.

Fun and Games: Week Two at the Olympics.

2008-08-25T01:24:00.000-07:00

The morning of Friday, August 15th, was one of unaccustomed freshness in Beijing, and it brought forth two objects, both wreathed in legend but hitherto hard to spot. The first was a boiling ball of gases some ninety-three million miles away, known as the sun. The second was the sprinter Usain Bolt, whose homeland lies more than eight thousand miles away, in Jamaica, but who was now a hundred and thirty metres from where I sat. I was close to the finish line of the hundred-metre track, and he was at the start, awaiting his first heat of the Games, and going through his pre-race routine: glancing to the heavens and beating a brief tattoo, with his index fingers, on an invisible drum. He shimmied on the spot, revving his muscles, as all athletes like to do—the most febrile being Rafael Nadal, the young minotaur of the tennis circuit, who hops up and down, before every match, like a small boy in need of a pee. Bolt’s nerves were less twitchy than that. Indeed, from this first heat up to the final, the following night, he seemed to be participating less in an Olympic sport than in a gargantuan party, which happened to have a sporting theme. My deepest fear was that he would break the world record and then test positive for rum and Coke.

In the end, come the final, he elected not to break the record so much as snap it like a bread stick. The clock stopped at 9.69, three-hundredths of a second faster than his previous record, set in New York earlier this year. To a sprinter, that is a gulf, and what was plain, to the bedazzled throng, was that he could widen it at will. Bolt is lofty for his sport, at six feet five (at first glance, you would tag him as a four-hundred-metre man), and he takes a while to get upright from the set position, but, once his stride is established, he is free to mold the rest of the contest into a monarchical stroll. In Beijing, reaction times—the getaway speed of a runner, measured from the crack of the pistol—flash up on the stadium screens, and they showed that Bolt the finalist had been sluggish off the blocks. What is more, after eighty-five metres he was already so far ahead of his peers, and so convinced of victory, that he swept his arms back like airplane wings, which must have slowed him down, and then, as a pièce de résistance, thumped his chest—a single clap of the right palm to the heart—before he crossed the line. So here’s the deal: once Usain Bolt gets a decent start, and if he can be bothered to finish properly, with a dip of the neck and no showboating, he might turn out pretty quick.

All of this provoked an instant debate. Was he not under obligation, given the occasion, to travel as fast as he could—get serious out there, before a watching world, and wrestle the record down to something superhuman, around the 9.60 mark? The opposing view was that, heck, if you can’t have a personal parade in the Olympics, when can you? Bolt set a new record anyway, and thus laid down another threshold that he will cross when he pleases, at some grim-faced meet in Qatar or Gothenburg. For the moment, he was like Russell Crowe in “Gladiator,” killing off the competition and then heating the blood of the masses with a taunting, rhetorical cry: “Are you not entertained?” We were amused, for sure. The obvious reaction, to such a spectacle of dominance, was not to marvel but to laugh. After all, Bolt’s domination was an innocent one, shod in golden sneakers and purged of ill will, and to witness it in a land where mastery is not always so benign, and where the government is unlikely to be entertained by any spirits who try to run free, felt like a blessing and a mischievous joke.

The long day closed, in other words, on a mirror image of its beginning. The first heroes to enter the stadium, that morning, had been the leaders of the twenty-kilometre walk, an event considered hilarious by everyone on planet Earth except the athletes themselves. Somehow, wordlessly, a deal has been agreed on: we will not giggle, for politeness’s sake, and they will continue to propel themselves, year in, year out, as if learning to moonwalk too soon after a hip replacement. Yet mockery was stilled, for a minute, by the haunted eyes of the winner, the Russian Valeriy Borchin, as he stood on the podium later, his gauntness telling of the mortification that had led him to this point; he clutched his medal and his bunch of flowers as if emerging from a cloistral seminary into the light.

Again and again, the visitor to the games was taken aback (as friends who stayed home, with their TV remotes, could never be) by this clash of tones, the comedy of sport crunching up against the obsessiveness—not to mention the fitness—that drives its devotees. I could make out little of the men’s shot put on Friday night, for instance, not because it was half a stadium away but because, even through binoculars, it appeared to be an international convention of bartenders, staged inside a cloud of talcum powder. This, or something similar, is what your shot-putter daubs onto his neck, from earlobe to shoulder, before hefting the ball and tucking it into position. Reese Hoffa, the United States Olympic trials champion, used more of the stuff than anyone since Diana Vreeland. The Americans had been billed, or overbilled, to run rampant. “I would love to be the class of Olympic athletes to sweep,” Hoffa said. In the end, he fell short, his countryman Adam Nelson landed not a single shot in bounds, and it was left to the hedge-bearded Christian Cantwell, from Columbia, Missouri, to grab the silver. The gold went to the Pole Tomasz Majewski, and his magic bandanna, and for the first time I understood the binary appeal of the discipline: the brute thrust of Majewski’s firing arm, uncrooked and locked, versus the delicate skip of his swivelling feet below. If the U.S. wants to do better in London, four years from now, it had better start sending some bison to ballet school.

The best thing about the shot put was the cars. After the shot landed, and the distance had been measured, the precious sphere would be retrieved by an official and placed in the cockpit of an automobile: two feet long, bright red, with a tail fin—in short, the idealized vehicle that I drew during chemistry lessons when I was nine years old. Now it exists, for real, and there are two Chinese fellows with the best job in the world, who get to steer it back to the shot-putting circle by remote control. (It can also bring a hammer, or even a javelin, which slots neatly into the fin.) I followed the gaze of the spectators around me, and realized that most of them had entirely lost interest in what was happening on the track, so urgently were they tracing the progress of the cars, and so hastily were they revising their list of what they want for Christmas. One question, though, will linger after the Games are done. The red supercars are equipped with windshields, but why? Who needs to see out? Are there tiny drivers tucked in there, bred specially for the event?

There are some sports, sadly, that are doomed to stay irredeemable—in which the skills required, however towering, cannot hope to emerge from the smog of absurdity. Synchronized swimming, it is universally agreed, presents too inviting a target. Long before this year’s competition began, on August 10th, I was lost in the arcana of the American press handout, which explained that the stuff the swimmers rub into their hair, to keep it helmet-hard and out of their smiles as they cavort, is unflavored Knox gelatin, “also used in Jell-O and cheesecake.” The main ingredient of Knox is “soft horse cartilage.” Add the Knox to the nose clips that the women affix, for those tricky submarine somersaults, and you get an unsavory blend of sport, cooking class, and circus.

No less ambivalent is the status of handball, in which teams—there is no getting around this—try to throw a ball into a net. If the net were in a hoop, above their heads, the game would demand a frictionless flexibility and pace, and the results would bring in hundreds of millions of dollars. Turn the net into a goal, however, tack it to the floor, and for some reason the appeal tends to wilt. In contrast to modern pentathlon, whose five segments—shooting, fencing, swimming, riding, and running—were proposed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founding genius of today’s Olympic Games, and based upon the experience of a cavalry soldier caught behind enemy lines, handball is based upon the experience of a management trainee with a ball of paper and a trash basket on the other side of the cubicle. I watched Spain against China, a tense affair, and scarcely noticed the score, so entranced was I that the Spanish goalkeeper had come to the game in his pajamas—soft, stretchy yellow ones with red piping, and a crisscross of matching yellow ribbon on his sure-grip slippers. He was the Malvolio of handball, his name was José Javier Hombrados, and he steered his team to a snug 36–22 victory—insured, I like to think, by the actions of his colleague Iker Romero, who crossed himself twice as he ran onto the court. How much divine protection, exactly, does one need for a game of handball?

Local support, needless to say, was pitched somewhere between the dutifully zealous and the ecstatic. There was one Chinese player, a close-cropped imp named Zhu Wenxin, whose pleasure was to whirl his arm before hurling a penalty throw, and his supporters reacted with the fervor of medieval flagellants. The English-speaking announcer fanned the mania, labelling him “Three-Sixty Master,” and what pen could describe the thrill of seeing Three-Sixty Master facing off against Pajama Boy? I sat either amid or alongside Chinese crowds at field hockey, weight lifting, fencing, tennis, table tennis, and water polo, and, for every skeptical moment at which their eagerness felt like a fix, or a pressurized public service, there were half a dozen when the howling seemed no less honest, thunderous, and partial than it would at an N.F.L. game, or at a soccer match in the British Premier League. There were reams of supporters at the hockey game, against South Korea, who had clearly been bused in to fill the seats, their yellow T-shirts bearing the words “Cheering from Beijing Workers.” Yet the buzz of the match was unfakably contagious, and, when China opened the scoring, after five minutes, even bewildered novices caught the mood, dizzy at the thought of vanquishing South Korea. I turned to the woman next to me, who had introduced herself as a Chinese-Korean interpreter. What was the current state of political relations between the two countries? “Very nice,” she said, and that was that.

Some of the sporting nuances were almost too fine to unpick. According to my neighbor, the Chinese cheerleaders at halftime had been coached in the niceties of the rah-rah by a South Korean. Where else but at the Olympics—whose motto reads “One World One Dream”—would you get this kind of deal? Likewise, the roars for Japan against Germany in team table tennis sounded a little excessive to me, until it was explained that one of the Japanese players, Kan Yo, was Chinese-born. Most disconcerting of all was the noise I heard behind me at eight o’clock on the night of August 14th: a sob of grief, the one thing that is never lost in translation. I turned around and found a volunteer—one of the hundred thousand young Chinese who gave their services to the Games, and who were its best and most likable asset. Their good cheer rarely dimmed, and this was the first volunteer I had seen in tears. I put an arm around her shoulders, risking a diplomatic incident, and asked what the matter was. “My name is Tian Xueping,” she said, bravely maintaining the required standard of English, “and I am so sad.” I asked if I could help in any way. “I want them to win this game in our country.” So that was it. “It is just a game, but so sad,” she added. Now I understood, and I knew there was nothing I could do. And it wasn’t just a game. It was fencing.

As Olympic endeavors go, fencing is kind of perfect. It has the sting of the new—the minor sport with a major place in history, a satisfyingly dense array of rules and dexterities, and yet, for all that, an aim that seems piercingly simple. This is a far cry from tennis, say, whose blueprint is in our brains, and which feels muffled and stranded at the Olympics. I saw Nadal play a set, and a listless Roger Federer do the same (two days later, he lost), and then drifted away. Tennis carries with it such a halo of big money, and the players are so starkly defined by their individual gifts, that it’s hard to rethink it, for eight days, as an Olympic team game, ablaze with amateur good will. Hero worship, for all but a handful of Olympians, is the fleeting exception, whereas for tennis stars it’s the rule. Nadal, to his credit, looked delighted when he won the gold medal, but, as he tossed his wristbands to his fans, you could see, in their outstretched hands, a craving that no Olympics could ever sate: bring me the sweat of Rafael Nadal.

Things were different on August 9th, when I dropped idly into the Fencing Hall at seven in the evening, steeped in total ignorance, to take a look. At two o’clock in the morning, still shaken by what I had seen, I was downing gins and vodkas with the coaches of the U.S. team and drinking in their wisdom. Luck had been on my side: that night, American female fencers had done what the shot-putting guys could only talk of, and won a clean sweep. Gold in the individual women’s sabre had gone to Mariel Zagunis, of Portland, Oregon; silver to Sada Jacobson, of Dunwoody, Georgia; and bronze to Rebecca Ward, also of Portland. Zagunis had repeated her triumph of four years ago, in Athens, and Jacobson had risen one place. Ward was the baby of the squad, only eighteen, and heading to Duke University in the fall, although by the time she left the hall that Saturday night, she no longer looked like a kid. She looked like a grownup.

The turning point can be pinned down precisely. It came after Ward lost her semifinal to Zagunis. Like many Olympic events, fencing is such a small world that you regularly, and unavoidably, compete against friends—in this case, friends beside whom you will later fight in the team event. This lends a taut and unbreathable air to the contest. If the scoring is close, then so is the atmosphere, near-stormy with complicated feelings. David Jacobson, the father of Sada, and an endocrinologist by profession, told me of the “huge emotional swings” that the sport entails—“You have to temper the highs as well as the lows,” he said. I went down to the mixed zone, the jungly gauntlet of reporters that athletes in every sport must run immediately after their events, and saw the defeated Ward pass through. To put a question would have been inhuman, and she wouldn’t have heard, anyway, so immured was she in her fortress of desolation. The natural high color of her face was deepened with perspiration and laved in tears; she looked like a woman ready to call a cab to the airport. Instead of which, she composed herself, walked out twenty minutes later for the bronze-medal playoff against the Russian Sofiya Velikaya, went 1–6 down, composed herself again, overhauled her opponent, and won the match, 15–14. How she did this I have no idea.

The profile of U.S. fencing is hard to gauge—that night won’t have harmed it, and all three medallists were on the “Today” show the next morning—but, full face, it has got a whole lot better. The fencers now use a transparent visor where there was once a mesh mask, and their intensity is clear to see. Indeed, there were times, during the American bouts, with the auditorium in darkness and the only light falling on the strip (the slender runway up and down which the fencers charge and retreat), when I felt more like a theatregoer, rapt and aghast, than like an ordinary sports fan. The sabre has the edge, literally, on the épée and the foil; hits from those are administered with the point, whereas the sabre-rattler can score with a slice of her cutting edge or the flat back of the blade. As a viewer, you get a lot more slash-and-clash for your money, which has to be a good thing, and if, mid-bout, you had presented Sada Jacobson with a staircase, a chandelier, and a black-clad Basil Rathbone she could probably have coped with them, too.

David Jacobson was a fencer at Yale, and made the national squad in 1974. His wife, Tina, still fences, and said proudly of Sada, “She’s doing it for America, and I’m doing it so I don’t get osteoporosis.” All three of her daughters—she also has Emily, twenty-three, and Jackie, nineteen—have been world champions at some stage. Then it’s in the genes, right? David Jacobson shook his head, and pointed: “Arkady,” he said. Arkady Burdan, the coach of the Jacobson clan and one of five coaches of the U.S. Olympic team, is a squat, unstoppable bullet of a man, heavy-shouldered and smooth-skulled, like two Alan Arkins mashed together. He is sixty-four years old, born in Uzbekistan, but brought up in Odessa, on the Black Sea. He came to America in 1990, and he will tell you what fencing is. “Is physical chess,” he told me, using his cigar like a short, fat épée to ram home the point. “Without coach, is nothing.” I saw him at strip-side, that Saturday, and again the following Thursday, when the same three Americans fenced as a team and took bronze. As each assumed her position, en garde, he sat gazing down, as though brooding in prayer, all but unable to watch. Halfway through one of Sada Jacobson’s individual bouts, when she was slipping against Velikaya, she took time out—there is a compulsory pause when one of the contestants reaches eight points—and came across to Burdan for advice. A few words, a hand on her arm, and back she went, transfigured and cooled, and wrapped the match up, 15–11. With coach, is everything. Later, over drinks, I asked Burdan what secrets he had confided in the gloom. “She look so tight,” he told me. “She look she do some hard, terrible job.” Did he discuss strategy, a way to strike back into the game? “I not call her technicals, no. I tell her, create fencing—her fencing. I say, have fun. Play.”

The way of Burdan is not, of course, the only way. There is also the Marcia Lyon way. I spoke with her son, Jay Lyon, of Canada, after he had held his nerve and taken two matches, one on the heels of the other, on the Archery Field. His first victim had been Xue Hai Feng, of China, who was ranked No. 18 at the games, twenty-nine places above Lyon, so it was quite a scalp, and he had then seen off Brady Ellison, of the United States. What was boosting him that day? “Sweet little e-mail from my mom. She said, no matter what, the sun’s still going to come up tomorrow.” Mrs. Lyon was clearly not in Beijing, where the chances of that were around fifty-fifty. “And, if I don’t do well, she’s going to kick my ass,” he added, lovingly. The other mystery weapon in Lyon’s quiver was Phil Towle, a performance coach back in the States, whose online messages had been an inspiration. “He’s also been a psychologist for Metallica,” Ryan said, as if to justify the gentleman. I had to steady myself against a passing volunteer. Metallica has a psychologist? What, exactly, is it repressing in its sylvan melodies?

The urge to play at the Olympic Games is not restricted to the athletes. As an onlooker, too, you want the kickass performance, but you also want some fun, and that was the problem for Beijing. Nobody could knock the transport system, with its humming fleet of electric buses, or the facilities at every venue; and yet, despite this formidable organization—or perhaps as its inevitable result—the enterprise, as a whole, was beset by a looming lack of joy. This was not really the fault of the Chinese; it may simply indicate a design flaw inherent in the Olympics themselves, which have grown so vast and unwieldy that the only way to run them successfully may be as a kind of mini-China, packaged and policed to a fault. Sports addicts and journalists alike were faced with a paradox: the more you got to see, the less of a blast it was. At noon every day, as I stumbled across the asphalt from one shuttle bus to another, my lunch, in the form of a Snickers bar, already softening in my pocket, the sensation of being a lost soul was overwhelming. Around me stretched the gray acres of the Olympic Green, its title being the closest thing that the Chinese authorities have come to irony, and within me was a memory of Fabrizio del Dongo. Readers of Stendhal’s “The Charterhouse of Parma” will know Fabrizio as the hapless hero, whose experience of Napoleonic combat does not come off quite as splendidly as planned. “Was what he had seen a battle,” Stendhal writes, “and secondly, was that battle Waterloo?”

In the same way, I am confident that I attended the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, in 2008; but I cannot truly say whether I went to China, and, if so, whether the city I lived in for a fortnight was Beijing. My hotel, miles away on an outer ring road, was like a silent, fortified compound for the criminally insane; it had no bar, though it did, in a slightly unwise nod to the Games, have an indoor archery range. I had a go, late one night, and almost shot myself in the foot; where were you, Phil Towle, just when I needed you most? I never made it out of town, to the soccer in Shanghai, the sailing in Qingdao, or the equestrian events in Hong Kong. (That seems a long trip, but the riders for the Melbourne Games, in 1956, didn’t compete in Melbourne at all. They competed in Stockholm. And, anyway, if you were a horse this year, would you really want to fly to Beijing, knowing that at any moment a synchronized swimmer might steal your soft cartilage and use it as hair gel?) The fact is that the Olympic Games could happen anywhere. They seem to unfold in a vast and spotless nowhere. I could have been in Melbourne, or Toronto, where at least the food would have been better—where the Chinese food would have been better. The organizers, inexplicably, built no respectable restaurants or enticing stores within the zone; the concession stands were best avoided, being barely any different from what you get at Loews before a movie. So bananas and water it had to be, as one sat for five hours in the National Stadium, on a windless night, and watched the women heptathletes. Still, by the look of them, they hadn’t eaten anything since a small Greek salad at the Athens Games, in 2004, so I guess we were all in the same boat.

The Chinese took these women to their hearts. Few events are more consuming than the heptathlon, which lasts two whole days. The athletes collapsed on the track at the end, after the eight hundred metres, with the Greek holding an ice pack to the neck of her French rival. Gathering their strength, they rose and linked hands to form a sisterly chorus line, taking a bow down the back straight, and the crowd went crazy. This prompted the thought, Was there something different in the massed exclamations of the second week? The locals had crowed over the opening ceremony, as it brandished the image of a potent China abroad, and that throb of entitlement had endured through the rest of the opening week, with its plethora of indoor events—badminton, gymnastics, diving, and other strongholds of the Chinese. An acquaintance who has lived in Beijing for five years says that, in his opinion, they have no notion of the underdog (why cheer anyone but a winner?), and the first week of the games had proved his point. Now we were outside, in the open air, and the People’s Republic was having to learn to lose. The overdog of the hundred-and-ten-metre hurdles, Liu Xiang, limped off before he had even begun, a disaster only slightly less traumatic for his country—not to mention for Visa, Coca-Cola, and Nike—than the loss of India was for the British Empire. More measured was the response to Hu Kai, a funky and bespectacled hundred-metre sprinter, who came in last in his second heat, yet earned a surge of sympathetic acclaim. Heaven knows, it takes more than a fortnight to melt a national mood, but it could just be that the most telling figure at the games, for the Chinese, was not their champion weight lifter Cao Lei, who started where the other lifters left off, but someone like their steeplechaser Zhao Yanni—outpaced, shattered, but unbowed as she flopped across the finish. If she is ostracized, of course, and banished to a Snickers factory for the next twenty years, we’ll know that nothing has changed.

“The Olympic victor, I said, is deemed happy in receiving a part only of the blessedness which is secured to our citizens, who have won a more glorious victory and have a more complete maintenance at the public cost. For the victory which they have won is the salvation of the whole State.” Thus Socrates says to Glaucon, in the fifth book of the Republic. Plato, one of the great wrestling philosophers, could be describing the official Chinese attitude to these Games, wherein the individual is swallowed up by the team performance of a nation. On the other hand, the one aspect of victory that Plato could not have foreseen is the television camera, which, in its sentimental aggression, has made the masses anything but faceless. Does our behavior change when we find ourselves being watched? I looked at the badminton winner, Zhang Ning, when she stood to receive her medal; as the tears fell, the camera crept in close. That focus, like the double air-punch—or, indeed, like the screams of the fabulous fencer Ni Hong, who celebrated almost every hit with an uninhibited yowl, crouching down and going, “Yeaah! Yeaah! Yeaah!”—is a pure invention of the wicked West, plundered by China for its own state-sponsored highs. Ni, at such moments, seemed less Chinese than any Chinese person I have ever seen; she looked, if anything, like a Beatles groupie in the final number of “A Hard Day’s Night.”

China has taken the gamble of seeking to make people rich before it has made them free. By the standards of the Enlightenment, that is either an illusion or a cruel con, though a free marketeer might argue that the liberties bestowed by trade and consumption—the strange half-freedom of the television commercial, for example, which enslaves us even as it promises the wealth of the world—are not to be sniffed at, and may, indeed, be what most of us ponder and pursue. (We shouldn’t worry more about the price of gas than about human rights in China, but we do.) As I dined, one day, on a Big Mac in a thunderstorm, seeking and failing to find refuge in a packed McDonald’s beside the Olympic Green subway station, I heard the Olympic theme song, playing on a tape loop inside, and watched a Chinese teen-ager in the doorway. She sucked on her milkshake and then sang along, swaying; she was, at once, everything that the capitalist corporation could hope for, and everything that the Communist Party had planned. I tried to talk to her, but she spoke no English; besides, what young person wants to be asked if he or she feels free? What kind of question is that? I thought of the sign I had seen on the first full day of the Games, in the Forbidden City, as I headed back from the cycling. “Hall of Earthly Tranquillity,” it read, and then, at the bottom, in smaller letters, “Made Possible by the American Express Company.” One world. One dream.

Relief in the pool for Phelps—and NBC, too

2008-08-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

By TIM DAHLBERG

BEIJING (AP)—The greatest swimmer in the world had just blown away the field and set yet another world record at a time most athletes are reaching for their first can of Red Bull. Now, Michael Phelps stood in the water, pumped his fist in the air and exhaled deeply.

Halfway around the world, NBC executives were undoubtedly doing the same.

They juggled the schedule to make sure Phelps won his first gold medal in prime time and he responded on a rainy morning in Beijing with a performance for the ages in the one event where he might be most vulnerable.

Seven more remain before he’s officially crowned the greatest swimmer ever, but that seems a mere formality now, much to the relief of NBC officials who built the first week of the Olympics around his quest for a record eight gold medals.

In front of a bleary-eyed crowd that included President Bush, Phelps did what great athletes do in their biggest moments on stage and he did it with a flourish, sprinting toward the finish to obliterate his own world record in the 400-meter individual medley and win the first gold for the U.S. swimming team.

Four minutes and 3.84 seconds after it began, it was over. The first gold medal was his, and the message to his fellow swimmers was clear.

Swim for the silvers and bronze if you wish. Just don’t think about winning the gold.

Those belong to Phelps.

“I’m pretty happy,” he said. “That was a pretty emotional race, I think.”

Emotional afterward, too. The normally stoic Phelps is used to being on medal stands, but this time he choked up as they played the national anthem.

“I wanted to sing on the medal podium but I couldn’t stop crying,” he said. “I was just happy to get the first one under my belt.”

Phelps wasn’t the only happy one. NBC took an $894 million gamble that American television viewers would put up with taped coverage and odd hours if they could also get some live drama during prime time.

The Chinese agreed to flip-flop the usual times to do just that, despite objections from other countries. About all that remained to be seen was how Phelps would respond to the early wakeup call, and Phelps answered with his best race ever.

The only thing missing was the drama in this race, which began shortly after 10 a.m. and ended much too quickly for Ryan Lochte, Phelps’ teammate who was supposed to give him the toughest challenge in any of his eight events.

Lochte did his best, staying even with Phelps halfway through the race, but it was all he could do to hang on to the bronze as he and Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh chugged to the wall about the same time Phelps was studying the board to see just how fast he had gone.

“It’s amazing,” Lochte said. “Setting a world record, you can’t ask for anything else.”

What was amazing was that anyone thought Phelps might be vulnerable in any race, much less his first race. The 23-year-old who won six gold medals in Athens and will have more Olympic golds than any other athlete after these games seems impervious to pressure and thrives on a competitive challenge.

Not only that, Phelps has held the world record in the 400 IM for the last six years, breaking it six times himself while lowering it by an average of one second a year before smashing it yet again on Sunday.

“I would never bet against him,” U.S. coach Eddie Reese said before the games.

Phelps stands to receive a $1 million bonus from Speedo if he wins all eight races and breaks the record of seven golds set by Mark Spitz 36 years ago in Munich. But there’s more at stake for him in Beijing, including cementing a legacy that began in Athens and will likely not end at least until the London games four years from now.

If he wins all eight races, he’ll own 14 gold medals, five more than the record haul currently held by Spitz, Carl Lewis and two others. Since he only seems to get better with age, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Phelps could end his career with 20 Olympic gold medals or even more.

That kind of greatness lured President Bush and his wife to the Water Cube, and Phelps gave them something to cheer about. The success of American swimmers is crucial to attempts by the United States to beat host China in the medal count.

“It’s pretty cool to have the president say congratulations,” Phelps said.

Bush isn’t sticking around long, but the congratulations are far from over. By the time Phelps gets out of the pool for the 17th time next weekend, his legend will be assured.

Morning or night, he’s the greatest swimmer we’ve ever seen.

Tim Dahlberg is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at tdahlberg@ap.org

dara torres

2008-08-05T01:26:00.000-07:00

Those who have seen Dara Torres the past two years on late-night TV -- talking to fitness guru Billy Blanks and his sweating, spandex- clad followers -- might not recognize her now. The face is the same, but the blond hair is cropped short, and she's layered on about 20 pounds of lean muscle.

Those who followed her through her three trips to the Olympics in the 1980s and '90s might not recognize her now, either. Think her hair is shorter? Look at her times. At age 33, eight years after swimming in Barcelona and picking up the last of her four Olympic medals, Torres is swimming faster than ever, fast enough to get to Sydney for a record fourth Games with air to spare.

She'll have to prove it at the U.S. Olympic Trials, which start today in Indianapolis.

``When I first decided to come back,'' Torres said, ``I told my coach, `Let's be realistic, I just want to make a relay.' I just want to go there and make the team and just want to have fun and swim my heart out, swim as fast as I can. And I feel like that will fall into place and will happen, because that's what's been happening all this year. Things have fallen into place.''

Into first place, mostly. In July of 1999, Torres left a career in acting, modeling and broadcasting

-- which included, of course, the ubiquitous Tae-Bo infomercials -- to return to competitive swimming. By March, she had re-entered the national radar, breaking seven personal bests and winning the 50-meter and 100-meter freestyles at the national championships. What she did in June at the Santa Clara International Invitational meet, the next- to-last major competition before the U.S. Olympic Trials, proved that her smashing re-debut was no fluke.

On the final day of the meet, Torres set an American record in the 50- meter freestyle at 24.73 seconds, breaking by 14-hundredths of a second the mark set by the runner-up in that race, Amy Van Dyken, in her four-gold-medal performance at the 1996 Olympics. It was the last of Torres' four victories that weekend, following the 100 and 200 free and the 100 butterfly. It stunned everyone, from Torres to the spectators to her coach, Stanford women's head coach and former Olympic head coach Richard Quick, who wrapped her in an ecstatic bear hug as she emerged from the pool.

``I've never seen anything like that in my life, in any sport,'' Quick said, ``to be out of the sport for seven years and to come back like that. It's all a surprise to me, really, not just the record. Not that I wasn't confident, but if you had asked me a year ago if she would be breaking records and swimming like that, I wouldn't have believed you.''

Torres probably wouldn't even have discussed it. ``Ever since I made a decision in my head, the decision was that I wasn't going to think about anything negative and worry about anything and to go out and do everything I could do. If I had made my comeback and was thinking, `Wow, I'm 32, can I do this? I haven't been in the water for seven years' -- if I had kept dwelling on that, I wouldn't be here right now.''

She would have been back in New York, continuing to model for the world-renowned Elite agency, doing television analysis at swim meets, and taping infomercials. (For those who were wondering: She says yes, she actually did do Tae-Bo, and even included it in her swimming training until about seven months ago.) To hear her tell it, once she stopped swimming competitively after the 1992 Barcelona Games -- after winning her fourth medal in three Olympic Games, all in relays, including two golds -- she couldn't even stand the sight of a pool. As a fan at the '96 Games, she said, she attended nearly every major event except swimming.

``In March '99, in New York, me and some friends went to nationals,'' she said. ``I walked in the pool and said, `Ugh, chlorine.' And I saw the swimmers with these huge backs, and I thought, `They have to get up at 5 in the morning and I get up at 8 or 9.' I turned to one of my friends and said, `I'm so glad I don't swim anymore.'

``And three months later,'' she continued, ``I get back in the pool.''

Until then, Torres truly believed she didn't miss the sport in which she had competed internationally since age 16 (when she won a 1983 Pan American Games gold medal in the 400 freestyle relay).

``When I got out of the sport, I'd said, `Yeah, yeah, close that chapter,' and started a career. I never had any desire to get into the pool or have any association with swimming except commentating at meets.''

Then last June, a casual dinner conversation with friends turned to swimming, and ended up exposing her as someone who still had that urge. ``For the next week, I couldn't get it out of my head, so I knew I had to call someone about it,'' she said. That someone was Quick, who had recruited her out of high school when he was at Texas (she ended up at Florida) and who had coached her at the '88 and '92 Games.

``I could tell by the tone of her voice,'' Quick said. ``I knew she wanted to swim competitively again.'' Three weeks later, she had moved out of her New York apartment and flown to Palo Alto, with no place to stay, and managed to make it to a practice hours after her flight had landed. She hit the water at full speed.

``I could tell by the third day she was in training, I saw something that made me believe that she'd be a little special,'' Quick said. ``She was so competitive. I was telling her to just swim slow, and she wouldn't. Then I saw the times, and I kept telling my assistant, `Will you get the time right?' ''

The results since then shouldn't be all that surprising, Torres said. The seven years away from the pool saved her body some wear and tear, she said. She eats better and works out differently. The time away has given her what she called ``a newfound love for the sport.''

``I used to worry about who was next to me, and I used to waste energy worrying about if somebody just broke a world record in my event,'' she said. ``Now I say, `That's good, but I want to do better than that.' I don't waste energy worrying about what other people are doing and the times they're doing, because no one knows the day of competition who's going to be the best that day.''

On the brink of the U.S. team's formation in Indianapolis, the comparatively ancient Torres is in the mix with Van Dyken, the breakout swimmer of '96, and Jenny Thompson, one of the stars of '96 and '92 (and a teammate of Torres' in Barcelona). All three plan to compete for the two berths in the 50 freestyle, and all three insist that they're heated competitors only in the pool.

Still, there's been evidence of the tension typical among swimmers competing for spots in Sydney. From the time Torres returned to the sport, she and Thompson had trained together under Quick with the Stanford team; in March, Torres stopped training with them and began working out alone with Quick, in what all concerned insist was a mutual decision.

``I think when two people are going for the exact same thing, and there's only one thing out there, the Olympic gold medal,'' Torres said, ``it could be like having that Olympic race every day in practice.''

That was why the Santa Clara meet was so widely anticipated. Thompson was forced to bow out after the first day with an intestinal virus; she later said that having to pull out ``kind of devastated me.'' In her absence, Torres proceeded to steal the show. Now, more than ever, Torres sees virtually no limits.

``Don't get too complacent,'' Torres said she tells herself. ``I know there's more I can do. If I stay injury free, I can go even faster.''

Meanwhile, Torres has one more infomercial to shoot -- but she's delayed taping until, at the earliest, October. ``I hope I'll be busy until then,'' she said.
PROFILE
Dara Torres Swimming -- Age: 33 -- From: Beverly Hills -- Now In: Palo Alto -- Olympic History: '84, '88 and '92 Games; four relay medals -- In Fact: Won her first national title in 1982

MEET DARA TORRES
A Conversation with Dara Torres
The diehard Olympic swimmer is proof that when it comes to any goal, it's all about how bad you want it
Sue Carswell

This diehard Olympic swimmer is proof that (1) your body can be rock-hard at 40; (2) a baby doesn't have to slow you down; and (3) when it comes to any goal, it's all about how bad you want it

Her body is insane. That's what I thought the first time I saw 33-year-old "DT," right after the Sydney Olympics in 2000. In a bright-blue one-piece, the 6-foot-tall Beverly Hills-born gold medalist, who's ripped from shoulders to calves, looked like Wonder Woman's badass little sister. Seven years later, she looks leaner, stronger, and not a day older. I'm checking out her Manhattan apartment, waiting for her to finish a call to her nanny back home in Parkland, Florida (her daughter, Tessa, is 18 months old): Damp swimsuits dangle from doorknobs, and every surface is covered with family photographs, including several of her father, who passed away earlier this year from cancer.

Torres is often singled out for her beauty -- she was the first athlete to pose alongside models in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue -- but she's more famous for her comebacks. After winning four medals in three Olympic games, she retired from competitive swimming in 1992 because she thought, at 25, she was too old. In 1999 she resumed training, and left Sydney with three bronzes and two golds.

Having busted out of retirement again, Torres is vying for a spot on the 2008 team -- and has been outswimming athletes half her age in the process. As a mom who's battled bulimia, been divorced twice, and recovered from five knee surgeries, she might have superpowers for real.

You've trained for the Olympics in your 20s and 30s. At 40, is your body responding differently?
It's very difficult for my body to recover after workouts now that I'm older, so we have to keep them short, which means they're extremely difficult and intense. It sucks. I can't sit here and say that it's been easy making this comeback. It hasn't. I mean, there are days when I feel like I'm swimming with a piano on my back and I'm going to sink.

How do you keep going?
I think about the end goal. When I feel like my body is exhausted, I focus on making my fifth Olympic team so I can push through it. They may become harder to achieve, but your dreams can't stop because you've hit a certain age or you've had a child.

How soon were you able to get back into the pool after having Tessa?
Tessa was put on my chest just after she was born, and I was saying, "Oh, she's so beautiful." Then the doctor came in and the first thing I asked was, "When can I work out?" He thought I was kidding. He told me I could do aerobic exercise in 6 weeks. I said, "I have a swim meet in 3 weeks!" About a week and a half after I delivered, I had to do something, so I went to the gym to work on my triceps and biceps. Then around the corner, I saw my doctor, and thought, "You've got to be kidding me!" When he spotted me, I think he just gave up. He said, "Go ahead and swim!"

Is it tough being away from her when you train?
I get out of the pool after a workout and look on my BlackBerry to see if the nanny called and to make sure everything's okay. My child is always on my mind. And now she's swimming too -- she hit the pool on the exact day the doctor said she could, which was the day she turned 3 months. She didn't like it -- I think she preferred her nice warm baths. It took a good month for her to loosen up. Now she loves splashing around and going underwater!

After two divorces, you're in a solid relationship again. What was it about him that won you over?
David [Hoffman] is 56, a doctor, and in really good shape. But I think what I find most attractive about him is his honesty and intelligence. I think we have a very good balance -- he's more on the nerdy, low-key side, while I'm energetic. He comes home after working 10 hours, and not only does he cook, he likes to clean up, too, so he can de-stress. I'm like, Go for it! He's an avid book reader, and I read my sports and gossip magazines when I'm not watching CSI, Grey's Anatomy, Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol tryouts.

Got any marriage advice to pass on?
Don't choose so fast. I was only 25, and getting married was the thing to do at that point. It was too soon. Then there were about 8 years between the first and the second. Both times I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with the guy. But you find out more things about the other person as you go along, so I guess what I'm trying to say is, take your time! Even though it may look from the outside as if I take marriage lightly, I don't. As for women struggling in a marriage, I think you really should try and work it out. If you know you've given it everything you possibly can and feel like it's not working out, then you can say, "Okay, I tried." But you have to try.

You battled bulimia through your first two Olympics. Do you still have to watch yourself?
I think you do to a degree after it happens, but it's been so long since then. More often I wonder what other people think about when they see me in an airport or wherever, scarfing down a cheeseburger and some fries. I can just imagine what bulimic women are thinking about me, because that's what I used to think about other women: How can she do that? She's so lucky she can eat that and not gain weight. Nowadays, if I have any cravings, I just go ahead and eat. I don't deprive myself.

What's your workout routine like now?
I do a lot of core work, and I work out on a Swiss balance ball. I train with a coach from the Florida Panthers hockey team, and my body has completely changed. It's a very fluid type of training, which is great, since swimming is a very fluid motion. In the weight room we concentrate on equipment that works a lot of different muscles at once. As for swimming, I'm now in the pool 5 days a week from 8 to 10 a.m. And I'm in the gym for an hour and a half, 4 days a week. Two days upper body, two days lower.

