Month: March 2019

Yet it—along with its meteorologists—is struggling through the shutdown

Private weather companies like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel would be lost without the federal government’s robust network of radars, satellites, sensors, and weather models. The good National Weather Service meteorologists keeping their eyes on the sky are working through the shutdown without pay—and we’re much safer for their efforts.

These folks are considered “excepted” federal employees, meaning that they’re forced to work a normal 40-hour-per-week schedule without pay during a partial government shutdown. That’s in large part because they’re responsible for a wide array of crucial forecasting tasks, ranging from predicting the path of blizzards to issuing tornado warnings.

The shutdown, which entered its 28th day on Friday, is starting to take a financial toll on these hard-working scientists. “I'm lucky to have had some savings built up, but the longer this shutdown lasts the more nervous I get about having to rely on credit cards to pay bills,” says one NWS meteorologist who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job. He noted that federal employees who are required to work through the shutdown can’t benefit from the financial help often offered to those going without a paycheck, such as filing for unemployment or taking on temporary part-time jobs.

While meteorologists are feeling the personal effects of the shutdown, most news coverage (when there’s been any) has focused on how the shutdown is affecting weather models and forecast accuracy. Yet concerns that the shutdown is affecting everyday forecasting may be somewhat overblown, say my sources. “We have not seen any measurable issues with our forecasting,” says a senior meteorologist working for another NWS office. “Our focus is on good science, good forecasts, but even more so, good communication. The forecast means very little if people don't understand the impact to them.”

The shutdown may not have an effect on day-to-day forecasting, but it is starting to affect efforts like hurricane predictions in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. The National Hurricane Center’s union steward Eric Blake posted a detailed Twitter thread explaining how the shutdown will have a negative effect on hurricane forecasting this summer by, for example, delaying improvements to hurricane modeling and cancelling important training sessions for local emergency managers.

The government’s widespread efforts to improve weather information gathering and advance the science of meteorology is one of its greatest success stories. Thousands of scientists and support staff work out of more than 120 individual NWS offices, serving as the backbone of this country’s weather infrastructure. Every severe weather watch and warning you hear for your location is issued by your local NWS office. The agency also operates NOAA Weather Radio, a critical piece of technology that benefits everyone from office workers to campers. It maintains weather.gov, which provides detailed local forecasts for every square mile of the U.S. There are plenty of specialized agencies under the NWS that keep us abreast of dangerous weather, too. The Storm Prediction Center issues forecasts ahead of severe thunderstorm outbreaks and dangerous wildfire days. The National Hurricane Center forecasts the track and strength of hurricanes around North America.

You might not know any of this because most people don’t get their weather forecasts directly from the NWS, which has no app. Private companies’ apps are the biggest source of weather information yet they’re basically parasiting onto the federal government's resources. The ubiquitous weather radar imagery you see on every weather app, website, and television channel? It all comes from a network of more than 100 radar dishes maintained by the federal government. NOAA operates the vast majority of these, with the remaining ones operated by the Federal Aviation Administration or the military. Some local television stations have their own low-power dishes, but they’re vulnerable to obstructions and power outages, and have limited range.

Now, private weather companies do develop and use their own weather models. Take AccuWeather, which issued a marketing statement ragging on the NWS’s forecasting abilities on Thursday. The press release, which the company later changed and apologized for, bragged about AccuWeather’s in-house weather model, which the company said would sustain them through the shutdown, no matter how lengthy. The Weather Channel has access to its own models as well, as do plenty of other weather forecasting companies.

The thing is, those private weather models don’t operate in a vacuum. Models are made using weather data collected throughout the atmosphere by weather balloons paid for and released by—you guessed it!—the federal government. These models also rely on government satellite data and a vast network of ground-based weather observing stations, many of which are also funded and operated by the government. If a company like AccuWeather or The Weather Channel wanted to match the level of service that we pay for with our tax dollars, they would have to charge way more than they already do for their forecasts. Even the sturdiest company would likely go bankrupt trying to build and maintain an analog to the vast network of satellites, radars, observation stations, and modelling provided by the feds.

Private weather companies and advocates of privatization are fully aware of the value of the federal government’s meteorological services. The only concerted effort to privatize the NWS in recent history was a failed undertaking by former Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, back in 2005. The senator introduced a bill that would have prohibited the NWS from releasing any products or forecasts to the public, forcing them to route all of their services—radar, satellite, weather models, everything—through private companies to be sold back to the American people. The bill was soundly defeated. 

So as the federal government shutdown enters its second month—and employees prepare to miss yet another paycheck—spare a kind thought for the thousands of dedicated scientists silently working to keep us safe from dangerous weather all across the country. And it doesn’t hurt to call Congress to demand that they reopen the government.

Thanks to its dominant women’s squad, the BTC has supplanted the Oregon Project

I’m not the first person to point it out, but it’s increasingly evident that Bill Belichick is pro football’s version of Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar. Both men have a reputation for being cagey, shrewd, successful, and, possibly, a little bit shady. They both have an aura of glowering seriousness, which might be why it’s weird to see them smile. 

While watching a post-game interview with Belichick after the Patriots win on Sunday, I was reminded of the one time I saw a jubilant Salazar in the wild. It was the penultimate night of the Rio Olympic Games and I had just witnessed Oregon Project runners Mo Farah and Matthew Centrowitz kick their way to gold medal glory in the 5,000 and 1,500-meters, respectively. Salazar was celebrating with his entourage. No wonder. It was 2016, and the Oregon Project was the most prestigious running club in the land. 

That status now seems in jeopardy, to put it mildly. As the club continues to be under investigation for alleged doping violations, a number of prominent athletes (including Farah and Centrowitz) have left the Oregon Project. Meanwhile, the Bowerman Track Club, which is also based out of Nike’s world HQ in Beaverton, Oregon, is suddenly overflowing with talent. The team is led by former University of Wisconsin coach Jerry Schumacher, who among other accolades, was USATF’s Coach of the Year in 2017.

“BTC is arguably THE program for The Swoosh right now,” Mario Fraioli wrote in a recent issue of his running newsletter The Morning Shakeout.  

When you are able to beat BTC athletes, Northern Arizona Elite coach Ben Rosario said in an email, “you’re beating the premier group in the country. I would agree that that’s what they've become, at least in terms of performance.” 

By and large, this “premier” status comes from the increasingly impressive performances of BTC professional women. At last weekend’s USATF Cross Country Championships, for instance, BTC took five out of the top seven spots in the women’s open division. The cross-country champs aren’t typically a high stakes event on the annual USATF calendar, but this year’s race was unusually stacked. The fact that BTC women were nonetheless able to dominate felt like an affirmation of what most running fans in this country already know: the “Bowerman Babes,” as they have branded themselves, are on fire right now.   

It wasn’t always like this. When she joined in 2009, Shalane Flanagan was the only woman on the team. In early 2015, BTC’s professional squad still only had two female members, after 10,000-meter specialist Emily Infeld joined in 2012. Word soon got out, however.

