Thursday, June 30, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
pens made an offer to DOuble J. puck's on his stick...not like he's gonna say no.
boooooom. fuck yeah man, talk about a fuckin team for next season.
holy shit. only thing will be injuries, but after this season
injuries will look like a joke.
Todd, the most experienced player, was flipping out the whole game. At one point, he said "I wanna win this for you guys, I'm so over this league and this place, I don't even want the jersey" that the champions get to wear for next season. The other team was hooking, slashing, tripping, running into guys and NOT ONE penalty. Todd got a high sticking penalty 'cause he was backchecking CJ, CJ ended up losing hte puck and htey were skating after it and, according to Todd, CJ bent low while Todd's stick was still up and it hit him in the helmet. All I know is that Todd never got a penalty before, so I highly doubt that he high stuck anybody. The other penalty was probably hooking 'cause the one Dman actually went after the puck carrier but got beat pretty bad and had to backcheck him. I don't get it, it's not hard to not get beat. Worst case scenario - you go after the guy and whichever way he turns you quickly go to a backwards skating position and stay with them or right behind them which is easy to screw them up. people always go for the puck, though, and that's why they get beat.
Monday, June 27, 2011
no more TK according to pensblog?
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Re: [Madness Writers] 6/25/2011 10:01:00 PM
i remember those numbers cuz i had to look em up too. way off.
On Sun, un 26, 2011 at 1:01 AM, Madness <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
> played 11 missions of 15 in Company of Heroes today. Too easy of a game.
> It started getting harder around mission 10, mission 11 I almost lost. It
> comes down to one thing basically: tanks. once you get 'em, you can't lose.
> The first .. maybe 8 mission you literally can't lose. The game makes it so
> even if you try to lose you probably couldn't.
> Fun game to play for a bit. I'm gonna delete it in the morning, definitely
> not finishing it. It strays away from the resource-based strategy games
> like command and conquer and warcraft, it does it pretty well 'cause you
> can't "farm" the resources. Well, technically you can, but you're rewarded
> for going out and getting more territories. I guess in some missions you
> could let the game sit for an hour, come back, but there's a population
> limit, so you can still only get 8 tanks at most, maybe 9 if you upgrade
> unit costs. I played it on normal, I guarantee the game would only be gay
> on harder difficulties 'cause they'd probably givey ou less resources to
> work with. Homie don't play that game. The missions where you have to
> defend, it's actually really easy. At the beginning, you just build
> anti-tank units and you're set, put machine gunners in the buildings. Once
> tanks become a usable unit, the game changes dramatically. I can't stress
> it enough. There's no need, absolutely no need, for any ground units, well,
> you do need one to capture territories.
> As much fun as the game could be, it has too many limitations. I wouldn't
> even try playing online, too stressful and I'm not devoting any time to
> being good.
> It said that only 300 americans were killed in DDay. So I look it up.. 6603
> American casualties, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 dead. Was gonna say,
> no way only 300 died. (and it said 1000 casualties, wtf do they get those
> numbers from).
> downloaded some books for the kindle. I have enough reading to last a few
> years at least.
>
>
>
> --
> Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 6/25/2011 10:01:00 PM
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
booom
100 smackers, why not. 115 with taxes and 2 day shipping. too easy
mightr as well get one, halo and nhl. something to do
put in the passport paperwork today. should get it by first week of
august. oct 3-7th. we can change it to later if you want, not sure
how the prices will change over hte next month. might go up an
additional $100 total or something. not a big deal. i can buy them
now if i wanted. no real reason why i shouldnt. let me know how the
date works out with Emily
's schedule.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
wow, ryan lambert says something bold for once
points in 41 games should be up for MVP —"
Monday, June 20, 2011
notion of getting concrete answers. In re-watching the series now, I
can't forgive the writers for bailing on the mysteries that they
created, saying that it never really mattered because it was all about
the characters.......well it sure as hell mattered for 3 seasons when
they were building it all up to get ratings."
muahaha, i was gonna send an email earlier saying the ending of Lost
sounds like it was perfect, but then i read that one.
it really is about the characters. i read some stuff abotu the ending,
theres no way anyone could figure it out and it really doesnt affect
my enjoyment of the show. but yeah, heather watched episode 1 of
season 4 last night after we finished season 3, and i could instantly
tell its gonna be mostly about the future characters tryin to get back
to the island and how their relationships change in the future. which
is a lot of suspense mixed in with the tryin to figure out the
island's mystery.
cuz honestly, the only thing now thats a mystery is the black smoke (i
would assume thats Jacob...he says "Help me" to John, and theres no
other manifestation he could take...and i dont even know who Jacob is
other than Ben's commander) and why Desmond went into the future after
the failsafe. i guess the history of the Dharma is important, but
that HAS to be tied in with Jacob because we learn everything from
Ben's history. so jacob, ben, and desmond's future....
i really have no idea what else needs to be explained. maybe how
Penny has been searching for the island. i have NO idea why the
hobbit wrote "not penny's boat" to desmond when he was drowning.
desmond is away from everyone as he's in the sea, but it doesnt affect
the plot. not like he can do anything but get out of there.
so now its three seasons of jacob, ben, the survivors, and those
rescued. at least before there were real mysteries. i heard season
4 was good, i think u said it sucked. i just dont see where the show
can go. jacob is the focal point of everything at this point, theres
nothing else.
Re: [Madness Writers] dude
oh, quick google search for "long form" reveals a longform.org. get
it right son1!
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 2:42 AM, Madness <nayrrizdaed@gmail.com> wrote:
> dude, check out longform.com ton of articles
>
> --
> Posted By Madness to Madness Writers at 6/19/2011 11:42:00 PM
lost
or 12 episodes. 23 total. watched the entire season in less than a
week. heather watched 5 or 6 without me.
good show, good acting.
jacob...hmmmm no idea how john gets out of the mass murder grave
and shoots that Naomi with the Satphone. guess that'll be explained.
dang, sayeed is indian. sure looks similar to an arab.
looks like oct 3-7, monday through friday is gonna be the date.
"Reaction to two new characters, Nikki and Paulo, was generally
negative, with Lindelof even acknowledging that the couple was
"universally despised" by fans"
yeah dude, that episode with the spider and they get paralyzed and
buried, POINTLESS. i couldnt believe that episode existed. fricken
pointless, man. nothing changed for the plot. although that girl is
pretty cute. that Naomi is cute, such a weird ethnicity goin' on
there. seems too tan.
did a quick research on Lost. i guess there were a lot of complaints
about seasons 3 havin too many questions in the first half and not
enough answers. i only watched the first 5 episodes or so, then got
back in somewhere between 10-12. the spider episode was 12-14.
yeah, there's no way to know anything about the island without Ben
revealing it.
jacob is obviously important.
heather, last night, said something like "why don't the Others just
tell them everything about the island?" and i was like "well, that
would kill the tv show". ben is the key to the show.
jack can be a whiny idiot. john would be the best leader. that
whole ordeal with the fertility doctor being basically a double agent
went over that easy with Jack? and the group? makes no sense. Sawyer
shoots the guy who gives up (who was holding the Korean, Sayeed, and
the plumber hostage) for not believing him, but they ALL dont put up a
fuss with the woman doctor? please.
killed the hobbit. booooom. not sure why he closed the hatch on
himself. guess cuz it was the only way to lock the door, but it could
have been closed and given them a lot more time to escape.
i thought that guy , one eyed, with teh grenade who killed the hobbit
was killed when he came down to kill the two women. must have got
those two Others confused.
gotta go get my passport photo, apply hopefully after work today.
might not make it.
ill let you know about the cruise. call me tonight. getting my
xbox, got dj hero, probably play that. waiting on the controller, set
up some Halo at some point. and Nhl. whatever, dont really care that
much about it.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
put on kindle
Inside 'The Order,' One Mormon Cult's Secret Empire
America's most twisted crime family – and the boys who dared to defy it
Illustration by Sean McCabe
The two boys pulled into the driveway and shifted the green Honda into park. It was February in Salt Lake, cold and gray, and in the foothills above the city, a low fog hung over the mountains. They sat there for a moment, warming their hands against the sputtering heater. Then one of them exhaled slowly, his breath shuddering in the cold air. It was time. They were finally getting even.
The well-kept yellow house sat on the corner of a tidy cul-de-sac called South Bonner Circle surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence. From the outside it seemed like a typical suburban home, offering few clues of the secrets that were contained inside. A passerby might catch a glimpse of children in the windows, but for the most part, the Young family kept to themselves. Their neighbors had no idea that the family were prominent members of the Kingston clan, the most powerful polygamist cult in America — and one of the most dangerous.
This article appears in the
June 23, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and in the digital archive.The clan, known privately as the Order, runs what prosecutors believe is one of the largest organized-crime operations in Utah, overseeing its far-flung empire from a string of secret locations and backrooms. On the surface, the operation is legit: From Salt Lake, the Order controls some 100 businesses spread out over the Western states, from a casino in California to a cattle ranch in Nevada to a factory that makes lifelike dolls in Utah. Over 75 years, the Kingstons have amassed a fortune worth an estimated $300 million, but the operation skirts the edges of the law. According to people who have left the Order, the cult exploits its 2,000 members as virtual slave labor and hides profits from tax collectors. Children born into the clan make up much of the labor force. Girls, many of them teen brides, answer phones at the Order's law office, bag groceries at its supermarket or tend to the clan's many children. Boys work its coal mine and stack boxes at Standard Restaurant Supply, a massive discount store. They are paid not in cash but in scrip, an arcane form of credit used by the Mormon pioneers that can only be redeemed at company stores. "If the Order doesn't have it," the clan teaches, "we don't need it."
The teenagers sitting in the driveway on South Bonner Circle that afternoon in 2009 knew the operation well. They belonged to the Order and had toiled in the cult for years. They also knew that much of the clan's wealth was stashed inside the unassuming suburban house on the corner. One of them approached the front door while the other kept a lookout. Then, moving quickly, the boy at the door let himself in and got to work.
Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire
In the kitchen, he opened a closet and popped a hatch in the floor that led down to a dark, musty basement. There, stacked on the concrete floor, were crates filled with bars of silver. He snapped the padlock on the first crate and began stuffing the silver ingots into duffel bags, lugging them back out to the waiting Honda. By the time the teenagers sped away, they had made off with more than $80,000 in silver.
Later that afternoon, in another house across town belonging to the Order, a woman named Patty Kingston opened her closet to discover that a chest of gold coins worth as much as $5 million had vanished. In its place, someone had left a note. "Thanks," it read. "This didn't belong to you anyway."
As big as the heist was, it attracted almost no attention in Salt Lake. The Kingstons operate in a self-contained universe, completely cut off from the outside world. "When you're three years old, they start training you what to say if people talk to you," recalls Jeremy Tucker, a 32-year-old former member of the cult, who now works in construction. "We were taught to be polite, but to never make friends with outsiders." The clan avoids hospitals, believing government-backed doctors might inject them with a mysterious disease or demand birth records exposing the Order's lifestyle. They steer clear of banks, fearing they'll steal their money. And they avoid the police, opting to handle any disputes in their own brutal manner. One of the Order's leaders did jail time for severely beating his own daughter after she fled an arranged marriage to his brother. Boys are taught that the prophet demands absolute loyalty and that they should be prepared to defend the clan. Over the years, the Order has armed itself to ward off rivals, and once stalked and intimidated a judge who was meddling in the clan's affairs. (Paul Kingston and other leaders of the family ignored repeated requests for comment for this story.)
Sex, Drugs, and the Biggest Cybercrime of All Time
"I could boil down what they're about in three words," says a member who broke with the Order. "Money, sex and power. They'll do what they need to do to defend what's theirs."
After the chest of gold was stolen, suspicion among the clan's leadership immediately fell on a group of rebellious teenagers who had left the cult a few years before. One of them, Stephen Knight, made for the most unlikely of suspects. The son of the clan's prophet, Knight, then 18, had once seemed destined for a leadership role within the Order. Instead, he had walked away from the family three years earlier to make a life of his own. No evidence directly linked him to the missing gold or silver, but his father was convinced he had played a part in the thefts.
One day, not long after the gold disappeared, Knight got an anonymous phone call. His life was in danger, the voice on the other end warned. The clan believed he had their treasure, and they were sending someone to kill him. Knight was born in Salt Lake City, the sixth child of third-generation polygamists. The Mormon Church officially banned polygamy in 1890, and some of the defiant bands of fundamentalists who refuse to give up the practice have been pushed out of the city and into the desert, where they eke out an existence in rusted-out trailers and sprawling compounds. But the Kingstons have remained in Salt Lake, operating virtually undetected in a city of more than 1 million people.
A lawyer and an accountant by trade, Stephen's father hardly looked like the sort of man who could command the unquestioned loyalty of thousands of followers. Paul Kingston wore secondhand suits that hung off his slender shoulders, and he spoke in a flat, emotionless monotone. He kept his office on a side street in central Salt Lake. It was a grimy, derelict-looking place. The roof sagged, the carpet was worn, and the place reeked of cheap cologne. Sometimes he parked his immaculately buffed burgundy Ford Thunderbird on the curb, but it was rare to see the man himself. He was usually off visiting one of his 30 or so wives, or checking on one of the clan's many businesses, or in a backroom getting his muscles rubbed in preparation for one of his painful, 40-day fasts, a purification ritual that he endured in order to get closer to God.
Kingston taught his followers that they are the literal descendants of Jesus and one of his wives, who had come down to Earth to found a race of chosen people. He also preached a bizarre extrapolation of the Book of Mormon called the White Horse Prophecy, a dreaded prediction of a cataclysmic time when the "black race" will rise up and attempt to destroy the white man, only to be thwarted by Native Americans riding to the rescue. Those in the Order, Kingston preached, are responsible for building a master race, which is why all marriages are arranged within the original four families that started the cult.
When Stephen was a boy, the clan would gather for the New Year in a warehouse in the city for its annual ritual: the numbering of the men. His father stood on the stage and called out the names of the men who were to receive one of the clan's highest honors. "Brother Ron Tucker," he would intone, "come and get your number." According to the Order's interpretation of the Book of Revelations, only 144,000 numbered men will be allowed to rule in heaven under God. Many of these men are also given "stewardship" of the Order's business holdings — sent out to run the clan's coal mine or ranches, or to oversee one of its many storefronts.
That Stephen's father sat atop a mafialike organization was a secret kept from him for most of his childhood. When he was three, his mother led him into a building controlled by the clan and pointed out an intense man lifting weights in the gym. "That's your Uncle Paul," she said. (Like most kids in the clan, Stephen wasn't told who his father was until he was old enough to be trusted to lie to protect the Order.) Back then, Paul Kingston stood around five feet ten and weighed close to 200 pounds. He had yet to lose his hair, and thanks to his fanatical devotion to healthy food and alternative medicine, he had the ropy build of a well-toned athlete. He also had dozens of children — a brood that would eventually grow to around 300 — and he had a hard time telling them apart.
But it is likely that Kingston could recognize some of himself in Stephen. They both have the same high cheekbones, the same pale skin, the same wide-set eyes. Noticing Stephen, he put the barbells down and came over to the boy. He asked him if he was being obedient, then excused himself to talk to Stephen's mother. "He seemed like the most amazing guy," Stephen recalls.
It would be several more years before Stephen learned that Paul Kingston was his father, and that his mother was just one of his dad's many wives. And it would be several years after that before he stole from his father for the first time.
While his dad was running the order from Salt Lake City, Stephen grew up on a cattle ranch called Washakie, near the Idaho border. Situated at the base of a rugged mountain range, the Order's spread sat in a pristine valley of glistening hayfields and open pasture. The land had once been home to the Washakie Indians, and as children, Stephen and his 15 full brothers and sisters played among the wind-swept ruins of a Native American cemetery. Their father rarely came by, and because the nearest town was 18 miles away, the kids forged a fierce bond among themselves. "We were off on our own out there and really close," Stephen says. "It felt like it was us against the world." His older brother Richard, a burly diesel mechanic, taught him how to fix cars. Another brother, Ben, showed him how to mend fences. In summer, the kids swam in the reservoir as their mother, Richaun, watched, the boys doing back flips off the rope swing into the water; at night, as the sun set behind the mountains, they all sat together to watch the clan's buffalo herd grazing in the pastures. "It was all fun," Stephen recalls. "We'd sleep on the chicken coop in the summer and shoot raccoons. Or we'd set traps and raise them as pets."
In many ways it was an idyllic childhood, except for the fact that the ranch also doubled as a work camp for disobedient clan wives and rebellious kids. The family believed that discipline would rein in the boys and that hard labor would make the girls more supplicant to their husbands back in the city. "It was a wild place," says Scott Cosgrove, a former detective with the Box Elder County Sheriff's Office, who remembers the ranch as a broken-down spread, guarded by a feral pack of boys who patrolled the fence line from the back of a pickup armed with shotguns. "The clan kids from there would come to school not properly dressed for the cold, and they were always getting in fights. You'd show up for a welfare call, or a domestic-abuse call, and it was just real run-down."
For Stephen and the other kids on the ranch, the highlight of each week came on Sundays, when they traveled the hour and a half south to Salt Lake for church. Sometimes his father read the Book of Mormon from the pulpit and talked about things regular Christians would recognize, like tithing or repentance. But mostly he talked about the history of the Order and his ancestors, the men who had started the clan.
The Order was founded by Elden Kingston, Stephen's grand-uncle, at the height of the Great Depression. As lore has it, Elden was the "one mighty and strong" predicted by Scripture, who "holding the scepter of power in his hand" would "set in order the House of God." With thick white hair, a lantern jaw and a commanding presence, he had no problem attracting followers. Like other fundamentalists of that era, he believed the Mormon Church had lost its divine authority when it renounced polygamy in 1890, so he persuaded three other families to join him in establishing their own sect. They threw away their possessions, donned matching blue overalls, and pitched canvas tents on a patch of land north of Salt Lake that would come to be known as the "Home Place."
As time passed, his dogma became even stranger. He went days at a time without eating, convinced it helped provoke visions, and believed that by "the laying on of hands" he could heal his followers from sickness and disease. He became obsessed with homeopathic treatments and herbal remedies, teaching followers that through proper diet they could "live to the age of a tree." When lightning struck a tree at the Home Place, he taught his followers that the tree had divine powers and was a gateway to heaven. His followers erected a crude stone cross nearby in his honor, covered with inscriptions of the letter "K" (for Kingdom or Kingston). His most bizarre beliefs, though, concerned the occult. When one of his favorite wives died, he missed her so much that he dug her up from her grave. He then severed her index finger, cleaned off the three bones, and carried them with him the rest of his life, believing that the totem kept her spirit with him.
When Elden died in 1948, leadership of the Order fell to Stephen's grandfather, J.O., a short, miserly man with bony shoulders and thinning hair. J.O. was just as frugal as his brother — he lived in a dilapidated shack with planks missing from the porch — but he had a better head for business. He trained the women how to rip off the government, a scheme the Order called Bleeding the Beast. They would trek into state welfare offices, their kids in tow, claiming that they had no idea who the father of their children was, or that he was a truck driver who had left them destitute. The grift was exposed decades later, in the 1980s, when the clan paid a $350,000 settlement for swindling the government through welfare fraud. Later the Order reportedly bought slot machines from mob-controlled companies. To hide the scope of his organization, J.O. took great pains to never show his wealth and taught his followers to do the same. He bragged that he had worn the same black shirt every day for a year. He also shared his brother's fascination with herbs and natural medicine. He became particularly obsessed with a plant called comfrey, which he believed would protect his clan from the nuclear war that would usher in the apocalypse. He mandated that children should drink tea brewed from the herb every morning, and that Order members should feed it to their cows.
J.O. had some 80 children by 13 wives, but his favorite was Paul, an excellent student who made friends easily. As a favored son of the prophet, Paul had the freedom to disregard the strict discipline his father imposed on other members of the Order. One day, for laughs, he and his half brother Ron Tucker stole some napalm from an Order army-supply store, drew lines of it in the street and lit it on fire as cars drove by. The boys also bought cigarettes wholesale through a small clan-owned market run by their older brother and sold them at school. "It was all just innocent teenage stuff," recalls Ron, who has since left the clan. "But within the Order, where drinking soda pop was against the rules, it was a pretty big deal."
When Paul turned 21, he married Richaun Dye. Unlike other girls in the Order, Richaun was refined — she didn't wear hand-me-downs, and at clan dances, a long line of boys waited to dance with her. "She was definitely the pick of the litter, and that's why Paul got her," Ron recalls. Paul already had two wives, but he and Richaun were married in a secret ceremony at her parents' house. J.O. presided, while Richaun's father officiated the wedding, promising the bride that if she obeyed her husband, she would be guaranteed a spot in the Celestial Kingdom, the highest level of heaven. After the wedding, Richaun chose the name Knight randomly — a practice designed to prevent prosecutors from proving that men in the Order have multiple wives.
"They seemed happy," Ron says. "I could tell she loved him, and it seemed like he loved her too." Within a year, Paul Kingston would take a fourth wife. By the time he was 30, he would have more than 10.
As he grew older, Stephen turned out to be as rebellious as his own father had been as a boy. The Knight brothers weren't afraid to fight, or to stand up to authority. "They were the type of kids you didn't mess with," says Robert Owen, a former member of the clan. "If you messed with one of them, you were messing with them all."
When Stephen was nine, an accident at Washakie set in motion a chain of events that would eventually prompt him to leave the cult. It was Mother's Day in 2000, and Stephen and two of his brothers were speeding up a dirt road for dinner at an aunt's house. Suddenly, Stephen's brother David lost control of the truck and it rolled over, killing David instantly. "His face was crushed," Stephen says now, matter-of-factly, his eyes going blank for a moment. "I felt for his pulse, but he was already gone."
That night, Paul Kingston arrived at the ranch. The family gathered in the living room. Still stunned at the sudden loss of their brother, Stephen and his siblings were numb with grief. Then their father said something they never expected. "This is your fault," he thundered, glaring at them. "If you were more obedient, this wouldn't have happened."
"After that, everything changed," Stephen says. "My mom was never the same. She didn't want to be in that house anymore; it reminded her of my brother." To test her devotion, Stephen's father began calling her in the middle of the night and telling her to move the family to a new location. Over the next several years, Stephen bounced from the suburbs of Salt Lake to the clan's ranch in Nevada. Consumed with guilt over his brother's death, Stephen lashed out. He picked fights at school, shot a teacher in the face with a water gun and refused to do homework or answer questions. "He was angry and confused," says a former member of the cult. "He didn't have anyone to help him process what had just happened."
Taking advantage of his status as a son of the prophet, Stephen began bending the rules even further. Because of the clan's distrust of banks, the Order had cash hidden all over the place, a poorly kept secret within the family. "They'd keep it in basements, in filing cabinets, in a big safe in one of Paul's offices," says Levi Kingston, a former clan member. "If you knew where to look — and the Knight boys did — it was easy to find." In his teens, Stephen and five of his half brothers stole $4,000 from their father. "We figured it was ours anyway," says Stephen, explaining that the clan hadn't paid the boys for bagging coal. "But we paid it all back."
Eventually, Stephen was sent back to Washakie and was placed under the supervision of his uncle, one of the family's most feared enforcers. A short, blustery man with a hair-trigger temper, Daniel Kingston had reportedly once kidnapped two boys at gunpoint and led them out to the Great Salt Lake (the charges were later dropped). At Washakie, he forced clan children to decapitate cows with chain saws to toughen them up, and sometimes beat the children for some infraction of the Order's rules like forgetting to face the Home Place three times a day and pray.
One afternoon, as Stephen and his cousin were taking a break from fixing a tractor that had broken down in a hayfield, Daniel Kingston pulled up. When he noticed that the boys had stopped working, he became enraged. He charged across the field and started brutally beating Stephen's cousin. When he had finished, he walked toward Stephen, who was sitting on the tractor. Stephen calmly waited until his uncle got close, and then he reached behind the seat and pulled out a shotgun, leveling it at his uncle. "If you ever do that again," he said, "I'll blow your head off."
It was an astonishing moment in the history of the clan. "It empowered Stephen — before that, no one had ever stood up to Daniel Kingston or any of them," says a former member. "I think it scared them."
It was also around then that Stephen, at the age of 14, began to see the clan for what it really was. On weekends, he was sent out to work at the Order's coal mine with other teenagers. Boys as young as 14 labored in the workshop. Older teenagers were crammed five and six to a room, sleeping on the floors of trailers. According to former Order members, they worked long shifts sorting coal and operating heavy machinery in unsafe conditions. At clan gatherings, girls who were still in their teens danced with men old enough to be their uncles, whom they were sometimes forced to marry.
With the Order's leaders taking so many wives for themselves, the clan's younger men were often unable to find anyone to marry. Stephen's father seemed to marry a new girl every year, each one younger and prettier than the last. He slept with a different one each night, in accordance with their ovulation cycles, and sometimes disappeared during lunch to have sex with a favorite. While the Order preached strict abstinence to its children, forbidding even incidental contact between the sexes, there seemed to be no rules after marriage — especially for the clan's leaders. Incest is endemic in the clan, with uncles marrying much younger female relatives; in 2003, police showed up at an Order barbecue and arrested a clan member for marrying his underage cousin.
According to former members of the Order, decades of inbreeding have resulted in rampant birth defects throughout the family. Some children are born blind, others with missing fingernails or undersize heads. One baby deemed to have too many deformities was allegedly put in a shoe box and left to die. Mark Shurtleff, the Utah attorney general, has spent years investigating the clan, gathering birth certificates and genealogical data, and has come to believe that the cult is guilty of a long list of crimes, including child labor, tax evasion, welfare fraud, polygamy and the sanctioning of underage marriages to blood relatives. So far, however, despite Shurtleff's efforts, the insular and highly secretive nature of the Order has prevented him from finding sufficient evidence to bring a case strong enough to dismantle the clan.
"I strongly believe they are an organized-crime family," Shurtleff says. "When people hear 'organized crime,' they think of mobsters. I don't think they're organized crime in that regard, but the racketeering statute defines it as any conspiracy or pattern of illegal activity done in concert with others. If they are money-laundering or making money in support of polygamy and incest, then they probably meet the statute."
Stephen didn't know what the law said — he only knew that the people he loved were being abused and exploited by his own father. He no longer believed in the Order, but he knew that leaving would mean being shunned by his own family, and because he had been forbidden from making friends outside the clan, there would be few people in the world he could turn to. "It's hard to leave when that's all you've known," says one former member, who was forced to marry her cousin when she was 15. "I was scared to death when I left." From a clan ranch in Nevada, Stephen called his brother Ben, who had left the Order a few years before. While some despised Ben for his apostasy and refused to speak with him, Stephen had remained in touch with his brother.
"Come and get me," Stephen said. "I'm done with this shit."
"What took you so long?" Ben said.
Like other teenagers who leave fundamentalist Mormon communities, Stephen was not prepared to enter the world at large. To cope with the disorientation and loneliness of leaving one world for another, many turn to drugs. Another group of kids called the Lost Boys, who were kicked out of the polygamist cult the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ended up on the streets of Las Vegas and Phoenix, some turning tricks for drugs like meth and heroin.
Stephen moved in with his brother. To deaden his feelings of isolation, he started smoking a lot of pot and sitting around the house all day listening to country music. "All I like to do is work on cars and hang out with friends and ride my ponies," he wrote one night on his MySpace page. "I am in love with old cars and horses. I don't really have too many friends, but the ones I do, I wouldn't trade for anything."
Among Stephen's friends were two of his cousins, Luke and Scott Brown. Short and chubby, the Brown boys looked up to the Knight brothers. Like Stephen, the boys were considered troublemakers by the Order — and like Stephen, they knew a lot about how the clan handled its money. Luke and Scott often visited the home of one of their aunts, Rachel Young. Everyone in the Order knew that she controlled the purse strings for the operation — but few were aware that she was sitting on a hidden stash of silver. "Only the inner circle knew the hoard even existed," says Christian Kingston, a former Order member. "You had to be, like, a son of the prophet to know where it was."
On February 26th, 2009, the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office got a call of suspicious activity in the foothills above the city. Two teenage boys had been spotted entering Rachel Young's home. They had sped off in a Honda sedan. When Rachel Young, a stern and humorless woman, got home, she discovered that several crates of silver in her basement had been pried open — whoever had robbed the place had clearly been in a hurry and had left with only a small fraction of her silver. She called her sister-in-law Patty Kingston, who lived across town. "You better check on your gold," Young told her.
As the first of Paul Kingston's many wives, Patty enjoyed a privileged role in the Order — including access to vast wealth. Hanging up the phone, she rushed to her closet. To her horror, all that remained was a ring of dust, marking the place where a chest of gold coins had once stood.
In the meantime, the police were closing in on the missing silver. A sheriff's deputy traced the license plate of the Honda to a run-down house in a working-class suburb south of the city. Pulling up, he noticed the getaway car parked in front of the house. As he talked to the woman who lived there, Luke Brown came out of the house, and his brother Scott soon joined him.
At first, the two boys denied any involvement in the break-in at Young's house. But the more the deputy pressed, the more their stories didn't add up. It didn't take long for them to break down and confess that they had robbed their aunt. The deputy opened the trunk of the Honda, where he found two duffel bags stuffed with silver. After the boys were taken into custody, one of their first calls was to Stephen. "We're fucked," they told their cousin.
One crime had been solved — but the chest of gold stolen from Patty Kingston's closet remained a mystery. The deputy heard the Brown boys knew who stole the gold — but suddenly, without explanation, they and everyone in the clan clammed up. "Paul was upset any of this had been reported at all," says a former member close to the boys. "The Order stays as far away as possible from police, and this was like inviting them in your front door."
With its vast wealth suddenly exposed to public view, the clan moved quickly to hush up the scandal. The Brown boys, charged with felony counts of burglary, wrote a letter to their aunt apologizing for stealing the silver in her house. She, in turn, wrote a letter to the judge on their behalf, and the case was settled without a trial. The boys were sentenced to two years of probation and taken back into the Order. Luke Brown now insists that he and his brother simply borrowed the silver, and planned to return it to their aunt later. "It wasn't like we thought about it a lot. It was a total spur of the moment thing," Brown says. "I love the Order. It's who I am."
To keep the police from prying into the matter any further, the clan also hired a private investigator to track down the missing gold. Within the clan, the pieces started to add up. The theft of the silver bars from Rachel Young's basement, they concluded, had been a copycat crime. In all likelihood, Stephen and his brothers had stolen the gold from Patty Kingston first — and then the Brown boys, in an effort to emulate their cousin's rebellious acts, had robbed their aunt weeks or even months later. Former Order members remain convinced the Knights stole the gold. "They did it," says Christian Kingston. "Everyone knows it."
After the gold disappeared, the Knight brothers suddenly seemed to have a lot of money — especially for young men on their own in the world for the first time. Unable to visit his mother, Stephen would leave a $100 bill in her mailbox or, with his brothers, buy her new furniture. "The Knight brothers were driving new trucks, and so were their friends," says Levi Kingston. "Some people say they funneled the money through Mexico. Others say they buried it out in the desert and are slowly cashing it out. If I had done it, the Order probably would have killed me. But because they were the sons of the prophet, they got away with it."
Stephen vehemently denies that he or his brothers had anything to do with the heist. "I honestly didn't even know there was any gold until they accused me of taking it," he says. These days Stephen works on a cattle ranch near the Idaho border, just down the road from where he grew up. It's a quiet, haunting place, with massive hayfields that stretch to the horizon. His arms are sunburned and his hands calloused from long days moving the irrigation pipes that water the fields. "Look around," Stephen says. "Do you think if I took $5 million in gold, I'd be working out here?"
In the months after the robbery, Stephen couldn't shake the feeling he was being watched. Mysterious cars followed his girlfriend, and he once came home to find that someone had rifled through his drawers. Then one night, a clan member called and told him that the Order planned to kill him. Terrified, he went out and bought a stash of guns to arm himself, just in case his family tried to gun him down.
Now, two years later, Stephen still sleeps with a gun near his bed. But the constant fear has subsided. "If they kill me, they kill me," he says. "I've lived a good life." Sometimes, lying in bed at night, he thinks of his brother who died not far from here, and the rest of his siblings who remain in the Order. He thinks about his mom, and wonders if she misses him. Every now and then, as he's driving around the ranch, his phone will ring. Fishing it out of his jeans, he'll recognize the number. It's his father, the prophet, calling to coax his wayward son back into the fold.
"Come back," his dad will say. "You could be such an asset to the Order."
December 1996
The Killer Cadets
They were young. They were smart. They were successful. They were in love. And they were cold-blooded murderers. Why did they do it?
by Skip Hollandsworth
THEY PROBABLY FIRST SAW EACH OTHER at a cross-country meet in the early autumn of 1995—two high school girls from neighboring small towns, competing in the two-mile run. There is no evidence that they said hello. Nor did they shake hands, as athletes sometimes do before the start of a race. Why should they have? It is doubtful the two girls even knew one another's names. Adrianne Jones was a clear-complexioned, sun-kissed blonde, the kind of girl one boy described as "not just good looking, but I mean, good lookin'." Diane Zamora, thinner and not as tall, was mesmerizing in a different way—her hair a dark circle around her face, her eyes dark as well, her eyebrows like slim shadows against her skin. "When she looked at you," another boy would later say, "it was hard for you to stop staring back."
There was no reason for the two to imagine that they had anything in common beyond cross-country. They were just pretty young teenagers in the full bloom of youth. What Adrianne and Diane did not know about each other, however, was that they were both drawn to the same boy—a lean, muscular high school senior named David Graham, who was described as "the perfect guy" by one classmate and "a brilliant student" by another. David was the kind of young man any parent would admire. He made straight A's. He said "yes, sir" and "yes, ma'am" when talking to adults. "His life was so unblemished," said one woman who knew him, "that he didn't so much as throw a spitwad in school."
At the time, David had chosen to be with Diane, who was called "the disciplined one" of the family by her mother because she would start studying for school before six o'clock each weekday morning. But David could not deny that there was something intriguing, and somewhat seductive, about Adrianne, who was called "bubble butt" by her mother because her bottom moved in sexy little circles when she walked. He found himself spending more time with her, talking to her, staring at her hazel eyes.
The two girls lined up for the cross-country race, waiting for the starter's gun. It would not be long before they would meet again.
I thought long and hard about how to carry out the crime. I was stupid, but I was in love.—From the killer's confession
IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF DECEMBER 3, 1995, a farmer driving along a desolate country road saw the body of a teenage girl on the ground behind a barbed-wire fence. At first, he thought he was looking at road kill. The girl's face was nearly unrecognizable. One bullet hole was in her left cheek, another in her forehead. She had been hit so hard on the left side of her head that the part of the skull above her ear was caved in like a pumpkin. She was wearing flannel shorts and a gray T-shirt that read, "UIL Region I Cross Country Regionals 1995." Within hours, police officers identified her as Adrianne Jones, a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore from the town of Mansfield, southeast of Fort Worth.
A former farming community built around a grain elevator, home to an old indoor rodeo arena and some cheery antique stores along Main Street, Mansfield was one of the last places in the Dallas—Fort Worth corridor that still felt like a small town. In 1984, looking for a safe place to raise his family, Bill Jones moved his wife, Linda, and his three children—Adrianne and two younger brothers—to Mansfield from the Dallas area. He found a modest neighborhood where the homes were clustered together, the yards were like little green squares, and the echoey sound of children at play drifted down the streets. Jones, who made his living repairing heavy construction equipment, was a no-nonsense, bearded man who kept his heavy brown work boots on when he arrived home at the end of the day, wearing them even when he sat in his easy chair. He also was determined to keep a tight rein on his children—especially Adrianne, who was known as AJ. "I truly felt that if we had some rules that kept her away from teenage temptations," Jones said, "we'd be okay." It was only that autumn that he had allowed Adrianne to stay out past nine o'clock on weekends. If she told him she was going to a movie or to Six Flags Over Texas in nearby Arlington with friends, he would often make her produce a ticket stub when she came home to prove where she had been. He had nailed her bedroom windows shut so she couldn't sneak out of the house at night.
It could hardly be said that Adrianne was a rebel. She took advanced honors courses, studied at least two hours a night, and was a good athlete. After she hurt her knee playing for the girls soccer team, she decided to join the girls' cross-country team to get in better shape, and she became so good in the two-mile run that she helped the team qualify for the November regional meet in Lubbock. "Her school spirit was just so awesome," said Carla Hays, an editor for the school newspaper, the Mansfield Uproar, bestowing upon Adrianne one of the greatest compliments a high school girl could receive. "I could see her becoming a cheerleader someday." She also managed to work twenty hours a week at Golden Fried Chicken, a local fast-food restaurant. "She was my superstar employee," said the restaurant's manager, Tina Dollar. "I made her the cashier at the drive-through window because she knew how to put a smile on everyone's face. She wore a hat with a smiley face drawn on the visor, and after taking an order, she'd say funny things to the customers like, 'Okay, drive forward to the ninety-ninth window to get your food!'"
Adrianne thrived on attention, especially when it came from the teenage boys around town. One of Adrianne's closest friends, Tracy Bumpass, called her "a big flirt." Linda Jones, a chatty blonde who worked during the day as a massage therapist in a Mansfield hair salon, said her daughter would spend two hours putting on makeup just to make it look like she wasn't wearing any: "When I asked her why she went to such trouble to put her makeup on before she went out of the house, she said, 'Mom, you never know who you might meet.'"
And there were plenty of high school guys who wanted to meet her. They'd slowly cruise by the Joneses' house. A few of the courageous ones would pull into the driveway to talk to Adrianne, who would be waiting for them in the front yard, casting quick glances toward the front door to see if her father was watching them. "I'm sure lots of guys really liked Adrianne," said Sydney Jones, a friend and former soccer teammate. "She was the kind of girl who would say hi to you in the hallway at school even if you didn't know her."
It was precisely Adrianne's popularity that was going to make the investigation into her murder so difficult. (Because Adrianne's body had been found in the outskirts of the Dallas suburb Grand Prairie, detectives from that city's police department—Dennis Clay and Dennis Meyer—and their boss, deputy police chief Brad Geary, were put in charge of the case.) Adults who are murdered rarely have more than a couple of dozen people close to them. But a high school student crosses paths with hundreds of other students every day. And it quickly became clear to the detectives that Adrianne knew her killer, or killers. There was no sign at the crime scene that she had struggled. There were no marks that her hands or legs had been restrained. Nor was there any indication that someone had broken into her house or had gone through her window to abduct her. Furthermore, an autopsy found no evidence that Adrianne had been sexually assaulted, which meant that this was not the act of a rapist. Adrianne's death, the cops realized, was more like an execution, the result of some colossal fury. As one investigator would later say, "It takes a cold-blooded person to shoot a pretty young girl in the face from two to four feet away. That girl was mangled, and it was sickening to look at."
Never did I imagine the heartache it would cause my school, my friends, Adrianne's family, or even my community.
IT WAS A STORY THAT WOULD EVENTUALLY SEND SHOCK WAVES across the entire country: a terrifying, macabre tale that would have people everywhere asking what had happened to the best and brightest of America's youth. At the start, however, Adrianne Jones's murder was just another killing in a small town. Because so much local media attention was then focused on the kidnapping and brutal murder of a little girl named Amber Hagerman in Arlington, Adrianne's death barely made the front pages of the Dallas and Fort Worth newspapers. In a society long accustomed to drive-by shootings and metal detectors at school entrances, dead teenagers didn't warrant the press that they once did.
But within Mansfield itself, the news had residents reeling. High school administrators set up special rooms for students to meet with counselors. A tree was planted in memory of Adrianne next to the junior varsity soccer field, and more than 150 of her classmates joined hands around the tree and shouted, "Unity! Strength! Courage!" Some residents wore ribbons in her memory, and a small cross made from two branches wrapped with red electrical wire was placed where her body had been discovered. After the family held a private funeral for Adrianne at the Methodist church, Linda Jones agreed to allow the cross-country and soccer teams to come to the church for a second memorial service. On the altar was a glamorous color photo of Adrianne, taken a few weeks earlier, that Linda had planned to give her for Christmas. "Try to remember the good things about Adrianne," she said in a spontaneous eulogy, trying to bolster the spirits of the students. "Do you remember the way she walked with that bubble butt of hers?"
Nearly crazed with grief, Linda consulted psychics to try to find out what had happened to Adrianne. She made sure to wear some item of her daughter's almost every day—either a piece of clothing or her shoes or her makeup. At night, she and Bill left the light on in Adrianne's bedroom, as if hoping their daughter would find her way back home. Kids drove past the house, staring through the open curtains, able to see Adrianne's vanity, where she had put on her makeup, her stereo, and her bookcase, which still held a couple of her Stephen King novels.
Among the nearly 2,500 students at Mansfield High, it didn't take long for the rumors to start flying. "A lot of us had this weird feeling that the killer was walking the halls with us," said April Grossman, a friend of Adrianne's who also ran cross-country and played on the soccer team. "Those of us who were really close to Adrianne were scared because we thought she might have been killed because of something she knew. And we thought, 'Well, will the killer come after us thinking that Adrianne had told us the secret?'"
Some kids said they had heard that Adrianne used to slip out of the house to attend all-night "rave" parties as far away as Denton (an hour's drive north of Mansfield). Maybe, they whispered, someone she met at a rave had wanted to kill her. Others said they had heard that she knew drug dealers. There was so much gossip about the boys Adrianne had been with that Linda went so far as to tell one reporter that her daughter was no "sleep-around." There was even a preposterous story that a close girlfriend of Adrianne's had wanted to kill her because Adrianne had told that girl's mother about her getting drunk at a party. "About the only thing we didn't hear," Bill said, "was that Adrianne had been abducted by aliens."
Still, for the investigators in the case—who had come to include the Mansfield police, a Texas Ranger, and extra Grand Prairie detectives—Adrianne's murder had all the makings of a high school whodunit. Although the Texas Education Agency had named Mansfield High a mentor school (a distinction given only to the best high schools in the state), the teenagers there were like teenagers anywhere, their lives often driven by insecurities, inchoate yearnings, and a provincial restlessness. Wavering in that territory that lies between childhood and adulthood, the students tried on and discarded different selves as quickly as they went through blue jeans, always searching for the perfect fit. It was here that they confronted raw new emotions, like their own budding sexuality, and here that they first attempted to make their way through such moral dilemmas as whether to "do it" or not.
Sitting outside the high school in their unmarked cars, watching students troop in and out, the detectives prepared themselves to enter the humid realm of adolescence. They talked to school officials about the students who had a knack for minor trouble. They asked other kids if they knew anyone who was jealous of or angry at Adrianne. Within days, they had compiled a long list of kids they wanted to talk to.
Bill and Linda Jones had told the police that on the night of Adrianne's death, they had reluctantly allowed her to talk on the phone past her usual ten o'clock cut-off time. Her new boyfriend, Tracy Smith, had been out of town that weekend with his parents, and he didn't call until ten-thirty. Bill and Linda didn't know Tracy that well. He was a large kid who was built like a lineman on a college football team, and he went to high school in the nearby town of Venus. Apparently, he and Adrianne had met just a couple of months earlier at the Golden Fried Chicken. Bill told Adrianne she could talk to Tracy but only for a few minutes.
During that call, Linda heard her daughter say, "Hold on, there's someone on the other line." Adrianne punched the call-waiting button and spoke quietly for a minute, then clicked back over and finished her conversation with Tracy.
"Who was that who called in?" Linda later asked.
According to Linda, Adrianne replied, "Oh, that was David from cross-country, and he's upset about something."
After talking with Tracy, Adrianne went to her room. At ten forty-five, Linda Jones saw that Adrianne was still awake, ironing her pants for school the next day. She seemed "sort of antsy," Linda said. Linda told her to turn off the lights and go to bed.
Sometime after midnight, one of Adrianne's younger brothers heard the constrained tumble of a slow-moving engine outside the house. When he looked out the window, he saw what he thought was a pickup truck driving away.
The next morning, Adrianne was nowhere to be found, and Linda and Bill thought she might have risen early to go running. But when they discovered her running shoes in her bedroom, they got anxious. Linda called Lee Ann Burke, the cross-country coach at Mansfield High, and asked, "Who is someone named David on the cross-country team?"
"Well, there's David Graham," Burke replied.
"Adrianne's missing," Linda said, "and I think he called her last night."
Burke was baffled. She didn't even know David and Adrianne were friends. David, a senior, was a decent cross-country athlete, but he was best known around the school for his position as battalion commander of the school's Junior ROTC program. Burke sent April Grossman to David's second-period math class to ask him if he had called Adrianne the previous night. David stared at April as if she were not making sense. "Did I talk to Adrianne? No. Why would I?"
As their investigation began, the detectives did conduct a perfunctory interview with David Graham, but they were so certain he was not involved that they didn't even try to give him a polygraph test. For one thing, David's name was not among the thirty or so listed in Adrianne's personal phone book. Nor did the detectives hear his name mentioned by any of Adrianne's friends when they asked who might have had a close relationship with her. In fact, Tracy Bumpass said that Adrianne told her all of her "deepest, darkest secrets," but not once did she ever talk about David.
Besides, David had supposedly been seen with tears in his eyes at the memorial service, seemingly stunned like everyone else that Adrianne was gone. Few students considered themselves good friends with David—"We all knew him, but we really didn't know him, you know?" said Kenny Grant, whose locker was next to David's throughout high school—and he certainly was not part of the school's most popular crowd. Still, he intrigued other kids. With his military burr haircut and ramrod posture, he seemed to be a throwback to a different era. The youngest of four children, David lived with his father, Jerry Graham, a retired Mansfield elementary school principal. He was divorced from David's mother, Janice, a former teacher who lived in Houston. At the age of seven, after seeing his first air show, David told his father he wanted to become an Air Force pilot, and he never wavered from his dream. Although ROTC students at Mansfield High were usually the subjects of jokes—"We thought of all of them in their green uniforms as sort of geeky," one girl said—it was clear that David was going places. He was a National Merit commended student (just below the rank of National Merit semifinalist), and Congressman Martin Frost had agreed to support his application to enroll the next fall in the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. "Some of the more sarcastic guys in school would address him as Colonel Graham," said Jennifer Skinner, who sat near David in a government class his senior year. "But you could tell they sort of said it out of respect." Added another classmate, David Brennan, "He could fall asleep during class and then wake up and still answer the teacher's questions."
David Graham might have seemed tailor-made for the military—when he and others in the ROTC squadron presented the colors before the football games, he stood so perfectly still that people tended to watch him instead of the flag—but he never came across as one of those overly aggressive GI Joe types. He quit the football team after his freshman year because, it was said, he didn't have the necessary ferocity to make it in Texas high school football. What's more, girls liked him for his courtly manners. Angel Lockhardt, who was on the girls' cross-country team, said David gave her rides home a few times after cross-country practice, "and he always acted like a gentleman."
Plenty of girls would have dated David—"He was one of the last cool guys on earth," a girl who served with David in the Mansfield High ROTC would later tell a reporter—but what few of them knew was that he already had a girlfriend. Her name was Diane Zamora, and she was a high school senior in the nearby town of Crowley. She was just as smart as David, and she was equally determined to get into one of the U.S. military academies. She was a member of the student council, the Key Club, the National Honor Society, and the Masters of the Universe, a science organization. She played flute in the marching band, and like David, she ran on her high school's cross-country team. "When you looked at the two of them together," one of Diane's relatives said, "you just knew that a great future lay before them."
The plan was to (and this is not easy for me to confess) break her young neck and sink her to the bottom of the lake…
THE FIRST MAJOR SUSPECT TO EMERGE in Adrianne's murder was a Mansfield teenager, Tara (not her real name), who lived in a trailer park and already had something of a reputation around town. A year before, she thought her boyfriend had had a sexual encounter with one of Adrianne's closest girlfriends. According to police records, Tara attacked the girl with a baseball bat, hitting her over the head, breaking her cheekbone, and leaving her with a concussion. Tara also shot and wounded her boyfriend. A restraining order was filed against Tara to keep her out of school and away from the girl she had attacked. At the hearing, Adrianne testified for her friend. Tara, in turn, allegedly told Adrianne, "I'll get you for this." Some students were convinced Tara was the killer. She fit their picture of what a killer would be: a surly, aimless individual far removed from the mainstream of suburban teenage life who had already shown her willingness to use a gun and a bat.
But the police discovered that Tara had a solid alibi, and she passed a polygraph test. Although Bill and Linda told the police they were suspicious of Adrianne's boyfriend, Tracy Smith—Linda said he had never tried to contact the family after Adrianne's killing—he too passed a polygraph.
Tracy did, however, give the police another clue. He said that Adrianne had told him that it was someone named Bryan who had clicked through on the phone that night. She had never mentioned David. She had said that "Bryan" was depressed and wanted to meet her that night to talk.
The detectives then learned that a Mansfield teenager named Bryan McMillen worked at an Eckerd's near a Subway sandwich shop where Adrianne once worked. According to Adrianne's friends and family, Bryan had become infatuated with Adrianne and often dropped by the Subway to see her. "He began to bother her so much that when she saw him coming, she started ducking her head behind the counter," Linda Jones said.
The investigators' suspicions were heightened when they discovered that the seventeen-year-old Bryan took four kinds of medication to battle symptoms of clinical depression. They asked him to come to the police station for an interview. According to an affidavit, Bryan first said he didn't know an Adrianne Jones. Then he admitted that he did. A detective asked him if he had talked to Adrianne the night she was murdered. Bryan said he could have talked to her, but he didn't remember. He had been drinking that night for the first time in six months, he said, and had become intoxicated. When asked why he had been drinking, Bryan said he had gotten upset because all of his friends had found girlfriends, but he hadn't. He told detectives he felt like the "odd man out."
It wasn't hard for the police to put this scenario together: a lonely boy, unable to get the beautiful blonde from the high school to pay attention to him, devising a way to meet her late at night, then losing control. The detectives bored in, asking Bryan if he had gone to Adrianne's house that night. Bryan said he might have. He said it was also possible he could have taken her somewhere. He just didn't remember, he said.
A week later, in the pre-dawn hours of December 15, 1995, police officers armed with guns and a search warrant arrived at Bryan's house. He was arrested for murder, and his pickup truck was impounded. This time, the story made the front pages of the newspapers, but several of Bryan's friends defended him, saying that he was a gentle, slightly baffled kid who would never resort to violence. Bryan's father insisted that the night of the murder, Bryan came home and never left the house.
Finally, after Bryan had spent Christmas and New Year's Eve in jail, a lead prosecutor in the district attorney's office arranged for a polygraph. "He not only passed," the prosecutor said, "he passed with flying colors."
Bryan's release triggered more rumors, but no other suspects emerged. Because Adrianne's brother had said that he had seen a pickup truck, the police ran computer checks to find any student who owned one. It never occurred to anyone that the vehicle her brother had seen might not have been involved in the murder. Nor, apparently, did anyone guess that Adrianne had told Tracy about a "Bryan" to keep him from learning about her relationship with someone else. Only months later would Tina Dollar, the manager at the Golden Fried Chicken, remember that Adrianne had once pulled a small photo of a boy out of her wallet and showed it to her.
"His name is David," Adrianne had said.
…[Her] beautiful eyes have always played the strings of my heart effortlessly. I couldn't imagine life without her; not for a second did I want to lose her.
DAVID GRAHAM AND DIANE ZAMORA first met about four years before Adrianne Jones's murder, when their parents began dropping them off at a small airfield south of Fort Worth. They went there for weekly meetings of the Civil Air Patrol, an Air Force auxiliary organization that teaches the basics of the military life and leads search-and-rescue missions for downed aircraft. But there was no romance between them in their younger years. Despite her good looks, Diane was careful around guys. She did have a boyfriend during her sophomore year in high school, but the relationship was not particularly heated. When the two went out for dinner on Valentine's Day, Diane asked to be taken home at eight-thirty because she needed to study. "She kept telling us she wanted to focus on her studies and her goals instead of on guys," said her aunt Sylvia Gonzalez. "And she always made it a point to tell us she was never going to lose her virginity unless she got married. When two of her cousins got pregnant in high school, she said she couldn't believe how stupid they were. She swore that nothing like that would happen to her."
In the world of high school sexual skirmishing, Diane firmly put herself into the camp of "good girls." A girl who goes too far, she would often say to her family, gets called a slut. When she realized during her sophomore year that her boyfriend was bent on having sex with her, she dumped him.
Diane's father, Carlos, a kind, soft-spoken man, was an electrician; her mother, Gloria, was a registered nurse. The family was deeply religious. Gloria was the daughter of a minister who led a nondenominational Spanish-speaking church on the south side of Fort Worth. Gloria, her five sisters, and their families never missed Sunday services, and after church, the entire Zamora clan would gather for lunch at a cafeteria. Diane was the eldest of the Zamoras' four children, and the most driven. When she was nine years old, she announced to her family that she wanted to become an astronaut. She sent off for NASA brochures, and by high school she was keeping a spiral notebook containing a list of achievements she had to accomplish to get a college scholarship. She knew exactly what her grade point average and SAT scores needed to be. She carried a knapsack full of schoolbooks everywhere in case she got stranded and had some time to fill.
At Crowley High School, Diane was not one of the social girls who gathered between periods in the school's chalky-smelling hallways to swap gossip. While she was not considered unfriendly, she was known around school as someone who kept to herself. "She didn't have a whole lot to say," one student said. She preferred associating with the smart kids at school—"homework buddies," she called them—and she was determined to become an academic star. Late in her junior year, when she posed for her high school graduation picture, she asked that she be allowed to wear the special tassel for being in the top 10 percent of her senior class—even though she had no idea at that time whether she would achieve that honor. Diane said she wanted to have the photograph as a way to keep her motivated.
Diane did end up in the top 10 percent of her senior class. Gloria Zamora told her friends that the reason Diane worked so diligently was because she knew her parents could not afford to send her to a good college. When her father got laid off from work, Diane watched Gloria take on two nursing jobs a day and then sell Mary Kay cosmetics on the side to help pay the family's bills. At one point, the electricity was cut off in their small house for more than a week. Diane studied by candlelight. But even with her ambition, Diane was still a teenager, filled with the same impulses and longings as any other girl her age. While she kept Civil Air Patrol military fatigues in her closet, she also had a collection of teddy bears on her bed. She took an after-school job at Fast Forward, a store oriented to teenage girls, because she liked the discount she could get on hip clothes. She listened to both contemporary Christian music and popular groups like Pearl Jam. "Diane was a really sweet girl," said one former neighbor, Dale Rogers. "But I thought she was a little naive and sheltered from the outside world. She was really a virgin in life, you know? She hadn't really experienced anything. She didn't know all the things that could happen between people."
And then, in August 1995, just before the start of her senior year, her life changed. She told her parents that she had fallen for a boy: David Graham. He was just like her, she said breathlessly. It was not only that they had known as children what they wanted to do with their lives. They both loved calculus, physics, and government, and they talked on the phone late into the night about their homework. Their feelings, well known to any adolescent, were a mixture of adoration and total possessiveness. When they were together, they never stopped touching. Diane would put her arm around his waist, sliding one finger into a belt loop, and David would encircle her with his arms. "He always had both arms around her, like he was afraid she was going somewhere," said Diane's aunt Sylvia. "The two of them looked like they were wrapped up in one another."
It was not difficult for David and Diane to be swept away by the romantic grandeur of their relationship. By then, they were the stars of the Civil Air Patrol—David was a cadet-colonel in the CAP's youth division, the highest accolade given, and Diane was the wing secretary—and they saw themselves as the top guns of the twenty-first century. David saw himself becoming a great fighter pilot, Diane a famous astronaut. Abandoning her plans to study physics at an academically elite major university, Diane applied to the Air Force Academy, where David was set on going. After she learned that the deadline had passed for applications, she applied to the U.S. Naval Academy with the intention of transferring her commission after graduation from the Navy to the Air Force so she could be stationed with David.
Diane's family knew that David's personality was a little different. He had a collection of hunting rifles, which he once brought over to their house. When he came to church with Diane, he wore his combat boots, pants, and a T-shirt, and he kept his arms closely around her through the service. He once showed up at the Zamoras' house with a couple of his ROTC buddies from Mansfield. For entertainment, David took them out to the front yard and ordered them to march back and forth. "Diane was laughing, thinking it was funny," said Sylvia, "but I think the rest of us wondered a little when David said, 'I can get these guys to do whatever I want.'"
Still, no one could say that David was ever impolite around Diane or her family. On weeknights he drove the eighteen miles from Mansfield to Crowley and quietly sat in the Zamoras' living room to do homework with her. When her parents couldn't afford a pair of $100 combat boots for Diane, David bought them. After Diane had a serious wreck driving David's pickup truck, requiring pins to be put into her left hand, David spent entire nights at the hospital with her. "Unlike that other boyfriend of hers who just wanted to go all the way," said a relative, "David genuinely cared for Diane. I don't think Diane had ever had that kind of attention."
That September, about a month after they started dating, they told Diane's parents that they were engaged. David had sold a couple of his hunting rifles to make a down payment for an engagement ring. They were going to get married, they said, on August 13, 2000, after they graduated from their military academies. They already had the wedding planned. They were going to charter a bus to carry their relatives in Texas to the famous Cadet Chapel on the Air Force Academy's campus. There, David would wear his uniform, Diane a white wedding dress, and at the end of the ceremony, they would walk under crossed swords held by other cadets.
Not long after they announced their engagement, her family confirmed, Diane lost her virginity to David—an act that had a dramatic impact on her life. "After it was over, she was real confused by what had happened," one relative said. "I know she felt guilty because she had wanted to wait. But once she went through with it, she became more committed than ever to David. I remember her saying, 'If I can't be Mrs. David Graham, then I will die as Miss Diane Zamora.'"
Indeed, they were hopelessly in love, focused as laser beams on each other. In that classic teenage way, they developed their own secret love code. She called him Tiger (the Mansfield High School mascot was a tiger), and he called her Kittens. And they ended many of their telephone conversations with the words, "Greenish brown female sheep."
Greenish brown is the color olive. A female sheep is a ewe. Olive ewe. I love you.
When this precious relationship we had was damaged by my thoughtless actions, the only thing that could satisfy her womanly vengeance was the life of the one that had, for an instant, taken her place.
ON THE FIRST WEEKEND IN NOVEMBER, David traveled to Lubbock with other members of the Mansfield High cross-country team for the regional meet. Both the boys' and girls' squads had qualified, and the school provided them a large van for the trip. One of the students who went on that trip was Adrianne Jones.
In many ways, Adrianne was Diane Zamora's polar opposite, an ebullient girl who knew how to charm guys and get them to look twice at her. When she posed for one studio portrait, she made sure to show some cleavage. Although she was far from sexually naive, she wasn't overtly promiscuous in a way that would make her an outcast among the more popular girls. Diane, on the other hand, rarely put on makeup for school, and except for David, she thought most high school guys were immature. It is not known if anything happened between Adrianne and David in Lubbock. No one can remember whether they sat next to one another on the van or stayed up late talking at the motel. Some of Adrianne's friends think she would have kept her distance from David. As one friend pointed out, Adrianne had her standards: She would never sleep with another girl's boyfriend.
But something did happen when they returned to Mansfield. For whatever reason—perhaps Adrianne looked at David on that van and saw the kind of guy that even her father would like—she asked him to give her a ride home. They didn't go straight to her house. Adrianne surprised him by asking him to take some turns that he knew were out of the way. They ended up behind an elementary school, where David parked the car, and he and Adrianne had sex—a brief but truly fatal entanglement.
Apparently they told no one. Their encounter seemed to have been an impulsive, one-night fling. But a month later, late in the evening, a friend of David's who lived in the nearby town of Burleson heard a tapping at his window. David and Diane, their clothes bloodied, came through the window. According to the friend, David begged him to ask no questions. But the friend noticed that both David and Diane were upset. They lay on the floor and held each other. It was the same night Adrianne Jones disappeared from her home and was murdered.
But the friend never reported the incident to the police, and soon David and Diane were back to their old ways. Using his father's credit card, David bought Diane and Gloria leather coats as Christmas presents. He got Diane's engagement ring out of layaway so she could begin to wear it. On Valentine's Day, he gave her a teddy bear and flowers.
Diane's family could not help but wonder about the relationship as it progressed. David and Diane seemed so absorbed in one another's lives . . . so obsessed. "No matter what we were talking about, Diane brought up David's name. She was always talking about David this or David that," said Diane's cousin Ronnie Gonzalez. One night when they were apart and David didn't call, Diane tearfully begged her mother to call his house to see if anything terrible had happened to him. David was no different. He came over every afternoon to run with Diane, and some nights he would stay so late that he would fall asleep on the couch. His father would call, demanding that he come home, but David would dawdle for hours before leaving. Whenever Diane would go to a school function at night, David would phone every hour from his home until she got back.
That spring, they learned within days of each other that they had been accepted to their academies—David to the Air Force, Diane to the Navy. At special ceremonies at their high schools, they were presented with their academy acceptance letters. The Mansfield students gave a long ovation to David, who had Diane at his side. "I know this sounds strange to say now," recalled Becki Strosnider, the former editor of the Mansfield Uproar, "but we thought it was so cool that he had followed his dream." For her part, Gloria was so proud of what her daughter had done that she called the Hispanic-oriented La Estrella section of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and suggested a story. When she spoke with David and Diane, the reporter, Rosanna Ruiz, asked them if they were being realistic about being married in five years, considering they would be so far apart. But the two insisted that they would stay in touch daily through e-mail. "I was surprised at how adamant they were," Ruiz recalled. "They said they were certain the marriage was going to happen and that there were not going to be any outs. Then they stopped and looked at one another."
In the summer of 1996, after nearly three hundred interviews, detectives put the case on what they called slow-down mode. Bill and Linda Jones sank deeper into despair. Bill had to restrain himself to keep from interrogating every teenager he saw in town. Linda would get into her car at night and drive to the site where Adrianne was found, hoping she might come across the killer. Some students continued to see counselors about Adrianne's death. April Grossman painted a portrait of Adrianne in art class to honor her. She showed it to David, who sat behind April in government. He looked at it, paused, and then said, "You did a good job, April."
We realized it was either her or us…I just pointed and shot.
ONLY 1,239 YOUNG PEOPLE WERE ACCEPTED out of the 8,736 who applied to enter the Air Force Academy for the fall 1996 semester. Of the nearly 10,000 who applied to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, only 1,212 were accepted, 200 of those being women. Just by getting into their academies, David Graham and Diane Zamora had become part of a select group of American teenagers. To stay there, however, they had to survive grueling summer boot camps designed to eradicate their civilian habits and teach them the exacting discipline of military life. For the freshmen at the academies—known as plebes at the Naval Academy and Doolies at the Air Force Academy—the six-week summer sessions were humid days of nonstop marching, push-ups, running, and taking orders. Upperclassmen belittled them every time they made a mistake. At meals, the freshmen were required to keep their eyes focused on their plates at all times except when questioned by a superior. They had to be prepared to answer a barrage of questions and recite long passages about academy rules from memory. The system was unnerving and often demoralizing, and it was not unusual to see a cadet or midshipman resign his or her commission before the summer was over.
By all indications, David successfully completed his Basic Cadet Training in Colorado Springs. According to relatives who read them, Diane's letters home indicated that she was capably enduring "plebe summer" in Annapolis. She wrote in detail about her daily schedule, from the ninety-minute calisthenic sessions at six in the morning to the evening drill period in which they marched with M16 rifles. She wrote that she was going to church again at the Naval Chapel and that she had joined the glee club.
But her squad leader, Jay Guild, a good-looking plebe from suburban Chicago, said Diane was not physically keeping up with the other plebes and seemed emotionally distracted. "She liked to talk about David," Jay said. "She missed him a lot. She often talked about him very strangely, as if she didn't trust him but she still wanted to be with him. It was very odd."
Jay said Diane went on "crying fits" when David wouldn't answer her e-mail. She told him she suspected David was cheating on her with a female cadet at the Air Force Academy. Apart from David for the first time since they began dating, Diane became plagued with jealousy, and she decided, in turn, to make David jealous. According to one source, Diane stopped sending David e-mail for several days, telling him that her computer had broken. A few weeks into the plebe summer, Jay added, Diane told him that she was considering breaking up with David, and she suggested that the two of them become boyfriend and girlfriend. She then sent David an e-mail telling him that Jay had kissed her.
David and Diane, who once had found such security in their all-consuming devotion, seemed to be whirling out of control. When David heard about Diane and Jay, he attempted to contact Naval officials to inform them that Jay was sexually harassing Diane. He sent threatening e-mail to Jay, demanding that he have nothing more to do with Diane. One person close to the investigation said that David wrote Diane letters begging her not to deceive him. In the letters, David would write such lines as, "Remember what binds us together."
It was clear that Jay was captivated by Diane. When Diane's parents and Jay's mother arrived in Annapolis for Parents' Weekend on August 9, they were told that Jay and Diane had been reprimanded by upperclassmen for excessive fraternizing. He had been seen sitting on the edge of her bed at night at Bancroft Hall, the coed dormitory where all the midshipmen lived. The truth was that Gloria was relieved to hear the news about Jay and Diane. "I got the very strong feeling that Diane's parents felt the relationship between Diane and David had become an unhealthy one," said Jay's mother, Cheryl Guild. At one point in the weekend, Diane and her parents went to lunch with Jay and his mother. During that lunch, Diane got up to call to David. Cheryl could see Diane across the room, talking on the phone, and she noticed the girl was physically shaking. Gloria leaned toward Cheryl and said, "I wish Diane had met Jay first."
Jay said that at one point in the summer, he asked Diane if David had ever cheated on her before. "She said yes, and I said, 'What did you do about it?' She told me that she had asked David to kill the other girl."
Stunned, Jay listened as Diane told him that she had watched David kill a girl named Adrianne. She never said she had participated. "All she said is that she told him to do it and she saw him do it," Jay said.
Although the Academy's strict honor code, known as the Brigade of Midshipmen Honor Concept, states that a midshipman must immediately report another midshipman who lies, cheats, or breaks the law in any way, Jay told no one—and would eventually be asked to resign from the Academy because of his silence. "I didn't want to believe it," he said. "I thought maybe she was trying to get attention."
But in late August, Diane told the story again, this time to her two roommates, Mandy Gotch and Jennifer McKearney. They were having a late-night conversation, and one of the girls mentioned how Diane and David seemed so in love. According to an investigator in the case, one roommate said to Diane, "I bet you two would do anything for one another."
Diane replied, "Yes."
"Even kill for one another?" the roommate asked.
Diane paused. "We have," she said. Then she told them the story about Adrianne—whether out of guilt or pride, no one is sure. Initially, the two roommates were skeptical about what they had heard, but the next day, they nervously told a Navy chaplain about the conversation. The chaplain contacted a Navy attorney at the Academy, who then began calling police departments in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to ask if they had an unsolved murder of a teenage girl. On August 29 he contacted the Grand Prairie police department. The next morning, detectives were on a flight to Annapolis.
I just wanted it to be a dream.…I wanted to be able to drive Adrianne back home, to go to sleep, and to wake up back on December 3, free to make my decisions all over again.
THEY PULLED HER OUT OF THE FIRST pep rally of the season for Navy's football team, the first night when the plebes were allowed to mingle with upperclassmen and feel a part of the Academy. Across the Yard came the sound of pounding drums and cheering midshipmen as Diane was escorted down a long hallway in the administration building and then was led into a room where several detectives and Navy officials waited.
She admitted to nothing. She said only that she had been insecure throughout plebe summer, and she thought such a tale about murder would make her look tougher in the eyes of other plebes.
The cops weren't buying it, but what could they do? They had no evidence against her. Navy officials told her they were temporarily suspending her and sending her home until the matter was straightened out. They gave her an airplane ticket that took her from Baltimore to Atlanta and then on to Dallas. When Diane reached Atlanta, however, she changed planes and flew to Colorado Springs, where she went to see David.
No one knows what was said between them. But the two did have their photographs taken by a friend of David's. David was wearing his Air Force uniform, Diane her all-white Naval outfit. In that one moment, they looked at the camera with a nearly desperate look, as if they knew that this was their last time together—that the fairy tale was over.
When the detectives arrived in Colorado Springs, David insisted that he couldn't imagine why Diane would tell such a blatantly false story. But the cops told him they had found his friend in Burleson and had heard the story of the bloody clothing. Then the Air Force officers told the young cadet that he had a duty to reveal the truth. Finally, David broke. He sat down at a word processor and typed a four-and-a-half-page confession (reprinted in part in the Dallas Morning News) that one forensic psychologist would later equate with a Danielle Steele novel. David wrote that for a month after his evening with Adrianne, he was tormented by "guilt and shame." The "perfect and pure" relationship between him and Diane, he added, had been defiled by "the one girl [who] had stolen from us our purity." Eventually, he told Diane about his tryst. "For at least an hour she screamed sobs that I wouldn't have thought possible. It wasn't just jealousy. For Diane, she had been betrayed, deceived and forgotten." He then said Diane gave him an ultimatum: kill Adrianne. David agreed. "I didn't have any harsh feelings for Adrianne," he wrote, "but no one could stand between me and Diane."
And so, David admitted, he called Adrianne on the night of December 4, 1995, and said he wanted to see her. He picked her up in a Mazda Protege owned by Diane's parents. Diane was hiding in the hatchback. They drove out to a secluded country road, and Adrianne reclined the passenger's seat, no doubt hoping for another romantic interlude. According to David's confession, while he held Adrianne, Diane raised up from her hiding place and hit her in the head with a dumbbell that belonged to David. Adrianne, however, did not die. "I realized too late that all those quick, painless snaps seen in the movies were just your usual Hollywood stunts," David wrote. "Adrianne somehow crawled through the window and to our horror, ran off. I was panicky, and just grabbed the Marakov 9mm to follow. To our relief (at the time) she was too injured from the wounds to go far. She ran into a nearby field and collapsed .…In that short instant, I knew I couldn't leave the key witness to our crime alive. I just pointed and shot…I fired again and ran to the car. Diane and I drove off. The first things out of our mouths were, 'I love you.'" And then Diane said, her thirst for revenge suddenly slaked, "We shouldn't have done that, David."
The police recovered the handgun along with several dumbbells from the attic of the Grahams' home. They also confronted Diane, who by then was back in Texas. She stared at the officers. Then she quietly went to the station to give her own confession. She was put in a solitary cell on a separate floor from David—she looked like a harmless teenage girl in a sleeveless shirt and blue jeans. Every day, she did push-ups and sit-ups in her cell. She asked her mother for history and government textbooks so she could continue her studies. She said little to the guards or to her fellow female inmates, except for one prisoner who regularly cried because she missed her children. Diane sang her a contemporary Christian song she had memorized back in high school titled "Faith."
In Mansfield, as everywhere else, the question on everyone's mind was, Why? It was one thing, residents said, to read about urban gang kids shooting it out over a rivalry, but how did the culture of the streets—where loyalty and vengeance are valued above life and law—infect upstanding small-town kids? There were the usual discussions about teenagers' values being shaped more by shabby movie violence and the angry lyrics of their favorite singers than they were by moral lessons from their parents. Other citizens were shocked to learn that more than one of David's closest friends suspected that David was involved in Adrianne's murder, yet never said anything to the police. It was as if the most important thing among these teenagers was not "narc-ing" on a friend.
After the initial wave of national publicity over the arrests, Anna Barrett, a reporter for the Mansfield News Mirror, began looking for positive stories to write about the high school to help the community's morale. "But something has changed in this town," she said. "You can feel it." Indeed, within a month after the arrests, a junior at Mansfield High was shot in the face with a shotgun and killed. A girl who had been on the cross-country team hanged herself because of personal problems. As for Bill and Linda Jones, they changed their phone number to avoid the phone calls from reporters, television shows, and movie producers. One producer, explaining why David and Diane's would be a great miniseries, said in an interview, "It's a modern-day Romeo and Juliet—only they kill someone else instead of each other."
What remained unfathomable was how David and Diane could convince themselves that only death could eliminate the one blot on their perfect teenage love affair. How could they imagine that sexual betrayal was a far worse crime than murder? It seems clear that David convinced Diane that Adrianne was a seductress who lured him behind the elementary school. According to one police source, just before Diane hit Adrianne in the head, she looked at her and said, "I know who you are! I know what you've done!"
Perhaps a trial will provide the definitive answer to why they did it. The district attorney's office has not determined whether it will seek the death penalty for the two eighteen-year-olds. There is an outside chance that David's attorney, Dan Cogdell of Houston, will get David's confession thrown out of court because he had been confined to his quarters at the Air Force Academy for more than thirty hours before the police took the confession. If a judge rules that the confession is admissible, however, then it is possible that Cogdell and John Linebarger, a prominent Fort Worth defense attorney who has been hired by Diane's family, will try to position their clients to point fingers at each other. "If I think attacking the Zamora girl is the appropriate line of defense, I will do it," said Cogdell, who added that he believes Graham wrote his confession to cover for Diane. A couple of investigators agree with him, believing that Diane had a Lady Macbeth-like control over David's life, coaxing and taunting him into letting his impulses and desires overcome his scruples. But others suggest that David, who brought guns and violence, sex and betrayal into Diane's sweet and studious life, exercised his spell over her by enlisting her as a partner in murder—using death to bind them together for life. There is even a third police theory that David, wanting to prove that he cared nothing for Adrianne, took one shot, and Diane, consumed with fury, took the other.
Still, it is difficult to imagine that David and Diane will someday turn into adversaries in court. When David was being escorted to the county jail in Fort Worth, a television reporter asked if he had anything to say to Diane. David looked at the camera and said, "I love you." As for Diane, one afternoon she motioned toward a guard and asked if she would pass on a message to David."
"What is it?" the guard asked.
Diane paused. "Tell him, 'Greenish brown female sheep.'"
What Mainstream Publishers Don't Want You to Know About Door-to-Door Magazine Sales
That kid at your door with a magazine order form will tell you a story -- part sad, part hopeful. The truth will be infinitely worse than you can imagine.
By Craig Malisow
published: July 17, 2008
James Scribner runs Team-Xtreme, which cleared orders through the late Robert Spruiell. "Scribs" said the media only focuses on the "negative" side of the industry.
Subject(s):
door-to-door sales, magazine sales crews, subscription clearinghouses, publishing industry, deceptive sales tacticsIn the Ramada Inn, across I-10 from Ikea, dozens of young sales agents spill out of vans and head for the first-floor conference room. They're in their late teens and early twenties, tired from a long day of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, but excited about the money they think they're going to get.
In the conference room, a line of middle-aged managers sit behind folding tables and count the stacks of receipts and cash their agents place before them. It's a ton of money. The crews hit Houston in late February, it's near the end of March now and it's been a lucrative stay. Houston is always a windfall.
It's been a tough hop for this caravan of sales crews, though. Winding their way down from California, they lost a few agents. Two were arrested in Albuquerque after they allegedly forced their way into the home of an elderly couple and beat them to death, raping the wife first. A few weeks later, another agent allegedly raped a woman in Claremont, California, so he got picked up, too. Then, in West Texas, a van flipped, killing one agent and injuring three others. That's seven agents out of commission. That's about a $2,800 loss per day.
After they turn in their cash and receipts, two agents, a pudgy girl and a lanky guy, hit the parking lot for a smoke. Two Houston Press reporters are there, observing. Without knowing they're talking to reporters, the agents walk over and ask for rolling papers. When asked what they're doing in town, the agents explain their job and how much they love it. It's a blast, they say. You lie all day to sell subscriptions, and you unwind afterward with some smoke. You tell the customers that you live a few streets over, that you go to the local school and play on the soccer team, that you just sold subscriptions to their neighbor, and the idiots buy it because by now you've got it down to a science. And on to the next town. And the next.
In the eight months the Press investigated door-to-door magazine sales across the country, the industry has seen at least three murders, one rape, two attempted rapes, one stabbing, one attempted murder, one vehicle fatality and one attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl.
Interviews with former agents reveal a constant party atmosphere where agents have easy access — often thanks to their managers — to drugs. The agents come primarily from two populations: reprobates who need to leave wherever they are fast, and vulnerable kids from unstable families who believe that hopping into a van full of strangers is better than what awaits them at home.
Crystal Mahathy is an example of the latter. In 2000, the 17-year-old crossed paths with a Texas-based magazine crew manager named Rick Senner.
Rick Senner got his start working for Russell Wood, one of the industry's biggest names. Senner started as an agent under Wood, who's based out of the hinterland of Pilot Point, Texas, about 50 miles north of Plano. Senner worked his way up from agent to crew manager, and later left to start his own company. When he's not on the road, Senner is with his wife and daughter at their home in Gainesville, just a few miles from Pilot Point.
Senner's crew was working Mahathy's hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, when he spotted her in an Arby's and figured she would make a good agent. Senner is six-one, blond, handsome and has the kind of confidence that allowed him to shrug off things like the warrant for his arrest out of Phoenix, where he was busted for weed and was a no-show at court. He offered a way out of Fort Wayne, and a way out of Mahathy's mixed-up family life. But first, because she was under 18, Senner wanted her mother to sign a permission slip. Because her mother is illiterate, Mahathy got an older cousin to sign for it instead. With that taken care of, she was able to hit the road. She made money for Senner, who made money for his boss, who in turn made money for major-league publishers.
Like many agents, the teenage Mahathy didn't know what she was getting herself into and how hard it was going to be to get herself out of it. Senner and his colleagues have a great sales pitch, and truth doesn't always close the deal.
Agents are often driven across the country by managers whose driver's licenses have been suspended or revoked. And while the industry's trade group says it encourages member companies to conduct background checks, the crews are overflowing with agents with open warrants, extensive criminal histories and probation terms that prohibit them from leaving their home state. Since its inception in 1987, the National Field Selling Association has not only done nothing to clean up the crews, it has lobbied against proposed legislation that would implement the most basic of safety regulations and prohibit the hiring of underage employees.
While mainstream publishers and their trade group, the Magazine Publishers Association, say door-to-door sales account for a minuscule percentage of annual sales, this seemingly small percentage still translates into millions. It's profitable enough to publishers like Condé Nast, Reader's Digest and others that they still consider door-to-door sales a worthwhile venture in the 21st century. And without publishers' participation, the industry would cease to exist. Which means, quite simply, that publishers have decided the collateral damage is worth the boost in circulation.
The following is a story of that collateral damage — of murder, rape, assault, overdoses and scamming — and the business decisions and lack of legislation that make it possible.
_____________________
In February 2000, Rick Senner, Crystal Mahathy and the rest of Senner's crew hit a rave party in Oakhurst, California, where they recruited an 18-year-old girl named Mandy Nixon.
When Nixon told her parents she wanted to drive around the country with Senner's crew, they were concerned. Nixon was a bit of a rebellious spirit. As a minor, she had trouble with drugs and alcohol and wound up on juvenile probation for a while. But Crystal Mahathy, who had turned 18 on the road, told the Nixons she'd look out for their daughter.
But a day or so after Nixon left, her parents read about the history of complaints online about All-Star Promotions, Senner's employer, and they grew concerned. They called Senner a few times to have him drop off their daughter wherever they were so they could bring her back home. But he ignored the calls. Deciding they needed more muscle, they had Nixon's former probation officer call Senner and tell him he had better get Nixon off his crew, so he dropped her off by a motel outside Medford, Oregon.
Although Mahathy said she'd look out for Nixon, Mahathy was having her own regrets about joining Senner Sales. She had called her Aunt Patsy a few times from the road, saying she wasn't getting the money she was promised, and she wasn't eating regularly. She wanted to come home. But Patsy never seemed to have the money for a Greyhound ticket.
On February 4, around the time Senner dropped Mandy Nixon off in Medford, Mahathy called Aunt Patsy from a pay phone outside a Wal-Mart. It had been a really long day; she hadn't made enough sales, and she felt really pressured. That time, Patsy told her to stay put. They'd get her a ticket. But the call was abbreviated; Mahathy had spotted Senner's rented Ford Explorer and she said he'd be mad if he found out she was calling home again. She'd call back later.
The next night, on their way to sell to Joneses in Eureka, California, Senner's crew was stopped by California Highway Patrol officers for driving 30 mph over the speed limit. Apparently unaware that Senner had a warrant for pot possession out of Phoenix, the officers gave him a citation and let him go on his way.
Less than an hour later, near Redding, Senner rounded an especially dangerous stretch of mountain highway running parallel to the Trinity River. With no guardrail, and with terrible visibility at night, the road had seen its share of accidents. Senner lost control of the Explorer and drove off the highway, falling into an embankment 80 feet below.
Passenger Scott Tarwater was ejected into the Trinity River, whose rapids carried him so far away his body wasn't found for three weeks. But a timely burial wasn't a problem for Mahathy's family, because she was right there in the passenger seat. Crushed to death.
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Whenever there's a tragedy tied to the industry, whether it be the death of one of the agents or of one of the customers, the industry mouthpieces issue impotent condemnations or reiterate the notion that door-to-door sales are just a sliver of the pie.
The Magazine Publishers of America will give a variation of the following, which is a statement it gave to the Press: "Magazine Publishers of America condemns any door-to-door business that preys on vulnerable individuals or poses a threat to the public. [MPA] has long urged its members to identify any subscriptions coming from these sources and recommends that its members cease doing business with any company that does not fully comply with the law. Our guidelines and relations with subscription agents are clear, and we encourage all our members to follow them."
Which, based on the Press's investigation, previous media stories and industry watchdogs, is complete nonsense. The object is to push subscriptions, and it scarcely matters how.
A customer is a "Jones." A sales pitch is a "spiel," and there are all kinds of spiels — a school-spiel, cancer-spiel, you name it. These lies are known as a dirty canvass, and they're quite successful. Of course, there are natural salespeople who don't have to dirty canvass and can write ten or 12 sales a day, but the agents who can't snow a Jones and who come back empty-handed are known as WABs, weak-ass bitches. A WAB occupies a stratum in the caste system right below circus freak and just above whore. No one wants to be a WAB, so sometimes you have to dirty canvass.
If the MPA is unaware of dirty canvassing, then its only other choice is to somehow believe that door-to-door companies are the country's single-biggest employer of college athletes in the marching band whose parents are dying of cancer and who are competing for a scholarship to study theater in London.
It's easier to understand the continued interest in door-to-door sales once you understand the financials.
Jack Hanrahan, a media consultant with three decades of experience in print advertising, publishes the CircMatters newsletter. He gave us a better understanding of how just a slight bump in circulation can mean serious money.
When magazines decide how much a page of advertising will cost, media buyers convert that into a ratio of cost-per-thousand.
Say the publisher of a magazine with a circulation of 1 million copies prices each page of advertising at $50,000. That's a cost-per-thousand of $50. Say the circulation jumps 50,000, which brings total circulation to 1.05 million. If the publisher keeps the cost-per-thousand at $50, that raises the single advertising page rate to $52,500 ($50 x 1,050).
If the magazine sells 100 pages of advertising per issue, then the total value of the 50,000 jump would be $250,000 per issue. ($2,500 per page x 100 pages). If the magazine runs 24 issues a year, that's 24 x $250,000 — $6 million, from an extra 50,000 copies.
That's enough incentive to keep using sales agents. Of course, publishers don't want to be linked to any of the kids knocking on the doors, so the system has been arranged to keep everyone at arm's length.
It works like this: Agents knocking on doors turn their sales receipts in to their managers, who send them off to clearinghouses. A clearinghouse submits the subscription orders to the publishers, who then mail out the magazines. The clearinghouses choose which traveling sales crew companies to work with; the heads of those companies usually have their managers do the hiring. This arrangement allows the publishers, clearinghouses and road crew company heads to pretend they have nothing to do with the kids pushing the publishers' product.
The real blessing for everyone, though, comes in a labor loophole: Even though a crew's agents ride in the same vehicle, are dropped off in the same neighborhoods, are returned at night to the same hotels and have commissions held by managers who dole out the cash when an agent wants to buy lunch or alcohol or a new pair of shoes, labor laws have allowed company owners to hire their agents as "independent contractors." Since the crews rarely have solicitation permits, if they are arrested for selling without a license or for any other matter, they are instructed to tell authorities they are not in fact employed by the company they're traveling with.
The companies that run the crews primarily hire through newspaper advertisements promising big money and free travel. The ads are generally placed when the crew hits a town; the prospective hires meet a crew manager at a hotel and are usually hired on the spot. Although they're promised about $500 a week, their money goes on "the book," a mysterious ledger kept by crew managers. Often, agents will start out in the red, already owing managers hotel rent money. Managers also dock pay for canceled orders or other so-called infractions.
Agents sell from a "hot-list," laminated brochures of magazine titles, usually provided by clearinghouses, that agents show their Joneses. The agents work on a point system; the hot-lists show the points each agent would get for a particular subscription. For example, a 2006 hot-list from the National Publishers Exchange, one of the country's largest clearinghouses, shows 40 points for Reader's Digest and 80 points for GQ. According to the titles on the hot-list, the agents were selling for — and NPE was clearing orders for — Condé Nast, Disney Publishing, Meredith and others. (While the list also includes titles from Hearst, a company spokesman told the Press, "A written directive was sent in January 2007, but most clearinghouses were alerted to our policy against accepting orders from door-to-door 'crews' years earlier." A Meredith spokesperson said the company de-authorized door-to-door sales in March 2007.)
Every link in the chain holds the door-to-door sales information close to the vest. Citing proprietary interests, publishers will not disclose their clearinghouses, and clearinghouses will not disclose their contracted magazine crews. Since there are only a handful of major clearinghouses in the country, publishers would have you believe that, after years in the industry, higher-ups are too incompetent to have figured out who their competitors clear through.
National Publishers Exchange was a member of the National Field Selling Association (NFSA), the trade group for door-to-door magazine sales companies. In 2006, the association stopped disclosing its membership, so it's difficult to tell if NPE is still a member.
The NFSA will not say why it decided to keep membership private, but that's not surprising for a trade association that doesn't even have its own office — instead, mail and phone calls are directed to the Philadelphia office of Fernley & Fernley, which prides itself on being "America's First Association Management Company."
And while Ellen Buckley handles preliminary media calls for the NFSA, she doesn't seem to know a whole lot, mostly because she wears a lot of hats. While she may be listed as the "director" of the NFSA, she is also, for example, Administrative Director of the North American Horticultural Supply Association, which means she doesn't just field calls about mag crews, but could probably also help with questions about mixed perennials and potting soil.
So for tough questions, Buckley refers reporters to the NFSA's Washington, D.C., attorney, Dan Smith. Smith has lobbied for the group, most notably in 2000, when legislators proposed the federal Traveling Sales Crew Protection Act. The bill was a response to a 1999 wreck in Wisconsin that killed seven agents and paralyzed another. It occurred when the 20-year-old driver of the van — whose Iowa license had expired and who previously had his Wisconsin driving privileges suspended — saw a police car and panicked. Not wanting to get busted again, he tried to change seats with a passenger while driving 80 miles per hour. The coordination was a bitch. Twelve passengers were ejected. The owner of the company the crew worked for never skipped a beat — she just hired a bunch of new kids and started up under a new name. Smith was the guy who handled the lobbying against the proposed safety act — lobbying that worked.
The bill called for making sure crews stayed in hotels that met certain safety guidelines, and making the companies keep an itinerary of where their crews were at any given time. Such a schedule would have helped when, in Houston in 2005, a sales agent raped a 17-year-old mentally retarded girl who answered the door of the apartment she shared with her mother. To gain her confidence, that agent acted as if he had a disability as well. If the Traveling Sales Crew Protection Act had passed intact, there's a very good chance authorities would be able to find out which crews were operating in Houston on June 5, 2005. As it is, the case remains unsolved.
Although Smith says otherwise, when it comes down to it, the NFSA doesn't appear to do much except hold an annual conference in Illinois where members gather to play golf. Smith says actual work is accomplished at the conference, such as the year a cop talked to company owners about driving safety, and another year when a CPA discussed tax preparation. Smith says he's also given talks about negligent hiring. (After 20 years, the NFSA members are still scratching their heads over this pesky "driving safety" thing. Seven years before the fatal Wisconsin wreck, an agent driving a van with only a learner's permit lost control in Des Moines, Iowa, hit a median, flipped the van and ejected nine passengers. Five were killed, six others injured.) (see
"Cataloguing Grief").In its newsletters, the NFSA is careful not to mention names of the sales agents, particularly those who die on the job. In its fall 1999 newsletter, the first one released after the Wisconsin tragedy, the lead article was the president's message on "Stating the Cause for Utilizing Prepaid Phone Cards in the Field," followed closely by "Small Wonders," a reflection on "the simple discoveries of the century." Sample passage: "Where would we be without the brassiere, first patented in 1914, or the zipper, patented in 1913? Could those inventions be related?" (For the record, the sales agents killed in Wisconsin were Peter Christian, 18; Cory Hanson, 22; Amber Lettman, 16; Crystal McDaniel, 26; Marshall Roberts, 16; Malinda Turvey, 18; and Joseph Wild, 21. Monica Forques, 16, was paralyzed from the waist down).
Of course, it's different if one of their own dies, as in the January 2006 newsletter's tribute to founding member Don Fish: "The next time you pick up a golf club, look up and say, 'Good luck, Don' — he will be playing with the greats of the game." (The NFSA named its annual golf tournament after Fish, who had the opportunity to die at age 74).
Smith talks in a sort of aw-shucks manner that would have you believe he wishes the NFSA could do more to ensure the safety of its agents and the Joneses they solicit. But don't think the trade group is just giving up — after 20 years of existence, the NFSA is toying with the radical notion of mandatory background checks. The bitch is, the NFSA has to be really careful about violating antitrust laws that limit the rules trade groups place on their members. So Smith says the NFSA probably has to stop just short of forcing members to conduct background checks.
"We can mandate that in order to be a member you must agree to do background checks," he says, adding that the NFSA would have no way of confirming if any of the companies ever did the checks.
"We can't force proof," Smith says. "The name of the game is, we're a trade association...the key is, you can't tell people how to run their business."
Furthermore, Smith was at a loss as to how someone might be able to confirm a company did the checks in the first place.
Citing privacy laws, he says, "You can't conduct background checks and send copies to a trade association to show you did it," apparently unaware of the fact that one of the NFSA's board members runs a service that audits companies' criminal background checks.
"The name of the game is whoever's doing the recruiting has got to run the background check," Smith says. "They've got to determine from what they see whether or not to put this guy out there or not. Now if they do it and screw up, then shame on them, but I'll find out after the fact, just like you do. Now can I do anything about it? The worst thing, the toughest thing I can do is to terminate their membership. I wish there was something else I could do, to be brutally frank, but there isn't any."
But if Smith has the power to jettison any owner who gets caught not running checks, he apparently hasn't been introduced to the NFSA's president, Vinnie Pitts. In 2000, after one of Pitts's agents murdered a woman in New York, the woman's family sued Pitts, who eventually settled for $1 million. The woman's sisters told local papers that they believed Pitts would now conduct background checks for sure. But in 2005, another of Pitts's agents — who was on probation for felony burglary out of Minnesota and was not supposed to leave the state — raped and beat a woman in Wisconsin (see
"Sales Force")._____________________
Back in the Houston Ramada, 79-year-old Diane Tork is in Room 301, smoking 100s, punching numbers into her calculator, taking calls on her pink cell and sifting through names and numbers of potential hires. Age has been kind to her body, but not so much her mind.
She'll get confused and send wrong birthdates back to the home office for criminal background checks, but of course it doesn't really matter anyway, because the checks are worthless. Only a formality. The kind of checks where you really don't want to find anything.
Tork says she started in the business on December 21, 1945, when she was 16. She eventually ran her own company, then took over for a company out of Spring when that owner died in the early 1990s. She worked alongside her now ex-husband, John Tork, who is 20 years her junior.
John Tork also had his own company, the Houston-based Tork & Associates. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission sued Tork's company for violating the "cooling-off" period, which allows customers three days to cancel an order. After Tork failed to respond to the suit, a federal judge fined his company $50,000. A year later, Tork was convicted of larceny and sentenced to three years and six months in a Texas prison.
Diane says she and John, who share a home in Atlanta, Georgia, are semiretired. John has long suffered type 2 diabetes, and recently had a foot amputated. Diane has been off the road for a long time and only pops into hotels to check on things once the crews are about to hop.
Her company is called Prestige, which clears orders through a Phoenix clearinghouse owned by the late Robert Spruiell (see
"Upper Management"). Joining Prestige on this hop are at least two other companies — it's not uncommon for supposedly distinct companies to travel together. And it's not uncommon for these groups to say they have no idea what the other is up to, which is what Diane Tork tells the Press.She can't speak for Team-XTreme, which is run by a guy named James Scribner, who was described as an alcoholic by every ex-agent who spoke to the Press about him. Diane Tork doesn't disagree with that characterization, saying, "He's a drunk. I've heard that he will take his clothes off and run around the hotel naked — never around me." ("Scribs," as he's known, is just one of the industry's many middle-aged men whose jobs require them to travel around the country in vans loaded with women in their late teens and early twenties, something that apparently creeps out no one in publishing. A few former agents accused Scribs of getting a tad too friendly with them when he was on a binge. One former agent said, "If you're 18 years old, he wants to fuck you. He's a dirty, nasty old man. I do not like that guy.")
Diane says she runs a tight ship: Her agents aren't allowed to bring alcohol inside the hotel. She also says her agents are periodically drug-tested. And if she hears any of them are using a dirty canvass, they're out. She says she's had to fire about 15 agents in the past month for failing drug tests and lying to Joneses.
The kids can be a handful. Yet it's precisely these kind of troublemakers that Diane targets, mostly because, according to her story, she's a philanthropist at heart. Sure, she could hire upstanding kids from stable families who are maybe looking for a summer job before going off to Harvard, but that would just be too damn easy. She'd rather take in needy kids and nurture their self-respect by giving them a job and responsibilities.
"Kids today, their parents don't want to talk to them; they throw them out on the streets...sometimes these kids need help," she says.
So she can be stern, but maybe not as much as her ex-husband John, who, she says, is especially hard on the young women in his crew.
"He hates girls," she says. "You know why he hates girls? He thinks they're all sluts. And he gets so mad that girls go around with half of their body hanging out...he doesn't like his guys associating with the girls." (John Tork didn't return numerous voice mails).
But deep down, she says, he's a softie. And neither he nor anyone else in the mag crew business should be painted with the same brush, she says. There are good and bad in every line of work.
It's a sentiment that was echoed by a lot of people contacted for this story. The media always wants to focus on the negative. Why talk about things like agents on probation who beat, rape and kill people when you can talk about kids who are honing valuable job skills?
James Scribner originally agreed to speak with the Press, but ultimately changed his mind, because of his belief that the Press just wanted to focus on the "negative."
Of course, Scribs and Diane Tork have a point. Few media stories describe how fun life on a mag crew can be — if you're not a WAB. First of all (based on what ex-agents told us), there is nearly unlimited access to marijuana, cocaine, pills and meth. It's like an especially fun dormitory on wheels. A lot of these young adults were already using before they joined crew, and find it absolutely wonderful that there are jobs where you can be high all the time, and instead of your boss caring, your boss is getting high with you.
You also get to travel the country, which means you get to experience Ramadas and Holiday Inns from coast-to-coast, as well as seeing the country's beauty from a van window. Plus, you get to knock on doors in exciting tourist destinations like suburban Houston, suburban Phoenix, suburban St. Louis and suburban Minneapolis.
For the guys, there's potential to get laid like crazy. Since crews are constantly picking up new agents, if a guy isn't getting anywhere with the current batch of young women, he just has to wait about 24 hours before the new batch arrives.
For the female agents, there is the promise of finding a boyfriend. A lot of serious relationships start on the road, and many lead to marriage. There are drawbacks, though; the Press spoke with a few female former agents who say their managers coerced them into getting abortions because a pregnant agent can't be walking all that much, and, really, who wants to buy a magazine subscription from a knocked-up 18-year-old? The idea is to appear innocent, not coked-out and with child.
Sure, if sales are bad, you don't always get to eat, and if you complain, managers often remind you of your station in life, and how your own family didn't want you, and besides, what the hell else are you going to do with your life? The agents who do manage to leave often come back because the lifestyle has gotten in their blood.
An agent named Jenn (she asked that her last name not be used) told the Press about returning to her crew, even though she knew it was bad for her. Jenn was hired in 2006, when she was 22 and hiding from her abusive boyfriend in a North Carolina women's shelter. Traveling around in a van seemed like a nice change of pace, so she answered an ad in the paper for Sunshine Subscription Agency, and met up with the crew manager, a 34-year-old guy who had served time in a Florida prison for burglary. She left with him that day.
She enjoyed the constant partying but had disagreements with the company owner (Vinnie Pitts, the current president of the NFSA), so she left after only a few months. But when she got home, she was freaked out by how quiet and slow things were. Her thumbtack habit grew worse — on the road, she would steal thumbtacks from bulletin boards and poke herself. She didn't know why. Once home, though, she was driving the suckers all the way in.
"I had not been alone for two months," Jenn told the Press. "I was so used to — no matter where I was, whether I was going to the bathroom, whether I was walking to the ice machine, I was never alone. And then all of a sudden, I was."
She added, "Physically, I couldn't be still, because my body was used to walking miles and miles a day, that if I didn't walk anywhere in one day, I would have these muscle spasms all over my body. And so I would walk for hours."
So she went back to the crew and got what she needed; the excitement, the friends, the exercise, the drugs. All fun things. Which goes to show that there is a positive side to this story.
_____________________
A year after the Wisconsin wreck, that state's governor, Jim Doyle, sent letters to the publishers of the magazines sold by the crew.
In his letter to Condé Nast, specifically citing the magazine Allure, Doyle wrote, "Our complaints document a pattern and practice of illegal conduct and deception in the marketing of your magazine. Unfortunately, last year's accident in Wisconsin was not an isolated incident. Other young people and adults have been killed in other states while working for itinerant sales crews. Young people are recruited to sell your publication with promises of extensive travel, wealth and college scholarships. Once employed, they are treated like animals."
He then laid the final responsibility at the feet of Condé Nast: "As a major publisher, you have the ultimate responsibility for the way your magazine reaches the public. You also control the purse strings because you pay these companies for obtaining new subscriptions. Clearly, you are in the best position to ensure that these companies obey the law and do not risk the lives of the children representing your product."
To date, Doyle appears to be the only politician who has called the publishers on their complicity in the door-to-door trade. However, it appears his words didn't quite sink in.
Two months after his letter to Condé Nast, he got a response not from the publisher, but from a lawyer for the Magazine Publishers Association, displaying that organization's uncanny ability to speak out of both sides of its mouth.
Attorney John Hadlock wrote that, to the best of his knowledge, the company running the crew in the Wisconsin wreck was not authorized by the publishers or the clearinghouse the company used. (This, of course, is an unverifiable statement, since all of the information is closely guarded).
Hadlock continued: "...And substantially, all of MPA's member publishers have taken steps to disassociate themselves and their magazines from road crew agents known to have acted unethically...."
And then, "The publishers would like to work with state and federal regulators to have a central clearinghouse of agents that are believed to be unethical or that violate the law. For antitrust reasons, MPA has been unable to create such a list for fear that that would be deemed an unlawful boycott."
A careful rereading of those passages presents a paradox: How were MPA's members able to "disassociate" from agents "believed to be unethical," unless they knew which agents had bad records and which were kosher? Presumably, one would have to work from a list in order to make disassociation possible.
Yet, "MPA has been unable to create such a list" for fear of inviting accusations of antitrust violations. So which is it? Either there is a list or not. Apparently, the likes of Condé Nast are afraid of being sued by people like Rick Senner and Vinnie Pitts, which would indicate that Condé Nast doesn't have much in its budget for hiring decent attorneys.
Hadlock ultimately blamed these unfortunate situations on the industry's bogeymen, the nefarious bunch of unauthorized sellers known as "rogue agents."
"Magazine publishers see such unethical agents as a serious problem," Hadlock wrote. "Agents of that type are quick to disappear when they are under scrutiny, only to reappear later under a different name and at a different location."
Although Hadlock's letter acknowledged the Wisconsin wreck, the MPA never issued a public statement on the tragedy. It was a sensitive time for them — it was the same year the association got a new president, Nina Link, who came to the MPA from the Children's Television Workshop, where she was, among other things, a producer of Sesame Street.
Nine months after the Wisconsin tragedy, Link was interviewed by Folio, a magazine geared toward people in publishing.
The interviewer asked Link, "In television reports about the accident, the MPA refused to comment. Was that the right decision?"
"I don't know," Link is quoted as saying. "People here are so thoughtful, and that decision was made with a lot of consideration."
The interviewer tried again: "Would you refuse to comment?"
Link said, "I'd have to be in the situation. If I felt it wasn't in the best interest of magazines, then no."
A few questions later, the interviewer asked, "Should publishers be more aggressive in self-policing efforts?"
Link's answer: "We have some 'best practices,' and again, we have established guidelines. I think many members have been good about following those guidelines, but there are probably a few that haven't."
The thing is, neither Hadlock's letter to the governor, nor Link's position that publishers take the MPA guidelines seriously, appears to hold up under scrutiny.
At the time of Crystal Mahathy's death — 11 months after the Wisconsin wreck — she was working from a hot-list provided by National Publishers Exchange, one of the country's biggest clearinghouses, which cleared major magazines like Time, Rolling Stone and US News & World Report. Yet NPE did not sever ties with Senner after the wreck. He served six months in jail and was back on the road, still using NPE's hot-lists.
After the families of Crystal Mahathy and Scott Tarwater sued Rick Senner, Russell Wood and All-Star Promotions (the case was settled for an undisclosed amount), Senner split from All-Star and joined a company called Entrepreneurs Across America. (Mahathy's and Tarwater's families also sued Firestone Tires, which in 2000 had recalled a massive number of defective tires, many of which were fitted onto Ford Explorers, one of which Senner was driving. Firestone settled with the families for an undisclosed amount).
Entrepreneurs Across America also used hot-lists from NPE, which featured titles like Reader's Digest, Maxim, Forbes and Elle. And these titles were hawked by top-tier individuals like Jacob Kanupp, who, according to internal documents from EAA, was a top seller when he joined in 2005. At the time, the 23-year-old Kanupp had a warrant out for his arrest and had racked up charges (if not outright convictions) for possession of cocaine, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying a concealed weapon, felony possession of marijuana, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, credit card fraud, driving without a license, DWI, defrauding an innkeeper, drunk and disorderly conduct, and, oh, littering.
Representatives at the National Publishers Exchange ignored calls from the Press for weeks. It wasn't until we left a voice mail saying we had confirmation that NPE had subcontracted with All-Star Promotions and Entrepreneurs Across America that we got a call back. That was from a woman named Elaine Scanlon, who would only say that they do not disclose which road crew companies they work with.
A TV Guide representative was the only person who would admit to a relationship with National Publishers Exchange, and that was only because, according to the representative, TV Guide dropped NPE — and all door-to-door sales — in 2007.
A representative for US News & World Report stated in an e-mail, "...since U.S. News is a privately held company, we do not disclose individual vendor sales information."
Ellen Morgenstern of Reader's Digest also sent an e-mail, stating, "the vast majority of Reader's Digest subscriptions come from direct mail efforts, partnerships, and via the Internet. A very small percentage come from authorized subscription agents that comply with industry guidelines and practices."
Beth Jacobson of Wenner Media, which publishes Rolling Stone, seemed confused when told that the Press was looking into door-to-door sales agents. "Wenner media doesn't directly retain those companies," she said, which is precisely the point.
The Web site for the Pilot Point-based Direct Subscription Services includes Rolling Stone on its list of available titles. But it's much better for Wenner Media never to step into the same room with a top-selling DSS agent like Tim Heinecke, who joined the company after skipping out on probation for beating his three-year-old daughter.
Who wants to be publicly associated with that guy?
_____________________
In her short time on the road for Senner Sales, Crystal Mahathy got to meet all kinds of people.
The thing about a Jones is, you never know what you're going to get. Some male Joneses will buy any crappy magazine from an agent showing enough cleavage. Some will invite you in for a joint. Some will slam the door in your face or sic their dog on you.
Mahathy was so young and unassuming that she seemed to invite sympathy from her Joneses. A woman in Rio Dell, California, invited Mahathy in for some food and a rest. She wound up talking to Mahathy for two hours. She felt so bad about taking up Mahathy's time that she bought a subscription to Rolling Stone.
Before Mahathy went on to the next Jones, the woman made sure to get her address. Mahathy gave her the address to her aunt Shirley's house.
The following Christmas, Shirley Mahathy opened her mailbox and found a card from Rio Dell, addressed to Crystal. Shirley opened the envelope to find a Christmas card — a red background with pictures of little toys scattered about, and a bed with three sleeping tots.
Inscribed in the card was a message from the woman who had sat and talked with Mahathy months earlier.
"Hey little one," it read, "...please send a note and let us know you are safe and home."
Of course, the woman never got a note. By that time, Crystal Mahathy was ten months dead.
25 years after Rajneeshee commune collapsed, truth spills out -- Part 1 of 5
Published: Thursday, April 14, 2011, 2:13 PM Updated: Friday, April 15, 2011, 3:03 PM
Editor's note: In a nearly unbelievable chapter of Oregon history, a guru from India gathered 2,000 followers to live on a remote eastern Oregon ranch. The dream collapsed 25 years ago amid attempted murders, criminal charges and deportations.
But the whole story was never made public. With first-ever access to government files, and some participants willing to talk for the first time, it's clear things were far worse than we realized.
What follows is an inside look -- based on witness statements, grand jury transcripts, police reports, court records and fresh interviews -- at how Rajneesh leaders tried to skirt land-use and immigration laws only to have their schemes collapse to the point they decided killing Oregonians was the only way to save their religious utopia.
Ma Anand Puja stepped into St. Vincent Hospital on a summer night in 1985, hunting for James Comini.
The Filipino nurse was there to kill the rural Oregon politician, who was recuperating from ear surgery at the Portland hospital. She carried a syringe to inject a mixture into Comini's intravenous tube that would stop his heart.
But once inside Comini's seventh-floor isolation room, Puja discovered her target wasn't on an IV. Flustered, she hurried from the hospital to a getaway car, and her assassination team started the long drive home.
Their destination: Rancho Rajneesh, a spiritual encampment 200 miles away in eastern Oregon. It was base for Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a guru from India, and 2,000 of his worshippers.
The murder scheme was just one of many increasingly desperate attempts to save the guru's empire.
The Rajneeshees had been making headlines in Oregon for four years. Thousands dressed in red, worked without pay and idolized a wispy-haired man who sat silent before them. They had taken over a worn-out cattle ranch to build a religious utopia. They formed a city, and took over another. They bought one Rolls-Royce after another for the guru -- 93 in all.
Along the way, they made plenty of enemies, often deliberately. Rajneeshee leaders were less than gracious in demanding government and community favors. Usually tolerant Oregonians pushed back, sometimes in threatening ways. Both sides stewed, often publicly, before matters escalated far beyond verbal taunts and nasty press releases.
Three months after the aborted Comini plot, the commune collapsed and the Rajneeshees' darkest secrets tumbled out.
Hand-picked teams of Rajneeshees had executed the largest biological terrorism attack in U.S. history, poisoning at least 700 people. They ran the largest illegal wiretapping operation ever uncovered. And their immigration fraud to harbor foreigners remains unrivaled in scope. The revelations brought criminal charges, defections, global manhunts and prison time.
But there was much more.
Long-secret government files obtained by The Oregonian, and fresh interviews with ex-Rajneeshees and others now willing to talk, yield chilling insight into what went on inside Rancho Rajneesh a quarter-century ago.
It's long been known they had marked Oregon's chief federal prosecutor for murder, but now it's clear the Rajneeshees also stalked the state attorney general, lining him up for death.
They contaminated salad bars at numerous restaurants, but The Oregonian's examination reveals for the first time that they just as eagerly spread dangerous bacteria at a grocery store, a public building and a political rally.
To strike at government authority, Rajneeshee leaders considered flying a bomb-laden plane into the county courthouse in The Dalles -- 16 years before al-Qaida used planes as weapons.
And power struggles within Rajneeshee leadership spawned plans to murder even some of their own. The guru's caretaker was to be killed in her bed, spared only by a simple mistake.
Strangely, most of these stunning crimes were in rebellion against that most mundane of government regulations, land-use law. The Rajneeshees turned the yawner of comprehensive plans into a page-turning thriller of brazen crimes.
A new start
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh needed a new place to build his worldwide commune.
In India, he worked as a small-town philosophy professor until he found enlightenment paid better. He built a thriving enterprise attracting Westerners to his lectures and group therapies. They sought meaning in their lives, escaping the remains of the Vietnam War and a crashing world economy. And Rajneesh mixed in plenty of sexual freedom, ensuring publicity to build his brand.
Government authorities in India, weary of the Rajneesh's growing notoriety, cracked down on his group's unseemly and illegal behavior, including smuggling and tax fraud. The guru ran, ending up half a globe away at the Big Muddy Ranch, 100 square miles of rangeland an hour's drive north of Madras.
The first contingent of Rajneeshees quietly moved to Oregon in summer 1981, but they couldn't escape notice for long. Part of the guru's brand was clothing in reddish hues. Such dress was out of place in the blue denim reaches of Oregon. Followers, known as sannyasins, also displayed their devotion to the guru by wearing malas, wood bead necklaces holding a photo of Rajneesh.
Resettling in Oregon was the work of his chief of staff, Ma Anand Sheela, then 31 years old. She was a native of India, born to a privileged family as Sheela Patel. She wasn't after enlightenment. She was quick-witted and hungry for power, the perfect instrument for the guru's ambition.
Initially soft-spoken and engaging, Sheela charmed Oregon ranchers and politicians. Early on, she hosted a dance in Madras where cowboys partied until dawn. She curried favor, buying 50 head of cattle from a Wasco County commissioner, even though the commune was vegetarian.
She assured the guru that the commune of his dreams would soon rise on the Big Muddy. She expected to put up housing compounds, warehouses and support buildings. Business enterprises, once based in India, would move to the ranch.
In short, Sheela intended to do as she wished on their remote 64,000 acres.
Anxious to move ahead, she closed the property deal without understanding Oregon law -- a pivotal mistake. She didn't know the state severely limited how many people and buildings could be jammed onto ranch land.
Already it was too late. The money was paid, the guru packed and hundreds of sannyasins were expecting to be housed and fed. Sheela and the guru were undeterred. In India, trickery and bribery got results. Why would Oregon be any different?
The Rajneeshees found that the law did allow some new homes, but only for farmworkers and their families. Sheela homed in on that exemption when she met with Wasco County planners in summer 1981.
She was joined by her husband, a former New York banker named John Shelfer who was known on the ranch as Swami Jay, and David Knapp, a California therapist known as Swami Krishna Deva. For the meeting, they shed any sign of affiliation with the sect. They wore plain clothes, stowed their malas and introduced themselves by their given, not sannyasin, names.
They told the assembled officials they planned to operate a farm commune. Workers would be brought in to restore abused rangeland. They needed dwellings to house the workers.
Attending the meeting was Dan Durow, a young planner who had been with Wasco County less than a month. He had a trusting nature from his Midwestern upbringing and was intrigued by the idea of a farm commune. They discussed how the ranch could legally house perhaps 150 workers.
But the three visitors were vague about whom they represented.
"Are you a religious organization?" Durow finally asked.
"No," came Sheela's quick answer. "We celebrate life and laughter. We are simple farmers."
In the ensuing months, Durow repeatedly traveled to the ranch to monitor developments. He discovered that four-bedroom modular houses were in fact dorms with no kitchen, no living room. The Rajneeshees, on alert for his visits, routinely hid extra mattresses to disguise the true population at the ranch.
Making enemies
To legally stretch the limits, the Rajneeshees moved to form their own city.
Their private Portland lawyers advised they needed to befriend 1000 Friends of Oregon. The environmental group was a watchdog over land use, especially guarding farmland from development.
In late 1981, Sheela, Krishna Deva -- better known as KD -- and others from the commune met with two lawyers from 1000 Friends. They explained they needed to erect a city to tend to the thousands who would be moving there. They explained that remaking the ranch into a working farm was a bigger task than expected.
The environmental lawyers applauded the desire to restore the land, but they saw no need for a city. Plopping an urban area into the middle of an agricultural operation didn't make sense. As their resistance became apparent, Sheela asked whether their opposition would dissolve if the Rajneeshees joined 1000 Friends with a substantial contribution.
The bribe was brushed off. Sheela turned snide. Observing the modest furnishings in the Portland office, Sheela said she wasn't surprised by "shabby" work being done by people working in "shabby" surroundings. The crack was needless, but it was trademark Sheela.
From then on, 1000 Friends and the Rajneeshees battled. The organization launched an aggressive, but not always successful, legal campaign to blunt creation of the city. Its fundraising literature soon bore the picture of Sheela, and donations and membership soared.
In turn, the Rajneeshees portrayed 1000 Friends as a pawn of powerful political interests. They considered the environmental group an enemy, more interested in crushing a religion than protecting land. They named their sewage lagoon after the group's executive director.
Their fight would rage on for years.
Much of it played out in Oregon courtrooms and in the media. Coached by the Bhagwan, Sheela became adept at using the press to her advantage. She could be counted on for outrageous news conferences, where her sharp tongue cut into the enemy of the day. She seemed to spit insults with every breath.
But her conduct troubled other Rajneesh leaders.
KD complained in a letter to the guru that the insults were impairing efforts to build the commune. The guru's response was blunt: You're a coward. KD swallowed the insult and kept his place at the inner circle of the ranch. Later, he used his insider knowledge to get a lenient plea deal for himself -- and to help send Sheela to prison.
Another insider, Ma Yoga Vidya, a mathematician then also known as Ann McCarthy, tried her hand at reeling in Sheela. In a private meeting with the guru, she described Sheela's conduct as "outrageous" and harmful to the commune. The guru nodded as he listened, but otherwise made no reply.
Her end run enraged Sheela. The next day, Sheela dragged herself out of a sick bed and, with an intravenous drip line in tow, took Vidya back to see the guru. This time he had plenty to say. He unloaded on Vidya, who was the commune president. He said Sheela was his agent, and when she spoke, she was talking for him. He told Vidya to never challenge Sheela and to share that instruction with other commune members.
Most Rajneeshees would have been surprised to learn the guru provided such intimate oversight. They believed the guru was a spiritual master, a rare enlightened man untouched by daily events at the ranch. To this day, some former sannyasins hold the view that he knew next to nothing about what was happening at his commune.
Sannyasins well understood, though, that Sheela acted with the guru's authority. She wasn't to be questioned on any decision or directive. She wielded the authority without restraint, sharing it with an elite team of other women leaders, called "moms" by their underlings, who kept the Rajneeshees in line both with favors and punishment.
Cliques and cracks
Not everyone could be so readily controlled, such as the guru's personal doctor, dentist and caretaker.
They and a handful of other sannyasins served Rajneesh in his fenced compound called Lao Tzu. Their independence irritated commune leaders, but especially peeved Sheela.
A group of wealthy California donors also proved challenging to control once they moved to the Oregon ranch in 1984. The most notable were Francoise Ruddy, whose former husband produced "The Godfather," and John Wally, a physician who made a fortune in emergency room medicine. She became Ma Prem Hasya; he was Swami Dhyan John.
They had no zeal for the lifestyle of seven-day workweeks, shared meals or rudimentary sleeping quarters. Instead, the Californians set up a home for themselves apart from the usual housing. They brought in expensive furnishings, artwork and even their own car, a Jaguar. Almost daily, they drove to Madras for groceries to avoid the ranch's staid meals.
That was bad enough, but they also attracted the guru's attention. They obliged him with diamond-studded watches and Rolls-Royces. Before long, Hasya married the guru's doctor.
The Hollywood group and the guru's personal staff soon made Sheela's list of people on and off the ranch considered a threat to the commune and the guru. She split up the Hollywood group, scattering them to separate homes around the ranch. She tried to replace the guru's doctor.
To keep tabs on what was going on inside the guru's compound, she had the place laced with hidden microphones and recording equipment. One bug was placed on a table leg next to the guru's favorite chair. He was told it was a panic button. Trusted sannyasins monitored the eavesdropping equipment, reporting information to the commune's top four leaders.
Eventually the chasm between the commune's leaders and the guru's chosen insiders became too much even for him. On a spring evening in 1984, he summoned both sides to his house and, in front of them all, lectured Sheela. He told her his house, not hers, was the center of the commune.
He turned to the others with a warning.
"Anyone who is close to me inevitably becomes a target of Sheela," the guru said.
He proved prophetic.
Two of those sitting at the guru's feet that day were later marked for death.
Thwarted Rajneeshee leaders attack enemies, neighbors with poison -- Part 2 of 5
Published: Thursday, April 14, 2011, 2:25 PM Updated: Friday, April 15, 2011, 3:00 PM
Rajneesh
An Oregonian
special report
Rajneeshees in Oregon -- The Untold Story: As land rules keep Rajneeshees from building the utopia they envision in the 1980s, they go from dirty tricks to biological warfare.
The call from home jolted Bill Hulse, a Wasco County commissioner and wheat rancher.
His wife, Rose, was panicked. Two Rajneeshees had driven up their dead-end street in Dufur, parked across from their house and sat there. One hour. Two hours. Four hours.
Hulse called police but was told their hands were tied. Parking on a public street wasn't illegal.
Such intimidation no longer surprised local officials, and leaders of the religious sect made no apologies.
The Rajneeshees wanted to be left alone to build their global commune. That ambition was being thwarted by regulators, politicians and nearby residents. Commune leaders fought back in ways large and small, public and clandestine. They did so in the name of their spiritual master, the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
Public opinion was initially divided as Gov. Vic Atiyeh tried to counsel tolerance.
From the time the group arrived in 1981, Atiyeh fielded scores of letters from Oregonians alarmed by the commune's development. Other citizens wrote their governor that the state should be more welcoming of a religious order.
Atiyeh responded to all with reserve. Typical was
one letter to a Portlander: "Regardless of the religious beliefs or practices of this group, they are entitled to every right afforded under our Constitution." His duty, he said, was to protect those rights.Retaliation grows
Dan Durow, the Wasco County planning director, was closer to the front lines, deciding almost daily what the Rajneeshees could and couldn't do on their land.
He was suspicious, since they had lied about their intentions in their first meeting with him. Still, he knew his every act would be closely watched, both by sharp Rajneeshee lawyers and their equally attentive legal opponents. He decided to administer land-use rules to the letter of the law, giving up the sometimes informal way rural counties handled such matters.
That strict compliance riled Rajneeshees, who felt Durow was deliberately impeding their efforts. They belittled him in meetings and in letters. On two occasions when he arrived for inspections, ranch equipment blocked the way, disabled by contrived breakdowns. Packs of Rajneeshees came to his office in The Dalles, disrupting work by scattering throughout workstations off-limits to the public.
Their aggressiveness alarmed Durow, and he worried for his safety. Uncertain what was coming, he sent his three young children to live out of town with their mother, his ex-wife.
At the commune, Rajneeshee leaders cast any resistance to their needs as oppression or religious discrimination.
They retaliated in petty ways. One Rajneeshee put a nail under the tire of a Wasco County planner while he attended a conference in Eugene. Ma Anand Sheela, the guru's top aide, held a courthouse door open for the state's deputy attorney general, his arms full of legal books. As he passed, she stuck out her foot, sending him sprawling to the ground to laughter from the Rajneeshees.
Such tactics, of course, didn't slow the growing government reaction to what was happening at Rancho Rajneesh. Durow and others held up, or denied, permission for some buildings, including a hospital. Then-Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer pressed his case to have the sect's city declared illegal.
Those obstacles undermined Sheela's power in the sect, derived in large measure from her promise to build a sprawling utopia. The guru pressed her relentlessly to sweep the hurdles away. Millions of dollars were at risk if their American dream failed.
Impatient with court action and petty pranks, Sheela set up secret squads to strike at the commune's enemies. These were disciples who accepted Sheela's view that the commune and their guru were in danger. Sheela, effective as any spy master, compartmentalized her minions. They operated alone, or in small teams, often unaware of one another's assignments.
Brewing trouble
Poison was the primary weapon,
crafted by Ma Anand Puja, a nurse also known then as Diane Onang.She was Sheela's shadow. The two had been close since their days in India, and Puja now supervised the ranch's medical department. She managed routine medical care but also ordered renegade Rajneeshees into isolation on trumped-up diagnoses and routinely overruled the sect's physicians. Daily, she medicated Sheela for stress.
From time to time, Puja retreated to a laboratory hidden in a cabin up a canyon on the ranch to secretly experiment with viruses and bacteria. Sheela wanted something to sicken people.
In summer 1984, Puja field-tested her work, handing
unlabeled vials to those on the secret teams.The operatives knew, or suspected,
the brown liquid was salmonella, which produces severe diarrhea and other symptoms. Over months, they were dispatched to spread the poison in The Dalles. They initially hoped to sicken public officials standing in their way, but then pursued a grander scheme to attack innocent citizens.Swami Krishna Deva, mayor of Rajneeshpuram, smeared Puja's mixture onto fixtures in the men's restroom at the Wasco County Courthouse in The Dalles.
Ma Dhyan Yogini, also known as Alma Peralta, went to town with vials in her purse. She stepped into a local political rally and took a seat. She secreted some of the contaminant on her hand, turned to an elderly man sitting next to her and shook hands. She also made her way into a nursing home in The Dalles, but her plan to contaminate food was disrupted by a suspicious kitchen worker.
Sheela tried her hand at contamination as well, taking a half-dozen Rajneeshees, including Puja, to a grocery store in The Dalles.
"Let's have some fun," Sheela said.
The group spread across the store with Sheela targeting the produce section, pouring brownish liquid from the vial she had hidden up her sleeve.
When there were no public reports of anyone getting sick, Sheela pushed Puja to find a more toxic solution.
About that time, Hulse and two other Wasco County commissioners arrived at the ranch for a tour. They parked Hulse's car outside the commune's welcome center and loaded into a commune van for their visit. When they got back, Hulse's car had a flat. The Rajneeshees arranged a repair on the spot that would cost Hulse $12.
As the commissioners waited in the hot August sun, Puja approached, offering each a glass of water. Her gesture was odd, for Puja was in her medical whites and had no role as a greeter.
The thirsty men took the water.
Rajneeshee leaders take revenge on The Dalles' with poison, homeless -- Part 3 of 5
Rajneeshees in Oregon -- The Untold Story: In the mid-1980s, Rajneeshee operatives unleash a secret weapon in The Dalles and import homeless people to get an electoral edge.
Unbearable stomach pain roused Bill Hulse from sleep.
The Wasco County commissioner ran for the bathroom, vomiting. His worried wife insisted he go to the hospital, where doctors admitted him as they tried to diagnose what was wrong.
Two hundred miles away in a mountain cabin at Camp Sherman, a second Wasco County commissioner awoke, ill. Ray Matthew stayed in bed, alone, for two days, unsure what was causing his violent sickness.
But a handful of Rajneeshees knew. The men had been poisoned the day before as they toured the religious sect's ranch, drinking down potent bacteria stirred into their water.
Hulse remained in the hospital four days, with doctors telling him he would have died without treatment. As he recovered at home later, Hulse concluded the Rajneeshees poisoned him. He said so publicly.
Rajneeshees reacted indignantly to his claim, saying there was nothing wrong with the water. "It was a simple act of human kindness on that sweltering day," a Rajneeshee PR person wrote to Hulse. "Now you are making a hysterical accusation that you were poisoned."
It wasn't until the commune collapsed a year later that Rajneeshee operatives admitted Hulse was right.
The poisoning was revenge for Wasco County's restricting growth at Rancho Rajneesh. The sect's leaders hoped sickening public officials would deter future decisions against their operation.
Yet the guru they worshiped, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, pushed for even more extreme acts.
His chief of staff, Ma Anand Sheela, shared with her inner circle that the guru was fed up with Wasco County's attitude. He wanted his people to get a seat on, or even get control of, the county's board of commissioners. That would at least give the commune a direct voice in its fate.
City under siege
Sheela conspired to make it happen. One Rajneeshee, shedding any trace she was affiliated with the ranch, moved to The Dalles intending to run for county office.
To elect her, the Rajneeshees hit upon two schemes. One was to depress the turnout by traditional Wasco County residents by making them sick. The second was to pack the rolls with new voters loyal to the Rajneeshees.
They first considered contaminating The Dalles' water supply. Operatives obtained maps of the water system and scouted reservoirs. But no one could figure a way to introduce enough contaminant to sicken people.
They decided instead to attack people where they ate: the restaurants of The Dalles. A young woman named Ma Anand Ava, one of Sheela's most reliable associates, was ferried to town by a driver who had no idea of her mission. She ordered him to stop at one restaurant after another, having him wait while she went in for a few moments at each stop.
Wearing a wig and dressed in street clothes, Ma Anand Puja -- who oversaw the commune's medical operations -- went on a separate mission, settling into a restaurant for lunch. Her companion helped himself to the salad bar and then watched, horrified, as Puja poured a liquid onto salad greens. She returned to her seat, calmly finishing her own lunch.
For residents and travelers exiting Interstate 84, going to any of 10 restaurants was routine.
Terry Turner, a local furniture store owner, took his wife and 2-year-old to Sunday brunch at a restaurant on the banks of the Columbia River. They enjoyed a casual meal, opting for the salad bar.
Across town, state Trooper Rick Carlton had the day off. He took his wife, 3-year-old son and 4-month-old baby to a downtown restaurant. After a meal that included a trip through the salad bar, they drove home.
By the next morning, both men were violently ill. So were Turner's young daughter and Carlton's son. Turner headed to a medical clinic, only to discover a waiting room filled with people just as ill.
"Where did you eat?" a nurse asked Turner.
"What?" he asked, confused by the question.
The nurse asked again, and when Turner told her, she said, "We've heard that several times."
Carlton tried going to work despite not feeling well, but soon clocked out for home, nauseated and weak. At home, he found his wife and son as sick as him. His mother-in-law drove up the Columbia River Gorge from Portland to tend the sick family.
Such scenes played out up and down the gorge. Soon, it was evident hundreds were sick. Hospital emergency rooms and medical clinics overflowed with people suffering nausea, diarrhea and enduring weakness.
"Rajneeshees," some whispered, but there was no proof.
A state health official famously concluded that restaurant workers in different restaurants had all ignored proper hygiene at the same time. Evidence of the Rajneeshees' true role wouldn't come out until the commune collapsed.
Using the homeless
Rancho Rajneesh faced an unfolding disaster of its own.
Using Sheela's American Express card, Rajneeshees had chartered buses in cities coast to coast, filling them with homeless people, mostly men. They said hauling them to Rancho Rajneesh was a humanitarian initiative. Those lured to the buses were promised food, beer and rest.
In truth, this was the second prong of the election scheme.
As the homeless rolled onto the ranch, they were obliged to register to vote. They were expected to vote the party ticket, as it were, when it came time to pick the new county commissioners.
But Rajneeshees quickly discovered many of the homeless had serious mental problems. A remote ranch founded on love and freedom was no place for an unruly mob. Fights broke out. To regain control, Rajneeshees injected the tranquilizer Haldol into beer kegs used to serve the homeless.
Eavesdroppers monitoring the ranch's bugged public pay phones recorded one of the homeless men apparently planning to kidnap the guru.
Sannyasins identified him as Felton Walker and took him to the Rajneeshee medical clinic, supposedly to be tested for tuberculosis. But the clinic had been emptied of all other patients by the time he arrived.
Walker changed into a hospital gown and lay on an examining room gurney. Someone taped Walker's arm to the gurney rail, and Puja put him to sleep with an injection. Then a Rajneeshee doctor administered sodium pentothal, the so-called "truth serum." Sheela and at least six other commune insiders gathered around Walker, slapping him awake to endure questioning about the plot. A tape of the call was played for him over and over. Walker kept dropping off to sleep, and his interrogators kept rousing him.
The episode went on for hours. About 3 a.m., the interrogators gave up after learning little of use. They kept Walker sedated for two more days before booting him off the ranch.
Soon, scores of homeless followed Walker. At first, they got bus tickets to return to their home cities. The Rajneeshees soon stopped that. Instead, they ferried the homeless to small towns around the commune and left them. Streets in towns such as Madras filled with penniless people far from home.
The spectacle deeply worried state and local authorities. They feared locals would be so angered by the callous act that they would strike out at the commune. The Oregon State Police and the National Guard devised contingency plans, with Guard commanders promising the governor they could mobilize 10,000 soldiers if necessary.
Sheela saw opportunity in the crisis and decided to negotiate for what she wasn't getting through the courts or crime. She sought meetings with Gov. Vic Atiyeh and Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer, inviting the governor to the ranch.
Neither man agreed, but when Sheela persisted, Atiyeh agreed to let his staff meet with her. The commune was dominating ever more of his time. And now the impending flood of homeless people into Oregon communities was pressing the tolerance of the state and its people to the breaking point.
Atiyeh hoped conversation would calm the charged atmosphere.
Sheela needed less than an hour to crush that hope.
Rajneeshee leaders see enemies everywhere as questions compound -- Part 4 of 5
Rajneeshees in Oregon -- The Untold Story: As problems grow for the Rajneeshees in 1984, an increasingly unstable Sheela continues her vicious campaign against enemies.
In fall 1984, Ma Anand Sheela believed she had leverage to play "Let's Make a Deal" with Oregon's governor.
She wanted Vic Atiyeh, a Republican in his second term, to dispose of three major problems facing the Rajneeshees.
In turn, she would dispose of a problem facing the state -- what to do with thousands of homeless men imported to Oregon in an attempt to swing local elections, but now being discarded to surrounding towns by the Rajneeshees.
She couldn't get an appointment with Atiyeh, but his chief of staff, Geraldine "Gerry" Thompson, arranged for a secret night meeting at a state office building in downtown Portland.
Thompson arrived with the head of the Oregon State Police, who discreetly placed officers around the building. Sheela arrived with Swami Krishna Deva, mayor of Rajneeshpuram and part of the commune's dirty tricks squad.
Thompson, well aware of Sheela's volatility, set the rules. There would be no shouting. There would be no profanity.
Sheela launched into her demands.
She wanted the governor to help clear visa troubles so her guru could avoid deportation. She wanted the state to drop its court case seeking to disband their city of Rajneeshpuram. And she wanted land-use obstacles removed so their compound's construction could continue apace.
In turn, she said, the Rajneeshees would help get the remaining homeless back where they came from.
Acting with Atiyeh's authority, Thompson said no deal. Growing angry, Sheela became abusive and profane.
Thompson finally slammed her palm on the desk. "That's it! Meeting over." Sheela sulked out into the hall, spewing invective.
But Krishna Deva, better known as KD, poked his head back into the office and told Thompson, "Just keep talking to us." The two set up a private link, and from then on he kept Thompson informed of the most intimate details of what was happening at the ranch, including the escalating danger.
Alarm among Sheela and her elite deepened. She secured their loyalty with privileges no one else in the commune had: private rooms, cars, special clothing. Together, they perceived ever-increasing threats from outside and from within.
They feared their guru would be harmed by vigilantes or arrested by authorities in what they were sure would be an unlawful act. They feared losing their own special places in the sect.
Their apocalyptic view wasn't shared by ordinary sannyasins, who were focused on the daily work, meditation and devising a life intended to be a global model. They didn't share in Sheela's paranoia, and some were embarrassed by her public tirades.
But most watched without protest.
They knew Sheela and her executive staff quickly punished doubters and challengers. Rank and file could be moved without notice to a new home or job. One of the commune's top lawyers crossed Sheela and soon found himself driving a bulldozer.
The most-feared punishment was banishment.
Complaining sannyasins were told they could -- or must -- leave the commune. To get there in the first place, however, worshippers typically sold all their possessions, donated most of their money to the commune and severed ties with outside families and friends.
Most truly believed Rancho Rajneesh was their home for life. Where would they go if that was taken away?
Arson squad
By late 1984, Sheela and her team were more isolated than ever.
They were exhausted. To keep going,
Sheela relied on a regimen of medications. Nervous energy so robbed her of sleep that she resorted to a drip line for sedation. For her and the others, the exhaustion made their demons loom more menacing than ever.One was Dan Durow, the Wasco County planner whose enforcement actions slowed or stopped construction at the ranch. They were particularly concerned that he had documented
illegal construction at the ranch.In her fatigue-fogged brain, Sheela reasoned that Durow couldn't act against the commune if his office was destroyed. Late one winter evening in early 1985,
Sheela gathered with a half-dozen others to go over photographs and maps of the house that had been converted into offices for the Wasco County Planning Department. They decided to torch it.Sheela called on trusted operatives: Ma Anand Ava, born Ava Avalos, and Ma Dhyan Yogini, born Alma Peralta; and Swami Anugiten, an arborist previously known as Richard Langford. The team used phony names to rent a Portland apartment as a safe house and recovered a Buick stashed at the airport for such missions.
Ava drove the team east on the freeway to The Dalles and about midnight dropped off Yogini and Anugiten just blocks from Durow's office. The two pried open a window, crawled inside and closed the drapes.
For about an hour, Yogini and Anugiten rifled through cabinets and desks, scattering government papers all about. To start the fire,
they placed eight candles inside cardboard squares soaked with lighter fluid. The pair intended the candles to act as timers, igniting the cardboard once they burned down. The two arsonists lit the candles, crept back out the window, and closed it. But that starved the candles of oxygen, and only two fires started.On their drive back to the safe house, the arsonists tossed their clothing, tainted with lighter fluid. In Portland, they called a ranch leader in a prearranged signal that meant "mission accomplished."
Back in The Dalles, a passing motorist called in the alarm, and firefighters quickly extinguished the flames before there was much damage. The heat melted part of the Planning Department's main computer, but the hard drive remained intact. Some papers burned, and others were damaged by water. But Durow and his crew were back in business within two weeks.
Legal setbacks
The Rajneeshees were no more successful later that May in trying to derail a state hearing that was exposing improper construction at the ranch. The state claimed the commune illegally wired 600 tents in preparation for a world festival.
The hearing was in a conference room at the State Library in Salem. A Rajneeshee contaminated unattended drinking water with an overdose level of Haldol. On one day, the state's
chief electrical inspector got sick. The next day, Assistant Attorney General Karen Green had trouble during questioning as her jaw inexplicably froze.When the session ended for the day, Green's two-block walk to her office became a half-hour ordeal. Her feet and legs, coursed with Haldol, cramped so much she froze in place.
But the poisonings didn't alter the outcome. The hearings officer proposed a $1 million fine against the commune for the wiring.
At the same time, federal prosecutors continued their now-relentless investigation into immigration fraud among Rajneeshees. A grand jury met for long hours, facing a deadline to indict soon or go home. The Rajneeshees monitored the secret work as best they could, growing alarmed when a loose-tongued federal mediator told them the guru himself could face criminal charges.
On the state front, Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer was winning round after round in his effort to declare Rajneeshpuram an illegal city. The commune's entire legal staff trooped to the guru's compound for guidance at one juncture. Advised the case was a losing matter, the guru instructed the lawyers to soldier on. Losing the case, though, meant losing the city and the worldwide base for Rajneesh.
Sheela, meanwhile, was wrapping up a trip to Australia. There, she badly botched a business deal. Resorting to drugging and eavesdropping, Sheela manipulated her way into partownership of a public company, only to watch its value plummet overnight when word got out. The move cost the commune nearly $1 million.
When she returned to Rancho Rajneesh, she faced incessant demands from the guru to expand his fleet of Rolls-Royces. He wanted to make it into the record books as the man with the most, and it was costing the financially shaky commune $200,000 a month. He also was demanding a $1 million watch, telling her to divert funds from the commune's needs if necessary.
Then, a federal jury awarded $1.7 million to an elderly former sannyasin who hadn't been repaid a loan. During the trial,
Sheela sent a team to poison the woman, but the mission failed.Sheela seethed when
she learned the verdict. She felt betrayed by the jury and her own lawyers. The commune didn't have that kind of money.The road ahead looked bleak. Sheela saw only one way out: murder.
Rajneeshees' Utopian dreams collapse as talks turn to murder -- Part 5 of 5
Published: Thursday, April 14, 2011, 2:34 PM Updated: Friday, April 15, 2011, 3:24 PM
Ma Anand Sheela's gaze swept over the commune leaders seated on the floor before her. She was in an especially dark mood.
"Are you people cowards or are you sannyasins of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?" she asked.
The day before, a jury shocked the commune by
awarding $1.7 million to a former Rajneeshee for an unpaid loan. The judgment was part of ever-worsening developments for the eastern Oregon compound.Sheela said the verdict showed the Rajneeshees couldn't count on fair treatment from U.S. courts or anyone else. The commune's enemies had to be stopped, she said.
That night, Sheela was an exhausted and nearly defeated woman. For four years, she had done the bidding of Rajneesh, an Indian guru who pressed Sheela to build him an international commune. Sheela chose to do that on a 64,000-acre ranch an hour's drive north of Madras.
Many of those seated before her had helped. The mix this May night in 1985 included the presidents of the commune, its investment corporation and its medical operation. The mayor of the sect's city was there, as were a handful of operatives who had secretly executed most of Sheela's plots.
After Sheela spoke, another leader gave what amounted to a pep talk, supporting Sheela's startling call to action.
One woman raised her hand. "I can't kill anybody, but I support you if you do it." Two men protested that the idea of murder was insane. They were browbeaten as cowards.
Others, startled by Sheela's proposal, kept their qualms to themselves because of growing mistrust among the insiders. The meeting proceeded to identifying enemies for a growing hit list.
So far, outrageous acts hadn't helped the Rajneeshee cause. The secret squads poisoned several hundred people in The Dalles. They set fire to the county planning office. They exploited homeless people, costing Oregon taxpayers $100,000 in bus fare to return them to their cities of origin.
Murder didn't make much sense, either, but the judgment of the leaders was crippled by exhaustion, isolation and their unwavering faith in the guru.
More meetings followed the extraordinary session in Sheela's bedroom, the scene for much of her plotting. She went to the guru for help stiffening the resolve of those participating. She returned with a tape of her conversation. Although the quality was poor, the commune insiders heard Rajneesh say that if 10,000 had to die to save one enlightened master, so be it.
Their top target was Charles Turner, the U.S. attorney for Oregon. His prosecutors were investigating immigration fraud at the commune. A federal mediator disclosed to the Rajneeshees that criminal charges were likely and might include the guru himself. He also disclosed that Sheela probably would be charged.
Sheela thought killing Turner would somehow derail the investigation.
A plan evolved to gun him down on his way home. One of the assassins traveled the country with another sannyasin, buying pistols that couldn't be traced. Others set up a safe house in Portland, which became the base for scouting Turner's home. On one occasion, two assassins sat in a McDonald's in Downtown Portland across from Turner's office, sipping coffee and monitoring his movements. They considered gunning him down in a parking garage but couldn't figure an easy way to escape.
Dave Frohnmayer, the state attorney general, was targeted as well. To determine with certainty where he lived, one Rajneeshee posed as a Bible salesman to reach his front door. Others staked out Frohnmayer's office in Salem.
A team of three went to Portland to kill James Comini as he lay in St. Vincent Hospital, recovering from ear surgery. As a Wasco County commissioner, Comini had been critical of the Rajneeshees, and he kept up his criticism after leaving office.
There was danger for enemies on the ranch as well. Much of the planning focused on killing two of the guru's personal staff: his doctor, Swami Devaraj, and his caretaker, Ma Yoga Vivek. Sheela convinced the others that the two were a threat to the guru. As proof, she played a secretly recorded conversation in which the doctor agreed to obtain drugs the guru wanted to ensure a peaceful death if he decided to take his own life.
The assignment to kill Vivek went to Ma Anand Ava and Ma Anand Su, president of the sect's investment firm and also known as Susan Hagan. The two set out late one night to catch Vivek in her room. They carried an ether-soaked rag to render her unconscious. In anticipation, Su trimmed her fingernails so no flesh would get trapped as evidence if Vivek fought.
The plan was for Ava to inject her with a lethal combination of potassium and adrenaline. They never got the chance because they couldn't unlock Vivek's rear door. They had the wrong key.
That was followed by a more elaborate plan to kill Devaraj, a British doctor also known as George Meredith. The attempt came the morning of July 6, 1985, when the commune was thick with sannyasins visiting for the annual world festival. The venue for the attempt was the massive lecture hall at the ranch, pulsing with sannyasins dancing to pounding music.
Devaraj, sitting cross-legged on the floor, considered joining the dancing. Then, a woman named Ma Shanti Bhadra, also known as Jane Elsea, leaned over his shoulder and whispered in his ear. He felt a hot sting in his buttock. She had jabbed him with a miniature syringe concealed by a handkerchief.
He whirled on her. "Oh, so this is what it's come to, has it?" he asked as he got to his feet. Shanti Bhadra walked with the doctor.
"What's wrong? What's wrong?" she asked in feigned surprise.
Devaraj made it out of the lecture hall and was flown to a Bend hospital. He nearly died from the injection of adrenaline.
The attack was a shock. Up to now, the episodes had seemed like pranks or justified acts of self-defense. But now the Rajneeshees had nearly killed one of their own. The guru himself ordered Shanti Bhadra to be drugged and questioned, an order Sheela ignored.
Ma Yoga Vidya, one of the commune's top executives who was also known as Ann McCarthy, thought other murder plans had been scrubbed when she heard two others discussing the Turner plan.
Vidya had fought Sheela in private about such plans. Sheela brushed aside her concerns but kept Vidya loyal by threatening to kill her husband.
Now, discovering that murder was still part of the operation, Vidya snapped.
She made her way to Sheela's room, interrupting a meeting.
"It's got to stop. I can't stand this talk of killing anymore. I can't stand it. I can't stand it," Vidya said. She collapsed on the floor, convulsing and crying.
Sheela summoned Shanti Bhadra from an adjoining room, asking her to calm Vidya. Shanti Bhadra was the one who had tried to kill Devaraj, and she was assigned to shoot Turner. She snapped when she encountered Vidya.
"I will not be killing anybody," Shanti Bhadra said. "No one will be killing anybody."
The turning point had come, for the commune and for Oregon.
The murder plots ended, as did other dirty tricks. Soon after Labor Day 1985, Sheela quit her posts at the ranch. She fled to Europe with selected taped conversations involving the guru, sect promissory notes and miniature hypodermic needles such as the one used to attack Devaraj. A dozen of her allies also quit the commune, joining her in Germany or fleeing elsewhere.
The ranch quickly fell apart.
At a news conference, the guru described a litany of crimes he attributed to Sheela and her "gang." Both Oregonians and Rajneeshees were stunned.
New commune leaders hired outside lawyers, who questioned sannyasins about what had gone on. The guru told his followers to be truthful. They were unsparing in their recollections.
At the same time, state and federal investigators rushed in, gathering evidence and interviewing Rajneeshees. Soon, two of Sheela's most trusted insiders struck deals. That included Krishna Deva, the Rajneeshpuram mayor, and Ava, one of the key members of the commune's dirty tricks squad.
Both gave lengthy statements that astonished investigators. The summary of Krishna Deva's statement, given over eight days, ran 96 pages.
In the coming months, one sannyasin after another trooped into court, admitting criminal conduct on behalf of the sect. The charges included attempted murder, assault, arson, immigration fraud, wiretapping and conspiracy.
Sheela, nurse Ma Anand Puja and Shanti Bhadra struck deals that included federal prison time.
The guru made a cross-country dash on a chartered jet to escape, but was caught in North Carolina as he was about to leave the country. He was hauled back to Portland in handcuffs, booked into jail like a common criminal. He ordered his lawyers to cut him a quick deal, and he was soon deported as a convicted felon, guilty of immigration crimes.
Courthouses were busy with civil matters as well. Rajneeshee corporations went bankrupt, poisoning victims sued and the state pressed the case against the city of Rajneeshpuram.
The insurance company holding the ranch's mortgage foreclosed, selling the ranch to a wealthy Montana rancher. He later turned it into a camp for Young Life, a Christian youth organization that now brings in busloads of youngsters from throughout the West.
Rajneeshees scattered about the planet, the guru ending up back in India. Renamed Osho, he died in 1990, but the faithful keep alive his spirit, running meditation centers across the world. Elsewhere, some of those most deeply involved faded back into civilian life, giving no clue to their former allegiance to the sect.
Now in Switzerland, Sheela blames Oregonians for much of what happened at Rancho Rajneesh. She'll talk about her days in Oregon, but not her crimes. She doesn't budge when pushed to do so.
"Leave me alone."
Heavy
Robert Kurson
A few months ago, this magazine published photographs from the portfolio of Robert Natkin, a local photographer who worked in the 1940s and 1950s. Natkin trained his lens mostly on hardened city people and landscapes, and his work resonated with the black-and-white urgency of an artist who believed he was shooting stories, not subjects. My job was to write a short essay to accompany his work. Most of the photos were slice-of-life Chicago: poor folk; bathing beauties; a jailbird; factory workers. One photo, however, seemed misplaced, as if it had wandered from a different collection and had settled into Natkin's book for the night. It showed a rail-thin young farmer playing checkers with a very heavy man. I recognized the large man immediately. He was Robert Earl Hughes, and I knew him from The Guinness Book of World Records. I remembered his weight—1,041 pounds—and another odd detail that had lingered in my memory since childhood: Hughes had been buried in a piano case.
There is much to behold in the photo—piled rolls of flesh, a five-foot-wide chair, tent-size overalls, brotherhood. I did not think to write about any of that. I stared at the picture for much of the day, and when I considered how to describe such a scene, one thought kept returning. I knew the heavy man was lonely.
* * *
My dad was fat. At the time I was born, he stood 5 feet 11 and weighed 280 pounds. Like many little boys, I worshiped my father. He was a traveling salesman, and my first memory of him is from a business trip we took together when I was four. We had stopped outside a steak house for dinner, and as his business partner, he allowed me to help close the car trunk. I slammed my thumb in the trunk lid and it began to swell. My dad took me inside the restaurant, using his stomach to push past the long line of waiting customers until we reached the bar, where he ordered a glass of Coke in which I could soak my finger. When the ice melted, he ordered another Coke. At four, the world is a rush of ominous faces, fantastic noises, and dangerous happenings. At four, my father's size struck me as the perfect protection against a place so large as the world.
I took many more road trips with my dad (my job was to read the maps, watch the gas, and tell my share of stories). Out across America, I noticed that people treated him differently; they were nervous around him, anxious to get away from him, and I remember thinking as the years and trips passed that a person could get lonely being fat in America, that my father looked lonely in America. When customers joked about his weight, I had to will myself not to blubber, even though I was studying karate magazines and playing Little League baseball and becoming a pretty tough young guy. In hotel restaurants, when my dad thought I was still in the bathroom, I peeked around corners to watch him slathering dinner rolls with whipped butter, even though he told me he never used butter, it was too fattening. I remember that he didn't look lonely when he ate those buttered rolls.
I began to look into the life of Robert Earl Hughes. I checked libraries, the Internet, bookstores, magazines. Though his picture in the Guinness Book was familiar to millions worldwide, little was known of him, save for his hometown (Fishhook, Illinois) and the year he had died (1958). I started digging. The skinny man playing checkers in the photo turned out to be Robert Earl's brother, who was alive and living on a small Missouri farm. I found his telephone number. Yes, the brother told me, if I'd like to drive some 300 miles, I could ask about Robert Earl—might even be a few other folks around who remembered him. I hadn't been on a road trip since my father died of a heart attack in 1995, but I collected my maps and checked my gas, and set out to find Robert Earl Hughes.
* * *
Fishhook, Illinois, is too tiny even for some mapmakers. Located about 300 miles southwest of Chicago near the state's westernmost tip, the town claims the same general store, two churches, and one-room schoolhouse it did in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Hughes family called it home. Four of Fishhook's 29 current residents have agreed to meet me at the general store, where they remember the Hughes family trading eggs and cream, socializing, and bringing their eldest son by horse-drawn wagon to be weighed on the platform scale. First, however, they recommend that I stop at the Pike County Historical Society in nearby Pittsfield to view a collection of local newspaper clips.
The historical society opens mostly by appointment in winter, and it is not heated. One board member, a retired high school history teacher, says that if I can stand the cold (most folks can't) and want to read the miles of yellowed news clippings spread across ancient wooden tables, I may avail myself of the life of Robert Earl Hughes.
Three hours later and steeped in the outline of Hughes's life, I arrive at the Fishhook general store. The four residents, including the widow of the long-time owner, have cleared a table in the back, where crinkle-cut snapshots of Robert Earl sit piled in a corner for my consideration. The store, they regret, is smaller than it was in its glory days in the 1940s and 1950s, when the town depended on it for meat, milk, shoes, feed, britches, and hammers; when the upstairs room hosted wedding receptions and lodge meetings; and when children paid 12 cents each to sit on benches and watch Gene Autry movies. For two hours, these people reach back into their lives to remember their friend Robert Earl, and by the time I leave for my hotel, the giant man from the Guinness Book has stepped from the gallery of freaks and oddities frozen with him on those pages, and ambled forward as a living, breathing human being.
* * *
Georgia Hughes of Lewis County, Missouri, was 20 when she gave birth to her first son, nine-pound Robert Earl, in 1926. At the time, Lewis County was known to be the proud home of Miss Ella Ewing, and while not as celebrated as Mark Twain of nearby Hannibal, Miss Ewing owned her own claim to fame—at eight feet four, she was believed to be the tallest woman who had ever lived.
Not long after Robert Earl was born, Georgia Hughes and her 48-year-old husband, Abe, crossed the Mississippi and moved to a farm near Fishhook—they were sharecroppers, and moved frequently to promising farms. The Illinois property, severed from town by a rough-running creek, was virtually inaccessible by automobile, but that wouldn't matter much—the family was poor, and could afford neither electricity nor running water, let alone a car. When Robert Earl was a few months old, he began to cough—a bit at first, then full-out, violently, for weeks. Doctors diagnosed a case of whooping cough, typically a monthlong hell of unrelenting hacking trademarked by a desperate "whoop" sound on the intake. Today, children are vaccinated against whooping cough, but on the farm in 1926, young Robert Earl could only cough and wait and cough some more.
Eventually, Robert Earl's cough faded, and life returned to normal. Over the next couple of years, Georgia gave birth to two more boys, Guy and Donald, and while the family remained poor, life on the Hughes farm tasted sweet for its simplicity. As Robert Earl made his way through infancy, his mother noticed that he grew faster than many children, maybe faster than any child should. By the time he reached two, Robert Earl was round enough to cause his father to fetch a doctor, who theorized that the boy's violent coughs had damaged his pituitary gland, a hormone center at the base of the brain that effects growth. Medical science, the doctor confessed, was helpless to correct it. No one could say how big the boy might grow.
By the time Robert Earl entered the first grade at age seven, he stood a few inches taller than his classmates, but weighed at least 225 pounds, about the same as his teacher, a grown man. Abe took to walking his sons to their one-room school, careful not to allow Robert Earl to become stuck in the muddy paths that led from farm to town. Today, a kid so desperately heavy would be brutalized by classmates, but to the eyes of the kids of Fishhook, who had known and seen and played with Robert Earl every day of their lives, he did not appear different, just bigger. "He was a little heavy, sure, but that never worried us," recalls Marian Wagner, a childhood friend. "We never mentioned it. Who would think of mistreating him? He was too kind. He was always upbeat and laughing and having fun with everyone, so why would someone think of hurting him?" When the roly-poly boy could no longer run or jump with his peers, they invented new games that suited or even featured him, and if the object at recess was to "get Earl down," why, you'd better believe that Robert Earl was laughing hardest of all while he whirled in circles to bat away his mates. It never occurred to Fishhook children, separated from the faster world by income, geography, and opportunity, to tease a boy who was so much like them.
Most Saturdays, the Hughes family would travel to the general store, where they would trade their farm goods for life's essentials. When he was ten, Robert Earl stepped for the first time on the store's platform scale, where the owner, Gerald Kurfman, added counterweights, then more counterweights, before announcing a reading of 378 pounds. Word spread to neighboring counties about the heavy lad in Fishhook. A doctor who came to examine Robert Earl told his parents that the boy would likely die by 15—that no heart could stand such stress. After that, Robert Earl avoided doctors whenever possible; he thought they were interested only in experimenting on him. While the Hughes family continued to visit the store, no one remembers Georgia watching Robert Earl's calories or scolding him for coveting marshmallows or treating him differently in any way than she treated his brothers.
At school, Robert Earl leapfrogged his peers in reading and writing, and startled teachers with a memory that bordered on eerie. "If he read something or met someone, he would remember it forever," says Harry Manley, 77, who worked for a couple of years in the general store. "He only needed one time." Robert Earl sat in a specially constructed chair reinforced with wires. Every month that chair got tighter and tighter, and every month the boy seemed to get smarter and smarter, to know more about the world and its odd places with strange names. By 12, Kurfman had weighed him at 500 pounds, and Robert Earl had taken to carrying a gallon of milk and two loaves of bread to school every day for lunch. In the fifth grade, while walking home from school, Robert Earl fell into a muddy ditch and had to be pulled out with a tractor and belts by the town's men. "It scared us all so terribly," recalls Gladys Still, a childhood friend who watched the rescue. Though the boy never spoke of dying, kids knew he wasn't supposed to live long, and they remember that day as the first time they were scared for the life of their friend.
By age 14, Robert Earl weighed nearly 550 pounds and could not move well. Once the epicenter of recess fun, he now watched from a sideline bench reinforced by two-by-fours as his classmates frolicked. His school chair no longer held him. Muddy roads had become quicksand to his potbellied legs. Since his family owned no vehicle with which to drive him to school, Robert Earl quit at the end of seventh grade to help his mother, who had become his best friend, with chores around the house.
In the United States, very young children rate drawings of fat children more negatively than they do drawings of children with disabilities.
Nursery schoolers asked to view drawings of children who are in wheelchairs, on crutches, without limbs, disfigured, or obese say that they like the amputee and obese children least.
American children prefer thin rag dolls to fat rag dolls; even fat children prefer thin dolls.
Fat children in the United States are less likely than others to receive best-friend ratings from their classmates.
By second grade, American children use these words to describe the silhouette of a fat child: dirty; lazy; sloppy; ugly; and stupid.
Fat students are less likely to attend college despite high standardized test scores.