In 2000 you were dogged by implications that you used performance-enhancing drugs, though you tested negative. Are you bothered when journalists bring up the topic?
It hurt me in Sydney because I worked my ass off to reach my goals. But as much as it hurt then, I can't waste my energy worrying about whether people are going to say it. I've asked the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to test me frequently so that when I'm questioned about drug use, I show them my results. The people who know me best -- David, the coaches, and my closest friends -- know that I would never do anything like that. I'd never cheat.

Pantry Raid - 5 treats Torres would swim 1,000 meters for

1. Root beer float "It has to be made with IBC root beer and Breyers vanilla ice cream."
2. Vanilla cream cookies "They're so good I don't even bother taking bites. I just put the whole cookie in my mouth."
3. Blocks of milk chocolate from Fresh Market "This is real, no-BS chocolate."
4. Lime Tostitos "They have a kick to them. I love to munch on them before dinner."
5. Fresh-squeezed lemonade "I keep it in my water bottle."

10 Questions with Dara Torres

Dara
Dara Torres explains her motivation to race: "I'm so freaking competitive it's unbelievable." (Photo courtesy of Toyota Motorsports)
The beautiful Dara Torres is the first four time Olympian in women's swimming.

Between Olympic years, Torres spends time as a catwalk model, journalist, and takes part in extreme sports. Now we can add high-speed driving to that list.

With her incredible natural beauty, Torres was the first athlete to appear among the supermodels in Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue in 1994. (Imagine a woman who looks as good as Cindy Crawford or Kathy Ireland without even having to wear makeup!) She has also appeared on TV for Extreme Step, The Next Step, Fox Sports Sunday, NHL Cool Shots, Tae Bo infomercials, Fitness Spokesperson for Self Magazine, and Turner Sports.

Dara
After retiring from competitive swimming in 1992, Dana decided to return to the Olympic lanes, and began training in 1999. After some work to her physique (she gained 10 kg in the space of a year) and a few words of advice from her coach Richard Quick, she lined up for competition in the hope of grabbing one of the Olympic berths for Sydney. During the American Olympic trials in Indianapolis she confirmed her return to the fray by registering the world's third-fastest time in the 100m butterfly (57.58 sec). At the Sydney games she competed in the 50m freestyle (winning the bronze), the 100m freestyle (bronze again) and the 100m butterfly (even another bronze), the 4x100m relay (gold), and the 4x100m medley (gold).

With no Olympics to compete in this Spring, Dara came to Long Beach, California, to race in the Toyota Pro/Celebrity race of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach in a 10-lap sprint to raise money for charity. SportsHollywood caught up with Dara at the celebrity practice at Willow Springs raceway in California on March 10, and asked a few questions.

TEN QUESTIONS

Dara
SportsHollywood: You were an Olympic athlete, how does this compare?

TORRES: I'm so friggin' competitive, It's unbelievable, Oh my gosh! You just figure that after the Olympics your competitiveness will mellow out, but not at all. I'm out there with these guys and everyone wants to beat everyone. It's different because it's a machine you're using to get across the finish line and with me (at the Olympics) it was just my body and that was it.

SportsHollywood: What kind of car do you drive every day?

TORRES: I don't have a car because I live in New York City, so the subway's my car.

SportsHollywood: So then how did you get interested in car racing?

TORRES: I did a feature on NASCAR in North Carolina a few years a go for a hockey show. I never was a race fan before, because when you watch them on TV they just go around and around. You really have such a better appreciation of it when you actually go to a race and see what the drivers do and how much energy and effort they out into it... and how scary it is! It's just amazing when you go --I absolutely love it now.

SportsHollywood: Rate the competition here: Who are your biggest threats? Everybody says you're going to win.

TORRES: They're crazy. I think there are two groups. There's the group learning to shift, then thee's the rest of us -- and it'll just be whoever's on that day.

SportsHollywood: How many speeding tickets have you gotten in the last year?

TORRES: None. I live in New York. I don't drive.

SportsHollywood: Yeah, but you swim over 55, don't you?

TORRES: I've been known to.

SportsHollywood: Name five parts of a car engine:

TORRES: Uuuuuuuummm... I have no idea. Is there a radiator on it? Belts? Metal? That's three. Then there's an oil thing and a water thing. There. What did I win?

SportsHollywood: How do you go to the bathroom in a racing suit?

TORRES: Good question. There are no flaps or anything. Hopefully the only stain I will have down there is this damn mustard stain I got at lunch.

SportsHollywood: Have you scared yourself out there on the track yet?

TORRES: I did the first day. I did a 360, and they pulled me into the pits -- and I'm like, "What?!?" They're like, "We just want to calm you down, make sure you're okay, make sure the car's okay." Then they let me out and I was goooone!

SportsHollywood: Who has the worst tattoo on the Olympic swim team:

TORRES: They got those after the competition, so I really didn't see them. There. Did you buy it?

SportsHollywood: No, but Kaitlin Sandeno tried the same evasion. Those tattoos must be uuugly! Anyway, do you ever expect anything in your life to be able to match your Olympic experience?

TORRES: Nope. Not a chance. That's just an experience that nothing will come close to, because you work all your life for it. And when you finally attain those goals, well, it's just something you have to experience.

SportsHollywood: Where do you keep your medals?

TORRES: The medals are under my bed. In fact the older ones I had to get polished in a jewelry store because they were tarnished.

Dara
2001 pole winner. (Photo courtesy of Toyota Motorsports)
SportsHollywood: Who should play you in The Dara Torres Story?

TORRES: Meg Ryan! Just kidding. But she's beautiful. (Josh Brolin gives her a look from nearbye) What?!?

SportsHollywood: Men's synchronized swimming: For or against? And if you're for it, should they wear makeup?

TORRES: I'm for it... but no makeup. I was swimming in Santa Clara, where the only guy is, and it was really hot that day, so all of the women were wearing two-pieces. I looked up quickly and thought, "Oh my God -- that woman doesn't have a top on!" He was just so graceful that he seemed part of the women. It's just an awesome sport.

SportsHollywood: Should any swimming performance that requires makeup and show tunes really be considered an Olympic sport?

TORRES: No!!!

SportsHollywood: Ever go for an entire day without remembering to remove your swim cap and goggles?

TORRES: No. Never. It cuts off your circulation!

SportsHollywood: Kaitlin did. Answer honestly: When I say the phrase, "Misty Hyman's butterfly stroke," does it sound to you like swimming analysis or a porno movie title?

TORRES: No comment.

SportsHollywood: So I guess with no car, you won't have any problems speeding on the way home?

TORRES: No, but what was really weird was after driving these cars, I got in a car yesterday and I felt like doing the same thing with the stick shift and going around the curves real fast, It wasn't a good thing! (Laughs)

Pro/Celeb

Torres Is Getting Older, but Swimming Faster
Marc Serota for The New York Times

Dara Torres training in Coral Springs, Fla. Torres, a nine-time Olympic medalist, set the U.S. record for the 50-meter freestyle this summer.

By KAREN CROUSE
Published: November 18, 2007

Dara Torres, the fastest female swimmer in America, plunged toward the bottom of the pool, like a child scavenging for coins. She came up for a breath, grinning. The lanes next to hers pulsed with swimmers pushing themselves through 100- and 200-meter timed sprints, but Torres was under orders from her coach to rest, the better to let her 40-year-old body recover.

Dara Torres’s regular training regimen has her spending more time out of the pool than in it.

It was a Friday, the end of another unorthodox training week for Torres, a four-time Olympian who is doing less in the water to wring more results out of a swimming career that was supposed to have run dry by now.

Her day had begun just after dawn in the weight room, where she worked her legs until they quivered and her arms until they ached — without pressing a weight or lifting a dumbbell. The 90-minute workout was the first leg of her training triathlon. It was followed by 90 minutes of swimming and 60 minutes of stretching.

Torres’s training is cutting edge so that her personal pharmacy does not have to be. A nine-time Olympic medalist who made her first Olympic team in 1984, Torres is at a short-course meet in Berlin this weekend, representing the United States in the freestyle sprints in her last competition of the year. She has the 2008 Summer Games in her sights after winning the 100 freestyle and setting a United States record in the 50 freestyle at the national championships in August.

In a one-lap race, where personal bests are typically whittled by hundredths of a second, Torres’s progression is astounding. Her age adds to the intrigue. What she is doing would be akin to Roger Clemens’s throwing a fastball harder now, at 45, than he did 20 years ago or goaltender Ed Belfour’s coming out of retirement at 42 to post his career-best save percentage.

“I think what Dara’s doing is fantastic,” said Gary Hall Sr., who was 25 and considered ancient — his teammates nicknamed him the Old Man and the Sea — when he swam in his third Olympics in 1976. “It proves that we really don’t know what the peak age of performance is.”

For every person who marvels at Torres’s motor, there are others who wonder what kind of fuel she is putting in her tank. It is the nature of a sport that lost its squeaky-clean image long ago. Beginning in the late 1960s with East Germany’s state-supported doping program and continuing through the 1990s with a rash of failed drug tests by the Chinese, the pool has turned into a breeding ground for skeptics, suspicion and cynicism.

“Behind my back people are saying I must be using something,” Torres said. “I know it. I hear it.”

She has been tested for performance-enhancing drugs more than half a dozen times this year, and the results have been negative, said Mark Schubert, the national team’s coach and general manager. At Torres’s request, her blood is being drawn regularly so she can be tested for illegal substances like human growth hormone that cannot be detected in urine.

“My attitude is, bring it on,” Torres said. “Do what you have to do to prove I’m clean.”

Torres has ridden the wave of popular opinion from crest to crash. In 1994, she was the first athlete to appear alongside supermodels in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, her face instantly recognizable as belonging to the golden girl who graced the American 4x100 freestyle relay team that beat the big, bad East Germans at the 1992 Olympics and bettered their world record.

In 2000, when she returned to the sport after a six-year layoff and won five medals at the Sydney Olympics, Torres became the face of innuendo, her success grist for the rumor mill. The rumors troubled Michael Lohberg, the coach at Coral Springs Swim Club in Florida. While working with West German swimmers in the 1980s, Lohberg saw how destructive steroid use could be to the health of the users and the emotional well-being of their pursuers who were clean.

One swimmer he worked with was Birgit Schulz, an individual medley specialist who later became his wife. At the 1986 world championships, Schulz placed sixth in the 200 individual medley. Four of the finishers ahead of her were from Eastern bloc nations where steroid use was considered rampant.

Seeing her frustration crystallized Lohberg’s stance on performance-enhancing drugs: he did not condone them and would not coach anyone who used them.

In late 2005, while pregnant with her first child, Torres began swimming three or four times a week at the Coral Springs Aquatic Complex, where Lohberg’s club is based. After giving birth to her daughter, Tessa Grace, in April 2006, Torres raced in two masters meets and posted times that were competitive with the world’s elite swimmers, emboldening her to try another comeback. She asked Lohberg if he would coach her, and he sat her down to have The Talk.
Skip to next paragraph
Marc Serota for The New York Times

Torres works out in the pool five times a week, about half as often as when she won a gold at the 1984 Games.

He asked Torres if she had ever used performance-enhancing drugs. “For myself, I needed to have this clear before we started anything,” Lohberg said.

Torres recalled, “I said, ‘Why do you ask that?’ and he said, ‘Because that’s what everybody was talking about on the deck in Sydney.’”

She assured Lohberg that she would never use drugs. After they began working together, he saw no reason to doubt her.

“Technically, she’s brilliant,” Lohberg said.

“And Dara wants to be perfect,” he added. “She’s very conscientious.”

People who know her say it is ludicrous to suspect Torres of doping. If she is guilty of anything, her friends say, it is of being a compulsive exerciser.

“I don’t think she has ever been out of shape a day in her life,” said Schubert, who coached Torres in the late 1980s. “I think that’s what makes this possible and conceivable.”

At the Olympic trials next June in Omaha, dozens will compete for two berths in Torres’s best events, the 50 and 100 freestyles. When Torres won her 14th and 15th national titles this summer, she became a feel-good story for baby boomers and a bad omen for their freestyle-sprinting progeny.

Rumors that she is doping are hurtful, Torres said, “but in another way it’s sort of a compliment.” It tells her that younger competitors perceive her not as a relic but as a real threat.

Torres works in the water five times a week, down from 10 to 12 water workouts in her teens and 20s.

“My body definitely takes longer to recover,” she said. “I have my good days when I feel like I’m 20, and then I have my days when I can’t lift my arms out of the water.”

The cost of being a middle-age champion can be steep, but she can afford it. Torres enlisted Bloomberg L.P., Toyota and Speedo as sponsors to help defray her training expenses. She estimated that she would spend about $100,000 this year on her support staff.

In addition to Lohberg, Torres employs a sprint coach, Chris Jackson; a strength and conditioning coach, Andy O’Brien, who also oversees her diet; two full-time personal stretchers, Steve Sierra and Anne Tierney; a physical therapist; a masseuse; and a nanny. She also leans heavily on her boyfriend, David Hoffman, an obstetrician who is Tessa’s father.

Most days, Sierra and Tierney are waiting for Torres at her suburban Fort Lauderdale home when she is finished swimming. They twist and pull her torso and limbs in a vigorous resistance stretching routine that eases her body’s recovery by flushing out toxins and lactic acid.

“People can say I’m on drugs or whatever, but they are really my secret weapon,” Torres said, referring to Sierra’s and Tierney’s torturous routine.

O’Brien, who is on the staff of the N.H.L.’s Florida Panthers, said, “Dara’s really gone a step ahead of other athletes in terms of taking care of her body.”

He began working with Torres last November, introducing her to an ever-evolving regimen that encompasses Swiss balls, medicine balls, bands and resistance cables. The goal of her four 90-minute strength sessions each week is to stimulate her nervous system and strengthen her core muscles through a variety of multijoint movements.

The results have been striking. Torres’s muscles have grown longer and leaner, with the exception of those in her back and shoulders, which have thickened. She carries 150 pounds on her 6-foot frame, down from 160 in 2000. Her reaction time off the blocks has improved, and she is more efficient in the water.

“Over all, she got a lot fitter,” Lohberg said, adding, “and she’s more balanced in the water.”

One of O’Brien’s longtime clients is Sidney Crosby, the Pittsburgh Penguins’ star center. For all their differences, the 20-year-old Crosby and Torres are remarkably alike, O’Brien said. Crosby becomes nervous when he is given a new exercise or task to complete because he does not want to fail.

“Dara’s the same way,” O’Brien said as he watched her complete a drill on the Swiss ball. “Even if it’s just her and a Swiss ball, there’s almost a little nervous energy before she tries something new.”

He added, “Dara reminds me of the student who’s worried she’s going to fail the test and then gets a 100.”

Days before leaving for Berlin, Torres asked Lohberg to critique her flip turn. Never mind that she has done hundreds of thousands of turns over the years. In Torres’s mind, there is always room for improvement. Yesterday in Berlin, she twice lowered the United States record in the 50 freestyle on a course that is rarely contested here, venturing further into uncharted waters.

A Swimmer of a Certain Age

2008-08-05T01:13:00.000-07:00

Relay gold, Sydney: Torres, 33, is third from left. Next podium: Beijing at 41?

By ELIZABETH WEIL
Published: June 29, 2008

NEAR THE WARM-UP POOL AT THE Missouri Grand Prix swim meet, in Columbia, a crop of Olympic hopefuls lolled around in practice suits and towels on a Saturday morning in February. Fully clothed among them stood some relics of Olympics past: Scott Goldblatt, who won a gold medal in the 2004 Games, wore an aqua sport coat and a striped tie and was doing on-air commentary for Swimnetwork.com; Mel Stewart, who won two golds and a bronze in 1992, wore the same goofy get-up, working as Goldblatt’s sidekick. Meanwhile, Dara Torres, who won the first of her nine Olympic medals in 1984, a year before Michael Phelps was born, stripped off her baggy T-shirt and sweat pants, revealing a breathtaking body in a magenta Speedo. She pulled on a cap marked with her initials and prepared to swim. Torres is now 41 and the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Tessa Grace. She broke her first of three world records in 1982, at 14, and she has retired from swimming and come back three times, her latest effort built on an obsessive attention to her aging body.

Torres’s retinue includes a head coach, a sprint coach, a strength coach, two stretchers, two masseuses, a chiropractor and a nanny, at the cost of at least $100,000 per year. At the Olympic trials, this week, in Omaha, Neb., she’s expected to swim fast enough to make her fifth Olympic team. If she does, she’ll be the first American swimmer to compete in five Olympics (despite sitting out 1996 and 2004). She’ll also be oldest female swimmer in the history of the Olympic games.

Stewart walked over to give Torres a hug, but he stopped himself short. “I don’t want to mess anything up,” he said, laughing, patting the air around her torso.

Last November in Germany, Torres clocked 23.82 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle short course, breaking the American record and making her one of only five women to swim the event in less than 24 seconds. The day after she got home to South Florida, she had a bone spur shaved out of her shoulder. In early January, she had another operation, to deal with a torn meniscus in her knee. Now just five weeks after the latest procedure, Torres looked great. She flashed her wide-open smile at Stewart and dove in the pool. Stewart retreated to Goldblatt and shrugged. “Hey, we’d all be in there if we could be winning,” he said.

As Torres swam, her nearly six-foot frame stretching out across the water, her head coach, Michael Lohberg, checked her hip rotation and distance per stroke, while Torres’s two stretchers, who moved from Connecticut to Florida to aid in her training, looked for small asymmetries and tensions in her body. Torres treats her body the way a motorhead treats his car: obsessively tuning it up, sparing no expense. If you study Torres’s face and neck, you can see some faint signs of her 40-plus years. But barring the 13 small surgical incisions on her knees, elbows, shoulders, hands and fingers, her physique looks nearly flawless. Rowdy Gaines, who in 1996 was the oldest swimmer (at 35) to qualify for the American Olympic swimming trials, recently described Torres to me as having “the perfect swimmer’s body; really, it’s the picture they’d draw in the dictionary.” Her posture is gangly, loose and cocky, like a teenage boy’s. Her proportions more closely resemble the long inverted triangle of Phelps — broad shoulders, long torso, slim hips, long arms — than the more tightly muscled curves of two of the biggest names in American women’s swimming, Natalie Coughlin and Katie Hoff.

Torres is known for being both competitive and compulsive. Each year, on her mother’s birthday, she tries to beat her siblings to be the first to call. In February, when a group of swimmers appeared on “The Today Show” to promote the new Speedo LZR suit, a Speedo rep offered $100 to the first athlete to say www.speedo.com; guess who won the money? Torres’s partner, David Hoffman, a reproductive endocrinologist, who is Tessa’s father, describes Torres’s personality as “not type A. She’s type A + +.” As if to explain, one evening, over dinner with Torres, her mother and me, Hoffman mentioned how challenging it can be to do any kind of physical exercise with Torres. “When we go on bike rides, she’s gone,” Hoffman said.

“That’s not true!” Torres objected. “I wait for you!”

Hoffman raised his eyebrows, resting his case.

After her swim, Torres returned to her hotel to eat lunch, nap and tear two LZR swimsuits worth $1,000 — Speedo failed to send Torres’s size, 27 long, and suggested she squeeze into 26 regular. Then she headed back to the aquatic center in the late afternoon. Gone was the morning’s big smile. Torres was now 149 pounds of focus. Her body kept warm in a knit cap and Ugg boots, she lay on a yoga mat in the gymnasium, readying herself for the preliminaries of the 50-meter freestyle. Most swimmers prep for races by pinwheeling their arms and trying to relax. For Torres, the chore is far more elaborate, as her two stretchers work in tandem to contort and flex her body, in a 20-minute preswim version of the two-hour sequence they do three times a week at her home.

Swimmers refer to the 50-meter freestyle as “the splash and dash.” You dive, hit the water, go all out for about 20 seconds and then reach for the wall. In the preliminaries, Torres streaked down the pool in 24.89 seconds, placing second behind the 22-year-old Kara Lynn Joyce. She was pleased with her performance.

The next morning, back at the aquatic center for the finals, Torres appeared more interior. As her stretchers made last-minute adjustments — during competitions they stretch her five times a day — she stared at the ceiling, listening to her iPod. Up on the blocks, Torres looked taller and fitter than the seven other women, who were between 12 and 20 years her junior. Torres dried her block with a towel, bent down to start and this time touched the wall in 24.85 seconds, just ahead of Natalie Coughlin and again behind Joyce.

Within minutes, the three women stood on a podium. A college kid hung a silver medal around Torres’s neck.

“Can I see it?” a high-school swimmer asked Torres after she stepped down.

Torres does not relish coming in second. “Sure,” she said. “You can have it.”

TORRES LOVES TO WIN, but not as much as she hates to lose. Growing up in Beverly Hills, the fifth of six children and the older of two girls, Torres started following her brothers to swim practice at the local Y.M.C.A. at age 7 and later joined the Culver City swim team. As a kid, Torres didn’t have much of a work ethic, but she did do whatever it took to come in first. Torres’s mother, Marylu Kauder, a former model, told me that one of her earliest memories of her daughter swimming was watching Torres during practice swim halfway across the pool and then stop and turn around so she could beat her teammates back to the wall. Torres lived a privileged life — her childhood home had 10 bathrooms. Still, when she broke the world record in the 50-meter freestyle, at 14, the achievement didn’t seem to impress or surprise anyone much in the Torres household. As Torres recalls, her brothers said, “Congratulations, whatever.” Torres’s own response wasn’t far more pronounced: “Someone told me I was the fastest in the world, and I thought, O.K., that’s neat. But those things really don’t stay with me.”

During her junior year in high school, Torres moved down to Mission Viejo, Calif., to train for the 1984 Olympics with Mark Schubert, who was coaching one of the best teams in the country and who is now the head coach of the U.S.A. Swimming National Team. “There are some athletes who love to train but are afraid to race,” Schubert explained to me. “In high school Dara was the opposite. I wouldn’t say she loved to train. But when it was swim-meet time, that’s when she’d really shine.” Despite this, the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles did not go as planned for Torres. At one point, she recalls, she peeked out to the pool from the athletes’ tent because she wanted to see her friend Rowdy Gaines swim. “I remember lifting up the bottom and seeing 17,000 people and I just freaked out. I got hot, I had to go to the nurse’s station, they were putting ice packs on me.” Torres swam so poorly in the preliminaries of the 4X100-meter freestyle relay (the 50-meter freestyle did not become an Olympic event until 1988) that the coaches even considered whether they could substitute a veteran for Torres in the finals that evening. But that afternoon a team captain took Torres back to the dorm to watch soap operas and managed to calm her down. In the finals, Torres swam her leg in 55.92 seconds, a personal best, and the team won a gold medal. Still, Torres describes those Olympics as “just scary.”

At the University of Florida, which Torres started attending in 1985, practice became a much more prominent and difficult part of her life. The coaches routinely weighed all the swimmers, and if a swimmer didn’t make weight, he or she had to swim extra morning workouts. At Florida, Torres earned 28 N.C.A.A. all-American swimming awards, the maximum number possible during a college career, but she also became bulimic, forcing herself to throw up to make weight. In the summer of 1988, between her junior and senior years of college, Torres was ranked No. 1 in the world in the 100-meter freestyle. But as she puts it, she “just couldn’t get it together” in Seoul at the 1988 Olympics, Torres placed seventh in the 100-meter freestyle; again she won medals only in relays, a silver and a bronze. Near the end of the games, Torres overheard the East German swimmer Kristin Otto, who won gold medals in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle, tell a reporter, “I thought I’d have more competition out of Dara Torres.” “That was a knife in my back and my heart,” Torres told me.

Once her college career ended, Torres decided to retire. But before long she felt the urge to compete again and was elected an Olympic team captain for the 1992 games in Barcelona. With her bulimia in check, she won a gold in a freestyle relay, yet it was her only event. “I would say 1992 was less than stellar by her standards,” Schubert told me, adding sympathetically, “I don’t ever remember her being good enough for her.” Torres had no individual medals to her name, and her growing collection of relay medals presented a complicated prize. She kept them under her bed in her apartment in New York, where, she told me, they turned black with tarnish.

After 1992, Torres lived what appeared to be a glamorous life. She became the first athlete model in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, married and divorced Jeff Gowen, a sports producer, kept fit running and cycling in Central Park and playing basketball at the Reebok gym. But in the spring of 1999, despite not having been in a pool, except to cool down, in seven years, Torres decided she wanted to compete in the 2000 games and moved to California to train. After only five months, Torres’s time in the 50-meter freestyle was 0.3 seconds faster than the world record she set in that event more than 15 years earlier. In Sydney in 2000, Torres, then 33, won three individual Olympic medals — bronzes in the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter freestyle and 100-meter butterfly. She won two gold medals in relays as well. Though she instantly missed the intensity of training for the Olympics — she told me she cried on the way to the required urine test after her last race, sad that it was over and unsure what to do with her life — she came home and again retired. “I felt like I really didn’t have anything else to prove to myself,” she told me. “Plus, I thought 33 was really old. And I was tired.”

Over the next five years, Torres married and divorced again, this time an Israeli surgeon named Itzhak Shasha, and was inducted in the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. (Torres’s father, Edward Torres, a real-estate developer, was Jewish, and she converted before marrying Shasha.) She also became the first woman to win the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach car race; when asked to explain why she entered the event, she replied, “I’m so freaking competitive it’s unbelievable.” Then, in the fall of 2005, after struggling for years to have a baby, Torres finally became pregnant with Tessa. At the time, she began swimming again for exercise, because, she says, she had terrible morning sickness and she’d “rather throw up in the pool gutter than next to the StairMaster.” But predictably, Torres soon found herself racing “whoever the middle-aged guy happened to be in the next lane,” even when she was noticeably pregnant. Three and a half months postpartum, she raced at the Masters World Championships. Fifteen minutes after nursing Tessa in the bathroom, she swam the first leg of the 50-meter freestyle relay in 25.98 seconds — fast enough to qualify for this week’s Olympic trials.

A WEEK AFTER THE MISSOURI GRAND PRIX, in the muggy South Florida haze, Torres rolled up to the Coral Springs Swim Club at 7:45 a.m. for an 8:00 practice, because, as she explained in a text message: “. . . hate getting there last! You’d think I would have grown out of that, but I still hate anything to do with being last!!”

As a swimmer of a certain age, Torres takes much longer to recover between workouts. In college she swam 10 practices a week, for a total of about 65,000 meters. Now she swims five, totaling around 25,000 meters. In the water, she does the same workouts as the other sprinters on her team — timed sets, kicking and drills — and she dispatches each with her signature flawless technique and the happy-to-be-there enthusiasm of a woman who was supposed to have hung up her Speedo many years ago. “Isn’t he nice to look at?” Torres whispered to me, cocking her head toward her training partner, the 6-foot-4, well-muscled, 28-year-old Bulgarian Ray Antonov. At the end of practice they kissed each other four times on the cheek. “It’s a Bulgarian thing,” Torres said, laughing.

Torres’s innovations for keeping her body in top shape as she advances deeper into middle age are almost entirely out of the pool. In Florida, after her two-hour water workout, Torres changed into a black workout top and shorts and met her strength coach, Andy O’Brien, in the gym. Over the past year and a half, O’Brien, who is also the strength coach of the Florida Panthers hockey team, has switched Torres’s focus away from heavy, static weightlifting and geared her training toward balanced, dynamic exercises that stimulate her central nervous system. “The idea is not to isolate muscle groups but to get muscles contracting together in the right sequences,” O’Brien explains. Weight training, he notes, grew out of bodybuilding, and that low-rep high-weight tradition is ill suited for a sprinter since a body comprised of big muscles that have been trained to produce force only individually wastes considerable energy trying to move. O’Brien says speed derives from highly coordinated movements and fluid timing. Under his tutelage Torres is 12 pounds lighter, stronger and more cut than she was in 2000. Torres told me that it took her head coach, Lohberg, a little while to embrace O’Brien’s program, but she says, “I’m swimming really fast now, so he can’t complain.”

Torres does her weight training for 60 to 90 minutes, four times a week. On this day, O’Brien coached Torres through a series of exercises that she did while lying on a large exercise ball — lifting weights, doing crunches with weights behind her head. She also performed cross-body pulls with another large ball in her arms. Throughout, O’Brien kept his eyes on Torres’s shoulders and upper back (and several of the young men on the team kept their eyes on O’Brien, unable to afford his services themselves but eager to see what they could learn). Nearly everyone in Torres’s orbit is in awe of her body — its beauty, its strength, its form. “Look at the way her scapula is traveling!” O’Brien enthused, noting the place where she just had an operation. “Dara repairs 10 times faster than most athletes. Considering her age and the length of time she’s been training, it’s pretty amazing.”

After grabbing a steak salad for lunch, Torres drove home (fast) to be stretched. Torres puts as much energy — and money — into her workout recovery as she does into her training. Nearly everybody I spoke to for this article struggled to find a way to say gracefully that Torres’s considerable financial resources — sponsorships from Toyota and Speedo; money she has earned from modeling, TV work and motivational speaking; plus a private sponsor for training expenses — are helping her gain speed. Torres books a massage three times a week and visits, as she needs to, a chiropractor, who works his bald head to a frothy sweat as he tries to stick his hand under her shoulder blade. This afternoon, however, she was getting her two-hour stretch. BlackBerry in hand, pink flower bolster from Tessa’s bed under her legs, Torres lay on her kitchen floor gossiping with her stretchers, as they used their bodies to guide her limbs into precise angles and knead knots and sometimes small pieces of scar tissue out of her muscles.

“Dara and I haven’t seen each other in like 10 hours, so we have to catch up,” Anne Tierney, one of the stretchers, explained as she sat on a chair near Torres’s head. Her partner, Steve Sierra, sat on a chair near Torres’s side, and the two proceeded to “mash,” or massage Torres’s shoulders and legs with their feet — sometimes standing on her body — so their hands wouldn’t tire and they could apply more force. After 45 minutes, they began Torres’s resistance-stretching sequence, a series of maneuvers that looks like a cross between a yoga class, a massage and a Cirque du Soleil performance. The concept behind resistance stretching is that muscles can gain more flexibility if they’re contracted and stretched at the same time. At one point Torres rolled onto her stomach, tucking one leg underneath her chest (in what yogis call pigeon pose). Then Tierney leaned her torso against Torres’s slightly bent back leg, pushing it toward Torres’s glutes, as Torres worked to overcome Tierney’s force and straighten out that leg. Later, Torres moved up onto a massage table and Tierney and Sierra worked on her tensor fascia latae, a muscle that starts on the outside of hip and extends down the leg. Sierra used his hands and shoulders to rotate Torres’s thigh externally; Tierney stood at the foot of the table, pulling outward on Torres’s calf near the ankle.

Torres calls resistance stretching her “secret weapon.” Bob Cooley, who invented the discipline, describes it in less-modest terms. According to Cooley, over a two-week period in 1999, his flexibility system turned Torres “from being an alternate on the relay team to the fastest swimmer in America.” The secret to Torres’s speed, Cooley says, is that his technique not only makes her muscles more flexible but also increases their ability to shorten more completely, and when muscles shorten more completely, they produce greater power and speed. “What do race-car drivers do when they want to go faster?” Cooley asks. “They don’t spend more hours driving around the track. They increase the biomechanics of the car. And that’s what resistance flexibility is doing for Dara — increasing her biomechanics.”

Moments from the end of Torres’s workday — her swim workout, her gym workout and her two-hour stretching session nearly complete — Tessa ran into the kitchen, shouting, “Mama!” The toddler clearly takes after her mom: even at age 2, she’s working on driving her plastic car between the Mini Cooper and the Lexus S.U.V. in the garage, while standing up. Tessa distracted herself in the living room full of toys while Sierra finished with Torres, first working his fingers under her rib cage, a painful technique that, unexpectedly, helps with shoulder rotation, and then pressing very firmly with the heels of his hands on Torres’s solar plexus, as if doing CPR. None of this is comfortable — I had the distinct pleasure of being stretched by Tierney and Sierra myself — but Torres has a very high threshold for pain and the willingness to endure it.

“O.K., Tessie!” Torres finally yelled, standing up from the table and sliding on her flip-flops. “Outside? Race ya!”

UPON HEARING THAT TORRES is likely to make the Olympic team at age 41, many people have the same question: How is this possible? Kinesiologists counter with a different query: Why are you so surprised? “Dara is extremely impressive, but she’s not as unique as people think,” says Michael Joyner, a competitive athlete and anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic who writes scholarly papers about aging and sports. “Ted Williams hit .388 when he was 39. Jack Foster did very well in the Olympic marathon when he was 40. Karl Malone earned a triple-double in an N.B.A. game at 40. Jeannie Longo won a French time-trial championship in cycling at age 47.” Torres’s events — short swims — are also well suited to competitors of advanced age. Compared to, say, running, swimming is more technique-intensive and produces fewer injuries. Sprints are also kinder to older athletes, in that strength falls off more gradually than aerobic power. In April, at 37, Mark Foster, a freestyle sprinter in England, came out of retirement and earned a spot, for the fifth time, on the British Olympic swim team. “For those of us who pay attention to this stuff,” Joyner said, “Dara’s performance is unusual but not totally unexpected.”

So why do we assume a middle-aged swimmer must be all washed up? Because for nonelite athletes, sporting achievements fall off precipitously with age. Body composition changes toward more fat and less muscle. Strength and aerobic capacity decrease as well. But a primary reason that athletic performance degrades in adulthood is changes in priorities. People tend to devote more time and energy to jobs and families than to sports. Even committed athletes downgrade their workout goals from achieving personal bests to staying in shape. Academics refer to this reduction in physical activity as hypokinesis. The phenomenon is not limited to humans. A 1985 study showed that rats with unlimited access to running wheels exercised less as they aged. “But look at people who maintain activity levels,” says Joel Stager, a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University. “It’s a different story! A lot of what we assume is aging is just progressive hypokinesis. How many people at Dara’s age have maintained their training consistently? I’m going to say there are very, very few.”

Even childbirth needn’t be a sports-career killer. In 1972, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, E. Zaharieva published a study of 13 women who were pregnant and then competed in the 1964 Olympic Games. Most resumed serious training between three and six months after giving birth. All said, Zaharieva wrote, “they became stronger, had greater stamina and were more balanced in every way after having a child.” Last September, Lindsay Davenport was back on the pro tennis tour and winning just three months after giving birth, while in November, Paula Radcliffe won the New York City Marathon less than 10 months after having a baby.

So how long can peak athletic performance last? Hirofumi Tanaka, the director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, found that both elite and nonelite runners and swimmers could maintain personal bests until age 35, after which performance declined in a gradual, linear fashion until about age 50 to 60 for runners and 70 for swimmers. Deterioration was rapid from there. Tanaka also found that swimmers experienced more modest declines than runners and that swim sprinters, like Torres, experienced the smallest declines of all. At Yale University, Ray Fair, a runner and an economist, crunched statistics on aging and peak athletic performance and created what he calls the Fair Model. The model provides a table of coefficients that enable an athlete to take a personal-best time and compute how long he or she should expect to take to complete that same event at a specific point later in life (assuming he or she has continued to train at the same level). According to the Fair Model, a woman who swam a personal best 24.63 seconds in the 50-meter freestyle at or before age 35 should expect to clock 25.37 seconds at age 41. “I am struck by how small the deterioration rates are,” Fair wrote in a paper titled “How Fast Do Old Men Slow Down?” “It may be that societies have been too pessimistic about losses from aging for individuals who stay healthy and fit.”

Historically, the economics of swimming have also contributed to the preponderance of young champions. Little sponsorship money existed for swimmers until about 10 years ago, which tended to mean that once a swimmer graduated from college, the gig was up — it was time to get a job. But now Speedo and TYR, among other companies in the swimming business, make it possible for elite American swimmers to train full time and continue to be competitive well into their 20s and 30s. This can’t fully counteract “black-line fatigue” — burnout from spending too many hours staring at the bottom of a pool; Phelps insists he’s retiring at age 30 — but the money is pulling elite swimmers’ ages up. Economists who study sports, like Raymond Sauer at Clemson University, note that if athletes are economically motivated enough — if, says Sauer, they have “low wealth and poor income-earning alternatives”— they can stay in sports until a quite advanced age. Stager, at Indiana University, notes that the average age of competitors at national swimming championships increased from 16 in the 1960s to 20 in 2004.

Despite evidence that older athletes can remain competitive longer than many imagine, Torres’s achievements have provoked consistent rumors that she must be doping. These began at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and have been so persistent in Torres’s latest comeback that last September Torres flew to Colorado Springs, Colo., to meet with Travis T. Tygart, C.E.O. of the United States Anti-Doping Agency. Tygart acknowledges that since the high-profile steroid scandals involving Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, the onus has fallen on athletes to prove that they’re clean, and that that’s nearly impossible to do. “Can U.S.A.D.A. give Dara or some other athlete the stamp of cleanliness?” Tygart asks. “No, the science isn’t there yet.” Every athlete who is training for the Olympics is subject to testing at any time, in or out of competition. But Tygart was able to offer Torres the chance to volunteer for a pilot program that tests more broadly blood and urine for signs of doping and presumably will catch a much higher percentage of dirty athletes. Torres said yes. (Jones, among others, passed less-sophisticated U.S.A.D.A. tests while using performance-enhancing drugs.) Tygart has not yet released any data on Torres’s testing. But he says the fact she volunteered is significant. “I think a dirty athlete would be crazy to volunteer for this program,” he told me. He was also heartened that Torres did not ask how the pilot’s protocols worked or what drugs they would be looking for.