“All of the Bowerman babes have one thing in common,” BTC steeplechaser Colleen Quigley wrote in a piece for Tempo Journal. “We all chose the Bowerman Track Club. We did not get recruited.” The appeal seems to have come from a growing awareness that BTC was a place to evolve as a runner, even if it occasionally broke you. As Quigley writes, “When you can’t finish a Jerry workout, you’re still doing way better than any workout you’ve ever done before joining the group.”

By the time the 2016 Olympics rolled around, that group expanded its roster to include eight women—seven of whom qualified for the Games. Since then, a number of these women have had professional breakthroughs that have launched them into the stratosphere of world-class running. In 2018, Shelby Houlihan, who eviscerated the competition with her finishing speed at last weekend’s cross-country championships, set a new national record in the 5,000-meters and won a Diamond League 1,500. Meanwhile, steeplechaser Courtney Frerichs, who had previously been overshadowed by her rival Emma Coburn, also set a national record when she ran 9:00.85 last summer in Monaco (only six women have ever run faster). Lest we forget, in 2017 BTC matriarch Shalane Flanagan won the New York City Marathon, becoming the first American woman to do so in 40 years. 

There are currently eleven women on the BTC (which has roughly the same number of professional men), and one could argue that the squad has the top American athlete in every competitive distance from the 1,500 up to the marathon. 

On the men’s side, there has also been a recent development which suggests a shifting balance of power among top American clubs. A year after his Olympic triumph in 2016, Matthew Centrowitz relocated from Oregon to the East Coast to train on his own. Last November, Centrowitz finally confirmed that he had left the Oregon Project, only to announce in January that he would be competing for BTC. It seemed like trolling, par excellence. Even though he expressed gratitude to his former coach, there was still something impressively in-your-face about Centrowitz bailing on Salazar and joining forces with longtime Salazar nemesis Jerry Schumacher. (In case you don’t know: Salazar and Schumacher are not the best of friends.)

Then again, Centrowitz has always been a pretty in-your-face type of guy. Among other things, it will be interesting to see how he gets on with Olympic silver-medalist and resident BTC nice boy Evan Jager. (When he’s not tearing it up on the track, Jager has the air of someone who might spend his free time volunteering at his local church, or scrubbing the schmutz off an injured baby seal.) 

As for the Oregon Project, it should be stated that, despite losing a few big names since the club’s 2016 high-water mark, Salazar’s crew is not short on heavy hitters. New pickups include Dutch-Ethiopian runner Sifan Hassan, who is probably one of the few women in the world right now who’s capable of outkicking Houlihan in a distance race; and Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha, who will try to break the indoor mile world record at this weekend’s Millrose Games. This is no B team.

But if there’s any lesson in the recent surge of BTC athletes, it’s that talent only counts for so much. Ideally, your training group will also provide an environment where top athletes actually want to stick around. Farah ostensibly left the OP because he wanted to move back to England with his family, and Centrowitz never publicly claimed to have any beef with the club. It’s difficult to imagine, however, that the allegations of potential misdeeds by Salazar didn’t play a role. If you want to attract and retain top runners, it pays to actively cultivate an image of being on the up and up. 

BTC appears to have figured that out. “Inside the ‘bubble’ that is made up of American professional distance runners and coaches, [BTC] are seen as a group that does it right,” Rosario said in his email. “Meaning that we believe they are 100% clean. So to see them have such success helps all of us who also do it the right way. We know it’s possible.”

We would like to stay on the ranch with the beloved author forever

The frustrating thing about reading Pam Houston is she does things no one else can pull off.

In memoirs, especially those that involve smushy, subjective things like relationships, nature, and relationships with nature, it’s nearly impossible to navigate the thin line between self-indulgent stories and ones that are very, very true.

Since her 1992 breakout book of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Houston has mastered that honest margin. She’s earnest without tipping into schmaltzy, clear and vivid without becoming trite. Her new memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country ($26; W.W. Norton), out last week, is no different. It’s ostensibly about her life on the 120-acre southern Colorado ranch she bought with the money she received for Cowboys—barely enough for 5 percent down—but it’s really about finding your identity by questioning your experiences.

The book weaves together stories of seasons on the ranch, where she finally discovers a sense of place, with the things threatening that stability: her troubled family history, her antsy need for adventure, the creep of climate change, and the writing work that both pays for the property and pulls her away from it. If you’ve read Houston’s fiction and nonfiction, which are tightly linked, many of the elements will feel familiar—abuse, the outdoors, addiction, risk, horses, and dogs. Her writing has always been personal, but Deep Creek is even more so. The people have names, her father’s sexual abuse is out in the open, she’s digging in.

The interlinked essays touch on disparate topics like narwhals and her childhood nanny, but they all tie back to the property. It’s the frame for understanding the toughness and flexibility it takes to struggle through building a life on a ranch, or really anywhere, and the feeling of being overwhelmed by the work and the knowledge necessary keep a fragile place going.

The main essays are bracketed by vignettes about ranch life, which are shorter and more concrete. These include the constant work of shoveling snow, the brain-expanding beauty of October in the Rockies, and taking the ram, Wooly Nelson, to get his horns sheared by shoving him in the back of a 4Runner and hoping he doesn’t bust out the back window.

Some sections lose the thread, like one where she repurposes the facts and old stories she learned from digging into the ranch archive—they feel less current and emotionally charged. Most feel more urgent than ever, like the chapter “Diary of a Fire,” about the 2013 West Fork Fire that almost torched her ranch. She digs into natural history, fire management, and the sleepless anxiety of being away from the place you love when it might be burning down. She calls the essay an “unironic ode to nature.”

The book is vivid and full of detail, real enough to feel relatable, even if you’re not going to put your life savings down on a remote ranch. Part of the appeal of Deep Creek is the hard-won fantasy that someone like Houston—nervy and green, but up for adventure—could carve out a life like that.

If you’re like a lot of people I know, trying to figure out where you want to live, what you want to love and be loved by, and where the lines are between adventure and home, no one writes about these themes more honestly than Houston. Deep Creek, her story of connection, and, as she says, learning to become the cowboy she thought she needed, is a model of what we might want—even if we could never pull it off like Houston does.

Posting shots of my kids skiing, camping, and playing outside is good for my brand as an adventure writer. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Lots of parents refuse to put their kids on Instagram because it feels too public. I respect that but have gone the opposite direction and plastered my five-year-old Lulu and three-year-old Marcos all over my feed. I was a newspaper photojournalist for years, and I’m used to capturing and sharing photos publicly. Since I’m now a dad and not chasing news stories, my kids are my subjects and I chase smiles, passed-out toddlers after a day on the hill, and other moments that capture the awesomeness of childhood. I’m so used to shooting photos that I can’t not pull out my phone when they do something funny or cute. Plus, it helps build my personal brand.

There are rules, of course: I never share anything that I think they’d hate to see once they’re older. I thought about posting photos of them throwing fits—as a way to be more honest with my followers—but my wife and I talked it over and decided that the kids might not want to see themselves losing it. They can’t control themselves right now, so I felt like it wasn’t fair to show them pissed off.

