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2017 Style + Design A sexier Ducati, a smart ski helmet, a full-size kayak that folds to backpack proportions: Here are 44 envelope-pushing objects that revolutionize form and function — and make life a helluva lot more fun.

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Kelly & Jack’s Surf Safari

An Orphan’s Odyssey

Last March, a massive swell hit a remote reef in the Marshall Islands. Surf pro Kelly Slater’s move: Round up pal Jack Johnson for a serious ocean adventure. By Devon O’Neil

photograph by TODD GLASER

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Eric Poole isn’t sure how old he is, who his parents are, or exactly where he was born. But after a lifetime of shunning his past, he’s ready to begin the hard journey to find answers.

By Benjamin Percy OCTOBER 2017

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NOTEBOOK 08 Alex Honnold’s Alaskan Vacation Fresh off his El Capitan free-climbing feat, the rock phenom attacks a new challenge.

16 All Together Now Where — and, more important, how — to travel with a big pack of family or friends.

32

The off-season for Tigers pitcher Daniel Norris

24 Canada by Canoe This recreational canoeist is paddling across Canada — for the third time.

30 Popping Pils The humble pilsner gets a flavor upgrade.

40 The Fall Guy These hybrid shirt-plus-jackets ensure you’re never too warm or too cold.

42 Seal of Approval The Pisgah Mountain Bike Festival, an inspiring coffee-table book, and linebacker Von Miller’s favorite things.

HEALTH & FITNESS 45 Good Hair Every Day Simple styling tips for every man’s mane.

50 Switch Your Pullup Grip An easy way to get stronger faster and prevent injuries.

54 More Tech, More Problems Kinesiologist Andy Galpin on why you should train without gadgets.

56 Health News Why you shouldn’t pair a burger and a soda, the key to longevity, and more new reports.

How to address achy knees, log better sleep, and other problems, solved.

Cooking with green chilies

36 L.A.’s celebrity cougar

THE L AST WORD

96 Christopher Walken The legendary actor on his 60-plus years in the business, the secret to motivation, and what he thinks of all those impressions.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: BEN MOON; CARLOS RIOS; STEVE WINTER/ NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE; CHRISTOPHER TESTANI

58 Ask Dr. Bob

28

LIGHTER. FASTER. Firstlight Tent Vapor Helmet Mission 55 Pack

Letters “Climate change is already affecting us and the things we care about, whether it’s health, food, business, or the outdoors. It is an issue that we are all a part of. And excitingly, we can all be part of its many solutions.” —MARLO FIRME, VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

RE A LI T Y BY T E S

I read Clint Carter’s article “Virtual Medicine Is Now a Reality” [July/ August 2017] with great interest. As an early adopter of virtual reality in health care and sciences education, I am optimistic that VR will not only positively impact the clinical treatment of patients but will also revolutionize how we teach and train students and doctors.

DAVID M. AXELROD, MD STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE , PALO ALTO, CA

THE D CONTROVERSY There has certainly been a lot of hype around this unusual nutrient [“Is Vitamin D Overhyped?”

by Melaina Juntti, July/ August 2017]. Vitamin D in sufficient supply is absolutely essential for health, but it is not necessary to take such a high dose regularly. Get a little bit of safe sunlight exposure daily during the spring and summer months, eat fish regularly, and take a good quality vitamin D supplement in the winter months. That will ensure you are doing everything you can to help your body stay healthy.

SUSAN LANHAM-NEW, UNIVERSITY OF SURREY, UNITED KINGDOM

THE HEAT IS ON Hillary Rosner’s story [“Al Gore Heats Up,” July/ August 2017] really struck a chord with me. I am not your typical climate activist either, but I went to the Climate Reality

Leadership training last month because I felt that I had to take action. The most important thing I learned from Gore is that there is still time to fix the problem. It is happening here and now, and it’s happening fast. But the answers we need are practical and affordable, and they are ready. We just have to choose to use them.

WILL COLE-HAMILTON COURTENAY, BRITISH COLUMBIA

As a mom, a mayor in Colorado, and a part of Moms Clean Air Force, I’ve seen parents fight climate change as if their children’s lives depend on it — because they do.

It’s every parent’s duty to protect their children from bodily harm. It’s why the army of parents I work with consider themselves on active duty when it comes to this grave health threat.

CHRISTINE BERG, LAFAYETTE , CO

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Alex Honnold’s Alaskan Vacation How does the world’s most celebrated climber decompress after pulling off the sport’s greatest feat? He heads north to size up North America’s tallest alpine wall. by JOSEPH HOOPER H I S J U N E , S LO U C H E D O N FOA M PA D S in a trench dug in the snow atop Alaska’s Ruth Glacier, some 12 miles from Denali, the highest summit in North America, eight of us are sitting around drinking PBR. From time to time, we all look eastward across the ice to the near vertical rock face of a mountain ingloriously called the Stump. Somewhere up there, three of this country’s finest climbers — Alex Honnold, Renan Ozturk, and Freddie Wilkinson — are making their way up a new route. They are only a few miles away, but they might as well have stepped of the edge of the earth, made invisible

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by the scale of the mountains that line both sides of this glacier: two unbroken rows of dark granite soaring 5,000 feet above. It’s essentially a Grand Canyon filled with ice.

Sometime late tonight or early the next morning, the climbers will rappel off the rocks, clip back into their skis, and trudge back to camp through the perpetual daylight of the Alaskan early summer. That is the hope anyway. In the meantime, our group — two support members from the climbers’ team; three staffers from the North Face, the company underwriting this expedition; and two guides from Alpine Ascents — crack another cold one in the warm Alaskan sun.

Ruth Glacier, Alaska: The team set up base camp in the middle of the ice, but with crevasses all around, traveling anywhere meant roping up in case of a fall.

photograph by FREDDIE WILKINSON

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Moving on the ice, even near

and pristine, you can often

base camp, requires constant

drink its water unfiltered.

precautions for crevasses.

YOU WANT TO BE HERE FOR A REASON, FOR A MISSION YOU ARE STOKED ABOUT. hoping to summit the Wine Bottle Route on the east face of Mount Dickey, a 5,000-foot behemoth that Ozturk has called “the last great unsolved problem in the Alaska Range.”

When the crew land on the glacier and get their f irst glimpse of the route, they know it’s going to be a long shot. Mount Dickey is still streaked with moisture left by melting snow and racked by rock and ice falling off the slowly thawing face. So their grand Alaska expedition is shaping up to be, as many do, a lesson in patience.

Adding to the uncertain mood is the fact that two weeks before, Honnold had pulled off one of the greatest feats in climbing history: a ropeless free solo ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan. A media frenzy is currently swirling around him — in a few weeks, he’ll appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live! with 50 Cent — and he’s dealing with an avalanche of press requests and sponsorship obligations. In many ways this trip comes at the perfect moment for Honnold, allowing the star climber to sneak off to the mountains.

MEN’S JOURNAL

Alex Honnold at rest: Staying entertained in the downtime can be one of mountaineering’s hardest adjustments.

But you also get the sense that he’s having a hard time mustering the motivation to tackle another massive project so soon after El Cap. Thus, at least for today, the Stump.

As evening falls — not that you would know it — and with no sign of the climbers, our team clips into skis and pushes off from the advanced camp on the glacier to our more comfortable digs, set up on terra firma, next to a snowfield where the bush planes land. We won’t know for sure until the next day, courtesy of a GPS cellphone linkup that intermittently connects their base camp with ours, that the team has succeeded on its new route during a 14-hour push.

T H E N O T I O N O F C L I M B I N G El Cap’s

3,000-foot granite wall without a rope would probably still be considered a suicide mission had not Honnold burst on the scene

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: TAYLOR REES; RENAN OZTURK(2)

One of the unheralded realities of alpine climbing is that you spend a lot of time sitting around camp waiting for the weather to clear or the conditions on the mountain to settle down. Or you take up the downtime by finding another peak to climb. Which is what Honnold, Ozturk, and Wilkinson are doing a mountain called the Stump.

Honnold, the most celebrated rock climber in the world, is not known for his alpine feats. This is his second trip to the Ruth Gorge, and while he pulled off some impressive ascents in 2013 with Ozturk and Wilkinson, he admits his debut in the big mountains wasn’t exactly a natural adjustment. “I was totally out of my depth,” he says.

Ozturk recalls that Honnold was such a fish out of water that, at times, he would climb by putting his f ingers in the holes made by his partners’ ice tools, rather than use his ax. For his preferred discipline, Honnold often wears shorts and climbing shoes, and that’s it. Mountaineering requires crampons, ice axes, heavy boots, and layers and layers of cold-weather gear.

The alpine game has a totally different psychology, too. Climbing at lower altitudes is about choosing the right conditions. In the big mountains, you have to submit to the conditions you find.

This time around in Ruth Glacier, Honnold has the experience of two record-setting traverses in Patagonia behind him, but he’s still a relative newbie to the high alpine world.

And their objective is no joke: The crew is

The glacier is so remote

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a decade ago. On his previous free solos, the most famous being the northwest face of Half Dome in 2008, Honnold could tell himself something like, “As long as I stay cool and don’t make any stupid mistakes, I’ll be fine.” But on El Cap, which offers even less for a climber to grab onto and is a thousand feet higher, the calculus was more like, “OK, I have to do that and, on a handful of moves, climb as well as I ever have in my life.”

And so he did, beginning in the pale light of dawn on June 3 and pulling himself up and onto the f lat summit just under four hours later. “I was overwhelmingly stoked,” Honnold says. “And, yeah, I was glad to be done with it, finishing a chapter.”

Honnold says he doesn’t know what’s left for him to do as a free soloist, but it’s fair to say that for now, he’s taken the art, and the risk, of the game to as high a level as any more or less sane person could. That’s why we’re in Alaska: Climbing higher-altitude “big walls” is a logical progression for him.

The Wine Bottle Route seems custommade for Honnold’s talents. It’s basically a giant buttress, almost vertical in the early pitches, like El Cap. It relents to lower-angled sections farther up, but those can be even harder going as the rock gets crumbly and the snow piles up. Two Austrians succeeded in topping out on it in 1988, during an epic five-day siege. But the Austrians occasionally resorted to using aid techniques, driving pitons or bolts into the rock and then boosting themselves up. What this American trio hopes to do would be extraordinary: climbing the route in a single, 36-hour push, using rope and gear only for protection in case of a fall.

“It would pretty much be a breakthrough,” says David Roberts, the co-author of Honnold’s autobiography, Alone on the Wall, and one of a trio of climbers who made the first ascent of Mount Dickey’s east face by a different route back in 1974. In this effort, Honnold is the team’s secret weapon, able to shrink the size of giant alpine walls by climbing at heretofore unimaginable speeds.

But two days later, when my group skis into the climbers’ base camp, the expedition is effectively over. Dickey is not drying off fast enough. That leaves open the possibility of an arduous, multiday push on one of the other major peaks in the gorge, akin to what the trio had done in 2013.

This time, the intense drive needed to complete such a feat isn’t there. Ozturk, who climbed the daunting Shark’s Fin route on the Himalayan peak Meru in 2011 with Jimmy Chin and Conrad Anker, is consumed with making a doc on the Ruth Gorge, where he and Wilkinson climb almost every season.

Wilkinson has a new baby and a new climbing gym outside of Portland, Maine. Honnold, having just pulled off the climb of his life, is the most conflicted alpine warrior of all. Ozturk describes for me the come-toJesus moment they’d had the night before: “I said to Alex, ‘I just want to give you happiness. It doesn’t matter what we do as long as 012

OCTOBER 2017

CLIMBING’S GREATEST FEAT

END OF FREERIDER ROUTE

4 THE ROUND TABLE

3 TEFLON CORNER AND THE BOULDER PROBLEM

1. The Beginning

2. Triangle Ledge

3. The Boulder Problem

2 TRIANGLE LEDGE

1 BEGINNING OF FREERIDER ROUTE

4. The Round Table

HERE, WHO KNOWS WHAT’S LURKING UNDER THE SNOW . . . THAT’S WHEN YOU NEED A MISSION YOU’RE STOKED ABOUT.

RENAN OZTURK (2)

you’re having fun in the mountains.’ ” As it turns out, Honnold chose not to climb at all. With the cachet of the Wine Bottle off the table, he wasn’t keen on risking his life on a dangerous secondary climb. Instead, they decided to ski partway up and down the lower-angled west face of Dickey. By the time we arrive back at their glacial camp, they’re back from the excursion and taking care of some corporate business, Honnold gracefully submitting to a North Face interview, shot by Wilkinson. Later, hiding from the debilitating sun under the cooking tarp, the gas stove eternally bubbling away to melt ice, the team decompresses, joking about anything, often about Honnold. He’s one of the gang but also somewhat apart, the guest star, and a slightly eccentric one at that: throwing himself into calisthenics to maintain his muscular fitness, letting Ozturk take photos of him that show off his post–El Cap ripped physique, and holing up in his tent and reading a small library of wonky public-policy books. “I’m going to write a screenplay about a great athletic talent withering away on an Alaskan glacier,” Wilkinson quips.

On point, Honnold pokes his head in the tent where I’m temporarily splayed out. His face, burned pink, slathered in zinc sunscreen that doesn’t quite do the job, tells me that it hasn’t been an easy week. “It’s a beautiful place, a magical place — and I can’t wait to go home,” he declares. “How many 5.10’s have I done?” he says of his rock climbs. “Except with the ones here, I have the possibility of dying on rappel.” I confess that I too have serious concern about the risks we’re all running even skiing over a glacier that, because of a light winter snowfall and warm spring temperatures, is rife with danger.

“Here, who knows what’s lurking underneath the snow,” Honnold agrees. “You have these Alaskan man-eating crevasses you could drive a bus into. That’s when you need the hunger. You want to be here for a reason, for a mission that you’re stoked about. Then the risks can be acceptable.” So, not this time, but maybe another. “If I’d only been sport climbing for the past eight months, I’d be, like, jonesing for a proper adventure.”

That’s what Ozturk and Wilkinson want to hear. “This is more of a long game,” Ozturk says. “We’ll get another shot at this with Alex after he forgets about the suffering. Whether he likes it or not, he’s built for this, and maybe some day he’ll appreciate his ability to accomplish some incredible things in the greater ranges.”