EVEN TORRES KNOWS that if she manages to earn one of the two spots available on the Olympic team for the 50-meter freestyle, or one of the six available on the 100-meter freestyle (which includes a relay team), this will be her last trip to the Games. Mark Schubert, the national team’s coach in 1984, told me he’s sure Torres will hold master’s swimming records in freestyle sprints at age 50 and 60 and 70. But — let’s face it — compared with the Olympics, even the Masters World Championship is a glorified losers’ round, and holding a master’s world record is hardly an exciting achievement for an athlete who hit the world stage just as she entered high school and who has nine Olympic medals to her name. Driving home one night from a sushi dinner, Torres’s partner, David Hoffman, admitted that he’ll be relieved when Torres emerges from her Olympic training tunnel. “We don’t spend as much time together,” he told me as he idled his car outside their home. “We can’t go on a vacation.” Torres had driven home separately with Tessa. Hoffman watched the swimmer standing in their driveway at dusk, her mind clearly turned toward getting Tessa to bed, so that she could get nine hours of sleep herself. “I can’t wait until this is over,” Hoffman sighed. “It’ll have been two years.”

Still, the next morning Torres rolled back up to the pool, chipper and early as usual. “Hey, Dara,” one of her teammates called, “I heard you were going up for ‘Dancing With the Stars’?”

“I can’t dance,” Torres laughed, dipping her goggles in the pool. “No way if I’m going to be the first one off!”

And with that, Torres grabbed her workout sheet, stuck it to the side of the pool and got down to business. The mood at practice was calm, and as Torres warmed up, her lean frame stretched out among the 16 other spectacular bodies, it was easy to forget that before last year nobody believed that a 41-year-old mother of a toddler, coming off a six-year hiatus, could swim this fast.

According to her coach, Michael Lohberg, Torres should feel less pressure than his other, younger swimmers. “What’s the worst thing that can happen to her?” he asks. “She goes home to her daughter and her partner. Her whole sense of self-worth doesn’t come down to tenths and hundredths of seconds in a pool.” But Torres doesn’t necessarily agree with that opinion. She takes seriously her new role: hero of the middle-aged. About an hour into the morning’s workout, all the swimmers gathered in the center of the pool for a much-loathed drill, vertical kicking. The task at hand was to hoist one’s torso out of the water, using only a flutter or dolphin kick, for 40 seconds, 12 times, with 35-second breaks between each rep. For the last 10 seconds of each vertical kick, the coach yelled, “Streamline,” meaning the swimmers, while still kicking, had to extend their arms straight overhead, one hand on top of the other.

At first Torres led good-natured griping among the swimmers. But after five kicks, the sets were done in silence, all of the athletes too exhausted and miserable to complain. The coach even stopped yelling, as his swimmers’ eyes were on the clock; everyone knew when to pop up and when to come back down. Yet each time, Torres rose to her vertical kick a second before everybody else, and there she was, rising out of the water, for a few moments longer at the end.

Investigation: Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear

2008-07-30T01:23:00.000-07:00

No thanks: An anti-Monsanto crop circle made by farmers and volunteers in the Philippines. By Melvyn Calderon/Greenpeace HO/A.P. Images.

Gary Rinehart clearly remembers the summer day in 2002 when the stranger walked in and issued his threat. Rinehart was behind the counter of the Square Deal, his “old-time country store,” as he calls it, on the fading town square of Eagleville, Missouri, a tiny farm community 100 miles north of Kansas City.
The Square Deal is a fixture in Eagleville, a place where farmers and townspeople can go for lightbulbs, greeting cards, hunting gear, ice cream, aspirin, and dozens of other small items without having to drive to a big-box store in Bethany, the county seat, 15 miles down Interstate 35.
Everyone knows Rinehart, who was born and raised in the area and runs one of Eagleville’s few surviving businesses. The stranger came up to the counter and asked for him by name.
“Well, that’s me,” said Rinehart.
As Rinehart would recall, the man began verbally attacking him, saying he had proof that Rinehart had planted Monsanto’s genetically modified (G.M.) soybeans in violation of the company’s patent. Better come clean and settle with Monsanto, Rinehart says the man told him—or face the consequences.
Rinehart was incredulous, listening to the words as puzzled customers and employees looked on. Like many others in rural America, Rinehart knew of Monsanto’s fierce reputation for enforcing its patents and suing anyone who allegedly violated them. But Rinehart wasn’t a farmer. He wasn’t a seed dealer. He hadn’t planted any seeds or sold any seeds. He owned a small—a really small—country store in a town of 350 people. He was angry that somebody could just barge into the store and embarrass him in front of everyone. “It made me and my business look bad,” he says. Rinehart says he told the intruder, “You got the wrong guy.”
When the stranger persisted, Rinehart showed him the door. On the way out the man kept making threats. Rinehart says he can’t remember the exact words, but they were to the effect of: “Monsanto is big. You can’t win. We will get you. You will pay.”
Scenes like this are playing out in many parts of rural America these days as Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers—anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the “seed police” and use words such as “Gestapo” and “Mafia” to describe their tactics.
When asked about these practices, Monsanto declined to comment specifically, other than to say that the company is simply protecting its patents. “Monsanto spends more than $2 million a day in research to identify, test, develop and bring to market innovative new seeds and technologies that benefit farmers,” Monsanto spokesman Darren Wallis wrote in an e-mailed letter to Vanity Fair. “One tool in protecting this investment is patenting our discoveries and, if necessary, legally defending those patents against those who might choose to infringe upon them.” Wallis said that, while the vast majority of farmers and seed dealers follow the licensing agreements, “a tiny fraction” do not, and that Monsanto is obligated to those who do abide by its rules to enforce its patent rights on those who “reap the benefits of the technology without paying for its use.” He said only a small number of cases ever go to trial.
Some compare Monsanto’s hard-line approach to Microsoft’s zealous efforts to protect its software from pirates. At least with Microsoft the buyer of a program can use it over and over again. But farmers who buy Monsanto’s seeds can’t even do that.
The Control of Nature
For centuries—millennia—farmers have saved seeds from season to season: they planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, then reclaimed and cleaned the seeds over the winter for re-planting the next spring. Monsanto has turned this ancient practice on its head.
Monsanto developed G.M. seeds that would resist its own herbicide, Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops. Monsanto then patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office had refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented. “It’s not like describing a widget,” says Joseph Mendelson III, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, which has tracked Monsanto’s activities in rural America for years.
Indeed not. But in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply. In its decision, the court extended patent law to cover “a live human-made microorganism.” In this case, the organism wasn’t even a seed. Rather, it was a Pseudomonas bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up oil spills. But the precedent was set, and Monsanto took advantage of it. Since the 1980s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Farmers who buy Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready seeds are required to sign an agreement promising not to save the seed produced after each harvest for re-planting, or to sell the seed to other farmers. This means that farmers must buy new seed every year. Those increased sales, coupled with ballooning sales of its Roundup weed killer, have been a bonanza for Monsanto.
This radical departure from age-old practice has created turmoil in farm country. Some farmers don’t fully understand that they aren’t supposed to save Monsanto’s seeds for next year’s planting. Others do, but ignore the stipulation rather than throw away a perfectly usable product. Still others say that they don’t use Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds, but seeds have been blown into their fields by wind or deposited by birds. It’s certainly easy for G.M. seeds to get mixed in with traditional varieties when seeds are cleaned by commercial dealers for re-planting. The seeds look identical; only a laboratory analysis can show the difference. Even if a farmer doesn’t buy G.M. seeds and doesn’t want them on his land, it’s a safe bet he’ll get a visit from Monsanto’s seed police if crops grown from G.M. seeds are discovered in his fields.
Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Yet in a little more than a decade, the company has sought to shed its polluted past and morph into something much different and more far-reaching—an “agricultural company” dedicated to making the world “a better place for future generations.” Still, more than one Web log claims to see similarities between Monsanto and the fictional company “U-North” in the movie Michael Clayton, an agribusiness giant accused in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit of selling an herbicide that causes cancer.

Monsanto brought false accusations against Gary Rinehart—shown here at his rural Missouri store. There has been no apology. Photographs by Kurt Markus.

Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds have transformed the company and are radically altering global agriculture. So far, the company has produced G.M. seeds for soybeans, corn, canola, and cotton. Many more products have been developed or are in the pipeline, including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. The company is also seeking to extend its reach into milk production by marketing an artificial growth hormone for cows that increases their output, and it is taking aggressive steps to put those who don’t want to use growth hormone at a commercial disadvantage.
Even as the company is pushing its G.M. agenda, Monsanto is buying up conventional-seed companies. In 2005, Monsanto paid $1.4 billion for Seminis, which controlled 40 percent of the U.S. market for lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetable and fruit seeds. Two weeks later it announced the acquisition of the country’s third-largest cottonseed company, Emergent Genetics, for $300 million. It’s estimated that Monsanto seeds now account for 90 percent of the U.S. production of soybeans, which are used in food products beyond counting. Monsanto’s acquisitions have fueled explosive growth, transforming the St. Louis–based corporation into the largest seed company in the world.
In Iraq, the groundwork has been laid to protect the patents of Monsanto and other G.M.-seed companies. One of L. Paul Bremer’s last acts as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority was an order stipulating that “farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties.” Monsanto has said that it has no interest in doing business in Iraq, but should the company change its mind, the American-style law is in place.
To be sure, more and more agricultural corporations and individual farmers are using Monsanto’s G.M. seeds. As recently as 1980, no genetically modified crops were grown in the U.S. In 2007, the total was 142 million acres planted. Worldwide, the figure was 282 million acres. Many farmers believe that G.M. seeds increase crop yields and save money. Another reason for their attraction is convenience. By using Roundup Ready soybean seeds, a farmer can spend less time tending to his fields. With Monsanto seeds, a farmer plants his crop, then treats it later with Roundup to kill weeds. That takes the place of labor-intensive weed control and plowing.
Monsanto portrays its move into G.M. seeds as a giant leap for mankind. But out in the American countryside, Monsanto’s no-holds-barred tactics have made it feared and loathed. Like it or not, farmers say, they have fewer and fewer choices in buying seeds.
And controlling the seeds is not some abstraction. Whoever provides the world’s seeds controls the world’s food supply.
Under Surveillance
After Monsanto’s investigator confronted Gary Rinehart, Monsanto filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Rinehart “knowingly, intentionally, and willfully” planted seeds “in violation of Monsanto’s patent rights.” The company’s complaint made it sound as if Monsanto had Rinehart dead to rights:
During the 2002 growing season, Investigator Jeffery Moore, through surveillance of Mr. Rinehart’s farm facility and farming operations, observed Defendant planting brown bag soybean seed. Mr. Moore observed the Defendant take the brown bag soybeans to a field, which was subsequently loaded into a grain drill and planted. Mr. Moore located two empty bags in the ditch in the public road right-of-way beside one of the fields planted by Rinehart, which contained some soybeans. Mr. Moore collected a small amount of soybeans left in the bags which Defendant had tossed into the public right-of way. These samples tested positive for Monsanto’s Roundup Ready technology.
Faced with a federal lawsuit, Rinehart had to hire a lawyer. Monsanto eventually realized that “Investigator Jeffery Moore” had targeted the wrong man, and dropped the suit. Rinehart later learned that the company had been secretly investigating farmers in his area. Rinehart never heard from Monsanto again: no letter of apology, no public concession that the company had made a terrible mistake, no offer to pay his attorney’s fees. “I don’t know how they get away with it,” he says. “If I tried to do something like that it would be bad news. I felt like I was in another country.”
Gary Rinehart is actually one of Monsanto’s luckier targets. Ever since commercial introduction of its G.M. seeds, in 1996, Monsanto has launched thousands of investigations and filed lawsuits against hundreds of farmers and seed dealers. In a 2007 report, the Center for Food Safety, in Washington, D.C., documented 112 such lawsuits, in 27 states.
Even more significant, in the Center’s opinion, are the numbers of farmers who settle because they don’t have the money or the time to fight Monsanto. “The number of cases filed is only the tip of the iceberg,” says Bill Freese, the Center’s science-policy analyst. Freese says he has been told of many cases in which Monsanto investigators showed up at a farmer’s house or confronted him in his fields, claiming he had violated the technology agreement and demanding to see his records. According to Freese, investigators will say, “Monsanto knows that you are saving Roundup Ready seeds, and if you don’t sign these information-release forms, Monsanto is going to come after you and take your farm or take you for all you’re worth.” Investigators will sometimes show a farmer a photo of himself coming out of a store, to let him know he is being followed.
Lawyers who have represented farmers sued by Monsanto say that intimidating actions like these are commonplace. Most give in and pay Monsanto some amount in damages; those who resist face the full force of Monsanto’s legal wrath.
Scorched-Earth Tactics
Pilot Grove, Missouri, population 750, sits in rolling farmland 150 miles west of St. Louis. The town has a grocery store, a bank, a bar, a nursing home, a funeral parlor, and a few other small businesses. There are no stoplights, but the town doesn’t need any. The little traffic it has comes from trucks on their way to and from the grain elevator on the edge of town. The elevator is owned by a local co-op, the Pilot Grove Cooperative Elevator, which buys soybeans and corn from farmers in the fall, then ships out the grain over the winter. The co-op has seven full-time employees and four computers.
In the fall of 2006, Monsanto trained its legal guns on Pilot Grove; ever since, its farmers have been drawn into a costly, disruptive legal battle against an opponent with limitless resources. Neither Pilot Grove nor Monsanto will discuss the case, but it is possible to piece together much of the story from documents filed as part of the litigation.
Monsanto began investigating soybean farmers in and around Pilot Grove several years ago. There is no indication as to what sparked the probe, but Monsanto periodically investigates farmers in soybean-growing regions such as this one in central Missouri. The company has a staff devoted to enforcing patents and litigating against farmers. To gather leads, the company maintains an 800 number and encourages farmers to inform on other farmers they think may be engaging in “seed piracy.”
Once Pilot Grove had been targeted, Monsanto sent private investigators into the area. Over a period of months, Monsanto’s investigators surreptitiously followed the co-op’s employees and customers and videotaped them in fields and going about other activities. At least 17 such surveillance videos were made, according to court records. The investigative work was outsourced to a St. Louis agency, McDowell & Associates. It was a McDowell investigator who erroneously fingered Gary Rinehart. In Pilot Grove, at least 11 McDowell investigators have worked the case, and Monsanto makes no bones about the extent of this effort: “Surveillance was conducted throughout the year by various investigators in the field,” according to court records. McDowell, like Monsanto, will not comment on the case.
Not long after investigators showed up in Pilot Grove, Monsanto subpoenaed the co-op’s records concerning seed and herbicide purchases and seed-cleaning operations. The co-op provided more than 800 pages of documents pertaining to dozens of farmers. Monsanto sued two farmers and negotiated settlements with more than 25 others it accused of seed piracy. But Monsanto’s legal assault had only begun. Although the co-op had provided voluminous records, Monsanto then sued it in federal court for patent infringement. Monsanto contended that by cleaning seeds—a service which it had provided for decades—the co-op was inducing farmers to violate Monsanto’s patents. In effect, Monsanto wanted the co-op to police its own customers.
In the majority of cases where Monsanto sues, or threatens to sue, farmers settle before going to trial. The cost and stress of litigating against a global corporation are just too great. But Pilot Grove wouldn’t cave—and ever since, Monsanto has been turning up the heat. The more the co-op has resisted, the more legal firepower Monsanto has aimed at it. Pilot Grove’s lawyer, Steven H. Schwartz, described Monsanto in a court filing as pursuing a “scorched earth tactic,” intent on “trying to drive the co-op into the ground.”
Even after Pilot Grove turned over thousands more pages of sales records going back five years, and covering virtually every one of its farmer customers, Monsanto wanted more—the right to inspect the co-op’s hard drives. When the co-op offered to provide an electronic version of any record, Monsanto demanded hands-on access to Pilot Grove’s in-house computers.
Monsanto next petitioned to make potential damages punitive—tripling the amount that Pilot Grove might have to pay if found guilty. After a judge denied that request, Monsanto expanded the scope of the pre-trial investigation by seeking to quadruple the number of depositions. “Monsanto is doing its best to make this case so expensive to defend that the Co-op will have no choice but to relent,” Pilot Grove’s lawyer said in a court filing.
With Pilot Grove still holding out for a trial, Monsanto now subpoenaed the records of more than 100 of the co-op’s customers. In a “You are Commanded … ” notice, the farmers were ordered to gather up five years of invoices, receipts, and all other papers relating to their soybean and herbicide purchases, and to have the documents delivered to a law office in St. Louis. Monsanto gave them two weeks to comply.
Whether Pilot Grove can continue to wage its legal battle remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, the case shows why Monsanto is so detested in farm country, even by those who buy its products. “I don’t know of a company that chooses to sue its own customer base,” says Joseph Mendelson, of the Center for Food Safety. “It’s a very bizarre business strategy.” But it’s one that Monsanto manages to get away with, because increasingly it’s the dominant vendor in town.
Chemicals? What Chemicals?
The Monsanto Company has never been one of America’s friendliest corporate citizens. Given Monsanto’s current dominance in the field of bioengineering, it’s worth looking at the company’s own DNA. The future of the company may lie in seeds, but the seeds of the company lie in chemicals. Communities around the world are still reaping the environmental consequences of Monsanto’s origins.
Monsanto was founded in 1901 by John Francis Queeny, a tough, cigar-smoking Irishman with a sixth-grade education. A buyer for a wholesale drug company, Queeny had an idea. But like a lot of employees with ideas, he found that his boss wouldn’t listen to him. So he went into business for himself on the side. Queeny was convinced there was money to be made manufacturing a substance called saccharin, an artificial sweetener then imported from Germany. He took $1,500 of his savings, borrowed another $3,500, and set up shop in a dingy warehouse near the St. Louis waterfront. With borrowed equipment and secondhand machines, he began producing saccharin for the U.S. market. He called the company the Monsanto Chemical Works, Monsanto being his wife’s maiden name.
The German cartel that controlled the market for saccharin wasn’t pleased, and cut the price from $4.50 to $1 a pound to try to force Queeny out of business. The young company faced other challenges. Questions arose about the safety of saccharin, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture even tried to ban it. Fortunately for Queeny, he wasn’t up against opponents as aggressive and litigious as the Monsanto of today. His persistence and the loyalty of one steady customer kept the company afloat. That steady customer was a new company in Georgia named Coca-Cola.
Monsanto added more and more products—vanillin, caffeine, and drugs used as sedatives and laxatives. In 1917, Monsanto began making aspirin, and soon became the largest maker worldwide. During World War I, cut off from imported European chemicals, Monsanto was forced to manufacture its own, and its position as a leading force in the chemical industry was assured.
After Queeny was diagnosed with cancer, in the late 1920s, his only son, Edgar, became president. Where the father had been a classic entrepreneur, Edgar Monsanto Queeny was an empire builder with a grand vision. It was Edgar—shrewd, daring, and intuitive (“He can see around the next corner,” his secretary once said)—who built Monsanto into a global powerhouse. Under Edgar Queeny and his successors, Monsanto extended its reach into a phenomenal number of products: plastics, resins, rubber goods, fuel additives, artificial caffeine, industrial fluids, vinyl siding, dishwasher detergent, anti-freeze, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides. Its safety glass protects the U.S. Constitution and the Mona Lisa. Its synthetic fibers are the basis of Astroturf.
During the 1970s, the company shifted more and more resources into biotechnology. In 1981 it created a molecular-biology group for research in plant genetics. The next year, Monsanto scientists hit gold: they became the first to genetically modify a plant cell. “It will now be possible to introduce virtually any gene into plant cells with the ultimate goal of improving crop productivity,” said Ernest Jaworski, director of Monsanto’s Biological Sciences Program.
Over the next few years, scientists working mainly in the company’s vast new Life Sciences Research Center, 25 miles west of St. Louis, developed one genetically modified product after another—cotton, soybeans, corn, canola. From the start, G.M. seeds were controversial with the public as well as with some farmers and European consumers. Monsanto has sought to portray G.M. seeds as a panacea, a way to alleviate poverty and feed the hungry. Robert Shapiro, Monsanto’s president during the 1990s, once called G.M. seeds “the single most successful introduction of technology in the history of agriculture, including the plow.”
By the late 1990s, Monsanto, having rebranded itself into a “life sciences” company, had spun off its chemical and fibers operations into a new company called Solutia. After an additional reorganization, Monsanto re-incorporated in 2002 and officially declared itself an “agricultural company.”
In its company literature, Monsanto now refers to itself disingenuously as a “relatively new company” whose primary goal is helping “farmers around the world in their mission to feed, clothe, and fuel” a growing planet. In its list of corporate milestones, all but a handful are from the recent era. As for the company’s early history, the decades when it grew into an industrial powerhouse now held potentially responsible for more than 50 Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites—none of that is mentioned. It’s as though the original Monsanto, the company that long had the word “chemical” as part of its name, never existed. One of the benefits of doing this, as the company does not point out, was to channel the bulk of the growing backlog of chemical lawsuits and liabilities onto Solutia, keeping the Monsanto brand pure.
But Monsanto’s past, especially its environmental legacy, is very much with us. For many years Monsanto produced two of the most toxic substances ever known— polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, and dioxin. Monsanto no longer produces either, but the places where it did are still struggling with the aftermath, and probably always will be.
“Systemic Intoxication”
Twelve miles downriver from Charleston, West Virginia, is the town of Nitro, where Monsanto operated a chemical plant from 1929 to 1995. In 1948 the plant began to make a powerful herbicide known as 2,4,5-T, called “weed bug” by the workers. A by-product of the process was the creation of a chemical that would later be known as dioxin.
The name dioxin refers to a group of highly toxic chemicals that have been linked to heart disease, liver disease, human reproductive disorders, and developmental problems. Even in small amounts, dioxin persists in the environment and accumulates in the body. In 1997 the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, classified the most powerful form of dioxin as a substance that causes cancer in humans. In 2001 the U.S. government listed the chemical as a “known human carcinogen.”

On March 8, 1949, a massive explosion rocked Monsanto’s Nitro plant when a pressure valve blew on a container cooking up a batch of herbicide. The noise from the release was a scream so loud that it drowned out the emergency steam whistle for five minutes. A plume of vapor and white smoke drifted across the plant and out over town.Residue from the explosion coated the interior of the building and those inside with what workers described as “a fine black powder.” Many felt their skin prickle and were told to scrub down.
Within days, workers experienced skin eruptions. Many were soon diagnosed with chloracne, a condition similar to common acne but more severe, longer lasting, and potentially disfiguring. Others felt intense pains in their legs, chest, and trunk. A confidential medical report at the time said the explosion “caused a systemic intoxication in the workers involving most major organ systems.” Doctors who examined four of the most seriously injured men detected a strong odor coming from them when they were all together in a closed room. “We believe these men are excreting a foreign chemical through their skins,” the confidential report to Monsanto noted. Court records indicate that 226 plant workers became ill.
According to court documents that have surfaced in a West Virginia court case, Monsanto downplayed the impact, stating that the contaminant affecting workers was “fairly slow acting” and caused “only an irritation of the skin.”
In the meantime, the Nitro plant continued to produce herbicides, rubber products, and other chemicals. In the 1960s, the factory manufactured Agent Orange, the powerful herbicide which the U.S. military used to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War, and which later was the focus of lawsuits by veterans contending that they had been harmed by exposure. As with Monsanto’s older herbicides, the manufacturing of Agent Orange created dioxin as a by-product.
As for the Nitro plant’s waste, some was burned in incinerators, some dumped in landfills or storm drains, some allowed to run into streams. As Stuart Calwell, a lawyer who has represented both workers and residents in Nitro, put it, “Dioxin went wherever the product went, down the sewer, shipped in bags, and when the waste was burned, out in the air.”
In 1981 several former Nitro employees filed lawsuits in federal court, charging that Monsanto had knowingly exposed them to chemicals that caused long-term health problems, including cancer and heart disease. They alleged that Monsanto knew that many chemicals used at Nitro were potentially harmful, but had kept that information from them. On the eve of a trial, in 1988, Monsanto agreed to settle most of the cases by making a single lump payment of $1.5 million. Monsanto also agreed to drop its claim to collect $305,000 in court costs from six retired Monsanto workers who had unsuccessfully charged in another lawsuit that Monsanto had recklessly exposed them to dioxin. Monsanto had attached liens to the retirees’ homes to guarantee collection of the debt.
Monsanto stopped producing dioxin in Nitro in 1969, but the toxic chemical can still be found well beyond the Nitro plant site. Repeated studies have found elevated levels of dioxin in nearby rivers, streams, and fish. Residents have sued to seek damages from Monsanto and Solutia. Earlier this year, a West Virginia judge merged those lawsuits into a class-action suit. A Monsanto spokesman said, “We believe the allegations are without merit and we’ll defend ourselves vigorously.” The suit will no doubt take years to play out. Time is one thing that Monsanto always has, and that the plaintiffs usually don’t.
Poisoned Lawns
Five hundred miles to the south, the people of Anniston, Alabama, know all about what the people of Nitro are going through. They’ve been there. In fact, you could say, they’re still there.
From 1929 to 1971, Monsanto’s Anniston works produced PCBs as industrial coolants and insulating fluids for transformers and other electrical equipment. One of the wonder chemicals of the 20th century, PCBs were exceptionally versatile and fire-resistant, and became central to many American industries as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, and sealants. But PCBs are toxic. A member of a family of chemicals that mimic hormones, PCBs have been linked to damage in the liver and in the neurological, immune, endocrine, and reproductive systems. The Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, now classify PCBs as “probable carcinogens.”
Today, 37 years after PCB production ceased in Anniston, and after tons of contaminated soil have been removed to try to reclaim the site, the area around the old Monsanto plant remains one of the most polluted spots in the U.S.
People in Anniston find themselves in this fix today largely because of the way Monsanto disposed of PCB waste for decades. Excess PCBs were dumped in a nearby open-pit landfill or allowed to flow off the property with storm water. Some waste was poured directly into Snow Creek, which runs alongside the plant and empties into a larger stream, Choccolocco Creek. PCBs also turned up in private lawns after the company invited Anniston residents to use soil from the plant for their lawns, according to The Anniston Star.
So for decades the people of Anniston breathed air, planted gardens, drank from wells, fished in rivers, and swam in creeks contaminated with PCBs—without knowing anything about the danger. It wasn’t until the 1990s—20 years after Monsanto stopped making PCBs in Anniston—that widespread public awareness of the problem there took hold.
Studies by health authorities consistently found elevated levels of PCBs in houses, yards, streams, fields, fish, and other wildlife—and in people. In 2003, Monsanto and Solutia entered into a consent decree with the E.P.A. to clean up Anniston. Scores of houses and small businesses were to be razed, tons of contaminated soil dug up and carted off, and streambeds scooped of toxic residue. The cleanup is under way, and it will take years, but some doubt it will ever be completed—the job is massive. To settle residents’ claims, Monsanto has also paid $550 million to 21,000 Anniston residents exposed to PCBs, but many of them continue to live with PCBs in their bodies. Once PCB is absorbed into human tissue, there it forever remains.
Monsanto shut down PCB production in Anniston in 1971, and the company ended all its American PCB operations in 1977. Also in 1977, Monsanto closed a PCB plant in Wales. In recent years, residents near the village of Groesfaen, in southern Wales, have noticed vile odors emanating from an old quarry outside the village. As it turns out, Monsanto had dumped thousands of tons of waste from its nearby PCB plant into the quarry. British authorities are struggling to decide what to do with what they have now identified as among the most contaminated places in Britain.
“No Cause for Public Alarm”
What had Monsanto known—or what should it have known—about the potential dangers of the chemicals it was manufacturing? There’s considerable documentation lurking in court records from many lawsuits indicating that Monsanto knew quite a lot. Let’s look just at the example of PCBs.
The evidence that Monsanto refused to face questions about their toxicity is quite clear. In 1956 the company tried to sell the navy a hydraulic fluid for its submarines called Pydraul 150, which contained PCBs. Monsanto supplied the navy with test results for the product. But the navy decided to run its own tests. Afterward, navy officials informed Monsanto that they wouldn’t be buying the product. “Applications of Pydraul 150 caused death in all of the rabbits tested” and indicated “definite liver damage,” navy officials told Monsanto, according to an internal Monsanto memo divulged in the course of a court proceeding. “No matter how we discussed the situation,” complained Monsanto’s medical director, R. Emmet Kelly, “it was impossible to change their thinking that Pydraul 150 is just too toxic for use in submarines.”
Ten years later, a biologist conducting studies for Monsanto in streams near the Anniston plant got quick results when he submerged his test fish. As he reported to Monsanto, according to The Washington Post, “All 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3½ minutes.”

Jeff Kleinpeter, of Baton Rouge, was accused by Monsanto of making misleading claims just for telling customers his cows are free of artificial bovine growth hormone.

When the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) turned up high levels of PCBs in fish near the Anniston plant in 1970, the company swung into action to limit the P.R. damage. An internal memo entitled “confidential—f.y.i. and destroy” from Monsanto official Paul B. Hodges reviewed steps under way to limit disclosure of the information. One element of the strategy was to get public officials to fight Monsanto’s battle: “Joe Crockett, Secretary of the Alabama Water Improvement Commission, will try to handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public at this time,” according to the memo.
Despite Monsanto’s efforts, the information did get out, but the company was able to blunt its impact. Monsanto’s Anniston plant manager “convinced” a reporter for The Anniston Star that there was really nothing to worry about, and an internal memo from Monsanto’s headquarters in St. Louis summarized the story that subsequently appeared in the newspaper: “Quoting both plant management and the Alabama Water Improvement Commission, the feature emphasized the PCB problem was relatively new, was being solved by Monsanto and, at this point, was no cause for public alarm.”
In truth, there was enormous cause for public alarm. But that harm was done by the “Original Monsanto Company,” not “Today’s Monsanto Company” (the words and the distinction are Monsanto’s). The Monsanto of today says that it can be trusted—that its biotech crops are “as wholesome, nutritious and safe as conventional crops,” and that milk from cows injected with its artificial growth hormone is the same as, and as safe as, milk from any other cow.
The Milk Wars
Jeff Kleinpeter takes very good care of his dairy cows. In the winter he turns on heaters to warm their barns. In the summer, fans blow gentle breezes to cool them, and on especially hot days, a fine mist floats down to take the edge off Louisiana’s heat. The dairy has gone “to the ultimate end of the earth for cow comfort,” says Kleinpeter, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in Baton Rouge. He says visitors marvel at what he does: “I’ve had many of them say, ‘When I die, I want to come back as a Kleinpeter cow.’ ”
Monsanto would like to change the way Jeff Kleinpeter and his family do business. Specifically, Monsanto doesn’t like the label on Kleinpeter Dairy’s milk cartons: “From Cows Not Treated with rBGH.” To consumers, that means the milk comes from cows that were not given artificial bovine growth hormone, a supplement developed by Monsanto that can be injected into dairy cows to increase their milk output.
No one knows what effect, if any, the hormone has on milk or the people who drink it. Studies have not detected any difference in the quality of milk produced by cows that receive rBGH, or rBST, a term by which it is also known. But Jeff Kleinpeter—like millions of consumers—wants no part of rBGH. Whatever its effect on humans, if any, Kleinpeter feels certain it’s harmful to cows because it speeds up their metabolism and increases the chances that they’ll contract a painful illness that can shorten their lives. “It’s like putting a Volkswagen car in with the Indianapolis 500 racers,” he says. “You gotta keep the pedal to the metal the whole way through, and pretty soon that poor little Volkswagen engine’s going to burn up.”
Kleinpeter Dairy has never used Monsanto’s artificial hormone, and the dairy requires other dairy farmers from whom it buys milk to attest that they don’t use it, either. At the suggestion of a marketing consultant, the dairy began advertising its milk as coming from rBGH-free cows in 2005, and the label began appearing on Kleinpeter milk cartons and in company literature, including a new Web site of Kleinpeter products that proclaims, “We treat our cows with love … not rBGH.”
The dairy’s sales soared. For Kleinpeter, it was simply a matter of giving consumers more information about their product.
But giving consumers that information has stirred the ire of Monsanto. The company contends that advertising by Kleinpeter and other dairies touting their “no rBGH” milk reflects adversely on Monsanto’s product. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission in February 2007, Monsanto said that, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that there is no difference in the milk from cows treated with its product, “milk processors persist in claiming on their labels and in advertisements that the use of rBST is somehow harmful, either to cows or to the people who consume milk from rBST-supplemented cows.”
Monsanto called on the commission to investigate what it called the “deceptive advertising and labeling practices” of milk processors such as Kleinpeter, accusing them of misleading consumers “by falsely claiming that there are health and safety risks associated with milk from rBST-supplemented cows.” As noted, Kleinpeter does not make any such claims—he simply states that his milk comes from cows not injected with rBGH.
Monsanto’s attempt to get the F.T.C. to force dairies to change their advertising was just one more step in the corporation’s efforts to extend its reach into agriculture. After years of scientific debate and public controversy, the F.D.A. in 1993 approved commercial use of rBST, basing its decision in part on studies submitted by Monsanto. That decision allowed the company to market the artificial hormone. The effect of the hormone is to increase milk production, not exactly something the nation needed then—or needs now. The U.S. was actually awash in milk, with the government buying up the surplus to prevent a collapse in prices.
Monsanto began selling the supplement in 1994 under the name Posilac. Monsanto acknowledges that the possible side effects of rBST for cows include lameness, disorders of the uterus, increased body temperature, digestive problems, and birthing difficulties. Veterinary drug reports note that “cows injected with Posilac are at an increased risk for mastitis,” an udder infection in which bacteria and pus may be pumped out with the milk. What’s the effect on humans? The F.D.A. has consistently said that the milk produced by cows that receive rBGH is the same as milk from cows that aren’t injected: “The public can be confident that milk and meat from BST-treated cows is safe to consume.” Nevertheless, some scientists are concerned by the lack of long-term studies to test the additive’s impact, especially on children. A Wisconsin geneticist, William von Meyer, observed that when rBGH was approved the longest study on which the F.D.A.’s approval was based covered only a 90-day laboratory test with small animals. “But people drink milk for a lifetime,” he noted. Canada and the European Union have never approved the commercial sale of the artificial hormone. Today, nearly 15 years after the F.D.A. approved rBGH, there have still been no long-term studies “to determine the safety of milk from cows that receive artificial growth hormone,” says Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for Consumers Union. Not only have there been no studies, he adds, but the data that does exist all comes from Monsanto. “There is no scientific consensus about the safety,” he says.
However F.D.A. approval came about, Monsanto has long been wired into Washington. Michael R. Taylor was a staff attorney and executive assistant to the F.D.A. commissioner before joining a law firm in Washington in 1981, where he worked to secure F.D.A. approval of Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone before returning to the F.D.A. as deputy commissioner in 1991. Dr. Michael A. Friedman, formerly the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for operations, joined Monsanto in 1999 as a senior vice president. Linda J. Fisher was an assistant administrator at the E.P.A. when she left the agency in 1993. She became a vice president of Monsanto, from 1995 to 2000, only to return to the E.P.A. as deputy administrator the next year. William D. Ruckelshaus, former E.P.A. administrator, and Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, each served on Monsanto’s board after leaving government. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto’s corporate-law department in the 1970s. He wrote the Supreme Court opinion in a crucial G.M.-seed patent-rights case in 2001 that benefited Monsanto and all G.M.-seed companies. Donald Rumsfeld never served on the board or held any office at Monsanto, but Monsanto must occupy a soft spot in the heart of the former defense secretary. Rumsfeld was chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical maker G. D. Searle & Co. when Monsanto acquired Searle in 1985, after Searle had experienced difficulty in finding a buyer. Rumsfeld’s stock and options in Searle were valued at $12 million at the time of the sale.

