The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

The Squid Hunter
CHASING THE SEA’S MOST ELUSIVE CREATURE

On a moonless January night in 2003, Olivier de Kersauson, the French yachtsman, was racing across the Atlantic Ocean, trying to break the record for the fastest sailing voyage around the world, when his boat mysteriously came to a halt. There was no land for hundreds of miles, yet the mast rattled and the hull shuddered, as if the vessel had run aground. Kersauson turned the wheel one way, then the other; still, the gunwales shook inexplicably in the darkness. Kersauson ordered his crew, all of whom were now running up and down the deck, to investigate. Some of the crew took out spotlights and shone them on the water, as the massive trimaran-a three-hulled, hundred-and-ten-foot boat that was the largest racing machine of its kind, and was named Geronimo, for the Apache warrior-pitched in the waves.

Meanwhile, the first mate, Didier Ragot, descended from the deck into the cabin, opened a trapdoor in the floor, and peered through a porthole into the ocean, using a flashlight. He glimpsed something by the rudder. “It was bigger than a human leg,” Ragot later told me. “It was a tentacle.” He looked again. “It was starting to move,” he recalled.

He beckoned Kersauson, who came down and crouched over the opening. “I think it’s some sort of animal,” Ragot said.

Kersauson took the flashlight, and inspected for himself. “I had never seen anything like it,” he told me. “There were two giant tentacles right beneath us, lashing at the rudder.”

The creature seemed to be wrapping itself around the boat, which rocked violently. The floorboards creaked, and the rudder started to bend. Then, just as the stern seemed ready to snap, everything went still. “As it unhooked itself from the boat, I could see its tentacles,” Ragot recalled. “The whole animal must have been nearly thirty feet long.”

The creature had glistening skin and long arms with suckers, which left impressions on the hull. “It was enormous,” Kersauson recalled. “I’ve been sailing for forty years and I’ve always had an answer for everything-for hurricanes and icebergs. But I didn’t have an answer for this. It was terrifying.”

What they claimed they saw-a claim that many regarded as a tall tale-was a giant squid, an animal that has long occupied a central place in sea lore; it has been said to be larger than a whale and stronger than an elephant, with a beak that can sever steel cables. In a famous scene in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Jules Verne depicts a battle between a submarine and a giant squid that is twenty-five feet long, with eight arms and blue-green eyes-“a terrible monster worthy of all the legends about such creatures.” More recently, Peter Benchley, in his thriller “Beast,” describes a giant squid that “killed without need, as if Nature, in a fit of perverse malevolence, had programmed it to that end.”

Such fictional accounts, coupled with scores of unconfirmed sightings by sailors over the years, have elevated the giant squid into the fabled realm of the fire-breathing dragon and the Loch Ness monster. Though the giant squid is no myth, the species, designated in scientific literature as Architeuthis, is so little understood that it sometimes seems like one. A fully grown giant squid is classified as the largest invertebrate on Earth, with tentacles sometimes as long as a city bus and eyes about the size of human heads. Yet no scientist has ever examined a live specimen-or seen one swimming in the sea. Researchers have studied only carcasses, which have occasionally washed ashore or floated to the surface. (One corpse, found in 1887 in the South Pacific, was said to be nearly sixty feet long.) Other evidence of the giant squid is even more indirect: sucker marks have been spotted on the bodies of sperm whales, as if burned into them; presumably, the two creatures battle each other hundreds of feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

The giant squid has consumed the imaginations of many oceanographers. How could something so big and powerful remain unseen for so long-or be less understood than dinosaurs, which died out millions of years ago? The search for a living specimen has inspired a fevered competition. For decades, teams of scientists have prowled the high seas in the hope of glimpsing one. These “squid squads” have in recent years invested millions of dollars and deployed scores of submarines and underwater cameras, in a struggle to be first.

Steve O’Shea, a marine biologist from New Zealand, is one of the hunters-but his approach is radically different. He is not trying to find a mature giant squid; rather, he is scouring the ocean for a baby, called a paralarva, which he can grow in captivity. A paralarva is often the size of a cricket.

“Squid, you see, hatch thousands of babies,” O’Shea told me in early 2004, when I called him at his office at the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute, at the Auckland University of Technology. “Most of these will get eaten up by larger predators, but during periods of spawning the sea should be filled with an absolutely fantastic amount of these miniature organisms. And, unlike the adults, they shouldn’t be able to dart away as easily.”

Rival hunters once viewed his plan skeptically: if no one could find the animal when it was sixty feet long, how could anyone discover it when it was barely an eighth of an inch? Lately, though, many have come to see O’Shea’s strategy as a potential breakthrough. “It offers several advantages,” Clyde Roper, an American who is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on squid, told me. Roper is a giant-squid hunter himself, who once descended underwater in a steel cage, in search of his quarry. “First, you could find the juvenile at shallower depths. That makes it a lot easier to catch. Furthermore, there are more of them around, because at that stage, even though mortality is high, the adult female will release up to four million eggs. That’s a hell of a lot of baby giant squid running around.” He added, “It’s a matter of a numbers game, pure and simple.”

In 1999, O’Shea studied what few had ever seen-the corpse of a baby Architeuthis, which was discovered off New Zealand. He described its curious morphology: two eyes spread disconcertingly far apart; a parrot-like mouth concealing a raspy, serrated tongue; eight arms extending outward from a torpedo-shaped head. Each elastic limb was lined with hundreds of suckers, ringed with sharp teeth. The skin was iridescent, and filled with chromatophores-groups of pigment cells-that allowed it to change colors. A funnel near its head could shoot out clouds of black ink. The specimen also had two extraordinary-looking clubbed tentacles. (When a giant squid is mature, it can stretch up to thirty feet.)

Armed with this rare expertise, O’Shea had spent the past five years mapping out where to find a baby giant squid and puzzling over how to catch one and grow it in a tank. This year, he told me, he would venture out during the summer nights of the Southern Hemisphere, when giant squid released their babies. “Come on down, mate,” he said. “We’ll see if we can’t find the bloody thing and make history.”

The bodies of dead giant squid have been found in nearly every ocean: in the Pacific, near California; in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Newfoundland and Norway; and in the Indian, south of South Africa. But no place is considered better for hunting giant squid than the waters around New Zealand. It is here that currents from the tropics and Antarctica converge, and the resulting diversity of marine life creates an abundance of plankton for squid to feed on. And it is here that, in recent years, more dead giant squid have been recovered than anywhere else.

I arrived in Auckland on a morning in late February, 2004, and O’Shea greeted me at the airport. He looked much younger than his age, thirty-eight. He wore khaki pants and a khaki-colored shirt, a uniform that evoked a safari ranger. He is small and trim, and has brown hair, which was sticking up as if he had just run his fingers through it. Peering through spectacles that made his eyes seem abnormally large, he confessed with some embarrassment that he had come for me the previous day. “I’ve been preoccupied with everything that’s happening,” he said.

He spoke in a soft yet intense murmur, and whenever I addressed him he would turn his head sideways, so that I was talking directly into his right ear. (Later, he told me that he had damaged his left ear in a diving accident.) He reached into his wallet and pulled out his business card; beside his name was a picture of an iridescent squid. While I was looking at it, he grabbed one of my bags and hurried to his truck, which, as soon as he opened the driver’s door, exhaled a strange, pungent odor. “I do apologize,” he said, as he rolled down the windows. “You’ll find that everything around me smells of dead squid and ciggies.” In the back seat was a metal pole that was three feet long, with a net on the end. I soon discovered that he carried it with him wherever he went, often slung over his shoulder, as if he were a butterfly hunter.

Over the next few days, we began making preparations for our maiden voyage. At one point, we were speeding down the highway, heading to the store for supplies, when he slammed on the brakes and reversed, in the middle of traffic. “I almost forgot,” he said, parking in a lot that overlooked a harbor. He leaped out with the net and darted down a wharf, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He leaned over the edge, the winds buffeting his face, and held the net high over his head. For a moment, he didn’t move or breathe. “There,” he said, and lunged with the net, slashing at the water. As he pulled the net in, his pant legs wet with spray, I glimpsed a dozen silvery sprat-a minnow-like fish-dancing in the mesh. “I know I look a bit like a bugger,” he said. “But these things are rather important.”

After he had flung the net into the water several more times (“Believe it or not, there is a technique to this,” he said), he returned to his truck and tossed the sprat into a white bucket in the back seat. We travelled farther down the road, the sprat jostling behind us, and eventually stopped at an aquarium called Kelly Tarlton’s Antarctic Encounter and Underwater World. (In its brochures, O’Shea was hailed as the “world-renowned squid man.”)

He grabbed the bucket, and we headed inside. “This is where I keep them,” he told me. He led me into a damp room with fluorescent lights, in which there was a round glass tank; inside, darting from side to side, were seventy baby squid, each an inch long. O’Shea explained that these squid, which are found in coastal areas, were a smaller species than Architeuthis. “Look at them,” he said. “They’re bloody marvellous, aren’t they?”

O’Shea is one of the few people in the world who have succeeded in keeping not only coastal but also deep-sea squid alive in captivity. Unlike an octopus, which, as he put it, “you can’t kill, no matter how hard you try,” a squid is highly sensitive to its environment. Accustomed to living in a borderless realm, a squid reacts poorly when placed in a tank, and will often plunge, kamikaze-style, into the walls, or cannibalize other squid.

In 2001, during a monthlong expedition at sea, O’Shea caught a cluster of paralarval giant squid in his nets, but by the time he reached the docks all of them had died. He was so distraught that he climbed into the tank, in tears, and retrieved the corpses himself. “I had spent every day, every hour, trying to find the paralarvae, and then they died in my grasp,” he told me. For two years, he was so stricken by his failure that he refused to mount another expedition. “I knew if I failed again I would be finished,” he recalled. “Not just scientifically but physically and emotionally.”

He couldn’t stop wondering, though, about what had happened in the tank. His wife, Shoba, a computer scientist who was born in India, told me that sometimes in the middle of an unrelated conversation he would suddenly say, “What did I do wrong?” O’Shea became determined to correct what he called “my fatal mistake,” and began a series of painstaking experiments on other species of juvenile deep-sea squid. He would subtly alter the conditions of captivity: tank size, intensity of light, oxygen levels, salinity. He discovered that the tank in which he had stored his paralarvae during the expedition had two lethal flaws: it had a rectangular shape, which, for some reason, caused the squid to sink to the bottom and die; and its walls were made of polyethylene, a plastic compound that, it turns out, is toxic to deep-sea squid. “Knowing what I know now, I feel like a fool,” he said. “It was like walking them to their execution.”

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, Clyde Roper managed to keep ocean-dwelling squid alive for fourteen days-then a record. O’Shea, using cylindrical tanks made of acrylic, had kept his latest coastal specimens alive for eighty days. Earlier, he had maintained a batch of deep-sea squid for more than seventy days, which he then returned to the wild, satisfied that his experiment was a success.

He held up his white bucket. “Watch this,” he said, and dumped the sprat into the tank. Though the fish were bigger than the squid, the squid shot toward them, with their arms curved over their heads, hiding their tentacles; they looked metallic, except for their bulging green eyes. Then the squids’ arms sprang open, and their tentacles exploded outward, lashing their prey. The fish squirmed to break free, but the squid engulfed them in a web of arms. They drew their frantic prey into their beaks, and the squids’ stomachs turned bright red as they filled with the blood of the fish. Staring into the tank, I imagined what a full-grown giant squid might look like swallowing its prey.

When the squid finished eating, O’Shea said, “If I can keep these squid alive, there’s no reason I can’t keep the giant alive. I’ll just need a bigger tank.”

He was nervous about what would happen to his squid during our expedition-he had left the animals alone for only one day, on Christmas-and he anxiously arranged with an employee at the aquarium to care for them in his absence. “You need to treat them with reverence,” he said.

We then headed to his university office, where he had to gather various things for the expedition. It was in an attic-like space, and seemed entirely devoted to what he described as his “lunatic obsession.” Pasted to the walls and stacked on tables were pictures, many of which he had sketched himself, of giant squid, colossal squid, broad squid, warty squid, leopard squid. In addition, there were squid toys, squid key chains, squid journals, squid movies, and squid-related newspaper clippings (“WARNING! GIANT FLYING SQUID ATTACKING VESSELS OFF AUSTRALIA”). On the floor were dozens of glass jars filled with dead squid that had been preserved in alcohol, their eyes and tentacles pressing against the glass.

Many squid scientists wait for decades before getting their hands on the remains of an Architeuthis. O’Shea, however, has developed a large network of fishermen informants, and in the last seven years has collected a hundred and seventeen corpses. Together, these specimens offer a clearer picture of the giant squid. O’Shea has concluded that although the animals could be as heavy as a thousand pounds, most weigh between a hundred and four hundred pounds. (Females are typically heavier than males.) His squid collection also provided some of the first clues about the animal’s diet. In an article recently published in the New Zealand-Journal of Zoology, O’Shea documented the “gut contents” of his specimens, which included arrow squid and chunks of another Architeuthis (“proof of cannibalism”).

In another recent experiment, O’Shea dissected a squid’s statolith: a bonelike particle in the animal’s ear that helps the animal balance itself. A statolith builds up rings of calcium deposits over time, he explained, and, like the rings on tree trunks, the layers of bone might help scientists determine a squid’s age and growth rate.

Initially, O’Shea told me, he had thought that he would dissect his corpses in his office. But, after he made an incision in one, the specimen released a noxious odor, a mixture of rotting flesh and ammonium (which keeps the animal buoyant in the water). Students and faculty fled the building, and he was soon forbidden to make further dissections there. “I became quite unpopular after that,” he said.

He began to pick up various jars. “Oh, here it is,” he said, holding up what appeared to be a stem of tiny grapes.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The eggs from the ovary of a giant squid. I have a freezer full of ’em.”

The phone rang. He stared at it without moving. “They’ll only want something,” he said.

He stuck a pair of tweezers inside the jar, pulled out a strand of eggs, and placed it under a microscope. “Go ahead, mate, take a look,” he said. When I looked into the eyepiece, I could see at least a hundred eggs, each no more than two millimetres wide. O’Shea said that he planned to attach the eggs, which may produce pheromones, to an underwater camera, in the hope of luring a giant squid close enough to be captured on film.

He sat at his computer, typed for a few minutes, then stopped abruptly and ran out of the office. He returned moments later, carrying two hula hoops. “We’re almost ready,” he said.

The phone rang again. “Oh, bloody hell,” he said, and let it ring. He picked up another jar, this one containing two black shells that appeared to lock together. “It’s the beak of a giant squid,” he said. I ran my finger along its sharp edge, which pricked my skin. He said he had found it inside the stomach of a sperm whale.

He began to race around again, and before long his arms were filled with a box of specimen jars, the hula hoops, a net, a hammer, a rope, a worn leather briefcase that was only half buckled, and several rolled-up maps. “O.K., I think we’re about ready,” he said. “I just need a smoke, and we’ll be off.”

For months, he had been carefully working out our destination, studying squid migration patterns as well as satellite readings of water currents and temperatures. His plan was to go south, where he had found the para-larvae before. At the last minute, however, he changed his mind. “We’re going north,” he said. As we got back in his truck, he added, “I should warn you, there’s a bit of a cyclone coming our way.”

For as long as sailors have been going out to sea, they have been returning with stories of monsters. The Bible speaks of “a dragon that is in the sea;” the Roman encyclopedia “Naturalis Historia” tells of an enormous “polyp” that was “smeared with brine and had a terrible smell.” As the science writer Richard Ellis demonstrates in his 1998 book, “The Search for the Giant Squid,” from these disparate accounts emerged a common portrait of a singular beast: a huge sea creature, with fearsome appendages-arms or horns or feet or legs or tails-that jutted out of its head. In the Odyssey, Homer describes a beast called the Scylla:

She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down

and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,

each head barbed with a triple row of fangs…

No mariners yet can boast they’d raced their ship

past Scylla’s lair without some mortal blow.

In Norway, sailors sometimes reported sightings of a tentacled predator, which they dubbed the Kraken. (The word is a colloquial term for a tree with the roots still attached.) In 1755, Bishop Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan included the animal in his “Natural History of Norway,” claiming that the Kraken was the size of a “floating island,” with horns as long as a ship’s mast. He went on, “It seems these are the creature’s arms, and, it is said, if they were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom.”

Meanwhile, American whalers were exchanging their own stories of a “devilfish.” In 1851, Herman Melville, who had worked for three years on a whaling ship, published “Moby Dick,” in which he describes a sailor who is witness to “the most wondrous phenomenon”: a “vast pulpy mass” with “innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.”

Around the same time, Johannes Japetus Smith Steenstrup, an eminent Danish zoologist, decided to investigate the rumors himself. As Steenstrup sorted through the available evidence, he was drawn in particular to several accounts of a strange beast caught in the Øresund Strait in the fifteen-forties, and brought to the king of Denmark, at whose court it was preserved in a dried state as “a rarity and a wonder.” Named a “sea monk,” because its smooth-looking head evoked men of the cloister, it resembled, in an original sketch, a large squid. In an 1854 lecture, Steenstrup declared that the sea monk, like the Kraken, was “firstly a cephalopod”-a classification term which derives from the Greek words for “head” and “foot,” and refers to animals whose tentacles sprout from their head. To the amazement of his audience, Steenstrup then held up a glass jar containing the jaws of a giant squid, which he said had been retrieved from a dead specimen off the coast of Iceland. He named the creature Architeuthis (“ruling squid”)-marking, as Ellis has noted, “the official passage of the giant squid from the realm of fable into the scientific literature.”

Just as seamen had previously exaggerated the evidence for the giant squid’s existence, the scientific community now exaggerated the lack of it. Most scientists were still disputing Steenstrup’s findings when, in November, 1861, the crew of the French steamship Alecton, in the middle of the Atlantic, saw a Kraken rise up before them. The captain decided that he had to capture it, and ordered his men to fire their muskets. The bullets seemed to have little effect, so they hurled harpoons, which appeared to glance off it. Finally, they wrapped a noose around its tail, but, as they began to haul the creature on board, its enormous weight caused the rope to slice through its boneless flesh. All that remained was a piece of the tail, which was soon dispatched, along with a detailed report, to the French Academy of Sciences. The report inspired Jules Verne’s depiction of a menacing giant squid, but it did little to secure the organism a certified place in the animal kingdom. Arthur Mangin, a French zoologist, declared that the rotting tail was the remains of a sea plant, and urged “the wise, and especially the man of science, not to admit into the catalogue those stories which mention extraordinary creatures… the existence of which would be… a contradiction of the great laws of harmony and equilibrium which have sovereign rule over living nature.”

Scientists continued to doubt Steenstrup’s thesis until one day in 1873, when a fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland saw a creature floating on the ocean’s surface and struck it with a hook. The animal was alive, and reached up and tried to seize him; the fisherman then grabbed an axe. Over the years, the story was embellished, but one fact was undeniable: the fisherman returned to shore with a tentacle from a giant squid, which was nineteen feet long. It was placed in a museum, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where the public could see it. At last, even the most ardent skeptic was forced to admit that the Kraken was real.

As the winds and rains from the cyclone began to descend on New Zealand, O’Shea stood in his back yard beside his boat, which rested on a trailer. The boat was not exactly what I had imagined it to be. It was barely twenty feet long and seven feet wide, with an outboard motor. There was no galley or head, and no place to sleep, except for a forward berth the size of a broom closet. “I suppose you were expecting one of those American yachts, weren’t you?” O’Shea said with a smile.

Initially, he had planned to charter a vessel with a traditional squid squad-a professional crew and a team of scientists. Squid hunters from Japan, America, and Europe crisscrossed the sea in this manner, and O’Shea had been on such a voyage when he found his paralarvae. But such expeditions cost millions of dollars, and O’Shea is an academic who must cobble together funding for his research from private sources, like the Discovery Channel. He had already sunk a significant portion of his family’s modest savings into his quest, and as a result he was unable to afford a hearing aid, among other necessities. “If I don’t find a giant squid soon, I’ll be ruined,” he told me.

Yet, according to other hunters, part of the genius of O’Shea’s scheme is that it can be executed relatively cheaply. Juvenile squid swim in shallower waters than adults, and he didn’t need to descend, say, in a submarine. He also didn’t require a ship that could accommodate a huge tank. By December, O’Shea had decided that he would go forward using his own fishing boat, and he whittled down his crew to three people: O’Shea, myself, and a graduate student in marine biology named Peter Conway, a gentle thirty-two-year-old vegetarian who rolled his own cigarettes and had never been on such an expedition. “The big swells make me a wee queasy,” he confessed at one point.

O’Shea told me that he was not willing to wait for the cyclone to pass: there was only a short period each year during which adult squid migrated into the region to spawn and release their eggs. And so we set off in the truck, with the trailer in tow, and headed north, listening to Neil Diamond’s slightly nasal tenor on the stereo. (“He’s bloody brilliant, isn’t he?” O’Shea said.)

Within a few hours, the exquisite landscape of New Zealand, with its long white shores and volcanic hills and sheep farms, was obscured in blackness as the storm intensified. The trailer rocked in the wind, which was approaching gale force. According to news reports, a nearby river had burst its banks, forcing local residents to evacuate. Civil-defense teams were being called up, and the power had gone out in several cities, including Auckland.

The police were warning motorists to stay off the roads, but we continued farther up the northern peninsula, past towns with Aboriginal names like Te Kao and Te Hapua, until we arrived at a wooden cabin, in the afternoon. We would stay here during the day, O’Shea explained, then launch the boat at night, when the squid rose upward in the water column to feed.