Fat students are more likely to be refused letters of recommendation from faculty.
College students rate fat people last as potential marriage partners, behind embezzlers, cocaine users, shoplifters, and blind people.
* * *
Knowledge thrilled Robert Earl, but now, at 15 and nearing 600 pounds, he was unable to attend school or stray from the farm. Simple tasks had become cumbersome: to put on shoes, he needed to sit on the edge of his six-legged bed, then pull one of his legs up and onto the side of the bed, where he would work his shoe over his size ten foot; Guy bathed Robert Earl daily with sponges, because the family had no running water and Robert Earl could not reach many parts of his body.
Robert Earl adored his mother, and they awoke early—she to help dress him in the freshest-smelling, morning-dried work shirt and overalls, he to help her wash dishes, peel fruit, and pitch hay. Those who knew him insist he ate as much as a strapping grown man, but no more. His thirst, on the other hand, was titanic, and his brothers found themselves constantly breaking from chores to bring water to Robert Earl. As his weight continued to constrict the physical boundaries of his universe, Robert Earl began to read voraciously—National Geographic, Life, Westerns, mysteries, travelogues—until he had imported vast chunks of the world onto the real estate of his imagination. At the general store on Saturdays, he would make his way to the special reinforced chair Mr. Kurfman had built and painted a fine shade of green, and oh, could that boy talk about anything! Customers brought Robert Earl the latest magazines and back issues. "Whatever reading material people had, they'd bring and leave for Robert Earl," says Mary Emma Kurfman, whose husband owned the store. "He appreciated it so much, and he read everything." People bought him marshmallows and cookies, too, not because fat boys needed sweets, but because they knew his family couldn't afford the extras, and boys—especially such pleasant boys—shouldn't go without extras forever.
* * *
Months passed and Robert Earl continued to expand. By 16, he stood five feet nine and weighed 600 pounds. To the folks in Fishhook, Robert Earl's weight had become as natural an evolution as the beard now sprouting from his brother Guy's face. Those outside the community were less reserved in their reaction to word of the nearby fat boy. Residents of surrounding counties began to dip their toes inside the general store—"Might you know where the Hughes lad lives?"—and Kurfman would draw them a detailed map, complete with creek. Those people made their way and knocked on the door, and Robert Earl was always happy to see them, always smiled for those cameras he dreamed of owning, always talked about whatever place his guests were going next or current event that caused them worry. When a local newspaperman wrote of visiting the Hughes farm, he described Robert Earl as a "wonderful conversationalist" and remarked on the boy's "pleasant personality and sense of humor." The daily paper was so impressed it sent Robert Earl a free subscription, which he devoured every morning.
During trips to the general store, Robert Earl rode in the back of the family's horse-drawn wagon, holding its wooden sides with marbled arms that rippled retorts to bumps in the town's rutted roads. Visitors continued to flock to Fishhook as word spread about the fat boy who never frowned, and some suggested that he "show" at the various festivals that become the focal point of autumn country life. In 1946, at age 20, Robert Earl and his family made a trip to the Baylis Fall Festival, where he pushed the scale past 700 pounds. He attracted a crush of observers, sold 160 photos of himself, then took orders for more. By day's end, he had grossed $240.03, and earned the attention of fast talkers with dollars in their eyes. No, Georgia told the hucksters and anglers, Robert Earl will not be made a regular carnival attraction, carted from town to town to be displayed before the public. The money would have been manna to the Hughes family, but Georgia could not bear the idea of her son as spectacle; she would never allow people to stare.
One Saturday evening in 1947, while in his backyard, a neighbor heard a faint cry from Robert Earl. The neighbor dashed to his truck and drove to the Hughes farm, where Georgia lay on the floor, her mop and bucket nearby. A doctor was summoned. Robert Earl sat despondent that he could do no more to help his mother than yell into the country air—he couldn't run to help her.
Early the next morning, Georgia died from a stroke. Now 21 years old and 754 pounds, Robert Earl was without his best friend. And the world has a way of changing when you lose your mother and your best friend in the same day.
* * *
The loss of a parent awakens impulses. Shortly after Georgia died, Robert Earl wrote a letter to Heart's Desire, a radio program in Hollywood. "I've been very large all my life, not able to work. I'm said to be the world's largest man. I'm 21 years old and weigh 754 pounds. I am not able to get around. My Heart's Desire is for a radio and a camera, so if I do get to go anywhere I can take pictures. . . . I'm too large to work. My belt is 110 inches around, and if you'll send me these things, I'll never forget you." The show sent him the camera and radio. They likely never considered the most important line in the letter: ". . . if I do get to go anywhere."
Offers from area fairs and festivals, at $50 to $100 per appearance, continued to roll in. With his father busy on the farm, his family poor, and a wanderlust fed by a constant influx of books and magazines, Robert Earl began to display himself at these events, attracting great crowds who stood behind fences and paid 25 cents for his autographed picture. Newspapers covered his appearances, and soon enough Hollywood came calling for the World's Largest Man from Illinois. Newsreel crews smooth-talked their way in Fishhook, posing three starlets together in a pair of Robert Earl's overalls, walking a neighbor around Robert Earl's belly with a tape measure, and shaking their heads at the enduring pleasantness of a man whose misery they could only imagine. The films played worldwide, and brought thousands of letters to downstate Illinois newspapers. A St. Louis heart specialist paid Robert Earl a tidy sum for the privilege of examining him, then proclaimed that the young man possessed the heart of an 1,100-pound steer. The attention only bolstered Robert Earl's drawing power, and he accepted offers to appear at auto parts stores, clothing shops, even movie theatres, though he had never been able to fit in the chairs they kept in those dark, wonderful palaces he had only heard about.
Two years after Georgia died, Guy Hughes married, and this proved to be a godsend to Robert Earl, who at 23 was now pushing the scales in excess of 800 pounds. Guy's new wife, Lillian, took over where Robert Earl's mother had left off, sewing his shirts (each of which required a piece of fabric 9 feet wide and 18 feet long), cooking his meals, and painting a feminine presence in what had become a very masculine household. With Guy away from home one day, Robert Earl and Lillian began to muse aloud about how wonderful it might be to visit Robert Earl's half-sister Dora. Could Lillian drive a tractor? She could try. Could Robert Earl climb aboard? He could try. Lillian pulled him the three miles for the surprise visit. It had taken him nearly half an hour to pull himself up. The adventure, so spontaneous and splendid, was memorialized with a snapshot of a smiling Robert Earl behind his house just before leaving.
Others also showed kindness to Robert Earl. A man who glimpsed him at a fair committed the large man's frame to memory, then went home and built a dignified, custom reinforced chair, which Robert Earl would use for the rest of his life. Daisy Sheckelsworth, a woman who had met Robert Earl and admired his poise and intellect at that first Baylis festival, became a sort of benefactor to the young man, supplying him with pencils, paper, and stamps for his burgeoning pen pal hobby, and securing a supply of complimentary custom-made overalls from a clothing factory in Iowa. "Aunt Daisy," as she became known to the Hughes family, would remain a lifelong friend.
For seven years, Robert Earl continued to travel to local fairs in the back of a pickup truck, earning respectable appearance fees and selling thousands of autographed photos. The real money, however, lay in traveling carnivals, the shows that toured the country to huge crowds over several days. Offers poured in; circus fat men rarely exceeded 500 pounds, and wore loose-fitting tents to suggest bulk that wasn't there. The idea of a half-tonner who might pose shirtless was irresistible to promoters. In 1954, at age 28 and weighing 946 pounds, Robert Earl signed with Texas-based W. A. Schafer sideshows. Lillian's father and brother would accompany him while Guy worked the farm. Before long, the family bought a traveling carnival trailer that had once belonged to performing Siamese twins—Robert Earl would sleep, eat, and live in the front end of the trailer, while the rear would open on the side to display him, seated and most of the time shirtless, during shows. Robert Earl Hughes, who had never seen a movie and could walk only 20 feet before resting, was about to discover America.
* * *
I never mentioned my father's weight to him. His customers did; he even joked about it with them. But our relationship was different; we were pals, and I pretended not to notice his stomach. Looking back, it's clear he allowed me to pretend.
In 1995, a doctor told my dad that he didn't have long to live, that his bad heart and diabetes and weight were about to kill him. I told him that doctors didn't know everything and asked him to take a road trip with me, that I wanted to tape-record all his best stories, the ones about buying a Mexican copper mine and throwing a killer knuckleball. I also decided that it was time to ask him about being fat, about how his weight had affected his life, if he had been hurt by people who treated him differently, if he was OK.
I picked up my dad on a Saturday morning and we set out for Wisconsin. A half-hour into the trip, I reached for the tape recorder and asked if he was ready to tell his greatest stories. He said that he was not, that the drive and the conversation were so nice we ought not interrupt it, let's just go. We drove into Wisconsin and onto the Kettle Moraine roads I'd discovered while in college. Six hours later, I dropped him off. We had talked about life and the world and the greatness of Steve Carlton's slider. We'd remembered funny characters. We had a Chinese buffet lunch. We never discussed his weight, and I never got around to asking if he was OK. He died a few months later in his kitchen, by himself. I called his doctor to ask if she thought he had suffered. She said she was sure that he had not.
* * *
Texas was glorious. With the Schafer show, Robert Earl hit Texarkana, Tyler, even Dallas, where he saw his first movie at a drive-in while a guest in the armored car once owned by gangster Mickey Cohen. It was probably during this time, in 1954 at age 28, that Robert Earl grew past 1,000 pounds. By now, he was making more money than anyone in his family ever had, though he was by no means rich. Expenses, insurance, and the promoter ate into the hundreds of 25-cent admissions (ten cents for kids) and photo fees he collected at every stop. During show times, Robert Earl chatted happily with onlookers: I do eat a lot, but not much more than many hearty fellows; My beds have collapsed, but the one I sleep on now is reinforced; I do dress myself, but I cannot tie my shoes; I suppose I'm fat because that's the way God wanted me. The crowds observed Robert Earl from behind a wooden partition—not because he was afraid of people or they of him, but because teenagers and drunks, refusing to believe he was real, had burned his arms too many times with cigarettes.
Robert Earl spent the next two summers touring the South, East, and Midwest (though he never "showed" in Chicago). After the 1956 season, he and Guy's family moved to a farm in Missouri, where the land was cheaper and Guy had high hopes for new crops. In 1956 and now weighing 1,041 pounds, Robert Earl was approached by a city slicker who offered him the deal of a lifetime: Go to New York to appear on the world's biggest television shows—Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Arthur Godfrey, Steve Allen. Pay would be $40,000 plus airfare and expenses—Rockefeller money. Robert Earl jumped at the chance.
No passenger airline, of course, could accommodate Robert Earl. The Civil Aeronautics Board studied the case and granted a special permission to allow Robert Earl to travel aboard the freight carrier Slick Airways. Robert Earl was taken to O'Hare by ambulance, where he was lifted by hydraulic hoist onto a specially made bed, then moved into a heated and pressurized section of the airplane. Newspapers, as they did often in stories about Robert Earl, treated him with a mixture of ridicule and humor. "Now, Will He Fit on TV Screen?" asked the headline in a Sun-Times story that also referred to the "Hughes acreage" and dubbed him the "self-styled emperor of avoirdupois." Another article pondered what Robert Earl's fare would be if he were billed as regular freight.
Upon his arrival in New York, Robert Earl was whisked to a suite in the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, where tailors from the He-Man Shops scurried to measure him for the world's biggest Santa Claus suit—the role he was to play on television. The costume arrived soon after, and photographers snapped hundreds of photos of the colossal Santa from Illinois. Then, nothing. No television, no phone calls, no paycheck. The promoter apparently got what he wanted—the photographs—and then abandoned his guest. Before long, Robert Earl was broke and without a place to stay or a ticket home. He had no contract on which to stake a claim—in Fishhook, a handshake was a man's bond. The Salvation Army stepped in and paid his way back. Arriving in St. Louis, he told reporters, "No more wild goose chases for me." Then he climbed into the ambulance his brother had hired for the trip back to the farm, still dressed in the giant Santa Claus suit to protect himself from the winter chill.
* * *
In the 1950s, doctors could do little more than recommend dieting for the severely obese. Today, clinics throughout the world specialize in advanced treatments for severe obesity.
"I've treated many in the 600-pound range very successfully with surgery," says Robert Kushner, medical director of the Wellness Institute at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The surgery Dr. Kushner favors is not the massive liposuction one might expect, but rather the stomach stapling made famous by Carnie Wilson and Roseanne. The stapling reduces the size of the stomach to that of a child. Even today, however, Robert Earl would present singular problems.
"At 1,000 pounds, he would be much too high a risk for surgery," says Kushner, whose heaviest patient weighed 780 pounds. "I'd be afraid Mr. Hughes wouldn't get off the ventilator and would die postoperatively. So he first would have to go on a very strict diet in order to allow him to take deeper breaths and reduce the load on his heart. Perhaps then, at 700 pounds, stapling would be appropriate."
Dr. Kushner says that the early explanation for Robert Earl's size—a glandular disorder brought on by whooping cough—is perfectly plausible. Reports that he ate only slightly more than average hearty eaters are less so. "A lot of eating by the severely obese is done when no one is around; it's secretive," the doctor says. "Many of my patients don't perceive that they're eating a lot of food, but even in cases of glandular disorders like Mr. Hughes, the calories must come from somewhere. Still, it is believable that he did not have to eat massive amounts in order to grow that large."
In the United States, 61 percent of adults are overweight. Between 3 percent and 5 percent of the American population—or about 11 million people—are severely obese (more than 100 pounds overweight). In treating his patients, Dr. Kushner has come to glimpse a side of human behavior few of us might care to know. They routinely tell him about children yelling, "Look at that fat pig!" They tell him about nailing three job interviews by phone, only to interview in person with a manager who cannot even make eye contact before dismissing them. They tell him about stepping aboard an airplane and watching everyone pray that they sit somewhere else. They tell him about strangers removing items from their grocery carts and saying, "You should be ashamed of yourself."
"When I finished my medical training, it became clear that these were people who had more than a desperate need for treatment," Dr. Kushner says. "They needed a little understanding, too."
* * *
Robert Earl's New York experience did little to derail him from the carnival circuit. In 1957, now traveling with Guy and Lillian, Robert Earl honored bookings throughout the country. Walking, even with his massive cane, had become nearly impossible for the 31-year-old, who almost certainly weighed in excess of the 1,041-pound figure that had been painted on his trailer the year before—a rare example of a screaming carnival boast that understated the facts. In September, word reached the carnival that Abe Hughes, Robert Earl's father, had died at age 79. Guy and Lillian returned to Illinois for the funeral, but Robert Earl stayed on, believing it his duty to honor his commitments. At season's end, he returned to Guy's farm, unable to walk more than a few feet without the assistance of family, who would follow closely, lugging the giant chair the stranger had designed for him years before.
Robert Earl spent this off-season, as he had several others, answering hundreds of pieces of mail from pen pals and friends he'd met on tour, and sewing quilt squares for his nieces, whom he adored. (While Robert Earl's body was enormous, his hands and size ten feet were of normal size and functioned perfectly.) At age 31, he had already outlived the doctor's prediction by more than double.
In 1958, Robert Earl joined the Gooding Amusement Company for a Midwest tour. Near South Bend, he complained to Lillian about a skin rash and fatigue. When Lillian suggested that he take a nap, Robert Earl replied that he was afraid that if he went to sleep, he would never wake up. Lillian had heard enough. She and Guy drove Robert Earl in the "World's Largest Man!" trailer to a parking lot in Bremen, Indiana, where they summoned medical help. Doctors connected three blood pressure cuffs to fit Robert Earl's arm. Diagnosing measles, the doctors administered an injection, most likely to stimulate his kidneys. Within hours, Robert Earl's fingernails turned blue and he slipped into a coma. The doctor ordered Robert Earl to the Bremen hospital.
There, hospital staff realized he could not be wedged into a room. Oxygen was wheeled to the trailer, where Guy and Lillian kept a vigil, mopping his brow and holding his hand. When Lillian began to wash Robert Earl's feet, Guy looked at his apparently comatose brother and worried aloud that Robert Earl did not even know who was cleaning him. Robert Earl moved a bit and said, "Lillian is washing my feet." He never spoke again. Two days later, Robert Earl was dead of congestive heart failure. He was 32.
Doctors immediately requested permission to perform an autopsy. Guy refused; why hurt him any more? Still inside the carnival trailer, Robert Earl's body was driven to a local funeral home, where embalmers climbed in and began their work. Embalming equipment was hooked to a heavy-duty drainage system at a nearby garage. Dozens of gallons of embalming fluid were pumped into the body. Eight hours later, the job was finished. The funeral home didn't charge Guy a dime extra. Today, when Duwaine Elliott thinks about embalming Robert Earl, he remembers little of the equipment or the long day inside the trailer. Instead, he sees Robert Earl's face. "He had such a youthful face," Elliott says. "I'll always remember his young face."
Lillian's brother drove Robert Earl back to the Fishhook area for the funeral, but the family had to wait a few days for Iowa casket makers to finish building the custom steel-reinforced coffin. (Robert Earl was not buried in a piano case, as the Guinness Book reported for decades.) About 2,000 people attended the open-casket funeral, and many of them joked and frolicked and hunted for souvenirs. State police accompanied the procession to a tiny cemetery in Benville, Illinois, where a crane lowered Robert Earl into a massive grave dug next to those of his parents. His tombstone, paid for by local residents, reads, "robert earl hughes / june 4, 1926–july 10, 1958 / world's heaviest man / weight 1,041 pounds."
* * *
I still have one more appointment before returning to Chicago. Guy and Lillian Hughes are expecting me at their home in tiny Emden, Missouri, about 75 miles west of Fishhook. Emden is the last place Robert Earl Hughes lived. Guy told me on the phone to look carefully for his house because it was small. "We were poor back in Robert's day, and we're still poor," he said.
I knock at the back door of the Hughes house, where the driveway delivers visitors into a phalanx of yapping dogs. A tall, thin man motions me inside a small patio. There, against the frame of the house, next to a plastic garbage can and an old Indian blanket, rests what looks like a park bench. "That's Robert's chair," the man says. "I'm Guy Hughes. This is my wife, Lillian."
On the kitchen table are photo books that Guy, 73, and Lillian, 68, have pulled out for my inspection. "There's the three of us boys with our teacher; here's Robert at a clothing store appearance with Aunt Jemima; that's Robert at the carnival." On another table sits Robert Earl's own scrapbook, crammed full of black-and-white snapshots of visitors, pen pals, a country music band from Jacksonville, Illinois, even 600-pound Ed Bauer of Campbellsport, Wisconsin, "The Biggest Man in the Liquor Business."
There are also photographs of several beautiful young women who had written him. "Love Janet." "As ever, Lula Mary." "Robert didn't have any girlfriends," Guy says. "A newspaper once asked him about marrying. He said, 'A fella's got to get a chance first.' He never did say if he was lonely for a girl."
For three hours, Guy and Lillian talk about Robert Earl, about his life and times and all those stories. But it is in the crevices of their memories, where details drop almost accidentally, that their recollections resonate. Robert Earl had hazel eyes, "something you never see in the pictures of him." He was a handsome fella; "you just had to know how to look." He used a little box camera, but he "made it take better pictures than the fancy ones these days." Robert Earl's parents sometimes called him Bob. They never forced him to diet because "they were nice to him about his weight." When people talked to him at carnivals, they didn't want to leave, not because he was fat, but because "there was something in him that made people like him." Robert Earl used the word "heavy" to describe himself, not "fat." If he was afraid of dying, he never let on to anyone. He believed in God.
I ask Guy if he thinks of Robert Earl when he sees a very heavy person today.
"It's funny," Guy says. "These days, when I see someone so heavy, I think, That's a happy person."
I leave my hotel early the next morning. Near Bloomington on Route 55, I notice my left hand resting atop the steering wheel, pinky pointing up and left toward the horizon—my dad's driving grip. I think about him leaning way back in those Lincoln Continentals—"the one car that fits me right"—and about all the trips he took by himself. As the rest stops and service stations fly by, I think my dad was OK on those trips—and it's OK by me that we never got to talking about him being fat.
free fallin'
HOW SKATEBOARD KING MARK "GATOR" ANTHONY WAS BORN
AGAIN AS A RAPIST AND A MURDER
By
Cory JohnsonFROM THE VILLAGE VOICE, December 8, 1992
WHILE HE AWAITED TRIAL, Mark "Gator" Anthony's cell in the San Diego County jail lay at the foot of a hill in Vista, California. At the very top of that hill, four-and-a-half miles up from the jail, was the rundown skateboard park where Gator had his last ride, MacGill's Skatepark. There, a handful of teenagers skated the ramps, rolling in and out, doing flips, handstands, board slides, ollies ... and every once in a while, some daring kid would at tempt a "lean 360." It's a notoriously difficult move, in which the skater tries to get enough momentum and height to fly vertically out of the bowl with his body almost perpendicular to the ground, spin around once completely, and then land where he'd taken off, inside the bowl, but this time rolling backward toward the bottom.
That move was called the "Gait-air," named for its originator, the man who sat in the jail at the bottom of the hill. For years Gator was skateboarding's biggest star. When he first started skating, fifteen years ago, his moves were so creative, so aggressive, so -- there's no other word for it -- radical, that he was able to turn pro at the tender age of fourteen. By the time he was seventeen, he was making $100,000 a year.
To skateboarders everywhere, he was a hero. He boasted of being a roving ambassador, telling skating magazines how he was going to turn the whole non-skating world on to the sport. He and his beautiful live-in girlfriend, Brandi McClain, were the skateboarding couple: they starred in skating videos together, they worked as models together, they even appeared together in a Tom Petty video. Gator gave tips to beginners in Sports Illustrated for Kids. There was a Gator clothing line, Gator skate boards, Gator videos. "I had it all," he says today, sitting in his prison cell. "I had different cars, a big house on an estate, even girls - I had the prettiest, most popular, hah, most voluptuous ' most unscrupulous girls. I say that I 'had a girl.' I once considered girls a possession. That's crazy."
Crazy or sick. Because despite all he had, on March 20, 199 1, Gator beat twenty-one-year-old Jessica Bergsten over the head with a steering-wheel lock called the Club and raped her for nearly three hours. Then he strangled her in a surfboard bag and buried her naked in the desert one hundred miles away. There were no witnesses, no one heard her screams, and the murder weapon was never found. Yet something drove Gator to confess his crime.
This is the story of the rise and fall of Mark "Gator" Anthony.
SKATEBOARDING, like other California phenomena such as surfing and savings-and-loan scams, had a tremendous surge in popularity in the 1980s. Skateboard parks were erected across the planet. Skateboard manufacturers became multimillion-dollar companies branching out into clothing, sneakers, even movies. Crude videos were slapped together featuring the latest moves by top skaters, and they sold by the thousands. The National Skate boarding Association was sponsoring contests all over North America, Europe, and Japan, and first-prize money reached $5,000 to $7,000 per event.
All this was fueled by a handful of San Diego County teenagers who had become the sport's superstars, and Gator was one of them. Born Mark Anthony Rogowski in Brooklyn, he moved with his mother and older brother to San Diego at age three, following his parents' divorce. They ended up in Escondido, a sun baked, middle-class suburb in northern San Diego County. Classic Reagan country, with surfers, malls, churches, and loads of disaffected middle-class youth, it was there that Gator, at age seven, discovered skating.
"I grew up without a father from day one," Gator told Thrasher magazine interviewer M.Fo in 1987, "and my brother kinda filled that gap. He was a bitchin' influence on me. He made me a good baseball player and an athlete in general. What was cool was that he was stoked that I was skating, too. Skating was some what deviant."
By 1977, Gator, ten, was skating regularly, but because he didn't have as much money as his friends he didn't quite fit in. "I was a social outcast back then," he told Thrasher. "My fellow skater friends were all hyped on the surf thing - who had what board, the newest O.P.'s, and who had a Hang Ten shirt. Then there I was, running around in Toughskins, y'know... . They were all wrapped up in the fashion and those types of superficial interests, they ended up fading out and I fucking lasted." Gator got his chops down at a local skatepark's half-pipes, moguls, and pool in the shape of a bra dubbed "the 42D Bowl." And he found a new set of skating friends. "These guys were so into it, having such a good time, sweatin' and laughin' and crackin' jokes and just snakin' each other. It was a full soul session, every body was just shralpin' it up. When they went into the bowl, their expressions changed to a 'going into battle' expression, going for it, no holds barred. When they popped out of the bowl, they'd get a smile on their faces and yelp and chime. It was hot." An obvious talent, young Gator was picked up by the skate- park team and began winning local contests. Bigger sponsors followed, and in 1982 he won the Canadian Amateur Skateboarding Championships in Vancouver, his first major title. With his green eyes and dark, lean good looks, charming personality, and aggressively physical skating style, he rose to the top rank of the sport.
Tony Hawk and Christian Hosoi rounded out the triumvirate of 1980's skating superstars. "That was a great time for us," says Hawk, who has been called the Wayne Gretzky of skating. "We were making a ton of money, we flew all over the world, there were skating groupies at every stop. It was pretty cool to see a bunch of guys from San Diego County at the center of this huge thing. No doubt, we were stoked."
The primary vehicle for the wealth of pro skaters was skate board sales, and Gator was one of the hottest tickets in that market too. A Gator skate "deck" - the board (decorated with his nickname rendered in an op art vortex or pastel quasi-African design), sans wheels and suspension system - would sell for up to $50, of which Gator would receive $2. At their peak, monthly sales of the Gator board reached seven thousand, earning him an easy $14,000. But the cash didn't end there; he also had hi contest winnings and lent his name to a slew of products mad by Vision Sport, a skateboard merchandising company. There were Gator shirts, berets, hip packs, videos, stickers, posters -- it seemed kids couldn't get enough of him.
"Gator, Gator, Gator ... every issue of Thrasher had Gator doing something," says Perry Gladstone, who owns FL (formerly Fishlips), a skateboarding company near San Diego. "He was al ways a part of everything. There were Gator stories, Gator spreads, full-page Gator ads - he was a hero to us. We'd read about their parties, the girls ... you've gotta understand, top skaters were like rock stars, traveling all over the world, living the life ... and Gator was the wildest of them all."
Wild for sure, as Gator himself indicated in the '87 Thrasher interview, when he talked about the rush he got from riding walls at go degrees, and "on the left side of the picture there's a bum with a bottle or a junkie with a needle hangin' out of his arm," and on the right side there's a skater "sweatin' it out and cussin' at the wall and -- Bam! -- fucking forging reality, pushing his body up the wall." One of the benefits of this, said Gator, was that "it's a real productive way of venting some way harsh aggressions. Instead of breaking a bottle and slashing some body's face, you're throwing yourself at a wall with sweat drip ping in your eyes.
Gator boasted to friends that while touring the South he would walk into liquor stores and 7-Elevens stark naked, rob them, then get drunk in the cornfields while police helicopters searched for him overhead.
On another of those wild tour dates, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1987, Gator, then twenty-one, met two beautiful seventeen-year old blondes from rich families, Jessica Bergsten and Brandi McClain. Brandi and Gator partied that entire weekend, which wasn't unusual considering the groupies who awaited him in every town. But Brandi was different. Soon he was flying her to San Diego to visit him, and a few months later, she left Tucson for good and moved in with Gator.
He had bought a ranch in the mountains near Tony Hawk's new ranch, which he'd equipped with a whole series of wood skating ramps. But Brandi became bored with the ranch and few months later Gator sold it. They moved to a condominium in the upscale beachside community of Carlsbad, one block away from the ocean.
Gator and Brandi were inseparable. They caroused all night Carlsbad bars, made the scene at all the San Diego parties. Th were the hottest couple on the beach. "We would get high eve night," says Brandi. "We wouldn't do coke every night, but we do bong hits, we'd go to the Sand Bar at the end of his street, and get fucked up. Then we'd hang out in his Jacuzzi, get drunk o our asses, and go in and have wild sex all night."
Gator spared no expense on Brandi. So that she could join him at competitions, "he flew her to Brazil and Europe," says Gator brother Matt Rogowski. "He bought her two cars. She was a gold digger, but when they were together, they were absolutely in love and you could see it." The couple did modeling jobs together Brandi appeared in Gator's videos, and when he appeared in Tom Petty's "Free Fallin'" video, she was in it too.
If he was a celebrity in southern California, in Carlsbad, the unofficial skateboarding capital of the world, he was a megastar Surfboard shops would just give him all the equipment h wanted, skaters would ask for his autograph or Gator stickers t put on their boards. Despite his ardor for Brandi, when he was alone he'd walk up to beautiful women on the beach, say, "Hi I'm Gator," and instantly have their undivided attention. With his looks, youth, and arrogance born of money and fame, in the holy land of skateboarding, Gator was his own god.
BUT WHILE GATOR was getting fat and happy cashing in on his skateboarding fame, by the late eighties a new, hipper type of skateboarding was challenging the dominance of his genre. It was called street skating, where skaters opted for urban obstacles like curbs, garbage cans, and stairways over the traditional skate board parks. Street skaters wore their pants around the knees, eschewed protective pads and helmets and counted on frequent run-ins with the police. Characterized by the sound of boards smacking against the pavement, it was louder, more dangerous, decidedly anti-establishment and, therefore, more appealing to the kids. Vertical ramp skating techniques, of which Gator was the master, were rapidly becoming obsolete. Vision, the company that sponsored Gator and dozens of other top skaters, was about to file Chapter Eleven.
"He was really worried about becoming a dinosaur," says Perry Gladstone, to whom Gator confided. "This was an entirely new type of skating. It was rad, more amped, and all the kids wanted to be a part of it. But except for Tony Hawk, none of the old pros could really skate both vert and street, and Gator was stressed out about it." Gator himself once told M.Fo just how stressed out he would get if he had to quit skating. "I'd probably have some suicidal tendencies. I'd feel low, cheap. I'd feel like nothing. I couldn't exist no way, I'd kill myself. Lose my spirit, I'd float away and my carcass would get buried."
Gator was still trying to milk vert skating for all he could. He talked to his family about marrying Brandi and settling down. Then, in October 1989, after a competition in West Germany, the party animal in Gator reared up and bit him. In typical Gator fashion, he spent the night getting sloshed, wandering from party to party. The accident that ensued is a skateboarding leg end - a drunken Gator, partying with a bunch of other skaters, leapt out of a second-story window, convinced that he could fly. Although Gator himself doesn't remember what happened, some of his friends say that he was actually trying to sneak back into his hotel after hours by crawling up a terrace. Whatever the cause, the result nearly killed him. He landed on a wrought-iron fence, impaling his neck, face, and thumb. He survived and was patched up in Germany, but upon returning home he spent months in San Diego with plastic surgeons trying to save his modeling career.
The Gator who emerged from the San Diego hospital shocked his friends and admirers. He looked the same, but he sounded completely different. "Jesus Christ spoke to me through that accident," said Gator. "I was a blind dude, but now I can see." Gator had been born again.
Augie Constantino takes the credit for Gator's metamorphosis. A skateboarder and former professional surfer who lived just two blocks from Gator and Brandi, Constantino had suffered an accident similar to Gator's four years earlier. "I was in Hawaii out drinking with some other pro surfers," says Constantino. "After leaving the party, me and a friend of mine were playing chicken when he hit me head on, doing 45 miles per hour. I guess I lost." The quadriceps in his right leg were severed, ending his pro surfing career. But Constantino decided that it was a message from God, and that he should devote his life to Christ.
Thus was born the man known as "the skateboard minister." In his stonewashed jeans, cowboy boots, and bolero jacket, he stands out from his fellow Calvary Chapel parishioners. He's built like a fireplug, wears a goatee, and has one eye slightly askew - a result of his accident. "I met Mark just before he left for Germany, 11 says Constantino from the office he keeps in the back of the church. He's vague about his official role at the church, where, he says, he is "a lay minister" who runs a youth hotline, but he adds that officially he is a church custodian.
"I introduced Mark to a personal God, a God the father," says Constantino. "Mark never had a father to speak of. I showed Christ to him and as the Bible says, He's our own true father. So of course that appealed to Mark." It was around this time that Gator started calling himself Mark Anthony instead of Mark Anthony Rogowski, because, as he later said, "I didn't want to be associated with my father at all."
When Gator's wounds healed, he joined Constantino. He started covering his boards with religious symbols and preaching to skaters, surfers, and anyone else who would listen about his "secret friend," Jesus. Witt Rowlett, owner of Witt's Carlsbad Pipelines, the premier surf shop in Carlsbad, says that everyone was amazed. "I believe in the Lord, don't get me wrong," says Rowlett. "But Mark was just fanatic. Everything he said was 'Jesus this, the Bible that.' He was way into it."
Others, however, dismissed it as typical behavior from Gator. "Yeah, he was fanatic, but that's just it, he was fanatic about every thing," says Gladstone. "That was just Gator."
But Brandi would have none of it. Gator dragged her along to Calvary Chapel a few times, but she wasn't ready for the party to end. "We literally had sex five times a day, we were so in love," says Brandi. "Then he met Augie and started saying, 'We can't have sex anymore unless we get married.' And I'm like, 'Wait a minute. We've been going out for four years, having mad sex for four years, and we can't have sex anymore? I can't deal with this. Later.' "
Brandi moved in with her mother and stepfather, who had recently moved to San Diego.
"Mark was devastated," says Constantino. "I think that it upset him even more than his accident in Germany. Look, here's an exact explanation of what happened to her." He reaches for his "sword" - a well-thumbed, red Bible on his bookshelf.
"First Peter, Chapter 4, Verse 3 -'Then, you lived in license and debauchery, drunkenness, revelry, and tippling, and the forbid den worship of idols. Now, when you no longer plunge with them into all this reckless dissipation, they cannot understand it.' " He shuts the Bible with a thump. "There. You see? Brandi just didn't get it. Mark had found a new life in Christ."
DESPITE HIS NEWFOUND DEVOTION TO JESUS, Gator's response to Brandi's leaving was decidedly un-Christian, particularly after she started seeing one of the guys she surfed with. Gator started calling her mother's house, leaving messages on the answering machine. "Mark was crazy," says Brandi. "He was calling me up leaving all these freaky messages. He'd growl. 'You bitch! You cunt! You're gonna fry in hell from your toes!' Weird shit like that."
One night, Brandi came home to find that someone had broken into her house through her window, taking everything that Gator had ever given her. Brandi and the police suspected Gator. "He took it all back, including the car," says Terry Jensen, an investigator from the San Diego County district attorney's office, to whom Brandi later recounted the story. "It's kind of like a typical young teenage stunt. That's what you do when you're fifteen, sixteen years old and you lose your first girlfriend. You want all your money back, every necklace, every ring. You know, 'Give me my high school jacket and my class ring because we're not going steady anymore.' Well, that's what he did."
Brandi still -hoped they might reconcile. On one such attempt, she invited Gator to take her out to dinner. But they started arguing as soon as they pulled out of her parents' driveway. "He was still so mad about the guy I was seeing," says Brandi. "He's the one that told me to go out and find one of my surfer friends to party with. So I did! I found this hot little blond surfer guy, six-one.
"And Mark was furious. He was driving out in the middle of this nowhere road out where my parents live when he turned to me with this really scary, serious look in his eye. His voice got all deep and, you know, he sounded like the devil. He says, 'You know what? I should take you out to the desert right now. I should drive you out right in the middle of the night and beat the shit out of you and leave you there. And I would get away with it, because everybody would know that you deserved it.' "I started crying and begging him to take me home right now. I'm like, 'My mother knows where I am.' And he took me back." Brandi was scared enough to flee to New York, not telling any one but her family where she was going. She didn't even tell her best friend Jessica in Tucson about the incident, so when Jessica showed up in San Diego a few weeks later, she called Gator asking him to show her the sights.
"Everything that I hated about Brandi, I hated about Jessica," Gator would later tell the police. "She was of the same mold that Brandi was made of." He told the police that he blamed Jessica for his breakup. Jessica, of course, had no idea about any of this. Like Brandi, Jessica was tall, blond, and beautiful, and her friends remember her as tough, savvy, and adventurous. "She was an incredibly intelligent, free-spirited girl," recalls Brandi. "She wanted to have fun and nothing else mattered. We would go to Mexico together, and she would, say, get so drunk that she would leave me there. If I couldn't get into bars - because we were under age and had fake IDs - she would leave me outside for three hours waiting while she drank.
"But we were best friends. We were very much alive. It was, like, quick, we're going to have the very best lives, and we're going to have them now."
On Wednesday, March 20, Jessica and Gator had lunch at an Italian restaurant in La Jolla, then returned to his condo with some movies and a few bottles of wine. As she was getting ready to leave, Gator went to his car, ostensibly to see if his driver's license was there.
Waiting in his living room, Jessica looked at the picture on his mantel, where Gator proudly displayed his favorite picture - a shot of him skydiving, facing the camera, screaming at the top of his lungs while plummeting to earth. As she stared at the picture' Gator snuck up behind her, hitting her two or three times in the head and face with the metal steering-wheel lock. She fell to the floor, blood gushing from her head, so much so that it soaked right through the carpet. He handcuffed her and carried her upstairs to his bedroom. There, he shackled her onto the bed, cut her clothes off with scissors, and raped her for two or three hours.
Jessica, still conscious, begged him to stop, occasionally screaming. In an attempt to shut her up, he pulled a surfboard bag from his closet and stuffed her inside it. She screamed that she couldn't breathe. He clasped his hands around her neck and strangled her.
Gator flipped over his mattress to hide the blood that was there, then put Jessica's body, her cut-up clothing, the bag, the handcuffs, and the club in the trunk of his car. He drove for two hours into the desert, pulled off the highway at a desolate place called Shell Canyon, and buried her naked body in a shallow grave. As he drove back to Carlsbad, he tossed her bloodstained clothes, his sheets, and the club out the window. On his way back to the condo, he rented a carpet steamer, and cleaned out every spot of blood he could from the rug. When police came to question him about her disappearance a couple of weeks later, there was no evidence to be found.
JESSICA'S FATHER, Stephen Bergsten, a Tucson lawyer, had enough to worry about without his daughter disappearing. One of his clients was under investigation by an Arizona drug task force, while rumors were rife that he himself was being investigated for money laundering. But when his daughter stopped calling soon after leaving for southern California, the panicked father, unsatisfied by efforts of the San Diego police, flew to San Diego to find her himself.
He plastered the entire county with posters that read MISSING PERSON with a picture of a grinning Jessica, her vital statistics (five-eight, 115 pounds, blond hair, blue eyes, fair complexion), and the telephone numbers for the San Diego police department. He talked to her friends, he even met with Gator to ask about her whereabouts. Gator shook his hand and told him, No, he didn't know where Jessica was. Bergsten's efforts were to no avail. There were no other witnesses to her disappearance. Two months went by without any leads.
But one of the posters stayed plastered up next to a phone booth at a 7-Eleven two blocks from Gator's condo. Next to the beach, with a pizza shop next door, the convenience store is a favorite hangout for young Carlsbad surfers and skateboarders. It was also a favorite place for Constantino and Gator to preach their message of Christianity to young kids hanging out. For Constantino, he was terrific bait for young skaters willing to listen to just about anything to meet Gator.
"One night at the 7-Eleven," remembers Constantino, "Gator and I were witnessing and I saw this young girl with what they call a miniskirt - I call them towels. I said to her, 'Go and put some clothes on and when you come back, I'd like to talk to you about Christ." And she said, 'I've got nothing to worry about, I've got no problems.' I pointed to the poster. 'What about that girl?' I said. 'She had nothing to worry about. But where is she now? She could have been involved in drugs, pornography. Maybe she's dead. 'The girl just ignored us and jumped into a car. But I got a strange reaction out of Mark. He was just kind of blank, silent." Seeing the picture of Jessica, and seeing it in the presence of Constantino, was too much for Gator. One night, after a Bible study at Constantino's house, Gator returned to the house with tears streaming down his face. "I was getting ready for bed when I answered the door," recalls Constant' no. "He was crying and said he was Judas Iscariot. We both sat and cried. We prayed for about an hour, asking God what we should do. About a week later he came to me and said, 'Remember that girl in the poster? She was the one I killed!'"
Constantino remembers what he told Gator as he drove him to the police department in the early morning of May 5- "1 said to him, 'Mark, you don't need a lawyer. You don't need innocent until-proven-guilty. What do you need a lawyer for, if you answer to a higher power? If a person is accountable to God, then he's accountable to society - the Bible says that.' Constantino scoffs at the idea that perhaps his legal advice wasn't the best. Nor does he think it was unethical for him, as a minister, to turn in someone confessing to him. "Mark didn't come to me as a minister, he came to me as a friend. Anyway, I'm not an ordained minister. He knew exactly what was going to happen."
The police were astonished that someone was turning himself in for a murder that they didn't even know had happened. Jessica's body had been found in the desert by some campers on April 10, but the body was so badly decomposed that it could not be identified. The next morning Gator led detectives to where he'd buried the body. Uncuffed, standing under the hot desert sun, Gator watched as they dug around for more evidence, photo graphed the site, and talked to the local police.
When the police announced Gator's confession, the press jumped all over it. It was the lead story in the local papers, local television ran nightly updates as the case unfolded, and on national TV, Hard Copy did a "dramatic reenactment" of the rape, murder, and subsequent confession. The initial reaction of the skateboarding world's street wing was best expressed by Koby Newell, a fifteen-year-old who skated with Anthony at Carlsbad. "He was getting old," Newell told the San Diego Union, "but he was keeping up with the moves."
Skating's more established wing reacted with a bit more shock. Perry Gladstone had just signed Gator to endorse a new line of skateboards for Fishlips, which ironically featured a takeoff on the 7-Eleven logo. "I came home the night he confessed to find eighty-seven messages on my answering machine. They were all reporters wanting me to talk about Gator. My wife and I were with him two or three days every week for months setting this deal up. He was such a great guy, I just couldn't believe it." The violent, anti-authority image of skateboarding -- symbolized in Thrasher magazine's old motto "Skate or Die" - combined with the sex and bondage aspects of the murder, fed the press's sensationalist treatment of the story. One of the many videos Gator did with Brandi was called Psycho Skate, which fed the frenzy even more. Skateboarders felt that the coverage was turning into an indictment of their sport, not just Gator. "It's likely the skateboarding world will be placed under a microscope in the media," warned Thrasher. "Let's just hope that we can all remain strong."
He became a cause celebre in San Diego County. Kids deco rated their jeans jackets with the phrase Free Mark Anthony. But there were also bumper stickers that read Skateboarding Is Not a Crime - Murder Is. Mark Anthony Should Die. Skateboarders who talked to the press about it were ostracized. "It was a terrible event for skateboarding," says Gladstone. "Skating's no more inherently violent than heavy metal is inherently satanic. But people in the media tried to make it seem as if skating is a threat to the youth of America. I think you'll find that most skaters won't even talk about Gator."
The police continued to compile evidence in case Gator decided to plead not guilty to a murder charge. They found the bloodstains under Gator's carpet, and a carpet-cleaner receipt (Gator's accountant had instructed him to save all his receipts). Gator was charged with "special circumstances," committing a murder during rape, which under California law can warrant the death penalty or life imprisonment without possibility of pa role.
Unable to get a lawyer, he was appointed a public defender, self-described "glory seeker" John Jimenez, a short, stocky for mer PTA president who drives a Harley-Davidson. After taking the case, Jimenez immediately challenged the validity of the confession, saying that Gator's minister had no right to turn him in. Jimenez appealed the rape charge, insisting that the decomposed body could show no signs of forcible rape. Although he never denied that Gator had killed Jessica, he suggested that it was her own fault. He told a reporter that Jessica was a "slut," claiming to have a long list of people with whom she'd had sadomasochistic sex, including the entire University of Arizona basketball team and a handful of pros - their names, however, were off the record. "Hey," says Jimenez, "it's like Sam Kinison said, some girls just turn Mr. Hand into Mr. Fist."
At the time these remarks were made, the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force was investigating the murders of forty-four women whose bodies had been dumped in isolated places around the county since 1985.
Eventually, when the higher court refused to toss out the rape charge, on Jimenez's advice Gator pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and rape, thus avoiding the death penalty or life without chance of parole. At the January 1992 hearing in which he entered his plea, Gator submitted a remarkable four-page written statement that hinted at the struggle going on in his mind before his crime, during its commission, and afterward. In the statement he admitted that although his original confession "was directed by the Lord," in the subsequent eight months he had been "tempted to dodge responsibility, deceiving myself as well as others." But now, at last, "I've been led to a full, true repentance, having nothing to hide. Thank God."
Finally able to express "my regret and my sorrow over our loss of Jessica," Gator tried to explain why he'd done what he did. "Two months prior to the incident," he wrote, "I found myself in the midst of some surprisingly strange and almost uncontrollable feelings. All at once the plague of vile visions and wicked imaginations and the daily battle to suppress them was overwhelming. It's no exaggeration to say I became completely enslaved to these devious mental images and inescapable thoughts....
"Essentially, I became a victim first, because I turned my back on God in several ways, thinking I could get through it on my own power."
Slave, victim, but still expressing regret and "without defer ring the blame for my actions," Gator targeted three things that influenced his state of mind:
"Firstly, sex outside of marriage, i.e. promiscuity, premarital sex and cohabitation, the disease of jealousy, and the unhealthy obsession that so often attaches to these.
"Secondly, pornography and its addictive character. Ranging from risqu6 public advertising, all the way to hardcore S&M, this dehumanizing of women and men and its dulling of the senses occurs at all levels. Porn is a consuming beast....
"Thirdly, closing the ears and heart to God's counsel, including partial or nonrepentance and disobeying and ignoring the Bible.... So people, we must realize, without reduction, the gripping strength and deceptive subtlety of sin! What will it take for us to examine ourselves and listen? The tragedy of an innocent young woman's death? The fall of your favorite celebrity? O.K., perhaps the imprisonment of your best friend or relative?...
"I know the Lord forgave me two thousand years ago on the cross at Calvary. And although I attempt to forgive myself daily," wrote Gator, the struggle over his ultimate culpability still raging in his head, "I haven't quite been able and may never be able to do so."
Gator's sentencing took place on March 6. It was quite a spectacle for a suburban courtroom. Five uniformed bailiffs used a hand-held metal detector to screen each observer. They had received information that Stephen Bergsten, who would attend the hearing with his wife, Kay, was going to try to harm Gator. Eight months earlier Bergsten had been indicted, along with forty four others, as part of a nationwide drug ring. With his property in two states seized by the government and his daughter brutally murdered, there was speculation that he had nothing left to lose by killing Gator.
With the bailiffs standing between Bergsten and Gator, the skater offered a solemn apology to Jessica's family, asking them to forgive him. "God has changed me, and it was no typical jail house conversion," pleaded Gator. "I sincerely hope that they can accept my apology for my carelessness."
"Carelessness?" Bergsten shouted. "He is a child-murderer and child-rapist. He is evil incarnate." Gator, along with many others in the courtroom, cried as Bergsten continued in an angry twenty-minute monologue. "Cowards die a thousand times and he will die a thousand deaths," Bergsten shouted, his voice breaking. "He raped her and raped her and raped her and then thought, 'Let's kill her.' We couldn't say goodbye to Jessica be cause that filth left her with nothing but a piece of skin, left her for the coyotes and the goddamned birds to eat her." He glared directly at Gator and said in a firm voice. "I told you - and you remember, Rogowski - what would happen if anyone hurt my daughter. He says he's undergone a religious conversion. judge, you must have heard that same story one hundred times. If he underwent a religious conversion, it was to evil, degradation, filth, and Satanism."
Shortly thereafter, Superior Court judge Thomas J. Whelan sentenced Gator to consecutive terms of six years for forcible rape and twenty-five years to life for first-degree murder. Gator will not be eligible for parole until 2010 at the earliest.
Jimenez says that Gator "took some shit" when he was first put in the San Diego County jail. But one night soon after he was incarcerated, inmates crowded around a television to hear Gator's story on Hard Copy. "After that," says Jimenez, "I guess they thought he was a heavy dude, because the rest of the population has kept their distance ever since."
Gator is trying to surround himself with other born-again Christians in jail. He is appealing his sentence, and has been placed in a medical facility (for manic depression). Augie Constantino is continuing his studies to be a minister, while cleaning up the Calvary Chapel. He still preaches to surfers and skaters in the San Diego area working with a group called Skaters for Christ.
Stephen Bergsten's money-laundering charges were dismissed two months ago in Tucson.
Brandi lives in a penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, working as a flower arranger.
Jessica's remains were buried in a family plot in Georgia.
THOSE WHO VISIT GATOR in prison are struck at first by how truly repentant he seems, sitting in his cell In a loose-fitting navy-blue jumpsuit with SD JAIL stamped on the back, his once wild long hair now shorn and carefully combed, as he talks about his fall from grace.
"I had been exposed to pornography since I was a little boy, three years old," he says. "In what form? In the form of sex, actual sex with people. I'm not going to say who, but with people in my childhood. First let me say that it wasn't only incest. I don't want to mention family members, of course, because I want to protect them. But let me put more emphasis on the fact that it was babysitters and older neighborhood kids."
Has it occurred to him that if he was the victim of sexual crime as a child, he might have a propensity to carry out such crimes as an adult? "If you believe that it was a revenge killing and that it was prompted by Brandi, I would say yes," he replies, and suddenly you're listening to a dramatically different Gator than the one at whose sentencing a Catholic priest testified, "Never before have I encountered a person so clearly open about his responsibility." You're listening to a man skating away from the idea that the murder was really his fault.
"I did lay upon her with a steering lock at one point, but that was part of the S&M," he says. "The fact is that it wasn't rape. It was more like an involuntary manslaughter. If it weren't for my submission to her wiles and the temptation of having such sex with her..."
Gator takes a deep breath, sighs, then continues. "I don't want to defame Jessica at all. I'm very, very sorry about what happened to her. I just want to make it known that I was led into a sexual situation that I didn't want to have anything to do with.
"I wouldn't have submitted if I didn't have some weakness, some background desire. You can go down the street to Coronet bookstore in Oceanside and buy a vast array of S&M bondage magazines, pictorials, descriptive pictorials, paperbacks that are step by step about how to lynch somebody sexually. It's pretty sick. I got a lot of ideas.
"That night, I didn't realize what kind of a purring feline she was. It's really hard for me to say these things about Jessica; we lost her and I don't feel good about that. I just want to make it known that I was led into a sexual situation that I didn't want to have anything to do with. I was scared I'd be discovered with this wayward woman.
"There were a lot of kids in my neighborhood, my prot6g6s in skateboarding who would have Bible studies with me. I was being an example to these impressionable kids. For them to see me with this woman and all that had been going on - the wine bottles, the cigarettes upstairs - it would have been devastating. In my attempt to quiet her, in her intoxicated and belligerent state, I had put my hand over her mouth to quiet her for a second so I could hear the voices and the footsteps coming up my walkway. She must have suffocated or had a seizure or a stroke or something. The next thing I knew, I look down and she's not breathing and not moving."
Mark "Gator" Anthony, who has finally broken up and out of the half-pipe of his guilt, will be forty-three years old before he is eligible for parole. He says he doesn't think he'll ever ride a skateboard again, but hopes that someday he'll be free so he can learn to fly a kite.
Annals of Transport
A Fleet of One
Eighty thousand pounds of Dangerous Goods.
The little four-wheelers live on risk. They endanger themselves. They endangered us. If you're in a big truck, they're around you like gnats. They're at their worst in the on-ramps of limited-access highways, not to mention what they do on horse-and-buggy highways. They do the kissing tailgate. They do passing moves over double yellow lines. They make last-second break-ins from stop signs on feeder roads. The way they are operated suggests insufficiency in, among other things, coördination, depth perception, and rhythm. When I went to bad-driver school, the opening lecturer did not imply any such flaws in his students. He was a real bear. He wore blue-and-yellow trousers and a badge. In a voice he fired like a .45, he began by asking us, "How many of you people think you're good drivers?"
We had all been singled out in four-wheelers. My own car had a tendency to ignore stop signs without previously sensing the presence of bears. It lapsed in other ways as well. After I reached twelve points, I was offered admission to the New Jersey Driver Improvement Program, on the following voluntary basis: enroll or lose your license. Among the twenty-five people in the class, two smart-asses stuck up their hands in positive response to the instructor's question. He looked them over, then swept the room. "Well, you must all be good drivers," he said. "If you weren't, you'd be dead."
Then he darkened the room and rolled a film showing cars hitting cars in on-ramps. A, looking left, accelerates. B, looking left, accelerates. B rear-ends A, because A hesitated, and B was still looking to the left. This primal accident, the figure 8 of bad driving, was the base of a graphic montage that ended in high-speed collision and hideous death on the road.
These memories of bad-driver school ran through me in eastern Oregon after Don Ainsworth, at the wheel of his sixty-five-foot chemical tanker, gave some air horn to a step van that was coming fast up an on-ramp on a vector primed for a crash. A step van is a walk-in vehicle of the U.P.S. variety, and, like all other four-wheelers, from Jettas to Jaguars, in Ainsworth's perspective is not a truck. FedEx, Wonder Bread, Soprano Sand-and-Gravel—they're not trucks, they're four-wheelers, even if they have six wheels. A true truck has eighteen wheels, or more. From Atlanta and Charlotte to North Powder, Oregon, this was the first time that Ainsworth had so much as tapped his air horn. In three thousand one hundred and ninety miles I rode with him he used it four times. He gave it a light, muted blast to thank a woman in a four-wheeler who helped us make a turn in urban traffic close to our destination, and he used it twice in the Yakima Valley, flirting with a woman who was wearing a bikini. She passed us on I-82, and must have pulled over somewhere, because she passed us again on I-90. She waved both times the horn erupted. She was riding in a convertible and her top was down.
If the step van had hit us it would only have been inconvenient, the fact notwithstanding that we were hauling hazmats. The step van weighed about ten thousand pounds and we weighed eighty thousand pounds, minus a few ounces. Ainsworth said he could teach a course called On-Ramp 101. "We get many near-misses from folks who can't time their entry. They give you the finger. Women even give you the finger. Can you believe it?"
I could believe it.
"Four-wheelers will pass us and then pull in real fast and put on their brakes for no apparent reason," he said. "Four-wheelers are not aware of the danger of big trucks. They're not aware of the weight, of how long it takes to bring one to a halt, how quickly their life can be snuffed. If you pull any stunts around the big trucks, you're likely to die. I'm not going to die. You are."
We happened to be approaching Deadman Pass. We were crossing the Blue Mountains—on I-84, the Oregon Trail. He said, "Before you know it, we'll be sitting on top of Cabbage. Then we're going to fall down." He had mentioned Cabbage Hill when we were still in the Great Divide Basin. He mentioned it again in Pocatello. After crossing into Oregon and drawing closer, he brought it up twice an hour. "It's the terrific hill we fall down before we come to Pendleton. Pretty treacherous. Switchbacks. Speed restricted by weight. You'll see guys all the time with smoke flying out the brakes or even a flameout at the bottom."
From the Carolina piedmont to Hot Lake, Oregon—across the Appalachians, across the Rockies—he had not put his foot on the brake pedal on any descending grade. In harmony with shrewd gear selection, this feat was made possible by Jake Brakes—a product of Jacobs Vehicle Systems, of Bloomfield, Connecticut. Ainsworth called the device "a retarder, generically—you're turning a diesel engine into an air compressor." On a grade we descended in Tennessee, he said, "If you choose your gear right, and your jake's on maxi, you can go down a hill with no brakes. It saves money. It also lengthens my life." Crossing the summit of the Laramie Range and addressing the western side, he geared down from twelfth to eighth and said, "I won't use one ounce of brake pressure. The jake is on maxi." As big trucks flew past us—dry boxes, reefers—he said, "These guys using brakes with improper gear selection don't own the tractor or the trailer. Using brakes costs money, but why would they care?" Ainsworth owns the tractor and the trailer. As he glided onto the Laramie Plains, he went back up to eighteenth gear: "the going-home gear, the smoke hole; when you got into this gear in the old days, your stacks would blow smoke." On a grade at Hot Lake, however, he tried fifteenth gear, and his foot had to graze the pedal. He seemed annoyed with himself, like a professional golfer who had chosen the wrong club.
And now we were about to "fall down Cabbage." In ten miles, we would drop two thousand feet, six of those miles on a six-per-cent grade. Through basaltic throughcuts we approached the brink. A sign listed speed limits by weight. If you weighed sixty thousand to sixty-five thousand pounds, your limit was thirty-seven miles an hour. In five-thousand-pound increments, speed limits went down to twenty-six and twenty-two. Any vehicle weighing seventy-five thousand pounds or more—e.g., this chemical tanker—was to go eighteen or under. A huge high view with Pendleton in it suddenly opened up. I had asked Ainsworth what makes a tractor-trailer jackknife. He had said, "You're going downhill. The trailer is going faster than the tractor. The trailer takes over. It's almost impossible to bring yourself out of it. Brakes won't do anything for you. It's a product of going too fast for the situation. It can happen on a flat highway, but nine times out of ten it's downhill." The escarpment was so steep that the median widened from a few feet to one and a half miles as the northbound and southbound lanes negotiated independent passage. Ainsworth had chosen eighth gear. He said, "Most truckers would consider this way too conservative. That doesn't mean they're bright." Oregon is the only American state in which trucks are speed-restricted by weight. Feet off both pedals, he started the fall down Cabbage praising the truck for "good jake" and himself for "nice gear selection." My ears thickened and popped.
"Six per cent is serious," he said. "I've seen some sevens or eights. British Columbia drivers talk about tens and twelves."
In two strategic places among the broad looping switchbacks were escape ramps, also known as arrester beds, where a brakeless runaway truck—its driver "mashing the brake pedal and it feels like a marshmallow"—could leave the road and plow up a very steep incline on soft sandy gravel. In winter, the gravel may not be soft. Ainsworth recalled a trucker in Idaho who hit a frozen ramp. His load, bursting through from behind, removed his head. On Cabbage Hill, deep fresh tracks went up an arrester bed several hundred feet. After trucks use a bed, it has to be regroomed. The state charges grooming fees. Some drivers, brakeless and out of control, stay on the highway and keep on plunging because they don't want to pay the grooming fees. Ainsworth said, "Would you worry about your life or the God-damned grooming fee?"
He was asking the wrong person.
A little later, he said, "Bears will roost at the bottom here."
Fulfilling the prediction, two cars were in ambush in the median where the grade met the plain. Wheat fields filled the plain—endless leagues of wheat, big combines moving through the wheat, houses far out in the wheat concealed within capsules of trees. We passed a couple of dry boxes, both of them Freightliners. Among truckers, they are universally known as Freightshakers. "What's the difference between a Jehovah's Witness and the door on a Freightliner?" Ainsworth said.
I said I didn't happen to know.
He said, "You can close a door on a Jehovah's Witness."
We crossed the Columbia River and went over the Horse Heaven Hills into the Yakima Valley, apples and grapes in the Horse Heaven Hills, gators in the valley. To avoid a gator he swung far right, over rumble bars along the shoulder. A gator is a strip of tire, dead on the road, nearly always a piece of a recap. "A gator can rip off your fuel-crossover line, punch in your bumper, bomb out a fender."
The Yakima River was deeply incised and ran in white water past vineyards and fruit trees, among windbreaks of Lombardy poplars. Hops were growing on tall poles and dangling like leis. There was so much beauty in the wide valley it could have been in Italy. Now, through high haze, we first saw the Cascades. On our route so far, no mountain range had been nearly as impressive. We had slithered over the Rockies for the most part through broad spaces. Now we were looking at a big distant barrier, white over charcoal green, its highest visible point the stratovolcano Mt. Adams. We met three new Kenworths coming east—three connected tractors without trailers. One was hauling the other two, both of which had their front wheels up on the back of the tractor ahead of them. They looked like three dogs humping. It was here that we were first passed by the scant bikini in an open Porsche, here that Ainsworth touched his horn for the second time on the journey. I was marginally jealous that he could look down into that bikini while I, on the passenger side, was served rumble bars in the pavement. I had long since asked him what sorts of things he sees in his aerial view of four-wheelers. "People reading books," he answered. "Women putting on makeup. People committing illicit acts. Exhibitionist women like to show you their treasures. A boyfriend is driving. She drops her top."
We skirted Yakima city. " 'Yakima, the Palm Springs of Washington,' " Ainsworth said. "That was written by a guy on laughing gas." He reached for his CB microphone. "Eastbounders, there's a pair of bears waiting for you. They're down there right before the flats." Now ahead of us was a long pull up North Umptanum Ridge. "We're going to give 'em hell," he said. In the left lane, he took the big tanker up to eighty-three, pressing for advantage on the climb. He was in the fast lane to overtake a flatbed hauling fifty thousand pounds of logs. The distance had almost closed; we were practically counting tree rings when the logging truck began to sway. It weaved right and then left and two feet into our lane. Ainsworth said, "Oh, my goodness!"
Ordinarily, I tend to be nervous if I am riding in a car driven by someone else. Like as not, the someone else is Yolanda Whitman, to whom I am married. On trips, we divide the driving time. I make her nervous and she makes me nervous. She was a student in bad-driver school in the same year that I was. While she is at the wheel, I sometimes write letters. I ask the recipients to "excuse my shaky penmanship," and explain that I am "riding in a badly driven car." Coast to coast with Don Ainsworth was as calm an experience as sitting in an armchair watching satellite pictures of the Earth. In only three moments did anxiety in any form make a bid for the surface. None had to do with his driving. The first was over the Mississippi River on the bridge to St. Louis—the big arch in the foreground, the water far below—where we seemed to be driving on a high wire with no protection visible beside us, just a void of air and a deep fall to the river. The second was in St. Joseph, where we swung through town on I-229 for a look at the Missouri River, and the narrow roadway, on high stilts, was giddy, a flying causeway convex to the waterfront. Falling down Cabbage Hill, concern for safety hadn't crossed my mind. And now this big logger was bringing up a third and final shot of adrenaline. We got by tightly. The driver was smoking something.
The ridges were dry in that part of Washington—rainfall less than eight inches a year. At elevations under three thousand feet, the ridges were not notably high—certainly not with the Pacific Crest becoming ever more imminent at twelve, thirteen, fourteen thousand feet. We made another long pull, over Manastash Ridge, and drifted down from the brown country into another paradise of irrigation—instant Umbria, just add water. It was a dazzling scene, the green valley of hay, wheat, and poplars; and here the string bikini passed us again, goosed by the air horn and waving. By Cle Elum, we were pulling at the mountains themselves—less than a hundred miles from Seattle and approaching Snoqualmie Pass. Listening to his engine climb, Ainsworth called it "operatic."
Ainsworth thinks his chemical tanker is at least as attractive as anything that could pass it in a car. He is flattered by the admiring glances it draws. He is vain about his truck. That day in particular had started in a preening mode— at a nylon-covered building called Bay Wash of Idaho, next to a beet field west of Boise, where we drew up soon after six and went off to have breakfast before the big doors opened at eight. Ainsworth will not go just anywhere to have his truck's exterior washed. All over the United States and Canada, for example, are washes called Blue Beacon, and they are known among truck drivers as Streakin' Beacon. Ainsworth passes them by. He insists on places that have either reverse-osmosis or deionized rinse water. He knows of three—one in Salt Lake City, one in the Los Angeles Basin, and Bay Wash of Caldwell, Idaho. To the two guys who washed the truck he promised "a significant tip" for a picture-perfect outcome, and he crawled in granny gear through the presoak acids, the presoak alkalis, the high-concentration soap, and warm water under such high pressure that it came through the seams of the windows. "They're hand-brushing the whole critter," he said admiringly a little later. And soon he was getting "the r.o. rinse" he had come for. Ordinary water dries quickly and spottily. This water had been heated and softened, sent through a carbon bed and a sand filter, and then introduced to a membranous machine whose function was distantly analogous to the gaseous diffusion process by which isotopes of uranium are separated. In this case, dissolved minerals and heavy metals failed to get through the semipermeable membranes of the reverse-osmosis generator. Water molecules made it through the membranes and on to rinse the truck, drying spotless. The Army and the Marine Corps use reverse-osmosis generators to go into swamps and make drinkable water. (Deionization is a different process but does the same thing.) Ainsworth paid sixty dollars and tipped fifteen. We were there two hours. "If you go into a Streakin' Beacon, you're going to be out in twenty minutes," he said. "You see the amount of time we fuck around just manicuring the ship? If I were in a big hurry, I wouldn't be doing it. Lord help us." We were scarcely on the interstate rolling when he said, "This is as close as a man will ever know what it feels like to be a really gorgeous woman. People giving us looks, going thumbs up, et cetera."
This is what raised the thumbs et cetera: a tractor of such dark sapphire that only bright sunlight could bring forth its color, a stainless-steel double-conical trailer perfectly mirroring the world around it. You could part your hair in the side of this truck. The trailer seemed to be an uncomplicated tube until you noticed the fused horizontal cones, each inserted in the other to the hilt in subtle and bilateral symmetry. Ainsworth liked to call it "truly the Rolls-Royce of tanks," and then he would deliver "Ainsworth's Third Axiom: if your stainless-steel thermos seems expensive, wait till you break three glass ones." The tank looked new. He had hauled it three hundred and eighty-seven thousand miles. It was so cosmetically groomed that its dolly-crank handle was stainless steel, its fire extinguisher chrome-plated—costly touches of an optional nature, not in the Third Axiom. Ainsworth uses tire blackener in the way that some people use lipstick. The dark tractor, still in its first ten thousand miles, had several horizontal bands, red and powder blue. On its roof, its two principal antennas were segmented red, white, and blue. Its bug screen—forward, protecting the nose—was a magnified detail of a flying American flag. His earlier tractors all had similar bug-screen bunting, long before 9/11.
When Ainsworth slides into a truck stop, if there are, say, two hundred and ten trucks on the premises he is wary of two hundred and nine, not to mention others that follow him in. At a Flying J in Oak Grove, Kentucky, he went completely around the big parking lot looking for the space where he was least likely to get clipped. "You're inside the truck stop and you hear your name on the P.A.," he said. " 'Meet So-and-So at the fuel desk.' At the fuel desk is a guy with a sheepish look. Nowadays, they usually don't show up." In Little America, Wyoming, he circled a couple of hundred trucks before parking beside a light pole so only one truck could get near him. He said, "We're fifty per cent protected and that's better than one hundred per cent vulnerable." He has never been dinged and nothing has ever been stolen from his truck. " 'Constant vigilance is the price of freedom,' " he remarked. "Patrick Henry."
Ainsworth wore T-shirts with the truck's picture on them. Tall and slim—wearing tinted glasses, whitish hair coming out from under the band at the back of his cap—he had pushed sixty about as far as it would go. Only in one respect was he as well dressed as the truck. His boots, fourteen inches high, had been custom-made from the tanned hide of a water buffalo by the bootmaker J. B. Hill, of El Paso. Hanging in the sleeper behind him as he drove were boot-shaped leather bags containing other boots, like fly rods in burnished tubes. His caiman boots, he wished to point out, were made from the skins of farm-raised caimans. "Most people think they're either gator or croc. They're not custom-made. They're off the shelf."
"Whose shelf?"
"Cavender's, in Amarillo."
In his boot library, as he calls it, are mule boots, eel boots, anteater boots, gator boots, crocodile boots. All these boots are in the Third Axiom, he says. Why? "Because they last forever." His elk and bison low walkers are made by H. S. Trask, of Bozeman. Most truck drivers are content with running shoes. Ainsworth is content never to wear them.
I rode with him as "part-owner" of the truck. I didn't own even one hub nut, but was primed to tell officials in weigh stations that that's what I was. I never had to. My identity in truck stops was at first another matter. Hatless, in short-sleeved shirts, black pants, and plain leather shoes, I had imagined I would be as nondescript as I always am. But I was met everywhere with puzzled glances. Who is that guy? What's he selling? What's he doing here? It was bad enough out by the fuel pumps, but indoors, in the cafés and restaurants, I felt particularly self-conscious sitting under block-lettered signs that said "Truck Drivers Only."
So, a little desperate and surprisingly inspired, I bought a cap. Not just any cap. I picked one with a bright-gold visor, a gold button at the top, a crown of navy blue, an American flag on the left temple, and—on the forehead emblem—a spread-winged eagle over a rising sun and a red-and-green tractor-trailer and the white letters "America— Spirit of Freedom." On the back, over my cerebellum, was a starred banner in blue, white, red, green, and gold that said "Carnesville, GA Petro." I put on that hat and disappeared. The glances died like flies. I could sit anywhere, from Carnesville to Tacoma. In Candler, North Carolina, while Ainsworth was outside fuelling the truck, I sat inside in my freedom hat saying "Biscuits and gravy" to a waitress. She went "Oooooo wheeeee" and I thought my cover wasn't working, but a trucker passing her had slipped his hand between the cheeks of her buttocks, and she did not stop writing.
I would pay for my freedom at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, when—with a one-way ticket bought the previous day—I would arrive to check in for home. Sir, your baggage has been randomly selected for radiation therapy. Please carry it to that far corner of the terminal. My boarding pass was covered with large black letters: "S S S S S S." At the gate, I was once again "randomly selected" for a shoes-off, belt-rolled, head-to-toe frisk. I had become a Class 1 hazmat. At home was a letter from Visa dated two days before my return. "Please call 1-800-SUSPECT immediately." Yes? "Please explain the unusual activity: Georgia? Oregon? Petro? Flying J? Kirk's Nebraskaland? Little America? What is your mother's maiden name?"
"Was."
Self-employed, Ainsworth has an agent in North Salt Lake. Ainsworth rarely knows where he will be going, or with what, until a day or two in advance. "I am in a very specialized portion of trucking," he had once told me. "I have chemicals in a tanker. The whole game hinges on tank washings. Without tank washings, tankers would roll loaded one-way, then go back to origin to load again. In the old days, it was all dedicated runs. Now, due to the widespread existence of interior tank washes, we can move around, taking different things."
For example, when I joined the truck, in Bankhead, Georgia, he was hauling a load of concentrated WD-40 east from San Diego. He had called the day before, from Birmingham, to say that he had just learned that after delivering the WD-40 in Gainesville, Georgia, he would be going to the Spartanburg Tank Wash, in South Carolina, then deadheading to Harrisburg, North Carolina, where he would pick up the hazmats for the haul west. We had been corresponding for four years but had never met. I was at Newark airport two hours after his call.
Before San Diego, he had hauled a surfactant from Salt Lake to New Mexico. He had washed in Phoenix and deadheaded west. To Hill Air Force Base, in Ogden, Utah, he once hauled parts degreaser for F-16s. From Philadelphia to Superior, Wisconsin, he hauled "a secret ingredient" to the company that manufactures Spy Grease. After bouncing to Neenah to wash, he loaded at Appleton a soap used in the making and curing of bricks. It was bound for Dixon, California. He has hauled weed killers, paint thinners, defoaming agents that form a broth in the making of explosives, latex for sandwiching plywood, and dust suppressants that are "kind to horses' hooves." To Fresno he took latex for a dye that turns brown cardboard white. Wood squeezings, or lignin liquor, is used in curing cement. He has carried it from Bellingham to Rancho Cucamonga—northern Washington to southern California. He turns down a job maybe once a year. "I don't want to haul any more cashew-nutshell oil—I believe it harms my barrel," he said. Cashew-nutshell oil arrives in ships from Brazil. "You can't make any friction device—clutches, brake shoes, brake pads—without it. It looks like creosote or asphalt. It's a hard wash. It calls for a stripper."
South of Pocatello, in a brightly greened irrigation valley, we met a Ranger reefer coming the other way. "They're out of Buhl, Idaho," he said. "They raise trout. I took some liquid fish guts up there last year—out of a tuna place in L.A. Harbor." Before the liquid fish guts, his load had been soap. Generally, the separation is distinct between food-grade and chemical tankers. You haul chemicals or you haul food. The vessels are different, the specs are different—mainly in protective devices against the aftermath of rollovers. Ainsworth used to haul wine, orange juice, and chocolate. He mentioned a load of concentrated cranberry juice worth five hundred thousand dollars, a load of chocolate worth seven hundred thousand. He said orange-juice haulers sometimes carry sizing agents on the return trip (sizing agents control shrinkage in textiles). Very few companies carry both foods and chemicals even in completely separate tankers. Ainsworth remembers a California carrier with a fleet of about twenty trucks who carried paint thinner, washed, and then picked up wine. He said, "Your brother better be F. Lee Bailey if you're going to engage in practices like that."
In Gainesville, north Georgia, less than fifty miles from Atlanta, we arrived at Piedmont Laboratories, Inc., on Old Candler Road, at 7:59 A.M. Piedmont is an independent packer of everything from hair spray and shaving cream to WD-40. "If it's rainy and your car won't start, rip off the distributor cap and spray it in there," Ainsworth said. "The WD means water displacement." A man named Bomba Satterfield came out—brown shirt, brown trousers—and took a sample of our brown liquid. Ainsworth hooked up a Piedmont hose to force out the cargo with compressed air. By nine we were discharging. Ainsworth said, "We're flowin' and a-goin' right now, Bomba. It'll be about an hour." Satterfield disappeared. Ainsworth said, "Got to take a whiz." As he started off in search of a men's room, he said to me, "If the cargo starts to spill or all hell breaks loose, turn that stopcock and pull down the lever of the internal valve." All hell stayed put, to the relief of the part-owner.
When the load was gone, air was hissing from a valve at the top of the tanker. "If we let air go into the company's tank it would roil the waters," Ainsworth said, adding helpfully, "That's r-o-i-l." He climbed up the steel ladder on the side of the vessel and began, gingerly, to undog the dome. The dome cover was nearly two feet in diameter and was secured by six dogs. "Bleed before you break," he said. "Air is bleeding. Pressure can kill you if you break early." He said he had "heard of guys being blown off the tops of their trucks and into walls and killed." He had "heard of guys having their heads blown off." Other discharging methods could result in negative pressures no less serious. You could implode the tank. If you worked on railroad tank cars, which are made of carbon steel, you could crush them with implosion and twist them like beer cans. Your head would not come off but you would surely be fired. From the dome, we looked down inside the vessel. It looked almost clean. The heel, or residue, was—as we would learn at the interior wash—scarcely more than one ten-thousandth of the six thousand gallons that had been there.
The Spartanburg Tank Wash charged him less than two hundred dollars. It consisted of four parallel bays in what had recently been country. After three pints of heel went into a bucket, a Texas spinner was lowered through the dome. "They're using ultrahot water—just below steam—and detergent," Ainsworth said. "It's an easy wash." A Texas spinner is a Gamma Jet, directing blasts of water at a hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The procedure took two hours. "They use steam for caustic, and strippers for supercorrosive solutions," Ainsworth remarked while we waited. "You clean out cement mixers with sugar and water." He had a chemical dictionary in his truck to help tank washers break down any unusual product he might be carrying. "But wash guys usually know. Are you aware that a lot of wash guys get killed every year by nitrogen blankets? Customers sometimes use nitrogen to force a load out of a truck. Then the driver goes to a wash. A wash man goes into the tank. He dies. The driver should have alerted him." Some tank washes that service food vessels are kosher. A rabbi is there, supervising.
Directions supplied by Chemical Specialties, Inc., to 5910 Pharr Mill Road, Harrisburg, North Carolina, were written for vehicles approaching the region from the direction opposite ours. When Ainsworth is given imperfect directions, he sometimes asks, on arrival at the company office, "How did you get to work?" Often the answer is "I take the bus." Ainsworth: "That's apparent." At Chemical Specialties, he nosed onto a scale that was under a loading rack lined with bulbous vats. Releasing air, locking the brakes, he said, "O.K., we're in the tall cotton." Variously, the tall cotton was zinc nitrate, manganese nitrate, D-Blaze fire-retardant solution, monoethanol-amine. Before filling our vessel, a company handler of hazmats rattled off questions while Ainsworth nodded affirmatively: "You got a wash-out slip? Is your outlet closed? Can you take forty-five thousand pounds?" Ainsworth, for his part, had a question he was required to ask the shipper: "Do we have to display placards?" But he knew the answer and he had the four placards—diamond-shaped, bearing the number 8 and the number 1760 and an inky sketch of test tubes spilling. If you dipped your fish in this hazmat, you would lift out its skeleton, but the hazmat at least was not combustible, not flammable, not explosive. The "8" meant "Corrosive." The "1760" stood for monoethanolamine.
We took it in by hose through the dome. As we filled, Ainsworth sat in the cab plotting his way west. Hazmats had to stay off restricted routes and avoid all tunnels except exempted tunnels. With your tire thumper, you did a tire check once every two hours or hundred miles, whichever came sooner. "Any fines that have to do with hazmats you take a large number and multiply it by a grandiose number," he said. "There's a twenty-seven-thousand-five-hundred-dollar maximum fine." A Class 6 hazmat is poison. A Class 9 hazmat with zebra stripes is "as close to harmless as you're going to get." Explosives are Class 1. Even Ainsworth develops wariness in the presence of a Class 1 placard. Seeing one at a truck stop in Cheyenne, he said, "You might not want to park next to him at night." If a placard with a 3 on it is white at the bottom, the load in the truck is combustible. If a placard with a 3 on it is red at the bottom, the load in the truck is flammable. Odd as it may seem, Gilbert and Sullivan did not write the hazmat codes. A flammable substance has a lower flash point than a combustible substance, according to the codes. "Hazmats" may soon be a word of the past. In Canada they are called "Dangerous Goods" and the term may become international. Hard liquor is a Class 3 hazmat. Depending on its proof, it is either combustible or flammable. The Glenlivet is combustible. Beefeater is flammable.
I got out of the truck to look at the hose in the dome. Ainsworth said, "Get back in. We're almost loaded and your weight has to be part of the total." He should not exceed eighty thousand pounds, and the part-owner's hundred and fifty would matter. We were, after all, parked on a scale. Drawing on his knowledge of nineteenth-century rifle-sighting, he said, "Kentucky windage and Tennessee elevation is what you are doing if you're not right on a scale."
And moments later Ainsworth said, "He's hammering on my dogs. We're getting ready to get out of here." He backed away from the loading rack, stopped the truck, and went off to sign papers and receive from a laboratory his Certificate of Analysis. As if in a minor earthquake, the truck trembled for minutes after he was gone, its corrosive fluid seiching back and forth. As we began to roll for the Pacific Northwest, he said, "We're weighing seventy-nine thousand seven hundred and twenty, so we'll have to plug our brains in to see where we're going to fuel."
In this trade, if you were "grossed out" you were flirting with the weight limit. In weigh stations, they could "make you get legal"—keep you right there until you discharged enough cargo not to be overweight. "Grain haulers, they may know a farmer who will take it, but this corrosive stuff is something else," Ainsworth said. His twin saddle tanks, one on either side of the tractor, could hold three hundred gallons, and "a full belly of fuel," at seven pounds a gallon, would weigh twenty-one hundred pounds. We never had anything like a full belly. Constantly he had to calculate, and cut it fine. With no disrespect for the Chemical Specialties scale, he sought a second opinion, pulling into a Wilco Travel Plaza forty miles up the road, where he came to a stop on a commercial CAT Scale (Certified Automated Truck Scale). While Ainsworth waited, while a truck behind us waited, and while the cashier in the CAT booth waited, the load in the big steel vessel took five minutes to calm down. Ainsworth paid $7.50, got a reading of 79,660, and renewed his fuel calculations. In Candler, North Carolina, at TravelCenters of America, he took on fifty-five gallons of fuel—"just a dab"—and, to pay $75.85, lined up at the truck stop's fuel desk behind a couple of dry-box drivers with lighter loads, who paid $325.63 and $432.22 for their fuel. Always near the intersections of interstates, truck stops have also tended to sprout on the leeward side of weigh stations. Approaching a Flying J just west of Knoxville, he said, "We're going to take on some Mormon motion lotion." He paid Flying J, a company based in Utah, $65.96 for another fifty-five gallons. Waiting behind trucks at fuel bays, Ainsworth sought to avoid being trapped, because some drivers park at the pumps, go inside, eat, and shower. Farther west, where space expanded, he could show more generosity to the saddle tanks. At the Nebraskaland Truck Stop, in Lexington, he bought a hundred gallons for $135.90. In the bays, there was always a pump on either side of the truck, one for each fuel tank. Truckers call the two pumps the master and the slave. One pump has the rolling numbers, the other is blank. As a general rule, if you take on fifty gallons or more at a truck stop, you get to shower and overnight free.
Many weigh stations have sensors that provide, as you enter, a ballpark assessment of your respect for the law. If a green arrow lights up after you go over the sensor, you bypass all other apparatus and move on. The stations have dynamic scales that you slowly roll across and static scales, on which you stop. The weight on each axle is critical as well as the gross. You obey brightly lettered, progressively stern, electrically lighted signs: "Ahead," "Stop," "Park Bring Papers." Sometimes in weigh stations the I.R.S. is present—there to check the color of fuel. Clear fuel is the only fuel you can legally burn on the highway. Red-dye fuel is maritime fuel, farm fuel, or for use in stationary engines. If you are caught with dyed fuel, the fine starts at a thousand dollars. Ainsworth recalled disdainfully a trucker-negative television piece in which "they only interviewed people in the failure line at scales—outlawish people, running around with no sleep, pinching asses, and going a hundred miles an hour." Park bring papers. In a weigh station east of Boise, we passed a painted wooden sign that said "Leaking Hazardous Materials Next Right." We weren't leaking. We proceeded on.
While the common weight limit for five-axle eighteen-wheelers is eighty thousand pounds, in some states you can carry a greater load if, on more axles, you spread the load out. Near Lincoln, for example, when we met a seven-axled ag hopper, Ainsworth said, "He can gross maybe a hundred thousand pounds. He takes grain from Nebraska to Salt Lake and brings salt back." The more axles you add, the more you can legally carry. In 1979, westbound at Rawlins, Wyoming, Ainsworth, in a reefer hauling pork, came up behind a "Long Load Oversize Load" surrounded by pilot cars, a press car, a spare tractor, a tire truck, mechanics, and bears. A lowboy, it had eighteen axles and a hundred and twenty-eight tires. From Argonne National Laboratory, southwest of Chicago, to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, in Palo Alto, California, it was carrying a superconducting magnet that weighed a hundred and seven tons. At close to half a million pounds gross, this itinerant enterprise was the largest legal load ever to move in the United States, a record that has since been eclipsed. To Don Ainsworth, the magnet was just a magnet. But the truck—the tractor! "It was a Kenworth—olive and glossy—with an olive trailer, a sharp-looking rig."
The most beautiful truck on earth—Don Ainsworth's present sapphire-drawn convexing elongate stainless mirror—gets a smidgen over six miles to the gallon. As its sole owner, he not only counts its calories with respect to its gross weight but with regard to the differing fuel structures of the states it traverses. In western Idaho, we took on fuel at $1.299 a gallon. An hour later, in Oregon, we passed pumps that were selling diesel for $1.199. He said, "It's much better for us to take Idaho fuel than that phony-assed Oregon fuel. It's expensive fuel that looks cheap." The Idaho fuel included all Idaho taxes. The Oregon fuel did not include Oregon's ton-mileage tax, which Oregon collects through driver logs reported to each truck's base-plate state (in Ainsworth's case, Utah). Oregon feints with an attractive price at the pump, but then shoots an uppercut into the ton-mileage. Passing a sign in Oregon that flogged the number 1.199, he said, "You got to add 24.9 to that to get a true price."
In general, he remarked, fuel is cheap on or below I-40, and north of I-40 it's costly. He particularly likes the "fuel structures" of Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Oklahoma. To save a couple of thousand pounds and commensurate money, some hazmat-carrying chemical tankers are made of a fibreglass-reinforced quarter-inch plywood with balsa core. Ainsworth's aesthetics do not include balsa cores. He would rather be caught dead in running shoes. In Idaho, in a heavy quartering wind on the huge plateau beyond Mountain Home, he could barely get into eighteenth gear and could feel the wind getting into his wallet, running up the cost of fuel. In the Laramie Basin, where we passed a collection of wrecked trucks, he said, "This place is Hatteras for box trailers. Those six wrecks, probably, were blown over in the wind. In terms of hurting your fuel economy, a side wind is every bit as bad as a headwind. The smaller the gap between the back of the cab and the nose of the trailer the better off you are in terms of fuel economy." In his mind as on his calculator, he paid constant attention to cost efficiencies. The Wyoming speed limit was seventy-five. Driving into a setting sun near Rock Springs, he said, "All day long I've been going seventy in an effort to save fuel." He asked if I knew what heaven is. Heaven is "this month's Playmate in the passenger seat, last month's in the sleeper, and diesel fuel at ten cents a gallon tax paid." Time and again, as we crossed the continent, he said, "I am a businessman whose office is on eighteen wheels. I have a fleet of one."
Most owner-operators own just their tractors. They haul company trailers. In the hazmat-tanker business, Ainsworth knows of only one other driver who owns his whole truck. Insurance is near prohibitive. Per vehicle per accident, the limit of liability for a dry box or a flatbed is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. For a chemical tanker, the limit of liability is five million. So why did Ainsworth want to own the whole truck? "First," he answered, "my piece of the pie increases. Second, I maintain her. I know what kind of shape she is in." The "wages" he pays himself are $1.08 times the odometer. But that pie he referred to was filled with more than hours driven. What did he and the truck earn in a typical year? A good year? His responses were strictly elliptical. He would sooner tell you what he paid for his water-buffalo boots, and he was not about to reveal that, either. Instead, he said, "Would we be waltzing around in a brand-new Pete and a virtually new tanker if there was no money in this business? And would my banker back me up? It's good money. It really is."
He said truck drivers make about seventy thousand a year if they are Teamsters, but few are. "Teamsters don't even organize trucking companies anymore. There's no point. Trucking is overpowered by non-union drivers." And companies pay them thirty-five thousand a year. Specialists like auto-haulers can make a hundred thousand a year. An owner-operator may gross a hundred thousand, but roughly half is overhead: payments on the tractor, road taxes, insurance, maintenance, and about seventeen thousand dollars' worth of fuel. There are some three hundred and fifty thousand independents on the road, hauling "mostly reefers and flats." And what about the people in local six-wheelers—dump trucks, delivery trucks? "Those guys who drive these little shit boxes around make thirty to forty grand a year. But, as I've said, they're not truck drivers. A truck driver drives an eighteen-wheeler. The skill level to drive those little step vans is like a kid riding a trike."
Don's father, Arthur Ainsworth, was born in Lancashire, and came to Canada, and then to western New York, after the Second World War. He became the editor-in-chief of Screw Machine Engineering, a magazine whose name a hyphen would have improved. In 1952, he gave up journalism and began rebuilding machine tools, specifically the Davenport Automatic Screw Machine. He also bought fifteen acres south of Rochester—a truck farm. "I'm a farm boy," Don says often, and that is where he grew up, one of seven kids, in the "muck empire" around Honeoye Falls, growing celery, sweet corn, onions, and cucumbers, and hauling them to the farmers' market in the city.
He went to Honeoye Falls High School, class of 1960. After four years as a billing clerk for the Mushroom Express trucking company, he joined the Army, and served in the Azores and at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey ("a lot of those people were spooks"). He was a reporter on the base newspaper. Out of the Army, he found a billing-clerk job in California, and in 1971 was married. He has two children. Jeff, who lives in Sioux City, hauls livestock in his own truck. Alisa lives in Newport Beach, California, and is a programmer/analyst.
Divorced in 1975, he has not remarried, but he calls a woman named Jill Jarvis three or four times a week and sees her half a dozen times a year. She lives in Dayton, Ohio. They met in 1989 in the lot at a Union 76 truck stop near Los Banos, California, in the Great Central Valley. She owned her own tractor in the reefer trade, and it had a crumpled fender. He asked what had happened. She said, "Man driver!" She travelled with a very large German shepherd that had flunked out of training for the L.A.P.D. If anything made her uncomfortable in the society of her peers, she would call out, "Here, Fluffy! Come here, Fluffy," and the big shepherd would leap out of her truck.
In 1976, when he was freshly single, Don began to hang around truck stops in the Los Angeles Basin. Thirty-four years old, he was seeking informal training on the road. At a Union 76 in Ontario, near Riverside, he saw a guy changing a headlamp, chatted him up, and learned that he was independent. His name was Tim, and sure, he said, why not? Don could come along. They took a load of lettuce to Iowa, and returned with pork, team driving. Four months later, Don bought Tim's truck—"a 1973 Peterbilt cab-over with a skillet face." With it, he did "endless pork-and-produce loops," and in 1977 bought his own refrigerated trailer. When "the produce market went to hell," he sold his reefer and found a tanker outfit—Silver Springs Transport, Howey-in-the-Hills, Florida—that would teach him the ways of tankers and take him on as an independent contractor. In addition to the orange juice and the chocolate, he hauled liquid chicken feed, lard, and tallow. It was a living, but after a while he was running empty too much of the time, getting too much deadhead. So he switched to chemical transport.
He watches his diet. Ordering dinner from a Waffle House menu in Smyrna, Georgia, he asked for a salad with his T-bone instead of the eggs. In the Kingdom City Petro, Kingdom City, Missouri, he had a big sirloin for breakfast with eggs over easy and toast. We went past Kansas City, up through western Iowa, and had lunch in Nebraska that day. Typically, we had lunch eight hours after breakfast. He described himself as a teetotaller and a nonsmoker all his life. He said "nor'west" for "northwest" and "mile" for "miles" ("It's twenty or thirty mile down the road"). He spoke trucker. A dump truck was a bucket. A moving van was a bedbugger. A motorcycle was a murdercycle, or crotch rocket, driven by a person wearing a skid lid. A speedo was a speeding violation. A civilian was someone not a truck driver. A lollipop was a mile marker. A "surface street" was anything off the interstate. On a horse-and-buggy highway, look for William Least Heat-Moon. He also used words like "paucity" and spoke of his "circadian rhythms." He frequently exclaimed, "Lord help us!" He said "shit" and "fuck" probably no more than you do. He seemed to have been to every jazz festival from Mt. Hood to Monterey. He had an innate pedagogical spirit, not always flattering but always warm. Twenty-two miles into Oregon, he explained the time zones of the United States. "There's four time zones with an hour's difference between them," he said. "Spread your four fingers. There's three zones between them." Or, as a Montrealer is said to have said to a Newfoundlander laying sod, "Green side up!"
Each morning, everywhere, he hunted for "the Walleye," often in frustration, because the Walleye tended not to be where his truck could go: "You just don't roll around with hazmat placards looking for the Wall Street Journal." He referred to the Journal conservatively as "the best-written paper in the world." In the course of a day that began in central Tennessee and went on through Kentucky and southern Illinois, he found no Walleye until we pulled into a QT in St. Peters, Missouri—"a convenience store on steroids that has grown into an El Cheapo truck stop"—where we parked between the pumps in a fuelling bay, left the truck, went inside, bought the Wall Street Journal, Xeroxed fifteen pages from "Hazardous Materials Transportation: The Tank Truck Driver's Guide," bought sandwiches to go, took a whiz, went back to the truck, pumped no fuel, and departed.
"Do you know of a writer named Joan Didion?" he had asked me in North Carolina.
I was too shy to say, "Take the 'of' out."
"She is a powerful writer," he went on. "She was raised in the San Joaquin Valley and now lives in New York City. Do you remember an author—he's dead now, twenty or thirty years; they celebrate him up there in the valley . . . ?" Silent for a mile or two, working on it, he eventually said, "Saroyan. William Saroyan." He had Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" in the truck. "It's the third time I've read it," he said, "but it's like 'Moby-Dick,' you learn something new every time." Out of the blue, in widely scattered moments, he mentioned other writers, editors. They seemed to come up out of the landscape like cell-phone towers. On I-85, George Plimpton: "Is he head of the Paris Review today?" On I-40, William Styron: "He really knows his cured ham." Esquire materialized on I-640 in Knoxville: "I don't know how you can run a man's magazine if you're a lady." As we crossed the Missouri River for the first time, Heat-Moon rose for the first time, too. Seeing two combines and a related house trailer in Little America, Wyoming, Ainsworth said he had read "a great book, a terrific book" called "Dream Reaper" that described a new machine for harvesting wheat, but he couldn't remember the name of the author.
"Craig Canine."
The ten-acre parking lot behind the Kingdom City Petro, in Missouri, was covered with steel biscuits, by now familiar to me—yellow humps, about a foot in diameter, protruding from the asphalt. "When the Martians land and try to figure things out, the toughest thing is going to be the yellow hump at the truck stop," Ainsworth said, but actually any self-respecting extraterrestrial would go straight to a yellow hump and start plugging in jacks to cable TV, the Internet, and the land-line telephone system. After dark, the big parking lots appear to be full of blue fireflies, as drivers lying in their sleepers watch TV. For team drivers, many trucks have in-motion satellite TV. Tractors come with built-in television trays. They're not an option. A truck with no television is about as common as a house without TV in Van Nuys. Ainsworth's TV shelf had boots on it.
Explosives are carried in liquid form in tankers. The more prudent truck stops have designated "safe havens"—Class 1 parking spaces situated, if not in the next county, at least, as Ainsworth put it, "a little away from the rest of the folks who may not want to be there when the thing lights off." Meanwhile, the main parking areas are always decibelled with the idling sounds of diesel engines and refrigeration units. At night in Bankhead, under the full moon, six hundred trucks were idling. It was hot in Georgia but the drivers were cool. Iowa, Oregon, everywhere, the trucks in the truck stops are idling, summer and winter, adjusting personal levels of coolness and warmth. When you are walking in a lot through the throaty sound of hundreds of idling trucks, it is as if you were on the roof of a co-op beside the air-conditioner. From the sidewalks at impressive distances, some drivers can hear their own trucks within the chorus, their own cicada reefers.
The concatenation of so many trucks can be intimidating to new, young drivers. Parking spaces are usually designed so that trucks can enter them and exit them moving in the same direction. But not always. Sooner or later, you have to back up, or make some other maneuver that raises the requirements of skill. "In truck stops, you see guys with stagefright," Ainsworth said, as we entered the Flying J in Oak Grove, Kentucky. They take their stagefright with them when they leave. Some years ago, a young tractor-trailer driver, new in his job, picked up a load in Minnesota bound for New York City. He got as far as the apron of the George Washington Bridge, where he became so nervous and scared that he stopped the truck, left it there, and headed for a bus station.
Ainsworth's favorite line in truck-stop restaurants is "I see a lot of civilians in here, a very good sign. You see a civilian and the food is good." My own first choice comes off the public-address system like this: "Shower No. 275 is now ready." While guys in truck stops are waiting for showers—or just killing time—they sit in the TV rooms and stare. One hour a week they are asked to clear the TV rooms for Sunday religious services. They gripe and yell obscenities. Ministers are provided by Truckstop Ministries Incorporated, of Atlanta; Transport for Christ International, of Ephrata, Pennsylvania; Truckers' Christian Chapel Ministries, of Enon, Ohio. Some truck stops have mobile-unit chapels permanently parked in mid-lot. "Sometimes they take you to a real church, and return you," Ainsworth said. He seldom misses a Sunday service.
He locked the cab wherever he parked. "Dopers are everywhere," he explained. "And they know the value of everything. In truck stops it's not truckers who bother me, it's pimps and whores, people who want to steal, and people who want to sell you Rolex watches with Timex guts." He said of a truck stop in the backcountry of eastern Oregon, "At one time it was a whorehouse with fuel pumps." Generally speaking, though, the seaminess of truck stops is in inverse proportion to their distance from major cities. In fact, you could generally call them wholesome if they're out in the tall corn. He described certain truck stops in the eastern Los Angeles Basin as "dangerous" and said they were full of burglars who would "hit you over the head," pushers, fencers of stolen goods, and hookers known as "sleeper leapers," who go from truck to truck. "The stops have security, but once the sleeper leapers get in there's no getting rid of them. You don't say 'Get lost.' They might hurt your truck. You say, 'I just left mama. I'm O.K.' "
In a bitter ice-cold winter wind at a truck stop on I-80 in South Holland, Illinois, he had seen a hooker going around the lot dressed in only a blouse and a miniskirt. Outside New York City, in his experience, no regional truck stop is less safe than the service area on the New Jersey Turnpike named for Vince Lombardi. His description of it was all but identical to his description of the truck stops of Los Angeles: "The Vince Lombardi plaza is a real dangerous place. Whores. Dope. Guys who'll hit you over the head and rob you. A lot of unsavory people wandering around, and not your brethren in transport." About his brethren in transport, the most unsavory item that Ainsworth pointed out to me was lying beside a curb at the edge of a truck-stop parking lot in Kentucky. It was a plastic quart-size fruit-juice bottle with—apparently—apple juice in it. He said, "That isn't apple juice. It's urine. They generally leave the bottles by the trucks. Other trucks run over them. When you see wet pavement, that isn't rainwater."
You see children playing in the truck-stop parking lots, especially in summer—eight-year-olds in baggy short pants like their parents'. A woman in Little America was walking her dog beside a closed auto-hauler with a custom sleeper. A closed auto-hauler hauls concealed expensive cars. A custom sleeper is a family home, stretched onto a bobtail. Indiana Custom Trucks, of Lagrange, Indiana, makes kitchen-bedroomparlors that cost more than the tractors themselves and, of course, have in-motion satellite TV. "People think truck drivers are all evil and mean," Ainsworth said when we were still in North Carolina, and even earlier in our acquaintance he said, "Please do not entertain any stereotypical notions about truck drivers—i.e., that they are tobacco-chewing, ill-educated, waitress-pinching folk raised on red beans and rice and addicted to country music." He is dour about the brethren's obscenities and profanities while talking with one another on CB radio. "A lot of four-wheelers have CBs," he said. "The truckers' language reinforces the stereotype that truck drivers are fourth-grade-educated grease-under-the-fingernails skirt-chasing butt-pinching dumdums. Dodos." Sometimes you look into trucks and see big stuffed animals on the passenger seat. "Lots of real dogs, too. The dog of choice is poodle."
I think it can be said, generally, that truckers are big, amiable, soft-spoken, obese guys. The bellies they carry are in the conversation with hot-air balloons. There are drivers who keep bicycles on their trucks but they are about as common as owner-operators of stainless-steel chemical tankers. At the Peterbilt shop in O'Fallon, Missouri, we saw a trucker whose neck was completely blue with tattoos. Like many other drivers in the summer heat, he was wearing shorts, running shoes, and white socks. Some still wear bib overalls—the Idaho tuxedo, according to Ainsworth. Sometimes it's the Louisiana tuxedo. Bull racks are trucks that carry cattle. If a bull rack has a possum belly, slung down inches from the pavement, it can variously carry "hogs, sheep, goats, cattle, vicuñas—whatever." Bull-rack drivers, according to Ainsworth, are "all macho guys." In Wyoming, we passed a Freightliner driven by a slight Asian woman in a baseball cap. She wore glasses and her hair was gray. In Oregon, an England company dry box out of Salt Lake overtook and passed us. Ainsworth described the driver as "a lady who looks like a grandmother." Women are now about five per cent of all truck drivers. "You have to have half-ass mechanical skills," he said modestly. "Women don't have such skills." Quite rare are "single lady drivers" and two-female teams. Man plus woman, however, seems to work out as a team. "For a husband and wife it can be a very simple chore. They have drop trailers at both ends. Dropping and hooking, they can easily do a thousand miles a day." The sun never sets on the languages spoken by American truck drivers.
Drug use is "not rampant" among truckers, he said. "Random drug screening is fairly effective. Preëmployment screening, too. If they see you staggering around and your eyes are red, you're going for a for-cause screening—urine test, blood test, et cetera. They test for five things: cocaine, marijuana, angel dust, amphetamines, and heroin. Many times, they'll give you a saliva test, just like a horse, right on the spot." Alcohol? "I don't smell it on guys." As a teetotaller, he is a particularly qualified smeller. Truck stops sell beer, and Ainsworth approves. "Better to have it right there than to be rolling around in your bobtail looking for a liquor store."
Just as the body of a fish tells you how that fish makes a living, the body of a tanker can tell you what it contains. In Ainsworth's words, "The architecture of the tank says what is in it." If a tank has gasoline inside, it has a full-length permanent manway on top, and, seen from the rear, is a recumbent oval. If a truck is a water wagon, the tank—rear view—is rectangular. A perfect circle ambiguously suggests asphalt, milk, or other food. If the vessel is all aluminum and shaped in tiers like nesting cups, it is a food-grade pneumatic hopper full of flour, granulated sugar, and things like that. If stiffeners are exposed—a series of structural rings circling and reinforcing the tank—the vessel is uninsulated, generally operates in a warm climate, and often hauls flammables and combustibles. Ainsworth said, "That is what mine looks like without the designer dress" (the stainless mirror sheath). The double conical side view speaks of chemical hazmats. Since September 11, 2001, all these shapes have scattered more than fish.
"Since 9/11, people see a tanker and they think you've got nitroglycerin in it," Ainsworth said.
Responding to a suggestion that we use a Wal-Mart parking lot while making a visit in Laramie, he said, "There's no way I'm putting these hazmats in a Wal-Mart. People in places like that think the truck is going to explode." In the fall of 2001, near St. Louis, a cop in a weigh station asked what he was carrying. "Latex," said Ainsworth. "Latex is a hazardous commodity," said the cop, but let him go. In a weigh station near Boise with a tankful of phosphoric acid he got the "Park Bring Papers" sign, as did all trucks with hazmat placards after 9/11. Everywhere, though, drivers were being scrutinized even more closely than the contents of their tanks. Drivers quit "because they looked Middle Eastern and were stopped left and right." If not native born, drivers with hazmat endorsements on their licenses became subject to police checks. "At truck stops, you used to be able to drop your trailer and bobtail into town. Now they don't want that. Something may be ticking." Signs have appeared: "No Dropping Trailers." The asphalt pavement at many truck stops used to be laced with dolly slabs. If you wanted to drop your trailer and go off bobtailing, you used a dolly slab or you might regret it. The retractable landing gear that supports the front end of a detached trailer could sink deep into asphalt and screw you into the truck stop for an extended stay. Rectangles just large enough for the landing gear, dolly slabs were made of reinforced concrete.
September 11th did not create in Ainsworth a sensitivity to law-enforcement officers which was not already in place. He describes the introduction of photo radar as "another encroachment of our rights." On I-10 once in Florida, a cop pulled him over and tried to put a drug-sniffing dog in his cab. He said, "I'm allergic to dogs." The officer said, "It's O.K. We can spray the cab." Slowly, Ainsworth said, "I'm constitutionally allergic to dogs." The bear got the message. The bear, of course, had "run a make" on him—"a cop phrase for plugging me into the N.C.I.C." The National Crime Information Center is a system within the F.B.I. "A cop stops you, runs an N.C.I.C. on your license, your whole history—your hit-and-runs, your D.U.I.s, your drug arrests. He's ready to give you a field sobriety test—walk a straight line, et cetera. Around San Francisco, that's called the Bay Shore Ballet."
"What did the cop find in your record?"
"Zero. There's nothing that exists on me. We don't really believe in interviews with police. It just gums us up. I run a legal ship, and the equipment is well maintained." Ainsworth added that he can afford water-buffalo boots because he obeys the law, keeping the buzzards out of his wallet. Buzzards, a word of broad application, extends from police to the Department of Transportation and the Internal Revenue Service and beyond. In the argot of the road, D.O.T. stands for Death on Truckers.
A female police officer is a sugar bear. A honey bear. A diesel bear is a cop who deals with truckers only. On a surface street in Puyallup, Washington, we happened by a municipal cop parked in his police car. Ainsworth said, "That's a local. That's not a real bear. Truck drivers would say, 'That's not a full-grown bear.' "
It had been well over a decade since he had acquired his last speedo. At one time, he thought "speedos were merely a form of doing business," but he had completely changed his mind. Individual bears have idiosyncratic speed thresholds that range from zero to ten miles above the limit. So Ainsworth sets his cruise control exactly on the speed limit. "Cops are suspicious of everybody," he said as we were starting to roll from Charlotte. "You have to think like a cop." His thinking is assisted by his radio scanner, which homes on the highway bands for state police. In Malheur County, Oregon, he heard a bear on the scanner say that he had a dump truck in Vale and was going to weigh it on a portable scale. "Vital information," Ainsworth said. "It's vital for you to know where the predators are." He bought the scanner mainly to detect "bears in the air." How does he know they're in the air? "You learn cop talk: 'That blue truck in lane No. 3—we've got him at 82.5.' " On the Pennsylvania Turnpike he once heard an air bear say to five chase cars on the ground: "We're going home early. We've got our work done for today." In other words, a quota had been met. The quota mattered more than a full shift of the cops' contribution to safety. Speedos, evidently, were for them a form of strip-mining more profitable than bituminous coal. On I-15 in Idaho, after we met a four-wheeler getting a speedo on the shoulder from a bear with flashing lights, Ainsworth turned on the scanner. "We want to know everything about cops," he said. "We want to know if that cop is going to turn and come along behind us after signing the ticket." He did.
"On I-90 in Montana it was legal to go any speed until about two years ago," Ainsworth said. "Guys went a hundred miles an hour. There were too many wrecks. You'd need a big parachute to stop this thing at a hundred miles an hour. I wouldn't think of doing a hundred miles an hour. You're going to Beulah Land."
Backing blindsided at the Peterbilt dealer's in Missouri, he said, "Sometimes you do this by Zen." He had never been to driver school. "I'm a farm boy," he explained. "I know how to shift. There are two things you need to know: how to shift, and how to align yourself and maintain lane control—exactly how much space is on each side. In city traffic it's critical." In the open country of western Kentucky, he said, "Out here, you look way ahead. It's the same as steering a ship. There's a silver car about a mile ahead that I'm looking at now. When you steer a ship, you don't look at the bow, you look at the horizon. When I'm in a four-wheeler, I stay away from trucks, because if a tire blows or an entire wheel set comes off I'm going to Beulah Land."
Gratuitously, he added, "Atlanta has a lot of wrecks due to aggressive drivers who lack skill. In Los Angeles, there's a comparable percentage of aggressive drivers, but they have skill. The worst drivers anywhere are in New Jersey. Their life cannot mean a great deal to them. They take a lot of chances I wouldn't take—just to get to work on time."
From Harrisburg, North Carolina, to Sumner, Washington, the load in the tank behind us kicked us like a mule whenever it had a chance. The jolt—which he called slosh, or slop—came mainly on surface streets and on-ramps when gears were shifting at low speeds. On the open road, it happened occasionally when we were gearing down, mashing on the accelerator, stepping on the brakes, going downhill, or going uphill. Ainsworth minimized the slosh with skills analogous to fly casting. "You coördinate shifting with the shifting of the load," he said. "You wait for the slop or you can pretzel your drive line." The more ullage the more slop. The density of the monoethanolamine had allowed us to take only six thousand gallons in the seven-thousandgallon tank. The ullage was the difference was the mule.
We would deliver it to Sumner after a day's layover in the Cascades. We were running twenty-four hours early. For the spectacular plunge in christiania turns down through the mountains from Snoqualmie Pass, Ainsworth's gear selection was No. 14 and his foot never touched the brake. The speed limit for trucks was, of course, restricted, but not by weight, causing Ainsworth to say, "They're not as bright as Oregon." The State of Washington was bright enough, however, to require that a truck stop in that beautiful forest of Engelmann spruce and Douglas fir be invisible from the interstate, right down to the last billboard. About thirty miles uphill from Puget Sound, we turned off I-90 at a nondescript exit, went through a corridor of screening trees, and into the Seattle East Auto Truck Plaza, where a freestanding coffee hut aptly named Cloud Espresso dispensed americano one-shots and mondo latte—truck-driver drinks, strong enough to float a horseshoe. In the lot, at least a hundred trucks were parked and humming. On one flatbed, a guy had a yacht he had hauled from Fort Lauderdale for a Seattle couple who had sailed around the Horn. He was getting ten thousand dollars to take the boat home.
As we began to roll on the second morning, I asked Ainsworth what time it was. He said, "0600 local." Sumner is down near Enumclaw and Spanaway, southeast of Tacoma. On Eighth Street East at 6:50 A.M., we turned into a large, elongate, and already busy lumbermill, where lanes were narrow among high piles of raw logs and stacks of lumber in numerous dimensions, from rough-cut ten-by-tens down. We saw a machine called a C-claw, or grappler (basically a crab's claw with a six-foot spread), go up to an eighteen-wheeler that had just arrived with fifty thousand pounds of fresh wood—forty-foot logs of Emperor fir. As if the huge logs were bundled asparagus, the big claw reached in, grabbed them all, and in one gesture picked up the entire fifty thousand pounds, swung it away from the truck, and set it on the ground.
A man appeared from behind some stacked lumber and shouted, "You guys got chemical?"
"We're not here with his morning orange juice," Ainsworth muttered.
"Did you know you've got a hole in your tank?"
A living riot, this guy. He directed us to "the second dry shed" in the vast labyrinthine yard. It was a cloudless day. From the roof of that dry shed, you could have seen the white imminence of Mt. Rainier, twenty-five miles southeast. But we were soon parked under the roof and looking instead at a bomb-shaped horizontal cylinder rouged with rust. This was the destination to which he had hauled the monoethanolamine 2,884 miles. "What is the capacity of the tank?" Ainsworth asked. Answer: "It's big." Eventually, he determined that the receiving tank's capacity was nine thousand gallons. He got out his tire thumper and thumped the tank. "Sounds pretty empty to me," he concluded, and from tubes on his tanker he removed two twenty-foot hoses two inches thick and a ten-foot jumper with double female ends. He hooked them together and forced out the hazmat with compressed air. As the fixing preservative in pressure-treated wood, chromated copper arsenate and ammoniacal copper arsenate were being phased out by the pressure-treated-wood industry. Some people had built their houses entirely of pressure-treated wood, and from the arsenic in the preserving compounds the people were going the way of old lace. Adults had been hospitalized. Children were at particular risk. So arsenic compounds were out now, and we had brought the base of the broth meant to replace them. In an hour, the six thousand gallons were discharged. We climbed to the dome, Ainsworth eased it open, and we looked down into the vessel. There remained what turned out to be a pint and a half of heel. It was a very dark and glistening, evil-looking blue. If blood were blue, it would look like monoethanolamine.
At 0900 local we were back on the road. Ainsworth was headed for a wash in Portland, and then would bounce to Kalama, near Kelso, and take a load of K-Flex 500 to Kansas City, and then bounce to Gastonia, North Carolina, for latex bound for White City, Oregon. From the lumbermill, he took me fourteen miles to the Flying J Travel Plaza, Port of Tacoma Truck Stop, Interstate 5. As he departed, the long steel vessel caroming sunlight was almost too brilliant to look at. I stood on the pavement and watched while the truck swung through the lot and turned, and turned again, and went out of sight. As it did, the Flying J's outdoor public-address system said, "Shower No. 636 is now ready." ♦
Moby-Duck:
Or, the synthetic wilderness of childhood
By
Donovan HohnFrom January 2007. In the September 2008 issue, Donovan Hohn continues his investigation into the meaning of toys in "
Through the Open Door: Searching for deadly toys in China's Pearl River Delta."We know exactly where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E. We know the day, January 10, 1992, but not the hour. Neither do we know the name of the ship nor of its captain nor of the shipping magnate who owned it. We do know the harbors from which it sailed (Hong Kong) and to which it was headed (Tacoma). We know that despite its grandeur, when rocked by forty-foot waves, the colossal vessel, a floating warehouse weighing 50,000 deadweight tons or more and powered by a diesel engine the size of a barn, would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a Jacuzzi.
We know that twelve of the colorful containers stacked above deck snapped loose from their moorings and tumbled overboard. We can safely assume that the subsequent splash was terrific, like the splash a train would make were you to drive it off a seaside cliff. We know that each container measured forty feet long and eight feet wide and may have weighed as much as 58,000 pounds, depending on the cargo, and that at least one of them—perhaps when it careened into another container, perhaps when it struck the ship's stays, perhaps as it descended to high-pressure depths—burst open. We know that when it left port, this ill-fated container had contained 7,200 little packages; that, as the water gushed in and the steel box sank, all or most of these packages came floating to the surface; that every package comprised a plastic shell and a cardboard back; that every shell housed four hollow plastic animals—a red beaver, a blue turtle, a green frog, and a yellow duck—each about three inches long; and that printed on the cardboard in multicolored lettering were the following words: floatees. the first years. from 6 months. expert developed ♥ parent preferred. 100% dishwasher safe.
From a low-flying plane on a clear day, the packages would have looked like confetti, a great drift of colorful squares, exploding in slow motion across the waves. Within twenty-four hours, the water would have dissolved the glue. The action of the waves would have separated the plastic from the cardboard. There, in the middle of the North Pacific, in seas almost four miles deep, more than six hundred miles south of Attu Island, the western extreme of the United States, more than a thousand miles east of Hokkaido, the northern extreme of Japan, and more than two thousand miles west of Sitka, Alaska, 28,800 plastic animals produced in Chinese factories for the bathtubs of America—7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles, and 7,200 yellow ducks—hatched from their plastic shells and drifted free.
Eleven years later, more than 7,000 nautical miles to the east, an anthropologist named Bethe Hagens and her boyfriend, Waynn Welton, a retired digital cartographer, spotted something small and bright perched atop the seaweed at the southwest end of Gooch's Beach near the entrance to Kennebunk Harbor in Maine. They stopped and crouched. Its body was approximately the size and shape of a bar of soap, its head the size of a Ping-Pong ball. A brand name, the first years, was embossed upon its belly. The plastic was "white, incredibly weathered, and very worn," Hagens would later recall. Welton remembers it differently. It was, he insists, still yellow. "Parts of it had started to fade," he told me. "But not a great deal. Whatever they'd used for the dye of the plastic had held up pretty well." Yellow or not, the thing looked as though it had crossed the ocean; on that Hagens and Welton agree. It was fun to imagine, a lone duck, drifting across the Atlantic, like something out of a fairy tale or a children's book—fun but also preposterous. Sensibly, they had left the toy where they found it and walked on.
The classified ads in the July 14, 1993, edition of the Sitka Daily Sentinel do not make for exciting reading, though they do convey something of what summertime in Alaska's maritime provinces is like. That week, the Tenakee Tavern "in Tenakee" was accepting applications "for cheerful bartenders." The Baranof Berry Patch was buying berries—"huckleberries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries." The National Marine Fisheries Service gave notice that the winners of the 1992 Sablefish Tag Recovery Drawing, an annual event held to encourage the reporting of tagged sablefish, would be selected at 1:00 p.m. on July 19 at the Auke Bay Laboratory. "Tired of shaving, tweezing, waxing?!" asked Jolene Gerard, R.N., R.E., enticing the hirsute citizens of Alaska's Panhandle with the promise of "Permanent hair removal." Then, under the ambiguous heading of "Announcements," between "Business Services" and "Boats for Sale," an unusual listing appeared.
ANYONE WHO has found plastic toy animals on beaches in Southeast please call the Sentinel at 747-3219.
The author of the ad was Eben Punderson, a high school teacher who moonlighted as a journalist. On Thanksgiving Day, 1992, a party of beachcombers strolling along Chichagof Island had discovered several dozen hollow plastic animals amid the usual wrack of bottlecaps, fishing tackle, and driftwood deposited at the tide line by a recent storm. After ten months at sea, the ducks had whitened and the beavers had yellowed, but the frogs were still as green as ever, and the turtles were still blue.
In subsequent weeks beachcombers on other islands found more of the toys, and new ones kept washing ashore. Laurie Lee of South Baranof Island filled an unused skiff with the horde she'd scavenged. Signe Wilson filled a hot tub. Betsy Knudson had so many to spare she started giving them to her dog. It appeared that even the sea otters of Sitka Sound were collecting them: one toy had been plucked from an otter's nest. On a single beachcombing excursion with friends, Mary Stensvold, a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service who normally spends her days hunting rare varieties of liverwort, gathered forty of the animals. Word of the invasion spread. Dozens of correspondents answered the Sentinel's ad. Toys had been found as far north as Kayak Island, as far south as Coronation Island, a range of tide line extending for hundreds of miles. Where had they come from?
Eben Punderson was pretty sure he knew. Three years earlier, in May of 1990, an eastbound freighter, the Hansa Carrier, had collided with a storm five hundred miles south of the Alaskan Peninsula. Several containers had gone overboard, including a shipment of 80,000 Nikes. Six months later, sneakers began washing up along Vancouver Island. The story had received national attention after a pair of oceanographers in Seattle—Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a scientist with a private consulting firm that tracked drifting icebergs for the oil industry, and James Ingraham of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—turned the sneaker spill into an oceanographic experiment. By feeding coordinates collected from beachcombers into NOAA's Ocean Surface Current Simulator, or OSCURS, a computer modeling system built from a century's worth of Navy weather data, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham had reconstructed the drift routes of some 200 shoes. In the process the basement of Ebbesmeyer's bungalow had become the central intelligence headquarters of what would eventually grow into a global beachcombing network. Would a similar accident account for the appearance of the bath toys?
Punderson had one lead. The ducks—and for some reason only the ducks—had been embossed with the logo of their manufacturer, The First Years. A local toy store was unable to find the logo in its merchandise catalogues, but the director of the Sheldon Jackson College Library traced the brand back to its parent company in Massachusetts, Kiddie Products. Punderson spoke to the company's marketing manager, who confirmed the reporter's speculations. Yes, indeed, a shipment of Floatees had been lost at sea. "Solved: Mystery of the Wandering Bathtub Toys," ran the headline in the Sentinel's "Weekend" section a month after Punderson's ad first appeared. And that is where the story should have ended—as an entertaining anecdote in the back pages of a provincial newspaper. Mystery solved. Case closed. But then something unexpected happened. The story kept going.
In part the story kept going because Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers joined the hunt, in part because the toys themselves kept going. Years later, new specimens and new mysteries were still turning up. In the autumn of 1993, Floatees suddenly began sprinkling the shores of Shemya, a tiny Aleutian island that lies about 1,500 miles closer to Russia than to Sitka, not far from the site of the original spill. In 1995, beachcombers in Washington State found a blue turtle and a sun-bleached duck. Dean and Tyler Orbison, a father-son beachcombing team who every summer scour uninhabited islands along the Alaskan coast, added more toys to their growing collection every year—dozens in 1992, three in 1993, twenty-five in 1994, until, in 1995, they found none. The slump continued in 1996, and the Orbisons assumed they'd seen the last of the plastic animals, but then, in 1997, the toys suddenly returned in large numbers.
Thousands more were yet to be accounted for. Where had they gone? Into the Arctic? Around the globe? Were they still out there, traveling the currents of the North Pacific? Or did they lie buried under wrack and sand along Alaska's wild, sparsely populated shores? Or, succumbing to the elements—freezing temperatures, the endless battering of the waves, prolonged exposure to the sun—had they cracked, filled with water, gone under? All 28,800 toys had emerged from that sinking container into the same acre of water. Each member of the four species was all but identical to the others—each duck was just as light as the other ducks, each frog as thick as the other frogs, each beaver as aerodynamic as the next. And yet one turtle had ended up in Signe Wilsonhot tub, another in the jaws of Betsy Knudson's labrador, another in the nest of a sea otter, while a fourth had floated almost all the way to Russia, and a fifth traveled south of Puget Sound. Why? What tangled calculus of causes and effects could explain—or predict—such disparate fates?
There were other reasons why the story of the toys kept going, reasons that had nothing to do with oceanography and everything to do with the human imagination, which can be as powerful and as inscrutable as the sea. In making sense of chaotic data, in following a slightly tangled thread of narrative to its source, Eben Punderson had set the plastic animals adrift all over again—not upon the waters of the North Pacific but upon currents of information. The Associated Press picked up the Daily Sentinel's story. Newspapers across the country ran it. The Floatees eventually made brief appearances in The Guardian and The New York Times Magazine, and a considerably longer appearance in The Smithsonian. Like migrating salmon, they returned almost seasonally to the pages of Scholastic News, a magazine for kids, which has reported on the story seven times. They were spotted in the shallows of People and MSNBC, and in the tide pools of All Things Considered. They swirled around the maelstrom of the Internet and bobbed up in such exotic waters as an oceanography textbook for undergraduates and a newsletter for the collectors of duck-themed stamps.
These travels wrought strange changes. Dishwasher safe the toys may have been, but newspaper safe they were not. By the time they drifted into my own imagination, the plastic animals that had fallen into the Pacific in 1992 were scarcely recognizable. For one thing, the plastic had turned into rubber. For another, the beavers, frogs, and turtles had all turned into ducks. It had begun the day Eben Punderson published an unusual ad in the pages of the Sitka Daily Sentinel—the metamorphosis of happenstance into narrative and narrative into myth.
Far across the ocean, in a toy factory made of red brick, a pinkly Caucasian woman in a brick-red dress and a racially ambiguous brown man in a sky-blue shirt work side by side at an assembly line. From a gray machine, yellow-beaked and lacking irises in the whites of their eyes, rubber ducks emerge, one by one, onto a conveyor belt. Chuckedy-chuckedy-chuck goes the rubber-duck machine. As the ducks roll past, the woman in the brick-red dress paints their beaks brick red with a little brush. The man in the sky-blue shirt paints their irises sky blue. It is beautiful, this unnamed country across the sea. Green grass grows around the factory. The people who work there clearly enjoy making rubber ducks. They are all healthy, well rested, and smiling. At the end of the assembly line another racially ambiguous brown man, lighter and yellower than the first, packs the ducks, ten to a cardboard box, onto a grass-green truck that carries them to a waiting ship named the Bobbie. The Bobbie's crew consists of a racially ambiguous stevedore in a hard hat and a pinkly Caucasian, white-bearded captain whose blue cap matches his blue coat. There are two gold stripes around the cuffs of the coat and two red stripes around the smokestack of the ship. A few decades ago the captain would have been smoking a pipe. Now he waves jauntily from a porthole. Above him, a white puff rises from the smokestack into a sky-blue sky.
Away the Bobbie chugs, carrying five cardboard boxes across a blue-green sea, a white streamer of smoke trailing behind it. Smiling overhead is an enormous sun the color of a rubber duck. Then a storm blows up. Waves leap. The Bobbie tosses about. The captain cries and throws his hands in the air. Down goes a cardboard box. Ducks spill like candy from a piñata. The sea calms. Slowly, the ducks drift apart, across the ocean, to diverse and far-flung ecosystems. One duck frolics with a spotted dolphin. A second receives a come-hither look from a blueberry seal in a lime-green sea. A polar bear standing on an ice floe ogles a third. And so their journeys go, each duck encountering a different picturesque animal—a flamingo, a pelican, a sea turtle, an octopus, a gull, a whale. Finally, who should the tenth rubber duck meet but a brood of real ducks. "Quack!" says the mother duck. "Quack! Quack! Quack!" say the ducklings. "Squeak," says the rubber duck. "Press here," says a button on the rubber duck's wing, and when you do, a battery-powered computer chip embedded in the back cover of Eric Carle's 10 Little Rubber Ducks emits what to my admittedly untrained ear sounds like the cry of a cormorant tangled in fishing line.
Published in the spring of 2005, shortly after my own duckie hunt began, Carle's picture book was inspired by a newspaper article, titled "Rubber Ducks Lost at Sea," that he'd happened upon in 2003. "I could not resist making a story out of this newspaper report," a brief author's note explains. "I hope you like my story." Beautifully illustrated with Carle's signature mix of paint and paper tearings, the book is hard not to like. Studies have shown that the primary colors, smiling faces, and cute animals with which 10 Little Rubber Ducks abounds—and of which the rubber duck may well be the consummate embodiment—have the almost narcotic power to induce feelings of happiness in the human brain. The myth had at last found if not its Aesop, then at least its Disney.
The loss of fantasy is the price we have paid for precision," I read one night in an outdated Ocean Almanac while investigating the journey of the Floatees, "and today we have navigation maps based on an accurate 1:1,000,000 scale of the entire world." Surveying the colorful, oversized landscape of my National Geographic atlas, a cartographic wonder made—its dust jacket boasted—from high-resolution satellite images and "sophisticated computer algorithms," I was unconvinced; fantasy did not strike me as extinct, or remotely endangered. The ocean is far less fathomable to my generation of Americans than it was when Herman Melville explored that "watery wilderness" a century and a half ago. Most of us are better acquainted with cloud tops than with waves. What our migrant ancestors thought of as the winds we think of as turbulence, and fasten our seat belts when the orange light comes on. Gale force, hurricane force—encountering such terms, we comprehend only that the weather is really, really bad and in our minds replay the special-effects sequences of disaster films or news footage of palm trees blown inside out like cheap umbrellas. In growing more precise, humanity's knowledge has also grown more specialized, and more fantastic, not less: the seas of my consciousness teem with images and symbols and half-remembered trivia as fabulous as those beasts frolicking at the edges of ancient charts. Not even satellite photographs and computer algorithms can burn away the mystifying fogs of ambient information and fantasy through which from birth I have sailed.
Not long ago on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the novelist Julia Glass worried that her fellow Americans, "impatient with flights of fancy," had lost the ability to be carried away by the "illusory adventure" of fiction, preferring the tabloid titillation of the "so-called truth." Perhaps, concluded Glass, "there is a growing consensus, however sad, that the wayward realm of make-believe belongs only to our children." By the spring of 2005, I had reached different conclusions. Hadn't we adults, like the imaginative preschoolers Glass admires, also been "encouraged"—by our government, by advertisers, by the fabulists of the cable news—"to mingle fact with fiction"? Hadn't millions of adults bought the illusory adventures of both Frodo Baggins and Donald Rumsfeld? Medieval Europeans divided the human lifetime into five ages, the first of which was known as the Age of Toys. It seemed to me that in twenty-first-century America, the Age of Toys never ends. Yes, stories fictional and otherwise can take us on illusory adventures, but they can also take us on disillusory ones, and it was the latter sort of adventure that I craved.
I tracked down a phone number for Curtis Ebbesmeyer and asked him how the journey of the castaway ducks had ended. I'd read that some toys were supposed to have crossed the Arctic, reaching the North Atlantic by the summer of 2003. Had they made it? Oh, yes, Ebbesmeyer assured me, yes, they had. Right on schedule, he'd received a highly credible eyewitness report from a trained anthropologist in Maine, which he'd published in his quarterly newsletter, Beachcombers' Alert! He promised to send me a copy. But—he added—if I really wanted to learn about things that float, then I should join him in Sitka that July. "You can't go beachcombing by phone," he said. "You have to get out there and look."
Since 2003, Sitka has played host to an annual Beachcombers' Fair over which Ebbesmeyer—part guru, part impresario—presides. Beachcombers bring him things they've scavenged from the sand, and Ebbesmeyer illuminates these discoveries as best he can. "Everything has a story," he likes to say. When an object mystifies him, he investigates. At this year's fair, a local fisherman would be ferrying a select group of beachcombers to the wild shores of Kruzof Island, where some of the toys had washed up. Ebbesmeyer, who would be leading the expedition, offered me a spot aboard the boat. Alaska—snow-capped mountains, icebergs, breeching whales, wild beaches bestrewn with yellow ducks. There was only one problem. The Beachcombers' Fair ended July 25, and my wife and I were due to have a baby on August 1, which was cutting it pretty close.
Soon thereafter an envelope with a Seattle postmark arrived. Inside, printed on blue paper, were a half-dozen issues of Beachcombers' Alert! Thumbing through this digest of the miscellaneous and arcane was a bit like beachcombing amid the wreckage of a storm. Alongside stories about derelict vessels and messages in bottles, the oceanographer had arrayed a photographic scrapbook of strange, sea-battered oddities, natural and man-made—Japanese birch-bark fishing floats, the heart-shaped seed of a baobab tree, land mines, televisions, a torn wet suit, a 350-pound safe. Many of these artifacts had accumulated colonies of gooseneck barnacles. Some were so encrusted they seemed to be made of the creatures: a derelict skiff of barnacles, a hockey glove of barnacles. A disconcerting number of the photographs depicted the plastic heads of mannequins and dolls, including the head of a plastic infant impaled like a candy apple on a stick.
At the end of an article titled "Where the Toys Are," Ebbesmeyer had published Bethe Hagens's letter. "You won't believe this," she'd written after hearing about the castaway toys on NPR, "but two weeks ago, I found one of your ducks." In fact, Ebbesmeyer had believed her, or wanted to. The details of her description matched the profile of a Floatee perfectly. Because Hagens had neglected to keep the evidence, however, her testimony remained in doubt. Accompanying the article was a world map indicating where and when the toys had washed up. Off the coast of Kennebunkport, Ebbesmeyer had printed a pair of question marks the size of barrier reefs.
There are two ways to get to the insular city of Sitka—by plane and by boat. In my dreams, I would have picked up the frayed end of that imaginary, 7,000-mile-long trail that led to Gooch's Beach and followed it, Theseus-style, to its source—sailing back across the Gulf of Maine, back through the Northwest Passage, that legendary waterway which the historian Pierre Breton has described as a "maze of drifting, misshapen bergs," a "crystalline world of azure and emerald, indigo and alabaster—dazzling to the eye, disturbing to the soul," a "glittering metropolis of moving ice." To Lieutenant William Edward Parry of the British Navy, who captained the Alexander into the maze in 1818, the slabs of ice looked like the pillars of Stonehenge.
By the summer of 2005, global warming had gone a long way toward turning that metropolis of ice into the open shipping channel of which Victorian imperialists dreamed. That September climatologists would announce that the annual summer melt had reduced the floating ice cap to its smallest size in a century of recordkeeping. Nevertheless, even a transarctic journey aboard a Coast Guard ice breaker was out of the question if I wanted to make it to Sitka and back before the birth of my first child. Instead I booked passage on the M/V Malaspina, part of the Alaskan Marine Highway, which is in fact not a highway at all but a state-operated fleet of ferries. Sailing from Bellingham, Washington, the Malaspina would reach Sitka five days before the Beachcombers' Fair began. If I flew home as soon as the fair ended, I would be in Manhattan a week before the baby arrived—assuming it did not arrive early, which, my wife's obstetrician warned us, was altogether possible. My wife was not at all happy about my plan, but she consented on one condition: that if she felt a contraction or her water broke, I would catch the next flight home, no matter the cost.
On my way to Bellingham I stopped in Seattle to visit Curtis Ebbesmeyer. I met him at home, in a quiet neighborhood near the University of Washington, where he had earned his Ph.D. Navy blue awnings overshadowed the porch of his bungalow, and peering into the semidarkness I could see four matching Adirondack chairs, lined up, side by side, as if to behold the vista of the lawn. Ebbesmeyer himself greeted me at the door. "Come in, come in," he said.
His face was familiar to me from photographs I'd seen in the press and in the pages of Beachcombers' Alert!, where he makes frequent cameo appearances, displaying a water-stained basketball, hoisting a plastic canister that was supposed to have delivered Taiwanese propaganda to the Chinese mainland, gazing down deifically at the four Floatees perched upon his forearm. He has a white beard, a Cheshire grin, and close-set eyes that together make his face a bit triangular. Since Ebbesmeyer likes to wear Hawaiian shirts and a necklace of what appear to be roasted chestnuts but are in fact sea beans, the waterborne seeds of tropical trees that ocean currents disseminate to distant shores, pictures of him often bring to mind cartoons of Santa Claus on vacation.
He brewed us each a cup of coffee and suggested we adjourn to the back yard, which he refers to as his "office." Passing through his basement, I saw many of the objects I'd read about in Beachcombers' Alert! Piled high on a bookshelf were dozens of Nikes. Some of them had survived the 1990 container spill—the first Ebbesmeyer ever investigated—in which 80,000 shoes had been lost. Others came from later accidents: 18,000 Nike sneakers fell overboard in 1999; 33,000 more in December of 2002. In January of 2000, some 26,000 Nike sandals—along with 10,000 children's shoes and 3,000 computer monitors, which float screen up and are popular with barnacles—plunged into the drink.
Nike's maritime fortunes are not unusually calamitous; as many as 10,000 containers spill from cargo ships annually. But few commodities are both as seaworthy and as traceable as a pair of Air Jordans, which conveniently come with numerical records of their provenance stitched to the undersides of their tongues, and which— submerged up to the ankle, laces aswirl—will drift for years. It helps, too, that Ebbesmeyer learned the serial numbers for all the shoes in the 1990 spill. In his basement, Ebbesmeyer selected a high-top at random and taught me how to "read the tongue." "See the ID?" he asked. "'021012.' The '02' is the year. '10' is October. '12' is December. Nike ordered these from Indonesia in October of 2002 for delivery in December."
Next he pulled down a black flip-flop, and then a matching one that he had sliced in half. Inside the black rubber was a jagged yellow core resembling a lightning bolt—a perfect identifying characteristic. If Ebbesmeyer had discovered the coordinates of this particular spill, the sandals would have provided a windfall of valuable data. Unfortunately, the shipping company, fearing legal liability, had "stonewalled" him, "like usual."
It took Ebbesmeyer a year of diplomacy and detective work to find out when and where the Floatees fell overboard. Initially, the shipping company stonewalled him, like usual. Then one day he received a phone call. The container ship in question was at port in Tacoma. On the condition that he never reveal its name or that of its owner, he was welcome to come aboard. For four hours, Ebbesmeyer sat in the ship's bridge interviewing the captain, a "very gracious" Chinese man who had a Ph.D. in meteorology and spoke fluent English. The day of the spill the ship had encountered a severe winter storm and heavy seas, the captain said. The readings on the inclinometer told the story best. When a ship is perfectly level in the water, its inclinometer reads 0°. If a ship were keeled on its side, the inclinometer would read 90°. Containers begin to break loose when a ship rolls more than 35°, Ebbesmeyer has found. When this particular spill occurred, the inclinometer would have registered a roll of 55° to port, then a roll of 55° to starboard. At that inclination, the stacks of containers, each one six containers tall, would have been more horizontal than vertical. Perhaps Dr. Ebbesmeyer would like to have a peek at the log book, the captain discreetly suggested. He'd already opened it to January 10, 1992. There were the magic coordinates.
OSCURS could now reconstruct, or "hindcast," the routes various toys had traveled, producing a map of erratic trajectories that appeared to have been hand drawn by a cartographer with palsy. Beginning at the scattered coordinates where beachcombers had reported finding toys, the lines wiggled west, converging at the point of origin, not far from where the International Dateline crosses the 45th parallel. The data that Ebbesmeyer's beachcombers had gathered also allowed NOAA's James Ingraham to fine-tune the computer model, adjusting for coefficients such as the height at which the toys rode in the water (an object with a tall profile will sail as well as drift). The toys, it turns out, rode high, skating across the Gulf of Alaska at an average rate of seven miles a day, twice as fast as the currents they were traveling. Among other things, the simulation revealed that in 1992 those currents might have shifted to the north as a consequence of El Niño.
OSCURS could forecast as well as hindcast, and in this respect, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were like clairvoyant meteorologists of the waves. OSCURS was their crystal ball. To the eyes of a driftologist, even the most state-of-the-art globe is in one respect as fabulous as the cartographic dreamscapes of the past. No clouds swirl across a map's invisible skies. The painted topography of its empty seas are not troubled by the wind. The polar ice does not thicken and thin with the seasons and the ages. There is no sign of "thermohaline circulation," the vertical movement of water layers caused by variations in density and temperature. A globe is a static illusion of permanence because it lacks a crucial dimension, the dimension that OSCURS was programmed to map—time.
By simulating "long-term mean surface geostrophic currents" (those currents that flow steadily and enduringly, though not immutably, like rivers in the sea) as well as "surface-mixed-layer currents that are functions of wind speed and direction" (those currents that change as quickly as the skies), OSCURS could project the trajectories of the toys well into the future. According to the simulator's predictions, some of the animals would drift south, where they would either collide with the coast of Hawaii in March of 1997, or, more likely, get sucked into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
"'Gyre' is a fancy word for a current in a bowl of soup," Ebbesmeyer likes to say. "You stir your soup, it goes around a few seconds." The thermodynamic circulation of air, which we experience as wind, is like a giant spoon that never stops stirring. Comprising four separate currents—the southerly California Current, the westerly North Equatorial Current, the northerly Kuroshio Current, and the easterly North Pacific Drift—the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre travels from the coast of Washington to the coast of Mexico to the coast of Japan and back again. Some of the toys would escape the gyre's orbit, spin off toward the Indian Ocean, and, eventually, circumnavigate the globe. Others would drift into the gyre's becalming center, where a high-pressure system has created what Ebbesmeyer calls "the garbage patch"—a purgatorial eddy in the waste stream that is approximately the size of Texas. "It's like Jupiter's red spot," says Ebbesmeyer. "It's one of the great features of the planet Earth, but you can't see it."
A similar high-pressure calm at the center of the North Atlantic Gyre gave rise to the legend of the Bermuda triangle as well as to the Sargasso Sea, named for the free-floating wilderness of sargasso seaweed that the currents have accumulated there. A Sargasso of the imagination, I thought to myself as I listened to Ebbesmeyer describe the garbage patch. The phrase comes from a scene in Day of the Locust in which Nathanael West is describing a Hollywood backlot jumbled with miscellaneous properties and disassembled stage sets.
The Atlantic is far shallower and narrower than the Pacific, and upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich water nourish the sargasso forest and the marine life that inhabits it. The center of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which circles around the deepest waters on the planet, is, by contrast, a kind of marine desert. If you go fishing in the garbage patch, all you're likely to catch aside from garbage is plankton.
In 1998, with help from Ingraham and Ebbesmeyer, a researcher named Charlie Moore began collecting water samples from the eastern edge of the North Pacific garbage patch, trawling along a 564-mile loop encompassing exactly one million square miles of ocean. Approximately 800 miles west of California, where the wind speed fell below ten knots, drifts of garbage began to appear. The larger items that Moore and his crew retrieved from the water included polypropylene fishing nets, "a drum of hazardous chemicals," a volleyball "half-covered in barnacles," a cathode-ray television tube, and a gallon bleach bottle "that was so brittle it crumbled in our hands." Most of the debris that Moore found had already disintegrated. Caught in his trawling net was "a rich broth of minute sea creatures mixed with hundreds of colored plastic fragments."
OSCURS's simulations predicted that relatively few of the bathtub toys would have contributed to this "plastic-plankton soup," as Moore calls it. The majority would have stayed well to the north, closer to the site of the spill, caught in the Sub-Polar Gyre, which travels counterclockwise between the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. Smaller and stormier than the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the Sub-Polar Gyre does not collect vast quantities of trash at its center. Here, the Floatees would have remained in orbit, completing a lap around the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea once every three years, until a winter storm blew them ashore or they strayed onto one of the northerly currents flowing through the Bering Strait.
There, OSCURS lost them.
Ingraham had not programmed his model to simulate the Arctic. To follow the animals into the ice, Ebbesmeyer had to rely on more primitive oceanographic methods. He went to a toy store and purchased a few dozen brand-new Floatees to use as lab animals in various experiments. Several specimens he subjected to the frigid conditions inside his kitchen freezer in order to find out whether cold would make them crack (it didn't). Others he bludgeoned with a hammer to see what it would take to make them sink (a lot). Even breeched and taking on water, they kept afloat. Able to withstand fifty-two dishwasher cycles, the toys, Ebbesmeyer concluded, could also survive a ten-year voyage through the ice. Using data collected from transarctic drift experiments conducted in the late 1970s, he calculated that, once beset, the toys would creep across the North Pole at an average rate of a mile per day. When they reached the North Atlantic, the ice would melt and set the Floatees loose upon the waters east of Greenland. Some would catch the Gulf Stream to Europe. Others would ride the cold southerly longshore current that flows past Gooch's Beach.
Although his library of shoes may suggest otherwise, Ebbesmeyer has not amassed a museum of flotsam in his basement. He collects stories and data, not things. Fat, three-ring binders occupy most of the shelf space. They contain "a small portion" of the studies he has conducted over the years. I saw binders labeled Fishing Floats and Vikings, Phytoplankton and Drifting Coffins, Eddies and Icebergs. There was an entire binder devoted to Isis and Osiris, the star-crossed Egyptian gods. Ebbesmeyer told me the tragic ending of their tale: "Osiris's brother killed him, put his body in a coffin, put the coffin in the Nile River, and it washed up 300 miles to the north of Lebanon. His wife, Isis, went to find it, and she did. That's the first documented drift of an object between point A and point B that I know of."
In the back yard, seated on the patio, where a string of rubber duckie Christmas lights festooned a grape arbor and wind chimes made mournful noises on the breeze, Ebbesmeyer waxed ecclesiastical. "There's nothing new around," he said. Take Osiris. Even today, when the Nile floods, flotsam follows that same route. Not even pollution is new. He told me to think of volcanic eruptions, of the tons of pumice and toxic ash an eruption throws into the sea. No, when you studied the history of flotsam long enough you realized that only one thing was fundamentally different about the ocean now, only one thing had changed since the time of the ancient Egyptians. "See, pumice will absorb water and sink," he said. "But 60 percent of plastic will float and the 60 percent that does float will never sink because it doesn't absorb water; it fractures into ever smaller pieces. That's the difference. There are things afloat now that will never sink."
Ebbesmeyer went inside and returned a moment later carrying what at first glance appeared to be exotic produce—a new, flatter variety of plantain or summer squash, perhaps. He spread these yellowy lozenges out on the patio table. "Remnants of high-seas drift-net floats," he said. There were four of them, in varying stages of decay. The best-preserved specimen had the hard sheen of polished bone. The worst was pocked and textured like a desiccated sponge that had been attacked with a chisel. Ebbesmeyer picked up the latter float. "This is a pretty cool old one," he said. By "cool" he meant that it told the story of drift-net floats particularly well.
"High-seas drift nets were banned by the United Nations in 1992," his version of this story began. "They were nets with a mesh size of about four inches, but they were, like, fifty miles long. The Japanese would sit there and interweave these for fifty miles. There were something like a thousand drift nets being used every night in the 1980s, and if you do the math they were filtering all the water in the upper fifty feet every year. Well, they were catching all the large animals, and it clearly could not go on."
According to Ebbesmeyer, those high-seas drift nets had not gone away, and not only because pirate drift netting still takes place. Before the moratorium, fishermen had lost about half of their nets every year, and those lost nets were still out there, still fishing. "Ghost nets," they're called. When he tells stories like this, Ebbesmeyer will punctuate the most astonishing facts with his eyebrows. He'll say something like, "What happens is, the nets keep catching animals, and then the animals die, and then after a while, the nets get old, and they roll up on a coral reef, and the waves roll it along like a big avalanche ball, killing everything in its path." Then his bushy eyebrows will spring up above his glasses and stay there while he looks at you, wide-eyed with auto-dumbfoundment.
And killer drift-net balls are genuinely dumbfounding, like something from a B horror movie—so dumbfounding that, smelling a hyperbole, I later checked Ebbesmeyer's facts. A ghost net may not kill everything that crosses its path, but it sure can kill a lot. News reports describe nets dripping with putrefying wildlife. Just three months before I showed up on Ebbesmeyer's doorstep, NOAA scientists scanning the ocean from the air with a digital imaging system had spotted a flock of 100 or so ghost nets drifting through the garbage patch. When they returned to fetch them, they found balls of net measuring thirty feet across. "There is a lot more trash out there than I expected," one of the researchers, James Churnside, told the Associated Press. A few years earlier, Coast Guard divers had spent a month picking 25.5 tons of netting and debris—including two 4,000-pound, fifteen-mile-long, high-seas drift nets—out of reefs around Lisianski Island in the North Pacific. They estimated that there were 6,000 more tons of netting and debris still tangled in the reefs when they left.
In Ebbesmeyer's opinion, ghost nets may pose a still greater danger once they disintegrate. While we were conversing on his patio, he handed me the oldest of the drift-net floats. "Hold this a minute," he said. It weighed almost nothing. "Now put it down and look." On the palm of my hand, the float had left a sprinkling of yellow dust, plastic particles as small as pollen grains in which, if you believe Ebbesmeyer, the destiny of both the Floatees and of the ocean could be read.
Out on his front lawn, as I was leaving, I asked him what he thought of 10 Little Rubber Ducks. Despite the gloomy future he glimpsed in that handful of plastic dust, he thought Carle's cheerful picture book was "delightful," especially that little squeaker in the back, and he hoped that it would "make the ocean fun to kids." He did have one criticism. He couldn't figure out why Carle along with just about everyone else seemed compelled to turn the four Floatees into rubber ducks. Coverage of the story in newspapers and magazines almost always showed a picture of a solitary rubber duck, and usually not even the right kind of duck. What was wrong with the other three animals? "Maybe it's a kind of racism," Ebbesmeyer speculated. "Speciesism."
The Floatees are no longer on the market, but before I left, Ebbesmeyer loaned me a set that had survived his experiments, to be returned when I was done with them. I have been carrying them around with me ever since, and they are at present perched before me on my desk as I write. Monochromatic and polygonal in a Bauhaus sort of way, they bear little resemblance to the rubber ducks in Carle's book or, for that matter, to any other plastic animal I've ever seen. Although blow-molded out of a rigid plastic (probably polyethylene), they look whittled from wax by some artisanal tribesman. The frog's four-fingered hands (the left smaller than the right) seem folded in prayer. The limbs of the turtle are triangular stubs. The duck's head, too large for the flat-bottomed puck of a body it sits upon, is imperfectly spherical, the flat plane of its beak continuing like a crew-cut mohawk over the top of the skull. Poke an axle through the duck's puffed cheeks and its head would make a good wheel. Wildly out of scale and dyed a lurid, maraschino red, the beaver seems altogether out of place in this menagerie, a mammalian interloper from somebody's acid trip. A seam left by the split mold bisects all four animals asymmetrically, and there's a little anal button of scarred plastic where the blow pin, that steel umbilicus, withdrew.
"Why do precisely these objects we behold make a world?" Thoreau wonders in Walden. "Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?" Since Thoreau's time, ecologists have explained why that mouse filled that crevice, and since then Walden woods have grown far less bewildering. For Thoreau the distinction between the natural world and the man-made one matters less than that between the subjective experience within and the objective world without. For him, both rocks and mice are objects that he perceives as shadows flickering on the walls of his mind. For him, anthropomorphism is inescapable. All animals, he writes, are "beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts."
The word "synthetic" in its current sense of "chemically unnatural" would not appear in print until 1874, twenty years after the publication of Walden and five years after the invention of celluloid, the first industrial synthetic. In its 137-year history, the synthetic world has itself grown into a kind of wilderness. With the exceptions of our fellow human beings and our domestic pets, the objects that make the worlds we behold today are almost entirely man-made. Consider the following: In nature, there are 142 known species of Anatidae, the family to which ducks, swans, and geese belong. Of those species only one, the white Pekin duck, a domesticated breed of mallard, produces spotless yellow ducklings. Since the invention of plastic, four known species of Anatidae have gone extinct; several others survive only in sanctuaries created to save them. Meanwhile, by the estimates of one collector, the makers of novelties and toys have concocted more than 5,000 different varieties of novelty duck, nearly all of which are yellow, and most of which are not made in fact from rubber but from plasticized polyvinyl chloride, a derivative of coal. Why has man just these species of things for his neighbors, a latter-day Thoreau might ask, as if nothing but a yellow duck could perch on the rim of a tub?
Let's draw a bath. Let's set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, misty November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duck's closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face of Wal-Mart commercials. A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a body and lips—which is what the beak of the rubber duck has become: great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips. Both the happy face and the rubber duck reduce facial expressions to a kind of pictogram. They are both emoticons. And they are, of course, the same color—the yellow of an egg yolk or the eye of a daisy, a shade darker than a yellow raincoat, a shade lighter than a taxicab.
Like the eyes of other animals (rabbits, for example, or deer) and unlike the eyes of a happy face, the rubber duck's eyes peer helplessly from the sides of its spherical head. Its movement is also expressive—joyously erratic, like that of a bouncing ball, or a dancing drunk. So long, that is, as it doesn't keel over and float around like a dead fish, as rubber ducks of recent manufacture are prone to do. It's arguable whether such tipsy ducks deserve to be called toys. They have retained the form and lost the function. Their value is wholly symbolic. They are not so much rubber ducks as plastic representations of rubber ducks. They are creatures of the lab, chimeras synthesized from whimsy and desire in the petri dish of commerce.
Apologists for plastics will on occasion blur the semantic lines between the antonyms "synthetic" and "natural." Everything is chemical, they rightly say, even water, even us, and plastic, like every living creature great and small, is carbon-based and therefore "organic." But to my mind the only meaningful difference between the synthetic and the natural is more philosophical than chemical. A loon can symbolize madness, and a waddling duck can make us laugh. But the duck and the loon exist outside of the meanings with which we burden them. A loon is not really mad. A duck is not really a clown; it waddles inelegantly because its body has evolved to swim. A rubber duck, by comparison, is not burdened with thought. It is thought, the immaterial made material, a subjective object, a fantasy in 3-D.
One night, during the thirty-third week of her pregnancy, my wife and I attended a practicum in infant CPR. With the other expectant parents, we sat around a conference table set with babies—identical, life-size, polyethylene babies, lying there on the formica like lobsters. The skin of these infantile mannequins was the color of graphite. Even their eyeballs were shiny and gray. Their mouths had been molded agape, so that they seemed to be gasping for air. To dislodge an imaginary choking hazard, you were supposed to lay the baby facedown over your left forearm and strike its back with the heel of your right hand. If you struck too hard, its hollow head would pop from its neck and go skittering across the linoleum. The morning after my visit with Ebbesmeyer, hurtling up the eastern shore of Puget Sound aboard the Amtrak Cascades bound for Bellingham, it occurs to me that "garbage patch" sounds like "cabbage patch," and for a moment I am picturing a thousand silvery, gape-mouthed heads bobbing on the open sea.
The old woman across the aisle, a retired high school chemistry teacher from Montana, tells me that she and her husband are traveling the globe. They have been to every continent but Antarctica. She teaches me how to say "I don't have any money" in Norwegian. She tells me about the mural she saw in Belfast depicting a masked man and a Kalashnikov. She tells me about her nephew, who has in fact been to Antarctica. He spent a night dangling from the ice shelf in something like a hammock. National Geographic named him one of the top mountain climbers in the world, she says. Then he died in an avalanche in Tibet. Left three little boys. She smiles as she says this. In the window behind her, the blue waters of Puget Sound flash through the green blur of trees.
The train groans into a curve. Suddenly there are green and orange and blue containers stacked atop flatbed train cars parked on a neighboring track. The polyglot names of shipping companies speed by: Evergreen, Uniglory, Maersk. Then, at a clearing in the trees, the great brontosaural works of a gantry crane loom up above a Russian freighter loaded with what looks like modular housing. port of seattle, a sign on the crane reads.
We are somewhere east of the Strait of Juan de Fuca—Juan de Fuca, whom I read about in one of my books. He was a Greek sailor in the Spanish navy whose real name was Apostolos Valerianos. He claimed to have discovered the entrance to the Northwest Passage at the 47th parallel in 1592. The transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic had taken a mere twenty days, he reported, and the northern lands between these oceans were filled with riches. Despite how familiar this tale must have sounded, for centuries people actually believed him. Although no one knows for certain whether the Greek sailor ever even visited the North Pacific, his description of the entrance to the passage, then known as the Strait of Anian, bears a superficial resemblance to the entrance of Puget Sound, and so the Strait of Juan de Fuca memorializes the pseudonymous perpetrator of a hoax.
Viewed from the patio of the Bellingham ferry terminal, the M/V Malaspina is a splendid sight, its white decks gleaming, a yellow stripe running the length of its navy-blue hull, its single smokestack painted in the motif of the Alaskan state flag—gold stars of the Big Dipper and the North Star against a navy-blue sky. All the motor vessels in the Alaska Marine Highway system are named for Alaskan glaciers, and the Malaspina is named for the largest, a 1,500-square-mile slow-moving mesa of ice, which is in turn named for an eighteenth-century Spanish navigator, Alejandro Malaspina, whose search for the Northwest Passage ended in 1791 at the 60th parallel, in an icy inlet that he christened Bahía del Desengaño, Disappointment Bay. When I wheel my suitcase down the gangway that evening, the splendor of the M/V Malaspina diminishes with every step. The ferry is, I see upon boarding it, an aging, rust-stained hulk, repainted many times. Posted in a display case of documents near the cocktail lounge one can read a disconcerting open letter in which "past and present crew members…bid farewell to this proud ship." Queen of the fleet when it was first launched in 1962, the Malaspina, the letter explains, "will cease scheduled runs of Alaska's Inside Passage on October 27, 1997." Why the old ferry is still in service eight years later the documents in the display case do not say.
The Malaspina's diesel engines rumble to life. I am going to sea! Who can resist an embarkation? The thrill of watery beginnings? Not me. The evening is cool and exhilarating, the sky clear save for a distant, flat-bottomed macaroon of a cloud. The wavelets on Bellingham Bay are as intricate as houndstooth, complicated by cross breezes and by ripples radiating from the hulls of anchored boats. The dock falls away. I stand at the taffrail and think to myself, taffrail, enjoying the union of a thing and its word. Out on the sundeck, at the mouth of the Plexiglas solarium where I will spend the next three nights sleeping for free in a plastic chaise longue, backpackers are pitching their tents, duct-taping them down so that the wind doesn't toss them overboard. Soon a rustling nylon village of colorful domes has sprung up. "Tent city," the veteran ferry-riders call it. On the forested hills of Bellingham, the houses face the harbor. How festive the ferry must look from up there! As the ship turns and slithers toward the horizon, the low sun moves across the windows of the town, igniting them one by one.
During the middle of the first night, off the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, the temperature drops, a fog shuts down, and my cell phone loses reception. So much for daily phone calls to my pregnant wife. A plastic deck chair, it turns out, makes for a miserable mattress. Cold air seeps between the slats. The government-issue cotton blanket I rented from the ship's purser for a dollar is far too thin. Some of my neighbors in the solarium move inside to sleep like refugees on the carpeted floor of the recliner lounge. I rent a second blanket for the second night, but it hardly makes a difference. Shivering in a fetal position, I think about that mountain climber dangling from the Antarctic ice shelf in a hammock and feel faintly ridiculous. After two nights in the solarium of a cruise ship—a state-operated, poor man's cruise ship, but a cruise ship nonetheless—I have already had my fill of adventuring.