Honnold is open — in theory. “My goal is always to improve, whether it’s to raise my technical grade or climb bigger walls or whatever. And that’s the fun thing about alpinism. Because I’m so bad at it, it makes for a quick way to get better.” Q

Honnold negotiates a pitch of the Stump. Top: The entire crew poses for a shot before flying out.

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All Together Now S

ALEX FARNUM/AUGUST

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BRO-CATION BOUND Getting the boys together for an adventure is trickier than you think.

THE PE RFECT DUDE’S TRIP, Loren Siek-

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While Siekman’s trips are bigger than most, the lessons he’s learned over the years apply to any group excursion. One of the key challenges, he says, comes at the very outset: getting all the guys to agree on a date. He’s addressed that issue by making the trip a tradition. Every year, the group sets out the weekend after Labor Day. Some people won’t be able to make it, but if finding a time that works for everyone were essential, the trip would probably never happen. “Commit, or don’t commit,” Siekman says.

Wherever they wind up going, the brodown generally becomes a marriage of heavy exercise with copious consumption of alcohol. Indeed, Siekman likes to describe his crew as a drinking club with a riding MEN’S JOURNAL

problem. But no matter how hungover, he says, “everyone is expected to contribute in some way.” Some guys cook dinner. Others catch cleanup duty. A designated “drinkmaster” keeps the cooler stocked with ice and beer. Of course, there’s always one dude who f lakes on his job, forcing Siekman to hunt him down. “As a trip leader and organizer for this group, I end up babysitting a little bit more than I think I should, since I’m not being paid to do this,” he says.

But frustration comes with the territory for anyone brave enough to organize a brotrip. These are guys, after all, and tempers may f lare. The key is not to dwell on the hassles and headaches — and instead hatch new plots for a better trip next year.

SCOTT G. TOEPFER

man believes, is one that no self-respecting wife or girlfriend would ever want to participate in. “Getting dirty, being smelly, telling lewd jokes, pulling pranks,” says Siekman.

“Women would hate it.”

Siekman should know: For the past 14 years, he’s helped pull off increasingly ambitious mountain-bike trips. This year, the trip ballooned to 36 guys — friends, and friends of friends, and some of their friends, too — who camped for four nights near Santa Fe, New Mexico, culminating in an epic day of climbing through evergreen forest and aspen glades and then bombing down 22 miles of singletrack on the famed South Boundary Trail.

The worst part of pack travel is logistics.

These apps can help.

1 PLANCHAT

2 TRAVEFY

3 ALLSTAYS

WHERE THE BOYS ARE 4 01

02

MOUNTAIN BIKE IN PARK CITY

INDULGE YOUR INNER SPEED FREAK IN TEXAS

Step outside your VRBO rental and crush more than 400 miles of prime alpine singletrack. The International Mountain Bicycling Association named Park City, Utah, its first Gold Level Ride Center, setting a world standard, with rides ranging from basic beginner stuff to white-knuckle expert downhills.

For the full-on fuel-injected rush that is Formula One, you don’t have to jet to Monaco. The world’s premier race cars now burn rubber on Circuit of the Americas, in Austin. Says Motosports Travel’s Nathan Griffiths: “Fast cars and hot women: It’s a glamorous sport and a big traveling circus.”

03

ROSIE

GO BIG IN AFRICA Skip the usual jeep safari, and instead travel the old-fashioned way. Rothschild Safaris in Denver offers horseback tours across Kenya’s Maasai Mara savanna, where you and the boys will gallop alongside wildebeests, zebras, and giraffes. Expect to pay about $5,500 a person. But what better way to take the testosterone level to 11?

MEN’S JOURNAL

OCTOBER 2017

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2

THE FAMILY BUSINESS On any group trip, some economic tug-of-war is inevitable. Here’s how to minimize the conflict.

1 SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

2 PROTECT YOUR INVESTMENT

3 APPOINT A MINISTER OF FINANCE

THREE WAYS TO GET THE FAMILY TOGETHER 01

02

03

DIG INTO YOUR ROOTS

LEND A HAND

Skip the cruise ship and do something that can lead to genuine bonding. Thanks to the popularity of sites like Ancestry .com, more families are journeying back to the old country. Services like Family Tree Tours will design custom trips, even connecting you with far-flung relatives you’ve never met.

Sure it’s noble, but pitching in on a volunteer project can also be fun.

Pam Brick, a Chicago book editor, took her clan to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana.

Grandma worked in the senior center, her son did construction, and her granddaughter cared for some foster kids. “I think it brought everyone closer,” Brick says.

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GET CRUISING “Cool cruise” does not have to be an oxymoron. The trick is to steer clear of those floating amusement parks and think small. Companies like Lindblad Expeditions and (the aptly named) UnCruise Adventures use smaller ships, allowing you to create custom trips with activities geared to people of all ages.

Be the breakthrough.

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Breakthroughs are the patients participating in clinical trials, the scientists and doctors working together to advance the fight against cancer, and the brave survivors like Tonya who never give up. Let’s be the breakthrough.

To learn about appropriate screenings and clinical trials or to help someone with cancer, go to su2c.org/breakthrough. #cancerbreakthrough

01

HIT DISNEY WORLD

There are plenty of good reasons to travel with other families.

Chief among them: Pals for your kids means free time for you.

MARK TWAIN ONCE REMARKED that “there

ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”

Keep that in mind the next time you plan a trip with other families.

Of course, teaming up with clans like yours has its advantages. Kids who might stomp their feet at the prospect of visiting a Civil War battlef ield are more easily persuaded when peers come along, too. And it’s easier on parents. “The kids go off and hang out.

And it gives you a chance to have a meal and maybe a couple of drinks after dinner,” says Pat Severo, a 58-year-old wealth manager from Manhattan Beach, California, who frequently travels with friends. “Just relax and talk about the day.”

A shared interest can be key — like a resort that revolves around nature photography or

fly-fishing. Think of it like family camp or an after-school program for adults. Severo found his travel tribe through his love of scuba diving. For more than a decade, he’s been taking his three kids to dive some of the best reefs in the world, staying at resorts in Roatán, Yap, and Fiji. On nearly every trip, his brood winds up bonding with another, staying in touch, and sometimes going on to become travel partners on future trips. “You sort of build your own group of people,” Severo says.

But wherever you go, take Dana Zucker’s lodging advice. The 49-year-old from Omaha co-writes a travel blog called Tri Wives Club, aimed at couples who travel to far-flung triathlons. Zucker’s must-have feature: “Space. We want a hotel where you can actually have alone time. It’s good to have rooms that are separated from each other.”

You heard us right: Disney World.

Not only will the kids love you forever, but you’ll be happy, too, especially if you’re thirsty. The Magic Kingdom’s various restaurants, bars, and pavilions serve an astonishing 250 different beers from around the world. Rent the three-bedroom Treehouse Villa at Saratoga Springs, which sleeps nine. When everyone else is at the water park, sneak away for a round at Lake Buena Vista Golf Course.

RENT A BEACH VILLA 02

3

BENEFITS WITH FRIENDS

FAMILY FIRST

Airbnb and HomeAway are full of listings for primo digs in warmer climes the world over. Our pick: Sea Horse Ranch, a private gated community in the Dominican Republic — just two hours from Miami — where five- and six-bedroom beachfront villas include swimming pools, access to private beach coves, tennis courts, and an equestrian center. Some include maids who will cook for you.

03

GO TO CAMP

1 How to keep your gang on the same page — and away from one another’s throats.

022

FACE THINGS HEAD ON

2 DO SOME PREP WORK

The kids love going to summer camp, and there’s no reason you can’t get in on the action. Learn to scuba-dive with Family Dive Adventures’ Kids Sea Camp, a pop-up scuba school. Try fly-fishing with your kids at a two-day Orvis parent-child course on Vermont’s Battenkill River. Or get ready for winter in June and July at High Cascade Snowboard Camp, where you’ll bed down in a chalet and spend a week learning to carve turns at Timberline — the only North American resort where the lifts run all year.

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Canada by Canoe To mark the country’s 150th anniversary, a onetime oil worker is paddling from coast to coast, nearly 5,000 miles across — for a third time. by JEFF MOAG

T S H O U LD G O w ithout saying that you’re bound to face some dicey situations while paddling and portaging a canoe 4,750 miles across Canada. Do it twice, as former oil-rig worker Mike Ranta has, and you’ve probably experienced it all: hailstorms, snowstorms, lightning strikes next to the boat, 20-foot waves on Lake Superior, a herd of elk crossing — and blocking — the river you’re floating down.

Today, Ranta is paddling across Canada for an unprecedented third time (he’s the only person ever to do it alone in a season), and the reason is simple: “I just love to paddle,” says the 46-year-old from Atikokan, Ontario.

I

This time he is being accompanied by photographer David Jackson, who follows in his own canoe and a pair of beat-up Canon 5D cameras, dropping back or running ahead to capture Ranta’s seemingly endless journey down rivers and across lakes, and marching over roadways.

“It’s a wild trip” says Jackson, who originally met and shot Ranta in 2014, midway through Ranta’s first cross-Canada journey.

“Sometimes I can’t believe Mike survived the last two times he did it alone.”

The two started on April 1 in Bella Coola, British Columbia, dragging their boats 625 miles on carts made from old bicycle parts up the Rocky Mountains, then putting in on the Bow River, which runs through Cal-

gary. So far, they’ve been out more than 130 days, stopping to resupply in towns whenever they can. The duo hopes to reach Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, by November, but they often find themselves at a standstill for a day or two, waiting out bad weather.

On July 1, Canada Day, the wind was so high that the two holed up in a swamp. “I couldn’t think of a more Canadian way to spend Canada Day,” says Ranta, who takes to the water in knee-high rubber boots, a traditional métis sash, and a birchbark hat, “you know, in a canoe, windswept in a little spruce swamp.”

“We had one beer each,” says Jackson, “and they were warm.” Here are a few of their other, um, highlights.

Ranta has experienced every kind of weather imaginable during his three trips, each of which has its own theme. The first one raised money for a youth program in Ranta’s hometown, and his 2016 crossing honored Canadian veterans.

This trip is dedicated to the country’s 150th anniversary, which is why his canoe is painted like an 18-foot Canadian flag. “Mike’s story is so Canadian,” says Jackson. “Someone needed to take on the burden of documenting it.”

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DAVID JACKSON (4)

Watching a storm approach on the border of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, June 19

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Sunrise on Cedar Lake, Manitoba, June 26 A bleary-eyed Ranta prepares to shove off after a few hours’ rest. When they have clear weather, the canoeists rarely stop. “That’s kind of the way you gotta run,” says Ranta, whose longest paddle was 47 hours straight. He pulls ashore to let his dog, Spitzii, do his business, but he stays in the canoe, brewing coffee and cooking meals on a stove between his feet. “We do a lot of fishing.

Whatever bites the hook is gonna get into the pan.”

Dragging his canoe over the Chilcotin Highway, British Columbia, April 10 To first hit a navigable waterway, the pair had to drag their canoes 625 miles over the Continental Divide. It was only then, once they hit the powerful rivers on the eastern slope, when Jackson came to the belated realization that Ranta is not an expert paddler. He’s just a guy who decided one day to canoe across the country, addressing issues as they come up — or not. His inflatable life jacket deployed early in the trip, and so far he hasn’t bothered to get a replacement CO2 cartridge. “I think Mike is much more of a blind-faith kind of person,” says Jackson.

Aurora borealis, Grand Rapids, Manitoba, night of July 1–2 When the wind finally died after Canada Day, and they were able to get on the water, Jackson was happy with Ranta’s call for an all-night push, which coincided with some spectacular northern lights. Jackson estimates he’s made more than 50,000 photographs during the expedition, only a handful of which include himself. “It’s not my trip,” he explains. “I try to do my very best to stay out of Mike’s way.”

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The Perfect Pepper W

FOOD STYLING BY CHRIS LANIER FOR APOSTROPHE REPS; PROP STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART

photograph by CHRISTOPHER TESTANI

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RAFT BREWERS have long treated pilsners like C -l i s t s w i l l, fo c u si n g their efforts instead on IPAs, potent stouts, and other styles avalanched with hops. But not everyone wants a haymaker that’ll TKO his taste buds. “People are realizing that there’s only so much strong, hoppy beer they can drink,” says Dan Suarez, cofounder of New York state’s Suarez Family Brewery. “Now they’re seeking out delicate, simple beers that are, for lack of a better term, more drinkable.”

Enter pilsners, a style that originated in

C

the Czech city of Pilsen in 1842. A blend of soft water, pale malts, cold fermentation, and f lavorful hops created an instant, and enduring, sensation: Pilsner Urquell, the original pilsner. Over time, however, the style morphed into a bland lager served primarily in a Solo cup, a dull Xerox of the original. But modern pilsners have hit reset on that trend by adding more f lavorful, but not overwhelming, varieties of hops, proving that simpler can be better.

“You don’t necessarily make a great beer by adding 20 different hops,” says Dave Engbers, president of Michigan’s Founders Brewing Co. Founders updates the pilsner

template by adding just the right amount of bright, aromatic hops typically found in an IPA. “It appeals to the American craft drinker and, at the same time, pays homage to the Old World pilsners,” says Engbers.

F lu sh w it h ex t r a bre w i ng c apa city, thanks to the craft boom, beermakers nationwide are embracing the style’s nuanced charms, creating brews with moderate booziness (around 5 percent ABV), memorable f lavors, and massive refreshment — great sidekicks for burgers, pizza, tacos, and conversation. “Sometimes you just want a crisp, easy-drinking beer,” says Engbers. Here are six of the easiest. Q

OUR FAVORITE NEW PILSNERS

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The Hopped-Up Pils

The Farm-to-Can Pils

The Kiwi Crusher

The Homegrown Pils

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The Classic German

The Sweetheart

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Baseball’s Most Interesting Man To most MLB fans, Tigers pitcher Daniel Norris is the bearded dude who lives in a van. But there’s far more to the talented lefty than his choice of wheels.

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ET ’S J U ST get this over

with: Daniel Norris lives in a van during the offseason. Also, sometimes he shaves his sizable beard with an ax. There, done.