The cabin had no phone and no heat, and it was musty inside, as if it had been abandoned for years. “Not bloody much, is it?” O’Shea said, as he brushed some ants off the kitchen table. He didn’t seem too dismayed, though, and while Conway and I unpacked our bags he spread his equipment across the floor and began to assemble a peculiar form. First, he took a round plywood board that was the size of a stop sign and drilled holes around its perimeter. He wove cable ties through the holes, then attached the board to a tube of fine-meshed netting that was large enough to accommodate him inside it. He was still working when Conway and I went to bed; when I got up the next morning, I found him in the same position. “It’s coming along nicely,” he said. A candle was burning beside him, and he held a sharp knife over the flame. Using the hot blade, he cut several holes into the sides of the net.

The slow, methodical work had put him in a reflective mood, and he told me how he first became interested in the giant squid. “It had never been my plan,” he said. “When I was four or five, my parents got divorced, and I was sent to live with my grandmother. I didn’t have many friends. I was one of these horribly geeky kids. I had glasses and a heart murmur and arthritis, and I spent all my time on the beach, looking for shells. I collected thousands of them. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I started to go out on commercial fishing boats in the summer to try to find the rarest kinds. I remember once, I was on this boat, and the fishermen pulled in this shell. I knew there were only one or two in all of New Zealand, and I let out this loud scream, and the captain came down and yelled at me for screaming, but I didn’t mind. I was so excited to find it.”

He burned another hole in the net, filling the room with an acrid smell. He said, “After I graduated from the university with a doctorate in marine biology, I went to work for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. In 1996, I got a phone call saying that a fisherman had found a giant squid down in Wellington, and did I want it. I’d never seen one, so I raced down to the jetty, and took one look at it, and it was the biggest bloody thing I’d ever seen. I knew it wouldn’t fit in the car, and so I borrowed a trailer, and strapped it down with the tentacles draped over the car.

“Before long, the press got wind of it, and they started calling and asking me all these questions, and I didn’t know anything about the giant squid. I spouted a bunch of nonsense, and I soon realized no one really knew anything about this blasted thing. It was this great unknown, this complete mystery. And I’ve been trying to solve it ever since.”

He seemed slightly embarrassed by his candor. “What we need now are Coke bottles,” he said. He had brought several empty one-litre containers with him; he sliced each bottle in half, so that the top part resembled a funnel. He inserted each funnel, the wide part facing out, into the holes that he had made in the mesh netting. He then sealed them in place with a glue gun. “We’re ready for the final touches,” he said. He slid a hula hoop inside the bottom end of the mesh sheath; the result looked like a Victorian skirt. Finally, he clamped the bottom of the net to a small glass container.

He climbed onto a chair and held the contraption up: it was roughly six feet long and cylindrical in shape, with a round hardwood top, a funnel-studded net draped along the sides, and a little glass jar dangling on the bottom. “Whaddaya think, chappies?” O’Shea asked Conway and me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A giant-squid trap.”

O’Shea pointed to the funnels excitedly, and explained that the para-larvae would swim through them and get trapped inside the net, eventually ending up in the glass jar. This rough-looking device had been carefully conceived: the net was made of extra-fine mesh, which would do less damage to the animals; the board was marine plywood, which would keep the net vertical in the water; and the Coke bottles were exactly the right size to trap the paralarvae. “It’s ugly as sin, I admit, but it should do the job,” he said, adding, “I’m a poor scientist, so it’s a bit of Steve O’Shea invention.”

He spent the rest of the day building a second trap, then announced that it was time to go hunting. The worst of the storm had blown out to sea, but the weather remained volatile, with gusting winds and dangerously high waves. Two surfers had drowned. “We’ll have to do some reconnaissance,” O’Shea said. Before sundown, we took a drive with the trailer, trying to find a safe place to launch the boat. We pulled into an inlet surrounded by volcanic cliffs. “This will have to do,” O’Shea said.

He backed the trailer down the beach, and we put the boat in the water. I climbed on board, and O’Shea and Conway followed. It was cold, but O’Shea was barefoot, and he was wearing only cutoff jeans and a baggy T-shirt. “Righteo, then,” he said, and gunned the engine.

O’Shea had no radar, but he had a navigational system with a small flickering display that signalled the location of the shore and the depth of the sea. It would be our only guide in the darkness.

“It’ll probably be too rough out there for any fishing boats,” O’Shea shouted over the noise of the engine. “But we’re going to need to be careful of container ships. They can come up pretty fast.” It was now twilight, and he squinted at one of the buoys that marked a safe route through the channel.

“What color is that?” he asked me.

“It’s green,” I said. “Can’t you see it?”

“I’m not just deaf,” he said. “I’m color-blind.”

As we left the harbor, it began to rain, and the smooth channel gave way to swells. The boat leaped over the crests, its aluminum hull vibrating.

“A bit rough, ain’t it?” Conway said.

“She’s sturdier than she looks,” O’Shea said of the vessel. He glanced at the forward berth. “Underneath those cushions are the life jackets. You don’t need to wear them, but just so you know where they are.”

The sun disappeared over the horizon, and for a while the sky released a flurry of bright colors, as if it had its own chromatophores. Then it grew dark, and the waves announced themselves not by sight but by sound, as they clapped against the bow. I slipped on my life jacket.

O’Shea said he knew just the spot for hunting, and he stared at the glowing dots on the navigational system. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“There,” he said, pointing into the distance.

I peered over the windshield and saw something shadowy looming over the waves, as if it were the prow of a ship. As we got closer, I realized that it was a large, jagged rock. More rocks became visible, hundreds of them, all jutting skyward. A channel, forty feet wide, flowed between the rocks, and the water stormed through this opening as if it were racing down a chute. O’Shea sped straight ahead. As we approached the rocks, the boat began to tremble while the swells climbed from ten to seventeen feet; the bow plunged downward, the boat sliding wildly in the water. “Hold on, mate,” O’Shea said. “Here comes a big one.”

The boat soared upward, and I felt momentarily suspended in the air, as if I were a cartoon character who had just stepped off a cliff. Then the boat fell straight down, and another wave crashed into it, sending us hurtling backward. My notebook and pen slid to the deck. The peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches we had packed for supper tumbled out of their containers. “We just need to make sure they don’t take us broadside,” O’Shea said.

The currents were pulling us toward the rocks, and I could hear the massive waves crashing into them. I was holding a flashlight, and I shone it in front of us: there was a twenty-foot wall of water. I turned around, and discovered that another enormous wall was pressing down on us from behind.

“You won’t find this in New York, will you, mate?” O’Shea said.

For a moment, I wondered if O’Shea was fully in command of his faculties. But we made it through the gap in the rocks, and he skillfully steered the boat into a protected inlet. It was indeed the perfect spot.

We dropped our anchor. O’Shea grabbed his homemade nets, and placed several glow sticks inside them. “The squid are drawn to the light,” he said. He tied the nets to a lead weight, which he then dropped in the water. We watched the light grow dimmer as the traps sank. “Well, let’s see what’s down there,” O’Shea said.

Though oceans cover three-quarters of the Earth-the Pacific alone is bigger than all the continents put together-the underwater realm has remained largely invisible to human beings. For centuries, there was no way for scientists to peer into the depths, no telescope that could gaze into the abyss. (A pearl diver can venture down no more than a hundred feet.) Until the nineteenth century, most scientists assumed that the deepest parts of the ocean-where the temperature was frigid, the pressure intense, and the light minimal-contained no life.

In 1872, the British government and the Royal Society launched the first major oceanic expedition, transforming a two-hundred-and-twenty-six-foot naval warship into a floating laboratory, equipped with microscopes and vats of pickling alcohol. Christened H.M.S. Challenger, the ship, with five scientists, roamed the globe for three and a half years. The crew was constantly dredging the ocean floor for specimens, and the work was repetitive, and brutal; two men went insane, two others drowned, and another committed suicide. The scientists, however, were enthralled with their discoveries. They catalogued more than forty-seven hundred new species-proving, as C. Wyville Thomson, the chief scientist, later noted, that living beings “exist over the whole floor of the ocean.”

The voyage gave rise to the field of oceanography, but it also exposed the twin obstacles that would impede underwater exploration for generations: prohibitive costs and primitive technology. Even when scientists could finance expeditions, their equipment allowed them to study animals only after hauling them on deck-the equivalent of looking at a human corpse, then trying to imagine it alive.

In the nineteen-thirties, two wealthy Americans, Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton, used twelve thousand dollars of their own money to design a hollow steel ball with two quartz peepholes, which they called a “bathysphere,” named after the Greek word for “deep.” The vessel, which was four and a half feet in diameter, was tethered to a ship with a cable; if it snapped, the men inside would die at the bottom of the sea.

In 1934, near Bermuda, Beebe and Barton went down five hundred feet, then a thousand feet more, as greater and greater pressure pushed against the steel walls; they stopped at three thousand and twenty-eight feet. It was far deeper than anyone had ever gone. At one point, Beebe peered out, and spotted something that was at least twenty feet long. Later, in his autobiography, “Half Mile Down,” he wrote, “Whatever it was, it appeared and vanished so unexpectedly and showed so dimly that it was quite unidentifiable except as a large, living creature.”

In 1960, the United States Navy dispatched its own team of scientists to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the ocean floor, in the Western Pacific. (It is seven times as deep as the Grand Canyon.) The voyage was considered among oceanographers to be the equivalent of landing on the moon, but America was caught up in the Cold War, and, because such exploration had little military relevance, similar projects were soon abandoned.

According to one recent study, as much as ninety-five per cent of the oceans remains unexplored. It is believed that the seas contain as many as ten million species, of which fewer than half have been identified. By the nineteen-sixties, the giant squid had become, for oceanographers, an emblem of all that was still unknown about the seas.

In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Frederick Aldrich, a marine biologist from Canada, formed the first official squid squad. He distributed posters around Newfoundland that bore an illustration of a giant squid and the words “WANTED! DEAD OR ALIVE.” On one hunting trip, he spent four days in a submersible that he had baited with raw tuna, but, like so many of his expeditions, this one was fruitless.

In the nineteen-nineties, as more squid hunters took up the chase, Clyde Roper decided to let the one animal that was known to prey on Architeuthis find it for him. For several years, in oceans ranging from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, he and his squad paddled out to sea in inflatable kayaks and delicately attached “crittercams”-specially designed underwater cameras-to the bodies of sperm whales. To Roper’s disappointment, the crittercams didn’t spy a single giant squid. In 1999, Roper, who is sixty-six, underwent a quadruple-bypass operation; though he has promised his family to desist from all the fund-raising that such expeditions require, he told me, “I’m hoping to make one more voyage.”

Meanwhile, the competition between rival squid squads has intensified. Xander Paumgarten, a publicist who helped to promote a 2000 expedition by Jacques Cousteau’s son Jean-Michel, told me, “There’s this all-out battle between these guys. Some of them totally hate each other.” Roper told me that many of the hunters now work in secret. O’Shea shares his research with several colleagues, whom he calls “gentlemen,” but there are some experts he calls “cannibals,” with whom he refuses to speak. “A lot of these people are vicious,” he said. “They want you to fail so they can be first.”

Several weeks before I ventured out with O’Shea, I joined the squid squad of Bruce Robison, one of O’Shea’s leading counterparts. Unlike other hunters, Robison has two underwater robots, which have superior imaging capabilities and speed through the water more quickly than divers or most submersibles. The robots belong to Robison’s employer, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which was founded, in 1987, by David Packard, the billionaire technology guru. Situated a hundred miles south of San Francisco, the institute has an annual budget of thirty million dollars. On the expedition I was joining, Robison and his squad planned to sink a robot worth ten million dollars in Monterey Canyon, the deepest underwater chasm along the continental United States.

Robison and his squad are “opportunists,” as he put it, meaning that they film more than just squid. (“If you only look for one animal,” he said, “you’ll always be disappointed.”) Nonetheless, the squad had planned to spend six days in the same general area where, in 1980, Robison came closer than perhaps anyone to capturing an adult Architeuthis. That day, he had been trawling with a net nearly two thousand feet down; he decided to bring the net to the surface, and snapped its steel jaws shut. The bars clamped down on the tentacle of a live giant squid. Before the net reached the boat, the tentacle had torn off-leaving only twelve feet of it. “There was this big thing hanging off the front of the net,” Robison recalled. “The suckers were still grasping.” Robison’s discovery offered the most accurate recording yet of a giant squid’s depth in the water column. “Until then, most people thought they were only near the bottom,” he said. Robison later dissected the tentacle and performed chemical analyses; the consistency of the tissue, and its high level of protein, led him to speculate that the giant squid was “a relatively strong swimmer.” Robison told me that he had taken a bite of its raw, rubbery flesh. “How could I not?” he said, adding, “It was bitter.”

When I arrived at the institute, Robison and his squad were already on board the ship. The vessel was named the Western Flyer, for a fishing vessel that John Steinbeck had sailed on during a 1940 expedition, a journey he later chronicled in “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” The Western Flyer was one of the most incredible ships I had ever seen. It was a hundred and seventeen feet long, with three layers of decks, and it had an unusual rectangular shape. Its boxlike frame rested on two pontoons, each running the length of the boat, allowing the Western Flyer to remain almost still in the roughest seas.

There were twenty-one people in Robison’s squad, among them computer scientists, marine biologists, chemists, and engineers. To my surprise, there seemed to be no one on deck when I stepped on board. As I opened the main door, though, I was greeted by a clatter of men and machines. In the center of the cavernous room, surrounded by crewmen communicating through headsets, was the remotely operated vehicle, or R.O.V. It was hanging from a cable attached to a crane; it was the size of a Volkswagen and weighed some eight thousand pounds. At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a jumble of wires. The front of the machine, or at least what I presumed was the front, had two large spotlights, which could be rotated. On the top of the machine was an outer shell with a single word painted on it: “TIBURÓN,” Spanish for “shark.”

“Welcome aboard,” Robison said.

Robison was standing near the R.O.V., coordinating much of the activity. He resembled an eighteenth-century whaling captain, with white hair and a white beard; even his eyebrows were inordinately thick and wild. He began to explain how the robot operated: a coated fibre-optic wire connected the ship to the R.O.V., sending signals back and forth. The machine was propelled by electric thrusters and had flotation devices that allowed it to hover with neutral buoyancy, much like a giant squid, despite weighing four tons. What’s more, the R.O.V. was outfitted with eight cameras, providing, as Robison put it, “a complete portrait of a three-dimensional universe.” He added, “Our mandate is to go and see what no one else can.”

He led me around the rest of the ship, which had a dining room, a computer room, a laboratory, and a freezer for preserving specimens. On the upper deck, along with the bridge, were quarters equipped with televisions, which displayed the Tiburon’s live feed. “The dirty secret is that you never have to get out of bed,” he said. He left me to settle in my own private room. I soon realized that the boat had already set sail: it cut so smoothly through the water that I hadn’t noticed it moving.

That afternoon, we drifted over the Monterey Canyon, and stopped to make our first probe. A team of half a dozen engineers and technicians prepared the Tiburon.

“How do we look on the starboard camera?” one asked.

“Good to go.”

“Do you have thrust?”

“Roger that.”

The crew stepped back and the lights on the Tiburon began to blink. A trapdoor slowly opened, revealing the ocean beneath, and the Tiburon hovered above it like a spaceship. The crane then lowered the R.O.V. into the turbulent water, its snubbed head pitching forward, its fibre-optic cable trailing behind it, like an endless tail.

I walked toward the stern and into the control room, where I expected to find Robison. It was dark, except for nearly two dozen glowing monitors, which broadcast color images from the Tiburon’s myriad cameras, each one capturing a different angle. Robison sat beside the pilot, who steered the R.O.V. with a joystick.

Strange gelatinous creatures began to appear, which gave off dazzling displays of bioluminescence. There was a crustacean that walked through the water like a daddy-longlegs spider, and fish with jaws that were unhinged. There was a Tiburonia granrojo, a red balloon-like jellyfish that Robison and his squad had discovered and named for the R.O.V., and that was one of hundreds of new species that the squad had uncovered. There was a diaphanous animal, which they still hadn’t identified, and called simply “the mystery mollusk.” And there was, when the Tiburon reached the soft, craggy bottom of the ocean, a constant snowfall of decomposing skeletons and microscopic organisms.

Over the next several days, as the Tiburon descended as deep as two miles, we saw hundreds of squid: blue-eyed ones, translucent ones, polka-dotted ones. Observing these squid in their natural habitat, Robison said, provided clues to the behavior of their giant relative. When a camera zoomed in on an individual squid, we could see water entering the muscular sac, or mantle, that contains the squid’s internal organs; it then inflated and contracted, shooting the water out through a funnel and propelling the squid like a bullet through the ocean. Watching the animals outrace the robot, I had a sense of why Clyde Roper once said of squid, “The only ones you catch are the slow, the sick, and the stupid.”

Another reason for their elusiveness is their unusually large eyes, which enable them to discern predators in places where light is nearly absent. (The giant squid’s eyes are thought to be the largest of any animal.) Squid also have highly developed brains for an invertebrate, and have nerve fibres that are hundreds of times thicker than those in human beings-allowing them to react in an instant. (For many decades, neuroscientists have relied on squid neurons for their research.) “By observing squid in their natural habitat, we have discovered that they are much more intelligent, much more complex than anything we suspected,” Robison said.

As we watched, the squid seemed to be using light patterns, colors, and postures as a means of communication. They didn’t just turn red or pink or yellow; ripples of color would wash across their bodies. And they would contort their arms into elaborate arrangements-sometimes balling them together, or holding them above their heads, like flamenco dancers. Robison explained that they use these movements and color changes to warn other squid of predators, to perform mating rituals, to attract prey, and to conceal themselves.

Several times, when the Tiburon got too close to them, the squid ejected streams of black ink. In the past, scientists assumed that it served solely as camouflage or a decoy. Robison told me that he and other scientists now believe the ink contains chemicals that disable predators; this would explain why he has seen deep-sea squid release black nimbuses in depths where there is no light. “As much as we know about squid, we still don’t know that much,” he said.

Robison noted that the behavior of giant squid, in particular, was poorly understood. No one knows just how aggressive giant squid are, whether they hunt alone or in packs, or whether, as legend has it, they will attack people as well as fish. After Robison caught the tentacle and descended in a submersible to the same spot, he said, “It occurred to me that there was a pissed-off squid out there with a grudge against me.” (Other scientists suspect that the giant squid’s violent reputation is undeserved; O’Shea, for one, contends that Architeuthis is probably a “gentle beast.”)

The expedition ended without a glimpse of Architeuthis, but, at one point, several jumbo squid did appear on the ship’s screens. They were only a fraction of the size of a giant squid-between five and eight feet in length and a hundred or so pounds-but they looked frighteningly strong. One night, several of the ship’s scientists dropped a jig, a device specially designed to lure squid, over the side of the boat. They caught two jumbo squid. As they reeled each squid in, screaming, “Pump him up!,” the weight and strength of the animals nearly pulled the men overboard. Several minutes later, Robison and I went to the ship’s laboratory, where a scientist held up one of the jumbo squid. The creature was nearly as long as Robison is tall, and its tentacles were still lashing and writhing. “Now imagine a giant squid with a tentacle thirty feet long,” he said.

After the squid was dissected, part of it was given to the cook. The next day, it appeared on a silver platter. “From beast to feast,” the chef said, as we sat down for supper.

“Shall we take a peek?” O’Shea said, leaning over the stern of the boat. It was after midnight, several hours since we had dropped the traps in the water; the rain had stopped, but a cold wind swirled around us. As the boat rocked in the waves, O’Shea pulled in the line, hand over hand, because the boat didn’t have winches. The traps weighed at least fifty pounds, and he climbed up on the side of the boat to get a better grip, his bare feet spread apart. As the first net emerged from the water, O’Shea shouted for Conway and me to haul it in, and we laid it on the deck, as icy water spilled around our feet. “Hurry, chappies,” O’Shea said. “Get the torch.”

Conway shined the flashlight into the net. There were no squid, but there were swarms of krill, and O’Shea seemed buoyed by the discovery. “We’re definitely in squid eating country,” he said.

He dropped the nets overboard again, anchoring them in place, and began the next phase of the hunt-towing a third, larger net behind the boat. “We’ll trawl for fifteen minutes at about one and a half knots,” O’Shea said. The maneuver was a delicate one, he explained: if he trawled too deep or not deep enough, the paralarvae would escape the net; if he trawled for too long, the net would suffocate what he caught. We drove the boat around for precisely fifteen minutes, then pulled in the net and dumped its contents-a thick, granular goop-into a cylindrical tank filled with seawater. The tank instantly lit up from all the bioluminescence. “There’s plenty of life in there, that’s for sure,” O’Shea said.

He found no Architeuthis in the tank, but he was undaunted. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” he said.

By all accounts, O’Shea is tireless and single-minded: he works eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and he no longer watches TV or reads newspapers. He never attends parties. “I’m not antisocial,” he said. “I just don’t socialize.” His sister told me, “We’d love him even if he chased mushrooms, but we just wish he’d spend the same emotion on people as he did on squid.” Shoba, his wife, who often calls him to remind him to eat lunch, said, “I don’t want him to stop. I just wish he could temper it a little bit and see that there are other things out there.”

People inevitably compare O’Shea’s quest to that of Captain Ahab. But, unlike Melville’s character, O’Shea does not think of the creature he pursues in grand symbolic terms. Indeed, he is constantly trying to strip the giant squid of its lore. He considers books like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” to be “rubbish;” his studies of dead specimens have led him to believe that the longest recorded measurement of a giant squid-fifty-seven feet-is apocryphal. “Now, if someone really wanted to prostitute the truth all they have to do is take the tentacle and walk and walk and walk,” he once told me. “The bloody things are like rubber bands, and you can make a forty-foot squid suddenly look sixty feet.” Unlike some other hunters, he thinks it is ridiculous to imagine that a giant squid could kill a sperm whale. He thinks of the giant squid as both majestic and mundane- with a precise weight, diet, length, and life span. He wants it, in short, to be real. “We have to move beyond this mythical monster and see it as it is,” O’Shea said. “Isn’t that enough?”

