The Trials of Bidder 70
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.
Totally Psyched for the Full-Rip Nine
“It breaks my heart to go out and tell people, ‘Hey, you know that place your grandparents immigrated to, the place you call home, that seaside cottage? Well, it turns out to be a high-risk disaster zone. Yeah. We get a massive earthquake every 300 to 500 years around here, and we’re due. They’re super bad. When it comes, it’s a monster. A full-rip nine.’ ” By “full-rip nine” Corcoran means a magnitude-9.0 earthquake, the kind of massive offshore temblor that triggered the tsunami that killed 28,050 people in Japan on March 11, 2011. Geologists call them megaquakes. Geologists also call the Northwest coast of North America—from Vancouver Island down to Northern California—one of the likeliest next victims.
A Mountain of Trouble
As we hiked into the Zagros Mountains, which rise to nearly 12,000 feet along the border between Iraq and Iran, the driver grew nervous. “We’re going to have lunch in Tehran,” he said with a tense laugh. He had reason for his gallows humor: Six months earlier, three Americans—Shane Bauer, 27; his girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, 31; and Josh Fattal, 27, Bauer’s former housemate from the University of California at Berkeley—had walked along this same trail, with disastrous results. The hikers had—accidentally, it seems—strayed across the unmarked border into Iran, been seized by border guards, accused of being U.S. spies, and transported to the notorious Evin Prison, in Tehran, where they remained as this story went to press, in March.
Blood in the Water
When killer whales perform a behavior correctly, they are “bridged” (often with a whistle sound, in essence signaling “well done”) and then receive reinforcement in the form of a reward, such as a fish or a playful rubdown. When they don’t perform correctly, the trainer reacts with a three-second neutral response and withholds the reward. This is known as a least-reinforcing scenario, or LRS. Repeated failed attempts—and the corresponding lack of reward—can sometimes lead to a frustrated killer whale. “The question the trainer has to constantly be asking is: Is this animal mildly frustrated but still has the ability to stay with it and work through the problem?” explains Samantha Berg, who worked as a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando’s Shamu Stadium in the early 1990s. “Or have I gone beyond this animal’s limits and it’s time to cut the losses, take a break, and start over?”
The Last Lion
(Fiction) The Rebbe Revain Gross had fallen asleep at his desk again. He dozed slumped over some tenth grade exams. In his dream he was young once more, standing on a familiar street of his childhood. All he felt was goodness, a soft drowsy blanket wrapped around him, the world warm and embracing, familiar faces floating by. There were smiles from the teachers that had loved him, his mother and aunts reaching out, tousling his red hair. He saw his own Rebbe with tender eyes. In the dream he was reaching for something, not knowing what it was; a leaf falling silently in a deep forest.
Excerpt: The Source of All Things
I knew Matt wanted to hike up the glacier, to feel the cold creep into his boots and to peer into the frightening ice chasms. And I knew he wanted to go there with me. The St. Elias Range looms beyond Kennicott, swathed in enormous sheets of ice and towering over the clouds and the birds and most bush planes at eighteen thousand feet high. It’s big enough to create its own weather, and mountaineers have come back from three-week trips with stories of white-outs and avalanches when it’s still summer in McCarthy. One day, as Matt and I stood at the bar smashing blood-bloated mosquitoes onto our forearms, I asked him on a date.
Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden
Once you enter the zone, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see it’s a town. They’ve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale.
Rage Against Your Machine: Drivers vs. Cyclists in America
“As a couples therapist, I tell people that we take things so personally,” he says as we near the Whitestone Bridge, on the first dedicated bike path we’ve seen in more than two hours. It’s easy, when a car edges too close or cuts him off, to “go to that paranoid place where they’re just trying to fuck with me. We’re so worried that someone else can steal our sense of self that we fight for it at every turn.” But it could have been just that the driver didn’t see him. Under the spell of what’s called “inattentional blindness,” people have been known to miss obvious things simply because they’re not looking for them. Either that or what seems inconsequential in a car—passing by within a foot or two—can be terrifying to someone on a bike.
Consumed
To be a kayaker in Africa is to be constantly warned that the rivers are too dangerous—too many lethal rapids, too many angry hippos, too many hungry crocodiles. Like John Goddard and others before them, Hendrik Coetzee, Ben Stookesberry, and Chris Korbulic had simply come to terms with the risks. The new team did, however, have one serious misunderstanding of the small rivers that feed the upper Congo. The general rule in Africa is that alpha predators are still no match for men with guns, meaning that crocodiles and other monsters are at their most menacing in protected areas, where they can’t be shot.
In a House by the River
Sixteen years ago, the man who helped raise Megan Michelson was shot to death at a remote kayaking lodge in Northern California. The writer embarks on a painful search to find out what happened, and why. “At the time, Mom told me Jerry had gotten into a fight and that his body had been found in the doorway of the Otter Bar owners’ private residence. The few times I asked for specifics, Mom’s response was short: ‘You don’t want to know.’ But I’m 28 now, and I do want to know.”