If it’s even close to the line, I pass the photo by my wife, who’s not a photographer and has a thicker filter. Right now I get a lot of satisfaction out of sharing our moments, but ultimately, Instagram motivates me to shoot more photos. I’m not just taking pictures and letting them sit on my phone; I have somewhere to share them. My feed only captures lighthearted moments—like Marcos learning to ski by himself or Lulu honing her rock-climbing skills at our camping spot in Moab, Utah, last summer—but that’s what family albums are all about. I hope that one day my kids are thankful I documented their lives.

In full transparency, my feed also promotes my brand as an adventure writer, which I’m fine with. Instagram proves that I don’t just talk about skiing with my kids, I actually do it. I don’t just want that beautiful Patagonia onesie for my boy because it’s cool—he actually uses the crap out of it. Instagram builds my equity with the brands, agencies, and magazines I work with­. At times I question whether this is exploitative, but the answer I always land on is no. My career as a journalist has provided my family with a lot of gear and opportunities that we might not otherwise have had, and if Instagram helps keep that going, I’m all for it.

Currently, I have about 2,400 followers, which is small compared to the influencer crowd but larger than your normal parent. I do use two hashtags specific to my kids: #lulugrams and #marcographs. Most of my followers are family and folks I’ve met on the road as a journalist. I’m not close to everyone, but I consider them friends or acquaintances, so it doesn’t feel like I’m sending my kids’ photos off to some random group of people. Instead, I feel like I’m sharing my daily life, just like people might share their family highlights on a Christmas card.

For my mom, who lives two hours away from our home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Instagram is a way to keep up on the day-to-day of the family. She checks it every morning to see what’s going on. For my aunt who doesn’t get to see the kids very often, she feels closer to them because she knows what’s going on when she sees my posts. My mother-in-law loves to share my photos with her friends.

My feed will eventually change. If either of my kids feel like they’re sick of me posting their images, I’ll stop. I know that people are not going to be as interested in seeing my children once they’re older because that cute-kid factor wears off. And I realize that Instagram will probably go away and be replaced by some other social platform. I’m fine with all of this, but until it happens, I’m going to keep shooting and posting.

At the 2019 Los Angeles Marathon, Adam Gorlitsky will set out to become the first American paraplegic to walk 26.2 miles—and bust his British rival’s 36-hour time in the process. But his real dream is to bring assisted mobility to people with disabilities.

When he was 19 years old, Adam Gorlitsky never wore his seat belt because—well, what could possibly happen? Life was good. He was a sophomore at the University of South Carolina and a fit guy. In high school, he’d run a 4:50 mile and played varsity basketball. Now he was a pickup-game star, a talented outside shooter, a business major, and an esteemed brother at Sigma Chi. On the day it happened—December 30, 2005—he’d just signed the lease on a sweet new apartment.

Gorlitsky moved furniture into the place that day, and then, just after nightfall, climbed into his dad’s Chevy Tahoe to make the two-hour journey home from Columbia to his parents’ house in Charleston. He was sober, but he was also weary, and he says that when he was careening along Highway 26 at 80 miles per hour, he nodded off for a second. An instant later, his car was rolling down the grassy slope of the median. It smacked sideways into some trees. The accident threw Gorlitsky around the inside of the vehicle until he lay, finally, in the back seat, spitting up blood. He was unable to move. Soon afterward he was airlifted to the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston, where X-rays revealed that he’d suffered a T9 spinal fracture. He was paralyzed from the belly button down.

By the time Gorlitsky got into rehab, he had lost 45 pounds from being on a ventilator and still had a tracheotomy tube in his throat. He was so weak that he needed to be lifted into his wheelchair. In a flash, his unformed young life had been inflected with a question he never anticipated: how could he become an adult now that it seemed he would never walk again?

But beginning on March 22, he plans to walk 26.2 miles. At the Los Angeles Marathon, Gorlitsky, now 32, will attempt to become the first American paraplegic ever to walk a full marathon. Relying on an $80,000 robotic exoskeleton, he’ll commence the race in the dark, after 10 P.M., more than 24 hours before any other competitors, and then hobble out of Dodger Stadium and along Sunset and then Hollywood Boulevards.

American marathons have been including wheelchair athletes for more than 40 years, but Gorlitsky’s 26.2 debut comes as the races are growing more welcoming to athletes with disabilities, and also more lucrative. At next month’s Boston Marathon, wheelchair athletes will vie for $125,000 in prize money, up from $84,500 in 2018. (The total purse of last year’s race was $830,500).  

Racing the Los Angeles Marathon in an exoskeleton, Gorlitsky will only be chasing after glory. If he finishes in less than 36 hours and 37 minutes, he’ll become the fastest paraplegic marathoner in the world.

So is this another feel-good inspirational story about a disabled guy?

Yes. And also no. If only it were that simple.

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“When you’re permanently disabled,” Gorlitsky says, “you wake up every day battling against two things—your spinal-cord injury and also society’s perception of who you are. You’re constantly playing from behind.”

Gorlitsky had an uphill road after the accident. He finished nine weeks of rehab, then graduated from USC a year behind schedule. But when he tried to launch a career, it didn’t materialize. He was passed over for an internship with a TV production company because, he thinks, he couldn’t climb the stairs to the office. He produced some short films, including a moody and ambient music video for the Charleston roots-gospel rock ensemble Stoplight Observations. He set out to create a feature film, but the only money he made came from working for his parents’ successful mail-order business, Allergicpet.com, which sells holistic products for dogs and cats. “When I posted pictures of myself on Tinder,” he says, “I cropped out my wheelchair. I didn’t want people to see it.”

But then, in 2015, Gorlitsky says, came the moment that would lend him both agency and self-esteem. At a spinal-cord-injury clinic in Charleston, Gorlitsky tried out a space-age apparatus—the ReWalk exoskeleton, designed to let paraplegics walk again. For the first two weeks, all he could do in the ReWalk was stand there. The stabilizing muscles in his core, unused for a decade, were so taxed that they would ache deeply for days, steeping him in a pain he’d never known as a high school runner. Ten weeks passed before he could walk a city block. Still, he’d regained a part of his old self. “Suddenly,” he says, “I went from a seated four foot nine to a standing six foot one.”

Released in 2011 after years of development by Israeli engineer Amit Goffer, the ReWalk is an ungainly 60-pound assemblage that consists of two heavy, black leg braces, each containing a whirring motor. Each motor angles forward the hip that it’s attached to, bringing the leg along with it. You activate the motors by throwing your weight forward onto low crutches, thereby tripping a sensor in the ReWalk.

The ReWalk is slow—rarely much faster than one mile an hour. But soon after Gorlitsky took his first few steps, lurching like a landlubber on a heaving boat, he hatched a new career plan. “Instead of trying to make a movie about someone’s else’s life,” he decided, “I’ll turn my own life into a movie.”

L.A. will be Gorlitsky’s 35th road race. Three years into his racing life, he’s already walked 10K portions of both the Marine Corps Marathon and the Walt Disney World Marathon, landing himself on the CBS Evening News and ESPN SportsCenter. He’s well-known in his native Charleston, and once, when he found himself with a dying ReWalk battery at a 5K on the South Carolina shore, a half-dozen soldiers came to his rescue and carried him atop their shoulders a quarter mile to the finish.

