Click on the image below for a slideshow of the PHOTOS.

And the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxRzRLv4H5U

Yellowstone in all its bubbling, gurgling, spewing glory. Last month’s essay gives the background. You can also view a slideshow of my Yellowstone photos HERE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ylCmgExgd8

Primordial Soaks in Yellowstone

“Stay On The Path” – Yellowstone Warning Sign

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK sits upon a supervolcano, the largest on the continent. Though it’s unlikely to erupt anytime before the human race first destroys itself, just the knowledge that it might erupt, thereby leveling the entire region and instantly killing close to 100,000 people, as well as cloaking the Western U.S. with a devastating ashfall, makes it a pretty badass destination.

Not to mention that in 2010, after over two decades without a single bear-caused fatality in Yellowstone, a grizzly snatched a sleeping camper out of his tent, dragged him 25 feet and then ate him (she also mauled two campers at a nearby tent site in a similar rare predatory attack, although they survived, albeit with some broken and bitten limbs). That same year grizzlies died in record numbers despite growing in population and rebounding from threatened status in 1975: unable to feed themselves in their habitat due to declining huckleberry supplies from the record hot weather, the bears had been pushing out into inhabited areas where they were often shot. So not only were there more now grizzlies around than in the past but they were also hungrier, surlier, and more desperate.

Again, badass destination, or at least so it seemed to me, an East Coast newbie to Yellowstone who had no experience with grizzlies or ‘geothermal features’ like cauldrons of steaming water, where one misstep or collapsing crust of earth underfoot could transform the lovely aquamarine pool into a highly efficient human deep fryer.

That’s why when a Montana friend invited me last year on a weeklong September camping trip through Yellowstone’s remote rainfall-heavy southwestern Bechler region I jumped on it. When you spend summers teaching swimming in the Hamptons and the rest of the year in NYC, a weeklong trek over a grizzly-populated supervolcano is just what you need.

Of course, for my friend Pete, as well as for his half-dozen friends from neighboring Mountain States who were also coming for the trek (one of whom had even been a ranger there) the camping trip was just another stroll in the park. Not that they thought of it as any old stroll. There’s something awesomely primal about Yellowstone. The vast majority of its visitors don’t venture more than 100 meters from their vehicles. Not to be a sanctimonious backpacker-snot about it, but the only real way to soak up the landscape is to trek through it, liberated from the tyranny of email or phone access. It’s also the only way to just plain soak. Supervolcanoes come with their advantages, one being the diversity of hot springs they offer. And, as you’d expect of a badass camping destination, the soaks are badass too.

The Fevered Brain

Take my favorite, The Fevered Brain. An elevated pool with a raging boiling center spills down in rivulets over a slimy orange sienna bulk, waterfalling over a cerebellum of green and white cauliflower formations into rocky pools that abut an icy river. It’s into any of these small pools that you gingerly lower yourself. The Fevered Brain is a violent macho soak – the pools are small, and the scalding water splashing into them is only a few feet from your face, so you’re gazing into a kind of otherworldy menacing steambath. If the Partnership for a Drug-Free America were ever to resurrect its classic late 80s “This is Your Brain on Drugs” ad, this location would make a fine sequel to the fried eggs.

Since we had to carry a week’s worth of food along with cold weather gear and camping equipment, the soaks were the rejuvenation and rehabilitation clinics for our sore bodies (although the icy river water was best for the feet). But they were unpredictable clinics. Yellowstone hot springs aren’t soaks of uniform temperature. They’re generally found when boiling water bubbling up from the earth pours down a slope into a river. The water flowing down the slope is scalding and the water in the river is freezing, but their place of intersection – if dammed up with rocks – forms a natural hot tub, one that varies dramatically in temperature depending on where you are in it. Settle in closer to the river and you’re in 90-degree water. Move towards the source of the hot water and it’s now 110 degrees. And even within each section, alternating currents of cold and hot water flow through so your perfect 105° soak can suddenly become 120° on your right thigh and 80° on your left arm. Any good vigorous Yellowstone soak always involves gasping sounds and abrupt recoiling movements (although they’re not always due to the temperature, like during our Day 2 soak when Mike felt something brush against him and he glanced down to find a water snake coiled up like a drowsy housecat on his chest).

Another highlight soak, and a less menacing one, is The Fevered Brain’s friendly neighbor, Mr. Bubbles. Unlike other springs, the boiling water that powers Mr. Bubbles doesn’t trickle in from above but is self-generated: it bubbles up from underwater fumaroles. Mr. Bubbles was the biggest spring we soaked in. It’s more like a watering hole. Most of our soaks could handle between two to five people, while this one could comfortably fit dozens. (The smallest spring I saw was a glorified shin-deep puddle that Pete and I hiked out to the day before we set off. “Wow, that’s a small one,” I said, having expected something deeper and wider. “I hope you’re talking about the soak,” said Pete, who had just shed his clothes and was stepping in).