If you follow Major League Baseball at all, chances are you already know that. In fact, that might be all you know about the Detroit Tigers left-hander, because being the “Van Man” is the only thing sportscasters seem to want to talk about.

“Any time we play a different team, they say that,” says Norris, who watches broadcasts of his starts to work on his pitching mechanics. “Just out of nowhere. It’s like, ‘Here’s a dull moment. Let’s just bring this up.’ And it’s like, man, I’m a baseball player, I’m a pitcher, and I’m pretty freaking good.

That’s what I want to be known for.”

Indeed, his choice of wheels and grooming implements is only a fraction of the story behind Norris a 6-foot-2 195-pound

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FROM TOP RIGHT: STEPHEN BRASHEAR/GETTY IMAGES; BEN MOON

Red Sox: “This guy is going to turn into an outstanding pitcher in this league,” he said.

“There’s a ton of upside with Daniel Norris.”

As we drive around Detroit’s northern suburbs, Norris looks as if he might have just come down from a hike in the mountains: f lannel shirt, Patagonia canvas jacket, scruffy facial hair, and brown curly locks flowing out from under a Bailey Seeds trucker cap. But while Norris may have the mellow makeup of a chill dude with similarly casual extracurricular pursuits — including surfing, skateboarding, and those freewheeling adventures on the road in his 1978 VW Westfalia, nicknamed Shaggy — on the field, he’s all business. The previous evening, he struck out eight and allowed just one run in a 7–1 win against the Cleveland Indians.

During the fourth inning, after getting a first-pitch strike on Indians catcher Roberto Pérez, a rainbow suddenly appeared beyond center field. All Norris remembers about the moment was that Pérez popped out to center

At 24 years old, with a 97-mph fastball and an 88-mph slider, Norris is one of baseball’s most promising young pitchers.

like, I’ll get this and have it for a year, and if I prove to myself that I’ll use it consistently and enjoy it, then I’ll upgrade to the real thing,” he says. When he made it to the big leagues with the Toronto Blue Jays later that year, his present to himself was a Canon 5D Mark III. Around then, he connected on Instagram with adventure photographer Ben Moon, who had shot some of Norris’ favorite images, for National Geographic and Patagonia. Moon was in the process of selling one of his lenses, an 85mm, f/1.2 portrait lens, and after scrolling through Norris’ Instagram feed, Moon thought it would be perfect for him.

“It’s cool to see him learning so quickly,” says Moon, “especially when three-fourths of his year is occupied by baseball. It seems to me a way to counterbalance all that pressure and have a creative outlet of his own.”

Using the lens he bought from Moon, Norris now ventures off by himself during Tigers road trips, taking black-and-white photos. They’re not what you’d expect — they’re portraits of homeless people he encounters while walking around cities. He posts the best ones on Instagram along with recollections of their conversations. Norris’ interest in connecting with homeless people is nothing new. Back during his high school years in Johnson City, Tennessee, his mom packed extra lunch bags, and he’d keep three or four in his car to hand out if he came across someone in need. “I never saw a homeless person as, ‘Aw, they’re grungy, let’s stay away,’ ” says Norris. “It’s another human life, and they’re still grinding away just like I am. I’m stressing about baseball, and they’re stressing about if they’re going to stay dry tonight if it’s raining. So once I got the camera, I really wanted to be able to at least tell their story.”

During the off-season, when he’s not traveling around in Shaggy, Norris lives with his parents in his childhood home. His

Off the field, Norris gets in as much surfing as he can during road trips.

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E XPOSURE

BEHIND THE LENS Norris tells the stories of his best shots.

While on the road with Shaggy, Norris often sneaks in ad hoc workouts.

Melanie is an accomplished painter whose watercolor portraits inspired his photography. In addition to baseball, Norris played basketball and football in high school. A lot of people thought football was his best sport, but baseball was his true love. (He was baptized at age 16 in his high school baseball uniform.)

“That’s what kept me up at night,” says Norris. “I was sitting in bed and daydreaming about baseball.”

But Norris has never been your average jock. Four years ago, he became curious about surfing and began driving five or six hours from Tennessee to practice at Folly Beach, South Carolina. A fellow surfer, Moon suggested the duo make a road trip together, and last year, Moon made a short f ilm, Offseason, documenting their travels. The pair drove from the Norris family home to the Pacific Northwest, a journey that took two weeks because of Shaggy’s breakdowns. They took a second trip last fall, through Southern California, where Norris met Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard at the company’s Ventura headquarters. Norris went surfing with Chouinard, took his portrait, and while driving around in Chouinard’s beat-up Subaru Outback, they got a flat. “I ended up fixing the tire for him,” says Norris, something he describes as an “all-time experience.”

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tests looking for the source of his arm fatigue found a tumor in his thyroid. For a while, he didn’t tell anyone about the diagnosis other than his agent. He waited two months before letting his parents know and put off surgery until the season was over (during which he was traded by the Blue Jays to the Tigers).

“When I found out about it, I was still in Triple A,” says Norris. “I wanted to be back in the big leagues. But when that happened, I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m playing baseball — this could have been a lot worse.’

It was kind of God’s way of telling me, ‘Just have fun, you’re playing baseball at a very high level. It might not be where you want to be right now, but just enjoy it.’ ” Lately Norris has upgraded his lifestyle — at least when it comes to his daily ride. This spring he bought a used Toyota FJ Cruiser so he wouldn’t have to deal with Shaggy’s breakdowns. “I’m always going to travel in it,” says Norris of the VW. “The only thing is, as I get older, it gets older. The last time I took it on a trip, it broke down three times, which makes for a great story, but it gets expensive and frustrating.”

Norris did customize his Cruiser in one way: He put a rooftop tent on it, and before spring training in Florida, he lived in it for three weeks, often parking on the beach. “I just enjoy being able to pull over to the side of the road and camp,” he says, smiling.

“That’s something I’m drawn to.” Q MEN’S JOURNAL

The Baddest Cat in Los Angeles California is home to approximately 6,000 mountain lions, and when one showed up in Hollywood’s Griffith Park, it became a Tinseltown sensation — even when his feel-good story turned dark. by KEVIN HA ZZARD

ER KILLER walked right in.

It was March 3, 2016, a cool spring morning, when Killarney, the oldest of the Los Angeles Zoo’s 11 koalas, was discovered missing. A search party quickly fanned out, hoping for the best. The 14-year-old koala was known for wandering her enclosure at night, so maybe she’d simply found a way through the fencing. But just 400 yards from the zoo’s Australia section, zookeepers found her stillwarm corpse. Half of her face was missing.

A review of security footage answered the most pressing question: The perpetrator was caught on camera, slinking through the zoo the night of the murder. He was one of the city’s most celebrated residents, covered regularly in the Los Angeles Times and once in National Geographic. Killarney’s killer was none other than P-22, the “Lion of Hollywood.”

L.A. is mostly associated with palm tree– lined boulevards and TMZ celebrity tours, but Tinseltown is also surrounded by 10,000foot mountains teeming with wildlife — deer, bobcats, bighorn sheep, California condors, and, yes, mountain lions. The state has roughly 6,000 big cats overall, but P-22 is by far its most famous, largely because he lives in inescapable proximity to some 4 million Angelenos. His home, the city’s 4,500-acre Griffith Park, is one of the largest urban parks in America, full of oak trees and shrubland.

But his seven-square-mile range is the smallest ever recorded for an adult lion. As such, P-22 has become a case study in human coexistence with apex predators.

“He’s the perfect microcosm for issues facing mountain lions today,” says National Park Service biologist Jeff Sikich, who has tracked P-22 for the past five years. Habitat loss, wildlife corridors, rodenticide — they all play out in dramatic fashion in his life, making P-22 perhaps the most important lion in America.

P-22 — P for puma, 22 for his National Park Service ID number — was born in 2009.

His father was P-1, a legendarily dominant male that ruled nearly all of the Santa Monica

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Soon after National Geographic photographer Steve Winter captured this image, in 2013, P-22 became a bona fide star, the “Lion of Hollywood.”

for wildlife. His journey was so improbable — miraculous even — that few doubted a big cat could ever survive it.

But in early 2012, biologist Miguel Ordeñana, who was conducting a study to determine if Griffith Park’s deer, coyotes, and bobcats interacted with outside populations, was reviewing photos from camera traps he’d set around the park. He’d heard rumors of lions prowling the park, but dismissed them. The park was simply too small. Too

STEVE WINTER/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

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Mountains, over 244 square miles. In 2012, at a little under two years old, P-22 fled home rather than risk challenging his father. No one could have imagined where he’d go.

Griffith Park, which attracts millions of visitors annually, is home to the Hollywood sign and the L.A. Zoo. It’s within sight of the Universal and Warner Bros. studio lots, as well as the trendy neighborhood of Los Feliz.

Though its canyons form the eastern tip of the Santa Monica Mountains, highways — and L.A.’s incessant, deadly traffic — isolate it from the rest of the range. To settle in Griffith Park, P-22 would have had to cross eight lanes of the 405 freeway, then negotiate the 101, an often deadly misadventure

urban. Then he came across a stunning image: the muscled haunches of a massive creature, thick tail curling out of the frame, the tip of an ear cocked, listening.

“I jumped out of my seat,” Ordeñana says.

“It was like finding Bigfoot.”

There was a lion in Griffith Park.

Though his range was tiny — adult males typically require 200 square miles — and surrounded by development, there were plenty of deer for him and no competition. Shortly after Ordeñana’s sighting, P-22 was darted by NPS employees and outfitted with a tracking collar. Yet his greatest contribution wouldn’t come at the hands of a scientist. It came from photographer Steve Winter, who had built

a career documenting wildlife pushed to extremes by habitat loss. He immediately recognized in P-22 the chance to bring renewed attention to the cause by capturing a single, almost incendiary image. “I knew it was possible that a picture could bring mountain lions and people together,” Winter says. “I just never would’ve thought it would happen in the way it did.”

Winter spent nearly a year trying to get the perfect photo: P-22 walking through the night, the Hollywood sign lit up in the background. When he finally snagged it, with a motion-sensor camera, the image was splashed across two pages of National Geographic’s December 2013 issue.

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Los Angeles immediately fell in love. The L.A. Times began writing regular columns on P-22. His story inspired a documentary, The Cat That Changed America, and a virtual-reality app that showed conservation efforts underway in the Santa Monica Mountains from the vantage point of a lion.

P-22 Facebook pages and Twitter feeds emerged. Nonprofit programs, like Save LA Cougars, began reaping a windfall thanks to P-22’s sudden celebrity.

“People all over the world who don’t normally give to environmental causes are donating,” says Beth Pratt-Bergstrom, California director of the National Wildlife Federation. “He’s trapped and lonely, can’t even OCTOBER 2017

THE LION OF HOLLYWOOD In 2012, NPS biologists darted and

How a California mountain lion came to call L.A. home.

tagged P-22 in order to track his movements and determine his diet.

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ing would be the largest such project in the world, spanning a section of the 101 to funnel animals safely over the freeway. Not surprisingly, it’s received a tremendous boost in both publicity and funding from P-22 fans.

“It won’t even benef it him,” PrattBergstrom says. “He’s just a martyr for the cause.”

Of course, as notorious as P-22 is, few Angelenos have ever seen him in person.

Millions of hikers walk past him and never know it. Even the person whose job it is to track him, Sikich, the NPS biologist, rarely gets a glimpse. “He sees us every day,” Sikich says, “and we hardly ever see him.” For five years, Sikich has known P-22’s exact location — his radio collar sends pings to satellites eight times a day — and he does regular tracking to see what the lion has killed. His diet is a clear indicator of his health. A dead deer usually suggests a healthy lion.

Though security cameras have caught P-22 walking the streets, only 6 percent of his pings place him in yards or roadways.

He keeps to deep cover, hunting at night and sleeping all day. Even without males to fight or females to woo, his daily routine remains typical for a lion.

Though wild animals are unpredictable, P-22 clearly poses a minimal risk. Since 1986, there have been only 14 lion attacks in California, three of which were fatal. It was MEN’S JOURNAL

always fear that drove the predator pogroms of the past, but P-22 suggests there’s less to be afraid of than we might think. It’s much more likely that he will turn up dead on a highway than turn his aggression toward a person. In fact, it’s a small miracle that he hasn’t been killed already — cars are the second-leading cause of death for adult mountain lions.

Without corridors allowing predators and prey to move freely, California’s urban lions are often forced to compete, and fight to the death, for space. This includes mates and offspring of male lions — endless infighting that could lead to their extinction in Southern California within 50 years.

But Sikich is optimistic. People in California, a state that hunted its grizzlies and gray wolves into extinction, are beginning to understand that lions are its last large carnivore, its final chance to get things right.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that P-22 came to Hollywood.

“People come here to make their dreams possible,” says city councilman David Ryu. “It’s the mystique of L.A.” However it ends for P-22, it’s clear his legacy, and the belief that we can coexist with predators, will live on.

“His journey, his celebrity, it’s not empty,” says Pratt-Bergstrom. “He’s getting people to rethink how they view wildlife. That’s huge — bigger even than him.” Q

COURTESY OF NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

get a date. He’s the long-awaited visceral story that connects with the public.”

In 2015, he crept beneath a house in Los Feliz and lounged, imperious and carefree, as curious onlookers and law enforcement descended. News trucks lined the streets, offering regular updates, but he eventually slipped back into the park without incident.

Then he ate Killarney. Even in California, this would normally inspire a backlash. Every year, the state issues around 200 depredation permits to kill lions for committing crimes much less egregious than massacring an endangered koala. P-22’s fate seemed sealed.

Anywhere else it would have been. But in P-22, L.A. saw a romantic if unlikely folk hero — more Butch Cassidy than Hannibal Lecter.

When a city councilman suggested relocating P-22, he was eviscerated in social media.

P-22 was now an L.A. mascot. Ultimately, Killarney’s death was simply swept under the rug, and the zoo vowed to upgrade its fences.

P-22’s fame has saved others, too. Last year, a large male named P-45 began killing alpacas on Malibu’s hobby farms. A depredation permit was granted but never acted on, thanks to protests from P-22 supporters.