After a while, he stood and dropped the trawling net back in the water. We worked until after sunrise. When we still hadn’t found any squid, O’Shea said, “An expedition that begins badly usually ends well.”

At the cabin, Conway and I took a brief nap while O’Shea plotted our next course. In the afternoon, we ventured into town for supplies. O’Shea warned us not to use his real name; he had recently campaigned to shut down a nearby fishery in order to protect the wildlife, and he said that he had received several death threats. “This is quite dangerous country for me,” he said.

I wasn’t sure how seriously to take his warning, but, when I accidentally used his name, he became tense. “Careful, mate,” he said. “Careful.”

Later that day, O’Shea was standing on the cabin porch, smoking a cigarette, when a villager approached. “Are you the guy chasing them monsters?” he asked.

O’Shea looked at him hesitantly. “I’m afraid that would be me,” he said.

“I saw you on the telly, talking about them things,” the man said. He reached out his hand. “After I saw you, I named my cat Architeuthis.”

O’Shea brightened. “This mate here has a cat named Archie,” he told Conway and me.

O’Shea invited the man in for “a cuppa,” and soon he and the stranger were bent down over his maps. “They say you can find the big calamari out here,” the man said, pointing to a reef.

Before long, another villager stopped by and was offering his own advice. “I’d try over here,” he said. “Billy Tomlin said he once found a big dead one out in these parts.” O’Shea took in the information. Fishermen sometimes embroider the truth, he said, but they also know the local waters better than anyone else.

That night, we went out again. Although we continued to haul up enormous quantities of shrimp and krill-sometimes there were so many that they could barely move inside the tank-we found not a single squid.

As the night lengthened, O’Shea seemed, for the first time, to grow dispirited. “The weather’s causing havoc with the currents,” he said.

After each haul, he’d study his charts and choose a new spot with renewed hope-“This could be it,” he’d say-only to be disappointed again. When the sun rose, at six-thirty, casting its bright rays upon the sea, O’Shea raced the boat over to the two anchored traps. He said that he had often had the best luck at dawn; the creatures seemed to rear their heads before vanishing deep below. “Let’s see what we got,” he said, hauling the nets on board.

“Anything?” Conway asked.

O’Shea held one of the nets up to his eye, then dropped it in disgust. “Diddly,” he said.

“We have to go farther out,” O’Shea said the following night. We sped far into the Pacific, leaving the safety of the inlet behind. The hauls remained dismal; after each one, he aimed the boat farther out to sea, saying, “We have to go deeper, that’s all.”

Conway, who was looking increasingly pale, said, “Haven’t we gone out enough?”

“I know the squid are out there,” O’Shea said.

The less he found, the harder he seemed to work. He is not a big man, and his childhood illness had left his body somewhat brittle, yet he never slowed down as he pulled the net in with all its weight, then returned it to the water. His fingers were covered in blisters, his clothes were soaked through, and his glasses were stained with salt from the seawater.

“He’s a bit of a fanatic, isn’t he?” Conway said quietly.

As the cold nights wore on, we worked in a kind of fog. We were getting little sleep during the day, and it became harder to pay attention to the mounds of larval fish, shrimp, krill, and jellyfish; not even the sight of dolphins jumping in the waters nearby relieved the drudgery. At one point, I felt fatigued, and lay down in the forward berth. I could fit only if I bent my knees toward my chest. As I closed my eyes and listened to the waves smashing against the hull, I could hear O’Shea grunting as he pulled in another net and cursing when there was nothing inside.

On yet another night, at around four in the morning, as we pulled in the trawling gear and dropped the contents in the cylindrical tank, Conway shone a flashlight and asked, “What’s that?”

O’Shea peered inside, and blinked several times, trying to keep himself awake. “Heaven help us!” he shouted. “It’s a fucking squid!” He stared blearily into its eyeball. “It looks like Archie,” he told us.

Although the creature was only the size of my thumbnail, I could see it, too-its tentacles, its fins, its eyes, its arms, its bullet-shaped mantle.

“This could be your dream squid,” Conway said.

“Quick,” O’Shea said. “Let’s drain some of the krill before they crush it.”

He held the cylindrical tank in the air, his arms shaking from exhaustion, as the waves pounded the side of the boat. “Steady!” he yelled. It was hard to see in the darkness-there was no moonlight-and as he poured some of the contents into a strainer, struggling to balance against the violent waves, something happened.

“Where did it go?” O’Shea asked.

“I don’t know,” Conway said. “I can’t see it anymore.”

“Jesus Christ,” O’Shea said.

He grabbed a specially designed tank, which he had purchased expressly for transporting a baby giant squid, and poured the rest of the cylindrical tank’s contents inside it. “Where is the bloody thing?” he said. “Where is it?”

He reached in with his hand, stirring the water frantically. “It has to be here,” he said.

He pulled out one shrimp, then another, holding them under the light.

“It’s gone,” Conway said.

But O’Shea didn’t seem to hear. He sifted through the mounds of plankton, trying to find the baby squid’s microscopic tentacles. At last, he stumbled backward, and put his arms over his head. “It’s a fucking catastrophe,” he said.

He fell back in the captain’s chair, and sat motionless. I tried to think of something to say, but failed. “It was right there,” O’Shea said to himself. “I had it.”

After a while, he tried to drop the traps in the water again, but he no longer seemed able to muster his strength. “I can’t take it anymore,” he said, and disappeared into the forward berth.

That afternoon, O’Shea was sitting on the cabin porch, sipping a glass of whiskey. “Want a spot?” he asked.

“That’s all right,” I said.

He spoke in a whisper, and much more slowly than usual. He said he had pinpointed a new location to search, but I told him I thought I would stay behind and catch up on my work. He looked at me for a long moment. “That’s what always happens,” he said. “People get bored and give up. But I can’t pay any attention to what’s going on around me. I just have to stay focussed.”

He took a sip of his whiskey. “I can already hear the critics saying, ‘The great squid hunter lost his blasted squid again.’ Do you know how it feels when everything goes to custard like this?” He fell silent again, then added, “I’m not going to stop. I’m not going to give up. I don’t care if someone finds the squid first. I’ll still go until I find it myself.”

The next morning, when he pushed open the cabin door, he looked despairing. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

It was the end of the expedition; he had to go back to Auckland to lecture. We loaded up the gear and returned to the city. When we got there, O’Shea went to the aquarium to visit his specimens. In his absence, seventeen squid had died. The employee in whose care he had left them had posted a sign on the tank. It said, “They have a new trick… It’s called ‘jumping out of the tank and committing suicide!’”

O’Shea checked the temperature and salinity of the water in the tank, and offered the remaining squid some sprat. Then we drove to his house. As he got out of his car, he said, “You may want to take a look at this.”

He led me into the garage, which was cluttered with tools and appliances. He started to clear off an enormous box. “You better put this on,” he said, and handed me a gas mask.

I slipped it over my face, and he opened the top of the bin. Inside was a dead giant squid. “It’s a twenty-seven-foot male,” he said.

The carcass was ivory white and was floating in embalming fluids; its arms were so long that they were bunched together in folds, and its suckers were the size of a child’s fist. “I’m preparing this one for a museum,” he said.

He told me that he had buried one squid corpse in his garden, under a patch of watermelons. Leaning over the box, he picked up the dead animal’s mantle, which was bigger than he was. “That’s the head,” he said.

He turned it over, and I could see a massive, lidless eye staring out at us.

“See here, this is the mouth,” he said, speaking rapidly again. He stuck his fingers inside the white cusp of flesh, revealing a sharp black beak and a serrated tongue. “It’ll cut right through your cartilage,” he said.

Though O’Shea didn’t have a mask on, he took a deep breath and, with great exertion, lifted half of the creature in his arms. He grabbed a tentacle and started to extend it. “Look at it. They’re fantastic, aren’t they?”

He ran his fingers up and down its limbs, opening and closing its suckers. For a moment, he shut his eyes, as if he were trying to imagine it underwater. Then he said, “The dead one is beautiful, but it’s the live one I want.”

– May, 2004

In December, 2006, near the Ogasawara Islands, south of Tokyo, a Japanese scientist and his squad finally captured a live giant squid. After spending years pinpointing a potential location, they attached a chunk of squid to a missile-shaped multipronged hook and dropped it more than two thousand feet down. Eventually, they caught a relatively small female giant squid, measuring eleven and a half feet long and weighing a hundred and ten pounds. As the men tried to reel it in, the giant squid spouted water-from its funnel and struggled to escape. By the time the men pulled the elusive creature on board, it had died from injuries. O’Shea has not given up his quest.

City of Water
CAN AN ANTIQUATED MAZE OF TUNNELS CONTINUE TO SUSTAIN NEW YORK?

No one knows how many sandhogs are, at any given moment, working beneath the streets of New York City, but one winter morning half a dozen men could be spotted gathering around a hole on the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Thirtieth Street. The hole, surrounded by a tall aluminum fence, was thirty feet wide and reinforced with concrete. A priest had visited months before, to offer a brief prayer: “May God be with all ye who enter here, that the earth shall return ye safely.” Now, as the sun rose, the men stepped from the snow-covered ground into a green metal cage, which was suspended over the chasm by an enormous winch. They wore yellow slickers and rubber boots with steel tips; they carried, among other things, flashlights, scissors, cigarettes, cough drops, knives, extra socks, and several twenty-pound crates marked “EXPLOSIVES.”

A worker who was to remain above ground pulled a lever, and the cage began to descend. As it accumulated speed, and the light from the surface grew thinner, James Ryan, one of the older men in the crew, peered over the edge into the void. He had a long, hard face flecked with scars. “We got nine cases of dynamite,” he said. “That should be plenty.”

His voice reverberated in the shaft as the men went down thirty, forty, fifty feet, then another fifty, then a hundred more. “Two hundred,” one of them called out. By three hundred feet, they could no longer see anything above or below. Surrounded by darkness, and pressed closely together, the men exchanged sight for sound-the ping of dripping water, the echo of voices, the cable groaning overhead. At five hundred feet, the air became warmer, denser; one of the men put on a mask to keep out the dust that floated through the shaft. “All right,” Ryan told me. “We’re almost there.”

A thin beam from a flashlight suddenly rose up from the bottom of the shaft, catching the men’s faces. They were all part of the fraternity of sand-hogs, a rare breed of tunnel digger whose name comes from the workers who excavated the soft earth under the Brooklyn Bridge in the eighteen-seventies. The men in the cage with me were mostly middle-aged, with barrel chests and knotted fingers; dust had already begun to streak the skin around their eyes. A bell sounded, and the cage came to a halt, bouncing up and down on the cable. “This is it,” Ryan said. “Brace yourself.” He unsealed the cage door. We were nearly six hundred feet underground.

Until that moment, I had only heard tales of New York City’s invisible empire, an elaborate maze of tunnels that goes as deep as the Chrysler Building is high. Under construction in one form or another for more than a century, the system of waterways and pipelines spans thousands of miles and comprises nineteen reservoirs and three lakes. Two main tunnels provide New York City with most of the 1.3 billion gallons of water it consumes each day, ninety per cent of which is pumped in from reservoirs upstate by the sheer force of gravity. Descending through aqueducts from as high as fourteen hundred feet above sea level, the water gathers speed, racing down to a thousand feet below sea level when it reaches the pipes beneath the city.

It is a third water tunnel, however, that is the most critical. Designed to meet expanding demand and to serve as a backup system in case something ever happens to City Tunnel No. 1 or City Tunnel No. 2, City Tunnel No. 3 has been under development since 1969, and was initially billed as “the greatest nondefense construction project in the history of Western Civilization.” Already, twenty-four people have died building it-roughly a man a mile-and it is not expected to be completed until 2020.

As an engineering feat, the water-tunnel system rivals the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal. Yet it has the odd distinction that almost no one will ever see it, save for the sandhogs who are building it. Over the years, the men have constructed an entire city under the city, a subterranean world as cluttered as the Manhattan skyline: it includes four hundred and thirty-eight miles of subway lines, six thousand miles of sewers, and thousands of miles of gas mains. “If it’s deeper than a grave,” sandhogs often say, “then we built it.” The water tunnels have become the sandhogs’ greatest and most elusive achievement, an often deadly effort that has consumed generations. “I’ll take you down there if you want,” Jimmy Ryan had said when I asked him to show me the tunnel’s newest section. “But, trust me, it ain’t like Macy’s down there.”

A large, reticent man of fifty who prefers gestures-an upturned eyebrow or a curled lip-to words, he has spent nearly as many hours underneath the earth as above it. “I started working on the third water tunnel when I was a kid,” he told me. “I’m still working on it, and I’ll probably be buried in it.” Ryan, who was elected president of the sandhogs’ union, Local 147, in 1999, has trouble lifting his shoulders; his red hair has turned silver, and his broad chest is compressed, as if it were about to collapse.

After Ryan opened the cage, I stepped out with him and the other men into the bottom of the shaft. Water seeped down the sides of the opening and dripped on us. There was a pool at our feet, and as we moved forward the icy water spilled over the tops of our boots. I began to sink in the muck, and Ryan gave me his hand to pull me out.

“Don’t stand under the shaft,” he said. “If somethin’ falls from the top, it’ll go right through you.” I looked up and could barely see the opening. Once, in Queens, a sixteen-ton winch fell down the shaft, crushing one worker and injuring seven others; another time, a man died after being impaled by a broken icicle.

As I followed Ryan into the tunnel’s main artery, it was hard to orient myself. There were only a few scattered electric bulbs, suspended from wires clamped to rocks and shrouded in mist, and I blinked, trying to adjust to the watery light. Several of the men turned on flashlights; through the shadows I could see a hospital stretcher and emergency medical supplies propped against a wall. At last, the tunnel came into focus: a cramped, crumbling cavern that extended a hundred yards or so in either direction.

This stage of Tunnel No. 3 will eventually run nine miles, reaching down to the Manhattan Bridge and looping up to Central Park; its walls will be honed into a smooth cylinder, ten feet in diameter and lined with concrete. But at this early stage swords of black schist-formed more than four hundred million years ago-hung from the ceiling, which was buttressed with steel bolts to prevent collapse. Ventilation pipes ran along the sides of the tunnel, circulating the choked air, which, unlike the freezing air at the surface, was nearly seventy degrees, a humid mist of dust and fumes.

The men split into two groups and went to opposite ends of the tunnel, where they began painting detailed patterns on the rock face. Moving out from the center of the rock, they carefully dabbed white dots about three feet apart, forming an elaborate grid. Then the sandhogs mounted hydraulic drills and bored a ten-foot-deep hole into each mark, their arms and legs rattling up and down, the lamps on their hard hats shaking.

As the men prepared the rock face, listening to each echo for any sign of danger, they spoke in a private language: a jackhammer was known as a “jackleg;” a bucket, a “battleship;” the Nerf-like sponge used to clean a pipe was called a “rabbit.” Sometimes, because of the noise, the men would simply draw images in the air, like mimes. After a while, they took out blowpipes, which blasted air and water into the holes, washing away the dirt. “Everything has to be done just right,” Ryan told me.

With his knife, he opened one of the boxes of explosives. Inside were dozens of red sticks of dynamite. The men packed the sticks into the holes as if loading muskets. Each piece of dynamite was wired to the next, and soon dozens of cords crisscrossed the rock face. Then the men turned off the lights, one by one, until the tunnel was completely dark, except for a single flashlight that guided us back to the metal cage. “We need to be a thousand feet away,” Ryan said, as we slowly rose to the surface. “It’s not like the old days, when they’d blow the son of a bitch in your ear.”

When we reached the street, the sun was fully in the sky, and Ryan squinted uncomfortably in the light. He leaned over a small detonator while the men cleared the intersection of pedestrians. A woman in a camel coat, who insisted that she was late for work, tried to force her way past. “One minute,” Ryan said, cocking an eyebrow. Another sandhog put his hand on the T-shaped lever. “Now,” Ryan said. The sandhog slammed the lever with both hands, yelling, “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”

There was a great roar, a percussive rumble that grew louder and louder. The sidewalk and fences began to tremble, along with the ground beneath our feet. The crane that was suspended above the hole rattled from side to side. One bystander looked up at the sky, then down at the ground, not sure what was happening. “Is it a bomb?” another asked. A plume of dust rose out of the shaft. Then everything fell silent. The tunnel had advanced another nine feet. “All right, hogs!” the foreman yelled. And, before anyone noticed, Ryan and the other men vanished into the hole.

At the end of the day, the sandhogs congregated in the hog house, a small white shack with wooden benches, lockers, and a shower, inside the fenced area on Thirtieth Street. Yellow slickers, now black with mud, hung from hooks. A television set murmured in the corner, and several men stood around it in towels while another mopped the floor around their feet.

Ryan sat down at a table to talk with me. His elbow rested on his hard hat; a line of mud traced the side of his cheek. He had lost part of his hearing from the constant concussions, and he spoke louder than normal.

“No one wants to talk about it, but we’re flirting with disaster,” he said. The old tunnels, Ryan explained, were leaking “like a sieve;” some of the sections were built nearly a century ago and were in desperate need of repair. But until Tunnel No. 3 is virtually complete there will be no way to fix them. In part, this is because getting inside Tunnel No. 1 or No. 2 would require the city to shut the water off, and without a backup supply there would be serious water shortages. But it was more than that, and, as several sandhogs peered over his shoulder, Ryan started to draw a circle on the table with his muddy finger. “See this?” he asked me. “These are the valves that control the flow of water.”

“They’re hundreds of feet underground,” another sandhog said.

The valves were designed, Ryan said, to open and close guillotine-like gates inside the cylindrical tunnels, stopping the flow of water. But they had become so brittle with age that they were no longer operable. “They’re afraid if they try to shut the valves they won’t be able to turn ’em back on,” Ryan said.

He wiped some mud from his eyes. “Look,” he said. “If one of those tunnels goes, this city will be completely shut down. In some places there won’t be water for anything. Hospitals. Drinking. Fires. It would make September 11th look like nothing.”

Ryan wasn’t the only one who spoke of the tunnel system’s frailties, even if the others did so in slightly less alarming terms. One day in the spring of 2003, I met Christopher Ward, the head of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which is responsible for designing and operating the tunnel system. With a broad chest and a blunt, goateed chin, he looks more like a sandhog than like a politician, and has a tendency to lean forward when he speaks, as if about to leap to his feet. “People don’t want to acknowledge it, but the useful life of a tunnel does exist, and at some point it does start to fail,” he said. The metal valves, in particular, degrade until they can no longer withstand the pressure. Ward said that the original two tunnels were so dilapidated that it was too risky to try to shut off the water and repair them until City Tunnel No. 3 was operational. He added that there is still time before the aging tunnels collapse-“We’re not talking about today or tomorrow”-though it is impossible to predict how much.

Others are more pessimistic. One D.E.P. scientist told me, “Some of the aqueducts are already hemorrhaging water badly,” while a recent study by Riverkeeper, an environmental organization, concluded, “In some cases, this extraordinary infrastructure is literally crumbling.” Upstate, in the industrial town of Newburgh, for example, water has begun to pour out of cracks in the underground aqueduct that feeds into the city tunnels-so much that the leaks have created a giant sinkhole.

Many experts worry that the old tunnel system could collapse all at once. “Engineers will tell you if it fails it will not fail incrementally,” said Ward. “It will fail catastrophically.” If City Tunnel No. 1, which is considered the most vulnerable, caved in, all of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as well as parts of the Bronx, would lose its water supply. If the aqueducts gave out, the entire city would be cut off. “There would be no water,” Ward told me. “These fixes aren’t a day or two. You’re talking about two to three years.”

In the past, the city sometimes tried to assuage concerns about New York’s water system, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg noted at a 2003 press conference that the aging pipelines were “very vulnerable” and that “this city could be brought to its knees if one of the aqueducts collapsed.”

Anthony DelVescovo, the project manager who has been working on City Tunnel No. 3 for nearly fifteen years, echoed Bloomberg’s warning. “What no one knows is that we’re facing a potential apocalypse,” he told me. “It’s a race against the clock.”

It is hard to imagine a city without water, its faucets empty, its hydrants dry, its plazas filled not with fountains but with citizens suffering from diseases spread by dirt and desiccation-to imagine, as Charles Einstein put it in the title of his 1964 futuristic novel, “The Day New York Went Dry.”

For much of its history, however, New York was a parched city. Though surrounded by the sea, its principal supply of freshwater remained, as late as the eighteenth century, a single fetid pool in lower Manhattan called the Collect Pond. Human waste was dumped into it, along with the occasional dead body. Distribution of water was dominated by racketeers known as teamen, who roamed the streets with giant casks, gouging customers. In 1785, with the city’s population reaching nearly thirty thousand, the New York Journal published an open letter to government officials complaining that the water supply had become a “common sewer.” One daily newspaper declared that it was “sickly and nauseating,” adding, “The larger the city grows, the worse this evil will be.”

Even as the paper warned that a “plague will make a yearly slaughter until you furnish better water,” pestilence spread through the squalid streets. In 1798, yellow fever wiped out two thousand New Yorkers, and venders wandered the streets yelling, “Coffins of all sizes!” The plague returned in 1805, 1819, and 1822. “New Yorkers are like the rich man told of in the Parable,” one resident noted in the local paper. “They have no clean cool water to slack their thirst when the flames of the plague are devouring their vitals.”

One summer morning in 1832, two children woke up in Manhattan with severe pain in their intestines. They stopped urinating and were overcome by thirst; they began to vomit and their skin turned blue. By the next day, they were dead, and two days later so was their mother.