The metaphors surrounding Gorlitsky’s journey are monumental, and he works it. In 2016, he abandoned film and launched a nonprofit, I Got Legs, with a proclaimed mission of “improving the lives of the disabled community.” I Got Legs has always been a one-man enterprise, but it now has a board of five directors, drawn largely from the Charleston business community, and a budget plan that prays for $150,000 in 2019, as compared to the $52,832 it reported on its most recent tax forms, which document 2017 revenues.

But what thrills Gorlitsky is storytelling and human drama. The stylish website of I Got Legs, shaped by Gorlitsky himself, highlights an I Need Legs campaign set up to raise funds to help other people with disabilities purchase assistive technology. The photos show Gorlitsky sitting in a wheelchair, then rising, half-bent, and finally standing erect, towering and sturdy, vanquishing frailty in his exoskeleton—as if, thanks to robotics, humans could evolve to a new plane of existence.

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The first time I reached Gorlitsky, on a late-night phone call in November, I found him simmering with disdain for the man he calls his arch nemesis: Simon Kindleysides, the 34-year-old Brit who ReWalked the London Marathon in 36:37 last April.

Like Gorlitsky, Kindleysides is paralyzed from the belly button down (his paralysis was caused by a brain tumor). Gorlitsky’s beef with him is that, on Facebook, Kindleysides said he finished in 27:30, a time that excludes numerous stops for battery changes and mechanical fiddling. “When I read his post,” Gorlitsky said, “I thought, Oh my God, that’s so lame! I told him, ‘If we to go by your logic, anyone could take breaks whenever they wanted, and it wouldn’t count toward their overall time.’”

“I want to race this guy one-on-one,” Gorlitsky said to me. “I’m thinking the New York Marathon next fall. I want it to be intense—just like the World Wrestling Federation!”

Gorlitsky and Kindleysides stand together atop a tiny worldwide community of six or so exoskeletal long-distance racers, competing in a sport so nascent that it lacks codified timing standards. Can’t Gorlitsky just try to get along? He is, statistically speaking, the slower athlete: in his only half marathon, in Portland, Oregon, last year, he finished in just under 20 hours. Beyond that, Kindleysides presents himself as a soft-spoken guy. He’s a rising pop singer who recently joined Geri Horner, once Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls, as a singing judge on a season of the BBC One show All Together Now. “I tried to be nice and polite with him,” Kindleysides told me in December. “But he kept writing me on Facebook, saying things like, ‘I’m going to kick your ass.’”

Gorlitsky, it seems, is inclined toward the grand statement. On the phone he told me, “I Got Legs isn’t some pat-on-the-back nonprofit. I run it like a Fortune 500 company.” He said that he sees himself as the social entrepreneur version of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He envisions building a Got Legs! digital network built, as he puts it, “around entertainment, retail, and fund-raising.”

But as the public face of U.S. exoskeleton walking, Gorlitsky hasn’t convinced everyone who has a disability. Bill Fertig, a paraplegic who serves as director of the New York–based Spinal Cord Resource Center, argues that for most paralyzed people, ambulation is not a paramount concern. “Walking is overrated,” Fertig says. Indeed, when the North American Spinal Cord Injury Consortium reported early this year on a survey of 1,800 constituents, it found that their principal hope was not to walk, but to restore bowel, bladder, and sexual function. The majority of paraplegics rely on catheters.

Fertig blames the glorification of walking on well-meaning but clueless able-bodied types who use terms like “wheelchair bound.” A former police officer who was injured in an off-duty motorcycle accident in 1999, he devotes his time to other pursuits: he swims and also water skis, using a padded extrawide ski topped by a metal cage for stabilization. Winters, he takes to the slopes on a sit-ski. “I don’t have time to worry about walking,” he says.

Fertig concedes that walking is good for the human body, pointing out that it’s crucial for bone density and bowel function. “We’re meant to be upright,” he says. “But exoskeletons are so expensive that I just can’t see them getting much play.” Only about 500 ReWalks are in use worldwide. Other manufacturers also make exoskeletons, but they’re not as robust and race ready. ReWalk dominates a small market, and while the company does have plans to release faster units, few ReWalk buyers are eligible to be reimbursed by their insurance.

Fertig just doesn’t see the ReWalk changing the game for paraplegics. “This thing,” he says, “is for the skydivers and the spelunkers of the disabled world.”

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I arrive in Charleston in mid-December, on the eve of I Got Legs’ second annual gala, a road race. But this isn’t just another boring 5K—it’s a beer mile, a four-lap chugalug sprint of the city block surrounding Commonhouse Aleworks.

Gorlitsky’s alluring race poster (an exoskeleton sporting Nikes) announces that it’s the Betty Carlton Beer Mile, a nod to his late grandmother, who was a chain-smoking roller-derby queen. There is even a Betty Carlton Beer Mile Queen, real estate agent and former TV reporter Sydney Ryan, who delivers just the right amount of ironic ohmygod squealing when a faux-solemn Gorlitsky crowns her with a tiara. Just under a hundred competitors, most of them around Gorlitsky’s age, and at least as many spectators have gathered not out of a piteous sense of obligation but rather because, well, where else would a Charleston hipster quaff ales at 11 on a Saturday morning?

Everyone here is, it seems, a Gorlitsky fan, and he works the crowd with aplomb, grinning, dropping wry one-liners, pausing dutifully each time someone asks him to pose for a selfie. “He’s got a really good cause,” says Howard Thomas, a police officer working the scene. “We see a lot of bad accidents, and it’s nice to see something positive come out of one of them.”

“He’s a good model to anyone in a wheelchair,” says beer miler Thomas Sessions, an engineer who is paralyzed from the armpits down. “He’s motivating me to become an activist and to think about getting an exoskeleton.”

When I join Gorlitsky out on the race course, shuffling beside him as he picks his way to a sub-one-hour mile, I find myself in the midst of a happy family drama. Gorlitsky’s dad is walking behind him, holding his hand at times, lest his son falls. Stan Gorlitsky, 69, was a veterinarian before he started Allergicpets.com, and in a thick accent redolent of his native New York, he tells me, “I do this every race. Every race. And I have to train for this, you know. I’m on the treadmill five times a week. At my age, it’s a pain in the ass.”

“I’m not drinking today,” says Stan, who has three other sons, including one who’s living at home with Asperger’s. “I’m the designated driver. If he slips and I don’t catch him, he’ll go down like a cut tree. And it’s a bitch to stand him up again.”

Gorlitsky pokes his crutches forward, one at a time, as a handful of admirers fan out behind him, their own race long over as they sip beer.

We round a corner. “Any tilts, any sand, any cracks in the pavement, any grates or walkways,” Stan says, “forget about it. I have to concentrate. A lot of times, I just tune out conversations.”