From the beginning some consumers have consistently been hesitant to drink milk from cows treated with artificial hormones. This is one reason Monsanto has waged so many battles with dairies and regulators over the wording of labels on milk cartons. It has sued at least two dairies and one co-op over labeling.
Critics of the artificial hormone have pushed for mandatory labeling on all milk products, but the F.D.A. has resisted and even taken action against some dairies that labeled their milk “BST-free.” Since BST is a natural hormone found in all cows, including those not injected with Monsanto’s artificial version, the F.D.A. argued that no dairy could claim that its milk is BST-free. The F.D.A. later issued guidelines allowing dairies to use labels saying their milk comes from “non-supplemented cows,” as long as the carton has a disclaimer saying that the artificial supplement does not in any way change the milk. So the milk cartons from Kleinpeter Dairy, for example, carry a label on the front stating that the milk is from cows not treated with rBGH, and the rear panel says, “Government studies have shown no significant difference between milk derived from rBGH-treated and non-rBGH-treated cows.” That’s not good enough for Monsanto.
The Next Battleground
As more and more dairies have chosen to advertise their milk as “No rBGH,” Monsanto has gone on the offensive. Its attempt to force the F.T.C. to look into what Monsanto called “deceptive practices” by dairies trying to distance themselves from the company’s artificial hormone was the most recent national salvo. But after reviewing Monsanto’s claims, the F.T.C.’s Division of Advertising Practices decided in August 2007 that a “formal investigation and enforcement action is not warranted at this time.” The agency found some instances where dairies had made “unfounded health and safety claims,” but these were mostly on Web sites, not on milk cartons. And the F.T.C. determined that the dairies Monsanto had singled out all carried disclaimers that the F.D.A. had found no significant differences in milk from cows treated with the artificial hormone.
Blocked at the federal level, Monsanto is pushing for action by the states. In the fall of 2007, Pennsylvania’s agriculture secretary, Dennis Wolff, issued an edict prohibiting dairies from stamping milk containers with labels stating their products were made without the use of the artificial hormone. Wolff said such a label implies that competitors’ milk is not safe, and noted that non-supplemented milk comes at an unjustified higher price, arguments that Monsanto has frequently made. The ban was to take effect February 1, 2008.
Wolff’s action created a firestorm in Pennsylvania (and beyond) from angry consumers. So intense was the outpouring of e-mails, letters, and calls that Pennsylvania governor Edward Rendell stepped in and reversed his agriculture secretary, saying, “The public has a right to complete information about how the milk they buy is produced.”
On this issue, the tide may be shifting against Monsanto. Organic dairy products, which don’t involve rBGH, are soaring in popularity. Supermarket chains such as Kroger, Publix, and Safeway are embracing them. Some other companies have turned away from rBGH products, including Starbucks, which has banned all milk products from cows treated with rBGH. Although Monsanto once claimed that an estimated 30 percent of the nation’s dairy cows were injected with rBST, it’s widely believed that today the number is much lower.
But don’t count Monsanto out. Efforts similar to the one in Pennsylvania have been launched in other states, including New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Utah, and Missouri. A Monsanto-backed group called afact—American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology—has been spearheading efforts in many of these states. afact describes itself as a “producer organization” that decries “questionable labeling tactics and activism” by marketers who have convinced some consumers to “shy away from foods using new technology.” afact reportedly uses the same St. Louis public-relations firm, Osborn & Barr, employed by Monsanto. An Osborn & Barr spokesman told The Kansas City Star that the company was doing work for afact on a pro bono basis.
Even if Monsanto’s efforts to secure across-the-board labeling changes should fall short, there’s nothing to stop state agriculture departments from restricting labeling on a dairy-by-dairy basis. Beyond that, Monsanto also has allies whose foot soldiers will almost certainly keep up the pressure on dairies that don’t use Monsanto’s artificial hormone. Jeff Kleinpeter knows about them, too.
He got a call one day from the man who prints the labels for his milk cartons, asking if he had seen the attack on Kleinpeter Dairy that had been posted on the Internet. Kleinpeter went online to a site called StopLabelingLies, which claims to “help consumers by publicizing examples of false and misleading food and other product labels.” There, sure enough, Kleinpeter and other dairies that didn’t use Monsanto’s product were being accused of making misleading claims to sell their milk.
There was no address or phone number on the Web site, only a list of groups that apparently contribute to the site and whose issues range from disparaging organic farming to downplaying the impact of global warming. “They were criticizing people like me for doing what we had a right to do, had gone through a government agency to do,” says Kleinpeter. “We never could get to the bottom of that Web site to get that corrected.”
As it turns out, the Web site counts among its contributors Steven Milloy, the “junk science” commentator for FoxNews.com and operator of junkscience.com, which claims to debunk “faulty scientific data and analysis.” It may come as no surprise that earlier in his career, Milloy, who calls himself the “junkman,” was a registered lobbyist for Monsanto.
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele are Vanity Fair contributing editors.

Simpson Family Values

2008-07-30T00:52:00.001-07:00

A cartoon family whacked America's funny bone in 1989, eventually becoming the longest-running TV comedy ever. As The Simpsons jumps to the big screen this month, not everyone involved—including the writers, the voices, and Rupert Murdoch—agrees on what has made it a pop phenomenon.

by John Ortved August 2007

This is an expanded version of the text that appears in the August 2007 Vanity Fair.

In January 1992, during a campaign stop at a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, George H. W. Bush made a commitment to strengthen traditional values, promising to help American families become "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." A few days later, before the opening credits rolled on the animated sitcom's weekly episode, The Simpsons issued its response. Seated in front of the television, the family watched Bush make his remarks. "Hey! We're just like the Waltons," said Bart. "We're praying for an end to the Depression, too." While the immediacy of the response was surprising, the retort was vintage Simpsons: tongue-in-cheek, subversive, skewering both the president's cartoonish political antics and the culture that embraced them. Twelve months later, Bill Clinton moved into the White House. The Waltons were out; the Simpsons were in.

When The Simpsons had premiered on Fox, in 1989, prime-time television was somewhat lacking in comedy. Despite a few bright spots such as Cheers and the barbed, happily crude Roseanne, the sitcom roost was ruled by didactic, saccharine family fare: The Cosby Show, Full House, Growing Pains, Family Matters. Of the last—the show that gave the world Urkel—Tom Shales piously declared in The Washington Post, "A decent human being would have a hard time not smiling."

It was on this wan entertainment landscape that The Simpsons planted its flag. Prime time had not seen an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, in the 1960s, and the Christmas special with which The Simpsons debuted made clear that Springfield and Bedrock were separated by more than just a few millennia. In "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire," Homer takes a job as a department-store Santa after the family's emergency money is spent on tattoo removal for Bart. Following a motivational chat from Bart on the nature of Christmas miracles on television—meta-commentary was a Simpsons hallmark from the start—Homer risks his earnings at the track, on a dog named Santa's Little Helper. When the dog comes in dead last, the family adopts him. While the ending sounds a tad cheesy, and it was, the seeds had been planted: up against impossible odds, and one another, the family ultimately bonded together and overcame. And the gags were solid: Homer is despondent at the length of his children's Christmas pageant; a tattoo artist unquestioningly accepts 10-year-old Bart as an adult; the family's Christmas decorations are clearly pathetic in contrast to the Flanders family's next door. Critical reaction was nearly unanimous. "Couldn't be better … not only exquisitely weird but also as smart and witty as television gets," raved the Los Angeles Times. "Why would anyone want to go back to Growing Pains?" asked USA Today.

What followed is one of the most astounding successes in television history. The Simpsons went on to be a ratings and syndication winner for 18 years, and has grossed Fox sums of money measuring in the billions. It has won 23 Emmys and a Peabody Award, and was named the best TV show of all time by Time magazine in 1999. (The magazine also named Bart one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. "[Bart] embodies a century of popular culture and is one of the richest characters in it. One thinks of Chekhov, Celine, Lenny Bruce," the writer cooed.) But the most telling accolade is that The Simpsons is TV's longest-running sitcom ever, outlasting The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet's 14 seasons.

Not surprisingly, given its success, The Simpsons has spawned many imitators and opened doors for new avenues of animated comedy. Directly or indirectly, the show sired Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Adult Swim, and South Park, which, nearly a decade after Bart's boastful underachieving, managed to regenerate a familiar cacophony of ratings, merchandise, and controversy when it premiered, in 1997. (The controversial label was perhaps deserved. Bart's greatest sin has been sawing the head off the statue of the town's founder; last year, on South Park, Cartman tried to exterminate the Jews.)

"It's like what sci-fi fans say about Star Trek: it created an audience for that genre," says Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. "I think The Simpsons created an audience for prime-time animation that had not been there for many, many years. As far as I'm concerned, they basically re-invented the wheel. They created what is in many ways—you could classify it as—a wholly new medium. It's just wholly original."

"The Simpsons is the bane of our existence," says Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park with Trey Parker. "They have done so many parodies, tackled so many subjects. 'Simpsons did it!' is a very familiar refrain in our writers' room. Trey and I are constantly having our little cartoon compared to the best show in the history of television, The Simpsons. Why can't we be compared to According to Jim? Or Sister, Sister?"

Not that there aren't some debits on The Simpsons' ledger—for every King of the Hill, there was a Fish Police and a Critic. But over 18 years, The Simpsons has been so influential, it is difficult to find any strain of television comedy that does not contain its DNA. And yet the show's footprint is so much larger. Homer's signature "D'oh!" has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. There's a "Simpsons and Philosophy" course at Berkeley (for credit), not to mention the hundreds of published academic articles with The Simpsons as their subject. Even conservatives have come around. "It's possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever," wrote the National Review in 2000. "The Simpsons celebrates many … of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority.… Springfield residents pray and attend church every Sunday." Next to pornography, no single subject may have as many Web sites and blogs dedicated to its veneration. The Simpsons has permeated our vernacular, the way we tell jokes, and how our storytellers practice their craft. If you look around, you can see the evidence, but as with any truly powerful cultural force, you can never see it all—it's buried too deep.

Such lofty significance was never the goal of Matt Groening, a native of Portland, Oregon, who, with writing aspirations, moved to L.A. in 1977, at the age of 23, immersing himself in the punk-rock scene and working on novels. He was freshly graduated from Evergreen State College, a hippie school in Olympia, Washington, with no grades, exams, or required classes. After several menial jobs, he began recording his disgust with life in L.A. in a comic strip, Life in Hell, which he sent to his friends back home and distributed at the record shop Licorice Pizza, where he found work behind the counter. The strip featured deeply cynical, existential ruminations from a bunny named Binky, his illegitimate, one-eared son, Bongo, and a fez-wearing gay couple—who may or may not be identical twins—named Jeff and Akbar. It found its way into the Los Angeles Reader and then LA Weekly, in 1986, and eventually caught the attention of James L. Brooks, writer-producer of Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and writer-director of the film Terms of Endearment, among others.

Gary Panter, friend of Matt Groening's, cartoonist: The people I knew who were doing the mini-comics at the earliest were Matt, Lynda Barry, me.… Matt's earliest comics were about language.… He did a whole series of Life in Hell called "Forbidden Words." He would just name all these phrases that were overused in culture and forbid them from being used again. His comics were very ambitious, and his drawings very simple, but beautifully designed; it has clarity, and Matt's a great writer, and understands human psychology.

James Vowell, founding editor, Los Angeles Reader: Matt was always trying to sell Life in Hell as an idea to me for a weekly cartoon in the paper. He'd draw these little pictures on paper napkins … and occasionally I'd say, "Matt, why don't you make that chin a little smaller." He didn't need me to edit his cartoons, I guarantee you.… They became super popular almost immediately.

Polly Platt, production designer, Terms of Endearment: I was nominated for an Academy Award for Terms of Endearment, and I wanted to give Jim Brooks a thank-you gift. [Matt] did a cartoon called "Success and Failure in Hollywood." So I called Matt and I bought the original. [Jim] was thrilled! He just laughed and laughed, and hung it up on his wall in his office. It was a brilliant cartoon. Success and failure come out to exactly the same thing in the cartoon. I think it's people shooting each other.

My suggestion to Jim was that I thought it would be great to do a TV special on the characters that Matt had already drawn; I never envisioned anything like The Simpsons.

At the time, Brooks was looking for a cartoon short to place before commercials as minute-long "bumpers" on The Tracey Ullman Show, a sketch-comedy series that Barry Diller, then C.E.O. of Fox Inc., had asked him to produce in 1987 for the new and struggling Fox network.

Jay Kogen, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): They really wanted Life in Hell. But Matt was making a good bit of money on mugs and calendars from Life in Hell, and Fox wanted to own the whole thing. He said, "I won't sell you this. But I have this other family, called The Simpsons, that you can have." And then he proceeded to draw something on a napkin that legend has it he just made up on the spot. And they said, "O.K., we'll do that!"

Polly Platt: What's funny now, because he's so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount, very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn't even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor. I stopped my car and said hello and offered him a ride. We were going in different directions, or he was too proud, or whatever.

Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, Maus: I pleaded with Matt and advised him strongly from my elder-statesman position to not work with Fox. "Whatever you do, don't work with those guys! They're gangsters! They're gonna take your rights away!" He's never let me forget it.

Gabor Csupo, original animator, The Simpsons (1987–92): When Jim Brooks originally saw Matt Groening's drawings on his wall, it was all black-and-white, just the line drawing, no color or anything. And that's how he wanted to do the show. And we said, "You know what? We gonna give you color for the same price." And all of a sudden the eyes lit up and he said, "O.K., you guys are on." The characters were so beautiful but, let's face it, primitively designed that we thought that we could counterbalance that design with shocking colors. That's why we came up with the yellow skin, and the blue hair for Marge.

Michael Mendel, associate producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–92): Matt would just show up with a two-page script and go, "Here it is. This is the cartoon we're doing this week." It was sort of guerrilla-style animation. We would hang out on the stage of Tracey Ullman, and in between block and rehearsal, we would grab [the actors] and record their lines. It was me and Matt and the animators and a couple directors—a really small group of people working on this little one-minute cartoon every week.

Wally Wolodarsky, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): The Simpsons were viewed as poor relations by the writing staff of The Tracey Ullman Show, and we secretly always felt that The Simpsons was the funniest part of the show.

For the voices of Homer and Marge, the producers used Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner, actors who were already regulars on The Tracey Ullman Show. (Marge's rasp is Kavner's normal voice, almost uninflected.) Yeardley Smith, who auditioned using her own voice for Lisa, was a struggling actress with some Broadway and TV-movie credits. She had originally auditioned for the role of Bart, while voice actress Nancy Cartwright tried for Lisa. When they switched, Cartwright—who had followed the advice of her mentor, Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi Bear, to move to L.A. and try voice acting—attempted a version of a voice she had used on My Little Pony and The Snorks, and Bart was born.

The bumper episodes were amusing snippets of the dysfunctional family's daily life, focusing mostly on the kids being kids, and the grief they caused their parents: Bart and Lisa engage in a burping contest; Bart directs the pallbearers at a funeral as if he were the foreman on a construction site.

Though critics liked The Tracey Ullman Show, the series wasn't a big hit; but, then, neither was much else on the network. Still, Diller saw that the big-three networks were getting old and tired—they were losing viewers to cable and independent networks—and he was eager to experiment. In early 1988, he launched one of television's first reality programs, America's Most Wanted (Cops would follow in 1989), while taking the sitcom in lewd new directions with Married … with Children. When Brooks approached him with the idea of making The Simpsons into its own series, Diller eventually bit, thinking that the show might be, as he later put it, "the one that can crack the slab for us."

Barry Diller, former chairman and C.E.O., Fox: Everything was failing at the time, all those half-hour sitcoms: Mr. President, etc. We all thought the Simpsons were really cute, but their shorts weren't making any noise, nor was The Tracey Ullman Show, for that matter, which was unfortunate. I never saw it as a series. What made the difference was Jim Brooks. I know it was originally Matt's drawings, and I'm sure [executive producer] Sam Simon made his contribution, but the show never would have happened, or have been successful, without Jim Brooks.

Rupert Murdoch, C.E.O., News Corp.: I was at a program meeting with Barry Diller and the people at Fox Network, and afterwards Barry said, "Come into my room, I want to show you something." And he had a tape there, of about 20 minutes in length, of all the little 30-second bits that had been through The Tracey Ullman Show. And he played it, and I just thought it was hilarious. I said, "You've gotta buy this tonight." He said, "No. It's more complicated than that." So we went forward from there.

Michael Mendel: Barry Diller just wanted to make specials and Jim [Brooks] put his foot down and said, "It's a series or nothing." The network wanted to play it safe, and they weren't sure if this was going to work. I don't think that happens today. I don't think anyone gets on the phone with Barry Diller and says, "Take it or leave it. It's a series."

Barry Diller: I wanted to do anything that did not involve making a commitment of 13 episodes. But Jim said, with six months of lead time, it wouldn't work any other way.

Michael Mendel: It was like, "I love them as one-minute cartoons, but as a whole half hour, I don't know." I didn't think they'd be able to hold people's attention. Great prediction on my part.

Rupert Murdoch: You look at it in today's figures, the risks [of making The Simpsons its own series] weren't that great. But at the time, we were very conscious of how much money we were spending on productions. It was certainly tremendously important in establishing the use of brand of the network.

Brooks's man in charge of developing the show was Sam Simon, a writer-producer who had worked with Brooks on Taxi and Ullman. Simon would depart The Simpsons after its fourth season, leaving behind much acrimony between him and Matt Groening over creative differences and compensation issues. Simon's lawyers negotiated a lucrative deal for him; he left without much severance, but retained a piece of the show. (He has made more than 10 million dollars a year since.) Many of the original staff remain loyal to Simon, crediting him with taking Groening's crude characters from The Tracey Ullman Show and making them into the Simpsons that the world knows and loves. Simon recently told 60 Minutes, "Any show I've ever worked on, it turns me into a monster. I go crazy; I hate myself." For his part, Groening has said, "I think Sam Simon is brilliantly funny and one of the smartest writers I've ever worked with, although unpleasant and mentally unbalanced."

Colin Lewis, postproduction supervisor and producer, The Simpsons (1990–97): Sam had problems with Matt from the beginning. The stuff with Matt, anyone will tell you, in terms of them feuding and not talking … that was consistent from the beginning.

Polly Platt: Matt did not get along with [Sam]. Nobody got along with him. He's kind of an awful person. If he was at any meeting, it just seemed that everyone would turn on each other.

Barry Diller: I was totally aware of their problems and often mediated them on behalf of everyone. For a while it was not a happy place. But I think it ultimately made the show better.

Michael Mendel: A lot of the foundation for the show and the reason why I think it's successful was laid down during those tumultuous times.

Jay Kogen: It was clear that there was animosity back and forth. It was a tough position for Sam to be in, because Matt was getting all the accolades. I would think that if you were pouring your life's blood into something and getting none of the credit, it would be irritating. If you look at the original Simpsons cartoons, those are closer to Matt's drawings, but Sam reshaped them and re-drew them. He had experience in sitcoms. He had also worked in animation. He's also a very talented cartoonist himself. He's really smart, and handled storyboards and all that stuff.

Brad Bird, supervising director, The Simpsons (1989–92); feature-film director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: I think the unsung hero has always been Sam. I was in the room when he took some pretty mediocre scripts and just sat there in his chair, with all the writers in the room and a cigar, and went through, line by line. And he would get people to pitch lines … but 9 times out of 10 he came up with the best line. And if someone came up with a genuinely better line, he'd put that in.

Jay Kogen: Matt wasn't always in the room. So it's hard to fight with everybody and have a real say if you're not there. He's also a very pleasant, easygoing guy, and the writers' room can be a tough place. But, you know, ultimately Matt got what he wanted. When he pitched stuff, he got what he wanted.

With the enlarged scope of a series, a cast of characters outside the family was needed. There were Patty and Selma, Marge's spinster sisters, and Grandpa, Homer's neglected father. Moe the bartender, Homer's enabler, is the bitterest man in town, while the local-TV kiddie show is hosted by Krusty the Clown, a Friars-era showbiz hack. Homer's boss is the 104-year-old nuclear-power-plant owner, Mr. Burns, a throwback to the robber barons (with some Charles Foster Kane, Rupert Murdoch, and Barry Diller thrown in). To voice the supporting roles, the performing cast was filled out with veteran improv actors Hank Azaria (Chief Wiggum, Moe, Apu) and Harry Shearer (Principal Skinner, Mr. Burns, Kent Brockman). The late Phil Hartman helped create some of The Simpsons' best moments voicing the charmingly incompetent litigator Lionel Hutz and washed-up actor Troy McClure.

Josh Weinstein, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): When Jim and Matt and Sam first assembled a group of actors for the show, they didn't go for voice-over actors, people who did kids' voices and cartoon shows. They went for real actors and actors who had a lot of comedy, improv experience. Sometimes some of the best moments came from the actors themselves, and not from the script.

Hank Azaria: The hard stuff was the first two or three years, where we were finding the tone, sensibility, even specifically the voices of the characters. There was a lot of finding it in fits and starts. We would record all day long.

Michael Mendel: Fox had this really huge A.D.R. stage, and everybody [not just the actors] was in the room with the microphones. You couldn't make a noise while they were recording or you would ruin it. It was always a challenge to not laugh on top of these actors' takes because they were so funny. So people would be, you know, crawling under their desks not to ruin the take.

roducing the volume of animation needed for the 13-episode first season was another hurdle. One problem was that much of the actual work would have to be farmed out to studios in Korea, which were used to animating Transformers and not sophisticated comedy shows. Another was that most of the staff—including Brooks and Groening—had little experience with animation.

Kent Butterworth, director of first Simpsons episode: Gabor Csupo had escaped from the Iron Curtain with a couple of his animator friends.… He had never done that volume of work, and had not worked with overseas studios, and he was concerned about his ability to deliver.

Michael Mendel: The first show came back from Korea and it was a complete disaster. It was unairable. We had to re-cast some voices. The director just went off and did a bunch of stuff on his own.

Gabor Csupo: It was a very, very raw first assembly of the scenes, and some of the scenes were still missing, didn't come back, wrong colors, wrong angles. So it was a disaster. Jim sort of got into it, started to laugh for the first five minutes, and then all of a sudden his face started to turn green and yellow, match the Simpsons characters almost. He got really disappointed because none of the jokes worked or nothing, and then all of a sudden he started to scream and yell, saying, "What is this?" He just went off and he even started to demand extra camera angles, which was the funniest thing ever—he never did animation in his life. He asked for coverage like when you're shooting a live-action movie. "So where are the other camera angles?" And [my producer] and I were just looking at each other, "O.K. … "

I was just so angry and embarrassed at the same time that they forced us to show this raw footage before we could even correct it. Jim was screaming and yelling that "this is not funny!" And I said, "Well, it may be not funny because you didn't write it funny." And then everybody looks at me: "Oh my God! You dared to say that to Jim!" But I felt I had nothing to lose.

Kent Butterworth: It was not fun. It was decided [by Brooks] to shelve this episode and get back to it later. Meanwhile, he would contact Fox and let them know that the delivery of the series would be delayed in order to get the quality they needed. Needless to say, my employment on The Simpsons was over!

The next episodes, directed by David Silverman and Wesley Archer, were less problematic.

Barry Diller: I remember when we screened the first episode, for a number of Fox executives, we all went down to their bungalows over at The Simpsons, and not a single person in the room was laughing, except for me and Jim Brooks. No one had done an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, and it was just like, "What is this?" But we put it on, and it became more and more successful every week.

The show hit a ratings high at the end of its first season, in the spring of 1990, cracking the Top 10 (the only Fox show to do so that year). Fox struck a deal with Mattel, and talking Bart Simpson dolls began disappearing from department-store shelves. Bart T-shirts were selling at the rate of a million per day in North America. His catchphrases, such as "Underachiever and proud of it" and "Don't have a cow, man," became staples of early-90s lexicon. Bootleg merchandise was soon as ubiquitous as the real thing. "Black Bart" T-shirts were a popular phenomenon in African-American communities, with Bart's catchphrases altered to "Watch it, mon!" and, without irony, "You wouldn't understand; it's a black thing."

Matt Groening found endless amusement in these imitations.

Conan O'Brien, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1991–93); host, Late Night with Conan O'Brien: Friends of Matt's would be traveling and they would find bootlegged Simpsons merchandise. Sometimes they were funny and sometimes they were disturbing. Like a Marge made out of a lizard's skull … or T-shirts that were from some country—recently liberated from the Iron Curtain—that had Bart saying weird phrases that were mildly threatening or racist. I remember Matt cracking up once. "Did you see what they just found? Ceausescu had this in his basement."

Jay Kogen: I had not been a part of anything that was that huge, ever. Literally, people were selling T-shirts of the show I was working on on freeway off-ramps. Instead of oranges off the freeway, they were selling Simpsons T-shirts. All people were talking about was The Simpsons. It was gigantic!

With Bart omnipresent and Fox expanding its programming schedule from three nights a week to five, a bold plan was hatched: beginning with the show's second season, in the fall of 1990, it would be moved to Thursday nights, where it would take on the reigning television champion, NBC's The Cosby Show.

Barry Diller: We were at a scheduling meeting, so there were about 15 people there, and we were figuring out what to put up against Cosby on Thursday nights at eight o'clock. Cosby had been the biggest thing on TV for God knows how many years. Rupert leaned over and whispered to me, "What about The Simpsons?" And I stood up and went over to the board and moved the little magnet that said "Simpsons" to Thursday night at eight. And it took a solid minute before someone said, "You know what? That could work." And it was a big deal, little Bart Simpson going up against big Bill Cosby. So it was a dragon-slayer story.

Rupert Murdoch: We were sitting down with Barry, reviewing the schedule. We look at it and I said, "We gotta be more aggressive … Let's put it up against Cosby. Cosby must be coming to the end of his run—he's been there forever." And everybody in the room was horrified and sort of laughed at me. Except Barry Diller, who said, "No, let's think about this."

Wally Wolodarsky: None of the writers cared [about the scheduling move]. It was just an opportunity to make fun of Cosby and be impudent about it. The writers never had a stake in the ratings; you never cared about that. That was always viewed as a business decision.

Rupert Murdoch: And so we did it. And at the end of the first year, Cosby announced his retirement. We started behind him, but I think we'd caught up by the end of the year; certainly the writing was on the wall. [The shows were close in the ratings most of the season, with The Simpsons occasionally edging out Cosby.]

Donick Cary, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1996–99); creator, Lil' Bush: They invented a network. In a lot of ways, the Fox Network wouldn't exist without the longevity and the amount of viewers that The Simpsons has consistently brought to Fox.

Barry Diller: In terms of ratings and financial terms it really built the network, but also in terms of giving Fox its attitude. Some of that was already there with Married … with Children, but The Simpsons is by far the most successful show.

The writers' room, assembled by Sam Simon, would come to be considered one of the great temples of comedy. Many of the original writers—including Wolodarsky, Kogen, John Swartzwelder, and the team of Al Jean and Mike Reiss—had substantial television credits. But Simon also found spectacular new talent in non-traditional locations, beginning a trend that would continue long after his departure. (David Mirkin, who ran the show in its fifth and sixth seasons, hired a mathematician and a lawyer.) Perhaps his key find was George Meyer, editor of a humor zine called Army Man—distributed sparingly in Hollywood in the late 80s—of which Simon was an enormous fan.

In 1991, Conan O'Brien, one of the many Harvard Lampoon veterans on the staff, and the writing team of Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein would be the first writers to be added to the original room.

Conan O'Brien: It was as if that first Olympic Dream Team, with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson … it was like getting the call, "Do you want to come shoot baskets with us?"

Josh Weinstein: It was like walking into the pantheon of comedy gods.

Colin Lewis: If you talk to a writer on any show, somehow he'll guide you towards, "What do you do? What show are you on?" And with the Simpsons writers, it was the opposite. They were guys who were having fun, doing what they were doing and making a good show, but they were the geekiest, most unassuming guys.

Donick Cary: A lot of these guys had written on the Lampoon together in college, so they were sort of falling back into their college routine—which was, basically, to hang out all day and entertain themselves.

Bill Oakley, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): From Season 2 to Season 8, there was never a time that there were less than 80 percent Harvard Lampoon graduates on the staff.

Conan O'Brien was fresh from Saturday Night Live when he joined The Simpsons. When not cracking up his fellow writers, he managed to craft memorable episodes such as "Marge vs. the Monorail" (a takeoff on The Music Man in which a straw-hatted shyster sells Springfield a dilapidated monorail) and "Homer Goes to College" (Homer lives out his college fantasies, which have been informed entirely by 80s Animal House rip-offs).

Conan O'Brien: I was very nervous [when I started]. They showed me into this office and told me to start writing down some ideas. They left me alone in that office, and I remember leaving after five minutes to go get a cup of coffee. And I heard a crash, and I walked back to the office, and there was a hole in the window and a dead bird on the floor—literally in my first 10 minutes at The Simpsons, a bird had flown through the glass of my window, hit the far wall, broken its neck, and fallen dead on the floor. And I remember George Meyer came in and looked at it, and he was like, "Man, this is some kind of weird omen."

I think when I first got there I stood out a bit, because everyone sat still in the room and thought, and I don't think it was too long before I was climbing on furniture. I would pitch the characters in their voices, and I thought that's just what people did, but then Mike Reiss told me nobody does that.

Wally Wolodarsky: Conan used to do this thing called "The Nervous Writer" that involved him opening a can of Diet Coke and then nervously pitching a joke. He would spray Diet Coke all over himself and that was always a source of endless amusement amongst us.

Conan O'Brien: Everyone heard the news [when he was hired to replace David Letterman on NBC in 1993], and John Swartzwelder—he looks like someone who would arrest an anarchist for throwing a bomb at Archduke Ferdinand's carriage—was sitting there and smoke was trailing off his cigarette. He doesn't say much, and then he just looked at me and he said, "I'd watch your show." And that meant a lot to me, because he's not a guy who will say something he doesn't mean.

Some executive at Fox—who I don't remember, and that's probably for the best—said, "No, no, no. He still owes us money on his contract." And it was like a year's salary or something. So I think NBC paid half, and I paid half. I actually had to pay my way out of Fox, which always felt a little strange. I'm sure Simon Cowell has that money now. He's using it on hair gel.

George Meyer is still with the show, considered the godfather of the writers' room and the unofficial show-runner. In a 2000 profile of Meyer, The New Yorker claimed that he has "so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of The Simpsons can be seen as mostly his."

Richard Appel, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): One thing George does, in any room he's in, he sets the bar high just by being in it. One of the best things to have in a writers' room is a sense that you're trying to make the best person in the room laugh. And George was always that at The Simpsons in my time there, and I don't think it's presumptuous to say that's what he was before I got there and after I left.

Conan O'Brien: George Meyer has just such a discerning comedy mind, your biggest fear is saying something hacky or contrived.

Wally Wolodarsky: There's a darkness and lightness in George, both of which are surprising. For someone who could pitch such dark material, he also had a kind of hippie lightness of spirit that you wouldn't necessarily think go together.

Richard Appel: George did the most, of anyone I know, to sustain the voice of the show. And I think he had a huge hand in defining the voice of the show, but so did Jim Brooks and Matt and Sam Simon. I have heard everyone say it's just a thrilling experience to be in a room with Sam, and I think George really thinks the same things of Sam, and for me, my Sam was George.

John Swartzwelder has written far more Simpsons scripts than anyone—upward of 50, including classics such as "Krusty Gets Kancelled," "Rosebud," and "Bart Gets an Elephant."

Bill Oakley: If you look at the Swartzwelder scripts—it's like he comes from another dimension. He is a genius—his material is so strange you almost wonder how his brain works. The ultimate Swartzwelder joke that I still remember appears in the episode "Whacking Day." Homer is letting people park on his lawn, and he has a sign that says, parking: $10 per axle. And this foreign guy in this crazy foreign car, with like eight axles, drives up, and Homer goes, "Woo-hoo!" and the foreign man goes, "Hooray!" God, it just makes me laugh.

Wally Wolodarsky: Swartzwelder seemed to go directly from being a homeless person to a writer on The Simpsons. He was a little bit older than us and had, I think, seen a little bit more of the world, in terms of being up and down. He did have interesting preoccupations. I know for a while he was collecting wanted posters. Real Patty Hearst wanted posters.

Jay Kogen: One time, I remember, [Swartzwelder] bought a painting that Hitler had painted. I was like, "Really? You want to buy a Hitler painting?" But he loved historic artifacts.

Animation had opened up a whole new world—the world, in fact—to the creative staff. Not only could they take their characters anywhere, physically and emotionally, but there were no adorable actors to become tangled up in pubescence, no live studio audience to pander to, no laugh track. (Even when Seinfeld premiered, in 1990, certainly a step forward for the sitcom, the viewer was still being told when to laugh.) Another advantage was the cover that a cartoon provided for humor that could never be permitted in live action.

Donick Cary: We'd have episodes where it starts with Homer's car crashed into the front porch, 'cause he drove home drunk. If an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond started with Ray Romano's car crashed into the front porch, there'd be a lot of chat about that.

One factor keeping the show's writing fresh has been the lack of network influence. Fox executives are forbidden to give notes to The Simpsons.

Larry Doyle, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1997–99): When you have a table read with a regular sitcom, you go in there and there's always a sense of fear, because those people [at the network] are unpredictable. They can come back and say, "No, we don't want you to do that," and then you'll have a day to write a new script. That never happens to us.

Josh Weinstein: Working on The Simpsons then felt like being in the graduate school of comedy, or a great comedy lab, where you could try and do anything and no one would stop you, as long as it was good or funny. That had an amazing feel.

Brad Bird: There were discussions [with the network], but they were over pretty quickly. I think people felt good being under the titanium shield of Jim Brooks. The studio might get upset and they might make notes, but we didn't have to take them unless Brooks said we had to take them.

Barry Diller: Anything with Jim Brooks has a level of independence in it, but it's not exclusionary. Jim's not about being exclusionary, and in this case couldn't be—there was just too much strife going on [between Sam Simon and Matt Groening]. Were we engaged in the early development of it, Fox network people? Yes. Did we give line notes? Not ever. I never gave line notes in my life.

Colin Lewis: David Mirkin was the first [show-runner] who said, "Why do we have to change it? We're The Simpsons. We're in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won't deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them."

What is striking about the early episodes is how sweet, and at times dramatic, they can be. "The question was: could you make cartoon characters that looked this weird and grotesque and actually make you feel some real emotion," Groening has said. The Simpsons faced legitimate problems: Homer lived in fear of losing his job; he had trouble connecting with his daughter. It was only in later years, to keep the writing interesting, that the characters became more exaggerated, as did their situations—Homer went to space; Maggie shot a man; the family created an international incident with Australia.

Conan O'Brien: Homer's a real temptation. We had so much fun trying to make him dumber and dumber and dumber that there was one time where Homer's brain got angry at him because he was so stupid, and so you heard the brain say, "That's it, I give up," and walk down a corridor and slam a door. I loved it—but it's like, "Wait, if his brain is his consciousness, who's his brain walking out on? And who is his brain angry with?"

Donick Cary: I think we got to times where it felt like Homer was just being dumb, like literally he's on the floor eating out of the garbage. And you're like, "Hmm. Is this really the best place to take this character?"

Conan O'Brien: There is a strong lack of sentimentality on The Simpsons, but something that Sam and Jim and Matt stressed was: this is a family. And that kind of talk can start to sound pretty treacly, but you can't have an episode where Homer sells Bart, or harvests his organs. So I think one of the things that works is respect for that unit was always kept intact.

Wally Wolodarsky: I think that Sam had helped to create such a vibrant world that once he left, his vision was in place, and I don't think that that ever really changed.

Donick Cary: At Letterman [where Cary had been a writer] it was always like, "We need material for tonight! What are we gonna do? We need jokes!" I got to The Simpsons, and I was like [speaking rapidly], "All right. Homer's under the table—and he's eating butter, and he's running around. And Homer … " And people are like: "Dude … we got nine months to get a joke together."

Conan O'Brien: By the time an episode came out, you had maybe heard the script read through like 20 times, and if for some reason the joke wasn't getting a laugh on the 21st time, you had to rework it. Sometimes your first pitch is your best pitch, but over time, if you revisit it constantly, you'll grow weary of it, it will start to wilt, and then you're just coming up with a different pitch that's maybe not necessarily better.

Donick Cary: So you go out—you write like crazy, your script. You bring it back in. And then the room would spend a week rewriting it.… If it was a story that was close to your heart, it could be a very painful process. Suddenly there's 15 opinions on why it's good or bad.

Josh Weinstein: The table read is a very exciting, nerve-racking event for a writer or show-runner because that is the first time that you hear your lines, like the opening night of a play. And there are also a lot of outside factors that can affect the table read. If it's raining in L.A., or if there's bad traffic, and people come in a bad mood, that can affect a table read as well.

Larry Doyle: A lot of the Fox "offices" are actually trailers that they just never moved, and one of them where the table reads were while I was there was a big double-wide trailer, and it's got a giant wooden table and the writers and actors sit at the table and then the entire room is lined with chairs that are always filled with everyone else who works on the show, and sometimes guests and sometimes various celebrities come in to hear a table read … they'll bring their kids. I remember once we had a couple Make-A-Wish kids. Ron Howard brought his kids. Stephen Hawking came to a table read.

As Bartmania cooled off, and the series moved toward institutional status with its fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, the show's quality miraculously refused to drop. It got funnier, smarter, richer in allusion and parody. The producers changed animation studios from Klasky Csupo to Film Roman in the fourth season, updating the rudimentary look with slicker designs and a more varied palette.

After Simon had left, in 1993, different writers were promoted to fill the role of show-runner. Al Jean and Mike Reiss took over first. Then the producers brought in David Mirkin, who had written for Three's Company and created Get a Life, with Chris Elliot. After Mirkin came longtime writers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, followed by Mike Scully (who stayed in charge for four seasons—the unwritten rule had been that show-runners stay for two years), before the show was given back to Al Jean, who has run The Simpsons since 2001.

Jay Kogen: Those years with Al [Jean] and Mike [Reiss] running it were pretty darn good. And then the ones after that maybe not so much … some people ran it better than others.

Wally Wolodarsky: We left during the fourth season, and at that point we were already running out of childhood anecdotes. And I think as a result the show got crazier and crazier. Because all the stories we had experienced, or seen other people experience, had been exploited. And to see the show go on is mind-boggling to me.

Colin Lewis: [Under David Mirkin] it stopped being like the geeky guys from college writing the show and became people who just really wanted to be comedy writers, and wanted to be Hollywood, so they could say, "I work on The Simpsons." That's when Homer sort of became stupid.

Rupert Murdoch: The show's had its ups and downs. It had a couple years there where it grew a bit dark, but we sort of got them out of that.

As the series relinquished the emotional grounding of the early years, it became more topical. Later episodes seemed increasingly tailored to guest appearances—a forgivable sin, concerning the impressive list: Mick Jagger, Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Steve Martin, Elton John, Ludacris, Ricky Gervais, Elvis Costello, Stephen Hawking, Tony Blair, Frank Gehry, Susan Sarandon, Tom Clancy, and J. K. Rowling (to name a few). Even the earliest seasons had been graced by Michael Jackson, Penny Marshall, and Elizabeth Taylor, who voiced Maggie's first word, "Daddy." (Taylor said "Fuck you" to Matt Groening and stormed out of the recording session after he made her read the line more than 20 times. He said it kept sounding "too sexual.")