Asiatic cholera, an excruciating disease that is spread, in large part, by water contaminated with feces, had struck. In barely a month, two thousand New Yorkers were dead, their bodies marked by a bluish tinge and puckered extremities; more than a hundred thousand residents-half the city’s population-fled to outlying villages. By the time the scourge ended, the death toll had reached more than three thousand. A group of doctors who visited the city at the time reported a “constant and imploring” cry: “Cold water, cold water, give us cold water!”

Finally, in the winter of 1834, the Common Council vowed to locate new sources of water. But before plans got under way a fire broke out near Wall Street. Without enough water to extinguish it-the rivers were frozen solid-the flames leaped from roof to roof, carried by a gale-force wind. Within minutes, the fire had spread from Exchange Place to Water Street, then on to Front and South Streets, and still onward. (The smoke was visible as far away as Philadelphia.) The fire burned for twenty-four hours, and after it had consumed nearly seven hundred buildings and caused such mass looting that the military was called in, roughly a third of New York City lay in ruins. One witness, who called it “the most awful calamity which has ever visited these United States,” wrote, “I am fatigued in body, disturbed in mind, and my fancy filled with images of horror which my own pen is inadequate to describe.”

And so at last the city began to construct its first aqueduct.

By today’s standards, the Croton Aqueduct is modest in scope, but at the time it was considered an architectural marvel. Begun in 1837 and completed in 1842, it extended more than thirty miles, running from the Croton Reservoir down the east bank of the Hudson River-an elegant, eight-by-seven-foot brick pipeline. When it was finished, church bells rang out across the city and thousands poured into the streets to parade past new fountains, whose water sparkled in the sun. Philip Hone, who eventually became mayor of New York, wrote in his diary, “Nothing is talked of or thought of in New York but Croton water… Water! water! is the universal note which is sounded through every part of the city, and infuses joy and exultation into the masses.”

Twelve years later, however, the city’s demand for water again exceeded supply, and the pressure in the pipeline fell so low that the water could no longer reach the third story of a building. By 1882, with thousands of immigrants arriving each week, the Times pleaded, “More Water Wanted,” adding, “The health of families… was jeopardized because sufficient water could not be secured.” Yet, unlike the previous century, when the city had looked on impassively at civic problems, there was now an almost evangelical faith in human progress. In 1905, Mayor George McClellan, who had just inaugurated the city’s first subway system, laid out a vision of “an additional supply of pure and wholesome water,” a vision so bold that it struck many as evidence of hubris. At an estimated cost of a hundred and eighty-five million dollars-3.7 billion in today’s dollars-it would be the largest municipal water system in the world. In 1907, at the groundbreaking, McClellan declared, “The course of human events is not permanently altered by the great deeds of history, nor by the great men but by the small daily doings of the little men.”

Before long, thousands of laborers arrived in the Catskill Mountains and began clearing away vegetation. Under the expansive McClellan Act, which one judge complained gave “power that the Almighty would not delegate to an archangel,” the city appropriated more than twenty-five thousand acres of land, including hundreds of homes around the area of Shokan, which is just south of Woodstock. Nine villages were torn down, some burned to the ground, and nearly three thousand residents driven out; even cemeteries were dug up. “The trees are all cut down and the village is fading as a dream,” the Kingston Freeman reported.

Then dams were built, water was diverted from streams in the Catskills, and rain was collected. The entire elevated basin was flooded, creating one of several reservoirs that, together, are nearly as large as the island of Manhattan. In photographs of the Shokan area taken before the flooding, the land is green and expansive; months later, it is covered by a glasslike inland sea.

Meanwhile, sandhogs burrowed through mountains and under hillsides to construct the Catskill Aqueduct, a ninety-two-mile conduit that slopes gently downhill from Shokan to Storm King Mountain and then down to White Plains. At one point, it crosses below the Hudson River, at a depth of eleven hundred feet-an achievement that New York City’s new mayor, William Gaynor, called “one of the greatest engineering feats in history.” The hardest part of the project, however, was yet to come. According to the engineers’ elaborate design, water would flow from the aqueduct into a reservoir in Yonkers. From there, it would be channelled into another tunnel-one dug deep beneath the city, and able to withstand the pressure of more than half a billion gallons coursing through it each day. This water would then begin flowing upward, into smaller and smaller pipes, ultimately discharging into the millions of faucets around the city. Construction on what became known as City Tunnel No. 1 began in 1911. Many men went down once and never went back. Those who stayed received about two dollars a day. Once, under the strain, a riot erupted twelve hundred feet underground, and workers attacked each other with picks and shovels.

The situation was equally difficult on the banks of the East River. According to “Liquid Assets,” a history of the city’s water system by Diane Galusha, natural groundwater made the rock so soft that the shafts which allowed sandhogs to descend into the tunnel became watery death traps. Engineers were forced to build on each bank a giant inverted box called a caisson-a risky device that was pioneered during the laying of the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge. About fifteen feet on each side and weighing as much as two thousand tons, the steel-and-concrete boxes were sealed on all sides except the bottom. As they were lowered into the soft ground, compressed air was pumped into the caissons, pushing out the mud and water. To get into the caisson the sandhogs were lowered in a bucket down a steel shaft; from there they entered an air lock, much like a diving chamber. Air was pumped in, and the sandhogs could feel their eardrums strained to bursting, the blood rushing to the center of their bodies. Many assumed that they were dying.

Once the pressure in the air lock was equal to that inside the caisson, the sandhogs crawled through a trapdoor into the caisson, where, standing ankle-deep in mud, they began to dig from the bottom, removing the muck in a bucket through a hatch in the ceiling. As they dug, under pressure that was so great they could work for only two hours at a time, the caisson would slowly sink, allowing the sides of the box to carve the lining of a shaft. An engineer who had been in a caisson during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge described the sensation this way: “The pulse was at first accelerated, then sometimes fell below the normal rate. The voice sounded faint, unnatural, and it became a great effort to speak. What with the flaming lights, the deep shadows, the confusing noise of hammers, drills, and chains, the half-naked forms flitting about, with here and there a Sisyphus rolling his stone, one might, if of a poetic temperament, get a realizing sense of Dante’s Inferno.”

More unnerving, though, was the threat of a “blowout”-a breach in the lining of the caisson wall, caused by a sudden imbalance of pressure, which created suction much like that of an airplane door opened in mid-flight, accompanied by a terrifying kettle-like screech. Men had a few seconds to climb inside the air lock; if they didn’t make it, they could be sucked into the earth, as happened in 1916, during the construction of a tunnel under the East River, when three men were swallowed through a crevice; two died, while a third, Marshall Mabey, was propelled safely into the afternoon sky on a geyser said to be four stories high. “I felt myself being pushed into the hole,” Mabey later explained to a reporter. “As I struck the mud it felt as though something was squeezing me tighter than I had ever been squeezed. I was almost smothered.”

It’s not known how many sandhogs died building the Catskill system, but in 1913 the Pine Hill Sentinel reported, “Approximately ten out of every 100 [workers] are killed or injured every year. More than 3,800 accidents, serious and otherwise, to workers on the great aqueduct have been recorded… The men doing the rough work are virtually all foreigners or negroes. Owing to the laborers being so inconspicuous, the death by accident of one or more of them attracts no public attention.”

In 1917, more than a decade after the work began, the last explosion was sounded. It was now possible to walk underground from Manhattan all the way to the Catskills. The city marked the accomplishment, but the event was more subdued than the Croton celebration. The moment a new fountain by the reservoir in Central Park was turned on, the skies opened up and rain poured down.

“Hey, can you smell it?” Jimmy Ryan asked.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Dynamite.”

We were back inside City Tunnel No. 3, watching the sandhogs scoop out the blasted rock-“mucking it out,” as Ryan called it. It had been only minutes since I watched the men detonate the explosives, and the misty air was laden with smoke and dust; soon, a thin yellow film covered everything. Rocks that had endured earthquakes had been smashed against the surrounding walls. Some were cracked in two, revealing bits of mica, beautiful white glimmers amid the dust; others were black and dull.

At this early stage, the method of digging through the rock was similar to that used on the first water tunnel. As Ryan put it, “You stick the dynamite in, blow the motherfucker up, then haul the shit out.” It was a repetitive, driving ritual, one in which there was no day or night and the sound of concussions replaced the passage of time. The men now loaded crushed granite into enormous buckets that carried as much as twenty-eight tons in a single load and were hoisted out by a crane through the same shaft that the men had come down. Each sandhog had his own role in the operation. There were muckers and blasters and signalmen and nippers; these last remained above the hole, connecting materials to the hoist. One veteran nipper, Brian Thorne, told me, “Everyone has a skill. My best skill is rigging. The guys downstairs want to know they can trust the guy that’s upstairs to put stuff over their head and not worry. If you hit someone, you can’t say, ‘Oops, I’m sorry.’ That person is dead. So you always have to be on top of your game.”

Over the years, Ryan had risen from mucker to foreman, or “walking boss,” and now, as president of the sandhogs’ union, he is largely responsible for the whole gang. One colleague paid him the highest compliment you can give a sandhog: “No job is too dirty for Jimmy.” But as Ryan waded through the mud, his eyes peering out from under his hard hat, he seemed slightly removed. When younger sandhogs started to recall some near-death tale, he would arch an eyebrow and say, “You got some line,” or “You’re a real bullshit artist, aren’t you?” Unlike the other men, who tell stories about the tunnel the same way fishermen spin tales about the sea, Ryan rarely speaks of his time underground. When his shift is over, he heads home to Queens, where he often changes from his digger uniform into bright golf pants and plays the links, trying to propel the ball with his sore arms as he breathes in the smell of freshly cut grass. His wife told me, “He never says a word about the tunnel. I don’t know what he does down there.”

Ryan is not, by the standards of the trade, a particularly superstitious man-he doesn’t carry a lucky crescent wrench or refuse to go down on Friday the thirteenth-but he maintains a constant watchfulness. And now, while the others told jokes, Ryan stood off by himself, quietly inspecting the walls to make sure there were no cracks that might cause chunks to shear off.

After a while, he trudged to the end of the tunnel, where there was a pile of smoldering rubble. At lesser depths, sandhogs had been known to uncover jewelry, murder weapons, false teeth, a chest of coins, a Colonial dungeon. “In the sewer tunnels, you sometimes find rats,” Ryan said. “But this far down there are only sandhogs.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, which he carefully unwrapped, revealing not his lunch but a pack of Marlboros. He was the only one who, in spite of the stinging dust, seemed always to work with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth-like the detectives in the old dime novels he likes to read.

Some of the men propped a ten-foot ladder against the rubble and Ryan started to climb it, the embers of his cigarette leading the way. “Come on,” he said. When I reached the top, he pointed down the tunnel, as if to say, Go on, take a look. And I saw a dozen figures moving through the dusty haze. There was a cacophony: men slamming picks into the jagged rocks, drills probing new holes, buckets moving back and forth amid sparks that flickered like fireflies. After five months of blasting and mucking, of two shifts working sixteen hours a day, of engineers and contractors measuring the quickest route, they had advanced only two city blocks, from Twenty-ninth Street to Thirty-first Street. But as I peered from one end to the other at the ceiling of rock, dripping with water and bathed in sulfurous light, I could sense the first hint of a design.

“So, what do you think of our cathedral?” Ryan asked.

Later, as he was taking off his boots in the hog house, Ryan told me, “You know, my grandfather did the same thing.” He clapped his boots together. “He came to this country in 1922, from England. He started working first on the Holland Tunnel, but then they started the second water tunnel and he moved over to that. It was even bigger than Tunnel No. 1. It was pretty brutal. That much I can tell you.”

In 1929, to keep pace with water consumption, which had increased by thirty-five million gallons per day since the first tunnel was built, the city began to construct Tunnel No. 2. Once again, another aqueduct was built, this one drawing water from the Delaware River. (It is still listed in the “Guinness Book of World Records” as the world’s longest water-supply tunnel.) Once again, villages were flooded and cemeteries were dug up.

Nick Ryan, Jimmy’s grandfather, was tall, with a muscular physique and red hair. Jimmy Ryan is said to resemble him, but Nick was more of “a wild man,” as his grandson puts it, with a distinct hint of understatement. He was known for his penchant for whiskey, which in those days was often consumed in the tunnel. He had little, if any, formal education. Most of the sandhogs of his generation were recently arrived immigrants, typically from Ireland, Italy, and the West Indies, who would show up for work in their only set of clothes and wrap plastic bags around their shoes. The Board of Water Supply would sometimes put them in camps, and try to teach their children to read and write; the townspeople occasionally complained of “immigrant hordes.” Black-and-white photographs taken at the time show Nick’s gang standing in the tunnel, only a few beams of timber supporting the crumbling rock over their heads. Instead of a hard hat, Nick Ryan wore something more like a cowboy hat. In a 1936 log from one of the earliest meetings of Local 147, to which Nick belonged, there is a warning to the men not to pack pistols.

“Even during the Depression, most men wouldn’t take these jobs,” one miner who was in the union with Nick Ryan recalled in an oral history. “Nobody was going to go down and work with a shovel all day and then work in compressed air. We had some hard, hard people, and you had to be a rough commander… They told you, Do it or get the hell out. So the only ones, as the insurance adjusters will tell you, that survived were the most fit.”

Nick Ryan endured chest pains, broken limbs, bleeding sinuses, and caisson disease-the bends. Then, in 1937, with his family still in need of money, Nick Ryan took his eighteen-year-old son, Joe, down the shaft with him. “That’s how my father learned how to survive underground,” Jimmy Ryan recalled.

“Years ago, it started as a father-son business,” a sandhog whose father worked side by side with Joe Ryan told me. “The fathers brought the sons in, then the brothers brought the brothers in, and the sons brought the cousins in. I don’t know how you word this, but no one ever asked you your pedigree if you came here. They didn’t care if you had a criminal record-as long as you worked you could stay in the hole.”

Shorter and more compact than his father, Joe Ryan was known as Red. A ferociously driven and, to those who didn’t know him well, intimidating man, he carried the burden-and perhaps the anger-of someone who had given up a football scholarship at Wake Forest University to work underground, helping to support a father who was sometimes out too late to make it to work on time. After Nick Ryan died, in 1958, his son briefly ran a gas station. But before long he returned underground-to the place that he knew best.

By the fifties, the city was already in frantic pursuit of more “pure and wholesome water.” This time, it was not simply demand from an exploding population, or even droughts, that provoked alarm. This time, it was something that few, if any, had ever contemplated.

In 1954, unbeknownst to most residents of the city, several engineers went into a shaft to try to turn off the water supply in City Tunnel No. 1, to see if the tunnel needed repairs after being in operation for almost half a century. “Imagine your faucet after only ten years,” Christopher Ward, the D.E.P. commissioner, said. “These things had been pounded away at for decades.”

At the bottom of the shaft, sticking out of the tunnel, was a long bronze stem with a rotating wheel at the end. It was supposed to control the six-foot-diameter valve inside the pipeline. But when the engineers started to turn the handle, using all their might, it began to tremble and crack. “There was too much pressure on it,” Ward said.

“They were afraid if they turned it any more the whole fucking thing would break,” Richard Fitzsimmons, Jr., the business manager of the sand-hogs’ union, said.

After decades of building the world’s greatest water system, the city had stumbled across its weak point, a single flaw that had rendered an otherwise invincible body mortal. “It scared the bejeezus out of people,” Doug Greeley, an engineer in charge of the city’s water distribution, said. There was no effective way to shut off the water, no way to get inside and weld a crack, no way to know if a tunnel was about to burst.

By the late sixties, officials had decided that something had to be done. “One of the original tunnels was seventy years old, and we were unable to repair any valves,” Ed Koch, who was a congressman at the time, recalled. In some cases, he said, “we didn’t even know where the valves were.” Koch, who later served three terms as mayor, added, “You can exist without food, but you can’t exist without water.”

On a cold January day in 1970, the ground was officially broken for the third water tunnel, which would dwarf both of its predecessors. Designed to be constructed in four stages, it would extend sixty miles, from the reservoir in Yonkers through the Bronx and down to the southern tip of Manhattan, and then into Brooklyn and Queens. The project would include another underground aqueduct. More important, at the center of the entire system would be thirty-four specially designed valves that would be made not of bronze but of stainless steel, with shorter stems that could withstand greater force. (Most were manufactured in Japan, where city inspectors lived for two years to insure that they were made according to precise measurements.) All of the valves would be contained in a single centralized chamber, where they could be easily reached and turned off.

Construction on the chamber began in 1970 and was not finished until 1998. Though the tunnel sections that will feed into the chamber have not yet been completed, the D.E.P. gave me a glimpse inside the vault-which is in the Bronx, not far from the sandhogs’ union hall. There is nothing above ground to indicate the vault’s existence except a small guard tower and a sealed door that leads into a grassy hillside. “Ordinarily, we’re not supposed to let anyone in,” Greeley told me, standing outside the door.

Like many of “the pencils,” as the sandhogs call the engineers, Greeley is a fastidious man: he has a neatly trimmed mustache and was wearing a blue blazer and a tie. The main door, which he unlocked as if it were a safe, was constructed out of solid steel. “They built this place during the Cold War,” he said. “It’s supposed to withstand a ten-megaton nuclear bomb.”

As he pressed his weight against the door, it gradually gave way, emitting a loud sigh. It was damp and cool inside; the corridor was made of concrete. After descending a flight of metal steps, we rode an elevator twenty-five stories down. As Greeley opened another thick door, he said, “Prepare to have your perception of the water supply permanently altered.”

The vault resembled an airplane hangar; it extended more than two hundred yards, with a domed ceiling that was forty-one feet high and walls that were cloaked in condensation and algae. Lights hung from the top like crescent moons. Suspended twenty feet off the ground, one after the other, were the valves, or, rather, the pipes that contained them: seventeen thirty-five-ton steel cylinders with studded bolts that reached horizontally from one side of the forty-two-foot-wide vault to the other. Each cylinder contained two valves. A metal gangplank ran alongside them, and Greeley walked excitedly to the first cylinder, running his hand along the torpedo-like shell. “This way, if a tunnel develops a crack, we can shut it off from here,” he said. “Everything’s right at your fingertips.”

If a valve broke, the cylinder could be lowered down to the bottom of the vault, and carried out on tracks. One piece, Greeley explained, could be removed without disrupting the rest of the system. The old tunnels had run in a straight line from the reservoirs into the city, but City Tunnel No. 3 was designed with various redundant loops (upper Manhattan has a loop; Brooklyn and Queens have a loop) that would pass through the chamber, so that parts of the city can be taken off-line without cutting the water supply entirely.

Putting his hand on a small wheel that jutted out of the cylinder, Greeley said, “Here we can turn the valves on and off electronically or, if there’s a power outage, even manually. Of course, if you did it manually, you’d have to turn it twenty-nine thousand times, but if you had to you could get a couple of guys down here and crank it away.”

It was cold in the chamber, and Greeley shuddered as he held out his hand to demonstrate another innovation. “They’re called butterfly valves,” he said of the sluices inside the cylinder. Unlike the old guillotine-like sluices, these gates rotated slowly into position. “That takes off the pressure and makes it easier to close,” he said, turning his hand clockwise. Though he had been in the vault dozens of times, he paused for a moment and looked out at the dozens of valves. Then he said, “Once the third water tunnel is finished, all the water in the city will flow like Zen.”

In 1969, just before construction on the first stage of the third water tunnel began, Jimmy Ryan’s father took him below the streets. “When I was eighteen, he said, ‘Come with me,’” Jimmy Ryan recalled. “He was old school. You never asked what your father did… Then they put us in this big bucket. I had no idea what to expect. It got darker and darker. My father told me to stay close and watch what he did. And that’s how I became a sandhog. I was born into it.”

Jimmy Ryan became known as the Red-Headed Hippie. “That was the style back then,” Jimmy told me, somewhat defensively. “Even the old-timers had sideburns.” If he was slightly rebellious, he had his father’s unrelenting drive: he told me that he wanted to prove to his “old man” that he could do the job. Jimmy also had a forthrightness that made him popular among the men. “I can’t say a bad word about Jimmy,” Buddy Krausa, one of his old foremen, said, adding that Ryan was the type “who would never steal a crescent wrench.”

After short stints on other jobs, the Ryans moved to the third water tunnel. On a summer day in 1982, Jimmy Ryan, Krausa, and a dozen or so other sandhogs went down a hole near Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx, where they were connecting a tunnel that would feed into the new valve chamber. The section had already been bored and they were in the final stages: building a steel form-it resembled the skeletal hull of a ship-around the contours of the carved-out earth, then pouring in concrete. To reach the cavern’s ceiling, Ryan had climbed atop eighteen feet of scaffolding.

Around noon, some of the men stopped for lunch, but Ryan and a few others were still working when another sandhog, George Gluszak, who was a mile up the line, saw two twenty-ton agitator cars, which were used to mix concrete, racing down the tunnel. They had broken free from the brake car and were picking up speed along the steady decline. Some of the men tried to throw things on the tracks to slow them down, but it had no effect.

Jimmy Ryan was drilling when the cars slammed into the scaffolding, catapulting him twenty-five feet through the air. “Everything turned upside down,” Ryan said. “I was knocked unconscious, and when I came to, all the lights had gone out. All I could hear were moans.”

Krausa, who had not been injured, felt his way through the tangle of steel, rock, and machines. He could hear the other men calling out for help. Eventually, he found a flashlight and pointed the beam in front of him. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” he said.

Sandwiched between two flatbed cars was Johnny Wademan, who had been drilling alongside Ryan. The two cars had collided under his shoulders and he was suspended in midair, his legs dangling, his arms outstretched. “He looked like Jesus Christ,” said Gluszak, who, along with his team, had run through the darkened tunnel to the scene. One of the men shouted that Wademan was dead.