At first glance you wouldn’t expect that anyone could soak in Mr. Bubbles: as far as hot springs go, anything with thrashing water generally means fast painful death. But for whatever reason – probably due to underwater jets of cold water that were seeping in – the temperature of the pool was just right. In fact, in an aquatic equivalent of firewalking, you could even dive through the bubbling center; it was very hot and you had to be nimble about it, but it looked far more dramatic/ballsy/stupid than it actually was. Adjusting the hot tub temperature in Mr. Bubbles was easy. Move to the center to heat up, move to the perimeter to cool down. And then of course, if you want to go with the Finnish hot/cold sauna sequence you could alternate from hovering around the nucleus of Mr. Bubbles to sprawling in the river, where you’d lie face down, gripping a fallen tree branch, and let the icy water rush over you for as long as you could take it.

Yellowstone gets frosty overnight – several mornings I had to slap the ice off my tent – so it’s worth making the trek from your campsite to a spring for a starry dip. One of the best back floats of your life can be had during a night soak in Mr. Bubbles. You lie there, eyes shut, undulating lightly, warm and hot currents washing over you, while innumerable cold water bubbles break upon on your back. You open your eyes and you’re confronted by the Milky Way. Then, in that dark and starry silence, when you eventually do let your feet fall and sink into the sulfurous bottom, you feel the muddy earth pulsing under you, rumbling with all that hot gas and pressure.

The only downside of the night soak is climbing out into the freezing air and trekking back by flashlight to your campsite, all too aware of the possibility of grizzlies. It’s even worse when it’s a few miles and you’re first in line and the others are walking in silence behind you and your breathing is in your ears and every tree is some gnarly hunched creature and around every corner surely awaits a malnourished grizzly with her cub looking for one last big meal before the long winter hibernation. But of course you make it back to your tent without incident and zip up into your zero degree mummy bag. Ahh that’s better, except now you’re thinking about the “Bear Frequenting Area” sign or the deep vertical gouges on the trunk of the bear bag tree or the story about the brown bear that two years ago made a single vertical

tear down the camper’s tent before hauling him out. The fear of grizzlies isn’t quite as irrational as the fear of sharks, but it’s comparable in the way it lingers once it gets into your head (I could never fully lose myself in the sky when I went out to look at the constellations because the slightest rustling of brush would yank me back to more immediate mundane concerns).

But of course the presence of large lumbering creatures with big teeth and claws is essential and integral to the territory. In Yellowstone you feel like you’re back in some primordial gestational era. In fact, astrobiologists, including NASA scientists, are studying the thermophile microorganisms unique to Yellowstone for insights into the origins of life on earth and the possibilities of life elsewhere in the universe. It is a mythic land where earth gods still reign and rumble underfoot. Walking through those thermals fields, the steam billowing up from the earth in the distance like sundry forest fires and water spewing out of knobby phallic formations and elk bugling and wolves howling and mudpits gurgling and splooging next to you like some obscene mudman knockoff of Jabba the Hut, you feel like you’re on location for a film set either during Earth’s origins or in its final apocalyptic moments. You wonder why no one has staged some epic scene of battle or post-cataclysm here (“Lord of the Rings” and “The Road” comes to mind) but that same moment your footsteps ring hollow and you look down to see little holes peppering the ground, actually it’s more crust than ground, and you realize you’re traveling atop a vast pond of steaming water, it’s what you might call walking on thin earth, so you stop in your tracks and carefully retrace your steps to firmer ground and you now understand exactly why they don’t shoot a film here and never will.

And then you make your way to the nearest soak.

*Next month I will post a slideshow and video from the Yellowstone Trip

(which has now been posted so CLICK HERE to view them)

THE DAYS AFTER HURRICANE SANDY I biked into downtown NYC a few times. Manhattan didn’t experience the scale of devastation of neighborhoods like the Rockaways or Breezy Point or Staten Island, but it was surely one of the most surreal places to be. It’s an eerie feeling biking in pitch black in the downtown of a city of eight million. It’s like being in the country, except you’re in the city. There was an upsurge in petty crimes — looting of supermarkets, drugstores, etc. — but a decrease in major crimes. On the whole the atmosphere was of camaraderie and fellowship. People came together to hand out dry ice or share food around curbside fires or set up impromptu charging stations (where else do you get to ride a bike to charge your phone?). You could even go to a bar and have a bottle of beer by candlelight. And after that, you could go relieve yourself against a tree trunk on 14th and 1st Ave without the slightest concern of being seen. You don’t get to do that every day in NYC. At least not at 8pm.

