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OUTSIDE CORRESPONDENT Bill Donahue has never been poisoned. Nor does he hail from a small town. But an old twist in his family tree makes him uniquely qualified to cover the situation in Fallon, Nevada, where high levels of arsenic were discovered in the municipal water supply 30 years ago.
"My great-great-great-great-uncle, Charles Mitchell, was a physician with the British naval ship the Vigo and one of Napoléon's surgeons," says Donahue. "He signed an autopsy report stating that Napoléon died naturally, of cancer, an assessment that is now in question." That's because, as historian Sten Forshufvud argued in his 1961 book
Assassination at St. Helena, the emperor was more likely murdered, gradually, with arsenic.
It's a long leap of space and time from St. Helena, an island off the coast of Africa, where Donahue's ancestor may have joined in an imperial cover-up back in 1821, to the present-day crisis in a hardscrabble town some 70 miles east of Reno. But when the Portland, Oregon-based writer traveled to the Silver State to interview Fallon residents, who drink
and bathe in what amounts to a solution of poison, he discovered a newfangled mystery with its own fatal implications.
In concentrated doses, arsenic kills quickly, but the low-grade, diluted version running in Fallon faucets has worked its mayhem over decades, not months. And recent Environmental Protection Agency enforcement actions have finally split Fallon's ranks. On one side stand those who believe that the EPA‹which has directed the town to help build and
pay for a treatment plant‹has the people's best interests at heart. On the other, outback populists who would rather the feds leave Fallon alone. "The EPA is coming in and telling them, 'Do this,' and it is easy to understand why some of them say, 'To hell with them, I am going to live my life,'" says Donahue.
Donahue, 36, also writes for Mother Jones and DoubleTake. "America's Little (Well...) Actually Kind of Serious (Um...) Maybe It's Worse Than We Thought (Hmmm...) Pretty Damn Big (Gulp!) Arsenic Problem" begins on page 42.
Like many East Coast surfers, correspondent Bucky McMahon, 46, knows that Puerto Rico offers nearly as much action as Hawaii's notorious proving ground, for a much cheaper plane ticket. "It is a poor man's North Shore," says the Floridabased writer, who lived in Rincon, one of the the country's coast towns, for two years. "Not many people
have the testicles to handle it." His story, "Riders on the Perfect Storm," appears on page 64 as part of Outside's Caribbean travel package.
Contributing editor and outdoor guy Ian Frazier used to drag his muddy gear all over the house back in Montana, but has since resigned himself to a life of wipe-your-feet domesticity in Montclair, New Jersey. In "The Great Indoors" (page 56), a meditation on the
improvised aesthetic of outdoorsmen, the author of On the Rez and Great Plains revisits the days of, say, mirrors hung from the ceiling with jumper cables. "Now that I'm a regular middle-class person," Frazier sighs, "my design ideas are no longer part of anything."
For 38 years, New Yorkbased photographer Philip Jones Griffiths has turned his lens to subjects ranging from poverty in Texas, drought in India, and war in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. For Bill Donahue's feature on Fallon, Nevada's water quality problem, Outside sent him to document the town's smaller, but no less bitter, troubles. "This
whole story is a clash between medicine and anarchism," he says. Griffiths, 64, last contributed images to our 1995 feature on Cambodia.
She often shoots layouts for fashion magazines and claims not to know any really rugged types, but Justine Parsons had a blast capturing interior-decor disaster zones in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for "The Great Indoors." "These places were so cluttered and perfect, they almost looked like movie sets," explains Parsons, 31. The Brooklyn resident
also shoots for Vanity Fair and will show her work this coming spring in an exhibition at New York's Bronwyn Keenan Gallery.
Outside correspondent Rob Story is an accomplished snowboarder, but he struggled alongside Tom Burt, the renowned Lake Tahoebased freerider whom he profiles in "Legend of the Fall Line" (page 36). "It was not easy keeping up," says Story, 38. "Fortunately, it
was relatively easy to spot a six-foot-two guy among all the little snowboard grommets." Story first met Burt a decade ago, when the writer was an editor at Powder magazine and Burt was cresting a streak of extreme descents that remain unbelievable to this day.
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