Today he’s not missing much. After the second lap (and third beer), Gorlitsky says, “I’m already drunk!” After the third lap, he says of his exoskeleton, “I wouldn’t wear it on a first date. I’m a little self-conscious in it. It takes up a lot of space. But on a second or third date? Definitely!”

Just before Gorlitsky crosses the finish line, he allows himself to dream of next year’s beer mile. “I want to have bands,” he says. “I want it to be a relay race, a festival. I want to make it a love letter to Charleston.”

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Gorlitsky’s emergence as a public figure in Charleston was filled with sparkle and hope. In April 2016, Julian Smith, the longtime director of Charleston’s premier road race—the Cooper River Bridge Run, a 10K that draws 40,000 racers each April—welcomed Gorlitsky into the event, even though he knew that the man would be out on the course posing traffic issues for much longer than the average runner. After Gorlitsky finished, in just under seven hours, Smith invited him to speak at a national conference for race directors. Gorlitsky, in turn, got a tattoo on his right arm that reads “17,932”—the number of steps his ReWalk took in the race.

But last year, Smith contracted glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, and in January he decided to step down. Before the 2018 race, Gorlitsky locked horns with the race’s deputy director, Irv Batten, who (in the interest of time, permitting, and insurance issues) wanted him to race in a wheelchair. Gorlitsky refused—“I probably dropped some f-bombs,” he acknowledges—and was ultimately picked up, ingloriously, by the race’s sweep van near the two-mile point, unable to complete the course in the three hours allotted all racers.

Batten declined to comment for this story, but when I visit Gorlitsky at the comfortable two-bedroom house he rents from his dad in the suburbs of Charleston, he has no qualms about describing his feud with another Bridge Run luminary, Marka Danielle Rodgers, a 62-year-old quadriplegic. Rodgers, a ballet instructor and disabilities advocate, has an incomplete spinal injury, meaning that she retains some motor skills and was able to finish the 2016 Cooper River race in just over two hours, using a less elaborate (but still uncommon) set of $20,000 mechanized leg braces made by the German company Ottobock. In 2017, she began to wonder what I Got Legs had actually accomplished, 18 months after incorporating as a 501c3.

“What is actually happening with your foundation?” she wrote Gorlitsky on Facebook Messenger in late November. “Where is the money going? Who are you helping?”

He wrote back, calling her “passive-aggressive,” and said that her “emotional statements” called to mind Donald Trump, who both he and Rodgers abhor.

Rodgers is reluctant to criticize Gorlitsky, focusing her concerns instead on the ReWalk. “To put it out there to the public that you can just go to your doctor and get a scrip for this device and go walking—that’s misleading,” she says. “It’s almost dangerous. It takes half an hour just to put a ReWalk on. It takes a lot of work to learn how to use one. It’s very frustrating.” And for people whose spinal injuries are incomplete, Rodgers says, a ReWalk won’t work. “It’s jerky on the body. If I tried to use one, it could induce muscle spasms.”  

Still, Rodgers’s principal question is a good one. What’s happening at I Got Legs?

When Gorlitsky started the nonprofit, he hoped to help other paraplegics buy exoskeletons. Soon, though, he realized that the demand for such devices was low. “They’re too expensive,” he says, “and they wear out after only a few years.” Instead he decided, “We need to help others toward their own version of getting legs.”

In recent months, I Got Legs has helped promote a fund-raising dinner for a 13-year-old paraplegic girl who needs an elevator in her home. It also made plans to aid two other mobility-related campaigns: One, set up by a Charleston physical-therapy student, aims to teach Ugandans how to build wheelchairs inexpensively. The other involves a disabled Ohio woman trying to scrape together $2,000 for a hand bike.

The latest tax documents of I Got Legs reveal that it received $38,117 in contributions in 2017, along with $14,715 in program revenues. Much of this went toward the 2016 Ford Explorer that Gorlitsky uses to drive around Charleston and to races. I Got Legs received a deep discount on the vehicle, along with a Braunability wheelchair ramp, from Charleston-based Ilderton Conversion Company, which adapts vehicles for people with disabilities. As for the remaining contributions, “almost all came from sponsorships,” Gorlitsky says, “meaning that a business contributes money and in exchange they receive signage or advertising at our events or on the car.”

Gorlitsky says that I Got Legs spent the sponsorship funds on two awareness programs: One is his own One Million Steps Tour, which sees him trying to log that many paces at road races (he’s currently up to 217,189). The second is what he’s dubbed the ReEnabled Racing Circuit, which includes the beer mile and two Charleston-area events that are not run by I Got Legs—a Turkey Day 5K and a July Fourth Firecracker Run.

Thus far, Gorlitsky says, about ten athletes with disabilities have joined him—in wheelchairs, in leg braces, and wearing prosthetics—to compete in the ReEnabled Circuit. I Got Legs has not yet given money to any mobility-impaired individuals, though it plans to in 2019, through a Got Legs! Give Back Fund. It has, however, already launched a program, I Need Legs, designed to help disabled people raise funds. Last year, in its first effort, I Need Legs helped a Charleston-based blind woman—Gina Applebee, a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology—raise about $10,000 for a tiny home she described on her GoFundMe page as the “perfect fit for my blind feng shui.” I Got Legs helped Applebee by, for instance, hosting a happy-hour fund-raiser at a local bar and introducing her to news reporters.   

Throughout 2018, Gorlitsky worked with a pair of Charleston consultants, Sandy Morckel and Frank Sonntag, whose outfit Solutions for the Greater Good helps nonprofits with organizational management. As Sonntag sees it, Gorlitsky is a “big thinker” whose vision surpasses I Got Legs’ tiny budget, and who's already looking to fund stem-cell research and create an endowment. Sonntag would like to see I Got Legs focus on aiding the mobility impaired. But he tells me, his tone judicious, “Adam isn’t a pushover. He doesn’t just flatly follow our lead.”

Gorlitsky says he arrived at his $150,000 budget for 2019 with the help of Sonntag and the board. Without divulging specifics, he claims he’s got some large donors lined up. “I’m into big rhetoric for sure,” he says, “but people are starting to see that I’ll live up to the rhetoric.”

“From day one, my philosophy has been: You have to raise public awareness. From there, you can leverage fund-raising money,” Gorlitsky says. “We’re a content-driven nonprofit,” he adds, alluding to the thousands of autobiographical videos he’s uploaded to Facebook and other platforms. “We create content, and we leverage it to build community and educate people. I don’t give a shit about money. If your nonprofit places too much emphasis on giving money away—well, then you’re just a GoFundMe. ”

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On the morning after the beer mile, I join Gorlitsky for what is his first marathon-training sesh—a ten-mile hand-bike spin through a quiet suburban neighborhood. He’s on the hand cycle; I’m on wheeled roller skis. As we glide along, he tells me that soon he’ll be walking about ten miles a week and also doing frequent hand-cycling and gym sessions. “I’d like to walk more,” he says, before considering his training partner. “But I have to be mindful of my dad’s body, too.”

Stan has been training on the treadmill, and he says, “I’m 99 percent sure I’ll make it. Bottom line: I’m his roadie. He needs me.”