Last month I posted a video of footage I took in Brooklyn during the hurricane. This month it’s of Manhattan, in the days after Sandy:

(p.s. a friend pointed out that I got a shot of Walter Isaacson — aka the biographer of Steve Jobs — talking with a hipster. It’s 30 seconds into the video. Or click on the thumbnail of the photo at the beginning of this post)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPrESkg2Gt0

]]> http://www.fourthnight.com/2012/12/out-of-power-in-the-dark/feed/ 2 http://www.fourthnight.com/2012/10/a-night-out-with-sandy/ http://www.fourthnight.com/2012/10/a-night-out-with-sandy/#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2012 18:31:33 +0000 Constantine Markides http://www.fourthnight.com/?p=4895

Last night I went for a walk around Greenpoint with Hurricane Sandy, who was passing through Brooklyn. Here’s what we did:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1BIykofvp4

p.s. I’m six days early in posting but I have a feeling my date with Sandy is going to be far less interesting to others a week from now. At least I’m not late for once.

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AT U.S. OLYMPIC SWIM TRIALS in Omaha this past June, a boy collecting autographs stopped a swimmer who was heading to the pool. “Are you fast?” the kid asked, holding his pen out. “Not yet,” was the reply. The boy nodded and lowered his pen. The swimmer, the 2000 Olympic gold medalist Anthony Ervin, wasn’t trying to evade an autograph. He’d given an honest answer, at least by his own estimation and standards: he hadn’t made it past semifinals in the 100-meter freestyle the previous day, a disappointing result he was trying to put behind him before his next event, the 50 free, a one-length sprint across the pool. And put it behind him he did: the following day – twelve years after his last Olympic showing – Anthony went on to make the Olympic team, posting a personal best time that was also the third fastest in the world. After that, no one was asking him if he was fast. But many were asking him for autographs.

Four months earlier I’d flown out to Berkeley, California, and spent a week with Anthony, trailing him at his workouts and interviewing his coaches, trainers, and advisors. The resulting 8,500-word article was distilled to a biographic 1,800 piece that appeared a week before the Olympics in Rolling Stone (the issue with a “Hot, Ready, Legal” 18-year-old Justin Bieber on the cover). Along with some friends and colleagues from Imagine Swimming, the swim school that Anthony used to teach for and that now sponsors him, I also flew to Omaha for Olympic Trials and to London for the Olympics.

American pizzazz and hoo-ha was in full display in Omaha, with club-like strobe lights and green waterfalls of light and award ceremonies with gold medalists emerging god-like out of the ground on an elevating podium and ten-foot-flames that blasted up out of the deck after every record-breaking swim, giving off a heat that could be felt way up in the stands. No question, it was a hell of a show. The poolside experience in London, on the other hand, was a more minimalist and dignified affair (think Wimbledon vs. U.S. Open), where swimming and partying were confined to their proper places, the pool and the pub respectively.

There’s plenty to recount from Trials and Olympics – watching a boy in Omaha who, after several minutes of nervous contemplation and goading by his sister, finally approached a breakfasting Michael Phelps only to pause a few feet from his table and sprint away in terror; being told in the VIP section of the London club Chinawhite that I had just unwittingly spilled half a drink down Ryan Lochte’s shirt; freezing with fear after a blaring double decker bus that was barreling down a narrow London street came inches from flattening Anthony when he looked left instead of right before crossing (let no one ever accuse him of a slow reaction time) – but, as with the rest of the original 8,500-word article, that material is on hold for later down the line.

Instead I have some photos to show. The bulk are from Omaha, where I had a press pass and, as a result, closer access to the action. I have plenty of video clips too, and of some great races – the Phelps vs Lochte 200 I.M. among them – which I may post later, although one can find the same and better footage online. About half the photos are of Anthony and his races (at the end of the slideshow I also include a few training photos from Berkeley). If you don’t know who he is or what his story is, the Rolling Stone piece, “The Rebel Olympian,” will give you some background (to download a pdf of the full article click here).

Anthony placed fifth in London in the 50 free. He’s now racing his way around the globe on a FINA World Cup Swimming circuit (the races are all short course meters, which means a 25-meter pool instead of 50-meter). Yesterday he won the 50 free in Dubai, posting a personal best time in a field that included some of the Olympic finalists and the event’s current world record holder, Roland Schoeman. On Saturday Anthony races in Doha, and then tours on to the following destinations (art credit Frank Zio):

You can check out his Indiegogo fundraising campaign and video here. For updates from his swimming tour, follow Anthony’s Facebook page. And, finally, as if I haven’t thrown enough social media at you, if you like what you’re reading, you can follow my monthly posts on the Fourth Night Facebook page and/or by a monthly email. As you can tell by clicking on the Essays header, this website covers random territory. The only constant is that I post on the fourth night of each month, which like right now occasionally spills over into the fifth morning.