Ryan was bleeding profusely from his head. “Jimmy was hurt pretty bad,” Krausa said. “God bless him, he was still looking for people, trying to help them. I don’t know how he could walk.”

In the corner, trapped between a concrete pipe and the wall, was a sandhog named Mike Butler. Most of his leg had been cut off, the crushed bone exposed; his foot, where the skin and tissue had been butterflied open, was pinned, so that he couldn’t move. “He was bleeding to death,” said Ryan.

Someone pulled out a penknife and, guided only by the unsteady beam of a flashlight, tried to pry him loose. His heel wouldn’t budge. “I told him we were going to have to cut part of his foot off,” Gluszak said. “He said, ‘Do whatever you have to do.’”

While one sandhog held a cigarette to Butler’s lips, another began to slice off his heel, severing what remained of the tendons and bone. “I took off my shirt, and wrapped his foot up in my undershirt and put a tourniquet around his leg,” Gluszak said.

While Butler was being freed, the other men pulled Wademan down from where he had been suspended. As he hit the ground, they heard a groan. He was still alive.

It had been one of the worst accidents to date in the third water tunnel. Butler later had the rest of his leg amputated. Wademan’s legs and hips were broken, six of his ribs were shattered, and he suffered severe head trauma. Ryan got a hundred and twenty stitches in his forehead and chin; he also had a broken knee, six fractured ribs, and two separated shoulders. It took him eight months to recuperate. When I asked him why he returned to work, he replied, “I’m a sandhog. That’s all I know.” He never went back to the scene of the accident, and he grew even quieter. “The accident took the life out of Jimmy,” another sandhog said. “The exuberance.”

“They ain’t gonna do any psychological work on me,” Ryan told me. “They ain’t ever gonna penetrate this head.”

Shortly after Ryan resumed working, he noticed that his father was having trouble breathing. “He’d walk thirty feet and have to stop,” Ryan said. Then Joe Ryan started to cough up black phlegm. When Joe visited the doctor, X-rays showed spots on his lungs. He had contracted silicosis, a disease caused by years of breathing dust.

Jimmy Ryan said his father had always told him that sandhogs die unexpectedly. They die of cave-ins and blowouts. They die of explosions and electrocutions. They die of falling rocks and winches and icicles. They die of drowning. They die of decapitation and the bends. They die without legs, without arms. They die by plunging hundreds of feet or simply a few. They die quickly and, more often than not, painfully.

In May, 2003, on Ascension Thursday, Ryan put on a neatly pressed tweed jacket and a tie and drove from his home, in Queens, to St. Barnabas Church in the Bronx for a service in honor of all those who had died in the third water tunnel. The stone church had stained-glass windows that could be opened, admitting the unfiltered sunlight. Ryan sat toward the front, his jacket tight around his broad shoulders. Packed in the pews around him were Christopher Ward, the D.E.P. commissioner; Anthony Del-Vescovo, the contractor; and dozens of sandhogs and engineers. “Let us pray for all those who have been hurt or killed in construction of City Tunnel No. 3,” the priest intoned.

“Lift them up,” a sandhog responded. “Lift them up.”

Ryan knelt against the front of his pew as the priest read the names of the twenty-four men who had died in the tunnel. “Lord have mercy on them,” the priest said. When the service was over, Ryan and the others headed down the street to an Irish pub. “My father was one of the lucky ones,” he said. “He held on until 1999. That’s when the silicosis finally got him.”

“I’m John Ryan. I think you met my father.”

The young man was standing by a shaft for a tunnel on the corner of Thirty-sixth Street and First Avenue. Short, with compact arms, he looked more like his grandfather than like his father. He was twenty-eight, and his face had yet to develop the hard etchings of a sandhog. It was broad and frank, with bright-green eyes; red hair poked out of the front of his hard hat.

The other sandhogs called him “Jimmy’s kid,” but he had little of his dad’s reticence. “You never know what’s going on up there,” he said of his father, with a smile. “I’m more of a bullshit artist.” He looked up at the crane that was lowering materials down the hole. “I used to think my father was out of his mind. I was about eight years old when he got hurt. I still remember it. He didn’t want to stay in the hospital and came home in a wheelchair. That’s when I first realized what it meant to be a sandhog, and I said, ‘Christ, I ain’t ever gonna do that.’” He peered down the hole. “It’s in your blood, I guess.” Holding out his arms, he added, “We’ve probably got more muck in our veins than anything else.”

“Nobody wants their kid to go into it,” Jimmy Ryan told me later. “You’ll always hope they’ll find some kind of pencil job.”

“I grew up wanting to be a baseball player,” John Ryan said. “Then I dropped out of college, and one day my father came in the bar where I was working and said, ‘All right, mister, you want to bartend? Come with me.’ I’d never been in the hole before. I was scared. I won’t lie to you.”

“I can only imagine what he was thinking,” Jimmy Ryan said. “We try to help each other.”

John Ryan’s great-grandfather brought home only a few dollars a week from his work on the water tunnel; today, sandhogs earn as much as a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year. Though many are descended from tramp miners, they now often emerge from the hog house in tailored suits, their hair perfectly combed, as if they were bankers or accountants. Chick Donohue, the head of the hog house, has a degree from the Kennedy School at Harvard and is well known in city politics. He wears his Harvard ring on one hand and his sandhogs’ union ring on the other. “That way, if I can’t outsmart ’em with the left, I hit ’em with the right,” he told me.

Just as sandhogs have gradually transformed the city, the city has gradually transformed the sandhogs. Some now arrive at the hole in a Cadillac or a BMW. John Ryan, who is engaged to be married, is buying a Colonial house in Nassau County. “A lot of guys are drawn to the money,” he admitted. He paused. “And there’s the camaraderie. That’s a big part of it, too.” He paused again, as if still searching for the deepest reason, then added, “Hell, I like it down there.”

After five years on the third water tunnel, John Ryan had risen to foreman. His current mission was to build the city’s newest “mole,” a two-hundred-and-thirty-ton drill that would be placed at his father’s site, on Tenth Avenue. Experimented with as early as the seventies, the mole was officially introduced in the water tunnels in 1992, and had become the sandhogs’ most critical instrument-comparable, in the world of tunnelling, to the invention of the printing press. In February, 2003, the latest mole was transported from New Jersey to Manhattan, in pieces weighing sixty to a hundred and thirty tons, on a flatbed truck; the payload was the largest ever to cross the George Washington Bridge. The components were then lowered into the Thirtieth Street hole by a special crane that could withstand the enormous weight.

One day in February, after the mole had been assembled in the tight confines of the tunnel, John Ryan invited me to go down with him and see it. The pipeline was twelve and a half feet in diameter. The mole had already been driven nearly half a mile, and to reach the heading we had to ride a railroad car called a “man trip,” which rattled from side to side. Groundwater seeped out of the surrounding rock, splattering against the walls as we sped past. After about five minutes, we came to a sudden stop. In the distance, I could see a monstrous machine that looked more like a space shuttle than a drill. The mole’s hydraulic engines churned, and its blinking lights gleamed. “Come on,” Ryan said excitedly, walking toward it. “That’s only the trailing gear.”

This gear-including a conveyor belt that carried out the crushed rock-took up most of the tunnel. A narrow gangplank had been built on the tunnel’s side. Occasionally, to pass one of the fifteen or so sandhogs, we had to turn sideways, pressing our faces against the damp rock. As we went deeper, the mole began to resemble a colossal organism: its giant cylindrical arms gripped the walls and pushed the machine’s mouth forward through the rock. In some compartments of the mole, engineers were peering at computer screens; the mole had lasers that registered the precise type of rock at the heading.

A siren sounded, and the men began to run up and down the plank. “What’s happening?” I asked nervously.

“Nothing,” Ryan said. “We’re just starting it up.”

The mole coughed and sputtered and shook. The temperature had been twenty degrees at the surface, but the mole heated the tunnel air to eighty degrees, and some of the men began to strip off their layers. After walking seventy-five yards, we reached the front of the mole: a round shield with twenty-seven cutters, each weighing three hundred and twenty pounds, pressed against the rock face, obscuring it completely. The cutters, driven forward by hydraulic propulsion, spun ferociously and noisily, chipping away at the granite, which was then carried out on the conveyor belt and loaded into muck cars. Ryan, who had grown up listening to tales of his forebears, said it was hard to believe that “my great-grandfather had only a goddam muck stick”-sandhog slang for shovel.

Indeed, until the mole was invented, tunnelling had changed only incrementally since the days of the Romans, who used fire and water to crack the rock and horses to carry it out. When a prototype of the mole was introduced in New York, in the seventies, many of the sandhogs feared it as much as they did caving rock.

“It’s like that old story about John Henry,” Chick Donohue explained, recalling the fabled contest between man and machine after the invention of the steam drill. “Well, when they introduced the first mole over in Brooklyn the cutters kept breaking, and the sandhogs would jump in with their shovels and picks. They knew they were competing for their jobs, and they were actually beating the mole! Of course, they then perfected the mole, and there was no contest.”

The construction of the first water tunnel required no fewer than eighty men to drill and blast for at least a week in order to advance a hundred feet. The mole, with a fraction of the manpower, can tunnel that far in a day.

Yet, even with the mole, the third water tunnel has already taken six times as long as either City Tunnel No. 1 or No. 2; some people think it won’t be completed, as scheduled, by 2020. “We should’ve been done with this thing twenty years ago,” Jimmy Ryan said. “But the city keeps fucking around.”

Conditions above ground have proved almost as difficult as those below. After the initial phase of a billion-dollar contract to build the tunnel was awarded to a consortium of companies, costs began to exceed estimates by the millions. When the city balked at the rising costs, the companies sued and the work stalled. Then, in 1974, when the city went bankrupt, construction was halted altogether. In all, nearly a decade was lost, and in 1981, with work proceeding only piecemeal and the ever-growing demand for water forcing the old tunnels to carry sixty per cent more capacity than intended, city officials were so desperate that they pleaded with the federal government to fund the project.

Meanwhile, charges began to surface that Tammany Hall-like machinations were contributing to the delays. The once vaunted Board of Water Supply, which oversaw the construction, had become a “Democratic patronage plum tree,” as one critic put it. Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic power broker who was later convicted of racketeering, was given a lifetime position on the board, with a salary of twenty thousand dollars, as well as an office, a secretary, a chauffeured car. “When I came in as mayor, it was a lifetime job given to retiring politicians,” Koch told me. “They didn’t do anything.”

The board was dismantled. But in 1986 the man in charge of supervising purchasing for the water tunnel at the D.E.P., Edward Nicastro, warned that contracts were still not being properly monitored. “You’d be amazed at how easy it is to steal in the system,” he told a reporter at the time.

In recent years, the greatest delays seem to be caused not by efforts to defraud the public but by attempts to placate it. Where the old water board once plowed over communities, the D.E.P. is now impeded by them. In 1993, when it tried to sink a shaft on East Sixty-eighth Street, Councilman Charles Millard protested that his office had received calls from parents whose children were “finding it difficult to concentrate.” NUMBY,or “not under my back yard,” movements sprang up. In 1994, after engineers had spent two years planning a new shaft site, residents in Jackson Heights held a protest, carrying signs that said, “DON’T GIVE US THE SHAFT.” Engineers were forced to find a new location. “When we want to choose a shaft site, everyone says, ‘Oh, the water system is a miracle, but please find another place,’” Ward told me. “‘We’re building a co-op’-or hotel or park-‘there.’” A D.E.P. engineer and geologist, Scott Chesman, added, “Instead of taking seven years to finish, we’re on thirty years, and hardly any of it’s been done. It’s like the eighteen-hundreds again.”

Indeed, for the first time the historic Delaware Aqueduct-the eighty-four-mile underground pipeline that carries the water from reservoirs upstate down to Yonkers, where it connects to City Tunnels No. 1 and No. 2-has begun to crack. According to some D.E.P. reports, in 1995 the aqueduct was losing about five hundred million gallons a month from leaks, which were creating massive sinkholes in Ulster and Orange Counties; in 2000, the monthly loss sometimes exceeded a billion gallons. An investigation by Riverkeeper warned of a potential “collapse” of the aqueduct, which would cut off as much as eighty per cent of the water flowing into the city.

In the spring of 2000, the D.E.P. decided to send a team of deep-sea divers down to do repairs on one of the original bronze valves in the Delaware Aqueduct, in the Dutchess County town of Chelsea, which had cracked, spewing a torrent of water through a hole the size of a quarter at eighty miles per hour. “For about two or three months, we built a mockup of the valve and a mockup of the bottom of the shaft,” said John McCarthy, the engineer who oversaw the project. “We took the crew and experimented in a tank of about fifty feet of water, without any light, trying to simulate the conditions.”

After practicing for days, the engineers transported a diving bell and a decompression chamber to the leak site. Four divers, who were hired from the same company that had helped to salvage the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk after it sank in the Barents Sea in August, 2000, had to remain inside the decompression chamber for twenty-four hours, in order to adjust to the intense water pressure underground. The chamber was about the size of a van, only round. On the outside were valves and hoses and an air-lock door to send in food (mostly fluids and peanut butter) and to remove human waste. The pressure in the chamber was gradually brought to the same pressure as that of the water seven hundred feet underground.

After breathing a mixture of ninety-eight per cent helium and two per cent oxygen for twenty-four hours, two of the divers crawled into a thirteen-foot diving bell that was attached to the top of the chamber. Once they had sealed themselves inside, the bell was lifted by a crane and lowered down the shaft that led into the aqueduct. There were only inches between the bell and the walls of the shaft. When the divers reached the bottom, one climbed out and swam toward the leak. (The other diver remained in the bell in case of an emergency.) He wore a wetsuit, a mask, and scuba equipment, and carried a small waterproof tool set. While struggling to stay in position against the pressure of the escaping water, he placed a brass plug in one of the holes, then sealed it with a clamp and an epoxy compound.

Each shift lasted at least four hours, then the bell was lifted up and two other divers went down. “It was not for the faint of heart,” McCarthy said. The men spent ten days finishing the repairs, and fifteen more in the decompression chamber.

Still, far greater leaks are suspected somewhere between the Rondout Reservoir, in the Catskills, and a reservoir in Putnam County. In June, 2003, the D.E.P. sent a custom-made two-million-dollar submarine through forty-five miles of the Delaware Aqueduct. (The job was deemed too dangerous for a human.) The eight-hundred-pound craft, which was nicknamed Persephone, took three hundred and fifty thousand photographs. “The sub looks like a torpedo with catfish antennas,” Commissioner Ward told me. “While a motor pushes it through, the antennas help it bounce back off the walls to stay within the middle of the tunnel.” The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, on Cape Cod, and the D.E.P. are examining the pictures to evaluate the structural integrity of the pipeline.

But even if the locations of the leaks are determined, and if engineers can then concoct some way to plug them, most D.E.P. officials I spoke with do not consider this section of the aqueduct the most vulnerable. They are more worried about pipelines closer to the city-in particular, Tunnels No. 1 and No. 2, which, because of their greater depth and buried valves, are far less accessible, even to a self-piloted submarine. Some sand-hogs believe that the only thing preventing these sections from collapsing is the pressure of the water pushing against their walls. A former chief engineer on the water system, Martin Hauptman, has noted, “We see headlines in the streets frequently where a 24-inch water main breaks and the street’s flooded, basements are flooded, the subway is flooded, and people think that is a horrible situation. Failure of a tunnel is an entirely different situation. What bothers me most… is the element of time. You cannot buy time with a situation like that.”

And there is now the additional threat of terrorism. Although the public’s attention has focussed on the danger of someone’s poisoning the water supply, officials believe that the system would likely dilute a toxin’s effects. The greater danger, they say, is that a terrorist might blow up one of the pipelines before the third water tunnel is up and running. “That’s the scary thing,” Ward said. Fitzsimmons, the sandhogs’ union leader, added, “If you attacked the right spots-I hate to say this, but it’s true-you could take out all of the water going into New York City.”

On the morning that I went down the hole with John Ryan, he told me, “My hope is that we can finish the third water tunnel, so my father will be able to see it completed.”

The mole was boring into the rock. Several sandhogs had laid new tracks on the floor, pounding them into the rock with sledgehammers.

“All right!” Ryan yelled. “Let’s check the cutter heads.”

He looked up at me from under his hard hat. “You want to go?” he asked.

“Where?”

He pointed underneath the mole, where a small passageway led into the bowels of the machine. Two other sandhogs were already crawling in and, after a moment, I followed. First we had to crouch in a cavity no more than three feet by four feet. One of the sandhogs, who introduced himself as Peter, fumbled with the lamp on his hard hat. “Fucking thing’s busted,” he said.

The other worker turned his light on, and I could see that the passage led to a five-foot-long corridor that connected to the head of the mole.

“Whenever you’re ready, John,” Peter yelled to Ryan, who was outside the cavity, directing the operation. “You can roll the head.”

We stayed in a crouch for several more minutes, watching the mole’s cutters rotate several degrees one way, then the other, until at last they came to rest.

“This is the most dangerous part,” Peter said. He then lay on his stomach and stuck his hands straight out in front of him and began to squirm, feet first, through the narrow passage leading to the mole’s cutters. He slid through the mud and water, and I followed on my stomach. Soon, I was standing in mud and water up to my knees, staring at the giant metal blades. I tried to step away, but my back hit something hard: the head of the tunnel. We were sandwiched between the mole and the rock. “You just don’t want anything to move,” Peter said.

As groundwater seeped from the ceiling, hitting the machine, puffs of steam filled the cavity.

“Go ahead, touch it,” Peter said, pointing to one of the blades.

I reached out and touched the edge: it was scalding hot, from friction. “You could fry an egg on it,” Peter said.

The other sandhog squeezed into the crevice. Now the only wiggle room was above our heads. As the water crept up to our thighs, Peter craned his neck, inspecting the front of the tunnel to make sure the rock was sound. There was a series of grooved concentric circles where the blades had cut. “It looks like a dartboard, doesn’t it?” Peter said.

“Like a tree,” the other sandhog said.

They checked the blades to make sure they didn’t require replacement.

I told them I thought I needed to leave.

“Just a second more,” Peter said.

The other sandhog exited first, followed by me, then Peter. When I saw John Ryan again, he looked at my muck-covered clothes, then clapped me cheerfully on the back. “Welcome to our fucking world,” he said.

There was no man-trip car to take me back to the shaft, so I set out by myself, walking the length of the tunnel. “If you see a muck car coming,” Ryan told me, “just hang on to the pipes on the side of the tunnel.”

A few minutes later, the noise from the mole faded, and the tunnel was empty and still. Though it extended as far as the eye could see, this tunnel was not even one-sixtieth the projected length of the third water tunnel; it was a mere one-thousandth of all the miles of water tunnels and pipelines and aqueducts combined. For the first time during my underground excursion, I had some sense of this city under the city-of what many engineers refer to as “the eighth wonder of the world.”

After a while, a light flickered in the distance and I thought it was a muck car. As Ryan had instructed, I hung on to the pipes on the side of the tunnel. But it was only a sandhog come to escort me out.

When I reached the top, I went into the hog house to change. On the bench beside me was a slender boy with a hard hat cocked to one side, as if it were a fedora. He looked astonishingly like Jimmy Ryan. It was Jimmy’s younger son, Greg. “I started in 2000, over on the third water tunnel in Queens,” he said. “They call us the millennial hogs.”

Only twenty, he looked like a slightly ungainly teen-ager in his dirty white shirt and a slicker that seemed too loose for his narrow waist. He hung his Yankees cap in his locker and wrapped his supper, a veal cutlet sandwich, in a plastic bag. “It saves time to eat underground,” he said.

Greg glanced at another sandhog who was dressing nearby. His left hand had been crushed under a beam in the hole, and his index finger was missing. “I still get scared sometimes,” Greg said, lifting his hard hat and removing a pack of menthol cigarettes. He lit one and let it dangle between his teeth, the way he had often seen his father do. “My father told me not to think about it. It’ll only make it worse.”

Greg turned and headed outside, where his brother John was emerging from the cage, his face covered in mud. As John stepped onto solid ground, shielding his eyes from the blinding light, he clapped his hand on Greg’s shoulder. “I’ll see you, O.K.?” Greg nodded and, without a word, descended into the darkness.

– September, 2003

The Old Man and the Gun
THE SECRETS OF A LEGENDARY STICKUP MAN

Just before Forrest Tucker turned seventy-nine, he went to work for the last time. Although he was still a striking-looking man, with intense blue eyes and swept-back white hair, he had a growing list of ailments, including high blood pressure and burning ulcers. He had already had a quadruple bypass, and his wife encouraged him to settle into their home in Pompano Beach, Florida, a peach-colored house on the edge of a golf course which they’d purchased for their retirement. There was a place nearby where they could eat prime rib and dance on Saturday nights with other seniors for $15.50 a person, and even a lake where Tucker could sit by the shore and practice his saxophone.

But on this spring day in 1999, while his neighbors were on the fairway or tending to their grandchildren, he drove to the Republic Security Bank in Jupiter, about fifty miles from his home. Tucker, who took pride in his appearance, was dressed all in white: white pants with a sharp crease, a white sports shirt, white suède shoes, and a shimmering white ascot.

He paused briefly in front of the A.T.M. and pulled the ascot up around his face, bandit style. He then reached into a canvas bag, took out an old U.S. Army Colt.45, and burst into the bank. He went up to the first teller and said, “Put your money on the counter. All of it.”

He flashed the gun so that everyone could see it. The teller laid several packets of fives and twenties on the counter, and Tucker inspected them for exploding dye packs. Checking his watch, he turned to the next teller and said, “Get over here. You, too.”

