The Happiness Of Pursuit Part 11

Back in Armenia

Reunited with Tenny, Tom felt overjoyed. He rented a small apartment and stayed in Yerevan several months, beginning to study the language and find his way around. The journey was far from over, but the break was good.

That's when he added a modification to his plan. Maybe they could do it together! Tom asked Tenny to ride along for part of the journey, and she said yes. Why not?

The two cycled from Yerevan to Tehran, the trip that Tom had nearly made by himself a few months earlier. Once there, they decided to separate again for a time, a decision that was hard but necessary. Tenny's conservative family had grown increasingly suspicious of the strange Western suitor who wanted to take their daughter around the world. Not wanting to completely alienate them, Tom suggested he go on alone and then return for Tenny later-a compromise that she quickly agreed to.

The first time he left Tenny, Tom instantly regretted it. But this time the decision was different. Tenny was a wonderful person and, it seemed, even the love of his life. But Tom realized that he'd made another mistake: Though they loved each other, it wasn't Tenny's dream to cycle the world. A dream can only have one owner, Tom decided. He was committed to Tenny, but his journey wasn't over. They said farewell in Tehran-temporarily, they both hoped-and Tom got back on the bike. From then on, he said, "I would just look forward and try not to think about the what-ifs."

Over the next seven months, Tom returned to the theme of reframing risk and opportunity. "It's about letting a little uncertainty into your life," he said. "Maybe a lot of people will tell me it's stupid to do this ... but I couldn't just stop because someone told me I had to. I needed to get back on the bike and fight."

Tom journeyed on, through Egypt and the Sudan, contracting malaria and struggling through an extremely challenging environment (there are no bike lanes in Cairo). This part of the trip was the most physically difficult experience he'd ever had, yet he remained hopeful throughout. He was on the road, fulfilling his mission-and he also knew he had someone he loved back in Armenia. Even with the broiling sun during the day and the mosquitoes at night, Tom felt happy.

The next stage of Tom's journey ended in Yemen, a place where few foreigners visit. Tom sat on a beautiful isolated beach and looked back on the year. "Did all of that really happen?" he wondered. He thought about setting out from England, naive but eager. He thought about losing his friends as they made different choices and moved on. He thought about the struggle he'd experienced and the challenges he'd overcome.

Most of all, he thought about Tenny. As beautiful as the beach was in Yemen, his mind remained fixed on the memories of their time falling in love.

He knew the time had come to end the trip. The adventure wasn't over, but part of it had reached its natural conclusion. The first time he turned back for Tenny, he did so consumed with uncertainty, conflicted between following his goal and pursuing someone he cared for deeply. This time he was going back convinced that he'd arrived at a point where it was right to choose love. He'd stared down his insecurities and the border guards of Yemen. He was going home ... to Armenia.

Tom and Tenny were married in a small ceremony that included Tom's friends from England. Further adventures would await them both, but the trajectory of Tom's life had changed. "I'm no longer the most important person in my life," he said. "Whatever the direction is going to be, it's going to be pursued together."

Remember If your family or close friends don't understand your dream, you need to find people who do.

Must a dream have only one owner? Not if two or more minds see the world from the same perspective.

Even with the support of others, it's hard to struggle through hards.h.i.+p without sufficient motivation of your own.

1 Note to parents: Adam Baker, whose story I told in my previous books, is quick to say that when traveling with kids, they will often adjust quicker than parents will. "When we took our one-year-old overseas," he says, "she was totally fine. We were the ones who had to learn to be flexible."

Dispatch

STRUGGLE.

I flew to Italy and rented a car at Fiumicino airport in Rome. I'd been to Italy several times before and was flying on to a stop in Africa the next day, but first I planned to drive to San Marino, the world's smallest republic, stay for the afternoon, and then drive back. I usually spend at least several days in each country, but San Marino is a small Italian town that managed to achieve diplomatic independence back when countries were still being formed. With a population of just thirty thousand people, it seemed like a fun little place to pop in to for a few hours.

If it didn't turn out to be a total disaster, it probably would have been fun.

I was already tired when I arrived at the rental-car counter, far from the arrivals area. Getting to the car itself required another extended hike to an off-site pickup location. As I settled into the vehicle-a tiny European model that felt like a go-kart-the plastic mechanism that opened the driver's side window snapped off. Oops. The window was stuck in a permanent position of uselessness: rolled down at least a third of the way, but unable to proceed any further. I decided to head out anyway-what could go wrong?