This was no f luke. He’s routinely served as surrogate for the state’s wildlife, swinging the needle on public opinion in favor of any cause to which he lends his star power. In 2014, when he contracted mange — a skin disease that causes hair loss and lesions — outrage turned to action as blood tests showed his illness was precipitated by eating raccoons and other animals exposed to rat poison. The same year, legislation was passed that limited, and in some cases banned, rodenticides in the state.

Then there’s the proposed Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing, an ambitious $55 million project that would connect the Simi Hills with the Santa Monica Mountains. If completed, the heavily landscaped cross-

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The Fall Guy This season’s go-to layer is not quite a shirt and not quite a jacket. The “shacket” steals a little from both and packs the warmth and ease to get you through chilly times. by JASON CHEN 040

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2/ EVOLUTION SHIRT JACKET $225 OUTERKNOWN

The contrast collar on Filson’s quilted jacket gives it a sporting vibe that’s reminiscent of an English country coat. It’s perfect for those days when the wind picks up and the fog rolls in.

$165

This piece from Kelly Slater’s sustainable line features an, ahem, wavy quilted pattern that separates it from the pack. That and an orange contrast interior make it a more casual pick.

photograph by JARREN VINK

T Y L ING BY EL IZ A BE T H PRESS FOR JUDY C A SE Y INC.

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The denim-like indigo shade on this quilted shirt jacket makes it an easy pair with white jeans or khakis. Flip up the sleeves to reveal the contrasting buffalo-plaid lining.

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Made of fabric from Italy, this shirt jacket is hardier than it looks. It’s got a durable water-repellent finish for additional wind and water resistance — and can even withstand a light drizzle.

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This New York–made shacket, in a Japanese cotton with horn buttons, has been a staple of the Freemans Sporting Club line for seasons now. The many pockets actually make it more jacket than shirt.

POLO RALPH LAUREN

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The quilting on this suede piece, with each line designed to keep the stuffing in place, ensures that you’ll stay toasty whether you’re hiking a trail or heading to the office.

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$395

$995 A native southerner, designer Billy Reid gained attention for his refined takes on rugged menswear staples — seen here in the antique brass snap buttons and ever-so-slightly shrunken chest pockets.

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EVENTS

PISGAH MOUNTAIN BIKE FESTIVAL, OCT. 13–15 Blessed with more than 300 miles of steep singletrack, highspeed hairpin turns, challenging drops and log jumps, and scenic forest roads, North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest and DuPont State Forest boast the best mountain biking east of the Rockies — and there’s no better way to explore them than at this three-day celebration of bikes, beers, and music. Sponsored by Oskar Blues Reeb Ranch, the Bike Farm, and Oskar Blues Brewery, the Pisgah Mountain Bike Festival (pisgahmountain bikefestival.com) offers group rides along the forests’ iconic trails and demos from manufacturers like Ibis, Santa Cruz, and Trek. The beauty of it: When the riding’s over, and you’re caked with mud and grinning from ear to ear, chill out to live music, food trucks, and tubs of cold Dale’s Pale Ale, Pinner Throwback IPA, and other Oskar Blues brews.

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Get product savvy MARK RUFFALO’S HAIR IS YOUR TEMPLATE FOR WELLSTYLED CURLS.

Curlier hair is apt to become dry and listless, which means finding a great moisturizing shampoo is essential. You want one that has silicones and oils on its ingredients list, and the product should have a pearly sheen rather than be clear. If your hair still feels dry, try a hair oil, says Collin O’Callaghan, barber at Los ngeles salon The Cut By: “It esn’t need to be an expensive product. It can be argan or coconut oil.” Massage a drop or two into hair before bed to let the oil work its way deep into follicles; wash it out in the morning.

Block out humidity The secret to beating frizz: hair spray. “Hair spray creates a real barrier to humidity,” says celebrity hairstylist Kevin Mancuso.

MANAGE CURLS

1/ SHAMPOO REGULARLY “One of the biggest myths of our industry is that you shouldn’t wash your hair too often,” says Trefor Evans, director of TRI-Princeton, a lab that studies hair. Shampooing, Evans says, removes product buildup, which can weigh hair down. To keep hair healthiest, wash it at least every other day.

Using a drugstore dandruff shampoo can strip away oils that keep the scalp and hair healthy, drying hair out even more, Kevin Mancuso says. Often, all a flaky scalp needs is a moisturizing shampoo and conditioner.

Good news — your hair is a blank slate and can pull off a variety of styling regimens. The trick? Creating one.

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Yes, straight hair can do just about anything, but making it look good doesn’t mean you have o labor over a precious pompaur. Anna Bernabe — who, worth noting, keeps Shawn des’ and Steven Yeun’s ht hair camera ready — ends this simple process shed look: Rub matte ectly on your fingerur hands through ith straight hair,” you just need enough uct to give it direction.” Be sparing — a dime-size amount to start — and avoid letting the stuff get to your scalp, where it can gunk up pores and make

hair look oily and heavy, says O’Callaghan. “Instead, shape the hair with the product from the middle of the hair shaft to the ends.”

Manage waves If your hair’s more wavy than straight, modify your routine to keep waves intact and smooth.

The simple way to do it, says O’Callaghan: When shampooing, spend 30 seconds or more massaging your scalp to work the hair’s natural oils into the hair shaft. When your hair dries, this light coating of oil will help lock your waves in place. Plus, it makes hair look healthier and helps set in any product you use for styling.

WHAT TO USE To get texture and hold without shine, we use John Allan’s lightweight, water-based matte pomade. johnallans.com; $25

FROM TOP: SMALLZ & RASKIND/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES; EMMA MCINTYRE/GETTY IMAGES

FINESSE STRAIGHT

The bad news: Most set-in-place styles (pompadour, greaser cut) don’t work for you. The good news is that a natural look does, and it’s easy to do.

Celebrity hairstylist Anna Bernabe’s suggestion to get it: Mix a dollop each of styling cream and gel between your palms, and apply the mixture to curls by squeezing sections of hair in your hands. The technique holds your curls in place, and the mixture adds texture without creating a crunchy feel.

2/ . . . BUT NOT WITH DANDRUFF SHAMPOO

Streamline your styling routine A LIGHT POMADE WORKS FOR RYAN GOSLING, AND IT WILL FOR YOU.

Pick the right style

WHAT TO USE Combine Malin + Goetz styling cream with Bumble and Bumble Sumogel for hold without residue. malinandgoetz.com $22; bumbleandbumble.com, $29

Your hair requires a little more styling time and a couple of products, but the result will be worth it: fully tamed coils.

FIVE

“It’s the best defense to insulate hair.” This doesn’t require an industrial-strength product (light versions work just as well) or a helmet-like application.

A five-second allover spray is enough to create a solid barrier.

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Comb-overs: Vote no LONGER, MESSY HAIR ON TOP MAKES JUDE LAW APPEAR TO HAVE MORE THAN HE’S GOT.

you really need an explanation hy, look to POTUS. Growing air long to make up for less of just makes the strands you’ve ot look thinner and more frage. The best solution, accordg to Bernabe: “A classic short n the sides, two inches on the p.” This leaves enough to style, hich can help add volume and ake hair appear thicker, but ot so much that you look crazy.

Don’t avoid washing he idea that shampooing your air often makes you thin faster an old wives’ tale. When hair ins, your scalp produces more baceous oil, explains hair-care xpert Michelle Blaisure. “That l is bathing the scalp, and over me can clog hair follicles and ad to inflammation,” she says.

WIN WITH THIN

3/ READ LABELS

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4/ KNOW WHEN TO PUT IN HAIR PRODUCT For a natural-looking style, apply product to towel-dried hair. “Products are absorbed and more evenly distributed in slightly damp hair,” Mancuso explains, which also means you’ll need to use less. For a sharper, textured look, apply when hair is desert-dry.

While styling needn’t be fussy, there’s no excuse for looking like a hobo. If you’re on the go, or postgym without any hair products, try this quick fix to look polished: Rub a dab of moisturizer between your palms and lightly smooth your hands over your hair. Done.

If you spend more time worrying about losing your hair than styling what’s left, it’s time for a shearing.

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Shaving your head isn’t giving in — it’s taking back control. And perhaps even exuding an aura of power. A University of Pennsylvania study found that guys with shaved heads are perceived as more dominant than hirsute peers. That said, a new shaver is a nervous shaver. Have a professional barber do the first honors, then follow these tips from Russell Cordeiro, master barber at Brooklyn’s Persons of Interest.

your head’s curvature. Still, shave slowly your first couple of times. “It’s going to be a learning curve,” says Cordeiro, who advises shaving daily in the shower. “Have a mirror in there, and really pay attention to the back.” Cordeiro recommends using a shaving cream, but in a pinch, he says, “a bit of soap lather is great. You just want something to lubricate the skin.”

Nick yourself? Use a styptic pencil to help stop the bleeding.

Use a separate razor

Above all, sunscreen

Dome-specific razors, such as the HeadBlade Sport, have better grips, are easier to control than facial razors, and have f lexible blades built to handle

“I’ve seen way too many newly bald men spend a day in the sun, and suddenly their head is peeling,” says Cordeiro. “That’s more unflattering than just thinning.”

WHAT TO USE You’ll get 50+ SPF along with scalpsoothing vitamin E in Kiehl’s Facial Fuel UV Guard sunscreen. kiehls.com; $38

FROM TOP: DANIEL ZUCHNIK/WIREIMAGE; SMALLZ & RASKIND/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES

EMBRACE BALD

What happens when you put a heavy product on thin hair? “If you’re a wee bit bald, suddenly you look 10 times more bald,” says O’Callaghan. Stick to a peasize amount of airy products — light creams or mousses — and style with your fingers. “Combing, brushing, blow-drying, using a towel: A ll of t hose rough up the texture and cuticle of the hair,” says Blaisure.

“And that causes more damage and loss.”

5/ PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER

First, get right with it AMBASSADOR FOR GOODLOOKING DOMES: DWAYNE “THE ROCK” JOHNSON.

Go light on product

WHAT TO USE The lightweight R+Co Aircraft pomade mousse plumps up thinner strands and gives them thicker, bedhead-like texture. randco.com; $29

Your mission: Employ a few easy styling tips to fake a thicker mane, and leave no strand behind.

“Products with phthalates or sulfates are more likely to strip hair of natural oils — particularly thinning or fine hair, which is more fragile,” says Michelle Blaisure, a hair-care expert at Bosley Professional Strength.

Her tip: Look for shampoos marked “low pH,” “sulfate-free,” or “gentle.”

That can create even more loss and slower regrowth. Blaisure recommends shampooing regularly and being extra-gentle when massaging in product. Be sure to condition, too, she adds, which “smooths the hair fiber,” making it more resilient.

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Switch Your Pullup Grip Physical therapist David Reavy, owner of React studio in Chicago, on how this small change makes a big difference.

THE NEXT TIME you do pullups, jump up with an extra-wide grip. Or a supernarrow one.

Or overlap your palms. Or try placing a towel under one hand, staggering your hands, or having one hand over and the other under the bar. You get the idea.

Any new grip variation acts like a jolt to the body. Suddenly small, stabilizing muscles in your back and arms have to fire to lift you up. Those same muscles surround your elbows and shoulders; targeting them will keep joints healthier, prevent injuries, and get you faster strength results. No matter what grip you use, always start from a dead hang. Pull your shoulders down and back, and engage your abs — this ensures you’re pulling with perfect form. Q

GROOMING BY REBECCA PLYMATE FOR ART DEPARTMENT. SHORTS PROVIDED BY COLUMBIA

ANY NEW GRIP ACTS LIKE A JOLT TO THE BODY. SUDDENLY SMALL, STABILIZING MUSCLES HAVE TO FIRE. 050

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photograph by DYLAN COULTER

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Fitness Secrets of Badass Bull Riders OCTOBER 2017

MEN’S JOURNAL

To win in the gritty Professional Bull Riders tour, you need a rock-solid core, lean strength, and good mobility. Here’s how the best build it all.

photograph by CARLOS RIOS

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HE DIFFE RE NCE BET WE E N elite bull riders and the rest of the pack is that the best know that the job takes more than holding on for eight seconds.

Over the past decade, genetic selection has produced stronger bulls that buck harder. To match them, top PBR riders are ratcheting up core training (to balance on an animal whose bucks produce 14 G’s), cutting body weight (atop a bucking bull, each additional pound feels like three), and developing the flexibility and speed needed to escape a beast that literally weighs a ton. We talked to three pros about making the switch to a smarter, more functional workout and recovery regime — which they’ll put to the test for the championship in Las Vegas next month.

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1. Cooper Davis 23 / JASPER, TX DIALING IN DIET AND FITNESS “A few years ago, I was standing next to two livestock contractors at a competition. I overheard Cody Lambert [a PBR executive and former bull-riding pro] say, ‘There’s three fat guys, and one of ’em’s riding bulls tonight.’ I was a little heavy — 167 pounds — and eating whatever I wanted, hamburgers and enchiladas. I also wasn’t putting in effort. Bull riding was just something that I was good at, and I’d made the finals every year. Hearing Cody say that lit a fire under me to get into the gym and drop weight.

2. Robson Palermo 34 / BRAZIL TRAINING LESS TO GET STRONGER “Two years ago, I went to California to work with a personal trainer. For four months, I trained eight hours a day, six days a week, lifting heavy weights.

I was ripped, lean, and thought, ‘This is gonna be my year.’

“In the first few weeks of competition, I won two seconds and a third place. Then I pulled my hamstring.

Two weeks later, my groin. Another

3. Matt Triplett 26 / COLUMBIA FALLS, MT ZEROING IN ON THE CORE “I’ve found that you can’t be a bodybuilder to win in bull riding. To be good, you need three key elements: You gotta be limber and flexible to move with the bull’s bucks, and have a strong core to stay planted on his back. Hot yoga gives me all three.

I first tried it four years ago in Fort

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“I started eating chicken, brown rice, broccoli, and other vegetables, and cutting way back on salt. I’d run three miles on the treadmill daily, then go straight into ab work — knee raises hanging from a bar, situps, planks — to strengthen my core from every angle. And I used apps like Insanity Max, which kicks your butt and works muscles you didn’t know you had. Also Sworkit, which tells you certain parts of your body to work each day.