Hank Azaria: They sent me down to greet Mick Jagger [when he arrived to record his part], and I said, "Hey, Mick, we're all thrilled to have you here." And he kind of blew right by me like I was the greeter, and went [dismissively], "Yeah, we'll get it," which I knew was going to be awkward, because I was about to walk upstairs and record with him. And it also made me a little bit annoyed. So before I even thought, I went, "No, I don't think we'll get it—I'm just glad you're here." And he kind of turned around and looked back at me like, What the fuck did you just say to me? And I was just like, "Hi. I'm Hank, I'll be recording with you." So that was slightly awkward.

Tim Long, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1999–present): Mr. T [another guest] was telling me the scenes that happened in Rocky III, where he lost. The reason he lost was because his mother needed money for an operation, and so he was paid to take a dive. And I said, "Well, I don't remember that in the movie." And he just looks at me right in the eye and says, "Things you don't see!"

I said to him, "I remember you put out a record called Mr. T's Commandments." And somehow he heard that as "Mr. T, please sing 'Mr. T's Commandments.'" So he sang me the whole song. And I just thought, If I'm killed by a sniper tonight, well, my life would have ended beautifully, because I have been sung to by Mr. T.

Ricky Gervais, guest writer and voice, The Simpsons (2006), creator and star, BBC's The Office: We had a lunch with Matt and Al Jean and all the writers and producers and everything, and at the very end, I was doing the nerdy thing, asking Matt to draw me a Homer. I was jealous of Moby's. I saw a Cribs, and it was Moby and he said it was his prized possession—I think the first Cribs where you actually saw a bookshelf. Matt said, "Would you like to be a guest voice?" And I said, "What are the hours?" And he said, "The hours are really good." I went, "Of course I would."

One battle the network decided to fight was against the actors who provided the voices on the show. According to a former producer, up until 1999, the actors were paid only about $25,000 an episode, while the Seinfeld cast had been making $600,000 per episode each. Negotiations that year for new contracts turned bitter. Though show-runner Mike Scully refused to participate, Fox began auditioning replacements.

Colin Lewis: There was a day, there was an actual moment when the actors, who are normally just friendly, sat down and started talking more in depth about contracts.… They asked us to give them some time alone, and it was like, "Alone? You guys don't hang out alone." They literally, like, closed the door.

Hank Azaria: You know, the show has made so much money, in so many ways. Eventually, we just wanted to get our piece of the pie. And Fox is tough. They're very tough negotiators. Their business model is not to give money away. So it got a little intense at times.

Larry Doyle: The actors actually didn't come to work for a while. Their contract expired, and we weren't recording them for I think a month. Fox had started to audition people. The actors got their deal because of a last-minute thing, some sort of bonus. And it turned out that they weren't going to get [the bonus money] until 2005 or something. So it was a real, like, Fox-studio "Fuck you," where the fine print means, "We're going to deliver that, in pennies, after you're dead." So Harry [Shearer], for the longest time, came to every table read wearing a T-shirt that said, you'll get it in 2005. The suggestion being that he wasn't going to do anything but work to contract.

Rupert Murdoch: The voices, who have been there since the very beginning, are now getting very large salaries … I'm not saying whether they're worth it or not. Or whether you could replace them or not, but Jim [Brooks] wouldn't hear of that, because they're all his friends.

Larry Doyle: I doubt that's what Jim Brooks said—I think that Jim Brooks might have been friends with some of them, but he wasn't really good friends with them. And he is first and foremost a businessman. If he was saying he didn't want to replace them, it was because he thought the show would tank, and I think it probably would have. Had they replaced Homer, I think that would have been the last year of the show.

Hank Azaria: I think that Fox, and even our own representation, didn't realize how much these voices couldn't just be replaced. And also, by the way, you don't animate first and then stick in voices. You're animating to the vocal performance, so that means comic timing and inflection and character all comes first, and then you animate. Bottom line is: they tried to replace us and couldn't.

A second contract dispute in 2004 spilled into the press when the cast demanded equity positions. This too was resolved—the actors now make more than "a hundred thousand dollars" an episode, according to Murdoch—and the show has kept rolling on. It has been renewed until 2009, and on July 27 of this year, the characters will make the jump to the big screen. While debate over the show's quality will rage (mostly on the Internet), what is significant is that it has persevered. Over 18 years, however, the relationship between Matt Groening and Jim Brooks has apparently deteriorated. "Jim and Matt hardly talk to each other now. They can't stand each other," Rupert Murdoch told me. But one former producer says that this is not quite accurate: while relations between the two have at times been strained, they are working together on the movie, and are far from not speaking.

Tim Long: [Matt Groening's] involvement with the show lately has kind of been in an advisory role. If this were a sort of medieval farming situation, he's like a benevolent feudal lord. He allows us to till the ground the way we want.

While The Simpsons' glory days passed a decade ago, the show is still reliable for some intelligent laughs, and comfortably sits in its eight-o'clock Sunday spot, watched by 10 million viewers every week. The writers' room is nearly as vibrant as ever, continuing to draw from Harvard and the cream of the young comedy-writing crop. (A rare exception came in 2006, when show-runner Al Jean allowed his wife, who had been a personal trainer, to write a script.)

Donick Cary: It seems like it's gotten a little simpler—it goes a little more topical. And … it's a little easy, you know? But, at the same time, they're in Season 18—so, what the hell?

Rupert Murdoch: I can't say I've watched every episode, but I watch it at every opportunity. And I think it's still as brilliant as ever.

Ricky Gervais: The longevity is astounding. Four hundred episodes. I had to have a lie-down after six [episodes of The Office]. I imagine the show's influence is as a paradigm of excellence. People go, "Would that pass in The Simpsons?" Because it's timeless and universal. But I don't know if it's changed the way people make TV. I don't know if many things do that outside technology and law.

Wally Wolodarsky: I see it in a continuum that starts with Martin and Lewis, Your Show of Shows, Honeymooners, early Carson, early Letterman, Get Smart, early SNL and just keeps moving. I don't see it as a revolution. I see it as a natural continuum of all the stuff we really loved.

Tim Long: I'd like to think that we prevented the president from invading Iraq and we kept Bush from being re-elected … Oh, whoops, we didn't do any of those things. I think that you can overstate the importance of comedy. At best I think comedians tend to be like that guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square—I think that you're actually flattering yourself if you think you're actually affecting anything.

Conan O'Brien: For the last 14 years of doing my show, I've been working hard on this comedy, but it's pretty disposable. I could light my arms on fire on the show tonight and you might see it for a couple of days on YouTube, but then it's gone. I'm constantly, no matter where I go in the world, running into people who know which episodes of The Simpsons I worked on, and they're quoting lines to me. I think long after my Late Night show is gone, I feel like the Simpsons episodes I worked on will always be in the ether. People will be watching them on some space station, like, 200 years from now. That's a nice feeling.

Jay Kogen: We thought we were really writing these really funny, smart, special shows that were chock-full of jokes every few seconds. And then someone showed us this study Fox had done: the No. 1 reason why people liked The Simpsons was "all the pretty colors" and they liked it when Homer hit his head. We were writing the show for ourselves—we always made it funny for ourselves—but who knows why America likes it. Maybe they like the pretty colors and when Homer hits his head, but I hope it's for more.

Also on VF.com: A Q&A with former Simpsons writer Conan O'Brien and our picks for the top 10 episodes ever.

John Ortved is a Vanity Fair contributing editorial associate.

Buy Shanghai! A city for sale.

2008-07-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

by Patricia Marx
New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Shanghai doesn’t even sit down, and not just because there is no room. Things move fast in this town which is both new and old, Western and Eastern, Adidas and Adidos, Adadis, Admimas, Daiads, and Odidoss. Blink, and another lane lined with hundred-year-old shikumen—each a home to handfuls of families—is bulldozed. In its place, here comes a high-rise rising higher than the one put up yesterday, a clothesline and an illegal satellite dish poking out from each window (a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot four-bedroom, four-bathroom rental at the luxurious Richgate: $8,572 a month). Shanghai has the world’s fastest intra-city train, largest skateboard park, longest laundry chute (running from the Hyatt hotel’s eighty-seventh floor to its basement), and, based on my observations, the least number of seat belts. Look up. The assorted finials on the tops of skyscrapers will make you think of a bottle opener, a Jell-O mold, a crown roast, a bamboo steamer, a chuppah, a Möbius strip, a snake that’s swallowed some golf balls, the Eiffel Tower, Lady Liberty’s headpiece, and the spiny back of a stegosaurus. Don’t breathe! The air is smelly with garbage juice. The sun, if visible at all, seems dimmer than the full moon on a hazy night. Need more light? You can see everything better after dusk, when the lunatic neon is switched on. Sh-h-h. High-school students are taking the college-entrance exams. No honking or construction work within a hundred metres of a testing site—by local ordinance.

Shortly before leaving for Shanghai, I e-mailed a friend who lives there and asked if she wanted anything from the States. “No need,” she wrote. “Chances are, any item you would bring from there is made here.” I packed light and carried a big duffel. I knew I wouldn’t be the first to pillage this town, but, unlike the British East India Company, I wasn’t planning to pay with opium. (In 1850, it was about as valuable as gold.)

What I did have in my wallet was the American greenback, and, despite its flume ride vis-à-vis the yuan, the Chinese have made sure that their wares remain affordable. A triple strand of freshwater pearls at Lily’s Pearl Store (First Asia Jewelry Plaza, Room 3021) cost me 85 yuan, or roughly the same as you’d pay for three tall mochas at Starbucks.

The Chinese are no slouches when it comes to capitalism. After the death of Chairman Mao, in 1976, the Communist slogan “Look to the Future” (“Xiang Qian Kan”) was morphed by the people into “Look to the Money,” because the words for “money” and “future” sound the same but are written differently. (During my visit, the dollar could be exchanged for 6.9 yuan, and that rate is used here, rounded to the dollar. By the time you read this, however, Americans might be better off bringing along opium instead of cash.) And here’s something that would have pleased Deng (Show Me the Money) Xiaoping. During my stay, I was asked three times if I was related to Groucho—not one inquiry about Karl.

“You can do business with them,” Helen Noh, a Korean who lives in Shanghai, said, referring to the Chinese. “But you should realize that, in the end, they are always going to win.” Noh, who represents designers like Diane von Furstenberg and Donna Karan, and I were at an open-air antique market on Dong Tai Road, surveying the booth of a shirtless, Buddha-shaped man who relentlessly chanted the phrase “old, very old” and then gestured to a box of twenty identical sparkling teapots. Or did he mean us? Anything more than a century old is marked with a red seal and cannot be taken out of the country without an export license, but that wasn’t a problem at this man’s booth. While I wandered off to another nook and admired a delicately embroidered red shoe no longer than five inches and supposedly worn a hundred years ago by a full-grown woman ($26), Noh negotiated with a vender over the price of a swatch of vintage fabric. Haggling is expected in all but the swankiest of shops and can lead to a discount as high as seventy or eighty per cent. After a bit of dickering, Noh acquired seven beautiful pillow-size pieces of hand-dyed appliquéd cotton for $406, about sixty-five per cent off the sticker price.

There are markets for everything in Shanghai, including crickets. These come in varieties meant for competitive fighting (gambling is illegal in mainland China, but nobody tattles) and for keeping as pets, but probably not for sneaking through customs (405 Xizang Road; $1.45 to $14.50 per bug, but some fetch more than $1,000). There are markets for birds, fish, and flowers, as well as entire streets dedicated to light fixtures, buttons, adhesive tape, silk, hair products, and toilets. Actually, toilets take up several streets.

I visited a three-story indoor fabric market (South Bund Soft-Spinning Material Market, 399 Lu Jia Bang Road) with Lin Lin Mai, a Kewpie-doll-cute twenty-eight-year-old with an eighteen-inch waist, a perfect pageboy haircut, a dot of hot-pink rouge on each cheek, green racing stripes on her fingernails, and a tattoo representing a crop circle on her back. Mai’s company, Jellymon, designs clothing, urban collectibles, record albums, posters, and art installations. She has also consulted for Nike and Coca-Cola and wants to start a cosmetics line.

“In my generation, there’s a lot of desperation to be different, to be an individual,” she told me, as we squeezed past stalls, each one indistinguishable from the next, each crammed with rolls of silk, linen, cotton, wool, leather, or fur. We came to her favorite stall, No. 237, where a tailor makes clothes for her based on sketches she does on the spot. She said, “Because we were only children, we grew up the center of attention in our families and now we want the attention of society. I think that’s why handmade, one-of-a-kind, standout clothes are so popular now.” On Mai’s recommendation, I chose two men’s shirting fabrics—a blue-and-white striped oxford and a Mao-red broadcloth—and had my measurements taken. The tailor whipped up a snappy little dress to Mai’s specifications and delivered it to my hotel three days later. I wore it to an appointment with Francine Martin, an American who leads shopping tours of Shanghai, to sites recondite and renowned (www.eastofthesun-asia.com). “Thirty-three dollars?” she said. “Very nice, but one should never pay more than twenty dollars for a simple custom-made dress.” (Stall 237 also makes men’s shirts of Egyptian cotton for $15, but Martin probably knows where they can be had for $10.)

You don’t have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country? Faux Scandinavia has Nobel Science and Technology Park. Thames Town has Tudor houses, cobblestoned streets, and a statue of Churchill. Plans for a Canadian Maple Town had palm trees and a bridge with Roman columns. Hmm.

Who’s to say that the replica isn’t better than the original? Such was the case with the brown quilted leather jacket lined in chartreuse silk that I’d bought on sale years ago at the Madison Avenue branch of Shanghai Tang, a Chinese company based in Hong Kong (600 Madison Avenue). In less than a week, the copycat in Stall 319 at the South Bund Soft-Spinning Material Market had produced an identical version for me in black quilted leather with puce lining (approximately $200; a similar coat at Shanghai Tang today, $1,490).

Jessica Chen, a sage in her twenties who owns a Shanghai cashmere label, told me, “In Los Angeles, they have real Birkin bags and fake boobs. In Shanghai, it’s the other way around.” If you ask a hotel concierge, you’ll be told the address of a lane house on South Shanxi Road, purveyors of the finest in fraudulence. There, according to the staff, N.B.A. players, including Yao Ming, shop for knockoff leather goods, and Celine Dion recently bought fifty handbags. George Washington probably slept there, too. This establishment is so hush-hush that a uniformed guard is stationed nearby to keep a lookout for the police, and it is so up to date that when a customer asked whether the shop carried a certain Gucci hobo bag she was dismissively informed that the article was last year’s model ($58 for belts and wallets; $435 for a blue-sheared mink jacket).

Not everyone is selling fakes. In “cabbage shops” all over town (so called because the merchandise “fell off a truck”), you can get bargains on factory rejects and overruns. Of course, you can also get skirts with zippers that are as reliable as the F train. A pleasant boutique called Quan seems to have an impressive share of the former (733 Julu Road).

Shanghai is the largest city in China, and I think I may have interviewed all 18.15 million residents to find out how their city stacks up against the capital, Beijing (pop. 17 million).

Some of the responses: “Women in Shanghai are flashier, more dolled up.” “Beijing looks down on Shanghai for wanting only money.” “In Shanghai, they say, ‘I’ll find it cheaper,’ whereas in Beijing it’s ‘I want it in every color.’ ” “There are more foreigners here. We have an Italian restaurant next to a Moroccan restaurant.” “A Shanghaier would rather buy a new pair of shoes than a ticket to the ballet.” “Beijing style is edgier, more avant-garde.” “Beijing’s short and wide. Shanghai’s tall and compact.” “Shanghai is more refined. More attention to detail.” “Shanghai’s female, Beijing’s male.” “Shanghai is New York. Beijing is Washington, D.C.” “Shanghai is New York. Beijing is L.A.” “Shanghai is Tel Aviv. Beijing is Jerusalem.” “Beijing is China. Shanghai is Shanghai.”

Until twenty-five years ago, it was practically unheard of for citizens to own property in China. By 2007, however, The Economist reported that eighty per cent of the urban population had become homeowners. So a lot of nesters suddenly have a need for a lot of dining-room sets and salad tongs and scented candles. Yes, there is an IKEA, and it is wildly popular (585 Longhua Xi Road). “But they don’t have silver furniture,” I was told by Yue-Sai Kan, whose home-decorating mini department store, House of Yue-Sai, opened late last year. Kan has been called the Martha Stewart/Oprah/Emily Post/Estée Lauder of China. Perhaps you know Kan’s cosmetics line? Or “One World,” her weekly television show, which was seen by an estimated three hundred million people? When I visited the House of Yue-Sai, there was a wide range of ornate pillows from India and China, a stunning Modigliani-esque painting of the back of a Chinese woman’s head by the French painter Christian de Laubadère, and a fanciful orange-and-black parasol (15-19 West Beijing Road; $72, $7,246, $84).

At Jane’s Home—actually Stall 130 in another fabric bazaar, the ShiLiuPu Cloth Market (surely you don’t think there’s just one of anything in Shanghai)—Jane is nowhere in sight, but Kelly is there to remind you how much more the same merchandise would cost down the block at Shanghai Tang. Any knickknack knockoff that can possibly be sewn out of silk brocade is piled high in this cubbyhole of a shop—cosmetics pouches ($4), wallets and change purses ($2), eyeglass cases ($2), business-card holders ($4), envelopes for packing shirts in suitcases ($20), shoe bags ($3), and loads more. But my favorite items are the bottle openers—shiny lacquered metal disks decorated with colorful Chinese-opera face masks ($2) (168 Dongmen Road).

The worst deal in town for anyone carrying U.S. dollars can be found at Plaza 66 and Three on the Bund, two shopping centers where every European designer whose apparel you’ve ever coveted has a boutique—Marni, Armani, Hugo Boss. They’re the real McCoy, but steer clear unless you’re packing euros or are one of China’s more than forty billionaires, the richest being a woman.

And the best deal? The underground eyeglass market near the railway station. In this bazaar, jam-packed with booths, you can get a pair of stylish, albeit no-name frames, complete with lenses ground to your prescription—all for a negotiated price of about $22.

Speaking of vision, the Shanghai government gives tax breaks to blind masseurs, who, according to many locals, provide the best and cheapest kneading in town (Feining Massage Center of Blind Persons, 597 Fu Xing Road; Song Song Massage Center, 6 Da Pu Road; Jing Xuan Blind Man’s Massage, 674 Yi Shan Road). A forty-five-minute foot massage is about $8; a forty-five-minute body massage is about $14. Based on the foot massage I endured, though, I’d recommend that you first learn the Chinese words for “Ow, not so hard.” I cannot tell you the name of my masseur, because, in keeping with Chinese custom, service people are identified only by number.

The Chinese went to the trouble of inventing porcelain, so the least we can do is shop for it. Remember, in “Measure for Measure,” when Pompey says, “They are not China dishes, but very good dishes”? Some scholars interpret this to mean that Shakespeare loved to rummage through the pottery warehouse at 457 Fang Bang Road for bogus Ming blanc-de-Chine plates and ersatz celadon vases from the Song dynasty (from $7). Methinks, however, that he was trying to say he preferred the creatively proportioned and reasonably priced ceramics at the austerely appointed shop Spin (758 Julu Road, Building No. 3). A bowl with delicate holes on one side looks like it could be the work of artful moths ($11). A block of plaster is cleverly chiselled so as to partially reveal its inner vase of pale green (in three sizes: $10, $70, $84). A large round white charger decomposes into sectional plates and resembles a jigsaw puzzle of a pizza ($928).

At the Yu Garden Jiang Nan Silk Center, you can watch artisans turn cocoons into silk thread. But the truly miraculous thing is the way they managed to compress all the silk quilts I bought into a parcel practically the size of a box of matzo (125 Jiu Xiao Chang Road, but find it with someone who knows this part of town, as the address is used by dozens of shops surrounding the Yu Garden; $55 to $116, depending on weight).

Never mind that there is all the tea in China at the Tianshan market (520 Zhongshan Xi Road); the truth is, after a few days I started to get tired of wrangling for phenomenal deals. So I was relieved to be taken to Song Fang, a serene, French-owned tea house with non-negotiable prices and a collection of tea caddies painted to look like they are from the Cultural Revolution (227 Yongjia Road; $12 to $46 for 50 grams). The tearoom upstairs, decorated with bamboo birdcages used as lanterns, has free wireless Internet access. After checking your e-mail, you can take a stroll in the French Concession. In the mid-nineteenth century, this neighborhood was granted to the French for them to live in, govern, and do with whatever they pleased. Much of what pleased them took place in brothels and shall go undescribed here. (A hundred and forty years ago, the price of a hooker tended to be ten times the price of a haircut.) Today, the chic enclave has boulevards lined with leafy plane trees imported from Europe in the nineteenth century, plenty of fresh baguettes, shops that stay open until ten, and a beauty parlor called Yuppies Hair Salon.

In what was formerly a candy factory on Taikang Road and spilling out into the surrounding alleys, there are a number of hip boutiques. I was enthralled with the collection in a shop called Jaooh, especially a white cotton jersey dress with an attached asymmetrical brown-and-white checked linen vest (Shop 47, Lane 248; $87). At Jooi, a polyester Rooney the Rat bag—so called in honor of the year of that rodent—is pretty nifty, too (Shop 3, Lane 210; $33).

The astonishingly encyclopedic selection of bootleg DVDs and boxed sets at a little outlet called Movie World are a genuine steal (378 Dagu Road). Across the street is Even Better Than Movie World, which is true to its name (407 Dagu Road). You can pick up a collection of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, seasons one to three of “Lost,” or just about any other movie or TV show ever shown or about to be shown ($7, $22, $1 to $2). Before you start thinking about setting up a nice little DVD-import business from your home office, though, note this: the United States Customs and Border Protection allows returning travellers to bring into the country only one counterfeit/gray-market article “of each type.”

I have no idea, however, what the policy is regarding the dead sea horses and powdered bear bile that are for sale in big glass jars behind the counter at Tong Han Chun Tang, established in 1783 (268 Zhong Shan Zhong Road). Or the Nourish the Ovary Defer Decrepitude pills and Onlly Smart-Brain Liquid at the Shanghai No. 1 Dispensary (various locations).

When I first arrived in Shanghai, I was puzzled by the sight of grown men moseying through the streets in Teddy-bear-patterned pajamas. That was before someone explained the semiotics to me. Now I know: such a man either has finished work for the day or is having a day off, and, along with all the other men and women who are wearing pajamas in public, he is telling the world, Yes, I may be working class, but I have leisure time, not to mention enough money for an extra set of silk pajamas (state-regulated Friendship stores; $55 to $81).

The clothes at Cha Gang, a tiny boutique in the French Concession, are not for everyone, and I’m glad about that, because it leaves more for me. There’s a cushion motif to the cunning creations of the shop’s designer, Wang Yiyang—T-shirt dresses with thick padded hems ($210), coats you could hide out in ($616), plaid scarves that look like squishy flannel tubes ($22), slippers with spongy six-inch-long pointed vamps ($76), and puffy patent-leather purses ($152). A pair of leather handbags in the shape of oversized mittens—one says “left” and the other says “right,” in Chinese—made me smile, and then I wondered whether perhaps they were actually mittens made to look like handbags. Either way, they are attached to each other by a khaki strap and are meant to be slung over the shoulder like a canteen (70 Yongfu Road; $145).

A cheongsam (or qipao) is a long, body-hugging, embroidered dress with a standup collar, usually made of silk. I would feel like an extra in “The World of Suzie Wong” wearing one. But you may feel differently, or maybe you are a movie extra. For you, the place to go is Maoming Road, particularly the section between Huaihai Road and NanChang Road ($150 to $500 for a topnotch cheongsam). For a hip version, perhaps trimmed in fur or adorned with see-through chrysanthemums, try Jinzhiyuye (72 Maoming South Road).

A sleeveless dress of ivory silk, decorated with a line drawing of a bicycle that spans nearly the whole circumference of the hem, is arguably the most glamorous item of clothing in Shanghai. It can be found at Anybody’s Blonde, the Shanghai branch of the hugely popular Russian-owned franchise, which is called So French in that country (351 Zizhong Road; $374).

No matter how you feel about the opera, the exquisite outerwear made by the designer Han Feng will make you want to be seen there, seated in a prominent box (particularly if you’re wearing Han’s diaphanous silk-organza coat with beaded-fish detail). Maybe it’s not a coincidence, then, that this Shanghai-based designer made the costumes for the Met’s 2006 and 2007 productions of “Madame Butterfly” (Jinjiang Hotel, 59 Maoming South Road, by appointment only).

These getups would also make lovely wedding attire. No prospects? Parents shopping for suitable mates for their children gather in the city’s parks most weekends to scrutinize and discuss the résumés of candidates, handwritten on bits of paper and torn sheets of cardboard taped to trees, resting on benches, and leaning against the risers of stone steps. The personals (so specific that they include details like “hunts for girl 163 cm”) are written by other yearning mothers and fathers.

Shanghai’s Old City is a congestion of narrow lanes and two- and three-story stone gatehouses from the early twentieth century. Many of them shelter three or more persons to a room. On the ground floor is a communal kitchen, shared by the families occupying the building. The sink is outside. Down the block is a neighborhood toilet, but many residents use wood or enamel chamber pots, typically painted with colorful flowers (eighteenth-century Imari chamber pot, Chine-de-Commande.com; $2,900). There is no lack of enterprise in this district. Note, for instance, the man with a rag who has a car-wash business ($1.45 for the car’s exterior and interior), and the man who repairs shoes and umbrellas (new sole, $1.40; 22 cents a spoke). On the sidewalk, under the shade, is the rice lady (uncooked grains, from 23 cents per pound). Next to her, a woman working a treadle sewing machine will cuff a pair of pants for 75 cents. The old guy sitting in a storefront, using a magnifying glass to help him read the screen on his cell phone? He’s the local barber (45 cents a haircut). A family making crullers, savory bread, and hot soybean milk outside their shikumen cooks with homemade charcoal lumps (each breakfast item is about a dime; charcoal not for sale). Stencilled and spray-painted almost everywhere on the peeling façades of buildings are Chinese characters and Arabic numerals advertising the services of local entrepreneurs, complete with cell-phone numbers. They make for the most fantastic-looking Rolodex ever.

Not far away is Old Street, choked with tourists and not nearly as old as it wants you to think it is. Along this drag, you’ll find piles of kitschy book bags, musical lighters, Red Guard caps, and cheesy busts of Mao for sale (a wristwatch with Mao’s waving arm as a second hand: $4). Even more Cultural Revolution-inspired curios, at radical prices, but nicer than the ones on the street, can be bought at Madame Mao’s Dowry (207 Fumin Road). Is it just me, or does Mao memorabilia seem akin to Inquisition cutlery or Holocaust stemware?

“Most people my age or younger don’t know what happened forty years ago,” Jessica Chen said. “As an experiment, I asked my assistants at the office about what went on at Tiananmen Square. Only one out of five knew.”

In China, it’s not always easy to know what’s going on, even today. CNN periodically blacks out for twenty seconds or so, and good luck navigating your way around the Great Firewall as you try to get information online about anything having to do with what are referred to as the three “T”s: Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Tibet. Incidentally, the three most popular Google “what is” searches in China in 2007 had to do with “blue chips,” “stock index futures,” and “consumer price index,” whereas worldwide the most popular topics were “love,” “autism,” and “rss.”

Is there anything you can’t get in Shanghai? Here are some things that expatriates told me they crave: antiperspirant; One-A-Day vitamins; non-soupy yogurt; dark chocolate; opaque tights in interesting colors; bras that aren’t gaudy, push-up, or padded; Tampax; stylish shoes with a decent high heel; porn magazines; real rye bread; Mexican food; cereal that costs less than $10; clothing and shoes in large sizes; avocados; Clairol Born Blonde All-Over hair color. It’s also impossible to find souvenir snow globes, but this doesn’t seem to matter to anyone but my nephew in Philadelphia. ♦

The Island in the Wind

2008-07-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

Jørgen Tranberg is a farmer who lives on the Danish island of Samsø. He is a beefy man with a mop of brown hair and an unpredictable sense of humor. When I arrived at his house, one gray morning this spring, he was sitting in his kitchen, smoking a cigarette and watching grainy images on a black-and-white TV. The images turned out to be closed-circuit shots from his barn. One of his cows, he told me, was about to give birth, and he was keeping an eye on her. We talked for a few minutes, and then, laughing, he asked me if I wanted to climb his wind turbine. I was pretty sure I didn’t, but I said yes anyway.

We got into Tranberg’s car and bounced along a rutted dirt road. The turbine loomed up in front of us. When we reached it, Tranberg stubbed out his cigarette and opened a small door in the base of the tower. Inside were eight ladders, each about twenty feet tall, attached one above the other. We started up, and were soon huffing. Above the last ladder, there was a trapdoor, which led to a sort of engine room. We scrambled into it, at which point we were standing on top of the generator. Tranberg pressed a button, and the roof slid open to reveal the gray sky and a patchwork of green and brown fields stretching toward the sea. He pressed another button. The rotors, which he had switched off during our climb, started to turn, at first sluggishly and then much more rapidly. It felt as if we were about to take off. I’d like to say the feeling was exhilarating; in fact, I found it sickening. Tranberg looked at me and started to laugh.

Samsø, which is roughly the size of Nantucket, sits in what’s known as the Kattegat, an arm of the North Sea. The island is bulgy in the south and narrows to a bladelike point in the north, so that on a map it looks a bit like a woman’s torso and a bit like a meat cleaver. It has twenty-two villages that hug the narrow streets; out back are fields where farmers grow potatoes and wheat and strawberries. Thanks to Denmark’s peculiar geography, Samsø is smack in the center of the country and, at the same time, in the middle of nowhere.

For the past decade or so, Samsø has been the site of an unlikely social movement. When it began, in the late nineteen-nineties, the island’s forty-three hundred inhabitants had what might be described as a conventional attitude toward energy: as long as it continued to arrive, they weren’t much interested in it. Most Samsingers heated their houses with oil, which was brought in on tankers. They used electricity imported from the mainland via cable, much of which was generated by burning coal. As a result, each Samsinger put into the atmosphere, on average, nearly eleven tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Then, quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing this. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome. “We are a conservative farming community” is how one Samsinger put it. “We are only normal people,” Tranberg told me. “We are not some special people.”

This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will produce, in aggregate, some four hundred quadrillion B.T.U.s of energy. It will also yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent.

When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up, in relatively short order, in the oceans. (CO₂ dissolves in water to form a weak acid; this is the cause of the phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.”) A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems—no one is quite sure exactly how or where—and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades the chemistry of the oceans will have been altered to such a degree that many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction. Meanwhile, atmospheric CO₂ levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees. The consequences of this warming are difficult to predict in detail, but even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.

Today, with CO₂ levels at three hundred and eighty-five parts per million, the disruptive impacts of climate change are already apparent. The Arctic ice cap, which has shrunk by half since the nineteen-fifties, is melting at an annual rate of twenty-four thousand square miles, meaning that an expanse of ice the size of West Virginia is disappearing each year. Over the past ten years, forests covering a hundred and fifty million acres in the United States and Canada have died from warming-related beetle infestations. It is believed that rising temperatures are contributing to the growing number of international refugees—“Climate change is today one of the main drivers of forced displacement,” the United Nations’ high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said recently—and to armed conflict: some experts see a link between the fighting in Darfur, which has claimed as many as three hundred thousand lives, and changes in rainfall patterns in equatorial Africa.

“If we keep going down this path, the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others,” President Nicolas Sarkozy, of France, told a meeting of world leaders in April. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has called climate change “the defining challenge of our age.”

In the context of this challenge, Samsø’s accomplishments could be seen as trivial. Certainly, in numerical terms they don’t amount to much: all the island’s avoided emissions of the past ten years are overwhelmed by the CO₂ that a single coal-fired power plant will emit in the next three weeks, and China is building new coal-fired plants at the rate of roughly four a month. But it is also in this context that the island’s efforts are most significant. Samsø transformed its energy systems in a single decade. Its experience suggests how the carbon problem, as huge as it is, could be dealt with, if we were willing to try.

Samsø set out to reinvent itself thanks to a series of decisions that it had relatively little to do with. The first was made by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy in 1997. The ministry, looking for ways to promote innovation, decided to sponsor a renewable-energy contest. In order to enter, a community had to submit a plan showing how it could wean itself off fossil fuels. An engineer who didn’t actually live on Samsø thought the island would make a good candidate. In consultation with Samsø’s mayor, he drew up a plan and submitted it. When it was announced that Samsø had won, the general reaction among residents was puzzlement. “I had to listen twice before I believed it,” one farmer told me.

The brief surge of interest that followed the announcement soon dissipated. Besides its designation as Denmark’s “renewable-energy island,” Samsø received basically nothing—no prize money or special tax breaks, or even government assistance. One of the few people on the island to think the project was worth pursuing was Søren Hermansen.

Hermansen, who is now forty-nine, is a trim man with close-cropped hair, ruddy cheeks, and dark-blue eyes. He was born on Samsø and, save for a few stints away, to travel and go to university, has lived there his entire life. His father was a farmer who grew, among other things, beets and parsley. Hermansen, too, tried his hand at farming—he took over the family’s hundred acres when his father retired—but he discovered he wasn’t suited to it. “I like to talk, and vegetables don’t respond,” he told me. He leased his fields to a neighbor and got a job teaching environmental studies at a local boarding school. Hermansen found the renewable-energy-island concept intriguing. When some federal money was found to fund a single staff position, he became the project’s first employee.

For months, which stretched into years, not much happened. “There was this conservative hesitating, waiting for the neighbor to do the move,” Hermansen recalled. “I know the community and I know this is what usually happens.” Rather than working against the islanders’ tendency to look to one another, Hermansen tried to work with it.

“One reason to live here can be social relations,” he said. “This renewable-energy project could be a new kind of social relation, and we used that.” Whenever there was a meeting to discuss a local issue—any local issue—Hermansen attended and made his pitch. He asked Samsingers to think about what it would be like to work together on something they could all be proud of. Occasionally, he brought free beer along to the discussions. Meanwhile, he began trying to enlist the support of the island’s opinion leaders. “This is where the hard work starts, convincing the first movers to be active,” he said. Eventually, much as Hermansen had hoped, the social dynamic that had stalled the project began to work in its favor. As more people got involved, that prompted others to do so. After a while, enough Samsingers were participating that participation became the norm.

“People on Samsø started thinking about energy,” Ingvar Jørgensen, a farmer who heats his house with solar hot water and a straw-burning furnace, told me. “It became a kind of sport.”

“It’s exciting to be a part of this,” Brian Kjær, an electrician who installed a small-scale turbine in his back yard, said. Kjær’s turbine, which is seventy-two feet tall, generates more current than his family of three can use, and also more than the power lines leading away from his house can handle, so he uses the excess to heat water, which he stores in a tank that he rigged up in his garage. He told me that one day he would like to use the leftover electricity to produce hydrogen, which could potentially run a fuel-cell car.

“Søren, he has talked again and again, and slowly it’s spread to a lot of people,” he said.

Since becoming the “renewable energy island,” Samsø has increasingly found itself an object of study. Researchers often travel great distances to get there, a fact that is not without its own irony. The day after I arrived, from New York via Copenhagen, a group of professors from the University of Toyama, in Japan, came to look around. They had arranged a tour with Hermansen, and he invited me to tag along. We headed off to meet the group in his electric Citroën, which is painted blue with white puffy clouds on the doors. It was a drizzly day, and when we got to the dock the water was choppy. Hermansen commiserated with the Japanese, who had just disembarked from the swaying ferry; then we all boarded a bus.

Our first stop was a hillside with a panoramic view of the island. Several wind turbines exactly like the one I had climbed with Tranberg were whooshing nearby. In the wet and the gray, they were the only things stirring. Off in the distance, the silent fields gave way to the Kattegat, where another group of turbines could be seen, arranged in a soldierly line in the water.

All told, Samsø has eleven large land-based turbines. (It has about a dozen additional micro-turbines.) This is a lot of turbines for a relatively small number of people, and the ratio is critical to Samsø’s success, as is the fact that the wind off the Kattegat blows pretty much continuously; flags on Samsø, I noticed, do not wave—they stick straight out, as in children’s drawings. Hermansen told us that the land-based turbines are a hundred and fifty feet tall, with rotors that are eighty feet long. Together, they produce some twenty-six million kilowatt-hours a year, which is just about enough to meet all the island’s demands for electricity. (This is true in an arithmetic sense; as a practical matter, Samsø’s production of electricity and its needs fluctuate, so that sometimes it is feeding power into the grid and sometimes it is drawing power from it.) The offshore turbines, meanwhile, are even taller—a hundred and ninety-five feet high, with rotors that extend a hundred and twenty feet. A single offshore turbine generates roughly eight million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which, at Danish rates of energy use, is enough to satisfy the needs of some two thousand homes. The offshore turbines—there are ten of them—were erected to compensate for Samsø’s continuing use of fossil fuels in its cars, trucks, and ferries. Their combined output, of around eighty million kilowatt-hours a year, provides the energy equivalent of all the gasoline and diesel oil consumed on the island, and then some; in aggregate, Samsø generates about ten per cent more power than it consumes.

“When we started, in 1997, nobody expected this to happen,” Hermansen told the group. “When we talked to local people, they said, Yes, come on, maybe in your dreams.” Each land-based turbine cost the equivalent of eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Each offshore turbine cost around three million dollars. Some of Samsø’s turbines were erected by a single investor, like Tranberg; others were purchased collectively. At least four hundred and fifty island residents own shares in the onshore turbines, and a roughly equal number own shares in those offshore. Shareholders, who also include many non-residents, receive annual dividend checks based on the prevailing price of electricity and how much their turbine has generated.