Logistics will be complicated in L.A. In December, Gorlitsky received a legalistic 11-paragraph letter from the Los Angeles Marathon office green-lighting his participation but also making clear that its officials were not about to stop traffic for 30-plus hours. “You will start at the 32K mark at 6:30 A.M.,” the letter reads. “Your walk to the start line is not sanctioned.”

In other words, Gorlitsky will need to travel the first 20 miles on the sidewalk—over the cracked pavement and patches of sand that give Stan Gorlitsky nightmares. He’ll move with an entourage—at least one ReWalk technician, a few supporters, and also a filmmaker, Caitlin Weiler, who’s including Adam’s journey in a documentary on her late father, a quadriplegic. Gorlitsky’s crew will carry some food and water on the back of his wheelchair.

Simon Kindleysides navigated London with a team as well. He did the last 18 miles of his marathon on sidewalks, alongside streets streaming with traffic. Which means that when Gorlitsky guns for Kindleysides’s record, he’ll be ReWalking onto a level playing field. “I’d say I have an 80 percent chance of beating Simon’s time,” he tells me. “I ran a 4:50 mile in high school. I played varsity basketball.”

Gorlitsky questions Kindleysides’s claim to have moved along at a 62-minute-mile pace at the London Marathon. “How’s that even possible?” he asks. Kindleysides says he told Gorlitsky, “Look, every disabled person has different abilities.”

A ReWalk service engineer, Wai Li, sheds a little light on this question. “Gorlitsky is not too smooth,” says Li, who walked the Portland half marathon beside him. As is true to a certain extent for all exoskeleton users, he says, “When Adam gets tired, he leans in many directions. He leans over the crutches so much. Supposedly, they are just there for balance, but his hands got bruised. In the end, he had to stop every block and rub them.” Kindleysides, who is better able to recruit his core muscles, walked more upright. His hands were sore but not bruised after his marathon.

“Simon has huge trunk control,” Gorlitsky tells me at the tail end of my visit. We’re at his house, and he begins scrolling through his rival’s Facebook feed. “There’s a lot of selfies,” he says. “There’s a boy-band thing going on. He’s got the tattoos, the hair.”

As I drive toward the airport, I remember something Gorlitsky said in an e-mail early on: “Every time I say the F-word to someone,” he wrote, “I do give them a big hug and tell them I’m sorry immediately after.” Gorlitsky gets it. He’s young, and he’s had a life freighted with more frustrations and challenges than most. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before he learns to channel the frustration within.

Simon Kindleysides may already be there. When I call him to ask for his thoughts on Gorlitsky’s upcoming race, his voice is cheery as his kids squeal and cavort in the background. “He says he’s going to beat me,” Kindleysides says, “that’s he going to smash my record. Well then, why doesn’t he just bring it on? Isn’t that what competition is all about? I wish him good luck.”

Inversions can choke all the fun out of winter in some places (looking at you, Salt Lake City)

Not only do we have to worry about large-scale weather patterns affecting our daily lives in the winter, but local geography can also dictate the atmospheric flavor of the day, leaving parts of the country racked with gloomy skies and stagnant air.

Inversions make for many a problem in some areas during the colder months, including ice storms, air pollution that results in health issues, and even enhanced effects of explosions and other loud noises. A temperature inversion occurs when a layer of warm air develops on top of a layer of cooler air. This warm layer, the inversion, acts like a cap that seals the cooler atmosphere beneath it. We sometimes hear about a “cap” in thunderstorm forecasts, since air in an updraft has a hard time rising through the inversion to produce thunderstorms.

If the fast-moving air of an updraft has a hard time breaking through a temperature inversion, imagine how much harder it is for the atmosphere to churn itself up when one of these events occurs during the winter months.

There are several different kinds of inversions you can encounter when it gets chilly. Each type of inversion comes with its own set of inconveniences and hazards.

Here’s what you need to know about each one.

Valley Inversions

Cold air is dense. It drains from higher elevations to lower elevations and hugs as close to the ground as possible. This makes valleys especially vulnerable to inversions in the winter. And few areas in the United States more susceptible to valley inversions than Utah’s Salt Lake Valley.

The bowl-shaped topography that surrounds Salt Lake City’s metro area exposes the region to several hazardous inversion events every winter. These inversions occur when cold air gets trapped in the valley and a layer of warm air seals it from above. The region’s terrain prevents that bubble of cold air from draining away, and the mountains stop winds from easily scouring it out and ushering in fresher air.

The end result is a spell of nasty, stagnant air that can be extremely hazardous to the health of anyone in the region. The stale air of an inversion allows for the buildup of pollutants created by vehicles, factories, fireplaces, and wildfires. These pollutants most often affect those with health problems such as asthma, but particularly unhealthy air can lead to respiratory problems even in folks without preexisting conditions.

Salt Lake City has some of the worst air quality in the United States during the winter as a result of these inversions. Officials encourage people to carpool and use public transportation to reduce the amount of pollution when these inversions take place.

Valley inversions can also lead to some unintended consequences. Blasting at quarries and munitions testing at military bases usually come to a halt during inversions due to the risk of causing damage and injuries to people many miles away. The capping effect of an inversion in the atmosphere can reflect the blast wave from an explosion back down toward the surface, spreading the effects of an explosion farther than intended.

A famous instance of this occurred about ten years ago Esparto, California, during the filming of an episode of Mythbusters that required a huge explosion. The larger-than-expected blast shattered windows in the town more than a mile away from the blast as a result of an inversion overhead.

Cold-Air Damming

Mountains are a significant source of inversions when it’s cold outside. Not only can valleys trap cold air and force cities to choke on their own exhaust, but mountains can trap cold air blown by the wind. This can lead to significant cold snaps and even ice storms for folks who live in the foothills of certain mountain ranges.

Cold-air damming occurs when winds blow cold air up against the side of a mountain range. The surge of cold, dense air can’t ride up and over the ridges of the mountains, forcing it to pool up, instead, at the base and hang around until the wind changes direction.

It’s frequently cold, gloomy, and drizzly in states like Virginia and North Carolina during the fall and winter as a result of easterly winds blowing cold air up against the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains. This setup can lead to more than just a raw drizzle. A low-pressure system approaching the mid-Atlantic from the south can force warm air into what would otherwise be a snowstorm, sometimes leading to a surprise ice storm in the region’s Piedmont.

The world’s most infamous example of poor air quality is also a result of cold-air damming. Beijing, which is home to more than 20 million people, sits at the horseshoe-shaped confluence of two mountain ranges in northeastern China. Prevailing winter winds from the south and east subject the city to days-long inversions through cold-air damming. The shape of the terrain prevents incoming weather systems from easily scouring out the stagnant air, exacerbating its already-treacherous pollution problem. The city’s air can spike the air-quality index off the charts during the winter, threatening the health of even an otherwise healthy person.

Marine Layer

The famed marine layer that bathes cities like San Francisco is another example of an inversion. The Pacific waters off the coast of San Francisco are quite cold, often significantly colder than the temperature of the air moving over the region. The cold water chills the air immediately above the ocean surface through conduction, leading to an inversion.

