Longreads

Peter Heller heads to Mexico's Pacific Coast for some surfing:

"The same phenomenon of scrappy local kids hitting the waves any way they could was occurring up and down Mexico's Pacific coast. Unlike California surfing, born in the early 1900s, the sport in Mexico didn't have a direct pollination from Hawaii, with its centuries-old surf culture. There was no Duke Kahanamoku bringing showy exhibitions and aloha spirit; there were only wayward gringos. American legends Bud Browne and Greg Noll took some trips to Acapulco and Mazatlán in the late fifties, but, according to Nathan Myers, a historical-minded editor at Surfing Magazine, Californians didn't start poking down the coast of mainland Mexico in significant numbers until the 1960s, after the Gidget movies and the Beach Boys craze had ignited the American surfing boom that suddenly crowded California's beaches. The majority of the first Mexican surfers were the sons of poor fishermen and hotel workers. I asked Arturo Astudillo, now 52, one of the early Mexican pioneers around Acapulco, how he and his friends got their first boards. "We stole them," he said. He hung his head. "I am sorry. It was the only way."

Peter Stark on the ups and downs of his family's move to Brazil for one year:

"That moment became emblematic of our year in Brazil: difficult yet welcoming. Unfamiliar yet warm. Emotionally exhausting yet richly rewarding. We found a cramped three-room ridgetop house, its front door opening onto a small plaza and, out the back window, a world-class view high over the river. Each of us met the experience in our own way—some more easily than others. Skyler’s year started downhill, with that ambulance ride, and kept going south, with his first day in Brazilian seventh grade as an acutely self-conscious, blond-haired, blue-eyed 12-year-old sporting a Frankenstein set of stitches under a baseball cap. At first, without any Portuguese, he had no idea if the other kids were laughing at him or befriending him. Most likely, in Brazil, it was some of both. He came to dread sitting four hours each day in the noisy, tiled classroom, although his Catholic school, Colégio Imaculada Conceição, was only 100 yards from our door."

In India’s Kaziranga National Park, a controversial new policy allows rangers to shoot poachers on sight:

"The guards receive a tiny stipend, a camp to live in, a uniform, a gun, and a few bullets. That’s it. They have to provide their own food and communication device."

"Shooting poachers? A no-brainer. Accord­ing to Unesco, nine to twelve poachers are shot in Kaziranga each year, and 50 were killed in the nineties alone. Has it worked? Since the peak in 1992, when 48 rhinos were poached, the past decade has averaged fewer than ten poachings per year. In 2010, only five rhinos were shot in Kaziranga, while nine poachers were killed, the first time poacher deaths surpassed rhinos. (For comparison, in South Africa, where rangers fire only in self-­defense, five poachers were killed in 2010, while 333 rhinos were poached.) In July 2007, the arrest of three guards connected to the shooting of a poacher sent a chill through Kazi­ranga’s staff, but in July 2010 the government of ­Assam finally made the unofficial policy ­official: it passed a law declaring that rangers who kill poachers in Assam will not be prosecuted."

Retracing the steps of a Marine who went missing in the Montana wilderness. Family, friends and fellow Iraq veterans struggle to understand what happened to 30-year-old Noah Pippin:

"Pierce remembers the stranger as none too friendly. Pippin kept his back turned when Pierce started asking questions and said curtly that he’d hiked in from Hungry Horse. Seeing the fatigues, Pierce asked if he was military, and Noah told him he was a vet.

"'You been over in Iraq?'

"'Got back a little while ago.'

"'I was in Vietnam,' said Pierce, hoping to break the ice. 'Navy.'

"Noah didn’t answer.

"'If you’re going hiking in these parts, you need a gun,' said Pierce. 'Do you have one?'

"'Yes, sir,' he said. 'Just a .38.'

"'That ain’t much to stuff in the face of a grizzly when he’s chewing on your foot.'

"'It’s all I got.'"