I set out for San Marino, a destination I thought was about two hours away. These were the days before GPS devices were common, so all I had was a marked-up map from the rental car place.

Two hours must have been the time it took for Formula 1 racers to get to San Marino. Me, I missed an exit and got lost, and then after I finally found the right exit, I got lost again. I went through a series of tollbooths, which probably made sense to Italian travelers but were confusing to an idiot like me. At one I was unable to find a receipt from a previous one, so the gruff toll agent simply issued me a bill for fifty euros. I feigned ignorance and drove away.

Fatigue was kicking in, the result of staying up all night on the overnight flight from Atlanta. At one point my eyes closed for a second and I awoke to find the car sc.r.a.ping the guardrail along the mountain. Yikes! With my heart pounding I pulled off at the next exit, looking for a place to park and nap for a while. Unfortunately, this plan didn't work either. It was the middle of the summer and hot. As soon as I turned off the AC, I immediately started sweating. I took my s.h.i.+rt off, then my pants, and tried to sleep in the backseat of the cramped car with my head against the luggage. It worked for about ten minutes.

Giving up, I stepped out of the car and began to put my clothes back on just as a young woman with two children drove by. The kids pointed at me and laughed. ("Oh, hi! Sorry. Scusi.") I got back behind the wheel and drove off quickly, frustrated at the lack of sleep and embarra.s.sed by my cameo as the half-naked tourist at the village rest stop.

Somehow I made it to San Marino, four hours after leaving Rome.

I drove back to the airport-four more hours-taking pride in getting to San Marino and learning to pay the tolls properly on the way back. The day's heat wave had turned into a rainstorm. Thanks to my window not rolling up all the way, I spent much of the journey getting soaked.

Thirty miles out from the airport, I ran low on fuel and had to stop at a gas station. Unfortunately, the gas station was unmanned, and the self-pay system wouldn't accept my credit card. Foiled again! I urged the little car on with effort until it limped into the airport. By now the car's side was sc.r.a.ped up from the guardrail encounter, the open window was still frozen in place a third of the way down, a bill of fifty euros for failing to pay the tolls was presumably due at some point, and the gas tank was bone dry.

I wrote a note: "Had some problems with this vehicle."

Returning the keys and note to the drop box, I headed for the terminal. My plane wasn't due to depart until early in the morning, but I looked forward to lying on a bench and resting as well as I could. It had been a crazy adventure, and for once I was glad it was over.

Alas, the terminal had been locked for the night and wouldn't open until six a.m.

Chapter 12.

Rebel for a Cause

The most subversive people are those who ask questions.

-JOSTEIN GAARDER Lesson: FIND WHAT TROUBLES YOU ABOUT THE WORLD, THEN FIX IT FOR THE REST OF US.

If something bothered you, what would you do about it? If your homeland were threatened, would you protest?

How much would you protest?

Let's say you were willing to do something. Would you write to a politician or attend a public meeting? Would you hold a sign and march?

Most of us have a limit to our activism. If we're troubled by something, we might ask "What can I do?" but we want the answer to be easy. We might send a small amount of money or help spread the word. If we're really troubled, we might try to recruit others to join our cause.

Some people go further.

Howard Weaver was born in Alaska, the son of restless American pioneers who'd moved progressively west from their native Switzerland. Right after college he began his career as a journalist for the Anchorage Daily News, covering the crime beat and following around a couple of known a.s.sociates of an organized crime family. Unfortunately, his tail-the-target skills were limited, and the mobsters easily tracked him down at home with an unambiguous message: "Don't do that again." After he went to a bar to meet them face-to-face, they laughed at how young he was and bought him a drink.

Howard continued to learn the ropes, getting better at building relations.h.i.+ps with sources and being more careful about following mobsters. His first attempt at challenging the voice of the status quo came as the Daily News was falling into dire straits. The paper had won the state's first Pulitzer Prize five months earlier, but times were hard and the paper lacked the resources of its main compet.i.tor, the Anchorage Times. While the News sought to present a balanced editorial voice, the Times was pro-business to the core. In the minds of many young and progressive-minded journalists, the Times wasn't just a compet.i.tor. It was the enemy.

