Obama's Quiet "Sheriff"

While the rest of Washington has been preoccupied with health care and tea parties and wars and Sarah Palin (not to mention wars about Sarah Palin), Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been quietly—and slowly—undoing some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration. My piece on Ken Salazar's toughest dilemma is now up on the Men's Journal site.

But first, some background:

Cheney's "energy strategy" amounted to a a death sentence for millions of acres of habitat out West, as the government handed out drilling and mining rights to public land at a tiny fraction of its true value. Oil and (especially) natural gas companies fanned out across the landscape—led by Halliburton's "Red Army," of course—and pocked the earth with thousands of drilling pads and miles upon miles of new roads. From Montana down to New Mexico, the landscape and economy of the West was completely changed.

One of the last un-drilled islands of land was on a place called the Roan Plateau, a magical Colorado landscape known to hunters and fishermen but not too many others. Cheney's office put the public land on the Roan—all 55,000 acres of it—on the fast track for energy leasing, but environmentalists fought back, made it their Alamo. And as a Senator, Ken Salazar was on their side, against drilling on the Roan. And he lost: with less than six months left in office, the Bush adminstration leased it all out.

But now that he's Interior Secretary, things are a bit more....complicated. If he yanks the leases outright, the oil industry will flip out. Oh, wait, they already have. And he's finally begun to shoot back...but some greeny types still weren't all that happy with the choice of Salazar. He's de-listed wolves from the Endangered Species Act, for one thing; and of course, he hasn't protected the Roan. Environmentalists expected Salazar to revoke the Roan leases, as he'd pulled back other, sensitive tracts. Instead, he's been in court, defending a drilling plan he had opposed as a Senator.

Me, I think it's a sort of test case for the Salazar style, where he sits back and waits for things to play out his way -- having done all he could, in his low-key way, to make sure the marbles all run his direction. Eventually. (For more, check out my pal Max Potter's epic profile of "Cowboy Ken" in 5280 magazine.)

This story was great fun to report: I spent a day tramping around on the Roan with Steve Torbit and Bill Dvorak from National Wildlife Federation and Ken Neubecker of Colorado Trout Unlimited, telling hilarious bait-and-bullet stories, then the next day we did a fly-over with Bruce Gordon of EcoFlight, who's like a Paul Newman character come to life. Then the next day we barreled down to the San Luis Valley, where Salazar grew up on a hardscrabble farm. The amazing thing, though, is the extent to which your stereotypical good ol' boys—hunters, fishers, ranchers, cowboys—have been turned into environmentalists, thanks to the Bush administration, which let the oil industry basically wreck their lands. And that's another story for another day...

Do You *Really* Need to Shoot Deer on Sunday, Too?

Because I live about, oh, 400 yards from state game lands, the first day of deer season here in Pennsylvania is always a shattering experience. It begins at first light, with a "KABOOM!" echoing across the valley. A few minutes later, more gunshots ring out in answer. And so it goes for most of the day. It's like living in Bosnia, circa 1994.

My neighbors and I all spend the week(s) of hunting season looking forward to Sunday, when the gunfire stops and we can go out and walk in the woods without having to put fluorescent orange kevlar vests on the dogs. So I was amazed to learn that Pennsylvania is one of the last states in the Union that bans Sunday hunting.

This seems like an eminently good idea — as I wrote in this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed yesterday. But then, I'm not a hunter. I was intrigued to learn, via the Pennsylvania Game Commission, that it helps hunters, too. Adding Sunday hunting would require the game authorities to shorten hunting seasons, restrict bag limits, and could result in private landowners withdrawing their lands from public hunting access programs. Finally, the Game Commission's own surveys have never indicated majority support for the idea—even among hunters.

In fact, banning Sunday hunting such a good idea that the National Rifle Association opposes it. The NRA's relentless, nationwide campaign has succeeded in overturning Sunday hunting bans in New York, among other states. They claim it treats hunters as "second-class citizens," but I fail to see where the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to bear arms in the woods on Sundays. It hasn't worked so far in Pennsylvania, in part thanks to opposition from the powerful farmers' lobby, but this state of affairs might not last forever, particularly given the vast power of the NRA — and their tendency to overreach on these things. (They also tend to oppose anti-poaching laws, as they have in PA.)

The truth is that hunting is on the decline. Sunday hunting is not going to bring it back; and for one group of people (whose numbers are shrinking) to demand that the woods be reserved for their use, seven days a week, is the height of selfishness.