On building a cabin in Trevelín, Argentina:

"I had spent ten years dreaming, three years shopping for land, and now almost two years arranging the construction, which I planned to spend 30 days supervising. Months before the planned January 2007 start, I flew down for ten days to line up a sawmill, open accounts at hardware stores, and coordinate a tight schedule of just-in-time deliveries. Julito vowed to have the site prepped and the foundation built before I returned with Team Sawyer in January, the height of Patagonian summer. We would go straight to the barn-raising scene in Witness where Harrison Ford is clambering all over the roof beams.

"Cut to reality. In January, Beth and I found the site green and lovely—and completely undisturbed. Not a single board, beam, nail, tile, or bolt had arrived, not a clod of dirt had been moved, and Julito and his crew were nowhere to be found—and wouldn't show up until a week later. Team Sawyer drifted in over the next few days. At sunset every night, we marveled at Trevelín's view of the Andes and toasted the coming endeavor. Mornings, we stood around the grassy clearing scuffing our heels. Right away an argument broke out over where to put the hot tub."

A trip through the "bike-crime underbelly"—and the futility of new technology when it comes to preventing it:

"The purpose of stealing a bike, after all, is to sell it. SFPD’s McCloskey estimated that 90 percent of bike thieves are drug addicts. In America’s rough streets, there are four forms of currency—cash, sex, drugs, and bicycles. Of those, only one is routinely left outside unattended. So the story of bike thieves would not be complete without a trip through the second half of the transaction—the recycling of cycles.

"Stolen bikes suffer many fates. In the Bay Area, they are often sold at flea markets, particularly in Alameda, just south of Oakland. In Portland, within hours of being taken, a few will appear at pawn shops just outside city limits, where documentation rules are lax. But just as they do in New York City, which shut down most ad hoc bike dealers years ago, the majority end up online, either on eBay or on Craigslist, the black hole of bicycles."

Here's what surprised me most: the Shuar themselves were prolific commercial head shrinkers. Beginning in the mid-1940s, word spread throughout the region that a tsantsa could be traded for a shotgun. Around the same time, anthropologist John Patton told me, the Shuar gained a tactical advantage over the Achuar. The Achuar had long controlled the rivers, affording access to trade routes and opportunities to barter for superior firearms being made in Brazil and traded up through Peru and Ecuador. Because Shuar headhunters faced retaliation from the better-armed Achuar, head-taking raids were sporadic and carefully considered. And then the balance shifted. A critical ­section of border closed, cutting off the Achuar’s access to trade and ammunition. The Shuar got busy.

“A hundred and fifty Shuar warriors would go and take heads, whole families,” says Patton, “partly because they had a commercial outlet for it and also because when the ­Achuar were reduced to using spears it was a lot easier to do.” Patton told me that the Shuar, around that time, would refer to the Achuar as fish—as in, “Let’s go catch some fish.”

In December 2008, DeChristopher shot to fame as Bidder 70 when he entered a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oil- and gas-lease auction in Utah, posed as a buyer, and laid claim to 22,500 acres of wilderness worth nearly $1.8 million. His comeuppance, handed down in early March, a month before Power Shift, was a federal conviction on two felony counts: making false statements and violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act. Together they carry a maximum sentence of $750,000 in fines and up to ten years in prison—a prospect that explains why he’s been packing on the muscle. DeChristopher’s reward, however, has been a rapid rise to folk-hero status.

I went to Spain not long ago to watch Cristina Sanchez fight bulls, but she had gotten toaed by one during a performance in the village of Ejea de los Caballeros and was convalescing when I arrived. Getting toaed sounds sort of merry, but I saw a matador toaed once, and he looked like a saggy bale of hay flung by a pitchfork, and when he landed on his back he looked busted and terrified. Cristina got toaed by accidentally hooking a horn with her elbow during a paa with the cape, and the joint was wrenched so hard that her doctor said it would need at least three or four days to heal. It probably hurt like hell, and the timing was terrible.