Walking away with three friends from the Daily News, a good paper that had run out of money, Howard cofounded the Alaska Advocate, a sc.r.a.ppy compet.i.tor with activist impulses. Beginning with just $5,000-the pooled sum of four $1,250 contributions from the founders-the paper strove to provide an alternative to the big-business voice of the Times.

Denied traditional funding from local banks, Howard and his cofounders created a crowdfunding campaign long before Internet fund-raising appeals became common. The youthful team decided to sell unregistered stock, despite not knowing how such a thing worked. Howard went to the stationery store and bought the nicest blank stock certificates he could find, also picking up an embosser for an official seal. The others went door-to-door in Anchorage and other cities to presell subscriptions.

Decades later, their pitch seems amusing and far-fetched: "Would you like to subscribe to a paper that doesn't exist?" But in just a few months they'd acquired a further $10,000 in seed money and were ready to get started. The first issue hit the press with much celebration by the small team.

The Advocate had little money after paying expenses at the printing press, and the staff worked for little or no pay. To feed themselves, they attended state functions, scrounging free food at buffets and free drinks at receptions whenever possible.1 Despite the limited funding, the team was enthusiastic and worked late into the night. The whole point was to build something, to be part of taking down a giant while armed only with the truth.

The upstart journalists ran free, pus.h.i.+ng limits wherever they could. When the Times ran a headline saying that the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was safe from sabotage (a questionable claim that was being pushed by big oil), the Advocate staff drove to a central area of pipeline and set off a fake explosion, complete with smoke grenades that sent dark plumes into the sky. Nothing happened-which was exactly what they expected. They then claimed that the Times story was incorrect, since no one even bothered to check on what seemed like a damaging explosion.

There was no shortage of energy or chutzpah. Still, these antics were more interesting than effective. Howard and his merry pranksters were having fun, but "fighting the man" was a tough business strategy. Moreover, in attacking the Times and "big business," they had inadvertently offended most of Alaska's largest companies, which might have been persuaded to support the paper by buying ads. Every week, Howard held a meeting with the bookkeeper to determine which bills could be paid and which should be deferred. The battle to stay afloat came to an end shortly after the Advocate's two-year anniversary. What little money they had was drying up, and the paper folded.

Never Say Die

Fortunately for Howard, the story wasn't over. His old paper, the Daily News, had been sold to a California company that was prepared to invest in making it a more serious compet.i.tor. The opportunity to provide an alternative media outlet for Alaskans was up for grabs, and Howard returned to the new Daily News, where he was now in charge of writing editorials and building a new team. At thirty years old, he once again had in his sights the goal of taking down the establishment newspaper.

For the next thirteen years, Howard and the Daily News team worked to produce a newspaper that would provide better news coverage than the Times, and eventually surpa.s.s them.

Slowly, the tide began to turn. The Daily News won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of alcohol abuse and suicide among native populations. As the team continued to increase the quality and quant.i.ty of local reporting, the Times grew more callous-and readers noticed. Every goal has a way to measure success, and in the Great Alaska Newspaper War there was a clear metric: daily subscribers. In the early days, the circulation at the Daily News hovered around ten thousand. By the time Howard's team made their second attempt, they had more than twenty thousand readers. The Times had always treated the News with condescension, but now they had good reason to be worried. All of a sudden, the newspaper world in the mainland United States, which had never cared much about Alaska, was paying attention.

What was special about Alaska? There were essentially two competing stories. The story from the Times, the establishment paper, was a story of big oil. Environmental causes were given short shrift or entirely ignored. The plight of native Alaskans, who often struggled with poverty and health problems, was put down to character defects, playing to the latent racism of some in the business community. The other story was one of respect for all Alaskans, and a desire to tell the truth-something you'd expect from a newspaper, but wasn't always common at the Times. Howard spoke of his team's values as "an enduring belief that telling the truth would change things. The people can decide for themselves, but you can't lie to the people."

When the Exxon Valdez supertanker shuddered into Prince William Sound, disgorging millions of barrels of oil and creating one of the world's worst environmental disasters, the coverage of the two papers was markedly different. The News devoted weeks of continual front-page coverage to the disaster and cleanup efforts. But over at the Times, the environmentalists were largely ignored, and an editorial stated that the cleanup would be completed in a matter of days. (It took years.) One week after the tanker struck the reef, the Times was ready to move on and began s.h.i.+fting coverage to the inner sections of the paper. When Exxon hired thousands of temporary workers in a frantic effort to clean up, the Times labeled it a "silver lining ... an economic bonanza" and "a positive jolt for the economy."