Then he gathered up the thick packets-more than five thousand dollars-and hurried to the door. On his way out, he looked back at the two tellers. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

He drove to a nearby lot, where he had left a “safe” car, a red Grand Am that couldn’t be traced to him. After wiping down the stolen “hot” car with a rag, he threw his belongings inside the Grand Am. They included a.357 Magnum, a sawed-off.30 carbine, two black nylon caps, a holster, a can of Mace, a pair of Smith & Wesson handcuffs, two rolls of black electrical tape, a police badge, five AAA batteries, a police scanner, a glass cutter, gloves, and a fishing cap. There was also a small bottle of medicine for his heart. No one seemed to notice him, and he went home, making what appeared to be a clean getaway.

After a brief stop to count the money, he got back in the car and headed out again. As he approached the golf course, the bills neatly stacked beside him, he noticed an unmarked car on his tail. He turned onto another street, just to make sure. There it was again. Then he spotted a police car pulling out behind him. He hit the gas as hard as he could, trying to outmaneuver them, turning left, then right, right, then left. He went past the North Pompano Baptist Church and the Kraeer Funeral Home, past a row of pink one-story houses with speedboats in the driveways, until he found himself on a dead-end street. As he spun around, he saw that a police car was barricading the road. One of the officers, Captain James Chinn, was reaching for his shotgun. There was a small gap between Chinn’s car and a wooden fence, and Tucker, his body pitched forward in his seat, sped toward it. Chinn, who had spent almost two decades as a detective, later said he had never seen anything like it: the white-haired figure barrelling toward him seemed to be smiling, as if he were enjoying the showdown. Then, as the car skidded over the embankment, Tucker lost control and hit a palm tree. The air bags inflated, pinning him against the seat.

The police were stunned when they realized that the man they had apprehended was not only seventy-eight years old-he looked, according to Chinn, “as if he had just come from an Early Bird Special”-but one of the most notorious stickup men of the twentieth century. Over a career that spanned more than six decades, he had also become perhaps the greatest escape artist of his generation, a human contortionist who had broken out of nearly every prison he was confined in.

One day in 2002, I went to meet Tucker in Fort Worth, Texas, where he was being held in a prison medical center after pleading guilty to one count of robbery and receiving a thirteen-year sentence. The hospital, an old yellow brick building with a red tiled roof, was on top of a hill and set back off the main road, surrounded by armed guards and razor wire. I was handed a notice that said no “weapons,” “ammunition,” or “metal cutting tools” were allowed, and then escorted through a series of chambers-each door sealing behind us before the next one opened-until I arrived in an empty waiting room.

Before long, a man appeared in a wheelchair pushed by a guard. He wore brown prison fatigues and a green jacket with a turned-up collar. His figure was twisted forward, as if he had tried to contort it one last time and it had frozen in place. As he rose from the wheelchair, he said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Forrest Tucker.”

His voice was gentle, with a soft Southern lilt. After he extended his hand, he made his way slowly over to a wooden table with the help of a walker. “I’m sorry we have to meet here,” he said, waiting for me to sit first.

Captain Chinn had told me that he had never met such a gracious criminal: “If you see him, tell him Captain Chinn says hi.” Even a juror who helped convict him once remarked, “You got to hand it to the guy-he’s got style.”

“So what do you want to know?” Tucker said. “I’ve been in prison all my life, except for the times I’ve broken out. I was born in 1920, and I was in jail by the time I was fifteen. I’m eighty-one now and I’m still in jail, but I’ve broken out eighteen times successfully and twelve times unsuccessfully. There were plenty of other times I planned to escape, but there’s no point in me telling you about them.”

As we sat in a corner by a window overlooking the prison yard, it was hard to imagine that this man’s career had featured wanted posters and midnight escapes. His fingers were knotted like bamboo, and he wore bifocals.

“What I mean by a successful escape is to elude custody,” he continued, squinting out the window. “Maybe they’d eventually get me, but I got away at least for a few minutes.”

He pointed to the places along his arm where he had been shot while trying to flee. “I still have part of a bullet in me,” he said. “They all opened up on me and hit me three times-in both shoulders with M16 rifles, and with buckshot in the legs.”

His voice sounded dry, and I offered to buy him a drink from the vending machine. He followed me and peered through the glass, without touching it. He chose a Dr Pepper. “That’s kind of like cherry soda, isn’t it?”

He seemed pleased. When I gave him the drink, he glanced at the candy bars, and I asked him if he wanted anything else. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he said, “I’d like a Mounds.”

After he finished eating, he began to tell me what he called “the true story of Forrest Tucker.” He spoke for hours, and when he grew tired he offered to continue the next morning. During our conversations, which went on for several days, we always sat in the corner by the window, and after a while he would cough slightly and I would offer to buy him a drink. Each time, he followed me to the machine, as the guard watched from a distance. It was only during the last trip to the machine, when I dropped some money, that I noticed his eyes were moving over everything-the walls, the windows, the guard, the fences, the razor wire. It occurred to me that Tucker, escape artist par excellence, had been using our meetings to case the joint.

“The first time I broke out of the can I was only fifteen,” Tucker told me. “At fifteen, you’re pretty fast.”

It was the spring of 1936, and he had been incarcerated for stealing a car in Stuart, Florida, a small town along the St. Lucie River which had been devastated during the Depression. He told the police that he took it “just for a thrill,” but as he sat in jail the thrill gave way to panic, and when a jailer removed his chains he darted out. Several days later, a deputy discovered him in an orange grove, eating a piece of fruit. “That was escape No. 1,” Tucker says. “Such as it was.”

The sheriff decided to transfer him to reform school. During his brief flight, however, Tucker had slipped a half-dozen hacksaw blades through the cell window to a group of boys he had met inside. “They hadn’t broken out yet and still had the blades,” he says. That night, after sawing a bar, he slithered out, helping two other boys squeeze through the tiny opening.

Unlike the others, Tucker knew the area. As a kid, he had spent a fair amount of time by the river, and it was in the river that the police found him and another boy, about an hour later, hiding with just their noses above water. The next day, the Stuart Daily News detailed his exploits under the headline “TRIO ESCAPE BY SAWING BARS OF CELL LAST NIGHT… SUPPLIED WITH HACK-SAWS, COLD CHISELS AND FILES BY BOY.”

“That was escape No. 2,” Tucker says. “A brief one.”

Like the outlaws he read about in dime novels who were forced into banditry by some perceived injustice, Tucker says that “the legend of Forrest Tucker” began on the morning when he was unfairly sent away for only a minor theft. The story, which he repeated even as a boy, eventually spread throughout the town, and over time the details became more ornate, the theft more minor. Morris Walton, who used to play with Tucker as a child, says, “My sense is he spent his life in jail for stealing a bicycle and simply trying to escape. If he became bad, it was only because the system made him that way.”

What Walton knew of Tucker’s upbringing reinforced that impression. His father was a heavy-equipment operator who disappeared when Tucker was six. While his mother struggled in menial jobs in Miami, Tucker was sent to live with his grandmother, who was the tender of the bridge in Stuart. There he built canoes and sailboats out of scrap metal and wood, which he gathered along the riverbank, and taught himself to play the saxophone and the clarinet. “It wasn’t like I needed a father to order me around,” he says.

But as his reputation for cleverness grew, so did his rap sheet. By his sixteenth birthday, it included charges of “breaking and entering” and “simple larceny.” After he escaped from reform school and fled to Georgia, he was sentenced to “be placed and confined at labor in the chain gang.” Like all new inmates, he was taken to the blacksmith, where a chain was riveted around both of his ankles. The steel gradually ate into the skin, a condition known as shackle poisoning.

“The guards would give you the first three days to let you get your hands broken in with calluses,” Tucker recalls. “But after that the walking boss would punish you, hit you with his cane or fist. And if you didn’t work hard enough the guards would take you in the bathroom and tie your hands behind your back and put a pressure hose in your face and hold it there until you’d sputter and you couldn’t breathe.”

Although Tucker was released after only six months, he was soon convicted again, for stealing another car, and sentenced to ten years. By now, “we see a man who has been thoroughly cast out by society,” Tucker’s lawyer later wrote in a court motion. “Marked as a criminal at seventeen years old and constantly railroaded through judicial proceedings without the benefit of counsel, Forrest Tucker was becoming an angry young man.” Tucker himself says, “The die was cast.” In photographs taken after he was paroled at the age of twenty-four, his hair is cut short and he has on a white T-shirt; his once slender arms are coiled with muscles. His eyes are piercing. People who knew him say that he was extraordinarily charismatic-that girls flocked around him-but they also noted a growing reservoir of anger. “I think he had this desperate need to show the world that he was somebody,” one of his relatives says.

At first, Tucker sought work playing the saxophone in big bands around Miami, and he seemed to have harbored ambitions of becoming another Glenn Miller. Nothing came of it, though, and, after a brief failed marriage, he put away his sax and got himself a gun.

The outlaw, in the American imagination, is a subject of romance-a “good” bad man, he is typically a master of escape, a crack shot, a ladies’ man. In 1915, when the police asked the train robber Frank Ryan why he did it, he replied, “Bad companions and dime novels. Jesse James was my favorite hero.”

When Tucker was growing up, during the Great Depression, the appeal of bank robbers, fuelled by widespread anger over defaults and foreclosures, was reaching its zenith. After the F.B.I. gunned down John Dillinger, in 1934, droves descended on the scene, mopping up his blood with their clothes. At least ten Hollywood films were devoted to Dillinger’s life; one of them exclaimed, “His Story Is Written in Bullets, Blood and Blondes!”

Because the holdup demands a public performance, it tends to draw a certain personality: bold, vainglorious, reckless. At the same time, most bank robbers know that the society that revels in their exploits will ultimately demand their elimination, by incarceration or death. “They’ll get me,” Pretty Boy Floyd once said. “Sooner or later, I’ll go down full of lead. That’s how it will end.”

Indeed, by the time Tucker set out to become an outlaw, in the late nineteen-forties, most of the legendary stickup men had already been gunned down. Still, he began to imitate their style, dressing in chalk-striped suits and two-tone shoes, and he would stand in front of a mirror, pointing a gun at his own reflection. Finally, on September 22, 1950, with a handkerchief tied over his face and a gun drawn in the style of Jesse James, he strode into a bank in Miami and made off with $1,278. A few days later, he went back to the same place, this time for the entire safe. He was apprehended as he was trying to crack it open with a blowtorch on the roadside.

His career seemed even more fleeting than that of most bank robbers, but in the county jail Tucker decided he was more than an ordinary stickup man. “It didn’t matter to me if they gave me five years, ten years, or life,” he says. “I was an escape artist.”

He searched the prison for what he called “the weak spot.” One day around Christmas, after weeks of looking, he began to moan in pain. The authorities rushed him to the hospital, where doctors removed his appendix. (“A small price to pay,” Tucker says.) While convalescing, still chained to his bed, he started to work on the shackles. He had taught himself how to pick a lock using almost anything-a pen, a paper clip, a piece of wire, nail clippers, a watch spring-and after a few minutes he walked out, unnoticed.

He made his way to California, where he went on a spree of robberies, hurtling over counters, pointing his gun, and declaring, “I mean business!” He wore bright checkered suits and sped away in a flamboyant getaway car with tubes along the sides. He even talked like a character in pulp fiction. “This is a stickup, girls,” he once said, according to witnesses. “I’ve got a gun. Be quiet and you won’t get hurt.”

Hoping to improve his take, Tucker began to cast about for a partner. “I didn’t want any nuts or rats,” he says, adding, “I’m from the old school.” In the end, he found an ex-con named Richard Bellew, a tall, handsome thief with a high I.Q. and wavy black hair. Like Tucker, Bellew modelled himself on the stickup men of the nineteen-thirties, and he ran with a stage dancer named Jet Blanca. But Tucker chose him for another reason: “He always let me count the dough.”

They began to hit one bank after another. After one heist, witnesses said the last thing they saw was a row of suits hanging in the back seat of the getaway car. The heists, which continued for two years, dominated the local headlines, often preempting coverage of the 1952 Presidential election and the McCarthy hearings. Tucker and Bellew were depicted as “armed men” who “terrorized” their “victims,” but also as “dramatically attired” “hold-up artists” who “expertly stripped” the tellers of cash, leaving behind “only an impression of competent banditry… and one getaway car.”

On March 20, 1953, more than two years after Tucker’s escape from the hospital, F.B.I. agents surrounded him as he was retrieving loot from a safe-deposit box in San Francisco. Then they went to search the place Tucker had listed as his residence. There, in a spacious apartment in San Mateo, they found a young blond woman who said she had never heard of Forrest Tucker. She was married to a wealthy songwriter, she said, who commuted daily to the city, and they had just moved into a bigger apartment to make room for their five-month-old son. Her husband’s name, she told the police, was Richard Bellew. Yet when the officers showed Shirley Bellew a photograph of the bank robber and longtime prison fugitive Forrest Tucker, she burst into tears. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “He was such a good man, such a good provider.”

She recalled how her husband would come home every night and play with their baby, whom they had named Rick Bellew, Jr. “What’s going to become of our little baby?” she asked. “What’s his name going to be?”

“Let me tell you about Alcatraz,” Tucker said one day as he sat in the corner of the visiting room, his walker resting against his leg. He had spread a napkin out in front of him and was eating a meatball hero I’d brought him and sipping a Dr Pepper. “There were only fifteen hundred and seventy-six people who ever went there. I was No. 1047.”

Alcatraz, or “the Rock,” had been converted from a military prison in 1934 as a way to confine the country’s most notorious criminals, including George (Machine Gun) Kelly, Robert Stroud (the Birdman of Alcatraz), and Mickey Cohen. At least half of the inmates had previously attempted to break out of other prisons. Surrounded by the freezing San Francisco Bay and its deadly currents, it was built to be escapeproof. Al Capone, who was sent there in 1934, is said to have told the warden, “It looks like Alcatraz has got me licked.”

Tucker arrived on September 3, 1953. He was thirty-three. He had been sentenced to thirty years. In his prison photo, he still has on a jacket and tie; his brown hair is brushed back with a touch of oil; he is slightly unshaved but still striking. Within moments, he was stripped naked, and a medical attendant probed his ears and nose and mouth and rectum, searching for any tools or weapons. He was given a blue chambray shirt with his number stamped on it and a pair of trousers, as well as a cap, a peacoat, a bathrobe, three pairs of socks, two handkerchiefs, a pair of shoes, and a raincoat. His cell was so narrow that he could reach out and touch both sides at the same time. “It was so cold in the cellblock you had to sleep with your coat and hat to stay warm,” Tucker says.

As he lay in bed, he says, he thought about his wife and child. He remembered the first time he met Shirley Storz, at an event for singles in Oakland. He remembered how they skied at Lake Tahoe and were married in a small ceremony in September of 1951, how she sang in a choral group, and how he’d sit and listen for hours. And he remembered his son being born. “We loved each other,” Tucker says of his wife. “I didn’t know how to explain to her the truth-that this was my way of life.”

Several weeks after he arrived, a guard roused him from his cell and led him into a tiny room that had a small window. Peering through it, he saw his wife sitting on the other side. He picked up the phone. “It was hard to talk,” he recalls. “We had to look at each other through a piece of glass. She told me she had to make a life for herself. I said, ‘The best thing you can do is make a life for you and our son.’ I told her, ‘I won’t bother you no matter what, no matter how much I want to. I won’t ring your phone.’” A few months later, he received notice that their marriage had been annulled.

By now, Tucker had developed several maxims, including “The more security, the more bizarre the method of escape must be.” He began to concoct elaborate schemes with a fellow-inmate named Teddy Green, an escape artist and bank robber who had once dressed as a priest to elude the police and had broken out of the state penitentiary by shipping himself out in a box of rags.

Along with another inmate, they started smuggling tools from their prison jobs, hiding them in the laundry, and planting pieces of steel wool on other prisoners to set off the metal detectors, so that the guards assumed they were broken. They carved holes in their toilet bowls and tucked the tools inside, putting putty over them. At night, they used the tools to tunnel through the floor, planning to go out by means of the basement.

One day, according to internal prison records, a prisoner in solitary suggested that guards examine the cell toilets; soon a full-scale search was launched. A warden’s report summed up the findings:

The result of the shakedown of these toilets was the blow torch as I have mentioned, a bar spreader, a pair of side cutters, a brace and some bits… a screwdriver and one or two pieces of wire and a piece of carborundum stone.

All three prisoners were labelled “very dangerous escape risks” and locked in the Treatment Unit, better known as “the hole.”

“I remember walking in with no clothes or shoes on,” Tucker says. “The steel floor was so cold it hurt to touch it. The only way to stay warm was to keep walking.” One night, he heard a haunting sound through the window. He couldn’t see anyone outside, but he heard voices from below. They were the guards’ children, singing carols. “It was the first children’s voices I had heard in years,” he says. “It was Christmas Eve.”

As the time passed, Tucker began to teach himself the law, and before long he was deluging the court with appeals, which he wrote in a slanting methodical print. Although a prosecutor later dismissed one of his writs as pure “fantasy,” he was granted a hearing in November of 1956. According to Tucker, as well as court records, the night before his court appearance, while being held in the county jail, he complained of pains in his kidneys and was rushed to the hospital. Guards were stationed at every door. When no one was looking, Tucker broke a pencil and stabbed his ankle. Because of the wound, the guards removed his leg irons, strapping him to the gurney with his hands cuffed. As he was being wheeled into the X-ray room, Tucker leaped up, overpowered two guards, and ran out the door. For several hours, he enjoyed the fresh air and the sight of ordinary people. He was apprehended, still in his hospital gown and handcuffs, in the middle of a cornfield.

The brief escape, for which he was tried and convicted, enhanced his reputation as an escape artist. Yet it was not for another twenty-three years, after Tucker had been released and arrested again for armed robbery, that he made his greatest escape. In the summer of 1979, while at San Quentin, a maximum-security facility that jutted out into the ocean and was known among cons as “the gladiator school,” Tucker took a job in the prison industries and, with the help of two other inmates, John Waller and William McGirk, secretly gathered together scraps of wood and sheets of Formica, which they cut into strange shapes and hid under tarps. From the electrical shop, they spirited away two six-foot poles and several buckets. Then, in the furniture workshop, they found the final pieces: plastic dust-covers, paint, and tape, which they stored in boxes labelled “Office Supplies.”

On August 9th, after months of preparation, Tucker exchanged nods with both of his confederates in the yard, signalling that everything was ready. While Waller and McGirk stood watch outside the lumber shop, Tucker drew on his childhood experience and began to fashion the pieces into a fourteen-foot kayak. “A hammer was too loud, so I had to use only tape and bolts,” Tucker says. He had just enough paint for one side of the craft, the side that would face the guard towers, and as the others urged him to hurry he stencilled on it “Rub-a-Dub-Dub.” Waller, who called the fifty-nine-year-old Tucker “the old man,” later told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, “The boat was beautiful; I wish my eyes were as blue as that boat.”

They wore sailor hats and sweatshirts that Tucker had painted bright orange, with the logo of the Marin Yacht Club, which he had seen on the boats that sailed by. When the guard wasn’t looking, they hurriedly put the kayak into the water. As they set out, the winds were blowing more than twenty miles an hour, and massive swells began to swamp the kayak. “The boat didn’t leak a drop,” Waller said. “We could have paddled to Australia. It was those damn waves over the side. When we finally reached the edge of the property at Q”-San Quentin-“the son of a bitch sank.”

A guard in one of the towers spotted them clinging to the upside-down craft, kicking to shore, and asked if they needed help. They said they were fine, and, as if to prove it, McGirk held up his wrist and yelled, “We just lost a couple of oars, but my Timex is still running!” The guard, unaware that three prisoners were missing, laughed and went back to his lookout.

California soon unleashed a statewide manhunt. Meanwhile, police in Texas and Oklahoma began to report a strange series of holdups. They all had the same M.O.: three or four men would stroll into a grocery store or a bank, flash a gun, demand the money, and speed away in a stolen car. Witnesses invariably noted that they were all, by the standards of the trade, old men. One even wore what appeared to be a hearing aid. The authorities compared them to the elderly thieves in the film “Going in Style,” and dubbed them “the Over-the-Hill Gang.”

“That was when I was really a good robber,” Tucker tells me. He is careful not to admit to any particular crime (“I don’t know if they still have jurisdiction”) or implicate any of his living partners (“Some of them are still out there”), but he says that by the age of sixty he had at last mastered the art of the holdup.

One day, while we were sitting in the prison visiting room, Tucker leaned forward in his chair and began to teach me how to rob a bank. “First of all, you want a place near the highway,” he said, putting on his bifocals, his eyes blinking as if he were imagining a particular layout. “Then you need to case it-you can’t just storm in. You need to size it up, know it like your own home.”

“In the old days, the stickup men were like cowboys,” he continued. “They would just go in shooting, yelling for everyone to lie down. But to me violence is the first sign of an amateur.” The best holdup men, in his view, were like stage actors, able to hold a room by the sheer force of their personality. Some even wore makeup and practiced getting into character. “There is an art to robbing a bank if you do it right,” Tucker said. Whereas he once cultivated a flamboyant image, he later developed, he said, a subtler, more “natural” style.

“O.K., the tools,” he pressed on. Ideally, he said, you needed nail polish or superglue to cover your fingertips (“You can wear gloves, but in warmer climates they only draw attention”), a glass cutter, a holster, a canvas bag (“big enough for the dough”), and a gun (“a.38 or semi-automatic, or whatever you can get your hands on”). He said the gun was just “a prop,” but essential to any operation.

There was one other thing, he said after a pause. It was the key to the success of the Over-the-Hill Gang and what he still called “the Forrest Tucker trademark”: the hearing aid. It was actually a police scanner, he said, which he wired through his shirt; that way, he would know if any silent alarms had been triggered.