What is childhood? Developmental psychologists will tell you that infancy and toddlerhood and childhood and adolescence are neurologically determined states of mind. Sociologists and historians, meanwhile, tell us that childhood is an idea, distinct from biological immaturity, the meaning of which changes over time. In his seminal, 1960 study of the subject, French historian Philippe Ariès argued that childhood as we know it is a modern invention, largely a by-product of schooling. In the Middle Ages, when almost no one went to school, children were treated like miniature adults. At work and at play, there was little age-based segregation. "Everything was permitted in their presence," according to one of Ariès's sources, even "coarse language, scabrous actions and situations; they had heard everything and seen everything." Power, not age, determined whether a person was treated like a child. Until the seventeenth century, the European idea of childhood "was bound up with the idea of dependence: the words 'sons,' 'varlets,' and 'boys' were also words in the vocabulary of feudal subordination. One could leave childhood only by leaving the state of dependence." Our notion of childhood as a sheltered period of innocence begins to emerge with the modern education system, Ariès argues. As the period of economic dependence lengthened among the educated classes, so too did childhood. These days education and the puerility it entails often last well into one's twenties, or longer.
Twenty-two years after Ariès published his book, media critic Neil Postman announced in The Disappearance of Childhood that modern childhood as Ariès described it had gone extinct, killed off by the mass media, which gave all children, educated or otherwise, premature access to the violent, sexually illicit world of adults. Children still existed, of course, but they'd become, in Postman's word, "adultified." I was ten years old when Postman published his book, and in many respects my biography aligns with his unflattering generational portrait. In Postman's opinion the rising divorce rate indicated a "precipitous falling off in the commitment of adults to the nurturing of children." My parents divorced just as the American divorce rate reached its historical peak. After my mother moved out for good, my brother and I came home from school to an empty house where we spent hours watching the sorts of television shows Postman complains about (Three's Company, The Dukes of Hazzard). Reading Postman's diagnosis, I begin to wonder if he's right. Maybe my childhood went missing.
But then I think of Joshua the Mouse. One day at the school where I teach I stopped to admire a bulletin board decorated with construction-paper mice that a class of first graders had made. Above one mouse there appeared the following caption: "My mouse's name is Joshua. He is 20 years old. He is afraid of everything." I love this caption. I love how those first two humdrum sentences do nothing to prepare us for the emotional revelation of the third. And then there's the age: twenty years old. What occult significance could that number possess for Joshua's creator? When you are six, even eight-year-olds look colossal. A twenty-year-old must be as unfathomable as a god. And contemplating poor, omniphobic, twenty-year-old Joshua, I am convinced that children may impersonate adults but they will never become them. I doubt that childhood has ever been the safe, sunlit harbor adults in moments of forgetfulness dream about. I suspect that it will always be a wilderness.
"For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land," Ishmael philosophizes midway through his whale hunt, "so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!" We canst never return, but oh, how we try, how we try.
Postman does not only argue that television produced "adultified children"; paradoxically, it also produced "childified adults." As evidence, he points to the absence on television of characters who possess an "adult's appetite for serious music" or "book-learning" or "even the faintest signs of a contemplative habit of mind." One wonders what he would have made of the popular culture of centuries past—the pornographic peep-show boxes, the slapstick vaudeville acts, the violent and salacious Punch and Judy shows, the bearbaitings and cockfights, the dime novels and penny weeklies. The great difference to me seems one not of quality but of quantity: entertainment has become so cheap and ubiquitous that it is inescapable. Even the material world has become a "Sargasso of the imagination." Life is still half known.
The Alaskan stretch of the Inside Passage snakes through the Alexander Archipelago, a chain of 1,000 or so thickly forested islands, some as small as tablecloths, some as large as Hawaii. These are, in fact, the tops of underwater mountains, part of the same snowcapped range visible on the mainland to the east. Most rise steeply from the water and soar to cloudy heights. Before going there, I expected southeast Alaska to feel like a giant outdoor theme park—Frontierland—and the shopping districts of the resort towns where the gargantuan cruise ships dock confirm my worst expectations. Cruise-ship companies now own many of the businesses in those districts and may soon be able to "imagineer" (as the folks at Disney call it) every aspect of your vacation experience. But the backwaters of the Inside Passage, too narrow and shallow for the superliners to enter, contain lost worlds.
In the narrowest of the narrows, it feels as though we are motoring down an inland river rather than along the ocean's edge—some Amazon of the north. Although this is the Pacific, the water doesn't look, smell, or sound like the sea. Neither waves nor flotsam get past the outer islands to the placid interior. In the summer, streams of glacial melt freshen the channels, and in places the minerals those streams carry turn the channels a strangely luminous shade of jade. The banks sometimes loom so close you could play Frisbee with a person standing on shore. Hours go by when we see no other ships, or any sign of civilization besides the buoys that mark the way among the shoals.
Early in the morning, fog rises here and there from the forests of hemlock, cedar, and spruce. It is as if certain stands are burning, except that the fog moves much more slowly than smoke. On the far side of one mountain, a dense white column billows forth like a slow-motion geyser that levels off into an airborne river flowing into a sea of clouds. I've begun to notice currents everywhere, a universe of eddies and gyres. Phytoplankton ride the same ocean currents that carried the Float ees to Sitka. Zooplankton follow the phytoplankton. Fish follow the zooplankton. Sea lions, whales, and people follow the fish. When, at the end of their upriver journey, salmon spawn and die en masse, their carcasses—distributed by bears, eagles, and other scavengersthe forests that make the fog, which falls as rain, which changes the ocean's salinity. All deep water travels along what oceanographers call the "conveyor belt," which begins with warm water from the Gulf Stream draining into the North Atlantic, where evaporation increases the salinity and makes it sink to the ocean floor, where it creeps south into the Antarctic circumpolar stream. After a thousand years—a millennium!—the conveyor belt ends here, in the North Pacific, where the ancient water wells up, carrying nutrients with it. Oceanographers learned much of this from studying radioactive isotopes released into the sea as fallout from nuclear tests. I'm becoming a devout driftologist. The only essential difference between rock, water, air, life, galaxies, economies, civilizations, plastics—I decide, standing on the Malaspina's deck, totally sober, watching the fog make pretty shapes above the trees—is the rate of flow.
Everywhere they look, archaeologists find them—buffalo sprayed with pigments onto the walls of caves, killer whales cut from cedar or stone, horses molded from terra-cotta or plaited out of straw. Our primal fear of predators and our hunger for prey cannot alone account for this menagerie. Three thousand years ago in Persia, someone carved a porcupine out of limestone and attached it to a little chassis on wheels. Four thousand years ago in Egypt, someone sculpted a mouse and glazed it blue. Why blue? Whoever heard of a blue mouse? Is this the forebear of the red beaver and the yellow duck? In fact, many of the figurines that look to us like toys turn out to have been totemic gods or demigods, used in religious ceremonies or funerary rites. To make the archaeological record all the blurrier, some totems in some cultures were given to children as playthings once the festivities had ended. One thing is clear: animals held an exalted position in the lives of both children and adults. Even after the missionaries came and cleansed them from the temples, the animistic gods survived, adapting to the altered cultural landscape. In Europe of the Middle Ages, one of the most popular books after the Bible was the Bestiary, a kind of illustrated field guide to the medieval imagination, wherein the animals of fable and myth were reborn as vehicles of Christian allegory. From the Bestiary came the idea that after three days a pelican could resurrect a dead hatchling with her blood, and from the Bestiary we learned that only a virgin girl can tame a unicorn. Even Aesop, that pagan, remained a favorite with old and young alike well into the seventeenth century.
Gradually, as allegory gave way to zoology and farming to industry, we decided that animals were for kids. "Children in the industrialised world are surrounded by animal imagery," notes John Berger in "Why Look at Animals?" Despite the antiquity of zoomorphic toys and the "apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals," it was not until the nineteenth century that "reproductions of animals became a regular part of the decor of middle class childhoods—and then, in [the twentieth] century, with the advent of vast display and selling systems like Disney's—of all childhoods." Berger traces this phenomenon to the marginalization of animals, which the age of industrialism either incarcerated as living spectacles at the public zoo, treated as raw material to be exploited, processed as commodities on factory farms, or domesticated as family pets. Meanwhile, "animals of the mind"—which since the dawn of human consciousness had been central to our cosmologies—were sent without supper to the nursery. Animals both living and imaginary no longer seemed like mysterious gods. They seemed, increasingly, like toys.
Go bird-watching in the pre-industrial libraries of literature and myth, and you will find few ducks, which is puzzling, considering how popular with the authors of children's books ducks have since become. Search, for instance, the fields and forests of Aesop, whose talking beasts are the ancestors of both Chanticleer the Rooster and Walter the Farting Dog, and you will meet ten cocks, a cote of doves, several partridges, a caged songbird, six crows, three ravens (one portentous, another self-loathing), a dozen or so eagles, five jackdaws (one of whom wishes he were an eagle), many kites, flocks of cranes, two storks, three hawks, a cote of pigeons, three hens, a sparrow with a bad case of schadenfreude, five swallows, many peacocks, a jay who wishes he were a peacock, many swans, two nightingales, two larks, two owls, a gluttonous seagull, a thrush en snared in birdlime, and nary a single duck.
Aesop's fables exhibit considerable ornithological knowledge, but their primary aim is to transmute animal behavior into human meaning—to burden them, as Thoreau would say, with some portion of our thought. "The lot of each has been assigned by the will of the Fates," the god Juno explains to an insecure peacock in one fable, "—to thee, beauty; to the eagle, strength; to the nightingale, song; to the raven, favorable, and to the crow, unfavorable auguries." The closest to ducks that Aesop gets is geese, which invariably end up on dinner plates.
Even Aesop's most famous goose, the one who lays the golden egg, succumbs to the carving knife. In a Kashmiri version of the same tale, Aesop's barnyard variety Anatidae becomes the Lucky-Bird Humá, a visitor from the magical avian kingdom of Koh-i-Qáf. A Buddhist version of the tale replaces the egg-laying goose with one of the only mythical ducks I have found, a mallard plumed in gold, which turns out to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva.
In all three versions of the fable, the human beneficiaries sacrifice their magically profitable waterfowl on the altar of their greed. The farmer kills the goose, cuts it open, and finds no eggs. Dreaming of rupees, a Kashmiri woodcutter accidentally asphyxiates the Lucky-Bird Humá while carrying him to market in a sack. A family of Brahmin women decide to pluck out all of the Bodhisattva's golden feathers at once; they turn into the feathers of a crane. Unlike the others, the Buddhist version tells the fable from the bird's point of view, and for that reason it is peculiarly affecting. Both Aesop's fable and the Kashmiri one show us the folly of human desire, and it is satisfying, reading them, to watch our wicked, bumbling protagonists endure dramatically ironic reversals of fortune. The Buddhist fable shows us the folly of human desire, but it also makes us experience that folly's cost, the debt of suffering our appetites can incur. The tone of the final sentences is more sorrowful than ironic. Trying to escape, the once golden mallard stretches his plucked wings but, featherless, finds he cannot fly. His captors throw him into a barrel. With time, his feathers grow back, but they are plain white ones now. He flies home, never to return.
On the morning that I disembark from the Malaspina at Sitka, Tyler and Dean Orbison are just returning from a two-week, 300-mile beachcombing expedition to Latuya Bay and back. They go on such expeditions every summer, traveling farther and farther afield every year, poking around in bunkers abandoned at the end of World War II, walking beaches where the only footprints in the sand are animal tracks. They have a cabin cruiser big enough to sleep in and a skiff for going ashore. From the cruiser, they look for V-shaped coastlines that funnel the tides, and they look for "jackstraw"—driftwood logs jumbled like a pile of pick-up-sticks—and, most important of all, like prospectors panning in the tailings, they look for "good color," their term for plastic debris visible from afar. Where there's some color, there's sure to be more. Their style of beachcombing is by necessity a two-man job. One person has to stay in the skiff to keep it from foundering on the rocks while the other person wades in and combs. They take turns. Dean prefers to hunt high up, in the purple fireweed, where storms will throw objects out of the reach of tides. Tyler, Dean's son, is "a digger." Like a human metal detector, he's learned to divine the location of buried objects by reading the terrain. This year, for the first time, Tyler and Dean started combing in seaside caves where tangled driftwood will form a kind of flotsam trap. It's dark in the caves. You have to beachcomb with a flashlight. It's also cold, but the labor of log-lifting keeps you warm. The effort's worth it. Every cave the Orbisons searched contained a farrago of wrack—a Dawn dish detergent bottle, glass fishing floats, Floatees. Half a water pistol turned up in one cave, the other half in another. By far the most common objects the Orbisons find are polyethylene water bottles. They have begun keeping the screw-tops, cataloguing the varieties. On this last trip they identified seventy-five different brands, many of them foreign in origin. Up in Latuya Bay they saw a black wolf and the bones of a whale, and they picked wild strawberries, and when their cooler ran out of ice they floated alongside a glacier and broke off a chunk.
Now, at the end of my first day ashore, they've fetched me from my hotel. "Growing up here, I mean, there's nothing," Tyler tells me from the back seat of his father's truck while we're waiting for his parents to emerge from Sitka's only supermarket. "I mean we don't even have a mall. So I took to the outdoors pretty hard." It is clear that Tyler has never given much thought to the marginalization of animals. You wouldn't either if you'd grown up in southeast Alaska, where bears make off with household pets, and ravens alighting on transformers cause power outages, and bald eagles sometimes come crashing through dining room windows. If anything, it's the people who occupy the margins here. Just look at a map: Sitka perches on the coastal brink of Baranof Island, wedged between mountainous wilderness to the east and watery wilderness to the west. Sitkans share their island with an estimated 1,200 grizzly bears—more than are found in all of the lower forty-eight states combined. In May and June, eagles and ravens—the supreme deities in the pantheon of the native Tlingit—wheel overhead. In July and August, the creeks grow dark with spawning sockeye and chum. In November, the whales and the whale watchers arrive. People like me may feel sorry for the 1.2 million sea otters that the Russian American Company parted from their pelts in the early 1800s, but Sitka's otters have replenished themselves with such procreative gusto that local fishermen now regard them as pests—crop-thieving, net-wrecking vermin of the sea.
Like most beachcombers of the Pacific rim, the Orbisons started out collecting Japanese fishing floats, the glass balls that you sometimes see hanging in nets from the ceilings of seafood restaurants, or decorating the window displays of maritime boutiques. The popularity of glass floats owes partly to their delicate, soap-bubble beauty, partly to the Kuroshio Current that sweeps them across the Pacific and bowls them up the beaches of the American West Coast, and partly to Amos L. Wood, an aeronautics engineer and beachcombing enthusiast whose books Beachcombing for Japanese Floats and Beachcombing the Pacific have become to beachcombers what Audubon guides are to bird-watchers.
A century and a half ago, beachcombers tended to be transcendental weirdos like Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau. Back then, much of New England's shoreline was as wild as Alaska's is today and more treacherous to passing ships. Just before Thoreau arrived at Provincetown in 1849, a ship carrying Irish immigrants sank off Cohasset. The bodies of the drowned lay strewn along the beach, torn asunder by the surf and fish. "There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice," Thoreau observed. "The Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where time and the elements will write new riddles with their bones." Even where no shipwrecks had occurred, a Cape Cod beach in 1849 was "a wild rank place" littered "with crabs, horse-shoes and razor clams, and whatever the sea casts up—a vast morgue, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them."
Still a recent coinage, the word "beachcomber" in 1849 meant approximately what we mean by "beach bum": it evoked a character like the narrator of Melville's Omoo, a transient ne'er-do-well who'd fled from civilization hoping to sample tropical women and tropical fruits and loaf around beneath the blowsy palms. "Idle, drunken, vagabond," Edward J. Wakefield wrote in 1845, "he wanders about without any fixed object, cannot get employed by the whaler or any one else, as it is out of his power to do a day's work; and he is universally known as 'the beach-comber.'" The local Cape Codders whom Thoreau met on his seaside rambles usually took him for a traveling salesman. What other explanation could there be for a vagabond with a walking stick and a knapsack full of books?
The Orbisons gave up collecting for driftology in the summer of 1993, when they began discovering bath toys. Tyler was just twelve at the time, but he was the one to find their first toy, a beaver, and he remembers the moment vividly. "We were on Kruzof Island, looking for glass balls," he says. "We didn't really know what else to look for. It was beautiful weather; the reason we went to Kruzof is because it's really hard to get ashore, and that's where we go when the weather's good. We were up beyond the high-tide line. It was in the drift a ways. It had been there for a little bit. And I thought, This is cool. It was bleached out, exactly like the beavers we find now. I would say it had been there since the winter storms."
They assumed that their beaver was a solitary castaway, but when they arrived back in town, talk of the mysterious invasion was in the air. Dean and Tyler went looking for more plastic animals, and found them. They started keeping meticulous records, treating the Floatees as data, which they eventually reported to Ebbesmeyer. About three years later, the oceanographer began publishing Beachcomber's Alert!, and the Orbisons were among his first subscribers. They own every issue. "Curt tells us what to look for, and we go out there and find it," Dean explains. This year, at Ebbesmeyer's bidding, they searched for and found a computer monitor, Japanese surveying stakes, hockey gloves, "antisandals" (a sheet of rubber from which flip-flop–shaped blanks have been stamped), part of a naval sonar buoy, and six new Floatees, including a turtle they'd chiseled from the ice. After cataloguing the junk on their and showing it to Ebbesmeyer, they'll take most of it to the dump.
Back in the 1970s, when I was a child, rubber ducks were wilder than they are now. There was nothing iconic or nostalgic about them. Some rubber ducks of the Nixon era were white, some were calico. Some had swan-like necks and rosy circles on their cheeks. Some came with rococo feathers molded into their wings and tails. No one used them to sell baby clothes or soap. Normal adults did not give them to one another, or decorate their desks with them. As far as I can remember, no one I knew even owned a rubber duck. I did own one, however, on account of the pet name my mother had given me: Donovan Duck. My duck was a somewhat hideous specimen, with white plumage, a green topcoat, a big head, and the posture of a penguin. It resembled a Hummel figurine that had sprouted a beak.
Not long ago, my mother sent me a photograph in which, naked, eight months old, sitting in the bath across from my brother, I appear to be attempting to gnaw through my rubber duck's skull. The picture is dated January 1973. Most exotic varieties of rubber duck have since gone extinct—they are the dodos and carrier pigeons of the nursery—and what new ones have evolved share a single, yellow ancestor whose pop-cultural apotheosis was by January 1973 already under way. It had begun three years earlier, in 1970, when an orange puppet named Ernie appeared on PBS and said, "Here I am in my tubby again. And my tubby's all filled with water and nice, fluffy suds. And I've got my soap and washcloth to wash myself. And I've got my nifty scrub brush to help me scrub my back. And I've got a big fluffy towel to dry myself when I'm done. But there's one other thing that makes tubby time the very best time of the whole day. And do you know what that is? It's a very special friend of mine. My very favorite little pal"—at which point Ernie reaches into the suds and, brandishing his yellow duck, bursts into song.
You can watch a video clip of the number online. A pink towel hangs from a wooden post at the left edge of the frame. The post looks like something out of an old Western. There is no other scenery to speak of. Behind the bathtub—which is huge, presumably claw-footed, and decorated with three pink daisies—hangs a sky-blue backdrop. Bubbles of the sort you blow with a wand come floating up from the bottom of the screen, and the gurgle of water accompanies the music. Although I watched my share of Sesame Street as a child, I far preferred Super Grover's mock-heroic pratfalls to Ernie's snickering bonhomie, and I have no memory of the rubber duckie number. My wife, on the other hand, still knows the song by heart.
"Rubber Duckie, joy of joys," Ernie sings. "When I squeeze you, you make noise,/Rubber Duckie, you're my very best friend, it's true." It's all so synthetic, so lonely, so imaginary, so clean. And apparently children loved it. In the 1969 pilot episode of Sesame Street, in which a version of the rubber duckie song appeared, children in the test audience responded so enthusiastically to Ernie and Bert and so tepidly to segments featuring the live actors that the show's creators redesigned it, giving the puppets a starring role.
However novel the medium, however inventive Jim Henson's puppetry, Ernie's bathtub serenade draws upon a history of representation that can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when British portraitists stopped painting children as diminutive adults and turned them into puppy-eyed personifications of Innocence. In the Romantic era, no longer was innocence merely the antithesis of guilt; it was also the antithesis of adulthood and modernity. Children became little noble savages and childhood became a place as well as an age—a lost, imaginary, pastoral realm.
It is striking how much the modern history of childhood resembles that of animals. "In the first stages of the industrial revolution," John Berger writes, "animals were used as machines. As also were children." In the latter stages of industrialism, poor children who escaped the factory often took to the street, where they formed what social historians call "child societies," gangs of urchins who—like feral cats—invented a social order all their own. Partly in fear of child societies, middle-class parents of the Gilded Era began treating their children increasingly like pets. Nurseries and playrooms became more common, and toy chests began to overflow. 11. Teddy bears and other stuffed animals, Peter Stearns explains in Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, "were widely appealing at a time when parents were trying to facilitate new sleeping arrangements for babies and also to guard against unduly fervent emotional attachments to mothers. The decline in paid help for young children also opened the door to the use of toys as surrogate entertainment." One commentator at the time speculated that toy animals helped children overcome primal fears of scary predators, turning lions and tigers and bears into snuggly sidekicks. Perhaps the most astute psychological profile of the child consumer appeared in Playthings, the trade journal of the American toy industry, which in 1913 was predicting that "the nervous temperament of the average American child and the rapidity with which it tires of things" would guarantee a never-ending bull market in toys.
In 1869, a printer from Albany, New York, named John Wesley Hyatt mixed ground camphor with nitrocellulose, thereby inventing celluloid. In 1873, the first Pekin ducks were imported to the United States from China. And in the 1880s, bathtubs began appearing in middle-class homes along with indoor plumbing. Celluloid eventually evolved into the plastics industry. The Pekin duck eventually became the preferred species of American duck breeders, making yellow ducklings a familiar symbol of birth and spring. And the average American bathroom, which had once consisted of a washtub and an outhouse, was consecrated as a temple of cleanliness. Much as the modern nursery sheltered children from the social contamination of the street, so the modern bathroom protected their naked, slippery bodies from germs. In the first decades of the twentieth century, public-health campaigns and soap advertisements—usually illustrated with pudgy little tots—exhorted parents to bathe their children often. Little boys, the thinking went, were naturally indisposed to bathing. Bath toys not only made hygiene boyishly fun; they helped overcome the naughty urges that bathing tended to arouse: "The baby will not spend much time handling his genitals if he has other interesting things to do," one government-issue child-care manual advised in 1942. "See that he has a toy to play with and he will not need to use his body as a plaything." Enter the rubber duck.
Ducklings are the aquatic equivalent of kittens and bunnies. In fact, it's hard to think of a smaller, cuddlier animal that can swim. Most of the frogs and turtles of children's literature are middle-aged men, whereas even in nature ducklings are model offspring: obedient, dependent, vulnerable to predation, clumsy, soft, a little dumb. Just think of them waddling in a train behind a mother duck, a familiar image memorialized by Robert McCloskey's best-selling children's book Make Way for Ducklings. McCloskey's baby mallards, penciled in black and white, look like real baby mallards—a little stylized, but real. Like the ducks depicted in other venerable children's books, they bear little resemblance to Ernie's Day-Glo squeak toy. Beatrix Potter's Jemimah is a white Pekin duck in a bonnet and shawl. Donald Duck, the most famous water fowl at mid-century, was also a white Pekin, and the most common toy duck was still the ancient bird-on-a-leash, a wooden pull-toy with wheels instead of feet. Before the rubber duck could eclipse it, plastic had to replace wood as the preferred material for toys, which, following the technical innovations spurred by World War II, it did.
McCloskey published his book in 1941. That same year, at the beginning of the war, two British chemists, V. E. Yarsley and E. G. Couzens, prophesied with surprising accuracy and quaintly utopian innocence what middle-class childhood in the 1970s would be like. "Let us try to imagine a dweller in the 'Plastic Age,'" they wrote in the British magazine Science Digest.
This creature of our imagination, this 'Plastic Man,' will come into a world of colour and bright shining surfaces, where childish hands find nothing to break, no sharp edges or corners to cut or graze, no crevices to harbour dirt or germs, because, being a child his parents will see to it that he is surrounded on every side by this tough, safe, clean material which human thought has created. The walls of his nursery, all the articles of his bath and certain other necessities of his small life, all his toys, his cot, the moulded perambulator in which he takes the air, the teething ring he bites, the unbreakable bottle he feeds from…all will be plastic, brightly self-coloured and patterned with every design likely to please his childish mind.
Here, then, is one of the meanings of the duck. It represents this vision of childhood—the hygienic childhood, the safe childhood, the brightly colored childhood, in which everything, even bathtub articles, have been designed to please the childish mind, much as the golden fruit in that most famous origin myth of paradise "was pleasant to the eyes" of childish Eve. Yarsley and Couzens go on to imagine the rest of Plastic Man's life, and it is remarkable how little his adulthood differs from his childhood. When he grows up, Plastic Man will live in a house furnished with "beautiful, transparent, glass-like materials in every imaginable form," he will play with plastic toys (tennis rackets and fishing tackle), he will, "like a magician," be able to make "what he wants." And yet there is one imperfection, one run in this nylon dream. Plastic might make the pleasures of childhood last forever, but it could not make Plastic Man immortal. When he dies, he will sink "into his grave hygienically enclosed in a plastic coffin." The image must have been unsettling, even in 1941; that hygienically enclosed death too reminiscent of the hygienically enclosed life that preceded it. To banish the image of that plastic coffin from their readers' thoughts, the utopian chemists inject a little more technicolor resin into their closing sentences. When "the dust and smoke" of war had cleared, plastic would deliver us "from moth and rust" into a world "full of colour…a new, brighter, cleaner, more beautiful world."
For new parents who had themselves grown up during the Depression and the war, the fantasy of childhood as consumer paradise exerted a powerful appeal. Browsing through issues of Parents Magazine from 1950, I came upon an ad campaign for Heinz baby food ("Scientific Cooking Gives Finer Flavor, Color and Texture to Heinz Strained Carrots"). In one Heinz ad, targeted at new mothers, cartoon butterflies, fairies, and dolls encircle the photograph of a baby girl. "Wee elfin creatures go riding on butterfly wings," the copy reads, "dolls speak in a language all their own and something altogether new and wonderful happens everywhere a baby looks…your child lives in a magic world where everything's enchanted." Then came television, enchantment in a box. Annual toy sales in America shot from $84 million in 1940 to $1.25 billion in 1960. Peg-and-socket pop beads sold to girls as costume jewelry consumed 40,000 pounds of polyethylene resin per month in 1956. In 1958, "twirling hoops" consumed 15 million pounds of the stuff. Polystyrene replaced balsa wood as the material of choice for model cars and planes. Plasticized polyvinyl chloride, the material from which the brand-new Barbie doll was made, provided a cheaper, more durable alternative to latex rubber, rendering traditional molded rubber animals and dolls obsolete except in name.
Not long after PBS first broadcast it, Ernie's rubber duckie song went to number 16 on the Billboard charts. Radio stations were playing it, adults were buying it. And, unlike the other Sesame Street characters, Ernie's rubber duck could not be licensed. Producers had picked up the prop at a local dimestore, which meant that even as it became a recurring character and a pop music phenomenon, it remained in the public domain, free for the taking, no fees required. Does that mean that if Ernie had gone bathing with a white duck or a green one, our iconic ducks would be white or green? I'm not sure. The threads of chance and meaning are hard to disentangle. On the album cover of the single of the song, Ernie, for some reason, is holding a different duck, a white one with burnt-orange spots. Perhaps there is more to the message in this particular bottle than the medium. Perhaps Ernie alone does not explain the yellowness of the duck.
"Ideals of innocent beauty and the adorable have changed little in a hundred years or more," the historian Gary Cross writes. "Many today share with the Victorian middle class an attraction to the blond, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, and well-fed child and are appalled by, uninterested in, and even hostile to the dark, dirty, and emaciated child. Even when humanitarian groups try to shame us into giving money to support poor peoples far away, they usually show us an image of a smiling olive-skinned (not black) girl, a close copy of our ideal of innocence." So maybe it's just as Curtis Ebbesmeyer suspected. Maybe there is a racial bias at play. Is it too much of a stretch to see in the yellowness of the rubber duck a visual reminder of that well-fed, blue-eyed, clear-skinned, yellow-haired Victorian ideal? After all, real ducklings have black, beady eyes, not blue ones like the ducks in Eric Carle's book. The lyrics to Ernie's serenade show just how childlike his rubber duckie is. "Every day when I,/Make my way to the tubby," the song's chorus goes, "I find a little fellow who's/Cute and yellow and chubby!" Chubby vs. well-fed, blond vs. yellow, what's the difference?
Tuesdays during the seventh month of her pregnancy, my wife and I attended a prepared childbirth class on the maternity ward of our hospital. On one wall of the classroom hung a poster of an egg, mid-hatch. Contemplating it during the long, tedious hours of instruction, I began to wonder why this particular poster had been hung before our eyes. Was it meant to comfort us? Did we prefer the clean, white orb of an egg to the bloody, mammalian mess of one body gushing forth from the wounded nethers of another? On the opposite wall of the classroom hung an enlarged, sepia photograph of naked, racially diverse babies; aligned firing-squad style along a fence over which they appeared to be attempting an escape, they displayed their wrinkly bums for our delight. Children are fundamentally the same, such images suggest, as indistinguishable as ducklings despite the color of their skin. They inhabit a world before sex, before race, before history, before self, before humanity. Children, then, are beasts of burden, too—ducklings and bunnies of burden—asked to carry the needful daydreams of adults. The apotheosis of the rubber duck wouldn't be truly complete until the children who had watched that 1970 episode of Sesame Street grew old enough to look back forgetfully with longing and loss.
We are going beachcombing. We are going beachcombing on Kruzof Island, along a pumice beach at the mouth of Fred's Creek, which originates high on the perennially snow-capped slopes of Mt. Edgecumbe and empties into Sitka Sound. Curtis Ebbesmeyer is here, aboard the Morning Mist, wearing his sea-bean necklace and a baseball cap decorated with stickers from Seattle coffee houses. Dean Orbison is here, in his customary plaid woodsman's shirt and a pair of Sitka sneakers—the local name for knee-high rubber boots. Tyler Orbison is not here; sadly, he had to work. Piloting the Morning Mist—a white, twin-engine troller with outrigging as tall as flagpoles and orange floats the size of beach balls dangling like ornaments from its rails—is Larry Calvin, a spry, white-haired fisherman in suspenders.
A self-employed, left-wing entrepreneur who subsidizes his fishing with profits earned in the building-supply business, Calvin embodies an old brand of American individualism that seems to flourish in the strange demographic conundrum that is maritime Alaska, a place both rural and coastal, both red and blue, Western and Tlingit, industrial and aquacultural and wild. On Calvin's black ball cap a fish leaps above the words absolute fresh.
With us aboard the Morning Mist are a dozen or so scholars—oceanographers, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, historians—who have come to Sitka for the annual Paths Across the Pacific Conference, an academic symposium scheduled to coincide with the Beachcombers' Fair. The organizing theory of the conference is this: People started crossing the Pacific Ocean by boat tens of thousands of years ago, far earlier than was previously thought. Some Asian immigrants sailed to America by mistake when blown astray. Some came on purpose, paddling along the coast of the Beringian ice shelf, traveling a little farther east with every generation. Comparatively little is known about these ancient migrations, and on the way to Kruzof Island, an oceanographer named Thomas Royer tells me one reason why. Sea levels have risen so much since the last ice age that the earliest settlements in Alaska are now 100 meters underwater.
Another passenger, an archaeologist, interrupts to contest Royer's figures. Sedimentation adds about a centimeter a year to the ocean floor, this archaeologist says, which means you'd have to dig deeper than 100 meters. You'd have to dig about 400 meters to find any artifacts.
Most of the chitchat aboard the Morning Mist is similarly quibbling, interdisciplinary, and esoteric. When did people first begin using boats—40,000 years ago? 50,000 years ago? What does it take to start a migration—a critical mass, or a few individuals with the itch to explore? Why did people migrate in the first place—the profit motive? hunger? exile? Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham's computer simulations may help these marine archaeologists reconstruct the routes of those transoceanic migrations, the history of which is inseparable from the history of global climate change. In other words, it is humanity's own past and future that the oceanographers are scrying in the tangled drift routes of the toys.
Looking out from the cabin of the Morning Mist, Royer teaches me how to read the surface of the sea. "You see that smooth area there?" he asks. "Either temperature or the salinity will change the surface tension of the water, so the same wind will ruffle the water in one spot but not in another." All variations in the surface are the effects of hidden causes. What to me looks simply like an expanse of water is in fact a kind of shifting, aquatic topography, like an enormous lava lamp, only far more complex and subtle. Instead of one liquid suspended in another, there are slopes of dense, salty water and rivers of light, brackish water, and all of it, over the course of centuries, will eventually intermingle. As in all complex systems, minute changes to the ocean—in salinity, in temperature, in air pressure—can entail grand and unpredictable climate events. Because of melting glaciers, for instance, the salinity in the 18-mile-wide coastal current that flows north along the Alaskan seaboard is presently decreasing, making the water fresher and lighter. Counterintuitively, however, sea levels in Alaska are falling—or so it seems—because the land, relieved of the weight of ice, is lifting, the way an air mattress resumes its shape after you stand up.
In the half hour or so it takes us to get to Kruzof, centuries seem to recede. Sitka disappears into a blur of blue horizon. The world out here would not have looked much different a millennium ago, I think to myself. It resembles the opening verses of Genesis. There is only the land, the water, the trees. And then, at the edge of my peripheral vision, an orange figure swoops and dives. It's a kite. A kite shaped like a bird, and there on the beach below it are three figures, a father and his children, dressed in colorful swimsuits. They have rented one of the four rustic cabins that the National Forest Service maintains on Kruzof Island. The cabin itself becomes visible now, tucked back into the trees. Here, in the forest primeval at the foot of a dormant volcano, is a scene from the New Jersey Shore. Larry Calvin anchors the Morning Mist well away from the rocky shallows and ferries us in several at a time aboard his aluminum skiff. The father flying the kite hollers hello, the children eye us warily. Ebbesmeyer hands out white plastic garbage bags in which to collect our discoveries. Dean Orbison will lead one beachcombing party to the south. I join Ebbesmeyer's party, headed north.
I try to remember what the Orbisons and Amos Wood have taught me. Up ahead, where the beach curves and tapers into a sickle, there's lots of jackstraw and even a little color—a fleck of blue, a daub of red. To get there we have to cross Fred's Creek, which spills down through the trees over terraces of rocks before carving a delta of rivulets and bluffs through the sand. The delta is perhaps a dozen yards wide, and those of us without Sitka sneakers have trouble getting across. I manage to leap from rock to rock. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who ambles along somewhat effortfully, is in no state to go rock jumping. He hikes up into the trees and crosses where the creek narrows. Reuniting on the far shore, we make our way down the beach in a line, scanning the sand. Ebbesmeyer launches into one of his litanies of facts. Bowling balls float, he informs us, or rather the nine-, ten-, and eleven-pounders do. Heavier ones sink. And did you know that the valves of clams are not symmetrical? A colleague of his once surveyed the clamshells along a mile of beach. "At one end of the beach, it's mostly rights, and at the other end it's mostly lefts." The currents can tell the difference.
In Beachcombing the Pacific, Amos Wood tells us "to keep looking out at the horizon and not continuously at the sand, for, after a few hours this can be tiring on the neck"—advice that I am all too happy to follow. For the first time since I entered Alaska aboard the Malaspina a week ago, the rain clouds have cleared. A strong breeze is blowing inland across the sparkling waves. To our right, there is the sound of the surf; to our left, the soughing of the trees. Peering into them, I see only shadowy depths of green. The beach here is more gravelly than sandy. It's like walking over peppercorns. Our boot soles crunch, and I fall into a kind of trance. No matter how crappy a pittance the tide leaves, no matter how darkly ominous the riddles in the sand, beachcombing has its delights. There is pleasure in setting your senses loose. At the sight of something half-buried, the eye startles and the imagination leaps. At the edge of the waves flickers a silver flame. A hundred yards off, from beneath a pile of driftwood, glows a small, fallen sun. Then, at the moment of recognition, there is a kind of satisfying latch. The silver flame? An empty bag of Doritos, torn open. The small sun? A red, dog-chewn Frisbee. The strange becomes suddenly familiar once again, though never quite as familiar as before. Occasionally the object you've inspected is unrecognizable or exotic or mysteriously incongruous. Occasionally that surf-tossed bottle turns out not to have been left by a camper but tossed from a Malaysian shrimp boat crossing the Andaman Sea.
It occurs to me that this is what I have been pursuing these past months, this is what I found so spellbindingly enigmatic about the image of those plastic ducks at sea—incongruity. We have built for ourselves out of this New World a giant diorama, a synthetic habitat, but travel beyond the edges or look with the eyes of a serious beachcomber, and the illusion begins to crumble.
According to Ebbesmeyer, the beachcombing this year has not been good. It all depends on the winter storms. But to me the junk seems abundant. I clamber over the jackstraw, finding there a predictable assortment of water bottles, but also a polystyrene ice cream tub, a plastic length of hose, nylon nets, huge cakes of Styrofoam, all of which I dump into Ebbesmeyer's bag.
"Aw, man," Ebbesmeyer says of the Styrofoam. "That'll break up into a billion pieces. That's the worst stuff. In Seattle you can't recycle Styrofoam. Pisses me off. So what do you do with it? See all those little cells? The irony is, it's made of polystyrene, which sinks, and they foam it to make it into something that floats. That's what I think of when I see that stuff, all the windrows of Styrofoam, coffee cups with barnacles growing on them. You say you'd love to get it off the beach, but there's no way." He tells me about a container that spilled a shipment of filtered cigarettes. "There are about 10,000 polymer fibers per butt—that's, what? Ten to the order…about ten billion fibers for just one container." His eyebrows spring up above his glasses.
This, then, is the destiny of those toy animals that beachcombers fail to recover: baked brittle by the sun, they will eventually disintegrate into shards. Those shards will disintegrate into splinters, the splinters into particles, the particles into dust, and the dust into molecules, which will circulate through the environment for centuries. The very features that make plastic a perfect material for bathtub toys—so buoyant! so pliant! so smooth! so colorful! so hygienic!—also make it a superlative pollutant of the seas. No one knows exactly how long a synthetic polymer will persist at sea. Five hundred years is a reasonable guess. Globally, we are presently producing 200 million tons of plastic every year, and no known organism can digest a single molecule of the stuff, though plenty of organisms try, including many of the friendly organisms depicted in Eric Carle's 10 Little Rubber Ducks.
Luckily for them, none of Carle's ducks runs into a Laysan albatross. The encounter would not be pretty. The Laysan albatross is probably the most suicidally voracious plastivore on the planet. Although the bird prefers squid, it will scarf up almost anything colorful that it sees on the ocean's surface. Albatross nesting grounds in the North Pacific are littered with the plastic debris that the birds have crapped out intact. Three to four million cigarette lighters have been collected from seabird rookeries on Midway. Albatross chicks have been known to starve to death on the plastic their parents regurgitate into their mouths, and the intestines of the adult birds can handle only so much before a fatal case of indigestion sets in. Naturalists recently found 700 different plastic items inside the feathery carcass of an albatross found in the Pacific. After cataloging this scrap, they assembled it into a mosaic, a great technicolor mandala of detritus, that is a marvel to behold. The other day, during a lecture he gave at a Rotary Club luncheon in Sitka, Ebbesmeyer showed a slide of the thing. Backlit against a white screen, it at first calls to mind stained glass. Then, as you look closer, you start spotting familiar objects strewn amid the shrapnel. Two cigarette lighters and a dozen-odd bottlecaps appear to be as good as new. Somewhere among those 700 items may be the remains of a Floatee.
Where does all that plastic come from? Container spills, fishing boats, and recreational beaches, but also sewers and drainage systems that empty into the sea. Bottlecaps are especially abundant in the North Pacific because they are small enough to slip through grates. The lost Super Balls of my childhood may now be abob in the garbage patch. The California Coastal Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial state agency, estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of visible plastic floating in every square mile of the ocean, never mind the invisible pieces Charlie Moore has gone trawling for. Based on the samples he collected, Moore calculates that in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre there are now six pounds of plastic for every one pound of zooplankton. Zooplankton such as salps, a kind of chordate jellyfish that feed by pumping seawater through their gelatinous bodies and straining out the nutrients, ingest bits of plastic far too small to catch an albatross's eye. But the journey of the toys won't end there, in the watery belly of a salp. Long after my own organic chemistry has fertilized leaves of grass, the pulverized, photo-degraded remains of that hollow duck of mine will, chemically speaking, live on, traveling through the food chain, scattering toxins in their wake.
We find the remains of a derelict motorboat, a bayliner. The boat was here last year, Ebbesmeyer says, marooned but intact on the beach to the south. A year's worth of wave and wind action has torn its fiberglass hull asunder. It looks as though someone blew it up. We find one big blue shard of fiberglass and then, fifty feet farther, another piece. I would like to place a time-lapse camera on a beach like this and watch what happens over the course of a year, watch the giant logs jump around and the flotsam explode. Not far from the bayliner's gas tank, we find a child's baseball mitt that looks as good as new, and then, not far from the glove, in the damp sand at the edge of the ebbing surf, we come upon the fresh footprints of a bear. The beach ends, the shoreline giving way to a labyrinth of wave-washed boulders into which the footprints continue. "Stonehenge for bears," says Michael Wilson, a Canadian geoarchaeologist who later this week will deliver a lecture titled "Natural Disasters and Prehistoric Human Dispersal: The Rising Wave of Inquiry."
Wilson leads us into the boulders, talking loudly. The wind is behind us, and we assume that the bear will keep its distance, but you can tell that Ebbesmeyer is feeling nervous. I am, too. We both start glancing into the trees. Wilson's spotted something, something big and blue, and runs ahead to see what it is. It turns out to be an empty plastic barrel with the word "toxic" printed on the lid. It appears to be watertight. Wilson thumps it like a drum, then hoists it up above his head and roars like one of the apes in 2001. We'd like to take it back with us rather than leave it here to decompose, but the damn thing is just too big, and we end up abandoning it there, among the rocks. As we turn to retrace our steps, I think of Wallace Stevens's anecdotal jar: The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild.
Another incongruity: in 1878, nine years after the invention of celluloid, a sales brochure promoted it as the salvation of the world. "As petroleum came to the relief of the whale," the copy ran, so "has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts; and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer." A hundred years later, in the public mind, plastic had gone from miracle substance to toxic blight. In 1968, at the dawn of the modern environmental movement, the editor of Modern Plastics argued that his industry had been unfairly vilified. Plastic was not the primary cause of environmental destruction, he wrote, only its most visible symptom. The real problem was "our civilization, our exploding population, our life-style, our technology." That 1878 sales brochure and that 1968 editorial were both partly, paradoxically, right. Petroleum did save the whale, plastics did save the elephant, not to mention the forest. Modern medicine would not exist without them. Personal computing would not exist without them. Safe, fuel-efficient cars would not exist without them. Besides, they consume fewer resources to manufacture and transport than most alternative materials do. Even environmentalists have more important things to worry about now. In the information age, plastics have won. With the wave of a magical iPod and a purified swig from a Nalgene jar, we have banished all thoughts of drift nets and six-pack rings, and what lingering anxieties remain we leave at the curbside with the recycling.
Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release greenhouse gases when they break down. What's most nefarious about plastic, however, is the way it invites fantasy, the way it pretends to deny the laws of matter, as if something—anything—could be made from nothing; the way it is intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting. The flotsam Ebbesmeyer and his beachcombers find is not only incongruous, it's uncanny, in the Freudian sense—a repressed fact breaking forth with the shock of strangeness into our conscious minds. As he, Charlie Moore, and other oceanographers can tell you, the ocean does not so easily forget. Chemically, it remembers. An environmental geochemist at the University of Tokyo has shown that on the open sea polyethylene acts as a toxin sponge, attracting and concentrating free-floating non-water-soluble chemicals such as DDT and PCB, and plastics themselves contain a host of known carcinogens, including PCBs, that are safe only as long as they remain inert. Some of these compounds have also been recently identified as "gender-bending" endocrine disruptors. The American Plastics Council has called such findings "fascinating" but inconclusive, and many concerned scientists agree. A PVC duck in the bathtub may well be harmless to your child, but no one yet knows how post-consumer plastics that escape the landfill are altering the chemistry of the environment. The experiment, which began a century or so ago, is ongoing. In the meantime, Ebbesmeyer worries that plastics could do to our civilization what lead did to the Romans. He thinks the garbage patch may betoken nothing less than "the end of the ocean." The seas have become synthetic. The planet is sick. It can no longer recycle its ingredients, or purge itself of pollutants.
Some of the archaeologists in our beachcombing expedition have studied the midden heaps of shells that prehistoric seafarers left around the Pacific Rim. Garbage often outlasts monuments, and if 10,000 years from now archaeologists come looking for us, they will find a trail of plastic clues. It will be easy to date us by our artifacts. At the rate we're burning and extruding fossil fuels, the age of petrochemical plastics promises to be relatively short.
I have yet to reach the end of my own trail of clues. I'd like to go farther. I'd like Larry Calvin to ferry me 2,000 miles west, to that spot in the middle of the North Pacific where thirteen years ago a container of bath toys tumbled into the sea. I'd like to ride a container ship through a winter storm and return with it to Guangdong Province, where low-wage factory workers manufacture 70 percent of the toys we Americans buy—about $22 billion worth—71 percent of which are made of plastic. I've read disturbing reports about the Chinese toy industry, and now when I read Eric Carle's 10 Little Rubber Ducks, which was itself manufactured in China, and come to the scene of the woman in the brick-red dress painting brick-red beaks with her little paintbrush, I can't help but think of Huangwu No. 2 Toy Factory, where, according to the nonprofit China Labour Watch, in order to earn the legal minimum wage of $3.45 for an eight-hour day, a piece-rate worker in the spray department "would have to paint 8,920 small toy pieces a day, or 1,115 per hour, or one every 3.23 seconds."
Did workers make the Floatees under similar conditions? Before leaving for Sitka, I called The First Years, Inc., which has recently been bought out. The current management seemed to know less about the Floatees than I did, or pretended to. There was no way they could tell me which factory produced that yellow duck of mine, they said. I would like to know the provenance of everything. I would like to follow the duck back into the blow molding machine, back into the resin extruder, back to the petroleum refinery, back to the oil field or coal mine whence it came. But for now, it's time to give up the chase. In 1827, returning from another failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage, Lieutenant Parry, upon learning that he was to become a father, sent a letter home to his pregnant wife: "success in my enterprize is by no means essential to our joy, tho' it might have added something to it; but we cannot, ought not to have everything we wish…."
On Kruzof Island, I find that for the first time since Bellingham my cell phone is picking up a signal. I call my wife and tell her I've decided to fly home sooner than planned, just to be safe. A week after my return, following a difficult, thirty-hour labor, my wife will give birth to a son, the sight and touch of whom will dispel my usual, self-involved preoccupations and induce a goofy, mystical, sleep-deprived euphoria. My wife will cry, and when she does so will I. These will be tears of joy, of course, but also of exhaustion and of awe and, truth be told, of sadness. Holding my son for the first time, I will feel diminished by the mystery of his birth and by the terrible burden of love, a burden that, requiring hopefulness, will feel too great to carry, but which I will take up nonetheless.
In the meantime, back on Kruzof Island, there is Fred's Creek to cross.
Tired, loaded down with our plastic bag of scavengings, Ebbesmeyer is having a hard time fording the stream. He picks his way carefully up into the trees, places his foot on a partially submerged rock, but hesitates. His breath is short and his footing poor. The rest of our party has continued on without us. I wait. "Throw me the bag," I call to him, and he does. It lands with a splash at the edge of the creek. I met the aging oceanographer in person only a week ago, but I feel oddly protective of him, oddly filial. I watch the trees for bears. Finally he is over to the other side, and we walk together back to the landing on the beach and wait for Larry Calvin to come for us.
You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!
Joachim Ladefoged/VII, for The New York Times
The audience at a show featuring Disney characters.
By JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
One night my wife, M. J., said I should prepare to Disney. It wasn't presented as a question or even as something to waste time thinking about, just to brace for, because it was happening. We have some old friends, Trevor and Shell (short for Michelle), and they have a girl, Flora, 5, who is only a year older than our daughter, Mimi. The girls grew up thinking of each other as cousins and get along beautifully. Shell and Trevor also have a younger son, Lil' Dog. He possesses a real, dignified-sounding name, but his grandparents are the only people I've ever heard call him that. All his life he has been Lil' Dog. The nickname didn't come about in any special way. There's no story attached. It was as if, at the moment of birth, the boy himself spoke and chose this moniker. When you look at him, something in him makes you want to say, "Lil' Dog." He's a tiny, sandy-haired, muscular guy, with a goofy, lolling grin, who's always about twice as heavy when you pick him up as you thought he was going to be.
Through family, Shell had come into some discount tickets, enough for the seven of us. It seemed not even a day passed between my getting a slight rumble of that news and finding myself at the wheel of the black Honda, headed south-southwest from North Carolina. For events to have actually moved this quickly is not far-fetched. M. J. often springs trips and appointments on me, in some cases literally overnight, knowing that if she removes the time factor, I won't be able to generate bogus neurotic back-out plans. Many of the best vacation memories of my life I owe to these strategies, which prove again a useful principle for all couples: don't try to change each other. Study and subvert each other.
The camper containing Shell, Trevor, Flora and Lil' Dog moved south-southeast from Chattanooga. We were converging like lines on a graphing calculator. Unless you are very, very strong, the time will come when you Disney, and our time had come, unrolling like a glaring scroll in the form of I-95. It was a Saturday. The next day would be Father's Day. This whole voyage, it turned out, was billed as a Father's Day gift to me and Trevor, which in my case was like having been shot with a heavy barbiturate dart and bundled off to your own birthday party. Nonetheless I had little anxiety — a total lack of options will often produce a strange, free feeling. In the rearview mirror, Mimi practically strained her car-seat buckles with impatience. My highway thoughts passed through a curious phase of gratitude toward Walter Disney, as an individual, for having made possible such an intensity of childhood joy. Maybe Trevor felt the same about his little brood, hundreds of miles away, fewer each minute.
There's something I should mention about Trevor, though I wouldn't if it weren't relevant to much of what came later, but he smokes a stupendous amount of weed. Think of a person who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, that's 20 cigarettes. Trevor smokes about that many joints, on a heavy day, the first one while he's making coffee. And yet is highly functional in all social and professional senses, or almost all. I've definitely seen him muff some conversations. Still, 90 percent of the time he's one of the sharpest and most interesting people I know. But to repeat: the brother is always, always high. We're not talking about stuff your roommate grew in the side lot, either; this is California high-grade he obtains through a kind of nationwide medical-
marijuana co-op, moving the legally obtained stuff out of California and into other states. It works the same as regular weed dealing, apparently, but you're not supporting a criminal network. Except insofar as you are part of a criminal network. It is one of the many contradictions of living at a time when half the country thinks of weed as more innocent than alcohol and the other half thinks of it as a stepping stool to hard drugs. I needled Trevor once for details on his source. He said that, unfortunately, there was one rule: don't tell your friends.When Trevor and I became tight — as neighbors, in our early 20s — I was smoking a bit myself, almost competing with him. But when I hit 30, I backed up off it, as the song says. I never stopped liking the stuff or feeling that it benefited me, for that matter, but the habit was starting to make me dumb, and I was just humble enough by 30, I guess, to realize I hadn't been born with enough cerebral ammunition to go voluntarily squandering any of it. Meanwhile Trevor stayed committed. And when we get together, a couple of times a year, I won't lie, I fall prey to old patterns. Every so often it causes worry in my wife, especially since our daughter came along. Mostly I think she sees it as a useful pressure valve, which keeps me straighter and narrower the rest of the year. (Study, subvert: happiness = winner.)
That night in our suite at the Disney hotel — not a theme hotel, just your standard luxury resort-dorm — the kids ran psychotically repetitive figure eights. A small child on Disneying Eve is a thoroughbred before the gates open. I watched my wife and Shell sit talking and laughing at the illuminated laminate kitchenette counter. Shell, who runs a garden center, still looks exactly as she did when we met her, a hippie soccer mom, with pretty German features and long dirty-blond hair, whose face will break from affectlessness into sudden disarming smiles. She had a deep history with Disney, something I hadn't known. She described being brought there as a child, with her sisters, and the way their father, a career military man, rushed them through the park, insisting they go on every ride, maximizing their fun-dollar. At noon they went back to the parking lot, into the van. There they ate prepacked lunches. Then they all napped. "All five of you?" All five, mother, father and three girls, in an Econoline. Forty-five minutes of silence. Then back to the park. "You did this every year?" They did it twice a year, in spring and fall, knocking down the attractions like obstacles on a high-speed course, never repeating. The detail of the van naps drew me in. I imagined being a child and lying awake when others were sleeping, the strangeness of that silence.
Later, when the children were huddled lumps in various spots on the sofa bed, Trevor and I stood on the balcony. He talked about how challenging it would be the next day, and during the next days and nights, in the park, not being able to smoke. That wasn't high on my list of concerns — in fact, I was foolish enough to think that the fact of Disney, that we would be spending our time in the heavily surveilled park, might banish the very notion of smoking weed, easing Trevor's miniwithdrawals and making my life easier, too, in that I wouldn't spend too much time stoned, only a few puffs at night like this, it would be a nonissue in terms of domestic harmony. Trevor wasn't trying to hear that at all. He was definitely stressed. "I'm gonna lose my mind in there," he said. "Have you ever been in there?"
I had once, when I was 11. I didn't remember much. It bounced off.
"Well, we go every year," Trevor said. "And every year I feel like my skull's about to split open."
"I always figured you were doing brownies," I said.
"I do do brownies," he said. "I have brownies. But, you know. . . ."
I did. Edibles are good, and wise heads move toward them over time, to save their lungs, but there's something about the combination of oxygen-deprivation and intense THC-flush that comes with smoking and in particular from smoking joints. There's no real substitute, for the abuser. A brownie can alter your mood over hours, but a joint swings a psychic broom around you — it clears an instant space.
"I actually saw this thing on the Internet," Trevor said, "where people were talking about getting high in the park."
"At Disney World!" I said, as if I hadn't been listening.
He led me back inside and quietly cracked open his laptop on the kitchen counter. "Check this out," he whispered. Only the two of us were awake.
I dropped into one of the swivel stools in front of the bright screen. I was reading before I knew what I was reading, but it was like a chat room. Or a forum. "Forum" is the better term. A motif of cannabis leaves and naked women holding glittery buds ran down the left margin: a pothead forum. Trevor scrolled it down to a posting, the subject of which read, "Re: Hello from Disney World."
An anonymous person, evidently the veteran of a staggering number of weed-smoking experiences in the park, had done a solid for the community and laid out his or her knowledge in a systematic way. It was nothing less than a fiend's guide to Disney World. It pinpointed the safest places for burning the proverbial rope, telling what in particular to watch for at each spot. Isolated footpaths that didn't see much traffic, conventional smoking areas with good hedge cover, places where you could hide under a bridge by a little artificial river — those were its points of interest. The number of views suggested that the list had helped a lot of desperate people.
The main point was clear and consistent: "Be ready to book it."
Next morning I seized the long plastic rods and parted the curtains: rain! Oh, well. We would have to stay in and read.
M. J. laughed at me. "Good luck telling that to Shell," she said. During the previous night's pre-Disney planning, it had come out that our friend inherited more of her father's attitude toward the park than we had imagined. She was ready to rock, packing up gear and squinting at me as predicted when I mentioned the weather, making an "are you serious?" face.
"Did you bring ponchos?" she asked.
When I replied that we didn't own any ponchos — we had an umbrella — she said, "We can buy some extras on the way."
Trevor winked from the door of their bedroom, where he was dressing Lil' Dog. All will be well, bro. He made the rolling sign, pinching his fingers together.
Both families fit into the camper, and so we just took that. But by the time we lurched into our appointed spot in one of the moonscape Disney World lots, gestured toward it by a series of old men, all showing the same drunk-on-power stone-facedness, it was raining too hard to get out of the vehicle. Even Shell would have to wait. She looked fidgety, sitting in her damp poncho and staring less through than at the steam-blind windows, while the Backyardigans played.
I was thinking about my late father. I don't know why. He would never have brought us here. Could never. My father could not have Disneyed. It requires something, not willpower, exactly, but willingness. You can't smoke cigarettes in those long lines. That would have driven him mad. The strain of pretending to have fun for many hours would have exasperated him; his irritability would then have soured the day. In the end he would try to redeem it all with gross jokes, and we kids would laugh, not able to help it. My mother would rightfully resent the cheap-bought victory, leading to tension at dinner, followed by TV.
Which isn't to say that we never had fun, or even that we never had fun in Florida, it was just that you had to do it my father's way. Not Disney World, not even SeaWorld — Ocean World, in Fort Lauderdale, that was his style. A now-defunct marine park where you could pet and feed the dolphins yourself, as long as you were O.K. with the skin condition half of them had developed from overchlorinated water. Ocean World had monkeys and gators, too (the ocean is wide). My father, who wrote about baseball, was down there covering spring training, I don't even remember which team. We met up with him for a week, stayed in a motel, where we may have been the only people not paying by the hour or month. He somehow managed to rent a car that you hadn't been able to buy in 10 years, a gigantic late-1970s white Ford LTD. We looked like complete trash on that trip, I realize now, and I had such an excellent time. Dad had his Pabst and pork rinds and menthols, what could go wrong? I was thinking about how his eccentricity, for all its problems, not least of which was that it had killed him, also had opened a space in my childhood that was one of the few places where I could relax. Maybe Mimi would have similar luck with me. It seems like a lot of what you end up doing as a parent is trying to figure out ways to save your children from you.
The rain let up as abruptly as if someone had snapped shut a dome overhead. We climbed out onto the wet pavement, under a changeable sky that, not 10 minutes after the rain, let through intense heat. Others around us similarly unstrapped themselves and stretched. We were an army of insects uncoiling. We started assembling the gear. Shell had brought a double-stroller. At any given time, two kids would be riding, with the third walking or on somebody's shoulders.
No sooner had we pressed our fingers onto the biometric scan-pads (because if you can't trust Disney with your biological data . . .), than old Trevor began to show signs. He hadn't been able to smoke that morning (quarters too cramped); he was craving. Not that he acted jumpy or cranky. I could just tell from the body language and sentence length that it was on his mind. Nothing like an enclosed space — and Disney World, for all its gigantism, manages never to let you forget for a second that you're in a very tightly enclosed space — to make a head start scanning for exits.
Lil' Dog and the ladies were sailing by up above on the Dumbo ride, in three successive elephants. Mimi had a tentatively happy face. It said, "I'm ready to think of this as fun, as long as it doesn't go any faster or higher." Trevor and I leaned on the railing like bettors at a track, smiling and waving every time they went past, as if we were dolls with arms hooked to wires. Trevor had his phone out, with the Internet dialed up to "the guide." He consulted it when they were on the dark side of their orbit. Checking it against a map of the park, we determined that one of the spots mentioned wasn't too far away, a little-used maintenance pathway with trees alongside it and some Dumpsters. Given a properly positioned lookout, you could have a puff in relative calm. We slipped away.
Now we were truly at Disney World. A person didn't come here every day! What is the scene here? Hello, primary colors; hello, quickly fading microdramas of passing human faces, incessantly deciding whether to make eye contact; hello, repeating stalls and gift shops. We were walking on the balls of our feet. The surface of things had become porous and permitted of the potential for enjoyment. Where were our womenfolk and Lil' Dog? Let's find them. Let's be good fathers. Tomorrow was Father's Day. Oh, my God, I didn't even remember that!
"We don't need to remember that," Trevor said. "We are that."
"We are Father's Day?"
As if to put an exclamation point on his observation, I stopped and bought, for some obscene amount of money, two blue plastic sprayer fans. You've seen these? It's a spray bottle, like you would use to spray water on your plants, but it had a little fan attached to the nozzle. The idea is you fan yourself and spray yourself at the same time. Trevor and I went ahead and started using them, while we searched for our people. The fan did nothing; the fan and spraying did have a cooling effect, but it was cruelly brief, like the relief of ice on a toothache. It was so hot by this time — about noon — that the heat from the pavement seemed to be microwaving our cells. To really get any help from the fan, you had to just walk along constantly misting and spritzing yourself, which seemed like something only a crazy or famous person would do. We finally just slung the sprayer-fans over our shoulders by their carrying straps and walked on.
Next memory: riding on the mechanical boat through the It's a Small World attraction, continually spraying Mimi, who looked as if she had been boiled in a tank, her cheeks were so red and her little forehead was glowing. The whole time I was spraying, she was waving at the dolls, acknowledging every single doll's wave with her own; showing an O.C.D.-like desire not to miss anyone. It seemed that she misunderstood the nature of the dynamic, believed we ourselves were part of some parade, being observed by the dolls. A more natural idea, I suppose. Why would you go floating by in a boat to look at children standing along the banks of a river; they would be looking at you. Because you are a princess. Flora was angry because Lil' Dog hogged their family's sprayer, and was just sitting there spray-fanning himself, right in the face, and by the end of the ride, he had squirted all the water away. "Son," Trevor said.
Next memory: suddenly being able to hear, for the first time, the Irishness of Disney's name, hearing it spoken aloud in my head with the thick Kilkenny accent of his own great-grandfather, Arundel Disney, with a sharp uptake on the last syllable. And being able to understand the essentially tragic nature of his charlatanism a little better.
It was a double hallucination: you were hallucinating inside of Walter Disney's hallucination. That's what he wanted.
That night in bed, my wife, who's an academic — she's interested in the transnational flow of entertainment capital and things like that — read to me from a book she brought along, "Married to the Mouse," by the political scientist Richard E. Foglesong. It's about Disney and Florida, which turns out to be a much more engaging story than I knew or than you might expect.
In order to understand what happened here, you have to know of Walt Disney's disappointment over Disneyland, not with the park itself but with the built environment right around the park, which boomed, to accommodate the tourist trade, and sprouted seedy hotels, garish advertisements, vistas of the wrong sorts of people. Disney was heartsick over it — he, who was so visually meticulous that he used to lurk in the various animal centers and zoological gardens of Los Angeles shooting footage of little creatures, trying to ensure his animators got the musculature and locomotion right. How was he supposed to fashion a flawless dream environment, with urban blight as the backdrop? How could he open, in the words of Bob Hope, "an escape from our aspirin existence into a land of sparkles and lights and rainbows"? For that, he needed control over the entire context of the park. Not a land, in other words, but a world. Virgin: that was the word he used in a 1967 promotional film, made right before he died. Walt Disney died dreaming about Disney World; it's said that while lying on his back, in his hospital room, he turned the tiles on the ceiling into a map of his precious "Florida project."
The way Walt went about getting his way was crafty and made for good listening. He wanted to buy more than 40 square miles of contiguous private property in central Florida. It wasn't virgin, by a long shot — Central Florida, after all, is where America's sins begin — but it was depopulated. Yet Disney knew that if word were to leak about Walter Disney buying real estate, local prices would soar, the overall cost become unmanageable. So he created shell companies, with improvised names, and through them acquired the acres in jigsaw parcels. The landowners didn't realize just one person was buying everyone's property until a local journalist figured it out, and Disney was forced to hold a press conference. You heard right, folks! It was me.
From one point of view, the state had deliberately deceived its citizens in order to help a corporation seize a massive chunk of its territory; from another, they were safeguarding a deal that would do more for Florida's economy than anything since oranges. People still argue over how smart a deal it was. Disney World has made a lot of money, but it's not clear whether Florida has received a fair share. A lot of this has to do with unique and highly irregular tax arrangements Disney was able to arrange (or demand, to use the term Walt's brother Roy accidentally let slip at that first press conference). These have only increased over the years. Today there's even a sort of "Disney visa," negotiated between the corporation and the U.S. government, in order to make it possible for Disney to fill its foreign-accent needs at Epcot.
Where it got interesting was that, in order to gain these extraordinary powers, Disney had to deceive the government of Florida at the same time the two were colluding in all sorts of other ways. It gets very complex and legalistic but comes down to this: Disney pitched Disney World to Florida not as a resort but as a real city. You've heard of Epcot (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). If you're a Disney freak, you may know that it was originally supposed to possess more of a utopian-futuristic vibe, not be just primarily an around-the-world-in-a-day-type tour, as it became. Fewer people are aware, however, that Epcot was supposed to be a working utopia, a "living blueprint," as Disney vividly calls it in that film, during which he stands before wall-size diagrams of geometric urban plans, pictures that could have come from the 21st century or the French Revolution. Twenty thousand people would live there, in this bubble-domed community, "completely enclosed . . . climate controlled . . . shoppers and theatergoers . . . protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity . . . the pedestrian will be king . . . only electric-powered vehicles will travel above the streets." Disney would solicit the major industrial giants to design and test bold new technologies for Epcot, "finding solutions to the problems of our cities."
The reality, as Foglesong shows, is that Disney never really meant for people to live permanently at Epcot. In the Disney archives, Foglesong turned up a memo, the Helliwell memo, drafted by one of Disney's lawyers and annotated in the margins by Walt himself, and it makes this point quite plain. Disney crossed out every mention of "permanent residents." The denizens of Epcot would be passing through, longer-term tourists, staying for a few months at the longest. How could Disney have it otherwise? If your town has residents, then those people are citizens of some local government of the United States — yours. They can vote. They can vote against you. That hardly made sense as part of a corporate development strategy. But without municipality status, Disney wouldn't be able to secure the legislative fief it ended up getting, with ludicrous tax advantages, unprecedented oversight of land and water usage, of building codes, etc. For that you needed inhabitants. So Disney fibbed and said he wanted them. Foglesong's point is that these maneuvers leave Disney World in an ambiguous category of legitimacy. It receives the breaks that an autonomous political settlement would have enjoyed (and then some), but it never has had any settlers. Strictly speaking Disney World shouldn't exist.
When you know all this, the promotional film becomes unsettling to watch. I prefer to keep my Disney-as-enemy-of-democracy thoughts at a comfortable left-theoretical distance. Disney was selling not utopia but a perversion of classic utopian aims. There would be no private property, sure, no ownership (again, if people owned land, they would have to be given the vote), but instead of substituting the commons for individual plots, as social planners had struggled to do for centuries, the Epcotians would be made renters. Tenants (just as the residents of Celebration, Fla., Disney's planned community, are today). The tall, architecturally innovative office buildings downtown? Those would be "designed especially to suit the local and regional needs of major corporations." And all on the soil where the very first North American utopias, the forgotten Franciscan missions of Spanish Florida, had been destroyed, when the South Carolina colonists burned them at the start of the 18th century, murdering their priests and enslaving their Native American populations. The Disney developers had to clear orange groves left over from those missions. Such is the virginity of the New World.
Mimi had a black eye the next morning, a real shiner. It was incurred the night before in a swimming-pool accident. Flora tried to throw her a plastic boat. It sort of caught an air current and scudded like a glider for a second. Hit Mimi straight in the face, prow first. There were tears from both girls, a little blood from mine. Lil' Dog looked confused, mounted mermanlike on his inflatable alligator. We adults went through that ritual of overreassuring one another that everything was O.K., no hard feelings, not deliberate. Still, it looked awful — definite maybe on the crucial permanent-scar question.
I was downhearted the next morning to find that Mimi's injury hadn't dampened her enthusiasm for Disney. Just as 24 hours before I placed hope in the foul weather, so I reinvested it in the prospect of staying in and holding an ice bag to her face. We would read. I could read her my big-people book aloud, no problem. But now M. J. was waking me up and telling me to get dressed and ready.
I wandered out into the little TV room. Shell was there packing and had on her battle face. I must have had a look on mine something like Lil' Dog's from the night before. "We're going back?" Why? We were there yesterday! And I hadn't exactly come away from that with a sense of failing to take full advantage of the park's opportunities.
Trevor and I had wound up pulling our lookout act twice more. "Just remember," he kept saying under his breath, "be ready to book it." As if you could ever successfully run away at Disney World, with the cameras everywhere and the underground tunnels and the private police force. Run to where?
The tunnels aren't really "underground." I heard this explained in a documentary about Disney World. The tunnels represent ground level. Everything else is built on top. Disney World is a giant mound, one of the greatest ever constructed in North America. When you're walking around in the park, you're about 15 feet above where construction began.
An importance of these tunnels for Disney was that he could keep the costumed characters invisible, when they weren't "on." He didn't ever want the children to see Pluto, for instance, slouching back from his shift to a break room. So at Disney World, the characters pop up where they're needed, then disappear.
It's the same with the park, on a grand scale — as you're moving between the separate parks-within-a-park (Magic Kingdom, Typhoon Lagoon, Epcot, etc.), you're passing through huge waste spaces in between, but they are Disney's waste spaces, manicured emptiness. These voids were in some ways more important to Disney than any attraction in the park. The screen had to be white.
Once again a day of equatorial heat that all but exerted a physical weight. The shoulder skin of the tank-top-wearing men around us roiled ultravioletly, in a precancerous way. It took a lot of psychic reserve to steel your soul for these long days of amusement. We weren't even out of the parking lot before the three kids were squabbling over who got to ride in the double stroller. In the end, the girls won. Mimi and Flora sat side by side, twin maiden prow of our straggly land vessel, their faces proudly forward, mist-spritzing themselves as they rode. Mimi with her purple eye. I somehow ended up carrying Lil' Dog. That was a lot of steps for his tiny legs across the desert of heat-mirage. There is something unnatural or I should say unearthly about Lil' Dog's weight, or his density. It was like carrying a meteorite. To carry both girls would have been easier.
No sooner did we enter Epcot than Trevor started checking his phone, and while I won't bore you with more detail about that business, there being no tediousness quite like doper tediousness, suffice it to say that the rest of the day was spent on pendulum bouts of ecstatic, hyper-attentive parenting followed by separation from family to indulge addiction and vice.
Ready as one may be to don the hair shirt, it was hard not to feel that this was the perfect way to do the park. I wasn't as prone to feel surly toward the late-empire brittleness of it all. I stopped trying to remember which companies Disney owns or co-owns: ESPN, Marvel and was it ABC or CBS? What gigantic swaths of our visual environment is this corporation shaping every bit as meticulously as it did those parks?
I took Mimi on a little roller coaster ride (with maternal urging; I hadn't gone rogue — she wanted to go). But pobrecita, it turned out she wasn't ready for it. The ride was small but still moved pretty fast. As soon as we started up, she put her head down. She never screamed, "Make it stop!" or anything. She just grabbed onto the hold-bar in front of her, put her head down so that her face was almost in her lap, and as we zoomed around the turns, kept repeating "oh, my goodness" like a charm. Two minutes later, it was over. She pronounced it, "A lot scary, but a little bit fun." The child has such nobility of soul! She reminds me of my mother, both in the nobility and in the occasional comedy of its display; for example, once in St. Augustine, Fla., when we were all eating pizza in a place downtown, and there was a stabbing outside. My mother grabbed Mimi and held her like they were about to run through a fire. "I'm getting you out of here, little girl," she said. I have always thought that if the secret police ever come asking for me — as they may come from Disney, after the publication of this article — I would much rather have the women in my life answer the door than any of the men I know.
We were watching the people. That's what you do at Disney World, mostly. Above and beyond all else, it's a place where people look at other people (the lines and the endless walking and the crowded feed stations) to reaffirm the fact that we are there together, that the value of the place is such, it has been worth traveling to from all over the world. I couldn't tell what we made of one another, in the looking. When Disney World was built, it embodied a shared idea of America as pure capitalist fantasy. It's no longer communicating that idea; the idea is no longer intelligible. I don't know what it's communicating. The old virtues are gone, the new ones unidentifiable.
And yet no matter where you travel in the world, you run into a startling number of people for whom Orlando is America. If you could draw one of those New Yorker cartoon maps in your head, of the way the world sees North America, the turrets of the Magic Kingdom would be a full order of scale bigger than anything else, than the Empire State Building for instance. Just this year it was announced that Orlando had become the first U.S. tourist destination to attract 50 million visitors in one year. The environmental impact of this human traffic must be phenomenal. I've met English people, Germans, Latin American people. Have you ever been to the United States? you ask them. "I've been to Orlando," they say.
When I taught for a year at a school in Lima, Peru, there was no greater hero among the students than the kid who had just returned from Orlando. They didn't want to hear about California or New York. I had one student, called Lucho. He came back from his trip with a thick stack of photos, in one of those paper wallets. He wanted to pass them around. And kill 30 minutes of class? Ah, you twisted my arm, Lucho. Unfortunately the pictures were entirely of women's bottoms. It wasn't "nice" or shapely bottoms that Lucho had been after, but gigantically obese ones. They've never seen people who look like us, most places in the world. I confiscated the pictures and stood red-faced, flip-booking through them in front of the class. Shot after zoomed shot of enormous, complexly dimpled bottoms shrink-wrapped into the most outrageously tight and revealing spandex. Young Lucho had found enough of these to fire through an entire roll. It was hard to come down on a student who showed such thoroughness of observation. I thought about him every time I saw one of these Americans go pounding by.
There is deep yearning at Disney. What you feel when you're in the state we were in and all of your emotional pores are wide open is yearning. There is something at stake here, for the families, in terms of that knife edge between joy and disappointment. So when you see people whose kids are definitely not having fun, but are standing in place and screaming, having to be dragged along by their leash-harnesses, there's a throb of empathetic sadness. They are not having a good Disney.
I looked at Mimi. Was she having fun? I thought so — she was smiling. But I knew there were times in my own childhood when I must have seemed to my parents like I was having a blast, while being inwardly tormented by some irrational worry. Ah, youth! How many of my genes had she inherited, and could I teach her how to play them better? You want joy for your children, but you yourself have brought them into this world of suffering.
Lunch was served by princesses. Or rather our table was visited by princesses. I suppose, pseudo-historically speaking, our waitresses, in Scandinavian folk dress, were meant to be the servants or the vassals' daughters of the princesses, village girls from olden times. I ordered meatballs and beer. Our whole section of the restaurant was paying attention to Lil' Dog, because he had fallen asleep in a hilarious way, ramrod straight in his chair, with even his head straight but eyes closed and mouth open. It just looked bizarre, like he was in a permanent coma but "we bring him along anyway." Even when we woke him, he couldn't focus or eat his food.
Sleeping Beauty came out from backstage. The girls pulled out their Disney Princesses autograph books. That's what their mothers bought them while we were off buying sprayer-fans that it later turned out were giving everyone facial sunburns.
Sleeping Beauty was down on one knee, signing her name in a huge stylized cursive that I imagined her practicing before an employee test. Mimi shook with something beyond excitement, into spasm.
"Say 'thank you' to the princess."
Later I was by myself, I don't recall precisely why, but the others had gone, and I was sitting on a bench. I had kind of checked out, I guess. At the other end of the bench was a large family, large in number and size. The girl, who looked about 14, was in a high-tech wheelchair and severely disabled. She started grunting: she was having a seizure. When it ended, I sat there and listened to the family have an argument about whether they should go back to the hotel and deal with the medical situation or stay and fun on, since the seizure was over, might as well. In fairness, the girl herself wanted to stay. The park would be open for only another couple of hours. Maybe they had been dreaming of coming here for years.
That wasn't even the last day. There were more. It was hard to believe, but this is what you do, you submit, otherwise you're a jerk. Shell was relentless, and everybody else was on her side, including Trevor, who had used me, I now realized, as a rent-an-enabler. Forced to come here every year or so, he made it more tolerable for himself by bringing me in. No shame in that, but he might have warned me what it involved. There was a day we went to a place called Typhoon Lagoon, a water park that's part of the Disney World complex. Huge slides dropped you almost into a free fall. A whole lot of fairly disgusting pale bodies, my own among them, pressed together on those stairs. All the females and Lil' Dog sat at the bottom, to watch me and Trevor come down. I did have one thought on the way down, a pot thought but a true one maybe. There's usually one thought, from any binge, that will seem true even afterward, and sometimes for the rest of your life, and it was this, that if there's no free will, as I more and more doubt there to be, we don't need to go crazy with guilt and worry about our children. We're not responsible for them. For their upbringing, yes, but not for their existence. Destiny wants them here. It uses us to put them here.
The strangest thing that happened was the very last thing that happened. As we were leaving the park, on the evening of the last day, it began to rain a monsoonlike rain. You'll have to believe me when I say it was exceptionally violent. The next morning I said to one of the bellboys at the hotel, "You guys probably get weather like that a lot, huh?" He said, "No, we don't." It was as if a black spaceship had swooped down and blocked out the sun. Sheets of wind were tearing through. Lightning continually exploded just above our heads. The tram-caravan kept having to stop, which made it only scarier, as if they had driven us out into the open in some sacrificial way, as target practice for an offended storm god. Also it was disturbing to see the clockwork perfection of the Disney machine threatened that way. It hinted at a larger underlying weakening of something. The tram we were riding in was open on the sides and covered above only by a plastic canopy. We were exposed and getting blasted. But we had the Disney ponchos. Shell had made us all buy them — at a gas station, so possibly they were knockoffs. But they worked, and by sitting close together with all of them spread, we could make a tent. It must have looked very weird. On the other hand I'm positive that every other person on the tram wished they were under it with us, and I'm pretty sure at one point we did have some other people's kids. Underneath, in the dark, the children were loving it. Mimi and Flora screamed in terror every time the thunder boomed, but their terror was full of joy, and afterward there was laughter. And it was wonderful to be able to cover them. We had the solution for this, barring a direct strike.
Later, when asked, Lil' Dog said that this had been his favorite ride.
November 2005
The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob
He wore a Western hat, never spoke a word, and robbed bank after bank. When the feds finally arrested him, they discovered that their suspect was actually a soft-spoken woman. They thought they'd never hear from her again— but she had other plans.
by Skip Hollandsworth
PEGGY JO TALLAS WAS, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the classic good-hearted Texas woman. For much of her adult life, she lived with her ailing mother in a small apartment in the Dallas suburbs. Every morning, after waking up and making her bed, always taking the time to smooth out all the wrinkles in the sheets with her hands, she'd walk into her mother's bedroom. She'd wrap a robe around her mother's shoulders, lead her to the kitchen, fix her cereal, and lay out her pills. For a few minutes, the two of them would sit at the table, making small talk. Peggy Jo, who didn't like to eat until later in the day, would often smoke a cigarette and drink Pepsi out of a coffee cup. Then, after her mother was finished eating, Peggy Jo would gently guide her back to her bedroom, prop a pillow behind her head, set a glass of tap water and her romance novel on the side table, and walk back into her own room to get dressed.
Usually, she liked wearing khaki pants, a simple blouse, and loafers. But on a lovely morning in May 1991, Peggy Jo, who was then 46 years old, decided to wear something different. She walked over to her dresser, the top of which held a few small glass sculptures of dolphins with iridescent eyes that she had been collecting off and on for more than a decade. She opened one of the lower drawers and pulled out a pair of men's pants and a dark men's shirt. From her closet, she grabbed a men's brown leather jacket that she kept on a hanger. She then reached for a Styrofoam mannequin's head that was on a shelf in the closet. A fake beard was pinned to it and on top was a white cowboy hat.
She took off her nightshirt and put on the clothes along with some boots that were too big for her feet. She stuffed a towel under her shirt to make herself look heavier. She stepped into the bathroom, rubbed some adhesive across her face, pasted on the fake beard, and colored her hair with gray paint she had bought at a costume shop. She placed the cowboy hat on her head, put on a large pair of silver-rimmed sunglasses, and pulled on a pair of gloves. She then took a few minutes to write a note on a sheet of lined paper and put it in her pocket.
"Be back in a minute," Peggy Jo told her mother, tiptoeing past her room. She walked outside, got behind the wheel of her 1975 two-door Pontiac Grand Prix, drove to the American Federal Bank just off West Airport Freeway in Irving, pulled into the parking lot, stepped into the bank's lobby, and headed toward the counter, where a young female teller was smiling cheerfully.
"Hello, sir," the teller said. "How may I help you?"
Peggy Jo pulled out the note she had written. "This is a bank robbery," it read. "Give me your money. No marked bills or dye packs."
The stunned teller handed over a stack of cash from her drawer. Peggy Jo nodded, stuck the money into a satchel, and walked out of the bank. She then drove straight back to her apartment, where her mother was still in bed, getting hungry, hoping Peggy Jo would return soon to fix her lunch.
IN THE CRIMINOLOGY TEXTBOOKS, they are invariably described as products of a deprived socioeconomic background. Most of them are young male drug addicts who don't have the slightest idea what they are doing. When they burst into banks, their fingers twitch and their heads swivel back and forth as they look for security guards. They shout out threats and wave guns in the air. When they get their money, they run madly for the exits, bowling over anyone in their path, and they squeal away in their cars, leaving tire tracks on the road.
And then there was Peggy Jo Tallas. "I promise you, my Aunt Peggy was the last person on earth you would ever imagine robbing a bank," said her niece, Michelle. "Whenever I was in a car with her, she never drove above the speed limit. If anything, she drove below it. And she always came to a complete stop at stop signs."
But Peggy Jo didn't just rob a bank. Beginning with that May 1991 trip to American Federal, she robbed lots of banks. According to the FBI, she was one of the most unusual bank robbers of her generation, a modern-day Bonnie without a Clyde who always worked alone, never using a partner to operate as her lookout or drive her getaway car. She was also a master of disguise, her cross-dressing outfits so carefully designed that law enforcement officials, studying bank surveillance tapes, had no idea they were chasing a woman. What's more, she was so determined not to hurt anyone that she never carried a weapon into any bank she robbed. "I have to admit, I admired her style," said Steve Powell, a former FBI agent who spent most of his thirty-year career chasing bank robbers and who supervised bank robbery investigations for the Dallas office of the FBI in the early nineties. "She knew how to get in and out of a bank in sixty seconds. She was very skilled and very efficient, as good as any man I've ever come across."
Although female bank robbers are not unheard of—it is estimated that women commit less than 5 percent of the some 7,600 bank robberies that take place each year in the United States—almost all of them are young women who, like most of the men, rob banks for drug money. And only a few of those women rob more than a bank or two before they quit or get caught. Accordingly, when Powell and his team of FBI agents happened to corner Peggy Jo near her apartment in 1992, they assumed they would never be dealing with her again. She was one of those women, they believed, who had succumbed to a strange bout of middle-aged craziness. She wasn't poor. She wasn't an addict or an alcoholic. And from what people who knew her said, she was utterly harmless—"A sweet lady who once chatted with me about the best way to grow plants on the front porch," one neighbor noted. Seemingly repentant, Peggy Jo pleaded guilty to bank robbery and quietly went off to prison for almost three years. And that seemed to be that.
But then, this past May, the story broke that a small bank in the East Texas city of Tyler had been robbed by a sixty-year-old woman. The woman was dressed in black, wearing a black wide-brimmed hat and dark sunglasses that covered much of her face. She was polite and did not use a gun when she confronted the teller. She placed the money she received in a black satchel, nodded "thank you," walked out the door, and climbed into a twenty-foot Frontier RV with pretty purple shades around the windows. She turned on the ignition, pushed on the gas pedal, and headed south on Texas Highway 69, straight out of town.
After all those years, Peggy Jo Tallas had returned.
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND HER, her friends say, you've got to go back to Dallas in the late fifties, when she was an irrepressibly free-spirited teenager, her hair brownish-blond and curly and her green eyes as shiny as marbles. "She had a beautiful, wide smile that made you want to smile back at her," said Karen Jones, her closest childhood friend. "And what was most special about her was that she loved doing things other kids didn't do. She once drove me around looking for stray dogs to adopt. And then she took me over to the Yellow Belly drag strip just to watch the cars race."
She was the youngest of three children. When she was four years old, her father died of cancer, and her mother, Helen, found a job as a nurse's aide to support the family. They lived in a tiny rent house in the suburb of Grand Prairie. Peggy Jo's sister, Nancy, was a high school majorette, and her older brother, Pete, played on the district's championship basketball team. Peggy Jo, however, dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. "She told me there was just too much else to do in life than spend so many days at school," Karen said. One day, in fact, Peggy Jo jumped in her car and drove to San Francisco because she wanted to see what life was like there. When she returned, she gave Karen a book of poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the co-founder of San Francisco's famous City Lights bookstore and an influential Beat poet whose work often decried the emptiness of modern life. (In one of his most famous poems, from A Coney Island of the Mind, he described America as a country of ". . . freeways fifty lanes wide/on a concrete continent/spaced with bland billboards/illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.") "I laughed and thought, 'Of all people, Peggy Jo's been off reading poetry in San Francisco,'" Karen said. "But that was just who she was, always ready for an adventure."
When she was in her twenties, Peggy Jo got her own apartment in North Dallas and started working as a receptionist at a Marriott hotel near downtown. She and another receptionist, a cute blonde named Cherry Young, went out almost every night. Peggy Jo always drove in her little burgundy Fiat, gunning the engine, racing other cars from stoplight to stoplight. They hit all the great Dallas nightclubs: Soul City, the Fog, and the Filling Station, on Greenville Avenue, ordering Coors, playing pool, and flirting with men. They went to see the Doors and the Doobie Brothers and even the Rolling Stones, screaming at the top of their lungs as a young, wrinkle-free Mick Jagger gyrated madly across the stage. Peggy Jo took Cherry to a coffeehouse where amateur poets read out of their notebooks, and they also went to see movies. Peggy Jo's favorite, which she saw over and over, was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the movie tells the story of the famous bank- and train-robbing duo who lived in the last days of the Old West: two good-natured, Robin Hood—like outlaws who never believed that what they were doing was wrong because they never hurt innocent bystanders and they always robbed from institutions that took advantage of downtrodden citizens. Although Butch and Sundance knew they had little chance of survival, they refused to walk away from the life they loved, and they ended up in South America, still robbing banks, finally dying in a hail of gunfire.
According to Cherry, Peggy Jo didn't have any immediate plans to get married and have children, she didn't care about finding the right career, and she didn't worry about money. All she wanted was enough to get by, to pay her bills and have a little left over for a few drinks or a couple of meals each week at El Fenix. "She told me she was saving a little so that she could someday go to Mexico, just to live on the beach in a hacienda and wear bathing suits night and day," Cherry said. "She was beautiful and she was rambunctious. She always told me that deep down she was wild at heart."
But just how wild? One afternoon, when Peggy Jo and Cherry were driving around in the Fiat, they passed a Wells Fargo armored truck, and Peggy Jo made a rather odd comment: "You know, I could go rob that and not have to worry about anything for a while."
"You'd need a gun," Cherry said.
"Oh, heck, I'm smarter than that," Peggy Jo replied.
Cherry laughed. It never once occurred to her that Peggy Jo would ever work up the courage to commit an actual robbery. True, she could get a little feisty: When a police officer pulled her over one evening for speeding, she laughed and tore up the ticket in his face. And there was the night when she and Cherry had a spat at a restaurant in Fort Worth. To calm down, Cherry walked to another bar. A few minutes later, Peggy Jo walked outside and saw an unlocked pickup with the keys in the ignition. She jumped in and drove away. The police caught up with her, and she eventually pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, receiving a five-year probated sentence.
Still, it's one thing to go on a joyride in a stolen car after a night of drinking. It's another thing entirely to become an outlaw. "And what everyone needs to remember is that my aunt was a wonderful, loving woman," said Michelle (who asked that her last name not be used). "When she came over to babysit me and my brothers, she made up funny games for us to play, she cooked us popcorn, and then at the end of the night, she told us ghost stories, where the ghosts were always creaking up the stairs and doors were squeaking. She truly had a heart of gold."
HER LIFE WAS NOT without disappointment, of course. In the mid-seventies, she told her friends she had fallen in love with a man who lived near Dallas. Then, several months later, she mentioned that the relationship was over. "She told me that she had gone to the town where the man lived and that she had seen his car parked in front of a business," Karen said. "She said she then saw a woman getting into the driver's seat. Peggy Jo walked up to the woman, asked her what she was doing, and the woman said, 'Well, ma'am, this is my husband's car.' Peggy Jo was completely devastated. She had no idea she had been dating a married man."
Not long after that, she moved into an apartment in Irving to live with her mother, who was battling a degenerative bone disease. Peggy Jo found a new job near the apartment at a computer factory, and then she worked in the office of a mobile-home construction company. She remained friends with Cherry, who by then was working as a cocktail waitress. "Every now and then, we'd have an old-fashioned night and hit all the old places and listen to rock and roll," Cherry said. "And one day she called and persuaded me to quit my job so that we could go to Florida and live for a couple of months on the beach."
But by 1980 Cherry had married and moved to Oklahoma City. Peggy Jo's childhood friend Karen had also married. Peggy Jo, who was still quite attractive, with a slender body and, in the words of Karen, "movie star long legs," certainly had plenty of chances to start another relationship, but she kept her distance from men. "I don't think she was ever able to get over the pain of the betrayal from the married man," Karen said. "I think she decided to be alone."
A year passed, then another, then another. And suddenly, just like that, it was 1984, and Peggy Jo was forty years old, with lines tracking out from the corners of her eyes and a touch of gray slipping into her hair. She found another job working for the Pony Express Courier Service, driving a van up and down Dallas's freeways, past a series of bland billboards, and delivering pack ages to businesses, and she also moved with Helen to a new apartment in another Dallas suburb—the Pecan Knoll Apartments, in Garland—to be closer to Michelle and her family. (Peggy Jo's sister, Nancy, was then living in East Texas; Peggy Jo and her brother, Pete, who had had disagreements in their younger years, were rarely speaking.)
Over the next couple of years, she endured her own medical problems. She injured her back and later underwent an emergency mastectomy, which kept her in bed for several weeks. She also began taking anti-anxiety medication, in large part because her income and her mother's Social Security checks barely covered the bills, especially as her mother's medical costs rose. "I think she was beginning to feel like she could never catch up," said Cherry, who occasionally came down from Oklahoma City to visit. "And she was too proud to ask anyone for help. She liked helping people. She didn't want people to help her."
Cherry paused. "And there's another thing that was going on with her," she finally said. "This is hard to explain, but I think Peg was starting to feel, well, like her life was slipping away. Do you know what I mean? It's the way women get sometimes. You get to a place in your life and you start looking back and you say to yourself that it's not working out the way you hoped. You think everything is slipping away and you feel—I don't know—crazy. You want to scream or something."
Cherry paused again. "I think Peg missed being wild at heart."
SHE HAD TO HAVE been scared out of her wits when she walked into American Federal in Irving in May 1991. Although a note-job bank robbery does not involve the same kind of drama as an old-fashioned bank heist, in which the robber tunnels through the walls and blows apart the vault, it is still an incredibly daring act, a very public performance that is not only witnessed by employees and customers but is also always caught on tape.
Amazingly, however, Peggy Jo did not commit any of the amateur mistakes that many first-time bank robbers make. She kept her head down so the security cameras could not get a good shot of her face. She did not fidget as the teller read her note. During those long seconds that ticked away as the teller pulled the money out of her drawer, she remained absolutely silent, saying nothing. Then came that long walk out of the bank, when she had to be wondering if a security guard she had not seen was coming up behind her, a gun in his hand. But she did not break into a run. Nor did she squeal away in her car, running red lights and drawing more attention to herself.
In fact, after the FBI's Steve Powell interviewed bank employees and watched the surveillance tapes, he had no doubt that he was dealing with a professional bank robber. Powell, who grew up in the small Panhandle town of Tulia, eventually noticed that the robber had worn his cowboy hat backward. And he figured that the beard was fake. But it never occurred to him that the suspect wasn't a man.
In December 1991 Peggy Jo, dressed in the same outfit, stole $1,258 from the Savings of America, which was also located in Irving. This time, an eyewitness was able to write down the license plate number of the Grand Prix. But when Powell's agents tracked the license plate and converged on the owner's home not far from the bank, they found a lady sitting in her living room who said she had not been out of the house that day. She took them outside to show them her car, which was a red Chevrolet. That's when she noticed that the license plate was missing. Obviously, the FBI agents said, the bank robber had stolen the license plate earlier that day and put it on his own car to mislead them.
A month later, Peggy Jo struck again. This time, she moved to the other side of Dallas, hitting the Texas Heritage Bank in Garland for approximately $3,000. In May 1992 she robbed $5,317 from the Nations Bank in the adjoining suburb of Mesquite. During the robbery, she wisely handed back a stack of bills that contained a hidden dye pack, a small package that is triggered to explode a few seconds after it passes underneath an electronic eye positioned at a bank's exit, staining the money with permanent ink and sometimes staining the robber himself.
By then, Powell had named the robber Cowboy Bob. "And he was making me start to pull my hair out," he said. "How could this thin, little dried-up cowboy be whipping us this bad, time after time?"
In September 1992 Cowboy Bob robbed First Gibraltar Bank in Mesquite of $1,772. Police officers roared up in their squad cars, followed about ten minutes later by several vehicles filled with FBI agents. They tracked the license plate on Cowboy Bob's car to a Mesquite resident who, predictably, went outside to his driveway to find his license plate missing.
Then, while agents were wrapping up their investigation at First Gibraltar, a call came in that Mesquite's First Interstate Bank, about a mile away, had just been robbed by a man in a beard, a cowboy hat, a leather coat, and gloves. And he had hit the jackpot, escaping with $13,706. He was so pleased, the teller said, that he gave her a kind of salute as he left, tipping his hat with his gloved hand.
"Cowboy Bob is at it again!" shouted Powell, jumping into his car and racing toward First Interstate. "Son of a bitch!"
This time the license plate that an eyewitness saw on Cowboy Bob's brown Pontiac Grand Prix was traced to a man named Pete Tallas. FBI agents found Tallas at work at a Ford auto parts factory in nearby Carrollton. "The agents asked me if I owned a Grand Prix with a certain license plate number, and I said, 'That's right,'" recalled Peggy Jo's brother. "I told them I had given it to my mother and Peggy Jo a year or so back because they couldn't afford a car. They said, 'It was just used in a bank robbery.' I said, 'Bullshit, that car can't go fast enough.'"
Pete gave the FBI the address of Helen and Peggy Jo's apartment. When Powell and the other agents arrived, they spotted the car in the parking lot. As they discussed the possibility of storming the apartment and catching Cowboy Bob red-handed, they saw a woman in shorts and a T-shirt walk toward the car.
Powell stared at her. "It must be Cowboy Bob's girlfriend," he murmured to the other agents. They allowed her to drive away from the apartment so that the assumed boyfriend wouldn't see them. When they finally stopped her around the corner, Powell introduced himself to the woman, who politely said hello and told him her name was Peggy Jo Tallas. She admitted that the car was hers, and she said she had driven it earlier that morning to a nursery to buy fertilizer. Powell opened the trunk of the car: There was, indeed, a bag of fertilizer. He asked her if he could look around her apartment. For a moment, just a brief moment, she paused. No one was in the apartment, she said, except for her sick mother.
Helen slowly eased herself out of her bed after she heard the doorbell ring and walked to the front door. She opened it and screamed as the FBI agents darted past her, their guns drawn. They moved into Peggy Jo's bedroom. Her bed was immaculately made, and all of her clothes were hanging neatly in her closet.
"What the hell?" said one agent.
Then, looking on the top shelf in her closet, another agent saw the Styrofoam mannequin's head with the beard pinned to it. He noticed the cowboy hat. When he looked under the bed, he saw a bag full of money.
"Come on, Peggy Jo, you're hiding a man from us," Powell said.
She gave him a look. "There isn't any man," she said. "I promise you that."
Powell kept studying her. That's when he noticed the spots of gray dye in her hair and the faint splotches of glue above her lip. "I'll be damned," he said as he pulled out his handcuffs. He read Peggy Jo her rights and drove her to the downtown FBI office, where other agents were waiting. "Gentlemen," Powell said, "Cowboy Bob is actually Cowboy Babette."
THE NEWSPAPERS, of course, had a field day, writing story after story about the cross-dressing bank robber who used her mother's apartment as a hideout. The reporters hunted down Peggy Jo's relatives, but they refused to say anything, in large part because they were so stunned about what Peggy Jo had been doing. "We had absolutely no idea," Michelle said. "We asked Helen if she knew what Aunt Peggy had been doing, and she kept saying, 'Robbing banks? Peggy was robbing banks?'"
Powell himself, realizing he had the case of a lifetime, did what he could to get Peggy Jo to talk. He wanted to know how she had learned to rob banks in the first place. He also wanted to know why she had decided to rob two banks in one day and why, before the second robbery, she didn't take the time to steal another license plate. Had she gotten so cocky that she thought the FBI would never catch her? "If she had just followed her usual routine," Powell later said, "we could still very well be wondering who Cowboy Bob really was."
But Peggy Jo wouldn't tell him anything. Nor would she say much to her court-appointed attorney, who then hired Richard Schmitt, a psychologist who specialized in evaluating criminals, to interview her. During their session, she eventually admitted that she had decided to rob a bank to pay for her mother's medications. But she certainly had no intention of robbing a second bank, she said. Or a third or a fourth, she continued, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it.
Schmitt could not take his eyes off her. Up until that point, he had interviewed approximately fifty bank robbers, all of them male. He had never before interviewed what he described as "a nice, normal-looking woman" who crossed her legs while she talked with him. "So why did you keep robbing banks?" he asked her.
But Peggy Jo never answered. She kept staring at a wall, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head as if she wasn't sure what else to tell him.
"I guess it was hard for her to admit just how much fun she had being a bank robber," Cherry said.
Perhaps because she carried out her crimes without using weapons—or perhaps because the judge agreed with the defense attorney's argument that Peggy Jo's behavior was "completely out of character"—she received a mild, 33-month sentence. Michelle later went to see her at the federal prison in Bryan. "I knew that she was unhappy, confined to a cell most of the day," Michelle said. "But she came out smiling, and she asked me all about me and my daughter. She didn't say anything to me about the bank robberies. She didn't say a single word. She just said it was something that would never happen again."
A true-crime author contacted Peggy Jo while she was in prison, asking her to collaborate on a book and perhaps sell it to Hollywood and make a lot of money, but she turned him down. "She told me she didn't want to embarrass her family with more publicity," Cherry said. "And I think she also was determined to put that part of her life behind her."
Peggy Jo did try to put it behind her. By the mid-nineties she was out of prison and back living with her mother. To avoid the stares of their neighbors at the apartment complex, they moved to a two-bedroom townhome in Garland, 1,120 square feet in size, with a tiny backyard. She spent most of her time with her mother, whose hands by then were shaking so badly that she couldn't hold her own silverware. Every night, she gave her mother a bath and put her to bed. Then Peggy Jo sat alone in her bedroom, usually watching nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel until late at night.
For a while she worked as a telemarketer, going to an office for a few hours a day and making cold calls, offering whoever answered the phone the opportunity to receive a catalog filled with lovely home decorative items. She later found a job as a cashier at the Harbor Bay Marina, at Lake Ray Hubbard, just outside Dallas, selling customers everything from coolers to minnows to those key chains that float in the water. "She was one of our best employees," said Suzy Leslie, who was then a manager at the marina. "Not once did the money in the cash register come up short on her shift. And what I loved about Peggy Jo was that she checked on the poorer customers. She was constantly pulling out her own money to help some of the families pay for bait. She used to visit with a poor Vietnamese woman who came out here to fish off the docks for her family's supper. There was a man who came out here who was deaf, and Peggy would write down questions on a sheet of paper, asking him if there was anything he needed. And I know she used to give some money to a man out here who had been in prison and was still down on his luck. One day I asked her why she did that, and she said, 'Well, we all got a past, you know.'"
Occasionally, at the end of the day, some man at the marina would ask Peggy Jo if she'd like to join him for a cocktail at Weekends, a little restaurant nearby that had a dance floor next to the bar. But she'd turn him down. She'd tell him she needed to get back to her house to look after her mother. Maybe next time, she'd say, giving the man an apologetic smile. Then she'd sweep the floors, take one more stroll around the docks, watch the sun set, and head for her car.
Once again, a year passed, and then another. Peggy Jo lost touch with her old friends like Cherry and Karen. Her sister, Nancy, died of breast cancer, and in December 2002 Helen died in her sleep at the age of 83. Peggy Jo was at her mother's bedside, holding her hand. "She could have put her mother in a nursing home a long time ago," said Suzy, who by then had become close friends with Peggy Jo. "But when we talked up at the marina, she said to me that she wanted her mother to be at home, to live out her last years in dignity, sleeping in her own bed. She was relieved her mother was no longer in pain, yet you could tell she was still heartbroken. She couldn't talk about Helen without tears coming to her eyes."
At Helen's funeral, Peggy Jo and her brother reconciled. She later went to the annual Christmas dinner that Pete and his wife put on for the Tallas family. "She was friendly to all of us, she loved on the kids, and when I asked her what she was going to do now, she said she had some plans," Pete said. "But she never told me what they were."
IN THE SPRING OF 2004 Peggy Jo approached a man at the marina who was selling a Frontier RV. She gave him $5,900 in cash and promised to pay him $500 more at a later date. She told Suzy that the time had come to move on. "She said she was going to put some money together and head down to Padre Island or to Mexico and live on the beach like she had always wanted to," Suzy recalled. "She told me I ought to come along while I had the chance, before life ran out on us. I'll never forget her saying that. 'Before life ran out on us.'"
Peggy Jo sold or gave away all of the furniture in her townhome, and she sold an old Volvo she had been driving. She carried a few potted plants over to a neighbor's front porch, and then she drove away in her RV—"Just flew the coop," one neighbor later said. For a few weeks, she stayed at a public park near Lake Ray Hubbard, spending part of the day fishing or walking along the shore, watching the herons fly across the water. Occasionally, Michelle came out in the late afternoons to visit. She and Peggy Jo would sit on maroon folding chairs next to the RV. Peggy would drink Pepsi out of a coffee cup and smoke Merit menthol cigarettes, grinding them out in a little ashtray she held in her hand.
"Sometimes she'd turn on the radio and listen to old rock and roll from her younger days, groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger," Michelle said. "She'd watch the sun set and then she'd go inside the RV and pull out a skillet and cook up some fajita meat with chopped onions. You know, it wouldn't have been the life I would have chosen for myself, but I couldn't help but admire her, doing her own thing and doing it her way. She loved being completely free."
In the late summer of 2004, Peggy Jo left a telephone message for Carla Dunlap, another friend from the marina. When Carla had developed breast cancer the previous year, Peggy Jo had checked on her nearly every day and had brought her a cap to wear when her hair began to fall out from chemotherapy. "On the message, she asked how I was doing and she said she was about to hit the road," Carla said. "And then she said, 'And no matter what happens to me, always remember that I love you.'"
Concerned, Carla's husband, John, drove out to the park to see if he could find her and perhaps give her some money, but she was already gone.
WHERE PEGGY JO WENT still remains the subject of great speculation. Months later, people would say that they had seen her at Lake Texoma and Lake Lavon. Others would say they had seen her driving her RV through various East Texas towns. And some would say they had seen her in Tyler in October 2004, right about the time that an odd bank robbery occurred at the small Guaranty Bank on the southern edge of the city. According to the tellers, the robber was an older man with a round stomach and a scraggly mustache; he wore a dark floppy hat, baggy clothes, and gloves. He placed a green canvas bag on the counter and said, "All your money. No bait bills. No blow-up money." Then, after receiving a stack of cash (the authorities would not say exactly how much), he walked out of the bank and down a street. No one got a glimpse of his getaway vehicle.
One of the tellers did tell FBI agents that she was struck by the softness of the robber's voice; it sounded a bit feminine. What's more, the teller said, the robber's mustache appeared to have been glued on, and his stomach looked more padded than real.
Perhaps if Steve Powell was still working for the FBI, he might have had an idea who had committed the robbery. But by then he was retired, living on a ranch outside Lubbock, occasionally teaching seminars to bank employees about how to spot a bank robber. At the end of each seminar, he'd pass around a photo of Cowboy Bob and tell her story with a certain relish, like a man reminiscing about his first lover.
The agents who were investigating this robbery, however, brought in an older male suspect to take a lie detector test. After he passed with flying colors, they began investigating other men. If they had been told that their suspect was a sixty-year-old spinster who drove an RV with pretty purple curtains, they would have laughed out loud.
Peggy Jo's own family certainly had no suspicions that she had returned to her secret life. Periodically, throughout the fall of 2004 and the early months of 2005, she would call them from pay phones, telling them she was doing just fine. One afternoon, Michelle ran into Peggy Jo at a Wal-Mart in Garland where Peggy Jo was picking up supplies—a couple cartons of cigarettes, some paper towels, and fajita meat. "She seemed to be in great spirits," Michelle said. And this past May—May 4, to be exact—Pete happened to be in Kaufman County, east of Dallas, when he heard that Peggy Jo's RV was parked next to a small lake on a farm owned by a relative. "I drove out to see her, and we spent about an hour together," Pete said. "She pulled out a bunch of family photos from a big old box, and we looked at all of them. I've got to tell you, we had a really good time, the two of us. Then she told me she was going to be packing up shortly and leaving, hitting the road, going on one of her adventures. I said, 'You okay, Peggy Jo?' And she hugged me and said she was happy, and then I said, 'See you later.'"
THE NEXT MORNING, Peggy Jo woke up and made her bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in the sheets and spreading a fake sheepskin blanket over the mattress, making sure the bottom edge of the blanket was as straight as a ruler. Nearby, hanging from two wooden rods, were her nicer clothes: a few pairs of blue jeans, a couple pairs of khaki pants, and six blouses, all of them neatly ironed. But on this particular morning, she put on a black long-sleeved shirt and a pair of black pants that she kept in a plastic drawer. From a shelf, she grabbed a sandwich baggie filled with makeup and applied some lipstick and rouge to her face, and she ran a brush through her graying hair. She looked at herself in a mirror that she kept on another shelf, right next to some photos of young children with freckles and lopsided grins—her grandnieces and grandnephews—and she then made her way to the front of the RV, where she kept a variety of sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats along with a couple of black wigs and hair extensions.
After choosing a large black straw hat that came down over her forehead and a pair of black sunglasses that practically covered the top half of her face, Peggy Jo slipped into the driver's seat and drove to Tyler, parking her RV next to a Jack in the Box, which happened to be across the street from Guaranty Bank, the very bank that had been robbed the previous October. Holding a black satchel, she stood at the street corner waiting for the traffic light to change; then she headed for the bank. She walked through the front door, past a sign in the lobby that read "You Need the Right Tools to Build Your Dreams," and said to the teller, "This is a robbery. I need all of your money. Don't set any alarms."
The teller, a young woman barely out of her teens, gave Peggy Jo everything she had in her drawer: $11,241. Peggy Jo's heart had to have started racing. This was big. This was like the robbery back in Mesquite in 1992. All she had to do was get out of there and head south, and she could finally get to Mexico and start her new life on a beach.
In her haste to get away, however, she made one simple mistake. She didn't check for a dye pack. It exploded as soon as she walked out the door, covering the money with red ink. A plume of red smoke also began to rise from the satchel as she headed back across the street, dodging traffic to get to her RV.
The smoking satchel caught the attention of a TXU crew working in cherry-picking buckets above the street. A young Tyler couple named Chris and Courtney Smith, who were driving away with their children from a nearby Wal-Mart, also saw Peggy Jo. Because of her disguise, however, they couldn't tell whether they were watching a woman or a man dressed as a woman. "I bet that person robbed a bank," Courtney said, dialing 911 on her cell phone while Chris whipped the car around to follow Peggy Jo, ordering the children in the backseat to keep their heads down.
It just so happened that a group of FBI agents and Tyler police officers were out in their cars that very morning, cruising the streets. They literally were searching for bank robbers. Three banks had been robbed recently in the Tyler area, and the authorities believed that two or three young black men were the robbers.
As a matter of fact, when the police radios crackled with the news about Guaranty Bank, Jeff Millslagle, the burly senior agent in charge of the FBI's Tyler office, had just begun to interview a young black man in the northern part of the city who had been caught driving a stolen car. Millslagle and other FBI agents raced south in their unmarked SUVs. Officers from the Tyler Police Department also came roaring toward the bank, their sirens screaming, as did state troopers from the Department of Public Safety.
Within minutes, a posse of law enforcement officers and such curious citizens as Chris and Courtney Smith and their children were right behind Peggy Jo as she headed down the highway. Because the RV was going up a hill, it was not able to get above the speed limit. Its gears grinding, it lumbered past the Colonial Hills Baptist Church, the Heritage Baptist Church, a movie theater, and a skating rink. Exhaust billowed out of the tailpipe and floated over a field of bluebonnets blooming in the highway's median.
Peggy Jo made one last-ditch attempt to get away, suddenly hitting the brakes and turning the RV into a quiet, middle-class subdivision at the edge of the city. She immediately turned again, onto the poetically named Irish Moss Drive. Before she could get to the end of that street, however, a couple of police cars raced past the RV, boxing it in. Officers in bulletproof vests leaped out of their cars, some holding handguns, a few holding rifles. One officer crouched near an azalea bush; another bent down behind a tree. One of the residents on Irish Moss Drive grabbed his video camera and stood in his doorway to film whatever was going to happen next.
The truth was that no one was exactly sure who was in the RV. The police dispatcher had reported that the bank robber was possibly a white female, but the officers could not rule out that the robber was one of their black suspects who had disguised himself as a woman. Nor could they rule out the possibility that other members of the bank-robbing gang were inside the RV, all of them wielding guns.
Minutes ticked by. Because the curtains were pulled across the windows, the officers were unable to see inside. Some of those close to the RV were saying the things that officers always say in such situations. "Come on out, now." "You're surrounded." "Just make it easy on yourself."
From what could later be determined, she sat at the RV's little kitchen table, smoking a Merit, the smoke drifting from her nostrils. On the floor next to the table was her black satchel, the money useless, almost all of it stained red. A couple of feet away from the satchel was her fishing pole, and beside the pole was her box of family photos.
Who knows what she thought about during those moments? Surely she had to have realized that she was facing a long prison sentence. Maybe, if she was lucky, she would get a couple of hours a day in a prison yard where she could feel the sun against her face. Maybe, if she was lucky, she would be released before she died.
A few more minutes passed.
Finally, Peggy Jo went back to her bedroom, where a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow point bullets was hidden underneath a pillow. But she didn't touch that gun. Instead, she picked up a toy pistol that she also kept in the bedroom. She had bought it, apparently, to carry with her in case she ever needed to threaten a bank employee in a future robbery.
She walked to the door and opened it, her hands at her side. The police officers who had surrounded the RV could not believe what they were seeing: an unassuming woman in a wide-brimmed hat. A woman who was the age of their grandmothers.
"You're going to have to kill me," she said.
"Ma'am, you don't have to do this," replied one of the officers, a young man who would later be advised by his superiors to seek counseling for the guilt that would haunt him.
"You mean to tell me if I come out of here with a gun and point it at y'all, you're not going to shoot me?"
"Please don't. Please don't do that," yelled another officer.
But then she took a step out of the RV, and from the doorway her hand emerged, holding the toy pistol. Just as she began to lower it, four officers fired, the sound of the shots echoing off the surrounding houses and Peggy Jo's RV.
The bullets came at her all at once, hitting her at nearly the same time, and she didn't even stagger. She fell forward, like a stalk of celery being snapped.
Once she hit the ground, however, she somehow found the strength to pull off her sunglasses. For a moment, she lifted her head. That May morning, the light was like honey. A soft breeze blew across the yard. From somewhere came the sound of pigeons cooing. Peggy Jo looked up at the dense new foliage of a sweet gum tree that rose above her. Then she closed her eyes and died.
STILL ASSUMING that accomplices were in the RV, a police SWAT team shot tear gas canisters through the windows and stormed through the front door, stepping over her fishing pole and box of photos and turning toward the bedroom. They stared at the bed, still perfectly made up, and at a couple of glass dolphin sculptures on the windowsill. After the "all clear" was announced, one officer found a small baggie of marijuana and another officer found her purse, which contained $38 in cash and her driver's license. The FBI's Millslagle ran a records check and realized that the dead woman was none other than Cowboy Bob. He called Steve Powell at his ranch and left him a message, saying he had some bad news about his old nemesis.
Powell called back. "Say it ain't so," he said almost wistfully.
"Yeah, I'm afraid we killed Peggy Jo," Millslagle said.
For the FBI, of course, the biggest question was how many other banks had Peggy Jo robbed. Some agents wondered if she had tried a bank robbery or two back in the sixties, when she was a freewheeling young woman tooling around Dallas in her burgundy Fiat. Others wondered if she had begun her career in the seventies, when she had been caught stealing the pickup. It is not an uncommon practice, after all, for a bank robber to avoid detection by using a stolen car as a getaway vehicle and then later abandoning it. Still others wondered if she had returned to robbing banks soon after her release from prison. After studying the evidence from the October 2004 robbery at Guaranty Bank, Millslagle did conclude that Peggy Jo was the robber. But that only led to other questions. Why had she gone back to that bank? Was she imitating her heroes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who had once robbed the same train twice? And why didn't she dress as a man for that second Guaranty robbery? Why also did she decide to speak to the teller instead of handing the teller a note? Was she hoping that FBI agents would study the bank's surveillance tapes and realize she had returned?
Meanwhile, newspaper and television reporters once again hunted down Peggy Jo's relatives. But they stayed silent. "I didn't know what to tell them," said Pete, who's now retired and living in Plano. "I mean, none of it made the slightest bit of sense. Surely Peggy Jo had to know that if she was in some kind of financial jam again, we would have helped her out."
About thirty members of the Tallas family and a few of Peggy Jo's friends gathered at the Kaufman city cemetery for a private burial service. In an impromptu eulogy, Michelle told a story about Peggy Jo's adopting a wounded duck at the marina and naming it Bernice. One of Michelle's brothers read some Scripture and then said, "I am certain that in the few minutes leading up to her death, as she sat in her RV contemplating her fate, Peg was making peace with God."
There was a long silence. Michelle and Karen covered their faces with their hands and wept. "Okay, I guess we're done," said Pete, nodding at the undertaker, walking away before anyone could see the strain on his face.
Cherry Young, still living in Oklahoma, wasn't at the funeral. She didn't hear about Peggy Jo's death until August, when she called Pete to catch up. "There still isn't a night that goes by that I don't wake up and think about her," Cherry said. "Sometimes I can't get over the sadness that she's gone. But then I think about her walking out of that bank, sixty years old, that bag full of money, and I have to say that she went out doing what she loved. We'll never understand it, but she was doing exactly what she loved. I wish I could write her a note and say, 'Good for you, my sweet Peg. Good for you.'"
Shoot the Moon
by Susan Orlean
The New Yorker
March 22, 1993
White men in suits follow Felipe Lopez everywhere he goes. Felipe lives in Mott Haven, in the South Bronx. He is a junior at Rice High School, which is on the corner of 124th Street and Lenox Avenue, in Harlem, and he plays guard for the school basketball team, the Rice Raiders. The white men are ubiquitous. They rarely miss one of Felipe's games or tournaments. They have absolute recall of his best minutes of play. They are authorities on his physical condition. They admire his feet, which are big and pontoon-shaped, and his wrists, which have a loose, silky motion. Not long ago, I sat with the white men at a game between Rice and All Hallows High School. My halftime entertainment was listening to a debate between two of them -- a college scout and a Westchester contractor who is a high-school basketball fan -- about whether Felipe had grown a half inch over Christmas break. "I know this kid," the scout said as the second half started. "A half inch is not something I would miss." The white men believe that Felipe is the best high-school basketball player in the country. They often compare him to Michael Jordan, and are betting he will become one of the greatest basketball players to emerge from New York City since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. This conjecture provides them with suspended, savory excitement and a happy premonition. Following Felipe is like hanging around with someone you think is going to win the lottery someday.
At the moment, Felipe is six feet five. He would like to be six feet seven. His shoes are size 12. He buys his pants at big-and-tall-men stores. His ears, which are small and high-set, look exaggeratedly tiny, because he keeps his hair shaved close to his skull. He has blackish-brown eyes and a big, vivid tongue -- I know this only because his tongue sometimes sticks out when he is playing hard, and against his skin, which is very dark, it looks like a pink pennant. His voice is slurry; all his words have round edges. He is as skinny as a bean pole, and has long shins and thin forearms and sharp, chiselled knees. His hands are gigantic. Walking down the street, he gets a lot of looks because of his height, but he is certainly not a horse of a kid -- not one of those man-size boys who fleshed out in fifth grade and whose adult forms are in place by the time they're thirteen. He is all outline: he doesn't look like a stretched-out average-size person -- he looks like a sketch of a huge person which hasn't yet been colored in.
On the court, Felipe's body seems unusually well organized. His movements are quick and liquid. I have seen him sail horizontally through thin air. High-school players are often rough and lumbering, and they mostly shoot flat-footed, but Felipe has an elegant, buoyant game. He floats around the edge of the court and then springs on the ball and sprints away. When he moves toward the basket, it looks as if he were speed-skating, and then, suddenly, he rises in the air, lingers, and shoots. His shot is smooth and lovely, with a loopy arc. Currently, he averages twenty-six points and nine rebounds per game, and he is within striking distance of the all-time high-school scoring record for New York State. He has great court vision, soft hands, a brisk three-point shot, and the speed to take the ball inside and low. He is usually the fastest man in the fast break. He can handle the ball like a point guard, and he beats bigger players defensively, because of his swiftness and his body control. When he is not on a court, though, the way he walks is complicated and sloppy. He seems to walk this way on purpose, to make light of his size and disguise his grace.
Before I met Felipe, people told me I would find him cuddly. Everything I knew about him -- that he is a boy, that he is a teenage boy, that he is a six-foot-five teenage-boy jock -- made this pretty hard to believe, but it turns out to be true. He is actually the sweetest person I know. At some point during our time together, it occurred to me that he could be a great basketball hustler, because he seems naive and eager -- the ideal personality for attracting competitive big shots on the basketball court. It happens that he is not the least bit of a hustler. But he is also not nearly as naive and eager as he appears. He once told me that he likes to make people think of him as a clown, because then they will never accuse him of being a snob. He also said that he likes to be friendly to everyone, so that no one will realize he's figuring out whom he can trust.
Felipe spoke no English at all when he moved to New York from the Dominican Republic, four years ago, but he quickly picked up certain phrases, including "crash the boards," "he's bugging out," "get the hell out of the paint," and "oh, my goodness." Now he speaks English comfortably, with a rich Dominican accent -- the words tumble and click together, like stones being tossed in a polisher. "Oh, my goodness" remains his favorite phrase. It is a utility expression that reveals his modesty, his manners, his ingenuousness, and his usual state of mind, which is one of pleasant and guileless surprise at the remarkable nature of his life. I have heard him use it to comment on the expectation that he will someday be a rich and famous player in the N.B.A., and on the fact that he was recently offered half a million dollars by people from Spain to put aside his homework and come play in their league, and on the fact that he is already considered a seminal national export by citizens of the Dominican Republic, who are counting on him to be the first Dominican in the N.B.A., and on the fact that he is growing so fast that he once failed to recognize his own pants. Sometimes he will use the phrase in circumstances where his teammates and friends might be inclined to say something more dynamic. One night this winter, I was sitting around at school with Felipe and his teammates, watching a videotape of old Michael Jordan highlights. The tape had been edited for maximum excitement, and most of the boys on the team were responding with more and more baroque constructions of foul language. At one point, Jordan was shown leaping past the Celtics center Robert Parish, and someone said, "Yo, feature that, bro! He's busting the Chief's face."
"Busting his fucking face," another one said.
"Busting his goddam big-ass face."
"He's got it going on. Now Jordan's going to bust his foul-loving big-ass mama's-boy dope black ass."
On the tape, Jordan slammed the ball through the hoop and Parish crumpled to the floor. While the other boys were applauding and swearing, Felipe moved closer to the television and then said, admiringly, "Oh, my goodness."
Felipe's life is unusually well populated. He is very close to his family. He is named Luis Felipe, after his father. His older brother Anthony is one of the managers of the Rice High School team. Anthony is a square-shouldered, avid man of twenty-five who played amateur basketball in the Dominican Republic and in New York until his ankle was badly injured in a car accident. Until last month, when he was laid off, he worked at a Manhattan printshop and had a boss who appreciated basketball and tolerated the time Anthony spent with the team. Anthony is rarely away from Felipe's side, and when he is there he is usually peppering him with directions and commentary in a hybrid of Spanish and English: "Felipe, mal, muy mal! Como estas you go so aggressive to a lay-up?" A couple of times a month, Anthony makes the rounds of Felipe's teachers to see if his B average is holding up. "If he's not doing well, then I go back and let my people know," Anthony says. "It's nice, it's beautiful to be a superstar, but if he doesn't work hard he doesn't play." Once, Felipe's father forbade him to travel to a tournament, because he had neglected to wash the dishes. This made Felipe cry, but in hindsight he is philosophical about it. "He was right," he says. "I didn't do my dishes." Felipe is also close to Lou DeMello, his coach at Rice, and to Dave Jones, his coach with the Gauchos, a basketball organization in the Bronx which he plays for during the summer, and to Louis d'Almeida, the founder of the Gauchos. Felipe says he sometimes gets basketball advice from his mother, Carmen, and from Maura Beattie, a teacher at Rice who tutors him in English. Neither of them plays. "You know what, though?" Felipe says. "They know something." His primary hobby is sleeping, but his other pastime is talking on the phone for hours to his girlfriend, who is an American, a resident of Brooklyn, and a basketball fan.
Sometimes his life seems overpopulated. He has so far received four crates of letters from college coaches and recruiters pitching woo at him. Some make seductive mention of the large seating capacities of their arenas. Basketball-camp directors call regularly, saying that they would like Felipe Lopez to be in attendance. Officials of Puerto Rico's summer basketball league have requested the honor of his presence this summer. There are corporate marketing executives who would very much like to be his friends. Not everyone crowding into his life wishes him well. There are people who might wittingly or unwittingly mislead him. Felipe has been warned by his father, for example, never to have sex without a condom, because some girls who pretend to like him might really have appraised him as a lucrative paternity suit. Last year, Felipe and another player were invited to appear in a Nintendo television commercial, and the commercial nearly cost them their college athletic eligibility, because no one had warned them that accepting money for a commercial was against N. C.A. A. regulations. There are people who are jealous of Felipe. There are coaches whose hearts he has broken, because they're not at one of the colleges Felipe is interested in -- Florida State, Syracuse, St. John's, Seton Hall, North Carolina, Georgia Tech, U. C.L. A., Indiana, Arizona, Ohio State, and Kansas. There are coaches who put aside all other strategy except Keep Felipe Lopez Away from the Ball. Some opponents will go out of their way to play him hard. There are kids on his own team who have bitter moments about Felipe. And there are contrarians, who would like to get in early on a backlash and look clairvoyant and hype-resistant by declaring him, at only eighteen and only a junior in high school, already overrated. His response to all this is to be nice to everyone. I have never seen him angry, or even peeved, but when he isn't playing well his entire body droops and he looks completely downcast. It is an alarming sight, because he looks so hollowed out anyway.
"Wait till this kid gets a body," Coach DeMello likes to say. During practice, DeMello will sometimes jump up and down in front of Felipe and yell, "Felipe! Make yourself big!" The best insult I ever heard DeMello hurl at Felipe was during a practice one afternoon when Felipe was playing lazily. DeMello strode onto the court, looked up at Felipe, and said acidly, "You're six-five, but you're trapping like you're five-eleven." Anthony Lopez can hardly wait until Felipe gets a body, so sometimes during the off-season he will take him to the steep stairway at the 155th Street subway station, in the Bronx, and make him run up and down the hundred and thirty steps a few times to try to speed the process along. Felipe is less than crazy about this exercise, although he appreciates the advantages that more bulk might give him: "When I first came here, I could tell the guys were looking at me and thinking, Who is this skinny kid? Then they would say, 'Hey, let's' -- excuse my language -- 'bust his ass.' "
Felipe's body is an unfinished piece of work. It gets people thinking. Tom Konchalski, a basketball scout who follows high schools in the Northeast, suggested recently that if Felipe ever wanted to give up basketball he could be a world-class sprinter. Coach DeMello said to me once that, much as he hated to admit it, he thought Felipe had the perfect pitcher's body. Felipe's mother told me that even though Felipe is now a fast-break expert, she thought he should sharpen his ability to penetrate to the basket and go for the big finish -- say, a windmill slam dunk. I once asked her whose style of play she wanted Felipe to emulate, and she pointed to a picture of Michael Jordan and said, in Spanish, "If he would eat more, he could be like the man who jumps."
Felipe's father, who played amateur baseball in the Dominican Republic, thought he saw in his son the outlines of a first baseman, and steered Felipe toward baseball when he was little. But Felipe was hit in the nose by a wild throw, and decided that, in spite of its popularity in the Dominican Republic and the success Dominican ballplayers have had in the United States, baseball was not his game. Maura Beattie, his English tutor, is an excellent tennis player, and one day, just for fun, she took Felipe with her to the courts. She was curious to see if someone with Felipe's build and abilities could master a racquet sport. He beat her. It was the first time he'd held a tennis racquet in his life. Another time, the two of them went to play miniature golf in Rockaway, and Felipe, who had never held a putter before, made a hole in one. Some of this prowess can be attributed to tremendous physical coordination and the biomechanical advantages of being tall and thin and limber. Felipe Lopez is certainly a born athlete. But he may also be one of those rarer cases -- a person who is just born lucky, whose whole life seems an effortless conveyance of dreams, and to whom other people's dreams adhere. This aura of fortune is so powerful that it is easy to forget that for the time being, and for a while longer, Felipe Lopez is still just an immigrant teenager who lives in a scary neighborhood in the South Bronx and goes to high school in Harlem, where bad things happen every day.
Currently, there are five hundred and eighteen thousand male high-school basketball players in the United States. Of these, only nineteen thousand will end up on college teams -- not even four per cent. Less than one per cent will play for Division One colleges -- the most competitive. The present N.B.A. roster has three hundred and sixty-seven players, and each year only forty or fifty new players are drafted. What these numbers forebode is disappointment for many high-school basketball players. That disappointment is disproportionate among black teenagers. A recent survey of high-school students by Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society reported that fifty-nine per cent of black teenage athletes thought they would continue to play on a college team, compared with thirty-nine per cent of white teen-agers. Only sixteen per cent of the white athletes expected that they would play for the pros; forty-three per cent of the blacks expected that they would, and nearly half of all the kids said they thought it would be easier for black males to become professional basketball players than to become lawyers or doctors. Scouts have told me that everyone on the Rice team will probably be able to get a free college education by playing basketball, and so far all the players have received recruiting letters from several schools. The scouts have also said that it will require uncommonly hard work for any of the boys on the team other than Felipe to ascend to the N.B.A.
Every so often, scouts' forecasts are wrong. Some phenomenal high-school players get injured or lazy or fat or drug-addled or bored, or simply level off and then vanish from the sport, and, by the same token, a player of no particular reputation will once in a while emerge from out of nowhere and succeed. That was the case with the N.B.A. all-stars Karl Malone and Charles Barkley, who both played through high school in obscurity; but most other N.B.A. players were standouts starting in their early teens. Most people who follow high-school basketball teams that are filled with kids from poor families and rough neighborhoods encourage the kids to put basketball in perspective, to view it not as a catapult into some fabulous, famous life but as something practical -- a way to get out, to get an education, to learn the way around a different, better world. The simple fact that only one in a million people in this country will ever play for the N.B.A. is often pointed out to the kids, but that still doesn't seem to stop them from dreaming.
Being told that you might be that one person in a million would deform many people's characters, but it has not made Felipe cynical or overly interested in himself. In fact, his blitheness can be almost unnerving. One evening when we were together, I watched him walk past a drug deal on 125th Street and step off the curb into traffic, and then he whiled away an hour in a fast-food restaurant where several ragged, hostile people repeatedly pestered him for change. He hates getting hurt on the court, but out in the world he is not very careful with himself. When you are around him, you can't help feeling that he is a boy whose body is a savings account, and it is one that is uninsured. But being around him is also to be transported by his nonchalant confidence about luck -- namely, that it happens because it happens, and that it will happen for Felipe, because things are meant to go his way. This winter, he and the Rice Raiders were in Las Vegas playing in a tournament. One evening, a few of them went into a casino and attached themselves to the slot machines. Felipe's first quarter won him a hundred quarters. Everyone told him to stop while he was ahead, but he continued. "I wanted to play," he says. "I thought, I had nothing before I started, now I have something, so I might as well play. So I put some more quarters in, and -- oh, my goodness! -- I won twelve hundred more quarters. What can I say?"
At three o'clock one afternoon this winter, I went over to the high school to watch Felipe and the Rice team practice. I hadn't met Felipe before that afternoon, but I had heard a lot about him from friends who follow high-school basketball. As it happens, Felipe's reputation often precedes him. Before he moved to this country, he was living in Santiago, in the Dominican Republic. The Lopez family had been leaving the Dominican Republic in installments for thirty years. A grandmother had moved to New York in the sixties, followed by Felipe's father in 1982, and then, in 1986, by his mother and Anthony. For three years, Felipe stayed in the Dominican Republic with another older brother, Anderson, and his sister, Sayonara. At age eight, he started playing basketball in provincial leagues, sometimes being bumped up to older age groups because he was so good. He already had a following. "I would hear from a lot of Dominicans about how good he was getting," Anthony says now. "It made me curious. When I left him in the Dominican Republic, he was just a little kid who I would boss around. He was my -- you know, my delivery guy." When more visas were obtained, in 1989, Felipe and Sayonara moved to New York. Anthony took Felipe to a playground near the family's apartment and challenged him one-on-one, decided that the rumors were true, and then took him to try out for the Gauchos. Lou d'Almeida says that people were already talking about Felipe by then. Many high-school coaches had intelligence on Felipe by the time he started school. Lou DeMello first saw him in a citywide tournament for junior-high players. Felipe was in the Midget Division. "He looked like a man among boys," DeMello says now. "If I could have, I would have taken him then and started him then on the Rice varsity. I swear to God. At the time, he was in eighth grade."
Rice High School is a small all-boys Catholic school, which was founded in 1938 and is run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. It is the only Catholic high school still open in Harlem. Currently, it has about four hundred students. Tuition is two thousand dollars a year, which many of the students can afford only with the help of scholarship money from private sponsors, including some basketball fans. At school, students have to wear a tie, real trousers, and real shoes, not sneakers. There is also a prohibition against beepers. The school is in a chunky brick building with a tiny, blind entrance on 124th Street, close to some Chinese luncheonettes, some crack dealers, and some windswept vacant tenements. A lot of unregulated commerce is conducted on the sidewalks nearby, and last year a business dispute in an alley across from the school was resolved with semi-automatic weapons, but the building itself emanates gravity and calm. Inside, it is frayed but sturdy and pleasant. There is an elevator, but it often isn't working; the gym, which occupies most of the top two floors of the school, is essentially a sixth-floor walkup. The basketball court is only fifty-five feet long instead of the usual ninety-four, and the walls are less than a foot away from the sidelines. It would qualify as regulation-size in Lilliput. Rice has to play its games in a borrowed gym -- usually the Gauchos' facility, in the Bronx.
At the time Coach DeMello first heard about Felipe Lopez, the Rice Raiders had a win-loss record of eight and thirteen, tattered ten-year-old uniforms, and an inferiority complex. Catholic League basketball in New York City is a particularly bad place for any of these. Since the early eighties, the Catholic schools in New York have had ferocious rivalries, fancy shoes and uniforms from friendly sporting-goods companies, and most of the best players in the city. College teams and the N.B.A. are loaded with New York City Catholic League alumni: Jamal Mashburn, now at Kentucky, attended Cardinal Hayes; the Nets' Kenny Anderson and the Houston Rockets' Kenny Smith went to Archbishop Molloy; the Pacers' Malik Sealy, Syracuse's Adrian Autry, and North Carolina's Brian Reese all went to St. Nicholas of Tolentine; the Pistons' Olden Polynice attended All Hallows; Chris Mullin, of Golden State, went to Xaverian; Mark Jackson, now of the Clippers, went to Bishop Loughlin. Rice had won the city Catholic-school championship in 1966 and proceeded to become steadily undistinguished over the next few decades. Four years ago, Lou DeMello took over as head coach. First, he persuaded Nike -- and later Reebok and Converse -- to donate shoes and uniforms to the team. Then he started scouting Midget Division players who might have a future at Rice. The Gaucho coaches have a cordial relationship with DeMello and began pointing players like Felipe his way. Last year, the Rice Raiders reached the finals of the city championship. This year, they are ranked in the top twenty high schools nationally -- the first time they have been ranked there for twenty-seven years.
Coach DeMello is short and trim, and has bright eyes and a big mustache and an air of uncommon intensity, like someone who is just about to sneeze. His usual attire consists of nylon warmup suits that are very generously sized. The first time I saw him in street clothes, he looked as if someone had let his air out. He speaks with a New York accent, but in fact he was born in Brazil, and played soccer there. His motivational specialty is the crisp reprobation wrapped around a sweet hint of redemptive possibility -- stick before carrot. When addressing the team, he is prone to mantra-like repetitions of his maxims, as in "Listen up. Listen up. I want you to go with your body. Go with your body. Go with your body. I want you to keep your foot in the paint. Your foot in the paint. Your foot in the paint. In the paint. And put the ball on the floor. The ball on the floor. On the floor."
This particular afternoon, Coach DeMello was especially hypnotic. The team was getting ready for its first out-of-town tournament of the year, the Charm City/Big Apple Challenge, in Baltimore, which would be played in the Baltimore Arena and televised on a cable channel. The Raiders would be facing Baltimore Southern High School, one of the best teams in the area. When I arrived at the Rice gym, the Raiders had been scrimmaging for an hour. Now, during a break, Coach DeMello was chanting strategy. "You guys are ina funk," he said. Someone dropped the ball, and it made an elastic poing! sound and rolled to the wall. "Gerald, hold the ball," DeMello went on. He clasped his hands behind his back. "Hold the ball. O.K. You guys are in a funk. You got to get your head in the game. Your head in the game. We're going up against a serious team in Baltimore. They do a hell of a job on help. A hell of a job. A. Hell. Of. A. Job. We need leaders on the floor. Leaders on the floor. All we want to do is contain. Contain. Contain. So you better hit the boards. Hit the boards. The boards."
Everyone nodded. The Rice Raiders are Felipe, Reggie Freeman, Yves Jean, Gerald Cox, Melvin McKey, Scientific Mapp, Gary Saunders, Gil Eagan, Kojo Lockhart, Rodney Jones, Robert Johnson, and Jamal Livingston. Melvin, the point guard, is usually called Ziggy. Jamal, the center, is known as Stretch. Gerald, who also plays center, is known as G-Money. Scientific, the reserve point guard, is known as Science. All of them are known, familiarly, as B, which is short for "bro," which is short for "brother." During practice, they are solemn and focussed. During a game, they are ardent and intense, as if their lives depended on it. Before and after each game, they stand in a circle, make a stack of their right hands, and shout, "One, two, three, Rice! Four, five, six, family!"
Most of the Raiders live in the Bronx or upper Manhattan. Once, after a game, I rode in the van with an assistant coach as he dropped the team members off at their homes. A few of them lived in plain, solid-looking housing projects and some in walkups that, at least from the outside, looked bleak. No one lived in a very nice building. Some of the kids have families that come to all their games and monitor their schoolwork; some have families that have fallen apart. Six of the twelve live with only their mothers. Ziggy lives with his uncle, and the five others have a mother and a father at home. Each of them has at least one person somewhere in his life who arranges to send him to attend a disciplined and serious-minded parochial school. Sometimes it's not a parent; the Gauchos, for instance, send a number of basketball players to school. The coaches and teachers I met at Rice are white. Most of the teachers are Catholic brothers. The basketball team is all black, and none of its members are Catholic, although Gary told me once that he was thinking of converting, because "being Catholic seems like a pretty cool thing." There is currently a debate in the Catholic Church about financing schools that used to have Catholic students from the surrounding parish but are now largely black and non-Catholic, their purpose having shifted, along with neighborhood demographics, from one of service to the Church to one of contribution to the inner city. The debate may also have a flip side. I had heard that for a time one player's father, a devout Muslim, was unhappy that his son was being coached by a white man. But Coach DeMello resisted being drawn into an argument about something no one on the team ever paid attention to, and the crisis eventually passed. I didn't think of race very often while I spent time with the team. I thought more about winning and losing, and about how your life could be transformed from one to the other if you happened to be good at a game.
The seniors on the team are Yves Jean, Gerald Cox, and Reggie Freeman. Yves has signed a letter of intent to go to Pitt-Johnstown, which is a Division Two school; Gerald and Reggie are going to the University of South Carolina and the University of Texas, respectively, which are both in Division One. Yves grew up in Lake Placid. He was more fluent in ice fishing than in basketball when he moved to New York, but he is big and strong and has learned the game well enough, even as a second language. Usually, he looks pleasantly amazed when he makes a successful play. Gerald and Reggie are handsome, graceful players who would have been bigger stars this year if it weren't for Felipe. Gerald is dimpled and droll and flirtatious. Reggie has a long, smooth poker face and consummate cool. At times, he looks rigid with submerged disappointment. I remember Coach DeMello's telling me that when Reggie was a sophomore he was waiting patiently for Jerry McCullough, then the senior star, to leave for college, so that at last he would be the team's main man. Then Felipe came. Reggie and Felipe now have a polite rapport that fits together like latticework over their rivalry.
The team is a changeable entity. Some of the kids have bounced on and off the squad because of their grades. One of the players has had recurring legal problems. The girlfriend of another one had a baby last year, and because of that he missed so much school that for some time he wasn't allowed to play on the team. When I first started hanging around with the Raiders, Rodney Jones wasn't on the roster, having had discipline problems and some academic troubles. Sometimes the boys get sick of each other. They practice together almost every day for several hours; they travel together to games and tournaments, which can sometimes last as long as two weeks; and they see each other all day in classrooms, at the Gaucho gym, and on the street. Usually, they have an easy camaraderie. During the other times, as soon as they are done with practice they quickly head their own ways.
"Are you guys listening to me? Are you listening?" DeMello was saying. He was now joined by Bobby Gonzalez, an assistant coach, who was nodding and murmuring "Uh-huh" after everything he said. Gonzalez handed DeMello a basketball. DeMello curled it to his left side, and then held his right hand up, one finger in the air, as if he were checking wind direction. "One more thing. One more thing. If there's one player you guys want to be looking up to right now, I'll tell you who it is."
"Uh-huh," Bobby Gonzalez said.
"That guy is Reggie Freeman. Reggie Freeman." No expression crossed Reggie's face. Felipe, who was standing on the other side of the circle, flexed his neck, rotated his shoulders, and then stood still, a peaceful expression on his face. "Reggie is the most unselfish player here. He is the most unselfish. I want you to remember that. He's grown a lot. That's who you should be looking at. O.K."
"Uh-huh."
DeMello bounced the ball hard, signalling the end of practice. The boys circled and counted: "One, two, three, Rice! Four, five, six, family!" They straggled out of the gym, talking in small groups.
"I never been to Baltimore."
"Let me ask you something. You think Larry Bird's a millionaire?"
"Larry Bird? I don't know. A millionaire. Magic's a millionaire."
"Magic's a millionaire, and he didn't have fifty-nine cents to buy himself a little hat and now he's going to die. The man's stupid."
"I don't know if Larry Bird's a millionaire. I do know he's never been to Harlem, and he's never done the Electric Slide."
Felipe on his development as a player:
"Back in my country, I was just a little guy. I tried to dunk, but I couldn't. I tried and I tried. Then, one day, I dunked. Oh, my goodness. Three months later, I was dunking everything, every way -- with two hands, backwards, backwards with two hands. I can do a three-sixty dunk. It's easy. You know, you jump up backwards with the ball and then spin around while you're in the air -- and pow! I'm working all the time on my game. If Coach DeMello says he wants me to work on my ball handling, then I just work at it, work at it, work at it, until it's right. In basketball, you always are working, even on the things you already know.
"When I come to this country, I was real quiet, because I didn't speak any English, so all I did was dunk. On the court, playing, I had to learn the words for the plays, but you don't have to talk, so I was O.K. My coach used his hands to tell me what to do, and then I learned the English words for it. There aren't too many Spanish kids at school. I know a lot of kids, though. I meet kids from all over the country at tournaments and at summer camps. If you do something good, then you start meeting people, even if you don't want to. Sometimes it's bouncing in my head that people are talking about me, saying good things, and that some people are talking about me and saying bad things, saying, like, 'Oh, he thinks he's all that,' but that's life. That's life. I don't like when it's bouncing in my head, but I just do what I'm supposed to do. I'm quick. I broke the record for the fifty-yard dash when I was in junior high school -- I did it in five point two seconds, when the record was five point five seconds. I also got the long-jump record. It feels natural when I do these things. In basketball, I like to handle the ball and make the decisions. I can play the big people, because of my quickness. But I got to concentrate or the ball will go away from me. At basketball camp, I'm always the craziest guy -- people always are walking around saying, 'Hey, who's that Dominican clown?' But on the court I don't do any fooling around. I got to show what I got.
"In life, I don't worry about myself. My brother will run defense for me. I got my family. Some kids here, I see them do drugs, messing around, wasting everything, and I see the druggies out on the street, and I just, I don't know, I don't understand it. That's not for me. I got a close family, and I got to think about my family, and if I can do something that will be good for my whole family, then I got to do it. I think about my country a lot -- I want to go there so bad. In Santiago, everyone knows about me and wants to see me play now. If I'm successful, the way everyone talks about that, I'd like a big house there in Santiago, where I could go for a month or two each year and just relax."
After practice, Felipe and I walked down 125th Street in a cold rain. First, he bought new headphones for his tape player from a Ghanaian street peddler, and then we stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat a pre-dinner dinner before heading home. He was dressed in his school clothes -- a multicolored striped shirt, a purple-and-blue flowered tie, and pleated, topstitched baggy black cotton pants -- and had on a Negro League baseball cap, which he was wearing sideways and at a jaunty angle. In his book bag were some new black Reebok pump basketball shoes; everyone on the team had been given a pair for the Baltimore tournament. Felipe was in a relaxed mood. He has travelled to and played in big tournaments so often that he now takes them in stride. He has become something of a tournament connoisseur. One of his favorite places in the world is southern France, where he played last spring with the Gauchos. He liked the weather and the countryside and the fact that by the end of the tour French villagers were crowding into the gyms and chanting his name. This particular evening, he was also feeling pleased that he had finished most of the homework he needed to do before leaving for Baltimore, which consisted of writing an essay for American history on Brown v. Board of Education and the Fifteenth Amendment, preparing an annotated periodic table of the elements, and writing two poems for his Spanish class.
One of his poems was called "Los Dientes de Mi Abuela," which translates as "The Teeth of My Grandmother." Sitting in Kentucky Fried Chicken, he read it to me: " 'Conservando la naturaleza se ve en aquella mesa los dientes de mi abuela, que los tenia guardados para Navidad.'" He looked up from his notebook and gestured with a chicken wing. "This is about an old grandmother who is saving her special teeth for Christmas. In my country, it's funny, old people will go around without their teeth. So in the poem the grandmother is saving the teeth for Christmas, when she'll be eating a big dinner. The teeth are brilliant and shiny. Then she gets impatient and uses them to eat a turkey at Thanksgiving -- 'GRRRT . . . suena la mordida de la abuela al pavo.' " The other poem Felipe had written was about a man about to enter prison or some other gloomy passage in his life. It is called "La Primera y 'Ultima Vez . . ." As he began reading it, an argument broke out in front of the restaurant between a middle-aged woman in a cream-colored suit and two little boys who were there on their own. First, the boys were just sassy, and then they began yelling that the woman was a crack addict. She balled up a napkin and threw it at them, shouting, "Why don't you respect your elders? What are you doing out at night all alone? Why don't you get your asses home and watch television or read a fucking book?" Felipe kept reciting his poem, raising his voice over the commotion. When he finished, he said, "It's a sadder poem than the one about the grandmother. I like writing poems. In school, I like to write if it's in Spanish, and I like to draw, and I like math. I'm good at math. I like numbers. How do I write the poems? I don't know how. They just come to me."
Done with dinner, we went back out onto 125th Street and caught a cab up to Felipe's apartment. The apartment was in a brick walkup, on a block with half a playground, a bodega, some unclaimed auto parts, and the depopulated stillness of urban decay. Walking up the four flights to the apartment, we passed an unchaperoned German shepherd napping in the vestibule, a stack of discarded Chinese menus, and someone's garbage, which had toppled over in a doorway. Felipe took the stairs three at a time. He used to dribble up and down the staircase until the neighbors complained that it was driving them crazy. For that reason and many others, the Lopezes were looking forward to moving as soon as they possibly could. Ironically, Felipe has been discouraged from playing in Puerto Rico this summer, on the ground that the basketball league there has a reputation for attracting prostitutes and drug use, when the fact is that spending the summer in Puerto Rico would help him get out of a neighborhood that attracts prostitutes and drug use.
One reason I decided to go home with Felipe was that I thought it might reveal something I hadn't yet seen in him -- impatience or embarrassment at living a very humble life when he has been assured that such a rich and celebrated one is virtually in his grasp. That turned out to be not at all the case. In fact, Felipe loves to have people come over to his apartment. That night, he had invited Coach DeMello and his tutor, Maura Beattie, to drop by. When we arrived, they were already there. So were Mrs. Lopez; Felipe's brother Anderson, who moved to this country last year; Anderson's girlfriend, Nancy; Anthony; and Felipe's father. Felipe's sister, Sayonara, was expected as soon as she was through with a meeting at church. The Lopezes are an exceptionally good-looking and unusually large-scale family. Felipe's father, a construction laborer, is broad-chested, dignified, and well over six feet tall. His mother, Carmen, who works in the Garment District, is leggy and vigorous. She competed in track and volleyball as a girl in the Dominican Republic. That night, she was wearing a long flowered dress and black Reeboks. In the Dominican Republic, the Lopezes had a middle-class life. In this country, that life did not change so much as compress. All its hallmarks -- Luis's exacting discipline, Carmen's piety, the children's sense of honor and obligation -- came over intact, and then intensified in contrast to the disorder of the neighborhood they found themselves in.
The Lopez apartment was a warren of tiny dark rooms. One wall in the living room was covered with plaques Felipe had won -- among them the Parade All-American High School Boys Award, the Five-Star Basketball Camp Most Promising Player, and the Ben Wilson Memorial Award for Most Valuable Player at ABCD Basketball Camp -- and one corner of the room was filled by an old broken television set with what looked like a hundred basketball trophies on top. There was also a new television set, a videocassette recorder, a shelving unit, a huge sofa, a huge easy chair, a huge coffee table, some pretty folk-craft decorations from the Dominican Republic, some occasional tables, big billowy curtains, several floor lamps, and a life-size freestanding cardboard cutout of Michael Jordan. It was an exuberant-looking place. It was also possibly the most crowded place I'd ever been in. The television was tuned to a Spanish soap opera when we walked in, and Maura Beattie and Coach DeMello, were sitting beside it, ignoring the show and eating pizza. The Michael Jordan cutout was propped up behind DeMello, blocking the back door. Anderson and Nancy were squeezed together on the couch, looking at one of Felipe's scrapbooks, and Anthony was pacing around the room and talking to his father, who was reclined in the easy chair. Felipe said hello to his mother and they chatted for a minute in Spanish, and then she led him to a seat at the kitchen table and set a stockpot in front of him that was filled with chicken stew. There seemed to be a lot of people coming and going, and the conversation perked along:
DeMello: "I'll never forget when Anthony brought Felipe to Rice. He couldn't speak a word of English. I thought, How on earth is this kid going to take the entrance exams? Maura, do you remember that?"
Ms. Beattie: "I'm a math teacher. I'm not an English tutor. But I figured this would be something interesting to do. I didn't want the Lopezes to realize I wasn't really a tutor."
Anthony, walking through the kitchen: "Felipe, are you ready for tomorrow? You got your books with you? You planning to play?"
Nancy, translating for Carmen Lopez: "She says Felipe would rather play than eat. Otherwise, he don't give her no torment."
DeMello: "You should see the tape of the commercial Felipe and Robert Johnson did for Nintendo. They had a lot of fun, a lot of fun. Someone gave them bad advice, though, and it almost cost Felipe his eligibility. He turned down the money, and the commercial has to stop playing when he gets into college."
Ms. Beattie: "You want more pizza? Should we get more pizza? Felipe, would you eat more? He doesn't eat. I don't think he eats."
Nancy: "Would you look at this, all these trophies! Felipe, you got all these trophies?"
Anderson, to Nancy: "One of those is mine. Yeah, really. Nancy, look in the middle of the table and you'll find mine."
Anthony: "Everything everybody tells you is so beautiful -- you know, be on TV, score thirty points, be the M.V.P., have the fame, all right -- but you got to pay attention. There are a lot of rules. The N.C.A.A. rule is that no coaches can talk to him while he's a junior. They're willing, they're dying to talk to him, but that's not going to happen. When he's ready, we'll meet and talk and see. I had these dreams to be a great player, and I had my ankle broken, so it was all over for me. Felipe is my chance to see it happen for someone in my family, but it's going to happen the right way."
Felipe, coming in from the kitchen with Sayonara, just back from church: "Mommy, hey, Mommy, didn't I grow all these inches over here? One day, remember, I went to my closet and found these little pants and I said, 'Mommy, whose pants are these?' They were only this big -- just little short pants -- and she said, 'Felipe, those are your pants!' I couldn't believe it! I couldn't believe I ever wore those pants! I just looked at them and thought, Oh, my goodness."
DeMello: "Hey, Felipe, are you ready for tomorrow? Because anyone who isn't ready with their homework done, Brother is going to hear about it, and we're not going to be going to any other tournaments. Are you ready?"
Felipe: "DeMello, I got one thing I got to do tomorrow. I got to type my essay."
Sayonara: "Felipe, I think you're better at basketball than at typing."
Nancy, translating for Carmen Lopez: "She says he has to do the essay. She says they're so proud of him, and with the help of God he'll go to the top, he'll be a great dunker. That's what she imagines for him in five years. For now, though, they don't soup him up. He has to do right. They still walk to Felipe -- they're not running."
We drove to Baltimore the next night in a car rented by the tournament sponsors and a beat-up van used by the school. The tournament sponsors were also providing rooms for the whole team in a posh hotel downtown. The following day, after breakfast, the Raiders went for a pregame practice. The Baltimore Arena is big and windy, and it had a depressing effect on the team. They ran some bumbling fast-break drills and then had shooting practice for forty-five minutes, banging the balls against the rim. The clanking sound floated up and away into the empty stands. Coach DeMello called them together toward the end of practice. "I don't know where you guys are," he said. "I don't know where you are. You got to get your heads here by tonight. By. Tonight. This team, this team is going to give us something. They've got No. 53, he's a beef, he's six-five. Six. Five. And there's a fast point guard. He looks really young, he's probably a sophomore, but he does a hell of a job on help. They don't gamble. They get a lot of shots off. They help and recover." Pause. "Help and recover. Help and recover. And, Felipe, I saw you start to drop your head because you missed some shots. I don't want to see that. I want to see you lift your head and go on. All right, let's head out. I want everybody to relax and be dressed and in my room at 6 p. m., understand? Understand? O.K. O.K."
The arena is near Inner Harbor, a fancy shopping development in downtown Baltimore, so everybody walked over there to get some pizza and kill time. Twelve tall black boys, wearing bright yellow-and-green warmups, the pants hanging low and almost sliding off their hips, made for a sight that was probably not usual at Inner Harbor. Shoppers were executing pick-and-rolls to avoid them. In the mall, there were dozens of nice stores open, but the boys seemed reluctant to go into them. We ended up in a sporting-goods shop that specialized in clothes and accessories with college- and professional-team logos. Felipe disappeared down one of the rows. Kojo posted up in front of a rack of jackets, took two down, looked at the price tags, and then put them back. Reggie and Gerald found hats featuring their future colleges. "Yo, I like this one," Gerald said. "It's fly, but what I really want is a fitted Carolina hat. They only have the unfitted kind."
Reggie glanced at him and then said, "Why don't you wait till you get to Carolina, man? They going to have everything you want, man, just wait."
"I don't want to wait." Gerald put on an unfitted hat -- the kind with an adjustable strap across the back -- and flipped the brim back. Gary Saunders came over and looked at him. Gary is a sophomore. An air of peace or woe seems to form a bumper around him. Some people think he will eventually be as good as Felipe, or even better. He pulled Gerald's brim and then rocked back on his heels and said, sadly, "I wish I had a hat head. I can't wear a hat. I look dumb in a hat." Felipe walked by, wearing three hats, with each brim pointing in a different direction. He was smiling like a madman. He admired himself in the mirror and then took the hats off. "I've had enough," he said to no one in particular. "Now I'm going to my room."
Some things at the tournament did not bode well. For instance, the program listed the team as "Rice, Bronx, N. Y." instead of placing the school in Manhattan. Also, Jamal Livingston had decided to shave his head during the afternoon, and the razor broke after he had finished only one hemisphere. The resulting raggedy hairdo made him look like a crazy person. He was so unhappy about it that he told Coach DeMello he wouldn't play, but Science finally persuaded him, saying, "Stretch, you look cool, man. You're down with the heavy-metal crowd now." The Raiders got their first look at the Southern players as they warmed up. They were big kids, and they looked meaty, heavy-footed, and mean. Damon Cason, the point guard DeMello had warned the Raiders about, had powerful shoulders and a taut body and a merciless look on his face. Beside him, Felipe looked wispy and hipless. Warming up, he was silent and unsmiling. The fans were loud and found much to amuse them. When Jamal stepped onto the court, they began chanting "Haircut! Haircut! Haircut!" and then switched to a chant of "Rice-A-Roni!" and then back to "Haircut!" every time Jamal took a shot.