The Valdez response further galvanized the team at the News, which by then had taken a commanding lead in the newspaper wars. (The News' Sunday circulation was seventy-two thousand versus The Times' circulation of forty-one thousand.) The Times played dirty, buying copies of their own paper to boost the reported circulation numbers, and running puff profile pieces on executives whose firms had agreed to purchase subscriptions in bulk for their employees.

It was a desperate, losing battle for the former giant, and in May 1992 it all came to an end. In a shock to the staff of both papers, the owner of the Times finally capitulated. The negotiation took less than a week to complete, with the owner agreeing to close the Times and sell its a.s.sets to the News in exchange for his own editorial page in the News for the next three years.

The newspaper war was over. The giant had fallen. Howard and the Anchorage Daily News had won.

Doing It All Yourself

As laudatory as Howard's years-long fight for Alaska's citizens was, he at least had the compensation of working with a dedicated team. He drew strength from working closely with others who shared the same pursuit. But what if you're confronting powerful adversaries as an army of one?

That was the case with Miranda Gibson.

A thirty-year-old Australian from the island of Tasmania, Miranda was troubled by the spread of industrial logging in her homeland's ancient forests. As a child, Miranda had walked through forests thick with hundred-year-old trees that were now being felled at an alarming rate, despite the area's having been nominated as a World Heritage site. Miranda believed there was an imbalance of power in favor of multinational logging companies, which were seemingly unaccountable to local populations. Other people were troubled, too, but few were willing to sacrifice to create real change.

Unlike most of us, Miranda didn't limit her protest efforts to firing off a few emails or donating to an environmental group. She decided to become a living example of activism, doing whatever she could to bring awareness to the cause and stop the industrial logging. Her means of protest? She climbed to the top of a sixty-meter-high eucalyptus tree ... and told the world she'd stay there until the problem was solved.

What's life like in the top of a eucalyptus tree? Well, the environment is fairly active. An installed platform provides a vantage point to observe a bustle of activity. You can look out at the fading light of the day and see Tasmanian devils causing trouble on the ground floor. Owls begin to awaken and say h.e.l.lo to their neighbors. Most of the inhabitants of the forest aren't accustomed to sharing s.p.a.ce with humans, but after you stay for months, they get used to you.

Outside visitors come and go, making their way up to say h.e.l.lo through an improvised pulley system. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, supportive messages arrive from all time zones.

But the visitors, the messages, and even the noise from the owls are blips on a continuous radar of monotony. Mostly, there's a lot of solitude. "Sometimes it gets lonely up here," Miranda told me by email in what seemed like the understatement of the century.

Miranda set up camp in the tree and began chronicling the activities of the forest with a worldwide audience. Her actions brought quick short-term relief. The loggers, not wis.h.i.+ng to wage a moral battle with a young woman living in a tree and receiving global attention, left the immediate area.

But how long was she prepared to stay? The goal wasn't just to get the loggers to disperse, but to make it illegal or impossible for them to return. In other words, this wasn't a short-term project. Miranda stayed in the tree for weeks, and then months. The seasons changed and she was still there. An entire year pa.s.sed, and she hadn't moved.

Miranda corresponded with me around Day 400 in her protest. She'd recently celebrated her second Christmas high above the earth.

I wanted to know more, so I asked her if we could speak by phone. "Even better," she said. Miranda is equipped with perhaps the world's only Wi-Fi hot spot at the top of a hundred-year-old tree, so we arranged a Skype session. "Why do this?" I asked, through a surprisingly strong video connection. "Why you?"

"This is what I knew I could do," she said. "Nothing else seemed to get attention."

When Miranda climbed the tree and set up "camp" at the top, she definitely got attention. Even better, the loggers continued to stay away.

Worth Living For

One online commenter wondered about Miranda Gibson's motivations: "Is she doing this to make up for something lacking in her personal life?" But you could ask the same thing about anyone devoted to a cause. Who's to say why anyone cares about anything? If you're willing to spend a year living in a tree, you have to really believe in something.

When I was a kid, I sat on the back row at a lot of dramatic late-night church services.

Often the preacher or evangelist would tell a story about our fellow believers in Russia, China, or Cuba (Communist countries were seemingly interchangeable) being surrounded by soldiers outside a church and forced to recant their faith or risk execution.