Warm air moving over cooler water is a recipe for fog, which is the most notable impact of an inversion caused by the marine layer. San Francisco’s fog is so famous that it even earned its own name and Twitter account. But fog isn’t the only impact this inversion can have. Concerts in San Francisco can be notoriously loud due to sound waves bouncing off the cap above the city and reflecting back down toward the surface. This was a particular problem during a 2014 Beyoncé concert, which was made so loud by an inversion layer that residents miles away from the stadium where it took place complained about it.

Learning to Adapt to Inversions

Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do to prevent inversions from developing during the winter months, so we have to adapt to the challenges they present. Places like Salt Lake City can reduce the air-pollution risk posed by inversions through emissions-reduction efforts like investing in public transit, stricter emissions standards on factories, and an overall shift toward clean energy. People with respiratory problems should try to avoid going outside on high-pollution days and wear respiratory masks if they can’t stay inside.

Think of the weather as your mood and the climate as your personality: your mood changes each day, whereas your personality is the sum of all those moods over the course of years

Let’s get one thing straight: Weather is not climate.

Look, I get it. It’s easy to conflate the two. After all, climate is the average of all the weather recorded over a period of time. But it’s incredibly dangerous when we mix the two up when it comes to climate change. Intense cold and snow in the winter, like what the Midwest is experiencing right now, does not disprove the fact that our planet is warming, yet political leaders prey on that fuzzy distinction to lie about the science. Case in point: 

Climate change is real. The vast majority of scientists agree that our planet is warming as carbon dioxide accumulates in our atmosphere at an alarming rate. A warmer climate will lead to longer and more intense heat waves, devastating droughts, more frequent flooding rains, rising sea levels, and a bevy of other ripple effects. Climate change does not mean that winter weather will cease. The world didn’t stop warming because it started snowing in Washington, D.C. A week of bone-chilling cold in the Midwest doesn’t negate the fact that five of the 10 warmest years on record in Minneapolis and four of the 10 warmest years in Chicago have occurred since the beginning of this decade.

The best analogy scientists use to differentiate weather and climate is to compare weather to your mood and climate to your personality. Your mood can change each day, but how people perceive your personality depends on your mood every day over the course of years. You can have some down days and still be considered an upbeat person. It gets really cold and snows in New Orleans every couple of years, but the city’s climate is considered subtropical because it’s usually warm there.

The Upper Midwest and Great Lakes saw some of the coldest air in the entire world this week. However, if you zoom out beyond our backyard, it’s obvious that this cold spell is a small blip in a global sea of abnormal warmth. The above image shows an analysis of temperature anomalies on Thursday, January 31. The world is glowing with warmth. It’s been like that for years now. If you were born in 1977 or later, you have never been alive during a year when the world as a whole averaged below-normal temperatures. This abnormal warmth serves the dual purpose of making cold snaps seem even colder as a warming atmosphere begins to warp our perspective of what constitutes truly cold weather.

Forecasters expect temperatures in the Midwest to undergo a tremendous swing from near-historic lows to dozens of degrees above normal by this weekend. International Falls, Minnesota, will experience a 79-degree-Fahrenheit swing from a minus-49 low on Thursday morning to a 29 high on Sunday afternoon. Over the same period, Chicago will see a temperature swing of almost 70 degrees and Minneapolis will see one of 73 degrees.

We’re not just talking drastic temperature ranges. Highs in the Midwest will be 15 to 20 degrees warmer than normal on Sunday and Monday. But you won’t see the President—or anyone who disputes the science of climate change—tweet out a snarky crack about global warming when the temps rise this weekend, let alone during the summer when the heat index is 100 degrees or hotter for weeks.

When we're comfortable, it easy to forget how much warmer than normal temperatures are. Most of us only sense that something is wrong during extreme events—and, because of how we conflate weather and climate, usually only when those extreme events bring the heat. 

Daily weather is a symptom of a changing climate. A record-setting cold snap in a handful of states won’t do much to alter the world’s temperature profile for 2019. In fact, this winter probably would have been colder if the planet wasn’t warming. Our political leaders can ignore the science on climate change all they want, but lying about it won’t make it go away. And we might only have about a decade left to change course.

Sometimes the best offense is none at all

Confrontations with strangers are a fact of life. Fortunately, most of these are relatively minor, and unless you’re Larry David, you’re unlikely to get into a heated argument with someone over an airplane seat armrest or a poorly-placed shopping cart. Some situations, however, can be considerably more fraught, like when you’re riding a bike and a driver almost kills you.

You don’t have to be a cyclist to almost get killed by a driver; you can be in your own car, on foot, or simply enjoying a donut. However, what’s unique about being on a bicycle is that you’ve got all the physical vulnerability of a pedestrian, yet thanks to the potent combination of a bike and the shot of adrenaline that accompanies nearly dying you’re also often able to catch up with and directly address your would-be assailant. And when someone plays fast and loose with your life, the impulse to do just that can be irresistible.

So should you?

Let’s just say you do yield to the impulse to confront a bad driver, and at the next red light you’re face to face with the piece of crap who almost hit you with their car. What do you do now? Well, as tempting as it may be to deck a homicidal trucker or wield your U-lock, then unleash a mighty bellow from atop the roof of an Uber driver’s Kia, we all know that violence is never the answer. (Well, almost never.)

Short of that, all that’s left to do is to say something, at which point your anger and your wits fight for control of your tongue. If the former wins then you simply hurl invective at the driver until you undergo some sort of catharsis and/or get punched in the face, and if the latter wins then you attempt to hit the driver with some piercing insight that you hope will instantly cause them to wither and apologize—kind of like that deadly joke from Monty Python, only in insult form.

Unfortunately, in real world situations, neither of these approaches is effective. No matter how justified, ultimately it’s never satisfying to fly into a rage; if anything, you just wind up feeling guilty and ashamed, like when you wake up on the couch covered in Cheetos after a Netflix binge. As for administering a devastating dressing-down with such surgical precision that the driver immediately questions all the life choices that led them up to this moment, no matter how clever you are, attempts to deliver the mot juste invariably backfire and leave you feeling even angrier.

To understand why this is true, put yourself in the mindset of a driver. Drivers almost kill you for one of four reasons, these being:

1. They’re not paying attention;
2. They don’t understand how to drive around people on bikes;
3. They’re selfish and impatient;
4. They’re actively trying to frighten or hurt you.

Alas, in every one of these scenarios the driver is virtually impervious to any sort of criticism. Consider the inattentive driver who cuts you off because they weren’t watching where they were going. For all their heedlessness, they really didn’t mean you any harm. However, when you grab their attention and exhort them to “Watch where you’re going!,” first they feel surprised, then they feel embarrassed, and then they become defensive and look for a reason why it wasn’t their fault, because this is how human nature works.

It may be infuriating, but if you’ve ever accidentally stepped on your cat, you understand the mental process. The yowl scares the shit out of you so you blurt out, “Stupid cat!,” and only later do you get around to feeling bad about it, because after all, lying in sun patches on the living room floor is just what cats do. This is why, instead of apologizing, the driver who almost merged into you says something stupid like, “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?,” and you just wind up even angrier, like the trodden-upon cat now seething under the bed.

As for the person who doesn’t understand how to drive around people on bikes, they may not be cutting you off on purpose exactly, but they also think what they’re doing is perfectly fine, which is just as bad. There’s really no way to educate somebody in the course of a brief interaction in the middle of traffic. If you try they’ll only make some inane excuse that pisses you off more (see Driver #1), and if you get angry they’ll dismiss you as one of those “entitled cyclists” because they think you’re being irrational. Basically, they’re petting the cat backwards, getting bit, and using that as the basis for concluding that cats suck.

From here it only gets more futile, since a person so impatient they’re willing to risk the lives of others with their car is clearly not going to listen to reason, and if you confront a driver who’s actually trying to hurt you then they’re only going to try to finish the job. The best possible outcome here is an encounter that leaves you even more shaken, and the demoralizing realization that some of the people you “share” the road with really do want you dead.

Sadly, this leaves only one viable option, which is to say nothing at all. While this may be hard to stomach in the moment, refraining from any sort of interaction is worth it for the fact that you won’t be nursing feelings of shame, anger, and disillusionment with the human race for the rest of the day. Nothing you say can stop people from cutting you off or idling in the bike lane or doing all the other shitty things they do, nor will it elicit any sort of contrition for them. But at least you always have the option of opting out of the disappointment that inevitably follows and instead channeling your anger into something that makes a difference, like pushing for better cycling infrastructure or advancing pro-bike ideas in a forum where people might actually be receptive to them.

Otherwise, there’s simply no reasoning with people when they’re behind the wheel of a car. We’re our worst selves behind the wheel, and as soon as we turn on the ignition we disable both our empathy and our ability to reason.

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The Selby Folsom is wildly useful and beautiful to boot

I camp and overland constantly, so I’ve tested my fair share of quality knives. But my hands-down, all-time favorite is the Selby Folsom Full Size, which I think is the best outdoor knife money can buy.

Made in small batches in California by Brian Selby, the knives come sharp but are easy to sharpen thanks to an ultrahigh-quality A2 steel blade that’s double tempered to a Rockwell hardness of 60–61 HRC. (For the layman, most knives only have a hardness of 57-59 HRC.) The blade itself is four inches, and that’s matched with a four-inch textured handle and thumb notch, so you get incredible purchase on the knife and can slice through everything from raw meat to tree limbs with full confidence. At the same time, the Folsom isn’t so big that you feel ridiculous pulling it out to break down a box.

Before the Folsom, I only carried flipper knives, because they folded down nicely and fit in my pocket. The Folsom does not fit in my pocket, but every knife comes standard with a svelte Kydex or carbon-pattern sheath and a quick clip on the outside that neatly attaches to a belt. It took me awhile to get used to reaching for my knife on the outside of my jeans, but after a couple of weeks, it was second nature. (I usually wear the knife at three o’clock, near my hip.) For those of you worried about looking like Crocodile Dundee, don’t worry: the Folsom is still small enough that it easily hides under your untucked shirt.

Because Selby builds every knife himself, they have that handmade look and are truly beautiful. The shape of the blade, the matte-black blade finish, and the color choices for the handle (simple colors like coyote brown and hunter orange) make the Folsom something you’re happy to pull out at camp and show off.  

Nearly $200 is a lot for a knife, but as I’m keen on saying, a big investment like this always pays off. You’ll have a knife that will be with you for years, if not decades, and you’ll find so many uses for the Folsom that $200 will eventually start to feel like a bargain.

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Peter Heller’s latest novel puts two college friends in a canoe on Canada’s Maskwa River, paddling toward a struggle against nature and other humans

The worst part about outdoor books, especially novels, is that they often screw up the outdoor parts. Not so for Peter Heller, a former Outside contributing editor who launched into fiction with The Dog Stars in 2012. His latest novel, The River ($26, Knopf), is his most overtly outdoorsy book—it’s about a river trip gone wrong. And his personal adventure experience is clear in the backcountry minutiae throughout the story. 

Every single fly that’s fished is accounted for. There’s summer sausage and whiskey in the drybag. Heller expertly describes the cragginess of the Canadian geology and the way the boat moves through the water. “There was something satisfying about the cessation of paddling on smooth water,” he writes. “It was like watching a flock of ducks all stop beating at once and sail over a bank of trees on extended wings.” The book is not flawless, but it gets into the tricky balance of safety and risk in the backcountry, especially with a partner and particularly when things take a turn for the worst. 

The book follows college best friends Jack and Wynn on a canoe trip down Canada’s remote Maskwa River. Jack is a tough ranch kid from Colorado who is struggling with his mother’s accidental death, and Wynn is a kindhearted New Englander who tries to see the best in everyone (the fact that he wants to be an outdoor instructor slash sculptor feels perfectly on point). The two originally bond over their love of paperback westerns, and The River feels a bit like a modern version of one of those stories. Our heroes use their wits to face bad guys and battle against nature. 

What was initially intended to be a bare-bones backcountry paddle turns into a grim, threat-filled voyage in which they confront an impending wildfire, two boozed up older guys, and a couple they hear arguing from the banks. Jack and Wynn are capable, strong outdoorsmen, but they’re also overconfident young dudes who confront their own egos and flaws, like failing to bring enough food and squabbles over judgement.

This is fiction, and at times the challenges Jack and Wynn face—like trying to run rapids in the dark while under attack—feel unrealistic. It’s hard to imagine they could possibly work their way into so many bad situations at once. But some of the big-picture threats feel believable, like the rapidly approaching fire, the lack of communication with the outside world, the potential threat of strangers, and the often unsettling way you have to trust your gut in the backcountry, even if you’re not exactly sure what you’re working with. 

Heller is good at tension, and his writing is terse and tight. Short, lyrical paragraphs are packed with action and keep the story moving along. In one scene, he writes, “They could see the whitewater ahead like a thin line of distant surf, but it was much closer than it seemed and before they could scout a line or intuit one they each felt the waft of cold air and the rush that came with it and the bow rocked into a breaking wave.” When the fire rolls in, Wynn and Jack paddle back upstream to tell the other folks they saw on the river about the coming danger. The couple’s violent dissolution becomes the center point of the story, pulling in Jack and Wynn and forcing the two into a frantic escape.

The details are often more dialed than the plotline. Maia, the woman in the couple, feels like more of a narrative device than a multidimensional character. She’s effectively silent until she conveniently drops salient pieces of information, while other less significant male characters get more fully fleshed out. And after 200 pages of buildup, all the action unspools a little too quickly at the end, crashing the plotlines together.  

But Heller’s writing is engaging enough to keep you racing toward the finish with the two complicated characters, and it’s satisfying to see their trip rendered right. Like a lot of backcountry missions, the most compelling parts of the story aren’t necessarily the rapids or the high-risk moves. Instead they’re the quiet moments where Wynn and Jack are coupling their rods together and wading slowly through vivid, tannic streams.