The game begins, and in the opening moments I focus only on Felipe. Rice wins the tap, but Southern scores nine quick points and looks ready to score more. Three Southern players are guarding Felipe. They struggle after him on the fast breaks, but he slips by and, still skimming along, makes a driving lay-up from the right. Then a fast-break lay-up, off a snappy pass from Ziggy. Then, thirty-two seconds later, a driving lay-up from the left side. The guards are looking flustered and clumsy. Felipe gets a rebound, passes to Reggie, gets the ball back, and then suddenly he drifts upward, over the court, over the other boys, toward the basket, legs scissored, wrists cocked, head tilted, and in that instant he looks totally serene. Right before he dunks the ball, I have the sensation that the arena is silent, but, of course, it isn't; it's just that as soon as he slams the ball down there is a crack of applause and laughter, which makes the instant preceding it seem, by contrast, like a vacuum of sound, a little quiet hole in space.
The final score is Rice 64, Southern 42. Leaving the floor, Felipe is greeted by some of the white men, who have come down to Baltimore to watch his game. One of them comments on how well he played and wants to know what he did all afternoon to prepare. Felipe is mopping his face with a towel. He folds it up and then says, "Oh, my goodness, I didn't do much of anything. I sat in my room and watched 'Popeye' on television and listened to merengue music. I just felt good today."
The last time I spent with the team was the night before they were to leave on a trip to two tournaments -- the Iolani Classic, in Honolulu, and the Holiday Prep Classic, in Las Vegas. The flight to Hawaii was so early that Coach DeMello decided to have the boys sleep at the school. After practice, they spent a few hours doing homework and then ordered in pizzas. Reggie had brought a big radio from home and set it up under a crucifix on the second floor, tuned to a station playing corny soul ballads. Coach DeMello had set up a video player and lent the team his N.B.A.-highlight tapes. "You guys going to keep it together up here?" he said. "Let's keep it together up here."
One of them yelled out, "Hey, Coach, I got to ask you something. Are there any girls in Hawaii our age?"
Someone told Reggie to turn off the radio, because the music was awful.
Reggie said, "Bro, you bugging."
"It's stupid, man. Find something better."
"Get your own radio, bro. Then you can be the d. j."
"Reggie Freeman's got a problem."
"Hey, Gary, where'd you get that shirt?"
"Macy's."
"Macy's! What, you rich or something?"
"Put on the tape. I want to see Bird and Magic play."
"Bird's a white guy."
Gerald turned on the video player and put in the tape.
"Bird could be a purple guy, bro. He's got a game."
"Here's Magic. This is the gospel, B, so you better listen up."
They sat in rapt attention, replaying some of the better sections and reciting the play-by-play along with the announcer, Marv Albert. After a few minutes, I realized that Felipe wasn't sitting with us, so I wandered down the hall, looking for him. Except for the vestibule where the boys were camping, the school was still and empty. I went upstairs to the gym. One window was broken, and a shaft of light from outside was shooting in. Someone's jersey was looped over the back of a chair in the corner, and it flapped in the night breeze. I walked from one end of the court to the other. My footsteps sounded rubbery and loud on the hardwood. After a moment, I heard a grinding in the hallway, so I walked back across the court and out to the hall. The elevator door opened, and there was Felipe, his shirttail hanging down, his hat on backward, his hand on the controls.
"Were you looking for me?"
"I was."
"I don't want to hang with the guys." He started to let the door slide shut, then pushed it open and leaned against it, grinning. "I just want to fool around. I don't want anyone to find me. I know what I got to do when we get to Hawaii. I just want to go up and down tonight."
Early the next morning, they left for Hawaii. They had a luau for Christmas, won three out of four games, flew to Las Vegas, ate too much casino food, again won three out of four games, and won a lot of quarters in the slot machines. The blustery, bright day they got back to New York, they celebrated Felipe Lopez's eighteenth birthday.
The rest of the season was a breeze until February, when Gil, Jamal, Kojo, and Rodney were taken off the team on account of bad grades. Still, going into the city Catholic-school championship, the Raiders had a record of nineteen and four. They then played St. Francis and won, 72-54, to get to the quarter-finals, and then beat Molloy, 46-36, to advance to the next round. On a cold night last week, they played Monsignor McClancy and lost in the last few minutes, 39-36, and so their season came to a close. The white men were following Felipe in every game. He had been playing so well and so steadily for the last few months that it now was as if some mystery had lifted off him and he was already inhabiting the next part of his life, in which he gets on with the business of making the most of his talent and polishing his game. In the meantime, the white men started taking note of a few young comers, like Gary Saunders, and also some skinny wisp of a kid at Alexander Burger Junior High. He's only an eighth grader, but he already dunks. They think he's worth watching. What they say is that he might be another Felipe someday.
Paper Tigers
What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?
By
Wesley YangPublished May 8, 2011
Sometimes I'll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see. Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. An expression that is nearly reptilian in its impassivity. I've contrived to think of this face as the equal in beauty to any other. But what I feel in these moments is its strangeness to me. It's my face. I can't disclaim it. But what does it have to do with me?
Millions of Americans must feel estranged from their own faces. But every self-estranged individual is estranged in his own way. I, for instance, am the child of Korean immigrants, but I do not speak my parents' native tongue. I have never called my elders by the proper honorific, �big brother� or �big sister.� I have never dated a Korean woman. I don't have a Korean friend. Though I am an immigrant, I have never wanted to strive like one.
You could say that I am, in the gently derisive parlance of Asian-Americans, a banana or a Twinkie (yellow on the outside, white on the inside). But while I don't believe our roots necessarily define us, I do believe there are racially inflected assumptions wired into our neural circuitry that we use to sort through the sea of faces we confront. And although I am in most respects devoid of Asian characteristics, I do have an Asian face.
Here is what I sometimes suspect my face signifies to other Americans: an invisible person, barely distinguishable from a mass of faces that resemble it. A conspicuous person standing apart from the crowd and yet devoid of any individuality. An icon of so much that the culture pretends to honor but that it in fact patronizes and exploits. Not just people �who are good at math� and play the violin, but a mass of stifled, repressed, abused, conformist quasi-robots who simply do not matter, socially or culturally.
I've always been of two minds about this sequence of stereotypes. On the one hand, it offends me greatly that anyone would think to apply them to me, or to anyone else, simply on the basis of facial characteristics. On the other hand, it also seems to me that there are a lot of Asian people to whom they apply.
Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility.
I understand the reasons Asian parents have raised a generation of children this way. Doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer: These are good jobs open to whoever works hard enough. What could be wrong with that pursuit? Asians graduate from college at a rate higher than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. They earn a higher median family income than any other ethnic group in America, including whites. This is a stage in a triumphal narrative, and it is a narrative that is much shorter than many remember. Two thirds of the roughly 14 million Asian-Americans are foreign-born. There were less than 39,000 people of Korean descent living in America in 1970, when my elder brother was born. There are around 1 million today.
Asian-American success is typically taken to ratify the American Dream and to prove that minorities can make it in this country without handouts. Still, an undercurrent of racial panic always accompanies the consideration of Asians, and all the more so as China becomes the destination for our industrial base and the banker controlling our burgeoning debt. But if the armies of Chinese factory workers who make our fast fashion and iPads terrify us, and if the collective mass of high-�achieving Asian-American students arouse an anxiety about the laxity of American parenting, what of the Asian-American who obeyed everything his parents told him? Does this person really scare anyone?
Earlier this year, the publication of Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother incited a collective airing out of many varieties of race-based hysteria. But absent from the millions of words written in response to the book was any serious consideration of whether Asian-Americans were in fact taking over this country. If it is true that they are collectively dominating in elite high schools and universities, is it also true that Asian-Americans are dominating in the real world? My strong suspicion was that this was not so, and that the reasons would not be hard to find. If we are a collective juggernaut that inspires such awe and fear, why does it seem that so many Asians are so readily perceived to be, as I myself have felt most of my life, the products of a timid culture, easily pushed around by more assertive people, and thus basically invisible?
A few months ago, I received an e-mail from a young man named Jefferson Mao, who after attending Stuyvesant High School had recently graduated from the University of Chicago. He wanted my advice about �being an Asian writer.� This is how he described himself: �I got good grades and I love literature and I want to be a writer and an intellectual; at the same time, I'm the first person in my family to go to college, my parents don't speak English very well, and we don't own the apartment in Flushing that we live in. I mean, I'm proud of my parents and my neighborhood and what I perceive to be my artistic potential or whatever, but sometimes I feel like I'm jumping the gun a generation or two too early.�
One bright, cold Sunday afternoon, I ride the 7 train to its last stop in Flushing, where the storefront signs are all written in Chinese and the sidewalks are a slow-moving river of impassive faces. Mao is waiting for me at the entrance of the Main Street subway station, and together we walk to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant.
Mao has a round face, with eyes behind rectangular wire-frame glasses. Since graduating, he has been living with his parents, who emigrated from China when Mao was 8 years old. His mother is a manicurist; his father is a physical therapist's aide. Lately, Mao has been making the familiar hour-and-a-half ride from Flushing to downtown Manhattan to tutor a white Stuyvesant freshman who lives in Tribeca. And what he feels, sometimes, in the presence of that amiable young man is a pang of regret. Now he understands better what he ought to have done back when he was a Stuyvesant freshman: �Worked half as hard and been twenty times more successful.�
Entrance to Stuyvesant, one of the most competitive public high schools in the country, is determined solely by performance on a test: The top 3.7 percent of all New York City students who take the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test hoping to go to Stuyvesant are accepted. There are no set-asides for the underprivileged or, conversely, for alumni or other privileged groups. There is no formula to encourage �diversity� or any nebulous concept of �well-�roundedness� or �character.� Here we have something like pure meritocracy. This is what it looks like: Asian-�Americans, who make up 12.6 percent of New York City, make up 72 percent of the high school.
This year, 569 Asian-Americans scored high enough to earn a slot at Stuyvesant, along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics, and 12 blacks. Such dramatic overrepresentation, and what it may be read to imply about the intelligence of different groups of New Yorkers, has a way of making people uneasy. But intrinsic intelligence, of course, is precisely what Asians don't believe in. They believe�and have �proved�that the constant practice of test-taking will improve the scores of whoever commits to it. All throughout Flushing, as well as in Bayside, one can find �cram schools,� or storefront academies, that drill students in test preparation after school, on weekends, and during summer break. �Learning math is not about learning math,� an instructor at one called Ivy Prep was quoted in the New York Times as saying. �It's about weightlifting. You are pumping the iron of math.� Mao puts it more specifically: �You learn quite simply to nail any standardized test you take.�
And so there is an additional concern accompanying the rise of the Tiger Children, one focused more on the narrowness of the educational experience a non-Asian child might receive in the company of fanatically preprofessional Asian students. Jenny Tsai, a student who was elected president of her class at the equally competitive New York public school Hunter College High School, remembers frequently hearing that �the school was becoming too Asian, that they would be the downfall of our school.� A couple of years ago, she revisited this issue in her senior thesis at Harvard, where she interviewed graduates of elite public schools and found that the white students regarded the Asians students with wariness. (She quotes a music teacher at Stuyvesant describing the dominance of Asians: �They were mediocre kids, but they got in because they were coached.�) In 2005, The Wall Street Journal reported on �white flight� from a high school in Cupertino, California, that began soon after the children of Asian software engineers had made the place so brutally competitive that a B average could place you in the bottom third of the class.
Colleges have a way of correcting for this imbalance: The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade has calculated that an Asian applicant must, in practice, score 140 points higher on the SAT than a comparable white applicant to have the same chance of admission. This is obviously unfair to the many qualified Asian individuals who are punished for the success of others with similar faces. Upper-middle-class white kids, after all, have their own elite private schools, and their own private tutors, far more expensive than the cram schools, to help them game the education system.
You could frame it, as some aggrieved Asian-Americans do, as a simple issue of equality and press for race-blind quantitative admissions standards. In 2006, a decade after California passed a voter initiative outlawing any racial engineering at the public universities, Asians composed 46 percent of UC-Berkeley's entering class; one could imagine a similar demographic reshuffling in the Ivy League, where Asian-Americans currently make up about 17 percent of undergraduates. But the Ivies, as we all know, have their own private institutional interests at stake in their admissions choices, including some that are arguably defensible. Who can seriously claim that a Harvard University that was 72 percent Asian would deliver the same grooming for elite status its students had gone there to receive?
Somewhere near the middle of his time at Stuyvesant, a vague sense of discontent started to emerge within Mao. He had always felt himself a part of a mob of �nameless, faceless Asian kids,� who were �like a part of the décor of the place.� He had been content to keep his head down and work toward the goal shared by everyone at Stuyvesant: Harvard. But around the beginning of his senior year, he began to wonder whether this march toward academic success was the only, or best, path.
�You can't help but feel like there must be another way,� he explains over a bowl of phô. �It's like, we're being pitted against each other while there are kids out there in the Midwest who can do way less work and be in a garage band or something�and if they're decently intelligent and work decently hard in school ��
Mao began to study the racially inflected social hierarchies at Stuyvesant, where, in a survey undertaken by the student newspaper this year, slightly more than half of the respondents reported that their friends came from within their own ethnic group. His attention focused on the mostly white (and Manhattan-dwelling) group whose members seemed able to manage the crushing workload while still remaining socially active. �The general gist of most high-school movies is that the pretty cheerleader gets with the big dumb jock, and the nerd is left to bide his time in loneliness. But at some point in the future,� he says, �the nerd is going to rule the world, and the dumb jock is going to work in a carwash.
�At Stuy, it's completely different: If you looked at the pinnacle, the girls and the guys are not only good-looking and socially affable, they also get the best grades and star in the school plays and win election to student government. It all converges at the top. It's like training for high society. It was jarring for us Chinese kids. You got the sense that you had to study hard, but it wasn't enough.�
Mao was becoming clued in to the fact that there was another hierarchy behind the official one that explained why others were getting what he never had��a high-school sweetheart� figured prominently on this list�and that this mysterious hierarchy was going to determine what happened to him in life. �You realize there are things you really don't understand about courtship or just acting in a certain way. Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.� I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend's parents' house the past Christmas, where the family had �sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble.� This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge �about social norms and propriety� had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.
Before having heard from Mao, I had considered myself at worst lightly singed by the last embers of Asian alienation. Indeed, given all the incredibly hip Asian artists and fashion designers and so forth you can find in New York, it seemed that this feeling was destined to die out altogether. And yet here it was in a New Yorker more than a dozen years my junior. While it may be true that sections of the Asian-American world are devoid of alienation, there are large swaths where it is as alive as it has ever been.
A few weeks after we meet, Mao puts me in touch with Daniel Chu, his close friend from Stuyvesant. Chu graduated from Williams College last year, having won a �creative-writing award for his poetry. He had spent a portion of the $18,000 prize on a trip to China, but now he is back living with his parents in Brooklyn Chinatown.
Chu remembers that during his first semester at Williams, his junior adviser would periodically take him aside. Was he feeling all right? Was something the matter? �I was acclimating myself to the place,� he says. �I wasn't totally happy, but I wasn't depressed.� But then his new white friends made similar remarks. �They would say, �Dan, it's kind of hard, sometimes, to tell what you're thinking.' �
Chu has a pleasant face, but it would not be wrong to characterize his demeanor as reserved. He speaks in a quiet, unemphatic voice. He doesn't move his features much. He attributes these traits to the atmosphere in his household. �When you grow up in a Chinese home,� he says, �you don't talk. You shut up and listen to what your parents tell you to do.�
At Stuyvesant, he had hung out in an exclusively Asian world in which friends were determined by which subway lines you traveled. But when he arrived at Williams, Chu slowly became aware of something strange: The white people in the New England wilderness walked around smiling at each other. �When you're in a place like that, everyone is friendly.�
He made a point to start smiling more. �It was something that I had to actively practice,� he says. �Like, when you have a transaction at a business, you hand over the money�and then you smile.� He says that he's made some progress but that there's still plenty of work that remains. �I'm trying to undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing. Four years at Williams helps, but only so much.� He is conscious of how his father, an IT manager, is treated at work. �He's the best programmer at his office,� he says, �but because he doesn't speak English well, he is always passed over.�
Though Chu is not merely fluent in En�glish but is officially the most distinguished poet of his class at Williams, he still worries that other aspects of his demeanor might attract the same kind of treatment his father received. �I'm really glad we're having this conversation,� he says at one point�it is helpful to be remembering these lessons in self-presentation just as he prepares for job interviews.
It is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that meritocracy comes to an abrupt end after graduation.
�I guess what I would like is to become so good at something that my social deficiencies no longer matter,� he tells me. Chu is a bright, diligent, impeccably credentialed young man born in the United States. He is optimistic about his ability to earn respect in the world. But he doubts he will ever feel the same comfort in his skin that he glimpsed in the people he met at Williams. That kind of comfort, he says��I think it's generations away.�
While he was still an electrical-�engineering student at Berkeley in the nineties, James Hong visited the IBM campus for a series of interviews. An older Asian researcher looked over Hong's résumé and asked him some standard questions. Then he got up without saying a word and closed the door to his office.
�Listen,� he told Hong, �I'm going to be honest with you. My generation came to this country because we wanted better for you kids. We did the best we could, leaving our homes and going to graduate school not speaking much English. If you take this job, you are just going to hit the same ceiling we did. They just see me as an Asian Ph.D., never management potential. You are going to get a job offer, but don't take it. Your generation has to go farther than we did, otherwise we did everything for nothing.�
The researcher was talking about what some refer to as the �Bamboo Ceiling��an invisible barrier that maintains a pyramidal racial structure throughout corporate America, with lots of Asians at junior levels, quite a few in middle management, and virtually none in the higher reaches of leadership.
The failure of Asian-Americans to become leaders in the white-collar workplace does not qualify as one of the burning social issues of our time. But it is a part of the bitter undercurrent of Asian-American life that so many Asian graduates of elite universities find that meritocracy as they have understood it comes to an abrupt end after graduation. If between 15 and 20 percent of every Ivy League class is Asian, and if the Ivy Leagues are incubators for the country's leaders, it would stand to reason that Asians would make up some corresponding portion of the leadership class.
And yet the numbers tell a different story. According to a recent study, Asian-�Americans represent roughly 5 percent of the population but only 0.3 percent of corporate officers, less than 1 percent of corporate board members, and around 2 percent of college presidents. There are nine Asian-American CEOs in the Fortune 500. In specific fields where Asian-Americans are heavily represented, there is a similar asymmetry. A third of all software engineers in Silicon Valley are Asian, and yet they make up only 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area's 25 largest companies. At the National Institutes of Health, where 21.5 percent of tenure-track scientists are Asians, only 4.7 percent of the lab or branch directors are, according to a study conducted in 2005. One succinct evocation of the situation appeared in the comments section of a website called Yellowworld: �If you're East Asian, you need to attend a top-tier university to land a good high-paying gig. Even if you land that good high-paying gig, the white guy with the pedigree from a mediocre state university will somehow move ahead of you in the ranks simply because he's white.�
Jennifer W. Allyn, a managing director for diversity at PricewaterhouseCoopers, works to ensure that �all of the groups feel welcomed and supported and able to thrive and to go as far as their talents will take them.� I posed to her the following definition of parity in the corporate workforce: If the current crop of associates is 17 percent Asian, then in fourteen years, when they have all been up for partner review, 17 percent of those who are offered partner will be Asian. Allyn conceded that PricewaterhouseCoopers was not close to reaching that benchmark anytime soon�and that �nobody else is either.�
Part of the insidious nature of the Bamboo Ceiling is that it does not seem to be caused by overt racism. A survey of Asian-Pacific-American employees of Fortune 500 companies found that 80 percent reported they were judged not as Asians but as individuals. But only 51 percent reported the existence of Asians in key positions, and only 55 percent agreed that their firms were fully capitalizing on the talents and perspectives of Asians.
More likely, the discrepancy in these numbers is a matter of unconscious bias. Nobody would affirm the proposition that tall men are intrinsically better leaders, for instance. And yet while only 15 percent of the male population is at least six feet tall, 58 percent of all corporate CEOs are. Similarly, nobody would say that Asian people are unfit to be leaders. But subjects in a recently published psychological experiment consistently rated hypothetical employees with Caucasian-sounding names higher in leadership potential than identical ones with Asian names.
Maybe it is simply the case that a traditionally Asian upbringing is the problem. As Allyn points out, in order to be a leader, you must have followers. Associates at Pricewaterhouse�Coopers are initially judged on how well they do the work they are assigned. �You have to be a doer,� as she puts it. They are expected to distinguish themselves with their diligence, at which point they become �super-doers.� But being a leader requires different skill sets. �The traits that got you to where you are won't necessarily take you to the next level,� says the diversity consultant Jane Hyun, who wrote a book called Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling. To become a leader requires taking personal initiative and thinking about how an organization can work differently. It also requires networking, self-promotion, and self-assertion. It's racist to think that any given Asian individual is unlikely to be creative or risk-taking. It's simple cultural observation to say that a group whose education has historically focused on rote memorization and �pumping the iron of math� is, on aggregate, unlikely to yield many people inclined to challenge authority or break with inherited ways of doing things.
Sach Takayasu had been one of the �fastest-rising members of her cohort in the marketing department at IBM in New York. But about seven years ago, she felt her progress begin to slow. �I had gotten to the point where I was overdelivering, working really long hours, and where doing more of the same wasn't getting me anywhere,� she says. It was around this time that she attended a seminar being offered by an organization called Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics.
LEAP has parsed the complicated social dynamics responsible for the dearth of Asian-American leaders and has designed training programs that flatter Asian people even as it teaches them to change their behavior to suit white-American expectations. Asians who enter a LEAP program are constantly assured that they will be able to �keep your values, while acquiring new skills," along the way to becoming �culturally competent leaders.�
In a presentation to 1,500 Asian-American employees of Microsoft, LEAP president and CEO J. D. Hokoyama laid out his grand synthesis of the Asian predicament in the workplace. �Sometimes people have perceptions about us and our communities which may or may not be true,� Hokoyama told the audience. �But they put those perceptions onto us, and then they do something that can be very devastating: They make decisions about us not based on the truth but based on those perceptions.� Hokoyama argued that it was not sufficient to rail at these unjust perceptions. In the end, Asian people themselves would have to assume responsibility for unmaking them. This was both a practical matter, he argued, and, in its own way, fair.
Aspiring Asian leaders had to become aware of �the relationship between values, behaviors, and perceptions.� He offered the example of Asians who don't speak up at meetings. �So let's say I go to meetings with you and I notice you never say anything. And I ask myself, �Hmm, I wonder why you're not saying anything. Maybe it's because you don't know what we're talking about. That would be a good reason for not saying anything. Or maybe it's because you're not even interested in the subject matter. Or maybe you think the conversation is beneath you.' So here I'm thinking, because you never say anything at meetings, that you're either dumb, you don't care, or you're arrogant. When maybe it's because you were taught when you were growing up that when the boss is talking, what are you supposed to be doing? Listening.�
Takayasu took the weeklong course in 2006. One of the first exercises she encountered involved the group instructor asking for a list of some qualities that they identify with Asians. The students responded: upholding family honor, filial piety, self-�restraint. Then the instructor solicited a list of the qualities the members identify with leadership, and invited the students to notice how little overlap there is between the two lists.
At first, Takayasu didn't relate to the others in attendance, who were listing typical Asian values their parents had taught them. �They were all saying things like �Study hard,' �Become a doctor or lawyer,' blah, blah, blah. That's not how my parents were. They would worry if they saw me working too hard.� Takayasu had spent her childhood shuttling between New York and Tokyo. Her father was an executive at Mitsubishi; her mother was a concert pianist. She was highly assimilated into American culture, fluent in English, poised and confident. �But the more we got into it, as we moved away from the obvious things to the deeper, more fundamental values, I began to see that my upbringing had been very Asian after all. My parents would say, �Don't create problems. Don't trouble other people.' How Asian is that? It helped to explain why I don't reach out to other people for help.� It occurred to Takayasu that she was a little bit �heads down� after all. She was willing to take on difficult assignments without seeking credit for herself. She was reluctant to �toot her own horn.�
Takayasu has put her new self-awareness to work at IBM, and she now exhibits a newfound ability for horn tooting. �The things I could write on my résumé as my team's accomplishments: They're really impressive,� she says.
The law professor and writer Tim Wu grew up in Canada with a white mother and a Taiwanese father, which allows him an interesting perspective on how whites and Asians perceive each other. After graduating from law school, he took a series of clerkships, and he remembers the subtle ways in which hierarchies were developed among the other young lawyers. �There is this automatic assumption in any legal environment that Asians will have a particular talent for bitter labor,� he says, and then goes on to define the word coolie,a Chinese term for �bitter labor.� �There was this weird self-selection where the Asians would migrate toward the most brutal part of the labor.�
By contrast, the white lawyers he encountered had a knack for portraying themselves as above all that. �White people have this instinct that is really important: to give off the impression that they're only going to do the really important work. You're a quarterback. It's a kind of arrogance that Asians are trained not to have. Someone told me not long after I moved to New York that in order to succeed, you have to understand which rules you're supposed to break. If you break the wrong rules, you're finished. And so the easiest thing to do is follow all the rules. But then you consign yourself to a lower status. The real trick is understanding what rules are not meant for you.�
This idea of a kind of rule-governed rule-breaking�where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense�is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice. LEAP appears to be very good at helping Asian workers who are already culturally competent become more self-aware of how their culture and appearance impose barriers to advancement. But I am not sure that a LEAP course is going to be enough to get Jefferson Mao or Daniel Chu the respect and success they crave. The issue is more fundamental, the social dynamics at work more deeply embedded, and the remedial work required may be at a more basic level of comportment.
What if you missed out on the lessons in masculinity taught in the gyms and locker rooms of America's high schools? What if life has failed to make you a socially dominant alpha male who runs the American boardroom and prevails in the American bedroom? What if no one ever taught you how to greet white people and make them comfortable? What if, despite these deficiencies, you no longer possess an immigrant's dutiful forbearance for a secondary position in the American narrative and want to be a player in the scrimmage of American appetite right now, in the present?
How do you undo eighteen years of a Chinese upbringing?
This is the implicit question that J. T. Tran has posed to a roomful of Yale undergraduates at a master's tea at Silliman College. His answer is typically Asian: practice. Tran is a pickup artist who goes by the handle Asian Playboy. He travels the globe running �boot camps,� mostly for Asian male students, in the art of attraction. Today, he has been invited to Yale by the Asian-American Students Alliance.
�Creepy can be fixed,� Tran explains to the standing-room-only crowd. �Many guys just don't realize how to project themselves.� These are the people whom Tran spends his days with, a new batch in a new city every week: nice guys, intelligent guys, motivated guys, who never figured out how to be successful with women. Their mothers had kept them at home to study rather than let them date or socialize. Now Tran's company, ABCs of Attraction, offers a remedial education that consists of three four-hour seminars, followed by a supervised night out �in the field,� in which J. T., his assistant Gareth Jones, and a tall blonde wing-girl named Sarah force them to approach women. Tuition costs $1,450.
�One of the big things I see with Asian students is what I call the Asian poker face�the lack of range when it comes to facial expressions,� Tran says. �How many times has this happened to you?� he asks the crowd. �You'll be out at a party with your white friends, and they will be like��Dude, are you angry?' � Laughter fills the room. Part of it is psychological, he explains. He recalls one Korean-American student he was teaching. The student was a very dedicated schoolteacher who cared a lot about his students. But none of this was visible. �Sarah was trying to help him, and she was like, �C'mon, smile, smile,' and he was like �� And here Tran mimes the unbearable tension of a face trying to contort itself into a simulacrum of mirth. �He was so completely unpracticed at smiling that he literally could not do it.� Eventually, though, the student fought through it, �and when he finally got to smiling he was, like, really cool.�
Tran continues to lay out a story of Asian-American male distress that must be relevant to the lives of at least some of those who have packed Master Krauss's living room. The story he tells is one of Asian-American disadvantage in the sexual marketplace, a disadvantage that he has devoted his life to overturning. Yes, it is about picking up women. Yes, it is about picking up white women. Yes, it is about attracting those women whose hair is the color of the midday sun and eyes are the color of the ocean, and it is about having sex with them. He is not going to apologize for the images of blonde women plastered all over his website. This is what he prefers, what he stands for, and what he is selling: the courage to pursue anyone you want, and the skills to make the person you desire desire you back. White guys do what they want; he is going to do the same.
But it is about much more than this, too. It is about altering the perceptions of Asian men�perceptions that are rooted in the way they behave, which are in turn rooted in the way they were raised�through a course of behavior modification intended to teach them how to be the socially dominant figures that they are not perceived to be. It is a program of, as he puts it to me later, �social change through pickup.�
Tran offers his own story as an exemplary Asian underdog. Short, not good-looking, socially inept, sexually null. �If I got a B, I would be whipped,� he remembers of his childhood. After college, he worked as an aerospace engineer at Boeing and Raytheon, but internal politics disfavored him. Five years into his career, his entire white cohort had been promoted above him. �I knew I needed to learn about social dynamics, because just working hard wasn't cutting it.�
His efforts at dating were likewise �a miserable failure.� It was then that he turned to �the seduction community,� a group of men on Internet message boards like alt.seduction.fast. It began as a �support group for losers� and later turned into a program of self-improvement. Was charisma something you could teach? Could confidence be reduced to a formula? Was it merely something that you either possessed or did not possess, as a function of the experiences you had been through in life, or did it emerge from specific forms of behavior? The members of the group turned their computer-science and engineering brains to the question. They wrote long accounts of their dates and subjected them to collective scrutiny. They searched for patterns in the raw material and filtered these experiences through social-psychological research. They eventually built a model.
This past Valentine's Day, during a weekend boot camp in New York City sponsored by ABCs of Attraction, the model is being played out. Tran and Jones are teaching their students how an alpha male stands (shoulders thrown back, neck fully extended, legs planted slightly wider than the shoulders). �This is going to feel very strange to you if you're used to slouching, but this is actually right,� Jones says. They explain how an alpha male walks (no shuffling; pick your feet up entirely off the ground; a slight sway in the shoulders). They identify the proper distance to stand from �targets� (a slightly bent arm's length). They explain the importance of �kino escalation.� (You must touch her. You must not be afraid to do this.) They are teaching the importance of sub-�communication: what you convey about yourself before a single word has been spoken. They explain the importance of intonation. They explain what intonation is. �Your voice moves up and down in pitch to convey a variety of different emotions.�
All of this is taught through a series of exercises. �This is going to feel completely artificial,� says Jones on the first day of training. �But I need you to do the biggest shit-eating grin you've ever made in your life.� Sarah is standing in the corner with her back to the students�three Indian guys, including one in a turban, three Chinese guys, and one Cambodian. The students have to cross the room, walking as an alpha male walks, and then place their hands on her shoulder�firmly but gently�and turn her around. Big smile. Bigger than you've ever smiled before. Raise your glass in a toast. Make eye contact and hold it. Speak loudly and clearly. Take up space without apology. This is what an alpha male does.
Before each student crosses the floor of that bare white cubicle in midtown, Tran asks him a question. �What is good in life?� Tran shouts.
The student then replies, in the loudest, most emphatic voice he can muster: �To crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentation of their women�in my bed!�
For the intonation exercise, students repeat the phrase �I do what I want� with a variety of different moods.
�Say it like you're happy!� Jones shouts. (�I do what I want.�) Say it like you're sad! (�I do what I want.� The intonation utterly unchanged.) Like you're sad! (�I � do what I want.�) Say it like you've just won $5 million! (�I do what I want.�)
�She was trying to help him. �C'mon, smile, smile, and he was like �� And here Tran mimes the unbearable tension of a face trying to contort itself into a simulacrum of mirth.
Raj, a 26-year-old Indian virgin, can barely get his voice to alter during intonation exercise. But on Sunday night, on the last evening of the boot camp, I watch him cold-approach a set of women at the Hotel Gansevoort and engage them in conversation for a half-hour. He does not manage to �number close� or �kiss close.� But he had done something that not very many people can do.
Of the dozens of Asian-�Americans I spoke with for this story, many were successful artists and scientists; or good-looking and socially integrated leaders; or tough, brassy, risk-taking, street-smart entrepreneurs. Of course, there are lots of such people around�do I even have to point that out? They are no more morally worthy than any other kind of Asian person. But they have figured out some useful things.
The lesson about the Bamboo Ceiling that James Hong learned from his interviewer at IBM stuck, and after working for a few years at Hewlett-Packard, he decided to strike off on his own. His first attempts at entrepreneurialism failed, but he finally struck pay dirt with a simple, not terribly refined idea that had a strong primal appeal:
hotornot.com. Hong and his co-founder eventually sold the site for roughly $20 million.Hong ran hotornot.com partly as a kind of incubator to seed in his employees the habits that had served him well. �We used to hire engineers from Berkeley�almost all Asian�who were on the cusp of being entrepreneurial but were instead headed toward jobs at big companies,� he says. �We would train them in how to take risk, how to run things themselves. I remember encouraging one employee to read The Game��the infamous pickup-artist textbook��because I figured growing the cojones to take risk was applicable to being an entrepreneur.�
If the Bamboo Ceiling is ever going to break, it's probably going to have less to do with any form of behavior assimilation than with the emergence of risk-�takers whose success obviates the need for Asians to meet someone else's behavioral standard. People like Steve Chen, who was one of the creators of YouTube, or Kai and Charles Huang, who created Guitar Hero. Or Tony Hsieh, the founder of
Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that he sold to Amazon for about a billion dollars in 2009. Hsieh is a short Asian man who speaks tersely and is devoid of obvious charisma. One cannot imagine him being promoted in an American corporation. And yet he has proved that an awkward Asian guy can be a formidable CEO and the unlikeliest of management gurus.Hsieh didn't have to conform to Western standards of comportment because he adopted early on the Western value of risk-taking. Growing up, he would play recordings of himself in the morning practicing the violin, in lieu of actually practicing. He credits the experience he had running a pizza business at Harvard as more important than anything he learned in class. He had an instinctive sense of what the real world would require of him, and he knew that nothing his parents were teaching him would get him there.
You don't, by the way, have to be a Silicon Valley hotshot to break through the Bamboo Ceiling. You can also be a chef like Eddie Huang, whose little restaurant on the Lower East Side,
BaoHaus, sells delicious pork buns. Huang grew up in Orlando with a hard-core Tiger Mom and a disciplinarian father. �As a kid, psychologically, my day was all about not getting my ass kicked,� he says. He gravitated toward the black kids at school, who also knew something about corporal punishment. He was the smallest member of his football team, but his coach named him MVP in the seventh grade. �I was defensive tackle and right guard because I was just mean. I was nasty. I had this mentality where I was like, �You're going to accept me or I'm going to fuck you up.' �Huang had a rough twenties, bumping repeatedly against the Bamboo Ceiling. In college, editors at the Orlando Sentinel invited him to write about sports for the paper. But when he visited the offices, �the editor came in and goes, �Oh, no.' And his exact words: �You can't write with that face.' � Later, in film class at Columbia, he wrote a script about an Asian-American hot-dog vendor obsessed with his small penis. �The screenwriting teacher was like, �I love this. You have a lot of Woody Allen in you. But do you think you could change it to Jewish characters?' � Still later, after graduating from Cardozo School of Law, he took a corporate job, where other associates would frequently say, �You have a lot of opinions for an Asian guy.�
Finally, Huang decided to open a restaurant. Selling food was precisely the fate his parents wanted their son to avoid, and they didn't talk to him for months after he quit lawyering. But Huang understood instinctively that he couldn't make it work in the professional world his parents wanted him to join. �I've realized that food is one of the only places in America where we are the top dogs,� he says. �Guys like David Chang or me�we can hang. There's a younger generation that grew up eating Chinese fast food. They respect our food. They may not respect anything else, but they respect our food.�
Rather than strive to make himself acceptable to the world, Huang has chosen to buy his way back in, on his own terms. �What I've learned is that America is about money, and if you can make your culture commodifiable, then you're relevant,� he says. �I don't believe anybody agrees with what I say or supports what I do because they truly want to love Asian people. They like my fucking pork buns, and I don't get it twisted.�
Sometime during the hundreds of hours he spent among the mostly untouched English-language novels at the Flushing branch of the public library, Jefferson Mao discovered literature's special power of transcendence, a freedom of imagination that can send you beyond the world's hierarchies. He had written to me seeking permission to swerve off the traditional path of professional striving�to devote himself to becoming an artist�but he was unsure of what risks he was willing to take. My answer was highly ambivalent. I recognized in him something of my own youthful ambition. And I knew where that had taken me.
Unlike Mao, I was not a poor, first-�generation immigrant. I finished school alienated both from Asian culture (which, in my hometown, was barely visible) and the manners and mores of my white peers. But like Mao, I wanted to be an individual. I had refused both cultures as an act of self-�assertion. An education spent dutifully acquiring credentials through relentless drilling seemed to me an obscenity. So did adopting the manipulative cheeriness that seemed to secure the popularity of white Americans.
Instead, I set about contriving to live beyond both poles. I wanted what James Baldwin sought as a �writer��a power which outlasts kingdoms.� Anything short of that seemed a humiliating compromise. I would become an aristocrat of the spirit, who prides himself on his incompetence in the middling tasks that are the world's business. Who does not seek after material gain. Who is his own law.
This, of course, was madness. A child of Asian immigrants born into the suburbs of New Jersey and educated at Rutgers cannot be a law unto himself. The only way to approximate this is to refuse employment, because you will not be bossed around by people beneath you, and shave your expenses to the bone, because you cannot afford more, and move into a decaying Victorian mansion in Jersey City, so that your sense of eccentric distinction can be preserved in the midst of poverty, and cut yourself free of every form of bourgeois discipline, because these are precisely the habits that will keep you chained to the mediocre fate you consider worse than death.
Throughout my twenties, I proudly turned away from one institution of American life after another (for instance, a steady job), though they had already long since turned away from me. Academe seemed another kind of death�but then again, I had a transcript marred by as many F's as A's. I had come from a culture that was the middle path incarnate. And yet for some people, there can be no middle path, only transcendence or descent into the abyss.
I was descending into the abyss.
All this was well deserved. No one had any reason to think I was anything or anyone. And yet I felt entitled to demand this recognition. I knew this was wrong and impermissible; therefore I had to double down on it. The world brings low such people. It brought me low. I haven't had health insurance in ten years. I didn't earn more than $12,000 for eight consecutive years. I went three years in the prime of my adulthood without touching a woman. I did not produce a masterpiece.
I recall one of the strangest conversations I had in the city. A woman came up to me at a party and said she had been moved by a piece of writing I had published. She confessed that prior to reading it, she had never wanted to talk to me, and had always been sure, on the basis of what she could see from across the room, that I was nobody worth talking to, that I was in fact someone to avoid.
But she had been wrong about this, she told me: It was now plain to her that I was a person with great reserves of feeling and insight. She did not ask my forgiveness for this brutal misjudgment. Instead, what she wanted to know was�why had I kept that person she had glimpsed in my essay so well hidden? She confessed something of her own hidden sorrow: She had never been beautiful and had decided, early on, that it therefore fell to her to �love the world twice as hard.� Why hadn't I done that?
Here was a drunk white lady speaking what so many others over the years must have been insufficiently drunk to tell me. It was the key to many things that had, and had not, happened. I understood this encounter better after learning about LEAP, and visiting Asian Playboy's boot camp. If you are a woman who isn't beautiful, it is a social reality that you will have to work twice as hard to hold anyone's attention. You can either linger on the unfairness of this or you can get with the program. If you are an Asian person who holds himself proudly aloof, nobody will respect that, or find it intriguing, or wonder if that challenging façade hides someone worth getting to know. They will simply write you off as someone not worth the trouble of talking to.
Having glimpsed just how unacceptable the world judges my demeanor, could I too strive to make up for my shortcomings? Practice a shit-eating grin until it becomes natural? Love the world twice as hard?
I see the appeal of getting with the program. But this is not my choice. Striving to meet others' expectations may be a necessary cost of assimilation, but I am not going to do it.
Often I think my defiance is just delusional, self-glorifying bullshit that artists have always told themselves to compensate for their poverty and powerlessness. But sometimes I think it's the only thing that has preserved me intact, and that what has been preserved is not just haughty caprice but in fact the meaning of my life. So this is what I told Mao: In lieu of loving the world twice as hard, I care, in the end, about expressing my obdurate singularity at any cost. I love this hard and unyielding part of myself more than any other reward the world has to offer a newly brightened and ingratiating demeanor, and I will bear any costs associated with it.
The first step toward self-reform is to admit your deficiencies. Though my early adulthood has been a protracted education in them, I do not admit mine. I'm fine. It's the rest of you who have a problem. Fuck all y'all.
Amy Chua returned to Yale from a long, exhausting book tour in which one television interviewer had led off by noting that Internet commenters were calling her a monster. By that point, she had become practiced at the special kind of self-presentation required of a person under public siege. �I do not think that Chinese parents are superior,� she declared at the annual gathering of the Asian-American Students Alliance. �I think there are many ways to be a good parent.�
Much of her talk to the students, and indeed much of the conversation surrounding the book, was focused on her own parenting decisions. But just as interesting is how her parents parented her. Chua was plainly the product of a brute-force Chinese education. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother includes many lessons she was taught by her parents�lessons any LEAP student would recognize. �Be modest, be humble, be simple,� her mother told her. �Never complain or make excuses,� her father instructed. �If something seems unfair at school, just prove yourself by working twice as hard and being twice as good.�
In the book, Chua portrays her distaste for corporate law, which she practiced before going into academe. �My entire three years at the firm, I always felt like I was playacting, ridiculous in my suit,� she writes. This malaise extended even earlier, to her time as a student. �I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did, and I froze whenever a professor called on me. I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning; I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it.�
At the AASA gathering at Yale, Chua made the connection between her upbringing and her adult dissatisfaction. �My parents didn't sit around talking about politics and philosophy at the dinner table,� she told the students. Even after she had escaped from corporate law and made it onto a law faculty, �I was kind of lost. I just didn't feel the passion.� Eventually, she made a name for herself as the author of popular books about foreign policy and became an award-winning teacher. But it's plain that she was no better prepared for legal scholarship than she had been for corporate law. �It took me a long, long time,� she said. �And I went through lots and lots of rejection.� She recalled her extended search for an academic post, in which she was �just not able to do a good interview, just not able to present myself well.�
In other words, Battle Hymn provides all the material needed to refute the very cultural polemic for which it was made to stand. Chua's Chinese education had gotten her through an elite schooling, but it left her unprepared for the real world. She does not hide any of this. She had set out, she explained, to write a memoir that was �defiantly self-incriminating��and the result was a messy jumble of conflicting impulses, part provocation, part self-critique. Western readers rode roughshod over this paradox and made of Chua a kind of Asian minstrel figure. But more than anything else, Battle Hymn is a very American project�one no traditional Chinese person would think to undertake. �Even if you hate the book,� Chua pointed out, �the one thing it is not is meek.�
�The loudest duck gets shot� is a Chinese proverb. �The nail that sticks out gets hammered down� is a Japanese one. Its Western correlative: �The squeaky wheel gets the grease.� Chua had told her story and been hammered down. Yet here she was, fresh from her hammering, completely unbowed.
There is something salutary in that proud defiance. And though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone's happiness, and to dare to be interesting.
Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater's Founder
Adam Ferguson/VII Network
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, has a new project.
Correction Appended
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.
THE PAPER TRAIL A collection of documents about the secret army includes recruits' permits. Some details have been obscured.
s built to train an 800-member military unit.
The army is based in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, but will serve all the emirates.
The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of
Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.
The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.
The U.A.E.'s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country's biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.
In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.
The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.
"The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don't have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help," said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. "They might want to show that they are not to be messed with."
Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States' official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.
Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince's company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years.
The U.A.E.'s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.
For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince's new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.
Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name "Kingfish." But three former employees, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements, and two people involved in security contracting described Mr. Prince's central role.
The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince's subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims.
Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.
A Lucrative Deal
Last spring, as waiters in the lobby of the Park Arjaan by Rotana Hotel passed by carrying cups of Turkish coffee, a small team of Blackwater and American military veterans huddled over plans for the foreign battalion. Armed with a black suitcase stuffed with several hundred thousand dollars' worth of dirhams, the local currency, they began paying the first bills.
The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21 million in start-up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said.
Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince's idea to build a foreign commando force for his country.
Savvy and pro-Western, the prince was educated at the Sandhurst military academy in Britain and formed close ties with American military officials. He is also one of the region's staunchest hawks on Iran and is skeptical that his giant neighbor across the Strait of Hormuz will give up its nuclear program.
"He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces," said a November 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
For Mr. Prince, a 41-year-old former member of the Navy Seals, the battalion was an opportunity to turn vision into reality. At Blackwater, which had collected billions of dollars in security contracts from the United States government, he had hoped to build an army for hire that could be deployed to crisis zones in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He even had proposed that the Central Intelligence Agency use his company for special operations missions around the globe, but to no avail. In Abu Dhabi, which he praised in an Emirati newspaper interview last year for its "pro-business" climate, he got another chance.
Mr. Prince's exploits, both real and rumored, are the subject of fevered discussions in the private security world. He has worked with the Emirati government on various ventures in the past year, including an operation using South African mercenaries to train Somalis to fight pirates. There was talk, too, that he was hatching a scheme last year to cap the Icelandic volcano then spewing ash across Northern Europe.
The team in the hotel lobby was led by Ricky Chambers, known as C. T., a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had worked for Mr. Prince for years; most recently, he had run a program training Afghan troops for a Blackwater subsidiary called Paravant.
He was among the half-dozen or so Americans who would serve as top managers of the project, receiving nearly $300,000 in annual compensation. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Prince soon began quietly luring American contractors from Afghanistan, Iraq and other danger spots with pay packages that topped out at more than $200,000 a year, according to a budget document. Many of those who signed on as trainers — which eventually included more than 40 veteran American, European and South African commandos — did not know of Mr. Prince's involvement, the former employees said.
Mr. Chambers did not respond to requests for comment.
He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in "placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas," according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about $150 a day.
Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars, Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes, motorcycles, rucksacks — and 24,000 pairs of socks.
To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower — a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi's Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government.
Emirati law prohibits disclosure of incorporation records for businesses, which typically list company officers, but it does require them to post company names on offices and storefronts. Over the past year, the sign outside the suite has changed at least twice — it now says Assurance Management Consulting.
While the documents — including contracts, budget sheets and blueprints — obtained by The Times do not mention Mr. Prince, the former employees said he negotiated the U.A.E. deal. Corporate documents describe the battalion's possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations "to destroy enemy personnel and equipment."
One document describes "crowd-control operations" where the crowd "is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and stones)."
People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks and put down uprisings inside the country's sprawling labor camps, which house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of the country's work force. The foreign military force was planned months before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern.
An Eye on Iran
Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.
The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced.
In recent years, the Emirati government has showered American defense companies with billions of dollars to help strengthen the country's security. A company run by Richard A. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser during the Clinton and Bush administrations, has won several lucrative contracts to advise the U.A.E. on how to protect its infrastructure.
Some security consultants believe that Mr. Prince's efforts to bolster the Emirates' defenses against an Iranian threat might yield some benefits for the American government, which shares the U.A.E.'s concern about creeping Iranian influence in the region.
"As much as Erik Prince is a pariah in the United States, he may be just what the doctor ordered in the U.A.E.," said an American security consultant with knowledge of R2's work.
The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2 should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. "The overall goal," the contract states, "is to ensure that the team members supporting this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny."
But former employees said that R2's leaders never directly grappled with some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States law?
Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company it might not need State Department authorization for its activities.
But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks if they did not get government approval to participate in training the foreign troops.
Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees said. What were the battalion's rules of engagement? What if civilians were killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret?
Imported Soldiers
The first waves of mercenaries began arriving last summer. Among them was a 13-year veteran of Colombia's National Police force named Calixto Rincón, 42, who joined the operation with hopes of providing for his family and seeing a new part of the world.
"We were practically an army for the Emirates," Mr. Rincón, now back in Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. "They wanted people who had a lot of experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia."
Mr. Rincón's visa carried a special stamp from the U.A.E. military intelligence branch, which is overseeing the entire project, that allowed him to move through customs and
immigration without being questioned.He soon found himself in the midst of the camp's daily routines, which mirrored those of American military training. "We would get up at 5 a.m. and we would start physical exercises," Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said the troops — outfitted in Emirati military uniforms — were split into companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and practice sniper training.
R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never wanted for anything, and that their American leaders even arranged to have a chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups.
But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike environment. "We didn't have permission to even look through the door," Mr. Rincón said. "We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we could see was sand everywhere."
The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians' military skills fell far below expectations. "Some of these kids couldn't hit the broad side of a barn," said a former employee. Other recruits admitted to never having fired a weapon.
Rethinking Roles
As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as "advisers" during missions — meaning they would not fire weapons — but over time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their troops, former officials said.
Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the ground. Mr. Rincón developed a hernia and was forced to return to Colombia, while others were dismissed from the program for drug use or poor conduct.
And R2's own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired, then fired within weeks.
To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries, including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s. The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world's tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing over control to Emirati troops.
But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently, former employees said, the battalion's size was reduced to about 580 men.
Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince's next big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after Blackwater's compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E. military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a "real world mission."
That has yet to happen. So far, the Latin American troops have been taken off the base only to shop and for occasional entertainment.
On a recent spring night though, after months stationed in the desert, they boarded an unmarked bus and were driven to hotels in central Dubai, a former employee said. There, some R2 executives had arranged for them to spend the evening with prostitutes.
Mark Mazzetti reported from Abu Dhabi and Washington, and Emily B. Hager from New York. Jenny Carolina González and Simon Romero contributed reporting from Bogotá, Colombia. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Washington.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 19, 2011
An article on Sunday about the creation of a mercenary battalion in the United Arab Emirates misstated the past work of Executive Outcomes, a former South African mercenary firm whose veterans have been recruited for the new battalion. Executive Outcomes was hired by several African governments during the 1990s to put down rebellions and protect oil and diamond reserves; it did not stage coup attempts. (Some former Executive Outcomes employees participated in a 2004 coup attempt against the government of Equatorial Guinea, several years after the company itself shut down.)
Correction: June 7, 2011
An article on May 15 about efforts to build a battalion of foreign mercenary troops in the United Arab Emirates referred imprecisely to the role played by Erik Prince, the founder of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide. He worked to oversee the effort and recruit troops. But Mr. Prince does not run or own the company Reflex Responses, which has a contract with the government of the U.A.E. to train and deliver the troops, according to the company president, Michael Roumi. An article on May 16 repeated the error.
THE CASTAWAYS
A Pacific odyssey.
Very early on the morning of October 28, 2005, in the town of San Blas, on the central Pacific Coast of Mexico, five men boarded a small boat. The day started out looking promising: hurricane season was waning, there were few clouds, and the surface of the broad Bay of Matanchén was calm. Three of the men were practiced commercial fishermen who'd been hired by the boat's captain to catch sharks near the Islas Marías, an archipelago sixty miles off-shore. Assuming all went well, they'd be at sea for two, maybe three days.
Nearly ten thousand people live in San Blas. It is one of the oldest ports in Mexico, and its industrial ambitions seem to have peaked during the late nineteenth century. Today, the town might thrive as a destination for tourists—beyond the serious surfers, bird-watchers, and "Lonely Planet" types who've been coming for decades—if it weren't for an inconvenient abundance of jejenes, a maddeningly aggressive species of sand flea. More than half the working population depends upon the ocean for its livelihood. A workweek tends to run seven days and yields a subsistence wage. An estuary a quarter mile wide connects the bay to a turbid cove known as the "U," where most of San Blas's fishing fleet is moored, and where, on a shore littered with old tires and empty motor-oil bottles, mom-and-pop wholesalers in cinder-block sheds with corrugated plastic roofs receive and clean each day's catch. Traffic in the "U" is heaviest around 4 A.M., when the boats venture out, and in the late morning and at dusk, when most return. Small cockpitless fishing boats are generically referred to as pangas, and the typical San Blas panga is a skiff twenty or so feet long, made of fibreglass, with a faded yellow or turquoise paint job. About a third of the boats have hand-lettered numbers on their sides, suggesting that they've been registered with the port officials. That the rest have no numbers, or markings that are no longer legible, is one indication that the authorities barely monitor their comings and goings. The fishermen (they are exclusively men) range from preteens to indeterminate post-middle-age. They wear baseball caps, sun-bleached everything, and plastic sandals. Usually, a San Blas skiff has three benches spanning the gunwales, carries a crew of three, and is propelled by an outboard motor of between forty and a hundred and twenty-five horsepower. At speeds above ten knots, the prow levitates like a seabird struggling to gain altitude.
A fisherman in San Blas, in the course of trying to earn two hundred pesos (about twenty dollars) for a day's work, isn't inclined to make other people's business his own. Although the shark-fishing panga was several feet longer than most local boats, had a draft a few feet deeper, wasn't from San Blas, and was outfitted with twin two-hundred-horsepower motors, it apparently didn't arouse attention. Painted gray, the boat bore no name or number. In the weeks and months after it failed to return, no one came forward who could describe it in detail.
The boat had arrived in San Blas from Mazatlán, a few hours up the coast. Its captain was Juan David Lorenzo, a heavyset man in his mid-thirties who had a background in electronics—in Mazatlán, he ran an Internet café and sold computer supplies—and had some experience as a sports an-gler but not much, evidently, as a shark hunter. In San Blas, Lorenzo understood, he could find men who were adept with a cimbra, a laborious-to-deploy-and-retrieve longline that's well suited to shark fishing. Among journeymen fishermen, shark specialists command particular respect, for their skills and courage and, not incidentally, the fact that a shark is among the most valued fish in the sea. Even in a marginal Mexican pueblo, a fisherman who has never met an Asian person, and probably never will, knows that a bowl of shark-fin soup sells in Hong Kong for more than a hundred dollars.
When Lorenzo began inquiring about potential crew members, one name bound to come up was that of Salvador Ordóñez, a friendly five-foot-four-inch Oaxacan. Salvador, who was thirty-six, had been a fisherman since the age of nine, when he left home and hitchhiked to the Yucatán, where he found work lobstering in the waters off Cancún—or so he said. At sixteen, he'd begun fishing for sharks in the Sea of Cortez. He settled in San Blas in the mid-nineties and was known for his predilection, after a beer or two, for narrating his exploits as a shark hunter. In turn, Salvador recommended Lucio Rendón, a frequent fishing and drinking partner. Lucio was twenty-seven and lived with his grandmother in El Limón, a hamlet thirteen miles from San Blas. Most of his fishing trips originated from Boca del Asadero, an estuarial port five miles away, a commute he ordinarily made by bicycle over a laughably rocky road. The third man hired was Jesús Vidaña, also twenty-seven. Like many fishermen, he often travelled considerable distances to find work. He had a wife and young son in Las Arenitas, a pueblo four hours by bus to the north. Especially during shrimp season, he kept close to home, but in slack periods he would stay for weeks at a time in port towns like San Blas, sending money to his family whenever he had money to send and somebody he knew was headed toward his village.
At dawn on the day of their departure, Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús met Lorenzo's boat at the concrete pier, or muelle, of San Blas. (A famous Mexican pop ballad from the nineties, "En el Muelle de San Blas," mythologizes the true story of a fisherman's wife who lost her mind after her husband was lost at sea.) Already on board was a fifth man, a friend of the captain's, who made it plain that he had no interest in small talk. After introducing himself as El Farsero—rough translation: trickster or joker or, less charitably, someone in-different to truth—he said, "You don't need to know anything more than El Farsero." He was slender, tall, light-skinned, and manifestly not a fisherman. He seemed to be tagging along out of nothing more than curiosity, though his reasons were impossible to discern, because he spoke only to the captain. If he had a sense of humor, he kept it hidden. The three fishermen, for their part, observed the fundamental protocol: it was the captain's boat. They might have the expertise required for the trip to succeed, but the captain called the shots. Whether or not they agreed, they would defer to him. They addressed him as Señor Juan.
At the pier, the panga took on fuel (ten plastic gasoline containers, fifty litres each) and ice for preserving the catch. Its interior was compartmentalized by horizontal dividers: fish here, ice there, gear there. A mile into the bay, it cruised past San Blas's signature totem, a stack of rock sixty feet high that looms like an iceberg and provides a perch for pelicans and blue-footed boobies and a white stone statue of Our Lady of Fátima. A statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe stands atop an islet of boulders a hundred yards away. Each May 13th, fishermen in pangas and shrimp trawlers assemble there for a Mass conducted by the parish priest of San Blas. Believers—Salvador, for one—toss roses and plastic crowns into the water and entreat the saints to protect them at sea.
Working against the prevailing wind and currents, the boat took five hours to reach the waters off Isla Isabel, just southeast of the Islas Marías. Sharks feed most avidly after dark, and the crew needed the afternoon to accumulate baitfish, mostly tuna. For this they used hand lines, the standard equipment of undercapitalized fishermen: monofilament wrapped around a flat piece of wood the size of a small envelope and knotted to a single hook, with a lead sinker. By 6 P.M., Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús had begun easing into the water the cimbra: a three-mile length of braided nylon cord from which hung, about every ten yards, a three-foot piece of monofilament and a three-inch hook baited with a chunk of flesh—five hundred hooks in all. Tied to the main line above each hook was a capped, empty plastic soda or water bottle. With luck, the next morning they would harvest an ample quantity of whitetip reef shark, which weigh from thirty to a hundred pounds each. The possibility also existed that not a single shark would turn up; overfishing threatens the shark population. International conservation and animal-rights groups want to ban the common practice of finning—taking only the dorsal fins of living sharks and releasing the doomed fish—which has proliferated, in part because of low demand for shark meat. Mexico is something of an exception: fins get exported, but fillets sell for domestic consumption. Considering the cost of fuel, for the trip to be worth the effort the boat would have to come back with almost a ton of fish.
Señor Juan had brought fifty litres of drinking water, as well as two loaves of grocery-store white bread, sliced ham, tomatoes, onions, chiles, and some boxes of saltine crackers. Each fisherman provided himself with a couple of days' worth of similar rations (sandwiches, tortillas, tins of sardines, canned corn). In a pinch, they knew, they could build a fire on one of the Islas Marías and make a meal of something they'd caught. Lucio and Jesús carried shark knives—slender eighteen-inch blades with plastic handles—and sharpening stones. Jesús also had a compass. Señor Juan's toolbox contained a hammer, two pairs of mechanical pliers, sparkplug pliers, extra sparkplugs, a screwdriver with multiple heads, and miscellaneous spare screws. Everyone brought a flashlight, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and at least one change of clothing. The captain packed a sweater, a sweatshirt, an extra pair of long pants, two pairs of shorts, four T-shirts, and three pairs of underwear. Salvador, the most experienced fisherman, travelled lightest, with a knife, a mirror, a comb, scissors, and a Bible. Lucio, more fastidious than the others, had five extra pairs of pants and five jackets, plus two blankets. The first day, after gasoline spilled on a blanket that belonged to Jesús, he threw it overboard. Lucio's supply of cigarettes was another early casualty of the trip—eight packs, all soaked. At dusk that evening, he smoked his last one.
Darkness fell before seven o'clock, and by nine they were ready to sleep, expecting to wake up at 3 A.M. to haul in the cimbra. Before midnight, though, something was obviously amiss. A cold front had arrived, bringing little rain but stiff northwest gusts and four-foot waves. The ocean in that location was far too deep for an anchor. Normally, the cimbra would have had a stabilizing effect, creating drag, like the tail of a kite. In the buffeting waves, however, the boat moved haphazardly. Upon investigation, the explanation was simple: the cimbra had vanished. Where it had been tethered to the boat, only a frayed twenty-five-foot section of nylon cord remained.
At dawn they began to search for the cimbra. By then, the fishermen realized, the currents or sharks could have transported it who knew how far away. The hunt proceeded systematically, the boat circling in an ever-widening spiral. To return to San Blas fishless was bad enough; to do so minus their equipment would mean a minor economic disaster. The cimbra represented an investment of as much as fifteen hundred dollars, and the fishermen's code dictated that everyone on board bore responsibility for its loss and replacement. As the men circled, straining for a glimpse of bobbing plastic bottles, they spoke very little. "The ocean that day was very ugly," Salvador later said. They knew where they were, approximately—the Islas Marías remained visible on the horizon—but they had no maps and no global-positioning device to impart an overview of what waters they had canvassed. Nor was there a radio or a cell phone on board. Or a life jacket or an oar.
The following day, as Señor Juan prepared to resume the search, Salvador tried tactfully to dissuade him. They no longer had enough fuel to reach San Blas, but if they headed toward the port they'd surely hitch a tow along the way. Salvador told Señor Juan how he'd once lost a three-hundred-hook cimbra and spent a day looking for it, went back to San Blas, returned to the sea three days later, and found it. They could do the same thing now; or someone might even bring it to them. "But Señor Juan didn't want to do that," Salvador said. "And that's where we failed." More slow circling, more featureless water. By midafternoon, the fishermen realized that their gas supply wouldn't even get them to the nearest island. Another panga was within sight; they aimed for it, and were less than a mile away when the engines died. Fishermen allow plenty of leeway to avoid entangling each other's cimbras, and the other boat soon took off.
Mechanical malfunction is part of the natural order of things in a Mexican fisherman's universe, easier to avert than unpleasant weather but inevitable still. Motors flood, erode their bearings, catch fire, never at an opportune moment. Even self-inflicted adversity (ignoring a fuel gauge, say) seems to fall within this general category. It happens. There's a parallel tendency—a passive acceptance that belongs somewhere along a continuum between faith and negligence—to assume that, in time, help will come along. The previous year, Salvador and Lucio and two other men, also while shark-fishing near the Islas Marías, had got stranded. Their engine had taken on water and wouldn't re-start. Adrift, they were found after four days by fishermen who were too low on fuel to tow them to San Blas and left them instead within the waters of Isla Isabel. The next day, some other fishermen rescued them. Everyone remained calm, in part because they'd brought plenty of food and water. When Lucio arrived home in El Limón and his grandmother asked how the trip had gone, he told her fine.
The present situation was less auspicious, yet no one panicked (with the possible exception of El Farsero, who had become even more withdrawn—which is to say, mute). The sun reappeared and the wind subsided. The panga had floated several miles northwest of Isla Isabel. By the fourth day, the Islas Marías became obscured by fog and then receded entirely. There were no boats on the horizon. Nearly all the food had been eaten—Jesús regretted the crumbled saltines he'd cavalierly flicked into the ocean on the first day—and they'd soon run out of drinking water. At the beginning of the trip, they'd tossed their baitfish onto their supply of ice, which had since melted and turned to swill. So they drank seawater.
Two large vessels—they looked like tankers or merchant ships—came into view the following day, but they were at least two miles away. Ingesting seawater had given everyone headaches and cramps. Jesús found a small bottle of clear liquid that he almost tasted before realizing it was rubbing alcohol. That same day, Salvador drank his own urine. The others refused to do likewise—until, after dark, they all privately did. For four days, they had no fresh water. Then it began to mist, an intermittent, teasing drizzle that barely wet their tongues. A day later, a steadier rain fell for several hours. The bow of the boat was partially covered with fibreglass, creating a shelter where the men could hide from the sun or huddle and seek warmth. It also functioned, the men realized, as a conduit. They sliced off the tops of four plastic gasoline containers, rinsed them with seawater, situated each so that it would catch rainwater trickling off the bow, and filled them, plus two buckets.
Salvador: "I decided that we weren't going to die. From that moment, we had two hundred litres of water. We drank a lot because it rained a lot and we never ran out because, the whole trip, it rained. I do think that God was with us, and we were surviving."
In 1955, Gabriel García Márquez published a series of newspaper articles depicting the ordeal of Luis Alejandro Velasco, an enlisted man in the Colombian Navy, who, in February of that year, fell overboard in the Caribbean Sea and survived ten days on a life raft, without food or water. (The articles later became a book, "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.") Velasco washed ashore a week after having been officially declared dead—the preamble to becoming briefly celebrated as a national hero. The first night: "To make myself less lonely, I looked at the dial of my watch. It was ten minutes to seven. Much la-ter—it seemed as if two or three hours had passed—it was five minutes to seven. When the minute hand reached twelve, it was exactly seven o'clock and the sky was packed with stars. But to me it seemed that so much time had passed, it should now be nearly dawn."
Lucio wore a Casio digital watch with a calendar, and it preserved some demarcation of time's otherwise blurred contours. Occasionally, planes passed overhead, prompting discussions about whether anyone in San Blas had realized that they were lost and instigated a search. (In fact, family members of Lucio's had started looking for him and the others, and fishermen in the community undertook an eight-day search after the Port Authority of San Blas failed to act. The search was called off when they could no longer afford the fuel.) For ten days, Lucio heard Salvador and Jesús repeat that they would soon be rescued. As he no longer believed this himself, their hollow reassurances irritated him, and he told them so. Yet he never accused Señor Juan of being the agent of their distress; even if they were lost at sea, Señor Juan was still the ship's captain.
When they had consumed no food, only water, for thirteen days, a sea turtle weighing about thirty pounds showed up, swimming just off the bow. Salvador jumped on its back and gripped its shell, which he'd learned to do in Oaxaca in his teens. The turtle suddenly dove deep, and he went along for the ride, wrestling until he had turned it toward the surface. Lucio and Jesús helped him hoist the turtle into the panga. They severed a flipper; Salvador sucked its blood and passed it around. Lucio took the knife, cut off the head, and drained a dense stream of blood into a bucket for drinking. After he had removed the meat from the shell, Jesús rinsed it, and Salvador filleted it.
Lucio: "I remember we said, 'How are we going to eat that meat?' It's not like a normal meal. All you can see is the meat. Pure red. I was thinking, How is it possible that I'm going to eat that? In November, we ate only two times. I'd never been hungry like that, with a desperateness that can't be expressed. I don't know how to explain that this is something that one feels. It's desperateness, hunger, thirst, cold."
Did he want to die?
"No, that was not a thought that passed through my head. Even though I knew I was headed that way."
Their other November meal presented itself a few days later, when a white seabird—most likely a tern, which can fly for long distances over the ocean—alighted on a corner of the boat. Salvador slowly removed his shirt, crept toward the rear, netted the bird, grabbed its feet, and dashed it against the inside of the boat. He decapitated it, drank some blood ("because I felt it gave me energy"), offered it to his companions, then plucked and quartered it: seabird sashimi. Lucio and Jesús ate their portions, but Señor Juan and El Farsero could only gag. The same thing had happened when they'd tried the raw turtle.
On December 12th, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, another turtle materialized. (Octavio Paz wrote, "The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments and defeats, have faith only in the Virgin of Guada-lupe and the National Lottery.") The sole reading matter on the panga was the Bible belonging to Salvador. In his cosmology, the turtles and the rain signified divine intervention. It's unlikely that Señor Juan and El Farsero saw it that way; they again tried to swallow the meat and again it caused them to retch. (The sea turtle is a protected species, and, in Mexico, killing one can get you a nine-year prison term. Given how far the boat had drifted beyond the territorial waters, however, not to mention the underlying circumstances, this wasn't the fishermen's most urgent concern.) At some point, Salvador removed a nail from one of the boat's wooden benches and began scratching a sea-turtle tally on the boat's interior—eventually, a hundred and eight. The men preserved much of the meat by curing it in seawater and drying it in the sun. A few times, they chipped wood from the benches and, with the aid of Lucio's cigarette lighter, built a small fire inside a cowling that they'd removed from one of the outboard engines. Atop that they rested the other cowling, with fresh meat inside, and cooked it enough to leach out much of the blood.
Schools of small fish often surrounded the boat, attracted by the barnacles that studded its hull. The flesh inside a barnacle shell was potential bait, but most of the hooks and hand lines had either been lost or damaged. With the cowlings removed, the men scrutinized the innards of the outboard engines. The carburetors had thin rods that could be sharpened and bent into hooks. There were screws with wires wrapped around the threads, and those wires could also become hooks. Each motor had six in-sulated cables about three feet long which, spliced together, made lines. A hook baited with a barnacle could catch a small fish, and that fish, cut up, could become bait for bigger fish. With this approach, they caught dogfish, sharks, sawfish, and dorado. Though the men didn't realize it, this diet probably protected them from developing scurvy—uncooked seafood has a small amount of Vitamin C.
Most fishermen routinely eat raw seafood without giving it a thought. Señor Juan simply couldn't. Starting in mid-December, he vomited blood and bile several times. (These symptoms are common with severe digestive disturbances.) Meanwhile, Lucio had developed an ear infection that left him weak and unable to keep his balance. Bleeding from both ears, he stuffed them with cotton ticking from the lining of a jacket. Wrapped in blankets, both men huddled under the bow, turning it into a sick bay. After eight days, Lucio began to get better, but Señor Juan did not.
Once the unforeseen odyssey began, El Farsero spent much of every day crouched in a corner, weeping. "We wanted to talk to him, and he wouldn't talk," Jesús said. "We wanted him to move, and he wouldn't move." Salvador and Lucio never cried, but Jesús often did, usually at night. Thinking of his family back in Las Arenitas—Jumey, his wife, and Juan José, their son—invariably induced longing and remorse. Jesús had quit school at fourteen ("I was a bum; I would go in the front door of the school and leave through the back") and found work shrimp-fishing and tending cows on a community-owned farm. Gray streaks had started appearing in his hair by his late teens, and as he matured he seemed equally capable of projecting an air of toughness or innocence. He had a broad-shouldered, athletic physique, a short nose, high cheekbones, a mole above a mustache, large teeth, and pendulous earlobes. He was nineteen and Jumey fifteen when they met; Juan José was born three years later. A few days before he'd gone to San Blas, Jumey told him that she was three or four months pregnant. Their home was a two-room hut that Jesús had built in three days from miscellaneous wood. (He'd been in a hurry to get away from Jumey's father, with whom they'd been living inharmoniously.) The hut had a corrugated metal roof, a dirt floor that was still covered with grass when they moved in, and no electricity or plumbing. On stifling nights—the most common sort—an electric fan that rested on a folding chair outside, with an extension cord that ran to a neighbor's house, would draw a breeze through a screened opening in one wall.
As Jesús packed for the trip, he searched for a fifty-peso bill that he'd hidden somewhere in the hut, couldn't find it, and berated Jumey. ("Why do you move my stuff?") Later, upon discovering the bill in his pocket, he'd felt ashamed, and the memory continued to bedevil him because he knew that the incident was hardly atypical. He often behaved callously and spoke harshly to his wife. The burden of caring for Juan José fell almost entirely upon her. If Jesús felt like staying out all night drinking with friends, he did so unapologetically. On days when he had to rise hours before dawn to go fishing, he expected her to get up before him and prepare breakfast, just as he expected her, as he still lay in bed, to put his socks on his feet. Now, somewhere in the Pacific, he pondered who Jumey truly was, apart from his expectations or desires: a mother of a small boy, pregnant, penniless and unprepared to support herself, bewildered by her husband's disappearance, assuming the worst. He pictured her quotidian routines—hauling water, for instance, for cooking and bathing—and vowed that if he found his way back home he would do whatever he could to give her running water. That was the least he could do. It was a comforting, hopeful thought, but, still, he couldn't help crying.
One December day when Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús were urging the captain to eat, Señor Juan stood in the front of the boat, flexed his biceps, and declared, "I'm strong!" At that point he'd gone six weeks without food. "He was very fat, and he thought he was full of life," Lucio recalled. Within days, Señor Juan began bleeding internally. By mid-January, he had lapsed into a semi-consciousness punctuated by bursts of delirium. The others did what they could—rinsed his mouth, brushed his teeth, washed his face and hands—but knew that they weren't much help. He'd become incontinent. One night, when Salvador was fishing and the others were sleeping, Señor Juan started groaning and called Sal-vador's name. Salvador went to his side and said, "What's wrong, Juanito, brother?" But Señor Juan was already dead, his eyes still open. It was Janu-ary 20th, almost three months since he'd left Mazatlán for San Blas. The fishermen cleaned Señor Juan's body and kept it in the boat for three days, in case they were rescued and could arrange a proper burial. Before finally placing the body in the sea, Salvador, who read from his Bible and prayed every morning and evening, gave a final benediction.
Food was plentiful during January, relatively speaking. Many days, they began fishing at 6 A.M. and by midday had caught sixty fish. For lunch, they would eat two or three apiece and put the rest in the sun to dry. In the late afternoon, they would catch more. Salvador had his thirty-seventh birthday that month, a fact that he kept to himself, though he celebrated in his own fashion. "I caught a shark that day and I ate it," he said. "A small shark. The head of a little shark is soft. There's a gelatine inside. I ate the whole thing—the eyes, the head, the brain, everything. I didn't throw anything out."
Long before Señor Juan died, Salvador had become, de facto, the captain. His resourcefulness proved indispensable—turtle wrangling, transforming engine parts into fishing tackle—and his equability counted for as much as his ingenuity. Except when Salvador drank alcohol (a moot point, for the duration), he possessed a gentle, genial temperament. He had dark native-Oaxacan coloring, a round face, smooth cheeks, black eyes, and a lithe, not especially muscular body. In San Blas, he lived alone, renting a single room in a family house, and got around town on a child's bicycle. Wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, from a distance he could pass for a thirteen-year-old—though he'd become a grandfather three years earlier, at thirty-four.
Salvador was born in Puerto Ángel, a tourist village on the Oaxacan coast; he was the youngest and, he liked to say, "most vagabond" of eight children. His father owned a panga and occasionally fished but mainly worked at a civil-service job in the office of the governor of Oaxaca. At times, the family would go to the South Sierra Madre Mountains and work the coffee harvest. (His uncles were planters.) Although he got along well with his parents, Salvador's childhood was marked by wanderlust. He'd enrolled in "open school"—an arrangement, typical of poor Mexican communities, that allows students to pick up books at the beginning of a term, study on their own, and show up for final exams. By the time he quit for good, at thirteen, he'd accumulated years of fishing experience in the Yucatán, Veracruz, and Oaxaca. He was accustomed to sleeping on beaches beneath upturned boats.
How often did he see his parents?
"I would just arrive home, and they would say, 'Oh, you came back, son.' My mother would give me a hug. I would stay there for two weeks and leave again."
Who took care of him if he got sick?
"I never got sick in my life. Not that I can remember."
At sixteen, he became a father, lived for a year with his son's mother in Puerto Ángel, then left for Guatemala to be with another woman. When he was twenty and back in Puerto Ángel, he had a daughter with yet a different woman. He stayed with her for four years, until, during a rainy spell in Puerto Ángel, he went away to work for a month. Upon his return, he heard rumors that she had taken up with another man.
"She said, 'That's not true,' but I got my things in a suitcase," he recalled. "I loved her so much. Whenever I saw a woman who looked like her, I thought about her. When I went to the ocean, I thought about her all the time. When I would come to Puerto Ángel, I would take her to dinner and she would say, 'Let's get back together.' I said, 'No, if for a month you can't stand me being away, then we can't live together.' "
After a decade in San Blas, if he'd been asked where he felt most at home, his answer would have been: the sea.
With Señor Juan gone, El Farsero confronted an awkward social dilemma. "At the beginning, because El Farsero was friends with the captain, he thought he was better than the rest of us," Lucio observed. "It was like, if you'll ignore me, I'll ignore you. But after the captain died who else was he going to talk to?" When the fishermen shared their visions of what they would do if they ever made it back to the inhabited world, El Farsero spoke of helping his sister establish a bakery. He also began helping the others catch fish.
Sleeping habits varied. Early on, Lucio endured an extended bout of insomnia. "November has how many days—thirty? Then I slept thirty hours that month," he later recalled. "People say that one dies sooner without sleeping than without eating," he added. "People are stupid." After a month and a half, Lucio regained the ability to sleep.
The most consistently accomplished sleeper was Jesús, who could put in nine or ten hours a night, plus a siesta in the afternoon, when the sun was most punishing. If there was a full moon, Salvador didn't mind staying awake, alone, for hours. "I would sit and watch the moon go behind the clouds," he said. "Small clouds would pass by, and it would rain lightly, and I would see a rainbow in the moonlight. I told Lucio and Jesús about it, and they said to me 'You're crazy!' and started to laugh. So the next time there was a midnight rainbow, I woke them and they saw it and they believed me."
On the coldest nights, they all slept in the bow side by side, in the fetal position, an intimate arrangement that would have made them self-conscious on land. It was crowded, but they succeeded in staying warm. Then it became less crowded: one morning in February, El Farsero didn't wake up.
Lucio: "He died at my side, asleep. We all lay down, and when the sun rose he had already died. That's the prettiest death, I think. To go to bed and die in your dream."
The fishermen gave him the same valedictory that they had given Señor Juan: a three-day wake; prayers and hymns courtesy of Salvador; then a ritual lowering into the water, feet first, with El Farsero's head cupped in their hands, facing the setting sun.
Jesús had kept some of Señor Juan's clothes—the sweater and the sweatshirt—and Lucio helped himself to El Farsero's. "I didn't feel disgust," he recalled. "El Farsero wasn't sick. If he had had a sickness, I wouldn't have worn them. Listen, where we were, everything was worth something."
Where were they? And by what measure or means—time, distance, imagination—could their experience thus far suggest what came next? All along, the fishermen knew, they'd been gravitating west; whether they were also angling north or south was a more elusive matter. Some mornings, the first sunlight illuminated low-lying clouds on the horizon, so that they resembled islands. Then, as the sun climbed higher, the illusion would evanesce. "That happened a lot, and it happened to all of us," Lucio said. "One gets tired after seeing that much. You want to forget that you're lost, but it makes you think that you're very far out and no boat is ever going to pick you up."
What if there had indeed been an island and they'd managed to go ashore? The notion lent itself to cinematic fantasies, because, after all, fiction offered as useful a frame of reference as anything. Jesús had seen the Tom Hanks movie "Cast Away" and he'd watched an episode of the television series "Lost," in which the survivors of a plane crash discover that their tropical island is home to lurking, huge creatures. "We thought that when we arrived on an island there would be a lot of big animals," he said. "That program was fic-tion. Still, we thought that there could be dinosaurs."
Only Salvador had ever set foot outside Mexico. The farthest north Jesús had travelled was Sonora, where he visited an indigenous reservation, and the farthest south was La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, a coastal resort town two hours beyond San Blas. The airplanes that they were seeing—where had they come from and where were they going? None of them had ever flown.
Earlier in the trip, they'd twice assembled what they called a "floating anchor." First, they filled a plastic gas tank with seawater and tied it to the bow, the idea being that it would ride beneath the surface and somehow prevent waves from striking the boat broadside. After a couple of weeks, they tried a different strategy, a tarpaulin—originally, the cover for the ice supply—that trailed from the stern like a parachute. To this they also attached the engine cowlings, their erstwhile cooking utensils. This contraption proved a bit more effective, but in time the lines broke. One consequence was that they were wholly at the mercy of the elements when, in early March, they encountered a fearsome storm.
Salvador: "A big wave hit the boat. We were going to have to put the weight on one side to stabilize it. We shifted the water containers so that the next waves didn't tip us. There were a lot of strong storms, but in that one there was a wave as tall as a two-story house. For ten days after that, I was traumatized. A wave would hit and I would jump. If the boat flipped over, we would have died, because there are a lot of sharks and octopuses to attack you. All of us made a decision about what we would do. If it had flipped, I would have grabbed one of the gas containers and held on. I said I would continue swimming. Lucio said he was going to tie himself to the bow. Jesús said he wouldn't float—he would dive down and get it over with."
Once Salvador regained his composure ("I thought, I have to control myself and manage the situation"), he reassured himself that divine Providence was managing the situation. "God lives with us at every moment," he later said. "We don't see Him but He is with us. In the sea I felt surrounded by His great love. I was on the high seas, deep in the ocean, and I knew that I was lost in the sea. But I also knew that there's a God. I never doubted for a moment that He wanted me to live."
Salvador read the Bible, knelt, and prayed—privately, at first. Jesús soon followed his example. Probably because, as Jesús readily acknowledged, he spent much of the voyage feeling afraid, he was more susceptible than Lucio to Salvador's ardent beliefs. Not necessarily as a quid pro quo, Jesús persuaded Salvador—Lucio, who began praying after Señor Juan's death, also agreed—that, if rescued, they should permanently abstain from alcohol. (As an adult, Salvador had been baptized as a Mormon but hadn't felt compelled to embrace temperance.) Jesús's and Lucio's families were Catholic, but none of the three men had ever been a regular churchgoer. Over the years, Salvador had become partial to hymns he'd heard in the Apostolic Church, and he sang every day. His standards were "Yo Era Uno Más" ("I Was One More"), "Un Día a la Vez" ("One Day at a Time"), and "El Fin del Mundo" ("The End of the World").
Wherever the fishermen were bound, Salvador suggested, it made sense to try to get there sooner rather than later. He proposed raising a sail, which had the advantage of allowing them to exert at least a symbolic influence over their fates. Though the tarpaulin had disappeared with the rest of the floating anchor, they had blankets from which they could make a sail. By dismantling one of the benches, they could construct a pair of masts. Initially, Jesús resisted. Somewhere he had read that seven hundred nautical miles from the coast was, in effect, the point of no return; beyond that range, the wind and tide and currents became much more powerful. (In fact, as they would all come to realize, they had already ventured much farther than that.) Eventually, Salvador persuaded Jesús; Lucio, though, was even more reluctant. His logic didn't quite amount to a flat-earth philosophy, but it did imply that he hadn't been an assiduous student of geography. Basically, he knew that Mexico lay behind them and that China, land of shark-fin soup, had to be somewhere ahead.
"There's a big ball and it says 'Mapa Mundi,' " he later explained. "I hadn't seen it, but Jesús had. Since we saw planes flying, we wanted to go toward where they were going. Jesús said China was straight ahead. I knew that where the sun sets is where China is. Do you really think I wanted to go farther into the ocean? I said no. Jesús and Salvador wanted to put up the sail. We didn't fight over that, we just talked about it. What were they going to do—leave me and go ahead? And I wasn't going to leave them. We had to figure it out, so we did." They raised the sail in mid-March.
Lucio had the most restrained demeanor of the crew. Among his friends, almost all of whom were fishermen, he was convivial enough. Within his own family, though, he was regarded as a loner. One of five children, he lived for most of his childhood in Mazatlán, where his father had moved to find work other than the narrow choices available in El Limón: fishing or farm labor (tomatoes, bananas, beans). Lucio's paternal grandfather had been a woodcutter in El Limón, and his grandmother still lived there, in a green cinder-block-and-stucco house with a shaded patio where she greeted visitors and spent most of her time. She had five sons who were an on-and-off presence, and Lucio, who often came to visit, preferred the ambience in her household. When he was ten, he asked to live there permanently. After three more years in school—he was no more diligent than Salvador or Jesús—he quit. His relationship with his parents had engendered an in-one-ear-and-out-the-other attitude toward authority, but he responded to an uncle, Remigio, who taught him to fish. If asked, he would identify Remigio as the most important person in his life. ("He taught me how to work.") Yet Lucio didn't speak of Remigio, or anyone else, with any degree of emotional attachment. Reyna Rendón, an older cousin who'd also been raised by their grandmother, said of him, "Lucio's never had a responsibility. He does what happens in the moment." He was six feet tall, with powerful forearms, a bony nose, thin lips, broad cheeks, a strong chin, and brown hair and eyes, and he had a habit of squinting, as if faintly amused. Women found him attractive, but Reyna said there was only one girlfriend whom he'd stayed with long enough for anyone in the family to meet her. Afloat in the Pacific, whatever Lucio missed about life in El Limón he didn't express aloud—in part because of his natural reserve, and also because he couldn't find the words. Speaking of Señor Juan and El Farsero as they lay in extremis, he said, "Who knows what those two were feeling? I can barely say what I was feeling."
During March, Jesús mentioned several times that Jumey would be giving birth any day now—a happy thought as well as a discouraging one. As they were falling asleep one night, Lucio responded to his sobbing by calling him a crybaby.
"Yes, I cry," Jesús taunted back. "I cry because I have a wife and children. And you don't need to cry because you have no one."
"I was born on this earth the same as you," Lucio said. "I have my mother, my father, my grandmother."
"No, you have nothing."
From there it might have escalated to blows if it weren't for Salvador. When they slept in the bow, his spot was in the middle. Because he'd been a consistent source of calm and reason—and because in the event of a serious fight he might have taken an errant punch or two—he was eager to smooth things over. Jesús and Lucio moved to different spots on the panga and didn't speak until, eventually, Lucio apologized: "I shouldn't have said that to you. Excuse me. I'm sorry. You know, the desperation."
Somewhat later, in a much lighter moment, the three men congratulated themselves. Columbus had sailed to the New World and back in less time than they had now been at sea. Intuitively, they knew that—whatever movies they'd seen, whatever stories they'd heard, whatever they knew firsthand about stranded fishermen—they had already survived longer than anyone else.
On the morning of August 9th, the fishermen awoke to the sound of a motor. Salvador stood up first and saw a much larger vessel, a hundred yards away, with lettering on its bow that said "Koo's 102." It had dispatched a motor launch carrying two men, who were gesturing and speaking a language that certainly wasn't Spanish.
The men in the launch helped them aboard and then, towing the panga, delivered them to the bigger boat: a tuna trawler with a Taiwanese crew which, two weeks earlier, had left its home port in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, in the Western Pacific. When the panga and the trawler converged, they were six hundred miles from Majuro, twenty-seven hundred miles northeast of Australia, and five thousand miles from San Blas. More than nine months had passed since Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús had last seen the statues of Our Lady of Fátima and the Virgin of Guadalupe.
The Koo's 102 crew initially assumed that the men they had rescued were indigenous islanders. As none of the Taiwanese spoke Spanish, the conversation was limited to sign language and drawings, a process complicated by the fact that what the three men seemed to be saying simply wasn't credible. At one point, while listening to Salvador, the captain made a hand signal indicating that he was crazy. Better to interview them one by one, the captain decided—so he met with the Mexicans separately and asked each one to show him, on a map, where they had come from. At the end of this interrogation, he had them print their names and home towns on a piece of paper, which was then faxed to Eugene Muller, the manager of Koo's, the fishing company that owned the trawler. Muller conveyed the list to the Marshall Islands' Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which forwarded it to the Mexican Embassy in New Zealand.
Calls were placed to municipal offi-cials in San Blas, seeking confirmation that the three men had set out from there, as claimed. One of the recipients was David Lara, who for many years had functioned as the unelected representative of San Blas fishermen. In the summer of 2005, he was appointed the town's director of fishing. At first, Lara was uncertain. He recognized the name Lucio Rendón and knew that his family lived in El Limón. He had fished often with Salvador, but was unaware that his last name was Ordóñez. Digital photographs sent from the Koo's 102 helped clear up that confusion. By then, a nephew of Lara's had also been able to identify Jesús Vidaña. Two days later, the world began to hear their story.
The Koo's 102 still had a tuna-fishing expedition to complete, so the boat didn't reach Majuro until August 20th. En route, Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús ate everything that was offered to them, including, for the first time, Japanese-style sushi (all things considered, not a shock to their systems). Jesús had never before tasted bamboo shoots or broccoli. The men shaved, cut their hair and nails, and reacquainted themselves with other niceties of personal hygiene. (Salvador's first shower lasted at least an hour.) They slept long hours in an air-conditioned cabin, and continued their daily Bible readings. In Majuro, Eugene Muller served as the primary source for English-speaking journalists reporting the saga; the Spanish-language media conducted ship-to-shore interviews with Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús. Details that captivated readers and television viewers concerned the fundamentals of sustenance: eating raw birds and fish, drinking rainwater, trusting in God.
Several days after the news coverage began—with headlines such as "NINE MONTHS IN ETERNITY" and "MIRACLE ON THE HIGH SEAS"—its tone started to shift. Three poor Mexican fishermen had been pulled from the sea more than five thousand miles from home, but originally there had been five. The other two were said to have died of starvation. Oh? Why wasn't their existence disclosed in the first place? (No information had been withheld; rather, that element of the tale was lost in translation.) By the time the Koo's 102 reached port in Majuro, a flotilla bearing dozens of broadcast and print journalists—with many more gathered on shore—was there, not so much to welcome its exotic passengers as to engulf them. In Mexico and the rest of Latin America, los náufragos ("the castaways") had instantly become a huge story, the improbability of which guaranteed that an onslaught of skepticism would follow.
In Majuro, they were examined by doctors, who pronounced them in good health, given what they had been through. Jesús and Lucio had mild arrhythmia; Lucio had swelling in his legs and arms—a result of excessive exposure. Salvador had sustained some eye damage from the glare of the sun. Perhaps because they had eaten well aboard the Koo's 102, they were neither malnourished nor exceptionally underweight.
Naturally, they had phone conversations with their families. Jesús discovered that he was the father of a four-month-old girl named Juliana, but didn't hear this directly from his wife, because Jumey was literally dumbstruck by the news that her husband was alive. Salvador learned that his sixteen-year-old daughter, Gladiola, had quit school, abandoning her dream of becoming a teacher, and moved to the United States. Such details were invaluable to reporters intent upon milking the castaways' full sentimental potential. ("I'm crying from both nerves and joy. It's like I'm going to see him for the first time. It's as if he's being born all over again" was a quote from Lucio's mother, to whom he wasn't all that close.)
After two days in the Marshall Islands, the fishermen were flown to Mexico City by way of Hawaii and Los Angeles. During their one night in Hawaii, at a party sponsored by the Mexican consulate, they ate chocolate cake. On August 25th, they landed in Mexico City, where members of their families had gathered, along with a media contingent that, for two weeks, had been tracking their movements as if anticipating the descent of Mexican astronauts returning from Mars. It both did and didn't benefit the castaways that the mood in Mexico at that moment was particularly agitated. The national soccer team had performed poorly in the World Cup. That summer's Presidential election and subsequent protracted recount had turned into a draining, bitterly divisive drama. Accusations of electoral fraud levelled by supporters of Andrés Manuel López Obrador against the eventual winner, Felipe Calderón, fed an atmosphere of cynicism and suspicion. (The most inventive conspiracy theory suggested that los náufragos were a hoax contrived by the Calderón camp to divert attention from accusations of vote-rigging.) At the same time, though, the castaways could be seen as symbols of national strength and resilience. The Roman Catholic Mexican Council of Bishops issued a statement urging others to follow their examples of faith and prayer. Still, certain details of the story that had emerged thus far provoked doubt. Many of the hostile questions that had been directed at them in the Marshall Islands were repeated during a press conference at the airport.
San Blas was in a region known for offshore trafficking in cocaine. How can you prove that you were shark-fishing? Weren't you instead on a smuggling errand? Why wasn't your trip officially registered with the port authorities in San Blas? Why did no one report to the government that you were missing? The two men who died—did you murder them or eat them?
No, we are not drug smugglers or cannibals. We are shark fishermen. Registering the trip was the responsibility of the captain. Fishermen get lost all the time, and the government doesn't make an effort to find them.
"To those who don't believe us, all I can say is that I hope that what happened to us never happens to you," Lucio said.
Are you willing to take lie-detector tests? Sí.
The grilling turned clinical, then silly: How did you go to the bathroom on the boat? "The same as you." When you were without water, did you drink your own urine? "Yes, we did."
What is your opinion of the Presidential election? "We followed it closely," Jesús said. "On the panga, every morning the newspaperman brought me a copy."
From Mexico City, Salvador and Jesús flew to their respective home towns, where celebrations awaited them. The grandest fiesta was to take place in San Blas, with Lucio its featured attraction. Less than an hour after he arrived, however, he confided to David Lara that he'd had enough. Stepping onto the tarmac in Mexico City and seeing his family, he had begun to cry. Now he wanted to take a taxi to El Limón, to his grandmother's house, and crawl into his own bed as if nothing had ever happened. As this was to be San Blas's moment of international glory, Lucio's vanishing act was not what the local V.I.P.s had in mind. He left anyway.
Among the onlookers at the San Blas festivities was an American, Joe Kissack, a forty-four-year-old former television executive from Atlanta who had arrived earlier that week, intent upon persuading the fishermen that he was the best person to help them tell—and sell—their tale throughout the world. Kissack had first heard of los náufragos by chance, from a Hispanic acquaintance in Atlanta; the story had been picked up as a one-day feature on cable news and in many U.S. newspapers. By Kissack's reckoning, God had sent him to Mexico, where he'd never been before. Though he didn't meet any of the fishermen on that trip, he soon made contact on the phone, and a month later they all gathered in Maza-tlán and signed an agreement that, Kis-sack promised, would make them rich.
One way to view Kissack's sudden entrance into the lives of the fishermen is to imagine him as a born-again Christian Max Bialystock, with the Leo Bloom role occupied by a Colombian born-again Orthodox Jew named Eli Beda. Kissack owned a company that he called Ezekiel 22 (an allusion to an Old Testament verse that, in Kissack's reading, said, "In the middle of catastrophe and crisis God is still there"), and Beda was his partner. As Kissack saw it, the chronicle of the Three Fishermen, as he preferred to call them, was a Biblical parable of salvation and deliverance which matched his own history—a tale of spiritual rebirth that he was quite willing to recount, uninterrupted, for hours. It was also no small coincidence that the Three Fishermen's names were Jesús, Lucio, and Salvador (Jesus, Light, and Saviour). At various times, the parties to the negotiations included the secretary of the San Blas municipal government and the parish priest of San Blas, not to mention the usual lawyers and advisers looking for their slice. As Beda, a Mexico City resident who attended high school and college in the United States, said, "It sounds like the beginning of a joke: a born-again Christian, a born-again Jew, and a priest sit in a room with three fishermen. But what's the punch line?" The punch line, it seemed, was a variation of the old Hollywood legerdemain. In October, a story in Variety reported that Kissack had paid about two and a half million dollars for worldwide rights to the fishermen's story. He was quoted saying, "I'm looking to produce a theatrical movie, and a book, about what I regard as a miraculous story of faith, hope, and survival."
Kissack's pitch to Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús had included a PowerPoint presentation delineating an even grander plan for ancillary potential paydays. A report in another paper placed the value of the deal at $3.8 million. When I asked Kissack about the incongruous sums, he said, "Don't believe what you read." Indeed. One didn't have to scrutinize the contract's fine print to recognize that the source of the castaways' putative future millions would be "net profits"—money that they would start to see, presumably, around the time McDonald's sold its ten-millionth Three Fishermen Happy Meal. In the meantime, each man would receive a cell phone and a two-thousand-dollar monthly allowance for five months.
One morning in December, I flew from Mexico City to Culiacán, the city closest to Las Arenitas, Jesús's home town. He met me at the airport, and we drove for an hour or so to his village—an isolated community where a profusion of mango, almond, orange, banana, guava, and mimosa trees competed with a profusion of unbagged household garbage. Inevitably, the calamity at sea had led each of the fishermen to reëxamine how to live—with others and with himself. Jesús made clear that he wanted to improve his own circumstances and, if possible, his neighbors'. "God says, 'Help yourself so that I may help you,' " he said. "God gives you the opportunity, but you have to put your grain of sand in." He was doing a lot more than memorizing Bible verses. The governor of Sinaloa, Jesús's home state, had shrewdly recognized a chance to enhance both Jesús's well-being and his own stature. While Jesús was still in the Marshall Islands, the governor was asked by reporters whether he would give him a new panga. He replied, "Yes, but he has to ask me for it." What else will you give him? "I will give him what he asks of me. But he has to ask me in front of the people." By the time of my visit, the tally included a new boat and motor, a two-bedroom cinder-block house (with a bathroom but no running water), air-conditioners and additional desks for the local school, shaded cabanas for the school playground, and a promise to build a bridge over an oft-flooded low spot along the road between Las Arenitas and the nearby town of El Dorado, to which many residents commuted.
Just before my visit, Jesús had made news in the Mexican press: he'd been in a government building in Culiacán when a woman came in seeking help for her young son, who needed a cardiac pacemaker. Jesús offered to pay for it, and asked Beda to put the funds in his account. (Beda did so, then told reporters.) To say that Jesús had adapted to celebrity more comfortably than his compadres greatly understates the case. From Las Arenitas, we drove to San Blas. Along the way, he told me about a family of five from Nuevo Laredo, on the border with Texas, who, aware that one of los náufragos lived in Las Arenitas, had come there on what they evidently deemed a religious pilgrimage. They spent several nights in the dirt-floored wooden house that Jesús had just vacated, which was fifty yards from his new cinder-block house. In San Blas and elsewhere, Jesús was constantly being recognized and asked to pose for photographs and give autographs, and he made an effort to oblige.
We arrived in San Blas late at night, driving the final stretch over a miserable unlit road with memorial crosses every couple of miles, past swamps teeming with shrimp farms and well-fed crocodiles. The next afternoon, we drove eighteen miles to Boca del Asadero, the port village. There we spent a few hours at an outdoor restaurant called El Náufrago, which had recently been opened by Lucio's cousin Reyna. It had streamers of multicolored plastic flags and strings of seashells hanging under a palapa roof, a jukebox full of banda music, a wood fire, and a clientele mostly of tourists and fishermen. Jesús sipped a soft drink—he was the only náufrago to honor the group vow to give up drinking—and ate roasted shrimp while we waited for Lucio to show up. At an adjacent table was an expectant vacationer from San Diego, who had brought along his teen-age daughter for a glimpse of Lucio. The men traded baseball caps. Jesús signed the brim of the one he gave away and also signed the shirt of a young girl in the kitchen. Fame had forced him to work on his penmanship. "My writing still comes out crooked," he said. "My spelling's improving."
Lucio wasn't around. Having been notified by Beda days earlier that I would be coming to interview him, he had elected to go fishing instead, for the first time since his return—a day's work that earned him a hundred pesos. This set the pattern for my dealings with Lucio during the two weeks that I spent in San Blas, an experience that left me feeling like a reluctant truant officer. A young American journalist living in Mexico, Julia Cooke, was translating for me. We would make a date with Lucio, he wouldn't be where he said he would, and we would then make the rounds of his preferred hiding places. By the time we found him—at El Náufrago, or at a cantina in El Limón patrolled by those vicious sand fleas—he would invariably be working on his tenth or twelfth bottle of Pacífico beer. I knew better than to take it personally. "I evade everyone," he once told me. When sober, he answered each of my questions, but always as if he wished it were the last. I attributed this to his inherent shyness and a profound desire not to remember his ordeal at sea.
Did he still read the Bible regularly?
"I have a ton of Bibles in my house and I haven't lifted a single one."
What about praying?
He shook his head.
"Why not?"
"Because, honestly, I'm on land again. But, in any case, I know that He exists."
As the press coverage of los náufragos was metamorphosing from adulation to suspicion, reporters dug up the information that Lucio had once been arrested for theft. The loot in ques-tion, apparently, was another fisherman's haul of shrimp. And? Other, more reputable efforts to debunk the castaways' tale also came along. Some oceanographers said that there was no way the winds and currents could have carried the panga from where it had departed to where it was found. Other oceanographers insisted that, no, it was quite possible.
Some members of the Mexican press, meanwhile, speculated that Señor Juan and El Farsero were fictional. Eventually, reporters confirmed that a thirty-five-year-old man named Juan David Lorenzo—Señor Juan—had gone missing from his home in the Juárez district of Mazatlán. His wife, Rosita, and two daughters declined to answer questions, but his brother Daniel showed a reporter a photograph of Juan proudly holding a freshly caught tuna, and said that his parents had resigned themselves to Juan's death. The identity of El Farsero, however, remained a mystery. "Nobody knows anything about him," said a typical report.
The fact was that when Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús shared with me their memories of what had taken place on the panga, chronologies and details often didn't quite jibe. If I pressed further, this or that element might alter by another degree or two. In a courtroom, a lawyer trying to impeach their credibility could have carved any of them to ribbons. But to what purpose? The prime sinister scenario (not a view I hold, but, nevertheless): they weren't shark fishing; they were delivering fuel to a trawler moving a shipment of cocaine. (In San Blas, a rumor circulated that Salvador had been involved in such operations in the past.) Yet, in the grand scheme of things, what mattered was that, one day, five men got into a small boat, and nine months later three of them were serendipitously found float-ing on the other side of the world. They had survived and now had a story to tell, a story that they could explain only by referring to the supernatural. As a "true" story, that was perhaps its principal defect: no one had ever before heard, told, or possibly even imagined one like it.
With Salvador, I played a game of catch-me-if-you-can with differ-ent constraints. After returning to San Blas, Salvador lived for a couple of months in a small hotel, but had since rented a room on the waterfront, just opposite the pier, for which he was paying fifty dollars a month. Every chance he got, he fished, determined to revert to what had previously passed for normalcy. Whenever he stepped into a boat, he still packed a Bible, though not the copy that had been with him on the fateful journey. (For the time being, that was in Atlanta, in the possession of Joe Kissack, who regarded it as a sacred object.)
Unless Salvador had gone on an overnight fishing trip, I would see him every day in and around San Blas—sometimes at prearranged appointments but more often in chance encounters, as he rode his bicycle near the waterfront or the central plaza. As he was at least as prolific a drinker as Lucio, if I wanted answers to substantive questions, timing was everything. Before lunch, no problem; after lunch, never mind. Sober or otherwise, though, Salvador hewed rigorously to the theological interpretation of shipwreck and deliverance, unwilling to entertain, evidently, the implicitly heretical notion that it was actually his own inventiveness, courage, and resolve that had kept all three fishermen alive. In any event, his expressions of certainty were, perhaps, exacting a toll: he had confided to friends that he'd been plagued by bad dreams since his return.
For one of our conversations, we met for breakfast at a beachfront restaurant and were joined by Ozcar Ramírez, a young Mexican filmmaker who had gone to the Marshall Islands and befriended Salvador, Lucio, and Jesús there; he is now making a documentary film about them. "When you see how Salvador lives his life, you know he feels alone," Ramírez told me. "You can see how he wants to connect with anyone who shows warmth toward him."
We spent more than three hours on the beach, until the conversation turned almost desultory, the returns diminishing. Later, as I rode in Ramírez's van, we encountered Salvador on his bicycle. He'd already eaten lunch but didn't mind joining us at the place he'd just left, the Comedor Martha, an eat-in kitchen and living room in a private home.
Ramírez ordered a pork stew and returned to an earlier topic: Salvador's vision of the New Jerusalem.
"Jesus will come down and be with the people who did good on earth," Salvador said. "He'll be with us. We're going to die now, but after the Last Judgment those who are good will live in the New Jerusalem, and, after that, nobody will die."
"Where will the New Jerusalem be?" Ramírez asked.
"Here."
At another point, Ramírez asked, "Salvador, if God decided to take a year off, and came to San Blas and rented a room, what would his job be?"
Salvador seemed mildly puzzled.
"Would he work in the government? Be a garbage collector? Drive a cab?"
"El mar," Salvador said. "He'd be on the sea—a fisherman."
"Where would he live?"
"He'd choose a room on the ocean, to watch the boats."
My last night in San Blas, I was sitting outside a taquería on the plaza when Salvador pedalled past, noticed me, turned around, parked his bike, and approached, rather unsteadily. He was wearing a gray baseball cap, tan shorts, and a brown polo shirt. I'd been hoping to get him to show me where he lived, but now wasn't the moment. He was on his way, he said, to see his newest girlfriend. She was twenty-two, he reported, very pretty, and gordita—a bit plump—which was fine with him. Did I want him to call her on his cell phone? He'd be happy to introduce us. Among her principal attractions, he said, was that she never asked him for anything. "I've been with other girls who ask for money-—five hundred pesos, two thousand pesos," he said. "This one asks for nothing."
I knew that he wanted to get going, but I offered to buy him dinner. He shook his head, then suggested that I could buy him a beer instead. I tried again: how about something to eat?
With both his hands, he grabbed mine—his were very rough, with dry, flaky skin—and looked me in the eyes. "If I eat," he said, "I want to eat a shark." ♦
Living the Good Lie
Photo illustration by John Gall
Should therapists help God-fearing gay people stay in the closet?
Denis Flanigan isn't hiding anything. A 42-year-old psychotherapist in Houston, he has a straightforward manner that meshes nicely with his no-nonsense buzz cut and neatly clipped goatee. Unlike many mental-health professionals, Flanigan puts personal items on display in his office, including a photo of his partner, who is attractive, and male. For his patients' amusement he has on hand an S-and-M Barbie as well as a Tickle Me Freud doll. ("It's so, so . . . wrong," Flanigan told me, in a tone that signaled he believed it was exactly right.) Flanigan's no-secrets policy extends to his Web site, where he writes that he "has frequently been asked to speak on the gay and lesbian experience and mental health, transgender concerns and body-modification issues." A member of the American Psychiatric Association, Flanigan has also served as Mr. Prime Choice Texas, winning a contest "designed for men 40 years or older who represent the masculine aesthetic embraced by the leather/Levi/uniform/fetish community." In his own words, he identifies as a "militant homosexual."
So it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn that when potential clients come to Flanigan's office to discuss their sexual orientation — in particular whether they should reveal their homosexuality to friends, family or employers — his first response is to ask, in a neutral tone, "Why do you want to do that?" Flanigan has a 20-year history of gay activism behind him, so you might expect that his primary goal would be to help gay clients discover and cultivate their most authentic selves. As Jonathan Ned Katz wrote in "Gay American History" in 1976, "Therapists who do not help their homosexual patients to fully explore the possibility of homosexuality as a legitimate option have not helped to expand those individuals' freedom."
Flanigan doesn't disagree with Katz. "I'm a very strong believer in people's rights," he said one gray morning at a Starbucks in Houston. But during his early training, he encountered a few clients who either would not come out of the closet or suffered mightily when they did. Christians of the kind who earnestly believed that
the Bible deplored homosexuality were particularly troubled as they tried to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation. The more Flanigan studied this conundrum, the more he came to see it as intractable. Some gay evangelicals truly believe that to follow their sexual orientation means abandonment by a church that provides them with emotional and social sustenance — not to mention eternal damnation. Keeping their sexual orientation a secret, however, means giving up any opportunity to have fulfilling relationships as gay men and women."When these clash, what do you do?" Flanigan recalled thinking, and when he began to research the topic about a decade ago, he found few answers beyond the obvious. Antigay religious groups would not condone homosexuality; they thought gays should just give up their orientation, and the most extreme among them offered frightening "conversion" practices. Nonreligious gays thought the conflicted should just walk away from churches that won't accept homosexuals as they are. "Which trumps which?" Flanigan asked himself. "Religion or sexual orientation?"
It wasn't until around 2004 that Flanigan found an answer, one that was given legitimacy by the American Psychiatric Association five years later and one that complicated the conventional wisdom about sexual identity and sexual orientation. Is it possible, he wondered, that the most psychologically sound alternative for truly devout gay men and women would be to defy both groups? It is an approach that Flanigan is sure has relieved suffering among his deeply conflicted clients, and yet he sometimes is struck by the method he has chosen. As he explained it to me, "The idea that I am helping the client stay in the closet is bizarre to me."
The closet now seems a vestige of a much darker era. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the godmother of the academic field known as queer theory who wrote "Epistemology of the Closet," called its hidden world "the defining structure for gay oppression in this century." The world in which men wore red neckties to signal their homosexuality to each other or taught themselves to speak and walk more "manfully" or risked arrest and, in turn, social and financial ruin just to be with people like themselves, now seems as archaic as segregated water fountains. And as insidious: Alan Frank, a 71-year-old analyst in Manhattan, sought professional help in the 1960s when he was an ad-agency art director. He was married with a child and realized he was gay. Three times a week he went to a psychiatrist "whose job was to make me straight," Frank told me. "I wanted that, because I thought being gay was deviant. I was a husband and a father, and I didn't want to destroy that." The psychiatrist took Frank into his backyard and taught him how to throw a baseball, asserting that it would make him "more manly and a better father." He vomited during every session from the humiliation. "There's hardly a gay man of my age who didn't go through some form of aversion therapy," he said. "This was an awful, awful thing that he did." But at the time, Frank's choices, and even his doctor's choices, were few.
So Frank lived his life in secret, until he couldn't stand it anymore. "I left my wife and I left that analyst, because I realized if I continued I would commit suicide," he said. Times changed: more gays were coming out, especially in New York City, particularly after the American Psychiatric Association (A.P.A.) removed homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders in 1973. "I think when that stigma was taken away and we could be our authentic selves, that made an enormous difference." He fell in love with an openly gay rabbi, and the two men lived together for 16 years until his partner's death. Frank is now married to another man. In his practice, he specializes in gender and sexuality conflicts, helping men and women to free themselves from the shame surrounding sexual issues. "The closet was necessary," Frank said. "It's not necessary now."
Frank came out while living in New York City. Flanigan says it's harder where he lives. Despite the undeniable progress — gay marriage in five states; the repeal of "
don't ask, don't tell"; mainstream icons like Ellen DeGeneres — "it's not all O.K.," Flanigan says. There is still discrimination, still bullying of gay kids. "In many states you can still be fired for being gay," he says. And an even deeper fear exists for a small but hidden group, those whose faith condemns their orientation. As Judith Glassgold, who was the chairwoman of the A.P.A.'s Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, told me: "Back in the '60s and '70s, the people who sought treatment were the ones who struggled with the discrimination and prejudice that they faced, and sensed that they couldn't have a life. But more recently, the people who come to treatment are people who have strong religious beliefs who cannot integrate that identity into their lives."Flanigan's parents were Lutheran, but religion was never an important part of his life. "I rejected the church long before I was gay," he told me. "But I still see the value of it in other people's lives." Still, coming out in high school in 1986 in Frederick, Md., was wrenching: "I thought my life was over," Flanigan said. "My thoughts of a family and happiness were ruined." So, too, he believed, was his dream of becoming a doctor. ("They won't let a gay person become a pediatrician," he told himself.) But in the months that followed, he drew on support from his parents, friends, teachers and an understanding therapist. In 1988, while a student at the University of Maryland, he became president of the gay student union. "I got over the delusion that I wouldn't be able to have a professional life," he said.
As Flanigan pursued a career in psychology, the question of how to help those who were torn between their religious orientation and their sexual orientation became a preoccupation. One patient, in particular, haunted him. When he was getting his master's in psychology in Florida, he counseled a young woman who was coming to the realization that she was gay but was afraid to tell her evangelical family. In talking with Flanigan, the student became more comfortable with her homosexuality, and although Flanigan suggested moving slowly, she came out to her brother. But then he told their parents, who pulled her out of school and put her in a religious program designed to change her sexual orientation. Stricken, Flanigan brooded for months over what he might have done differently. He felt plagued by a professional contradiction: "Psychological ethics say that we're supposed to support religious beliefs and support sexual orientation," Flanigan told me. "But there was nothing I knew of that says what to do when they conflict." As far as he could tell, the only choice those people had was to give up one or the other.
Until relatively recently, mental-health professionals considered sexual orientation the most expendable. As Katz wrote in "Gay American History," gay men and lesbians "were long subjected to a varied, often horrifying list of 'cures' at the hands of psychiatric-psychological professionals." These included lobotomies, castration, hysterectomy, clitoridectomy, hormone therapy, LSD, sexual stimulants, sexual depressants, shock treatment, aversion therapy, electroshock and so on. That changed, of course, as mainstream attitudes about sexual orientation changed. But even as Flanigan was beginning his professional life as a counselor in the late 1990s, groups on the religious right, like Narth (then called the National Association of Research and Treatment of Homosexuality) and Exodus International were advertising that they could cure homosexuality.
One person opposed to conversion therapy was a psychologist named Douglas Haldeman, who had been working with gay men recovering from those same therapies since the early '80s. A gay man himself, Haldeman was known as a proponent of "gay affirmative" therapy, which asserts that many of the emotional problems afflicting gays have everything to do with the antigay social stigma they face. When a conversion therapist set up shop in Seattle, where Haldeman lived, a gay rights organization sought his help. Haldeman went to the A.P.A. for guidance and discovered that it had no policy on conversion therapy. A tall, thin, intensely curious man, Haldeman took it upon himself to push for change; in 1991, he produced a survey of the psychological literature for the A.P.A. In 1994 he drew on his clinical experience and other studies to publish his first paper of many on the harms done by conversion therapy.
Haldeman found in his research that the vast majority of people seeking to change their orientation held strong religious beliefs; often, these were married men with families who grew up in a church and who felt that they had far too much to lose by coming out. "For some," Haldeman wrote in a 2004 paper called "When Sexual and Religious Orientation Collide," "religious identity is so important that it is more realistic to consider changing sexual orientation than abandoning one's religion of origin." In the case of such clients, abandoning the church meant abandoning the entire belief system by which they defined themselves.
They suspected, too, that they would be exiles in the secular gay community, in which many didn't understand why gay evangelicals couldn't just change churches or leave religion behind altogether. In other words, Haldeman was certain that conversion therapy didn't work, but he wasn't sure that gay-affirmative therapy — helping gay clients to see that their discomfort with their orientation might come from internalizing a prejudice — would help them find peace of mind, either. In these circumstances, Haldeman tried a different approach.
In that 2004 paper, Haldeman laid out the case history of John, a gay, middle-aged, married and deeply religious man. John acknowledged that he was gay, but he also felt fervently that he wanted to stay married to his wife and remain an active, involved father to his three children. In professional parlance, his sexual orientation was gay, but his sexual identity — the way he saw himself, and the way he wanted to be seen — was as a straight man.
John told his wife about his sexual orientation when they were dating in college. She agreed to continue the relationship, as long as he agreed that he would never have sex with men. John kept his side of the bargain until the birth of his third child, some seven years into the relationship. At that point, he began having sex with men and couldn't stop. Still, he didn't want to leave his family and live as a gay man.
The approach Haldeman used was, in the therapeutic parlance, client-centered; that is, the client's desires took precedence over any values or opinions held by the therapist. So if John wanted to be a gay man who lived as a straight man, Haldeman would help him become that person. As part of his therapy, John agreed to steer clear of any place or activity that might arouse his interest in men — the sauna at the gym, the park where he looked for sex and the Internet, which in the late 1990s was not quite as pervasive or accessible as it is now. Haldeman's clients were taught to acknowledge rather than to deny their feelings (denial only made things worse) but to choose not to act on them. For instance, John had sex with his wife, though he did have a pass to concoct gay masturbatory fantasies. Haldeman also encouraged him to join support groups made up of what have come to be known in the psychological community as mixed-orientation marriages.
At the time Haldeman wrote his paper, John was managing this existence fairly well, mainly because of his determination to remain a good father. Not surprisingly, his wife had her doubts, particularly as she looked ahead, to the time her children would leave home. "Wives require an ability not to see themselves as failed women because of their husbands' attraction to other men as well as a tolerance for ambiguity in the extreme," Haldeman noted in that paper.
In Haldeman's view, this approach wasn't perfect, and his doubts grew over time. But for all the inherent contradictions — some might say hypocrisies — in this approach, Haldeman and others in the psychological community were talking about something that hadn't, to that point, been addressed. And they were meeting the patient at a place he felt comfortable.
Flanigan moved to Texas in 2005 for an internship in psychology at the University of Houston (he'll complete his doctorate this August). His supervisor was a practicing psychologist named Elizabeth Maynard, and when he eventually opened his own practice, Flanigan chose Maynard, who had been teaching at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic school, to supervise his work again. More and more, he was coming across religious gay men who felt forced to make a choice between their faith and their sexual orientation. Maynard had a doctorate in clinical psychology from Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. A onetime charismatic Christian, Maynard felt that it was her mission to undo the damage many churches inflicted on gay men and lesbians. As she told me, the "hate the sin but love the sinner" ethos that is the norm in many evangelical churches "doesn't seem very loving to someone who is G.L.B.T."
On a superficial level, no two people seem more different: Flanigan is gay,
atheist and cerebral; Maynard, who at 40 evokes the pert, pretty Breck girls of the 1960s, is married (to a man) with a new baby and is unshakable in her faith.Flanigan consulted with Maynard to help him challenge his closeted clients' view that the Bible condemned homosexuality. She once had lesbians and gay men in a therapy group perform the story of Sodom and Gomorrah — "a clobber passage within evangelical circles" she told me — to suggest to them that it wasn't necessarily a story about men trying to have sex with one another (as many on the religious right claim) but, more likely, a ghastly rape scenario. With Maynard's help, Flanigan began studying alternative interpretations of Leviticus ("You shall not lie with a man as with a woman; it is an abomination" could be read more generally as a call to reproduce) and the letters of the Apostle Paul. (Even Maynard sees those as "not so easily untangled.") He found himself in discussions with clients about whether God was vengeful and angry or loving and forgiving. Sometimes Flanigan had success in getting clients to try "reconciling" churches that were open to gay people. There were times, however, when the client held fast to the evangelical faith in which he was raised.
Flanigan read Haldeman's 2004 paper and began trying similar treatment strategies. "I would describe my work as identity management as opposed to sexual-identity management," he told me. He wanted to help patients feel comfortable with themselves in a way that then allowed them to make their own choices.
Those decisions could sometimes lead to unorthodox results. An assistant pastor from an evangelical church came to Flanigan seeking to manage his anxiety. He was terrified that he would be exposed as a gay man. At the time, he was fending off the advances of a woman in the church while also trying to end a clandestine affair with the son of his church's pastor. The assistant pastor readily acknowledged that he was sexually attracted to men. (When he wasn't involved with the pastor's son, he told Flanigan, he had fleeting sexual encounters at conferences.) The client didn't want to join another church, nor did he want to come out. For many therapists, the approach would have been to affirm his sexual orientation. But the man cared more about preaching than he did about having an open, intimate relationship with a man.
From Flanigan's point of view, the assistant pastor's most authentic self was one that somehow balanced two conflicting needs. They both agreed that the man should end his affair with the pastor's son, which carried a great risk of discovery and stoked his anxiety. But they decided he could continue having sex with men. The client was not interested in exploring the complexities of his position; he just wanted to feel less anxious. Flanigan saw the hypocrisy of the man's choices, but that's not why he had come to therapy. "He was functioning fine within the church," Flanigan told me. "He didn't seem distressed about the incongruity." If the man had stayed in treatment longer, Flanigan would probably have pushed, but the client stopped coming after several sessions, maybe because he got what he wanted or maybe because the therapy, however gentle, was forcing him to see some things that he didn't want to see.
Around the same time that Haldeman was trying to help his religious clients deal with their homosexuality, two psychologists, Warren Throckmorton and Mark Yarhouse, were approaching the same issue from a very different perspective. At this time — the mid-2000s — sexual orientation was one of the most intense battlegrounds in the Bush-era culture wars. Gay-affirmative therapists saw conversion therapists as sadists; conversion therapists saw the affirmatives as, at best, godless.
Throckmorton and Yarhouse are each heterosexual evangelical Christians: Yarhouse teaches at Regent University, a school founded by Pat Robertson; Throckmorton at Grove City College, another Christian institution, just north of Pittsburgh. They were convinced that sexual orientation could be changed and tried to help their clients in that pursuit. Throckmorton accepted an award from Narth in 2002 for his support of the "ex-gay" movement, and in 2004 he made a video called "I Do Exist," in which five people declared they changed their sexual orientation.
But unlike many of their evangelical colleagues, Yarhouse and Throckmorton reconsidered their positions. A pensive, soft-spoken man, Throckmorton still reveals anguish when he speaks of those who proclaimed their conversion worldwide in "I Do Exist" but later recanted. "What I came to find out was those people felt the pressure of the social contract and said they had completely changed when they had not," Throckmorton said. "They were in my tradition, so I trusted them. If they said they'd changed, why would I doubt them? That was sloppy scientifically, and I regret that." He had been too caught up in the politics, he said, and assumed that the condemnation of conversion therapy was really an effort to undermine religion. "Many theorists in the gay-affirming world have taken a view that religion is a changeable aspect of personality," Throckmorton said. "But people don't wake up in the morning and say, 'I'll be a Baptist instead of a Buddhist.' Religion is the way the world makes sense to them, and for them that seems like a pretty stable attribute." He began looking for a less polarized, more nuanced approach.
Yarhouse and Throckmorton came up with what they called sexual-identity therapy (SIT). At first, Yarhouse told me, many left-leaning therapists saw SIT as a trick — conversion therapy by another name, and many remain skeptical: Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, an organization devoted to debunking the ex-gay ministry, told me that though he respects Throckmorton, he still believes that SIT is just another way of encouraging repression. "I think Throckmorton means well and really wants to help people reconcile their faith and sexuality," Besen said. "However, the more appropriate way is for people to find a more moderate religion that doesn't force them to live at cross purposes with their sexual health."
Still, Throckmorton is a long way from those who insist that being gay is a lifestyle choice. Though he comes from an evangelical perspective, he accepts that homosexuality is unchangeable and has helped clients and their families to begin to accept that, too. But acceptance goes only so far. I spoke with a woman named Susan, whose gay son went to Throckmorton. "The shame for our family started to lift," she told me. "We stopped saying it was our fault." They still harbor the hope that their son could somehow be transformed into a heterosexual, but "we have let go of it as best we humanly can," she told me. As Throckmorton put it: "We are not trying to change your orientation. We are trying to help you develop the life you are trying to live" through the values that matter most to you. He said he had helped clients come out, when they wanted to, though this was rare. His clients are to a certain extent self-selecting because of his reputation for respecting those who interpret the Bible literally.
Like Flanigan's assistant pastor, most of the men seen by Throckmorton and Yarhouse (most of their clients are men) acknowledged their homosexual attractions but also refused to live openly. Hence they use the term "same-sex attracted," or S.S.A. "They would say they have attractions to the same sex but haven't formed their core identity around that," Throckmorton said.
Throckmorton and Yarhouse begin by encouraging self-acceptance. Most of their clients want to marry or stay married, and the therapists encourage them to talk about their same-sex attraction to their wives or others close to them. "My experience has been that their spouse already knows," Yarhouse said. "That's what has led to the consultation or therapy."
One of Throckmorton's former clients, Rob, shared his experience with me by telephone. He did not want to be identified. His voice was soft yet sunny. In a 45-minute conversation, he did not once use the word "gay."
Now in his mid-40s, Rob fought the notion that he might be gay throughout his 20s and 30s. "I struggled for years after beginning to follow Jesus. I struggled and knew that I was not living up to the standard. For years I would try on my own to do better, but I was not being successful." Rob didn't act on his impulses, he told me, other than to masturbate to male pornography on the Web. He told no one about his sexual attraction, but as his religious faith deepened, he became more conflicted and decided to get help, which is when he contacted Throckmorton.
"I went to him and explained where I was and that that was not where I wanted to be," Rob said. He wanted to date women, but he feared telling a woman whom he might become serious about that he was sexually attracted to men. Rob expected to begin a process akin to psychoanalysis, but within just a few sessions the two were focused on the life Rob imagined for himself. "My faith was very important to me," he recalled. "I didn't want to be alone all my life, and I wanted to be married and share that kind of life with someone else in the context of my Christian faith." He never considered having a male partner or attending a more liberal church, because neither conformed to his religious beliefs. "I can't pursue being a follower of Jesus and picking and choosing from what it is in Scripture that I want to follow," he told me. For him, there is only one way to read the Bible. He said he believed that his attractions to men were "the way Satan wants to tempt me for that sin" of homosexuality.
Throckmorton's approach was, first of all, not to argue. "If we try to subtly or directly advocate for our personal loyalties, then we've stopped doing the kind of therapy that we advocate," he said. Rather than challenge Rob's desire to marry a woman, as other therapists might have done, Throckmorton felt the important thing was to help him accept that his thoughts were his own. Rob's language was, to Throckmorton, "a kind of religious imagery," and he noted that religious clients with eating disorders use the same words. Throckmorton didn't engage in a discourse about good and evil but simply said "this sounds like something that feels really out of control to you, something you haven't been able to manage."
Throckmorton wanted to know how much of Rob's identity was wrapped up in being attracted to men. "It didn't seem like a vital part of him," Throckmorton told me confidently. He found support for his conclusion in Rob's mild attraction to the opposite sex; this suggested to Throckmorton that he might be bisexual. "I wasn't devoid of feelings for women, but I also had a same-sex attraction," was the way Rob explained his orientation to me. This sort of therapy necessarily leads to some fine parsing of terms. Rob didn't have to suppress his same-sex attractions, which just made his desires more intense, but he did have to develop avoidance methods to keep them in check.
What Rob saw as "encouragement" from his psychologist — Throckmorton blanches at the word, with its suggestion of conversion therapy — Throckmorton saw as helping a client prioritize. Rob's Christian values, and his desire to spend his life with a partner of the opposite sex, came first.
Throckmorton saw Rob for the next year and a half, as he began to date. Eventually Rob found himself in a serious relationship with a woman. "At that point I had to sit down and lay out all the cards on the table — the good, the bad, the ugly," he told me. "She needed to know, so that if that was a deal breaker then we weren't any further down the road. That was the only fair thing." Rob told her about his same-sex attraction and also offered to meet jointly with Throckmorton, which they did, once. Then they married. When I asked whether they had a happy sex life, Rob hesitated, before answering yes. His reply was much more emphatic when I asked which was more important to him, his sexual orientation or his religious orientation: "My faith," he said.
Several years after completing therapy, Rob told me, his attraction to men is reduced but still present. He has stayed away from gay porn on the Internet and remains married. "My mind-set, praise God, is very different than it used to be," he told me. "The longer I choose to walk the road that I'm on, the less temptation there is, but I'm not foolish enough to think I'm quote-unquote cured. I would be foolish to think I've overcome this and it will never rear its ugly head again. But things are much different than when I started with Warren. The longer I walk this road, the easier it seems to be."
Many people who are openly gay or straight and secular can't grasp how desperately evangelicals do not want to be gay or the lengths to which they will go to try to change. Last fall, Jim Swilley, the bishop of the Church in the Now, in Conyers, Ga., gave a moving,
hourlong coming-out sermon to his congregation, his response to a spate of suicides by gay teenagers and, perhaps, to rumors in his church about his own sexual orientation. "There are two things in my life that I didn't ask for . . . one is the call of God in my life, and the other is my orientation. I didn't think that those two things could ever be compatible," he told his congregation."There is nothing I haven't done," he told the crowd about his attempts to change his orientation. "I've cast out demons, made myself vomit, I've quoted Scripture." Many in the congregation wept as Swilley spoke. He said he spent years practicing the directive of an evangelical preacher who promised that "if you say 1,000 times every day, 'I like to kiss girls,' that will fix it." Swilley also tried marriage — twice; once for five years and then again for 21 — because he desperately wanted a conventional life with a wife and children (he has three sons and a daughter).
In fact, it was his second wife, Debye, who persuaded Swilley to come out. When they started dating, Swilley told her about his attractions to men. "Let's get married; we'll figure it out," Debye said. Once they agreed to divorce, he intended to remain celibate for the rest of his life and to take his secret to his grave, but Debye challenged his hypocrisy. "You tell people to experience the real God in the real world, but you're not real," she told him. "You don't believe God loves you as you are."
Swilley, who is writing a book about his experience, says that any therapy that doesn't involve coming out is pointless. "You can't believe the stuff I watched people go through," he said "and they are all still gay all those years later. And all the people we married off to the opposite sex are divorced."
After years of experimenting with various treatments, Douglas Haldeman came to the same conclusion. "The clients keep trying," Haldeman said. "The danger is that it promotes fraudulent relationships, and their mates finally leave them." He saw too many gay men pressuring themselves to be someone they weren't and saw spouses trying to adapt to marriages that cheated them of emotional and sexual intimacy. Even John, who was the subject of his 2004 case study, went back to seeking out sexual encounters with men.
Swilley hoped that his honesty would touch his congregants, and the coming-out sermon gave him a measure of relief. But some people walked out during the sermon and did not come back, and the International Communion of Charismatic Churches asked him to leave. That's one reason he is cautious about advising others to follow his path. "I've faced the worst fear in my life," he said, but he remains sympathetic to those who lived as he did, "walking around holding a secret, knowing that you're just one piece of information away from the closest people in your life abandoning you."
Swilley is still the bishop of the Church in the Now and has the support of his family; Debye still preaches with him. When closeted gay ministers come to him for advice, he asks if friends and family will stay true. If not, he tells those in hiding to consider the costs carefully. "Man," he said, "there's quite a few of them out there."
By 2007, there was enough confusion and dissent about what had come to be known as "sexual-orientation-change efforts" that psychologists were clamoring for guidance. The American Psychiatric Association formed a task force of gay and straight members to investigate and develop guidelines. A small brush fire erupted when no members of the evangelical community were asked to serve, but they needn't have worried. "Over time we evolved," said Lee Beckstead, a task-force member and psychologist who works with Mormons conflicted about their homosexuality. "We were trying to integrate the psychology of religion with the psychology of sexual orientation." They wanted a client-centered approach that was also based on scientific research. "The science says that being gay is not an illness," Beckstead told me. "You don't need another treatment model, because there's nothing to treat. The important thing is meeting where the client is — honoring them, validating them, supporting them, giving them the ability to decide for themselves."
In the final document, the A.P.A. clearly stated its opposition to conversion therapy and unequivocally described homosexuality as normal. But it also offered a nuanced view of religious gay people who did not want to come out. The A.P.A. considered the kind of identity therapy proposed by Throckmorton and Yarhouse to be a viable option. No effort needed to be expended trying to change a client's religion or sexual orientation. Therapy, in fact, was to have no particular outcome either way, other than to guide the client closer to self-acceptance, whatever the client believed that to be. The difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity was microscopically parsed. "Acceptance of same-sex sexual attractions and sexual orientation may not mean the formation of an L.G.B. sexual-orientation identity," the report stated. "Alternate identities may develop instead." It further stated that acting on same-sex attractions might not be a fulfilling solution for everyone. "I called up Mark, and I said: 'Can you believe this? Am I reading this right?' " Throckmorton told me.
The chairwoman of the task force, Judith Glassgold, remains pleased with the outcome. "People might want to adopt an identity that fits with what their religion proscribes," she explained. "Or they might want to be celibate rather than identify as a gay person. Some people prioritize their religion over their sexuality, like priests and nuns. That's an identity." The goal was to help the client come up with an identity that worked for them. "The dialogue has changed in the last decade," she continued. "Among therapists — both among gay activists and the religious — we can have a discussion. We all agree that arousal and orientation are not under someone's volition. What we can work on is self-acceptance, integration identity and reducing stigma."
Clinton Anderson, director of the A.P.A.'s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Concerns Office, put it another way: "The task-force report is more of an acknowledgment than was true in the past that not everyone who is coming to this dilemma with a strong religious background is going to find an adaptation that is positive with regard to their sexuality. There may be people who are just not going to get there."
Denis Flanigan has come to the same conclusion. Over time, he has found that clients are shifting and experimenting with sexual identities. "There's crazy stuff out there," is the way he puts it. "The terminology we have doesn't work for a lot of people."
For two years, Flanigan has been treating a man who is sexually attracted to men but emotionally attracted to women. It's been a frustrating case: the client had relationships with women for a period of years, but they ended when he refused to marry them, knowing, without confessing to them, that he was gay. At the same time, however, he had no interest in exploring life in the gay community, despite Flanigan's encouragement. "I honestly believe his life would be more fulfilling if he would express that part of himself," Flanigan told me. "He needs to forgive his sexual orientation for what he thinks it did to him." Still, Flanigan can't see the benefits of guiding the man to come out. "He will feel the loss of a weight, but beyond that?" he asked, opening his palms and shrugging. By giving up one identity without a willingness to embrace a new one, he may find himself lonelier than he is now. "He's actually pretty happy," Flanigan said, "except for a nagging voice in his head that tells him he's not being honest about who he should be."
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 19, 2011
An article on Page 30 this weekend about gay people who prefer to keep their sexuality secret misstates the second word in the name of the organization that in 1973 removed homosexuality from its manual of disorders. It is the American Psychiatric Association, not Psychological.
Killing Mom and Dad on Staten Island
All-American kid Eric Bellucci fell into madness and violence, leaving his brother and sister behind to wonder if he could have been stopped
By Elizabeth Dwoskin
published: May 11, 2011
Photograph by Michael Oates
Brian and Vanessa Bellucci at the time of Brian's wedding, to which Eric was a no-show
One evening last October, on a quiet block in Staten Island, a man named Eric Bellucci came out of the bedroom that he barricaded himself into on most nights and used a hunting knife to stab his parents, Marian and Arthur, until they bled to death.
The murders took place sometime between the evening of Tuesday, October 12—when the family got sushi delivered—and the following afternoon, when Bellucci took his parents' 2007 Honda Ridgeline to JFK and boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. His younger sister, Vanessa, discovered their parents' bodies when she showed up at the house later that night.
In the days that followed, media outlets mobbed the funeral of the Staten Island couple, while an international manhunt ensued. Bellucci, who is 30, was apprehended when he tried to use a credit card to buy a plane ticket to Beijing. A week after the murder, he was brought to Staten Island for arraignment.
With their parents dead and brother in custody, Vanessa, a 25-year-old law student, and her 28-year-old brother, Brian, a physician doing his residency, are what's left of the immediate family. Until now, neither sibling has spoken to the press. In a series of exclusive interviews with the Voice, they describe their brother's descent into mental illness and offer a portrait of a family coping with a problem spiraling out of control: Despite their attempts to get Bellucci institutionalized, his family was unable to convince a court to authorize the state to medicate him, even as the troubled man—a diagnosed schizophrenic—was stockpiling weapons in their home.
On April 28, after spending six months on Rikers Island, Bellucci was found not mentally competent to stand trial on homicide charges (his attorney, Mark Fonte, did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this article). As a result of that court decision, the State Office of Mental Health will place Bellucci in a psychiatric institution where he can be medicated by force if he poses a danger to himself or others. After a year, he will be periodically re-evaluated. If it is determined that he is able to understand the charges levied against him, he will stand trial.
If he never does comprehend what he's accused of, he will be committed for the rest of his life.
The first thing Eric Bellucci's siblings remember that indicated something might be wrong were the unusual infatuations he developed while in law school.
In 2003, Bellucci had enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but he instead became obsessed with documentary filmmaking in a way that seemed odd and a little troubling. With a high school friend, he began making a film about poverty in Red Hook, and, while shooting it, he began developing exaggerated ideas about his own role in the community.
"At one point, he was trying to 'save people in Red Hook.' He would give someone a ride, and to him he was becoming a 'super-mentor,' " Bellucci's brother, Brian, says. "Or he would befriend someone, and he would call it his 'gang outreach.' He thought these were huge gestures."
Vanessa remembers what in hindsight seems a crucial early sign that Bellucci's mind was not right. During his film project, he became convinced that someone was trying to steal his videotape. His friend became so concerned by his paranoid behavior that he called Bellucci's mother, Marian, who called Vanessa.
"I vividly remember where I was when my mother called," she says. "So it indicated, looking back, that we were starting to be worried about him."
Around the same time, Bellucci developed another infatuation—Judaism. He was raised Catholic, but when he discovered that an Italian grandfather had been Jewish, he began studying Hebrew on his own. He even sought guidance from Rabbi Aaron Twerski, a professor at Brooklyn Law School. But Twerski referred Bellucci to a campus psychiatrist. A school official who saw him around this time tells the Voice, "It did not take a maven to see that he was a sick, sick boy."
For those who knew Bellucci well, it was bewildering to see him so quickly become someone they hardly recognized. Only a few years earlier, he had been the star quarterback of the Stuyvesant High School football team, a magnetic standout in a school of standouts.
The Belluccis were a close-knit family in the upscale Annadale neighborhood of Staten Island. Arthur Bellucci had worked as a bond trader on Wall Street before becoming a real estate broker at the Corcoran Group. His wife, Marian, worked as a manager for a home health company and, after an MBA, started a company providing home-nursing services. Marian's mother and sister lived nearby and often dropped by to visit. The kids, meanwhile, were pushed to achieve in school, sports, and music. "If there's one thing that I remember about the Belluccis," says a high school friend who asked not to be named, "it's that they were close—almost unusually close for a family in this day and age."
Both Bellucci and his sister, Vanessa, went to the elite Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. When Seventeen magazine profiled the school, Bellucci and his girlfriend—the football team's trainer—were photographed together for the opening spread. "Everyone who looked at my brother—all my friends—thought he was the best-looking guy they had ever met," Vanessa says.
"If you had asked me where I thought Eric Bellucci would be right now, I would say . . . working as the manager of some company, running things!" says Raymond Wheeler, a Stuyvesant assistant principal who was also Bellucci's band director. Of the thousands of students he has taught since the 1970s, Wheeler says Eric Bellucci was one of the five he considered the most memorable. "He was bright, articulate, and he had that magic personality, that charm. He could get things done, and people wanted to do what he wanted them to do. I noticed that right away as a teacher." And yet, Wheeler says, Bellucci handled his popularity "without an ounce of arrogance."
A student who worked for the football team but did not want her name used, has a similar recollection: "A lot of guys who are popular can be jerks—that's the stereotype. Eric wasn't one of them. He was a strong player, and a lot of guys looked up to him," she says. At an academically demanding school like Stuyvesant, even being a football team captain did not confer automatic social stature, and she says it was Eric's personality that made him so popular.
But Brian remembers his older brother differently. "He was completely egotistical about everything he did," he says, "Eric would never take any criticism. He would fire the insults right back. Everybody yessed him. His third-grade teacher probably yessed him." He adds: "With the illness, that became narcissistic behavior."
Wheeler can still remember where he was when he heard about the murders. He said his whole body went cold. "If you were to ask me if Eric Bellucci was going to end up in the mess he ended up in? I would say never in a million years."
After his senior year, as quarterback and captain of the Stuyvesant High School "Peglegs," Bellucci was named an All-State Scholar by the New York State High School Football Coaches Association and won a scholarship to Williams College in Massachusetts.
He was listed on the 1998 football team roster as a six-foot-three, 210-pound freshman wide receiver and defensive back. Mike Whalen, the team's coach at the time, says that Bellucci was extremely disappointed to find out that he wasn't good enough to play quarterback at the school. "Many guys would have just walked way," he says. "But to his credit, he worked hard and started as an outside linebacker. He worked his way up the ladder. I think, in his heart, he thought he should have been starting quarterback, but when I told him that would never happen, he didn't give up."
Like many students in college, Bellucci struggled to settle on a major, first choosing pre-med and then political science. Later, he decided he wanted to be in finance and did an internship at Merrill Lynch. His academic performance began to taper off, but only slightly. He was very involved with his team, but didn't act like a jock. "He was a very unique individual, in that he didn't always have to hang around a certain group of guys," says Whalen. "I would see him on campus with lots of different kinds of people. He traveled in a lot of different circles."
Whalen says he never noticed any signs of mental illness. After college, however, he did notice a change. The football team at Williams is extremely close-knit, and alumni tend to come back for years to attend games. But Bellucci, though he played for four years and was always involved with the team, never showed up to a game after college. And he never once went back to see his coaches.
Bellucci's siblings believe that in college he began using anabolic steroids (they say their parents found empty containers in his room when he was away). Whalen says he didn't see evidence of it. The Belluccis also say their brother used cocaine and began smoking pot more frequently. (Six years later, he would be a chronic drug user.) If true, drug use would have almost certainly exacerbated the onset of his schizophrenia. Dawn Velligan, director of the Division of Schizophrenia and Related Disorders at the University of Texas, tells the Voice that in patients who have an underlying predisposition for mental illness, drug use can help trigger the disease. Schizophrenia typically develops in late adolescence and early adulthood, but Velligan says that many people can start exhibiting more subtle signs of the disease years before that.
After Williams, Bellucci enrolled at Brooklyn Law School, but almost immediately seemed to lose interest in classes. Instead, he took up the filmmaking and other obsessions. He dropped out of school in 2004, moved back home, and began formulating plans that were increasingly far-fetched. He told his family that he wanted to be a photographer, and then a model, and then an actor. He bought thousands of dollars' worth of photography equipment. He would hatch grandiose business plans, and took trips to Paris, Italy, and even Israel to execute them. He always referred to these trips as "business ventures," but no one was quite sure what he was doing when he traveled.
"He was becoming disorganized," says Brian. "His ambitions were starting to make less and less sense. There were some realistic things, like law school, and some unrealistic things, like turning his businesses into empires, and it would become nationwide, and with that he could buy a villa in Tuscany! At first, some things seemed realistic, but then they just started to come, you know, over and over and one after the other. If you took all his ambitions together, they were no longer ambitions. They were delusions. Because no one could be all that at one time."
The family did not know what to make of Bellucci's behavior. "At first we chalked it up to that egotistical aspect of his personality," Brian says. "It's like, if you know somebody is mentally ill, you look at what they do and say they are delusional. But if you don't know they are mentally ill, then you look at it differently."
Schizophrenia expert Velligan says that it is common for families, in the early stages of the illness, to have trouble distinguishing between the signs of sickness and the more extreme sides of the person's personality. "Our personalities are what they are, and should we become psychotic, our personalities shine through that. So if his worldview is 'I'm right and everyone else is wrong,' then when a person becomes psychotic, that is developed to the extreme."
"We all became worried around the same time," Vanessa says. "But it was about him, never about ourselves. And we knew that there were issues that were coming up and needing to be addressed, but you're not really sure how to go about doing it." She adds: "Maybe there is a denial element. But then it just becomes so clear that you can't be in denial."
By 2005, the delusions had really set in. "He thought he was leading this big life," Brian says. "At that point, his lifestyle was changing from one minute to the next." He would go for months without seeing his friends, and then would call people constantly. He would go into the city and stay out all night. At one point, he went to Atlantic City five times in a month. He started taking more trips to Israel, but instead of scheduling them a week or two in advance, as he once had, he would buy his ticket and fly out on the same day.
The family tried to bring up their concerns with Bellucci, but it was not easy. He would usually get angry, and tell them that they were the ones who needed psychiatric help.
Bellucci also began to develop a military obsession, and would walk around the house in Army fatigues. "My mother would say, 'Eric, you have a closet full of clothes—why are you wearing the same thing every day?' " Vanessa recalls. Sometimes he would dress very formally, and would put on a suit to go out and check the mail. He would drive to West Virginia to buy hunting rifles at Walmart and began racking up credit-card debt. He adopted certain phrases indicative of paranoia—"Something's up in the town here," was one of them. At times, he thought he was a victim or possibly a member of organized crime. And he started to develop a hatred of women, and often said that his female relatives were conspiring against him.
At that time, Terre Ciervo, Marian's sister, remembers that he would act remote at family events—making brief appearances and then leaving mysteriously. Relatives say that sometimes, to escape the city and seek what he referred to as "his peace and serenity," he would go back to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Williams College is located. Sometimes he would book a hotel for the weekend, but he never went back to visit his football coaches that he had been close to. He lost touch with friends.
As Bellucci became more delusional, he would say that it disappointed him that his family did not believe in his grand plans. "He started to feel like we weren't taking him seriously," Vanessa says. He became resentful and angry, and began referring to his parents by their first names. There were frequent fights in the Bellucci household, but family members tried their best to pick their battles, knowing that any disagreement could throw him into a rage. Sometimes, when he got very angry, he punched walls or doors, busted car tires, or scratched cars with his knives and his keys. One time, he got so angry that Marian locked herself in the bathroom in terror. After that, the family was walking on eggshells, doing whatever they could not to antagonize him.
Attempting to diffuse the anger, Marian would jump at every opportunity to have a conversation with her son. She would listen whenever he was in the mood to actually talk, even if all he discussed were his delusions.
"You could just see the toll it took on her, on her face," says Ciervo. "In just a few years," says Vanessa, "they aged so much. It really hurt."
Marian was the most involved with her son, and she hid his illness from everyone besides her immediate family. With Brian, who was studying to be a physician, she would discuss the clinical aspects of Bellucci's situation. She relied on Vanessa for emotional support. But even Marian's sister, Terre, who lived nearby and whom she saw frequently, knew very little about what was happening. Friends, too, according to Ciervo, had no idea that Bellucci was sick; they thought Marian and her husband were just overworked. "My sister was a very private person, and I know that she was going about it in her own way to get some help," Ciervo says. "She didn't talk too much about it, and, you know, I didn't ask. When she wanted to tell me something, I listened." She added: "She was disappointed that Eric wasn't what he could have been."
It's less clear how Arthur dealt with his son's illness. His children say he was supportive of Marian's choices about Bellucci's care. He also felt that if Bellucci got violent, he could physically handle his son. At one point, according to the Staten Island Advance, Arthur asked an old friend who had been in law enforcement about whether it was legal for him to trace his son's movements. (The friend, Frank Floridia, did not respond to multiple requests from the Voice for an interview.)
By 2008, Bellucci was losing weight rapidly, and had become a chain smoker, smoking two to three packs a day. He would take a puff or two on a cigarette, throw it out, and immediately start another. Arthur, whose father had died of emphysema, was especially hurt by the smoking, his children say. Bellucci was also smoking pot constantly, and his siblings suspect that he was abusing cocaine as well.
On a February afternoon, Vanessa was driving into the city when Bellucci called and told her that he was standing in the shower and was about to slit his wrists. She drove home immediately and found her brother in what she called a "psychotic haze." The family called 911 and Bellucci was taken by ambulance to Bayley Seton Hospital, about 25 minutes away. But he was never admitted, the family says. "He probably just convinced them that he was OK," says Vanessa, adding that her brother, like many schizophrenics, could disguise his illness when he needed to.
That same year, Bellucci missed Brian's wedding in California, where he was supposed to be best man. The day before the event, he called from Israel, saying that he had to stay there for business. "So that put a stamp on it," Brian says. "Now, it's like he's missing things. Now it's starting to feel like, not that it's falling apart, but that we can't be a family."
In August 2009, Bellucci was finally hospitalized. He had taken his mother's computer into his room and barricaded the door, claiming he was protecting her from bad people who were going to hack into her machine. His mother screamed at him, trying to make him understand that her company's files were on the computer. He wouldn't open the door.
Ciervo says it was the first time she really understood how sick her nephew was. It was also the first time anyone outside the immediate family had seen that side of him. Vanessa called the police to have her brother removed from the house.
Bellucci was admitted to Staten Island University Hospital, where he stayed for about six weeks. During his hospital stay, he was injected with a long-acting medication, which his siblings say made him very mellow, almost without personality. Marian went to visit him every day, but for the most part he refused to see her and the other family members. He was furious for being hospitalized against his will, and blamed everything on his family—specifically his sister, Vanessa. It was during that hospital stay—about six years after his illness began to surface—that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The hospital's on-site psychiatrist, Dasen Brajkovic, told the family that he was going to bring a petition to a judge that recommended Bellucci for an "assisted outpatient treatment." An AOT court order would give doctors the right to come to the house and medicate him there. (Brajkovic did not respond to requests to be interviewed.)
Bellucci's siblings say that Brajkovic told them he felt they had a strong case for an AOT order. The family was elated. "We thought that could have been the answer to our prayers," Brian says.
The law that allows this is called Kendra's Law—after Kendra Webdale, a young woman who died in January 1999 after being pushed in front of a New York City subway train by a man who was not receiving treatment for his mental illness.
Kendra's Law has been the subject of bitter political fights. Civil liberties advocates have argued that it infringes on the rights of competent mentally ill people to make their own health care decisions and to refuse treatment if they choose. The ACLU and other groups argue that Kendra's Law was supposed to apply only to individuals with a history of violence—a small percentage of the mentally ill—but was being applied to anyone who did not comply with a doctor's prescription. The ACLU has helped defeat a similar statute in New Mexico.
Even with a court order, Kendra's Law, mental health experts say, is toothless in New York State. Nurses cannot compel a patient to take medication unless the patient is an immediate threat to himself or others. And the criteria are very narrow: In order to qualify, a patient must either have been hospitalized two additional times within the prior 36 months, or have threatened or attempted to cause physical harm in the prior 48 months.
Still, the vast majority of petitions are granted in New York courts—the most recent data show that 93 percent of petitions are granted.
For some reason, Bellucci's was not among them.
Prior to his hospitalization, Bellucci had been smashing car tires and punching walls, stockpiling firearms, and making threats like, "I'm going to burn the house down," his siblings say. Brian says that he and his mother provided all of this information to Brajkovic. But without the transcript to Bellucci's Kendra's Law hearing—which is not accessible to the public—it's unclear what the judge in his case was told about his behavior. His siblings only know that the court was not convinced that he should be subject to an AOT order, even though granting such orders is nearly automatic in this state.
The day Bellucci was discharged from the hospital, he came home to his parents' house. The long-acting medication he had been given was in effect, and he was under orders, by Brajkovic, to visit an outpatient treatment center a few times a week. It was September 2009. Vanessa had just started law school. She remembers sitting on the back porch with her brother, and for the first time in years, the two held an ordinary conversation. Bellucci asked if she liked law school, and she told him that she did. He was mellow, medicated, but more mentally present than he'd been for a very long time. That, she says, was the last normal conversation she would have with her brother.
Once the medicine wore off, Bellucci was angrier and more hostile than ever, Vanessa says. He blamed her, and his parents, for locking him up, and when she came over, he would lock himself in his room.
Then he began barricading himself in regularly, putting furniture in front of his door. He would only come out at night, when he was alone in the house with his parents. He developed a health-food obsession, and would sometimes take the car to Whole Foods to eat. He began smoking in the house, an affront to his father that he had never made before. Distrustful of tap water, he began importing bottled water from Israel.
He told his parents that he would kill them if they sent him back to the hospital. Arthur had thrown out his son's rifles during the hospital stay, taking them to a local precinct's gun buyback program. Bellucci responded by obsessively ordering hunting knives. In the last months, Vanessa says, packages of knives were being delivered to the house constantly.
Without the Kendra's Law petition, however, the family didn't have many options. If Bellucci did something violent, they could call the police and have him hospitalized again, and then try another court petition. "Marian was hoping he would make a wrong move, possibly like the last time, so she could put him on the program," Ciervo says. "But he was smart enough not to. He knew what not to do. He would push the button so far, and then he would stop."
But Brian points out that his parents were reluctant to call the police, even when it might have been appropriate. "They didn't want the SWAT team to come in and have him kill himself right in the room there," he says. "So they thought they would roll the dice."
And there was another reason, the siblings say: Their mother didn't like the state hospital that he would be taken to if they called authorities. "She wanted him to go to an academic hospital, where they would be better equipped to deal with such a unique case," Vanessa says. Her mother believed that in a better hospital her son would receive superior care and might be less resistant to treatment. In the weeks before the murders, Marian had been discussing with Brian the prospect of getting her son into a treatment center at the prestigious New York Presbyterian Hospital, but their discussion always went around in circles. They both knew Bellucci would refuse to go.
Dawn Velligan says these kinds of impulses are common in families who have children with serious mental illness. "There is very little a family in that kind of situation can do," she says. "Part of the problem is that people walk around on eggshells. People don't want them to become violent and threatened, and so what happens is you have the mentally ill person running the whole house.
"I think the situation was far more dangerous than the parents realized," she continues. "If you are afraid in your own home, it's time to do something about it. I tell families: If you are walking on eggshells, you have to stand up to them. Everyone is afraid to confront a person like this, but you have to do that in order to get them out and to get yourself safe. I would have been calling 911 every day."
In the weeks leading up to the murders, Bellucci had been threatening to kill his parents on a regular basis, and his threats were becoming more pointed and serious, Brian says. Marian never told Vanessa about the threats.
On the night of the murders, Vanessa and her grandmother were visiting. Marian was working at the computer, Arthur—"Artie," as everyone called him—was watching television, Vanessa was working on her law school homework, and Eric was in his room upstairs. Vanessa wanted to leave early—she had a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach, for some reason—but her mother convinced her to stay while they ordered sushi. She and her grandmother left after eating.
The next day—Wednesday, October 13—Terre Ciervo had plans to go with her sister to the Richmond Hill Country Club to attend a fashion-show benefit for children with developmental disabilities. (The Staten Island Advance reportedly incorrectly that Marian attended the fashion show with her son, Eric, based on the statement of Terre's husband, Joe. Marian was killed before the fashion show occurred, and Joe says the Advance must have misunderstood him.)
That night, Ciervo says she was concerned because Marian hadn't answered her text messages. She went to the house and rang the doorbell and no one answered. "I didn't go around the back," Ciervo says. "Something told me not to go around the backyard, and I'm glad I didn't, because I didn't want to see that." She went to the fashion show, and called Vanessa, relating her concerns. It was Vanessa who then went to the house and found the bodies.
To this day, Vanessa insists that her parents never really believed that their son would actually hurt them. "As parents, they would have given their lives for any one of their children," she says. "Unfortunately, they did not think it would be at the hand of their child. I don't think she thought in a million years that he would have harmed either one of them."
Brian, however, says that his parents weren't entirely blind to the danger. "They were rolling the dice," Brian says. "They knew they would either go down with him or get him help. They did not fear for their safety. And they thought they would go down with the ship if they were wrong."
Neither Vanessa nor Brian have seen or spoken to their brother since the incident. He has sent them letters from jail, but they don't respond. They say he seems psychotic in his letters—in one, he'll insist that the murders were committed by organized crime; in another, he'll blame their uncle Joe Ciervo, or members of the CIA. Bellucci avows, in his letters, to get to the bottom of his parents' deaths, saying that he misses his mother terribly.
As long as he refuses medication, his siblings see no point in communicating with him. They don't even attend his court hearings, preferring to read about them in the news.
"Is he going to become medicated and one day realize that he did it? Or will he be medicated his whole life and have no recollection?" Vanessa asks. "I don't know which is worse."