On to the photos. Click on the fire to view the complete set:

or to view as a slideshow CLICK HERE

Keep your feet off the ground, don’t forget to smell the brine, and stay wet.

-constantine.

FOURTH NIGHT is going into a summer hibernation for a much needed rest and will return in October full of roaring, honey-questing life. Enjoy your summer.

Photo slideshow and videos from Occupy Wall Street. For Part I of this piece, which includes an intro and Tahrir photos, click HERE

OCCUPY WALL STREET PHOTOS

TAHRIR SQUARE & OCCUPY PROTESTS VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woIiLMDK-Mg

TIME MAGAZINE announced last month that its 2011 person of the year was “The Protester.”  It was a perceptive, albeit obvious, choice (although the editors almost stumbled badly: Kate Middleton was one of the runner ups) . In the Middle East alone, 2011 saw three revolutions — Tunisia, Egypt and Libya — uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria, and major protests in Algeria, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Oman, not to mention smaller protests all over the region. [skip rest of post and view this month's Tahrir Square slideshow HERE]

Though the heavy duty action was in the “Arab world,” it wasn’t exactly serene in the other worlds: in Santiago, 200,000 marched calling for more government support for education; in Madison massive labor protests spilled into the statehouse; in Madrid tens of thousands encamped in the central square demanding economic reform and a more representative electoral system; in Greece tens of thousands rallied against fresh rounds of austerity measures; in Jerusalem 15,000 gathered outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house to protest growing income inequality and high costs of living.

That’s just a sampling of the global rumbling. And of course the year of protest fittingly concluded with the rise of the self-proclaimed 99 percenters and the Occupy Wall Street movement, with offshoots springing up all over from London to Oakland. Arrests for civil disobedience soon became commonplace events and with the ubiquity of cameras, no act of police aggression was left unrecorded (one of the more memorable certainly being the Zen-like composure with which a U.C. Davis campus police officer sprayed seated student protesters in the face with pepper spray, much as if they were garden weed):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

Of course, the most brutal and lethal police actions are still going on, unrecorded, in the Eastern Mediterranean (Syria). 2011 may have been the year of the protester but 2012 doesn’t look to be the year of the inert. In fact, what was an Arab Spring of 2011 may prove, in a far less violent and revolutionary form of course, to be the American Spring of 2012 (the cover article of November’s New York Magazine about Occupy Wall Street was titled “2012 = 1968?“).

With the 2011 protester in mind, I thought I’d do a three-part post this month focusing on Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street’s Zucotti park, both of which I visited this past fall. Today I’ll post photos from Tahrir Square; on February 4 I’ll post photos from Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street marches as well as video footage from Tahrir and Occupy Wall Street.

So here’s Part I. The link below leads to a slideshow of photos I took on October 7 in Tahrir Square while visiting my friend Sean Moylan who lives in Cairo. Sean and I visited Tahrir on a Friday, the day of prayer and protest.  The protest was heated but relatively small and peaceful. After the rally we walked over to the charred party headquarters of Mubarak, which protestors had set fire to during the uprising earlier in the year.

The violence came a few days later, the night before I flew out, when we learned over dinner that a group of marching Coptics had been attacked. At 11pm the television was still showing “live” footage of the event. Finally, unable to watch it anymore on television when it was just 15 minutes away, I hailed a taxi. After negotiating a price to make it worthwhile for him, we set off, only to quickly find out that the “live” video was just a loop of replaying footage. Since the violence had ended and the roads were blocked off, there was nothing to do but turn back. The next morning I learned that over two dozen people had been killed. Upon seeing the footage (on a foreign English-language news station) of military police firing into the crowds and running over people with tanks I can’t say I wasn’t a bit relieved that my Tahrir Square slideshow wouldn’t include tanks:

TAHRIR SQUARE PHOTOS

THE FOLLOWING VIDEO accompanies the photos I posted last month from Patagonian Chile and Argentina. The footage includes the glaciers Perito Moreno, Viedma  and Grey; Torres del Paine National Park; Calafate; and the penguin colony on Isla Magdalena (slideshow of photos HERE).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHxCjJjNWE8

As a sidenote, don’t be troubled by the background cheering when the glacier calves off into the glacial lake: the glacier, called the Perito Moreno, is an advancing glacier so the collapsing face is a regular, ordinary event (it advances at the rate of about 2 meters per day). What should trouble you instead is the fact that Perito Moreno is one of only three glaciers in Patagonia that are advancing; the rest are receding at a faster rate than in any other region of the world.