He removed a napkin from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Once you’ve got your cool car parked nearby, you’ve got your radio, your hands are covered with gloves or superglue, you walk in. Go right up to the manager. Say, ‘Sit down.’ Never pull the gun-just flash it. Tell him calmly you’re here to rob the bank and it better go off without a hitch. Don’t run from the bank unless you’re being shot at, ’Cause it only shows something is going on. Just walk to the hot car, real calm, then drive to the cool car. Rev it up, and you’re gone.”

After he finished, he seemed satisfied. “I’ve just given you a manual on how to rob a bank,” he said. He reflected on this for a moment, then added, “No one can teach you the craft. You can only learn by doing.”

A forty-year-old sergeant on the Austin police force, John Hunt, was assigned to investigate the mysterious holdups of the Over-the-Hill Gang. “They were the most professional, successful robbers that I ever encountered in all my years on the force,” Hunt, who is now retired after a thirty-year career, told me. “They had more experience in robbery than we had catching them.”

Then a chain-smoker with a drooping mustache and a slight paunch, Hunt spent long days trying to catch the gang. With the advent of high-tech security there were fewer and fewer traditional bank robbers; most were desperate drug addicts who made off with only a few thousand dollars before they were caught. The members of the Over-the-Hill Gang seemed to defy not just their age but their era. “They’d get up every day and be on the job,” Hunt said. “Just as a welder gets good at welding, or a writer gets good over the years by writing, these guys learned from their mistakes.”

In a one-year span, the Over-the-Hill Gang was suspected in at least sixty robberies in Oklahoma and Texas-twenty in the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone. The gang was also believed to be responsible for holdups in New Mexico, Arizona, and Louisiana. “SENIOR CITIZENS STRIKE AGAIN,” one headline blared. “MIDDLE-AGED BANDITS PUZZLE DETECTIVES,” another read.

In December of 1980, Hunt and forty other law-enforcement officers from at least three states held a conference in Dallas to figure out how to stop them. “You can’t say how many lives they altered by sticking a gun in someone’s face,” a former F.B.I. agent told me.

Tucker seemed unable to stop, no matter how much money he accumulated. Although there are no official estimates, Tucker-relying on an array of aliases, including Robert Tuck MacDougall, Bob Stone, Russell Johns, Ralph Pruitt, Forrest Brown, J. C. Tucker, and Ricky Tucker-is believed over his career to have stolen millions of dollars, a fleet of sports cars, a bag of yen, and one Sambo’s wooden nickel. In the spring of 1983, he embarked on his most audacious heist yet: robbing a high-security bank in Massachusetts in broad daylight by pretending that he and his men were guards making a routine pickup in an armored car. Tucker believed the plan was “a breakthrough in the art.” On March 7th, moments before the armored car was scheduled to arrive, they put on makeup and mustaches; Tucker’s wig had shrunk in a recent snowstorm, and rather than postpone the operation he decided to do without it.

The teller buzzed them in. Just as they were entering the vault, according to a police report, the manager noticed that “the dark mustache on one man and the white mustache on the other man were not real.” One of the “guards” patted his gun and said, “This is a holdup.”

Tucker locked the manager and two tellers inside the vault, and escaped with more than four hundred and thirty thousand dollars. But when the police showed the tellers a series of mug shots, they identified, for the first time, the leader of the Over-the-Hill Gang as the same man who had broken out of San Quentin in a homemade kayak three years earlier.

As the F.B.I., the local police, and the county sheriffs all tried to track him down, Tucker hid in Florida, checking in daily with Teddy Green, his old Alcatraz confidant. One June morning, Tucker pulled into Green’s garage and waited while his friend walked toward the car. “I was looking at him,” Tucker recalls, “thinking, My, what a sharp suit!”

A man jumped in front of Tucker’s car and yelled, “F.B.I., don’t move! You’re under arrest.”

Agents were everywhere, coming out of cars and bushes. Tucker glowered at Green, convinced that his friend had “ratted me out.” Although Tucker insists that he never had a pistol-and none was ever found-several agents said they saw one in his hand. “He’s got a gun!” one of them yelled, diving to the ground. The garage filled with the sound of gunfire. Bullets shattered the windshield and the radiator. Tucker, who had been hit in both arms and in the leg, ducked below the dashboard and pressed the accelerator, crashing outside the garage. He opened the car door and stumbled onto the street, his hands and face covered in blood. A woman with two children was driving toward him. “As I got closer,” the woman later testified, “he started to look bloodier and bloodier-it was all over him-and I thought, This poor man has been hit by a car.”

She offered him a ride, and he climbed into the passenger seat. Then, in her rearview mirror, she saw someone holding a rifle, and her six-year-old son cried out, “Criminal!” When she hesitated, Tucker grabbed the wheel and snapped, “I have a gun-now drive!” Her son began to sob. After a half-mile chase, they veered down a dead-end street. At a muttered “O.K.” from Tucker, the woman scrambled out of the car and dragged her children to safety. Then Tucker himself stepped from the car and passed out.

A columnist for the Miami Herald summed up the capture of the longtime prison fugitive and leader of the Over-the-Hill Gang this way:

There is something vaguely appealing about Tucker… Old guys are not regularly associated with high crimes… Tucker must also be admired, in a twisted way I admit, for pulling off an incredible escape from San Quentin prison in San Francisco… Tucker might have made a fortune selling the escape yarn to Hollywood and holing up somewhere. Instead he chose to resume the line of work to which he was dedicated… The aging Robin Hood took from the rich, who were probably loaded with insurance.

Tucker’s story had, at last, acquired the burnish of outlaw mythology. The battered Rub-a-Dub-Dub had been donated to the Marin Yacht Club and was later placed in a prison museum, and the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Oakland requested that Tucker be allowed to serve as grand marshal for its upcoming Bathtub Regatta. Amid the clamor, the F.B.I. showed up at a fancy retirement community in Lauderhill, Florida, where Tucker was believed to have been living. An elegant woman in her fifties answered the door. When they asked her about Forrest Tucker, she said she had never heard of the man. She was married to Bob Callahan, a successful stockbroker whom she had met shortly after her first husband died. When the agents explained that Bob Callahan was really Forrest Tucker, a man who had broken out of jail four years earlier, she looked at them in tears. “I told ’em, ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying,’” she recalled, nearly two decades later. “But they had him. They shot him three times.”

An heiress to a modest moving-company fortune who looked, in her youth, a bit like Marilyn Monroe, she remembers meeting Tucker at the Whale and Porpoise, a private club on Oakland Park Boulevard. She had never encountered anyone so kind and gallant. “He came over and asked me to dance, and that was that,” she told me.

She recalled how she went to see him in prison (“still in a daze”), not sure what to say or do. When she saw him lying there, pale and bloodied, she was overcome with love for this man who, she learned, had been in a chain gang at sixteen. As he begged her forgiveness, she told me, “All I wanted to do was hold him.”

At first, awaiting trial in Miami, Tucker tried to break out of jail, removing a bar in his cell with a hacksaw and climbing onto the roof with a homemade grappling hook. But after his wife promised-to the consternation of her family and friends-to stay with him if he reformed, Tucker vowed to rehabilitate himself. “I told her that from then on I’d only look at ways to escape,” he says, adding, “She is one in a million.”

He returned to San Quentin, where he was nicknamed “the captain,” and where, for the first time, his seemingly impervious constitution began to show its age. In 1986, he underwent a quadruple bypass. Although guards stood by the door in case he tried to escape, he now considered himself strictly a legal contortionist. Years earlier, at Alcatraz, he had written an appeal that went all the way to the Supreme Court in which he successfully argued that a judge could not, at sentencing, take into account prior convictions received when the defendant lacked counsel. (“It is time we become just a little realistic in the face of a record such as this one,” Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote in an angry dissent.) Now, with his failing health, Tucker unleashed another flurry of appeals, getting his sentence reduced by more than half. “This is to thank you,” he wrote one judge. “It’s the first break I ever got in my life. I won’t ever need another.”

He began to pour all his energy into what he saw as the culmination of his life as an outlaw: a Hollywood movie. Tucker had seen all sorts of films that echoed his life, among them “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,” “Escape from Alcatraz,” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” and he wanted, at last, to see his story enshrined in the American imagination. He began to put his exploits down on paper, five pages at a time. “No one could have written this inside story of the Rock and what really happened there unless they had personally lived it,” he wrote. He devoted two hundred and sixty-one pages to “Alcatraz: The True Story,” while working on a second, more ambitious account, which he titled “The Can Opener.” In it, he described himself as a throwback “to the highly intelligent, nonviolent type of criminal in the Willie Sutton mold,” and, more grandly, as a kind of heroic underdog, pitted against a vast and oppressive system. “Tucker’s obsession with freedom and escape has transformed itself into gamesmanship,” he wrote. “This is his way of keeping his sanity in a lifetime of being the hunted. Each new ‘joint’ is a game, a game to outwit the authorities.”

In 1993, he was released, at the age of seventy-three, and settled into the peach-colored house in Pompano Beach, which his wife had bought for them. He polished his manuscript and set up a music room in the den, where he gave saxophone and clarinet lessons for twenty-five dollars an hour. “We had a wonderful life,” his wife said. Tucker recalls, “We used to go out dancing. She’d dress up real pretty, and I’d show her off.” He composed music for her. “He has all these talents that had been wasted all these years,” she told me. From time to time, he played in local jazz clubs. “I got used to being free,” he says. But his manuscript failed to captivate people as he had hoped it would-“I called Clint Eastwood’s secretary, but she said, ‘Unless you have an agent, he won’t read it’”-and the author of “The Can Opener” increasingly seemed trapped, an ordinary old man.

Then came the day in 1999 when, at the age of seventy-eight, he painted his fingertips with nail polish, pulled his white ascot up over his face, and burst into the Republic Security Bank with his gun. “He didn’t do it for the money,” his wife said. “We had a new car, nice home paid for, beautiful clothes. He had everything.”

“I think he wanted to become a legend, like Bonnie and Clyde,” said Captain Chinn, who apprehended him after what was believed to be his fourth recent robbery in the Florida area. A court psychologist who examined Tucker noted, “I have seen many individuals who are self-aggrandizing, and that would like to make their mark in history… but none, I must admit, that I heard that would want to, other than in the movies, go out in a blaze in a bank robbery. It is beyond the realm of psychological prediction.”

After Tucker’s arrest, the police put him in semi-isolation, fearing that even at seventy-eight he might somehow elude them. Despite his lawyer’s pleas that his client could die under such conditions, he was denied bail. “Ordinarily, I would not consider a seventy-eight-year-old man a flight risk or a danger to the community,” the magistrate said, “but Mr. Tucker has proved himself to be remarkably agile.” On October 20, 2000, just before his case was scheduled to go to trial, and with his wife looking on, Tucker pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to thirteen years.

At one point, I found a report that the Department of Corrections had compiled, detailing Tucker’s life. After pages listing his dramatic holdups and daredevil escapes, it concluded with a different kind of summary:

The defendant does not know the whereabouts of [his] daughter. He stated he did not have an active part in this child’s upbringing… The defendant has no knowledge of his son’s whereabouts. The defendant did not partake in the rearing of this child.

“I thought he died in an automobile accident,” his son, Rick Bellew, told me over the phone after I tracked him down in Nevada, where he was living and working as a printer. “That’s what my mom told me to protect me.” He didn’t know the truth, he said, until he was in his early twenties, when Tucker was about to be paroled. “My mom was afraid he’d come up to me on the street and freak me out.”

He said that after his father was taken away the authorities confiscated all their furniture and possessions, which had been paid for with stolen cash. They had to move in with his grandparents, while his mother worked in a factory to support them. “He left us with nothing,” he said. “He turned our world inside out.”

After Bellew read about Tucker’s last arrest, he wrote him a letter for the first time. “I needed to know why he did it,” he said. “Why he sacrificed everything.”

Although Tucker could never give him a satisfactory answer, they struck up a correspondence, and in one of his letters Tucker told him something he had never expected: Bellew had an older half sister named Gaile Tucker, a nurse who lived in Florida. “I called her up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ I said, ‘This is your long-lost brother.’ She said, ‘Oh, my God.’” Later, the two met, studying each other’s features for similarities, trying to piece together a portrait of a man they barely knew.

“I don’t have any ill feelings,” his daughter told me. “I just don’t have any feelings.”

At one point, Bellew read me part of a letter that Tucker had recently sent him: “I’m sorry things turned out the way they did… I never got to take you fishing, or to baseball games or to see you grow up… I don’t ask you to forgive me as there is too much lost but just so you know I wish you the best. Always. Your dad, Forrest.”

Bellew said he didn’t know if he would continue the correspondence, not because of what Tucker had done to him but because of what he had done to his mother. “He blew my mother’s world apart,” Bellew told me. “She never remarried. There was a song she used to sing to me called ‘Me and My Shadow,’ all about being alone and blue. And when she had cancer, and wasn’t going to live much longer, I broke down and she sang that song, and I realized how bittersweet it was. It was her life.”

In the spring of 2002, when I visited Tucker’s third wife in Pompano Beach, she seemed to be still trying to cope. A small, delicate woman, now in her seventies, she had had several operations and lived alone in their house. “With Forrest gone, there’s no one to fix things up,” she said. She paused, scanning the den where he used to keep his musical instruments. “The silence is unbearable.” She showed me a picture of the two of them, taken shortly after they met. They are standing side by side, their arms touching. He has on a red shirt and tie, and his wavy hair is neatly combed to one side. “God, he used to be so handsome,” she said. “When I met him, he was a doll.”

She turned the picture of him over several times in her hand. “I waited all those years,” she said as she walked me outside, wiping her eyes. “I thought we had the rest of our lives together. What am I supposed to do now?”

One of the last times I met Tucker in prison, he looked alarmingly frail. His facial muscles seemed slack, and his hands trembled. Since his incarceration, he had had several strokes, and a cardiologist concluded that blood clots were gradually cutting off oxygen to his brain. His daughter told me bluntly, “He’ll die in prison.”

“Everyone says I’m smart,” Tucker said to me. “But I’m not smart in the ways of life or I wouldn’t have done the things I did.” After a brief flurry of attention following his arrest, he had been all but forgotten. “When I die, no one will remember me,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. “I wish I had a real profession, something like the music business. I regret not being able to work steady and support my family. I have other regrets, too, but that’s as much as one man can stand. Late at night, you lie in your bunk in prison and you think about what you lost, what you were, what you could’ve been, and you regret.”

He said that his wife was thinking of selling their house and moving into a community where she could see more people. Although he and his wife still spoke regularly, Tucker said, she was too frail to visit.

“What hurts most… is that I know how much I disappointed my wife,” he went on. “That hurts more than anything.”

As he rose to go, he took a piece of paper from his back pocket. “I made this up for you last night,” he said.

On it was a list of all his escapes, neatly printed. At the bottom, there was a No. 19-one more than he had actually made-left blank. As the guard fetched his wheelchair, he waved him away. “I don’t need my chariot,” he said. Then slowly, with his back hunched, he steadied himself against the wall and, with the guard standing behind him, inched down the corridor.

– January, 2003

Stealing Time
WHY RICKEY HENDERSON WON’T GO HOME

One summer night not long ago, Rickey Henderson, the greatest base stealer and lead-off hitter in baseball history, stood in a dugout, pinching the front of his jersey and plucking it several inches from his chest-“peacocking,” as some players call it. He went through the same pregame rituals that he has performed since he was a rookie outfielder with the Oakland A’s, in 1979. He sorted through a bunch of bats, asking, “Which one of you bad motherfuckers has got a hit in you?” Picking one up with resin on the handle, he cocked it back, waiting for an imaginary pitch, and talked to himself in the third person, the words running together so fast that they were nearly unintelligible: “Let’s-burn-Rickey-come-on-let’s-burn.”

Henderson is accustomed not only to beating his opponents but also to lording his abilities over them. As a ten-time All Star for the A’s, the New York Yankees, and seven other teams, he stole more than fourteen hundred bases-a record that is considered untouchable, like Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. He scored more runs than Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, or Hank Aaron. Bill James, the oracle of baseball statistics, wrote, “Without exaggerating one inch, you could find fifty Hall of Famers who, all taken together, don’t own as many records.” Or, as Henderson puts it, “I’m a walking record.”

As Henderson stepped onto the field, he stopped abruptly. A foul odor was seeping from under the dugout. “Where’s it coming from?” one of his teammates asked. Several players bent down, trying to find the source of the smell; previously, the manager had found a dead rat in the stadium.

“I think it’s coming from over here,” one player said. “See that hole?”

Henderson tried to ignore the commotion and resume his routine. He walked toward the batter’s box, moving casually, as if he were out for an evening stroll. An opposing player once noted that it took him longer to get to the batter’s box than to drive to the stadium. Henderson has said that his slow approach is a way to get into a pitcher’s head; opponents have said that it is simply another means for Henderson to let the world take stock of him. As he reached the batter’s box, informing the world what Rickey was going to do to the ball, he again seemed disconcerted, and looked up at the crowd: there were only six hundred or so fans in the stadium, and many of the women had dressed up, as part of a promotional Eighties Night, in sequins and lace stockings, like Madonna in her “Like a Virgin” phase.

Earlier, Henderson had confessed to me, “Last night, I dropped down on my knees and I asked God, ‘Why are you doing this to Rickey? Why did you put me here?’”

An announcer called his name on the scratchy P.A. system: “Now batting lead-off for the San Diego Surf Dawgs… RICKEY HENDERSON.”

The man who once proclaimed “I am the greatest of all time!” was, at the age of forty-six, playing in the Golden Baseball League. It wasn’t the majors. It wasn’t even part of the minor-league farm system. It was an independent league, which consisted largely of players who had never made it to the minors, or had washed out of them. Created by two Stanford business-school graduates, the league-which began operating in 2005, with eight teams in Arizona and California-is widely considered to be the bottom of the bottom. Yet it is here that Henderson suited up for three thousand dollars a month, less than he could bring in selling a piece of memorabilia from his days in the majors.

“Come on, hot dawwwg, let’s see what you can do!” a fan yelled.

Henderson tapped the dirt out of his cleats and got into his crouch, staring at the pitcher, a twenty-four-year-old right-hander for the Mesa Miners. Several nights earlier, Henderson had singled and stolen second base, sliding head first in a cloud of dust, to the delight of fans, but, this time, he hit a weak liner to the second baseman for an easy out. As he made his way to the dugout, one of the hecklers in the crowd yelled, “Hey, Rickey, where’s your fucking wheelchair?”

Other baseball greats have insisted on playing past their prime: at forty, Babe Ruth, in his last major-league season, batted.181 for the Boston Braves. But Henderson’s decision to go so far as to join the Surf Dawgs-which, the team’s former publicist admitted, was frequently assumed to be a girls’ softball team-has been a source of astonishment. His last stint in the majors was in 2003, when he played part of the season for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He hit a mere.208, with three stolen bases. (His last productive season was in 1999.) The Dodgers management, concluding that time had finally defeated “the man of steal,” as he was often called, unceremoniously released him. He had played three thousand and eighty-one games, putting him fourth on the all-time list. He was forty-four years old, and most fans reasonably assumed that he would retire and wait for his induction into the Hall of Fame. Instead, he played the 2004 season with the Newark Bears, in the independent Atlantic League, before switching to the Golden Baseball League. Manny Ramirez, the Boston Red Sox slugger, who played alongside Henderson in 2002, has said that Henderson must be “crazy,” and a sportswriter declared that it would take “a team of psychiatrists” to figure him out. Even one of his three daughters, Alexis, asked, “Dad, why are you doing this?”

A few hours before the game against the Miners, I found Henderson sitting on a metal chair in the Surf Dawgs’ locker room, with his shirt off. He insisted that he was no different from anyone else in the league: he simply wanted to make it to the majors. But he also seemed shocked by his own predicament, by the riddle of age. As he put it, “There are pieces of this puzzle that Rickey is still working out.”

He stood to put on his uniform. He is five feet ten, and, like a Rockette, most of his height seems to come from his legs, which he calls “the essence of my game;” they dwarf his torso, which always appears to be pressing forward, as if he were bursting out of a starting gate. His eyes betray frequent shifts in mood-they squint with displeasure, then widen with delight-and, during games, he often hides them behind wraparound sunglasses. He put on his jersey, which was white, with powder-blue sleeves, and pulled his pants above his hips; when he slipped on his cap, only the creases on his forehead and around his mouth confirmed that he was as old as many of his teammates’ fathers. Extending his arms, he said, “Look at me. I ain’t got no injuries. I got no problem with my eyes. My knees are good. The only problem I have is a little pain in my hip, and it ain’t nothin’ a little ice can’t cure.”

Henderson knew that he had only a few months to prove to a scout that he was able to play at the highest level-the major-league season ended in October. He told me that not long after he began playing for the Newark Bears he called Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Most of Henderson’s greatest achievements in baseball, including his first World Series ring, in 1989, stemmed from his time on the A’s, and he told Beane that he wanted to return to the team more than to any other. “Then I could go out the way I came in,” he said. Beane responded that the A’s, which were currently vying for a spot in the playoffs, had no room for him. Nevertheless, Henderson said, “I ain’t giving up hope. I know if people would just come out to see me play they would realize that Rickey is still Rickey.”

He arrived hours before a game, and would slash at balls as they shot out of a pitching machine at eighty-five miles an hour, while the Surf Dawgs’ adopted theme song blared over the loudspeakers: “Who let the dogs out? Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!” On some mornings, he could be seen running up and down the bleachers. Jose Canseco, who played with Henderson on the A’s, and who helped to fuel the explosion of performance-enhancing drugs in the major leagues, has said of Henderson, “That’s one of the guys who’s not on steroids!”

“They kept that shit a secret from me,” Henderson said. “I wish they had told me. My God, could you imagine Rickey on ’roids? Oh, baby, look out!” He laughed in an easygoing way. “Maybe if they weren’t juicing there’d still be a spot on a ball club for me. People always ask me why I still want to play, but I want to know why no one will give me an opportunity.