THE ABORTIONIST
Saint and Satan, the doctor who replaced David Gunn lives on the front lines of the war over a woman's right to her own body
February 1994
By Torn Junod
PHOTOG NAME
219Y-041-007
The abortionist makes house calls. The abortionist's patient, Mr. Beazley, is dying, and the abortionist has made a habit of visiting his house after work, to steer him to his end. Mr. Beazley is an old man, dying in his bed. He is beyond speech, beyond seeing and hearing. His lips are blue, and his gray tongue hangs out of his mouth. His wife and daughters stroke his arm, his leg. A drip bag, suspended over his bed, feeds him. The abortionist adjusts the rate of the drip. There is nothing else he can do. He cannot save Mr. Beazley. He cannot do anything but deaden his pain and console his family, and for this the Beazleys love him. "Oh, Doc, I can't tell you how much we brag on you," Mrs. Beazley says to him in her weary smoker's voice, and every few minutes a little blonde girl in an orange skirt -Mr. Beazley's granddaughter-hands him, with a curtsy, a fresh drawing of the sun. The abortionist puts the drawings in his pocket and bows. The abortionist has a weakness for children. Some years ago, he delivered babies. The abortionist is a family doctor, and he understands that what he is doing -drawing out Mr. Beazley's death- is simply a gesture for the family's sake: an exercise that enables the Beazleys to believe they have done all they can, and to get a head start on their grief. The abortionist would rather let Mr. Beazley go. He is not, as he says, "sentimental," and he is ready to withhold the medicines that allow Mr. Beazley his scant purchase on existence. As a physician, he has decided that Mr. Beazley is already gone, and it is this-his willingness to make decisions, to answer questions of life and death-that permits Dr. John Bayard Britton to believe that one day, should his enemies come to kill him, he will find the courage to kill them first.
His enemies-they make house calls, too. If you are an abortionist, they find you. They snap your picture, and they tail your car, and they copy the letters and numerals of your license plate, and they find you. Last September, they traveled across the state of Florida-from Pensacola, in the far corner of the Panhandle, to Fernandina Beach, a small town outside of Jacksonville-to find Dr. Britton. They went to his house, while he was not at home, and took a picture of his front door. The house is isolated, at the end of an unpaved road, next to a swamp. The loneliness gave rise to a hope: that a man who lives in such a house-far from help-might be easily frightened. They left a message of Christian forgiveness on his doorstep and then went to his office in Fernandina. The next morning, Dr. Britton's nurse and housemate, Vanita McKinney, opened the door of the office and found a message that caused her to call the police. She had been wondering how long it would take for them to find him, and now she knew.
Dr. Britton has been traveling to Pensacola since the end of March 1993. He has been traveling there to do abortions, because David Gunn, the doctor who had done abortions before him, had been murdered -murdered; martyred; transformed, by the agency of three bullets in his back, from an abortionist into a kind of secular saint. Dr. Britton abstains from sainthood and contemplates martyrdom with great reluctance, and yet now here he is, walking Gunn's path and sharing Gunn's shadows. His enemies found him, and to demonstrate their concern for his soul, they left him an incentive for Christian conversion, a message in the door of his office that asked "WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU HAD FIVE MINUTES LEFT TO LIVE?"
219Y-008-001
In the airport men's room, John Bayard Britton dons the accessory that has become standard issue for those who ply his trade.
We like our abortionists pure. We like our abortionists consumed by their cause. If we are among those who oppose what they do, we like them pure in their apostasy; pure in what we imagine to be their greed, their rapacity; pure in their evil. If we are among those who champion them -perhaps not what they do but, rather, their freedom to do it- we like them pure in their devotion to the cause of women; selfless and burnished to high ideological sheen. We like them, in other words, like David Gunn.
You've heard of Dr. Gunn, of course. You've heard of him because he was, in the words of virtually all who knew him, "special." The Christians described him -as they describe Bayard Britton- as a "circuit-riding abortionist," and, in a sense, they were absolutely correct. To provide the option of abortion to the women of southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, Gunn drove, each week, every week, from Montgomery to Mobile to Pensacola to Fort Walton Beach, sleeping in hotels, at his girlfriend's place in Pensacola and sometimes in his car. He was small and tireless, his body flawed, his spirit impeccable. He weighed about 130 pounds and, with one of his legs twisted by polio, he had to walk with a cane. His back ached, and at clinics with two floors, he had trouble climbing the stairs. He insisted on educating the women he treated. In the election year of 1992, he would ask, in his soft voice, if they were registered to vote and the candidate they intended to vote for. If they answered "George Bush," he would interrupt the procedure. "Why should I do this for you," he would say, "if you're going to vote for someone who wants to make it illegal?" On the twentieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, he sang "Happy Birthday" to the Christians outside a clinic and, in a gesture that became his iconographic epitaph, danced to Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down." He did not wear a bulletproof vest. He kept a gun in his car but not on his person. He never saw the man who killed him. He never had the opportunity for fear, or repentance, and so he remains, in death, defiant, incorruptible, purified in the crucible of his cause.
John Bayard Britton -who answers to "Bayard" and "J.B." and, most often, "Doc"- is not pure. He is 68 years old, and his aspect can be wolfish. He is tall and gaunt, with the air of a dissipated blue blood. He has stained teeth and a long, bent nose, broken more times than he can remember. His hair is gray and lank, and when he pushes it off his forehead with his fingers, he captures the posture of a rebellious adolescent. His clothes are shabby and his offices, in Jacksonville and Fernandina, are seedy. He likes working on cars and machines, and there is usually a residue of grime under his fingernails. He prefers the company of mechanics, mill hands, plumbers and prisoners to the company of doctors and intellectuals. His politics are often reactionary and intentionally provocative. He has a small, shy smile, and when he talks about public issues, he appears to recover a lost innocence, like a child amused by his own capacity for mischief. There is an NRA sticker on his briefcase, and a .357 magnum in a box on the seat of his truck. Since the murder of David Gunn, he views all the Christian protesters as potential assailants and believes that if they come on his property with the intention of doing him harm, he should have the right to shoot them. At the clinic in Pensacola, the protesters congregate behind a tall wooden fence, and Doc Britton sometimes speaks, with a smile, of taking target practice through the knotholes. He believes, deeply, in the prerogative of capital punishment. If he were God, or king, he says, he would have executed Gunn's murderer two weeks after the arrest. If, by chance, he executed the wrong man, his remorse would have been tempered by the simple fact that we are all frail, we are all sinners, and the accused, in the course of his life, had probably done something worthy of death.
What? You don't like him? He offends you? You don't find his provocations endearing? Well, you're stuck with him. Who else is going to walk where the guns have been drawn? How many other doctors will make themselves targets? David Gunn is gone, departed, like a spirit, like smoke. The others, more and more of them, are reluctant. They don't show up. They quit, they get tired, they grow old. Doc is your new hero. He is old, yes... he is tired, yes... he just doesn't quit. He can't quit. His resistance, his defiance -they are not based in ideology, or cause, but in himself, his character, his troubled and troubling history. He is, if nothing else, a brave and contrary man. All his life, he has gotten into scrapes -with hospitals, with other doctors, with medical boards- until he has become, in some quarters, an outcast who can walk only where no one else will.
"Abortionist": The Christians commandeered the word long ago and employ it, in the words of David Gunn Jr., to "make the doctors seem less than human." Abortion, though, is a uniquely human activity, a measure of our estrangement from nature and our distance from God, and it is his very humanity that forces Doc to stay on the road... to keep riding out, to the west, to Pensacola, where the war over the soul of the fetus and the freedom of women is being fought by men who believe in guns, where Christians scream behind fences and measure the abortionist through the knotholes.
The call comes in the night, to the house Doc shares with Vanita, a dog, several cats and the detritus of his past. Doc built the house himself, years ago, and although he raised five children in it, he never really managed to finish it. It is built on a swamp that was once a clearwater bay. Indians lived by the bay and buried their dead in the ridge next to the house, and it seems appropriate that they bequeathed Doc a yardful of relics. Doc is obsessively frugal-"tight as a drum," Vanita says-and his property has been overtaken by the objects he has been unable to discard: stoves, refrigerators, trailers, boats, bikes, pipes, fans, cinder blocks, tangles of cable, propane tanks, a ship's wheel and nine cannibalized cars and trucks, overgrown with weeds. A neighbor recently accused him of creating a junkyard, and Doc had to tow away six scrapped Volkswagens. In his garage, he has been repairing two large vacuum consoles-the machines that provide the suction for a first-trimester abortion-from the Pensacola clinic. They are clean and cared for; everything else molders and rusts under huge magnolia trees, and the yard's atmosphere of profuse desolation is gothic and surreal.
The call comes at midnight, just as Doc is going to bed. It is Mrs. Beazley, sure that her husband is about to die. "Well, I guess I better come over," Doc says. He kisses Vanita good-night and gets in his truck, with a stethoscope slung over his shoulder and a cowboy kerchief around his neck. His soiled shirt is the color of mustard, and his black belt is cinched so tightly around his thin waist that his pants wrinkle and pleat. On the way to the Beazleys', he almost falls asleep, and, to stay awake, he starts brushing his teeth. It has always been this way. He has never been able to turn away a patient. His daughter Louise remembers people coming to their house at all hours, asking for help. Doc treated them, often in return for nothing more than a five-dollar bill or vegetables from their garden or fish they'd pulled out of the bay. He has always preferred to treat poor people, who tend to be grateful for his services. He describes himself as a "therapeutic nihilist" and has often prescribed, for illnesses he regards as less than serious, "tincture of time." He is suspicious of patients who file claims for workmen's compensation, and once, when he worked at a mill, he told employees that if they were worried about their fingers they should work in an office. He distrusts other doctors. Other doctors, in turn, distrust him.
219Y-088-002
Innocuous to the point of invisibility among the protesters outside the clinic, Paul Hill is nonetheless the one who frightens the employees of Pensacola's Ladies Center.
Doc has suffered for his unconventional approach to medicine. He has been fired from many jobs. He came to Fernandina in the late Fifties, with his wife, Faith, an artist who painted in gloomy tones of green and blue and was the daughter of one of Fernandina's founding families. He worked at the general hospital as a family practitioner, and from the start he argued with his colleagues, over what he regarded as their penchant for unnecessary tonsillectomies, over emergency-room procedures, over his right to deliver babies and over an abortion he arranged, in the late 1960s, for a woman who threatened to commit suicide if she was forced to take her pregnancy to term. He never did any illegal abortions, he says; no, what he did was set up a little room in the hospital for "pelvic exams," and if a woman came in bleeding, with a nub of fetal tissue showing through her cervix-in the throes of miscarriage, in other words, or of her own botched abortion-he would complete, with a loop of steel, what nature, or the woman, had started.
It is strange, what finally undid him. Doc had always prided himself on his "objectivity" in the face of death, his lack of "sentimentality" in his contemplation of the void. When his father died, though, in the mid-Seventies, he fell into a depression and, in its grip, "probably said some things I shouldn't have said" to his antagonists at the hospital. His antagonists, in response, contended that his depression rendered him unstable -unable to care properly for his patients- and, on April 11, 1978, succeeded in voting him out of the hospital.
They had him now, the doctors he once delighted in calling dishonest, the obstetricians appalled that a family practitioner of his stripe wished to deliver babies. He put his money, what was left of it, into a business that encouraged home births and the use of midwives-but that, too, was doomed, especially after the state medical board charged him, in 1981, with prescribing 1,900 Percodan and Percocet tablets to a drug addict. He disputed the charges, but accepted-"on the advice of an expensive lawyer"-two years of probation, and that, he says, was the end of him: "I was a pariah as far as any salaried job was concerned." After Faith died of cancer in 1983, all that was left were the two offices he kept in Fernandina and Jacksonville with their clientele of poor people and workmen's comp cases -and then, yes, the clinics that would welcome a pariah, so long as he could deliver a safe abortion.
"I made a living doing abortions," Doc says. "I did them because I thought they should have been done; I wouldn't have done them otherwise. But I will say I had no money to feed my family..."
A clinic in Orlando, a clinic in Daytona, a clinic in Melbourne, a clinic in Tallahassee-Doc was on the road now in earnest, on the circuit, in exile. An exile from his home, from his profession and from the great joy in his life-the delivery room and the squeal of newborn children. You see, "he really loves children"-that's what his daughter Louise says. "It's sort of sad, that society has forced him into this. He seems like a sadder person now than when his practice was delivering a lot of babies."
She does not know what keeps her father going, on the road, driving himself beyond the point of exhaustion. Neither does anyone else. Even the Christians look at him and wonder why such an old man doesn't just go home instead of enduring their wrath and daring their judgment. Is it the money? To some degree, yes -several years ago, Doc lost a lot investing in a chain of pet stores. He needs the money. There is something else, though. Long ago, the state medical board charged him "with being unable to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety"; and now, here he is, going where no other physician dares go, risking his life to fulfill the contract between doctor and patient. He is the pariah as hero, the hero as pariah, returned to the halo of principle by the threat of the gun. Women want abortions? Women need abortions? He is a doctor; he will give them their abortions. That is his ideology, just as the house call is his ideology. He will give them their abortions, if it kills him.
Doc makes it to the Beazleys' in the steamy, violet dark. He sits with Mrs. Beazley until three o'clock in the morning, watching her husband breathe. Mr. Beazley does not die. He keeps breathing, long, rattling gasps. Doc does not go home. He walks out to the Beazleys' driveway and sleeps on a pallet in their small trailer. Before sunrise, a nightmare shakes him awake. It's a dream he has had before, a dream in which Vanita's grandson, Michael-a bright, energetic 4-year-old boy whom Doc, with his love of children, with his need for children, has taken as his own-disappears beneath the wheels of a car. Doc lies in the trailer, sweating, unable to catch his breath, as he waits for the dream to change, somehow wills the dream to change, and Michael pops up, miraculously alive, on top of the car, his blond hair aglow.
The following morning, Doc flies to Pensacola.
219Y-059-009
Three residents of Our Father's House, a home for unwed mothers, which activist John Burt runs like a hoot camp for antiabortion protesters.
When will it happen, if it happens? Will it happen when he steps off the plane at the gate, or when he walks through the soft hush of the terminal? Will it happen when he steps into the bathroom to splash water on his face, or when the car from the clinic comes to pick him up at the curb, or when the car parks at the clinic and Doc has to open the door and walk, for a few seconds, in front of the knotholes?
Doc never sees the man shadowing him. His plane lands in Pensacola at seven o'clock in the morning, when the airport is empty and drained of all sound but the whoosh of air-conditioning. No one meets him at the gate, and he walks through the terminal with a smile on his face, a leather bag hanging off his shoulder. He is wearing a windbreaker, blue pants, brown shoes, maroon socks, a stringy orange tie and a white shirt the shade of a dim lightbulb. He walks leaning slightly forward and, after nodding a familiar hello to an airport guard, heads directly to the men's room. It's spotless and smells of disinfectant. Doc moves quickly. He takes off his windbreaker, tosses his leather bag on the counter and unzips it. He pulls out a slate-blue polyester vest, V-necked, with six buttons. He raises his arms and jumps into it and then says, with an air of deep satisfaction, "Aah." Doc is proud of his bulletproof vest. Too cheap to buy one, he went through the Dumpster of a manufacturer and collected enough scraps to construct his own. "I tested it in my backyard with my .357, until my neighbor complained," he says. He splashes water on his face and combs back his hair with a wet hand. When he reemerges in the terminal, wearing the vest under his windbreaker, his upper body appears bulky and squared-off. He walks outside, in the billowing sunlight of morning, to look for his ride, which has been arranged by the local chapter of NOW. No one is there. He comes back inside and waits, nervously. He will hear later that a sheriffs deputy, off-duty and out of uniform, followed him through the airport but, somewhat ominously, never showed himself.
After fifteen minutes, a minivan pulls up to the curb, bedecked with a bumper sticker urging "CHOICE." "That's it," Doc says. The van is occupied by June Barrett, a silverhaired woman with a red AIDS ribbon on her T-shirt, and driven by her husband, Jim, a small, ruddy-faced retiree wearing a Baltimore Orioles cap. On the seat between them is a wooden box containing Jim's handgun. June gets into the backseat, and Doc sits in the front, complaining that his vest is too short. "I'd like it longer so they can't get me in the gut," he says. "If they get me in the liver, that's pretty tough to patch. The spleen? The spleen you can take out."
It is a five-minute drive to the Ladies Center, one of the two Pensacola clinics that, until March 10, 1993, employed David Gunn. Gunn did not die at the Ladies Center; he died at the back door of Pensacola Women's Medical Services, and the Ladies Center likes to think that it is the safer of the two. It is a brown two-story wooden building, with a cinder parking lot shaded by oak trees and surrounded by a fence eight feet tall. Jim parks his van right next to the side entrance and says in an official tone "Now Doc, I'll get your bag-when you get out, go right through the door, please." Doc moves slowly, and his ease is disconcerting. Jim looks at Doc for a moment, steps out of the van and says "Get in there now, please." But Doc stands outside the clinic door, blinking, smiling in the morning air, as though listening for the singing of birds. He yawns and stretches and then, whistling "Ode to joy," from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, disappears through the door.
Jim takes out his gun box and places it on the deck outside the clinic's entrance. He looks at the fence, where the Christians usually come. "I like to keep an eye on those peckerheads," he says. "I didn't go to Korea and serve my country for twenty-five years in the service so that these peckerheads can shoot doctors. It won't happen as long as I'm around. I do not miss. These hands are small but I know where to put them. I have survived this long because I shoot first. I was sent home from Korea because I taught that to the 357 men I brought over there. [My superiors] thought my hyperaggressiveness was not in keeping with the military effort. But of the 357 I brought to Korea, 356 came home.
"I have gotten threats. These men have threatened to drive me out of town. They don't like what I do here. I told them to get their friends together and ask themselves: Is their dislike of what I'm doing here worth dying for?"
At 8:30, the first Christian, fat and bearded, sticks his head over the fence, to bellow and holler.
219Y-111-008
On Fridays-abortion day at the Pensacola Ladies Center-the Christians arrive with the sun, to pray or scream.
Pensacola is low and hot, a modestly sized southern port city with an influx of retirees, a profusion of churches and a stone monument to the Confederate dead in the heart of its downtown. Its economy has been dependent on the military, and an enormous percentage of its population has known the authoritarianism of armed service. It is sandy, scrubby, weedy and piney, and its peculiarly American desolation breeds fundamentalists and terrorists as efficiently as does the desert.
Pensacola has been called "the Selma of the abortion-rights movement" by an activist in the Christian Right, and indeed the city's history has been notable for Christian violence. On June 25, 1984, the Ladies Center was bombed and then, six months later, on Christmas Day, was bombed again-along with the offices of two Pensacola doctors who performed abortions-in an action the bombers described as "a gift to Jesus on his birthday." In 1986, a man named John Burt led his own charge against the Ladies Center, pushing open the side door, slamming the director, Linda Taggart, against a wall and joining three accomplices in the trashing of the clinic. In 1988, John Brockhoeft, who three years earlier had torched a clinic in Columbus, Ohio, parked with Burt in the lot across the street from the Ladies Center and, a few hours later, was apprehended with a trunkful of steel pipes, explosives and detonators. The murder of David Gunn, during a protest that Burt had organized, was the fulfillment of a decade of promises.
The sin of abortion has provided a world of opportunity for Christians such as John Burt, It is Burt, the ex-marine and former Klansman, whose figure looms in every cloud of smoke that has risen from the clinics in Pensacola, whether from bomb or gun; Burt, with his gray beard and black teeth, who came to prominence during the trial of the Christmas bombers, brandishing a pickled fetus he called "Baby Charlie" and giving his blessing to the bombing; Burt who has turned his home for unwed mothers, Our Father's House, into a boot camp for antiabortion protesters on the public dole; Burt who put David Gunn's face on a wanted poster; Burt who prayed with Michael Griffin for the salvation of Gunn's soul three days before Gunn fell dead and Griffin confessed to killing him. And it is Burt, of course, who trespassed on Doc Britton's property, left his message of love at Doc's office and accused him of "crimes against humanity" on a new poster, one that says "UNWANTED: JOHN BAYARD BRITTON."
Would he do it? Would Burt kill a man to save what science regards as a potentiality-a genetic blossom, unfolding-and he regards as a child? Would he countenance the murder of a doctor, of an abortionist, of a "bottom-feeder," of John Bayard Britton? No, he says: "I don't have any problem taking out a clinic as long as nobody's in the clinic. I draw the line at the taking of human life." Oh, he knows why somebody might be moved to kill a doctor, and he sees how tempting an option murder may be, given that we have an ungodly president, that the federal government is moving to limit peaceful protest, that Christians are growing frustrated with the rule of unjust laws. He just doesn't care for that particular form of expression. He knows that he is old-fashioned that way. He knows that "they're out there now," the Christians who will take recourse to the gun, because, well, it just makes sense."Anyone can shoot a doctor." He knows that in the future, when the real work of his movement is being done by those who have decided that the only course of action is to "take out ten or fifteen doctors," people "will look at us the way we look at National Right to Life"-that is, as "wimps." He can even see himself running a kind of Underground Railroad, offering safe haven to those who do the killing. He just doesn't want to become involved in the killing itself. That is the future, and Burt has not claimed it. The future has been claimed by someone else, a man named Paul Hill.
219Y-125-008
The procedure, performed by Britton as many as thirty-five times in a day, is over in minutes.
The bearded man, preaching the Gospel over the fence until his face turns red and spittle cakes in the corners of his mouth-he has outlived his usefulness. The clinic workers and the NOW escorts sit under the trees and applaud his sermons. Although he is one of Burt's men, they laugh at him and call him "Old Lard-Ass." He is not Paul Hill.
The monk, in his brown robes, carrying a blood-spattered crucifix over his shoulder-he is sort of archaic, too. He comes to the clinic from a monastery in Alabama every Friday -the day the clinic does abortions-and leads a circle of Catholics in the Rosary. The clinic workers call them "our little Catholics." They are gentle; the prayers escape their lips in a soft murmur, and the monk is their leader. He is not Paul Hill, either.
The man who is almost ostentatiously clean-cut, with the straw-blond hair and the orangy tan and the chapped lips; the man who looks like a Peace Corps worker circa 1963, in his shortsleeved sky-blue shirt and blue slacks and aviator-style glasses; the man who is painfully polite and often speaks with a little smile, as the banality of his presentation clashes with the enormity of his message-the clinic workers have no name for him yet. They just say that he is "scary" and that he'd better stay away from them and their children. Some say that should he ever threaten them, they would shoot him -which he must find somehow pleasing, because he is Paul Hill, and Paul Hill believes in the potentialities of murder.
He has come to the Ladies Center today, as he does every Friday, to walk up and down North 9th Avenue and hold up a sign emblazoned with the words "PROTECT INNOCENT CHILDREN NOT GUILTY DOCTORS" or "HOW OLD DOES A CHILD HAVE TO BE BEFORE YOU DEFEND HER WITH FORCE?" Hill has great faith in what he calls "force." That's what he is doing, has been called upon to do-"proclaiming the justice of the use of force." He showed up at the Ladies Center with the timing of a prophet, six weeks before Gunn's murder; no one knew him, no one had heard of him, but two days after Gunn died, Hill called The Phil Donahue Show and told a producer what he had to say. He flew up to New York City, and, sitting on the same stage as Gunn's son, he told the world that the Bible is clear in its justification of deadly forcehell, Hill construes the Golden Rule as a call to arms-and that Gunn deserved to die. Oh, sure, the crowd howled; it hurled its imprecations and insults. But as Hill later told the pastor of his church, he liked it, he felt very much in his element-for this is what he had been chosen to do, to be the "herald" of a new belief.
His church "excommunicated" him. Hill is not without a congregation, though; there are others who believe as he does that Christians have to live above the laws of man, answering only to the laws of God; who believe that the Bible not only allows them but asks them, commands them, to kill in the cause of Christ. There is David Trosch, the Catholic priest in nearby Magnolia Springs, Alabama, who tried to put an advertisement in a Mobile newspaper, calling the killing of abortionists "justifiable homicide." There are the editors of a "rescue" magazine in Oregon, Life Advocate, who publish Hill's writings. There is a convicted clinic-bomber, Michael Bray, in Washington, D.C., with whom Hill trades ideas. There is a movement, by God, and Hill, by virtue of his residence in Pensacola, is at its center. He is in the vanguard of a historical inevitability, yes, and now, with the trial of Michael Griffin about to begin, they will gather together, all the Christians who envision the gun as the tool necessary to reconfigure our society in accordance with God's laws, and they will announce themselves,
"Coming out here in front of the clinic used to be considered outrageous," Hill says as the cars go in and out of the clinic's parking lot. "Now it's old hat. Rescue used to be outrageous. Now it's old. The next thing will be the use of force. Right now it's the focus of a lot of attention, but pretty soon it will be old hat and we'll wonder why we didn't think of it sooner."
He would not kill anyone, he says; that's not his calling. He is simply an advocate, someone who "advocates the advocacy of force." Why wouldn't Hill kill, if he thinks killing is just? "You don't put Robert E. Lee on the front lines," he told his former pastor. Killing doctors, he says, is "an individual thing. If an individual feels called to do something like that, it is entirely up to the individual. We're just saying that force is just. It's up to each individual to make his own contribution."
Doc pushes his hand into a rubber glove. He holds out his thumb, and a nurse squeezes a blob of lubricating jelly on his thumbnail. On an examining table is a woman, young, with frosted-blonde hair, a round Kewpie-doll face and eyelashes like spokes. She is resting under a white flannel sheet that is bedecked with a pastel design; her feet, in white socks, are braced by stirrups.
Doc puts his hand on her belly and says, "It's about as big as a softball, a nice, soft softball." He is smiling, somewhat rakishly; his voice is soft and furred, almost a caricature of an old doctor's voice. With his thumb, he examines the woman's cervix. "Tell me if you feel anything," he says, but she just looks at the nurse with her wide eyes and nods her head, and says not a word. "Well," Doc says, "then tell me if you faint or if you die." Then he gives her a painkiller, "a paracervical block," with a long needle, and she says "I can feel it; I just don't want to look."
"Why-because if you don't look you won't know how dreadful it is?" he asks, and, with the injection completed, he leaves the room.
The patient looks at the nurse. "Are you sure he's...?"
"Well, he's old," the nurse says, "but he knows what he's doing."
In truth, Doc scares them, the young women who come to the Ladies Center. He has been doing abortions for more than twenty years. As soon as the Supreme Court wrote Roe v. Wade into law, he applied some heat to the shaft of a ballpoint pen, fashioned it into a cannula (the stiff tube that's inserted through the cervix during an abortion), attached the cannula to a hose and the hose to a small vacuum and went into business. In the Ladies Center, although the cannula is a long plastic tube, rather than the body of a ballpoint pen, and the vacuum is a large beige box fitted with hoses and gauges, rather than a small gray cylinder, there is still something ramshackle about Doc, something improvisatory and unsettled... and when he returns to the room, he looks at the patient and says "Okay, are you ready? You haven't changed your mind, have you?"
The woman glances at the nurse and rolls her eyes. The nurse shakes her head and then, with Doc sitting on a stool between the stirrups, presses a black switch on the vacuum console. The machine rumbles and shudders, working itself into a pulsing hum, and almost instantly the clear hose that runs from the cannula to the console turns red, so red it is almost purple, the red of raw meat, and there is a sucking sound, the sound of a straw scouring a nearly empty glass. The patient's face instantly turns pale, her eyes shocked wide open. As the hose fills with a splash of purple clots, she throws her arm over her face and turns away in a gesture that parodies the movements of ecstasy. "It'll be over soon," the nurse says. With his head tilted, as though he were straining to hear some sound, and the smile not quite erased from his lips, Doc works the cannula and says, when the patient flinches, "Are you cramping? It's just like menstrual cramps. You've never had menstrual cramps before, have you?"
The nurse holds the patient's hand. The woman mouths the words "It hurts" and breathes in rhythmic, shallow breaths. "Breathe through pursed lips, like that," Doc says. "See-you breathed the pain away. I don't feel anything." The patient keeps breathing, and then, barely ninety seconds from the moment the nurse hit the switch, the cannula is gurgling, there is nothing in the hose, and what was once in the patient's womb is in a glass jar, in shades of pink and red and purple.
The nurse lets go of the patient's hand and, with the vacuum still running, dips the cannula in a bucket of hot water; the hose, instantly, is flushed clean, and the nurse reclaims the patient's hand. Doc is sitting at a countertop, flicking his scribble across a logbook; he stands and says "You did fine," but the patient doesn't hear him, and he leaves the room, whistling Beethoven's Ninth.
The nurse brings the jar to a technician; the technician dumps its contents into what resembles a glass pie plate and, over a sink, combs through it with gloved fingers. The technician describes herself as "a recovering Catholic" and often seems on the verge of tears. "I don't approve, but it doesn't matter if I don't approve," she says. "I'm doing my job. I'm doing what I'm trained to do, and so is Doc-it's better than that back-alley shit! These girls put themselves through hell over this. The punishment is themselves. They don't need people outside to tell them they're going to hell." She runs water and looks at the fetal tissue in the plate. "This one's nine weeks, so it's not that bad. The later ones, though, they're bad-you see little arms and feet... little, but you know what they are, and you know what's really being done."
Outside, on the sidewalk, on the other side of the fence, the Christian protesters have constructed their fantasy of what goes on inside the clinic: a doctor driven by greed; clinic workers and nurses driven by ideology; everyone united in gleeful slaughter. "They won't tell you what goes on in there, what actually happens"-that's what the protesters tell the people walking into the clinic. In truth, the nurses and clinic workers know precisely what is happening and most will tell you that they arrange a costly bargain and that abortion, although the only way to ensure the freedom of women, "is the termination of a kind of life." They go about their work with care, with courage, with determination, and with regret. They do go about it, though, and all day you see glimpses of white socks and stirrups; you see Doc walk through the door and close it behind him; you hear the murmur of the vacuum and feel its pulse; you hear the sucking and gurgling of the straw emptying its glass. Doc works all day; he does thirty-two abortions, for which he earns $50 apiece; and at six o'clock, at the close of business, you see him, gray with exhaustion, slumped against a wall, with his hair askew and a tune still on his lips.
Doc lost one once. A young woman, college aged. On the poster John Burt made of him, advertising his sins, there is this information: "Britton is directly responsible for the death of at least one woman. [The woman] died... from complications stemming from a SAFE, LEGAL ABORTION performed by Britton . Does Doc remember? Sure he does. How can he forget? "She was sort of a runaway type, living in a crash pad .... She had a double uterus, so there were complications .... I couldn't stop the procedure; I had already broken the barrier, and it was improper to quit .... She started vomiting a day after. She went to the emergency room -maybe she had haphazard treatment, maybe she stayed at home too long-but she did get admitted. She was in shock. She was sick. I tried to get through to the doctors, to tell them what I knew, but they wouldn't talk to me. They treated me like a criminal! Like talking to me would taint them! They ended up operating on her and she died after surgery. But why operate? They did it to prove I did something wrong! They took out her uterus, but they didn't treat the girl. If they had treated her shock, she'd still be alive.
He had to defend himself and was absolved, after an investigation, of all wrongdoing. He has always had to defend himself: Since embarking on the practice of medicine, he has been called before his peers, before hospital boards, before judges and juries in malpractice suits, and he has survived them, endured them, though not without a taint.
If he were to be called before a different kind of tribunal, though-a man with a gun, a man who had heard the call of Paul Hill's gospel and decided to "make his own contribution"-how would he defend himself then? What could John Bayard Britton say if he had five minutes left to live? That he is not a criminal? That he still makes house calls? That he loved his wife and still talks about her? That he remembers the time when her womb was filled with their first child as the most wonderful time of his life? That he is disappointed that his children haven't given him a brood of grandkids? That he would consider it a "disgrace," a "nightmare," if he found out that one of his daughters went for an abortion-"for convenience"-without consulting him? That he doesn't particularly like abortion and sometimes tries to persuade his patients-if he thinks "the baby has any chance at genetic qualities"-to take the pregnancy to term and put the child up for adoption?
What else could Doc say to the Christian who would hold him in judgment? That his own ethics are not Christian but medical and he should be free to follow them? That he grew up on a farm and learned early on to do the unpleasant-to dispatch dogs, cats and barnyard animals without sentiment-because such things "had to be done"? That he feels, when he is doing an abortion, the same way he felt when he had to "sacrifice" laboratory animals for research-"I'm not taking that life out of anger or cruelty; I'm taking that life for a purpose. I feel like the American Indian did-I'm saying a prayer to that animal: Give me your life so that I can accomplish this purpose, 'speed thy spirit on to other places' so that the life that is lost will one day be replaced."
Could the man with the gun ever understand such a prayer? Could he ever understand that, in Doc's eyes, there are things worse than death; that abortion is bad but an unwanted child, left to the harsh mercy of this world, is worse; that by allowing a profusion of the unwanted, we are breeding criminals who will devour this country; that we are, in fact, breeding ourselves to destruction, to a reckoning, to "Armageddon"? Yes, Armageddon: Doc is an atheist, but he believes that with each new generation America lurches to its final fissure, its final collapse. He is not alone, of course; in America, in 1994, we are united by our belief in the apocalypse; we are separated only by the apocalypse we choose, and by how far we are willing to go to implement our vision.
Doc leaves the clinic in his vest, although the sunlight has begun seeping from the air and the Christians are gone from the fences and the sidewalks and linger only in threat. He gets a ride to the airport and drinks a scotch in the lounge. He flies home to Jacksonville, and when he gets in his truck in the airport parking lot, he says, "Do you think old Mr. Beazley is still alive?" It is almost eleven o'clock, one of those nights when the sky is alive with light, as though from a distant fire. Doc has been awake since four in the morning, and yet as he comes to the Beazleys' exit, he pulls abruptly off the highway and speeds to their driveway. The little house is blazing with lights; there is a gale of children in the front yard, running and scrambling, and, in the middle of them, there is Mr. Beazley's daughter, She sees Doc and rests her head on his shoulder: "Oh, Dr. Britton," she says with a sad smile, "you're too late. My daddy ain't here no more." •
Tom Junod is a GQ writer-at-large.
The Coming Storm
The people of Bangladesh have much to teach us about how a crowded planet can best adapt to rising sea levels. For them, that future is now.
By Don Belt
We may be seven billion specks on the surface of Earth, but when you're in Bangladesh, it sometimes feels as if half the human race were crammed into a space the size of Louisiana. Dhaka, its capital, is so crowded that every park and footpath has been colonized by the homeless. To stroll here in the mists of early morning is to navigate an obstacle course of makeshift beds and sleeping children. Later the city's steamy roads and alleyways clog with the chaos of some 15 million people, most of them stuck in traffic. Amid this clatter and hubbub moves a small army of Bengali beggars, vegetable sellers, popcorn vendors, rickshaw drivers, and trinket salesmen, all surging through the city like particles in a flash flood. The countryside beyond is a vast watery floodplain with intermittent stretches of land that are lush, green, flat as a parking lot—and wall-to-wall with human beings. In places you might expect to find solitude, there is none. There are no lonesome highways in Bangladesh.
We should not be surprised. Bangladesh is, after all, one of the most densely populated nations on Earth. It has more people than geographically massive Russia. It is a place where one person, in a nation of 164 million, is mathematically incapable of being truly alone. That takes some getting used to.
So imagine Bangladesh in the year 2050, when its population will likely have zoomed to 220 million, and a good chunk of its current landmass could be permanently underwater. That scenario is based on two converging projections: population growth that, despite a sharp decline in fertility, will continue to produce millions more Bangladeshis in the coming decades, and a possible multifoot rise in sea level by 2100 as a result of climate change. Such a scenario could mean that 10 to 30 million people along the southern coast would be displaced, forcing Bangladeshis to crowd even closer together or else flee the country as climate refugees—a group predicted to swell to some 250 million worldwide by the middle of the century, many from poor, low-lying countries.
"Globally, we're talking about the largest mass migration in human history," says Maj. Gen. Muniruzzaman, a charismatic retired army officer who presides over the Bangladesh Institute of Peace and Security Studies in Dhaka. "By 2050 millions of displaced people will overwhelm not just our limited land and resources but our government, our institutions, and our borders." Muniruzzaman cites a recent war game run by the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., which forecast the geopolitical chaos that such a mass migration of Bangladeshis might cause in South Asia. In that exercise millions of refugees fled to neighboring India, leading to disease, religious conflict, chronic shortages of food and fresh water, and heightened tensions between the nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan.
Such a catastrophe, even imaginary, fits right in with Bangladesh's crisis-driven story line, which, since the country's independence in 1971, has included war, famine, disease, killer cyclones, massive floods, military coups, political assassinations, and pitiable rates of poverty and deprivation—a list of woes that inspired some to label it an international basket case. Yet if despair is in order, plenty of people in Bangladesh didn't read the script. In fact, many here are pitching another ending altogether, one in which the hardships of their past give rise to a powerful hope.
For all its troubles, Bangladesh is a place where adapting to a changing climate actually seems possible, and where every low-tech adaptation imaginable is now being tried. Supported by governments of the industrialized countries—whose greenhouse emissions are largely responsible for the climate change that is causing seas to rise—and implemented by a long list of international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these innovations are gaining credence, thanks to the one commodity that Bangladesh has in profusion: human resilience. Before this century is over, the world, rather than pitying Bangladesh, may wind up learning from her example.
More than a third of the world's people live within 62 miles of a shoreline. Over the coming decades, as sea levels rise, climate change experts predict that many of the world's largest cities, including Miami and New York, will be increasingly vulnerable to coastal flooding. A recent study of 136 port cities found that those with the largest threatened populations will be in developing countries, especially those in Asia. Worldwide, the two cities that will have the greatest proportional increase in people exposed to climate extremes by 2070 are both in Bangladesh: Dhaka and Chittagong, with Khulna close behind. Though some parts of the delta region may keep pace with rising sea levels, thanks to river sediment that builds up coastal land, other areas will likely be submerged.
But Bangladeshis don't have to wait decades for a preview of a future transformed by rising seas. From their vantage point on the Bay of Bengal, they are already facing what it's like to live in an overpopulated and climate-changed world. They've watched sea levels rise, salinity infect their coastal aquifers, river flooding become more destructive, and cyclones batter their coast with increasing intensity—all changes associated with disruptions in the global climate.
On May 25, 2009, the people of Munshiganj, a village of 35,000 on the southwest coast, got a glimpse of what to expect from a multifoot rise in sea level. That morning a cyclone, called Aila, was lurking offshore, and its 70-mile-an-hour winds sent a storm surge racing silently toward shore, where the villagers, unsuspecting, were busy tending their rice fields and repairing their nets.
Shortly after ten o'clock Nasir Uddin, a 40-year-old fisherman, noticed that the tidal river next to the village was rising "much faster than normal" toward high tide. He looked back just in time to see a wall of brown water start pouring over one of the six-foot earthen dikes that protect the village—its last line of defense against the sea.
Within seconds water was surging through his house, sucking away the mud walls and everything else. His three young daughters jumped onto the kitchen table, screaming as cold salt water swirled around their ankles, then up to their knees. "I was sure we were dead," he told me months later, standing in shin-deep mud next to a pond full of stagnant green water the color of antifreeze. "But Allah had other plans."
As if by a miracle, an empty fishing boat swept past, and Uddin grabbed it and hoisted his daughters inside. A few minutes later the boat capsized, but the family managed to hang on as it was tossed by waves. The water finally subsided, leaving hundreds of people dead along the southwest coast and thousands homeless. Uddin and most of his neighbors in Munshiganj decided to hunker down and rebuild, but thousands of others set out to start a new life in inland cities such as Khulna and Dhaka.
Thousands of people arrive in Dhaka each day, fleeing river flooding in the north and cyclones in the south. Many of them end up living in the densely populated slum of Korail. And with hundreds of thousands of such migrants already, Dhaka is in no shape to take in new residents. It's already struggling to provide the most basic services and infrastructure.
Yet precisely because Bangladesh has so many problems, it's long served as a kind of laboratory for innovative solutions in the developing world. It has bounced back from crisis after crisis, proving itself far more resourceful than skeptics might have guessed. Dhaka is home to BRAC, the largest nonprofit in the developing world, held up as a model for how to provide basic health care and other services with an army of field-workers. Bangladesh also produced the global micro-finance movement started by Nobel Peace laureate Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank.
And believe it or not, it's a population success story as well. To whittle its high birthrate, Bangladesh developed a grassroots family-planning program in the 1970s that has lowered its fertility rate from 6.6 children per woman in 1977 to about 2.4 today—a historic record for a country with so much poverty and illiteracy. Fertility decline has generally been associated with economic improvement, which prompts parents to limit family size so they can provide education and other opportunities to their children. But Bangladesh has been able to reduce fertility despite its lack of economic development.
"It was very hard in the beginning," says Begum Rokeya, 42, a government health worker in the Satkhira District who's made thousands of home visits to persuade newlywed couples to use contraception and plan their family's size. "This is a very conservative country, and men put pressure on women to have lots of children. But they began to see that if they immunized their kids, they wouldn't need to have a bunch of babies just so a few would survive. They like the idea of fewer mouths to feed."
Working in partnership with dozens of NGOs, Bangladesh has made huge strides in educating women and providing them with economic opportunities; female work-participation rates have doubled since 1995. Its economy is growing, helped by its garment-export industry. And Bangladesh has managed to meet an important UN Millennium Development Goal: Infant mortality dropped dramatically between 1990 and 2008, from 100 deaths per 1,000 births to 43—one of the highest improvement rates among low-income countries.
In Dhaka such successes are dwarfed by the overwhelming poverty and the constant influx of villagers, prompting organizations, including BRAC, to get involved in helping village people figure out how to survive in a deteriorating environment. "Our goal is to prevent people from coming to Dhaka in the first place, by helping them adapt and find new ways of making a go of it in their villages," says Babar Kabir, head of BRAC's climate change and disaster management programs. "Big storms like Aila uproot them from the lives they know."
Ibrahim Khalilullah has lost track of how many times he's moved. "Thirty? Forty?" he asks. "Does it matter?" Actually those figures might be a bit low, as he estimates he's moved about once a year his whole life, and he's now over 60. Somehow, between all that moving, he and his wife raised seven children who "never missed a meal," he says proudly. He's a warm, good-natured man, with gray hair cut short and a longish gray beard, and everything he says has a note of joy in it.
Khalilullah is a char dweller, one of the hundreds of thousands of people who inhabit the constantly changing islands, or chars, on the floodplains of Bangladesh's three major rivers—the Padma, Jamuna, and Meghna. These islands, many covering less than a square mile, appear and vanish constantly, rising and falling with the tide, the season, the phase of the moon, the rainfall, and the flow of rivers upstream. Char dwellers will set out by boat to visit friends on another char, only to find that it's completely disappeared. Later they will hear through the grapevine that their friends moved to a new char that had popped up a few miles downstream, built their house in a day, and planted a garden by nightfall. Making a life on the chars—growing crops, building a home, raising a family—is like winning an Olympic medal in adaptation. Char dwellers may be the most resilient people on Earth.
There are tricks to living on a char, Khalilullah says. He builds his house in sections that can be dismantled, moved, and reassembled in a matter of a few hours. He always builds on a raised platform of earth at least six feet high. He uses sheets of corrugated metal for the outside walls and panels of thatch for the roof. He keeps the family suitcases stacked neatly next to the bed in case they're needed on short notice. And he has documents, passed down from his father, that establish his right to settle on new islands when they emerge—part of an intricate system of laws and customs that would prevent a million migrants from the south, say, from ever squatting on the chars. His real secret, he says, is not to think too much. "We're all under pressure, but there's really no point to worry. This is our only option, to move from place to place to place. We farm this land for as long as we can, and then the river washes it away. No matter how much we worry, the ending is always the same."
Even in the best of times, it's a precarious way of life. And these are not the best of times. In Bangladesh climate change threatens not just the coast but also inland communities like Khalilullah's. It could disrupt natural cycles of precipitation, including monsoon rains and the Tibetan Plateau snowfall, both of which feed the major rivers that eventually braid their way through the delta.
But precisely because the country's geography is prone to floods and cyclones, Bangladeshis have gotten a head start on preparing for a climate-changed future. For decades they have been developing more salt-resistant strains of rice and building dikes to keep low-lying farms from being flooded with seawater. As a result, the country has actually doubled its production of rice since the early 1970s. Similarly its frequent cyclones have prompted it to build cyclone shelters and develop early-warning systems for natural disasters. More recently various NGOs have set up floating schools, hospitals, and libraries that keep right on functioning through monsoon season.
"Let me tell you about Bangladeshis," says Zakir Kibria, 37, a political scientist who serves as a policy analyst at Uttaran, an NGO devoted to environmental justice and poverty eradication. "We may be poor and appear disorganized, but we are not victims. And when things get tough, people here do what they've always done—they find a way to adapt and survive. We're masters of 'climate resilience.'"
Muhammad Hayat Ali is a 40-year-old farmer, straight as bamboo, who lives east of Satkhira, about 30 miles upstream of the coast but still within range of tidal surges and the salinity of a slowly rising sea. "In previous times this land was juicy, all rice fields," Ali says, his arm sweeping the landscape. "But now the weather has changed—summer is longer and hotter than it used to be, and the rains aren't coming when they should. The rivers are saltier than before, and any water we get from the ground is too salty to grow rice. So now I'm raising shrimps in these ponds and growing my vegetables on the embankments around them." A decade ago such a pond would have been a novelty; now everyone, it seems, is raising shrimps or crabs and selling them to wholesalers for shipment to Dhaka or abroad.
Sometimes, though, adaptations backfire. Throughout southern Bangladesh, villages and fields are shielded from rivers by a network of dikes built by the government with help from Dutch engineers in the 1960s. During floods the rivers sometimes overflow the dikes and fill the fields like soup bowls. When the flood recedes, the water is trapped. The fields become waterlogged, unusable for years at a time.
Decades ago things got so bad in Satkhira—so many fields were waterlogged, so many farmers out of work—that members of the local community used picks and shovels to illegally cut a 20-yard gap in an embankment, draining a huge field that had been waterlogged for nearly three years. In doing so, they were emulating Bengali farmers of earlier times, who periodically broke their embankments and allowed river water to enter their fields, rising and falling with the tides, until the deposited sediment raised the level of the land. But this time the villagers were charged with breaking the law.
Then a funny thing happened. The field, which had been left open, acquired tons of sediment from the river and grew higher by five or six feet. The river channel deepened, and fishermen began to catch fish again. Finally a government study group came to survey the situation and wound up recommending that other fields be managed the same way. The villagers were vindicated, even hailed as heroes. And today the field is covered with many acres of rice.
"Rivers are a lifeline for this region, and our ancestors knew that," Kibria says as he walks an embankment. "Opening the fields connects everything. It raises the land level to make up for the rise in sea level. It preserves livelihoods and diversifies the kinds of crops that we can grow. It also keeps thousands of farmers and fishermen from giving up and moving to Dhaka."
But every adaptation, no matter how clever, is only temporary. Even at its sharply reduced rate of growth, Bangladesh's population will continue to expand—to perhaps more than 250 million by the turn of the next century—and some of its land will continue to dissolve. Where will all those people live, and what will they do for a living?
Many millions of Bangladeshis are already working abroad, whether in Western countries, in places such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, or in India, where millions fled during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence against Pakistan and never returned. Millions more have slipped across the frontier in the decades since, prompting social unrest and conflict. Today India seems determined to close and fortify its border, girding against some future mass migration of the type hypothesized in Washington. It's building a 2,500-mile security fence along the border, and security guards have routinely shot people crossing illegally into India. Interviews with families of victims suggest that at least some of the dead were desperate teenagers seeking to help their families financially. They had been shot smuggling cattle from India, where the animals are protected by Hinduism, to Muslim Bangladesh, where they can fetch up to $40 a head.
But if ten million climate refugees were ever to storm across the border into India, Maj. Gen. Muniruzzaman says, "those trigger-happy Indian border guards would soon run out of bullets." He argues that developed countries—not just India—should be liberalizing immigration policies to head off such a chilling prospect. All around Bangladesh bright, ambitious, well-educated young people are plotting their exit strategies.
And that's not such a bad idea, says Mohammed Mabud, a professor of public health at Dhaka's North South University and president of the Organization for Population and Poverty Alleviation. Mabud believes that investing in educating Bangladeshis would not only help train professionals to work within the country but also make them desirable as immigrants to other countries—sort of a planned brain drain. Emigration could relieve some of the pressure that's sure to slam down in the decades ahead. It's also a way to bolster the country's economy; remittances sent back by emigrants account for 11 percent of the country's GDP. "If people can go abroad for employment, trade, or education and stay there for several years, many of them will stay," he says. By the time climate change hits hardest, the population of Bangladesh could be reduced by 8 to 20 million people—if the government makes out-migration a more urgent priority.
For now, the government seems more interested in making climate adaptation a key part of its national development strategy. That translates, roughly, into using the country's environmental woes as leverage in persuading the industrialized world to offer increased levels of aid. It's a strategy that's helped sustain Bangladesh throughout its short, traumatic history. Since independence, it has received tens of billions of dollars in international aid commitments. And as part of the accord produced at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, nations of the developed world committed to a goal of $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of poor countries on the front lines of climate change. Many in Bangladesh believe its share should be proportionate to its position as one of the countries most threatened.
"Climate change has become a kind of business, with lots of money flying around, lots of consultants," says Abu Mostafa Kamal Uddin, former program manager for the government's Climate Change Cell. "During the global financial meltdown, trillions of dollars were mobilized to save the world's banks," he says. "What's wrong with helping the poor people of Bangladesh adapt to a situation we had nothing to do with creating?"
Two years after the cyclone, Munshiganj is still drying out. Nasir Uddin and his neighbors are struggling to wring the salt water out of their psyches, rebuild their lives, and avoid being eaten by the tigers that prowl the village at night, driven from the adjacent Sundarbans mangrove forest in search of easy prey. Attacks have risen as population and environmental pressures have increased. Dozens of residents around Munshiganj have perished or been wounded in recent years—two died the week I was there—and some of the attacks occurred in broad daylight.
"It's bad here, but where else can we go?" Uddin says, surveying the four-foot-high mud platform where he's planning to rebuild his house with an interest-free loan from an NGO. This time he's using wood, which floats, instead of mud. The rice fields around his house are full of water, much of it brackish, and most local farmers have begun raising shrimps or crabs in the brine. Deep wells in the village have gone salty too, he says, forcing people to collect rainwater and apply to NGOs for a water ration, which is delivered by truck to a tank in the village and carried home in aluminum jugs, usually balanced on the heads of young women. "You should take a picture of this place and show it to people driving big cars in your country," says Uddin's neighbor Samir Ranjan Gayen, a short, bearded man who runs a local NGO. "Tell them it's a preview of what South Florida will look like in 40 years."
As the people of Munshiganj can attest, there's no arguing with the sea, which is coming for this land sooner or later. And yet it's hard to imagine millions of Bangladeshis packing up and fleeing en masse to India, no matter how bad things become. They'll likely adapt until the bitter end, and then, when things become impossible, adapt a little more. It's a matter of national mentality—a fierce instinct for survival combined with a willingness to put up with conditions the rest of us might not.
Abdullah Abu Sayeed, a literacy advocate, explains it this way: "One day I was driving on one of the busiest streets in Dhaka—thousands of vehicles, all of them in a hurry—and I almost ran over a little boy, no more than five or six years old, who was fast asleep on the road divider in the middle of traffic. Cars were whizzing by, passing just inches from his head. But he was at peace, taking a nap in some of the craziest traffic in the world. That's Bangladesh. We are used to precarious circumstances, and our expectations are very, very low. It's why we can adapt to just about anything."
The City of Broken Men
There's a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where every American soldier injured in Iraq and Afghanistan is brought, treated—if only for a few days—and then sent home.
Devin Friedman follows the story of a planeload of men and their week in this miraculous netherworld between war and peace, life and death
PICTURE A METAL CAN, like an empty coffee can, and the bottom of this can is lined with copper, and above the copper is an explosive charge, and when someone throws this device at the rear wheel well of an American Humvee in Mosul, the charge detonates, the blast element melts the copper, and the copper launches from the can with enough heat and force to pierce the Humvee's armor plating and pour
into the interior of the vehicle. This is called an explosively formed penetrator, this device.
It is an adaptation of pretty simple technology to suit the conditions of this particular war, and it has changed the course of events profoundly. The copper blob, soiled by accel-erant and blasted metal, flies past Sergeant Cooper in the rear seat, embeds some small bits of shrapnel in the driver, Sergeant Hudson, and pierces the engine block, igniting a fire that inside of five minutes will engulf the vehicle. Between the wheel well and the engine block, though, this molten copper also blows through the left leg of a guy named Michael Brown, a private first class with the military police, out of Hawaii.
Immediately, Michael can't feel anything below his hip. He looks down and sees his boot, and inside that he sees his green Army-issue tube sock, and inside that he sees -brilliant red flesh and then two white circles of bone, one smaller than the other, that have never been exposed to light or air. The lower part of his leg hangs by a piece of skin. The phrase bridge of skin appears in his mind. His blood is emptying out and pooling beneath him.
Before the Humvee incinerates, Brown's team leader pulls him out of the vehicle and onto the hot greasy asphalt, where he continues pumping out blood. Then this contractor lady, a former bodybuilder named Miss Dee who helps his unit train Iraqi police, is standing over him. She shoulders him and takes him to another truck. He hears air support arrive, helicopters. The ride out is the longest five minutes of his life, and after that, a gap in the tape. Later, he wakes up without a lower leg, at the combat hospital in Mosul, which he remembers as a face or two and a dirty plaster wall. He is awarded a Purple Heart by his lieutenant colonel and he does his best to appear dignified or at least coherent. Some time passes; they load him onto a plane or maybe a helicopter—it has to be a plane, but it sure feels like a helicopter—and take him to Balad. Then, once again, he's being shipped out.
Inside of forty-eight hours, Michael Brown is strapped onto a stretcher, hanging like a shelf off the fuselage of a C-17 transport plane. There's a guy stacked above him and another below, plus two rows of men on gurneys in the middle, and across the way a guy who has a stump where his hand should be and two others where his legs should be, all the nurses in their flight suits crowding around that man and saying, What's your pain level one to ten and Put this pillow under your leg and Can you take a big breath for me?—Mike Brown feels bad for staring, but he does and he thinks, Man, that guy is really fucked. And then he feels the pressure of the plane accelerating down the runway, lights extinguished to protect against attacks, the plastic tubing connected to everyone tilting toward the vertical, and they're up, the slurp of wheels sucked back into the belly of the plane, grinding through the dust higher over the dead earth that is most of Iraq, a few orange fires smeared onto the black. A little while later, the pilot comes on: "We have just left Iraq," and a muted little cheer goes out, Michael Brown noticing how small he feels away from his unit, to whom he feels deeply connected, away from his family, shivering with the cold of blood loss even beneath the eighty-five blankets he's wrapped in, heading "to Germany," though the geographical nature of the place he's not sure about, the plane moving past invisible black earth and over some black meaningless sea, he and these eighteen other compromised bodies that he's never seen before and will not see again, all bound for a place that is only in between.
It's not like Michael Brown is the first guy to get hurt in Iraq. He's not even the first Michael Brown to get hurt in Iraq. The Michael Brown in question was more or less the 44,360th person hurt badly enough to be evacuated out of Iraq or Afghanistan. And every one of those men and women take this flight, out of Bagram or Balad.
In the morning, the big gray plane begins its slow fall from the sky, dropping into the thick, damp air over Germany, groaning again with fractional g's that yaw the metal fasteners on the gurneys and pull at the plastic tubing, until it's reeled in by the brick-straight runways of Ramstein Air Base, where buses wait to take them to an ugly little hospital on top of a hill in the Rhine Palatinate Forest. It is called the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, itself a reengineering of pretty simple technology that has changed this war profoundly, and for the past five years the only hospital in the whole complex, dysfunctional, miraculous, weirdly pedestrian American military medical system where absolutely every hurt man who doesn't die spends time.
* * *
IT IS EARLY STILL, 7 a.m., and outside the front doors of the hospital is a wintry mix of cold mist and German Weltschmerz, if that means what I think it does. The bus, with its shipment of injured people, appears at the end of the asphalt drive. It draws closer, begins to back up to the hospital entrance through a cloud of its own vaporous exhaust. Inside, in the lobby, there are maybe thirty hospital sta waiting, and they start to move toward the door. There are people in Army fatigues, Navy fatigues, Air Force uniforms, people in scrubs and white coats who would look normal in any hospital. There are lots of young people who joined the military after the war began and have never been to the places the injured are coming from, and a fair number of gray-headed folks who've been called up from the reserves. They are mostly women, a lot of them stout in those Army shirt-tunics with the pixelated camo they use now, and many of them a light brown, belonging to an emergent -American post-black ethnicity, a majority with their hair harnessed vigorously. Their faces are placid, and they seem to say without speaking: I will take care of you, but I'm not going to cry or anything. There is no more sense of urgency than in a crowd waiting out a break at a pharmaceutical conference. This is routine, this delivery of the wounded. It occurs once or twice a day, as it has just about every day for the past five years.
The bay doors of the bus open, and the first stretcher appears. "Careful," a voice from inside the bus says, "watch the O2 tank on this side. It's strapped but not tight to the leg—it's very painful." A man, his face a steamy plastic mask, is lowered from the bus, onto a waiting gurney, laid over with one of the quilts the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and VFWs and other organizations, o∞cial and not, send over. Then a chaplain, an upright German national with a pink face and a gray mustache, takes the patient's hand and leans down and says with some gravity, "Welcome to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Thank you for serving your country. We want to serve you now."
They appear one at a time, the second one is breathing on his own, the third is holding a stued penguin, the seventh is a black man torqued between two steel plates to keep his back immobilized, with zero body fat and veiny biceps and some kind of red mandala tattoos on his shoulders, his head somewhere inside the aluminum sandwich, his arms moving but maybe not his legs. I wonder if he's terrified; I am terrified thinking about being inside that thing with no idea what has happened to me. Among those who are unloaded is Mike Brown. They seem exotic here in this little German hamlet on top of a hill, excreted from the bus while still in their dusty combat fatigues, their standard-issue boots with actual Iraqi dirt caked onto them, like seeing people getting off their flight from Cancún in the dead of winter still in shorts with sunglasses on their heads. One of the nurses, a guy from the Inland Empire, Southern California, says, "You can smell the war on them."
Without a lot of fanfare, they disappear to their designated spots in the hospital, wheeled by nurses and orderlies carrying printed instructions. Each is brought to the room he's been assigned, issued hospital pj's, tested for brain injury, visited in a timely manner by one of about fifty representatives of the active combat units that will arrange for gear and personal eects to be sent on to wherever is appropriate, issue them $250 allocated by Congress, as well as a phone card to call home. More or less the same routine experienced by the 44,000 people who have come and gone before this shipment here at the busiest trauma hospital in the world, the single experience every injured U.S. serviceman and woman shares. None will stay more than two weeks, and almost all will be gone again in three days.
* * *
LANDSTUHL IS the central hub in a military medical system developed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you are in the military and you get hurt, and if you don't die immediately, you are treated by a field medic, and if you don't die then, you're brought to a forward surgical team, which is basically a doctor operating out of the back of a truck, and if you don't die there, you are taken to one of a half-dozen CASHes (the next generation of the MASH field hospital) in Iraq or Afghanistan and from there to the large brick-and-mortar hospital in Bagram or Balad, where you are readied for the flight to Germany. Everyone hurt badly enough to leave his unit goes to Landstuhl, where he gets preliminary care, undergoes surgery, receives medication, waits out his fever, goes through a course of blood thinners, etc., and then gets triaged back out—the burn victims lighting out for Brooke Army Medical Center, the wounded Army to Walter Reed, the wounded Navy to Bethesda, the less injured to any of a dozen smaller, less specialized places.
In the afternoon, fog pushes against the windows along the white corridors. It's easy to get lost in this hospital, under its low ceilings, in its fourteen identical wings lined with framed reproductions of Frederic Remington paintings—the Rough Riders falling bloodlessly on San Juan Hill. It could be a hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the sound of squeaky white shoes on linoleum, the grim fried chicken and canned green beans turned out in the cafeteria, the cryptic medical messages chiming in over the PA. Except for the Army captain trussed in white bandages, a glossy red spilling down his arm from where the skin on his chest was incinerated in a blast. Except for the 350 fresh Navy reservists in forest camo from Illinois, standing in groups of three and four in every hallway you look down, women near 50 with spray-sti hair and lipstick and flat accents, men with baldy pates who look like dentists. Except for the security check at the fortified entrance.
All the wards are lined with little white rooms, and inside those rooms are patients, pallid heads on white pillows. Everyone's the color of chicken skin. And they mostly have this arch to their forehead, the manifestation of a very poignant inner moan. You pop your head into the doorway and they look at you like you are on a TV show broadcast in Urdu. John Crosser is racked with fever and infection, lolling around his bed, his broken leg immobile, his blown-up arm. Derena McCray sits in his bed while a machine bends and unbends his leg, and his wife, a little Italian girl he met at a club near his base in Italy just before he shipped out, looks at a magazine through sunken eyes. At this late date, people are getting cycled through Landstuhl more than once. Because there are not, relatively speaking, that many men and women in the combat sections of the armed forces, and because the tours are so long (in the Army they're fifteen months) that it seems like almost everyone deployed to a combat zone has already survived something. The primary objective of Landstuhl, as it is written in the manuals, is to preserve the fighting force, get people back to their units downrange.
In the surgery wing, there's a break room where three or four men are eating a casserole out of Tupperware. One is a doctor visiting as a representative of the American College of Surgeons, a certain Dr. Sise from Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego.
"I saw more in the first two days here in terms of the severity of injury than I will see in three years in my trauma center," Sise says. His eyes are clear and his black hair is responsibly cut. He has cried a few times since he's been here, but while he talks, what he betrays is a certain excitement about just how interesting the injuries he has seen are. These are inventive injuries, things never before conjured by the human mind. Not a lot of gunshot wounds—if you get shot at, either they miss you or you're in a coffin flying to Delaware. It's more like wiring from bombs embedded three inches deep in soft tissue. Organs seared by Humvee door hinges still scorching hot when they violate the abdominal cavity. "The blast injuries are like nothing I've ever seen before," he says. "There's a guy right over there, ICU, who had his testicles blown off, the flesh in his inner thigh, his anus, just sitting in a vehicle that got blown up. I saw one the other day where inside his leg there was a cavity basically the size of one of those small Nerf footballs, twelve inches long by six inches deep of just mangled muscle. The shock wave of the blast had damaged the muscle and then the debris had been forced up inside."
Landstuhl was a normal hospital before these wars began, dedicated to treating the ordinary medical problems of the enlisted men stationed nearby and the veterans who decided to stay in Germany. If you aren't one of the people who undress the wounds, it still seems like a regular hospital. And while it seems normal, orderly, pedestrian for the people working here, Landstuhl has actually become a complex, exceedingly dynamic system, thanks to some pretty special circumstances—a jet-powered war fought by a wealthy country not very close by, with outposts in friendly lands halfway between home and war. Thirty trauma patients arrive one day; twenty souls are outbound the same day. Twenty-three incoming tomorrow; thirty-two checking out. The motion contained here is extraordinary—not just the 40,000 patients processed through here but the roughly 10,000 doctors and nurses and orderlies and enlisted men who have passed through, none staying more than three years, most considerably less than that.
* * *
A MALE NURSE wheels Michael Brown into the operating theater. Brown is all bristly brown brush-cut hair and yellow skin, deposited in a pocket of white sheets in a bed ratcheted so he's almost upright. He's on plenty of morphine and something called a nerve block that they use for amputations, since basically all of the nerves in a given appendage are severed, if you can imagine that pain. He's kind of smiling, struggling through the pharmaceutical fog to be a part of this tableau—the young black tech arranging shiny metal cutting tools, the meso-morphic male nurse hauling in jugs of saline and Betadine prep, four or five other people moving in and out of the room with a sense of single-mindedness. They start to hook up the surgical apparatuses to Michael Brown without letting him know exactly what they're doing or
really even looking at him, which doesn't appear to bother him at all. He looks more like someone who's about to watch a surgery than someone who's about to undergo one. Before they lift him onto the operating table, he recognizes me as the guy in his room who asked him to sign a release so his medical history could be written about. "Are you going to tell my story in specifics?" I say I don't know, maybe. He says, "Why mine in specifics?" I say I don't know; you're here right now and I'm here right now, I guess.
The nurse anesthetist, a woman named Captain LaFleur, pulls up a stool next to him and starts talking to him like they're old friends while she readies her gauges and bottles and tubes. She's treating him with a special dignity. She takes a syringe and injects it into a port on Michael Brown's IV.
"Okay, Mike," she says. "I'm giving you some Versed. It's like Valium." Then she leans in so only Brown can hear her and says, "Thank you for serving, you're very brave, thanks for protecting us."
"Thanks for taking care of me," he says.
She asks him to count backward from a hundred. At ninety-four, she tapes his eyes shut with clear tape. She tells everyone in the room she's going to intubate; she needs quiet. Then the surgeon, Dr. Sigmond, enters wearing a mask. Sigmond is a trauma surgeon from Philadelphia, about 35, arrived not one month ago. He talks loudly and walks with a swagger. He has some tattoos on his upper arms that say things in Japanese. Someone somewhere puts some loud methy white-people music on the speakers. The procedure they will perform is to wash out Mike Brown's amputation, check the health of the wound, trim out any dead tissue. It's Sigmond's fifth such wash-out since Monday.
"Must be amputation week," he says.
Then, piece by piece, Mike Brown begins to disappear. They put a blue curtain up between his face and the rest of his body, then a blue sheet is laid over his lower torso, his good leg is covered with another blue sheet, then his compromised leg is laid over still another brilliant blue sheet and propped up with a blue towel and lit with huge overhead lamps. The only thing left is that single leg, pale and hairy and bright, with a crude seam where his calf used to be before the introduction of the exploding coee can—if someone were to walk into the room right now, he may not even know this was a leg at all.
Sigmond asks for the music to be turned down and says, "Okay. We have Michael Brown. DOB 23 August. This is a wash-out for a below-knee amputation. Everyone agree?" Everyone agrees, the music comes back up.
When Sigmond slits open the incision with a knife, a new world is revealed. Red, brilliant, wet, confusing, without discernible form except for a thick ring of white fat below a layer of skin, and some white bone. They wash it out roughly with a plastic saline-sprayer–suction machine that looks like something you'd buy on TV to detail your car. They poke and prod the muscle with an electrified wire to see if it contracts, if it's alive, and you can smell burning flesh, which doesn't smell any different than burning hair. If any tissue is dead, it's sliced off, like cutting the cooked layer of gyro meat.
Brown will have three surgeries before he leaves Landstuhl (and then four more when he gets to Walter Reed). They do some of the high-wire, complicated surgical procedures here—reapproximating colons, repairing arteries, installing shunts in the skull—but mostly what they do is take men to the operating room, remove their dressings, open up their wounds, clean them out, and perhaps most important, trim back the dead tissue. This is one of the major surgical weapons employed here at Landstuhl. The technical term for it is debridement, a procedure that's been widely used since the end of World War I. It involves cutting back (i.e., slicing o) tissue in a devastating wound, cutting away anything dead or dying, cutting back more than one might logically eliminate, so that it doesn't get infected, so that healthy tissue has a chance to grow back, so you incrementally, incrementally, incrementally increase the chances of a full recovery.
Which is basically the medical theory of Landstuhl in a nutshell.
WHEN THE United States invaded Iraq, there was an ad hoc process for the movement of the wounded, a case-by-case system adopted from the civilian world and previous wars. In the intervening years, a new structure has accreted, and Landstuhl has become the main transit station in a complicated military FedEx system where the injured are freight. In the grass next to one of the hospital buildings is a series of trailers that is the nerve center of this system, called the DWMMC, which is pronounced dwimmick and stands for Deployed Warrior Medical Management Center.
The DWMMC is where the military tracks every wounded person from the moment they get to a combat hospital until they're sent off to a hospital in the U.S. It's administrated by a surgeon named Captain Miguel Cubano, a man in his late forties with a big, strong face, no-bullshit metal-framed glasses, and neatly trimmed nose hair. He is originally from Puerto Rico, a product of the military who also holds advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins. He explains the way the system works. Usually within about four hours of a serviceman like Mike Brown being injured, someone downrange sends the DWMMC an electronic message—a so-called patient movement request. A virtual profile is created. Almost every hour, messages, called traces, are generated as the patient, undead and moving inexorably toward Landstuhl, works upward through the system. Digital X-rays and doctors' comments are attached. When the patient gets to one of the two big air bases that are departure points for all flights to Landstuhl, his name appears on the white marker board in the main o∞ce of the DWMMC. Flight manifests are assembled, changed, notated on this marker board—how many ambulatory patients will be on each flight, how many intensive-care patients, the time of wheels up in Iraq or Afghanistan and the time of wheels down at Ramstein. The DWMMC receives updates in-flight—patients crashing on board, hemorrhages, what have you. As patients get closer to Landstuhl, people in these trailers have medicines pulled, schedule specialist appointments, set up surgeries. Captain Cubano, here at the single narrowest spot in the system's funnel, where every data point passes by one at a time, must then make sure that every single patient gets cycled out again—sent to the appropriate hospital given his or her ailment and hometown, etc.—inside of two weeks so there will always be space for the next busload.
"The number of patients coming in at a single time would overwhelm a civilian hospital," Cubano says. "Eighty percent of hospitals would be overwhelmed by one bus with thirty patients. You don't see that except in a mass-casualty exercise. We have a mass-casualty exercise every day; that's our joke."
This system has made it possible for the U.S. military to push survival rates to unheard of percentages. It is the positive story of the war. Ten percent of those with serious injuries die, compared with 28 percent in Vietnam, 34 percent in Korea, and 30 percent in World War II.
"I would look at the speed we operate at—in the previous conflicts many of the casualties remained in-theater for a lot longer," Steve Flaherty, M.D., the chief of trauma of Landstuhl, says. "During Vietnam it was more than a month before servicemen were sent out to longer-term facilities. Casualties are coming to us much faster. And that has never happened before."
America has gotten better at war—maybe because we have had more practice, or a more industrialized approach, a taste for it, what have you—than anyone else. Part of that approach has been to work on what you could call a killer app. Let's call it: the Theoretical War with No Downside. A war that will be quick, beautiful, with very little dying on either side. Dying, after all, is the major downside of war. Precision armaments would reduce death on the receiving end. Overwhelming force would keep injury to a minimum on the American end. And for those who were hurt, all but the most drastically compromised could be saved with a system that would involve discipline, technology, and a serious premium on speed. Get the man with the blown-o leg to a safe, prepared hospital before he can change out of his boots. It's not about inventing new medicine; it's about adapting existing technology, getting the wounded the medicine we already know about before they die. And the system has worked exceedingly well.
In the past five years, the Landstuhl-based system has become the most high-tra∞c, semipermanent, extremely expensive transglobal ambulance system in history. Fourteen flights per week to and from Landstuhl, for a grand total of 3,800 flights since 2003. You could argue that the greatest advance in the care of the wounded has been the simple application of money. The U.S. government can be accused of cutting corners on armored vehicles or body armor but not on this medical system. It's been reported that it costs $10,000 per person for the medical flight from Iraq to Landstuhl, and as much again to fly from Germany to America. The budget of Landstuhl is double what it was before the war. A state-of-the-art prosthetic leg is $100,000, not including teaching someone how to use it or all the surgeries and physical therapy you get before and after. There are some estimates that say it costs the military as much as $1 million per seriously injured serviceman to get someone from Iraq to Walter Reed and out into the world again. And that doesn't include what we pay to take care of them in the future.
THE BLARNEY STONE is an Americanized Irish pub in the cobblestony section of Landstuhl, the little German burg where every shop window bears a sign welcoming the American soldier, his American dollar, and his American English. Parts of the town are pretty in the European way, with stone buildings casting romantic old-world charm over the citizens. Other parts are defined by beer warehouse stores. Next door at the Ramstein Air Base, they have their own Chili's and a half-built mall that looks airlifted from Charlotte, North Carolina. In the Blarney Stone, there's a karaoke machine in the corner going full blast, so that you can't even make out what song is playing.
Dr. Sigmond, who performed the wash-out on Mike Brown, is sitting before a very tall beer with an enlisted man who works with him. Sigmond's got big brown eyes and a high lineless forehead and talks like someone whom people are paid to listen to. One of his Japanese tattoos means something like "The samurai is the first to suffer anxiety for the people and the last to feel pleasure." Irony quotient appears low. I start things out on an ass-kissy note, or so I believe: What a mistake it was to shift traditionally military operations into the private sector. The contractors—like, you know, Blackwater—lack that higher, more noble directive that the military is meant to operate under. The Army doesn't spray civilians with bullets and then drive off toward safety down the wrong side of an Iraqi boulevard—
Sigmond locks eyes with me and says, "I am not over there, with guns pointed at me and bombs going off and IED attacks, so I think those forces, whether it's Blackwater or the military, need to do whatever is necessary to keep themselves safe and achieve their mission. And they should never, ever be questioned or doubted." I fear he might aikido my ass right there.
Then he says, "I am really glad to be able to talk to you. It is an honor and a privilege to treat these men and women. They are my heroes, I really believe that. They're why I get up in the morning. In my civilian job as a trauma surgeon, I treat people who don't care about the people who treat them. I treat a lot of people who are responsible for their own injuries, because they were with the wrong people or they were stabbed dealing drugs. But this is totally different."
We join up with another table of people, some nurses, some surgical techs, a young physician. A girl from Ohio, a private first class stationed at Landstuhl, is turning 21 today. She comes over and sits on the physician's lap and says, "I always knew I was going to marry a doctor." The doctor orders up two oatmeal-cookie shots. He tucks her shot in the waist of his jeans. She takes it no-hands, drinks it, then swivels around and puts her butt out. "Don't I have a nice ass?" She disappears when she hears that her boyfriend, who's been banned from the bar for fighting, is waiting for her outside.
Sigmond's friend, a surgical tech, is talking to a woman (we'll call her W.) who also works in the OR. W. is in a revealing dress, holding a big beer in toward her body like it's a baby under threat of violence. She smokes a cigarette and rolls her eyes a lot.
"I bet you're just going to interview General This and Colonel That," she says. "They don't know shit. They don't scrub in every day. I've been here three fucking years."
There's an awkward silence, and I say, "You guys are doing great stuff here."
W. says, "I know. I don't need you to tell me that."
The birthday girl comes back, looking for her doctor friend.
"You know whose birthday it is, too?" W. says. "That guy who got his nuts blown off. He's 21 years old, sitting in the intensive-care unit. His penis was what they call degloved. The whole top layer of skin was blown off. Happy birthday, right?" Tears well up in her eyes, and she tries to hide them with the back of her fist. She doesn't pretend to hide them; she genuinely seems pissed that she's crying. W. doesn't want to be laying claim to the pain of these people. I remember talking to a vascular surgeon who came here unpaid, and while he found the work totally satisfying, he still felt somehow that the war was a total mystery to him. Sigmond's friend (he doesn't want his name printed) says, "There's a disconnect between soldiers and the people who are taking care of them. The soldier will look to see if you've got a combat patch. They see I have one, so sometimes that helps. But they also know I'm not there. So we're all kind of outsiders."
The truth is that the men who come to the hospital on those buses, they mostly seem so far away that you can barely see them. You can walk into the wards and turn on your tape recorder and talk to them for an hour or so while they fight to pay attention to you instead of whatever significant pain they are in, you can watch them in the operating room while they lose consciousness, you see what they look like and try to understand the events that brought them here and imagine what all that must be like. But what happened to them happened to them, and though you are in the same physical space, you may as well be on the phone to Mars. W. and her friend, they are saying that the folks here at the Irish pub know what it's like to work here, to lay hands on the catastrophically injured. But even they do not really have access to them.
It's not that it doesn't get to you. It's not that, going through the paces of your day here at Landstuhl, you don't occasionally get emotionally torpedoed. One woman, sweet-faced, who worked at the Fisher House, which puts up the families of injured soldiers who make the trip to Germany, and sometimes the soldiers themselves if they're here for an extended stay, was working one evening, around dusk. She walked outside to find a soldier smoking a menthol and listening to an iPod, crying. "Not like a few tears," she says. "He was crying like my own child cried when he was 3 years old." When she asked him why, he said it was because he was afraid to go back to Iraq but was too ashamed to let anyone know. Or another story: This chaplain named Ronald Pettigrew, evangelical, black, impenetrably chipper, is called by Jesus to sit at the bedside of a bilateral amputee who can't speak because he's got a breathing tube down his throat, and after some time he tells Pettigrew he wants to hear his wife's voice, and Pettigrew calls her for him, recites into the phone whatever the soldier writes on a marker board: I'M SORRY, I LOVE YOU. When he got off the phone, he wrote the word RING.
"He wanted his wedding ring," Pettigrew says. "I called back downrange. Got his wedding ring for him." Or: A young nuclear-medicine tech, bright-eyed, very polite, hails out of Columbus, Ohio, tells a story where one night, when it's late and the hospital is quiet, he gets orders to perform a brain scan, a final test to make sure there's no brain activity before they take a young man off life support, and he sits with this still-warm human with white bandages around his head and wires strung out from his extremities as his brain scan comes up cool and empty. "And the parents are outside the o∞ce," he says, "in the middle of the night in Germany, holding hands." Or: The surgical tech at the Blarney Stone talks about when he sat with a guy from his best friend's unit who'd had his face blown off—"mushroomed" is how he describes it—sat and talked to him for hours and hours while he was in a coma as a favor to his friend, so the guy would know he wasn't alone. But that's the experience of caring for them, not the experience of being them, a truth that makes almost everyone here feel weirdly guilty and helpless.
And the fact is that even the injured themselves don't feel a real connection to their own injuries yet, still don't exactly know what happened to them, still feel more sorry for people they see across the plane from them than they do for themselves.
In the morning, Mike Brown will be moving again, in a plane, wrapped in blankets, strapped onto aluminum, up over the Ramstein bowling alley and the Ramstein Chili's, out over the vineyards and the cities of Germany, over borders and oceans toward home, on to the next phase of the system. If it's true that we could end this war in the next year, it won't be long until this place, as it's imagined now, is gone. It will become an artifact. Maybe a stop along the evolutionary trail of the wartime medical system, or maybe something that was dreamed up and then went away, no one the wiser, just some people without legs who remember it in a haze, some no-nonsense women with sprayed-sti hair who were here for a year and then returned like from a fugue state to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
Captain Miguel Cubano of the DWMMC explained it as he sat under his diplomas and plaques, describing the system he oversees.
"The whole idea of it is that it's going to be mothballed," he says, clasping his strong, cologned surgeon's hands before him. "It goes into a crate that says BREAK OPEN IN CASE OF WAR, and then this just becomes a sleepy military hospital again."
POSTSCRIPT
Two months later, I wouldn't have recognized Mike Brown if he'd been sitting next to me on a flight to Dallas, because whoever I met at Landstuhl was not the same person. Here in the dim living room of the Fisher House, in the Walter Reed Medical Center, Mike Brown appears vigorous, outspoken, not at all ashen. He's seated on a floral couch with his wife of two years, Kim, with one eyeball on his infant daughter, Alyssa, big-eyed and downy-headed, with a snot bubble emerging from the concretized-mucus shell of her nose. The guy's eyes are bright. His skin is the color of the living. He is short and thick and upright and clothed, and you can see what he really looks like: a guy who could have been the starting fullback at a small high school. "You get a lot of benefits if you're injured," Mike Brown says. "We got put up here for free. We don't have to buy any necessities—milk, eggs, cheese, whatever you can imagine, they just give you! And the Army gives you a minimum of $50,000 for insurance. Double amputee would get $100,000."
Mike doesn't remember Landstuhl well. He doesn't remember landing or being on a bus or that he was in the ICU. He doesn't remember how many surgeries he had or who his surgeon was. "It felt more like I was in America," he says. "Seeing all those people in uniform and everyone speaking English."
He's eager to show me the rehab center at Walter Reed, over in one of the main buildings, which looks like a replica of Independence Hall built in the '60s. I'd seen specials about these rehab centers on CNN and the evening news—this has always been an attractive place to the media, with its daily miracles, its focus on our American ingenuity and basic human decency—but it's still overwhelming to see it in person. It's like a state-of-the-art gym built for and populated entirely by a race of people with bodies slightly different from ours. A white man in Army shorts does leg raises, his calf missing its skin, so you can see the muscle, fully articulated like an anatomical drawing. Another man, on the floor, raises a plastic ball using an arm with the skin peeled off and replaced by netting, like a mesh laundry bag. Two guys barely old enough to shave play a tile game like Scrabble, one with a hooking prosthetic arm and the other with a hand sewn together smaller than it should be. Men like beta versions of robots lurch down the rubberized track on complicated metal legs while a black Lab in what looks like a photographer's vest trots alongside them, tongue lolling.
Things have basically gone as well as they could have for Mike Brown. He's not dead. His amputation is below the knee—way easier to walk on than if it were above. It's taken him half the time to recover and learn how to walk than it does most people. He thinks he's got a beautiful scar. He's worried he could develop a painkiller problem, with all the Percocet they're giving him, and he's freaked out about what happens when he leaves here. He doesn't know what his daughter is going to think when she looks at him. "What happens when I'm the only one with the metal leg and people are like, What a freak?" he says later, when we're eating lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, where he and his wife like to go when they feel like a piece of vanilla-macadamia-nut cake as big as your face.
Personally, I don't really think that's going to happen. I think it'll more be like: He'll get treated differently. He'll be on the outside of normal society, which the military already is. It's something none of these guys really understand yet, in my estimation. Mike Brown is not at war and he's still not, two months after his injury, really back home yet. When he moves out of the Fisher House, when he has been processed through Landstuhl and Walter Reed and rehab, when we've given him all that money can buy until he's out of the system and we've all gone headlong past the war except for the stories about how vets are homeless or committing murders or getting divorced or suffering from a weird lung disease or something, when he's out on his own, that's when Mike Brown will know what happened to him. Landstuhl, and the system connected to it, is the maximization of what we're capable of doing for the injured on a large scale, and it's not feasible to maintain that care as the timeline gets longer for people like Mike. It's kind of dazzling: We can send you to a broiling desert across the world to fight precision battles in a country you know nothing about; and we can beam you up when you're hurt and put you down in the middle of Germany, rebuild your leg, get you free cheese and $50,000. But there are some things we just can't do. And what it is we couldn't save Mike Brown from is what he'll find out next.
A baffling illness
Desperate for clues to a 4-year-old's gut-destroying disease, doctors wonder whether a pioneering DNA technique could help.
One in a Billion
First of three parts
On a Saturday morning in June, when his children are at piano lessons and the Whitefish Bay house is quiet, pediatrician Alan Mayer composes the e-mail he hopes will persuade a colleague to try a costly new technology. He has been shaping the argument in his mind - the chance to take the first steps into the future of medicine and maybe save the life of a very sick little boy.
"Dear Howard - I hope you are well," he writes, addressing Howard Jacob, director of the Medical College of Wisconsin's Human and Molecular Genetics Center. "I'm writing to get your thoughts on a patient of mine . . . "
Nicholas Volker is a short, blue-eyed 4-year-old who loves Batman and squirt gun fights and steak - on the rare occasions when he's not restricted to a feeding tube.
Food has become his dream - and his curse. Severely underweight, he arrived at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in 2007 with the bony arms and distended belly of a famine victim. Yet when he ate, unusual holes would open between his intestine and skin, causing feces to leak into a large wound in his abdomen.
For two years he has suffered from this mysterious illness. He has survived more than 100 trips to the operating room. He has endured gut pains so severe he asked his mother to pray for him. Surgeons have removed his colon, its pink hue discolored by an enormous yellow ulcer.
The disease is relentless. Mayer and the other doctors have never seen anything like it. They have been unable to find another doctor anywhere who has observed the boy's affliction. Nor have they found the disease among millions of entries in the medical literature.
The case churns through Mayer's brain at night. He dreams of being lost in the woods and wakes with a tightness in his throat that comes from feeling responsible for another life.
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A 44-year-old father of two with a background in
genetics, Mayer has now arrived at what may be Nicholas' last hope."I am writing to ask if there is some way we can get his
genome sequenced," he tells Jacob. "There is a good chance Nicholas has a genetic defect, and it is likely to be a new disease. Furthermore, a diagnosis soon could save his life and truly showcase personalized genomic medicine."As he types that morning, June 27, 2009, Mayer realizes he is proposing a high-tech fishing expedition - the search for some
mutation in a gene that explains the vicious disease he sees in the boy. They could spend months and tens of thousands of dollars only to find not one culprit, but a multitude among Nicholas' 21,000 or so genes. Even if they are lucky enough to find a single mutation, it is only a first step. They could discover the cause of the disease and learn they are helpless to treat it.Mayer understands the uncertainties. They are outweighed by his responsibility to the boy and his faith that he'll know the right mutation when he sees it. The doctor rereads and polishes the e-mail until he is certain he has made his best case.
Then he hits "send."
•
Mayer's plea goes beyond one sick child. Reading Nicholas Volker's genes could change the way doctors treat patients, especially those whose symptoms don't match any known disease.
Even if the boy's illness affects just a handful of people around the world, the technique might be used to diagnose other rare, hereditary illnesses. Taken together, rare diseases, most of them hereditary, afflict 25 million to 30 million Americans, roughly one in 10.
The sequencing question also goes beyond standard medical research with its anonymous participants and far-off benefits. This time scientists would be trying to help a single child with a name and a desperate need.
Seldom has there been such urgency connected to the sequencing of one person's
DNA. To this point, the technology has been used for research, or as a crystal ball to tell us whether we have a mutation that will lead later to a devastating disease such as Huntington's.What Mayer needs is not a forecast, but an explanation for the disease Nicholas has today. Without it, he can only respond to symptoms.
The doctor has come to view the unknown illness as a dragon. All his skill has only lulled it into a temporary sleep.
"You want this dragon gone," he says.
•
From his office window at the Medical College, Howard Jacob can see Flight for Life helicopters land on the roof of nearby Froedtert Hospital. Urgency is something he understands.
For almost two decades Jacob has pushed to take our genetic code from the laboratory to the health care system. He imagines a day when doctors will read our DNA, review health risks, and devise ways of countering the defects and vulnerabilities each one of us has inherited.
But this is only a vision on the morning he reads Mayer's e-mail. His target for sequencing patients at the hospital is 2014, still an ambitious timetable. As of June 2009, there have been no published reports of patients diagnosed using this technology.
If sequencing enters the clinic in 2014, a new era in medicine will begin 61 years after James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA's structure, the spiraling strands, or
double helix, that Crick called "the secret of life."The new era would dawn some 40 years after Americans Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam and Englishman Fred Sanger discovered different methods of reading the information on the double helix. They translated our genetic makeup into chains of chemical bases, a language of sentences and paragraphs written in a four-letter code: A for the base
adenine; G for guanine; T for thymine and C for cytosine.The new era would begin a little more than a decade after the Human Genome Project took the Gilbert-Maxam-Sanger discoveries to their logical extension by stringing together those sentences and paragraphs to produce the finished book, the first complete blueprint of a human being.
Jacob had played a major role in the 2004 sequencing of the first rat genome, significant because the vast majority of medicines are developed and tested using rats. He has seen the field move rapidly, especially in the last few years.
At presentations, he shows a slide of the machines that sequenced the first human genome. It took hundreds of machines seven years to accomplish the feat at a cost of $600 million. Today, a single machine at the Medical College accomplishes the job of 200 of the original human genome workhorses.
Sequencing a genome now takes a few months and costs tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the level of analysis.
Mayer's e-mail challenges Jacob and the Medical College to go beyond what can be done in theory or in several years.
If Nicholas Volker's disease continues, if doctors cannot discover the cause, he may not live to see 2014 and the grand plans Jacob has envisioned.
At the end of the e-mail is a link to the online journal kept by Amylynne Santiago Volker, Nicholas' mother. Read it, Mayer says, "and you will get a good flavor for the desperation of this situation."
Jacob has two children of his own. He clicks on the journal and reads.
•
The story begins October 26, 2004. The birth of a boy with a name as unique as his genes: Nicholas Zane Fernando Santiago Volker.
Amylynne, a homeschooling mom, and her husband, Sean, an electrician, choose "Nicholas" after the patron saint of children. The parents are Christians, regulars at their church in Madison. A silver cross dangles from Amylynne's neck.
Sean, a quiet, pickup truck and blue jeans kind of guy, has wanted a boy so badly - they have three girls - that before the birth, he would not allow Amylynne to pick female names. He sees himself tossing a football to his son, a Wisconsin boy through and through.
For almost two years, Nicholas appears healthy, the only sign of trouble, a certain pickiness about food. While he consumes breast milk, other foods repulse him. He lags on the growth charts.
Just before Nicholas' second birthday Amylynne discovers an
abscess at the opening of his rectum. Doctors at the University of Wisconsin Children's Hospital in Madison give him antibiotics and the abscess bursts.In its place, two holes appear. It does not seem to Amylynne that the doctors are worried initially, but she is sure something is wrong. She has grown up with doctors: her father, stepmother, two brothers and their wives, a sister and her husband.
Her fears are borne out. The two holes merge into a larger opening, and stool leaks through it.
But tests only tell the doctors what Nicholas does not have.
Eight months of visits to UW Children's Hospital bring a succession of medications.
No diagnosis.
•
The disease is relentless.
In early 2007, Amylynne takes Nicholas to a gastroenterologist at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin near Milwaukee for a second opinion. Subra Kugathasan has seen hundreds of patients with
inflammatory bowel disease, but none like Nicholas.The boy is much younger than most patients with such an illness. His symptoms resemble
Crohn's disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disease. But Crohn's can be treated. Nicholas' disease cannot."He basically failed every single medical, surgical and nutritional approach," Kugathasan would say.
Amylynne likes Kugathasan for his gentleness. She forms a particular bond with Marjorie Arca, the pediatric surgeon who examines Nicholas' large intestine.
Arca fell in love with pediatrics years ago, the evening a sick 4-year-old gave her a Christmas ornament he'd made. Amylynne trusts her. Both women are Filipino. Both wear crosses. Most of all, Arca is thorough.
In her initial examination, the surgeon discovers that Nicholas now has four holes, pencil pricks drilled through the skin all the way into his intestine. That's why stool is leaking. Arca says the holes are called
fistulas. Weeks earlier another doctor had found no fistulas.Arca performs a
colostomy, diverting waste from his damaged intestine to a bag outside his stomach.Less than a month after the surgery, Nicholas has more fistulas. The skin surrounding the holes grows purple. By late June, Nicholas seems to be fading fast.
Doctors give him blood transfusions and a medication that spurs the production of infection-fighting white blood cells. Gradually his energy returns. He is playing with his trains again. His cheeks grow chubby. The fistulas heal.
On Sept. 1, 2007, he tells his mom he's not sick anymore.
•
Two days later, the Volkers race along I-94 from Madison, bound for the emergency room at Children's Hospital. In the back seat, Nicholas is hallucinating. He sees spiders on the ceiling.
He had been doing so well. Home from the hospital for the weekend. Blood counts good.
But Sunday his breathing had turned rapid and shallow. He had no energy. Amylynne felt his forehead; he was burning up.
She knew what was wrong. Nicholas had classic symptoms of
sepsis, an often deadly blood infection.As Sean drives, Amylynne sits in back comforting Nicholas. The boy is sweating, his pulse galloping. He mumbles and Amylynne prays aloud, the words flowing almost mechanically because there have been so many emergencies.
Oh Heavenly Father, I ask that you please protect Nic.
Children's Hospital confirms her fear. Nicholas has sepsis. For several weeks, her journal fills with worry. Sometimes others write the entries. While Sean works and cares for the girls, Amylynne seldom leaves her son's bedside. Although she is not supposed to, some nights she curls up beside him.
Nurses marvel at the way she pulls herself together each morning, applying makeup, dressing in business suits. She does not give up on anything, not even her appearance. No matter how grave the news.
Sept. 4.
"Nicky is in dire straits . . . He is at risk for all organs being damaged or failing now. His temp is now at 106 . . . "
Sept. 6.
"The doctors are asking her to make decisions about whether or not to resuscitate him if he would go into cardiac arrest . . . "
Sept. 13.
"Nicholas had a couple of breathing scares because of his collapsed lung . . . "
Sept. 20.
"Nicky is in day 5 of a very high fever which has reached as high as 105.6. He has tested positive for E. coli which has come from his breathing tube."
At times the situation is so serious that relatives talk to Amylynne about visiting a funeral home; she refuses. Her father encourages her to give a "do not resuscitate" order. Absolutely not, she says. I will not give up hope.
There is a word she won't write in her journal. She calls it "the D word."
In the end, there is no need for the word. After receiving powerful antibiotics and numerous transfusions of blood, plasma and platelets, the boy Amylynne calls her "little warrior" pulls through. A month after the crisis began, he is well enough to eat scrambled eggs, the first food in all that time that has not come through a tube. In late October, seven weeks after the sprint to the emergency room, Nicholas goes home.
Early in 2008, the inflammation and fistulas return.
•
The longer Nicholas' illness defies diagnosis, the more specialists weigh in. Half a dozen doctors now form the core of the boy's expanding medical team. They take home questions and hunches about him. At night, they search the medical literature. At conferences across the country, they tell colleagues about Patient X, the anonymous child with the mysterious disease.
"I thought he was going to be one of those kids who dies without us knowing the answer," Kugathasan would say.
Doctors run tests on individual genes and more tests on the immune system. One theory holds that Nicholas' immune system has turned against his body, killing healthy cells. Bill Grossman, an immunologist at Children's and the Medical College, spends hour after hour dissecting complex
genetic pathways, hoping to understand what is happening inside the child's body."We did pretty much any test you can think of on him," Grossman says. "The more we got back, the more confusing the picture was. . . . He really was a one in a billion kind of case."
In August 2008, the Volkers seek another opinion, this time at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, which has expertise in illnesses that resemble Nicholas'.
"He's certainly one of the sickest children we've seen," says Ted Denson, who is medical director of the hospital's center specializing in inflammatory bowel disease. "You needed to give him about twice as much nutrition as you'd normally give a child to get any weight gain at all."
The doctors in Cincinnati conduct numerous blood and genetic tests. They find no specific genetic cause. The best they can tell, Nicholas has an immune disorder. For some reason, white blood cells called
lymphocytes have kicked into overdrive, destroying cells that line the intestinal wall. The Cincinnati hospital concludes that Nicholas must receive more nutrition until he is well enough to have his diseased colon removed.By January 2009, Nicholas is back at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. He is now 4 years old. He has been poked, prodded and jabbed with needles so often that sometimes he growls at the doctors and nurses.
He weighs less than 20 pounds, well below the 35 pounds of a typical 4-year-old.
No diagnosis.
•
The gaping wound in Nicholas' abdomen from his colostomy will not heal. As the disease spreads from his bottom to his colon and small intestine, more holes form and stool drains through them into the wound, raising the threat of infection.
No article in a medical journal prepares a surgeon for such a wound. It must be cleaned and dressed so frequently that for several months Arca has a standing daily appointment with Nicholas in the operating room.
Although cleaning and dressing wounds is not usually considered surgery, in Nicholas' case the task takes at least two hours and requires general anesthesia.
They have a routine. Nicholas' mother carries him to the operating room, which she cannot enter without wearing scrubs. Arca meets her and carries the boy inside.
Often Nicholas wears his black Batman cape and mask. On his hands: Batman gloves that make the sound "Ka-pow!" He prefers to be called "Batman."
What should we listen to? Arca usually asks. Jonas Brothers?
Nicholas likes the Jonas Brothers. His mother has heard him sing: "A little bit longer and I'll be fine."
He holds out the tube in his chest, used for medications, fluids and blood draws.
I would like milky Versed, he says. That's what he calls the anesthetic propofol (it reminds him of Versed, a sedation drug).
He chooses a flavor for the oxygen he receives. Today it's blueberry.
I'll hold the mask, he says. If residents try, he pushes them away.
When it is over and his eyes open in the recovery area, Nicholas always asks for Mom.
•
By summer 2009, Nicholas has spent more than 300 days at Children's Hospital. Time enough for Kugathasan to move to a hospital in Atlanta and Grossman to move to a pharmaceutical company. Time enough for Kugathasan to be replaced by Michael Stephens, a gastroenterologist, who is replaced by Mayer.
Time enough for one of the nurses, Tara Bell, to find she is caring for Nicholas not only at work but in her dreams.
The wound in his abdomen heals after his inflamed colon is removed. Still, the boy's health rises and falls so often and the lack of a diagnosis persists so long that conflicts between the Volkers and their medical team become inevitable. Getting Nicholas to gain weight without sprouting new fistulas becomes a personal mission for Mayer. At times when they disagree, Amylynne reminds him: "He's not your child. He's my child."
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She has learned to care for Nicholas outside the hospital. Years ago, she had been squeamish to the point of throwing up at the sight of excrement and had declined her father's wish that she attend nursing school. Now she changes colostomy bags and flushes and maintains intravenous lines. She considers becoming a nurse.
Nicholas' three sisters, all teenagers, think of their brother at school when friends mention younger siblings. They miss the crazy things he says, and even the way he gets them to compete for the honor of favorite sister.
Sean endures long absences from his son for the first two years of the illness, taking all the overtime he can get to pay what health insurance will not. Then, in the early months of 2009, the construction jobs dry up and he and Amylynne swap roles. He goes to the hospital; she does clerical work for Great Wolf Resorts.
The father and son grow close, passing long hours in the hospital room playing on the floor and talking superheroes and monster trucks. When Sean returns to construction sites, he thinks back to those days, and sometimes his phone rings and it is Nicholas' high-pitched voice: Dad, when are you coming?
The long hospital stays get to Nicholas most of all. Amylynne sees the way he grows so familiar with the different floors that the hospital becomes a de facto home, the way he longs for friends and enjoys "hospital play dates," the way his friends always leave. They go home after a few weeks, or they die.
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Months have passed since the last time Nicholas ate real food. He tells a nurse about the steak he will eat when he goes home. At night, he sleeps with a bag of Bagel Bites cradled in his arms.
There are days Nicholas asks:
Mom, is God listening?
Is He there?
Because, why would I be here then?
Sometimes Amylynne tells him: God is always with us. Sometimes the questions leave her speechless, wiping away tears.
By now she is desperate to cure Nicholas herself. After doctors suggest he may need a bone marrow transplant, Amylynne talks with Sean about having a baby to serve as the donor (no one in their blended family is a genetic match for Nicholas). Her pastor dissuades her, saying that she would be forcing a solution rather than trusting God to provide one.
So when Mayer suggests sequencing Nicholas' DNA, she is ready.
The cost will be high. Even if insurance did pay for such things, Nicholas has exceeded his $2 million lifetime benefit. Money will have to be raised.
Reading his DNA will have implications for the family. Nicholas' genetic information comes from his parents; examining it will reveal things about them and about their relatives. Doctors seeking the cause of Nicholas' gut disease could find mutations for other illnesses that run in families.
None of that worries Amylynne. What matters is Nicholas.
•
The mother's journal is 230 pages and growing. A book with no end in sight.
As he reads, Howard Jacob, head of the Medical College's genetics center, wonders what it would be like to watch one of his children wheeled into the operating room.
He imagines his child disappearing behind a door where he can neither follow nor offer protection. Then he tries to imagine experiencing that moment more than 100 times, as the Volkers have.
Jacob knows the chances of finding the cause of Nicholas' illness - perhaps one mutation hidden among thousands of minor variations in his genetic script - are slim to none. He knows, too, that without a diagnosis the boy's long-term odds are little better.
He must weigh the two. The risk that an ambitious test of a new technology could fail. The risk that if they do not make the attempt, a young boy could die.
Jacob recalls what he tells his students. You do the experiment because you need to do it.
There is no other way to learn whether something works.
Sifting through the DNA haystack
Can scientists pinpoint Nicholas' devastating gene mutation - and quickly?
April 19, 2011 | Since leaving Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in October after an epic medical journey that spanned hundreds of days, Nic Volker, now 6, has been making steady progress.
(2)More Headlines
Second of three parts
James Verbsky is drawn to pediatrics by its ethical simplicity - the notion that you do anything to save a child. Yet as the doctor talks with colleagues at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin in the summer of 2009, he finds himself doubting their proposal for 4-year-old Nicholas Volker. They want to sequence Nicholas'
DNA.The boy in the Batman cape has a mysterious disease marked by painful holes leading from his intestine to his skin. Fecal matter leaks through the holes. In 2 1/2 years, Nicholas has made more than 100 trips to the operating room.
Verbsky, a 39-year-old immune specialist, has run every test he can think of to pin down the source of Nicholas' disease. So have the other doctors. They are running out of options.
Some favor a
bone marrow transplant based on the theory that Nicholas' immune system has gone out of control and is destroying healthy cells. But the procedure is risky and the doctors are not certain it will help. How can they be certain? They don't understand the problem they're trying to fix.Verbsky's colleagues hope the answer can be found by reading the boy's genetic script. But the hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin have never sequenced all of a patient's genes and were not planning to until 2014.
To do so for Nicholas could take months, cost a small fortune and still leave more questions than answers.
Every human carries thousands of variations in the genetic script, the long chain of chemical bases that makes us who we are. These differences - the base adenine in one position instead of guanine - determine everything from harmless diversity (brown hair vs. blond) to the defects that cause disease. Although some differences are harmful, most are not. Some are even beneficial.
They could find 20,000 of these differences in Nicholas'
genome, Verbsky worries, so many that they will never determine which of them caused his illness."I was skeptical when they said they were going to sequence him," he would later say. "I laughed, to be totally honest."
•
Soon after the July Fourth weekend, 10 doctors and scientists meet at the Medical College to discuss sequencing Nicholas. The man who called the meeting, Howard Jacob, head of the Human and Molecular
Genetics Center, has never met Nicholas. He has been weighing whether to sequence him for a little more than a week, ever since the boy's pediatrician, Alan Mayer, suggested the idea.Although Jacob can find no published reports of a patient being sequenced to diagnose a disease, when he reads the spirit in the room he finds a willingness to try.
Mike Tschannen (pronounced Shannon), the research associate who runs the college's sequencing lab, looks at the question this way: "If we choose not to do this, why are we here? This is the entire reason we're here."
The scientists decide not to read Nicholas' entire genome, a massive undertaking that could cost up to $2 million. Instead, they plan to target a little more than 1%, the
exons. Part of every gene, exons carry the instructions for making proteins. It is the failure to make proteins correctly that causes many diseases.While zooming in on this section of the genome cuts the cost substantially, the estimate is not trivial: $75,000. Donors will have to be found.
The Medical College, a relatively small player in
genomics with just one sequencing machine, will be attempting something that large centers with dozens of machines have not done.As they leave the conference room that day, one of the most optimistic is Liz Worthey, a senior research scientist from Scotland. Since the moment she learned of the project, she has felt: We can do it. Now, she will be called upon to make sense of the thousands of variations they expect to find in Nicholas' genetic sequence.
The project will be different from anything Worthey has ever done. As a researcher, she is accustomed to thinking that her work may affect thousands of people, years in the future. This time she may help a single child.
This time she does not have the luxury of years.
•
"We need urgent prayers now please," Nicholas' mother, Amylynne Santiago Volker, writes in her online journal.
It is July 14, 2009. She has received worrisome news.
Two of the doctors, David Margolis, a bone marrow transplant specialist, and James Casper, a blood expert, are recommending giving Nicholas very high doses of chemotherapy, a treatment that has proved successful in children with
Crohn's disease. Unable to reach a definitive explanation for Nicholas' illness, the doctors have settled on Crohn's as a working diagnosis.If he survives the chemotherapy - and the doctors believe he will - the hope is that the drugs will wipe out his immune system, allowing it to reset and develop normally this time.
Amylynne cannot get past the "if." Too many times in the last few years, she has been warned that Nicholas might not live out the night.
She leans heavily on her faith. Yet she cannot ward off the fear that something will go wrong.
At this point,
DNA sequencing is not her focus. Doctors are asking that she decide on the chemotherapy plan soon, before Nicholas becomes too sick for treatment."What do I choose?" she writes. "How do I make the right decision? What if I wait? What if I don't wait? Either way I could compromise my son's life."
•
The sequencing of Nicholas' DNA begins with money and paperwork and blood.
In addition to its scientific challenges, the project straddles a sensitive regulatory border. Is it research for the greater good, or treatment for a single patient?
Children's Hospital has a rule prohibiting staff from raising money to pay for the care of one patient. But Howard Jacob says that's not what he's doing. He is raising money to run a pilot test of sequencing because the technology has the potential to help many patients.
The interpretation differs when pediatrician Mayer consults the hospital's institutional review board. The board oversees human subject research, but this is not research, says chairman Paul Scott. Reading Nicholas' DNA is an attempt to help one patient; it is nothing more than the practice of medicine.
In fact, sequencing is both: a way to help Nicholas, and to test a technology that could help others. But before the project can proceed, money must be raised, a task for which Jacob is well-positioned. He speaks to business groups frequently and co-founded a start-up company, PhysioGenix, which helps drug developers test their compounds.
Once Jacob begins making calls, it does not take him long to raise the money. In addition, the company that makes the sequencing machine decides to collaborate with the Medical College team by performing the first run for free.
Amylynne Volker is hopeful, though she has been warned that sequencing may not reveal an answer. Nicholas has undergone many tests already: at least nine focusing on individual genes and 35 examining his immune system. And still, no diagnosis.
Before sequencing can begin, Amylynne must sign a stack of releases, so many pages she does not read most of them. Then medical staff go to her son for blood, a more efficient source of DNA than saliva. All they need is a teaspoon.
•
If the disease is genetic, the clues lie packed inside the nuclei of Nicholas' white blood cells, the portion of his blood sample that contains DNA. First, scientists must remove the red blood cells, platelets and plasma.
Although there is a machine that can extract DNA, the individual strands emerge in better shape when the job is done by hand. Mike Tschannen, who runs the sequencing lab, knows the hands he wants working with Nicholas' blood. He goes to Gwen Shadley, a research technologist at the Medical College who has a talent for pulling good DNA from samples.
Tschannen does not tell her whom the blood comes from, whether the person is alive or dead. Only this: Handle it with tender loving care. It's a very special sample.
Shadley first uses a solution to burst the red blood cells, then a centrifuge to separate out the plasma, platelets and cell debris. At the bottom of the test tube are the white blood cells. She adds detergents to break open those cells, releasing the DNA inside. Then she separates out the other cell contents - proteins, sugars, fats. What's left gets poured into a test tube of alcohol solution. She places the tube on a machine that rocks gently back and forth.
Tiny strands of DNA like fine white thread drift through the solution and clump together, all visible to the naked eye.
"It's absolutely gorgeous to see," Shadley says. "I was born and raised on a farm. It's almost like watching a birth."
Within 24 hours Nicholas' blood is pared down to DNA, his genetic secrets reduced to a clear, ordinary-looking liquid.
Tschannen places a large drop of the liquid inside a sealed container surrounded by dry ice and sends it by overnight mail to the pharmaceutical giant Roche.
The company's 454 Life Sciences division is performing the first sequencing run. Technicians begin by breaking the long strands of DNA with their 3.2 billion chemical base pairs into shorter, readable stretches. Using pressurized nitrogen gas, they shear Nicholas' DNA into segments of roughly 500 to 800 bases.
The segments are loaded onto a special chip the size of a microscope slide that captures only the exons. Whatever does not stick to the chip - the non-exon portion - is washed away.
Nicholas' exons are attached to tiny beads and spread over a sequencing plate the size of a standard Post-it note. The plate is then loaded into the machine.
The sequencing machine works by reading individual segments, then reassembling them into the complete string.
One by one each of the four bases -
adenine, thymine, guanine, cytosine, or A, T, G, C - washes over the plate containing Nicholas' exons. A light flashes each time the base encounters a match. A matches T; G matches C.A camera photographs the pattern of light flashes.
A computer translates the photos into Nicholas' sequence.
•
Meanwhile, Worthey and research scientist Stan Laulederkind get an early sense of the best candidates to cause an illness like Nicholas'. They scan the medical literature for papers that tie specific genes to any of the boy's symptoms. Whenever a pathway - a group of interacting genes - is linked to a symptom, they include all of the genes.
By August, a month or so into the sequencing project, their finished list contains more than 2,000 suspects. Doctors are confident one is the gene they're hunting. Yet they know the machine will produce a much longer list of possibilities.
To prepare for the deluge, Worthey and David Dimmock, a pediatric genetics specialist at Children's and the Medical College, devise a strategy to narrow down the thousands of differences they expect to find between Nicholas' sequence and what is considered normal. To this point relatively few human genomes have been read, so "normal" has yet to be fully established.
The Medical College team is guided by two assumptions: The crucial difference in Nicholas' DNA, the one at the root of his disease, must sabotage an important process in the body and must have been undiscovered until now, since Nicholas' disease does not appear in medical literature.
To find it they must eliminate the differences that do not have dire consequences. Some produce the same
amino acid as the normal sequence. Others change an amino acid but do not disrupt a vital function in the body.Existing tools can analyze some effects of these differences. But scientists have nothing that can perform the broad analysis Worthey and her colleagues require.
So she designs her own tool. Working with a group of software developers at the Medical College, she pulls together new and existing algorithms and data from different sources to create a program that can tackle a case of Nicholas' complexity. She calls the program Carpe Novo, Latin for "seize the new." Carpe Novo is still being developed in August when the results arrive from the first read of Nicholas' DNA.
James Verbsky's initial fear that they would find 20,000 variations was not far off. In all, Nicholas has 16,124.
That's the size of the haystack they're searching.
•
Late in August, Nicholas is receiving high doses of chemotherapy, the treatment doctors have recommended. The treatment Amylynne has been dreading. His fever hovers around 104. He vomits up to 20 times in a single day.
When Nicholas looks into a hand mirror he sees his head, bald from the chemo. He shrugs and walks away. He wants to go home.
Finally, in early September, his pediatrician calls with the first good news in months.
"NIC IS IN REMISSION," Amylynne writes in her journal. "PRAISE GOD!!!!"
After 250 consecutive days in the hospital, he returns home to Monona, a Madison suburb. He enjoys the simple pleasures of jumping in leaf piles, riding the bus to 4-year-old kindergarten, and trick-or-treating with Batgirl (his mom) and Wonder Woman and Robingirl (two of his sisters). He can even eat - as long as he adds just one new food a week, Mayer says.
One day that fall, Amylynne writes in her journal, "Now he is dancing in front of the television, eating some kind of sticky treat."
•
Somewhere in a pool of 16,000 variations in Nicholas' genetic script lurks the cause of his disease, if only Worthey and Dimmock can find it.
Dimmock, an Englishman, discovered his passion for pediatrics in the resiliency of the children he cared for a decade ago at a tin-roofed hospital in Uganda. He would treat them for malaria one day, and watch them race across the hospital grounds the next.
For more than a year, Worthey and Dimmock have worked together on research using sequencing to understand the genetics of liver failure and the genes that cause mitochondrial disease. But Dimmock has not lived solely in the research world with its slow progress toward conclusions. He screens babies for metabolic diseases and sees children born with genetic conditions. He knows what it means to need a diagnosis yesterday.
Although their roles blend at times, Worthey is the data-miner, Dimmock, the clinician. She gets computers to pry information from Nicholas' lengthy genetic script; he compares potential mutations with the boy's clinical profile.
Based on the results from the first sequencing run, they list variations in 32 genes that appear promising.
Two raise particular interest: a gene called CLECL1 and another called
XIAP, both involved in regulating the immune system. CLECL1 was among the more interesting suspects on Worthey's list of 2,000-plus genes; XIAP did not make the list.Not all genes are captured in one sequencing run, so they must repeat the process several times. Each run is like a slide superimposed over the previous slides, adding depth and resolution to the picture. After the first run at Roche, Nicholas' DNA passes through the sequencing machine at the Medical College four times.
To this point, Mike Tschannen has used the Medical College machine solely for research, sequencing rats and bacteria and examining a few specific areas of human biology. Now, he sees a chance to show that a small lab with one machine "can do science that may change the world."
In an eight-day span at the end of September, Tschannen works 92 hours sequencing Nicholas' DNA three times. In early October, he performs one final run.
Multiple copies of each short segment of DNA pass through the machine on each run. After five runs, each segment of Nicholas' DNA has been read an average of 34 times, enough to reduce significantly the possibility that a mutation could be missed.
Worthey and Dimmock filter Nicholas' variations with the software tool and search a database of genetic differences. They discover that many of his variations, including CLECL1, are common and can be eliminated.
Their list drops to eight.
Worthey examines what each gene does and conducts a more thorough literature search. She zeros in on two genes, then discovers that one, GSTM1, is commonly altered in people who are perfectly healthy.
That leaves one prime suspect: XIAP.
Since the previous literature search two months ago, a new article has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences linking XIAP to a pathway involved in
inflammatory bowel disease. Several of Nicholas' symptoms resemble that disease.It is now November 2009. Worthey scans the publicly available human genome sequences. Then she goes further, asking researchers with unpublished genome data to look for this variation in XIAP. In all she is able to check about 2,000 human genomes.
Not a single one has the variation.
It must be Nicholas' mutation.
•
For the first time, his disease begins to make sense. If Worthey and Dimmock are correct, the holes in Nicholas' intestine, the ravaged colon, all of it stems from a single misplaced base in the long chain of his DNA.
On the X
chromosome, on the gene XIAP, the rest of humanity has the sequence thymine-guanine-thymine.Nicholas has thymine-adenine-thymine. In the single-letter shorthand scientists use, he has what amounts to a typo, an A instead of a G.
The bases in this sequence make an amino acid, the 203rd in a chain of almost 500. That amino acid is supposed to be cysteine, and has been in all humans examined to this point.
But in Nicholas, the one-letter change produces an entirely different amino acid, tyrosine.
His tyrosine is part of a long chain that makes a protein, also called XIAP. This protein has two important jobs: it blocks a process that makes cells die and it helps prevent the immune system from attacking our intestine.
In Nicholas, however, the protein is made incorrectly. In his body, the immune system is at war with his intestine.
Since the human genome is composed of more than 3 billion base pairs, Nicholas' mutation represents the smallest possible error in a vast blueprint. Imagine one letter out of place in the 55 million-word Encyclopaedia Britannica online edition.
Even this image does not do justice to Nicholas' terrible luck. Not only is his misspelling unique among the human genomes examined, it is unique among the animal genomes Worthey checks. Fruit flies, rats, mice, cows, chickens, chimpanzees - every organism she can find makes cysteine at this position.
To Worthey, the extreme rarity of his mutation across the species carries an unmistakable message.
"If all of those organisms have (cysteine) at that position, then clearly it's important because over all that time it has never been allowed to change," she says, "(If it did) something bad obviously happened to stop that line from evolving any further. So everything has a cysteine."
Except Nicholas.
•
On a Friday afternoon in mid-November, Amylynne's cell phone rings. It is Mayer, Nicholas' pediatrician.
Has anybody contacted you from the hospital? he asks.
Nicholas and Amylynne have been home for six weeks. Nicholas, now 5, has been going to school, playing, eating.
Mayer says the doctors are excited. They have found the mutation. Maybe.
From the beginning, Mayer has felt he would know the right mutation when he saw it. After reading the paper on XIAP, he is confident they have their culprit. Still, he is cautious with Amylynne.
Her mind skims over the new information.
All right, she says, what disease? How many years does Nic have to live? Tell me the bad news first.
Mayer explains that a mutation on Nicholas'
X chromosome has caused the illness in his gut. But there's more. The same mutation has also caused a second extremely rare disease called XLP. Only boys get this second disease, which leaves them unable to fight off one of the most common human viruses, Epstein-Barr.Most die before the age of 10. The only cure is a bone marrow transplant.
A few days later, Amylynne meets with Dimmock, the genetics specialist. He explains what the doctors have found, and why it leads them to believe Nicholas needs a bone marrow transplant, a risky procedure that had been under consideration before the sequencing. First, Nicholas' blood must be sent to a federally approved clinical lab to confirm the mutation.
Dimmock tells Amylynne that he would like to test her blood to determine whether she has the same mutation. Some mutations are not inherited but occur as the egg forms.
The doctor explains that what they find may have implications for her children and other relatives. They may learn what the likelihood is that they have the mutation and could pass it to their own children.
Dimmock goes through the consents that must be signed, and asks a series of questions.
Are you Nicholas' mother?
Really? Amylynne says. You're asking me if I'm the mom?
Is Sean Nicholas' father?
Yes and Yes.
Although the questions seem odd and uncomfortable, the need to ask them is not far-fetched. Doctors have learned that a proportion of tests for genetic diseases inadvertently disclose unsettling information, for example, that Dad isn't actually Dad. DNA tells our secrets.
Finally, Amylynne must answer two questions: Does she want her own DNA tested, and does she want to know the results?
Yes and Yes.
•
In early December 2009,the boy's disease reawakens.
Nicholas loses weight. He becomes lethargic. The Volkers worry about swine flu or mononucleosis. They take Nicholas to Children's, hoping he won't have to spend another Christmas there.
Amylynne has moved into a room at the Ronald McDonald House near the hospital. She buries her head in a pillow.
"This must be what hell is like," she writes in her journal.
Nicholas' ileum, the final section of his small intestine, is full of pus and ulcers. Amylynne worries he'll never eat again.
A few days before Christmas, Nicholas erupts.
"I want my food back. Give me my food back," he screams, an outburst Amylynne records in her journal. "I don't want to get better, I want to be sick and have my food."
•
It falls to the skeptic to prove that sequencing has worked.
Despite his early reservations about the technique, James Verbsky feels a rush of excitement when he learns a mutation has been found and confirmed by the clinical lab. The fact that the mutation is unprecedented, that evolution appears to have kept it from taking hold in other species, tells him that in all likelihood they have found the culprit.
Still, the immune specialist knows the scientists need more evidence before they can say that this defect caused Nicholas' disease. They must show the mutation prevents the XIAP protein from doing its job.
To do this, Verbsky designs two tests. In one, they stimulate Nicholas' cells, adding a product made by bacteria to see whether the cells will recognize it and respond, as they should, by releasing a protein. Three times they perform the test. Each time other human cells release the protein.
Nicholas' cells do not.
In the second test, Verbsky and his team try to determine whether Nicholas' XIAP protein is curbing a process that causes cells to die. Once again Nicholas' cells differ from other human cells. More of his cells die. His protein isn't saving them as it should.
Now, Verbsky believes, they have the evidence. The single-letter mutation prevents Nicholas' protein from performing its jobs; that is why his gut doesn't work. The answer, so logical yet unexpected, prompts the scientist to reconsider the future of the test he once doubted.
To this point, doctors facing a mysterious condition would often single out suspicious genes and test them one by one. Each genetic test could take two to three months and cost up to $3,000.
Sequencing now gives medicine the chance to dispense with piecemeal methods and examine all of the genes at once. While it has cost roughly $75,000 to sequence and sift through Nicholas' DNA, the price is plummeting and should reach $1,000 or less in a few years.
"In five years," Verbsky says, "this is what we will do. I have no doubt."
•
Early in 2010, Amylynne returns for a second meeting with Dimmock. The tests on her DNA and immune system are complete.
The doctor begins with a preamble, one he always gives before genetic testing and again when the results come back. We have no say in the genes we pass to our children. There are benefits to reading our DNA, but they are balanced by the potential harm of what the DNA tells us.
Then the preamble is over.
You carry the mutation, he says.
Like all females, Amylynne has two X chromosomes. One has the normal gene; the other has the mutation. The normal X appears to compensate for the bad X. That's why she is not afflicted with her son's disease.
Like all males, Nicholas has only one X chromosome. It has the mutation.
Amylynne's eyes fill with tears.
The doctor is saying she did not get the disease.
She just passed it to her son.
Gene insights lead to a risky treatment
Sequencing Nicholas' DNA has given his family and doctors a diagnosis and more worries. Now they hope a new immune system can stop his disease.
By
Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher of the Journal SentinelDec. 25, 2010 |
(21) CommentsThird of three parts
For the first time in the three years of Nicholas Volker's illness, his mother dreams of the word she cannot say.In the dream, her 5-year-old, the little boy who calls himself "Batman," lies on the ground. There is a smile on his face. His blue eyes are closed. The heat is stifling and a boy and girl stand over Nicholas pointing down and holding their noses. Amylynne Santiago Volker keeps trying to wake her son, gripping his shoulders, crying his name over and over. "I can still hear myself screaming," she writes in her journal. "I hope and pray this is just my mind playing tricks on me."
The mother, a practicing Christian, believes in what she calls "signs and wonders." She pays attention to dreams, the sermons at church, the animals and scenery that catch her eye as she jogs. During her son's long stays at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, she has prayed and fasted and slept beside him. She has not used "the 'D' word" and has bristled at the doctors who have.
So when the dream visits her in June of this year, on the eve of an important, but risky, treatment for Nicholas, it unsettles her to the core.
Nicholas has spent much of his life in the hospital, at times near death from a mysterious illness that attacks his gut. But a powerful new technology has allowed scientists to sequence his
DNA, pinpoint the mutation causing his disease and arrive at an answer to the mystery.A partial answer.
Sequencing revealed a more complex picture than the doctors at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Children's Hospital had suspected. The slightest mutation in a single gene has left Nicholas with not one, but two extremely rare, life-threatening illnesses.
One of them, called
XLP, is an inherited immune system disorder that affects fewer than one in a million children. Found on the X chromosome, the disease strikes only boys and is usually fatal, rendering them unable to survive one of the most common human viruses, Epstein-Barr. Although Nicholas' specific mutation has never been seen before, it affects the same protein impaired in the other boys with XLP.His second disease, the gut illness marked by holes that pierce the intestine and skin, has never been identified until now. Nicholas is the first known case in medical history.
A
bone marrow transplant should treat XLP; doctors do not know whether it will remedy the gut disease.The transplant will be a dangerous time for Nicholas. His old immune system must be wiped out using powerful chemotherapy drugs. His body could reject the cells that will build the new immune system. Even if his body accepts the cells, it will take time to create the new system and, in the interim, he will be vulnerable to any infection or virus.
The diseases could end his life; so could the treatment.
•
Nicholas Volker's name is unknown beyond his family, friends and medical staff, but his case has reached some of the world's elite geneticists. His sequencing, one of the first to result in a diagnosis, is hailed by some as a demonstration of what the Human
Genome Project made possible a decade ago.A single player that is 440 pixels wide, with no padding
The Wisconsin scientists who decoded Nicholas' DNA are writing up the case for a medical journal. In late March, David Dimmock, a Children's Hospital
genetics specialist, described the work at a meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics in Albuquerque, N.M. Dimmock explained the extensive search that took scientists from a list of more than 16,000 variations - departures from the normal genetic sequence - to the single one responsible for the boy's illness."It's thrilling to see that this has come around as a real consequence so soon because it took us the better part of 13 years to sequence the first human genome," said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, who learned of Dimmock's presentation later.
"To now find, just a few years later, that it's possible to apply this in a medical situation and come up with an answer to a puzzling disorder of a child, is really remarkable and very gratifying."
Studies in late 2009 and early 2010 at Yale University, the University of Washington and other schools have shown success using the technique employed with Nicholas: sequencing not the whole genome, but a little more than 1% of it called the
exons. Exons, part of every gene, contain the instructions for making proteins. Failure to make proteins correctly leads to many diseases.These successes have come as scientists take stock of the genome project a decade after it gave us the first draft of our genetic blueprint. The accomplishment has spawned research into the genetic roots of diseases and commercial tests that reveal whether our individual mutations increase the risk of various ailments.
But the project has yet to bring about profound changes in medicine, such as cures for common illnesses or the sequencing-at-birth of babies.
Scientists are learning that heart disease and other common illnesses appear to involve the interaction of several or even many genetic mutations, as well as diet, exercise and environmental factors. Sequencing offers simpler medical answers when it comes to rare inherited diseases such as those confronting Nicholas.
In his request to sequence the boy's DNA back in 2009, pediatrician Alan Mayer wrote, "a diagnosis soon could save his life and truly showcase personalized genomic medicine."
Doctors have reached a diagnosis and showcased genomic medicine.
Now, they must hope what they've learned can save Nicholas' life.
•
Allowing their son's DNA to be sequenced was an easy decision for Sean and Amylynne Volker.
The aftermath has been proving more difficult. Amylynne aches with the knowledge that she passed the ruinous mutation to Nicholas. Her extended family struggles, too. The mutation is a genetic shadow hanging over them all and over their children. It is like a sealed envelope no one wants to open.
To date, no other members of Amylynne's family have been tested for the mutation.
Even using the genetic information to treat Nicholas has not been as straightforward as the Volkers once imagined. They have not rushed to proceed with the bone marrow transplant.
After being hospitalized at Christmas, Nicholas recovered and came home. Late in March, the Make-A-Wish Foundation flew the family to Las Vegas, where Nicholas watched the monster truck world finals and met Batman. At school, he ran and climbed with the other children in gym class. In their Monona home, he roughhoused with Dad and bossed around his three big sisters.
A single player that is 440 pixels wide, with no padding
To the Volkers, the days outside the hospital were a joy.
Still, all of Nicholas' food came through a tube. He longed for a bite of steak or pizza, but real food seemed to spur on the disease in his digestive system. The disease was the reason a short piece of intestine jutted from his stomach, diverting waste into a bag. Nicholas prayed for this nub of intestine to go back inside him, for his stomach to close up and for everything to be as it was before he got sick.
Conflicted as they were, the Volkers had signed the consent forms for the transplant.
By mid-June, the day was almost upon them.
"This is the best he's been," Sean said, admitting to second thoughts. "It's just so hard when he's so healthy and you're going to make him sick again."
•
On the morning after Amylynne's dream, the Volkers drive to Damascus Road Church, which sits in a small strip mall in Madison. It is Father's Day and Sean Volker carries his only son, slumped over his shoulder, into the church. The boy has spent each of the last three Father's Days in the hospital. The Volkers would like to spend this one anywhere else.
But Nicholas' face is ashen. His eyes keep closing. Dressed as usual in his Batman cape, the child appears bound for Children's Hospital once more - a day too soon. The next morning, Nicholas is due at the hospital to begin preparations for the transplant.
As the service opens, Amylynne stands, hands outstretched, eyes closed. Sean sits, Nicholas' head buried in his chest.
Family friend Dan Peck asks the congregation of 100 to pray for the Volkers. The family comes forward and Amylynne describes what Nicholas is facing.
"Pray against complications," she asks. "Pray that the new immune system will take, because Nic . . . "
Her voice falters. Friends surround the family, stretching their hands over Nicholas' head as he rests in his father's arms. A red spotlight bathes the child and the arms reaching toward him.
"We have your favor and we know that, God," prays Joseph Steinke, co-founder of this church in the Protestant evangelical tradition. "But we live in this broken and disrupted, unhealthy world. . . . Jesus, we're asking you to come and to place your hand on little Nic, and would you just guide him through this next week."
When the prayer finishes, the Volkers depart. Within an hour, Nicholas' fever passes. For once, the family avoids spending Father's Day at the hospital. They enjoy an afternoon of mini-golf.
That night Nicholas cannot sleep.
Put your arm around me, he tells his mom.
•
The next morning, the day he is scheduled for surgery to install a central line for chemotherapy drugs, Amylynne takes Nicholas straight to the emergency room. All the color has drained from his face. The fever is back.
"Water, Mommy," he pleads. "Get some. Get some. Get some."
But if the surgery is to proceed, he cannot drink. What happens next is up to David Margolis, the transplant doctor.
Margolis is a great believer in the fundamental principle: do no harm. He is also a stickler for proof, a trait instilled in him by his father, a lawyer. Before Margolis would agree to perform the transplant, a procedure that carries the risk of harm, he insisted his colleagues prove they had found the cause of Nicholas' disease.
He examines Nicholas and decides to postpone the surgery. The boy's symptoms suggest
sepsis, the blood infection that almost killed him in the fall of 2007.By nightfall, Nicholas is resting in intensive care, his mother hovering at his bedside.
Many times she has seen him gravely ill. Always, he has rallied. In the morning, Nicholas sits up and kisses her.
Mommy, I had a bad dream last night, he says. A scary ghost came into my room to get me, but then there was a younger man and he was in my room too and he said he would protect me in place of you.
In a few days, the sepsis clears. Margolis sets a new schedule. On July 14, Nicholas is to receive a transplant of umbilical cord blood from an anonymous donor.
Cord blood functions in a very similar way to bone marrow and is often given as an alternative in transplants. In Nicholas' case, Margolis prefers the cord blood because it carries less risk of
graft-versus-host disease, a condition in which the transplanted cells turn against the recipient's body.Even so, Margolis says, "There's a whole laundry list of things that can go wrong."
•
On the day before the transplant, mother and son discuss what's coming. Some who receive bone marrow transplants think of the event as a second birthday, the day their blood is reborn.
Amylynne explains the idea to Nicholas, who offers his own view. Until now he has been Batman. He has worn the bat cape and mask on many trips to the operating room.
Recently, though, he saw a sneak preview of the movie "The Last Airbender" and liked the character Aang, a boy with a shaved head who battles powerful forces.
Nicholas says he will go into the transplant as Batman. He will emerge as Aang.
After a week of heavy chemotherapy, he is ready. Though the chemo made him vomit, he seldom let it bother him. "Mom, I just got sick and I took care of it myself," he told Amylynne once when she returned to the room. "I got a bucket myself."
On the afternoon of July 14, a storm is simmering in Nicholas' room when the cord blood arrives in its plastic bag. One of the nurses has made a special Batman poster for the transplant, but the gesture fails to soothe Nicholas.
"Go away!" he screams even before the procedure begins. "I don't like the Batman sign. Take it apart."
Amylynne reminds him of his transformation from Batman to Aang. But he howls and will not be consoled. Though his father is working and cannot come until later, two of his sisters are in the room.
At 2:17, the nurse begins introducing the cord blood, a rose-red liquid that seeps from a 50-milliliter syringe through a line and into a vein in Nicholas' chest.
"We're starting, Bud."
Amylynne lies in the hospital bed beside her tense son as she has so many times. She is aware of an odd smell from the cord blood; it reminds her of creamed corn.
Nicholas' screams subside, fade to a whimper. He pulls her arm across his chest.
His face calms; his breath becomes slow and rhythmic.
She stays beside him, watching him drift off to sleep. Violins play. The soundtrack Amylynne has chosen begins with Vivaldi's "Spring" from "The Four Seasons."
At 28 minutes, Amylynne begins to weep. "I pray," she says, "that sickness and infirmity will have no place in his life." She reads from Psalm 107, beginning at verse 20: "He sent forth his word and healed them."
At 35 minutes, Vivaldi is replaced by "Aang's Theme," from the "Airbender" movie.
At 48 minutes, the last of the cord blood enters Nicholas. It is 3:05 p.m.
Minutes later, he sits up.
How do you feel? Amylynne asks. Any different?
Nope, he says.
•
Eight days after the transplant, Nicholas' old white blood cells have vanished. The new donor cells are still traveling into the hollows of his bones, where they will begin making new red and white blood cells and platelets. His immune system is virtually defenseless. Sores form on his mouth, throat, tongue, gut. He has mucositis, a common reaction to chemotherapy.
Nicholas, his hair now shaved, barks at his mom. Stop talking. Don't ask any more questions.
Torrential rains whip through Milwaukee County that night and Nicholas' fever rises. His heart rate and blood pressure climb.
"Something is brewing in his body," Amylynne writes after meeting with Margolis.
There is talk of sepsis and fungal infections. Two weeks after the transplant, Nicholas' enemy has a name:
adenovirus.The virus strikes the respiratory tract. In a healthy person the symptoms might seem like a cold. In someone with a weakened immune system, the virus can be dangerous.
Nicholas insists he is not sick and demands toys, which Amylynne is no mood to deny him.
"What do you say to a kid who has lived over 600 days in the hospital," she writes, "has lived without food more of his life than with it, who has had over 150 trips to the (operating room), who has just had a transplant and can't go out of his room - now not even at night when everyone else is sleeping, even with a mask on?"
She copes by searching the Internet for information about each new complication. When she needs relief, she goes for a run.
By Day 20 after the transplant, the adenovirus is advancing. But there is good news, too: Nicholas' count of white blood cells has risen. The cells from the transplant appear to be engrafting.
By Day 24, the adenovirus is declining. The white blood cell count grows. A pudgy smile lights up Nicholas' shaved head.
Then, on Day 29, after a week of encouraging news, Amylynne posts another urgent prayer request. Nicholas has a fever. He is struggling to remember things, even his mother's name.
He tests positive for HHV-6, a common virus that is a member of the herpes family. The virus can cause
encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, which is what worries Amylynne. His memory worsens. No sooner does he hang up the phone than he forgets which of his sisters was on the line.By Day 31, a test confirms that Nicholas has encephalitis. He lies in bed, his face blank.
HHV-6 , encephalitis, memory loss - none is a normal complication from a cord blood transplant."There is no fight anymore with his cares, he just lays there, all docile and good," Amylynne writes. "I absolutely hate it and it breaks my heart."
Nicholas gets a rash. He gets graft-versus-host disease. He gets a
staph infection.The medical team anticipates problems and responds quickly - with antivirals for the adenovirus, HHV-6 and encephalitis; antibiotics for the staph infection; and an increase in immune-suppressing drugs for graft-versus-host.
In the cascade of bad news, it is the possibility of brain damage from encephalitis that worries Amylynne most. She longs to see the Nicholas who growled when he felt annoyed with a doctor or nurse.
Unable to sleep much, Amylynne feels tired and worried all the time.
"Losing his personality," she says, "if I knew this was coming, I probably wouldn't have done (the transplant). That's how I feel today."
A few days later, the personality begins to come back. Nicholas snaps at the anesthesiologist for touching his stuffed bull.
On Day 47, Aug. 30, Nicholas' memory is improving. He is healthy enough to eat real food for the first time in months, chicken noodle soup. He says it is the happiest day of his life. Two weeks later he is pouring sauce on top of a steak.
"The heavens are opening up," Amylynne writes on his Facebook page, "the angels are singing and Almighty God is dropping down bottles of A.1."
•
As Nicholas' body adapts to his new immune system, the Medical College installs a much faster, next-generation sequencing machine and awaits delivery of another.
The machine used to unravel Nicholas' DNA just a year ago is destined for a research lab.
Steve Turner, who founded Pacific Biosciences, a California company that makes one of the new machines, says the steps taken with Nicholas went against the prevailing view in medicine on the value of sequencing. "The thing I find stunning was the courage on the part of the physicians and the family to do this."
Nicholas' case, in his view, represents the beginning of an era in which our genes will be mined increasingly to find medical answers.
The change is likely to come with its own pitfalls and limitations. In many cases, genes may be only part of the picture along with factors such as diet, exercise and environment. Even when a disease is entirely genetic and when sequencing pinpoints the gene or genes responsible, doctors may have no treatment.
"One of the problems is: Without a therapy, do you want a diagnosis?" asks Walter Gilbert, an emeritus professor at Harvard who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a method of sequencing DNA.
"It's a cost issue. Will somebody pay for it? For insurance to pay, it's not enough that the patient wants it or the doctor wants it, but the insurance company has to agree that it's useful in some way."
Some worry the flood of data from genome sequencing will overwhelm the storage capacity of our computers. Others are more troubled by privacy questions. Who will have access to the trove of genetic secrets, and how will access be restricted?
Still, Gilbert marvels that in half a century scientists have moved from a point at which genes "were still mysterious things . . . to the plethora of knowledge we have in modern biology."
More than a year has passed since Howard Jacob, head of the Medical College's Human and Molecular Genetics Center, received the e-mail asking to sequence Nicholas. He knows the next time doctors search a patient's DNA they may not connect a disease so definitively to one error or even several in the genetic code.
"We are a long way from saying this is something that is going to work every time," he says.
Yet he is confident this is where medicine is headed.
People ask how doctors will decide which patients to sequence. Jacob believes this will be a concern for only a year or two. A few years from now, he says, when the total cost hits $1,000 or less, the steps taken to diagnose Nicholas Volker's disease won't seem extraordinary at all.
A single player that is 440 pixels wide, with no padding
The Medical College's new machines should have enough capacity, in theory at least, to sequence 90 entire genomes in a single year. Strange as it sounds, Jacob has told the dean that's not going to be enough.
"That's how fast this is changing," he says.
A sense of urgency about this new era of medicine crystalized for Jacob in the fall of 2009 during one of the meetings about Nicholas Volker. He thought of the young boy, and the second chance he might have because of what they were finding in his DNA.
Then he sprang from his chair and scribbled three words on the whiteboard in his office. He has left them there ever since.
"How many Nics?"
•
The Medical College has expanded its sequencing efforts. Six more patients are in various stages of the process.
"We learned a tremendous amount . . . that continues to ripple through our institution," the doctors wrote in a commentary accompanying their recent paper in the journal Genetics in Medicine.
Nicholas Volker was discharged from Children's Hospital on Oct. 21. Amylynne packed her van with plastic tubs stuffed with toys, games and Batman gear accumulated over the course of a four-month hospital stay.
Minutes before they drove away, a stranger in a shirt and tie rushed up accompanied by Margolis, the transplant doctor. Howard Jacob wanted to meet the boy whose genes he had come to know. Nicholas, less than a week from his sixth birthday, greeted the genetics expert, then poked him in the stomach with his plastic "Airbender" staff.
No one can be sure that sequencing Nicholas' DNA has saved his life. The cord blood transplant he received as a result should treat XLP, the rare immune system disorder.
But it is not clear what the transplant will mean for the mysterious illness that ravaged his intestine and it may be two years before doctors know, says pediatrician Alan Mayer. After all, the gut disease did not show itself until two years after the boy was born.
Today, Nicholas is a new patient. Inside his body are two distinct DNAs, one with the mutation and one without it.
His immune system has the donor's DNA - no mutation. The rest of his body has the DNA he was born with, including the slight genetic error that caused so much damage.
A single player that is 440 pixels wide, with no padding
Mayer wonders how all of this will play out - Nicholas' new immune system co-existing with his old gut.
The doctor likes to imagine a time when the boy is healthy enough to watch a Brewers baseball game. When the years in the hospital, the surgeries, the feeding tubes are all a vague memory.
He sees a summer day, and Nicholas Volker at the ballpark eating a hot dog.
The Brain on Trial
Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order.
By David Eagleman
On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them.
The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:
I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.
By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.
It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …
Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin's Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he'd scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.
For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.
I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.
Whitman's body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman's brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage often neglected or physically abused their infants. In humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias. Whitman's intuition about himself—that something in his brain was changing his behavior—was spot-on.
Stories like Whitman's are not uncommon: legal cases involving brain damage crop up increasingly often. As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems, and link them more easily to aberrant behavior. Take the 2000 case of a 40-year-old man we'll call Alex, whose sexual preferences suddenly began to transform. He developed an interest in child pornography—and not just a little interest, but an overwhelming one. He poured his time into child-pornography Web sites and magazines. He also solicited prostitution at a massage parlor, something he said he had never previously done. He reported later that he'd wanted to stop, but "the pleasure principle overrode" his restraint. He worked to hide his acts, but subtle sexual advances toward his prepubescent stepdaughter alarmed his wife, who soon discovered his collection of child pornography. He was removed from his house, found guilty of child molestation, and sentenced to rehabilitation in lieu of prison. In the rehabilitation program, he made inappropriate sexual advances toward the staff and other clients, and was expelled and routed toward prison.
At the same time, Alex was complaining of worsening headaches. The night before he was to report for prison sentencing, he couldn't stand the pain anymore, and took himself to the emergency room. He underwent a brain scan, which revealed a massive tumor in his orbitofrontal cortex. Neurosurgeons removed the tumor. Alex's sexual appetite returned to normal.
The year after the brain surgery, his pedophilic behavior began to return. The neuroradiologist discovered that a portion of the tumor had been missed in the surgery and was regrowing—and Alex went back under the knife. After the removal of the remaining tumor, his behavior again returned to normal.
When your biology changes, so can your decision-making and your desires. The drives you take for granted ("I'm a heterosexual/homosexual," "I'm attracted to children/adults," "I'm aggressive/not aggressive," and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption.
Alex's sudden pedophilia illustrates that hidden drives and desires can lurk undetected behind the neural machinery of socialization. When the frontal lobes are compromised, people become disinhibited, and startling behaviors can emerge. Disinhibition is commonly seen in patients with frontotemporal dementia, a tragic disease in which the frontal and temporal lobes degenerate. With the loss of that brain tissue, patients lose the ability to control their hidden impulses. To the frustration of their loved ones, these patients violate social norms in endless ways: shoplifting in front of store managers, removing their clothes in public, running stop signs, breaking out in song at inappropriate times, eating food scraps found in public trash cans, being physically aggressive or sexually transgressive. Patients with frontotemporal dementia commonly end up in courtrooms, where their lawyers, doctors, and embarrassed adult children must explain to the judge that the violation was not the perpetrator's fault, exactly: much of the brain has degenerated, and medicine offers no remedy. Fifty-seven percent of frontotemporal-dementia patients violate social norms, as compared with only 27 percent of Alzheimer's patients.
Changes in the balance of brain chemistry, even small ones, can also cause large and unexpected changes in behavior. Victims of Parkinson's disease offer an example. In 2001, families and caretakers of Parkinson's patients began to notice something strange. When patients were given a drug called pramipexole, some of them turned into gamblers. And not just casual gamblers, but pathological gamblers. These were people who had never gambled much before, and now they were flying off to Vegas. One 68-year-old man amassed losses of more than $200,000 in six months at a series of casinos. Some patients became consumed with Internet poker, racking up unpayable credit-card bills. For several, the new addiction reached beyond gambling, to compulsive eating, excessive alcohol consumption, and hypersexuality.
What was going on? Parkinson's involves the loss of brain cells that produce a neurotransmitter known as dopamine. Pramipexole works by impersonating dopamine. But it turns out that dopamine is a chemical doing double duty in the brain. Along with its role in motor commands, it also mediates the reward systems, guiding a person toward food, drink, mates, and other things useful for survival. Because of dopamine's role in weighing the costs and benefits of decisions, imbalances in its levels can trigger gambling, overeating, and drug addiction—behaviors that result from a reward system gone awry. Physicians now watch for these behavioral changes as a possible side effect of drugs like pramipexole. Luckily, the negative effects of the drug are reversible—the physician simply lowers the dosage, and the compulsive gambling goes away.
The lesson from all these stories is the same: human behavior cannot be separated from human biology. If we like to believe that people make free choices about their behavior (as in, "I don't gamble, because I'm strong-willed"), cases like Alex the pedophile, the frontotemporal shoplifters, and the gambling Parkinson's patients may encourage us to examine our views more carefully. Perhaps not everyone is equally "free" to make socially appropriate choices.
Does the discovery of Charles Whitman's brain tumor modify your feelings about the senseless murders he committed? Does it affect the sentence you would find appropriate for him, had he survived that day? Does the tumor change the degree to which you consider the killings "his fault"? Couldn't you just as easily be unlucky enough to develop a tumor and lose control of your behavior?
On the other hand, wouldn't it be dangerous to conclude that people with a tumor are free of guilt, and that they should be let off the hook for their crimes?
As our understanding of the human brain improves, juries are increasingly challenged with these sorts of questions. When a criminal stands in front of the judge's bench today, the legal system wants to know whether he is blameworthy. Was it his fault, or his biology's fault?
I submit that this is the wrong question to be asking. The choices we make are inseparably yoked to our neural circuitry, and therefore we have no meaningful way to tease the two apart. The more we learn, the more the seemingly simple concept of blameworthiness becomes complicated, and the more the foundations of our legal system are strained.
If I seem to be heading in an uncomfortable direction—toward letting criminals off the hook—please read on, because I'm going to show the logic of a new argument, piece by piece. The upshot is that we can build a legal system more deeply informed by science, in which we will continue to take criminals off the streets, but we will customize sentencing, leverage new opportunities for rehabilitation, and structure better incentives for good behavior. Discoveries in neuroscience suggest a new way forward for law and order—one that will lead to a more cost-effective, humane, and flexible system than the one we have today. When modern brain science is laid out clearly, it is difficult to justify how our legal system can continue to function without taking what we've learned into account.
Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It's a charitable idea, but demonstrably wrong. People's brains are vastly different.
Who you even have the possibility to be starts at conception. If you think genes don't affect how people behave, consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You're three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.
And this feeds into a larger lesson of biology: we are not the ones steering the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and an egg granted us certain attributes and not others. Who we can be starts with our molecular blueprints—a series of alien codes written in invisibly small strings of acids—well before we have anything to do with it. Each of us is, in part, a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history. By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you've probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you're a carrier, we call you a male.
Genes are part of the story, but they're not the whole story. We are likewise influenced by the environments in which we grow up. Substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight all can influence how a baby will turn out as an adult. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can impede mental development, as can the physical environment. (For example, the major public-health movement to eliminate lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that ingesting lead can cause brain damage, making children less intelligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive.) And every experience throughout our lives can modify genetic expression—activating certain genes or switching others off—which in turn can inaugurate new behaviors. In this way, genes and environments intertwine.
When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that we choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint, and then born into a world of circumstances that we cannot control in our most-formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment mean that all citizens—equal before the law—possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision-making. The unique patterns of neurobiology inside each of our heads cannot qualify as choices; these are the cards we're dealt.
Because we did not choose the factors that affected the formation and structure of our brain, the concepts of free will and personal responsibility begin to sprout question marks. Is it meaningful to say that Alex made bad choices, even though his brain tumor was not his fault? Is it justifiable to say that the patients with frontotemporal dementia or Parkinson's should be punished for their bad behavior?
It is problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone breaking the law and conclude, "Well, I wouldn't have done that"—because if you weren't exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, and physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable. You cannot walk a mile in his shoes.
The legal system rests on the assumption that we are "practical reasoners," a term of art that presumes, at bottom, the existence of free will. The idea is that we use conscious deliberation when deciding how to act—that is, in the absence of external duress, we make free decisions. This concept of the practical reasoner is intuitive but problematic.
The existence of free will in human behavior is the subject of an ancient debate. Arguments in support of free will are typically based on direct subjective experience ("I feel like I made the decision to lift my finger just now"). But evaluating free will requires some nuance beyond our immediate intuitions.
Consider a decision to move or speak. It feels as though free will leads you to stick out your tongue, or scrunch up your face, or call someone a name. But free will is not required to play any role in these acts. People with Tourette's syndrome, for instance, suffer from involuntary movements and vocalizations. A typical Touretter may stick out his tongue, scrunch up his face, or call someone a name—all without choosing to do so.
We immediately learn two things from the Tourette's patient. First, actions can occur in the absence of free will. Second, the Tourette's patient has no free won't. He cannot use free will to override or control what subconscious parts of his brain have decided to do. What the lack of free will and the lack of free won't have in common is the lack of "free." Tourette's syndrome provides a case in which the underlying neural machinery does its thing, and we all agree that the person is not responsible.
This same phenomenon arises in people with a condition known as chorea, for whom actions of the hands, arms, legs, and face are involuntary, even though they certainly look voluntary: ask such a patient why she is moving her fingers up and down, and she will explain that she has no control over her hand. She cannot not do it. Similarly, some split-brain patients (who have had the two hemispheres of the brain surgically disconnected) develop alien-hand syndrome: while one hand buttons up a shirt, the other hand works to unbutton it. When one hand reaches for a pencil, the other bats it away. No matter how hard the patient tries, he cannot make his alien hand not do what it's doing. The movements are not "his" to freely start or stop.
Unconscious acts are not limited to unintended shouts or wayward hands; they can be surprisingly sophisticated. Consider Kenneth Parks, a 23-year-old Canadian with a wife, a five-month-old daughter, and a close relationship with his in-laws (his mother-in-law described him as a "gentle giant"). Suffering from financial difficulties, marital problems, and a gambling addiction, he made plans to go see his in-laws to talk about his troubles.
In the wee hours of May 23, 1987, Kenneth arose from the couch on which he had fallen asleep, but he did not awaken. Sleepwalking, he climbed into his car and drove the 14 miles to his in-laws' home. He broke in, stabbed his mother-in-law to death, and assaulted his father-in-law, who survived. Afterward, he drove himself to the police station. Once there, he said, "I think I have killed some people … My hands," realizing for the first time that his own hands were severely cut.
Over the next year, Kenneth's testimony was remarkably consistent, even in the face of attempts to lead him astray: he remembered nothing of the incident. Moreover, while all parties agreed that Kenneth had undoubtedly committed the murder, they also agreed that he had no motive. His defense attorneys argued that this was a case of killing while sleepwalking, known as homicidal somnambulism.
Although critics cried "Faker!," sleepwalking is a verifiable phenomenon. On May 25, 1988, after lengthy consideration of electrical recordings from Kenneth's brain, the jury concluded that his actions had indeed been involuntary, and declared him not guilty.
As with Tourette's sufferers, split-brain patients, and those with choreic movements, Kenneth's case illustrates that high-level behaviors can take place in the absence of free will. Like your heartbeat, breathing, blinking, and swallowing, even your mental machinery can run on autopilot. The crux of the question is whether all of your actions are fundamentally on autopilot or whether some little bit of you is "free" to choose, independent of the rules of biology.
This has always been the sticking point for philosophers and scientists alike. After all, there is no spot in the brain that is not densely interconnected with—and driven by—other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and therefore "free." In modern science, it is difficult to find the gap into which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts.
Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.
The study of brains and behaviors is in the midst of a conceptual shift. Historically, clinicians and lawyers have agreed on an intuitive distinction between neurological disorders ("brain problems") and psychiatric disorders ("mind problems"). As recently as a century ago, a common approach was to get psychiatric patients to "toughen up," through deprivation, pleading, or torture. Not surprisingly, this approach was medically fruitless. After all, while psychiatric disorders tend to be the product of more-subtle forms of brain pathology, they, too, are based in the biological details of the brain.
What accounts for the shift from blame to biology? Perhaps the largest driving force is the effectiveness of pharmaceutical treatments. No amount of threatening will chase away depression, but a little pill called fluoxetine often does the trick. Schizophrenic symptoms cannot be overcome by exorcism, but they can be controlled by risperidone. Mania responds not to talk or to ostracism, but to lithium. These successes, most of them introduced in the past 60 years, have underscored the idea that calling some disorders "brain problems" while consigning others to the ineffable realm of "the psychic" does not make sense. Instead, we have begun to approach mental problems in the same way we might approach a broken leg. The neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky invites us to contemplate this conceptual shift with a series of questions:
Is a loved one, sunk in a depression so severe that she cannot function, a case of a disease whose biochemical basis is as "real" as is the biochemistry of, say, diabetes, or is she merely indulging herself? Is a child doing poorly at school because he is unmotivated and slow, or because there is a neurobiologically based learning disability? Is a friend, edging towards a serious problem with substance abuse, displaying a simple lack of discipline, or suffering from problems with the neurochemistry of reward?
Acts cannot be understood separately from the biology of the actors—and this recognition has legal implications. Tom Bingham, Britain's former senior law lord, once put it this way:
In the past, the law has tended to base its approach … on a series of rather crude working assumptions: adults of competent mental capacity are free to choose whether they will act in one way or another; they are presumed to act rationally, and in what they conceive to be their own best interests; they are credited with such foresight of the consequences of their actions as reasonable people in their position could ordinarily be expected to have; they are generally taken to mean what they say.
Whatever the merits or demerits of working assumptions such as these in the ordinary range of cases, it is evident that they do not provide a uniformly accurate guide to human behaviour.
The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more we tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline—and toward the details of biology. The shift from blame to science reflects our modern understanding that our perceptions and behaviors are steered by deeply embedded neural programs.
Imagine a spectrum of culpability. On one end, we find people like Alex the pedophile, or a patient with frontotemporal dementia who exposes himself in public. In the eyes of the judge and jury, these are people who suffered brain damage at the hands of fate and did not choose their neural situation. On the other end of the spectrum—the blameworthy side of the "fault" line—we find the common criminal, whose brain receives little study, and about whom our current technology might be able to say little anyway. The overwhelming majority of lawbreakers are on this side of the line, because they don't have any obvious, measurable biological problems. They are simply thought of as freely choosing actors.
Such a spectrum captures the common intuition that juries hold regarding blameworthiness. But there is a deep problem with this intuition. Technology will continue to improve, and as we grow better at measuring problems in the brain, the fault line will drift into the territory of people we currently hold fully accountable for their crimes. Problems that are now opaque will open up to examination by new techniques, and we may someday find that many types of bad behavior have a basic biological explanation—as has happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, and mania.
Today, neuroimaging is a crude technology, unable to explain the details of individual behavior. We can detect only large-scale problems, but within the coming decades, we will be able to detect patterns at unimaginably small levels of the microcircuitry that correlate with behavioral problems. Neuroscience will be better able to say why people are predisposed to act the way they do. As we become more skilled at specifying how behavior results from the microscopic details of the brain, more defense lawyers will point to biological mitigators of guilt, and more juries will place defendants on the not-blameworthy side of the line.
This puts us in a strange situation. After all, a just legal system cannot define culpability simply by the limitations of current technology. Expert medical testimony generally reflects only whether we yet have names and measurements for a problem, not whether a problem exists. A legal system that declares a person culpable at the beginning of a decade and not culpable at the end is one in which culpability carries no clear meaning.
The crux of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, "To what extent was it his biology, and to what extent was it him?," because we now understand that there is no meaningful distinction between a person's biology and his decision-making. They are inseparable.
While our current style of punishment rests on a bedrock of personal volition and blame, our modern understanding of the brain suggests a different approach. Blameworthiness should be removed from the legal argot. It is a backward-looking concept that demands the impossible task of untangling the hopelessly complex web of genetics and environment that constructs the trajectory of a human life.
Instead of debating culpability, we should focus on what to do, moving forward, with an accused lawbreaker. I suggest that the legal system has to become forward-looking, primarily because it can no longer hope to do otherwise. As science complicates the question of culpability, our legal and social policy will need to shift toward a different set of questions: How is a person likely to behave in the future? Are criminal actions likely to be repeated? Can this person be helped toward pro-social behavior? How can incentives be realistically structured to deter crime?
The important change will be in the way we respond to the vast range of criminal acts. Biological explanation will not exculpate criminals; we will still remove from the streets lawbreakers who prove overaggressive, underempathetic, and poor at controlling their impulses. Consider, for example, that the majority of known serial killers were abused as children. Does this make them less blameworthy? Who cares? It's the wrong question. The knowledge that they were abused encourages us to support social programs to prevent child abuse, but it does nothing to change the way we deal with the particular serial murderer standing in front of the bench. We still need to keep him off the streets, irrespective of his past misfortunes. The child abuse cannot serve as an excuse to let him go; the judge must keep society safe.