“I lost 30 pounds in three months and went from a decent rider to a great one, quick. The funny thing is, I never thought, ‘I’m fat.’ I just thought bull riding was hard. But you get in shape and realize, ‘This could have been a whole lot easier.’”

two weeks later, my shoulder tore. I was overtraining, making my body more imbalanced than strong.

“Now I focus on leg and ab strength and balance — the stuff you actually use when riding a bull. I use TRX bands for body-weight exercises like rows, flies, and crunches, and I work on a physioball to improve my stability and reflexes.

“Before, I was always trying to overpower the bull. But to fight a 2,000-pound animal, you’ve got to have coordination and balance. You’ve gotta be balanced. It’s a dance.”

Worth, Texas. I came out drenched in sweat and said, ‘Holy shit. This is the real deal.’ I went back every day that week, then won the competition that weekend. The benefits aren’t just physical, either. Bull riding is 90 percent mental, and holding a pose in a hot room is a mental challenge, too.

“I do get made fun of in the locker room. Guys are like, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing that — it’s for girls.’ And it’s true. There are a lot of beautiful women in there. That’s another plus.”

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bers you do get? A device may tell you that you’ve logged 100,000 steps this week or that your sleep’s been crappy — but what does that mean? There’s no direction. It’s literally just tracking you. And all that data can be overwhelming and cause paralysis.

What if you like getting constant data?

The problem is that you can get hooked on constant data, and that can crush the joy of exercise. Take the runner’s high — the dopamine rush you get from running. Every time you check heart rate, pace, or split time, you get a little dopamine hit. But eventually the numbers become the source of pleasure rather than the actual activity. You need to look at the device more and more to get your fix, while the activity itself becomes secondary. That’s not sustainable.

So, should we ditch trackers?

Heart-rate monitors and activity trackers have some benefit: They show you roughly what moderate or intense physical activity is.

But the ultimate goal should be to feel these intensity levels yourself. I don’t know what 85 percent of my max heart rate is, but I know exactly what it feels like to go at a challenging pace. If you have that personal understanding, you don’t need tech.

How do you get that?

Practice using a simple intensity scale of 1 to 10. (One is walking the dog; 10 is your heart feeling like it will explode out of your chest.) You want to train throughout that entire range. I suggest this: Every day, do something in the 1 to 4 range. A few times a week, hit the 4 to 6 range — light jogging, lifting weights, taking a class. A couple of times a week, go up to the 6 to 8 range — maybe you crank it up with a tough circuit or sprints. Then, twice a month, hit that 9 to 10 intensity: You’re working at your absolute max. Train like this and you’re far less likely to get injured or mentally burned out, and you’ll get better physical results too.

More Tech, More Problems ales of fitness trackers have never been stronger. And that’s a bad thing, says Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology at the Center for Sport Performance at California State University. In fact, in his new book, Unplugged: Evolve From Technology to Upgrade Your Fitness, Performance and Consciousness, Galpin and co-authors Brian MacKenzie and Phil White explain that the smarter path to fitness is to tap into the technology you’ve always had: your brain.

“This means learning to trust your gut

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and training by how your body feels in the moment,” says Galpin, who also co-hosts one of the Web’s most popular fitness podcasts, The Body of Knowledge. We sat down with him — gadget-free — to hear more about how to hone our natural exercise instincts.

You argue we’ve become reliant on trackers.

Why is that a bad thing?

For starters, it’s not a good idea to outsource decision-making to technology that is often wildly inaccurate. Research shows that these devices can have up to a 40 percent margin of error. Plus, how do you interpret the numMEN’S JOURNAL

I hear you’re also no fan of genetic tests that give fitness recommendations. Why? These tests might be very good at telling you whether you have red hair or blue eyes.

That stuff is pretty dialed in. But the performance, nutrition, and training — for example, tests for whether you tend genetically toward slow- or fast-twitch muscle fibers or how well your body absorbs certain nutrients — this information is extremely immature right now, and often pretty wrong.

Is there any tool we’re not using enough?

A mirror. I use one during warm-ups to check form and to gauge what muscles look tight and need to be mobilized. I also don’t think it’s narcissistic to look at yourself naked. Check out your quads, that back fat. Know what your body looks like. How will you ever know that you’re progressing if you don’t? Q

illustration by YUTA ONODA

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AT-HOME CANCER CHECKS ARE HERE

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THE SLEEPALZHEIMER’S CONNECTION

Eat This Burger, Skip a Soda

If you’re having a burger or steak, pass on the soft drink. A study published in BMC Nutrition found that when people ate a protein-packed meal with a sugary beverage, they saw a 43 percent decrease in fat oxidation — the body’s way of metabolizing fat for energy. The high-protein-plus-sugar combo cues the body to store fat instead of breaking it down, explains study author Shanon Casperson. “This means if you did nothing else — didn’t increase physical activity, didn’t change your diet over the next few days — you could gain more fat.” What’s more, the meal boosted the subjects’ cravings for salty and savory foods — a surprise fact because protein typically suppresses, not induces, hunger. The real fix here? Ditch soda altogether.

—EDWARD DIENER, University of Utah psychology professor and author of a meta-analysis that connects happiness to good health. Diener’s team found that people aren’t happy just because they’re healthy — it works the other way, too. Happy people are more likely to exercise, eat and sleep better, and make smarter choices, like wearing a seat belt.

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FACT OR FICTION?

Heavy Weights Get You Strongest FACT. While high reps with light weights increase muscle size just as much as low reps with heavy weights, the latter helps you lift loads up to 10 pounds heavier, finds a University of Nebraska study. The reason: A few reps at a challenging weight train the central nervous system, activating more muscle fibers.

SAM KAPLAN/TRUNKARCHIVE.COM

“FOR FACTORS THAT PREDICT LONGEVITY, NOTHING IS AS STRONG AS HAPPINESS.”

Poor-quality sleep can raise levels of key proteins — amyloid beta and tau — associated with Alzheimer’s disease, finds two new studies.

Why? Deep sleep may help reduce the buildup of these proteins in the brain, the researchers say.

According to one report, even one bad night’s rest can raise amyloid beta levels 10 percent. “Over time, this increases the risk of plaques, the first step of Alzheimer’s,” says study author Dr. Yo-El Ju. To sleep deeper, avoid caffeine later in the day, limit screen time at night, and cut back on booze.

Mary Erickson with son Gary in Mesa Verde National Park, 1965.

Mom knew I’d come around. But when?

That’s me with Mom on a hike.

Mom loved me. But she could drive me absolutely nuts. Always trying to fix me up with young ladies from church. And everything had to be done Mom’s way. No matter what anyone did, as far as my mom was concerned, it was never quite good enough.

I’m sure that I drove my mom nuts. She didn’t like the idea of me hanging off granite cliffs. Or staying out late with a bunch of jazz musicians. Or moving into a garage in my early thirties.

But I‘ll say this about my mom: Cooking was how she expressed herself every day of her life. And that’s what I learned from her: how to bake and be passionate about it. Long before I named the energy bar after my dad, Mom and I worked endlessly on test bakes.

Right there in her kitchen. Six months later we did it. We created the better-tasting energy bar.

Without that time with Mom in her kitchen, Clif Bar wouldn’t exist.

Thank you, Mom.

— Gary Erickson, Mary’s son

© 2017 Clif Bar & Company. Trademarks and registered trademarks are owned by Clif Bar & Company, or used with permission. CBC17.1490a

Celebrating Clif Bar’s 25th Anniversary

Ask Dr. Bob Our in-house doc answers your questions about health, fitness, and living adventurously.

Recently I noticed blood in my urine.

Should I be worried?

Blood in urine is actually common and can be caused by myriad activities: prolonged and intense exercise (like running a race), taking a new medication, or bruising a kidney during sports or a fall. Noticing it once is no cause for immediate alarm. However, if none of the above applies to you, and you’ve had more than two episodes, see a urologist. Hematuria — the medical term for blood in the urine — is a prime early warning sign of bladder cancer, the fourth most common cancer in men. Fortunately, the condition is easily treatable if caught early, so don’t wait to get checked.

Yes, in fact. Glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate, a supplement that has some of the same components as human cartilage, is proved to help treat pain in bad knees just as effectively as prescription medications (and without the side effects). Doctors think it may even help restore connec tive tissue. A side from supplements, eating a high-fiber diet may help lower inflammation in joints and reduce aches in arthritic knees, according to an interesting study that came out earlier this year. While this was one small report, and we’ll need more studies to bolster its results, loading up on fiber is a risk-free measure that has many known benefits (lower cholesterol and level blood sugar, among them). That means more legumes, nuts, seeded fruits, and whole grains.

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I don’t know of any “easy” tricks, but there is an effective way to build back strength for those body-weight movements: negative reps. This means focusing on the portion of an exercise when your muscles are lengthening (for example, lowering your body to the bottom of a pullup or pushup) versus when muscles are contracting (pulling up to the bar or pushing up from the ground). So for a pullup, stand on a bench or box and start with your chin over the bar, then slowly lower yourself to the ground; climb back on the bench, and go again. Same goes for a pushup. Start in a plank, then slowly lower to the f loor, then get back into the plank, and repeat. You’ll find that you can do several negative-only reps in a row. That’s because you’re about

I’ve tried everything to improve my sleep (no tech before bed, a dark, cold room, exercising more), and nothing has helped.

What do I do?

B u y a g o o d a i r p u r i f i e r.

Chronic exposure to air pollution increases the likelihood of “sleep inefficiency” — waking up, tossing and turning, trouble falling asleep — up to 60 percent, according to new research from the University of Washington.

We’ve long known that polluted air can harm the heart and lungs, but this is the first study to show a negative connection to sleep. Why? Pollution may irritate the airways, cause congestion, and even affect the central nervous system and areas of the brain that control breathing patterns during sleep, the study authors say. And this isn’t just a big-city problem. Air pollution can affect those who live close to a freeway, construction site, or factory. Invest in a whisper-quiet purifier — Honeywell makes a good one — and see if your sleep doesn’t quickly improve.

FROM LEFT: THOMAS BARWICK/GETTY IMAGES; SKIP O’DONNELL/GETTY IMAGES

MY KNEES ARE SHOT FROM YEARS OF RUNNING AND PLAYING BASKETBALL. I’VE HEARD TAKING CERTAIN SUPPLEMENTS CAN HELP. ANY TRUTH TO IT?

I’ve been out of the gym for a while and can no longer do pushups or pullups.

Is there any easy way to get my strength back?

25 percent stronger in the negative phase of an exercise than the positive. Which also means you can handle the kind of volume of negative reps — I’d suggest three sets of 10 to 12 — that will strengthen your muscles fast for the full range of motion. And be sure to lower as slowly as you can during negatives. The more time you log under tension, the stronger you’ll get.

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SUPERHERO VISION See the side-view mirrors? There are none. Instead, a more aerodynamic (and lighter) camera-and-display system shows the cars you’ve just dusted.

THE NEED FOR SPEED

WINGS OF GLORY

LYING LOW Two giant Venturi tunnels run end to end, generating enough downforce to keep the car land-bound at speeds rivaling those of an aircraft taking off.

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PROP STYLING BY JARED LAWTON FOR APOSTROPHE REPS

photographs by NIGEL COX

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ANALOG GOES HIGH-TECH 1

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RESSENCE TYPE-1 SQUARED

ORIS CHRONORIS DATE

$20,600

$1,750

The 107 parts in the self-winding Type-1 run a main dial and each subdial (days, hours, and seconds) to accurately tell time.

With stainless-steel construction and a blue dial, it’s a modern take on an analog form. ressencewatches.com

Unlike its predecessor from the decade of disco, this updated ChronOris doesn’t have standard chronograph pushers.

Instead, turning the second crown rotates an internal timing bezel to track elapsed time. oris.com

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OMEGA 1957 TRILOGY LIMITED EDITION SEAMASTER 300

PORSCHE MONOBLOC ACTUATOR 24HCHRONOTIMER

$7,000

$7,450

The first Seamaster, in 1948, was inspired by waterproof watches made for the British military. This update returns to the 1957 version’s 39mm diameter with a new aluminum bezel. omegawatches.com

The Actuator builds on its predecessor, which hid its chronograph pushers under sleek buttons. The Actuator substitutes a single rocker that seesaws over the watch’s crystal when pressed. porsche-design.us

HOW’D THEY DO IT?

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A W AT E RSAVING SHOWER

SHAPESCALE $299 That mechanical scale at the gym can tell you only so much. The sci-fi ShapeScale uses an arm-mounted camera that spins around you and generates a 3-D model of your body, pinpointing the exact spots of weight gains and losses. The localized data can help design workouts that target those problem areas. shapescale.com

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NAKED AMBITION

THE SPEAKER AS WALL ART From $4,430 The hexagonal Bang & Olufsen BeoSound Shape speakers have a modular design that lets you choose individual functions and the look of the overall cluster. Some are speakers, some amplifiers, and some dampen sound to stop it from bouncing around the room. bang-olufsen.com

AN ULTRAMODERN LOUNGER $3,700

SET DESIGN BY JARED LAWTON FOR APOSTROPHE REPS

Designer Ben Erickson says his EAE Lounge Chair was inspired by a plumber’s 45-degree elbow joint, which he placed on the rear of the arms. “From there, I experimented with proportions to get this low, modern stance,” he says.

Perfect for sipping a cold brew in high style. erickson aesthetics.com

1 CANARY FLEX HOMEMONITORING CAMERA $179 Home monitoring has never been easier. Leave your house and the Flex automatically switches to Away mode. If someone is skulking around while you’re out of town, you’ll get an alert. canary.is

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2 SAMSUNG GEAR 360 $299 How close is 360-degree video to the mainstream? Well, consider this handheld, which uses a VR headset to send lifelike 4K streams to Facebook in real time. It’s versatile, too. The portable camera is dust- and splashproof, and an app lets you edit footage on the go. samsung.com

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PARALENZ DIVE CAMERA

FUJIFILM X-PRO2

$599

$1,700

There’s a post-trip bummer common to most action-camera undersea footage: No matter how stunning the coralscape, the colors won’t look as gorgeous onscreen as they did through your dive mask. To fix that problem, the Paralenz uses depth sensors to make automatic color corrections to its 4K footage on the fly, adding more-vibrant hues without a filter. paralenz.com

The 1960s-inspired X-Pro2 shoots magazine-quality 24-megapixel stills and also happens to be the first mirrorless camera (its lenses are interchangeable, but it’s less bulky than a DSLR) with two memory card slots. That feature is a nod to rapid-firing pro shooters, but the XPro2’s real audience is anyone who appreciates an old-school metal body. fujifilm.com

MOVE OVER, CARBON FIBER. BAMBOO IS KING $219 each Before aluminum, bamboo was actually a go-to material used to make sporting equipment. A Colorado company is going back to basics, starting with ski poles and now its first SUP paddle.