“If I’m reduced to being a customer, then if I like something I buy it, and if I don’t like it I don’t buy it,” Hermansen said. “But I don’t care about the production. We care about the production, because we own the wind turbines. Every time they turn around, it means money in the bank. And, being part of it, we also feel responsible.” Thanks to a policy put in place by Denmark’s government in the late nineteen-nineties, utilities are required to offer ten-year fixed-rate contracts for wind power that they can sell to customers elsewhere. Under the terms of these contracts, a turbine should—barring mishap—repay a shareholder’s initial investment in about eight years.

From the hillside, we headed to the town of Ballen. There we stopped at a red shed-shaped building made out of corrugated metal. Inside, enormous bales of straw were stacked against the walls. Hermansen explained that the building was a district heating plant that had been designed to run on biomass. The bales, each representing the equivalent of fifty gallons of oil, would be fed into a furnace, where water would be heated to a hundred and fifty-eight degrees. This hot water would then be piped underground to two hundred and sixty houses in Ballen and in the neighboring town of Brundby. In this way, the energy of the straw burned at the plant would be transferred to the homes, where it could be used to provide heat and hot water.

Samsø has two other district heating plants that burn straw—one in Tranebjerg, the other in Onsbjerg—and also a district plant, in Nordby, that burns wood chips. When we visited the Nordby plant, later that afternoon, it was filled with what looked like mulch. (The place smelled like a potting shed.) Out back was a field covered in rows of solar panels, which provide additional hot water when the sun is shining. Between the rows, sheep with long black faces were munching on the grass. The Japanese researchers pulled out their cameras as the sheep snuffled toward them, expectantly.

Of course, burning straw or wood, like burning fossil fuels, produces CO₂. The key distinction is that while fossil fuels release carbon that otherwise would have remained sequestered, biomass releases carbon that would have entered the atmosphere anyway, through decomposition. As long as biomass regrows, the CO₂ released in its combustion should be reabsorbed, meaning that the cycle is—or at least can be—carbon neutral. The wood chips used in the Nordby plant come from fallen trees that previously would have been left to rot. The straw for the Ballen-Brundby plant comes mainly from wheat stalks that would previously have been burned in the fields. Together, the biomass heating plants prevent the release of some twenty-seven hundred tons of carbon dioxide a year.

In addition to biomass, Samsø is experimenting on a modest scale with biofuels: a handful of farmers have converted their cars and tractors to run on canola oil. We stopped to visit one such farmer, who grows his own seeds, presses his own oil, and feeds the leftover mash to his cows. The farmer couldn’t be located, so Hermansen started up the press himself. He stuck a finger under the spout, then popped it into his mouth. “The oil is very good,” he announced. “You can use it in your car, and you can use it on your salad.”

After the tour, I went back with Hermansen to his office, in a building known as the Energiakademi. The academy, which looks like a Bauhaus interpretation of a barn, is covered with photovoltaic cells and insulated with shredded newspapers. It is supposed to serve as a sort of interpretive center, though when I visited, the place was so new that the rooms were mostly empty. Some high-school students were kneeling on the floor, trying to put together a miniature turbine.

I asked Hermansen whether there were any projects that hadn’t worked out. He listed several, including a plan to use natural gas produced from cow manure and an experiment with electric cars that failed when one of the demonstration vehicles spent most of the year in the shop. The biggest disappointment, though, had to do with consumption.

“We made several programs for energy savings,” he told me. “But people are acting—what do you call it?—irresponsibly. They behave like monkeys.” For example, families that insulated their homes better also tended to heat more rooms, “so we ended up with zero.” Essentially, he said, energy use on the island has remained constant for the past decade.

I asked why he thought the renewable-energy-island effort had got as far as it did. He said he wasn’t sure, because different people had had different motives for participating. “From the very egoistic to the more over-all perspective, I think we had all kinds of reasons.”

Finally, I asked what he thought other communities might take from Samsø’s experience.

“We always hear that we should think globally and act locally,” he said. “I understand what that means—I think we as a nation should be part of the global consciousness. But each individual cannot be part of that. So ‘Think locally, act locally’ is the key message for us.”

“There’s this wish for showcases,” he added. “When we are selected to be the showcase for Denmark, I feel ashamed that Denmark doesn’t produce anything bigger than that. But I feel proud because we are the showcase. So I did my job, and my colleagues did their job, and so did the people of Samsø.”

Around the same time that Samsø was designated Denmark’s renewable-energy island, a group of Swiss scientists who were working on similar issues performed a thought experiment. The scientists, all of whom were affiliated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, asked themselves what level of energy use would be sustainable, not just for an island or a small European nation but for the entire world. The answer they came up with—two thousand watts per person—furnished the name for a new project: the 2,000-Watt Society.

“What it’s important, I think, to know is that the 2,000-Watt Society is not a program of hard life,” the director of the project, Roland Stulz, told me when I went to speak to him at his office, in the Zurich suburb of Dübendorf. “It is not what we call Gürtel enger schnallen”—belt tightening—“it’s not starving, it’s not having less comfort or fun. It’s a creative approach to the future.”

Stulz, who is sixty-three, is a softspoken man with dark wavy hair and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He was trained as an architect and later became interested in energy-efficient building. In 2001, when he took over the 2,000-Watt Society, his mandate was to push it into the realm of the practical. (His work is funded in part by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, which has campuses in Zurich and Lausanne, and in part by private donations.) He began holding meetings that brought researchers together with government officials from cities like Zurich and Basel.

“I divided them into groups,” Stulz recalled. “And I told them, At four o’clock each group must come and tell the whole session what project they will do in the future, and who will lead the projects. And they said, Oh, it’s not possible. But at four o’clock everybody came with a project. And that’s how we started.” The cantons of Geneva and Basel-Stadt and the city of Zurich subsequently endorsed the aims of the 2,000-Watt Society, as did the Swiss Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy, and Communications. “At first glance, the objective of a two-thousand-watt society appears unrealistic,” Moritz Leuenberger, the head of the federal department, has said. “But the necessary technology already exists.”

One afternoon, Stulz took me to visit the headquarters of an aquatic-research center known as EAWAG, which was designed to meet the 2,000-Watt Society’s energy-efficiency goals. (EAWAG is an acronym for a German name so complicated that even German speakers can’t remember it.) We drove over in his Volvo, which runs on compressed natural gas produced in part from rotting vegetables. When I first caught sight of the place, I thought it was covered with banners; these turned out to be tinted-glass panels. Inside, hanging from a set of chains in a large atrium, was what I took to be a sculpture of a bug. This turned out to be a model of a water molecule, enlarged some ten billion times.

Among the many unusual features of the EAWAG Center is a lack of usual features. The building, which opened in 2006, has no furnace; it is so tightly insulated that, on most days, the warmth thrown off by the office equipment and the two hundred people who work inside is enough to keep it comfortable. Additional heat is provided by the sun—in winter, the outside panels tilt to allow in the maximum amount of light—and by air sucked in from underground. The building also has no conventional air-conditioners: in summer, the panels tilt to provide shade, and if the building gets hot during the day, at night the windows at the top of the atrium open, and the warm air rushes out. It supplies about a third of its own electricity with photovoltaic panels installed on the roof, and gets its hot water from solar collectors. Its bathrooms are equipped with specially designed “no mix” toilets that separate out urine, which contains potentially useful phosphorus and nitrogen. (“Exploiting common waste as a resource is a mark of sustainable civilization,” a booklet on the building observes.)

“It’s not a miracle, such a building,” Stulz told me when we went to have a cup of coffee in the center’s cheerfully modernist cafeteria. “It’s just putting smart elements together in a smart way.” Outside, it was rainy and forty-three degrees; inside the temperature was a pleasant seventy.

One way to think about the 2,000-Watt Society is in terms of light bulbs. Let’s say you turn on twenty lamps, each with a hundred-watt bulb. Together, the lamps will draw two thousand watts of power. Left on for a day, they will consume forty-eight kilowatt-hours of energy; left on for a year, they will consume seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours. A person living a two-thousand-watt life would consume in all his activities—working, eating, travelling—the same amount of energy as those twenty bulbs, or seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours annually.

Most of the people in the world today consume far less than this. The average Bangladeshi, for example, uses only about twenty-six hundred kilowatt-hours a year—this figure includes all forms of energy, from electricity to transportation fuel—which is the equivalent of using roughly three hundred watts continuously. The average Indian uses about eighty-seven hundred kilowatt-hours a year, making India a one-thousand-watt society, while the average Chinese uses about thirteen thousand kilowatt-hours a year, making China a fifteen-hundred-watt society.

Those of us who live in the industrialized world, by contrast, consume far more than two thousand watts. Switzerland, for instance, is a five-thousand-watt society. Most other Western European countries are six-thousand-watt societies; the United States and Canada run at twelve thousand watts. One of the founding principles of the 2,000-Watt Society is that this disparity is in itself unsustainable. “It’s a basic matter of fairness” is how Stulz put it to me. But increasing energy use in developing countries to match that of industrialized nations would be unacceptable on ecological grounds. Were per-capita demand in the developing world to reach current European levels, global energy consumption would more than double, and were it to rise to the American level, global energy consumption would more than triple. The 2,000-Watt Society gives industrialized countries a target for cutting energy use at the same time that it sets a limit for growth in developing nations.

The last time Switzerland was a two-thousand-watt society was in the early nineteen-sixties. By the end of that decade, energy use had reached three thousand watts, and by the mid-seventies it was up to four thousand watts. This rapid rise could be said to follow from technological advances—the spread of automobiles, the advent of jet travel, the proliferation of appliances and electronic devices—or it could be seen as just the reverse: a failure to apply technology where it is needed. A few years ago, a group of Swiss scientists published a white paper—or, to use the Swiss term, a “white book”—on the feasibility of a 2,000-Watt Society. Relying on widely agreed-upon figures, the scientists estimated that two-thirds of all the primary energy consumed in the world today is wasted, mostly in the form of heat that nobody wants or uses. (“Primary energy” is the energy contained in, say, a lump of coal; “useful energy” is the light emitted by a bulb once that coal has been burned to produce steam, the steam has been used to run a turbine, and the resulting electricity has been transmitted over the grid to heat the bulb’s filament.) This same paper concluded that, with currently available technologies, buildings could be made eighty per cent more efficient, cars fifty per cent more efficient, and motors twenty-five per cent more efficient.

In Switzerland, I visited several other buildings that, like the EAWAG Center, had been specifically designed to maximize efficiency. One was an upscale apartment building in Basel. The apartments have eighteen-inch-thick walls filled with insulation, triple-paned windows coated with a special reflective film, and a heat-recovery system that captures eighty per cent of the energy normally lost through ventilation. Instead of a boiler, it has a geothermal heat pump, which essentially sucks energy out of the groundwater. In the summer, the same system is used for cooling. (In compliance with Swiss building codes, the building also contains a bomb shelter.)

“The construction industry is very traditional,” Franco Fregnan, an engineer who showed me around the apartments, said. “If you bring an innovation to them, you usually have to wait another generation until it arrives into a building. And we are trying to change that, step by step.”

“It usually makes sense to become more intelligent in any human activity,” Stulz told me. “As the former Saudi Arabian oil minister Sheikh Yamani once said, the Stone Age didn’t end because there were no more stones. It ended because people became more intelligent. ”

What would it take to lead a two-thousand-watt life? When I posed this question to Stulz, he gave me another research paper, which offers case studies of six fictionalized households. The Jeannerets are an imaginary family of four who live in Glattbrugg, a town north of Zurich. They own an energy-efficient house, travel by electric bike or train, and occasionally rent a car—they belong to a car-sharing service—to do their grocery shopping. The Moeris, fictional farmers who live northeast of Bern, generate their own electricity with natural gas produced from cow manure; and Alain, Michel, Angela, and Marlène, fictional students living in Geneva, share all their appliances, use the tram, and like to go hiking in the French Alps during school breaks. “There is no formula for how to achieve a two-thousand-watt society,” the paper declares. “Three things are needed: societal decisions. . . technical innovation, and the resolve of every individual to act in an energy-conscious way.”

Very broadly speaking, the average Swiss today uses energy as follows: fifteen hundred watts per day for living and office space (this includes heat and hot water), eleven hundred watts for food and consumer items (the energy that it takes to produce and transport goods is referred to as “embodied” or “gray” energy), six hundred watts for electricity, five hundred watts for automobile travel, two hundred and fifty watts for air travel, and a hundred and fifty watts for public transportation. Each person’s share of Switzerland’s public infrastructure, which includes facilities like water- and sewage-treatment plants, comes to nine hundred watts. Reducing these five thousand watts to two thousand would seem to require a significant reduction in every realm. Assuming that infrastructure-related consumption could be cut to five hundred watts, a person who continued to use fifteen hundred watts for living and office space would have nothing left for food, electricity, and transportation. Similarly, a person who continued to travel and use electricity at current rates would consume two thousand watts without having anywhere to live or work, or anything to eat.

While I was in Switzerland, I kept looking for people who actually led two-thousand-watt lives.

“I’m pretty close, except for this stupid air travel,” Gerhard Schmitt, the vice-president for planning and logistics at the Zurich campus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, told me. “I go once to Shanghai and it’s gone.” (A round-trip flight between Zurich and Shanghai is the equivalent of using something like eight hundred watts continuously for a year.)

“Let’s skip that question,” Stulz said when I put it to him. While he lives in an energy-efficient apartment, he, too, travels a great deal; when I visited, he had just returned from a conference in New Delhi, a round trip that used roughly the equivalent of six hundred watts for the year.

The one person I spoke to who did seem to be leading a two-thousand-watt life, or something very near to it, was an engineer named Robert Uetz. Uetz works in the same building as Stulz, and when we returned from visiting the EAWAG Center he was still in his office, even though it was after six. Stulz encouraged me to go talk to him.

“We don’t experience it as a restriction,” Uetz told me of his two-thousand-watt life style. “On the contrary. I don’t feel that we’re giving up anything.” Uetz and his wife, a dentist, live with their two children in the city of Winterthur, near Zurich. About ten years ago, they bought a two-thousand-square-foot house in a newly built energy-efficient development. The house is heated with a geothermal heat pump—“It’s crazy to heat a house with fossil fuels,” Uetz said—and has a solar hot-water system. Uetz added photovoltaic panels to the roof to produce electricity; in the winter the panels produce somewhat less power than the house uses—it’s equipped with the most energy-efficient lights and appliances the family could find—and in the summer they produce somewhat more, so that over the course of the year the house’s electricity use nets out to zero.

“The most important decision was that we wouldn’t have a car,” Uetz told me. “That was a conscious decision. We looked for a house where we didn’t need a car.” Driving a lot—even in what, by today’s standards at least, counts as an energy-efficient vehicle—also makes it difficult to live within two thousand watts. A person who drives a Toyota Prius ten thousand miles a year consumes roughly two hundred and twenty-five gallons of gasoline. This is equivalent to consuming around eight thousand kilowatt-hours, or to using nearly a thousand watts on a continuous basis. (For a family of four, the same gasoline consumption would come to almost two hundred and fifty watts per person.)

“It’s a matter of what you’re used to, but I find taking the train a lot more pleasant than driving,” Uetz went on. “On the train I can work and relax. If I took a car, I’d have to worry about parking and traffic, rain, snow, and a certain number of people who can’t drive but are on the road anyway.” When Uetz and his family go on vacation, they travel by rail. “The only thing I’d say that is sort of a restriction is the flying,” he said. “Because, obviously, with the train where you can go is limited. We can’t go to China, or if we did it would take a week.”

“I don’t make a religion out of it,” he added. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel good about it—it’s how I like to live.”

By the 2,000-Watt Society’s own reckoning, cutting consumption is just half—or, perhaps more accurately, a quarter—of what needs to be done. The project’s ultimate goal is a world where people consume no more than two thousand watts apiece and where fifteen hundred of those watts come from carbon-free sources. In such a world, everyone would use energy sparingly, like Robert Uetz, and generate it renewably, like Jørgen Tranberg. In such a world, filled with windmills and net-zero houses, carbon emissions would fall sharply, and the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere would slowly level off. But how realistic is such a scenario?

Before I left Switzerland to fly back to New York (a trip equivalent to using roughly two hundred and fifty watts continuously for a year), I went to speak to the president of the research council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, Dieter Imboden. Imboden, who is sixty-four, is a compact man with an oval face and silvery hair. He received his training in theoretical solid-state physics, later became interested in environmental physics, and for several years chaired the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s environmental-sciences department. In the late nineties, he served as the director of the 2,000-Watt Society. He said that as a scientist he could see no technical barriers to creating a two-thousand-watt world.

“We are putting our mental energy into the wrong basket,” he told me. “Nothing has to be reinvented—for an engineer it’s not even a challenge.”

“The problems of the twenty-first century are a different kind of problem,” he went on. “And I think our society will be measured according to the solution of this new kind of problem, which cannot be solved with the same recipe as the flight to the moon, or the Manhattan Project. It’s a qualitative difference—a paradigm change in the role of science for our society.”

He continued, “The difficult thing is what I call ‘constructed Switzerland.’ You in America could call it ‘constructed United States’—the buildings and how they are built, but also where they are built and, even more important, the roads, the railroads, the lines for energy, for wastewater, and so on. It’s not economically feasible to replace everything in one instant.” But since infrastructure should in any case be replaced at the rate of roughly two per cent a year, if the project is approached incrementally, it’s a different task. Then, Imboden said, “it suddenly is feasible.”

As of yet, no one has undertaken a rigorous analysis of the economics of a transition to two thousand watts. Researchers have tended, rather, to focus on the price of stabilizing carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere at a given concentration—either, say, five hundred and fifty parts per million, which is double pre-industrial levels, or four hundred and fifty parts, which, many climate scientists say, is the very highest level advisable. Perhaps the most often cited economic study is the Stern Review, commissioned by the British government and named for its lead author, Sir Nicholas Stern, formerly the chief economist for the World Bank. The Stern Review, published in October, 2006, concluded that greenhouse-gas levels could be stabilized below double pre-industrial concentrations at a cost to global G.D.P. of around one per cent a year. (The Stern Review considered not just CO₂ but other greenhouse gases, like methane and nitrous oxide, as well.) An analysis released last year by the Swedish utility Vattenfall, with research assistance from the American consulting firm McKinsey & Company, reached a similar conclusion: it determined that many measures to reduce carbon emissions, like improving building insulation, would save money, while others, like installing wind turbines, would carry a price. The Vattenfall report estimates that “if all low-cost opportunities are addressed,” CO₂ levels could be stabilized at four hundred and fifty parts per million with an annual expenditure of six-tenths of one per cent of global G.D.P.

Though one per cent of the global economy is clearly a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things it’s also clearly manageable. It is about a ninth of what’s currently spent on health care, a seventh of what’s spent on oil, and half of what’s spent on defense. (More than forty per cent of all the world’s military expenditures are made by the United States.) Perhaps most pertinent, it’s a far smaller figure than the cost of inaction. The Stern Review projects that if current emissions trends are allowed to continue, the eventual damage from climate change will “be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever,” and that “if a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account” that figure could “rise to 20% of GDP or more.”

Twenty years ago, NASA’s chief climate scientist, James Hansen, testified on Capitol Hill about the dangers of global warming. Just a few days ago, Hansen returned to the Hill to testify again. “Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic,” he said. “Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding ninety-nine per cent. The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule.” Hansen went on to warn that there would be no practical way to prevent “disastrous” climate change unless the next President and Congress act quickly to curb emissions. Few parts of the U.S. may be as windy as Samsø, or as well organized as Switzerland, but just about everywhere there are possibilities for generating energy more inventively and using it more intelligently. Realizing these possibilities will require a great deal of effort. We may well decide not to make this effort. Such a choice to put off change, however, will merely drive us toward it. ♦

A Soldier’s Legacy

2008-07-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

Don’t ask, don’t tell, but Alan Rogers was a hero to everyone who knew him.

by Ben McGrath

In a handwritten letter to himself, dated December 13, 1990, Specialist Alan Rogers, a twenty-three-year-old African-American chaplain’s assistant, grappled with the issue of fear as he prepared for his first combat tour. Aboard Flight 104 from Germany to Saudi Arabia, as part of Operation Desert Shield, he wrote, “It seems like only yesterday that we were initially alerted that our unit would be deploying to the Persian Gulf to support the multinational force buildup already operating in the Middle East theater. Yet, in the midst of all the preparations and briefings, frenzied activity and excitement, there exists a general feeling of numbness. This really isn’t happening . . . this world crisis is not going to affect me. . . .” Rogers was an unusually soft-spoken and cerebral enlistee—he’d been voted “most intellectual” in his high-school class—and he found himself replaying the lyrics to Diana Ross’s “Theme from Mahogany” in his head (“Do you know where you’re going to?”).

Rogers went on to a distinguished military career. After earning two Kuwait Liberation medals with the 8th Battalion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery, which provided Patriot-missile support against Saddam Hussein’s Soviet-made Scuds, he returned home and, on an R.O.T.C. scholarship at the University of Florida, earned his bachelor’s degree, in religion. Then he accepted a commission as an intelligence officer. While stationed in Arizona, as an aide-de-camp at Fort Huachuca, he received a master’s degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix, and later, after serving two tours in South Korea, and returning to the Middle East in 2002 for the initial phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, he pursued a second master’s, in policy management, at Georgetown. The Georgetown stint was part of an élite Defense Department internship program offered to twenty captains across the services, and it included an assignment to the Pentagon—in Rogers’s case, as a special assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England. After the internship, he worked at the Pentagon as the lead biometrics officer in Army Intelligence—“the stuff that you see on ‘C.S.I.: Miami,’ ” as one of his friends put it, referring to the use of advanced fingerprinting techniques and retinal scans, which are particularly useful in counter-insurgency warfare, and in tracking the sources of improvised explosive devices, the primary killer of U.S. troops. Biometrics was a notorious mess, but Rogers excelled in the role, owing in large part to his facility for reconciling the technological demands of civilian contractors with the Army bureaucracy. “Every biometrics staff in the Pentagon and beyond—every single one, and I’m not joking here—contacted me and asked if they could borrow Major Rogers to help them work out their biometrics problems,” his supervisor later recalled. “Every meeting—fights, pandemonium—heads would turn to Alan.”

The measure of a soldier can fairly be said to consist of his ability to maintain the respect of his peers and his subordinates while earning it anew from his superiors. Rogers rarely talked about himself, which helped contribute to a widespread sense among his troops that he was there “solely for them,” as one Pentagon colleague said recently, but he was also fearless when it came to briefing two- and three-star generals. “If the sun was coming up and Alan said, ‘You know, it’s still kind of dark outside,’ people would say, ‘Yeah, maybe it is kind of dark outside,’ ” the colleague recalled. Rogers was deeply attracted to the symbolism of the Army, frequently leading civilian friends on tours of the Pentagon and of Arlington National Cemetery, and after he began his third tour in Iraq, last December, he took note of the weather in Baghdad, which wasn’t so different from Florida’s, and declared, “This is an ideal time to be here.” Major Rogers was by then approaching twenty years’ service, and was on track to be eligible for promotion to lieutenant colonel. He believed in the nobility of the mission.

In Baghdad, Rogers was assigned to the 1st Division National Police Transition Team, which involved embedding with Iraqi military units in an effort to train them for eventual self-sufficiency. He was part of an eleven-man unit known as Team Stiletto, working closely with several Iraqis who were nicknamed Steve, Mike, Leo, Kiwi, and Dave. “It is an understatement to say this is a significant paradigm shift for our conventional army,” he wrote in an e-mail to friends, after arriving at Forward Operating Base Shield, on the site of the former Olympic Training Center. “Throw into the mix the deadly I.E.D.’s that continue to produce casualties daily, rampant corruption and mixed allegiances, a Shia/Sunni divide that threatens all of our progress, coupled with a myriad of other elements, and it makes for the very complex battlespace which is Iraq today.”

At the end of January, Rogers spent the better part of a Saturday night checking back in with home, by e-mail and using a “morale phone” that he shared with a couple of other soldiers. He had a two-week leave coming up, so that he could stand as the best man in his friend Shay Hill’s wedding, in Jacksonville, and he called Hill, who was heading out to a rugby game and couldn’t talk. He was able to reach another friend, Kelly O’Connor, an Army recruiter stationed in St. Augustine; they talked about the relevance of his pre-deployment training at Fort Riley, in Kansas (so far, so good), and about the upcoming bachelor party they were planning for Hill, in Orlando. Rogers had no siblings, and had lost both his parents to illness in 2000. He thought of Hill and O’Connor as surrogate brothers. By the time Hill returned Rogers’s call, it was four in the morning in Iraq, and he could tell that he had woken Rogers up, so he kept the conversation brief. The next night, while helping his fiancée, Theresa, sort through the effects of her grandmother, who had recently died, Hill got a call from one of his neighbors in Jacksonville, who said that there were two men in uniform standing outside his door.

Several hours after the inadvertent wakeup call, it turned out, Rogers was sitting in the right rear seat of an armored Humvee, in East Baghdad, on a routine morning patrol, as it passed a guardrail concealing an I.E.D. The force of the explosion blew straight through the vehicle, knocking an Iraqi interpreter, in the left seat, into the street. The interpreter and an American gunner who was standing beside Rogers in the Humvee were injured. Rogers died instantly. He was forty.

Deputy Secretary England attended a memorial service at the Pentagon, where Thomas Gandy, a director of counterintelligence and human intelligence, hailed Rogers as “simply the most talented officer I ever had the opportunity to serve with,” and described his selflessness in taking wounded veterans at Walter Reed hospital to a Super Bowl party on a nearby base. “There was something special about Alan Rogers,” Lieutenant General John F. Kimmons, the deputy chief of staff for Army Intelligence, said. “He was more than he seemed.”

An obituary in the Gainesville Sun mentioned that Rogers was divorced and a Baptist minister—news, in both cases, to many of his friends at the Washington, D.C., chapter of American Veterans for Equal Rights (AVER), formerly known as Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Veterans of America. The minister claim was accurate—Rogers’s troops on Team Stiletto called him the Preacher, on account of his frequent sermonlike pep talks—and before his burial at Arlington National Cemetery, in March, a “homegoing service” was held for his casket at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Starke, Florida, where he was ordained, in 1995. (Governor Charlie Crist ordered the flags at the statehouse flown at half-mast for the occasion.) The mention of a divorce was not accurate; it may have been a story some acquaintances passed on to explain why Rogers did not have a wife or a girlfriend. “We made a statement that he was married to the Army,” one longtime friend told me.

Defense Department policy acts as a deep closet, even in death. From the Second World War until the Clinton Presidency, homosexuality in the armed services was banned outright; declaring oneself gay was a common draft-dodging maneuver during the Vietnam years. When Bill Clinton took office, in 1993, he vowed to end the ban, but, facing strong opposition from the four-star community, he settled on a compromise: “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” which attempted to draw a distinction between homosexuality (not forbidden in theory) and homosexual conduct (grounds for immediate discharge). The effectiveness of the distinction has been a source of debate ever since.

Shortly after Rogers moved to Washington, in 2004, he joined AVER, and served as the local chapter’s membership coördinator and treasurer, participating in “pride” festivals in Baltimore and Washington and organizing rafting and movie trips; among the latter was a trip to see “Gunner Palace,” a documentary about the experiences of soldiers in Iraq. In March of 2005, an AVER member named Tom posted to the organization’s Yahoo discussion group an Army Times op-ed titled “Gays in the Military: It’s a Question of Liberty.” “Thanks for sharing this,” Rogers posted, in response. “It’s nice to see active-duty field-grade officers making a strong case for the repeal of D.A.D.T. and publishing it in the Army Times. Curious to read some of the backlash the subsequent issues will no doubt contain.” (A retired officer, Lieutenant Colonel James E. Schmidt, wrote, “The Bible clearly states that homosexuality is a sin. Leaders must have respect from those they lead. I do not think many soldiers will respect or follow a leader who promotes sin.”) As word of Rogers’s death spread in the gay community, some began to wonder if he might not qualify as the first known gay casualty of the Iraq war. Opponents of the military’s policy, noting his impeccable résumé, and his work with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, saw in Rogers a transformative figure and began soliciting media coverage.

About a dozen gay active-duty personnel, including one senior officer, attended Rogers’s formal burial at Arlington, and joined in a memorial celebration later that evening at a local bed-and-breakfast that was attended by reporters from the Washington Post and from N.P.R.’s “Morning Edition.” The Post’s unusually detailed obituary ran the following week, under the headline “ARMY OFFICER REMEMBERED AS HERO: FRIENDS, FELLOW SOLDIERS MOURN LOSS OF ‘EXCEPTIONAL’ MAN.” It cited his Purple Heart and his two bronze stars, discussed the Persian rug that Rogers’s team in Baghdad had pitched in to buy for Shay Hill as a wedding gift, and quoted Mark Nadel, Rogers’s thesis adviser at Georgetown, saying that he recalled thinking, “This is a guy I’m going to hear from in ten years, and he’s going to be a general.” It did not mention that the subject of the thesis was the effect of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” on United States military recruiting and retention rates. The N.P.R. segment was pegged to news of the four-thousand-casualty mark having been crossed five years after the invasion, with Rogers’s story standing in as a kind of Everyman soldier’s. “You should know that about two hundred people came to the burial, soldiers and civilians alike,” the host, Steve Inskeep, said. “Major Rogers had no wife or child to take away the flag that draped his coffin, so soldiers folded that flag and gave it to his cousin, Cathy Long.”

The coverage pleased Long, who is fifty-nine, and who became close to Rogers after the death of both his parents, assuming an almost motherly role. Others, particularly those who had tipped off the Post and N.P.R., were frustrated by what was omitted. Weren’t the skill and the secrecy with which Rogers had compartmentalized the varied and seemingly incompatible aspects of his accomplished life a notable part of his “exceptional” story? Outing him was left to the Washington Blade, a gay weekly, which ran the headline “MEDIA, MILITARY KEPT SOLDIER IN CLOSET AFTER DEATH: FRIENDS SAY GAY MAN KILLED IN IRAQ WOULD WANT THE TRUTH TO BE KNOWN.” The blogger Andrew Sullivan linked to the Blade account and encouraged readers to complain to the Post. “I can see why outing someone who is alive and closeted is unethical,” he wrote. “Inning someone who is dead and was out is a function of utterly misplaced sensitivity, rooted in well-intentioned but incontrovertible homophobia.”

At the end of March, a patent agent in the Washington, D.C., area named Rob Pilaud decided to create a Wikipedia page for Rogers. Pilaud was a peripheral friend of Rogers—he wasn’t aware of the death until he received an e-mail invitation to the bed-and-breakfast gathering, seven weeks afterward—but he felt connected to the cause through his father (a retired enlisted man) and his domestic partner (a former military interpreter).

Two days after the Wikipedia entry appeared, an anonymous editor removed nearly all the biographical information, including references to Rogers’s involvement with AVER. The new entry read, simply, “Alan G. Rogers was a United States Army Major that died in Iraq in late January 2008. Alan was an ordained pastor.” The anonymous editor also added a comment on the Wiki Talk page which suggested that he or she had an even more personal connection to the subject: “Alan’s life was not about his sexual orientation but rather about the body of work he performed ministering to others and helping the defense of the country. Quit trying to press an agenda that Alan wouldn’t have wanted made public just to suit your own ends.”

Pilaud decided to track the tamperer’s I.P. address, and what he found lent credence to a growing conspiracy theory among his friends. The address associated with the computer on which the edits were made was assigned to “Army Information Systems Command-Pentagon.” A subsequent search appeared to connect the computer to the department run by Lieutenant General John F. Kimmons, the deputy chief of staff for Army Intelligence, who had not only praised Rogers at the Pentagon memorial service (“I rated Alan in the top five per cent of all M.I. majors I had seen in thirty-four years of service”) but had also presented the American flag to Cathy Long at the burial. A brief Wiki edit war ensued. Pilaud expanded on his initial entry, referring to Rogers as a “civil rights activist.” He uploaded a photograph of Rogers holding hands with another man on the beach at a same-sex wedding ceremony. He added that “the subsequent coverage of his death in the national media sparked a debate as to what information should and should not be included in the biography of a gay military person killed in action.”

Pilaud told me a few weeks later, “There’s this sort of dark side of me that thinks they shoved him off to Iraq to get rid of him.” He wondered if a further military coverup might not be to blame for the fact that Georgetown had proved unable to furnish a copy of Rogers’s master’s thesis.

The coverup, such as it was, was not the result of any coördinated government campaign but a freelance effort enabled by the good intentions of colleagues and friends whose own experiences with Rogers made it hard to conceive of him as a dissident of any kind. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Hardy worked in the cubicle across from Rogers at the Pentagon, and spoke movingly at the memorial service, comparing Rogers’s mentoring of his troops to the sacrifices of the apostle Paul. He and Rogers were the only African-Americans in the office with Army backgrounds. “Alan was a few years behind me, but I would have rated him above me in leadership and intelligence,” Hardy said recently. Hardy was assigned the role of casualty assistance officer, overseeing the execution of Rogers’s will, and evidently took this to include the protection of Rogers’s legacy from people who seemed too ready to introduce politics into the grieving process. After the bed-and-breakfast gathering, where he was struck by the composition of the mourners, Hardy sent an e-mail to Donna St. George, the Post reporter, expressing vague concern, on behalf of Rogers’s family, about the tone of her forthcoming piece. Deborah Howell, the Post’s ombudsman, did not mention Hardy or the letter in her follow-up account, “PUBLIC DEATH, PRIVATE LIFE,” but she explained that the paper’s decision not to disclose Rogers’s sexuality had been an “agonizing” one, which was ultimately made by the paper’s executive editor, Len Downie, who preferred to exercise caution in the absence of any proof of the soldier’s own wishes. (Howell concluded that the paper had erred: “There was enough evidence—particularly of Rogers’s feelings about ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’—to warrant quoting his friends and adding that dimension to the story of his life.”)

“To a person—I really mean every person in the office was completely surprised,” Hardy told me, referring to Rogers’s private life. Hardy’s officemates knew Rogers as an easygoing college-football enthusiast and a capable volleyball player—their team captain, last June, at the annual office picnic. “ ‘The first openly gay soldier to die in Iraq,’ ” Hardy said, recalling Pilaud’s Wikipedia entry. “We’re, like, ‘Hold it. If it’s a surprise to all of us, that can’t count as the first openly gay soldier to die in Iraq.’ And we just felt there was an agenda that wasn’t Alan’s.” Hardy said that he did not know who had made the Wikipedia edits, but he mentioned a recent article in USA Today in which a soldier’s mother expressed some unease about the specificity of the instructions her son had given her in the event of his death—which friends should speak on his behalf, what songs to play at his funeral. “Nowhere—and I read the will—did Alan leave any piece of paper that said that,” Hardy told me. “He did not make any moves to be remembered as a gay soldier. Nowhere in those phone calls home did he say, ‘Let everyone know that I died a proud gay officer.’ ” Of course, being a proud gay officer is tantamount, under the current military policy, to being a retired gay officer with no pension.

Hardy’s appeal to the wishes and concerns of the family may have been weakened by the fact that the closest living relatives of the deceased were only cousins, but he found additional moral support from Rogers’s longtime friend Shay Hill, whom Rogers had designated his executor and sole benefactor. Hill lodged a complaint with the Washington Blade arguing that Rogers’s sexuality had “no more relevance than the color of his skin,” and, after joking with Hardy about the biographical editing, even considered pursuing defamation charges against Wikipedia on behalf of the Rogers estate. “It’s really minimizing him,” Hill told me. “Granted, we remember the bad and the good, but typically we remember the good. I’m not saying being gay is bad or good, just saying he would rather be remembered for a lot more than that.”

After Rogers’s death, it emerged that there were a number of people who considered him to be their closest friend, and who felt that they were in a position to discern how he would have wished to be remembered. Their differing notions may have said more about the richness of Rogers’s friendships than about his beliefs. Nearly everyone, in recalling Rogers, talked about his great strength as a listener—his habit of drawing people out and making them feel as though their best selves had been understood. Only in retrospect did they realize that he never revealed much of himself.

The wrangling over Rogers’s private life threatened to obscure a remarkable American biography. He was born in New York City in 1967; the man his mother had married was in prison and denied paternity, so she, a Roman Catholic of Trinidadian descent, put him up for adoption. He lived at the Foundling Hospital, an orphanage on Sixth Avenue, until he was three, when he moved into the Mitchel Houses, in the South Bronx, with his new parents, George and Genevieve Rogers. George worked in a garment factory; Genevieve stayed home to take care of Alan, who was never told that he was adopted. When Alan was in the fourth grade, he and his mother moved to Hampton, Florida, an hour southwest of Jacksonville, to take care of Genevieve’s mother, who was ailing. (George continued working at the factory, and joined them after he retired.) Hampton has a population of about four hundred, and the new living circumstances could hardly have been more different from the South Bronx.

The Rogerses were devout Southern Baptists, and in Hampton Alan mostly kept to himself and his Bible, occasionally picking buckets of pecans from a giant tree in the back yard. He was the only boy to carry a briefcase to school in the eighth grade, and in high school he joined the debate team. In every picture from his school days, his shirts appear pressed and tucked. “He reminded me of Urkel growing up—you know, the nerdy Urkel,” Gordon Smith, a former classmate, who is now the police chief in the neighboring town of Starke, said recently. “But he got along with everybody. Nothing bothered him. He just read his Bible. He was one of those few people you meet in life where nobody has nothing bad to say. It was just hard for me to picture him going into the military. I’ll be honest with you: I’d have never dreamed it in my life that he’d be a military man. I believed he’d be a preacher. ’Cause he never was a tough, macho kind of guy.”