The piece is sure to spark debate; it already has, based on my appearance today on KDKA Radio. To anyone who disagrees with me, I'd just say this: Be careful what you wish for.

The Fire Last Time

I've long admired Tim Egan's reporting for the NYT, because it seemed to come from a genuine connection with and love for his native Pacific Northwest; plus, it reminded New Yorkers that there was, in fact, a whole entire country out there beyond the brown clouds over New Jersey.

In his latest book, The Big Burn, he spools out a history of the catastrophic forest fires that swept across Idaho and Montana in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt's newly-created National Forest system was still a sizzling-hot controversy, with the usual extractive-industry ho's making all kinds of noise against the whole crazy radical idea of not cutting down every single tree west of the Mississippi.

Eight decades later, not much has changed. Oil and gas companies screech bloody murder at any suggestion that they can't drill everywhere they want to, right now. The only reason the West hasn't been totally raped is because, way back at the turn of the last century, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot (and John Muir) showed rare courage and vision.

From my Washington Post review of The Big Burn:

What's most striking is how little has really changed since then. Huge corporations still angle for Western resources, misusing laws intended to encourage homesteading to help themselves to the oil, gas and minerals that lie underneath the Rockies. Recent immigrants are still despised in many political quarters, and our African American president has been portrayed as a monkey by his foes. And politicians, particularly Republicans, insist on invoking Teddy Roosevelt's name when in truth his progressive, anti-corporate and pro-conservation agenda would get him branded a radical tree-hugger today.

Fear of Flying

I’ve done plenty of stupid stuff that could have killed me, everything from backcountry skiing after a snowstorm without avalanche gear (or knowledge), to riding a moped on the island of Mykonos, without lights and plastered on some sort of blue drink. Bad ideas, all. But the worst it ever got, the closest I’ve ever come to starring in one of those two-inch stories buried in the back of the New York Times, happened in the Poconos. In the basket of a hot air balloon.

If you’ve ever been ballooning, then you know that there’s basically nothing less extreme—and nothing more peaceful. You ascend silently, borne up by the power of warmed gases, and then you drift along with the wind, in perfect relative stillness, high above the world and its busy little tangle of people and problems. Cars slow to watch, the people inside pointing and going, “Look! A hot-air balloon!” Many people seem to get engaged on balloon rides; perhaps you did, too. This is the story of a balloon ride gone terrifyingly wrong...

[To read the rest, go to The Accidental Extremist, a great site maintained by my pal Christian DeBenedetti.]

Attack of the Lance Trolls!

I had it coming, I guess. About a month ago, I published a little article in Slate that charted the rockier bits of Lance Armstrong's comeback: The testy encounters with the press, the headgames with his own teammates, the crashes and miscues, and just the general sense that things were not necessarily going according to plan. And yes, I did find some similarities between his own ultra-touchy, somewhat narcissistic behavior and that of a certain former Alaska governor.

It went up July 7, during the first week of the Tour. And then everyone flipped out. More than 125 comments, and the majority were, how to put it, highly negative. I was called pathetic, a loser, a "whiner"—a classic Armstrong-fan epithet. I was called other names, too, like "Bob." (Next time, LesterFreeman, try reading before you post.)

Some of the points were well taken. A number of people pointed out that journalist Paul Kimmage, who Armstrong reamed out in a Tour of California press conference, had "compared Armstrong to cancer."

Yep, it's called a metaphor. (Read Kimmage's actual column here.) And it's somewhat understandable that Armstrong would be angry. It's less understandable why he would then turn around and make this Nike ad, which not-so-subtly compares his own critics to....cancer. (Metaphorically, of course.)

Anyway: What's clear is that Lance Armstrong commands a devotion from his fans that is unmatched by any other sports star in memory. He's more than a hero to these people; he's a savior. And to cancer people, of course, he really is a kind of savior, if only by example. I get that. (And in fact, I still give It's Not About The Bike to my friends who get diagnosed.) But his appeal goes way beyond the disease. He's the only cyclist ever to tap into mainstream American sports culture.

The diehard Lance fan is typically a middle-aged male who discovered (or re-discovered) cycling during his hero's 1999-2005 Tour de France reign. It's a wholly different group of people from the geeky-misfit kids who were drawn to the sport in the pre-Lance era, like the kid in Breaking Away who digs bike racing because it is European, exotic and obscure. The Lance fans are closer to the Dale Jr. crowd, with their contempt for "The French" and perfervid America, Fuck-Yeah!-ism.

