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Outside magazine, September 1999
Like many an Easterner before him, North Carolina mountain man Eustace Conway packed up this summer and headed west, heeding the siren call of a frontier dream. Unlike anyone before him, however, Conway's peculiar Manifest
Destiny was to be the first and fastest to circle the Great Plains in a horse-drawn buggy. Logging 2,488 miles in less than two months, he became the undisputed speed-and-distance record holder for a feat that, more likely than not, will never be attempted again.
Florence Williams was along for the ride. "The West is the perfect backdrop for a big drama like Eustace's," says the Helena, Montana–based writer, an Outside correspondent who began her career at Colorado's High Country News ten years ago. People have always come here to reinvent themselves," the
native of New York City admits."My own particular frontier fantasy had to do with being more connected to the land. But like me, everyone wants to move to the mountains, and the region has gone from overmythologized to overdeveloped overnight."
Walking anachronisms like Eustace have a special allure for Williams. "As the New West becomes more and more like the rest of the country," she says, "the eccentric remnants of the Old West become more interesting." She recently spent so much time on the road visiting scattered colonies of polygamists that her husband, the director of the Nature Conservancy's
Montana chapter, began joking that she must be harboring an extra husband out there somewhere.
If anyone could juggle two lives, it's Florence: She goes on hikes and paddles kayaks, selflessly and tenaciously searches out and reports on the Rockies' finest powder, then pulls out her notebook to profile insurgent environmental groups. She camps out with someone like Eustace, and two days later fly-fishes with Ted and Jane. Come to think of it, to look at the
West through Williams's eyes is to discover how varied and wonderfully strange it still can be.
There was a time in high school when Max Potter thought he had the potential to be a great rower. Then he got clobbered in the face by a wayward oar and took up football instead. Now 28, Potter covers politics and crime ("a package deal more often than not") at his hometown Philadelphia
magazine. This summer, he revisited his sculling days, reporting from Princeton on the dog-eat-dog stress of tryouts for the U.S. national rowing team ("Blood on the Water," page 54). "Coach Mike Teti is a hard-ass times ten," says Potter. "He has absolutely zero tolerance for
second place."
If Alex Markels has more time on his hands lately, it's because the Minturn, Colorado–based writer is no longer running a pirate radio station from his living room. "I rigged up a 200-disc CD changer so it wouldn't repeat a song for 17 days," says Markels, whose unsanctioned 100-watt operation played everything
from Led Zeppelin to Mozart before it was shut down by the FCC.A former Wall Street Journal staff reporter and jazz guitarist, Markels has traveled extensively in Central America. His guide to Panama's ecotourism splendors ("Beyond the Zone") starts on page 110.
German-born photographer Jorg Badura has always been ready for anything: shooting an ad campaign while bungee jumping off the Manhattan Bridge, navigating Class III rapids in an inner tube just to get a shot, and free-falling from a plane for this month's fashion shoot in Titusville, Florida ("Hang Time," page 102). A novice sky diver, Badura tandem-jumped with a professional. "He did all the steering," the Manhattan-based lensman says of his skydiving partner. "I just kept the camera steady."
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Before Bill Donahue went to Tennessee to report on the mating rituals of fireflies ("O Look at All the Firefolk Sitting in the Air!" page 78), he had not given much thought to the bioluminescent bugs. "I wish I
could tell you that I trapped them in jars as a kid," says the longtime Outside correspondent. "But I was more into frogs and newts." And certain other creatures: Donahue's first published article was a sixth-grade essay on the nefarious mosquito. "The first and last lines were the same: 'I hate mosquitoes.' "
"The North Pole is incredibly beautiful," says National Public Radio political correspondent Elizabeth Arnold, who recently covered a NASA expedition to measure ozone depletion in the frozen wilderness. "But the extreme cold and all that shifting ice are reminders that we're just not meant to be there." The debate over
man's place in the wilderness is central to Arnold's report on page 66, a front-lines look at a just-emerging new-wilderness movement. Thirty-five years after the momentous Wilderness Act, more land is up for grabs than ever, and Arnold's report—her first for
Outside—is accompanied by our picks for pristine places worth saving.
When artist Tim Bowersat down to illustrate Mark Jenkins's column about an encounter with a campground thief (The Hard Way, page 43), he didn't have much experience to go on. "I've lived in Brooklyn for ten years without a single
altercation," admits Bower, who frequently escapes to the wilds of Maine. "I kind of wish I'd get mugged, so my odds of anything else happening would decrease."
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