Made to order from Calcutta bamboo, the Grass Sticks SUP Paddle is stronger than concrete under compression, won’t kink or snap like aluminum, is lightweight and warm in the hand, and sustainable.

We also like the way the bamboo subtly flexes as you paddle. grasssticks.com

cotopaxi.com/gearforgood When the nosebleeds are worth it.

Photos by Chris Brinlee Jr.

A P R I V AT E JET FOR THE REST OF US OK, it’s not exactly for the masses, but the first-ever single-engine Cirrus Vision SF50 is designed to be flown by its owner, and it’s also the least-expensive personal jet money can buy. (Of course, it’s still $2 mil.) Almost as interesting, it has a carbon-fiber fuselage and is outfitted with an enormous parachute in case of emergency. This luxury microjet seats five adults and two kids, has a top speed of 345 miles per hour, and a range of 1,150 miles. But if you lay off the throttle a bit, you can stretch that out to easily make it from Boston to the Bahamas. $2 million; cirrusaircraft.com

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KITCHENAID ARTISAN BLACK TIE STAND MIXER $999 At last count, KitchenAid’s iconic Ohio-made stand mixer came in 85 colors, from gloss cinnamon to tangerine. Add to that this limited edition Bond-esque black on black. Everything from the body, clad in finely textured, matte die-cast stainless steel, to the five-quart bowl and the dough hook is as black as night. The wedding-gift staple just got a lot cooler. kitchenaid.com

THE STYLISH WINTER WARRIOR $700 The Cole Haan x Mountain Hardwear GrandExplore Parka is a 650-fill down collaboration “designed to meet the rigors of city living and working,” says Steve Adams, Mountain Hardwear’s senior manager of outerwear. That means storm-shedding insulation and seam sealing, mixed with thoughtful details like a suite of seven pockets to organize essentials and a badass faux-fur hood ready for serious expeditions. colehaan.com

MICROSOFT SURFACE LAPTOP From $999 The most striking new laptop of the year isn’t from Apple: The sleek Surface is just 0.57 inches thick, weighs less than three pounds, and has an aluminum body and microfiber keyboard. The option to sketch or jot notes on the screen with the ultra-accurate Surface Pen (sold separately) makes it the new must-have for professional creatives. microsoft.com

SAMSUNG THE FRAME From $2,000 Spot the TV! The most ambitious example of the ever-thinning television is Samsung’s 4K UHD TV, which fits into a 1.7-inch-deep picture frame.

When displaying still images (in Art Mode), it could genuinely pass for a masterpiece. The only giveaway? A single, unobtrusive optical cable that connects to a cable box or media streamer. samsung.com

HOW’D THEY DO IT?

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Digital photos will never be as special as those you can stick to your fridge. That’s where Prynt Pocket comes in. In a nod to the on-the-spot printing of the old Polaroids, this accessory attaches to an iPhone and converts it into an instant printer.

You can use the Pocket’s zoom wheel and shutter button to capture moments, review them on your iPhone screen, apply filters, and then press a button to get a two-by-three-inch print. The Pocket can even tag the photos with six-second video clips, so anybody with the app can watch the static printed image come to life on his phone. $150; prynt.co

JOHN FULTON/GALLERY STOCK

THE RETURN O F I N S TA N T G R AT I F I C AT I O N

PA C K ’ N ’ P L AY Size matters — and for some of our favorite activities, big and bulky gear can actually be a barrier to entry. That’s why we’re so excited about these toys that use ingenious folding designs to become much more portable. It means getting on the road, in the water, and up in the sky a lot faster.

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ORU BAY ST KAYAK

DJI MAVIC PRO

WHIPPET BICYCLE

$1,599

$999

$3,955

Oru’s original origamistyle folding kayak (cool enough to be in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) was redesigned to make it even easier to assemble, more comfortable, and smoother in the water. You can go from bag to boat in minutes. orukayak.com

When quadcopter drones appeared, it was hard to imagine putting those bulky flyers in your backpack and heading out on the trail. The Mavic, however, collapses into a tidy three-by-eightinch package — and soars with a stabilized 4K camera. dji.com

This is the sleekest folding bike we’ve ever seen. British designers focused on making the most compact form possible (when collapsed, it folds to less than 30 percent of its original size) while creating something that’s fun to ride. whippetbicycle.com

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TA K E Y O U R S U N D AY B A C K Even the most lawn-obsessed suburbanite can find better things to do with his time on the weekends — and that’s exactly why we all need a Honda Miimo robot mower. Once the programmable 27-pound bot is dispatched from its docking bay, it traverses your lawn following a guide wire, and a spinning disk fitted with three razor-sharp blades cleanly severs grass tips. After an hour, or about three-quarters of an acre, Miimo returns to the dock to recharge its lithium-ion battery, the same engineering found in hybrid cars. Quiet operation means you can cut day or night. $2,799; miimo.honda.com

PRINCE BRYAN BROS LIMITED EDITION 95 $225 Tennis has never gotten over its love affair with wood. This very modern graphite racquet — a collab with the 16 Grand Slam winning twins — pays homage with an old-school calfskin grip, leather case, smaller head size (95 square inches), and a strung weight of 11.99 ounces that has more in common with the older style. If you squint, you can almost see grain. princetennis.com

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THE SEXIEST BIKE TOOL EVER From $26 The nickel-plated stainless steel Ringtool is a 2.5-inch cog of hexes, drivers, and Torx tips sized for bikes — though it can also help you assemble your new Ikea purchase. Invented by a Brooklynbased bike-commuting industrial designer who didn’t want to carry a full tool kit, it’s a first line of defense against cycling fails that fits on a key chain. And like any good tool, it’s ready to crack your cold one once the problem is solved. reductivist.com

HOW’D THEY DO IT?

C R E S C E N T M O O N E VA S N O W S H O E

What do you get when you cross a running shoe with a snowshoe? A surprisingly revolutionary piece of outdoor gear that may make long walks in deep snow a lot more fun.

he EVA All-Foam represents just the third leap in snowshoe evolution since the devices were first used by humans more than 5,000 years ago. Wooden frames begot aluminum, followed by injection-molded plastics. In this new iteration, three layers of EVA foam (the stuff in sneaker soles) provide both flotation and structural strength. The softer top layer is for flexibility and foot support, while the stiff bottom layer is contoured for traction. The rockered shape helps the shoe track cleanly using a natural walking stride, without the need for a heavy, hinged binding. It’s perfect for everything from casual recreation to day-trekking in the mountains — and feels just like your favorite runners. $160; crescentmoonsnowshoes.com

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THE DISAPPEARING SUV The 2018 Range Rover Velar continues the British brand’s march toward minimalism, with reductive lines and clean surfaces that work to belie the bulk of this SUV. Take, for example, the flush door handles, which emerge from the Velar’s body when you hit a button on the key fob or on the handle itself. The sleek handles are more than a style flourish: They reduce the vehicle’s drag coefficient to .32, the automaker’s most impressive figure yet. The minimalist bent continues with a floating roof, steely slim LED headlights, and controls that are hidden until lit. From $49,900; landroverusa.com

TIVOLI AUDIO MODEL ONE DIGITAL $300 It’s hard to believe it’s been 17 years since Tivoli Audio dropped the Model One. With its small size, great sound, and Danish-mod aesthetic, it actually made radios cool. Well, the new Model One Digital has done it again: The same great sound and minimalist look now come with WiFi — so you can stream music directly from the cloud — as well as Bluetooth and good old-fashioned FM. tivoliaudio.com

GIRO EMPIRE KNIT VR70 $250 Those Nike guys know what’s up: Giro has followed their lead to create the first knit-top bike shoe for dirt and gravel. The supple woven polyester is reinforced with a flexible TPU skeleton to give it some structure before it’s welded to a Vibram carbon sole. The shoe is so breathable that Giro claims it reduces rider fatigue, and the chafe-free, high-ankle design keeps trail debris out. giro.com

BRIDGESTONE AIR-FREE TIRE The world’s largest manufacturer of tires wants to reinvent the wheel — and it’s making headway. After introducing the Air-Free idea for cars a few years back, Bridgestone recently announced that it’s ready to move beyond the concept phase, and the company is starting with a bicycle tire that will be ready for market in 2019.

Instead of air, the tire will use shockabsorbing ribbons of recyclable thermoplastic resin. That means that you’ll be able to ride for years without ever suffering a flat or riding low on air. bridgestone.com

SKI BOOTS MADE FOR WALKING

WOOLSEY SHUFFLEBOARD TABLE $14,000 Furniture maker Sean Woolsey turned a bar game into a luxe centerpiece with a handmade white-oak table coated twice with epoxy resin and set on a steel frame with black walnut trim. While it won’t improve your play, it could help you build the world’s most expensive game room. seanwoolsey.com

To create a touring boot that strides up as well as it rips down, Scott altered a backcountry constant: the location of the walk-mode toggle. Usually the lever sits on the heel of the boot, locking it stiff for descending and softening it up for easier climbing. Shifting it to the instep of the S1 Carbon Ski Boot simultaneously increases forward range of motion for more natural striding, makes the lever easier to reach, and even improves downhill performance. $950; scott-sports.com

YOUR FLATSCREEN’S NEW BEST FRIEND $700 The picture may be brilliant, but the audio coming out of HDTVs leaves a lot to be desired. A soundbar is one solution, but its bulk cancels out the appeal of a sleek flatscreen. The best solution yet: the slim Sonos Playbase. It sits inconspicuously under the TV, pumps larger-than-life audio, and communicates with the rest of your Sonos speakers. sonos.com

CONTRIBUTORS: Berne Broudy, Clint Carter, Greg Emmanuel, Adam Erace, Michael Frank, Stephen Krcmar, John Lonsdale, James Martin, Dan Nelson, Peter Reese, Jen See, Erik Sofge, Jeremy Spencer, Ryan Stuart, Stephen Treffinger, Sal Vaglica, Jesse Will, Chris Wright

The Complete Issue.

Every Word. Every Photo.

Now Available on Mobile

B AT T E R IE S INCLUDED 1 While Elon Musk and other carmakers are perfecting highpowered, long-lasting battery cells so we can drive fast and far on a single charge, that same tech has trickled down to other gear, big and small. In the past year, we’ve seen a number of electric-powered devices that have outgunned their human- or gas-powered counterparts.

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1 ONEWHEEL+ $1,499 “The feeling of riding it is just so magical,” says Kyle Doerksen, founder and CEO of Future Motion and the inventor of Onewheel+, a rechargeable skateboard-like device, with a tire in the center, that tops out at 19 mph — and flies over sand, snow, rough pavement, grass, and dirt. Unlike most electric scooters and personal-transportation rigs, it has a steep learning curve, which makes each ride that much more fun. Just wear a helmet. onewheel.com

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3

FREE FORM FACTORY GRATIS X1

SPECIALIZED VADO 5.0

$17,990

$4,600

The first zeroemissions personal watercraft has an innovative hull made of Tupperware-like plastic. Free Form’s Jordan Darling developed it after breaking conventional fiberglass hulls doing tricks. Paired with an electric motor, the X1 is a quiet and gas-free way to play. ridefreeform.com

Many e-bikes have hub motors that feel like a manufacturer’s afterthought. Specialized built the Vado from the ground up with a 604watt “engine” in the bottom bracket, so the extra propulsion feels incredibly natural. The Vado boosts up to 28 mph and has a range of 38 miles. specialized.com

K E L L Y & J A C K ’S

Slater and Johnson paddle out to the lineup, a quarter-mile offshore.

competing on pro surfing’s world tour, 11-time world c h a mp i o n K e l l y S l a t e r makes sure to keep his eye on a handful of far-f lung, secret spots — places where the wind and swell almost never come together, but when they do, erupt into r id icu lous, d rop - ever ything-and-go conditions.

One of those spots is a remote reef break in the Marshall Islands, some 2,600 miles from Slater’s home in Hawaii, about halfway to the Philippines. There, when conditions are just right, open-ocean freight trains collide with a shelf about a quarter-mile offshore, creating perfect right-handed tubes that peel for hundreds of yards. And because the locals don’t surf, it’s just one empty wave after another after another. “Wind’s really critical, because it’s generally not right for that place and the swell can be blocked by a number of different islands,” Slater says. “It’s a very small window where it works.”

One evening in early March, the window opened.

Weather models showed a huge north swell steamrollering toward his spot — and it looked like a rare offshore wind would be there to meet it.

One of Slater’s first moves: to text Jack Johnson to see if he wanted to join. Johnson, the pro surfer turned musician, has grown accustomed to these “Wanna go?” messages from Slater, one of his closest friends. In fact, he pretty much counts on receiving two or three invites a year to put his life on hold and jet to some exotic lineup “Every once in a while there’s a strike mission I can d says Johnson. But thanks to the demands of record touring, and raising three kids, he is usually for decline. It always pains Johnson to watch footage fr a trip he had to skip, knowing it could have been him in, say, a peeling barrel halfway across the world. “You know you’re going to miss good surf as soon as you say you can’t make it,” he says.

But in March, Slater was persistent: “Of all the times I’ve told you,” he wrote, “this one you should really make happen.” The timing was not great. They’d have to leave the following day. Johnson was working on a new album and was scheduled to perform in a few days at an event for the Kokua Hawaii Foundation, an environmentaleducation nonprofit he and his wife founded. It was a gig he absolutely could not miss. “I’m a long shot, but lemme check,” Johnson replied. He pondered Slater’s last sentence. When he learned that the event wasn’t for four days, he told Slater that he was in. “It was cool because I didn’t have time to overthink it or find reasons why I couldn’t do it,” Johnson says.