Those who break social contracts need to be confined, but in this framework, the future is more important than the past. Deeper biological insight into behavior will foster a better understanding of recidivism—and this offers a basis for empirically based sentencing. Some people will need to be taken off the streets for a longer time (even a lifetime), because their likelihood of reoffense is high; others, because of differences in neural constitution, are less likely to recidivate, and so can be released sooner.
The law is already forward-looking in some respects: consider the leniency afforded a crime of passion versus a premeditated murder. Those who commit the former are less likely to recidivate than those who commit the latter, and their sentences sensibly reflect that. Likewise, American law draws a bright line between criminal acts committed by minors and those by adults, punishing the latter more harshly. This approach may be crude, but the intuition behind it is sound: adolescents command lesser skills in decision-making and impulse control than do adults; a teenager's brain is simply not like an adult's brain. Lighter sentences are appropriate for those whose impulse control is likely to improve naturally as adolescence gives way to adulthood.
Taking a more scientific approach to sentencing, case by case, could move us beyond these limited examples. For instance, important changes are happening in the sentencing of sex offenders. In the past, researchers have asked psychiatrists and parole-board members how likely specific sex offenders were to relapse when let out of prison. Both groups had experience with sex offenders, so predicting who was going straight and who was coming back seemed simple. But surprisingly, the expert guesses showed almost no correlation with the actual outcomes. The psychiatrists and parole-board members had only slightly better predictive accuracy than coin-flippers. This astounded the legal community.
So researchers tried a more actuarial approach. They set about recording dozens of characteristics of some 23,000 released sex offenders: whether the offender had unstable employment, had been sexually abused as a child, was addicted to drugs, showed remorse, had deviant sexual interests, and so on. Researchers then tracked the offenders for an average of five years after release to see who wound up back in prison. At the end of the study, they computed which factors best explained the reoffense rates, and from these and later data they were able to build actuarial tables to be used in sentencing.
Which factors mattered? Take, for instance, low remorse, denial of the crime, and sexual abuse as a child. You might guess that these factors would correlate with sex offenders' recidivism. But you would be wrong: those factors offer no predictive power. How about antisocial personality disorder and failure to complete treatment? These offer somewhat more predictive power. But among the strongest predictors of recidivism are prior sexual offenses and sexual interest in children. When you compare the predictive power of the actuarial approach with that of the parole boards and psychiatrists, there is no contest: numbers beat intuition. In courtrooms across the nation, these actuarial tests are now used in presentencing to modulate the length of prison terms.
We will never know with certainty what someone will do upon release from prison, because real life is complicated. But greater predictive power is hidden in the numbers than people generally expect. Statistically based sentencing is imperfect, but it nonetheless allows evidence to trump folk intuition, and it offers customization in place of the blunt guidelines that the legal system typically employs. The current actuarial approaches do not require a deep understanding of genes or brain chemistry, but as we introduce more science into these measures—for example, with neuroimaging studies—the predictive power will only improve. (To make such a system immune to government abuse, the data and equations that compose the sentencing guidelines must be transparent and available online for anyone to verify.)
Beyond customized sentencing, a forward-thinking legal system informed by scientific insights into the brain will enable us to stop treating prison as a one-size-fits-all solution. To be clear, I'm not opposed to incarceration, and its purpose is not limited to the removal of dangerous people from the streets. The prospect of incarceration deters many crimes, and time actually spent in prison can steer some people away from further criminal acts upon their release. But that works only for those whose brains function normally. The problem is that prisons have become our de facto mental-health-care institutions—and inflicting punishment on the mentally ill usually has little influence on their future behavior. An encouraging trend is the establishment of mental-health courts around the nation: through such courts, people with mental illnesses can be helped while confined in a tailored environment. Cities such as Richmond, Virginia, are moving in this direction, for reasons of justice as well as cost-effectiveness. Sheriff C. T. Woody, who estimates that nearly 20 percent of Richmond's prisoners are mentally ill, told CBS News, "The jail isn't a place for them. They should be in a mental-health facility." Similarly, many jurisdictions are opening drug courts and developing alternative sentences; they have realized that prisons are not as useful for solving addictions as are meaningful drug-rehabilitation programs.
A forward-thinking legal system will also parlay biological understanding into customized rehabilitation, viewing criminal behavior the way we understand other medical conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia, and depression—conditions that now allow the seeking and giving of help. These and other brain disorders find themselves on the not-blameworthy side of the fault line, where they are now recognized as biological, not demonic, issues.
Many people recognize the long-term cost-effectiveness of rehabilitating offenders instead of packing them into overcrowded prisons. The challenge has been the dearth of new ideas about how to rehabilitate them. A better understanding of the brain offers new ideas. For example, poor impulse control is characteristic of many prisoners. These people generally can express the difference between right and wrong actions, and they understand the disadvantages of punishment—but they are handicapped by poor control of their impulses. Whether as a result of anger or temptation, their actions override reasoned consideration of the future.
If it seems difficult to empathize with people who have poor impulse control, just think of all the things you succumb to against your better judgment. Alcohol? Chocolate cake? Television? It's not that we don't know what's best for us, it's simply that the frontal-lobe circuits representing long-term considerations can't always win against short-term desire when temptation is in front of us.
With this understanding in mind, we can modify the justice system in several ways. One approach, advocated by Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA, is to ramp up the certainty and swiftness of punishment—for instance, by requiring drug offenders to undergo twice-weekly drug testing, with automatic, immediate consequences for failure—thereby not relying on distant abstraction alone. Similarly, economists have suggested that the drop in crime since the early 1990s has been due, in part, to the increased presence of police on the streets: their visibility shores up support for the parts of the brain that weigh long-term consequences.
We may be on the cusp of finding new rehabilitative strategies as well, affording people better control of their behavior, even in the absence of external authority. To help a citizen reintegrate into society, the ethical goal is to change him as little as possible while bringing his behavior into line with society's needs. My colleagues and I are proposing a new approach, one that grows from the understanding that the brain operates like a team of rivals, with different neural populations competing to control the single output channel of behavior. Because it's a competition, the outcome can be tipped. I call the approach "the prefrontal workout."
The basic idea is to give the frontal lobes practice in squelching the short-term brain circuits. To this end, my colleagues Stephen LaConte and Pearl Chiu have begun providing real-time feedback to people during brain scanning. Imagine that you'd like to quit smoking cigarettes. In this experiment, you look at pictures of cigarettes during brain imaging, and the experimenters measure which regions of your brain are involved in the craving. Then they show you the activity in those networks, represented by a vertical bar on a computer screen, while you look at more cigarette pictures. The bar acts as a thermometer for your craving: if your craving networks are revving high, the bar is high; if you're suppressing your craving, the bar is low. Your job is to make the bar go down. Perhaps you have insight into what you're doing to resist the craving; perhaps the mechanism is inaccessible. In any case, you try out different mental avenues until the bar begins to slowly sink. When it goes all the way down, that means you've successfully recruited frontal circuitry to squelch the activity in the networks involved in impulsive craving. The goal is for the long term to trump the short term. Still looking at pictures of cigarettes, you practice making the bar go down over and over, until you've strengthened those frontal circuits. By this method, you're able to visualize the activity in the parts of your brain that need modulation, and you can witness the effects of different mental approaches you might take.
If this sounds like biofeedback from the 1970s, it is—but this time with vastly more sophistication, monitoring specific networks inside the head rather than a single electrode on the skin. This research is just beginning, so the method's efficacy is not yet known—but if it works well, it will be a game changer. We will be able to take it to the incarcerated population, especially those approaching release, to try to help them avoid coming back through the revolving prison doors.
This prefrontal workout is designed to better balance the debate between the long- and short-term parties of the brain, giving the option of reflection before action to those who lack it. And really, that's all maturation is. The main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early 20s, and this fact underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized largely involves developing the circuitry to squelch our first impulses.
This explains why damage to the frontal lobes unmasks unsocialized behavior that we would never have thought was hidden inside us. Recall the patients with frontotemporal dementia who shoplift, expose themselves, and burst into song at inappropriate times. The networks for those behaviors have been lurking under the surface all along, but they've been masked by normally functioning frontal lobes. The same sort of unmasking happens in people who go out and get rip-roaring drunk on a Saturday night: they're disinhibiting normal frontal-lobe function and letting more-impulsive networks climb onto the main stage. After training at the prefrontal gym, a person might still crave a cigarette, but he'll know how to beat the craving instead of letting it win. It's not that we don't want to enjoy our impulsive thoughts (Mmm, cake), it's merely that we want to endow the frontal cortex with some control over whether we act upon them (I'll pass). Similarly, if a person thinks about committing a criminal act, that's permissible as long as he doesn't take action.
For the pedophile, we cannot hope to control whether he is attracted to children. That he never acts on the attraction may be the best we can hope for, especially as a society that respects individual rights and freedom of thought. Social policy can hope only to prevent impulsive thoughts from tipping into behavior without reflection. The goal is to give more control to the neural populations that care about long-term consequences—to inhibit impulsivity, to encourage reflection. If a person thinks about long-term consequences and still decides to move forward with an illegal act, then we'll respond accordingly. The prefrontal workout leaves the brain intact—no drugs or surgery—and uses the natural mechanisms of brain plasticity to help the brain help itself. It's a tune-up rather than a product recall.
We have hope that this approach represents the correct model: it is grounded simultaneously in biology and in libertarian ethics, allowing a person to help himself by improving his long-term decision-making. Like any scientific attempt, it could fail for any number of unforeseen reasons. But at least we have reached a point where we can develop new ideas rather than assuming that repeated incarceration is the single practical solution for deterring crime.
Along any axis that we use to measure human beings, we discover a wide-ranging distribution, whether in empathy, intelligence, impulse control, or aggression. People are not created equal. Although this variability is often imagined to be best swept under the rug, it is in fact the engine of evolution. In each generation, nature tries out as many varieties as it can produce, along all available dimensions.
Variation gives rise to lushly diverse societies—but it serves as a source of trouble for the legal system, which is largely built on the premise that humans are all equal before the law. This myth of human equality suggests that people are equally capable of controlling impulses, making decisions, and comprehending consequences. While admirable in spirit, the notion of neural equality is simply not true.
As brain science improves, we will better understand that people exist along continua of capabilities, rather than in simplistic categories. And we will be better able to tailor sentencing and rehabilitation for the individual, rather than maintain the pretense that all brains respond identically to complex challenges and that all people therefore deserve the same punishments. Some people wonder whether it's unfair to take a scientific approach to sentencing—after all, where's the humanity in that? But what's the alternative? As it stands now, ugly people receive longer sentences than attractive people; psychiatrists have no capacity to guess which sex offenders will reoffend; and our prisons are overcrowded with drug addicts and the mentally ill, both of whom could be better helped by rehabilitation. So is current sentencing really superior to a scientifically informed approach?
Neuroscience is beginning to touch on questions that were once only in the domain of philosophers and psychologists, questions about how people make decisions and the degree to which those decisions are truly "free." These are not idle questions. Ultimately, they will shape the future of legal theory and create a more biologically informed jurisprudence.
The Man Who Had HIV and Now Does Not
Four years ago, Timothy Brown underwent an innovative procedure. Since then, test after test has found absolutely no trace of the virus in his body. The bigger miracle, though, is how his case has experts again believing they just might find a cure for AIDS.
By Tina Rosenberg
Published May 29, 2011
AIDS is a disease of staggering numbers, of tragically recursive devastation. Since the first diagnosis, 30 years ago this June 5, HIV has infected more than 60 million people, around 30 million of whom have died. For another 5 million, anti-retroviral therapy has made their infection a manageable though still chronic condition. Until four years ago, Timothy Brown was one of those people.
Brown is a 45-year-old translator of German who lives in San Francisco. He is of medium height and very skinny, with thinning brown hair. He found out he had HIV in 1995. He had not been tested for the virus in half a decade, but that year a former partner turned up positive. �You've probably got only two years to live,� the former partner told him when Brown got his results.
His partner was wrong�lifesaving anti-retrovirals were about to arrive�and Brown spent the next ten years living in Berlin, pursuing his career and enjoying the city by night. He was gregarious, a fast talker; when he went out, he'd always wind up the center of a group. �I used to be quite a flirt,� he tells me. �I would see someone in a café, bar, or disco and knew how to get what I wanted.� In 2006, Brown was living in Berlin with his boyfriend, a man named Michael from the former East Germany. That year, on a trip to New York for a wedding, he began to feel miserable. He chalked it up to jet lag, but it didn't go away. Back in Berlin, his bike ride to work took so long that he got chewed out by his boss for lateness. Michael called his doctor, who saw Brown the next day.
The results came back: leukemia. A new, unrelated disease was now threatening his life. Michael cried. Brown was referred to Charité Medical University, where he was treated by Gero Hütter, a 37-year-old �specialist in blood cancers.
After chemo, the leukemia came back. Brown's last chance was a stem-cell transplant from a bone-marrow donor. Hütter had an idea. He knew little about HIV, but he remembered that people with a certain natural genetic mutation are very resistant to the virus. The mutation, called delta 32, disables CCR5, a receptor on the surface of immune-system cells that, in the vast majority of cases, is HIV's path inside. People with copies from both parents are almost completely protected from getting HIV, and they are relatively common in northern Europe�among Germans, the rate is about one in a hundred. Hütter resolved to see if he could use a stem-cell donor with the delta-32 �mutation to cure not just Brown's leukemia but also his HIV.
Hütter found 232 donors worldwide who were matches for Brown. If probabilities held, two would have double delta 32. Hütter persuaded the people at the registry to test the donors for the �mutation; his laboratory paid, at a cost of about $40 per sample. They worked through the list. Donor 61 was a hit.
His colleagues and the chief of his unit were dubious. �The main problem was that I was just a normal physician�I had no leading position. It was not always easy to get what we needed,� Hütter recalls. Brown himself was not pushing the idea. �At that point, I wasn't that concerned about HIV, because I could keep taking medication,� he says.
Before Hütter asked the donor registry to begin testing, he'd searched the literature and contacted AIDS experts. It dawned on him that no one had ever done this before. �My first thought was, I'm wrong. There must be something I was missing.� In a sense, that was true. Gero Hütter did not know what most AIDS researchers and clinicians had taken as accepted wisdom: A cure was impossible.
The 1996 International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver brought the stunning announcement that a combination of three anti-retroviral drugs could keep HIV in check. David Ho, director of New York's Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, went further. In the closing session, Ho said that it might be possible to eradicate the disease from the body with 18 to 36 months of therapy. Time magazine named Ho �Man of the Year.�
But Ho was too optimistic. Treatment with the drugs, no matter how early it's begun, cannot eradicate HIV, because the virus hides, lurking in the brain or liver or gut without replicating, invisible to the immune system. It is waiting to come roaring back if therapy is stopped. Disillusioned, some cure researchers transferred their finite resources and energy to improving AIDS treatment or working on a vaccine. Money for cure research dried up. Some scientists took to calling it �the C-word� or �cure� with air quotes.
Meanwhile, advances in treatment have further shifted attention from the hunt for a cure. A study released in May found that early anti-retroviral therapy decreases patients' infectiousness by a striking 96 percent. Today, most people on anti-retroviral drugs achieve an undetectable viral load�there is virtually no HIV circulating in their blood. An idea has taken hold: We can live with this.
But we cannot. Doctors will tell you that many patients still fail treatment and die. As people age with the disease, we are seeing that even those successfully treated can lose years of life. A massive multicountry study published in The Lancet in 2008 reported that someone starting therapy at age 20 could expect to live to only 63. The following year, another study found that a group of HIV-positive patients with a median age of 56 had immune systems comparable to those of healthy 88-year-olds. The latent reservoir of HIV seems to be most to blame, producing inflammation that degrades the immune system, increasing susceptibility to age-related diseases. What's more, research has shown that the drugs themselves can lead to increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis.
The cost of treatment is also unsustainable. In the United States, second-line drugs�for people who don't improve on standard medications�can total $30,000 a year. Cash-strapped states are trimming programs that pay for these medicines; there are now more than 8,300 people in America on waiting lists for anti-retroviral drugs. In developing countries, drugs are much cheaper�some generic regimens cost only $67 annually�but wealthy nations are wearying of picking up the bill. According to UNAIDS, 10 million people in the Third World who need treatment are not getting it at all. The math of the epidemic is unrelenting: For every three people who start treatment, five new people are infected.
A vaccine for AIDS is �probably decades away,� says Daria Hazuda, a vice-president at Merck. �There's still an enormous amount of hope, but people now realize it's going to be extremely complicated.� We know now that we will neither treat nor vaccinate our way out of this epidemic. But there could be another way for it to end.
In February 2007, Brown had his stem-cell transplant from Donor 61. Right before the procedure, he stopped taking his anti-retrovirals. He survived the operation�no small feat, since stem-cell transplants from unrelated donors kill a hefty minority of the people who undergo them. His initial recovery was encouraging. �I went back to work, started working out at a gym and riding my bicycle again,� he says.
Then Brown relapsed. In February 2008, Hütter did another transplant from Donor 61. (Going back to the same donor is standard; the patient is now accustomed to that immune system.) This time, the cancer seems to have stayed away. More striking: More than four years after he stopped taking anti-retroviral therapy, there is also no sign of HIV in his body. Brown is now surely one of the most biopsied humans on Earth. Samples from his blood, his brain, his liver, his rectum, have been tested over and over. People in whom the disease is controlled with anti-retroviral therapy will still have hidden HIV�perhaps a million copies. But with Brown, even the most sensitive tests detect no virus at all. Even if trace amounts remain (it is impossible to test every cell), it no longer matters. Absent the CCR5 receptors, any HIV still present cannot take root. He is cured.
A stem-cell transplant from an unrelated donor can cost $250,000 and is a reasonable risk only in the face of imminent death. What cured Timothy Brown is obviously not a cure for the rest of the world. But it is proof of concept, and it has jolted AIDS-cure research back to life. Sometimes science follows sentiment; the abandonment of cure research after the disillusion of the nineties is now playing out in reverse.
For Brown's cure to be relevant on a wide scale, it would have to be possible to create the delta 32 mutation without a donor and without a transplant�preferably in the form of a single injection. As it happens, progress toward that goal has already begun, in the laboratory of Paula Cannon at the University of Southern California. Instead of a donor, Cannon is using a new form of gene editing known as zinc finger nucleases, developed by the California company Sangamo BioSciences. Zinc finger nucleases are synthetic proteins that act as genetic scissors. They can target and snip a specific part of the genetic blueprint: They can, for instance, cut out the code that produces the CCR5 receptor, yielding a cell with HIV resistance.
Cannon works with mice given human immune systems, since normal mice cannot get HIV. In one study, she took human stem cells, treated them to have the CCR5 mutation, and injected them into a group of mice, with another set of animals given untreated stem cells as a control. Then she infected both groups with HIV. The result, as published in Nature Biotechnology in July 2010: The control group got sick and died. The mice given the mutation fought off the virus and remained healthy.
Great leaps are still required to find ways to inject the zinc finger nucleases directly into a patient's body. But an important leap has already been made. Gene therapy is allowing us to imagine a world of Timothy Browns, without everything he had to endure.
News of the Berlin Patient's cure�Brown stepped forward to identify himself by name only late last year�made its debut at the February 2008 annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston. Hütter had submitted a paper to The New England Journal of Medicine and to the conference organizers as well, asking to present Brown's results�no HIV a year after stopping treatment. The journal rejected his submission, and CROI only allotted Hütter space to put up a poster, the platform offered to present research considered of lesser importance.
Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a doctor at San Francisco General Hospital's Positive Health Program�the newest name for the old Ward 86, the first-ever outpatient AIDS clinic�was among the few to appreciate the significance of Hütter's display. �I said, �Wow, this is interesting. Why doesn't anyone seem to care?' � Another was Jeffrey Laurence, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Virus Research at Weill Cornell Medical College and a senior scientific consultant for AMFAR. �I thought it was the most exciting thing I'd heard about since the discovery of the virus,� he says. �I couldn't believe people didn't take notice.� Laurence wrote an editorial about the Berlin Patient in The AIDS Reader. He received two letters. �It basically got ignored.�
Laurence asked Hütter to present his findings to a small meeting of top AIDS researchers at M.I.T. in September 2008. He also asked him to provide Brown's samples to send to laboratories in the United States and Canada, which could run more sensitive tests. Again, all the samples were negative. Mark Schoofs, a Wall Street Journal reporter who'd been invited to attend the session, wrote an article about the Berlin Patient. The New England Journal of Medicine reconsidered its rejection of Hütter's paper, publishing his results in February 2009.
The case caught the attention of a small activist organization called the AIDS Policy Project, which was trying to rehabilitate the idea of a cure. One of the things the group does is track the money going to cure research, as a way to highlight the need for more of it. Its founder and leader, Kate Krauss, is an organizer and publicist but not a fund-raiser�the group's annual budget is roughly the price of a used car. She often travels to scientific conferences by bus.
The Project, together with officials from San Francisco, presented an award to Hütter in June 2010. Stephen LeBlanc, a patent attorney in Oakland active with the group, drove Hütter to the ceremony. He was startled when Hütter told him that this was the first such honor he had received. �Le�Blanc replied that he'd read that the Berliner Morgen�post newspaper had named Hütter a �Berliner of the Year.� Hütter smiled. �I came in ninth,� he said.
The AIDS Establishment, like many Establishments, tends to be suspicious of outsiders. Here comes a young doctor, not even prominent at his own hospital, who by his own admission knew next to nothing about AIDS, doing something never done before. As more of the research community became aware of Hütter's claims, the prevailing view was: Who is this guy?
Robert Gallo, a co-discoverer of HIV, devoted his opening address at a major conference in December 2009 to an attack on Hütter's results. Gallo simply didn't believe them and warned that only a pathologist could declare the patient cured�once the patient was dead. Hütter, scheduled to speak at the same event, quickly amended his presentation. As he defended his results to a panel of skeptics, he showed the new slide: �Do we have to cut this patient into slices?� it asked.
When Kevin Robert Frost, the CEO of AMFAR, began to cite Hütter's work in fund-raising pitches, he found that potential donors sought different proof. �They said if the Berlin Patient were true,� he says, �it would be on the front page of the New York Times.�
In fact, the Berlin Patient did appear in the Times�on page A12. The short article included quotes from Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the world's most important gatekeeper of AIDS research. Unlike other experts, Fauci accepted that Brown had been cured. He just didn't think it was anything to get excited about. �It's very nice, and it's not even surprising,� he said�meaning that if you take away someone's immune system and give him a new one resistant to HIV, it's logical that he would be cured of AIDS. �But it's just off the table of practicality.�
It was a disingenuous dismissal: New treatments often start out dangerous, inconvenient, and expensive. It is only with additional research that they gradually morph into, say, a one-pill-a-day therapy that can be administered anywhere, as anti-retrovirals now are. �Picture Alexander Fleming with his vats of penicillin,� says Cannon, �and people saying, �Oh, yeah, that's totally going to work in sub-Saharan Africa.' �
Among the big questions remaining about gene therapy is whether all relevant receptors need to be disabled to achieve full HIV resistance. CCR5 is by far the most important of those receptors, but it isn't the only one, and we don't yet know how significant this is. With Brown, it didn't seem to matter. This could be because he had ablation�his immune system was wiped out by chemotherapy and radiation before his transplants. But that raises another puzzle: Could ablation itself be a necessary ingredient to a cure? Full ablation is a punishing experience, and even partial ablation requires hospitalization. No cure is practical on a wide scale if it must employ it.
Science, of course, has ways to find out. Building on Cannon's work, a clinical trial in San Francisco and Philadelphia is testing whether using the genetic scissors not on stem cells but on T-cells�immune-�system cells�to modify them with the CCR5 mutation can also yield HIV resistance. The use of T-cells has some disadvantages, but its big plus is that the procedure wouldn't require ablation. �If that virus moves, it's kind of a new universe,� says Jay Lalezari of Quest Clinical Research, one of the trial's leaders.
Gene therapy is only one possible path to an AIDS cure, and the fact is, it may not be the best one. There is also a less flashy approach, one explored before cure acquired its air quotes: eradication, in which a patient on anti-retrovirals is given an additional drug that wakes up the latent virus so that it can be eliminated. Scientists have identified several different substances that can turn the virus on or off, but so far, none has worked safely in people.
Answers may be years away, but until recently, nobody was even asking the questions. They're asking now�the International AIDS Society has just set up a working group on an AIDS cure. Despite the early doubters, �the Berlin Patient proved to be a tectonic shift in the way the scientific community looked at this issue,� says AMFAR's Frost. �I've lived it�we started to talk about it internally, then in public. I got e-mails from prominent scientists warning me I was raising false hope. It wasn't until there was a scientific consensus that the Berlin Patient was cured that people came around.�
If a cure for AIDS is no longer �the C-word,� it's not yet clear that sufficient money will follow the renewed sense of hope. Gene-therapy research has been almost entirely financed by two new entities: One is Sangamo; the other is the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, or CIRM, which since 2007 has given out more than $40 million in grants for AIDS-cure research, including $14.5 million to Cannon.
While the pharmaceutical industry has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into developing AIDS treatments, most drug companies are sitting out cure research. (One big exception is Merck, which is funding studies of some of its drugs' possible uses in eradication; Gilead is also looking at its compounds for cure candidates.) It's no mystery why. �The whole field suffers from the lack of a business model,� says Jeff Sheehy, a San Francisco activist and CIRM board member. �A cure may make sense from a public-policy point of view, but not to a company.� Unlike treatment, which must be taken daily for life, a cure would be a one-time intervention. �It's not that it's sinister and they don't want a cure. But it doesn't fit.�
Drugmakers' indifference can doom promising potential cures, as compounds owned by a company can't be used by anyone else. Many AIDS researchers are particularly excited about the eradication possibilities of a substance developed by Medarex. But Medarex was bought in 2009 by Bristol-Myers Squibb, which is testing the compound on cancer but doing nothing visible with it on HIV. (A spokeswoman says the company is �considering the use� of the drug in HIV research, but no trials are set.)
Nor has the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the world's largest funder of AIDS research, made a priority of cure research. According to its own figures�as obtained and published by Krauss�the NIAID spent $40 million on cure research in 2009. That's 3 percent of its total AIDS-research budget. (Fauci argues that this doesn't take into account other research that may eventually apply to a cure.) Until recently, the NIAID did not even have an internal code for AIDS-cure work.
But the agency's reservations about cure research may be softening slightly. Fauci says he hopes to spend some $60 million in the coming year. As of 2013, research networks that niaid funds will be required to include studies directed at a cure. Given Washington's budget crisis, any increase in funding is noteworthy, and some are choosing to see it as a sign of new commitment. �Tony Fauci is definitely a believer,� says Deeks. He is? �The world has changed,� Deeks says, smiling. �In the past, no. In the future, yes.�
Fauci didn't seem like a believer when I spoke with him. Gene therapy, he says, is �promising, but it ain't gonna be easy.� Awakening the latent reservoir? �Nothing that's a hot product.�
What the NIH spends on cure research �is not even close to enough,� says Frost. �It doesn't come close to representing the genuine enthusiasm the scientific community feels about the issue�and we risk losing that enthusiasm. The science isn't all that difficult. We're closer than people think, and with the right financial investment, we can get there. The real question in my mind is, are we going to find the money to do it?�
Brown's second transplant cured his leukemia, but it was much harder on him than the first. Neurological problems can be a side effect of the chemotherapy and irradiation used in ablation. In Brown's case, his doctors suspected that the leukemia had infected his brain and ordered a biopsy. It was negative but brought new trouble. �The surgeons left air bubbles on my brain and had to perform emergency surgery to relieve the pressure,� Brown says. He temporarily lost the ability to walk and talk. Hütter says that CT scans show a scar inside Brown's head. He cannot pinpoint exactly what happened.
Brown was in physical therapy for more than a year. His intellect is intact, but today he sometimes gropes for words. He still walks haltingly. �My public personality has changed,� he says. �I am not as outgoing as I once was�for better or worse. Part of it is that I no longer feel very attractive.�
In January, Brown moved to San Francisco. His new doctor is Deeks, who is both treating and studying him. Brown is happy to be studied. Aside from a brief stint with ACT UP when he lived in Seattle in 1989, he was never an activist. Being poked and prodded by doctors�and reporters�is his activism now. �I can help,� he says.
Brown's neurological injuries are of no relevance to the question of how to cure AIDS, but they do serve as reminders of two things we already knew: Ablation is hell, and disease capricious. I asked Brown about living with the knowledge that something has happened to him that has happened to no one else. �I do wonder why,� he says, �but sort of in the same way that I wonder how I got leukemia in the first place. I guess I do not need to ask that question about why I got HIV.� He was twice diagnosed with a fatal disease and cured of both, only to be left impaired�possibly for life, probably by the very thing that cured him. It is not clear whether Brown is the luckiest man in the world or the unluckiest. He's been lucky for the rest of us.
The Invention of Patient Zero
How crystal-meth-fueled promiscuity, AIDS medical politics, and one very sick man combined to create a phantom superbug.
By
David FrancePublished May 21, 2005
Maybe the 46-year-old New York man who had managed to avoid HIV for the life of the epidemic finally succumbed on Friday, October 22, 2004, when he failed to use even one condom during a weekend of crystal meth and multiple sexual encounters. Ordinarily, the New York man was sexually dominant, the penetrator. That changed on October 22. �Apparently he used Viagra, but when he didn't, he became a bottom,� says Dennis deLeon, a grandee in AIDS politics who has been briefed on the case. �Crystal can make anybody a bottom. I've heard stories that even straight guys flip over on this stuff.�
Maybe he was at the West Side Club that night, as one report says, and maybe out of the steamy recesses of the place came a man, as yet unidentified, who probably knew he was HIV-positive, who knew that his infection was defying treatment. Through the distorting lens of crystal, the New York man reportedly had hundreds of encounters around this time�and seven or eight that evening alone.
Let's say most of these strangers assumed the man was himself HIV-positive, which would account for why none of them insisted on a condom either. Many gay men practice this gambit, colloquially called �sero-sorting,� based on the belief that having unprotected sex with somebody who shares your HIV status carries minimal risk. Most doctors believe otherwise, and point to the danger of reinfection. Studies show that in such encounters, those who are positive tend to assume their prospective partners are positive, and negatives make the opposite�and equally unspoken�assumption.
And maybe on that long night in Chelsea, the worst possible thing happened: This New York man contracted an extremely deadly �superbug� like nothing ever seen before. It appeared to carry a dreadful punch. While most people go a decade after infection before showing major symptoms, this man sank to a sickly shadow of himself by mid-November, and was an AIDS patient by December and a curiosity by January, when tests showed him resistant to most AIDS drugs. By February 11, when the New York City health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Frieden, called a press conference to alert the world to the case, the man had become a modern-day Typhoid Mary, Patient Zero in a foreboding new epidemic threatening New York City and the globe.
�We've identified this strain of HIV that is difficult or impossible to treat,� Dr. Frieden announced ominously. �Potentially, no one is immune.�
With those words, this man's misfortune became the biggest AIDS story of the 21st century, shouted in headlines as far away as India. The New York Times discussed the supervirus in twelve stories in the first week alone. The alarm about the drug-fueled, sexually irresponsible gay-male community has given new fodder to old anti-gay mouthpieces. �There's a new strain of HIV available in New York City. It's because of gay men,� the Catholic League's William Donohue said on MSNBC. �They're endangering the lives of everybody.� Even William F. Buckley, who twenty years ago suggested the rumps of HIV carriers be branded with warnings, reentered the fray. �Murderers need to be stopped,� he explained in National Review.
Panicking about the new pathogen, most gay men didn't race to denounce Buckley this time. Instead, they raced to their doctors. Physicians across the country reported a crush of visits from worried patients; the Gay Men's Health Crisis Website experienced a 63 percent surge in hits. At two heated community meetings in Manhattan, gay men and AIDS service providers swapped accusations with rancorous outbursts reminiscent of early ACT UP meetings. Only this time, the anger was directed less at the health Establishment than at the patient himself. �My first reaction was one of anger�that someone in his mid-forties, who had escaped the devastation and pain of the eighties and nineties, had seroconverted,� Tokes Osubu, executive director of a Harlem-based group called Gay Men of African Descent, told more than 300 people gathered at FIT in early March. �We have lost that sense of outrage. Many of our friends and lovers are dead, but we are not afraid anymore.�
After the frenzy died down, however, the new epidemic began to look a lot less fearsome. In fact, on closer examination, almost everything about this case seems murky. An investigation by the Department of Health turned up no evidence that the New York man passed the virus to anybody. And on March 29, the department put out a press release saying that the patient was responding well to his medications.
�The virus that ate New York,� as Richard Jefferys, basic-science project director for Treatment Action Group, put it, �is just one case.�
The responsibility for this medical panic attack is spread widely: from the patient to the reporters who made him a caricature, to the city health commissioner for terrifying the city and the scientists who characterized the case, most notably Dr. David Ho, the top researcher at the world-renowned Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University, and his deputy, Dr. Marty Markowitz, who warned of a �silent tsunami� of new infections spreading undetected across the land.
�There were all these signs that said, �Slow down, take this with caution'�and they just weren't heeded,� says Martin Delaney, the founding director of Project Inform, an AIDS-information clearinghouse. �Everyone down the line miscalculated. It was like a perfect storm; every element had to be in place for this to happen the way it did.�
Let's go back to October 22, a warm and clear night in Chelsea. According to Dr. Larry Hitzeman, a colleague of the New York patient's doctor at Cabrini Medical Center, the man had by then negotiated a long courtship with crystal meth. �For five years, he took it one time a month on average,� Hitzeman said at the FIT meeting on the case. �He was taking it every weekend for the past two years.�
The drug has become endemic among gay and bisexual men in urban meccas. Some users, like a 42-year-old man I have known for more than twenty years, can snort a few bumps every few months without escalation. �In my world, it's an ordinary fixture,� he told me recently. �If you go out to big dance parties, late at night, you're probably using a little crystal.�
But Crystal, for most, is one of the most dangerously addictive substances around. It is also a powerful disinhibitor, with a remarkable ability to concentrate the attention on sex for hours at a time. Invitations to �party and play,� or PNP, are often included in personal ads on sites like Manhunt and Craigslist. A recent survey showed that men taking crystal meth are twice as likely not to use condoms, and this man was no exception.
Among gay men, stories echoing the New York patient's headlong collapse into addiction are commonplace. �It's the most serious problem I'm dealing with,� says Dr. Paul Bellman, an AIDS specialist in Manhattan. And with crystal-meth use comes a predictable upsurge in risky behavior�increasingly, people who have avoided HIV for decades are suddenly contracting the virus in middle age. �The way I look at it, Chelsea is like Iraq,� says Bellman. �Every day, somebody gets blown up.�
On October 22, the patient was still sinking into the drug's grip. He remembers staying up all night and through the next day, thanks to crystal. �He believes this was the night,� Dr. Markowitz told a group of AIDS doctors in February. His last HIV test was on May 9, 2003�like four previous tests, it was negative and his immune system tested normal.
His doctors have tended to credit his own theory of when he contracted the virus, in part because two weeks later he suffered severe flulike symptoms, suggestive of what is called acute seroconversion illness. About half the people experience these symptoms following initial exposure to HIV. By mid-December, he was rapidly losing weight, and his fatigue kept him in bed. Concerned, on December 16, he saw his doctor. The news came back almost two weeks later, and it was bad: a massive viral load of 280,000 copies per milliliter, and a near total T-cell obliteration. A normal T-cell count is 700 to 1,200; he had just 80. It meant that just two months after his presumed exposure, he had developed full-blown AIDS.
�This was alarming to me,� says Dr. Michael Mullen, the patient's longtime physician, speaking about his patient for the first time. �You wouldn't expect to see that sort of profile in early infection.�
On December 29, just before Mullen gave him the terrible news, the patient, assuming he was still negative, picked up a young man in a bar and, according to Markowitz, had insertive anal sex with him, potentially infecting him as well.
Mullen referred his patient to doctors at Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, among the most highly regarded facilities in the field. Under the direction of Dr. David Ho, the center has scored some of the most spectacular advances of any AIDS research team. Ho discovered the triple-drug-cocktail approach to treating HIV, credited for turning AIDS from a fatal illness into a chronic disorder, saving tens of thousands of lives. In 1995, nearly 50,000 Americans died of the disease; in 2003, approximately 18,000 succumbed, a fraction of the approximately 850,000 living with HIV. For his efforts, Ho was named Man of the Year by Time in 1996, famously edging out the likes of Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa.
Since then, he has authored a number of important papers on viral replication that have helped shape the field. While there's broad consensus that different viral strains can produce different effects, Ho's focus on the virus as the most important factor in the progression of the disease strikes many as overly narrow. Some doctors say this approach deemphasizes the immunological issues involved, or whether environmental factors, like drug abuse, might be contributing. This has not always been a gentle dispute. A number of years ago, Ho courted fury in the tightly knit field by ordering up lapel pins for his staff that declared, IT'S THE VIRUS, STUPID!
Despite the tensions, Ho is still broadly respected as among the world's best AIDS minds. But more recently, the Aaron Diamond Center has had trouble living up to its reputation. It has quietly changed focus from basic research to vaccine investigation, a field that has not produced promising news in two decades.
To some degree, Ho and his center are victims of their own success. At least among affluent Americans, AIDS is seen as a manageable condition rather than a death sentence. Perhaps as a consequence, funding sources have been going dry. In IRS filings, Aaron Diamond reported $9.4 million in donations and research grants in 2003, the last available year, down dramatically from $20 million in 2000. Ho's compensation package, meanwhile, has gone in the other direction�in the last reported year it was $518,000. With the stipends and consultancy fees from pharmaceutical firms, he is one of the highest-compensated medical researchers in the world.
An unusually large number of researchers have left over the years, many privately citing conflicts with Ho, whom they describe as a poisonous personality with little patience for dissent. In fact, many leading AIDS scientists, while giving him credit for leadership in the field, also criticize him for overplaying his king-of-the-hill standing.
Some wonder if he didn't see potential in the mysteries of this new case. �David Ho has a huge shop that he has to maintain,� says Dr. Cecil Fox, an AIDS pathologist and veteran of many skirmishes, who owns a biotech company in Arkansas. �If he finds a new phenomenon, naturally he's going to jump on it with all four feet.�
Ho denies he was under any particular pressure when the patient arrived at the center. �Think about this: We're doctors, scientists, doing research,� he says. �Our mission is research.�
On January 17, the patient was seen by Marty Markowitz, Ho's longtime research collaborator. Markowitz ordered more tests, which confirmed the dire clinical picture. The patient continued his precipitous decline, losing nine pounds in the next three weeks. His viral load rose to 650,000. Viral samples were sent to a San Francisco lab for resistance sequencing, tests that help determine which drugs are most likely to be effective.
Although Markowitz did not respond to interview requests, he has spoken often about the case in public. �Let me tell you, this guy told me he had four partners and no drug use,� Markowitz said at a meeting of AIDS doctors at the Strata restaurant in New York on February 15. �And I am a very difficult guy to fool. But he's very charming, very handsome, very successful. You'd invite him to Christmas. You'd want your mother to meet him. He is not a demon. He's a great guy. But he has . . . he has a dark side.�
Ultimately, he confided in Markowitz about how meth propelled him through the sexual underground. �This man,� Markowitz told the meeting of doctors, �has had thousands of sexual contacts over the past three years. I said it right. Thousands.�
In the weeks between his presumed exposure in late October and his diagnosis after Christmas, Markowitz learned, the man had swapped fluids with about ten other partners, unknowingly exposing them to his virus. This is one of the biggest problems with sero-sorting. People who don't know they're infected are responsible for more than 50 percent of all new infections.
This is why, despite all the internecine conflict, there's unanimity among doctors on the issue of safe sex. Still, some people have proposed population-based sero-sorting as a way to slow the epidemic. And one study has led researchers to speculate that if men born before 1980 never had sex with men born afterward, the epidemic would eventually die out in the gay community.
�The way I look at it,� says AIDS specialist Paul Bellman about the influence of crystal meth, �Chelsea is like Iraq; every day, somebody gets blown up.�
While the rate of HIV transmission seems to have dropped in each of the past three years, case reports of syphilis and drug-resistant gonorrhea are soaring among gay men, suggesting more people are having unprotected sex.
Though he felt ill, the New York patient assumed he was still negative and no risk to anybody else, his longtime physician says. Still, he's been vilified. �This guy is a total and utter asshole,� Larry Kramer told the New York Observer. �What happens is, this is what people think gay people are like. Now we can't move forward, we can't get to our place in the sun, because of stupid assholes like this.�
Michael Mullen emphatically defended his patient, who he says never engaged in unsafe sex after his diagnosis. �He's so beat up about this, he would never, ever do something like that. That's a total lie, a fabrication�it's just not true.�
On January 22, a Saturday, e-mail arrived on Markowitz's computer from the lab with resistance-test results showing the man's virus was extremely mutated, rendering it less likely to respond to 19 of the 21 approved AIDS drugs. Markowitz had never seen a more resistant strain. The only thing that causes HIV to acquire resistance is sporadic exposure to anti-AIDS drugs�the virus, a clever foe, can seize the opportunity of poor drug adherence to change attributes and evade medication.
But that alone didn't cause Markowitz great concern. What worried him was the fact that this mutated virus seemed to cause disease so rapidly. On average, HIV needs about ten years to bring on full-blown AIDS, though in a small percentage of infected people�perhaps 45 in 10,000�it progresses in under a year. Ordinarily, rapid progression is more likely associated with viruses that have few or no mutations; the more changes a viral strain undergoes to evade medications, the less potent it becomes. But here was a mutated and fast-progressing virus, a frightening combination. In addition, when Markowitz cultured the virus, he found it was at least as contagious as non-mutated viruses. Markowitz has said he ordered the standard tests, which look for the nine markers that make some people genetically disposed to progress quickly to AIDS�all that came back were negative. Markowitz came to the frightening conclusion that he was looking at a deadly new viral subspecies. �If you can't see the horse and you want to see a zebra, that's your prerogative. But the data here is incontrovertible,� Markowitz said.
Most leading researchers, however, were not so quickly convinced. Many viewed Markowitz's analysis as overly influenced by the Aaron Diamond Center's preconceptions. �It is fairly agreed upon that what produces rapid outcome is the host, not necessarily the virus,� says Dr. Michael Ascher, an immunologist now working for the federal government. �We just don't know what all the factors might be yet.�
Markowitz and Ho had some indication of resistance and doubt among their colleagues when they submitted their findings to the Retrovirus Conference in Boston. When it was decided, after a peer-review process, that the results were not significant enough to be discussed on a panel, but instead should be displayed on a large poster board in a room with other research posters, Markowitz reportedly became furious. �He began to argue with the organizers, saying the poster would present a danger to the public health�because so many people were going to crowd around it, someone would be injured,� one attendee said. �People were scratching their heads.�
Markowitz also began work on an emotional op-ed piece he hoped the Times would publish�and when the paper chose not to, he began to circulate it himself: �As I write, the extent of this potential, silent tsunami is being defined,� he warned. �This untreatable virus with an aggressive clinical course can bring us back to the eighties and early nineties�the truly darkest years.�
�It was of course a stressful, emotional moment for him,� David Ho told me. �Marty saw that the man had a virus that was resistant to nearly all the drugs and he had a very aggressive course of disease, and that was sufficiently alarming to us to say, �Wait a minute: Because of his active sexual history, are there more such cases out there?'� This was difficult to ascertain, because many of the patient's sexual contacts had been anonymous. Even those whose names he knew hesitated to come forward.
Lacking more evidence, many AIDS experts have questioned why news of this middle-aged man's declining health went any further than this. �This is an unusual virus in its resistance patterns. That's important,� says Dr. Howard Grossman, executive director of the American Academy of HIV Medicine. �But there's nothing that suggests this is the beginning of an epidemic.�
On the same Saturday Markowitz got the alarming lab results, he e-mailed the New York City Department of Health. The alert reached Dr. Susan Blank, the assistant commissioner for the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Control Program, on Monday, January 24. According to Markowitz's remarks in February, his dealings with them were heated. �The patient is sick in four months! He never got better really. Intractable pharyngitis, twenty-pound weight loss, bed-bound fatigue. These are bringing me back to the days of the eighties, and it frightened me so much that I stood on my soapbox and screamed and screamed and screamed until they listened.�
The news reached Frieden within a week. Appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002, Frieden is an activist commissioner widely respected for his medical instincts and his political courage�his steady hand guided the administration through its biggest medical crusade to date, the successful and politically risky campaign to ban smoking in public places. But before entering politics, Frieden was an infectious-disease doctor, specializing in drug-resistant tuberculosis. For much of the past eighteen months, AIDS has been his top priority, and he has earned high marks so far. As early as this month, he expects to announce a controversial new approach to the epidemic in the city, which is still the AIDS epicenter of America. Citywide, more than 110,000 are infected�and 20,000 of them don't know it. According to a draft of the report, which was leaked to me, he wants to change the state laws in order to streamline the consent process, making an AIDS test like other blood tests, while making AIDS testing much more widely available. �Knowledge is power,� he told me in an interview in his Chambers Street office several weeks ago. �Most people who know their status . . . do the right thing. So increasing the proportion of people who know their status is probably the single most important thing we can do to reduce the spread of HIV.�
Some activists are disturbed about this change. �It seems to me that's a slippery slope,� says Tracy Welsh, the executive director of the HIV Law Project in New York. �Pretty soon we're looking at universal testing�i.e., mandatory testing . . . And then what? Restrict their civil liberties? Criminalize their behavior?�
Frieden has been known to push the civil-liberties envelope in order to contain health risks. In New York in 1993, he helped establish detention centers for people with TB who refused to follow doctors' orders. But while the commissioner has expressed grave concerns about patients who are courting HIV mutation by not following their drug regimens, he's said he has no plans to make testing compulsory. Instead he wants to track patients' viral profiles case by case and help their doctors find a better regimen if their virus is mutating. For the most part, AIDS leaders take him at his word. In fact, he enjoys support from traditionally antagonistic groups like the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, GMHC, and the Harm Reduction Coalition.
At first, Frieden was skeptical of the supervirus case. �I asked both David and Marty, �How do we know this isn't severe acute retroviral syndrome?' And I asked people from around the country, too. �Could this be just a severe conversion reaction?' And they said, �No.' � He also challenged the conclusion that the patient was newly infected. What if the patient's flu symptoms were caused by something else�something as simple as the flu?
For the next week or so, Frieden conferred with other experts, including AIDS specialists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then, on January 31, Department of Health investigators interviewed the patient, hoping to develop a list of those he may have exposed. However, because a majority of the original patient's contacts were anonymous, Frieden says, �we started with less than a 50-50 chance.� Those men whose names he recalled were invited to talk; many reportedly declined.
He also contacted three dozen blood laboratories in the U.S., Canada, and Europe and asked them to canvass their records for evidence of viruses that matched this patient's nucleotide sequences�potentially hundreds of thousands of samples.
Frieden then weighed various additional options, and sent out a blast-fax to a network of doctors. But he worried that some of these men weren't symptomatic yet or had mistaken their symptoms for something more benign. �You want to generate demand,� he says. �You want people to think, Oh, I just had unsafe sex a couple of weeks ago, and I've got now what feels like a really bad viral syndrome. Maybe I should remind my doctor that they should test for HIV now. It's important to do that, because the viral load and infectiousness of someone who's recently infected with HIV is astronomically high.�
Ultimately, the decision to hold a press conference was Frieden's alone. He assembled some prominent community leaders to join him on February 11. The next day, the story dominated the covers of papers around the globe.
The announcement detonated a long-smoldering debate in the gay community over sexual responsibility. �We are murderers, we are murdering each other,� says Larry Kramer, whose new book, The Tragedy of Today's Gays, was published this month. �If intelligent, smart people are unwilling to take responsibility 100 percent for their own dicks, I don't know how you stop the killing.� Some, like the columnist Dan Savage, saw in the case a reason to bring on a new penalty phase for prevention activism. �There's a great deal of anger and frustration among gays and lesbians at the never-ending, nonstop coddling and compassion campaign that passes for HIV prevention,� he says. �There will be no sympathy when this happens to us again. We are not going to be the baby harp seals the way we were in the eighties and nineties. We picked up the same gun and said, �I hope it's not loaded this time,' and pulled the trigger again. And I'm gay�imagine how straight people feel.�
But others took a more skeptical approach. �I thought this sounded familiar, so I Googled �superbug' and �AIDS,'� said GMHC's Gregg Gonsalves. He found two cases reported in 2001 by a noted Vancouver AIDS specialist, Dr. Julio Montaner. The Vancouver Sun quoted Montaner about the cases, but he could have been describing the newest Patient Zero: �In a matter of months, these people have gone from totally asymptomatic to very low immune systems.�
Frieden says he was caught unawares by the Vancouver cases, and that he wishes he had known about them before deciding to hold his own press conference. Ho, who still maintains the uniqueness of the New York case, wasn't aware of the specifics of the Vancouver cases, and called Montaner the Monday following the press conference. �It was very cordial,� Montaner says with a laugh. �He phoned me up to find out more about it.� (Both Canadian patients, it turned out, have responded well to treatment and now have fully suppressed viral loads.)
Ho, meanwhile, was coming under heavy criticism. �When I first heard this, I said, Holy shit�there is no evidence,� says Dr. Robert Gallo, an eminent virologist. �Clearly, conclusively, scientifically, it was inappropriate to make that statement.�
Gallo and other leading figures in the field�including Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases�believe the new case report, while unfortunate for the patient, is likely a statistically predictable outlier. Unfortunately, according to data generated by Ho's institute, drug-resistant HIV is now commonplace: Nearly 30 percent of newly diagnosed HIV cases are resistant to at least one AIDS drug, and 11 percent are resistant to drugs in two or more drug classes.
In much of the criticism, there was an undercurrent of resentment toward Ho. Many saw the announcement as grandstanding. Michael Petrelis, an AIDS activist and blogger from San Francisco, fanned the flames with revelations about Ho's links to Frieden (who sits on the Aaron Diamond Board of Directors) and the San Francisco laboratory that does the resistance testing, ViroLogic (as a scientific adviser, he receives a stipend and stock options). �I'm not saying any of that is wrong, or undermines the concern that Ho or others have about this mutant strain. I'm saying, we should know these things as we consider this case. That's all I'm asking for: Give us all of the facts.� (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I also have some relevant history�I am a volunteer fund-raiser for Housing Works, the AIDS services agency that has been critical of Frieden, and I'm friendly with some of the players�including Frieden's press spokeswoman.)
"I think it is only a couple individuals working really hard to spread bad news about us,� Ho says. �Whenever there is some news surrounding me or our institution, the usual suspects emerge�it's not surprising to me.�
While Ho was contending with this backlash, his deputy Marty Markowitz surprised the February 15 New York meeting with a lecture stridently defending his superiority and referring to himself in the third person. �This is not for amateurs,� he said at one point, in response to a question. �You are arguing the . . . you are taking the doubting-Thomas point of view. However, you must also yield to the expertise of people who do know better.�
�You want to generate demand,� says Frieden. �You want people to think, Oh, I just had unsafe sex a couple of weeks ago . . . I should see my doctor.�
It was true that a kind of circuslike atmosphere was developing, with a laboratory in San Diego saying it had found a match there (not true, according to Frieden). South Park did an episode featuring a supervirus. And a doctor in Connecticut claimed he was treating the couple that infected Markowitz's patient in the first place. �My guys were at the West Side Club on the weekend in question,� Dr. Gary Blick, a longtime AIDS practitioner based in Norwalk, told me. �The timing fits.� Blick says Frieden tried to keep him from going public with his findings, but he sent out a press release anyway. �I felt obligated before the Black Party [a vast annual party, held this year at
Roseland] to give a message about this transmission.�On March 29, Frieden announced the conclusion of the detective phase of his investigation. More than a dozen sexual contacts of the New York patient's have been interviewed, and thousands of blood samples have been retested. But the investigation failed to find an original source for this viral strain, nor did it locate anybody who might have contracted it from the New York patient. Frieden has ordered further tests on about ten additional mutated strains that surfaced in his investigation, but for now it seems his worst fears haven't come to pass. He hastens to say that he is relieved by this, not disappointed. And he has no second thoughts about going public. �The role of public health is to prevent outbreaks, not to describe them,� he says.
The problem, however, is one of crying wolf�the alarm gets harder and harder to hear. Despite the spike in doctor visits, the gay community apparently hasn't changed course. Condoms are no more widely available at gay meeting places; drug use was just as prevalent at the Black Party as in previous years.
On one level, the case is a cautionary tale about the dangers of meth, unprotected sex, and complacency. And the mythological trappings surrounding the supervirus feed into that very sense of complacency. The introspection that rose up around the early epidemic has given way to what Dan Carlson, co-founder of the HIV Forum, calls a �culture of disease,� in which HIV is now accepted as an intractable reality. �Whether there's a dangerous new virus among us or not, we need to talk about what HIV means to us,� Carlson says. �Why are we so skittish or afraid to talk about the issues that lead us to have unsafe sex? Do we talk about the decisions we make that put us at risk? We have a lot of work to do.�
And where does that leave Patient Zero? �It's not a walk in the park,� Mullen says. �He's taking a lot of drugs��his regimen involves two daily injections��and there are toxicities. He was short of breath for some time. But he's responding to medications.� And he's back at work.
If he continues his slow return to health, he may be allowed to fade into the ranks of the 110,000 New Yorkers who live every day with HIV without causing anybody alarm. But a 39-year-old veteran of AIDS scare stories named Hush McDowell wonders if that's possible. In 1998, McDowell made global news as the first known person to catch multiple-drug-resistant HIV�and the last one responsible for unleashing the phrase �superbug� in the press.
�I feel awful for him,� says McDowell. �Maybe he's able to ignore the press and focus on his care, but I never was.� These days, McDowell is doing well on medication, and he lives far from the media's glare, tending bees on a farm in Tennessee. �Best thing I ever did,� he says.
First Impressions
What does the world's oldest art say about us?
by
Judith Thurman June 23, 2008During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, "They've invented everything." What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magiclantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the grease lamp—a lump of fat, with a plant wick, placed in a hollow stone—to light their workplace; scaffolds to reach high places; the principles of stencilling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and, more to the point of Picasso's insight, the very concept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas—but not from a void.
Some caves have rock porches that were used for shelter, but there is no evidence of domestic life in their depths. Sizable groups may have visited the chambers closest to the entrance—perhaps for communal rites—and we know from the ubiquitous handprints that were stamped or airbrushed (using the mouth to blow pigment) on the walls that people of both sexes and all ages, even babies, participated in whatever activities took place. Only a few individuals ventured or were permitted into the furthest reaches of a cave—in some cases, walking or crawling for miles. Those intrepid spelunkers explored every surface. If they bypassed certain walls that to us seem just as suitable for decoration as ones they chose, the placement of the art apparently wasn't capricious. In the course of some twenty-five thousand years, the same animals—primarily bison, stags, aurochs, ibex, horses, and mammoths—recur in similar poses, illustrating an immortal story. For a nomadic people, living at nature's mercy, it must have been a powerful consolation to know that such a refuge from flux existed.
As the painters were learning to crush hematite, and to sharpen embers of Scotch pine for their charcoal (red and black were their primary colors), the last Neanderthals were still living on the vast steppe that was Europe in the Ice Age, which they'd had to themselves for two hundred millennia, while Homo sapiens were making their leisurely trek out of Africa. No one can say what the encounters between that low-browed, herculean species and their slighter but formidable successors were like. (Paleolithic artists, despite their penchant for naturalism, rarely chose to depict human beings, and then did so with a crudeness that smacks of mockery, leaving us a mirror but no self-reflection.) Their genomes are discrete, so it appears that either the two populations didn't mate or they couldn't conceive fertile offspring. In any case, they wouldn't have needed to contest their boundless hunting grounds. They coexisted for some eight thousand years, until the Neanderthals withdrew or were forced, in dwindling numbers, toward the arid mountains of southern Spain, making Gibraltar a final redoubt. It isn't known from whom or from what they were retreating (if "retreat" describes their migration), though along the way the arts of the newcomers must have impressed them. Later Neanderthal campsites have yielded some rings and awls carved from ivory, and painted or grooved bones and teeth (nothing of the like predates the arrival of Homo sapiens). The pathos of their workmanship—the attempt to copy something novel and marvellous by the dimming light of their existence—nearly makes you weep. And here, perhaps, the cruel notion that we call fashion, a coded expression of rivalry and desire, was born.
The cave artists were as tall as the average Southern European of today, and well nourished on the teeming game and fish they hunted with flint weapons. They are, genetically, our direct ancestors, although "direct" is a relative term. Since recorded history began, around 3200 B.C., with the invention of writing in the Middle East, there have been some two hundred human generations (if one reckons a new one every twenty-five years). Future discoveries may alter the math, but, as it now stands, forty-five hundred generations separate the earliest Homo sapiens from the earliest cave artists, and between the artists and us another fifteen hundred generations have descended the birth canal, learned to walk upright, mastered speech and the use of tools, reached puberty, reproduced, and died.
Early last April, I set off for the Ardèche, a mountainous region in south-central France where cave networks are a common geological phenomenon (hundreds are known, dozens with ancient artifacts). It was here, a week before Christmas in 1994, that three spelunkers exploring the limestone cliffs above the Pont d'Arc, a natural bridge of awesome beauty and scale which resembles a giant mammoth straddling the river gorge, unearthed a cave that made front-page news. It proved to contain the oldest known paintings in the world—some fifteen to eighteen thousand years older than the friezes at Lascaux and at Altamira
*, in the Spanish Basque country—and it was named for its chief discoverer, Jean-Marie Chauvet. Unlike the amateur adventurers or lucky bumblers (in the case of Lascaux, a posse of village urchins and their dog) who have fallen, sometimes literally, upon a cave where early Europeans left their cryptic signatures, Chauvet was a professional—a park ranger working for the Ministry of Culture, and the custodian of other prehistoric sites in the region. He and his partners, Christian Hillaire and Éliette Brunel, were aware of the irreparable damage that even a few indelicate footsteps can cause to an environment that has been sealed for eons—posterity has lost whatever precious relics and evidence that the carelessly trampled floors of Lascaux and Altamira, both now sealed to the public, might have yielded.The cavers were natives of the Ardèche: three old friends with an interest in archeology. Brunel was the smallest, so when they felt an updraft of cool air coming from a recess near the cliff's ledge—the potential sign of a cavity—they heaved some rocks out of the way, and she squeezed through a tight passage that led to the entrance of a deep shaft. The men followed, and, unfurling a chain ladder, the group descended thirty feet into a soaring grotto with a domed roof whose every surface was blistered or spiked with stalagmites. Where the uneven clay floor had receded, it was littered with calcite accretions—blocks and columns that had broken off—and, in photographs, the wrathful, baroque grandeur of the scene evokes some Biblical act of destruction wreaked upon a temple. As the explorers advanced, moving gingerly, in single file, Brunel suddenly let out a cry: "They have been here!"
The question of who "they" were speaks to a mystery that thinking people of every epoch and place have tried to fathom: who are we? In the century since the modern study of caves began, specialists from at least half a dozen disciplines—archeology, ethnology, ethology, genetics, anthropology, and art history—have tried (and competed) to understand the culture that produced them. The experts tend to fall into two camps: those who can't resist advancing a theory about the art, and those who believe that there isn't, and never will be, enough evidence to support one. Jean Clottes, the celebrated prehistorian and prolific author who assembled the Chauvet research team, in 1996, belongs to the first camp, and most of his colleagues to the second. Yet no one who studies the caves seems able to resist a yearning for communion with the artists. When you consider that their legacy may have been found by chance, but surely wasn't left by chance, it, too, suggests a yearning for communion—with us, their descendants.
Two books published in the past few years, "The Cave Painters" (2006), by Gregory Curtis, and "The Nature of Paleolithic Art" (2005), by R. Dale Guthrie, approach the controversy generated by their subject from different perspectives. Guthrie is an encyclopedic polymath who believes he can "decode" prehistory. Curtis, a former editor of Texas Monthly, is a literary detective (his previous book, on the Venus de Milo, also concerned the obscure provenance of an archaic masterpiece), and in quietly enthralling prose, without hurry or flamboyance, he spins two narratives. (The shorter one, as he notes, covers a few million years, and the longer one, the past century.)
I packed both volumes, along with some hiking boots, protein bars, and other survival gear, all of it unnecessary, for my sojourn in the Ardèche. My destination was a Spartan summer camp—a concrete barracks in a valley near the Pont d'Arc. It is owned by the regional government, and normally houses groups of schoolchildren on subsidized holidays. But twice a year, for a couple of weeks in the spring and the autumn, the camp is a base for the Chauvet team. They, and only they, are admitted to the cave (and sometimes not even they: last October, the research session was cancelled because the climate hadn't restabilized). Access is so strictly limited not only because traffic causes contamination but also because the French government has been embroiled for thirteen years in multimillion-dollar litigation with Jean-Marie Chauvet and his partners, as well as with the owners of the land on which they found the cave. (The finders are entitled to royalties from reproductions of the art, while the owners are entitled to compensation for a treasure that, at least technically, is their property—the Napoleonic laws, modified in the nineteen-fifties, that give the Republic authority to dispose of any minerals or metals beneath the soil do not apply to cave paintings. Had Chauvet been a gold mine, the suit couldn't have been brought.)
By dusk on the first night, most of the researchers had assembled in the cafeteria for an excellent dinner of rabbit fricassée, served with a Côtes du Vivarais, and followed by a selection of local cheeses. (The Ardèche is a gourmet's paradise, and the camp chef was a tough former sailor from Marseilles whose speech and cooking were equally pungent.) Among the senior team members, Evelyne Debard is a geologist, as is Norbert Aujoulat. He is a former director of research at Lascaux, and the author of a fine book on its art, who calls himself "an underground man." Marc Azéma is a documentary filmmaker who specializes in archeology. Carole Fritz and Gilles Tosello, a husband and wife from Toulouse, are experts in parietal art, and Tosello is a graphic artist whose heroically patient, stroke-by-stroke tracings of the cave's signs and images are essential to their study. Jean-Marc Elalouf, a geneticist, and the author of a poetic essay on Chauvet, has, with a team of graduate students, sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of the cave's numerous bears. They pocked the floor with their hibernation burrows, and, in a space known as the Skull Chamber, a bear's cranium sits on a flat, altar-like pedestal—perhaps enshrined there by the artists. The grotto is littered with other ursine remains, and some of the bones seem to have been planted in the sediment or stuck with intent into the fissured walls. (No human DNA has yet surfaced, and Elalouf doesn't expect to find any.) Dominique Baffier, an official at the Ministry of Culture, is Chauvet's curator. She coördinates the research and conservation. Jean-Michel Geneste, an archeologist, is the director of the project, a post he assumed in 2001, when Jean Clottes, at sixty-seven, took mandatory retirement.
Clottes is a hero of Gregory Curtis's "The Cave Painters," one of the "giants" in a line of willful, brilliant, and often eccentric personalities who have shaped a discipline that prides itself on scientific detachment but has been a battleground for the kind of turf wars that were absent from the caves themselves. No human conflict is recorded in cave art, although at three separate sites there are four ambiguous drawings of a creature with a man's limbs and torso, pierced with spearlike lines. More pertinent, perhaps, is a famous vignette in the shaft at Lascaux. It depicts a rather comical stick figure with an avian beak or mask, a puny physique, and a long skinny penis. He and his erect member seem to have rigor mortis. He is flat on his back at the feet of an exquisitely realistic wounded bison, whose intestines are spilling out. The bison's glance is turned away, but it might have an ironic smile. Could the subject be hubris? Whatever it represents, some mythic contest—and the struggle of prehistorians to interpret their subject is such a contest—has ended in a draw.
Curtis profiles a dynasty of interpreters, beginning with the Spanish nobleman Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who discovered Altamira in 1879—it was on his property. (Parts of Niaux and Mas d'Azil, two gigantic painted caves in the Pyrenees, had been known for centuries, but their decorations were regarded as graffiti made in historic times, perhaps by Roman legionaries.) He was accused of art forgery, and his scholarly papers on the paintings' antiquity were ridiculed by two of the era's greatest archeologists, Gabriel de Mortillet and Émile Cartailhac. Sautuola died before Cartailhac repented of his skepticism, in 1902. By then, the art at two important sites, Les Combarelles and Font-de-Gaume (which contains a ravishing portrait of two amorous reindeer), had come to light, and, in 1906, Cartailhac published a lavish compendium of cave painting that was subsidized by the Prince of Monaco. The book's much admired illustrations of Altamira were the work of a young priest with a painterly eye, Henri Breuil, who, in the course of half a century, became known as the Pope of Prehistory. He divided the era into four periods, and dated the art by its style and appearance. Aurignacian, the oldest, was followed by Perigordian (later known as Gravettian), Solutrean, and Magdalenian. They were named for type-sites in France: Aurignac, La Gravette, Solutré, and La Madeleine. But Breuil's theory about the art's meaning—that it related to rituals of "hunting magic"—was discredited by subsequent studies.
During the Second World War, Max Raphael, a German art historian who had studied the caves of the Dordogne before fleeing the Nazis to New York, was looking for clues to the art's meaning in its thematic unity. He concluded that the animals represented clan totems, and that the paintings depicted strife and alliances—an archaic saga. In 1951, the year before Raphael died, he sent an extract of his writings to Annette Laming-Emperaire, a young French archeologist who shared his conviction that "prehistory cannot be reconstructed with the aid of ethnography." Beware, in other words, of analogue reasoning, because no one should presume to parse the icons and figures of a vanished society by comparing them with the art of hunter-gatherers from more recent eras. In 1962, she published a doctoral thesis that made her famous. "The Meaning of Paleolithic Rock Art" dismissed the various, too creative theories of its predecessors, and, with them, any residual nineteenthcentury prejudice or romance about the "primitive" mind. Laming-Emperaire's structuralist methodology is still in use, much facilitated by computer science. It involves compiling minutely detailed inventories and diagrams of the way that species are grouped on the cave walls; of their gender, frequency, and position; and of their relation to the signs and handprints that often appear close to them. In "Lascaux" (2005), Norbert Aujoulat explains how he and his colleagues added time to the equation. Analyzing the order of superimposed images, they determined that wherever horses, aurochs, and stags appear on the same panel, the horse is beneath, the aurochs in the middle, and the stag on top, and that the variations in their coats correspond to their respective mating seasons. The triad of "horse-aurochs-stag" links the fertility cycles of important, and perhaps sacred or symbolic, animals to the cosmic cycles, suggesting a great metaphor about creation.
Laming-Emperaire had an eminent thesis adviser, André Leroi-Gourhan, who revolutionized the practice of excavation by recognizing that a vertical dig destroys the context of a site. In twenty years (1964-84) of insanely painstaking labor—scraping the soil in small horizontal squares at Pincevent, a twelve-thousand-year-old campsite on the Seine—he and his disciples gave us one of the richest pictures to date of Paleolithic life as the Old Stone Age was ending.
A new age in the science of prehistory had begun in 1949, when radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard Libby, a chemist from Chicago. One of Libby's first experiments was on a piece of charcoal from Lascaux. Breuil had, incorrectly, it turns out, classified the cave as Perigordian. (It is Magdalenian.) He had also made the Darwinian assumption that the most ancient art was the most primitive, and Leroi-Gourhan worked on the same premise. In that respect, Chauvet was a bombshell. It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a "classical civilization." For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been "deeply satisfying"—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.
Jean Clottes is a tall, cordial man of seventy-four, who still attends the biannual sessions at Chauvet, conducting his own research (this April, he and Marc Azéma found a new panel of signs), while continuing to travel and lecture widely. The latest addition to his bibliography, "Cave Art," a luxuriously illustrated "imaginary museum" of the Old Stone Age, is due out from Phaidon this summer.
Clottes's eminence in his field was never preordained. He once taught high-school English in Foix, a city in the Pyrenees, near the Andorran border, which is an epicenter for decorated caves. He studied archeology in his spare time, and earned a doctorate at forty-one, when he quit teaching. He had been moonlighting in a job that gave him privileged access to new caves, and an impressive calling card—as the director of prehistory for the Midi-Pyrenees—but a nominal salary. The appointment was made official in 1971, and for the next two decades Clottes was usually the first responder at the scene of a new discovery. The most sensational find, before Chauvet, was Cosquer—a painted cave near Marseilles that could be reached only through a treacherous underwater tunnel, in which three divers had drowned. Like Altamira, Cosquer was, at first, attacked as a hoax, and some of the press coverage impeached Clottes's integrity as its authenticator. He could judge its art only from photographs, but, in 1992, a year after Cosquer was revealed, carbon dating proved that the earliest paintings are at least twenty-seven thousand years old. That year, the Ministry of Culture elevated him to the rank of inspector general.
At the base camp, Clottes bunked down, as did everyone, in a dorm room, and braved the morning hoarfrost for a dash to the communal showers. There is a boyish quality to his energy and conviction. (At sixty-nine, he learned to scuba dive so that he could finally explore Cosquer himself.) One evening, he showed us a film about his "baptism," in 2007, as an honorary Tuareg; the North African nomads crowned him with a turban steeped in indigo that stained his forehead, and he danced to their drums by a Saharan campfire. Among his own sometimes fractious tribesmen, Clottes also commands the respect due an unusually vigorous elder, and it was hard to keep pace with him as he scampered on his long legs up the steep cliff to Chauvet, talking with verve the entire way.
The path skirts a vineyard, then veers up into the woods, emerging onto a corniche—a natural terrace with a rocky overhang on one side, and a precipitous drop on the other. "En route to Chauvet, the painters might have sheltered here or prepared their pigments. Looking at the valley and the river gorge, they saw what we do," Clottes said, indicating a magnificent view. "The topography hasn't changed much, except that the Ice Age vegetation was much sparser: mostly evergreens, like fir and pine. Without all the greenery, the resemblance of the Pont d'Arc to a giant mammoth would have been even more dramatic. But nothing of the landscape—clouds, earth, sun, moon, rivers, or plant life, and, only rarely, a horizon—figures in cave art. It's one among many striking omissions."
Where the terrace ended, we plunged back into the underbrush, following a track obstructed by rocks and brambles, and, after about half an hour of climbing, we arrived at the entrance that Jean-Marie Chauvet and his partners discovered. (The prehistoric entrance has been plugged, for millennia, by a landslide.) A shallow cave at the trailhead has been fitted out as a storeroom for gear and supplies. From here, a wooden ramp guides one along a narrow ledge, shaped like a horseshoe, that was formed when the cliffs receded, to a massive metal door that's as well defended—with voice alarms, video surveillance, and a double key system—as a bank vault. Some members of the team relaxed with a cigarette or a cold drink and a little academic gossip, but Clottes immediately changed into his spelunking overalls, donned a hard hat with a miner's lamp, and disappeared into the underworld.
On a map, Chauvet resembles the British Isles, and, like an island with coves and promontories, its outline is irregular. The distance from the entrance to the deepest gallery is about eight hundred feet, and, at the northern end, the cave forks into two horn-shaped branches. In some places, like the grotto that Éliette Brunel first plumbed in 1994 (it is named for her), the terrain is rocky and chaotic, while in others, like the Chamber of the Bear Hollows, the walls and floor are relatively smooth. (In the nineteen-nineties, a metal catwalk was installed to protect the cave bed.) The ceilings of the principal galleries vary in height from about five to forty feet, but there are passages and alcoves where an adult has to kneel or crawl. Twenty-six thousand years ago (six millennia after the first paintings were created), a lone adolescent left his footprints and torch swipes in the furthest reaches of the western horn, the Gallery of the Crosshatching.
The Megaloceros Gallery—a funnel in the eastern horn named for the huge, elklike herbivores that mingle on the walls with rhinos, horses, bison, a glorious ibex, three abstract vulvas, and assorted geometric signs—is the narrowest part of the cave, and it seems to have been a gathering point or a staging area where the artists built hearths to produce their charcoal. Dominique Baffier, the curator, and Valérie Feruglio, a young archeologist who arrived at the base camp during my visit with her new baby, were moved to write in "Chauvet Cave" (2001), a book of essays and photography on the team's research, "The freshness of these remains gives the impression that . . . we interrupted the Aurignacians in their task and caused them to flee abruptly." They dropped an ivory projectile, which was found in the sediment.
From here, one emerges into the deepest recess of Chauvet, the End Chamber, a spectacular vaulted space that contains more than a third of the cave's etchings and paintings—a few in ochre, most in charcoal, and all meticulously composed. A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock. As at many sites, the scratches made by a standing bear have been overlaid with a palimpsest of signs or drawings, and one has to wonder if cave art didn't begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature's passage through the dark.
To the far right of the frieze, on a separate wall, a huge, finely modelled bison stands alone, gazing stage left toward a pair of figures painted on a conical outcropping of rock that descends from the ceiling and comes to a point about four feet above the floor. The fleshy shape of this pendant is unmistakably phallic, and all of its sides are decorated, though only the front is clearly visible. The floor of the End Chamber is littered with relics. In order to preserve them, the catwalk stops close to the entrance, and the innermost alcove, known as the Sacristy, remains to be explored. But one of the team's archeologists, Yanik Le Guillou, rigged a digital camera to a pole, and was able to photograph the pendant's far side. Wrapped around, or, as it appears, straddling, the phallus is the bottom half of a woman's body, with heavy thighs and bent knees that taper at the ankle. Her vulva is darkly shaded, and she has no feet. Hovering above her is a creature with a bison's head and hump, and an aroused, white eye. But a line branching from its neck looks like a human arm with fingers. The relationship of these figures to each other, and to the frieze on the adjacent wall, is among the great enigmas in cave art. The woman's posture suggests that she may be squatting in childbirth, and the animals, on a level with her loins, seem to be streaming away from her. Gregory Curtis, who fights and loses a valiant battle with his urge to speculate, admits in "The Cave Painters" that he can't help reading a mythical narrative into the scene, one that relates to the Minotaur—the hybrid offspring of a mortal woman and a sacred bull "who lived in the Labyrinth, which is a kind of cave." Art on the walls of Cretan palaces depicts the spectacle of youths leapfrogging a charging bull, and that public spectacle—in the guise of the bullfight—has, he points out, endured into modern times precisely in the regions where decorated caves are most concentrated. "European culture began somewhere," he concludes. "Why not right here?"
In the course of a friendly correspondence, Yanik Le Guillou gave Curtis a warning about indulging his imagination. Perhaps that sin might be forgiven in an American journalist, but not in Jean Clottes. The book that sets forth his controversial theory about the art, "The Shamans of Prehistory," co-written with the South African archeologist David Lewis-Williams, and published in 1996—the year Clottes took over at Chauvet—detonated a polemical fire-storm that hasn't entirely subsided. Defying the prohibitions against importing evidence to the caves from external sources, the authors grounded their interpretation in Lewis-Williams's studies of shamanism among hunter-gatherers, historical and contemporary, and of African rock art, specifically the paintings of a nomadic people, the San, whose shamans still serve as spiritual mediators with the powers of nature and with the dead. In an earlier article, "The Signs of All Times," written with the anthropologist T. A. Dowson, Lewis-Williams had explored what he called "a neurological bridge" to the Old Stone Age. The authors cited laboratory experiments with subjects in an induced-trance state which suggested that the human optic system generates the same types of visual illusions, in the same three stages, differing only slightly by culture, whatever the stimulus: drugs, music, pain, fasting, repetitive movements, solitude, or high carbon-dioxide levels (a phenomenon that is common in close underground chambers). In the first stage, a subject sees a pattern of points, grids, zigzags, and other abstract forms (familiar from the caves); in the second stage, these forms morph into objects—the zigzags, for example, might become a serpent. In the third and deepest stage, a subject feels sucked into a dark vortex that generates intense hallucinations, often of monsters or animals, and feels his body and spirit merging with theirs.
Peoples who practice shamanism believe in a tiered cosmos: an upper world (the heavens); an underworld; and the mortal world. When Clottes joined forces with Lewis-Williams, he had come to believe that cave painting largely represents the experiences of shamans or initiates on a vision quest to the underworld, where spirits gathered. The caves served as a gateway, and their walls were considered porous. Where the artists or their entourage left handprints, they were palping a living rock in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force beyond it. They typically incorporated the rock's contours and fissures into the outlines of their drawings—as a horn, a hump, or a haunch—so that a frieze becomes a bas-relief. But, in doing so, they were also locating the dwelling place of an animal from their visions, and bodying it forth.
This scenario has its loose ends, particularly in the art's untrancelike fidelity to nature, but it fits the dreamlike suspension of the animals in a vacuum, and it helps to explain three of the most sensational figures in cave art. One is the bison-man at Chauvet; another is the bird-man at Lascaux; and the third, known as the Sorcerer, looks down from a perch close to the high ceiling at Les Trois Frères, a Magdalenian cave in the Pyrenees. He has the ears and antlers of a stag; handlike paws; athletic human legs and haunches; a horse's tail; and a long, rather elegantly groomed wizard's beard.
Clottes was hurt and outraged by the rancor of the attacks that greeted "The Shamans of Prehistory" ("psychedelic ravings," one critic wrote), and the authors defended themselves in a subsequent edition. "You can advance a scientific hypothesis without claiming certainty," Clottes told me one evening. "Everyone agrees that the paintings are, in some way, religious. I'm not a believer myself, and I'm certainly not a mystic. But Homo sapiens is Homo spiritualis. The ability to make tools defines us less than the need to create belief systems that influence nature. And shamanism is the most prevalent belief system of hunter-gatherers."
Yet even members of the Chauvet team feel that Clottes's theories on shamanism go too far. The divide seems, in part, to be generational. The strict purists tend to be younger, perhaps because they came of age with deconstruction, in a climate of political correctness, and are warier of their own baggage. "I don't mind stating uncategorically that it's impossible to know what the art means," Carole Fritz said. Norbert Aujoulat tactfully told me, "We're more reserved than Jean is. He may be right about the practice of shamanism in the caves, but many of us simply don't want to interpret them." He added with a laugh, "If I knew what the art meant, I'd be out of business. But in my own experience—I've inventoried five hundred caves—the more you look, the less you understand."
For an older generation, on more intimate terms with mortality, it may be harder to accept the lack of resolution to a life's work. Jean-Michel Geneste, a leonine man of fifty-nine with a silver mane, told me about an experiment that he had conducted at Lascaux in 1994. (In addition to directing the work at Chauvet, he is the curator of Lascaux, and last winter he had to deal with an invasion of fungus that was threatening the paintings there.) Geneste decided to invite four elders of an Aboriginal tribe, the Ngarinyins—hunter-gatherers from northwestern Australia—to visit the cave, and put them up at his house in the Dordogne. "I explained that I would be taking them to a place where ancients had, like their own ancestors, left marks and paintings on the walls, so that perhaps they could explain them," he said. " 'They're your ancestors?' they asked. I said no, and that stupid reply made them afraid. If we weren't visiting my ancestors, they wouldn't enter their sanctuary, and risk the consequences. I was terribly disappointed, and finally, as good guests, they agreed to take a look. But first they had to purify themselves, so they built a fire, and pulled some of their underarm hair out and burned it. Their own rituals involve traversing a screen of smoke—passing into another zone. When they entered the cave, they took a while to get their bearings. Yes, they said, it was an initiation site. The geometric signs, in red and black, reminded them of their own clan insignia, the animals and engravings of figures from their creation myths."
Geneste agrees with their reading, but he also believes that a cave like Lascaux or Chauvet served many purposes—"the way a twelfth-century church did. Everyone must have heard that these sanctuaries existed, and felt drawn to them. Look at the Pont d'Arc: it's a great beacon in the landscape. And, like the art in a church, the richness of graphic expression in the caves was satisfying to lots of different people in different ways—familial, communal, and individual, across the millennia—so there is probably no one adequate explanation, no unified theory, for it."
For the next week, I climbed the hill to Chauvet once a day. A guardian, Charles Chauveau, who, by law, has to be present when the scientists are underground, took me hiking, and we scaled the cliffs to sun our faces on a boulder, watching the first rafters of the season negotiate the river and pass under the Pont d'Arc. Only a few members of the team enter the cave at a time, each to pursue his or her research, though because of potential hazards, especially carbon-dioxide intoxication, no fewer than three can ever be alone there. "In the old days, when you sometimes had Chauvet to yourself, it was awesome and a little frightening," the geologist Evelyne Debard said. But Aujoulat felt more intimidated at Lascaux. "I used to spend a solitary hour there once a week," he said. "I rehearsed all my gestures, so I wouldn't lose time. But after a while it became oppressive: those huge animals staring you down in a small space—trying, or so it feels, to dominate you."
Those who have elected to stay behind spend the day in a prosaic annex next to the camp parking lot which was built to provide the team with office space and computer outlets. Marc Azéma, who has collaborated with Clottes on books about Chauvet's lions (he also filmed the Tuareg baptism), gave me a virtual cave tour on a big monitor. Of necessity, Fritz and Tosello spend more time Photoshopping their research than conducting field work. (Henri Breuil made tracings directly from cave walls—an unthinkable sacrilege to modern archeologists.) They digitally photograph an image section by section, print the picture to scale, and take it back underground, where Tosello sets up a drawing board as close as possible to the area of study. The digital image is overlaid with a sheet of clear plastic, and he traces the image onto the sheet, referring constantly to the original painting as he does so. This dynamic act of translation gives him a deeper insight into the artists' gestures and techniques than a mere reading would. He repeats the process on successive plastic sheets, each one focussed on a separate aspect of the composition, including the rock's contours. Then he transfers the tracings (as many as a dozen layers) onto the computer, where they can be magnified and manipulated. Describing the detail in a monumental frieze of horses between the Megaloceros Chamber and the Skull Chamber, Fritz and Tosello wrote, in "Chauvet Cave":
Once again, the surface was carefully scraped beneath the throat, which suggests to us a moment of reflection, or perhaps doubt. . . . The last horse is unquestionably the most successful of the group, perhaps because the artist is by now certain of his or her inspiration. This fourth horse was produced using a complex technique: the main lines were drawn with charcoal; the infill, colored sepia and brown, is a mixture of charcoal and clay spread with the finger. A series of fine engravings perfectly follow the profile. With energetic and precise movements, the significant details are indicated (nostril, open mouth). A final charcoal line, dark black, was placed just at the corner of the lips and gives this head an expression of astonishment or surprise.
While the team was at work, I often stayed on the cliff with Chauveau, reading Dale Guthrie's book at a picnic table. Guthrie, a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Alaska, specializes in the paleobiology of the Pleistocene era. Not only is he an expert on the large mammals that cavort on cave walls; he has spent forty years in the Arctic wilds hunting their descendants with a bow and arrow. In that respect, perhaps, he brings more empiricism to his research than other scholars, though he also brings less humility. "The Nature of Paleolithic Art," as its title suggests, aspires to be definitive.
It is a handsome, five-hundred-page volume composed, like a mosaic, of boxed highlights, arresting graphics, and short sections of text that distill a wealth of multi-disciplinary research. The prose, like the layout, is designed to engage a layman without vulgarizing the science, or, at least, not too much. Guthrie, who sounds and looks, in his author's photograph, like an earthy guy, has fun with occasional rib-nudging subtitles ("Lesbian Loving or Male Fantasy?," "Graffiti and Testosterone"), but they promote a premise at least as audacious as that of Clottes and Lewis-Williams: that our biology, expressed in our carnal appetites and attractions, including an attraction to the supernatural, is a "baseline of truth" for the cave artists' symbolic language.
Nearly all the illustrations are Guthrie's own renderings or interpretations of Paleolithic imagery (there are no photographs). A number of prehistorians are and have been, as he is, gifted draftsmen and copyists. But unlike the devout Breuil, or the cautious Tosello, Guthrie is a desacralizer. He admires the creative "freedom" of cave art—an acuity of observation coupled with, in his view, a nonchalance of composition. He stresses its erotic playfulness, even straining to discern evidence of dildos and bondage, despite the rarity of sexual acts depicted on walls or artifacts. ("No Sex, Please—We're Aurignacian" was the title of a scholarly paper on the period.) The reverence with which certain researchers—including, one infers, the Chauvet team—treat even the smallest nick in a cave strikes him as a bit too nice, and, where they perceive an elaborate, if obscure, metaphysics, he sees high-spirited improvisation. "Some Paleolithic images identified as part man and part beast may simply be artistic bloopers," he writes. (But the artists sometimes did correct their work, Azéma told me, by scraping the rock's surface.)
Paleobiology is, in part, a science of statistical modelling, and, analyzing the handprints in the caves, Guthrie argues that many, perhaps a majority, of the artists were not the "Michelangelos" of Lascaux or Chauvet but teen-age boys, who, being boys, loved rutting and rumbling and, in essence, went on tagging sprees. It is true that among the masterpieces there are many line drawings, including pubic triangles, that seem hasty, impish, or doodle-like. In Guthrie's view, prehistorians have imported their mandarin pieties, and the bias of a society where children are a minority, to the study of what, demographically, was a freewheeling youth culture.
Guthrie is both provocative and respected—Clottes wrote one of the cover blurbs on his book—but some of his methods make you wonder how much of the light that he throws onto the nature of the art owes to false clarity. By culling examples of erotica from a huge catchment area without noting their size, date, or position, he distorts their prevalence. His cleaned-up drawings minimize the art's bewildering ambiguity and the contouring or the cave architecture organic to many compositions. As for the bands of brothers spelunking on a dare, and leaving what Guthrie calls their "children's art" to bemuse posterity, the life expectancy for the era was, as he notes, about eighteen, since infant mortality was exorbitant. But those who lived on could, thanks to the rarity of infectious diseases and the abundance of protein, expect to survive for thirty years more—considerably longer than the Greeks, the Romans, or the medieval peasants who built Chartres. Can puerility as we know it—horny, reckless, and transgressive—be attributed to a people for whom early parenthood and virtuosity in survival skills were, as Guthrie acknowledges, imperative? Rash spelunkers die every year, yet no human remains have been discovered in the caves (with the exception of a single skeleton, that of a young man, at Vilhonneur, near Angoulême, and those of five adults who were buried at Cussac, in the Dordogne). That is a staggering testament to the artists' sureness of foot and purpose, if not to their solemnity.
A few days before Easter, I left the camp and drove southwest, over the mountains, stopping at the town of Albi, where the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, in a thirteenth-century palace off the cathedral square, has a small gallery of Stone and Bronze Age artifacts. I wanted to see the museum's tiny Solutrean carving, in red sandstone, of an obese woman with impressive buttocks. She seemed well housed among Toulouse-Lautrec's louche Venuses. By the next evening, in a thunderstorm, I had reached Jean Clottes's home town of Foix, and found an old-fashioned hotel that he had recommended. From a corner table in the dining room, I could watch the swollen Ariège River flowing toward a distant wall of snow-covered peaks—the Pyrenees—that were black against a livid sunset. The Neanderthals had come this way.
Pascal Alard, an archeologist, met me the next morning at Niaux, where he has conducted research for twenty years. It is one of three caves (with Chauvet and Lascaux) that Clottes, who had arranged the rendezvous, considers paradigmatic. I had driven south for about forty minutes, the last few miles on a road with hairpin turns that wound up into flinty, striated hills. The site was nothing like Chauvet. There was, for one thing, a parking lot at the entrance, deserted at that hour, a bookshop, and an imposing architectural sculpture, in Corten steel, cantilevered into the cliff. (It is supposed to represent an imaginary prehistoric animal.)
Niaux is Magdalenian—its walls were decorated about fourteen thousand years ago—and it was one of the first caves to be explored. Visitors from the seventeenth century left graffiti, as did pranksters for the next three hundred years. In 1866, an archeologist named Félix Garrigou, who was looking for prehistoric relics, confessed to his journal that he couldn't figure out the "funny-looking" paintings. "Amateur artists drew animals here," he noted, "but why?"
Niaux's enormity—a network of passages that are nearly a mile deep from the entrance gallery, which was used as a shelter during the Bronze Age, to the Great Dome, at the far end, branching like a cactus into narrow alcoves and low-ceilinged funnels, but also into chambers the size of an amphitheatre—helps to give it a stable climate, and small groups can make guided visits at appointed times. But when Alard had unlocked the door, and it closed behind us, we were alone. He had two electric torches, and he gave me one. "Don't lose it," he joked. He told me that he and some colleagues, all of whom know the cave intimately, decided, one day, to see if they could find their way out without a light source. None of them could.
The floor near the mouth was fairly flat, but as we went deeper it listed and swelled unpredictably. Water was dripping, and sometimes it sounded like a sinister whispered conversation. The caves are full of eerie noises that gurgle up from the bowels of the earth, yet I had a feeling of traversing a space that wasn't terrestrial. We were, in fact, walking on the bed of a primordial river. Where the passage narrowed, we squeezed between two rocks, like a turnstile, marked with four lines. They were swipes of a finger dipped in red pigment that resembled a bar code, or symbolic flames. Further along, there was a large panel of dots, lines, and arrows, some red, some black. I felt their power without understanding it until I recalled what Norbert Aujoulat had told me about the signs at Cussac. He was the second modern human to explore the cave, in 2000, the year it was unearthed, some twenty-two thousand years after the painters had departed. (The first was Cussac's discoverer, Marc Delluc.) "As we trailed the artists deeper and deeper, noting where they'd broken off stalagmites to mark their path, we found signs that seemed to say, 'We're sanctifying a finite space in an infinite universe.' "
Beyond the turnstile, the passage widens for about six hundred feet, veering to the right, where it leads to one of the grandest bestiaries in Paleolithic art: the Black Salon, a rotunda a hundred and thirty feet in diameter. Scores of animals were painted in sheltered spots on the floor, or etched in charcoal on the soaring walls: bison, stags, ibex, aurochs, and, what is rarer, fish (salmon), and Niaux's famous "bearded horses"—a shaggy, short-legged species that, Clottes writes in his new book, has been reintroduced from their native habitat, in Central Asia, to French wildlife parks. All these creatures are drawn in profile with a fine point, and some of their silhouettes have been filled in with a brush or a stumping cloth. I looked for a little ibex, twenty-one inches long, that Clottes had described to me as the work of a perfectionist, and one of the most beautiful animals in a cave. When I found him, he looked so perky that I couldn't help laughing. Alard was patient, and, since time loses its contours underground, I didn't know how long we had spent there. "I imagine that you want to see more," he said after a while, so we moved along.
Every encounter with a cave animal takes it and you by surprise. Your light has to rouse it, and your eye has to recognize it, because you tend to see creatures that aren't there, while missing ones that are. Halfway home to the mortal world, I asked Alard if we could pause and turn off our torches. The acoustics magnify every sound, and it takes the brain a few minutes to accept the totality of the darkness—your sight keeps grasping for a hold. Whatever the art means, you understand, at that moment, that its vessel is both a womb and a sepulchre. ♦
*Correction, August 7, 2008: Altamira is not in the Basque country, as originally stated.
Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn't introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.
In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes, "we need to dominate the central nervous system."
His plan hinged on the success of an experimental antidepressant codenamed MK-869. Still in clinical trials, it looked like every pharma executive's dream: a new kind of medication that exploited brain chemistry in innovative ways to promote feelings of well-being. The drug tested brilliantly early on, with minimal side effects, and Merck touted its game-changing potential at a meeting of 300 securities analysts.
Behind the scenes, however, MK-869 was starting to unravel. True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.
Ultimately, Merck's foray into the antidepressant market failed. In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary.
MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.
The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an "unusually high" response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.
It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.
It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.
The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today's economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.
Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings—and potential therapeutic applications—of the placebo effect. At the same time, drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body's innate ability to heal itself. A special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry. After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.
The roots of the placebo problem can be traced to a lie told by an Army nurse during World War II as Allied forces stormed the beaches of southern Italy. The nurse was assisting an anesthetist named Henry Beecher, who was tending to US troops under heavy German bombardment. When the morphine supply ran low, the nurse assured a wounded soldier that he was getting a shot of potent painkiller, though her syringe contained only salt water. Amazingly, the bogus injection relieved the soldier's agony and prevented the onset of shock.
Returning to his post at Harvard after the war, Beecher became one of the nation's leading medical reformers. Inspired by the nurse's healing act of deception, he launched a crusade to promote a method of testing new medicines to find out whether they were truly effective. At the time, the process for vetting drugs was sloppy at best: Pharmaceutical companies would simply dose volunteers with an experimental agent until the side effects swamped the presumed benefits. Beecher proposed that if test subjects could be compared to a group that received a placebo, health officials would finally have an impartial way to determine whether a medicine was actually responsible for making a patient better.
In a 1955 paper titled "The Powerful Placebo," published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement that was mistakenly attributed to the drugs being tested. He demonstrated that trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic, boosting the curative power of the medicine. Only by subtracting the improvement in a placebo control group could the actual value of the drug be calculated.
The article caused a sensation. By 1962, reeling from news of birth defects caused by a drug called thalidomide, Congress amended the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring trials to include enhanced safety testing and placebo control groups. Volunteers would be assigned randomly to receive either medicine or a sugar pill, and neither doctor nor patient would know the difference until the trial was over. Beecher's double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial—or RCT—was enshrined as the gold standard of the emerging pharmaceutical industry. Today, to win FDA approval, a new medication must beat placebo in at least two authenticated trials.
Beecher's prescription helped cure the medical establishment of outright quackery, but it had an insidious side effect. By casting placebo as the villain in RCTs, he ended up stigmatizing one of his most important discoveries. The fact that even dummy capsules can kick-start the body's recovery engine became a problem for drug developers to overcome, rather than a phenomenon that could guide doctors toward a better understanding of the healing process and how to drive it most effectively.
In his eagerness to promote his template for clinical trials, Beecher also overreached by seeing the placebo effect at work in curing ailments like the common cold, which wane with no intervention at all. But the triumph of Beecher's gold standard was a generation of safer medications that worked for nearly everyone. Anthracyclines don't require an oncologist with a genial bedside manner to slow the growth of tumors.
What Beecher didn't foresee, however, was the explosive growth of the pharmaceutical industry. The blockbuster success of mood drugs in the '80s and '90s emboldened Big Pharma to promote remedies for a growing panoply of disorders that are intimately related to higher brain function. By attempting to dominate the central nervous system, Big Pharma gambled its future on treating ailments that have turned out to be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect.
The tall, rusty-haired son of a country doctor, William Potter, 64, has spent most of his life treating mental illness—first as a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and then as a drug developer. A decade ago, he took a job at Lilly's neuroscience labs. There, working on new antidepressants and antianxiety meds, he became one of the first researchers to glimpse the approaching storm.
To test products internally, pharmaceutical companies routinely run trials in which a long-established medication and an experimental one compete against each other as well as against a placebo. As head of Lilly's early-stage psychiatric drug development in the late '90s, Potter saw that even durable warhorses like Prozac, which had been on the market for years, were being overtaken by dummy pills in more recent tests. The company's next-generation antidepressants were faring badly, too, doing no better than placebo in seven out of 10 trials.
As a psychiatrist, Potter knew that some patients really do seem to get healthier for reasons that have more to do with a doctor's empathy than with the contents of a pill. But it baffled him that drugs he'd been prescribing for years seemed to be struggling to prove their effectiveness. Thinking that something crucial may have been overlooked, Potter tapped an IT geek named David DeBrota to help him comb through the Lilly database of published and unpublished trials—including those that the company had kept secret because of high placebo response. They aggregated the findings from decades of antidepressant trials, looking for patterns and trying to see what was changing over time. What they found challenged some of the industry's basic assumptions about its drug-vetting process.
Assumption number one was that if a trial were managed correctly, a medication would perform as well or badly in a Phoenix hospital as in a Bangalore clinic. Potter discovered, however, that geographic location alone could determine whether a drug bested placebo or crossed the futility boundary. By the late '90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail. Conversely, Prozac performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa. It was an unsettling prospect: FDA approval could hinge on where the company chose to conduct a trial.
Mistaken assumption number two was that the standard tests used to gauge volunteers' improvement in trials yielded consistent results. Potter and his colleagues discovered that ratings by trial observers varied significantly from one testing site to another. It was like finding out that the judges in a tight race each had a different idea about the placement of the finish line.
Potter and DeBrota's data-mining also revealed that even superbly managed trials were subject to runaway placebo effects. But exactly why any of this was happening remained elusive. "We were able to identify many of the core issues in play," Potter says. "But there was no clear answer to the problem." Convinced that what Lilly was facing was too complex for any one pharmaceutical house to unravel on its own, he came up with a plan to break down the firewalls between researchers across the industry, enabling them to share data in "pre-competitive space."
After prodding by Potter and others, the NIH focused on the issue in 2000, hosting a three-day conference in Washington. For the first time in medical history, more than 500 drug developers, doctors, academics, and trial designers put their heads together to examine the role of the placebo effect in clinical trials and healing in general.
Potter's ambitious plan for a collaborative approach to the problem eventually ran into its own futility boundary: No one would pay for it. And drug companies don't share data, they hoard it. But the NIH conference launched a new wave of placebo research in academic labs in the US and Italy that would make significant progress toward solving the mystery of what was happening in clinical trials.
Visitors to Fabrizio Benedetti's clinic at the University of Turin are asked never to say the P-word around the med students who sign up for his experiments. For all the volunteers know, the trim, soft-spoken neuroscientist is hard at work concocting analgesic skin creams and methods for enhancing athletic performance.
One recent afternoon in his lab, a young soccer player grimaced with exertion while doing leg curls on a weight machine. Benedetti and his colleagues were exploring the potential of using Pavlovian conditioning to give athletes a competitive edge undetectable by anti-doping authorities. A player would receive doses of a performance-enhancing drug for weeks and then a jolt of placebo just before competition.
Benedetti, 53, first became interested in placebos in the mid-'90s, while researching pain. He was surprised that some of the test subjects in his placebo groups seemed to suffer less than those on active drugs. But scientific interest in this phenomenon, and the money to research it, were hard to come by. "The placebo effect was considered little more than a nuisance," he recalls. "Drug companies, physicians, and clinicians were not interested in understanding its mechanisms. They were concerned only with figuring out whether their drugs worked better."
Part of the problem was that response to placebo was considered a psychological trait related to neurosis and gullibility rather than a physiological phenomenon that could be scrutinized in the lab and manipulated for therapeutic benefit. But then Benedetti came across a study, done years earlier, that suggested the placebo effect had a neurological foundation. US scientists had found that a drug called naloxone blocks the pain-relieving power of placebo treatments. The brain produces its own analgesic compounds called opioids, released under conditions of stress, and naloxone blocks the action of these natural painkillers and their synthetic analogs. The study gave Benedetti the lead he needed to pursue his own research while running small clinical trials for drug companies.
Now, after 15 years of experimentation, he has succeeded in mapping many of the biochemical reactions responsible for the placebo effect, uncovering a broad repertoire of self-healing responses. Placebo-activated opioids, for example, not only relieve pain; they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Mechanisms like these can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate digestive disorders, relieve insomnia, and limit the secretion of stress-related hormones like insulin and cortisol.
In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer's patients with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the connections between the patients' prefrontal lobes and their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer's patients don't get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.
Benedetti often uses the phrase "placebo response" instead of placebo effect. By definition, inert pills have no effect, but under the right conditions they can act as a catalyst for what he calls the body's "endogenous health care system." Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won't stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo's evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.
Further research by Benedetti and others showed that the promise of treatment activates areas of the brain involved in weighing the significance of events and the seriousness of threats. "If a fire alarm goes off and you see smoke, you know something bad is going to happen and you get ready to escape," explains Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. "Expectations about pain and pain relief work in a similar way. Placebo treatments tap into this system and orchestrate the responses in your brain and body accordingly."
In other words, one way that placebo aids recovery is by hacking the mind's ability to predict the future. We are constantly parsing the reactions of those around us—such as the tone a doctor uses to deliver a diagnosis—to generate more-accurate estimations of our fate. One of the most powerful placebogenic triggers is watching someone else experience the benefits of an alleged drug. Researchers call these social aspects of medicine the therapeutic ritual.
In a study last year, Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk devised a clever strategy for testing his volunteers' response to varying levels of therapeutic ritual. The study focused on irritable bowel syndrome, a painful disorder that costs more than $40 billion a year worldwide to treat. First the volunteers were placed randomly in one of three groups. One group was simply put on a waiting list; researchers know that some patients get better just because they sign up for a trial. Another group received placebo treatment from a clinician who declined to engage in small talk. Volunteers in the third group got the same sham treatment from a clinician who asked them questions about symptoms, outlined the causes of IBS, and displayed optimism about their condition.
Rx for Success
What turns a dummy pill into a catalyst for relieving pain, anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, or the tremors of Parkinson's disease? The brain's own healing mechanisms, unleashed by the belief that a phony medication is the real thing. The most important ingredient in any placebo is the doctor's bedside manner, but according to research, the color of a tablet can boost the effectiveness even of genuine meds—or help convince a patient that a placebo is a potent remedy.—Steve Silberman
Branding matters.
Placebos stamped or packaged with widely recognized trademarks are more effective than "generic" placebos.
Clever names
can add a placebo boost to the physiological punch in real drugs. Viagra implies both vitality and an unstoppable Niagara of sexy.
Not surprisingly, the health of those in the third group improved most. In fact, just by participating in the trial, volunteers in this high-interaction group got as much relief as did people taking the two leading prescription drugs for IBS. And the benefits of their bogus treatment persisted for weeks afterward, contrary to the belief—widespread in the pharmaceutical industry—that the placebo response is short-lived.
Studies like this open the door to hybrid treatment strategies that exploit the placebo effect to make real drugs safer and more effective. Cancer patients undergoing rounds of chemotherapy often suffer from debilitating nocebo effects—such as anticipatory nausea—conditioned by their past experiences with the drugs. A team of German researchers has shown that these associations can be unlearned through the administration of placebo, making chemo easier to bear.
Meanwhile, the classic use of placebos in medicine—to boost the confidence of anxious patients—has been employed tacitly for ages. Nearly half of the doctors polled in a 2007 survey in Chicago admitted to prescribing medications they knew were ineffective for a patient's condition—or prescribing effective drugs in doses too low to produce actual benefit—in order to provoke a placebo response.
The main objections to more widespread placebo use in clinical practice are ethical, but the solutions to these conundrums can be surprisingly simple. Investigators told volunteers in one placebo study that the pills they were taking were "known to significantly reduce pain in some patients." The researchers weren't lying.
These new findings tell us that the body's response to certain types of medication is in constant flux, affected by expectations of treatment, conditioning, beliefs, and social cues.
For instance, the geographic variations in trial outcome that Potter uncovered begin to make sense in light of discoveries that the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure. Moreover, a pill's shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body. Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team—Forza Azzurri!
But why would the placebo effect seem to be getting stronger worldwide? Part of the answer may be found in the drug industry's own success in marketing its products.
Potential trial volunteers in the US have been deluged with ads for prescription medications since 1997, when the FDA amended its policy on direct-to-consumer advertising. The secret of running an effective campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi's Jim Joseph told a trade journal last year, is associating a particular brand-name medication with other aspects of life that promote peace of mind: "Is it time with your children? Is it a good book curled up on the couch? Is it your favorite television show? Is it a little purple pill that helps you get rid of acid reflux?" By evoking such uplifting associations, researchers say, the ads set up the kind of expectations that induce a formidable placebo response.
The success of those ads in selling blockbuster drugs like antidepressants and statins also pushed trials offshore as therapeutic virgins—potential volunteers who were not already medicated with one or another drug—became harder to find. The contractors that manage trials for Big Pharma have moved aggressively into Africa, India, China, and the former Soviet Union. In these places, however, cultural dynamics can boost the placebo response in other ways. Doctors in these countries are paid to fill up trial rosters quickly, which may motivate them to recruit patients with milder forms of illness that yield more readily to placebo treatment. Furthermore, a patient's hope of getting better and expectation of expert care—the primary placebo triggers in the brain—are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine. "The quality of care that placebo patients get in trials is far superior to the best insurance you get in America," says psychiatrist Arif Khan, principal investigator in hundreds of trials for companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "It's basically luxury care."
Big Pharma faces additional problems in beating placebo when it comes to psychiatric drugs. One is to accurately define the nature of mental illness. The litmus test of drug efficacy in antidepressant trials is a questionnaire called the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. The HAM-D was created nearly 50 years ago based on a study of major depressive disorder in patients confined to asylums. Few trial volunteers now suffer from that level of illness. In fact, many experts are starting to wonder if what drug companies now call depression is even the same disease that the HAM-D was designed to diagnose.
Existing tests also may not be appropriate for diagnosing disorders like social anxiety and premenstrual dysphoria—the very types of chronic, fuzzily defined conditions that the drug industry started targeting in the '90s, when the placebo problem began escalating. The neurological foundation of these illnesses is still being debated, making it even harder for drug companies to come up with effective treatments.
What all of these disorders have in common, however, is that they engage the higher cortical centers that generate beliefs and expectations, interpret social cues, and anticipate rewards. So do chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, Parkinson's, and many other ailments that respond robustly to placebo treatment. To avoid investing in failure, researchers say, pharmaceutical companies will need to adopt new ways of vetting drugs that route around the brain's own centralized network for healing.
Ten years and billions of R&D dollars after William Potter first sounded the alarm about the placebo effect, his message has finally gotten through. In the spring, Potter, who is now a VP at Merck, helped rev up a massive data-gathering effort called the Placebo Response Drug Trials Survey.
Under the auspices of the FNIH
1, Potter and his colleagues are acquiring decades of trial data—including blood and DNA samples—to determine which variables are responsible for the apparent rise in the placebo effect. Merck, Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Johnson & Johnson, and other major firms are funding the study, and the process of scrubbing volunteers' names and other personal information from the database is about to begin.In typically secretive industry fashion, the existence of the project itself is being kept under wraps. FNIH staffers
2 are willing to talk about it only anonymously, concerned about offending the companies paying for it.For Potter, who used to ride along with his father on house calls in Indiana, the significance of the survey goes beyond Big Pharma's finally admitting it has a placebo problem. It also marks the twilight of an era when the drug industry was confident that its products were strong enough to cure illness by themselves.
"Before I routinely prescribed antidepressants, I would do more psychotherapy for mildly depressed patients," says the veteran of hundreds of drug trials. "Today we would say I was trying to engage components of the placebo response—and those patients got better. To really do the best for your patients, you want the best placebo response plus the best drug response."
The pharma crisis has also finally brought together the two parallel streams of placebo research—academic and industrial. Pfizer has asked Fabrizio Benedetti to help the company figure out why two of its pain drugs keep failing. Ted Kaptchuk is developing ways to distinguish drug response more clearly from placebo response for another pharma house that he declines to name. Both are exploring innovative trial models that treat the placebo effect as more than just statistical noise competing with the active drug.
Benedetti has helped design a protocol for minimizing volunteers' expectations that he calls "open/hidden." In standard trials, the act of taking a pill or receiving an injection activates the placebo response. In open/hidden trials, drugs and placebos are given to some test subjects in the usual way and to others at random intervals through an IV line controlled by a concealed computer. Drugs that work only when the patient knows they're being administered are placebos themselves.
Ironically, Big Pharma's attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.
Cowboys and Pit Crews
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Atul GawandeThis afternoon, Atul Gawande delivered this year's commencement address at Harvard Medical School.
In his book "The Youngest Science," the great physician-writer Lewis Thomas described his internship at Boston City Hospital in pre-penicillin 1937. Hospital work, he observed, was mainly custodial. "If being in a hospital bed made a difference," he said, "it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, and food, and attentive, friendly care, and the matchless skill of the nurses in providing these things. Whether you survived or not depended on the natural history of the disease itself. Medicine made little or no difference."
That didn't stop the interns from being, as he put it, "frantically busy." He learned to focus on diagnosis—insuring nothing was missed, especially an illness with an actual, effective treatment. There were only a few. Lobar pneumonia could be treated with antiserum, an injection of rabbit antibodies against the pneumococcus, if the intern identified the subtype correctly. Patients in diabetic coma responded dramatically to animal-extracted insulin and intravenous fluid. Acute heart failure patients could be saved by bleeding away a pint of blood from an arm vein, administering a leaf-preparation of digitalis, and delivering oxygen by tent. Early syphilitic paresis sometimes responded to a mix of mercury, bismuth, and arsenic. Surgery could treat certain tumors and infections. Beyond that, medical capabilities didn't extend much further.
The distance medicine has travelled in the couple of generations since is almost unfathomable for us today. We now have treatments for nearly all of the tens of thousand of diagnoses and conditions that afflict human beings. We have more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures, and you, the clinicians graduating today, will be legally permitted to provide them. Such capabilities cannot guarantee everyone a long and healthy life, but they can make it possible for most.
People worldwide want and deserve the benefits of your capabilities. Many fear they will be denied them, however, whether because of cost, availability, or incompetence of caregivers. We are now witnessing a global societal struggle to assure universal delivery of our know-how. We in medicine, however, have been slow to grasp why this is such a struggle, or how the volume of discovery has changed our work and responsibilities.
The rapid growth in medicine's capacities is not just a difference in degree but a difference in kind. We have experienced the sort of vast, quantum alteration that my father describes experiencing during a life that brought him from childhood in rural India to retirement from a surgical practice in Ohio. The greatest leap for him, he tells me, wasn't in taking that first step off the plane in New York City, extraordinary as that was. It was in going from his rural farming village of five thousand people to Nagpur, a city of millions where he was admitted to medical school, three hundred kilometers away. Both communities were impoverished. But the structure of life, the values, and the ideas were so different as to be unrecognizable. Visiting back home, he found that one generation couldn't even grasp the other's challenges. Here is where we seem to find ourselves, as well.
We are at a cusp point in medical generations. The doctors of former generations lament what medicine has become. If they could start over, the surveys tell us, they wouldn't choose the profession today. They recall a simpler past without insurance-company hassles, government regulations, malpractice litigation, not to mention nurses and doctors bearing tattoos and talking of wanting "balance" in their lives. These are not the cause of their unease, however. They are symptoms of a deeper condition—which is the reality that medicine's complexity has exceeded our individual capabilities as doctors.
The core structure of medicine—how health care is organized and practiced—emerged in an era when doctors could hold all the key information patients needed in their heads and manage everything required themselves. One needed only an ethic of hard work, a prescription pad, a secretary, and a hospital willing to serve as one's workshop, loaning a bed and nurses for a patient's convalescence, maybe an operating room with a few basic tools. We were craftsmen. We could set the fracture, spin the blood, plate the cultures, administer the antiserum. The nature of the knowledge lent itself to prizing autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency among our highest values, and to designing medicine accordingly. But you can't hold all the information in your head any longer, and you can't master all the skills. No one person can work up a patient's back pain, run the immunoassay, do the physical therapy, protocol the MRI, and direct the treatment of the unexpected cancer found growing in the spine. I don't even know what it means to "protocol" the MRI.
Before Elias Zerhouni became director of the National Institutes of Health, he was a senior hospital leader at Johns Hopkins, and he calculated how many clinical staff were involved in the care of their typical hospital patient—how many doctors, nurses, and so on. In 1970, he found, it was 2.5 full-time equivalents. By the end of the nineteen-nineties, it was more than fifteen. The number must be even larger today. Everyone has just a piece of patient care. We're all specialists now—even primary-care doctors. A structure that prioritizes the independence of all those specialists will have enormous difficulty achieving great care.
We don't have to look far for evidence. Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn't follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It's like no one's in charge—because no one is. The public's experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it's pit crews people need.
Another sign this is the case is the unsustainable growth in the cost of health care. Medical performance tends to follow a bell curve, with a wide gap between the best and the worst results for a given condition, depending on where people go for care. The costs follow a bell curve, as well, varying for similar patients by thirty to fifty per cent. But the interesting thing is: the curves do not match. The places that get the best results are not the most expensive places. Indeed, many are among the least expensive. This means there is hope—for if the best results required the highest costs, then rationing care would be the only choice. Instead, however, we can look to the top performers—the positive deviants—to understand how to provide what society most needs: better care at lower cost. And the pattern seems to be that the places that function most like a system are most successful.
By a system I mean that the diverse people actually work together to direct their specialized capabilities toward common goals for patients. They are coordinated by design. They are pit crews. To function this way, however, you must cultivate certain skills which are uncommon in practice and not often taught.
For one, you must acquire an ability to recognize when you've succeeded and when you've failed for patients. People in effective systems become interested in data. They put effort and resources into collecting them, refining them, understanding what they say about their performance.
Second, you must grow an ability to devise solutions for the system problems that data and experience uncover. When I was in medical school, for instance, one of the last ways I'd have imagined spending time in my future surgical career would have been working on things like checklists. Robots and surgical techniques, sure. Information technology, maybe. But checklists?
They turn out, however, to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction—in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains. They emphasize group precision in execution. And making them in medicine has forced us to define our key aims for our patients and to say exactly what we will do to achieve them. Making teams successful is more difficult than we knew. Even the simplest checklist forces us to grapple with vulnerabilities like handoffs and checklist overload. But designed well, the results can be extraordinary, allowing us to nearly eliminate many hospital infections, to cut deaths in surgery by as much as half globally, and to slash costs, as well.
Which brings us to the third skill that you must have but haven't been taught—the ability to implement at scale, the ability to get colleagues along the entire chain of care functioning like pit crews for patients. There is resistance, sometimes vehement resistance, to the efforts that make it possible. Partly, it is because the work is rooted in different values than the ones we've had. They include humility, an understanding that no matter who you are, how experienced or smart, you will fail. They include discipline, the belief that standardization, doing certain things the same way every time, can reduce your failures. And they include teamwork, the recognition that others can save you from failure, no matter who they are in the hierarchy.
These values are the opposite of autonomy, independency, self-sufficiency. Many doctors fear the future will end daring, creativity, and the joys of thinking that medicine has had. But nothing says teams cannot be daring or creative or that your work with others will not require hard thinking and wise judgment. Success under conditions of complexity still demands these qualities. Resistance also surfaces because medicine is not structured for group work. Even just asking clinicians to make time to sit together and agree on plans for complex patients feels like an imposition. "I'm not paid for this!" people object, and it's true right up to the highest levels.
I spoke to a hospital executive the day after he'd presented to his board a plan to reorient his system around teams that focus on improving care outcomes, improving the health of the community, and lowering its costs of care. The meeting was contentious. The aims made sense, but hospital finances are not based on achieving them, and the board wasn't sure about asking payers to change that. The meeting ended unresolved. These aims are not yet our aims in medicine, though we need them to be.
Not long ago, I had an experience at our local school that brought home the stakes. I'd gone for a meeting with my children's teachers, and I ran into the superintendent of schools. I told him how worried I was to see my kids' art classes cut and their class sizes rise to almost thirty children in some cases. What was he working on to improve matters? I asked.
"You know what I spend my time working on?" he said. "Health-care costs." Teachers' health-benefit expenses were up nine per cent, city tax revenues were flat, and school enrollment was up. A small percentage of teachers with serious illnesses accounted for the majority of the costs, and the only option he'd found was to cut their benefits.
"Oh," I said.
I went to the teacher meetings. On the way, I ran into a teacher I had operated on. She'd had a lymphoma. She was one of that small percentage who accounted for most of the costs. That's when it struck me. I was part of the reason my children didn't have enough teachers. We all are in medicine. Reports show that every dollar added to school budgets over the past decade for smaller class sizes and better teacher pay was diverted to covering rising health-care costs.
This is not inevitable. I do not believe society should be forced to choose between whether our children get a great education or their teachers get great medical care. But only we can create the local medical systems that make both possible. You who graduate today will join these systems as they are born, propel them, work on the policies that accelerate them, and create the innovations they need. Making systems work in health care—shifting from corralling cowboys to producing pit crews—is the great task of your and my generation of clinicians and scientists.
You are the generation on the precipice of a transformation medicine has no choice but to undergo, the riders in the front car of the roller coaster clack-clack-clacking its way up to the drop. The revolution that remade how other fields handle complexity is coming to health care, and I think you sense it. I see this in the burst of students obtaining extra degrees in fields like public health, business administration, public policy, information technology, education, economics, engineering. Of some two hundred students graduating today, more than thirty-five are getting such degrees, intuiting that ordinary medical training wouldn't prepare you for the world to come. Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You've recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change. Even the laboratory science must change—toward generating treatments and diagnostics that do not stand in isolation but fit in as reliable components of an integrated, economical, and effective package of care for the needs patients have.
The problems of making health care work are large. The complexities are overwhelming governments, economies, and societies around the world. We have every indication, however, that where people in medicine combine their talents and efforts to design organized service to patients and local communities, extraordinary change can result.
Recently, you might be interested to know, I met an actual cowboy. He described to me how cowboys do their job today, herding thousands of cattle. They have tightly organized teams, with everyone assigned specific positions and communicating with each other constantly. They have protocols and checklists for bad weather, emergencies, the inoculations they must dispense. Even the cowboys, it turns out, function like pit crews now. It may be time for us to join them.
Caveman: An Interview with Michel Siffre
Joshua Foer and Michel Siffre
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In 1962, a French speleologist named Michel Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, his goal was to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living "beyond time." Over the next decade, Siffre organized over a dozen other underground time isolation experiments, before he himself returned to a cave in Texas in 1972 for a six-month spell. His work helped found the field of human chronobiology. Joshua Foer interviewed Siffre by email.
Michel Siffre's tent in Midnight Cave, Texas, glows with incandescent lights. All images from Siffre's 1972 experiment in Texas.
In 1962, you were just twenty-three years old. What made you decide to live underground in complete isolation for sixty-three days?
You have to understand, I was a geologist by training. In 1961, we discovered an underground glacier in the Alps, about seventy kilometers from Nice. At first, my idea was to prepare a geological expedition, and to spend about fifteen days underground studying the glacier, but a couple of months later, I said to myself, "Well, fifteen days is not enough. I shall see nothing." So, I decided to stay two months. And then this idea came to me—this idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.
Instead of studying caves, you ended up studying time.
Yes, I invented a simple scientific protocol. I put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided I would call them when I woke up, when I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team didn't have the right to call me, so that I wouldn't have any idea what time it was on the outside. Without knowing it, I had created the field of human chronobiology. Long before, in 1922, it had been discovered that rats have an internal biological clock. My experiment showed that humans, like lower mammals, have a body clock as well.
Siffre's cave-appropriate reading: Plato.
During your first stay underground, temperatures were below freezing, and humidity was ninety-eight percent. How did you pass the time?
I had bad equipment, and just a small camp with a lot of things cramped inside. My feet were always wet, and my body temperature got as low as 34°C (93°F). My pastimes were reading, writing, and doing research in the cave. I also spent a lot of time thinking about my future. Also, there were two tests I performed every time I called the surface. First, I took my pulse. Secondly, there was a psychological test. I had to count from 1 to 120, at the rate of one digit per second. With that test we made a great discovery: it took me five minutes to count to 120. In other words, I psychologically experienced five real minutes as though they were two.
The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus conducted an experiment in which she showed people a filmed scene of a bank robbery and asked them to estimate its duration. They overestimated by 500 percent. It seems that our subjective experience of time is highly variable. In the absence of clocks, how did you feel time's passage?
There was a very large perturbation in my sense of time. I descended into the cave on July 16 and was planning finish the experiment on September 14. When my surface team notified me that the day had finally arrived, I thought that it was only August 20. I believed I still had another month to spend in the cave. My psychological time had compressed by a factor of two.
What do you think caused this dramatic disconnect between psychological time and the clock?
That's a big question that I've been investigating for forty years. I believe that when you are surrounded by night—the cave was completely dark, with just a light bulb—your memory does not capture the time. You forget. After one or two days, you don't remember what you have done a day or two before. The only things that change are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Besides that, it's entirely black. It's like one long day.
Siffre weighing himself.
These sorts of isolation experiments could just as easily be carried out in a laboratory. Why have you always preferred to do them underground?
A laboratory is a fine place to do these experiments, but you must find people who are motivated. It's difficult to ask people to spend several months in a laboratory capsule. During the period between 1962 and 1972, a professor in Germany did more than 150 isolation experiments in an artificial underground bunker, but they were short-term experiments, lasting only about a month. The people we sent underground were spelunkers first, and so they were interested in the caves and could stay longer because of their high motivation.
When you were underground, entirely isolated from any artificial measurements of time, your body slept exactly when it wanted to, and for exactly as long as it wanted to. It might be said that you achieved perfect sleep. What was that like?
My sleep was perfect! My body chose by itself when to sleep and when to eat. That's very important. We showed that my sleep/wake cycle was not twenty-four hours, like people have on the surface on the earth, but slightly longer—about twenty-four hours and thirty minutes. But the important thing is that we proved that there was an internal clock independent of the natural terrestrial day/night cycle. Interestingly, during the subsequent experiments I did with other research subjects, all of the people in the caves showed cycles longer than twenty-four hours. In fact, it became common for them to achieve cycles lasting forty-eight hours: They would have thirty-six hours of continuous activity followed by twelve to fourteen hours of sleep. After we made that discovery, the French army gave me lots of funding. They wanted me to analyze how it would be possible for a soldier to double his wakeful activity.
What did you find?
After me, I put a man in a cave for four months, and then a woman for three months. In 1966, another man did six months underground, and then we did two other experiments lasting four months. We analyzed sleep stages—the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, when dreaming occurs, and slow-wave sleep—and we made another discovery. We showed that there is a correlation between how long a person stays up and how much he dreams the next night. Roughly speaking, for every ten extra minutes of activity each day, a man gets one extra minute of REM sleep. We also found that the more you dream, the shorter your reaction time during your next phase of wakefulness. After we made this discovery, the French army tried to find drugs that artificially increase the amount of time spent dreaming, with the hope of producing very long days of thirty or more hours for soldiers.
Ten years after your first time-isolation experiment, you went back underground yourself, this time in Midnight Cave near Del Rio, Texas, and spent 205 days. Why did you go back?
There were two reasons. First, I was interested in studying the effects of aging on psychological time. My plan was to do an experiment every ten or fifteen years to see if there had been any changes in how my brain perceives time. Secondly, all of the other people I had put underground caught a forty-eight-hour sleep/wake cycle, except for me. I decided I would stay underground for six months to try to catch the forty-eight-hour cycle.
Why do people fall into this forty-eight-hour cycle?
I have no theory. I don't make theories. The forty-eight-hour cycle is a fact. I observed this phenomenon, and I'm sure of this finding, but nobody understands what could be responsible for such a large desynchronization of the sleep-wake cycle. And now that the Cold War is finished, it's more difficult to get funding. Today, only mathematicians and physiologists can go further with this.
Siffre adorned with the electrodoes that monitored his heart, brain, and muscle activity during his 1972 experiment.
Your first subterranean isolation experiment took place in 1962, the same year that the Cuban Missile Crisis made the world starkly aware of the importance of bomb shelters, and a year after Yuri Gagarin first entered space. How did those two events change the way we think about the underground?
I came at the right time. It was the Cold War, and we knew nothing about the human sleep cycle in outer space. Not only was there a competition between the US and Russia to put men into space, but France had also just begun its nuclear submarine program. French headquarters knew nothing about how best to organize the sleep cycle of submariners. This is probably why I received so much financial support. NASA analyzed my first experiment in 1962 and put up the money to do sophisticated mathematical analysis.
What is it about the underground that both attracts us and scares us?
It is dark. You need a light. And if your light goes out, you're dead. In the Middle Ages, caves were the place where demons lived. But at the same time, caves are a place of hope. We go into them to find minerals and treasures, and it's one of the last places where it is still possible to have adventures and make new discoveries.
You rang in the new millennium 2,970 feet below ground in the Clamouse Cave with foie gras and champagne, but you were three-and-a-half days late. You also missed your sixty-first birthday. Why did it take almost three decades for you to decide to go underground again?
When I came out of Midnight Cave in 1972, I was 100,000 US dollars in debt. I had badly underestimated the cost of bringing my experiments from France to Texas, and I had to leave the field of chronobiology. Much of my data from that experiment has yet to be mathematically analyzed. In 1999, I decided to go back into a cave in the south of France. I stayed there for two months, studying the effects of aging on the circadian cycle. I was following the lead of John Glenn, who went back into space at age seventy-seven.
I understand you're at work on a "permanent subterranean station for human confinement and chronobiology experiments." What else are you working on?
The experiments in the caves are finished. You can't do these kinds of experiments any more. When we first did them, I was young, and we took all the risk. Now, there are limitations on researchers. Now you have ethics panels. Let me give you an example. In 1964, the second man after me to go underground had a microphone attached to his head. One day he slept thirty-three hours, and we weren't sure if he was dead. It was the first time we'd ever seen a man sleep for that long. I thought, okay, I'll descend into the cave and find out what happened. And then at thirty-four hours, he snored, and we understood he was alive. And then a couple minutes later, he called us at the surface to take his pulse. Today, doctors would have to wake him up because it would be too risky to do otherwise.
Did you ever succeed in catching a forty-eight-hour cycle?
Yes. In the 1972 experience in Texas, there were two periods where I caught the forty-eight-hour cycle—but not regularly. I would have thirty-six hours of continuous wakefulness, followed by twelve hours of sleep. I couldn't tell the difference between these long days and the days that lasted just twenty-four hours. I studied the diary I kept in the cave, looking cycle by cycle, but there was no evidence that I perceived those days any differently. Sometimes I would sleep two hours or eighteen hours, and I couldn't tell the difference. That is an experience I think we all can appreciate. It's the problem of psychological time. It's the problem of humans. What is time? We don't know.
Michel Siffre is a scientist based in Paris. He is the author of several books, including Beyond Time (McGraw-Hill, 1964) and Découvertes dans les grottes mayas (Arthaud, 1993).
Joshua Foer is a freelance science writer. He is working on a book about the art and science of memory, forthcoming from Penguin.
Weird Science
Testimony from forensic experts can be the most persuasive evidence presented at trial, but often juries don't realize that the analysis of hair, fire, and even fingerprints may not be so scientific. And as the story of deputy Keith Pikett, master of the dog-scent lineup, shows, investigations can sometimes lead to the greatest crime of all: putting innocent people behind bars.
by Michael Hall
Quincy, the amazing bloodhound, sniffed the air around the body of Sally Blackwell, who lay half-naked in a field just outside Victoria. Blackwell, a supervisor for Child Protective Services, had been missing for a day when a county-road crew found her in a brushy field on March 15, 2006. She had been strangled with a rope, which was still on her body. Quincy's handler, Deputy Keith Pikett, held the leash and surveyed the scene, which was teeming with officers from the Victoria Police Department, the Victoria County Sheriff's Office, the Department of Public Safety, and the Texas Rangers. It was almost seven o'clock and would be getting dark soon.
A few hours earlier, Sam Eyre, a sergeant with the Victoria police, had called Pikett, who lived in Houston and worked out of the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office, about two hours away. Pikett (pronounced "Pie-ket") was something of a star in law enforcement circles. For years he and his dogs—Quincy, James Bond, and Clue—had helped find missing children and escaped convicts, and they had investigated murders all over the state, including one in Victoria in 2003. They had worked with the FBI, the ATF, the Texas Rangers, and the state attorney general's office, and they had helped solve hundreds of crimes with Pikett's version of a technique called a scent lineup, in which his dogs matched an odor found at a crime scene to the person who left it. His dogs were so good at sniffing out the bad guys, he said, that they had made only five mistakes in fifteen years.
Standing in the field, Pikett, a lean man of 59, took out a couple of gauze pads. He knelt down and wiped one on Blackwell's body; the other he wiped on the rope. Then he held the first up to Quincy's nose. "Seek," the deputy said.
Quincy took off, with Pikett on the other end of the leash. An excited cry went up from the other investigators, who jumped in their vehicles. Eyre ran alongside Pikett, while Pikett's wife, Karen, followed in an SUV with James Bond. They cruised down Hanselman Road, a two-lane blacktop, for about half a mile, then took a hard left at Loop 463. Quincy loped along, her head bobbing between the air and the pavement. She crossed under U.S. 59 and led the officers up a wide overpass that went over Business 59. Pikett stopped, put Quincy in the vehicle to rest, and took out James Bond. He pulled the scent pad out of a Ziploc bag and held it to James Bond's nose. Again they were off.
By this point they were inside the Victoria city limits. James Bond, younger and faster than Quincy, took a left at Airline Road into a suburban neighborhood called Cimarron. The twenty-month-old bloodhound jogged through the quiet streets, finally stopping on Laguna Drive at Blackwell's house. A truck from a local TV station was parked across the street. It had been a five-and-a-half-mile journey from the victim's body to her home, but the dogs weren't finished. There was a killer to catch. So Pikett held one of the scent pads to Quincy's nose, and she took off again, turning onto the first street, Navajo Drive. At this point, Sheriff T. Michael O'Connor told Eyre that a "person of interest" in the case, Michael Buchanek, lived on the street. Buchanek had gone out on a couple of dates with Blackwell, and he had been questioned that morning. Now Quincy led Pikett and Eyre down Navajo, around a long bend, up a driveway, and to the front door of a brown brick home. It belonged to Buchanek.
He was not your typical suspect. The divorced father of two had been an officer with the sheriff's department for 24 years. He'd run the SWAT team, taught firearms classes, and had some experience with police dogs, rising to the rank of captain before retiring, in 2004, and taking a job with a contractor training police officers in Iraq. He had asked O'Connor to care for his children if anything happened to him while he was overseas and even left his friend a signed document granting him power of attorney. Buchanek had returned in late 2005, but only after being injured when a suicide bomber attacked his hotel.
The law enforcement officers all reconvened at ten o'clock at Cimarron Express, a nearby convenience store, buzzing with excitement about the break in the case. What was next, they asked the deputy? To be certain of the connection and to have probable cause for a search warrant, Pikett suggested a scent lineup. All he needed was a scent sample from Buchanek. O'Connor told Pikett about the document Buchanek had signed two years earlier; it was still sitting in an envelope in O'Connor's desk drawer. Pikett said that that would do, so O'Connor retrieved it. Pikett wiped a pad across the signature and put the gauze in a bag.
Some time before midnight, at Pikett's direction, detectives set up six paint cans twenty feet apart in the parking lot of the police station. Five of the cans contained scent samples from five other white males as foils; in the sixth was the scent pad that had been wiped along Buchanek's signature. Pikett then held the scent pad from the rope to the nose of James Bond and walked him along the cans. According to Pikett, James Bond "alerted" on the one that held Buchanek's scent. Pikett did the same with Quincy, using the scent pad from Blackwell's body, and Quincy also matched Buchanek's scent to the victim. Though Buchanek had denied having anything to do with Blackwell's murder, he officially became a suspect, and officers obtained a warrant to search his home and car. He was barred from his home, and his car was seized.
Six days later Pikett and Eyre conducted another lineup, this time with a scent taken directly from Buchanek's arm, in a grassy area of the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office. The three dogs did fourteen lineups using various scents from the crime scene. In every one, according to Pikett, the dogs picked Buchanek's scent. Once again, Pikett's dogs had nailed their man.
They did it again a year later, when in the summer of 2007 Pikett helped Houston police nab Ronald Curtis for a string of cell phone store burglaries. It wasn't long before Houston investigators called again, asking for help in solving a brutal triple slaying; Pikett and his hounds matched two men to the crime, Cedric Johnson and Curvis Bickham, both of whom were charged with capital murder. In March 2009 an officer with the Yoakum Police Department took a scent pad to Pikett after two women, on two separate Sunday mornings, had been attacked—one was raped and the other robbed. The pad had come from the hand of Calvin Miller, a mechanic who, an informant told police, had been buying a lot of cocaine lately. Pikett ran a series of scent lineups using all three dogs. Each one picked Miller.
Buchanek, Curtis, Johnson, Bickham, Miller: five men from three cities incriminated by one forensic technique. But they had one other thing in common: All five were innocent. In August 2006 the son of Blackwell's boyfriend confessed to her murder. The Houston burglaries continued while Curtis was in jail, and eventually the actual perpetrator was caught. In April 2009 another man confessed to the Houston murders. That same month Miller was exonerated by a DNA test. Between them, Curtis, Johnson, Bickham, and Miller spent nearly three years in jail, their lives shattered. Buchanek was more fortunate. He was never charged, but he had to deal with five months of stares and whispers. "My friends turned their backs on me," he says. "People from my church didn't want anything to do with me. I was locked in my house, crying and praying, trying to figure out why my world fell apart. I spent my adult life defending the Constitution. As far as I'm concerned, Pikett and the others walked all over it."
The unscientific method
What could be more terrifying than to be accused of a crime you didn't commit? How about to be accused by a forensic expert? This doesn't happen on popular television dramas like CSI, CSI: New York, and CSI: Miami. On those shows investigators and lab technicians confidently use often-fantastical techniques to solve violent crimes, like the time an examiner poured a special paste into a knife wound and extracted a replica of the murder weapon.
If Keith Pikett, Quincy, Clue, and James Bond were to appear on CSI, he would be quirky, they would be lovable, and the suspects would be 100 percent guilty. But can dogs—which are reliably used to track criminals and sniff out drugs and bombs—actually match scents in paint cans in a parking lot? We don't know. Various states have used scent lineups, but there's little science to back them up. Quincy, Clue, and James Bond had never had any standard training, and they had never been certified. Pikett (who declined to be interviewed for this story) had no specialized forensic training either, and his protocols and methodologies, which he developed himself, were primitive at best. "A gypsy reading tea leaves and chicken bones is probably as reliable as a dog doing a scent lineup," Steve Tyler, the current district attorney of Victoria County, told me. Yet Pikett worked on more than two thousand cases, helped indict more than one thousand suspects, and testified in forty cases as an expert witness before retiring this past February.
The truth is, police and prosecutors have been using questionable forensic techniques for years, things involving bite marks, blood-spatter patterns, and even ear and lip prints. They use them because they help solve crimes. But over the past decade we've begun to understand just how unscientific forensic science can be. In the lab and at the crime scene, unsound techniques have incriminated the wrong person time and again. The most visible evidence of this is the 252 DNA exonerations nationwide since 1989—many of which, according to the Innocence Project, involved some form of improper or faulty forensic science. And these exonerees were the ones whose stories had happy endings, saved by DNA taken from old crime-scene samples that had not been discarded; no one knows how many unlucky people convicted on faulty science still languish in prison.
Texas has had forty DNA exonerations, more than any other state, including several high-profile cases that involved forensic science. In 1986 David Pope, of Dallas, was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and sentenced to 45 years in prison based in part on the "voice-print identification" technology of a sound spectrograph that two analysts had used to compare his voice with one left on the victim's answering machine. Pope was exonerated by DNA in 2001. In 1994 hair-comparison analysis was used to wrongly send Michael Blair to death row for the murder of Ashley Estell, a seven-year-old Plano girl; he was also exonerated by a series of DNA tests. Some terrible forensic science mistakes have been discovered without the magic of DNA. Arson science was used in Fort Stockton in 1987 to convict Ernest Willis of murder and send him to death row. It took seventeen years to convince authorities that there was no actual science to the arson evidence, and in 2004 he was released. It turns out that even fingerprint analysis—the gold standard for most of the past century—can lead to mistakes. In 2004 three FBI fingerprint examiners and one independent one investigating the Madrid train bombing that killed 191 people made four unbelievable errors, matching a print found on a bag of detonators near the scene to the finger of Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim attorney from Oregon. He was sent to jail for two weeks, where he spent seven days in solitary confinement. It was a very public humiliation for the greatest crime-solving lab of all time—made worse when Mayfield sued the government and was awarded $2 million.
Today, law enforcement organizations and the legal system are facing a crucial moment in the history of forensic science. The Mayfield fiasco, coming on the heels of mistakes at state crime labs all over the country (most notoriously in Texas, where the Houston Police Department crime lab was closed in 2002 because of a series of problems), helped spur the federal government into action. In 2007 Congress authorized the National Academy of Sciences to investigate forensic science, and seventeen scientists, medical examiners, professors, and judges spent two years interviewing crime-lab personnel, police officers, lawyers, and scholars. Their report, released in February 2009, was a detailed summary of the "serious problems" of the forensic science system. Most disciplines had no standardized protocols, oversight was inconsistent or nonexistent, and education and training requirements varied across jurisdictions. There was too much room for human error. The report slammed techniques like bite-mark and hair comparisons, but it also went after fingerprint analysis, which the NAS said was essentially subjective. In fact, except for biological disciplines, like DNA (which has a standardized methodology in which scientists examine a person's genetic profile by comparing thirteen specific locations on the chromosome), the report found that "forensic science professionals have yet to establish either the validity of their approach or the accuracy of their conclusions." And the courts—the gatekeepers of the whole process—"have been utterly ineffective in addressing this problem."
Invalid science, ineffective courts, and the ultimate punishment: A few months after the NAS report was released, the country got an idea of just how disastrous a forensic science mistake could be when the New Yorker published a long story about the Cameron Todd Willingham case. Willingham had been convicted of murdering his three children by setting fire to his family's Corsicana home in 1991, and he had been executed in 2004. The guilty verdict came primarily because of the testimony of two longtime arson investigators—an assistant fire chief and a deputy fire marshal—neither of whom had much education in the actual science of fire. The two men sleuthed their way through the burned-out structure, and though they found no indisputable physical evidence of arson in the house—no gas can, no kerosene, no matches—they did find, on the floor of the children's bedroom, strange marks that they identified as "pour patterns," which indicated that an accelerant had been used. They also found "crazed glass," pieces of broken window suffused with spiderweb cracks, which suggested that an accelerant had been used, causing the fire to burn superfast and superhot. And they found charring under a threshold plate; common sense indicated that an accelerant had been poured there too. By the time their tour was complete, they believed the fire had been intentionally set.
Willingham protested his innocence until his execution. Afterward, others began protesting too, including seven contemporary arson scientists and investigators, some of whom had done actual science experiments and analytical chemistry on fires and all of whom were stunned at the lack of hard science used to determine that the fire was arson. Each of the seven reached the conclusion that every indicator of arson the two original investigators had found was invalid. "The investigators had poor understandings of fire science and failed to acknowledge or apply the contemporaneous understanding of the limitations of fire indicators," wrote Craig Beyler, a nationally recognized fire scientist, in an August 2009 report to the state's new Forensic Science Commission, a panel founded by the Legislature to investigate faulty or negligent forensic science. "Their methodologies did not comport with the scientific method or the process of elimination. A finding of arson could not be sustained."
The Willingham case got national attention this October when, two days before Beyler was to testify publicly before the commission, Governor Rick Perry replaced three members, including attorney Sam Bassett, its chairman. The new chairman, Williamson County DA John Bradley, promptly canceled the meeting. Everyone from texas monthly to CNN called the move an attempt to cover up the truth: Since there was no evidence of arson, there was no crime, and hence Texas could have executed an innocent man. When Bradley finally scheduled his first meeting as the new chair, in January, he moved it to Harlingen (the previous twelve meetings had been held in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio). But instead of discussing the Willingham case, he spent the whole meeting talking about policies and procedures.
"every contact leaves its trace"
It would not have surprised Willingham, Buchanek, Curtis, or any of the other victims of bad forensic science that the father of crime-scene investigation was a fictional character. Sherlock Holmes, the subject of four novels and 56 short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927, was one of the most popular characters in fiction in a new era of science, a man who used his superior sleuthing skills to solve baffling crimes. He was the first to analyze handwriting, typewriter-key impressions, and footprints, connecting evidence at the scene with the person who left it. He had superb observational and deductive-reasoning skills that allowed him to make superhuman leaps of logic, as when he once deduced that Watson had a "careless servant girl" because of the six parallel marks on the inside of his shoe, which the detective saw in the flickering light of a fireplace. He was always right, as are his modern-day TV counterparts. Holmes was also a cocaine addict who wasn't above breaking the law (theft and extortion, for example) to solve a crime. It's a wonder he didn't send any innocents to prison. Of course, he wasn't real.
But what followed him was. A Frenchman named Edmond Locard established the first police lab in Lyons in 1910, where he could analyze evidence left at a crime scene. Locard had studied medicine and law, but more important, he had studied Holmes, and he frequently noted his admiration for Doyle and directed investigators to read him. Before Holmes had come along, few had thought to connect the criminal to the scene, and crimes were typically solved the old-fashioned way: by asking around or just compelling a suspect to confess. Locard revolutionized the inefficient business of crime-scene investigation with what came to be known as the Locard Exchange Principle: "Every contact leaves its trace."
Over the next three generations, this principle would become the cornerstone of forensic science. Out in the field, investigators used deductive logic and common sense to compare and match things left behind at crime scenes—a fingerprint, a strand of hair, a speck of blood—with the person suspected of leaving them. In the labs, forensic scientists developed new ways of helping them. "Crime labs arose from law enforcement," says Jay Siegel, a member of the NAS committee and the head of the forensics program at Indiana University—Purdue University. "And law enforcement's job is to get the bad guys off the street." The results were often convincing, as when police investigator Calvin Goddard solved the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre by comparing marks on bullets left at the scene with marks on bullets made from two submachine guns taken from Al Capone's men. Or when scientists took a huge step forward in 1937 with the discovery that Luminol could be used to test for the presence of blood.
Yet these advances were accompanied by theories and practices that seemed reasonable but were ultimately flawed. For example, the idea that if a hair found at a murder scene was the same color, thickness, and texture as one from the suspect, then the two could be reliably linked. Or that if a bite mark found on a body looked the same as an impression of the teeth of a suspect, he had left the bite mark. Or that two recorded voices could be matched. Imperfections were rarely analyzed, and basic assumptions were problematic—or outright wrong, because they had not been subjected to the scientific method. "There is not the scientific culture in a law enforcement agency that there is in a scientific agency," says Siegel. "They often don't pay attention to the scientific rigors needed to properly analyze and interpret forensic evidence."
One of the results of not paying attention to science was that no one ever looked closely at an inherent problem at the heart of these comparisons: the uniqueness fallacy. Folklore, intuition, and hundreds of crime movies and detective shows have led us to believe that every fingerprint, bite mark, voice pattern, or even strand of DNA is unique to a person, but in fact we don't know if this is true. "What law enforcement folks do is called 'individualizing,'" says Michael Saks, a leading authority on forensic science at Arizona State University. "They'll say, 'We know no two fingerprints are alike,' or 'Every single person has unique bite marks.' They say it, and everyone believes it, but no one knows if that's true. It can't be tested unless you test everyone on the planet."
The Ashley Estell case is a good example of what happens when comparisons are taken too far. Estell disappeared from a crowded Plano soccer field in September 1993. Her body was discovered six miles away by the side of a dirt road, and crime-scene analysts found black hairs on and near her body. When a criminologist spotted Michael Blair, who had dark hair, driving by, he insisted the police follow him. They pulled him over, and it turned out that Blair was a convicted child molester. He also had a stuffed toy rabbit and a leaflet about the search in his car.
Blair was interrogated for nine hours, and a few days later, he was arrested. Police had no fingerprints, blood, or eyewitnesses to tie Blair to Estell or the scene, but they had found hairs in Blair's car that, according to a crime-lab analyst, "appeared similar" to Estell's hair. Hairs in a clump were also found at a park two miles from the soccer field and appeared to have come from both Blair and Estell.
At trial, the most important witness was the analyst, who made three major connections between Blair and Estell: Those hairs from the car had the same "microscopic characteristics" as hers; two small black hairs found on and near her body had Mongolian characteristics, which could apply to Blair, who was half Thai; and a fiber found on her body was similar to fibers from the rabbit. The jury found Blair guilty in 27 minutes. One juror later said, "He wore his fingerprints in his hair."
Actually, he didn't. A series of DNA tests, taken between 1998 and 2007, found that none of the hairs connected Blair to Estell and that the rabbit fiber could have come from half a million different stuffed animals. Blair was taken off death row, and Estell's killer was never found.
The lesson from the Blair saga is that using a microscope to compare a hair found at a crime scene with one from a suspect is too unreliable, too human. It depends too much on interpretation and not enough on hard science. And this, says Saks, is the difference between DNA and other methods. "The DNA scientists know they can't prove two people don't share the same DNA profile," he says, "so they develop a methodology of stating it. That's why they speak in terms of probabilities." DNA analysts say, for example, that two people could have all thirteen locations of their profiles match, but the odds of that happening are one in 200 billion. This is a "statistical model for estimating random match probabilities." Because other forensic science techniques don't have these statistical models, analysts can't give probabilities. What they can give, and what they have offered since Locard's time, are opinions and judgments, which can be as unreliable and unsteady as the people who make them. Forensic science is done not in a vacuum but in the lab and at the crime scene, where analysts are often influenced by the people around them. This is called bias, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a human thing.
But it's a dangerous thing when it comes to law enforcement. "When you work in a crime lab," says Vincent DiMaio, a former medical examiner in Bexar County, "you get a mind-set, a view of the world, based on the people you hang around with. Since crime labs are often run by police agencies, analysts spend a lot of time with cops and other analysts." Besides the law enforcement mind-set, there's a too-much-information problem, says Saks. "Our perceptions and judgments play tricks on us. If I'm an analyst and I know other stuff that says, 'This is the guy,' I'll see similarities that aren't really there." Carol Huser, the coroner in La Plata County, in Colorado, told me, "In a crime lab, you typically work closely with the police and prosecutors and are given information that can introduce unintended bias and cause subtle shifts in point of view. It's awfully easy to come to see yourself as being on the side of the angels, a member of a team whose goal is to get the bad guys."
Especially when the suspect is someone like Blair, a five-foot-tall child molester whom a prosecutor referred to as a "subterranean little troll." The difficulty, says Sam Bassett, "is staying true to scientific principles in the midst of an emotionally challenging case where there may be influence from your employer or from friends in law enforcement." People under pressure discern patterns that aren't there; they join the conclusions of other members of their team, even if they don't really believe them. This was the cause of the notorious mistake in the 2004 Madrid bombing case. How could FBI fingerprint examiners—the best in the business—make such an error? The Department of Justice investigated and found it was simple: They were law enforcement agents and they were human. They had found ten genuine points of comparison between the bag print and Mayfield's, but then their biases got in the way, and they found others that didn't exist. They overlooked or rationalized "subtle but important differences" between the two. The second examiner knew that the first had claimed to have found a match, and he followed suit. The Department of Justice found that the examiners had no idea that Mayfield was a Muslim, so the bias wasn't because of his religion. It was the human bias of wanting to nail the bad guy.
The legend of keith Pikett
The rise and fall of deputy Keith Pikett shows just how vulnerable the system is to the vagaries of bad forensic science. Pikett was born in New York on January 27, 1947. He went to high school outside Buffalo and college at the University of South Alabama, where he earned a degree in chemistry and met his future wife, Karen. He also earned a "master of sport science—sport coaching" degree from the U.S. Sports Academy, in Mobile. In 1979 the couple moved to Houston and settled into teaching—elementary school for her, high school chemistry and physics for him. Ten years later the two dog lovers got a four-month-old bloodhound named Samantha. They were intrigued by the breed and its legendary powers of sniffing, and the couple found that she could follow rudimentary scent trails. They began training her, a process Pikett later described as "You're just playing hide-and-seek. Chase." They would hold a smelly handkerchief up to her nose, say, "Seek," and get her to follow a trail.
In 1991 they took her to a trailing camp in Illinois, and she successfully sniffed where other dogs had failed. An impressed observer told the Piketts, "That dog needs a job." So upon their return to Texas, they began taking Samantha on search-and-rescue missions, helping the police find missing children and elderly people. Soon they got a second dog, Columbo. The Piketts started going to seminars, where Pikett, he later testified, learned from "old-timers." Around 1993, Pikett recalled, someone in law enforcement said to him, "'Well, that's nice, but can you find criminals?' It just got bigger and bigger."
In 1994 Pikett began taking his trailing bloodhounds to the next logical step: using them to match scents and identify people in a lineup. It made sense—if dogs could sniff out a scent on a trail, why couldn't they match a person's scent in a lineup? Many scientists believe that we each have a unique scent. Ken Furton, a chemistry professor at Florida International University, says that we each have an "odorprint," which is made up of 63 compounds, such as acids and ketones. And in fact, scent lineups have been used for years in Florida, New York, California, and Arizona, as well as in Europe. Doug Lowry, of the National Police Bloodhound Association, says that his group used humans in their lineups, which Pikett sometimes did too. "This method was passed down through the ages," Lowry told me.
When trailing or tracking, dogs sniff out the dead skin cells (sweetened with bacteria) that are constantly flaking off when we touch things or just move through the world, over grass, soil, or even sidewalks. But simple trailing and tracking is much easier than matching scents and picking someone out of a lineup. Dogs are creatures of habit with short attention spans. They are easily distracted and catch colds and suffer allergies. No one knows exactly what they are doing—or smelling. They can't tell us their methodology. Studies do show that dogs can discern one scent from another, though they make mistakes at least 15 percent of the time, according to an extensive 1994 study published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Then there's the handler. In the early 1900's, an amazing German horse named Clever Hans put on public demonstrations where he answered math problems by tapping one of his hooves, say, eight times after being asked what was four plus four. But eventually someone figured out that Hans could do this only if he could see his handler, who unconsciously raised his head slightly when Hans reached the correct answer. Hans was clever in the way many animals are—they can read us, just as we can read them. Dogs in particular are adept at interpreting their master's body language and even emotional state, and as anyone who owns dogs will tell you, they want to please their masters more than anything.
In Holland during the nineties, scientists and the police figured out a way to keep the handler from influencing scent lineups. First the dogs are trained to run scent lineups exclusively for an entire year. When they are ready, an actual lineup is done in a clean room, using sterilized stainless-steel tubes that are held for five minutes by the suspect and six other people (five foils and one control person). The dog—on his own—walks through four lineups. The first two are control lineups to make sure the dog is willing and able to perform; he must twice pick out the scent of the control person. If he does this properly, he is given the scent of the suspect. If he gets it right the first time, he does it again. When a Dutch dog alerts, he does something affirmative, such as bite at the tube, bark, or lie down. Even with all these safeguards, the Dutch have had high error rates—alerting on the wrong man 6 percent of the time and failing to alert at all 32 percent of the time.
Pikett devised his lineups on his own, using gauze pads, paint cans (which he occasionally cleaned in the dishwasher), and Ziploc bags; his methodology was simple, he would later say: "It's only a couple of steps." He would walk the dog along the cans and look for him or her to alert. His dogs' alerts were less distinct than those of drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs, which bark, jump, whine, scratch, or just sit down. Pikett would later say he watched his dogs' body language, looking at their head, ears, tail, and legs. "That's called reading your dog," he once testified. He didn't use blind or double-blind procedures ("I don't feel it's necessary") and never used gloves in his lineups. Neither he nor his dogs were ever supervised by others in the department or certified (there's no industry group).
In 1997 Pikett got a new dog, Quincy, and used a lineup to nab Marcus Cotton for murdering a Fort Bend County deputy. Pikett also testified in court, and on the stand he padded his résumé by claiming he had a master's degree in chemistry—not the only time he would say this. That same year Pikett began working with the FBI, which, he later said, "started flying me around the country to work on some cases." He was getting so popular that in 1998 he retired from teaching; attended the Gus George Law Enforcement Academy, in Richmond; and became a full-time Fort Bend County deputy sheriff and the head of the K-9 Patrol Unit.
Over the next twelve years, Pikett and his dogs became legends. In 1999 he used a scent lineup to help the Texas Rangers figure out that one man had killed five people in Houston and a couple small towns, which turned out to be true when they caught Rafael Resendiz Ramirez, a.k.a. the Railroad Killer. In 2002 Pikett was named Officer of the Year by the 100 Club, a southeast Texas police support group, and Quincy was inducted into the Texas Animal Hall of Fame. Pikett printed up baseball-like trading cards for his dogs, each of whom wore a badge. He taught seminars and lectured at conferences for district attorneys. Mostly, though, he helped law enforcement all over the state with trailing and lineups. He used a lineup to help police nail the triggerman in Bart Whitaker's elaborate scheme to murder his Houston family in 2003. Many times authorities called Pikett to corroborate other evidence. For example, one morning in May 2007 an Elgin detective asked Pikett for help indicting a man in custody for rape; the detective took scent pads from the suspect, drove three hours to Fort Bend County, and got validation from Pikett's dogs about the suspect, who later confessed.
Other times, as with Michael Buchanek, Calvin Miller, and Ronald Curtis, the police needed probable cause to get a search or arrest warrant, so they called Pikett, who was happy to oblige. Curtis had already had the charges against him dismissed by a judge when a police officer decided to take another run at him. The cop got Curtis to provide a scent pad, which was taken to Pikett, whose dogs implicated Curtis.
Dog-scent lineups had become an invaluable forensic tool for law enforcement, while Pikett was the go-to guy to catch criminals, even when the abilities of his dogs were clearly too good to be true. For example, last year both the Texas Rangers and the state attorney general's office employed Pikett to run scent lineups on items such as clothing, a Dr Pepper bottle, and vehicle floor mats that had connections to two murder investigations, from 1988 and 1992, respectively. In their affidavits for warrants to get scent pads from suspects Lightsey Saul Jr. and Anthony Graves, a sergeant with the Rangers and an investigator for the AG's office each wrote that Pikett had told them "there is a strong likelihood" the scents from the killers would still be on those things 21 and 17 years later—and that his dogs could identify them. Not only did the investigators believe Pikett, so did the judges who granted the warrants. To no one's surprise, the dogs matched both Saul and Graves to the evidence.
The experts
Pikett's dogs became superheroes to police and prosecutors all over the state. By last summer, Pikett estimated his three dogs had performed 6,756 scent and live lineups and made only five mistakes, though he had no records to back this up. When he was asked at a trial in 2007 if he thought it was important to figure out if his bloodhounds were reliable in some kind of measurable way, he replied, "No. Everybody in the country calls me, so I guess that's something."
Of course, Pikett wasn't the first "expert" to become a popular witness for the prosecution. Ever since the Supreme Court's landmark 1923 Frye decision, which held that a forensic technique (in this case, lie detectors) had to have "general acceptance" in the scientific community before it would be admitted in court, the law has used several standards for allowing new evidence. Ultimately, though, "reliability" is the touchstone, and the judge is the gatekeeper. The problem is that judges are trained in the law, not the sciences, so they allow all kinds of experts and testimony. "As long as a judge says you're an expert, you're an expert," says state representative Pete Gallego, a former prosecutor from Alpine who is the chair of the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. "Anybody can be an expert on anything." Cathy Cochran, who serves on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, says there is some truth to that. "We judges have not been sufficiently skeptical of forensic science and forensic scientists. But if you don't know why something works and you don't know the principle behind it, you ought to stay away from it."