At the time of Rogers’s enlistment, in 1987, he had never been to the Atlantic Ocean, despite the fact that he lived no farther than seventy miles from the coast. It is not difficult to imagine that, amid such a sheltered environment, and given his family’s limited financial means, the Army seemed an easy way out—all the more so when he was assigned to Giebelstadt Army Airfield, in Germany. While in Germany, friends recalled, Rogers struggled to reconcile his emerging sexuality with his faith, and found sanctuary in a house owned by an American pharmaceutical executive named Marty McNeil, who was married (his wife worked for Stars and Stripes) and also had a male lover. McNeil’s house was a popular retreat for gay service members in Germany at the time, but McNeil was also a practicing Roman Catholic, and he often spoke with Rogers about his admiration of the Jesuits. Rogers joined the Giebelstadt Gospel Church and became an associate pastor. “Alan really cared deeply about what people felt about him—people’s respect for him,” McNeil told me. “He went to a lot of effort to maintain that respect. He certainly impressed the hell out of my father, an ex-marine.” McNeil said that he and his father had “one of those ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ relationships,” but that his father continued to ask about Rogers ten years after Rogers had left the country.

Broadly speaking, Rogers’s friends could be divided into two camps, one associated with Florida and the other with Washington. “Shay was never really a part of Alan’s gay life,” Tami Sadowski, a close friend from Washington, said in April, at a gathering at her house, where several people expressed reservations about Hill’s handling of the estate, and shared recollections of Rogers as a lover of good food and fashion, who enjoyed taking long vacations in the Greek Isles. In 2004, Sadowski attended an Army ball as Rogers’s date, and last year she asked Rogers to stand beside her as a “man of honor” at her marriage to Matt Wagenhofer. “I think we were all a little surprised to find out that Shay was the sole beneficiary of the will,” she said, and added that she had started an Alan G. Rogers Memorial Scholarship Fund, to which Hill had not yet contributed anything. As Rogers’s beneficiary, Hill was entitled to the military life-insurance policy of four hundred thousand dollars.

Hill, an affable environmental scientist with a slight drawl and a ruddy complexion, met Rogers in 1992, while selling boiled peanuts at the side of the road outside Gainesville to pay for his education at a local community college. Rogers, who had recently returned from Germany and had enrolled at the University of Florida, didn’t particularly like boiled peanuts, but he decided to stop one day after noticing that Hill seemed always to be waving at him when he drove by. The waves were nothing more than a simple salesman’s trick. “I almost didn’t have the heart to say, ‘I’m actually waving to everybody,’ ” Hill told me. But Rogers took the opportunity to invite Hill to a party, and Hill, in turn, invited Rogers to join in his regular games of Risk. Before long, they became roommates—Rogers had told Hill that he was gay—in what Hill calls the “international house of people,” which included “a guy from Mexico, a black lady from England, and a white guy from South Africa.”

Hill met his future wife, Theresa Bennett, at the Riverside Avenue Christian Church, in Jacksonville, in 2005. She was a commercial banker and came from a prominent Florida family—her grandfather Charles Bennett was the longest-serving congressman in the state’s history, and the man responsible for placing the phrase “In God We Trust” on the nation’s currency. She objected to homosexuality on religious grounds and likened it to drug addiction, so Hill spoke cautiously about Rogers before introducing her to him. He took her to Washington for Rogers’s graduation from Georgetown, in 2005, and they arranged to stay at his town house. “There was an ironing board, there was a whole vase of fresh flowers near my bed, all clean linens, everything organized in the bathroom,” she recalled. “You could eat off the floor.” The discovery was unsettling at first—“I’m, like, ‘Shay has an African-American gay best friend. This is interesting’ ”—but she came to regard Rogers as her favorite of Shay’s friends, and the most respectful and supportive of their relationship. This may have been Rogers’s singular gift: an extraordinary ability to read the anxieties of others, and to offer a suitable version of himself to fit the situation. “He realized that you don’t change the system by alienating those who are against you,” Shay told me. “You change the system by trying to convince those who are against you.”

When I first met the Hills, a couple of months had passed since their wedding, and their house was overrun with boxes containing the personal effects of Major Alan G. Rogers, which had recently been delivered by the Army, as well as dozens of testimonials and condolences from dignitaries and acquaintances as varied as Senator Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and “Steve,” of Team Stiletto. (“Sir . . . would be honored if you would accept this Babylonian Lion. He wanted to do one last thing for the man he called his friend, Alan.”) Hill had been looking forward to the shipment as an opportunity to peer into the soul of a close but intensely private friend. “Think about if you died tomorrow,” he said. “What would somebody remember you by? That, to me, is the neatest thing about receiving all these items.”

Rogers did not appear to have kept a regular diary, however, and the writings that Hill had unearthed were for the most part spiritually reflective, not personally introspective. (“Rev. Rogers’s life philosophy is summed up in these two sentences: ‘If you meet me and forget me, you have lost NOTHING. When you meet Jesus and forget Him, you have lost EVERYTHING!’ ”) Rogers’s collection of books was extensive, but notable more for its breadth (from the complete “Left Behind” series to Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell”) than for its exploration of any particular themes or ideas. A bright-orange life preserver served as a reminder that Rogers, for all his travels, had never learned to swim.

Hill pointed to a bongo drum—a gift from the men of the Bravo Company human-intelligence unit out of Yongsan, South Korea. “Here’s something cool,” he said. The skin of the drum had been marked up to resemble an interrogation form, and its joking tone suggested that some of Rogers’s troops would have been neither shocked nor offended by Pilaud’s Wikipedia entry: “Alan Rogers, a.k.a. Preacherman, Captain Velveeta . . . Source is very cocky and sure to talk about his knowledge of men’s fashion. Do not talk about the inappropriateness of his tuxedo.” A list of the subject’s “documents” included “one book, titled ‘Searching for My Perfect Bride,’ unsuccessfully well used . . . one V.I.P. membership to all the clubs on Texas Street . . . one copy, ‘It’s Raining Men’ CD.”

Hill referred to his inheritance as “blood money,” and after a few days of living with Rogers’s effects he seemed to regard each unopened box as a kind of rebuke—a reminder of guilt. “The biggest burden has been not to wither his worldly goods away—to do something with them, aside from taking care of myself or my family,” he said. “It’s a higher responsibility.” It was also slow going. He had had to get up early on the morning after learning of Rogers’s death, and drive to Tallahassee to dig wells at the site of a proposed gas station. The wedding followed not long afterward, and then came an abbreviated honeymoon in Napa Valley. These were not ideal circumstances for grieving, or the most salutary conditions for beginning a happy marriage. Hill still had a dime that he found on the street during his bachelor party, in February; it had oxidized in such a way that President Roosevelt’s face appeared black. It was dated 1967, the year of Rogers’s birth, and Hill had noticed, while looking up at the stars that night, that Mars—the Roman god of war—was shining directly overhead. Hill’s first fiduciary act as the executor of the Rogers estate was to sign for his dead best friend’s credit-card bill when checking out of the rooms that Rogers had reserved for the occasion.

“You wonder, like, why he picked me,” Hill said at one point. “I wonder that sometimes. A lot of people were his friends.” He recounted the story of the deaths of Rogers’s parents, which occurred in swift succession in 2000, when Rogers was stationed in Korea. George Rogers had had a heart attack while driving to visit Genevieve, who was suffering from kidney failure. She died less than two weeks later. In the interim period, Rogers was going through some family paperwork, and discovered that he’d been adopted. “She wasn’t feeling well enough for him to approach her,” Hill said. “So here he is, a grown man, had just buried his father, and he found out he was adopted. And I’m there as a friend to experience that. I don’t know how I would have reacted if it were me. But then he did the eulogy at his mom’s funeral. It was just amazing how he had the wherewithal.”

Kelly O’Connor, the Army recruiter from St. Augustine, first met Rogers at a Kmart in Arizona, where O’Connor was working part time to pay for community college. One day, while stocking shelves, he noticed a customer wearing a Florida Gators T-shirt, and made a taunting comment; the Florida-Florida State football game was coming up, and O’Connor was a Seminoles fan. Rogers was the Gators partisan, and he invited O’Connor to a party to watch the game. The two men later ended up serving overlapping combat tours—O’Connor was a construction engineer who helped build base camps—at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon returning to the United States, O’Connor volunteered for recruiting duty. “Anybody who was interested in military intelligence, I used to be able to call Alan,” he told me. “It was just another of the things he did—he could talk to applicants about all the different careers that Intel had. He would make time in his schedule to call them back.” O’Connor now runs the recruiting station in St. Augustine, and he was, like many of Rogers’s friends, curious about Rogers’s thesis.

The thesis did not turn up among Rogers’s personal effects, although Theresa Hill showed me a white binder on the kitchen floor, labelled “Capstone Project Research,” that left little doubt about the strength of Rogers’s convictions on the matter. The binder included a printout of an e-mail from Rogers to his friend Jason Cianciotto (an AVER member at whose same-sex wedding Rogers had offered a prayer), explaining that his adviser was urging him to work on concealing his biases, and to focus more on analysis than on advocacy. (The adviser, Mark Nadel, explained that because the project was a capstone paper and not, technically, a thesis, there was no protocol for keeping a copy on file.) The research followed the history of attitudes toward gay servicemen in the military both before and since the introduction of the current policy, and included the story of Private First Class Barry Winchell, who was beaten to death in 1999 by a fellow-soldier at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, because of suspicions that he was gay. Survey results have shown a steady increase in tolerance over time, with generals typically lagging behind enlisted men. A Zogby poll, in 2006, of people who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that nearly half believed at least one member in their own unit to be gay, and, among those who felt certain that they had served alongside a gay colleague, about two-thirds did not think troop morale had been affected. Two weeks ago, the Washington Post released the results of a poll indicating that seventy-five per cent of Americans now favor repealing “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” up from forty-four per cent fifteen years ago. Fifty per cent of veterans agreed.

While working in biometrics, after completing the thesis, Rogers had his first extended exposure to civilian contractors, and realized that not only did they make twice as much money for doing similar work, in many cases, as that of active-duty officers; they had their private lives to themselves. Shortly after accepting his third tour of duty in Iraq, last year, Rogers began telling friends that he planned to retire from the Army when he reached the twenty-year mark, which would have coincided with his stateside return. He was beginning to worry that he would never get a chance to settle down and enjoy a long-term relationship. One of the people he called on the night before his death was his friend Tami Sadowski, who works as a real-estate broker in Maryland. They had made arrangements to go house hunting in the D.C. area during his two-week leave.

“He followed every rule he believed in,” a close friend and colleague who got to know Rogers well while they were both living in Atlanta, near the headquarters of the Third U.S. Army, in 2003, told me. “He believed in the Army. It was so important to him. This is probably the perfect case study of somebody who was gay and accepted the Army’s values—and how it doesn’t work at the end of the day. If he hadn’t died in Iraq, the Army would have lost him.”

A couple of weeks after Memorial Day, Hampton held a political rally at its City Park, a sandy square a few hundred yards from the one-story house where Rogers and his parents had lived. Hampton’s mayor, Jim Mitzel, refers to the town as “Mayberry, U.S.A.” The rally featured short speeches by candidates running for the local school board, county commissioner, sheriff, and even for Congress, and was intended to raise money for a Hampton Veterans Memorial, which would be dedicated in the honor of Major Rogers, Hampton’s first and only casualty of the War on Terror. Rude Roy the BBQ Boy, a burly Vietnam veteran with a gray ponytail, was selling pulled-pork sandwiches and burgers, and donating twenty per cent of his proceeds to the effort; and the Mayor’s wife, Jennifer, occasionally passed around a jar and minded a folding table at which contributors could inspect potential designs for the memorial statue. (Five thousand dollars would buy a helmet sitting atop a standing machine gun, and twice that much added a pair of boots.) On a pole to the right of the town bandstand, Mayor Mitzel had affixed a poster board mounted with a couple of local newspaper stories about Rogers. “SOLDIER: TOOK CARE OF HIS AGING PARENTS AS THEY GREW WEAK” read one headline, above an article that repeated the divorce canard.

Gordon Smith, the Starke police chief and Rogers’s old classmate, was there, running for the office of sheriff, with a large contingent of supporters giving out free ice cream. (“There’s nobody more red, white, and blue than Gordon Smith,” he said. “Nobody loves the Lord above more than I do.”) During pauses between speeches, a man wearing an American-flag bandanna sang karaoke to the music of Eric Clapton and Creed. The other candidates included a member of the National Guard who had been called to drill duty, and who therefore asked the Hampton police chief to read a statement on his behalf, and a man, Charles Van Zant, who said that his call to public service had come last year when his son, a member of the local school board, began his second Iraq deployment, and Governor Crist asked Dad to fill in. Van Zant, who was running for the State House, said that he had sought higher counsel in devising his platform. “I asked the Lord, ‘Is there something else that you’d like for me to do?’ ” Van Zant said. “And he showed me two things. One, he showed me plainly that he wanted me to get in the fight against abortion politically. . . . Secondly, we’ve got an amendment coming up on our constitution that you need to vote yes for. It’s amendment No. 2. It has to do with the definition of marriage as one man, one woman.” Except for this digression, the day’s honoree might have felt entirely at home.

Shay Hill and his wife spent the morning holding a yard sale to unload some of Rogers’s less personal belongings—furniture, clothes, books—and they arrived late. After two weekends, they’d sold five hundred and forty-four dollars’ worth, or just enough to clear a path through the living room. Instead of donating to Tami Sadowski’s scholarship fund in Washington, they planned to give the cash to an organization in Jacksonville called Community Connections, for homeless women and children. Hill’s pickup truck was loaded with paintings and some other selected items of Rogers’s—a family Bible, a Buffalo Soldier figurine—that he intended to give to Cathy Long and her husband, Jerry.

The Longs, the only black people in the park, were easily recognizable as representatives of the Rogers family. Cathy is the grand-niece of George Rogers, Alan’s adoptive father. She and Jerry were living in the Bronx, where Jerry worked as a New York City cop, when Alan was adopted. They had a son who was about the same age, and had joined George and Genevieve and Alan for their first Thanksgiving dinner. In 1990, the Longs moved to Ocala, about an hour south of Hampton, which is where I’d first met them, a few weeks before the rally.

Cathy works the night shift at a hospital, as a nurse, so she had suggested that we have an early dinner, at four o’clock, in a Piccadilly Cafeteria on State Road 40. She and Jerry seemed to be on familiar terms with much of the staff and the clientele. Hill had warned me that the Longs didn’t approve of homosexuality, and Cathy seemed uncomfortable talking about it. “As far as the family is concerned, we really did not become privy, I guess you could say, to ‘the information’ until Alan had passed,” she said. “Just because he felt that all people should be treated the same—and I’m sure that that was the extent of his involvement, not that he was trying to parade any particular life style, or whatever. He just loved people. He was a people person.”

Jerry, a Vietnam veteran, said grace before we ate. Cathy mentioned the phone call she’d received from Rogers the day before his death; they were in Georgia at the time, looking at investment properties, and Rogers was worried about the possibility of their leaving Ocala, which he’d come to see as an extension of his home base. In retrospect, Cathy felt that the way he’d said “I love you,” at the close of the conversation, seemed like a final goodbye. She hadn’t yet been able to delete his number from her phone, and she said that, in the days after the guardrail explosion, she’d received more than fifty calls from servicemen and women, many of them in Iraq. “One of the generals, I had to console him,” she said. “He tried to express his condolences, but I was concerned with what was going on with him, because he was still there.” She and Jerry couldn’t agree on whether their Verizon bill for that month had exceeded three hundred or eight hundred dollars.

They recalled the last time they’d seen Rogers, about a year ago, and how eager he had been to take them to the Jacksonville Landing, a waterfront tourist plaza with restaurants and shops. When they arrived, the Landing was closed, because of a terrorist threat, so they met at a Japanese restaurant instead, and Shay Hill showed up carrying a five-foot python in a pillowcase—Rogers’s pet, as it turned out, which had been left in Hill’s care. “I joked with Alan for the longest time,” Cathy told me. “I said, ‘You know, Alan, I finally saw a side of you that I didn’t know was there.’ I never took him to be a snake owner.” The python’s name is Alexis, and it currently lives in a tank in the Hills’ bedroom.

In late June, Shay Hill received a CD from the Army, the contents of which drastically altered his perspective on the preceding five months. It contained the unclassified files from Rogers’s laptop in Iraq, among them a “letter of intent,” to accompany his will.

Rogers had told Hill that the letter of intent would be included in a box of clothes for the wedding that he was shipping to Jacksonville before departing for Iraq. He’d mentioned it primarily to suggest that Hill not open the box when it arrived. Hill recalled this exchange on the night that the two Army representatives came to his door with the news of Rogers’s death. He told Kelly O’Connor, who had raced over from St. Augustine, and they opened the box together. But there was no letter. Evidently, Rogers did not finish writing it until he had arrived in Baghdad, in December.

“Well, if you’re reading this, you’ve got a lot of work to do,” Rogers wrote, and then explained in some detail the various ways in which he had clearly considered the question of his legacy. He wished his funds to be disbursed not only to other friends and family but to a variety of organizations: the N.A.A.C.P., AVER, and the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which publishes a gay soldier’s survival guide. The letter also mentioned a godson, living in California, for whom Rogers wanted to set up a trust; Hill hadn’t known of any godchildren, and he didn’t recognize the names of the child’s parents. “I’m not even sure if they know Alan is dead,” he said, marvelling at the number of secrets his friend had kept.

Hill realized that none of the people mentioned in the letter knew of its existence, and that, legally speaking, he was still the sole beneficiary. Who was to say that Rogers hadn’t intended to revise the letter further? He hadn’t printed it and signed it, after all. Shay and Theresa had recently made an offer on a new home, and they’d been planning to use much of the life-insurance money for the down payment. “I did make some purchases I wouldn’t have made,” Shay said, with a mixture of remorse and aggravation. “This has completely thrown our lives into a whirlwind. My house has been saturated with physical stuff.”

But his conscience soon overpowered his frustration, and after consulting a minister he even began to relieve himself of the guilt associated with all the remaining household clutter. “Little did I know that he wasn’t blessing me as much as I thought he was,” Hill said. “I mean, I was blessed to be his best friend. Maybe that’s the whole life lesson.”

He read aloud some more from Rogers’s letter: “Growing up in New York, and then moving to the small town of Hampton, I never imagined that I would see much beyond the city limits of Bradford County. My parents gave me so much love and hope that there was a better life out there, and by God’s grace I found it. The U.S. Army has provided me such a wonderful opportunity to realize my dreams to go to college and see parts of the world that I had only read about in schoolbooks. I’ve been to countries that many only dream about. Walked the streets of Europe: Paris, Greece, Spain, Germany, England, Italy, Czech Republic. I’ve seen Asia, South America, and, of course, the Middle East. . . . As you know I’ve been raised in the Church and have always had a love, reverence, and fascination for God. I am blessed to be saved by His grace, and so I know that I am going up yonder to be with my Lord. Please tell those who remain not to grieve too much but to have a big party and celebrate. . . . My only regret is that I have never found that special one to grow old with and watch the sunset with.”

Dr. Kush

2008-07-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Tibetan prayer flags suspended on a string over the sleeping body of Captain Blue rose and fell in fluttering counterpoint to the wheezy rhythm of his breath. Lifted by a gentle breeze off the Pacific Ocean, each swatch of red, white, yellow, or green cotton bore a paragraph of Asian script. Every time a flag flaps in the breeze, it is thought, a prayer flies off to Heaven. Blue’s mother says that when her son was an infant he used to sleep until noon, which is still the time that he wakes up most days, on his platform bed in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking Venice Beach, a neighborhood of Los Angeles.

It was now three o’clock in the afternoon, and Captain Blue was dozing after a copious inhalation of purified marijuana vapor. (His nickname is an homage to his favorite variety of bud.) His hair was black and greasy, and was spread across his pillow. On the front of his purple T-shirt, which had slid up to expose his round belly, were the words “Big Daddy.” With his arm wrapped around a three-foot-long green bong, he resembled a large, contented baby who has fallen asleep with his milk bottle.

Captain Blue is a pot broker. More precisely, he helps connect growers of high-grade marijuana upstate to the retail dispensaries that sell marijuana legally to Californians on a doctor’s recommendation. Since 1996, when a referendum known as Proposition 215 was approved by California voters, it has been legal, under California state law, for authorized patients to possess or cultivate the drug. The proposition also allowed a grower to cultivate marijuana for a patient, as long as he had been designated a “primary caregiver” by that patient. Although much of the public discussion centered on the needs of patients with cancer, AIDS, and other diseases that are synonymous with extraordinary suffering, the language of the proposition was intentionally broad, covering any medical condition for which a licensed physician might judge marijuana to be an appropriate remedy—insomnia, say, or attention-deficit disorder.

The inside of Blue’s apartment, where he spends most of his time, measures less than four hundred square feet. It opens onto a huge wraparound terrace that offers mind-bending views of the ocean and the Hollywood Hills. The apartment, which is in the vicinity of Washington Boulevard, used to be occupied by another pot dealer, who moved out a few years ago, leaving Blue with his crash pad and a list of about a hundred patients. The building is near Abbot Kinney Boulevard, the commercial drag in Venice that, in recent years, has been transformed from a low-rent strip of bars and secondhand-clothing stores into a destination for well-heeled shoppers and restaurant-goers. The building retains a funky seventies vibe, with white wood floors, murky brown walls, and faded Morrison Hotel-style carpets. The sounds of “Tom and Jerry” episodes blare through locked doors in the middle of the day.

I recently spent six months, off and on, with Blue—at his apartment, in private homes, on farms, in pot grow rooms, and in other places where “medical marijuana” is produced, traded, sold, and consumed in California. During that time, I saw thousands of Tibetan prayer flags. The flags identify their owners with serenity and the conscious path, rather than with the sinister world of urban dope dealers, who flaunt muscles and guns, and charge exorbitant prices for mediocre product. For Blue and tens of thousands of like-minded individuals, Proposition 215 presented an opportunity to participate in a legally sanctioned experiment in altered living. The people I met in the high-end ganja business had an affinity for higher modes of thinking and being, including vegetarianism and eating organic food, practicing yoga, avoiding prescription drugs in favor of holistic healing methods, travelling to Indonesia and Thailand, fasting, and experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Many were also financially savvy, working long hours and making six-figure incomes.

Blue and I have known each other for almost two decades. Our fathers were both professors of political science, and, starting in the mid-eighties, we both attended Ivy League colleges in the Northeast, where we shared a fondness for illegal drugs. After graduation, Blue spun records and taught nursery school in Manhattan. He left for California in 1998, not long after the state banned cigarette smoking in workplaces—Blue is highly allergic to cigarette smoke—and passed Proposition 215. After working for a while as a bouncer, he began selling pot full time.

In 2003, the California State Legislature passed Senate Bill 420. The law was intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by Proposition 215, which had failed to specify how patients who could not grow their own pot were expected to obtain the drug, and how much pot could be cultivated for medical purposes. The law permitted any Californian with a doctor’s note to own up to six mature marijuana plants, or to possess up to half a pound of processed weed, which could be obtained from a patients’ collective or coöperative—terms that were not precisely defined in the statute. It also permitted a primary caregiver to be paid “reasonable compensation” for services provided to a qualified patient “to enable that person to use marijuana.”

The counties of California were allowed to amend the state guidelines, and the result was a patchwork of rules and regulations. Upstate in Humboldt County, the heartland of high-grade marijuana farming in California, the district attorney, Paul Gallegos, decided that a resident could grow up to ninety-nine plants at a time, in a space of a hundred square feet or less, on behalf of a qualified patient. The limited legal protections afforded to pot growers and dispensary owners have turned marijuana cultivation and distribution in California into a classic “gray area” business, like gambling or strip clubs, which are tolerated or not, to varying degrees, depending on where you live and on how aggressive your local sheriff is feeling that afternoon. This summer, Jerry Brown, the state’s attorney general, plans to release a more consistent set of regulations on medical marijuana, but it is not clear that California’s judges will uphold his effort. In May, the state Court of Appeal, in Los Angeles, ruled that Senate Bill 420’s cap on the amount of marijuana a patient could possess was unconstitutional, because voters had not approved the limits.

Most researchers agree that the value of the U.S. marijuana crop has increased sharply since the mid-nineties, as California and twelve other states have passed medical-marijuana laws. A drug-policy analyst named Jon Gettman recently estimated that in 2006 Californians grew more than twenty million pot plants. He reckoned that between 1981 and 2006 domestic marijuana production increased tenfold, making pot the leading cash crop in America, displacing corn. A 2005 State Department report put the country’s marijuana crop at twenty-two million pounds. The street value of California’s crop alone may be as high as fourteen billion dollars.

According to Americans for Safe Access, which lobbies for medical marijuana, there are now more than two hundred thousand physician-sanctioned pot users in California. They acquire their medication from hundreds of dispensaries, collectives that are kept alive by the financial contributions of their patients, who pay cash for each quarter or eighth of an ounce of pot. The dispensaries also buy marijuana from their members, and sometimes directly from growers, whose crops can also be considered legal, depending on the size of the crop, the town where the plants are grown, and the disposition of the judge who hears the case.

California’s encouragement of a licit market for pot has set off a low-level civil war with the federal government. Growing, selling, and smoking marijuana remain strictly illegal under federal law. The Drug Enforcement Administration, which maintains that marijuana poses a danger to users on a par with heroin and PCP, has kept up an energetic presence in the state, busting pot growers and dispensary owners with the coöperation of some local police departments.

In the past five years, an unwritten set of rules has emerged to govern Californians participating in the medical-marijuana trade. Federal authorities do not generally bother arresting patients or doctors who write prescriptions. Instead, the D.E.A. pressures landlords to evict dispensaries and stages periodic raids on them, either shutting them down or seizing their money and marijuana. Dispensary owners are rarely arrested, and patient records are usually left alone. Through trial and error, dispensary owners have learned how to avoid trouble: Don’t advertise in newspapers, on billboards, or on flyers distributed door to door. Don’t sell to minors or cops. Don’t open more than two stores. Any Californian who is reasonably prudent can live a life centered on the cultivation, sale, and consumption of marijuana with little fear of being fined or going to jail.

Captain Blue displays his pot on a shelf by his bed, next to two new laptop computers and an assemblage of high-end stereo equipment. The weed is kept in silver Ziploc bags. All the pot that Blue sells is grown in accordance with California state law, he says, and is provided only to dispensaries of which Blue is a member, and to patients for whom he is the primary caregiver.

Blue has a photo I.D. card from the City of Los Angeles confirming that he is a bona-fide medical-marijuana patient. His malady is anxiety. On a side table by his bed, he keeps a Volcano, a German-made vaporizer that resembles a stainless-steel coffeemaker. The Volcano, which costs five hundred dollars, warms dried marijuana, releasing vapor into a plastic bag and leaving behind a toasted brown chaff that smells oddly like popcorn. When Blue uses the Volcano, he inhales the contents of the plastic bag through a bong, which purifies the vapor.

While Blue napped, I wandered around his apartment, and counted nearly a dozen images and carvings of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha. The proliferation of Ganesha dates back to a well-publicized federal bust in January, 2007, when the D.E.A. seized the medicine and cash of eleven pot dispensaries in Los Angeles. The only major dispensary that wasn’t busted had a Ganesha in its window. Now it is hard to find a karmically inclined ganja dealer in Los Angeles who doesn’t own a herd of lucky figurines.

Blue’s cell phone rang several times in succession, rousing him. His phone rings, on average, once every two and a half minutes between noon and 2 A.M., and I soon developed a Pavlovian aversion to his ringtone, a swirling, Middle Eastern-inflected electronica tune called “Lebanese Blonde.” Blue switches phone numbers every six months or so. Although it is unlikely that the D.E.A. would tap his phone, he told me, it doesn’t hurt to take simple precautions, if only to reassure his more paranoid clients.

Blue answered the phone, rubbed his eyes, and began rattling off numbers. “Three hundred fifty? Three-fifty? Three-twenty-five? We could do three-twenty-five,” he said, quoting a final price per ounce. Assuming a sitting position on his bed, he punched numbers into a calculator and suggested some designer strains that his patient might enjoy.

“Try Sour Diesel,” he told the client. “Take that and the Bubba Kush.” In addition to Sour Diesel and Bubba Kush, which are grown indoors, he also had AK Mist, an outdoor strain; Jedi, which is brown and fuzzy; Purple Urkel, whose hue is suggested by its name; O.G. Kush and L.A. Confidential, two particularly potent strains; and Lavender, a fragrant purple grown up North. Modern Kush plants are derived from a strain that is said to have originated in the Hindu Kush mountains, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, according to stoner lore, was imported to Southern California by some hippie surfers in the seventies, and then popularized in the late nineties by the Los Angeles rap group Cypress Hill. Stronger, better-tasting varieties of pot can sell for more than five thousand dollars per pound, more than double the price of average weed. The premium paid for designer pot creates a big incentive for growers and dealers to name their product for whatever strains happen to be fashionable that year. The variety of buds being sold as Kush has proliferated to the point where even the most catholic-minded botanist would be hard pressed to identify a common plant ancestor.

Only a small percentage of consumer marijuana sales in California occur within the medical-marijuana market. Even so, the dispensaries, by serving as a gold standard for producers and consumers, have fuelled the popularity of high-end strains in much the same way that the popularity of the Whole Foods grocery chain has brought heirloom lettuce to ordinary supermarkets. To serve these sophisticated new consumers, growers in California and elsewhere are producing hundreds of exotic new strains, whose effects are more varied, subtle, and powerful than the street-level pot available to tokers in the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

“Does Terrence have paperwork with him?” Blue asked the customer. From the living room, I could hear the hum of the Volcano and the crinkle of the expanding plastic bag. The vapor in the bag was Gush, a robust mixture of Goo—a lighter, giddier high—and Kush.

Blue’s business consists mainly of selling a few pounds a week to various dispensaries; occasionally, though, a single outlet will buy five or more pounds at a time. In the course of a month, Blue is typically in debt to half a dozen people, and in turn holds markers for twenty to thirty thousand dollars that he is owed by distributors around town. Because Blue works only with people he trusts, he usually gets his money back, although it can take as long as two or three years for some debtors to make good. Understanding the abstractions of ganja credit and debt is important in the pot business, where financial success is determined largely by the velocity of your cash transactions. A practiced flipper like Blue can make twenty to thirty dollars on an eighth of an ounce of high-grade pot, which retails for anywhere between fifty and seventy-five dollars. Last year, Blue made roughly a hundred thousand dollars, and paid some ten thousand in taxes.

Later in the afternoon, a friend of Blue’s, who calls herself Lily, showed up with a duffelbag. She unzipped the bag and placed on Blue’s kitchen table three black trash bags filled with ganja. Lily is a courier; she transports pot to Los Angeles from the growing regions upstate. A witchy Japanese-American girl with a dolphin tattoo on her right shoulder, she wore large gold hoop earrings, a Lucite cross necklace, and sunglasses perched on top of her hair. She said that she got into the business because she suffers from chronic back and neck pain from a spinal injury, and found that smoking weed helped her with symptoms such as nausea and a loss of appetite.

Captain Blue encourages the growers he deals with to stay within legal cultivation limits, and makes sure that the dispensaries he joins keep the doctor’s recommendations of members on file. The only participants in Blue’s transactions whose activities are not strictly covered by prevailing interpretations of state law are couriers, or mules, who usually transport marijuana in airtight containers in the trunk, seats, or tires of a car. Neither Proposition 215 nor Senate Bill 420 spelled out how medical marijuana should be transported from rural growers to urban patients, leaving the mules as the least protected link in the distribution chain. Once the mules reach Los Angeles, they make the rounds of middlemen like Blue, who can legally broker their product to dispensaries where they are members. Mules receive a cut that ranges from five to sixteen per cent of the purchase price.

Being a courier was risky, Lily said, but the pay was good enough to let her not work for half the year. Her methods of transporting the pot from Northern California to Blue’s apartment were time-tested and low-tech. You get the largest garbage bags you can find, some food bags, and a vacuum sealer. Then you double- or triple-bag the pot, seal it, pack it in garbage bags, put the bags inside some old newspapers, and stuff the bags into some cheap knapsacks, and then put three knapsacks each into duffelbags, along with a few hockey gloves or soccer balls. Then you pack the duffelbags in the back of the trunk and throw an old blanket over them, and toss on top a few folding chairs, along with some grocery bags full of fresh organic apples, to mask the scent of pot.

Blue, having assessed Lily’s stash, made his offer for a portion. “Six thousand,” he said.

One day, Blue and I went for a drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, in his blue hybrid S.U.V. I watched him make more than a thousand dollars in under an hour, dealing on the phone. “I’ve got some tasty L.A. Confidential,” he told a customer, motioning me to extract a disk of trance music from a pile of stale laundry in the back seat. “It’s like O.G. Kush. A pound? I think I can do that.” Blue said that he sells pot solely for medical purposes, although he conceded the possibility that some clients might break their purchases down into smaller amounts for the street trade. Asking questions about what buyers intend to do with their pot is not friendly behavior, Blue explained with a smile.

We were headed up to Topanga Canyon, in the mountains near Malibu, to meet a broker who supplies Blue with some of the best weed in the state. I’ll call him Guthrie. A lifelong resident of Humboldt County, he funds a number of growing operations, ranging from a large underground bunker to smaller outdoor plots of fewer than a hundred plants. He also uses a fat bankroll to buy product from other producers, which he takes to Los Angeles two or three times a month. The house in Topanga, an old hippie enclave, belonged to a friend who let Guthrie sleep outside in a blue-and-green tent that resembled one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. I ducked to avoid a string of Tibetan prayer flags that hung over the entrance.

Guthrie was a lean, healthy-looking, brown-eyed man in his mid-thirties. “We have a list of all the pot growers in Humboldt County,” he said, repeating an old Northern joke for my benefit. “It’s called the Yellow Pages.” He reached beneath a table and handed Blue a large black trash bag. Blue untied the bag and stuck his head inside, as the rich aroma of Purple Kush filled the interior of the tent.

“Mmm,” Blue said, inhaling. Purple Kush smells like a mixture of cardamom and cloves, with a darker, earthier undertone of dried peat moss, and an acidic top note evoking freshly ground coffee. The two men agreed on a figure of forty-four hundred dollars a pound; the price had eased somewhat since its peak, in 2005. A large number of new growers entering the market had nudged prices down.

Guthrie’s parents had been hippies. Growing up in Humboldt, he and his siblings got used to fleeing their house in the middle of the night when D.E.A. helicopters raided his family’s growing patch. Perhaps a quarter of the kids in his class had parents involved in the marijuana trade. “You’d say, ‘My dad, he fixes our house a lot,’ ” Guthrie recalled with a laugh, as he offered me a loaded pipe. By the end of the summer, the family was usually broke. In October, the harvest would come, and the family would sell their crop and have a great Christmas; by the next summer, they’d be back in a jam.

Guthrie stayed out of the family business until he was twenty-seven. Then he obtained a trucker’s license and began hauling propane. Since truckers who transport hazardous materials are professional drivers who must go through background checks, the police generally leave them alone once they show their license, whether they are driving a truck or not. Guthrie’s trucker’s license gave his family a free pass through the “gantlet”—a stretch of Highway 101 between Humboldt and Santa Rosa where state police routinely search cars for pot.

Guthrie said that the quasi-legal status of smaller growing arrangements, combined with consumers’ preference for potent, high-maintenance weed, has shifted the balance of the pot business away from large-scale farms. “There’s a lot more people doing little scenes,” he said. The welter of laws pertaining to medical marijuana in California has offered careful operators like Guthrie the best of both worlds: prosecution for growing and selling has become much less likely, while federal busts and seizures keep prices high. Guthrie sells about ten per cent of his product to dispensaries and collectives. Starting up a sophisticated indoor farming operation costs about three hundred thousand dollars, he said, including the cost of making a building airtight—to lock in the humidity, and to keep passersby from smelling the pot and calling the cops—and fitting it with thousand-watt grow lights.

Guthrie grows his plants in octagons, a hydroponic arrangement that allows producers to maximize the number of plants in a confined space. The cost of a piece of property upstate can run an additional three hundred thousand to one and a half million dollars, he said. After a few years, if you know what you are doing, you can make your investment back, and then you can pay a sharecropper to run your operation and spend your time travelling. Guthrie told Blue that he would soon be heading to Indonesia. “It’s amazing over there,” he said. The last time he was in Java, he recalled, he stayed in a Muslim village near the beach, and found the people generally relaxed and welcoming, if somewhat hostile to the Western habit of lying in the sun without clothing.

Life was good, he said; the only problem was that too many other people wanted the same life. Most people who moved up North to become pot entrepreneurs fucked it up, he said. Their failures, however, did nothing to diminish the potency of the dream.

One of Captain Blue’s regular marijuana customers was a dispensary in Venice Beach. The store, which has cement floors, a glass display case, and a couch the color of aluminum, looks like a cross between a photographer’s loft and a Kiehl’s boutique. When I last visited, large Mason jars in the display case were filled with designer strains of weed selected by the owner, Cindy 99, whose nickname refers to a variety of designer pot. In a refrigerator, and marked “For medicinal use only,” were treats such as marijuana granola and marijuana milk chocolate with crispy wafers. Above the counter hung a notice: “To our valued patients: in accordance with California law, we are required to add 8.25% sales tax.”

Cindy 99’s employees included a receptionist, a full-time counter girl, a part-time counter girl, and a bonded security guard—a former Green Beret—who is licensed to carry a weapon. Dr. Dean, a local physician, saw aspiring patients at the dispensary once a week. As long as they had a California state I.D., those who received recommendations for marijuana could buy some immediately from the dispensary’s stock. Cindy told me that when she opened her shop, in 2007, she needed the same licenses that she would have needed to open a newsstand on the Santa Monica Pier: a commercial lease, a seller’s permit, a federal tax I.D. number, and a tobacco license (for selling rolling papers and pipes). She estimated that forty per cent of her clients suffer from serious illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, epilepsy, and M.S. The rest have ailments like anxiety, sleeplessness, A.D.D., and assorted pains.

Like many other dispensary owners I spoke with, Cindy derives particular satisfaction from providing medication to people who suffer from chronic diseases. Although she suspects that there is nothing seriously wrong with many of the young men who come in to buy an eighth of L.A. Confidential, she doesn’t regard marijuana as a harmful drug when compared with Xanax, Valium, Prozac, and other pills that are commonly prescribed by physicians to treat vague complaints of anxiety or dysphoria. It was easy to see why the dispensary was so popular with young men: there was good pot, and Cindy 99, who is in her thirties, looks like an adolescent boy’s fantasy of his best friend’s hot older sister. The day I was there, she wore a tight sleeveless blue T-shirt with a gilt-winged emblem of a flying horse.

The first customer of the day was a Hispanic guy with three tattoos, the biggest one of which read “Angeles del Inferno.” He had a doctor’s note on file. After a short discussion, Cindy recommended two strains, which cost sixty-five dollars for an eighth. “These two have sativa in them,” she said. “They’re really good for daytime use.” All strains of pot sold in the United States are derived from two varieties of the plant—indica and sativa—which have discernibly different effects on the user. Indica is a heavier, numbing drug; sativa is better for doing creative work or listening to music. Cindy refers to a popular book called “The Big Book of Buds” to determine the precise balance of indica and sativa in the strains she sells. Purple Urkel, Cindy explained, was mostly indica, making it better for alleviating pain. “The percentages are arbitrary, because of all the cross-breeding,” Cindy admitted to me. “You take a Blueberry and you cross it with a Kush and you go back into Trainwreck, and how do you get a percentage from that?”

A young white man, barely out of his teens, with lace-up black boots, a nubby backpack, and a goatee, came in and bought an eighth of Trainwreck. He selected a chocolate turtle from the edibles case while gazing shyly at Cindy. “Don’t eat it all at once if you have anything to do,” she warned him.

Cindy has been in the ganja business for seventeen years, her entire adult life. Both of her parents grow pot. She began selling weed in high school, in British Columbia, where enforcement of anti-marijuana laws was famously lax. One day, a friend asked her if she would help distribute what his mom had grown. Within six weeks, they had doubled their money. “We started bringing it from Canada down to California,” she recalled. “And then we moved to snowmobiles and then hollow-panelled speedboats on trailers, and then semis and shadow-planes. A plane would go up in the States and another plane would go up in Canada, and they’d fly around as if they were sightseeing, and you’re allowed to switch airspace as long as you don’t land. And then they would land in each other’s countries looking like each other, same serial number, same everything.”

A patio in back of the shop had been set up with a white plastic table with a batik tablecloth and two plastic chairs, in preparation for Dr. Dean’s weekly visit. Each prospective patient pays the Doctor a hundred and fifty dollars, in cash, for a diagnostic interview. Dr. Dean’s full name is Dr. Dean Hillel Weiss. Forty years old, he is one of a few dozen doctors in Los Angeles who regularly write medical-marijuana recommendations. In the past few years, he said, he had written several thousand such letters, none of which had been successfully challenged in court.

I told Dean that I wanted a doctor’s recommendation that would allow me to legally smoke pot. He began a fifteen-minute interview, asking me about my reasons for wanting the drug. “How long have you been under the care of a psychiatrist?” he asked me, writing down the answer on a notepad. I provided him with a bill from my psychiatrist in New York, along with proof that I was currently living in California. He then quizzed me about my brief and unsatisfactory experiences with prescription medications for anxiety and depression, and my history of illegal drug use. Deciding that I was a suitable candidate for a medicalmarijuana recommendation, Dr. Dean took my money and provided me with a quick tutorial on strains of pot—indica offered a “body high,” whereas sativa was “more heady and abstract”—along with a signed letter certifying that I was a patient under his care. The letter was good for a year, after which I could renew it, for a hundred dollars.

So far that day, Dr. Dean had seen seven patients, including a former doorman at a Manhattan night club, a musician working on a Bob Marley tribute album, and a young woman named Cassandra who was in the publishing business and came armed with a purse full of prescription medications for anxiety and depression. The vast majority of his referrals, he said, were by word of mouth. Though he was always careful to observe the letter of California state law, he said, “My personal belief is that marijuana is a useful and relatively harmless substance and that adults should be free to choose whether they want to use it or not.”

Dean graduated from Columbia University and SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and began an orthopedics residency in his home town of Detroit before moving to Los Angeles, in 1998, and becoming an emergency-room doctor at Martin Luther King, Jr./Drew Medical Center—known to locals as Killer King. By 2005, he was burned out. One day, a friend invited him over to his house to sample some marijuana that he had obtained from his fiancée’s boss, who had a recommendation for pot. “My friend said, ‘I’ve got six strains you’ve got to try. I’ve got lollipops, I’ve got brownies,’ ” Dr. Dean recalled. “I went over. It was like being in Amsterdam. At the end of the night, he turned to me and said, ‘You know, you hate working in the emergency room. Maybe you should look into this.’ ”

Cassandra, the publishing employee, was interviewed by Dr. Dean after I was. Emerging from the patio, she said, “That was amazing! That was fantastic!” She went over to the display case.

“What’s the best in terms of social life, having other people around?” she asked. As Cindy discussed the relative merits of the various sativa strains, Cassandra noticed some small hash pipes in the glass case.

“It’s a great little travel device that you can take to the beach,” Cindy explained.

“No way! Cool! I love it!” Cassandra said. She bought one.

As Cindy weighed out Cassandra’s marijuana purchases, which totalled a hundred and ten dollars, she commiserated with her new customer about the unattractive names of some popular strains. “Cat Piss?” she said. “Dog Shit? If it’s going to be legal, the stoners can’t still be making up the names.”

The Farmacy, which has outlets in West Hollywood, Venice, and Westwood, made Cindy 99’s dispensary look like a mom-and-pop operation. Famous for the “Very Open” neon sign in the window of the West Hollywood location, the Farmacy has the carefully art-designed “natural” aesthetic of an Aveda boutique. The reigning concept is that pot is simply another benign medicinal herb, like echinacea or ginkgo biloba. The Farmacy is the brainchild of Michael, an elusive hippie who doesn’t give out his last name and whose defiant nature and marketing prowess have made him a celebrity on the medical-marijuana scene. His success has begun to irritate the authorities: the D.E.A. recently forced the Farmacy’s landlord to close a fourth outlet, in Santa Monica.

I met Michael one afternoon at the Venice store, a large retail space on Abbot Kinney. In the front of the shop, Asian handicrafts are for sale. Saint-John’s-wort and various Chinese herbs are stocked in jars behind the main counter; a forty-two-inch plasma TV screen displays Tao symbols and other karmic imagery. An extensive selection of organic soaps and shampoos is available in the back of the store, near a children’s-medicine section. The main sign that the Farmacy is not, in fact, a Body Shop is a large color portrait on the wall of Bob Marley, smiling broadly while toking on a fat spliff.

Customers with a valid doctor’s letter may request one of the bamboo-bound menus kept behind the counter, which list available strains of pot, some of them requiring a “donation” of seventy-five dollars per gram. There is also a gelato bar, which offers a variety of flavors laced with marijuana and other herbs.

Michael, a sixty-year-old man with a gray ponytail, was wearing jeans, a faded navy T-shirt, a yellow flannel shirt, and a battered fleece vest. Shifting impatiently from one foot to the other, he read from a poster on the wall stating that words and phrases like “weed,” “dope,” and “getting stoned” were used to “devalue, disempower, and criminalize people who choose to use medical cannabis.” Recently, he noted, characters on “Desperate Housewives” had used the words “medicine” and “medicating” while referring to cannabis consumption. The culture was changing. “We see cannabis as a gateway herb,” he said.

Upstairs, he showed me a light-filled waiting room with a grand piano and handcrafted wood chairs and couches. Someday soon, he said, the room would be filled with patients waiting to meet with therapists practicing massage, acupuncture, and other healing arts. Licensed professionals would be available to consult about medication, diet, and exercise. The waiting room was even equipped with children’s toys, so that mothers could bring their kids to appointments. As we spoke, he trimmed some long-stemmed flowers that were in a vase on top of the piano. He then sat down and played a passage of Brahms.

Michael had trouble sitting in one place for any length of time, a legacy, in part, of five and a half years he says he spent in San Quentin for various pot-related offenses. (Spending years in a small, cramped prison cell had made him antsy, he said.) Michael has been involved in the marijuana business since he was eighteen years old. His first big deal, with an Arab partner, was smuggling into California two hundred pounds of hash from Lebanon. In the early seventies, he attended a pot-legalization rally in Washington, D.C. While in the city, he did some research on cannabis at the Library of Congress. He found a trove of cannabis studies from the early twentieth century; botanists at the time had studied the plant extensively. According to a paper from 1903, the internal clock that tells a marijuana plant whether to flower or not could be turned on or off by varying its exposure to light. By lengthening the “day” to sixteen or eighteen hours, growers could speed up the initial growth of the plants; later in the growing cycle, they could cut back on light exposure, causing female plants to flower. The useless male plants, which produce pollen rather than smokable buds, could then be thrown away.

By speeding up the growing cycle and getting rid of the males, you could produce three or four times the amount of pot indoors. In the winter of 1973, Michael, who was living in Mendocino County, put together a slide show for upstate growers based on what he had learned about manipulating the growing cycle. “Nobody ever grew males again,” he boasted.

Michael said that he served two stints in San Quentin. After he was discharged the second time, in 1999, he grew tomatoes for Whole Foods and worked for a seed bank. After the passage of Senate Bill 420, a friend told him about the dispensary scene and loaned him a 1987 BMW. Michael placed an ad in the newspaper saying that he would deliver cannabis right to a customer’s door. He opened the first Farmacy in 2005.

I asked Michael if being involved in the dispensary business was a wise choice for a two-time drug offender. “I’ve got two strikes around my neck, and, yes, I’ve been anxious,” he said. He noted that he had ten children from various wives and girlfriends, all of whom were supported by the income from his stores. He declined to reveal how much money he made.

Michael jumped off the couch and bounded downstairs to take care of some business, leaving me with JoAnna LaForce, who helps run the business side of the Farmacy. A cheerful woman in her fifties, she believes that she is the only pharmacist in the United States who actively participates in a medical-cannabis dispensary. Though doctors are protected under California state law, she explained, pharmacists are not, which means that she is theoretically subject to arrest, although the D.E.A. generally avoids entanglements with medical professionals.

LaForce told me that she had once been married to Michael; they did not have children. “I met him in San Diego in February, 1993, through a mutual friend,” she said. “At the time, he was on the lam. We were together for a year before the feds took him away.” When he got out of prison, they were together for two more years, and then he went to Mexico, to live on the beach and surf. When Michael decided to open the Farmacy, she was happy to help.

LaForce spent fifteen years working in a hospice with dying patients. “I saw the value of alternative medicine, particularly cannabis, in helping with appetite, pain management, and anxiety,” she said. “I found that I could use cannabis to decrease the pain medication, which in turn made patients able to spend their last days talking to their friends, spouses, to share good times.” The upcoming pot harvest, she said, was set to be the largest in the state’s history, adding, “There is a gold rush going on with cannabis in the state of California.”

The dispensary owners of Los Angeles hold a meeting once a month in an anonymous office building in the shadow of Cedars-Sinai hospital. At a recent gathering, a sign on the wall said “Stop Arresting Medical Marijuana Patients.” The shades were drawn. There were twenty-five people in attendance, and most of them were either in their mid-twenties or in their mid-forties. A few—such as a muscular man in biker gear and a woman in glittery flip-flops and not much else—looked like refugees from the porn industry.

The meeting began with a “raid update,” delivered by Chris Fusco, a young field coördinator for Americans for Safe Access. In the past month alone, ten dispensaries had been raided in Los Angeles by the D.E.A. “Raids suck,” Fusco said.

“I think things will get worse before they get better,” said Don Duncan, the owner of the California Patients Group, a large dispensary that was raided by the D.E.A., and then shut down, in the summer of 2007. He owns another dispensary, the Los Angeles Caregivers and Patients Group, which was raided a few months later but has subsequently reopened, despite the rumored seizure of close to a million dollars in marijuana. (Duncan puts the figure at thirteen thousand dollars’ worth of cannabis-based products.)

Several of the top dispensary owners had recently attended meetings with the city planning department, the city attorney, and the L.A.P.D. The meetings were intended to help draft a set of legal guidelines to govern the conduct of the dispensaries. Despite the dispensary owners’ willingness to coöperate with the city, Duncan said, everyone who attended the meetings had either had his dispensary raided by the D.E.A. or received a letter from his landlord asking him to give up his lease, owing to threats from federal authorities that the property would be seized.

“What is the information that the D.E.A. wants from the people they detain in these raids?” a man asked.

“They want to know who is in charge and where the medicine comes from,” Duncan answered. “They want growers.” Patient records were untouched. “They left all the concentrates,” he added, describing the aftermath of the raid on the Los Angeles Caregivers and Patients Group. “That’s how we reopened the vapor bar.”

“Did they take computers?” another person asked.

“They planted some tracking software that records user names and passwords which was transmitting to an I.P. address in Virginia,” Duncan said. “Our computer guy found it right away.”

After the meeting, I paid a visit to Allison Margolin, who calls herself “L.A.’s dopest attorney.” Her trade is a sort of family business—her father, the lawyer Bruce Margolin, is the author of the Margolin Guide, which enumerates the legal penalties for the sale and possession of pot in each of the fifty states. She works in a black-glass office tower on Wilshire Boulevard owned by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler. On the walls in her office, a Harvard Law School degree is juxtaposed with a pictorial layout from the magazine Skunk, featuring her in a low-cut leopard-print dress. Margolin’s sexpot image is an advantage with clients, who, more often than not, are socially isolated men. Margolin has a reputation for getting cases dismissed, and for retrieving marijuana plants that have been seized by the police.

“The truth is, it’s very rare to get plants back,” Margolin said. Her long auburn hair was in a tidy French bun, but a few strands had been allowed to slip loose. Like many of her clients, she adopted a tone of adolescent vulnerability and outraged innocence when talking about the mean grownups who don’t like pot. “People are talking about how it’s being over-recommended and abused,” she said. “I mean, big fucking deal. It’s not toxic!” I asked her if she had a doctor’s letter, and she nodded vigorously, explaining that she suffers from an anxiety disorder.

She said that courts are sometimes sympathetic to her arguments about the relative safety of pot, but most judges and prosecutors seem to have only a glancing acquaintance with the case law since the passage of Proposition 215. “I’ve gone to court, like, several times where the judge has read only the first half of the case, which talks about how dispensaries are not legal according to Proposition 215,” she said. “I think it’s just intellectual and physical laziness.”

A patient whose plants Margolin had recovered, Matt Farrell—known in the community as Medical Matt—stopped by for some counsel. Medical Matt was hardly an advertisement for the curative wonders of medical marijuana, or for the idea that all medical-marijuana patients are enjoying themselves by gaming the system. His cheeks and chin were covered in a three-day growth of dark stubble, and his red-rimmed eyes got wet as he spoke.

“I’ve always suffered from mental problems,” Farrell said, reciting a long list of prescription drugs that he had taken, including Paxil, Wellbutrin, Risperdal, and Prozac. He had obtained his first doctor’s letter for pot in late 2001 or early 2002—his memory wasn’t clear. He began growing pot to support his habit, which costs him between sixty and a hundred dollars a day.

In December, 2005, he said, police officers ransacked his house—seizing about a hundred and twenty plants and nine grow lights—even though he showed his doctor’s letter, and contended that the plants were for his own use and the use of the members of the collective to which he belonged. He was accused of unlawfully cultivating marijuana; the charge was dismissed in 2006. The police came back to his house in 2007, he said, once again trashing the premises and charging him with the unlawful cultivation of marijuana and the possession of marijuana for sale. They froze his bank account, which, he said, destroyed his credit rating. The second case against him is still pending.

Although the police behavior he described may seem excessive, it is usually forgiven by judges who try to balance the competing demands of state and federal law. By routinely looking the other way when law-enforcement officers make “mistakes,” the courts have allowed police departments that don’t like current state law to work around it, and put pressure on people like Farrell.

In the wake of the seizures and the property damage, Farrell said, he was borrowing money from his parents, and his house was going into foreclosure. “It’s either a joke or I’m delirious,” he said, starting to cry. “I mean, I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I sure as hell can read something pretty simple and understand it. If the state, county, city council, and everybody else is saying you can, how the hell does the L.A.P.D. come in to say you can’t?” Spokesmen and officers of the D.E.A. and the L.A.P.D. told me, off the record, that the federal laws regulating the possession and distribution of marijuana took precedence over the laws of the State of California, and that, until federal law changed, the D.E.A. and the L.A.P.D. would continue to work together in their fight against the drug trade.

Sitting beneath a willow tree on a breezy day in Sonoma County, you can see why the idea of leaving the city behind and growing your own weed exerts such a pull on the holistic health nuts, masseurs, d.j.s, art-school dropouts, and New Age types who populate the medical-marijuana scene in Los Angeles. Farming a crop of twenty-five or thirty plants of killer weed is an updated (and highly profitable) version of the age-old California dream of an orange tree in every back yard. For those who can’t afford to pay for a prime plot of land in Humboldt, there is the possibility of renting a small split-level house in Sonoma or Mendocino and converting the master bedroom into a grow room, where you can turn around an indoor crop every sixty days.

Captain Blue and I took a five-day excursion to the growing fields up North. Our guide was an old friend of his, a woman who called herself the Kid. She had been minding a grow house in Sonoma since being laid up with a half-dozen broken ribs after a bad motorcycle accident. The Kid had large eyes, a big nose, and long hair, and a squat, powerful body covered in black-ink tattoos, which ran across her chest and arms and up the back of her neck. “There’s a lot of women in the bud scene that are just looking to be with some guy that has some property and some plants, so that they can sit on their ass and do nothing,” she said, as we sat outside on her porch and watched horses graze. “There is a large percentage of really fabulous beauties. And then there’s the hard, serious worker girls that dig holes all day.”

Blue wiped the sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his loose plaid shirt. He wasn’t used to being outside. He asked for a glass of water and drank it in a single gulp. Then he wrapped his arms around his friend and gave her a hug, taking care not to put pressure on her ribs. They made for a weird, medieval-looking couple; both had long hair, round bodies, and shoulders strong enough to chop wood. Both had spent years smoking pot and consuming staggering quantities of mushrooms, cactus powders, LSD, and other mind-altering substances.

The Kid made her bed by the picture window in the living room, next to a plaster Buddha and a shelf of books about plants, including “Marijuana Horticulture,” by Jorge Cervantes. The dining room was occupied by a pool table. If you are selling your own product, she explained, you can clear as much as seventy-five thousand dollars, after expenses, on a duffelbag filled with thirty pounds of pot. The easiest way to make this kind of small indoor scene work is to live in someone else’s house and nurture the plants in exchange for a third or half the profits, and that is how the Kid would be spending her time for the next two months.

The Kid’s plants, all Sour Diesels, were being raised on a mixture of nutrients which changed every three to five days, in accordance with a detailed regimen that had been laid out, in black Magic Marker, in a battered spiral-bound notebook. The notebook had been bequeathed to the Kid by a longtime friend. The cost of the nutrients was approximately six hundred dollars a week.

We entered the darkened bedroom, and were confronted by the fetid smell of plant life. Without the ventilation system that the Kid had installed, the temperature would have been about a hundred and ten degrees in the dark, largely from the stored-up heat of the lights—seven of them, a thousand watts each. There was a tank of carbon dioxide in the corner. “The more CO2, the thicker the bud,” the Kid explained.

It was a relatively small operation: the lights and their installation had cost about fifteen thousand dollars, and power and nutrients had cost an additional twelve thousand or so. The array of nutrients along the walls included specialized growing products such as Bud Blood (“promotes larger, heavier & denser flowers and fruit”) and Rizotonic (a powerful root stimulant). “Voodoo Juice is going to go in here, and Scorpion, and it goes on and on,” the Kid said. Every three or four days, she ran purified water through her hydroponic growing medium for a full day, in order to give the plants a break. After the full, eight-week growth cycle, the Kid planned to harvest her crop and clear out.

Up North, the marijuana harvest is known as “trimming season.” In Humboldt and Mendocino, she said, October is a month-long sleepover, with all the free ganja, beer, and organic food you want. A really good trimmer can trim two pounds of pot a day, at a rate of two hundred and fifty dollars per pound, while sitting around a table with three or four friends. Kids from San Francisco or even Australia hear about the harvest from friends of friends and show up for the pot and the cash. The D.E.A. routinely busts a few big scenes each year, and the local police have been known to stop cars and check the passengers for telltale scratches on their arms or sticky resin under their fingernails.

None of this intimidated the Kid. “It’s a fucking blast,” she said. “This is crop No. 6 for me this year.” After a month of being cooped up, she was eager to get on the road. I agreed to drive, because her license had been suspended since the motorcycle accident. Along the way, she recounted a transformative experience that she had had at the age of nineteen with the psychedelic drug DMT. While tripping, she had a vision of herself lying down on a forest floor. She heard a growling sound and saw a twenty-foot-tall woman guarded by a gigantic dog. “She was enormous, and definitely not attractive, and I recognized the look in her eye,” the Kid remembered. “I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s me.’ And she said, ‘Yep, I am you. But I’m very old. My energy is very big.’ I was kind of in shock, but I didn’t feel threatened.” The old woman explained that the Kid didn’t need to worry about death anymore. There was no such thing as death, in fact. Energy returned to its source and then took another form.

The Kid fell silent for a moment. “I only saw her that one time,” she said. Afterward, she recalled, she felt a bit woozy, and a friend sat her in front of the television and let her watch cartoons.

The Kid, Blue, and I arrived in Arcata, a small, well-kept Northern town, around dusk. After dinner, we drove to a farm owned by a couple whom I’ll call Nick and Danielle. Nick, who had long brown hair and Mediterranean features, and Danielle, a yoga-toned blonde, had both worked as massage therapists in Malibu. One day, a massage client of Nick’s asked him about dispensaries, and he took her to one. “She saw people spending two thousand dollars at the counter,” Nick said, with a laugh. “She said, ‘What kind of business is this?’ ” Her next reaction was to suggest that Nick and Danielle could run a dispensary, and that she could front them the fifty thousand dollars they would need to get started. They soon opened one, and, after the business took off, they bought the property up North.

Nick and Danielle’s farm was at the end of a long, well-protected valley surrounded by high mountains. The turnoff was a dirt path barred by a classic old wooden ranch gate featuring the longest string of Tibetan prayer flags I saw during my stay in California.

Arriving at the house, we dumped our bags on a wooden deck. Nick, who was dressed in jeans and a sweaty T-shirt, showed us around the property. He was already a skilled grower: last year, he told me, he won second place in the Los Angeles Cannabis Cup, an annual competition, for a particularly potent strain of marijuana that he had grown from seeds he ordered through the mail from Amsterdam. But he did not consider pot his life’s calling. He spoke of one day starting up a healing center on Mt. Shasta, where people could clean out their systems and go hiking.

The property lacked sufficient water for pot growing, Nick said, but their neighbor up the mountain helped them out. “He’s a great bro,” he said. “Every few days, he drops two thousand gallons down a pipe.” In exchange, Nick paid the neighbor a minimal fee. “He’s an older guy, he’s been up here for forty years. He knows how hard it can be when you first move somewhere.” Nick had about three hundred plants in the ground on a hill behind his house. On another plot of land, a few hills over, he had two hundred and fifty plants, as insurance against a targeted raid on his property.

A perfect half-moon was shining brightly in the twilight. The North Star was already visible. Nick, Danielle, and some friends had gathered in the living room, whose focal point was a large homemade altar, for meditation, surrounded by burning tea candles. At the kitchen table, a friend of Nick’s, Charlie, packed a large water pipe with the smoke of the day. Next to Charlie was Nick’s friend Dylan Fenster, from Venice, who was spending a few months up North to help with the harvest. He said that he smoked marijuana primarily to deal with the pain from a degenerative spinal condition; he carried his doctor’s letter in his back pocket. “Twice in the last six months, I’ve been cited for smoking in public,” he told me. “Both times I got the weed back, and both times the judge admonished the cops, ‘You know, this is legal.’ ”

On the fridge, someone had posted a handwritten sign with the motto “Today is the day we manifest heaven on earth and godly bliss.” Water pipes were passed around, and everyone got high. After four hits on Nick’s bong, the slogans on the refrigerator started to vibrate with uncommon significance. I looked over at Blue and saw that he was dozing off again, this time with a homemade bong resting on his chest.

“I always wanted to heal the world or find the cure for cancer,” Nick told me, with a faith-healer stare. “I have massaged over ten thousand people, and I hope to massage ten thousand more, and to heal the world with good medicine that I can grow here and provide on a compassionate basis to the people who need it.”

Danielle started talking with the Kid about her wedding. “It was three days,” she said. The wedding was held in a clearing in a forest, and a cigar box was passed around containing two hundred hand-rolled joints of Kush.

I headed out to a swinging bench on the porch and gazed intently at dozens of bright stars, and thousands of lesser stars. Nick came outside and offered another hit. “I love it here,” he said. “I love the earth and the sounds and the smells and the sounds at night.” The farm’s location at the tip of the valley was particularly sweet. “There are no cars driving by and no planes flying over and no sirens going off or any kind of negative frequencies,” he said. “It almost feels like it must have felt for the original pioneers who were first exploring California.”

Every morning, Nick said, he woke up at seven, had a smoothie, and got in tune with nature. “Then I’ll head out to the garden and I’ll do some watering,” Nick continued. “Depending on the day of the week, I’ll maybe feed the plants, check in with them. Double-check for damage from the deer and whatever else has been creeping in through the cracks. Make sure the praying mantises are on duty.” Growing marijuana outdoors, he felt, emphasized the holistic qualities of the plant rather than its psychotropic function. Someday, he said, he wanted to plant cherry trees, and peaches, plums, and apricots.

Nick said that he hoped to have kids, and he liked the idea of raising children on a farm. When I asked him whether he worried about the atmosphere of danger and illegality that came with operating a gray-area business, he shook his head. “I really feel like my karma’s good,” he said. “I’m not doing anything wrong.” He owned the dispensary for which his crop was intended. He had never been arrested or done time in jail. “We’ve got a good lawyer, and we pay state sales tax,” he said.

Nick’s income from the dispensary last year, he said, was only around fifty thousand dollars. “That’s what I make for all the scary shit I do,” he said, looking up at the constellations. “I’m not making millions of dollars. I’m a hardworking, compassionate person, and I spend my time helping people. It makes me feel happy to bring smiles to the faces of people that have frequented my collective.”

The next morning, I woke up on the floor of Nick and Danielle’s living room, a ceiling fan whirring stale air above my head. There were three other people asleep in the room. As my head cleared, I perused a nearby bookshelf, which contained various speculative and esoteric texts, including “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth,” “Secrets of Shamanism,” and “Crop Circles: Signs of Contact.”

I wandered outside. Behind the building were two long greenhouses made of translucent plastic sheeting supported by bent steel ribs, which sheltered smaller plants until they were ready to be put in the ground. I ran into Nick, who was already at work, and he led me on a tour of the slopes at the back of his property. “I planted these at the end of May,” he said. “They’re three months old.” Outdoors, the sativa growth cycle is eleven weeks; the indica cycle is seven to nine. Toward the end of the cycle, the flowering plant loses its lush green leaves and manifests a shrivelled brown bud. “This is Afghooey crossed with Maui Wowie,” Nick said, pointing to a six-foot plant with half its leaves missing. So far, he said with equanimity, he had lost about a quarter of his crop—more than a hundred thousand dollars’ worth—to nibbling deer.

The three hundred or so plants on this part of the mountain were arranged in a V shape. The arms of the V ascended the mountain and spread out beneath the shelter of the surrounding forest. Nick admitted that the plants were not particularly well hidden, and said that the planting formation was mainly a respectful tip of the hat to the D.E.A. planes that flew over the valley. “They appreciate it when you’re not growing it in rows, like a cornfield,” he explained. Small planes had been buzzing overhead lately. Last night, one of Nick’s visiting friends had reported that a helicopter had canvassed the property and shone a light down onto the front porch. The friend admitted to having been stoned when he saw the searchlight.

Virtually everyone in the valley made a living from growing pot, Nick said. The signs of their activity were hard to miss. To illustrate his point, he indicated to the top of a mountain across the way. “It’s quite expensive to put electrical poles up a mountain,” he said. As I followed his gaze, I caught sight of what looked like a sail. “You’re looking at greenhouses,” he explained.

With so much pot on the market in California, it paid to differentiate your crop. Later that day, Nick and Danielle’s investor from Malibu arrived with a lawyer, who was there to inspect the farm’s organic-farming methods. If the farm passed, the pot would be certified as an organic product. The lawyer was a tall, fit-looking middle-aged man from San Francisco who wore a gray suit and a white starched shirt with no tie. He declined to be interviewed about his business.

Captain Blue spent the day outside, roaming the property and taking photographs with a digital S.L.R. camera. He took pictures of Nick’s friends working the pot fields and tending to the mature mother plants. And he took closeups of the enormous brown buds on a fifteen-foot-high pot plant. The physical exertion was hard for Blue. Beads of sweat collected on his forehead, and his shirt was soon soaking wet.

Blue handed me his camera, and I clicked through his photographs. I had told Blue many times that if he were slightly more motivated he could probably have a career as a photographer. My motherly attempts to lure Blue away from a life centered on pot had created a certain degree of tension in our friendship, even though he claimed not to mind. The truth was that Blue’s life had never been better. He was making money. People depended on him. He was a respected member of his community. He treated the people in his life—growers, suppliers, patients, customers—in a considerate fashion. He had even figured out a way to keep his marijuana business within the letter of California state law.

But it is hard to argue that what Blue does for a living is the kind of activity that California’s medical-marijuana laws were designed to protect. Though he is not a dangerous criminal, he is not exactly a hospice worker, either. He is a gray-area entrepreneur, working the seams of a hidden economy, populated by tens of thousands of people whose lives and minds and bank accounts it has altered forever, even as the rest of the country is only beginning to realize that it exists.

After leaving Nick’s farm, Blue, the Kid, and I stopped at a diner in Redway to get a slice of blackberry pie. While we ate, I watched a long-haired teen-ager guide her stoned father to their car. His hair was gray, and longer than hers, and when he stepped off the curb and started to amble toward a black BMW she grabbed his arm. “Dad, this is not your car,” she said sweetly. “Your car is over there.”

Humboldt’s economy is so heavily dependent on cannabis cultivation that you can drive for miles on well-kept highways and back roads without discovering a single legitimate source of income, aside from honey stands. Heading north, we eventually entered a maze of logging roads on a private reserve. A bunch of hippies grew pot in the forest, and the local cops stayed away.

Our destination was a house occupied by a woman who identified herself as Emily. A wiry marijuana sharecropper who also works as an environmental activist, she was busy watering her plants. There were twenty-five plants in all, surrounded by a fence on which hung a laminated patient’s letter, signed by Ken Miller, M.D., stating that the marijuana was intended for medical purposes. Because marijuana is a fungible commodity, like soybeans or rice, there is no way to tell the difference between marijuana that winds up going to patients and marijuana that winds up on the street. The doctor’s letter was, therefore, halfway between a legal document and a good-luck charm. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered along the length of the fence.

Emily was thin, with curly hair, and had a solitary, independent air; she’d been living alone for five months. She wore a gray T-shirt advertising a club called the Boom-Boom Room, in Cambodia. Her hands were covered with homemade tattoos of the kind that skater kids draw on each other.

The Kid and Emily were old friends, and they quickly launched into the technical details of Emily’s growing regimen. “It’s a three-day flip with Penetrator and a carbo load,” Emily said, and then I lost them.

After Emily finished her watering, we hiked over the mountain to a patch of twenty plants, where she went through the same routine. We sat on a couch that someone had carried up the mountain, and looked down on the verdant valley below as Emily described her growing arrangements. The house where we first met was owned by a man in his fifties, Emily said, who lived on the peak of the next mountain over. In addition to the two parcels of land that Emily tended, her host had half a dozen other plots in and around the reserve, which were worked by other sharecroppers. By taking care to stay under the local limit of ninety-nine plants on each of his properties, Emily’s host had averted most of the risk inherent in his profession while enjoying an income large enough to finance a laid-back life of self-exploration. He also donated considerable funds to environmentally friendly social-action projects in Central America and South America.

Emily had come to Humboldt ten years ago as a young activist, working to save old-growth redwoods. She first encountered marijuana plants after she picked some edible mushrooms on a friend’s land, cooked them up in marijuana-laced butter, and ate a good meal with some wine. That evening, her friend went outside briefly and returned with three huge plants over his shoulder. He taught Emily and some other activists how to trim the plants, separating the buds from the leaves over a framed screen with a sheet of glass underneath, to catch loose trichomes.

Emily decided to stay in the mountains. She loved the odd mixture of people who lived in a place with no apparent cash economy: the old lesbian couples who made jam and grew pot, the acupuncturists with connections to the San Francisco drag-queen scene, the old hippie ladies whose grower husbands had left them years ago and who toughed it out on the land they got in the divorce. Gazing at the setting sun, Emily said, “I think a lot of those people were drawn up here for intuitive reasons—soul reasons, or whatever.” The problem with growing pot back then, she said, was that it was illegal, and that changed you. “You had to carry a gun and be scared of people, and you lost track of the reason you came up here.”

Before the legalization of medical marijuana, she said, the wholesale price of good weed was forty-eight hundred dollars a pound. Now it was between twenty-two and twenty-six hundred. That was still profitable, though, and there were fewer stories in the newspapers about people being bound and gagged by cash-hungry gangsters.

The one thing that hadn’t changed was the Humboldt Slide. “You start at this really great percentage, and you’re buddy-buddy and everything’s great,” Emily said. As the harvest approaches, growers inevitably begin to run out of money and get greedy, and the sharecroppers lose whatever leverage they had earlier in the growing cycle, when their daily attention was necessary for the young plants to survive. Emily’s wage the previous year was initially set at a third of the value of the plants that she harvested. Later, her boss “slid” her percentage to a sixth, meaning that she owned only a dozen of the eighty plants that she grew that season. Emily’s philosophical approach to her losses is psychologically necessary for surviving in a gray-area business, where there are no signed contracts and recourse to the police or the courts is impossible, even in Humboldt. (“Officer, this man had me growing marijuana on his land for five months, and now he’s only giving me twelve plants!”)

Providing that the weather and the authorities coöperated, Emily expected to end up with approximately twenty pounds of pot. She would dispose of it in whatever manner brought her the most money; she thought it could fetch as much as fifty thousand dollars.

“There’s a bunny!” she cried out as a tiny brown rabbit scampered through her marijuana plants. “Oh, he’s cute!” Being around plants made her happy, she said. She’d be even more excited to grow something else, if it paid decently. Growing pot required a careful rhythm between periods of benign neglect and periods of close, loving attention. She noted that all her marijuana plants were females. “They’re ladies, right?” she joked. “So how do ladies like to be treated? They like to be given lots of attention and then left the fuck alone for a few days to revel in it. If you hang on to them all the time, they’re not going to do anything for you.”

That morning, Emily said, she had spent four hours on eight plants, plucking the thickest leaves in order to channel more energy to the buds. She had fertilized the soil with a mixture of bat and seabird guano. (Humboldt supermarkets sell the blend for nineteen dollars a gallon.) Her arms had become dark and sinewy from her labor.

Back at Emily’s borrowed house, we got high on her private stash and settled in for the night. The living room was decorated with save-the-rain-forest posters and a fake-leather gray couch. On the table was a boom box, a Mason jar of marijuana, and a Mac PowerBook. There was no television set; the radio was tuned to NPR. Emily was reading William Morris and working on a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of a Brazil nut, which she had bought at the thrift store for a dollar. Puzzles were popular during growing season, she said. That’s what being a grower in Humboldt County is like, she said. You do jigsaw puzzles at night, get high, and shit in the woods.

For Emily, that was enough. “It’s fuuun! It’s super-fun,” she said the next morning, lazily sunning herself on top of the mountain and smoking a spliff. “We’re gonna smoke it to the Man, you know?” Twenty years ago, people like Emily would have been too soft for the pot business in Humboldt County. The statewide legalization of medical marijuana has allowed for the illusion that farming pot can provide opportunities for travel and cool art projects and personal growth without any corresponding commitment to the perils of a life of crime. Medical marijuana has made it easy for people like Emily, the Kid, and Captain Blue to see growing pot as a casual life-style choice. By going into the pot business, Emily had made the kind of compromise with reality that idealistic people often make when they get older and lose faith in their ability to effect wholesale change, and when they need the money.

Growing ganja lets you feel that you’re still living on the edge, especially when you’ve become a little complacent politically. Emily nodded, and took another puff. “The forest is still getting cut down or whatever,” she said, watching the fragrant smoke swirl in the breeze. “But you’re still working out here. You’re still subverting the Man. And you’re getting people high.”