Slater, 45, and Johnson, 42, have been close since they were teenagers, when Slater began stashing his boards under the Johnson family home on the North Shore of Oahu. A few years later, when Johnson left for college in California, Slater moved into Johnson’s room. In their twenties, they traveled to Europe and Asia, journeys documented in a pair of surf films, Thicker Than Water and The September Sessions. For the latter, in 1999, Slater and Johnson — who shot the entire movie on 16mm film — spent two weeks riding perfect waves in the Mentawai Islands, off the coast of Indonesia. “Those early trips felt like such a dream come true,” Johnson recalls.

Devon O’Neil is a freelance writer based in Breckenridge, Colorado.

Clockwise from right: Johnson, eager to arrive; Slater’s secret Marshall Islands spot; strumming a uke while waiting for the wind to change; Slater mourns a broken board.

With the Marshall Islands s packed quickly, stuff ing surf screen, and a f irst-aid kit int selecting a quiver of boards (t Slater). The next morning, th a South Pacific island they wo From there, they chartered a pl island, and boarded a boat, wh est fishing and diving resort o friends. The resort was occup boarders, so Slater and Johnso erboat anchored just offshore. A Johnson’s cigar-box ukulele back and forth and caught up on life, reveling in how removed they felt. “Not many places in the world are that far from a main landmass,” Slater says. “You feel so small out in the big ocean.”

The next morning, Slater and Johnson paddled out to find the gaping barrels they’d hoped for, some of them three times overhead. Unfortunately, a stiff onshore wind had rendered the waves almost impossible to ride, in some cases dangerously so. Slater’s heart sank. Had his prediction been wrong?

Then a squall blew through and the choppy water turned to glass. When the wind kicked up again, it was blowing offshore. The perfect conditions had materialized after all. Astonished, the two friends started catching as many waves as they could. “We didn’t know if it would last for a few minutes, but it lasted for seven hours,” says Johnson, who compared the waves with his beloved Backdoor Pipeline, only longer. To Slater, it evoked Australia’s Kirra Beach, except with clearer water — “probably the best visibility you’ll ever see,” he says.

The duo traded turquoise tunnels for much of the day, until Johnson pulled into a tube as big as a train and never made it out. His hip slammed the reef so hard that his first thought, as he f lailed beneath the froth, was, “Am I paralyzed?” When Johnson surfaced, his leg was throbbing. He managed to paddle to a dinghy where photographer Todd Glaser was shooting. Then he collapsed on the boat, sure his day was over. He watched Slater pull into cavern after cavern, bummed that he couldn’t join him.

Slater was nearly as disappointed. Surfing with his friend, he says, helps him let go of the pressures of life on the pro circuit and instead tap into the enthusiasm he felt all those decades ago when he and Johnson would spend hours in the water for the pure joy of it. “He gives me a clean perspective about enjoying time in the water and riding waves for just what it is,” Slater says.

Soon, Johnson was hoarse from hooting for his friend and more than a little bit concerned about the purple mess his thigh would become. But he felt the moment tugging at him. The following day, he would f ly home, just in time for the gig at his nonprofit, returning to a life of responsibility and sched with a six-month tour looming. After an hour he couldn’t help himself. “I’d peek over t h Kelly get completely barreled a leg would hurt a little less,” h catch another one, and Then it still hurt, but I on it. I didn’t think I reled again — the was, like, the wa gotta do this.”

Johnson ju swapping w years, neith I could ba MJ most m

“WE DIDN’T KNOW IF IT WOULD LAST FOR A FEW MINUTES, BUT IT LASTED FOR SEVEN HOURS.”

Johnson, deep in the tube

Eric Poole’s journey begins at the Hyehwa subway station in Seoul.

ERIC POOLE

O U T S I D E S E O U L , on a train platform in Uijeongbu, his mother shields him, tucking his tiny body against hers, as people spit and throw garbage. She tells him not to listen, but how can he not? They scream and shake their f ists — some from the train’s open windows, others from the crowd that closes around him like a fist. He is only three years old, but that doesn’t stop them. They don’t like the color of his skin. They don’t like the curl of his hair. They don’t like that he exists, his mother Korean, his father black.

This is his first memory.

His name is Eric Charles Poole now. He isn’t sure how old he is. He isn’t sure about a lot of things.

That’s why we’re flying to South Korea — to unearth what we can of his lost history.

Eric is an athlete, and he looks it. Not tall, just shy of 6 feet, but broad-shouldered, thick-limbed. He attended the University of North Dakota on a football scholarship, and these days he jogs and plays pickup basketball. Maybe it’s because of this he has trouble sitting still. Always stretching, motioning with his hands, pretending an

H I S NAM E WAS C HAR S U TH E N .

BY BENJAMIN PERCY PHOTOGRAPHS BY JUN MICHAEL PARK 089

empty water bottle is a football and spiraling it into a trash can.

Somewhere near the North Pole, he paces the aisle and leans over me to peer out the window. Far below, ice floes reach off into the distance, seamed by black water. They’re breaking up, colliding — like his memories. “The closer we get, the more stuff comes back to me,” he says. “But it’s hard to know how it all fits together.” of cars and planes and buses, we find ourselves walking through the neon-lit streets of Seoul. It feels as far as we can get from Northfield, Minnesota, a nice, ordinary town where Eric lives a nice, ordinary life. He’s a pilot. He has a wife, three kids, and a yellow Lab. He loves old-school hiphop, SportsCenter, and Michael Lewis books. But he has another life — a secret, extraordinary life — that he’s been weighed down by and is carrying around with him.

And after five years of friendship, he asked if I could help him rediscover it.

He shares memories with me as we move through the city, stepping aside as scooters zoom past, navigating alleyways busy with vendors selling mung bean pancakes, pork intestines, chicken feet, octopus on ice. He remembers a river. On one side of the river was a U.S. Army base. On the other side was his mother’s home, one of many thatchedroof, dirt-f loor shacks clustered along the banks. Eric is similarly divided. His father was stationed at the base. His mother was a prostitute who entertained soldiers at a club.

He remembers his father being tall, his long arms hoisting Eric into the air and onto a roof. It was supposed to be a game, but Eric cried, a little boy begging to be let down, leaning toward the edge, hoping someone would be there to catch him when he fell.

He remembers the funeral. Everyone in the procession wore white. They marched through the streets, carrying the casket, like a slow-moving river. The women wailed. The men chanted, their voices low and grinding.

Eric trailed behind uncertainly. “I don’t think I really understood what had happened,” he says. “It was too much to understand.”

He was the one who found his mother’s body. When she worked nights, he sometimes slept at a neighbor’s, and he came back one morning to the smell of charcoal. A small heating and cooking stove had filled their one-room home with smoke. Coughing, his eyes burning, he found his mother curled on a mat. When he nudged her shoulder, she did not respond. He thinks he was four years old.

She was in her late teens or early twenties.

His memory here becomes a conflicting maze of images. He knows he spent some

AFTER MORE THAN 20 HOURS

Benjamin Percy is the author of seven books — most recently The Dark Net, a novel.

090

OCTOBER 2017

Climbing to the Army base, now shuttered, where his father served

nights alone. He knows an old woman cared for him, but her silver-haired husband was a heavy drinker and would punch her and throw her against walls and chase Eric off. As best as he can recall, he lived in the village another two years — surviving off handouts, eating sesame leaves that grew wild, persimmons plucked from a tree outside a Buddhist temple — before being swept up in a police raid on homeless children. is located in Ilsan, an upscale suburb northwest of Seoul. In the morning, when we get off the train, the first thing we see is a giant netted driving range adjacent to a mall packed with Europeanthemed coffee shops that runs up against a towering range of luxury apartments.

Eric recalls a small village, dirt roads, rice paddies walled by thick forests. Now there is only concrete, glass, and steel. “I would never guess this was the same place,” he says.

His wife, Mary, is with us. They knit their fingers together as they walk. In so many ways, Eric’s childhood seems mythic, a huge, sprawling story. His close friends have heard some of it, but Mary has heard it all. They’ve been married 17 years but together for 29.

“This is different than someone telling you a story,” she says as we approach the orphanage gate. “This is starting to get real.”

We wander across what looks like a college campus, and aside from Eric’s occasionally muttering, “I can’t believe what’s happened to this place,” no one speaks. The noise of traffic gives way to birdsong. Roses perfume the air. We wander a path edged by a stone wall, and Eric runs his fingers along it as if afraid to lose his way.

He remembers his f irst night at the orphanage and how the children in the beds around him screamed and shook with seizures. He remembers digging through the medical clinic garbage and using the needles he found there as arrows to fire from homemade bows. He remembers the older boys

TH E HOLT ORPHANAG E

making the younger ones fight for their entertainment. He remembers a Korean folk song, “Arirang,” that’s about sadly sending someone away, and he hums a few bars of it now.

These days, the orphanage specializes in the disabled. A man with a towel shoved in his mouth stumbles by, and a woman with Down syndrome shakes our hands and asks us to take her picture and says, “Hello, hello.”

Bertha and Harry Holt were Oregon farmers who adopted eight Korean War orphans and were so moved by the experience that they founded the Holt Orphanage in 1956. Their gravestones spike a hill on the campus, and their daughter, Molly, runs the facility. We meet with her now, in a modest brick home located on the grounds, and she cocks her head and says, “How old are you anyway?”

“Supposedly in my late forties. But beats me,” Eric says. “Cut me open, count the rings!”

“Oh, we had a lot of boys like you. Your birthday was the day you showed up here.

Then we gave you a good, hard look and guessed your age.”

Molly sinks into a recliner and says, “Sit, sit. Please.” She has a stout build and a silver helmet of hair and looks like someone who would bring a macaroni casserole to a church potluck. “It makes me so happy when we find nice families for the children,” she says. “You ended up with a nice family?”

Eric flinches but manages a smile. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, not wanting to disappoint her.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” she says. “We had so many black boys. And it wasn’t easy to place them.”

Eric nods, but his attention is drifting.

Molly’s vision of the orphanage doesn’t align with his. He was not happy here. He does not feel grateful.

But it did feel like a refuge from the rest of Korea. “We were the island of misfit toys,” he says. There was a fence that surrounded the grounds, and sometimes he and the others made a game of crawling over it and shouting, “I’m free!” before rushing back. Because they feared what was out there.

But one day he and his friends kept going. They climbed the fence and followed a road that cut through a rice paddy to visit a store and buy Popsicles and ice cream. The local school had just let out, and the students arrived at the same time as the orphans. “There were five of us,” Eric says. “All mixed-race. And these schoolkids walk in and spot us and immediately start in with the teasing and the shoving. And things got out of control from there.” They threw punches, rocks, and bottles. One kid was dragged away and stomped by several others. “This was a complete melee,” he says. “A bloody mess.”

Our conversation with Molly is interrupted by a man named Ill-Nam. “Charley!” he yells. “Charley!” He too was a Holt orphan. He was never adopted, and so he never left, working for Holt as a maintenance man. He instantly remembers Eric, calling him by his childhood name, and drags him into a back-slapping hug. Tears dampen his cheeks as he repeats the name, “Charley, Charley,” like an incantation.

Ill-Nam is thick-waisted, square-shaped, with a face that putties over to one side with a deformity. His ears are twisted and undeveloped, so he yells when he says, “Charley!”

He barks out sentences that Molly translates for us. Apparently he still has a photo of the two of them, their arms around each other, framed in his apartment. He digs out his phone and asks me to take a photograph of them. He can’t take his eyes off Eric, as if in disbelief that he actually exists.

Eric feels similarly. There is something about Ill-Nam that both depresses and reassures him, the same as when we search the Holt photo archive and discover snapshots. A black-and-white version of Eric climbs a play structure. A sepia-toned version of Eric crouches before the grave of Harry Holt. Eric lingers on a photo of himself seated on a bed while another boy strums a guitar. “That kid might as well be someone else,” he says. “I don’t know him.”

He later tells me that he never felt Korean.

“I was so ostracized there,” he says. “Everyone told me, from the very beginning, I was an American. Kids sired by Americans were the responsibility of Americans. So getting to the U.S. was the goal.”

This mind-set was only encouraged by Sgt. James Singley — a U.S. serviceman who was stationed nearby and visited the orphanage often, a man Eric refers to as “the only element of hope in my childhood.”

Molly remembers him. “Singley, Singley!” the boys would chant when he showed up at the orphanage. “But he only wanted to be with the black boys. Some people criticized

him for that, but it was the black boys who needed him most.”

He had a husky body and a thick caterpillar of a mustache. He would greet Eric with a quick kiss and take him and the other boys for drives in his Jeep. He taught them English and gave them candy, toys, money, music, but more than that, a sense of family.

“Unconditional love,” Eric says. “He gave us so much. He was like a superhero to me, to all these destitute kids. I don’t know what his motivation was, but I always wondered

C B K

if he might have been my father. I thought of him as a father. I guess I . . . wanted him to be my father.”

BETWEEN 1966 AND 1969, a series of clashes erupted between North Korea and South Korea and the U.S. — what came to be known as the Korean DMZ Conf lict. This is, as best as we can tell, when Eric was born, during the highest surge of U.S. armed forces outside of the Korean War. Bases are staggered throughout the country, many of them clustered near the DMZ, where the majority of African-American troops were stationed. Brothels mush-

roomed around them. On our trip, when Eric tells people his mother was a prostitute, they use the word gijichon. We don’t understand what they mean at first. It will take many days of questions before we do, before we understand fully how Eric is the product and survivor of war.

For now we have only a single piece of paper to guide us. It’s as close as we’ll get to a map, this stained, wrinkled orphanage admission form. From it we know that Eric lived in Uijeongbu, north of Seoul, and this is where we go, hoping to find his father’s Army base, his mother’s brothel, and the river that cut between them.

Uijeongbu is grittier than Ilsan, with sun-faded signs and smog-tortured windows. We go to the city hall first, where the clerks make every effort to help us, despite the privacy laws. Eric’s birth was never registered, so he officially does not exist. His mother’s records are therefore unavailable to him.