This was true enough in Pikett's case. After he first testified, he kept getting called back, to the constant annoyance of defense attorneys, who often objected to his expertise. In 2002 an appellate court expressly approved scent lineups as sufficiently reliable and found that Pikett was sufficiently qualified. The judge noted how the deputy and his dogs had never made a mistake, adding that Pikett "holds a master's degree in chemistry."
One of the reasons judges tend to let in shaky experts and expertise, says Guy Wellborn, a professor of the law of evidence at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, is that they don't like to unilaterally turn down something they don't understand. "It puts judges in an uncomfortable position," he says. Huser, the Colorado coroner, told me about a case in which she was a witness for the prosecution: "The defense lawyer questioned whether I had sufficient expertise to testify. The judge just shrugged and said, 'She knows way more than I do, and that's the standard!'"
Even if judges occasionally let in unreliable evidence, the thinking has always been that the jury could sort it out. Unfortunately, the jury also has to learn about science from the experts, and this, says Wellborn, is not always such a good thing. "What predicts whether a jury will believe an expert is how confident he is, but unfortunately there's no reason to think there's any correlation between confidence and accuracy. Being highly confident and adamant in your conclusion is not a sign of being a good scientist. It's a sign of being a bad scientist. A good scientist is cautious, admits other hypotheses, acknowledges doubt. If you talk that way as an expert, you won't be hired back." To make matters worse, the defense often can't afford experts of its own to provide balance to the testimony. "In a criminal trial, the resources are usually all on one side," says Wellborn. "The state has a machine running 24/7 generating forensics."
Pikett and his dogs became the prosecutor's best ally. The deputy was confident and folksy; his bloodhounds were trustworthy, loyal, and error-free. Attorney Steven John Gilbert represented two clients convicted in part on Pikett's testimony: "He would get up there and say, 'My dogs can smell those thousands of skin cells even when they've been on the ground for four months,' and juries were eating it up."
It's in the nature of experts to exaggerate, says Saks. But even when experts are cautious on the witness stand, their testimony can be misinterpreted or misused. In the Blair case, the expert witness said that hairs found in Blair's car had the same "microscopic characteristics" as Estell's. That didn't mean they definitively came from the same person. However, the prosecutor eliminated any ambiguity in his closing remarks, telling the jury, "You can call it a link, you can call it association, you can call it a match." The jury was sold.
According to Vincent DiMaio, another phrase that confuses jurors is "consistent with." "Jurors hear 'A is consistent with B' and think that means they're the same. It doesn't necessarily mean that." Philip Wischkaemper, one of Blair's appellate attorneys, agrees: "Rain is 'consistent with' clouds in the sky, but it's cloudy here in Lubbock right now, and it's not raining."
Ultimately experts are doomed by the very nature of science to not know what they are talking about. For example, back in the eighties arson investigators genuinely believed that certain marks on the floor of a burned-out house were evidence that an accelerant had been used. Now they know better.
Science came too late for Cameron Todd Willingham, but it arrived just in time for another death row inmate, Cathy Lynn Henderson. Henderson was babysitting three-month-old Brandon Baugh in her Pflugerville home in January 1994 when the baby fell and died from multiple skull fractures. Henderson said she had accidentally dropped Brandon while reaching to answer the phone, but Travis County medical examiner Robert Bayardo disagreed. At the time, most scientists believed that a simple skull fracture indicated an accidental fall, whereas multiple fractures suggested some kind of violence, and he ruled that the baby's fractures indicated homicide. At trial the assistant DA asked Bayardo if a fall from Henderson's arms could have caused the fractures. "No," he replied. "That's incredible." For injuries as bad as those, Bayardo testified, "He would have to have fallen from a height higher than a two-story building."
Henderson was found guilty in May 1995, sent to death row, and eventually given a June 2007 execution date. But between 1994 and 2007 a lot of things changed in the field of infant head trauma; biomechanical research had led some pathologists and doctors to conclude that babies could get severe head injuries with far less force than anyone had previously thought. In other words, a short fall could cause catastrophic skull injury—and Henderson could have been telling the truth. Her lawyers showed this research to Bayardo, who filed a stunning affidavit in May 2007. "Based on the physical evidence in the case," he wrote, "I cannot determine with a reasonable degree of medical certainty whether Brandon Baugh's injuries resulted from an intentional act or an accidental fall. In fact, had the new scientific information been available to me in 1995, I would not have been able to testify the way I did . . ." Two days before Henderson was scheduled to die, the Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution and sent the case back to the trial court.
"Reckless Disregard"
Last June the cracks finally started appearing in Pikett's world: Not only did the state lose a case in which he'd testified, but for the first time a judge refused to allow him to take the stand. "Deputy Pikett's methods fail the reliability test," wrote Brady Elliott, of the Fort Bend County district court, "and therefore I will not qualify him as an expert." In October the attorney general's office—which had been pursuing both the Saul and Graves cases—declared that it had "imposed a moratorium prohibiting the use of scent evidence." (The investigations of both men are ongoing.) Then came the media scrutiny, including a long story in the New York Times. It was all too much for Pikett, who retired in February. "When all those things hit," Sheriff Wright told me, "none of the agencies wanted to call him for work because they were afraid of being sued."
Indeed, fifteen years of relying on an unreliable expert finally caught up with the State of Texas. In 2009 Buchanek, Curtis, Johnson, Bickham, and Miller all filed federal civil rights suits against the cities of Victoria and Houston and the counties of Victoria and Fort Bend, as well as various law enforcement officers, including, of course, Pikett. The suits accuse them of negligence, poor methodology, and outright fraud, of acting "unreasonably and in reckless disregard for the truth." The scent lineups, one suit declares, were "rigged to be result oriented."
Three noted dog experts analyzed a video of the fourteen lineups used against Buchanek; all three agreed that the dogs didn't go anywhere near some of the cans Pikett said they'd alerted on. "This is the most primitive evidential police procedure I have ever witnessed," Robert Coote, an English police-dog expert, wrote in an affidavit for Buchanek. "If it was not for the fact that it is a serious matter, I could have been watching a comedy." Doug Lowry, of the National Police Bloodhound Association, also provided an affidavit in which he argued that Pikett had been telling his dogs what to do; Coote agreed, adding, "It appears that it was Mr. Pikett who actually stopped walking when reaching the cans containing the suspect scent." Steven Nicely, the owner of K9 Consultants of America, described Pikett in an affidavit as "an unprofessional charlatan." All three saw nothing to indicate that the dogs had alerted on anything. Kevin Kocher, of the National Bloodhound Training Institute, who also saw the video, told me, "Those dogs showed none of the behaviors that dogs that are 'working' show. If a dog is working, you'll see the behavior, either a passive alert or an aggressive one. I mean, a dog is a dog."
Since Pikett's dogs consistently put innocent people at the scenes of violent crimes, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that Pikett was, in Lowry's words, "cueing his dogs." In a reply to Buchanek's suit, Pikett filed a motion for summary judgment, in which he denied "intentionally implicat[ing]" Buchanek in the lineups, saying he hadn't known which cans held his scent. As to why his dogs consistently matched Buchanek's scent to the crime scene, he stated, "There certainly could be non-incriminating reasons why Buchanek's scent/his skin cells could be detected/present on the victim's body." Pikett also defended his dogs' alerts. There is, he wrote, a "unique and intimate relationship between the dogs and their handler, wherein the means of communication becomes clear and obvious between them, although it might appear subtle, incomprehensible, or undetectable to others."
In his complaint, Buchanek claims the dogs didn't follow any scents to his or Blackwell's homes. They were "reportedly directed there" by Pikett and other officers. Sheriff O'Connor, who was part of the caravan following Pikett, denies this. "I watched it all very closely," he told me. "I saw those dogs pulling him. Sure it was unusual, but I've trained hunting dogs. I've seen a Brittany dog track a bird for a mile." Pikett insisted that he "was not leading or directing his bloodhounds, but rather he was following the dogs, during their trailing activities." He also contended, "'Vehicle trails' are not impossible," adding that his dogs had done them before three dozen times, at least in practice sessions.
"Dogs just can't do that," says Ed Frawley, a famed breeder and trainer. Echoing the other experts, Frawley noted the 24 hours that had elapsed between the time Blackwell's body had been dumped and the dogs started on the trail, the 5.5-mile distance, the heavy March wind (up to 28 miles per hour), and the estimated 13,000 vehicles traveling along Loop 463 that day. "Dogs cannot follow the scent of a person in a car."
How did Keith Pikett, a well-intentioned chemistry teacher who just wanted to help the police, become Deputy Pikett, "unprofessional charlatan"? And how much did law enforcement enable him? Attorney Jeff Blackburn, who represented numerous defendants in the notorious Tulia drug cases against a lying undercover detective, says, "There will always be careerist cops bold enough to seize an opportunity to make names for themselves by testifying against someone. They get too big for their britches, become the star of the show in their mind. Before you know it, they're inventing stuff." Shirley Baccus-Lobel, an appellate lawyer for Richard Winfrey Sr.—who was convicted of a bloody 2004 murder on the testimony of a jailhouse snitch and several Pikett lineups, one of which took place three years after the murder along the third-base line of a Little League baseball diamond—says law enforcement can be part of the problem: "The police are doing it because it's easy. It's easier than the grunt work involved in walking the streets, developing leads. 'Just call the dog guy. He can do it in an hour!'" Even Sheriff Wright agreed with this notion: "My opinion of what happened in some of these cases is that some of the investigators relied too much on dogs and not enough on shoe leather to beat out the evidence."
I asked Wright if any of the controversy had made him doubt Pikett's work: "Not necessarily. We've known in the past he's missed some." Of course, the big question now is, How many?
Hard science
Even the most vocal critic of the criminal justice system wouldn't argue that we should give up on using forensic science to solve crimes because of practices such as scent lineups or officers like Pikett. Crime is messy, crime scenes are imperfect, and we shouldn't be slaves to the needs of perfect science—or "quantified random match probability data." Fingerprints, for all their problems, are essential to the crime-solving process. Even things like dog-scent lineups, if done as the Dutch do them, can help investigate crimes, exclude suspects, and nail the bad guy. As Siegel says, "Just because some of the methods used in the analysis of scientific evidence haven't been scientifically validated yet doesn't mean they are invalid."
But if the system is going to be fixed, putting some actual hard science into forensic science would be a good place to start. The NAS report made several recommendations for reform in the labs, such as creating a new federal agency to oversee various disciplines, establishing rules that standardize the terminology experts can use in court, and removing labs from the control of law enforcement agencies. State representative Gallego held a hearing in January to discuss changing the rules of evidence to keep things like dog-scent lineups out of the Texas courts. He thinks the way to fix the system is to put more responsibility on judges: "We need to find a way to make judges more cautious, to make sure the gatekeeper keeps the gate—lets in the good evidence, keeps out the bad, like these scent lineups."
A little more caution, or even skepticism, on the part of law enforcement in the quest to solve crimes wouldn't hurt either. If the history of forensic science has shown us anything, it's this: Whether we're talking about voice prints, hair, or the smells that waft from our bodies, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Prodigal Sun
Solar energy was a rising star in the '70s -- until it was banished by the powers that be. Are we ready for its return?
— By Arthur Allen
It was the winter of 1981 and the country was just beginning to feel the sharp edges of the Reagan revolution. Denis Hayes, head of the fledgling Solar Energy Research Institute, was walking through the halls of the Department of Energy when an acquaintance came up to him and said, "Has Frank lowered the boom on you yet?" The Frank in question was an acting assistant secretary, but the boom, it turned out, was falling from the top. President Reagan had once been General Electric's most camera-ready tout, and his administration viewed alternative energy with open scorn. "They're going to kill your study," the gray-suited informant warned Hayes, before slipping down the corridor.
The study, a yearlong investigation by some of the nation's leading scientists, provided a convincing blueprint for a solar future. It showed that alternative energy could easily meet 28 percent of the nation's power needs by 2000. The only thing that solar and wind and other nonpolluting energy sources needed was a push, the study concluded -- the same research funding and tax credits provided to other energy industries, and a government committed to lead the way to reduced reliance on fossil fuels. But the messenger in the corridor signaled that the solar future would only be won with a little guerrilla warfare. Hayes phoned a colleague at his office in Golden, Colorado, and told him to make 100 copies of the study and circulate them around the country. Energy Secretary Jim Edwards killed the study, all right, but not before it had been published in the Congressional Record.
It was a bold gesture, but not enough to alter the outcome. The quashed study proved to be the beginning of the end. The budget for the solar institute -- which President Jimmy Carter had created to spearhead solar innovation -- was slashed from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Scientists who had left tenured university jobs to work under Hayes were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. The squelching of the institute -- later partly re-funded and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory -- marked the start of Reagan's campaign against solar power. By the end of 1985, when Congress and the administration allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era had faded. The solar water heater President Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 was dismantled and junked. Solar water heating went from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses went bankrupt. "It died. It's dead," says Peter Barnes, whose San Francisco solar- installation business had 35 employees at its peak. "First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up," says Jim Benson, another solar activist of the day.
Today solar and other renewable alternatives provide barely five percent of America's energy. The solar-powered present never arrived, postponed by opposition from big utility companies, government support that favored oil and nuclear, and unproven solar technology that left the entire concept of solar energy open to ridicule. The story of what happened to solar during that first, failed revolution is more than a footnote to forgotten history. It provides a primer for the current resurgence in alternative energy, an indication of what we can expect from solar power in the decades ahead. Although the solar panels came off the White House 14 years ago, the sun continues to shine, an obvious reminder of natural hope, bathing the earth in enough heat and light every hour to provide the world's energy needs for a year. It brightens the sulfuric haze above coal-fired power plants, splinters into psychedelic spectra in smoggy sunsets, reflects off the concrete cooling towers of Three Mile Island and Trojan. It powers highway signs and wristwatches and more than a million homes and offices and schools, fueling a worldwide industry that has grown from $150 million in 1990 to $1.2 billion in 1998.
This time around, alternative energy is being fueled by an unlikely coalition of Big Oil, green marketers, antimonopoly libertarians, and solar pioneers who survived the '70s. Energy deregulation has also revived hopes for cleaner, brighter power. In perhaps the most promising development, some individual homes and businesses with solar panels are now connecting directly to the existing power grid. By generating more electricity than they need and supplying the excess energy to utilities, homeowners can actually make their electric meters run backward. "In the 1970s everybody wanted to be off the grid," says Scott Sklar, executive director of the Solar Energy Industries Association in Arlington, Virginia. "It was part of the back-to-the-land thing. But it took a lot of money and energy to build these grids -- and we should use them."
The solar future first dawned in the fall of 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, when Arab states halted oil shipments to try to force the United States and Europe to withhold support for Israel. The 1973 and 1979 oil embargoes drove the price of a barrel of crude oil from less than $4 in 1970 to more than $22 a decade later. The crisis created an awareness of U.S. dependence on foreign oil, spurring research into alternatives. Although nuclear power received the most funding, hopes that cleaner sources of energy would power the future made the 1970s a good time to be technically adept and politically engaged in Washington. A corner of government opened itself to young idealists.
The solar pioneers of the '70s were a mixed lot -- anti-war activists with technical training, counterculture farmers, computer nerds with a conscience. Jim Benson, a University of Missouri geology graduate, arrived in Washington in 1972 to work on computers for a mortgage company. "It was the beginning of the winding down of the Vietnam War and the winding up of Watergate, and it was a fascinating time to arrive from the provinces," he recalls. "My next-door neighbors were CIA agents. They could see I was confused so they gave me The Limits to Growth. That's really what got me interested in solar energy." Benson studied urban planning and joined the solar division of the Energy and Resources Development Agency (ERDA), which later became the Department of Energy.
In those days, no one even knew with any precision how much sunlight struck different parts of the country. "The first thing we did was set up a network of solar monitors," recalls Benson. He also helped create a small-grants program for energy conservation technology, which attracted more than 20,000 applications a year at its peak before the Reagan administration did away with it. Some of the proposals were funded, but most were ignored or sent back. "Not just skimpy ill-defined ideas were rejected," wrote Texas journalist Ray Reece in his 1979 account, The Sun Betrayed, "but proposals for innovations so simple and yet so brilliant in concept as to be virtually fail-safe, effective, economical." Most of the initial research money went to large universities and corporations like General Electric, which was awarded $2.8 million, and Martin Marietta, which received $3.5 million. By the late 1970s, Exxon, Mobil, Arco, and other oil companies had bought out many patents for the photovoltaic cells that collect sunlight and convert it to electricity, prompting consumer watchdogs like Ralph Nader to sound the alarm that companies with vested interests in "hard" energy were in position to smother "soft" innovations.
An investigation by the Center for Renewable Resources, an environmental advocacy group, found no evidence of a systematic oil industry effort to suppress solar power, but those involved in the alternative energy movement knew the energy industry was worried about the sun's potential. Larry Shirley, an activist with the center who now heads a solar research institute at North Carolina State University, remembers speaking with the CEO of a major utility. "He told me that photovoltaics were going to be the wave of the future," Shirley recalls. "He looked out his window and said he could imagine the power lines coming down." Then the utility executive turned to face Shirley. "Larry," he said, "why shouldn't I feel threatened by them right now?"
Even after the oil crisis, most federal research targeted nonrenewable energy sources. According to a recent analysis by the Congressional Research Service, 77 cents of every energy research dollar from 1973 to 1997 went to nuclear and fossil fuels. Only 14 cents went to alternative energy, and the remaining 9 cents supported energy conservation. The results show just how skewed spending priorities have been. Every nuclear plant ordered since 1974 has been canceled, and consumers will be stuck with at least $112 billion in "stranded costs" -- money utilities have sunk into nukes and other failed investments. Over the same period, by contrast, the efficiency of solar photovoltaic cells has leaped fivefold.
The last thing Jim Benson did at ERDA was to commission a study of the environmental impact of solar energy versus coal, nuclear, and other sources. When Benson's bosses got wind of the study's pro-solar conclusions, they tried to kill it. But just as Hayes would do some years later at DOE, Benson skirted protocol to get his message out. He sent out copies to reporters and activists. His bosses were not pleased. "I was accused of skewing the results to favor solar energy and conservation," recalls Benson, "but actions speak louder than words. Where is synthetic fuel today? Where is nuclear energy? They weren't clean or cost-effective. But look at solar."
Jimmy Carter's narrow victory in the 1976 presidential election warmed solar hopes. Before the inauguration, Benson, Hayes, alternative-energy guru Amory Lovins, and others were invited to a retreat in Georgia where they drew up the Wolf Creek Statement, a document that helped shape the new administration's energy plan. Politi- cally speaking, Sun Day -- May 3, 1978 -- was the peak of support for solar energy in the United States. U.N. representative Andrew Young took part in a sunrise ceremony on the East River in New York. Jimmy Carter, at a rainy Colorado rally, announced new tax incentives and solar research programs; Rosalynn Carter donned a Sun Day T-shirt at a press conference with Denis Hayes, the event's leading organizer. In subsequent years, the Carter administration haltingly introduced legislation that helped create a fledgling solar industry, its most visible arm being rooftop solar water heaters.
Then came Reagan. "If Jimmy Carter had been reelected president, we would now have a quarter or so of the nation's energy resources coming from renewables," Hayes says. "It was a clear, calculated campaign by the DOE in the years of the Reagan administration to crush the solar energy program of the federal government, driving many of the most talented people out of the field."
Not all the solar veterans share Hayes' perspective. To be sure, there were vested interests, but as a clunky, expensive, and often inefficient technology, solar sometimes left itself open to derision. The powerful symbolism of placing solar panels atop the White House was offset, for example, by the solar-heated reviewing stand Carter ordered for his inaugural parade. It didn't heat very well. "So much for solar energy," Vice President Walter Mondale was heard to mutter as he left the ceremony, blowing into his chapped hands. In California, rip-off artists built leaky solar water heaters, abusing the mellow idealism of their trade to bilk thousands of modest homeowners. And even some of the model solar-heated buildings created in the utopian spirit of the day haven't panned out.
"The glass panels would break and we'd have water dripping onto the sidewalk and need jackhammers to break up the ice," says Linda Groo, registrar at Terraset Elementary School in Reston, Virginia. The earth-insulated school, built in 1977 as a gift from the government of Saudi Arabia, was intended to show the desert kingdom's commitment to human progress at a time when Americans were vilifying Arabs as greedy oil sheikhs. But some classrooms were too hot and others were too cold, and the kids threw rocks at the solar panels. It was new technology and it had bugs. "We tore it out about 12 years ago," Groo says. "It really didn't work out so well."
Others think that solar tax credits were mishandled. In 1983, a homeowner could pay $5,000 to have a solar water heater installed in Virginia and get more than $3,000 of that back in state and federal tax credits. The prospect of a quick buck drew companies to the solar industry that had no commitment to the technology. "We had three crews putting up 10 or 11 systems every week in 1984," says Al Rich, then a district manager for American Solar King, which marketed its installed heating systems through Sears. The federal credits disappeared on December 31, 1985, and so did American Solar King. Rich was reduced to peddling solar heating systems out of his home. "In this business," Rich says with the resignation of a bruised but still faithful devotee of solar power, "you get used to a lot of ups and downs."
Solar, of course, isn't the only industry to receive tax support. The oil industry has enjoyed billions in breaks in the form of depletion allowances, and utilities have received billions in subsidies for nuclear development from taxpayers and consumers. If solar tax credits had been phased out slowly, instead of disappearing overnight, the technology would have gotten better faster. And implementing stronger incentives today could feed demand, creating economies of scale in solar production that would boost its viability. "Increased volume has brought down the price of photovoltaics, but the curve is flattening out," says J. Michael Davis, president of Kyocera Solar Inc., a PV distributor in Scottsdale, Arizona. "To cut the price in half again is going to take a hell of a lot more volume."
Even without the support enjoyed by nuclear and fossil fuels, the promise of solar power has continued to grow. On a recent afternoon, the sun was shining on an array of black panels on the roof of BJ's Wholesale Club, located off Interstate 476 outside Philadelphia -- a most unlikely place for solar energy's renaissance, but as good an example as any of the likely shape of solar to come.
The 1,400 tiny panels atop BJ's were built by BP Solarex, a subsidiary purchased for $45 million last April by oil giant BP Amoco. Its chief executive, Sir John Browne, plans a sixfold increase in Solarex's revenues from photovoltaics by 2007. The panels atop BJ's send electricity directly into the existing power grid, thanks to utility deregulation in Pennsylvania that allows consumers to switch from their traditional utility to an independent energy provider. One of those providers, a Vermont firm called GreenMountain.com, now sells power from BJ's and other alternative sources to 100,000 customers -- all via the transmission lines owned by traditional utilities. In essence, the roof of the store has become a miniature solar-power plant, supplying enough energy through existing electric lines to light and cool a dozen homes.
Such rooftop generators signal a potential transformation of the power industry, one that industry observers say is likely to be implemented by nearly every state in the nation in the coming decade. To ensure that homes and businesses can connect their solar collectors directly to the grid, activists are leading a campaign that has already convinced 30 states to force utilities to purchase solar power fed into the grid at the same prices they charge consumers. Solar advocates hope that utilities, faced with competition from new, more agile power companies, will have an economic incentive to avoid costly new investments in coal-fired and nuclear plants. In short, the market itself could favor the creation of numerous small power stations -- including rooftop solar panels -- distributed around the grid.
Thanks in part to technical innovations, the price of converting solar energy to electricity has been cut in half over the past decade, making it economical in many areas. Some municipal utilities are starting to invest in solar: The city-owned utility in Los Angeles has pledged to help install 100,000 solar systems, while SMUD, the Sacramento-area utility, has provided financial incentives for hundreds of solar homes in recent years. The excess power from these tiny generating plants will save SMUD money by reducing its need to buy power from other utilities during peak hours.
Despite the potential of solar energy, the Clinton administration has expended little money on research and little political capital on securing new federal tax incentives. Industry officials say Clinton's predecessor, oilman George Bush, funded solar programs more consistently. In 1997, however, the Clinton administration did launch the Million Solar Roofs Initiative, an underfunded but ambitious plan to facilitate solar construction by bringing together architects, school builders, solar companies, and others into partnerships. So far the program has garnered commitments to build solar power into 910,000 separate structures -- BJ's warehouse in Pennsylvania among them.
Solar will receive another boost, its backers hope, from moves by designers to incorporate arrays of solar cells directly into building materials like windows, house tiles, and shingles. A visit to the BP Solarex factory in Toano, Virginia, gives a sense of the potential. Set amid pine trees off a state highway, the factory produces 4-foot by 2-foot solar panels of glass coated with a thin film of semiconductor material that converts sunlight into electricity. The panels resemble the facings of typical office buildings -- and the factory plans to customize the film coating depending on how opaque the architect wants the glass to be. Combining solar technology and building materials cuts construction costs, making the panels more attractive to builders. "Our goal for 2007 is to produce 53 percent of our panels for incorporation as building material," says Scott Albertson, a BP Solarex vice president.
Yet dozens of obstacles to a solar future remain. The most obvious is the difficulty of plugging solar homes and businesses into the electrical grid. Although many states now require utilities to pay fair-market prices to customers who produce excess energy, some utilities have resisted by forcing consumers to sign 400-page liability agreements. What's more, there's no simple standard that would allow, say, a woman moving from Massachusetts to receive reimbursement for plugging her solar panel into the grid at her new home in California. The utility red tape has inspired a defiant group of fly-by-night electricians to connect solar homes directly to utility meters -- their guerrilla raids chronicled by the Oregon magazine Home Power.
Even if the legal hurdles are crossed, there's still the problem of educating all those architects and utility managers and electricians and contractors about the alternatives so they can start using them. "One of the things I didn't understand in the '70s," says Scott Sklar of the solar energy association, "is that things that look good in the lab and even in manufacturing don't necessarily find a pathway to the consumer."
Energy generated by photovoltaic modules remains more expensive than the average cost of utility power, but experts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory predict that PV costs will fall eightfold by 2020. Solar is already cheaper than peak-use electricity in many areas. It's also cheaper than running new lines to isolated spots, which explains why 85 percent of all U.S. photovoltaics are exported -- mostly to the Third World, where an estimated two billion people lack electricity. "Frankly, democratization is a driver for us," says Sklar. "What's the first thing democratic governments do to enfranchise the poor in the Third World? Electrify their villages." The government of Indonesia, for example, has installed more than 36,000 rural solar systems, 50-watt housetop modules that power batteries and lights in remote areas years away from being connected to a grid.
Closer to home, though, some advocates say solar has lost much of the democratic appeal that encouraged so many to promote it as a decentralized alternative to big energy conglomerates. Multinationals like BP Amoco produce most of the photovoltaic power, and utilities have yet to see the light. "Today, the resurgence of solar technologies is strictly managed by the same energy corporations who undermined solar hot-water heating in the 1970s and 1980s," write Daniel Berman and John O'Connor in their recent book, Who Owns the Sun? "Solar power without a grassroots solar movement will be merely another form of business as usual."
That prospect doesn't bother everyone. "So I have to buy my PV from British Petroleum," says Peter Barnes, the former California contractor who went on to found Working Assets. "It doesn't matter who makes it. Let's face it, total energy independence is a myth. Most of us need to rely on the grid -- if only on cloudy days."
Denis Hayes, who organized the first Earth Day back in 1970, is leading a monthlong celebration culminating on April 22 to mark the event's 30th anniversary. As he sees it, the potential for solar power has never been greater. Climate change increasingly demonstrates the need to reduce dependency on fossil fuels, and alternative technologies are much further along than they were in the 1970s. But the public will have to get involved -- not only as consumers demanding cleaner energy, Hayes says, but also as activists and voters seeking government leadership for solar and other alternatives. Little will change, he adds, without the spirit of idealism so present during the first solar revolution. "There was a higher degree of confidence in government then, less estrangement," Hayes says. "Maybe that's what we're trying to do with this Earth Day -- to keep hope alive."
Adventures in Extreme Science
From Crick and Watson through J. Craig Venter, we had all our eggs in one basket — molecular biology, gene mapping, whatever you want to call it. It failed. And now we're counting on this guy.
By Tom Junod
Published in our April issue, on sale soon
There may be another scientist in the world as smart as Eric Schadt. After all, scientists are a pretty smart lot, even though you'd be surprised at how few want to change the world, and how many of them have the trudging souls of brilliant, dutiful clerks. There may even be another scientist in the world as popular, as in demand as Eric Schadt, even though Eric works hard at everything he does, including his popularity, and is engaged, at any given time, in at least ten collaborations with other top scientists, not to mention the production — just last year — of a profligate thirty-five scientific papers, not to mention the delivery, year in and year out, of about forty talks and presentations after receiving invitations to deliver two or three hundred. (You'd also be surprised by how social a lot of scientists are, and how many parties they go to.) But if you're looking for a scientist whose great popularity rests in tirelessly writing papers and delivering speeches whose implicit and sometimes explicit message to the most eminent minds in his field is that they're wrong, that they've failed, and that the best way for them to stop wasting their lives is to follow him in a scientific revolution that he admits might not even work: Well, then you'd probably have to narrow your search a little bit. It takes a pretty smart guy to tell the smartest people in the world that all their success, all their hard-won knowledge has led them to a dead end ... that the approach they've taken has been a little, um, simplistic. It takes Eric Schadt to say that — and then to make the damned sale.
What's he selling? Well, the first way to answer that is to say what he's not selling. He's not selling molecular biology. He's not selling the last big revolution in biology, the revolution that made biology the dominant science of our time and was supposed to save us. The Human Genome Project, which at a cost of about $3 billion mapped the twenty-three thousand or so genes that are said to encode all of human existence? That's molecular biology, man — its signal triumph, its apotheosis, the culmination of an effort that began with the elucidation of the structure of the DNA molecule, picked up speed and funding with the War on Cancer, and then, well, figured everything out for us, from the causes of cancer to the roots of belief. (Hint: They're both in the genes, which govern our biology by the proteins they express.) And so we believed. We believed that in our genes was the code for not just our proteins but our fates; we believed what we read in the newspapers and heard on television, that a gene for this had been found, or a gene for that; and we believed above all that if a cause for a certain disease had been discovered, then a cure had to be on the way. Indeed, without quite knowing it, we believed in the logic of molecular biology, its inexorable momentum, which we equated with scientific progress itself. The logic was this: one gene at a time. One gene at a time, we'd triumph over disease, and if we figured out the right gene, the right protein, and the right pathway between genes and proteins, maybe we'd even triumph over death itself. How triumphant was molecular biology? It was so triumphant that we believed in it (and still believe in it) even when it has gone a long way toward bankrupting the pharmaceutical industry with drugs like the painkiller Vioxx and the diabetes medication Avandia — drugs that hit their molecular targets but also cause catastrophic side effects by hitting other unforeseen targets as well — or drugs that never come close to making it to market at all. We still believe in it even when nearly ten years after the mapping of the genome, it has radically increased the cost of drug development while delivering next to nothing in return.
That's right: nothing. Oh, sure, knowledge, yes. Humans know more about the workings of individual genes, proteins, pathways, and kinds of cells than we ever have. We know so much that surely all we need is time. Because one gene at a time takes time. And drug discovery takes time. And FDA approval takes time, gobs of time, epochal engines of time ... and now here comes Eric Schadt saying, Don't hold your breath. Here comes Eric Schadt saying that time isn't the problem with molecular biology — molecular biology is. Reductionism is. Willful oversimplification is. The very idea that humanity can enlist the aid of grunting lab-coated Sherpas and march toward pharmaceutical nirvana one gene at a time is. Here comes Eric Schadt saying, "All right, so the idea was that understanding individual proteins and their missions could open up our understanding of the complexity of living systems. That's failed. That's turned out not to be true. And that was the dream, right? So it's a crisis. We understand simple processes, but we have no idea how simple processes fit into larger processes." You get that? Molecular biology — the great scientific god of our age, not just the answer to but the explanation for our prayers — in crisis! Not true! A failure! Dead wrong! No wonder that a few years ago, Schadt gave one of his talks at Columbia and five minutes into the speech, a gray biological eminence stood up and said (in Eric's telling), "How dare you dismiss all the biology that has made us so successful today? My recommendation to everyone in this audience is not to listen to what this man has to say."
The gentleman then turned and walked out, in front of a few hundred people. But here's the deal: Everybody else stayed. And listened. Because you see, at the time, Eric Schadt was working for Merck and was already getting a reputation as the guy who was remaking Merck from the inside out. And because Schadt's not just (or even) a critic, not some apocalyptic scold. He's funny. He's a real character. He's the life of the party, with a line of bullshit he likes to call bullshit, a mad motormouthed charisma that he combines with a mad cackling awareness of the absurdity of all intellectual endeavor, especially his own. He has a shtick, a pitch, but he also has a vision, and that's what he's selling, with evangelical fervor. And the vision, basically, is this:
Okay, so focusing on one gene at a time doesn't work, doesn't explain what causes disease, indeed falsifies the causes of disease and makes it nearly impossible to develop the drugs we need to cure it. So how about focusing on thousands of genes at a time? How about focusing on thousands of genes and thousands of proteins with some enzymes and environmental factors thrown in for good measure? How about getting bigger instead of getting smaller? How about going for complexity instead of simplicity? How about implicating not single genes and single pathways of proteins in disease but whole vast networks of genes and proteins — networks that have been invisible to us until now? How about taking advantage of the technology and the data that's become available over the past ten years and using it to create models of the living world that are nearly as complex as the living world itself and by God nearly as large? Oh, sure, it sounds impossible. Maybe it is impossible. But that's why Eric Schadt wants not just to remake the underpinnings of biological science but rather to remake science itself — the way it's done. Okay, so the complexity of living systems — and the amount of data they generate — turns out to be too much for even the most heroic of individual scientists to master. All right then: Biologists have to form networks that mimic the biological networks they're studying. The networks between genes and proteins turn out to be organized socially, like human networks, and so human social networks will be required to understand them ... with Eric Schadt at their center.
eric schadt
Douglas Adesko
Basically, most anecdotes about Eric Schadt involve the two things that have enabled him to be both highly connected and a revolutionary — smarts and salesmanship. For example, here's how he met his wife. He was a graduate student at UC Davis, going for his Ph.D. in pure mathematics. Pure math is the hardest, most abstract and conceptually demanding discipline you can find, which is why Eric was studying it, and why a young woman named Jennifer Harkness one night gave him a call. She was a freshman with nothing to do, and she and her friends were making prank phone calls. The phone rang, Eric picked it up, and he heard a voice say, "Hi, this is Jenny." He said instantly, "Hi, Jenny — is this a prank phone call?" Jenny and her friends started screaming; they couldn't figure how he'd figured out what they were doing. He explained that he was an inveterate prank caller himself — he liked calling seismologists and telling them that he was feeling tremors — and when Jennifer stayed on the line, he found out that she was, like him, from Michigan, and they had some things in common... .
He made the sale, in other words, and now he and Jennifer live in Palo Alto, California, with their five blond kids, the big sprawling brood that inevitably causes other scientists to remark, "Oh, you're an optimist!" when he tells them about it and also prompts him to articulate an elemental personal philosophy when he's sitting at his big dining-room table one morning, trying to finish another of his groundbreaking papers while bouncing his five-year-old daughter in his lap and at the same time checking his oldest son's math homework — "I can never do too much of anything. Bring it on, baby." He's forty-six years old, and he has the moonfaced swagger of a former child star, albeit one who grew up to be a football blocking back. He's stocky and strong, with a knobby nose and an imposingly lumpy brow and a disheveled head of brown hair spit-curled to his forehead by the sweat induced by his Herculean labors. Think Jack Black in a white lab coat and you get the picture ... except that he doesn't wear a lab coat. He's developed his own standardized scientific uniform — a white tennis shirt with a dark-blue Polo insignia and a pair of hiking shorts — and he wears it as faithfully as Steve Jobs wears blue jeans and a black mock turtleneck. He wears it when you see him in the morning and he wears it when you see him at night, so that you don't really know if he's ever gone to sleep or ever changed, and he even wears it when he takes his motorcycle to work, though the motorcycle is to motorcycles exactly what Eric Schadt is to biology — a baroque exaggeration of normal capabilities that either promises deliverance or threatens obliteration. But let Eric, who's something of a gearhead in both the civilian and scientific aspects of his life, describe the specifications of the BMW S 1000 RR:
"Four hundred pounds, 200 horsepower, the fastest thing out there, zero to 60 in 2.9 seconds, the first superbike." Well, at least he wears a helmet — and not just a helmet but a big black-visored one with a video camera rigged on top so that he can record the sublime experience of riding his superbike or the inevitably annihilating experience of being run off the road and crashing it. "People don't like being passed," he worries, but of course he passes them anyway on the way to work, hitting 100 miles per hour on the street and 120 miles per hour at the office park and popping the occasional celebratory wheelie in nothing but the white shirt, the short pants, and the mitered black helmet that makes him look like some kind of postmodern grenadier, sporting technological plumage.
And then, when he gets to work, three miles from his house, he gets to ride something that goes even faster.
He's one of those guys with a coveted brain, so he's one of those guys with a lot of gigs. He's cofounder of a nonprofit organization called Sage Bionetworks, which is dedicated to facilitating biological research through an open-source sharing of data. He's been trying to start his own institute — the catchily titled Institute for Multi Scale Biology — at the University of California, San Francisco, though he's constantly getting wooed, and it seems inevitable that he'll wind up with a big academic appointment somewhere, along with what's known as "massive institutional support" — i.e., a lot of money. There's a lot of money in biology, and Schadt, like a lot of other brilliant minds for hire, spends a lot of his time chasing it, making his pitch to the venture capitalists in and around the Bay Area or else going up to Seattle and making his pitch to the Gates Foundation and to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. "I think I must amuse Paul," Schadt says. "He keeps on inviting me up there, and he never gives me any money."
He does, however, have a regular job, with somewhat regular hours, and that's his job as chief scientific officer of a seven-year-old biotech company called Pacific Biosciences. It's a pretty interesting job, because basically Pacific Biosciences hired him the way a big-time Nascar team hires a driver — that is, because it has this miraculous machine, and it wants someone to drive it really, really fast. Schadt had just left Merck and could have gone almost anywhere he wanted — Yale wanted him to start a systems-biology department, and Genentech wanted him as its head of genetic research, a story that harkens once again to the constants of smarts and salesmanship: "When I was interviewing for that job, the head of the company's research department said, 'You're either completely full of shit or the smartest person on earth. We're not smart enough to know. But we're willing to bet that you're the smartest person on earth.' "
He wound up going to PacBio instead, even though it was essentially a start-up whose fortunes were and are tied to a machine called the RS, which stands for "real-time sequencer" but which is really an homage to "Rally Sport" and a nod to the fact that the people who run the company are really into California car culture. Schadt had heard of the RS when he was at Merck — he had heard that a scientist at Cornell named Stephen Turner had created a technology that could look at individual molecules of DNA in real time and was trying to take it into production. Schadt never thought he'd pull it off but realized that if he did ... well, the technology would be to some enterprising biologist what the telescope was to Galileo — a chance to corroborate what was a mathematical inference, a chance to see "changes in DNA causing changes in cellular networks causing changes in tissue networks going up to the whole organism." And then, in 2008, PacBio gave him a call. Turner's technology was now the RS, a $260 million triumph of engineering, design, and the kind of precautionary prophylaxis that's usually implemented around Level 4 biohazards. Would Schadt like to take it for a spin? Oh, hell yes — it was a job offer that satisfied the gearhead in him, the daredevil, the biologist who thinks like an astronomer, and, not incidentally, the salesman. Indeed, in his job as PacBio's top scientist, Schadt is a cross between Galileo, a paid thinker at someplace like the Santa Fe Institute, and a guy hawking ultra-high-end copiers. Yes, he's already glimpsed some things with the PacBio RS — he's looking to prove that instead of four bases making up the DNA molecule, there are actually so many modifications of the four that the real number could be more than twenty. (It's a perfect Eric Schadt breakthrough, because not only would it be a "game changer," it would also complicate the practice of biology beyond human capability.) But Schadt's also on the road a lot and on the phone a lot, because PacBio hired him not only to figure out the best experimental applications for the RS but also to "work your collaborations like you've been doing" — because it was his collaborative nature, his connectivity, that was at the heart of his attempt to remake the scientific culture at Merck. And that's where he's happiest. He's not the solitary scientist heroically thinking big thoughts. What he does at PacBio is his "vision of the perfect life" precisely because he's hardly ever alone, precisely because after "thinking of the things I want to think about," he gets to "travel around and talk them over with the most interesting people in the world."
He's all about the network, you see. He's helped identify it as the fundamental organizing principle of biological systems, and he sees very little difference between biological networks and social ones. When you look at biological networks comprised of thousands of genes, you'll see that they are just like social ones, with a few "highly connected" genes showing up again and again as "hub nodes" and others acting as spokes and outliers. Well, Schadt's ambition is to be a hub node. And PacBio allows him to realize his ambition because now not only is he Eric Fricking Schadt, but he's also got the machine that nobody else in the world has — the telescope, the souped-up gene sequencer, the RS. People call him out of the blue. He picks up the phone. And if their interest sounds interesting enough, he says yes, even when — hell, especially when — he already has too many projects to handle. Bring it on, baby. So now he's got collaborations going on with people at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Northwestern, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, the University of Washington, the University of Colorado, and the University of God Knows Where Else. He's got collaborations going that are intended to target the relevant biological networks behind cancer, heart disease, aging, diabetes, and sleeping problems. He's even collaborating with a scientist who's trying to extract energy from bacteria. And back in November, he got a call from a team at Harvard that was trying to figure out the strain of cholera that was ripping the guts out of Haiti almost a year after the earthquake. They'd heard about him. Could he help? Moreover, could the PacBio RS help? So here's what happened: They sent him the cholera strain from the cell culture, and he ran it through the RS. And four weeks after he received the samples, The New England Journal of Medicine published his paper with the results. A month, man. That's instantaneous in the world of biology. That's unprecedented. Turns out the strain of cholera originated in South Asia, and that information now makes a mass-vaccination plan feasible.
But this is also part of Schadt's vision — part of his pitch, part of what he's selling. He's worked at two big drug companies, Roche and Merck, and he knows what they're good at and knows what they're bad at. What they're good at: making drugs. What they're bad at: sharing. Unfortunately, what they're bad at sharing is the information that would help them make better drugs. But Eric Schadt is the strange rebel who happens to play well with others. He's the strange outlier who wants nothing more than to be a hub node. If anything, he overshares, and so what he wants to do is convince biologists to share for those who can't. In all his collaborations, he says, "we don't have as clear a path in getting drugs developed as in a pharmaceutical setting," so what he and his collaborators are doing is "publishing papers so that anyone can pursue them for whatever reason" — i.e., so that drug companies can use the ideas in them to make better drugs. And this is the idea that really gets Schadt going. Eric Schadt's the biggest thinker in biology, but meeting him sometimes feels like meeting Einstein and finding out that what he really liked about physics was the parties, like meeting Niels Bohr and having to look at his autograph collection. But that's why this is Schadt's moment: because he is out to erase the distinctions between intellectual force, technological force, and social force. Because as the Age of Information inexorably morphs into the Age of Information Overload, he's figured out that social force is the key to science's survival. And because when you ask him his grandest aim, his most cherished ambition, what he really wants to be, he answers, without hesitation, is a "master of information."
He never mentions the word science at all.
He wasn't supposed to be a scientist, anyway. Literally. It was, like, forbidden. It was ungodly. He grew up in Stevensville, Michigan, a town of a thousand people one mile square. His family was hardcore evangelical. His stepfather was a hard man, a believer, and a beautician, in roughly that order. Was Eric Schadt a believer? "Of course I was. I had no choice." Education was suspect — "I had no education to speak of." And so although he went to high school, what he calls the "greatest compliment I ever received" came when a teacher pronounced him "untamable," and as soon as he graduated, he was gone. He joined the Air Force, only to realize that instead of escaping the social and intellectual poverty of his background, he had planted himself "on the lowest rung of an organization that people in society already regarded as the lowest rung." His answer: step one, "I became profoundly depressed." Step two: He did the hardest thing he could think of doing, which was joining Special Operations. Parachute rescue. But he blew out his shoulder rappelling down a cliff, so he washed out. The Air Force looked to salvage its investment by giving him a battery of aptitude tests. When the results came back, he was asked if math had come easily to him in high school.
"Yeah, I guess so," he said. "Well, look at your scores," the Air Force said, and sent him to Cal Poly on a military scholarship.
He studied computer science and applied math at Cal Poly, and it was like taking a drug. Education itself blew a mind hungry for expansion. It wasn't just math. It was ... enlightenment. He came home, started talking about logic and philosophy, started posing "thought experiments" to his brothers and sisters. His stepfather kicked him out of the house. What he said, in Eric's recollection: "You are of the devil. Leave and never come back." Eric's answer, of course, was to do the hardest thing he could think of doing, even after his mother called a year and a half later and invited him back into the fold. He went to UC Davis to get a doctorate in pure math. Pure math: a purely conceptual exercise that takes place in purely abstract space. That's why they call it pure. But he kept learning real-world things from it. The first was how to sell something intellectually ambitious, even impossible: "People don't understand, but if you can make them think you understand, your story wins." The second was what he wanted to do with his life. He was still a Christian in orientation, if not in practice, and pure math, after a while, started feeling, well, "a little empty," even ungodly. It wasn't going to help anyone. So he passed his Ph.D. candidacy tests but never wrote his dissertation and instead enrolled in UCLA's biomathematics Ph.D. program. He had the math for it, certainly, but since he hadn't taken a biology course since high school, he had to learn Ph.D.-level biology "from scratch." To catch up, he began reading through the basic textbooks in genetics and molecular biology on his own. Sounds hard. It wasn't. Pure math was hard. Biology? "It was so easy, it was like a vacation. After pure math it was so refreshing and conceptually simple that my mind just locked onto it."
Indeed, biology was so simple that he began to suspect that what was in the textbooks was simplified, even simplistic. He began to suspect there was something wrong with it, molecular biology in particular. As a former creationist, he immediately saw the insufficiency of a biology of broken pieces, and as a man of broken faith he wondered whether he could put it back together again.
There's a famous book, written by Thomas S. Kuhn and published in 1962, called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Well, maybe it's not so famous — but it's hugely influential. It introduced the term "paradigm shift" into the language. A promiscuous term, as it turns out, used to describe everything from the emergence of smartphones to the omnipresence of the spread offense in college football. But in Kuhn's book it describes something specific to science. According to Kuhn, scientific progress is not a peaceful process, characterized by the gradual accumulation of knowledge. Rather, it's a nearly political one, characterized by acts of intellectual violence. A paradigm is like a king — it's the body of knowledge and practice that coheres around a theory or a discovery, and in periods of stability everybody serves it by practicing what Kuhn calls "normal science." Eventually, though, it becomes insufficient to its own ends and enters a period of crisis, during which it comes under attack by those practicing "extraordinary science." At last, the king is overthrown, and that's a paradigm shift.
Has Schadt read Kuhn's book? "I remember the exact month, almost the exact day I started reading that. It was when I first started graduate school in 1993." And of course, he knew what kind of science he wanted to practice even before he knew what king he wanted to kill. A paradigm shift requires not only scientists practicing extraordinary science; it requires "attackers" and "persuaders" willing to declaim the end of the old order and announce the dawn of the new. Schadt has turned out to be both. He's very aware that biology is in the middle of a paradigm shift and very aware of his role in both the murder of molecular biology — the king is dead! — and the establishment of its successor. He's even produced a documentary film entitled The New Biology, which heralds the arrival of a biology that's "more like physics" and "more quantitative in nature" than biology has ever been. Not incidentally, it's also a whole lot harder.
He was doing New Biology even before he got his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1999. Big Pharma, in the form of Roche, had recruited him. He was thirty-three years old, just another brilliant nobody, but he started improving the algorithms on the "gene chips" Roche used for gene detection and sharing them publicly. That gave him a name; it also got him investigated by the U. S. Attorney's office under suspicion of stealing trade secrets, because nobody could believe that he was picking the lock on proprietary algorithms without resorting to illegal means. He was cleared when investigators found out that, well, as a matter of fact, he could. Still, it was the start of his career, and he'd already seen "the amount of energy devoted to keeping you from breaking out of accepted paradigms. It was an extraordinary amount of energy. But the cool thing about the human spirit is its ability to push and persist if it thinks it's on the right path. And the path I was on was the right path from which to change biology."
Yes, that's right: The guy who wants to change biology now wanted to change biology even then, and eventually his ambition brought him to the attention of Stephen Friend and Leland Hartwell of Rosetta Inpharmatics. They were molecular biologists. To be more precise, they had made history as molecular biologists, Friend becoming the first scientist to clone a human gene associated with inherited tumors and Hartwell winning the damned Nobel Prize. That's all. But they'd thought deeply about
molecular biology and had started Rosetta in part to address its inherent limitations, in particular its failure to deliver drugs to the marketplace. They were looking for the future. And so when Stephen Friend met Eric Schadt, he saw a scientist with "almost Mozart-like qualities — insights that are not always logical, but they're correct. You talked to Eric and you said to yourself, Oh, my God, I can see what's going to come."
Schadt went to Rosetta, and then, when Merck bought Rosetta, he went with Friend and a team of fifty nascent New Biologists to Merck. At the time, Merck was a molecular-biology company. It was using the basic techniques of molecular biology to figure what proteins to target and what drugs to develop. The main technique is called a "knockout study." A scientist interested in the function of a specific gene "knocks out" the gene in mice bred for the purpose, to see what happens. Schadt and Friend thought the strategy was hopeless. Not only are there twenty-three thousand genes to be knocked out one gene at a time, there are also catastrophic side effects when the drug you develop to hit a single protein encoded by a single gene instead hits a network of genes and proteins all working together in mysterious and invisible concert.
The idea of networks was not original to Schadt. What was original to Schadt, however, was a method for finding them and proving their existence. How could he find something that was not only invisible but indescribably vast, involving thousands of genes and thousands of proteins? Well, the sky is vast, and astronomers can't see the planets orbiting distant stars, either. But they prove their existence by measuring the changes in starlight and subjecting the data to statistical analysis. They never see the new planets — the whole new solar systems — they're exploring. They just know they're out there, in the numberless flickerings of the stars.
And that's how Schadt proved the existence of biological networks. He developed algorithms to mine Merck's massive troves of biological data, and he began finding genetic networks through statistical correlations. Were the networks merely theoretical? To the contrary: They were "highly predictive" experimentally — that is, they could predict the success or failure of therapeutic interventions. And so in 2003, he started publishing the papers that, in the words of a Merck spokesman, "changed the way people looked at disease," and at the same time became the foundations of the New Biology. What's more, he and his team began using the networks they were finding to figure out which genes Merck should target, until they were responsible for "half the drugs" in Merck's pipeline. What's more, long before GlaxoSmithKline ran into problems with Avandia, Schadt predicted that a similar drug Merck was developing would fail for the same reasons — because it would lower the risk of diabetes but increase the risk for cardiovascular problems — and therefore proved that the New Biology could save pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. And then, of course, he and Friend tried to turn Merck into a New Biology company, by which they meant a company that would share its data with networks of outside scientists and that would develop drugs that targeted networks instead of single genes. The problem with that: Merck was still an old biology company. The drugs in its pipeline — including the drugs informed by Schadt's networks — targeted single genes. And so when Schadt and Friend made their presentation, this was Merck's response: "We're not an information company." And when, in 2009, Schadt published a paper in Nature entitled "A Network View of Disease and Compound Screening" — a paper that implied that drugs targeting single genes were doomed to failure — "well, that was the paper that got me kicked out of Merck."
He likes to do his supercomputing on planes now, because that's the one place where he's alone. He had access to a supercomputer at Merck, but he and Friend left Merck in 2009 after negotiating an agreement to take the New Biology component with them — including the millions of dollars' worth of data necessary to continue their work — and turn it into Sage Bionetworks. He still needs the capacity of a supercomputer, however, because the amount of data generated by the networks he's exploring is inordinate, overwhelming. There's terabytes of data, petabytes of data. Fortunately, he has the same access to supercomputers that every other American with an Internet connection and a credit card has. He waits till the plane climbs to a cruising altitude, waits for the pilot to allow electronic devices, and then uses the plane's WiFi to get on Amazon. Amazon sells a lot of stuff — books, washing machines, whatever the hell you want. What it sells Schadt is super-computing on the cheap. You see, companies like Amazon have a lot of computing power available, and now it's gotten in the business of selling some of that to guys like Schadt and whoever else might want it. A guy like Schadt doesn't have to work for a company like Merck anymore, because he has as much computing power available to him on an airplane as a scientist at Merck does on the company's multimillion-dollar supercomputer. More even. On cross-country flights he tells Amazon what data to crunch after takeoff, and for a few hundred bucks the job's done by the time he lands.
He likes to talk about this kind of stuff, because it's one of the ways he makes his sale. A lot of people are afraid of the Age of Information. They think things are getting too big and too complicated, and going too fast. You think scientists are immune? You think biologists are immune? No, they're especially anxious, because biology has turned out to be even more complex than they thought, indeed precisely as complex as the world in general. And so what Schadt has done is not only give biologists the tools to deal with the problem of increasing complexity; he's also sold complexity and has gotten biologists to relax and embrace it, in the words of Stephen Friend. "And it's a good thing, because the complexity is just going to get worse. But Eric gets you to understand that it's out of complexity that a pattern derives. That complexity is not the enemy but the vehicle of understanding, and embracing it is how you get there. You talk to him and he makes you think, Oh, this might turn out all right after all."
Schadt has sold the New Biology by making biologists feel that if they change biology, they can change the world. But he also makes it clear that as the world changes, it will change biology, whether biologists like it or not — whether we like it or not. For instance, he has this idea for what he calls a "disease weather map" that will inform people what kind of pathogens are on the handrails of the escalators, say, at the San Francisco Airport, or for that matter in the bathrooms. The idea would have been laughable just a few years ago, but Schadt is not only thinking about it — he's doing it, with the PacBio RS. He's sending out technicians, getting samples, and sequencing them more or less instantly. This is an extension of Schadt's vision to expand the network model of human disease into tracking the forces of infection in the population at large; the network is not just genes, it's also germs. He's able to do the same with sewage outflows, which has led him to a vision of monitoring the pathogens that pour out of individual households — a vision of helpful technicians knowing what's coming out of your toilets, and calling you if they think you need to eat more yogurt.
Does anybody want a world of pathogen surveillance and transparent effluvia? Well, DARPA does, Schadt says — they're very interested. And he's not overly concerned about everybody else. He's a revolutionary, and what he knows about revolutions — scientific and otherwise — is that "it's best to be one of the drivers of the revolution, and then it will work itself out." What he knows about revolutions is that "there's always this outcry, but the revolution marches on. And I would rather be part of the revolution than on the outside figuring out what it all means."
And that's what Eric Schadt's really all about — why he wants to be a "master of information" instead of simply a scientist. The New Biology is the New World, and he wants to be part of both. He wants to be one of the people who help other people figure out that information overload is not the enemy, if you know how to read it (and have supercomputer access). He wants to be part of what he calls "a revolution in human intelligence." He wants to make the sale, even if what he's selling is what so many fear. The world is getting too big? Make it bigger. The world is getting too fast? Make it faster. The world is getting complex to the point of impossibility? Bring it on, baby.
Bring it on.
The Saga of the Scientific Swindler! (1884-1891)
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February 24, 2011 by skullsinthestarsWhen reading of the achievements of a giant of scientific thought such as Einstein, Feynman or Darwin, it is far too easy to envision the person, and scientists in general, as some sort of being above the worries of daily life. The reality, of course, is that scientists are subject to the same emotions and problems as the rest of humanity: they can be irrational at times, angry at others. Scientists can be fleeced by a clever con-man — and can even become the con-man themselves.
In the 1880s, a fascinating chain of letters appeared in the magazine Science and in other publications, including the New York Times. The scientific community was being victimized by a clever confidence man, who was working his way into members' trust and then stealing from them. The exploits span at least 7 years and stretch over much of the United States. Most surprising about it, however, is that the con artist was so successful because he was apparently trained as one of their own.
In this post we'll trace the path of this mysterious swindler and the chaos he wreaked upon the scientific community. Along the way, we'll get a glimpse of the social interactions of scientists at the time and their very human nature, for good and ill.
The story begins in the February 29, 1884 issue of Science. On page 245, we get a letter titled, "A scientific swindler", written by
F.V. Hayden, a geologist and physician who served with the Union army during the Civil War, and led an 1871 geological survey of Yellowstone that was instrumental in turning the region into the first national park.F.V. Hayden in Wyoming, at far end of table in dark jacket, as part of United States Geological and Geographical Survey, 1870 (
source).Hayden's letter is as follows:
A few weeks ago a man calling himself N. R. Taggart, and claiming to be a member of the Ohio geological survey, visited Philadelphia. He called on the principal scientific men of this city, and attended one of the regular meetings of the Academy of natural sciences. He seemed to have an extended acquaintance with scientific men all over the country, talked very glibly about fossils, and claimed to be preparing a report on the Productidae for the Ohio survey. He is about five feet eight inches in height, a hundred and sixty pounds in weight, heavy set, heavy featured, with light hair, and rather deep-set eyes, shabbily dressed, and wore an old gray overcoat. He had an adroit way of ingratiating himself into the confidence of his intended victims; and then, if he could not steal, he would, under some plausible pretext, borrow valuable books or specimens to take to his hotel, and forget to return them. His victims are to be found scattered all over the country. In New York he was E. D. Strong of Fort Scott, Kan., and claimed to be employed by the Kansas Pacific railway to collect statistics of coal production. In West Philadelphia he gave his address as E. Douglas, Columbus, O., member of the State survey. In Auburn, N.Y., he was a deaf-mute, under the name of E. D. Whitney, U. S. geologist, Denver, Col. There he obtained a large quantity of valuable books and fossils from the family of Professor Starr, in the absence of the owner. In Harrisburg, Chambersburg, Columbus, and Indianapolis he was a deaf-mute. He swindled the state geologist of Indiana out of over a hundred dollars' worth of scientific books. From the Cleveland historical society's rooms he obtained Indian relics of great value, and in Cincinnati, minerals and fossils which he converted into cash. He has been permitted access to several museums, public and private, from which he has succeeded in abstracting valuable specimens, and sold them. Any information in regard to the real name and residence of this man is much to be desired.
The value of items swindled is quite impressive; if I've done my
conversions correctly, a hundred dollars of scientific books in 1884 would be roughly $2400 worth in today's dollars.The modus operandi of our thief is already clear. He would visit and collaborate with geologists under the guise of a colleague, and work his way into their trust. He would then borrow (or simply steal if the opportunity presented itself) books from these researchers and make a prompt departure, converting the possessions into cash. Often, for reasons that are unclear, he would pass himself off as a deaf-mute.
Even this short letter gives quite a bit of insight into the nature of science in the late 1800s. In the absence of the internet, television, radio, or even telephones (AT&T would be founded in 1885), there was no real way to identify other scientists other than their scientific ability, letters of referral — and a high degree of trust. As we will see, the swindler was equipped with all three.
So, leaving off his previous exploits as listed, our trail of the swindler begins in Philadelphia:
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Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney
The next report of the swindler comes from the October 28th, 1885 issue of the New York Times, and would seem to suggest that the swindler's career had come to a quick end:
Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 27 — Last evening the police made a most important arrest in the person of Leo Lesquereaux, a geologist, who is alleged to have been conducting a series of swindling operations in various parts of the country. Lesquereaux came to Milwaukee about a week ago, and straightway proceeded to dispose of some books of which he claimed the ownership. He represented himself as employed upon the United States Government survey for the Northwest, and as such sought the acquaintance of scientific men in various localities wherever he might happen to be. He turned up in Whitewater about two weeks ago, and by his glib talk and immense self-assurance obtained the confidence of W.F. Bundy, Professor of Sciences at the Whitewater Normal School. His leaving Whitewater and the disappearances of a lot of valuable scientific books were so closely allied that it was concluded that the man and the books had departed together. Prof. Bundy came to Milwaukee and reported to the police the loss. In Milwaukee Prof. Bundy obtained track of Lesquereaux through Prof. Peckham, of the High School, to whom he had sold two or three of the stolen books. It was also learned that he had sold some books to Thomas A. Greene and others to Prof. Rogers. Prosecuting his inquiries still further, Prof. Bundy learned that a man answering Lequereaux's description was working at the Public Museum, and the police being notified, his arrest was easily affected. The charge lodged against him at the station was that of receiving stolen property.
Emphasis mine! So Professor Bundy, having been swindled, went all CSI on the con-man and tracked him down himself!
Prof. Peckham called at the police station and had an interview with the prisoner. He was greatly surprised at his arrest, and was convinced that he was a very learned man, a skilled scientist, and felt complimented at acquiring his acquaintance. Lesquereaux had become quite intimate with Prof. Peckham, at whose house he had taken dinner. He had also spent evenings at the house of Mr. Greene, and entertained the family with stories of his travels and scientific achievements.
Here were have the strong indication that the prisoner is no ordinary swindler; it is hard to imagine that he could have so snookered the scientists without having a good knowledge of geology himself.
He said he expected to clear himself as soon as he could have a preliminary examination. He mentioned the names of several prominent scientists and geologists in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New-York, and other States with whom he was intimately acquainted, and with whom he had at various times been professionally associated. It was suggested to him that those persons be telegraphed to and that a message be sent to Secretary Lamar, in whose department he claimed to be engaged. The prisoner declined to do this, saying he did not wish to be humiliated by so doing.
It is hard to say for certain, but note that the scientists whose names he refers to herald from states that he had swindled people in! Was he giving the names of his victims as a half-hearted alibi?
He said that numerous cases of swindling charged to him were the work of another impostor, who had assumed his (the prisoner's) name. When brought to the station the prisoner gave his name as Leo Lesquereaux, and stated that he was 46 years old and a native of France. His left hand is missing, and in place thereof is an artificial hand. He is of medium height, with blonde mustache, wears eyeglasses, and is shabbily dressed. He did not appear like a drinking man.
Emphasis mine! Oh, this just gets better — a criminal mastermind, wandering the States preying on scientists, missing his left hand! It is especially cheeky of him to claim that he was being impersonated by Leo Lesquereaux, as in fact the swindler himself had taken the name of a famous Swiss paleobotanist,
Charles Leo Lesquereux (1806-1889)!It is somewhat striking that the police had no choice but to incarcerate the swindler under the name of Lesquereux, even though it was clearly an assumed name. In the 1880s, there was no certain way to identify a prisoner if the prisoner didn't want to be identified.
The NYT account continues:
The swindling operations in which Leo Lesquereaux has been engaged in various parts of the country entitle him to be classed as one of the most skillful of educated crooks. Lesquereaux was traced in his wanderings over the country for three years past by the audacious and clever schemes he has resorted to in order to obtain money. He assumes a number of names, and always claims to be the son or brother of some geologist known personally, or by reputation, to other geologists. His specialty is paleontology, and in January, 1884, he completely deceived Prof. R.P. Whitfield, of the American Museum of Natural History, probably the best paleontology in the country. He then passed as E.P. Strong, of Wisconsin, who was drowned while descending the Flambeau Rapids some years ago in prosecuting the Wisconsin Geological Survey.
Classy!
He next turned up in Philadelphia as W.R. Taggart, and wormed himself into the hospitalities of Prof. Hayden, of the United States Geological Survey. He carried off one of Prof. Hayden's most valuable books, besides borrowing $20. Prof. Hayden afterward learned that the same fellow had been to see him on a former occasion and then borrowed $20. He then wore black whiskers and gave his name as Prof. T.S. Holmes, of Charleston, S.C. Under the name of Lee, in Connecticut, he is said to have swindled one man out of $300 and another out of $100. He once called at the Surveyor's office, in Washington, and was invited to call again when it was intended to arrest him, but he did not call a second time.
Professor Hayden, who wrote our first letter, had in fact been swindled twice by the same man, in disguise!
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes
The incarceration of the swindler was noted in the November 6, 1885 issue of Science, p. 408, but it has a tone of despair to it:
A thief representing himself as Leo Lesquereux, jun., and also as one Strong, son of the geologist who was drowned in this state some years since, has been doing this part of the country of late, making way with geological reports, instruments, and specimens. He has been apprehended, and is now in the jail at Elkhorn, Walworth county, Wis. His term will expire January 28, or within a day or two of that time. He is the same man who has carried on extensive swindling operations of a similar nature in the east. Would it not be well to have him 'sent up' as many times as possible ? I send you this information, hoping that it may seem wise to you to make his whereabouts known through your widely-circulated columns, and to encourage all interested to make it as warm as possible for this impostor. He very probably assumes other names than those I have given. He is rather short, of light complexion, has a cynical expression, wears eye-glasses, talks with the greatest freedom of geologists, finding few worthy of recognition or favor. He looks to be thirty years, but represented himself here as forty six. He told in many places about here, but did not say it here, that he was distributing specimens from the Smithsonian institution. He imposed upon many in that way. He is conversant with geology and geological work, and is certainly well posted on fossil plants.
(My emphasis.) Darn liberal justice system of 1885! There is quite a bit of frustration in this letter, as the swindler seems to have had an imprisonment of only a handful of months. Here we have a good indication that the swindler is a disgruntled academic of some sort, as he "talks with the greatest freedom of geologists, finding few worthy of recognition or favor."
The author of the letter was
R.D. Salisbury (1858-1922), a prominent midwestern geologist who was one of the early faculty of the University of Chicago, founded 1891.A November 20, 1885 letter to Science, p. 453, titled, "The Swindling Geologist", adds to the outrage felt by Salisbury:
PROFESSOR SALISBURY'S letter in Science for Nov. 6 gives the present location of a miscreant who has been plundering cabinets and libraries throughout the country for the last two or three years, and who has been making decent people even more unhappy by assuming their names than by stealing their books. His present address is County Jail, Elkhorn, Wis. Esto perpetua. This is the address; but as to the name, who knows ? For the last six months he has dragged through the mire the honored name of Leo Lesquereux, to the great annoyance of the venerable owner. Before this he was Prof. F. A. Arendel of the Pennsylvania survey. Other names under which he has stolen and swindled are N. U. Taggart, E. Douglass, E. D. Whitney, E. D. Strong, etc. Three of these names have the initials E. D., in which fact there may be some significance. The Milwaukee police record says of him that he has but one hand, wearing a false hand on one arm. This fact may help to identify him. He seems to have a remarkable amount of geological knowledge, and especially on fossil botany. Where did he get this knowledge ? Who trained him? Who was his father ? Who was his mother ? Has he a sister ? Has he a brother ? These are questions that many victims desire to have answered, in whole or in part.
Apparently the real Prof. Lesquereux was aware of the impostor, and none too pleased! Especially noteworthy in this correspondence, however, is the exasperation of the author regarding the swindler's education: "Where did he get this knowledge? Who trained him?" Education is supposed to be an ennobling process, and yet a villain was lurking amongst the academics. We nevertheless learn of another alias:
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel
Soon after his release from prison, the swindler got back to work. A letter titled, "A swindler abroad again" appeared in the March 26, 1886 issue of Science, p. 286:
A person has been operating in Illinois and Iowa, representing himself to be Prof. H. S. Williams at some points, and Professor Oelrich at others; in all cases, so far as heard from, assuming to be connected with the faculty of Cornell university. His modus operandi is to borrow scientific works, money, and paleontological specimens, and contract with colleges to furnish series of fossils illustrative of American geology. He is an expert in classifying fossils, and his method of work is strongly suggestive of the individual who duped many scientific workers last year under the alias of Lesquereux. He has worked his games at Galesburg, Ill., Burlington, Mount Pleasant, Ottumwa, and Oskaloosa, Io., being at the latter place March 8 last. He is undersized, a man of from thirty to thirty-five years of age, light hair, beard, and mustache, and apparently having no use of his right arm, though this defect may have been simulated.
The description of the swindler has solidified, and the story of his missing hand has changed to a crippled right arm, "though this defect may have been simulated."
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Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich
On April 2nd, 1886, a letter appeared in Science directly from Oskaloosa on p. 308, written by
Erasmus Haworth (1855-1932), another geologist of note:Please give place to an advertisement of a fraud who has just left Oskaloosa. He came on the 6th, remained six days, and left without having caused sufficient suspicion for any one to say any thing. He professes to be Prof. Henry S. Williams of Cornell University, N. Y., a captain on the retired list of the U. S. army, – retired for disabilities resulting received from the Indians three days after General Custer fell. He is now representing the Smithsonian institution as a sort of an examiner, looking after books and specimens deposited at different places. He also represents that Cornell has a fund which makes it possible for them to sell for fifty dollars a set of fossils equal to sets sold by Ward for eight hundred and fifty dollars, and that they only want five dollars cash to pay for boxing and labelling, the remainder to be paid from time to time in local fossils, for which reasonable prices will be allowed. He contracted two sets here, but received the five dollars on but one of them. He is about five feet eight inches high, weighs about one hundred and forty pounds, carries his right arm as though stiff, wears a glove on that hand, has light-brown straight hair, mustache, blue eyes, a large head with prominent forehead, so that his eyes seem a little sunken, and uses tobacco and whiskey tolerably freely for a professional man. We know he has a whole right arm and hand, and it is quite possible nothing is the matter with it. He talks very freely and accurately of fossils, books, and men, can give minute details of events in Indian warfare of ten and more years ago, which some of our citizens know to be literally true. He spends his money very freely, and seems to have plenty of it. There is a general feeling that he worked someone for one hundred and eighty dollars, but, if so,whoever it was will not tell it. The amount is indicated,because it is rumored he draws one hundred and eighty dollars per month from the army. I cannot find who started it. If he has not done so, he certainly missed a good chance. A despatch from Humboldt to the Des Moines Register says he has been there and got about one hundred dollars.
Though it is pure speculation, the connection of the possibly crippled right arm and knowledge of Indian warfare suggests that the swindler may have been in the military.
Regardless, it looks like we may add Humboldt, IA to the list of locations:
The next letter appeared in the May 7, 1886 issue of Science, p. 418, and was written by I.C. White, who seems to have taken the swindler's actions a little personally, with some justification:
It has just come to my knowledge that the 'tramp 'geologist who has been ' wandering up and down the earth' for the last three years, the man of many accomplishments and aliases, is now in the vicinity of St. Cloud, Minn., posing as 'Capt.' I. C. White of the West Virginia university. I would say, in my own defence, that the title of 'captain' is not worn by me, and that in this case I can establish an alibi, with the help of my friends. Cannot something be done to throttle this nuisance before he scandalizes every geologist in the country? Probably a committee from those whom he has swindled and misrepresented would hunt him down most successfully, and I am sure such a committee could be trusted to squelch him effectually.
Here we have an 1886 case of identity theft! Clearly I.C. White is rather angry about the abuse of his name, considering he is essentially suggesting to organize a posse (committee) to hunt the swindler down.
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White
From the image of
Israel C. White (1848-1927), he looks like the sort of fellow who might run a posse:Israel C. White, c. 1898 (
source).White undertook explorations to study coal deposits in South America, and his observation of similar rock strata in South America and Africa was an important contribution to the development of
Alfred Wegener's 1912 theory of continental drift.White's posse — ahem — committee never seems to have formed, but fortunately the swindler ended up being caught again nevertheless. A letter titled "The swindling naturalist caught" appeared in the August 6th, 1886 issue of Science, p. 124:
The geological swindler described in Science, p.308, No. 165 (April 2, 1886), has finally been entrapped and captured here, and is now in jail at Kankakee, Illinois, for the sale of books which he borrowed from a gentleman in that town. He passed here as 'Captain Lindley ' of the U. S. army, detailed as 'instructor in geology' at West Point. I need not say that there is no such name in the Army register nor on the roster of instructors at the military academy. As he will undoubtedly be sentenced for at least a term in jail, it is much to be desired that those who have heretofore been swindled by him may communicate promptly with the sheriff of Kankakee county. If he is not vigorously prosecuted, it will soon become necessary for the naturalist to carry a passport in travelling through this region.
This letter was written from Champaign, Illinois; it therefore seems that we have two more stops on the trail, and a new alias:
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley
Any relief that the scientific community felt was short-lived, alas; within short order the swindler was at work again. He did, however, seem to have learned some caution from his two incarcerations, and an alternate scam. In the November 26th, 1886 issue of Science, p. 482, we get a report titled, "The swindler at work again":
I ENCLOSE for the benefit of others a letter from a swindler in the west, addressed to me, over the very well forged signature of Charles D. Walcott, U. S. N. M. (national museum at Washington), dated simply ' Cook co. Normal, Nov. 7, 1886.' Chicago is in Cook county, Ill. It requested the immediate despatch of a set of geological reports to Prof. George Wells Litz. of the Cook county (Ill.) normal school, and his colleague, Professor Parker.
Prof. JOHN P. LESLEY.Dear Sir,- Will you kindly send to Prof. George Wells Litz, of the Cook county(Il.) normal school, a complete set of the reports of the second geological survey of Pennsylvania. I am indebted to him, and to his colleague Professor Parker, for a most delightful Sunday, and wish to place him and his friend in the way of getting literature at present inaccessible to them. An early compliance with this request will be considered a great favor, and one to be soon repaid by your friend, CHARLES D. WALCOTT, U.S.N.M.
Mr. Walcott informs me by letter, after seeing the above letter, that he had tried to trace the rascal, but thus far without success. The fellow has obtained, under various false pretences, quantities of specimens, books, and sometimes money, from eastern geologists.
John Peter Lesley (1819-1903) was another prominent geologist who performed extensive researches into the coal, oil and iron of the U.S. and Canada. In 1874 he was made state geologist of Pennsylvania, and was a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania; he presumably got the letter from the swindler while in Philadelphia.
J.P. Lesley, c. 1877 (source).
The scheme seems to have been a simple one: the swindler pretended in writing to be C.D. Walcott, and tried to use Walcott's authority to get documents sent directly to him in the Chicago area.
Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850-1927) was a good choice for a fake identity. A respected paleontologist specializing in invertebrates he would later in life become famous for the discovery of fossils in the Burgess Shale of British Columbia.
The swindler's plan failed, but it was an audacious one — he clearly hadn't gone very far from Kankakee before trying a con again! In one letter, he also presumably took on three new identities — Walcott, and the two Professors who were supposed to receive the documents.
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley, George Wells Litz, Professor Parker, C.D. Walcott
We next hear of the swindler in the January 14th, 1887 issue of Science, p. 34:
The swindling geologist was this week in Springfield, Mass., where he passed himself off as Capt. C.E. Dutton. I cannot learn that he succeeded in victimizing any one except the hotel-keeper of the house where he stopped, owing to the fact that he was early exposed by the commanding officer of the armory, who luckily happened to know Captain Dutton. He later inflicted himself on me, playing the deaf mute, calling himself Ivan C. Vassile of the Russian museum, and offering to sell me odd volumes of Hall's 'Geology of New York state.' Suspecting that they were stolen, I declined to buy. He is a square-faced, smooth-shaven, light-complexioned fellow, of rather short stature, and wore a white felt hat and an army cape. His names and clothes, however, would perhaps hardly serve to identify him, as he probably has a variety of both. He claimed to be on his way to Albany. Perhaps if he can be exposed all along the line, he may soon be rendered harmless.
Perhaps it is simply because the swindler failed in his attempts, but this letter seems to take a softer tone towards the man, particularly in the last sentence.
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley, George Wells Litz, Professor Parker, C.D. Walcott, C.E. Dutton, Ivan C. Vassile
His next stop was Syracuse, N.Y., as a June 17, 1887 letter to Science, p. 592 relates:
The following from one of the local papers here will show that the peculiar person who has repeatedly been shown up in Science is still at large and at work: at least, I presume he is the same person, since it is unlikely that there is more than one such perverse genius abroad. This time he turns up as a deaf-mute, attached to the Smithsonian, and named ' R. M. Vasile.'
"The Syracuse (N. Y.) Herald says, 'A highly educated man, who appeared to be deaf and dumb, and who represented himself to be an attache of the Smithsonian institution at Washington, came here eight or ten days ago, and succeeded in ingratiating himself into the confidence of Prof. W. A. Brownell of the high school, and of other scientific gentlemen. He gave his name as R. M. Vasile. It took him but a short time to prove himself a master of geology, mineralogy, and chemistry, and his proficiency in those sciences lent color to his representation that he had come here to investigate the rocks and minerals of Onondaga county, and also to get together material for a report on its fishes. Professor Brownell obtained from him for a mere trifle a rare and valuable scientific work, and for one dollar and twenty-five cents got a promise from him, that, upon his return to Washington, he would send on a set of trilobites. Having thus won the confidence of the professor, he began to talk of exchanging specimens with his new-made friend; but his offers excited suspicion, and an inquiry sent by telegraph to Washington brought back the information that Vasile was not in the government's employ. Soon afterward the man disappeared, and he has not been heard from since. He left a board-bill at the Kingsley House, and the impression prevails there that he only pretended to be deaf and dumb. His scheme is apparently to borrow books and scientific specimens in one town, and dispose of them in another.'"
The constant reports in Science seem to have had an effect; the swindler seems to be getting diminishing returns for his efforts. The attitude towards him seems to have changed subtly, as well; he is now referred to as a "genius", albeit a "perverse" one.
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley, George Wells Litz, Professor Parker, C.D. Walcott, C.E. Dutton, Ivan C. Vassile, R.M. Vasile
Heading off from Syracuse, the swindler ended up back in Pennsylvania (Science, June 24, 1887, p. 614):
About six weeks ago a delightfully intelligent and amiable deaf-and-dumb man appeared in Pottsville, and was entertained hospitably by Mr. Bard Wells, late of the geological survey of Pennsylvania, to whom he gave some valuable books, and from whom he took some, also a compass. He left Pottsville suddenly without paying his hotel-bill. About two weeks afterward he called at the office of the survey, in Philadelphia, after office-hours, and represented himself to the janitress as an assistant on the survey, sent by the assistant in charge of the office to get certain survey reports. Having no written order to show, he was refused admittance, and went away very angry. I see that he has turned up at Syracuse. It is astonishing that the fellow can have managed to escape capture so long.
There seems to me to be a bit of desperation in the swindler's actions at this point: showing up after office hours at the office of the geological survey seems very irregular and certain to draw more attention than he would like.
Whew! We've worked our way through a lot of swindling! Let's take a short commercial break:
Okay, back to the swindler's saga! In October 21st, 1887 issue of Science, p. 203, we find that the swindler appeared in Boston:
A MAN answering the description of the impostor given in previous numbers of Science, appeared at the rooms of the Boston Society of Natural History on Saturday last, having in his possession a microscope, which he offered for sale at a very low price. We suspected his character, but, having no charge against him, were unable to do any thing, and were in hopes he would return on Monday with his microscope, as he engaged to do. He did not return, and we could therefore do nothing.
By 1888, we find that the swindler has targeted New York, though with apparently little success (Science, Feb 17, 1888, p. 86):
A YOUNG man of gentlemanly bearing, who calls himself Dr. S. M. Gutmann, and claims membership in the American Chemical Society, has been lately imposing on various members of the scientific fraternity in New York and vicinity. He claims to be a pupil and son-in-law of Professor Hofmann of Berlin, and shows letters purporting to come from some well-known persons, who recommend him as an expert in the manufacture and analysis of coal-gas. He is familiar with the names of chemists and physicists in this country, and uses them with freedom by way of introduction to strangers. He represents himself to be in pecuniary straits, as the result of long and fruitless efforts to obtain employment since his arrival in this country.
Since there are many readers of Science whom he will attempt to victimize, it may be well to warn them against this plausible and mendacious vagabond.
We now have some indications that the swindler is having trouble; his own admission that he is in bad financial shape, and his shift to targeting chemists.
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley, George Wells Litz, Professor Parker, C.D. Walcott, C.E. Dutton, Ivan C. Vassile, R.M. Vasile, S. M. Gutmann
This reign of swindling couldn't last forever; at last, in March 1888, we get two letters describing his recapture:
The Scientific Swindler Again (Science, Mar 9, 1888, p. 119)
The following from the Indianapolis Journal of Feb. 24 may be of interest to those who have been the victims of the swindler so extensively advertised by your own and other journals: "The book-thief who has, under the names of W.R. Taggart, Professor Cameron, Professor Douglass, and various aliases, travelled over the country, representing himself as a scientific student, and borrowing valuable books, has been arrested in Cincinnati, where he gave the name of Otto Syrski. He was recognized yesterday by Professor Collett of this city, who was one of his victims. Professor Collet learned where his books has been sold, and will probably recover them." It is to be hoped that this will stop his operations, at least for a time.
End of the Swindler (Science, Mar 23, 1888, p. 144)
IT will give undoubted satisfaction to his many victims to learn that the 'swindling geologist,' whose depredations have been so frequently noted in your columns, has been lately convicted of stealing a number of microscopic objectives from the University of Cincinnati, and sentenced to spend five years at hard labor in the Ohio Penitentiary. He was sentenced under the name of O. L. Syrski, but admitted having pursued his calling under a variety of aliases, such as Taggart, Vasile, Ellison, Cameron, Douglas, Strong, Lee, Arundal, and Lesquereux. A valuable microscopic objective, found in his possession, awaits identification by the owner.
Five years of hard labor! It looks like the swindler's crime wave had finally been brought to an end:
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley, George Wells Litz, Professor Parker, C.D. Walcott, C.E. Dutton, Ivan C. Vassile, R.M. Vasile, S. M. Gutmann, O.L. Syrski
The alias O.L. Syrski was almost certainly another alias, and not his real name. One Simon Syrski (1829-1882) was an accomplished zoologist who did extensive studies on eels.
With "Syrski" sentenced to hard labor, it seemed that the saga of the scientific swindler had come to an end. While researching this post, I did one final Google search to see if I'd missed any of his exploits, and — oh, FFS:
The "geological swindler" again abroad (The American Geologist, Vol. 8, 1891, after p. 64):
Readers of the Geologist will recall several references in the early numbers, Vol. I ( 1888), to an adept thief who had for several years practiced upon the geologists and other scientists of America with a good degree of success. This fellow was apprehended and served six months' imprisonment in the Elkhorn jail, in Wisconsin, but on release resumed his nefarious tricks. In January, 1888, he stole some microscopic objectives from the University of Cincinnati, and under the instigation of Prof. Chas. H. Gilbert, the police of the city were put upon his trail. After a pursuit of some weeks, tracing him in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, he was apprehended at Nashville, and on trial was convicted and sentenced for five years for grand larceny, to the State penitentiary at Columbus, O. Ho pleaded guilty and admitted that he was the "swindling geologist" of numerous aliases.
Okay, that catches us up to where we had last left our swindler, but there is more:
In confinement he made a good record for himself and was put in charge of the night-school. He would have been released, on account of good behavior, at the expiration of three years and nine months under the rules of the Ohio penitentiary, in the fall of 1891, but under special protestations of reform he was given a degree of freedom at Columbus, which allowed of his release finally "on parole" for the remainder of the term that he had to serve. He remained for a time quietly at Columbus, as reporter for the Columbus Sunday World. Suddenly he appeared at Saginaw, Michigan, in violation of his parole, where he attached himself to the High school principal and addressed the pupils of the High school, claiming to have been a professor in Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N. Y., and then connected with Smith College, but preferring his present occupation of dealing in fossils, as more remunerative. He sold the High school ten dollars worth of fossils. He said he was a Russian, descended from an eminent Russian geologist, and acquainted with the most distinguished geologists of our country—(his usual story, the latter part, alas, too true! ), also that he is the brother of the celebrated nihilist martyr Vera Sussulich, that he had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, and had been made a captain, 3tc., etc. Thence he went to Lansing, Mich., and the speeches he made there were reported in the Detroit Tribune under the title—"A man with a history." At Lansing, he claimed to be a mining engineer, and betook himself to the Agricultural College, whore he " named the fossils" in the collection of that institution.
On making inquiry as to the identity of this man with the "O. L. Syrski," who had been a short time before released on parole, it was learned that, "in the language of the streets, Syrski has jumped his parole, beaten his boarding-house, and employer, and skipped," with the incompleted sentence still hanging over his head.
Here we have more indications that the swindler is an educated man, and perfectly capable of keeping an honest job, namely that of a reporter. That seems to have not been satisfying to him, however, and we soon find him selling fossils again, when he isn't identifying specimens in museum collections!
He is now again launched upon the community, to continue to be a scourge to scientists and amateurs. In addition to his standard way of representing himself as a geologist (or other scientist more rarely), as a Russian, often as deaf and dumb, and always making memoranda on little squares of colored writing-paper which he carries in very small vest-pocket blocks, and taking occasion to steal valuable books, instruments, and fossils from his hosts, he now has adopted also the method of corresponding with scientists, especially geologists, soliciting exchanges, which of course he conducts dishonestly.
This we had already learned, but we get something extra and surprising in this report:
He is thus described at Saginaw; a man of medium bight, of light complexion, with a light colored moustache, blue or grey eyes of great keenness and rather watery, and a firm jaw, giving decision to his conversation. His language is fluent, and free from any foreign accent or peculiarity. He has lost one or two front lower teeth, and looks to be 35 or 40 years old. The attached half-tone reproduction of his portrait is from a photograph taken by the Cincinnati police at the time of his last trial and incarceration. The negative is held by Vail Brothers, photographers, 254 Main street, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and their price for a single copy is 25 cents. It Is a very accurate portrait of him as he appeared three years ago, as many who have suffered from his thefts can testify, except that he is a little more rough in his personal appearance, in the portrait, than usual.
Yes, we have a photograph:
The "Scientific Swindler", c. 1888.
Does he appear as you imagined him to be? I didn't know what to expect, really, which is perhaps a testament to his ability as a con-man to remain rather nondescript.
Perhaps the most fascinating part of the report is the end of it:
No one has yet been found who was a classmate to the swindler, nor has any knowledge been obtained as to the institution where he gained his excellent higher education. He himself declares that he is a graduate of the University of Kief in Russia, but no inquiry seems to have been made into the truth or falsity of the statement. He has shown a familiarity with the Sclavonic languages by conversing freely with Polos and Hungarians in the quarries at Rondont, N. Y., in their own tongues.
We have no vindictive feelings against the man at all, but we believe that we can do no better service to scientists in America than by putting them on their guard against strangers without good credentials, and arming them against "O. L. Syrski," by giving this information.
From reading the progress of the reports, the scientific community seems to have gone from complete outrage towards him, to a grudging acceptance of his skills, to almost pitying his status.
http://skullsinthestars.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/1891_map1.jpghttp://skullsinthestars.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/1891_map1.jpg
Aliases used: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley, George Wells Litz, Professor Parker, C.D. Walcott, C.E. Dutton, Ivan C. Vassile, R.M. Vasile, S. M. Gutmann, O.L. Syrski, R. Verrall, O.L. Sussulich, Professor Leveille, Gratacap (new ones listed in American Geologist notice)
Though he was back at large, the fight seems to have gone out of our swindler somewhat — and the scientific community was now on guard against him. The American Geologist notice was reprinted in the next issue, but included an additional letter from Columbia, Mo, dated June 17, 1891:
A few days ago a man came to this place, came to the University and asked the janitor to show him specimens. Next morning he came to me as a "deaf and dumb" man, said he wanted some work to do. Could name fossils, American or European. I told him there was no fund for the purpose. I showed him mine, He then spent the day looking at the university collection. I told him I would pay him to look over our European fossils and correct their names if necessary. He wrote on a paper his name "Otto Ludovttz Sassulich" said he was a brother of Vera Sassulich of Zurich, Switzerland. He is a Russian by birth, and he seemed strangely familiar with every thing, people, places, fossils, but said his deaf and dumbness prevented his working as an active mining expert. Well, I got him at work, in room with him most of time. A few fossils I was in doubt of and asked him, and he was surprisingly correct, knew just where to find descriptions, etc.
While thus engaged one of our professors came in and mentioned about a geological swindler being in Tennessee a few years ago. I then remembered that there was a notice of such a man in June Geologist, but had not paid much attention to it. It was at hand and I looked and there was the man's likeness exactly. I let him work all day, paid him, then told him he ought to talk, that he was not dumb. Also told him that I knew who he was, and that I thought that a man gifted as he was ought to be every way correct. I wished him well, etc., but had not told him of article and portrait, but Prof. P—- of university, happening in just then, insisted on showing it to him. Of course he denied being a thief, produced a recommendation from Prof. Ed. Orton, also one from of Vasssar. He trembled though and hurried off.
Don't know where he went, but he certainly is very gifted and smart, and is well posted in paleontology, and would make the best I have ever known provided he stuck to it and honesty. He did not steal anything here that I know of, may have taken one or two fossils, nothing else, and probably nothing of much value if anything. Yours, etc.,
G. C. Broadhead.
N. B. He gave address Columbus, Ohio, and that his mother there would take care of his letters.
Final tally: N.R. Taggart, E.D. Strong, E. Douglas, E.D. Whitney, Leo Lesquereux, T.S. Holmes, F. A. Arendel, H. S. Williams, Professor Oelrich, I.C. White, Captain Lindley, George Wells Litz, Professor Parker, C.D. Walcott, C.E. Dutton, Ivan C. Vassile, R.M. Vasile, S. M. Gutmann, O.L. Syrski, R. Verrall, O.L. Sussulich, Professor Leveille, Gratacap
Would you like to know the rest of the story? Well, unfortunately, there is no more — as far as I have been able to tell. Later issues of The American Geologist and Science don't seem to contain any further accounts of the swindler's exploits. The swindler disappears as mysteriously as he appeared, his true identity and history unknown.
Reading that last letter, I like to think that Professor Broadhead got through to the confidence man. Broadhead told him flat out that he was a very smart man who should be able to make a career out of his knowledge; indeed, Broadhead says that he "would make the best I have ever known provided he stuck to it and honesty." Broadhead would be one to know; he was the State Geologist of Missouri.
Perhaps our swindler settled down at that point, finding himself a low-key job identifying fossils in some museum or university, making a living and not living in fear of being discovered. When next you visit some museum's fossil exhibit, you may in fact end up looking at some specimens that were identified by a man who was for nearly ten years the scourge of the geological community.
The Choke Artist
Who are the mysterious critics hunting Henry Heimlich?
Jason Zengerle
April 23, 2007 | 12:00 am
"A serious matter has been brought to my attention," the letter began. Addressed to an official in the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects at the University of California at Los Angeles, it accused two UCLA medical researchers of participating in illegal human experiments on HIV patients in China. "These experiments consist of giving malaria to people already suffering from HIV and full-blown AIDS," the letter alleged, before going on to make an even more startling claim: "[T]hese experiments have been conducted under the direction of Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, known for the Heimlich maneuver."
The letter, which was sent via e-mail in October 2002 and was from a "Dr. Bob Smith," was merely the first in a series of epistolary attacks against Heimlich. A few months later, editors at more than 40 publications—ranging from The New York Times to the medical journal Chest—received missives from someone calling himself "David Ionescu" that accused Heimlich of improperly taking credit for inventing a type of esophageal surgery. And then, in September 2003, the website heimlichinstitute.com went online. Its URL was almost identical to the official website of Henry Heimlich's Heimlich Institute, heimlichinstitute.org, but, rather than being dedicated to burnishing the doctor's legend, it was devoted to tearing it down. The site featured a long, angry indictment of Heimlich and accused him of all sorts of medical misconduct. The site's proprietor was listed as "Holly Martins"—the protagonist in the 1949 film noir The Third Man.
The octogenarian Heimlich seemed an unlikely target of so many people's ire. He had entered into the pantheon of medical history not for inventing a disease-eradicating vaccine or for isolating the DNA of a killer virus but, rather, for developing an anti-choking maneuver that even a child could perform. And, yet, it is the very simplicity of Heimlich's lifesaving technique that makes it so ingenious; because anyone can perform the maneuver, anyone can save a life. Since its invention in 1974, it has become a standard First Aid procedure around the world; and, while it may have been hyperbole for Norman Vincent Peale to once declare that Heimlich "has saved the lives of more human beings than any other person living today," it was fair to say that, by the measure of name recognition at least, the maneuver had made Heimlich America's most famous doctor.
But, after the letters started arriving, Heimlich could no longer rest on such laurels. When I met him in his office at the Heimlich Institute, he was under siege. Heimlich is tall and thin with a sharp nose and watchful gray eyes, giving him an almost avian appearance. He wore a coat and tie and, as he sat at his desk, he told me that he still put in a five-day work week—but what he was working on was unclear. The impressive-sounding Heimlich Institute, in fact, consisted of just two rooms in an administrative annex behind Cincinnati's Deaconess Hospital. On the afternoon I visited, Heimlich had cajoled his old secretary, who had recently been laid off due to lack of funds, to come in to help find some files for me; otherwise, he was the only person at the Institute.
And, yet, even in its diminished state, Heimlich's office served as an impressive testament to his unique stature. Framed cartoon strips that referenced the Heimlich maneuver shared wall space with pictures of celebrities—Cher, Elizabeth Taylor, Ronald Reagan—who were saved by his anti-choking treatment. A giant toy caterpillar—"Heimlich," a ravenous character from the Pixar movie A Bug's Life—sat on the floor by his desk. Heimlich thumbed through a stack of newspaper articles. "I still get clippings from papers from all over the country whenever somebody saves a life," he said in a tone that sounded both boastful and surprised.
Heimlich was copied on some of the letters attacking his reputation; but, initially, he paid them little mind, assuming no one would take the allegations seriously. Soon, though, the attacks began to exact a toll. UCLA launched an investigation into its researchers' work with Heimlich and ultimately found that one researcher had violated federal laws. Meanwhile, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Heimlich's hometown paper, ran a front-page story in which a rival doctor called Heimlich "a liar and a thief." Other doctors soon followed suit. Even the American Red Cross began to take a second look at the Heimlich maneuver. Heimlich and his family were traumatized. "It's an incredibly painful and difficult thing for someone to go through in the twilight of his life," Phil Heimlich, the eldest of the doctor's four children, told me.
Heimlich eventually decided that he could no longer do nothing. He hired a lawyer and an investigator to determine who was behind the allegations—or, as Heimlich called them, "the hate campaign." It was an investigation that would take months and frequently run into dead ends. For a reason that Heimlich did not yet understand—a reason so shocking that, when he did discover it, it would shake him to his core—his mysterious critics had gone to great lengths to conceal their identities, wielding their anonymity as a potent weapon against his fame.
But, although he was pained by the attacks, in some ways Heimlich actually relished the confrontation—because he had never shied away from a fight. Lost amidst the tchotchkes and celebrity photos in his office that testify to the maneuver's success is the story of just how hard he fought to get the medical establishment to accept it in the first place. Indeed, Heimlich's achievement was not so much the maneuver itself but the vigorous and sometimes underhanded campaign he waged to promote it. Heimlich's genius—one that has been adopted lately by everyone from drug companies to war planners—was to circumvent the experts and take his case directly to the people. A showman as much as a scientist, a brawler as much as a doctor, Heimlich was the P.T. Barnum of medicine—his career serving as testament to the fact that even the supposedly fact-based medical realm is susceptible to the phantom powers of personality and salesmanship.
"This letter is to bring to your attention allegations that the International Society of Surgery, the World Journal of Surgery, and the American medical journal, Diseases of the Chest, have been defrauded by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, best known for the Heimlich maneuver,"—letter from "David Ionescu," April 3, 2003.
In 1963, a Florida coroner named Robert Haugen published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that called attention to a frequently overlooked medical problem. Haugen detailed the cases of nine Florida diners who each collapsed and died while eating at a restaurant. Their deaths were initially attributed to natural causes, usually a heart attack. As Haugen wrote, it wasn't until his office performed an autopsy and discovered a large bolus of food lodged in each person's airway—"steak in four cases, beef in two, ham fat in one, kippered herring in one, and broiled lobster in another"—that the cause of death was correctly determined to be asphyxiation. Haugen dubbed this phenomenon "the cafe coronary" and implored the medical community to recognize choking as a serious problem.
Medical researchers began working to come up with an anti-choking treatment more scientifically advanced than the age-old backslap. One doctor invented the "Throat-E-Vac," which, after being inserted into the victim's mouth and creating an airtight seal, supposedly sucked up whatever was obstructing the airway. Haugen himself marketed a nine-inch-long pair of plastic tweezers—the "ChokeSaver"—that would-be rescuers could use to grasp the offending piece of food in the victim's throat and pull it out. As the public furor over choking grew—with radio stations running public service announcements about the threat posed by "the cafe coronary"—it was clear that the doctor who devised a successful anti-choking treatment would be hailed as a medical hero.
That Henry Heimlich found such a prospect appealing was hardly surprising. He had experienced his first taste of the glory that comes to those who save lives in 1941, when, as a 21-year-old passenger on a New York City-bound train, he rescued a fellow traveler after the train derailed in Connecticut—earning him a mention on the front page of The New York Times and a gold watch from the Greater New York Safety Council. After serving as a Navy doctor in World War II, during which he volunteered for "prolonged extra-hazardous" duty in the Gobi Desert, he returned to New York and specialized in thoracic surgery—a field that allowed him to hold a patient's beating heart in his hands. But even that proved unsatisfying. As a mere surgeon, Heimlich concluded, he was limited to the finite number of people on whom he could operate. By devising new and revolutionary treatments and procedures, he could exponentially increase the number of lives he saved.
Heimlich started off, in the mid-'50s, by introducing a surgery that made it possible for people with severe esophageal damage to swallow food. He called it the "Heimlich operation." Later, he devised a chest drain valve that could be used to treat a collapsed lung, which he named the "Heimlich valve." In 1969, Heimlich, along with his wife Jane (daughter of the dance hall impresario Arthur Murray), his sons, Phil and Peter, and his twin daughters, Janet and Elisabeth, moved to Cincinnati, where he became director of surgery at the city's Jewish Hospital. It was there that he turned his attention to choking.
Heimlich still relishes telling the story of his most famous invention. "No one was doing much about [choking] except for these gadgets," he says, dismissively waving his hand. He set out to develop a treatment that was, as he puts it, "so simple anybody could do it." From his thoracic surgery experience, Heimlich knew that at the moment of choking the lungs contained a substantial amount of air. He concluded that the best hope for devising a practical anti-choking treatment lay in harnessing that air to expel whatever was lodged in the larynx.
Heimlich's research methods, at least with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, seem comical. In his hospital's animal lab, he partially anesthetized a 38-pound beagle—"the equivalent of having three or four good stiff drinks at dinner," he told his lab technician. Next, he "strangled" it with a cuffed endotracheal tube inserted into the larynx. Then Heimlich attempted to dislodge the tube. At first, he tried pressing on the dog's chest, but nothing happened; with the beagle on the verge of death, he dejectedly removed the tube. Then inspiration struck. "I just got the idea that if I push up on the diaphragm, the diaphragm comes up, the chest cavity decreases in volume, and that would compress the lungs," Heimlich recalls. Sure enough, when he did just that, the tube flew out. He tried the same technique on three other beagles, each time with the same result. Elated, he sent his lab tech down to the hospital commissary for some raw hamburger. That flew out of the beagles' mouths, too.
Of course, all Heimlich had proved with his experiments was that his anti-choking treatment worked on dogs. Whether it would work on humans was an open question. Seeking an answer, Heimlich prevailed upon the editor of Emergency Medicine—a "throwaway" journal that did not require its articles to be peer-reviewed—to let him propose his anti-choking treatment in its pages. Writing in the June 1974 issue, under the headline "Pop Goes The Cafe Coronary," Heimlich instructed would-be rescuers on how to perform the maneuver. He urged readers to report the results of their rescue attempts to him. The public would serve as both his researchers and his subjects.
Heimlich made certain that a copy of his Emergency Medicine article made it to Arthur Snider, the Chicago Daily News's nationally syndicated science writer. The week after Snider's article on Heimlich's proposed new anti-choking treatment appeared, a retired restaurant owner in Washington state used the new treatment to save his choking next-door neighbor. "News Article Helps Prevent A Choking Death" read the headline in The Seattle Times a few days later. Other Snider readers across the country made similar rescues, inspiring more headlines. But, despite the growing number of positive anecdotal reports, not everyone jumped on the Heimlich maneuver bandwagon. Based on the lack of hard scientific evidence, the American Red Cross—much to Heimlich's consternation—would only endorse the Heimlich maneuver as a secondary technique to be used if back blows were unsuccessful.
The only body that seemed capable of resolving the dispute between Heimlich and the Red Cross was the National Academy of Sciences. In June 1976, the academy's Committee on Emergency Medical Services convened a two-day conference on "Emergency Airway Management." The committee included such preeminent research doctors as Peter Safar, the co-inventor of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and James Jude, who discovered cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). On the conference's first day, Heimlich gave an impassioned speech, boasting of the more than 500 lives he said the maneuver had already saved. After his presentation, nine conference participants gathered in the academy's boardroom to try to reach an official consensus on choking treatments. For hours, they debated. Finally, as the clock ticked past midnight, they voted six to three in favor of elevating the Heimlich maneuver above the backslap.
But the group's chairman, an anesthesiologist named Don Benson, still harbored doubts, and, the next morning, he told the conference that the group had been unable to obtain a "universal opinion." Heimlich stormed out of the conference. He was convinced he had a proven lifesaving idea and that the only thing preventing the medical establishment from accepting it was professional jealousy. "These were the guys who were the experts ... but none of them, despite all their years of expertise, had come up with this idea," Heimlich says with bitterness that, three decades on, still seems fresh. "And then here comes this unknown guy in this field that they've been working their whole lives in, and not only does he discover this thing, but it's named after him."
From this point on, Heimlich decided to bypass the medical establishment and to take his maneuver directly to the public. He sold Heimlich maneuver posters and t-shirts (through a company he started with his son Phil) and made a slick film that featured choking actors being saved by his technique and a horror-movie-like score composed by his other son, Peter, a musician who performed in a band called "Choke." He barnstormed across the country, appearing on "The Tonight Show" and speaking to non-medical groups about the maneuver. In his dark suits and conservative ties, Heimlich looked the part of a somber doctor. But his presentations were anything but dull. He told stories of miraculous rescues and cracked risque jokes while watching Johnny Carson demonstrate the maneuver on Angie Dickinson; his speeches often ended with a massive group hug as he asked everyone in the audience to practice the maneuver on the person sitting next to them. By the late '70s, a booking agency ranked Heimlich as one of the top ten public speakers in the United States. "The guy was a dynamo," says Trevor Hughes, an anesthesiologist who became an outspoken advocate of the maneuver. "It was like when you see a tornado cutting across the plains or you come up against a force of nature. ... His charisma was incredible."
Eventually, the Red Cross and the rest of the medical establishment seemed to realize it was fighting a losing battle. Although Heimlich still lacked much in the way of convincing laboratory studies, he had managed to create a set of facts on the ground. In 1985, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop proclaimed the Heimlich maneuver "the only method" that should be used to treat choking victims. The next year, when the American Heart Association, in conjunction with the Red Cross, published its "Standards and Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiac Care," it recommended the maneuver as the primary anti-choking treatment.
Heimlich had won—making himself a household name in the process—but he had also created a number of enemies. Thanks to Heimlich's constant criticism of the organization, enrollment in the Red Cross's first-aid classes dropped, and the organization had its lawyers explore the possibility of suing him for slander. The National Academy of Sciences also suffered indignities: Heimlich had declared backslaps "death blows" and accused the organization of engaging in a cover-up—a "medical Watergate," he called it. There were also the individual doctors with whom Heimlich had tangled—he even tried to initiate ethics proceedings against one doctor who opposed the maneuver.
Thirty years later, Heimlich knew that the campaign against him could have been the work of these old enemies. He told me he drew comfort from the words of the Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote, "At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men assigned to guard the past." He thought about the many—if not necessarily 1,000—men who had opposed him, and he tried to determine who would engage in such attacks today. He came up with a short list, which he conveyed to his lawyer, who in turn passed it on to the investigator. But the investigator soon determined that none of the suspects were involved. Still, there was some progress. Although Heimlich's tormentors had signed their attacks with fake names, employed multiple e-mail accounts and Web-hosting services from far-flung places (such as the Czech Republic), and used phone numbers that were registered under even more pseudonyms, the investigator made the startling discovery that the attacks could be traced back to the same ISP number. In other words, Dr. Bob Smith, David Ionescu, and Holly Martins were likely the same person. But if that person wasn't one of Heimlich's suspects, then who could it be?
"Even after being made aware of potentially life-threatening risks associated with the Heimlich maneuver for drowning, did [Heimlich and a colleague] continue to encourage the public to test it on one another, putting at risk not only the victims but their rescuers? ... Was the Heimlich maneuver for drowning rescue nothing more than a scam?"—from "Conclusion," by "Holly Martins," heimlichinstitute.com.
Heimlich had based his antichoking maneuver on little science but much intuition. And, because his intuition had proved correct, his populist campaign on the maneuver's behalf appeared heroic. It was the act of an innovative—if maverick—doctor who wanted to save lives right away instead of waiting for the medical establishment to catch up and give his idea its seal of approval. In many ways, Heimlich's story—despite its rough edges—was inspirational. But that inspiration had a downside. What if Heimlich viewed his experience with the maneuver as a sign that he was uniquely equipped, perhaps even destined, to solve other, even more pressing medical problems? And what if Heimlich, convinced of his own rightness, started up his publicity machine in order to sell the public another medical treatment, but, this time, his intuition turned out to be incorrect?
In the early '80s, Heimlich, searching for an even grander lifesaving idea, became convinced there was another, wider-reaching use for his maneuver. In 1974, a surgeon named Victor Esch claimed he used Heimlich's anti-choking treatment to save the life of a man who had nearly drowned on a Delaware beach. "[W]ater gushed out of his mouth and he began breathing," Esch reported. In subsequent years, Heimlich received a handful of similar reports, and, in 1985, he argued that the maneuver should replace CPR at a joint American Heart Association-Red Cross meeting in Dallas, Texas.
As had been true nine years earlier at the National Academy of Sciences, Heimlich lacked any convincing scientific studies to support his claim, and he had even fewer anecdotal reports. There was also concern among drowning experts that the Heimlich maneuver was potentially dangerous, since it would delay resuscitation efforts and was likely to induce vomiting, which can lead to aspiration pneumonia. And yet, the four other members of the drowning panel agreed to add the maneuver to the drowning rescue protocols as a secondary treatment. Heimlich's public fight over choking seemed to play a role in their decision. "We were aware that there was controversy over the prior set of guidelines on choking," says Joe Ornato, the drowning panel's chairman and an emergency medicine doctor at the Medical College of Virginia. "I didn't want anyone to potentially not have his life saved if it turned out Dr. Heimlich's idea was correct."
But Heimlich was not mollified. He continued to agitate for the maneuver to replace CPR as the primary near-drowning treatment, and, eventually, the Institute of Medicine (IOM)—the nation's leading medical advisory group—agreed to give him a hearing. In 1993, Heimlich testified before an IOM committee. "[Heimlich] kind of impressed me as a guy who doesn't really know anything about research science," says Peter Rosen, who chaired the IOM committee and was then an emergency medicine doctor at the University of California at San Diego. "It was an old man telling tales." The IOM committee's subsequent report concluded that there was no good evidence to support the routine use of the Heimlich maneuver on drowning victims.
Just as he had done during his fight over choking, Heimlich decided to circumvent the medical establishment. In 1995, he appeared at a U.S. Lifesaving Association seminar and urged the assembled lifeguards to ignore the American Heart Association guidelines as an act of conscience, adding, "I think the Nuremberg trials told the story that no one can be excused for saying, 'I was ordered to do so or was taught to do so, to kill people.'" That same year, Jeff Ellis & Associates, the nation's largest private lifeguard company—which staffs many of the nation's major water parks and trains about 35,000 lifeguards annually—began teaching the maneuver as a first response. It continued to do so for the next five years, until a reporter for the water park industry trade magazine Fun World wrote a story documenting the questionable science behind Heimlich's crusade.
There is much speculation in the lifesaving community that Ellis's five-year embrace of the Heimlich maneuver compromised safety at the company's facilities, and there are rumors of rescues that went awry. An Ellis spokesperson refused to answer any questions about the company's experience with the maneuver. But James Orlowski, a pediatrician in Tampa, Florida, who has tracked the use of the Heimlich maneuver in drownings, says he knows of more than 30 cases (though not at Ellis pools) in which the use of the maneuver had "destructive" results—from stomach rupture to aspiration pneumonia to death. Orlowski says he knows of no instances where the maneuver saved a near-drowning victim.
Ellis's decision to drop the maneuver from its protocol was a severe blow to Heimlich. But he turned to his supporters for solace—none more so than his family. Although Heimlich still had many admirers among the general public, their regard for him could never approach the larger-than-life status in which his family held him. His eldest son Phil, who went from selling Heimlich maneuver t-shirts to a successful legal career to an eventual seat on the Cincinnati city council, credits his father for his decision to go into politics. "He really inspired me, because he used his abilities to have a real impact on society," he says. When Phil had his own son, he named him Henry. And, while Phil worked on the public stage to carry on his father's good name, Heimlich's younger son Peter toiled privately. Having left Cincinnati to live in San Francisco and then Portland, Oregon, Peter typically only saw his father when the doctor visited the West Coast—tagging along with him to "The Tonight Show." But Peter—who eventually put aside his musical ambitions to start a business with his wife importing fabrics from Asia—stayed close to his father in another way. For years, Henry would send Peter newspaper clips and medical journal articles about his latest accomplishments, and Peter would dutifully save every one—until he had assembled what may be the world's largest private archive devoted to the life and times of Henry Heimlich.
"[I]njecting malaria into people already sick with another disease, meanwhile denying them access to other aids treatments, is reminiscent of the Tuskegee syphilis research atrocities. Yet, according to Heimlich, Chen, et al., denying other treatments to their Chinese research subjects was a condition of participation in their study."—letter from "Dr. Bob Smith," October 2, 2002.
"I want to truly teach you about malariatherapy," Heimlich said one day in the office at his condominium, as he motioned for me to move my chair closer to his. He had pulled several large black binders from his bookcase and had one of them sitting open across his lap. "Malariatherapy, I'll tell you, is very important. ... I think there's nothing more important that we can talk about."
Of all the battles Heimlich has waged, none has proven as controversial as malariatherapy—the practice of intentionally infecting a patient with malaria in order to treat another ailment. And yet, perhaps because of its controversial nature—to say nothing of its grandiosity—malariatherapy is the medical crusade most dear to him. Like all of Heimlich's endeavors, malariatherapy does have one foot in the realm of legitimate science. In 1917, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner von Jauregg proved that a malaria-induced fever would kill the syphilis micro-organism after testing the theory on patients. Malariatherapy soon became the standard treatment for neurosyphilis, and, in 1927, Wagner von Jauregg was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work. The discovery of penicillin in the 1940s, however, rendered malariatherapy obsolete, and it was eventually abandoned as a medical treatment. But, in the mid-'80s, Heimlich started campaigning to resurrect the practice—not as a treatment for neurosyphilis but as a means to fight other, more intractable, diseases.
His first target was cancer. Although he had no expertise in oncology, Heimlich's idea of treating cancer with malariatherapy was not immediately dismissed. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) even invited him to Atlanta to discuss it. But the CDC was ultimately unwilling to supply Heimlich with malariainfected blood, so he took his work across the border. In 1987, he persuaded doctors at the Mexican National Cancer Institute in Mexico City to begin treating five patients with malariatherapy. The results were not promising: Less than a year after their first inoculations, four of the patients had died.
But Heimlich was not so easily discouraged. If malariatherapy didn't work on cancer, he believed there were other afflictions that it might cure. In 1990, he published a letter in The New England Journal of Medicine suggesting malariatherapy as a treatment for Lyme disease. It wasn't long before "Lymeys" from as far away as Hungary were requesting the treatment from Heimlich. But, when a New Jersey woman who was one of his first Lyme patients later denounced Heimlich—"[I]f anybody ever asked me about Dr. Heimlich and his supposed cure," she said, "I wouldn't hesitate to tell them to run away fast"—the tightly knit Lyme community turned against malariatherapy.
Nothing, however, could shake Heimlich's faith. In fact, each time malariatherapy failed, his ambitions for it seemed to grow—so much so that, by the early '90s, he was touting it as a solution to arguably the world's most pressing medical problem: AIDS. Eminent immunology experts, such as the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, dismissed Heimlich's idea as "quite dangerous and scientifically unsound." But Heimlich did not need their support. All he needed was money and a place to try out his idea. In Hollywood he found the former; and in China he found the latter. Using private donations from prominent members of the entertainment industry—including Amy Irving and Estelle Getty—Heimlich established a malariatherapy clinic for HIV patients in Guangzhao, China. There, beginning in 1994, a team of four Chinese doctors injected at least eight HIV patients with malarial blood; for each patient, the Heimlich Institute provided the doctors between $5,000 and $10,000 in funding.
In 1996, Heimlich went to the eleventh International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver and made a stunning announcement. He reported that the CD4 counts—which are depleted as HIV progresses to AIDS—in two of the Chinese HIV patients had increased after a course of malariatherapy and that the counts remained high two years later. Before the Vancouver conference, he had stopped in Portland to visit Peter, to whom he had touted his China study. "This will put us over," he told his son. But, when AIDS experts looked closely at Heimlich's results, they saw that the test the Chinese doctors had employed to measure CD4 levels was notoriously unreliable—rendering the data useless. After a falling out with the Chinese doctors, Heimlich began searching for other countries where he could do a clinical trial, but no one was interested.
Two years ago, Heimlich changed the name of malariatherapy. "People hear malaria and they shy away," he explained to me, "so we'll call it immunotherapy." Heimlich was seated in a large recliner, and, since he was working from home that day, he wore a plaid shirt and an old pair of blue bedroom slippers. For more than an hour, he flipped through the binders and read me portions of various medical studies that he said proved malariatherapy—as he still frequently called it—works. "So we're not without evidence," he said. But, when I later read the studies in their entirety, they showed no such thing; Heimlich was cherry-picking the passages that seemed to support his position. His method reminded me of something Peter Rosen, the emergency medicine doctor who clashed with him over drowning, had told me. "One of the differences between people who do science and people who don't is the people who do science realize that what you're trying to do in science is falsify a hypothesis," Rosen said. "And only after you examine all sorts of evidence and you can't falsify a hypothesis do you establish that the hypothesis is true. The people trying to prove a hypothesis look at any piece of positive evidence and then stop. Heimlich never understood that distinction."
As Heimlich droned on, he seemed more pathetic than dangerous—just an old man telling tales, one whose crackpot theories would, thankfully, never gain currency or be put into practice again. But then Heimlich opened his last binder, which was marked confidential, and pulled out two sheets of paper. "Now I will tell you about the malariatherapy, or immunotherapy as we now call it, in Africa." He began to read from one of the sheets. "The Heimlich Institute has been collecting CD4 and viral load data on patients who are HIV-positive and have become infected with malaria. This data will provide support for the concept of using malariatherapy for treating HIV infection." The study involved the questionable practice of initially withholding treatment for malaria, so Heimlich would not tell me where in Africa this new malariatherapy trial was being done. "You never know how the politicians will react in these countries," he explained. But, according to a public health physician who has worked on AIDS in East Africa and has knowledge of Heimlich's latest project, the study site is in Ethiopia. An official with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health told me that the ministry is unaware of any malariatherapy work being conducted in the country and that, if it is, it is being done without proper notification and permission.
Still reading from the papers, Heimlich boasted about the study's early results. Six of the first seven HIV patients treated with malariatherapy, he claimed, had experienced decreases in their viral loads. Now he was eagerly anticipating results from the 42 other patients in the study. He seemed to have little doubt about what those results would be. "I've been right in just about everything I've done," Heimlich said. "And when it gets to something like this, I know."
"Evidence does exist which raises doubts about the assumption that Dr. Heimlich is the inventor [of the Heimlich maneuver]."—from "The Patrick Maneuver?" by "Holly Martins," heimlichinstitute.com
While the web of fake names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers obscured the identity of Heimlich's tormentor, the content and tenor of the attacks began to provide clues about their author. There was something about the campaign—in its form and its ferocity, in its penchant to begin with provable facts before spinning off into questionable, even wild, assertions—that, in fact, seemed reminiscent of Heimlich's own work. In one last desperate attempt, Heimlich's investigator conducted a massive Internet search on the phone numbers, hoping to come up with a match. It was a digital fishing expedition, but the investigator got a bite. One of the phone numbers used by Heimlich's nemesis had also been used in an Internet classified ad for a 27-inch television and VCR. The seller was located in Portland, Oregon, and the company he owned was called Global Fabric. The seller identified himself as "Pete." The culprit, it turned out, was not one of Heimlich's old medical opponents. Rather, the person responsible for the "hate campaign" was his onetime greatest fan: his son, Peter.
Peter Heimlich is 53 years old. He is tall and thin like his father and has the same watchful eyes. When I went to meet him, he had moved from Portland and was living with his wife, Karen, in a gated community outside New Orleans. He invited me into his large house, which was filled with musical instruments, kitschy art, and reams of Heimlichrelated material. Peter explained that, in late 2001, his relationship with his father, which had gradually grown more distant, effectively came to an end. Peter believed his father was not paying sufficient attention to what he cryptically describes as "medical problems" in his family, and, when he approached his father with his concerns, he felt he was ignored. It was then that Peter, along with Karen, began what he calls their "project"—an investigation into his father's career so far-reaching in its scope and so fevered in its conclusions that it has dominated their lives ever since.
"At the beginning, I'll be frank, I felt like I wanted to get back at my father," Peter said one afternoon, after he had spent the morning showing me the archive. "I was looking for a needle in a haystack, ... something I could just use against him." He began combing through the old newspaper articles and checking out medical journals from the library, searching for impropriety. It wasn't long before he thought he had found it. Indeed, Peter soon became convinced that the wrongdoing he had uncovered was so significant that his project became less a personal vendetta than an "ethical responsibility." He and Karen shuttered their fabric-importing company and devoted themselves to scrutinizing every chapter of Henry Heimlich's career. And, in the end, Peter concluded that everything—the esophagus operation, the maneuver, the drowning cases, even the youthful heroism at the train wreck—was a fraud. "I don't think my father invented anything," Peter said, "but his own mythology."
Peter Heimlich is a dogged and resourceful researcher. He has meticulously documented a number of instances of his father's less than honorable behavior, including his promotion of the Heimlich maneuver for drowning and his malariatherapy work. But some of the most damning accusations Peter has leveled against his father appear to be based on a combination of conjecture, leaps of logic, and assumptions of almost epic bad faith. I spent several months trying to confirm Peter's most explosive allegation—namely, that his father did not invent the maneuver but stole it from a colleague named Ed Patrick. But the tantalizing scraps of information that sparked Peter's suspicions ultimately led me nowhere, and I eventually concluded the claim was unfounded or, at the very least, unprovable. (Patrick, for his part, has stated that he and Heimlich "worked together to develop" the maneuver, but he refuses to substantiate that claim.)
Peter is nearly the same age his father was when he achieved greatness with the maneuver. And, in his own quest, Peter has appropriated many of the tactics favored by the man he seeks to destroy. At the beginning of his project, Peter tried to work through official channels—filing complaints against his father with several groups, including the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Ohio Medical Board. When those groups failed to take action, he accused them of a cover-up and took his complaints to the press. Portraying himself as a real-life David doing battle with a Goliath-like "celebrity doctor," Peter has developed a small but loyal following among reporters, leading to a steady stream of news stories about his father's various (real and alleged) misdeeds. Last year, the Red Cross—without explanation—amended its First Aid guidelines, reinstituting backslaps as the primary choking treatment and relegating the Heimlich maneuver (or, as the organization now calls it, "abdominal thrusts") to secondary-treatment status. Peter boasts that these changes are at least partly because of him.
While he once waged his campaign in secret—using pseudonyms and talking to reporters only on the condition that he not be identified—he has now stepped out of the shadows. Indeed, Peter's project is no longer just about destroying what's left of his father's good name; it's also about making a name for himself. He believes that, in his project, he has found his true calling. "They're always saying you only use so much of your brain in life," he told me. "And I felt like here was something where I could put all my resources." On his website—which he changed from heimlichinstitute.com to medfraud.info, after the Heimlich Institute initiated legal action—he now lists himself, not "Holly Martins," as the proprietor. He hopes in the future to become a guru of sorts, perhaps even an inspiration, to other whistle-blowers—not only in medicine but also industry and government—helping them with their efforts to expose wrongdoing. And, most important, he and Karen are writing a book. It will be, he said, "the unauthorized biography" of Henry Heimlich and the "authorized autobiography" of Peter Heimlich.
On a cold winter night in Cincinnati in 2005, several hundred people gathered in a hotel ballroom for the Cincinnati Business-Courier's annual Health Care Heroes awards banquet. Among the many honorees, the weekly business publication had selected Henry Heimlich as its "Lifetime Hero." The choice seemed uncontroversial enough—a relatively meaningless honor (the awards are a marketing event) bestowed upon the city's most famous doctor in the twilight of his life. But, of course, nothing with Heimlich is uncontroversial these days. And, when Peter Heimlich learned of the Business-Courier's decision, about four weeks before the banquet, he besieged the paper with phone calls and faxes demanding the honor to his father be rescinded. The Business-Courier ultimately stood by its choice, but not without some awkwardness, publishing a defensive editorial a few days before the banquet that emphasized the award was being given to Heimlich solely for his anti-choking treatment.
The night before the awards ceremony, I met Heimlich in his condominium. My flight into Cincinnati had been delayed by snow, and it was already late in the evening when I arrived, but Heimlich ushered me into his living room and asked me to sit down. He clearly wanted to talk. It had been a trying period for Heimlich. A few months earlier, Peter had managed to persuade the organizers of the PanAfrica AIDS Conference, which Heimlich had addressed several times in the past, to disinvite him as a speaker; and a growing number of other doctors, egged on by Peter, had recently denounced him. "He's very clever," Heimlich said of his son, his voice mixed with both sorrow and a strange sort of admiration. "He always was. And that's part of the hurt. He has such talent." He added, "This has been the most painful part of my life."
But the more marginalized and embattled Heimlich was, the more defiant he became. Leaning forward in his chair, he launched into a diatribe against his critics. "I call these people medical assassins," Heimlich said. "They're nobodies, they've done nothing, and they want to get their names known, so they attack a person who is famous." It wasn't long before he was offering disquisitions on the Heimlich maneuver for drowning and malariatherapy. He stood up and began to pace the room. "I understand this struggle," he said, stopping and looking me hard in the eyes. "I've been having it for too long. And invariably I've succeeded, invariably I've succeeded."
The next night at the awards banquet, Heimlich seemed serene as he sat at a table with his wife, Jane, and his son Phil—who, earlier that day, had told me that he fully supported his father and that his brother's behavior was "inappropriate and abusive." Heimlich laughed and talked with his tablemates throughout the meal. And, when it came time to deliver his acceptance speech, he kept it light and brief, mostly thanking Cincinnatians for taking him into theirs arms and supporting his endeavors. "[S]aving lives," he concluded, almost wistfully, "is still a worthwhile thing to do." After his speech, the ballroom began to empty, but a small crowd of people eagerly gathered around Heimlich. Pressing close to him, they told of relatives and friends who had been saved from choking by the maneuver. Then a woman stepped forward, and Heimlich stuck out his hand. But she brushed past it, opening her arms and embracing him. Heimlich smiled and wrapped his arms around her. "Thank you," he said, gladly accepting her gratitude. For one night, at least, it seemed to be enough.
Jason Zengerle is a senior editor at The New Republic.
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?
By GARY TAUBES
If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling ''Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution'' and ''Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.
When Atkins first published his ''Diet Revolution'' in 1972, Americans were just coming to terms with the proposition that fat -- particularly the saturated fat of meat and dairy products -- was the primary nutritional evil in the American diet. Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart's desire, because it was the carbohydrates, the pasta, rice, bagels and sugar, that caused obesity and even heart disease. Fat, he said, was harmless.
Atkins allowed his readers to eat ''truly luxurious foods without limit,'' as he put it, ''lobster with butter sauce, steak with bearnaise sauce . . . bacon cheeseburgers,'' but allowed no starches or refined carbohydrates, which means no sugars or anything made from flour. Atkins banned even fruit juices, and permitted only a modicum of vegetables, although the latter were negotiable as the diet progressed.
Atkins was by no means the first to get rich pushing a high-fat diet that restricted carbohydrates, but he popularized it to an extent that the American Medical Association considered it a potential threat to our health. The A.M.A. attacked Atkins's diet as a ''bizarre regimen'' that advocated ''an unlimited intake of saturated fats and cholesterol-rich foods,'' and Atkins even had to defend his diet in Congressional hearings.
Thirty years later, America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of weight. On the one hand, we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer. On the other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades' worth of best-selling diet books, including ''The Zone,'' ''Sugar Busters'' and ''Protein Power'' to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the alternative hypothesis: it's not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer.
The perversity of this alternative hypothesis is that it identifies the cause of obesity as precisely those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous Food Guide Pyramid -- the pasta, rice and bread -- that we are told should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet, and then on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy. While the low-fat-is-good-health dogma represents reality as we have come to know it, and the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research trying to prove its worth, the low-carbohydrate message has been relegated to the realm of unscientific fantasy.
Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus. It used to be that even considering the possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to quackery by association. Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, may be the most visible proponent of testing this heretic hypothesis. Willett is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals. Those data, says Willett, clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message ''and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.''
These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.''
The science behind the alternative hypothesis can be called Endocrinology 101, which is how it's referred to by David Ludwig, a researcher at Harvard Medical School who runs the pediatric obesity clinic at Children's Hospital Boston, and who prescribes his own version of a carbohydrate-restricted diet to his patients. Endocrinology 101 requires an understanding of how carbohydrates affect insulin and blood sugar and in turn fat metabolism and appetite. This is basic endocrinology, Ludwig says, which is the study of hormones, and it is still considered radical because the low-fat dietary wisdom emerged in the 1960's from researchers almost exclusively concerned with the effect of fat on cholesterol and heart disease. At the time, Endocrinology 101 was still underdeveloped, and so it was ignored. Now that this science is becoming clear, it has to fight a quarter century of anti-fat prejudice.
The alternative hypothesis also comes with an implication that is worth considering for a moment, because it's a whopper, and it may indeed be an obstacle to its acceptance. If the alternative hypothesis is right -- still a big ''if'' -- then it strongly suggests that the ongoing epidemic of obesity in America and elsewhere is not, as we are constantly told, due simply to a collective lack of will power and a failure to exercise. Rather it occurred, as Atkins has been saying (along with Barry Sears, author of ''The Zone''), because the public health authorities told us unwittingly, but with the best of intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We ate more fat-free carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier and then heavier. Put simply, if the alternative hypothesis is right, then a low-fat diet is not by definition a healthy diet. In practice, such a diet cannot help being high in carbohydrates, and that can lead to obesity, and perhaps even heart disease. ''For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive,'' says Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard's prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center. ''They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.''
cientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory. The result is a balkanized community -- ''splintered, very opinionated and in many instances, intransigent,'' says Kurt Isselbacher, a former chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science -- in which researchers seem easily convinced that their preconceived notions are correct and thoroughly uninterested in testing any other hypotheses but their own.
What's more, the number of misconceptions propagated about the most basic research can be staggering. Researchers will be suitably scientific describing the limitations of their own experiments, and then will cite something as gospel truth because they read it in a magazine. The classic example is the statement heard repeatedly that 95 percent of all dieters never lose weight, and 95 percent of those who do will not keep it off. This will be correctly attributed to the University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Albert Stunkard, but it will go unmentioned that this statement is based on 100 patients who passed through Stunkard's obesity clinic during the Eisenhower administration.
With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's. According to Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of obese Americans stayed relatively constant through the 1960's and 1970's at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in the 1980's. By the end of that decade, nearly one in four Americans was obese. That steep rise, which is consistent through all segments of American society and which continued unabated through the 1990's, is the singular feature of the epidemic. Any theory that tries to explain obesity in America has to account for that. Meanwhile, overweight children nearly tripled in number. And for the first time, physicians began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. Type 2 diabetes often accompanies obesity. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes and now, for the obvious reason, is not.
So how did this happen? The orthodox and ubiquitous explanation is that we live in what Kelly Brownell, a Yale psychologist, has called a ''toxic food environment'' of cheap fatty food, large portions, pervasive food advertising and sedentary lives. By this theory, we are at the Pavlovian mercy of the food industry, which spends nearly $10 billion a year advertising unwholesome junk food and fast food. And because these foods, especially fast food, are so filled with fat, they are both irresistible and uniquely fattening. On top of this, so the theory goes, our modern society has successfully eliminated physical activity from our daily lives. We no longer exercise or walk up stairs, nor do our children bike to school or play outside, because they would prefer to play video games and watch television. And because some of us are obviously predisposed to gain weight while others are not, this explanation also has a genetic component -- the thrifty gene. It suggests that storing extra calories as fat was an evolutionary advantage to our Paleolithic ancestors, who had to survive frequent famine. We then inherited these ''thrifty'' genes, despite their liability in today's toxic environment.
This theory makes perfect sense and plays to our puritanical prejudice that fat, fast food and television are innately damaging to our humanity. But there are two catches. First, to buy this logic is to accept that the copious negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity -- both socially and physically -- is easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal. And second, as Flegal points out, little data exist to support any of this. Certainly none of it explains what changed so significantly to start the epidemic. Fast-food consumption, for example, continued to grow steadily through the 70's and 80's, but it did not take a sudden leap, as obesity did.
As far as exercise and physical activity go, there are no reliable data before the mid-80's, according to William Dietz, who runs the division of nutrition and physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control; the 1990's data show obesity rates continuing to climb, while exercise activity remained unchanged. This suggests the two have little in common. Dietz also acknowledged that a culture of physical exercise began in the United States in the 70's -- the ''leisure exercise mania,'' as Robert Levy, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, described it in 1981 -- and has continued through the present day.
As for the thrifty gene, it provides the kind of evolutionary rationale for human behavior that scientists find comforting but that simply cannot be tested. In other words, if we were living through an anorexia epidemic, the experts would be discussing the equally untestable ''spendthrift gene'' theory, touting evolutionary advantages of losing weight effortlessly. An overweight homo erectus, they'd say, would have been easy prey for predators.
It is also undeniable, note students of Endocrinology 101, that mankind never evolved to eat a diet high in starches or sugars. ''Grain products and concentrated sugars were essentially absent from human nutrition until the invention of agriculture,'' Ludwig says, ''which was only 10,000 years ago.'' This is discussed frequently in the anthropology texts but is mostly absent from the obesity literature, with the prominent exception of the low-carbohydrate-diet books.
What's forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself is only about 25 years old. Until the late 70's, the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat. In ''The Physiology of Taste,'' for instance, an 1825 discourse considered among the most famous books ever written about food, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that he could easily identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one ''stout party'' after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a ''particularly stout party'') potatoes. Brillat-Savarin described the roots of obesity as a natural predisposition conjuncted with the ''floury and feculent substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment.'' He added that the effects of this fecula -- i.e., ''potatoes, grain or any kind of flour'' -- were seen sooner when sugar was added to the diet.
This is what my mother taught me 40 years ago, backed up by the vague observation that Italians tended toward corpulence because they ate so much pasta. This observation was actually documented by Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota physician who noted that fats ''have good staying power,'' by which he meant they are slow to be digested and so lead to satiation, and that Italians were among the heaviest populations he had studied. According to Keys, the Neapolitans, for instance, ate only a little lean meat once or twice a week, but ate bread and pasta every day for lunch and dinner. ''There was no evidence of nutritional deficiency,'' he wrote, ''but the working-class women were fat.''
By the 70's, you could still find articles in the journals describing high rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost exclusively carbohydrates. The common thinking, wrote a former director of the Nutrition Division of the United Nations, was that the ideal diet, one that prevented obesity, snacking and excessive sugar consumption, was a diet ''with plenty of eggs, beef, mutton, chicken, butter and well-cooked vegetables.'' This was the identical prescription Brillat-Savarin put forth in 1825.
It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ''killer diseases'' supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become ''this greasy killer'' in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates.
In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,'' Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.''
Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were effectively ignored. Pete Ahrens, whose Rockefeller University laboratory had done the seminal research on cholesterol metabolism, testified to McGovern's committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. It was not a scientific matter who might benefit and who might be harmed, he said, but ''a betting matter.'' Phil Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, testified in Congress to the same effect in 1980. ''What right,'' Handler asked, ''has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?''
Nonetheless, once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over. The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating.
ew experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it.
What this means is that even saturated fats -- a k a, the bad fats -- are not nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it's a virtual wash. As Willett explained to me, you will gain little to no health benefit by giving up milk, butter and cheese and eating bagels instead.
But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.
The crucial example of how the low-fat recommendations were oversimplified is shown by the impact -- potentially lethal, in fact -- of low-fat diets on triglycerides, which are the component molecules of fat. By the late 60's, researchers had shown that high triglyceride levels were at least as common in heart-disease patients as high L.D.L. cholesterol, and that eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would, for many people, raise their triglyceride levels, lower their H.D.L. levels and accentuate what Gerry Reaven, an endocrinologist at Stanford University, called Syndrome X. This is a cluster of conditions that can lead to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
It took Reaven a decade to convince his peers that Syndrome X was a legitimate health concern, in part because to accept its reality is to accept that low-fat diets will increase the risk of heart disease in a third of the population. ''Sometimes we wish it would go away because nobody knows how to deal with it,'' said Robert Silverman, an N.I.H. researcher, at a 1987 N.I.H. conference. ''High protein levels can be bad for the kidneys. High fat is bad for your heart. Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.''
Surely, everyone involved in drafting the various dietary guidelines wanted Americans simply to eat less junk food, however you define it, and eat more the way they do in Berkeley, Calif. But we didn't go along. Instead we ate more starches and refined carbohydrates, because calorie for calorie, these are the cheapest nutrients for the food industry to produce, and they can be sold at the highest profit. It's also what we like to eat. Rare is the person under the age of 50 who doesn't prefer a cookie or heavily sweetened yogurt to a head of broccoli.
''All reformers would do well to be conscious of the law of unintended consequences,'' says Alan Stone, who was staff director for McGovern's Senate committee. Stone told me he had an inkling about how the food industry would respond to the new dietary goals back when the hearings were first held. An economist pulled him aside, he said, and gave him a lesson on market disincentives to healthy eating: ''He said if you create a new market with a brand-new manufactured food, give it a brand-new fancy name, put a big advertising budget behind it, you can have a market all to yourself and force your competitors to catch up. You can't do that with fruits and vegetables. It's harder to differentiate an apple from an apple.''
Nutrition researchers also played a role by trying to feed science into the idea that carbohydrates are the ideal nutrient. It had been known, for almost a century, and considered mostly irrelevant to the etiology of obesity, that fat has nine calories per gram compared with four for carbohydrates and protein. Now it became the fail-safe position of the low-fat recommendations: reduce the densest source of calories in the diet and you will lose weight. Then in 1982, J.P. Flatt, a University of Massachusetts biochemist, published his research demonstrating that, in any normal diet, it is extremely rare for the human body to convert carbohydrates into body fat. This was then misinterpreted by the media and quite a few scientists to mean that eating carbohydrates, even to excess, could not make you fat -- which is not the case, Flatt says. But the misinterpretation developed a vigorous life of its own because it resonated with the notion that fat makes you fat and carbohydrates are harmless.
As a result, the major trends in American diets since the late 70's, according to the U.S.D.A. agricultural economist Judith Putnam, have been a decrease in the percentage of fat calories and a ''greatly increased consumption of carbohydrates.'' To be precise, annual grain consumption has increased almost 60 pounds per person, and caloric sweeteners (primarily high-fructose corn syrup) by 30 pounds. At the same time, we suddenly began consuming more total calories: now up to 400 more each day since the government started recommending low-fat diets.
If these trends are correct, then the obesity epidemic can certainly be explained by Americans' eating more calories than ever -- excess calories, after all, are what causes us to gain weight -- and, specifically, more carbohydrates. The question is why?
The answer provided by Endocrinology 101 is that we are simply hungrier than we were in the 70's, and the reason is physiological more than psychological. In this case, the salient factor -- ignored in the pursuit of fat and its effect on cholesterol -- is how carbohydrates affect blood sugar and insulin. In fact, these were obvious culprits all along, which is why Atkins and the low-carb-diet doctors pounced on them early.
The primary role of insulin is to regulate blood-sugar levels. After you eat carbohydrates, they will be broken down into their component sugar molecules and transported into the bloodstream. Your pancreas then secretes insulin, which shunts the blood sugar into muscles and the liver as fuel for the next few hours. This is why carbohydrates have a significant impact on insulin and fat does not. And because juvenile diabetes is caused by a lack of insulin, physicians believed since the 20's that the only evil with insulin is not having enough.
But insulin also regulates fat metabolism. We cannot store body fat without it. Think of insulin as a switch. When it's on, in the few hours after eating, you burn carbohydrates for energy and store excess calories as fat. When it's off, after the insulin has been depleted, you burn fat as fuel. So when insulin levels are low, you will burn your own fat, but not when they're high.
This is where it gets unavoidably complicated. The fatter you are, the more insulin your pancreas will pump out per meal, and the more likely you'll develop what's called ''insulin resistance,'' which is the underlying cause of Syndrome X. In effect, your cells become insensitive to the action of insulin, and so you need ever greater amounts to keep your blood sugar in check. So as you gain weight, insulin makes it easier to store fat and harder to lose it. But the insulin resistance in turn may make it harder to store fat -- your weight is being kept in check, as it should be. But now the insulin resistance might prompt your pancreas to produce even more insulin, potentially starting a vicious cycle. Which comes first -- the obesity, the elevated insulin, known as hyperinsulinemia, or the insulin resistance -- is a chicken-and-egg problem that hasn't been resolved. One endocrinologist described this to me as ''the Nobel-prize winning question.''
Insulin also profoundly affects hunger, although to what end is another point of controversy. On the one hand, insulin can indirectly cause hunger by lowering your blood sugar, but how low does blood sugar have to drop before hunger kicks in? That's unresolved. Meanwhile, insulin works in the brain to suppress hunger. The theory, as explained to me by Michael Schwartz, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington, is that insulin's ability to inhibit appetite would normally counteract its propensity to generate body fat. In other words, as you gained weight, your body would generate more insulin after every meal, and that in turn would suppress your appetite; you'd eat less and lose the weight.
Schwartz, however, can imagine a simple mechanism that would throw this ''homeostatic'' system off balance: if your brain were to lose its sensitivity to insulin, just as your fat and muscles do when they are flooded with it. Now the higher insulin production that comes with getting fatter would no longer compensate by suppressing your appetite, because your brain would no longer register the rise in insulin. The end result would be a physiologic state in which obesity is almost preordained, and one in which the carbohydrate-insulin connection could play a major role. Schwartz says he believes this could indeed be happening, but research hasn't progressed far enough to prove it. ''It is just a hypothesis,'' he says. ''It still needs to be sorted out.''
David Ludwig, the Harvard endocrinologist, says that it's the direct effect of insulin on blood sugar that does the trick. He notes that when diabetics get too much insulin, their blood sugar drops and they get ravenously hungry. They gain weight because they eat more, and the insulin promotes fat deposition. The same happens with lab animals. This, he says, is effectively what happens when we eat carbohydrates -- in particular sugar and starches like potatoes and rice, or anything made from flour, like a slice of white bread. These are known in the jargon as high-glycemic-index carbohydrates, which means they are absorbed quickly into the blood. As a result, they cause a spike of blood sugar and a surge of insulin within minutes. The resulting rush of insulin stores the blood sugar away and a few hours later, your blood sugar is lower than it was before you ate. As Ludwig explains, your body effectively thinks it has run out of fuel, but the insulin is still high enough to prevent you from burning your own fat. The result is hunger and a craving for more carbohydrates. It's another vicious circle, and another situation ripe for obesity.
The glycemic-index concept and the idea that starches can be absorbed into the blood even faster than sugar emerged in the late 70's, but again had no influence on public health recommendations, because of the attendant controversies. To wit: if you bought the glycemic-index concept, then you had to accept that the starches we were supposed to be eating 6 to 11 times a day were, once swallowed, physiologically indistinguishable from sugars. This made them seem considerably less than wholesome. Rather than accept this possibility, the policy makers simply allowed sugar and corn syrup to elude the vilification that befell dietary fat. After all, they are fat-free.
Sugar and corn syrup from soft drinks, juices and the copious teas and sports drinks now supply more than 10 percent of our total calories; the 80's saw the introduction of Big Gulps and 32-ounce cups of Coca-Cola , blasted through with sugar, but 100 percent fat free. When it comes to insulin and blood sugar, these soft drinks and fruit juices -- what the scientists call ''wet carbohydrates'' -- might indeed be worst of all. (Diet soda accounts for less than a quarter of the soda market.)
The gist of the glycemic-index idea is that the longer it takes the carbohydrates to be digested, the lesser the impact on blood sugar and insulin and the healthier the food. Those foods with the highest rating on the glycemic index are some simple sugars, starches and anything made from flour. Green vegetables, beans and whole grains cause a much slower rise in blood sugar because they have fiber, a nondigestible carbohydrate, which slows down digestion and lowers the glycemic index. Protein and fat serve the same purpose, which implies that eating fat can be beneficial, a notion that is still unacceptable. And the glycemic-index concept implies that a primary cause of Syndrome X, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity is the long-term damage caused by the repeated surges of insulin that come from eating starches and refined carbohydrates. This suggests a kind of unified field theory for these chronic diseases, but not one that coexists easily with the low-fat doctrine.
At Ludwig's pediatric obesity clinic, he has been prescribing low-glycemic-index diets to children and adolescents for five years now. He does not recommend the Atkins diet because he says he believes such a very low carbohydrate approach is unnecessarily restrictive; instead, he tells his patients to effectively replace refined carbohydrates and starches with vegetables, legumes and fruit. This makes a low-glycemic-index diet consistent with dietary common sense, albeit in a higher-fat kind of way. His clinic now has a nine-month waiting list. Only recently has Ludwig managed to convince the N.I.H. that such diets are worthy of study. His first three grant proposals were summarily rejected, which may explain why much of the relevant research has been done in Canada and in Australia. In April, however, Ludwig received $1.2 million from the N.I.H. to test his low-glycemic-index diet against a traditional low-fat-low-calorie regime. That might help resolve some of the controversy over the role of insulin in obesity, although the redoubtable Robert Atkins might get there first.
he 71-year-old Atkins, a graduate of Cornell medical school, says he first tried a very low carbohydrate diet in 1963 after reading about one in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He lost weight effortlessly, had his epiphany and turned a fledgling Manhattan cardiology practice into a thriving obesity clinic. He then alienated the entire medical community by telling his readers to eat as much fat and protein as they wanted, as long as they ate little to no carbohydrates. They would lose weight, he said, because they would keep their insulin down; they wouldn't be hungry; and they would have less resistance to burning their own fat. Atkins also noted that starches and sugar were harmful in any event because they raised triglyceride levels and that this was a greater risk factor for heart disease than cholesterol.
Atkins's diet is both the ultimate manifestation of the alternative hypothesis as well as the battleground on which the fat-versus-carbohydrates controversy is likely to be fought scientifically over the next few years. After insisting Atkins was a quack for three decades, obesity experts are now finding it difficult to ignore the copious anecdotal evidence that his diet does just what he has claimed. Take Albert Stunkard, for instance. Stunkard has been trying to treat obesity for half a century, but he told me he had his epiphany about Atkins and maybe about obesity as well just recently when he discovered that the chief of radiology in his hospital had lost 60 pounds on Atkins's diet. ''Well, apparently all the young guys in the hospital are doing it,'' he said. ''So we decided to do a study.'' When I asked Stunkard if he or any of his colleagues considered testing Atkins's diet 30 years ago, he said they hadn't because they thought Atkins was ''a jerk'' who was just out to make money: this ''turned people off, and so nobody took him seriously enough to do what we're finally doing.''
In fact, when the American Medical Association released its scathing critique of Atkins's diet in March 1973, it acknowledged that the diet probably worked, but expressed little interest in why. Through the 60's, this had been a subject of considerable research, with the conclusion that Atkins-like diets were low-calorie diets in disguise; that when you cut out pasta, bread and potatoes, you'll have a hard time eating enough meat, vegetables and cheese to replace the calories.
That, however, raised the question of why such a low-calorie regimen would also suppress hunger, which Atkins insisted was the signature characteristic of the diet. One possibility was Endocrinology 101: that fat and protein make you sated and, lacking carbohydrates and the ensuing swings of blood sugar and insulin, you stay sated. The other possibility arose from the fact that Atkins's diet is ''ketogenic.'' This means that insulin falls so low that you enter a state called ketosis, which is what happens during fasting and starvation. Your muscles and tissues burn body fat for energy, as does your brain in the form of fat molecules produced by the liver called ketones. Atkins saw ketosis as the obvious way to kick-start weight loss. He also liked to say that ketosis was so energizing that it was better than sex, which set him up for some ridicule. An inevitable criticism of Atkins's diet has been that ketosis is dangerous and to be avoided at all costs.
When I interviewed ketosis experts, however, they universally sided with Atkins, and suggested that maybe the medical community and the media confuse ketosis with ketoacidosis, a variant of ketosis that occurs in untreated diabetics and can be fatal. ''Doctors are scared of ketosis,'' says Richard Veech, an N.I.H. researcher who studied medicine at Harvard and then got his doctorate at Oxford University with the Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs. ''They're always worried about diabetic ketoacidosis. But ketosis is a normal physiologic state. I would argue it is the normal state of man. It's not normal to have McDonald's and a delicatessen around every corner. It's normal to starve.''
Simply put, ketosis is evolution's answer to the thrifty gene. We may have evolved to efficiently store fat for times of famine, says Veech, but we also evolved ketosis to efficiently live off that fat when necessary. Rather than being poison, which is how the press often refers to ketones, they make the body run more efficiently and provide a backup fuel source for the brain. Veech calls ketones ''magic'' and has shown that both the heart and brain run 25 percent more efficiently on ketones than on blood sugar.
The bottom line is that for the better part of 30 years Atkins insisted his diet worked and was safe, Americans apparently tried it by the tens of millions, while nutritionists, physicians, public- health authorities and anyone concerned with heart disease insisted it could kill them, and expressed little or no desire to find out who was right. During that period, only two groups of U.S. researchers tested the diet, or at least published their results. In the early 70's, J.P. Flatt and Harvard's George Blackburn pioneered the ''protein-sparing modified fast'' to treat postsurgical patients, and they tested it on obese volunteers. Blackburn, who later became president of the American Society of Clinical Nutrition, describes his regime as ''an Atkins diet without excess fat'' and says he had to give it a fancy name or nobody would take him seriously. The diet was ''lean meat, fish and fowl'' supplemented by vitamins and minerals. ''People loved it,'' Blackburn recalls. ''Great weight loss. We couldn't run them off with a baseball bat.'' Blackburn successfully treated hundreds of obese patients over the next decade and published a series of papers that were ignored. When obese New Englanders turned to appetite-control drugs in the mid-80's, he says, he let it drop. He then applied to the N.I.H. for a grant to do a clinical trial of popular diets but was rejected.
The second trial, published in September 1980, was done at the George Washington University Medical Center. Two dozen obese volunteers agreed to follow Atkins's diet for eight weeks and lost an average of 17 pounds each, with no apparent ill effects, although their L.D.L. cholesterol did go up. The researchers, led by John LaRosa, now president of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, concluded that the 17-pound weight loss in eight weeks would likely have happened with any diet under ''the novelty of trying something under experimental conditions'' and never pursued it further.
Now researchers have finally decided that Atkins's diet and other low-carb diets have to be tested, and are doing so against traditional low-calorie-low-fat diets as recommended by the American Heart Association. To explain their motivation, they inevitably tell one of two stories: some, like Stunkard, told me that someone they knew -- a patient, a friend, a fellow physician -- lost considerable weight on Atkins's diet and, despite all their preconceptions to the contrary, kept it off. Others say they were frustrated with their inability to help their obese patients, looked into the low-carb diets and decided that Endocrinology 101 was compelling. ''As a trained physician, I was trained to mock anything like the Atkins diet,'' says Linda Stern, an internist at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Hospital, ''but I put myself on the diet. I did great. And I thought maybe this is something I can offer my patients.''
None of these studies have been financed by the N.I.H., and none have yet been published. But the results have been reported at conferences -- by researchers at Schneider Children's Hospital on Long Island, Duke University and the University of Cincinnati, and by Stern's group at the Philadelphia V.A. Hospital. And then there's the study Stunkard had mentioned, led by Gary Foster at the University of Pennsylvania, Sam Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis, and Jim Hill, who runs the University of Colorado Center for Human Nutrition in Denver. The results of all five of these studies are remarkably consistent. Subjects on some form of the Atkins diet -- whether overweight adolescents on the diet for 12 weeks as at Schneider, or obese adults averaging 295 pounds on the diet for six months, as at the Philadelphia V.A. -- lost twice the weight as the subjects on the low-fat, low-calorie diets.
In all five studies, cholesterol levels improved similarly with both diets, but triglyceride levels were considerably lower with the Atkins diet. Though researchers are hesitant to agree with this, it does suggest that heart-disease risk could actually be reduced when fat is added back into the diet and starches and refined carbohydrates are removed. ''I think when this stuff gets to be recognized,'' Stunkard says, ''it's going to really shake up a lot of thinking about obesity and metabolism.''
All of this could be settled sooner rather than later, and with it, perhaps, we might have some long-awaited answers as to why we grow fat and whether it is indeed preordained by societal forces or by our choice of foods. For the first time, the N.I.H. is now actually financing comparative studies of popular diets. Foster, Klein and Hill, for instance, have now received more than $2.5 million from N.I.H. to do a five-year trial of the Atkins diet with 360 obese individuals. At Harvard, Willett, Blackburn and Penelope Greene have money, albeit from Atkins's nonprofit foundation, to do a comparative trial as well.
Should these clinical trials also find for Atkins and his high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, then the public-health authorities may indeed have a problem on their hands. Once they took their leap of faith and settled on the low-fat dietary dogma 25 years ago, they left little room for contradictory evidence or a change of opinion, should such a change be necessary to keep up with the science. In this light Sam Klein's experience is noteworthy. Klein is president-elect of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, which suggests that he is a highly respected member of his community. And yet, he described his recent experience discussing the Atkins diet at medical conferences as a learning experience. ''I have been impressed,'' he said, ''with the anger of academicians in the audience. Their response is 'How dare you even present data on the Atkins diet!' ''
This hostility stems primarily from their anxiety that Americans, given a glimmer of hope about their weight, will rush off en masse to try a diet that simply seems intuitively dangerous and on which there is still no long-term data on whether it works and whether it is safe. It's a justifiable fear. In the course of my research, I have spent my mornings at my local diner, staring down at a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage, convinced that somehow, some way, they must be working to clog my arteries and do me in.
After 20 years steeped in a low-fat paradigm, I find it hard to see the nutritional world any other way. I have learned that low-fat diets fail in clinical trials and in real life, and they certainly have failed in my life. I have read the papers suggesting that 20 years of low-fat recommendations have not managed to lower the incidence of heart disease in this country, and may have led instead to the steep increase in obesity and Type 2 diabetes. I have interviewed researchers whose computer models have calculated that cutting back on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart Association would not add more than a few months to my life, if that. I have even lost considerable weight with relative ease by giving up carbohydrates on my test diet, and yet I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related.
This is the state of mind I imagine that mainstream nutritionists, researchers and physicians must inevitably take to the fat-versus-carbohydrate controversy. They may come around, but the evidence will have to be exceptionally compelling. Although this kind of conversion may be happening at the moment to John Farquhar, who is a professor of health research and policy at Stanford University and has worked in this field for more than 40 years. When I interviewed Farquhar in April, he explained why low-fat diets might lead to weight gain and low-carbohydrate diets might lead to weight loss, but he made me promise not to say he believed they did. He attributed the cause of the obesity epidemic to the ''force-feeding of a nation.'' Three weeks later, after reading an article on Endocrinology 101 by David Ludwig in the Journal of the American Medical Association, he sent me an e-mail message asking the not-entirely-rhetorical question, ''Can we get the low-fat proponents to apologize?''
Gary Taubes is a correspondent for the journal Science and author of ''Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion.''
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Taming the Wild
Only a handful of wild animal species have been successfully bred to get along with humans. The reason, scientists say, is found in their genes.
By Evan Ratliff
"Hello! How are you doing?" Lyudmila Trut says, reaching down to unlatch the door of a wire cage labeled "Mavrik." We're standing between two long rows of similar crates on a farm just outside the city of Novosibirsk, in southern Siberia, and the 76-year-old biologist's greeting is addressed not to me but to the cage's furry occupant. Although I don't speak Russian, I recognize in her voice the tone of maternal adoration that dog owners adopt when addressing their pets.
Mavrik, the object of Trut's attention, is about the size of a Shetland sheepdog, with chestnut orange fur and a white bib down his front. He plays his designated role in turn: wagging his tail, rolling on his back, panting eagerly in anticipation of attention. In adjacent cages lining either side of the narrow, open-sided shed, dozens of canids do the same, yelping and clamoring in an explosion of fur and unbridled excitement. "As you can see," Trut says above the din, "all of them want human contact." Today, however, Mavrik is the lucky recipient. Trut reaches in and scoops him up, then hands him over to me. Cradled in my arms, gently jawing my hand in his mouth, he's as docile as any lapdog.
Except that Mavrik, as it happens, is not a dog at all. He's a fox. Hidden away on this overgrown property, flanked by birch forests and barred by a rusty metal gate, he and several hundred of his relatives are the only population of domesticated silver foxes in the world. (Most of them are, indeed, silver or dark gray; Mavrik is rare in his chestnut fur.) And by "domesticated" I don't mean captured and tamed, or raised by humans and conditioned by food to tolerate the occasional petting. I mean bred for domestication, as tame as your tabby cat or your Labrador. In fact, says Anna Kukekova, a Cornell researcher who studies the foxes, "they remind me a lot of golden retrievers, who are basically not aware that there are good people, bad people, people that they have met before, and those they haven't." These foxes treat any human as a potential companion, a behavior that is the product of arguably the most extraordinary breeding experiment ever conducted.