It’s like they put a stamp on me: ‘Hall of Fame. You’re done. That’s it.’ It’s a goddam shame.”

As Henderson was talking to me, one of his teammates, who had tousled hair and looked to be about eighteen, walked over. He was holding a baseball and a pen in his hand. He said to Henderson, “I feel funny asking, but could you sign this?”

Henderson smiled and signed the ball.

“Thank you, Rickey,” the young man said, holding the ball along the seams, so as not to smudge the ink.

Henderson turned back to me, and said, “I’ll tell you the truth. I’d give everything up-every record, the Hall of Fame, all of it-for just one more chance.”

Base stealers are often considered their own breed: reckless, egocentric, sometimes even a touch mad. Ron LeFlore, who stole ninety-seven bases with the Montreal Expos, was a convicted armed robber; Ty Cobb, who was called “psychotic” by his authorized biographer, used to slide with his spikes in the air, in an effort to take out the second baseman; even Lou Brock, who was more gentlemanly, believed that one of his greatest assets was unbridled arrogance. Henderson, by all accounts, was a natural-born thief. Lloyd Moseby, a childhood friend of his who played for the Toronto Blue Jays, told Sports Illustrated, “Rickey hasn’t changed since he was a little kid. He could strut before he could walk, and he always lived for the lights.”

Henderson grew up with little outside the game: when he was two, his father disappeared, abandoning the family, and, after his mother moved to California to find work, he and his four brothers remained in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, for several years, in the care of a grandmother. In 1976, when Henderson was seventeen, the Oakland A’s drafted him in the fourth round and assigned him to one of their minor-league teams, in Boise, Idaho. From the beginning, he was intense, moody, and flamboyant. If he hit what looked like an easy ground out, he sometimes refused to run it out, to the consternation of the manager. But, when he thought the opportunity was ripe, his speed was unparalleled. One night in Fresno, California, in 1977, he stole seven bases, tying the record for a single game. Two years later, in the middle of the season, the Oakland A’s called him up to the majors.

With his new money, Henderson hired a group of detectives to find his father. “I didn’t care if he was a bad guy or a good guy,” Henderson told me. “I just wanted to know him.” The private eyes reported back to his mother, who informed him, “Your father is dead. He died a few years ago in a car accident.” In 1980, however, Henderson found an unlikely father figure in Billy Martin, the A’s new manager. Martin was a pugnacious drinker who, on at least one occasion, slugged one of his own players. But he and Henderson shared an in-your-face approach to the game-Martin hung on his office wall a poster that said, “There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm”-and together they developed a manic style of play, known as Billy Ball, that was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. As Henderson has put it, “Billy was the publisher of Billy Ball, and I was the author.”

Because the A’s didn’t have a lot of power, they couldn’t rely on three-run homers and big innings; they had to manufacture runs, to create them out of the slightest opportunities. As the lead-off hitter, Henderson was the catalyst, or, as he likes to say, “the creator of chaos.” He had remarkable strength (twice, he finished the season with a higher slugging percentage than Mark McGwire), but his principal role was to be a nuisance, a pest-to “get on base, any damn way I can,” and begin wreaking havoc on the defense.

As part of his strategy, he had developed one of the most distinctive and infuriating batting stances ever seen. Each hitter has a strike zone that extends roughly from his chest to his knees. Henderson, by collapsing his shoulders to his knees-by practically doubling over-made his strike zone seem uncommonly small; one sportswriter quipped that it was “the size of Hitler’s heart.” With so little room for the pitcher to throw a strike, Henderson would frequently eke out a walk. (In 2001, he broke Babe Ruth’s record for total walks, and is now second, behind Barry Bonds.) Or he would crush the ball-he is one of only twenty-five players in history with more than three thousand hits. Once he was on base, the chaos began: he would often steal second, then steal third; he stole home four times. In his first full year, he broke Ty Cobb’s American League record of ninety-six stolen bases in a season, which had stood since 1915; two seasons later, he blew past Lou Brock’s major-league mark of a hundred and eighteen. Thomas Boswell, of the Washington Post, wrote, “Not since Babe Ruth hit fifty-four home runs in 1920-thirty more than anyone else had hit in a season-has one of baseball’s fundamental areas of offensive production been in such danger of major redefinition… Now, perhaps for the first time, a player’s skill is challenging the basic dimensions of the diamond.”

His mere presence on the base paths was a force of psychic disruption. Distracted infielders made errors, and pitchers, finding themselves unable to concentrate, gave up easy hits to subsequent batters. As the former Yankee captain Don Mattingly has said, “Basically, he terrorizes a team.” Henderson would score in ways that made his heroics nearly invisible: he would often get a walk, then steal second, then advance to third on a ground ball, and, finally, come home on a routine fly ball to the outfield. In other words, he regularly scored when neither he nor his teammates registered a single hit.

But there was also something out of control about Henderson. A base stealer takes his team’s fortunes into his own hands; if he decides to run and gets thrown out, he can devastate a team’s chances for a big inning. In 1982, Henderson didn’t merely set a season record for steals; he also set one for being caught (forty-two times). The very traits that won him praise-bravado, guile, defiance-also made him despised. During a 1982 game against the Detroit Tigers, when he needed only one more base to tie Brock’s record, he singled but had no chance to steal, because there was a slow base runner on second. Violating every norm of the game, Billy Martin ordered the man on second to take such a big lead that he would get picked off. Henderson’s path was now clear, and he took off, sure that he was safe at second, but the umpire called him out, allegedly muttering, “You got to earn it.”

Baseball has an unspoken etiquette about lopsided games, and Henderson’s habit of stealing when his team was already trouncing an opponent was widely seen as unsportsmanlike. In 2001, while Henderson was playing with the San Diego Padres in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers, he took off in the seventh inning, when his team was leading by seven runs. The Brewers’ manager, Davey Lopes, who had been one of the most aggressive base stealers of his day, was so incensed that he stormed onto the field, yelling that the next time Henderson came up to bat the pitcher was going to “drill” him. The threat was clearly in earnest, and Henderson was removed from the game. “We’re old school,” Lopes said later.

And it wasn’t just the way Henderson ran the bases that irked traditionalists. In 1985, after being traded to the Yankees, he was asked what it would be like to play on the same field that once knew Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, and he replied, “I don’t care about them… It’s Rickey time.” When he hit a home run, he would stop and watch it go over the fence, then arc ostentatiously around first base, one elbow outstretched like a bird’s wing. Instead of simply catching a ball, he would make a show of snatching it out of the air. “I don’t appreciate that hot-dog garbage in my ballpark,” the former Orioles catcher Rick Dempsey, who once had to be restrained by an umpire from attacking Henderson, said.

Henderson earned a reputation for creating tumult off the field as well. He held general managers hostage with his contractual demands. “I’ve got to have my money guaranteed,” he’d say. Or, in one of his more Yogi Berra-like phrases, “All I’m asking for is what I want.” Once, when he couldn’t find his limousine upon leaving a ballpark, he was heard saying, “Rickey don’t like it when Rickey can’t find Rickey’s limo.” In 1989, the A’s signed him to a four-year contract worth twelve million dollars, which made him the highest-paid player in the game; but less than two years later, after several players surpassed that sum, he demanded a new contract. The pitcher Goose Gossage, who played with Henderson on the A’s, once said, “Henderson set a new standard for selfishness. He made Jose Canseco look like a social worker.” By the end of his career in the majors, Henderson was recognized as one of the best players of all time, but, in the view of many players and sportswriters, he was also “greedy,” “egomaniacal,” “Tropical Storm Rickey,” “the classic baseball mercenary,” and “the King of I.” In other words, he was the last player anyone thought would join the Golden Baseball League.

“I can’t be late,” Henderson said.

He was at the Los Angeles airport, waiting for a morning flight to Yuma, Arizona, where, for a July game against the Scorpions, the Golden Baseball League was hosting Rickey Henderson Night. (The first thousand fans to arrive at the game would receive Rickey Henderson bobble-head dolls.) The league, realizing that Henderson helped give it legitimacy, had offered him various perks to sign on, and, unlike the rest of the players, he didn’t have to endure long bus rides to away games-he flew by commercial airplane. And so, while the team was spending five hours on a bus to Yuma, Henderson picked up his bags and boarded the plane. He was wearing an elegant tan shirt and matching pants, and a gold Rolex studded with diamonds. During his career, he has earned more than forty million dollars in salary alone. He owns dozens of rental properties, as well as a hundred-and-fifty-acre ranch, near Yosemite National Park, where he spent time in the off-season with his wife and their daughters. He also has a Porsche, a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley, a BMW, a Mercedes, a Cadillac, a G.M. truck, a T-bird, and a Ferrari. “I’ve told major-league clubs, ‘Don’t worry about your bank account-I’ll play for free,’” Henderson said. “This ain’t about my portfolio.”

As he waited for the plane to taxi to the runway, he checked his cell phone to see if his agent had called with any word from the majors. “Nothing,” he said. After holding power over general managers for so long, Henderson seemed uncertain what to do now that they held power over him. He had even considered crashing a Colorado Rockies tryout for high-school and college players. He knew that his reputation had probably hurt his chances of being brought onto a team as an elder statesman and bench player. “There’s always that concern: will Rickey be willing to come off the bench?” Henderson said. “I would. If you let me retire in a major-league uniform, you won’t hear a peep out of me.” Henderson regularly scoured the news reports for injuries and roster changes in the majors, to see if there might be an opening.

“Who’s that new guy they got playing center field for the Yankees?” Henderson asked me.

“Tony Womack,” I said.

“Womack, huh?” he said, then added in frustration, “My God, you mean to tell me I ain’t better than him?”

He placed a call on his cell phone, and began talking over the roar of the engine. The stewardess, who seemed unusually tense, asked him sharply to turn the phone off. He said that he would, but requested that she ask him nicely. Within moments, security officers had boarded the plane to remove him.

“What the hell’s going on?” he asked.

“Is that Rickey Henderson?” a passenger asked.

“Look how cut he is,” another said. “I hear he never lifts weights-he only does pushups and situps.”

“You’ll have to come with us,” an officer told Henderson.

I stood up to get off with Henderson, and the officer asked who I was.

“That’s my biographer and lawyer,” Henderson said.

The passengers began to shout, “You can’t take Rickey!” But the stewardess wouldn’t relent, although Henderson said that if he had done something to offend her he was happy to apologize. The plane took off without us.

“See, man?” Henderson said to me. “I cause controversy even when I don’t do nothin’. That’s the way it’s always been.”

The airline, seemingly embarrassed by his removal, tried to find us another flight, but the next one to Yuma didn’t leave until the evening. “I gotta make my game,” Henderson said. “It’s Rickey Henderson Night.”

Eventually, the airline found us a flight to Imperial, California, which was about an hour’s drive from Yuma; from there, the airline said, it would provide a car to take us to the stadium. When we arrived at the Imperial airport, a middle-aged man standing in the baggage-claim area said, “Rickey, what brings you to Imperial?”

“Got a game tonight in Yuma.”

“In Yuma?”

“Playing in a new independent league over there.”

“You trying to make it back to the show?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Well, I sure wish they’d give you a shot. They never treat us old guys well.”

We drove in a van across the desert to Yuma, which is known primarily for a prison that once housed outlaws from the Wild West. When we reached Desert Sun Stadium, Henderson seemed taken aback-it was little more than a field with bleachers and a water tank looming over it. “It ain’t Yankee Stadium, is it?” he said.

The temperature was a hundred and nine degrees, and it was hard to breathe. Henderson signed autographs and posed for photographs with fans-“I’m, like, the Babe Ruth of the independent leagues,” he said-and then went into the clubhouse to suit up. The bus for the rest of the team had already arrived, and the players were lounging in their underwear; a few were chewing sunflower seeds and discussing a rumor that a scout from a major-league organization had appeared at a recent game.

By now, Henderson knew most of his teammates’ stories. There was Nick Guerra, a former college star who worked a construction job in the mornings to support his family. There was Scott Goodman, a slightly pear-shaped power hitter, who once hit eighteen home runs for a minor-league team affiliated with the Florida Marlins but was released anyway. And there was Adam Johnson, perhaps the most promising player on the team, a twenty-six-year-old starting pitcher who had lost only one game all season. The manager, Terry Kennedy, who had played fourteen years in the major leagues as a catcher, and whose father had played in the majors as well, told me, “I sometimes call this the Discovery League. Everybody here is trying to discover something about themselves-whether they should continue pursuing their dream or whether it’s time to finally let it go.”

Henderson and Goodman went out to the batting cage together. Goodman, who was among the league leaders in home runs and R.B.I.s, had been struggling with his swing in recent games.

“How you feeling?” Henderson asked him.

“Last night, I wasn’t getting my bat out right.”

“I don’t mean last night. I’m not worried about last night. How do you feel now?”

“I don’t know,” Goodman said. “It’s like I’m not getting my weight behind anything.” He went into the cage and swung at several pitches.

“See your foot?” Henderson said. “You’re stepping too far in, instead of toward the pitcher.”

Goodman inspected the divot in the dirt where his front foot had landed. “You’re right,” he said. “I never noticed.”

Kennedy told me that he had initially worried how Henderson would fit in with the team, especially considering his perks. “I was never into guys who chirp,” he said. But, to his surprise, Henderson had gone out of his way to mentor other players. “I don’t want to go too deep into his head,” Kennedy said. “But something’s clearly going on in there. I think maybe he’s trying to show clubs that he’s willing to be a different player.”

After a while, Goodman and Henderson returned to the clubhouse.

They put on their road uniforms, which were gray and navy blue, and walked onto the field, their cleats leaving marks in the sticky grass. Despite the heat, more than four thousand people had come out for Rickey Henderson Night-the biggest crowd in Yuma since the opening night of the season. As Henderson took his position in center field, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, with a pair of rodent-like ears attached to its roof and a curly tail sticking out of its trunk, circled the grass. “It’s time to exterminate the competition,” the stadium announcer said. “Truly Nolen Pest Control-We get the bugs out for you.” After the first inning, Henderson sat on the bench, his uniform already soaked with sweat, while cheerleaders danced on the dugout roof over his head. The announcer said, “See if you can answer tonight’s trivia question! The question is: What year was Rickey Henderson originally drafted by the Oakland A’s?”

“Nineteen seventy-six,” one of Henderson’s teammates said.

“I wasn’t even born then,” another said.

At one point, with Henderson playing center field, a shot was hit over his head and he began to run, unleashing at least a memory of his speed. He looked back over his shoulder, trying to bring the ball into focus, and made a nice catch. “Thataway, Rickey!” his teammates yelled when he came back to the dugout.

Even though Henderson played well, with two singles and a walk, the Surf Dawgs lost, 5-0. His wife, who had come to see him play that weekend with two of their daughters, told the team’s general manager, “Why won’t he just quit and come home?” As he left the field, fireworks began to explode in the sky above him, the finale of Rickey Henderson Night.

One afternoon before a home game, Kennedy approached Henderson at the ballpark and asked if he would teach the other players the art of stealing. Kennedy knew that, in recent years, base stealing had been all but forgotten in the major leagues. Team owners, convinced that home runs brought people to the stadium, had built smaller and smaller ballparks; at the same time, players made their muscles bigger and bigger with steroids. Since 1982, when Henderson broke the single-season record for steals, home-run totals had risen by sixty-one per cent, while the number of stolen bases had fallen nearly twenty per cent. But Kennedy knew how devastating stealing could be: he had been with the San Francisco Giants in the 1989 World Series, when Henderson and the A’s swept the Giants in four games and Henderson set a post-season record, with eleven stolen bases.

Henderson agreed to give a demonstration, and there was a buzz as Goodman, Johnson, and the other players gathered around first base. Henderson stepped off the bag, spread his legs, and bent forward, wiggling his fingers. “The most important thing to being a good base stealer is you got to be fearless,” he said. “You know they’re all coming for you; everyone in the stadium knows they’re coming for you. And you got to say to yourself, ‘I don’t give a dang. I’m gone.’” He said that every pitcher has the equivalent of a poker player’s “tell,” something that tips the runner off when he’s going to throw home. Before a runner gets on base, he needs to identify that tell, so he can take advantage of it. “Sometimes a pitcher lifts a heel, or wiggles a shoulder, or cocks an elbow, or lifts his cap,” Henderson said, indicating each giveaway with a crisp gesture.

Once you were on base, Henderson said, the next step was taking a lead. Most players, he explained, mistakenly assume that you need a big lead. “That’s one of Rickey’s theories: Rickey takes only three steps from the bag,” he said. “If you’re taking a big lead, you’re going to be all tense out there. Then everyone knows you’re going. Just like you read the pitcher, the pitcher and catcher have read you.”

He spread his legs again and pretended to stare at the pitcher. “O.K., you’ve taken your lead; now you’re ready to find that one part of the pitcher’s body that you already know tells you he’s throwing home. The second you see the sign, then, boom, you’re gone.” He lifted his knees and dashed toward second base. After he stopped, he said, “I’ll tell you another of Rickey’s theories.” Nearly all base stealers, he explained, begin their run by crossing their left foot in front of their right, as they turn their bodies toward second. That was also a mistake. “If you cross over, it forces you to stand straight up to get into your stride,” he said. “That’s the worst thing you can do as a runner. You want to start out low and explode.”

As Henderson was conducting his demonstration, members of the opposing team arrived and began to look on. He said that the final touch was the slide. Before Henderson, the great base stealers typically went feet first. Henderson decided that it would be faster-not to mention more daring and stylish-to go in head first, the way Pete Rose, who was never a major base stealer, occasionally did. Yet each time Henderson tried the head-first slide he would bounce violently, brutally pounding his body. Then, one day, while he was flying to a game, he noticed that the pilot landed the plane in turbulence without a single bump. Henderson recalled, “I asked the pilot, I said, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ He said the key is coming in low to the ground, rather than dropping suddenly. I was, like, ‘Dang. That’s it!’” After that, Henderson said, he lowered his body gradually to the ground, like an airplane.

Henderson concluded by saying that if the base runner studied the pitcher, made a good jump, and slid well, he should beat the throw nearly every time. And, if for some reason he was caught, the moment he got back on base he should try to steal again. As Henderson put it to me, “To steal a base, you need to think you’re invincible.”

“Look at your head,” the Surf Dawgs’ hitting instructor said to Henderson one July afternoon. “You’re dropping it down.”

“I know it,” Henderson said, stepping back in the batting cage. He took several more swings, but nothing seemed to be going right. “Come on, Rickey, you’re better than this!” he yelled.

That month, his batting average had plunged from.311 to.247-one of the lowest on the team. In May, he hit only one home run; he had none in June. “He still sees the ball well,” Kennedy, who was leaning against the cage, said of Henderson. “But he doesn’t have the bat speed to get around.”

After a dismal series against the Samurai Bears, an all-Japanese squad that had the worst record in the league, Henderson began staring at the ground in the outfield. Kennedy turned to his coaches and said, “I think we’ve lost him.”

Kennedy, believing that Henderson was ready to quit, later called him into his office. “I understand if you’re through,” Kennedy said.

“No, man, it’s not that. It’s just my damn hitting. I can’t get it straight.”

As the weeks wore on, it became clearer that the defiant mind-set that had made him a great base stealer had, in many ways, trapped him in the Golden Baseball League. He was forever convinced that he could do the impossible. “When I went to play with the Newark Bears, I was sure I would be there for only a few weeks-that a major-league team would call me,” he said. “But one week became two weeks, and now it’s two years and I’m still waiting for that call.”

Trying to improve his average, he started to experiment with his trademark crouch; he stood straighter at the plate, until he was an almost unrecognizable figure. “I remember at the end of my career I began to doubt my ability,” Kennedy said. “I knew what I wanted to do, but my body wouldn’t let me do it. And I called my father and said, ‘Dad, did you ever start to think you weren’t good enough to play this game?’ And he said, ‘I did, and once you do you can never get it back.’”

During the game against the Scorpions in late July, after Henderson had singled and was on first, he got into his three-step lead. I had been travelling with the team periodically throughout the season, waiting to see him steal. The crowd implored him to run, and several times the pitcher threw to first to keep him close. “Here he goes!” a fan yelled. “Watch out!” But, when the pitcher went into his motion, Henderson didn’t move. He stood there, frozen. “What’s wrong, Rickey?” another fan yelled. “Can’t you steal anymore?” On the next pitch, Henderson took his lead again and wiggled his fingers. The pitcher seemed to dip his shoulder when he was about to throw home-his tell-but Henderson didn’t break. After several more pitches, the batter hit a ground ball to short and Henderson was easily thrown out at second. As Henderson returned to the dugout, he shouted, “Goddam cocksucking sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t see a goddam motherfucking bullshit thing.” He sat in the dugout with his head bowed, and for the first time since I had seen him play he didn’t say a word.

Two weeks later, in the middle of August, as the Surf Dawgs’ season was nearing its end, word spread in the clubhouse that the Oakland A’s had just phoned about a player. Kennedy came out and told the team the good news: a Surf Dawg was being called up to Oakland’s AAA farm team. It was Adam Johnson, the pitcher. Afterward, Henderson told me, “I’m happy to see one of the guys get out of the league, to get a chance to move on.” He seemed genuinely glad for him and refused to mention his own circumstances. On another night on the field, however, he pointed to the Surf Dawg logo on his jersey and said, “I never thought I might end my career in this uniform.” I asked if he would retire at the end of the season. “I don’t know if I can keep going,” he said. “I’m tired, you know.” As he picked up his glove, he stared at the field for a moment. Then he said, “I just don’t know if Rickey can stop.”

– September, 2005

After the 2005 season, Henderson quit the Golden Baseball League, though he continued to hope that he would get a call to play again in the majors. In 2009, at the age of fifty, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He still insisted, “I can come back and play.”