But a clerk waves us over to his desk. He spends the next 15 minutes negotiating satellite images based on Eric’s memories. He jogs the screen this way, zooms in, zooms out, jogs the screen another way, finally homing in on a location less than a mile away.

We follow our phones, mapping our way through the streets. And then we cross a bridge that spans a grassy channel of water.

A temple, raftered with dragons, squats nearby. An Army base topped with barbed wire rises in the near distance. And an alleyway of shacks huddles along the water. “I think we’re here,” Eric says.

Texas Alley. That’s what people call the shantytown where Eric grew up. “Texas,” we’re told, is slang for brothel. Some of the buildings are neatly kept, and others are roofed with tarps or windowed by chicken wire. There are kimchi pots, barking dogs, a sewer smell. People step out of doorways to stare at us.

From near right: Eric at the orphanage; Sgt. James Singley, the boy’s mentor

OCTOBER 2017

091

Eric goes to the river. We cross the stones linking its banks, and cross back again, and this is the way his memory works. “There used to be a dirt path here, and I remember men pushing these two-wheeled handcarts along it. And there was a persimmon tree over there.” He heads one way, then another, leaving uncertain tracks in the sand.

We knock on doors. We approach older men and women, show them the form, and ask if they recognize the names listed on it.

Eventually we end up sitting on the f loor of the home owned by the woman who acts as the unofficial mayor of Texas Alley. She offers us aloe juice, listens intently to our translator, and pulls out her cellphone.

Old women parade into the house. Their eyes are bagged and their legs bowed. They wear f loral shirts and polyester pants, crouching like toads and speaking rapid-fire.

One remembers Eric’s mother calling his name, “Char su, Char su,” in the evenings.

Another begins chattering into her phone.

“Wait,” Eric says. “Who’s she talking to?”

“A man who grew up here at the same time as you,” our translator says. “He lives in Charlotte now.”

“North Carolina?” Eric says and checks his watch. “But it’s four in the morning there.” Soon the phone is in his hand, and his face creases with confusion. “Hello?”

Everyone goes silent and listens to the stuttery, awkward conversation. The man on the phone is disoriented because it’s the middle of the night — and Eric can’t believe he’s speaking to someone who firmly links him here. “This is so surreal,” he says more than once.

They don’t remember each other, but they remember the same things, the same people.

After his mother died, Eric bounced around, living brief ly with another prostitute. She is the one who dumped him at the orphanage, so her name is on the form. Eric mentions her name, and the guy says he knew her. As Eric asks more questions, his voice goes from surprised to solemn. Because the

memories are locking together painfully.

Eric needs some air, some space to move, so we thank the women and return to the river, where he trudges up the bank, toward the Army base — and with every step, he slows, as if something is pushing him back.

The barbed wire gleams. Eric walks the perimeter, then climbs a rise so that he can see inside. But no one is there. The grounds are empty except for rusted equipment. In the shadow thrown by the wall, a garden grows.

HE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD when he moved to New Hope. A family from Minnesota had picked him out of an adoption catalog. “New Hope,” Eric says. “Can you believe that?”

And the name aligned perfectly with Holt’s mission. “They were all about hope,” Eric says. “That’s what’s they preached. We’re going to get you out of here — and get you over there — and over there, everything’s going to be better.”

Which made his arrival in America so painful. “This boy’s not Korean,” his adopted grandfather said when they brought Eric home from the airport. “I think he’s a pickaninny.”

Eric, for his part, expected everyone in America to be black. Like Singley. Like the other soldiers he encountered overseas. But

Minnesota was overwhelmingly white, and he was one of only three black kids at his elementary school. “I had been told that America was the land of milk and money,” he says. “But I went from being marginalized in one world to marginalized in another.

And . . . I suppose I had expected my family to love me like Singley did.”

They didn’t. “They never got to know me, never asked me what I had been through or what I needed,” he says. “All they preached was gratitude. They browbeat me with this constant guilt. ‘You should feel so fortunate we adopted you’ — that was their stance.

And when I didn’t do what they wanted, when I didn’t conform to their expectations, I was punished and shamed.”

For a few years, Singley stayed in touch, sending Eric postcards, photos, mix tapes made from his time as an Army disc jockey.

“So here I was, living in lily-white Minnesota, listening to this rich black music Singley sent me. I’m talking about Parliament-Funkadelic stuff. It was a huge, definitive part of my life. And so was Singley. Even when he wasn’t with me.”

He’s dead now, we later learn. He died in 2002. “I don’t know why I waited so long,” Eric says. “I never got the chance to thank him for the difference he made in my life.”

At school, he was teased about his race and his broken English. He got into fights, one time beating a boy down, and “even though he was crying for me to stop, I couldn’t.” That, he says, was the beginning of the end of his relationship with his adoptive parents. Their approach, then and in the years to follow, was punitive. “I was accused of everything. Of acting too black. Of using drugs. But especially of being ungrateful.”

The family had two other adopted children, Korean sisters, and they also fostered an Ethiopian boy named Ben. “He was my big brother, the person I connected to most,” Eric says. “He taught me about Pan-Africanism and introduced me to Afrocentric music and philosophy. I remember him defiantly arguing on our behalf, yelling to our parents, ‘We are not your slaves!’”

The family thought Ben was a damaging inf luence on Eric, so they sent him away.

Soon after that, one of the sisters ran off to join a carnival. “So all around me, everyone was escaping this toxic environment, and I took a cue from that,” he says. He spent much of junior high couch-surfing in the homes of friends.

Yet it was also during this time that he gained confidence in himself, because of athletics. He references a school track meet as a turning point. He won every event. “And

Eric hugs a foster mother who put him in touch with other orphaned children that she raised.

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all of a sudden everyone was looking at me differently,” he says. “I went, just like that, from being ostracized to being idolized. I finally figured out how I fit in.”

Then, one winter in high school, soon after Christmas, his adoptive parents f latly told him he couldn’t live there anymore. He called his friend and football teammate, Chuck Poole, who drove over and picked Eric up.

“And that was it,” he says. “I never went back.”

In Chuck, he found a brother. In Big Jim and Barb, he found parents. In the Pooles he found the unconditional love he had been seeking since he’d said goodbye to Singley so many years before. “Salvation is kind of a dramatic word, but that’s what I got from them.”

But Eric still panicked, a few years later, when he was a freshman playing football in North Dakota and the coach announced Parents Day to the team. During halftime, everyone’s families would gather at the 50-yard line, and the announcers would call out their names. “And that’s when it dawned on me: Who the hell is going to come for me?”

The Pooles did, standing midfield with Eric as a stadium full of people applauded.

That’s why he calls them his mom and dad.

That’s why he eventually took the name of Poole.

Through the Pooles, he forged a family. Through football, he found a way to finance his education. Through the Navy, he launched a career in aviation. He came from nothing and built a scarred but beautiful life.

He is the definition of a self-made man.

T H E R E A L I Z AT I O N D O E S N ’ T C O M E all at once but steadily, as we talk to more and more Koreans. Eric’s mother was part of a state-sponsored program. She was a gijichon — that word we’ve been hearing over and over again, only now we know what it means. She was one of thousands of women who catered to American soldiers during the

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OCTOBER 2017

Eric’s journey ends at the site of his childhood home.

1960s and ’70s. The government created and managed the prostitution network — poor women recruited to work in bars and brothels as a “patriotic” service — and only this January, a South Korean court declared this a human rights violation.

“I am the son of a prostitute,” is how Eric thought of himself before, but now that statement feels more complicated. He believes his mother was mixed-race as well.

Not black but white, her skin lighter and her hair brownish. “It could be,” he says, when recalling his first memory — that moment on the train platform — “that she was the one getting spit on, more than me.”

He remembers walking in on her, after she entertained a client, as she crouched over a brass bucket to clean herself with river water.

And when he asks some of the old women who live in Texas Alley, the ones with long memories, the ones who might have worked with her at the brothel, “Is there a cemetery here? Would they have buried her?” they say no. There are no graves. No evidence the women were ever there. “They would have burned her,” a woman says. “And they would have put her ashes in the river.”

As Eric stands over its waters now, studying his warped and rippling ref lection, he feels something wash over him: understanding. telling your story. That’s what people say to Eric. Maybe it will help others, give them hope. “But I have my doubts,” he says. When I talk about how heroic and miraculous and inspiring his life is, he says, “Come on, man. Lay off.

You’re going to make me sound like Jesus or something.”

Don’t be the white anthropologist, is what he’s saying. This isn’t about the plight MAYBE IT WILL BE CATHARTIC,

of adoptees or about Korean history or about race relations in the United States. “I suppose people will read into it whatever they want, but it’s just the story of my life.”

Eric asked me to share it because I’m his friend. Because he wants to cement his history for his kids. And because its fragmented pieces didn’t make any sense to him.

“To be honest, everything in my life felt uncertain until I got to JetBlue.” And maybe it wasn’t just the job, and the joy he got from it, but the control he felt as a navigator, always knowing the way.

That’s what telling this story is about.

That’s why we traveled halfway across the world. That’s why he spent all these hours with me, sorting through the broken memories. “I wanted to find as much information as I could to fill in the void. And I have.” By charting the course of a life that had otherwise made him feel lost.

The longer we explore Texas Alley, the more Eric questions whether we’re in the right place. It does and doesn’t align with the vectors he remembers. The temple, the river, the base, the well. The brothel. And the hill, the one with a bunker on top of it. This especially bothers him. Because there is no hill. He keeps shaking his head as we try to figure out where his home might have been.

We knock on doors, peer through windows, hoist each other up to peek over gates. It isn’t right. His compass is off.

One old woman says his house must have been here, showing him an abandoned shack, but he says, “No. It was on the opposite side of the alley, up against the river.” And another old woman points out a cemented-over well, and he says, “No. It was between my house and the brothel.”

The sun is so bright it hurts, and Eric slumps on a shadowed stoop. “I’m done. I’m ready to leave.”

But then we f ind another old woman, and she points to the highway spanning the river. They knocked down a hill to make way for it, she says. And they knocked down half of Texas Alley with it, including the club where his mother worked.

It is then that Eric understands. After searching all afternoon, it at last makes sense. He realizes that Texas Alley has been hacked in half, dismembered by the highway, and his eyes suddenly widen and he hurries along, almost jogging. He crosses a road and dodges through traffic and enters a park.

He spends a few minutes pacing. And then approaches a tree twisting from the top of a rise. This is the spot. This. He is certain of it. His home was here. His story begins here. He palms the rough bark and takes in the river, the temple, the base, the bridge that stands where there was once a hill. “Roots,” he says in a hushed, disbelieving voice when he curls an arm around the tree. “I’ve got roots.” MJ

@SightingsMJ

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Christopher Walken The legendary actor, whose résumé spans 60 years, talks about playing the villain, growing up in Queens, and those many impressions of him.

096

OCTOBER 2017

equipped to do anything except what I’m doing. At that time, I was in musical comedy, and I worked in a chorus for many years. I always figured that I would stay there. Sometime in my mid-twenties, I got an acting job. And then, after a while, I got a job in a movie. And, for me, the progression to being an actor was very much a happy accident. I’ve always looked for that in my life, that kind of serendipity that you can repeat. Something good happens by accident and you find out what that is and see if you can replicate it in some way.

Where did you get your work ethic from?

That came from my father. He had a bakery and was the hardest-working man I’ve ever met — seven days a week, 16 hours a day. He did it because he loved it. He was passionate about it. My father set an example that I admired and I’ve stuck with.

MEN’S JOURNAL

—INTERVIEW BY SEAN WOODS

RICK WENNER FOR OBSERVER/REDUX

You’ve been an entertainer your whole life.

How did that happen?

I was born after the Second World War at the same time as the birth of television in New York City. My mother was smitten by the entertainment industry.

She came to America as an adult, as my father did, from Europe, and from the time we were kids, we were in show business. There were 90 live shows every week. Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and The Colgate Comedy Hour were very much a spinoff of vaudeville. You had jugglers, dog acts, and acrobats and comedians. So I grew up with musical people and comics, which is a pretty unusual education.

Did people ever tell you to get a real job and quit acting?

When I left high school, people talked about, you know, “What are you going to do?” I thought, well, I’m not really

Do you think people change as they grow up?

It was very interesting to me, how little I’ve changed. I don’t have the sense of getting old, although I know I am. But a lot of the people that I know, the guys I went to grade school with . . . when we’re together, there’s very much the feeling of laughing at the same jokes and horsing around. It’s not really that different from when I was 12. I have a friend who I’ve known for 60 years, and he’s exactly like he was when he was 12. Maybe not as much changes as we’d like to think.

What have you learned about women?

Women are, of course, mysterious. But one thing I’m sure of is that women like me, and they like me because they know I like them. Women can always sense that.

You’re often cast as the villain. Why are you so good at intimidating people?

Oh, it’s just movies. I play a lot of people who are up to no good and twisted. It’s probably physical as much as anything.

I’m very pale, I have an odd way of speaking — it’s the fear of “the other.” But in the movies, if they want you for any reason, it’s a fortunate thing. I’m not complaining. I’m grateful for work.

So many people do impressions of you. Do you find them flattering?

Of course. I don’t always immediately know what they’re doing. If somebody starts doing that, I think, why are they speaking that way? But certain people are really good at it. I have a friend who does me on his answering machine.

So that when I call him, I’m basically speaking to myself. Where I come from in Queens, the kids were all born in America, but their parents — almost everybody — were from somewhere in Europe. The guys who worked in the back of my father’s bakery, they spoke German all day long. Maybe I speak English almost as a second language, with those kinds of rhythms, because of where I grew up.

How should a man handle getting old?

I worked with a great actress 30 years ago.

She would have been about my age now.

We were in rehearsal, and she got a letter.

She opened it, she read it, and she closed it, and I said, “You OK?” and she said, “Well, there’ll come a time in your life when you keep hearing that people you know have died.” And it was not a concept that I could grasp. But she was absolutely right. You know Hamlet said that “readiness is all.” I recognize this more as I get older. You try to take care of yourself and stay ready for that opportunity.

You’ve been acting for six decades. How do you stay motivated?

I really love doing it. I’ve been married for a long time, nearly 50 years. But we never had children. And I’d never had hobbies.

I don’t play tennis. I can’t swim. I don’t leave the house much. I like to go to work.

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