It started more than a half century ago, when Trut was still a graduate student. Led by a biologist named Dmitry Belyaev, researchers at the nearby Institute of Cytology and Genetics gathered up 130 foxes from fur farms. They then began breeding them with the goal of re-creating the evolution of wolves into dogs, a transformation that began more than 15,000 years ago.
With each generation of fox kits, Belyaev and his colleagues tested their reactions to human contact, selecting those most approachable to breed for the next generation. By the mid-1960s the experiment was working beyond what he could've imagined. They were producing foxes like Mavrik, not just unafraid of humans but actively seeking to bond with them. His team even repeated the experiment in two other species, mink and rats. "One huge thing that Belyaev showed was the timescale," says Gordon Lark, a University of Utah biologist who studies dog genetics. "If you told me the animal would now come sniff you at the front of the cage, I would say it's what I expect. But that they would become that friendly toward humans that quickly… wow."
Miraculously, Belyaev had compressed thousands of years of domestication into a few years. But he wasn't just looking to prove he could create friendly foxes. He had a hunch that he could use them to unlock domestication's molecular mysteries. Domesticated animals are known to share a common set of characteristics, a fact documented by Darwin in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. They tend to be smaller, with floppier ears and curlier tails than their untamed progenitors. Such traits tend to make animals appear appealingly juvenile to humans. Their coats are sometimes spotted—piebald, in scientific terminology—while their wild ancestors' coats are solid. These and other traits, sometimes referred to as the domestication phenotype, exist in varying degrees across a remarkably wide range of species, from dogs, pigs, and cows to some nonmammalians like chickens, and even a few fish.
Belyaev suspected that as the foxes became domesticated, they too might begin to show aspects of a domestication phenotype. He was right again: Selecting which foxes to breed based solely on how well they got along with humans seemed to alter their physical appearance along with their dispositions. After only nine generations, the researchers recorded fox kits born with floppier ears. Piebald patterns appeared on their coats. By this time the foxes were already whining and wagging their tails in response to a human presence, behaviors never seen in wild foxes.
Driving those changes, Belyaev postulated, was a collection of genes that conferred a propensity to tameness—a genotype that the foxes perhaps shared with any species that could be domesticated. Here on the fox farm, Kukekova and Trut are searching for precisely those genes today. Elsewhere, researchers are delving into the DNA of pigs, chickens, horses, and other domesticated species, looking to pinpoint the genetic differences that came to distinguish them from their ancestors. The research, accelerated by the recent advances in rapid genome sequencing, aims to answer a fundamental biological question: "How is it possible to make this huge transformation from wild animals into domestic animals?" says Leif Andersson, a professor of genome biology at Uppsala University, in Sweden. The answer has implications for understanding not just how we domesticated animals, but how we tamed the wild in ourselves as well.
The exercise of dominion over plants and animals is arguably the most consequential event in human history. Along with cultivated agriculture, the ability to raise and manage domesticated fauna—of which wolves were likely the first, but chickens, cattle, and other food species the most important—altered the human diet, paving the way for settlements and eventually nation-states to flourish. By putting humans in close contact with animals, domestication also created vectors for the diseases that shaped society.
Yet the process by which it all happened has remained stubbornly impenetrable. Animal bones and stone carvings can sometimes shed light on the when and where each species came to live side by side with humans. More difficult to untangle is the how. Did a few curious boar creep closer to human populations, feeding off their garbage and with each successive generation becoming a little more a part of our diet? Did humans capture red jungle fowl, the ancestor of the modern chicken, straight from the wild—or did the fowl make the first approach? Out of 148 large mammal species on Earth, why have no more than 15 ever been domesticated? Why have we been able to tame and breed horses for thousands of years, but never their close relative the zebra, despite numerous attempts?
In fact, scientists have even struggled to define domestication precisely. We all know that individual animals can be trained to exist in close contact with humans. A tiger cub fed by hand, imprinting on its captors, may grow up to treat them like family. But that tiger's offspring, at birth, will be just as wild as its ancestors. Domestication, by contrast, is not a quality trained into an individual, but one bred into an entire population through generations of living in proximity to humans. Many if not most of the species' wild instincts have long since been lost. Domestication, in other words, is mostly in the genes.
Yet the borders between domesticated and wild are often fluid. A growing body of evidence shows that historically, domesticated animals likely played a large part in their own taming, habituating themselves to humans before we took an active role in the process. "My working hypothesis," says Greger Larson, an expert on genetics and domestication at Durham University in the United Kingdom, "is that with most of the early animals—dogs first, then pigs, sheep, and goats—there was probably a long period of time of unintentional management by humans." The word domestication "implies something top down, something that humans did intentionally," he says. "But the complex story is so much more interesting."
The fox-farm experiment's role in unraveling that complexity is all the more remarkable for how it began. The Soviet biology establishment of the mid-20th century, led under Joseph Stalin by the infamous agronomist Trofim Lysenko, outlawed research into Mendelian genetics. But Dmitry Belyaev and his older brother Nikolay, both biologists, were intrigued by the possibilities of the science. "It was his brother's influence that caused him to have this special interest in genetics," Trut says of her mentor. "But these were the times when genetics was considered fake science." When the brothers flouted the prohibition and continued to conduct Mendelian-based studies, Belyaev lost his job as director of the Department of Fur Breeding. Nikolay's fate was more tragic: He was exiled to a labor camp, where he eventually died.
Secretly, Belyaev remained dedicated to genetic science, disguising his work as research in animal physiology. He was particularly consumed with the question of how such an incredible diversity of dogs could have arisen from their wolf ancestors. The answer, he knew, must lie at the molecular level. But even outside the Soviet Union, in the 1950s, the technology to sequence an animal's genome—and thereby try to understand how its genes had changed through history—was an impossible dream. So Belyaev decided to reproduce history himself. The silver fox, a fellow canid and close cousin of dogs that had never been domesticated, seemed the perfect choice.
Lyudmila Trut's first job as a grad student, in 1958, was to travel around to Soviet fur farms and select the calmest foxes she could find, to serve as the base population for Belyaev's experiment. The prohibition on genetic studies had thawed since Stalin's death in 1953, and Belyaev set up shop in Siberia at the newly minted Institute of Cytology and Genetics. Still, he was careful to frame the study only in terms of physiology, leaving out any mention of genes. Trut recalls that when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev arrived to inspect the institute, he was overheard to say, "What, are those geneticists still around? Were they not destroyed?" Protected by the careful politics of Belyaev's boss and favorable articles on genetics written by Khrushchev's journalist daughter, the fox-farm experiment quietly began.
By 1964 the fourth generation was already beginning to live up to the researchers' hopes. Trut can still remember the moment when she first saw a fox wag its tail at her approach. Before long, the most tame among them were so doglike that they would leap into researchers' arms and lick their faces. At times the extent of the animals' tameness surprised even the researchers. Once, in the 1970s, a worker took one of the foxes home temporarily as a pet. When Trut visited him, she found the owner taking his fox for walks, unleashed, "just like a dog. I said 'Don't do that, we'll lose it, and it belongs to the institute!'" she recalls. "He said 'just wait,' then he whistled and said, 'Coca!' It came right back."
Simultaneously, more of the foxes began to show signs of the domestication phenotype: floppy ears retained longer in development and characteristic white spots on their coats. "At the beginning of the 1980s, we observed a kind of explosion-like change of the external appearance," says Trut. The research had expanded to include rats in 1972, followed by mink and—for a brief period—river otters. The otters proved difficult to breed and the experiment was eventually abandoned, but the scientists were able to shape the behavior of the other two species in parallel with the foxes.
Just as the genetic tools became available to accomplish Belyaev's end goal of tracing that connection to the animal's DNA, however, the project fell on hard times. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, scientific funds began to dwindle, and the researchers could do little more than keep the fox population alive. When Belyaev died of cancer in 1985, Trut took over the research and fought to keep it funded. But by the beginning of the 21st century, she was in danger of having to shut down the experiment.
Around the same time, Anna Kukekova, a Russian-born postdoc in molecular genetics at Cornell, read about the project's struggles. She had been fascinated with the fox-farm work for years, and now decided to focus her own research on the experiment. With help from Utah's Gordon Lark and a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), she joined Trut's effort to try and finish what Belyaev had started.
Not all the foxes on the farm in Novosibirsk, it turns out, are as friendly as Mavrik. Across the small road from him and his fellow tame foxes is an identical-looking shed full of wire crates, each holding one of what the researchers refer to as the "aggressive foxes." To study the biology of tameness, the scientists needed to create a group of decidedly untame animals. So in a mirror image of the friendly foxes, the kits in the aggressive population are rated according to the hostility of their behavior. Only the most aggressive are bred for the next generation. Here are the evil twins of the tail-wagging Mavrik, straight out of a B-grade horror film: hissing, baring their teeth, snapping at the front of their cages when any human approaches.
"I'd like to draw your attention to this fox," says Trut, pointing to one snarling creature nearby. "You can see how aggressive she is. She was born to an aggressive mother but brought up by a tame mother." The switch, the result of the aggressive mother being unable to feed its kit, serendipitously proved a point: The foxes' response to humans is more nature than it is nurture. "Here," she says, "it's the genetics that change."
Identifying the precise genetic footprint involved in tameness, however, is proving extremely tricky science. First the researchers need to find the genes responsible for creating friendly and aggressive behaviors. Such general behavior traits, however, are actually amalgamations of more specific ones—fear, boldness, passivity, curiosity—that must be teased apart, measured, and traced to individual genes or sets of genes working in combination. Once those genes are identified, the researchers can test whether the ones influencing behavior are also behind the floppy ears and piebald coats and other features that characterize domesticated species. One theory among the scientists in Novosibirsk is that the genes guiding the animals' behavior do so by altering chemicals in their brains. Changes to those neurochemicals, in turn, have "downstream" impacts on the animals' physical appearance.
For now, though, Kukekova is focused on the first step: linking tame behavior to genes. Toward the end of every summer, she travels from Cornell to Novosibirsk to evaluate the year's newborn kits. Each researcher's interaction with a kit is standardized and videotaped: opening a cage, reaching a hand in, touching the fox. Later, Kukekova reviews the tapes, using objective measures to quantify the foxes' postures, vocalizations, and other behaviors. Those data are layered on top of a pedigree—records that keep track of tame, aggressive, and "crossed" foxes (those with parents from each group).
The joint American-Russian research team then extracts DNA from blood samples of each fox in the study and scans for stark differences in the genomes of those that scored as aggressive or tame in the behavioral measures. In a paper in press in Behavior Genetics, the group reports finding two regions that are widely divergent in the two behavioral types and might thus harbor key domestication genes. Increasingly, it appears that domestication is driven not by a single gene but a suite of genetic changes. "Domestication," the paper concludes, "appears to be a very complex phenotype."
As it happens, 2,800 miles to the west in Leipzig, Germany, another laboratory is at the exact same juncture in understanding domestication genes in rats. Frank Albert, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, obtained 30 descendants of Belyaev's rats (15 tame, 15 aggressive) in two wooden boxes from Siberia in 2004. "What we found were regions of the genome that influence tameness and aggression," says Albert. "But we don't know which genes cause these signals." Like Kukekova's group, he says, "we are in the process of whittling down the number."
Once either group is able to pinpoint one or more of the specific genetic pathways involved, they or other researchers can look for parallel genes in other domesticated species. "In a perfect situation, we'd like to define specific genes involved in tame and aggressive behaviors," says Kukekova. "Even when we find those, we will not know if they are the genes for domestication until we compare them in other animals."
Ultimately, the biggest payoff of the research may come from finding similar genes in the most thoroughly domesticated species of all: human beings. "Understanding what has changed in these animals is going to be incredibly informative," says Elaine Ostrander, of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH. "Everyone is waiting with great excitement for what they come out with."
Not all domestication researchers believe that Belyaev's silver foxes will unlock the secrets of domestication. Uppsala University's Leif Andersson, who studies the genetics of farm animals—and who lauds Belyaev and his fellow researchers' contribution to the field—believes that the relationship between tameness and the domestication phenotype may prove to be less direct than the fox study implies. "You select on one trait and you see changes in other traits," Andersson says, but "there has never been proven a causal relationship."
To understand how Andersson's view differs from that of the researchers in Novosibirsk, it's helpful to try and imagine how the two theories might have played out historically. Both would agree that the animals most likely to be domesticated were those predisposed to human contact. Some mutation, or collection of mutations, in their DNA caused them to be less afraid of humans, and thus willing to live closer to them. Perhaps they fed off human refuse or benefited from inadvertent shelter from predators. At some point humans saw some benefit in return from these animal neighbors and began helping that process along, actively selecting for the most amenable ones and breeding them. "At the beginning of the domestication process, only natural selection was at work," as Trut puts it. "Down the road, this natural selection was replaced with artificial selection."
Where Andersson differs is in what happened next. If Belyaev and Trut are correct, the self-selection and then human selection of less fearful animals carried with it other components of the domestication phenotype, such as curly tails and smaller bodies. In Andersson's view, that theory understates the role humans played in selecting those other traits. Sure, curiosity and lack of fear may have started the process, but once animals were under human control, they were also protected from wild predators. Random mutations for physical traits that might quickly have been weeded out in the wild, like white spots on a dark coat, were allowed to persist. Then they flourished, in part because, well, people liked them. "It wasn't that the animals behaved differently," as Andersson says, "it's just that they were cute."
In 2009 Andersson bolstered his theory by comparing mutations in coat-color genes between several varieties of domesticated and wild pigs. The results, he reported, "demonstrate that early farmers intentionally selected pigs with novel coat coloring. Their motivations could have been as simple as a preference for the exotic or selection for reduced camouflage."
In his own hunt for domestication genes, Andersson is taking a close look at the most populous domesticated animal on Earth: the chicken. Their ancestors, red jungle fowl, roamed freely in the jungles of India, Nepal, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. Somewhere around 8,000 years ago, humans started breeding them for food. Last year Andersson and his colleagues compared the full genomes of domesticated chickens with those of zoo-based populations of red jungle fowl. They identified a mutation, in a gene known as TSHR, that was found only in domestic populations. The implication is that TSHR thereby played some role in domestication, and now the team is working to determine exactly what the TSHR mutation controls. Andersson hypothesizes that it could play a role in the birds' reproductive cycles, allowing chickens to breed more frequently in captivity than red jungle fowl do in the wild—a trait early farmers would have been eager to perpetuate. The same difference exists between wolves, which reproduce once a year and in the same season, and dogs, which can breed multiple times a year, in any season.
If Andersson's theory is correct, it may turn out to have intriguing implications for our own species. Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham has theorized that we, too, went through a domestication process that altered our biology. "The question of what is the difference between the domestic pig and a wild boar, or the distinction between a broiler chicken and a wild jungle fowl," Andersson told me, "is very similar to the question of what is the difference between a human and a chimpanzee."
Human beings are not simply domesticated chimpanzees, but understanding the genetics of domestication in chickens, dogs, and pigs may still tell us a surprising amount about the sources of our own social behavior. That's one reason the fox-farm research being conducted by Kukekova is underwritten by the NIH. "There are over 14,000 genes expressed in the brain, and not many are understood," she points out. Ferreting out which of those genes are related to social behavior is a tricky business; obviously one cannot perform breeding experiments on humans, and studies purporting to find innate differences in behavior among people or populations are at the very least problematic.
But delving into the DNA of our closest companions can deliver some tantalizing insights. In 2009 UCLA biologist Robert Wayne led a study comparing the wolf and dog genomes. The finding that made headlines was that dogs originated from gray wolves not in East Asia, as other researchers had argued, but in the Middle East. Less noticed by the press was a brief aside in which Wayne and his colleagues identified a particular short DNA sequence, located near a gene called WBSCR17, that was very different in the two species. That region of the genome, they suggested, could be a potential target for "genes that are important in the early domestication of dogs." In humans, the researchers went on to note, WBSCR17 is at least partly responsible for a rare genetic disorder called Williams-Beuren syndrome. Williams-Beuren is characterized by elfin features, a shortened nose bridge, and "exceptional gregariousness"—its sufferers are often overly friendly and trusting of strangers.
After the paper was published, Wayne says, "the number one email we got was from parents of children suffering from Williams-Beuren. They said, Actually our children remind us of dogs in terms of their ability to read behavior and their lack of social barriers in their behavior." The elfin traits also seemed to correspond to aspects of the domestication phenotype. Wayne cautions against making one-to-one parallels between domestication genes and something as genetically complex as Williams-Beuren. The researchers are "intrigued," he says, and hoping to explore the connection further.
In 2003 a young researcher at Duke University named Brian Hare traveled out to Novosibirsk. Hare is known for his work cataloging the unique behaviors of dogs and wolves, showing the ways in which dogs have evolved to follow human cues like pointing and eye movements. When he conducted similar tests on fox kits in Siberia, he found that they did just as well as puppies of the same age. The results, while preliminary, suggest that selecting against fear and aggression—what Hare calls "emotional reactivity"—has created foxes that are not just tame but that also have the doglike ability to engage with humans using their social cues.
"They didn't select for a smarter fox but for a nice fox," says Hare. "But they ended up getting a smart fox." This research also has implications for the origins of human social behavior. "Are we domesticated in the sense of dogs? No. But I am comfortable saying that the first thing that has to happen to get a human from an apelike ancestor is a substantial increase in tolerance toward one another. There had to be a change in our social system."
Hare's research came to mind on my last afternoon in Novosibirsk, as Kukekova, my translator Luda Mekertycheva, and I played with Mavrik in a pen behind the fox farm's research house. We watched him chase a ball and wrestle with another fox, then run back so we could grab him up and let him lick our faces. But we all had flights to catch, and after an hour, Kukekova carried him back toward the sheds. Mavrik seemed to sense that he was headed back to his cage and whined with increasing agitation. Here was an animal biologically conditioned for human attention, as much as any dog is. Now that we'd provided it, I suddenly felt guilty for taking it away.
The fox-farm experiment is, of course, just that: a scientific experiment. For decades the project has been forced to manage their population by selling off to real fur farms those foxes not friendly or aggressive enough to be research candidates. For the scientists, deciding which ones stay and which ones go is a harrowing process; Trut says she has long since passed on the job to others and stays away from the farm during selection time. "It is very difficult emotionally," she told me.
In recent years the institute has been working to obtain permits to sell the surplus tame foxes as pets, both domestically and in other countries. It would be a way not just to find a better home for the unwanted foxes, they suggest, but also to raise money for the research to continue. "The situation today is we are just doing our best to preserve our population," Trut says. "We do some genetic work with our partners in America. But this experiment has many more questions to resolve."
As for Mavrik, Luda Mekertycheva was so enthralled by the chestnut-colored fox and another playmate that she decided to adopt them. They arrived at her dacha outside of Moscow a few months later, and not long after, she emailed me an update. "Mavrik and Peter jump on my back when I kneel to give them food, sit when I pet them, and take vitamins from my hand," she wrote. "I love them a lot."
The man who taught himself to see.
Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.
by Michael Finkel
photograph by Steve Pyke
The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. "You're going to leave it that far from the curb?" he asks. He's standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.
The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. "They get gummy," he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in.
Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy — Kish is now 44 — he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he's playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind.
He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.
But not silent. Kish has trained himself to hear these slight echoes and to interpret their meaning. Standing on his front stoop, he could visualize, with an extraordinary degree of precision, the two pine trees on his front lawn, the curb at the edge of his street, and finally, a bit too far from that curb, my rental car. Kish has given a name to what he does — he calls it "FlashSonar" — but it's more commonly known by its scientific term, echolocation.
Bats, of course, use echolocation. Beluga whales too. Dolphins. And Daniel Kish. He is so accomplished at echolocation that he's able to pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails. He climbs trees. He camps out, by himself, deep in the wilderness. He's lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. He travels around the globe. He's a skilled cook, an avid swimmer, a fluid dance partner. Essentially, though in a way that is unfamiliar to nearly any other human being, Kish can see.
This is not enough for him. Kish is seeking — despite a lack of support from every mainstream blind organization in America — nothing less than a profound reordering of the way the world views blind people, and the way blind people view the world. He's tired of being told that the blind are best served by staying close to home, sticking only to memorized routes, and depending on the unreliable benevolence of the sighted to do anything beyond the most routine of tasks.
Kish preaches complete and unfettered independence, even if the result produces the occasional bloody gash or broken bone. (He once fractured the heel of his left foot after leaping from a rock and has broken a couple of teeth.) He's regarded by some in the blind community with deep veneration. Others, like a commenter on the
National Federation of the Blind's listserv, consider him "disgraceful" for promoting behavior such as tongue clicking that could be seen as off-putting and abnormal.Kish and a handful of coworkers run a nonprofit organization called
World Access for the Blind, headquartered in Kish's home. World Access offers training on how to gracefully interact with one's environment, using echolocation as a primary tool. So far, in the decade it has existed, the organization has introduced more than 500 students to echolocation. Kish is not the first blind person to use echolocation, but he's the only one to meticulously document it, to break it down into its component parts, and to figure out how to teach it. His dream is to help all sight-impaired people see the world as clearly as he does.—-
Kish, here biking in Long Beach, preaches total independence. Photo courtesy Daniel Kish
It begins with the lid of a pot. "Stand up," Kish instructs, then guides me to the center of his living room and ties a blindfold around my head, while mentioning, in a schoolteachery tone, that I should not for an instant think that wearing a blindfold represents the experience of being blind. A blindfold almost always causes someone who can see to feel frightened, confused, and disoriented. Kish is none of these things.
"Now wait here," he says. Though he was born and raised in Southern California, Kish has an odd, almost foreign-sounding accent — a bouillabaisse of Canadian, British, and relaxed Los Angeleno. He says it's a result of his many travels. "I'm a natural mimic," he explains. Kish is 5-foot-7, thin and fit, with an impressive mane of dark brown hair and a meandering winestain birthmark on his left cheek.
I hear him walk into his kitchen, his bare feet padding faintly on the hardwood floor. "I'm very particular about feeling life and air around my feet," he once wrote in the journal he braille-typed and shared with me. I'm barefoot as well. Kish asked me to remove my shoes, which is one of his many little rules you quickly learn to adopt. Like: He's Daniel Kish, and anyone who calls him "Dan" more than once may be struck with withering disdain. And don't disturb him during his sleep time — lately, he's been sleeping just two hours twice a day, usually from 5 to 7 in the morning and again from 5 to 7 in the evening. He often stays up all night dealing with World Access logistics. He lives alone and does not have a significant other. He plays a lot of Celtic hymnal music.
I listen as Kish opens a cabinet and rummages amid his pots. He returns and stands behind me. "Make a click," he says.
It's a terrible click, a sloppy click; what Kish calls a "clucky click." Kish's click is a thing of beauty — he snaps the tip of his tongue briefly and firmly against the roof of his mouth, creating a momentary vacuum that pops upon release, a sound very much like pushing the igniter on a gas stove. A team of Spanish scientists recently studied Kish's click and deemed it acoustically ideal for capturing echoes. A machine, they wrote, could do no better.
My click will work for now. Kish tells me that he's holding a large glass lid, the top to a Crock-Pot, a few inches in front of me. "Click again," he says. There's a distinct echo, a smearing of sound as if I'm standing in my shower. "Now click," he says. The echo's gone. "I've lifted it up. Can you tell?"
I can, quite clearly. "Click again," he instructs. "Where is it?" I click; there's no echo.
"It's still lifted," I say.
"Try again," says Kish. "But move your head, listen to your environment."
I turn my head to the right and click. Nothing. Then I click to the left. Bingo. "It's over here," I say, tilting my head in the direction of the lid.
"Exactly," says Kish. "Now let's try it with a pillow."
There are two reasons echolocation works. The first is that our ears, conveniently, are located on both sides of our head. When there's a noise off to one side, the sound reaches the closer ear about a millisecond — a thousandth of a second — before it reaches the farther ear. That's enough of a gap for the auditory cortex of our brain to process the information. It's rare that we turn the wrong way when someone calls our name. In fact, we're able to process, with phenomenal accuracy, sounds just a few degrees off-center. Having two ears, like having two eyes, also gives us the auditory equivalent of depth perception. We hear in stereo 3-D. This allows us, using only our ears, to build a detailed map of our surroundings.
The second reason echolocation works is that humans, on average, have excellent hearing. We hear better than we see. Much better. On the light spectrum, human eyes can perceive only a small sliver of all the varieties of light — no ultraviolet, no infrared. Converting this to sound terminology, we can see less than one octave of frequency. We hear a range of 10 octaves.
We can also hear behind us; we can hear around corners. Sight can't do this. Human hearing is so good that if you have decent hearing, you will never once in your life experience true silence. Even if you sit completely still in a soundproof room, you will detect the beating of your own heart.
—-
Kish does not go around clicking like a madman. He uses his click sparingly and, depending on his location, varies the volume. When he's outside, he'll throw a loud click. In good conditions, he can hear a building 1,000 feet away, a tree from 30 feet, a person from six feet. Up close, he can echolocate a one-inch diameter pole. He can tell the difference between a pickup truck, a passenger car, and an SUV. He can locate trail signs in the forest, then run his finger across the engraved letters and determine which path to take. Every house, he explains, has its own acoustic signature.
He can hear the variation between a wall and a bush and a chain-link fence. Bounce a tennis ball off a wall, Kish says, then off a bush. Different response. So too with sound. Given a bit of time, he can echolocate something as small as a golf ball. Sometimes, in a parking garage, he can echolocate the exit faster than a sighted person can find it.
I accompanied Kish on several occasions as he cruised the busy streets of Long Beach. The outside world is an absolute cacophony. Every car, person, dog, stroller, and bicycle makes a sound. So do gusts of wind, bits of blowing garbage, and rustling leaves. Doors open and close. Change jangles. People talk. Then there are the silent obstacles — what Kish calls urban furniture: benches, traffic signs, telephone poles, postal boxes, fire hydrants, light posts, parked vehicles. Kish hears the sonic reflections from his click even in a place teeming with ambient noise. "It's like recognizing a familiar voice in a crowd," he says. The load upon his mind is undoubtedly immense. Yet he casually processes everything, constructing and memorizing a mental map of his route, all while maintaining an intricate conversation with me. It's so extraordinary that it seems to border on the magical.
When we walk into a restaurant — never a simple choice with Kish, since he's a strict vegan — he makes a much quieter click. Kish describes the images he receives as akin to a brief flick of the lights in a dark room; you get enough essential information — tables here, stairway there, support pillars here — to navigate your way through. "It becomes as ridiculous for blind people to run into a wall as it is for sighted people," he once wrote in his FlashSonar manual. He strolls casually across the restaurant, making one or two more clicks as we approach our table, then sits down. It's both smooth and subtle. Kish says that it is rare a sighted person even notices he's making an unusual noise. Almost all blind people instantly do.
What people do notice about Kish is his long white cane. His blind person's cane. Using echolocation, Kish could get around without one. For most of his youth, in fact, he never carried a cane, seeking to avoid the stigma attached to it. Now, as he approaches middle age, he's come to believe that whatever can conveniently provide him with more information about his environment he will use. Echolocation's chief liability is that it is not good at detecting holes in the ground, or small dropoffs, which a cane can do. There are also some figure-ground issues with echolocation — a park bench can "disappear" when it's directly in front of a stone wall — and a cane, in essence, increases the length of your arm by as much as five feet.
Kish also keeps aware, during the day, of where the sun is striking him — a good way to determine direction — and how the cracks between sidewalk blocks line up; if you remain steadily perpendicular to them, you're not veering.
When it's all put together, says Kish, he has very rich, very detailed pictures in his head.
"In color?" I ask.
"No," he says. "I've never seen color, so there's no color. It's more like a sonar, like on the Titanic."
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At his high school graduation in 1984, Kish was voted "most likely to succeed." Photo courtesy Daniel Kish
Kish can hardly remember a time when he didn't click. He came to it on his own, intuitively, at age two, about a year after his second eye was removed. Many blind children make noises in order to get feedback — foot stomping, finger snapping, hand clapping, tongue clicking. These behaviors are the beginnings of echolocation, but they're almost invariably deemed asocial by parents or caretakers and swiftly extinguished. Kish was fortunate that his mother never tried to dissuade him from clicking. "That tongue click was everything to me," he says.
He has a vivid recollection of sneaking out his bedroom window in the middle of the night, at age two and a half, and climbing over a fence into his neighbor's yard. "I was in the habit of exploring whatever I sensed around me," he writes in his journal. He soon wondered what was in the yard of the next house. And the one after that. "I was on the other side of the block before someone discovered me prowling around their backyard and had the police return me home to completely flummoxed parents."
Kish was born in Montebello, California, into a difficult family situation. His younger brother, Keith, was also born with retinoblastoma — it's genetic, though neither of Kish's parents had the disease. Doctors managed to save enough of Keith's eyesight so that he doesn't need echolocation. He's now a middle school English teacher. Kish's father, who worked as an automobile mechanic, was a physically abusive alcoholic, and his mother left him when Kish was six.
"I was a violent kid," says Kish. He frequently got into fistfights. "I rarely lost. My strategy consisted of immobilizing opponents before they could hit me too often." He went to mainstream schools and relied almost exclusively on echolocation to orient himself, though at the time neither he nor his mom had any concept of what he was doing. "There was no one to explain it, there was no one to help me enhance it, and we all just kind of took it for granted," he says. "My family and friends were like, 'Yeah, he does this funny click thing and he gets around.' " They called it his radar. Navigating new places, he says, was like solving a puzzle.
He rode his bike with wild abandon. "I used to go to the top of a hill and scream 'Dive bomb!' and ride down as fast as I could," he says. This is when he was eight. The neighborhood kids would scatter. "One day I lost control of the bicycle, crashed through these trash cans, and smashed into a metal light pole. It was a violent collision. I had blood all over my face. I picked myself up and went home."
He was raised with almost no dispensation for his blindness. "My upbringing was all about total self-reliance," he writes, "of being able to go after anything I desired." His career interests, as a boy, included policeman, fireman, pilot, and doctor. He was a celebrated singer and voracious consumer of braille books. He could take anything apart and put it back together — a skill he retains. Once, when I was driving Kish to an appointment with a student, the GPS unit in my car stopped working. Kish examined the unit with his hands, instructed me from the passenger seat how to get to the nearest Radio Shack, and told me which part to buy (the jack on the power cord was faulty). He was named "best brain" in middle school and graduated high school with a GPA close to 4.0. He was voted "most likely to succeed."
He attended the University of California Riverside, then earned two master's degrees — one in developmental psychology, one in special education. He wrote a thesis on the history and science of human echolocation, and as part of that devised one of the first echolocation training programs. The ability of some blind individuals to perceive objects well before they could touch them was noted as early as 1749 by French philosopher Denis Diderot. He theorized it had something to do with vibrations against the skin of the face. In the early 1800s, a blind man from England named James Holman journeyed around the world — he may have been the most prolific traveler in history up to that point, Magellan and Marco Polo included — relying on the echoes from the click of his cane. Not until the 1940s, in Karl Dallenbach's lab at Cornell University, was it irrefutably proven that humans could echolocate.
The thesis was the first time Kish really studied what he'd been doing all his life; it was the beginning, as he put it, of "unlocking my own brain." He then became the first totally blind person in the United States (and likely the world) to be fully certified as an orientation and mobility specialist — that is, someone hired by the visually impaired to learn how to get around.
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Kish teaching echolocation. Photo courtesy Daniel Kish
It was never Kish's goal to run a foundation dedicated to the blind. He planned to be a psychologist. But he could not ignore the fact that few blind people enjoyed anything close to his freedom of movement, and he had grown weary of society's attitude toward the blind. "I am belittled, patronized, disrespected, invaded, restricted, and presumed weak, vulnerable, or otherwise incapacitated," he wrote in his journal. It still drives him crazy when he's congratulated for simply crossing the street or preparing dinner.
In a letter he posted on his website a few years ago, Kish responded to a public school program in New Jersey called Kindness Beats Blindness, in which hundreds of middle school students were blindfolded while others led them around, to develop sympathy for the blind. "I have felt beaten and pummeled by many things," he wrote, "misplaced kindness foremost among them." When I asked Kish about the letter he said, "I have a reputation for being a pain in the ass." One of his closest friends sometimes refers to him as "the bridge burner."
Young people, says Kish, are especially hard-hit. "Most blind kids hear a lot of negative talk. 'Don't do this, don't do that, don't move. No, here, let me help you.' The message you get, if you're blind, is you're intellectually deficient, you're emotionally deficient, you're in all ways deficient." A few sighted people have commented to Kish that they'd rather be dead than blind.
So in 2001 he started World Access for the Blind. One of its missions is to counter every no that blind people hear. Blindness, Kish says, should be understood — by both the blind and the sighted — as nothing more than an inconvenience. "Most of my life," he writes, "I never even thought of myself as blind. In fact, I saw myself as smarter, more agile, stronger, and generally more capable than most other boys my age."
World Access operates on what Kish calls "an annual budget of silliness" — less than $200,000 a year. (Kish himself makes only "a survival wage.") He depends on the "blind vine," the chattery network of the visually impaired, to spread the word. When a potential student, or a parent of a student, agrees to hire World Access, either Kish or one of three other World Access teachers — all blind or visually impaired — will pay a visit, whether it's on the other side of Los Angeles or the other side of the world.
Lessons can consist of private meetings a few times a month, or an intensive week of training for students farther afield. He's visited a group of blind students in northern Mexico three times and traveled to Scotland eight times. In all, Kish has taught in 14 countries, including Armenia, South Africa, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Blind students or organizations in more than a dozen other nations, from Afghanistan to Guatemala, are now on his waiting list. The chief focus of World Access classes is setting students on the path to complete autonomy. Echolocation is an essential element of what Kish terms "a holistic approach" that also includes lessons on comfortable social interactions, confident self-image, and nonvisual conversational cues (a head turn can be noted by the sound of hair swishing; arm gestures by the whisper of skin brushing against clothing; the shift of someone's body by the creaking of furniture).
World Access doesn't turn anyone away for lack of resources. But there are a couple of reasons why the organization hasn't trained more students. The first is Kish's general ethos about how blind children should be raised. "Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster," he writes. "Pain is part of the price of freedom." This attitude is not wildly popular, especially in a safety-first nation like the United States. Also, echolocation is not easy to master. Kish compares it with piano lessons — anyone can learn basics; very few will make it to Carnegie Hall. Only about 10 percent of the people who learn echolocation, he admits, find their abilities immediately enriched.
And then there is resistance from mainstream organizations. The National Federation of the Blind, the largest blind organization in America, does not endorse Kish's work. "Let's just say he's unique," says John Paré, the federation's executive director for strategic initiatives, clearly straining to be polite. Paré believes that for most people, echolocation is not worth the tremendous effort required to grasp it. "We urge people to learn how to use a long white cane," he says. According to Kish, a colleague once overheard members of the federation refer to him as Clicker Boy. "The blindness field is firmly based in tradition and dogma and is very slow to evolve," says Kish. "It's been traditionally dominated by sighted people who feel the need to tell blind people what to do."
The same afternoon I first visit Kish, I also meet Brian Bushway and Juan Ruiz. Bushway became blind at age 14 due to a genetic condition known as optic nerve atrophy and was introduced to Kish soon after. Ruiz was born blind and was one of Kish's first students; Kish began working with him while preparing his echolocation thesis. They both told me, individually, that Kish's teaching transformed them, allowing them to feel at peace with their blindness and at one with the world.
Bushway and Ruiz are now in their late 20s and have become instructors with World Access. They often hang out at Kish's home, forming a foul-mouthed and funny little gang. (Bushway: "You know why echolocators get all the girls? 'Cause they're skilled with their tongues and comfortable in the dark.") They've become so adept at echolocation that, in many ways, they have surpassed their teacher — at least in terms of fearlessness, sociability, and willingness to run into poles. They're the next generation of echolocators, ready to take Kish's work and see how far they can push it.
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If you happen to be blind and want to live a bold, stereotype-smashing life, there will be blood. I witness this firsthand when I spend a day mountain biking with Bushway and Ruiz. (Kish, acceding to the realities of near–middle age, stays home.) We ride on a roller-coastery ridgetop trail in the Santa Ana Mountains, above the town of Mission Viejo. Clipped to the rear fork of each of our bikes is a plastic zip tie, attached so that the end flicks through our spokes, creating a constant snapping sound that lets Bushway and Ruiz know where the other bikes are. But to determine where the trail is going, and where the bushes and rocks and fence posts and trees are, the boys rely on echolocation.
Bushway is a fearless biker. He often flies down the dirt trail in aerodynamic form, hands off the brakes, clicking as fast and as loud as he can. "Your brain is on overload," he says to me during a water break. "You feel like you can hear every bush, every tree. Your body is hyperaware." I try and warn them when the trail presents a serious consequence, like a long drop-off on one side or a cactus jutting out. But mostly I'm just along for the ride. It's difficult to believe, even though it's happening right in front of me. It's incredible.
And then, suddenly, it's not. When I look behind me and see that Ruiz has drifted back, I stop and wait for him. I'm just standing there, silently, and before I realize what's happening, he is bearing down on me. I shout, and he pulls the brakes, but it's too late. He smashes into me and crushes his left hand between his handlebar and the back of my seat post. He falls off his bike and rolls about in pain, clutching his hand. There's a trickle of blood, though nothing seems broken. I feel terrible, but Ruiz says it's his fault — he should have echolocated my bike, even if I wasn't moving. We finish the ride, with Ruiz using only one hand.
The next day I join Kish and Bushway as they teach Sebastian Mancipe, who is 15 and has been working with World Access for three years. When he started, he rarely came out of his bedroom. He had little interaction with the outside world. He developed infant glaucoma and was blind by age three months. His parents moved from Colombia to the United States to give him a chance at a better life. His mother, Viviana, saw a brief appearance by Kish on the Ripley's Believe It or Not television show, and soon hired World Access to work with Sebastian.
He now rides a skateboard. He ice-skates. He's popular at school, stocked with friends and a busy social life. I follow as Kish and Bushway stroll around Sebastian's neighborhood, in a busy section of Burbank. He'd obviously mastered the echolocation basics — the pot lid, the pillow, general shapes. Kish and Bushway encourage him to push his skills further. "A tree," says Kish, clicking a couple of times, "is like a bush on a pole." They walk on. "A tree without a bush on top is probably a telephone pole." They pass a parking lot. "A large object that starts out low at one end, rises in the middle, and drops off again at the other end — that's a parked car."
Back at home, I ask Sebastian's mother about the impact World Access has had on her son. "It was an awakening," she says. "He believes he can do anything. To see Sebastian as a normal child…" She can't complete the sentence before the tears come.
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The longer the waiting list for his services grows, the more conflicted Kish feels. He knows what he's doing is important. But what he really wants, as more people clamor for his time, as the frequent-flier miles add up, is to hand over the reins of World Access and run away from it all.
He's essentially a loner. "My constitution," he says, "is that of Grizzly Adams." In 2003 he purchased a 12-foot by 12-foot cabin deep in the Angeles National Forest. It was built in 1916; he paid $10,000 for it. To get there he'd take a taxi to the end of the road and hike in. "My only company," he wrote in his journal at the time, "is a small family of mice." He explored the wilderness. "I taught myself how to negotiate tricky, winding trails with sharp switchbacks, how to cross rushing streams on slippery stones. I've gone for miles and days without meeting another soul."
He was once asked by a colleague what he thought the biggest problem was with being blind. "My biggest barrier is people," he answered. "Especially sighted people." He has never once in his life had a girlfriend or, for that matter, a boyfriend. When I ask him, via e-mail, to explain why, his response is three words: "Lack of interest."
Two tragedies, nearly 20 years apart, have bookended his adult life. The first was the death of his dog, a black lab named Whiska. This was in 1990. She was run over by a car while Kish was walking with her. Kish has always blamed himself for the accident. "I loved Whiska with an intensity that completely distorted my better judgment," he wrote. "I spoiled her rotten and took over her job. She forgot to watch for traffic, because I'd always done that for her." He had nightmares for a year after the accident. "The chain's just dangling and there's no dog. I'll never forget that moment." Not long after, he got another dog, but soon started traveling and gave him away. That was his last pet.
The second tragedy occurred in January 2007 when his cabin burned down. He'd had a wood-burning stove installed, and the wrong materials were used for the chimney. The fire was fast-moving and horrific — "my last memories of my cabin are the ominous crackle and rumble of advancing flames" — and Kish had no idea if it would engulf the entire canyon, incinerating him as well. The disaster haunts him; he keeps a chunk of melted glass from the cabin in his home in Long Beach. "A piece of my own heart has gone up in flames," he wrote. He plans to one day return to the woods, perhaps permanently. "I find people," he says, "to be incredibly draining."
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Kish has an idea. Beyond the pot lid and the pillow, beyond the mission of World Access, there is something he has been quietly working on for more than a decade. If his wish is fulfilled — if someone else takes over World Access and he's able to escape from life's perpetual rush hour — it may prove to be his true legacy. What Kish envisions is the next leap in human echolocation. His idea is to become more like a bat.
Bats are the best. Some can fly in complete darkness, navigating around thousands of other bats while nabbing insects one millimeter wide. Bats have evolved, over millions of years, to possess the ideal mouth shape and the perfect ear rotation for echolocation. They can perceive high-frequency sound waves, beyond the range of human hearing — waves that are densely packed together, whose echoes give precise detail.
There is evidence that humans could be that good. Bats have tiny brains. Just the auditory cortex of a human brain is many times larger than the entire brain of a bat. This means that humans can likely process more complex auditory information than bats. What we'll require, to make up for bats' evolutionary head start, is a little artificial boost.
Actually, two boosts. We need a way to create batlike sound waves, and we need to be able to hear those waves. In pursuit of these goals, Kish has spent time in New Zealand with Leslie Kay, who worked on underwater sonar for the British Navy during the Cold War. For nearly 50 years, Kay tinkered with ideas for helping the blind to see with sound. He eventually introduced, after many weeks of consultation with Kish, a product called the K-Sonar, a flashlight-size machine that attaches to a blind person's cane and emits ultrasonic pulses. The pulses are then digitally translated into tones humans can hear, through earphones. "Flowers actually sound soft," says Kish. "Stones sound hard and crisp. It pretty much represents the physical environment as music." The problem is range: The K-Sonar can detect a postage stamp from 15 feet, but not the side of a barn from 30 feet.
If money were no object, Kish believes that blind people could essentially mimic bats within five years. A next generation of K-Sonar, using the input from a global consortium of scientists that Kish has been corresponding with, should have a nearly limitless range. Our hearing, Kish says, can be increased tenfold through surgical augmentation — basically, inner-ear microphone implants. Combine the two and it's possible that the blind will be able to take up tennis. Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he'll never get the opportunity.
"It's virtually impossible to gather funding for experimental devices for the blind," he says. "The blind population is seen as a lost cause." Kish's patience is running thin. He is still reaching out to scientists and studying scholarly journals and pondering ways to conjure the money. But more and more these days, he finds himself daydreaming about rebuilding his cabin and devoting himself to playing music, to writing. Let the new crop of echolocators take over the research and the networking and the panhandling. So for the foreseeable future, at least, Kish will continue to click in his usual way. And the sighted world will continue to not notice.
Inside Google's Age of Augmented Humanity
For its next act, the Silicon Valley giant wants to put a supercomputer in your pocket, the better to sense, search, and interpret your personal surroundings. We talked to the scientists who are making it happen.
Wade Roush 2/28/2011
[Editor's Note: This is the unified, single-page version of a series of articles originally published on January 3, January 5, and January 6, 2011.]
1: New Frontiers in Speech Recognition
Already, it's hard for anyone with a computer to get through a day without encountering Google, whether that means doing a traditional Web search, visiting your Gmail inbox, calling up a Google map, or just noticing an ad served up by Google Adsense. And as time goes on, it's going to get a lot harder.
That's in part because the Mountain View, CA-based search and advertising giant has spent years building and acquiring technologies that extend its understanding beyond Web pages to other genres of information. I'm not just talking about the obvious, high-profile Google product areas such as browsers and operating systems (Chrome, Android), video (YouTube and the nascent Google TV), books (Google Book Search, Google eBooks), maps (Google Maps and Google Earth), images (Google Images, Picasa, Picnik), and cloud utilities (Google Docs). One layer below all of that, Google has also been pouring resources into fundamental technologies that make meaning more machine-tractable—including software that recognizes human speech, translates written text from one language to another, and identifies objects in images. Taken together, these new capabilities promise to make all of Google's other products more powerful.
The other reason Google will become harder to avoid is that many of the company's newest capabilities are now being introduced and perfected first on mobile devices rather than the desktop Web. Already, our mobile gadgets are usually closest at hand when we need to find something out. And their ubiquity will only increase: it's believed that 2011 will be the year when sales of smartphones and tablet devices finally surpass sales of PCs, with many of those new devices running Android.
That means you'll be able to tap Google's services in many more situations, from the streets of a foreign city, where Google might keep you oriented and feed you a stream of factoids about the surrounding landmarks, to the restaurant you pick for lunch, where your phone might translate your menu (or even your waiter's remarks) into English.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company has adopted a "mobile first" strategy. And indeed, many Googlers seem to think of mobile devices and the cameras, microphones, touchscreens, and sensors they carry as extensions of our own awareness. "We like to say a phone has eyes, ears, skin, and a sense of location," says Katie Watson, head of Google's communications team for mobile technologies. "It's always with you in your pocket or purse. It's next to you when you're sleeping. We really want to leverage that."
This is no small vision, no tactical marketing ploy—it's becoming a key part of Google's picture of the future. In a speech last September at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, Schmidt talked about "the age of augmented humanity," a time when computers remember things for us, when they save us from getting lost, lonely, or bored, and when "you really do have all the world's information at your fingertips in any language"—finally fulfilling Bill Gates' famous 1990 forecast. This future, Schmidt says, will soon be accessible to everyone who can afford a smartphone—one billion people now, and as many as four billion by 2020, in his view.
It's not that phones themselves are all that powerful, at least compared to laptop or desktop machines. But more and more of them are backed up by broadband networks that, in turn, connect to massively distributed computing clouds (some of which, of course, are operated by Google). "It's like having a supercomputer in your pocket," Schmidt said in Berlin. "When we do voice translation, when we do picture identification, all [the smartphone] does is send a request to the supercomputers that then do all the work."
And the key thing about those supercomputers—though Schmidt alluded to it only briefly—is that they're stuffed with data, petabytes of data about what humans say and write and where they go and what they like. This data is drawn from the real world, generated by the same people who use all of Google's services. And the company's agility when it comes to collecting, storing, and analyzing it is perhaps its greatest but least appreciated capability.
The power of this data was the one consistent theme in a series of interviews I conducted in late 2010 with Google research directors in the fundamental areas of speech recognition, machine translation, and computer vision. It turns out that many of the problems that have stymied researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence for decades—understanding the rules behind grammar, for instance, or building models of perception in the visual cortex—give way before great volumes of data, which can simply be mined for statistical connections.
Unlike the large, structured language corpuses used by the speech-recognition or machine-translation experts of yesteryear, this data doesn't have to be transcribed or annotated to yield insights. The structure and the patterns arise from the way the data was generated, and the contexts in which Google collects it. It turns out, for example, that meaningful relationships can be extracted from search logs—the more people who search for "IBM stock price" or "Apple Computer stock price," the clearer it becomes that there is a class of things, i.e. companies, with an attribute called "stock price." Google's algorithms glean this from Google's own users in a process computer scientists call "unsupervised learning."
"This is a form of artificial intelligence," Schmidt observed in Berlin. "It's intelligence where the computer does what it does well and it helps us think better…The computer and the human, together, each does something better because the other is helping."
In a series of three articles this week, I'll look more closely at this human-computer symbiosis and how Google is exploiting it, starting with the area of speech recognition. (Subsequent articles will examine machine translation and computer vision.) Research in these areas is advancing so fast that the outlines of Schmidt's vision of augmented humanity are already becoming clear, especially for owners of Android phones, where Google deploys its new mobile technologies first and most deeply.
Obviously, Google has competition in the market for mobile information services. Over time, its biggest competitor in this area is likely to be Apple, which controls one of the world's most popular smartphone platforms and recently acquired, in the form of a startup called Siri, a search and personal-assistant technology built on many of the same machine-learning principles espoused by Google's researchers.
But Google has substantial assets in its favor: a large and talented research staff, one of the world's largest distributed computing infrastructures, and most importantly, a vast trove of data for unsupervised learning. It seems likely, therefore, that much of the innovation making our phones more powerful over the coming years will emerge from Mountain View.
The Linguists and the Engineers
Today Michael Cohen leads Google's speech technology efforts. But he actually started out as a composer and guitarist, making a living for seven years writing music for piano, violin, orchestra, and jazz bands. As a musician, he says, he was always interested the mechanics of auditory perception—why certain kinds of sound make musical sense to the human brain, while others are just noise.
A side interest in computer music eventually led him into computer science proper. "That very naturally led me, first of all, to wanting to work on something relating to perception, and second, related to sounds," Cohen says today. "And the natural thing was speech recognition."
Cohen started studying speech at Menlo Park's SRI International in 1984, as the principal investigator in a series of DARPA-funded studies in acoustic modeling. By that time, a fundamental change in the science of speech was already underway, he says. For decades, early speech researchers had hoped that it would be possible to teach computers to understand speech by giving them linguistic knowledge—general rules about word usage and pronunciation. But starting in the 1970s, an engineering-oriented camp had emerged that rejected this approach as impractical. "These engineers came along, saying, 'We will never know everything about those details, so let's just write algorithms that can learn from data,'" Cohen recounts. "There was friction between the linguists and the engineers, and the engineers were winning by quite a bit."
But around the mid-1980s, Cohen says, "the linguists and the engineers started talking to each other." The linguists realized that their rules-based approach was too complex and inflexible, while the engineers realized their statistical models needed more structure. One result was the creation of context-dependent statistical models of speech that, for the first time, could take "co-articulation" into account—the fact that the pronunciation of each phoneme, or sound unit, in a word is influenced by the preceding and following phonemes. There would no longer be just one statistical profile for the sound waves constituting a long "a" sound, for example; there would be different models for "a" for all of the contexts in which it occurs.
"The engineers, to this day, still follow the fundamental statistical, machine-learning, data-driven approaches," Cohen says. "But by learning a bit about linguistic structure—that words are built in phonemes and that particular realizations of these phonemes are context-dependent—they were able to build richer models that could learn much more of the fine details about speech than they had before."
Cohen took much of that learning with him when he co-founded Nuance, a Menlo Park, CA-based spinoff of SRI International, in 1994. (Much later, SRI would also spin off Siri, the personal assistant startup bought last year by Apple.) He spent a decade building up the company's strength in telephone-based voice-response systems for corporate call centers—the kind of technology that lets customers get flight status updates from airlines by speaking the flight numbers, for example.
The Burlington, MA-based company now called Nuance Communications was formerly a Nuance competitor called ScanSoft, and it adopted the Nuance name after it acquired the Menlo Park startup in 2005. But by that time Cohen had left Nuance for Google. He says several factors lured him in. One was the fact that statistical speech-recognition models were inherently limited by computing speed and memory, and by the amount of training data available. "Google had way more compute power than anybody had, and over time, the ability to have way more data than anybody had," Cohen says. "The biggest bottleneck in the research being, 'How can we build a much bigger model?,' it was definitely an opportunity."
But there were other aspects to this opportunity. After 10 years working on speech recognition for landline telephone systems at Nuance, Cohen wanted to try something different, and "mobile was looking more and more important as a platform, as a place where speech technology would be very important," he says. That's mainly because of the user-interface problem: phones are small and it's inconvenient to type on them.
"At the time, Google had barely any effort in mobile, maybe four people doing part-time stuff," Cohen says. "In my interviews, I said, 'I realize you can't tell me what your next plans are, but if you are not going to be serious about mobile, don't make me an offer, because I won't be interested in staying.' I felt at the time that mobile was going to be a really important area for Google."
As it turned out, of course, Cohen wasn't the only one who felt that way. Schmidt and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin also believed mobile phones would become key platforms for browsing and other search-related activities, which helped lead to the company's purchase of mobile operating system startup Android in 2005.
Cohen built a whole R&D group around speech technology. Its first product was goog-411, a voice-driven directory assistance service that debuted in 2007. Callers to 1-800-GOOG-411 could request business listings for all of the United States and Canada simply by speaking to Google's computers. The main reason for building the service, Cohen says, was to make Google's local search service available over the phone. But the company also logged all calls to goog-411, which made it "a source of valuable training data," Cohen says: "Even though goog-411 was a subset of voice search, between the city names and the company names we covered a great deal of phonetic diversity."
And there was a built-in validation mechanism: if Google's algorithms correctly interpreted the caller's prompt, the caller would go ahead and place an actual call. It's in many such unobtrusive ways (as Schmidt pointed out in his Berlin speech) that Google recruits users themselves to help its algorithms learn.
Google shut down goog-411 in November 2010—but only because it had largely been supplanted by newer products from Cohen's team such as Voice Search, Voice Input, and Voice Actions. Voice Search made its first appearance in November 2008 as part of the Google Mobile app for the Apple iPhone. (It's now available on Android phones, BlackBerry devices, and Nokia S60 phones as well.) It allows mobile phone users to enter Google search queries by speaking them into the phone. It's startlingly accurate, in part because it learns from users. "The initial models were based on goog-411 data and they performed very well," Cohen says. "Over time, we've been able to train with more Voice Search data and get improvements."
Google isn't the only company building statistical speech-recognition models that learn from data; Cambridge, MA, startup Vlingo, for example, has built a data-driven virtual assistant for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Windows Phone platforms that uses voice recognition to help users with mobile search, text messaging, and other tasks.
But Google has a big advantage: it's also a search company. Before Cohen joined Google, he says, "they hadn't done voice search before—but they had done search before, in a big way." That meant Cohen's team could use the logs of traditional Web searches at Google.com to help fine-tune its own language models. "If the last two words I saw were 'the dog' and I have a little ambiguity about the next word, it's more likely to be 'ran' than 'pan,'" Cohen explains. "The language models tell you the probabilities of all possible next words. We have been able to train enormous language models for Voice Search because we have so much textual data from Google.com."
Over time, speech recognition capabilities have popped up in more and more Google products. When Google Voice went public in the spring of 2009, it included a voicemail transcription feature courtesy of Cohen's team. Early in 2010, YouTube began using Google's transcription engine to publish written transcripts alongside every YouTube video, and YouTube viewers now have the option of seeing the transcribed text on screen, just like closed-captioning on television.
But mobile is still where most of the action is. Google's Voice Actions service, introduced last August, lets Android users control their phones via voice—for instance, they can initiate calls, send e-mail and text messages, call up music, or search maps on the Web. (This feature is called Voice Commands on some phones.) And the Voice Input feature on certain Android phones adds a microphone button to the virtual keypad, allowing users to speak within any app where text entry is required.
"In general, our vision for [speech recognition on] mobile is complete ubiquity," says Cohen. "That's not where we are now, but it is where we are trying to get to. Anytime the user wants to interact by voice, they should be able to." That even includes interacting with speakers of other languages: Cohen says Google's speech recognition researchers work closely with their colleagues in machine translation—the subject of the next article in this series—and that the day isn't far off when the two teams will be able to release a "speech in, speech out" application that combines speech recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis for near-real-time translation between people speaking different languages.
"The speech effort could be viewed as something that enhances almost all of Google's services," says Cohen. "We can organize your voice mails, we can show you the information on the audio track of a YouTube video, you can do searches by voice. A large portion of the world's information is spoken—that's the bottom line. It was a big missing piece of the puzzle, and it needs to be included. It's an enabler of a much wider array of usage scenarios, and I think that what we'll see over time is all kinds of new applications that people would never have thought of before," all of them powered by user-provided training data. Which is precisely what Schmidt had in mind in Berlin when he quoted sci-fi author William Gibson: "Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products."
2: Changing the Equation in Machine Translation
When science fiction fans think about language translation, they have two main reference points. One is the Universal Translator, software built into the communicators used by Star Trek crews for simultaneous, two-way translation of alien languages. The other is the Babel fish from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which did the same thing from its home in the listener's auditory canal.
When AltaVista named its Web-based text translation service after the Babel fish in 1997, it was a bit of a stretch: the tool's translations were often hilariously bad. For a while, in fact, it seemed that the predictions of the Star Trek writers—that the Universal Translator would be invented sometime around the year 2150—might be accurate.
But the once-infant field of machine translation has grown up quite a bit in the last half-decade. It's been nourished by the same three trends that I wrote about on Monday in the first part of this week's series about Google's vision of "augmented humanity." One is the gradual displacement of rules-based approaches to processing speech and language by statistical, data-driven approaches, which have proved far more effective. Another is the creation of a distributed cloud-computing infrastructure capable of holding the statistical models in active memory and crunching the numbers on a massive scale. Third, and just as important, has been the profusion of real-world data for the models to learn from.
In machine translation, just as in speech recognition, Google has unique assets in all three of these areas—assets that are allowing it to build a product-development lead that may become more and more difficult for competitors to surmount. Already, the search giant offers a "Google Translate" app that lets an Android user speak to his phone in one language and hear speech-synthesized translations in a range of languages almost instantly. In on-stage previews, Google has been showing off "conversation-mode" version of the app that does the same thing for two people. (Check out Google employees Hugo Barra and Kay Oberbeck carrying out a conversation in English and German in this section of a Google presentation in Berlin last September.)
While still experimental, the conversation app is eerily reminiscent of the fictional Universal Translator. Suddenly, the day seems much closer when anyone with an Internet-connected smartphone will be able to make their way through a foreign city without knowing a word of the local language.
In October, I met with Franz Josef Och, the head of Google's machine translation research effort behind the Translate app, and learned quite a bit about how Google approaches translation. Och's long-term vision is similar to that of Michael Cohen, who leads Google's efforts in speech recognition. Cohen wants to eliminate the speech-text dichotomy as an impediment, so that it's easier to communicate with and through our mobile devices; Och wants to take away the problem of language incomprehension. "The goal right from the beginning was to say, what can we do to break down the language barrier wherever it appears," Och says.
This barrier is obviously higher for many Americans than it is for others, present company included—I'm functionally monolingual despite years of Russian, French, and Spanish classes. ("It's always a shock to Americans," Google CEO Eric Schmidt quipped during the Berlin presentation, but "people actually don't all speak English.") So a Babel fish in my ear—or in my phone, at any rate—would definitely count as a step toward the augmented existence Schmidt describes.
But in the big picture, Google's machine translation work is really just a subset of its larger effort to make the world's information "universally accessible and useful." After all, quite a bit of this information is in languages other than those you or I may understand.
The Magic Is in the Data
Given the importance of language understanding in military affairs, from intelligence-gathering to communicating with local citizens in conflict zones, it isn't surprising that Och, like Cohen, found his way to Google by way of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The German native, who had done masters work in statistical machine translation at the University of Nuremberg and PhD work at the University of Aachen, spent the early 2000s doing DARPA-funded research at USC's Information Sciences Institute. His work there focused on automated systems for translating Arabic and Chinese records into English, and he entered the software in yearly machine translation "bake-offs" sponsored by DARPA. "I got very good results, and people at Google saw that and said 'We should invite that guy,'" Och says.
Och was getting his results in part by setting aside the old notion that computers should translate expressions between languages based on rules. In rules-based translation, Och says, "What you write down is dictionaries. This word translates into that. Some words have multiple translations, and based on the context you might have to choose this one or that one. The overall structure might change: the morphology, the extensions, the cases. But you write down the rules for that too. The problem is that language is so enormously complex. It's not like a computer language like C++ where you can always resolve the ambiguities."
It was the heady success of British and American cryptographers and cryptanalysts at breaking Japanese and German codes during World War II, Och believes, that set the stage for the early optimism about rule-based translation. "If you look 60 years ago, people said 'In five years, we'll have solved that, like we solved cryptography.'" But coming up with rules to capture all the variations in the ways people express things turned out to be a far thornier problem than experts expected. "It didn't take five years [to start to solve it], it took 60 years," Och says. "And the way we are doing it is different. For us, it's a computer science problem, not a linguistics problem."
The pioneers in statistical machine translation in the 1990s, Och says, came from the field of speech recognition, where it was already clear that it would be easier to bootstrap machine-learning algorithms by feeding them lots of recordings of people actually speaking than to codify all the rules behind speech production.
The more such data researchers have, the faster their systems can learn. "Data changes the equation," says Och. "The system figures out on its own what is correlated. Because we feed it billions of words, it learns billions of rules. The magic comes from these massive amounts of data."
But back in 2004, when Google was taking a look at Och's DARPA bake-off entry, the magic was still slow, limited by his team's computation budget at USC. "We had a few machines, and the goal was to translate a given test sentence, and it would take a few days to translate just that sentence," he says. Translating random text? Forget it. "Building a real system would have needed much bigger computational resources. We were CPU-constrained, RAM-constrained."
But Google wasn't. Access to the search company's data centers, Och figured, would advance his project by a matter of several years overnight. Then there was Google's ability to crawl the Web, collecting examples of already-translated texts—which are the key to bootstrapping any statistical machine translation system. But what clinched the deal when Google finally hired Och in early 2004, he says, was the opportunity to work on technology that would reach so many people: "The idea of being able to build a real system that millions of people might use to break down the language barrier, that was a very exciting thought."
Och and the machine-translation team he started to build at Google began with his existing systems for translating Chinese, Arabic, and Russian into English, fanning out over the Web to find as many examples as possible of human-translated texts. The sheer scope of Google's areas of interest was a help here—it turns out that many of the millions of books Google was busily scanning for its Book Search project have high-quality translations. But another Google invention called MapReduce was even more important. The more statistical associations that a translation system can remember, the faster and more accurately it can translate new text, Och says—so the best systems are those that can hold hundreds of gigabytes of data in memory all at once. MapReduce, the distributed-computing framework that Google engineers developed to parallelize the work of mapping, sorting, and retrieving Web links, turned out to be perfect for operating on translation data. "It was never built with machine translation in mind, but our training infrastructure uses MapReduce at many many places," says Och. "It helps us, as part of building those gigantic models, to manage very large amounts of data."
By October of 2007, Och's team was able to replace the third-party, rules-based translation software Google had been licensing from Systran—the same technology behind AltaVista's Babel Fish (which now lives at babelfish.yahoo.com)—with its own, wholly statistical models. Today the Web-based Google Translate system works for 58 languages, including at least one—Latin—that isn't even spoken anymore. "There are not so many Romans out there any more, but there are a lot of Latin books out there," Och explains. "If you want to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, then the Latin books are certainly part of that."
And new languages are coming online every month. Human-translated documents are still the starting point—"For languages where those don't exist, we cannot build systems," Och says—but over time, the algorithms have gotten smarter, meaning they can produce serviceable translations using less training data. "We have Yiddish, Icelandic, Haitian Creole—a bunch of very small languages for which it's hard to find those kinds of documents," Och says.
Today Google Translate turns up in a surprising number of places across the Google universe, starting with plain old search box. You can translate a phrase at Google.com just by typing a phrase like "translate The Moon is made of cheese to French" (the translation offered sounds credible to me: La Lune est faite de fromage). For those times when you know the best search results are likely to be in some other language, there's the "Translated Search" tool. And when results come up that aren't in your native language, Google can translate entire Web pages on the fly. (If you're using Google's Chrome browser or the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox, page translation happens automatically.) Google can translate your Gmail messages, your Google Talk chats, and your Google Docs. It can even render the captions on foreign-language YouTube videos into your native tongue. And, of course, there are mobile-friendly versions of the Google translation tools, including the Android app.
In September, Hugo Barra, Google's director of mobile products, hinted that the conversation-mode version of the Google Translate Android app would be available "in a few months," meaning it could arrive any day now. But whenever it appears, Och and his team aren't likely to stop there. In fact, they're already thinking about how to get around some of the barriers that remain between speakers of different languages—even if they have an Android smartphone to mediate between them.
"If I were speaking German now, ideally we should just be able to communicate, but there are some user interface questions and issues," Och points out. There's the delay, for one thing—while the Google cloud sends back translations quickly, carrying on a conversation is still an awkward process of speaking, pushing a button, waiting while the other person listens and responds, and so on. Then there's the tinny computer voice that issues the translation. "It would be my voice going in, but isn't my voice coming out," Och says. "So no one knows how [true simultaneous machine translation] would work, until we get to the Babel fish or the Universal Translator from Star Trek—where it just works, and language is never an issue when they go to a different planet."
3: Computer Vision Puts a "Bird on Your Shoulder"
It's a staple of every film depiction of killer androids since Terminator: the moment when the audience watches through the robot's eyes as it scans a human face, compares the person to a photo stored in its memory, and targets its unlucky victim for elimination.
That's computer vision in action—but it's actually one of the easiest examples, from a computational point of view. It's a simple case of testing whether an acquired image matches a stored one. What if the android doesn't know whether its target is a human or an animal or a rock, and it has to compare everything it sees against the whole universe of digital images? That's the more general problem in computer vision, and it's very, very hard.
But just as we saw with the case of statistical machine translation in Part 2 of this series, real computer science is catching up with, and in some cases outpacing, science fiction. And here, again, Google's software engineers are helping push to the boundaries of what's possible. Google made its name helping people find textual data on the Web, and it makes nearly all of its money selling text-based ads. But the company also has a deep interest in programming machines to comprehend the visual world—not so that they can terminate people more easily (not until Skynet takes over, anyway) but so that they can supply us with more information about all the unidentified or under-described objects we come across in our daily lives.
I've already described how Google's speech recognition tools help you initiate searches by speaking to your smartphone rather than pecking away at its tiny keyboard. With Google Goggles, a visual search tool that debuted on Android mobile phones in December 2009 and on the Apple iPhone in October 2010, your phone's built-in camera becomes the input channel, and the images you capture become the search queries. For limited categories of things—bar codes, text on signs or restaurant menus, book covers, famous paintings, wine labels, company logos—Goggles already works extremely well. And Google's computer vision team is training its software to recognize many more types of things. In the near future, according to Hartmut Neven, the company's technical lead manager for image recognition, Goggles might be able to tell a maple leaf from an oak leaf, or look at a chess board and suggest your next move.
Goggles is the most experimental, and the most audacious, of the technologies that Google CEO Eric Schmidt described in a recent speech in Berlin as the harbingers of an age of "augmented humanity." Even more than the company's speech recognition or machine translation tools, the software that Neven's team is building—which is naturally tailored for smartphones and other sensor-laden mobile platforms—points toward a future where Google may be at hand to mediate nearly every instance of human curiosity.
"It is indeed not many years out where you can have this little bird looking over your shoulder, interpreting the scenes that you are seeing and pretty much for every piece in the scene—art, buildings, the people around you," Neven told me in an interview late last year. "You can see that we will soon approach the point where the artificial system knows much more about what you are looking at than you know yourself."
Going Universal
Neven, like most of the polymaths at Google, started out studying subjects completely unrelated to search. In his case, it was classical physics, followed by a stint in theoretical neurobiology, where he applied methods from statistical physics to understanding how the brain makes sense of information from the nervous system.
"One of most fascinating objects of study in nature is the human brain, understanding how we learn, how we perceive," Neven says. "Conscious experience is one of the big riddles in science. I am less and less optimistic that we will ever solve them—they're probably not even amenable to the scientific method. But any step toward illuminating those questions, I find extremely fascinating."
He sees computer vision as one of the steps. "If you have a theory about how the brain may recognize something, it's surely nice if you can write a software program that does something similar," he says. "That by no means proves that the brain does it the same way, but at least you have reached an understanding of how, in principal, it could be done."
It's pretty clear that the brain doesn't interpret optical signals by starting from abstract definitions of what constitutes an edge, a curve, an angle, or a color. Nor does it have the benefit of captions or other metadata. The point—which I won't belabor again here, since we've already seen it at work in the cases of Google's efforts in speech recognition and machine translation—is that Neven's approach to image recognition was data-driven from the start, relying on computers to sift through the huge piles of 1s and 0s that make up digital images and sniff out the statistical similarities between them. "We have, early on, and sooner than other groups, banked very heavily on machine learning as opposed to model-based vision," he says.
Trained in Germany, Neven spent the late 1990s and early 2000s at the University of Southern California, in labs devoted to computational vision and human-machine interfaces. After tiring of the grant-writing treadmill, he struck out on his own, co-founding a company called Eyematic around a unique and very specific application of computer vision: using video from a standard camcorder to "drive" computer-generated characters in 3D. When that technology failed to pay off, Neven started Neven Vision, which began from the same foundation—facial feature tracking—but wound up exploring areas as diverse as biometric tools for law enforcement and visual searches for mobile commerce. "What Goggles is today, we started out working on at Neven Vision on a much smaller scale," he says. "Take an image of a Coke can, and be entered in a sweepstakes. Simple, early applications that would generate revenue."
How much revenue Neven Vision actually generated isn't on record—but the company did have a reputation for building some of the most accurate face recognition software on the market, which was Google's stated reason for acquiring the company in 2006. The team's first assignment, Neven says, was to put face recognition into Picasa—the photo management system Google had purchased a couple of years before.
Given how far his team's computer vision tools have evolved since then, Neven Vision probably should have held out for more money in the acquisition, Neven jokes today. "We said, 'We can do more than face recognition—one of our main products is visual mobile search.' They knew it, but they kept a poker face and said, 'All we want is the face recognition, we are just going to pay for that.'"
Once the Picasa project was done, Neven's team had to figure out what to do next. His initial pitch to his managers was to build visual search app for packaged consumer goods. That was when Google's poker face came off. "We said, 'Let's do a verticalized app that supports users in finding information about products.' And then one of our very senior engineers, Udi Manber, came to the meeting and said, 'No, no, it shouldn't be vertical. It's in Google's DNA to go universal. We understand if you can't quite do it yet, but that should be the ambition.'" The team was being told, in other words, to build a visual search tool that could identify anything.
That was "a little bit of a scary prospect," Neven says. But on the other hand, the team had already developed modules or "engines" that were pretty good at recognizing things within a few categories, such as famous structures (the Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge). And it had seen the benefits of doing things at Google scale. Neven Vision's original face recognition algorithm had achieved a "significant jump in performance" simply because the team was now able to train it using tens of millions of images, instead of tens of thousands, and to parallelize the work across thousands of computers.
"Data is the key for pretty much everything we do," Neven says. "It's often more critical than the innovation on the algorithmic side. A dumb algorithm with more data beats a smart algorithm with less data."
In practice, Neven's team has been throwing both algorithms and data at the general computer vision problem. Goggles isn't built around a single statistical model, but a variety of them. "A modern computer vision algorithm is a complex building with many stories and little towers on the side," Neven says. "Whenever I visit a university and I see a piece that I could add, we try to find an arrangement with the researchers to bring third-party recognition software into Goggles as we go. We have the opposite of 'Not Invented Here' syndrome. If we find something good, we will add it."
Goggles is really good at reading text (and translating it, if asked); it can work wonders with a business card or a wine label. If it has a good, close-up image to work with, it's not bad at identifying random objects—California license plates, for example. And if it can't figure out what it's looking at, it can, at the very least, direct you to a collection of images with similar colors and layouts. "We call that internally the Fail Page, but it gives the user something, and over time this will show up less and less," Neven says.
As even Neven acknowledges, Goggles isn't yet a universal visual search tool; that's why it's still labeled as a Google Labs project, not an officially supported Google product. Its ability to identify nearly 200,000 works by famous painters, for example, is a computational parlor trick that, in truth, doesn't add much to its everyday utility. The really hard work—getting good at identifying random objects that don't have their own Wikipedia entries—is still ahead. "What keeps me awake at night is, 'What are the honest-to-God use cases that we can deliver,' where it's not just an 'Oh, wow,'" Neven says. "We call it the bar of daily engagement. Can we make it useful enough that every day you will take out Goggles and do something with it?"
But given the huge amount of learning material Google collects from the Web every day, the company's image recognition algorithms are likely to clear that bar more and more often. They have savant-like skill in some areas: they can tell amur leopards from clouded leopards, based on their spot patterns. They can round up images not just of tulips but of white tulips. The day isn't all that far away, it seems clear, when Goggles will come close to fulfilling Neven's image of the bird looking over your shoulder, always ready to tell you what you're seeing.
The Next Great Stage of Search
What reaching this point might mean on a sociocultural level—in areas like travel and commerce, learning and education, surveillance and privacy—is a question that we'll probably have to confront sooner than we expected. Why? Because it's very clear that this is where Google wants to go.
Here's how Schmidt put it in his speech: "When I walk down the streets of Berlin, I love history, [and] what I want is, I want the computer, my smartphone, to be doing searches constantly. 'Did you know this occurred here, this occurred there?' Because it knows who I am, it knows what I care about, and it knows roughly where I am." And, as Schmidt might have added, the smartphone will know what he's seeing. "So this notion of autonomous search, the ability to tell me things that I didn't know but I probably am very interested in, is the next great stage, in my view, of search."
This type of always-on, always-there search is, by definition, mobile. Indeed, Schmidt says Google search traffic from mobile devices grew by 50 percent in the first half of 2010, faster than every other kind of search. And by sometime between 2013 and 2015, analysts agree, the number of people accessing the Web from their phones and tablet devices will surpass the number using desktop and laptop PCs.
By pursuing a data-driven, cloud-based, "mobile first" strategy, therefore, Google is staking its claim in a near-future world where nearly every computing device will have its own eyes and ears, and where the boundaries of the searchable will be much broader. "Google works on the visual information in the world, the spoken and textual and document information in the world," says Michael Cohen, Google's speech technology leader. So in the long run, he says, technologies like speech recognition, machine translation, and computer vision "help flesh out the whole long-term vision of organizing literally all the world's information and making it accessible. We never want you to be in a situation where you wish you could get at some of this information, but you can't."
Whatever you're looking for, in other words, Google wants to help you find it—in any language, via text, sound, or pictures. (And if it can serve up a few ads in the process, so much the better.) That's the real promise of having a "supercomputer in your pocket," as Schmidt put it. But what we do with these new superpowers is up to us.
Epidemiology: Study of a lifetime
In 1946, scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week. On their 65th birthday, the study members find themselves more scientifically valuable than ever before.
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On Tuesday 5 March 1946, Patricia Malvern was born in a small flat in Cheltenham, UK, near the boilers that her dad stoked to warm the building above. She weighed in at 9 pounds, 2 ounces (4 kilograms).
The next day, David Ward was "one of the few Catholics born in a Jewish hospital" opposite Hampton Court, near London. Ward doesn't know exactly what he weighed, although his dad said later that he looked "like a skinned rabbit".
Throughout the rest of that week, just months after the end of the Second World War, 16,695 babies were born in England, Scotland and Wales. Health visitors carefully recorded the weights of the vast majority on a four-page questionnaire, along with countless other details including the father's occupation, the number of rooms and occupants (including domestics) in the baby's home and whether the baby was legitimate or illegitimate. Over subsequent years, the information files on more than 5,000 of these children thickened, then bulged. Throughout their school years and young adulthood and on into middle age, researchers weighed, measured, prodded, scanned and quizzed the group's bodies and minds in almost every way imaginable.
This week, the group has much to celebrate. They are turning 65, the age at which many in the United Kingdom retire and, as such, a milestone in British life. They will also celebrate being part of the longest-running birth-cohort study in the world. These ordinary men and women are now some of the best-studied people on the planet. And this makes them some of the most scientifically valuable, because it has allowed researchers to track their health and wealth throughout their lives, and to search for factors that could explain their trajectories.
The exercise has revealed some surprises. It has shown that the heaviest babies were most at risk of breast cancer decades later; that children born into lower social classes were more likely to gain weight as adults; that women with higher IQ reached menopause later in life; and that young children who spent more than a week in hospital were more likely to suffer behaviour and education problems later on.
A generation under study
All told, the results from the 1946 birth cohort — now known as the National Survey of Health and Development and run by the Medical Research Council (MRC) — have filled 8 books and some 600 papers so far. Perhaps more than anything else, the survey has shown that early life matters — a lot. "Ultimately, where you get to in early adulthood is strongly influenced by where you come from," says Michael Wadsworth, who led the study for nearly 30 years, until 2007.
Children who were born into better socioeconomic circumstances were most likely to do well in school and university, escape heart disease, stay slim, fit and mentally sharp and, so far at least, to survive. (Ward, whose father worked his way up in a Walthamstow-based dry-cleaning business, went on to university and built a career in journalism. Malvern, whose father left home when she was five and who wore third-hand clothes, left school at 16 and "bitterly regrets" the fact that her mother couldn't afford to pay tuition for her to train as a teacher.)
David Ward as a baby in 1947 with his mother and sister; and in 1976 with his son and daughter.Courtesy of D. Ward
Those lessons are arguably more urgent today than they were in 1946 when, caught up in post-war optimism, Britain was introducing major educational reforms and a National Health Service (NHS) to ensure that good schooling and health were available to all. The contrast with the country's mood this winter couldn't be starker. Students have been rioting to protest against the government's plan to introduce £9,000 (US$14,600) annual fees for universities; plans are afoot to drastically reform the NHS (eviscerate it, critics say); and sweeping budget cuts are threatening public services — including early childhood support centres, for which the cohort's data once helped provide impetus. "I find these changes very worrying," says Diana Kuh, who now directs the survey and says she is saving up for her grandchildren to attend university.
"It's unique and groundbreaking in the history of epidemiology. It's the only study to have chased an entire cohort across its life course — and it's not yet finished," says Ezra Susser, an epidemiologist who works with cohort studies at Columbia University in New York. He says that cohort research has been vital in seeding the idea that disease evolves as a result of events throughout life. "You gain enormous depth of understanding in how that disease came to be by following someone over their life course."
Now, as the cohort members enter old age, the study offers a precious opportunity to understand how a lifetime of experiences might hasten or slow their decline — an urgent question for countries such as the United Kingdom and United States, whose populations are rapidly ageing and sickening. In the latest round of data collection, running from 2006 to 2010 and costing £2.7 million, study members underwent almost every modern biomedical test, including echocardiograms, measures of blood-vessel function, whole-body bone, muscle and fat scans, and tests of blood, memory and how quickly they could get up from a chair.
The data will provide a detailed starting point from which to measure the cohort members' inevitable decline, and the opportunity to analyse the information is already swelling an extensive network of collaborators. Some are testing how genes interact with a lifetime of experiences to lead to obesity or disease; others plan to scan participants' genomes for 'epigenetic' marks — molecular traces left, perhaps, by early birth weight or by life's inequalities — that alter gene expression and might provide a molecular explanation for effects in later life. Greg Duncan, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the impact of child poverty, hopes that follow-up studies could help to answer a question arising from the earlier findings on socioeconomic status and health: "What are the active ingredients in social class?"
It is this ability to draw associations between biological data, from blood pressure right down to genes, and life as it is actually lived that makes the cohort study so unusual, say its leaders. "These are real people," says Kuh. "This is what it is to be human and normal."
Next steps in making motherhood easier
The first few decades of the twentieth century found Britain acutely concerned about its falling birth rate and stagnant infant mortality. (The thought at the time, as Kuh puts it, was "how are we going to maintain Britain and its empire?") A Population Investigation Committee recommended a maternity survey to explore whether the social and economic costs of childbearing were discouraging prospective parents. James Douglas was appointed to head it.
Douglas, a physician, had spent part of the war conducting vast studies of air-raid casualties. He set about launching an investigation that today would be ethically difficult, logistically nightmarish and financially prohibitive: sending health visitors to interview the mothers of every child born in that March week. He reached 13,687 of them. "It was crazily ambitious," says Wadsworth, who inherited the study leadership from Douglas more than three decades later. Yet "he pulled it off".
In 1948, when Douglas's book about the study's results appeared, the baby boom was in full swing and concerns about birth rate had mostly dissipated. But the volume, Maternity in Great Britain, made a stir by revealing shocking disparities between rich and poor in infant survival and women's care. One widely reported result showing that only 20% of women who gave birth at home were offered pain relief, and that the poor suffered most, spurred a parliamentary bill allowing more midwives to deliver gas and air.
Douglas decided to turn the study into a tool for documenting social inequality and gauging the impact of newly minted welfare reforms such as the NHS. In particular, he realized that he had the perfect weapon for testing the success of the 1944 Education Act, which had introduced a nationwide system of exams for 11-year-olds — the 11+ — intended to channel the brightest, regardless of background, into elite 'grammar' schools. He selected a sample of the original 13,687 children spanning geography and social class, ending up with 5,362, whose health, growth and other data were regularly recorded and then transferred onto punch cards. Douglas also tested the children's cognition as they reached 8, 11 and 15, and tracked their course through school.
Britain's squandered treasury of talent
To the architects of the welfare state, the results were discouraging. Bright children from the middle classes were more likely to pass the 11+ and do well at school than were equally bright working-class children, although supportive parents and good teachers could better a child's odds. The attrition of smart but poor boys (girls counted for less) became known as the 'waste of talent', turning Douglas's next two books — The Home and the School (1964) and All Our Future (1968) — into must-read educational references and contributing to the introduction of non-selective 'comprehensive' schools in the 1960s.
Patricia Malvern aged 16; and aged 51, holding one of her grandchildren.Courtesy of P. Malvern
While Douglas was studying the group's diverging paths, the children were walking them. Malvern, who was cripplingly embarrassed by taking free school meals, failed her 11+. She blames a class teacher so violent that Malvern would sleep without covers in order to catch a cold and avoid school, and who "walloped me across the head" on the day of the exam. After she left school, Malvern went to learn typing at Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham. Ward's father, meanwhile, was planning to buy a house, and his mother tested him on Latin vocabulary over the ironing. He was one of 4 children out of 66 in his school's top two classes who passed the 11+ exam, and he and his sister were the first in their family to attend university.
As the 1970s rolled on and the participants entered their thirties, Douglas was losing steam. Most of his questions about the cohort members' education, occupations and social mobility had been answered, and Douglas was heading towards retirement. Medical epidemiologists thought that the cohort should be mothballed until its members got interesting again, when they started to sicken and die. The MRC, which had been funding the project since 1962, dithered about what to do with it; even Douglas thought the project was finished.
Life's pattern decided — at the age of seven
For Wadsworth, a social epidemiologist who had joined Douglas's team in 1968, it was just getting going. "I thought the changing pattern of health of these people would be interesting over life," he says.
After he took the helm in 1979, Wadsworth convinced the MRC to fund a new round of data collection as the cohort reached 36, then again at 43 and 53. He started assessing the group's physical capabilities and health, including blood pressure, heart and lung function, diet and exercise. He wanted to see how these indicators had been influenced by earlier life — and then chart them into the future.
Correlations tumbled out of the data. In 1985, Wadsworth and his team reported that cohort members whose birth weight had been low had higher blood pressure as adults1. It was an early hint that fetal and infant growth shape adult health, a link that became known as the Barker hypothesis after David Barker, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton, UK, who published a 1989 analysis of birth weight and health in a different cohort2. He found that babies with the lowest birth weights had the highest risk of heart disease as adults.
Study after study from the 1946 cohort supported the link, showing a tangle of connections between infant and child growth or development and adult traits from cognitive ability to frailty, diabetes, obesity, cancer and schizophrenia risk. "It isn't the same story every time, but we find an endless stream of long-term associations in quite 'noisy' data," says Kuh. "Big babies were more likely to get breast cancer. Small babies were more likely to have poor grip strength. Those who grew fast postnatally have more cardiovascular risk." (Says Ward: "I find that quite extraordinary, almost in a poetic way, that there is something that spans all those years, that something was set down, determined at that stage.")
A major question for scientists today is how to explain these connections: which biological systems in infants are so important, and how are lasting scars laid down on them? One possible answer lies in epigenetics: the chemical footprints, such as methyl groups, stamped on DNA by early life events that alter gene-expression patterns and might contribute to later disease. Martin Widschwendter, an oncologist at University College London (UCL), for example, is planning to analyse tens of thousands of possible methylation sites in the cohort's DNA, looking for changes that could explain the link between birth weight and breast-cancer risk. The detailed life-course information that can be combined with the DNA "is really only available via these cohorts", says Widschwendter.
The doctor's son does better than a dustman's
Yet Kuh and others emphasize that fates are not fixed by early life. "I don't ever want the findings to be interpreted as purely deterministic," says Kuh; she prefers the more optimistic idea that disease risks result from an accumulation of experiences throughout life, and that education, diet or other factors can shift poor trajectories to better ones. Marcus Richards, an epidemiologist who is leading the cognition studies on the group, points to evidence from the 1946 cohort — and supported by many other studies — that regular physical exercise in a person's thirties and forties can slow their cognitive decline with age. "We can take that research and say, here is very clear-cut evidence of something you can do to protect your cognitive health as you get older, and this is how you should do it," says Richards.
The 1980s brought a vivid lesson in the power of environment. Hardly any of the Douglas babies, nourished on post-war rations, were fat as children — a sharp contrast to those of today — and they had maintained a healthy weight throughout young adulthood. But now incomes were climbing, eating out was more affordable, and cars were the way to get around. As the cohort approached their thirties, the line plotting the proportion who were obese edged upwards; in their late thirties it soared3. And although those in lower socioeconomic brackets did get fatter faster, no social class was immune.
Somewhere on one of those curves is Malvern, who found her own weight creeping up when she moved to Luxembourg in 1992 and stopped work as a school bursar. She weighed 11 ½ stone (73 kilograms) when she moved. "When I came back in 2000 I was horrified: I was 15 stone. It was the pâté and the baguettes and the cheese and having visitors," she thinks — on top of the menopause. Malvern has since lost weight, and Ward has kept himself trim, he says, by living in the Peak District, where "you can't get anywhere without going up and down a hill".
Cleverness 'delays the menopause'
As women in the study reached their fifties, a more mysterious pattern emerged: those who had performed well on childhood intelligence tests tended to reach menopause several years later than those who had performed poorly4. "We tested almost to destruction every social and behavioural pathway; we threw almost everything we had at that to see if we could make that association go away and it didn't," says Richards. But once the researchers considered the association, it began to make sense. Their theory now is that childhood cognition provides a readout of brain development, including that of some areas that respond to hormones or are responsible for hormone production. In short, high IQ scores could indicate a brain that was well-developed all round, and so was able to sustain reproduction for longer. Kuh says that she has been testing whether genes are responsible, "so far without success".
In 2005, as the cohort neared 60 and Wadsworth neared the end of his scientific career, the project's future was again in jeopardy. The MRC was pondering whether to keep paying for it and, if it did, who should lead it. "We didn't know if the study would be closed down — and Mike was retiring. It was a very unstable period," says Kuh.
Kuh — who had trained in economics — wanted to build up the biomedical data that Wadsworth had been collecting. Until that time, all the examinations had been performed at the study members' homes, but by this stage the nurses were staggering under all the equipment. To really understand the participants' physiology and biology, Kuh argued, the study needed to get them to a clinic. "People appreciate a free bone scan," she says. By 2008 she had convinced the MRC to pay for every willing cohort member to visit one of a number of clinics around the country and had established a dedicated research unit, now housed in a Georgian terrace in central London.
Ward went to a clinic in Manchester for his exam. He learned that he has signs of osteoporosis in his spine, and that he can no longer stand on one leg for long with his eyes closed. "You wobble rather more and I ended up hopping about the place." He recalls the food diary he had to prepare as a "serious challenge". "You don't want to admit that you had that extra glass of plonk or another slice of cake, but you say, hang on, this is science, I've got to tell the truth".
Diana Kuh leads the UK National Survey of Health and Development, which has compiled thick files on more than 5,000 people since their birth in 1946.M. Dunham/Nature
Kuh and her colleagues — the study now has about 25 full-time researchers and support staff and 100 collaborators — are still compiling such truths about their thousands of participants. "Now the cohort is one of the most phenotyped in the world," says Kuh. Once her paper summarizing the latest data goes public5, Kuh is expecting the queue of epidemiologists, geneticists and other scientists who want to collaborate to lengthen, and last November she hired someone for three years especially to cope with the increased data sharing. As the cohort ages and falls ill, the study will continue monitoring participants' health and trying to tease out the influence of early experience. "One big question we can ask is, are these life effects we see in mid life going to wane?" says Kuh. Or will they, as some epidemiologists expect, get more dramatic with age?
Kuh is also thinking about how best to exploit genomic and other biomedical analyses. At least one study has hinted at the power of the cohort's life-course data combined with genetics. Last year, Rebecca Hardy, a statistician with the survey, published a study of two hot genes called FTO and MC4R, variants of which have been identified as risk factors for obesity6. When she analysed DNA collected from the cohort in 1999, she found that the association of those variants with body mass index increased in early adult life, then weakened as the cohort grew older. Perhaps, Hardy speculates, any effects of the genes on appetite or fat storage were overwhelmed by that onslaught of fat-promoting influences in the 1980s, a possibility that might become clearer when she tests a further panel of obesity-linked genes.
Ever protective of her study members and the limited DNA samples she has, Kuh says that she views the latest molecular biology techniques with caution. "I feel a huge responsibility to deliver," she says. Quite often, she says, outside researchers have an attitude of "give us all the cohort data and we'll rush this through and find millions of associations. I say, well, that sounds very interesting; can you come back with a hypothesis?" Even so, when Kuh compiles a plan for the MRC's five-yearly review of the survey in 2012, she knows that working out how to incorporate these technologies "is going to be key". The falling cost of DNA sequencing means that ploughing through participants' entire genomes is an almost inevitable step, she acknowledges. "The questions are, when is the best time — and what would we learn from it?"
A survey taking on a life of its own
For now, Kuh has more immediate planning concerns: five 65th-birthday parties, at which the study members will meet each other for the first time (see 'Cards & calls'). The parties are causing her some anxiety. Wadsworth had considered and rejected the idea of a 50th- or 60th-birthday bash, in case the get-together ended up influencing the participants' life course in some way. "Basically, we thought people might leave their partners and get off with someone in the study," he says. But Kuh decided that recognizing and rewarding the members was worth the risk. (She even wrote to Buckingham Palace to request a garden-party invitation for the study members. "I wrote such a nice letter. I learned all about how to address the Queen, and I'm still hoping to get a reply.")
Ward and Malvern are pleased to have been part of the study. "It gives me a fair old bit of pride in a way," says Ward. "Just things like bed-wetting. What did I contribute to the nation's store of knowledge on bed-wetting?" Neither is perturbed by the idea of the researchers watching them until they crumble and die. "I suppose," says Ward, "it helps you accept that you're mortal, you're not going to last forever."
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Some 13% of subjects have died so far — and the study already has something to say about the fate of the rest. Kuh flips open some graphs of survival rates that she has calculated. They show the proportion of the survey members surviving up to age 60, separated by father's social class. And they reveal yet another curious correlation for Kuh and her colleagues to dig into. Kuh points out a blue line representing a group of women from better-off backgrounds, whose death rate is about half that of everyone else7. Kuh has not been able to attribute the effect to less smoking or other obvious factors, and she suspects that these women took advantage of the educational and health opportunities afforded by post-war Britain to improve themselves. "They really changed their lives with education. The girls, if they got through, they did really well."
Yet the study is lending a touch of immortality to all its participants, whether men and women, born into comfort or poverty. Traces of them will live on in preserved DNA, cell lines frozen in liquid nitrogen — and in their records, now all transferred from punch cards to computers. "You're very aware that your memory is going," says Ward. "But you also know that in the archive is a version of you."
"I often call it an alternative biography in there," he adds, "and that I'd quite like to get my hands on."
Body Snatchers
Four years ago, 244 corpses supposedly destined for cremation at a Philadelphia funeral home were hacked apart, their organs and tissue sold for transplantation. It's a gruesome story of betrayal, for both the grieving families and the unwitting recipients of diseased body parts
By Dan P. Lee
DAN OPREA'S MOTHER, Rose, was always fiercely self-reliant. Born in 1923, she grew up at 5th and Oxford. After graduating from Hallahan Catholic Girls' High School, she married Daniel Oprea Sr., with whom she had a son. When the two divorced after seven years, Rose took it upon herself to enroll in Drexel University, where she studied electrical engineering. She became an engineer with RCA. With her only child, Rose Oprea carved out a happy life. She was not afraid of aloneness.
She and her son remained close — geographically and otherwise — as he grew older, despite the fact that they were opposites of sorts; Rose was bookish and artistic, while Dan, who took a job with the Navy, enjoyed working with his hands. (They shared a common interest in movies, something Rose instilled in her son from a young age.) Dan married and had two sons, to whom Rose was especially devoted. When Dan and his wife Mary Rose tragically lost their 26-year-old son Stephen in 2001, the mother-son bond grew stronger.
In her later years, Rose developed her share of health problems; she'd had a kidney removed years earlier, she suffered from angina and diverticulitis and a low iron count, and there was some slippage mentally. Dan and Mary Rose worried about her — her continued driving was of particular concern — and tried repeatedly to convince her to let them move in with her in the three-bedroom rancher in Huntingdon Valley that Rose had always said Dan would someday inherit. But Rose, who at 82 kept herself busy painting American Indian-syle works and running errands in her Chrysler Concorde, would have none of it. Dan and Mary Rose lived a few miles away, and Dan visited his mother every Saturday, mowing the lawn, raking leaves, changing light bulbs, whatever she needed done. The two spoke on the phone, without fail, every day.
One day in late December 2004, Dan tried to reach his mother. She didn't answer. He figured she was out rummaging the after-Christmas sales, and wasn't immediately worried. When it turned six o'clock and they still hadn't heard from her, Dan and Mary Rose drove to her house. They found her car parked in the driveway. Dan used his key to unlock the front door. Inside, they called out, flipping lights on as they searched. In her bedroom, they discovered Rose lying contorted on the floor. Her dachshund Sparky stood vigil beside her.
At the hospital, doctors determined that Rose had suffered a stroke. She was completely paralyzed on one side, and she was disoriented. She could no longer speak, or write. As the days wore on and her condition stabilized, she regained little of what she'd lost. After two weeks, she was transferred to a nursing home.
The Opreas visited Rose at Luther Woods Convalescent Center as frequently as possible. Though she struggled to communicate, it was clear she was uncomfortable — she tried often to wiggle out of bed — and wished to be home. She once managed to express to her son her worry that she was causing trouble. He told her she was no trouble at all. Late on the night of April 18, 2005, the Opreas rushed to the nursing home after receiving a call that Rose was deteriorating rapidly. They stood at her bedside, holding her hands, trying their best to comfort her as she lay dying.
Obsession over what happens after death — not just to the soul but also to the physical self — has always been part of the human condition; for as far back as we can discern, human beings have taken steps to care for their dead. But what was once exclusively the province of families — literally, next of kin — has morphed into a $15 billion annual business in America. Society, with the considerable influence of the funeral industry, has come to consider the way a corpse is treated as a direct, final and lasting expression of the quantity and quality of love felt.
The Opreas had talked at length about what they wanted done with their bodies after their deaths. All disliked the idea of embalming and burial, and when the Opreas' son died, they had his body cremated. Dan and his mother had made a pact years earlier, inspired by one of their favorite movies, Beau Geste, from 1939; it features a so-called Viking funeral, in which the body is put on a ship, lit on fire, and sent out to sea. Mother and son agreed that when she died, he'd have her cremated, place her ashes on a model ship, set it on fire, and launch it from the Atlantic City beach.
From the nursing home, Mary Rose phoned Charlie Mancini of Mancini Funeral Home, on Somerset Street in South Philadelphia, whom she'd known for years and who'd handled her son's arrangements. After she hung up, she and Dan said one last goodbye, and left.
Mancini arrived some time later to take possession of Rose Oprea's body. There was little for him to do but deliver it to the crematorium. There are just four crematoria in the City of Philadelphia, and Mancini always used one called Liberty, which was owned by Louis Garzone and his brother Gerald and their partner, James McCafferty Jr. Arriving at Liberty's nondescript building in Kensington, Mancini wheeled the body of Rose Oprea inside, where it was to have been cremated following a 24-hour waiting period, in keeping with Pennsylvania law.
Two years later, when a Philadelphia detective showed up on their doorstep, the Opreas would learn what actually happened next: Once Mancini was gone, in the cloak of darkness, a shadowy figure — a man — walked across Somerset Street. He entered the crematorium, placed the body bag containing Rose Oprea's remains on a gurney, and wheeled it back across the street, to a funeral home that Lou Garzone owned, where the cutters were waiting.
The cutters drove down from New York usually in the morning. They arrived in broad daylight. They went to work on a rusted table in a cramped, fetid, windowless, blood-encrusted embalming room one of them would later liken to the back of a butcher shop.
They slashed off the arms and legs at their joints, and then stripped the bones from them. Bones taken in complete pieces are most valuable, so femurs and other long bones were removed whole. The cutters used power tools to remove spines. They cut out Achilles and other tendons. Occasionally they took hearts. They skinned the bodies, including the faces. It was a blood-soaked, rushed operation. A proper harvesting can take four hours; the cutters could do it in 30 minutes. Appropriately removing a thin layer of skin from the body can itself take more than 30 minutes; the cutters could do it in 60 seconds. They used the same blades, wore the same gloves, cross-contaminated bodies and specimens.
They paid no mind to established protocol for harvesting postmortem tissue, which defines a suitable donor as someone under 65, without infection, serious disease or cancer, preferably felled by accident, heart attack or stroke; harvesting is to be completed within 15 hours of death. At Lou Garzone's funeral home, bodies routinely sat for days without refrigeration, often in the alleyway. The body of Philadelphia resident Diane Thomas, who died of metastatic cervical cancer, sat out for 113 hours. Joseph Pace, a 54-year-old widower from Kensington, suffered from sepsis, cancer, HIV and hepatitis C. James Herlihy, a former Naval Yard worker, also had hepatitis C and cancer. The cutters sliced apart 81-year-old Joseph Gibson, who died at the University of Pennsylvania of stomach cancer; his tissue was recovered 92 hours after he died. The eviscerated remains were rolled across the street to the crematorium, with packed towels to prevent a trail of blood. A crematorium employee said the bodies arrived disfigured, often missing limbs. Some were just torsos. The body bags that held them were full of blood. This was how the body of Rose Oprea, too, was cared for.
On forms forwarded to tissue processing companies, the cutters invented virtually everything, creating new identities for the deceased, new death certificates, subtracting decades from their ages (one 89-year-old was said to be 60), inventing next of kin, fabricating doctors, sometimes using, as a grand jury would put it, "special touches" — writing, on one form, that "Lois Glory" traveled to Mexico in 1981. As a result, authorities have been able to identify just 48 of the 244 corpses McCafferty and the Garzones handed over to the cutters; of those 48, nearly half died of cancer, sepsis, HIV or hepatitis. To circumvent compulsory blood tests, the cutters supplied the processing companies with blood from other corpses known to be clean.
About the same time that Rose Oprea was hospitalized for her stroke, the 62nd precinct of the New York City police department, in Brooklyn, was notified of a possible case of fraud. A couple — Deborah Johnson and her husband, Robert Nelms — had recently purchased the Daniel George & Son Funeral Home. A man had come to the home wishing to bury his aunt, who had prepaid for her funeral; Johnson could not find the appropriate documentation, and noticed larger-scale accounting irregularities. The case was assigned to Detective Patricia O'Brien.
O'Brien checked the files at the funeral home, which seemed to corroborate Johnson's concern. But there was something else, Johnson told O'Brien. The detective accompanied her upstairs, to a hidden room. It was fitted out like an operating room, with hospital-style overhead lights, a hydraulic lift that rose through the ceiling of the embalming room on the floor below, a toilet with tubes into which blood and other bodily fluids were drained, scalpels, knives, saws. …
Back at the precinct, O'Brien began Googling addresses from forms Johnson had also shown her: All were for tissue-transplant companies, scattered around the country.
Through records from the George funeral home — many of them obviously fabricated — the investigation spread, from Brooklyn to the city's other boroughs. O'Brien was joined by members of the NYPD's prestigious major case squad, who fanned out, interviewing relatives of the deceased. The number of corpses that had been butchered at the funeral home increased first by the dozens and quickly by the hundreds. The police learned that in every case but one, permission hadn't been granted — hadn't, in fact, even been sought — for the harvesting of the dead's skin, bones and tendons. The case seemed to grow more outrageous by the day. Detectives soon discovered that among those eviscerated was 95-year-old Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke, who'd died of lung cancer that had spread to his bones; his daughter, who had sought a cheap, simple cremation at her father's request, would later speak of "lives torn asunder" by "these desecrations." The exhumation of an 82-year-old Queens woman who died of brain cancer revealed that most of the bones below her waist had been cut out and replaced with plastic piping. When word of the investigation finally leaked out, a year after O'Brien first arrived at George & Son, the number of unwitting donors had eclipsed 1,000. The city was, to put it mildly, scandalized. BODY-SNATCHERS! shrieked the New York Daily News, which broke the story. Not to be outdone, GHOUL AND THE GANG! shouted the Post.
The investigation in New York was building steam, but 90 miles away as the crow flies — or in this case, a sparrow, which was flying, flitting, above the streets of Kensington, searching for a tree or some other place to perch — in Philadelphia, no one at Lou Garzone's funeral home was aware of that. The sparrow arced down on Somerset Street, over an alleyway beside Garzone's, where a mound of … something lay on a gurney, covered, oddly, by a large swatch of artificial turf. Later, a cutter would tell the grand jury he distinctly remembered the sparrow perched atop a human body that had been hacked to pieces and covered in fake turf — perhaps Rose Oprea's, or one of the 243 others dismembered there — then left in the alleyway. The sparrow stood on two toothpick legs. Its head bobbed up and down, like a puppet's. With its beak, it inspected the gaps between the artificial green blades of turf. Then it stared straight, fluttered its wings once, and flushed.
FINALLY, IN OCTOBER 2007, the Philadelphia district attorney's office announced its own indictments: of Louis Garzone; his brother Gerald; their partner James McCafferty Jr.; the mastermind behind the entire enterprise, physician Michael Mastromarino; and Lee Cruceta, Mastromarino's right-hand man. At the same time, the D.A. released a highly unusual 104-page report from the grand jury that had spent a year investigating the case. "What we found," the grand jury wrote, "was appalling."
It began with Mastromarino, handsome, cleft-chinned, a married father of two, in his early 40s, from tony Fort Lee, New Jersey. He'd worked in Manhattan and New Jersey as an oral surgeon until 2000, when he was forced to surrender his license following a string of Demerol-induced antics at his office: He'd fallen asleep while suturing a patient; he collapsed coming out of a bathroom with his scrub pants down around his ankles; after he left a patient under general anesthesia on the operating table, a nurse found him on the floor of a bathroom with a needle in his arm. Finally, according to a lawsuit he later settled, he sliced through a nerve in a patient's jaw, leaving part of her face permanently paralyzed.
Down but not out, Mastromarino regrouped in 2002 by opening Biomedical Tissues Services, or BTS, a cadaver body-parts recovery company; he had knowledge of the business through his experience as a surgeon, since he sometimes transplanted human parts into his patients. While it's illegal in the U.S. to profit from organ and tissue donation, Mastromarino would exploit a loophole that allows companies to charge for "handling" and "processing" tissue and bone. Mastromarino met Lee Cruceta, a nurse then in his early 30s who was adept with power tools and enjoyed medicine's similarities to carpentry; he also had experience working for tissue banks. Cruceta was put in charge of field operations, a position that had him overseeing a Dickensian cast of cutters. With very little practical governmental oversight, and with the extraordinary medical need for tissue, Mastromarino operated his body-snatching enterprise with breathtaking ease.
Though it's the major organs — heart, kidneys, liver — that we think of in cases of transplantation, they represent, in fact, the minority of what's harvested. Fifty times more often, bones, skin, tendons and other tissues are transplanted in operating rooms, in more than a million procedures annually. Pieces of bone can be used to repair back and spine injuries; bone can be ground into a putty to fill voids from fractures. Cadaver skin not only replaces that of burn victims; it can repair stomach linings eaten away by acid, patch holes in hearts, shore up faulty bladders as slings.
In 90 percent or more of cases, the harvesting of such materials occurs in the confines of a hospital, as with major organs. But Mastromarino knew of a lesser-tapped, though legal, source: the funeral home. He reached out to ones in lower-income urban areas, penetrating Philadelphia through an employee of the city's medical examiner's office. Over an 18-month period ending in September 2005, the Garzones and McCafferty would hand over to Mastromarino and his cutters those 244 bodies — and perhaps more — entrusted to them for cremation, from which thousands of individual body parts were harvested. (In New York, the bodies taken were destined for both cremation and burial, forcing cutters to operate conservatively if a viewing was to be held; Philadelphia's bodies were taken exclusively from the cremation lot, so cutters were free, according to Cruceta, to go "whole hog.") Of the more than $3.8 million earned by BTS, Mastromarino and Cruceta from their enterprise, $1 million came from Philadelphia corpses. The Garzones and McCafferty were paid $1,000 a body, or approximately $250,000 total.
The funeral directors apparently felt little obligation to their unsuspecting customers, even failing to make sure that the ashes returned to them were actually those of their loved ones. One family held its memorial the day before the relative was actually cremated. Another conducted a service in the family home at the precise time cutters were at work on the body.
What then, exactly, is their crime? How to categorize it? Prosecutors have labeled it fraud. Theft. Fraud and theft committed upon the families who trusted the funeral directors to render the agreed-upon services. But also, implicitly, theft upon the dead, the very pilfering of their parts. Such thinking, though, not only places the dead, strangely, at the center of the victimization; it also ignores the underlying basis of what funeral directors do, which is, after all, to traffic in death.
We have given them that. Until the Civil War — when sons died far from home and needed to be preserved for transport, and when hundreds of thousands of Americans were exposed for the first time to an embalmed body vis-à-vis Abraham Lincoln's epic train journey from Washington to Philadelphia to New York to Illinois — there was no such thing as embalming here, or funeral directors. Americans took care of their dead. They stood by them when they died, washed them, built them wooden coffins, laid them out in front parlors (hence "funeral parlor"), and then buried them themselves, paying more than lip service to the axiom of "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Now we hand off our loved ones' bodies before they've even appreciably cooled to funeral directors charged with transforming corpses into what's called, in funerary parlance, "a memory picture," to drain them of blood, pump them full of dye and formaldehyde, glue their eyes and wire their mouths shut; to jab a metal instrument through their abdomens and pierce their vital organs, vacuuming up their discharge; to paint them with makeup and position them in coffins in mimicry of peaceful sleep. Or, in cases of cremation, to introduce their bodies into ovens heated to 1,600 degrees, and stoke their bones during an hours-long combustion. This is their job.
Yes, the dead may have been victims of a sort, but beyond them, there was what the funeral directors and cutters did to the living, and not just to the families of the dead. For once their work was finished, the cutters packed the flesh and bones into picnic coolers and headed back north with them. BTS then forwarded the bones and tissue to its client processing companies, which cleaned, handled and supposedly sterilized the parts. Next they were repacked and shipped to doctors and hospitals around the world, including Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where on the morning of May 12, 2005, 65-year-old Betty Pfaff lay unconscious in an operating room as her surgeon tore open a plastic package containing AlloDerm — a white freeze-dried substance, derived from cadaver skin, that dissolves into a wound and stimulates rapid tissue regeneration — which he lowered into the opening stretching across the woman's abdomen.
Lying in the recovery room, draped in covers and her mind foggy, Betty Pfaff was informed that her surgery — a somewhat complicated one, due to the fact that her abdomen had been opened so many times before — had been a success. Everything went well. You're going to be fine, she was told. At this moment, these sentences were not only accurate as far as anyone knew, but provided Pfaff with great solace.
Pfaff, a sweet, plump widow who lived alone in a tiny white house across the street from a picturesque cemetery in Jenkintown, had had surgery for abdominal hernias twice before. She'd become susceptible to them as a result of having undergone two cesarean sections within one year. (After her first child, a daughter, died at three months, in 1976, she'd quickly become pregnant with a son, Philip.) Another hernia had cropped up the previous winter; she scheduled the operation for the spring, when the weather would be better. She was unaware before her surgery that she'd be receiving human tissue — she didn't recall her doctor explicitly telling her, and hadn't read the consent forms carefully — and remained unaware after, which isn't unusual, given how routinely it's used.
She was wheeled back to her room. Her wound, about eight inches long, was to remain open so that accumulating fluids could drain, and doctors came frequently over the next several days to check it, and to change the dressing. She was out of bed and sitting in a chair in one day, and walking down the hallway in three. After a week, she was doing well enough to be discharged. Instead of going home, she decided to recuperate at a nursing home, as she was worried about being alone. She intended to stay there for a month, but was so disgusted with the care she received that she left after six days, despite having developed a fever, which fluctuated seemingly without reason. Her doctor prescribed an oral antibiotic, which she supplemented with Tylenol. Overall, she felt unwell, weak.
Surrounded by the comforts of home — her favorite navy blue recliner, her books and magazines, her favorite stuffed bunny with the long floppy ears and a country dress — Betty hoped she'd begin feeling better. She did not. Visiting nurses handled the wound and monitored her fever, which continued. In early June, she began feeling particularly bad, and her temperature spiked to 100.4º. She called a friend, who drove her back to Jefferson, where she was admitted.
While examining Pfaff, her doctor discovered a tiny piece of gauze deep inside her wound. He performed a debridement — a deep cleaning of the wound. Afterward, he told her, once again, that all had gone well. He ordered a culture of the wound, and started her on a three-day course of high-potency amoxicillin. She remained in the hospital for four more days.
Her son picked her up and returned her to her home, and the visiting nurses began coming again. She felt about the same, and her temperature persisted; she remained on antibiotics, and was instructed to return to the ER if her fever broke 100.5º. On July 1st, her visiting nurse came and took her temperature: It was 104º. "We have to get you to the hospital," the nurse said, and left a message for Pfaff's son. Betty called her sister Nancy, who came over to sit with her and wait for Philip.
Betty's condition worsened. She began staring; she had trouble focusing. She rocked oddly in her chair. Nancy feared her sister was suffering a stroke. Philip arrived, and Nancy went outside to confer with him. They dialed 911.
By the time they reached Abington Hospital, Betty's fever was burning at 106º. Her heart rate had increased rapidly, along with her respiration. Nurses threaded a catheter into her hand and pumped fluids into her. A doctor ordered several intravenous medications. She appeared to be getting better. At 9 p.m. she told Nancy and Philip to go home, that she would be fine. Then, at midnight, Philip received a call to return to the hospital. His mother had been moved to intensive care. Doctors told him there was just a 20 percent chance she would survive.
Betty Pfaff was septic, meaning her entire body was ravaged by infection. When Philip saw her, a ventilator was breathing for her. She was horrifically swollen. She was hooked to a dialysis machine that was removing and purifying her blood. Philip was told to summon his family. They arrived at the hospital and surrounded Betty. A priest administered last rites.
For nine days her family stood vigil, having been assured she would die. Incredibly, on the 10th day, she opened her eyes.
All around the hospital, she became known as "the new Lazarus."
It would be, however, a long, difficult recovery. She couldn't walk, wash, or take care of herself. She spent 26 days at Abington Hospital, then two months in rehabilitation, slowly building back her strength.
Over and over, Betty Pfaff asked her doctors a single question: How could this happen? They replied with the only answer they knew: Infection is always a risk with surgery. But Betty was unsatisfied.
It wasn't until Valentine's Day 2006, almost a year after her surgery, that she opened a letter that arrived from the Food and Drug Administration via her doctor. It advised her that she'd received human tissue, stolen from a cadaver, that was now the subject of an unprecedented and, for her, utterly impossible recall.
As of press time, after vehemently professing their innocence for two years, Michael Mastromarino, Lee Cruceta, several New York City funeral directors and several cutters were either in the process of accepting or already had accepted deals to plead guilty to the charges they faced in both New York City and Philadelphia. They are expected to testify against the remaining defendants, including the Garzone brothers and McCafferty, who have pleaded not guilty in Philadelphia court and are scheduled to stand trial later this year. The defense is expected to argue that these defendants did none of the actual harvesting and therefore cannot be held accountable, though the spate of plea agreements by their co-defendants obviously bodes poorly for them. In addition, Mastromarino, having just been sentenced to 18 to 54 years in prison, will likely cooperate in implicating the tissue companies that bought from him. Those companies — which generate multimillion-dollar profits annually and are publicly traded — have claimed they had no way of knowing the documents Mastromarino prepared were fabricated, and no way of knowing the true source of the materials they received.
Then there are the civil lawsuits. Philadelphia attorney Larry Cohan has been named by the U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, as lead counsel in a class-action lawsuit against all of the defendants in the criminal case as well as the tissue companies, representing so far 900 people nationwide, including Betty Pfaff, who received some of the 20,000 pieces of stolen tissue. In addition, along with his partner Melissa Hague, Cohan is representing 15 families of the unwitting donors in their suits in Philadelphia court, including the Oprea family.
The cases are, however, by no means surefire. In the first place, there seems to be little money to be wrung from many of the defendants, including Mastromarino, who's paid for legal representation in several jurisdictions, and the funeral home operators, whose insurers have maintained that their policies don't cover subscribers' criminal conduct. That leaves the tissue companies that distributed Mastromarino's stolen goods, especially Regeneration Technologies Inc., recently renamed RTI Biologies, the first-stop processing company in Florida through which all of Mastromarino's body parts flowed.
Cohan and Hague argue that it's impossible RTI didn't know what Mastromarino was up to. Parroting the prosecutors' argument, they say the paperwork — including the death certificates — forwarded to the company were almost transparently fraudulent. The numbers themselves coming out of Mastromarino's company, they say, should have raised red flags. "Normally, one particular harvesting company might get just a minimal number of donors, say one a month or maybe two or three," says Hague. "Mastromarino was getting 10 or 30 a month. He was RTI's primary supplier for human tissue implants, and they never questioned him about it. There's no way they couldn't have known."
Still, RTI — which recently announced record revenues of $94.2 million for 2007 — and the other tissue companies are preparing an aggressive defense, challenging the idea that those who've developed serious diseases contracted them from the transplanted materials, given the claimed sophistication of the companies' sterilization processes.
Bob Rigney, CEO of the American Association of Tissue Banks, puts great stock in RTI's "BioCleanse" low-temperature chemical sterilization process; RTI claims to have distributed more than 500,000 BioCleansed implants "with zero incidence of infection." Rigney says furthermore that the risk of spreading infection or disease from transplanted tissue, even in cases when the tissue has not been treated as such, is exceedingly low. "Quite frankly, the safety record in terms of tissue is remarkable," he says. "In the last 20 years, we've seen only one confirmed death."
Rigney attributes that level of success in large part to the extraordinary safeguards his organization has helped build into the tissue-retrieval system, from the stringent donor criteria that disqualify 90 percent of would-be donors — not only the diseased but in some cases even those with tattoos — to the multi-layered testing of donors' blood, to careful reviews of the deceased's medical records, to elaborate interviews with loved ones to ascertain the donor's lifestyle — the same safeguards, in short, that Mastromarino and his henchmen systematically ignored. And the one death that Rigney mentions is noteworthy. In 2001, a 23-year-old Minnesota man died following knee surgery to repair a torn ACL. An investigation later determined that the cadaver cartilage implanted during his surgery hadn't been recovered until 19 hours after the donor's death, during which time a deadly fungus grew in it, forming spores that withstood the sterilization process and blossomed inside the recipient into an overwhelming infection. The investigation specifically cited the 15-hour limit for safe retrieval, the same 15-hour limit authorities believe was exceeded in Philadelphia in almost every case.
Cohan will also have the testimony of these witnesses to offer to a jury: A 41-year-old Ohio man who tested positive for HIV and hepatitis C after receiving BTS bone implants in surgery for degenerative disk disease. A 30-year-old Colorado woman who had to undergo a repeat ACL replacement after her first BTS tendon failed. A 74-year-old widow from Ohio who received BTS bone for a lower-back surgery and developed syphilis.
Though he has the model ship ready, Dan Oprea hasn't yet fulfilled his promise to his mother to deliver her ashes to the sea in a Viking funeral. "I intend to do this," he says. "I've got the ship, I've got everything. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have this feeling like … I'm throwing her in the trash. And I understand that's not what's happening, and I intend to do this eventually, but I'm just not ready yet."
Oprea says he's struggled to get past the news of what happened to his mother's body. His wife says she often catches him staring into space, and knows where his mind is. In many ways, Dan says, he wishes he never found out about it. "It's just like something out of a horror movie," he says. "You just can't understand how anybody could do this."
And this poses the question, again, of what the greatest crime here may be. Irish journalist Mary Kenny, whose sister Ursula was among the unwitting donors, wrote that she doesn't resent that her sister's body was dissected, only that it was done without express permission. "What is a body after death anyway? Nothing but waxwork effigy," she noted. "Her spirit remains strongly with me, hovering over so many moments in my life, and that is dearer to me than the fate of a mere anatomy."
Certainly the accused in this case may be guilty of much, of fraud, of larceny, of misleading loved ones, of taking advantage of their vulnerabilities, of falsifying records, of harvesting remains in grotesque, unsanitary settings, and of introducing potentially infectious parts into otherwise healthy bodies. Isn't that last thing, without doubt, their most egregious offense? Yet it hasn't resulted in a single criminal charge. Instead, it's the charge of "abuser of corpses" — defined by the Commonwealth as "a person who treats a corpse in a way that he knows would outrage ordinary family sensibilities" — that has given the government the most traction. That may seem, in the scheme of things, almost quaint. Except that for Dan Oprea and millions of others, it goes to the very heart of how we still look at an uncertain line, between life and death.
Autism's First Child
As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.
By John Donvan and Caren Zucker
Image credit: Miller Mobley/Redux
In 1951, a Hungarian-born psychologist, mind reader, and hypnotist named Franz Polgar was booked for a single night's performance in a town called Forest, Mississippi, at the time a community of some 3,000 people and no hotel accommodations. Perhaps because of his social position—he went by Dr. Polgar, had appeared in Life magazine, and claimed (falsely) to have been Sigmund Freud's "medical hypnotist"—Polgar was lodged at the home of one of Forest's wealthiest and best-educated couples, who treated the esteemed mentalist as their personal guest.
Polgar's all-knowing, all-seeing act had been mesmerizing audiences in American towns large and small for several years. But that night it was his turn to be dazzled, when he met the couple's older son, Donald, who was then 18. Oddly distant, uninterested in conversation, and awkward in his movements, Donald nevertheless possessed a few advanced faculties of his own, including a flawless ability to name musical notes as they were played on a piano and a genius for multiplying numbers in his head. Polgar tossed out "87 times 23," and Donald, with his eyes closed and not a hint of hesitation, correctly answered "2,001."
Indeed, Donald was something of a local legend. Even people in neighboring towns had heard of the Forest teenager who'd calculated the number of bricks in the facade of the high school—the very building in which Polgar would be performing—merely by glancing at it.
According to family lore, Polgar put on his show and then, after taking his final bows, approached his hosts with a proposal: that they let him bring Donald with him on the road, as part of his act.
Donald's parents were taken aback. "My mother," recalls Donald's brother, Oliver, "was not at all interested." For one, things were finally going well for Donald, after a difficult start in life. "She explained to [Polgar] that he was in school, he had to keep going to classes," Oliver says. He couldn't simply drop everything for a run at show business, especially not when he had college in his sights.
But there was also, whether they spoke this aloud to their guest or not, the sheer indignity of what Polgar was proposing. Donald's being odd, his parents could not undo; his being made an oddity of, they could, and would, prevent. The offer was politely but firmly declined.
What the all-knowing mentalist didn't know, however, was that Donald, the boy who missed the chance to share his limelight, already owned a place in history. His unusual gifts and deficits had been noted outside Mississippi, and an account of them had been published—one that was destined to be translated and reprinted all over the world, making his name far better-known, in time, than Polgar's.
His first name, anyway.
Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as "Case 1 … Donald T," he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike "anything reported so far," the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.
That was 67 years ago. Today, physicians, parents, and politicians regularly speak of an "epidemic" of autism. The rate of ASDs, which come in a range of forms and widely varying degrees of severity—hence spectrum—has been accelerating dramatically since the early 1990s, and some form of ASD is now estimated to affect one in every 110 American children. And nobody knows why.
There have always been theories about the cause of autism—many theories. In the earliest days, it was an article of faith among psychiatrists that autism was brought on by bad mothers, whose chilly behavior toward their children led the youngsters to withdraw into a safe but private world. In time, autism was recognized to have a biological basis. But this understanding, rather than producing clarity, instead unleashed a contentious debate about the exact mechanisms at work. Differing factions argue that the gluten in food causes autism; that the mercury used as a preservative in some vaccines can trigger autistic symptoms; and that the particular measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is to blame. Other schools of thought have portrayed autism as essentially an autoimmune response, or the result of a nutritional deficiency. The mainstream consensus today—that autism is a neurological condition probably resulting from one or more genetic abnormalities in combination with an environmental trigger—offers little more in the way of explanation: the number of genes and triggers that could be involved is so large that a definitive cause, much less a cure, is unlikely to be determined anytime soon. Even the notion that autism cases are on the rise is disputed to a degree, with some believing that the escalating diagnoses largely result from a greater awareness of what autism looks like.
There is no longer much dispute, however, about the broad outlines of what constitutes a case of autism. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the so-called bible of psychiatry—draws a clear map of symptoms. And to a remarkable degree, these symptoms still align with those of one "Donald T," who was first examined at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, in the 1930s, the same boy who would later amaze a mentalist and become renowned for counting bricks.
In subsequent years, the scientific literature updated Donald T's story a few times, a journal entry here or there, but about four decades ago, that narrative petered out. The later chapters in his life remained unwritten, leaving us with no detailed answer to the question Whatever happened to Donald?
There is an answer. Some of it we turned up in documents long overlooked in the archives of Johns Hopkins. But most of it we found by tracking down and spending time with Donald himself. His full name is Donald Gray Triplett. He's 77 years old. And he's still in Forest, Mississippi. Playing golf.
The question that haunts every parent of a child with autism is What will happen when I die? This reflects a chronological inevitability: children with autism will grow up to become adults with autism, in most cases ultimately outliving the parents who provided their primary support.
Then what?
It's a question that has yet to grab society's attention, as the discussion of autism to date has skewed, understandably, toward its impact on childhood. But the stark fact is that an epidemic among children today means an epidemic among adults tomorrow. The statistics are dramatic: within a decade or so, more than 500,000 children diagnosed with autism will enter adulthood. Some of them will have the less severe variants—Asperger's syndrome or HFA, which stands for "high-functioning autism"—and may be able to live more independent and fulfilling lives. But even that subgroup will require some support, and the needs of those with lower-functioning varieties of autism will be profound and constant.
How we respond to those needs will be shaped in great measure by how we choose to view adults with autism. We can dissociate from them, regarding them as tragically broken persons, and hope we are humane enough to shoulder the burden of meeting their basic needs. This is the view that sees the disabled in general as wards of the community, morally and perhaps legally, and that, in the relatively recent past, often "solved" the "problem" of these disabled adults by warehousing them for life—literally in wards.
Alternatively, we can dispense with the layers of sorrow, and interpret autism as but one more wrinkle in the fabric of humanity. Practically speaking, this does not mean pretending that adults with autism do not need help. But it does mean replacing pity toward them with ambition for them. The key to this view is a recognition that "they" are part of "us," so that those who don't have autism are actively rooting for those who do.
Donald Triplett, the first person cast in the story of autism, has spent time in the worlds shaped by each of these views.
Donald drives his car with a light, percussive rhythm. After pressing on the gas pedal for a second, he lets up briefly, and then presses back down again. Down. Release. Down. Release. The tempo doesn't vary. It's late afternoon, and Donald is guiding his coffee-colored 2000 Cadillac, in hardly perceptible surges and glides, south along Mississippi's Route 80. Though his forward posture and two-fisted grip on the wheel are those of an old man, his face beams like a boy's. He wears the expression, at once relaxed and resolute, of a man who is doing precisely what he wants to be doing.
The day's agenda thus far has included morning coffee with friends, a long walk for exercise, a Bonanza rerun on TV, and now, at 4:30, this short drive down Route 80 to get in some golf. "I noticed," he mentions, "you have a Lafayette County sticker on your car." He's broken a long silence with that comment, a reference to the registration decal on the rental we parked in his driveway. His words hang there for a moment, and then he adds: "That means it comes from Lafayette County." That's all. Nodding to himself, Donald goes silent again, his focus returning to the road ahead, or tuned to some inner monologue. Given his tendency to close his eyes for long moments when he speaks, this is probably the safest choice.
He parks just short of the front steps of the Forest Country Club, an establishment without pretensions. The one-story red-brick clubhouse fronts onto a well-tended, mostly flat course carved out of the woods. Membership is $100 per family per month, and a round of 18 holes costs $20 on a weekday. On any given day, the roster of players on the fairways includes lawyers and mechanics, bankers and truckers, salesmen and farmers—and Donald. Actually, Donald is there every day, weather permitting. And almost every day, he golfs alone.
Not everyone who plays here realizes that "DT"—as he's known around the club—has autism. But his quirks are hard to miss as he makes his way to the first tee, well within sight of members who take the shade in armchairs under the club's columned portico. A small man in khaki shorts and a green knit shirt, with a pink-camouflage bucket hat pulled down tight over his ears, Donald strides to the tee with the distinctive gait that is often a tip-off for autism—his arms out from his sides in the shape of a large capital A, his steps just slightly mechanical, his head and shoulders bobbing left-right-left in the rocking movement of a metronome.
The fact is that Donald's not a bad golfer: tee shots mostly on the fairway, passable short game, can nail a six-foot putt. His swing, however, is an unfolding pantomime, a ritual of gestures he seems compelled to repeat with almost every shot—especially when he really wants the ball to travel.
He licks the fingers of his right hand, and then his left. Squaring himself to the ball, he raises his club skyward, until it's straight up over his head, as if he were hoisting a banner. Sometimes he holds his arms up there for a long moment. Then he brings the club head back to earth, stopping not far from the ball, before taking it back up. He goes through a series of these backswings, picking up speed with each iteration until, stiff-legged, he inches forward to get his head over the ball. With one final stroke, he commits to contact. Crack! It's gone, and Donald, bouncing up and down at the knees, peers down the fairway to see the result. As a swing, it's the opposite of fluid. But it's Donald's own. And he never whiffs it.
Some days, Donald has no choice but to partner with other golfers, when the country club, honoring golf's traditions as a social game, reserves the entire course for a membership "scramble." In a scramble, golfers are randomly assigned to teams, which compete for lowest group score by picking the ball in the best position and having everyone on the team play from that spot. During one recent scramble, Donald made the rounds with Lori and Elk and Kenneth and Mary, all of whom seemed to be at least three or four decades younger than he was. But Donald held his own competitively, with his shots often enough the ones used. He also kicked in a passable amount of friendly banter, which was returned in the same spirit, though Donald's patter tended to get repetitive: "Way to hit that ball, Kenneth!" "Way to hit that ball, Lori!" "Way to hit that ball, Elk!" At times he would entertain variations, marrying his partners' names with words from his own private vocabulary: "Hey, Elkins the Elk!" "Hey, Mary Cherry!" "Okay, thank you, Kenneth the Senneth!"
Most of the time, however, Donald remained silent. This is in keeping with the decorum of the game, of course. But Donald appears comfortable with silence, and in a larger sense, content with the life he's leading, which resembles—with the car and the coffee and the golf and the TV—a retirement community's brochure version of how to live out the golden years. Donald has freedom, independence, and good health. All in all, life has turned out well for autism's first child.
Donald was institutionalized when he was only 3 years old. Records in the archives at Johns Hopkins quote the family doctor in Mississippi suggesting that the Tripletts had "overstimulated the child." Donald's refusal as a toddler to feed himself, combined with other problem behaviors his parents could not handle, prompted the doctor's recommendation for "a change of environment." In August 1937, Donald entered a state-run facility 50 miles from his home, in a town then actually called Sanatorium, Mississippi.
The large building where he was housed served what today seems an odd function: preemptive isolation for children thought to be at risk of catching tuberculosis. The place wasn't designed or operated with a child like Donald in mind, and according to a medical evaluator, his response upon arrival was dramatic: he "faded away physically."
At the time, institutionalization was the default option for severe mental illness, which even his mother believed was at the root of Donald's behavior: she described him in one despairing letter as her "hopelessly insane child." Being in an institution, however, didn't help. "It seems," his Johns Hopkins evaluator later wrote, "he had there his worst phase." With parental visits limited to twice a month, his predisposition to avoid contact with people broadened to everything else—toys, food, music, movement—to the point where daily he "sat motionless, paying no attention to anything."
He had not been diagnosed correctly, of course, because the correct diagnosis did not yet exist. Very likely he was not alone in that sense, and there were other children with autism, in other wards in other states, similarly misdiagnosed—perhaps as "feeble-minded," in the medical parlance of the day, or more likely, because of the strong but isolated intelligence skills many could demonstrate, as having schizophrenia.
Donald's parents came for him in August of 1938. By then, at the end of a year of institutionalization, Donald was eating again, and his health had returned. Though he now "played among the other children," his observers noted, he did so "without taking part in their occupations." The facility's director nonetheless told Donald's parents that the boy was "getting along nicely," and tried to talk them out of removing their son. He actually requested that they "let him alone."
But they held their ground, and took Donald home with them. Later, when they asked the director to provide them with a written assessment of Donald's time there, he could scarcely be bothered. His remarks on Donald's full year under his care covered less than half a page. The boy's problem, he concluded, was probably "some glandular disease."
Donald, about to turn 5 years old, was back where he had started.
Dr. Peter Gerhardt waves a credit card in his right hand, animated—as he often is—about the point he's trying to make. This time, it's a trick that he guarantees makes it impossible to swipe the card the wrong way. "You can slide it this way, or like this, or stick it in like this"—he jabs straight into the air in front of him, as if into a bank machine—"and if you keep your thumb in this position on the card, you will always swipe it the correct way."
Closer examination clarifies: the card he is holding is a Visa, and his right thumb completely covers the blue-on-white logo in the lower right corner, the sweet spot that makes the trick work. Keep your thumb there, Gerhardt pronounces, and the magnetic stripe will always line up properly, regardless of the type of card reader.
Gerhardt's demonstration isn't intended merely for news-you-can-use convenience. Rather, he's explaining how using a bank card fits into the bigger picture that has defined his career since he embarked on his doctorate in educational psychology at Rutgers in the early 1980s: the struggle people with autism face to be accepted into a world occupied by "the rest of us."
The truth is that we often deny to adults with autism the kind of empathy and support we make readily available to children with the condition—or, for that matter, to people with white canes at crosswalks. We underestimate their capabilities, reveal our discomfort in their company, and display impatience when they inconvenience us. The people standing in the back of a long supermarket checkout line aren't always going to say or do the nice thing when some odd-looking man in front is holding the whole place up because he can't figure out the credit-card swipe. It's in that moment, Gerhardt says, that the thumb-on-the-logo trick is a matter of "social survival." If the man with autism can navigate this situation successfully—and, just as important, be seen doing so—Gerhardt argues that our collective acceptance of people with autism in "our" spaces will tick up a notch. If the man fails, it will go the other way.
Gerhardt, who is a former president of the Virginia-based Organization for Autism Research and is now developing a program focused on adolescence to adulthood at the respected McCarton School in New York, is considered among the top experts in the country working with adults who have autism. But he jokes that this is chiefly because he's never faced much competition. "I have an entire career," he says, "based on people not wanting my job." Child development is the hot area in autism research; working with adults, Gerhardt says, "is not a career move." Adults present greater challenges: they are big enough to do real violence in the event of a tantrum; they are fully capable of sexual desires, and all that those imply; and they're bored by many of the activities that can distract and entertain children with autism. "People want to treat these adults like little kids in big bodies," Gerhardt says. "They can't. They're adults." As such, he argues, they're equipped, as much as any of us, with the recognizable adult aspiration of wanting to "experience life."
"It's having friends," Gerhardt explains. "It's having interesting work. It's having something you want. It's all the things the rest of us value, once given an opportunity."
Gerhardt wants priority given to teaching the kinds of skills adults with autism need in order to survive independently: keeping track of money, asking for directions and then following them, wearing clean clothes, navigating public transport, recognizing a dangerous person, and—of extreme difficulty for most—looking a job interviewer in the eye. Gerhardt disputes the doubts he hears even within his profession about encouraging adults with autism to aspire to independence. "What's the worst thing that can happen?" he asks. "You know—he's at the supermarket and he drops some eggs, or somebody thinks he's a little weird. I would rather he be there alone, and only getting nine out of 10 items he came shopping for, than need me there with him to get all 10. That's a much better way to live."
This leads to the question of where they will live. As it is, 85 percent of adults with autism still live with parents, siblings, or other relatives. But what happens when that is no longer an option? Large-scale warehousing is gone—and good riddance, most say. An obvious alternative is residential arrangements offering multiple spaces to people with autism, who can share support services under one roof in a setting that really is a home. At present, however, given both start-up costs and resistance from neighbors, the number of spaces in such homes is limited, and landing a spot can be extremely difficult: nationally, more than 88,000 adults are already on waiting lists.
All of which leads to an unsettling answer for those parents asking what happens, after they die, to their children with autism. We don't really know.
BROTHERS: A recent family snapshot of Donald with Oliver (right)
Most likely, Donald's name would never have entered the medical literature had his parents not had both the ambition to seek out the best help for him, and the resources to pay for it. Mary Triplett had been born into the McCravey family, financiers who had founded and still controlled the Bank of Forest. Uncommonly for a woman at that time, particularly in that milieu, she had a college degree. After a doomed romance with a local cotton farmer's son, whom her family forbade her to marry—he later went on to renown as six-term segregationist U.S. Senator James "Big Jim" Eastland—she instead married the former mayor's son, an attorney named Oliver Triplett Jr. With a degree from Yale Law School and a private practice located directly opposite the county courthouse, Oliver would later hold the position of Forest town attorney and would be admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was an intense man who had suffered two nervous breakdowns, and who could get so lost in his thoughts that he'd return from walks in town with no recollection of having seen anyone or anything along the way. But as a lawyer, he was considered brilliant, and when he proposed to Mary, her family apparently raised no objections.
Their first son, Donald, was born in September 1933. A brother came along nearly five years later, while Donald was in Sanatorium. Also named Oliver, the baby stayed behind with his grandparents in Forest when, in October 1938, the rest of the family boarded a Pullman car in Meridian, Mississippi, headed for Baltimore. Donald's parents had secured him a consultation with the nation's top child psychiatrist at the time, a Johns Hopkins professor named Dr. Leo Kanner.
Kanner (pronounced "Connor") had written the book, literally, on child psychiatry. Aptly titled Child Psychiatry, this definitive 1935 work immediately became the standard medical-school text, and was reprinted through 1972. No doubt Kanner's stature was enhanced by his pedigree—he was an Austrian Jew with a medical degree from the University of Berlin—while his nearly impenetrable accent perfectly fit the image Americans had in mind when they used the word psychiatrist.
Kanner would always seem slightly perplexed by the intensity of the letter he had received from Donald's father in advance of their meeting. Before departing Mississippi, Oliver had retreated to his law office and dictated a detailed medical and psychological history covering the first five years of his elder son's life. Typed up by his secretary and sent ahead to Kanner, it came to 33 pages. Many times over the years, Kanner would refer to the letter's "obsessive detail."
Excerpts from Oliver's letter—the outpourings of a layman, but also a parent—now hold a unique place in the canon of autism studies. Cited for decades and translated into several languages, Oliver's observations were the first detailed listing of symptoms that are now instantly recognizable to anyone who knows autism. It is not too much to say that the agreed-upon diagnosis of autism—the one being applied today to define an epidemic—was modeled, at least in part, on Donald's symptoms as described by his father.
Their little boy, Oliver wrote, had almost never cried to be with his mother. He appeared to have withdrawn "into his shell," to "live within himself," to be "perfectly oblivious to everything about him." Entirely uninterested in human beings—including his parents, for whom he displayed "no apparent affection"—he nevertheless had several obsessions, including "a mania for spinning blocks and pans and other round objects." He was fascinated with numbers, musical notes, pictures of U.S. presidents, and the letters of the alphabet, which he enjoyed reciting in reverse order.
Physically awkward, he also had intense dislikes: milk, swings, tricycles—"almost a horror of them"—and any change in routine or interruption of his internal thought processes: "When interfered with he has temper tantrums, during which he is destructive." Generally nonresponsive when his name was called—he seemed not to have heard—he instead had "to be picked up and carried or led wherever he ought to go." When asked a question, if he answered at all, he generally kept his response to one word, and then only if it derived from something he had memorized. Certain words and phrases captivated him, and he would loop them aloud endlessly: trumpet vine, business, chrysanthemum.
At the same time, Donald exhibited some prodigious, if isolated, mental skills. By the age of 2, he could recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …") and knew 25 questions and answers from the Presbyterian catechism by heart. And the random humming he engaged in while spinning blocks turned out not to be quite so random after all. Rather, he always picked three notes that, if played simultaneously on a keyboard, would blend into a perfect chord. Alone in thought, Donald gave the impression of a quite intelligent little boy, working through some sort of problem. "He appears to be always thinking and thinking," his father wrote. He was, in a heartrendingly comprehensive phrase, "happiest when left alone."
When Kanner finally met Donald, he confirmed all this, and more. Donald entered the room, Kanner later recalled, and headed straight for the blocks and toys, "without paying the least attention to the persons present." Kanner had a trick up his sleeve that today would draw disapproval: he pricked Donald with a pin. The result was revealing. Donald didn't like it—it hurt—but he didn't like Kanner any less for doing it. To Kanner, it seemed that he could not attach the pain to the person who'd inflicted it. Throughout the visit, in fact, Donald remained completely indifferent to Kanner, as uninterested in him as in "the desk, the bookshelf, or the filing cabinet."
The surviving medical records of that initial visit contain a notation preceded by a question mark: schizophrenia. It was one of the few diagnoses that came even close to making sense, because it was clear that Donald was essentially an intelligent child, as a person exhibiting schizophrenia might easily be. But nothing in his behavior suggested that Donald experienced the hallucinations typical of schizophrenia. He wasn't seeing things that weren't there, even if he was ignoring the people who were.
Kanner kept Donald under observation for two weeks, and then the Tripletts returned to Mississippi—without answers. Kanner simply had no idea how to diagnose the child. He would later write to Mary Triplett, who had begun sending frequent updates on Donald: "Nobody realizes more than I do myself that at no time have you or your husband been given a clear-cut and unequivocal … diagnostic term." It was dawning on him, he wrote, that he was seeing "for the first time a condition which has not hitherto been described by psychiatric or any other literature."
He wrote those lines to Mary in a letter dated September 1942, almost four years after he'd first seen Donald. The family had made three follow-up visits to Baltimore, all equally inconclusive. Perhaps hoping to allay her frustration, Kanner added that he was beginning to see a picture emerge. "I have now accumulated," he wrote, "a series of eight other cases which are very much like Don's." He hadn't gone public with this, he noted, because he needed "time for longer observation."
He had, however, been working on a name for this new condition. Pulling together the distinctive symptoms exhibited by Donald and the eight other children—their lack of interest in people, their fascination with objects, their need for sameness, their keenness to be left alone—he wrote Mary: "If there is any name to be applied to the condition of Don and those other children, I have found it best to speak of it as 'autistic disturbance of affective contact.'"
Kanner did not coin the term autistic. It was already in use in psychiatry, not as the name of a syndrome but as an observational term describing the way some patients with schizophrenia withdrew from contact with those around them. Like the word feverish, it described a symptom, not an illness. But now Kanner was using it to pinpoint and label a complex set of behaviors that together constituted a single, never-before-recognized diagnosis: autism. (As it happens, another Austrian, Hans Asperger, was working at the same time in Vienna with children who shared some similar characteristics, and independently applied the identical word—autistic to the behaviors he was seeing; his paper on the subject would come out a year after Kanner's, but remained largely unknown until it was translated into English in the early 1990s.)
Kanner published his findings in 1943, in a journal called The Nervous Child. Since writing to Mary the previous year, he had added two more cases to this total: 11 children, 11 histories. But he started the story with Donald.
For all the progress that Donald has made in the decades since—the driving, the golfing—conversation is an art that continues to elude him. He initiates on occasion, but his purpose is generally to elicit a piece of information he needs ("What time is lunch?") or to make a passing observation (his comment about the sticker on our car). A regular chat, the casual back-and-forth of kicking around an idea, is something he has never experienced.
When asked questions—even questions that invite some elaboration—he responds in a terse, one-way manner, like a man working his way through a questionnaire.
Topic: Donald's sense of achievement at being able to multiply in his head
"Donald, how does it make you feel that it just comes out of your head?"
"It just comes out."
"Does it make you feel good?"
"Oh yes, oh yes."
"Can you describe it?"
"No, I can't describe it."
Topic: Donald's memory of meeting the mentalist Franz Polgar
"Donald, do you remember Franz Polgar?"
"Yes, I do remember Franz Polgar."
[Silence.]
"When did he come?"
"Actually he came twice. He came in 1950 and 1951."
[Another long lapse.]
"Who was he?"
"He was a hypnotist."
"Can you tell me what he was like? Was he an old man?"
"He was probably 55 years old. And he'd be 110 if he were living."
As is clear from these exchanges, Donald's thinking likes to go to numbers—even when, as in this case, his arithmetic appears faulty—to dates and calculations and constants that order the world concretely and do not require interpretation. He even has a habit of assigning numbers to people he encounters, a sort of internal indexing system. An old acquaintance named Buddy Lovett, who resides one town over, in Morton, Mississippi, told us that Donald had assigned him the number 333 sometime in the late 1950s. Though he had not seen Donald for several years, he urged, with a hint of mischief, "Next time you see him, go ahead: ask him what my number is."
ndeed, the next day Donald nailed Lovett's number almost before hearing the end of the question. We ran this test several times, presenting the names of people all over Forest who had told us of being "numbered" over the years. Donald recalled every one, without hang or hiccup, though he can't explain the underlying system. The numbers just come to him, he says, and then stay forever.
Likewise, those who receive a Donald Number seem to remember it for the rest of their lives. An indelible distinction, a recognition they'll never have to share—it may feel akin to an honor.
That is almost certainly not what Donald intends. Honor is one of those concepts—an abstraction arbitrating between the ideal and the actual—unlikely to come easily to someone like Donald, who is far more comfortable in a world ordered by established facts, by what literally is. This is why it is generally believed that people with autism have difficulty lying, or appreciating a joke. Although Donald obviously enjoys pondering lists of people, places, and things, he does not engage easily with implication, mood, or emotion.
Topic: The death of his mother, Mary Triplett, who took care of Donald for 52 years
"Donald, when did your mother die?"
"It was 1985. May 1985."
"Do you remember where you were?"
"I was at the bank. Her doctor had said it was just a matter of time … and I got the word saying that she had passed away with congestive heart failure."
"Do you remember how you felt?"
"It was rather expected. I wasn't really downhearted or weeping or anything like that."
"Were you not downhearted because … ?"
"I just don't react. Different people react differently to situations like that."
Asked whether he missed his mother, he replied—questionnaire again—"Yes, I miss her." He said he also misses his father, whose death in a 1980 car accident he described in a similarly matter-of-fact manner. He recalls that his dad's accident was a shock and, again, that he didn't cry.
Peter Gerhardt tells the story of his friend Tony, who was 55 years old when he got a crash course in the condolence hug. Tony, diagnosed with autism as an adult, had lived all his life under the same roof as his mother. Then she died.
The funeral marked the first time in his life that Tony had been placed in the category of "the bereaved," and, as he mingled among the other funeral-goers, he learned that people in his position must be prepared to accept some intense and lingering hugs. He handled it fine, observing how his brother was responding to the same sorts of approaches, and comprehending that the people doing this were trying to help him not feel sad. Then he went home, hugged his neighbor, and nearly got arrested.
It was the day after the funeral, and the elderly woman who lived next door—not a close family friend, but someone kindly observing the custom of bringing meals when there's been a death—came to his door with food she'd prepared. Tony thanked her, and she offered condolences.
According to Peter Gerhardt, what happened next is a textbook example of the kind of misunderstanding that bedevils people with autism. "Tony thought, Well, she offered condolences. I'm supposed to hug her. So he went to hug her." Gerhardt notes that the woman undoubtedly sent off strong social signals that she did not want to be embraced. But Tony failed to pick up on them: "He hugged her, probably somewhat awkwardly—a little too long, a little too hard, a little too low—because she went home and called the police [reporting] a sexual assault by the man next door."
To Gerhardt, this serves as a parable for interactions between people who have autism and those who don't: neither party did anything wrong, but neither knew enough to get it right. Tony, a man bright enough to have earned a college degree, simply lacked the instinctive experience—the teachable experience, Gerhardt contends—to tell whether or not a person wants a hug. He was sufficiently self-aware to understand that he was missing vital cues, but he had no idea what they were. He later explained to Gerhardt: "The rules keep changing on me. Every time I think I learn a new rule, you change it on me."
The answer to this problem, Gerhardt argues, is the right kind of education for the many Tonys out there. At present, he contends, schooling for children with high-functioning levels of autism overemphasizes traditional academic achievement—trying to learn French or the state capitals—at the expense of what someone like Tony really needs, a set of social skills that keep him from making mistakes such as hugging his neighbor the wrong way. These skills—like knowing how to swipe a Visa card—are not generally taught to kids with autism. And once they become adults, the teaching, in all too many cases, stops completely. In general, state-funded education ends the day a person with autism turns 21. Beyond that, there are no legal mandates, and there is very little funding. "It's like giving someone a wheelchair on a one-month rental," Gerhardt says, "and at the end of the month, they have to give it back, and walk."
But there was another side to the equation in the hug incident: the neighbor's lack of education on the character of autism. Had she been more aware of Tony's condition, and what it might occasionally entail, she might not have felt so threatened. At the very least, had she understood the situation, she could have simply told Tony that she'd like him to let go, rather than hoping he'd read social cues that were invisible to him.
As it was, the whole situation was quickly defused: Tony's brother arrived and offered both the neighbor and the police an explanation of Tony's disability, and she declined to press charges. But, as Gerhardt notes, a little more information on both sides might have prevented this misunderstanding in the first place.
Donald lives alone now, in the house where his parents raised him. Enshrined in honeysuckle and shaded by several old oaks, a few minutes' walk from Forest's faded business district, the house needs some paint and repairs. Several of its rooms—including the dining and living rooms, where his parents welcomed visitors—are dark and musty with disuse. Donald rarely enters that part of the house. The kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom are home enough for him.
Except for once a month, that is, when he walks out the front door and leaves town.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Donald's life is that he grew up to be an avid traveler. He has been to Germany, Tunisia, Hungary, Dubai, Spain, Portugal, France, Bulgaria, and Colombia—some 36 foreign countries and 28 U.S. states in all, including Egypt three times, Istanbul five times, and Hawaii 17. He's notched one African safari, several cruises, and innumerable PGA tournaments.
It's not wanderlust exactly. Most times, he sets six days as his maximum time away, and maintains no contact afterward with people he meets along the way. He makes it a mission to get his own snapshots of places he's already seen in pictures, and assembles them into albums when he gets home. Then he gets to work planning his next foray, calling the airlines himself for domestic travel, and relying on a travel agent in Jackson when he's going overseas. He is, in all likelihood, the best-traveled man in Forest, Mississippi.
This is the same man whose favorite pastimes, as a boy, were spinning objects, spinning himself, and rolling nonsense words around in his mouth. At the time, he seemed destined for a cramped, barren adulthood—possibly lived out behind the windows of a state institution. Instead, he learned to golf, to drive, and to circumnavigate the globe—skills he first developed at the respective ages of 23, 27, and 36. In adulthood, Donald continued to branch out.
Autism is a highly individualized condition. The amount of room the brain makes available for growth and adaptation differs, often dramatically, from one person to the next. One can't presume that duplicating Donald's circumstances for others with autism would have the effect of duplicating his results.
Still, it's clear that Donald reached his potential thanks, in large part, to the world he occupied—the world of Forest, Mississippi—and how it decided to respond to the odd child in its midst. Peter Gerhardt speaks of the importance of any community's "acceptance" of those who have autism. In Forest, it appears, Donald was showered with acceptance, starting with the mother who defied experts to bring him back home, and continuing on to classmates from his childhood and golfing partners today. Donald's neighbors not only shrug off his oddities, but openly admire his strengths—while taking a protective stance with any outsider whose intentions toward Donald may not have been sufficiently spelled out. On three occasions, while talking with townspeople who know Donald, we were advised, in strikingly similar language each time: "If what you're doing hurts Don, I know where to find you." We took the point: in Forest, Donald is "one of us."
For a time, Donald's care was literally shifted out into the community. Kanner believed that finding him a living situation in a more rural setting would be conducive to his development. So in 1942, the year he turned 9, Donald went to live with the Lewises, a farming couple who lived about 10 miles from town. His parents saw him frequently in this four-year period, and Kanner himself once traveled to Mississippi to observe the arrangement. He later said he was "amazed at the wisdom of the couple who took care of him." The Lewises, who were childless, put Donald to work and made him useful. "They managed to give him [suitable] goals," Kanner wrote in a later report.
They made him use his preoccupation with measurements by having him dig a well and report on its depth … When he kept counting rows of corn over and over, they had him count the rows while plowing them. On my visit, he plowed six long rows; it was remarkable how well he handled the horse and plow and turned the horse around.
Kanner's final observation on this visit speaks volumes about how Donald was perceived: "He attended a country school where his peculiarities were accepted and where he made good scholastic progress."
Likewise, during high school, when Donald was again living back home with his parents, it appears his ways were mostly taken in stride. Janelle Brown, who was a few classes behind Donald (and the recipient of Donald Number 1,487), remembers that although he was teased a few times, he was generally regarded as a student who was enviably intelligent, even "brilliant"—again a legacy of his famous multiplication skills and brick-counting act. She recalls his sitting with a notebook and filling page after page with numbers, and her impression, as well as that of others, that they were seeing evidence of a superior mind at work.
It's clear in all this that with the passage of time, Donald's focus gradually turned outward. He increasingly came to terms with how his world was shaped, at the same time that his world was adjusting to him.
By 1957, he was a fraternity brother—Lambda Chi Alpha—at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, majoring in French and performing in the men's a cappella choir. (The choir director, we were told by one member, never used a pitch pipe, because he took any note he needed directly from Donald.)
The Reverend Brister Ware, of the First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, was a fraternity brother and roommate of Donald's. "He was a dear friend," Ware says, recalling that he tried in various ways to give Donald a hand up socially, though "it was challenging to integrate him." While training to be a water-safety instructor, he set out to teach Donald how to swim, "but the coordination was not so good for him." Undaunted, Ware set another goal: "I thought I would try to open up his personality," by introducing Donald to what was then a cool verbal affectation making the rounds, a way to pronounce the word yes as "yeeeeeeees." Ware's encouragements—to "put a little emotion and feeling and savoir faire into it"—again proved futile.
Ware was clearly rooting for his classmate, as were, he says, the other members of the fraternity. "I knew he was a little bit strange," he admits. "But he's genuine … I feel so lucky to have had him as a friend"—a friend, by the way, who gave Ware a number: 569.
Throughout Donald's youth, it helped, no doubt, that the Tripletts had money—the money to get Leo Kanner's attention in Baltimore, the funds to pay room and board at the Lewises' farm. As the town's bankers, they also had status, which may have discouraged the sort of cruelty that can come to people like Donald. One insightful resident of Forest put it this way: "In a small southern town, if you're odd and poor, you're crazy; if you're odd and rich, all you are is a little eccentric." When Donald was grown, the family bank employed him as a teller, and an irrevocable trust fund established by his family pays his bills to this day. The fund, according to his younger brother, Oliver, was designed with controls that ensure, as he put it, "some gal wouldn't be able to talk Don into marrying her and then abscond." In fact, Donald has never expressed any interest in girlfriends, nor has he had one.
But he has his brother—they dine together every Sunday, along with Oliver's wife—and he has a community that has always accepted him, since long before people in town had heard the word autism. Tranquility, familiarity, stability, and security—if we were talking about healing, these would create an ideal environment. Forest provided all of them for Donald, who didn't need to heal. He needed only to grow, and that he did, spectacularly. In one of her later letters to Leo Kanner, Mary Triplett reported: "He has taken his place in society very well, so much better than we ever hoped for." There were still difficulties, of course—she confessed to the psychiatrist, by this time a friend, "I wish I knew what his inner feelings really are"—but her fears of having borne a "hopelessly insane child" were long past. By the time she died, Donald had grown into manhood, learning more about the world and his place in it than she could ever have imagined in those early years.
But he never could count bricks. This, it turns out, is a myth.
Donald explained how it had come about only after we'd been talking for some time. It had begun with a chance encounter more than 60 years ago outside his father's law office, where some fellow high-school students, aware of his reputation as a math whiz, challenged him to count the bricks in the county courthouse across the street. Maybe they were picking on him a little; maybe they were just seeking entertainment. Regardless, Donald says he glanced quickly at the building and tossed out a large number at random. Apparently the other kids bought it on the spot, because the story would be told and retold over the years, with the setting eventually shifting from courthouse to school building—a captivating local legend never, apparently, fact-checked.
A common presumption is that people with autism are not good at telling fibs or spinning yarns, that they are too literal-minded to invent facts that don't align with established reality. On one level, the story of Donald and the bricks demonstrates again the risks inherent in such pigeonholing. But on another level, it reveals something unexpected about Donald in particular. At the time of that episode, he was a teenager, barely a decade removed from the near-total social disconnect that had defined his early childhood. By adolescence, however, it seems he'd already begun working at connecting with people, and had grasped that his math skills were something that others admired.
We know that, because we finally asked him directly why he'd pulled that number out of the air all those years ago. He closed his eyes to answer, and then surprised us a final time. Speaking as abruptly as ever, and with the usual absence of detail, he said simply, and perhaps obviously, "I just wanted for those boys to think well of me."
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/autism-8217-s-first-child/8227/