Longreads

The writer visits a farm in the town of Lyme, Conn. with a group of biologists to learn what's driving the population of pathogen-laden ticks:

It's startling to look at the graphs of tick-borne diseases over the past few decades. They’re mostly going in the wrong direction. The research on Lyme disease is fairly recent, sparked in the mid-1970s after a cluster of children around Lyme developed fever and aches. They were diagnosed with juvenile arthritis—a peculiar diagnosis for so many children in one place. Their parents searched for an explanation, and eventually Allan Steere, a doctor at Yale, figured out that they suffered from an infectious disease. The fact that they all came from a rural part of the state suggested that an insect or some other animal had delivered the infection. In 1982, Willy Burgdorfer, an entomologist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, discovered corkscrew-shaped bacteria in black-legged ticks from Long Island. He exposed the bacteria to serum from people with Lyme disease and discovered that their antibodies swarmed around the microbes. That was a sign that these bacteria—which would later be named Borrelia burgdorferi after him—were the cause of Lyme disease.

In 1983, three whitewater guides attempted a record-breaking speed run down the Colorado River in dangerous waters. Their story is adapted from The Emerald Mile, which will be published in May:

"For Grua, Petschek, and Wren, getting tossed was brutal and blunt. 'The flip was instantaneous—there was nothing rhythmic or graceful or easy about it at all—it was just boom,' said Petschek, who was summarily dumped into the river.

"Grua was holding his oars as tight as he could. As the boat toppled, they flew from his hands, and he followed Petschek into the current. But the worst punishment was reserved for Wren."

A profile of Scott Lindquist, a blind Alaskan who harvests icebergs for a living:

"Quickly, Lindquist grabs his most important tool: his son Hank’s old hockey stick, which he uses partly for good luck and partly because it works well for hooking ice. 'Ease it back,' he shouts at the captain, who idles the boat. Lindquist lies on his belly at the bow, extending his torso over the water, and starts pulling on the berg. The wind has just picked up, and Lindquist’s target is bobbing around like a giant candy apple dusted with powdered sugar. The boat rises and falls on the waves, the water slapping Lindquist. When he finally pulls the berg within arm’s reach, one of the crew scurries up and tries to steady the ice with the pike pole as Lindquist attempts to twist in the ice screws. But with each motion, the berg bobs away stubbornly. After more than an hour of failed attempts, Lindquist says it’s time to move to calmer waters. 'I like hanging out in front of a glacier,' he tells me, wiping the water from his face, 'but sometimes you gotta go where the getting is good.'"

What led to the sinking of the HMS Bounty during Hurricane Sandy?

"'We knew there was weather out there,' says Doug Faunt, the ship’s unofficial white-haired curmudgeon. 'But we also respected Robin’s knowledge a great deal. We had a plan, and we were ready.'

"That plan, as Walbridge explained it, was to sail due east, wait for Sandy to turn toward land, and then push the vessel into the storm’s southeast quadrant, where hurricane winds are usually weakest. Why he so quickly abandoned that idea once at sea remains a mystery."

A writer joins a group of Ohioans looking for Sasquatch:

"For the past two hours, Bernie has led us down miles of dark trails. We’ve walked to the historic stone house by the lake, to the spot where Bernie and Nancy had their sighting, to the entrance of the caves that have the most nightly Bigfoot activity. We’ve taken so many turns; I have no idea where I am.

"Every once in a while, we stop so Nancy or Todd can shriek and shout gibberish into the forest. That’s how they communicate with any creatures that might be nearby. They encourage me to try it; Bigfoot is attracted to female voices. I let out a weak yelp. Nancy smiles proudly. I blush and laugh nervously, feeling totally ridiculous. Are they trying to prove something to me here? It’s really not working."

On Argentina's violent—and often corrupt—soccer fan clubs:

"The first murder spawned by Argentinean soccer can be traced to 1924, when a Boca fan shot a Uruguayan rival during a tango-style showdown outside a luxury hotel in Montevideo. Sometime in the 1950s, the fan clubs organized for self-defense. La Doce took its fierce, fistfighting form in the 1970s. Then, around 1981, in the last violent days of Argentina’s military dictatorship, the fan killings accelerated. Journalist Amílcar Romero, who wrote a history of soccer—this country also produces philosophers and artists specializing in the sport—divided the violence into three ­periods. Only 12 fans had been killed during the roughly 30 years following that first hotel murder. In the next three decades there were 102. The next 30 years saw 144 dead.

"But Romero counted only game-day deaths. The antiviolence group Salvemos al Fútbol tallies 269 soccer-related deaths in its running count—with much of the killing moving off-site in recent years. In 2009, for example, the former Lepers leader Roberto 'Pimpi' Camino was shot four times while leaving a wine bar late at night. Today the violence often takes place within the fan clubs themselves, in fights to control the barras’ growing incomes and the benefits of their power. 'They fight over money and women,' one sportswriter told me. (He insisted on anonymity, saying, 'No Argentine journalist could write this story,' for fear of retaliation.)"

A man murders a ranger at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State on New Year's Day leading to an active manhunt in subfreezing temperatures.

"The SWAT guys found climbing notches in the roadside berm and postholes leading into the trees. No innocent park visitor would continue to posthole up to his crotch. This had to be their guy.

"Heads swiveled. The Y had been a forward tactical post for the past three hours. All that time, it was now clear, the shooter had been moving above them, below them, all around. The team strapped on snowshoes and followed the holes.

"Around the next bend, a second SWAT team searched Barnes’ Impala. One officer cut the car’s distributor-cap wires to disable it. From the trunk, deputy John Delgado removed a lever-action rifle, several packs of AR-15 ammunition, and heavy body armor. Another officer pulled an AK-47 and several .223 magazines from the passenger seat."

An oral history of Burning Man, which started as an effigy burning in 1986 on San Francisco's Baker Beach, and moved to the Black Rock Desert in 1990 to become one of the largest annual gatherings of inventors, artists and free spirits:

"ALAN “REVEREND AL” RIDENOUR (head of Los Angeles Cacophony): In ’96, Burning Man was at its peak. We did the Damnation of Tinseltown and the flaming Helco tower. Burn Night felt like a scary, transformative ritual. Flash played Satan, and he came through with a gas can and doused Doris Day and John Wayne. I was on acid when I heard Flash’s booming laugh. He was Satan.

"ELIZABETH GILBERT (author of Eat, Pray, Love who wrote about Burning Man ’96 for Spin): Honestly, I was scared of it. I remember the way the camp turned from this playful thing by day—beautiful and fanciful and Narnia-like—to this menacing thing at night. Being around all that fire, people with guns, and a lot of people on drugs, I was like, “They’ll be eating each other soon!” And in some ways they were—more sexually than anything else. I understood that Burning Man was waking something up. That awakening might lead to transcendent creativity—or it might be savage and ungovernable once it’s released."

An eight-year-old autistic boy disappears into a densely forested park in Virginia for five days. The frantic search to find a child who doesn't understand he's in danger:

"Because of his autism, Robert probably didn’t know that he was lost. If he heard people coming through the woods, he might well have taken cover from them, thinking it was a game of hide-and-seek. Or he might not have wanted to be found by a stranger, even one calling out his name. This made efforts to locate him extremely difficult, and it’s how Robert managed to elude what would soon become one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in Virginia history.

"When he disappeared that day, Robert began an unlikely adventure that placed him at the center of the newest concern in the search-and-rescue (SAR) world: lost autistic children. Why autistic kids have the tendency to run off is not known, but the urge is strong in half of all children diagnosed with the disorder."