Subtlety and nuance are lost on this crowd. They see nothing wrong—or even boring—with their man's relentless, grinding domination of the world's hardest bike race, or the fact that in seven years he seemed to have suffered (by my count) exactly four bad days. They're the breed of sports fans who always root for the favorites: for the Yankees when they were good, or the Dallas Cowboys in the '80s. In Breaking Away, they cheer for the college boys, not the Cutters.

With other sports stars, imperfect private lives and off-field boorishness are acknowledged and forgiven. (Or at worst, ignored.) But Lance is not permitted to have flaws. Which is why a sizable army of fans seems to spend lots of time trolling the Webernets for any mention of their lord. If there's the slightest negative connotation towards Armstrong, then Boom! The comments section lights up.

Calm down, folks. It's not the end of the world if your hero has a few crashes, gives a pissy interview, or gets in a dust-up with his younger, stronger, faster teammate. It's part of the sport. Not everyone has to love him, either. How he deals with it—and how you deal with it—is what's important.

Which brings me back to my piece, which wasn't nearly as harsh as the commenters perceived it to be. The Palin comparison and the cheeky "Jerkstrong" headline (sorry, I couldn't resist) were provocative but meant to convey a serious point: If Armstrong wants to have a future in public life, as he seems to, then he's going to have to toughen up and learn to deal with (or at least accept) criticism. You can't be that thin-skinned. You can't have that much drama, all the time. And if the cycling press is too tough for you, then you're going to have problems in the real world. Is all I'm sayin'.

Singletrack in the City

Just out in Mountain Bike magazine: My feature on Manhattan's first legal mountain bike trails, way up yonder where the wild things roam...

The backstory: Back when I was a 21-year-old Park Slope "Manny" (long story), I used to sneak into the "backcountry" of Prospect Park for a quick mountain-bike ride, every once in a while. It wasn't much: scrappy, eroded trails, and you never knew who was going to jump out from behind a tree. But there some sweet rocky sections, a few rideable staircases that didn't seem to have been maintained since Olmsted's day. Then some young teacher got knifed for his bike back there, and that was the end of my urban mountain biking.

Mountain bikes were banned from NYC parks almost as soon as the mountain bike was invented—understandably, in the case of, say, Central Park. But Central is not the only park in town, and even as it was restored and renovated, other city parks continued to go feral, particularly in Upper Manhattan.

Four years ago, a group of mountain bikers persuaded NYC Parks to let them "adopt" a section of Highbridge Park, a narrow strip of hillside woodlands near the approaches to the GW Bridge. It looked like something out of the movie Warriors: junkies, homeless encampments (cum drug dens), abandoned cars, wild dogs. The bikers' group, NYC MTB, pulled out literally tons of trash and spent thousands of man-hours forging trails out of the urban wilderness. Almost as an afterthought, they built a dirt-jump park for the kids -- and it's turned into a mecca for helmetless punks from Manhattan, Bronx, even Jersey. I like to sit there sometimes and watch the kids pull spins, even flips—stuff I'd never dare attempt now.

It's a cool place to visit. Take the #1 train to Dyckman Street (be sure to eat at the pork-rice-and-beans joints right by the subway). Better yet, take your bike up there. Or check out Max Breslow's photos of the place--which has already hosted a handful of races, including a Thursday-night informal series. And then there's Yonathan Arava's superb documentary, "The Highbridge Project," worth it for the groovetastic soundtrack alone.

Shane McConkey and the End of Extreme

"You step off the edge, and everything goes away," Shane McConkey told one of the last interviewers he ever met. "And you’re just 100 percent in the zone – you’re flying now. You’re a bird."

Human flight is one of the oldest human dreams, and also one of the deadliest. Skiing off cliffs with a parachute, and later a wingsuit, Shane McConkey came as close as you can to achieving that dream. But not close enough. My piece about his extraordinary life and death, in the July/August Men's Journal, is one of the saddest I've ever had to write. The devastated wife, their three-year-old daughter, the stunned friends who now have a Shane-size hole in their lives, all because he just couldn't quit while he was ahead. For whatever reason.

I tried to capture his personality and his vision in the piece, but this shot-perfect James Bond homage (from the Matchstick Productions film Seven Sunny Days) is how I choose to remember him: