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+{"text":"\n\nTHIS IS A BORZOI BOOK  \nPUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND  \nALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA\n\n_Copyright \u00a9 2012 by Oliver Sacks, M.D_.\n\n_All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto_.\n\n_www.aaknopf.com_  \n _www.randomhouse.ca_\n\n_Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc_.  \n _Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks_.\n\n_Owing to limits of space, permissions acknowledgments may be found following_.\n\n_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sacks, Oliver W_.  \n _Hallucinations \/ Oliver Sacks. \u2014 1st American ed_.  \n _p.; cm_.  \n _Includes bibliographical references_.  \n _I. Title_.\n\n_[ DNLM: 1. Hallucinations. 2. Perceptual Disorders. WM 204]_  \n _616.89\u2013dc23 2012002877_\n\n_Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sacks, Oliver W_.  \n _Hallucinations \/ Oliver Sacks_.  \n _eISBN: 978-0-307-95725-2_  \n _1. Hallucinations and illusions. 2. Perceptual disorders. I. Title_.  \n _RC553.H3S23 2012 616.89 C2012-902091-5_\n\n_www.oliversacks.com_\n\n_Cover design by Hailey Wojcik_\n\nv3.1\n_For Kate_\n\n# Contents\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Introduction_\n\n 1. Silent Multitudes: Charles Bonnet Syndrome\n\n 2. The Prisoner's Cinema: Sensory Deprivation\n\n 3. A Few Nanograms of Wine: Hallucinatory Smells\n\n 4. Hearing Things\n\n 5. The Illusions of Parkinsonism\n\n 6. Altered States\n\n 7. Patterns: Visual Migraines\n\n 8. The \"Sacred\" Disease\n\n 9. Bisected: Hallucinations in the Half-Field\n\n10. Delirious\n\n11. On the Threshold of Sleep\n\n12. Narcolepsy and Night Hags\n\n13. The Haunted Mind\n\n14. Doppelg\u00e4ngers: Hallucinating Oneself\n\n15. Phantoms, Shadows, and Sensory Ghosts\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\n_Bibliography_\n\n_Permissions Acknowledgments_\n\n_A Note About the Author_\n\n_Other Books by This Author_\n\n# Introduction\n\nWhen the word \"hallucination\" first came into use, in the early sixteenth century, it denoted only \"a wandering mind.\" It was not until the 1830s that Jean-\u00c9tienne Esquirol, a French psychiatrist, gave the term its present meaning\u2014prior to that, what we now call hallucinations were referred to simply as \"apparitions.\" Precise definitions of the word \"hallucination\" still vary considerably, chiefly because it is not always easy to discern where the boundary lies between hallucination, misperception, and illusion. But generally, hallucinations are defined as percepts arising in the absence of any external reality\u2014seeing things or hearing things that are not there.1\n\nPerceptions are, to some extent, shareable\u2014you and I can agree that there is a tree; but if I say, \"I see a tree there,\" and you see nothing of the sort, you will regard my \"tree\" as a hallucination, something concocted by my brain or mind, and imperceptible to you or anyone else. To the hallucinator, though, hallucinations seem very real; they can mimic perception in every respect, starting with the way they are projected into the external world.\n\nHallucinations tend to be startling. This is sometimes because of their content\u2014a gigantic spider in the middle of the room or tiny people six inches tall\u2014but, more fundamentally, it is because there is no \"consensual validation\"; no one else sees what you see, and you realize with a shock that the giant spider or the tiny people must be \"in your head.\"\n\nWhen you conjure up ordinary images\u2014of a rectangle, or a friend's face, or the Eiffel Tower\u2014the images stay in your head. They are not projected into external space like a hallucination, and they lack the detailed quality of a percept or a hallucination. You actively create such voluntary images and can revise them as you please. In contrast, you are passive and helpless in the face of hallucinations: they happen to you, autonomously\u2014they appear and disappear when they please, not when you please.\n\nThere is another mode of hallucination, sometimes called pseudo-hallucination, in which hallucinations are not projected into external space but are seen, so to speak, on the inside of one's eyelids\u2014such hallucinations typically occur in near-sleep states, with closed eyes. But these inner hallucinations have all the other hallmarks of hallucinations: they are involuntary, uncontrollable, and may have preternatural color and detail or bizarre forms and transformations, quite unlike normal visual imagery.\n\nHallucinations may overlap with misperceptions or illusions. If, looking at someone's face, I see only half a face, this is a misperception. The distinction becomes less clear with more complex situations. If I look at someone standing in front of me and see not a single figure but five identical figures in a row, is this \"polyopia\" a misperception or a hallucination? If I see someone cross the room from left to right, then see them crossing the room in precisely the same way again and again, is this sort of repetition (a \"palinopsia\") a perceptual aberration, a hallucination, or both? We tend to speak of such things as misperceptions or illusions if there is something there to begin with\u2014a human figure, for example\u2014whereas hallucinations are conjured out of thin air. But many of my patients experience outright hallucinations, illusions, and complex misperceptions, and sometimes the line between these is difficult to draw.\n\nThough the phenomena of hallucination are probably as old as the human brain, our understanding of them has greatly increased over the last few decades.2 This new knowledge comes especially from our ability to image the brain and to monitor its electrical and metabolic activities while people are hallucinating. Such techniques, coupled with implanted-electrode studies (in patients with intractable epilepsy who need surgery), have allowed us to define which parts of the brain are responsible for different sorts of hallucinations. For instance, an area in the right inferotemporal cortex normally involved in the perception of faces, if abnormally activated, may cause people to hallucinate faces. There is a corresponding area on the other side of the brain normally employed in reading\u2014the visual word form area in the fusiform gyrus; if this is abnormally stimulated, it may give rise to hallucinations of letters or pseudowords.\n\nHallucinations are \"positive\" phenomena, as opposed to the negative symptoms, the deficits or losses caused by accident or disease, which neurology is classically based on. The phenomenology of hallucinations often points to the brain structures and mechanisms involved and can therefore, potentially, provide more direct insight into the workings of the brain.\n\nHallucinations have always had an important place in our mental lives and in our culture. Indeed, one must wonder to what extent hallucinatory experiences have given rise to our art, folklore, and even religion. Do the geometric patterns seen in migraine and other conditions prefigure the motifs of Aboriginal art? Did Lilliputian hallucinations (which are not uncommon) give rise to the elves, imps, leprechauns, and fairies in our folklore? Do the terrifying hallucinations of the night-mare, being ridden and suffocated by a malign presence, play a part in generating our concepts of demons and witches or malignant aliens? Do \"ecstatic\" seizures, such as Dostoevsky had, play a part in generating our sense of the divine? Do out-of-body experiences allow the feeling that one _can_ be disembodied? Does the substancelessness of hallucinations encourage a belief in ghosts and spirits? Why has every culture known to us sought and found hallucinogenic drugs and used them, first and foremost, for sacramental purposes?\n\nThis is not a new thought\u2014in 1845, Alexandre Brierre de Boismont, in the first systematic medical book on the subject, explored such ideas in a chapter titled \"Hallucinations in Relation to Psychology, History, Morality, and Religion.\" Anthropologists including Weston La Barre and Richard Evans Schultes, among others, have documented the role of hallucinations in societies around the globe.3 Time has only broadened and deepened our appreciation of the great cultural importance of what might at first seem to be little more than a neurological quirk.\n\nI will say very little in this book about the vast and fascinating realm of dreams (which, one can argue, are hallucinations of a sort), other than to touch on the dreamlike quality of some hallucinations and on the \"dreamy states\" which occur in some seizures. Some have proposed a continuum of dream states and hallucinations (and this may be especially so with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations), but, in general, hallucinations are quite unlike dreams.\n\nHallucinations often seem to have the creativity of imagination, dreams, or fantasy\u2014or the vivid detail and externality of perception. But hallucination is none of these, though it may share some neurophysiological mechanisms with each. Hallucination is a unique and special category of consciousness and mental life.\n\nThe hallucinations often experienced by people with schizophrenia also demand a separate consideration, a book of their own, for they cannot be divorced from the often profoundly altered inner life and life circumstances of those with schizophrenia. So I will refer relatively little to schizophrenic hallucinations here, focusing instead on the hallucinations that can occur in \"organic\" psychoses\u2014the transient psychoses sometimes associated with delirium, epilepsy, drug use, and certain medical conditions.\n\nMany cultures regard hallucination, like dreams, as a special, privileged state of consciousness\u2014one that is actively sought through spiritual practices, meditation, drugs, or solitude. But in modern Western culture, hallucinations are more often considered to portend madness or something dire happening to the brain\u2014even though the vast majority of hallucinations have no such dark implications. There is great stigma here, and patients are often reluctant to admit to hallucinating, afraid that their friends and even their doctors will think they are losing their minds. I have been very fortunate that, in my own practice and in correspondence with readers (which I think of, in some ways, as an extension of my practice), I have encountered so many people willing to share their experiences. Many of them have expressed the hope that telling their stories will help defuse the often cruel misunderstandings which surround the whole subject.\n\nI think of this book, then, as a sort of natural history or anthology of hallucinations, describing the experiences and impact of hallucinations on those who have them, for the power of hallucinations is only to be understood from firstperson accounts.\n\nSome of the chapters that follow are organized by medical categories (blindness, sensory deprivation, narcolepsy, etc.), and others are organized by sensory modality (hearing things, smelling things, etc.). But there is a great deal of overlap and interconnection between these categories, and similar hallucinations may occur in a wide variety of conditions. Here, then, is a sampling which I hope will give a sense of the great range, the varieties, of hallucinatory experience, an essential part of the human condition.\n\n1. My own favorite definition is that given by William James in his 1890 _Principles of Psychology_ : \"An hallucination is a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. The object happens to be not there, that is all.\" Many other researchers have proposed their own definitions, and Jan Dirk Blom, in his encyclopedic _Dictionary of Hallucinations_ , includes dozens of these.\n\n2. We cannot be certain whether other animals have hallucinations, although \"hallucinatory behaviors\" have been observed in laboratory animals as well as in natural settings, as Ronald K. Siegel and Murray E. Jarvik described in their review of the subject.\n\n3. La Barre provided an extended review of anthropological perspectives on hallucination in a chapter published in 1975.\n\n# 1\n\nSilent Multitudes: Charles Bonnet Syndrome\n\nOne day late in November 2006, I got an emergency phone call from a nursing home where I work. One of the residents, Rosalie, a lady in her nineties, had suddenly started seeing things, having odd hallucinations which seemed overwhelmingly real. The nurses had called the psychiatrist in to see her, but they also wondered whether the problem might be something neurological\u2014Alzheimer's, perhaps, or a stroke.\n\nWhen I arrived and greeted her, I was surprised to realize that Rosalie was completely blind\u2014the nurses had said nothing about this. Though she had not seen anything at all for several years, she was now \"seeing\" things, right in front of her.\n\n\"What sort of things?\" I asked.\n\n\"People in Eastern dress!\" she exclaimed. \"In drapes, walking up and down stairs... a man who turns towards me and smiles, but he has huge teeth on one side of his mouth. Animals, too. I see this scene with a white building, and it is snowing\u2014a soft snow, it is swirling. I see this horse (not a pretty horse, a drudgery horse) with a harness, dragging snow away... but it keeps switching.... I see a lot of children; they're walking up and down stairs. They wear bright colors\u2014rose, blue\u2014like Eastern dress.\" She had been seeing such scenes for several days.\n\nI observed with Rosalie (as with many other patients) that while she was hallucinating, her eyes were open, and even though she could see nothing, her eyes moved here and there, as if looking at an actual scene. It was that which had first caught the nurses' attention. Such looking or scanning does not occur with imagined scenes; most people, when visualizing or concentrating on their internal imagery, tend to close their eyes or else to have an abstracted gaze, looking at nothing in particular. As Colin McGinn brings out in his book _Mindsight_ , one does not hope to discover anything surprising or novel in one's own imagery, whereas hallucinations may be full of surprises. They are often much more detailed than imagery, and ask to be inspected and studied.\n\nHer hallucinations, Rosalie said, were more \"like a movie\" than a dream; and like a movie, they sometimes fascinated her, sometimes bored her (\"all that walking up and down, all that Eastern dress\"). They came and went, and seemed to have nothing to do with her. The images were silent, and the people she saw seemed to take no notice of her. Apart from their uncanny silence, these figures seemed quite solid and real, though sometimes two-dimensional. But she had never before experienced anything like this, so she could not help wondering: was she losing her mind?\n\nI questioned Rosalie carefully but found nothing suggestive of confusion or delusion. Looking into her eyes with an ophthalmoscope, I could see the devastation of her retinas but nothing else amiss. Neurologically, she was completely normal\u2014a strong-minded old lady, very vigorous for her years. I reassured her about her brain and mind; she seemed, indeed, to be quite sane. I explained to her that hallucinations, strangely, are not uncommon in those with blindness or impaired sight, and that these visions are not \"psychiatric\" but a reaction of the brain to the loss of eyesight. She had a condition called Charles Bonnet syndrome.\n\nRosalie digested this and said she was puzzled as to why she had started having hallucinations now, after being blind for several years. But she was very pleased and reassured to be told that her hallucinations represented a recognized condition, one that even had a name. She drew herself up and said, \"Tell the nurses\u2014 _I_ have Charles Bonnet syndrome.\" Then she asked, \"Who was this Charles Bonnet?\"\n\nCharles Bonnet was an eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist whose investigations ranged broadly, from entomology to reproduction and regeneration in polyps and other animalcules. When an eye disease made his beloved microscopy impossible, he turned to botany\u2014he did pioneer experiments on photosynthesis\u2014then to psychology, and finally to philosophy. When he heard that his grandfather Charles Lullin had started to have \"visions\" as his eyesight failed, Bonnet asked him to dictate a full account.\n\nJohn Locke, in his 1690 _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ , put forward the notion that the mind is a tabula rasa until it receives information from the senses. This \"sensationalism,\" as it was called, was very popular with the philosophes and rationalists of the eighteenth century, including Bonnet. Bonnet also conceived of the brain as \"an organ of intricate composition, or rather an assemblage of different organs.\" These different \"organs\" all had their own dedicated functions. (Such a modular view of the brain was radical at the time, for the brain was still widely regarded as undifferentiated, uniform in structure and function.) Thus Bonnet attributed his grandfather's hallucinations to continuing activity in what he postulated were visual parts of the brain\u2014an activity drawing on memory now that it could no longer draw on sensation.\n\nBonnet\u2014who would later experience similar hallucinations when his own eyesight declined\u2014published a brief account of Lullin's experiences in his 1760 _Essai analytique sur les facult\u00e9s de l'\u00e2me_ , a book devoted to considering the physiological basis of various senses and mental states, but Lullin's original account, which filled eighteen pages of a notebook, was subsequently lost for nearly 150 years, coming to light only at the beginning of the twentieth century. Douwe Draaisma has recently translated Lullin's account, including it in a detailed history of Charles Bonnet syndrome in his book _Disturbances of the Mind_.1\n\nUnlike Rosalie, Lullin still had some eyesight left, and his hallucinations were superimposed on what he saw in the real world. Draaisma summarized Lullin's account:\n\nIn February 1758, strange objects had begun to float into his field of vision. It started with something that resembled a blue handkerchief, with a small yellow circle in each corner.... The handkerchief followed the movement of his eyes: whether he was looking at a wall, his bed, or a tapestry, the handkerchief blocked out all the ordinary objects in his room. Lullin was perfectly lucid and at no time did he believe that there really was a blue handkerchief floating around....\n\nOne day in August two granddaughters came to see him. Lullin was sitting in his armchair opposite the mantelpiece, and his visitors were to his right. From the left, two young men appeared. They were wearing magnificent cloaks, red and grey, and their hats were trimmed with silver. \"What handsome gentlemen you've brought with you! Why didn't you tell me they were coming?\" But the young ladies swore that they saw no one. Like the handkerchief, the images of the two men dissolved within a few moments. They were followed by many more imaginary visitors in the next few weeks, all of them women; they were beautifully coifed and several of them had a small box on their head....\n\nSomewhat later Lullin was standing at the window when he saw a carriage approaching. It came to a halt at his neighbour's house and, as he watched in amazement, the carriage grew bigger and bigger until it was level with the eaves of the house some thirty feet from the ground, with everything perfectly in proportion.... Lullin was amazed by the variety of images he saw: one time it was a swarm of specks that suddenly turned into a flight of pigeons, another time a group of dancing butterflies. Once he saw a rotating wheel floating in the air, the kind you saw in dockside cranes. On a stroll through the town he stopped to admire an enormous scaffolding, and when he arrived home he saw the same scaffolding standing in the living room, but then in miniature, less than a foot high.\n\nAs Lullin found, the hallucinations of CBS would come and go; his lasted for some months and then disappeared for good.\n\nIn Rosalie's case, the hallucinations subsided within a few days, as mysteriously as they had appeared. Almost a year later, though, I got another phone call from the nurses, telling me that she was \"in a terrible state.\" Rosalie's first words when she saw me were \"All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, the Charles Bonnet has come back with a vengeance.\" She described how a few days before, \"figures started to walk around; the room seemed to crowd up. The walls turned into large gates; hundreds of people started to pour in. The women were dolled up, had beautiful green hats, gold-trimmed furs, but the men were terrifying\u2014big, menacing, disreputable, disheveled, their lips moving as if they were talking.\"\n\nIn that moment, the visions seemed absolutely real to Rosalie. She had all but forgotten that she had Charles Bonnet syndrome. She told me, \"I was so frightened that I screamed and screamed, 'Get them out of my room, open those gates! Get them out! Then shut the gates!' \" She heard a nurse say of her, \"She is not in her right mind.\"\n\nNow, three days later, Rosalie said to me, \"I think I know what triggered it again.\" She went on to say that she had had a highly stressful, exhausting time earlier in the week\u2014a long, hot journey to see a gastrointestinal specialist on Long Island and a nasty fall backwards on the way. She arrived back many hours later, shocked, dehydrated, in a state of near collapse. She was put to bed and fell into a deep sleep. She awoke the next morning to the terrifying visions of people bursting through the walls of her room, which lasted for thirty-six hours. Then she started to feel somewhat better and recovered her insight into what was happening. At that point, she instructed a young volunteer to track down an account of Charles Bonnet syndrome on the internet and to give copies of this to the nursing home staff, so that they would know what had been going on.\n\nOver the next few days, her visions grew much fainter and ceased altogether when she was talking with others or listening to music. Her hallucinations had become \"shyer,\" she said, and now occurred only in the evening, if she sat quietly. I thought of the passage in _Remembrance of Things Past_ where Proust speaks of the church bells of Combray, how their sound seemed muted in the daytime, only to be heard when the hubbub and blare of the day had died down.\n\nCharles Bonnet syndrome was considered rare before 1990\u2014there were only a handful of case histories in the medical literature.2 I thought this strange, for working in old-age homes and nursing homes for over thirty years, I had seen a number of blind or purblind patients with complex visual hallucinations of the Charles Bonnet type (just as I had seen a number of deaf or nearly deaf patients with auditory\u2014and most often musical\u2014hallucinations). I wondered whether CBS was actually much commoner than the literature seemed to indicate. Recent studies have confirmed that this is the case, although CBS is still little recognized, even by doctors, and there is much to suggest that many or most cases are overlooked or misdiagnosed. Robert Teunisse and his colleagues, studying a population of nearly six hundred elderly patients with visual problems in Holland, found that almost 15 percent of them had complex hallucinations\u2014of people, animals, or scenes\u2014and as many as 80 percent had simple hallucinations\u2014shapes and colors, sometimes patterns, but not formed images or scenes.\n\nMost cases of CBS probably remain at this elementary level of simple patterns or colors. Patients who have simple (and perhaps transient or occasional) hallucinations of this type may not take much notice or remember to report them when they visit a doctor. But some people's geometrical hallucinations are more persistent. One old lady with macular degeneration, learning of my interest in such matters, described how in the first two years of her visual impairment, she saw\n\na big blob of light circling around and then vanishing, followed by a colored flag in sharp focus... it looked exactly like the British flag. Where it came from, I do not know.... For the last few months I have been seeing hexagons, often hexagons in pink. At first there were also tangled lines inside the hexagons, and other little balls of color, yellow, pink, lavender, and blue. Now there are only black hexagons looking for all the world like bathroom tiles.3\n\nWhile most people with CBS are aware that they are hallucinating (often by the very incongruity of their hallucinations), some hallucinations may be plausible and in context, as with the \"handsome gentlemen\" accompanying Lullin's granddaughters, and these may, at least initially, be taken as real.4\n\nWith more complex hallucinations, it is typical to see faces, though they are almost never familiar. David Stewart, in an unpublished memoir, described this:\n\nI had another hallucination.... This time it was faces, the most prominent of which was one of a man who might have been a burly ship captain. It wasn't Popeye, but along those lines. The cap he was wearing was blue with a shiny black visor. His face was grey, the cheeks rather chubby, bright eyes and a decidedly bulbous nose. He was no one I had ever seen before. This was not a caricature, and he seemed very much alive, someone I felt I might like to know. He gazed at me with a benign, unblinking, and altogether incurious expression.\n\nThe burly ship captain, Stewart noted, appeared as he was listening to an audiobook biography of George Washington, which included a reference to some sailors. He mentioned, too, that he had one hallucination \"which nearly replicated a Brueghel painting I once\u2014and only once\u2014observed in Brussels,\" and another of a coach he thought might have belonged to Samuel Pepys shortly after he read a biography of Pepys.\n\nWhile some hallucinatory faces, like Stewart's ship captain, seem coherent and plausible, others may be grossly distorted or composed, sometimes, of fragments\u2014a nose, part of a mouth, an eye, a huge head of hair, all juxtaposed in a seemingly haphazard way.\n\nSometimes people with CBS may hallucinate letters, lines of print, musical notes, numerals, mathematical symbols, or other types of notation. The overall term \"text hallucinations\" is used for such visions, although for the most part what is seen cannot be read or played and may indeed be nonsensical. My correspondent Dorothy S. mentioned this as one of her many CBS hallucinations:\n\nThen there are the words. They are from no known language, some have no vowels, some have too many: \"skeeeekkseegsky.\" It is hard for me to capture them as they move swiftly from side to side and also advance and retreat.... Sometimes I catch a glimpse of part of my name, or a version of it: \"Doro\" or \"Dorthoy.\"\n\nSometimes the hallucinated text has an obvious association with experience, as with one man who wrote to me that he would see Hebrew letters all over the walls for about six weeks following Yom Kippur each year. Another man, who was nearly blind from glaucoma, reported that often he saw lines of print in balloons, \"like the balloons in comic strips,\" though he could not decipher the words. Text hallucinations are not uncommon; Dominic ffytche, who has seen hundreds of people with CBS, estimates that about a quarter of them have text hallucinations of one sort or another.\n\nMarjorie J. wrote to me in 1995 about what she called her \"musical eyes\":\n\nI am a 77-year-old woman with glaucoma damage to mostly the lower half of my vision. About two months ago, I started to see music, lines, spaces, notes, clefs\u2014in fact written music on everything I looked at, but only where the blindness exists. I ignored it for a while, but when I was visiting the Seattle Art Museum one day and I saw the lines of the explanatory notes as music, I knew I was really having some kind of hallucination.\n\n... I had been playing the piano and really concentrating on music prior to the musical hallucinations... it was right before my cataract was removed, and I had to concentrate hard to see the notes. Occasionally I'll see crossword puzzle squares... but the music does not go away. I've been told the brain refuses to accept the fact that there is visual loss and fills in\u2014with music in my case.\n\nArthur S., a surgeon who is also a fine amateur pianist, is losing his vision from macular degeneration. In 2007, he started \"seeing\" musical notation for the first time. Its appearance was extremely realistic, the staves and clefs boldly printed on a white background, \"just like a sheet of real music\"\u2014and Arthur wondered for a moment whether some part of his brain was now generating his own original music. But when he looked more closely, he realized that the score was unreadable and unplayable. It was inordinately complicated, with four or six staves, impossibly complex chords with six or more notes on a single stem, and horizontal rows of multiple flats and sharps. It was, he said, \"a potpourri of musical notation without any meaning.\" He would see a page of this pseudo-music for a few seconds, and then it would disappear suddenly, replaced by another, equally nonsensical page. These hallucinations were sometimes intrusive, and might cover a page he was trying to read or a letter he was trying to write.\n\nThough Arthur has been unable to read real musical scores for some years, he wonders, as Marjorie did, whether his lifelong immersion in music and musical scores might have determined the form of his hallucinations.5\n\nHe wonders, too, whether his hallucinations might progress. For about a year before he began to see musical notation, Arthur saw something much simpler: a checkerboard pattern. Will his musical notation be followed by even more complex hallucinations, such as people, faces, or landscapes, as his eyesight declines?\n\nThere is clearly a wide array, a whole spectrum, of visual disturbances which can occur when vision is lost or compromised, and originally the term \"Charles Bonnet syndrome\" was reserved for those whose hallucinations were related to eye disease or other ocular problems. But an essentially similar array of disturbances can also occur when the damage lies not in the eye itself but higher up in the visual system, especially the cortical areas involved in visual perception\u2014the occipital lobes and their projections into the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain\u2014as seems to be the case with Zelda.\n\nZelda was a historian who came to see me in 2008. She told me how her world of strange visual phenomena had started at a theater six years earlier, when the beige curtain in front of the stage suddenly seemed to be covered in red roses\u2014the roses were three-dimensional, thrusting out of the curtain. When she closed her eyes, she still saw the roses. This hallucination lasted for a few minutes and then vanished. She was perplexed and frightened by this, and she went to consult her ophthalmologist, but he found no impairment of vision and no pathological changes in either eye. She saw her internist and cardiologist, but they could not provide any plausible explanation for this episode\u2014or the countless episodes that followed. Finally she had a PET scan of her brain, which showed reduced blood flow in her occipital and parietal lobes, presumably the cause, or at least a possible cause, of her hallucinations.\n\nZelda has both simple and complex visual hallucinations. The simple ones may appear when she is reading or writing or watching television. One of her physicians asked her to keep a journal of her visions over a three-week period, and in it, she recorded, \"As I write this page, it is becoming more and more covered by a pale green and pink lattice.... The garage walls, covered in white cinderblock, continually mutate... coming to resemble bricks, or clapboard, or being covered with damask, or flowers of different colors.... On the upper part of the walls in the hallway, shapes of animals. They were formed by blue dots.\"\n\nMore complex hallucinations\u2014battlements, bridges, viaducts, apartment houses\u2014are especially common when she is being driven in a car (she gave up driving herself after her initial attack, six years ago). Once when she and her husband were driving along a snowy road, she was startled to see brilliant green bushes, their leaves glittering with icicles, to either side of the road. Another day, she saw a rather shocking sight:\n\nAs we drove away from the beauty parlor, I saw what looked like a teenage boy on the front hood of our car, leaning on his arms with his feet up in the air. He stayed there for about five minutes. Even when we turned he stayed on the hood of the car. As we pulled into the restaurant parking lot, he ascended into the air, up against the building, and stayed there until I got out of the car.\n\nAt another point, she \"saw\" one of her great-granddaughters, who rose up, moved to the ceiling, and disappeared. She saw three \"witchlike\" figures, motionless and hideous, with huge hooked noses, protruding chins, and glaring eyes\u2014these also vanished after a few seconds. Zelda said she had no idea that she had so many hallucinations until she starting keeping a journal; many of them, she thought, would otherwise have been forgotten.\n\nShe also spoke of many strange visual experiences which were not quite hallucinations in the sense of being totally invented or generated but seemed to be persistences, repetitions, distortions, or elaborations of visual perceptions. (Charles Lullin had a number of such perceptual disorders, and they are not uncommon in people with CBS.) Some of these were relatively simple; thus, when she looked at me on one occasion, my beard seemed to spread until it covered my entire face and head, and then resumed its proper appearance. Occasionally, looking in a mirror, she might see her own hair rising a foot above her head and have to check with her hand to make sure it was in its usual place.\n\nSometimes her perceptual changes were more disturbing, as when she encountered her mail carrier in the lobby of her apartment building: \"As I looked at her, her nose grew until it was a grotesque figure on her face. After a few minutes, as we stood talking, her face came back to normal.\"\n\nZelda would often see objects duplicated or multiplied, and this might create odd difficulties. \"Making dinner and eating was quite difficult,\" she said. \"I kept seeing several of each piece of food when they didn't exist. This lasted most of dinner.\"6 Visual multiplication like this\u2014polyopia\u2014can take even more dramatic form. Once, in a restaurant, Zelda observed a man in a striped shirt paying at the cash register. As she watched, he split into six or seven identical copies of himself, all wearing striped shirts, all making the same gestures\u2014then concertinaed back into a single person. At other times, her polyopia can be quite frightening or dangerous, as when, sitting in the passenger seat of her car, she saw the road ahead of her split into four identical roads. The car seemed to her to proceed up all four roads simultaneously.7\n\nSeeing moving pictures even on television may lead to hallucinatory perseverations. Once, watching a television program that showed people descending from a plane, Zelda began to hallucinate minute replicas of the figures, which continued their descent off the screen and down the wooden cabinet of the television console.\n\nZelda has dozens of these hallucinations or misperceptions every day, and has had them, almost nonstop, for the past six years. And yet she has managed to maintain a very full life, both domestically and professionally\u2014keeping house, entertaining friends, going out with her husband, and completing a new book.\n\nIn 2009, one of Zelda's doctors suggested that she take a medication called quetiapine, which can sometimes diminish the severity of hallucinations. To our amazement and especially hers, she became entirely free from hallucinations for more than two years.\n\nIn 2011, however, she had heart surgery, and then, on top of this, she broke a kneecap in a fall. Whether it was due to the anxiety and stress of these medical problems, the unpredictable nature of CBS, or the development of tolerance to her medication, she started to have some hallucinations again. Her hallucinations, though, have taken a somewhat more tolerable form. When she is in the car, she said, \"I see things, but not people. I see planted fields, flowering, and many forms of medieval buildings. Frequently I see modern buildings change into more historic looking ones. Every experience brings something different.\"\n\nOne of her new hallucinations, she said, \"is very difficult to describe. It's a performance! The curtain goes up and 'performers' dance out on the stage\u2014but no people. I see black Hebrew letters dressed in ballet dresses of white. They dance to beautiful music, but I don't know where it comes from. They move the upper parts of the letters like arms and dance on the lower parts so gracefully. They come onstage from right to left.\"\n\nWhile the hallucinations of CBS are usually described as pleasant, friendly, diverting, even inspiring, they may occasionally take on a very different character. This happened to Rosalie when a neighbor of hers in the nursing home, Spike, died. Spike was a whimsical, laughter-loving Irishman, and he and Rosalie, both in their nineties, had been close friends for years. \"He knew all the old songs,\" Rosalie remarked; they would sing these together and joke and chatter by the hour. When he died suddenly, Rosalie was devastated. She lost her appetite, withdrew from social activities, and spent more time alone in her room. Her hallucinations returned, but instead of the gaily dressed figures she had seen before, she saw five or six tall men standing around her bed, silent and motionless. They were always dressed in dark brown suits and wore dark hats that shadowed their faces. She could not \"see\" their eyes, but she felt that they were gazing at her\u2014enigmatically, solemnly. She felt that her bed had become a deathbed and that these ominous figures were harbingers of her own death. They seemed overwhelmingly real to her, and although she knew that if she stretched out a hand it would pass right through them, she could not bring herself to do this.\n\nRosalie continued to have these visions for three weeks, and then she started to emerge from her melancholy. The somber, silent men in brown disappeared, and her hallucinations started taking place chiefly in the dayroom, a place full of music and talk. They would start with a vision of patterns\u2014quadrangles of pink and blue that seemed to cover the floor and then extend up the walls, finally spreading across the ceiling. The colors of these \"tiles,\" she said, put her in mind of a nursery. And, in accordance with this, she now saw little people a few inches high, like elves or fairies, with little green caps, climbing up the sides of her wheelchair. There were children, too, \"picking up pieces of paper from the floor\" or climbing hallucinatory stairs in one corner of the room. Rosalie found the children \"adorable,\" although their activities seemed pointless and, as she put it, \"silly.\"\n\nThe children and the little people lasted for a couple of weeks, and then they, too, vanished, in the mysterious way that such hallucinations tend to. Though Rosalie misses Spike, she has found other friends in the nursing home, and she is back to her usual routines of chatting and listening to audiobooks and Italian operas. She is rarely alone now, and\u2014coincidentally or not\u2014her hallucinations have, for the time being, disappeared.\n\nIf some or all sight is preserved, as with Charles Lullin and Zelda, there may be not only visual hallucinations but various disorders of visual perception: people or objects may appear too large or too small, too near or too far; there may be too little or too much color or depth; misalignment, distortion, or inversion of the image; or problems with motion perception.\n\nIf, of course, the person is completely blind, as Rosalie is, then there can only be hallucinations, but these may also show anomalies of color, depth, transparency, motion, scale, and detail. CBS hallucinations are often described as having dazzling, intense color or a fineness and richness of detail far beyond anything one sees with the eyes. There are strong tendencies to repetition and multiplication, so that one may see rows or phalanxes of people, all dressed similarly and making similar motions (some early observers referred to this as \"numerosity\"). And there is a strong tendency to elaboration: hallucinatory figures often seem to be wearing \"exotic dress,\" rich robes, and strange headgear. Bizarre incongruities often appear, so that a flower may protrude not from someone's hat but from the middle of their face. Hallucinatory figures may be cartoonlike. Faces, in particular, may show grotesque distortions of the teeth or eyes. Some people hallucinate text or music. But by far the commonest hallucinations are the geometrical ones: squares, checkerboards, rhomboids, quadrangles, hexagons, bricks, walls, tiles, tessellations, honeycombs, mosaics. Simplest of all, and perhaps most common, are phosphenes, blobs or clouds of brightness or color, which may or may not differentiate into anything more complex. No single individual has all of these perceptual and hallucinatory phenomena, though some people may have a great range, like Zelda, while others tend to stick to a particular form of hallucination, like Marjorie, with her \"musical eyes.\"\n\nIn the last decade or two, Dominic ffytche and his colleagues in London have done pioneering research on the neural basis of visual hallucinations. Based on the detailed reports of dozens of subjects, they developed a taxonomy of hallucinations, including categories like figures with hats, children or small people, landscapes, vehicles, grotesque faces, text, and cartoonlike faces. (This taxonomy is described in a 2000 paper by Santhouse et al.)\n\nWith this classification in hand, ffytche went on to do detailed brain-imaging studies in which selected patients with different categories of visual hallucinations were asked to signal the beginning and end of their hallucinations while being scanned.\n\nThere was, as ffytche et al. wrote in a 1998 paper, \"a striking correspondence\" between the particular hallucinatory experiences of each patient and the particular portions of the ventral visual pathway in the visual cortex which were activated. Hallucinations of faces, of color, of textures, and of objects, for example, each activated particular areas known to be involved in specific visual functions. When there were colored hallucinations, there was activation of areas in the visual cortex associated with color construction; when there were facial hallucinations of a sketchlike or cartoonlike character, there was activation in the fusiform gyrus. Visions of deformed or dismembered faces or grotesque faces with exaggerated eyes or teeth were associated with heightened activity in the superior temporal sulcus, an area specialized for the representation of eyes, teeth, and other parts of the face. Text hallucinations are associated with abnormal activation in the visual word form area, a highly specialized area in the left hemisphere.\n\nFfytche et al. observed, moreover, a clear distinction between normal visual imagination and actual hallucination\u2014thus, imagining a colored object, for example, did not activate the V4 area, while a colored hallucination did. Such findings confirm that, not only subjectively but physiologically, hallucinations are unlike imagination and much more like perceptions. Writing of hallucinations in 1760, Bonnet said, \"The mind would not be able to tell apart vision from reality.\" The work of ffytche and his colleagues shows that the brain does not distinguish them, either.\n\nThere had never before been direct evidence of such a correlation between the contents of a hallucination and the particular areas of cortex activated. We have long known, from observation of people with specific injuries or strokes, that different aspects of visual perception (color perception, face recognition, movement perception, etc.) depend on highly specialized areas of the brain. Thus, for example, damage to a tiny area of the visual cortex called V4 may knock out color perception but nothing else. Ffytche's work is the first to confirm that hallucinations make use of the same visual areas and pathways as perception itself. (Ffytche has emphasized more recently, in papers on the \"hodology\" of hallucinations, that attributing hallucinations, or any cerebral function, to specific brain regions has its limitations, and that one must pay equal attention to the connections between these areas.)8\n\nBut while there are neurologically determined categories of visual hallucination, there may be personal and cultural determinants, too. No one can have hallucinations of musical notation or numbers or letters, for example, if they have not actually seen these at some point in real life. Thus experience and memory may influence both imagery and hallucination\u2014but with CBS, memories are not hallucinated in full or literal form. When people with CBS hallucinate people or places, they are almost never recognizable people or places, only plausible or invented ones. CBS hallucinations give one the impression that, at some lower level, in the early visual system, there is a categorical dictionary of images or part images\u2014of generic \"noses,\" for example, or \"headwear\" or \"birds,\" rather than of particular noses or headwear or birds. These are, so to speak, the visual ingredients called upon and used in the recognition and representation of complex scenes\u2014elements or building blocks which are purely visual, without context or correlation with other senses, without emotion or particular associations of place or time. (Some researchers have called them \"proto-objects\" or \"proto-images.\") In this way, CBS images seem more raw, more obviously neurological, not personal like those of imagination or recollection.\n\nHallucinations of text or musical scores are intriguing in this regard, for although they initially look like real music or text, they quickly reveal themselves to be unreadable, in the sense that they have no shape, no tune, no syntax or grammar. Although Arthur S. at first thought he might be able to play his hallucinatory musical scores, he soon realized that he was seeing \"a potpourri of musical notation, without any meaning.\" Similarly, text hallucinations lack meaning; they may, on closer inspection, not even be actual letters but letter-like runes.\n\nWe know (from studies by ffytche and his colleagues) that text hallucinations go with hyperactivity in the visual word form area; there are probably analogous (though more widespread) activations with hallucinations of musical notation, though these have yet to be \"caught\" on fMRI. In the normal process of reading text or scores, what is initially deciphered in the early visual system goes on to higher levels where it acquires syntactical structure and meaning. But in hallucinations of text or scores, caused by anarchical hyperactivity in the early visual system, letters, proto-letters or musical notation appear without the normal constraints of syntax and meaning\u2014providing a window into both the powers and the limitations of the early visual system.\n\nArthur S. saw musical notation of fanciful elaboration, far more ornate than any real score. CBS hallucinations are often fanciful or fantastical. Why should Rosalie, a blind old woman in the Bronx, see figures in \"Eastern dress\"? This strong disposition to the exotic, for reasons we do not yet understand, is characteristic of CBS, and it would be fascinating to see whether this varies in different cultures. These strange, sometimes surreal images, of boxes or birds perched atop people's heads or flowers coming out of their cheeks, make one wonder whether what is occurring is a sort of neurological mistake, a simultaneous activation of different brain areas, producing an involuntary, incongruous collision or conflation.\n\nThe images of CBS are more stereotyped than those of dreams and at the same time less intelligible, less meaningful. When Lullin's notebook, lost for a century and a half, resurfaced and was published in a psychology journal in 1902 (just two years after Freud's _Interpretation of Dreams_ ), some wondered whether the hallucinations of CBS might afford, as Freud felt dreams did, \"a royal road\" to the unconscious. But attempts at \"interpreting\" CBS hallucinations in this sense bore no fruit. People with CBS had their own psychodynamics, of course, like everyone else, but it became apparent that little beyond the obvious was to be gained from analyzing their hallucinations. A religious person might hallucinate praying hands, among other things, or a musician might hallucinate musical notation, but these images scarcely yielded insights into the unconscious wishes, needs, or conflicts of the person.\n\nDreams are neurological as well as psychological phenomena, but very unlike CBS hallucinations. Dreamers are wholly enveloped in their dreams, and usually active participants in them, whereas people with CBS retain their normal, critical waking consciousness. CBS hallucinations, even though they are projected into external space, are marked by a lack of interaction; they are always silent and neutral\u2014they rarely convey or evoke any emotion. They are confined to the visual, without sound, smell, or tactile sensation. They are remote, like images on a cinema screen in a theater one has chanced to walk into. The theater is in one's own mind, and yet the hallucinations seem to have little to do with one in any deeply personal sense.\n\nOne of the defining characteristics of Charles Bonnet hallucinations is the preservation of insight, the realization that a hallucination is not real. People with CBS are occasionally deceived by a hallucination, especially if it is plausible or contextually appropriate. But such mistakes are quickly realized to be such, and insight is restored. The hallucinations of CBS almost never lead to persistent false ideas or delusions.\n\nThe ability to evaluate one's perceptions or hallucinations, however, may be compromised if there are other underlying problems in the brain, especially those which impair the frontal lobes, since the frontal lobes are the seat of judgment and self-evaluation. This may happen transiently, for example, with a stroke or head injury; fever or delirium; various medications, toxins, or metabolic imbalances; dehydration or lack of sleep. In such cases, insight will return as soon as cerebral function returns to normal. But if there is an ongoing dementia, like Alzheimer's or Lewy body disease, there may be less and less ability to recognize hallucinations as such\u2014which, in turn, may lead to frightening delusions and psychoses.\n\nMarlon S., in his late seventies, has progressive glaucoma and some mild dementia. He has been unable to read for the last twenty years, and for the last five years has been virtually blind. He is a devout Christian and still works as a lay minister in prisons, as he has done for the last thirty years. He lives alone in an apartment, but he leads a very active social life. He goes out each day, either with one of his children or with a home attendant, to family occasions or to the senior center, where there may be games, dancing, going out to restaurants, and other activities.\n\nAlthough he is blind, Marlon seems to inhabit a world that is very visual and sometimes very strange. He tells me that he often \"sees\" his surroundings\u2014he has lived most of his life in the Bronx, but what he sees is an ugly, desolate version of the Bronx (he describes it as \"shabby, old, much older than me\"), and this may give him a feeling of disorientation. He \"sees\" his apartment, but he can easily get lost or confused. Sometimes, he says, the apartment gets \"as big as a Greyhound bus terminal,\" and at other times it contracts, becoming \"as skinny as a railroad apartment.\" In general, the hallucinated apartment looks dilapidated and chaotic: \"My whole house is a wreck, looks like the Third World... then it looks regular.\" (The only time his apartment actually _is_ a mess, his daughter told me, is when Marlon, thinking that he is \"blockaded\" by the furniture, starts rearranging it, pushing things to and fro.)\n\nHis hallucinations started about five years ago and were at first benign. \"In the beginning,\" he told me, \"I saw a lot of animals.\" They were followed by hallucinations of children\u2014multitudes of them, just as there would always be multitudes of animals. \"All of a sudden,\" Marlon remembered, \"I see all these kids come in, they were walking all around; I thought they were regular kids.\" The children were silent but \"talked with their hands\"; they seemed unconscious of him and \"did their own thing\"\u2014walking around, playing. He was startled when he found that no one else saw them. It was only then that he realized that his \"eyes were playing tricks\" on him.\n\nMarlon enjoys listening to talk shows, gospel, and jazz on the radio, and when he does so, he may find his sitting room crowded with hallucinatory people who are also listening. Sometimes their mouths move as if they are speaking or singing along with the radio. These visions are not unpleasant, and they seem to provide a sort of hallucinatory comfort. It is a social scene, which he enjoys.9\n\nIn the last two years, Marlon has also started to see a mysterious man who always wears a brown leather coat, green pants, and a Stetson hat. Marlon has no idea who it is but feels that this man has a special message or meaning, though what the message or meaning is eludes him. He sees this figure at a distance, never close up. The man seems to float through the air rather than walk, and his figure can become enormous, \"as tall as a house.\" Marlon has also spotted a small, sinister trio of men, \"like FBI, a long way off.... They look real, real ugly and bad.\" Marlon believes in angels and devils, he tells me, and he feels that these men are evil. He has started to suspect that he is under surveillance by them.\n\nMany people with mild cognitive impairment may be organized and oriented during the daytime\u2014this is the case with Marlon, especially when he is at the senior center or at a church social, actively engaged with other people. But as evening comes, there may be a \"sundowning\" syndrome, and fears and confusions start to proliferate.\n\nGenerally, in the daytime, Marlon's hallucinatory figures deceive him briefly, for a minute or two, before he realizes they are figments. But late in the day, his insight breaks down, and he feels his threatening visitors as real. At night, when he finds \"intruders\" in his apartment, he is terrified\u2014even though they seem uninterested in him. Many of them look \"like criminals\" and wear prison garb; sometimes they are \"smoking Pall Malls.\" One night one of his intruders was carrying a bloodstained knife, and Marlon yelled out, \"Get out of here, in the name of the blood of Jesus!\" On another occasion one of the apparitions left \"under the door,\" slipping away like a liquid or vapor. Marlon has ascertained that these figures are \"like ghosts, not solid,\" and that his arm will go right through them. Nevertheless, they _seem_ quite real. He can laugh about this as we talk, but it is clear that he can be quite terrified and deluded when he is alone with his intruders in the middle of the night.\n\nPeople with CBS have, at least in part, lost the primary visual world, the world of perception. But they have gained, if only in an inchoate and fitful way, a world of hallucinations, a secondary visual world. The role CBS may play in an individual's life varies enormously, depending on the sort of hallucinations that occur, how often they occur, and whether they are contextually appropriate, or frightening, or comforting, even inspiring. There are, at one extreme, those who may have had only a single hallucinatory experience in their life; others may have had hallucinations, on and off, for years. Sometimes hallucinations can be distracting\u2014seeing patterns or webs over everything, not knowing whether the food on one's plate is real or hallucinatory. Some hallucinations are manifestly unpleasant, especially those that involve deformed or dismembered faces. A few are dangerous: Zelda, for instance, does not dare drive, since she may see the road suddenly bifurcate or people jumping on the hood of her car.\n\nFor the most part, however, the hallucinations of CBS are unthreatening and, once accommodated to, mildly diverting. David Stewart speaks of his hallucinations as being \"altogether friendly,\" and he imagines his eyes saying, \"Sorry to have let you down. We recognize that blindness is no fun, so we've organized this small syndrome, a sort of coda to your sighted life. It's not much, but it's the best we can manage.\"\n\nCharles Lullin, too, enjoyed his hallucinations and would sometimes go into a quiet room for a brief hallucinatory break. \"His mind makes merry with the images,\" Bonnet wrote of his grandfather. \"His brain is a theatre where the stage machinery puts on performances which are all the more amazing because they are unexpected.\"\n\nSometimes the hallucinations of Charles Bonnet syndrome can inspire. Virginia Hamilton Adair wrote poetry as a young woman, publishing in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _New Republic_. She continued to write poems during her career as a scholar and professor of English in California, but these, for the most part, remained unpublished. It was not until she was eighty-three and completely blind from glaucoma that she published her first book of poetry, the acclaimed _Ants on the Melon_. Two further collections followed, and in these new poems she made frequent reference to the Charles Bonnet hallucinations that now visited her regularly, the visions given to her by \"the angel of hallucinations,\" as she put it.\n\nAdair and, later, her editor sent me extracts from the journal she kept in the last years of her life. They were full of descriptions she dictated of her hallucinations as they occurred, including this:\n\nI am maneuvered into a delightfully soft chair. I sink, submerged as usual in shades of night... the sea of clouds at my feet clears, revealing a field of grain, and standing about it a small flock of fowl, not two alike, in somber plumage: a miniature peacock, very slender, with its little crest and unfurled tail feathers, some plumper specimens, and a shore bird on long stems, etc. Now it appears that several are wearing shoes, and among them a bird with four feet. One expects more color among a flock of birds, even in the hallucinations of the blind.... The birds have turned into little men and women in medieval attire, all strolling away from me. I see only their backs, short tunics, tights or leggings, shawls or kerchiefs.... Opening my eyes on the smoke screen of my room I am treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit. The familiar milkman invaded the scene in his azure cart with the golden horse; he joined us a few days ago out of some forgotten book of nursery rhymes or the back of a Depression cereal box.... But the magic lantern show of colored oddities has faded and I am back in black-wall country without form or substance... where I landed as the lights went out.\n\n1. Draaisma's book provides not only a vivid account of Bonnet's life and work, but fascinating reconstructions of the lives of a dozen other major figures in neurology whose names are now remembered mostly for the syndromes named after them: Georges Gilles de la Tourette, James Parkinson, Alois Alzheimer, Joseph Capgras, and others.\n\n2. Or so it would seem. Recently I came across a marvelous 1845 report by Truman Abell, a physician who started to lose his sight in his fifty-ninth year and had become totally blind by 1842, four years later. He described this in an article for the _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_.\n\n\"In this situation,\" he wrote, \"I often dreamed of having my sight restored, and of seeing the most beautiful landscapes. At length these landscapes began to appear in miniature _when awake_ : small fields, a few feet square, would appear, clothed with green grass, and other vegetables, some in bloom. These would continue two or three minutes, and then disappear.\" The landscapes were followed by an immense variety of other \"illusions\"\u2014Abell did not use the word \"hallucinations\"\u2014provided by \"an internal sight.\"\n\nOver the course of several months, his visions increased in complexity. His \"silent, but impudent visitors\" were sometimes intrusive, with three or four people who would sit on his bed or \"come to my bed-side, stoop down over me, and look directly into my eyes.\" (Often his hallucinatory people seemed to acknowledge him, although CBS hallucinations typically do not interact with their hallucinators.) One night, he reported, \"I was threatened to be run over about 10 o'clock by a drove of oxen; but having my presence of mind, I sat quiet, and with much crowding they all passed without touching me.\"\n\nSometimes he saw ranks of thousands of people, splendidly dressed, forming columns that disappeared into the distance. At one point he saw \"a column at least half a mile wide\" of \"men on horseback riding towards the west.... They continued to pass for several hours.\"\n\n\"What I have here stated,\" Abell wrote at the end of his detailed account, \"must appear incredible to those unacquainted with the history of illusive visions.... How far my blindness contributed to produce such a result, I am not able to say. Never before have I been able to realize the ancient comparison of the human mind to a microcosm, or universe in miniature... [yet] the whole was confined within the organ of mental vision, and occupied, perhaps, a space of less than the tenth part of an inch square.\"\n\n3. A particularly good description of hallucinations in CBS (\"I See Purple Flowers Everywhere\") is provided by Lylas and Marja Mogk in their excellent book _Macular Degeneration_ , written for patients with this condition.\n\n4. The reverse may also occur. Robert Teunisse told me how one of his patients, seeing a man hovering outside his nineteenth-floor apartment, assumed this was another one of his hallucinations. When the man waved at him, he did not wave back. The \"hallucination\" turned out to be his window washer, considerably miffed at not having his friendly wave returned.\n\n5. I have heard from at least a dozen people who, like Arthur and Marjorie, hallucinate musical notation; some of them have eye problems, some parkinsonism, some see music when they have a fever or delirium, some see it hypnopompically when they awaken. All but one are amateur musicians who often spend many hours a day studying scores. This very specialized and repetitive sort of visual study is peculiar to musicians. One may read books for hours a day, but one does not usually study print itself in such an intensive way (unless one is a type designer or proofreader, perhaps).\n\nA page of music is far more complex visually than a page of print. With musical notation, one has not just the notes themselves but a very dense set of information contained in symbols for key signatures, clefs, turns, mordents, accents, rests, holds, trills, etc. It seems likely that intensive study and practice of this complex code somehow imprints it in the brain, and should any tendency to hallucination later develop, these \"neural imprints\" may predispose to hallucinations of musical notation.\n\nAnd yet people with no particular training or even interest in music may also have hallucinations of musical notation, as Dominic ffytche has pointed out. In a letter to me, he wrote, \"although prolonged exposure to music increases the likelihood of musical eyes, it is not a prerequisite.\"\n\n6. I was reminded, when she said this, of a case I had heard of in which as a patient ate cherries from a bowl, they were replaced by hallucinatory cherries, a seemingly endless cornucopia of cherries, until, suddenly, the bowl was totally empty. And of another case, of a man with CBS who was picking blackberries. He picked every one he could see; then, to his delight, he saw four more he had missed\u2014but these turned out to be hallucinations.\n\n7. Something about visual movement or \"optic flow\" seems to be especially provocative of visual hallucinations in people with CBS or other disorders. I met one elderly psychiatrist with macular degeneration who had experienced only a single episode of CBS hallucinations: he was being driven in a car and began to see, on the edges of the parkway, elaborate eighteenth-century gardens which reminded him of Versailles. He enjoyed the experience and found it much more interesting than the ordinary view of the roadside.  \nIvy L., who also has macular degeneration, wrote:\n\n> As a passenger in cars, I began riding with my eyes closed. Now I often \"see\" a small, moving travel scene in front of me when my eyes are shut. I \"see\" open roads and sky, houses, and gardens. I do not \"see\" any people or vehicles. The scene constantly changes, showing unidentifiable houses in great detail sliding by when the car is in motion. These hallucinations never appear except when I am in a moving car.\n\n(Mrs. L. also reported text hallucinations as part of her CBS, \"brief periods when I would 'see' handwriting in huge letters across a large white wall, or the income tax figures imprinted on the drapes. These lasted several years, at intervals.\")\n\n8. Such correlations involve sizable regions of the brain; they are at a macro level. Correlations on a micro level, at least for elementary geometric hallucinations, have been proposed by William Burke, a neuro-physiologist who has experienced such hallucinations himself, due to macular \"holes\" in both eyes. He has been able to estimate the visual angles subtended by specific hallucinations and to extrapolate these into cortical distances. He concludes that the separation of his brickwork hallucinations corresponds to the separation of the physiologically active \"stripes\" in the V2 part of the visual cortex, while the separation of the dots he hallucinates corresponds to that of the \"blobs\" in the primary visual cortex. Burke hypothesizes that with diminished input from his damaged maculas, there is diminished activity in the macular cortex, releasing spontaneous activity in the cortical stripes and blobs that give rise to hallucinations.\n\n9. I have heard similar descriptions from other people who have both CBS and some dementia. Janet B. likes to listen to audiobooks and sometimes finds herself joined by a hallucinatory group of fellow listeners. They listen intently but never speak, do not respond to her questions, and seem unaware of her presence. At first, Janet realized that they were hallucinatory, but later, as her dementia advanced, she insisted that they were real. Once when her daughter was visiting and said, \"Mom, there's no one here,\" she got angry and chased her daughter out.\n\nA more complex delusional overlay occurred while she was listening to a favorite show on television. It seemed to Janet that the television crew had decided to use her apartment, and that it was set up with cables and cameras, that the show was actually being filmed at that moment in front of her. Her daughter happened to telephone her during the show, and Janet whispered, \"I have to be quiet\u2014they're filming.\" When her daughter arrived an hour later, Janet insisted that there were still cables all over the floor, adding, \"Don't you see that woman?\"\n\nEven though Janet was convinced of the reality of these hallucinations, they were entirely visual. People pointed, gestured, mouthed, but made no sound. Nor did she have any sense of personal involvement; she found herself in the midst of strange happenings, yet they seemed to have nothing to do with her. In this way they retained the typical character of CBS hallucinations, even though she insisted that they were real.\n\n# 2\n\nThe Prisoner's Cinema: Sensory Deprivation\n\nThe brain needs not only perceptual input but perceptual _change_ , and the absence of change may cause not only lapses of arousal and attention but perceptual aberrations as well. Whether darkness and solitude is sought out by holy men in caves or forced upon prisoners in lightless dungeons, the deprivation of normal visual input can stimulate the inner eye instead, producing dreams, vivid imaginings, or hallucinations. There is even a special term for the trains of brilliantly colored and varied hallucinations which come to console or torment those kept in isolation or darkness: \"the prisoner's cinema.\"\n\nTotal visual deprivation is not necessary to produce hallucinations\u2014visual monotony can have much the same effect. Thus sailors have long reported seeing things (and perhaps hearing them, too) when they spent days gazing at a becalmed sea. It is similar for travelers riding across a featureless desert or polar explorers in a vast, unvarying icescape. Soon after World War II, such visions were recognized as a special hazard for high-altitude pilots flying for hours in an empty sky, and it is a danger for long-distance truckers focused for hours on an endless road. Pilots and truckers, those who monitor radar screens for hours on end\u2014anyone with a visually monotonous task is susceptible to hallucinations. (Similarly, auditory monotony may lead to auditory hallucinations.)\n\nIn the early 1950s, researchers in Donald Hebb's laboratory at McGill University designed the first experimental study of prolonged perceptual isolation, as they called it (the term \"sensory deprivation\" became popular later). William Bexton and his colleagues investigated this with fourteen college students immured in soundproof cubicles for several days (except for brief time out for eating and going to the toilet), wearing gloves and cardboard cuffs to reduce tactile sensation and translucent goggles which allowed only a perception of light and dark.\n\nAt first the test subjects tended to fall asleep, but then, on awakening, they became bored and craved stimulation\u2014stimulation not available from the impoverished and monotonous environment they were in. And at this point, self-stimulation of various sorts began: mental games, counting, fantasies, and, sooner or later, visual hallucinations\u2014usually a \"march\" of hallucinations from simple to complex, as Bexton et al. described:\n\nIn the simplest form the visual field, with the eyes closed, changed from dark to light colour; next in complexity were dots of light, lines, or simple geometrical patterns. All 14 subjects reported such imagery, and said it was a new experience to them. Still more complex forms consisted in \"wall-paper patterns,\" reported by 11 subjects, and isolated figures or objects, without background (e.g., a row of little yellow men with black caps on and their mouths open; a German helmet), reported by seven subjects. Finally, there were integrated scenes (e.g., a procession of squirrels with sacks over their shoulders marching \"purposefully\" across a snow field and out of the field of \"vision\"; prehistoric animals walking about in the jungle). Three of the 14 subjects reported such scenes, frequently including dreamlike distortions, with the figures often being described as \"like cartoons.\"\n\nWhile these images first appeared as if projected onto a flat screen, after a time they became \"compellingly three-dimensional\" for some of the subjects, and parts of a scene might become inverted or pivot from side to side.\n\nAfter being initially startled, the subjects tended to find their hallucinations amusing, interesting, or sometimes irritating (\"their vividness interfered with sleep\") but without any \"meaning.\" The hallucinations seemed external, proceeding autonomously, with little relevance or reference to the individual or situation. The hallucinations usually disappeared when the subjects were asked to do complex tasks like multiplying three-figure numbers, but not if they were merely exercising or talking to the researchers. The McGill researchers reported, as many others have, auditory and kinesthetic hallucinations as well as visual ones.\n\nThis and subsequent studies aroused enormous interest in the scientific community, and both scientific and popular efforts were made to duplicate the results. In a 1961 paper, John Zubek and his colleagues reported, in addition to hallucination, a change in visual imagery in many of their subjects:\n\nAt various intervals... the subjects were asked to imagine or visualize certain familiar scenes, for example, lakes, countryside, the inside of their homes, and so forth. The majority of the subjects reported that the images which they conjured up were of unusual vividness, were usually characterized by bright colours, and had considerable detail. All these subjects were unanimous in their opinion that their images were more vivid than anything they had previously experienced. Several subjects who normally had great difficulty visualizing scenes could now visualize them almost instantly with great vividness.... One subject... could visualize faces of former associates of a few years back with almost picture-like clarity, a thing which he was never able to do previously. This phenomenon usually appeared during the second or third day and, in general, became more pronounced with time.\n\nSuch visual heightenings\u2014whether due to disease, deprivation, or drugs\u2014can take the form of enhanced visual imagery or hallucination or both.\n\nIn the early 1960s, sensory deprivation tanks were designed to intensify the effect of isolation by floating the body in a darkened tank of warm water, which removed not only any sense of bodily contact with the environment but also the proprioceptive sense of the body's position and even its existence. Such immersion chambers could produce \"altered states\" much more profound than those described in the original experiments. At the time, such sensory deprivation tanks were sought out as avidly as (and sometimes combined with) \"consciousness-expanding\" drugs, which were more widely available then.1\n\nThere was a great deal of research on sensory deprivation in the 1950s and 1960s (a 1969 book edited by Zubek entitled _Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research_ listed thirteen hundred references)\u2014but then scientific interest, like popular interest, started to peter out, and there was relatively little research until the recent work of Alvaro Pascual-Leone and his colleagues (Merabet et al.), who designed a study to isolate the effects of pure visual deprivation. Their subjects, though blindfolded, were able to move around freely and \"watch\" TV, listen to music, walk outside, and talk to others. They experienced none of the somnolence, boredom, or restlessness the earlier test subjects had shown. They were alert and active during the daytime, when they carried tape recorders so they could take immediate note of any hallucinations. They enjoyed calm, restful sleep at night, and each morning they dictated what they could remember of their dreams\u2014dreams that did not seem significantly altered by their being blindfolded.\n\nThe blindfolds, which allowed the subjects to close or move their eyes, were worn continuously for ninety-six hours. Ten of the thirteen subjects experienced hallucinations, sometimes during the first hours of blindfolding, but always by the second day, whether their eyes were open or not.\n\nTypically the hallucinations would appear suddenly and spontaneously, then disappear just as suddenly after seconds or minutes\u2014although in one subject, hallucination became almost continuous by the third day. The subjects reported a range from simple hallucinations (flashing lights, phosphenes, geometrical patterns) to complex ones (figures, faces, hands, animals, buildings, and landscapes). In general, the hallucinations appeared full-fledged, without warning\u2014they never seemed to be built up slowly, piecemeal, like voluntary imagery or recall. For the most part, the hallucinations aroused little emotion and were regarded as \"amusing.\" Two subjects had hallucinations which correlated with their own movements and actions: \"I have the sensation that I can see my hands and my arms moving when I move them and leaving an illuminated trail,\" said one subject. \"I felt like I was seeing the pitcher while I was pouring the water,\" said another.\n\nSeveral subjects spoke of the brilliance and colors of their hallucinations; one described \"resplendent peacock feathers and buildings.\" Another saw sunsets almost too bright to bear and luminous landscapes of extraordinary beauty, \"much prettier, I think, than anything I have ever seen. I really wish I could paint.\"\n\nSeveral mentioned spontaneous changes in their hallucinations; for one subject, a butterfly became a sunset, which changed to an otter and, finally, a flower. None of the subjects had any voluntary control over their hallucinations, which seemed to have \"a mind\" or \"a will\" of their own.\n\nNo hallucinations were experienced when subjects were engaged in challenging sensory activity of another mode, such as listening to television or music, talking, or even attempting to learn Braille. (The study was concerned not only with hallucinations but with the power of blindfolding to improve and heighten tactile skills and the ability to conceive of space and the world around one in nonvisual terms.)\n\nMerabet et al. felt that the hallucinations reported by their subjects were entirely comparable with those experienced by patients with Charles Bonnet syndrome, and their results suggested to them that visual deprivation alone could be a sufficient cause for CBS.2\n\nBut what exactly is going on in the brains of such experimental subjects\u2014or in the brains of pilots who crash in cloudless blue skies, or truckers who see phantoms on an empty road, or prisoners watching their enforced \"cinema\" in darkness?\n\nWith the advent of functional brain imaging in the 1990s it became possible to visualize, at least in gross terms, how the brain might respond to sensory deprivation\u2014and, if one was lucky (hallucinations are notoriously fickle, and the inside of an fMRI machine is not an ideal place for delicate sensory experiences), one might even catch the neural correlates of a fugitive hallucination. One such study, by Babak Boroojerdi and his colleagues, showed an increase in the excitability of the visual cortex when subjects were visually deprived, a change that occurred within minutes. Another group of researchers, in the neuroscience lab led by Wolf Singer, studied a single subject, a visual artist with excellent powers of visual imagery (an article on this by Sireteanu et al. was published in 2008). The subject was blindfolded for twenty-two days and spent several sessions in an fMRI machine, where she was able to indicate the exact times her hallucinations appeared and disappeared. The fMRI showed activations in her visual system, both in the occipital cortex and in the inferotemporal cortex, in precise coincidence with her hallucinations. (When, by contrast, she was asked to recall or imagine the hallucinations using her powers of visual imagery, there was, additionally, a good deal of activation in the executive areas of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex\u2014areas that had been relatively inactive when she was merely hallucinating.) This made it clear that, at a physiological level, visual imagery differs radically from visual hallucination. Unlike the top-down process of voluntary visual imagery, hallucination is the result of a direct, bottom-up activation of regions in the ventral visual pathway, regions rendered hyperexcitable by a lack of normal sensory input.\n\nThe deafferentation tanks used in the 1960s produced not only visual deprivation but every other sort of deprivation: of hearing, touch, proprioception, movement, and vestibular sensation, as well as, to varying degrees, deprivation of sleep and social contact\u2014any of which may in themselves lead to hallucinations.\n\nHallucinations engendered by immobility, whether from motor system disease or external constraints, were frequently seen when polio was rampant. The worst afflicted, unable even to breathe by themselves, lay motionless in coffinlike \"iron lungs\" and would often hallucinate, as Herbert Leiderman and his colleagues described in a 1958 article. The immobility produced by other paralyzing diseases\u2014or even splints and casts for broken bones\u2014may likewise provoke hallucinations. Most commonly these are corporeal hallucinations, in which limbs may seem to be absent, distorted, misaligned, or multiplied; but voices, visual hallucinations, and even full-blown psychoses have been reported, too. I saw this especially with my postencephalitic patients, many of whom were, in effect, enclosed in immoveable parkinsonism and catatonia.\n\nSleep deprivation beyond a few days leads to hallucination, and so may dream deprivation, even with otherwise normal sleep. When this is combined with exhaustion or extreme physical stress, it can be an even more potent source of hallucinations. Ray P., a triathlete, described one example:\n\nOnce, I was competing in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii. I was not having a good race, I was overheated and dehydrated\u2014miserable. Three miles into the marathon portion of the race, I saw my wife and my mom standing on the side of the road. I ran over to them to say I would be late to the finish line, but when I reached them and began telling my tale of woe, two complete strangers who did not even remotely resemble my wife and mother looked back at me.\n\nThe Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon, with its extreme temperatures and long hours of monotony under grueling conditions, can provide an athlete with a fertile venue for hallucination, much the same as the vision quest rites of passage of Native Americans. I have seen Madame Pele, the Hawaiian Volcano and Fire Goddess, at least once out there in the lava fields.\n\nMichael Shermer has spent much of his life debunking the paranormal; he is a historian of science and the director of the Skeptics Society. In his book _The Believing Brain_ , he provides other examples of hallucinations in marathon athletes, like those of the mushers competing in the Iditarod dogsled race:\n\nMushers go for 9\u201314 days on minimum sleep, are alone except for their dogs, rarely see other competitors, and hallucinate horses, trains, UFOs, invisible airplanes, orchestras, strange animals, voices without people, and occasionally phantom people on the side of the trail or imaginary friends.... A musher named Joe Garnie became convinced that a man was riding in his sled bag, so he politely asked the man to leave, but when he didn't move Garnie tapped him on the shoulder and insisted he depart his sled, and when the stranger refused Garnie swatted him.\n\nShermer, an endurance athlete himself, had an uncanny experience while competing in a grueling bike marathon, which he later described in his _Scientific American_ column:\n\nIn the wee hours of the morning of August 8, 1983, while I was traveling along a lonely rural highway approaching Haigler, Neb., a large craft with bright lights overtook me and forced me to the side of the road. Alien beings exited the craft and abducted me for 90 minutes, after which time I found myself back on the road with no memory of what transpired inside the ship.... My abduction experience was triggered by sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion. I had just ridden a bicycle 83 straight hours and 1,259 miles in the opening days of the... transcontinental Race Across America. I was sleepily weaving down the road when my support motor home flashed its high beams and pulled alongside, and my crew entreated me to take a sleep break. At that moment a distant memory of the 1960s television series \"The Invaders\" was inculcated into my waking dream. In the series, alien beings were taking over the earth by replicating actual people but, inexplicably, retained a stiff little finger. Suddenly the members of my support crew were transmogrified into aliens. I stared intensely at their fingers and grilled them on both technical and personal matters.\n\nAfter a nap, Shermer recognized this as a hallucination, but at the time it seemed completely real.\n\n1. While the romantic use of sensory deprivation, as that of vision-producing drugs, has diminished since the 1960s, its political use is still horrifyingly common in the treatment of prisoners. In a 1984 paper on \"hostage hallucinations,\" Ronald K. Siegel pointed out that such hallucinations can be magnified sometimes to madness, especially when combined with social isolation, sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst, torture, or the threat of death.\n\n2. There may be severe visual impairment or complete blindness without a hint of CBS, and this might seem to imply that visual deprivation alone is not a sufficient cause for it. But we are still ignorant as to why some people with visual problems get CBS and others do not.\n\n# 3\n\nA Few Nanograms of Wine: Hallucinatory Smells\n\nThe ability to imagine smells, in normal circumstances, is not that common\u2014most people cannot imagine smells with any vividness, even though they may be very good at imagining sights or sounds. It is an uncommon gift, as Gordon C. wrote to me in 2011:\n\nSmelling objects that are not visible seems to have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.... If, for instance, I think for a few minutes about my long dead grandmother, I can almost immediately recall with near perfect sensory awareness the powder that she always used. If I'm writing to someone about lilacs, or any specific flowering plant, my olfactory senses produce that fragrance. This is not to say that merely writing the word \"roses\" produces the scent; I have to recall a specific instance connected with a rose, or whatever, in order to produce the effect. I always considered this ability to be quite natural, and it wasn't until adolescence that I discovered that it was not normal for everyone. Now I consider it a wonderful gift of my specific brain.\n\nMost of us, in contrast, have difficulty summoning smells to mind, even with strong suggestion. And it may be oddly difficult to know whether a smell is real or not. Once I revisited the house where I grew up and where my family lived for sixty years. The house had been sold to the British Association of Psychotherapists in 1990, and what used to be our dining room had been turned into an office. When I entered this room on a visit in 1995, I immediately and strongly smelled the kosher red wine which used to be kept in a wooden sideboard next to the dining table and drunk with Kiddush on the Sabbath. Was I just imagining the smell, assisted by these once intensely familiar, beloved surroundings and nearly sixty years of memory and association? Or could a few nanograms of wine have survived all of the repainting and renovation? Smells can be oddly persistent, and I am not sure whether my experience should be called a heightened perception, a hallucination, a memory, or some combination of all these.\n\nMy father had an acute sense of smell as a young man, and like all doctors of his generation, he depended on it when seeing patients. He could detect the smell of diabetic urine or of a putrid lung abscess as soon as he entered a patient's house. A series of sinus infections in middle age blunted his sense of smell, and he could no longer rely on his nose as a diagnostic tool. But he was fortunate that he did not lose his sense of smell entirely, for total loss of the sense of smell\u2014anosmia, which affects perhaps as many as 5 percent of people\u2014causes many problems. People with anosmia cannot smell gas, smoke, or rancid food; they may be beset by social anxiety, not knowing whether they themselves smell of something rank. They cannot enjoy the good smells of the world, either, and they cannot enjoy many of the subtler flavors of food (for most of these depend equally on smell).1\n\nI wrote about one anosmic patient in _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_. He had suddenly lost all sense of smell, as the result of a head injury. (The long olfactory tracts are easily sheared as they cross the base of the skull, so loss of smell can be caused by a relatively mild head injury.) This man had never given much conscious thought to the sense of smell, but once he lost it, he found his life radically poorer. He missed the smell of people, of books, of the city, of springtime. He hoped against hope that the lost sense would return. And, indeed, it seemed to come back some months later when, to his surprise and delight, he smelled his morning coffee as it was brewing. Tentatively, he tried his pipe, abandoned for many months, and caught a whiff of his favorite aromatic tobacco. He returned, excitedly, to his neurologist, but after careful testing, he was told that there was not a trace of recovery. Clearly, though, he was having an olfactory experience of some sort, and I could only think that his power to imagine smells, at least in situations charged with memories and associations, had been enhanced by his anosmia, perhaps as the power to visualize may be enhanced in some who have lost their sight.\n\nThe heightened sensitivity of sensory systems when they have lost their normal input of sight, smell, or sound is not an unmixed blessing, for it may lead to hallucinations of sight, smell, or sound\u2014phantopsia, phantosmia, or phantacusis, to use the old but useful terms. And just as 10 to 20 percent of those who lose their sight get Charles Bonnet syndrome, a similar percentage of those who lose their sense of smell experience the olfactory equivalent. In some cases these phantom smells follow sinus infections or head injuries, but occasionally they are associated with migraine, epilepsy, parkinsonism, PTSD, or other conditions.2\n\nIn CBS, if there is some remaining vision, there may also be perceptual distortions of all sorts. Similarly, those who have lost much but not all of their sense of smell tend to suffer from distortions of smell, often of an unpleasant sort (a condition called parosmia or dysosmia).\n\nMary B., a Canadian woman, acquired dysosmia two months after an operation performed under general anesthesia. Eight years later, she sent me a detailed account of her experiences, entitled \"A Phantom in My Brain.\" She wrote:\n\nIt happened fast. In September 1999 I felt great. I'd had a hysterectomy in the summer, but I was already back to daily Pilates and ballet classes, feeling fit and full of vigour. Four months later I was still fit and vigorous, but I was locked in an invisible prison by a disorder no one could see, that no one seemed to know anything about, that I couldn't even find a name for.\n\nThe changes were gradual at first. In September tomatoes and oranges started tasting metallic and a bit rotten, and cottage cheese tasted like sour milk. I tried different brands; they were all bad.\n\nDuring October, lettuce began to smell and taste of turpentine, and spinach, apples, carrots and cauliflower tasted slightly rotten. Fish and meat, especially chicken, smelt as if they'd been rotting for a week. My partner couldn't detect the off tastes at all. Was I developing some sort of food allergy?...\n\nSoon the exhaust fans of restaurant kitchens started smelling weirdly unpleasant. Bread tasted rancid; chocolate, like machine oil. The only meat or fish I could eat was smoked salmon. I started having it three times a week. In early December we ate out with friends. I had to choose carefully, but I enjoyed the meal, except that the mineral water smelt like bleach. But the others were drinking it happily, and I decided that my glass hadn't been rinsed properly. Smells and tastes got dramatically worse in the next week. Traffic smelt so bad that I had to force myself to go out; I made long detours to go to my Pilates and ballet classes by pedestrian-only routes. Wine smelt revolting; so did anybody who was wearing scent. The smell of Ian's morning coffee had been getting worse, but between one day and the next it turned into a lurid, intolerable stench that permeated the house and lingered for hours. He started having coffee at work.\n\nMs. B. kept careful notes, hoping to find, if not an explanation, at least some pattern to the distortions, but she could find none. \"There was no rhyme or reason to it,\" she wrote. \"How could lemons taste okay but not oranges; garlic, but not onions?\"\n\nWith complete anosmia, rather than exaggerations or distortions of perceived smells, there can only be hallucinations of smell. These too can be very various, and sometimes difficult to define or describe. This was brought out by Heather A.:\n\nThe hallucinations generally cannot be described by one smell descriptor (except one night I smelled dill pickles for most of an evening). I can kind of describe them as an amalgam of other smells (metallic-y roll-on deodorant; dense acrid-sweet cake; melted plastic in a three-day-old garbage pile). I have been able to have fun with it in this way, make an art of naming\/describing them. In the beginning, I would go through phases where I would access one at a time for a couple of weeks, multiple times a day. After a few months, the family of smells I had gone through had diversified, and now I can reference several different ones in a day. Sometimes a new one will pop up and I may not smell it again. The experience of them varies. Sometimes they will come up strong, like something stuck right under my nose, and dissipate quickly; sometimes one will be subtle and linger, at times barely noticeable.\n\nSome people hallucinate a particular smell, which may be influenced by context or suggestion. Laura H., who lost most of her sense of smell after a craniotomy, wrote to me that she would occasionally have a brief burst of smells that were plausible, though not always entirely accurate from what she remembered sensing before her loss. Sometimes they were not really there at all:\n\nOur kitchen was being revamped, and the electrics blew one evening. My husband assured me that all was safe but I was very worried about a possible electrical fire that might start.... I woke up in the middle of the night and had to get up to check the kitchen because I thought I could smell electrical burning.... I checked everywhere I could see in the kitchen, hall, cupboards, but could see nothing burning.... I then started to think the smell could be coming from behind a wall or somewhere I couldn't see.\n\nShe woke her husband; he could smell nothing, but she could still smell the smoke strongly. \"I was shocked,\" she said, \"by how strongly I could smell something that wasn't there.\"\n\nOthers may be haunted by a single constant smell of such complexity that it seems to conglomerate almost all the bad smells in the world. Bonnie Blodgett, in her book _Remembering Smell_ , describes the phantosmic world she was plunged into following a sinus infection and the use of a potent nasal spray. She was driving along a state highway when she first detected a \"weird\" smell. She checked her shoes at a gas station, found them clean, then wondered if there was something amiss with the heater fan in the car\u2014a dead bird perhaps? The smell pursued her, waxing and waning in intensity but never absent. She explored a dozen possible external causes and was finally, reluctantly, forced to the realization that the smell was in her head\u2014in a neurological, not a psychiatric, sense. She described the smell as resembling \"shit, puke, burning flesh and rotten eggs. Not to mention smoke, chemicals, urine and mold. My brain had truly outdone itself.\" (Hallucination of particularly vile smells is called cacosmia.)\n\nWhile humans can detect and identify perhaps ten thousand distinct smells, the number of possible smells is far greater, for there are more than five hundred different odorant receptor sites in the nasal mucosa, and stimulation of these (or their cerebral representations) may be combined in trillions of ways. Some hallucinated smells may be impossible to describe because they are different from anything ever experienced in the real world, and evoke no memories or associations. New, unprecedented experiences can be a hallmark of hallucinations, for when the brain is released from the constraints of reality, it can generate any sound, image, or smell in its repertoire, sometimes in complex and \"impossible\" combinations.\n\n1. Molly Birnbaum, an aspiring chef who became anosmic after being struck by a car, has described the anosmic's predicament eloquently in her memoir _Season to Taste_.\n\n2. Among these other conditions is infection with the herpes simplex virus, which can attack nerves (including sometimes the olfactory nerves), both impairing and stimulating them. The virus can remain dormant for long periods, sequestered in nerve ganglia, and suddenly reemerge at intervals of months or years. One man, a microbiologist, wrote to me: \"In the summer of 2006, I began to 'smell things,' a faint pervasive odor that I could not identify (my best guess was... wet cardboard).\" Prior to this, he said, \"I had a highly sensitive nose, and was able to identify my laboratory cultures by smell alone, or subtle differences in organic solvents, or faint perfumes.\"\n\nHe soon developed a constant hallucination of the smell of rotting fish, which faded only after a year had passed, along with most of his \"olfactory acuity and the subtlety of most foods.\" He wrote:\n\nCertain odors are completely gone\u2014feces(!), baking bread, or cookies, roasting turkey, garbage, roses, the fresh soil smell of _Streptomyces_... all gone. I miss the smells of Thanksgiving, but not the smell of public toilets.\n\nThe dysosmia and phantosmia were due to a reemergence of the herpes simplex 2 which he had contracted many years before, and he is intrigued that these are always preceded by hallucinatory smells. He writes, \"I smell the onset of herpes reactivation. A day or two prior to the onset of a neuritis episode, I again have olfactory hallucinations of the last strong smell I noticed. [This smell] persists during the neuritis and fades as the neuritis fades.... The strength of the hallucinations is correlated with the severity of the generalized neuritis.\"\n\n# 4  \nHearing Things\n\nIn 1973 the journal _Science_ published an article that caused an immediate furor. It was entitled \"On Being Sane in Insane Places,\" and it described how, as an experiment, eight \"pseudopatients\" with no history of mental illness presented themselves at a variety of hospitals across the United States. Their single complaint was that they \"heard voices.\" They told hospital staff that they could not really make out what the voices said but that they heard the words \"empty,\" \"hollow,\" and \"thud.\" Apart from this fabrication, they behaved normally and recounted their own (normal) past experiences and medical histories. Nonetheless, all of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic (except one, who was diagnosed with \"manic-depressive psychosis\"), hospitalized for up to two months, and prescribed antipsychotic medications (which they did not swallow). Once admitted to the mental wards, they continued to speak and behave normally; they reported to the medical staff that their hallucinated voices had disappeared and that they felt fine. They even kept notes on their experiment, quite openly (this was registered in the nursing notes for one pseudopatient as \"writing behavior\"), but none of the pseudopatients were identified as such by the staff.1 This experiment, designed by David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist (and himself a pseudopatient), emphasized, among other things, that the single symptom of \"hearing voices\" could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of schizophrenia even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior. Psychiatry, and society in general, had been subverted by the almost axiomatic belief that \"hearing voices\" spelled madness and never occurred except in the context of severe mental disturbance.\n\nThis belief is a fairly recent one, as the careful and humane reservations of early researchers on schizophrenia made clear. But by the 1970s, antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers had begun to replace other treatments, and careful history taking, looking at the whole life of the patient, had largely been replaced by the use of DSM criteria to make snap diagnoses.\n\nEugen Bleuler, who directed the huge Burgh\u00f6lzli asylum near Zurich from 1898 to 1927, paid close and sympathetic attention to the many hundreds of schizophrenic people under his care. He recognized that the \"voices\" his patients heard, however outlandish they might seem, were closely associated with their mental states and delusions. The voices, he wrote, embodied \"all their strivings and fears... their entire transformed relationship to the external world... above all... [to] the pathological or hostile powers\" that beset them. He described these in vivid detail in his great 1911 monograph, _Dementia Praecox; or, The Group of Schizophrenias:_\n\nThe voices not only speak to the patient, but they pass electricity through the body, beat him, paralyse him, take his thoughts away. They are often hypostasized as people, or in other very bizarre ways. For example, a patient claims that a \"voice\" is perched above each of his ears. One voice is a little larger than the other but both are about the size of a walnut, and they consist of nothing but a large ugly mouth.\n\nThreats or curses form the main and most common content of the \"voices.\" Day and night they come from everywhere, from the walls, from above and below, from the cellar and the roof, from heaven and from hell, from near and far.... When the patient is eating, he hears a voice saying, \"Each mouthful is stolen.\" If he drops something, he hears, \"If only your foot had been chopped off.\"\n\nThe voices are often very contradictory. At one time they may be against the patient... then they may contradict themselves.... The roles of pro and con are often taken over by voices of different people.... The voice of a daughter tells a patient: \"He is going to be burned alive,\" while his mother's voice says, \"He will not be burned.\" Besides their persecutors the patients often hear the voice of some protector.\n\nThe voices are often localized in the body.... A polyp may be the occasion for localizing the voices in the nose. An intestinal disturbance brings them into connection with the abdomen.... In cases of sexual complexes, the penis, the urine in the bladder, or the nose utter obscene words.... A really or imaginarily gravid patient will hear her child or children speaking inside her womb....\n\nInanimate objects may speak. The lemonade speaks, the patient's name is heard to be coming from a glass of milk. The furniture speaks to him.\n\nBleuler wrote, \"Almost every schizophrenic who is hospitalized hears 'voices.' \" But he emphasized that the reverse did not hold\u2014that hearing voices did not necessarily denote schizophrenia. In the popular imagination, though, hallucinatory voices are almost synonymous with schizophrenia\u2014a great misconception, for most people who do hear voices are not schizophrenic.\n\nMany people report hearing voices which are not particularly directed at them, as Nancy C. wrote:\n\nI hallucinate conversations on a regular basis, often as I am falling asleep at night. It seems to me that these conversations are real and are actually taking place between real people, at the very time I'm hearing them, but are occurring somewhere else. I hear couples arguing, all kinds of things. They are not voices I can identify, they are not people I know. I feel like I'm a radio, tuned into someone else's world. (Though always an American-English-speaking world.) I can't think of any way to regard these experiences except as hallucinations. I am never a participant; I am never addressed. I am just listening in.\n\n\"Hallucinations in the sane\" were well recognized in the nineteenth century, and with the rise of neurology, people sought to understand more clearly what caused them. In England in the 1880s, the Society for Psychical Research was founded to collect and investigate reports of apparitions or hallucinations, especially those of the bereaved, and many eminent scientists\u2014physicists as well as physiologists and psychologists\u2014joined the society (William James was active in the American branch). Telepathy, clairvoyance, communication with the dead, and the nature of a spirit world became the subjects of systematic investigation.\n\nThese early researchers found that hallucinations were not uncommon in the general population. Their 1894 \"International Census of Waking Hallucinations in the Sane\" examined the occurrence and nature of hallucinations experienced by normal people in normal circumstances (they took care to exclude anyone with obvious medical or psychiatric problems). Seventeen thousand people were sent a single question:\n\nHave you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice, which impression, as far as you could discover, was not due to an external physical cause?\n\nMore than 10 percent responded in the affirmative, and of those, more than a third heard voices. As John Watkins noted in his book _Hearing Voices_ , hallucinated voices \"having some kind of religious or supernatural content represented a small but significant minority of these reports.\" Most of the hallucinations, however, were of a more quotidian character.\n\nPerhaps the commonest auditory hallucination is hearing one's own name spoken\u2014either by a familiar voice or an anonymous one. Freud, writing in _The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_ , remarked on this:\n\nDuring the days when I was living alone in a foreign city\u2014I was a young man at the time\u2014I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice; I then noted down the exact moment of the hallucination and made anxious enquiries of those at home about what had happened at that time. Nothing had happened.2\n\nThe voices that are sometimes heard by people with schizophrenia tend to be accusing, threatening, jeering, or persecuting. By contrast, the voices hallucinated by the \"normal\" are often quite unremarkable, as Daniel Smith brings out in his book _Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity_. Smith's own father and grandfather heard such voices, and they had very different reactions. His father started hearing voices at the age of thirteen, Smith writes:\n\nThese voices weren't elaborate, and they weren't disturbing in content. They issued simple commands. They instructed him, for instance, to move a glass from one side of the table to another or to use a particular subway turnstile. Yet in listening to them and obeying them his interior life became, by all reports, unendurable.\n\nSmith's grandfather, by contrast, was nonchalant, even playful, in regard to his hallucinatory voices. He described how he tried to use them in betting at the racetrack. (\"It didn't work, my mind was clouded with voices telling me that this horse could win or maybe this one is ready to win.\") It was much more successful when he played cards with his friends. Neither the grandfather nor the father had strong supernatural inclinations; nor did they have any significant mental illness. They just heard unremarkable voices concerned with everyday things\u2014as do millions of others.\n\nSmith's father and grandfather rarely spoke of their voices. They listened to them in secrecy and silence, perhaps feeling that admitting to hearing voices would be seen as an indication of madness or at least serious psychiatric turmoil. Yet many recent studies confirm that it is not that uncommon to hear voices and that the majority of those who do are not schizophrenic; they are more like Smith's father and grandfather.3\n\nIt is clear that attitudes to hearing voices are critically important. One can be tortured by voices, as Daniel Smith's father was, or accepting and easygoing, like his grandfather. Behind these personal attitudes are the attitudes of society, attitudes which have differed profoundly in different times and places.\n\nHearing voices occurs in every culture and has often been accorded great importance\u2014the gods of Greek myth often spoke to mortals, and the gods of the great monotheistic traditions, too. Voices have been significant in this regard, perhaps more so than visions, for voices, language, can convey an explicit message or command as images alone cannot.\n\nUntil the eighteenth century, voices\u2014like visions\u2014were ascribed to supernatural agencies: gods or demons, angels or djinns. No doubt there was sometimes an overlap between such voices and those of psychosis or hysteria, but for the most part, voices were not regarded as pathological; if they stayed inconspicuous and private, they were simply accepted as part of human nature, part of the way it was with some people.\n\nAround the middle of the eighteenth century, a new secular philosophy started to gain ground with the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment, and hallucinatory visions and voices came to be seen as having a physiological basis in the overactivity of certain centers in the brain.\n\nBut the romantic idea of \"inspiration\" still held, too\u2014the artist, especially the writer, was seen or saw himself as the transcriber, the amanuensis, of a Voice, and sometimes had to wait years (as Rilke did) for the Voice to speak.4\n\nTalking to oneself is basic to human beings, for we are a linguistic species; the great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky thought that \"inner speech\" was a prerequisite of all voluntary activity. I talk to myself, as many of us do, for much of the day\u2014admonishing myself (\"You fool! Where did you leave your glasses?\"), encouraging myself (\"You can do it!\"), complaining (\"Why is that car in my lane?\"), and, more rarely, congratulating myself (\"It's done!\"). Those voices are not externalized; I would never mistake them for the voice of God, or anyone else.\n\nBut when I was in danger once, trying to descend a mountain with a badly injured leg, I heard an inner voice that was wholly unlike my normal babble of inner speech. I had a great struggle crossing a stream with a buckled and dislocating knee. The effort left me stunned, motionless for a couple of minutes, and then a delicious languor came over me, and I thought to myself, Why not rest here? A nap maybe? This was immediately countered by a strong, clear, commanding voice, which said, \"You can't rest here\u2014you can't rest anywhere. You've got to go on. Find a pace you can keep up and go on steadily.\" This good voice, this Life voice, braced and resolved me. I stopped trembling and did not falter again.\n\nJoe Simpson, climbing in the Andes, also had a catastrophic accident, falling off an ice ledge and ending up in a deep crevasse with a broken leg. He struggled to survive, as he recounted in _Touching the Void_ \u2014and a voice was crucial in encouraging and directing him:\n\nThere was silence, and snow, and a clear sky empty of life, and me, sitting there, taking it all in, accepting what I must try to achieve. There were no dark forces acting against me. A voice in my head told me that this was true, cutting through the jumble in my mind with its coldly rational sound.\n\nIt was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The _voice_ was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the _voice_. I had to get to the glacier.... The _voice_ told me exactly how to go about it, and I obeyed while my other mind jumped abstractly from one idea to another.... The _voice_ , and the watch, urged me into motion whenever the heat from the glacier halted me in a drowsy exhausted daze. It was three o'clock\u2014only three and a half hours of daylight left. I kept moving but soon realized that I was making ponderously slow headway. It didn't seem to concern me that I was moving like a snail. So long as I obeyed the _voice_ , then I would be all right.\n\nSuch voices may occur with anyone in situations of extreme threat or danger. Freud heard voices on two such occasions, as he mentioned in his book _On Aphasia:_\n\nI remember having twice been in danger of my life, and each time the awareness of the danger occurred to me quite suddenly. On both occasions I felt \"this was the end,\" and while otherwise my inner language proceeded with only indistinct sound images and slight lip movements, in these situations of danger I heard the words as if somebody was shouting them into my ear, and at the same time I saw them as if they were printed on a piece of paper floating in the air.\n\nThe threat to life may also come from within, and although we cannot know how many attempts at suicide have been prevented by a voice, I suspect this is not uncommon. My friend Liz, following the collapse of a love affair, found herself heartbroken and despondent. About to swallow a handful of sleeping tablets and wash them down with a tumbler of whiskey, she was startled to hear a voice say, \"No. You don't want to do that,\" and then \"Remember that what you are feeling now you will not be feeling later.\" The voice seemed to come from the outside; it was a man's voice, though whose she did not know. She said, faintly, \"Who said that?\" There was no answer, but a \"granular\" figure (as she put it) materialized in the chair opposite her\u2014a young man in eighteenth-century dress who glimmered for a few seconds and then disappeared. A feeling of immense relief and joy came over her. Although Liz knew that the voice must have come from the deepest part of herself, she speaks of it, playfully, as her \"guardian angel.\"\n\nVarious explanations have been offered for why people hear voices, and different ones may apply in different circumstances. It seems likely, for example, that the predominantly hostile or persecuting voices of psychosis have a very different basis from the hearing of one's own name called in an empty house; and that this again is different in origin from the voices which come in emergencies or desperate situations.\n\nAuditory hallucinations may be associated with abnormal activation of the primary auditory cortex; this is a subject which needs much more investigation not only in those with psychosis but in the population at large\u2014the vast majority of studies so far have examined only auditory hallucinations in psychiatric patients.\n\nSome researchers have proposed that auditory hallucinations result from a failure to recognize internally generated speech as one's own (or perhaps it stems from a cross-activation with the auditory areas so that what most of us experience as our own thoughts becomes \"voiced\").\n\nPerhaps there is some sort of physiological barrier or inhibition that normally prevents most of us from \"hearing\" such inner voices as external. Perhaps that barrier is somehow breached or undeveloped in those who do hear constant voices. Perhaps, however, one should invert the question\u2014and ask why most of us do not hear voices. Julian Jaynes, in his influential 1976 book, _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ , speculated that, not so long ago, all humans heard voices\u2014generated internally, from the right hemisphere of the brain, but perceived (by the left hemisphere) as if external, and taken as direct communications from the gods. Sometime around 1000 B.C., Jaynes proposed, with the rise of modern consciousness, the voices became internalized and recognized as our own.5\n\nOthers have proposed that auditory hallucinations may come from an abnormal attention to the subvocal stream which accompanies verbal thinking. It is clear that \"hearing voices\" and \"auditory hallucinations\" are terms that cover a variety of different phenomena.\n\nWhile voices carry meaning\u2014whether this is trivial or portentous\u2014some auditory hallucinations consist of little more than odd noises. Probably the most common of these are classified as tinnitus, an almost nonstop hissing or ringing sound that often goes with hearing loss, and may be intolerably loud at times.\n\nHearing noises\u2014hummings, mutterings, twitterings, rappings, rustlings, ringings, muffled voices\u2014is commonly associated with hearing problems, and this may be aggravated by many factors, including delirium, dementia, toxins, or stress. When medical residents, for example, are on call for long periods, sleep deprivation may produce a variety of hallucinations involving any sensory modality. One young neurologist wrote to me that after being on call for more than thirty hours, he would hear the hospital's telemetry and ventilator alarms, and sometimes after arriving home he kept hallucinating the phone ringing.6\n\nAlthough musical phrases or songs may be heard along with voices or other noises, a great many people \"hear\" only music or musical phrases. Musical hallucinations may arise from a stroke, a tumor, an aneurysm, an infectious disease, a neurodegenerative process, or toxic or metabolic disturbances. Hallucinations in such situations usually disappear as soon as the provocative cause is treated or subsides.7\n\nSometimes it is difficult to pinpoint a particular cause for musical hallucinations, but in the predominantly geriatric population I work with, by far the commonest cause of musical hallucination is hearing loss or deafness\u2014and here the hallucinations may be stubbornly persistent, even if the hearing is improved by hearing aids or cochlear implants. Diane G. wrote to me:\n\nI have had tinnitus as far back as I can remember. It is present almost 24\/7 and is very high pitched. It sounds exactly like how cicadas sound when they come in droves back on Long Island in the summer. Sometime in the last year [I also became aware of] the music playing in my head. I kept hearing Bing Crosby, friends and orchestra singing \"White Christmas\" over and over. I thought it was coming from a radio playing in another room until I eliminated all possibilities of outside input. It went on for days, and I quickly discovered that I could not turn it off or vary the volume. But I could vary the lyrics, speed and harmonies with practice. Since that time I get the music almost daily, usually toward evenings and at times so loud that it interferes with my hearing conversations. The music is always melodies that I am familiar with such as hymns, favorites from years of piano playing and songs from early memories. They always have the lyrics....\n\nTo add to this cacophony, I now have started hearing a third level of sound at the same time that sounds like someone is listening to talk radio or TV in another room. I get a constant running of voices, male and female, complete with realistic pauses, inflections and increases and decreases in volume. I just can't understand their words.\n\nDiane has had progressive hearing loss since childhood, and she is unusual in that she has hallucinations of both music and conversation.8\n\nThere is a wide range in the quality of individual musical hallucinations\u2014sometimes they are soft, sometimes disturbingly loud; sometimes simple, sometimes complex\u2014but there are certain characteristics common to all of them. First and foremost, they are perceptual in quality and seem to emanate from an external source; in this way they are distinct from imagery (even \"earworms,\" the often annoying, repetitious musical imagery that most of us are prone to from time to time). People with musical hallucinations will often search for an external cause\u2014a radio, a neighbor's television, a band in the street\u2014and only when they fail to find any such external source do they realize that the source must be in themselves. Thus they may liken it to a tape recorder or an iPod in the brain, something mechanical and autonomous, not a controllable, integral part of the self.\n\nThat there should be something like this in one's head arouses bewilderment and, not infrequently, fear\u2014fear that one is going mad or that the phantom music may be a sign of a tumor, a stroke, or a dementia. Such fears often inhibit people from acknowledging that they have hallucinations; perhaps for this reason musical hallucinations have long been considered rare\u2014but it is now realized that this is far from the case.9\n\nMusical hallucinations can intrude upon and even overwhelm perception; like tinnitus, they can be so loud as to make it impossible to hear someone speak (imagery almost never competes with perception in this way).\n\nMusical hallucinations often appear suddenly, with no apparent trigger. Frequently, however, they follow a tinnitus or an external noise (like the drone of a plane engine or a lawn mower), the hearing of real music, or anything suggestive of a particular piece or style of music. Sometimes they are triggered by external associations, as with one patient of mine who, whenever she passed a French bakery, would hear the song \"Alouette, gentille alouette.\"\n\nSome people have musical hallucinations virtually nonstop, while others have them only intermittently. The hallucinated music is usually familiar (though not always liked; thus one of my patients hallucinated Nazi marching songs from his youth, which terrified him). It may be vocal or instrumental, classical or popular, but it is most often music heard in the patient's early years. Occasionally, patients may hear \"meaningless phrases and patterns,\" as one of my correspondents, a gifted musician, put it.\n\nHallucinated music can be very detailed, so that every note in a piece, every instrument in an orchestra, is distinctly heard. Such detail and accuracy is often astonishing to the hallucinator, who may be scarcely able, normally, to hold a simple tune in his head, let alone an elaborate choral or instrumental composition. (Perhaps there is an analogy here to the extreme clarity and unusual detail which characterize many visual hallucinations.) Often a single theme, perhaps only a few bars, is hallucinated again and again, like a skipping record. One patient of mine heard part of \"O Come, All Ye Faithful\" nineteen and a half times in ten minutes (her husband timed this) and was tormented by never hearing the entire hymn. Hallucinatory music can wax slowly in intensity and then slowly wane, but it may also come on suddenly full blast in mid-bar and then stop with equal suddenness (like a switch turned on and off, patients often comment). Some patients may sing along with their musical hallucinations; others ignore them\u2014it makes no difference. Musical hallucinations continue in their own way, irrespective of whether one attends to them or not. And they can continue, pursuing their own course, even if one is listening to or playing something else. Thus Gordon B., a violinist, sometimes hallucinated a piece of music while he was actually performing an entirely different piece at a concert.\n\nMusical hallucinations tend to spread. A familiar tune, an old song, may start the process; this is likely to be joined, over a period of days or weeks, by another song, and then another, until a whole repertoire of hallucinatory music has been built up. And this repertoire itself tends to change\u2014one tune will drop out, and another will replace it. One cannot voluntarily start or stop the hallucinations, though some people may be able, on occasion, to replace one piece of hallucinated music with another. Thus one man who said he had \"an intracranial jukebox\" found that he could switch at will from one \"record\" to another, provided there was some similarity of style or rhythm, though he could not turn on or turn off the \"jukebox\" as a whole.\n\nProlonged silence or auditory monotony may also cause auditory hallucinations; I have had patients report experiencing these while on meditation retreats or on a long sea voyage. Jessica K., a young woman with no hearing loss, wrote to me that her hallucinations come with auditory monotony:\n\nIn the presence of white noise such as running water or a central air conditioning system, I frequently hear music or voices. I hear it distinctly (and in the early days, often went searching for the radio that must have been left on in another room), but in the instance of music with lyrics or voices (which always sound like a talk radio program or something, not real conversation) I never hear it well enough to distinguish the words. I never hear these things unless they are \"embedded,\" so to speak, in white noise, and only if there are not other competing sounds.\n\nMusical hallucinations seem to be less common in children, but one boy I have seen, Michael, has had them since the age of five or six. His music is nonstop and overwhelming, and it often prevents him focusing on anything else. Much more often, musical hallucinations are acquired at a later age\u2014unlike hearing voices, which seems, in those who have it, to begin in early childhood and to last a lifetime.\n\nSome people with persistent musical hallucinations find them tormenting, but most people accommodate and learn to live with the music forced on them, and a few even come to enjoy their internal music and may feel it as an enrichment of life. Ivy L., a lively and articulate eighty-five-year-old, has had some visual hallucinations related to her macular degeneration, and some musical and auditory hallucinations stemming from her hearing impairment. Mrs. L. wrote to me:\n\nIn 2008 my doctor prescribed paroxetine for what she called depression and I called sadness. I had moved from St. Louis to Massachusetts after my husband died. A week after starting paroxetine, while watching the Olympics, I was surprised to hear languid music with the men's swim races. When I turned off the TV, the music continued and has been present virtually every waking minute since.\n\nWhen the music began, a doctor gave me Zyprexa as a possible aid. That brought a visual hallucination of a murky, bubbling brown ceiling at night. A second prescription gave me hallucinations of lovely, transparent tropical plants growing in my bathroom. So I quit taking these prescriptions and the visual hallucinations ceased. The music continued.\n\nI do not simply \"recall\" these songs. The music playing in the house is as loud and clear as any CD or concert. The volume increases in a large space such as a supermarket. The music has no singers or words. I have never heard \"voices\" but once heard my name called urgently, while I was dozing.\n\nThere was a short time when I \"heard\" doorbells, phones, and alarm clocks ring although none were ringing. I no longer experience these. In addition to music, at times I hear katydids, sparrows, or the sound of a large truck idling at my right side.\n\nDuring all these experiences, I am fully aware that they are not real. I continue to function, managing my accounts and finances, moving my residence, taking care of my household. I speak coherently while experiencing these aural and visual disturbances. My memory is quite accurate, except for the occasional misplaced paper.\n\nI can \"enter\" a melody I think of or have one triggered by a phrase, but I cannot stop the aural hallucinations. So I cannot stop the \"piano\" in the coat closet, the \"clarinet\" in the living room ceiling, the endless \"God Bless America\"s, or waking up to \"Good Night, Irene.\" But I manage.\n\nPET and fMRI scanning have shown that musical hallucination, like actual musical perception, is associated with the activation of an extensive network involving many areas of the brain\u2014auditory areas, motor cortex, visual areas, basal ganglia, cerebellum, hippocampi, and amygdala. (Music calls upon many more areas of the brain than any other activity\u2014one reason why music therapy is useful for such a wide variety of conditions.) This musical network can be stimulated directly, on occasion, as by a focal epilepsy, a fever, or delirium, but what seems to occur in most cases of musical hallucinations is a release of activity in the musical network when normally operative inhibitions or constraints are weakened. The commonest cause of such a release is auditory deprivation or deafness. In this way, the musical hallucinations of the elderly deaf are analogous to the visual hallucinations of Charles Bonnet syndrome.\n\nBut although the musical hallucinations of deafness and the visual hallucinations of CBS may be akin physiologically, they have great differences phenomenologically, and these reflect the very different nature of our visual worlds and our musical worlds\u2014differences evident in the ways we perceive, recollect, or imagine them. We are not given an already made, preassembled visual world; we have to construct our own visual world as best we can. This construction entails analysis and synthesis at many functional levels in the brain, starting with perception of lines and angles and orientation in the occipital cortex. At higher levels, in the inferotemporal cortex, the \"elements\" of visual perception are of a more complex sort, appropriate for the analysis and recognition of natural scenes, objects, animal and plant forms, letters, and faces. Complex visual hallucinations entail the putting together of such elements, an act of assemblage, and these assemblages are continually permuted, disassembled, and reassembled.\n\nMusical hallucinations are quite different. With music, although there are separate functional systems for perceiving pitch, timbre, rhythm, etc., the musical networks of the brain work together, and pieces cannot be significantly altered in melodic contour or tempo or rhythm without losing their musical identity. We apprehend a piece of music as a whole. Whatever the initial processes of musical perception and memory may be, once a piece of music is known, it is retained not as an assemblage of individual elements but as a completed procedure or performance; music is _performed_ by the mind\/brain whenever it is recollected; and this is also so when it erupts spontaneously, whether as an earworm or as a hallucination.\n\n1. The real patients, however, were more observant. \"You're not crazy,\" said one. \"You're a journalist or a professor.\"\n\n2. Freud was not unsympathetic to the notion of telepathy; his \"Psychoanalysis and Telepathy\" was written in 1921, though published only posthumously.\n\n3. Recently, a number of people who hear voices have organized networks in various countries asserting their \"right\" to hear voices, to have them respected and not dismissed as trivial or pathological. This movement and its significance are discussed by Ivan Leudar and Philip Thomas in their book _Voices of Reason, Voices of Madness_ and by Sandra Escher and Marius Romme in their 2012 review of the subject.\n\n4. Judith Weissman, in her book _Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices_ , presents strong evidence, drawn especially from what poets themselves have said, that many of them, from Homer to Yeats, have been inspired by true auditory vocal hallucinations, not just metaphorical voices.\n\n5. Jaynes thought that there might be a reversion to \"bicamerality\" in schizophrenia and some other conditions. Some psychiatrists (such as Nasrallah, 1985) favor this idea or, at the least, the idea that the hallucinatory voices in schizophrenia emanate from the right side of the brain but are not recognized as one's own, and are thus perceived as alien.\n\n6. Sarah Lipman has noted, in her blog (www.reallysarahsyndication.com), the phenomenon of \"phantom rings\" as people imagine or hallucinate the ringing of their cell phones. She links this to a state of vigilance, expectation, or anxiety, as when she thinks she may hear a knock at the door or her baby crying. \"Part of my consciousness,\" she wrote to me, \"is straining to monitor for the sound. It seems to me that it is this hyper-alert state that generates the phantom sounds.\"\n\n7. There may be paroxysmal musical hallucinations during temporal lobe seizures. But in such cases, the musical hallucinations have a fixed and invariable format; they appear along with other symptoms (perhaps visual or olfactory hallucinations or a sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu) and at no other time. If the seizures can be controlled medically or surgically, the epileptic music will cease.\n\n8. Most people who get musical hallucinations are elderly and somewhat deaf; it is not unusual for them to be treated as if demented, psychotic, or imbecilic. Jean G. was hospitalized after she had an apparent heart attack, and a few days later, she began \"hearing a male choir in the distance as if it were coming through the woods.\" (Several years later, when she wrote to me, she still heard this, especially in times of stress or when she was extremely tired.) But, she said, \"I quickly stopped talking about this type of music when faced with a nurse asking me, 'Do you know your name? Do you know what day this is?' I responded back, 'Yes, I know what day this is\u2014it is the day I am going home.' \"\n\n9. I have written at much greater length about musical hallucinations (as well as intrusive musical imagery, or \"earworms\") in my book _Musicophilia_.\n\n# 5\n\nThe Illusions of Parkinsonism\n\nJames Parkinson, in his famous 1817 _Essay on the Shaking Palsy_ , portrayed the disease that now bears his name as one that affected movement and posture, while leaving the senses and the intellect unimpaired. And in the century and a half that followed, there was virtually no mention of perceptual disorders or hallucinations in patients with Parkinson's disease. By the late 1980s, though, physicians had begun to realize (and only in response to careful inquiry, for patients are often reluctant to admit it) that perhaps a third or more of those being treated for Parkinson's experienced hallucinations, as Gilles F\u00e9nelon and others reported. By this time, virtually everyone diagnosed with Parkinson's was medicated with L-dopa or other drugs that enhance the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.\n\nMy own experience with parkinsonism as a young doctor was predominantly with the patients I described in _Awakenings_ , who did not have ordinary Parkinson's disease but a much more complex syndrome. They were survivors of the encephalitis lethargica epidemic that followed the First World War, and they had come down, sometimes decades later, with postencephalitic syndromes including not only a very severe form of parkinsonism but often a host of other disorders, especially sleep and arousal disorders. These postencephalitic patients were far more sensitive to the effects of L-dopa than patients with ordinary Parkinson's disease. Many of them, once they were started on L-dopa, began to have excessively vivid dreams or nightmares; often this would be the first apparent effect of the medication. Several of them became prone to visual illusions or hallucinations, too.\n\nWhen Leonard L. was started on L-dopa, he began to see faces on the blank screen of his television set, and a picture of an old western town that hung in his room would come to life as he looked at it, with people emerging from its saloons and cowboys galloping through the streets.\n\nMartha N., another postencephalitic patient, would \"sew\" with hallucinatory needles and thread. \"See what a lovely coverlet I have stitched for you today!\" she said on one occasion. \"See the pretty dragons, the unicorn in his paddock.\" She traced their invisible outlines in the air. \"Here, take it,\" she said, and placed the ghostly thing in my hands.\n\nWith Gertie C., the hallucinations (precipitated by the addition of amantadine to her L-dopa) were less benign. Within three hours of receiving the first dose, she became intensely excited and deliriously hallucinated. She would cry out, \"Cars bearing down on me, they're crowding me!\" She also saw faces \"like masks popping in and out.\" Occasionally she would smile rapturously and exclaim, \"Look what a beautiful tree, so beautiful,\" and tears of pleasure would fill her eyes.\n\nIn contrast to these postencephalitic patients, people with ordinary Parkinson's disease do not usually experience visual hallucinations until they have been on medication for many months or years. By the 1970s, I had several such patients who had started to get hallucinations, which were predominantly (though not exclusively) visual. Sometimes these began as webs and filigrees or other geometrical patterns; other patients experienced complex hallucinations, usually of animals and people, from the start. Such visions might seem quite real (one patient had a nasty fall while chasing a hallucinatory mouse), but the patients soon learned to distinguish them from reality and ignore them. At the time I could find almost nothing in the medical literature about such hallucinations, although it was sometimes said that L-dopa might make patients \"psychotic.\" But by 1975, more than a quarter of my patients with ordinary Parkinson's disease, while otherwise doing well on L-dopa and dopamine agonists, had found themselves living with hallucinations.\n\nEd W., a designer, started to get visual hallucinations after he had been on L-dopa and dopamine agonists for several years. He realized that they were hallucinations and regarded them largely with curiosity and amusement; nevertheless, one of his physicians declared him \"psychotic\"\u2014an upsetting misdiagnosis.\n\nHe often feels himself \"on the verge\" of hallucination, and he may be pushed over the threshold at night, or if he is tired or bored. When we had lunch one day, he was having all sorts of what he calls \"illusions.\" My blue pullover, draped over a chair, became a fierce chimerical animal with an elephant-like head, long blue teeth, and a hint of wings. A bowl of noodles on the table became \"a human brain\" (though this did not affect his appetite for them). He saw \"letters, like teletype\" on my lips; they formed \"words\"\u2014words he could not read. They did not coincide with the words I was speaking. He says that such illusions are \"made up\" on the spot, instantaneously and without conscious volition. He cannot control or stop them, short of closing his eyes. They are sometimes friendly, sometimes frightening. For the most part, he ignores them.\n\nSometimes he moves from \"illusions\" to frank hallucinations. One such was a hallucination of his cat, which had gone to the vet for a few days. Ed continued to \"see\" her at home, several times a day, emerging from the shadows at one end of the room. She would walk across the room, paying no attention to him, and then disappear into the shadows again. Ed realized at once that this was a hallucination, and had no desire to interact with it (though it aroused his curiosity and interest). When the real cat came back, the phantom cat disappeared.1\n\nIn addition to such isolated or occasional hallucinations, people with Parkinson's may develop elaborate and frightening hallucinations, often of a paranoid sort. Such a psychosis took hold of Ed toward the end of 2011. He started to have hallucinations of people who entered his apartment, emerging from \"a secret chamber\" behind the kitchen. \"They invade my privacy,\" Ed said. \"They occupy my space.... They are very interested in me\u2014they take notes, take photos, rifle through my papers.\" Sometimes they had sex\u2014one of the intruders was a very beautiful woman, and sometimes three or four of them would occupy Ed's bed when he was not using it. These apparitions never appeared if he had real visitors or when he was listening to music or watching a favorite TV show; nor would they follow him when he left his apartment. He often regarded these persecutors as real and might say to his wife, \"Take a cup of coffee to the man in my office.\" She always knew when he was hallucinating\u2014he would stare fixedly at one point or follow an invisible presence with his eyes. Increasingly, he started to talk with them\u2014or _at_ them, for they never replied.\n\nEd's neurologist, on hearing this, advised him to have \"a drug holiday,\" to stop all his anti-Parkinson's medications for two or three weeks, but this left Ed so incapacitated he could hardly move or speak. He then planned a gradual reduction of medication, and, two months later, on half his previous dose of L-dopa, Ed's hallucinations, his fears, and his psychosis have cleared completely.\n\nIn 2008, Tom C., an artist, came to my office for a consultation. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and put on medication about fifteen years earlier. Two years later, he started to experience \"misperceptions,\" as he calls them (like the others, he avoids the term \"hallucinations\"). He is fond of dancing\u2014he finds that this can unfreeze him, releasing him, for a while, from his parkinsonism. His first misperceptions occurred when he was in a nightclub; the skin of the other dancers, even their faces, seemed to be covered with tattoos. At first he thought the tattoos were real, but they started to glow and then to pulse and writhe; at that point he realized they must be hallucinatory. As an artist and a psychologist, he was intrigued by this experience\u2014but frightened, too, that it might be the beginning of uncontrollable hallucinations of all sorts.\n\nOnce, while sitting at his desk, he was surprised to see a picture of the Taj Mahal on his computer monitor. As he gazed, the picture became richer in color, three-dimensional, vividly real. He heard a vague chanting, of the sort he thought might be associated with an Indian temple.\n\nAnother day, while he was lying on the floor, frozen by his parkinsonism, the reflections on a fluorescent ceiling lamp started to change into old photographs, mostly in black and white. These seemed to be photographs from earlier days, mostly of family, with some of strangers. \"I had nothing else to do\" in this immobilized state, he said, so he happily indulged this mild hallucinatory pleasure.\n\nFor Ed W. and Tom C., hallucinations usually remain on the \"misperception\" side, but Agnes R., a seventy-five-year-old lady who has had Parkinson's disease for twenty years, has had frank visual hallucinations for the last decade. She is, as she says, \"an old hand\" at hallucinations: \"I see a whole array of things, which I enjoy\u2014they are fascinating; they don't frighten me.\" In the clinic waiting room, she had seen \"women\u2014five of them\u2014trying on fur coats.\" The size, color, solidity, and movement of these women looked perfectly natural; they seemed absolutely real. She knew that they were hallucinations only because they were out of context: no one would be trying on fur coats on a summer day in a doctor's office. In general, she is able to distinguish her hallucinations from reality, but there have been exceptions: on one occasion, seeing a furry black animal leap onto the dining table, she jumped. At other times, while walking, she has stopped abruptly to avoid bumping into a hallucinatory figure just in front of her.\n\nAgnes most often sees apparitions from the windows of her twenty-second-floor apartment. From here, she has \"seen\" a skating rink on top of a (real) church, \"people in tennis courts\" on neighboring rooftops, and men working just outside her window. She does not recognize any of the people she sees, and they continue whatever they are doing without paying any attention to her. She watches these hallucinatory scenes with equanimity and sometimes with enjoyment. (Indeed, I got the impression that they help her pass the time\u2014time which now seems to pass more slowly with her relative immobility and difficulties reading.) Her visions are not like dreams, she said; nor do they resemble fantasies. She has a great love for travel and for Egypt in particular, but she has never had \"Egyptian\" hallucinations or travel ones.\n\nShe sees no patterns to her hallucinations\u2014they may come at any time of day, when she is busy with others or when she is alone. They seem to have nothing to do with current events, with her feelings, thoughts, or moods, or with the time of day she takes her medication. She cannot will them to come, or will them away. They superimpose themselves on what she is looking at and vanish, along with actual visual perception, when she closes her eyes.\n\nEd W. often describes a persistent feeling of a \"presence\"\u2014something or someone he never actually sees\u2014on his right. Professor R., while doing very well on L-dopa and other anti-parkinsonian drugs, also has \"a companion\" (as he calls it), just out of sight on his right. The sense of someone there is so strong that he sometimes wheels round to look, though there is never anyone to be seen. But his chief illusion is the transformation of print, words and sentences, into musical notation. The first time this happened was about two years ago. He was reading a book, turned away for a few seconds, and found, when he returned to the book, that the print had been replaced by music. This has occurred many times since, and may also be induced by staring at a page of print. Occasionally the dark border of his bath mat turns into staves and lines of music. There is always something\u2014letters or lines\u2014that is transformed into music; this may be why he regards these as \"illusions,\" not hallucinations.\n\nProfessor R. is a very good musician; he started to play the piano when he was five and still plays for many hours a day. He is curious about his illusions, and he has done his best to transcribe or play the illusory music. (His best chance of \"catching\" this phantom music, he has found, is to set up a newspaper on the music stand and play it as soon as the newsprint turns into music.) But the \"music\" is scarcely playable, because it is always very highly ornamented, with innumerable crescendo and decrescendo markings, while the melody line is three or more octaves above middle C, and so may have half a dozen or more ledger lines above the treble staff.\n\nSeeing music has been described to me by others (see this page). Esther B., a composer and music teacher, wrote to me that, twelve years after being diagnosed with Parkinson's, she started to have \"a rather peculiar visual phenomenon.\" She described this in detail:\n\nWhen I look at a surface\u2014like a wall, or a floor, or a garment someone is wearing, or a curved surface like a tub or sink, or other surfaces too numerous to mention\u2014I see a sort of collage of music scores superimposed upon the surface, especially with my peripheral vision. When I try to focus on any one image, it dims out or disappears elusively. These images of music scores come unbidden and are especially vivid after I've been working with any written music. The images always appear more or less horizontal, and if I tilt my head one way or the other, the horizontal images will tilt accordingly.\n\nHoward H., a psychotherapist, began to notice tactile hallucinations soon after being diagnosed with Parkinson's, as he wrote:\n\nI would feel that the surfaces of various objects were covered by a film of fuzz, like peach fuzz, or the down in a pillow. It could also be described as cotton candy or spider webs. Sometimes the webs and fuzz can get very \"lush,\" as when I reach down to pick up something that has fallen under my desk and my hand feels as if it has become submerged in a huge pile of this \"stuff.\" But when I try to scoop up that pile, I see nothing and yet feel that I have a large amount of this \"stuff\" in my hands.\n\nIs the use of L-dopa wholly responsible for such effects? Can L-dopa be regarded as a hallucinogenic drug? This seems unlikely in view of the fact that it is used in treating other conditions (such as dystonias) without provoking any hallucinations. Is there then something in the parkinsonian brain, or at least in some parkinsonian brains, which may predispose to visual hallucinations?2\n\nToo often, parkinsonism is seen as no more than a movement disorder, but it may also involve a number of other aspects, including sleep disturbances of various sorts. People with Parkinson's may sleep poorly at night and often have chronic sleep deprivation. Their sleep may be marked by vivid and sometimes bizarre dreams, or nightmares in which they are awake but paralyzed, helpless to combat dream images being superimposed on their waking consciousness. All of these factors additionally predispose to hallucination.\n\nIn 1922 the French neurologist Jean Lhermitte described the sudden onset of visual hallucinations in an elderly patient\u2014people in costume, children playing, animals around her (she would sometimes try to touch them). The patient had insomnia at night and drowsiness in the daytime, and her hallucinations tended to come at dusk.\n\nThough this lady had dramatic visual hallucinations, she had no visual impairments and no lesions in the visual cortex. But she had neurological signs suggesting an unusual pattern of damage in parts of the brain stem, the midbrain, and the pons. It was well known at this point that lesions in the visual pathway could cause hallucinations, but it was not clear how damage in the midbrain\u2014not a visual area\u2014could do so. Lhermitte thought such hallucinations might go with a derangement of the sleep-wake cycle, that they were essentially dreams or dream fragments invading daytime consciousness.\n\nFive years later, the Belgian neurologist Ludo van Bogaert reported a somewhat similar case\u2014his patient suddenly started seeing the heads of animals projected on the walls of his house at dusk. There were neurological signs similar to those of Lhermitte's patient, and van Bogaert also surmised midbrain damage. When his patient died, a year later, an autopsy revealed a large midbrain infarction involving (among other structures) the cerebral peduncles (hence his coinage of the term \"peduncular hallucinations\").\n\nIn Parkinson's disease, postencephalitic parkinsonism, and Lewy body disease, there is damage to the brain stem and associated structures, as there is in peduncular hallucinosis\u2014though the damage occurs gradually and not abruptly, as with a stroke. In all of these degenerative diseases, however, there may be hallucinations, as well as sleep, movement, and cognitive disorders. But the hallucinations are markedly different from those of CBS; they are nearly always complex rather than elementary, often multisensory, and more apt to lead to delusions, which CBS alone rarely does. The hallucinations of brain-stem origin seem to be associated with abnormalities in the acetylcholine transmitter system\u2014abnormalities that may be aggravated by giving the patient L-dopa or similar drugs, which heighten the dopamine load on an already fragile and stressed cholinergic system.\n\nPeople with ordinary Parkinson's disease may be active and retain their intellectual powers for decades\u2014Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, for instance, developed \"the shaking palsy\" around the age of fifty, when he was completing his _Leviathan_ , but remained intellectually intact and creative, though motorically disabled, into his nineties. But it has been increasingly recognized in the last few years that there is a more malignant form of parkinsonism, one accompanied sooner or later by dementia and by visual hallucinations even in the absence of L-dopa. Examination of the brain at autopsy in such patients may show abnormal aggregates of protein (so-called Lewy bodies) inside the nerve cells, mostly in the brain stem and basal ganglia but also in the visual association cortex. The Lewy bodies, it is conjectured, may predispose patients to visual hallucinations even before they are put on L-dopa.\n\nEdna B. seems to have this disease, though the diagnosis of Lewy body disease cannot be made with certainty in life without doing a brain biopsy. Mrs. B. enjoyed excellent health until her mid-sixties, but in 2009 she developed some tremor in the hands, her first symptoms of parkinsonism. By the summer of 2010 her symptoms included some slowing of movement and speech as well as problems with memory and concentration\u2014she would forget words and thoughts, lose the thread of what she was saying and thinking, and, most distressingly of all, she had hallucinations.\n\nWhen I saw her in 2011, I asked her what her hallucinations were like. \"Horrible!\" she said. \"It's like watching a horror movie, and you're part of it.\" She saw little people (\"Chuckys\") running around her bed at night; they seemed to be talking to each other, she saw their gestures and their lips move, but she could not hear any speech. On one occasion she tried to speak to them. Although they looked frightening and (she thought) had evil intentions, they never molested or approached her, though once one of them sat on her bed. But far worse were certain scenes enacted before her. \"I saw my son murdered right in front of my eyes,\" she told me. (\"It was Darkside stuff,\" her husband interpolated.) Once, when her husband visited, she said, \"What are you doing here? They just had your funeral at Sacred Heart Church.\" She often saw rats, and sometimes felt them in her bed. She also felt \"fish\" nibbling at her feet. Sometimes she had hallucinations of being part of an army marching into battle.\n\nWhen I asked if she had any pleasant hallucinations, she said that she had sometimes seen people \"in Hawaiian dress\" in the corridor or outside her window, getting ready to play music for her, though she never actually heard any music. What she did hear, however, were various noises\u2014especially the sound of running water. No voices. (\"Good thing I didn't have those,\" she said, \"or they'd think I was really crazy.\") There have been some olfactory hallucinations, too: \"people around me with different kinds of scents.\"\n\nWhen her hallucinations started, Mrs. B. was understandably terrified, and took them for reality\u2014\"I did not even _know_ the word 'hallucination,' \" she said. Then she found herself more able to distinguish hallucinations from reality, but this did not prevent her from being frightened when they occurred. She always looked to her husband for reality testing; she would ask him whether _he_ saw, heard, felt, or smelled some of the things she did. Sometimes she would have distortions of vision\u2014her husband's face would be disfigured by a down-curving, sneering smile or occasionally his mouth would be upturned, \"like a smiley face.\" A particularly strange and frightening hallucination occurred recently. There is a poster of a Native American chief hanging above her bed, and this came to life for Mrs. B. the other day; the chief stepped out of the frame and seemed to be standing in the bedroom. To reassure her, her husband waved his hands in front of the picture to dissipate the hallucination\u2014and the chief seemed to disintegrate, but then she felt _she_ was disintegrating, too. On another occasion, clothes in the bedroom \"started walking around,\" and she had to have her husband shake a pair of jeans to show that it was just this, and nothing more.\n\nHallucinations may also occur in other types of dementia, including moderately advanced Alzheimer's disease, though less often than they do in Lewy body disease. In such cases, hallucinations may give rise to delusions, or they may stem from delusions. There may also be, in Alzheimer's or other types of dementia, delusions of duplication or misidentification. One patient of mine, sitting next to her husband on an airplane, suddenly saw him as \"an imposter\" who, she believed, had murdered her husband and was now trying to take his place. Another patient of mine, while she recognized the nursing home she was in by day, felt that she had been transferred to a cunning \"duplicate\" of the home each night. Sometimes psychoses can be centered on delusions of persecution, and occasionally these lead to violent behavior: one such patient assaulted a harmless neighbor, whom she felt was \"spying\" on her. Hallucinations in Alzheimer's disease, like those of Lewy body disease, are usually embedded in a complex matrix of sensory deceptions, confusion, disorientation, and delusions, and are rarely isolated, \"pure\" phenomena as in Charles Bonnet syndrome.\n\nI worked for many years with the eighty deeply parkinsonian postencephalitic patients I described in _Awakenings_. Many of them had been \"frozen\" for decades, virtually immobilized by their disease. Once I got to know them well (after they had been enabled to move and talk by L-dopa), I found that perhaps a third of them had experienced visual hallucinations for years _before_ L-dopa was introduced\u2014hallucinations of a predominantly benign and sociable sort. I was not sure why they hallucinated in this way, but I thought it might be related to their isolation and social deprivation, their longing for the world\u2014an attempt to provide a virtual reality, a hallucinatory substitute for the real world which had been taken from them.\n\nGertie C. had had a half-controlled hallucinosis for decades before she started on L-dopa\u2014bucolic hallucinations of lying in a sunlit meadow or floating in a creek near her childhood home. This changed when she was given L-dopa, and her hallucinations assumed a social and sometimes sexual character. When she told me about this, she added, anxiously, \"You surely wouldn't forbid a friendly hallucination to a frustrated old lady like me!\" I replied that if her hallucinations had a pleasant and controllable character, they seemed rather a good idea under the circumstances. After this, the paranoid quality dropped away, and her hallucinatory encounters became purely amicable and amorous. She developed a humor and tact and control, never allowing herself a hallucination before eight in the evening and keeping its duration to thirty or forty minutes at most. If her relatives stayed too late, she would explain firmly but pleasantly that she was expecting \"a gentleman visitor from out of town\" in a few minutes' time, and she felt he might take it amiss if he was kept waiting outside. She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.\n\n1. My colleague Steven Frucht described to me a hallucination experienced by a patient of his, an intellectually intact woman who has been treated with medications for Parkinson's disease for more than fifteen years. Her hallucinations, however, started only a year ago. She also sees a cat\u2014a grey cat with \"beautiful\" eyes which wears a serene, \"beautiful expression\" on its face and seems to be of a most friendly disposition. To her own surprise (for she has never liked cats), she enjoys visits from the grey cat and worries that \"something may happen to him.\" Though she knows the cat is a hallucination, he seems very real to her: she can hear him coming, feel the warmth of his body, and touch him if she wishes. The first time the cat appeared, wanting to rub against her legs, she said, \"Don't touch me, don't get too close.\" And since then the cat has kept a decorous distance. Occasionally, in the afternoon, the cat is joined by a large black dog. When Dr. Frucht asked her what happens when the cat sees the dog, she replied that the cat \"looks away and is peaceful.\" She later remarked, \"He is fulfilling his purpose in coming to visit me.\"\n\n2. Impairment of the sense of smell may appear early in Parkinson's disease and may perhaps predispose to smell hallucinations as well. But even in the absence of a noticeable impairment of smell, as Landis and Burkhard suggested in a 2008 paper, patients with incipient Parkinson's disease may have olfactory hallucinations before they develop motor symptoms.\n\n# 6\n\nAltered States\n\nHumans share much with other animals\u2014the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example\u2014but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.\n\nWe may search, too, for a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with one another, or for transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.\n\nWilliam James was deeply interested, throughout his life, in the mystagogic powers of alcohol and other intoxicants, and he wrote about this in his 1902 book _The Varieties of Religious Experience_. He described, too, his own transcendent experiences with nitrous oxide:\n\nOur normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.... Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some mystical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity.... To me [this sense] only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.\n\nMany of us find the reconciliation that James speaks of and even Wordsworthian \"intimations of immortality\" in nature, art, creative thinking, or religion; some people can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar trance-inducing techniques or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These shortcuts are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate many complex brain functions.\n\nEvery culture has found chemical means of transcendence, and at some point the use of such intoxicants becomes institutionalized at a magical or sacramental level; the sacramental use of psychoactive plant substances has a long history and continues to the present day in various shamanic and religious rites around the world.\n\nAt a humbler level, drugs are used not so much to illuminate or expand or concentrate the mind, to \"cleanse the doors of perception,\" but for the sense of pleasure and euphoria they can provide.\n\nAll of these cravings, high or low, are nicely met by the plant kingdom, which has various psychoactive agents that seem almost tailored to the neurotransmitter systems and receptor sites in our brains. (They are not, of course; they have evolved to deter predators or sometimes to attract other animals to eat a plant's fruit and disseminate its seeds. Nevertheless, one cannot repress a feeling of wonder that there should be so many plants capable of inducing hallucinations or altered brain states of many kinds.)1\n\nRichard Evans Schultes, an ethnobotanist, devoted much of his life to the discovery and description of these plants and their uses, and Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD-25 in a Sandoz lab in 1938. Together Schultes and Hofmann described nearly a hundred plants containing psychoactive substances in their _Plants of the Gods_ , and new ones continue to be discovered (to say nothing of new compounds synthesized in the lab).2\n\nMany people experiment with drugs, hallucinogenic and otherwise, in their teenage or college years. I did not try them myself until I was thirty and a neurology resident. This long virginity was not due to lack of interest.\n\nI had read the great classics\u2014De Quincey's _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ and Baudelaire's _Artificial Paradises_ , among others\u2014at school. I had read about the French novelist Th\u00e9ophile Gautier, who in 1844 paid a visit to the recently founded Club des Hashischins, in a quiet corner of the \u00cele Saint-Louis. Hashish, in the form of a greenish paste, had recently been introduced from Algeria and was all the rage in Paris. At the salon, Gautier consumed a substantial piece of hash (\"about as large as a thumb\"). At first he felt nothing out of the ordinary, but soon, he wrote, \"everything seemed larger, richer, more splendid,\" and then more specific changes occurred:\n\nAn enigmatic personage suddenly appeared before me... his nose was bent like the beak of a bird, his green eyes, which he wiped frequently with a large handkerchief, were encircled with three brown rings, and caught in the knot of a high white starched collar was a visiting card which read: _Daucus-Carota, du Pot d'or_.... Little by little the salon was filled with extraordinary figures, such as are found only in the etchings of Callot or the aquatints of Goya; a _p\u00eale-m\u00eale_ of rags and tatters, bestial and human shapes.... Singularly intrigued, I went straightaway to the mirror.... One would have taken me for a Javanese or Hindu idol: my forehead was high, my nose, lengthened into a trunk, curved onto my chest, my ears brushed my shoulders, and to make matters more discomforting still, I was the color of indigo, like Shiva, the blue deity.3\n\nBy the 1890s, Westerners were also beginning to sample mescal, or peyote, previously used only as a sacrament in certain Native American traditions.4\n\nAs a freshman at Oxford, free to roam the shelves and stacks of the Radcliffe Science Library, I read the first published accounts of mescal, including ones by Havelock Ellis and Silas Weir Mitchell. They were primarily medical men, not just literary ones, and this seemed to lend an extra weight and credibility to their descriptions. I was captivated by Weir Mitchell's dry tone and his nonchalance about taking what was then an unknown drug with unknown effects.\n\nAt one point, Mitchell wrote in an 1896 article for the _British Medical Journal_ , he took a fair portion of an extract made from mescal buttons and followed this up with four further doses. Although he noted that his face was flushed, his pupils were dilated, and he had \"a tendency to talk, and now and then... misplaced a word,\" he nevertheless went out on house calls and saw several patients. Afterward, he sat down quietly in a dark room and closed his eyes, whereupon he experienced \"an enchanted two hours,\" full of chromatic effects:\n\nDelicate floating films of colour\u2014usually delightful neutral purples and pinks. These came and went\u2014now here, now there. Then an abrupt rush of countless points of white light swept across the field of view, as if the unseen millions of the Milky Way were to flow a sparkling river before the eye. In a minute this was over and the field was dark. Then I began to see zigzag lines of very bright colours, like those seen in some megrims [migraines].... It was in rapid, what I might call minute, motion.... A white spear of grey stone grew up to huge height, and became a tall, richly finished Gothic tower of very elaborate and definite design.... As I gazed every projecting angle, cornice, and even the face of the stones at their joinings were by degrees covered or hung with clusters of what seemed to be huge precious stones, but uncut, some being more like masses of transparent fruit. These were green, purple, red, and orange.... All seemed to possess an interior light, and to give the faintest idea of the perfectly satisfying intensity and purity of these gorgeous colour-fruits is quite beyond my power. All the colours I have ever beheld are dull as compared to these.\n\nHe found he had no power to influence his visions voluntarily; they seemed to come at random or to follow some logic of their own.\n\nJust as the introduction of hashish in the 1840s had led to a vogue for it, so these first descriptions of mescal's effects by Weir Mitchell and others in the 1890s and the ready availability of mescaline led to another vogue\u2014for mescal promised an experience not only richer, longer-lasting, and more coherent than that induced by hashish, but one with the added promise of transporting one to mystical realms of unearthly beauty and significance.\n\nUnlike Mitchell, who had focused on the colored, mostly geometric hallucinations that he compared in part to those of migraine, Aldous Huxley, writing of mescaline in the 1950s, focused on the transfiguration of the visual world, its investment with luminous, divine beauty and significance. He compared such drug experiences to those of great visionaries and artists, though also to the psychotic experiences of some schizophrenics. Both genius and madness, Huxley hinted, lay in these extreme states of mind\u2014a thought not so different from those expressed by De Quincey, Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Poe in relation to their own ambiguous experiences with opium and hashish (and explored at length in Jacques Joseph Moreau's 1845 book _Hashish and Mental Illness_ ). I read Huxley's _Doors of Perception_ and _Heaven and Hell_ when they came out in the 1950s, and I was especially excited by his speaking of the \"geography\" of the imagination and its ultimate realm\u2014the \"Antipodes of the mind.\"5\n\nAround the same time, I came across a pair of books by the physiologist and psychologist Heinrich Kl\u00fcver. In the first one, _Mescal_ , he reviewed the world literature on the effects of mescal and described his own experiences with it. Keeping his eyes closed, as Weir Mitchell had done, he saw complex geometrical patterns:\n\nTransparent oriental rugs, but infinitely small... plastic filigreed spherical objets d'art [like] radiolaria... wallpaper designs... cobweb-like figures or concentric circles and squares... architectural forms, buttresses, rosettes, leafwork, fretwork.\n\nFor Kl\u00fcver these hallucinations represented an abnormal activation in the visual system, and he observed that similar hallucinations could occur in a variety of other conditions\u2014migraine, sensory deprivation, hypoglycemia, fever, delirium, or the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states that come immediately before and after sleep. In _Mechanisms of Hallucination_ , published in 1942, Kl\u00fcver spoke of the tendency to \"geometrization\" in the brain's visual system, and he regarded all such geometrical hallucinations as permutations of four fundamental \"form constants\" (he identified these as lattices, spirals, cobwebs, and tunnels). He implied that such constants must reflect something about the organization, the functional architecture, of the visual cortex\u2014but there was little more to be said about this in the 1940s.\n\nIt might be said that both approaches\u2014the \"high,\" mystical approach of Huxley and the \"low,\" neurophysiological approach of Kl\u00fcver\u2014were too narrowly focused and failed to do justice to the range and complexity of the phenomena that mescaline could induce. This became clearer in the late 1950s, when LSD, as well as psilocybin mushrooms and morning glory seeds (both of which contain LSD-like compounds), became widely available, ushering in a new hallucinogenic drug age and a new word to go with it: \"psychedelic.\"\n\nDaniel Breslaw, a young man just out of college in the 1960s, was one of the subjects in a study of LSD at Columbia University, and he gave a vivid description of the effects of psilocybin, which he took under supervision, so that his reactions could be observed.6 His first visions, like Weir Mitchell's, were of stars and colors:\n\nI closed my eyes. \"I see stars!\" I then burst out, finding the firmament spread out on the inside of my eyelids. The room about me receded into a tunnel of oblivion as I vanished into another world, fruitless to describe.... The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colors I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colors are entirely new\u2014areas of the spectrum which I seem to have hitherto overlooked. The colors do not stand still, but move and flow in every direction; my field of vision is a mosaic of unbelievable complexity. To reproduce an instant of it would involve years of labor, that is, if one were able to reproduce colors of equivalent brilliance and intensity.\n\nThen Breslaw opened his eyes. \"With the eyes closed,\" he noted, \"one is _not here_ , but inhabits a distant world of abstractions. But with eyes open, one glances around the physical universe with curiosity.\" Curiosity\u2014and amazement, for the visual world he saw was bizarrely changed and continually changing, as Gautier had found with hashish. Breslaw wrote:\n\nThe room is fifty feet tall. Now it is two feet tall. A strange disparity here. Whatever comes into the focus of my eyes dissolves into whorls, patterns, arrangements. There is The Doctor. His face is crawling with lice. His glasses are the size of pressure cookers, and his eyes are those of some mammoth fish. He is beyond doubt the funniest sight I have ever seen, and I insist upon this point by laughing.... A footstool in the corner shrinks to a mushroom in jerky spasms, braces\u2014and springs to the ceiling. Amazing!... In the elevator, the face of the operator grows hair, becomes an affably growing gorilla.\n\nTime was immensely distended. The elevator descended, \"passing a floor every hundred years. Back in the room, I swim through the remaining centuries of the day. Every five eons or so a nurse arrives (in the aspect of a cougar, a differential equation, or a clock radio) and takes my blood pressure.\"\n\nAnimation and intentionality appeared everywhere, as did relationship and meaning:\n\nHere is a fire extinguisher in a glass case, evidently an exhibit of some sort. A bit of staring reveals that the beast is alive: it coils its rubber hose around its prey and sucks flesh through the nozzle. The beast and I exchange glares, and then the nurse drags me away. I wave goodbye.\n\nA smudge on the wall is an object of limitless fascination, multiplying in size, complexity, color. But more than that, one sees _every relationship it has to the rest of the universe_ ; it possesses, therefore, an endless variety of meanings, and one proceeds to entertain every possible thought there is to think about it.\n\nAnd when the effects were most intense, there came a rich synesthesia\u2014a mingling of all the senses, and of sensation and concepts. Breslaw noted, \"Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal).\"\n\nNo two people ever have the same responses to such drugs; indeed, no two drug experiences are ever the same for the same person. Eric S. wrote to me to describe some of his experiences with LSD during the 1970s:\n\nI was in my late twenties when a friend and I took some LSD. I had tripped many times before but this acid was different.... We noticed that we were talking to each other mentally through thoughts only, no verbal talk, tele-communicating. I thought in my head, \"I want a beer,\" and he heard me and got me a beer; he thought, \"Turn the music up\" and I turned the music up.... It went on like this for some time.\n\nThen I went to urinate, and in my urine stream was a video or movie of the past played back in reverse. Everything that had just happened in the room was coming out of me like watching a movie in my urine stream, playing in reverse. This totally blew my mind.\n\nThen my eyes became a microscope, and I looked at my wrist and was able to see each individual cell breathing or respirating, like little factories with little puffs of gas shooting out of each cell, some blowing perfect smoke rings. My eyes were able to see inside each skin cell, and I saw that I was choking myself from the inside by smoking five packs of cigarettes a day and the debris was clogging my cells. At that second I quit smoking.\n\nThen I left my body and hovered in the room above the whole scene, then found myself traveling through a tunnel of beautiful light into space and was filled with a feeling of total love and acceptance. The light was the most beautiful, warm and inviting light I ever felt. I heard a voice ask me if I wanted to go back to Earth and finish my life or... to go in to the beautiful love and light in the sky. In the love and light was every person that ever lived. Then my whole life flashed in my mind from birth to the present, with every detail that ever happened, every feeling and thought, visual and emotional was there in an instant. The voice told me that humans are \"Love and Light.\"...\n\nThat day will live with me forever; I feel I was shown a side of life that most people can't even imagine. I feel a special connection to every day, that even the simple and mundane have such power and meaning.\n\nThe effects of cannabis, mescaline, LSD, and other hallucinogenic drugs have an immense range and variety. Yet certain categories of perceptual distortion and hallucinatory experience may, to some extent, be regarded as typical of the brain's responses to such drugs.\n\nThe experience of color is often heightened, sometimes to an unearthly level, as Weir Mitchell, Huxley, and Breslaw all observed. There may be sudden changes in orientation and striking alterations of apparent size. There may be micropsia or Lilliputian vision (little beings\u2014elves, dwarfs, fairies, imps\u2014are curiously common in these hallucinations), or there may be gigantism (macropsia).\n\nThere may be exaggerations or diminutions of depth and perspective or exaggerations of stereo vision\u2014or even stereo hallucinations, seeing three-dimensional depth and solidity in a flat picture. Huxley described this:\n\nI was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known self-portrait by C\u00e9zanne\u2014the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through a window in the page before me.\n\nThe perceptual transformations and hallucinations induced by mescaline, LSD, and other hallucinogens are predominantly, but not exclusively, visual. There may be enhancements or distortions or hallucinations of taste and smell, touch and hearing, or there may be fusions of the senses\u2014a sort of temporary synesthesia\u2014\"the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green,\" as Breslaw put it. Such coalescences or associations (and their presumed neural basis) are creations of the moment. In this way they are quite different from true synesthesia, a congenital (and often familial) condition where there are fixed sensory equivalences that last a lifetime. With hallucinogens, time may appear to be distended or compressed. One may cease to perceive motion as continuous and see instead a series of static \"snapshots,\" as with a film run too slowly. Such stroboscopic or cinematic vision is a not uncommon effect of mescaline. Sudden accelerations, slowings, or freezings of movement are also common with more elementary hallucinatory patterns.7\n\nI had done a great deal of reading, but had no experiences of my own with such drugs until 1953, when my childhood friend Eric Korn came up to Oxford. We read excitedly about Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD, and we ordered 50 micrograms of it from the manufacturer in Switzerland (it was still legal in the mid-1950s). Solemnly, even sacramentally, we divided it and took 25 micrograms each\u2014not knowing what splendors or horrors awaited us\u2014but, sadly, it had absolutely no effect on either of us. (We should have ordered 500 micrograms, not 50.)\n\nBy the time I qualified as a doctor, at the end of 1958, I knew I wanted to be a neurologist, to study how the brain embodies consciousness and self and to understand its amazing powers of perception, imagery, memory, and hallucination. A new orientation was entering neurology and psychiatry at that time; it was the opening of a neurochemical age, with a glimpse of the range of chemical agents, neurotransmitters, which allow nerve cells and different parts of the nervous system to communicate with one another. In the 1950s and 1960s, discoveries were coming from all directions, though it was far from clear how they fit together. It had been found, for instance, that the parkinsonian brain was low in dopamine, and that giving a dopamine precursor, L-dopa, could alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, while tranquilizers, introduced in the early 1950s, could depress dopamine and cause a sort of chemical parkinsonism. For about a century, the staple medication for parkinsonism had been anticholinergic drugs. How did the dopamine and acetylcholine systems interact? Why did opiates\u2014or cannabis\u2014have such strong effects? Did the brain have special opiate receptors and make opioids of its own? Was there a similar mechanism for cannabis receptors and cannabinoids? Why was LSD so enormously potent? Were all its effects explicable in terms of altering the serotonin in the brain? What transmitter systems governed wake-sleep cycles, and what might be the neurochemical background of dreams or hallucinations?\n\nStarting a neurology residency in 1962, I found the atmosphere heady with such questions. Neurochemistry was plainly \"in,\" and so\u2014dangerously, seductively, especially in California, where I was studying\u2014were the drugs themselves.\n\nWhile Kl\u00fcver had little idea of what the neural basis of his hallucinatory constants might be, rereading his book in the early 1960s was especially exciting to me in light of the groundbreaking experiments on visual perception that David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel were performing at the time, recording from neurons in the visual cortex in animals. They described neurons specialized for the detection of lines, orientations, edges, corners, etc., and these, it seemed to me, if stimulated by a drug or a migraine or a fever, might well produce just such geometrical hallucinations as Kl\u00fcver had described.\n\nBut mescal hallucinations did not stop with geometrical designs. What was happening in the brain when one hallucinated more complex things: objects, places, figures, faces\u2014let alone the heaven and hell that Huxley had described? Did _they_ have their own basis in the brain?8\n\nThoughts like this tipped the balance for me, along with the feeling that I would never really know what hallucinogenic drugs were like unless I tried them.\n\nI started with cannabis. A friend in Topanga Canyon, where I lived at the time, offered me a joint; I took two puffs and was transfixed by what happened then. I gazed at my hand, and it seemed to fill my visual field, getting larger and larger while at the same time moving away from me. Finally, it seemed to me, I could see a hand stretched across the universe, light-years or parsecs in length. It still looked like a living, human hand, yet this cosmic hand somehow also seemed like the hand of God. My first pot experience was marked by a mix of the neurological and the divine.\n\nOn the West Coast in the early 1960s, LSD and morning glory seeds were readily available, so I sampled those, too. \"But if you want a really far-out experience,\" my friends on Muscle Beach told me, \"try Artane.\" I found this surprising, for I knew that Artane, a synthetic drug allied to belladonna, was used in modest doses (two or three tablets a day) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, and that such drugs, in large quantities, could cause a delirium (such deliria have long been observed with accidental ingestion of plants like deadly nightshade, thorn apple, and black henbane). But would a delirium be fun? Or informative? Would one be in a position to observe the aberrant functioning of one's brain\u2014to appreciate its wonder? \"Go on,\" urged my friends. \"Just take twenty of them\u2014you'll still be in partial control.\"\n\nSo one Sunday morning, I counted out twenty pills, washed them down with a mouthful of water, and sat down to await the effect. Would the world be transformed, newborn, as Huxley had described it in _The Doors of Perception_ , and as I myself had experienced with mescaline and LSD? Would there be waves of delicious, voluptuous feeling? Would there be anxiety, disorganization, paranoia? I was prepared for all of these, but none of them occurred. I had a dry mouth, large pupils, and found it difficult to read, but that was all. There were no psychic effects whatever\u2014most disappointing. I did not know exactly what I had expected, but I had expected _something_.\n\nI was in the kitchen, putting on a kettle for tea, when I heard a knocking at my front door. It was my friends Jim and Kathy; they would often drop round on a Sunday morning. \"Come in, door's open,\" I called out, and as they settled themselves in the living room, I asked, \"How do you like your eggs?\" Jim liked them sunny side up, he said. Kathy preferred them over easy. We chatted away while I sizzled their ham and eggs\u2014there were low swinging doors between the kitchen and the living room, so we could hear each other easily. Then, five minutes later, I shouted, \"Everything's ready,\" put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room\u2014and found it completely empty. No Jim, no Kathy, no sign that they had ever been there. I was so staggered I almost dropped the tray.\n\nIt had not occurred to me for an instant that Jim and Kathy's voices, their \"presences,\" were unreal, hallucinatory. We had had a friendly, ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the same as always; there had been no hint, until I opened the swinging doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, at least their side of it, had been completely invented by my brain.\n\nI was not only shocked, but rather frightened, too. With LSD and other drugs, I knew what was happening. The world would look different, feel different; there would be every characteristic of a special, extreme mode of experience. But my \"conversation\" with Jim and Kathy had no special quality; it was entirely commonplace, with nothing to mark it as a hallucination. I thought about schizophrenics conversing with their \"voices,\" but typically the voices of schizophrenia are mocking or accusing, not talking about ham and eggs and the weather.\n\n\"Careful, Oliver,\" I said to myself. \"Take yourself in hand. Don't let this happen again.\" Sunk in thought, I slowly ate my ham and eggs (Jim and Kathy's, too) and then decided to go down to the beach, where I would see the real Jim and Kathy and all my friends, and enjoy a swim and an idle afternoon.\n\nI was pondering all this when I became conscious of a whirring noise above me. It puzzled me for a moment, and then I realized it was a helicopter preparing to descend, and that it contained my parents, who, wanting to make a surprise visit, had flown in from London and, arriving in Los Angeles, had chartered a helicopter to bring them to Topanga Canyon. I rushed into the bathroom, had a quick shower, and put on a clean shirt and pants\u2014the most I could do in the three or four minutes before they arrived. The throb of the engine was almost deafeningly loud, so I knew that the helicopter must have landed on the flat rock beside my house. I rushed out, excitedly, to greet my parents\u2014but the rock was empty, there was no helicopter in sight, and the huge pulsing noise of its engine had abruptly cut off. The silence and emptiness, the disappointment, reduced me to tears. I had been so joyfully excited, and now there was nothing at all.\n\nI went back into the house and had put on the kettle for another cup of tea when my attention was caught by a spider on the kitchen wall. As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out, \"Hello!\" It did not seem at all strange to me that a spider should say hello (any more than it seemed strange to Alice when the White Rabbit spoke). I said, \"Hello, yourself,\" and with this we started a conversation, mostly on rather technical matters of analytic philosophy. Perhaps this direction was suggested by the spider's opening comment: did I think that Bertrand Russell had exploded Frege's paradox? Or perhaps it was its voice\u2014pointed, incisive, and just like Russell's voice (which I had heard on the radio, but also\u2014hilariously\u2014as it had been parodied in _Beyond the Fringe_ ).9\n\nDuring the week, I would avoid drugs, working as a resident at UCLA's neurology department. I was amazed and moved, as I had been as a medical student in London, by the range of patients' neurological experiences, and I found that I could not comprehend these sufficiently, or come to terms with them emotionally, unless I attempted to describe or transcribe them. It was then that I wrote my first published papers and my first book (it was never published, because I lost the manuscript).\n\nBut on the weekends, I often experimented with drugs. I recall vividly one episode in which a magical color appeared to me. I had been taught, as a child, that there were seven colors in the spectrum, including indigo (Newton had chosen these, somewhat arbitrarily, by analogy with the seven notes of the musical scale). But some cultures recognize only five or six spectral colors, and few people agree as to what indigo is like.\n\nI had long wanted to see \"true\" indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, \"I want to see indigo now\u2014now!\"\n\nAnd then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved\u2014never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought\u2014it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo _exists_ , and it can be conjured up in the brain.\n\nFor months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum\u2014but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen. And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi's mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objects on display\u2014lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth\u2014and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists!\n\nDuring the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a \"sip\" of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce\u2014no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.\n\nWhen a friend and colleague of my parents'\u2014Augusta Bonnard, a psychoanalyst\u2014came to Los Angeles for a year's sabbatical in 1964, it was natural that we should meet. I invited her to my little house in Topanga Canyon, and we had a genial dinner together. Over coffee and cigarettes (Augusta was a chain-smoker; I wondered if she smoked even during analytic sessions), her tone changed, and she said, in her gruff, smoke-thickened voice, \"You need help, Oliver. You're in trouble.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" I replied. \"I enjoy life. I have no complaints; all is well in work and love.\" Augusta let out a skeptical grunt, but she did not push the matter further.\n\nI had started taking LSD at this point, and if that was not available, I would take morning glory seeds instead (this was before morning glory seeds were treated with pesticides, as they are now, to prevent drug abuse). Sunday mornings were usually my drug time, and it must have been two or three months after meeting Augusta that I took a hefty dose of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds. The seeds were jet black and of agate-like hardness, so I pulverized them with a pestle and mortar and then mixed them with vanilla ice cream. About twenty minutes after eating this, I felt intense nausea, but when it subsided, I found myself in a realm of paradisiacal stillness and beauty, a realm outside time, which was rudely broken into by a taxi grinding and backfiring its way up the steep trail to my house. An elderly woman got out of the taxi, and, galvanized into action, I ran towards her, shouting, \"I know who you are\u2014you are a _replica_ of Augusta Bonnard. You look like her, you have her posture and movements, but you are _not_ her. I am not deceived for a moment.\" Augusta raised her hands to her temples and said, \"Oy! This is worse than I realized.\" She got back into the taxi, and took off without another word.\n\nWe had plenty to talk about the next time we met. My failure to recognize her, my seeing her as a \"replica,\" she thought, was a complex form of defense, a dissociation which could only be called psychotic. I disagreed and maintained that my seeing her as a duplicate or impostor was neurological in origin, a disconnection between perception and feelings. The ability to identify (which was intact) had not been accompanied by the appropriate feeling of warmth and familiarity, and it was this contradiction which had led to the logical though absurd conclusion that she was a \"duplicate.\" (This syndrome, which can occur in schizophrenia, but also with dementia or delirium, is known as Capgras syndrome.) Augusta said that whichever view was correct, taking mind-altering drugs every weekend, alone, and in high doses, surely testified to some intense inner needs or conflicts, and that I should explore these with a therapist. (In retrospect, I am sure she was right, and I began seeing an analyst a year later.)\n\nThe summer of 1965 was a sort of in-between time: I had completed my residency at UCLA and had left California, but I had three months ahead of me before taking up a research fellowship in New York. This should have been a time of delicious freedom, a wonderful and needed holiday after the sixty- and sometimes eighty-hour workweeks I had had at UCLA. But I did not feel free; I get unmoored, have a sense of emptiness and structurelessness, when I am not working\u2014it was weekends which were the danger times, the drug times, when I lived in California\u2014and now an entire summer in my hometown, London, stretched before me like a three-month-long weekend.\n\nIt was during this idle, mischievous time that I descended deeper into drug taking, no longer confining it to weekends. I tried intravenous injection, which I had never done before. My parents, both physicians, were away, and, having the house to myself, I decided to explore the drug cabinet in their surgery on the ground floor for something special to celebrate my thirty-second birthday. I had never taken morphine or any opiates before. I used a large syringe\u2014why bother with piddling doses? And after settling myself comfortably in bed, I drew up the contents of several vials, plunged the needle into a vein, and injected the morphine very slowly.\n\nWithin a minute or so, my attention was drawn to a sort of commotion on the sleeve of my dressing gown, which hung on the door. I gazed intently at this, and as I did so, it resolved itself into a miniature but microscopically detailed battle scene. I could see silken tents of different colors, the largest of which was flying a royal pennant. There were gaily caparisoned horses, soldiers on horseback, their armor glinting in the sun, and men with longbows. I saw pipers with long silver pipes, raising these to their mouths, and then, very faintly, I heard their piping, too. I saw hundreds, thousands of men\u2014two armies, two nations\u2014preparing to do battle. I lost all sense of this being a spot on the sleeve of my dressing gown, of the fact that I was lying in bed, that I was in London, that it was 1965. Before shooting up the morphine, I had been reading Froissart's _Chronicles_ and _Henry V_ , and now these became conflated in my hallucination. I realized that what I was gazing at from my aerial viewpoint was Agincourt, late in 1415, that I was looking down on the serried armies of England and France drawn up to do battle. And in the great pennanted tent, I knew, was Henry V himself. I had no sense that I was imagining or hallucinating any of this; what I saw was actual, real.\n\nAfter a while the scene started to fade, and I became dimly conscious, once more, that I was in London, stoned, hallucinating Agincourt on the sleeve of my dressing gown. It had been an enchanting and transporting experience, literally so, but now it was over. The drug effect was fading fast; Agincourt was hardly visible now. I glanced at my watch. I had injected the morphine at nine-thirty, and now it was ten. But I had a sense of something odd\u2014it had been dusk when I took the morphine; it should be darker still. But it was not. It was getting lighter, not darker, outside. It _was_ ten o'clock, I realized, but ten in the morning. I had been gazing, motionless, at my Agincourt for more than twelve hours. This shocked and sobered me, and made me realize that one could spend entire days, nights, weeks, even years of one's life in an opium stupor. I would make sure that my first opium experience was also my last.\n\nAt the end of that summer of 1965, I moved to New York to begin a postgraduate fellowship in neuropathology and neurochemistry. December 1965 was a bad time: I was finding New York difficult to adjust to after my years in California, a love affair had gone sour, my research was going badly, and I was discovering for myself that I was not cut out to be a bench scientist. Depressed and insomniac, I was taking ever-increasing amounts of chloral hydrate to get to sleep, and was up to fifteen times the usual dose every night. And though I had managed to stockpile a huge amount of the drug\u2014I raided the chemical supplies in the lab at work\u2014this finally ran out on a bleak Tuesday a little before Christmas, and for the first time in several months I went to bed without my usual knockout dose. My sleep was poor, broken by nightmares and bizarre dreams, and upon waking, I found myself excruciatingly sensitive to sounds. There were always trucks rumbling along the cobblestoned streets of the West Village; now it sounded as if they were crushing the cobblestones to powder as they passed.\n\nFeeling a bit shaky, I did not ride my motorcycle to work as usual, but took a train and bus. Wednesday was brain-cutting day in the neuropathology department, and it was my turn to slice a brain into neat horizontal sections, to identify the main structures as I did so, and to observe whether there were any departures from normal. I was usually pretty good at this, but that day I found my hand trembling visibly, embarrassingly, and the anatomical names were slow in coming to mind.\n\nWhen the session ended, I went across the road, as I often did, for a cup of coffee and a sandwich. As I was stirring the coffee, it suddenly turned green, then purple. I looked up, startled, and saw that a customer paying his bill at the cash register had a huge proboscidean head, like an elephant seal. Panic seized me; I slammed a five-dollar note on the table and ran across the road to a bus on the other side. But all the passengers on the bus seemed to have smooth white heads like giant eggs, with huge glittering eyes like the faceted compound eyes of insects\u2014their eyes seemed to move in sudden jerks, which increased the feeling of their fearfulness and alienness. I realized that I was hallucinating or experiencing some bizarre perceptual disorder, that I could not stop what was happening in my brain, and that I had to maintain at least an external control and not panic or scream or become catatonic, faced by the bug-eyed monsters around me. The best way of doing this, I found, was to write, to describe the hallucination in clear, almost clinical detail, and, in so doing, become an observer, even an explorer, not a helpless victim of the craziness inside me. I am never without pen and notebook, and now I wrote for dear life, as wave after wave of hallucination rolled over me.\n\nDescription, writing, had always been my best way of dealing with complex or frightening situations\u2014though it had never been tested in so terrifying a situation. But it worked; by describing what was going on in my lab notebook, I managed to maintain a semblance of control, though the hallucinations continued, mutating all the while.\n\nI managed somehow to get off at the right bus stop and onto the train, even though everything was now in motion, whirling vertiginously, tilting and even turning upside down. And I managed to get off at the right station, in my neighborhood in Greenwich Village. As I emerged from the subway, the buildings around me were tossing and flapping from side to side, like flags blowing in a high wind. I was enormously relieved to make it back to my apartment without being attacked, or arrested, or killed by the rushing traffic on the way. As soon as I got inside, I felt I had to contact somebody\u2014someone who knew me well, who was both a doctor and a friend. Carol Burnett was the person: we had interned together in San Francisco five years earlier and had resumed a close friendship now that we were both in New York City. Carol would understand; she would know what to do. I dialed her number with a grossly tremulous hand. \"Carol,\" I said, as soon as she picked up, \"I want to say good-bye. I've gone mad, psychotic, insane. It started this morning, and it's getting worse all the while.\"\n\n\"Oliver!\" Carol said. \"What have you just taken?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" I replied. \"That's why I'm so frightened.\" Carol thought for a moment, then asked, \"What have you just _stopped_ taking?\"\n\n\"That's it!\" I said. \"I was taking a huge amount of chloral hydrate and ran out of it last night.\"\n\n\"Oliver, you chump! You always overdo things,\" Carol said. \"You've got a classic case of the DT's, delirium tremens.\"\n\nThis was an immense relief\u2014much better DT's than a schizophrenic psychosis. But I was quite aware of the dangers of the DT's: confusion, disorientation, hallucination, delusion, dehydration, fever, rapid heartbeat, exhaustion, seizures, death. I would have advised anyone else in my state to get to an emergency room immediately, but for myself, I wanted to tough it out, and experience it to the full. Carol agreed to sit with me for the first day; then, if she thought I was safe by myself, she would look by or phone me at intervals, calling in outside help if she judged it necessary. Given this safety net, I lost much of my anxiety, and could even enjoy the phantasms of delirium tremens in a way (though the myriads of small animals and insects were anything but pleasant). The hallucinations continued for almost ninety-six hours, and when they finally stopped, I fell into an exhausted stupor.10\n\nAs a boy, I had known extreme delight in the study of chemistry and the setting up of my own chemistry lab. This delight seemed to desert me at the age of fifteen or so; in my years at school, university, medical school, and then internship and residency, I kept my head above water, but the subjects I studied never excited me in the same intense way as chemistry had when I was a boy. It was not until I arrived in New York and began seeing patients in a migraine clinic in the summer of 1966 that I began to feel a little stirring of the intellectual excitement and emotional engagement I had known in my earlier years. It was in the hope of stirring up these intellectual and emotional excitements even further that I turned to amphetamines.\n\nI would take the stuff on Friday evenings after getting back from work and would then spend the whole weekend so high that images and thoughts would become rather like controllable hallucinations, imbued with ecstatic emotion. I often devoted these \"drug holidays\" to romantic daydreaming, but one Friday, in February 1967, while I was exploring the rare book section of the medical library, I found a hefty volume on migraine entitled _On Megrim, Sick-Headache, and Some Allied Disorders: A Contribution to the Pathology of Nerve-Storms_ , written in 1873 by one Edward Liveing, MD. I had been working for several months in the migraine clinic, and I was fascinated by the range of symptoms and phenomena that could occur in migraine attacks. These attacks often included an aura, a prodrome in which aberrations of perception and even hallucinations occurred. They were entirely benign and would last only a few minutes, but those few minutes provided a window onto the functioning of the brain and how it could break down and then reintegrate. In this way, I felt, every attack of migraine opened out into an encyclopedia of neurology.\n\nI had read dozens of articles about migraine and its possible basis, but none of them seemed to present the full richness of its phenomenology or the range and depth of suffering which patients might experience. It was in the hope of finding a fuller, deeper, and more human approach to migraine that I took out Liveing's book from the library that weekend. So, after downing my bitter draft of amphetamine\u2014heavily sugared to make it more palatable\u2014I started reading. As the amphetamine effect took hold of me, stimulating my emotions and imagination, Liveing's book seemed to increase in intensity and depth and beauty. I wanted nothing but to enter Liveing's mind and imbibe the atmosphere of the time in which he had worked.\n\nIn a sort of catatonic concentration so intense that in ten hours I scarcely moved a muscle or wet my lips, I read steadily through the five hundred pages of _Megrim_. As I did so, it seemed to me almost as if I were becoming Liveing himself, actually seeing the patients he described. At times I was unsure whether I was reading the book or writing it. I felt myself in the Dickensian London of the 1860s and '70s. I loved Liveing's humanity and social sensitivity, his strong assertion that migraine was not some indulgence of the idle rich but could affect those who were poorly nourished and worked long hours in ill-ventilated factories. In this way, his book reminded me of Mayhew's great study of London's working classes, but equally, one could tell how well Liveing had been trained in biology and the physical sciences, and what a master of clinical observation he was. I found myself thinking, _This represents the best of mid-Victorian science and medicine; it is a veritable masterpiece!_ The book gave me what I had been hungering for during the months that I had been seeing patients with migraine, frustrated by the thin, impoverished articles which seemed to constitute the modern \"literature\" on the subject. At the height of this ecstasy, I saw migraine shining like an archipelago of stars in the neurological heavens.\n\nBut a century had passed since Liveing worked and wrote in London. Rousing myself from my reverie of being Liveing or one of his contemporaries, I came to and said to myself, Now it is the 1960s, not the 1860s. Who could be the Liveing of our time? A disingenuous clutter of names spoke themselves in my mind. I thought of Dr. A. and Dr. B. and Dr. C. and Dr. D., all of them good men but none of them with that mix of science and humanism that was so powerful in Liveing. And then a very loud internal voice said, \"You silly bugger! _You're_ the man!\"\n\nOn every previous occasion when I had come down after two days of amphetamine-induced mania, I had experienced a severe reaction in the other direction, feeling an almost narcoleptic drowsiness and depression. I would also have an acute sense of folly, thinking that I had endangered my life for nothing\u2014amphetamines in the large doses I took would give me a sustained pulse rate close to 200 and a blood pressure of I know not what; several people I knew had died from overdoses of amphetamines. I would feel that I had made a crazy ascent into the stratosphere but had come back empty-handed and had nothing to show for it; that the experience had been as empty and vacuous as it was intense. This time, though, when I came down, I retained a sense of illumination and insight; I had had a sort of revelation about migraine. I had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps _I_ could be the Liveing of our time.\n\nThe next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing. Then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book. The joy I got from doing this was _real_ \u2014infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines\u2014and I never took amphetamines again.\n\n1. Curiously, lower plants\u2014cycads, conifers, ferns, mosses, and seaweeds\u2014lack hallucinogenic substances.\n\nSome nonflowering plants, however, contain stimulants, as the Mormons, among others, discovered. Mormons are forbidden to use tea or coffee. But on their long march along the Mormon Trail to Utah, the pioneers who were to found Salt Lake City, the new Zion, noticed a simple herb by the roadside, an infusion of which (\"Mormon tea\") refreshed and stimulated the weary pilgrims. The herb was ephedra, which contains ephedrine, chemically and pharmacologically akin to the amphetamines.\n\n2. Quite by accident, Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic powers of LSD when he synthesized a new batch of the chemical in 1943. He must have absorbed some through his fingertips, for later that day he began to feel odd and went home, thinking he had a cold. As he lay in bed, he experienced \"an uninterrupted stream of fantastic images of extraordinary plasticity and vividness and accompanied by an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors.\" Jay Stevens, in his book _Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream_ , recounted what came next:\n\nSuspecting that LSD-25 had caused these fireworks, Hofmann decided to test this hypothesis.... [A few days later] he dissolved what he thought was a prudently infinitesimal amount of the drug\u2014250 millionths of a gram\u2014in a glass of water and drank it down. [Forty minutes later] he recorded a growing dizziness, some visual disturbance, and a marked desire to laugh. Forty-two words later he stopped writing altogether and asked one of his lab assistants to call a doctor before accompanying him home. Then he climbed onto his bicycle\u2014wartime shortages having made automobiles impractical\u2014and pedaled off into a suddenly anarchic universe.\n\n3. I am quoting from the translation provided by David Ebin in his excellent book _The Drug Experience: First-Person Accounts of Addicts, Writers, Scientists, and Others_.\n\n4. Louis Lewin, a German pharmacologist, published the first scientific analysis of the peyote cactus in 1886, and it was named _Anhalonium lewinii_ in his honor. Later, he sought to classify various psychoactive substances based on their pharmacological effects, and he divided them into five general groups: euphoriants or sedatives (like opium), inebriants (like alcohol), hypnotics (like chloral and kava), excitants (like amphetamine and coffee), and hallucinogens, which he called phantastica. Many drugs, he noted, had overlapping and paradoxical effects, so that stimulants or sedatives could sometimes be as hallucinogenic as peyote.\n\n5. Benny Shanon uses this phrase as the title of his remarkable book _The Antipodes of the Mind_ , which is based on personal experience as well as extensive cultural and anthropological experience with the South American hallucinogen ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is, in fact, a blend of two plants: _Psychotria viridis_ and _Banisteriopsis caapi_ , neither of which has any hallucinogenic power by itself. The leaves of _Psychotria_ contain dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a very powerful hallucinogen\u2014but DMT, if taken by mouth, is deactivated in the gut by monoamine oxidase (MAO). _Banisteriopsis_ , however, contains compounds that inhibit the MAO and so allow the DMT to be absorbed. \"When one thinks about it,\" Shanon writes, \"the discovery of Ayahuasca is indeed amazing. The number of plants in the rain forest is enormous, the number of their possible pairings astronomical. The common sense method of trial and error would not seem to apply.\"\n\n6. Breslaw's account is included in David Ebin's book _The Drug Experience_.\n\n7. I have discussed neurological aspects of time and motion perception, as well as cinematic vision, at greater length in two articles, \"Speed\" and \"In the River of Consciousness.\"\n\n8. Very little was known in the early 1960s about how psychoactive drugs worked, and early research by Timothy Leary and others at Harvard, as well as the work of L. Jolyon West and Ronald K. Siegel at UCLA in the 1970s, focused mostly on the experiences of hallucinogens rather than their mechanisms. In 1975, Siegel and West published a wide-ranging collection of essays in their book _Hallucinations: Behavior, Experience, and Theory_. Here West set out (as he had in previous work) his release theory of hallucination.\n\nIt is now known that stimulants like cocaine and the amphetamines stimulate the \"reward systems\" of the brain, which are largely mediated by the neurotransmitter dopamine; this is also the case with opiates and alcohol. The classical hallucinogens\u2014mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, and probably DMT\u2014act by boosting serotonin in the brain.\n\n9. When, decades later, I told this story to my friend Tom Eisner, an entomologist, I mentioned the spider's philosophical tendencies and Russellian voice. He nodded sagely and said, \"Yes, I know the species.\"\n\n10. Many years later, I experienced the much gentler effects of sakau, the intoxicating sap of a pepper ( _Piper methysticum_ , also called kava in Polynesia) cultivated in the South Pacific. Drinking sakau has been a central part of Micronesian life, as chewing coca leaves has been in the Andes, for thousands of years; and its use is formalized in elaborate sakau rituals. I described the effects of sakau at length in _The Island of the Colorblind;_ it may evoke a delicious sense of floating and ease, as well as a variety of visual illusions or hallucinations.\n\n# 7\n\nPatterns: Visual Migraines\n\nI have had migraines for most of my life; the first attack I remember occurred when I was three or four years old. I was playing in the garden when a shimmering light appeared to my left, dazzlingly bright. It expanded, becoming an enormous arc stretching from the ground to the sky, with sharp, glittering, zigzagging borders and brilliant blue and orange colors. Then behind the brightness came a growing blindness, an emptiness in the field of vision, and soon I could see almost nothing on my left side. I was terrified\u2014what was happening? My sight returned to normal in a few minutes, but these were the longest minutes I had ever experienced.\n\nI told my mother what had happened, and she explained to me that what I had had was a migraine aura\u2014a feeling or sensation that precedes a migraine; she was a doctor, and she too was a \"migraineur.\" It was a visual migraine aura, and the characteristic zigzag shape, she would later tell me, resembled that of medieval forts, so it was often called a fortification pattern. Many people, she said, would get a terrible headache after seeing the aura.\n\nI was lucky to be one of those people who got only the aura without the headache, and lucky, too, to have a mother who could reassure me that everything would be back to normal within a few minutes, and with whom, as I got older, I could share my migraine experiences. She explained that auras like mine were due to a sort of electrical disturbance like a wave passing across the visual parts of the brain. A similar \"wave\" could pass over other parts of the brain, too, she said, so one might get a strange feeling on one side of the body or experience an odd smell or find oneself temporarily unable to speak. A migraine might affect one's perception of color or depth or movement, might make the whole visual world unintelligible for a few minutes. Then, if one were unlucky, the rest of the migraine would follow: violent headaches, vomiting, painful sensitivity to light and noise, abdominal disturbances, and a host of other symptoms.1 Migraine was common, my mother said, affecting at least 10 percent of the population. Its classic visual presentation is a scintillating, zigzag-edged, kidney-shaped form like the one I saw, expanding and moving slowly across one half of the visual field over the course of fifteen or twenty minutes. Inside the shimmering borders of this shape is often a blind area, a scotoma\u2014thus the whole shape is called a scintillating scotoma.\n\nFor most people with classical migraine, the scintillating scotoma is the chief visual effect, and things go no further. But sometimes, within the scotoma, there are other patterns. In my own migraine auras, I would sometimes see\u2014vividly with closed eyes, more faintly and transparently if I kept my eyes open\u2014tiny branching lines like twigs or geometrical structures: lattices, checkerboards, cobwebs, and honeycombs. Unlike the scintillating scotoma itself, which had a fixed appearance and a slow, steady rate of progression, these patterns were in continual motion, forming and re-forming, sometimes assembling themselves into more complicated forms like Turkish carpets or complex mosaics or three-dimensional shapes like tiny pinecones or sea urchins. Usually these patterns stayed inside the scotoma, to one side or the other of my visual field, but sometimes they seemed to break loose and scatter themselves all over.\n\nOne has to call these hallucinations, even though they are only patterns and not images, for there is nothing in the external world that corresponds to the zigzags and checkerboards\u2014they are generated by the brain. And there may also be startling perceptual changes with migraine. I might sometimes lose the sense of color or of depth (for other people, color or depth may intensify). Losing the sense of movement was especially startling, for instead of continuous movement, I would see only a stuttering series of \"stills.\" Objects might change size or shape or distance, or get misplaced in the visual field so that, for a minute or two, the whole visual world would be unintelligible.\n\nThere are many variations on the visual experiences of migraine. Jesse R. wrote to me that during a migraine, \"I think my mind loses its ability to read shapes and misinterprets them.... I think I see a person instead of the coat rack... or I often think I see movement across a table or floor. What is strange is that the mind always errs toward giving life to inanimate objects.\"\n\nToni P. wrote that before her migraines, she might see alternating black and white zigzag lines in her peripheral vision: \"shiny geometric shapes, flashes of light. Sometimes it is as if whatever I am viewing is through a sheer curtain that is blowing in the wind.\" But sometimes, for her, a scotoma is simply a blank spot, producing an uncanny sense of nothingness:\n\nI was studying for a major lab exam when all of a sudden I knew something was missing\u2014the book was in front of me; I could see the edges, but there were no words, no graphs, no diagrams. It wasn't as if there was a blank page, it just didn't exist. I only knew it SHOULD be there by reason. That was the strangeness of it.... It lasted for about twenty minutes.\n\nAnother woman, Deborah D., had an attack of migraine in which, she wrote:\n\nWhen I looked at the computer screen, I could not read anything; the screen was a crazy blur... of multiple images.... I could not see the numbers on the phone's keypad, it was as if I was seeing through a fly's lens, multiple images, not double, not triple, but many, many images of wherever I looked.\n\nIt is not only the visual world that may be affected in a migraine aura. There may be hallucinations of body image\u2014the feeling that one is taller or shorter, that one limb has shrunk or grown gigantic, that one's body is tilted at an angle, and so forth.\n\nIt is known that Lewis Carroll had classical migraines, and it has been suggested (by Caro W. Lippman and others) that his migraine experiences may have inspired Alice in Wonderland's strange alterations of size and shape. Siri Hustvedt, in a _New York Times_ blog, described her own transcendent Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome:\n\nAs a child I had what I called \"lifting feelings.\" Every once in a while I had a powerful internal sensation of being pulled upward, as if my head were rising, even though I knew my feet hadn't left the ground. This lift was accompanied by what can only be called awe\u2014a feeling of transcendence. I variously interpreted these elevations as divine (God was calling) or as an amazed connection to things in the world. Everything appeared strange and wondrous.\n\nThere may be auditory misperceptions and hallucinations in migraine: sounds are amplified, reverberant, distorted; occasionally voices or music are heard. Time itself may seem distorted.\n\nHallucinations of smell are not uncommon\u2014the smells are often intense, unpleasant, strangely familiar, yet unspecifiable. I myself twice hallucinated a smell before a migraine, but a pleasant one\u2014the smell of buttered toast. The first time it happened, I was at the hospital and went in search of the toast\u2014it did not occur to me that I was having a hallucination until the visual fortifications started up, a few minutes later. On both occasions there was a memory or pseudomemory of being a little boy in a high chair about to have buttered toast at teatime. One migraineur wrote to me, \"I have always smelled beef roasting about thirty minutes before the onset of a migraine.\"2 A patient described by G. N. Fuller and R. J. Guiloff had \"vivid olfactory hallucinations, lasting five minutes, of either her grandfather's cigars or peanut butter.\"\n\nWhen I worked in a migraine clinic as a young neurologist, I made a point of asking every patient about such experiences. They were usually relieved that I asked, for people are afraid to mention hallucinations, fearing that they will be seen as psychotic. Many of my patients habitually saw patterns in their migraine auras, and a few had a host of other strange visual phenomena, including distortion of faces or objects melting or flickering into one another; multiplication of objects or figures; or persistence or recurrence of visual images.\n\nMost migraine auras remain at the level of elementary hallucinations: phosphenes, fortifications, and geometrical figures of other sorts\u2014but more complex hallucinations, though rare in migraine, do occur. My colleague Mark Green, a neurologist, described to me how one of his patients had the same vision in every migraine attack: a hallucination of a worker emerging from a manhole in the street, wearing a white hard hat with an American flag painted on it.\n\nS. A. Kinnier Wilson, in his encyclopedic _Neurology_ , described how a friend of his would always have a stereotyped hallucination as part of a migraine aura:\n\n[He] used at first to see a large room with three tall arched windows and a figure clad in white (its back toward him) seated or standing at a long bare table; for years this was the unvarying aura, but it was gradually replaced by a cruder form (circles and spirals), which, later still, developed once in a while without subsequent headache.\n\nKlaus Podoll and Derek Robinson, in their beautifully illustrated monograph _Migraine Art_ , have collected many reports of complex hallucinations in migraine from the world literature. People may see human figures, animals, faces, objects, or landscapes\u2014often multiplied. One man reported seeing \"a fly's eye made of millions of light-blue Mickey Mouses\" during a migraine attack, but this hallucination was confined to the temporarily blind half of his visual field. Another saw a \"crowd of [more than] one hundred people, some dressed in white.\"\n\nThere may also be lexical hallucinations. Podoll and Robinson cite a case from the nineteenth-century literature:\n\nA patient of Hoeflmayr's saw words written in the air; a patient of Schob's had hallucinations of letters, words, and numbers; and a patient reported by Fuller et al. \"saw writing on the wall and when asked what it was said he was too far from it. He then walked up to the wall and was able to read it out clearly.\"\n\nLilliputian hallucinations can occur in migraine (as well as in other conditions), as Siri Hustvedt described in a _New York Times_ blog:\n\nI was lying in bed reading a book by Italo Svevo, and for some reason, looked down, and there they were: a small pink man and his pink ox, perhaps six or seven inches high. They were perfectly made creatures and, except for their color, they looked very _real_. They didn't speak to me, but they walked around, and I watched them with fascination and a kind of amiable tenderness. They stayed for some minutes and then disappeared. I have often wished they would return, but they never have.\n\nAll of these effects seem to show, by default, what a colossal and complicated achievement normal vision is, as the brain constructs a visual world in which color and movement and size and form and stability are all seamlessly meshed and integrated. I came to regard my own migraine experiences as a sort of spontaneous (and fortunately reversible) experiment of nature, a window into the nervous system\u2014and I think this was one reason I decided to become a neurologist.\n\nWhat is stirring up the visual system during a migraine attack, to provoke such hallucinations? William Gowers, writing more than a century ago, when little was known of the cellular details of the visual cortex (or the brain's electrical activity), addressed this question in _The Border-land of Epilepsy:_\n\nThe process which gives rise to the sensory symptoms... of migraine is very mysterious.... There is a peculiar form of activity which seems to spread, like the ripples in a pond into which a stone is thrown. But the activity is slow, deliberate, occupying twenty minutes or so in passing through the centre affected. In the region through which the active ripple waves have passed, a state is left like molecular disturbance of the structures.\n\nGowers's intuition proved quite accurate and was given physiological backing decades later, when it was discovered that a wave of electrical excitation could track across the cerebral cortex at much the same rate the fortifications did. In 1971, Whitman Richards suggested that the zigzag shape of migraine fortification patterns, with its characteristic angles, might reflect something equally constant in the architecture of the visual cortex itself\u2014perhaps clusters of the orientation-sensitive neurons which Hubel and Wiesel had demonstrated in the early 1960s. As the wave of electrical excitation slowly marches across the cortex, Richards suggested, it might directly stimulate these clusters, causing the patient to \"see\" shimmering bars of light at different angles. But it was only with the use of magnetoencephalography, twenty years later, that it was possible to demonstrate that the passage of fortifications in a migraine aura was indeed accompanied by just such a wave of electrical excitation.\n\nA hundred and fifty years ago, the astronomer Hubert Airy (who was a migraineur himself) felt that the aura of migraine provided \"a sort of photograph\" of the brain in action. He, like Gowers, may have been more literally accurate than he knew.\n\nHeinrich Kl\u00fcver, writing about mescal, remarked that the simple geometric hallucinations one might get with hallucinogenic drugs were identical to those found in migraine and many other conditions. Such geometrical forms, he felt, were not dependent on memory or personal experience or desire or imagination; they were built into the very architecture of the brain's visual systems.\n\nBut while the zigzag fortification patterns are highly stereotyped and can perhaps be understood in terms of the orientation receptors in the primary visual cortex, a different sort of explanation must be sought for the rapidly changing, permuting play of geometric forms. Here we need dynamic explanations, a consideration of the ways in which the activity of millions of nerve cells can produce complex and ever-changing patterns. We can actually see, through such hallucinations, something of the dynamics of a large population of living nerve cells and, in particular, the role of self-organization in allowing complex patterns of activity to emerge. Such activity operates at a basic cellular level, far beneath the level of personal experience. The hallucinatory forms are, in this way, physiological universals of human experience.\n\nPerhaps such experiences are at the root of our human obsession with pattern and the fact that geometrical patterns find their way into our decorative arts. As a child, I was fascinated by the patterns in our house\u2014the square colored floor tiles on the front porch, the small hexagonal ones in the kitchen, the herringbone pattern on the curtains in my room, the check pattern on my father's suit. When I was taken to the synagogue for services, I was more interested in the mosaics of tiny tiles on the floor than in the religious liturgy. And I loved the pair of antique Chinese cabinets in our drawing room, for embossed on their lacquered surfaces were designs of wonderful intricacy on different scales, patterns nested within patterns, all surrounded by clusters of tendrils and leaves. These geometric and scrolling motifs seemed somehow familiar to me, though it did not dawn on me until years later that this was because I had seen them in my own head, that these patterns resonated with my own inner experience of the intricate tilings and swirls of migraine.\n\nMigraine-like patterns, indeed, can be found in Islamic art, in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry\u2014in virtually every culture, going back tens of thousands of years. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize and make art from these internal experiences, from the cross-hatchings of prehistoric cave paintings to the swirling psychedelic art of the 1960s. Do the arabesques and hexagons in our own minds, built into our brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of formal beauty?\n\nThere is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception\u2014that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems; one may see it in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning but a universal of nature itself.\n\n1. A migraine headache often occurs on only one side (hence the term, which derives from the Greek for \"hemi\" and \"cranium\"). But it can also be on both sides, and can range from a dull or throbbing ache to excruciating pain, as J. C. Peters described in his 1853 _A Treatise on Headache:_\n\nThe character of the pains varied very much; most frequently they were of a hammering, throbbing or pushing nature.... [in other cases] pressing and dull... boring with sense of bursting... pricking... rending... stretching... piercing... and radiating.... In a few cases it felt as if a wedge was pressed into the head, or like an ulcer, or as if the brain was torn, or pressed outwards.\n\n2. This woman, Ingrid K., also reported that she sometimes has \"another strange experience just before the migraine... I think I recognize everyone I see. I don't know who they are... but everyone looks familiar.\" Other correspondents have described a similar \"hyperfamiliarity\" at the start of migraine\u2014and this feeling is occasionally part of an epileptic aura, as Orrin Devinsky and his colleagues have described.\n\n# 8\n\nThe \"Sacred\" Disease\n\nEpilepsy affects a substantial minority of the population, occurs in all cultures, and has been recognized since the dawn of recorded history. It was known to Hippocrates as the sacred disease, a disorder of divine inspiration.1 And yet in its major, convulsive form (the only form recognized until the nineteenth century), it has attracted fear, hostility, and cruel discrimination. It still carries a good deal of stigma today.\n\nEpileptic attacks\u2014often called seizures or fits\u2014can take a dozen or more forms. These have in common a sudden onset (sometimes without any warning, but sometimes with a characteristic prodrome or aura) and a basis in a sudden, abnormal electrical discharge in the brain. In generalized seizures, this discharge arises from both halves of the brain simultaneously. In a grand mal seizure, there is violent, convulsive movement of the muscles, biting of the tongue, and sometimes foaming at the mouth; there may also be a harsh, inhuman-sounding \"epileptic cry.\" Within seconds, the person having a grand mal seizure will lose consciousness and fall to the ground (epilepsy was also called \"the falling sickness\"). Such attacks can be terrifying to see.\n\nIn a petit mal seizure, there is only a transient loss of consciousness\u2014the person seems to be \"absent\" for a few seconds, but may then continue a conversation or a chess game without realizing, or anyone else realizing, that anything unusual has happened.\n\nIn contrast to such generalized seizures, which arise from an inborn, genetic sensitivity of the brain, partial seizures arise from a particular area of damage or sensitivity in one part of the brain, an epileptic focus, which may be congenital or the result of an injury. The symptoms of partial seizures depend on the location of the focus: they may be motor (twitching of certain muscles), autonomic (nausea, a rising feeling in the stomach, etc.), sensory (abnormalities or hallucinations of sight, sound, smell, or other sensations), or psychic (sudden feelings of joy or fear without apparent cause, d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu or jamais vu, or sudden, often unusual, trains of thought). Partial seizure activity may be confined to the epileptic focus, or it may spread to other areas of the brain, and occasionally it leads to a generalized convulsion.\n\nPartial or focal seizures were only recognized in the second half of the nineteenth century\u2014a time when focal deficits of all kinds (for instance, aphasia, the loss of linguistic ability, or agnosia, the loss of ability to identify objects) were being described and attributed to damage in specific areas of the brain. This correlation of cerebral pathology with specific deficits, or \"negative\" symptoms, led to the understanding that there are many different centers in the brain crucial to certain functions.\n\nBut Hughlings Jackson (sometimes called the father of English neurology) paid equal attention to the \"positive\" symptoms of neurological disease\u2014symptoms of overactivity, such as seizures, hallucinations, and deliria. He was a minute and patient observer, and he was the first to recognize \"reminiscence\" and \"dreamy states\" in complex seizures. We still speak of focal motor seizures which start in the hands and \"march\" up the arm as Jacksonian epilepsy.\n\nJackson was also an extraordinary theorist, who proposed that higher and higher levels had evolved in the human nervous system\u2014and that these were hierarchically organized, with higher centers constraining lower ones. Thus, he thought, damage in the higher centers might cause \"release\" activity in the lower ones. For Jackson, epilepsy was a window into the organization and workings of the nervous system (as migraine was for me). \"He who is faithfully analyzing many different cases of epilepsy,\" Jackson wrote, \"is doing far more than studying epilepsy.\"\n\nJackson's younger partner in the enterprise of describing and classifying seizures was William Gowers, and where Jackson's writing was complex, convoluted, and full of reservations, Gowers's was simple, transparent, and lucid. (Jackson never wrote a book, but Gowers wrote many, including his 1881 _Epilepsy and Other Chronic Convulsive Diseases_.)2\n\nGowers was especially drawn to the visual symptoms of epilepsy (he had previously written a book on ophthalmology), and he enjoyed describing simple visual seizures, as with one patient, for whom, he wrote:\n\nThe warning was always a blue star, which appeared to be opposite the left eye, and to come nearer until consciousness was lost. Another patient always saw an object, not described as light, before the left eye, whirling round and round. It seemed to come nearer and nearer, describing larger circles as it approached, until consciousness was lost.\n\nJen W., an articulate young woman, came to see me several years ago. She told me that when she was four, she saw \"a ball of colored lights on the right side, spinning, very defined.\" The ball of colored lights spun for a few seconds and was succeeded by a greyish cloud to the right, obscuring her vision to that side for two or three minutes.\n\nShe had further visions of the spinning ball, always in the same place, four or five times a year, but she assumed that this was normal, something everyone saw. When she was six or seven, the attacks took on a new aspect: the colored ball was followed by a headache on one side of her head, often accompanied by an intolerance of light and sound. She was taken to a neurologist, but an EEG and CAT scan revealed nothing, and Jen was diagnosed with migraine.\n\nWhen she was thirteen or so, the attacks became longer, more frequent, and more complicated. Sometimes these frightening attacks led to complete blindness for several minutes, along with an inability to understand what people were saying. When she tried to talk, she could only utter gibberish. At this point, she was diagnosed with \"complicated migraine.\"\n\nWhen she was fifteen, Jen had a grand mal seizure\u2014she had a convulsion and fell to the floor, unconscious. She had many EEGs and an MRI, all of which were interpreted as normal, but finally a detailed investigation by an epilepsy specialist revealed a clear epileptic focus in the left occipital lobe and an area of abnormal cortical architecture in the same area. She was put on antiepileptic drugs, and these prevented further convulsions but did little to help with her purely visual seizures, which became increasingly frequent, sometimes occurring many times a day. She said they could be precipitated by \"bright sunlight, flickering shadows, or brightly colored scenes with movement and fluorescent lights.\" This extreme sensitivity to light drove her to a very restricted life, an effectively nocturnal and crepuscular existence.\n\nSince her visual seizures did not respond to medication, a surgical approach was suggested, and when Jen was twenty, she had the abnormal area in her left occipital lobe removed. Before the surgery, while the occipitotemporal cortex was being mapped by electrical stimulation, she saw \"Tinkerbell\" and \"cartoon figures.\" This was the only time she has ever had complex visual hallucinations; her visual seizures are normally of a simple sort, with the spinning ball to the right or, occasionally, a shower of \"sparklers\" in this area.\n\nThe immediate effect of the surgery was very good. She was thrilled that she no longer had to stay inside, and she went back to teaching gymnastics. She found that a very small dose of antiepileptic medication could now control most of her visual seizures, although she remained sensitive to stress, missing meals, not getting enough sleep, and flickering or fluorescent lights. Her surgery left her with blindness in the lower right quadrant of her visual field, and although she can navigate pretty well in the world with this blind spot, she avoids driving. Her symptoms returned, though less severely, a few years after the surgery. She says, \"Epilepsy is a major challenge in my life, but I've developed strategies to manage it.\" She is working now on a PhD in biomedical engineering (with a focus on neuroscience), not least because of the intricate ways in which a neurological disorder has affected her own life.\n\nWhen the epileptic focus lies at higher levels of the sensory cortex, in the parietal or the temporal lobes, the epileptic hallucinations may be much more complex. Valerie L., a gifted twenty-eight-year-old doctor, had what were called \"migraines\" from an early age\u2014one-sided headaches preceded by twinkling blue dots. But when she was fifteen, she had a new, unprecedented experience. She said, \"I had run a ten-mile race the day before... the next day I felt very strange.... I had a six-hour nap after a full night of sleep, which was most atypical for me, and then I went to temple with my family: it was a long service, a lot of standing.\" She started to see halos around objects and said to her sister, \"Something weird is happening.\" And then a glass of water at which she was looking suddenly \"multiplied itself,\" so that she saw glasses of water wherever she looked, dozens of them, covering the walls and the ceiling. This went on for perhaps five seconds, \"the longest five seconds of my life,\" she said.\n\nThen she lost consciousness. She came to in an ambulance, hearing the driver say, \"I have a fifteen-year-old girl with a seizure,\" and then realized with a start that _she_ was the girl.\n\nWhen she was sixteen, she had a second, similar attack and was put on antiepileptic medication for the first time.\n\nA third grand mal seizure occurred a year later. Valerie saw vague black shapes in the air (\"like Rorschach ink blots\"), and as she continued to look, these transformed themselves into faces\u2014her mother's face and the faces of other relatives. The faces were motionless, flat, two-dimensional, and \"like negatives,\" so that light-skinned faces were seen as dark, and vice versa. They had wavering edges, \"as if enveloped in flame,\" in the thirty seconds before she had a convulsion and lost consciousness. After this, her doctors changed her antiepileptic medication, and she has had no more grand mal seizures since, though she continues to get visual auras or visual seizures, on average twice a month, more if she is stressed or sleep-deprived.\n\nOn one occasion, when Valerie was in college, she felt weak and not quite herself, so she went to her parents' house for the evening. She and her mother were sitting and talking as Valerie lay in bed, when she suddenly \"saw\" e-mails she had received earlier in the day plastered all over her bedroom. One particular e-mail was multiplied, and one of its images was superimposed on her mother's face, although she could see the face through it. The image of the e-mail was so clear and exact that she could read every word. Objects from her dorm room appeared everywhere she looked. It was a particular object, whether perceived or remembered, that got multiplied, never a whole scene. Her visual multiplications and reiterations are now of familiar faces for the most part, \"projected\" onto the walls, the ceiling, any available surface. This sort of spreading of visual perceptions in space (polyopia) and in time (palinopsia) was vividly described by Macdonald Critchley, who first used the term palinopsia (he originally called it paliopsia).\n\nValerie may also experience perceptual changes in relation to her seizures; indeed, her first intimation of a seizure is sometimes that her own reflection looks different\u2014her eyes, in particular. She may feel, \"This is not me,\" or \"It's a close relative.\" If she can go to sleep, she can avert a seizure. But if she has not been able to sleep well, other people's faces may also look different the next morning\u2014\"strange\" and distorted, especially around the eyes, though not so much that they are unrecognizable. Between attacks, she may have the opposite feeling\u2014a hyperfamiliarity, so that everyone seems familiar to her. It is a feeling so overwhelming that sometimes she cannot resist greeting a stranger, even though, intellectually, she can say to herself, \"This is just an illusion. It seems most unlikely that I have ever met this person.\"\n\nDespite her epileptic auras, Valerie lives a full and productive life, keeping up with a demanding career. She is reassured by three things: that she has not had a generalized seizure for ten years, that whatever is provoking her attacks is not progressive (she had a minor head injury when she was twelve and probably has a small temporal lobe scar from that injury), and that medication can provide adequate control.\n\nBoth Jen and Valerie were initially misdiagnosed as having \"migraine\"\u2014such confusion of epilepsy and migraine is not uncommon. Gowers was at pains to differentiate them in his 1907 book, _The Border-land of Epilepsy_ , and his lucid descriptions bring out some of the differences between the two ailments as well as some of the similarities. Both migraine and epilepsy are paroxysmal\u2014they present themselves suddenly, go through their course, and then disappear. Both show a slow movement or \"march\" of symptoms and the electrical disturbance underlying them\u2014in migraine this takes fifteen or twenty minutes; in epilepsy it is often just a matter of seconds. It is unusual for people with migraine to have complex hallucinations, whereas epilepsy commonly affects higher parts of the brain; there it may evoke very complex, multisensorial \"reminiscences\" or dreamlike fantasies, like one of Gowers's patients, who saw \"London in ruins, herself the sole spectator of this desolate scene.\"\n\nLaura M., a psychology major in college, at first ignored her \"strange attacks\" but finally consulted an epilepsy specialist, who found that she was \"experiencing stereotypic episodes of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, visual and emotional flashbacks of a dream or series of dreams, usually one of five dreams... which she had in the past ten years.\" These could happen several times daily and were aggravated by tiredness or by marijuana. When she started taking an antiepileptic medication, her attacks decreased in severity and frequency, but she had increasingly unacceptable side effects\u2014in particular, a feeling of overstimulation followed by a \"crash\" later in the day. She took herself off the medication and reduced her use of marijuana, and now her attacks are at a tolerable level, perhaps half a dozen per month. They last only a few seconds, and although the internal feeling is overwhelming and she may \"zone out\" a little, others might not notice anything amiss. The only physical symptom she feels during these attacks is an impulse to roll her eyeballs back, which she resists when others are around.\n\nWhen I met Laura, she said she had always had vivid, richly colored dreams that she could easily remember, and she characterized most of them as \"geographic,\" involving complex landscapes. She felt that the visual hallucinations or flashbacks she had in her seizures all drew on the landscapes of those dreams.\n\nOne such dreamscape was Chicago, where she lived as a teenager. Most of her seizures transported her to this dream Chicago\u2014she has drawn maps of it, which contain actual landmarks, but in which the topography is strangely transformed. Other dreamscapes center around the hill in another city, where her university is situated. \"For a few seconds,\" she told me, \"I flash back to a dream I have had, into the world of that dream, being in a different time and place. The places are 'familiar,' but don't really exist.\"\n\nAnother dreamscape, often reexperienced in seizures, is a transformed version of a hill town in Italy where she lived for a while. There is another, frightening one: \"I'm with my little sister, on some sort of beach. We're being bombed. And I lose her.... People are being killed.\" Sometimes, she says, the dreamscapes blend together, a hill somehow turning into a beach. There are always strong emotional components\u2014fear or excitement, usually\u2014and these emotions can dominate her for fifteen minutes or so after the actual attack.\n\nLaura has quite a lot of apprehension about these odd episodes. On one of her maps, she wrote, \"This all really scares me. Please, help me any way possible. Thanks!\" She says she would give a million dollars to be free of these attacks\u2014but she also feels they are a portal to another form of consciousness, another time and place, another world, although that portal is not under her control.\n\nIn his 1881 _Epilepsy_ , Gowers gave many examples of simple sensory seizures and noted that auditory warnings of a seizure were as common as visual ones. Some of his patients spoke of hearing \"the sound of a drum,\" \"hissing,\" \"ringing,\" \"rustling,\" and sometimes more complex auditory hallucinations, such as music. (Music can be a hallucination in seizures, but real music may also trigger seizures. In _Musicophilia_ , I described several examples of such musicogenic epilepsy.)3\n\nThere may also be chewing and lip-smacking movements in a complex partial seizure, occasionally accompanied by hallucinatory tastes.4 Olfactory hallucinations, either alone as an isolated aura or as a part of complex seizure, may occur in various forms, as David Daly described in a 1958 review paper. Many of these hallucinatory smells seem unidentifiable or indescribable (except as \"pleasant\" or \"unpleasant\"), even though a patient will have the same smell in every seizure. One of Daly's patients said his hallucinatory smell odor was \"somewhat like the smell of frying meat\"; another said it was \"like passing a perfume shop.\" One woman would experience an odor of peaches so vivid, so real, that she was certain there must be peaches in the room.5 Another patient had a \"reminiscence\" associated with hallucinatory smells which \"seemed to recall odors in his mother's kitchen when he was a child.\"\n\nIn 1956, Robert Efron, a naval physician, provided an extraordinarily detailed description of his patient Thelma B., a middle-aged professional singer. Mrs. B. experienced olfactory symptoms in her seizures, and she also gave a striking description of what Hughlings Jackson called doubled consciousness:\n\nI can be perfectly well in every way when suddenly I feel snatched away. I seem to feel as if I'm in two places at once but in neither place at all\u2014it is a feeling of being remote. I can read, write and talk and can even sing my lyrics. I know exactly what is going on but I somehow don't seem to be in my own skin.... When this feeling happens I know that I'm going to have a convulsion. I keep trying to stop it from happening. No matter what I do, it always comes. Everything goes ahead like a railroad schedule. At this part of my attack I feel very active. If I'm home I make beds, dust, sweep or do the dishes. My sister says that I do everything at breakneck speed\u2014I rush around like a chicken with his head cut off. But to me it all seems to be in slow motion. I am very interested in the time, I'm always looking at my watch and asking someone the time every few minutes. That is why I know exactly how long this part of the attack lasts. It has been as short as ten minutes or may last the better part of a day; it is real hell then. Usually it lasts about twenty to thirty minutes. All this time I feel that I'm remote. It is like being outside a room and looking in through a keyhole, or as if I'm God just looking down on the world but not belonging to it.\n\nAt about the halfway point in her seizure, Mrs. B. said, she would get a \"funny idea\" in her head involving the anticipation of a smell:\n\nI expect to smell something at any moment, but I don't yet.... The first time it ever happened, I was out in the country and I was feeling funny. I was in a field picking forget-me-nots. I remember very well that I kept smelling these flowers even though I knew they had no odour. For about half an hour I kept sniffing them because I was sure they would begin to smell soon... even though I knew perfectly well at that time that forget-me-nots have no odour at all.... I know it and don't know it at the same time.\n\nIn this second phase of her epileptic aura, Mrs. B. continued to feel more and more \"remote,\" until finally she knew a convulsion was near. She would lie on the floor, away from the furniture, to avoid hurting herself during the convulsion. Then, she said:\n\nJust when I seem to be as remote as I possibly could get, I suddenly get a smell like an explosion or a crash. There is no buildup. It is all there at once. At the same moment that the smell crashes through, I'm back in the real world\u2014I no longer feel remote. The smell is a disgusting sweet, penetrating odour like very cheap perfume.... Everything seems very quiet. I don't know if I can hear. I am all alone with the smell.\n\nThe smell would last for a few seconds and then go away, though the silence remained for five or ten seconds, until she heard a voice off to her right calling her name. She said:\n\nThis is not like hearing a voice in a dream. It is a _real_ voice. Every time I hear it I fall for it. It is not a man's voice or a woman's voice. I don't recognize it. There is one thing that I do know and that is if I turn towards the voice I have a convulsion.\n\nShe would try hard not to turn towards the voice, but it was irresistible. Finally, she would lose consciousness and have a convulsion.\n\nGowers had a \"favorite\" seizure, one that he returned to in his writing many times, for this patient, like Thelma B., had an epileptic aura that involved many different sorts of hallucinations, unfolding in a \"march\" or stereotyped progression of symptoms. This showed Gowers how an epileptic excitation might move about the brain, stimulating first one part, then another, and evoking corresponding hallucinations as it did so. He first described this patient in his 1881 book _Epilepsy_ :\n\nThe patient was an intelligent man, twenty-six years of age, and all his attacks began in the same manner. First there was a sensation [under the ribs, on the left side] \"like pain with a cramp;\" then, this sensation continuing, a kind of lump seemed to pass up the left side of the chest, with a \"thump, thump,\" and when it reached the upper part of the chest it became a \"knocking,\" which was heard as well as felt. The sensation rose up to the left ear, and then was like the \"hissing of a railway engine,\" and this seemed to \"work over his head.\" Then he suddenly and invariably saw before him an old woman in a brown-stuff dress, who offered him something which had the smell of Tonquin beans. The old woman then disappeared, and two great lights came before him\u2014round lights, side by side, which got nearer and nearer with a jerking motion. When the lights appeared the hissing noise ceased, and he felt a choking sensation in the throat, and lost consciousness in the fit, which, from the description, was undoubtedly epileptic.\n\nFor most people, focal seizures always consist of the same symptoms repeated with little or no variation, but others may have a large repertoire of auras. Amy Tan, the novelist, whose epilepsy may have been caused by Lyme disease, described her hallucinations to me.\n\n\"When I realized the hallucinations were seizures,\" she said, \"I found them fascinating as brain quirks. I tried to notice the details of the ones that repeated.\" And, being a writer, she gave all of her repeating hallucinations names. The most frequent one she calls the \"Illuminated Spinning Odometer.\" She describes it as\n\nwhat you might see on the dash of your car at night... except the numbers begin spinning more and more rapidly, like a gas pump giving you a running tally of the cost of gas. After about twenty seconds, the numbers begin to disintegrate and the odometer itself falls apart, and gradually disappears. Because it happened so often... I made it a game to see if I could name the numbers as they were falling, or to see if I could control the speed of the odometer or make the hallucination last longer. I could not.\n\nNone of her other hallucinations moved. For a time, she would often see\n\nthe figure of a woman in long white Victorian dress in the foreground of a scene with other people in the background. It looked like a faint Victorian photograph, or a black and white version of one of those Renoir paintings of people in the park.... The figure was not looking at me, not moving.... I did not mistake it as a live scene or real people. The image had no significance to anything in my life. I did not feel any heightened emotions associated with it.\n\nShe sometimes has unpleasant odor hallucinations or physical sensations, \"the ground beneath me wobbling, for instance,\" she says, adding, \"I have to ask others if an earthquake is happening.\"\n\nShe often experiences d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu but finds her occasional jamais vu much more disturbing:\n\nThe first time it happened, I remember looking at a building I had passed hundreds of times and thinking I had never noticed it was that color or shape, etc. And I then looked at everything around me, and none of it looked familiar. It was so disorienting I could not move an inch further. In the same way, I would sometimes not _recognize_ my home, but I knew I was _in_ my home. I had learned to be patient and wait for it to pass in twenty or thirty seconds.\n\nAmy remarks that her seizures most often occur when she is waking up or dozing off. She occasionally sees \"Hollywood aliens\" dangling from the ceiling. They look like \"someone's inept attempt to make an alien creature for a movie set... like a spider with a Darth Vader\u2013like helmet head.\"\n\nShe emphasizes that the images have no personal relevance, are not related to anything that happened that day, and carry no special associations or emotional significance. \"They do not stay in my mind as anything to think about,\" she observes. \"They are more like the detritus of those parts of dreams that mean nothing, like random images arbitrarily flashed in front of me.\"\n\nStephen L., an affable, outgoing man, first consulted me in the summer of 2007. He brought with him his \"neurohistory,\" as he called it\u2014seventeen pages of single-spaced typing\u2014adding that he had \"a little graphomania.\" He said his problems started after an accident thirty years before, when his car was broadsided by another, and his head slammed against the windshield. He suffered a severe concussion but seemed to recover fully after a few days. Two months later, he started to have brief attacks of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu: he would suddenly feel that whatever he was experiencing, doing, thinking, or feeling he had already experienced, done, thought, or felt before. At first he was intrigued by these brief convictions of familiarity and found them pleasant (\"like the breeze going past my face\"), but within a few weeks he was getting them thirty or forty times a day. On one occasion, to prove that the feeling of familiarity was an illusion, he stamped his foot, threw one leg high in the air, and did a sort of Highland fling in front of a washroom mirror. He _knew_ he had never done such a thing before, but it _felt_ as though he were repeating something he had done many times.\n\nHis attacks became not only more frequent but more complex, the d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu being only the start of a \"cascade\" (as he put it) of other experiences, which, once started, would move forward irresistibly. The d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu would be followed by a sharp icy or burning pain in the chest, then by an alteration of hearing, so that sounds become louder, more resonant, seemed to reverberate all around him. He might hear a song as clearly as if it were being sung in the next room, and what he heard would always be a specific performance of the song\u2014for example, a particular Neil Young song (\"After the Gold Rush\") exactly as he had heard it during a concert at his college the year before. He might then go on to experience \"a bland, pungent smell\" and a taste \"which corresponded with the smell.\"\n\nOn one occasion Stephen dreamt he was having one of his aura cascades and woke to find that he was indeed in the midst of one. But then to the usual cascade was added a strange out-of-body experience, in which he seemed to be looking down at his body as it lay in bed, through an elevated open window. This out-of-body experience seemed real\u2014and very frightening. Frightening, in part, because it suggested to him that more and more of his brain was being involved in his seizures, and that things were getting out of control.\n\nNonetheless, he kept these attacks to himself until Christmas of 1976, when he had a convulsion, a grand mal seizure; he was in bed with a girl at the time, and she described it to him. He consulted a neurologist, who confirmed that he had temporal lobe epilepsy, probably caused by injury to the right temporal lobe sustained during the car crash. He was put on antiepileptics\u2014first one, then others\u2014but he continued to have temporal lobe seizures almost daily and two or more grand mal seizures a month. Finally, after thirteen years of trying different antiepileptic medications, Stephen consulted another neurologist for evaluation and consideration of possible surgery.\n\nIn 1990, Stephen had surgery to remove an epileptic focus in his right temporal lobe, and he felt so much better after the surgery that he decided to wean himself off medication. Then, unfortunately, he had another car accident, after which his seizures returned. These were not responsive to medication, and he had to have much more extensive brain surgery in 1997. Nevertheless, he continues to need antiepileptic medication and to have various seizure symptoms.\n\nStephen feels that there has been a \"metamorphosis\" in his personality since the start of his seizures, that he has become \"more spiritual, more creative, more artistic\"\u2014specifically, he wonders whether \"the right side\" of his brain (as he puts it) is being stimulated, coming to dominate him. In particular, music has assumed greater and greater importance for him. He had taken up the harmonica in his college days, and now, in his fifties, he plays \"obsessively,\" for hours. He often writes or draws for hours at a time, too. He feels that his personality has become \"all or none\"\u2014he may be either hyperfocused or completely distracted. He has also developed a tendency to sudden rage: on one occasion, when a car cut him off, he attacked the offender physically, hurling a can at his car, then punching him. (He wonders, in retrospect, whether some seizure activity played a part in this.) Despite all his problems, Stephen L. is able to continue working in medical research, and he remains an engaging, sensitive, and creative person.\n\nThere was little that Gowers or his contemporaries could do for patients with complex or focal seizures, other than giving them sedative drugs like bromides. Many patients with epilepsy, especially temporal lobe epilepsy, were considered to be \"medically intractable\" until the introduction of the first specific antiepileptic drug in the 1930s\u2014and even then the most severely affected patients could not be helped. But the 1930s also saw a much more radical, surgical approach, undertaken by Wilder Penfield, a brilliant young American neurosurgeon working in Montreal, and his colleague Herbert Jasper. In order to remove the epileptic focus in the cerebral cortex, Penfield and Jasper first had to find it by mapping the patient's temporal lobe, and this required the patient to be fully conscious. (Local anesthesia is used when opening the skull, but the brain itself is insensitive to touch and pain.) Over a twenty-year period, the \"Montreal procedure\" was carried out in more than five hundred patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. These people had very diverse seizure symptoms, but forty or so of them had what Penfield termed \"experiential seizures,\" in which, seemingly, a fixed and vivid memory of the past would suddenly burst into the mind with hallucinatory force, causing a doubling of consciousness: a patient would feel equally that he was in the operating room in Montreal and that he was, say, riding horseback in a forest. By systematically going over the surface of the exposed temporal cortex with his electrodes, Penfield was able to find particular cortical points in each patient where stimulation caused a sudden, involuntary recall\u2014an experiential seizure.6 Removal of these points could prevent further such seizures, without affecting the memory itself.\n\nPenfield described many examples of experiential seizures:\n\nAt operation it is usually quite clear that the evoked experiential response is a random reproduction of whatever composed the stream of consciousness during some interval of the patient's past life.... It may have been a time of listening to music, a time of looking in at the door of a dance hall, a time of imagining the action of robbers from a comic strip... a time of lying in the delivery room at birth, a time of being frightened by a menacing man, a time of watching people enter the room with snow on their clothes.... It may have been a time of standing on the corner of Jacob and Washington, South Bend, Indiana.\n\nPenfield's notion of actual memories or experiences being reactivated has been disputed. We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.7\n\nAnd yet, some memories do, seemingly, remain vivid, minutely detailed, and relatively fixed throughout life. This is especially so with traumatic memories or memories carrying an intense emotional charge and significance. Penfield was at pains, however, to emphasize that epileptic flashbacks seem to lack any such special qualities.8 \"It would be very difficult to imagine,\" he wrote, \"that some of the trivial incidents and songs recalled during stimulation or epileptic discharge could have any possible emotional significance to the patient, even if one is acutely aware of this possibility.\" He felt that the flashbacks consisted of \"random\" segments of experience, fortuitously associated with a seizure focus.\n\nCuriously, though Penfield described such a variety of experiential hallucinations, he made no reference to what we now call \"ecstatic\" seizures\u2014seizures that produce feelings of ecstasy or transcendent joy, such as Dostoevsky described. Dostoevsky's seizures started in childhood, but they became frequent only in his forties, after his return from exile in Siberia. In his occasional grand mal attacks, he would emit (his wife wrote) \"a fearful cry, a cry that had nothing human about it,\" and then fall to the floor, unconscious. Many of these attacks were preceded by a remarkable mystical or ecstatic aura\u2014but sometimes there would be only the aura, without any subsequent convulsions or lack of consciousness. The first occurred one Easter Eve, as his friend Sophia Kowalewski wrote in her _Childhood Recollections_ (Alajouanine quotes this in his paper on Dostoevsky's epilepsy). Dostoevsky was talking with two friends about religion when a bell started to toll midnight. Suddenly he exclaimed, \"God exists, He exists!\" He later went into detail about the experience:\n\nThe air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don't remember anything else. You all, healthy people, he said, can't imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second or so before our fit.... I don't know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.\n\nHe gave similar descriptions on a number of other occasions, and endowed several of the characters in his novels with seizures akin to, and sometimes identical with, his own. One such involves Prince Myshkin in _The Idiot_ :\n\nDuring these moments as rapid as lightning, the impression of the life and the consciousness were in himself ten times more intense. His spirit and his heart were illuminated by an immense sense of light; all his emotions, all his doubts, all his anxiety calmed together to be changed into a sovereign serenity made up of lighted joy, harmony and hope; then, his reason was raised up to the understanding of the final cause.\n\nThere are also descriptions of ecstatic seizures in _The Devils_ , _The Brothers Karamazov_ , and _The Insulted and the Injured_ , while in _The Double_ there are descriptions of \"forced thinking\" and \"dreamy states\" almost identical with what Hughlings Jackson was describing at much the same time in his great neurological articles.\n\nOver and above his ecstatic auras\u2014which always seemed to Dostoevsky revelations of ultimate truth, direct and valid knowledge of God\u2014there were remarkable and progressive changes in his personality throughout the later parts of his life, his time of greatest creativity. Th\u00e9ophile Alajouanine, a French neurologist, observed that these changes were clear when one compared Dostoevsky's early, realistic works with the great, mystical novels he wrote in later life. Alajouanine suggested that \"epilepsy had created in the person of Dostoevsky a 'double man'... a rationalist and a mystic; each having the better of the other according to the moment... [and] more and more the mystical one seems to have prevailed.\"\n\nIt was this change, seemingly progressing even between Dostoevsky's seizures (\"interictally,\" in neurological jargon), that especially fascinated the American neurologist Norman Geschwind, who wrote a number of papers on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s. He noted Dostoevsky's increasingly obsessive preoccupation with morality and proper behavior, his growing tendency to \"get embroiled in petty arguments,\" his lack of humor, his relative indifference to sexuality, and, despite his high moral tone and seriousness, \"a readiness to become angry on slight provocation.\" Geschwind spoke of all this as an \"interictal personality syndrome\" (it is now called \"Geschwind syndrome\"). Patients with it often develop an intense preoccupation with religion (Geschwind referred to this as \"hyper-religiosity\"). They may also develop, like Stephen L., compulsive writing or unusually intense artistic or musical passions.\n\nWhether or not an interictal personality syndrome develops\u2014and it does not seem to be universal or inevitable in those who have temporal lobe epilepsy\u2014there is no doubt that those who have ecstatic seizures may be profoundly moved by them, and even actively seek to have more such seizures. In 2003, Hansen Asheim and Eylert Brodtkorb, in Norway, published a study of eleven patients with ecstatic seizures; eight of them wished to experience their seizures again, and of these, five found ways to induce them. More than any other sort of seizure, ecstatic seizures may be felt as epiphanies or revelations of a deeper reality.\n\nOrrin Devinsky, a former student of Geschwind's, has been a pioneer himself in the investigation of temporal lobe epilepsy and the great range of neuropsychiatric experiences which may be associated with it\u2014autoscopy, out-of-body experiences, d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu and jamais vu, hyperfamiliarity, and ecstatic states during seizures, as well as personality changes between seizures. He and his colleagues have been able to perform clinical and video EEG monitoring in patients as they are having ecstatic-religious seizures, and thus to observe the precise coinciding of their \"theophanies\" with seizure activity in temporal lobe seizure foci (nearly always these are right-sided).9\n\nSuch revelations may take different forms; Devinsky has told me of one woman who, following a head injury, started to have brief episodes of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu and a strange, indescribable smell. After a cluster of these complex partial seizures, she entered an exalted state in which God, with the form and voice of an angel, told her to run for Congress. Though she had never been religious or political before, she acted on God's words at once.10\n\nOn occasion, ecstatic hallucinations can be dangerous, although this is very rare. Devinsky and his colleague George Lai described how one of their patients had a seizure-related vision in which \"he saw Christ and heard a voice that commanded him to kill his wife and then himself. He proceeded to act upon the hallucinations,\" killing his wife and then stabbing himself. This patient ceased to have seizures after the seizure focus in his right temporal lobe was removed.\n\nSuch epileptic hallucinations bear a considerable resemblance to the command hallucinations of psychosis, even though the epileptic patient may have no psychiatric history. It takes a strong (and skeptical) person to resist such hallucinations and to refuse them either credence or obedience, especially if they have a revelatory or epiphanic quality and seem to point to a special\u2014and perhaps exalted\u2014destiny.\n\nAs William James observed, an acute and passionate religious conviction in a single person can sway thousands of people. The life of Joan of Arc exemplified this. People have puzzled for nearly six hundred years as to how a farmer's daughter with no formal education could have found such a sense of mission and succeeded in getting thousands of others to aid her in an attempt to drive the English out of France. The early hypotheses of divine (or diabolic) inspiration have given way to medical ones, with psychiatric diagnoses vying with neurological ones. Much evidence is available from the transcripts of her trial (and her \"rehabilitation\" twenty-five years later) and from the recollections of contemporaries. None of these is conclusive, but they do suggest, at least, that Joan of Arc may have had temporal lobe epilepsy with ecstatic auras.\n\nJoan experienced visions and voices from the age of thirteen. These came in discrete episodes lasting seconds or minutes at most. She was very frightened by the first visitation, but later she derived great joy and an explicit sense of mission from her visions. The episodes were sometimes precipitated by the sounds of church bells. Joan described her first \"visitations\":\n\nI was thirteen when I had a Voice from God for my help and guidance. The first time that I heard this Voice, I was very much frightened; it was mid-day, in the summer, in my father's garden... I heard this Voice to my right, towards the Church; rarely do I hear it without its being accompanied also by a light. This light comes from the same side as the Voice. Generally it is a great light.... When I heard it for the third time, I recognized that it was the Voice of an Angel. This voice has always guarded me well, and I have always understood it; it instructed me to be good and to go often to Church; it told me it was necessary for me to come into France... it said to me two or three times a week: \"You must go into France.\"... It said to me: \"Go, raise the siege which is being made before the City of Orleans. Go!\"... and I replied that I was but a poor girl, who knew nothing of riding or fighting.... There is never a day when I do not hear this Voice; and I have much need of it.\n\nMany other aspects of Joan's putative seizures, as well as evidence of her clarity, her reasonableness, and her modesty, were explored in a 1991 article by the neurologists Elizabeth Foote-Smith and Lydia Bayne. While they present a very plausible case, other neurologists disagree, and one cannot hope to see the matter definitively resolved. The evidence is soft, as it must be for all historical cases.\n\nEcstatic or religious or mystical seizures occur in only a small number of those who have temporal lobe epilepsy. Is this because there is something special\u2014a preexisting disposition to religion or metaphysical belief\u2014in these particular people? Or is it because the seizure stimulates particular parts of the brain that serve to mediate religious feeling?11 Both, of course, could be the case. And yet quite skeptical people, indifferent to religion, not given to religious belief, may\u2014to their own astonishment\u2014have a religious experience during a seizure.\n\nKenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard, in a 1970 paper, provided several examples of this. One related to a bus conductor who had an ecstatic seizure while collecting fares:\n\nHe was suddenly overcome with a feeling of bliss. He felt he was literally in Heaven. He collected the fares correctly, telling his passengers at the same time how pleased he was to be in Heaven.... He remained in this state of exaltation, hearing divine and angelic voices, for two days. Afterwards he was able to recall these experiences and he continued to believe in their validity.... During the next two years, there was no change in his personality; he did not express any peculiar notions but remained religious.... Three years later, following three seizures on three successive days, he became elated again. He stated that his mind had \"cleared.\"... During this episode he lost his faith.\n\nHe now no longer believed in heaven and hell, in an afterlife, or in the divinity of Christ. This second conversion\u2014to atheism\u2014carried the same excitement and revelatory quality as the original religious conversion. (Geschwind, in a 1974 lecture subsequently published in 2009, noted that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy might have multiple religious conversions and described one of his own patients as \"a girl in her twenties who is now on her fifth religion.\")\n\nEcstatic seizures shake one's foundations of belief, one's world picture, even if one has previously been wholly indifferent to any thought of the transcendent or supernatural. And the universality of fervent mystical and religious feelings\u2014a sense of the holy\u2014in every culture suggests that there may indeed be a biological basis for them; they may, like aesthetic feelings, be part of our human heritage. To speak of a biological basis and biological precursors of religious emotion\u2014and even, as ecstatic seizures suggest, a very specific neural basis, in the temporal lobes and their connections\u2014is only to speak of natural causes. It says nothing of the value, the meaning, the \"function\" of such emotions, or of the narratives and beliefs we may construct on their basis.\n\n1. When Hippocrates wrote \"On the Sacred Disease,\" he was bowing to the then-popular notion of epilepsy's divine origin, but he dismisses this in his opening sentence: \"The disease called sacred... appears to me no more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause from which it originates, like other affections.\"\n\n2. Beginning in 1861, when he was twenty-four, Hughlings Jackson published many major papers\u2014on epilepsy, aphasia, and other subjects, as well as what he called \"evolution and dissolution in the nervous system.\" A selection of these, filling two large volumes, was published in 1931, twenty years after his death. In his later years, Jackson published a series of twenty-one short, gemlike papers in the _Lancet_ under the title _Neurological Fragments_. These were collected and published in book form in 1925.\n\n3. David Ferrier, a contemporary of Gowers's, moved to London in 1870, where he was mentored by Hughlings Jackson (Ferrier became a great experimental neurologist in his own right\u2014he was the first to use electrical stimulation to map the monkey's brain). One of Ferrier's epileptic patients had a remarkable synesthetic aura, in which she would experience \"a smell like that of green thunder.\" (This is quoted by Macdonald Critchley in his 1939 paper on visual and auditory hallucinations.)\n\n4. Hughlings Jackson described such seizures in 1875 and thought they might originate from a structure in the brain located beneath the olfactory cortex, the uncinate gyrus. In 1898 Jackson and W. S. Colman were able to confirm this by autopsy in Dr. Z., a patient who had died of an overdose of chloral hydrate. (More recently, David C. Taylor and Susan M. Marsh have recounted the fascinating history of Dr. Z., an eminent physician named Arthur Thomas Myers whose brother, F. W. H. Myers, had founded the Society for Psychical Research.)\n\n5. In the 1946 film _A Matter of Life and Death_ (called _Stairway to Heaven_ in the United States), David Niven's character, a pilot, has complex epileptic visions that are always preceded by an olfactory hallucination (the smell of burnt onions) and a musical one (a recurrent theme of six notes). Diane Friedman has written a fascinating book about this, indicating how meticulous the director, Michael Powell, was in consulting neurologists about the forms of epileptic hallucinations.\n\n6. Penfield was a great physiologist as well as a neurosurgeon, and in the process of searching for epileptic foci, he was able to map most of the basic functions of the living human brain. He showed, for example, exactly where sensations and movements of specific body parts were represented in the cerebral cortex\u2014his sensory and motor homunculi are iconic. Like Weir Mitchell, Penfield was an engaging writer, and after he and Herbert Jasper published their magnum opus, _Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain_ , in 1958, he continued to write about the brain, as well as writing novels and biographies, until his death at eighty-six.\n\n7. For Gowers and his contemporaries in the early twentieth century, memories were imprints in the brain (as for Socrates they were analogous to impressions made in soft wax)\u2014imprints that could be activated by the act of recollection. It was not until the crucial studies of Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s that this classical view could be disputed. Whereas Ebbinghaus and other early investigators had studied rote memory\u2014how many digits could be remembered, for instance\u2014Bartlett presented his subjects with pictures or stories and then questioned and requestioned them over a period of months. Their accounts of what they had seen or heard were somewhat different (and sometimes quite transformed) on each re-remembering. These experiments convinced Bartlett to think in terms not of a static thing called \"memory,\" but rather a dynamic process of \"remembering.\" He wrote:\n\nRemembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience.... It is thus hardly ever really exact.\n\n8. Penfield sometimes used the term \"flashback\" for experiential hallucinations. The term is also used in quite different contexts, as in post-traumatic flashbacks, where there are recurrent hallucinatory replayings of traumatic events.\n\nThe term \"flashback\" is also used for a sudden, transient reexperiencing of a drug effect\u2014suddenly feeling, for example, the effects of LSD, even though one has not taken it for months.\n\n9. One such patient, who had very little in the way of religious interests as an adult, had his first religious seizure at a picnic, as Devinsky described to me: \"His friends observed at first that he stared, became pale, and was unresponsive. Then suddenly, he began to run in circles for two or three minutes yelling, 'I am free! I am free!... I am Jesus! I am Jesus!' \"\n\nThe patient later had a similar seizure which was recorded on video EEG, and, just before the seizure, Devinsky noted, the patient was slow to respond and disoriented regarding time and place:\n\nWhen asked if there was anything wrong, he replied: \"nothing is wrong, I am doing well... I am very happy\" and when asked whether he knew where he was, he replied with a smile and a surprised look: \"Of course I know. I am in heaven right now;... I am fine.\"\n\nHe remained in this state for ten minutes, then went on to a generalized seizure. Later, he remembered his ecstatic aura \"as if it were a vivid and happy dream\" from which he had now awoken, but he had no memory of the questions put to him during the aura.\n\n10. She ran as a Republican in a district that had been Democratic for a very long time, and lost by only a narrow margin. Whenever she appeared in public during her campaign, she said that God had told her to run, and this apparently persuaded thousands of people to vote for her, despite her manifest lack of political experience or skills.\n\n11. The evidence here has been discussed in a number of books, including Kevin Nelson's _The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience_. It is also the theme of a novel, _Lying Awake_ , by Mark Salzman; the protagonist is a nun who has ecstatic seizures in which she communes with God. Her seizures, it turns out, are caused by a tumor in her temporal lobe, and it must be removed before it enlarges and kills her. But will its removal also remove her portal to heaven, preventing her from ever communing with God again?\n\n# 9\n\nBisected: Hallucinations in the Half-Field\n\nOne does not see with the eyes; one sees with the brain, which has dozens of different systems for analyzing the input from the eyes. In the primary visual cortex, located in the occipital lobes, at the back of the brain, there are point-to-point mappings of the retina onto the cortex, and it is here that light, shape, orientation, and location in the visual field are represented. Impulses from the eyes take a circuitous route to the cerebral cortex, some of them crossing to the opposite side of the brain as they do so, so that the left half of the visual field of each eye goes to the right occipital cortex, and vice versa. If, therefore, one occipital lobe is damaged (as by a stroke, for example), there will be blindness or impaired vision in the opposite half of the visual field\u2014a hemianopia.\n\nBesides the impairment or loss of vision to one side, there may be positive symptoms, too\u2014hallucinations in the blind or purblind area. About 10 percent of patients with sudden hemianopia get such hallucinations\u2014and immediately recognize them to _be_ hallucinations.\n\nIn contrast to the relatively brief and stereotyped hallucinations of migraine or epilepsy, the hallucinations of hemianopia may continue for days or weeks on end; and, far from being fixed or uniform in format, they tend to be ever changing. Here, one might envisage not a small knot of irritable cells discharging paroxysmally, as in an attack of migraine or epilepsy, but a large area of the brain\u2014whole fields of neurons\u2014in a state of chronic hyperactivity, out of control and misbehaving because of the lessening of forces that normally control or organize them. The mechanism here thus resembles that of Charles Bonnet syndrome.\n\nWhile such notions were implicit in Hughlings Jackson's vision of the nervous system as having hierarchically ordered levels (the higher levels controlling the lower ones, and lower ones starting to behave independently, even anarchically, if released from control by damage at the higher levels), the idea of \"release\" hallucinations was made explicit by L. Jolyon West in his 1962 book _Hallucinations_. A decade later, David G. Cogan, an ophthalmologist, published an influential paper that included short, vivid histories of fifteen patients. Some of them had damage to their eyes, some had damage to their optic nerves or tracts, some had occipital lobe lesions, some had temporal lobe lesions, and some had lesions in the thalamus or the midbrain. Lesions in any of these different places, it seemed, could break the normal network of controls and lead to a release of complex visual hallucinations.\n\nEllen O. was a young woman who came to see me in 2006, about a year after surgery for a vascular malformation in her right occipital lobe. The procedure was a fairly simple one, sealing off the swollen vessels of the malformation. As her doctors had warned her, she had some visual problems following the procedure: a blurring of vision to the left side, as well as some agnosia and alexia\u2014difficulties recognizing people and printed words (English words looked like \"Dutch,\" she said). These difficulties prevented her from driving for six weeks and interfered with her reading and enjoyment of television, but they were transient. She also had visual seizures in the first weeks after surgery. These took the form of simple visual hallucinations, flashes of light and color to the left that lasted a few seconds. The seizures came several times a day at first but had practically ceased by the time she returned to work. She was not too concerned about them, for her doctors had warned her that she might experience such aftereffects.\n\nWhat they had not warned her about was that she might develop complex hallucinations later. The first of these, about six weeks after her surgery, was of a huge flower, occupying most of the left half of her vision. This had been stimulated, she thought, by seeing an actual flower in bright, dazzling sunlight; it seemed to burn itself into her brain, and the vision of it persisted in the left half of her visual field, \"like an afterimage\"\u2014but an afterimage that lasted not for a few seconds but for an entire week. The following weekend, after her brother visited, she saw his face\u2014or, rather, part of his profile, just one eye and cheek\u2014for several days.1\n\nThen she moved from abnormalities of perception\u2014seeing things that were actually there, with perseveration or distortion\u2014to hallucinations, seeing things that were not there. Visions of people's faces (including, at times, her own) became a frequent sort of hallucination. But the faces Ellen saw were \"abnormal, grotesque, exaggerated,\" often just a profile with the teeth or perhaps one eye hugely magnified, completely out of scale with the rest of the features. At other times she saw figures with \"simplified\" faces, expressions, or postures\u2014\"like sketches or cartoons.\" Then Ellen started to hallucinate Kermit the Frog, the _Sesame Street_ puppet, many times a day. \"Why Kermit?\" she asked. \"He means nothing to me.\"\n\nMost of Ellen's hallucinations were flat and still, like photographs or caricatures, though sometimes an expression would change. Kermit the Frog sometimes looked sad, sometimes happy, occasionally angry, though she could not connect his expressions with any of her own moods. Silent, motionless, ever changing, these hallucinations were almost continuous throughout her waking hours (\"They are 24\/7,\" she said). They did not occlude her vision but were superimposed like transparencies over the left half of her visual field. \"They have been getting smaller lately,\" she told me. \"Kermit the Frog is tiny now. He used to occupy most of the left half, and now he's down to a little fraction of it.\" Ellen wondered whether she would have these hallucinations for the rest of her life. I said that I thought their diminution a very good sign; perhaps one day Kermit would be too small to see at all.\n\nWhat was going on in her brain? she asked me. Why, above all, was she getting these odd and sometimes nightmarish hallucinations of grotesque faces? From what depths did they come? Surely it was not normal to imagine such things. Was she becoming psychotic, going mad?\n\nI told her that the impairment of vision on one side following her surgery had probably led to heightened activity in parts of the brain higher up in the visual pathway, in the temporal lobes, where figures and faces are recognized, and perhaps in the parietal lobes, too; and that this heightened, at times uncontrolled, activity was causing her complex hallucinations and also the extraordinary persistence of vision, the palinopsia, she was experiencing. The particular hallucinations which so horrified her\u2014of deformed and dismembered faces or faces with exaggerated, monstrous eyes or teeth\u2014were, in fact, typical of abnormal activity in an area of the temporal lobes called the superior temporal sulcus. They were neurological faces, not psychotic ones.\n\nEllen wrote to me periodically with updates, and six years after our initial visit, she wrote: \"I would not say that I am entirely recovered from my visual problems; more that I am living more harmoniously with them. My hallucinations are much smaller, but they are still there. Mostly I see the colorful orb all the time, but it no longer distracts me as much.\"\n\nShe still has some difficulty with reading, especially when she is tired. When she read a book recently, she said,\n\nI lost a word or two in my color spot (I had a black\/blind spot after surgery, but it turned into a colored spot a few weeks later, and I still have it. My hallucinations are around that spot.)... As I type now, after a very long day at work, there is a very faint black-and-white Mickey Mouse from the thirties just off center to the left. He's transparent, so I'm able to see my computer screen as I type. I do, however, make many mistakes typing, as I can't always see the key I need.\n\nBut Ellen's blind spot has not prevented her from pursuing graduate courses and even marathon running, as she reported with characteristic good humor:\n\nI ran the New York City marathon in November and tripped on this metal ring, a piece of garbage, on the Verrazano Bridge a little before the second mile. It was on my left side, and I didn't even see it, as I was only looking to my right. I got back up and finished, although I did break a small bone in my hand\u2014which, I think, makes for a wonderful running injury story. In the orthopedics waiting room when I was there, everyone else who had finished the marathon had knee or hamstring injuries.\n\nWhile Ellen's complex hallucinations started several weeks after her operation, similar \"release\" hallucinations may appear almost immediately with sudden damage to the occipital cortex. This was the case with Marlene H., a woman in her fifties who came to see me in 1989. She told me that she had awoken one Friday morning in December 1988 with a headache and visual symptoms. She had had migraines for years, and at first she took this as just another visual migraine. But the visual symptoms were different this time: she saw \"flashing lights all over... shimmering lights... arcs of lightning... like a Frankenstein thing,\" and these did not go away in a few minutes, like her usual migraine zigzags, but continued all through the weekend. Then, on Sunday evening, the visual disturbances took on a more complex character. In the upper part of the visual field, to the right, she saw a writhing form \"like a Monarch caterpillar, black and yellow, its cilia glistening,\" along with \"incandescent yellow lights, like a Broadway show, going up and down, on and off, nonstop.\" Though her doctor had reassured her that this was just \"an atypical migraine,\" things went from bad to worse. On Wednesday, \"the bathtub seemed to be crawling with ants... there were cobwebs covering the walls and ceiling... people seemed to have lattices on their faces.\" Two days later she started to experience gross perceptual disturbances: \"My husband's legs looked really short, distorted, like someone in a trick mirror. It was funny.\" But it was less funny, and rather frightening, in the market that afternoon: \"Everyone looked ugly, parts of their faces were gone, and eyes\u2014there seemed a blackness in their eyes\u2014everyone looked grotesque.\" Cars seemed to appear suddenly to the right. Testing her visual fields, waggling her fingers to either side, Marlene found that she could not see them on the right until they crossed the mid-line; she had lost all vision to the right side.\n\nIt was only at this point, days after her initial symptoms, that she was finally investigated medically. A CAT scan of her brain revealed a large hemorrhage in the left occipital lobe. There was little to be done therapeutically at this stage; one could only hope that there would be some resolution of her symptoms, some healing or adaptation with time.\n\nAfter some weeks, the hallucinations and perceptual distortions, which had been largely confined to the right side, did start to die down, but Marlene was left with a variety of visual deficits. She could see, at least to one side, but was bewildered by what she saw: \"I would have preferred to be blind,\" she told me, \"instead of not being able to make sense of what I saw.... I had to go slowly, deliberately, to put things together. I would see my sofa, a chair\u2014but I couldn't put it together. It did not add up, at first, to a 'scene.'... I was a very fast reader before. Now I was slow. The letters looked different.\"\n\n\"When she looks at her watch,\" her husband interpolated, \"at first she can't process it.\"\n\nBesides these problems of visual agnosia and visual alexia, Marlene was experiencing a sort of runaway visual imagery, outside her control. At one point, she saw a woman wearing a red dress on the street. Then, she said, \"I closed my eyes. This woman, almost puppetlike, was moving around, took on a life of her own.... I realize that I had been 'taken over' by the image.\"\n\nI kept in touch with Marlene at intervals and saw her most recently in 2008, twenty years after her stroke. She no longer had hallucinations, perceptual distortions, or runaway visual imagery. She was still hemianopic, but her remaining vision was good enough for her to travel independently and to work (which involved reading and writing, albeit at her own slow pace).\n\nWhile Marlene experienced protracted perceptual changes as well as hallucinations after a massive occipital lobe hemorrhage, even a \"little\" occipital lobe stroke can evoke striking, though transient, visual hallucinations. Such was the case with a bright, deeply religious old lady whose hallucinations appeared, \"evolved,\" then disappeared, all within the space of a few days in July of 2008. I got a call from one of the nurses in a nursing home where I work\u2014we had worked together for many years, and she knew that I was especially interested in visual problems. She asked whether she could bring her great-aunt Dot to see me, and between them, they reconstructed the story. Aunt Dot told me that her vision had seemed \"blurry\" on July 21, and the following day, \"it was like looking through a kaleidoscope... all this rotating color going through,\" with sudden \"lightning streaks\" to the left. She went to her doctor, who, finding that she had a hemianopia to the left, sent her to an emergency room. There it was found that she had atrial fibrillation, and a CAT scan and MRI showed a small area of damage in the right occipital lobe, probably the result of a blood clot dislodged by the fibrillation.\n\nThe following day, Aunt Dot saw \"octagons with red centers... moving past me like a film strip, and the moving octagons changed into hexagonal snowflakes.\" On July 24, she saw \"an American flag, outstretched, as if flying.\"\n\nOn July 26, she saw green dots, like little balls, floating to the left, and these turned into \"elongated silvery leaves.\" When her niece remarked that an early autumn was on the way in Canada and the leaves were already changing color, the hallucinated silvery leaves immediately turned reddish brown. These ushered in a day full of complex visual hallucinations, including \"daffodils in bouquets\" and \"fields of goldenrod.\" They were followed by a very particular image, which was multiplied. When her niece visited that day, Aunt Dot said, \"I'm seeing sailor boys... one on top of the other, like a film strip.\" They were colored, but flat and motionless and small, \"like stickers.\" She did not recognize their origin until her niece reminded her that she (the niece) often used a sailor-boy sticker when she sent her aunt a letter\u2014so here, the sailor boy was not a complete invention, but a reproduction of the stickers Aunt Dot had once seen, now multiplied.\n\nThe sailor boys were replaced by \"fields of mushrooms\" and then by a golden Star of David. A neurologist in the hospital had been wearing such a star prominently when he visited her, and she continued to \"see\" this for hours, though not multiplied like the sailor boys. The Star of David was superseded by \"traffic lights, red and green, turning on and off,\" then by scores of tiny golden Christmas bells. The Christmas bells were replaced by a hallucination of praying hands. Then she saw \"gulls, sand, waves, a beach scene,\" with the gulls flapping their wings. (Up to this point, apparently, there had not been movement within an image; she had seen only static images passing in front of her.) The flying gulls were replaced by \"a Greek runner wearing a toga... he looked like an Olympic athlete.\" His legs were moving, as the gulls' wings had been. The next day she saw stacked and serried coat hangers\u2014this was the last of her complex hallucinations. The day after that, she saw only lightning streaks to the left, as she had seen six days before. And this was the end of what she called her \"visual odyssey.\"\n\nAunt Dot was not a nurse, like her great-niece, but she had worked for many years as a volunteer in the nursing home. She knew that she had had a small stroke on one side in the visual part of her brain. She realized that the hallucinations were caused by this and were probably transient; she did not fear that she was losing her mind. She did not for a moment think that her hallucinations were \"real,\" although she observed that they were quite unlike her normal visual imagery\u2014much more detailed, more brightly colored, and, for the most part, independent of her thoughts or feelings. She was curious and intrigued, and so she made a careful note of the hallucinations as they occurred and tried to draw them. Both she and her niece wondered why particular images popped up in her hallucinations, to what extent they reflected her life experiences, and how much they might have been prompted by her immediate environment.\n\nShe was struck by the sequence of her hallucinations\u2014that they had gone from simple and unformed to more complex, and then back to simple before disappearing. \"It's like they moved up the brain, then down again,\" she said. She was struck by how things she had seen could change into similar forms: octagons turning into snowflakes, blobs into leaves, and perhaps gulls into Olympic athletes. She observed that, in two instances, she had hallucinated something she had seen shortly before: the neurologist's Star of David and the sailor-boy stickers. She noted a tendency to \"multiplication\"\u2014bunches of daffodils, fields of flowers, octagons galore, snowflakes, leaves, gulls, scores of Christmas bells, and multiple copies of the sailor-boy stickers. She wondered whether the fact that she was a deeply religious Catholic who prayed several times a day had played a part in her seeing a hallucination of praying hands. She was struck by the way in which the silvery leaves she was seeing instantly turned reddish brown when her niece said, \"The leaves are changing.\" She thought the Olympic runner might have been provoked by the fact that the 2008 Olympic Games were coming up, with constant previews on television. I found it impressive and moving that this old lady, curious and intelligent, though not intellectual, would observe her own hallucinations so calmly and thoughtfully and, without being prompted, raise virtually all the questions a neurologist might ask about them.\n\nIf one loses half the visual field from a stroke or other injury, one may or may not be aware of the loss. Monroe Cole, a neurologist, became aware of his own field loss only by doing a neurological exam on himself after his coronary bypass surgery. He was so surprised by his lack of awareness of this deficit that he published a paper about it. \"Even intelligent patients,\" he wrote, \"often are surprised when a hemianopia is demonstrated, despite the fact that it has been demonstrated on numerous examinations.\"\n\nThe day after his surgery, Cole began to have hallucinations, in the blind half of his visual field, of people (most of whom he recognized), dogs, and horses. These apparitions did not frighten him; they \"moved, danced and swirled, but their purpose was unclear.\" Often he hallucinated \"a pony with his head cradled in my right arm\"; he recognized this as his granddaughter's pony, but as with many of his hallucinations, \"the colour was wrong.\" He always realized that these visions were unreal.\n\nIn a 1976 paper, the neurologist James Lance provided rich descriptions of thirteen hemianopic patients, and he emphasized that their hallucinations were always recognized as such, if only by their absurdity or irrelevance: giraffes and hippopotamuses sitting on one side of a pillow, visions of spacemen or Roman soldiers to one side, and so on. Other physicians have made similar reports; none of their patients ever confuses such hallucinations with reality.\n\nI was therefore surprised and intrigued to receive the following letter from a physician in England, about his eighty-six-year-old father, Gordon H., who had long-standing glaucoma and macular degeneration. He had never had hallucinations before, but recently he had had a small stroke affecting his right occipital lobe. He was \"quite sane and largely intellectually undiminished,\" his son wrote, but\n\nhe has not recovered vision and retains a left hemianopia. He has, however, little awareness of his visual loss as his brain appears to fill in the missing parts. Interestingly, though, his visual hallucinations \/ filling in always seem to be context-sensitive or _consistent_. In other words, if he is walking in a rural setting, he can be aware of bushes and trees or distant buildings in his left visual field, which when he turns to engage his right side, he discovers are not really there. The hallucinations do, however, seem to be filled in seamlessly with his ordinary vision. If he is at his kitchen bench, he \"sees\" the entire bench, even to the extent of perceiving a certain bowl or plate within the left side of his vision\u2014but which on turning disappear, because they were never really there. Yet he definitely sees a _whole_ bench, with no clear separation between parts composed of hallucination and true perception.\n\nGordon H.'s normal visual perception to the right side, one might think, by its normalcy and detail, would immediately show up the relative poverty of the mental construct, the hallucination, on the left. But, his son asserts, he cannot tell one from the other\u2014there is no sense of a boundary; the two halves seem continuous. Mr. H.'s case is unique, to my knowledge.2 He has none of the outlandish, obviously out-of-context hallucinations commonly reported in hemianopia. His hallucinations blend perfectly well with his environment and seem to \"complete\" his missing perception.\n\nIn 1899, Gabriel Anton described a singular syndrome in which patients totally blind from cortical damage (usually from a stroke affecting the occipital lobes on both sides) seemed to be unaware of it. Such patients may be sane and intact in all other ways, but they will insist that they can see perfectly well. They will even behave as if sighted, boldly walking in unfamiliar places. If, in so doing, they collide with a piece of furniture, they will insist that the furniture has been moved, that the room is poorly lit, and so on. A patient with Anton's syndrome, if asked, will describe a stranger in the room by providing a fluent and confident, though entirely incorrect, description. No argument, no evidence, no appeal to reason or common sense is of the slightest use.\n\nIt is not clear why Anton's syndrome should produce such erroneous but unshakable beliefs. There are similar irrefutable beliefs in patients who lose the perception of their left side and the left side of space but maintain that there is nothing missing, even though we can demonstrate convincingly that they live in a hemi-universe. Such syndromes\u2014so-called anosognosias\u2014occur only with damage to the right half of the brain, which seems to be especially concerned with the sense of bodily identity.\n\nAn even stranger twist was given to the matter in 1984, with the publication of a paper by Barbara E. Swartz and John C. M. Brust. Their patient was an intelligent man who had lost the sight in both eyes from retinal injuries. Normally, he recognized that he was blind and behaved as if blind. But he was also an alcoholic, and twice, while on a drinking binge, he believed that his sight had returned. Swartz and Brust wrote:\n\nDuring these episodes, he believed he could see; for example, he would walk about without asking for assistance, or he would watch television, and he claimed he could then discuss the program with friends.... [He] could not read the 20\/800 line on a visual acuity chart, or detect a bright light or hand movements in front of his left eye. Nonetheless, he claimed that he could see, and in response to questions he offered plausible confabulations\u2014for example describing the examining room or the appearance of the two physicians with whom he was speaking. In many particulars his descriptions were wrong, but he did not recognize that they were wrong. However, he did admit that he was also seeing things that were not really there. For example, he described the examining room as being full of little children, all wearing similar attire, some of whom were walking in and out of the room through the walls. He also described a dog in the corner eating a bone, and then noted that the walls and the floor of the room were orange. The children, dog and wall colors he recognized as hallucinations, but [he] insisted that his other visual experiences were real.\n\nReturning to Gordon H., I would hazard a guess that damage to the right occipital lobe has produced a unilateral Anton's syndrome (though I do not know if such a syndrome has ever been described). His hallucinations (unlike those of Lance's patients) are informed and shaped by what he perceives in the intact part of his visual field, and mesh seamlessly with his intact perception to the right.\n\nMr. H. has only to turn his head to discover that he has been deceived, but this does not shake his conviction that he can see equally to both sides. He may, if pressed, accept the term \"hallucination,\" but if he does so he must feel that, for him, hallucination is veridical, that he is hallucinating reality.\n\n1. Before seeing Ellen O., I had never heard of visual perseveration of such duration. Visual perseveration of a few minutes may be associated with cerebral tumors of the parietal or temporal lobes or may occur in temporal lobe epilepsy. There are a number of such accounts in the medical literature, including one by Michael Swash, who described two people with temporal lobe epilepsy. One of them had attacks in which \"his vision seemed to become fixed, so that an image was retained for several minutes. During these episodes the real world was seen through the retained image, which was clear at first, but then gradually faded.\"\n\nSimilar perseveration may occur with damage or surgery to an eye. My correspondent H.S. was blinded by a chemical explosion at the age of fifteen but had some sight restored by corneal surgery twenty years later. Following the operation, when his surgeon asked if he could now see the surgeon's hand, H.S. replied, \"Yes\"\u2014but then was astonished to see the hand, or its image, preserving its exact shape and position, for several minutes afterward.\n\n2. In a letter to me, James Lance commented, \"I have never encountered hallucination embracing information from the surroundings like Mr. H.'s.\"\n\n# 10\n\nDelirious\n\nAs a medical student at the Middlesex Hospital in London in the 1950s, I saw many patients with delirium, states of fluctuating consciousness sometimes caused by infections with high fevers or by problems like kidney or liver failure, lung disease, or poorly controlled diabetes, all of which may produce drastic changes in blood chemistry. Some patients were delirious from medications, especially those receiving morphine or other opiates for pain. Patients with delirium were almost always on medical or surgical wards, not on neurological or psychiatric wards, for delirium generally indicates a medical problem, a consequence of something affecting the whole body, including the brain, and it disappears as soon as the medical problem has been righted.\n\nIt may be that age, even when there is full intellectual function, increases the risk of hallucinations or delirium in response to medical problems and medication\u2014especially with the polypharmacy so often practiced in medicine today. Working in a number of old-age homes, I sometimes see patients on a dozen or more different medications, which are liable to interact with one another in complex ways and, not uncommonly, tip the patients into delirium.1\n\nWe had one patient on a medical ward at the Middlesex Hospital, Gerald P., who was dying from kidney failure\u2014his kidneys could no longer clear the toxic levels of urea building up in his blood, and he was delirious. Mr. P. had spent much of his life supervising tea plantations in Ceylon. I read this in his chart, but I could have gathered it from what he said in his delirium, for he talked nonstop, with wild associational leaps from one thought to another. My professor had said he was \"talking nonsense,\" and at first I could make little sense of what he was saying\u2014but the more I listened, the more I understood. I started spending as much time as I could with him, sometimes two or three hours a day. I began to see how fact and fantasy were admixed in the hieroglyphic form of his delirium, how he was reliving and at times hallucinating the events and passions of a long and varied life. It was like being privy to a dream. At first he talked to no one in particular; but once I started to ask him questions, he responded. I think he was glad that someone was listening; he became less agitated, more coherent in his delirium. He died peacefully a few days later.\n\nIn 1966, when I started practice as a young neurologist, I began working at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a home for those with chronic diseases. One patient there, Michael F., was an intelligent man who, besides other problems, had a very damaged, cirrhotic liver, the result of a severe hepatitis infection. The little liver he had left could not cope with a normal diet, and his protein intake had to be strictly limited. Michael found this hard to take, and every so often he \"cheated\" by eating some cheese, which he adored. But one day, it seemed, he went too far, for he was found in a near coma. I was called at once, and when I arrived, I found Mr. F. in an extraordinary state, alternating between stupor and delirious agitation. There were brief periods when he would \"come together\" and show insight into what was going on. \"I'm out of this world,\" he said at one point. \"I'm stoned on protein.\"\n\nWhen I asked him what this state felt like, he said, \"like a dream, confused, sort of crazy, spaced out. But I know I'm high, as well.\" His attention seemed to dart about, touching on one thing and then another almost at random. He was very restless and had all sorts of involuntary movements. I had my own EEG machine at the time, and, wheeling that into Mr. F.'s room, I found that his brain waves were dramatically slowed\u2014his EEG showed classic slow \"liver waves\" as well as other abnormalities. Within twenty-four hours of resuming his low-protein diet, though, Mr. F. was back to normal, as was his EEG.\n\nMany people\u2014especially children\u2014experience delirium with a high fever. One woman, Erika S., recalled this in a letter to me:\n\nI was 11 years old and was home from school with chicken pox and a high fever.... During a fever spike, I experienced a frightening hallucination for what seemed like a very long time, in which my body seemed to shrink and grow.... With each of my breaths, my body would feel like it was swelling and swelling until I was sure that my skin would burst like a balloon. Then when it felt so excruciating, like I had suddenly grown from a normal sized child to a grotesquely fat person... like a person-balloon... I would look down at myself, sure that I would see my insides bursting out of my inadequate amount of skin, and blood pouring from enlarged orifices that could not contain my swollen body. But I would \"see\" my normal sized self... and looking would reverse the process.... I would feel like my body was shrinking. My arms and legs would get thinner and thinner... then skinny, then emaciated, then cartoon thin (like the legs on Mickey Mouse in _Steamboat Willie_ ) and then so pencil thin that I thought my body would disappear altogether.\n\nJos\u00e9e B. also wrote to me about her \"Alice-in-Wonderland syndrome\" as a child with fever. She remembered feeling \"incredibly small or incredibly large and sometimes both at the same time.\" She also experienced distortions in proprioception, her perception of her own body position: \"One evening, I couldn't sleep in my own bed\u2014every time I lay down on it, I would feel I was standing tall.\" She had a visual hallucination, too: \"Suddenly I saw cowboys who were throwing apples at me. I jumped onto my mother's dresser to hide behind a lipstick tube.\"\n\nAnother woman, Ellen R., had visual hallucinations that took on a rhythmic, pulsing quality:\n\nI would \"see\" a smooth surface, like glass, or like the surface of a pond.... Concentric rings would spread from the center to the outside edges, as though a pebble had been dropped right in the middle. This rhythm starts slowly [but]... eventually speeds up, so that the surface is constantly agitated, and as this happens, my own agitation is heightened. Eventually the rhythm slows, the surface smooths out, and I become relieved and calmer myself.\n\nSometimes in a delirium there may be a deep humming sound that waxes and wanes in a similar way.\n\nWhile many people describe delirious swellings of body image, Devon B., when feverish, experienced mental or intellectual swellings instead:\n\nWhat made them so strange was that they weren't sensory hallucinations, but a hallucination of an abstract idea... a sudden dread of a very, very large and growing number (or a thing, but a thing I never really defined).... I remember pacing up and down the hallway... in a growing state of panic and horror at an exponentially increasing, impossible number.... My fear was that this number was violating some very basic precept of the world... an assumption we hold that absolutely should not be violated.\n\nThis letter made me think of the arithmetical deliria which Vladimir Nabokov went through, wrestling with impossibly large numbers, as he described in his autobiography _Speak, Memory:_\n\nAs a little boy, I showed an abnormal aptitude for mathematics, which I completely lost in my singularly talentless youth. This gift played a horrible part in tussles with quinsy or scarlet fever, when I felt enormous spheres and huge numbers swell relentlessly in my aching brain.... I had read... about a certain Hindu calculator who in exactly two seconds could find the seventeenth root of, say, 35294\u200b71145\u200b76027\u200b51323\u200b01897\u200b34205\u200b586617\u200b1392 (I am not sure I have got this right; anyway the root was 212). Such were the monsters that thrived on my delirium, and the only way to prevent them from crowding me out of myself was to kill them by extracting their hearts. But they were far too strong, and I would sit up and laboriously form garbled sentences as I tried to explain things to my mother. Beneath my delirium she recognized sensations she had known herself, and her understanding would bring my expanding universe back to a Newtonian norm.\n\nSome people feel that the hallucinations and strange thoughts of delirium may provide, or seem to provide, moments of rich emotional truth, as with some dreams or psychedelic experiences. There may also be revelations or breakthroughs of deep intellectual truth. In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace, who had been traveling the world for a decade, collecting specimens of plants and animals and considering the problem of evolution, suddenly conceived the idea of natural selection during an attack of malarial fever. His letter to Darwin proposing this theory pushed Darwin to publish _On the Origin of Species_ the following year.\n\nRobert Hughes, in the opening of his book on Goya, writes about a prolonged delirium during his recovery from a nearly fatal car crash. He was in a coma for five weeks and hospitalized for almost seven months. In intensive care, he wrote,\n\nOne's consciousness... is strangely affected by the drugs, the intubation, the fierce and continuous lights, and one's own immobility. These give rise to prolonged narrative dreams, or hallucinations, or nightmares. They are far heavier and more enclosing than ordinary sleep-dreams and have the awful character of inescapability; there is nothing outside them, and time is wholly lost in their maze. Much of the time, I dreamed about Goya. He was not the real artist, of course, but a projection of my fears. The book I meant to write on him had hit the wall; I had been blocked for years before the accident.\n\nIn this strange delirium, Hughes wrote, a transformed Goya seemed to be mocking and tormenting him, trapping him in some hellish limbo. Eventually, Hughes interpreted this \"bizarre and obsessive vision\":\n\nI had hoped to \"capture\" Goya in writing, and he instead imprisoned me. My ignorant enthusiasm had dragged me into a trap from which there was no evident escape. Not only could I not do the job; my subject knew it and found my inability hysterically funny. There was only one way out of this humiliating bind, and that was to crash through.... Goya had assumed such importance in my subjective life that whether I could do him justice in writing or not, I couldn't give up on him. It was like overcoming writer's block by blowing up the building in whose corridor it had occurred.\n\nAlethea Hayter, in her book _Opium and the Romantic Imagination_ , writes that Piranesi, the Italian artist, was \"said to have conceived the idea of his engravings of Imaginary Prisons when he was delirious with malaria,\" a disease he contracted\n\nwhile he explored the ruined monuments of Ancient Rome... among the nocturnal miasmas of that marshy plain. He was bound to get malaria; and the delirious visions when they came to him may have owed something to opium as well as to a high temperature, since opium was then a normal remedy for ague or malaria.... The images which were born during his delirious fever were executed and elaborated over many years of fully conscious and controlled labour.\n\nDelirium may produce musical hallucinations, as Kate E. wrote:\n\nI was about eleven, in bed with a high fever, when I heard some heavenly music. I understood it to be a choir of angels, even though I found this odd, as I don't believe in heaven or angels and never have. So I decided it must be coming from Christmas carolers on our front doorstep below. After a minute or so, I realized it was springtime, and that I must be hallucinating.\n\nA number of people have written to me that they have _visual_ hallucinations of music, hallucinating musical notation all over the walls and ceiling. One of them, Christy C., recalled:\n\nAs a child, I ran high fevers when sick. With each spell, I would hallucinate. This was an optical hallucination involving musical notes and stanzas. I did not hear music. When the fever was high, I would see notes and clef lines, scrambled and out of order. The notes were angry and I felt unease. The lines and notes were out of control and at times in a ball. For hours, I would try to mentally smooth them out and put them in harmony or order. This same hallucination has plagued me as an adult when feverish.\n\nTactile hallucinations, too, can come with fever or delirium, as Johnny M. described: \"When I had high fevers as a child I had very weird tactile hallucinations... a nurse's fingers would switch from being beautiful smooth porcelain to rough, brittle-feeling twigs or my bed sheets would go from luscious satin to drenched, heavy blankets.\"\n\nFevers are perhaps the commonest cause of delirium, but there may be a less obvious metabolic or toxic cause, as recently happened with a physician friend of mine, Isabelle R. She had had two months of increasing weakness and occasional confusion; finally she became unresponsive and was taken to the hospital, where she had a florid delirium, with hallucinations and delusions. She was convinced that a secret laboratory was hidden behind a picture on the wall of her hospital room\u2014and that I was supervising a series of experiments on her. She was found to have extremely high levels of calcium and vitamin D (she had been taking large doses of these for her osteoporosis), and as soon as these toxic levels dropped, her delirium ceased, and she returned to normal.\n\nDelirium is classically associated with alcohol toxicity or withdrawal. Emil Kraepelin, in his great 1904 _Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry_ , included the case history of an innkeeper who developed delirium tremens from drinking six or seven liters of wine a day. He became restless and immersed in a dreamlike state in which, Kraepelin wrote,\n\nparticular real perceptions... are mingled with numerous very vivid false perceptions, especially of sight and hearing. As in a dream, a whole series of the most strange and remarkable events take place with occasional sudden changes of scene.... Given the vivid hallucinations of sight, the restlessness, the strong tremors, and the smell of alcohol, we have all the essential features of the clinical condition called _delirium tremens_.\n\nThe innkeeper had some delusions, too, perhaps produced by his hallucinations:\n\nWe learn, by questioning him, that he is going to be executed by electricity, and also that he will be shot. \"The picture is not clearly painted,\" he says; \"every moment someone stands now here, now there, waiting for me with a revolver. When I open my eyes they vanish.\" He says that a stinking fluid has been injected into his head and both his toes, which causes the pictures [he] takes for reality.... He looks eagerly at the window, where he sees houses and trees vanishing and reappearing. With slight pressure on his eyes, he sees first sparks, then a hare, a picture, a washstand-set, a half-moon, and a human head, first dully and then in colours.\n\nWhile deliria such as the innkeeper's may be incoherent, without any theme or connecting thread, other deliria convey the sense of a journey, or a play, or a movie, giving coherence and meaning to the hallucinations. Anne M. had such an experience after she had run a high temperature for several days. She first saw patterns whenever she closed her eyes to go to sleep; she described them as resembling Escher drawings in their sophistication and symmetry:\n\nThe initial drawings were geometric but then evolved into monsters and other rather unpleasant creatures.... The drawings were not in color. I was not enjoying this at all because I wanted to sleep. Once a drawing was complete it was copied so all four or six or eight quadrants of my visual field would be full of these identical pictures.\n\nThese drawings were succeeded by richly colored images that reminded her of Brueghel paintings. Increasingly, these too became full of monsters and subdivided themselves, polyopically, into a cluster of identical mini-Brueghels.\n\nThen came a more radical change. Anne found herself in the back of \"a 1950s Chinese bus on a propaganda tour of Chinese Christian churches.\" She recalls watching a movie on religious freedom in China projected onto the rear window of the bus. But the viewpoint kept changing\u2014both the movie and the bus suddenly tilted to odd angles, and it was unclear, at one point, whether a church spire she saw was \"real,\" outside the bus, or part of the movie. Her strange journey occupied the greater part of a feverish and insomniac night.\n\nAnne's hallucinations appeared only when she closed her eyes and would vanish as soon as she opened them.2 But other deliria may produce hallucinations that seem to be present in the real environment, seen with the eyes open.\n\nIn 1996, I was visiting Brazil when I started to have elaborate narrative dreams with extremely brilliant colors and an almost lithographic quality, which seemed to go on all night, every night. I had gastroenteritis with some fever, and I assumed that my strange dreams were a consequence of this, compounded, perhaps, by the excitement of traveling along the Amazon. I thought these delirious dreams would come to an end when I got over the fever and returned to New York. But, if anything, they increased and became more intense than ever. They had something of the character of a Jane Austen novel, or perhaps a _Masterpiece Theatre_ version of one, unfolding in a leisurely way. These visions were very detailed, with all the characters dressed, behaving, and talking as they might in _Sense and Sensibility_. (This astonished me\u2014for I have never had much social sense or sensibility, and my taste in novels inclines more to Dickens than Austen.) I would get up at intervals during the night, dab cold water on my face, empty my bladder, or make a cup of tea, but as soon as I returned to bed and closed my eyes again I was in my Jane Austen world. The dream had moved on while I was up, and when I rejoined it, it was as if the narrative had continued in my absence. A period of time had passed, events had transpired, some characters had disappeared or died, and other new ones were now on stage. These dreams, or deliria, or hallucinations, whatever they were, came every night, interfering with normal sleep, and I became increasingly exhausted from sleep deprivation. I would tell my analyst about these \"dreams,\" which I remembered in great detail, unlike normal dreams. He said, \"What's going on? You have produced more dreams in the past two weeks than in the previous twenty years. Are you _on_ something?\"\n\nI said no\u2014but then I remembered that I had been put on weekly doses of the antimalarial drug Lariam before my trip to the Amazon, and that I was supposed to take two or three further doses after my return.\n\nI looked up the drug in the _Physician's Desk Reference_ \u2014it mentioned excessively vivid or colorful dreams, nightmares, hallucinations, and psychoses as side effects, but with an incidence of less than 1 percent. When I contacted my friend Kevin Cahill, an expert in tropical medicine, he said that he would put the incidence of excessively vivid, colorful dreams closer to 30 percent\u2014the full-blown hallucinations or psychoses were considerably rarer. I asked him how long the dreams would go on. A month or more, he said, because Lariam has a very long half-life and would take that long to be eliminated from the body. My nineteenth-century dreams gradually faded, though they took their time doing so.\n\nRichard Howard, the poet, was thrown into a delirium for several days following back surgery. The day after the operation, lying in his hospital bed and looking up, he saw small animals all around the edges of the ceiling. They were the size of mice but had heads like those of deer; they were vivid: solid, animal-colored, with the movements of living creatures. \"I knew they were real,\" he said, and he was astonished when his partner, arriving at the hospital, could not see them. This did not shake Richard's conviction; he was simply puzzled as to why his partner, an artist, could be so blind (after all, he was the one who was usually so good at seeing things). The thought that he might be hallucinating did not enter Richard's mind. He found the phenomenon remarkable (\"I'm not accustomed to things like a frieze of deer heads on mouse bodies\"), but he accepted them as real.\n\nThe next day, Richard, who teaches literature at a university, began seeing another remarkable sight, a \"pageant of literature.\" The physicians, nurses, and hospital staff had dressed up as literary figures from the nineteenth century, and they were rehearsing the pageant. He was very impressed by the quality of their work, although he understood that some other observers were more critical. The \"actors\" talked freely among themselves, and with Richard. The pageant, he could see, took place on several floors of the hospital simultaneously; the floors seemed transparent to him, so that he could watch all the levels of the performance at once. The rehearsers wanted his opinion, and he told them he thought it very attractively and intelligently done, delightful. Telling me this story six years later, he smiled, saying that even recollecting it was a delight. \"It was a very privileged time,\" he said.\n\nWhen real visitors came, the pageant would disappear, and Richard, alert and oriented, chatted with them in his usual way. But as soon as they left, the pageant recommenced. Richard is a man with an acute and critical mind, but his critical faculty, it seems, was in abeyance during his delirium, which lasted for three days, and was perhaps provoked by opiates or other drugs.\n\nRichard is a great admirer of Henry James\u2014and James, as it happens, also had a delirium, a terminal delirium, in December 1915, associated with pneumonia and a high fever. Fred Kaplan describes it in his biography of James:\n\nHe had entered another imaginative world, one connected to the beginning of his life as a writer, to the Napoleonic world that had been a lifelong metaphor for the power of art, for the empire of his own creation. He began to dictate notes for a new novel, \"fragments of the book he imagines himself to be writing.\" As if he were now writing a novel of which his own altered consciousness was the dramatic center, he dictated a vision of himself as Napoleon and his own family as the imperial Bonapartes.... William and Alice he grasped with his regent hand, addressing his \"dear and most esteemed brother and sister.\" To them, to whom he had granted countries, he now gave the responsibility of supervising the detailed plans he had created for \"the decoration of certain apartments, here of the Louvre and Tuileries, which you will find addressed in detail to artists and workmen who take them in hand.\"... He was himself the \"imperial eagle.\"\n\nTaking down the dictation, Theodora [his secretary] felt it to be almost more than she could bear. \"It is a heart-breaking thing to do, though, there is the extraordinary fact that his mind _does_ retain the power to frame perfectly characteristic sentences.\"\n\nThis was recognized by others too\u2014and it was said that though the master was raving, his style was \"pure James\" and, indeed, \"late James.\"\n\nSometimes withdrawal from drugs or alcohol may cause a delirium dominated by hallucinatory voices and delusions\u2014a delirium which is, in effect, a toxic psychosis, even though the person is not schizophrenic and has never had a psychosis before. Evelyn Waugh provided an extraordinary account of this in his autobiographical novel _The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold_.3 Waugh had been a very heavy drinker for years, and at some point in the 1950s he had added a potent sleeping draft (an elixir of chloral hydrate and bromide) to the alcohol. The draft grew stronger and stronger, as Waugh wrote of his alter ego, Gilbert Pinfold: \"He was not scrupulous in measuring the dose. He splashed into the glass as much as his mood suggested and if he took too little and woke in the small hours he would get out of bed and make unsteadily for the bottle and a second swig.\"\n\nFeeling ill and unsteady, and with his memory occasionally playing tricks on him, Pinfold decides that a cruise to India might be restorative. His sleeping mixture runs out after two or three days, but his drinking stays at a high level. Barely has the ship got under way than he starts to have auditory hallucinations; most are of voices, but on occasion he hears music, a dog barking, the sound of a murderous beating administered by the captain of the ship and his doxy, and the sound of a huge mass of metal being thrown overboard. Visually, everything and everyone seems normal\u2014a quiet ship with unremarkable crew and passengers, steaming quietly past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. But complex and sometimes preposterous delusions are engendered by his auditory hallucinations: he understands, for example, that Spain has claimed sovereignty over Gibraltar and will be taking possession of the vessel, and that his persecutors possess thought-reading and thought-broadcasting machines.\n\nSome of the voices address him directly\u2014tauntingly, hatefully, accusingly; they often suggest that he commit suicide\u2014although there is a sweet voice, too (the sister of one of his tormentors, he understands), who says she is in love with him, and asks if he loves her. Pinfold says he must see her, as well as hear her, but she says that this is impossible, that it is \"against the Rules.\" Pinfold's hallucinations are exclusively auditory, and he is not \"allowed\" to see the speaker\u2014for this might shatter the delusion.\n\nSuch elaborate deliria and psychoses have a top-down as well as a bottom-up quality, like dreams. They are volcano-like eruptions from the \"lower\" levels in the brain\u2014the sensory association cortex, hippocampal circuits, and the limbic system\u2014but they are also shaped by the intellectual, emotional, and imaginative powers of the individual, and by the beliefs and style of the culture in which he is embedded.\n\nA great many medical and neurological conditions, as well as all sorts of drugs (whether taken for therapeutic purposes or for recreation), can produce such temporary, \"organic\" psychoses. One patient who stays most vividly in my mind was a postencephalitic man, a man of much cultivation and charm, Seymour L. (I refer to him and his hallucinations briefly in _Awakenings_ ). When given a very modest dose of L-dopa for his parkinsonism, Seymour became pathologically excited and, in particular, started to hear voices. One day he came up to me. I was a kind man, he said, and he had been shocked to hear me say, \"Take your hat and your coat, Seymour, go up to the roof of the hospital, and jump off.\"\n\nI replied that I would not dream of saying anything like that to him, and that he must be hallucinating. \"Did you _see_ me?\" I continued.\n\n\"No,\" Seymour answered, \"I just heard you.\"\n\n\"If you hear the voice again,\" I said to him, \"look round and see if I am there. If you cannot see me, you will know it is a hallucination.\" Seymour pondered this briefly, then shook his head.\n\n\"It won't work,\" he said.\n\nThe next day he again heard my voice telling him to take his hat and his coat, go up to the roof of the hospital, and jump off, but now the voice added, \"And you don't need to turn round, because I am really here.\" Fortunately, Mr. L. was able to resist jumping, and when we stopped his L-dopa, the voices stopped, too. (Three years later, Seymour tried L-dopa again, and this time he responded beautifully, without a hint of delirium or psychosis.)\n\n1. In addition to the overt delirium that may be associated with life-threatening medical problems, it is not uncommon for people to have slight delirium, so mild that it would not occur to them to consult a physician, and which they themselves may disregard or forget. Gowers, in 1907, wrote that migraine is \"often attended by quiet delirium of which nothing can be subsequently recalled.\"\n\nThere has always been inconsistency in defining delirium, and as Dimitrios Adamis and his colleagues pointed out in their review of the subject, it has frequently been confused with dementia and other conditions. Hippocrates, they wrote, \"used about sixteen words to refer to and name the clinical syndrome which we now call delirium.\" There was additional confusion with the medicalization of insanity in the nineteenth century, as German Berrios has noted, so that insanity was referred to as _d\u00e9lire chronique_. Even now the terminology is ambiguous, so that delirium is sometimes called \"toxic psychosis.\"\n\n2. Just such an appearance of delirious images when closing the eyes, and their disappearance when the eyes are opened, is described by John Maynard Keynes in his memoir \"Dr. Melchior\":\n\nBy the time we were back in Paris, I was feeling extremely unwell and took to my bed two days later. High fever followed.... I lay in my suite in the Majestic, nearly delirious, and the image of the raised pattern on the _nouveau art_ wall-paper so preyed on my sensibilities in the dark that it was a relief to switch on the light and, by perceiving the reality, to be relieved for a moment from the yet more hideous pressure of its imagined outlines.\n\n3. In a prefatory note to a later edition, Waugh wrote: \"Three years ago Mr. Waugh suffered a brief bout of hallucinations resembling what is here described.... Mr. Waugh does not deny that 'Mr. Pinfold' is largely based on himself.\" Thus we may accept _The Ordeal_ as an autobiographic \"case history\" of a psychosis, an organic psychosis, albeit one written with a mastery of observation and description\u2014and a sense of plot and suspense\u2014that no purely medical case history has.\n\nW. H. Auden once said that Waugh had \"learned nothing\" from his ordeal, but it at least enabled him to write a richly comic memoir, a new departure quite unlike anything he had written previously.\n\n# 11\n\nOn the Threshold of Sleep\n\nIn 1992, I received a letter from Robert Utter, an Australian man who had heard me speak about migraine aura on television. He wrote, \"You described how some migraine sufferers see elaborate patterns before their eyes... and speculated that they might be a manifestation of some deep pattern-generating function in the brain.\" This reminded him of the experience that he routinely had upon going to bed:\n\nThis usually occurs at the moment when my head hits the pillow at night; my eyes close and... I see imagery. I do not mean pictures; more usually they are patterns or textures, such as repeated shapes, or shadows of shapes, or an item from an image, such as grass from a landscape or wood grain, wavelets or raindrops... transformed in the most extraordinary ways at a great speed. Shapes are replicated, multiplied, reversed in negative, etc. Color is added, tinted, subtracted. Textures are the most fascinating; grass becomes fur becomes hair follicles becomes waving, dancing lines of light, and a hundred other variations and all the subtle gradients between them that my words are too coarse to describe.\n\nThese images and their subsequent changes appear and fade without my control. The experience is fugitive, sometimes lasting a few seconds, sometimes minutes. I cannot predict their appearance. They appear to take place not in my eye, but in some dimension of space before me. The strength of the imagery varies from barely perceptible to vivid, like a dream image. But unlike dreams, there are absolutely no emotional overtones. Though they are fascinating, I do not feel moved by them.... The whole experience seems to be devoid of meaning.\n\nHe wondered whether this imagery represented a sort of \"idling\" in the visual part of the brain, in the absence of perception.\n\nWhat Mr. Utter described so vividly are not dreams but involuntary images or quasi-hallucinations appearing just before sleep\u2014hypnagogic hallucinations, to use the term coined by the French psychologist Alfred Maury in 1848. They are estimated to occur in a majority of people, at least occasionally, although they may be so subtle as to go unnoticed.\n\nWhile Maury's original observations were all of his own imagery, Francis Galton provided one of the first systematic investigations of hypnagogic hallucinations, gathering information from a number of subjects. In his 1883 book _Inquiries into Human Faculty_ , he observed that very few people might at first admit to having such imagery. It was only when he sent out questionnaires stressing the common and benign qualities of these hallucinations that some of his subjects felt free to speak about them.\n\nGalton was struck by the fact that he, too, had hypnagogic hallucinations, even though it had taken time and patience for him to realize this. \"Had I been asked, before I thought of carefully trying, I should have emphatically declared that my field of view in the dark was essentially of a uniform black, subject to an occasional light-purple cloudiness and other small variations,\" he wrote. Once he began observing more closely, however, he saw that\n\na kaleidoscopic change of patterns and forms is continually going on, but they are too fugitive and elaborate for me to draw with any approach to truth. I am astonished at their variety.... They disappear out of sight and memory the instant I begin to think about anything, and it is curious to me that they should often be so certainly present and yet be habitually overlooked.\n\nAmong the scores of people who responded to Galton's questionnaire was the Reverend George Henslow (\"whose visions,\" Galton wrote, \"are far more vivid than mine\").1 One of Henslow's hallucinations started with a vision of a crossbow, then of an arrow, then a flight of arrows, which changed into falling stars and then into flakes of snow. This was followed by a finely detailed vision of a rectory and then of a bed of red tulips. There were quickly changing images in which he reported visual association (for instance, arrows became stars, then snowflakes) but no narrative continuity. Henslow's imagery was extremely vivid, but it had no quality of a dream or story.\n\nHenslow emphasized how greatly these hallucinations differed from voluntary images; the latter were assembled slowly, bit by bit, like a painting, and seemed to be in the realm of everyday experience, while the former appeared spontaneously, unbidden and full-blown. His hypnagogic hallucinations were \"very frequently of great beauty and highly brilliant. Cut glass (far more elaborate than I am conscious of ever having seen), highly chased gold and silver filigree ornaments; gold and silver flower-stands, etc.; elaborate colored patterns of carpets in brilliant tints.\"\n\nWhile Galton singled out this description for its clarity and detail, Henslow was only one of many who described essentially similar visions when they were in a quiet, darkened room, ready for sleep. These visions varied in vividness, from faint imagery such as Galton himself had to virtual hallucination, though such hallucinations were never mistaken for reality.\n\nGalton did not regard the disposition to hypnagogic visions as pathological; he thought that while a few people might experience them frequently and vividly whenever they went to sleep, most (if not all) people experienced them at least on occasion. It was a normal phenomenon, although special conditions\u2014darkness or closing the eyes, a passive state of mind, the imminence of sleep\u2014were needed to bring it out.\n\nFew other scientists paid much attention to hypnagogic visions until the 1950s, when Peter McKellar and his colleagues started what was to be a decades-long investigation of near-sleep hallucinations, making detailed observations of their content and prevalence in a large population (the student body at the University of Aberdeen) and comparing them with other forms of hallucination, especially those induced by mescaline. In the 1960s, they were able to complement their phenomenological observations with EEG studies as their subjects passed from full wakefulness to a hypnagogic state.\n\nMore than half of McKellar's subjects reported hypnagogic imagery, and auditory hallucinations (of voices, bells, or animal or other noises) were just as common as visual ones. Many of my own correspondents also describe simple auditory hallucinations: dogs barking, telephones ringing, a name being called.\n\nIn his book _Upstate_ , Edmund Wilson described a hypnagogic hallucination of a sort that many people share:\n\nI seem to hear the telephone ringing just before I am completely awake in the morning. At first, I would go to answer it, but find that it was not ringing. Now I simply lie in bed, and if the sound is not repeated, I know that it is imaginary and don't get up.\n\nAntonella B. hears music as she is falling asleep. The first time it happened, she wrote, \"I heard a really nice classical piece, played by a big orchestra, very complex and unknown.\" Usually, no images accompany her music, \"just beautiful sounds that fill my brain up.\"\n\nSusan F., a librarian, had more elaborate auditory hallucinations, as she wrote in a letter:\n\nFor several decades, just as I am drifting off to sleep, I have heard sentences uttered. They are always grammatically correct, usually in English, and usually spoken by a man. (On a few occasions they were spoken by a woman and once in a language I could not understand. I can recognize the differences between the Romance languages, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and Polish, but it was none of these.) Sometimes the sentences are commands, such as \"Go get me a glass of water,\" but at other times they are just statements or questions. During the summer of 1993, I kept a log of what I heard. Here are some of the sentences: \"Once he was walking in front of me\"; \"This is yours, perhaps\"; \"Do you know what the photo looks like?\"; \"Mama wants some cookies\"; \"I smell the unicorn\"; \"Go get a shampoo.\"\n\nWhat I hear bears no relationship to what I have read, seen, experienced or remembered on that day, previous day, week or year. Frequently when my husband is driving and we are on a long trip, I will nod off in the car. The sentences come very rapidly then. I will nod off for a second, hear a sentence in the twilight of waking, repeat the sentence to my husband, and then nod off again, hear another sentence in the twilight and so on, until I decide to wake up and stay awake.\n\nIn _Speak, Memory_ , Nabokov provided an eloquent description of his own hypnagogic imagery, both auditory and visual:\n\nAs far back as I remember... I have been subject to mild hallucinations.... Just before falling asleep, I often become aware of a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts. It is a neutral, detached, anonymous voice, which I catch saying words of no importance to me whatever\u2014an English or a Russian sentence, not even addressed to me, and so trivial that I hardly dare give samples.... This silly phenomenon seems to be the auditory counterpart of certain praedormitary visions, which I also know well.... They come and go, without the drowsy observer's participation, but are essentially different from dream pictures for he is still master of his senses. They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear. At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing _flou_ quality, and then I see\u2014projected, as it were, upon the inside of the eyelid\u2014gray figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows, or a mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts.\n\nFaces are especially common in hypnagogic hallucinations, as Andreas Mavromatis emphasizes in his encyclopedic book _Hypnagogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep_. He cites one man who described this in 1886; the faces, he wrote,\n\nseem to come up out of the darkness, as a mist, and rapidly develop into sharp delineation, assuming roundness, vividness, and living reality. They fade off only to give place to others, which succeed with surprising rapidity and in enormous multitude. Formerly the faces were wonderfully ugly. They were human, but resembling animals, yet such animals as have no fellows in the creation, diabolical-looking.... Latterly the faces have become exquisitely beautiful. Forms and features of faultless perfection now succeed each other in infinite variety and number.\n\nMany other descriptions stress how common it is to see faces, sometimes clusters of faces, with each face highly individuated but unrecognizable. F. E. Leaning, in her 1925 paper on hypnagogia, speculated that such an emphasis on faces \"almost suggests that there is a special 'face-seeing' propensity in the mind.\" Leaning's \"propensity,\" we now know, has its anatomical substrate in a specialized portion of the visual cortex, the fusiform face area. Dominic ffytche and his colleagues have shown in fMRI studies that it is precisely this area in the right hemisphere which is activated when faces are hallucinated.\n\nActivation of a homologous area in the left hemisphere may produce lexical hallucinations\u2014of letters, numbers, musical notation, sometimes words or pseudowords, or even sentences. One of Mavromatis's subjects put it this way: \"When dozing or before going to sleep... I appear to be reading a book. I see the print clearly and distinguish the words, but the words rarely seem to have any particular significance. The books I appear to be reading are never books with which I am familiar, but frequently deal with whatever subject I have been reading during the day.\"\n\n(While hypnagogic images of faces and places are usually unrecognizable, there is a distinct category of hypnagogia which McKellar and Simpson call \"perseverative\": hallucinations or recurrent images of something one has been exposed to earlier in the day. If, for example, one has been driving all day, one may \"see\" a hedgerow or line of trees continually unfurling before one's closed eyes.)\n\nHypnagogic imagery may be faint or colorless, but it often has brilliant and highly saturated color. Ardis and McKellar, in a 1956 paper, cited a case in which the subject described \"colors of the spectrum intensified as though bathed in the fiercest sunlight.\" They compared this, as others have, to the exaggeration of color with mescaline. In hypnagogic hallucinations, luminosity or outlines may also seem to be abnormally distinct, with shadows or furrows exaggerated\u2014sometimes such exaggerations go with cartoonlike figures or scenes. Many people speak of an \"impossible\" clarity or a \"microscopic\" detail in their hypnagogic visions. Images may seem finer-grained than perception itself, as if the inner eye has an acuity of 20\/5 rather than 20\/20 (this hyperacuity is a feature common to many types of visual hallucination).\n\nOne may \"see\" a constellation of images in hypnagogia\u2014a landscape in the middle, a face erupting in the upper left corner, a complex geometric pattern around the edge\u2014all present simultaneously and all evolving or metamorphosing in their own ways, a sort of multifocal hallucination. Many people describe hallucinatory polyopia, multiplications of objects or figures (one of McKellar's subjects saw a pink cockatoo, then hundreds of pink cockatoos talking to each other).\n\nFigures or objects may suddenly zoom towards one, getting larger and more detailed, then retreat. Hypnagogic images, often compared to snapshots or slides, flash into consciousness, hold for a second or two, then disappear; they may be replaced by other images that seem to have no connection or apparent association to one another.\n\nHypnagogic visions may seem like something from \"another world\"\u2014this phrase is used again and again by people describing their visions. Edgar Allan Poe stressed the fact that his own hypnagogic images were not only unfamiliar but unlike anything he had ever seen before; they had \"the absoluteness of novelty.\"2\n\nMost hypnagogic images are not like true hallucinations: they are not felt as real, and they are not projected into external space. And yet they have many of the special features of hallucinations\u2014they are involuntary, uncontrollable, autonomous; they may have preternatural colors and detail and undergo rapid and bizarre transformations unlike those of normal mental imagery.\n\nThere is something about the rapid and spontaneous transformations specific to hypnagogic imagery that suggests the brain is \"idling,\" as my correspondent Mr. Utter suggested. Neuroscientists now tend to speak of \"default networks\" in the brain, which generate their own images. Perhaps one may also venture the term \"play\" and think of the visual cortex playing with every permutation, playing with no goal, no focus, no meanings\u2014a random activity or perhaps an activity with so many microdeterminants that no pattern is ever repeated. Few phenomena give such a sense of the brain's creativity and computational power as the almost infinitely varied, ever-changing torrent of patterns and forms which may be seen in hypnagogic states.\n\nAlthough Mavromatis writes of hypnagogia as \"the unique state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep,\" he sees affinities with other states of consciousness\u2014those of dreams, meditation, trance, and creativity\u2014as well as the altered modes of consciousness in schizophrenia, hysteria, and some drug-induced states. Although hypnagogic hallucinations are sensory (and thus cortical, being produced by the visual cortex, auditory cortex, etc.), he feels that the initiating processes may be in the more primitive, subcortical parts of the brain, and this, too, is something that hypnagogia may share with dreams.\n\nAnd yet the two are quite distinct. Dreams come in episodes, not flashes; they have a continuity, a coherence, a narrative, a theme. One is a participant or a participant-observer in one's dreams, whereas with hypnagogia, one is merely a spectator. Dreams call on one's wishes and fears, and they often replay experiences from the previous day or two, assisting in the consolidation of memory. They sometimes seem to suggest the solution to a problem; they have a strongly personal quality and are determined mostly from above\u2014they are largely \"top-down\" creations (although, as Allan Hobson argues, with a wealth of supporting evidence, they also employ \"bottom-up\" processes). In contrast, hypnagogic imagery or hallucination, with its largely sensory qualities\u2014enhanced or exaggerated color and detail and outlines, luminosity, distortions, multiplications, and zoomings\u2014and its detachment from personal experience, is overwhelmingly a \"bottom-up\" process. (But this is a simplification, for given the two-way traffic at every level in the nervous system, most processes are both top-down and bottom-up.) Hypnagogia and dreaming are both extraordinary states of consciousness, as different from each other as they are different from waking consciousness.\n\nHypnopompic hallucinations\u2014those that may come upon waking\u2014are often profoundly different in character from hypnagogic hallucinations.3 Hypnagogic hallucinations, seen with closed eyes or in darkness, proceed quietly and fleetingly in their own imaginative space and are not usually felt to be physically present in one's room. Hypnopompic hallucinations are often seen with open eyes, in bright illumination; they are frequently projected into external space and seem to be totally solid and real. They sometimes give amusement or pleasure, but they often cause distress or even terror, for they may seem charged with intentionality and ready to attack the just-wakened hallucinator. There is no such intentionality with hypnagogic hallucinations, which are experienced as spectacles unrelated to the hallucinator.\n\nWhile hypnopompic hallucinations are only occasional with most people, they may occur frequently in some, as is the case with Donald Fish, an Australian man whom I met in Sydney after he wrote to me about his vivid hallucinations:\n\nI wake from a calm sleep and perhaps a fairly normal dream with a shock, and there before me is a creature that even Hollywood couldn't create. The hallucinations fade in about ten seconds, and I can move when I have them. In fact I usually jump about a foot into the air and scream.... The hallucinations are becoming worse\u2014now about four a night\u2014I am now becoming terrified of going to bed. The following are some examples of what I see:\n\nA huge figure of an angel standing over me next to a figure of death in black.\n\nA rotting corpse lying next to me.\n\nA huge crocodile at my throat.\n\nA dead baby on the floor covered in blood.\n\nHideous faces laughing at me.\n\nGiant spiders\u2014very frequent.\n\nHuge hand over my face. Also one on the floor five feet across.\n\nDrifting spider webs.\n\nBirds and insects flying into my face.\n\nTwo faces looking at me from under a rock.\n\nImage of myself\u2014only looking older\u2014standing by the bed in a suit.\n\nTwo rats eating a potato.\n\nA mass of different colored flags descending onto me.\n\nUgly-looking primitive man lying on floor covered in tufts of orange hair.\n\nShards of glass falling on me.\n\nTwo wire lobster pots.\n\nDots of red, increasing to thousands like spattered blood.\n\nMasses of logs falling on me.\n\nIt is often said that hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations are more vivid and most easily remembered in childhood, but Mr. Fish's hallucinations have been lifelong\u2014they started when he was eight, and he is now over eighty. Why he should be so prone to hypnopompic hallucinations is a mystery. Although he has had thousands of hypnopompic hallucinations, he has been able to live a full life and function consistently at a high creative level. A graphic designer and visual artist with a brilliant imagination, he sometimes finds inspiration in his surreal hallucinations.\n\nWhile Mr. Fish's hypnopompic imagery is extreme in its frequency (and very distressing to him), it is not atypical in character. Elyn S. wrote to me about her own hypnopompic images:\n\nThe most typical one would involve me sitting up in bed and seeing a person\u2014often an old lady\u2014staring at me at some distance from the foot of my bed. (I imagine that such hallucinations are thought to be ghosts by some people\u2014but not by me.) Other examples are seeing a foot-wide spider crawling up my wall; seeing fireworks; and seeing a little devil at the foot of my bed riding a bicycle in place.\n\nA powerfully persuasive form of hallucination, not explicitly sensory at all, is the feeling of the \"presence\" of someone or something nearby, a presence that may be felt as malevolent or benign. The sense of conviction that someone is there can be irresistible at such times.\n\nFor me, hypnopompic experiences are usually more auditory than visual, and they take a variety of forms. Sometimes they are persistences of dreams or nightmares. On one occasion I heard a scratching sound in the corner of the room. I paid little attention at first, thinking it was just a mouse in the walls. But the scratching grew louder and louder and began to frighten me. Alarmed, I flung a pillow into the corner. But the action (or, rather, the imagined action) of flinging fully awakened me, and I opened my eyes to find that I was in my own bedroom, not the hospital-like room of my dream. But the scratching sound continued, loud and utterly \"real,\" for several seconds after I woke.\n\nI have had musical hallucinations (when taking chloral hydrate as a sleeping aid) which were continuations of dream music into the waking state\u2014once with a Mozart quintet. My normal musical memory and imagery is not that strong\u2014I am quite incapable of hearing every instrument in a quintet, let alone an orchestra\u2014so the experience of hearing the Mozart, hearing every instrument, was a startling (and beautiful) one. Under more normal conditions I experience a hypnopompic state of heightened (and somewhat uncritical) musical sensibility; whatever music I hear in this state delights me. This happens almost every morning when I am awoken by my clock radio, which is tuned to a classical station. (An artist friend describes a similar enhancement of color and texture when he lies in bed after first opening his eyes in the morning.)\n\nRecently, I had a startling and rather moving visual hallucination. I cannot recollect what I was dreaming, if indeed I was dreaming, but when I awoke I saw my own face\u2014or, rather, my face as it was when I was forty, black-bearded, smiling rather shyly. The face was about two feet away, life-sized, in faint, unsaturated pastel color, poised in midair; it seemed to look at me with curiosity and affection, and then, after about five seconds, it faded out. It gave me an odd, nostalgic sense of continuity with my younger self. As I lay in bed, I wondered whether, when young, I had ever had a vision of my present, almost eighty-year-old face, a hypnopompic \"hello\" across forty years.\n\nWhile we may have the most fantastical and surreal experiences in our dreams, we accept these because we are enveloped in our dream consciousness, and there is no critical consciousness outside it (the rare phenomenon of lucid dreaming is an exception). When we awake we can remember only fragments, a tiny fraction of our dreams, and can easily dismiss these as \"just a dream.\"\n\nHallucinations, in contrast, are startling and apt to be remembered in great detail\u2014this is one of the central contrasts between sleep-related hallucinations and dreaming. My colleague Dr. D. has had only one hypnopompic hallucination in his life, and it occurred thirty years ago. But he retains the most vivid memory of it:\n\nIt was a relaxed summer night. I awoke around 2 AM, as I sometimes do in the middle of the night, and next to me, standing six and a half feet tall, was an imposing Native American. A huge man, muscles chiseled, black hair and black eyes. I realized, seemingly simultaneously, that if he wanted to kill me there was nothing I could do, and that he must not be real. Yet he was standing there, like a statue yet very alive. My mind flashed about\u2014how could he have gotten into the house?... Why was he motionless?... This can't be real. Yet his presence frightened me. He became diaphanous after five or ten seconds, gently vaporizing into invisibility.4\n\nGiven the outlandish quality of some hypnopompic images, their often terrifying emotional resonance, and perhaps the heightened suggestibility that may go with such states, it is very understandable that hypnopompic visions of angels and devils may engender not only wonder or horror but belief in their physical reality. Indeed, one must wonder to what degree the very idea of monsters, ghostly spirits, or phantoms originated with such hallucinations. One can easily imagine that, coupled with a personal or cultural disposition to believe in a disembodied, spiritual realm, these hallucinations, though they have a real physiological basis, might reinforce a belief in the supernatural.\n\nThe term \"hypnopompic\" was introduced in 1901 by F. W. H. Myers, an English poet and classicist who was fascinated by the emerging study of psychology. He was a friend of William James's and a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research, where he sought to connect the abnormal and paranormal with normal psychological function. Myers's work was highly influential.\n\nLiving in the late nineteenth century, a time in which s\u00e9ances and mediums were all the rage, Myers wrote extensively of ghosts, apparitions, and phantoms. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed in the idea of life after death, but he tried to place it in a scientific context. Although he felt that experiences likely to be interpreted as supernatural visitations were especially apt to occur in hypnopompic states, he also believed in the objective reality of a spiritual or supernatural realm, to which the mind might be given brief access in various physiological states, such as dreaming, hypnopompic states, trance states, and certain forms of epilepsy. But at the same time, he thought that hypnopompic hallucinations might be fragments of dreams or nightmares persisting into the waking state\u2014in effect, waking dreams.\n\nYet reading Myers's 1903 two-volume _Human Personality and Its Survival After Bodily Death_ , as well as _Phantasms of the Living_ , the compilation of case histories he and his colleagues (Gurney et al.) published in 1886, one feels that the majority of \"psychical\" or \"paranormal\" experiences described are, in fact, hallucinations\u2014hallucinations arising in states of bereavement, social isolation, or sensory deprivation, and above all in drowsy or trancelike states.\n\nMy colleague Dr. B., a psychotherapist, related the following story to me, about a ten-year-old boy who woke one morning \"to find a woman dressed in blue hovering at the foot of his bed, surrounded by radiant light\":\n\nShe introduced herself as his \"guardian angel,\" speaking in a soft, gentle voice. The child was terrified, and turned on the light beside his bed, expecting the image to disappear. The woman remained suspended in the air, however, and he ran from the room, awakening his parents.\n\nHis parents framed the experience as a dream, trying to reassure the child. He was unconvinced, unable to make sense of the event. His family had no religious background, and he found the image of the angel alien. He began to experience a pervasive sense of dread and developed insomnia, fearful that he would awaken to find the woman again. His parents and teachers described him as agitated and distracted, and he increasingly withdrew from relationships with peers and activities. His parents called their pediatrician, who referred the child for psychiatric evaluations and psychotherapy.\n\nThe child had no prior history of problems in functioning, sleep disorder, or physical illness, and he appeared to be well-adjusted. He made effective use of therapeutic consultations, where he continued to... make sense of what had happened, coming to understand the event as a type of hallucination that commonly occurs following arousal from sleep.\n\nDr. B. added, \"Although there would appear to be a high prevalence of hypnopompic hallucinations among healthy, well-adjusted persons, they are potentially traumatic, and it is crucial to explore the _meaning_ and implications of such phenomena for the individual.\"\n\nExperiences so far out of the ordinary constitute a severe challenge to one's world picture, one's belief system\u2014how can they be explained? What do they mean? One sees poignantly with this young patient how reason itself can be rocked by such nighttime visions, which insist on their own reality.\n\n1. The Reverend Henslow was a son of the botanist John Stevens Henslow, who was Darwin's teacher at Cambridge and was instrumental in getting him a position aboard the _Beagle_.\n\n2. Feeling that hypnagogic hallucinations could extend and enrich the imagination, Poe would jerk himself suddenly to full wakefulness while hallucinating, so that he could make note of the extraordinary things he saw, and he often brought these into his poems and short stories. Poe's great translator, Baudelaire, was also fascinated by the unique quality of such visions, especially if they were potentiated by opium or hashish. A whole generation in the early nineteenth century (including Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as Southey and De Quincey) was influenced by such hallucinations. This is explored by Alethea Hayter in her book _Opium and the Romantic Imagination_ and by Eva Brann in her magisterial _The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance_.\n\n3. Hypnopompic hallucinations are far less common than hypnagogic ones, and some people have hypnagogic hallucinations upon awakening, or hypnopompic ones while falling asleep.\n\n4. Spinoza, in the 1660s, described a similar hallucination in a letter to his friend Peter Balling:\n\nWhen one morning, after the day had dawned, I woke up from a very unpleasant dream, the images, which had presented themselves to me in sleep, remained before my eyes just as vividly as though the things had been real, especially the image of a certain black and leprous Brazilian whom I had never seen before. This image disappeared for the most part when, in order to divert my thoughts, I cast my eyes on a book or something else. But as soon as I lifted my eyes again, without fixing my attention on any particular object, the same image of this same negro appeared with the same vividness again and again, until the head of it finally vanished.\n\n# 12\n\nNarcolepsy and Night Hags\n\nSometime in the late 1870s, Jean-Baptiste-\u00c9douard G\u00e9lineau, a French neurologist from a wine-making family, had occasion to examine a thirty-eight-year-old wine merchant who had been having attacks of sudden, brief, irresistible sleep for two years. By the time he came to G\u00e9lineau, he was having as many as two hundred a day. He sometimes fell asleep in the middle of a meal, the knife and fork slipping from his fingers; he might drop off in the middle of a sentence or as soon as he had been seated in a theater. Intense emotions, sad or happy, often precipitated his sleep attacks and also episodes of \"astasia,\" in which there was a sudden loss of muscular strength and tone, so that he would fall helplessly to the ground, while remaining perfectly conscious. G\u00e9lineau regarded this conjunction of narcolepsy (a term he coined) and astasia (we now call it cataplexy) as a new syndrome\u2014one with a neurological origin.1\n\nIn 1928 a New York physician, Samuel Brock, presented a broader view of narcolepsy, describing a young man of twenty-two who was prone not only to sudden sleep attacks and cataplexy but also a paralysis, with the inability to talk or move, following his sleep attacks. In this state of sleep paralysis (as the condition was later to be named), he had vivid hallucinations, which he experienced at no other time. Though Brock's case was described in a contemporary (1929) review of narcolepsy as \"unique,\" it soon became apparent that sleep paralysis and the hallucinations associated with it were far from uncommon and should be regarded as integral features of a narcoleptic syndrome.\n\nIt is now known that the hypothalamus secretes \"wakefulness\" hormones, orexins, and that these are deficient in people who have congenital narcolepsy. Damage to the hypothalamus, from a head injury or a tumor or disease, can also cause narcolepsy later in life.\n\nFull-blown narcolepsy can be incapacitating if untreated, but it is mercifully rare, affecting perhaps one person in two thousand. (Milder forms may be appreciably commoner.) People with narcolepsy are apt to feel embarrassed, isolated, or misunderstood (as with G\u00e9lineau's patient, who was regarded as a drunk), but awareness is spreading, in part because of organizations such as the Narcolepsy Network.\n\nDespite this, narcolepsy often goes undiagnosed. Jeanette B. wrote to me that her narcolepsy had not been diagnosed until she was an adult. In elementary school, she said, \"I thought I had schizophrenia, because of my hypnagogic hallucinations. I even wrote a paper on schizophrenia in sixth grade (never mentioning that I thought that was my problem).\" Much later, when she went to a narcolepsy support group, she wrote, \"I was astounded to find that many in the group not only had hallucinations, but the very same hallucinations as I did!\"\n\nWhen I heard recently that the New York chapter of the Narcolepsy Network was due to have a meeting, I asked if I might come along to listen to members discuss their experiences and to talk with some of them myself. Cataplexy\u2014the sudden, complete loss of muscle tone with emotion or laughter\u2014affected many at this meeting, and it was freely discussed. (Cataplexy, indeed, can scarcely be hidden. I spoke to one man, by chance a friend of the comedian Robin Williams's, who said that whenever he met Robin, he would lie down on the ground preemptively; otherwise, he was sure to fall down in a fit of laughter-induced cataplexy.) But hallucinations were another matter: people often hesitate to admit to them, and there was little open discussion of the subject, even in a room full of narcoleptics. Nonetheless, many people later wrote to me about their hallucinations, including Sharon S., who described her own experience:\n\nI wake on my stomach to the sensation that the mattress is breathing. I cannot move and the terror sets in as I \"see\" the marbled grey skin with sparse black hairs underneath me. I am sprawled on the back of a walking elephant.... The absurdity of my hallucinations causes me to collapse with cataplexy.... [Another time] as I am waking from a nap I \"see\" myself in the corner of the bedroom.... I am close to the ceiling, slowly floating to the floor by parachute. During the hallucination it seemed perfectly normal and I am left with a very peaceful, serene feeling.\n\nSharon has also had hallucinations while driving:\n\n[I am driving] to work, and getting increasingly sleepy; suddenly, the road ahead rises up in front of me and hits me in the face. It is so realistic. I jerk my head back. It certainly woke me up. This experience is different from my other hallucinations in that my eyes were open and I was seeing my actual surroundings, but with distortion.\n\nWhile most of us have a robust sleep-wake cycle, with sleep occurring predominantly at night, people with narcolepsy can have dozens of \"microsleeps\" (some lasting for only a few seconds) and \"in-between states\" each day\u2014and any or all of these may be charged with intensely vivid dreams, hallucinations, or some almost-indistinguishable fusion of the two. Sudden, narcolepsy-like sleep without cataplexy may also occur in toxic states or with various medications (especially sedatives), and there is often some tendency to it with aging, in the dozing or nodding off of the elderly into brief, dream-charged sleeps.\n\nI have these increasingly often myself. Once, while reading Gibbon's autobiography in bed\u2014this was in 1988, when I was thinking and reading a great deal about deaf people and their use of sign language\u2014I found an amazing description by Gibbon of seeing a group of deaf people in London in 1770, immersed in an animated sign discourse. I immediately thought that this would make a wonderful footnote for the book I was writing, but when I came to reread Gibbon's description, it was not there. I had hallucinated or perhaps dreamt it, in a flash, between two sentences of text.\n\nStephanie W. had her first narcoleptic hallucination when she was five, walking home from kindergarten. She wrote to me that her hallucinations frequently occur during the daytime, and she presumes they happen before or after very short microsleeps:\n\nHowever... I am not able to detect that a microsleep has occurred unless something in my environment noticeably \"jumps\" forward or changes in some way\u2014as it did, for example, when I still drove a car and would find that my vehicle had unaccountably leapt forward on the road during a microsleep.... Prior to treatment for narcolepsy, I had many periods during which I experienced hallucinations on a daily basis.... Some were utterly benign: an \"angel\" which would appear periodically over a particular highway exit... hearing a person whispering my name repeatedly, hearing a knock at the door which no one else hears, seeing and feeling ants walking on my legs.... Some were terrifying [like the] experience of visually seeing the people before me take on the appearance of being dead....\n\nIt was especially difficult as a child to be experiencing things that the people around me did not also sense. The attempts that I remember making to talk with adults or other kids about what was going on repeatedly elicited anger and suspicion that I was \"crazy\" or lying.... It got easier as an adult. (Although when I was treated within the mental health system, I was told that I had \"Psychosis with unusually strong reality testing.\")\n\nReceiving the correct diagnosis\u2014narcolepsy\u2014was deeply reassuring to Stephanie W., as was meeting others with similar hallucinations in the Narcolepsy Network.2 With this diagnosis and the prescription of effective medication, she feels there has been a complete change in her life.\n\nLynn O. wished that her doctors had told her earlier that her hallucinations were part of a narcoleptic syndrome. Prior to her diagnosis, she wrote,\n\nThese episodes happened frequently enough throughout my life that instead of suspecting a sleep disorder, I suspected paranormal activity in my life. Are there many people who integrate the experiences in this manner? Had I been better educated about this disorder, perhaps instead of suspecting I was being interfered with, haunted, spiritually challenged or perhaps mentally ill, I would have sought more constructive help earlier in life. I am now forty-three years old. And I have found a new peace in life in realizing many of these experiences have had to do with this disorder.\n\nIn a later letter, she observed, \"I find myself in the fresh stage of having to reevaluate many of my 'paranormal' experiences, and I find I am having to reintegrate a new view of the world based on my new diagnosis. It is like letting go of childhood or, rather, letting go of a mystical, almost magical view of the world. I must say, perhaps I am experiencing a touch of mourning.\"\n\nMany people with narcolepsy have auditory or tactile hallucinations along with visual ones, as well as complex bodily feelings. Christina K. is prone to sleep paralysis, and often her hallucinations go with this, as in the following episode:\n\nI had just lain down in bed, and after a few rounds of changing positions I ended up face down. Almost immediately I felt my body go more and more numb. I tried to \"pull\" myself out of it, but I was already too deep into the paralysis. Then it was almost as if someone sat down on my back, pressing me deeper into the mattress... the weight on my back got heavier and heavier, and I was still not able to move. [Then] the thing on my back got off and laid down next to me.... I could feel it lying beside me, breathing. I got so scared and thought that this couldn't be anything other than real... because I had been awake all along. It felt like an eternity before I managed to turn my head towards it. Then I laid eyes on an abnormally tall man in a black suit. He was greenishly pale, sick-looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes. I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all. He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-ONE-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically.... I started feeling able to move again, and as I came back to a normal state the image of the man became more and more blurry until he was gone and I was able to get up.\n\nAnother correspondent, J.D., also described the hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis, including the feeling of pressure on her chest:\n\nSometimes I would see things like huge centipedes or caterpillars crawling all over my ceiling. Once I thought my cat was on the shelf in my room. She seemed to be rolling around and turning into a rat. The worst was when I would hallucinate that a spider was on my chest. I couldn't move. I would try to scream. I am TERRIFIED of spiders.\n\nOn one occasion, she had a hallucination resembling an out-of-body experience:\n\nI hallucinated that my body floated up to the ceiling towards the end of my bed, and then all of a sudden my body quickly dropped through the floor to the first level of the house and then dropped through that floor and into the basement. I could see everything in each room. The floors did not seem to break when I went through them. I just passed through them.\n\nThere was little physiological understanding of sleeping, dreaming, or sleep disorders until 1953, when Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago discovered REM sleep\u2014a distinctive stage of sleep with characteristic rapid eye movements, as well as characteristic EEG changes. They also found that if their subjects were woken during REM sleep, they would always report that they had been dreaming. It seemed, then, that dreaming was correlated with REM sleep.3 In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements. Most people enter the REM stage ninety minutes or so after falling asleep, but people with narcolepsy (or those with sleep deprivation) may fall into REM at the very onset of sleep, plunging suddenly into dreaming and sleep paralysis; they may also wake at the \"wrong\" time, so that the dreamlike visions and the loss of muscle control characteristic of REM sleep persist into the waking state. Even though the person is wide awake, he may be assaulted by dream- or nightmare-like hallucinations, made even more terrifying by an inability to move or speak.\n\nBut one does not have to have narcolepsy to experience sleep paralysis with hallucinations\u2014indeed, J. A. Cheyne and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo have shown that somewhere between a third and half of the general population has had at least occasional episodes of this, and even a single episode may be unforgettable.\n\nCheyne et al. explored and categorized a huge range of sleep-paralysis-related phenomena, based on reports from three hundred student subjects as well as a large and varied population who responded to an internet questionnaire. They concluded that isolated sleep paralysis (that is, sleep paralysis without narcolepsy), being relatively common, \"constitutes a unique natural laboratory for the study of hallucinoid experiences\" but stressed that such hallucinations cannot be compared to ordinary hypnagogic or hypnopompic experiences. The hallucinations accompanying isolated sleep paralysis, they wrote, are \"substantially more vivid, elaborate, multimodal and terrifying,\" and therefore more likely to have a radical impact on anyone who experiences them. These hallucinations may be visceral, auditory, or tactile as well as visual and are accompanied by a feeling of suffocation or pressure on the chest, the sense of a malignant presence, and an overall sense of absolute helplessness and abject terror. These, of course, are the cardinal qualities of the nightmare, in its original sense.\n\nThe \"mare\" in \"nightmare\" originally referred to a demonic woman who suffocated sleepers by lying on their chests (she was called \"Old Hag\" in Newfoundland). Ernest Jones, in his monograph _On the Nightmare_ , emphasized that nightmares were radically different from ordinary dreams in their invariable sense of a fearful presence (sometimes astride the chest), difficulty breathing, and the realization that one is totally paralyzed. The term \"nightmare\" is often used now to describe any bad dream or anxiety dream, but the real night-mare has dread of a wholly different order; Cheyne speaks of \"the ominous numinous\" here. He suggests that the term for the night-mare proper be spelled with a hyphen, and this convention has been adopted by other workers in the field.\n\nShelley Adler, in her book _Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection_ , also brings out the extreme nature of the sense of terror and doom that makes the experience of sleep paralysis unlike any other. She emphasizes that night-mares, unlike dreams, occur when one is awake\u2014but awake in a partial or dissociated way; in this sense, the term \"sleep\" paralysis is misleading. The terror of this state is heightened by the shallow breathing of REM sleep and a rapid or irregular heartbeat, which can go with extreme excitement. Such overpowering fear and its physiological accompaniments can even be fatal, especially if there is a cultural tradition that associates sleep paralysis with death. Adler studied a group of Hmong refugees from Laos who had immigrated to central California in the late 1970s and were not always able to perform their traditional religious rites during the upheaval of genocide and relocation. In Hmong culture, there is a strong belief that night-mares can be fatal; this evil expectation, or nocebo, apparently contributed to the sudden unexplained nocturnal deaths of almost two hundred Hmong immigrants (mostly young and in good health) in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Once they were more assimilated and the old beliefs lost their power, the sudden deaths stopped.\n\nThe folklore of every culture includes supernatural figures like the incubus and succubus, which assault the sleeper sexually, or the Old Hag, which paralyzes its victims and sucks their breath away. Such images seem to be universal\u2014indeed, there is a remarkable similarity of such figures in widely disparate cultures, although there are local variations of every sort. Hallucinatory experiences, whatever their cause, generate a world of imaginary beings and abodes\u2014heaven, hell, fairyland. Such myths and beliefs are designed to clarify and reassure and, at the same time, to frighten and warn. We make narratives for a nocturnal experience which is common, real, and physiologically based.\n\nWhen traditional figures\u2014devils, witches, or hags\u2014are no longer believed in, new ones\u2014aliens, visitations from \"a previous life\"\u2014take their place. Hallucinations, beyond any other waking experience, can excite, bewilder, terrify, or inspire, leading to the folklore and the myths (sublime, horrible, creative, and playful) which perhaps no individual and no culture can wholly dispense with.\n\n1. Bill Hayes, in his book _Sleep Demons_ , cites an even earlier reference to irresistible, overwhelming sleepiness and probable cataplexy\u2014\"It falls upon them in the midst of mirth\"\u2014from a little-known 1834 book, _The Philosophy of Sleep_ , by the Scottish physician Robert Macnish.\n\n2. A key figure in the narcolepsy world is Michael Thorpy, a physician whose many books on narcolepsy and other sleep disorders have grown out of a lifetime of experience directing a sleep disorders clinic at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.\n\n3. This simple equation had to be modified later, when it was found that dreams\u2014albeit of a somewhat different kind\u2014could also occur in non-REM sleep.\n\n# 13\n\nThe Haunted Mind\n\nIn Charles Bonnet syndrome, sensory deprivation, parkinsonism, migraine, epilepsy, drug intoxication, and hypnagogia, there seems to be a mechanism in the brain that generates or facilitates hallucination\u2014a primary physiological mechanism, related to local irritation, \"release,\" neurotransmitter disturbance, or whatever\u2014with little reference to the individual's life circumstances, character, emotions, beliefs, or state of mind. While people with such hallucinations may (or may not) enjoy them as a sensory experience, they almost uniformly emphasize their meaninglessness, their irrelevance to events and issues of their lives.\n\nIt is quite otherwise with the hallucinations we must now consider, which are, essentially, compulsive returns to a past experience. But here, unlike the sometimes moving but essentially trivial flashbacks of temporal lobe seizures, it is the significant past\u2014beloved or terrible\u2014that comes back to haunt the mind\u2014life experiences so charged with emotion that they make an indelible impression on the brain and compel it to repetition.\n\nThe emotions here can be of various kinds: grief or longing for a loved person or place from which death or exile or the passage of time has separated one; terror, horror, anguish, or dread following deeply traumatic, ego-threatening or life-threatening events. Such hallucinations may also be provoked by overwhelming guilt for a crime or sin that, perhaps belatedly, the conscience cannot tolerate. Hallucinations of ghosts\u2014revenant spirits of the dead\u2014are especially associated with violent death and guilt.\n\nStories of such hauntings and hallucinations have a substantial place in the myths and literature of every culture. Thus Hamlet's murdered father appears to him (\"In my mind's eye, Horatio\") to tell him how he was murdered and must be avenged. And when Macbeth is plotting the murder of King Duncan, he sees a dagger in midair, a symbol of his intention and an incitement to action. Later, after he has had Banquo killed for threatening to expose him, he has hallucinations of Banquo's ghost; while Lady Macbeth, who has smeared Duncan's blood over his slain grooms, \"sees\" the king's blood and smells it, ineradicable, on her hands.1\n\nAny consuming passion or threat may lead to hallucinations in which an idea and an intense emotion are embedded. Especially common are hallucinations engendered by loss and grief\u2014particularly following the death of a spouse after decades of togetherness and marriage. Losing a parent, a spouse, or a child is losing a part of oneself; and bereavement causes a sudden hole in one's life, a hole which\u2014somehow\u2014must be filled. This presents a cognitive problem and a perceptual one as well as an emotional one, and a painful longing for reality to be otherwise.\n\nI never experienced hallucinations after the deaths of my parents or my three brothers, though I often dreamt of them. But the first and most painful of these losses was the sudden death of my mother in 1972, and this led to persistent illusions over a period of months, when I would mistake other people in the street for her. There was always, I think, some similarity of appearance and carriage behind these illusions, and part of me, I suspect, was hyper-alert, unconsciously searching for my lost parent.\n\nSometimes bereavement hallucinations take the form of a voice. Marion C., a psychoanalyst, wrote to me about \"hearing\" the voice (and, on a subsequent occasion, the laugh) of her dead husband:\n\nOne evening I came home from work as always to our big empty house. Usually at that hour Paul would have been at his electronic chessboard playing over the game in the _New York Times_. His table was out of sight of the foyer, but he greeted me in his familiar way: \"Hello! You're back! Hi!\"... His voice was clear and strong and true; just the way it was when he was well. I \"heard\" it. It was as if he were actually at his chess table and actually greeting me once more. The other part was that, as I said, I couldn't see him from the foyer, yet I did. I \"saw\" him, I \"saw\" the expression on his face, I \"saw\" how he moved the pieces, I \"saw\" him greet me. That part was like one sees in a dream: as if I were seeing a picture or a movie of an event. But the speech was live and real.\n\nSilas Weir Mitchell, working with soldiers who had lost limbs in the Civil War, was the first to understand the neurological nature of phantom limbs\u2014they had previously been regarded, if at all, as a sort of bereavement hallucination. By a curious irony, Mitchell himself suffered a bereavement hallucination following the sudden death of a very close friend, as Jerome Schneck described in a 1989 article:\n\nA reporter brought the unexpected news one morning and Mitchell, greatly shaken, went up to tell his wife. On the way back downstairs he had an odd experience: he could see the face of Brooks, larger than life, smiling, and very distinct, yet looking as if it were made of dewy gossamer. When he looked down, the vision disappeared, but for ten days he could see it a little above his head to the left.\n\nBereavement hallucinations, deeply tied to emotional needs and feelings, tend to be unforgettable, as Elinor S., a sculptor and printmaker, wrote to me:\n\nWhen I was fourteen years old, my parents, brother and I were spending the summer at my grandparents' house as we had done for many previous years. My grandfather had died the winter before.\n\nWe were in the kitchen, my grandmother was at the sink, my mother was helping and I was still finishing dinner at the kitchen table, facing the back porch door. My grandfather walked in and I was so happy to see him that I got up to meet him. I said, \"Grampa,\" and as I moved towards him, he suddenly wasn't there. My grandmother was visibly upset, and I thought she might have been angry with me because of her expression. I said to my mother that I had really seen him clearly, and she said that I had seen him because I wanted to. I hadn't been consciously thinking of him and still do not understand how I could have seen him so clearly.\n\nI am now seventy-six years of age and still remember the incident and have never experienced anything similar.\n\nElizabeth J. wrote to me about a grief hallucination experienced by her young son:\n\nMy husband died thirty years ago after a long illness. My son was nine years old at the time; he and his dad ran together on a regular basis. A few months after my husband's death, my son came to me and said that he sometimes saw his father running past our home in his yellow running shorts (his usual running attire). At the time, we were in family grief counselling, and when I described my son's experience, the counsellor did attribute the hallucinations to a neurologic response to grief. This was comforting to us, and I still have the yellow running shorts.\n\nA general practitioner in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed nearly three hundred recently bereft people and found that almost half of them had had illusions or full-fledged hallucinations of a dead spouse. These could be visual, auditory, or both\u2014some of the people interviewed enjoyed conversations with their hallucinated spouses. The likelihood of such hallucinations increased with the length of marriage, and they might persist for months or even years. Rees considered these hallucinations to be normal and even helpful in the mourning process.\n\nFor Susan M., bereavement stimulated a particularly vivid, multisensory experience a few hours after her mother died: \"I heard the squeaking of the wheels of her walker in the hallway. She walked into the room shortly afterward and sat down on the bed next to me. I could feel her sit down on the mattress. I spoke to her and said I thought she had died. I don't remember exactly what she said in return\u2014something about checking in with me. All I know is I could feel her there and it was frightening but also comforting.\"\n\nRay P. wrote to me after his father died at the age of eighty-five, following a heart operation. Although Ray had rushed to the hospital, his father had already lapsed into a coma. An hour before his father died, Ray whispered to him: \"Dad, it's Ray. I'll take care of mom. Don't worry, everything is going to be alright.\" A few nights later, Ray wrote, he was awakened by an apparition:\n\nI awoke in the night. I did not feel groggy or disoriented and my thoughts and vision were clear. I saw someone sitting on the corner of my bed. It was my Dad, wearing his khaki slacks and tan polo shirt. I was lucid enough to wonder initially if this could be a dream but I was certainly awake. He was opaque, not ethereal in any way, the nighttime Baltimore light pollution in the window behind him did not show through. He sat there for a moment and then said\u2014did he speak or just convey the thought?\u2014\"Everything is all right.\"\n\nI turned and swung my feet to the floor. When I looked [back toward] him, he was gone. I stood and went to the bathroom, got a drink of water, and went back to bed. My dad never returned. I do not know whether this was a hallucination or something else, but since I provisionally do not believe in the paranormal, it must have been.2\n\nThe hallucinations of grief may sometimes take a less benign form. Christopher Baethge, a psychiatrist, has written about two mothers who lost young children in a particularly traumatic way. Both had multisensory hallucinations of their dead daughters\u2014seeing them, hearing them, smelling them, being touched by them. And both were driven to delusional, otherworldly explanations of their hallucinations: one believed that \"this was her daughter's attempt to establish contact with her from another world, a world in which her daughter continues to exist\"; the other heard her daughter cry out, \"Mamma, don't be afraid, I'll come back.\"3\n\nRecently I tripped over a box of books in my office, fell headlong, and broke a hip. This seemed to happen in slow motion. I thought, _I have plenty of time to put out my arm to break the fall_ , but then\u2014suddenly\u2014I was on the floor, and as I hit, I felt the crunch in my hip. With near-hallucinatory vividness, in the next few weeks, I reexperienced my fall; it replayed itself in my mind and body. For two months I avoided the office, the place where I had fallen, because it provoked this quasi-hallucination of falling and the crunch of breaking bone. This is one example\u2014a trivial one, perhaps\u2014of a reaction to trauma, a mild traumatic stress syndrome. It is largely resolved now, but it will, I suspect, lurk in the depths as a traumatic memory that may be reactivated under certain conditions for the rest of my life.\n\nMuch deeper trauma and consequent PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) may affect anyone who has lived through a violent crash, a natural cataclysm, war, rape, abuse, torture, or abandonment\u2014any experience that produces a terrifying fear for one's own safety or that of others.\n\nAll of these situations can produce immediate reactions, but there may also be, sometimes years later, post-traumatic syndromes of a malignant and often persistent sort. It is characteristic of these syndromes that, in addition to anxiety, heightened startle reactions, depression, and autonomic disorders, there is a strong tendency to obsessive rumination on the horrors which were experienced\u2014and, not infrequently, sudden flashbacks in which the original trauma may be reexperienced in its totality with every sensory modality and with every emotion that was felt at the time.4 These flashbacks, though often spontaneous, are especially liable to be evoked by objects, sounds, or smells associated with the original trauma.\n\nThe term \"flashback\" may not do justice to the profound and sometimes dangerous delusional states that can go with post-traumatic hallucinations. In such states, all sense of the present may be lost or misinterpreted in terms of hallucination and delusion. Thus the traumatized veteran, during a flashback, may be convinced that people in a supermarket are enemy soldiers and\u2014if he is armed\u2014open fire on them. This extreme state of consciousness is rare but potentially deadly.\n\nOne woman wrote to me that, having been molested as a three-year-old and assaulted at the age of nineteen, \"for both events smell will bring back strong flashbacks.\" She continued:\n\nI had my first flashback of being assaulted as a child when a man sat next to me on a bus. Once I smelled [his] sweat and body odor, I was not on that bus anymore. I was in my neighbor's garage and I remembered everything. The bus driver had to ask me to get off the bus when we arrived at our destination. I lost all sense of time and place.\n\nParticularly severe and long-lasting stress reactions may occur after rape or sexual assault. In a case reported by Terry Heins and his colleagues, for example, a fifty-five-year-old woman who had been forced to watch her parents' sexual intercourse as a young child and then forced to have intercourse with her father at the age of eight experienced repeated flashbacks of the trauma as an adult, as well as \"voices\"\u2014a post-traumatic stress syndrome that was misdiagnosed as schizophrenia and led to psychiatric hospitalization.\n\nPeople with PTSD are also prone to recurrent dreams or nightmares, often incorporating literal or somewhat disguised repetitions of the traumatic experiences. Paul Chodoff, a psychiatrist writing in 1963 about the effects of trauma in concentration camp survivors, saw such dreams as a hallmark of the syndrome and noted that in a surprising number of cases, they were still occurring a decade and a half after the war.5 The same is true of flashbacks.\n\nChodoff observed that obsessive rumination on concentration camp experiences might diminish in some people with the passage of time, but others\n\ncommunicated an uncanny feeling that nothing of real significance had happened in their lives since their liberation, as they reported their experiences with a vivid immediacy and wealth of detail which almost made the walls of my office disappear, to be replaced by the bleak vistas of Auschwitz or Buchenwald.\n\nRuth Jaffe, in a 1968 article, described one concentration camp survivor who had frequent attacks in which she relived her experience at the gates of Auschwitz, where she saw her sister led off into a group destined for death but could do nothing to save her, even though she tried to sacrifice herself instead. In her attacks, she saw people entering the gates of the camp and heard her sister's voice calling, \"Katy, where are you? Why do you leave me?\" Other survivors are haunted by olfactory flashbacks, suddenly smelling the gas ovens\u2014a smell which, more than anything else, brings back the horror of the camps. Similarly, the smell of burning rubble lingered around the World Trade Center for months after 9\/11\u2014and continued as a hallucination to haunt some survivors even when the actual smell was gone.\n\nThere is a large body of literature on both acute stress reactions and delayed ones following natural disasters like tsunamis or earthquakes. (These occur in very young children too, though they may tend to reenact rather than hallucinate or reexperience the disaster.) But PTSD seems to have an even higher prevalence and greater severity following violence or disaster that is man-made; natural disasters, \"acts of God,\" seem somehow easier to accept. This is the case with acute stress reactions, too: I see it often with my patients in hospital, who can show extraordinary courage and calmness in facing the most dreadful diseases but fly into a rage if a nurse is late with a bedpan or a medication. The amorality of nature is accepted, whether it takes the form of a monsoon, an elephant in musth, or a disease; but being subjected helplessly to the will of others is not, for human behavior always carries (or is felt to carry) a moral charge.\n\nFollowing the First World War, some physicians felt that there must be an organic brain disturbance underlying what were then called war neuroses, which seemed unlike \"normal\" neuroses in many ways.6 The term \"shell shock\" was coined with the notion that the brains of these soldiers had been mechanically deranged by the repeated concussion of the new high-explosive shells introduced in this war. There was as yet no formal recognition of the delayed effects of the severe trauma of soldiers who endured shells and mustard gas for days on end, in muddy trenches that were filled with the rotting corpses of their comrades.7\n\nRecent work by Bennet Omalu and others has shown that repeated concussion (even \"mild\" concussions that do not cause a loss of consciousness) can result in a chronic traumatic encephalopathy, causing memory and cognitive impairment; this may well exacerbate tendencies to depression, flashbacks, hallucination, and psychosis. Such chronic traumatic encephalopathy, along with the psychological trauma of war and injury, has been linked to the rising incidence of suicide among veterans.\n\nThat there may be biological as well as psychological determinants of PTSD would not have surprised Freud\u2014and the treatment of these conditions may require medication as well as psychotherapy. In its worst forms, though, PTSD can be a nearly intractable disorder.\n\nThe concept of dissociation would seem crucial not only to understanding conditions like hysteria or multiple personality disorder but also to the understanding of post-traumatic syndromes. There may be an instant distancing or dissociation when a life-threatening situation occurs, as when a driver about to crash sees his car from a distance, almost like a spectacle in a theater, with a sense of being a spectator rather than a participant. But the dissociations of PTSD are of a more radical kind, for the unbearable sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of the hideous experience get locked away in a separate, subterranean chamber of the mind.\n\nImagination is qualitatively different from hallucination. The visions of artists and scientists, the fantasies and daydreams we all have, are located in the imaginative space of our own minds, our own private theaters. They do not normally appear in external space, like the objects of perception. Something has to happen in the mind\/brain for imagination to overleap its boundaries and be replaced by hallucination. Some dissociation or disconnection must occur, some breakdown of the mechanisms that normally allow us to recognize and take responsibility for our own thoughts and imaginings, to see them as ours and not as external in origin.\n\nIt is not clear, however, that such a dissociation can explain everything, for quite different sorts of memory may be involved. Chris Brewin and his colleagues have argued that there is a fundamental difference between the extraordinary flashback memories of PTSD and those of ordinary autobiographic memory and have provided much psychological evidence for such a difference. Brewin et al. see a radical distinction between autobiographic memories, which are verbally accessible, and flashback memories, which are not verbally or voluntarily accessible but may erupt automatically if there is any reference to the traumatic event or something (a sight, a smell, a sound) associated with it. Autobiographic memories are not isolated\u2014they are embedded in the context of an entire life, given a broad and deep context and perspective\u2014and they can be revised in relation to different contexts and perspectives. This is not the case with traumatic memories. The survivors of trauma may be unable to achieve the detachment of retrospection or recollection; for them the traumatic events, in all their fearfulness and horror, all their sensorimotor vividness and concreteness, are sequestered. The events seem to be preserved in a different form of memory, isolated and unintegrated.\n\nGiven this isolation of traumatic memory, the thrust of psychotherapy must be to release the traumatic events into the light of full consciousness, to reintegrate them with autobiographic memory. This can be an exceedingly difficult and sometimes nearly impossible task.\n\nThe idea that different sorts of memory are involved gets strong support from the survivors of traumatic situations who do not get PTSD and are able to live full, unhaunted lives. One such person is my friend Ben Helfgott, who was incarcerated in a concentration camp between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Helfgott has always been able to talk fully and freely about his experiences during these years, about the killing of his parents and family and the many horrors of the camps. He can recall it all in conscious, autobiographic memory; it is an accepted, integrated part of his life. His experiences were not locked away as traumatic memories, but he knows the other side well\u2014he has seen it in hundreds of others: \"The ones who 'forget,' \" he says, \"they suffer later.\" Helfgott is one of the contributors to _The Boys_ , a remarkable book by Martin Gilbert that relates the stories of hundreds of boys and girls who, like Helfgott, survived years in concentration camps but somehow emerged relatively undamaged and have never been subject to PTSD or hallucinations.\n\nA deeply superstitious and delusional atmosphere can also foster hallucinations arising from extreme emotional states, and these can affect entire communities. In his 1896 Lowell Lectures (collected as _William James on Exceptional Mental States_ ) James included lectures on \"demoniacal possession\" and witchcraft. We have very detailed descriptions of the hallucinations characteristic of both states\u2014hallucinations which rose, at times, to epidemic proportions and were ascribed to the workings of the devil or his minions, but which we can now interpret as the effects of suggestion and even torture in societies where religion had taken on a fanatical character. In his book _The Devils of Loudun_ , Aldous Huxley described the delusions of demonic possession that swept over the French village of Loudun in 1634, starting with a mother superior and all the nuns in an Ursuline convent. What began as Sister Jeanne's religious obsessions were magnified to a state of hallucination and hysteria, in part by the exorcists themselves, who, in effect, confirmed the entire community's fear of demons. Some of the exorcists were affected as well. Father Surin, who had been closeted for hundreds of hours with Sister Jeanne, was himself to be haunted by religious hallucinations of a terrifying nature. The madness consumed the entire village, just as it would later do in the infamous Salem witch trials.8\n\nThe conditions and pressures in Loudun or Salem may have been extraordinary, though witch-hunting and forced confession have hardly vanished from the world; they have simply taken other forms.\n\nSevere stress accompanied by inner conflicts can readily induce in some people a splitting of consciousness, with varied sensory and motor symptoms, including hallucinations. (The old name for this condition was hysteria; it is now called conversion disorder.) This seemed to be the case with Anna O., the remarkable patient described by Freud and Breuer in their _Studies on Hysteria_. Anna had little outlet for her intellectual or sexual energies and was strongly prone to daydreaming\u2014she called it her \"private theater\"\u2014even before her father's final illness and death pushed her into a splitting or dissociation of personality, an alternation between two states of consciousness. It was in her \"trance\" state (which Breuer and Freud called an \"auto-hypnotic\" state) that she had vivid and almost always frightening hallucinations. Most commonly she would see snakes, her own hair as snakes, or her father's face transformed into a death's-head. She retained no memory or consciousness of these hallucinations until she was again in a hypnotic trance, but this time induced by Breuer:\n\nShe used to hallucinate in the middle of a conversation, run off, start climbing up a tree, etc. If one caught hold of her, she would very quickly take up her interrupted sentence without knowing anything about what had happened in the interval. All these hallucinations, however, came up and were reported on in her hypnosis.\n\nAnna's \"trance\" personality became more and more dominant as her illness progressed, and for long periods she would be oblivious or blind to the here and now, hallucinating herself as she was in the past. She was, at this point, living largely in a hallucinatory, almost delusional world, like the nuns of Loudun or the \"witches\" of Salem.\n\nBut unlike the witches, the nuns, or the tormented survivors of concentration camps and battles, Anna O. enjoyed an almost complete recovery from her symptoms, and went on to lead a full and productive life.\n\nThat Anna, who was unable to remember her hallucinations when \"normal,\" could remember all of them when she was hypnotized, shows the similarity of her hypnotized state to her spontaneous trances.\n\nHypnotic suggestion, indeed, can be used to induce hallucinations.9 There is, of course, a world of difference between the long-lasting pathological state we call hysteria and the brief trance states which can be induced by a hypnotist (or by oneself). William James, in his lectures on exceptional mental states, referred to the trances of mediums who channel voices and images of the dead, and of scryers who see visions of the future in a crystal ball. Whether the voices and visions in these contexts were veridical was of less concern to James than the mental states which could produce them. Careful observation (he attended many s\u00e9ances) convinced him that mediums and crystal gazers were not usually conscious charlatans or liars in the ordinary sense; nor were they confabulators or phantasts. They were, he came to feel, in altered states of consciousness conducive to hallucinations\u2014hallucinations whose content was shaped by the questions they were asked. These exceptional mental states, he thought, were achieved by self-hypnosis (no doubt facilitated by poorly lit and ambiguous surroundings and the eager expectations of their clients).\n\nSuch practices as meditation, spiritual exercises, and ecstatic drumming or dancing can also facilitate the achievement of trance states akin to that of hypnosis, with vivid hallucinations and profound physiological changes (for instance, a rigidity which allows the entire body to remain as stiff as a board while supported only at the head and feet). Meditative or contemplative techniques (often aided by sacred music, painting, or architecture) have been used in many religious traditions\u2014sometimes to induce hallucinatory visions. Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.\n\nThe commonest, the most sought, and (in many cultures and communities) the most \"normal\" of exceptional mental states is that of a spiritually attuned consciousness, in which the supernatural, the divine, is experienced as material and real. In her remarkable book _When God Talks Back_ , the ethnologist T. M. Luhrmann provides a compelling examination of this phenomenon.\n\nLuhrmann's earlier work, on people who practice magic in present-day Britain, involved entering their world very fully. \"I did what anthropologists do,\" she writes. \"I participated in their world: I joined their groups. I read their books and novels. I practiced their techniques and performed in their rituals. For the most part, I found, the rituals depended on techniques of the imagination. You shut your eyes and saw with your mind's eye the story told by the leader of the group.\" She was intrigued to find that, after about a year of this practice, her own mental imagery became clearer, more detailed, and more solid; and her concentration states became \"deeper and more sharply different from the everyday.\" One night she became immersed in a book about Arthurian Britain, \"giving way,\" she writes, \"to the story and allowing it to grip my feelings and to fill my mind.\" The next morning she woke up to a striking sight:\n\nI saw six druids standing against the window, above the stirring London street below. I _saw_ them, and they beckoned to me. I stared for a moment of stunned astonishment, and then I shot up out of bed, and they were gone. Had they been there in the flesh? I thought not. But my memory of the experience is very clear.... I remember that I saw them as clearly and distinctly and as external to me as I saw the notebook in which I recorded the moment. I remember it so clearly because it was so singular. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.\n\nLater, Luhrmann embarked on a study of evangelical religion. The very essence of divinity, of God, is immaterial. God cannot be seen, felt, or heard in the ordinary way. How, she wondered, in the face of this lack of evidence, does God become a real, intimate presence in the lives of so many evangelicals and other people of faith? Many evangelicals feel they have literally been touched by God, or heard his voice aloud; others speak of feeling his presence in a physical way, of knowing that he is there, walking beside them. The emphasis in evangelical Christianity, Luhrmann writes, is on prayer and other spiritual exercises as skills that must be learned and practiced. Such skills may come more easily to people who are prone to being completely engaged, fully absorbed, by their experiences, whether real or imaginary\u2014the capacity, Luhrmann writes, \"to focus in on the mind's object... the mode of the novel reader and the music listener and the Sunday hiker, caught up in imagination or appreciation.\" Such a capacity for absorption, she feels, can be honed with practice, and this is part of what happens in prayer. Prayer techniques are often focused on attention to sensory detail:\n\n[Congregants] practice seeing, hearing, smelling, and touching in the mind's eye. They give these imagined experiences the sensory vividness associated with the memories of real events. What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.\n\nAnd one day the mind leaps from imagination to hallucination, and the congregant _hears_ God, _sees_ God.\n\nThese yearned-for voices and visions have the reality of perception. One of Luhrmann's subjects, Sarah, put it this way: \"The images I see [in prayer] are very real and lucid. Different from just daydreaming. I mean, sometimes it's almost like a PowerPoint presentation.\" Over time, Luhrmann writes, Sarah's images \"got richer and more complicated. They seemed to have sharper borders. They continued to get more complex and more distinct.\" Mental images become as clear and as real as the external world.\n\nSarah had many such experiences; some congregants might have only a single one\u2014but even a single experience of God, imbued with the overwhelming force of actual perception, can be enough to sustain a lifetime of faith.\n\nEven at a more modest level, all of us are susceptible to the power of suggestion, especially if it is combined with emotional arousal and ambiguous stimuli. The idea that a house is \"haunted,\" though scoffed at by the rational mind, may nonetheless induce a watchful state of mind and even hallucination, as Leslie D. brought out in a letter to me:\n\nAlmost four years ago I started a job that is housed in one of the oldest residences in Hanover, PA. On my first day, I was told there was a resident ghost, the ghost of Mr. Gobrecht, who lived here many years ago and was a music teacher.... I suppose he died in the house. It would be almost impossible to adequately describe how much I do NOT believe in the supernatural! However, within days I started to feel something like a hand tugging on my pant leg while I sat at my desk, and once in a while a hand on my shoulder. Just a week ago we were discussing the ghost, and I felt ( _very pronounced_ ) fingers moving along my upper back, just behind my shoulder, distinct enough to make me jump. Power of suggestion, maybe?\n\nChildren not uncommonly have imaginary companions. Sometimes this may be a sort of ongoing, systematized daydreaming or storytelling, the creation of an imaginative and perhaps lonely child; in some cases it may have elements of hallucination\u2014a hallucination that is benign and pleasant, as Hailey W. described to me:\n\nGrowing up without brothers or sisters, I created a few imaginary friends whom I played with frequently from approximately age three to six. The most memorable of these was a pair of identical twin girls named Kacey and Klacey. They were my age and size, and we would often do things together like play on the swings in the backyard or have tea parties. Kacey and Klacey also had a little sister named Milky. I had a strong image of them all in my mind's eye, and they seemed very real to me at the time. My parents were mostly amused by it, though they did question whether it was natural for my imaginary friends to be so detailed and plentiful. They recall me having long conversations at the table with \"no one,\" and when asked, I would always say I was talking with Kacey and Klacey. Often when playing (with toys, or games) I would say I was playing with Kacey and Klacey or Milky. I would talk about them often as well, and for a period of time I remember being fixated on the idea of a seeing-eye dog, begging my mother to let me have one. Rather taken aback, my mother asked where I got the idea; I replied that Kacey and Klacey's mother was blind, and that I wanted a seeing-eye dog like hers. As an adult, I am still surprised when someone tells me that they never had imaginary friends growing up, as they were such an important\u2014and enjoyable\u2014part of my childhood.\n\nAnd yet \"imagination\" may not be an adequate term here, for imaginary companions may seem intensely real, as no other products of fantasy or imagination do. Perhaps the difficulty of fitting our adult categories of \"reality\" and \"imagination\" to the thoughts and play of children is not surprising; for, if Piaget is right, children cannot consistently and confidently distinguish fantasy from reality, inner from outer worlds, until the age of seven or so. It is usually at this age, or a little later, that imaginary companions tend to disappear.\n\nChildren may also be more accepting of their hallucinations, having not yet learned that hallucinations are considered (in our culture) \"abnormal.\" Tom W. wrote to me about his \"intended\" childhood hallucinations, hypnagogic visions he would bring on as entertainment from the ages of four to seven:\n\nI used to entertain myself while falling asleep by hallucinating. I would lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling in the halflight.... I would stare at a fixed point, and by holding my eyes very still, the ceiling would neutralize and gradually become swarming pixels, which would become patterns: waves and grids and paisleys. Then, in the midst of that, figures would start to appear and interact. I remember quite a few\u2014[and] I remember the exceptional visual clarity of them. Once the vision was present, I could look around at things the way you would a film.\n\nThere was another way I used to do this. There was a family portrait that hung at the foot of my bed, a classical staged photo of my grandparents, cousins, an aunt and uncle, my parents, my brother, and me. Behind us was a huge privet hedge. Again, in the evening, I would gaze at the portrait. Very quickly, strange and delightfully silly things would start to happen: apples would grow out of the privet hedge, my cousins would begin to chatter and chase each other around the group. My grandmother's head would \"pop off\" and attach to her two calves, which would then start to dance about. Grim as that seems now, I found it hilarious then.\n\nAt the other end of life, there is a special sort of hallucination that may attend death or the anticipation of death. Working in old-age homes and nursing homes, I have been struck and moved by how often patients who are lucid, sane, and fully conscious may have hallucinations when they feel that death is near.\n\nWhen Rosalie\u2014the very old blind lady I described in the chapter on Charles Bonnet syndrome\u2014became ill and thought she was dying, she had visions of her mother and heard her mother's voice welcoming her into heaven. These hallucinations were completely different in character from her usual CBS hallucinations\u2014they were multisensory, personal, addressed to her, and steeped in warmth and tenderness. Her CBS hallucinations, by contrast, had no apparent relation to her and aroused no emotion. I have known other patients (who did not have CBS or any other special condition facilitating hallucinations) to have similar deathbed hallucinations\u2014sometimes the first and last hallucinations in their lives.\n\n1. Many of H. G. Wells's short stories also involve guilt hallucinations. In \"The Moth,\" a zoologist who feels himself responsible for the death of his lifelong rival is haunted and finally driven mad by a giant moth that no one else can see, a moth of a genus unknown to science; but in his lucid moments, he jokes that it is the ghost of his deceased rival.\n\nDickens, a haunted man himself, wrote five books on this theme, the best known of these being _A Christmas Carol_. And in _Great Expectations_ , he provides a dramatic account of Pip's vision after his first, horrified encounter with Miss Havisham:\n\nI thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes\u2014a little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light\u2014towards a great wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so that I could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham's, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call me. In the terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all when I found no figure there.\n\n2. Losing a spouse, of course, is one of the most stressful of life events, but bereavement may happen in many other situations, from the loss of a job to the loss of a beloved pet. A friend of mine was very upset when her twenty-year-old cat died, and for months she \"saw\" the cat and its characteristic movements in the folds of the curtains.\n\nAnother friend, Malonnie K., described a different sort of cat hallucination, after her beloved seventeen-year-old pet died:\n\nMuch to my surprise, the next day I was getting ready for work and she appeared at the bathroom door, smiled and meowed her usual \"good morning.\" I was flabbergasted. I went to tell my husband and when I returned, of course, she was no longer there. This was upsetting to me because I have no history of hallucinations and thought I was \"above\" such things. However, I have accepted that this experience was, perhaps, a result of the phenomenally close bond that we had developed and sustained over nearly two decades. I must say, I am so grateful that she stopped by one last time.\n\n3. Loss, longing, and nostalgia for lost worlds are also potent inducers of hallucinations. Franco Magnani, \"the memory artist\" I described in _An Anthropologist on Mars_ , had been exiled from Pontito, the little village where he grew up, and although he had not returned to it in decades, he was haunted by continual dreams and hallucinations of Pontito\u2014an idealized, timeless Pontito, as it looked before it was invaded by the Nazis in 1943. He devoted his life to objectifying these hallucinations in hundreds of nostalgic, beautiful, and uncannily accurate paintings.\n\n4. Though \"flashback\" is a visual, cinematic term, auditory hallucinations can be very striking, too. Veterans with PTSD may hallucinate the voices of dying comrades, enemy soldiers, or civilians. Holmes and Tinnin, in one study, found that the hearing of intrusive voices, explicitly or implicitly accusing, affected more than 65 percent of veterans with combat PTSD.\n\n5. Sometimes this effect can be heightened by medications. In 1970, I had one patient with postencephalitic parkinsonism who was a concentration camp survivor. For her, treatment with L-dopa caused an intolerable exacerbation of her traumatic nightmares and flashbacks, and we had to discontinue the drug.\n\n6. In the \"normal\" neuroses commonly brought to psychotherapists, the buried, pathogenic material typically comes from much earlier in life. Such patients are also haunted, but as in the title of Leonard Shengold's book, they are _Haunted by Parents_.\n\n7. Freud was deeply puzzled and troubled by the pertinacity of such post-traumatic syndromes after World War I. Indeed, they forced him to question his theory of the pleasure principle and, at least in this case, to see instead a much grimmer principle at work, that of repetition-compulsion, even though this seemed maladaptive, the very antithesis of a healing process.\n\n8. Many of the testimonies and accusations in the Salem witch trials described assaults by hags, demons, witches, or cats (which were seen as witches' familiars). The cats would sit astride sleepers, pressing on their chests, suffocating them, while the sleepers had no power to move or resist. These are experiences we would now interpret in terms of sleep paralysis and night-mare, but which were given a supernatural narrative. The whole subject is explored by Owen Davies in his 2003 article \"The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations.\"\n\nOther conditions have also been suggested as contributing to the hallucinations and hysteria of seventeenth-century New En gland. One hypothesis, which Laurie Winn Carlson proposes in her book _A Fever in Salem_ , sees the madness as a manifestation of a postencephalitic disorder.\n\nOthers have proposed that ergot poisoning played a part. Ergot, a fungus containing toxic alkaloid compounds similar to LSD, can infest rye and other grains, and if contaminated bread or flour is eaten, ergotism may result. This happened frequently in the Middle Ages, and it could cause agonizing gangrene (which led to one of its popular names, St. Anthony's fire). Ergotism could also cause convulsions and hallucinations very similar to those of LSD.\n\nIn 1951, an entire French village succumbed to ergot poisoning, as John Grant Fuller described in his book _The Day of St. Anthony's Fire_. Those affected endured several weeks of terrifying hallucinations and often compulsions to jump from windows, as well as extreme insomnia.\n\n9. This was shown experimentally by Brady and Levitt in a 1966 study, in which they suggested to hypnotized subjects that they \"see\" (i.e., hallucinate) a moving visual stimulus (a rotating drum with vertical stripes). The subjects' eyes, as they did this, showed the same automatic tracking movements (\"optokinetic nystagmus\") that occur when one is actually looking at such a rotating drum\u2014whereas no such movements occur (and they are impossible to feign) if one merely imagines such a visual target.\n\n# 14\n\nDoppelg\u00e4ngers: Hallucinating Oneself\n\nSleep paralysis may be associated, as some of my correspondents have emphasized, with a sense of floating or levitation, and even hallucinations of leaving one's own body and flying through space. These experiences, so unlike the hideous night-mare ones, may go with feelings of calm and joy (some of Cheyne's subjects used the term \"bliss\"). Jeanette B., who has had a lifetime of narcolepsy and sleep paralysis (which she refers to as \"spells\"), described this to me:\n\nIt was after college that the spells became both a burden and a blessing. Not being able to pull myself out of the paralysis one night, I let go; and felt myself slowly rising out of my body! I had come through the terror part and felt a wonderful peaceful bliss as I rose out of my body and floated up. Now, as I experienced this I found it very difficult to believe it was a hallucination. All of my senses seemed unusually sharp: someone's radio playing in another room, crickets chirping outside the window. Without going into detail, this was a hallucination that was more pleasant than anything I had ever experienced....\n\nI suppose I became so nearly addicted to the out of body experiences, that when offered some meds from my neurologist to help with the nighttime paralysis and hallucinations, I refused, rather than give up the out of body experiences. I didn't say that was the reason.\n\nFor quite some time, I would try to will myself into that pleasant hallucination. I discovered it usually came after much stress or lack of sleep, and would deprive myself of sleep in order to achieve the experience of floating amongst the stars, high enough to observe the curvature of the earth....\n\nBut bliss can coincide with terror\u2014Peter S., a friend, found this when he had a single episode of sleep paralysis with hallucination. It seemed to him that he left his body, cast a backward glance at it, then soared up into the sky. He had an enormous sense of freedom and joy, now that he had left the limitations of his human body, a feeling that he could roam at will through the universe. But there was also a fear, which became terror, that he might be lost forever in infinity, unable to rejoin his body on earth.\n\nOut-of-body experiences may occur when specific regions of the brain are stimulated in the course of a seizure or a migraine, as well as with electrical stimulation of the cortex.1 They may occur with drug experiences and in self-induced trances. OBEs can also occur when the brain is not receiving enough blood, as may happen if there is a cardiac arrest or arrhythmia, massive blood loss, or shock.\n\nMy friend Sarah B. had an OBE in the delivery room, just after giving birth. She had delivered a healthy baby, but she had lost a lot of blood, and her obstetrician said that he would have to compress the uterus to stop the hemorrhage. Sarah wrote:\n\nI felt my uterus being squeezed and told myself not to move or cry out.... Then, suddenly, I was floating with the back of my head against the ceiling. I was looking down on a body which was not my own. The body was some distance from me.... I watched the doctor pound on this woman and heard him grunt loudly with his efforts. I thought, \"This woman is very inconsiderate. She is giving Dr. J. a lot of trouble.\"... So I was completely oriented to time, day, place, people, and event. I was just unaware that the center of the drama was myself.\n\nAfter some time, Dr. J. withdrew his hands from the body, stepped back, and announced that the bleeding had stopped. As he said this, I felt myself slip back into my body like an arm sliding into the sleeve of a coat. I was no longer looking, from a distance, down on the doctor; instead he was looming above and quite close to me. His green surgical scrubs were covered with blood.\n\nSarah had critically low blood pressure, and it was probably this\u2014her brain getting insufficient oxygen\u2014which precipitated the OBE. Anxiety may have constituted an additional factor, as reassurance did in ending the attack, despite her still very low blood pressure. Her not recognizing her own body is curious, though it is commonly reported that the body looks \"vacated\" or \"empty\" when the now-disembodied self looks down on its former home.\n\nAnother friend, Hazel R., a chemist, told me of an experience she had many years ago, also when she was in labor. She was offered heroin for her pain (this was common in England in those days), and as the heroin took effect, she felt herself floating upwards, coming to rest beneath the ceiling in the corner of the delivery room. She saw her body beneath her, and she had no pain whatever\u2014she felt that the pain had stayed in the body below her. She also had a sense of great visual and intellectual acuity: she felt that she could easily solve any problem (unfortunately, she said wryly, no problem presented itself). As the heroin wore off, she returned to her body and its violent contractions and pain. When her obstetrician told her she could have a further dose, she asked if it could affect the baby adversely. Once she was reassured that it would not, she assented to a second dose, and again she enjoyed a detachment from her body and its labor pains, as well as a feeling of supernal mental clarity.2 Although this occurred more than fifty years ago, Hazel still remembers every detail.\n\nIt is not easy to imagine such detachment from the body if one has never experienced it. I have never had an OBE myself, but I was once involved in a remarkably simple experiment which showed me how easily one's sense of self can be detached from one's body and \"reembodied\" in a robot. The robot was a massive metal figure with video cameras for \"eyes\" and lobsterlike claws for \"hands,\" designed for training astronauts to operate similar machines in space. I donned goggles connected to the video cameras, so that in effect I was seeing the world through the robot's eyes, and I inserted my hands into gloves with sensors that would register my movements and transmit them to the robot's claws. As soon as I was connected, looking out through the robot's eyes, I had the odd experience of seeing, a few feet to my left, an oddly small figure (did it seem small because I, embodied in the robot, was now so large?) sitting in a chair and wearing goggles and gloves, a vacated figure who I realized, with a start, must be _me_.\n\nTony Cicoria, a surgeon, was struck by lightning a few years ago and suffered a cardiac arrest. (I tell his whole, complex story in _Musicophilia_.) He recounted this to me:\n\nI remember a flash of light... hit me in the face. Next thing I remember, I was flying backwards... [then] I was flying forwards. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, \"Oh shit, I'm dead.\" I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman... position herself over my body, give it CPR.\n\nCicoria's OBE became more complex. \"There was a bluish-white light... an enormous feeling of well-being and grace\"; he felt he was being drawn into heaven (his OBE had evolved into a \"near-death experience,\" which is not the case with most OBEs), and then\u2014it could have been little more than thirty or forty seconds from the moment he was struck by lightning\u2014\"Slam! I was back.\"\n\nThe term \"near-death experience\" (NDE) was introduced by Raymond Moody in his 1975 book _Life After Life_. Moody, culling information from many interviewees, delineated a remarkably uniform and stereotyped set of experiences common to many NDEs. A majority of people felt that they were being drawn into a dark tunnel and then propelled towards a brightness (which some interviewees called \"a being of light\"); and, finally, they sensed a limit or barrier ahead\u2014most interpreted this as the boundary between life and death. Some experienced a rapid replay or review of events in their lives; others saw friends and relatives. In a typical NDE, all this was suffused with a sense of peace and joy so intense that being \"forced back\" (into one's body, into life) might be accompanied by a strong sense of regret. Such experiences were felt as real\u2014\"more real than real,\" as was often commented. Many of Moody's interviewees favored a supernatural interpretation for these remarkable experiences, but others have increasingly tended to regard them as hallucinations, albeit of an extraordinarily complex kind. A number of researchers have sought a natural explanation in terms of brain activity and blood flow, since NDEs are especially associated with cardiac arrest and may also occur in faints, when blood pressure plunges, the face becomes ashen, and the head and brain are drained of blood.\n\nKevin Nelson and his colleagues at the University of Kentucky have presented evidence suggesting that, with the compromise of cerebral blood flow, there is a dissociation of consciousness so that, although awake, the subjects are paralyzed and subject to the dreamlike hallucinations characteristic of REM sleep (\"REM intrusions\")\u2014in a state, therefore, with resemblances to sleep paralysis (NDEs are also commoner in people prone to sleep paralysis). Added to this are various special features: the \"dark tunnel\" is correlated, Nelson feels, with the compromise of blood flow to the retinas (this is well known to produce a constriction of the visual fields, or tunnel vision, and may occur in pilots subjected to high g-stresses). The \"bright light\" Nelson correlates with a flow of neuronal excitement moving from a part of the brain stem (the pons) to subcortical visual relay stations and then to the occipital cortex. Added to all these neurophysiological changes may be a sense of terror and awe going with the knowledge that one is undergoing a mortal crisis\u2014some subjects have actually heard themselves pronounced dead\u2014and the wish that dying, if imminent and inevitable, should be peaceful and perhaps a passage to a life after death.\n\nBoth Olaf Blanke and Peter Brugger have studied such phenomena in several patients with severe epilepsy. Like Wilder Penfield's patients in the 1950s, people with intractable seizures that do not respond to medication may need surgery to remove the epileptic focus responsible. Such surgery requires extensive testing and mapping to find the seizure focus and to avoid damaging vital areas. The patient must be awake during this procedure, so that he can report what he is experiencing. Blanke was able to demonstrate that stimulating certain areas of the brain's right angular gyrus invariably caused OBEs in one such patient, as well as feelings of lightness and levitation and changes in body image; the patient saw her legs \"becoming shorter\" and moving towards her face. Blanke et al. speculate that the angular gyrus is a crucial node in a circuit that mediates body image and vestibular sensations, and that \"the experience of dissociation of self from the body is a result of failure to integrate information from the body with vestibular information.\"\n\nAt other times, one is not disembodied but sees a double of oneself from one's normal viewpoint, and the other self often mimics (or shares) one's own postures and movements. These autoscopic hallucinations are purely visual and usually fairly brief\u2014they may occur, for instance, in the few minutes of a migraine or epileptic aura. In his delightful history of migraine, \"Migraine: From Cappadocia to Queen Square,\" Macdonald Critchley describes this in the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus:\n\nOften Linnaeus saw \"his other self\" strolling in the garden parallel with himself, and the phantom would mimic his movements, i.e. stoop to examine a plant or to pick a flower. Sometimes the alter ego would occupy his own seat at his library desk. Once at a demonstration to his students he wanted to fetch a specimen from his room. He opened the door rapidly, intending to enter, but pulled up at once saying, \"Oh! I'm there already.\"\n\nA similar hallucination of a double was seen regularly by Charles Lullin, the grandfather of Charles Bonnet, for about three months, as Douwe Draaisma describes:\n\nOne morning as he was quietly smoking his pipe at the window, he saw on his left a man leaning casually against the window frame. Except for the fact that he was a head taller, the man looked exactly like him: he was also smoking a pipe, and he was wearing the same cap and the same dressing gown. The man was there again the next morning, and he gradually became a familiar apparition.\n\nThe autoscopic double is literally a mirror image of oneself, with right transposed to left and vice versa, mirroring one's positions and actions. The double is a purely visual phenomenon, with no identity or intentionality of its own. It has no desires and takes no initiatives; it is passive and neutral.3\n\nJean Lhermitte, reviewing the subject of autoscopy in 1951, wrote: \"The phenomenon of the double can be produced by many other diseases of the brain besides epilepsy. It appears in general paralysis [neurosyphilis], in encephalitis, in encephalosis of schizophrenia, in focal lesions of the brain, in post-traumatic disorders.... The apparition of the double should make one seriously suspect the incidence of a disease.\"\n\nIt is now thought that a substantial number\u2014perhaps a third\u2014of all cases of autoscopy may be associated with schizophrenia, and even cases of manifestly physical or organic origin may be sensitive to suggestion. T. R. Dening and German Berrios described a thirty-five-year-old man whose apparitions were related to temporal lobe seizures following a head injury. The man said that he had once seen his ties hanging up as a rack of snakes, but when asked whether he had any outright hallucinations or autoscopic experiences, he said no. A week later, he came in for another appointment in a state of some excitement, for he had now had an autoscopic experience:\n\nHe had been sitting in a caf\u00e9, when he was suddenly aware of an image of himself, about 15\u201320 yards away, looking in through the caf\u00e9 window. The image was dark and looked like him at the age of nineteen (when his accident occurred). It did not speak and probably lasted for less than a minute. He felt amazed and uncomfortable, as though physically struck, and he felt he had to get up and leave. It is difficult not to suppose that the timing of this episode was influenced by the questions asked by the psychiatrist in the previous week.\n\nWhile most examples of autoscopy are fairly brief, long-lasting autoscopy has also been recorded. Zamboni et al. provide a detailed description of this in a 2005 paper. Their patient, B.F., was a young woman who developed eclampsia in pregnancy and was comatose for two days. As she started to recover, it was evident that she was cortically blind and had a partial paralysis on both sides as well as an unawareness of her left side and of the left side of space, a hemi-neglect. With further recovery, her visual fields became full and she could discriminate color, but she was profoundly agnosic, unable to recognize objects or even shapes. At this stage, Zamboni et al. wrote, their patient first started seeing her own image as if reflected in a mirror, about a meter in front of her. The image was transparent, as though it were set \"in a sheet of glass,\" but a bit blurry. It was life-sized and consisted of a head and shoulders, though if she looked down, she could see its legs, too. It was always dressed exactly like her. It disappeared when she closed her eyes and reappeared the moment she opened them (although, as the novelty wore off, she was able to \"forget\" the image for hours at a time). She had no special feelings for the image and never attributed any thoughts or feelings or intentionality to it.\n\nAs B.F.'s agnosia disappeared, the mirror image gradually faded, and it had vanished entirely by six months after the original brain injury. Zamboni et al. suggested that the unusual persistence of this mirror image may have been associated with her severe visual loss, along with disturbances of multisensory integration (visual, tactile, proprioceptive, etc.) at higher levels, perhaps in the parietotemporal junction.\n\nAn even stranger and more complex form of hallucinating oneself occurs in \"heautoscopy,\" an extremely rare form of autoscopy where there is interaction between the person and his double; the interaction is occasionally amiable but more often hostile. Moreover, there may be deep bewilderment as to who is the \"original\" and who the \"double,\" for consciousness and sense of self tend to shift from one to the other. One may see the world first with one's own eyes, then through the double's eyes, and this can provoke the thought that he\u2014the other\u2014is the real person. The double is not construed as passively mirroring one's posture and actions, as with autoscopy; the heautoscopic double can do, within limits, whatever it wants to (or it may lie still, doing nothing at all).\n\n\"Ordinary\" autoscopy\u2014such as Linnaeus and Lullin experienced\u2014seems relatively benign; the hallucination is purely visual, a mirroring which appears only occasionally, has no pretensions to autonomy, no intentionality, and attempts no interactions. But the heautoscopic double, mocking or stealing one's identity, may arouse feelings of fear and horror and provoke impulsive and desperate acts. In a 1994 paper, Brugger and his colleagues described such an episode in a young man with temporal lobe epilepsy:\n\nThe heautoscopic episode occurred shortly before admission. The patient stopped his phenytoin medication, drank several glasses of beer, stayed in bed the whole of the next day, and in the evening he was found mumbling and confused below an almost completely destroyed large bush just under the window of his room on the third floor.... The patient gave the following account of the episode: on the respective morning he got up with a dizzy feeling. Turning around, he saw himself still lying in bed. He became angry about \"this guy who I knew was myself and who would not get up and thus risked being late at work.\" He tried to wake the body in the bed first by shouting at it; then by trying to shake it and then repeatedly jumping on his alter ego in the bed. The lying body showed no reaction. Only then did the patient begin to be puzzled about his double existence and become more and more scared by the fact that he could no longer tell which of the two he really was. Several times his bodily awareness switched from the one standing upright to the one still lying in bed; when in lying in bed mode he felt quite awake but completely paralysed and scared by the figure of himself bending over and beating him. His only intention was to become one person again and, looking out of the window (from where he could still see his body lying in bed), he suddenly decided to jump out \"in order to stop the intolerable feeling of being divided in two.\" At the same time, he hoped that \"this really desperate action would frighten the one in bed and thus urge him to merge with me again.\" The next thing he remembers is waking up in pain in the hospital.\n\nThe term \"heautoscopy\" (sometimes spelled h\u00e9autoscopy), introduced in 1935, is not always regarded as a useful one. T. R. Dening and German Berrios, for example, write, \"We see no advantage in this term; it is pedantic, almost unpronounceable, and not widely used in ordinary practice.\" They see not a dichotomy but a continuum or spectrum of autoscopic phenomena, in which the sense of relationship to one's autoscopic image may vary from minimal to intense, from indifferent to impassioned, and the sense of its \"reality\" may be equally variable and inconsistent. In a 1955 paper, Kenneth Dewhurst and John Pearson described a schoolteacher who, at the start of a subarachnoid hemorrhage, saw an autoscopic \"double\" for four days:\n\nIt appeared quite solid as if seen in a mirror, dressed exactly as he was. It accompanied him everywhere; at meal-times it stood behind his chair and did not reappear till he had finished eating. At night it would undress and lie down on the table or couch in the next room of his flat. The double never said anything to him or made any sign, but only repeated his actions: it had a constant sad expression. It was obvious to the patient that this was all a hallucination, but nevertheless it had become sufficiently a part of himself for the patient to draw a chair up for his double when he first visited his private doctor.\n\nIn 1844, a century before the term was coined, A. L. Wigan, a physician, described an extreme case of heautoscopy with tragic consequences:\n\nI knew a very intelligent and amiable man, who had the power of thus placing before his eyes _himself_ , and often laughed heartily at _his double_ , who always seemed to laugh in turn. This was long a subject of amusement and joke, but the ultimate result was lamentable. He became gradually convinced that he was haunted by [his other] _self_. This other self would argue with him pertinaciously, and to his great mortification sometimes refute him, which, as he was very proud of his logical powers, humiliated him exceedingly. He was eccentric, but was never placed in confinement or subjected to the slightest restraint. At length, worn out by the annoyance, he deliberately resolved not to enter on another year of existence\u2014paid all his debts\u2014wrapped up in separate papers the amount of the weekly demands\u2014waited, pistol in hand, the night of the 31st of December, and as the clock struck twelve fired it into his mouth.\n\nThe theme of the double, the doppelg\u00e4nger, a being who is partly one, partly Other, is irresistible to the literary mind, and is usually portrayed as a sinister portent of death or calamity. Sometimes, as in Edgar Allan Poe's \"William Wilson,\" the double is the visible and tangible projection of a guilty conscience that grows more and more intolerable until, finally, the victim turns murderously on his double and finds that he has stabbed himself. Sometimes the double is invisible and intangible, as in Guy de Maupassant's story \"Le Horla,\" but this double nonetheless leaves evidence of his existence (for instance, he drinks the water that the narrator sets out in his night bottle).\n\nAt the time he wrote this, de Maupassant often saw a double himself, an autoscopic image. As he remarked to a friend, \"Almost every time when I return home I see my double. I open the door and see myself sitting in the armchair. I know it's a hallucination the moment I see it. But isn't it remarkable? If you had not a cool head, wouldn't you be afraid?\"\n\nDe Maupassant had neurosyphilis at this point, and when the disease grew more advanced, he became unable to recognize himself in a mirror and, it is reported, would greet his image in a mirror, bow, and try to shake hands with it.\n\nThe persecuting yet invisible Horla, while perhaps inspired by such autoscopic experiences, is a different thing altogether; it belongs, like William Wilson and Golyadkin's double in Dostoevsky's novella, to the essentially literary, Gothic genre of the doppelg\u00e4nger, a genre which had its heyday from the late eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth.\n\nIn real life\u2014despite the extreme cases reported by Brugger and others\u2014heautoscopic doubles may be less malign; they may even be good-natured or constructive moral figures. One of Orrin Devinsky's patients, who had heautoscopy in association with his temporal lobe seizures, described this episode: \"It was like a dream, but I was awake. Suddenly, I saw myself about five feet in front of me. My double was mowing the lawn, which is what I should have been doing.\" This man subsequently had more than a dozen such episodes just before seizures, and many others that were apparently unrelated to seizure activity. In a 1989 paper, Devinsky et al. wrote:\n\nHis double is always a transparent, full figure that is slightly smaller than life size. It often wears different clothing than the patient and does not share the patient's thoughts or emotions. The double is usually engaged in an activity that the patient feels he should be doing, and he says, \"that guy is my guilty conscience.\"\n\nEmbodiment seems to be the surest thing in the world, the one irrefutable fact. We think of ourselves as being in our bodies, and of our bodies as belonging to us, and us alone: thus we look out on the world with our own eyes, walk with our own legs, shake hands with our own hands. We have a sense, too, that consciousness is in our own head. It has long been assumed that the body image or body schema is a fixed and stable part of one's awareness, perhaps in part hardwired, and largely sustained and affirmed by the continuing proprioceptive feedback from joint and muscle receptors regarding the position and movement of one's limbs.\n\nThere was general astonishment, therefore, when Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen showed in 1998 that a rubber hand, under the right circumstances, could be mistaken for one's own. If a subject's real hand is hidden under a table while the rubber hand is visible before him, and both are stroked in synchrony, then the subject has the convincing illusion, even though he knows better, that the rubber hand is his\u2014and that the sensation of being stroked is located in this inanimate though lifelike object. As I found when I looked through the \"eyes\" of a robot, knowledge in such a situation does nothing to dispel the illusion. The brain does its best to correlate all the senses, but the visual input here trumps the tactile.\n\nHenrik Ehrsson, in Sweden, has developed a great range of such illusions, using the simplest equipment\u2014video goggles, mannequins, and rubber arms. By disrupting the usual unity of touch, vision, and proprioception, he has induced uncanny experiences in some people, convincing them that their bodies have shrunk or grown enormous, even that they have swapped bodies with someone else. I experienced this for myself when I visited his laboratory in Stockholm for a number of experiments. In one, I was convinced that I possessed a third arm; in another, I felt embodied in a two-foot-high doll, and as I looked through \"its\" eyes via video goggles, normal objects in the room appeared enormous.\n\nIt is evident, from all of this work, that the brain's representation of the body can often be fooled simply by scrambling the inputs from different senses. If sight and touch say one thing, however absurd, even a lifetime of proprioception and a stable body image cannot always resist this. (Individuals may be more or less susceptible to such illusions, and one might imagine that dancers or athletes, who have an exceptionally vivid sense of where their bodies are in space, may be harder to fool in this way.)\n\nThe body illusions Ehrsson is exploring are very much more than party tricks; they point to the ways in which our body ego, our sense of self, is formed from the coordination of senses\u2014not just touch and vision but proprioception and perhaps vestibular sensation, too. Ehrsson and others favor the idea that there are \"multisensory\" neurons, perhaps at a number of places in the brain, which serve to coordinate the complex (and usually consistent) sensory information coming into the brain. But if this is interfered with\u2014by nature or experiment\u2014our seemingly unassailable certainties about the body and the self can vanish in an instant.\n\n1. The term \"out-of-body experience\" was introduced in the 1960s by Celia Green, an Oxford psychologist. While there had been stories of out-of-body experiences for centuries, Green was the first to systematically examine a large number of firsthand accounts, from more than four hundred people whom she located by launching a public appeal through the newspapers and the BBC. In her 1968 book, _Out-of-the-Body Experiences_ , she analyzed these in detail.\n\n2. Several of Celia Green's subjects described similar feelings. \"My mind was clearer and more active than before,\" one wrote; another spoke of being \"all-knowing and understanding.\" Green wrote that such subjects felt they \"could obtain an answer to any question they chose to formulate.\"\n\n3. August Strindberg noted, in his autobiographical novel _Inferno_ , an odd body double, an \"other\" who mirrored his every movement.\n\nThis unknown man never uttered a word; he seemed to be occupied in writing something behind the wooden partition that separated us. All the same, it was odd that he should push back his chair every time I moved mine. He repeated my every movement in a way that suggested that he wanted to annoy me by imitating me.... When I went to bed the man in the room next to my desk went to bed too.... I could hear him lying there, stretched out parallel to me. I could hear him turning the pages of a book, putting out the lamp, breathing deeply, turning over and falling asleep.\n\nStrindberg's \"unknown man\" is identical with Strindberg in one sense: a projection of him, at least of his movements, his actions, his body image. Yet, at the same, he is someone else, an Other who occasionally \"annoys\" Strindberg, but perhaps, at other times, seeks to be companionable. He is, in the literal sense of the term, Strindberg's \"Other,\" his \"alter ego.\"\n\n# 15\n\nPhantoms, Shadows, and Sensory Ghosts\n\nWhile hallucinations of sight and sound\u2014\"visions\" and \"voices\"\u2014are described in the Bible, in _The Iliad_ and _The Odyssey_ , in all the great epics of the world, none of these so much as mentions the existence of phantom limbs, the hallucinatory feeling that one still has a limb even though it has been amputated. Indeed, there was no term for these before Silas Weir Mitchell gave them their name in the 1870s. And yet they are common\u2014more than a hundred thousand people in the United States have amputations every year, and the vast majority of them experience phantoms after their amputations. The experience of phantom limbs must be as old as amputation itself, and amputations are not new\u2014they were performed thousands of years ago: the Rig Veda tells the story of the warrior queen Vishpla, who went to battle with an iron prosthesis after she lost a leg.\n\nIn the sixteenth century, Ambroise Par\u00e9, a French military surgeon who was called upon to amputate dozens of injured limbs, wrote, \"Long after the amputation is made, patients say that they still feel pain in the amputated part... which seems almost incredible to people who have not experienced this.\"\n\nDescartes, in his _Meditations on First Philosophy_ , observed that, just as the sense of vision was not always reliable, so \"errors in judgment\" could occur in the \"internal senses\" as well. \"I have sometimes been informed,\" he wrote, \"by parties whose arm or leg had been amputated, that they still occasionally seemed to feel pain in that part of the body which they had lost\u2014a circumstance that led me to think that I could not be quite certain even that any one of my members was affected when I felt pain in it.\"\n\nBut by and large, as the neurologist George Riddoch brought out (in 1941), a curious atmosphere of silence and secrecy seems to surround the subject. \"Spontaneous description of phantoms is rarely offered,\" he wrote. \"Dread of the unusual, of disbelief, or even of the accusation of insanity may be behind this reticence.\"\n\nWeir Mitchell himself hesitated for years before writing professionally on the subject; he introduced it first in the form of fiction (he was a writer as well as a physician), in \"The Case of George Dedlow,\" published anonymously in the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1866. As a neurologist working at a military hospital in Philadelphia during the Civil War (the place was informally known as the \"Stump Hospital\"), Mitchell saw dozens of amputees and, driven by his own curiosity and compassion, he encouraged them to describe their experiences. It would take him several years to fully digest what he had seen and heard from his patients, but in 1872, in his classic _Injuries of Nerves_ , he was able to provide a detailed description and discussion of phantom limbs\u2014the first such in the medical literature.1\n\nMitchell devoted the final chapter of his book to phantom limbs, introducing the subject as follows:\n\nNo history of the physiology of stumps would be complete without some account of the sensorial delusions to which persons are subject in connection with their lost limbs. These hallucinations are so vivid, so strange, and so little dwelt upon by authors, as to be well worthy of study, while some of them seem to me especially valuable, owing to the light which they cast upon the subject of the long-disputed muscular sense.\n\nNearly every man who loses a limb carries about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself.\n\nAfter Mitchell had brought attention to the subject, other neurologists and psychologists were drawn to study phantom limbs. Among them was William James, who sent a questionnaire to eight hundred amputees (he was able to contact them with the help of prosthetic manufacturers), and of these, nearly two hundred answered the questionnaire; a few he was able to interview personally.2\n\nWhere Mitchell's observations, working with Civil War amputees, were of fresh, just developed phantom limbs, James was able to study a much more varied population (one man, in his seventies, had had a thigh amputation sixty years earlier), and so he was in a better position to describe the changes in phantom limbs over years or decades, changes which he described in detail in his 1887 paper on \"The Consciousness of Lost Limbs.\"\n\nJames was especially interested in the way that initially vivid and mobile phantoms often tended to shorten or disappear with time. This surprised him more than the presence of phantoms, which he felt was only to be expected with continuing activity in the areas of the brain that represented sensation and movement in the lost limb. \"The popular mind wonders how the lost feet can still be felt,\" James wrote. \"For me, the cause for wonder are those in which the lost feet are not felt.\" Hand phantoms, he observed, unlike leg or arm phantoms, rarely disappeared. (We now know that this is because the fingers and hands have a particularly massive representation in the brain.) He did, however, note that the intervening arm might disappear, so that the preserved phantom hand now seemed to sprout from the shoulder.3\n\nHe was also struck by the way in which an initially mobile phantom could become immobile or even paralyzed, so that \"no effort of will can make it change [its position].\" (In rare cases, he said, \"the very attempt to will the change has grown impossible.\") James saw that fundamental questions were raised here about the neurophysiology of \"will\" and \"effort,\" though he could not answer them. And they were not to be answered for more than a century, until V. S. Ramachandran clarified the nature of \"learned\" paralysis in phantom limbs in the 1990s.\n\nPhantom limbs are hallucinations insofar as they are perceptions of something that has no existence in the outside world, but they are not quite comparable to hallucinations of sight and sound. While losing one's eyesight or hearing may lead to corresponding hallucinations in 10 or 20 percent of those affected, phantom limbs occur in virtually all who have had a limb amputated. And while it may be months or years before hallucinations follow blindness or deafness, phantom limbs appear immediately or within days after an amputation\u2014and they are felt as an integral part of one's own body, unlike any other sort of hallucination. Finally, while visual hallucinations such as those of Charles Bonnet syndrome are varied and full of invention, a phantom closely resembles the physical limb that was amputated in size and shape. A phantom foot may have a bunion, if the real one did; a phantom arm may wear a wristwatch, if the real arm did. In this sense, a phantom is more like a memory than an invention.\n\nThe near universality of phantom limbs after amputation, the immediacy of their appearance, and their identity with the corporeal limbs in whose stead they appear suggest that, in some sense, they are already in place\u2014revealed, so to speak, by the act of amputation. Complex visual hallucinations get their material from the visual experiences of a lifetime\u2014one has to have seen people, faces, animals, landscapes to hallucinate them; one has to have heard pieces of music to hallucinate them. But the feeling of a limb as a sensory and motor part of oneself seems to be innate, built-in, hardwired\u2014and this supposition is supported by the fact that people born without limbs may nonetheless have vivid phantoms in their place.4\n\nThe most fundamental difference between phantom limbs and other hallucinations is that they can be moved voluntarily, whereas visual and auditory hallucinations proceed autonomously, outside one's control. This was also emphasized by Weir Mitchell:\n\n[The majority of amputees] are able to will a movement, and apparently they themselves execute it more or less effectively.... The certainty with which these patients describe their [phantom motions], and their confidence as to the place assumed by the parts moved, are truly remarkable... the effect is apt to excite twitching in the stump.... In some cases the muscles which act on the hand are absent altogether; yet in these cases there is fully as clear and definite a consciousness of the movement of the fingers and of their change of positions as in cases [where the muscles of the hand are partially preserved].\n\nOther hallucinations are only sensations or perceptions, albeit of a very special sort, whereas a phantom limb is capable of phantom _action_. Given a suitable prosthesis, the phantom limb will slip into the prosthesis (\"like a hand into a glove,\" as many patients say)\u2014slip into it and animate it, so that the artificial limb can be used like a real one. Indeed, this must happen if one is to use a prosthesis effectively. The artificial limb becomes part of one's body, of one's body image, as a cane in a blind man's hand becomes an extension of himself. One may say that an artificial leg, for instance, \"clothes\" the phantom, allows it to be effective, gives it an objective sensory and motor existence, so that it can often \"feel\" and respond to minute irregularities in the ground almost as well as the original leg.5 (Thus the great climber Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who lost a leg during World War I, was able to climb the Matterhorn using a prosthetic limb of his own design.)6\n\nOne might go further and say that a phantom is a portion of body image which is lost or dissociated from its natural, embodying home (the body)\u2014and, as such, as something extraneous, it may be intrusive or deceptive (thus the danger of walking off a curb with a phantom leg). The lost phantom (if one can speak figuratively) longs for a new home, and it will find this in a suitable prosthesis. I have had many patients tell me how they may be disturbed by their phantom at night but relieved in the morning, for the phantom disappears the moment they put on their prosthesis\u2014disappears, that is, _into_ the prosthesis, merging so seamlessly with it that phantom and prosthesis become one.\n\nKnowledge of what one is doing with one's phantom\u2014even without a prosthesis\u2014can be exquisitely refined. As a young student, Erna Otten, a distinguished pianist, was a pupil of the great Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War but continued to play with his left hand (and commissioned a number of composers to write music for the left hand). Yet he continued to teach, in a sense, with both hands. In a letter to the _New York Review of Books_ , responding to an article I had written, Otten wrote:\n\nI had many occasions to see how involved his right stump was whenever we went over the fingering for a new composition. He told me many times that I should trust his choice of fingering because he felt every finger of his right hand. At times I had to sit very quietly while he would close his eyes and his stump would move constantly in an agitated manner. This was many years after the loss of his arm.\n\nUnfortunately, not all phantoms are as well formed, as painless, or as mobile as Wittgenstein's. Many show a tendency to shrink or \"telescope\" with time\u2014a phantom arm may be reduced to a hand seemingly sprouting from the shoulder. This tendency to shrink is minimized by embedding the phantom in a prosthesis and using it as much as possible. A phantom may also become paralyzed or contorted in painful positions, with its \"muscles\" in spasm. Thus Admiral Lord Nelson, after losing his right arm in battle, developed a phantom limb with the hand permanently clenched, the fingers digging excruciatingly into the palm.7\n\nSuch disorders of body image have long seemed inexplicable and untreatable. But over the last few decades, it has become clear that the body image is not as fixed as we once thought; indeed, it is remarkably plastic, and extensive reorganization or remapping can occur with phantom limbs.\n\nIf there is interruption of nerve function from injury or disease in the spinal cord or peripheral nerves, cutting off or reducing normal sensory input to the brain, this may cause major disturbance of body image, with strange phantom images superimposed on the real but insentient body parts. This was very striking with a colleague of mine, Jeannette W., who broke her neck in a car accident and became quadriplegic, with a complete absence of sensation below the level of the fracture. She had, in a sense, been \"amputated\" from the neck down and had little sense of her body below this. But in its place, she had a phantom body, which was unstable and prone to distortions and deformations. She could reverse these, for a while, by _seeing_ that her body still had a normal shape and conformation, and she arranged for mirrors to be set up in her office and in the hospital corridors, so that she could glance up and (in her words) take \"visual sips\" from them as she bowled past in her wheelchair.\n\nAs normal sensation is blocked, body image disturbances can occur very quickly. Most of us have had strange phantom experiences with dental anesthesia, of a grotesquely swollen, deformed, or misplaced cheek or tongue. Looking in a mirror will do little to dispel these illusions, which disappear only with the return of normal sensation. One patient of mine, with the removal of a large brain tumor, had to sacrifice the roots of the sensory nerves on one side of her face. For years following this, she had a persistent sense that the whole right side of her face was \"slipping,\" \"caved in,\" or \"missing\"; that her tongue and cheek on this side were tremendously swollen and grotesque-looking. She later came to have a leg amputated, and soon after surgery became aware of a phantom leg. Now, she said, \"I know what's wrong with my face. It's exactly the same feeling\u2014I have a phantom face.\"\n\nThere can also be extra limbs\u2014supernumerary phantoms\u2014if certain areas of the body are denervated. A striking example of this was described by Richard Mayeux and Frank Benson. Their patient was a young man with multiple sclerosis who developed a numbness on his right side and then experienced, as they wrote,\n\na tactile illusion that a second right arm was lying across his lower chest and upper abdomen. The extra arm seemed to be attached to the chest wall.... There was only a vague sensation of the duplicate illusory lower forearm, wrist, and palm, but a vivid impression of the fingers lying on the abdominal wall.... The illusion persisted for period of 5 to 30 minutes and was accompanied by a \"gripping\" sensation of the illusory hand.... The phantom limb sensation was always coincident with feelings of increased stiffness, numbness, and burning [sensations] of the actual right arm.\n\nNelson's clenched hand exemplifies an unpleasant evolution which phantom limbs may undergo\u2014phantoms which are initially loose, mobile, and obedient to the will may subsequently become paralyzed, contorted, and often intensely painful. Before the 1990s, there was no plausible explanation as to why phantom limbs might get frozen in this way, nor any notion of how to unfreeze them. But in 1993, V. S. Ramachandran suggested a physiological scenario which might explain the progressive loss of voluntary movement so common in phantom limbs. The vivid sense that one could move a phantom limb freely, he thought, went with the brain being able to monitor its own motor commands to the phantom. But with the continuing absence of visual or proprioceptive confirmation of movement, the brain, in effect, might \"abandon\" the limb. Thus, Ramachandran thought, paralysis was \"learned,\" and he wondered whether it could be unlearned.\n\nCould one, by simulating visual and proprioceptive feedback, dupe the brain into believing that the phantom was once again mobile and capable of voluntary movement? Ramachandran developed a brilliantly simple device\u2014an oblong wooden box with its left and right sides divided by a mirror, so that looking into the box from one side or the other, one would get an illusion of seeing both hands, where in reality one was seeing only one hand and its mirror image. Ramachandran tried this device on a young man who had had a partial amputation of his left arm\u2014his now-rigid phantom hand, Ramachandran wrote, \"jutted like a mannequin's resin-case forearm out of the stump. Far worse, it was also subject to painful cramping that his doctors could do nothing about.\"\n\nAfter explaining what he had in mind, Ramachandran asked the young man to \"insert\" his phantom arm to the left of the mirror. Ramachandran described this in his book _The Tell-Tale Brain:_\n\nHe held out his paralyzed phantom on the left side of the mirror, looked into the right side of the box and carefully positioned his right hand so that its image was congruent with (superimposed on) the felt position of the phantom. This immediately gave him the startling visual impression that the phantom had been resurrected. I then asked him to perform mirror-symmetric movements of both arms and hands while he continued looking into the mirror. He cried out, \"It's like it's plugged back in!\" Now he not only had a vivid impression that the phantom was obeying his commands, but to his amazement, it began to relieve his painful phantom spasms for the first time in years. It was as though the mirror visual feedback (MVF) had allowed his brain to \"unlearn\" the learned paralysis.\n\nThis extremely simple procedure (which was devised only after much careful thinking and a whole, very original theory as to the many interacting factors involved in the production of phantoms and their vicissitudes) can easily be modified for dealing with phantom legs and a variety of other conditions involving distortion of body image.\n\nThe _appearance_ of the hand moving, the optical illusion, was sufficient to generate the _feeling_ that it was moving. I described the converse of this in _The Mind's Eye_ , when the existence of a large blind spot in my visual field allowed me, visually, to \"amputate\" a hand. But if, when I had done this, I opened and closed my fist or moved my now-invisible fingers, a sort of pink protoplasmic extension grew out of my visual \"stump\" and developed into a (visual) phantom of the hand.\n\nJonathan Cole and his colleagues have made similar observations, testing a virtual reality system to reduce phantom pain. In their experiments with leg and arm amputees, the amputated stump is connected to a motion capture device, which in turn determines the movements of a virtual arm or leg on a computer screen. Most of their subjects learned to correlate their own movements with those of the on-screen avatar, and developed a sense of agency or ownership, so that they were able to move the virtual limb with surprising delicacy (for instance, to reach for and grasp a virtual apple lying on the surface of a virtual table). Such learning occurred remarkably quickly, within half an hour or so. With this sense of agency and intentionality often came a reduction in phantom pain\u2014and even virtual perception. One man, for example, could \"feel\" the virtual apple when he picked it up. Cole and his colleagues wrote, \"Perception was not only of motion of the limb but also of touch, a virtual-visual cross-modal perception.\"\n\nIn 1864, Weir Mitchell and two of his colleagues put out a special circular from the Surgeon General's Office, entitled _Reflex Paralysis_. In reflex paralysis, the injured limb is intact, but it cannot be moved; it seems absent or \"alien,\" not part of the body. It is, in a sense, the opposite of a phantom limb\u2014an external limb with no internal image to give it presence and life.\n\nI had such an experience in 1974 during the mountaineering accident in which I ruptured the quadriceps tendon in my left leg. Though the tendon was repaired surgically, there was damage at the neuromuscular junction, and additionally, the leg was hidden from sight and touch, immobilized in a long, opaque cast. Under these circumstances, where it was impossible to send commands to the injured muscle and there was no sensory or visual feedback, the leg disappeared from my body image, leaving (so it seemed to me) an inanimate, alien thing in its place. This continued to be the case for thirteen days. (Thinking back on this experience, I wonder whether one of Ramachandran's mirror boxes would have helped me to recover movement, and a sense of reality, in this leg sooner. It might have helped, too, had the cast been transparent, so that I could at least see the leg.)\n\nIt was an experience so uncanny that I wrote an entire book, _A Leg to Stand On_ , about it. I suggested, only half-jokingly, that readers would more easily imagine such experiences if they read the book under spinal anesthesia, for as the anesthetic blocks activity in the spinal cord, one's lower half becomes not only paralyzed and senseless but, subjectively, nonexistent. One feels that one's body terminates in the middle, and that what lies below\u2014hips and a pair of legs\u2014do not belong to one; they could just as well be a wax model from an anatomy museum. This lack of ownership, this alienation, is bizarre to experience. I found it almost intolerable during the thirteen days in which my left leg seemed alien to me\u2014I wondered, darkly, whether any recovery would occur and whether, if it did not, I would do best to have the useless leg removed.\n\nThere may indeed, though very rarely, be a congenital absence of body image in an otherwise normal limb; this is suggested, at least, by the numerous reported cases of what Peter Brugger has termed \"body-integrity identity disorder.\" Such people feel, from childhood onward, that one of their limbs, or perhaps a part of a limb, is not theirs, but an alien encumbrance, and this feeling may engender a passionate desire to have the \"superfluous\" limb amputated.\n\nPrior to 1990, the whole field of phantom limbs and other disturbances of body image could be studied only phenomenologically, from the accounts and behaviors of those afflicted. Such conditions were often ascribed to hysteria or an overactive imagination, but the development of sophisticated brain imaging has changed this by showing the physiological changes in the brain (especially in parts of the parietal lobes) which underlie such strange experiences. This, along with ingenious experiments such as Ramachandran's mirror box, has allowed us to get a clearer view of the neural basis of embodiment, of agency, of self; to bring purely clinical and sometimes purely philosophical ideas into the realm of neuroscience.\n\nShadows\" and \"doubles\"\u2014hallucinatory distortions of the body and body image\u2014take us into an even stranger realm. If a limb or part of the body is \"deanimated\" by nerve or spinal cord damage, the deanimated part itself may feel lifeless, inorganic, alien. But if there is damage to the right parietal lobe, a much deeper form of estrangement may occur. The deanimated part of the body\u2014if its existence is acknowledged at all\u2014is felt to belong to someone else, a mysterious \"other.\" Many years ago, as a medical student, I saw a patient who had been admitted to the neurosurgery service for removal of a parietal lobe tumor. One evening, while awaiting surgery, he fell out of bed in a peculiar way\u2014almost, the nurses said, as if he had thrown himself off the bed. When I asked him about this, he said that he had been asleep and awoke to discover a leg\u2014a dead, cold, hairy leg\u2014in his bed. He could not think how someone else's leg had got into his bed, unless\u2014the idea suddenly occurred to him\u2014the nurses had taken a leg from the anatomy labs and slipped it into his bed as a joke. Shocked and repelled, he used his good right leg to kick the alien thing out of his bed, and, of course, he came out after it, and was now aghast because \"it\" was attached to him. I said, \"But it is _your_ leg,\" and pointed out to him that the size, the shape, the contour, the color were precisely the same in the two legs; but he would have none of it. He was absolutely certain that it was someone else's.8\n\nOver the years I have seen other patients who, in consequence of a right-hemisphere stroke, have lost all feeling and use of the left side. Often they have no awareness that anything has happened, but some people are convinced that their left side belongs to someone else (\"my twin brother,\" \"the man next to me,\" even \"It's _yours_ , Doc, who are you kidding?\"). Perhaps \"my twin brother\" is a hieroglyphic way of indicating that while half of the body seems alien, it also seems very akin, almost identical to oneself... that it _is_ oneself in a strange, disguised way. It needs to be emphasized that such patients may be highly intelligent, lucid, and articulate\u2014and that it is solely in reference to their odd distortions of body image that they make their surreal but irrefragable statements.\n\nThe feeling that _someone is there_ , to the left or the right, perhaps just behind us, is known to us all. It is not just a vague feeling; it is a distinct sensation. We may wheel around to catch the lurking figure, but there is no one to be seen. And yet it is impossible to dismiss the sensation, even if we have learned from repeated experience that this sort of sensed presence is a hallucination or an illusion.\n\nThe sensation is commoner if one is alone, in darkness, perhaps in unfamiliar surroundings, hyperalert. It is well known to mountaineers and polar explorers, where the vastness and danger of the terrain, the isolation and exhaustion (and, in the mountains, reduced oxygen) contribute to the feeling. The sensed presence, the invisible companion, the \"third man,\" the shadow person\u2014all sorts of terms are used\u2014is well aware of us, and has definite intentions, whether these are benign or malignant. The shadow stalking us has something in mind. And it is this sense of its intentionality or agency which either raises the hair on our neck or produces a sweet, calm feeling of being protected, not alone.\n\nWhile the sense of \"somebody there\" is commoner in the hypervigilant states induced by some forms of anxiety, by various drugs and by schizophrenia, it may also occur in neurological conditions. Thus Professor R. and Ed W., who both have advancing Parkinson's disease, have persistent feelings of a presence\u2014something or someone they never actually see; this presence is always on the same side. There may be a transitory sense of \"someone there\" in attacks of migraine or in seizures\u2014but a very persistent sense of a presence, always to the same side, is suggestive of a brain lesion. (This is also the case with such experiences as d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, which we all have occasionally, but which, if very frequent, suggests a seizure disorder or a brain lesion.)\n\nIn 2006 Olaf Blanke and his colleagues (Shahar Arzy et al.) described how, with a young woman being evaluated for surgical treatment of epilepsy, they could predictably induce a \"shadow-person\" by electrical stimulation of the left temporoparietal junction. When the woman was lying down, a mild stimulation of this area gave her the impression that someone was behind her; a stronger stimulation allowed her to define the \"someone\" as young but of indeterminate sex, lying down in a position identical to her own. When stimulations were repeated with her in a sitting position, embracing her knees with her arms, she sensed a man behind her, sitting in the same position and clasping her with his intangible arms. When she was given a card to read for a language learning test, the sitting \"man\" moved to her right side, and she understood that he had aggressive intentions (\"He wants to take the card.... He doesn't want me to read.\"). There were thus elements of the \"self\" here\u2014the mimicking or sharing of her postures by the shadow person\u2014as well as elements of the \"other.\"9\n\nThat there may be some connection between body-image disturbances and hallucinatory \"presences\" was brought out as early as 1930 by Engerth and Hoff, as Blanke and his colleagues wrote in a 2006 paper. Engerth and Hoff described an elderly man who had become hemianopic after a stroke. He saw \"silver things\" in the blind half of his visual field, then automobiles coming at him from the left, and then people: \"countless\" people, all identical in appearance and with a clumsy gait, staggering, with the right arm outstretched\u2014precisely the gait the patient himself had when he tried to walk and avoid colliding with people on his left.\n\nBut he also had alienation of his left side, and he felt that this side of his body was \"filled with something strange.\"\n\n\"Finally,\" Engerth and Hoff wrote, \"the host of hallucinations disappeared, and there then appeared what the patient called 'a constant companion.' Wherever the patient went, he saw someone walking along on his left.... At the moment when the companion appeared, the alien feeling in the left half of the body disappeared.... We would not be in error,\" they concluded, \"if we saw in this 'companion' the left half of the body which had become independent.\"\n\nIt is not clear whether this \"constant companion\" is to be classified as a \"sensed presence\" or an autoscopic \"double\"\u2014it has qualities of both. And perhaps some of these seemingly distinct categories of hallucination merge. Blanke and his colleagues, writing in 2003 of body-image, or \"somatognosic,\" disorders, observed that these may take a number of forms: illusions of a missing body part, a transformed (enlarged or shrunk) body part, a dislocated or disconnected body part, a phantom limb, a supernumerary limb, an autoscopic image of one's own body, or a \"feeling of a presence.\" All of these disorders, Blanke stresses, with their hallucinations of vision, touch, and proprioception, are associated with parietal or temporal lobe damage.\n\nJ. Allan Cheyne has also investigated sensed presences, both in the relatively mild form that may occur when one is fully conscious and in the terrifying form that is often associated with sleep paralysis. He speculates that this feeling of \"presence\"\u2014a universal human (and perhaps animal) sensation\u2014may have a biological origin in \"the activation of a distinct and evolutionary functional 'sense of the other'... deep within the temporal lobe specialized for the detection of cues for agency, especially those potentially associated with threat or safety.\"\n\nSensed presence not only has its place in the neurological literature; it also forms a chapter in William James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_. He recounts a number of case histories where the initially horrible feeling of an intrusive and threatening \"presence\" became a joyful and even blissful one, including that of a friend who told him:\n\nIt was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience... suddenly I FELT something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense and yet there was a horribly unpleasant \"sensation\" connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception.... Something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was as conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the \"horrible sensation\" disappeared....\n\n[On a subsequent occasion], there was not a mere consciousness of something there, but fused in the central happiness of it, a startling awareness of some ineffable good. Not vague either, not like the emotional effect of some poem, or scene, or blossom, or music, but the sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person.\n\n\"Of course,\" added James, \"such an experience as this does not connect itself with the religious sphere... [and] my friend... does not interpret these latter experiences theistically, as signifying the presence of God.\"\n\nBut one can readily see why others, perhaps of a different disposition, might interpret the \"sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person\" and \"a startling awareness of some ineffable good\" in mystical, if not religious, terms. Other case histories in James's chapter bear this out, leading him to say that \"many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief not in the form of mere conceptions which the intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.\"\n\nThus the primal, animal sense of \"the other,\" which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious passion and conviction, where the \"other,\" the \"presence,\" becomes the person of God.\n\n1. It is likely that there was popular or folk knowledge of the phenomenon long before there were any medical descriptions.\n\nTwenty years before Weir Mitchell named phantom limbs, Herman Melville included a fascinating scene in _Moby-Dick_ , where the ship's carpenter is measuring Captain Ahab for a whalebone leg. Ahab addresses the carpenter:\n\nLook ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?\n\n[The carpenter replies:] Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?\n\nIt is, man [says Ahab]. Look, put thy live leg here in place where mine once was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I.\n\n2. The importance of first-person accounts was emphasized by William James in his 1887 paper \"The Consciousness of Lost Limbs\":\n\nIn a delicate inquiry like this, little is to be gained by distributing circulars. A single patient with the right sort of lesion and a scientific mind, carefully cross-examined, is more likely to deepen our knowledge than a thousand circulars answered as the average patient answers them, even though the answers be never so thoroughly collated by the investigator.\n\n3. The reason for this was not to be clarified until a century later, when it became possible to visualize, with fMRI, the gross changes in the brain's body mapping that could occur after an amputation. Michael Merzenich and his colleagues at UCSF, working with both monkeys and humans, have shown how rapid and radical such changes may be.\n\n4. Despite categorical assertions by many that \"congenital\" phantoms cannot occur, there have been several reports (as Scatena has noted in a review of the subject) indicating that some people with aplasia\u2014congenitally defective or absent limbs\u2014do have phantoms. Klaus Poeck, in 1964, described an eleven-year-old girl born without forearms or hands who was able to \"move\" her phantom hands. As Poeck wrote, \"In her first years at school, she had learned to solve simple arithmetic problems by counting with her fingers.... On these occasions she would place her phantom hands on the table and count the outstretched fingers one by one.\"\n\nIt is not clear why some people born without limbs have phantoms and some do not. What is clear, as Funk, Shiffrar, and Brugger observed in one study, is that those who do have phantoms seem to have cerebral \"action observation systems\" similar to those of normally limbed people, allowing them to grasp action patterns by observing others and to internalize these as mobile phantoms. Those born without limbs who do not have phantoms, Funk et al. propose, may have problems in motion perception, especially judging the movements of other people's limbs.\n\n5. When Henry Head introduced the term \"body image\" (fifty or so years after Weir Mitchell had introduced the term \"phantom limb\"), he did not mean it to refer to a purely sensory image or map in the brain\u2014he had in mind an image or model of agency and action, and it is this which needs to be embodied in an artificial limb.\n\nPhilosophers like to speak of \"embodiment\" and \"embodied agency,\" and there is no simpler place to study this than in the nature of phantoms and their embodiment in artificial limbs\u2014prosthesis and phantom go together like body and soul. I have wondered whether some of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical notions were suggested by his brother's phantom arm\u2014thus his final work, _On Certainty_ , starts from the certainty of the body, the body as embodied agency.\n\n6. Wade Davis describes this in his book _Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest_.\n\n7. Nonetheless, Nelson regarded his phantom as \"a direct proof for the existence of the soul.\" The survival of a spiritual arm after a corporeal one was annihilated, he thought, epitomized the survival of the soul after bodily death.\n\nFor Captain Ahab, however, this was a matter for horror as much as wonder: \"And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell forever, and without a body? Hah!\"\n\n8. This story, \"The Man Who Fell Out of Bed,\" is related more fully in _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_.\n\n9. Several people have written to me with similar stories of sensing a presence just as they are going to sleep or waking. Linda P. observed that once, as she was drifting off to sleep, she felt \"as if I was being held on my right side, as if someone had put their arms around me and was stroking my hair. It was a lovely feeling; then I remembered that I was alone, and [the feeling disappeared].\"\n\n# Acknowledgments\n\nI am most grateful, first and foremost, to the hundreds of patients and correspondents who have shared their experiences of hallucinations with me over many decades, and especially to those who have allowed me to quote their words and tell their stories in this book.\n\nI owe an enormous debt to my friend and colleague Orrin Devinsky, who has stimulated my thoughts with his many published and forthcoming papers and referred many of his patients to me. I have enjoyed and benefited from discussions with Jan Dirk Blom and from reading his wonderfully comprehensive _Dictionary of Hallucinations_ and _Hallucinations: Research and Practice_. I am deeply grateful for the friendship and advice of my colleagues Sue Barry, Bill Borden, William Burke, Kevin Cahill, Jonathan Cole, Douwe Draaisma, Henrik Ehrsson, Dominic ffytche, Steven Frucht, Mark Green, James Lance, Richard Mayeux, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Stanley Prusiner, V. S. Ramachandran, and Leonard Shengold. And I am grateful to Gale Delaney, Andreas Mavromatis, Lylas Mogk, Jeff Odel, and Robert Teunisse for sharing their own experiences (and sometimes patients) with me.\n\nI must also thank Molly Birnbaum, Daniel Breslaw, Leslie Burkhardt, Elizabeth Chase, Allen Furbeck, Kai Furbeck, Ben Helfgott, Richard Howard, Hazel Rossotti, Peter Selgin, Amy Tan, Bonnie Thompson, Kappa Waugh, and Edward Weinberger. Eveline Honig, Audrey Kindred, Sharon Smith, and others at the Narcolepsy Network kindly introduced me to many people with narcolepsy and sleep paralysis. Bill Hayes, a friend and a writer whom I much admire, read each chapter with his own writerly eye and made many valuable suggestions.\n\nFor their support and encouragement, I thank David and Susie Sainsbury; Dan Frank, who has patiently reviewed draft after draft of this book (as with many previous ones); Hailey Wojcik, invaluable research assistant, typist, and swimming companion; and Kate Edgar, my friend, editor, and collaborator for thirty years, to whom this book is dedicated.\n\n# Bibliography\n\nAbell, Truman. 1845. Remarkable case of illusive vision. _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_ 33 (21): 409\u201313.\n\nAdair, Virginia Hamilton. 1996. _Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems_. New York: Random House.\n\nAdamis, Dimitrios, Adrian Treloar, Finbarr C. Martin, and Alastair J. D. Macdonald. 2007. 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New York: Penguin.\n\nSociety for Psychical Research. 1894. Report on the census of hallucinations. _Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research_ 10: 25\u2013422.\n\nSpinoza, Benedict. 1883\/1955. _On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, and Correspondence_. Vol. _2_. New York: Dover.\n\nStevens, Jay. 1998. _Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream_. New York: Grove.\n\nStrindberg, August. 1898\/1962. _Inferno_. London: Hutchinson.\n\nSwartz, Barbara E., and John C. M. Brust. 1984. Anton's syndrome accompanying withdrawal hallucinosis in a blind alcoholic. _Neurology_ 34 (7): 969.\n\nSwash, Michael. 1979. Visual perseveration in temporal lobe epilepsy. _Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry_ 42(6): 569\u201371.\n\nTaylor, David C., and Susan M. Marsh. 1980. Hughlings Jackson's Dr Z: The paradigm of temporal lobe epilepsy revealed. _Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry_ 43: 758\u201367.\n\nTeunisse, Robert J., F. G. Zitman, J. R. M. Cruysberg, W. H. L. Hoefnagels, and A. L. M. Verbeek. 1996. Visual hallucinations in psychologically normal people: Charles Bonnet's syndrome. _Lancet_ 347 (9004): 794\u201397.\n\nThorpy, Michael J., and Jan Yager. 2001. _The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Sleep Disorders_. 2nd ed. New York: Facts on File.\n\nVan Bogaert, Ludo. 1927. Peduncular hallucinosis. _Revue neurologique_. 47: 608\u201317.\n\nVygotsky, L. S. 1962. _Thought and Language_ , ed. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vahar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and John Wiley & Sons. Original Russian edition published in 1934.\n\nWatkins, John. 1998. _Hearing Voices: A Common Human Experience_. Melbourne: Hill of Content.\n\nWaugh, Evelyn. 1957. _The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold_. Boston: Little, Brown.\n\nWeissman, Judith. 1993. _Of Two Minds: Poets Who Hear Voices_. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press \/ University Press of New England.\n\nWells, H. G. 1927. _The Short Stories of H. G. Wells_. London: Ernest Benn.\n\nWest, L. Jolyon, ed. 1962. _Hallucinations_. New York: Grune & Stratton.\n\nWigan, A. L. 1844. _A New View of Insanity: The Duality of the Mind Provided by the Structure, Functions, and Diseases of the Brain_. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans.\n\nWilson, Edmund. 1990. _Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York_. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.\n\nWilson, S. A. Kinnier. 1940. _Neurology_. London: Edward Arnold.\n\nWittgenstein, Ludwig. 1975. _On Certainty_. Malden, MA: Blackwell.\n\nZamboni, Giovanna, Carla Budriesi, and Paolo Nichelli. 2005. \"Seeing oneself\": A case of autoscopy. _Neurocase_ 11 (3): 212\u201315.\n\nZubek, John P., ed. 1969. _Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research_. New York: Meredith.\n\nZubek, John P., Dolores Pushkar, Wilma Sansom, and J. Gowing. 1961. Perceptual changes after prolonged sensory isolation (darkness and silence). _Canadian Journal of Psychology_ 15 (2): 83\u2013100.\n\n# Permissions Acknowledgments\n\nGrateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:\n\nAmerican Academy of Neurology: Excerpt from \"Anton's Syndrome Accompanying Withdrawal Hallucinosis in a Blind Alcoholic\" by Barbara E. Swartz and John C. M. Brust from _Neurology 34_ (1984). Reprinted by permission of the American Academy of Neurology as administered by Wolters Kluwer Health Medical Research.\n\nAmerican Psychiatric Publishing: Excerpt from \"Weir Mitchell's Visual Hallucinations as a Grief Reaction\" by Jerome S. Schneck, M.D., from _American Journal of Psychiatry_ (1989). Copyright \u00a9 1989 by _American Journal of Psychiatry_. Reprinted by permission of American Psychiatric Publishing a division of American Psychiatric Association.\n\nBMJ Publishing Group Ltd.: Excerpt from \"Heautoscopy, Epilepsy and Suicide\" by P. Brugger, R. Agosti, M. Regard, H. G. Wieser and T. Landis from _Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry_ , July 1, 1994. Reprinted by permission of BMJ Publishing Group Ltd. as administered by the Copyright Clearance Center.\n\nCambridge University Press: Excerpts from _Disturbances of the Mind_ by Douwe Draaisma, translated by Barbara Fasting. Copyright \u00a9 2006 by Douwe Draaisma. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.\n\nCanadian Psychological Association: Excerpt from \"Effects of Decreased Variation of the Sensory Environment\" by W. H. Bexton, W. Heron and T. H. Scott from _Canadian Psychology_ (1954). Copyright \u00a9 1954 by Canadian Psychological Association. Excerpt from \"Perceptual Changes after Prolonged Sensory Isolation (Darkness and Silence)\" by John P. Zubek, Dolores Pushkar, Wilma Sansom and J. Gowing from _Canadian Psychology_ (1961). Copyright \u00a9 1961 by Canadian Psychological Association. Reprinted by permission of Canadian Psychological Association.\n\nElsevier Limited: Excerpt from \"Migraine: From Cappadocia to Queen Square\" in _Background to Migraine_ , edited by Robert Smith (London: William Heinemann, 1967). Reprinted by permission of Elsevier Limited.\n\n_The New York Times_ : Excerpts from \"Lifting, Lights, and Little People\" by Siri Hustvedt from _The New York Times Blog_ , February 17, 2008. Reprinted by permission of _The New York Times_ as administered by PARS International Corp.\n\nOxford University Press: Excerpt from \"Dostoiewski's Epilepsy\" by T. Alajouanine from _Brain_ , June 1, 1963. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press as administered by Copyright Clearance Center.\n\nRoyal College of Psychiatrists: Excerpt from \"Sudden Religious Conversion in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy\" by Kenneth Dewhurst and A. W. Beard from _British Journal of Psychiatry 117_ (1970). Reprinted by permission of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.\n\n_Scientific American_ : Excerpt from \"Abducted!\" by Michael Shermer from _Scientific American 292_ (2005). Copyright \u00a9 2005 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of _Scientific American_.\n\nVintage Books: Excerpts from _Speak, Memory_ by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright \u00a9 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1967, copyright renewed 1994 by the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.\n\n# **A Note About the Author**\n\nOliver Sacks is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine and the author of many books, including _Musicophilia, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_ , and _Awakenings_ (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film).\n\n**Other titles available in eBook format by Oliver Sacks**\n\n_The Mind's Eye._ 978-0-307-59455-6\n\n_Musicophilia._ 978-0-307-26791-7\n\n_Oaxaca Journal._ 978-0-307-94758-1\n\n_Vintage Sacks._ 978-0-307-43005-2\n\nVisit Oliver Sacks: www.oliversacks.com\n\nFriend: www.facebook.com\/oliversacks\n\nFollow: @OliverSacks\n\nFor more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com\n\n# ALSO BY OLIVER SACKS\n\n_Migraine_\n\n_Awakenings_\n\n_A Leg to Stand On_\n\n_The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_\n\n_Seeing Voices_\n\n_An Anthropologist on Mars_\n\n_The Island of the Colorblind_\n\n_Uncle Tungsten_\n\n_Oaxaca Journal_\n\n_Musicophilia_\n\n_The Mind's Eye_\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nTable of Contents\n\nCOLUMBIA STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL HISTORY\n\nTitle Page\n\nEpigraph\n\nPREFACE\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nIntroduction\n\nChapter 1 - STORIES OF CONTROL\n\nPhaethon's Blunder\n\nThe Mandan Rainmakers\n\nLeavers and Takers\n\nScience Fiction\n\nJules Verne and the Baltimore Gun Club\n\nMark Twain: Controlling the Climate and Selling It\n\nA Comedic Western\n\nRock the Earth\n\nTales of the Rainmakers\n\nSky King and the Indian Rainmaker\n\nPorky Pig and Donald Duck\n\nChapter 2 - RAIN MAKERS\n\nScientific Revolutions \"de l'air\"\n\nGreat Fires and Artificial Volcanoes\n\nEliza Leslie's \"Rain King\"\n\nCannon and Bells\n\nWar and the Weather\n\nA Perfect Imitation of Battle\n\nChapter 3 - RAIN FAKERS\n\nAt War with the Clouds\n\nHurricane Cannon\n\nKansas and Nebraska Rainmakers\n\n\"An Unfortunate Rain-maker\"\n\nCharles Hatfield, the \"Moisture Accelerator\"\n\nBetting on the Weather\n\nSeeding the American West\n\nDeadly Orgone\n\nProvaqua\n\nChapter 4 - FOGGY THINKING\n\nElectrical Methods\n\nElectrified Sand\n\nRound 1: Dayton, Ohio\n\nRound 2: Aberdeen and Bolling\n\nRound 3: Hartford, Connecticut\n\nThe Business of \"Rainmaking\"\n\nFog Research at MIT\n\nFIDO: A Brute-Force Method of Fog Dispersal\n\nFirst Successful Tests\n\nFIDO Becomes Operational\n\nThe Aftermath of FIDO\n\nThe Airs of the Future\n\nChapter 5 - PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE\n\nBlowing Smoke\n\nLiquid and Solid Carbon Dioxide\n\nThe Rainmaker of Yore\n\nGE Tells the World\n\nThreat of Litigation\n\nProject Cirrus\n\nHurricane King\n\nSilver Iodide\n\nThe New Mexico Seedings\n\nA Pathological Passion\n\nCommercial Cloud Seeding\n\nDisasters\n\nChapter 6 - WEATHER WARRIORS\n\nWeather in Wars and Battles\n\nScience and the Military\n\nMeteorology and the Military\n\nCold War Cloud Seeding\n\nMilitary Research\n\nPublic Perceptions\n\nProject Stormfury\n\nCloud Seeding in Indochina\n\nENMOD: Prohibiting Environmental Modification as a Weapon of War\n\nChapter 7 - FEARS, FANTASIES, AND POSSIBILITIES OF CONTROL\n\nFears\n\nFantasies\n\nPopularizations\n\nHurricane Control\n\nSoviet Fantasies\n\nWarming the Arctic\n\nRehydrating and Powering Africa\n\nSpace Mirrors and Dust\n\nBombs Away\n\nHarry Wexler and the Possibilities of Climate Control\n\nCutting a Hole in the Ozone Layer\n\nChapter 8 - THE CLIMATE ENGINEERS\n\nWhat Is Geoengineering?\n\nTerraforming and Beyond\n\nEthical Consequences\n\nProtection, Prevention, and Production\n\nClimate Leverage\n\nNational Academy, 1992\n\nA Naval Rifle System\n\nOcean Iron Fertilization\n\nArtificial Trees or Lackner Towers\n\nRecycling Ideas\n\nA Royal Society Smoke Screen\n\nField Tests?\n\nThe Middle Course\n\nNOTES\n\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nINDEX\n\nCopyright Page\n\nCOLUMBIA STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL HISTORY\n\nThe idea of \"globalization\" has become a commonplace, but we lack good histories that can explain the transnational and global processes that have shaped the contemporary world. Columbia Studies in International and Global History will encourage serious scholarship on international and global history with an eye to explaining the origins of the contemporary era. Grounded in empirical research, the titles in the series will also transcend the usual area boundaries and will address questions of how history can help us understand contemporary problems, including poverty, inequality, power, political violence, and accountability beyond the nation-state.\n\nCemil Aydin, _The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia:_   \n_Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought_\n\nAdam M. McKeown, _Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and_   \n_the Globalization of Borders_\n\nPatrick Manning, _The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture_\n\n\"Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world\" (Archimedes), but where will it roll? ( _MECHANICS MAGAZINE_ , 1824, AND ORIGINAL ART)\n_The middle course is safest and best._\n\n\u2014HELIOS\nPREFACE\n\n**THE** possibility but not the desirability of weather and climate control entered my consciousness in the early 1970s. I was a graduate student in atmospheric science at Colorado State University and one of my air force colleagues proposed to zap clouds with laser beams to make them more energetic. I think he was wondering if a focused beam of radiation could destroy hailstones, perhaps like microwave medical treatment for kidney stones, although I suspect his patrons had other ideas. I also noted a widespread ambivalence among most of my professors toward cloud seeding, which was not part of the main curriculum. My own project involved putting cirrus clouds into a computerized tropical atmosphere and modeling their radiative effects. This was an early exercise in climate modeling. The way clouds interact with sunlight and heat radiation was very speculative then and is still an open question, even as some climate engineers propose to \"manage\" solar radiation.\n\nColorado State University also supported my training as a high-altitude observer, which qualified me to work with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder in its instrumented glider project. This was an ideal job for someone who loved clouds, since we were able to slip quietly and unobtrusively  into them, spend up to several hours spiraling in their growing updrafts and collecting data, and then exit the tops of budding thunderstorms for absolutely spectacular views. This project was conducted in 1973 over the Continental Divide near Leadville, Colorado. Its poignant but unintended link to weather control came one evening, unexpectedly, when the Colorado state police visited our lodgings and informed us that someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail into the hangar and had burned up one wing of the glider. Apparently, some of the locals mistakenly thought that we were engaged in cloud seeding, or, colloquially, \"stealing their sky water.\"\n\nIn my next project, at the University of Washington, I flew in a World War II\u2013era surplus bomber equipped with cloud physics equipment to investigate the claims of the weather modification community. The problem was, we usually flew only when the weather was bad, so we were buffeted quite frequently by Pacific storms. Early one morning, after a particularly harrowing night of flying, the airplane clipped off the top of a pine tree during our landing approach. I recall pulling a 2-inch-diameter branch out of the equipment slung below the plane and deciding, pretty much there and then, that I would be seeking other, safer modes of engagement with the atmosphere.\n\nThe history of science and technology, including its relevance to public policy, became for me that mode of engagement. I received my doctorate in history at Princeton University with a dissertation on the history of meteorology in America. Since then, I have had more than a passing interest in the history of weather and climate modification and have written several essays on the topic. I also remain deeply involved in issues involving climate change history and public policy. Today's climate engineers are championing an approach to the problem of what to do about climate change that arouses my deepest suspicions regarding technological fixes. It is a seriously flawed and speculative undertaking that typically involves impractical or even dangerous schemes to \"fix the sky.\" Proposals include \"solar radiation management\" and other forms of planetary leverage, including thermodynamically impractical schemes for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration. The proposals are typically supported by scribbling back-of-the-envelope calculations or tinkering with simple computer models that are just not good enough. It is an approach that is oblivious to the checkered history of weather and climate control.\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\n**MOST** of the research for this book was conducted during a research leave supported by Colby College, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Early versions of this work were presented at a number of venues. I extend my profound gratitude to my hosts, sponsors, listeners, and questioners.\n\nSpecial thanks are due to Ralph Cicerone and Lee Hamilton and their staffs; British Broadcasting Corporation filmmakers Fiona Scott and Weini Tesfu; 4th Row Films producers and directors Robert Greene and Greta Wink; Wilson Center Environmental Change and Security director Geof Dabelko, _Wilson Quarterly_ editor Steve Lagerfeld and assistant editor Rebecca Rosen, Wilson Center press director Joe Brinley, and Wilson Center librarian Janet Spikes; National Academy of Science archivists Dan Barbiero and Janice Goldblum; Colby College librarians Susan Cole, Margaret Menchen, Darylyne Provost, and Alisia Wygant Rizett; Len Bruno and the staffs of the Library of Congress, the  Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the NOAA Central Library; and a host of other archivists and librarians.\n\nThe following individuals provided extremely helpful perspectives and welcome encouragement: Stephen Cole, NASA Goddard; Lindsay Collins, Brooke Larson, and Theda Perdue, Woodrow Wilson Center; Matthew Connelly, Columbia University; Bill Frank and Charles Hosler, Pennsylvania State University; Justin Grubich and Alexey Voinov, AAAS Policy Fellows; Vladimir Jankovic, Manchester University; D. Whitney King, Ursula Reidel-Schrewe, and Thomas Shattuck, Colby College; Roger Launius, David DeVorkin, Martin Collins, and Michael Neufeld, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland; Michael MacCracken and John Topping, Climate Institute; Alan Robock, Rutgers University; Richard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; and Roger Turner, University of Pennsylvania.\n\nGregory Cushman and students in his graduate seminar at the University of Kansas read and commented on an early draft of the manuscript; so, too, did Roger Launus, Alan Robock, and several unnamed reviewers. Research assistants Noah B. Bonnheim, Alice W. Evans, Amie R. Fleming, Ashley J. Oliver, Mette Fog Olwig, Mandy Reynolds, and James S. Westhafer made essential contributions to the process. My editor, Anne Routon, greatly facilitated production of the book.\nINTRODUCTION\n\n_In facing unprecedented challenges, it is good to consider historical precedents._\n\n**AS** alarm over global warming spreads, some climate engineers are engaging in wild speculation and are advancing increasingly urgent proposals about how to \"control\" the Earth's climate. They are stalking the hallways of power, hyping their proposals, and seeking support for their ideas about fixing the sky. The figures they scribble on the backs of envelopes and the results of their simple (yet somehow portrayed as complex) climate models have convinced them, but very few others, that they are planetary saviors, lifeboat builders on a sinking _Titanic_ , visionaries who are taking action in the face of a looming crisis. They present themselves as insurance salesmen for the planet, with policies that may or may not pay benefits. In response to the question of what to do about climate change, they are prepared to take ultimate actions to intervene, even to do too much if others, in their estimation, are doing too little.\n\nThese climate engineers share a growing concern that something is terribly wrong with the sky. They are convinced that the climate system is headed into uncharted territory, carbon mitigation will fail or at least move too slowly to avert an environmental disaster, and adaptation will be too little, too late. Some simply place more faith in engineering solutions than in human agreements.  They have come to the conclusion that the twenty-first century will be \"geotechnic\"\u2014that the atmosphere is humanity's aerial sewer, sorely in need of treatment, and the Earth needs a thermostat or perhaps global air-conditioning. They seek a technological fix through geoengineering, which they loosely define as the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment. Some have called it the \"ultimate technological fix\"; critics say it has unlimited potential for planetary mischief. Shade the planet by launching a solar shield into orbit. Shoot sulfates or reflective nanoparticles into the upper atmosphere, turning the blue sky milky white. Make the clouds thicker and brighter. Fertilize the oceans to stimulate massive algae blooms that turn the blue seas soupy green. Suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air with hundreds of thousands of giant artificial trees. Flood the Sahara and the Australian outback to plant mega-forests of eucalyptus trees. Surround the Arctic sea ice with a white plastic flotilla. While all this may sound like science fiction, it is actually just the latest set of installments in the perennial story of weather and climate control. For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have hatched schemes to manipulate the weather and climate. Like them, today's aspiring climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible, while scarcely considering the political, military, and ethical implications of attempting to manage the world's climate. This is not, in essence, a heroic saga about new scientific discoveries that can save the planet, as many of the participants claim, but a tragicomedy of overreaching, hubris, and self-delusion. At a National Academy of Sciences meeting in June 2009 on geoengineering, planetary scientist Brian Toon told the audience that we do not have the technology to engineer the planet. We do not have the wisdom either. Global climate engineering is untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief.\n\nThe latest resurgence of interest in geoengineering dates to an editorial written in 2006 by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, \"Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?\" The question mark is well placed, for far from solving a policy dilemma, he actually opened a can of worms, albeit from a historical pantry filled with such cans. Crutzen's basic message, that \"research on the feasibility and environmental consequences of climate engineering... should not be tabooed,\" was but the latest round in an ancient quest for ultimate control of the atmosphere\u2014a quest with very deep roots in traditional cultures, practices, myth, fiction, and history.\n\nEver since Archimedes, engineers have been excited about technological leverage, but they have never had the \"standing\" or the ability to predict all or even most of the consequences of their actions. This is a perennial issue. Yet today's geoengineers exude a false confidence when they proclaim that their tools and techniques have now matured to the extent that fixing the sky\u2014cooling  the planet, saving humanity, and minimizing unwanted side effects, whether physical or moral\u2014is now both possible and desirable. How did we arrive at this situation?\n\nThis book examines historical and current ways of thinking about weather and climate control. It includes stories from a long and checkered history and a dizzying array of contemporary ideas\u2014most of them wildly impractical. It examines the proposals and actual practices of a large number of dreamers, militarists, and outright charlatans, of rain kings and queens, of weather warriors and climate engineers, both ancient and modern. It provides scholars and the general public with new perspectives that are missing from the technically oriented or policy-oriented conversations about control. This book is based on research in original manuscript and document collections; it also contains fresh interpretations of existing work. It is an extended essay arguing for the relevance of history, the foolishness of quick fixes, and the need to follow a \"middle course\" of expedited moderation in aerial matters, seeking neither to control the sky nor to diminish the importance of environmental problems we face.\n\nThis history is located within a long tradition of imaginative and speculative literature involving the \"control\" of nature. Early efforts to exercise some form of control over the environment included seeking shelter from the elements, using fire for warmth, herding animals, cultivating plants, and moving and storing fresh water. Yet control of the heavens remains far beyond the ability of mortals. Our ancestors either bowed or cowered before the ancient sky gods, while the mythological figures of classical antiquity met with tragedy when they sought to exceed mortal limits. Many societies, seeking a measure of influence over the vagaries of the sky, invested their rulers or shamans with the title \"rain king\" or \"rain queen\" and charged them with ceremonial duties of vast significance not only for upholding the physical well-being and prosperity of the tribe but also for maintaining the proper relationships between heaven and Earth.\n\nSince the seventeenth century, the Baconian expectation that increasing knowledge would lead to new technologies \"for the common good\" has been widely applied to all scientific fields, including, notably, meteorology and climatology. For several centuries now, planners, politicians, scientists, and soldiers have proposed schemes for the purposeful manipulation of weather and climate, usually for commercial or military purposes. Their stories have tragic, comedic, and heroic aspects. Control of weather and climate is a perennial issue rooted in hubris and tragedy; it is a pathological issue, illustrating what can go wrong in science; and it is a pressing public policy issue with widespread social implications.\n\nEnlightenment philosophers supposed that the climate of Europe had moderated since Roman times in response to human activity. Thomas Jefferson thought  that clearing the forests, draining the marshes, and cultivating the land would improve the American climate. In the 1840s, James Espy, the first meteorologist in U.S. government service, proposed rainmaking by lighting huge fires to stimulate convective updrafts. The following era in rainmaking was dominated by artillerists and \"rain fakers,\" the so-called pluviculturalists.\n\nNineteenth-century climatologists could find no trends in the weather records beyond variability and temporarily quashed the notion that humans can influence climate. Yet by mid-century, geologists had discovered great changes, ice ages and interglacial epochs, in the record of the rocks. The two timescales (the human historical and the geological) and the two agencies (anthropogenic forces and natural forces) were reunited in a new form at the dawn of the twentieth century by the Swedish meteorologist Nils Gustaf Ekholm (1848\u20131923), who wrote about \"the climate of the geological and historical past.\" Ekholm regarded variations in carbon dioxide concentration as the principal cause of climatic variations, citing the \"elaborate inquiry on this complicated phenomenon\" made by his colleague Svante Arrhenius. He explained that carbon dioxide is a key player in the greenhouse effect and that this conclusion is based on the earlier work of Joseph Fourier, John Tyndall, and others. By his estimates, an increase in carbon dioxide would heat high latitudes more than the tropics and would create a warmer, more uniform climate over the entire Earth; a tripling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would raise global temperatures by 7 to 9\u00b0C (12 to 16 \u00b0F).\n\nAccording to Ekholm, the secular cooling of the originally hot Earth was the principal cause of variation in the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As the Earth cooled, the oceans sequestered great amounts of carbon into limestone and other calcium carbonate deposits, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. This caused temperatures to fall, triggering a chain reaction of feedback mechanisms that lowered carbon dioxide levels even further. Other processes added carbon dioxide to the air. Volcanic emissions, mountain uplift, and changes in sea level and plant cover produced the periodical variations evident in the geological record.\n\nEkholm pointed out that humanity was now playing a role in these geological processes. He held that over the course of a millennium the accumulation in the atmosphere of CO2 from the burning of pit coal would \"undoubtedly cause a very obvious rise of the mean temperature of the Earth.\" He also thought this effect could be accelerated by burning coal exposed in shallow seams or perhaps decreased \"by protecting the weathering layers of silicates from the influence of the air and by ruling the growth of plants.\" Ekholm pointed to the grand possibility that by such means it might someday be possible \"to regulate the future climate of the Earth and consequently prevent the arrival of a new Ice  Age.\" In this scenario, climate warming by enhanced coal burning would be pitted against the natural changes in the Earth's orbital elements, recently identified by James Croll, or the secular cooling of the Sun, as pointed out by Lord Kelvin (William Thomson). Ekholm concluded, \"It is too early to judge of how far Man might be capable of thus regulating the future climate. But already the view of such a possibility seems to me so grand that I cannot help thinking that it will afford Mankind hitherto unforeseen means of evolution.\"\n\nArrhenius popularized Ekholm's observations in his book _Worlds in the Making,_ noting that \"the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries.\" Arrhenius considered it likely that in future geological ages, the Earth would be \"visited by a new ice period that will drive us from our temperate countries into the hotter climates of Africa.\" On the timescale of hundreds to thousands of years, however, Arrhenius agreed with Ekholm that a \"virtuous circle\" could be defined in which the burning of fossil fuels could help prevent a rapid return to the conditions of an ice age and could perhaps inaugurate a new carboniferous age of enormous plant growth.\n\nYet in the early decades of the twentieth century, the carbon dioxide theory of climate change, along with the human influence theory, fell out of favor with most scientists. Most scientists believed that at current atmospheric concentrations, carbon dioxide already absorbed all the available long-wave radiation; thus any increases would not change the radiative heat balance of the planet. The person responsible for reviving the ideas of Arrhenius and Ekholm and placing them on a revised scientific basis was Guy Stewart Callendar (1898\u20131964), a British steam and defense engineer. In 1938 Callendar reformulated the carbon dioxide theory by arguing that rising global temperatures and increased fossil fuel burning were closely linked. He compiled weather data from stations around the world that clearly indicated a climate warming trend of 0.5\u00b0C (0.9\u00b0F) in the early decades of the twentieth century. His estimate of 290 parts per million for the nineteenth-century background concentration of CO2 is still a valid estimate, and he documented an increase of 10 percent between 1900 and 1935, which closely matched the amount of fuel burned. On the basis of new understanding of the infrared spectrum and calculations of the absorption and emission of radiation by trace gases in the atmosphere, Callendar established the carbon dioxide theory of climate change in its recognizably modern form, reviving it from its earlier, physically unrealistic and moribund status. Today the theory that global climate change can be attributed to an enhanced greenhouse effect resulting from elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources and activities is called the Callendar effect.\n\nThe dawn of aviation brought new needs and challenges, with fog dispersal taking center stage. A number of ineffective efforts using chemical and electrical means preceded the massive World War II fog-clearing project FIDO (Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation), which allowed British Royal Air Force and Allied planes to take off and land when the Germans were grounded. With national survival at stake, it did not matter that it required burning 6,000 gallons of gasoline to land one airplane in the fog.\n\nAfter World War II, promising discoveries in \"cloud seeding\" at the General Electric Corporation rapidly devolved into questionable practices by military and commercial rainmakers seeking to control the weather. At the same time, hopeful developments in digital computing led to speculation that a perfect machine forecast of weather and climate could lead to perfect understanding and control. During the cold war, speculation about geoengineering by the Soviets promoted a chilling vision (to Westerners) of global climate control. Geoscientific speculators in the West returned the favor.\n\nBy 1962 the results of early computer simulations of the general circulation of the atmosphere and the first satellite estimates of the Earth's heat budget led Harry Wexler, head of research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, to warn a United Nations symposium on the environment of the \"inherent risk\" in attempted climate control \"of irremediable harm to our planet or side effects counterbalancing the possible short-term benefits.\" Yet only three years later, the President's Science Advisory Committee reported that scientists might soon need to increase the Earth's albedo, or planetary brightness, deliberately in response to increased warming from carbon dioxide emissions.\n\nDuring the hot summer of 1988, with Yellowstone National Park in flames and global warming in the headlines, an international scientific conference sponsored by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization recommended reductions of carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1988 levels, to be achieved by 2005. Today, we are nowhere near reaching that goal. Experts advise that reductions of greenhouse gas emissions of at least 80 percent will be necessary, while popular cries of \"Stop global warming\" and \"Control climate change\" are becoming more and more widespread. Invoking the unlikelihood that such reductions will be accomplished voluntarily and the fear of passing a climate \"tipping point,\" some modern-day climate engineers are suggesting that they can provide cheap, reliable technological \"fixes\" for the climate system through macro-engineering options that include \"solar radiation management,\" carbon capture and sequestration, and other invasive techniques of \"planetary surgery.\"\n\nWeather and climate are intimately related: weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given place and time, while climate is the aggregate of weather conditions  over time. A vast body of scientific literature addresses these interactions. In addition, historians are revisiting the ancient but elusive term _Klima_ , seeking to recover its multiple social connotations. Weather, climate, and the climate of opinion matter in complex ways that invite\u2014some might say require or demand\u2014the attention of both scientists and historians.\n\nYet some may wonder how weather and climate are interrelated rather than distinct. Both, for example, are at the center of the debate over greenhouse warming and hurricane intensity. A few may claim that rainmaking, for example, has nothing to do with climate engineering, but _any_ intervention in the Earth's radiation or heat budget (such as managing solar radiation) would affect the general circulation and thus the location of upper-level patterns, including the jet stream and storm tracks. Thus the weather itself would be changed by such manipulation. Conversely, intervening in severe storms by changing their intensity or their tracks or modifying weather on a scale as large as a region, a continent, or the Pacific basin would obviously affect cloudiness, temperature, and precipitation patterns, with major consequences for monsoonal flows and ultimately the general circulation. If repeated systematically, such interventions would influence the overall heat budget and the climate.\n\nIn the 1950s, Irving Langmuir sought to cause changes in the seasons and the climate of large regions such as the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean by massive seeding of weather systems. Three decades earlier, L. Francis Warren tried to develop a system of universal weather control using electrified sand. In the 1840s, James Espy's proposed large fires were intended to act as artificial volcanoes, triggering regular rains along the entire eastern seaboard to change the climate and improve the health of the region, while Thomas Jefferson speculated on climate engineering at the dawn of the nineteenth century and thought that the sum total of American agricultural practices would surely change local weather and warm the entire continent. Thus, both by definition and in historical practice, weather and climate occupy a continuous spectrum ranging from local to global scales and from short- to long-term temporal changes. As Harry Wexler liked to point out, if you change the weather repeatedly on a large spatial scale, you are changing the climate, and vice versa.\n\nI have set down in writing my ideas about fixing the sky\u2014primarily historical ideas about mending, repairing, or somehow improving perceived defects in the weather or in climate systems\u2014but fixing the sky has many, many other possible meanings. In the _Oxford English Dictionary_ , the \"sky\" is the apparent arch or vault of heaven, whether covered with clouds or clear and blue; it may be the climate or clime of a particular region, nowadays usually designated more globally than locally. The appearance of the sky is variously sunny, starry, hazy,  overcast, azure, copper, even milky white. Fog or cloud modification involves fixing the sky. Sky gods and goddesses, sky-shades, and sky-fliers (the overly ambitious) have all played their roles in this seemingly limitless and often extravagantly fanciful history.\n\nA \"fix\" is a predicament, difficulty, dilemma, or a \"tight place.\" It refers to a heroic intervention to help the hopeless and make things right again. It can also be a certified position at sea, in the air, or on the trading floor; a dose of narcotics for an addict; or an illegal bribe or illicit arrangement. A fix is a measure undertaken to resolve a problem, an easy remedy, sometimes known as a \"quick fix,\" which connotes an expedient but temporary solution that fails to address underlying problems. It can be a \"tech fix\" that emphasizes the engineering aspect rather than the social dimensions of an issue. Something \"fixed\" is not changing or vacillating; it possesses stability and consistency, even if it is a steady, concentrated, unwavering, or mesmerizing fixed gaze. When the chemist Joseph Black discovered what we now call carbon dioxide, he called it \"fixed air\" because of its stable properties\u2014ironic now that this compound is the volatile core of all environmental discussion. Plants are good at fixing carbon into their tissues through photosynthesis, but we have yet to learn how to capture, fix, and sequester carbon dioxide underground or in ocean trenches. Sporting events and elections can be \"fixed\" by illegal means, bulls by legal means; the unattached can be \"fixed up\" with likely partners.\n\nIn 1966 physicist Alvin Weinberg coined the term \"technological fix.\" Since then, it has come to connote simplistic or stopgap remedies to complex problems, partial solutions that may generate more problems than they solve. Placing more faith in technology than in human nature, Weinberg offered engineering as an alternative to conservation or restraint. We face this dilemma with technological fixes for global warming, although those who propose such ideas are quick to say that they are only buying time until more reasonable forms of mitigation and adaptation can take effect.\n\nIn a practical way, humans have long practiced a form of climate control in their technologies of clothing and shelter. By controlling the heat and moisture budgets within a centimeter of the skin surface, humans can function in even the harshest weather conditions. Mountain climbers, polar explorers, even the French Foreign Legion represent extreme examples of what we all do\u2014clothe ourselves according to expected environmental conditions.\n\nControlling the heat budget (and to some extent the moisture budget) within small, enclosed spaces allows humans to live, work, and play in relative comfort and safety in most weather conditions and climate zones. As Ralph Waldo Emerson  said, \"Coal is a portable climate.... Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.\" Just one century ago, industrial power was applied to cooling, drying, and purifying the air when Willis H. Carrier invented an industrial air-conditioning system. Carrier's invention has now infiltrated all aspects of modern life. It is doubtful whether the American Sun Belt would be growing as it is today without the widespread use of home, auto, and industrial air-conditioning. As these brief examples indicate, controlling the weather and climate is something we all do (on a small scale), while some fantasize about it on a large scale. Clark Spence, in his entertaining book _The Rainmakers_ , surveyed the sometimes fantastic and always quixotic history of scientific weather modification before World War II. Here those stories are expanded and continued after 1945.\n\nWhile many works in the history of science and technology have been crafted in a heroic mode\u2014great men with great ideas \"standing on the shoulders of giants\"\u2014and environmental histories are often written as tragedies, the history of weather and climate control is best told by invoking a broader range of approaches, including a mixture of the tragic and comedic genres. Most of the rainmakers and climate engineers portray their activities as heroic and dramatic attempts to rescue humanity from a recalcitrant sky by exercising control over it; however, their efforts often have commercial or military dimensions and almost always fall far short of the stated goals. Here is where tragicomedy\u2014or perhaps just comedy\u2014best captures the flawed anti-heroics of those who would seek to fix the sky or control the weather and climate. In this book, I present a comedy of ideas extending from the mythological past to the present, with the common denominator being farce, and sometimes satire, especially when the hype becomes too great. Most of the stories emphasize the perennial nature of the claims, the hubris and ineptitude of the protagonists, the largely pathological science on which they are based, the opportunistic appeals to new technologies, the false sense that macro-engineering will solve more problems than it creates, and the ineptitude of the protagonists.\n\nThe trinity of understanding, prediction, and control undergirds the dominant fantasies of both science and science fiction. Understanding often involves reducing a complex phenomenon to a set of basic laws or mechanisms. This may even involve extreme \"molecular reductionism\"\u2014for example, in the treatment of silver iodide (AgI) as a \"trigger\" mechanism for widespread weather modification or of carbon dioxide, today's environmental molecule of choice, as an  international symbol of human intervention in the climate system, signaling and codifying both affluence and apprehension.\n\nPrediction introduces the time dimension in which the future state of a natural phenomenon is specified. If you understand a phenomenon, scientists say, you should be able to predict its behavior. But while rather precise prediction of the appearances of the sky was practiced in antiquity, weather prediction and basic climate modeling were not possible until the mid-1950s when digital computing provided our first glimpses of the possibility of handling the extreme complexity of this nonlinear system.\n\nControl is the third member of the trinity, but understanding does not imply either predictability or control. If you know from observation that horses need pasture and fresh water, you may predict that a wild herd will gather in the grassy fields near the river. Capturing them, taming them, and bending them to your will, however, is a far more difficult undertaking. For some, in the age of digital computing, Earth observations from space, and extremely precise measurement of atmospheric chemical species, controlling the weather and climate is more desirable than merely observing or predicting it. Some think that this is now possible and that science and technology have given us an Archimedean set of levers with which to move the Earth. This book examines these ancient, perennial, and contemporary quests and questions by placing recent developments in the context of the deeper past.\n\nChapter 1, stories of control, highlights imaginative and speculative literature on the control of nature. It draws from the classical tradition, including Phaethon's blunder, Milton's _Paradise Lost_ , and Dante's _Divine Comedy_ , among others. The examples indicate that myth, magic, religion, and legend are not relics of the past but constitute deep roots and living sparks of contemporary practices. An excursion into early geoscientific fiction follows, demonstrating the affinities between the genre of science fiction and the fantasies of the cloud and climate controllers. The works of famous authors such as Jules Verne, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut serve to anchor the analysis of a host of lesser-known but still important, enlightening, and entertaining early fiction. Tales of the rainmakers, including the well-known play _The Rainmaker_ , by N. Richard Nash, appear alongside popularizations from the television series _Sky King_ and comics from Warner Brothers and Walt Disney. Here, as in Twain, the comedic genre clearly trumps the heroic and the tragic. It is also clear that fiction writing has a moral core that is missing from the speculative proposals of scientists and engineers. Moreover, the writers tend to employ female voices to remind their predominantly male protagonists of their ethical excesses.\n\nScientific rainmakers take the historical stage in chapter 2. The story of control begins with the aspirations of Sir Francis Bacon and continues as a legacy of the historiographically contentious scientific revolution. Enlightened dreamers, enamored by the notion of progress, enthusiastically sought to understand, predict, and ultimately control the weather and climate. But did they reveal nature's deepest secrets or abuse our deepest sensibilities? The distinguished American meteorologist James Espy wanted to control rainfall with great fires, a problematic goal that, if ever accomplished, would have raised immense ethical dilemmas. Another group wanted to cannonade the clouds to wring out their moisture, but succeeded mainly in entertaining onlookers with pyrotechnic displays. The notion of progress was such a heady surety that it seemed that anything was possible; not even the sky was the limit. Surely things are much different now. Or are they?\n\nChapter 3 examines the rain fakers, the charlatans or confidence men who lived by their wits and accepted payment from desperate and gullible farmers for their questionable services. Hail shooting falls into this category, as do the Kansas and Nebraska proprietary rainmakers of the 1880s and 1890s. Charles Hatfield, the \"moisture accelerator,\" was a charlatan's charlatan who mixed his proprietary chemicals and dispensed them from high towers at considerable profit in the first three decades of the twentieth century. George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, who scammed the Belmont Park racetrack in the 1930s; Wilhelm Reich, who scammed his followers in the 1950s; Irving Krick, who practiced commercial cloud seeding over most of the American West; and the Provaqua project, which just recently tried to scam the citizens of Laredo, Texas, serve to illustrate the perennial nature of these questionable but humorous (at least from a distance) practices. Ironically, the rainmakers and the rain fakers employed surprisingly similar techniques, although the former actually believed in what they were doing, while the latter clearly did not.\n\nChapter 4 focuses on fog removal in the era of early aviation. As the airplane provided a new platform for aerial experimentation, it also raised the stakes for aviation safety and military efficiency. Teams of experimenters, some working largely on their own and some with the full support of governments, tried electrical, chemical, and physical methods of fog removal. These included attacking clouds with electrified sand, spraying calcium chloride on airports, and burning hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline in a brute-force effort to keep the Royal Air Force aloft and return its pilots safely. The chapter ends with a look at the \"airs of the future,\" both indoors and out. The rising popularity of air-conditioning in the 1930s was an approach to weather and climate control that  has since reached the level of domed stadiums and indoor shopping malls, falling just shy of totally air-conditioned cities. Also in the 1930s and early 1940s, meteorologists shared their visions of technological breakthroughs in the coming decades leading to perfect forecasts and the holy grail of weather control.\n\nChapter 5 examines the defining characteristics of \"pathological science\" established by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir and then proceeds to indict him on his own criteria. Langmuir, and to some extent his associates at General Electric, was an overenthusiastic supporter of weather control by using dry ice and silver iodide as cloud-seeding agents. When the military took over the project, the stage was set for heavy-handed intervention in hurricanes, large-scale tests with few controls, and sweeping but unsupportable claims. As the technique spread around the world, a host of commercial cloud seeders, personified by Irving Krick, made their living at the expense of those in need of rainfall. The chapter concludes with stories of meteorological disasters in England and the former Soviet Union attributed to but not proved to have been caused by cloud seeding.\n\nThe mood darkens considerably in chapter 6 as military themes take center stage. What are the historical dimensions of military interest and involvement in the weather; how were the clouds weaponized, especially in the cold war era; and how did a race for weather control domination emerge between the United States and the Soviet Union? The sordid episode of rainmaking in Vietnam over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the ban by the United Nations on environmental warfare quashed much of this enthusiasm in the 1970s. Yet the weather and climate warriors are with us still, preparing to \"own\" and manipulate the weather over the battlefields of the future and seeking to control the evolving nature of climate change in the interest of national security.\n\nChapter 7 examines climate fears, climate fantasies, and the possibility of global climate control between 1945 and 1962. It illuminates technical, scientific, social, and popular issues and moves us beyond the timeworn origin stories of numerical weather prediction into a new field of numerical climate control\u2014a marketplace of wild ideas, a twentieth-century Hall of Fantasy, or even Twilight Zone, whose boundaries are those of imagination. It does so by examining some of the chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and, yes, meteorologists who tried to \"interfere\" with natural processes. They intervened not with dry ice or silver iodide, but with the new Promethean possibilities of climate tinkering using digital computing, satellite remote sensing, and nuclear power. Key players include Vladimir Zworykin, the inventor of television, and the noted mathematician John von Neumann, both of whom were seeking a perfect forecasting machine, and Harry Wexler, who imagined cutting a hole  in the stratospheric ozone layer and issued a clear warning about the coming dangers of climate engineering.\n\nFinally, chapter 8 examines recent and current ideas and proposals regarding geoengineering. Driven by the fear of global warming and their underlying certainty that mitigation and adaptation will not be sufficient to prevent a climate catastrophe, the climate engineers are pushing for the authority and the wherewithal to go beyond paper studies and computer models to field trials and fullscale implementation as a technological fix for global warming. But in their quest to create a \"planetary thermostat,\" they lack a widespread following and appear to most mainstream scientists, environmentalists, and policymakers as overly aggressive in their vocal advocacy for untested, and perhaps untestable, practices. It is likely that humanity as a whole has done too little in response to the problem, but the climate engineers are seeking to do too much.\n\nAttempted control of the environment may not be a good thing, especially when it is based on simplistic assumptions (for example, that hurricanes may be readily redirected or that basic radiation physics controls the Earth's climate) or when it exceeds the knowledge base or verges on science fantasy. Like the pseudoscientific rainmakers of yore, today's aspiring climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible and scarcely consider the political or ethical implications of attempting to manage the world's climate\u2014with potential consequences far greater than any of their predecessors were ever likely to face.\n\nWho has the moral right to modify the weather or the global climate? Where will a global thermostat be located, and who gets to control it? Will climate engineering reduce incentives to mitigate carbon emissions? What about unknown side effects? Should it be commercialized? What if nations or companies do it unilaterally? Does it violate existing treaties? Why is the military so interested? Once it begins, can we ever stop it? How will weather and climate engineering alter fundamental human relationships to nature?\n\nThis book is grounded in the practices of the past and provides perspectives on the largely fantastic claims of the current batch of geoscientific speculators, collectively known as the climate engineers, who are proposing to cool the planet in response to fears of global warming. In facing the unprecedented challenges posed by humanity's current confrontation with the elements\u2014a situation exacerbated by world population, a host of aerial effluents, and generally rising affluence\u2014it is good to seek historical precedents.\n\nThe current generation of climate engineers is not the first to consider planetary-scale environmental manipulation. Indeed, they are heirs to a long and checkered history of weather and climate control populated by a colorful  cast of dreamers and losers. If this history provides new insights, raises new issues, provokes new controversies, or serves to inform social, ethical, and public policy considerations, I will deem the effort worthwhile. The goal is the articulation of perspectives fully informed by history and the initiation of a dialogue that uncovers otherwise hidden values, ethical implications, social tensions, and public apprehensions surrounding our past and current environmental situations.\n\n**1**\n\nSTORIES OF CONTROL\n\n_The General Electric Company_ was s _cience fiction._\n\n\u2014KURT VONNEGUT\n\n**THROUGHOUT** history and across cultures, civilizations have told stories about gods and heroes who have attempted to control that which may be largely uncontrollable, including phenomena both above and below the horizon. There are many sources for such stories. Myth, religion, and traditional practices form the foundations of culture and are often invoked when people seek group solidarity\u2014for example, when the expected rains fail to arrive or a violent storm rages. Stories drawn from Greek mythology, the Western canon, Native American rainmaking, and recent fiction are presented here, followed by examples of geo-science fiction before about 1960\u2014drawn from the pages of pulp fiction, the stage and silver screen, and the boob tube\u2014that serve to illuminate popular culture. But much more than edification is at stake. Storytelling skirts the borderlands between fact and fantasy and acknowledges their reciprocal relationship. Here the comic and tragicomic genres provide fresh insights into the speculative practices of the meteorological Don Quixotes and Rube Goldbergs of the past. Such storytelling clearly trumps the heroic and the tragic genres so typical in the literature of science studies. It is an excursion that historians of science, technology, and environment have only recently begun to take.\n\n#  Phaethon's Blunder\n\nIn uncovering the deeper cultural roots of weather and climate engineering, it is instructive to consider the wisdom invested in mythological stories, since whether we realize it or not, much of Western civilization rests on these foundations. In Greek mythology, the youth Phaethon lost control of the Sun chariot, and his recklessness caused extensive damage to the Earth before Zeus shot him out of the sky. The story began when Phaethon, mocked by a schoolmate for claiming to be the son of Helios, asked his mother, Clymene, for proof of his heavenly birth. She sent him east toward the sunrise to the awe-inspiring palace of the Sun god in India. Helios received the youth warmly and granted him a wish. Phaethon immediately asked his father to be permitted for one day to drive the chariot of the Sun, causing Helios to repent of his promise, since the path of the zodiac was steep and treacherous and the horses were difficult, if not impossible, to control. Helios replied prophetically, \"Beware, my son, lest I be the donor of a fatal gift; recall your request while yet you may.... It is not honor, but destruction you seek.... I beg you to choose more wisely.\" But the youth held to his demand, and Helios honored his promise. At the break of dawn, the horses were harnessed to the resplendent Sun chariot, and Helios, with a foreboding sigh, urged his son to spare the whip, hold tight the reins, and \"keep within the limit of the middle zone,\" neither too far south or north, nor too high or low: \"The middle course is safest and best\" (63).\n\nNow Phaethon spared the whip; that was not the problem. A bigger problem was that the youth was a lightweight (literally) and the horses sensed this, \"and as a ship without ballast is tossed hither and thither on the sea, so the chariot, without its accustomed weight, was dashed about as if empty\" (64). Also Phaethon was a completely inexperienced driver without a clue as to the proper route to take: \"He is alarmed, and knows not how to guide them; nor, if he knew, has he the power\" (64). The chariot veered out of the zodiac, with hapless Phaethon looking down on the vast expanse of the Earth, growing pale and shaking with terror. He repented of his request, but it was too late. The chariot was borne along \"like a vessel that flies before a tempest,\" and Phaethon, losing control completely, dropped the reins. So much for the middle course:\n\nThe horses, when they felt them loose on their backs, dashed headlong, and unrestrained went off into unknown regions of the sky, in among the stars, hurling the chariot over pathless places, now up in the high heaven, now down almost to earth.... The clouds begin to smoke, and the mountain tops take fire; the fields are parched with heat, the plants wither, the trees with their leafy branches burn, the  harvest is ablaze! But these are small things. Great cities perished, with their walls and towers; whole nations with their people were consumed to ashes! The forestclad mountains burned.... Then Phaeton beheld the world on fire, and felt the heat intolerable. The air he breathed was like the air of a furnace and full of burning ashes, and the smoke was of a pitchy darkness. (65\u201366)\n\n1.1 Phaethon, from the series _The Four Disgracers_ (1588) by Hendrick Goltzius (Netherlandish, 1558\u20131617). Icarus, Ixion, and Tantalus are also called \"disgracers\" for their overweening ambition.\n\nWith the Earth on fire, the oceans at risk, and the poles smoking, Atlas did more than shrug\u2014he fainted. The Earth, overcome with heat and thirst, implored Zeus to intervene, \"lest sea, Earth, and heaven perish, [and] we fall into ancient Chaos. Save what yet remains to us from the devouring flame. O, take thought for our deliverance in this awful moment\" (67). Zeus responded by shooting the devious charioteer out of the sky with a fatal lightning bolt as Helios looked on in shock and dismay (figure 1.1). A utilitarian ethic applies in the myth. After  much of the Earth was incinerated, Phaethon was killed by a higher authority to avoid further damage. And rightly so.\n\nThe story of Phaethon was invoked in 2007 by the noted meteorologist Kerry Emanuel to frame a short discussion of contemporary climate change science and politics. Emanuel, widely known and respected for his hurricane studies, called attention to a growing scientific consensus on climate change prominently and authoritatively spearheaded by today's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, yet he admitted pointedly that \"we are ... conscious of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works.\" Abruptly returning to myth, Emanuel ended his essay, \"Like it or not, we have been handed Phaeton's reins, and _we will have to learn how to control climate_ if we are to avoid his fate\" (69; emphasis added). Emanuel thus advocated repeating Phaethon's blunder. Think underage driver of gasoline tanker, taken with father's permission, veers out of control in reckless, high-speed chase before being subdued by the authorities. Or more globally, geoengineering project given the green light last year results in the collapse of the Indian monsoon, leaving millions starving.\n\nWhat about Emanuel's final thought\u2014that we \"will have to learn how to control climate\"? That is the subject of the final chapter of this book. Cambridge scientist Ross Hoffman has proposed a speculative \"star wars\" system to redirect hurricanes by beaming lasers at them from satellites\u2014assuming one knew where the storm was originally headed and that there would be no liabilities along its new path. Is this an example of Phaethon's reins? Since the Sun god Helios was directly involved, what about other means of \"solar radiation management,\" such as Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen's suggestion (made in 2006, but actually a much older idea) to cool the Earth by injecting sulfates or other reflective aerosols into the tropical stratosphere? There are many, many more such dangerous and expensive proposals of environmental control that invoke the inexperience and possible tragedy of the myth of Phaethon.\n\nRemember, Helios made a fundamentally flawed decision to give his son the reins, and that decision had catastrophic consequences. He did, however, give Phaethon apiece of good advice about steering the Sun chariot through the middle course of the zodiacal signs. For humanity, the best we can do between this world and the next is to admit our \"own collective ignorance,\" remain humble, and avoid angering both the Sun god and his boss. Will this involve following the \"middle course\" of collective energy efficiency, environmental stewardship, and ethical choices? Certainly to do nothing is out of the question. But could we try to do too much? Will someone or some group trying to \"fix\" the climate repeat Phaethon's blunder? Greek mythology is replete with such stories, characters, and moral lessons.\n\n##  _Paradise Lost_ and the _Inferno_\n\nBiblical themes permeate the Western canon, and some of them speak either directly or indirectly to the human role in weather and climate control. In _Paradise Lost_ (1667), John Milton alludes to a divinely instituted shift in the Earth's axis (and thus its climate) as a consequence of the original ancestors' lapse from grace. According to Milton, while Eden was the ultimate temperate clime, watered with gentle mists, God, in anger and for punishment, rearranged the Earth and its surroundings to generate excessive heat, cold, and storms: \"the Creator, calling forth by name His mightie Angels, gave them several charge.\" The Sun was to move and shine so as to affect the Earth \"with cold and heat scarce tolerable\" (10.653\u2013654); the planets were to align in sextile, square, opposition, and trine \"thir influence malignant ... to showre\" (10.662); the winds were to blow from the four corners to \"confound Sea, Aire, and Shoar\" (10.665\u2013666); and the thunder was to roll \"with terror through the dark Aereal Hall\" (10.667). The biggest change, however, resulted from tipping the axis of the Earth: \"Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse the Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more from the Sun's Axle; they with labor push'd oblique the Centric Globe ... to bring in change of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flours, equal in Days and Nights\" (10.668\u2013671, 677\u2013680).\n\nThis led to massive changes in weather and climate on sea and land: \"sidereal blast, Vapour, and Mist, and Exhalation hot, Corrupt and Pestilent\" (10.693\u2013695). Northern winds (Boreas, Kaikias, and Skeiron) burst \"their brazen Dungeon, armd with ice and snow and haile, and stormie gust and flaw\" (10.697\u2013698), and other winds (Notus, Eurus, and the Tempest-Winds) in their season rent the woods, destroyed crops, churned the seas, and rushed forth noisily with black thunderous clouds, serving the bidding of the storm god Aeolus. But the angels had one last task: evicting \"our lingring Parents\" (12.638) from Eden. In this, too, Milton evokes climatic change when the blazing sword of God, \"fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat, and vapour as the _Libyan_ Air adust, began to parch that temperate Clime\" (12.634\u2013636). Looking back at Paradise, \"som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon; the World was all before them, where to choose thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They, hand in hand, with wandring steps and slow, through _Eden_ took their solitarie way\" (12.645\u2013649). So you see, the wages of sin are ... climate change.\n\nWhen Dante Alighieri visited hell with Virgil in the spring of 1300, he witnessed the consequences of sin. They had left a world with \"air serene\" and entered \"into a climate ever vex'd with storms ... where no light shines.\" Before  them, confined to the third circle, were the gluttons experiencing unique meteorological torments of eternal cold and heavy rain, hail, and snow (6.6\u201311), while in the seventh circle were those who had done violence to God, naked souls weeping miserably, supine, sitting, wandering, muttering, under a steady rain of \"dilated flakes of fire\" (14.18\u201327) (figure 1.2). Today we might add a new caption to Gustave Dor\u00e9's illustration: Sulfurous rains fall on a wretched humanity following artificial volcano experiment gone awry; two geoengineers look on.\n\n1.2 _Inferno_ : \"The violent, tortured in the Rain of Fire,\" in Dante's version of hell. (ILLUSTRATION BY GUSTAVE DOR\u00c9, FOR _INFERNO_ 14.37\u201339, 1861)\n\nThe heavens and \"heaven\" have never been strictly demarcated; in fact, they have been closely intertwined, especially when it comes to something at once as nebulous and portentous as atmospheric phenomena. Synergistic rather than conflicting interactions between the numinous and the immanent appear to be more the norm than the exception throughout history. Humans attempting to intervene in the \"realm of the gods,\" whether through ceremonies or technologies, inevitably find themselves engaged in a complex dance with both novel and traditional steps, where stumbling and falling from grace, or at least stepping on toes, is more likely than perfect execution.\n\n#  The Mandan Rainmakers\n\nThe nineteenth-century American painter George Catlin juxtaposed traditional rainmaking and Western technology in his account of the manners and customs of North American Indians. When the Mandan, who lived along the Upper Missouri River, were facing a prolonged dry spell that threatened to destroy their corn crop, the medicine men assembled in the council house, with all their mystery apparatus about them, \"with an abundance of wild sage, and other aromatic herbs, with a fire prepared to burn them, that their savory odors might be sent forth to the Great Spirit.\" On the roof of the council house were a dozen young men who took turns trying to make it rain. Each youth spent a day on the roof while the medicine doctors burned incense below and importuned the Great Spirit with songs and prayers:\n\nWah-kee (the shield) was the first who ascended the wigwam at sunrise; and he stood all day, and looked foolish, as he was counting over and over his string of mystery-beads\u2014the whole village were assembled around him, and praying for his success. Not a cloud appeared\u2014the day was calm and hot; and at the setting of the sun, he descended from the lodge and went home\u2014\"his medicine was not good,\" nor can he ever be a medicine-man. (1:153)\n\nOn successive days, Om-pah (the elk) and War-rah-pa (the beaver) also failed to bring rain and were disgraced.\n\nOn the fourth morning, Wak-a-dah-ha-hee (hair of the white buffalo) took the stage, clad in his finest garb and with a shield decorated with red lightning bolts to attract the clouds and a sinewy bow with a single arrow to pierce them. Claiming greater magic than his predecessors, he addressed the assembled tribe and commanded the sky and the spirits of darkness and light to send rain. The medicine men in the lodge at his feet continued their chants.\n\nAround noon, the steamboat _Yellow Stone_ , on its first trip up the river, neared the village and fired a twenty-gun salute, which echoed throughout the valley. The Mandans, at first supposing it to be thunder, although no cloud was seen in the sky, applauded Wak-a-dah-ha-hee, who took credit for the success. Women swooned at his feet, his friends rejoiced, and his enemies scowled as the youth prepared to reap the substantial rewards due a successful rainmaker. However, the focus quickly shifted to the \"thunder-boat\" as it neared the village, and the hopeful rainmaker was no longer the center of attention. Later in the day, as the excitement of the boat's visit began to ebb, black clouds began to build on the horizon. Wak-a-dah-ha-hee was still on duty. In  an instant, his shield was on his arm and his bow drawn. He commanded the cloud to come nearer, \"that he might draw down its contents upon the heads and the corn-fields of the Mandans!\" (1:156). Finally, with the black clouds lowering, he fired an arrow into the sky, exclaiming to the assembled throng, \"My friends, it is done! Wak-a-dah-ha-hee's arrow has entered that black cloud, and the Mandans will be wet with the water of the skies!\" (1:156\u2013157). The ensuing deluge, which continued until midnight, saved the corn crop while proving the power and the efficacy of his medicine. It identified him as a man of great and powerful influence and entitled him to a life of honor and homage.\n\nCatlin draws two lessons from this story. First, \"when the Mandans undertake to make it rain, they never fail to succeed, for their ceremonies never stop until rain begins to fall\" (1:157). Second, the Mandan rainmaker, once successful, never tries it again. His medicine is undoubted. During future droughts, he defers to younger braves seeking to prove themselves. Unlike Western, technological rainmaking, in Mandan culture the rain chooses the rainmaker.\n\n#  Leavers and Takers\n\nIn his imaginative book _Ishmael_ (1992), Daniel Quinn draws a basic distinction between two major streams in human culture: the Takers (the heirs of the agricultural revolution) and the Leavers (or traditional societies). As he tells it, ten thousand years ago, the Takers exempted themselves from the evolutionary process. They saw the world as having been made for them and belonging to them, so they sought to manipulate and control it. Since then, they have systematically expanded their own food resources and their population at the expense of other species. Their quest for control seemingly knows no bounds. It extends from the control of pests, both micro- and macroscopic (from bacteria to browsing deer), to the attempted control of the sky. Guided by the tacit but ubiquitous voice of Mother Culture, the assumed nurturer of Taker human societies and lifestyles, they have come to see themselves as special and superior beings who possess the knowledge of good and evil. This allows them to decide, in god-like fashion, who shall live and who shall die. The world for them is a human life-support system, a machine designed to produce and sustain human life. When the elements or other species defy him, man declares war on nature and sees it as his destiny to conquer and rule it with _complete_ control:\n\nWe'll turn the rain on and off.... We'll turn the oceans into farms [or carbon sinks]. We'll control the weather [and climate]\u2014no more hurricanes, no more tornadoes, no more droughts, no more untimely frosts. We'll make the clouds release their water over the land instead of dumping it uselessly into the oceans. All the life process of this planet will be where they belong\u2014where the gods meant them to be\u2014in our hands. And we'll manipulate them the way a programmer manipulates a computer.\n\nTechnology seems to provide the leverage to make all this possible, but, according to Quinn, Taker culture is fatally flawed in that it lacks historical perspective and the wisdom of how to live. The Takers, who act as though the world belongs to them, are the enemy of the world and are on an evolutionarily recent, unsustainable, and potentially world-shattering detour.\n\nThe older cultures, the Leavers, far from being savage, primitive, or degenerative, constitute the main stream of human evolution and trace their roots back at least 3 million years. They respect the right to life and food of all other creatures and live as members, not rulers, of the community of all life. They live close to nature in relative abundance, free from worry, in the hands of the gods, enhancing biological and cultural diversity and ecological sustainability. The Leavers, who act as though they belong to the world, allow the creatures around them a chance to fulfill their potential. In this sense, they share an evolutionary destiny.\n\nQuinn's basic quest is to reform Taker culture by making people aware of what has been lost. He argues that people need something positive to work for, rather than something negative to work against. They need an inspiring vision more than a vision of doom, more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty:\n\nThere's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact, in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now. (84)\n\nThis is the voice of Ishmael, an articulate, Bible-reading, telepathic gorilla whom Quinn uses as a transcendent messenger to humanity. Ishmael's students, in effect  each reader of the book, must have \"an earnest desire to save the world,\" must \"apply in person,\" and must be willing to enact a life-affirming story that puts them in accord with the world. Ishmael reminds us that stopping pollution or cutting down on carbon emissions is not in itself an inspiring goal, but thinking of ourselves and the world in a new way is. By seeking to have a minimal impact on the planet, environmentalists align themselves with the values of Leaver culture. The climate engineers, however, in the name of stopping climate change, are the consummate Takers.\n\n#  Science Fiction\n\nUltimate control of the weather and climate embodies both our wildest fantasies and our greatest fears. Fantasy often informs reality (and vice versa). NASA managers know this well, as do Trekkies. The best science fiction authors typically build from the current state of a field to construct futuristic scenarios that reveal and explore the human condition. Scientists as well often venture into flights of fancy. Although not widely documented, the fantasy\u2013reality axis is a prominent aspect of the history of the geosciences. The chief distinction is that the fiction writers provide a moral core and compass.\n\nAn occasional whimsical story of rainmaking in the nineteenth century has given way to such a flood of science fiction that accounts of weather and climate control alone could fill a volume. The plot of the science fiction film _Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea_ (1961) revolves around a heroic and unilateral engineering response to a global environmental emergency. When a swarm of meteors pierces the Van Allen radiation belt and sets it on fire, the Earth is threatened by imminent \"global warming\" and possible mass extinctions. With the Arctic ice cap disintegrating and Africa on fire, with world temperatures rising quickly and the end of civilization nigh, the commander of a new state-of-the-art atomic submarine (with Cadillac tail fins) proposes to extinguish the fires by launching a nuclear missile into space to cut off the burning radiation belt from the Earth. When United Nations scientists reject the plan as too risky, the commander takes unilateral action against the will of what he deems to be overcautious government representatives and elected officials. Thwarting various attempts to stop him, by saboteurs, a giant octopus, and a religious fanatic who believes it is God's will that the world end, the submarine commander fires the missile and saves the world, proving that he was right all along. The television series also featured many episodes with geophysical threats and geoengineering responses.\n\nOther thrillers and spoofs of thrillers in recent eras had plot lines involving weather or climate control. In _Our Man Flint_ (1965), super-duper secret agent Derek Flint foils an evil cabal of utopian mad scientists who are planning to take over the world through weather control. At the end of the movie _The Andromeda Strain_ (1971), cloud seeding over the Pacific Ocean results in the alien \"strain\" being washed into the salt water, presumably killing it. _The Nitrogen Fix_ (1980), by Hal Clement, depicts catastrophic global chemical and environmental changes in the not-too-distant future triggered by both extractive industry and misguided genetic engineering aimed at increasing the number and quality of nitrogen compounds. The resulting chemical reactions deplete the Earth's atmosphere of oxygen, deposit toxic and explosive compounds on the surface, and acidify the oceans. Anaerobic bacteria are the only life-forms that flourish, while humans survive only with breathing apparatus and, since most metals corrode in this harsh environment, develop a material culture based on ceramic technology. Jack Williamson's _Terraforming Earth_ (2001) is based on the premise that after a devastating asteroid impact, beneficent robots will tend the human remnant, slowly terraform the Earth, and eventually reintroduce colonies of cloned humans on the planet, while Kim Stanley Robinson looks to the utopian project of terraforming the planet Mars in the not-too-distant future in his trilogy _Red Mars_ (1993), _Green Mars_ (1994), and _Blue Mars_ (1996). In _The Case for Mars_ (1996), Robert Zubrin argues that terraforming Mars for human habitation would be a relatively simple and straightforward process. Not to overlook the comedic genre, in the _Red Green Show_ episode \"Rain Man\" (season 15, episode 297), title character Red Green sets up a homemade cloud-seeding cannon at Possum Lodge to shoot chemicals into the clouds and alleviate a drought\u2014with hilarious unintended consequences.\n\nIn what follows, rather than overwhelming the reader with the seemingly endless themes of modern or postmodern, post-1960s science fiction, I have chosen to present some older literature that most people have not read or probably have not read recently. This literature, which is dated in many ways, yet quite relevant and enjoyable in others, strikes many of the thematic and moral chords that echo through past, recent, and current concerns about weather and climate control. I am not claiming\u2014indeed, I think it is insupportable to claim\u2014that science fantasy eventually finds its way into science fact. Instead, generations of readers, long before the atomic age or the space age, discovered in science fiction a more subtle kind of wish fulfillment that sets the tone but not the parameters for what might be expected in the future. The main theme here is control, but the literary genres are varied. Although some of it is tragic, much is what we might call \"hard path\" science fiction (with apologies to  Amory Lovins), involving massive and heroic efforts to terraform a planet or geoengineer its basic physical or biophysical systems. Such literature usually emphasizes words such as \"mastery\" or \"domination.\" That is, it plays out the Baconian program involving fantasies of control. The comedic genre is well represented too, with stories that are both silly and funny. The overall effect is that no single style dominates imaginative work on weather and climate control, and some, akin to Woody Allen's movie _Melinda and Melinda_ (2004), explicitly combine both tragedy and comedy.\n\n#  Jules Verne and the Baltimore Gun Club\n\nJules Verne, the renowned French author of \"scientific fiction,\" wrote a notable book in 1865, _De la terre \u00e0 la lune_ , known in English after 1873 as _From the Earth to the Moon_. In the story, when the members of the elite Baltimore Gun Club, bemoaning the end of the Civil War, find themselves lacking any urgent assignments, their president, Impey Barbicane, proposes that they build a cannon large enough to launch a projectile to the Moon. But when Barbicane's adversary places a huge wager that the project will fail and a daring volunteer elevates the mission to a \"manned\" flight, one man's dream turns into an international space race.\n\nIn a sequel, _Sans Dessus Dessous_ , published in 1889 and appearing simultaneously in English as _The Purchase of the North Pole_ , Verne revisits the possibilities of big guns, but this time with a distinct skepticism for the wonders of technology. For 2 cents an acre, a group of American investors acquires rights to the vast, incredibly lucrative but seemingly inaccessible coal and mineral deposits under the North Pole. To mine the region, they propose to melt the polar ice. Initially, the project captures the public imagination, as the backers promise that their scheme will improve the climate everywhere. They find it relatively easy to convince the public of the idea that the tilt of the Earth's axis should be eliminated (shades of John Milton). This would remove the contrasts between summer and winter, reduce the extreme stresses of heat and cold, improve health, calm the power of storms, and make the Earth a terrestrial heaven, where every day is mild and springlike. But public opinion shifts when it is revealed that the investors\u2014members of the Baltimore Gun Club, the very same group who shot the projectile to the Moon\u2014intend to shoot the Earth off its axis by building and firing the world's largest cannon. Initial public enthusiasm gives way to fears that if these retired Civil War artillerymen (modern-day Titans) have their way and build a kind of Archimedean lever, the tidal waves generated by the explo-sion  will kill millions of people. In secrecy and haste, the protagonists proceed with their plan, building the huge cannon in the side of Mount Kilimanjaro (figure 1.3). The scheme fails only when an error in calculation renders the massive shot ineffective. Verne concludes, \"The world's inhabitants could thus sleep in peace. To modify the conditions of the Earth's movement is beyond the power of man.\" Or is it? Perhaps he spoke too soon.\n\n1.3 _The Purchase of the North Pole_ : ( _left_ ) building the cannon at Mount Kilimanjaro; ( _center_ ) inside the cannon; ( _right_ ) Fire! (ILLUSTRATION BY GEORGE ROUX, IN _THE ILLUSTRATED JULES VERNE_ )\n\n#  Mark Twain: Controlling the Climate and Selling It\n\nThe American humorist Mark Twain opens his book _The American Claimant_ (1892) with an outrageous claim: \"No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.\" In an opening section called \"The Weather in This Book,\" Twain cites the undesirable and \"persistent intrusions of weather\" that delay both the reader and the author: \"Nothing breaks up an author's progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather.\" After conceding the obvious\u2014\"Weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience\"\u2014Twain seeks to keep it in its place, out of the way, \"where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative.\" So he promises to relegate weather to the end of his book\u2014indeed, to its \"climatic\" conclusion  and an appendix. With tongue still firmly in cheek, he elevates weather, or the writing about it, to the status of a \"literary specialty\" and points out to his discriminating readers that it ought to be \"not ignorant, poor-quality amateur weather\" but the \"ablest weather that can be had.\"\n\nOf course, talk of the weather dominates the work, just as, in the 1890s, talk of Robert Dyrenforth's experiments in Texas dominated discussions of weather control (chapter 2). In the concluding pages of _The American Claimant_ , Twain gives an account of the eccentric Colonel Mulberry Sellers, the epitome of American free enterprise, who seeks to control the world's climates\u2014and sell them\u2014by manipulating sunspots. The colonel has just drafted a long letter explaining his scheme:\n\nIn brief, then, I have conceived the stupendous idea of reorganizing the climates of the earth according to the desire of the populations interested. That is to say, I will furnish climates to order, for cash or negotiable paper, taking the old climates in part payment, of course, at a fair discount, where they are in condition to be repaired at small cost and let out for hire to poor and remote communities not able to afford a good climate and not caring for an expensive one for mere display. (271)\n\nThe colonel portrays himself as nothing more esoteric than a regulator and (shades of William Ruddiman) holds that climate was manipulated in prehistoric times by Paleolithic peoples\u2014for profit!\n\nMy studies have convinced me that the regulation of climates and the breeding of new varieties at will from the old stock is a feasible thing. Indeed I am convinced that it has been done before; done in prehistoric times by now forgotten and unrecorded civilizations. Everywhere I find hoary evidences of artificial manipulation of climates in bygone times. Take the glacial period. Was that produced by accident? Not at all; it was done for money. I have a thousand proofs of it, and will some day reveal them. (271\u2013272)\n\nColonel Sellers hopes to patent a \"complete and perfect\" method for controlling the \"stupendous energies\" behind sunspots. Wielding this power, Sellers plans to reorganize the climates \"for beneficent purposes.... At present they merely make trouble and do harm in the evoking of cyclones and other kinds of electric storms; but once under humane and intelligent control this will cease and they will become a boon to man\" (272). His plans for commercialization of this technique include licensing it \"to the minor countries at a reasonable figure\"  and providing the great empires with special rates for ordinary affairs and \"fancy brands for coronations, battles and other great and particular occasions\" (272). He expects to make billions of dollars with this enterprise, which requires no expensive plant, and he hopes to be operational within a few days or weeks at the longest. His first goal is improving the climate of Siberia and clinching a contract with the Russian czar, which he confidently projects will save both his honor and his credit immediately. Reminiscent of the purchase of the North Pole by the Baltimore Gun Club, the daffy colonel confides in his friend and former colleague Marse Washington Hawkins, \"a stoutish, discouragedlooking man\":\n\nI would like you to provide a proper outfit and start north as soon as I telegraph you, be it night or be it day. I wish you to take up all the country stretching away from the North Pole on all sides for many degrees south, and buy Greenland and Iceland at the best figure you can get now while they are cheap. It is my intention to move one of the tropics up there and transfer the frigid zone to the equator. I will have the entire Arctic Circle in the market as a summer resort next year, and will use the surplusage of the old climate, over and above what can be utilized on the equator, to reduce the temperature of opposition resorts. (272\u2013273)\n\nSellers promises to communicate with Hawkins not by earthbound means such as letter or telegraph, but with a \"kiss across the universe\" using a cosmic signal sent from the surface of the Sun itself\u2014a vast attenuation of sunbeams that will generate envy even among current proponents of solar radiation management, especially those who propose to cast a shade on the Earth using orbiting space mirrors (chapter 8). Sellers writes:\n\nMeantime, watch for a sign from me. Eight days from now, we shall be wide asunder; for I shall be on the border of the Pacific, and you far out on the Atlantic, approaching England. That day, if I am alive and my sublime discovery is proved and established, I will send you greeting, and my messenger shall deliver it where you are, in the solitudes of the sea; for I will waft a vast sun-spot across the disk like drifting smoke, and you will know it for my love-sign, and will say \"Mulberry Sellers throws us a kiss across the universe.\" (273)\n\nAs he promises, Twain ends _The American Claimant_ with an appendix subtitled \"Weather for Use in This Book. Selected from the Best Authorities,\" in which he presents a rich parody of the type of dense weather writing that he fails to exclude from his own text. Here Twain contrasts the prolixity of  William Douglas O'Connor's \"The Brazen Android\" (1891), in which purple prose serves to invoke the purple skies of medieval London after a thunderstorm, with the terse elegance of a much greater apocalypse experienced by Noah and his family and recorded in Genesis 7:12: \"It rained for forty days and forty nights.\"\n\n##  _The Wreck of the South Pole_\n\nIn _The Wreck of the South Pole, or the Great Dissembler_ (1899), by Charles Curtz Hahn, protagonist George Wilding finds himself shipwrecked and stranded in low southern latitudes on a continent of ice. Befriended and guided by what he takes to be mysterious spirits, Wilding makes his way south to warmer climates, to a great city inhabited by Theosophists, who, by practicing mind reading and astral projection, seek to control nature with their minds. There, the weather bureau does not predict the weather\u2014it uses mental prowess to control it: \"Their duty is to decide upon the proper kind of weather for certain seasons and days and then see that the country has it.\" It is a land without droughts or damaging winds. There the police do not arrest criminals\u2014they track and detain suspects who have been placed under suspicion by mind-reading surveillance.\n\nThe Great Dissembler, the most advanced Theosophist sage, has mastered a technique for keeping others from reading his mind: \"I cultivated the habit of jumbling up my thoughts in the worst mess you could imagine\" so no one could fasten on them (67\u201368). It is he who is both the chief geoengineer and the greatest general. In order to defeat the revolutionary forces threatening his city, the Great Dissembler decides to wrench the South Pole suddenly from its axis to destroy the enemy with a tidal wave and \"bring back the old order of things\" (72). When he executes this plan, all the climatic zones of the world will change dramatically. Cyclones, tornadoes, and earthquakes will increase in both number and intensity until the temperate latitudes merge into the tropics. With the wreck of the South Pole (a day later than planned, possibly due to the confused thinking of the Great Dissembler) comes an unexpected rift in the surrounding ice walls and unintended consequences described only as \"days of terror and suffering\" (74). The story ends here abruptly, with no description of the fate of the world but with the assurance that George Wilding, again stranded in a remote and icy cove but cared for and comforted by the astral bodies of his friends, will soon be reunited with them.\n\n##  _The Great Weather Syndicate_\n\nWeather and climate control, war, gender, and romance are juxtaposed in _The Great Weather Syndicate_ (1906), by George Griffith. In the novel, Arthur Arkwright, a young British engineer, develops a machine that modifies the weather by drilling atmospheric holes to redirect the winds and clouds. This invention promises to make him the \"master of the fate of the world.\" Working through investors in the World Weather Syndicate, Arkwright sets up a chain of mountain stations equipped with \"atmospheric disintegrators\" that project impulses powerful enough to break up and dissipate clouds while creating partial vacuums or \"holes\" in the atmosphere. By coordinating its efforts, the Syndicate can determine the direction of winds and weather over any area within the range of its stations. Controlling the weather of the whole world, then, is simply a matter of multiplying the number of stations. The Syndicate \"will enable us to run the world's weather and sell it out to the countries which need any particular brand at our own price\" (86). For example, the Gulf Stream can be altered by this technique to benefit those willing to pay. Arkwright's love interest, Eirene, the daughter of his chief investor, introduces moral objections:\n\nNow I think it's wicked. You're going to upset the order of nature, you're going to make hot countries cold and cold countries hot, just so you can make profits out of them; but have you thought of all the misery and starvation and all sorts of horrors that you are going to bring upon innocent work-people who won't have a notion of what's really going on; how you will make fertile places into deserts and ruin farmers and manufacturers and all the people depending on them just because the Government of the country won't pay your price for the weather they want? No, it's just wicked. (12)\n\nAn opposing syndicate has a \"pretty big idea\" of its own (15). It proposes to dam the Arctic Ocean across the Bering Sea, Baffin's Bay, and Spitzbergen to stop all the icebergs from coming south and bottle up the Arctic Ocean until ice builds up there. The excess weight will then shift the axis of the Earth and cause a general redistribution of the map of the world\u2014land, sea, and weather all included. If this evil syndicate gains control of the Earth's axis, a struggle will ensue for control of the world's weather, which can \"only result in disaster to mankind\" (73). Arkwright thus finds himself \"at the beginning of a war for the economic control of the world,\" and he proposes to win \"by any means  within his power\" (17), yet Eirene refuses to marry him until she sees how he plans to wield this power.\n\nEager to prove its dominance over weather, the World Weather Syndicate triggers a snowstorm in London on July 6 designed to impress the British foreign secretary. This time, the voice of Arthur's conscience is his Aunt Martha from Lancashire: \"I tell him to his face that it's a sin and a shame interfering with the course of nature. For shame on thee, lad! ... why canna' thee let the good God manage His weather in His own way? Dost'a want to bring a great city like this, and maybe all England to ruin, just to make thy own business pay?\" (55).\n\nArthur replies that he and his investors have altruistic intentions:\n\nNow to be quite frank, we simply want to make money, and incidentally, increase the fertility of the world by turning deserts into paradises, for which, of course, we should expect to be paid, though not extravagantly. As the work develops we should also hope to put a stop to war ... by just freezing the fleets of the belligerents up in their harbours, and producing such a degree of cold on any given battlefield that fighting would be impossible. (73\u201374)\n\nAnother female voice of conscience, Arthur's sister Clarice, worries about \"all the poor people who will have to suffer\" if the Syndicate engineers a frosty British winter: \"[T]he people who won't be able to get work, and can't pay for wood and coal and oil, to say nothing of proper food\" (78\u201379).\n\nAfter Arkwright makes a fortune by converting formerly barren areas into arable farmland, he turns his attention to the utopian project of ending world hunger, poverty, and, especially, war. Against the world's militarists, Arkwright calls down devastating snowstorms from the heavens as a kind of meteorological Moses, freezing armies in their tracks, fogging battlefields, and locking naval vessels in ice-bound harbors. \"It's weather against war, and weather will win,\" he tells the kaiser, after thwarting a German plot to revive the Holy Roman Empire (308).\n\nAt least in this science fantasy, techniques of weather control inaugurate a millennial reign of global peace and prosperity. The Syndicate is generally considered to be \"a sort of earthly Providence\" by the people in marginal lands that it helps. Eirene ultimately marries Arthur (the Controller of the Elements) so that _she_ can show _him_ \"how to manage the climates of the world\" (312). In such fiction, as later in actual proposals, the themes of precise and ultimate control of the weather and climate for economic, humanitarian, and military purposes are inextricably blended.\n\nEarlier in their careers, some real-life twenty-first-century geoengineers worked on heroic schemes to deflect Earth-grazing asteroids. They would surely appreciate another of Griffith's novels, _The World Peril of 1910_ (1907), in which astronomer Gilbert Lennard discovers a comet threatening to destroy the Earth. In the novel, American money and know-how contribute to the construction of a great cannon built into a mine shaft. The massive shot deflects the comet so that it does not strike the Earth.\n\n#  A Comedic Western\n\n_The Eighth Wonder: Working for Marvels_ (1907), by William Wallace Cook, is a humorous \"geoengineering\" Western that was serialized in 1907 in the pulp magazine _Argosy_. In the badlands of North Dakota, Ira Xerxes Peck, an out-of-luck bicycle dealer, befriends a despondent but brilliant inventor, Copernicus Jones, who plans to corner the nation's electricity market by turning Horseshoe Butte, a naturally occurring iron formation, into the eighth wonder of the world, the world's largest electromagnet. It is to be Jones's Archimedean lever to move the world. \"I don't think it pays, Copernicus,\" Peck observes timidly, \"to tinker with the machinery of the universe.... Not unless there's money in it.\" When the titanic magnet is turned on, everything made of iron within a 25-mile radius\u2014tools, pumps, wagons, threshing machines, even a sheet-iron house\u2014flies through the air and adheres to the mountain. Jones is ecstatic, as in the myth of ships imperiled by the lodestone, \"ancient fables come true in modern times ... that's what we call civilization and progress\" (81).\n\nJones is more an inventor than a scientist, and his device actually fails to attract all the electricity from across the country. Instead, it begins to alter the seasons by deflecting the tilt of the Earth's axis. Jones takes credit for this unforeseen consequence and tries to capitalize on it by making the Northern Hemisphere permanently warmer: \"We will corner the hot weather ... and we'll make the people pay for it! ... [W]e will select the brand of weather we want, and I will ... hold the Earth's axis at that precise inclination\" (171\u2013175). Ever his conscience, Peck reminds Jones that \"tampering with the Earth's axis, Copernicus, brings responsibilities. We must not shut our eyes to that fact\" (187).\n\nThe citizens of the world respond to Peck and Jones by insisting that tinkering with the seasons is a crime against nature. The industrialists are particularly adamant, since they made much of their money in cold weather and during changes of seasons. Parroting the claims of climatic determinists, they argue the  necessity of the yearly return of ice and snow to conserve the rugged character and \"insistent energy\" that has made the United States great, while pointing out that continuous warm weather would \"sap our strength\" (194): \"The cold gives a zest to the blood that calls for achievement. In tropical countries the inhabitants are mostly dreamers, and excessive humidity paralyzes effort\" (280).\n\nMeanwhile, it appears that Jones did not really know what he was doing or the consequences of his actions. As Peck expresses it, \"We were as two children, Copernicus and I, playing around powder with a box of matches\" (197\u2013199). Fame and fortune or infamy and prison are equal possibilities. For a ransom of $1 billion, the two geoengineers propose to stop their magnet, \"leaving the seasons as we had found them.\" In other words, they demand an exorbitant price to maintain the status quo. Peck and Jones fend off an attack on their installation by federal troops armed only with wooden clubs (because the magnetic force has stripped them of their metal weapons), but the iron butte is finally destroyed by a cannon bombardment, since the giant electromagnet actually acts to attract the incoming shells to it! Peck and Jones survive, but Jones has seemingly learned nothing, continuing his inventive scheming under an assumed name and promising, \"If anything unusual happens you'll know who should have the credit.... I'm off for Europe ... to see what I can meddle with across the pond\" (317\u2013318).\n\n##  _The Twist in the Gulf Stream_\n\nA different genre of story tells of large-scale and catastrophic unintended consequences of tinkering in sensitive areas of the Earth's system. _The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream_ (1908), by Louis P. Gratacap, tells of geophysical and social dislocations caused by the collapse of the Isthmus of Panama, which diverts the Gulf Stream, causing vast climatic and social changes, including the refrigeration and depopulation of Europe.\n\nThe story begins with scientists' warnings about instabilities along the west coast of North and Central America that could result in massive geological chain reactions. Earthquakes could trigger the release of the \"volcanic energy\" of Panama and the West Indies, and the region could experience an \"isostatic rebound\"\u2014basically a rebalancing of the Earth's crust\u2014as it seeks a new equilibrium state. When Panama is breached (by either humans or geology), \"again the waters of the two oceans will unite, and the impetuous violence of the rushing oceanic river, the Gulf Stream, that now races and boils through the Caribbean Sea, will fling its torrential waves across this divide into the Pacific.\"\n\nIn spite of these warnings, commercial interests and the president of the United States push for the completion of the Panama Canal (actually completed in 1914 at a cost of $400 million). In the book, the excavation commences in 1909 and triggers a natural disaster. A massive series of earthquakes and tidal waves strikes Col\u00f3n. The isthmus sinks, opening up a passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific that had been closed for 3 million years. Subsidence in Panama results in volcanic eruptions and the catastrophic convergence and elevation of the Caribbean islands. The Earth shudders, the poles \"wobble,\" and the Gulf Stream, \"no longer turned aside by impassible walls of land, triumphantly [sweeps] into the Pacific,\" opening a \"new chapter in the history of the world and the history of nations\" (92\u201399). In an understated response, President Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying, \"It seems likely that this physical alteration may mean a change in the climate of the older portion of the earth\" and an end of \"the glory of England\" (121\u2013123).\n\nWith the Gulf Stream now warming the Pacific coast of the United States, Europe descends into a new ice age as the North Atlantic cools dramatically and devastating snowstorms pummel the region. Like a scene out of the film _The Day After Tomorrow_ (2004), Reykjavik lies deserted. In Edinburgh, snow \"fill[s] up the deep moat of the Princes' Street gardens [and] round[s] the rugged edges and wandering parapets of the Citadel\" (131\u2013136). Europe trembles \"with a new apprehension\" as markets panic and moral depravity sets in. London is evacuated. As the savage Scots move south, the English seek refuge in their colonies in Asia and Australia. \"Heat is life, cold is death.... Our civilization, the civilization of Europe, has overstepped the limits of climatic permission\" (187, 295). All these consequences were triggered by a macro-engineering project that went against the advice of the geologists.\n\n#  Rock the Earth\n\nWorld peace as a consequence of the demands of a mad scientist is the theme of _The Man Who Rocked the Earth_ (1915), by Arthur Train and Robert Williams Wood. With most of the world wracked by war, a mysterious message arrives by wireless from the inventor PAX: \"To all mankind\u2014I am the dictator\u2014of human destiny\u2014Through the earth's rotation\u2014I control day and night\u2014summer and winter\u2014I command the\u2014cessation of hostilities and\u2014the abolition of war upon the globe.\"\n\nTo demonstrate his resolve and his power over the elements, PAX slows the Earth's rotation by five minutes; makes it snow in Washington, D.C., in August;  and, with a flying ring and super-powerful Lavender Ray, diverts the Mediterranean Sea into the Sahara and destroys a German siege gun as it fires on Paris. These phenomena are accompanied by geophysical marvels: strange yellow aurorae, earthquakes, tidal waves, and atmospheric disturbances. An international assembly of scientists is formed to respond, but it is designed by the diplomats to stall and fail in the hope that particular nations might gain special advantages by capturing the inventor and learning his powers.\n\nPAX controls a source of power\u2014atomic disintegration\u2014that would allow the Earth to blossom \"like the rose! Well-watered valleys where deserts were before. War abolished, poverty, disease!\" This is reminiscent of the rhetoric, some forty years later, hyping the potential of atomic energy. Impressed, physicist Bennie Hooker sets out to find PAX and the secret behind \"the greatest achievement of all time!\" (111).\n\nMeanwhile, disappointed by cease-fire violations, PAX sends his final warning to humanity, declaring that he will \"shift the axis of the Earth until the North Pole shall be in the region of Strasbourg and the South Pole in New Zealand\" (172). Hooker eventually finds PAX's laboratory in Labrador and witnesses his demise in an explosion near a gigantic outcrop of pitchblende: \"This radioactive mountain was the fulcrum by which this modern Archimedes had moved the Earth\" (216). Anticipating the founding of the League of Nations by several years, the nations of the Earth form a coalition government coordinated at The Hague and destroy all their armaments, an event that inaugurates a new age of international cooperation, peace, and never-before-experienced prosperity. In a setup to a possible sequel, Hooker is last seen exploring the solar system in his \"Space-Navigating Car,\" powered by the Lavender Ray.\n\n##  _The Air Trust_\n\n_The Air Trust_ (1915), by George Allan England, combines both geochemical and political fantasy in telling the story of a dedicated band of socialists who thwart the plans of ruthless capitalists aiming to control the world's air supply. The book is dedicated to Eugene V. Debs, \"Comrade Gene, Apostle of the World's Emancipation.\" The author depicts scientists for hire as the willing servants of capitalists and the obedient executioners of both corporate plans and, possibly, humanity. England writes in the foreword: \"I believe that, had capitalists been able to bring the seas and the atmosphere under physical control, they would long ago [have done so].\"\n\nThe story begins when billionaire businessman Isaac Flint, seeking new and ever more powerful monopolies, asks:\n\nWhat is it they all must have, or do, that I can control? ... Breathing! ... Breath is life. Without food and drink and shelter, men can live a while. Even without water, for some days. But without _air_ \u2014they die inevitably and at once. And if I make my own, then I am the master of all life!... Life, air, breath\u2014the very breath of the world in my hands\u2014power absolutely, at last\n\nHis business partner, Maxim \"Tiger\" Waldron, suggests \"The Air Trust\u2014A monopoly on breathing privileges!... Imagine that we might extract oxygen from the air.... [P]eople would come gasping to us, like so many fish out of water, falling over each other to buy!\" (23\u201325).\n\nThe businessmen delegate responsibility for the details and the execution of the plan to the industrial research staff (\"That's what they're for\") as personified by the chemist Herzog\u2014\"a fat rubicund, spectacled man\" with a keen mind, two fingers missing (from experimenting with explosives), and \"character and stamina close to those of a jelly fish\" (29). In the novel, the oxygen extraction plant is located at Niagara Falls and uses hydropower to run the condensers. The book includes sufficient technical details about the extraction process and the scale of the operation to suspend readers' disbelief while clearly drawing an analogy to the nitrogen fixation process developed about 1909 by the German chemist Fritz Haber and industrialized in 1913 by Carl Bosch. Benefits of commodifying the air include the sale of liquid gas refrigerants, nitrogen for fertilizer and explosives, and even ozone to \"freshen and purify\" the environment. But by far the most precious commodity is oxygen, the breath of life. As Flint expresses it, \"We'll have the world by the wind pipe; and let the mob howl _then_ , if they dare!\" (69).\n\nThe plot turns around the loss of Flint's notebook, which alerts the socialist hero, Gabriel Armstrong, to the plan. He and his comrades passionately debate the need to destroy the \"infernally efficient tyrants\" who have taken possession of \"all that science has been able to devise, or press and church and university teach, or political subservience make possible.\" The capitalists control \"military power, and the courts and the prisons and the electric chair and the power to choke the whole world to submission, in a week!\" If the socialists can destroy the Air Trust, \"the great revolution will follow\" to annihilate capitalism (261\u2013262).\n\nAfter working out a strategy of attack, the workers organize and, led by Armstrong, storm the plant. In a scene worthy of a Saturday matinee, they chase Flint  and Waldron into one of the huge empty air tanks, as the chemist Herzog takes his own life with a vial of poison. The final scene is both ghastly and ghoulishly amusing as Waldron notices the odor of ozone and cries out, \" _Flint! Flint! The oxygen is coming in!_ \" (325) As a huge stream of pure oxygen from a ruptured valve floods the tank, the brains of Flint and Waldron literally began to \"combust\":\n\n\" _Ha! Ha! Ha!_ \" rang Waldron's crazy laughter.... All at once his cigar burst into flame. Cursing, he hurled it away, staggering back against the ladder and stood there swaying [panting, with crimson face], clutching it to hold himself from falling.... \"Help! Help!\" [Flint] screamed. \"Save me\u2014my God\u2014save me\u2014Let me out, let me out! A million, if you let me out! A billion\u2014 _the whole world!_ ... It's mine\u2014I own it\u2014 _all, all mine!_ \" (326\u2013327)\n\nWith a final burst of energy, \"his heart flailing itself to death under the pitiless urge of the oxygen,\" Flint runs across the tank screaming blasphemies and slams into the opposite wall, where he falls sprawling, stone dead. Tiger Waldron attempts a final dash up the ladder to reach the door at the top of the tank. \"Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety\"\u2014until his overtaxed heart too bursts and he falls to his death. \"And still the rushing oxygen, with which they two had hoped to dominate the world, poured [in]\u2014senseless matter, blindly avenging itself upon the rash and evil men who impiously had sought to cage and master it!\" (328).\n\nAs the plant goes up in flames, the oxygen tank explodes in a huge ball of fire. Thus the socialists foil the attempt to control the air supply of the world\u2014and thus the world itself\u2014and inaugurate the \"Great Emancipation\" of humanity from the clutches of greedy capitalists. In the words of the protagonist Armstrong, \"Academic discussion becomes absurd in the face of plutocratic savagery\" that seeks a \"complete monopoly of the air, with an absolute suppression of all political rights.\" Slavery and violent revolution are the only options.\n\n#  Tales of the Rainmakers\n\n\"The Rain-Maker,\" by Margaret Adelaide Wilson, a short story that appeared in _Scribner_ ' _s Magazine_ in 1917, recounts the hopes and dreams of William Converse, who operates, like the real Charles Hatfield at the time (chapter 3), by mixing and evaporating chemicals on a high tower: \"The chemicals are holding the storm-centre right overhead, and the evaporation is tremendous. The rain will come this time if it holds off, the wind holds off\u2014if only it holds off.\"\n\nConverse is a true believer in his rainmaking process. He came to the desert on a mission: to use his skills to atone for the death of his father, who died of thirst near this very spot some thirty years before. But Converse has much more to confront than just the desiccated sky. His wife, Linda, who thought she was marrying a prosperous entrepreneur, has become super-critical of his idealistic quest, which keeps her cooped up in a tent with a smoky stove, frying bacon and potatoes: \"You've gone and thrown up a perfectly good contract in Grass Valley, a thousand sure, and more if your luck held, and you've dragged me off to this God-forsaken spot, with not a soul in thirty miles to know whether it rains or not. I want to know what you mean by it\" (503\u2013504). The high-minded Converse, like a modern-day Job, is seeking \"to bring rain in the wilderness\" by lifting his voice to the heavens as his father did on the night of his death. He receives no support from the vulgar, vain, and greedy Linda, though. She drives him from the tent into the night with her cutting remarks about how she no longer believes in him, and perhaps never did.\n\n\"Driven by an animal's blind desire to escape its tormentor, Converse stumble[s] down the rocky path toward the tower\" (506). Devastated by her verbal assaults, he realizes that Linda has managed to shatter his faith in himself. He trips over something in the sand, and \"a hot pain dart[s] through his ankle ... it must have been a snake\" (507). Pitiful and increasingly delirious, he collapses in the dry waterhole where his father met his demise. Even as he nears death, his gaze is fixed on the black and brooding sky, with its great masses of clouds sinking lower until a soft hiss, a pitter-pat of rain on the sand, informs him of \"his\" success: \"Rain!... Rain in the wilderness.... I've not failed, after all.... I must find father and tell him\" (509)\u2014an impossible quest for his paralyzed body but not for his triumphant spirit.\n\n_Jingling in the Wind_ (1928), by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, is a stylistically complex and multivocal tone poem, \"a fantasy of weather control.\" Here we meet Jeremy the rainmaker, a man who participates in the pure sensation of nature and \"gives it a point.\" For Jeremy, interior feelings and reflections trump the mere wetness of the rain, which is the \"least significant part\": \"He had brought the rain into the sky. With his science and his apparatus he had engendered the rain and now, as rainman, reve of the rain, he looked about and saw his work was well done, saw his work take purpose in the clods and the parted loam.\"\n\nUsing Jeremy's techniques, the commissioners of rural Jason County, Kentucky, in conference with the farmers, set the rain schedule for the month, but only in their own local jurisdiction. The process is so precise that if you wish for fine weather on a scheduled rain day, you merely need to cross into the next county. Much like the Kansas and Nebraska rainmakers of yore, \"retorts, clouds,  equations, antennae, derricks, vats, and acids\" play their symbolic, if nondescript, roles in the rainmaking scenes. So does the hall of the rainmen, where licensed practitioners confer and visitors thumb charts, prod apparatus, and inscribe their names in the guest book.\n\nOf greater rhetorical significance, however, are the debates over the morality of the technique. Half the population, led by the Reverend James Ahab Crouch (\"Make the World Safe for God\"), oppose rain control as a \"device of the devil,\" blasphemous or pagan. He champions a bill in the legislature designed to crush the rainmen and preaches from his great tent how terrible it is \"to subtract from the omnipotence of an omnipotent God\" (179). Others, more open-minded or daring, look on it as a great benefit (25\u201327, 74). They plan a carnival with \"a great rain display, a model rain, predicted, arranged, conducted by some rainman, controlled\" (185).\n\nLike Frank Melbourne at the Goodland County fair (chapter 3), Jeremy, known popularly as the \"rain bat\" for his tight-fitting black rain suit, is invited to the carnival and promises the expectant crowd a deluge by two o'clock. He works feverishly, tuning his instruments, mixing the proprietary chemicals, and conjuring up and battling with the clouds, which fight back like dragons. Finally, \"out of the great rent in the beast rolled a stream of rain and the gutters were running flush, running over\" (213\u2013217). Jeremy's success is celebrated with a parade, with the rain bat riding in a convertible at the head of a motorcade as music plays, drums beat, men cheer, women swoon, and skywriters pay homage overhead. At the time the book was written, Charles Hatfield was still active in the field, and the Rock Island Railroad rainmakers persisted in memory.\n\nN. Richard Nash's romantic comedy _The Rainmaker_ (1955) is set in Three Point, Texas, \"on a summer day in a time of devastating drought.\" Lizzie Curry's family worries more about her marriage prospects than about their dying crops and livestock. Suddenly, a charming stranger arrives, a Texas twister of a man named Bill Starbuck\u2014 _Rainmaker!_ \u2014a charlatan, but not essentially a crook, who promises, for $100, to make miracles, to bring rain. As the summer storm clouds gather overhead, lonely and plain Lizzie, too, has her love life \"seeded\" by the confidence man's machinations.\n\nHow to make rain? Starbuck mocks the scientific voice of the charlatan when he cries, \"Sodium chloride! Pitch it up high\u2014right up to the clouds. Electrify the cold front. Neutralize the warm front. Barometricize the tropopause. Magnetize occlusions in the sky.\" But Starbuck, like faith healers, has his own method, \"all my own,\" that begins with him brandishing his hickory stick and exuding confidence. After inviting himself to supper and collecting $100 in advance, Starbuck puts the family members to work for him in a test of their faith\u2014beating on a big bass drum, painting arrows on the ground to direct the lightning away from  the house, tying the farm mule's hind legs together\u2014without allowing any questions and certainly without acting sensibly. Lizzie, who is flabbergasted by all this, admonishes her father, H. C.:\n\nLIZZIE: You're making a big fool of yourself! Where's your common sense?\n\nH. C.: Common sense? Why, that didn't do us no good\u2014we're in trouble. Maybe we better throw our common sense away.\n\nLIZZIE: For Pete's sake, hang on to a little of it! (76)\n\nStarbuck counters: \"You gotta take my deal because once in your life you gotta take a chance on a con man! You gotta take my deal because there's dyin' calves that might pick up and live! Because a hundred bucks is only a hundred bucks\u2014but rain in a dry season is a sight to behold! You gotta take my deal because it's gonna be a hot night\u2014and the world goes crazy on a hot night\u2014and maybe that's what a hot night is for!\" H. C. responds, \"Starbuck, you got you a deal!\"\n\nWhile the family is busy performing their rainmaking rituals, Starbuck romances Lizzie, getting her to acknowledge her own beauty. Here is where real confidence is built. But Starbuck, also known as Tornado Johnson, is wanted for selling four hundred tickets to a rain festival when it did not rain, peddling a thousand pairs of smoked eyeglasses to view an eclipse of the Sun that never happened, and selling six hundred wooden poles guaranteed to turn tornadoes into a gentle spring breeze (152). In a final confrontation with the town officers of Three Point, one of whom is sweet on Lizzie, Starbuck throws the $100 on the table and makes a dramatic escape. He returns soon thereafter, just as the drought breaks and a storm is unleashed overhead: \"Rain, folks\u2014it's gonna rain! Rain, Lizzie\u2014for the first time in my life\u2014rain!\" (as he takes the money and races out for the second time, pausing only long enough to wave to Lizzie). \"So long\u2014beautiful!\" (182).\n\n_The Rainmaker_ opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre, New York City, on October 28, 1954, with Darren McGavin as Bill Starbuck and Geraldine Page as Lizzie Curry. London's _Daily Mail_ called the production \"a beautiful little comedy with a catch in its throat.\" One reviewer commented that Starbuck captivated Lizzie and her family \"neither to connive nor corrupt but because he must live in a glow of esteem, and what to do in that case but radiate it oneself?\" A 1956 film version starred Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. _New Yorker_ film critic Pauline Kael observed:\n\nThe cowtown spinster suffering from drought is Katharine Hepburn, and the man who delivers the rain is Burt Lancaster. The casting is just about perfect. Lancaster has an athletic role, in which he can also be very touching. His con man isn't a  simple trickster; he's a poet and dreamer who needs to convince people of his magical powers. Hepburn is stringy and tomboyish, believably plain yet magnetically beautiful. This is a fairy tale (the ugly duckling) dressed up as a bucolic comedy and padded out with metaphysical falsies, but it is also genuinely appealing, in a crude, good-spirited way, though N. Richard Nash, who wrote both the play and the adaptation, aims too solidly at lower-middle-class tastes. Once transformed, the heroine rejects the poet for the deputy sheriff (Wendell Corey); if there were a sequel, she might be suffering from the drought of his imagination.\n\nA musical adaptation, _110 in the Shade_ (1963), played to packed houses; a remake broadcast on HBO in 1982, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Tuesday Weld, was less than memorable; and a Broadway revival featuring Woody Harrelson and Jayne Atkinson in the lead roles opened and closed with little fanfare in 1999. Still, _The Rainmaker_ has perennial appeal and has been performed many times since by innumerable school and community theater groups.\n\n#  Sky King and the Indian Rainmaker\n\nSky King, America's favorite flying cowboy, ruled the \"clear blue Western skies\" over the Flying Crown Ranch in Arizona (although the opening credits showed a high cirrostratus haze). With the help of his niece Penny, nephew Clipper, and private airplane, the _Songbird_ , Sky King solved mysteries, rescued those in need, and fought villains\u2014on radio from 1946 to 1954 and intermittently on television on Saturday mornings from 1951 to 1962. In June 1948, as news of cloud seeding at the General Electric Corporation reached the public (chapter 5), an episode titled \"The Rainmakers Magic\" aired on radio. Eight years later, in 1956, the TV episode \"The Rainbird\" revisited the topic, juxtaposing traditional and modern methods of weather control.\n\nDuring a devastating drought, Indian dancers, medicine men, and rainmakers implore the heavens for rain. The chief and elders of the local tribe present their elderly medicine man, Tai-Lam, with an ultimatum: bring rain in two days or be replaced. Sky King, who is sympathetic, decides to help out behind the scenes by seeking advice from the local weather bureau on when and where to seed the clouds. Penny coordinates efforts, signaling Tai-Lam to begin shaking his Kachina doll and droning his pitiful rainmaking chant, while Sky King simultaneously seeds an \"upper-level front\" with silver iodide. A deluge follows, placing both Penny and the tribe at risk, filling the dam to its brim, and threatening to flood the valley. None of the protagonists, however, place the blame on  modern weather control technology or traditional methods. The weather bureau attributes the rain to unexpected changes in a naturally occurring system. Tension returns as a second storm rapidly approaches, which could cause the dam to burst. At the risk of his life, Sky King takes off, flying into the weather front to divert it, again by cloud seeding, while Tai-Lam begins a new chant, this time to _stop_ the rain. Through the mixed agency of the Kachina doll and silver iodide, all turns out well at the end of the half-hour episode. This fictional episode has its counterpart in the actual practices of the era. A. J. Liebling described a magazine clipping from 1952 titled \"Old Order Changeth: Navajo Indians near Gallup, N.M. have become skeptical of\u2014or just plain bored with\u2014their ancient rainmaking rites. During a recent drought, they hired professional rainmakers to seed the clouds over their reservation. Result: one-and-a-half inches of rain.\"\n\nThe futurist Arthur C. Clarke, of all people, wrote about the Zuni tribe of New Mexico, who are famous for their rain dances. At the beginning of the ceremony, just after the summer solstice, a boy representing the Fire God torches a field of dry grass. This serves as a signal for the Zuni dancers, painted with yellow mud and carrying live tortoises, to begin dancing, which continues as long as necessary, until it rains. Clarke editorialized: \"That is one beauty of rain making. It always works _eventually_ , though sometimes you have to wait a few weeks or months for the pay-off.\" A cartoon contrasting traditional and scientific methods accompanied Clarke's article (figure 1.4).\n\n1.4 Rainmaking old and new.\n\n(CARTOON BY CHARLES ADDAMS, IN CLARKE, \"MAN-MADE WEATHER\")\n\n#  Porky Pig and Donald Duck\n\nCommercial cloud seeding even found its way into the cartoons. The Warner Brothers Looney Tune _Porky the Rain-Maker_ was shown in theaters in 1936. During a devastating drought, Porky sends his son to town with his last dollar to buy feed for the starving animals. There, next to the feed store, Dr. Quack is selling an assortment of \"rain pills\" for $1 from the back of his wagon. As part of his presentation, Quack hands out umbrellas to the crowd and launches a rain pill into the sky with a peashooter. The pill bursts like Dyrenforth's ordnance, and rain begins to fall immediately.\n\nConvinced, Porky Jr. buys a box of the pills with the family's last dollar, but his angry father, in a scene reminiscent of Jack and the Magic Beanstalk, throws them on the ground. This gives rise to a series of comedic shticks. A barnyard chicken eats a lightning pill and is instantly electrified; the old gray mare eats a fog pill and is shrouded in cloud; the goose eats thunder and wind pills and all hell breaks loose. When, in the melee, one of the rain pills reaches the sky, clouds form instantly and the rains fall. As the cartoon credits roll, all ends well on the farm and everyone is happy. \"That's all Folks!\"\n\nIn _Walt Disney_ ' _s Comics and Stories_ (1953), Donald Duck, M.R.M. (Master Rain Maker), has perfected the science of rainmaking. In the opening sequence, a farmer orders 2 inches of rain on his barley field. Donald, wearing an aviator's helmet and pointing to his bag of M-3 \"rain seed,\" offers him 2.5 inches for the same price. Donald fulfills his contract with extreme precision \"to the millimeter\" by seeding the farmer's X-shaped field with an X-shaped cloud he has \"bulldozed\" into position. The farmer and his wife are delighted, since none of the rain falls on his hay field next door: \"That duck shore is a Jim Dandy! It's raining right up to the fence row! And the drops that fall on the line even have one flat side!\"\n\nOf course, Donald eventually loses his temper in every cartoon, and this one is no exception. Daisy has gone to the Idle Dandies picnic with Donald's cousin, Gladstone. Donald, jealous and angry, takes off in his cloud-seeding airplane, this time loaded with \"snow starter,\" to gain retribution. Flying over the picnic site in Greenwood Canyon in a clear blue sky, Donald's agitation with his rival increases until he admits, \"I feel mean enough now to do _anything_!\" After herding some ominous rain clouds together, Donald declares, \"I won't give 'em ... anything as common as a cloudburst\u2014I'll give 'em a _blizzard_!\" In a memorable image, he pulls the control lever beyond \"rain,\" \"hail,\" and \"snow\" all the way to \"blizzard,\" but he miscalculates and \"overseeds\" the clouds, turning them into a solid dome of ice.\n\nDonald crashes his plane on the ice and parachutes down into the canyon to warn the picnickers of the danger above. The ice dome crashes down on their parked cars, but since this is a Disney cartoon, no one is injured. However, to avoid liability and preserve deniability, Donald suspends his lucrative rain business, sneaks away from the ongoing investigation, and takes an extended vacation\u2014in Timbuktu.\n\n##  _Henderson the Rain King_\n\nOn a more literary note, in _Henderson the Rain King_ (1959), by Saul Bellow, the title character, Eugene, an introspective, earnest, and egocentric former violinist and pig farmer, seeks to find himself and escape his troubles with the modern world with a one-way ticket to Africa. Traveling cross-country on foot to visit native tribes, he unexpectedly becomes the Great White Sungo, the rain king of the Wariri, when he performs certain feats of prowess. In charge of both moisture and fertility, Henderson participates in a frenzied ceremony involving leaping, drumming, shrieking, chanting, and whipping both images of the gods and one another:\n\nCaught up in this madness, I fended off blows from my position on my knees, for it seemed to me that I was fighting for my life, and I yelled. Until a thunder clap was heard. And then, after a great, neighing, cold blast of wind, the clouds opened and the rain began to fall. Gouts of water like hand grenades burst all about and on me. ... I have never seen such water.\n\nHaving found at least part of himself, Henderson, significantly transformed by his experiences and eager to start anew, takes a flight back to America. In evocative passages that inspired Joni Mitchell's popular song \"Both Sides Now,\" Bellow writes, \"We are the first generation to see the clouds from both sides. What a privilege! First people dreamed upward. Now they dream both upward and downward. This is bound to change something\" (280). \"[Clouds are] like courts of eternal heaven. Only they aren't eternal, that's the whole thing; they are seen once and never seen again, being figures and not abiding realities\" (333).\n\n##  _Cat's Cradle_\n\nAt the urging of his older brother Bernard, Kurt Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, in 1947, where he worked, unhappily, as a publicist for General  Electric\u2014a company he once said \" _was_ science fiction\"\u2014in what he called \"this goddamn nightmare job.\" At a time when the air force's Project Cirrus was taking over the cloud-seeding business (chapter 5), Vonnegut published \"Report on the Barnhouse Effect,\" a science fiction story in _Collier's_ that emphasizes an inventor's moral resistance to an attempted militarization of his invention. His first novel, _Player Piano_ (1952), was inspired by the mechanization he witnessed at GE and deals with the demoralizing effects of vast corporations attempting to use technology to automate everything and replace human labor with machines. The setting is Illium, a fictitious town along the Iroquois River in New York State, a dreary mill town dominated by a high-tech factory called Illium Works. In reality, Schenectady, on the Mohawk River, is the home of General Electric, while Illium is the ancient Roman name for Troy, which is also an industrial city near Schenectady in New York.\n\nWhile still at GE, Vonnegut heard about the visit of H. G. Wells to the plant in the 1930s and how Irving Langmuir proposed a story idea to the famous novelist and futurist involving a new form of water (ice-nine) that would freeze at room temperature. Wells never wrote about this, but Vonnegut thought it might someday be worth pursuing. Bernard Vonnegut had, in reality, identified the hexagonal structure of silver iodide (ice-six?) as a substance that could trigger natural ice formation in clouds. Years later, Vonnegut used these ideas in his book _Cat's Cradle_ (1963), where a quirky and amoral scientist named Felix Hoenikker, a loose composite of Langmuir and H-bomb scientists Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller, invents a water-like substance that instantly freezes everything it touches. When a tiny crystal of \"ice-nine\" is brought into contact with liquid water, it stimulates the molecules into arranging themselves into solid form.\n\nBernard obviously had a big influence on Kurt. Real-life meteorologist Craig Bohren credited _Cat's Cradle_ with the \"best discussion of nucleation\" in print and claimed that the novel contained more information on this subject than \"all the physics textbooks written since the beginning of time.\" Indeed, Langmuir and Teller were reportedly fascinated by the theoretical possibility that a substance such as ice-nine could actually exist. In the book, Hoenikker's intent is to create a material that will be useful to armies bogged down in muddy battlefields, but the result is an unprecedented ecological disaster that destroys the world.\n\nClearly, the practice of weather control is not restricted to the West, to modern times, or to scientific practices. It has much deeper roots in world cultures and carries  much deeper meaning than simply making rain or stopping it. In _Rain Making and Other Weather Vagaries_ (1926), William Jackson Humphreys (1862\u20131949), a meteorological physicist at the U.S. Weather Bureau, classifies rainmaking into three general categories: _magical_ (practices alleging personal control over secret forces of nature), _religious_ (appeals to a higher power or supernatural being), and _scientific_ (using natural means to alter the otherwise undisturbed course of nature). Closely following Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer's influential work _The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion_ (1890), Humphreys introduces his readers to magical rainmaking practices such as bloodletting and mimicry of lightning, thunder, rain, and clouds. As did Frazer before him, Humphreys writes of ceremonies to stop the rain, involving the sympathetic magic of setting fires, heating stones, or keeping things dry. His treatment of religious rites includes appeals and supplications directed to the gods, tribal ancestors, or deceased rainmakers. In some cases, the ceremonies are intended to threaten, abuse, or annoy the powers that be. Ringing church bells in inclement weather and praying for rain were the two most common. In his writing, Humphreys tries heroically to separate myth from science and reserves \"scientific rainmaking\" for special treatment, but as this chapter and those to follow demonstrate, the distinction between mythological and analytical, fictional and aspirational is not so clear-cut.\n\nToday, chemical cloud seeders have largely superseded traditional rain kings and queens, but apart from (apparently) dealing with the same topic, weather control, they hold a vastly different social status. Silver iodide flares may serve as the new fetish replacing shamanistic practices, but traditional rainmakers were and still are celebrated as central figures in their societies, while the cloud seeders are considered culturally marginal at best. If the world's cultures remain firmly rooted in myth, tradition, and storytelling, so too does the history of weather and climate control.\n\nThe hubris and folly of Phaethon, themes from Milton and Dante, and examples drawn from cultures other than our own serve to remind us of the richness and relevance of myth and storytelling. Daniel Quinn's distinction between the Takers and the Leavers, expressed through the fictional voice of Ishmael, serves further to problematize and universalize human relationships and attitudes toward the sky. Rather than standing in opposition to rationality, these stories point to fundamental relationships among nature, culture, and human solidarity that are currently not being examined in the scientistic West.\n\nThe examples of early popular sci-fi literature on weather and climate control make many of the moral points often left unsaid by scientists and engineers. Some of the stories told here are drawn from prominent authors, but most of them are probably unfamiliar. All of them, written in a variety of genres and from  different angles, are relevant to later chapters. Standard histories often privilege the heroic genre. Warriors, statesmen, scientists, and lone inventors rise to face the unknown or to meet unprecedented challenges. This is particularly true in much of the history of science\u2014but not in this book. The FIDO fog-clearing story (chapter 4) is about as close to the heroic genre as it gets.\n\nIn the fictional accounts presented here, George Griffith's _Great Weather Syndicate_ fits the heroic mold, with Arthur Arkwright ending up as a managed hero. Less ruly are the heroic socialists who oppose the Air Trust. Tragedy dominates _The Wreck of the South Pole_ , _The Evacuation of England_ , and the short story \"The Rain-Maker.\" Mark Twain's _American Claimant_ is pure comedy, as is the geoengineering Western _The Eighth Wonder_. So, too, are the stories of Jeremy the rain bat in _Jingling in the Wind_ and _Porky the Rain-Maker_ , while N. Richard Nash's _Rainmaker_ is a self-described romantic comedy. The _Sky King_ episode is largely unclassifiable, but on balance it is indeed an adventure-farce.\n\nThe tragicomedic hybrid genre is also prevalent in this literature, from the Baltimore Gun Club's failed attempt to tip the Earth's axis for profit in Jules Verne's _The Purchase of the North Pole_ to PAX and his Lavender Ray in _The Man Who Rocked the Earth_ , and Kurt Vonnegut's Felix Hoenikker and the practitioners of the absurd human-centered philosophy of Bokononism in _Cat's Cradle_. Even Donald Duck, as \"Master Rain Maker,\" strikes out in anger and slinks away in shame to avoid blame. There are ample opportunities in this type of analysis to reward additional scholars with literary interests\u2014if we can only break out of our narrative ruts. There are no classical heroes here. It is the tragicomic\u2014the voices of Verne, Vonnegut, and even Donald Duck\u2014that seems to come closest to the actual tone of most of the checkered history of weather and climate control.\n\n**2**\n\nRAIN MAKERS\n\n_It is not generally known ... that the question of causing rain by artificial means is no new one._\n\n\u2014ROBERT DECOURCY WARD, \"ARTIFICIAL RAIN\"\n\n**THE** quest to control nature, including the sky, is deeply rooted in the history of Western science. In the dedication to _The Great Instauration_ (1620), Sir Francis Bacon (1561\u20131626) encouraged his \"wisest and most learned\" patron, James I, to regenerate and restore the sciences. Bacon's program involved \"collecting and perfecting\" natural and experimental histories to ground philosophy and the sciences \"on the solid foundation of experience of every kind.\" His wide-ranging catalog of particular histories included aerial and oceanic topics that are relevant here: lightning, wind, clouds, showers, snow, fog, floods, heat, drought, ebb and flow of the sea. The goal was to replace Aristotelian natural philosophy, stimulate rapid progress in science, improve the human condition through technology, and eventually control nature.\n\nBacon's philosophy identified three fundamental states of nature: (1) the liberty of nature, (2) the bonds of nature, and (3) things artificial. In the first category, nature is, well, \"natural\"\u2014free and unconstrained. The second category comprises mistakes and monstrosities resulting from motions that are violently forced or impeded. The third category involves art and technology\u2014mechanisms  and experiments constraining nature to operate under human control. Thus gentle rains falling from the sky may water a garden naturally; rainmaking, which seeks to bond and bend natural processes, is a violent or forced act, a monstrosity; and designed irrigation systems, employed by many agriculturalists, constitute artifice. To cite another example of the three states, a shade tree and a gentle breeze may provide some respite on a hot day; towing icebergs to lower latitudes or turning the blue sky milky white with sulfate aerosols to attenuate sunbeams, however, would be violent acts involving forced motions and would constitute errors of potentially monstrous proportions; and the design of building ventilation and cooling systems, subject to individual choice, is clearly within the realm of artifice. As a third example, the eruption of a volcano is considered a force of nature; making an artificial volcano or otherwise tinkering with an existing one would certainly be a mistake; but deflecting lava flows around a village is an artificial but useful thing to do.\n\nIn _New Atlantis_ (1624), the scientists of Solomon's House practice both observation and manipulation of the weather: \"We have high towers ... for the view of divers meteors\u2014as winds, rain, snow, hail, and some of the fiery meteors also. And upon them in some places are dwellings of hermits, whom we visit sometimes and instruct what to observe ... and engines for multiplying and enforcing of winds to set also on divers motions.\" In great experimental spaces, researchers imitate and demonstrate natural meteors such as snow, hail, rain, thunder, and lightning and \"some artificial rains of bodies and not of water\" (400). Three so-called mystery men are in charge of expanding the repertoire of practices not yet brought into the arts, and three pioneers or miners try new experiments \"such as themselves think good\" (410); that is, they manipulate nature without further review or oversight, a task requiring perfect virtue and judgment by the experimentalists.\n\nBacon was conversant with a venerable humanistic tradition that divided history into three parts\u2014ancient, medieval, and modern\u2014but his valuation of the three eras was asymmetric. He granted grudging respect to the ancients, denigrated the Middle Ages, and elevated modern accomplishments to equal or soon-to-be-greater status than those of antiquity. For Bacon, the rise of modern science was due to \"the true method of experience ... commencing ... with experience duly ordered and digested, not bungling or erratic, and from it educing axioms, and from established axioms, again new experiments.\" \"New discoveries,\" Bacon argued, \"must be sought from the light of nature, not fetched back out of the darkness of antiquity\" (154). He elaborated at length on his new method, calling for researchers to work together and making the important point that the sciences were about to enter a period of great fertility. Bacon's  communitarian campaign was taken over by innumerable practitioners in the seventeenth century. His greatest legacy, without doubt, was institutional, in that his outlook was absorbed by the Royal Society of London and by many other scientific societies.\n\n#  Scientific Revolutions \" _de l'air_ \"\n\nThe \"scientific revolution,\" although subject to intense historiographic debate, is a term that commonly refers to the transformation of thought about nature through which the authority of ancient texts was replaced by the \"mechanical philosophy\" and methodology of modern science. Most, but not all, historians see it as a series of events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or, more narrowly, from 1543 ( _De Revolutionibus_ of Copernicus) to 1687 ( _Principia_ of Newton). The standard accounts privilege astronomy, physics, and medicine, but also in this era natural philosophers turned away from the traditional practice of preparing commentaries on Aristotle's _Meteorologica_ and instead began focusing on new techniques for describing, measuring, and weighing the atmosphere. Behind this turn was the hope that somehow quantification might lead to understanding and trigger a cascade of new capabilities, including prediction and control. Beginning with the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the scientific societies of Europe attempted to make histories of the weather and promoted the collection, compilation, dissemination, and discussion of meteorological observations from remote locations and over widespread areas of the globe. Adherents of the new mechanical and chemical philosophy insisted that all atmospheric phenomena could be reduced to their component processes and could be explained by an emerging body of natural laws. They developed new instruments\u2014thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, and calibrated rain gauges\u2014for observing and quantifying aspects of the atmosphere. New practices and perspectives meant that henceforth no atmospheric process, however seemingly insignificant, would be left unrecorded. As a result, a culture of measurement emerged, linked to a new meteorological science of planetary proportions. This \"descent, with variation,\" of viable meteorological instruments, so proudly traced by scientists and historians, is only one aspect of the story, since many techniques resulted in dead ends\u2014in extinct or forgotten practices. The lack of uniform standards and global and temporal coverage, however, remained a continuing challenge.\n\nIn 1949 one of the early champions of the idea of a scientific revolution, the historian Herbert Butterfield, wrote the following:\n\nSince the Scientific Revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world\u2014since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics\u2014it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the realm of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom. Since it changed the character of habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the non-material sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.\n\nMore recently, a prominent feminist scholar, Carolyn Merchant, saw the same events as a disaster of unmitigated proportions: \"The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature\u2014the most far-reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution.\" She argured that because scientists had redefined nature as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external rather than inherent forces, their endorsement of the reductionistic framework of the mechanical philosophy legitimized nature's manipulation and progressive destruction. Power over nature was fully compatible with the values of scientists' ultimate supporters\u2014governments\u2014especially the military establishment, commodifiers, and other ideologues and opportunists of various stripes. Others wonder if there have been many scientific revolutions, or perhaps none at all\n\nMost historians agree that since the seventeenth century, scientists have attempted to complete the Baconian program, elevating the attainment of natural knowledge to the sine qua non of human achievement, and then wielding this knowledge to gain power over and control of nature for the stated purpose of improving the human condition, however narrowly defined, but often falling short of this goal. This program, the opening wedge of a revolution articulated in different ways by Galileo, Descartes, and others, was more than a new set of techniques in the laboratory or the field. It was a revolution in thought that placed humanity at the conceptual and willful center of the universe, redefined our relationship with the natural world, elevated the scientific method to the pinnacle of truth recently vacated by the church fathers, and dealt a blow to apocalyptic thinking. As the Enlightenment eroded belief in divine providence as a moving force in history, the historiographic void was filled by the notion of progress, a secular notion based on the development and application of human reason to the challenges of understanding, prediction, and ultimately, control.\n\n#  Great Fires and Artificial Volcanoes\n\nIn the closing decades of the eighteenth century in Europe, and slightly later in Russia and the United States, serious attempts were made to broaden the geographic coverage of weather observations, standardize their collection, and publish the results. Individual observers in particular locales dutifully tended to their journals while networks of cooperative observers gradually extended the meteorological frontiers. No one, however, had yet proposed a serious scientificbased program of weather control. James Pollard Espy (1785\u20131860) was a leading meteorologist of his day, the first to be employed by the U.S. government in this capacity. Born into a farm family in Washington County, Pennsylvania, and educated at Transylvania University in Kentucky, he worked as a frontier schoolmaster and lawyer until he moved to Philadelphia in 1817. There he supported himself by teaching mathematics and classics part time at the Franklin Institute while devoting his free time to meteorological research. From 1834 to 1838, he served as the chairman of the Joint Committee on Meteorology of the Franklin Institute and the American Philosophical Society. He won the latter's Magellenic Prize in 1836 for his theory of hail. Working with the scientific societies of Philadelphia, Espy gained the support of Pennsylvania's legislature to equip weather observers in each county in the state with barometers, thermometers, and other standard instruments to provide a larger, synoptic view of the weather, especially the passage of storms. He also maintained a national network of correspondents and volunteer observers. During this period, he invented a \"nephelescope,\" an early cloud chamber, which he used in his popular lectures and, in his technical work, to calculate the amount of heat released by condensing water vapor.\n\nEspy moved to Washington, D.C., in 1842. In his first government appointment, as professor of mathematics in the navy, he developed a ventilator for ships and expanded his network of meteorological correspondents. He also held a joint appointment as the \"national meteorologist\" in the U.S. Army Medical Department, a position that boosted his storm studies by providing him access to the meteorological reports of the army post surgeons. From 1847 to 1857, his salary was provided by annual appropriations from Congress. With Joseph Henry, he established the Smithsonian meteorological system of observers and experimented with telegraphic weather reports. Several of his major reports on meteorology appeared as U.S. Senate executive documents.\n\nEspy viewed the atmosphere as a giant heat engine. According to his thermal theory of storms, all atmospheric disturbances, including thunderstorms, hurricanes,  and winter storms, are driven by steam power. Heated by the Sun, a column of moist air rises, allowing the surrounding air to rush in. As the heated air ascends, it cools and its moisture condenses, releasing its latent heat (this is the \"steam power\") and producing rain, hail, or snow. Espy emphasized, correctly, the importance of knowing the quantity of vapor in the air, \"for it is from the latent caloric [or heat] contained in the vapor that all the force of the wind in storms is derived. It is only when the dew-point is high that there is sufficient steam power in the air to produce a violent storm; for _all storms are produced by steam power_.\" His theory was well received by many scientists of his time, including a committee of the French Academy of Sciences chaired by Fran\u00e7ois Arago. The convective theory is now an accepted part of meteorology, and for this discovery Espy is well regarded in the history of science.\n\nEspy strayed from the scientific mainstream when he promoted his idea that significant rains of commercial importance for agriculture and navigation could be generated by cutting and burning vast tracts of forest. He believed the heat and smoke from these fires would create huge columns of hot air, producing clouds and triggering precipitation, much like the effects of volcanic eruptions. He listed five scientific reasons why setting large fires should produce rain: (1) experiments showed that expanding air cools dramatically, and (2) under certain conditions of high humidity forms both a visible cloud and significant amounts of precipitation; (3) chemical principles indicated that the \"caloric of elasticity\" (a venerable term for latent heat) released in the condensation of this vapor is immense, equal to about 20,000 tons of anthracite coal burned on each square mile of cloud extent. Espy's convective theory further held that (4) this release of heat would keep the cloud buoyant, lower the barometer, and \"cause the air to rush inward on all sides toward the center of the cloud and upward in the middle, thus continuing the process of condensation of vapor, formation of cloud, and generation of rain.\" Espy derived his final point empirically by collecting observations and testimonials to the effect that (5) air does indeed rush inward on all sides toward the center of the region where a great rain is falling and upward into the cloud.\n\nEspy explained that three things can prevent rains from accompanying great fires: (1) winds, (2) excessive moisture, and (3) stability of the upper levels of the atmosphere. He released small balloons and tracked their flight in order to get a sense of the winds, and he used a hygrometer to measure atmospheric moisture and estimate its changes with height. Stability was more of a problem, for as he observed, in the present state of science, the levity of an upper stratum of air could not always be known. Correspondents, friends, and even a congressman laughed at Espy when they heard of his proposal to make rain, but he assured  them that science was on his side. He even ventured a prediction of how the experiments might turn out in favorable conditions and felt there was no disgrace in desiring to see a great experiment made. He anticipated that his labors would be crowned with success.\n\nIn 1838 Espy petitioned the U.S. Senate to reward him in proportion to his ability to make rain by burning woodlands. James Buchanan (D-Pennsylvania) apologized to his colleagues for the \"strange petition\" he was about to present, but assured them that it came from \"a very respectable and scientific man\" with excellent references and credentials:\n\nThe petitioner ... says that he has discovered a means of making it rain in a tract of country at a period of time when there would be no rain without the use of his process. Mr. Espy proposed to make the experiment at his own expense; and he proposed that Congress should pass an act engaging to reward him with a certain sum if he succeeded in making it rain in a tract of country ten miles square; a still higher sum if he produced rain in a tract of country one thousand square miles; a still higher sum if he produced rain in a tract of five thousand square miles; and, lastly, to give him a still greater compensation if he should cause the Ohio river to be navigable all summer from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi.\n\nBuchanan supported the petition based on Espy's scientific reputation, but \"scarcely knew himself what to say about it.\" Senator John J. Crittenden (W-Kentucky) \"doubted very much, whether, even if this thing was possible, it would be a good policy to encourage the measure.\" He thought that no mortal should have the power that Espy professed to have and no one could take the Ohio River under his special protection:\n\nWhy, sir, he might enshroud us in continual clouds, and, indeed, falsify the promise that the earth should be no more submerged. And if he possesses the power of causing rain, he may also possess the power of withholding it, and, in his pleasure, instead of giving us a navigable river, may present us with rock and shoals and sandbars. He thought that this would be too dangerous a power to entrust to any individual ... unless ... we had some very summary process of manufacturing sunshine. (39)\n\nThe senators, obviously enjoying the discussion, pointed out that no citizen should be empowered to hoard up the clouds and vapors or to dispense them at will. Buchanan's motion failed, and Espy's petition lay on the table. That year, and for several years following, Espy looked closer to home, seeking, but  failing to receive, government support for rainmaking. \"Magnificent Humbug\" opined the _Genesee Farmer_. According to the _Boston Quarterly Review_ , \"The public at large think of him as a sort of madman, who fancies that he can produce artificial rain.\"\n\nEspy's magnum opus, _The Philosophy of Storms_ (1841), includes a long section titled \"Artificial Rains,\" in which he compiled testimonies of rainfalls accompanying volcanic eruptions and large fires: \"The documents which I have collected on this subject, if they do not prove that the experiment will succeed, do at least prove that it ought to be tried.\" Espy concluded that if a large body of air is forced to ascend in a column, a large self-sustaining cloud will be generated and cause more air to rise up into it to form more cloud and rain. He argued that this was certainly the case in volcanic eruptions and should also be the case for great fires. He cited the mysterious connection between volcanoes and rain as noted by the famous geographer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who observed that sometimes during a volcanic eruption a dry season changed into a rainy one. Thus he argued that the rainmaking effects of a giant forest fire should mimic those of a volcanic eruption.\n\nEspy scoured the literature for supporting evidence. He cited Martin Dobrizhoffer, an Austrian Jesuit evangelist in South America who wrote that he witnessed the tribes of the Abipones in Paraguay producing rain (in an admittedly very rainy climate) by setting fire to the plains. He also cited the practice of American Indians burning the prairies to produce rain, and he called for his correspondents to send in reports and testimonies of similar instances supporting his theory. An observer in Louisiana wrote that a conflagration in the long grass in the prairies of that state was soon followed by rain.\n\nIn 1845 Espy issued a circular letter \"To the Friends of Science\" with specific details of his rainmaking plan. He proposed a massive experiment along the Alleghany Mountains (a region quite familiar to him): \"Let forty acres ... be fired every seven days through the summer in each of the counties of McKean, Clearfield, Cambria, and Somerset, in Pennsylvania; Alleghany in Maryland; and Hardy, Pendleton, Bath, Alleghany, and Montgomery, in Virginia.\" Espy anticipated the effects of upper-air wind shear by recommending that woodlots several miles apart be fired, \"so that the up-moving column of air which shall be formed over them may have a wide base, and thus may ascend to a considerable height before it may be leaned out of perpendicular by any wind which may exist at the time.\"\n\nHe also proposed an even larger, continental-scale project that involved simultaneously firing masses of timber in the amount of 40 acres every 20 miles,  every seven days, along a line of 600 or 700 miles in the western United States along the Rocky Mountains. Espy predicted that the _probable_ outcome of this managed system would be regular, gentle, and steady rains sweeping across the entire country like clockwork for the benefit of farmers and navigators. Here is how Espy explained his plan:\n\nA rain of great length, north and south will commence near or on the line of fires; this rain will travel eastward; it will not break up till it reaches far into the Atlantic Ocean; it will rain over the whole country east of the place of beginning; it will rain only a short time in any one place; it will not rain again until the next seventh day; it will rain enough and not too much in any one place; it will not be attended with violent wind, neither on land or on the Atlantic Ocean; there will be no hail nor tornadoes at the time of the general rain nor intermediate; there will be no destructive floods, nor will the waters ever become very low; there will be no more oppressive heats nor injurious colds; the farmers and the mariners will always know before the rains when they will commence and when they will terminate; all epidemic diseases originating from floods and subsequent droughts will cease; the proceeds of agriculture will greatly increase, and the health and happiness of the citizens will be much promoted. (51)\n\nEspy presented the testimonies of eyewitnesses who saw both clouds and rain produced by fires. The good citizens of Coudersport, Pennsylvania, including attorneys, judges, and ministers, attested that both clouds and rain were produced by the burning of a fallow field in July 1844. Similar phenomena had attended a prairie fire in Indiana the previous summer. Surveyor George Mackay claimed to have stimulated convective showers in Florida by cutting and burning \"exceedingly inflammable\" saw grass: \"We often fired the saw-grass marshes afterward ; and whenever there was no wind stirring, we were sure to get a shower.\" Apparently, a number of farmers in Florida were in the habit of setting grass fires to produce rain when they planted their corn. A forest fire in Isle Royale, Michigan, in 1846 produced similar results, as did extensive forest fires in Nova Scotia and, apparently, coal burning in the industrial city of Manchester, England.\n\nPerhaps the most striking eyewitness testimony of \"steam power\" of the atmosphere being kindled by a great fire was sent to Espy by the Reverend J. D. Williamsom, who was hiking with a companion on a mountain summit near Keene, New Hampshire, in July 1856: \"The weather was excessively hot. Not a cloud was to be seen, nor was there a breath of wind stirring. Looking to the southeast at a distance of some five or six miles, I saw a fire just kindled in a fallow of some acres in extent. The column of smoke ascended perpendicularly and unbroken.\"  Williamsom, who was familiar with Espy's theory, remarked to a companion that the fire should soon produce rain unless disturbed by upper currents:\n\nUp went the column strait as an arrow, and anon it began to expand at the top and assume the appearance of cloud. This cloud, with its base stationary, expanded upward, and swelled as if a huge engine was below with its valve open for the escape of steam.... Soon the rain began to descend ... [and the cloud] sailed off in an eastern direction, pouring down torrents of rain.... I have ever regarded [this event] as a perfect and undeniable demonstration of the truth of [your] theory, and I can no more doubt it than I can doubt the evidence of my senses.\n\nFor his work in mapping and forecasting and for his tireless promotion of rainmaking, Espy earned the derisive sobriquet \"the Storm King.\"\n\n#  Eliza Leslie's \"Rain King\"\n\nThe year Espy moved to Washington, the popular magazine writer Eliza Leslie published a short story in _Godey's Lady's Book_ called \"The Rain King, or, A Glance at the Next Century,\" a fanciful account of rainmaking a century in the future, in 1942. In the story, Espy's great-great-grand-nephew, the new Rain King, offers weather on demand for the Philadelphia area. Various factions vie for the weather they desire. Scores of alfalfa farmers and three hundred washerwomen petition the Rain King for fine weather forever, while corn growers, cabmen, and umbrella makers want consistent rains. Fair-weather and foul-weather factions apply in equal numbers until the balance is tipped by a late request from a highsociety matron desperately seeking a hard rain to muddy the roads and prevent a visit by her country-bumpkin cousins.\n\nWhen the artificial rains come, they satisfy no one and raise widespread suspicions. The Rain King, suddenly unpopular because he lacks the miraculous power to please everybody, takes a steamboat to China, where he studies magic in anticipation of returning someday with new offerings. \"Natural rains had never occasioned anything worse than submissive regret to those who suffered inconvenience from them, and were always received more in sorrow than in anger,\" Leslie wrote. \"But these artificial rains were taken more in anger than in sorrow, by all who did not want them.\"\n\nLeslie's short, humorous fantasy revealed a dramatic and instantaneous change in public attitudes \"precipitated\" by artificial weather control. Although Leslie was no meteorologist, her tale \"showed a far better grasp of weather's  human dimensions and of the pitfalls of weather control than anything Espy ever wrote.\" Since then, however, the intractable human dimensions of weather and climate control have taken a backseat to the technical schemes of optimistic rain kings and climate engineers with relatively simple ideas, or at least angles.\n\nEspy received honorable mention in 1843 in Nathaniel Hawthorne's \"Hall of Fantasy\"\u2014a marketplace of wild ideas that most of us visit at least once but some dreamers occupy permanently; a marketplace seemingly perfectly suited to the millennial ideas of rain kings and climate engineers. Here the statues of the rulers and demigods of imagination\u2014Homer, Dante, Milton, Goethe\u2014are memorialized in stone, while those of more limited and ephemeral fame are made of wood. Plato's Idea looms over all. Here are social reformers, abolitionists, and Second Adventist \"Father [William] Miller himself!\" Civil and social engineers propound ideas of \"cities to be built, as if by magic, in the heart of pathless forests; and of streets to be laid out, where now the sea was tossing; and of mighty rivers to be stayed in their courses, in order to turn the machinery of a cotton-mill.\" \"Upon my word,\" exclaimed Hawthorne, \"it is dangerous to listen to such dreamers as these! Their madness is contagious\" (204). Here are inventors of fantastic machines aimed to \"reduce day dreams to practice\": models of a railroad through the air, a tunnel under the sea, distilling machines for capturing heat from moonshine and for condensing morning mist into square blocks of granite, and a lens for making sunshine out of a lady's smile. \"Professor Espy was here,\" reminiscent of Aeolus, the god of the winds, \"with a tremendous storm in a gum-elastic bag\" (206). The \"inmates of the hall,\" it is said (remember that all pass through here on occasion), take up permanent residence by throwing themselves into \"the current of a theory,\" oblivious to the \"landmarks of fact\" passing along the stream's bank.\n\n#  Cannon and Bells\n\nCharles Le Maout (1805\u20131887), a pharmacist and mine assayer in Saint-Brieuc, near the coast of Brittany, was a dedicated pacifist. One of his powerful arguments in favor of peace went far beyond typical arguments invoking the carnage, desolation, and miseries of war. He thought that war, especially cannonading but also the ringing of bells, destroyed the fragile equilibrium of the aerial elements and was responsible for undesirable atmospheric perturbations of all kinds, including rain, hail, thunder, lightning, harsh winters, and possibly airborne epidemic diseases. He wrote:\n\nTo have a proper idea of the fragility of the atmosphere in which we are destined to live, like fish in the depths of the sea, we ought to imagine ourselves inhabiting a crystal palace which, on the firing of a cannon, would be shattered to atoms over our heads.... As soon as the cannon cease firing or the bells cease sounding, when the sky is cloudy or overcast, the weather clears up and the blue sky and sunshine appear.... I am not thus wrong to say that God creates fine weather and man turns it foul.\n\nDuring the memorable siege of Sevastopol (1854\u20131855), which he observed, Le Maout said \"all of nature was affected\" by the cannonading, which he claimed caused a widespread outbreak of whooping cough. He convinced Marshal Jean-Baptiste Philibert Vaillant, the scientifically minded French minister of war who had instituted telegraphic weather reports, to order his artillery officers to record the weather on days when cannon were being fired. The results were inconclusive, and Vaillant, unimpressed by the outcome, disavowed the theory in the _Journal officiel de l'Empire_ , concluding, \"The famous influence of cannon is illusory.\"\n\nDisappointed but undaunted, Le Maout collected his own statistics to show that the weather in years with peace was more salubrious than in those with war. He advised keeping both the guns and the church bells of Europe and the Mediterranean silent, both in war and during celebrations, since their concussions disrupted the natural course of the winds and produced clouds and condensation at immense distances:\n\nMan has two powerful agents at his disposal [guns and church bells], for influencing the atmosphere. He can, if he pleases ... govern the aerial phenomena; and (were all human disturbance to cease on the surface of the globe) the air, in obedience to the laws of attraction, would probably return to a state of repose, as does the surface of the sea when not agitated by storms.\n\nConversely, he argued that selective cannonading and bell ringing during times of drought might provide relief for agriculture. Le Maout was convinced that he had presented the most powerful argument for the establishment of universal peace and urged his readers to propagate and popularize this doctrine for the sake of humanity. Waxing poetic, he wrote:\n\nNature prepares the storms and tempests; man makes them explode.\n\nGod makes good weather; man makes it bad.\n\nHe who sows with gunpowder will reap the storm.\n\n#  War and the Weather\n\nIn America, the enthusiasm for \"har vesting the storm\" with gunpowder and other explosives was just beginning. During the Civil War, some observers began to suspect that the smoke and concussion of artillery fire generated rain. After all, didn't it tend to rain a day, or two ... or three ... following most battles? The heavy fighting at Gettysburg on the first three days of July 1863 under fair skies was followed by torrential downpours on July 4 that lasted all day and into the night, resulting in roads knee-deep in mud and water that hampered the Confederate retreat. Skeptics hastened to point out that the connection between war and the weather was an ancient one\u2014and a shaky one.\n\nIn Plutarch's \"Caius Marius\" (75 C.E.), \"it is observed, indeed, that extraordinary rains generally fall after great battles; whether it be, that some deity chooses to wash and purify the earth with water from above, or whether the blood and corruption, by the moist and heavy vapors they emit, thicken the air, which is likely to be altered by the smallest cause.\" According to William Jackson Humphreys, Plutarch's first option was a matter of belief, not science, while his second option was not significant, since only about 0.01 inch of rain would fall over a square mile if ten thousand soldiers, assuming they were nothing but blood and sweat, \"were wholly evaporated and then all condensed back.\" Humphreys posed a plausible explanation for the apparently high correlation between rains and battles. He noted that plans were usually made and battles fought in good weather, so that after the battle in the temperate regions of Europe or North America rain will often occur in accordance with the natural three- to five-day periodicity for such events. Perhaps generals simply preferred to fight under fair skies, with rainy days therefore tending naturally to follow. Perhaps it would tend to rain several days after doing most anything!\n\nIn 1871 Chicago civil engineer and retired Civil War general Edward Powers published his book _War and the Weather, or, The Artificial Production of Rain_ , in which he reviewed the weather following selected battles and contended that rain followed artillery engagements\u2014usually within several days. Powers found a \"perfect explanation\" for this in the theory of oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who maintained that there were two great atmospheric currents, the equatorial and the polar, flowing aloft in nearly opposite directions. Powers argued that the concussion of battle caused these higher strata to mix and release their moisture. He envisioned stimulating rainfall on demand through the agency of loud noises, perhaps by detonating explosive charges carried aloft by kites or balloons. In times of drought, when the ground was bone-dry, he envisioned tapping into the elevated rivers of air that carried abundant moisture  from the Pacific Ocean. Analogous to drilling for groundwater, aerial explosions would merely release the moisture that was already up there, traveling overhead. Seven decades later, this \"river of air\" would be called the jet stream and would be deemed important not for its moisture, since it is absolutely desiccated, but for its dynamic effects on high-flying aircraft and on surface weather.\n\nWhen critics pointed out that loud concussions, if effective, should cause it to rain immediately, not hours or days later, Powers fell back on his two-current theory: \"The center of the atmospheric disturbance caused by a battle should remain in the vicinity of the battlefield while the two currents are mixing together and initiating the process that leads to rain\u2014a process which, it is plain, must require time in reaching a state of effective action.\" However deficient in meteorological details, Powers's theory was appealing to desperate farmers, like those in New England at the time, since it directed their hopeful gaze aloft, away from their parched fields and devastated crops. Powers reminded them that there is an ocean of moisture derived not from surface evaporation but from the Pacific Ocean and just waiting to be tapped. However, one observer noted that no effect on the weather had been perceived in the Rocky Mountains after years of blasting for mining and road-building operations.\n\nPowers sought support for his theory from the U.S. Army Signal Office weather service and through his representative, Charles Farwell (R-Illinois), who championed this cause for the next two decades. After reviewing Powers's theory and his proposal to fire three hundred cannon arranged in a circle a mile across, the House Committee on Agriculture concluded in a report that the government should act unilaterally on this issue of great significance and support Powers's field experiments: \"We have the powder, and we have the guns, and the men to serve them, and we ought not to leave to other nations and to after-ages the task of solving the great question as to whether the control of the weather is not, to a useful extent, within the reach of man.\" In another proposal, Powers suggested employing the siege guns at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois for rainmaking experiments at a cost, per rainstorm, of $21,000, an amount he claimed was much less expensive than the cost of irrigation or the loss of crops due to lack of rain, but an amount that could outfit more than a score of family farms. The proposals were not funded.\n\nPowers finally found an ally in Daniel Ruggles of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Ruggles was a West Point graduate, a former general in the Confederate Army, and the owner of a ranch in Rio Bravo, Texas, who received a patent in 1880 \"for producing rain fall ... by conveying and exploding torpedoes or other explosive agents within the cloud realm.\" Ruggles's \"invention\" consisted, in brief, of a balloon carrying torpedoes and cartridges charged with such explosives as nitroglycerine,  dynamite, gun cotton, gunpowder, or fulminates, and connecting the balloon with an electrical apparatus for exploding the ordnance.\n\nLike his predecessor Espy, Ruggles made surprising claims to have \"invented a method for condensing clouds in the atmospheric realm, and for precipitating rainfall from rain-clouds, to prevent drought, to stimulate and sustain vegetation, to equalize rainfall and waterflow, and by combining the available scientific inventions of the age, to guard against pestilence and famine, and to prevent, or to alleviate them where prevailing.\" He claimed that the concussions and vibrations of the explosions would, under the proper conditions, consolidate the \"diffused mists\" passing overhead into rainfalls. His scheme favored the remote detonation of the explosives using timed fuses or electric wires, but for more precision (and much greater risk) he also imagined aeronauts bombing the clouds with torpedoes attached to parachutes. Promising scientific rigor (still a challenge today in rainmaking), he proposed to select clouds on which to experiment in conformity with \"well-defined meteorological data,\" which he listed as \"barometric tension, thermometer and its changes, hygrometer, anemometer, anemoscope ..., elevation, average rainfall, river stages, and magneto-electric condition of the atmosphere\" (10).\n\nArguing that if God had not wanted us to manipulate the clouds, he would not have placed them so clearly in our line of vision, Ruggles promised \"to _appropriate the atmospheric laws of cloud-land_ , in sunshine and in storm, and direct them, so far as may be practicable, within the sphere of the great industrial interests and energies of man\" (12). Dazzled by his own genius, the scope of the undertaking, and the prospects for \"untold advancement,\" he exclaimed, \"The field is broad\u2014very broad; as deep as it is broad\u2014it is very deep!\" (12).\n\nRuggles claimed (as did every generation afterward) that he was taking the next step technologically, in this case by ascending above the Earth's surface into the atmospheric realms with balloon probes and human aeronauts using the latest chemical explosives and electrical devices, all under the banner of advanced engineering and meteorological science unknown to Espy:\n\nThe gigantic stride of the engineer through the cloud-capped mountains, and with miraculous force rendering asunder the foundations of old ocean's bed; the modern \"Prometheus,\" magneto-electric lightning, had not then been enchained; the leviathan \"steam\" had not then been bound to the billowy ocean's foam; aerial navigation sat with clipped wings in the portals of the temple of science; the grand triumphs in chemical philosophy in the development of explosives; in the condensation of the elements of light in the photographic art; the development of mines of vast extent and fabulous wealth; the unfolded banner of meteorological  science\u2014no, none of these grand revelations of occult science were available to him. They had then [in Espy's day] scarcely dawned upon the horizon of the human mind. (13)\n\nWrapping up his argument, which was by now a secular sermon, with themes borrowed from the march of progress and the pulpit, Ruggles claimed that his technique might alleviate human suffering both in the United States and around the world:\n\nThe conformation of our continent, crowned with lofty mountain ranges, its great bounding rivers, its broad fertile plains, and its boundless forests\u2014all swept by the rain-clouds of surrounding oceans\u2014all, all give assurance that a combination of skill and industry will materially protect our soil from impending drought, and from those visitations of desolating famine so often chronicled in the eastern world.... [If this plan works,] no other scheme of philanthropy known to man\u2014save that embodied in the Christian dispensation\u2014transcends it! (17\u201318)\n\nDescribing his scheme as an \"advanced step\" in the science of \"meteorological engineering,\" Ruggles appealed, unsuccessfully, to the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture for $10,000 in support of his rainmaking experiments. A Civil War veteran who had witnessed major battles with no rain at all wrote in a letter to _Scientific American_ that if cannon explosions in a battle do not cause rain, Ruggles's patent balloon will not do it either. An editorial writer opined, \"We do not think the invention is worth a cent or the patent either.\"\n\n#  A Perfect Imitation of Battle\n\nRobert St. George Dyrenforth (1844\u20131910), a controversial and flamboyant patent lawyer from Washington, D.C., was certain that rain could be caused by explosions in midair. He read whatever he could about rainmaking, including Le Maout's pamphlets from France and the second edition of Powers's book, published in 1890, and consulted with meteorologist John P. Finley of the Signal Service and many others. During a severe and prolonged western drought, Charles Farwell, now a U.S. senator, succeeded in obtaining appropriations of $9,000 for the support of a new series of field experiments on rainmaking by concussion. He recommended that Secretary of Agriculture Jeremiah Rusk be placed in charge of the project. The newly formed U.S. Weather Bureau, also under Rusk's supervision, was quite skeptical of rainmaking by concussion, and the chief of  the Division of Forestry, Bernhard E. Fernow, thought that the entire enterprise was under-conceptualized, with no reasonable expectation that the experiments would be effective. Nevertheless, Rusk chose Dyrenforth as the lead investigator and special agent of the government.\n\nDyrenforth was born in Chicago and received his education in Germany, at Prussian military academies, at the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe, and at the University of Heidelberg, where he was awarded a doctorate in mechanical engineering in 1869. He served as a war correspondent during the Austro-Prussian War of 1861 and, during the Civil War, attained the rank of major in the Union Army, but later he claimed he was a \"general.\" After studying law at Colombian College in Washington, D.C., he worked as an attorney for the Patent Office and in private practice. It was said that Dyrenforth was boastful of his accomplishments, even alleged ones, and was extremely demanding of both his family and his subordinates.\n\nDyrenforth decided that the best rainmaking policy would be to attack the atmosphere on multiple fronts with balloons, kites, dynamite, mortars, smoke bombs, and even fireworks. His primary idea was to stimulate condensation of moisture or deflection and mixing of opposing moist and cold air currents by concussion, using whatever explosive devices were available to him. In this, he was firmly following trails blazed by Powers and Ruggles. Dyrenforth theorized that as secondary effects, the explosions would generate shock, pressure, and heat, creating a powerful upward current in the form of an eddy or a whirlpool and inward- and upward-rushing streams of air in line with Espy's convective theory. The explosions should also generate electrical charges that would polarize the Earth and sky, generate a magnetic field, and possibly enhance the condensation of moisture\u2014a theory reminiscent of the one articulated by the American chemist Robert Hare in the 1830s. Following a line of reasoning attributed to the Scottish physicist and meteorologist John Aitken. Dyrenforth expected smoke from the gunpowder to provide nuclei for the agglomeration of suspended particles of moisture.\n\nAnother idea was that balloons inflated with one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen and detonated aloft with an electric spark would supposedly form a small amount of liquid water in the process, thereby seeding the clouds with sympathetic nuclei for the aggregation of more water. Critics pointed out that producing hydrogen and oxygen gases in the field was slow and required bulky and expensive equipment and supplies. Moreover, since a large exploding balloon could be expected to produce no more than 6 ounces of water, it would probably be more efficient to fly a pint of water into a cloud on a balloon or kite and just release it. Dyrenforth was persistent, however, since he favored a secondary  effect of this technique: the loud bang produced by the exploding balloon. He noted that a small bubble of oxy-hydrogen produces a report like a \"horse-pistol,\" and recalled an occasion years before, when physicist Joseph Henry had detonated 50 cubic feet of the mixture in a buried vessel, and the explosion tore a hole in the ground 18 feet in diameter. Dyrenforth's experiments with rackarock (an explosive widely used in coal mining) and a 10-foot oxy-hydrogen balloon on his country estate in Mount Pleasant, near the current National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., were witnessed by Secretary of the Smithsonian Samuel P. Langley, John Wesley Powell of the U.S. Geological Survey, patent-holder Daniel Ruggles, and other luminaries. Although Dyrenforth did not generate rain that day, he did induce a letter of protest to the secretary of agriculture from his neighbor William J. Rhees, chief clerk of the Smithsonian, who claimed the blasts disturbed his fine herd of Jersey cows, shook his farmhouse, and alarmed his family. Beyond the neighborhood upset, this exercise in backyard bombing, with smoke billowing and flaming oxy-hydrogen balloons falling from the sky, was dramatic, it attracted a large crowd of onlookers, and it was fun. It amounted to the government's declaration of war on both drought and boredom.\n\nNelson Morris, a prominent Chicago meatpacker who was said to own the largest herd of Black Angus cattle in the world, offered his \"C\" Ranch near Midland, Texas, as a site for the field trials. The ranch was located at 32\u00ba12'N, 102\u00ba20' W, at an elevation of about 3,000 feet, in dry, hilly country just off the right-of-way of the Texas and Pacific Railroad. Morris sweetened the offer with free room and board for Dyrenforth's team and payment of all local expenses. The site is located on Ranch Road 1788, not far from the New Mexico towns of Alamogordo, Socorro, and Roswell, if you get my drift and are looking for a day trip.\n\nThe advance party left Washington, D.C., on July 3, 1891, by train, carrying suitcases, mortars, and 2 tons of cast-iron borings furnished by the navy for making hydrogen. The full account is in Dyrenforth's final report, but as recorded more humorously by the _Farm Implement News_ of Chicago, the party consisted of half a dozen special scientists, \"all of whom know a great deal, some of them having become bald-headed in their earnest search for theoretical knowledge.\" Myers and Castellar were the balloonists; Rosell, the chemist; Curtis, the meteorologist; and Draper, the electrician. In St. Louis, they added 8 tons of sulfuric acid in drums, 5 additional tons of cast iron, 1 ton of chloride of potash, and 0.5 ton of manganese oxide, along with casks, balloons, and other supplies. Once they got to Texas, the railroad provided them free passage to Midland, where they arrived on August 5. Waiting for them on the siding was a block of pure tin rolled into thin sheets for making electrical kites and six kegs of blasting powder donated by a local coal mine.\n\nThe arrival of \"Generals\" Dyrenforth, Powers, and Ruggles coincided with a summer dry spell but also, conveniently, with the traditional (and commonly known) onset of the rainy or monsoon season, when winds from the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California typically bring showers and thunderstorms to the high plains. Dyrenforth, broad-shouldered and brash, wearing cavalry boots and a campaign pith helmet, gave a public address to dramatize the situation and heighten the sense of accomplishment if his rainmaking experiments happened to succeed. He emphasized the barrenness and extreme aridity of the region, the heat, harsh Sun, cloudless sky, dry south wind, alkaline soil, and feeling that his skin was turning into parchment. Although even as he spoke the winds were beginning to loft moisture across Texas from the south, he pointed out the current local dry conditions. He was sure that, by his technique, Midland's wells and lakes would fill up, its fine soils would produce a bountiful crop, and there would be little left to desire\u2014if the region could only be supplied with water.\n\nAt the \"C\" Ranch, a front line of attack was established with sixty makeshift mortars constructed from 6-inch well pipe. His crew tamped charges of dynamite into prairie dog holes, placed them on flat stones, and draped mesquite bushes with rackarock. The electrical kites and the oxy-hydrogen balloons formed the second and third lines of battle. The contract meteorologist, George E. Curtis, deployed barometers, thermometers, sling psychrometers, and an anemometer, but curiously no rain gauges and no electrical measuring apparatus. The first rain fell on August 13, before any experiments had been made, but the _Chicago Herald_ reported this event as \"heavy rain at the ranch in response to the party's efforts.\" This on a day when the U.S. Weather Bureau was predicting rain and showers in the state, mainly east of Midland. Still, Dyrenforth assumed that he had had some effect in causing the nimbus clouds to drop their loads on Midland and claimed that he had caused a \"very heavy rain\" of about an inch that day.\n\nThe reporter on assignment from the _Farm Implement News_ had a different perspective. The headline read: \"News from the Rainmakers. They fail on account of the dry weather and because their apparatus won't work. The elements play them false.\" Of their efforts he wrote,\n\nTheir kites fail to fly ..., their hydrogen tanks and their balloons leak, and even the clouds fail to cooperate.... When the gas generating furnace caught fire, eventually a cowboy roped the blazing furnace and dragged it into a stock tank and extinguished the flame. ... And when a cumulus cloud happens to pass their way, rain often falls before they can make their explosive apparatus work.\n\nBeginning on the evening of August 17, a massive barrage of aerial and ground explosions echoed throughout the night. At dawn, the skies were clear, but twelve hours later rain began to fall in the area. Dyrenforth took immediate credit for this, even though the ranch received only a trace amount of rain. About a week later, on August 25, a day after the weather observer, Curtis, had departed, Dyrenforth declared the weather \"settled and dry,\" this according to the opinion of the ranch hands. The team set off a barrage of explosions all day, ending at eleven o'clock that night with Dyrenforth commenting that the \"atmosphere at that time [was] very clear, and as dry as I have ever observed it.\" But seemingly, the concussions had done their job, for \"at about 3 o'clock on the following morning, August 26, I was awakened by violent thunder, which was accompanied by vivid lightning, and a heavy rainstorm was seen to the north\u2014that is, in the direction toward which the surface wind had steadily blown during the firing, and hence the direction in which the shocks of the explosions were chiefly carried.\"\n\nProfessor Alexander McFarlane of the University of Texas had a different perspective: \"The trial of Friday, August 25, was a crucial test, and resulted not only in demonstrating what every person who has any sound knowledge of physics knows, that it is impossible to produce rain by making a great noise, but also that even the explosion of a twelve-foot balloon inside a black rain cloud does not bring down a shower.\" Dyrenforth left the next day for Washington with an inconclusive set of results, but clearly thinking and claiming that he had made a difference. He instructed his expedition, under the direction of John T. Ellis, to carry on in El Paso at the invitation of the mayor, as long as expenses were paid.\n\nIn need of munitions, Ellis contracted with the Consolidated Fireworks Company of North America in New York City for six dozen bombshell salutes, each weighing 21 pounds. He also bought 2,000 cubic feet of oxygen and 1,000 pounds of dynamite. The city of El Paso paid the $477 bill for equipment and shipping. The team conducted experiments in September about 1.5 miles north of the city center, on a ridge about 5,700 feet above sea level.\n\nOn September 18, a team of twenty-three artillerists fired at the sky all day long, in what one observer called \"a beautiful imitation of a battle.\" Many prominent witnesses were in attendance for the event, including the mayor, the local weather bureau observer, curious citizens, and dignitaries from Mexico. They assembled on the ridgeline with their buggies and parasols to watch Ellis inflate his hydrogen balloon and ascend into the heavens (figure 2.1). Most brought their lunches and were treated to an all-day fireworks display. Witnesses reported seeing clouds and lightning flashes downwind at sunset (not at all unusual in this  climate). Ellis reported hopefully, \"Soon after midnight rain had begun to fall _within a few miles of El Paso_ , to the south and southeast.\" Remember, however, that they were experimenting _north_ of the city and the prevailing winds were from the south. In other words, whether the Ellis team was responsible or not, they were willing to take credit for any rain that fell anywhere in the region. The final bill presented to the city for one thundershower during the \"rainy\" season was $1,300.\n\n2.1 Weather engineers and onlookers in El Paso, Texas, watching the inflation of the balloon in which John T. Ellis is to make his ascent. ( _HARPER'S WEEKLY_ , OCTOBER 10, 1891, 772)\n\nFrom there, the team proceeded by invitation to Corpus Christi and San Diego, Texas, which were reportedly \"suffering a severe drought\"; according to Ellis, when the group arrived and before they could set up their equipment, \"a heavy rain had set in from off the Gulf of Mexico and the weather continued stormy for several days.\" Still, they decided to bombard the rain-swept skies. Although many shells were detonated with no apparent effect, Ellis reported, selectively, that one explosion, in heavier clouds than usual, \"was immediately followed by a downpour which lasted for several minutes and soaked the [observing] party to the skin before they could enter a carriage\" (33).\n\nAccording to long-term climatological records, West Texas was well watered in 1891, with rainfall up to an inch more than average. Or could it be that the amount was enhanced and the statistics skewed by the Dyrenforth team's purported successes? Lieutenant S. Allen Dyer, second in command of the expedition, concluded from his experiences that \"rain can be produced by artificial means ... and 'rainmaking' will prove a practicable and most valuable success when the conditions are favorable for rain\" (41). Eugene Fairchild, an expedition member, testified: \"I am convinced that the experiments have been entirely successful, and furthermore that the scheme is practicable\" (53). But how practical is it to have more than twenty artillerists staying in a town at a cost of more than $1,500 just for materials? Nevertheless, some prominent citizens of San Diego said they were \"astonished\" at the results and were sure that the rain was a direct result of the experiment. Judge James O. Luby sent Dyrenforth his congratulations: \"What was my surprise, after retiring for the night, to hear the patter [of rain] on the shingles; I then knew that, in the language of the festive cowboy, you had 'got a cinch on Old Pluvius,' and that the 'Powers' that be, go there with the limpid _aqua pura_ \" (55).\n\nNevertheless, Dyrenforth, who had spent $17,000 for the three experiments ($9,000 from the government and $8,000 from local sources and assistance in kind), sounded a note of uncertainty in his official report: \"The few experiments which have been made, do not furnish sufficient data from which to form definite conclusions, or evidence upon which to uphold or condemn the theories of the artificial production or increase of rainfall by concussion\" (57). Still, he ventured the following three positive \"inferences\":\n\nFirst, that when a moist cloud is present, which if undisturbed, would pass away without precipitating its moisture, the jarring of the cloud by concussions will cause the particles of moisture in suspension to agglomerate and fall in greater or less quantity, according to the degree of moistness of the air in and beneath the cloud.\n\nSecond, that by taking advantage of those periods which frequently occur in droughts, and in most if not in all sections of the U.S. where precipitation is insufficient for vegetation, and during which atmospheric conditions favor rainfall, without there being actual rain, precipitation may be caused by concussion.\n\nThird, that under the most unfavorable conditions for precipitation ... storm conditions may be generated and rain be induced, there being, however, a wasteful expenditure of both time and material in overcoming unfavorable conditions. (58)\n\nTo paraphrase all this, if you go to a dry area during a typically rainy season and conduct entertaining and impressive demonstrations but do not take any careful  measurements, you can usually convince the eyewitnesses of your efficacy and, in turn, claim credit for any rain that does fall nearby.\n\nThe media had a field day with Dyrenforth's experiments. The _Nation_ criticized the government for wasting tax dollars, observing that the effect of the explosion of a 10-foot hydrogen balloon on aerial currents would be less than \"the effect of the jump of one vigorous flea upon a thousand-ton steamship running at a speed of twenty knots.\" _Scientific American_ pointed out that after the rainmakers had telegraphed from Texas to all parts of the country announcing the wonderful success of their bombs, it was discovered that the meteorological records for that locality had indicated probabilities for rain for a day or two in advance of the firing, and that the rain would have fallen all the same without any burning of powder or sending up of balloons. The article was accompanied by an illustration of traditional rainmaking in India and the cutting remark that there \"seems to be little doubt that the swinging of a Hindoo head downward is just as effective for producing rain as the making of loud noises.\" The _Farm Implement News_ published a satirical cartoon of Dyrenforth and his team in action (figure 2.2).\n\nF. W. Clarke's humorous \"An Ode to Pluviculture; or, The Rhyme of the Rain Machine,\" published in _Life_ in 1891, was undoubtedly inspired by Dyrenforth's experiments. In the poem, the hapless farmer, Jeremy Jonathan Joseph Jones, seeks to break a drought using\n\ncannon, and mortars, and lots of shells,   \nAnd dynamite by the ton;   \nWith a gas balloon and a chime of bells   \nAnd various other mystic spells   \nTo overcloud the sun.\n\nHis third shot into a cloudless sky \"brought a heavy dew\"; his fourth, tornadoes, \"thunder, rain and hail.\" Jeremy drowned in the ensuing flood, and his farm is now a lake. All efforts to stop the deluge were in vain,\n\nUntil the Bureau at Washington stirred,   \nAnd stopped the storm with a single word,   \nBy just predicting\u2014Rain\n\nCurtis, the meteorologist on the Dyrenforth expedition, ended his official report on a sour note: \"These experiments have not afforded any scientific standing to the theory that rain-storms can be produced by concussions.\" He thought  it had only encouraged the \"charlatans and sharpers\" who were busily engaged in defrauding the farmers of the semiarid states by contracting to produce rain and by selling rights to use their various methods. But Senator Farwell, who had supported the experiments, was very upbeat in an interview with the _New York World_ : \"For twenty years I have had no doubt rain could be produced in that way, and quite expected the experiments to be successful.... When Prof. Dyrenforth makes his official report of these experiments, I expect that [the government will appropriate] $1 million, may be, or $500 thousand any way, for rainmaking.\" Dyrenforth ultimately claimed victory and was actually reappointed as government rainmaker in 1892 to continue the work in San Antonio, Texas, with a grant of $10,000, although he spent less than half of that. He distanced himself from all the press coverage and hoopla, but claimed in his official report that his  practical skills, combined with his use of special explosives \"to keep the weather in an unsettled condition,\" could cause or at least enhance precipitation\u2014when conditions were favorable! Not everyone was convinced, however.\n\n2.2 Robert St. George Dyrenforth claimed success after his federally funded rainmaking mission to Texas in 1891. After receiving a telegram from the weather bureau saying \"Rainstorm approaching,\" Dyrenforth orders his assistants to speed up: \"Hurry up the inflation, touch off the bombs, send up the kites, let go the rackarock; here's a telegram announcing a storm. If we don't hurry, it will be on us before we raise our racket.\" (CARTOON BY H. MAYER, IN _FARM IMPLEMENT NEWS_ , SEPTEMBER 1891, 25)\n\nIn 1891 Lucien I. Blake, professor of physics and electrical engineering at Kansas State Agricultural College, reviewed the Dyrenforth experiments and criticized the working assumption that concussion alone could make it rain. Blake noted that the effect of \"air quakes\" (basically energy from sound waves) should be immediate, yet Dyrenforth reported rain hours or days after the explosions. Perhaps, argued Blake, the smoke and particles from the explosions had a greater effect than the concussions. He pointed out that scientists had recently discovered that moisture does not condense in dust-free air but only in the presence of dust nuclei, or \"Aitken nuclei.\" Blake further observed that every hailstone had a bit of dust in it and pointed to his own experimental seeding results with powders of carbon, silica, sulfur, and common salt that precipitated the moisture in a condensation chamber, and on burning sulfur and gunpowder to produce heavy, visible clouds of vapor.\n\nA year later, Blake proposed a field test to produce rain in the free atmosphere by raising, at intervals of about half a mile, a number of relatively inexpensive tethered balloons, each lifting a 30-pound smoldering ball of turpentine mixed with sawdust, straw, or paper pulp. These would generate a considerable smoke screen and might produce the right type of nuclei in the proper (but not excessive) concentrations needed for rain. Although he had insufficient funds for the field test, he claimed that his reasoning was based on sound laboratory experiments and would be much cheaper than Dyrenforth's elaborate explosive techniques.\n\nObservers from afar also commented on the explosive American rainmaking attempts. In _Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London_ for 1892, Sir William Moore noted that a rainmaker in New York had exploded 200 pounds of dynamite carried aloft by a balloon over the Croton Aqueduct and was immediately rewarded with a heavy downpour. He thought it \"quite possible\" to produce rain, since in his understanding clouds were \"masses of minute vesicles\" in an aeriform state. Their liquefaction could be caused by an explosion and the resulting compression that forces the moisture to coalesce, become larger drops, and fall as rain. Contrary to Powers, Ruggles, and Dyrenforth, all of whom maintained that concussive explosions could intervene directly in copious streams of invisible high-altitude moisture, Moore held that the amount of rain produced artificially would be insufficient unless clouds were already present, an unlikely situation during droughts in tropical lands. Instead, he recommended that governments invest in irrigation systems.\n\nOne of the more colorful ideas for bringing down the rain at the time came from G. H. Bell of New York in 1880. He proposed building a series of hollow towers 1,500 feet high\u2014one set of towers to blow saturated air up to cooler air and have the moisture condensed into rain, the other set to suck in rain clouds and store them for use as needed. The inventor considered that the same system could be used to prevent rain by reversing the blower so that the descending air might \"annihilate\" the clouds.\n\nOther explosive ideas were in the air as well. A weather patent to destroy or disrupt tornadoes was filed by J. B. Atwater in 1887. His device consisted of dynamite charges with blasting caps installed on poles and situated a mile or so southwest of a settlement. A tornado crossing the elevated minefield was supposed to detonate the explosives with its high winds and flying debris, hopefully disrupting its circulation and protecting the town. With the likelihood of a given area being visited by tornadoes rare and their recurrence even more rare, the installation of minefields, even elevated ones, never caught on\u2014fortunately so for the generation of children then playing in the fields.\n\nThe most improbable invention, however, belongs to Laurice Leroy Brown of Patmos, Kansas, who filed a patent application in 1892 for an \"automatic transporter and exploder for explosives aiding rain-fall\" (figure 2.3). The device was basically a large tower ( _A_ ) with a sloping wire ( _B_ ) connected to a battery ( _C_ ) on which an operator can hang a stick of dynamite ( _D_ ) on a pulley ( _E_ ) and have it roll along a track until it completes an electrical circuit through a wire ( _F_ ) and point ( _G_ ) at the end of the track ( _H_ ). The completed electric circuit was intended to ignite the dynamite and set off shock waves to stimulate rainfall, according to the ideas published by Edward Powers. Although erecting, and especially operating, such a device would certainly be a welcome diversion on the Kansas plains, possible design flaws include the danger to the operator of climbing a high metal tower with sticks of dynamite during an electrical storm and the apparent certainty that the first detonation of explosives at the end of the track would completely destroy the apparatus at the base of the sloping wire.\n\nIn the nineteenth century, the scientific rain kings\u2014James Espy, Charles Le Maout, Edward Powers, Daniel Ruggles, and Robert Dyrenforth\u2014were altruistic monomaniacs who based their vision of a prosperous and healthy world order on the ultimate control of a single weather variable: precipitation. Grasping at scientific straws while posing as masters of an esoteric aerial realm, they  appealed to the public's sense of the possible and, for funding, to the government's general lack of good sense. They wrote speculative books, brandished patents, and tinkered with their gadgets and toys, many of them incendiary or explosive, like children with firecrackers on the Fourth of July. It would be unfair to call them charlatans, since they explained their technical principles, experimented in the open (often with military surplus equipment), and avoided direct or deceptive marketing techniques. Yet there was often more hoopla than actual theory, and in lieu of results, their efforts produced perhaps less promise than hype.\n\n2.3 Tower and dynamite detonator proposed by Laurice Leroy Brown. Aside from the danger of climbing a high metal tower when storms are building, the dynamite ( _D_ ) sliding down the sloping wire ( _B_ ) would completely destroy that part of the apparatus. (ADAPTED FROM U.S. PATENT APPLICATION 473, 820, APRIL 26, 1892)\n\nOf course, things are different now, if only much larger in scale. Twenty-first-century climate engineers behave as, well, altruistic monomaniacs who base their vision of a prosperous and healthy world order on the ultimate control of a single climate variable: either solar radiation or carbon dioxide (chapter 8). Yes, things  are truly different now. No longer do \"climate kings\" grasp at scientific straws while posing as masters of an esoteric aerial realm; nor do they appeal to the public's sense of the possible and, for funding, to the government's general lack of good sense. Or do they? There is no flood of speculative books, patents, articles, and gadgets regarding geoengineering. Or is there? Surely the \"boys with their military toys\" syndrome has long since passed. Or has it?\n\n**3**\n\nRAIN FAKERS\n\n_Among the many people who \"live by their wits\" there is a class who prey_ _upon others subtly yet publicly. Their impelling motives, cupidity and desire_ _for notoriety are stimulated by their vanity, and their rudder is hypocrisy._ _Although it is their business to live at the expense of others, it is not as parasites_ _or fawning dependents; rather, they make dupes of their patrons, and they_ _do this by pretending to possess knowledge or skill of a high order in some_ _professional line. Their victims become their prey through sheer credulity and_ _the predatory class [is known as] charlatans._\n\n\u2014DANIEL HERING, _FOIBLES AND FALLACIES OF SCIENCE_\n\n\" **IT** is not in human nature to suffer froma prolonged orrepeated evil without seeking for a remedy\"\u2014so wrote Daniel Hering in 1924 regarding weather control. In the struggle of the agriculturalist against hail and drought, that \"remedy\" was to seek new techniques for altering the weather. When the rainmaker mixed his proprietary chemicals and a sprinkle of rain touched the parched prairie, it was hard to dissuade the relieved farmers from believing that they had witnessed a miracle. Hering called this charlatanism an \"old, familiar form of delusion\"\u2014 _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_ \u2014and a weather control, \"vagary.\" After the hail cannons were discharged with a mighty roar and the storm clouds dissipated, \"it [was] hard ... to convince the relieved grape growers that the cannons [had] not shot the storm away\" (249).\n\nThe hoopla and hype of Robert Dyrenforth and his team could well be considered a form of charlatanism, except that they made some attempt, modest as it was, to explain their assumptions and they conducted their affairs without extensive marketing efforts. Like James Espy before him, Dyrenforth fits better into the sincere but deluded category of those who became overly enthusiastic about  a single technique or theory. The hail shooters and the rainmakers who mixed secret chemicals, however, preyed on misguided hope and gullibility.\n\n#  At War with the Clouds\n\nOver the years, two basic approaches have prevailed concerning what to do when severe weather threatens: ceremonial and militaristic. Sacrifices, prayers, and the ringing of consecrated storm bells were favored by most until about 1750; since then, military assaults on the clouds have predominated. In ancient Greece, the official \"hail wardens\" of Cleonae were appointed at public expense to watch for hail and then signal the farmers to offer blood sacrifices to protect their fields: a lamb, a chicken, or even a poor man drawing blood from his finger was deemed sufficient. But woe to the negligent hail watcher if the signal was not given in time to offer the sacrifices and the crops were subsequently flattened. He himself might be beaten down by the angry farmers. The Roman philosopher Seneca mocked this practice as one of the \"silly theories of our Stoic friends.\" In Norse tradition, making a loud racket during storms was said to frighten away the demons of the storm. This was also a widespread practice among early and medieval Christians. A passage in the Bible about the \"prince of the power of the air\" convinced Saint Jerome that there were devils around when storms were about. Witches, too, were accused of causing bad weather. The _Compendium Maleficarum_ (1626) contained an illustration of a witch riding a goat in the storm clouds. Throughout the Middle Ages, processions, often involving entire villages, were held in times of storm.\n\nChurch bells were inscribed, consecrated, and even baptized. In his _Meteorological Essays_ (1855), the noted French scientist and politician Fran\u00e7ois Arago cited a number of traditional prayers that were recited during the installation of a new church bell, including the following: \"Bless this bell, and whenever it rings may it drive far off the malign influences of evil spirits, whirlwinds, thunderbolts, and the devastations which they cause.\" As well as calling the faithful to prayer and assembly and warning the community of invaders, the peals of the church bell were thought to agitate the air, disperse sulfurous exhalations, protect against thunder and lightning, and disperse hail and wind. The German playwright and lyric poet Friedrich Schiller placed as the motto of his famous \"Song of the Bell\" the Latin inscription customarily adorning many church bells: _Vivos voco; Mortuos plango; Fulgura frango_ (I call the living; I mourn the dead; I break the lightning). In Austria, it was traditional to ring \"thunder bells\" or blow on huge \"weather horns\" while herdsmen set up a terrific howl and women rattled  chains and beat milk pails to scare away the destructive spirit of the storm. But is it dangerous to ring church bells during thunderstorms? Because a large number of bell ringers had been struck dead by lightning, Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria banned the practice in 1750. The French government followed suit in 1786, but noted in its decision that the demons were still suspected of throwing lightning at churches. Still, bell ringers were well advised to avoid any proximity to or contact with a wet rope connected to a large metal object in a high tower during electrical storms.\n\n3.1 Medieval hail archers. (OLAUS MAGNUS, _HISTORIA DE GENTIBUS SEPTENTRIONALIBUS_ , 1555)\n\nConfronting the storm with displays of military might was also a venerable practice (figure 3.1). The mythical King Salmoneus of Elis, who traced his lineage to Aeolean roots, was an arrogant man who imitated thunder by dragging bronze kettles behind his chariot and hurled blazing torches at the sky to imitate lightning. It was his impious wish to mimic the thunder of Zeus as it rolled across the vault of heaven. Indeed, he declared that he actually _was_ Zeus and designated himself the recipient of sacrificial offerings. Zeus punished this ridiculous behavior by striking him dead with a thunderbolt and destroying his capital city of Salmonia. His mistake of playing god brought down the wrath of heaven against him, but also triggered the annihilation of both the unjust and the just in his kingdom. In this case, imitation was not rewarded as the sincerest form of flattery. In the fifth century B.C.E., Artaxerxes I of Persia was said to have planted two special swords in the ground with the points uppermost to drive away clouds, hail, and thunderstorms. In France in the eighth century, the populace  erected long poles in the fields to do the trick. The poles were not anticipations of Benjamin Franklin's lightning rods, but were festooned with pieces of paper covered with magic inscriptions to protect against storms, a practice that the emperor Charlemagne regarded as superstitious. In the farm communities of central Europe, it was traditional to ignite gigantic heaps of straw and brushwood in advance of an approaching storm. The main effect of this was likely not meteorological, but it did foster a sense of shared risk and community engagement. Of course, the burning pyres contributed to the awesome spectacle of flashing lightning and pealing thunder.\n\nIn more recent times, according to Arago, nautical men generally believed that the noise of artillery dissipated thunderstorms and that waterspouts could be disrupted by the firing of cannon (figure 3.2). He mentioned the case of the Comte d'Estr\u00e9es, who in 1680 fired on storms off the coast of South America and dissipated them, reportedly to the amazement of the Spanish witnesses. In 1711, however, a furious French naval bombardment in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro was followed by a tremendous thunderstorm (216).\n\n3.2 Naval vessel firing its guns at a triple waterspout. (ESPY, _THE PHILOSOPHY OF STORMS_ )\n\nThe practice of firing storm cannon apparently spread from sea to land. An entry on _orage_ by Louis de Jaucourt in the famous French _Encyclop\u00e9die_ of 1750 states that the dissipation of storms by the noise of cannon \"does not seem out of all probability\" and may be worth the cost of an experiment. By 1769 a retired French naval officer, the Marquis de Chevriers, had set up his battery in France to fight against strong hail and damaging storms. Ever the empiricist, Arago examined the weather records of the Paris Observatory, where, within earshot, regular gun practice took place for more than twenty years at a nearby fort. He found no effect of the cannonading on dissipating the clouds (214\u2013218). By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the opposite opinion\u2014that the concussions of great explosions might make it rain\u2014had garnered renewed public attention, but certainly not acceptance, through the work of Charles Le Maout, Edward Powers, Daniel Ruggles, and Robert Dyrenforth.\n\n##  _Hagelschiessen_\n\nFor centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to dispel them. Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches riding in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty barrels to make a great noise\u2014perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance of the storm. In 1896 Albert Stiger, a vine grower in southeastern Austria and burgomaster of Windisch-Feistritz, revived the ancient tradition of _hagelschiessen_ (hail shooting)\u2014basically declaring \"war on the clouds\" by firing cannon when storms threatened. Faced with mounting losses from summer hailstorms that threatened his grapes, he attempted to disrupt, with mortar fire, the \"calm before the storm,\" or what he observed as a strange stillness in the air moments before the onset of heavy summer precipitation.\n\nStiger gained notoriety on his first attempt. A gentle rain in his valley reportedly accompanied his shooting on June 4, 1896, with damaging hail falling elsewhere. He experienced a very militant summer, shooting at the clouds on forty different occasions. His hail cannon were constructed from 12-inch iron mortars (or pipes) and were loaded with a quarter pound of black powder; but some of them burst upon firing. Their replacements were made of steel with funnel-shaped chimneys taken from the smokestacks of worn-out railway engines, which the state provided to Stiger and others free of charge. The devices resembled megaphones pointed vertically and were installed on strong bases made of oak, some with wheels for towing. Later models had a steel ring welded inside  the barrel to act as rifling, giving the discharged gases and smoke a distinct rotation and a whistling sound, said to be effective in agitating the air (figure 3.3).\n\n3.3 International Congress on Hail Shooting, 1901\n\nStiger erected lines of small huts overlooking his valley, with the funnels of the hail cannon protruding through their roofs. They were spaced about half a mile apart and were located along ridgelines. These \"hail forts\" were staffed by a small army of officers, artillerists, and signalmen who systematically fired at the clouds. The huts served the dual function of getting the shooters a bit closer to the clouds and keeping them and their powder dry so that firing could proceed even in the pouring rain.\n\nA number of sentries occupied mountain watchtowers during hail season. Their assignment was to sound a warning so that the artillerists could break up the ominous calm before a gathering storm. The forward sentry was the town's telegraph operator, who kept a magnetic dip needle in his office. When the instrument behaved erratically, its agitation was taken as an indication of the presence of great electrical tension in the air. Messages from nearby towns might also warn of advancing storms. The telegraph operator spread the warning locally by first hoisting a red flag, which alerted carriage operators and other drivers to keep a tight rein on their horses in anticipation of the coming barrage. Then he fired a  warning shot, which signaled the men to run to their posts to begin their fusillade of up to two shots per minute and up to a hundred shots per station per storm.\n\nAlthough the efficacy of the system was never proved, the kaiser had a favorable opinion of it, and the technique spread to nearby countries. Some guns were sold in northern Italy by 1900, and some insurance companies decided to offer lower rates to growers within earshot of the hail cannon. Some provincial governments provided funds so that towns could appoint a general officer, instruct the artillerists, test and operate the cannon, and stockpile powder provided by the military. It was an exciting day in the neighborhood when the hail cannon started roaring. According to one commentator, the discharge was impressive: \"From the mouth of the cannon issues a mass of heated gas, smoke, and smoke rings, propelled violently against the lowering cloud ... like puffs of a locomotive, but with far greater energy of propulsion ... a veritable gas attack in the realm of the aeronaut.\" Even though no ammunition was involved, it was said that the power of the shot could kill small birds.\n\nIn 1907 the American meteorologist Cleveland Abbe, who had been publishing critiques of hail shooting since the turn of the century, reported the demise of the practice in Italy. A special commission of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome had just issued a report that concluded, after testing more than two hundred cannon and other explosive devices through the course of five summer seasons, that there was no rational basis for expecting the noise, smoke, heat, or grand vortex rings to have any significant effect on enormous hail-generating clouds that extended over 30,000 feet in height. The study indicated that the vortex rings issuing from the hail cannon reached no higher than about 300 feet above the surface and had no influence on the storm clouds. The commissioners recommended that the Italian government no longer encourage \"such expensive and useless work.\" Although official support waned, the practice lingered, for hope springs eternal, and on occasion the clouds did disperse following a bombardment. Given the enormous sense of relief felt by the grape growers, it was hard to convince them that their artillery had not shot the storm away.\n\nContemporary hail shooters still make noise in farming communities on the Great Plains of the United States. In the film _Owning the Weather_ (2009), Mike Jones and his crew discharged a radio-controlled stovepipe-shaped cannon nestled inside a corral padded with bales of straw. They claimed that the cannon's whistling \"sonic boom disrupts the formation of hail\" and lessens the chances of its formation. Jones was aware of the checkered history of this practice, but claimed that a revival was under way because of new technologies and \"new understanding of the physics involved.\" Moreserious scientists were of the opinion that hail shooting gave a bad name to  weather modification practices. In 1926 William Jackson Humphreys denigrated the practice in the epigraph of his book: \"Trying to avert or destroy the hailstorm whether by scare or by prayer, by shooting or electrocuting, has been one of our fatuous follies from the earliest times down to the very present.\"\n\n#  Hurricane Cannon\n\nWilliam Suddards Franklin (1863\u20131930), a physics professor first at Lehigh University and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thought he understood atmospheric instability and how to use it for weather control. In 1901 he proposed to do something about hurricanes before they made landfall by exploding charges of gunpowder to initiate convection and thus dissipate a storm's source of energy before it could intensify. For Franklin, it was just an idea: \"Please don't think that I have the machinery all designed and constructed to put this idea into effect. In fact I have made no experiments and do not know if the plan is at all practical.\"\n\nFranklin speculated about controlling the weather by using small amounts of judiciously placed energy. Just as an unstable brick chimney might collapse in a gust of wind, so, in an unstable atmosphere, it might be possible to trigger storms by exploding 5 to 10 tons of powder. Using the domino effect as a metaphor, he pointed out how turning a \"number of grasshoppers\" loose in a room full of dominos would surely result in their collapse. Franklin was convinced that the atmosphere also responded to what he called \"impetuous processes,\" such as a single spark causing a raging fire or the movement of a single insect setting off a storm:\n\nImagine a warm layer of air near the ground overlaid with cold air. Such a condition of the atmosphere is unstable, and any disturbance, however minute, may conceivably start a general collapse. Thus a grasshopper in Idaho might conceivably initiate a storm movement, which would sweep across the continent and destroy New York City, or a fly in Arizona might initiate a storm movement, which would sweep out harmlessly into the Gulf of Mexico. These results are different surely, and the grasshopper and the fly may be of entirely unheard-of varieties, more minute and insignificant than anything assignable. Infinitesimal differences in the earlier stages of an impetuous process may, therefore, lead to finite differences in the final trend of the process.\n\nSuch minute disturbances \"may be the determining factor\" in what Franklin called \"atmospheric collapse,\" triggering the time and place of severe \"domino storms\" downstream. Note that triggering unstable equilibrium processes is not the same as the butterfly effect, or more properly the Lorenz attractor, of Edward Lorenz's chaos theory. The set of nonlinear, three-dimensional, and deterministic solutions to the Lorenz oscillator, when graphed, resembles a butterfly. I once asked Ed if a butterfly could actually affect the Earth's general circulation, especially given viscosity. He smiled and said, \"Perhaps if the butterfly was as big as the Rocky Mountains.\" I call this the \"Mothra effect.\"\n\nFranklin thought that the ultimate goal of meteorology was to devise a means for controlling storm movements by the suitable expenditure of energy at the critical time and place. Whether or not it could ever actually be realized, Franklin concluded, this was a \"legitimate conception to say the least,\" well worth the attention of meteorologists. He praised the smoke-ring cannon of Burgomaster Stiger as a possible means for controlling all kinds of storm movements and thought it might hold the key to weather control. After laying out the mathematics of the forecast problem and the need for some future computer to solve thousands of equations simultaneously, Franklin proposed a more prosaic method of protecting Florida, by \"touching off\" the local energy of the atmosphere when a hurricane approached. Imagine a line of overgrown hail cannon along the coast consisting of twenty or thirty very large open steel cones, 15 to 20 feet in diameter at the base, 40 to 50 feet in diameter at the top, and each 100 feet high, with a ton or more of gunpowder per cone to be exploded. This would drive the air in the cone (60,000 cubic feet of it) upward as a kind of giant \"smoke ring\" that would start a rising column of air, thus stealing this energy from the approaching hurricane. Although such a project could cost several million dollars, according to Franklin, the people of southern Florida would benefit if they funded it.\n\nAbbe thought that Franklin's suggestions were \"not the best that science has to offer.\" He pointed out that neither the concussions of cannonading nor Stiger's special vortex ring cannon had ever been proved to be effective. Abbe concluded, \"The importance of unstable equilibrium in the atmosphere is a matter that has been so thoroughly investigated since the days of Espy that Professor Franklin has only to study the modern literature of meteorology and the mechanics of whirlwinds in order to realize the folly of his argumentation.\" Abbe wanted experimental trial, not peasant-like faith. More than seventy years later, Ross Hoffman would again propose hurricane control using a distorted understanding of chaos theory as his guide (chapter 7).\n\n#  Kansas and Nebraska Rainmakers\n\nIn the 1880s and 1890s, intermittent drought conditions in Kansas and Nebraska, some regionally severe, combined with economic turmoil and crop failures to encourage farmers to seek the services of rainmakers. According to climatological records, the Midwest received nearly normal rainfall in 1891. Kansas and nearby states, however, experienced a summer dry spell (but not a full-blown drought) that was threatening to stunt the crops. The farmers, seeking to be proactive, contacted rainmaker Frank Melbourne\u2014known variously as \"the Australian,\" \"the Irish Rainmaker,\" or \"the Ohio Rain Wizard\"\u2014who promised a soaking areal rain for $500. \"Let every farmer who is able act promptly and contribute to this fund,\" advised the _Goodland News_ , \"and we will give to Goodland and Sherman county a valid boom such as they have never enjoyed before.\" Plans were made for the rainmaker to be the star attraction of the county fair, along with horse racing, public speeches, and a grand evening ball. The governor and members of the State Board of Agriculture were invited as special guests, and the Rock Island Railroad announced reduced fares for all. Those opposed to the effort cited the hubris of meddling in the \"Lord's business\" and the dangers of unintended consequences such as setting off a tornado \"that would blow the town from the face of the earth\" (310).\n\nThe rainmaker arrived amid great fanfare, with his proprietary chemicals and rain machine. But he arrived slightly damp, since a period of unsettled weather had just begun and a light rain was already falling. Determined to collect his fee by wringing even more moisture out of the clouds, Melbourne (perhaps a model for Jeremy the \"rain bat\") proceeded to the fairgrounds, where he mixed his chemicals in solitude on the second floor of a mysterious shed, especially erected to his specifications. The shed was cordoned off by a 20-foot rope perimeter patrolled by Melbourne's brother, who remained on the ground floor as a sort of bodyguard and bouncer. The general public could do little more than gaze at the shed, hoping to catch a glimpse of the \"cloud making substances\" escaping through a hole in the roof. Melbourne built up anticipation by releasing reports from neighboring towns announcing major rainfalls downwind, for which he took full credit. Ultimately, however, he failed to deliver on his contract. His excuse, which many accepted, was that conditions were not right for rainmaking ; the relatively cool nights and strong winds had rendered his chemicals and rain machine ineffective. Before leaving town for far-off engagements, never to return, Melbourne lined his pockets by selling his secret formula and copies of his rainmaking machines to local entrepreneurs. Soon three new enterprises\u2014the Inter-State Artificial Rain Company, the Swisher Rain Company, and  the Goodland Artificial Rain Company\u2014were sending \"rain-making squads\" throughout the region.\n\nIn 1894 the _American Meteorological Journal_ reported that entrepreneurial rainmakers had succeeded in convincing a number of people, and even some paying clients, that they could, for a price and with the proper chemicals, draw down moisture from the arid skies. The _Kansas City Star_ reported that the rainmakers possessed good timing, for they often commenced their experiments just as rain was due, convincing the gullible onlookers that their success was no coincidence. It did not hurt that, according to climatological records, rainfall was near normal in the region in 1893 and 1894.\n\nIn those years, the Rock Island Railroad Company maintained a popular rainmaking department and hauled a special car along the tracks with an agent who claimed not to be producing rain but to be assisting nature in the task by supplying certain missing (but unnamed) elements to the atmosphere through concussions, gaseous mixtures, and electrical discharges. By 1894 the railroad had developed ten such rainmaking outfits, frequently deploying three units at a time to operate in tandem. Clinton B. Jewell, the railroad's chief dispatcher, offered his rainmaking services free of charge. His mobile rainmaking car, inspired by Dyrenforth's experiments and outfitted at company expense with what Jewell claimed were the secret chemicals and apparatus of Melbourne, rode the rails as a kind of traveling fireworks and vaudeville show, detonating dynamite, launching exploding balloons and rockets, and dispensing foul-smelling volatile gases charged with electricity, the last said to chill the air to enhance condensation. He promised to deliver \"Kansas Weather\" to his clients across the Midwest.\n\nJewell gave reporters a tour of his car and a briefing on his procedures. He said his gas formula used \"metallic sodium, ammonia, black oxide of manganese, caustic potash, and aluminum,\" these mixed with an \"alloy known as murium,\" an imaginary radical thought to be an active agent in hydrochloric acid. These materials were both toxic and potentially explosive. When rain was to be produced, Jewell parked his car on a side track and filled an 800-gallon tank on the roof with water. Inside the car's laboratory was a wide shelf laden with bottles of chemicals and various sorts of apparatus. Under the shelf were large locked boxes, which were never opened in the presence of visitors. A second shelf supported a twenty-four-cell battery connected with wires to a very large jar. Another set of wires ran to the \"rain machine proper,\" which consisted of six large jars grouped by twos in which the gas was made and from which it was released from the car through three pipes. Other pipes, bottles, and vessels completed the scene, making the car look like a small chemistry laboratory. Jewell explained that no force  was necessary to send the warm, lighter-than-air, bluish gas into the sky: \"When the rainmaking machine is in operation, 1,500 feet of gas escapes from each of the three pipes each hour. The warm gas ascends steadily over the span of four hours to an altitude of between 4 and 8,000 feet.\" After several hours, the gas inexplicably \"turns cold instantly and drops with a rush, creating a vacuum, into which the moisture contained in the air rushes, forming clouds, and they form the storm center.\" Seeking a way to \"make rainfall almost instantly,\" Jewell said he was working on an apparatus to send his gases up in liquid form enclosed within a shell, which, when it burst, would release the liquid, spreading it in all directions, instantly forming a large volume of cold gas. Jewell and his colleagues gladly took credit for any rainfall, near or far, that coincided with their operations. In at least one case, however, a hailstorm came up in Belleville, Kansas, that broke windows and outraged the locals, who threatened to sue for damages. Nevertheless, Jewell claimed that his trials frequently produced between 0.5 inch and 6 inches of rain, \"each time contrary to the predictions made by the weather service.\"\n\nOne widely publicized appearance of a rainmaker at a fair in Dodge City, Kansas, described a test of the liquid gas bombs:\n\nShortly before noon, a special train pulled in bearing the rainmaking contraption on a flatcar. The apparatus was described as a monster mortar, \"a sort of cross between a cannon of exceptionally large caliber and a giant slingshot.\" The workmen spent hours preparing the equipment for the demonstration. Thousands of people milled around the car, asking questions and offering advice. When the contraption finally was ready, an official of the railroad company quieted the crowd. He said that no one knew whether the apparatus would produce results. He pointed out that the company had the interests of the people at heart and was willing to spend its own money in an effort to produce rain for the district's crops. Chemical bombs were placed in the cannon and thrown into the air by the slingshot. A dozen or more bombs were discharged, emitting a cloud of yellowish smoke.\n\nReportedly, the crowd was satisfied with the demonstration and fully expected to be drenched soon by a downpour. But nothing happened. The lasting result was equivalent to that of a good fireworks display\u2014memorable but evanescent.\n\n#  \"An Unfortunate Rain-maker\"\n\n_Harper_ ' _s Weekly_ published a spoof of Kansas rainmaking in 1893 with its tale of \"an unfortunate rain-maker,\" the fictitious Mr. Schermerhorn Montgomery, of  Hankinside, Kansas. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that something would go wrong. Montgomery got into legal trouble by causing a flood when he claimed to have made rain: \"It did not seem possible that a man could go about carrying, as it were, thunder storms in one pocket and long steady rains in another, and not fall into some sort of a complication with common folks who do not have even a heavy dew in the whole house.\"\n\nMontgomery advertised that he made it rain only at night and on Sundays. He also claimed responsibility for cool northwesterly winds in the summer, but never charged for them. \"I throw in a wind with each rain ordered,\" he explained, \"the same way you get a baked potato when you order a chop. Fogs, frosts, cloudy days, and aurora borealis extra. Earthquakes should be spoken for two days in advance of the time needed\" (735).\n\nOne morning after a particularly heavy rain, Montgomery set out to collect $1 from every farmer in the county for his services, but he met with considerable opposition. The first farmer somehow \"knew that warn't no artificial rain,\" the second \"reckoned it was a naterel thunder-storm,\" and the third demanded proof that the shower was a Montgomery special. At a public meeting, Montgomery addressed the skeptical farmers:\n\n\"I produced that rain myself,\" said he. \"It came, like all of my rains, in the night, when your hired man can't be put to any practical use. I saw the country needed rain, and I went out last night while you slept and made it. Consequently today your fields rejoice and your grateful cattle low their mellow thanksgivings from pastures revivified and gladdened by my beneficent rain.\" (735)\n\nFollowing this oration, a corn farmer rose and asked Montgomery if he was absolutely certain that it was his rain. \"Every drop of it,\" answered Montgomery. \"Then,\" replied the guileless farmer, \"you are responsible for the ten acres of my corn which the storm washed away. I shall sue you for damages\" (735). And he did, to the tune of $400.\n\nAdding editorially that \"the science of rain-making is in its infancy\" (which it always seems to be), _Harper_ ' _s_ noted that the business of artificial rainmaking (or, for that matter, hurricane diversion or climate engineering) would always be vulnerable to lawsuits that would be impossible to prevent and devastating to the enterprise: \"A rain-maker, without his umbrella, standing in the middle of a vast Kansas prairie watching his rain pour down in torrents, and his patrons' crops ride gaily past on the hurrying flood and [with] no way to stop it, must be a most melancholy spectacle\" (735). It seemed that Montgomery the rainmaker had not figured out a way to turn the rain off!\n\n#  Charles Hatfield, the \"Moisture Accelerator\"\n\nCharles Mallory Hatfield (ca. 1875\u20131958), who ran his proprietary operations mainly in the western states, garnered both widespread fame and quite some notoriety in the opening decades of the new century. Hatfield was born in Kansas and moved with his family to California as a youth, later working as a sewing machine salesman and eventually city manager of the Home Sewing Machine Company of Los Angeles. In 1898 he began to study meteorology; _Elementary Meteorology_ , by William Morris Davis, was his favorite text, which he heavily annotated, and his favorite chapter, undoubtedly, was the one on the causes and distribution of rainfall.\n\nHatfield turned to rainmaking in 1902, trying his first experiments on his father's ranch in Bonsell, near San Diego. There he climbed a windmill and stirred and heated some chemicals in a metal pan, watching and waiting as the vapors rose into the sky. When a heavy rainstorm followed, it convinced him that his technique worked. He got into professional rainmaking on a bet, by claiming that he could produce 18 inches of rain in Los Angeles in the winter and spring of 1904\/1905. Thirty prominent businessmen signed up to offer him $1,000 if he could accomplish this by May 1; the goal was exceeded a month early. Not that Hatfield had \"done\" anything. The long-term average rainfall in Los Angeles is 15 inches a year, more at higher elevations, and has ranged over the years from as little as 4 inches to more than 38 inches. Hatfield was lucky that year. The previous year's rainfall total had been a meager 8.7 inches; in 1904\/1905, the year of his wager, it was 19.5 inches; and the following year, without Hatfield's involvement, it was 18.2 inches.\n\nWhat Hatfield had \"done\" was erect a high tower near Esperanza Sanitarium in the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena and mix his noisome but ultimately harmless chemicals diligently throughout the winter. He believed that his technique worked best during the winter rainy season and at an altitude above 3,000 feet, two facts that he likely learned from Davis. When a reporter from the _Los Angeles Examiner_ caught up with Hatfield in March, he described his theory as \"a beautiful one\":\n\nWhen it comes to my knowledge that there is a moisture-laden atmosphere hovering, say, over the Pacific, I immediately begin to attract that atmosphere with the assistance of my chemicals, basing my efforts on the scientific principle of cohesion. I do not fight Nature as Dyrenforth, Jewell and several others have done by means of dynamite bombs and other explosives. I woo her by means of this subtle attraction.\n\nHis primary apparatus consisted of galvanized evaporation pans containing chemicals and water to be absorbed by the atmosphere, \"where the fluid begins to work to attract and accelerate moisture.\" He also used a standard weather bureau rain gauge to document his results. His first tower was 14 feet square and 12 feet high, with a small opening underneath to create an updraft and thus assist the evaporation. Working with his brother Paul, Charles said he stayed up most of the night, with Paul coming on duty from four to eight o'clock in the morning. Then Charles would work again until six in the evening, sleep for three hours, and get ready for the next night. One of the brothers was constantly on watch. They had devised several alarms \"for the detection of unannounced visitors during the night,\" and they kept a \"small arsenal\" inside their tent. Charles told the reporter, \"I can assure you anyone who is looking for trouble will find it. I devote some time to hunting in the mountains.\" Hatfield said his technique was much more subtle and less noisy and flamboyant than those of his predecessors, but that he charged much more. He claimed that he never wanted to apply to Washington for a patent, \"for that would mean the publication of information and rain-producers would spring up like mushrooms all over the country\" (as they did after 1947). When asked about those who were skeptical of his methods, Hatfield quickly added, \"Censure and ridicule are the first tributes paid to scientific enlightenment by prejudiced ignorance\" (8).\n\nWillis L. Moore, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, called Hatfield's method \"fake rainmaking\" and pointed out that widespread and \"excessive\" rains were prevalent throughout the West that winter:\n\nIt is, therefore, apparent that the rainfall which was supposed to have been caused by the liberation of a few chemicals of infinitesimal power was simply the result of general atmospheric conditions that prevailed over a large area. It is hoped that the people of southern California will not be misled in this matter and give undue importance to experiments that doubtless have no value. The processes which operate to produce rain over large areas are of such magnitude that the effects upon them of the puny efforts of man are inappreciable.\n\nBy operating in the climatologically established rainy seasons (usually in midwinter in California), by consulting U.S. Weather Bureau forecasts, by taking contracts in drought-stricken regions on the chance that conditions would improve, and by claiming success for any nearby shower, Hatfield was able to operate at a substantial profit. Billing himself in newspaper ads as a \"moisture accelerator,\" he built his tall, mysterious towers, usually in the hills and often near a lake, and equipped them with large shallow pans in which he patiently  mixed and evaporated proprietary chemicals\u2014until it rained. He used the \"no rain, no pay technique,\" with a clause in the contracts to cover his daily expenses in case of failure. Cynics said he was just betting his time against the expected fee that it would rain somewhere in the region during the contracted period. Hatfield's claims extended over an area that was about 100 miles in radius, which increased his chances of apparent success a hundredfold, compared, for example, with a circle merely 10 miles in radius. The careful reader will note that _any_ rainmaking technique, traditional or technological, will be followed by rain in a large enough designated area if the practitioner is sufficiently persistent. It may take weeks or months, but it _will_ rain\u2014eventually, somewhere, and sooner if the technique is practiced during the rainy season. If you extend the spatial dimension to cover the globe, it is raining very hard somewhere on the Earth right _now_ ; and if you wait long enough, it will rain where you are. Hatfield also fielded requests to suppress the rain. The following appeal, published in the local newspapers, was addressed to him concerning the weather in Pasadena in January 1905 for the Tournament of Roses Parade: \"Great moistener if you will listen now, And make this vow: Oh, please, kind sir, don't let it rain on Monday!\"\n\nHatfield plied his trade along the West Coast and into Canada and Mexico. In the summer of 1906, following a drought in the Canadian Yukon and after his initial success in Los Angeles, the provincial governors became an \"easy mark\" for Hatfield's self-promoting efforts. They awarded him a $5,000 contract for \"meteorological experiments on the Dome,\" the mountain peak near Dawson. The largest mining concerns raised an additional $5,000 by private subscription. According to the contract, should Hatfield fail to produce sufficient rain to satisfy a board of seven evaluators, he was to receive only his cost of transportation and shipping to and from the Klondike and maintenance for himself and an assistant.\n\nThese arrangements generated concerns in the Canadian Parliament a continent away in Ottawa. The Honorable George E. Foster, of North Toronto, was the most vocal: \"Suppose that man Hatfield gets his apparatus to work and tinkers with the vast and delicate atmosphere of the universe; is it not possible that he may pull out a plug or slip a cog, and this machinery of the universe once started agoing wrong may go on to the complete submersion of this continent?\" And what if damage is done across international borders?\n\nIf this government starts Mr. Hatfield shooting up into the sky, discharging his wondrous and mysterious combination of chemicals into the atmosphere and interferes with the vast chain of atmospherical mechanism to which the United  States has some claim as well as ourselves, what about the Monroe Doctrine? ... International complications, international conflagrations may take place, and for aught we know we may be involved in a tremendous bill for damages. (562)\n\nFoster thought that the weight of scientific opinion was not in favor of Hatfield: \"I believe the United States [Weather] Bureau ... and they give it as their scientific opinion that he is an unmitigated fake and that anybody who has truck with Mr. Hatfield is very close to being bereft of good common sense. But that is only [the opinion of] a weather bureau. What is a weather bureau compared with the Yukon council and the Dominion government?\" (563). The parliament ultimately decided that rainmaking was indeed the business of the local Yukon council, and Hatfield found away to claim \"success\" for his efforts.\n\nHatfield was once described as \"smiling, buoyant and fast talking, with a strong chin, large nose, high forehead and light blue, twinkling eyes ... a quietly dressed, slender man of middle height with square shoulders, who is crowding forty\" (figure 3.4). By another description, he was \"a man on a mission ...,  wiry, bordering on downright skinny ... the greyhound narrowness of his face ... exaggerated by a long, aquiline nose ... yet ... possessed of a quiet charisma, a patina of self-confidence that belied his unimpressive physiognomy. On occasion, when he was in full flow, his piercing blue eyes could take on the glaze of the evangelist.\"\n\n3.4 Closely guarded to keep the inventor's secret. Charles Mallory Hatfield's rainmaking plant on the shore of Chappice Lake, Alberta: \"A deck surmounted by an open tank containing chemicals.\" The inset shows Hatfield. (\"THE RAIN-MAKER: FIGHTING DROUGHT WITH CHEMICALS,\" _ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS_ , FEBRUARY 4, 1922)\n\nHatfield is remembered largely because his rainmaking activities in January 1916 coincided with a severe flood in San Diego. According to city water department records, more than 28 inches of rain fell that month, the Morena Reservoir overflowed, and the Lower Otay Dam burst, sending a wall of water into downtown San Diego that killed dozens of people, left many others homeless, and destroyed all but 2 of the city's 112 bridges. Seeking to avoid lawsuits, the city of San Diego denied its connection to Hatfield, who had a vague contract for rain enhancement, and never paid him the $10,000 he claimed was due to him. Hatfield pursued the suit against the city for two decades before it was finally dismissed, without payment, in 1938.\n\nBut Hatfield was not ready to cease his practice, and his services were sought across the country. In 1920 he took a contract in Washington State under the sponsorship of the Commercial Club of Ephrata. Hundreds of curiosity seekers gazed from afar at his strange tower on the shore of Moses Lake, from which mysterious gases were said to emanate. Nothing happened immediately, but soon after his departure the skies opened up, releasing a deluge. Skeptics saw no connection between the cloudburst and Hatfield's earlier efforts, but the miracle man claimed the rain as his own, bearing his private brand\u2014although he did admit that it arrived somewhat late. The _Seattle Post-Intelligencer_ reported: \"The wonder worker himself must admit that his process is somewhat crude and unfinished when his storms wander all over the state, washing out orchards and bursting canals. Possibly some legislation may be necessary to compel the rainmaker to hog-tie his storms in the future.\" He was back in Washington State a year later at $3,000 an inch, and collected $4,000 an inch from the United Agricultural Association of Alberta, Canada, until, after 2 inches of rain fell, he was asked to \"turn off the faucets.\"\n\nIn 1922 he took his equipment to drought-stricken Naples, Italy. American papers reported that after the rains came, he was received as a hero, and the Italian government tried, unsuccessfully, to offer him 1 million lire for his secret. Two years later, the authoritative _Monthly Weather Review_ informed its technically oriented readers that the rainmaker had failed in California and had folded his tower and silently left the Bakersfield area after falling well short of his goal of producing 1.5 inches of rain in a month.\n\nHatfield and the U.S. Weather Bureau had never been on good terms, although he knew the local officials personally and was a heavy user of weather bureau data, maps, and forecasts. He typically took contracts in areas that had experienced lower than normal precipitation and worked in seasons when rainfall might be expected to occur. This combination ensured that the local citizenry was desperate for rain, increased the chances of getting a contract, raised the price, and bettered the odds that average or above-average rainfall\u2014for which Hatfield could take credit\u2014was just around the corner. In 1918 Ford Ashman Carpenter, the weather bureau station manager in San Diego and Los Angeles, looked back on several decades of attempted rainmaking in southern California. Without naming names (but clearly alluding to Hatfield), Carpenter recalled that the rainmaker \"possessed a limited education\" and lacked the ability to differentiate cause from effect. Using a system of \"no rain, no pay\" but still always collecting his expenses in advance, the rainmaker typically operated in the rainier months of January and February, after a dry autumn. Carpenter concluded that by far the most important feature of the rainmaker's work consisted of playing on the credulity of the people: \"It is therefore a psychological rather than a meteorological problem, for the fundamental factors are those of the mind and not of matter.\" It is in this sense that Hatfield served as the model for Starbuck in the Broadway play _The Rainmaker_ (1955). He was even invited to its Los Angeles premiere.\n\n#  Betting on the Weather\n\nIn the early 1950s, more than $2 million in legal claims were filed against New York City by upstate residents for purported damage caused by the cloud-seeding efforts of Dr. Wallace E. Howell over the Catskill Mountains reservoirs. Although the lawsuits were eventually dismissed because of technicalities, an elderly raconteur and bon vivant, Colonel John R. Stingo, who often referred to himself as \"the Honest Rainmaker,\" was astonished that men of science at that time were becoming targets of damage suits and hard feelings, when decades earlier his own rain-inducing efforts had generated nothing but good feelings for all involved. The noted _New Yorker_ columnist A. J. Liebling caught up with Stingo (whose name means literally \"strong brew\") at a series of Manhattan watering holes and heard his creatively embellished, colorful, improbable, and possibly misleading stories of how in yesteryear he had lived by his wits and bet with the odds (but never with his own money) on prizefights, on the horses (when betting at the track was outlawed), and, of course, on the weather. For him, rainmaking  was a confidence game and not at all a scientific endeavor. Liebling described Stingo as neatly dressed, short of stature, lively, and quick of wit, with the air of an old military man; his habitual expression \"that of a stud-poker player with one ace showing who wants to give the impression that he has another in the hole\"; his typical regimen a series of golden gin fizzes with egg yolk in the morning, hard liquor at midday, and then beer and wine for the duration.\n\nStingo, a weaver of tall tales, claimed that as a youth in 1908 he had witnessed a memorable but ultimately futile rainmaking extravaganza in the Lower San Joaquin Valley. To save his wheat crop, Captain James McKittrick had invited Egypt's leading rainmaker, (the fictional) \"Sudi Witte Pasha,\" and his entourage of twenty-two professors and holy men, and assorted cantors, priests, bell ringers, soothsayers, dancing girls, chefs, servants, and bodyguards, to his (also fictional) 212,000-acre estate, \"Rancho del McKittrick.\" Their rainmaking technique consisted of chants, prayers, ablutions, and dancing, lots of dancing, over the course of three days. On the fourth day, the pasha and his crew scattered ground-up kofu beans from ancient Persia in the fields and hosted a feast for three hundred guests, an \"Orgy in Imploration for Rain,\" that lasted into the fifth day. After several more days of waiting, with no rain in sight, the formerly jolly Captain McKittrick, who was out about $200,000 in expenses, decided to ship the pasha and his entourage to the nearest railroad station, thence \"to the outgoing Pelican Express for Phoenix, Fort Worth and New Orleans,\" and finally by steamer \"from the Crescent City through the Straits of Gibraltar to the palm-waving beaches of dear old Cairo\" (12\u201313). Stingo was impressed by the pasha's show but judged his timing unfortunate in that the Fates did not deliver normal rainfall that week. He took away from the experience the impression that an American market might require a show with less exoticism and more displays of cold science and impressive paraphernalia, perhaps with a spiritual note.\n\nThe colonel then related his early efforts out west in 1912, when he was the front man or setup man for the rainmaking show of \"Professor Joseph Canfield Hatfield\" (again a made-up name). To clinch a deal, Stingo (at that time working under his given name, James A. Macdonald) would warm up a crowd of farmers with a version of the following speech:\n\nRain\u2014its abundance, its paucity\u2014meant Life and Death to the Ancients, for from the lands and flocks, herds, the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the deer and mountain goat they found sustenance and energized their being. All the elements depend upon the Fall of Rain, ample but not in ruinous overplus, for very existence. Through human history the plentitude of Rain or its lack constituted the difference between Life and Death, the Joy of Rain or existence and misery. (11)\n\nNext onstage was the director of ordnance, Dr. George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison Sykes, who would explain how barraging the clouds with cannon and a rapid-fire Gatling gun would wring out their moisture. Then J. C. Hatfield himself, not a particularly eloquent or convincing man but a true believer in his techniques, would mumble something about how Marco Polo had returned from Cathay with an explosive yellow powder and stories of its use as a rainmaking device in ancient China. Finally, it was up to Macdonald to close the deal (or set the hook) by getting the local farm officials to sign a contract for \"detonationary services\" with the Hatfield Rain Precipitation Corporation, at $10,000 an inch of rain for up to 3 inches and $80,000 for a full 4 inches. Stingo confessed to Liebling, \"All first-class Boob Traps must contain a real smart Ace-In-The-Hole,\" and the rainmaking company's consisted of converting weather bureau tables, charts, and rainfall averages into a set of betting odds, a kind of pari-mutuel handicapping that the company estimated to be 55 percent in its favor. He then described how 5,000 people had turned out on a hot, dry afternoon to watch the team set off the ordnance show, how Hatfield climbed the mountain like an Old Testament prophet, how Sykes's spouse gathered the faithful together to pray for rain, how the guns roared and the smoke billowed, how a storm came up at midnight and drenched the valley, how the rainmakers took credit for this, and how the local populace subsequently prospered, praising Hatfield's powers and paying the rainmakers the $80,000. Macdonald's cut was $22,000. The team repeated the show, successfully, in Oregon the next summer, but business tapered off in subsequent years after the farm guild bought its own cannon (16\u201319).\n\nWe know from newspaper accounts that one of Stingo's stories was based in fact. In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression and Prohibition, Stingo was working the crowds at Belmont Park, living by his wits, and writing a horse-racing column for the _New York Enquirer_ , an unpaid position but one that kept him in circulation _._ During a rainy week in early September, he spotted his old comrade in rainmaking, Sykes\u2014now a \"minister of Zoroastrianism,\" a flat-earther, and another Wizard of Oz\u2014who was in the process of trying to convince the track officials (and other \"solvent boobs\") that his California-based U.S. Weather Control Bureau could _prevent_ rain during the racing season and save the track from bankruptcy (29\u201335). Sykes, who used neologisms freely, claimed that he controlled the weather through \"dynurgy, xurgy, psychurgy ... isogonic force, quantumie ... Bolecular energy, freenurgy\u2014especially freenurgy ... and thermurgy.\"\n\nSoon Stingo and Sykes were back in business as equal partners: Stingo was to run the office, calculate the odds of rain in September, do most of the talking, and close the deal; Sykes would act as the incomprehensible true zealot and set up and operate his mysterious rain machine (which could be run in reverse, he  said, to drive away the rain). The deal included a 10 percent cut for Mrs. Sykes, not for leading the prayers, as she had done in 1912, but for improving public relations by mixing pitchers of \"Pisco Punch,\" a legendary smooth and fruity drink featuring Peruvian pisco brandy, made popular during the California gold rush.\n\nStingo sweet-talked the millionaire sponsors of this project, Joseph E. Widener, president of the Westchester Racing Association, and his female associate, the \"long, lissome, and lucreferous\" Mrs. Harriman, whose critical weaknesses included belief in the occult and \"an inquiring mind.\" Then he made his pitch: \"We, the U.S. Weather Control Bureau ... agree to induct, maintain and operate the Iodine Silvery-Spray and Gamma-Ray-Radio system\" for a payment of $2,500 for each of two dry Saturdays and $1,000 for each intervening weekday, with a forfeiture of $2,000 for every day it rained, the track to pay for the buildings and labor. The rain suppressors stood to make $10,000 if every day was clear and to lose $4,000 if it rained every day. They calculated the climatological odds as 0.7499 in their favor.\n\nSoon Sykes began installing his equipment. The \"Vibratory Units and the Chemicalized Respository\" were located in an abandoned clubhouse and the \"Detonary Compound\" in a one-room, five-sided, windowless shed at the other end of the track. Sprouting from the roof of the clubhouse were two rods of shiny steel; inside were an old Ford Model-T engine serving as the Vibrator, an impressive mass of wires, batteries, long rows of gaudy glass jars (probably filled with colored water), and a washtub full of evil-smelling chemicals. The shed looked like an ornate \"cabalistic\" pentagram covered with a spiderweb of wires. Padlocked doors and security guards confronted the curious. As described at the time by _New Yorker_ racing columnist Audax Minor, \"On the roof was a big five pointed star strung with radio aerial wire and festooned with ornaments from discarded brass beds and springs from box mattresses. The star always faces the way the wind blows\" (41). Over the roof of the shed Sykes had constructed a small platform where he could stand to \"direct magnetic impulses\" and conduct the show.\n\nThe two buildings stood about a mile apart and were linked, as described by Stingo, by the \"Ethereal Conduit upon which traveled with the speed of Light augmented 30,000-fold the initiatory Pulsations the Vibrator, and thence, via the antennae, to the natural Air Waves and channeled Coaxial Appendixtum\" (42). The press played along for a while, publishing accounts of the mysterious equipment and reporting Sykes's claim that he had \"one of the most powerful radio installations in the Western Hemisphere,\" which led local residents to wonder if static electricity generated by the equipment was interfering with their radio reception. A visit from representatives of the Federal Communications  Commission revealed that to run his contraption, Sykes had \"borrowed\" some 32,400 kilowatts of electric power daily from the grid without the knowledge of Consolidated Edison; this resulted in local power failures and an official warning to Sykes not to do that again.\n\nThe weather remained fair and dry that week, save for a light mist on the final Saturday, and the Weather Control Bureau netted $8,000, with additional income derived from side contracts and bets, some with local mobsters. To celebrate, Mrs. Sykes threw a party for several hundred people at the Hotel Imperial in Manhattan, replete with chamber music, dancing long into the night, and endless bowls of Pisco Punch. All was well, but it did not end well. When reporters accused Sykes of just being lucky, he announced, perhaps after one too many drinks, that he would prove his power by throwing his machinery into reverse to produce torrents of rain between 2:30 and 4:30 on the next Monday afternoon. The odds were heavily against him; Stingo likened it to \"breaking up a full house to draw for four of a kind.\" It did not rain that afternoon, and a \"deluge of derision\" broke over Sykes and the Weather Control Bureau, resulting in the loss of pending future contracts at Belmont and Churchill Downs (47\u201348). Thus, according to Stingo, the rainmaker's art was eclipsed, not to be revived for a score of years, next time not with old Ford motors, radios, and secret chemicals, but with airplanes, dry ice, and silver iodide (chapter 5).\n\n#  Seeding the American West\n\nIrving P. Krick (1906\u20131996) was a talented, charismatic \"rainmaker\" in both the business sense and the meteorological sense. The term that adheres most readily to him is \"maverick.\" Krick was a child prodigy on piano as well as a student of physics. After completing his doctorate in meteorology at Caltech, he helped establish the university's Department of Meteorology, but he lacked a strong theoretical background. The program he developed emphasized the training of applied meteorologists, especially for the rapidly growing airline industry. Krick himself spent most of his time developing the Krick Weather Service, of Pasadena, California, using department space and weather bureau equipment. He specialized in speculative ultra-long-range forecasts, which the U.S. Weather Bureau considered doubtful. Krick gained a moment of fame by forecasting calm winds for the set of _Gone with the Wind_ the night the burning of Atlanta was filmed. His forecasts were based on so-called analog methods using data from historic maps, which he codified for use with a simple slide-rule gadget. The forecasts were also tailored to be just what the client wanted to hear. Filmmakers  favored rainfall, since they saved money on the days it rained and they did not shoot outside, so Krick provided them with \"wetter\" forecasts than normal. The hydropower company Edison Electric, on the contrary, preferred dry forecasts that favored water conservation in its dams, and Krick was glad to oblige by predicting clear skies for the company whenever he could.\n\nKrick's use of analog forecasting techniques almost led to disaster in World War II, when, serving in the U.S. Army Air Force as one of six principal Allied forecasters tasked with predicting the date of the D-day invasion of Europe, he urged that the invasion proceed on June 5, when winds in the English Channel would have swamped the Allied invasion force. Ever the self-promoter, Krick later tried to take credit for the actual June 6 forecast, but more-balanced accounts indicate that the undertaking was truly a group effort, with Krick again playing the role of a maverick. The Norwegian meteorologist Sverre Petterssen (1898\u20131974), who was centrally involved, later expressed his opinion of the situation:\n\nI knew Krick very well. In 1934 he had spent about two weeks with me in Bergen, [Norway] and in 1935, [when I was] a visiting professor at California Institute of Technology, I had worked with him for a period of four months. I considered him a very able, intuitive forecaster who could rise to considerable heights if he would dig deeper into the theoretical background of weather prediction.... However, wisely or unwisely, Krick took a liking to industrial applications and offered his services first to the film industry and later to any industry, anywhere. Krick's main protector at Caltech was its President, Dr. Robert A. Millikan, who had organized U.S. weather efforts in the First World War. Millikan was a top level science advisor and confidant of General [H. H.] Arnold, the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Corps.... I knew that Krick, after a brief service in the U.S. Navy, had transferred to the Army Air Corps and that his long-range forecasting system had some kind of official sanction there. General Arnold saw to it that many of the senior air weather officers were sent to Krick to study his techniques.... I had little confidence in any system of mechanical selection of analogs and I thought it ... would not be difficult to look up the true meaning of the word \"quackery\" and then ignore the forecasts altogether.\n\nKrick returned to Caltech after the war, but, according to its former president Lee A. DuBridge, \"everybody around the campus, and other meteorologists and other scientists around the country, said that Krick was a fake.\" DuBridge wanted Krick's department to deemphasize long-range forecasting and proprietary methods and to focus on \"a real study of the physics of the atmosphere.\" He  ordered a review of Krick's work by scientific elites Vannevar Bush, Karl Compton, and Warren Weaver, who concluded that Krick \"claims to do things that he can't do [and] claims to have done things he didn't do.\" About the same time, the weather bureau accused Krick of using its equipment on loan to Caltech for commercial gain. In 1948 DuBridge discontinued the meteorology program at Caltech and accepted Krick's resignation, but Krick already had a new job, as a commercial rainmaker.\n\nSoon after the General Electric Corporation's cloud-seeding experiments, Krick requested and received a set of GE reports on weather research. He followed with interest the saga of Project Cirrus and Irving Langmuir's claims for the silver iodide generator in New Mexico (chapter 5). Krick visited GE in February 1950, seeking advice on the latest cloud-seeding technologies, but the visit was tense. He had been marketing his rainmaking projects out west by representing himself as having an unofficial relationship with GE, while dropping the names of Langmuir, Vincent Schaefer, and Bernard Vonnegut with his customers as if they were his close colleagues. When the science editor of the _San Francisco Chronicle_ contacted GE in conjunction with a story he was planning on Krick's rainmaking claims, he was informed that there was \"no connection whatsoever\" between Krick and GE, other than supplying him with background material as was done for many others.\n\nDuring the western drought of the early 1950s, Krick began cloud-seeding operations for large agricultural concerns. His clients included wheat farmers, ranchers, and stream-flow-enhancement projects on the Salt River in Arizona and the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. In the latter project, Krick was credited by the Bureau of Reclamation with an 83 percent enhancement of the river flow, but the weather bureau considered this claim meaningless and sought to discredit him whenever possible. At the height of its operations, Krick's company was conducting seeding operations covering 130 million acres of western lands, in all the areas where Charles Hatfield had operated (figure 3.5). By 1954 cloud seeding had been attempted in about thirty nations, including Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, Spain, Peru, and Israel, and that year a total of fifty-seven commercial cloud-seeding projects were under way in twenty-five states and territories, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico.\n\nLater, Krick snagged a contract to run silver iodide generators in Squaw Valley for the 1960 Winter Olympics and claimed that the deep snow pack was in part the result of his efforts. He remained active in ultra-long-range forecasting, expressing his belief in an orderly universe (and atmosphere) and the sorting out of its regularities through the use of analog methods and digital computers. Echoing a common sentiment about long-range prediction at the time (chapter 7),  Krick proclaimed, \"Give me enough time, men, and electronic computers and I'll tell you the Newfoundland weather for 200 years from now.\" He also claimed, echoing the surety and determinism of the famous mathematicians Gottfried Leibniz and Pierre-Simon Laplace, \"If we had precise information back to the Ice Age, we could pinpoint the weather at 3:10 P.M. on March 11, 3004 in Tokyo\"\u2014a prediction no one would be around to verify. Although he said that he had voted for Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, Krick offered a free (and lucky) long-range forecast for the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy: \"fair, cold, and dry.\" Controversy continued to follow Krick, however. He resigned from the American Meteorological Society (AMS) after being accused of making unsubstantiated claims for his forecasting methods and for violating the society's code of professional ethics, but he rejoined in 1985, because, he said, he had outlived most of his enemies. His necrology in the _Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society_ constitutes a study in understatement.\n\n3.5 Irving Krick's generators for cloud-seeding operations in seventeen western states and Mexico. (WILLARD HASELBACH, \"'RAIN MAKER OF THE ROCKIES': HISTORY'S BIGGEST WEATHER EXPERIMENT UNDERWAY,\" _DENVER POST_ , APRIL 22, 1951, 17A)\n\n#  Deadly Orgone\n\nIn 1951 a near fatal experiment with radium led Wilhelm Reich (1897\u20131957), an eccentric Austrian-born physician and practicing psychoanalyst, to conclude that he had discovered a new type of proprietary energy he called \"deadly orgone,\" which, in its material form, he claimed, appeared in the air as black toxic specks that could calm the winds, cause tree leaves to droop, silence the birds and insects, and even sicken humans. The following year, Reich invented a \"cloudbuster,\" a cluster of hollow pipes resembling a Gatling gun, to attract and remove the deadly orgone from the atmosphere. Running water through the tubes served to rinse out and drain off the accumulated toxins. Or so he claimed.\n\nReich, who had worked with Sigmund Freud on human sexuality in the 1920s, moved to Germany in 1930 and joined the Communist Party, seeking to combine social theory and personal liberation from sexual taboos. When the Nazis came to power, Reich was forced into an itinerant life in a number of Scandinavian countries, where he experimented, using basic electrical equipment, on what he termed \"bioelectric energy.\" His experiments led him to believe that he had discovered a fundamental motive power of the universe, which he first called \"bions\" and later \"orgone energy.\" He postulated that this energy permeated all life and was also present in the atmosphere. Moving from Norway to the United States in 1939, Reich lectured on the psychological aspects of orgone energy and devised a simple device he named the Orgone Energy Accumulator to demonstrate his theories on both healthy and cancerous tissue. In the late 1940s, accused of fraud and suspected of conducting a sex racket, Reich moved his operation to a remote location in Rangely, Maine, to an estate he called Organon. It was here that he discovered \"deadly orgone.\"\n\nReich claimed to be able to prevent or produce rain wherever he pointed his cloudbuster; he even devised a smaller-scale medical device that he pointed at his patients! After all, isn't it either raining or not raining all the time? And aren't patients either mostly healthy or unhealthy? An eyewitness to a demonstration in Maine in 1953 reported: \"The strangest looking clouds you ever saw began to form soon after they got the thing rolling.\" Maintaining Reich's legacy, a dedicated band of enthusiasts is currently clearing the air of \"chemtrails,\" with homemade cloudbusters constructed from copper pipe, quartz crystals, and metal filings. They are \"repairing the sky.\" They do so at the risk of their health, however, since plans published on the Internet do not include a drain for the deadly orgone. Use of this device will be followed by rain or clearing skies\u2014your choice.\n\n#  Provaqua\n\nIf Charles Hatfield were active today, he might be working for Earthwise Technologies, trying to peddle the company's ion rain project. Unsung heroes often emerge, however, to expose the charlatans and to contest unsupportable claims. Richard \"Heatwave\" Berler, a television weatherman in Laredo, Texas, deserves to receive a journalism award for using moments stolen from his nightly weathercast to confront the charlatans and reveal the madness. In late November 2003, in response to an unsolicited proposal, the Webb County Commissioners Court issued a contract to Earthwise Technologies for rainmaking in the vicinity of Laredo. The project, called Provaqua, involved building four large iongenerating rain towers spanning the Rio Grande watershed at a cost of up to $5 million. Webb County taxpayers were asked to pay $1.2 million, with the balance coming from Mexico.\n\nEarthwise, a sole proprietorship operating out of Dallas, Texas, was promoting an unproven Russian technology known as IOLA (ionization of the local areas). Three years earlier, the company\u2014or, more accurately, Steven Howard, its president and sole employee\u2014made an unsuccessful bid to install up to twenty-five \"ionization platforms\" in the Houston\u2013Galveston area, a heavily populated region and, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a non-attainment area for air pollution. For a fee of $25 million a year, he offered to clear the region's air of particulate matter and reduce concentrations of ozone near the ground. According to Howard, the company's patented IOLA technology would create an ascending \"convection chimney\" to draw in polluted air and disperse pollutants more rapidly and at greater heights than occurs naturally. Much like a giant home air purifier, Howard explained, the devices would help precipitate heavier particles and could mitigate the formation of ground-level ozone.\n\nThe Laredo project claimed to be able to harness and redirect natural atmospheric energy processes in the Earth's hydrological cycle. According to Howard, clouds were not necessary to produce rain. Ions floating up from the tall electrified towers that his company proposed to erect would cling to humidity in the air, generating clouds and producing a slow, gentle rain. The ions would also attract new \"aerial rivers of moisture\" from the Gulf of Mexico and would disperse pollution and freshen and purify the air. In a presentation to the commissioners court, Howard further explained that IOLA \"changes the electrical charge of water vapor, thereby speeding up the natural velocity of condensation.\" Earthwise offered to generate a 15 to 20 percent minimum increase in measurable rainfall, with a maximum 300 percent increase. Local TV channel KGNS  interviewed the excited Webb County chief of staff, Raul Casso, who explained that society had wanted to create rain for centuries and that he believed it was now possible: \"Making it rain ... has always been one of man's age-old aspirations. ... [Y]ou have [dowsing] forks and diviners, and rain gods and all sorts of things that people have done to try to evoke rain; but you can't do it\u2014until now.\" Heatwave Berler, however, smelled a rat.\n\nIn the closing moments of one of his evening weathercasts, Heatwave humbly expressed his concerns about the project, saying that he was not arguing that it was impossible for the project to work, just that there was no evidence of it working. He interviewed Casso, asking him if the county commissioners had sought the opinion of any scientists before making the decision to spend $1.2 million of the taxpayers' money on the project. Casso initially listed the various civic groups they had talked to, but eventually admitted that no, they had not asked any scientists. Heatwave's questions generated a list of explanations from Howard (doing business as Earthwise Technologies), all of which Heatwave systematically debunked.\n\nHeatwave, now fully engaged with the issue, used his weathercast to express his concerns about the lack of peer-reviewed articles and improper documentation provided to the commissioners. He also found it interesting that Howard, like Dyrenforth and Hatfield long before him, was trying to make it rain during the naturally occurring rainy season. Earthwise was claiming experimental successes based on only one year of precipitation measurements, a timeframe that Heatwave stressed was much too short when dealing with weather, especially when rainfall amounts in different years and in different locales can vary by as much as an order of magnitude. He drew the analogy to tossing a coin once and then concluding that all coin tosses would have the same outcome. When Heatwave discovered that similar projects elsewhere had been terminated due to lack of evidence, Earthwise Technologies responded that there was a lot of research and articles on the methodology, but that unfortunately it was all in Russian and had not been translated. This puzzled Heatwave, since the American Meteorological Society and the World Meteorological Organization, to name only two organizations, had a long history of cooperation with Russian meteorologists and issued reports and abstracts in translation to overcome language barriers. The absurdity of the situation spurred a spoof advertisement for \"Dud Light\" on the local radio, the gist of which was that for only $5 million you can get a machine that magically makes rain, with instructions in Russian and with the guarantee that it has failed to work everywhere else it was tried.\n\nThe fiasco ended in a dramatic Webb County Commissioners Court meeting in December 2003 during which Judge Louis Bruni aggressively and embarrassingly supported funding. He was voted down by the county commissioners because of the overwhelming rejection of the project from their voter constituency, largely brought about by Heatwave's investigations. A local magazine, _Laredos_ , summarized the mood of the meeting: \"While the early minutes of the meeting were glossed by a thin patina of civility, the proceedings quickly degenerated into a side show of blatant disdain, sarcasm, chicanery, the rearing of ugly heads, a couple of juggling acts, patronizing platitudes, and for some on the sidelines of county government, incredulity that public leaders conducted county business in this manner.\" Humble Heatwave Berler had stood up to and defeated the rainmakers, saving the county and the region millions of dollars and further embarrassment.\n\nHail shooting to protect a crop and rainmaking in times of drought are usually considered to be desperate acts by desperate people. But there are other dimensions, both cultural and psychological. One is the solidarity of a community trying to do something, anything, to augment Providence. Another is the sheer entertainment value of a traveling rainmaker's entourage coming to town with its mysteries, loud fireworks, and showmanship. Many times, people do both: pray _and_ hire a rainmaker. Charles Hatfield undoubtedly turned a profit by working with the moist air masses provided by nature and predicted by the weather bureau. John Stingo and George Sykes combined climatology, handicapping, and complicated apparatus in executing their confidence game. They, like Clinton Jewell and others, kept their secret techniques under close wraps. Others, like Frank Melbourne, made their money by selling their secrets as a kind of franchise operation to the highest bidders.\n\nCommon traits of successful charlatans include seeking financial gain by taking credit for natural rains. Little to no capital and no business training are needed. A sense of ethical responsibility or long-term engagement with a community may be detrimental. Use of the latest technologies, juxtaposed in odd and mysterious ways with claims of esoteric knowledge, and recitation of a scientific mantra also seem to help.\n\nPracticing meteorologists were uniform in their criticism of rainmaking and hail shooting. In 1895 meteorologist Alexander McAdie wrote: \"Rainmakers of our time bang and thrash the air, hoping to cause rain by concussion. They may well be compared to impatient children hammering on reservoirs in  a vain effort to make the water flow.\" Weather forecaster Ford Carpenter's examination into the methods of the rainmaker revealed \"a disregard of physical laws,\" with no proof or prospect of success; and Cornell University president David Starr Jordan ridiculed rainmakers when he called their attempts to grow rich without risk or effort \"the art of pluviculture,\" a practice that William Humphreys defined as \"the growing and marketing of rain-making schemes, a never-failing drought crop.\"\n\nAre there charlatans out there now ? Certainly there are huge commercial interests, similar to Irving Krick's, hoping to profit from the scientific and social angst surrounding looming water shortages, damaging storms, and climate change. The Provaqua project in Laredo is one obvious example. Massive ocean iron fertilization schemes to cash in on carbon credits also come to mind (chapter 8). Weather control is currently being practiced on five continents in some forty-seven countries, through some 150 experimental and operational programs. To what effect? In 2002 the Texas Department of Agriculture provided funding of $2.4 million for rainmaking activities. Throughout the American West, agricultural, water conservation, and hydropower interests are conducting routine weather modification operations that cover about one-third of the total area. They are not sure if their efforts are effective, _but they are afraid to stop_!\n\nIn 2003 the National Academy of Sciences issued the report _Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research_. The study cited looming social and environmental challenges such as water shortages and drought, property damage and loss of life from severe storms as justifications for investing in major new national and international programs in weather modification research\u2014in essence, finding engineering solutions for nature's shortfalls and wrath. Although the report acknowledged that there was no \"convincing scientific proof of efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts,\" its authors believed that there should be \"a renewed commitment\" in the field. The fact is, weather modification has never been shown to work in a reliable and controllable way, and the report admitted as much: \"Evaluation methodologies vary but in general do not provide convincing scientific evidence for either success or failure.\" This has been true throughout history, and it remains true today.\n\nDuring the 2008 Summer Olympics, China spent more money on rainmaking and rain suppression than any other nation\u2014but with no verifiable results. The country has developed a cadre of peasant artillerists, supported by a high-tech weather central, who stand ready to bombard every passing cloud with chemical agents assumed to either dry it out or make it precipitate. Note the use of cannon. In every era, weather and climate controllers employ the latest  techniques: explosives, proprietary chemicals, electrical and magnetic devices. Aviation was added in the early twentieth century, as were radar and rocketry by mid-century. Since then, every new technology of any meteorological relevance has been proposed or actually tried in the controversial quest for weather control.  With so much invested and so little to show for it, perhaps there are more charlatans out there than we might imagine.\n\n**4**\n\nFOGGY THINKING\n\n_Fog is a cloud that is earth bound._\n\n\u2014ALEXANDER MCADIE, \"THE CONTROL OF FOG\"\n\n**FOR** most of human history,at least until 1944, people were at a loss to know what to do about the fogs and vapors obscuring their view. Natural fog, seen from afar, is quite beautiful as it pools in the river valleys or burns off on a sunny morning, but those enshrouded by it may not fully welcome the whiteout conditions it brings. Of course, such obscuration can be a good thing, as in Virgil's _Aeneid_ when Venus cloaks her son and his companion in a thick fog to protect them on their journey, or when, following a massive artillery barrage in World War I, the fog, \"mute but masterful ... countermanded all battle orders, and the roar of a thousand batteries gave way to stillness.\" Sometimes fog is used as a theatrical curtain. Shakespeare employs the weather to reveal Hamlet's mental state when he apprehends the sky filled with \"a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.\" Coleridge's ill-fated albatross first appears to the Ancient Mariner out of an ice fog. Then there is London or pea soup fog, mixed with the smoke of millions of chimneys, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's \"duncoloured veil,\" sometimes yellow, sometimes brown, composed of an unhealthy mixture of smoke and vapor. Actual, as opposed to literary, fogs were deemed  unhealthy and undesirable, capable of interrupting or suspending normal activities such as shipping or aviation.\n\nIn 1899 Cleveland Abbe described a local fog dispeller suitable for use on ships to assist navigation, or perhaps to increase precipitation. It was called the Tugrin fog dispeller. In foggy weather, a pipe 3 inches in diameter with a musket-shaped flange at the end was used by the navigating officer to direct a powerful stream of warm air from the engines to \"blow a hole right through the fog,\" causing it to fall as raindrops and providing forward visibility of several hundred feet, sufficient to avoid a collision. Abbe further suggested that if the pipe was aimed vertically, it could be used to condense and precipitate fog moisture\u2014for example, for agricultural uses along the California coast. According to meteorologist Alexander McAdie, in March 1929 a murky smokefog, the densest and most persistent in twenty years, settled down over New York City, forcing transatlantic liners to lie at anchor. Commerce was suspended and commuters were stranded for several days. With the rise of commercial and military aviation, efforts to dispel fog were driven largely by the desires (and actual needs) of pilots to overcome the vulnerabilities and limitations that fog imposed. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, electrical, chemical, and physical methods of fog dissipation included the electrified sand trials of L. Francis Warren and his associates, the experiments with chemical sprays of Henry G. Houghton, and the operational FIDO fog burners of World War II. All these projects were relevant to aviation safety, and all were of interest to the military.\n\n#  Electrical Methods\n\nFrom the time of Benjamin Franklin, the role of atmospheric electricity in meteorological processes, including its suspected role in stimulating precipitation and its possible role in clearing fogs, was under active investigation. In the early nineteenth century, chorographer John Williams proposed a scheme to dehumidify the British climate by electrifying it. For personal, political, and vaguely scientific reasons, he argued that climatic change in England became noticeable around 1770, with the spring and summer months becoming cloudier, wetter, and colder and the winters milder. Williams attributed this shift to human \"change effected on the surface of our Island,\" due to the cutting of forests, digging of canals, and enclosing of lands\u2014all of which had combined to increase the amount of moisture released into the atmosphere and caused adverse effects on human health and agriculture. These physical changes, he  claimed, were themselves due to political and economic changes, including the American Revolution, the inflated price of grain, and heavy taxation on labor and agriculture. It was a view that sprang from the author's personal malaise and a generally unsettled mood in Britain. Williams argued that the newly \"ungenial seasons\" might be ameliorated by building electrical mills, two per county, with giant rotating cylinders to diffuse excess electrical fluid into the surrounding air. He imagined that the newly electrified air would then act to dissolve fogs and dissipate rain clouds. The electrical mills were never built, and the British, as ever, are still damning their damp and cloudy climate and discussing their \"peculiar weather,\" with no ready answers as to what, if anything, is wrong with it or how, if at all possible, to fix it.\n\nIn the 1830s, the American chemist Robert Hare, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, promoted an electrical theory of storms. He imagined that the atmosphere behaved like a charged Leyden jar with two electrical oceans of opposite charge: the celestial and the terrestrial. Clouds acted as the mediators between the two, suspended like pith balls in a static electrical field. When the electrical balance was disturbed, the atmosphere behaved in a way that counteracted gravity. The net result was a local diminution of pressure, inducing inward- and upward-rushing currents of air that resulted in rain, hail, thunder, lightning, and, in extreme cases, tornadoes. Hare argued strenuously that he had discovered a new electrical \"discharge by convection\" in the atmosphere, which formed the motive power of storms and was to be considered the complement of the famous electrical discharge by conduction discovered by Franklin in lightning strokes.\n\nIn 1884 British physicist Oliver Lodge demonstrated that smoke and dust can be precipitated by the discharge of a static electric machine. He then asked, \"Why should not natural precipitation be assisted artificially?\" In his largest-scale experiment, he cleared a smoke-filled room and discovered that electrical charges encourage the coalescence of infinitesimally small cloud droplets into \"Scotch mist or fine rain.\" He opined that clearing London fogs and abating industrial or urban smoke might be a \"difficult but perhaps not impossible task,\" equivalent to such other noble quests as navigating the Arctic Ocean, exploring the Antarctic continent, scaling Mount Everest, and conquering tropical diseases. Lodge regarded the future prospects with hope and felt that the control of the atmosphere \"will be tackled either now or by posterity\" (34). But applying this technique outdoors was another matter, and he admitted the propensity of physicists \"to rush in where meteorologists fear to tread!\" Thus the stage was set for the cloud modifiers to add electricity to their tool kit as they attempted to make rain and dissipate fogs.\n\n#  Electrified Sand\n\nOn the basis of Lodge's theory, a U.S. patent was awarded in 1918 to John Graeme Balsillie of Melbourne, Australia, for a \"process and apparatus for causing precipitation by coalescence of aqueous particles contained in the atmosphere.\" Balsillie claimed to be able to ionize a volume of air and switch the polarity of the electrical charges in the clouds \"by means of suitable ray emanations,\" making them more attractive to one another and thus producing artificial rain. His apparatus, complete with a schematic diagram, consisted of an array of tethered balloons or kites linked to an electrical power supply on the ground. His patent claimed that R\u00f6ntgen rays from a tube carried aloft and beamed to reflect off a metalliccoated balloon would ionize the surrounding air. In an age in which mysterious X-rays could penetrate flesh to reveal bone, the development of a rainmaking ray gun might be just around the corner. Balsillie's balloons were charged to 320,000 volts\u2014or at least he said they should be\u2014and the ionization, he claimed, would extend outward for a good 200 to 300 feet from each balloon or kite\u2014to be flown in formation (more or less) during a brewing storm. There is no evidence, however, that this patent was anything more than the inventor's flight of fancy\u2014except for its influence on L. Francis Warren and his associates.\n\n#  Round 1: Dayton, Ohio\n\n\"Fliers Bring Rain with Electric Sand,\" the _New York Times_ headline announced on February 12, 1923. The story itself, however, was quite underwhelming. Between 1921 and 1923, field trials conducted in Dayton, Ohio, at McCook Field seemed to show that electrified sand could dissipate clouds and might someday both dispel fog and generate artificial rain. The demonstrations were the brainchild of Luke Francis Warren (fl. 1930), a self-styled and self-taught independent inventor and dreamer who frequently misstated his credentials as \"Dr. Warren of Harvard University.\" Credibility and financial support came from Wilder D. Bancroft (1867\u20131953), a well-ensconced but controversial chemistry professor at Cornell University. Technical assistance came from Emory Leon Chaffee (1885\u20131975), a Harvard University electrophysicist, and the U.S. Army Air Service provided aircraft facilities (and a patina of respectability). Although the hope of making rain and driving mists from cities, harbors, and flying fields was great, the hype was even greater. Little is known about Warren, save for a few press clippings, but his story can be told through documents in the Bancroft Papers at Cornell.\n\nWilder Bancroft, grandson of the famous historian and statesman George Bancroft, was expected to do great things. He studied physical chemistry with Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig and J. H. van't Hoff in Amsterdam before joining the faculty of Cornell University in 1895. Bancroft was seemingly more adept at writing than at chemistry. He attracted students with his genteel style and wit more than with his laboratory technique, while he dedicated his considerable writing skills to the new _Journal of Physical Chemistry_ , which he edited for thirtyseven years. During the Great War, Bancroft served in the Chemical Warfare Service and wrote its history; after the war, he chaired the Division of Chemistry of the National Research Council. Back at Cornell, Bancroft worked on colloid chemistry, the chemical physics of finely divided matter in suspension\u2014for example, in such complex fluids as ink, wine, milk, smoke, and fog. Thinking about fog, specifically fog dissipation, brought Bancroft into the controversial field of weather control. If, in laboratory tests, electric fields precipitated smoke and fog, why would they not do so in nature?\n\nAt the time, Bancroft was under fire from critics for his lack of clarity in organic chemistry and for having missed most of the new physical implications of quantum mechanics. He was busy trying to keep his struggling journal afloat, more by diplomacy and fund-raising than by the influx of new ideas. The marketing of ideas was important to Bancroft. He once opined, \"Since the greatest discoveries are likely to be ones for which the world is least ready ... the greatest scientific men should really be super-salesmen.\" On weather control, however, he chose to stand on the sidelines as an investor and cheerleader and allowed his associate Warren to take the point position as advocate and business \"rainmaker,\" if not super-salesman. As the airplane was opening up a new era in weather control, Bancroft wrote to Warren in 1920, \"[i]t would probably be absolutely prohibitive in cost to produce rain by spraying clouds from beneath; but it is quite possible that you can get satisfactory results by spraying from above.\"\n\nTo get his ideas off the ground, Warren lobbied in Washington, D.C., lunching and dining on Bancroft's dime, with \"leading men of the air force.\" Initially, the military offered merely to take electrical measurements at its flying fields. General Electric was interested in providing the electrical equipment. Major William Blair, who had led the meteorological efforts of the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the war, offered the use of an airplane. The lobbying possibilities were endless. Warren wrote to Bancroft that he had to move quickly, or \"I shall be forced to go through the entertainment and visit stunts with a 'new bunch of guys', but as I like them all, and have a soft spot in my make-up for all mankind, I do not apprehend serious trouble, but only inconvenience, as there will be days here when I can do little more than spend denario [mainly Bancroft's] and kick  up my heels away from home.\" Detained in Washington over a weekend, Warren ended his letter to Bancroft with a list of his possible activities, including \"attending the aviators ball at Langley Field, playing in the parks with the kids on Sunday, or flirting with the hat girls at the restaurants.\"\n\nHis lobbying efforts eventually paid off, though, and the army provided funds for an initial field test. In the summer of 1921, Warren contracted for electrical work to be done by the physicist Chaffee at Harvard's Cruft High Tension Electrical Laboratory. Chaffee examined the theoretical basis for charging small particles with high voltage, built a generator that would run off an aircraft motor, and designed the best way to disperse the sand, which he determined was through an electrically energized nozzle and the prop backwash. Warren arrived in Dayton on September 7 and began to install equipment on the aircraft. The army paid to bring Chaffee out at $25 a day plus expenses, but Warren chose to stay off the payroll to protect his business rights, since he was then in the process of applying for multiple international patents. The U.S. Army Air Service provided him with two planes, pilots and observers, a car and driver, a stenographer, and a coordinating officer\u2014Major T. H. Bane. Not all was going smoothly, however. Warren had fallen behind on payments to his creditors and, as usual, was writing to Bancroft seeking financial aid \"to help me out of this mess.\" His plan was to \"go above detached clouds and try to cause precipitation in the form of trailing rain. We should be able to pull this stunt off within ten days, I hope.\"\n\nIn the \"stunts\" (they can hardly be called experiments), a La Pere plane flying above the cloud tops sprinkled sand charged to approximately 10,000 volts by an on-board wind-driven generator. The electrified sand was dispensed through musket-shaped nozzles (figure 4.1) and further scattered across the clouds by the action of the airplane's propeller. Sometimes, but only sometimes, these aerial \"attacks\" opened clearings in fair-weather cumulus clouds or dissipated them completely. Although the stated goal of the project was to clear airport fogs and generate rain, no tests were conducted on low-level stratus or nimbus clouds. Other than a dramatic exhibition of the prowess of aviators (it was known at the time that the backwash from propellers alone could bust up clouds by mixing them with surrounding drier air), nobody knew why the electrified sand technique should work.\n\nAlluding in vague terms to small-scale smoke-clearing demonstrations under laboratory conditions, Warren offered up some technical mumbo jumbo about the effect of electrified sand particles accelerating the \"free electrons in a mass of air.\" He told the press and his patrons (but never published) his theory that \"each electron attaches itself to a certain number of molecules and so forms a gas ion, upon which moisture condenses, thereby making a cloud particle.\" He claimed that his technique produced \"a so-called trigger action, forcing the elec-trical  charge in the cloud to change from a static to a kinetic state that will rapidly spread or flash over the whole clouded area from the spraying of only a few pounds of dust over a small part of a highly charged storm movement and force precipitation when the wet bulb conditions are favorable over the dry section\" (3). By changing the polarity of his generator, he said, he could reverse the process and produce \"a large hole, in a fraction of a minute ... through the entire cloud from top to bottom\" (3). Of course this is gobbley-gook, akin to the unsupported technical claims invoked by the charlatan rain fakers. When asked why he was intercepting only fair-weather clouds, Warren cited the absence of suitable fog in Dayton and the danger of flying through rain clouds, since all were \"highly electrified and it was not deemed safe to deal with them with high voltage until measures were taken to guard against possible accidents to the pilots and planes\" (3).\n\n4.1 Fog dispersal apparatus: sand being discharged through nozzles that are carrying a potential of 10,000 volts. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO B8241)\n\nAviation pioneer Orville Wright, who worked at McCook Field, witnessed one of the test flights through his office window and sent a telegram to the _New York Times_. He testified that he saw aviators cut to pieces three cumulus clouds in ten minutes, but saw no rain fall: \"Having little knowledge of meteorology and  the other sciences involved in the experiment, I do not wish to be understood as expressing any opinion as to the practical value of the experiment nor of the possibilities that may develop from them.\" Navy commander Karl F. Smith was also watching. His memo, \"Dr. Warren\u2014Rainmaker,\" noted that as an observer he was \"not gullible and had remained skeptical,\" but seeing a cloud split in two by the technique was \"absolutely uncanny.\" The military applications were obvious. Smith envisioned special-purpose \"clearing ships\" for enhancing aerial navigation by dissipating fog or for cutting holes in clouds for bombing operations while keeping the main cloud bank intact for cover. Although he was not fully convinced, he thought Warren's technique \"so important\" that, after a few more trials, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics should either present it to the Patent Office or purchase outright Warren's rights and retain them for military purposes. Had Warren agreed, he could have cashed in on his invention then and there. Instead, he reserved his rights, immediately formed the A. R. Company (for \"Artificial Rain\"), and issued Bancroft 1,000 shares of stock at $5 a share. He also filed a U.S. patent application for \"Condensing, Coalescing, and Precipitating Atmospheric Moisture.\"\n\nWhen the story was initially reported in the newspapers, cartoonists immediately got to work. One set of panels published in the _New York World_ fantasized about using the technique for raining out Sunday baseball games, ruining a rival's new hat, fighting fires, disrupting parades, and selling umbrellas (figure 4.2).\n\nIn March 1923, one month after the initial publicity, U.S. Weather Bureau librarian and widely read weather popularizer Charles Fitzhugh Talman reported that meteorologists remained unconvinced by the Dayton tests. In a weather bureau press release, William Jackson Humphreys contrasted the puny efforts of the rainmakers with the enormous scale of the atmosphere and called their techniques \"entirely futile.\" He compared the techniques of Bancroft and Warren with those of earlier rain kings: \"The idea of the college professor and his aviator friends out in Cleveland, to sprinkle electrically charged sand on a cloud while above it in an airplane, is picturesque and plausible,\" he noted, \"but won't work in commercial quantities.\" Given the enormous forces at work in the atmosphere, Humphreys warned farmers in arid regions not to pay out their good money for so-called rainmaking devices: \"Wet weather a la carte\u2014the dream of meteorologists, farmers, and umbrella salesmen for a good many years\u2014is still an empty mirage.\" In response, Bancroft wrote: \"No use arguing with Weather Bureau. Prefer to wait for results and let them do the explaining.\" A cartoonist captured the tension between the new high-tech possibilities and domestic farm life, with the grizzled older man representing both worlds (figure 4.3).\n\n4.2 \"Rain to Order\": lampoon of possible applications of rainmaking using electrified sand. (CARTOON BY AL FRUEH, IN _NEW YORK WORLD_ , FEBRUARY 15, 1923; BANCROFT PAPERS)\n\nThe May 1923 issue of _Popular Science Monthly_ described the Warren\u2013Bancroft demonstrations and hyped the story: \"Think of it! Rain when you want it. Sunshine when you want it. Los Angeles weather in Pittsburgh and April showers for the arid deserts of the West. Man in control of the heavens\u2014to turn them on or shut them off as he wishes.\" In an illustration, an electrified plane turns smog over a city into artificial clouds, while a second plane clears the air by generating artificial rain (figure 4.4).\n\nWarren claimed that a number of practical applications were just over the horizon: clearing the smoke from cities, removing London fogs, intervening in the course of naval battles, bringing rain to the farmers. As he explained it, the electricity generated by falling sand and rain would cause more rain to generate in the adjacent clouds and set off the entire heavens, much in the manner of a long fuse, thus causing widespread rains. Bancroft, who had been supportive all  along, yet constantly worried about the expenditures, doubted this. Concerned about possible lawsuits downwind of their operations, he recommended that they conduct field trials not over cities but over the Atlantic Ocean, both as a safety precaution and as an opportunity to experiment on marine fogs.\n\n4.3 \"The Rain Makers\": \"Go up and bust that there cloud over th' ten-acre field, Noah\u2014before somebody else gets it; an' fer th' love o' peace, keep off th' ol' woman's washin'!\" (\"THE RAIN MAKERS,\" _LIFE_ , APRIL 5, 1923, 24)\n\n4.4 The way scientists propose to manufacture clouds and rainfall: \"The first plane, trailing sparking antennae, condenses the soot and moisture laden air into a cloud by scattering electric charges. The second plane turns this cloud into rain by spraying it with electrically charged sand.\" (MCFADDEN, \"IS RAINMAKING RIDDLE SOLVED?\")\n\n#  Round 2: Aberdeen and Bolling\n\nIn March 1923, seeking better access to government patrons, Warren moved the test flights to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, on the Chesapeake Bay northeast of Baltimore. It was an adequate but not ideal site. Only about a third of the area was available for tests, since the army's gun-firing range was given first priority. There was no machine shop or other manufacturing facilities, so Warren purchased commercial transformers, which turned out to be too heavy to fly and more costly than originally budgeted. Other delays were caused by problems with workers, a continual lack of funds, and an inordinate amount of red tape.\n\nAfter more than a year of struggles and setbacks, on July 8, 1924, a plane from Aberdeen carrying Warren's equipment encountered an intense thunderstorm over the mouth of the Susquehanna River. The crew of two aviators reported: \"Immediately following the attack [with 10 pounds of negatively charged sand] there was no more lightning or thunder, and a gentle rain of over one hour's duration followed, purely local.\" Warren claimed that this result was far from coincidental and that the plane's intervention had upset the electrical balance of the storm. More intense lobbying followed. On October 30, 1924, two planes equipped with electrified sand dispensers conducted a demonstration over Washington, D.C. Warren sent messages to President Calvin Coolidge, members of his cabinet, and members of Congress to \"watch\" as the planes \"attacked\" the clouds over the city. There is no record from eyewitnesses, but Warren noted, \"We scored a most deplorable failure, as not a thing happened\" (5). Disappointed but not deterred, Warren moved his operations closer to Washington, to Bolling Field. Less than a month later, _Time_ reported a subsequent set of successful sanding demonstrations over Washington. Captain L. I. Eagle and Lieutenant W. E. Melville flew their De Havilland airplanes to an altitude of 13,000 feet, where they \"shot down\" a series of cumulus clouds with a barrage of electrified sand. As the planes circled overhead, a clearing opened up. \"A miracle!\" cried some of the watchers. Still, although Warren had busted clouds, he had not yet cleared a fog or made it rain. Positive press clippings notwithstanding, Warren and his A. R. Company had not earned a penny on his invention, and Bancroft was still writing the checks.\n\n#  Round 3: Hartford, Connecticut\n\nTo save money and to be closer to home, Warren moved his operation yet again in 1925, this time to the municipal airfield in Hartford, Connecticut. On the basis of his rather meager successes in busting up fair-weather clouds\u2014fortythree successes and twenty-six failures in six years\u2014he again petitioned for research support from the army, navy, and post office. Warren argued that he needed access to better airplanes that would be capable of reaching the very tops of the clouds, \"so that the rays of the sun will freely strike the walls of the wide gashes cut in flight ... and the electric action of our sand ... will be reinforced and energized many fold by the radiant energy of the rays of the sun.\" The army and navy awarded him a grant of $15,000 and the services of some of its pilots, but provided no new airplanes or equipment. Warren thought he deserved more.\n\nAlexander McAdie witnessed the trials in Hartford and noted that the planes had cleared a \"figure 8\" in the sky with their device\u2014this, two decades before General Electric announced a similar accomplishment using dry ice. Warren was quick to claim success. He telegraphed Bancroft that he had \"knocked the stuffings out of two small clouds,\" but this was not news; he had claimed this five years earlier. With time running out on the grant, Warren told the press in October, \"Our work here is finished.... We have clearly proved our theories concerning the art of making it rain through the use of airplanes and are now in position to perfect our apparatus and equipment.\" But he added, \"There are many things yet to be done.\" Warren admitted that the atmosphere following his cloud-busting test flights had \"an uncanny and hard to describe look, effervescent, like dissolved gas escaping under high pressure, or the sudden escape of steam, rolling and tumbling until it quickly disappears.\" The press, previously enthusiastic, was now turning skeptical. Warren worried that the news stories coming out were surrounded with a halo of unreality, \"as wizard or witchdoctor type of news\u2014this needs to be debunked\" (17). He could have well said that his own nebulous ideas needed to be debunked. The world's verdict to date was \"not proven\" (16).\n\n#  The Business of \"Rainmaking\"\n\nEver the businessman, Warren summarized his accomplishments, frustrations, and fantasies in a pamphlet, _Fact and Plans: Rainmaking\u2014Fogs and Radiant Planes_ (1928). Here he opined that \"once rainmaking is mastered\" through good high-tension engineering, \"the wealth and prosperity arising from increased  production, and decreased cost of living, will reach figures almost 'beyond the dreams of avarice,' not only for our country but for the entire world\" (16). With no further prospects for support from the military, it seemed that he would have to realize his dream by raising private capital. But so far, the only investor was Bancroft. Warren's business plan (or vision) included a fleet of airplanes to clear pollution, relieve drought, and suppress forest fires. Clients could be cities, farmers, government agencies, railways, and steamship lines. The London Chamber of Commerce estimated that dense fog cost the city \u00a31 million a day (and he promised he could clear it out in a day). To undertake contracts like this, he proposed the formation of the Warren Company, incorporated in Delaware with 100,000 shares at $8, with four airplanes, two assistants, a machine shop, and a lab, \"Warren and his two assistants to devote their entire time, to the exclusion of all else, to the work in hand for at least one year, without salary or expense charges to the company, until the work is satisfactorily completed\" (23).\n\nLooking further to the future, Warren waxed philosophical about the possibility of constructing a radiant (ionized) metal plane charged to a potential of 100,000 volts. He wrote that such a plane would operate on what Sir William Crookes had called a fourth state of \"radiant matter\": \"Such a radiant plane will decompose the aqueous vapor immediately in contact with it, creating ozone ... and the hydrogen, nitrogen, helium, argon, neon, krypton, xenon, etc. or the rare and inert gases will be repelled and forced away, through electric radiation\" (10\u201311). By creating its own partial vacuum, \"the resistance to the flight of the plane [would be] reduced to a minimum\" and the plane would set new speed records. Pure fantasy! But wait, there's more: Warren wrote that the electric charge would also de-ice the plane so it could fly in bad weather, and the ozone could be collected and used on board \"for the benefit of the engines and passengers.\" A radiant plane would repel and efface everything in nature, \"including the frictional action of high winds, storms, tornadoes, cyclones, etc.\" (11). It could fly at any height in the coldest, iciest conditions; consume less fuel; and attain great speeds. With no drag from the air, the plane would have increased buoyancy, flying on a cushion of highly electrified air. It would be more easily handled and controlled, \"immune from all of nature's attacks.\" The title page of Warren's _Facts and Plans_ is marked \"Strictly Confidential, Not for General Circulation.\" The inside cover of Bancroft's personal copy was inscribed by the author: \"Kindly keep in your own possession; Sent with supreme confidence in the unexpected; _Don_ ' _t Worry_.\"\n\nBut Bancroft did worry; he had lost confidence in Warren. His enthusiastic partner, who likened his situation to the struggles of other famous inventors (Morse, Bell, and Marconi), had a tendency to blame others for lack of progress.  Warren blamed the equipment, the hired help, government red tape, his poor health, even interservice rivalries for his shortcomings; however, he never doubted his theory. Bancroft had invested tens of thousands of his own dollars in the fog-clearing and rainmaking project, but after eight years he had little to show for it\u2014only some minor cloud-busting demonstrations, Warren's promises, and worthless shares of stock. By 1927 Bancroft had decided that it was time to cut his losses\u2014and his losses ran deep. Rumor has it that to cover his investments, he even sold a copy of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address given to the family by his grandfather. Warren reacted to Bancroft's pullout with shock and dismay, and then with recriminations of his own, going all the way back to the Dayton experiments, when, he said, Bancroft had \"injured rather than helped the cause\" with his aloofness and air of superiority. There is evidence that as late as February 1929, Warren was still hanging on, trying to persuade aviation moguls to fund him, trying to issue stock for a new company, and, unbelievably, still trying to solicit money from Bancroft. There the trail fades away, possibly obliterated by the stock market crash, but there is ample material in the Bancroft Papers on this and other ventures to reward a potential biographer. In 1938, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his college graduation, Bancroft wrote to his Harvard classmates: \"Owing to my lifelong habit of being a minority of one on all occasions, my research work does not look convincing to most people. Since I have become avowedly a specialist in unorthodox ideas in the last decade the situation is getting worse, because now I irritate more people.\" In addition to the electrified sand episode, he was referring to questions raised by the medical community concerning his excursion into the supposed colloidal chemistry of the human nervous system and his theory of anesthesia. In other episodes, Bancroft's attempts to articulate a general chemical explanation of poisoning, drug addiction, alcoholism, and insanity, and his fumbling, and some say unethical, experiments with human subjects brought him into direct conflict with the larger research community and damaged his scientific reputation. There was more to it than just electrified sand.\n\n#  Fog Research at MIT\n\n\"Fog dissipating has, on the one hand, attracted the attention of crack-pot inventors, and on the other, occupied the minds of sober, able investigators. So it is that there have been visionary grandiose ideas of ridding harbors and airports alike of fog. The scale of operations implied together with the lack of factual data  relating to fog as a physical entity have at once fascinated the untrammeled mind of the wild inventor and harassed the mind of the cautious investigator.\" This was written in 1938 by Edward L. Bowles, director of the Round Hill Research Division at MIT and supervisor of its fog research.\n\nUndoubtedly, MIT meteorologist Henry Garrett Houghton Jr. (1905\u20131987) considered himself a \"cautious investigator\" engaged in fog research, and most certainly he regarded Warren as a \"wild inventor.\" The theoretical processes involved in precipitation formation\u2014the Wegener-Bergeron-Findeisen ice crystal process (in cold clouds) or the collision-coalescence process (in warm clouds)\u2014had only recently been defined. In 1935, working on the basis of research done by Alfred Wegener, Norwegian meteorologist Tor Bergeron published his hypothesis that the growth of ice crystals in a cloud containing both ice and water droplets could lead to precipitation; three years later, Walter Findeisen clarified and expanded on Bergeron's ideas. The key to fog removal seemed to lie in the reversing of these processes.\n\nIn 1938 Houghton and his colleague W. H. Radford surveyed the various approaches to fog removal and categorized them as physical, thermal, or chemical removal methods. Here is a synopsis of his report:\n\n\u2022 _Physical methods_. One imaginative approach to freeing airfields from fog involved the installation of powerful fans and ventilation ducts beneath the runways to provide a fresh-air circulation system. This technique would not work, however, if the airport was covered by a large fog bank and the fans merely circulated moist air. Another plan envisioned forcing a stream of air through a set of baffles to slow it down and to condense some of the moisture on contact, but such an apparatus would likely be huge, inefficient, and impractical.\n\nWhat about high-intensity sound waves? Experiments had demonstrated that they could clear the air of smoke and dust. The theory was that the energy generated by the sound echoing off the walls of a small, enclosed space triggered the precipitation of suspended matter in the air. But an airport is not a tabletop experiment. It is not an enclosed space. Fog particles in the free air are much larger than smoke or dust particles, and air travelers and airport neighbors could not safely or pleasantly be subjected to high-intensity sound waves every time the fog rolled in.\n\nWhat about electricity? Warren's technique of sprinkling electrically charged sand above fog or clouds should, in theory, lead to the coalescence of the cloud droplets. In practice, however, it was fraught with practical problems and had met with only limited success. Alternatively, spraying charged water drops might also be effective, but could result in the formation of additional fog. An electrical  precipitator\u2014long used for removing smoke, dust, and fumes from industrial gases\u2014could be adapted to fog removal, but a medium-size airport installation might require a huge elevated plate suspended some 32 feet above the ground, with a potential difference between plate and ground of 6 million volts. Woe to anyone or anything that short-circuited this apparatus!\n\n\u2022 _Thermal methods_. It was well known at the time that supplying heat directly to the atmosphere by burning fuel (discussed in detail later) was a simple, brute-force method of dissipating fog. This technique, however, required an immense amount of energy, since water has such a large latent heat of evaporation. The apparatus (open fires, electric grids, blasts of air or steam) would be large and cumbersome and would probably constitute a dangerous obstruction at an airport. Another approach, using selective absorption of infrared radiation to heat the water vapor and carbon dioxide in the air, lay beyond the capability of current (1938) technology. It was of theoretical interest, however, since it required no cumbersome airport installations, just a properly designed invisible heat ray to zap the fog at a distance.\n\n\u2022 _Chemical methods_. Houghton's own research program focused on the physical and radiative properties of condensation, fog, and clouds. His experiments involved the use of calcium chloride as a chemical drying agent, which he sprayed from an array of pipes installed over an airfield. Other possible substances, most with undesirable side effects, included silica gel, sulfuric acid, and certain strong alkalis. For example, calcium oxide (quicklime) releases heat when it reacts with atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, but it is a caustic substance that causes eye and skin irritation and requires proper storage and handling to avoid spontaneous combustion. Thus it was deemed not suitable for field operations involving aircraft.\n\nHoughton was born in New York City and attended high school in Newton, Massachusetts. He was educated at Drexel (B.S. 1926) and MIT (S. M. 1927), receiving his degrees in electrical engineering. From 1928 to 1938, he served on the staff of MIT's Round Hill Research Division, where he and Bowles investigated the behavior of small water droplets as they formed and evaporated, measured the transmission of visible light through fog, and developed chemical techniques for fog dissipation. Houghton became an assistant professor of meteorology at MIT in 1939 and directed the department as associate professor and executive officer (1942\u20131945) and professor and head (1946\u20131970). During World War II, Houghton trained weather officers and served on a number of national boards and military committees. After 1945, he chaired the meteorology panel of the Pentagon's Joint Research and Development Board, served on  the science advisory board of the Commanding General of the Air Force, and was the first board chairman of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), in 1959. He also sustained a lifelong interest in weather control. In 1951, in conjunction with the American Meteorological Society, he prepared an appraisal of cloud seeding as a means of increasing precipitation, contributed to discussions about weather warfare (chapter 6), and in 1968 published a review of precipitation mechanisms and their artificial modification in the _Journal of Applied Meteorology_.\n\nA story in _Time_ in 1934 described a test of Houghton's chemical \"fog broom,\" conducted at the private airfield of eccentric millionaire Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green on his Round Hill estate overlooking Buzzards Bay. Houghton had erected a large scaffold across the runway to support a maze of piping and nozzles, \"patterned after the business end of a skunk,\" that he claimed offered \"the first practically-tested way of artificially dissipating fog over local areas\" (figure 4.5). As a bank of thick fog rolled in from the ocean, Houghton powered up his \"secret\" apparatus. As the _Time_ reporter described it, \"Centrifugal pumps sent a  high-pressure stream of liquid through the overhead pipe. Its nozzles hissed, and jets of Mr. Houghton's chemical cut into the fog like rapiers. The white sea seemed to divide, roll back like the Red Sea before Moses. Soon the watchers were looking through a half-mile tunnel of clear air, 30 feet high, 100 feet wide.\"\n\n4.5 Henry G. Houghton standing on the chemical fog dissipation apparatus at the MIT research station near South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Colonel Edward Howland Robinson Green's mansion and the mast of a whaling ship can be seen in the background. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO 27-G-1A-8\u201348)\n\nHoughton's research supported the goals of military chemists who were seeking effective smoke screen agents and possible chemical neutralizing agents for use during poison gas attacks. He learned that titanium or zinc chloride could be used in generating smoke screens, but calcium chloride (CaCl2) acted as a hygroscopic drying agent, or desiccant. Calcium chloride is a non-toxic exothermic compound that lowers the freezing point of water. It is used as a water softener, to suppress dust on dirt roads, to melt ice, and as a drying agent in concrete. It can be used as a food preservative, but can also be a powerful abrasive irritant on moist skin tissue and in the eyes, nose, mouth, throat, and lungs. When burned, it produces toxic and corrosive fumes. It attacks zinc in the presence of water to form highly flammable hydrogen gas, and it corrodes steel rebar. Experiments conducted in a laboratory cloud chamber indicated that 1 gram of calcium chloride could clear 3 cubic meters of foggy air, possibly by lowering the vapor pressure of water. Houghton hoped his chemical sprays might be used to clear fog at airports and to add a margin of safety for ocean liners using it to sweep their paths clear. He had basically designed a huge chemical dehumidifier.\n\nWorking against the practical adoption of this technique was the enormous amount of chemical needed to keep open even a moderate-sized hole in the fog. Since the ocean fog kept rolling in and re-forming, a constant chemical spray of about 400 pounds a second (!) would have been needed to maintain a half mile opening during the Round Hill experiment. Moreover, as the researchers admitted, \"Apparatus of the type described cannot readily be made portable and its size makes it a rather serious obstruction for some applications, notably at airports.\" As mentioned, the electrified, high-pressure calcium chloride spray was corrosive to metals. It tended to clog the spray nozzles and had to be washed off any metal objects it contacted, especially electrical systems, but also the piping and even the airplanes and ships it was designed to serve. It was also dangerous to personnel, producing skin rashes if not rinsed off, and it killed vegetation (it was sold as a weed killer). The navy had some unfortunate experiences with the chemical and ultimately decided not to use it on its airplane carriers.\n\nReminiscent of the later distinction between cloud physics and weather modification\u2014perhaps also between basic research and practical applications\u2014MIT researchers were quick to point out that fog research, not fog control, was their ultimate aim: \"The end result, whatever the practical application of local fog  dissipation, has been a substantial increase in knowledge of the physical properties of fog and of the means for conveniently determining these properties, as well as a more thorough quantitative knowledge of the transmission of electromagnetic waves through fog, whether they be radio, light, or long infrared.\"\n\nStill, the list of institutions acknowledged for their support in the MIT report reads like a who's who of the military\u2013industrial complex in 1934: Colonel Green for the use of his estate; the American Philosophical Society for a research grant; and the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, the U.S. Army Air Corps, and the Bureau of Air Commerce of the Department of Commerce for their support. Huge amounts of chemicals were provided free of charge by the Michigan and Columbia alkali companies and the Dow Chemical Company. Edison Electric of Boston lent the experimenters a large power transformer. This combination of government, commercial, and private philanthropic support was part of a persistent pattern of patronage (6\u20137).\n\nIt is undoubtedly true that a 30-foot-high barrier made of metal pipes and stretched across a runway is dangerous to airplanes landing and taking off, especially in conditions of low visibility. Houghton's chemical mix, although promising, was also impractical, being dangerous and corrosive. More substantial was his basic research on the formation and evaporation of small droplets, on the optical properties of fog, and on the search for possible hygroscopic chemicals to disperse it. Houghton's greatest contribution, however, involved the idea that cloud physics research, as distinct from but related to operational weather modification, had a place in the modern university.\n\n#  FIDO: A Brute-Force Method of Fog Dispersal\n\nFoggy weather kept aviators grounded in World War I, but by 1921 British meteorologist Sir Napier Shaw discussed the possibility of clearing fog at an airfield by heating it, concluding, \"I would not like to say it is impossible with unlimited funds and coal.\" He noted, however, that \"air in the open is very slippery stuff and it has all sorts of ways of evading control that are very disappointing.\"  Professor Frederick A. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) agreed with Shaw and chose to emphasize blind landing techniques. Other possibilities, although none of them were proved, included sprays of electrified water, air, or sand (Warren), chemical treatments (Houghton), vigorous fanning, and coating rivers with oil. Yet the brute-force technology of heating the runway was the only one certain to work\u2014although it appeared at the time to be prohibitively expensive.\n\nIn 1926 Humphreys estimated that it would require the combustion of 6,600 gallons of oil (or 35 tons of coal) an hour to clear a layer of fog about 150 feet thick from a typical airfield\u2014a cost that he deemed far too large. David Brunt, Shaw's successor at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, revisited the issue in 1939. He estimated that clearing a layer of fog about 300 feet thick would require an average temperature increase of 3.5\u00b0C (6\u00b0F) (twice this at the ground) and suggested that smokeless burners supplied by an oil pipeline along an airfield could be designed to do the job. Brunt's ideas were field-tested in the winter of 1938\/1939, but the results were not promising.\n\nAs World War II escalated, fog became an obstacle to successful bombing raids. With more raids scheduled, a surging accident rate, and the large number of flying hours lost to fog, the problem became one of \"extreme urgency.\" In 1942 Prime Minister Winston Churchill directed his scientific adviser, Lord Cherwell, to address the matter and issued the following statement: \"It is of great importance to find means to disperse fog at aerodromes so that aircraft can land safely. Let full experiments to this end be put in hand by the Petroleum Warfare Department with all expedition. They should be given every support.\"\n\nUnder the leadership of Britain's minister of fuel and power, Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, and Major-General Sir Donald Banks, the scientific research establishment and industry joined forces to tackle the problem. The Petroleum Warfare Department (PWD), an agency created in 1940 to consider \"the possibilities inherent in the use of burning oil as an offensive and defensive weapon in warfare,\" was charged with developing a reliable, if expensive, brute-force method of clearing fogs over airfields, a system it called Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation. FIDO was one of the most spectacular but least publicized secret weapons of the war. According to Banks, \"We had been making vast preparations to cook the Germans. We would see whether we could cook the atmosphere!\"\n\nIt was a massive undertaking. The FIDO project brought together pilots, engineers, fuel scientists, industrialists, government bureaucrats, and meteorologists. Given the urgency of the situation, normal research and development plans were shelved in favor of an all-out attack by research teams from the National Physical Laboratory, Imperial College of Science and Technology, Royal Aircraft Establishment, Armament Research Department, and such industries as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Gas Light and Coke Company, General Electric, Imperial Chemical Industries, London Midland and Scottish Railway, and the Metropolitan Water Board. According to Lloyd, the project director, \"each was told to get on with the job with the fullest support and freedom of action.\"\n\n#  First Successful Tests\n\nFIDO consisted of a system of tanks, pipes, and burners surrounding British airfields and designed to deliver petroleum that, when ignited, raised the ambient temperature by several degrees\u2014enough to disperse fog and light the way for aircraft operations. The first large-scale test of a FIDO system was conducted in a field and did not involve aircraft takeoffs or landings. With strong radiation fog predicted for the morning of November 4, 1942, the FIDO team assembled at Moody Down, Hampshire. An 80-foot fire escape ladder was positioned between two FIDO burners 200 yards in length and 100 yards apart. As a local fireman climbed to the top of the ladder, he disappeared into the fog. When the burners were lit, the fog began to clear and the fireman came into view. To verify the result, the burners were turned down and the fog reappeared. The burners were again ignited, and the fog dissipated. With typical British reserve, it was reported that Lloyd \" _almost_ whooped for joy\" (emphasis added).\n\nOn the same day, experiments were also conducted at the airfield in Staines, Surrey, using coke-burning braziers shuttled by miniature rail cars along tracks paralleling the runways. While an even denser fog was cleared with less smoke, the coke took longer to light and required more effort to replenish. Gasoline was much easier to pipe to airfields and ultimately became the fuel of choice for FIDO. The urgency of the situation did not allow much time for further experimentation and research. As a result, the petroleum burner setup at Graveley airfield, Hertfordshire, served as the prototype for other FIDO systems ultimately installed at fourteen Royal Air Force (RAF) fields.\n\nOn February 5, 1943, Air Vice Marshal Donald C. Bennett landed a Gypsy Major at Graveley in a midday FIDO light-up. Thirteen days later, in the first night test, he again landed, in a Lancaster. Although it was not foggy, visibility was poor. Bennett recounted seeing the blazing runway when he was still 60 miles out. As he made his approach, he recalled, \"I had vague thoughts of seeing lions jumping through a hoop of flames at the circus. The glare was certainly considerable and there was some turbulence, but it was nothing to worry about.\" Except wildfires. A demonstration test for aircrews on February 23 resulted in grass, hedges, trees, and telegraph poles near the burners going up in flame. All hands, in addition to local bomb spotters and fire companies, were called in to fight the blaze. The first opportunity to land an aircraft in actually foggy conditions occurred in July 1943. A thick fog, approximately 300 to 400 feet deep, blanketed the runway, with visibility less than 200 yards. The FIDO burners were lit at five o'clock in the morning, and within seven minutes, an area 1,500 yards long and 200 yards wide was cleared of fog. Aircraft were then able to land successfully at fifteen-minute intervals.\n\nThe futurist Arthur C. Clarke once witnessed a FIDO test in Cornwall:\n\nThe runway was lined on either side with a double row of pipes\u2014four or five miles in all\u2014which conveyed gasoline to long rows of burners. When they were in action, they consumed fuel at the awesome rate of 100,000 gallons an hour and formed multiple walls of flame the full length of the runway.\n\nAt night, with the fog rolling in from the Atlantic, a FIDO operation was like a scene from Dante's _Inferno_. The roar of the flames made speech difficult; such an updraft was created that small stones on the edge of the runway were picked up and tossed around by the air currents. The yellow walls of fire, taller than a man, stretched away into the foggy night as far as the eye could see. The miles of burners pumped heat into the air at the rate of 10 million horsepower, cutting a long, narrow trench through the fog down which the retuning bombers found their way to the ground.\n\nI have known nights when the fog was so thick that visibility was less than ten feet; but standing in the middle of the runway, with the flames roaring on either side, you could see the stars shining overhead. FIDO worked by brute force, and the development of radar made it obsolete, but it did show what could be done if the incentive was sufficiently great.\n\nThe view from the cockpit was especially exhilarating. Although airmen were thankful for the safety that FIDO provided, they described their first experiences of landing between FIDO burners as frightening. One veteran pilot, echoing Clarke's description, likened it to a descent into hell, remarking that it seemed as if he \"was over [the enemy] target once more ... [and] that the whole place must have caught on fire.\"\n\n#  FIDO Becomes Operational\n\nFIDO actually worked. It allowed British and Allied aircraft to take off and land in conditions of poor visibility when the Germans were grounded (figure 4.6). The urgency that Churchill demanded had been met, and FIDO was quickly serving the duty of guiding RAF and Allied airmen home safely. Pilots returning to foggy England after a mission could see the airfield glowing in the distance, beckoning them home to a lighted, fog-free airport. They could also save valuable time getting their shot-up planes and exhausted (and possibly wounded) crews on the ground. Because of FIDO, the Allies could launch patrols and air raids and return their planes safely when enemy  aircraft were grounded due to poor visibility. RAF Coastal Command aircraft on anti\u2013U-boat patrol used FIDO frequently. On one occasion, a lost Lysander aircraft landed on a runway that had been cleared of fog. When FIDO was turned off, fog once again enveloped the aircraft. Reportedly, the pilot wandered across the tarmac for quite some time before finding the control tower.\n\n4.6 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, 493rd Bomb Group, landing in England with the aid of FIDO, November 16, 1944. Note the giant flames behind the airplane. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES PHOTO A9004, DETAIL)\n\nThe success of FIDO was presented to a war-weary public as almost a miracle. Newspapers proclaimed it as a lifesaver and a triumph for British aviation. Those involved in administering the project credited FIDO with shortening the war and saving the lives of up to 10,000 airmen. Military historians are fond of invoking \"the fog of war\" as they struggle to reconstruct events. In the case of England, the fog was literal. An ice fog persisted during the opening days of the Battle of the Bulge, when FIDO supported Allied aviation. But during the long campaign, the weather cleared and much of the tactical air support came from the Continent, not England. Thus contemporary evaluations of the overall success of FIDO in \"shortening the war\" may have been somewhat optimistic and self-serving.\n\n#  The Aftermath of FIDO\n\nFIDO proved to be one of the innovation success stories of World War II. It was a crash research program that became operational; it saved lives and equipment; and it definitely gave the edge to Allied aviation during the last two years of the war. But FIDO was feasible only under the desperate conditions of wartime. Bomber Command, its chief beneficiary, credited it with introducing a \"revolutionary change in the air war,\" but its success was never replicated. When the FIDO system was ignited at an airfield, up to _6,000 gallons_ of gasoline were burned during the time required to land one aircraft. By comparison, a Mosquito bomber might burn between 10 and 20 gallons of fuel during its landing approach. It is estimated that during the two and a half years that FIDO was in operation, airfields that used it consumed a total of 30 million gallons of gasoline. Such expenditures were justifiable only when national survival was at stake. Ironically, FIDO's success was due in large part to the brilliant but modest British defense engineer Guy Stewart Callendar, who was the first scientist to attribute the enhanced greenhouse effect to the burning of fossil fuels, who designed key components of the system (including the trench burners), and who was one of the patent holders on the massive FIDO fuel burner.\n\nAfter the war, a FIDO system was planned for London's Heathrow Airport, but it was never installed. For a time, FIDO systems were maintained at the Blackbushe and Manston RAF bases, but according to one 1957 estimate, the cost of running a FIDO installation was prohibitively expensive\u2014\u20a444,500 an hour. Experiments using jet engines installed along runways to heat and disperse fog at Orly Airport near Paris and in Nanyuan, China, met with mixed results. The main technique for dealing with fog, developed after the war, was not weather or cloud modification but the widespread use of instrumented landing techniques.\n\n#  The Airs of the Future\n\nOn July 11, 1934, Willis R. Gregg, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, presided over the dedication ceremony at the air-conditioned house at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago. It was the Midwest's hottest summer to date, with temperatures that day in St. Louis reaching 100\u00b0F (38\u00b0C), but Chicago, cooled by a breeze from Lake Michigan, reached only a moderate 82\u00b0F (28\u00b0C). It was a dust bowl year, with little rain and the average regional temperatures soaring 5 to 10 degrees above normal. Gregg's theme, broadcast over NBC Radio, was weather control, and he began by discounting the \"fantastic methods\" of the professional  rainmakers \"who have boasted of their abilities to end drouths by the simple expediency of setting off a few explosives,\" or of those charlatans who \"would mount receptacles containing small quantities of chemicals on poles or platforms in the vicinity of the drouth stricken areas, and then trust to the law of averages and Old Mother Nature to come through with rain at the psychological moment so they may collect rain-making fees.\" He deemed the prospects for controlling outdoor weather \"rather slim\" for a great many centuries to come.\n\nGregg's focus was on the control of indoor weather, on display that day in the air-conditioned house, where there was \"no necessity for suffering from weather discomforts.\" Of course, indoor air-conditioning really began before recorded history, when people sought shelter from the storm to keep them dry and warm. Roofs, doors, windows, screens, fireplaces, stoves, and furnaces function either to keep out undesirable elements like rain, wind, and pests or to allow in or provide desirable elements such as shade, light, and heat. In hot climates, traditional practices of ventilation and evaporative cooling have long served to moderate heat, if not moisture. The inner atmosphere of the show house of 1934, however, had been refrigerated and dehumidified by mechanical means, the science of thermodynamics, the engineering that has come to be known as HVAC, and the power supplied by electricity. According to Gregg, conditioning this indoor air was solving \"the one thing that actually has the most lasting effect upon the human body and human activity\u2014weather, if only in a small way.\" Gregg, speaking from the front porch of the house, speculated about the possible, if impracticable, project of refrigerating an entire city mechanically, but he did point out, prophetically, that air-conditioning would allow cities to expand in areas formerly considered too hot for comfort. He might be amazed today to see air-conditioned mega-malls and domed stadiums, but not really, since even then air-conditioning was becoming more and more popular. On his inspection tour out west, through the dust bowl region, Gregg, at least on occasion, traveled on air-conditioned trains, slept in air-conditioned hotels, and ate in air-conditioned restaurants. He spoke of air-conditioning in relief of hay fever and of living in it from cradle to grave, citing the hospital incubators supporting the Dionne quintuplets, born in May of that year in Canada, and the growing trend for air-conditioned funeral parlors. His weather bureau office in Washington, D.C., however, was not air-conditioned; it had high ceilings and fans that helped alleviate the oppressive heat somewhat. The federal government followed liberal leave policies during heat waves.\n\nBut what about the outside air? In the summer of 1938, Gregg sent letters to his colleagues asking them to speculate on what the meteorological profession might look like in fifty years. Most of the responses focused on scientific and technological advances in forecasting. Some emphasized the growing importance of upper-air  measurements using radiosondes and broadcasts that would allow \"records to be flashed to all parts of the world.\" Charles Franklin Brooks foresaw remote sensing of the atmosphere using ultra-high-frequency radio transmissions. J. Cecil Alter suggested that \"sky-sweeping robots of electric eyes will explore the upper atmosphere for air mass demarcations, depths, direction and velocity movement, moisture content, and other factors. Zigzag tracings or photographic replicas, automatically registered, will be made of the shape of the course of the refracted ray from the electric eye, as it passes through different air masses.\" Humphreys wrote of \"robot reporters\u2014instruments that not only keep a continuous record of the weather elements, but which, at the touch of a button, or automatically at regular intervals, also tell all about the weather there at the time\" (215). These predictions were largely realized through the development of weather radar and other forms of remote sensing. Also, in 1939, George W. Mindling foretold, in doggerel, of the \"coming perpetual visiontone show\" of perfect surveillance and perfect prediction using television and infrared sensors, a technology instituted in the TIROS (Television Infrared Observation Satellite) meteorological satellite program in 1960:\n\nIn the coming perpetual visiontone show   \nWe shall see the full action of storms as they go.   \nWe shall watch them develop on far away seas,   \nAnd we'll plot out their courses with much greater ease.   \nThen a new day will come in electrical lore   \nWhen the pictures will register very much more....   \nThen a day there will be when predictions won't fail,   \nThough describing the weather in every detail,   \nJust what minute 'twill rain, even when it will hail.\n\nThese lines in Mindling's poem are preceded by seven stanzas praising the radiosonde and followed by two stanzas anticipating that weather forecasting might someday attain the accuracy of astronomical predictions.\n\nTwo of Gregg's respondents spun wild fantasies involving geoengineering. Major E. H. Bowie of the San Francisco weather bureau office facetiously suggested that the only way to end the dust bowl was through a Works Progress Administration project to lower the height of the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains. T. A. Blair of Lincoln, Nebraska, issued this ominous forecast for a weather control agency and a \"war for the control the air masses,\" a full century into the future:\n\nIn the year 2038 an American meteorologist discovers how to control the weather.... But difficulties arise. This control involves a shifting of the air masses  and means that while the one area is getting the kind of weather it wants, another region is subject to unfavorable weather.... Political parties develop on the basis of these differences, and \"pressure groups\" attempt to control the WDA (Weather Distributing Administration). Soon other nations attempt to manipulate the weather. International complications begin and the human masses of the world are plunged into a war for the control of the air masses.\n\n4.7 \"Weather Superstitions and Fallacies\" (ADAPTED FROM BARBER, _AN ILLUSTRATED OUTLINE OF WEATHER SCIENCE_ )\n\nRepresentative of the attitudes of the era was Charles William Barber's 1943 illustration of the curtain of \"weather superstitions and fallacies\" being drawn aside to reveal the progressive path of weather science leading to its ultimate goals (figure 4.7). Perhaps, however, accurate long-range forecasting and weather control are the _real_ weather superstitions and fallacies.\n\nI am writing this book in Maine, in the summer, under a tree, without air-conditioning. I do not have it in my office, and I do not need it in my home. With a basement dehumidifier, window screens, fans, and a lake conveniently nearby, I have no need at all to be sequestered from the open air. In fact, I found creative writing to be nearly impossible while on sabbatical, cooped up as I was in the elegant air-conditioned buildings of Washington, D.C. There I focused on doing library and archival research, giving and attending seminars, and otherwise broadening my horizons while avoiding the heat of the day. It seems to me that climate deliberations in the U.S. capital will be conducted indoors, in air-conditioned buildings sequestered from the summer heat of Washington. Some of the people making the decisions might even be advocates for a Weather Distributing Administration.\n\nThe rise of civilian and military aviation in the early decades of the twentieth century placed fog clearing at the center of the research-and-development agenda. The airplane provided a new tool and a new research platform, and its vulnerability to fog provided a new urgency. New theories of electrical influence, chemical affinity, and large-scale combustion were put to the test. Of the three case histories presented here, L. Francis Warren was the most speculative, and Wilder Bancroft ended up the biggest loser, in both credibility and financial terms; Henry Houghton's reputation as a careful researcher grew, even if his applications failed; and FIDO actually worked and may even have helped the British war effort, but at an immense cost that rendered it impractical after the war when the question of national survival was no longer at issue.\n\nCloud physics and chemistry got its start in this era, as did serious attempts to make smoke screens and dissipate clouds. So too did air-conditioning, which grew by leaps and bounds from a novelty to a seeming necessity for larger and larger spaces. In common with later eras, weather control research before 1944 benefited from military patronage and the passing interest, if not support, of large corporations like General Electric. T. A. Blair's 1938 vision of dystopian climate control in the distant future now seems a spooky possibility in the not-so-distant future. These themes, mutatis mutandis, would reemerge in the work of an articulate, highly credentialed spokesperson: Irving Langmuir.\n\n**5**\n\nPATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE\n\n_Pathological Science\u2014the science of things that aren't so._\n\n\u2014IRVING LANGMUIR, \"PATHOLOGICAL SCIENCE\"\n\n**IRVING** Langmuir (1881\u20131957), Nobel laureate in chemistry, quintessential industrial scientist, and associate director of research at the General Electric Corporation in Schenectady, New York, was both a rain king and a friend of weather warriors. He was also the leader of a research team that included Vincent Schaefer (1906\u20131993), \"the snowflake scientist,\" who developed dry ice seeding, and Bernard Vonnegut (1914\u20131997), who identified the chemical silver iodide as a cloud-seeding agent. Langmuir's work in surface chemistry was solid, even brilliant, and his scientific intuition was usually quite sound. By some measures he was considered to be a genius and was by no means a charlatan. Yet his work in weather control exemplified his own warnings about pathological possibilities of science gone awry.\n\nIn 1953 at GE's Knolls Research Laboratory, Langmuir presented a seminar titled \"Pathological Science,\" on \"the science of things that aren't so.\" He cited a number of examples of this phenomenon, some drawn from the history of laboratory science and some from popular culture. Among them were Prosper-Ren\u00e9 Blondlot's nonexistent N-rays (1903), so subtle that only a Frenchman could see them; the \"mitogenic rays\" (1920s) of the Russian biologist Alexandr  Gurwitsch, who claimed to have revealed the secret lives of plants; the extrasensory perception (ESP) of the American parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, whose work convinced many people that they had this sixth sense; and, beginning in the 1940s, worldwide reports of flying saucers. Focusing his argument on basic research rather than on popularizations, Langmuir argued that in many pathological cases there was no dishonesty involved, but researchers were tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking, or threshold interactions. \"Research\" is defined as seeking to discover what you do not know. According to Langmuir, science conducted at the limits of observation or measurement\u2014precisely where cutting-edge research is done\u2014may become pathological if the participants make excessive claims for their results. Overly hopeful researchers studying phenomena close to the threshold of delectability may interpret minor variations or even random noise as meaningful patterns. By attributing causation to events that are barely detectable or poorly understood, they may convince themselves and co-workers of the reality of their \"discovery.\" If they persist, weaving theoretical justifications with claims of great accuracy and responding to criticisms with ad hoc excuses, they may cross the boundary into pathological science. If other researchers cannot reproduce any part of the alleged effect, or of the experiment fails repeatedly in the presence of an objective observer, the rules of good scientific practice are supposed to kick in, with support dropping off rapidly until nothing is left to salvage\u2014according to Langmuir.\n\nMany scientists would say that they are working in exciting and rapidly changing fields, in which a breakthrough or named discovery could establish their careers or secure them adequate levels of funding. Otherwise, why bother? Under such conditions, external or social pressures may distort the scientific process and lead into the realm of pathology. Such pressures may include the rush to publish questionable or speculative results, to claim priority, or to avoid priority disputes; intervention of the press, the courts, or government regulators in the process; or competitions for prizes. The patentability and potential profitability of proprietary discoveries may also short-circuit the scientific process and result in the violation or circumvention of established standards of evidence. When things begin to go awry, investigators may suspect a conspiracy to discredit their results, which, depending on the personality of the leading figure, may be convincing to others.\n\nPathological science is by no means limited to esoteric physics experiments done in darkened rooms or at high temperatures and pressures where the subjectivity of the experimenter or malfunctioning equipment may be the source of the deception.  In fact, at the very same time Langmuir presented his seminar on pathological science, he was deeply involved in making highly dubious and unsupportable claims for the efficacy of cloud seeding in creating rain, otherwise modifying the weather, and perhaps even altering the climate. We can thus add one final criterion supporting pathological outcomes that Langmuir did not mention in his lecture\u2014over-reliance on the credentials of a scientist, for example a Nobel laureate, instead of proof. When Robert N. Hall transcribed Langmuir's talk, he added, editorially, \"Pathological science is by no means a thing of the past. In fact, a number of examples can be found among current literature, and it is reasonable to suppose that the incidence of this kind of 'science' will increase at least linearly with the increase in scientific activity.\" If Langmuir's lecture were to be given today, one might include such pathologies as polywater, an illusory form of water promoted by Soviet physicists Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Derjaguin in the 1960s, and cold fusion, purportedly discovered by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in 1989. A 2008 Purdue University report on \"bubble\" fusion contained the following line about the misconduct and unsustainable claims of one of the school's physicists, who publicly purported to have produced nuclear energy in a tabletop experiment by making tiny bubbles collapse: \"From small beginnings there developed a tangled web of wishful thinking, scientific misjudgment, institutional lapses and human failings.\" This is pathological science. Langmuir's obsessive and unbridled enthusiasm for weather control and his unsubstantiated claims for it represented a serious lapse in judgment. Thus his final, major undertaking\u2014his foray into weather control\u2014deserves to be scrutinized in light of the criteria developed in his own lectures on pathological science.\n\n#  Blowing Smoke\n\nDuring World War II, General Electric held contracts with the National Defense Research Council, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), the Chemical Warfare Service, and the U.S. Army Air Force for research on gas mask filters, screening smokes, aircraft icing studies, precipitation static, and other aspects of what came to be known as aerosol or \"cloud\" physics. In 1941, following German successes in using a smoke generator to hide the battleship _Bismarck_ in the fjords of Norway, Langmuir asked his associate Schaefer to enlarge a small smoke generator he had built under military contract for testing air filters for gas masks. Using a mercury diffusion pump originally designed by Langmuir attached to a pot of boiling oil, Schaefer proceeded to \"smoke up the whole room,\" getting him into trouble with his laboratory neighbors and with the local fire department when he tested it, without advance notice, on the laboratory roof.\n\nA full demonstration for the military was held at dawn on June 24, 1942, at Vrooman's Nose, a 600-foot cliff that provided a panoramic view of an agricultural region in upstate New York known as the Schoharie Valley. Notables in attendance included Vannevar Bush and Alan Waterman of the OSRD, Vladimir K. Zworykin of RCA Research Labs (prominent in chapter 7), and top military officers. On cue, at sunrise, with drainage winds flowing down the valley, a tiny puff of smoke from a single Langmuir\u2013Schaefer generator rose in the distance and quickly spread to fill the valley floor. The device worked by forcing 100 gallons of lubricating oil at a temperature of about 450\u00b0C (842\u00b0F) at supersonic speeds through a hot manifold. As the oil vapor hit the cold air, it formed a dense white cloud of tiny particles. Within minutes, the generator had belched out a persistent, thick smoke screen 1 mile wide, 10 miles long, and 1,000 feet deep, totally obscuring the valley. The army had its smoke screen, GE its contract, and Langmuir and Schaefer had taken their first steps in the new field of cloud physics. Since they had made an artificial cloud successfully, why not modify an existing one?\n\nIn 1943, again under military patronage, Langmuir's research team shifted its attention to studies of electrical effects such as precipitation static, which interfered with radio communications during snowstorms. The Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire provided ideal conditions for their experiments and, serendipitously, led them into the study of the behavior of clouds containing water droplets as cold as\u201340\u00b0C (\u201340\u00b0F) (\"quite a bit below freezing\"). Such conditions represented the typical environment for clouds in the free atmosphere and provided insights into the nature of ice nuclei, ice deposition, and other aspects of cloud physics. \"In the process,\" according to an interview with Schaefer, \"Langmuir and I became very much interested in the whole business of supercooled clouds, and whether you could modify them.\" The military roots of weather control research should not be surprising, given the earlier history of army aviators using electrified sand and chemicals for cloud busting and the contemporaneous effort to clear fog in England using the FIDO system.\n\nLangmuir and his team read the latest articles by meteorologists Alfred Wegener, Tor Bergeron, Walter Findeisen, and other European researchers on the initiation of ice-phase precipitation. Schaefer again took the lead, seeding supercooled clouds of water droplets with \"dozens of different materials\": talc, carbon, graphite, volcanic dust, various smokes, and quartz crystals\u2014following an idea attributed to Findeisen that the crystals might provide suitable cloud condensation nuclei (this \"didn't work at all\"). Yet Schaefer persisted in his \"cut and try\" methods, emulating Thomas Edison's search for a suitable lamp filament. Rather than theory, it was Schaefer's use of dry ice to cool his cloud chamber in the summer of 1947 that opened up a new chapter in the history of weather control. Others had tried this before.\n\n#  Liquid and Solid Carbon Dioxide\n\nIn 1891, Louis Gathman of Chicago obtained a patent to encourage and enhance rainfall by chilling the atmosphere through the release of \"liquefied carbonic acid gas\" shot from a projectile or released from a balloon. In Gathman's plan, the liquid carbonic acid sent into the clouds would vaporize and expand, chilling the surrounding air. Even though one method involved delivery of the agent by artillery burst, Gathman's idea was quite distinct from those of the concussionists. Senator Charles Farwell (R-Illinois), who had supported Robert Dyrenforth, was reportedly interested in the patent, but did not pursue the idea. Fernando Sanford, a physics professor at Stanford University, praised Gathman's theory, since he thought that cooling the air was a physically sound technique to enhance rainfall artificially. Sanford categorized Dyrenforth's recent Texas rainmaking expedition as a \"national fiasco,\" since the explosions of the concussionists actually heated the air and encouraged the proliferation of charlatans. Real scientists conducted carefully controlled tests and were published in the technical literature; they did not petition Congress for money on the basis of their brainstorms. Sanford wrote: \"Unquestionably we have [in Gathman's proposal] the proper kind of an agent for producing rain. The only question to be considered is one of finance.\" Unfortunately, the scale of the atmosphere worked against the idea. Sanford calculated that it would take an astronomical amount of carbonic acid, 406 million pounds of it, to cool a cubic mile of air sufficiently to generate a quarter of an inch of rainfall over 640 acres. With carbonic acid selling for $1 a pound, Sanford estimated that the cost of the rainfall per acre was a prohibitively expensive $600,000.\n\nIf Gathman had taken the next step, proposing the use of solid carbonic acid (dry ice); if Sanford had seen a triggering effect to the cloud seeding rather than a brute-force approach to chilling the entire atmosphere; and if someone had actually tried the experiment, perhaps by shelling a growing cumulus congestus cloud ... but those are a lot of \"ifs.\" In 1948 the _Stanford Law Review_ , in an examination of the science behind the current cloud-seeding rage, briefly mentioned Gathman's patent, pointing out that minute particles of dry ice and even artificial clouds must have been formed in the rapid cooling process. They speculated that if Gathman were alive, and if his patent had not long since expired, \"he might have an action for patent infringement against those who are using dry ice to cause rainfall.\" Two more big \"ifs.\"\n\nIn the late nineteenth century, supercooled cloud conditions were known, and meteorologists were hinting at the possibility that ice-phase processes could initiate precipitation. In 1895 Alexander McAdie wrote that, by analogy, \"a snowflake  or ice crystal falling into [a supercooled cloud] may suffice to start a sudden congelation, just as we see ice needles dart in all directions when a chilled surface of a still pond is disturbed.\" Speaking of towering convective clouds\u2014which are certainly large but not quiescent like a pond\u2014McAdie noted, \"We liken this monstrous cloud to a huge gun, loaded and quiet, but with a trigger so delicately set that a falling snowflake would discharge it.\" He predicted that \"successful rain engineers will come in time ... from the ranks of those who study and clearly understand the physical processes of cloud formation\" (77). The key word here is \"trigger,\" which is just what the General Electric scientists were attempting to do in 1946.\n\nReaders of the September 1930 issue of _Popular Mechanics_ learned that a Dutch scientist, August Veraart, had recently \"succeeded\" in producing rain by throwing dry ice power (solid CO2) on clouds. Veraart also claimed to be able to produce more sunshine by conducting his seeding in the early morning, which cleared the sky of fog, mist, and clouds for the rest of the day. From a small airplane flying above the Zuider Zee, Veraart scattered some 3,300 pounds of crushed ice particles cooled to a temperature of\u201378\u00b0C (\u2013108\u00b0F) into growing cumulus clouds. Observers testified that the intervention was followed by falling streaks of rain, although there is no evidence that the rain actually reached the ground. In 1931 Veraart published a small popular book in Dutch, now quite rare, titled _More Sunshine in the Cloudy North, More Rain in the Tropics_. Here he presented a history of his involvement in rainmaking, an overview of his experiments and theories, and a summary of his wide, sweeping claims.\n\nOver the years, Veraart said, he had tried an assortment of seeding techniques involving dry ice, supercooled water-ice, and ammonium salts. He theorized that seeding particles could upset the stability or release instability in clouds, release latent heat of condensation, and perhaps influence their electrical charges to either dissolve them or condense their moisture into rain. As a kind of budding climate engineer, he speculated that the widespread application of such techniques could produce both more rain (at night) and more sunshine, while serving to purify the air and reduce the frequency and severity of storms. Veraart thought that this would make the world better by rearranging climate zones that were either too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry.\n\nVeraart died in 1932, before Bergeron and Findeisen published their work on cloud physics. Meteorologists have minimized Veraart's contribution, even though he was using the \"right\" substance, by claiming that he probably did not understand the mechanism involved in the precipitation process he triggered, he did not realize that the dry ice was effective in development of ice crystals  by cooling supercooled clouds, and his success was likely only a coincidence. Veraart's lack of an academic affiliation and his excessive enthusiasm led Dr. E. van Everdingen, head of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Service, to brand him a \"non-meteorologist and charlatan.\" Meteorologist Horace Byers wrote in 1974 that Veraart's vague concepts on changing the thermal structure of clouds, modifying temperature inversions, and creating electrical effects were not accepted by the scientific community. Thus, instead of Veraart, it is the scientists at GE who are remembered as the pioneers in weather control.\n\nSchaefer was trained as a machinist and toolmaker at GE and joined Langmuir's research team in 1932, specializing in building models, devices, and prototypes. He was involved in outdoor activities, including nature study, preservation, and hiking in the Adirondack Mountains. In 1940 he became widely known for his method of replicating individual snowflakes using a thin plastic coating. On July 12, 1946, Schaefer attempted to cool off a home freezer that he was using as a cloud chamber by dropping a chunk of dry ice into it. To his surprise, he saw the cold cloud instantly transform into millions of tiny ice crystals (figure 5.1). Later measurements indicated that he had reduced the temperature of the chamber from\u201312 to\u201335\u00b0C (10 to\u201331\u00b0F) and had generated an ice cloud from \"supercooled\" water droplets. His GE laboratory notebook for the day reads: \"I have just finished a set of experiments in the laboratory which I believe points out the mechanism for the production of myriads of ice crystals.\" Schaefer later recalled\n\nIt was a serendipitous event, and I was smart enough to figure out just what happened ... so I took the big chunk out of the chamber and used the smaller one and a still smaller one until I finally found that by producing the supercooled cloud, and then scratching a piece of dry ice held above the chamber, a tiny grain would just flood the chamber with ice crystals. So I knew I had something pretty important.\n\nThe following week, on July 17, when Langmuir returned from a trip and witnessed the effect, he scribbled in his laboratory notebook \"Control of Weather\" above his analysis of Schaefer's discovery. Schaefer recalled that Langmuir \"was just ecstatic and he was very excited and said, 'Well, we've got to get into the atmosphere and see if we can do things with natural clouds.' So I immediately began to plan ... to seed a natural cloud.\"\n\nSpeculation was rampant that summer about the possibilities of weather control. On July 31, Schaefer made some rough calculations that indicated that if a 50-pound block of dry ice, costing $2.50, could be ground up and dispersed  into a cloud from an airplane, hundreds of thousands of pounds of snow could be generated. Like the electrified sand researchers of the 1920s, Schaefer supposed that \"precipitation\" not reaching the ground would serve to dry out the clouds and dissipate them. \"Thus,\" he speculated, \"it would seem possible with the right arrangements\u2014barrage or captive balloons, rockets, etc., etc., to clear areas around airports, on flight paths, or possibly to precipitate snow in mountainous regions where it could be used for water storage and sport and prevent it from being deposited in cities!\" Langmuir too was engaged in calculations of his own about the vast economic and practical consequences of seeding natural clouds with dry ice.\n\n5.1 Vincent Schaefer reenacting his discovery on July 12, 1946, that sparked fresh weather-control experiments, as Irving Langmuir ( _left_ ) and Bernard Vonnegut watch. Colleagues have said that he did this on innumerable occasions for anyone who would watch. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)\n\n#  The Rainmaker of Yore\n\nThe public had not yet heard about cloud seeding in September 1946 when the midwestern novelist and screenwriter Homer Croy reminisced in _Harper_ ' _s Magazine_ about the rainmakers of his youth. The article was an instant anachronism: \"One day when I was just a boy, my father said, 'Get ready and we'll go to town and see the rainmaker.' No work! Maybe a candy mouse. Maybe some 'lickorish.' ... There were always wonderful things to be had in town. It was not long before we were in the hack and jogging along the dusty road. There, on each side of us, was the suffering, gasping, dying corn.\" Croy recalled that in the 1890s, especially during times of drought, many people sought the services of rainmakers. He and his family gathered that day with other citizens at the railroad depot where the Rock Island Railroad had sent its rainmaker to work his magic from a specially equipped boxcar. There was\n\na great stirring inside the mysterious car and in a few minutes a grayish gas (that was going to save our corn) began coming out the stove-pipe hole in the roof. In no time the gas hit our noses\u2014the most evil-smelling stuff we had ever encountered. But if it took that to make it rain, why, all well and good, we could stand it. The theory, as most of us knew by this time, was that this gas went up and drops of moisture coagulated around the particles and down came the rain.... It seemed simple and logical to us. Up went the gas and up went our eyes and up went our hopes ... sometimes it took only two or three hours, sometimes it took two or three days. (215)\n\nBut by the end of the afternoon, only a little cloud, \"about as big as a horseblanket,\" appeared and suddenly disappeared in the otherwise cloudless sky. Croy and his family returned home that evening disappointed but not disillusioned. As they prepared for bed, they heard, on the tin roof of the shed, a hopeful pitter-pat that soon became a downpour\u2014the soaking rains had started. The next morning \"everything in all the world was all right. The drought was broken. And we knew why it had been broken.... And we were thankful to God for the wonderful man who had come among us\" (217).\n\nIn his essay, Croy relegated these events to the gullibility of a bygone era, concluding, \"There is now not a farmer in all the corn belt who believes in rainmakers. ... It hardly seems possible today that I once went to town to see a rainmaker save our crops, but I believed in it then and so did most people\" (220). The timing could not have been more ironic. Croy's article was published in _Harper_ ' _s_ just _after_ Schaefer's discovery of dry ice seeding and just _before_ General Electric announced it to the public, initiating a new wave of faith and hope in weather control\u2014and a resurgence of commercial rainmakers.\n\n#  GE Tells the World\n\nOn November 13, 1946, the General Electric News Bureau announced that laboratory cold box experiments had succeeded in making snowflakes and that scientists would soon conduct an outdoor experiment to see if they could exercise \"some human control over snow clouds.\" The _New York Times_ headline read, \"Scientist Creates Real Snowflakes.\" November 13 was also the day that Schaefer conducted an airborne test by dropping 6 pounds of dry ice pellets into a cold cloud over Mount Greylock in the nearby Berkshires, creating ice crystals and streaks of snow along a 3-mile path. This marked the beginning of a new era of cloud seeding. Here is Schaefer's account of the test flight:\n\nAt 9:30 am Curtis G. Talbot of the GE Flight Test Division at the Schenectady airport piloted a Fairchild cabin plane taking off from the east west runway. I was in the plane with Curt with a camera, 6 pounds of dry ice, and plans for attempting the first large scale test of converting a supercooled cloud to ice crystals. As we took off of the ground, temperature was 6\u00b0C [43\u00b0F]. In the sky were long stratus clouds isolated from each other and at an altitude of what appeared to be about 10,000 feet.\n\nWe started climbing immediately and continued for more than an hour ... [reaching a cloud at 14,000 feet that appeared to be supercooled, with temperature estimated to be\u201318.5\u00b0C [1.3\u00b0F]. Some brilliant iridescent colors on the edges, and the thermometer bulb beginning to show a light deposit of ice]. At 10:37 am Curt flew into the cloud and I started the dispenser in operation. We dropped about three pounds [of dry ice] and then swung around and headed south.\n\nAbout this time I looked toward the rear and was thrilled to see long streams of snow falling from the base of the cloud which we had just passed. I shouted to Curt to swing around and as we did so we passed through a mass of glistening snow crystals! We then saw a brilliant 22\u00b0 halo and adjacent parhelia. ... We made another run through a dense portion of the unseeded cloud during which time I dispensed about three more pounds of crushed dry ice (pellets from 5\/16\" down to sugar size). This was done by opening the window and letting the suction of the passing air remove it. We then swung west of the cloud and observed draperies of snow which seemed to hang for 2\u20133,000 feet below us and noted the cloud drying up rapidly.... While still in the cloud we saw the glinting crystals all over.\n\nThe next lines in Schaefer's notebook reveal the true excitement of the moment: \"I turned to Curt and we shook hands as I said 'We did it!' Needless to say we were quite excited. The rapidity with which the CO2 dispensed from the window seemed to affect the cloud was amazing. It seemed as though it almost exploded the effect was so widespread and rapid.\" Later, back at the airport, Langmuir rushed out enthusiastically to congratulate the experimenters, praising the remarkable view from the airport control tower and exclaiming that only minutes after the cloud-seeding run had begun, he had seen long streamers of falling snow pouring out of the base of the cloud more than fifty miles away.\n\nC. Guy Suits, GE vice president and director of research, immediately wrote a memo recommending access to a better airplane, either commercial or military, since the one operated by GE could not fly over 14,000 feet. Demonstrating his easy access to the military, he wrote, \"We might want the Army Air Force to give us some help. I think a call to [Major General Curtis E.] LeMay would be helpful in this connection, particularly if [he knows] about the preliminary result of the experiment.\"\n\nThe following day, GE told the story in detail, framing it as a triumph of scientific prediction with seemingly limitless practical possibilities: \"Schenectady, NY, Nov. 14, 1946\u2014Scientists of the General Electric Company, flying in an airplane over Greylock Mountain in western Massachusetts yesterday, conducted experiments with a cloud three miles long, and were successful in transforming the cloud into snow.\" Langmuir claimed that this result \"completely fulfilled\" predictions based on laboratory experiments and calculations. If one pellet of dry ice, \"about the size of a pea,\" could precipitate several tons of snow, he predicted that \"a single plane could generate hundreds of millions of tons of snow\" over mountain ski resorts, possibly diverting the snowfall from major cities. Or, depending on conditions, perhaps the seeding technique could be used to clear fogs over airports and harbors or prevent aircraft icing problems. A flurry of news reports followed leaving the lab \"snowed under\" by hundreds of clippings (figure 5.2). The _New York Times_ read, \"Three-mile cloud made into snow by dry ice dropped from plane ... opening vista of moisture control by man.\" A banner headline in the _Boston Globe_ announced, \"Snowstorm Manufactured.\" Louis Gathman and August Veraart rolled over in their graves.\n\nLetters, postcards, and telegrams flooded in, too. One of them asked for indoor snow for a Christmas pageant to replace the white corn flakes used the previous year; another asked for artificial snow for a college winter carnival; and a ski operator seeking market advantage asked for advice. A search-and-rescue operation on Mount Rainier urgently asked GE to clear out the clouds so the team might be able to spot a downed aircraft. Movie producers requested tailor-made blizzards.  A Los Angeles air pollution officer wrote to Schaefer, asking him for advice on how to clear the air over the city. The chairman of the Kansas State Chamber of Commerce sent a telegram to President Harry Truman, asking for relief of the drought conditions using GE technology. This stimulated a reply from Francis W. Reichelderfer, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, to the effect that dry ice seeding worked only in special circumstances, and even then the results were controversial, since no one had established a method to determine how much was caused by human intervention and how much by natural processes. A cane sugar producer in Hawaii wrote that he, too, had tried, in 1941, to make it rain, cooling the clouds by launching slabs of dry ice into the valley fog from a huge slingshot on the mountain summit. Since he was working with warm clouds, he would have needed an enormous amount of dry ice. A newspaper editorial wondered if GE would be forming a \"snow cartel\" to sell us a white Christmas.\n\n5.2 Avalanche of news articles received by General Electric after press releases of November 13 and 14, 1946. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)\n\n#  Threat of Litigation\n\nAn extremely optimistic announcement of progress in weather modification appeared in the _General Electric Annual Report_ for 1947: \"Further experiments  in weather control led to a new knowledge which, it is believed now, will result in _inestimable_ benefits for mankind.\" When one of Schaefer's cloud-seeding attempts coincided with an 8-inch snowfall in upstate New York\u2014earlier the weather bureau had forecast \"fair and warmer\"\u2014Langmuir was quick to claim that cloud seeding had \"triggered\" the storm. Cloud seeding was becoming a controversial issue, and Langmuir's exaggerated claims threatened to take the company into litigious territory, far beyond the limits of normal corporate support for research.\n\nOn November 18, 1946, just three days after the public learned about cloud seeding, Simeon H. F. Goldstein, an insurance broker in New York City, wrote to General Electric warning of the need for liability coverage and offering insurance services \"to protect your Company against lawsuits for bodily injury and property damage resulting from artificial snowstorms produced at your direction\":\n\nThe newspapers report that your Company has developed a method of manufacturing snow, and will soon use it in the field. This is likely to produce lawsuits against your Company. Traffic accidents, as well as injurious falls by individuals, frequently result from natural snow, and are similarly likely to be caused by artificial snow. Government units, as well as large property-holders, will be put to extra expense in removing snow from roads and thoroughfares. When it melts, snow causes floods. It may also cause direct damage to property which happens to be in the open, as well as to structures which are not fully enclosed.... In addition to the foreseeable results, the complete novelty of the operation means that other sources of liability\u2014unforeseeable both in their nature and extent\u2014may exist. It would therefore seem dangerous to leave yourselves unprotected in these circumstances. May I hear from you?\n\nGE lawyers, fearing a deluge of property damage and personal inconvenience suits, immediately tried to silence Langmuir and his team. Langmuir and Schaefer, however, were riding high on a wave of publicity. They were both outspoken, enthusiastic promoters and popularizers of large-scale weather control. But Langmuir had extra clout and flaunted his Nobel laureate status. In the press and before the meteorological community, Langmuir repeatedly expounded his sensational vision of large-scale weather control and even climate control, with possible military implications. It was beginning to get pathological.\n\n#  Project Cirrus\n\nIn February 1947, General Electric research director Suits hurriedly called a halt to outdoor experimentation on cloud seeding and instructed Langmuir's team  to serve only as advisers on Project Cirrus, a new classified cloud-seeding effort to be conducted by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Air Force. As stated in the GE contract, the general purposes of the project were \"research study of cloud particles and cloud modifications\" by seeding, including investigations of liquid water content, particle sizes and distribution, and vertical cloud development. They were searching for fundamental knowledge of cloud physics and chemistry to improve operational forecasting as well as practical techniques of cloud modification for military purposes or possible economic development. An important clause in the contract further stipulated that \"the entire flight program shall be conducted by the government, using exclusively government personnel and equipment, and shall be under the exclusive control of such government personnel.\" Suits notified his staff that \"it is essential that all of the GE employees who are working on the project refrain from asserting any control _or_ direction over the flight program. The GE research laboratory responsibility is confined _strictly_ to laboratory work and reports.\"\n\nGE argued that the whole matter properly belonged to the government, and that the government, by suitable legislation, should both regulate the inducing of rainfall and indemnify for loss any contractor acting on the government's behalf\u2014especially themselves. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal asked Congress for a law \"to protect contractors engaged in cloud modification experiments against claims for damages by third parties,\" but no such legislation was forthcoming. The _Harvard Law School Record_ reported:\n\nToday \"Project Cirrus\" has an annual budget of $750,000 from military and naval funds because of its war implications\u2014bogging down enemy troops in snow and rain, clearing airfields of fog at lowest cost, and infecting induced storms with bacteriological and radiological materials. The Battle of the Bulge, in which the Nazis mobilized and attacked under supercooled fog, could have been much altered by a few pounds of dry ice.\n\nBetween 1947 and 1952, Project Cirrus conducted about 250 experiments involving modification of cold cirrus and stratus clouds, warm and cold cumulus clouds, periodic seeding, forest fire suppression, and a notable attempt to modify a hurricane. Researchers in the project developed a suite of modern techniques applicable to cloud physics, including instruments for measuring temperatures and cloud properties in flight, collecting cloud droplets and ice crystals, and generating artificial nuclei. Military aircraft (a B-17, later a B-29, and eventually as many as six planes) equipped with seeding devices, new instrumentation, and camera equipment operated over a 1,000-square-mile restricted flight area just  north of the Schenectady airport, where the team was based. Under the auspices of Project Cirrus, Langmuir consulted with cloud seeders in Central America and corresponded with cloud seeders in Hawaii who were seeking to generate rainfall from warm convective clouds. This stimulated Langmuir's thinking about possible chain reactions in cumulus clouds seeded by as little as a single drop of water. Although the Project Cirrus staff collected and analyzed mountains of photographic and other data, the response of the atmosphere to seeding was erratic and the researchers could not obtain any definitive measures of the efficacy of artificial nucleating agents. The results from several experimental runs were spectacular, however, and the Department of Defense decided to expand the work of Project Cirrus to include rain enhancement experiments in New Mexico, forest fire suppression trials in New England, liquid water seeding of warm clouds in Puerto Rico, and hurricane modification in the Atlantic Ocean.\n\nOne parallel study, the joint Air Force\u2013Weather Bureau Cloud Physics Research Project, found that seeding did indeed produce striking visual changes in clouds, including dissipation of cold stratus decks. However, experiments with clouds over Ohio in 1948 and over California and the Gulf states in 1949 led the researchers to conclude that cloud seeding could not initiate self-propagating storms or relieve drought. The weather bureau spent $85,000 on the project in 1948 and $100,000 in 1949, with the air force supplying aircraft, personnel, and ground radar facilities.\n\n#  Hurricane King\n\nIn October 1947, GE announced that Project Cirrus would be intercepting a hurricane, not to \"bust\" it but to experiment on the effects of seeding with dry ice on a portion of a storm. Atlantic tropical storm number eight, unofficially dubbed Hurricane King, had just made a devastating pass over southern Florida and was churning in the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles northeast of Orlando. It was expected to head farther out to sea. On October 13, the Project Cirrus team, led by navy lieutenant commander Daniel Rex and accompanied by Schaefer, bombed the heart of the storm with 80 pounds of dry ice and dropped 100 pounds more into two embedded convective towers.\n\nThe newspapers initially reported that the task force had \"attacked\" the storm in a \"hurricane-busting\" effort to reduce its winds or redirect it. It was reported in the press as \"history's first assault by man on a tropical storm,\" an experiment with energies of nature far greater than those unleashed by the atomic bomb. The official results were classified as military secrets, and Schaefer told the press  that he was \"not allowed to say\" whether the seeding had had any visual effects. Commander Rex's official report, not yet released, claimed a pronounced modification of the cloud deck that had been seeded. What happened after that, according to Langmuir, \"nobody knows,\" since Hurricane King made a \"hairpin\" turn and headed west, smashing into the coast along the Georgia\u2013South Carolina border near Savannah (figure 5.3). In Charleston, a tree fell, killing one person, and the storm caused more than $23 million in damage during its second landfall.  A letter in a St. Petersburg newspaper from J. M. Enders and addressed to GE research director Suits placed the blame for the devastation on \"the weather tinkers of your lab\" and pointed out that the people of Savannah were not so sure it was a coincidence. In fact, they were \"pretty sore at the army and navy for fooling around with the hurricane.\"\n\n5.3 Project Cirrus hurricane-seeding experiment and the subsequent path of Hurricane King in 1947 ( _solid line_ ), compared with the path of a 1906 hurricane ( _dashed line_ ) that also had turned suddenly. A retrospective study by the weather bureau showed that upper-level steering currents, not seeding with dry ice, had likely caused the storm to veer suddenly. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)\n\nNo one held the \"hurricane busters\" officially liable, but that would certainly not be the case today. The storm's unexpected turnaround following\u2014if not necessarily because of\u2014seeding dampened GE's hopes of making grandiose claims about storm control. Schaefer participated in a press conference at which evading questions was the order of the day, and he wrote in his official report: \"Change in plans of the publicity angles to the project caused considerable delay and should be completely eliminated. This should be done by the assignment of a [public relations officer] to the project if it's again tried.\" An unrepentant Langmuir admitted, \"The main thing we learned from this flight is that we need to know enormously more than we do at present about hurricanes.\" Langmuir was already looking ahead to future hurricane seasons\u2014he hoped that the Project Cirrus team could intercept hurricanes far out at sea, fly multiple tracks through them, \"and see if we cannot, by seeding them, in some way modify or shift their positions.... The stakes are large and, with increased knowledge, I think we should be able to abolish the evil effects of these hurricanes\" (185).\n\nSix decades later, the case of Hurricane King might serve as a warning to the Department of Homeland Security, which, as of 2008, wants to fund a new wave of research aimed at weakening the strength of tropical storms and steering them \"off course.\" But, of course, hurricanes do not run on tracks or on a schedule, so _everyone_ damaged by a modified hurricane could sue for damages\u2014unless the government tried to place an embargo on such lawsuits.\n\n#  Silver Iodide\n\nThe exciting news from GE about weather control took another step in January 1947 when physical chemist Bernard Vonnegut discovered that molecules of silver iodide act as artificial nuclei and can \"fool\" cloud water droplets into crystallizing. During World War II, Vonnegut worked in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT on projects related to gas warfare and with the Department of Meteorology on problems of aircraft icing. He moved to GE in 1945 and worked closely with Langmuir and Schaefer. His brother, the famous writer Kurt Vonnegut, also worked at GE as a publicist.\n\nFollowing Schaefer's cold box discovery, Langmuir asked Vonnegut to do quantitative work \"on the number of ice crystals produced by dry ice.\" This led Vonnegut to search for other agents that might initiate ice phase processes in a cloud. As he told the story five years later, \"It occurred to me that if I could get something that was awfully close to ice in its crystal structure that might do the job, and I looked up in the handbook to find out what substances were close. I  came across ... lead iodide, antimony, and silver iodide.\" Powdered lead iodide produced \"a reasonable number of crystals\" in Schaefer's cold box, a phenomenon that Schaefer attributed to the hexagonal shape of the molecules, but still they could not get a good result: \"Well, I couldn't figure this out; so I was just puttering around and I decided to see just what happened when I put metal smoke in there [from silver]. I was amazed\u2014the ice box was just swimming with ice crystals\u2014colossal numbers.... Then I remembered silver iodide and made smoke.... Vaporizing silver iodide worked like a charm.\" Vonnegut's laboratory notebook indicates that he had identified lead iodide as an artificial nucleating agent by November 6, 1946. After numerous trials, he finally got iodine vapor and metallic silver to work on November 14: \"Hallelujah! the nucleation was even more wonderful.\" By November 18, just four days after Schaefer's outdoor experiment, Vonnegut had found out that it was the silver iodide that did the job. Because of its hexagonal structure, silver iodide imitates ice condensation nuclei, causing \"explosive ice growth\" in supercooled clouds.\n\nVonnegut soon started seeding experiments with ground-based silver iodide generators, but found it hard to tell where the smoke was going and what effect it was having. He did some inconclusive aircraft tests in December 1947, but \"felt\" that the experiments he conducted with GE meteorologist Ray Falconer with a silver iodide generator on the summit of Mount Washington were the most satisfying : \"I feel darn sure we got some nice results ... we caused quite a nice snow squall downwind from the generator on air as it goes up over the mountain.\" He had yet to develop reliable techniques for following the particles and measuring their concentrations. The General Electric News Bureau, however, was quick to claim credit:\n\nIf generators can be used on the ground to introduce silver iodide or other foreign particle nuclei into huge masses of air, it might be possible to alter the nature of the general cloud formation over the northern part of the United States during winter.... It would prevent all ice storms, all storms of freezing rain, and icing conditions in clouds. The amount of heat absorbed by sunlight would be changed. It should be possible to change the average temperature of some regions during winter months.\n\nVonnegut, who was less sanguine, pointed out that silver iodide has its own problems. It is persistent in the environment and can activate long after its release in clouds of proper temperature; dry ice, though, works immediately and then sublimates. He recalled in an interview, \"This is bad, I think, for commercial cloud-seeding operations, because I think they're playing with fire releasing this stuff all over the place and I think it's a shame they haven't shown any sense of  public responsibility particularly when they deny it has any large scale effect ... to stink up the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of miles down wind producing God knows what effect is a dangerous thing.\"\n\nNevertheless, Langmuir touted chemical seeding agents as being superior to natural ice nuclei because they act at higher temperatures, they do not melt or evaporate, and they can be spewed into the atmosphere over widespread areas to remain active until it snows. He echoed the GE News Bureau in making unsubstantiated claims that the chemical might eliminate severe aircraft icing, suppress hailstorms, and perhaps, since by his estimates only 200 pounds of silver iodide would be needed to seed the entire atmosphere of the United States, could result in large-scale weather or even climatic changes.\n\n#  The New Mexico Seedings\n\nProject Cirrus was operating in Socorro, New Mexico, in July 1949, with Vonnegut running a test burner on the ground while the military air crews, with Langmuir and Schaefer as observers, seeded clouds aloft with dry ice. One day, one of Vonnegut's cumulus clouds \"really whooped it up, and the first thing I knew there was lightning, and it was all very exciting, and I thought, 'Gee, I wonder if I'm responsible for it.'\" When his colleagues returned that evening with no results to report, Vonnegut ventured the suggestion that perhaps his ground generators had glaciated all the clouds, so the dry ice seeding planes could not find any for their experiments.\n\nNoting that widespread rains were reported downwind on this day, Langmuir ordered seeding to be done periodically, once a week for eighty-two weeks, from December 1949 to July 1951. Then, even before the data were collected and other possibilities explored, he proceeded to make the outrageous claim that large-scale seven-day periodicities in the nation's weather were being caused by Vonnegut's single ground-based silver iodide generator located in New Mexico. Langmuir supported his claim by noting that the Midwest and East were moister than normal during this period, while the Southwest was drier than normal\u2014conditions that occur naturally on a regular basis, although he did have to admit, sheepishly, that in the weeks when the generators were not operating, \"rains were about forty percent greater than the other weeks.\" Nevertheless, Langmuir went so far as to claim that severe flooding in the Midwest and the Ohio Valley, accompanied by widespread property damage and loss of life, was the result of these experiments. He apparently \"proved\" his result using unconventional statistical methods of his own devising.\n\nIn his insightful autobiographical memoir, Sverre Petterssen, a leader in the field of weather analysis and forecasting, reviewed his involvement with Langmuir in the 1950s. Petterssen was trained in the Bergen School of meteorology, chaired the Department of Meteorology at MIT, and served in Norwegian uniform in World War II, preparing forecasts for bombing raids by the British Royal Air Force, the Anzio landing, and, notably, the D-day invasion of Normandy. After World War II, Petterssen served as head of the Norwegian Forecasting Service, scientific director for the U.S. Air Force Weather Service, and professor and chair of the Department of Meteorology (later Geophysics) at the University of Chicago. He explained the situation:\n\nAbout 1947 Irving Langmuir, a Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry, and his group working at the General Electric Laboratories had discovered that silver iodide had a structure similar to small ice crystals. Since natural clouds, even at very low temperatures, are generally deficient in ice crystals while silver iodide can readily be produced, it seemed possible to supply silver iodide dust to cold clouds, hoping that the clouds might be \"fooled into believing\" that natural ice crystals were present. Thus, if the clouds could be so misled (and few doubted it) weather modification (or control) would not be much of a problem.\n\nLangmuir was unlucky and became a victim of one of the many pitfalls that nature so generously provides for scientists who venture too far outside their own field of specialization. Though a leading authority on the chemistry of crystal points and surfaces, a philosopher, and a polyhistor in general science, Langmuir did not appreciate the complexity of meteorology as a science. In the atmosphere, processes of vastly different spatial scales and life spans exist together and interact; impulses and energy are shuttled through the whole spectrum of phenomena\u2014all the way from molecular processes to global circulations and the changes in the atmosphere as a whole. No chemist, physicist, or mathematician who has not lived with and learned to understand this peculiar nature of meteorology can pass valid judgment on how the atmosphere will react if one interferes with the details of the natural processes. Moreover, to determine whether or not the atmosphere has responded to outside interference, it is necessary to predict what would have happened had it been left alone.\n\nAs I have just said, Langmuir was unlucky. For no profound reason he had left a silver-iodide generator somewhere in New Mexico and made arrangements with a local person to \"burn\" the generator on a weekly schedule. Using a set of readily available weather reports, Langmuir found that the rainfall had begun to vary in a weekly rhythm. The amazing thing was that the response was not just local; it was nationwide and might well be of hemispheric proportions. Langmuir, and  many with him, concluded that the weekly injection of silver iodide from a single generator in New Mexico had excited a hitherto undiscovered natural rhythm of the atmosphere, with the result that the rainfall had yielded to the will of man. ... In his mind, and in the minds of many others, there was but little doubt that the weather processes could be intensified or repressed to suit human needs.\n\nLangmuir was unable to accept the criticism of Petterssen or the analysis of weather bureau statistician Glenn Brier that the atmosphere frequently exhibits a _natural_ seven-day periodicity.\n\nAfter the New Mexico incident, Suits again warned Langmuir that his field experiments and unsupported claims might put Project Cirrus at risk and expose the lab to litigation. He pointed out that Schaefer and Vonnegut were \"a great deal less certain\" about the interpretation of the New Mexico results than he was, and that ground-based seeding would again raise legal questions for General Electric: \"If the [cloud seeding] program develops in such a direction as to subject the Company to serious hazards from a liability standpoint, it may very well become impossible for us to continue with this work.\" In a long letter to Langmuir, with carbon copies to Schaefer and Vonnegut, Suits reminded the team that \"there has been no recent change in the law which makes it less necessary at present for General Electric personnel to be cognizant of the hazards from the standpoint of legal liability than when the agreement referred to above was reached.\" Suits again reminded the team that GE employees were to serve only as advisers to the government: \"GE personnel _must not_ engage directly or indirectly in seeding experiments which might lead to harmful weather phenomena. They _may_ engage in laboratory experiments which they consider advisable and in very small scale weather experiments for confirming laboratory tests with actual meteorological conditions.\" Suits could not approve their publications that reported the results of large-scale modification. He issued a similar embargo on technical talks, claiming that GE was doing the experiments for the sake of humankind and was earning no profits from the activity: \"I do not believe that our obligation extends to the taking of exceptional risks of damage suits as a result of any work which we may do in this field.\"\n\nLangmuir retired from GE on January 2, 1950, after a forty-year career with the company. The press release referred to him as a \"world-famous scientist who is regarded as the greatest of modern times,\" a man \"who continually embarks upon mental voyages in regions so nearly airless that only the mind can breathe in comfort.\" He invented the gas-filled incandescent lamp, the high-vacuum power tube, atomic hydrogen welding, a highly efficient smoke screen generator, and methods for artificial production of snow and rain from clouds, and received  the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932. GE also announced that he would continue working in a consulting capacity, primarily with Project Cirrus.\n\n#  A Pathological Passion\n\nEven in retirement, Langmuir continued to make increasingly outrageous claims. He was a featured speaker at the National Academy of Sciences annual meeting held in Schenectady in October 1950. There, on the occasion of receiving the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, presented by NAS president D. W. Bronk, he reiterated his claim that silver iodide seeding in New Mexico on July 21, 1949, had produced 0.1 inch of rain over an area of 33,000 square miles and could have led to unusually heavy rains and flooding in Kansas a few days later, 700 to 900 miles downwind. Suits must have been in the audience, and he must have been seething.\n\nDistinguished meteorologist Charles Hosler tells of an encounter with Langmuir at a symposium at MIT in 1951 where the seventy-two-year-old scientist was again describing how cloud seeding had apparently changed the course of a hurricane off the coast of Florida, causing it to veer westward and hit Savannah, Georgia. When the twenty-seven-year-old Hosler, with a newly minted doctorate in meteorology, pointed out that forecasters had attributed the change in the hurricane's direction to steering currents in the larger-scale circulation, and that the small amount of ice generated by cloud seeding would have been overwhelmed by naturally occurring ice in the storm, Langmuir, in essence, replied that Hosler \"was so stupid that [he] didn't deserve an explanation and that [he] should figure it out.\" During a meeting break, Henry G. Houghton, the chair of the Department of Meteorology at MIT, took Hosler aside and explained to him that Langmuir's attitude stemmed from his belief that cloud seeding was his greatest scientific discovery and he had no time or patience to listen to objections\u2014yet another characteristic of pathological science.\n\nLangmuir had made such claims early and often. He spoke about how Project Cirrus had redirected Hurricane King at a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in November 1947, only a month after the event. He made similar claims on national television on the _Today Show_ when it broadcast from Schenectady, the hometown of host Dave Garroway. Throughout his life, Langmuir made claims for weather control that could not be substantiated by meteorologists. Storms of controversy raged for years between Langmuir and the U.S. Weather  Bureau, although the bureau, too, had a vested interest in the techniques (chapter 8). When the weather bureau's cloud physics experimenters failed to produce significant precipitation from either summer cumulus or winter stratus, they concluded that the findings of Project Cirrus were largely unsubstantiated and the redirection of Hurricane King was a \"colossal meteorological hoax.\" They found no evidence to show spectacular precipitation effects and filed a conservative assessment of the economic importance of cloud seeding.\n\nAlthough Langmuir remained enthusiastic about the potential benefits of large-scale weather and even climate control, he changed his tactics in 1955 by warning of possible dangers of experiments gone awry and suggested that the cloud-seeding trials be moved to the wide-open spaces of the South Pacific. In a speech presented in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he expressed his personal belief that widespread and devastating droughts, such as the Southwest had experienced in 1949, could be triggered by trying to make it rain elsewhere, and that the floods in Kansas in 1951, in which forty-one people had died, were caused by a military cloud-seeding experiment. \"We need research, much more research,\" he said, and it would be best to move the experiments to the South Pacific, \"where there is less population\" (and less likelihood of litigation).\n\nIn his 1955 report to the congressionally mandated Advisory Committee on Weather Control, Langmuir said that experimenters look for \"big effects,\" extending over continental distances, and interactions between seeding and planetary circulation patterns, including hurricanes and especially typhoons in the South Pacific: \"There are obvious reasons for not experimenting with hurricanes near the coast of North America, but it would seem very important to learn how such storms can be controlled. This would require experimentation with typhoons far from any inhabited lands.\"\n\nLangmuir recommended three types of Pacific experiments: (1) intervention in mature storms, as Project Cirrus had done with Hurricane King, but with no one living in the way; (2) large-scale experiments across the entire region to see if regular seeding with silver iodide could trigger typhoons to start prematurely, perhaps producing more-frequent storms of lower intensity; and (3) intervention in nascent storms, not necessarily to stop the storm or prevent it from forming, but to \" _control its path_ \" (emphasis added). Langmuir wanted to go to Bikini Atoll to redirect typhoons or possibly slosh the entire Pacific basin circulation, as El Ni\u00f1o is now known to do. In doing so, he was expanding the nuclear analogy from \"chain reactions in cumulus clouds\" (with energy similar to the detonation of an A-bomb) to control of typhoons on and even beyond the energy released by H-bomb tests.\n\n#  Commercial Cloud Seeding\n\nWhile researchers were struggling for verifiable results, an uncritical, determined, and enthusiastic band of private meteorological entrepreneurs, operating primarily in the West and Midwest, had appropriated the new technology and succeeded in placing nearly 10 percent of the land area of the country under commercial cloud seeding. The annual cost of this plan to farmers and municipal water districts was $3 million to $5 million. The spread of this practice generated numerous public controversies that pitted weather control entrepreneurs and their clients against weather bureau officials. Third parties often claimed damages purportedly caused by cloud seeding. In 1951, for example, New York City was facing 169 claims totaling more than $2 million from Catskill communities and citizens for flooding and other damages attributed to the activities of a private rainmaker, Dr. Wallace E. Howell. The city had hired Howell to fill its reservoirs and, at least initially, claimed that Howell had succeeded. When faced with the lawsuits, however, city officials reversed their position and commissioned a survey to show that the seeding was ineffective. Although the plaintiffs were not awarded damages, they did win a permanent injunction against New York City, which terminated further cloud-seeding activities; further litigation stopped just short of the Supreme Court. As discussed earlier, this prompted Colonel John Stingo to comment on the incivility of it all.\n\n\"State Farmers Wage Fight For, Against Rain,\" reported the _Seattle Times_ on June 14, 1952: \"Cloud formations moving toward the Yakima and Wenatchee Valleys are being bombarded daily in secret, opposing experiments financed by wheat-growers who want rain and fruit growers who don't. One set of attacks is designed to punch holes in the clouds to bring rain. The other seeks to disperse the clouds without rainfall.\" Both \"wet\" and \"dry\" campaigns were being waged with competing ground-based silver iodide generators. One array was deployed by the Water Resources Corporation of Denver, which was attempting to make rain for the wheat growers; the other array, deployed by Olympia meteorologist Jack M. Hubbard, was run continuously to \"overseed\" the clouds and ward off rain for the fruit growers\u2014a domestic version of cloud wars (figure 5.4).\n\n#  Disasters\n\nAlthough cloud seeding has never been proved to cause or augment precipitation directly, it has been implicated in weather-related disasters. On the night  of August 15, 1952, a sudden and appalling tragedy struck the little seaside resort of Lynmouth in Devonshire, England, when 6 to 9 inches of torrential rain drenched the area and a flash flood ripped through the town's main street, killing thirty-five people outright and injuring many others. A contemporary newsreel called it the \"most destructive storm in British history,\" but was it a natural one? Within days of the catastrophe, there were rumors of governmentsponsored experiments being conducted nearby, which the Meteorological Office and the Ministry of Defence flatly denied. Decades later, requests for weather control documents and research in the archives revealed only one thing: a gap in the records for that year. In preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the tragedy, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) obtained Royal Air Force flight records and interviewed one of the participants in the experiment, glider pilot Allan Yates, now deceased, who described the secret cloud-seeding trials going on at the time, called Operation Cumulus, alternatively known as Operation Witch Doctor.\n\n5.4 Cartoon emphasizing commercial applications of weather control, accompanying Vincent Schaefer's lecture for the meeting of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)\n\nYates recalled, \"We'd assembled in Cranfield in Bedfordshire in mid-August 1952 studying clouds. On the day I'm recalling, the weather was superb, but the cotton ball cumulus clouds were going everywhere, and it was decided to make  them rain.\" After he and his team had sprayed \"salt\" into the clouds, he was told that it had rained heavily some 50 miles away: \"I circled down between the clouds, still doggedly noting temperature, height, time and the rest. Eventually far below I saw a sodden-looking countryside. Toasts were drunk to meteorology. [We] certainly had made it rain.\" But when he and his colleagues heard the news of the flood, he recalled, \"a stony silence fell on the company.\" More than fifty years after the event, it is impossible to say if cloud seeding really did trigger the flooding, or if it was just an unfortunate coincidence. What is clear is that the British government, anxious not to be blamed, closed down the project and denied that it had ever taken place.\n\nOther cases where cause and effect cannot be proved include Langmuir's claims that seeding redirected Hurricane King in 1947 and could have caused the Midwest floods of 1949 and 1951. So, too, was a famous flood disaster in 1972 in Rapid City, South Dakota, where, at the time, large-scale weather modification trials were under way. In that case, there was widespread official state and public support for the experimentation. A much more sinister case, however, occurred in 1986 in the Soviet Union.\n\nFor decades, the Soviet Union had seeded clouds before they reached Moscow, hoping to prevent rain from falling on big military parades. This seemed both harmless and foolish, like hail shooting or the weather control promised by the Chinese for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Evidence has recently come to light that the Soviet authorities also used cloud-seeding technology to clear the air after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine exploded in 1986, melted down, and caught on fire, spewing hundreds of tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. It was the most horrific nuclear power plant accident in history. Again, the BBC took the lead in uncovering the links to cloud seeding.\n\nFollowing the incident, there was a buildup of heavily radioactive rain clouds above Chernobyl. The prevailing winds were blowing toward Russia and its major cities, like Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the rain never reached that far. Instead, very heavy rains fell in rural Belarus, in a region located between Chernobyl and Moscow. In 1992 Dr. Allan Flowers, a British ecologist studying radioactivity patterns downwind of the reactor, discovered that extremely high levels of fallout had been deposited in the Gomel area of Belarus, some 60 miles north of the power plant. Many children were showing the effects of internal radiation poisoning, but how was that possible more than 100 miles from the reactor? One possibility was Soviet cloud seeding.\n\nEyewitnesses told Flowers of experiencing very heavy rain after the incident and noticing airplanes in the sky trailing colored smoke. After the planes had passed, the black rainfall started. Dr. Zianon Pazniak, a Belarussian scientist and  politician, is convinced that to save Moscow, the Soviet authorities deliberately rained down radioactive material on Belarus without notifying local inhabitants. After issuing this accusation, he feared for his life and decided to live in exile. Authorities in Moscow denied such allegations, but in 2006, on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, Major Alexsei Grushin, a former military pilot who received an award for cloud-seeding operations during the Chernobyl cleanup, shared his testimony:\n\nI am proud to say that I took part in the operation back in 1986; my comrades are proud as well. The area where my crew was actively influencing the clouds was near Chernobyl, not only in the 30-kilometer zone, but out a distance of 50, 70, even 100 kilometers. The plane was equipped with artillery shells which were filled with a seeding material, silver iodide, and we were following orders from [Moscow] regarding which zones we were required to seed. The wind direction was moving from west to east and the radioactive clouds were threatening to reach highly populated areas of Moscow, Voronezh, and Yaroslavl. If the rain had fallen on these cities it would have meant a catastrophe for millions.\n\nDuring this operation, Grushin, his crew, and his plane were heavily exposed to radiation. He recalls that after he landed at the airport, he was ordered to park far from the hangar and his plane was greeted by technicians wearing anti-radiation suits and carrying sensors. They approached from an upwind direction, but soon turned around and ran away from the highly contaminated plane. Grushin and others said they flew seeding missions as early as two days after the explosion and continued their operations for months.\n\nThe decision makers applied a dose of utilitarian ethics in their attempt to use the technology at their disposal to spare millions from the radioactive cloud, yet inbred secrecy, ethnic prejudice, and a horrendous and criminal lapse of judgment prevented them from trying to mitigate the effects of their actions by warning the population in advance to stay indoors and by distributing potassium iodide tablets. According to Flowers, \"It is quite clear that these actions did not take place.\" The high levels of radiation found in Belarus have led to the frequent occurrence of leukemia, thyroid cancers, and birth defects. His informant Pazniak said the area had been devastated, and he blamed Moscow:\n\nI had lots of friends in the area where the cloud seeding took place. They had to move away from their homes and their children became ill. Thyroid cancer has increased among children by fifty times in the area where the cloud seeding took  place. If there had been no cloud seeding, there would be no radiation, even if the radiation had reached that far, it would never have been on such a huge scale. They decided to keep the cloud seeding quiet. They thought that the public would never find out about it. Everything would stay a secret and nobody would need to take responsibility.\n\nThis was truly a pathological situation.\n\nIntervention in a weather system, any weather system, carries immense ethical considerations. One of the moral pitfalls could be that trying to modify the weather in one place could actually cause a disaster elsewhere. This is true in localand regional-scale situations (Lynmouth and Chernobyl) as well as in large-scale instances (intervening in hurricanes and synoptic weather). It may also be true of the Earth's climate in general. Weather and climate are essentially very chaotic systems, and although they may be somewhat predictable on short timescales, in many cases surprises will arise from non-linear interactions. There are all sorts of unknowns. As Irving Langmuir told his audience at the 1953 lecture on pathological science, when you are examining new or threshold phenomena in science, it means that you do not know\u2014 _you really do not know\u2014_ whether you are seeing something important or not. In such cases, it is much better to err on the side of caution than to try to operationalize what is unknown. Ironically, by his own criteria, Langmuir's final undertaking\u2014his involvement in weather and climate control\u2014must be judged a pathological obsession and somewhat of a scientific dead end. Pathological science may be bad enough, but pathological engineering can actually create disasters. Remember this as you analyze the odd mixtures of wild speculation, faulty logic, poor experimental design, passionate certainty, and appeals to authority that so often arise in the fields of weather and climate control.\n\n**6**\n\nWEATHER WARRIORS\n\n_Conflict over weather control [is] the likely cause of \"the last war on earth.\"_\n\n\u2014EDWARD TELLER, QUOTED IN CHRISTOPHER STONE, \"THE ENVIRONMENT IN MORAL THOUGHT\"\n\n**IN** an interview conducted in 2008, Colonel Don Berchoff, chief of U.S. Air Force Weather Resources and Programs, denied knowledge, interest, or involvement in techniques for controlling the weather: \"I personally don't believe weather modification is a good thing, and I don't think the military believes in it.... The military does not conduct any kind of experimentation, that I understand, to control the environment to become more advantageous on the battlefield against our enemies.... We don't do that.... As far as I know.\" We might take this at face value, or we might assume that particular individuals, of whatever rank, however highly placed or seemingly well informed, simply have no knowledge of ongoing top-secret research projects.\n\nJust what do we know? We know that throughout history, weather has been a crucial factor in the outcome of wars and battles, and we know that the military has been a major patron in the development of weather science and services, providing logistical support and leadership for scientific field campaigns and running large-scale, even national, weather services. We know that the military has supplied important equipment for meteorological research, in some cases through new research-and-development projects in aviation, electronics, digital  computing, and space and in other cases through dual-use or surplus hardware. We know that the emergence of modern meteorology is, in many ways, a product of two world wars and the cold war. We also know that in the Vietnam era, only a very few people knew about secret cloud seeding over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, originating as it did directly from the White House. This dynamic continues today. Geoscientists with high-level security clearances share associations, values, and interests with national security elites. Both groups agree on the necessity of preserving deniability in top-secret programs. We know with certainty that historically, weather and climate control have been portrayed as weapons that might be used against enemies without their knowledge\u2014or the knowledge of lowerlevel operatives and the wider public.\n\nThe military roots of meteorology can be traced from the deep past through the history of the cold war and Vietnam eras. In addition to traditional goals of being able to function and prevail under all environmental conditions, weather warriors have attempted to weaponize weather control. In the early cold war era, they were particularly active in experimentation on cloud seeding, in hurricane modification efforts such as Project Stormfury, and in rainmaking efforts in Vietnam. The United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD), which entered into force in 1978, marks the end of this era and serves as a landmark treaty that may have to be revisited soon to avoid or at least try to mitigate possible military or hostile use of climate control or geoengineering. If, as has been recently asserted but not yet demonstrated, \"[c]limate change has the power to unsettle boundaries and shake up geopolitics, usually for the worse,\" it is certain that the governments of the world will have their strategic military planners working in secret on both worst-case scenarios and technological responses.\n\n#  Weather in Wars and Battles\n\nThe weather has often been called the most violent variable in human affairs; that characterization could also apply to military affairs. Generals \"mud\" and \"winter\" and admiral \"storm\" have always had a big influence on the outcome of battles. Historians attribute the devastating defeat of the Roman general Varus and three of his legions in Germany in 9 C.E. to a combination of treachery, poor strategy, rough terrain, and bad weather; the kamikaze (divine winds), legendary protectors of Japan, destroyed Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's invading force not once but twice, in 1274 and 1281; and British history teaches that favorable winds and gales contributed mightily to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.\n\nMilitary history is filled with weather lore. The Revolutionary Army's successful retreat from Long Island in August 1776 was said to have been enabled by night fog and favorable tides; five months later, General George Washington crossed the Delaware River by boat in a driving snowstorm and surprised the Hessian troops in New Jersey; and the ambush of General Nicholas Herkimer's volunteers in upstate New York in August 1777 was interrupted by the onset of a violent thunderstorm. Napoleon's attack on Russia, like those of generals before and after him, was thwarted by winter weather, while his battle plan at Waterloo was interrupted by heavy rains. In World War I, it was all quiet on the western front during mud season. In World War II, the miracle at Dunkirk took place under the cover of heavy fog, the Japanese carrier fleet skirted Pacific storms to launch its attack on Pearl Harbor, and the outcome of the Battle of Midway hinged on the ability of American dive-bombers to shield their approach behind the clouds. The D-day invasion of Normandy in the unusually stormy month of June 1944 proceeded on the basis of the most critical set of forecasts in history. Of course, there are many more examples, with the winning side often considering a favorable outcome as an act of Providence.\n\n#  Science and the Military\n\nA mutually supportive relationship has long existed among science, engineering, and the military. According to engineering legend, long before the birth of modern science, Archimedes designed and built a series of machines to keep the Romans at bay during the siege of Syracuse. Leonardo da Vinci's Renaissance drawings of war engines are also legendary. And in 1638, Galileo's _two_ new sciences were astronomy and the strength of materials as applied to military engineering.\n\nIn later centuries, scientists often \"hitched a ride\" with army and navy exploring expeditions; scientists utilized military scope, organization, and discipline to collect data during field campaigns; and military institutions forged their identities in part around scientific and engineering agendas, leadership, and training. As the prestige of scientists grew, linked as it was to their power over nature, whether actual or perceived, military planners took note and became major patrons. Scientists gained state funding, approbation, and political power through governmental channels with direct links to the military. The French Academy had long supported scientific research for national interests, and the Russian Academy, founded in 1724, served the interests of the tsars and, after 1917, the technical needs of the Communist Party. The National  Academy of Sciences was established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to \"investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art\" whenever called on to do so by any department of the government. In the twentieth century, the task-oriented National Research Council coordinated scientific research during America's brief involvement in World War I; and during World War II, the National Defense Research Committee, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and the Manhattan Project demonstrated convincingly the absolute importance of promoting and supporting scientific research, development, testing, and evaluation of new weapons systems. In the cold war era, science became a prominent and permanent component of all modern militaries.\n\nLinks between science and the military\u2014in perspectives, personnel, values, budgets, scale\u2014have grown inexorably over the years. This \"pursuit of power\" in modern states, however, has come at a steep price. As was the case in Irving Langmuir's pathological enthusiasm for weather control, and in many other instances of what has come to be called \"big science,\" the military can act as a distorting force in the ongoing development of natural and engineering knowledge, specifically by imposing secrecy on new discoveries in the name of national security and seeking to weaponize every new technique, no matter how new or speculative, such as James Van Allen's discovery of the magnetosphere (chapter 7).\n\nIn the relationship between scientists and the military, it is safe to say that scientists seek support from the state and access to political power, while the state (especially the military) seeks power over nature as promised (and sometimes delivered) by scientists. Of course, transcending this dichotomy is the coproduction of the military-scientific-industrial state in which the various components are by no measure independent of one another. As geoscientists pursue knowledge of the Earth, they tend to focus their investigations on those areas in which technology and military interests have made resources readily available. In doing so, they go far beyond availing themselves of commercial, state, or military patronage; they actually contribute to the commodification, nationalization, and militarization of the natural world.\n\n#  Meteorology and the Military\n\nDuring the War of 1812, U.S. Army Surgeon General James Tilton, motivated by prevailing environmental theories of disease that linked illness and epidemics to weather and climate, issued a general order directing all the medical personnel under his command to prepare quarterly reports as part of their official duties  and to \"keep a diary of the weather.\" For the next six decades, the Army Medical Department continued its support for meteorology by observing, recording, and analyzing airs, waters, and places for the protection of the health of the troops. In the 1830s, the U.S. Navy also initiated a program to collect meteorological data at navy yards and aboard its ships. As discussed earlier, the army and navy supported James Espy's storm studies in the 1840s and 1850s while simultaneously downplaying his weather control eccentricities. Not long after, Charles Le Maout and Generals Edward Powers and Daniel Ruggles developed their notions about cannonading leading to disturbed weather and enhanced rainfall.\n\nBetween 1870 and 1891, the U.S. Army Signal Office administered the national weather service, providing daily weather reports and forecasts for the benefit of commerce and agriculture. Linked to Washington by military and commercial telegraph networks, the weather service served as a national surveillance force reporting to the government on a variety of threats to the domestic order, such as striking railroad workers, Indian uprisings on the frontier, locust outbreaks, and natural hazards to transportation, commerce, and agriculture. In World War I, meteorology took on new roles in warfare. Knowledge of lift, lob, and loft was needed for planes, shells, and poison gas, all of which rode the air currents. Meteorologists developed principles of battlefield climatology as they advised on how to launch and possibly survive poison gas attacks. In the newly minted field of aeronomy, or the study of conditions in the upper atmosphere, data collection from balloons, airships, and airplanes supported reconnaissance flights, the siting of aerodromes, and computations of the ballistic wind needed for long-distance artillery shelling. One proposal suggested using wind currents to carry balloons over enemy territory so that they might drop propaganda leaflets. As discussed earlier, with the rise of aviation, a desire to alter the weather, especially fogs, for the benefit of pilots got under way under military patronage.\n\nDuring World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy trained approximately 8,000 weather officers, who were needed for bombing raids, naval task forces, and other special and routine operations worldwide. Personnel of the army's Air Weather Service (AWS), an agency that was nonexistent in 1937, numbered 19,000 in 1945. Even after demobilization, the AWS averaged approximately 11,000 soldiers during the cold war and Vietnam eras. In 1954 a National Science Foundation (NSF) survey of 5,273 professional meteorologists in America revealed that 43 percent of them were still in uniform on active duty, 25 percent held Air Force Reserve commissions, and 12 percent were in the Navy Reserve. Thus almost a decade after World War II, 80 percent of American meteorologists still had military ties. Postwar meteorology also benefited from new tools such as radar, electronic computers, and satellites provided by or pioneered by the military.\n\nThe importance of weather to war and weather science to the military is reflected in the history of military interest in weather and climate control, a long-term relationship that deepened and intensified after World War II.\n\n#  Cold War Cloud Seeding\n\nEarly in 1947, the new cloud-seeding techniques developed at the General Electric Corporation led to crash military programs in weather control research. Could there be a weather weapon that would release the violence of the atmosphere against an enemy, tame the winds in the service of an all-weather air force, or, on a larger scale, perhaps disrupt (or improve) the agricultural economy of nations and alter the global climate for strategic purposes? At the time, Langmuir was very interested in the idea of starting a \"chain reaction\" in clouds\u2014using a tiny amount of a \"nucleating\" agent such as dry ice, silver iodide, or even water\u2014that could release as much energy as an atomic bomb. If this technique could be weaponized and controlled, it could be used surreptitiously and without radioactive fallout; moreover, it would be unidirectional, in that clouds seeded upwind (for example, west of the Soviet Union) would be carried to their targets by the prevailing winds. This was an attractive idea for cold warriors, since the use of weather modification as a weapon could easily be denied and any damage could be blamed on natural causes. Given the military and economic implications of the technique and the powers it promised its masters, meteorologists advised the military to launch an \"intensive research and development effort.\"\n\nEdward Teller\u2014cold warrior extraordinaire, father of the H-bomb, and possibly the \"real Dr. Strangelove\"\u2014recalled in his memoirs that Langmuir visited him at Los Alamos in the summer of 1947 and that he was \"mostly interested in talking about cloud seeding; he talked so much about the amount of damage done by a storm his seeding had caused that I began to wonder whether he saw the technique as competition to the atomic bomb.\" Although the timescales are different by many orders of magnitude, the total amount of energy released by a single thunderstorm is equal to that of a 20-kiloton atomic bomb. Moreover, a mature hurricane of moderate strength and size releases as much energy in a day as that of about four hundred 20-megaton hydrogen bombs. Such impressive numbers\u2014despite the technical uncertainties involved in attempting to control storms\u2014made Langmuir's comparisons between weather modification and nuclear weapons very popular in military circles. Langmuir and his GE team had the security clearances needed to work on the Manhattan Project\u2014but they had not participated. Metaphorically, a seeded thunderstorm became Langmuir's  A-bomb, and like his nuclear peers, he tested his techniques in the desert of New Mexico and bombed clouds with a B-29 aircraft, the sister of _Enola Gay_ and _Bockscar_ , the planes that had delivered atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A seeded hurricane was, by analogy, Langmuir's \"Super\" or H-bomb, and he yearned to take his techniques to the South Pacific for basin-scale tests near Bikini Atoll.\n\nLangmuir talked openly to the press about the analogy. From a military perspective, he pointed out, cloud seeding could produce widespread drought and thus play havoc with an enemy's food supply and hydropower plants, or trigger torrential downpours sufficient to cause flooding, immobilize troop movements, and put airfields out of commission. In 1950 he claimed that weather control \"can be as powerful a war weapon as the atom bomb.\" Invoking the famous letter written by Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 describing the potential power of an atom-splitting weapon, Langmuir recommended that the government seize on the phenomenon of weather control as it did on atomic energy. GE research director C. Guy Suits reinforced the nuclear analogy in his Senate testimony of March 1951, pointing out the \"many points of similarity between the release of atomic energy and the release of weather energy,\" including the immense energies involved, the chain reaction mechanisms common to both, the trans-boundary problems and the need for international agreements, and similar national defense and economic implications. Suits also highlighted key differences\u2014such as the early stage of weather modification research, its small-scale experimental needs, and its lack of top-secret processes\u2014but he ended up \"placing his bets\" on Langmuir's scientific judgment and argued that a central authority was needed, modeled after the Atomic Energy Commission.\n\nWeather control had tactical dimensions as well. In Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1947, Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer demonstrated cloud-seeding techniques for the military's top brass. Invited to the show were the chief of naval operations, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz; the commander in chief of the Army Air Forces, General Carl A. Spaatz; and the U.S. Army chief of staff, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. A total of sixteen generals, seven colonels, and two GE vice presidents attended the demonstration. Among them were the deputy chief of staff of the War Department, the chief of the Army Engineer Corps, the chief of the U.S. Army Signal Office, the head of War Department Intelligence, and the chief of research and development for the Air Corps. The Pentagon's Joint Research and Development Board had the task of examining all the implications.\n\nBy October, GE was discussing plans to develop \"bullets of compressed carbon dioxide or silver iodide. Shot from the nose of a plane, these fifty-caliber tracer  bullets might cover a range of two miles in 30 seconds, change supercooled moisture in the path of the plane to ice crystals, and thus continuously dissipate an icing condition as the plane travels\"\u2014sort of shooting your way through the clouds. Remington Arms was the initial contractor, but the Army Ordnance Department soon took over the task. Schaefer sketched pseudo-military schemes to barrage the clouds with seeding agents, an array of armaments for battling the clouds that would have made General Robert Dyrenforth jealous (figure 6.1).\n\n6.1 \"Possible Methods for Seeding Supercooled Clouds and Ground Fog with Ice Crystal Nuclei,\" February 6, 1947: Vincent Schaefer's military-inspired diagram for barraging the clouds. Techniques include delivery of seeding agents silver iodide (AgI), zinc oxide (ZnO), carbon dioxide (CO2), and gas using aircraft, rockets, smoke generators, projectiles, and captive balloons. (SCHAEFER PAPERS)\n\nThe commercial cloud seeder Irving Krick was a weather warrior, too. He was so sure that weather modification worked that he once testified before a Senate subcommittee, \"The nation that first acquires control of the weather shall be the leading power in the world.\" He envisioned wild strategic applications, such as enhancing artificial precipitation, increasing radioactive fallout over nuclear targets,  and dispersing bomb plumes in case of an attack on our own cities. In his view, waging weather warfare by producing both droughts and floods was well within the realm of possibility.\n\nBecause of the terrifying implications of the new technology, Senator Clinton P. Anderson (D-New Mexico) proposed federal regulation of rainmaking and related weather activities and introduced a bill in 1951 to provide for studies of the possible use of weather control in military operations. The Department of Defense viewed this idea as a threat to its autonomy and categorically opposed any new laws or agencies. In this, the department found strong support from the American Meteorological Society and the U.S. Weather Bureau. Meteorologist Horace Byers pointed out how unfortunate the analogy between weather modification and atomic weapons was at the time, since the weather bureau \"was in the midst of a difficult task of assuring the public that atomic explosions were not changing and could not change large-scale weather.\" As the agency responsible for guiding public policy in such matters, \"it was forced into the unpleasant position of trying to restrain Langmuir who, because of his high standing in the scientific community, had strong support from scientists and the general public alike\" (13).\n\n#  Military Research\n\nCloud-seeding technology seemed to have such great military potential that, at the urging of Langmuir and Teller, Vannevar Bush, an MIT-trained engineer and a Washington insider, brought the issue to the attention of Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall and General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This was in 1951. Bradley immediately convened a \"cushion committee\" consisting of an admiral, a general, and weather bureau chief Francis Reichelderfer, which in turn appointed the special scientific Ad Hoc Committee on Artificial Cloud Nucleation (ACN), chaired by meteorologist Sverre Petterssen, director of scientific weather services for the U.S. Air Force. In his memoirs, Petterssen referred to the ACN as an innocuous-sounding name \"that did not suggest interest in secret weapons.\" To add camouflage (Petterssen's words), Dr. Alan T. Waterman, director of the NSF, was appointed a member.\n\nAt the direction of General Bradley, and with the hope that a secret weapon might emerge from this technology, Petterssen's ACN conducted a brief survey of the state of the field and recommended a program of technology development and statistically controlled experiments \"to clarify major uncertainties.\"  The U.S. Air Force, working with the University of Chicago, tried  to modify thunderstorms by bombing cold clouds in the Midwest with dry ice and bombing warm clouds in the Caribbean with liquid water to test Langmuir's chain reaction theory. For what purpose? The navy seeded midlatitude storm systems in an attempt to evaluate Langmuir's claim that large-scale weather systems could be controlled. Again, for what purpose? The army tried to cut holes in cold stratus clouds using dry ice seeding. These tests were done in strategically sensitive areas of West Germany, Greenland, and Ellesmere Island. An air force project, however, determined that the most likely cause of ice fogs at air bases in the Arctic regions was pollution from the military's own motor vehicles and aircraft. The army contracted with the consulting firm Arthur D. Little to try to modify warm stratus and fog using electrical and chemical agents, but with little success. Other ACN-sponsored experiments involved documenting the meteorological effects of nuclear explosions, trying to suppress jet contrails, and, in accordance with Schaefer's vision, developing small tactical seeding rockets.\n\nThis series of experiments, run by the air force, the navy, and the army, was every bit as military-oriented as Project Cirrus, with better scientific advice and much better statistical controls (Petterssen claimed the \"meteorological lambs\" could no longer be thrown to the \"statistical wolves\"). The experiments ended in 1954, but because of security requirements, the final report was not published until 1957, when it appeared in a limited-circulation monograph published by the American Meteorological Society. The report claimed that the experiments were inconclusive and did not produce any significant results and that more basic research in cloud physics was needed before attempts at weather modification could be justified. But did the military reveal all that it had learned? Could it?\n\n#  Public Perceptions\n\nThe ongoing debate over private, public, and military cloud seeding prompted Congress to pass a law establishing the Advisory Committee on Weather Control (ACWC) in 1953. Chaired by a presidential appointee, retired navy captain Howard T. Orville, the committee conducted no new experiments of its own but made site visits and collected testimony. Orville placed the military theme squarely before the public in a 1954 cover article in _Collier's_ that included scenarios for using weather as a weapon of war (figure 6.2). In one scenario, airplanes would drop hundreds of balloons containing seeding crystals into the jet stream and then return to their air bases. Downstream, when fuses on the balloons exploded, the seeding agents would fall into the clouds, initiating  thunderstorms and disrupting enemy operations. The illustrations indicated that because of prevailing westerly winds, this technique might work as a unidirectional weapon for NATO nations confronting a tank column from the eastern bloc.\n\n6.2 Technocrat pulling the levers of weather control. Howard T. Orville's article \"Weather Made to Order?\" focuses on weather warfare. ( _COLLIER_ ' _S_ , MAY 28, 1954)\n\nAlthough in Orville's assessment total weather mastery would be possible only after four decades of intensive research, the spin-offs from this work, when combined with the maturation of electronic computers, would provide a  completely accurate system of weather forecasting, perhaps within a decade: \"I think it entirely probable that, in 10 years, your daily weather forecast will read something like this: 'Freezing rain, starting at 10:46 A.M., ending at 2:32 P.M.' or 'Heavy snowfall, seven inches, starting today at 1:43 A.M., continuing throughout the day until 7:37 P.M.'\" This sort of accuracy of prediction, even without weather control, would have major consequences for military operations. Orville, like Krick, was echoing the surety of earlier determinists. Orville thought it was \"conceivable that we could use weather as a weapon of warfare, creating storms or dissipating them as the tactical situation demands\" (25). A more insidious technique would strike at the enemy's food supply by seeding clouds to rob them of moisture before they reached enemy agricultural areas. Orville wrote: \"We might deluge an enemy with rain to hamper a military movement or strike at his food supplies by withholding needed rain from his crops.... But before we can hope to achieve all the _benefits_ I have outlined, hundreds of meteorological unknowns must be solved at a cost of possibly billions of dollars\" (25\u201326; emphasis added). Although speculative and wildly optimistic, such ruminations from an official source helped fuel a weather race with the Russians and the rapid expansion of meteorological research in all areas, but especially in weather modification.\n\nIn December 1957, while Americans were still reeling from the psychological impact of the launch of the Soviet Union's first Earth-orbiting satellite, the _Washington Post and Times Herald_ informed its readers that there was a \"new race with the reds\" in the form of weather warfare. _Newsweek_ picked up the story in its next issue. Again, Orville, whose final ACWC report was about to be released, was quoted indicating that the need to keep ahead of the Russians was more clear than ever: \"If an unfriendly nation gets into a position to control the large-scale weather patterns before we can, the result could even be more disastrous than nuclear warfare.\" The article also quoted Teller, an expert on hydrogen bombs but not on weather control, who told the U.S. Senate Preparedness Subcommittee: \"Please imagine a world ... where [the Soviets] can change the rainfall over Russia ... and influence the rainfall in our country in an adverse manner. They will say, 'we don't care. We are sorry if we hurt you. We are merely trying to do what we need to do in order to let our people live'\" (54). Henry Houghton at MIT expressed the same concerns: \"I shudder to think of the consequences of a prior Russian discovery of a feasible method of weather control.... An unfavorable modification of our climate in the guise of a peaceful effort to improve Russia's climate could seriously weaken our economy and our ability to resist\" (54). At the time, by some estimates, the Soviet Union employed some 70,000 hydrometeorologists, more than three times as many  as the United States. Harry Wexler reported that the Russians seemingly had unlimited access to funding. One of their leading academicians, K. N. Fedorov, had wondered if the Soviet Union was engaged in an international \"struggle for meteorological mastery,\" but paranoid cold warriors thought perhaps that meant also meteorological mastery over the free world. The distinguished aviator-engineer Rear Admiral Luis de Florez urged the U.S. government to \"start now to make control of weather equal in scope to the Manhattan District Project which produced the first A-bomb.\" He added the by-now-obvious militant twist: \"With control of the weather the operations and economy of an enemy could be disrupted.... [Such control] in a cold war would provide a powerful and subtle weapon to injure agricultural production, hinder commerce and slow down industry.\"\n\n#  Project Stormfury\n\nIn 1954 three damaging landfalling hurricanes, Carol, Edna, and Hazel, convinced members of Congress that funding was needed for a National Hurricane Research Project (NHRP), to be directed by the weather bureau using equipment on loan from the air force. Official histories claim that the NHRP was established to measure and model the storms, but in 1958 the research group employed silver iodide in an unreported and unpublicized attempt to modify Hurricane Daisy off the coast of Florida\u2014in spite of the public relations disaster that had followed the Project Cirrus seeding of Hurricane King in 1947. Again, in 1961 Hurricane Esther reportedly displayed some apparent weakening after seeding. This encouraged meteorologists to develop a more aggressive hurricane modification project called Project Stormfury, a collaboration, initially between the weather bureau and the navy but later involving the air force, that operated from 1962 to 1983.\n\nBoth Robert H. (Bob) Simpson and Joanne (Malkus) Simpson were early directors of the project, which involved a team of scientists and technicians flying into mature hurricanes and seeding them using military equipment. According to an oral interview with Bob Simpson, Project Stormfury was conceived after a high-altitude visual reconnaissance flight into Hurricane Donna made by meteorologist Herb Riehl in 1960 that indicated a concentrated, perhaps supercooled, outflow region above the storm. Riehl called this feature the \"chimney cloud\"; Simpson thought it was worth trying to seed it to attempt to cause the eye of the hurricane to expand and perhaps weaken the storm. In 1967 one of the directors of Stormfury compared hurricane hunting to big-game hunting: \"For  scientists concerned with weather modification, hurricanes are the largest and wildest game in the atmospheric preserve. Moreover, there are urgent reasons for 'hunting' and taming them.\"\n\nThe NSF provided some initial funding for Stormfury, but it was the U.S. Navy that was most interested in modifying and hopefully controlling the air\u2013ocean environment. The navy's vision of weather control involved using fog and low clouds as screens against enemy surveillance, calming heavy seas, and redirecting violent storms both to enhance its own operations and to interfere with enemy plans and operations. The wish list included the capability to change the intensity and direction of hurricanes and typhoons; produce rain, snow, or drought as desired; and \"mdify the climate of a specific area\"\u2014all for the sake of military operations. As the navy saw it, the military problem in the field of weather modification and control was \"to alter, insofar as possible, the environment surrounding the task force or target area so that the success of the naval operation is enhanced.\" The Navy Weather Research Facility in Norfolk, Virginia, was designated a center for weather control experiments aimed at better understanding and controlling a vast array of atmospheric phenomena. The Naval Research Laboratory was involved in developing the equipment and instrumentation, while the Naval Ordinance Test Station, in China Lake, California, led by atmospheric scientist Pierre St. Amand, specialized in pyrotechnic units for seeding clouds with silver iodide. The navy's vast array of instrumentation for basic cloud physics and atmospheric research and the availability of aircraft and crews made it a logical partner for scientists seeking support for field studies.\n\nFrustration mounted as Stormfury scientists began to realize that their hurricane-seeding hypotheses were flawed. First of all, hurricanes contain very little of the supercooled water that is necessary for effective silver iodide seeding. Also, the effects of seeding were so small that they were impossible to measure. Morale plummeted when Stormfury scientists learned that the navy intended to weaponize their research. St. Amand, in particular, wanted to learn how to intensify and steer hurricanes, certainly for tactical advantage but also perhaps as weapons of war. Bob Simpson recalled, without specifying the details, that St. Amand did not share his scientific values and \"succeeded in throwing monkey wrenches into the works.\" In 2007 Joanne Simpson, then a retired NASA employee, recalled in an on-camera interview, \"I thought it was terrible\u2014I mean all my life I've tried to work for the betterment of the planet and the people in a small way\u2014and to use what I have done as some kind of a military thing. I obviously am very concerned and not happy about it.\"\n\nIn October 1962, just as Stormfury was getting under way, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. A year later, Fidel Castro accused the United States of having waged strategic weather warfare by changing the course of Hurricane Flora. Although Flora was not seeded, its behavior was indeed suspicious. It hit Guant\u00e1namo Bay as a Category 4 storm and made a 270-degree turn, lingering over Cuba for four full days, with intense driving rains that caused catastrophic flooding, resulting in thousands of deaths and extensive crop damage. Nor was Cuba alone. Mexico denounced the United States for having caused a protracted drought \"resulting from cloud seeding.\" The response to these complaints, according to Bob Simpson, involved \"restrictions of area and of conditions in which seeding would be allowed, restrictions to such degree that little hope remained to demonstrate statistically that hurricanes could be usefully seeded.\" Meanwhile, plans were afoot to use operational cloud seeding in a real war\u2014over the jungles of Vietnam.\n\n#  Cloud Seeding in Indochina\n\nWeather warfare took a macro-pathological turn between 1966 and 1972 in the jungles over North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia when the U.S. military conducted secret operations intended to generate rain and reduce \"trafficability\" along portions of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which Hanoi used to move men and mat\u00e9riel to South Vietnam. In March 1971, nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson broke the story about U.S. Air Force rainmakers in Southeast Asia in the _Washington Post_ , a story confirmed several months later with the publication of the _Pentagon Papers_ and splashed on the front page of the _New York Times_ in 1972 by Seymour Hersh. These reports confirmed that the U.S. government had tested its techniques in Laos in 1966 and had begun a top-secret program of operational cloud seeding in and around Vietnam in 1967. The code name of the field trial was Project Popeye, and the much larger operational program was known to the air force fliers as Operation Motorpool, sometimes referred to in news reports as Intermediary-Compatriot.\n\nIn October 1966, Project Popeye, a clandestine, all-service military\/civilian experimental program, seeded the skies over southern Laos to evaluate the concept of impeding traffic on Viet Cong infiltration routes by increasing the amount of rainfall and the length of the rainy season. It was hypothesized that excess moisture would soften road surfaces, trigger landslides, wash out river  crossings, and in general maintain saturated soil conditions longer than would normally be expected. After seeding about sixty-eight cloud targets, the Popeye experimenters concluded, using their own techniques of analysis, that their interventions had caused \"significant\" increases in both cloud growth and precipitation and the operational feasibility of the technique had been clearly established. St. Amand, who had designed the seeding flares and was leading the project, claimed that \"the first [cloud] we seeded grew like an atomic bomb explosion and it rained very heavily out of it and everybody was convinced with that one experiment that we'd done enough.\" General Dyrenforth would have concurred.\n\nOperation Motorpool, which began on March 20, 1967, was conducted by air force fliers each year during the rainy monsoon season until July 5, 1972. This was done with the full and enthusiastic support of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and the U.S. State Department. General William Westmoreland was one of the few individuals privy to the details. The governments of Thailand, Laos, and South Vietnam were not informed, nor were the American ambassadors to those countries. After 1969, the administration of President Richard M. Nixon continued the program\u2014and the secrecy.\n\nOperating out of Udorn Air Base, Thailand, the Fifty-fourth Weather Reconnaissance Squadron flew three WC-130 and one or two RF-4 aircraft in more than 2,600 seeding sorties, expending almost 50,000 flares over a period of approximately five years at an annual cost of approximately $3.6 million. Air force pilot Howard Kidwell told how, out of curiosity, he volunteered for a secret mission, code-named Motorpool, and once he was approved for a higherlevel security clearance, was involved in trying to make rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail:\n\nDuring the rainy season each crew flew once a day, on the average, in addition to regular missions. A \"scout\" plane (WC-130) would call back and \"scramble\" us\u2014giving us a flight level, which was usually 19,000 [feet]. We would go into the roll cloud (or whatever you WX guys call it) by the side of each thunderstorm. When it got to raining like crazy we would pickle off a cart [fire a rack of silver iodide flares], count to 5, pickle off another one, and then you were out in the blue, made a 360 degree turn and, like magic, another thunderstorm had usually formed and you did the same thing again.\n\nAlthough some claimed that Operation Motorpool induced from 1 to 7 inches of additional rainfall annually along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, no scientific  data were collected to verify the claim. General Westmoreland thought there was \"no appreciable increase\" in rain from the project. Even if the cloud seeding had produced a tactical victory or two in Vietnam (it did not), the extreme secrecy surrounding the operation and the subsequent denials and stonewalling of Congress by the military resulted in a major strategic defeat for military weather modification.\n\nTypical of the cover-up during this period was the Air Weather Service annual survey report on weather modification for 1971, which contained brief accounts of cold and warm fog dissipation experiments, one precipitation augmentation trial, and illustrations of its equipment; of course, there was no mention of the (still) top-secret Operation Motorpool. Even after the scandal broke, the official history of AWS weather modification in the period 1965 to 1973 contained no mention of military cloud seeding in Vietnam, admitting only, in vague and bland terminology, that \"AWS's _current_ operational weather modification capabilities include airborne and ground based cold fog dissipation and precipitation augmentation\" (emphasis added). Under the heading \"Precipitation Augmentation,\" the report claimed that AWS efforts \"have been few indeed\" but did admit to having seeded over the entire Philippine archipelago in 1969 for drought relief for the benefit of agriculture. A short section titled \"Other Activities\" mentioned hurricane seeding in Project Stormfury and \"participation\" in several non-AWS weather modification projects, both as observers and as project workers, to keep abreast of the field and to find new techniques applicable to air force and army operations. Read between the lines.\n\nIn 1973 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report, _Weather and Climate Modification:_ Problems _and Progress_ (emphasis added). The panel, chaired by Thomas Malone, a cold war\u2013era meteorologist with high-level security clearances, prefaced its report with this bald statement: \"During the course of this study, no attempt was made by the Panel to examine ... or to ascertain the existence of classified experimental programs in weather modification.\"  Yet the field's largest _problem_ at the time was the recently revealed militarization of cloud seeding in Vietnam. The prime example of stonewalling, however, came from President Richard Nixon's secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972 that there was no cloud seeding going on over North Vietnam but never mentioned that Operation Motorpool was still functioning over Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.\n\nProject Popeye and Operation Motorpool were neither the first use of weather modification as a weapon of war nor the first use in Asia. Cloud seeding  was apparently used in Korea in 1950 to clear out cold fogs. In 1954 the French High Command announced in connection with the besieged French forces at Dien Bien Phu that \"it will try to wash out Vietminh communication routes from Red China with man-made rainstorms as soon as cloud conditions permit.\" Confirming this, a Vietnamese account of the battle reported that the French had shipped 150 baskets of activated charcoal and 150 bags of ballast from Paris \"for the making of artificial rain aimed at impeding our movement and supply.\" Moreover, the Central Intelligence Agency seeded clouds in South Vietnam as early as 1963 in an attempt to disperse demonstrating Buddhist monks after it was noticed that the monks resisted tear gas but disbanded when it rained. Cloud-seeding technology had also been tried, but proved ineffective, in drought relief efforts in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Okinawa, and elsewhere. All the programs were conducted under military sponsorship and had the direct involvement of the White House. In 1967 St. Amand participated in Project Gromet, a secret effort to employ weather modification in India to mitigate the Bihar drought and famine and to achieve U.S. policy goals in this strategically important region.\n\nOperation Motorpool, made public as it was at the end of the Nixon era, was called the Watergate of weather warfare. Some argued that environmental weapons were more \"humane\" than nuclear weapons. Others suggested that inducing rainfall to make travel more difficult was preferable to dropping napalm; and the Fifty-fourth Weather Reconnaissance Squadron was directed, in the jargon of the era, to \"make mud, not war.\" St. Amand tried to put a benign spin on the project when he claimed that \"by making the trail more muddy and trafficability difficult, we were hoping to keep people out of the fight.\" Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, represented the mainstream of scientific opinion, however, when he wrote to Senator Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island): \"It is grotesquely immoral that scientific understanding and technological capabilities developed for human welfare to protect the public health, enhance agricultural productivity, and minimize the natural violence of large storms should be so distorted as to become weapons of war.\" Prominent geoscientist Gordon J. F. MacDonald observed that the key lesson of the Vietnam experience was not that rainmaking is an inefficient means for slowing logistical movement on jungle trails but \"that one can conduct covert operations using a new technology in a democracy without the knowledge of the people.\" The dominant opinion was that seeding clouds\u2014like using Agent Orange or the Rome Plow, setting fire to the jungles or bombing the irrigation dikes over North Vietnam\u2014was but one of many sordid techniques involving war on the environment that the military used in Vietnam.\n\n#  ENMOD: Prohibiting Environmental Modification as a Weapon of War\n\nIn 1972 Senator Pell, following the hearings, introduced a resolution calling on the U.S. government to negotiate a convention prohibiting the use of environmental or geophysical modification activities as weapons of war. Testifying to the Senate, Richard J. Reed, president of the American Meteorological Society, cited earlier bans on chemical and biological warfare and atmospheric nuclear testing and urged the government to present a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly that pledged all nations to refrain from engaging in weather modification for hostile purposes. Citing a 1972 public policy statement of the society, he referred to the primitive state of knowledge in the field and the difficulties of controlled experimentation during military operations. The testimony of other prominent atmospheric scientists stressed the need to protect open and peaceful international scientific cooperation. Despite the opposition of the Nixon administration, the Senate adopted the resolution in 1973 by a vote of 82 to 10. Representative Donald M. Fraser (D-Minnesota) led a parallel effort in the House.\n\nIn May 1974, Senator Pell placed the formerly top-secret Department of Defense briefing on cloud seeding in Vietnam into the public record. Less than two months later, at the Moscow summit, President Nixon and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev signed the \"Joint Statement Concerning Future Discussion on the Dangers of Environmental Warfare,\" expressing their desire to limit the potential danger to humankind from the use of environmental modification techniques for military purposes whose effects would be \"widespread, long-lasting and severe.\" This wording of the communiqu\u00e9, favored by the National Security Council, presented the fewest constraints on the military, since it seemed to indicate that only conjectural and highly impractical techniques of climatic and large-scale environmental modification, such as climate engineering, would be covered, while more or less operational techniques of weather modification, including rainmaking and fog dispersal, whose effects were considered limited in time and place, were to be excluded from the discussion.\n\nWithin a month, the Soviet Union, realizing the weakness of the U.S. position on cloud seeding in Vietnam and taking full advantage of the Watergate crisis, seized the diplomatic initiative by unilaterally bringing the issue of weather modification as a weapon of war to the attention of the United Nations. The Soviet proposal did not limit the treaty to a bilateral agreement, nor did it limit it to effects that were \"widespread, long-lasting and severe.\" According to Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko, \"It is urgently necessary to draw up and conclude  an international convention to outlaw action to influence the environment for military purposes.\" The draft convention unveiled by the Soviet Union in September 1974 sought to forbid contracting parties from using \"meteorological, geophysical or any other scientific or technological means of influencing the environment, including weather and climate, for military and other purposes incompatible with the maintenance of international security, human well-being and health, and, furthermore, never under any circumstances to resort to such means of influencing the environment and climate or to carry out preparation for their use.\"\n\nThe UN General Assembly, taking note of the Soviet draft convention, decided that the subject deserved further attention and, with the United States abstaining, voted to turn it over to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament. To avoid further embarrassment, the administration of President Gerald R. Ford (Nixon had resigned) insisted that the qualifiers \"widespread, long-lasting and severe\" be put back into the convention. The final treaty, Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, was a watered-down instrument that applied only to environmental effects that encompass an area on the scale of several hundred square miles, last for a period of months (or approximately a season), and involve serious or significant disruption or harm to human life, natural and economic resources, or other assets. Such language implicitly legitimized the use of cloud seeding in warfare, the diversion of a hurricane, and other, smaller-scale techniques. The convention, however, does not prohibit \"the use of environmental modification techniques for peaceful purposes.\" It was designed to be of unlimited duration and contains provisions for periodic meetings of the parties to assess its effectiveness and for emergency meetings to respond to perceived violations.\n\nENMOD was opened for signature in Geneva on May 18, 1977. It was signed initially by thirty-four states, including the United States and the Soviet Union, but did not enter into force until October 5, 1978\u2014ironically, when the Lao People's Democratic Republic, where the American military had tested Project Popeye and had used weather modification technology in war only six years earlier, became the twentieth nation to ratify it. After a delay of more than a year, the convention entered into force for the United States on January 17, 1980, when the U.S. instrument of ratification was deposited with the United Nations Secretariat.\n\nWhen the wording of ENMOD was being negotiated, environmentalists were disappointed with the process and urged the United States not to ratify the treaty. They saw many flaws in the document, including its vague wording, its unenforceable nature, its overly high threshold for violations, and the fact that it  dealt only with intentionally hostile environmental modification. Moreover, it did not prohibit research and development in the field and applied only to parties that had ratified or acceded to the convention. Jozef Goldblat, vice president of the Geneva International Peace Research Institute, commented: \"Evidently, certain powers preferred not to foreswear altogether the possibility of using environmental methods of warfare and sought to keep future options open.\" This was precisely what the U.S. military wanted. The Air Weather Service was of the opinion that the treaty's language was so vague that it did not affect its program in weather modification at all, and the Military Airlift Command was instructed to retain its capabilities in this area. For the military, the deciding factor was not the ENMOD convention but the fact that weather modification technology had \"little utility\" or \"military payoff\" as a weapon of war. Federal funding for all weather modification programs was collapsing by this time, and by 1978 the Department of Defense claimed that its operational programs were directed solely at fog and cloud dispersal, while military research funding continued in cloud physics, computer modeling, and new observational systems. Dan Golden, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and an alumnus of Project Stormfury, observed in a 2008 interview that ever since ENMOD, \"our defense department has, at least to my knowledge, not engaged in weather modification activities, and if you ever ask them if they are supporting weather modification activities, they strongly deny it. However, there have been recent workshops sponsored by the defense department on various types of weather modification.\"\n\nTwo conferences reviewing ENMOD have been held since its ratification, one in 1984 and one in 1992. The 1984 review conference pushed, without success, to expand the scope of the treaty and to reduce the threshold for violations. The 1992 meeting was influenced by the first Persian Gulf War, which included belligerent environmental acts such as torching oil wells. This conference expanded the convention to cover herbicides and various \"low-tech\" interventions such as using fire for military purposes. As of this writing, however, the ENMOD treaty has not been used formally to accuse a country of a violation.\n\nOf relevance to climate engineering, ENMOD prohibits environmental modification techniques that change \"through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes\u2014the dynamics, composition or structure of the Earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.\" This restriction would be relevant on the scale of climate or ocean engineering. Today's climate engineers emphasize the altruistic aspects of their work\u2014saving the world from global warming, while also declaring \"war\" on global warming. They are fully aware, however, of the military implications of the techniques they  are developing. In this case, a revised version of ENMOD may be the best hope of providing the international community with sufficient diplomatic leverage to stop any unacceptable collateral damage from geoengineering, or even to intervene if rogue states or terrorist groups were to employ these techniques.\n\nWhile purposeful military or hostile intent would be required to trigger the existing convention, all climate-engineering schemes involve deliberate manipulation of the dynamics, composition, or structure of the Earth, and all such schemes carry the potential for \"widespread, long-lasting and severe\" harm on national, regional, and possibly global scales. At a minimum, ENMOD will have to be revisited under its provisions for consultation of the parties before any large-scale climate engineering projects are field-tested or deployed and before any human or environmental damage is either threatened or done. The present war on global warming must be viewed as the outgrowth of a long historical process in which military metaphors are much more than metaphors. They are hardnosed realities influencing the course of scientific research, military policy, and perhaps most tellingly, our attitudes toward nature.\n\nThe history of meteorology and military history have many points of significant overlap and mutual influence. Weather warriors have long sought to take advantage of natural phenomena and, in the twentieth century, to manipulate them for military advantage. The interaction of science and the military seems to be well on its way to fulfilling a Faustian bargain struck in the early modern era if not before. Weapons systems of the past and current centuries have increasingly been based on science; they have also been increasingly lethal (especially to civilians), increasingly toxic, and increasingly pathological. Physics, chemistry, and biology have weaponized the atom, molecule, virus, and bacterium, while the geosciences have militarized the global environment in the air, under the seas, and in outer space. In the cold war era, it was presumed that clouds, storms, and even the climate, like any other natural phenomenon, could be controlled and weaponized. Nano-scale warfare meets geo-scale warfare. It was further presumed that a weather warfare race, analogous to the space race, was under way and that the other side was probably ahead. All was fair in war, especially surreptitious programs.\n\nThe cases presented here go beyond simple military support or patronage for science. They clearly document the interpenetration of values and perspectives among meteorologists and military officers. Project Cirrus, Project Stormfury, and their kin were all too common during the cold war. When military cloud  seeding in Vietnam was revealed in the press, it caused an immediate firestorm of controversy. People were concerned at the time that we had opened a Pandora's box of evil and we really did not know where it might lead. Ultimately, it led to international embarrassment for the United States and the ratification of the rather toothless ENMOD convention. But if ENMOD was born from abuse, can it be revised and reinvigorated to prevent larger abuses?\n\nIn the decades following the ratification of ENMOD, the rhetoric of the meteorological community emphasized scientific internationalism and the free exchange of data and information, even as much of its funding continued to flow from cold war military sources. The showcase international research collaboration of the 1980s, the Global Atmospheric Research Programme, served the dual needs of the U.S. world-spanning military. After the collapse of communism, the U.S. national laboratories, showcases for the talents of weapons scientists, suddenly became \"greener,\" providing a boost to Edward Teller's ongoing program of training atmospheric scientists, many of them armed with basic physics and access to military funding and hardware, hell-bent on \"fixing the sky.\" After 2001, classified meteorological research, funded by the deep pockets of the military and the Department of Homeland Security, was dedicated, for example, to detecting and predicting the spread of plumes of heavier-than-air gases in urban settings, especially Washington, D.C., or to seeking effective chemical sniffers for toxic, explosive, or radiological sources in and around government buildings, airports, train stations, and harbors.\n\nWith the reputation of the field of weather control severely tarnished as it is, the military's semi-official public line is \"you can't control how the world is changing around you, so you have to be able to control how you react to that change.\" Spokesmen for this view emphasize training, discipline, and vigilance. The air force will say it is in the business of improving the accuracy and usefulness of its forecasts and its capabilities in general by applying operational risk management techniques to both routine and exceptional weather services. This is true so far as it goes, but there is probably much more that the military simply does not know or cannot say\u2014most likely the latter.\n\nOn the other side of the coin are conspiracy theorists who see a toxic cloud on every horizon. Their fears are fueled by statements such as those made in 1997 by Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, who warned of \"an eco-type of terrorism whereby [adversaries] can alter the climate, set off earthquakes [and] volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.... It's real, and that's the reason why we have to intensify our efforts, and that's why this is so important.\" Cohen, known to levitate on occasion, at least rhetorically, was responding, off the cuff, to questions about the possibility of all sorts of  futuristic weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, and his remarks should not be misconstrued. Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists have focused on his words in support of their suspicions that the military is supporting secret geoengineering projects involving directed energy beams, chem trails, or other technologies. The historical record, rather than such speculation, is actually much more revealing\u2014and chilling.\n\n**7**\n\nFEARS, FANTASIES, AND POSSIBILITIES OF CONTROL\n\n_Present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more awful. After global climate control becomes possible, perhaps all our present involvements will seem simple. We should not deceive ourselves: once such possibilities become actual, they will be exploited._\n\n\u2014JOHN VON NEUMANN, \"CAN WE SURVIVE TECHNOLOGY?\"\n\n**CLIMATE** fears, fantasies, and the possibility of global climate control were widely discussed by scientists and in the popular press in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Some chemists, physicists, mathematicians, and, yes, meteorologists tried to \"interfere\" with natural processes, not with dry ice or silver iodide but with new Promethean possibilities of climate tinkering opened up by the technologies of digital computing, satellite remote sensing, nuclear power, and atmospheric nuclear testing. Aspects of this story involve engineers' pipe dreams of mega-construction projects that would result in an ice-free Arctic Ocean, a well-regulated Mediterranean Sea, or an electrified and well-watered Africa. Pundits also fantasized about engineering the climate and possibly weaponizing it, using, for example, nuclear weapons as triggers. Far from being a heroic story of invention and innovation, global climate control has had, from its first mention in the literature of science fiction, a dark side, hinting at the possibility of global accidents or hostile acts. The warnings of two close scientific associates, John von Neumann (1903\u20131957) and Harry Wexler (1911\u20131962), one famous and one as yet relatively unknown, provide a framework for examining such issues. Von Neumann was a mathematician extraordinaire  at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, and a pioneer in the application of digital computing techniques to the problem of numerical weather prediction and climate modeling. It was the dark side of climate control that led von Neumann to ponder the brave new world of such techniques. Wexler was chief of scientific services at the U.S. Weather Bureau. He was instrumental in advancing the agenda for climate modeling and promoted many other new technologies, especially meteorological satellites. It was Wexler who conducted the first serious technical analysis of climate engineering and issued an early warning about the possibilities of climate control. It was the very real possibility of purposeful destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer that led Wexler to spell out, in great technical detail, the dangers of both inadvertent and intentional climate tinkering. The interplay of such technical, scientific, and social issues moves beyond the timeworn origin stories of the modern atmospheric sciences into another dimension, a marketplace of wild ideas, a \"Hall of Fantasy\" or \"Twilight Zone\" whose boundaries are that of imagination.\n\n#  Fears\n\nWe are apprehensive about climate change, we seek to understand it, and some may seek to stop it. The word \"apprehension\" signifies several distinct meanings: (1) fear, (2) awareness, and (3) intervention. In _Historical Perspectives on Climate Change_ (1998), I examined how people became aware of and sought to understand phenomena in which they were immersed, that covered the entire globe, that had both natural and anthropogenic components, and that changed constantly on a multiplicity of temporal and spatial scales. What do climate scientists know about climate change and how do they know it? By what authority and by what historical pathways have they arrived at this knowledge? How have they established privileged positions? I offered some reflections on the ways such perspectives emerged historically: from appeals to authority, data collection, fundamental physical theory, critical experiments, models (including computer models), new technologies (including space-based observations), to consensus building and the beginnings of coordinated action.\n\nI also examined climate-related fears, including drought, crop failures, volcano weather, apocalyptic visions of the return of the deadly glaciers, and global warming. The cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan once observed, \"To apprehend is to risk apprehensiveness.\" For much of history, people feared that the powers of evil were active during inclement weather or that when the rains failed to arrive or it rained too much something was terribly wrong with either nature or, more  likely, the social order. Many also saw themselves as agents of climate change. Even in fictional accounts of weather and climate control, much of the dramatic tension is derived from fundamental fears. An incomplete understanding, fueled by fear, may result in ineffective or even dangerous interventions. In the field of climate change, the two main approaches seem to be big technical fixes and social engineering.\n\nIn 1955 in a prominent article titled \"Can We Survive Technology?\" von Neumann referred to climate control as a thoroughly \"abnormal\" industry. He thought that weather control using chemical agents and climate control through modifying surface albedo or otherwise managing solar radiation were distinct possibilities for the near future. He argued that such intervention could have \"rather fantastic effects\" on a scale difficult to imagine. He pointed out that it was not necessarily rational to alter the climate of specific regions or purposely trigger a new ice age. Tinkering with the Earth's heat budget or the atmosphere's general circulation \"will merge each nation's affairs with those of every other more thoroughly than the threat of a nuclear or any other war may already have done.\" In his opinion, climate control, like other \"intrinsically useful\" modern technologies, could lend itself to unprecedented destruction and to forms of warfare as yet unimagined. Climate manipulation could alter the entire globe and shatter the existing political order. He made the Janus-faced nature of weather and climate control clear. The central question was not \"What can we do?\" but \"What should we do?\" This was the \"maturing crisis of technology,\" a crisis made more urgent by the rapidity of progress.\n\nBanning particular technologies was not the answer for von Neumann. Perhaps, he thought, war could be eliminated as a means of national policy. Yet he ultimately deemed survival only a \"possibility,\" since elements of future conflict existed then, as today, while the means of destruction grew ever more powerful and was reaching the global level.\n\nIn Baconian terms, do we consider climate to be based on the unconstrained operations of nature, now modified inadvertently by human activities, or do we seek to engineer climate, constrain it, and mold it to our will? Certainly, the ubiquity and scale of indoor air-conditioning could not have been imagined less than a century ago, but what about fixing the sky itself? In attempting to do so, we run the risk of violently rending the bonds of nature and unleashing unintended side effects or purposely calculated destruction. After all, von Neumann identified frenetic \"progress\" as a key contributor to the maturing crisis of technology. Fumbling for an ultimate solution, but falling well short, he suggested that the brightest prospects for survival lay in patience, flexibility, intelligence, humility, dedication, oversight, sacrifice\u2014and a healthy dose of good luck.\n\n#  Fantasies\n\nGlobal climate control has a history rooted in the quest for perfectly accurate machine forecasts and supported by the dream of perfectly accurate data acquisition. Calculating the weather has long been a goal of meteorologists. By the turn of the twentieth century, Felix Exner and Vilhelm Bjerknes had identified the basic equations of atmospheric dynamics. In 1922 Louis Fry Richardson had actually tried to solve the equations numerically with rather poor data and without the use of a computer. Their dreams\u2014to solve the equations of motion for the atmosphere faster than the daily weather develops\u2014were fulfilled with the advent of numerical weather prediction in the 1950s. This story has been told often, always as a heroic saga\u2014a quest to do what no one has ever done before. Kristine Harper is the latest in a long line of historians and meteorologists to illuminate the \"genesis\" of modern meteorology, its \"exodus\" from weather bureau captivity, and its arrival at the edge of a \"promised land\" of digital computer modeling. As complex (and familiar, at least in outline) as this story might be, there is nevertheless a story as yet untold, a darker tale of digital climate modeling, prediction, and control.\n\nJust after World War II, in October 1945, Vladimir K. Zworykin, associate research director at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, wrote his influential but now all but forgotten mimeographed \"Outline of Weather Proposal\" (figure 7.1). He began by discussing the importance to meteorology of accurate prediction, which he thought was entering a new era. Modern communication systems were beginning to allow the systematic compilation of scattered and remote observations, and, he hoped, new computing equipment would be developed that could solve the equations of atmospheric motion, or at least search quickly for statistical regularities and past analog weather conditions. He imagined \"an automatic plotting board\" that would instantly digest and display all this information.\n\nZworykin suggested that \"exact scientific weather knowledge\" might allow for effective weather control. If a perfectly accurate machine could be developed that could predict the immediate future state of the atmosphere and identify the precise time and location of leverage points or locations sensitive to rapid storm development, effective intervention might be possible. A paramilitary rapid-deployment force might then be sent to intervene in the weather as it happened\u2014literally to pour oil on troubled ocean waters or use physical barriers, giant flame throwers, or even atomic bombs to disrupt storms before they formed, deflect them from populated areas, and otherwise control the weather. Zworykin suggested a study of the origins and tracks of hurricanes, with a view to their  prediction, prevention, and even diversion. Long-term climatic changes might be engineered by large-scale geographical modification projects involving such climatically sensitive areas as deserts, glaciers, and mountainous regions. In effect, numerical experimentation using computer models would guide field experiments and interventions in both weather and climate. According to Zworykin,\n\n[t]he eventual goal to be attained is the international organization of means to study weather phenomena as global phenomena and to channel the world's weather, as far as possible, in such a way as to minimize the damage from catastrophic disturbances, and otherwise to benefit the world to the greatest extent by improved climatic conditions where possible. _Such an international organization may contribute to world peace by integrating the world interest in a common problem and turning scientific energy to peaceful pursuits. It is conceivable that eventual far-reaching beneficial effects on the world economy may contribute to the cause of peace_.\n\n7.1 Cover of Vladimir K. Zworykin's \"Outline of Weather Proposal,\" October 1945. (WEXLER PAPERS)\n\nZworykin's proposal gained a powerful formal endorsement when von Neumann attached a letter to it dated October 24, 1945, stating: \"I agree with you completely. ... This would provide a basis for scientific approach[es] to influencing the weather.\" Using computer-generated predictions, von Neumann envisioned that weather and climate systems \"could be controlled, or at least directed,  by the release of perfectly practical amounts of energy\" or by \"altering the absorption and reflection properties of the ground or the sea or the atmosphere.\" It was a project that neatly fit von Neumann's overall agenda and philosophy: \"All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.\" Zworykin's proposal also contained a long endorsement by the oceanographer Athelstan Spilhaus, then a U.S. Army major, who ended his letter of November 6, 1945, with these words: \"In weather control, meteorology has a new goal worthy of its greatest efforts.\"\n\n#  Popularizations\n\nComplicating the picture at the time were suggestions about the use of atomic weapons for climate control and announcements of new discoveries in cloud seeding. In 1945 the prominent scientist-humanist Julian Huxley, then head of UNESCO, had spoken to an audience of 20,000 at an arms control conference at Madison Square Garden about the possibilities of using nuclear weapons as \"atomic dynamite\" for \"landscaping the Earth\" or perhaps using them to change the climate by dissolving the polar ice cap. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on record as advocating the use of atomic bombs for \"cracking the Antarctic icebox\" to gain access to its known mineral deposits. \"Sarnoff Predicts Weather Control\" read the headline on the front page of the _New York Times_ on October 1, 1946. The previous evening, at his testimonial dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, RCA president Brigadier General David Sarnoff had speculated on worthy peaceful projects for the postwar era. Among them were \"transformations of deserts into gardens through diversion of ocean currents,\" a technique that could also be reversed in time of war to turn fertile lands into deserts, and ordering \"rain or sunshine by pressing radio buttons,\" an accomplishment that, Sarnoff declared, would require a World Weather Bureau in charge of global forecasting and control (much like the Weather Distributing Administration proposed in 1938). A commentator in the _New Yorker_ intuited the problems with such control. \"Who,\" in this civil service outfit, he asked, \"would decide whether a day was to be sunny, rainy, overcast ... or enriched by a stimulating blizzard?\" It would be \"some befuddled functionary,\" probably bedeviled by special interests such as the raincoat and galoshes manufacturers, the beachwear and sunburn lotion industries, and resort owners and farmers. Or if a storm was to be diverted, \"Detour it where? Out to sea, to hit some ship with no influence in Washington?\" Recall that all this was just one month before the General Electric Corporation announced the news of Vincent Schaefer's cloud-seeding exploits and Irving  Langmuir began making his fantastic claims about weather control. But such notions are still around. In 2009 a fantastic proposal was floated for just such a bureau or administration to implement regional-scale geoengineering\u2014in the Arctic, in certain ocean regions, or for certain storms\u2014to attempt to moderate specific climate change impacts.\n\nIn the era of cloud seeding, von Neumann and Zworykin, especially the latter, continued to feed public speculation about control. In January 1947, both men spoke in New York at a joint session of the American Meteorological Society and the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, chaired by incoming AMS president Henry G. Houghton. Von Neumann's talk, \"Future Uses of High Speed Computing in Meteorology,\" was followed by Zworykin's much more controversial \"Discussion of the Possibility of Weather Control.\" According to the _New York Times_ : \"Hurricanes may be dispersed, Dr. Zworykin said, and rain may be made, first through the speed which an electronic computer now approaching completion can synthesize all elements in weather problems, and second, through application of energy in small doses from spreads of blazing oil to heat critical portions of the atmosphere or blackened-over areas to cool them.\" Zworykin focused on \"trigger\" mechanisms such as artificial fogs or even cloud seeding as examples of adding small amounts of energy to cause enormous effects, claiming that the missing ingredient was not the techniques but how to \"make the most of our weather information mathematically.\" A follow-up story the next day ended with the comment \"If Dr. Zworykin is right the weather-makers of the future are the inventors of calculating machines.\"\n\nMost scientists thought this speculation was premature. Wexler and a colleague who dined at Zworykin's home discussed weather control with him, including techniques such as igniting oil on the sea surface to redirect hurricanes, but Wexler indicated that Zworykin's views \"were not shared by most tropical meteorologists.\" The distinguished oceanographer Harald U. Sverdrup at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was not convinced by Zworykin's claim that \"the underlying general physical principles governing weather behavior are mostly well understood.\" Regarding weather control, he wrote: \"It seems that only in rare cases can we expect to know the initial conditions in sufficient detail to predict the consequences of a 'trigger action.'\" Yet talk of triggers was something the military understood. In a 1947 fund-raising speech presented at the annual alumni dinner at MIT, General George C. Kenney, commander of the Strategic Air Command, speaking of future weapons systems, asserted: \"If rain could be kept from falling where it has been falling for ages,\" it is conceivable that \"the nation which first learns to plot the paths of air masses accurately and learns to control the time and place of precipitation will  dominate the globe.\" He urged MIT to look into this, suggesting a multimilliondollar research program.\n\nThat spring, Martin Mann, an associate editor of _Popular Science Monthly_ , sent a draft of his article \"War Against Hail,\" to von Neumann for corrections. The article began with a declaration of war against hail, announcing that the army would soon be using Schaefer's cloud-seeding techniques in its quest for triggers\u2014\"With enough triggers, weather could be made to order!\" Mann then highlighted the quest at the IAS to develop numerical \"model experiments,\" which he said would reveal additional triggers:\n\nOnce the weather equations are perfected [von Neumann and Zworykin] foresee their use to control weather.... Figures corresponding to imaginary weather conditions will be fed into the computer. It will then forecast what final weather would have resulted from the imaginary starting conditions. For example, the machine would show how a higher temperature over the Caribbean Sea would have affected the weather in Miami. (10)\n\nMann had also interviewed Zworykin for the article, citing his opinion that because of the vast energy generated by weather systems, the use of brute-force methods, even nuclear bombs, to divert a hurricane was futile. Zworykin favored smaller \"trigger mechanisms\" such as modifying the surface of an island in the path of the storm to make it either darker or more reflective and to upset the storm's already shaky balance of forces. Covering an island with a thin layer of carbon black would absorb heat, while generating a white smoke screen would make it more reflective: \"These reflecting-absorbing areas would have to be placed in exactly the right spots and used at exactly the right times\" (11)\u2014a job for the decision-making power of the digital computer. Pity the poor Caribbean islanders whose tropical paradises would be invaded and possibly brutalized each hurricane season by paramilitary forces trying to save Miami. How could they clean up all the soot? Mann concluded his article by juxtaposing the more proximate goal of hail suppression and the distant goal of climate control. He also contrasted Vincent Schaefer, the Edison-like everyman \"who never even finished high school,\" and the Princeton eggheads working on a big military\u2013industrial project.\n\n#  Hurricane Control\n\nOver five decades later, Ross Hoffman, principal scientist with Atmospheric and Environmental Research, used a little butterfly as a logo in his presentations  to symbolize his notion that chaos theory, developed by his graduate school adviser, Edward Lorenz, might be used to control weather systems such as hurricanes. Since the atmosphere is chaotic and exhibits extreme sensitivity to small changes, he argued, a series of \"just right\" perturbations might be used to control the weather. Echoing the perennial hope of William Suddards Franklin, who believed in perturbations, and the pathological hype of Irving Langmuir, who advocated control, Hoffman asked us to imagine a world with no droughts, no tornadoes, no snowstorms during rush hour, and no killer hurricanes.\n\nHoffman proposed an atmospheric controller similar in its characteristics to feedback systems common in many industrial processes. The components of his integrated system included numerical weather prediction (NWP), data assimilation systems, and satellite remote sensing\u2014all part of today's normal meteorological practices. Where Hoffman's system differed was in adding a fourth component, what he called \"perturbations,\" into natural weather systems to move them off course. These are planned interventions in natural systems that are then to be monitored by remote sensing and modeled via NWP in an endless management loop. He provided examples of global-scale interventions that included changing the altitude and flight paths of airplanes to optimize contrail formation for perturbing solar and infrared radiation, launching reflectors into low Earth orbit to produce bright spots on the night side and shadows on the day side of the Earth, running wind turbines as high-speed fans at a sufficient scale to transfer atmospheric momentum and influence storm tracks, and the pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance, a space solar power generator that would \"downlink microwave energy\" to provide a tunable atmospheric heat source\u2014an orbiting death ray to zap hurricanes or anything else in the way.\n\nHis goal was not to eliminate hurricanes but just to \"control their paths\" in order to prevent them from striking population centers. To demonstrate his ideas, Hoffman increased the sea surface temperature by 5\u00b0C (9\u00b0F) in one quadrant of a computer model of Hurricane Iniki. The model responded by \"steering\" the storm away from the Hawaiian Islands. Hoffman concluded by gesturing in the direction of legal and ethical questions, asking, \"If we can do it, do we want to?\" Just imagine the lawsuits from those poor folks over whose property Hoffman steers the storm! And isn't \"steering\" too strong a term to use to describe the result of a chaotic perturbation? Hoffman's effort was supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funded wild futuristic ideas such as space elevators, robotic asteroid patrols, antimatter propulsion, and genetically modified organisms for terraforming other planets. Hoffman cited as his inspiration Arthur C. Clarke's vision of a Global Weather Authority:\n\nIt had not been easy to persuade the surviving superpowers to relinquish their orbital fortresses and to hand them over to the Global Weather Authority, in what was\u2014if the metaphor could be stretched that far\u2014the last and most dramatic example of beating swords into plowshares. Now the lasers that had once threatened mankind directed their beams into carefully selected portions of the atmosphere, or onto heat-absorbing target areas in remote regions of the Earth. The energy they contained was trifling compared with that of the smallest storm; but so is the energy of the falling stone that triggers an avalanche, or the single neutron that starts a chain reaction.\n\nBut Hoffman also alluded to possible future misuse and militarization. Every prophetic call to \"beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks\" (Isaiah 2:4) can be countered by another prophet calling, \"Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears\" (Joel 3:10).\n\nHurricane expert Kerry Emanuel has been generally supportive of Hoffman's hurricane control quest: \"Weather modification will occur, almost inevitably ... the recent results, that suggest you can do it with a little tiny bit of energy placed in the right place, will prove irresistible, and one can only hope that it is done for the right reasons and to good ends.\" On another occasion, Emanuel opined: \"We might be able to prevent or reduce vulnerability to serious hurricanes by controlling the storm, by reducing its intensity, by steering it out to sea. I don't think it would take very many years to come up with a technology.\" Recall that it was Emanuel who advanced the dubious notion of taking up Phaethon's reins. In June 2009, Microsoft's Bill Gates announced that he intended to fight hurricanes by manipulating the sea, \"draining warm water from the surface to the depths, through a long tube.\" One commentator on the proposal suggested not to \"mess with Mother Nature\"; another included the hope that this technique might work better than the Windows operating system!\n\n#  Soviet Fantasies\n\nVladimir Lenin set the tone for Soviet attitudes toward \"the mastery of nature.\" According to his philosophy, a new era was dawning through \"objectively correct reflection\" on independently occurring phenomena and processes embedded in the absolute and eternal laws of nature. Mastery would be manifest in praxis. Two decades later, in 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin announced his \"Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature,\" an ultimately futile attempt to expand the Soviet economy by harnessing nature and controlling the weather and climate. Throughout the cold war era, authors from at least nineteen research institutions in the Soviet Union published numerous books, articles, and reports on weather and climate modification. Several popularizations of this literature are notable for their geoengineering fantasies. In _Soviet Electric Power_ (1956), Arkadii Borisovich Markin outlined the progress of electrification in the Soviet Union and provided a forecast to the year 2000, when, he supposed, electrical power output would be one hundred times greater than at present. Markin gave special emphasis to the future role of nuclear power, including using nuclear explosions for geoengineering purposes:\n\nGigantic atom explosions in the depths of the earth will give rise to volcanic activity. New islands and colossal dams will be built and new mountain chains will appear. Atom explosions will cut new canyons through mountain ranges and will speedily create canals, reservoirs, and sea, carry[ing] out huge excavation jobs. At the same time we are convinced that science will find a method of protection against the radiation of radioactive substances.\n\nSuch ideas were derived from the Soviet program Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy, which, like Edward Teller's Project Plowshare, proposed techniques to employ nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes. Surely, Markin concluded, the Soviet power engineers can achieve \"magnificent results\" when inspired by the \"omnipotence of human genius\" (135).\n\nIn _Man Versus Climate_ (1960), Soviet authors Nikolai Petrovich Rusin and Liya Abramovna Flit surveyed a large number of schemes for climatic tinkering. Invoking a Jules Verne\u2013style fantasy, the book's cover is illustrated by the Earth surrounded by a Saturn-like ring of dust particles intended to illuminate the Arctic Circle, increase solar energy absorption, and ultimately melt the polar ice caps. Chapters in the book are dedicated to mega-engineering projects such as damming the Congo River to electrify Africa and irrigate the Sahara, diverting the Gulf Stream with a causeway off Newfoundland or harnessing it with turbines installed between Florida and Cuba, and, of course, Petr Mikhailovich Borisov's proposal to dam the Bering Strait to divert Atlantic waters into the Pacific and melt the Arctic sea ice. The authors' ultimate goal was to convince the reader \"that man can really be the master of this planet and that the future is in his hands.\"\n\nIn a much more politically oriented book, _Methods of Climate Control_ (1964), Rusin and Flit admitted that \"we are merely on the threshold of the conquest of nature,\" attributing the nascent ability to control nature to the emergence of the new Soviet man: \"Before the Revolution, under the autocracy, nine-tenths of the territory of Russia had not been studied at all. The Soviet man, taking ownership  of the greatest natural wealth, learned not only how to use it, but how to subordinate nature to his will. And now we are not surprised when we learn that a new sea has been developed or the desert has blossomed.\"\n\nReferring to the macro-engineering projects discussed in their earlier book, Rusin and Flit argued that deeper scientific insight into the laws of nature would result in ever more \"grandiose\" plans for developing immense energy reserves, controlling the flow of rivers, and subjugating permafrost, to name but a few of the advances that they expected. Science was not just about observing and understanding nature; it was about exploiting and controlling it as well. They cited the program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on this: \"The progress of science and technology under the conditions of the Socialist system of economy is making it possible to most effectively utilize the wealth and forces of nature for the interests of the people, make available new forms of energy and create new materials, develop methods for the modification of climatic conditions and master space\" (3).\n\nI. Adabashev reviewed many of the same projects in his book _Global Engineering_ (1966), with his utopian hopes tinged by strong ideological commitments. Concerning the \"second Nile\" project in Africa, he wrote: \"The great new man-made inland seas would transfigure the Sahara ... and create a new climate in Northern Africa.... Millions and millions of fertile acres would be made to yield two and even three crops a year for the benefit of mankind.\" This would enhance the \"struggle of African peoples for national liberation\" against the vested interests of American and European capitalists seeking to control the African economy (161). In essence, Adabashev envisioned in the not-too-distant future a new global hydrologic era of gigantic dams and dikes, pumping stations capable of handling entire seas, and other facilities that would \"trigger\" various meteorological processes. He called it \"a better heating system for our planet, better able to serve all the five continents\" (201). But with world population and energy needs increasing, why should a visionary engineer stop with the surface of the Earth? Adabashev concluded his book with a fanciful account of a \"Dyson sphere,\" one astronomical unit in radius, a new home for humanity roughly a trillion times greater than that of the Earth, synthesized from the remains of the outer planets and capturing all the energy of the Sun\u2014solar-powered sustainable development in action\u2014at least for the next 300 million years! For Adabashev, however, implementation of such projects had been delayed by the continued existence of capitalism, which he likened to \"a ball and chain hampering man in his progress towards a happier lot\" (237).\n\n#  Warming the Arctic\n\nThe idea of melting the Arctic ice cap dates at least to the 1870s, when Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler suggested channeling more of the warm Kuroshio Current through the Bering Strait:\n\nWhenever the Alaskan gates to the pole are unbarred, the whole of the ice-cap of the circumpolar regions must at once melt away; all the plants of the northern continents, now kept in narrow bounds by the arctic cold, would begin their march towards the pole.... It is not too much to say that the life-sustaining power of the lands north of forty degrees of latitude would be doubled by the breaking down of the barrier which cuts off the Japanese current from the pole.\n\nIn 1912 Carroll Livingston Riker, an engineer, inventor, and industrialist, proposed a scheme to change the climate of polar regions by tinkering with the ocean currents of the Atlantic. This was to be accomplished by preventing the cold Labrador Current from colliding with the Gulf Stream. To do this, he proposed building a 200-mile causeway extending east from Cape Race off the coast of Newfoundland. The theory was that the causeway could be built by suspending a long rope cable, or \"Obstructor,\" in the ocean that would act to slow the southward flow of the Labrador Current, causing it to deposit its sediment load. Potential benefits of diverting the Gulf Stream farther east (shades of Thomas Jefferson) included fewer fogs and a general warming of northern climates. Riker's proposal was inspired by recently completed mega-projects such as Henry Flagler's railroad bridge from Key West, Florida, to the mainland and the ongoing excavation of the Panama Canal. The tragic sinking of the _Titanic_ also lent urgency to his proposal, since his causeway might help remove icebergs from shipping lanes. Riker was supported in Congress by Representative William Musgrave Calder (R-New York), who proposed the creation of a Commission on the Labrador Current and Gulf Stream. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was not at all convinced by the proposal, but thought that a general survey of the currents of the Grand Banks would be useful.\n\nAn ice-free Arctic Ocean was one of the largest-scale and most widely discussed climate-engineering projects of the time. Jules Verne's story _The Purchase of the North Pole_ (1889) may have been inspired by such ideas. Ironically, an ice-free Arctic Ocean is something we may actually see sooner or later through a combination of natural and anthropogenic influences. In 1957 Soviet academician Borisov, alluding to the centuries-old quest of the  Russian people to overcome the northland cold, proposed building a dam across the Bering Strait to melt the Arctic sea ice. In numerous articles and then again in his book _Can Man Change the Climate?_ (1973), Borisov detailed his vision of a dam 50 miles long and almost 200 feet high with shipping locks and pumping stations. He proposed that the dam be built in 820-foot sections made of prefabricated freeze-resistance ferroconcrete that could be floated to the construction site and anchored to the sea bottom with pilings. He further suggested that the top of the dam be shaped so that ice floes would ride up over the dam and break off on the southern side. An alternative design included an intercontinental highway and railroad. According to Borisov, \"What mankind needs is war against cold, rather than a 'cold war.'\"\n\nTo liquidate Arctic sea ice, Borisov wanted to pump cold seawater out of the Arctic Ocean, across the dam, and into the Bering Sea and the North Pacific. This displacement would allow the inflow of warmer water from the North Atlantic, eliminate fresh water in the surface layer in several years, and thus prevent the formation of ice in the Arctic Basin, creating warmer climate conditions:\n\nIn this day and age, with mankind's expanding powers of transforming the natural environment, the project we are advancing does not present any technical difficulties. The pumping of the warm Atlantic water across into the Pacific Ocean will take the Arctic Ocean out of its present state of a dead-end basin for the Atlantic water [and] drive the Arctic surface water out into the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait.\n\nHis goal was to remove a 200-foot layer of cold surface water, which would be replaced by warmer, saltier water that would not freeze. Inspired by Markin's popular book _Soviet Electric Power_ , Borisov also assumed that huge amounts of electricity would soon be available to run the pumps, perhaps from hydroelectric generators or nuclear reactors.\n\nThe dam was, of course, never built, but if it had been attempted, would the nations of the world have confronted the Russians? The net climatic effect of the project, if it had been carried out, is still highly uncertain. A good argument can be made that the effect would be less than that of naturally occurring variations in the Atlantic influx, but none of the computer models at the time were sophisticated enough to show any robust results.\n\nOther ocean-engineering schemes included installing giant turbines in the Strait of Florida to generate electricity and adding a thin film of alcohol to the northern branch of the Gulf Stream to decrease surface water evaporation and warm the water by several degrees, although the cod might become rather tipsy.  In Japan, engineers imagined that the icy Sea of Okhotsk could be tamed by deflecting the warm Kuroshio Current with a dam or one-way water valve built at the Tatarsk Strait. And in a 1970 geoengineering experiment thought suitable only for testing on a computer model (aren't they all?), the Japanese geoscientific speculator Keiji Higuichi wondered what would happen to the global atmospheric and oceanic circulation and thus the world's climate if the Drake Passage, between the tip of South America and Antarctica, was blocked by an ice dam. One possibility was the onset of a new ice age.\n\nRussian scientists warned of possible climate disruption from such megaprojects. Borisov admitted that the large-scale climatic and ecological effects of his Bering Strait dam could not be fully predicted, nor could they be confined within the borders of any one national state; rather, they would directly involve the national interests of the Soviet Union, Canada, Denmark, and the United States and indirectly affect many countries in other areas that might experience climate change caused by the project. With such a dam in place, the middlelatitude winters would be milder due to the warming of Arctic and polar air masses. He thought areas such as the Sahara would be much better watered and would perhaps turn into steppe land or savannah. Direct benefits of an ice-free Arctic Ocean would include new, more-direct shipping routes between East Asia and Europe, while, by his overly optimistic calculations, sea-level rise would be modest, even with the melting of the Greenland ice cap. Yet such climatic changes elsewhere were of little concern to the Soviets.\n\nLarisa R. Rakipova noted that a substantial Arctic warming could cool the winters in Africa by 5\u00b0C (9\u00b0F), \"leading to a complete disruption of the living conditions for people, animals, and plants,\" and Oleg A. Drozdov warned that the warming of the Arctic would lead to a total breakdown of moisture exchange between the oceans and continents with excess rain in the Far East and great aridity in Europe. The resulting drastic changes in the soils, vegetation, water regime, and other natural conditions would have widespread negative ecological, economic, and social consequences (25). As in the fictional case described earlier in _The Evacuation of England_ , Rusin and Flit also wondered what might happen if the Americans implemented one of their projects and turned the Gulf Stream toward the shores of America: \"In Europe the temperature would drop sharply and glaciers would begin to advance rapidly\" (22). In his book _The Gulf Stream_ (1973), T. F. Gaskell pointed out, \"This is why such natural phenomena as the Gulf Stream have political implications.\" Geoengineers should realize that the same is true of a wide range of natural phenomena.\n\nIn addition to sea ice, the Soviets were also battling the \"curse of the Siberians\"\u2014permafrost as thick as 1,600 feet in places. One suggestion to remove it  involved applying soot to the snowfields to absorb more sunlight; or perhaps cheaper materials such as ash or peat could do the job. Reminding their readers that \"everyone knows what permafrost is,\" Rusin and Flit recounted its horrors: \"A newly constructed house unexpectedly begins to shift, a Russian stove suddenly begins to sink into the ground, deeply driven piles spring from the ground,\" and when it melts and refreezes, the trees of the mysterious \"drunken forests\" lean akilter, like a Siberian full of vodka. In the twenty-first century, permafrost has reemerged not as a local curse but as something to be saved, in part to preserve the migration patterns of the reindeer and caribou, and as a global environmental issue because of its high methane gas content. In 1962 Rusin and Flit opined, \"Much has been learned, but it has been impossible to completely eliminate permafrost\" (27).\n\n#  Rehydrating and Powering Africa\n\nThe completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 under the direction of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps led to a number of mega-engineering proposals for rehydrating Africa. One was proposed by an eccentric British adventurer and entrepreneur, Donald Mackenzie, who proposed flooding the Sahara Desert in Algeria with water from the Mediterranean Sea to improve transportation, benefit commerce, and spread Christianity. The _Daily Telegraph_ reported:\n\nInstead of a pathless wilderness across which once in the year a line of camels carry merchandise, the envious but admiring ears of M. de Lesseps are destined to hear the fleets of merchantmen sailing over the conquered Sahara. Liverpool will only be fourteen days from the Upper Niger, and while a magnificent new market will be opened for British and other goods, the regeneration of Africa will be advanced as if centuries had suddenly rolled over.\n\nA colleague wrote to Mackenzie that the project \"would recommend itself to every Christian mind, spreading a net of Christianity over Africa\" (274). The French, not to be outdone, appointed geographer Fran\u00e7ois Elie Roudaire to lead a commission that suggested that the French Academy of Sciences explore the idea. This discussion raised the possibility that an inland sea might enhance rainfall and thus agricultural production in the Sahara, but also might adversely affect the climate of Europe.\n\nJules Verne's novel _L'Invasion de la mer_ (1905) was based on the premise that French engineers returned to Africa to complete Roudaire's project. The  book raised a number of environmental, cultural, and political concerns, including the possibility of warfare triggered by macro-engineering projects. Verne's idea was revived in whole cloth in 1911 by a French scientist named Etchegoyen, who again proposed to convert large portions of the Sahara into an inland sea by digging a 50-mile canal on the north coast of Africa. He touted the ease of construction and the massive benefits: more fertile soil and cropland, a cooler local climate, and a great new colony for France along the \"Sea of Sahara.\" Critics warned that the massive redistribution of water, up to half the volume of the Mediterranean Sea, might tip the Earth's axis, adversely affect regional precipitation patterns, or even trigger an ice age in northern Europe.\n\nIn the 1930s, the German architect Herman S\u00f6rgel's \"Atlantropa Project\" promoted the idea of lowering the level of the Mediterranean Sea and developing more than 3 million acres of new territory (an area as large as France) for European settlement. According to S\u00f6rgel, the construction of gigantic dams at Gibraltar and the Dardanelles to drain much of the Mediterranean and generate massive amounts of power \"would assure Europe a utopian future of expanded territory; abundant, clean, and cheap energy; and the revival of its global economic and political might.\" S\u00f6rgel tried to sell his ideas first to the Nazis and then, during the cold war, to Western governments as a hedge against Soviet expansionism in Africa.\n\nBut lowering the Mediterranean Sea was only part of S\u00f6rgel's vision. He also wanted to irrigate much of Africa by building a massive system of dams and artificial lakes. Damming the Congo River, Africa's mightiest and the secondmost-voluminous river in the world, near its outlet at Brazzaville, Congo, would create a huge new lake that S\u00f6rgel dubbed the \"Congo Sea,\" basically covering the entire surface area of that nation. A chain of events, including the drowning of natives, wildlife, and ecosystems, would then occur. By his calculations, the Ubangi River would reverse its course, flowing northwest into the Chari River and finally into the greatly enlarged \"Chad Sea.\" These two new seas would cover about 10 percent of the continent, and the northern outlet could be dubbed the \"Second Nile,\" flowing north across the Sahara to create an irrigated settlement corridor in Algeria similar to that in Egypt. S\u00f6rgel's plan also included a giant hydroelectric plant at Stanley Falls, with sufficient surplus electric power to illuminate and industrialize much of the continent (figure 7.2).\n\nAmerican and Soviet hydrological engineers, too, dreamed of such macro-scale projects. In the 1950s and 1960s, the North American Water and Power Alliance proposed to channel 100 million acre-feet of water per year from Alaska and Canada for use in the southwestern United States and Mexico. Soviet  engineers dreamed of creating a massive new \"Siberian Sea\" east of the Ural Mountains by damming the Ob, Yenisei, and Angara rivers, for irrigation of crops and climate modulation. As recently as 1997, Robert Johnson, a retired geoscientist at the University of Minnesota, commandeered the front page of _EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union_ , to warn that the Mediterranean Sea was being starved of fresh water because human activities have diverted the outflow of rivers, mainly the Nile. He called for a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar to block the outflow of salt water into the Atlantic Ocean, paradoxically making the Mediterranean even saltier than at present. All of this was for a good cause, however, since his computer models indicated that the mega-dam would stave off a little ice age in northern Europe while preserving the holy grail of climate change, preventing the West Antarctic ice sheet from collapsing, and raising the worldwide sea level by 20 feet. It seems that all current geoengineering schemes should be able to do this, at least.\n\n7.2 Herman S\u00f6rgel's plan for transforming Africa and the Mediterranean. (RUSIN AND FLIT, _MAN VERSUS CLIMATE_ )\n\n#  Space Mirrors and Dust\n\nIn July 1945, a classified U.S. Army Air Force memorandum on the subject of German liquid rocket development included speculations on \"future possibilities,\" including ideas on intercontinental ballistic missiles, Earth-orbiting satellites, space station platforms, and interplanetary travel. Significantly, a section of the memo titled \"Weather Control\" cited a 1923 proposal by Herman Oberth to launch large mirrors, a mile or so in diameter, into orbit to be used to concentrate the Sun's energy on the Earth's surface \"at will,\" and in this way influence the weather. _Time_ further popularized Oberth's idea in 1954, describing the space mirror as made of \"shiny metal foil reinforced with wire\" and spinning slowly around a space station as its hub. The space mirror would be positioned in such a way as to illuminate the Earth's nighttime hemisphere. It would bathe cold countries in reflected sunlight, making them productive and habitable. Areas with excess rainfall could be heated and dried with the mirrors. Conversely, rainfall might be generated in an arid region by concentrating the Sun's rays on the nearest lakes to evaporate water and form clouds. Then the rain clouds could be directed toward arid regions by thermal currents and pressure gradients generated by \"proper manipulation of the mirrors.\"\n\nThe army report speculated that these mirrors could be used by \"the world group of nations\" against a country that became aggressive or obnoxious to persuade it \"to be more friendly and reasonable by the concentration of intensive heat on their country,\" but did not discuss other possible hostile applications of these death rays. _Time_ was considerably more blunt in its account: \"If war should start on the earth below, the 'aggressor' ... could be handily incinerated by making the mirror concave to concentrate its beam.\" _Time_ also reported that the Nazis gave serious consideration to a space mirror for military purposes during World War II.\n\nOther radiative effects on climate were also being considered. Beginning in 1913, William Jackson Humphreys explored the idea that volcanic dust might control the climate. Two decades later, astronomer Harlow Shapley and his associates realized that space is filled with interstellar dust that might be influencing their calculations by obscuring distant stars. Astronomers Fred Hoyle and R. A. Lyttleton further speculated that space dust may affect the solar constant and thus cause climatic change.\n\nEarly in the space age, Leningrad mathematician Mikhail Aleksandrovich Gorodskiy proposed creating an artificial dust ring passing over both poles. Shaped like a flat washer with its lower boundary at an altitude of 750 miles and its upper boundary at 6,000 miles, the Saturn-like ring would be made of  metallic potassium particles that were highly reflective, lightweight, and relatively inexpensive. Gorodskiy wanted the ring turned full face to the Sun in summer and oriented on edge in the winter, but his back-of-the-envelope calculations provided no details on the coherence or lifetime of the ring or how to shift its orientation. He imagined, however, that the ring would increase shortwave radiation between 55\u00b0 and 90\u00b0N to values up to 50 percent greater than those at the equator! Permafrost would disappear, polar ice would melt, the cities of Siberia would flourish, and the entire planet would warm considerably (figure 7.3).\n\n7.3 Mikhail Aleksandrovich Gorodskiy's plan for launching a Saturn-like ring of reflective particles into Earth orbit to warm the Arctic. (RUSIN AND FLIT, _MAN VERSUS CLIMATE_ )\n\nAnother Soviet engineer, Valentin Cherenkov, proposed a much smaller orbiting cloud, formed from only 1 ton of opaque particles, that would direct the Sun's rays earthward (63\u201365). He estimated that the cloud would yield 1,300 billion kilowatts of power, the equivalent of about 500,000 large conventional power stations. This amount of energy could heat the Arctic and provide sky illumination of more than 500 lux, basically eliminating the long polar night. It would also eliminate the differences among the seasons and between the climate at the poles and that at the equator. Counterproposals existed at the time to cool the planet by positioning a sunshade over the equator between 30\u00b0N and 30\u00b0S\u2014this about forty-five years before the current batch of proposals to manage solar radiation (chapter 8).\n\n#  Bombs Away\n\nThe scientists and cold warriors who meddled with the Earth's atmosphere and near-space environment believed that \"they could control everything,\" even radiation and nuclear fallout. They had supporters in high places, such as Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, chair of the Preparedness Subcommittee. The launch of _Sputnik 1_ in October 1957 diverted the world's attention from the scientific concerns of the ongoing International Geophysical Year and heightened American apprehensions of a \"missile gap\" and possible national security threats from space. The launch of _Sputnik 2_ in November further fueled these fears. Johnson warned in early 1958 that the Russian _Sputniks_ were not \"play toys\" and proclaimed that the very future of the United States depended on its first seizing ownership of space and controlling it for military purposes.\n\nThe testimony of the scientists is this: Control of space means control of the world, far more certainly, far more totally than any control that has ever or could ever be achieved by weapons, or by troops of occupation. From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth's weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the Gulf Stream and change temperate climates to frigid.... If, out in space, there is the ultimate position\u2014from which total control of the earth may be exercised\u2014then our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to win and hold that position.\n\nLater that month, the United States launched its first satellite, _Explorer 1_ , with a modified Redstone military missile, the Juno 1.\n\nIn August 1958, during the extensive series of bomb tests known as Operation Hardtack, the military tested its antiballistic missile and communication disruption capabilities with two high-altitude shots named Teak and Orange. In each test, an army Redstone rocket launched a 3.8-megaton hydrogen bomb warhead. Teak detonated at 48 miles altitude in the mesosphere, and Orange at 27 miles in the stratosphere. Each blast illuminated the night sky as if it were daylight, with the added excitement that due to a malfunction of the missile guidance system, the Teak shot occurred directly over Johnston Island, in the North Pacific, instead of at the planned spot 48 miles downrange. Apparently, the experimenters had no qualms about destroying either themselves or any sensitive or protective layers of the atmosphere.\n\nIn Operation Argus, conducted in August and September 1958, just six months after the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by the satellites _Explorer 1_ and _3_ , the U.S. military and the Atomic Energy Commission decided  that they should try to destroy or disrupt what had just been discovered. They did this with the full cooperation of astronomer James Van Allen. A specially equipped naval convoy launched and detonated three 1.7-kiloton atomic bombs at altitudes ranging from 125 to 335 miles above the South Atlantic Ocean to \"seed\" the exosphere with electrons. The participants hyped it as the \"greatest scientific experiment of all time\" and claimed it was a test of a geophysical theory proposed by Nicholas C. Christophilos of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. In scale it was indeed impressive, involving nine ships and 4,500 people, with \"nuclear observations\" taken by the overflying satellite _Explorer 4_ , a barrage of high-altitude fivestage Jason sounding rockets, airplane flights, and ground stations\u2014but there was very little science, apparently. Test results and other documentation remained classified for the next twenty-five years. The military purpose was most likely to see if and how nuclear explosions disrupted communication channels. Since an atmospheric test-ban treaty was then under negotiation, the military was quick to point out that this test was not _in_ the atmosphere but \"above it.\"\n\nOther nuclear tests in near space ensued, such as the much larger Starfish explosion of July 1962 above Johnston Island, which disrupted the Van Allen belts and created an artificial magnetic belt and an \"aurora tropicalis\" visible as far away as New Zealand, Jamaica, and Brazil. Three Soviet high-altitude explosions that year had similar effects. A _New Yorker_ cartoon depicted a serious-looking technocrat questioning a colleague in a high-tech laboratory setting: \"But how do you _know_ destroying the inner Van Allen belt will create havoc until you try it?\" It was quite a year for near-space fireworks, with the British, Danes, and Australians issuing formal protests, led by the astronomical community. During the tests, some hotels in the Pacific apparently offered \"rainbow\" bomb parties on their roofs so guests could watch the light shows.\n\nOne of the more bizarre items that crossed Harry Wexler's desk at the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1961 was a technical report simply called \"Weather Modification,\" by M. B. Rodin and D. C. Hess at Argonne National Laboratory. The authors made the reasonable suggestion that applying heat directly to a rain cloud, or to a moist air mass with rain potential, might alter the natural precipitation in a given geographical region by increasing the buoyancy of the cloud or air parcel. This was James Espy's century-old convective theory. The modern twist: they favored using large, hovering nuclear reactors \"wherever safety criteria can be met\" to deliver the huge amounts of heat required (figure 7.4). Such nuclear-powered aircraft were never built.\n\nNot all space seeding was nuclear. In 1960 the Department of Defense and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory announced a plan to launch 500 million tiny copper wires into an 1,800-mile orbital ring to serve as radio antennae. Since the Earth's  ionosphere was vulnerable to enemy attack by a thermonuclear detonation, and undersea cables might be cut by a hostile power, the military wanted to be able to guarantee secure worldwide communication channels, regardless of the protests of other nations about space debris or the concerns of astronomers about visual or radio interference. The first launch, in 1961, failed, but two years later the detritus injected by Project West Ford (originally called Project Needles) was used to bounce radio messages across the continent.\n\n7.4 \"Weather Modification\": ( _above_ ) schematic drawing of the layout for a hoveringtype aircraft equipped with a nuclear heat source (note the lead-lined crew cabin and the little pinwheel blowers for air inlet and mixing); ( _below_ ) nuclear weather modification helicopter in action (1) suppressing rain on one side of the mountain and (2) filling a reservoir on the other. (WEXLER PAPERS)\n\nThis is indeed geoengineering. The experiment effectively created an artificial ionosphere, \"better\" than the original since it would not be disrupted by magnetic storms or solar flares. Wexler, however, was concerned that the environmental effects of the cloud of needles had not been fully considered, including their effect on the Earth's heat budget, magnetic field, and ozone levels. Astronomers protested bitterly, since the layer of needles interfered with their observations, especially in the new field of radio astronomy. Although the cloud of needles behaved broadly as designed and mostly dispersed after about three years, rendering it useless for radio communication, as of 2010 some copper \"needles\" are still in orbit. Occasionally, one of them reenters the Earth's atmosphere and flashes briefly as it burns up as an artificial meteor. Astronomers soon will be forced to oppose proposals for solar radiation management, since any attempt to attenuate sunlight will also attenuate starlight (chapter 8).\n\nIn February 1962, Wexler was informed of a review by an ad hoc panel at NASA convened to consider the \"High Water Experiment,\" the upcoming release of almost 100 tons of water into the ionosphere. The delivery vehicle was a Saturn test rocket to be launched from Cape Canaveral to an altitude of 65 miles and then destroyed. The panel, chaired by atmospheric scientist William W. Kellogg of the RAND Corporation, concluded, on the basis of some back-of-the-envelope calculations, that \"it was unable to predict exactly what would happen following the rupture of the Saturn tanks.\" They supposed that the water would boil instantly in the vacuum of space and then form ice crystals in a cloud about 6 miles wide and up to 20 miles long that would gradually fall out and dissipate downrange (figure 7.5). Some of the water would also dissociate, forming atomic O and H. Noctilucent clouds should form, and the radio properties of the ionosphere might be affected, with possible disruption to stratospheric ozone. The members of the panel knew that \"introducing more H would change _something_ \" (4), but they could not say what. Nevertheless, they considered the scale of this test, literally a \"drop in the bucket,\" and predicted that \"no major change in the atmosphere will take place that will hinder human activities\" (1). They also predicted, correctly, that \"in fact it may turn out to be hard to detect any effects at all (alas!), after the first few minutes\" (1).\n\nKellogg and the panel were not completely confident that they understood all the factors involved in this experiment and readily admitted to \"a good deal of uncertainty.\" At the time, atmospheric scientists were used to the idea \"that on occasion small changes can 'trigger' larger ones, if the conditions in the atmosphere are in a kind of metastable state.\" Kellogg asked, \"Is there such a condition in the upper atmosphere?\" (6). He was unable to identify any, and the panel suggested no contingency plans for any \"trigger\" effects.\n\n7.5 \"High Water Experiment,\" February 1962: William W. Kellogg's \"Sketch showing how the various sizes of ice particles produced from the moving Saturn vehicle would be expected to travel in the upper atmosphere and finally sublime as they fall to lower altitudes,\" prepared on the basis of an ad hoc NASA panel discussion. (WEXLER PAPERS)\n\n#  Harry Wexler and the Possibilities of Climate Control\n\n\"The subject of weather and climate control is now becoming respectable to talk about.\" This was Harry Wexler's opening line in his 1962 speech \"On the Possibilities of Climate Control.\" Wexler based his remarks on newly available technical capacities in climate modeling and satellite remote sensing, new scientific insights into the Earth's heat budget and stratospheric ozone layer, and new diplomatic initiatives, notably President John F. Kennedy's 1961 speech at the United Nations proposing \"cooperative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control.\" Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, flush with the success of two space spectaculars carrying Russian cosmonauts into orbit, had also mentioned weather control in his report to the Supreme Soviet in July 1961. Wexler noted that the subject had recently received serious attention from the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, the Department of State, and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Atmospheric Sciences. The last had recommended increased funding for large-scale cooperative weather control projects and made it part of the proposal that led to the creation of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. For its part, the United Nations, with  Wexler's scientific input through the State Department, had issued a resolution on international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space, recommending \"greater knowledge of basic physical forces affecting climate and the possibility of large-scale weather modification.\" Before this, statements about controlling the atmosphere had typically been provided by non-meteorologists: chemists, cloud-seeding enthusiasts, futurists, generals, and admirals.\n\nWexler was none of the above. He was one of the most influential meteorologists of the first half of the twentieth century, and his career, as revealed in his publications and well-preserved office files, touched every aspect of weather and climate science. He was born in 1911 in Fall River, Massachusetts, and died suddenly of a heart attack in August 1962 at age fifty-one during a working vacation in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The third son of Russian immigrants Samuel and Mamie (Hornstein) Wexler, Harry was interested in science at an early age, an interest he shared with his childhood friend and future brother-inlaw, the noted meteorologist Jerome Namias. Wexler majored in mathematics at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in 1932. He then attended MIT, earning his master's degree in 1934 and his doctorate in 1939 under the mentorship of the influential meteorologist Carl-Gustav Rossby. Wexler worked for the U.S. Weather Bureau throughout his career, initially on operationalizing Bergen School techniques for air mass and frontal analysis and later as head of research.\n\nFollowing the outbreak of war in Europe, Wexler served in the U.S. military's crash program to train a new cadre of weather forecasters. On a leave of absence from the weather bureau, he taught at the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of meteorology. In 1941 he returned to the weather bureau as senior meteorologist in charge of training and research, working to assist in defense preparations. He accepted a commission as captain in the U.S. Army in 1942 and served as the senior instructor of meteorology to the U.S. Army Air Force's Aviation Cadet School at Grand Rapids, Michigan. While in this position, he joined the University Meteorological Committee, established to coordinate military efforts in meteorological training.\n\nAfter his honorable discharge in January 1946 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, Wexler returned to the weather bureau, becoming chief of the Special Scientific Services division and serving on the Pentagon's Research and Development Board. In this capacity, he encouraged the development of new technologies, including tracing nuclear fallout, airborne observations of hurricanes, sounding rockets, and weather radar. He was a pioneer in the use of electronic computers for numerical weather prediction and general circulation modeling, serving as the weather bureau liaison to von Neumann's IAS meteorology project  and playing a more central role than has hitherto been acknowledged. In 1954 he helped institutionalize the U.S. Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit, a partnership of the weather bureau with the air force and navy \"to produce prognostic weather charts on an operational basis using numerical techniques.\" A year later, after a successful numerical experiment by Norman Phillips, in which he was able to simulate realistic features of the general circulation of the atmosphere, von Neumann and Wexler argued for the creation of a General Circulation Research Section (later Laboratory) in the weather bureau. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, New Jersey, and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Maryland, trace their origins to these roots.\n\nTaking up Rossby's call for more information about geophysical interactions between the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere, Wexler accepted the added challenge involved in serving as chief scientist for the U.S. expedition to the Antarctic for the International Geophysical Year (IGY; 1957\u20131958). By doing so, he could integrate critical new information about both the South Pole and the Southern Hemisphere into a global picture of circulation and dynamics of the entire atmosphere. Wexler also incorporated the results of theoretical work on the influence of rising carbon dioxide levels into the weather bureau's climate-modeling efforts and instituted radiation, ozone, and, notably, carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory, which were established under his guidance just prior to the IGY.\n\nAtmospheric observation by rockets and satellites also came under Wexler's purview. He served as chairman of several influential committees on this subject, including the Upper-Atmosphere Committee of the American Geophysical Union, the National Advisory Committee on Aviation's Special Committee for the Upper Atmosphere, and the National Research Council's Space Science Board. Wexler was in charge of the meteorology of the TIROS (Television Infrared Observation Satellite) meteorological satellite program and helped support the first Earth heat budget experiment flown on _Explorer 7_. In 1961 the Kennedy administration appointed Wexler as the lead negotiator for the United States in talks with the Soviet Union concerning the joint use of meteorological satellites. The negotiations expanded into a multinational effort to institute a World Weather Watch (W W W), with Wexler and Soviet academician Victor A. Bugaev as the architects for a new program to be administered by the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. Formally established in 1963 and still in existence, the World Weather Watch coordinates the efforts of member nations by combining observing systems, telecommunication facilities, and data-processing and forecasting centers to make available meteorological and related environmental  information needed to provide efficient weather services in all countries. Wexler was clearly on top of his science, a leader in new techniques and technologies, and a figure of international importance. In other words, he was a meteorological heavyweight.\n\nIn 1958 Wexler published a paper in _Science_ that examined some of the consequences of tinkering with the Earth's heat budget. He began by describing the two streams of radiant energy and their seasonal and geographic distribution, one stream directed downward and the other upward, which \"dominate the climate and weather of the planet Earth.\" The downward stream of energy consists of the solar radiation absorbed by the Earth's surface and atmosphere after accounting for losses by reflection. The upward stream is infrared radiation emitted to space by the Earth's surface and atmosphere, the latter mostly from atmospheric water vapor, clouds, carbon dioxide, and ozone. Wexler wrote: \"In seeking to modify climate and weather on a grand scale it is tempting to speculate about ways to change the shape of these basic radiation curves by artificial means\" (1059), especially by changing the reflectivity of the Earth. After a brief examination of possible albedo changes caused by using carbon dust to blacken the deserts and the polar ice caps, Wexler turned to the notion, probably originating with Teller, that detonating ten really \"clean\" hydrogen bombs in the Arctic Ocean would produce a dense ice cloud in northern latitudes and would likely result in the removal of the sea ice. The balance of the paper in _Science_ is an examination of the radiative, thermal, and meteorological consequences of this outrageous act, not only for warming the polar regions but also for the equatorial belt and middle latitudes. Noting perceptively that \"the disappearance of the Arctic ice pack would not necessarily be a blessing to mankind\" (1062\u20131063) and implying that a nation like the Soviet Union already had the firepower to try such an experiment, Wexler concluded with a paragraph whose relevance has not been diminished by time: \"When serious proposals for large-scale weather modification are advanced, as they inevitably will be, the full resources of generalcirculation knowledge and computational meteorology must be brought to bear in predicting the results so as to avoid the unhappy situation of the cure being worse than the ailment\" (1063).\n\nIn 1962, armed with the latest results from computer models and satellite radiance measurements as applied to studies of the Earth's heat budget, Wexler expanded his study to examine theoretical questions concerning natural and anthropogenic climate forcings, both inadvertent and purposeful. He did this in his lectures to technical audiences: \"On the Possibilities of Climate Control,\" presented at the Boston chapter of the American Meteorological Society, the Traveler's Research Corporation in Hartford, and the UCLA Department of  Meteorology. After reminding his listeners that Kennedy and Khrushchev had made climate modification \"respectable\" to talk about, Wexler quoted extensively from Zworykin's weather control proposal and von Neumann's response to it.\n\nWexler discussed the problem of increasing global pollution from industry and reviewed recent developments in atmospheric science, including computing and satellites that led him to believe that manipulating and controlling large-scale phenomena in the atmosphere were becoming distinct possibilities. He cited rising carbon dioxide emissions as an example of indirect control, mentioning the Callendar effect as one of the ways in which humanity was already inadvertently modifying global climate: \"We are releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases and particles into the lower atmosphere, which may have serious effects on the radiation or heat balance, which determines our present pattern of climate and weather.\"\n\nWexler warned that the space age was introducing an entirely new kind of \"atmospheric pollution\" problem. He was particularly worried that some types of rocket fuel might release chlorine or bromine, \"which could destroy naturally occurring atmospheric ozone and open up a 'hole,' admitting passage of harmful ultra-violet radiation to the lower atmosphere\" (2). Changes in the upper atmosphere caused by increasing contrails, space experiments gone awry, or the actions of a hostile power could disrupt the ozonosphere, the ionosphere, or even the general circulation and climate on which human existence depends. Wexler felt that it was urgent to use \"the most advanced mathematical models of atmospheric behavior\" (3) to study the physical, chemical, and meteorological consequences of such interferences. He then explained how the weather bureau was in the process of acquiring new computers and developing new models to \"simulate the behavior of the actual atmosphere and examine artificial influences that Man is introducing in greater and greater measure as he contaminates the atmosphere\" (4). Both the _Christian Science Monitor_ and the _Boston Globe_ ran prominent stories on this aspect of his lecture.\n\nWexler told his audiences that he was concerned with planetary-scale manipulation of the environment that would result in \"rather large-scale effects on general circulation patterns in short or longer periods, even approaching that of climatic change.\" He assured them that he did not intend to cover all possibilities \"but just a few ... _limited primarily to interferences with the Earth_ ' _s radiative balance on a rather large scale_ : I shall discuss in a purely hypothetical framework those atmospheric influences that man might attempt deliberately to exert and also those which he may now be performing or will soon be performing, perhaps  in ignorance of its consequences. We are in weather control _now_ whether we know it or not\" (4).\n\nHe was clearly interested in both inadvertent climatic effects\u2014such as might be created by industrial emissions, rocket exhaust gases, or space experiments gone awry\u2014and purposeful interventions, whether peaceful or done with hostile intent. Echoing von Neumann's 1955 warning about technology, Wexler continued: \"Even in this day of global experiments, such as the world-wide Argus electron seeding of the Earth's magnetic field at 300 miles height, man and machinery orbiting the Earth at 100 miles seventeen times in one day, and 100 megaton bombs\u2014are we any closer to some idea of the approaches which could lead to an eventual 'solution' [to the problem of climate control]?\" (3). He noted \"a growing anxiety\" in the public pronouncements that \"Man, in applying his growing energies and facilities against the power of the winds and storms, may do so with more enthusiasm than knowledge and so cause more harm than good.\"\n\nWexler was well aware that any intervention in the Earth's heat budget would change the atmospheric circulation patterns, the storm tracks, and the weather itself, so, as he pointed out, weather and climate control are not two different things. After presenting some twenty technical slides on the atmosphere's radiative heat budget and discussing means of manipulating it, Wexler concluded with a grand summary of highly speculative techniques to heat, cool, or otherwise restructure the atmosphere:\n\na. increase global temperature by 1.7\u00b0C [3\u00b0F] by injecting a cloud of ice crystals into the polar atmosphere by detonating 10 H-bombs on the Arctic sea ice;\n\nb. lower global temperature by 1.2\u00b0C [2.2\u00b0F] by launching a ring of dust particles into equatorial orbit to shade the Earth;\n\nc. warm the lower atmosphere and cool the stratosphere by injecting ice, water, or other substances into space; and\n\nd. destroy all stratospheric ozone, raise the tropopause, and cool the stratosphere by up to 80\u00b0C [144\u00b0F] by an injection of a catalytic de-ozonizer such as chlorine or bromine.\n\n#  Cutting a Hole in the Ozone Layer\n\nOne of the most stunning aspects of Wexler's lectures was his awareness that catalytic reactions of chlorine and bromine could severely damage the ozone layer. Wexler was concerned that inadvertent damage to ozone might occur if  increased rocket exhaust polluted the stratosphere or if near-space \"seeding\" experiments went awry: \"The exhausts from increasingly powerful and numerous space rockets will soon be systematically seeding the thin upper atmosphere with large quantities of chemicals it has never possessed before or only in small quantities.\" He was also concerned that the cold war and the space age might provide rival militaries with both the motivation and the wherewithal to damage the ozone layer. He cited a 1961 study by the Geophysics Corporation of America on possible harm to the Earth's upper atmosphere caused by the oxidizers in rocket fuel. He was also aware that Operations Argus and Starfish, Project West Ford, and Project High Water constituted recent significant interventions in the near-space environment that were accompanied by unknown and unquantified risks.\n\nOn the topic of purposeful damage, Wexler turned to the 1934 presidential address to the Royal Meteorological Society, in which the noted geoscientist Sydney Chapman had asked, \"Can a hole be made in the ozone layer?\" That is, can all or most of the ozone be removed from the column of air above some chosen area? Chapman was thinking of an event that would provide a window for astronomers to extend their observations some hundreds of angstroms farther into the ultraviolet without the interference of atmospheric ozone. Possible health effects of human exposure to shortwave radiation did not appear to Chapman to be an important issue, since the hole he was contemplating would be localized, probably in a remote area (he suggested Chile), and would be short-lived, somewhere between a day and an hour, timed for the benefit of astronomers only. Cutting such a hole, Chapman continued, would require \"the discharge of a deozonizing agent\" perhaps by airplanes, balloons, or rockets. Chapman proposed two possibilities: a large amount of a one-to-one destructive agent such as hydrogen that would reduce O3 molecules to O2 or \"some catalyst which, without itself undergoing permanent change, could promote the reduction of large numbers of ozone molecules in succession\" (134). Although the choice of the agent would have to be left to the chemists, Chapman concluded that \"the project of making a [temporary] hole in the ozone layer [a 90 percent reduction for the benefit of astronomers] does not seem quite impossible of achievement\" (135).\n\nIn November 1961, Wexler gathered weather bureau staff for a briefing on ozone depletion and circulated this memo, titled \"Deozonizer\":\n\nSydney Chapman proposed making a temporary \"hole\" in the ozone layer by inserting a substance which could be oxidized by the ozone. He suggested that hydrogen might be dispersed but wondered if there might be a catalyst gas or fine  powder which might perhaps be dispersed in smaller quantities than the 1 to 1 ratio hydrogen would require. Could you or your colleagues suggest suitable agents that might do the job with maximum efficiency consistent with the least weight?\n\nBill Malkin suggested that Wexler might wish to raise the possibility with the country's national defense research arm, \"that serious consideration be given to the possibility of artificially and temporarily altering (up or down) the ozone concentration over an area, as a most effective weapon.\" Using the radiation model of Syukuro Manabe and F. M\u00f6ller, Wexler was able to calculate a catastrophic 80\u00b0C (144\u00b0F) stratospheric cooling that would occur with no ozone layer.\n\nSeeking further advice on how to cut a \"hole\" in the ozone layer, Wexler turned to chemist Oliver Wulf at Caltech, who suggested that \"from a purely chemical viewpoint, chlorine or bromine might be a 'deozonizer.'\" Wulf and Wexler exchanged numerous letters between December 1961 and April 1962 and met face-to-face in March, and Wulf met with Chapman in April. All these exchanges point to the conclusion (a stunning one, given the received history of ozone depletion) that chlorine or bromine atoms might act in a catalytic cycle with atomic oxygen to destroy thousands of ozone molecules. For example, Wulf wrote in early January 1962, \"chlorine or bromine photosensitized decomposition [of ozone] might come closest to a reaction in which a small amount of added material would cause a relatively large amount of decomposition.\"  Wexler replied immediately, adding that he even had a delivery system in mind \"\u00e0 la West Ford dipoles\" but had \"no intention of suggesting or backing any such proposal.\"\n\nWexler estimated that a 100-kiloton bromine \"bomb\" would destroy all ozone in the polar regions, and four times that amount would be needed near the equator. In a handwritten note composed in January 1962 he scrawled the following (figure 7.6):\n\nUV decomposes O3 \u2192 O in presence of a halogen like Br, Cl.\n\nO \u2192 O2 and so prevents O3 from forming.\n\n100,000 tons Br. could theoret[ically] prevent all O3 north of 65\u00b0N from forming.\n\nAnd in another note (figure 7.7):\n\nBr2 \u2192 2 Br in sunlight destroys O3 \u2192 O2 \\+ BrO\n\nThese are essentially the basis of the modern ozone-depleting chemical reactions.\n\n7.6 ( _top_ ) Harry Wexler's handwritten note on ozone depletion, January 1962. (WEXLER PAPERS)\n\n7.7 ( _bottom_ ) Harry Wexler's handwritten note on bromine reactions, January 1962. (WEXLER PAPERS)\n\nWexler's rough note of December 20, 1961, jotted down during a telephone conversation with Wulf, constitutes an ozone-depletion Rosetta Stone. It links Chapman's 1934 speech, Wulf, rocket fuel emissions, ozone-destroying reactions triggered by chlorine and bromine as catalysts, particulates, methane destruction, and an estimate that a minuscule amount of atomic bromine could cause immense harm (figure 7.8).\n\nIn the summer of 1962, Wexler accepted an invitation from the University of Maryland Space Research and Technology Institute to present a lecture titled \"The Climate of Earth and Its Modifications\" and might, under normal circumstances, have prepared his ideas on geoengineering and ozone destruction for publication. However, he was cut down in his prime by a sudden heart attack on August 11, 1962, during a working vacation at Woods Hole. The documents  relating to his career\u2014from his early work at MIT, his work as liaison to the IAS meteorology project, his research into all sorts of new technologies, to his final speeches on ozone depletion and climate control\u2014headed into the archives, probably not to be seen and certainly not to be reevaluated until today.\n\n7.8 Harry Wexler's \"Rosetta Stone\" note, linking Sydney Chapman, Oliver Wulf, rocket fuel, and catalytic ozone-destroying reactions triggered by chlorine and bromine. (WEXLER PAPERS)\n\nThe well-known and well-documented supersonic transport (SST) and stratospheric-ozone-depletion issues date only to the 1970s and do not include Wexler's role. The idea that bromine and other halogens could destroy stratospheric ozone was published in 1974, while chlorofluorocarbon production expanded rapidly and dramatically after 1962. Had Wexler lived to publish his ideas, they would certainly have been noticed and could have led to a different outcome and perhaps an earlier coordinated response to the issue of stratospheric ozone depletion. Recently, I have been in correspondence with three notable ozone scientists about Wexler's early work: Nobel laureates Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen and current National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. They are uniformly interested and quite amazed by Wexler's insights and accomplishments.\n\nRemarkable, too, is the fact that with all his sophistication and the leading roles he played in the development of computer modeling, satellite monitoring, and many, many other technical fields, Wexler still opened his 1962 lectures by quoting extensively from Zworykin's \"Outline of Weather Proposal\" (1945) and von Neumann's response to it. A colleague who heard Wexler's lecture in Boston wrote that climate engineering constituted \"a delightful area of mental gymnastics. Let's hope the entire world is satisfied to play the game on this plane until the state of meteorological knowledge is truly adequate for big league experimentation.\"   Wexler replied, \"I hope that before we get into large experimentation that not only will the state of meteorological knowledge be much more advanced than it is now, but also the state of our socio-political affairs as well.\" Remember, it was not Paul Crutzen in 2006 but Harry Wexler about fifty years before who first claimed that climate control was now \"respectable to talk about,\" even if he considered it quite dangerous and undesirable.\n\nThe possibility of manipulating global climate through planetary-scale engineering is currently being actively debated, although its feasibility and desirability are highly questionable, if not contentious. Most of the debate centers on back-of-the -envelope calculations (which are not good enough) or basic climate models (which are also not good enough). Still, the current crop of geoengineers has yet to acknowledge the checkered history of the subject.\n\nAccounts of the early history of computers in meteorology follow a wellrehearsed script, identifying Vilhelm Bjerknes and Louis Fry Richardson as early pioneers and emphasizing progress after 1946 through the work of a familiar cast of characters and technical breakthroughs. Through the career of Harry Wexler, we can now see that the two histories, the familiar and the (until now) unwritten, are closely interrelated and that climate control is not so much a newcomer in the age of global warming as something that has been up in the air for quite a long time.\n\nThe recent history of climate fears, fantasies, and possibilities is positioned firmly between the work of two colleagues, John von Neumann and Harry Wexler. An examination of general climate fears and specific climate fantasies reveals that some were no more than hand-waving proposals, while some were actual field projects. Anchoring this in time were the high hopes that futurists had for new emerging technologies such as digital computers, to provide stunning precision and predictability; nuclear energy, to power continental-scale transformations or violently alter the geophysical status quo; and satellites, to monitor the Earth continuously with eagle eyes and to serve as platforms for active interventions.\n\nWexler's work on geoengineering in the period 1958 to 1962 applied the results of new computer climate experiments, nuclear tests in near space, and newly available satellite heat budget measurements. His work on ozone destruction, in particular, is notable since it predated the Nobel Prize\u2013winning work of Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina by about a decade, although Wexler died before he could publish the results. It is clear that Wexler was well qualified to speak authoritatively about the otherwise \"nebulous\" subjects of climate, climate change, and climate control. He served on numerous scientific  panels and governmental advisory boards, had access to and helped collect global climate data, understood the theoretical issues and their complexity, and promoted and advanced the latest technologies. He warned then, and we might wisely conclude today, that\n\n[climate control] can best be classified as \"interesting hypothetical exercises\" until the consequences of tampering with large scale atmospheric events can be assessed in advance. Most such schemes that have been advanced would require colossal engineering feats and contain the inherent risk of irremediable harm to our planet or side effects counterbalancing the possible short-term benefits.\n\nBased on the visionary foundation provided by Vladimir Zworykin and John von Neumann, and the much more speculative megaprojects being proposed at the time, Wexler's prescient work \"On the Possibilities of Climate Control\" clearly reminds us that we are not the first generation to be involved with or concerned about geoengineering and places the current debate in the context of at least half a century of continuous and usable history.\n\n**8**\n\nTHE CLIMATE ENGINEERS\n\n_How can you engineer a system whose behavior you don't understand?_\n\n\u2014RON PRINN, QUOTED IN MORTON, \"CLIMATE CHANGE\"\n\n**DURING** the unusually hot summerof 1988, with a major heat wave in in the American Midwest, Yellowstone National Park in flames, and issues such as ozone depletion in the headlines, climate modeler James Hansen of NASA announced to the world that \"global warming has begun.\" Hansen reported that he was \"99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere\" and that anthropogenic greenhouse warming \"is already happening now.\" He predicted more-frequent episodes of very high temperatures and drought in the next decade and beyond. Hansen later revised his remarks, but his statement remains the starting point for recent widespread concern about global warming. The question was no longer whether human agency had contributed to global change. That question was answered in the affirmative long ago. The more significant questions involved the magnitude and consequences of the global changes being caused by a combination of natural forces and increasing anthropogenic stresses and what was to be done about it.\n\nThat summer, the government of Canada, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological  Organization (WMO), convened a major conference on the topic \"The Changing Atmosphere: Implications for Global Security.\" The conference statement captured the tone and urgency first expressed in the 1950s by Roger Revelle and John von Neumann: \"Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.\" The conference recommended reductions of carbon dioxide emissions to 20 percent below 1988 levels, to be achieved by 2005. Needless to say, we did not reach this goal, but a process had been put into motion to set new goals and deadlines.\n\nAlso in 1988, the WMO and UNEP established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose purpose is to provide periodic assessments of \"the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.\" From modest beginnings, the IPCC has emerged as a representative parliamentary body that has gradually acquired status and authority. It has prepared four major assessments to date, the first in 1990 in preparation for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Here the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) set an ultimate objective of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at levels that would prevent \"dangerous\" human interference with the climate system.\n\nEach of the subsequent IPCC reports (1995, 2001, 2007) has expressed a sense of greater urgency about the climate change problem. The IPCC consensus involves six key points:\n\n1. Anthropogenic emissions are changing the composition of the atmosphere, especially by increasing its radiatively active trace gases.\n\n2. This will enhance the greenhouse effect and will result in long-term global warming.\n\n3. Observed changes in climate on decades-to-centuries time scales are consistent with human influence.\n\n4. Models indicate that future warming is likely to be substantial.\n\n5. Both environment and society will be adversely impacted.\n\n6. Avoiding dangerous human influence in the climate system will require substantial early actions, but may not provide direct benefits for several generations.\n\nIt is still not clear what \"dangerous human influence\" in the climate system actually is or how to avoid it, but mitigation, adaptation, and intervention through climate engineering are now on the table. Deindustrialization will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as demonstrated by the political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.\n\nRatcheting up the sense of urgency, in 2005 Hansen warned that the Earth's climate is nearing an unprecedented \"tipping point\"\u2014a point of no return that can be avoided only if the \"growth of greenhouse gas emissions is slowed\" in the next two decades:\n\nThe Earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. These include not only the loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale due to rising seas.... This grim scenario can be halted if the growth of greenhouse gas emissions is slowed in the first quarter of this century.\n\nAccording to Hansen, tipping points occur because of amplifying feedbacks, including loss of sea ice, melting glaciers, release of methane in warming permafrost, and growth of vegetation on previously frozen land. These surface and atmospheric changes increase the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth and amplify the warming effect of carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. Hansen's brief statement, widely distributed by the press, clearly struck a cultural nerve. It acknowledged undesirable and inadvertent human influence on the climate system and pointed to a possible remedy. In the interest of impact, however, Hansen avoided complexities. For example, it is highly unlikely that merely slowing the growth of emissions would be a very effective policy. Hansen may be right: we may be approaching the physical tipping point of climate, or, as James Lovelock argued in his book _The Revenge of Gaia_ , we may already have passed it, with catastrophic consequences for humanity. More likely, Hansen, Lovelock, and many others are trying to add the weight of their opinions to a second kind of \"tipping point,\" a behavioral change in which humanity decides to live with only clean energy and takes concerted action against harming the climate system. There is also a third \"tipping point\"\u2014one that has been reached by a handful of geoengineers who are so concerned about climate change that they are proposing purposeful, even reckless, intervention.\n\nThe following discussion will define geoengineering, review its recent history, and provide a critique of current proposals and practices by revealing their assumptions and values. It is an occasion to reflect on the precedents that brought us to this point and to identify a \"middle path\" of mitigation and adaptation located between doing too little and doing too much. It is offered in the hope that the study of a checkered past can help us avoid a checkered future and with the conviction that if we are indeed facing unprecedented challenges, it is good to consider historical precedents.\n\n#  What Is Geoengineering?\n\nIn 1996 Thomas Schelling wrote, \"'Geoengineering' is a new term, still seeking a definition. It seems to imply something global, intentional, and unnatural.\" More than a decade later, the word remains largely undefined and unpracticed. It is not in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ , but it did find its way into the _Urban Dictionary_ , where it is loosely defined as \"the intentional large-scale manipulation of the global environment; planetary tinkering; a subset of terraforming or planetary engineering... the last gasp of a dying civilization.\" Lovelock subscribes to this definition, at least the first part, and further claims that \"we became geoengineers soon after our species started using fire for cooking,\" or perhaps, as geoscientist William Ruddiman has proposed, millennia ago through the practices of extensive deforestation and agriculture.\n\nIn the _OED_ , an \"engineer\" is one who contrives, designs, or invents, \"a layer of snares\"; a constructor of military engines; one whose profession is the designing and constructing of works of public utility. So engineering, by definition, has both military and civilian aspects, elements potentially both nefarious and altruistic (figure 8.1). By analogy, the neologism \"geoengineer\" refers to one who contrives, designs, or invents at the largest planetary scale possible for either military or civilian purposes\u2014a layer of snares at the global level. Today geoengineering, as an unpracticed art, is still largely \"geo-scientific speculation.\"\n\n\"Ecohacking,\" another term for geoengineering, made the short list for the Oxford Word of the Year 2008. It is loosely defined as \"the use of science in very large-scale [planetary scale] projects to change the environment for the better\/stop global warming (e.g., by using mirrors in space to deflect sunlight away from Earth).\" A recent report issued by the Royal Society of London defines geoengineering as \"the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change.\" But there are significant problems with such definitions. First of all, an engineering practice defined by its scale (geo) need not be constrained by its stated purpose (environmental improvement), by one of its currently proposed techniques (space mirrors), or by one of perhaps many stated goals (to counteract anthropogenic climate change). Nuclear engineers, for example, are capable of building both power plants and bombs; mechanical engineers can design components for both ambulances and tanks; my father, a precision machinist during World War II, milled both aluminum ice cream scoops and one-of-a-kind components for top-secret military projects. So to constrain the essence of something that does not exist by its stated purpose, techniques, or goals is misleading at best.\n\n8.1 A climate engineer. (FLEMING, \"THE CLIMATE ENGINEERS\")\n\n\"Ecohacking\" sounds both too small and too electronic to cover the field of geoengineering. We are all ecohackers, as was the first person to cut down a tree with an axe. In traditional English, hackers are literally those who chop up the Earth, or figuratively those who mangle words or sense. In the computer age, \"hacker\" is slang for an enthusiast who considers programming an end in itself or, more subversively, who seeks to gain unauthorized access to computer  files or networks. Hackers typically have \"big projects\" about which they obsess. One project of the computer climate engineers is to cut off the sunbeams in a simple climate model to \"prove\" that the Earth will cool and sea ice will grow. Much more sophisticated modelers have shown that the unknown consequences of doing this may be very, very serious. When people propose to cool the Earth by 2\u00b0C (3.6\u00b0F) using a technical fix, they are overlooking the fact that Earth has not yet warmed 2\u00b0C in the past century. So we are really dealing with dangerous speculation about speculation. A more apt term might be \"geohacking,\" which is hopefully harmless enough if the practice is restricted to tinkering with computer models and never \"sees the light of day\" in the form of potentially dangerous outdoor demonstration projects or planetary-scale tinkering.\n\nPlacing his faith firmly in progress, engineer and policy analyst David Keith is of the opinion that scientific understanding grants us increased Archimedean leverage and an \"ever greater capability to deliberately engineer environmental processes on a planetary scale.\" Echoing William Suddards Franklin and his grasshopper of long ago or Ross Hoffman and his misunderstanding of the butterfly effect, Keith maintains that \"accurate knowledge of the atmospheric state and its stability could permit leverage of small, targeted perturbations to effect proportionately larger alterations of the atmospheric dynamics.\" But no matter how great the scientific wizardry, the modern Archimedes still has no place to stand, no acceptable lever or fulcrum, and no way to predict where the Earth will roll if tipped. Failing ultimate control, geoengineering may indeed have the potential to enrage the chaotic \"climate beast\" of the influential geochemist and oceanographer Wallace Broecker.\n\n#  Terraforming and Beyond\n\nGeoengineering is a subset of \"terraforming ,\" or the engineering of planetary environments. Martyn J. Fogg reviewed the history and some of the technical aspects of \"orchestrated planetary change\" in his book on this subject, published, curiously, by the Society of Automotive Engineers, a group that one might expect would be most familiar with automobile air-conditioning. He defined \"planetary engineering\" as \"the application of technology for the purpose of influencing the global properties of a planet\" and \"terraforming\" as the process of \"enhancing the capacity of an extraterrestrial planetary environment to support life. The ultimate in terraforming would be to create an uncontained planetary biosphere emulating all the functions of the biosphere of the Earth\u2014one that would be fully habitable for human beings.\"\n\nFogg described how ecological-engineering techniques might be used someday to implant life on other planets and how geoengineering might be used to ameliorate (or perhaps exacerbate) the currently \"corrosive process\" of global change on the Earth. He presented order-of-magnitude calculations and the results of some simple computer modeling to assess the plausibility of various planetary-engineering scenarios. He deemed it \"rash to proclaim\" impossible any scheme that does not \"obviously violate the laws of physics.\" Yet Fogg focused only on possibilities, not on unintended consequences, and left unaddressed questions of whether the schemes are desirable, or even ethical. According to Fogg, geoengineering is not simply, or even primarily, a technical problem because people, their politics, and their infrastructures get in the way. That is, it involves the implications and dangers of attempting to tamper with an immensely complex biosphere on an inhabited planet.\n\nThe epigraph of Fogg's book cites Hungarian-born engineer and physicist Theodore von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n to the effect that \"scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.\" This quote has an ominous ring, however, when it comes to terraforming, since some \"worlds\" perhaps should never be. Fogg traced inspiration for the field to Olaf Stapleton's _Last and First Men_ (1930), Robert Heinlein's _Farmer in the Sky_ (1950), and James Lovelock and Michael Allaby's _The Greening of Mars_ (1984). In his \"concise history of terraforming,\" Fogg mentioned the work of naturalists John Ray (English, seventeenth century) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French, eighteenth century), who looked on the Earth as unfinished, with man taking the role of a junior partner in creation, taming the wilderness as part of a historical progression toward \"perfection.\" From there, Fogg dropped the names of George Perkins Marsh (1801\u20131882), an American diplomat and naturalist who wrote about replanting forests, channeling rivers, and reclaiming deserts in _Man and Nature_ (1864); Vladimir Vernadsky (1863\u20131945), the Russian mineralogist and geochemist who popularized the notion of the interconnectedness of the \"biosphere\"; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881\u20131955), the French cleric and philosopher who placed the \"noosphere,\" the realm of human thought, in evolutionary succession to the geosphere and the biosphere.\n\nSuch expansive antecedents belie recent attempts to restrict the definition of geoengineering to the purposeful and large-scale alteration of the shortwave side of the Earth's energy budget with the intent of affecting climate. In the literature of planetary terraformation, geoengineering is much, much more than that. It comprises macro-scale projects to control not only the supposed relatively simple and straightforward interaction of albedo and temperature but also much  more complex and potentially unknowable interactions of Earth system science\u2014involving the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and, perhaps most important, society. After all, engineering deals with the technical side of _human_ affairs, and the prefix \"geo\" potentially involves all aspects of the planet, perhaps also its most prominent companions, the Sun and the Moon. Fogg ventured into hyper-speculative territory when he discussed \"astroengineering,\" or modifying the properties of the Sun, by intervening in its opacity, nuclear reactions, mass loss, chemical mixing, and even \"accretion into a central black hole.\" Tellingly, Fogg admitted that \"technical difficulties associated with astroengineering will be immense\" (457\u2013458).\n\n#  Ethical Consequences\n\nMost studies have ignored, minimized, or barely mentioned important ethical issues regarding geoengineering. The report of a 2009 study group, composed of prominently placed geoengineering advocates, candidly admits that the most important sociopolitical and ethical constraints on implementing climate engineering were largely outside the expertise of the technically oriented participants and thus beyond the scope of their study. Every engineer has to seek a building permit for every project, to engage the community and the local authorities in discussion, and to obsess (a lot) about design, safety, and cost. A well-engineered project, especially at the \"geo\" scale, must be based on ethical principles and practices, sound science, technologies and testing methods, economics (not just immediate costs), politics (including legal and diplomatic aspects), and attention to social, cultural, medical, and environmental concerns. However, if it ever comes down to it, who has the right to issue a permit for the intentional manipulation of the global environment? Who does cost-benefit and safety analysis for the planet? Who is liable for any engineering shortcomings or failures? Would climate engineering, by counteracting the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, create moral traps\u2014for example, by reducing incentives to mitigate or by burdening future generations with expensive and unwieldy projects? Where would the global thermostat be located, and who would control it? Could designer geoengineering be practiced at regional levels to address the greatest problems while seeking to avoid a one-size-fits-all planetary fix? What if some group or nation decided, unilaterally, to intervene in a heavy-handed way in planetary processes and the results were viewed as detrimental to a region or even to the globe? Could today's climate control engineering fantasies, if acted out, lead to undesirable consequences and exacerbate international tensions?\n\nIn this vein, atmospheric scientist Alan Robock, a leader in modeling efforts to evaluate climate-engineering schemes, recently wrote,\n\nThe reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea are manifold, though a moderate investment in theoretical geoengineering research might help scientists to determine whether or not it is a bad idea. Small-scale deployments are out of the question until we are sure that known adverse consequences can be avoided. Then there are the [Donald Rumsfeld\u2013like] multiple unknown unknowns that argue against ever undertaking a large-scale deployment.\n\nHis list of twenty reasons (subsequently pared down to seventeen) why geoengineering (especially solar radiation attenuation by sulfates) may be a bad idea includes:\n\n(1) Potentially devastating effects on regional climate, including drought in Africa and Asia, (2) Accelerated stratospheric ozone depletion, (3) Unknown environmental impacts of implementation, (4) Rapid warming if deployment ever stops, (5) Inability to reverse the effects quickly, (6) Continued ocean acidification, (7) Whitening of the sky, with no more blue skies, but nice sunsets, (8) The end of terrestrial optical astronomy, (9) Greatly reduced direct beam solar power, (10) Human error, (11) The moral hazard of undermining emissions mitigation, (12) Commercialization of the technology, (13) Militarization of the technology, (14) Conflicts with current treaties, (15) Who controls the thermostat? (16) Who has the moral right to do this? (17) Unexpected consequences.\n\nSome of these results (1\u20135) are derived from general circulation model simulations and others (6\u20139) from back-of-the-envelope calculations; most, however, (10\u201317) stem from historical, ethical, legal, and social considerations. Robock admits that geoengineering would have certain benefits, including cooling the planet, possibly reducing or reversing sea ice and ice sheet melting and sea level rise, and increasing plant productivity and thus the terrestrial carbon sink.\n\nMost enthusiasts for solar radiation management have overlooked, however, its \"dark\" side: the scattering of starlight as well as sunlight, which would further degrade seeing conditions for both ground-based optical astronomy and general night sky gazing. A recent article by astronomers Christian Luginbuhl, Constance Walker, and Richard Wainscoat discusses the rapid growth of light pollution from ground-based sources but does not consider aerosol scattering effects that reduce nighttime seeing. Imagine the outcry from professional astronomers and the general public if the geoengineers pollute the stratosphere with a  global sulfate cloud; imagine a night sky in which sixth-magnitude stars are invisible, with a barely discernible Milky Way and fewer visible star clusters or galaxies. This would be worse than Project West Ford. It would constitute a worldwide cultural catastrophe.\n\nWhen contemplating _planetary_ -scale engineering, regionally or nationally based technical initiatives are not nearly broad enough. As the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research pointed out, the equity issues are likely to be substantial: \"There will be winners and losers associated with geo-engineering (as there will be with climate change itself). Should the losers be compensated, and if so how? Where the losses include non-market goods, which may be irreplaceable, how are they to be valued?\" The process of discussion and decision making needs to include an interdisciplinary mix of historians, ethicists, policymakers, and a broad and inclusive array of international and intergenerational participants\u2014features that have been sorely lacking in recent meetings, which featured mostly white, Western, scientifically trained, and technocratically oriented males. In fact, the field's current lack of diversity indicates that some of the most critical questions have probably not even been posed! For example, how would geoengineering alter fundamental human relationships to nature? Does this or the other questions posed so far have univocal answers ? How do they play out in different cultures ? Has anyone considered this? A large-scale environmental technological fix framed as a response to undesired climate change could be seen as an act imposed on the multitude by the will of the few, for the primary benefit of those already in power. Many would undoubtedly interpret it as a hostile or an aggressive act. Isn't geoengineering in the category of \"Western solutions to global problems\"? Rather than engaging in speculative large-scale climate engineering, isn't it better to reduce the effects of greenhouse gas emissions\u2014by reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, offered a \"rock the boat\" analogy to illustrate the point:\n\nThink of the climate as a small boat on a rather choppy ocean. Under normal circumstances the boat will rock to and fro, and there is a finite risk that the boat could be overturned by a rogue wave. But now one of the passengers has decided to stand up and is deliberately rocking the boat ever more violently. Someone suggests that this is likely to increase the chances of the boat capsizing. Another passenger then proposes that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics he can counterbalance the first passenger and, indeed, counter the natural rocking caused by the waves. But to do so he needs a huge array of sensors and enormous computational resources to be ready to react efficiently but still wouldn't be able to guarantee absolute  stability, and indeed, since the system is untested, it might make things worse. So is the answer to a known and increasing human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?\n\n#  Protection, Prevention, and Production\n\nIn 1930 Harvard geographer and meteorologist Robert DeCourcy Ward sorted climate intervention strategies into three categories: (1) protection, which is \"perfectly passive\"; (2) prevention, which is more proactive; and (3) production, which is the most active and aggressive of the three. Today we might call these approaches adaptation, mitigation, and intervention. Ward pointed out that protection from the elements, which started in cave dwellings and tropical huts, now involved heated buildings and, \"more and more in the future,\" buildings \"artificially cooled during the heat of summer.\" As in today's discussions of weather-related natural disasters, Ward cited increasing populations in areas visited by tropical cyclones and the need for \"better methods of building,\" coastal setbacks \"beyond the reach of the storm waves,\" and seawalls and breakwaters for coastal cities. For protection against tornadoes, \"the most violent disturbances in the atmosphere,\" Ward recommended storm cellars and solid steel and concrete buildings. For protection from electrical fields, he touted the Faraday \"cage\" and the grounded lightning rod. High walls, narrow streets, and covered awnings traditionally provide shady relief in hot climates. Ward noted that in America by 1930, newly built arcades and department stores were providing shelter for shoppers, who tended to frequent them more and perhaps spend more money during periods of inclement weather.\n\nPrevention required more effort and more resources. Planting trees for windbreaks to protect crops and prevent soil erosion was a widespread practice in Ward's day. \"Frost-fighting\" involved regular observations, forecasts for agricultural regions, and cooperative arrangements among farmers and fruit growers\u2014for example, by flooding the cranberry bogs or lighting smudge pots in orchards. Overall, however, Ward had very few successful examples of prevention on which to draw. Fog dispersal worked on only a very small scale. The electrified sand experiments of L. Francis Warren indicated that clouds could be modified somewhat but not controlled, given the vast scale of the atmosphere.\n\nFor Ward the third stage, production, was \"the most active and aggressive\" and also the least possible. Best known to him was the history of artificial rainmaking\u2014a history of promise and hype. James Espy's theory of lighting  huge fires was theoretically sound and demonstrable on a small scale, yet impossible to implement operationally. Ward called Robert Dyrenforth's experiments a \"national disgrace\" and thought it \"highly important that no such occasion should arise again\" (13). He called the production of rain for profit to \"hoodwink\" desperate farmers the work of \"pure fakirs.\" He claimed, perhaps too hastily, that \"the speculations of former times have been discarded,\" and now we know the facts. How could he have known that speculation would _increase_ over the next eight decades? Asking \"How far can man control his climate?\" Ward replied that we can protect against and prevent unwanted weather damage, but \"we can not produce rain or change the order of nature.\" He saw \"no hope ... of our ever being able to bring about any but local modifications of the weather and climate\" (18). Citing the opinion of Sir Napier Shaw, Ward concluded, \"We are lords of every specimen of air which we can bottle up or imprison in our laboratories [but] in the open air we are practically powerless\" (6). These words were written in 1930, before the dawn of cloud physics as a field, before the General Electric Corporation's cloud-seeding experiments, before the fantasies of ultimate control, and before the rise of serious fears of weather and climate warfare in the 1950s and 1960s.\n\n#  Climate Leverage\n\nThe noted Soviet geoscientist Mikhail Ivanovitch Budyko (1920\u20132001) was deeply concerned about both the enhanced greenhouse effect and the growing problem of waste heat. At a 1961 conference in Leningrad on \"problems of climate control,\" he pointed out that at current and projected rates of growth, the waste heat produced by human energy generation could, in two hundred years, rival that of the Earth's radiation balance, rendering life on Earth \"impossible.\" Cities already generated more than five times more energy than the natural radiation balance, and if thermonuclear power was harnessed, he warned, dangerous temperature levels could be reached within a few decades. The threat of such excessive heat led him to become a strong advocate for learning to control and regulate climate. His colleague, academician M. Ye. Shvets, advanced a proposal to inject 36 million tons of 1-micron dust particles into the stratosphere, which would blanket the Northern Hemisphere within six months. His calculations indicated that such a dust screen would reduce solar radiation by 10 percent and temperatures by 2 to 3\u00b0C (3.6 to 5.4\u00b0F). Such an intervention was also expected to reduce evaporative losses, increase precipitation, and thus increase water supply.\n\nBudyko found this scheme preferable to other ideas of the time, such as the one to create thermal mountains. In James Black and Barry Tarmy's article \"The Use of Asphalt Coatings to Increase Rainfall\" (1963), two workers for the Esso Research and Engineering Company in New Jersey argue that \"useful amounts of rainfall might be produced economically in arid regions near seas and lakes\" by \"coating a large area with asphalt to produce thermal updrafts which increase the sea breeze circulation and promote condensation.\" One acre of petrochemical paving materials, conveniently supplied by Esso, would be needed for every 2 to 3 acres of enhanced rainfall area. The authors cited the ancient Babylonian practice of burning their fields after harvest, supposedly to create a blackened area that would produce extra rainfall for the next crop (but possibly for other reasons), and the early work of Espy on producing rain by large conflagrations. Turning to the recent literature, they cited papers on \"man-made tornadoes\" by Jean Dessens, who burned an acre-size pool of fuel oil at the rate of 1 ton a minute to create artificial clouds and even a small tornado, and suggested that the weather could be controlled artificially if an inexpensive means could be developed \" _to paint the Earth black_ \" (emphasis added). This sounds very much like the Sherwin Williams paint slogan \"Cover the Earth\" or perhaps the irreverent bumper sticker \"Earth First! We'll Pave the Other Planets Later.\"\n\nIn 1962 Harry Wexler was the first to use the new methods of computer climate modeling and satellite heat budget measurements to warn of the possibilities, dangers, and excesses of \"climate control,\" including ways to destroy the ozone layer either inadvertently or with possible harmful intent. The following year, the Conservation Foundation report _Implications of Rising Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere_ , based largely on the work of Charles David Keeling and Gilbert Plass, predicted climate problems ahead and noted: \"As long as we continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels for our increasing power needs, atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise and the Earth will be changed, more than likely for the worse.\"\n\nGordon J. F. MacDonald, professor of geophysics at UCLA, was of the opinion that weather control, even of severe storms such as hurricanes and typhoons, was just the beginning step in an escalating game of environmental and geophysical warfare using climate engineering. He thought that belligerents might, for example, cut a hole in the ozone layer over a target area to let in lethal doses of ultraviolet radiation, manipulate the Arctic ice sheet to cause climatic changes or massive tidal waves, trigger earthquakes from a distance, and in general manipulate or \"wreck\" the planetary environment and its geophysics on a strategic scale. MacDonald developed his perspective as a high-level government adviser, Pentagon confidant, chair of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Weather and  Climate Modification, and member of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in the Johnson administration.\n\nIn 1965 the PSAC issued a report titled _Restoring the Quality of Our Environment_ , which contained 104 recommendations about pollution of air, soil, and waters. Appendix Y of this report, the work of a subcommittee on atmospheric carbon dioxide chaired by Roger Revelle, is now widely cited as the first official government statement on global warming. It pointed out that \"carbon dioxide is being added to the earth's atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at the rate of 6 billion tons a year. By the year 2000 there will be about 25 percent more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at present.\" Increases in atmospheric CO2 resulting from the burning of fossil fuels could modify the Earth's heat balance to such an extent that harmful changes in climate could occur. The subcommittee also explored the possibilities of deliberately bringing about \"countervailing climatic changes.\" One ill-conceived suggestion involved increasing the Earth's solar reflectivity by dispersing buoyant reflective particles over large areas of the tropical sea at an annual cost of about $500 million. The subcommittee pointed out that this technology, which was not excessively costly, might also inhibit hurricane formation. No one thought to consider the side effects of particles washing up on tropical beaches or choking marine life or the negative consequences of intervening in hurricanes. And no one thought to ask if the local inhabitants would be in favor of such schemes. Another speculation involved modifying high-altitude cirrus clouds to counteract the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The subcommittee failed to mention the most obvious option: reducing fossil fuel use.\n\nIn 1968 Joseph O. Fletcher (b. 1920) of the RAND Corporation published a review of the known patterns and causes of global climate change. In addition to natural causes, the main influencing factors seemed to be the side effects of industrial civilization: carbon dioxide emissions, smog and dust pollution, and waste heat. As Wexler had argued in 1962, purposeful climate modification was also a theoretical possibility, but Fletcher was beginning to argue that it was now becoming a necessity. He reported on recent activities in the Soviet Union aimed at climate control, none of them very promising, and asked: \"What can be done to speed progress\" in this field? Fletcher's prescription was that climate science must follow what he considered an inevitable four-stage progression: observation, understanding, prediction, and control. Global observations were being conducted or planned at the time using new satellite platforms and large-scale field research campaigns, while theoretical groups were forming around increased computing resources and new mathematical models of atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Fletcher thought that \"an inevitable result\" of all this  would be \"the development of a more sophisticated theory to explain climatic change which, in turn will trigger an avalanche of 'climatic experiments' testing the predictions of the improved theory of climate\" (22). Is scientific progress linear? Can it be managed?\n\nThe following year, Fletcher issued a report on \"managing climatic resources\" in which he came to the \"inescapable conclusion\" that due to rising population, greater vulnerabilities, and the irreversible damage being done to the climate system, \"purposeful management of global climatic resources and control of the planet's climate would eventually become necessary to prevent undesirable changes.\" Citing a recent upsurge of research in weather modification and climate control, he thought that humanity had reached a technological threshold at which it was already \"within man's engineering capacity\" to influence the global system by altering patterns of thermal forcing. He considered it feasible to carry out climate-influencing schemes such as creating large inland seas, deflecting ocean currents, seeding clouds extensively, and (the reverse of today's sentiment) even removing the Arctic pack ice. Then, as now, he left unresolved the huge and complex economic, sociological, legal, and political problems that such intervention would generate.\n\nFletcher stated, in no uncertain terms, that \"an increase in CO2 causes global warming\" (2). Referring to the work of Guy Stewart Callendar and Gilbert Plass, who attributed the warming of the previous century of approximately 0.5\u00b0C (0.9\u00b0F) to this cause, he warned that a future warming of three times this amount or even more could be possible by the year 2000 (this did not happen) and could bring about \"important changes of global climate during the next few decades\" (this might yet happen) (3). Another, longer-term problem that he highlighted, echoing Budyko, was that heat pollution from energy generation could grow to rival the energy provided by the Sun. Still, Fletcher hedged his bets by pointing to the strong negative feedback of increased low-level cloudiness; the assumed enormous capacity of colder ocean water to absorb carbon dioxide; the 30 percent increase in turbidity, or \"global dimming,\" due to air pollution and aircraft condensation trails; and the overall complexity of the climate system, which renders specific cause-and-effect estimates very uncertain.\n\nAfter reviewing the complex patterns of past climate change and the workings of the global climate \"machine,\" Fletcher concluded that the most important outstanding problem was developing a quantitative understanding of the general circulation, especially oceanic heat transport and ocean\u2013atmosphere heat exchange. (Note that computer modeling was still in its infancy in 1969 and the El Ni\u00f1o\u2013Southern Oscillation [ENSO] had not yet been identified, although aspects of the El Ni\u00f1o\u2013La Ni\u00f1a system were known.) Fletcher also discussed feedbacks that acted as \"triggers\" of climate change and provided the example of  the dramatic warming of the Arctic, identified and measured by 1940, which, had it continued, could have resulted in \"a new and stable climatic regime\" in which the Arctic Ocean became ice-free.\n\nFrom climate \"triggers,\" Fletcher moved on to a discussion of the possibilities of deliberately influencing climate. Here he followed the theoretical lead of Russian scientist M. I. Yudin, who sought to identify critical \"instability points\" for intervening in the development of cyclones, by changing either their winds or steering currents or their heat budget. Using back-of-the-envelope calculations that have become de rigueur among geoengineers, Fletcher estimated that it would take only sixty C-5 aircraft to conduct cloud-seeding operations over the entire Arctic Basin and to exert \"enormous thermal leverage\" by creating or dissipating clouds, influencing the reflectivity of the Arctic pack ice with soot or carbon black, or even changing the course of ocean currents with macro-engineering projects.\n\nFletcher again presented his four-stage model of what he called \"progress toward climate control\": \"We must observe how nature behaves before we can understand why, we must understand before we can predict, and we must be able to predict the outcome before we undertake measures for control.\" He warned, however, that while modern technology was already capable of influencing the global climate system or \"heat engine\" by altering patterns of thermal forcing, the consequences of such acts could not be adequately predicted. The situation was pretty much the same then as it is now. Geoengineers tend to argue linearly, in a mythical orderly series from science, to engineering, to a public discussion with other \"citizens,\" who can then be educated on the wonders of science and the possibilities of engineering. Prefiguring later optimism, Fletcher thought that an improved observational system, combining ground stations and satellite surveillance, paleoclimatic reconstructions, much faster computers, and better models, would resolve the problems and allow simulations to be performed in enough detail \"to evaluate the consequences of specific climate modification acts.\" He estimated that this capability would be available by 1973, but close to four decades later it is still a desideratum (for some).\n\nHaving spent most of his time on technical speculations, Fletcher turned briefly to what he called \"international cooperation\" for the management of global climatic resources, basing his comments on his assumption that purposeful climate modification deserved the attention of scientific and government leaders. Repeating the opening lines of Wexler's lecture (could Fletcher have been in the audience in 1962?), he invoked John F. Kennedy's statement to the United Nations regarding \"further co-operative efforts between all nations in weather prediction and eventually in weather control\" (21). Fletcher also cited a joint congressional resolution of April 1, 1968, to the effect that the United  States would be a full participant in the World Weather Watch, which certainly involved observation and prediction, if not understanding and control, and would take steps to support \"the theoretical study and evaluation of inadvertent climate modification and the feasibility of intentional climate modification\" (22). While the W W W is still functioning and there have been numerous integrated assessments of climate change, recall that even as Fletcher was writing this piece, Project Popeye and Operation Motorpool were under way in the jungles of Southeast Asia, giving a black eye to schemes for the intentional modification of the environment.\n\nBudyko included a section on climate modification in his book _Climatic Changes_ (1974). Noting how difficult it had been to control urban air pollution, he predicted that it would be even more difficult to prevent an increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and a growth in waste heat release. Agreeing with Fletcher, he concluded that \"in the near future climate modification will become necessary in order to maintain current climatic conditions.\" Budyko was quite skeptical of plans to remove the polar ice, rehydrate Africa, or redirect ocean currents, commenting that it remained \"quite unclear how they may influence climate\" (239). He was more favorable, however, toward the possibility of triggering instabilities in large-scale atmospheric flows.\n\nBudyko's preferred technique\u2014one discussed by the National Academy of Sciences in 1992 and still under discussion\u2014involved increasing the aerosol content of the lower stratosphere using aircraft or rocket delivery systems. In a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he estimated that a 2 percent reduction in direct solar radiation and a 0.3 percent decrease in total radiation were needed to cool the Earth by several degrees. This could be accomplished by generating an artificial cloud of 600,000 tons of sulfuric acid, the result, under favorable circumstances and assumptions, of burning some 100,000 tons of sulfur per year. Budyko considered this to be a \"negligible\" quantity compared with other anthropogenic and natural sources. He wrote that \"such amounts [of sulfur] are not at all important in environmental pollution\" (240), with the important exceptions of the unfavorable effects of such injections on the ozone layer and on agricultural activity, which required further study. Budyko was aware that current simplified theories were inadequate to specify all the possible changes in weather conditions resulting from modifications of the aerosol layer of the stratosphere. Obviously, he believed then, and it holds true today, that deliberate climate modification would be premature before the consequences could be calculated with confidence.\n\nIn 1974 William Kellogg and Stephen Schneider published an article in _Science_ titled \"Climate Stabilization: For Better or Worse?\" One of their major  concerns was food and water shortages ravaging Africa and whether climatologists could do anything to alleviate this situation while simultaneously cooling the planet. Noting that human activities were increasingly pushing on certain \"leverage points\" that control the heat balance of the system, they admitted that, as yet, there was no comprehensive theory that could explain\u2014much less predict\u2014temperature trends or rainfall patterns. They drove this point home by listing as a \"cause\" of climate change the behavior of the climate system as described by Edward Lorenz: \"An interactive system as complex as the oceans and atmosphere can have long-period self-fluctuations, even with fixed external inputs.\" According to Lorenz, chaotically forced internal fluctuations with timescales longer than the thirty- to forty-year interval used to define a climatological average might easily be misinterpreted or confused with climatic changes forced by external variations. This fundamental property of complex systems has vexed those seeking to attribute climate change to any one factor.\n\nNevertheless, imagining a future in which climate changes could be forecast, Kellogg and Schneider laid out three basic (but not morally equivalent) options: (1) do nothing, (2) alter our patterns of land and sea use in order to lessen the impact of climate change, or (3) anticipate climate change and implement schemes to control it. As they noted, the third option would be extremely contentious and would inevitably generate conflict, for the atmosphere is a highly complex and interactive resource common to all nations. The second option is related to the \"middle path.\"\n\nWhat if one nation developed the skills to predict climate? This would dramatically change international economic market strategies and might lead to pressure for climate control. What if, after purposeful manipulation, climatic cause-and-effect linkages could be traced? Accusations would abound, and nations might use perceived damages as an excuse for hostility. Given the immense costs of miscalculation (or perception of miscalculation), who then would decide and who would implement climate modification and control schemes? Kellogg and Schneider noted with some irony, but prophetically, \"We have the impression that more schemes will be proposed for climate control than for control of the climate controllers.\" They ended their article by calling for interdisciplinary studies of climate change and its consequences for society. These sorts of studies have subsequently been pursued by the IPCC, but so far with little attention given to geoengineering fantasies.\n\nIn 1977 Cesare Marchetti used the term \"geoengineering\" to refer to the capture and injection of carbon dioxide into the ocean in down-welling currents. He identified the Mediterranean undercurrent at Gibraltar as a likely candidate, with the capacity to sequester all the carbon dioxide emissions of Europe. Today,  geoengineers discuss carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and solar radiation management techniques at their meetings. Also in 1977, the National Academy of Sciences looked at a variety of ideas to reduce global warming, should it ever become dangerous, and concluded that investing in renewable energy was more practical than climate engineering. That same year, Freeman Dyson estimated the scale and cost of an emergency program to plant fast-growing trees to control the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. He later suggested transporting and dispersing sulfates into the stratosphere using smokestack emissions from burning high-sulfur coal in power plants. Recently, he proposed dumping snow in Antarctica to reduce sea levels. These wild ideas, not taken seriously, were intended as illustrations of how to buy time for society to switch to non-carbon-based energy sources.\n\nIn a 1983 report for the National Research Council on \"changing climate,\" Thomas Schelling wrote that \"technologies for global cooling, perhaps by injecting the right particles into the stratosphere, perhaps by subtler means, [might] become economical during coming decades.\" Economics however, was not the most important dimension. Echoing von Neumann's 1955 warning, Schelling wrote that climate control, like nuclear weapons, could become \"more a source of international conflict than a relief \" (470) if several nations possessed the technology and if they disagreed on the optimum climatic balance. He cited the possibility that one nation might view landfalling hurricanes as disasters, while another might see them as providing necessary water for crops. Concerning interventions that might last for decades or centuries, Schelling predicted that future environmental agendas might well change, as they had in the past and that \"CO2 may not ... dominate discussion of anthropogenic climate change as it does now\" (470). \"It is difficult to know what will still look alarming 75 years from now\" (482)\u2014that is, after 2050. Also, in 1983 the idea of nuclear winter emerged. A major nuclear war would certainly inject smoke and dust into the stratosphere, yet no one in his right mind would consider such a holocaust an offset to global warming.\n\nGrowing concern about anthropogenic global warming led Stanford Solomon Penner, director of the Center for Energy and Combustion Research at the University of California\u2013San Diego, and his associates to suggest in 1984 that the heating from a doubling of CO2 could be offset if commercial airlines would fly at an altitude of 8 to 20 miles for a ten-year period and tune their engines to emit more particulates to increase the Earth's albedo. A major problem with this suggestion, beyond polluting the stratosphere (which concerned Wexler in 1962), was that commercial aircraft rarely fly at or above 8 miles (although military aircraft do). About this time, studies by cloud physicists indicated that an  increase in the amount or brightness of marine stratocumulus clouds in the lower atmosphere might provide significant offsets to global warming. One possible mechanism would be through adding cloud condensation nuclei from emissions of sulfur dioxide; several hundred coal-fired power plants might do the job.\n\nIn 1989 James Early, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, revisited the issue of space mirrors and linked space manufacturing fantasies with environmental issues in his wild speculations on the construction of a solar shield \"to offset the greenhouse effect.\" His back-of-the-envelope calculations indicated that a massive shield some 1,250 miles in diameter would be needed to reduce incoming sunlight by 2 percent. He estimated that an ultrathin shield, possibly manufactured from lunar materials using nano-fabrication techniques, might cost \"from one to ten trillion dollars.\" Launched from the Moon by an unspecified \"mass driver,\" the shield would reach a \"semi-stable\" orbit at the L1 point 1 million miles from the Earth along a direct line toward the Sun, where it would perch \"like a barely balanced cart atop a steep hill, a hair's-width away from falling down one side or the other.\" Here it would be subjected to the solar wind, harsh radiation, cosmic rays, and the buildup of electrostatic forces. It would have to remain functional for \"several centuries,\" which would entail repair missions. It would also require an active positioning system to keep it from falling back to the Earth or into the Sun. In other words, it was not feasible. Early did not indicate what a guidance system might look like for a 5-million-square-mile sheet of material possibly thinner than kitchen plastic wrap, with a mass close to 1 billion kilograms (2.2 billion pounds in Earth gravity). He alluded to the enormous scale and costs of this project and its \"major undefined systems,\" while disingenuously declaring it to be a simpler project, \"much smaller in size and scale,\" than controlling the temperatures on _other_ planets of the solar system. By this \"logic,\" even controlling the temperature of the entire solar system would be \"simple\" compared with galacticscale engineering!\n\n#  National Academy, 1992\n\nThe publication of the National Academy of Sciences report _Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming: Mitigation, Adaptation, and the Science Base_ (1992) is well within the memory of the current generation of climate engineers. The massive report, whose synthesis panel was chaired by Daniel J. Evans, former governor and U.S. senator from Washington State, examined what was known about greenhouse gases and their climatic effects and then presented geoengineering  as one of the cheapest mitigation options, at least in its direct costs. One of the controversial aspects was the report's conclusion that \"assumed gradual changes in climate\" would produce impacts \"that will be no more severe, and adapting to them will be no more difficult, than for the range of climates already on the\n\nEarth and no more difficult than for other changes humanity faces.\" Another problem was the report's narrow focus on cost-effectiveness and the assumed ease of implementing remedial policies. These include fantastic geoengineering schemes conflated with energy-switching and efficiency options under the catchall category \"mitigation.\"\n\nHere are the National Academy's geoengineering options, notable for their impracticability:\n\n\u2022 _Space mirrors_. Place 50,000 mirrors, each 40 square miles in area, in Earth orbit to reflect incoming sunlight.\n\n\u2022 _Stratospheric dust_. Use guns, rockets, or balloons to maintain a dust cloud in the stratosphere to increase the reflection of sunlight.\n\n\u2022 _Stratospheric bubbles_. Place billions of aluminized, hydrogen-filled balloons in the stratosphere to provide a reflective screen.\n\n\u2022 _Low-stratospheric dust, particulates, or soot_. Use aircraft delivery systems or fuel additives to maintain a cloud of dust, particulates, or soot in the lower stratosphere to reflect or intercept sunlight.\n\n\u2022 _Cloud stimulation_. Burn sulfur in ships or power plants to form sulfate aerosols in order to stimulate additional low marine clouds to reflect sunlight.\n\n\u2022 _Laser removal of atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons_. Use up to 150 extremely powerful lasers, consuming up to 2 percent of the world power supply, to break up CFCs in the lower atmosphere.\n\n\u2022 _Ocean biomass stimulation_. Fertilize the oceans with iron to stimulate the growth of CO2-absorbing phytoplankton.\n\n\u2022 _Reforestation_. Plant 3 percent of the entire U.S. surface area (100,000 square miles) with fast-growing trees to sequester 10 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. (433\u2013464)\n\nWashington insider Robert A. Frosch\u2014a vice president of General Motors Research Labs, former deputy director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, former assistant secretary of the navy for research and development, and former administrator of NASA\u2014spearheaded the geoengineering aspects of the study. His enthusiastic promotion of climate engineering was seen as a rationale for GM and other corporations to argue against cutting carbon dioxide emissions. At the time, Frosch said,\n\nI don't know why anybody should feel obligated to reduce carbon dioxide if there are better ways to do it. When you start making deep cuts, you're talking about spending some real money and changing the entire economy. I don't understand why we're so casual about tinkering with the whole way people live on the Earth, but not tinkering a little further with the way we influence the environment.\n\nYale economist William Nordhaus, also a contributor to the National Academy study, used geoengineering scenarios in his dynamic integrated climate economy (DICE) model to calculate the balance between economic growth (or decline) and climate change. Defining geoengineering as \"a hypothetical technology that provides _costless_ mitigation of climate change\" (emphasis added), he came to the controversial conclusion that \"geoengineering produces major benefits, whereas emissions stabilization and climate stabilization are projected to be worse than inaction.\" At one point, he referred to the scale of his global economic projections as \"mind-numbing,\" but he could well have applied this description to his overall conclusions regarding the potential for a geoengineering solution. Stephen Schneider later wrote: \"As a member of that panel, I can report that the very idea of including a chapter on geoengineering led to serious internal and external debates. Many participants (including myself) were worried that even the thought that we could offset some aspects of inadvertent climate modification by deliberate modification schemes could be used as an excuse to continue polluting.\" In fact, it was precisely in this way\u2014as an alternative to reducing emissions\u2014that geoengineering discussions found their way into the twenty-first century.\n\nSuch sentiments echoed the dismal opinions of economists at the time on pollution solutions. In 1991, for example, World Bank economist Lawrence Summers (who later resigned as president of Harvard University following a no-confidence vote of the faculty and now directs the White House's National Economic Council) wrote, in what he assumed would remain a private, and what he later deemed a sarcastic, memo: \"Shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries].... I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to the fact that ... under populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted.\" The outrage generated when this memo became public in 1992, just before the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, motivated Jos\u00e9 Lutzenberger, Brazil's secretary of the environment, to respond to Summers:\n\nYour reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane.... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional \"economists\" concerning the nature of the world we live in.... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said ... the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.\n\n\"Insane,\" \"reductionist,\" \"ruthless,\" \"arrogant\"\u2014such modifiers suit most geoengineering proposals quite well. Nordhaus wrote in 2007 that geoengineering is, at present, \"the only economically competitive technology to offset global warming.\"\n\n#  A Naval Rifle System\n\nFrosch called his proposal to bombard the stratosphere using an array of 350 naval guns \"designer volcanic dust put up with Jules Verne methods\" (figure 8.2). He envisioned each $1 million, 16-inch gun being able to fire 1 ton of sulfate or aluminum oxide into the stratosphere about every ten minutes. Each barrel would need replacement after 1,000 to 1,500 shots. Thus a single cannon would have a useful life of less than two weeks, and a total of 300,000 cannon would be needed for a forty-year program! The naval guns had been designed in 1939 and were first put into service in 1943, so they would have to be updated. The cost of ammunition for 400 million shots was estimated at $4 trillion, the barrels would be $300 billion, the firing stations $200 billion, and the personnel costs $100 billion\u2014for a total of $5 trillion over forty years. This system could deliver dust to the stratosphere for about $14 a pound, and each pound was expected to mitigate 45 tons of carbon emissions. Balloon delivery systems were estimated to cost $36 a pound and sounding rockets, $45.\n\nFrosch was aware that damaging side effects could result, such as stratospheric ozone destruction, widespread drought, or unacceptable atmospheric haze, but he did not emphasize that. Instead, he reassured his readers that \"the rifle system appears to be inexpensive, to be relatively easily managed, and to require few launch sites\" (460). He concluded that \"the rifles could be deployed at sea or in military reservations where the noise of the shots and the fallback of expended shells could be managed\" (817\u2013819). What Frosch forgot to take into account was the lower tropospheric air pollution generated by the bombardments. If, for example, each 650-pound explosive charge contained pure  nitroglycerine (C3H5N3O9), it would generate about 380 pounds of carbon dioxide when fired, so 400 million cannon shots would produce about 76 million tons of carbon dioxide. This calculation does not take into account other gaseous by-products, such as smoke or nitrous oxide, nor does it consider the carbon emissions involved in manufacturing or transporting 300,000 cannon barrels,  each of which is over 65 feet long and weighs over 130 tons.  Could such a long-term and violent bombardment be sustained without any accidents or other side effects? Is declaring war on the stratosphere the best mitigation strategy? The authors of the 2009 Novim Group report on geoengineering seem to think so and discuss, apparently without a sense of irony, the possibility of opening fire on the ozone layer with M1 tank guns loaded with aerosols.\n\n8.2 Shooting dust into the stratosphere to offset global warming, one proposal by the National Academy of Sciences in its report published in 1992. Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen revived the idea in 2006. (CARTOON BY JOHN IRELAND, IN _GEOGRAPHICAL MAGAZINE_ , MAY 1992)\n\n#  Ocean Iron Fertilization\n\nThe other scheme hatched at the time was ocean iron fertilization (OIF). \"Give me half a tanker of iron, and I'll give you an ice age,\" biogeochemist John Martin (a Colby College graduate) reportedly quipped in a Dr. Strangelove accent at a conference at Woods Hole in 1988. Martin and his colleagues at Moss Landing Marine Laboratories proposed that iron was a limiting nutrient in certain ocean waters and that adding it stimulated explosive and widespread phytoplankton growth. They tested their iron deficiency, or \"Geritol,\" hypothesis in bottles of ocean water, and subsequently experimenters added iron to the oceans in a dozen or so ship-borne \"patch\" experiments extending over hundreds of square miles. OIF worked, just like pouring Miracle-Gro on your tomatoes. Was it possible that the blooming and die-off of phytoplankton, fertilized by the iron in natural dust, was the key factor in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during glacial\u2013interglacial cycles? Dust bands in ancient ice cores encouraged this idea, as did the detection of natural plankton blooms by satellites.\n\nEnter the geoengineers. Could OIF speed up the biological carbon pump to sequester carbon dioxide, and was it a solution to global warming? Because of this possibility, Martin's hypothesis received widespread public attention. What if entrepreneurs or governments could turn patches of ocean soupy green and claim that the carbonaceous carcasses of the dead plankton sinking below the waves constituted biological \"sequestration\" of undesired atmospheric carbon? Or could plankton blooms increase the production of dimethyl sulfate (DMS) and cool the Earth by making marine clouds slightly more reflective? Several companies\u2014Climos, Planktos (now out of the business), the aptly named GreenSea Ventures, and the Ocean Nourishment Corporation\u2014have proposed entering the carbon-trading market by dumping either iron or urea into the oceans to stimulate both plankton blooms and ocean fishing. The scientific consensus, however, supported by diplomatic negotiations, held that more research was needed to evaluate risks and benefits before anyone should even think of selling carbon offsets from ocean iron fertilization. Some of the key questions  that are as yet unanswered include the amount and fate of carbon from a bloom, how long it would remain sequestered, and, most important, how all this could be verified. If the commercial companies are going to try to sell an artificial and beneficial \"rain\" of ocean phytoplankton, then all the caveats and all the verification and attribution challenges of artificial rainmaking apply. It is similar to the relationship between cloud physics and commercial cloud seeding; as Kenneth Coale, director of Moss Landing, pointed out, \"iron experiments are about how nature works; commercial ocean seeding is about getting nature to work for us.\"\n\nTotally unresolved issues related to all large-scale OIF projects include possible damage to the ocean food web and the world's fishing industry caused by disturbing marine ecosystems, production of biological \"dead zones,\" pollution of the deep ocean by the buildup of iron compounds, possible destruction of stratospheric ozone, and generation of undesirable greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. OIF projects could be undertaken unilaterally by a rogue state or a group out to make a point; and if the fertilization ever stopped, the carbon dioxide would immediately begin to return to the atmosphere. Regarding OIF, chemist Whitney King wrote in 1994,\n\nNo engineer would consider designing a building which has a less than a 1 percent chance of standing up and the potential of wiping out a whole city if it falls. Yet this is probably a good analogy for our state of understanding the carbon cycle and the role iron plays in controlling it. So why has the iron fertilization theory gained so much attention? I would suggest that we enjoy the thought of being able to control global climate.\n\n#  Artificial Trees or Lackner Towers\n\nKlaus Lackner of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, collaborating with Tucson, Arizona\u2013based Global Research Technologies, envisions a world filled with millions of inverse chimneys, some of them more than 300 feet high and 30 feet in diameter, inhaling up to 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year (the world's annual emissions) and sequestering it in underground or undersea storage areas. Picture in your mind's eye Al Gore's _An Inconvenient Truth_ movie logo of a smokestack apparently exhaling a Katrinalike hurricane; now run the smokestack in reverse and imagine millions of such giant planetary vacuum cleaners or, more accurately, air filters. Lackner prefers a different, somewhat greener metaphor: a forest of artificial trees covered in CO2absorbing artificial leaves. Note, however, that trees sequester carbon, not carbon  dioxide, and they return oxygen to the atmosphere. Unlike Lackner forests, trees also provide shade, habitat, and food for squirrels, birds, and other living things. Although Lackner says he is not a geoengineer, but merely interested in compensating for current emissions, he envisions his devices being enlisted in the \"fight against climate change.\" Others hope someday to attain negative global carbon dioxide emissions, but this would entail immense storage problems, similar to nuclear waste disposal.\n\nLackner has built a demonstration unit in which a filter filled with caustic and energy-intensive sodium hydroxide can absorb the carbon dioxide output of a single car. He admits, however, that this system is not safe or practical, so he is currently looking into proprietary \"ion-exchange resins\" with undisclosed energetic and environmental properties. Of course, the capture, cooling, liquefaction, and pumping of 30 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide would require an astronomical amount of energy and infrastructure, and it is not at all certain that the Earth has the capacity for safe long-term storage of such a large amount of carbon.\n\nLet us look briefly at the chemical energetics that make air capture of carbon and its sequestration (CCS) such a non-starter (with the possible exception of selected local sites, such as North Sea oil rigs, where pumping carbon dioxide back into the wells makes more sense than venting it). First there is the mass problem. Combustion of coal (mainly carbon-12) results in carbon dioxide waste products of molecular weight 44. Thus a mole of carbon burned yields energy, plus a mole of carbon dioxide waste, a mass gain of 267 percent. Lackner did not acknowledge this mass problem when he wrote, \"Ultimately _carbon_ extraction must be matched by _carbon dioxide_ capture and storage. For every _ton_ of carbon pulled from the ground, another _ton_ of carbon must be taken out of the mobile carbon pool\" (emphasis added). In actuality, for every ton of carbon used, 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide have to be captured and stored. There are other problems as well. Liquefying such a huge amount of CO2 requires immense pressures, on the order of 80 to 100 atmospheres. We are still not done, since the liquid CO2 must be piped to injection sites. Imagine all the pipelines needed for the pipe dream of erecting 3 million large Lackner towers worldwide, or up to 100 million smaller, container-size units.\n\nThe image of a Lackner tower, resembling a huge flyswatter, was superimposed over New York's Central Park in a photomontage created by a Canadian film company. Left unmentioned was the fact that Manhattan alone would require hundreds of these scrubbers for its resident population of 1.5 million people (not counting visitors), so about one in every ten large structures in the city would resemble a giant flyswatter. The cost of the land to build them, energy to run them, piping to drain them, and makeup and maintenance of their \"idealized\"  filters were not specified, making Lackner's proposal at present untenable. Oh, by the way\u2014each of the large Lackner towers would cost at least $20 million.\n\nLackner's dream of carbon sequestration found support from his Columbia University colleague Wallace Broecker and science writer Robert Kunzig in their book, _Fixing Climate_ (2008). Their overall thesis is that carbon dioxide capture and storage represents the equivalent of sewage treatment, which modern societies deem a necessity. They quoted Harrison Brown, the Caltech geochemist, eugenicist, futurist, and role model for the current presidential science adviser, John Holdren. In 1954 Brown imagined feeding a hungry world by increasing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere to stimulate plant growth:\n\nWe have seen that plants grow more rapidly in an atmosphere that is rich in carbon dioxide.... If, in some manner, the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere could be increased threefold, world food production might be doubled. One can visualize, on a world scale, huge carbon-dioxide generators pouring the gas into the atmosphere.... In order to double the amount in the atmosphere, at least 500 billion tons of coal would have to be burned\u2014an amount six times greater than that which has been consumed during all of human history. In the absence of coal ... the carbon dioxide could be produced by heating limestone.\n\nRecall that Nils Ekholm and Svante Arrhenius had suggested in the first decade of the twentieth century that, facing the return of an ice age, atmospheric carbon dioxide might be increased artificially by opening up and burning shallow coal seams\u2014a process that would also fertilize plants. Broecker and Kunzig end their book with just such a fantasy:\n\nOur children and grandchildren, having stabilized the CO2 level at 500 or 600 ppm [parts per million], may decide, consulting their history books, that it was more agreeable at 280 ppm. No doubt our more distant descendents will choose if they can to avert the next ice age; perhaps, seeing an abrupt climate change on the horizon, they will prevent it by adjusting the carbon dioxide level in the greenhouse. By then they will no longer be burning fossil fuels, so they would have to deploy some kind of carbon dioxide generator, shades of Harrison Brown, to operate in tandem with the carbon dioxide scrubbers. (232)\n\nLackner reportedly agreed, adding that capturing, storing, and releasing carbon dioxide may one day be possible. Can you imagine a world in which Lackner's carbon dioxide scrubbers and the Ekholm\u2013Arrhenius\/Brown carbon dioxide generators  would operate in tandem as a kind of planetary thermostat? \"Trying to see that far into the future is crazy, of course\" (232) (Broecker and Kunzig's words, not mine).\n\nHow can we comprehend such proposals? It may be common for people living in close proximity to the megalopolis\u2014for example, just off Broadway\u2014to see the sky as an open sewer and try to \"fix it.\" Bus exhaust, steam vents, fumes, and foul odors serve as constant reminders that something is indeed wrong with the sky. Fly into a major city near or after sunset, and you will see, on approach, streams of red taillights and white headlights of opposing traffic. Stand on the street, perhaps daring to cross, and you will see the grim visages of oncoming drivers or the tailpipes and exhaust plumes of the passing traffic. In such a dense infrastructure, when almost every building is air-conditioned, it is not hard to imagine a future in which every tenth building might in fact be a giant outdoor air filter or an inverse chimney. To put it simply, when you see pipes sticking out everywhere, it is not hard to imagine more pipes\u2014good pipes correcting emissions from the bad pipes.\n\nToday's city dwellers, especially the influential ones, do not choose to spend much time on crowded, dangerous, and uncomfortable streets. Instead, they shuttle between microtopian environments, from air-conditioned vehicles to air-conditioned buildings, and even to air-conditioned shopping malls and sports arenas. Near Washington, D.C., certainly a city known for both its international influence and its need for air-conditioning, the power brokers always wear business suits to signal their status and their unlimited access to HVAC. The tunnels running under Capitol Hill and into the Library of Congress symbolize this, as does Pentagon City, across the Potomac River in nearby Virginia, which is known for its underground warrens where not only can the air be conditioned, but Muzak can be pumped in and the homeless can be kept out. This is the type of \"environment\" in which most of our decision makers operate.\n\n#  Recycling Ideas\n\nIn the twenty-first century, geoengineers have convened several meetings, regularly exchange views on Google Groups, and continue to hatch, nurture, and recycle their ideas. In September 2001, the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program quietly held an invitational conference on \"response options to rapid or severe climate change.\" Sponsored by a White House that was officially skeptical about greenhouse warming, the meeting gave new status to the control fantasies of the climate engineers. According to one participant, however, \"If they had broadcast that meeting live to people in Europe, there would have been riots\"\u2014a  comment indicative of a much more robust green movement in Europe, which at the time still hoped the United States might sign the Kyoto Protocol.\n\nTwo years later, the Pentagon released a controversial report titled \"An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.\" The report explained how global warming might lead to rapid and catastrophic global cooling through mechanisms such as the slowing of North Atlantic deep-water circulation\u2014and recommended that the government \"explore geoengineering options that control the climate.\" Such actions would have to be studied carefully, of course, given their potential to exacerbate conflict among nations. A symposium sponsored in 2004 by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Cambridge, England, set out to \"identify, debate, and evaluate\" possible but highly controversial options for the design and construction of engineering projects for the management and mitigation of global climate change.\n\n\"Russian Scientist Suggests Burning Sulfur in Stratosphere to Fight Global Warming,\" read the headlines from Moscow in November 2005. The article referred to a letter from the prominent scientist Yuri Izrael, the head of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute, to President Vladimir Putin warning that global warming required immediate action and suggesting burning thousands of tons of sulfur in the stratosphere as a remedy. Izrael said his plan was based on the idea of putting aerosols into the atmosphere at an altitude of 8 to 12 miles to create a reflective layer that would lower the heating effect of solar radiation: \"In order to lower the temperature of the Earth by 1\u20132 degrees we need to pump about 600,000 tons of aerosol particles. To do that, we need to burn from 100\u2013200,000 tons of sulfur. And we do not have to burn the sulfur there, we can simply use sulfur-rich aircraft fuel.\" It seems that Izrael did not make his own calculations, but simply dusted off Penner's 1984 idea and used the exact figures of his countryman Budyko, published in 1974.\n\nA 2006 editorial on geoengineering by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen contained a proposal that was very similar to Budyko's, although framed by different environmental and policy concerns. He came to similar conclusions, too, except his calculations indicated that ten times more sulfur would be needed, between 1 and 2 _million_ tons per year. Budyko had pegged the geoengineering sulfur input at about one-ten-thousandth of \"that due to man's activity,\" while Crutzen had it as \" _only_ 2\u20134 percent of the current input\" (emphasis added). Crutzen wrote that albedo enhancement was not the best solution to global warming \"by far,\" but he still recommended that the Budyko\/National Academy notions of using artillery guns, balloons, or aircraft to inject sulfates or other particles into the stratosphere \"might again be explored and debated.\" He suggested that the  attack on the upper atmosphere might be conducted from \"remote tropical island sites or from ships\" (213), but nowhere indicated that he had considered the need to consult residents of the tropics for their opinions on this. Whether from Budyko, Penner, Izrael, or Crutzen, the idea of purposeful stratospheric pollution, for whatever purpose, is extremely grating to modern sensibilities. Nevertheless, there have been several more workshops in recent years. NASA-Ames and the Carnegie Institution convened one in 2006 on the Phaethon-like topic \"managing solar radiation.\" Participants could not help but laugh when a meeting coordinator apologized for not being able to control the temperature of the room. Ad hoc meetings on climate engineering pop up on a regular basis. In 2007 one was held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, another at MIT in 2009, and a large gathering on \"climate intervention\" in 2010 at the Asilomar campus in Pacific Grove, California. The topics under discussion at these meetings have been far from mainstream, involving more speculation than science.\n\nGeoengineering does not have a widespread following. In 2006 Ralph Cicerone wrote: \"Ideas on how to engineer the Earth's climate, or to modify the environment on large scales ... do not enjoy broad support from scientists. Refereed publications that deal with such ideas are not numerous nor are they cited widely.\" The situation has not changed substantially since then. According to a 2008 report by the Tyndall Centre, geoengineering proposals have not advanced beyond the outline\/concept stage and are best confined to computer model simulations, since small-scale field experiments would be inconclusive and global experiments would be far too risky and socially unacceptable. Recently, atmospheric scientist Richard Turco, founding director of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and one of the authors of \"Nuclear Winter\" (1983), called many geoengineering plans \"preposterous\" and \"mind-boggling.\" He saw \"no evidence\" that technological quick fixes to the climate system would be as cheap or as easy as their proponents claim, and he said that many of them \"wouldn't work at all\" and could not be field-tested without unacceptable, even unpredictable, risks. Embarking on such projects, he said, \"could be foolhardy.\"\n\nLate in 2009, Izrael and his colleagues reported on what they called a geoengineering field experiment in Russia to study solar radiation passing through aerosol layers. Citing Crutzen's 2006 editorial, they made the dubious and selfreferential claim that \"injection of reflecting aerosol submicron particles into the stratosphere can be an _optimal_ option to compensate warming\" (emphasis added). The experimenters then proceeded to experiment, not in the stratosphere but near the ground. In several tests, a military helicopter burning \"metal-chloride pyrotechnic\" flares and a military truck spraying an \"overheated vapor-gas mixture of individual fractions of petroleum products\" generated  thick toxic clouds of smoke (266). The petroleum device was not unlike Irving Langmuir and Vincent Schaefer's smoke screen generator of World War II. Ground-based solar radiation measurements then showed what everyone already knows\u2014a thick cloud obscures the Sun: \"Possible changes in the irradiance are estimated in this case rather approximately. The irradiance reduction in this case was about 28%\" (269). Note the experimenters' use of the terms \"possible\" and \"approximately\"; a reduction of sunlight of 28 percent, sustained globally, would devastate life on Earth. Another experimental trial also yielded inconclusive results. Cloudy weather with sky clearing made it difficult for the researchers to detect a \"possible change in the solar radiation caused by the artificial aerosol sample passing over the instrument complex against the background of natural changes\" (269). Nevertheless, for this team, inconclusive small-scale experiments near the ground were seemingly a sufficient proof of concept: \"Based on the experimental results obtained in our work, it is shown how it is principally possible to _control_ solar radiation passing through artificially created aerosol formations in the atmosphere with different optical thickness\" (272). We can only hope these Russian experimenters are not in charge of managing solar radiation for the globe.\n\nAn editorial cartoonist for the _New York Times_ captured the essence (and the absurdity) of one of the proposed techniques (figure 8.3). Two overheated polar bears are feverishly trying to pump sulfur into the air, but they seem to be having trouble keeping their hose erect, especially if their ice floe shrinks any further. And whose warships are those in the distance? Do they carry Frosch\/Crutzen sulfate cannons, or are they trying to stop the geoengineering? Russian opinion has long favored an open Arctic Ocean, and some scientists, including Budyko, believe that the beneficial effects of global warming might \"pep up\" cold regions and allow more grain and potatoes to be grown, making the country wealthier. Better check with Vladimir Putin before we screw (with) the Arctic.\n\nNaval artillery is only one of the many \"manly\" ways to declare \"war\" on global warming by using military equipment. The cartoon alludes to a proposal by Edward Teller's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Lowell Wood to attach a long hose to a nonexistent but futuristic military High Altitude Airship (a Lockheed-Martin\u2013Defense Department stratospheric super blimp now on the drawing board with some twenty-five times the volume of the Goodyear blimp) to \"pump\" reflective particles into the stratosphere. According to Wood, \"Pipe it up; spray it out!\" Wood has worked out many of the details\u2014except for high winds, icing, and accidents, since the HAAs are likely to wander as much as 100 miles from  their assigned stations. If the geoengineers cannot keep it up, however, imagine a 25-mile phallic \"snake\" filled with 10 tons of sulfuric acid ripping loose, writhing wildly, and falling out of the sky. Carol Cohn said it best in her classic article \"Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals\": \"The dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard ... until that voice is delegitimated.\" The geoengineers have been playing such games with the planet since computerized general circulation models were first developed. While this kind of research will undoubtedly continue, it should remain indoors between consenting adults. What must be aired are the underlying assumptions.\n\n8.3 \"Screwing (with) the Planet,\" as interpreted by Henning Wagenbreth. (\u00a9 _NEW YORK TIMES_ , OCTOBER 24, 2007)\n\n#  A Royal Society Smoke Screen\n\nThe Royal Society of London recently dedicated a special issue of its venerable _Philosophical Transactions_ to the topic \"Geoscale Engineering to Avert Dangerous Climate Change.\" The journal bills itself as \"essential reading for mathematicians, physicists, engineers and other physical scientists,\" which is noteworthy, since climate engineering is not solely or even essentially a technical problem and none of the eleven papers in the special issue were written by historians, ethicists, or other humanists or social scientists. Editors Brian Launder, an engineer, and Michael Thompson, an applied mathematician\/solar physicist, began by blaming China and India for their soaring greenhouse gas emissions, praising the developed world (at least the European Union) for struggling to meet its carbonreduction targets, and wondering if the day may come when geoengineering solutions are \" _universally_ perceived to be less risky than doing nothing\" (emphasis added). Only a few of the articles did what the editors promised: subject macro-engineering options to \"critical appraisal by acknowledged experts in the field.\" Most of the articles had been recycled from the 2004 Tyndall Centre meeting on climate engineering and were written by advocates standing to benefit directly from any increase in funding.\n\nSurvey articles by Stephen Schneider and James Lovelock questioned, in broad brushstrokes, the validity and overall viability of the geoengineering enterprise. Schneider briefly reviewed the fifty-year history of schemes to modify large-scale environmental systems or control climate. He pointed out that schemes are typically presented as cost-effective alternatives or as ways to buy time for mitigation, but he expressed doubts that they would work as planned or that they would be socially feasible, given the potential for transboundary conflicts if negative climatic events occur during geoengineering activities.\n\nLovelock, invoking a metaphor he has long used, posed as a \"geophysiologist,\" or planetary physician, and diagnosed the Earth as having a fever induced by the parasite _Disseminated primatemia_ (the superabundance of humans). As treatment, he recommended a low-carbon diet combined with nuclear medicine. He likened geoengineering to crude planetary surgery, as practiced by the butcher\/ barber surgeons of old. While the patient would definitely survive, the parasites had a much lower probability: \"Our ignorance of the Earth system is overwhelming. ... Planetary scale engineering might be able to combat global warming, but as with nineteenth century medicine, the best option may simply be kind words and letting Nature take its course.\" Lovelock is a freethinker who advocates nuclear power, imagines dystopian futures caused by climate change, and has had Michael Mann's \"hockey stick\" graph pinned on the wall above his  desk for a number of years. He and Chris Rapley have recently proposed their own geoengineering fix for the \"pathology of global warming,\" specifically, a vast array of vertical pipes placed in the oceans to bring colder, nutrient-rich water to the surface to spur the growth of carbon dioxide\u2013absorbing plankton. But many worry that the idea might interfere with fishing, disrupt whale populations, and release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than it captures. Most recently Lovelock has supported \"biochar,\" the conversion of massive amounts of agricultural \"waste\" into non-biodegradable charcoal and its subsequent burial. This surely qualifies for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hall of Fantasy, since it would mark the end of composting and would generate massive amounts of the known carcinogen benzo[a]pyrene. Its practitioners risk the fate of Hawthorne's Dr. Cacaphodel, \"who had wilted and dried himself into a mummy by continually stooping over charcoal furnaces and inhaling unwholesome fumes during his researches.\"\n\nIn the _Philosophical Transactions_ special issue on geoengineering, two teams of oceanographers examined ocean iron fertilization field experiments and model studies to gauge whether this technique can \"become a viable option to sequester CO2.\" Victor Smetacek and S. W. A. Naqvi impugned the current \"apparent consensus against OIF [as] premature.\" They praised vague but possibly positive side effects of the widespread use and commercialization of this technique (more krill may mean more whales), while they minimized discussion of any negative side effects, such as disruption of the ocean food chain or the creation of anoxic dead zones. Without providing any details, they offered the hollow reassurance that \"negative effects of possible commercialization of OIF could be controlled by the establishment of an international body headed by _scientists_ to supervise and monitor its implementation\" (emphasis added). Scientists typically have little or no training in history, ethics, or public policy, while global climate change is a human problem, not merely a scientific issue.\n\nThe article by John Latham and colleagues rehearsed the idea of seeding marine stratus clouds with seawater to increase their albedo and possibly make them more persistent. They concluded, to no one's surprise, that it might\u2014just might\u2014work. A companion piece by Steven Salter and colleagues pointed out that an armada of robotic spray ships plying the high seas would be needed and that their spray would make the clouds brighter by introducing so many cloud condensation nuclei that the cloud droplets would be much smaller and more numerous. This \"overseeding\" technique was attempted using silver iodide in the 1950s as a means to prevent rain. Thus the worldwide array of brighter clouds proposed by Latham and Salter might produce less rain than unaltered clouds, with unknown environmental consequences. It looks like the  international body of scientists mentioned by the oceanographers will be busy monitoring this technique too.\n\nKen Caldeira and Lowell Wood offered perhaps the most disingenuous paper by using an \"idealized\" (read: relatively simple) climate model in which they turned down the sunlight at the top of the atmosphere by using various aerosols. They did not specify where this magic knob might actually be located, but every undergraduate student in atmospheric science knows that the \"knob\" is built into the models as an indication of the climate's sensitivity to solar insolation. Wonder of wonders, when the sunlight is turned down, the planet cools; and when the sunlight is turned down over the Arctic Circle, the Arctic cools and parameterized sea ice grows. By focusing on physics rather than on the complexities of atmospheric science or ecology, and by tuning their model assumptions, they concluded that their \"engineered high CO2 climate\" could be made to emulate a perhaps more desirable but presently unattainable low CO2 climate. Caldeira and Wood used back-of-the-envelope calculations to push forward their case for military hardware with unspecified failure rates delivering unspecified aerosols into the stratosphere with unknown environmental consequences. They ignored the recent, more sophisticated modeling work of Alan Robock, Luke Oman, and Georgiy Stenchikov indicating that stratospheric aerosols injected at high latitudes would soon be carried by the winds as far south as 30\u00b0N, interfering with the Asian summer monsoon. Since stratospheric aerosols would not stay confined above the Arctic Circle, the \"yarmulke plan\" of Caldeira and Wood is physically impossible. Their non-sequitur conclusion: \"Implementing insolation modulation appears to be feasible.\" Their most honest admission: \"Modeling of climate engineering is in its infancy.\"\n\nThe article in the volume with the greatest integrity, by the most sophisticated team of modelers, and the one that offered a fresh and rather sobering assessment of the consequences of injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere was by Philip Rasch and his colleagues. Their simulations indicated that while the Northern Hemisphere might cool overall after such an intervention, significant and undesirable reductions in precipitation could occur over vulnerable areas such as North Africa and India, possibly leading to drought conditions and damage to agricultural productivity. Such climate engineering would also cause significant changes in the overall spectrum of solar radiation, with more biologically damaging ultraviolet-B radiation reaching the Earth's surface, with negative consequences likely for human health and biological populations. The worldwide sulfate haze would also reduce direct-beam solar radiation and increase diffuse sky radiation with unwelcome aesthetic effects, interfere with optical astronomy, dramatically reduce the capacity for generation of solar power, and  probably cause unwanted stresses on plant ecosystems and crops. Rasch and his colleagues also warned of increased ozone depletion attributable to the presence of additional sulfate particles in the stratosphere. A related article in _Science_ by Simone Tilmes, Rolf M\u00fcller, and Ross Salawitch supported this conclusion: \"An injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO2 would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a considerable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.\" So much for Crutzen's proposal.\n\nIn 2009 oceanographer John Shepherd and I were on a panel presenting testimony to the U.S. Congress on the governance of geoengineering. He introduced a recent study that he chaired for the Royal Society of London with the comment \"geoengineering is no magic bullet.\" I immediately thought, \"It is no bullet at all\" and we would be better off not shooting our ordnance at the atmosphere. The published report recommends, sensibly, that nations make increased efforts toward mitigating and adapting to climate change, but it also supports further research and development of geoengineering, including appropriate observations, development and use of climate models, and (more ominously) \"carefully planned and executed experiments,\" including small- to medium-scale experiments both in the laboratory and in field trials.\n\n#  Field Tests?\n\nIn his 2008 testimony to the British House of Commons, Launder spotlighted his recent editorship of the _Philosophical Transactions_ special issue on geoengineering and urged the government to go beyond paper studies and \"earmark\" a portion of its budget for a program of field tests leading to possible geo-scale deployment. The response of mainstream engineers, however, was lukewarm. In the opinion of Britain's Royal Academy of Engineering, \"All the current proposals have inherent environmental, technical and social risks and none will solve all the problems associated with energy and climate change.\" The academy recommended that the government \"stay well informed\" but treat geoengineering with caution. Geographer Dan Lunt, from the University of Bristol, and others pointed out that the missing dimension in all of this was a large-scale program to determine the efficacy, side effects, practicality, economics, and ethical implications of geoengineering, a kind of ethical, legal, social implications (ELSI) approach common in other controversial fields. If American geoengineers are seeking  funding, a single agency with deep pockets\u2014for example, the Department of Energy, NASA, or even the Department of Defense or Homeland Security\u2014is not the way to go. Neither is a private company in which commercial goals may overwhelm scientific objectivity. This field needs enhanced public input and open peer review, such as that provided by the National Science Foundation.\n\nRecently, atmospheric scientist William Cotton pointed out the relationship between weather engineering and climate engineering, along with their systematic problems and structural differences. In weather modification experiments, the scientific community requires \"proof\" that cloud seeding has increased precipitation. Following an intervention, such proof would include \"strong physical evidence of appropriate modifications to cloud structures and highly significant statistical evidence\"\u2014that is, effects that exceed the natural background variability of the atmosphere. But intervention is not control. In 1946 Kathleen Blodgett at General Electric told Irving Langmuir that intervening in or modifying a cloud was a far cry from controlling its subsequent motion and growth or the characteristics of its precipitation. Having experienced the promise and hype of cloud seeding, and after having worked for fifty years in this field, Cotton admitted, \"We cannot point to strong physical and statistical evidence that these early claims have been realized.\" He went on to note that proof of success in climate engineering would be far harder to establish than in weather engineering. In fact, it would be impossible, for several reasons: climate models are not designed to be predictive, so there is no forecast skill; global climate experiments cannot be randomized or repeated and cannot be done without likely collateral damage; climate variability is very high, so the background-noise-tosignal ratio is overwhelming; and climate change is slow to develop because of built-in thermal lags due to oceans and ice sheets. What all this adds up to is that experimental \"results\" could not be established even within the experimenters' life spans. Did I mention the chaotic behavior of the climate system? That alone would overwhelm any attribution of experimental interventions by climate engineers. Cotton warned that in times of drought or climate stress, politicians would emerge with the need to demonstrate that they were doing something, that they were in control of the situation, even if they only enacted what he called political placebos.\n\n#  The Middle Course\n\nIn 1983 Thomas Schelling outlined four basic policy choices for responding to carbon dioxide\u2013induced climate change:\n\n1. Reduce its production.\n\n2. Adapt to increasing carbon dioxide and changing climate.\n\n3. Remove it from the atmosphere.\n\n4. Modify climate, weather, and hydrology.\n\nThe first two options, practiced worldwide, with foresight and moderation, constitute the \"middle course.\" \"Mitigation\" properly refers to a complex array of initiatives involving primarily decarbonizing and increasing the efficiency of the energy supply, afforestation and the prevention of further deforestation, and other efforts aimed at reducing anthropogenic emissions and concentrations of radiatively active trace gases. \"Adaptation,\" or climate resilience, involves collective means taken to avoid, cope with, or reduce the adverse impacts of climate change, both on humans and on all living creatures and ecosystems. The first climate migrants in prehistorical times were adapting to the onset of an ice age. Ward's categories of prevention and protection, from 1930, are close matches. Some mitigation efforts, however, involving proposed carbon capture and sequestration can indeed be massive in scale, such as ocean iron fertilization and a worldwide array of Lackner towers, and deserve the same caveats as direct climate intervention schemes.\n\nIn a 2008 book, Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King surveyed the problems of global warming and some of the technological and political \"solutions,\" or at least responses that might arise. They discussed the oft-cited \"stabilization wedges\" of Princeton professors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow, which offered the hopeful vision of stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (but not necessarily the climate system) using existing technologies. Pacala and Socolow rightly emphasized efficiency first\u2014in electricity generation, passenger vehicle transport, shipping, and other end-use sectors\u2014followed by new renewable energy sources and as-yet-unproven carbon capture and storage. Walker and King wrote that stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million would require implementing the following \"wedges\" immediately:\n\nDouble the fuel economy of two billion cars, halve the annual average distance traveled by two billion cars, cut carbon emissions from buildings and appliances by one-quarter, capture and store carbon dioxide from 800 gigawatts of coal power plants and 1600 gigawatts of natural gas power plants, build two million 1-megawatt wind turbines (about 50 times more than exist today), stop all felling of tropical forests and plant 740 million acres of new trees in the tropics, double the current amount of nuclear power, quadruple the amount of natural gas used to generate electricity ..., increase the use of biofuels in vehicles to fifty times today's  level, use low-tillage farming methods on all the world's cropland, and increase the global area of solar panels by a factor of seven hundred. (92\u201393)\n\nNote that all these wedges involve large geometric factors: 2-, 50-, even 700-fold increases (or decreases) in current practices, with unspecified costs or other considerations. The global back-of-the-envelope nature of these suggestions, the sheer scale of the challenge, and the lack of fine-grained analysis regarding local and regional implementation strategies had led some, geoengineers included, to wonder if it can be done efficiently\u2014or at all. At the 2007 American Academy meeting on geoengineering, Socolow was musing aloud about adding a geoengineering wedge to his portfolio; I suggested that this was probably a premature move.\n\nThe middle course is Phaethon's ideal path, as advised by his father, Helios, to spare the whip, hold tight the reins, and \"keep within the limit of the middle zone,\" neither too far south or north, nor too high or low: \"the middle course is safest and best.\" Inviting people from different cultures and diverse walks of life to take action on climate change involves defining a middle course, not a path of least resistance but one between doing too little about climate change (which has been the case recently with much of U.S. policy) and doing too much (which would most certainly be the case if the climate engineers have free rein to turn the planet into a machine). For that matter, it is also possible for well-meaning social engineers to attempt to do too much, by promoting overly aggressive or one-size-fits-all approaches to energy-climate-environment issues. We have yet to demonstrate that economic prosperity can exist or that development can proceed without the use of fossil fuels, although it seems we must indeed do so in the interest of long-term sustainability. Many minds are currently working on plans for expanding the middle course, but these should not include taking up Phaethon's reins and repeating his mistake.\n\nPaper, even that provided by the Patent Office, lies still for anything to be written on it. Recall the 1880 patent of Daniel Ruggles \"for producing rain fall by conveying and exploding explosive agents within the cloud realm\"; the 1887 patent of J. B. Atwater \"to destroy or disrupt tornadoes\"; the 1892 patent of Laurice Leroy Brown for a tower to transport and detonate explosives automatically for \"aiding rainfall\"; and the patent awarded in 1918 to John Graeme Balsillie for ionizing a volume of air and switching the electrical polarity of clouds, \"by means of suitable ray emanations.\" Not to slight the modern era, recall also the 2003 promise by Earthwise Technologies to clear the air and enhance rainfall in Laredo,  Texas, using patented \"ionization towers.\" Now, are you ready for the \"Welsbach Patent\" to offset global warming? It was granted in 1991 to inventors David B. Chang and I-Fu Shih of Hughes Aircraft Company. Chemtrail conspiracy theorists, suspicious of the U.S. government, are certain that the military is using this technique to seed the lower stratosphere with microscopic particles of aluminum and barium oxide emitted in jet aircraft exhaust. Climate engineers may point out that the early patents were just fantasies, while Welsbach seeding would actually \"work.\" This depends on what you mean by making something \"work\" in more than a narrow technical sense.\n\nEarlier modification plans always were couched in the context of the pressing issues and available technologies of their eras: James Espy wanted to purify the air and make rain for the East Coast, General Robert Dyrenforth set out to solve the problem of drought in the West, and L. Francis Warren hoped to clear airports in the 1920s, while the Russians and Americans vied over militarizing weather and climate control throughout the cold war. In 1971 climatologist Hubert Lamb wrote that the greatest pending climate emergency might be the overuse of the natural water supply in Central Asia and elsewhere. In 1991 Michael MacCracken at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory turned his attention to geoengineering the climate as a response to global warming; that same year, Ralph Cicerone and his colleagues proposed injecting alcane gases (ethane and propane) into the ozone layer as a possible way to heal the damage being caused by chlorine compounds. Each generation, it seemed, has had its own leading issues for investing in technologies of control.\n\nIdeas about fixing the sky are seemingly endless, and wild new ideas arrive daily in my in-box. Recently, an engineer claiming space science credentials proposed to shuttle tanks of liquid nitrogen to high altitudes to chill the air and form high, thick contrail-like clouds\u2014this with no analysis of the energetics of the process, either in producing sufficient quantities of liquid nitrogen (which is energy-intensive), in delivering it to altitude (which is both polluting and energy-intensive), or in understanding the radiative consequences of artificial cirrus haze (which can serve to warm the atmospheric layers beneath it). Ideas about stirring up the deep-ocean column with Mixmasters, laying down gigantic plastic bags of liquefied CO2 on the ocean floor, tilling \"biochar\" charcoal into the soil, blowing bubbles to make the oceans more reflective, or perhaps shooting each individual CO2 molecule into space have all been floated as trial balloons. Just yesterday, my in-box had a proposal to flood the Sahara Desert and the Australian Outback to plant mega-forests of eucalyptus trees. My personal favorite involves supernanotechnolog y of the future and would entail adding tiny \"shock absorbers\" to each carbon\u2013oxygen bond in CO2 molecules. This would serve to keep the  molecular bonds from vibrating and rotating freely, thus preventing properly retrofitted CO2 molecules from acting as strong infrared absorbers and emitters; in lay terms, it would stop them from behaving like greenhouse gases. Imagine the boost to industry and \"American competitiveness\" in developing high-tech and \"green-collar jobs\" to manufacture and install more than 10 such submolecular devices worldwide! Of course this is nonsense, but in the coming years you will see many such proposals to \"fix the sky.\" They will be couched in the language of possibility and will convey a sense of unprecedented urgency. But now you know the precedents, the checkered history of weather and climate control.\n\nIn 2009 I participated in an America's Climate Choices workshop on geoengineering. At the meeting, convened by the National Academy of Sciences at the request of Representative Alan Mollohan (D-West Virginia), the dominant voices were those of scientists and social scientists interested in a full assessment of the possibilities and dangers of geoengineering; influential policymakers were the primary audience. Unlike earlier meetings, advocates for particular technological fixes were not in the ascendant. I consider this an encouraging development as we seek more nuanced perspectives.\n\nIn my presentation, the only one representing the history of science and technology, I pointed out how climate engineers mistakenly claim that they are the \"first generation\" to propose climate control and how commercial and military interests have inevitably influenced what scientists and engineers have considered purely technical issues. Geoengineering, like climate change, involves, quintessentially, socio-technical hybrid issues. As the American Meteorological Society is recommending, any enhanced research on the scientific and technological potential for geoengineering the climate system must be accompanied by a comprehensive study of its historical, ethical, legal, and social implications, an examination that integrates international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational issues and perspectives and includes lessons from past efforts to modify weather and climate. History can provide scholars in other disciplines with detailed studies of past interventions by rainmakers and climate engineers as well as structural analogs from a broad array of treaties and interventions. Only in such a coordinated fashion, in which researchers and policymakers participate openly, can the best options emerge to promote international cooperation, ensure adequate regulation, and avoid the inevitable adverse consequences of rushing forward to fix the sky. I repeated this message in my 2009 testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science and Technology.\n\nIn his _Critique of Pure Reason_ , the philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote: \"The whole interest of my reason ... is concentrated in the three following questions:\n\n1. What can I know?\n\n2. What should I do?\n\n3. What may I hope?\"\n\nThese general questions are of immense theoretical, practical, and moral import. Here we conclude by applying them to weather and climate control.\n\n\u2022 _What can I know?_ We know that climate is nebulous, complex, and unpredictable. We know that it is always changing, on all temporal and spatial scales; and we know few of the turbulent details: what the weather will be next week or if a sudden and disruptive climate change looms in the near or distant future. We know that humans, especially the \"Takers,\" have perturbed the climate system through agriculture, by the burning of fossil fuels, and by the sum total of many additional practices. We do not know the ultimate outcome of all this, but we strongly suspect that it may not be good. We know that weather and climate control has a checkered history, rooted in hubris and populated with charlatans and sincere but misguided scientists; we also know that most plans for weather and climate control were speculative responses to the urgent problems of the day and were based on then-fashionable cutting-edge technologies\u2014cannon, chemicals, electric discharges, airplanes, H-bombs, space probes, computers\u2014with much of it military in origin. We know that those who understand the climate system best are most humbled by its complexity and are among the least likely to claim that they have simple, safe, or cheap ways to \"fix\" it. We also know that many weather and climate engineers thought they were the \"first generation\" to think about these things and, since they faced \"unprecedented\" problems, were somehow exempt from historical precedents. On the contrary, they were critically in need of historical precedents.\n\n\u2022 _What should I do?_ We should all be asking this question and working together to implement the most reasonable, just, and effective answers. My colleagues at the Climate Institute are eloquent supporters of middle course solutions, but they also advocate responsible geoengineering research, while educating and gently correcting the speculators. Some have asked if the risk of geoengineering is worse than the risk of global warming. I think that it just might be, especially if we neglect the historical precedents and cultural implications. We should cultivate a healthy dose of humility, even awe, before the complexities of nature (and human nature). Do not propose simplistic technical solutions to complex socioeconomic problems; do not even propose simplistic socioeconomic solutions. Do not claim credit for unverifiable results. Adopt the Hippocratic prescription for a planetary fever: \"to help, or at least to do no harm.\"  Practice mitigation and adaptation in a pluralistic world with many climes and many cultures. Perhaps as a first ethical approximation, we could follow Kant's categorical imperative: \"Act only on a maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law.\"\n\n\u2022 _What may I hope?_ We can hope that fears and anxieties that freeze us into inaction or that tempt us to do too much might be overcome and that a middle course of climate mitigation and adaptation might emerge\u2014amenable to all, reasonable, practical, equitable, and effective.\nNOTES\n\n#  Introduction\n\n National Academy of Sciences, \"Geoengineering Options.\"\n\n Crutzen, \"Albedo Enhancement.\"\n\n Fleming, \"Global Climate Change and Human Agency.\"\n\n Glacken, _Traces on the Rhodian Shore_ , 501\u2013705; Fleming, _Historical Perspectives on Climate Change_ , 11\u201332.\n\n Fleming, _Meteorology in America_ , 44, 99.\n\n Jordan, \"Art of Pluviculture,\" 81\u201382; Spence, _Rainmakers_.\n\n Ekholm, \"On the Variations of the Climate,\" 61.\n\n Fleming, _Callendar Effect_ , xiii.\n\n Wexler, \"U.N. Symposium.\"\n\n President's Science Advisory Committee, _Restoring the Quality_ , 127; Weart, \"Climate Modification Schemes.\"\n\n Fleming and Jankovic, eds., _Klima_.\n\n Curry, Webster, and Holland, \"Mixing Politics and Science,\" 1035.\n\n Weinberg, \"Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?\"\n\n Emerson, _Conduct of Life_ , 86\u201387.\n\n#  1. Stories of Control\n\n Bulfinch, _Age of Fable_ , 62; Ovid, _Metamorphoses_ , 1.750\u2013779, 2.1\u2013400.\n\n Emanuel, _What We Know About Climate Change_ , 53.\n\n Milton, _Paradise Lost_ , bk. 10, lines 649\u2013650.\n\n Dante, _Divine Comedy: Inferno_ , canto 4, lines 146\u2013148.\n\n Catlin, _North American Indians_ , 1:152\u2013153.\n\n Quinn, _Ishmael_ , 80\u201381.\n\n Verne, _Purchase of the North Pole_ , 143.\n\n Twain, _American Claimant_ , opening section, \"The Weather in This Book.\"\n\n Hahn, _Wreck of the South Pole, or the Great Dissembler_ , 48.\n\n Griffith, _Great Weather Syndicate_ , 6.\n\n Cook, _Eighth Wonder_ , 55\u201356.\n\n Gratacap, _Evacuation of England_ , 54.\n\n Train and Wood, _Man Who Rocked the Earth_ , 11.\n\n England, _Air Trust_ , 17\u201321.\n\n Wilson, \"Rain-Maker,\" 503.\n\n Mergen, _Weather Matters_ , 233.\n\n Roberts, _Jingling in the Wind_ , 3\u20136.\n\n Nash, _Rainmaker_ , 60\u201361.\n\n Quoted in \"From the Footlights,\" n.p.\n\n [McGavin], \"Darren's Theatre Page,\" n.p.\n\n Kael, \"Reviews A\u2013Z,\" s.v. \"The Rainmaker.\"\n\n Liebling, _Just Enough Liebling_ , 283.\n\n Clarke, \"Man-Made Weather,\" 74.\n\n Bellow, _Henderson the Rain King_ , 201.\n\n Vonnegut, _Fates Worse Than Death_ , 26.\n\n Bohren, \"Thermodynamics,\" n.p.\n\n#  2. Rain Makers\n\n Bacon, _Works_ , vol. 8, _Great Instauration_ , 23\u201324.\n\n Ibid., vol. 5, _New Atlantis_ , 399.\n\n Ibid., vol. 8, _New Organon_ , 115.\n\n Fleming, \"Meteorology,\" 184\u2013188.\n\n Butterfield, _Origins of Modern Science_ , viii.\n\n Merchant, _Death of Nature_ , 193.\n\n Cohen, _Revolution in Science_ ; Shapin, _Scientific Revolution_.\n\n Fleming, _Meteorology in America_ , 23\u201354, 66\u201373, 78\u201381, 95\u2013106.\n\n Espy, _Third Report on Meteorology_ , 100.\n\n Espy, _Philosophy of Storms_ , 492\u2013493.\n\n _Congressional Globe_ , 25th Cong., 3d sess., December 18, 1838, 39\u201340.\n\n Quoted in Meyer, _Americans and Their Weather_ , 87.\n\n Espy, _Philosophy of Storms_ , 492.\n\n Quoted in Harrington, \"Weather Making,\" 51\u201352.\n\n Espy, _Second Report on Meteorology_ , 14\u201319.\n\n Quoted in Espy, _Fourth Meteorological Report_ , 35\u201336.\n\n Leslie, \"Rain King,\" 11.\n\n Meyer, _Americans and Their Weather_ , 89.\n\n Hawthorne, \"Hall of Fantasy,\" 204.\n\n Le Maout, _Effets du canon_ , 13.\n\n Quoted in Le Maout, _Lettre \u00e0 M. Tremblay_ , 5.\n\n Le Maout, _Effets du canon_ , 11.\n\n Le Maout, _Encore le canon_ , 13.\n\n \"Caius Marius,\" in _Plutarch_ ' _s Lives_ , 3:220.\n\n Humphreys, _Rain Making,_ 30.\n\n Powers, \"Rain-Making,\" 52.\n\n Stone, \"Rain-Making by Concussion,\" 52.\n\n U.S. House of Representatives, _Production of Rain by Artillery-Firing_ , 5.\n\n Ruggles, \"Method of Precipitating Rainfalls,\" 1; \"Novel Method of Precipitating Rainfalls,\" 342.\n\n Ruggles, _Memorial_ , 1.\n\n Van Bibber, \"Rain Not Produced,\" 405.\n\n \"How About That Patent for Rain-Making?\" _Farm Implement News_ , October 22, 1891, clipping in NOAA Central Library.\n\n Williams, \"Bizarre & Unusual Will of Robert St. George Dyrenforth,\" 12.\n\n Dyrenforth, _Report of the Agent_ , 8\u201310.\n\n _Farm Implement News_ , September 1891, n.p., clipping in NOAA Central Library.\n\n Dyrenforth, _Report of the Agent_ , 16\u201317.\n\n _Farm Implement News_ , September 1891, n.p.\n\n Dyrenforth, _Report of the Agent_ , 25.\n\n Quoted in Hering, \"Weather Control,\" 181\u2013182.\n\n Dyrenforth, _Report of the Agent_ , 32.\n\n \"Government Rainmaking,\" 309\u2013310.\n\n _Scientific American Supplement_ , October 17, 1891, 13160.\n\n Clarke, \"Ode to Pluviculture,\" 260.\n\n Curtis, \"Rain-Making in Texas,\" 594.\n\n Quoted in _Scientific American Supplement_ , October 17, 1891, 13160.\n\n Hering, \"Weather Control,\" 182.\n\n Blake, \"Can We Make It Rain?\" 296\u2013297.\n\n Blake, \"Rain Making,\" 420.\n\n Moore, \"Famine,\" 45\u201346.\n\n \"Another Rain Controller,\" 113.\n\n Harrington, \"Weather Making,\" 47.\n\n Brown, \"Tower and Dynamite Detonator.\"\n\n#  3. Rain Fakers\n\n Hering, _Foibles and Fallacies of Science_ , 240.\n\n Seneca, _Naturales Quaestiones_ , quoted in Frazer, \"Some Popular Superstitions,\" 142.\n\n White, _History of the Warfare_ , 1:323\u2013372.\n\n Arago, _Meteorological Essays_ , 219.\n\n Lomax, _Bells and Bellringers_ , 20.\n\n Arago, _Meteorological Essays_ , 211\u2013213.\n\n Fitzgerald, \"At War with the Clouds,\" 629\u2013636; Hering, \"Weather Control,\" 185.\n\n Cerveny, _Freaks of the Storm_ , 36.\n\n Abbe, \"Hail Shooting in Italy,\" 358.\n\n _Owning the Weather_ (Greene).\n\n Humphreys, _Rain Making_ , 1.\n\n News clipping, undated, Franklin Papers.\n\n Franklin, \"Weather Control,\" 496\u2013497.\n\n Franklin, \"Much-Needed Change of Emphasis,\" 452.\n\n Franklin, \"Weather Control,\" 496\u2013497.\n\n Franklin, \"Weather Prediction and Weather Control,\" 378.\n\n Abbe, \"Cannonade Against Hail Storms,\" 738\u2013739.\n\n Caldwell, \"Some Kansas Rain Makers,\" 309.\n\n Spence, _Rainmakers_ , 52\u201363.\n\n \"Current Notes,\" 192.\n\n \"Kansas All Right Now She Has Ten Rainmaking Outfits Ready for Service,\" _St. Louis Republic_ , April 25, 1894, 12\n\n \"A Successful Rainmaker: How Clayton B. Jewell Coaxes Moisture from Cloudless Skies,\" _Columbus Enquirer-Sun_ , August 12, 1894, 6.\n\n Tate and Tate, _Good Old Days Country Wisdom_ , 95\u201396.\n\n \"Unfortunate Rain-maker,\" 735.\n\n Quoted in T. E. Murtaugh, \"Rainmaker C. M. Hatfield as Seen at Close Range,\" _Los Angeles Examiner_ , March 19, 1904, reprinted in _San Antonio Daily Express_ , April 2, 1905, 8.\n\n Moore, \"Fake Rainmaking,\" 153.\n\n Patterson, \"Hatfield the Rainmaker,\" n.p.\n\n \"Fake Rainmaker,\" 84.\n\n Canada, House of Commons, _Official Report of Debates_ , 562\n\n Tuthill, \"Hatfield the Rainmaker,\" 107\u2013110.\n\n Jenkins, _Wizard of Sun City_ , 5\u20136.\n\n Patterson, \"Hatfield the Rainmaker,\" n.p.; Spence, _Rainmakers_ , 79\u201399.\n\n _Seattle Post Intelligencer_ , July 17, 1920, reprinted in _Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society_ 1 (1920): 80\u201382.\n\n \"Rain Maker Asked to Turn Off Faucets,\" _Wyoming State Tribune_ , May 23, 1921, 2.\n\n \"Rainmaker Makes Hit: Dr. Hatfield Biggest Hero in Italy Today,\" _Morning Oregonian_ , September 2, 1922, 4; \"Rainmaker Fails,\" 591.\n\n Carpenter, \"Alleged Manufacture of Rain,\" 377.\n\n Liebling, _Honest Rainmaker_ , 9.\n\n \"Sykes Sells Sunshine,\" 40; Spence, _Rainmakers_ , 128\u2013131.\n\n Liebling, _Honest Rainmaker_ , 38.\n\n \"Belmont Park to Test Rainmaker's Magic,\" _New York Times_ , September 10, 1930, 23; \"Rainmaker Fails in Test,\" _New York Times_ , September 16, 1930, 11; Liebling, _Honest Rainmaker_ , 47\u201348.\n\n Goodstein, \"Tales in and out of 'Millikan's School,'\" n.p.\n\n Fleming, \"Sverre Petterssen,\" 79.\n\n Petterssen, _Weathering the Storm_ , 181\u2013182.\n\n DuBridge interview.\n\n Roger Hammond to Irving Langmuir, February 3, 1950, copy in Vonnegut Papers.\n\n Willard Haselbach, \"'Rain Maker of the Rockies': History's Biggest Weather Experiment Underway,\" _Denver Post_ , April 22, 1951, 17A.\n\n \"Brief History of Artificial Weather\"; Changnon, \"Paradox of Planned Weather Modification,\" 29.\n\n James Y. Nicol, \"Weather's Miracle Man,\" _Star Weekly Magazine_ , April 6, 1957, 10\u201311.\n\n Kobler, \"Stormy Sage,\" 69\u201370.\n\n Bundgaard and Cale, \"Irving P. Krick.\"\n\n \"Biography,\" Wilhelm Reich Museum, <http:\/\/www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org\/biography.html> (accessed January 20, 2010).\n\n \"Cloudbuster.\"\n\n \"Goodbye Chemtrails.\"\n\n Webb County Commissioners, \"Official Minutes,\" April 14, 2003.\n\n Raul Casso, Webb County, Texas, chief of staff (2003), in Berler, KGNS-TV broadcasts.\n\n Berler, KGNS-TV broadcasts.\n\n Guerra, \"Stormy Weather,\" 6.\n\n McAdie, \"Natural Rain-makers,\" 77.\n\n Carpenter, \"Alleged Manufacture of Rain,\" 376\u2013377.\n\n Jordan, \"Art of Pluviculture.\"\n\n Humphreys, _Rain Making_ , vii.\n\n National Academy of Sciences, _Critical Issues_ , 3\u20134.\n\n Fleming, \"Fixing the Weather\"; Fleming, \"The Pathological History.\"\n\n#  4. Foggy Thinking\n\n McAdie, \"Control of Fog,\" 36.\n\n Shakespeare, _Hamlet_ , act 2, scene 2; Coleridge, _Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ , 12; Doyle, _Study in Scarlet_ , 27.\n\n Abbe, \"Tugrin Fog Dispeller,\" 17.\n\n Williams, _Climate of Great Britain_ , cited in Jankovic, _Reading the Skies_ , 1.\n\n Fleming, _Meteorology in America_ , 26\u201327.\n\n Lodge, \"Electrical Precipitation,\" 34.\n\n Balsillie, \"Process and Apparatus for Causing Precipitation.\"\n\n Bancroft to Warren, August 23, 1920, Bancroft Papers.\n\n Warren to Bancroft, May 21, 1921, Bancroft Papers.\n\n Chaffee, \"Second Report on Dust Charging.\"\n\n Warren to Bancroft, September 19, 1921, Bancroft Papers.\n\n \"Fliers Bring Rain with Electric Sand,\" _New York Times_ , February 12, 1923, 3.\n\n \"Wright Sees Sand Rip Clouds Away,\" _New York Times_ , February 18, 1923, E1.\n\n Smith, \"Dr. Warren\u2014Rain Maker.\"\n\n Warren to Bancroft, July 11, 1922, Bancroft Papers.\n\n Talman, \"Can We Control the Weather?\"\n\n \"Rain-making Not Feasible Says U.S. Weather Bureau,\" U.S. Department of Agriculture press release, March 21, 1923, _New York Tribune_ and _New York Times_ , clippings in Bancroft Papers.\n\n Ibid.\n\n _Cornell Daily Sun_ , March 24, 1923, clipping in Bancroft Papers.\n\n McFadden, \"Is Rainmaking Riddle Solved?\" 30.\n\n Warren, _Facts and Plans_ , 26.\n\n \"Miracle.\"\n\n Warren, _Facts and Plans_ , 7.\n\n \"Dispersal of Clouds Here Accomplished,\" _Hartford Courant_ , June 19, 1926, 1; \"The Rainmaker Comes to Town,\" _Hartford Courant_ , June 20, 1926, D1; \"Rainmaker Successful for 2d Time,\" _Hartford Courant_ , August 25, 1926, 1.\n\n Warren to Bancroft, telegram, June 18, 1926, Bancroft Papers.\n\n \"Rainmaker's Work in City Is Completed,\" _Hartford Courant_ , October 22, 1926, 1.\n\n Warren, _Facts and Plans_ , 17.\n\n Warren to Bancroft, April 7, 1927, May 4, 1928, and February 21, 1929, Bancroft Papers.\n\n Servos, \"Wilder D. Bancroft,\" 4. Spence calls this episode \"scientific,\" but it was not ( _Rainmakers_ , 103\u2013115).\n\n Quoted in Houghton and Radford, \"On the Local Dissipation,\" 5.\n\n Bergeron, \"On the Physics\"; Bergeron, \"Some Autobiographic Notes.\"\n\n Houghton and Radford, \"On the Local Dissipation,\" 13\u201326.\n\n Houghton Papers.\n\n \"Fog Broom,\" n.p.\n\n Bowles and Houghton, \"Method for the Local Dissipation,\" 48\u201351; \"Controlled Weather,\" 205; Wylie, _M.I.T. in Perspective_ , 80\u201381.\n\n Houghton to N. McL. Sage, July 18, 1940, Office of the President, Institute Archives, MIT.\n\n Houghton and Radford, \"On the Local Dissipation,\" 6.\n\n Quoted in Fleming, _Callendar Effect_ , 51.\n\n Humphreys, _Rain Making_ ; Brunt, \"Artificial Dissipation\"; Ogden, \"Fog Dispersal.\"\n\n \"FIDO Conference Program\"; Banks, _Flame over Britain_.\n\n Records of the Petroleum Warfare Department, British National Archives; Banks, _Flame over Britain_.\n\n \"FIDO Conference Program.\"\n\n Banks, _Flame over Britain_ , 148\u2013150.\n\n Williams, _Flying Through Fire_ , 20.\n\n Banks, _Flame over Britain_.\n\n Clarke, \"Man-Made Weather,\" 188.\n\n Ogden, \"Fog Dispersal,\" 34.\n\n Fleming, _Callendar Effect_ , 56\u201359.\n\n Ibid., 59\u201360.\n\n Ibid., 60; Ogden, \"Fog Dispersal,\" 38.\n\n Gregg, \"Address at the Dedication Ceremonies.\"\n\n \"U.S. Weather Chief Hails Achievement of Air Conditioning,\" _Chicago Tribune_ , July 12, 1934, 4.\n\n Devereaux, \"Meteorological Service of the Future,\" 217.\n\n Mindling, \"Raymete and the Future.\"\n\n Devereaux, \"Meteorological Service of the Future,\" 218.\n\n#  5. Pathological Science\n\n Rosenfeld, _Quintessence of Irving Langmuir_ ; Suits and Martin, \"Irving Langmuir\"; Fleming, \"Pathological History,\" 8\u201312.\n\n Langmuir, \"Pathological Science.\"\n\n Fleagle, \"Second Opinions,\" 100.\n\n Quoted in Langmuir, \"Pathological Science,\" 11\u201312.\n\n Associated Press, \"Panel Finds Misconduct by Controversial Fusion Scientist,\" July 18, 2008, <http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/story\/2008\/07\/18\/fusion-misconduct.html>.\n\n Schaefer, autobiography, chap. 6, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Langmuir, \"Growth of Particles,\" 167\u2013174; Smoke Generation (1940\u20131947), Schaefer Papers.\n\n Schaefer interview; Schaefer to C. Guy Suits, October 10, 1946, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Lambright, _Weather Modification_.\n\n Gathman, \"Method of Producing Rainfall,\" 1; Gathman, _Rain Produced at Will_ , 27\u201328.\n\n Sanford, \"Rain-Making,\" 490\u2013491.\n\n \"Who Owns the Clouds?\" 43.\n\n McAdie, \"Natural Rain-makers,\" 80.\n\n \"Clouds Sprayed,\" 418.\n\n Grunow, \"Der K\u00fcnstliche Regen,\" 602.\n\n Veraart, _Meer zonneschijn_.\n\n Quoted in Kramer and Rigby, \"Selective and Annotated Bibliography,\" 191\u2013192.\n\n Byers, \"History of Weather Modification,\" 5\u20136.\n\n Schaefer Laboratory Notebook, July 12, 1946, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Schaefer interview.\n\n Langmuir Laboratory Notebook, July 1946, Langmuir Papers.\n\n Schaefer interview.\n\n Schaefer Laboratory Notebook, July 31, 1946, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Schaefer to Suits, October 10, 1946, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Croy, \"Rainmakers,\" 214.\n\n Press release, November 13, 1946, GE Archives.\n\n \"Scientist Creates Real Snowflakes,\" _New York Times_ , November 14, 1946, 33.\n\n Press release, November 13, 1946, GE Archives; Schaefer, \"Production of Ice Crystals\"; Byers, \"History of Weather Modification.\"\n\n Schaefer Laboratory Notebook, November 13, 1946, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Suits to V. H. Fraenckel, November 13, 1946, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Press release, November 14, 1946, GE Archives.\n\n _New York Times_ , November 15, 1946, 24; _Boston Globe_ , November 15, 1946, 1.\n\n Schaefer Papers.\n\n General Electric Corporation, _56th Annual Report_ , 27.\n\n Fleming, \"Fixing the Weather,\" 177.\n\n Goldstein to GE, November 18, 1946, copy in Schaefer Papers.\n\n Goldston, \"Legal Entanglements\"; Langmuir, \"Summary of Results.\"\n\n Havens, \"History of Project Cirrus,\" 13.\n\n \"Interim Report.\"\n\n \"Project Cirrus\" (1952), 13.\n\n \"Law Asked to Bar Suits Against the Rainmakers,\" _New York Times_ , January 13, 1949, 25.\n\n \"Many Legal Entanglements.\"\n\n \"Project Cirrus\" (1950), 287.\n\n Schaefer interview; Droessler, \"Federal Government Activities,\" 253.\n\n Doubleday, \"Air Force Activities\"; Byers, \"History of Weather Modification,\" 16\u201317.\n\n News clippings, including _New York Times_ , October 12, 1947, 24; _Albany Times-Union_ , October 12, 1947, n.p.; _Christian Science Monitor_ , October 14, 1947, 10; _Los Angeles Times_ , October 14, 1947, 1, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Larry Murray, \"Hurricane Study Only Begun, Says Schaefer,\" October 17, 1947, clipping in Schaefer Papers.\n\n Langmuir, \"Growth of Particles,\" 183\u2013185.\n\n Enders to Suits, November 13, 1947, with clipping enclosed, \"Dry Ice and a Crazy Hurricane,\" Schaefer Papers.\n\n Schaefer, \"Preliminary Report.\"\n\n Langmuir, \"Growth of Particles,\" 185.\n\n Richard Gray, \"U.S. Government Aims to Tame Hurricanes,\" _Daily Telegraph_ , August 2, 2008, <http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk>.\n\n Vonnegut, \"Nucleation of Ice,\" 593\u2013595.\n\n Vonnegut interview.\n\n Vonnegut Laboratory Notebook, November 1946, Vonnegut Papers.\n\n Vonnegut interview.\n\n Press release, October 21, 1947, GE Archives.\n\n Vonnegut interview.\n\n Havens, Juisto, and Vonnegut, _Early History_.\n\n Vonnegut interview.\n\n Langmuir, \"Report on Evaluation,\" 23.\n\n Petterssen, _Weathering the Storm_ , 293\u2013294.\n\n Langmuir, \"Seven Day Periodicity\"; Brier, \"7-Day Periodicities.\"\n\n Suits to Langmuir, August 26, 1949, copy in Vonnegut Papers.\n\n Press release, January 2, 1950, GE Archives.\n\n Langmuir, \"Abstract of Remarks, Oct. 1950,\" GE Archives.\n\n Hosler, \"Weather Modification\"; Steinberg, _Slide Mountain_ , 106\u2013134, 191\u2013194.\n\n Langmuir, note card, \"TV Aug. 24, 8:33 am, Dave Garroway, Today,\" after 1953, Langmuir Papers.\n\n \"Review of Savannah Hurricane.\"\n\n \"Rain Making Ineffective,\" 375; Reichelderfer, \"Letter,\" 38.\n\n \"Scientist Would Move Rain Tests to South Pacific,\" _Albuquerque Tribune_ , April 29, 1955, 50, clipping in Schaefer Papers.\n\n Langmuir, \"Report on Evaluation,\" 23.\n\n \"Scientist Would Move Rain Tests,\" 50.\n\n Langmuir, \"Production of Rain\"; Langmuir, \"Report on Evaluation,\" 23; \"Langmuir Predicts Hurricane Prevention,\" _Washington Post_ , August 25, 1955, 2.\n\n Elliott, \"Experience of the Private Sector\"; \"City Flip-Flop on Rainmaking,\" _Daily News_ , November 5, 1951, clipping in Schaefer Papers; Landsberg, \"Memorandum for the Record.\"\n\n _Science of Superstorms_ (British Broadcasting Corporation).\n\n Ibid _.,_ cited in Richard Gray, \"How We Made the Chernobyl Rain,\" _Sunday Telegraph_ , April 22, 2007, n.p.\n\n _Science of Superstorms_ (British Broadcasting Corporation).\n\n Ibid.\n\n#  6. Weather Warriors\n\n _Owning the Weather_ (Greene).\n\n Stephan Farris, \"Ice Free,\" _New York Times_ , July 27, 2008, MM 20.\n\n Fuller, _Weather and War_ ; Fuller, _Thor_ ' _s Legions_.\n\n Fleming, \"Sverre Petterssen,\" 75\u201383.\n\n Polybius, _Universal History_ , bk. 8; Rossi, _Birth of Modern Science_.\n\n Hacker, \"Military Patronage\"; Mendelsohn, \"Science, Scientists.\"\n\n McNeill, _Pursuit of Power_ ; Fleming, \"Distorted Support.\"\n\n Gillispie, _Science and Polity_.\n\n U.S. Army Medical Department, \"Regulations,\" 227.\n\n Fleming, \"Storms, Strikes, and Sur veillance\"; see also Whitnah, _History of the United States Weather Bureau_ , 22\u201342; and Hawes, \"Signal Corps.\"\n\n Bates and Fuller, _America_ ' _s Weather Warriors_ , 16\u201326; Fleming, \"Distorted Support,\" 51\u201353.\n\n Fleming, \"Fixing the Weather and Climate,\" 176.\n\n Ibid., 175\u2013176.\n\n Teller, _Memoirs_ , 253.\n\n Simpson and Simpson, \"Why Experiment?\"; news clippings in Schaefer Papers.\n\n \"Weather Control Called 'Weapon,'\" _New York Times_ , December 10, 1950, 68.\n\n Suits, \"Statement on Weather Control.\"\n\n V. H. Fraenckel to C. Guy Suits, telegram, 1947; W. H. Milton Jr. to C. Guy Suits, September 2, 1947, Schaefer Papers.\n\n R. E. Evans to Vincent Schaefer, December 10, 1947, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Vincent Schaefer to C. J. Brasefield, May 4, 1948; Vincent Schaefer to Michael J. Ference Jr., May 13, 1948, and reply May 14, 1948, Schaefer Papers.\n\n Kobler, \"Stormy Sage,\" 70.\n\n Byers, \"History of Weather Modification,\" 13.\n\n Petterssen, _Weathering the Storm_ , 295.\n\n Droessler, _Federal Government Activities_ , 254.\n\n Byers, \"History of Weather Modification,\" 25\u201327.\n\n Petterssen, _Cloud and Weather Modification_.\n\n Act of Congress, August 13, 1953 (67 Stat. 559), as amended July 9, 1956 (70 Stat. 509); U.S. Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, _Weather Modification_.\n\n Orville, \"Weather Made to Order?\" 26.\n\n Nate Haseltine, \"Cold War May Spawn Weather-Control Race,\" _Washington Post and Times Herald_ , December 23, 1957, A1.\n\n Quoted in \"Weather Weapon,\" 54.\n\n Fedorov, \"Modification of Meteorological Processes,\" 391.\n\n Quoted in Arthur Krock, \"An Inexpensive Start at Controlling the Weather,\" _New York Times_ , March 23, 1961, 32.\n\n U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, \"Hurricane Research Division History\"; Willoughby et al., \"Project STORMFURY.\"\n\n Gentry, \"Hurricane Modification,\" 497.\n\n U.S. Navy, \"Technical Area Plan,\" 1.\n\n Simpson interview.\n\n _Science of Superstorms_ (British Broadcasting Corporation).\n\n Simpson interview; MacDonald, \"Statement\"; Fleming, \"Distorted Support.\"\n\n Jack Anderson, \"Air Force Turns Rainmaker in Laos,\" _Washington Post_ , March 18, 1971), F7; Seymour M. Hersh, \"Rainmaking Is Used as a Weapon by U.S.,\" _New York Times_ , July 3, 1972, 1.\n\n Cobb et al., _Project Popeye_.\n\n _Science of Superstorms_ (British Broadcasting Corporation).\n\n Fleming, \"Pathological History,\" 13.\n\n Fuller, _Air Weather Service Support_ , 30\u201332.\n\n \"Motorpool.\"\n\n Shapley, \"Weather Warfare,\" 1059\u20131061; Westmoreland, _Soldier Reports_ , 342.\n\n Appleman et al., _Fourth Annual Survey Report_.\n\n Chary, _History of Air Weather Service Weather Modification_ , abstract.\n\n National Academy of Sciences, _Weather and Climate Modification_ , 24.\n\n Fleming, \"Pathological History,\" 13.\n\n \"Dienbienphu Push Renewed by Reds,\" _New York Times_ , April 23, 1954, 2.\n\n _Contributions to the History of Dien Bien Phu_ , 201.\n\n Doel and Harper, \"Prometheus Unleashed.\"\n\n _Science of Superstorms_ (British Broadcasting Corporation).\n\n Handler to Pell, July 25, 1972, in U.S. Senate, _Prohibiting Military Weather Modification_ , 153.\n\n Quoted in U.S. House of Representatives, _Prohibition of Weather Modification_ , 5; Munk, Oreskes, and Muller, \"Gordon James Fraser MacDonald.\"\n\n \"Hearing on Senate Resolution 281\"; _Congressional Record_ , July 11, 1973, 233303\u20135.\n\n Seymour M. Hersh, \"U.S. Admits Rain-Making from '67 to '72 in Indochina,\" _New York Times_ , May 19, 1974, 1; U.S. House of Representatives, _Weather Modification as a Weapon_.\n\n Gromyko to United Nations secretary-general, August 7, 1974, in U.S. House of Representatives, _Weather Modification as a Weapon_ , 11\u201312.\n\n U.S. House of Representatives, _Weather Modification as a Weapon_ , 510\u2013513; Juda, \"Negotiating a Treaty,\" 28.\n\n United Nations, \"Convention on the Prohibition.\"\n\n United Nations, _Multilateral Treaties Deposited_ , 667.\n\n Goldblat, \"Environmental Convention,\" 57.\n\n _Owning the Weather_ (Greene).\n\n Chamorro and Hammond, _Addressing Environmental Modification_.\n\n United Nations, _Multilateral Treaties Deposited_ , 667.\n\n Conway, \"World According to GARP,\" 131\u2013147.\n\n Marshall, \"Greening of the National Labs,\" 25.\n\n Stapler, \"New Face of the Pacific,\" n.p.\n\n Cohen, \"DoD News Briefing,\" n.p.\n\n#  7. Fears, Fantasies, and Possibilities of Control\n\n Tuan, _Landscapes of Fear_ , 6.\n\n von Neumann, \"Can We Survive Technology?\"\n\n Harper, _Weather by the Numbers_ ; see also Phillips, \"General Circulation\"; Smagorinsky, \"Beginnings of Numerical\"; Thompson, \"History of Numerical\"; and Nebeker, _Calculating the Weather_.\n\n Zworykin, \"Outline of Weather Proposal,\" 8.\n\n von Neumann to Zworykin, October 24, 1945, in Zworykin, \"Outline of Weather Proposal.\"\n\n Athelstan F. Spilhaus, \"Comments on Weather Proposal,\" November 6, 1945, in Zworykin, \"Outline of Weather Proposal.\"\n\n Waldemar Kaempffert, \"Julian Huxley Pictures the More Spectacular Possibilities That Lie in Atomic Power,\" _New York Times_ , December 9, 1945, 77; \"Blasting Polar Ice,\" _New York Times_ , February 2, 1946, 11.\n\n \"Sarnoff Predicts Weather Control and Delivery of the Mail by Radio,\" _New York Times_ , October 1, 1946, 1.\n\n \"Talk of the Town,\" _New Yorker_ , October 12, 1946, 23.\n\n . MacCracken, \"On the Possible Use of Geoengineering.\"\n\n \"Storm Prevention Seen by Scientist,\" _New York Times_ , January 31, 1947, 16.\n\n \"Weather to Order,\" _New York Times_ , February 1, 1947, 14.\n\n Wexler, \"Trip Report\u2014Princeton, N.J., Oct. 14\u201315, 1946,\" box 2, Wexler Papers.\n\n Harald Sverdrup to Francis Reichelderfer, June 2, 1946, box 2, Wexler Papers.\n\n \"$28,000,000 Urged to Support M.I.T.,\" _New York Times_ , June 15, 1947, 46.\n\n Mann, \"War Against Hail,\" 8.\n\n Hoffman, \"Controlling Hurricanes\"; see also Hoffman, \"Controlling the Global Weather\"; and Hoffman, Leidner, and Henderson, \"Controlling the Global Weather.\"\n\n Shachtman, \"NASA Funds Sci-Fi Technology.\"\n\n Quoted in Hoffman, Leidner, and Henderson, \"Controlling the Global Weather,\" 1.\n\n _Science of Superstorms_ (British Broadcasting Corporation).\n\n _Owning the Weather_ (Rosen).\n\n Mark Schleifstein, \"Bill Gates of Microsoft Envisions Fighting Hurricanes by Manipulating the Sea,\" _Times-Picayune_ , July 15, 2009, <http:\/\/www.nola.com>.\n\n Lenin, _Materialism_.\n\n Burke, \"Influence of Man,\" 1036, 1049\u20131050.\n\n Zikeev and Doumani, _Weather Modification_.\n\n Markin, _Soviet Electric Power_ , 133.\n\n Rusin and Flit, _Man versus Climate_ , 174.\n\n Rusin and Flit, _Methods of Climate Control_ , 2.\n\n Adabashev, _Global Engineering_ , 161.\n\n Shaler, \"How to Change,\" 728\u2013729.\n\n Riker, _Conspectus of Power_.\n\n Borisov, \"Radical Improvement of Climate.\"\n\n Quoted in Adabashev, _Global Engineering_ , 192.\n\n Borisov, _Can We Control the Arctic Climate?_ 6\u20137.\n\n Takano and Higuchi, \"Numerical Experiment.\"\n\n Rusin and Flit, _Methods of Climate Control_ , 25.\n\n Gaskell, _Gulf Stream_ , 152.\n\n Rusin and Flit, _Methods of Climate Control_ , 26.\n\n Mackenzie, _Flooding of the Sahara_ , 285.\n\n \"Algerian Inland Sea.\"\n\n Verne, _L'Invasion de la mer_.\n\n G. A. Thompson, \"Proposes to Turn Sahara into a Sea,\" _New York Times_ , October 15, 1911, C1; Thompson, \"Plan for Converting the Sahara.\"\n\n Gall, _Das Atlantropa-Projekt_ ; Voigt, _Atlantropa_.\n\n Johnson, \"Climate Control.\"\n\n U.S. Army Air Forces, \"Memorandum Report\"; Oberth, _Die Rakete_ ; Oberth, _Wege zur Raumschiffahrt_.\n\n \"Space Mirror.\"\n\n U.S. Army Air Forces, \"Memorandum Report.\"\n\n \"Space Mirror.\"\n\n Humphreys, \"Volcanic Dust\"; Humphreys, _Physics of the Air_.\n\n Hoyle and Lyttleton, \"Effect of Interstellar Matter\"; Krook, \"Interstellar Matter.\"\n\n Rusin and Flit, _Man versus Climate_ , 60\u201363.\n\n Bruno, \"Bequest of the Nuclear Battlefield,\" 259.\n\n \"Text of Johnson's Statement on Status of Nation's Defenses and Race for Space,\" _New York Times_ , January 8, 1958, 10.\n\n Fleming, \"What Counts as Knowledge?\"\n\n Walter Sullivan, \"Called 'Greatest Experiment,'\" _New York Times_ , March 19, 1959, 1; Christofilos, \"Argus Experiment,\" 869.\n\n _New Yorker_ , May 26, 1962, 31.\n\n Rodin and Hess, \"Weather Modification.\"\n\n Lovell and Ryle, \"Interference to Radio Astronomy.\"\n\n Kellogg, \"Review of Saturn High Water Experiment,\" 1.\n\n Wexler, \"On the Possibilities of Climate Control,\" 1.\n\n Kennedy, \"Address to the United Nations,\" n.p.\n\n United Nations, \"International Co-operation in the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.\"\n\n Wexler Papers; Yalda, \"Harry Wexler.\"\n\n U.S. Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit, \"Facts Sheet\"; Washington, \"Computer Modeling.\"\n\n Price and Pales, \"Mauna Loa Observatory.\"\n\n European Space Agency, \"Harry Wexler.\"\n\n Wexler, \"Modifying Weather on a Large Scale,\" 1059.\n\n Wexler, \"On the Possibilities of Climate Control.\"\n\n Wexler, \"Further Justification for the General Circulation,\" 1; see also Fleming, _Callendar Effect_.\n\n Robert C. Cowen, \"Space Fuel: Weather Maker?\" _Christian Science Monitor_ , January 17, 1962, 5; Sumner Barton, \"Space Taint Could Twist Weather,\" _Boston Globe_ , January 21, 1962, A5.\n\n Wexler, \"On the Possibilities of Climate Control,\" 1.\n\n Wexler, \"Further Justification for the General Circulation,\" 1.\n\n Wexler, \"On the Possibilities of Climate Control,\" table 1.\n\n Wexler, \"Further Justification for the General Circulation,\" 2.\n\n Chapman, \"Gases of the Atmosphere,\" 133.\n\n Wexler, \"Deozonizer\" memorandum.\n\n Malkin to Wexler, November 22, 1961, Wexler Papers.\n\n Manabe and M\u00f6ller, \"On the Radiative Equilibrium.\"\n\n Wulf to Wexler, December 15, 1961, Wexler Papers.\n\n Wulf to Wexler, January 2, 1962, Wexler Papers.\n\n Wexler to Wulf, January 5, 1962, Wexler Papers.\n\n Wexler to Wulf, telephone call notes, December 20, 1961, Wexler Papers.\n\n Crutzen, \"Influence of Nitrogen Oxides\"; Molina and Rowland, \"Stratospheric Sink.\"\n\n C. N. Touart to Wexler, January 11, 1962, Wexler Papers.\n\n Wexler to Touart, January 19, 1962, Wexler Papers.\n\n Wexler, \"U.N. Symposium,\" 2.\n\n#  8. The Climate Engineers\n\n Philip Shabecoff, \"Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate,\" _New York Times_ , June 24, 1988, 1.\n\n _Changing Atmosphere_ , 292.\n\n Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, \"IPCC History\"; Bolin, _History of the Science and Politics_.\n\n United Nations, \"Framework Convention on Climate Change.\"\n\n MacCracken, \"Working Toward International Agreement.\"\n\n Hansen, \"Tipping Point?\" n.p.\n\n Lovelock, _Revenge of Gaia_.\n\n Schelling, \"Economic Diplomacy,\" 303.\n\n _Urban Dictionary_ , s.v. \"geoengineering,\" <http:\/\/www.urbandictionary.com>.\n\n Lovelock, _Vanishing Face of Gaia_ , 139; Ruddiman, _Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum_.\n\n _Oxford English Dictionary_ , s.v. \"engineer.\"\n\n \"OUP Blog.\"\n\n Royal Society of London, _Geoengineering_ , 77.\n\n Keith, \"Engineering the Earth System.\"\n\n Keith, \"Geoengineering the Climate,\" 269.\n\n Broecker, _Fossil Fuel CO_ _2_ , cover illustration.\n\n Fogg, _Terraforming_.\n\n Quoted in \"Terraforming Information Pages.\"\n\n Glacken, _Traces on the Rhodian Shore_ , 415\u2013426, 672\u2013681.\n\n For example, Keith and Dowlatabadi, \"Serious Look at Geoengineering\"; Flannery et al., \"Geoengineering Climate\"; and Teller, Wood, and Hyde, \"Global Warming and Ice Ages.\"\n\n Blackstock et al., _Climate Engineering Responses_ , v.\n\n Just such a scenario is in Dyer, _Climate Wars_ , 190\u2013193.\n\n Robock, \"20 Reasons,\" 17\u201318\n\n Robock, \"Need for Organized Research.\"\n\n Luginbuhl, Walker, and Wainscoat, \"Lighting and Astronomy.\"\n\n Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, \"Potential of Geo-engineering Solutions,\" paragraph 2.13.\n\n An interesting article on ethics, but with no mention of geoengineering, is Gardiner, \"Ethics and Global Climate Change.\" The work of philosophers Dale Jamieson and  Martin Bunzl also comes to mind. I was personally involved in sessions on geoengineering history, ethics, and policy at the American Geophysical Union (2005), at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), and elsewhere, but I would suggest that more work on this subject is essential.\n\n [Gavin Schmidt], \"Geo-engineering in Vogue ...,\" n.p.\n\n Ward, \"How Far Can Man Control His Climate?\"\n\n Danko, \"Budyko,\" 179\u2013180; Gal'tsov, \"Conference on Problems of Climate Control\"; Budyko, \"Heat Balance of the Earth.\"\n\n Shvets, \"Control of Climate Through Stratospheric Dusting.\"\n\n Black and Tarmy, \"Use of Asphalt Coatings,\" 557.\n\n Dessens, \"Man-made Tornadoes,\" 13.\n\n Eichhorn, _Implications of Rising Carbon Dioxide_ , 14; Fleming, \"Gilbert N. Plass.\"\n\n MacDonald, \"How to Wreck the Environment\"; Munk, Oreskes, and Muller, \"Gordon James Fraser MacDonald.\"\n\n President's Science Advisory Committee, _Restoring the Quality of Our Environment_.\n\n Fletcher, _Changing Climate_ , 20.\n\n Fletcher, _Managing Climatic Resources_ , 2.\n\n Yudin, \"Possibilities for Influencing.\"\n\n Fletcher, _Managing Climatic Resources_ , 18.\n\n Budyko, _Climatic Changes_ , 236.\n\n Kellogg and Schneider, \"Climate Stabilization,\" 1165.\n\n Santer et al., \"Towards the Detection and Attribution.\"\n\n Kellogg and Schneider, \"Climate Stabilization,\" 1171.\n\n Marchetti, \"On Geoengineering.\"\n\n National Academy of Sciences, _Energy and Climate_.\n\n Dyson, \"Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide?\"; Dyson and Marland, \"Technical Fixes\"; \"Question of Global Warming.\"\n\n Schelling, \"Climatic Change,\" 469.\n\n Turco et al., \"Nuclear Winter\"; Badash, _Nuclear Winter's Tale_.\n\n Penner, Schneider, and Kennedy, \"Active Measures.\"\n\n Early, \"Space-Based Solar Shield.\"\n\n Tyson, \"Five Points of Lagrange,\" n.p.\n\n National Academy of Sciences, _Policy Implications_ , 657.\n\n Stix, \"Removal of Chlorofluorocarbons.\"\n\n Dan Fagin, \"Tinkering with the Environment,\" _Newsday_ , April 13, 1992, 7.\n\n Nordhaus, \"Optimal Transition Path,\" 1317\u20131318.\n\n Schneider, \"Earth Systems Engineering,\" 418.\n\n Summers, \"Memo,\" n.p.\n\n Quoted in ibid.\n\n Nordhaus, \"Challenge of Global Warming,\" n.p.\n\n Fagin, \"Tinkering with the Environment,\" 7.\n\n National Academy of Sciences, _Policy Implications_ , 451\u2013452.\n\n I thank Gregory Cushman for illuminating discussions on tropospheric pollution caused by cannon fire.\n\n Blackstock et al., _Climate Engineering Responses_ , 47.\n\n The quote is widely cited and is based on Martin and Fitzwater, \"Iron Deficiency,\" 341\u2013343.\n\n Martin, \"Glacial\u2013Interglacial CO2 Change\"; Martin, Gordon, and Fitzwater, \"Case for Iron.\"\n\n Buesseler et al., \"Ocean Iron Fertilization\"; quoted at Woods Hole ocean engineering meeting, September 2007.\n\n _Oceanus_.\n\n King, \"Can Adding Iron?\" 134.\n\n Lackner, \"Capture.\"\n\n Keith, \"Why Capture?\"\n\n Lackner, \"Submission.\" I thank my colleague Thomas Shattuck for an enlightening discussion of chemical energetics.\n\n Broecker, _Fossil Fuel CO_ _2_ , fig. 59.\n\n Brown, _Challenge of Man_ ' _s Future_ , 142, quoted in Broecker and Kunzig, _Fixing Climate_ , 228.\n\n Schwartz and Randall, \"Abrupt Climate Change,\" n.p.\n\n \"Russian Scientist Suggests Burning Sulfur in Stratosphere to Fight Global Warming,\" _MosNews_ , November 30, 2005, n.p.\n\n Crutzen, \"Albedo Enhancement.\"\n\n Budyko, _Climatic Changes_ , 241.\n\n Crutzen, \"Albedo Enhancement,\" 212.\n\n U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, _Workshop Report_ ; Kintisch, \"Tinkering\"; Kintisch, \"Giving Climate Change a Kick.\"\n\n Cicerone, \"Geoengineering,\" 221.\n\n \"No Quick or Easy Technological Fix\"; compare with \"Five Ways to Save the World.\"\n\n Izrael et al., \"Field Experiment,\" 265.\n\n Budyko, \"Global Climate Warming,\" n.p.\n\n Wood, \"Stabilizing Changing Climate.\"\n\n Cohn, \"Sex and Death,\" 717\u2013718.\n\n Launder and Thompson, eds., \"Geoscale Engineering.\"\n\n Schneider, \"Geoengineering\" (2008).\n\n Lovelock, \"Geophysiologist's Thoughts,\" quoted in \"Medicine for a Feverish Planet: Kill or Cure?\" _Guardian_ , September 1, 2008.\n\n Lovelock and Rapley, \"Ocean Pipes,\" 403.\n\n Vince, \"One Last Chance.\"\n\n Hawthorne, \"Great Carbuncle,\" 128.\n\n Lampitt et al., \"Ocean Fertilization\"; Smetacek and Naqvi, \"Next Generation.\"\n\n Latham et al., \"Global Temperature Stabilization\"; Salter, Sortino, and Latham, \"Sea-going Hardware.\"\n\n Caldeira and Wood, \"Global and Arctic Climate Engineering\"; Robock, Oman, and Stenchikov, \"Regional Climate Responses.\"\n\n Rasch et al., \"Overview of Geoengineering\"; Tilmes, M\u00fcller, and Salawitch, \"Sensitivity of Polar Ozone Depletion,\" 1201.\n\n U.S. House of Representatives, _Geoengineering_.\n\n Royal Society of London, _Geoengineering_ , ix.\n\n Royal Academy of Engineering, \"Submission.\"\n\n Cotton, \"Weather and Climate Engineering ,\" 1.1.\n\n Walker and King, _Hot Topic_ ; Pacala and Socolow, \"Stabilization Wedges.\"\n\n Bulfinch, _Age of Fable_ , 63.\n\n Chang and Shih, \"Stratospheric Welsbach Seeding.\"\n\n Lamb, \"Climate-Engineering Schemes\"; MacCracken, \"Geoengineering the Climate\"; Cicerone, Elliott, and Turco, \"Reduced Antarctic Ozone Depletion\"; Cicerone, Elliott, and Turco, \"Global Environmental Engineering.\"\n\n American Meteorological Society, \"Policy Statement on Geoengineering\"; U.S. House of Representatives, _Geoengineering_.\n\n Kant, _Critique of Pure Reason_ , 690.\n\n MacCracken, \"Beyond Mitigation.\"\n\n Kant, _Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals_ , xvii.\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\n#  Archival and Manuscript Collections\n\nBancroft, Wilder D. 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Draft remarks in Wexler Papers, box 14.\n\nWhite, Andrew Dickson. _A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom_. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1896.\n\nWhitnah, Donald R. _A History of the United States Weather Bureau_. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961.\n\n\"Who Owns the Clouds?\" _Stanford Law Review_ 1 (1948): 43\u201363.\n\nWilliams, Geoffrey. _Flying Through Fire: FIDO\u2014The Fogbuster of World War Two_. Stroud: Sutton, 1995.\n\nWilliams, John. _The Climate of Great Britain: Or Remarks on the Change It Has Undergone, Particularly Within the Last Fifty Years_. London: Baldwin, 1806.\n\nWilliams, Paul K. \"The Bizarre & Unusual Will of Robert St. George Dyrenforth.\" Scenes from the Past. _InTowner_ , April 2005, 12. <http:\/\/www.washingtonhistory.com\/ScenesPast\/index.html>.\n\nWilliamson, Jack. _Terraforming Earth_. New York: Tor, 2001.\n\nWilloughby, H. E., D. P Jorgensen, R. A. Black, and S. L. Rosenthal. \"Project STORMFURY: A Scientific Chronicle, 1962\u20131983.\" _Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society_ 66 (1985): 505\u2013514.\n\nWilson, Margaret Adelaide. \"The Rain-Maker.\" _Scribner_ ' _s Magazine_ , April 1917, 503\u2013509.\n\nWood, Lowell. \"Stabilizing Changing Climate via Stratosphere-Based Albedo Modulation.\" PowerPoint presentation at NASA-Ames\u2013CIW Workshop on Managing Solar Radiation, 2006.\n\nWylie, Francis E. _M.I.T. in Perspective: A Pictorial History_. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975.\n\nYalda, Sepideh. \"Harry Wexler.\" In _Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography_ , 25:273\u2013276. Detroit: Scribner\/Thomson Gale, 2007.\n\nYudin, M. I. \"The Possibilities for Influencing Large-Scale Atmospheric Processes.\" _Contemporary Problems in Climatology_ (1966). Translated by Foreign Technology Division, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, 1967.\n\nZikeev, Nikolay T., and George A. Doumani, comps. _Weather Modification in the Soviet Union, 1946\u20131966: A Selected Annotated Bibliography_. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, Science and Technology Division, 1967.\n\nZubrin, Robert. _The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must_. New York: Free Press, 1996.\n\nZworykin, Vladimir K. \"Outline of Weather Proposal.\" RCA Laboratories, Princeton, N.J., October 1945. Copy in Wexler Papers, box 18. [Reproduced in _History of Meteorology_ 4 (2008): 57\u201378]\nINDEX\n\nNumbers in italics refer to pages on which illustrations appear.\n\n##\n\nA. R. Company\n\nAbbe, Cleveland\n\nAberdeen Proving Ground\n\nAbipones (South American Indians)\n\nAccademia del Cimento\n\nACN. _See_ Artificial Cloud Nucleation\n\nACWC. _See_ Advisory Committee on Weather Control\n\nAdabashev, I.\n\nadaptation\n\nAdvisory Committee on Weather Control (ACWC)\n\n_Aeneid_ (Virgil)\n\nAeolus (storm god)\n\naerial explosions\n\nAfrica\n\nAgent Orange\n\nair-conditioning\n\n_Air Trust, The_ (England)\n\nAitken, John\n\nAitken nuclei\n\nalbedo, enhancement of\n\nalcane gases\n\nAllaby, Michael\n\nAllen, Woody\n\nAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences\n\n_American Claimant, The_ (Twain)\n\nAmerican Geophysical Union, Upper-Atmosphere Committee\n\n_American Meteorological Journal_\n\nAmerican Meteorological Society; _Bulletin_ ; Krick and; policy statement of, on geoengineering\n\nAmerican Philosophical Society\n\nAmerica's Climate Choices\n\nAnderson, Clinton P.\n\nAnderson, Jack\n\n_Andromeda Strain, The_ (film)\n\nAntarctic\n\nanthropogenic: forcing; greenhouse warming\n\nArago, Fran\u00e7ois\n\nArchimedean leverage\n\nArctic\n\nArgonne National Laboratory\n\n_Argosy_ (magazine)\n\nAristotle\n\nArnold, H. H.\n\nArrhenius, Svante\n\nArtaxerxes I (king of Persia)\n\nArtificial Cloud Nucleation (ACN), Ad Hoc Committee on\n\nartificial volcanoes\n\nAsilomar\n\nAtkinson, Jayne\n\nAtlantropa Project\n\nAtmospheric and Environmental Research\n\nAtwater, J. B.\n\naviation\n\n##\n\nBacon, Francis\n\nballoons\n\nBalsillie, John Graeme\n\nBancroft, Wilder D.\n\nBane, T. H.\n\nBanks, Donald\n\nBattle of the Bulge\n\nBell, G. H.\n\nBellow, Saul\n\nbell ringing\n\nBennett, Donald C.\n\nBerchoff, Don\n\nBergen School\n\nBergeron, Tor\n\nBerler, Richard\n\nbiochar\n\nbiosphere\n\nBjerknes, Vilhelm\n\nBlack, James\n\nBlack, Joseph\n\nBlair, T. A.\n\nBlair, William\n\nBlake, Lucien I.\n\nBlodgett, Kathleen\n\nBlondlot, Prosper-Ren\u00e9\n\n_Blue Mars_ (Robinson)\n\nBohren, Craig\n\nbombs. _See also_ nuclear bombs\n\nBorisov, Petr Mikhailovich\n\nBosch, Carl\n\n\"Both Sides Now\" (Mitchell)\n\nBowie, E. H.\n\nBradley, Omar\n\n\"Brazen Android, The\" (O'Connor)\n\nBrezhnev, Leonid\n\nBroecker, Wallace\n\nbromine\n\nBronk, D. W.\n\nBrooks, Charles Franklin\n\nBrown, Harrison\n\nBrown, Laurice Leroy\n\nBruni, Louis\n\nBuchanan, James\n\nBudyko, Mikhail Ivanovitch\n\nBugaev, Victor A.\n\nBush, Vannevar\n\nButterfield, Herbert\n\nbutterfly effect. _See also_ chaos theory\n\nByers, Horace\n\n##\n\nCaCl2. _See_ calcium chloride\n\n\"Caius Marius\" (Plutarch)\n\ncalcium chloride (CaCl2)\n\nCaldeira, Ken\n\nCalder, William Musgrave\n\nCalifornia Institute of Technology\n\nCallendar, Guy Stewart\n\nCallendar effect\n\ncaloric of elasticity\n\n_Can Man Change the Climate?_ (Borisov)\n\ncannon; hurricane. _See also_ hail shooting\n\n\"Can We Survive Technology?\" (von Neumann)\n\ncarbon black\n\ncarbon capture and sequestration (CCS); Lackner towers and; practicality of; viability of\n\ncarbon dioxide (CO2); CCS and; climate change and; as cloud-seeding agent; control of; discovery of; Ekholm and; fossil fuels and; global warming and; influence of; liquefaction of; liquid; reducing production of; removal of; solid. _See also_ carbonic acid; dry ice\n\ncarbonic acid\n\nCarpenter, Ford Ashman\n\nCarrier, Willis H.\n\n_Case for Mars, The_ (Zubrin)\n\nCasso, Raul\n\nCastro, Fidel\n\nCatlin, George\n\n_Cat's Cradle_ (Vonnegut)\n\nCCS. _See_ carbon capture and sequestration\n\nCentral Intelligence Agency\n\nChaffee, Emory Leon\n\nChang, David B.\n\nchaos theory\n\nChapman, Sydney\n\nChardin, Pierre Teilhard de\n\ncharlatans\n\nCharlemagne\n\nChemical Warfare Service\n\nchemtrails\n\nCherenkov, Valentin\n\nChernobyl, nuclear accident at\n\nChevriers, Marquis de\n\nChina\n\nchlorine\n\nchlorofluorocarbons\n\n_Christian Science Monitor_ (newspaper)\n\nChristophilos, Nicholas C.\n\nChurchill, Winston\n\nCicerone, Ralph\n\nCivil War\n\nClarke, Arthur C.; on FIDO; Global Weather Authority, vision of\n\nClarke, F. W.\n\nClement, Hal\n\nclimate; fluctuations in; intervention strategies for; models of; tipping point of; variability of\n\nclimate change; abrupt; carbon dioxide theory of; fantasies about; fears about; popularizations of; triggers for; Wexler and\n\nclimate control: dangers of; Fletcher's model of; Langmuir and; possibilities of; as weapon\n\n\"Climate Stabilization\" (Kellogg and Schneider)\n\n_Climatic Changes_ (Budyko)\n\ncloud physics\n\ncloud seeding; cold war and; commercial; dry ice as agent for; General Electric and; Houghton and; in Indochina; Krick and; Langmuir and; popularization of; Schaefer and, ; with seawater; triggers and. _See also_ Project Cirrus\n\nCO2. _See_ carbon dioxide\n\ncoal\n\nCohen, William S.\n\nCohn, Carol\n\ncold war\n\nColeridge, Samuel Taylor\n\n_Collier's_ (magazine)\n\nCommunist Party\n\n_Compendium Maleficarum_ (Guazzo)\n\nCompton, Karl\n\ncomputer modeling; hurricane control and; Wexler and\n\nconcussions\n\nConservation Foundation\n\nConsolidated Edison\n\nconvective theory\n\nCook, William Wallace\n\nCoolidge, Calvin\n\nCotton, William\n\n_Critique of Pure Reason_ (Kant)\n\nCrittenden, John J.\n\nCroll, James\n\nCrookes, William\n\nCroy, Homer\n\nCrutzen, Paul\n\nCurtis, George E.\n\n##\n\n_Daily Telegraph_ (newspaper)\n\nDaniels, Josephus\n\nDante Alighieri\n\nDavis, William Morris\n\n_Day After Tomorrow, The_ (film)\n\nDebs, Eugene V.\n\ndeforestation\n\ndehumidification. _See also_ fog dispersal\n\ndeindustrialization\n\ndeozonizer\n\nDerjaguin, Boris\n\nDescartes, Ren\u00e9\n\ndesert, flooding of\n\nDessens, Jean\n\nd'Estr\u00e9es, Comte\n\nDICE model. _See_ dynamic integrated climate economy model\n\ndimethyl sulfate (DMS)\n\ndisasters\n\n_Divine Comedy, The_ (Dante); _Inferno_\n\nDMS. _See_ dimethyl sulfate\n\nDobrizhoffer, Martin\n\ndomino effect\n\nDonald Duck\n\nDor\u00e9, Gustave\n\nDow Chemical Company\n\nDoyle, Arthur Conan\n\nDrozdov, Oleg A.\n\ndry ice\n\nDuBridge, Lee A.\n\ndust; hail and; pollution from; in space; in stratosphere\n\nDyer, S. Allen\n\ndynamic integrated climate economy (DICE) model\n\ndynamite\n\nDyrenforth, Robert St. George\n\nDyson, Freeman\n\nDyson sphere\n\n##\n\nEagle, L. I.\n\nEarly, James\n\nEarth: albedo of; axis of; radiative balance of; rotation of; secular cooling of\n\nEarth Institute (Columbia University)\n\nEarth Summit\n\nEarthwise Technologies\n\necohacking. _See also_ geoengineering\n\nEdison, Thomas\n\n_Eighth Wonder, The_ (Cook)\n\nEinstein, Albert\n\nEisenhower, Dwight D.\n\nEkholm, Nils Gustaf\n\nelectricity, for fog and smoke dispersal\n\nelectrified sand\n\n_Elementary Meteorology_ (Davis)\n\nEllis, John T.\n\nELSI. _See_ ethical, legal, social implications\n\nEmanuel, Kerry\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo\n\nEnders, J. M.\n\nEngland, George Allan\n\nEnlightenment\n\nENMOD. _See_ United Nations: Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques\n\nEnvironmental Protection Agency\n\nenvironmental warfare\n\n_EOS: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union_\n\nEspy, James Pollard\n\nEsso Research and Engineering Company\n\nEtchegoyen (scientist)\n\nethical, legal, social implications (ELSI)\n\n_Evacuation of England, The_ (Gratacap)\n\nEvans, Daniel J.\n\nEverdingen, E. von\n\nExner, Felix\n\n_Explorer_ (satellites)\n\nexplosions. _See also_ bombs\n\nextrasensory perception\n\n##\n\n_Facts and Plans_ (Warren)\n\nFairchild, Eugene\n\nFalconer, Ray\n\nfantasies\n\n_Farmer in the Sky_ (Heinlein)\n\n_Farm Implement News_\n\nFarwell, Charles\n\nfears\n\nFederal Communications Commission\n\nFedorov, K. N.\n\nFedyakin, Nikolai\n\nFernow, Bernhard E.\n\nFIDO. _See_ Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation\n\nFindeisen, Walter\n\nFinley, John P.\n\nfires\n\nfixes\n\n_Fixing Climate_ (Broecker and Kunzig)\n\nFlagler, Henry\n\nFleischmann, Martin\n\nFletcher, Joseph O.\n\nFlit, Liya Abramovna\n\nflooding, of desert\n\nFlorez, Luis de\n\nFlowers, Allan\n\nfog; modification of; research on; seeding of. _See also_ fog dispersal\n\nfog dispersal; apparatus for; chemical methods for; electricity for; electrified sand and; at MIT; physical methods of; thermal methods for. _See also_ Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation\n\nFogg, Martyn J.\n\nFog Investigation and Dispersal Operation (FIDO)\n\nFord, Gerald R.\n\nforecasting; of climate; Espy and; fantasies about; Krick and\n\nForrestal, James\n\nfossil fuels; carbon dioxide and; consumption of; global warming and; greenhouse effect and; PSAC and. _See also_ gasoline\n\nFoster, George E.\n\nFourier, Joseph\n\nFranklin, Benjamin\n\nFranklin, William Suddards\n\nFraser, Donald M.\n\nFrazer, James George\n\nFrench Academy of Sciences\n\nFreud, Sigmund\n\n_From the Earth to the Moon_ (Verne)\n\nFrosch, Robert A.\n\n\"frost-fighting,\" 235\n\n##\n\nGalileo Galilei\n\nGarroway, Dave\n\nGaskell, T. F.\n\ngas mask filters\n\ngasoline\n\nGates, Bill\n\nGathman, Louis\n\nGeneral Electric Corporation (GE); _Annual Report_ ; Bancroft and; cloud seeding and; contracts of; FIDO and; Knolls Research Laboratory; Krick and; Kurt Vonnegut and; News Bureau; Project Cirrus and; silver iodide and. _See also_ Langmuir, Irving; Schaefer, Vincent; Vonnegut, Bernard\n\nGeneral Motors Research Labs\n\nGeneva International Peace Research Institute\n\ngeoengineering; artificial ionosphere and; criticism of; definition of\u2013230; economics of; ELSI approach to; ethics of; options of; Royal Society of London and; socio-technical hybrid issues of; terraforming and\n\nGeophysics Corporation of America\n\nGlobal Climate and Ecology Institute (Russia)\n\nglobal cooling\n\n_Global Engineering_ (Adabashev)\n\nGlobal Research Technologies\n\nglobal warming; PSAC and; science fiction and\n\n_Godey's Lady's Book_ (magazine)\n\nGoldblat, Jozef\n\nGolden, Dan\n\n_Golden Bough, The_ (Frazer)\n\nGoldstein, Simeon H. F.\n\n_Gone with the Wind_ (film)\n\n_Goodland News_ (newspaper)\n\nGore, Al\n\nGorodskiy, Mikhail Aleksandrovich\n\nGratacap, Louis P.\n\n_Great Instauration, The_ (Bacon)\n\n_Great Weather Syndicate, The_ (Griffith)\n\nGreen, Edward Howland Robinson\n\ngreenhouse effect\n\ngreenhouse gases; OIF and; reduction of; tipping point and. _See also_ pollution\n\n_Greening of Mars, The_ (Lovelock and Allaby)\n\n_Green Mars_ (Robinson)\n\nGregg, Willis R.\n\nGriffith, George\n\nGromyko, Andrei\n\nGrushin, Alexsei\n\nGuazzo, Francesco Maria\n\nGulf Stream\n\n_Gulf Stream, The_ (Gaskell)\n\ngunpowder\n\nGurwitsch, Alexandr\n\n##\n\nHAA. _See_ High Altitude Airship\n\nHaber, Fritz\n\nhackers\n\nHahn, Charles Curtz\n\nhail: dust and; Espy and; shooting at; suppression of\n\nHall, Robert N.\n\n\"Hall of Fantasy, The\" (Hawthorne)\n\nHandler, Philip\n\nHansen, James\n\nHare, Robert\n\nHarper, Kristine\n\n_Harper's Magazine_\n\nHarrelson, Woody\n\n_Harvard Law School Record_\n\nHarvard University; Cruft High Tension Electrical Laboratory\n\nHatfield, Charles Mallory\n\nHatfield Rain Precipitation Corporation\n\nHawkins, Marse Washington\n\nHawthorne, Nathanial\n\nheat budget; measurements of; Wexler and\n\nHeinlein, Robert\n\n_Henderson the Rain King_ (Bellow)\n\nHenry, Joseph\n\nHepburn, Katharine\n\nHering, Daniel\n\nHerkimer, Nicholas\n\nHersh, Seymour\n\nHess, D. C.\n\nHigh Altitude Airship (HAA)\n\nHiguichi, Keiji\n\n_Historical Perspectives on Climate Change_ (Fleming)\n\nHo Chi Minh Trail\n\nHoff, J. H. van't\n\nHoffman, Ross\n\nHoldren, John\n\nHosler, Charles\n\nHoughton, Henry G.arrett, Jr.\n\nHowell, Wallace E.\n\nHoyle, Fred\n\nHubbard, Jack M.\n\nHughes Aircraft Company\n\nHumboldt, Alexander von\n\nHumphreys, William Jackson; on electrified sand; FIDO and; on hail shooting; predictions of\n\nHurricane King\n\nhurricanes; cannon; control over; tracking of\n\nHuxley, Julian\n\n##\n\nIAS. _See_ Institute for Advanced Study\n\nice age; carbon dioxide and; induction of\n\nice caps, melting of\n\nImperial College of Science and Technology\n\n_Implications of Rising Carbon Dioxide Content of the Atmosphere_ (Conservation Foundation)\n\n_Inconvenient Truth, An_ (film)\n\nIndia\n\nIndochina\n\nInstitute for Advanced Study (IAS)\n\nInstitute of Aeronautical Sciences\n\nIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)\n\nIntermediary-Compatriot. _See_ Operation Motorpool\n\nInternational Geophysical Year\n\n_Invasion de la mer, L'_ ( Verne)\n\nIOLA. _See_ ionization of the local areas\n\nionization of the local areas (IOLA)\n\nionization platforms\n\nionosphere, artificial\n\nIPCC. _See_ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change\n\n_Ishmael_ (Quinn)\n\nIzrael, Yuri\n\n##\n\nJames I (king of England)\n\nJaucourt, Louis de\n\nJefferson, Thomas\n\nJerome, Saint\n\njet stream\n\nJewell, Clinton B.\n\n_Jingling in the Wind_ (Roberts)\n\nJohnson, Lyndon B.\n\nJohnson, Robert\n\n\"Joint Statement Concerning Future Discussion on the Dangers of Environmental Warfare,\" 183\n\nJones, Mike\n\nJones, Tommy Lee\n\nJordan, David Starr\n\n_Journal of Applied Meteorology_\n\n_Journal of Physical Chemistry_\n\n##\n\nKael, Pauline\n\nKansas, rainmakers in\n\n_Kansas City Star_ (newspaper)\n\nKansas State Agricultural College\n\nKant, Immanuel\n\nKeeling, Charles David\n\nKeith, David\n\nKellogg, William W.; \"High Water Experiment\" of\n\nKelvin, Lord (William Thomson)\n\nKennedy, John F.\n\nKenney, George C.\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita\n\nKidwell, Howard\n\nKing, David\n\nKing, Whitney\n\nkites\n\n_Klima_\n\nKrick, Irving P.; Petterssen and\n\nKrick Weather Service\n\nKublai Khan\n\nKunzig, Robert\n\nKuroshio Current\n\n##\n\nLabrador Current\n\nLackner, Klaus\n\nLaird, Melvin\n\nLancaster, Burt\n\nLangley, Samuel P.\n\nLangmuir, Irving; experiments of; Petterssen and; Project Cirrus and\n\nLangmuir\u2013Schaefer smoke generator\n\nLaplace, Pierre-Simon\n\n_Laredos_ (magazine)\n\nlasers\n\n_Last and First Men_ (Stapleton)\n\nlatent heat (caloric)\n\nLatham, John\n\nLaunder, Brian\n\nLeavers\n\nLehigh University\n\nLeibniz, Gottfried\n\nLe Maout, Charles\n\nLenin, Vladimir\n\nLeonardo da Vinci\n\nLeslie, Eliza\n\nLesseps, Ferdinand de\n\nLiebling , A. J.\n\n_Life_ (magazine)\n\nlight pollution\n\nLincoln, Abraham\n\nLindemann, Frederick A.\n\nLittle, Arthur D.\n\nLloyd, Geoffrey\n\nLodge, Oliver\n\nLondon; fog in\n\nLooney Tunes\n\nLorenz, Edward\n\n_Los Angeles Examiner_ (newspaper)\n\nLovelock, James\n\nLuby, James O.\n\nLuginbuhl, Christian\n\nLunt, Dan\n\nLutzenberger, Jos\u00e9\n\nLyttleton, R . A.\n\n##\n\nMacCracken, Michael\n\nMacDonald, Gordon J. F.\n\nMacdonald, James A.. _See also_ Stingo, John R.\n\nMackay, George\n\nMackenzie, Donald\n\nmagnetic field\n\nMalkin, Bill\n\nMalone, Thomas\n\nManabe, Syukuro\n\n_Man and Nature_ (Marsh)\n\nMandan (North American Indians)\u2013\n\nManhattan Project\n\nMann, Martin\n\nMann, Michael\n\n_Man Versus Climate_ (Rusin and Flit)\n\n_Man Who Rocked the Earth, The_ (Train and Wood)\n\nMarchetti, Cesare\n\nMaria Theresa (archduchess of Austria)\n\nMarkin, Arkadii Borisovich\n\nMarsh, George Perkins\n\nMarshall, George C.\n\nMartin, John\n\nMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Lincoln Laboratory\n\nMaury, Matthew Fontaine\n\nMcAdie, Alexander\n\nMcFarlane, Alexander\n\nMcGavin, Darren\n\nMcKittrick, James\n\nMcNamara, Robert S.\n\nMediterranean Sea\n\nMelbourne, Frank\n\n_Melinda and Melinda_ (film)\n\nMelville, W.E.\n\nMerchant, Carolyn\n\n_Meteorologica_ (Aristotle)\n\n_Meteorological Essays_ (Arago)\n\nmethane\n\n_Methods of Climate Control_ (Rusin and Flit)\n\nMiddle Ages\n\nmilitary: meteorology and; research by; science and. _See also_ war\n\nMiller, William\n\nMillikan, Robert A.\n\nMilton, John\n\nMindling, George W.\n\nMinor, Audax\n\nmirrors, in space\n\nMIT. _See_ Massachusetts Institute of Technology\n\nMitchell, Joni\n\nmitigation\n\n\"mitogenic rays,\"\n\n\"molecular reductionism,\"\n\nMolina, Mario\n\nM\u00f6ller, F.\n\nMollohan, Alan\n\nmonopolies\n\n_Monthly Weather Review_\n\nMoore, William\n\nMoore, Willis L.\n\n_More Sunshine in the Cloudy North, More Rain in the Tropics_ (Veraart)\n\nMorris, Nelson\n\nMoss Landing Marine Laboratories\n\nMother Culture\n\nMount Washington Observatory\n\nM\u00fcller, Rolf\n\nmythology\n\n##\n\nNamias, Jerome\n\nnanotechnology\n\nNapoleon Bonaparte\n\nNaqvi, S. W. A.\n\nNASA; Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Institute for Advanced Concepts\n\nNash, N. Richard\n\nNational Academy of Sciences; Committee on Atmospheric Sciences; _Critical Issues in Weather Modification Research_ ; National Research Council; Panel on Weather and Climate Modification; _Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warning_\n\nNational Advisory Committee on Aviation\n\nNational Center for Atmospheric Research\n\nNational Centers for Environmental Prediction\n\nNational Defense Research Council\n\nNational Hurricane Research Project (NHRP)\n\nNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)\n\nNational Science Foundation (NSF)\n\nnatural gas\n\nnature, states of\n\nNavajo (North American Indians)\n\nNebraska, rainmakers in\n\nnephelescopes\n\n_New Atlantis, The_ (Bacon)\n\nNew Mexico\n\n_Newsweek_ (magazine)\n\n_New York Enquirer_ (newspaper)\n\n_New Yorker_ (magazine)\n\n_New York Times_ (newspaper)\n\n_New York World_ (newspaper)\n\nNHRP. _See_ National Hurricane Research Project\n\nNimitz, Chester W.\n\n_Nitrogen Fix, The_ (Clement)\n\nnitrogen fixation process\n\nnitroglycerine\n\nnitrous oxide\n\nNixon, Richard M.\n\nNOAA. _See_ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\n\nnoosphere\n\nNordhaus, William\n\nNorth American Water and Power Alliance\n\nNorwegian Forecasting Service\n\nNovim Group\n\n\"N-rays,\" 137\n\nNSF. _See_ National Science Foundation\n\nnuclear bombs\n\nNuclear Explosions for the National Economy\n\nnuclear power\n\nnuclear winter\n\nnucleation\n\nnumerical weather prediction (NWP)\n\nNWP. _See_ numerical weather prediction\n\n##\n\nOberth, Herman\n\nocean iron fertilization (OIF)\n\nO'Connor, William Douglas\n\nOffice of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)\n\nOIF. _See_ ocean iron fertilization\n\nOlympics\n\nOman, Luke\n\n_110 in the Shade_ (Nash)\n\n\"On the Possibilities of Climate Control\" (Wexler)\n\nOperation Argus\n\nOperation Cumulus (Operation Witchdoctor)\n\nOperation Hardtack\n\nOperation Motorpool (Intermediary-Compatriot)\n\nOperation Starfish\n\norgone\n\nOrville, Howard T.\n\nOSRD. _See_ Office of Scientific Research and Development\n\nOstwald, Wilhelm\n\n_Our Man Flint_ (film)\n\n\"Outline of Weather Proposal\" (Zworykin)\n\n_Owning the Weather_ (film)\n\noxygen\n\noxy-hydrogen balloons\n\nozone depletion\n\nozone layer\n\n##\n\nPacala, Stephen\n\nPage, Geraldine\n\nPanama Canal\n\n_Paradise Lost_ (Milton)\n\npatents\n\npathological science\n\nPazniak, Zianon\n\nPell, Claiborne\n\nPenner, Stanford Solomon\n\n_Pentagon Papers_\n\npermafrost\n\nPersian Gulf War I, 185\n\npetroleum burners\n\nPetroleum Warfare Department (PWD)\n\nPetterssen, Sverre\n\nPhaethon\n\nPhillips, Norman\n\n_Philosophy of Storms, The_ (Espy)\n\nplankton, blooms of\n\nPlass, Gilbert\n\n_Player Piano_ (Vonnegut)\n\nPlutarch\n\npluviculture\n\npollution; control of; global warming and; light; from rifle system. _See also_ greenhouse gases\n\nPons, Stanley\n\npopularizations\n\n_Popular Mechanics_ (magazine)\n\n_Popular Science Monthly_ (magazine)\n\nPorky Pig\n\n_Porky the Rain-Maker_ (film)\n\nPowell, John Wesley\n\npower plants; hydroelectric; nuclear\n\nPowers, Edward\n\nprayer\n\nprecipitation static\n\npredictions. _See_ forecasting\n\nPresident's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC)\n\nprevention, as intervention strategy\n\nproduction, as intervention strategy\n\nProject Cirrus\n\nProject Gromet\n\nProject High Water\n\nProject Plowshare\n\nProject Popeye\n\nProject Stormfury\n\nProject West Ford (Project Needles)\n\nprotection, as intervention strategy\n\nProvaqua\n\nPSAC. _See_ President's Science Advisory Committee\n\n_Purchase of the North Pole, The_ (Verne)\n\nPurdue University\n\nPutin, Vladimir\n\nPWD. _See_ Petroleum Warfare Department\n\n##\n\nQuinn, Daniel\n\n##\n\nradar\n\nRadford, W. H.\n\nRadio Corporation of America (RCA) Laboratory\n\nradium\n\nRAF. _See_ Royal Air Force\n\nrain gauges\n\n\"Rain King, The\" (Leslie)\n\n\"Rain-Maker, The\" (Wilson)\n\n_Rainmaker, The_ (Nash)\n\n_Rainmakers, The_ (Spence)\n\nrainmaking: cartoonists' take on; categories of; early efforts at; electrified sand and; examination of; from fires; in Kansas; in Nebraska; practicality of\n\n_Rain Making and Other Weather Vagaries_ (Humphreys)\n\nRakipova, Larisa R.\n\nRAND Corporation\n\nRapley, Chris\n\nRasch, Philip\n\nRCA Laboratory. _See_ Radio Corporation of America Laboratory\n\n_Red Green Show_ (television show)\n\n_Red Mars_ (Robinson)\n\nreforestation\n\nReich, Wilhelm\n\nReichelderfer, Francis W.\n\nRemington Arms\n\nremote sensing\n\n\"Report on the Barnhouse Effect\" (Vonnegut)\n\n_Restoring the Quality of Our Environment_ (PSAC)\n\nRevelle, Roger\n\n_Revenge of Gaia, The_ (Lovelock)\n\nRex, Daniel\n\nRhees, William J.\n\nRhine, Joseph Banks\n\nRichardson, Louis Fry\n\nRickenbacker, Eddie\n\nRiehl, Herb\n\nrifle system\n\nRiker, Carroll Livingston\n\nRoberts, Elizabeth Madox\n\nRobinson, Kim Stanley\n\nRobock, Alan\n\nrocketry\n\nRock Island Railroad Company\n\nRodin, M. B.\n\nRome Plow\n\nR\u00f6ntgen rays\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin\n\nRoosevelt, Theodore\n\nRossby, Carl-Gustav\n\nRoudaire, Fran\u00e7ois Elie\n\nRowland, Sherwood\n\nRoyal Academy of Engineering\n\nRoyal Aircraft Establishment\n\nRoyal Air Force (RAF)\n\nRoyal Meteorological Society\n\nRoyal Society of London; _Philosophical Transactions_\n\nRuddiman, William\n\nRuggles, Daniel\n\nRusin, Nikolai Petrovich\n\nRusk, Jeremiah\n\nRussian Academy\n\n##\n\nsacrifices\n\nSahara Desert\n\nSalawitch, Ross\n\nSalter, Steven\n\nsand, electrified\n\nSanford, Fernando\n\n_San Francisco Chronicle_ (newspaper)\n\nSarnoff, David\n\nsatellite remote sensing\n\nsatellites\n\nsaw grass\n\nSchaefer, Vincent; Project Cirrus and\n\nSchelling, Thomas\n\nSchiller, Friedrich\n\nSchmidt, Gavin\n\nSchneider, Stephen\n\n_Science_ (magazine)\n\nscience fiction\n\n_Scientific American_ (magazine)\n\nScientific Revolution\n\n_Scribner's Magazine_\n\nseawater, as cloud-seeding agent\n\nSellers, Mulberry\n\nSeneca\n\nSevastopol, siege of\n\n\"Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals\" (Cohn)\n\nShakespeare, William\n\nShaler, Nathaniel\n\nShapley, Harlow\n\nShaw, Napier\n\nShepherd, John\n\nShih, I-Fu\n\nShvets, M. Ye.\n\nsilver iodide (AgI); Bernard Vonnegut and; as cloud-seeding  agent; in flares; Langmuir and; in New Mexico\n\nSimpson, Joanne\n\nSimpson, Robert H.\n\n_Sky King_ (television show)\n\nSmetacek, Victor\n\nSmith, Karl F.\n\nsmog\n\nsmoke\n\nsocialism\n\nsocio-technical hybrid issues\n\nSocolow, Robert\n\nsolar radiation management; idealized; stratospheric dust and; sulfuric acid and\n\nsolar shield\n\n\"Song of the Bell\" (Schiller)\n\nS\u00f6rgel, Herman\n\nsound waves\n\n_Soviet Electric Power_ (Markin)\n\nSoviet Union; ENMOD and\n\nSpaatz, Carl A.\n\nspace: control of; mirrors in\n\nSpence, Clark\n\nSpilhaus, Athelstan\n\n_Sputnik_ (satellites)\n\nSST. _See_ supersonic transport\n\nSt. Amand, Pierre\n\nstabilization wedges\n\nStalin, Joseph\n\n_Stanford Law Review_\n\nStapleton, Olaf\n\nStenchikov, Georgiy\n\nStiger, Albert\n\nStingo, John R.\n\nstorytelling\n\nstratosphere: aerosol content of; bubbles in; burning sulfur in; cooling of; dust in; pollution in; rifle system and\n\nSuits, C. Guy\n\nsulfates\n\nSummers, Lawrence\n\nsunspots, manipulation of\n\nsupersonic transport (SST)\n\nSverdrup, Harald U.\n\nSykes, George Ambrosius Immanuel Morrison\n\n##\n\nTakers\n\nTalbot, Curtis G.\n\nTalman, Charles Fitzhugh\n\nTarmy, Barry\n\nTatarsk Strait\n\ntechnology; fear of; historic; limitations of; Takers and\n\nTelevision Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS) program\n\nTeller, Edward\n\nterraforming\n\n_Terraforming Earth_ (Williamson)\n\nTexas Department of Agriculture\n\nTheosophists\n\nThompson, Michael\n\nTilmes, Simone\n\nTilton, James\n\n_Time_ (magazine)\n\ntipping points\n\nTIROS. _See_ Television Infrared Observation Satellite program\n\nToon, Brian\n\n\"To the Friends of Science\" (Espy)\n\ntrafficability\n\nTrain, Arthur\n\n_Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London_\n\ntriggers\n\nTruman, Harry\n\nTuan, Yi-fu\n\nTurco, Richard\n\nTwain, Mark\n\nTyndall, John\n\nTyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. 255\n\n##\n\nUCAR. _See_ University Corporation for Atmospheric Research\n\nUlam, Stanislaw\n\nUnited Nations (UN); Conference of the Committee on Disarmament; Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD); Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); Environment Program (UNEP); Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)\n\nUniversity Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)\n\nUniversity Meteorological Committee\n\nUniversity of California\u2013San Diego: Center for Energy and Combustion Research; Scripps Institution of Oceanography\n\nU.S. Air Force: Cloud Physics Research Project (with Weather Bureau); Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (with Navy and Weather Bureau); Strategic Air Command; Weather Reconnaissance Squadron; Weather Resources and Programs; Weather Service\n\nU.S. Army: Air Force; Air Weather Service; Medical Department; Ordnance Department; Signal Office\n\nU.S. Atomic Energy Commission\n\nU.S. Climate Change Technology Program\n\nU.S. Congress: House of Representatives; Senate; testimony before\n\nU.S. Department of Agriculture, Division of Forestry\n\nU.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Air Commerce\n\nU.S. Department of Defense\n\nU.S. Department of Energy\n\nU.S. Department of Homeland Security\n\nU.S. Geological Survey\n\nU.S. Navy: Bureau of Aeronautics; Espy and; Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (with Air Force and Weather Bureau); meteorological data of; Naval Ordinance Test Station; Project Stormfury and; seeding of storms by; Warren and; Weather Research Facility\n\nU.S. Weather Bureau; Cloud Physics Research Project (with Air Force); electrified sand and; Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab; Gregg and; Hatfield and; Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (with Air Force and Navy); Langmuir and; Wexler and\n\nU.S. Weather Control Bureau\n\n\"Use of Asphalt Coatings to Increase Rainfall, The\" (Black and Tarmy)\n\n##\n\nVaillant, Jean-Baptiste Philibert\n\nVan Allen, James\n\nVan Allen radiation belts\n\nVeraart, August\n\nVernadsky, Vladimir\n\nVerne, Jules\n\nVietnam\n\nVirgil\n\nvolcanoes, artificial\n\nvon K\u00e1rm\u00e1n, Theodore\n\nVonnegut, Bernard\n\nVonnegut, Kurt\n\nvon Neumann, John\n\n_Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea_ (film)\n\n##\n\nWainscoat, Richard\n\nWak-a-dah-ha-hee\n\nWalker, Constance\n\nWalker, Gabrielle\n\n_Walt Disney's Comics and Stories_\n\nwar. _See also_ military\n\n\"War Against Hail\" (Mann)\n\n_War and the Weather_ (Powers)\n\nWard, Robert DeCourcy\n\nWarner Brothers\n\nWarren, L. Francis\n\nWashington, George\n\n_Washington Post_ (newspaper)\n\nwaste heat\n\nWaterman, Alan T.\n\nWater Resources Corporation of Denver\n\nwaterspouts\n\nWDA. _See_ Weather Distributing Administration\n\nweather; engineering of; reports; superstitions and fallacies about; in war; as weapon\n\nWeather Distributing Administration (WDA)\n\n\"Weather Modification\" (Rodin and Hess)\n\nWeaver, Warren\n\nWegener, Alfred\n\nWegener-Bergeron-Findeisen process\n\nWeinberg, Alvin\n\nWeld, Tuesday\n\nWells, H. G.\n\nWelsbach Patent\n\nWestchester Racing Association\n\nWestmoreland, William\n\nWexler, Harry\n\nWidener, Joseph E.\n\nWilliams, John\n\nWilliamsom, J. D.\n\nWilliamson, Jack\n\nWilson, Margaret Adelaide\n\nWMO. _See_ World Meteorological Organization\n\nWood, Lowell\n\nWood, Robert Williams\n\nWorld Bank\n\nWorld Meteorological Organization (WMO); Global Atmospheric Research Programme\n\n_World Peril of 1910, The_ (Griffith)\n\nWorld's Fair\n\n_Worlds in the Making_ (Arrhenius)\n\nWorld War I,\n\nWorld War II,\n\nWorld Weather Bureau\n\nWorld Weather Watch (W W W)\n\n_Wreck of the South Pole, The_ (Hahn)\n\nWright, Orville\n\nWulf, Oliver\n\nW W W. _See_ World Weather Watch\n\n##\n\nYates, Allan\n\nYudin, M. I.\n\n##\n\nzinc oxide (ZnO), as cloud-seeding agent\n\nZoroastrianism\n\nZubrin, Robert\n\nZuni (North American Indians)\n\nZworykin, Vladimir K.\n\nCOLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS   \n_Publishers Since 1893_   \nNew York Chichester, West Sussex\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2010 Columbia University Press All rights reserved\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   \nFleming, James Rodger.   \nFixing the sky : the checkered history of weather and climate control \/   \nJames Rodger Fleming.   \np. cm.\u2014(Columbia studies in international and global history)   \nIncludes bibliographical references and index.\n\neISBN : 978-0-231-51306-7\n\n1. Weather control\u2014History. 2. Nature\u2014Effect of human beings on. I. Title. II. Series.\n\nQC928.F54 2010   \n551.68\u2014dc22 2010015482\n\nColumbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content.\n\nc\n\n__\n\nReferences to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n_**praise for john schlimm**_\n\n**PRAISE FOR _THE CHEESY VEGAN_ :**\n\n\"The Cheesy Vegan _proves the point that living a vegan lifestyle doesn't mean giving up your favorite foods. These recipes are good for the body and leave nothing to be desired\u2014John Schlimm is the Bobby Flay of the vegan movement._ \"\n\n**\u2014Eddy Lu, CEO and co-founder of Grubwithus**\n\n\" _With_ The Cheesy Vegan, _John Schlimm continues his unique brand of tasty activism. Once again, John uses an irresistible and family-friendly collection of plant-based dishes that everyone, vegan and carnivore alike, will devour to poignantly convey his unconditional love for all animals.\"_\n\n**\u2014Robin Ganzert, PhD, president and CEO of American Humane Association**\n\n\"The Cheesy Vegan _is a heavenly dose of cheese-filled recipes that will please any and every palate. Take one look at the mouthwatering photos and recipes and you'll want to dive right in (to a pool of vegan cheesecake)!\"_\n\n**\u2014Christy Morgan, The Blissful Chef, author of _Blissful Bites: Vegan Meals That Nourish Mind, Body, and Planet_**\n\n\" _It's hard to count the number of people who've told me over the years, 'I could never stop eating cheese!' Well, John Schlimm is here to say you don't have to! In_ The Cheesy Vegan, _he's got a plethora of homemade vegan cheeses and related recipes that you're sure to love, and cows will love you for choosing them!_ \"\n\n**\u2014Paul Shapiro, vice president of Farm Animal Protection for The Humane Society of the United States and founder of Compassion Over Killing**\n\n\" _John's recipes are my go-to for inspiration and_ The Cheesy Vegan _is no exception. He's actually come up with the missing link to making vegan eating complete\u2014a great tasting and easy recipe for vegan blue cheese. Don't be surprised if you see that one on our menu!_ \"\n\n**\u2014Doron Petersan, founder of Sticky Fingers Sweets & Eats and author of _Sticky Fingers' Sweets_**\n\n\" _The homemade vegan cheeses and other related recipes in this beautifully crafted book bring health and kindness to a luscious new level. Cheese was always the hardest for vegans to emulate, and the one thing most non-vegans crave the most, so with the publication of this new masterpiece, we see the handwriting on the wall: Veganville is getting closer every day. Highly recommended!_ \"\n\n**\u2014Will Tuttle, PhD, best-selling author of _The World Peace Diet_ , recipient of the Courage of Conscience Award, co-founder of Veganpalooza and Circle of Compassion, and acclaimed pianist and composer**\n\n\" _Cheese is one of life's great treats and to have it when it's 'cruelty-free' is the best thing for all! John . . . Thank you for making the world a tastier place with_ The Cheesy Vegan _!!!_ \"\n\n**\u2014Cornelia Guest, designer, philanthropist, and author of _Cornelia Guest's Simple Pleasures_**\n\n\" _For the past 26 years, I have been on exactly the same pathway as John Schlimm. I have wanted to delight and do less harm . . . and to have fun doing that. I literally am a kindred spirit except for one small thing: He is at least one lap ahead of me in being vegan. I'm so convinced about the power of plant-based foods in my own life and work that it is high time for me to take a deep breath and plunge into_ The Cheesy Vegan _and see if I can at least not fall further behind! Let's join John\u2014it seems to be a great way to enjoy the truly good life!_ \"\n\n**\u2014Graham Kerr, award-winning cookbook author, culinary consultant, and host of _The Galloping Gourmet_**\n\n**PRAISE FOR _GRILLING VEGAN STYLE_ :**\n\n\" _Our love for John Schlimm knows no bounds. . . . The man knows his way around a theme, not to mention a barbecue. . . . Schlimm is an author we'd love to stand around the grill with\u2014gabbing, drinking, and saving the world all at once._ \"\n\n_**\u2014VegNews**_\n\n\" _A common-sense and fun book about grilling that even carnivores can enjoy._ \"\n\n_**\u2014Washington Post**_\n\n\" _Who knew you could have so much fun grilling everything from salads and sandwiches to desserts?!_ Grilling Vegan Style is _more than a cookbook; it's a go-to handbook for outdoor living, eating, and celebrating._ \"\n\n**\u2014Rory Freedman, coauthor of the #1 _New York Times_ best seller _Skinny Bitch_**\n\n\" _With_ Grilling Vegan Style, _John has shown you ways to bring out flavors and taste you never thought possible. John's recipe for Party on South Peach Salsa especially is to die for and will go with almost anything._ \"\n\n**\u2014Chef Paul Kirk, CWC, PhB, BSAS, Kansas City Baron of BBQ, and author of _Championship Barbecue_ and _America's Best BBQ_**\n\n\" _I have to admit that I was a little skeptical about a vegan grilling book. After all in my world it's all about the meat. I might even be considered a nonvegan! But John's book has opened my eyes to the concept and his recipes are outstanding.\"_\n\n**\u2014Ray Lampe a.k.a. Dr. BBQ, author of _Ribs, Chops, Steaks, and Wings_ and _Dr. BBQ's Big-Time Barbecue Cookbook_**\n\n\" _Veggie backyard BBQ warriors and grill pan guerrillas; John Schlimm, your knight in tofu armor has arrived, also bearing Spiked Ruby Daiquiris and other sipping delights.\"_\n\n**\u2014Terry Hope Romero, author of _Viva Vegan!_ and coauthor of _Veganomicon_**\n\n\" _This cookbook ensures that the magic of a summer barbecue or a night around the campfire can ignite your taste buds all year long._ \"\n\n**\u2014FoxNews.com**\n\n**PRAISE FOR _THE TIPSY VEGAN_ :**\n\n\" _His recipes are often spot-on and don't require too many arcane or hard-to-source ingredients. Moreover, the addition of alcohol to his dishes\u2014Bottom's Up VegeBean Stew employs a dark beer for added oomph, Triple Sec is added to a blueberry pie as well as homemade granola\u2014truly serves a purpose other than novelty. . . . Schlimm's efforts will pay off for vegans, as well as their omnivorous guests._ \"\n\n_**\u2014Publishers Weekly**_\n\n\" _With beautiful, vivid photography and a refreshingly lucid tone despite the focus on spirits_ , The Tipsy Vegan is _already a winner, but with a cookbook, no matter how fun the novelty, the recipes are what it's all about, of course. This cookbook does not disappoint. An efficient but muscular little book, the recipes featured here are largely variations on classics but full of fun, flavor, and spark.\"_\n\n**\u2014Examiner.com**\n* * *\n\nTHE\n\nCHEESY\n\nVEGAN\n\n* * *\n_**other books by john schlimm:**_\n\n_Grilling Vegan Style_\n\n_The Tipsy Vegan_\n\n_Stand Up!_\n\n_Twang: a novel_\n\n_The Seven Stars Cookbook_\n\n_The Ultimate Beer Lover's Cookbook_\n\n_The Beer Lover's Cookbook_\n\n_The Pennsylvania Celebrities Cookbook_\n\n_Straub Brewery_\n\n_The Straub Beer Party Drinks Handbook_\n\n_The Straub Beer Cookbook_\n\n_Corresponding with History_\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2013 by John Schlimm\n\nPhotographs Copyright \u00a9 2013 by Amy Beadle Roth\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02210.\n\nDesigned by Megan Jones Design (www.meganjonesdesign.com)\n\nSet in 9 point Neutraface Light by Megan Jones Design\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nSchlimm, John E., 1971\u2013\n\nThe cheesy vegan : more than 125 plant-based recipes for indulging in the world's ultimate comfort food \/ John Schlimm ; photographs by Amy Beadle Roth.\n\npages cm\n\nIncludes index.\n\nISBN 978-0-7382-1680-5 (e-book) 1. Cooking (Cheese) 2. Dairy substitutes. 3. Vegan cooking. I. Title.\n\nTX759.5.C48S328 2013\n\n641.6 73\u2014dc23\n\n2013007875\n\nFirst Da Capo Press edition 2013\n\nPublished by Da Capo Press\n\nA Member of the Perseus Books Group\n\nwww.dacapopress.com\n\nNote: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. This book is intended only as an informative guide for those wishing to know more about health issues. In no way is this book intended to replace, countermand, or conflict with the advice given to you by your own physician. The ultimate decision concerning care should be made between you and your doctor. We strongly recommend you follow his or her advice. Information in this book is general and is offered with no guarantees on the part of the authors or Da Capo Press. The authors and publisher disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book. The names and identifying details of people associated with events described in this book have been changed. Any similarity to actual persons is coincidental.\n\nDa Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n_**To all the animals\u2014**_\n\n_**so you know that you have not passed**_\n\n_**this way unloved.**_\n_**Just maybe, the moon is really made of**_\n\n_**vegan cheese . . .**_\n\nCONTENTS\n\n**INTRODUCTION**\n\n**THE CHEESY VEGAN PANTRY**\n\nCHAPTER 1\n\n_**The DIY Vegan Cheese Kitchen**_\n\nNooch Cheese\n\nCheddar\n\n_Horseradish Cheddar_\n\n_Smoked Cheddar_\n\n_Extra-Sharp Cheddar_\n\nWine Cheese\n\nMozzarella\n\n_Smoked Mozzarella_\n\nBrie\n\nSwiss\n\nFeta\n\nCottage Cheese\n\nCream Cheese\n\n_Garlic Cream Cheese_\n\n_Jalape\u00f1o Cream Cheese_\n\n_Farmers' Market Veggie Cream Cheese_\n\n_Hot Sauce Cream Cheese_\n\n_Smoked Cream Cheese_\n\nParmesan\n\n_Parmesan Walnut_\n\n_Parmesan Almond_\n\nRicotta\n\nBlue\n\nJack\n\nMuenster\n\nAmerican\n\n_Horseradish American_\n\nCHAPTER 2\n\n_**Breakfast & Brunch**_\n\nSunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest\n\nThe Great Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese\n\nThe DIY Cheesy Scramble\n\nToast with the Most Cheese Bread\n\nSwiss & Cheddar Sunday Brunch Tarts\n\nCozy Cottage Pancakes\n\nYou Gotta Frittata!\n\nMrs. Cleaver's Cheddar Muffins\n\nCaf\u00e9 Spinach & Mushroom Quiche\n\nCaf\u00e9 Broccoli & Parmesan Quiche\n\nMushroom-Cheese Strudel\n\nSpoonable Bloody Queen Marys\n\nCHAPTER 3\n\n_**Soups & Salads**_\n\nFancy Schmancy Vichyssoise\n\nSwiss Meets French Onion Soup\n\nCheesy Broccoli & Potato Soup\n\nPowwow Mushroom Soup\n\nOktoberfest in a Bowl\n\nChorizo-Pepper-Onion Stew\n\nSmoky Mountain Tomato & Cheddar Soup\n\nBucking Bronco Tomato & Horseradish Soup\n\nNew Potato & Ricotta Salad\n\nThe Parmesan Caesar with Cheesy Croutons\n\nParmesan Croutons\n\nTomato Meets Mozzarella, Falls in Love\n\nSpicy Green Salad with Swiss Cheese & Pears\n\nPicnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese\n\nBroccoli & Cauliflower Salad\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad\n\nCHAPTER 4\n\n_**Sides**_\n\nThyme of Your Life Baked Broccoli\n\nSpaghetti Squash with Browned Buttery Nutmeg Sauce\n\nRoasted Asparagus with Swiss Cheese\n\nRoasted Tomatoes on the Side with Wine Cheese\n\nBalsamic Grilled Onion Rings Showered in Parmesan\n\nParmesan Garlic Bread\n\nYou Say POtato, I Say PoTAto Gratin\n\nTwice-Baked Ricotta Potato Skins\n\nCounty Fair Cheese Fries\n\nCheesy Mashed Potatoes\n\nJack's Sweet Potato Casserole\n\nCHAPTER 5\n\n_**Sandwiches**_\n\nThe Grilled Cheese Trio\n\n_Four-Alarm Grilled Cheese & Jalape\u00f1o Sandwiches_\n\n_Grilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches_\n\n_The King's Grilled Cheese & Peanut Butter Sandwiches_\n\nReuben, the Magnificent\n\nThe Mile-High Club\n\nThe Super Hero\n\nOutta the Park Shiitake Sliders\n\nPita Pizza in a Pocket\n\nPizza Mountain Pie\n\nAvocado & Parmesan Pita Lunch Rush\n\nBlack Bean & Jalape\u00f1o Tacos\n\nBuild Your Own Quesadilla\n\nCool as a Cucumber Finger Sandwiches\n\nLulu's Finger Sandwiches\n\nLulu's Front Porch Juleps\n\nSmoked Seitan & Avocado Panini\n\nCHAPTER 6\n\n_**Appetizers & Snacks**_\n\nBlue Moon Dip\n\nSeitan Flares\n\nCrunchy Leek Dip\n\nThe Sailor's Spinach Dip\n\nAmazo-Queso Dip\n\nCheddar Pub Dip\n\nFlying Buffalo Dip\n\nLucky Horseradish Dip\n\nAvocado, Corn & Black Bean Dip\n\nMinced Chipotle Pepper & Cheese Dip\n\nFried Olives Stuffed with Smoky Cheese Hummus\n\nCheesy Hummus\n\n_Blue Cheese Hummus_\n\n_Hot Pepper Cheese Hummus_\n\n_Smoky Cheese Hummus_\n\nCasanova's Blue Cheese\u2013 or Feta-Stuffed Cocktail Olives\n\nPrimo-Pimiento Spread\n\nThe Dynamic Jalape\u00f1o Popper Duo\n\n_Inferno Poppers_\n\n_Fiery Poppers with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce_\n\n'Tis the Season Fruit & Nut Ball\n\nPecan & Cranberry Party Log\n\nWhite Truffle Rice-Stuffed Mushrooms\n\nCheddar Chips\n\nParmesan Popcorn\n\nSwiss Mangoes\n\nCHAPTER 7\n\n_**Suppers**_\n\nTomato Gratin with Cheddar Crumbs & Basil Chiffonade\n\nHot Chili Bean Casserole\n\nTriple Your Pleasure Fondue\n\nAll You Can Eat Pizza Buffet\n\n_When the Moon Hits Your Eye Cheesy Pizza Pie_\n\n_Tex-Mex Tortilla Pizza_\n\n_Flying Buffalo Pizza_\n\nMy Friend Alfredo\n\nAngel Hair Pasta with Ricotta & Herb Sauce\n\nThree-Cheese Screwy Fusilli\n\nFour-Cheese Baked Rigatoni Gratin\n\nBaked Cauliflower-Parmesan Penne\n\nLemony Parmesan Linguine\n\nSuper Fab Fettuccine with Horseradish Cheese Sauce\n\nChedda-Peppa Pasta\n\nBrie & Tomato Pasta Shells\n\nCHAPTER 8\n\n_**Mac 'n' Cheese**_\n\nCreamy Seasoned Macaroni\n\nParmesan-Cheddar-Swiss Skillet Macaroni\n\nMac 'n' Cheese with Ground Cashews & Truffle Oil\n\nMac & Jack\n\nWhole-Grain Macaroni with Cottage Cheese & Cheddar\n\nTwo-Cheese Macaroni with Caramelized Shallots\n\nSpicy Hot Mac Attack!\n\nCHAPTER 9\n\n_**Cheesecake**_\n\nThe Cheesecake Extravaganza\n\n_Strawberry Cheesecake_\n\n_Chocolate Cheesecake_\n\n_Blueberry Cheesecake_\n\n_Banana Cheesecake_\n\nPecan-Crusted Cheesecake Bars\n\nCheesecake Party Parfaits\n\nWhite Chocolate Cheesecake Petit Fours\n\nStrawberry-Banana Cheesecake Smoothie\n\nCHAPTER 10\n\n_**Vegan Cheese Pairings: Wine, Beer & Cocktails**_\n\nChart for Pairing Vegan Cheese with Wine, Beer & Cocktails\n\nThe Cheesy Vegan Table\n\nArtisanal Vegan Cheese Platters by the Season\n\n_The Fall\/Winter Vegan Artisanal Cheese Platter_\n\n_The Spring\/Summer Vegan Artisanal Cheese Platter_\n\nVegan Cheese of the Month Club\n\n**METRIC CONVERSIONS**\n\n**STORE-BOUGHT VEGAN CHEESE RESOURCE GUIDE**\n\n**RESOURCE GUIDE FOR CHEESE TOOLS**\n\n**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**\n\n**INDEX**\n**_introduction_**\n\nWe have officially entered the Age of Vegan Cheese!\n\nWith two dozen easy, homemade vegan cheese recipes and variations followed by more than one hundred recipes for dishes either using those cheeses or re-creating the unique flavor and texture of cheese, _The Cheesy Vegan_ gives the power of cheese back to the people. Within these pages, cheese becomes accessible to everyone, whether you are a lifelong vegan, one of my more carnivorous pals at home, or merely curious and hungry.\n\nSince before recorded history, cheese has been one of the most beloved and sought-after foods in the world. Sliced, cubed, shredded, and spread, it has dutifully marched through the annals of time, from the walls of Egyptian tombs, where it was celebrated as a go-to ancient treat, straight into pop culture, thanks to the cheese wedge hats that have become the ultimate expression of cheesy love and standard propaganda at tailgating parties.\n\nAlthough the very first cheeses were a whole lot saltier and even sour compared to what's enjoyed today, traditional, dairy-based cheese has always been the toast of cozy family dinners, party appetizers, and midnight snacks. For everyone except vegans, that is.\n\nSmooth, creamy, _dairy_ delights to the tune of Cheddar, Swiss, mozzarella, Parmesan, Brie, and so many more, have long been an epic tease, tempting and taunting those of us who follow a plant-based lifestyle. But no longer, my friends. Because now, we get to indulge, too!\n\n_The Cheesy Vegan_ transforms vegan cheese into the Main Street party it's meant to be, whether for a casual family meal at home, a romantic date for two, or a full-blown bash where cheese, wine, and beer each become a convenient excuse to indulge in the other.\n\nTo start, I help you get your Cheesy Vegan Pantry stocked with all the basics, many of which you probably already have on hand. Like my other cookbooks, _The Cheesy Vegan_ is small-town friendly, meaning I use ingredients that my friends and neighbors in my small hometown can easily find in our grocery stores or online, just like my big city pals can in their larger supermarkets. Plus, I use basic equipment and easy techniques that are geared toward the everyday home cook, whether a beginner or pro, so you can whip up a cheesy _licious_ feast anytime you want.\n\nThe Cheesy Vegan Pantry is followed by Chapter 1: The DIY Vegan Cheese Kitchen, which is full of inspired, nondairy alternatives for everyone's favorite cheeses: from a basic Cheddar (with smoked and horseradish variations), to regular and smoked mozzarella, to Swiss, Brie, and much more. This library of cheese recipes will carry you throughout the book, no matter the occasion, the craving, or how much time you have (or don't have). Also, some of the recipes go solo, relying on their own inventive combinations of everyday ingredients to magically convey that familiar cheesy flavor and texture in a dish.\n\nBrunches, lunches, and family suppers become instantly warm and cozy when the menus include Sunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest; Four-Alarm Grilled Cheese & Jalape\u00f1o Sandwiches; Brie & Tomato Pasta Shells; and Build Your Own Quesadilla. Or laid-back soups and salads, such as Smoky Mountain Tomato & Cheddar Soup, Swiss Meets French Onion Soup, Three Beans Steal the Scene Salad, and Picnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese. And if it's ooey-gooey, eyes-rolled-back-in-your-head comfort you're after, head straight to the buffet of mac 'n' cheese dishes in Chapter 8, and dig in!\n\nAlso, get ready to make the most of quality snack time with family and friends by serving quick bites, such as Flying Buffalo Dip, Cheddar Pub Dip, the Dynamic Jalape\u00f1o Popper Duo, and Parmesan Popcorn.\n\nOf course, dessert is always an exclamation point to a great meal. The cheesecake chapter has\u2014you guessed it\u2014an array of sweet cheesecake delights: the Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, Blueberry, and Banana Cheesecake Extravaganza; Pecan-Crusted Cheesecake Bars; White Chocolate Cheesecake Petit Fours; Cheesecake Party Parfaits; and Strawberry-Banana Cheesecake Smoothies.\n\nFinally, Chapter 10 offers vegan cheese pairings with your favorite wines, beers, cocktails, and more. Whether for a swanky party or a barefoot, backyard barbecue, these buzz-worthy pairings have you covered for many endless days and nights filled with good memories, laughter, and dancing on tabletops.\n\nMy friends, it's our time to raise a slice, a scoop, or a forkful to the new Kingdom of Cheese, where our appetites for good food and fun can run wild once more!\n_**the cheesy vegan pantry**_\n\nIt would be impossible to always have every ingredient on hand, but it is certainly helpful to have a pantry of basics close by whenever you're craving a cheesy snack or feast. This chapter lays out many of the standard ingredients that either are used frequently throughout the book in various recipes or have a starring role in a homemade cheese or dish that you will likely return to on a regular basis.\n\n_**agar**_\n\nAgar, or agar-agar, which comes in powder or flakes, is a natural vegetable gelatin additive made from various species of red algae. Often used to make such things as jelly, custards, puddings, and desserts, it is especially prized within plant-based cooking for its high gelling capabilities, and because true gelatin is made from animal products. Agar actually has higher gelling properties than traditional gelatin does, and it sets in just an hour at room temperature. Note that the same volume measurement of agar flakes is half the quantity of agar powder.\n\nWhile agar is available in most natural food stores and large supermarkets, it may also be obtained online at such places as VeganEssentials.com, VeganStore.com, Amazon.com, iherb.com, EdenFoods.com, BarryFarm.com, agar-agar.org, and BulkFoods.com.\n\nFor other vegan gelatin needs, Lieber's Unflavored Jel is recommended and is available online at VeganEssentials.com.\n\n_**alcohol**_\n\nEvery attempt has been made to confirm that the alcohol used throughout this book is either inherently vegan or produced in vegan forms by various companies. For more information on vegan brands of alcohol, please visit Barnivore.com.\n\nThe alcohol used in a few of the cheese and food recipes includes:\n\n   Beer (dark, stout)\n\n   Port wine\n\n   Rum (white)\n\n   Vermouth (white)\n\n   Vodka\n\n   Wine (dry red, dry white, Madeira, Marsala)\n\nFor the cheese, wine, beer, and cocktail pairing chart, please refer to page 220.\n\n_**beans**_\n\nBeans are a vegan's best friend; well, one of them, anyway. It's always nice to have a variety of beans in the pantry. For our purposes here, the following beans are used throughout the book:\n\n   Black beans\n\n   Garbanzo beans (chickpeas)\n\n   Green beans\n\n   Kidney beans\n\n   Hot chili beans\n\n   Refried beans (see note)\n\n   Yellow beans\n\nNote: When using refried beans, be sure to check the can's label, as many brands are made with lard.\n\n_**berries**_\n\nThe best berries are always those that are in season and fresh from a local fruit stand or farmers' market, or picked by you. The following is a list of the berries that are used in making the cheesecakes in Chapter 9 and other recipes:\n\n   Blueberries\n\n   Cranberries (dried)\n\n   Strawberries\n\nAlso, various companies make berry-flavored vegan syrups that can also be drizzled on the cheesecakes, such as the Raspberry Chocolate Syrup by Santa Cruz Organic (Scojuice.com). In stores, read the label carefully to determine whether the syrup contains any non-vegan ingredients.\n\n_**bread, vegan**_\n\nJust as for all products, when shopping for bread, read the ingredient labels carefully to determine whether a certain brand of bread is vegan, or visit the brand's website. Sometimes, bread will contain refined sugar, milk, butter, or honey. In addition, you can also find many vegan bread recipes online. For the recipes that follow, feel free to experiment with different bread types, including making your own, while still sticking close to the recipe.\n\nA variety of different breads are used throughout the book, including:\n\n   Bread crumbs\n\n   Brown\n\n   Ciabatta\n\n   French\n\n   Italian\n\n   Panko (Japanese bread crumbs)\n\n   Pumpernickel\n\n   Rye\n\n   Slider buns\n\n   Sourdough\n\n   Whole-grain\n\n   Whole wheat\n\n_**cheese, vegan**_\n\nIn addition to the cheese recipes in Chapter 1, vegan cheese is starting to become more widely available in stores and online. Unfortunately, not all nondairy cheese is created the same, taste-wise. Some reliable brands of vegan cheese are listed in the Store-Bought Vegan Cheese Resource Guide on page 233.\n\n_**chocolate, vegan**_\n\nVegan chocolate is available from such online sites as VeganEssentials.com and Amazon.com. In stores, read the label carefully to determine whether the chocolate contains any dairy products; ideally, it has been manufactured in a dedicated milk-free environment. Here, both regular and white chocolate are used to make the cheesecake recipes in Chapter 9.\n\nAlso, Santa Cruz Organic Chocolate Syrup, which comes in various flavors, is perfect for drizzling on cheesecakes and is even available in different flavors (Scojuice.com).\n\n_**cornstarch**_\n\nExtracted from the endosperm of a corn kernel, cornstarch is basically the starch of the corn grain. Here in the cheese recipes, as in other cooking, it is used as a thickening agent.\n\n_**egg replacers, vegan**_\n\nToday, there are many options for removing eggs from dishes and replacing them with vegan egg substitutions or replacers, which basically consist of a natural powdered combination of starches and leavening ingredients. While various vegan egg replacers are available, one go-to source is Ener-G brand's Egg Replacer (Ener-G.com), which is made using potato starch, tapioca flour, leavening (calcium lactate, calcium carbonate, tartaric acid), cellulose gum, and modified cellulose. For this particular egg replacer, the conversion is: 1 egg = 1\u00bd teaspoons of dry Egg Replacer plus 2 tablespoons of water.\n\nAlso, see Flaxseed on this page.\n\n_**extra-virgin olive oil**_\n\nExtra-virgin olive oil is the most flavorful and highest quality of the olive oils and is used frequently throughout the book. Moreover, it isn't made using chemicals. Olive oils can range in price widely, but using a less expensive, moderately priced extra-virgin olive oil is fine.\n\nFor more information on all things olive oil, go to OliveOilSource.com.\n\nOther oils used in the book include:\n\n   Canola oil\n\n   Coconut oil\n\n   Peanut oil\n\n   White truffle oil (see page 21)\n\n_**flavorings**_\n\nThe following flavorings are used in the book and will come in handy for other cooking as well:\n\n   Almond extract\n\n   Vanilla extract\n\n_**flaxseed**_\n\nOften recognized for its nutritional properties, flaxseed is used in the book to create an alternative to the egg replacers in such recipes as Swiss & Cheddar Sunday Brunch Tarts (page 53) and Three-Cheese Screwy Fusilli (page 181). Generally, you can experiment by replacing the egg replacer in more savory recipes with a flaxseed mixture.\n\nTo use flaxseed to replace eggs, for each egg, process or blend 3 tablespoons of filtered or bottled water with 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed until the mixture is smooth and thick. Let the mixture rest for a minute or two before adding to your recipe.\n\n_**flour, instant**_\n\nA few of the recipes call for Wondra or instant flour. Instant flour is a finely ground flour that instantly dissolves in water, as opposed to all-purpose flour, pastry flour, and cake flour that take longer to dissolve. Although these latter three flours can often be used interchangeably, they cannot be used in place of instant flour. One widely available, go-to brand of instant flour is General Mills's Gold Medal Wondra Flour. Instant flour is used to make such recipes as Thyme of Your Life Baked Broccoli (page 92) and Cozy Cottage Pancakes (page 54).\n\nAll-purpose flour is also used in several recipes throughout the book.\n\n_**fruit**_\n\nThe best fruit is always that which is in season and fresh from a local fruit stand or farmers' market, or picked by you. The following is a list of the fruits that are used throughout the book:\n\n   Avocados\n\n   Bananas\n\n   Coconut\n\n   Dates (dried)\n\n   Lemon (juice, zest; see note)\n\n   Lime (juice, see note)\n\n   Mangoes\n\n   Olives (black, kalamata, Spanish)\n\n   Pears\n\n   Pimiento (see note)\n\n   Raisins (black, white)\n\nNote: Rolling lemons and limes on your counter with the palm of your hand to soften them, and\/or microwaving the lemons and limes, lightly punctured, for 1 to 2 minutes, depending on your oven's wattage, will make them yield more juice. Also, thinner-skinned lemons and limes yield more juice. When using pimiento-stuffed olives, be sure to check the label, as many brands are preserved using an unidentified source of lactic acid.\n\n_**graham crackers, vegan**_\n\nGraham crackers are used to make the cheesecake recipes in Chapter 9. Not all graham crackers are vegan, so carefully read ingredient labels when shopping for them. Online sources for vegan graham crackers include Sweetandsara.com, VeganEssentials.com, and VeganStore.com.\n\n_**herbs and spices**_\n\nHerbs and spices really do make the world of cheese go around. A dash of this herb and a pinch of that spice can completely revive, refresh, and transform a cheesy dish right before your eyes. A well-stocked herb and spice rack is an ever-evolving thing, but it will come in just as handy for these recipes as for any other cooking. Herbs and spices raise the flavor profile of the actual homemade cheese itself and whatever other ingredients it's being mixed and matched with. They can also be fun to experiment with when trying to switch up a dish.\n\nThe herbs and spices used throughout the book include:\n\n**Herbs:**\n\n   Basil leaves\n\n   Bay leaves (see note about chiffonade)\n\n   Caraway seeds\n\n   Coriander (also called cilantro)\n\n   Dill\n\n   Mint leaves\n\n   Oregano (dried and leaves)\n\n   Parsley leaves\n\n   Rosemary leaves\n\n   Sage leaves\n\n   Tarragon\n\n   Thyme\n\n**Spices:**\n\n   Allspice\n\n   Chili powder\n\n   Cinnamon\n\n   Cloves\n\n   Cumin\n\n   Curry powder\n\n   Garlic powder\n\n   Ginger\n\n   Nutmeg\n\n   Onion powder\n\n   Paprika (smoked Spanish, unsmoked)\n\n   Pepper (black, cayenne, white)\n\n   Red pepper flakes\n\n   Salt (celery, kosher, sea salt)\n\n   Turmeric\n\nNote: A few recipes, such as Picnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese (page 86), Tomato Gratin with Cheddar Crumbs & Basil Chiffonade (page 170), and When the Moon Hits Your Eye Cheesy Pizza Pie (page 174), call for basil leaves to be cut chiffonade style. To do this, stack the basil leaves, roll them tightly from the top down, and then carefully slice the roll into thin strips.\n\n_**hot sauce**_\n\nSeveral of the recipes call for hot sauce. While Tabasco sauce is the original liquid fire, another go-to is Frank's Red Hot Cayenne Pepper Sauce (FranksRedHot.com). For a DIY hot sauce, check out the Seitan Flares hot sauce (page 138) or the following recipe on loan from _Grilling Vegan Style_ :\n\n* * *\n\n_**drop it like it's hot**_\n\n1 (0.7-OUNCE) PACKET GOOD SEASONS ITALIAN DRESSING (POWDER)\n\n8 TABLESPOONS (1 STICK) VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n2 CUPS FRANK'S RED HOT CAYENNE PEPPER SAUCE\n\n6 TABLESPOONS BEER (OPTIONAL)\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, combine all the ingredients, mixing well.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 2\u00bd CUPS\n\n* * *\n\n_**ketchup, vegan**_\n\nMost ketchup is inherently vegan, but it is important to still read the labels to make sure you are comfortable with the product you are buying. One online source for vegan ketchup is the Annie's Naturals brand of Organic Ketchup (Annies.com).\n\n_**liquid smoke**_\n\nIf it's a smoked cheese flavor you're after, liquid smoke is an easy way to give some of the vegan cheeses, such as Cheddar (page 28) and mozzarella (page 31), and other dishes that down-home country touch. Produced through a procedure using real smoke from select wood chips, liquid smoke mimics the taste of food produced through a traditional smoking process. It comes in a variety of flavors, such as hickory, mesquite, apple, and more. In addition to adding smokiness to cheese, it is also used as a flavoring for such items as tofu, tempeh, and seitan. Liquid smoke can be strong, so be aware that a little goes a long way, and, in some cases, can even be applied with a spray bottle for greater control. While liquid smoke is easily found in stores, one online source offering a variety of vegan liquid smoke flavors is Colgin.com.\n\n_**margarine, vegan**_\n\nWhere a recipe calls for \"vegan margarine\" as a substitute for traditional butter, I suggest using the Earth Balance brand of buttery spreads (EarthBalanceNatural.com) or another nondairy, trans-fat-free, nonhydrogenated vegan margarine of choice.\n\nThe vegan Muenster cheese recipe on page 44 calls for cashew butter, which is as simple and delicious as it sounds. While cashew butter is now widely available in stores and online, here are two DIY versions:\n\n* * *\n\n_**homemade vegan cashew butter**_\n\n2 CUPS UNSALTED ROASTED OR DRY TOASTED CASHEWS\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGETABLE OR EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, PLUS MORE IF DESIRED\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON SALT\n\n1 TEASPOON VEGAN SUGAR (OPTIONAL)\n\nIn a food processor or blender, combine the nuts, oil, salt, and sugar (if using). Process on high speed for 30 seconds. Scrape down the sides with a rubber spatula and process to your desired smoothness, adding more oil, 1 teaspoon at a time, if a smoother butter is desired. Adjust the seasoning to taste. Place the cashew butter in a covered container and refrigerate until ready to use. Yields 1 to 1\u00bd cups.\n\nOne other quick alternative for making cashew butter: In a food processor, process 2 cups of roasted salted cashews until finely ground and then add 2 tablespoons of vegan margarine, blending until smooth. Add salt to taste, if desired.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 2 CUPS\n\n* * *\n\n_**mayonnaise, vegan**_\n\nWhen store-bought vegan mayonnaise is called for, Vegenaise is the recommended brand. Vegenaise is becoming more widely available in stores and can also be purchased online at FollowYourHeart.com, which is the company that originally created it.\n\nFor a DIY mayo, the following two versions can be used throughout this book:\n\n* * *\n\n_**homemade vegan mayonnaise**_\n\n\u00be CUP ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN SUGAR\n\n1 CUP WATER\n\n\u00bd CUP CIDER VINEGAR\n\n\u00be CUP VEGETABLE OIL\n\n2 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE\n\n1 TEASPOON GRATED LIME ZEST\n\n2 TEASPOONS SALT\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n\u00be CUP SOFT TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED, IF DESIRED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\nIn a medium-size saucepan, stir together the flour, sugar, water, and vinegar. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring often, until thick.\n\nIn a standing blender, combine the vegetable oil, lime juice, zest, salt, dry mustard, and tofu, and blend well.\n\nAdd half the hot flour mixture to the blender and blend. Add the remaining flour mixture and blend again.\n\nUse at room temperature or cool in the refrigerator. Homemade vegan mayonnaise will keep in the refrigerator for 4 to 5 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 2 CUPS\n\n* * *\n\n* * *\n\n_**homemade red vegan mayonnaise**_\n\n3 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON OR LIME JUICE\n\n\u00bd CUP SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SALT\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON HUNGARIAN OR SMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n\u2153 CUP CANOLA OIL\n\nIn a blender, combine the lemon juice, soy milk, salt, paprika, and dry mustard. Blend on low speed, then very slowly add the canola oil until the mixture thickens, 1 to 2 minutes. Transfer the mayonnaise to a sealable jar and keep refrigerated, where it will last for 3 to 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ \u00be CUP\n\n* * *\n\n_**millet**_\n\nDating back to biblical times, millet is a popular grain used around the world that is rich in B vitamins and used to make everything from cereal and porridge to soups and bread, and now cheese. Herein, it is used to make blue cheese (page 41).\n\n_**milk, vegan**_\n\nNondairy milk is widely available in grocery stores. Recipes here call for soy and rice milk. Soy, rice, and almond milks can be used interchangeably where nondairy milk is called for throughout the book.\n\n_**miso, white, yellow, or light**_\n\nA traditional Japanese seasoning that is made into a paste by fermenting such ingredients as soybeans, rice, barley, and other legumes and grains, miso adds layers of saltiness and a gentle cheesy flavor to many of the homemade cheese recipes that follow. Also called bean paste, the lighter colored miso is used here to prevent an overly salty taste (darker miso can be really salty). While miso is becoming more widely available, it can also be found in natural food stores, Asian food stores, and online at such places as Amazon.com, AsianFoodGrocer.com, and Earthy.com.\n\n_**mustard, vegan**_\n\nPrepared mustard is one of those fine-line items that most often is vegan, but you still need to read the labels to make sure you are comfortable with all the ingredients, which could include such things as refined sugar. Also, homemade mustard can include such ingredients as mayonnaise and eggs.\n\nSeveral recipes in the book call for dry mustard, in which case the Colman's brand (ColmansUSA.com) is suggested and widely available.\n\nFor vegan Dijon mustard, which is widely available in stores, one go-to online source is the Annie's Naturals brand of Organic Dijon Mustard (Annies.com).\n\n_**nutritional yeast**_\n\nAlso called \"nooch,\" nutritional yeast is a mustard-colored yeast that is used for its cheesy and even nutty flavor, as well as its power punch of protein and vitamins. Available in flakes or powdered form, it's especially effective in making some vegan cheeses and even in place of cheese in many dishes. Just to be clear, it's not brewer's yeast or any other kind of yeast. It's found in most health food stores and online at such places as VeganEssentials.com, VeganStore.com, and Amazon.com. For more information on nutritional yeast and other yeasts, visit RedStarYeast.com.\n\n_**nuts**_\n\nNuts help bring a wholesome earthiness to many cheeses and dishes in the book. Each recipe will specify the type of nuts (e.g., raw or toasted) needed. The nuts that are most commonly used throughout the book include:\n\n   Almonds\n\n   Cashews (see note that follows)\n\n   Pecans\n\n   Pine nuts\n\n   Walnuts\n\nNote: Cashews, especially, are used in many of the recipes because of their unique ability to help lend a cheesy flavor and texture to a dish when combined with various other ingredients. It is recommended that raw, unsalted cashews be used in the recipes throughout.\n\n_**oats, rolled**_\n\nUsed herein to make mozzarella (page 31), rolled oats are nice to have on hand for any number of recipes.\n\n_**pasta**_\n\nBe sure to read the labels of any pasta you buy to make sure all the ingredients are vegan. The pasta used in the book includes:\n\n   Angel hair\n\n   Bucatini\n\n   Elbow\n\n   Farfalle (bow-tie)\n\n   Fettuccine\n\n   Fusilli (corkscrew, multicolored suggested)\n\n   Gemelli\n\n   Linguine\n\n   Penne\n\n   Rigatoni\n\n   Shells (large)\n\n   Spaghetti\n\n_**seitan**_\n\nSeitan (say-tan) is made from the gluten of wheat. Wheat flour dough is washed with water to dissolve the starch, leaving only the elastic gluten, which is high in protein. For anyone who still has a hankering for meat, seitan is particularly known for its ability to take on the texture and flavor of meat. In fact, some varieties of seitan are flavored to taste like chicken, beef, and so on. In this book, when seitan is used, it is the regular, unflavored seitan, but, by all means, feel free to experiment. Be aware that seitan sometimes tends to crumble or break into small pieces, so handle carefully.\n\nSeitan is becoming more widely available in stores and can also be found online at such places as VeganEssentials.com.\n\n_**sour cream, vegan**_\n\nNondairy sour cream, such as Tofutti Sour Supreme, is available at some supermarkets and health food stores as well as online at such sites as Tofutti.com. FollowYourHeart.com also produces a tasty sour cream alternative. While vegan sour cream is recommended in the recipes, another option is to use unsweetened nondairy yogurt; however, the yogurt will not be as rich as the vegan sour cream. Or, you can use this DIY version:\n\n* * *\n\n_**homemade vegan sour cream**_\n\n5 (1-INCH) SLICES SILKEN SOFT TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n4 TEASPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n2 TEASPOONS CIDER VINEGAR\n\n1 TEASPOON VEGAN SUGAR\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\nIn a standing blender, combine all the ingredients and blend for 5 minutes, until creamy and very smooth. Refrigerate for 1 hour or more to thicken. Keeps for about 1 week.\n\n_**yields**_ 1\u00bd CUPS\n\n* * *\n\n_**soy sauce**_\n\nWherever soy sauce is used throughout the book, a vegan low-sodium version can be substituted, if desired. Be sure to read labels as some low-sodium brands may contain lactic acid from an unspecified source. Also, Bragg Liquid Aminos is a natural, soybean-based alternative to traditional soy sauce that is gaining momentum. Check it out at Bragg.com.\n\n_**stock, vegetable**_\n\nVegan vegetable stock is widely available in stores and can easily be made at home, using recipes found online.\n\nVegan vegetable bouillon cubes are also used in the book and are readily available. As always, carefully read the ingredient labels.\n\n_**sugar, vegan**_\n\nRegular white, refined table sugar is often made using animal bone char and is avoided by vegans. Therefore, where you see \"sugar\" used herein, you can use vegan granulated sugars, such as the Florida Crystals brand (FloridaCrystals.com), or other vegan sugar substitutes of choice.\n\nFor powdered sugar, such as for Sunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest (page 48), use a vegan brand, such as the Florida Crystals brand, or the following DIY version:\n\n* * *\n\n_**homemade vegan powdered sugar**_\n\n1 CUP UNBLEACHED VEGAN CANE SUGAR\n\n\u00bc CUP CORNSTARCH\n\nIn a processor or even a mini-processor, blend the sugar and cornstarch, in batches if necessary, for 1 minute per batch, scraping down the sides of the processor with a rubber spatula. Then blend for another 30 seconds. Store the mixture in an airtight container.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 1\u00bd CUPS\n\n* * *\n\n_**tahini**_\n\nTahini, a paste made from ground sesame seeds, is a staple in any vegan pantry. Often used in hummus dishes, here it pulls double duty in several of the homemade cheese and other recipes that follow. While becoming more widely available in stores, tahini is also available online at VeganEssentials.com and Amazon.com.\n\n_**tempeh**_\n\nLike tofu, and originally hailing from Indonesia, tempeh (tem-pay) is a fermented soybean cake. Its utilization of the entire soybean and its fermentation process empower this treat with a power punch of protein, vitamins, calcium, and dietary fiber. It has a firm texture and a nutty and mushroomlike, earthy flavor that make it a rock star among foodies. Tempeh comes in a wide range of varieties and flavors; the recipes in this book were tested with regular, unflavored tempeh, but you should feel free to also experiment with the other varieties and flavors.\n\nFYI: Tempeh can be a little temperamental because it doesn't absorb flavors as swiftly as tofu or seitan does. The secret is to simmer it in vegan vegetable stock or water for 10 to 15 minutes (to soften it and make it more absorbent), then drain.\n\n_**tofu, soft, silken, firm, or extra-firm**_\n\nA worldwide favorite for about two thousand years running, tofu, also known as bean curd, is a soy product made from pressing soy milk curds into blocks that come in soft\/silken and firm\/extra-firm varieties. The beauty of tofu, high in protein, calcium, and iron, is its amazing versatility. With little taste on its own, tofu acts as a magical sponge, soaking up whatever flavors it is combined with, such as sweet or spicy seasonings to make the various types of cheese and other dishes.\n\n**PRESSING AND DRAINING TOFU**\n\nBefore using tofu, it's best to press and drain it to remove excess water. This will firm up the tofu even more.\n\nCut the tofu block into pieces of your desired size, usually bite-size or \u00be-inch slices. Cover a dish or slanted cutting board (with a catch pan at the bottom) with an absorbent dish towel or paper towels. Place a single layer of tofu pieces on the surface. Cover the tofu layer with another dish towel or paper towels. Top that layer with a heavy object, such as another plate with heavy cans on top of it, another cutting board, or a weighty skillet. Allow the tofu to drain for at least 30 minutes to an hour.\n\nDo not press and drain any tofu that you will not be using immediately. Place the remaining tofu in a sealed container, cover with water, and refrigerate. Replace the water every day. Tofu keeps fresh for at least 3 to 4 days.\n\n**FREEZING TOFU**\n\nSome people prefer to freeze tofu for a chewier texture. Doing this also helps the tofu to better absorb seasonings. To freeze, first cut the tofu as desired and drain it as instructed, getting out as much water as possible. Leftover water will form ice pockets in the tofu, leaving holes when thawed. Then, either wrap the tofu in plastic wrap or place it in a resealable plastic bag, and store it in the freezer for up to 5 or 6 months. After only a few days, the frozen tofu will assume a chewy texture. To thaw, simply place the tofu in the refrigerator overnight.\n\nTofu has a tendency to take on a yellowish hue when frozen, but this is natural and nothing to worry about.\n\n_**truffles, white and black**_\n\nCreated from the highly valued white truffle (an edible fungus), also called an earthnut, white truffle oil is fairly easy to come by nowadays in stores or online at such places as Amazon.com. Try to find real white truffle oil, not white truffle\u2013 _flavored_ oil. It's fairly pricey, but a little goes a long way and it stores very well in the refrigerator for several months. White truffle oil is used in such recipes as White Truffle Rice-Stuffed Mushrooms (page 162); Three-Cheese Screwy Fusilli (page 181); Mac 'n' Cheese with Ground Cashews & Truffle Oil (page 199; black truffles are also used), and others.\n\n_**vegetables**_\n\nThe best vegetables are always those that are in season and fresh from a local vegetable stand or farmers' market, or from your own garden. The following is a list of the vegetables that are used throughout the book:\n\n   Artichokes\n\n   Arugula\n\n   Asparagus\n\n   Beets\n\n   Broccoli\n\n   Carrots\n\n   Cauliflower\n\n   Celery\n\n   Chives\n\n   Corn\n\n   Cucumbers\n\n   Eggplant\n\n   Fris\u00e9e (curly endive)\n\n   Garlic\n\n   Horseradish (fresh, prepared)\n\n   Leeks\n\n   Lettuce (romaine)\n\n   Mushrooms (button, cremini, portobello, shiitake, white)\n\n   Onions (purple, red, green onions\/scallions, white, yellow)\n\n   Peas (frozen)\n\n   Peppers (banana, chipotle, green bell, habanero (see note), hot chile, jalape\u00f1o see note on [page 156 for the Dynamic Jalape\u00f1o Popper Duo], red bell, yellow bell)\n\n   Potatoes (frozen French fries, new, red, russet, white, Yukon Gold)\n\n   Pumpkin (seeds, canned)\n\n   Sauerkraut\n\n   Shallots\n\n   Spaghetti squash\n\n   Spinach\n\n   Sweet potatoes\n\n   Tomatoes (cherry, canned\/diced, grape, juice, paste, plum, sun-dried [see note])\n\n   Water chestnuts\n\n   Zucchini\n\nNote: If your skin is sensitive to hot peppers, such as jalape\u00f1os and habaneros, wear rubber gloves when you chop them.\n\nNote: There is a variance in the sun-dried tomato industry, both here and abroad. When packed in oil, saltiness fluctuates wildly. For example, when not packed in oil, in Italy, dried tomatoes tend to be salted; in California, they tend not to be. Taste yours before proceeding and salt the dish accordingly.\n\n_**vinegars**_\n\nVinegars add zest to many dishes in this book and can range in flavors and uses. The most used varieties in the book include:\n\n   Apple cider\n\n   Balsamic\n\n   Cider\n\n   Red wine\n\n   Sherry\n\n_**wheat germ**_\n\nA very small part of a grain of wheat, wheat germ is a good source of fiber and a concentrated source of many essential nutrients, fatty acids, and more. Herein, it is used to make Brie (page 33).\n\n_**worcestershire sauce, vegan**_\n\nTraditional Worcestershire sauce is made using anchovies, and therefore not vegan. Luckily, vegan Worcestershire sauce is becoming more widely available in stores. One go-to source for vegan Worcestershire sauce is the Annie's Naturals brand of Organic Worcestershire Sauce (Annies.com).\n\nAlso, here is an easy DIY version:\n\n* * *\n\n_**homemade vegan worcestershire sauce**_\n\n2 CUPS CIDER VINEGAR\n\n\u00bd CUP SOY SAUCE\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN LIGHT BROWN SUGAR\n\n1 TEASPOON GROUND GINGER\n\n1 TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND CINNAMON\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\nIn a medium-size saucepan, combine all the ingredients over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to simmer and reduce the mixture by half, about 20 minutes. Strain through a fine sieve and let cool completely before using. The sauce will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 2 to 3 months.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 1 CUP\n\n* * *\nCHAPTER 1\n\n_The DIY Vegan Cheese Kitchen_\n\n**A lthough vegan cheeses have become much more widely available in stores and online, with a little time and effort, you can easily dazzle your family, friends, and party guests by making your own at home, and then using it in all your favorite dishes and so much more. Whether you are planning an easy supper for family night, craving a rich snack, or planning an artisanal platter for the ultimate wine, beer, and cocktail pairing party, these plant-based cheese recipes and the foods that follow have you covered 24\/7, no matter the occasion.**\n\n**Versatile and fun to make, the homemade cheeses, including Cheddar, Swiss, Nooch, Muenster, blue, American, wine, Jack, Brie, and cottage cheese, fly solo as well as find their way into various recipes throughout the book. Others, such as Parmesan Walnut, Parmesan Almond, and feta, are mainly here to punch up the flavor profile of a number of dishes. But, as always, I encourage you to truly make this cookbook your own.**\n\n**Feel free to experiment with the recipes by trying different cheeses or variations of those cheeses to add ever new layers of flavor to the recipes in the other chapters. The potential combinations are endless, offering something new and tasty for you to enjoy every day. For example, if you like that smoky touch, try substituting the Smoked Cheddar or Smoked Mozzarella variations where those cheeses are called for, and the same goes for the horseradish variations. Likewise, if a dish calls for Cheddar cheese, try using Jack, American, Muenster, or wine cheese, or a combination of cheeses for a change.**\n\n**As always, make sure to read through the recipes first. Some of the cheese basics do take some time (mostly for setting), so it's good to plan ahead if you're feeding a hungry crowd\u2014or just your hungry self!**\n\n_nooch cheese_\n\n**Used alone, nutritional yeast conveys a nutty and cheesy flavor, helping to galvanize many dishes as both a main ingredient and a condiment. It's only right then that this equivalent of magic dust for the plant-based set now gets its very own cheese. Lively ingredients, such as garlic, white peppercorns, and white truffle oil, meet the earthy combination of cashews and the nutritional yeast in this master Nooch cheese recipe.**\n\n* * *\n\nCANOLA OIL, FOR OILING 4 RAMEKINS\n\n\u00bd CUP PLUS 2 TABLESPOONS RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n4 CUPS NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n1\u00be CUPS UNSWEETENED SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd CUP AGAR FLAKES\n\n\u00bc CUP CANOLA OIL\n\n2 TABLESPOONS WHITE MISO\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n1 TABLESPOON WHITE TRUFFLE OIL (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nLightly oil four half-cup ramekins, wiping off any excess oil with a paper towel.\n\nIn a food processor, pulse the cashews just until they are finely ground. Don't let them become cashew butter! Add the nutritional yeast, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and white pepper. Pulse four or five times to blend the mixture well, but not so much as to make a paste.\n\nIn a large saucepan over medium-high heat, whisk together the soy milk, agar flakes, and canola oil. Bring the mixture just to a simmer. Immediately lower the heat to medium-low, cover the saucepan, and let the mixture simmer very slowly for 10 minutes, whisking occasionally. Then let the mixture cool for 10 minutes.\n\nTurn on the food processor and slowly add the soy milk mixture through the processor's feed tube. Process until the mixture is very smooth, then add the miso, lemon juice, and truffle oil (if using), and pulse until blended.\n\nTransfer the mixture to a glass container, cover tightly, and refrigerate for 4 to 5 hours. If using immediately after 5 hours, run a knife around the outer edge of the cheese, place a large plate over the container, invert the container, and tap with a wooden spoon or knife handle until the cheese tumbles onto the plate. The cheese may now be sliced or grated through the large holes of a grater. It may also be spread on crackers and melted in the microwave or under a hot broiler, but watch carefully\u2014the cheese can liquefy very quickly and suddenly. If serving on crackers, decorate with pimiento slices, chopped jalape\u00f1os, and\/or minced olives.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 3 to 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 4 CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**note:** In addition to being tasty by the slice, this master cheese can be used in just about all of the dishes in this book even though it is not specifically mentioned as an option in the recipes. Plus, this recipe is pretty easy to double as needed, whether using it in appetizers or main dishes._\n**_cheddar_**\n\n**One of the most beloved cheeses in the world since the twelfth century, when King Henry II declared it the best cheese in England, Cheddar gets its name from its birthplace, a small English village called Cheddar in Somerset. Now, we vegans are leaving our own sharp-tasting mark on history with this nondairy-, agar-, pimiento-, and mustard-infused version. Serve sliced on crackers with a cold beer or use it to make killer nachos, _or_ kick it up a few notches with the horseradish, smoked, and extra-sharp variations.**\n\n* * *\n\nCANOLA OIL, FOR OILING A LOAF PAN\n\n5 TEASPOONS AGAR POWDER, OR 5 TABLESPOONS AGAR FLAKES\n\n1\u00bd CUPS FILTERED OR BOTTLED WATER\n\n\u00bd CUP RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n\u2153 CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n\u00bd CUP SLICED PIMIENTOS\n\n3 TO 4 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE, DEPENDING ON HOW SHARP YOU WANT IT\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD\n\nPORT WINE (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nLightly oil a loaf pan measuring 3 by 7 or 4 by 8 inches. In a small saucepan over medium heat, whisk together the agar and water. Stir often until the mixture comes to a boil, then lower the heat to simmer. Let the mixture bubble away gently for 5 minutes, stirring often to dissolve the agar completely.\n\nMeanwhile, into the container of a standing blender, measure the cashews, nutritional yeast, pimiento, lemon juice, onion powder, garlic powder, and mustard.\n\nWhen the agar has boiled for 5 minutes, carefully and slowly pour it into the blender container. Return the lid to the blender and blend the mixture on high speed for about 1 minute. Stop the blender, scrape down the sides of the container with a rubber spatula, replace the lid, and blend on high speed again for another minute. The mixture should be very smooth and about the same orange color as standard dairy Cheddar cheese.\n\nPour the mixture into the prepared loaf pan, drizzle with the port wine (if using), transfer to the refrigerator, and let it chill until firm, at least 1 hour.\n\nServe sliced, or grate it to garnish or meld into your favorite dishes.\n\nThe cheese will keep tightly wrapped in the refrigerator for at least 1 week.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 2 CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**variations**_\n\n**Horseradish Cheddar:** Before pouring the mixture into the loaf pan, stir in 2 tablespoons of prepared horseradish, or to taste.\n\n**Smoked Cheddar:** Before pouring the mixture into the loaf pan, add \u00bd teaspoon of liquid smoke, or to taste.\n\n**Extra-Sharp Cheddar:** Before pouring the mixture into the loaf pan, add more lemon juice and mustard, to taste.\n\n_**wine cheese**_\n\n**This Cheddar-inspired blend of ground pine nuts, agar flakes, and white wine can be accented with other ingredients, such as caraway seeds and Tabasco sauce to taste. Also, the finished cheese can be rolled in smoked Spanish paprika for a whole new flavorful touch.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP SOY MILK\n\n3 TABLESPOONS AGAR FLAKES\n\n\u00bd CUP PINE NUTS, TOASTED IF YOU WISH\n\n\u2153 CUP CANOLA OIL\n\n\u00bc CUP FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n\u00bc CUP DRY WHITE WINE, SUCH AS A DRY RIESLING\n\n2 TABLESPOONS GRATED WHITE ONION\n\n3 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n2 TEASPOONS SALT\n\nFRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nLine a 2-cup ramekin or rectangular container with two layers of cheesecloth, letting an ample amount of the cloth\u20142 to 3 inches\u2014drape over all sides of the container.\n\nIn a small saucepan, whisk the soy milk and agar flakes until blended. Over medium heat, bring the mixture to a gentle simmer, then lower the heat and cook for 10 minutes, stirring often with a wooden spoon, until the agar is fully incorporated into the soy milk. Let the mixture cool.\n\nIn a standing blender, combine the pine nuts, canola oil, lemon juice, wine, onion, garlic, salt, and white pepper. Blend at medium speed for 5 minutes, until the mixture is smooth, scraping down the sides of the blender with a rubber spatula every minute or so.\n\nAdd the soy milk mixture and blend for 2 minutes longer. Transfer the mixture to the prepared ramekin and smooth the top of the mixture with the spatula. Fold the overhanging cheesecloth over the mixture and refrigerate for an hour, or until the mixture is fairly firm.\n\nUsing the overhanging cheesecloth, pull the cheese out of the container. Unwrap it, slice it into \u00bc-inch slices, and plate with whole wheat crackers. It can also be grated to garnish or meld into your favorite dishes.\n\nThe cheese will keep tightly wrapped in the refrigerator for at least 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 1 POUND OF CHEESE\n\n* * *\n\n_**toasted pine nuts**_\n\nPour the pine nuts into a small dry skillet preheated over medium heat. Return the pan to medium heat and, shaking very often, toast the pine nuts until they begin to color. Immediately transfer the pine nuts to a 2-cup bowl, shaking every so often to keep the nuts from steaming or browning.\n\n* * *\n_**mozzarella**_\n\n**First mentioned in a cookbook by the famous Renaissance chef Bartolomeo Scappi in 1570 and arguably the most lusted after cheese in the world (as most things of Italian origin are), this vegan version uses garlic, mustard, and tahini to transform it into something extraordinary. The smooth mozzarella, including the smoked variation, is perfect for pizzas, appetizers, and other dishes calling for it.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PEELED\n\n1 CUP WATER OR SOY MILK\n\n2 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS TAHINI (SEE NOTE)\n\n\u00bc CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n3 TABLESPOONS LIGHTLY GROUND TOASTED ROLLED OATS\n\n1 TABLESPOON CORNSTARCH\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n* * *\n\nIn a sturdy empty skillet, toast the garlic, tossing the cloves often, until lightly browned.\n\nIn the bowl of a food processor, place the water, toasted garlic cloves, lemon juice, tahini, nutritional yeast, rolled oats, cornstarch, dry mustard, onion powder, and salt. Process the ingredients until very smooth.\n\nUsing a rubber spatula, transfer the mixture to a roomy saucepan and place over medium heat. Stir the mixture constantly until it thickens.\n\nIf using the cheese to spread on pizza, you can thin the cheese by adding a little water and stirring, which will also make it nice and gooey. Or pour the cheese mixture into a suitable square or rectangular storage container and refrigerate until well chilled, at least 1 hour. Then slice the cheese and offer with crackers and chopped sun-dried tomatoes.\n\nThe cheese will keep, tightly wrapped in plastic wrap, in the refrigerator for about 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ \u00bd TO \u00be POUND OF CHEESE, OR ENOUGH FOR A 14-INCH PIZZA\n\n_**variation**_\n\n**Smoked Mozzarella:** Add \u00bd teaspoon of liquid smoke, or to taste, to the mixture in the food processor.\n\n_**note:** Tahini is a thick paste made from ground sesame seeds. The more you use in this recipe, the cheesier the flavor will be._\n\n**_brie_**\n\n**Class and style ooze from the mere mention of the spirited French cheese named after its native Brie region near Paris. But here, high society flavor comes home in this easy-to-make mild and creamy vegan Brie, which is tasty on baked woven wheat crackers, as well as when served as part of an artisanal cheese platter or alongside sliced apples and\/or pears with a glass of wine.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n2 TABLESPOONS TOASTED WHEAT GERM\n\n1\u00bd CUPS UNSWEETENED SOY MILK\n\n1 TABLESPOON AGAR POWDER\n\n\u00bd CUP ROUGHLY CHOPPED RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n\u00bd CUP CRUMBLED FIRM SILKEN TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n3 TABLESPOONS NUTRITIONAL YEAST FLAKES\n\n3 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n3 TABLESPOONS SMOOTH TAHINI\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\n2 GENEROUS PINCHES GROUND CORIANDER\n\n* * *\n\nLightly oil an 8- to 9-inch glass pie dish. Sprinkle the wheat germ over the bottom of the dish and shake to spread as evenly as possible.\n\nMeanwhile, in a small saucepan, combine the soy milk and agar powder over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer, stirring frequently until the agar dissolves, about 7 minutes. Let cool.\n\nTransfer the soy milk mixture to a standing blender or food processor and add the cashews, tofu, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, tahini, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and coriander. Pulse and process until the mixture is very smooth, scraping down the sides of the container with a rubber spatula.\n\nPour the mixture into the oiled pie dish. Cool, uncovered, in the refrigerator for 90 minutes, then cover tightly with plastic wrap and chill for several hours or overnight.\n\nWhen you're ready to serve, uncover the pie dish and invert it onto a large plate. Slice into wedges and serve.\n\nThe cheese will keep, tightly wrapped, in the refrigerator for 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 2\u00bd CUPS OF CHEESE\n_**swiss**_\n\n**Named for its country of origin, this popular style of cheese from Switzerland is more formally referred to as Emmental, after its native region and dating back to the 1300s. But around here, we keep things simple. For this nondairy Swiss cheese, the wholesome down-to-earth likes of cashews, almonds, mustard, and soy milk produce a sophisticated palate pleaser that can be served by the slice for snacks and sandwiches or shredded as a topping for salads and other dishes.**\n\n* * *\n\n1\u00bd CUPS BOTTLED OR FILTERED WATER\n\n\u2153 CUP AGAR FLAKES\n\n\u00bd CUP RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n\u2153 CUP BLANCHED ALMOND SLIVERS\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n\u2153 CUP UNSWEETENED SOY MILK\n\n\u2153 CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST FLAKES\n\nJUICE OF 1 FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON\n\n1 TABLESPOON LIGHT MISO\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD\n\n1 TABLESPOON ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\nCANOLA OIL, FOR OILING THE LOAF PAN\n\n* * *\n\nPlace the water in a medium-size saucepan, scatter on the agar flakes, and simmer over low heat until the agar flakes have dissolved, 5 to 10 minutes. Let cool.\n\nIn the bowl of a food processor, place the cashews, almond slivers, and canola oil. Pulse for 3 to 4 minutes to form a smooth paste, scraping down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as necessary.\n\nAdd the soy milk, yeast flakes, lemon juice, miso, mustard, onion powder, garlic powder, and salt to the processor bowl. Process for 1 minute.\n\nAfter the agar flakes have dissolved and cooled, add the mixture to the processor and process for 2 minutes to blend the mixture thoroughly, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary.\n\nLightly oil a loaf pan measuring 3 by 7 or 4 by 8 inches. Pour the cheese mixture into the pan, cover with plastic wrap, and chill overnight.\n\nPlace a large plate over the loaf pan, invert the pan over the plate, and tap the pan to release the cheese mixture. Slice the cheese or shred it as desired.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for up to 10 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 2 CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**note:** This Swiss cheese mixture needs to refrigerate in a loaf pan overnight, so plan accordingly._\n**_feta_**\n\n**Time to indulge in the Greek life! With its inspiration dating back to the Byzantine Empire and even making an appearance in Homer's _The Odyssey_ , this vegan feta cheese, also known as white cheese, is made with miso, red wine vinegar, and favorite herbs. With an etymology linking it to the Italian word _fetta_ , meaning \"slice,\" the version here is quite tasty when sprinkled liberally into a tossed salad, but it also cooks nicely on pizza or in casseroles. Or try it with fruit for an unusual and light dessert.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 POUND EXTRA-FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n4 TEASPOONS YELLOW MISO PASTE\n\n\u00bc CUP RED WINE VINEGAR\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY MINCED BASIL LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY MINCED ROSEMARY LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON DRIED OREGANO\n\n2 TABLESPOONS NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n* * *\n\nUsing your hands, crumble the tofu into large chunks in a roomy bowl.\n\nIn a separate medium-size bowl, whisk together the miso paste, vinegar, lemon juice, salt, basil, rosemary, and oregano. Pour the mixture over the tofu chunks and mix with your hands until the tofu is in pieces about the size of lima beans. Set aside for 10 minutes.\n\nSprinkle the nutritional yeast over the top and mix again. Serve chilled.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 SERVINGS, OR ABOUT 2\u00bd CUPS OF CHEESE\n_**cottage cheese**_\n\n**Beloved across the generations, from ancient Greeks and Egyptians to Little Miss Muffet (who famously \"sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey\") and Richard Nixon (who infamously enjoyed it for his final meal as president). The grassroots moniker of cottage cheese dates back to 1848 when it was commonly made in cottages from leftover milk. Like its dairy doppelg\u00e4nger, this vegan version can also be served with fruit or vegetables for lunch or used in main course recipes. Two light and easy serving options are to dot the plated cottage cheese with halved cherry tomatoes and sprinkle them with minced fresh basil, or serve it with pineapple slices, \u00e0 la Nixon.**\n\n* * *\n\n12 OUNCES FIRM SILKEN TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n\u00be CUP VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE), PLUS MORE, IF NEEDED, FOR TEXTURE\/APPEARANCE\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\n1 TEASPOON NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n* * *\n\nUsing your hands, crumble the tofu into a medium-size bowl. Continue mixing with your hands until the tofu achieves the texture of large-curd cottage cheese.\n\nMix in the mayonnaise, garlic, onion powder, salt, and nutritional yeast, stirring until the mixture looks like cottage cheese, adding more mayonnaise if necessary. Serve chilled.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 3 to 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS, OR 1\u00bd TO 2 CUPS OF CHEESE\n_**cream cheese**_\n\n**The mere mention of cream cheese sends the imagination in so many delicious directions at once, from breakfast straight through to that midnight snack. With origins in 1500s England and 1600s France, cream cheese as we know it today is credited to Chester, New York, dairy farmer William A. Lawrence, who first mass-produced it in the 1870s, as well as other later American cream cheese makers. Retaining that signature texture and versatility, this twenty-first-century vegan version couldn't be easier. With or without the optional flavor variations, use it anywhere you would use traditional cream cheese. For example, I like it on a toasted onion bagel with chopped green onions and diced tomatoes.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP FIRM SILKEN TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CANOLA OIL\n\n3 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN SUGAR\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n* * *\n\nIn a standing blender or a mini-processor, combine all the ingredients and blend until very smooth. Transfer to a glass bowl and refrigerate until well chilled, at least 1 hour.\n\nThe cheese will keep tightly wrapped in the refrigerator for 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 1\u00bd CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**variations**_\n\n**Garlic Cream Cheese:** Blend in crushed garlic cloves to taste.\n\n**Jalape\u00f1o Cream Cheese:** Stir in finely minced jalape\u00f1os to taste, with or without seeds. Remember that the heat is in the jalape\u00f1o's inner white ribs, and some of that heat naturally transfers to the seeds, so proceed according to the level of heat you want.\n\n**Farmers' Market Veggie Cream Cheese:** Before blending the cheese, finely mince about \u00bc cup each of chopped carrots, celery, seeded red bell peppers, and the white and light green parts of trimmed green onions, then make the cream cheese in the same blender.\n\n**Hot Sauce Cream Cheese:** Blend in 1 teaspoon of Tabasco sauce, or to taste.\n\n**Smoked Cream Cheese:** Blend in \u00bd teaspoon of liquid smoke, or to taste.\n\n_**parmesan**_\n\n**What better muse for a poet or dreamer than cheese? In his seminal 1350s work _The Decameron_ , Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio dreams of \"a mountain, all of grated Parmesan cheese\" and the dishes it could be used to create. Throughout the book, where a recipe calls for Parmesan cheese, either of the following two nutty versions can be used.**\n\n* * *\n\n_**parmesan walnut**_\n\n1 CUP COARSELY CHOPPED RAW WALNUTS\n\n2 TABLESPOONS NUTRITIONAL YEAST FLAKES\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND SEA SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\n_**parmesan almond**_\n\n1 CUP SLIVERED ALMONDS\n\n5 TABLESPOONS NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n1 TEASPOON LEMON ZEST\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\n_**parmesan walnut**_\n\n**This simple vegan Parmesan cheese, or Parmigiano-Reggiano if you want to get all Italian and fancy about it, comes surprisingly close to the real deal, and some (okay, many) would say it's even better! With the original dating back to the Middle Ages when it was created in Bibbiano, a province of Reggio Emilia, walnuts and nutritional yeast have brought this cheesy topper into modern times.**\n\nIn a small bowl, mix the walnuts, nutritional yeast, and salt together. In batches, if necessary, grind the mixture in a coffee grinder dedicated to ingredients other than coffee. Grind for 8 to 10 seconds per batch. Don't overgrind the mixture.\n\nTransfer the mixture to a tightly covered container and refrigerate.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for about 1 week, assuming the walnuts are fairly fresh.\n\n_**yields**_ 1\u00bc CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**parmesan almond**_\n\n**Its ancestor has been long-heralded, from the world's first celebrity chef, Bartolomeo Scappi, who declared it the best cheese on earth in the 1500s, to Mario Batali, who called it the \"king of all cheese.\" This homemade Parmesan cheese, starring almonds and lemon zest, continues the tradition by adding a refreshing burst to your favorite pasta and pizzeria-inspired dishes as well as to sandwiches and anything else you want to punch up with a unique shot of classic flavor.**\n\nIn a blender or mini-processor, combine all the ingredients. Pulse until the ingredients form crumbs the size of a half-grain of rice or baby peas.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 3 to 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 1\u00bc CUPS OF CHEESE\n_**ricotta**_\n\n**Ricotta cheese is believed to originally hail from Sicily or Rome. Ancient foodie and author Athenaeus is credited with first writing about ricotta cheese in the second and third centuries. The star of many Italian dishes from main courses to decadent desserts, this luscious nondairy version with its garlic, basil, and oregano power points can be spread on crackers, used in manicotti or stuffed shells, and so much more.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 POUND MEDIUM-FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n2 GARLIC CLOVES, PRESSED\n\n\u00bc CUP EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY CHOPPED BASIL LEAVES\n\n2 TEASPOONS FRESHLY CHOPPED OREGANO LEAVES, OR 1 TEASPOON DRIED\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, mash the tofu with a fork. Add the garlic, olive oil, basil, oregano, salt, and white pepper. Mash together until the mixture has the consistency of traditional ricotta cheese. Taste for salt.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 3 to 4 days.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 CUPS OF CHEESE\n_**blue**_\n\n**Its various dairy counterparts have lineages starting with such dates as AD 879 and count the likes of Charlemagne and Casanova (who proclaimed it an aphrodisiac!) among their fans, making this one of the world's oldest and most storied cheeses. Here, this vegan incarnation, created with millet, cashews, onion and garlic powders, miso, cider vinegar, and two pinches of nutmeg, makes a smooth blue cheese spread, which can be thinned with soy milk to additionally make a savory salad dressing.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS MILLET\n\n\u00bd CUP CHOPPED RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS, OR DESIRED CONSISTENCY (SEE NOTE)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\nJUICE OF 1 LARGE LEMON\n\n\u00bc CUP TAHINI\n\n3 TABLESPOONS WHITE MISO\n\n1 TABLESPOON CIDER VINEGAR\n\n\u2154 CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n1 TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n2 PINCHES GROUND NUTMEG\n\n\u00bc CUP CHOPPED FRESH PARSLEY LEAVES\n\n2 TEASPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CHIVES\n\n* * *\n\nRinse the millet thoroughly under cold running water, removing any dirt or small stones you may encounter. In a large saucepan, bring the millet and 5 cups of water to a boil. Lower the heat, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes, adding a little more water as necessary. Let the cooked millet cool.\n\nTransfer the millet to a food processor and pulse until a smooth paste forms. Add the cashews and pulse for 5 seconds. Add the onion powder, garlic powder, lemon juice, tahini, and miso, and pulse for 10 seconds. Add the vinegar, nutritional yeast, dry mustard, nutmeg, parsley, and chives, and pulse until you reach your desired consistency, at least 20 seconds. Taste for seasoning.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 3 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 3 CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**note:** Although more of a spread, this recipe can be made more crumbly by not overprocessing the cashews._\n**_jack_**\n\n**Originally produced in the nineteenth century by Franciscan friars in Monterey, California, this vegan version's ancestor has long been a scrumptious pride and joy among native US cheeses. While many legends exist as to its origins and to how it got its name (one version credits businessman David Jacks, who helped commercialize it), Monterey Jack has now been transformed for a new generation of cheeseheads with a blend of agar flakes, cashews, lemon juice, tahini, onion and garlic powders, and coriander. This new take on an American classic is named after my dad, Jack.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n1\u00bd CUPS FILTERED OR BOTTLED STILL WATER\n\n5 TABLESPOONS AGAR FLAKES\n\n1\u00bd CUPS FIRM SILKEN TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n\u00bd CUP CHOPPED RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n\u00bc CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST FLAKES\n\nJUICE OF 1 LARGE LEMON\n\n2 TABLESPOONS TAHINI\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n1 TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON GROUND CORIANDER\n\n* * *\n\nRub the canola oil around in a 3-cup container with a tight cover. In a medium-size saucepan, combine the water and agar flakes, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until dissolved, stirring frequently, about 8 minutes. Let cool.\n\nTransfer to a blender and add the tofu, cashews, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, tahini, onion powder, salt, dry mustard, garlic powder, and ground coriander. Blend until completely smooth. Pour into the oiled container and refrigerate, uncovered, for 90 minutes. Cover the container and chill overnight.\n\nTo serve, invert the container onto a large plate and slice. Leftovers will keep, covered and refrigerated, for about a week.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**notes:** You can vary the flavor of this mild pale cheese by adding your favorite fresh or dried herbs, pressed garlic, minced hot chiles, or even chopped vegan green pimiento-stuffed olives._\n\n_This Jack cheese mixture needs to refrigerate overnight, so plan accordingly._\n\n**_muenster_**\n\n**As mild, smooth, and soft as the native US cheese it's inspired by, this nondairy Muenster cheese, made with paprika, cashew butter, tahini, coriander, and more, marks the birth of a new standard on the cheese circuit. It will satisfy your cravings for toasted cheese sandwiches, quesadillas, veggie cheeseburgers, mac 'n' cheese, and anytime snacks by the slice.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n2 TABLESPOONS UNSMOKED PAPRIKA\n\n1\u00bd CUPS FILTERED OR BOTTLED STILL WATER\n\n1 TEASPOON AGAR POWDER\n\n7 TABLESPOONS VEGAN CASHEW BUTTER (SEE NOTE)\n\n\u00bc CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST FLAKES\n\nJUICE OF 1 LARGE LEMON\n\n2 TABLESPOONS TAHINI\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n1 TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON GROUND CORIANDER\n\n1 TABLESPOON CARAWAY SEEDS\n\n* * *\n\nRub the canola oil around in a 3-cup container with a tight cover. Sprinkle the paprika over the sides and bottom of the container until lightly coated.\n\nIn a small saucepan, combine the water and agar, and bring to a boil. Let cool, then transfer to a standing blender and add the cashew butter, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, tahini, onion powder, salt, dry mustard, garlic powder, and coriander. Process until very smooth, then sprinkle with the caraway seeds.\n\nPour the mixture into the oiled container and refrigerate, uncovered, for 90 minutes. Cover the container and chill overnight.\n\nTo serve, invert the container over a large plate. Slice the cheese and serve.\n\nLeftovers will keep, refrigerated and covered, for about 1 week.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 3 CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**notes:** Vegan cashew butter is now widely available in large supermarkets and health food stores, or see the DIY version on page 13._\n\n_This Muenster cheese mixture needs to refrigerate overnight, so plan accordingly._\n**_american_**\n\n**Forget the common, processed, dairy versions. The _new_ American cheese has arrived in a wholesome and natural version created with a blend of cashews, almonds, onion and garlic powders, lemon juice, and red bell peppers. This vegan wonder can very tastefully be served in slices over a veggie burger and topped with a thick slice of red onion, but that's only one of its many uses. It's extremely versatile, and nice and mild, so kids will love it, too! Also, fire up appetizers and dishes with the horseradish variation.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP FILTERED OR BOTTLED STILL WATER\n\n\u2153 CUP PLUS 1 TABLESPOON AGAR POWDER\n\n1 CUP FINELY GROUND RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n1 CUP FINELY GROUND RAW SLIVERED ALMONDS\n\n\u00bc CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST FLAKES\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n2 TABLESPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n1 TABLESPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bc CUP FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n\u00bd LARGE RED BELL PEPPER, STEMMED, SEEDED, AND CHOPPED INTO \u00bd-INCH PIECES\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n* * *\n\nIn a standing blender or food processor, pour the water over the agar. Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes, then add the cashews, almonds, nutritional yeast, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, lemon juice, and chopped bell pepper. Blend until it reaches a creamy consistency.\n\nLightly oil a 4-cup mold or container. Pour the mixture into the mold and let cool briefly. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Serve sliced.\n\nThe cheese will keep in a tightly covered container, refrigerated, for 4 to 5 days.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 4 CUPS OF CHEESE\n\n_**variation**_\n\n**Horseradish American:** Add freshly grated or prepared horseradish to taste, starting with 2 teaspoons.\n\n_**note:** This American cheese mixture needs to refrigerate overnight, so plan accordingly._\nCHAPTER 2\n\n_Breakfast & Brunch_\n\n**T here are a few different things to consider when planning a daily breakfast or weekend brunch menu. Is it going to be a small family gathering with little mouths to feed before everyone heads off to work and school? Are you having friends over and hope to impress them with your culinary gravitas? Or are you pulling together a drop-in buffet for fellow revelers who will be staggering in at different times with crushing hangovers or returning home from long walks of glorious shame?**\n\n**Good news! No matter the circumstances, the following mix-and-match recipes, which run the gamut from sweet and tangy to earthy and wholesome, have you covered seven days a week. Everyone at the table will get their fill with such dishes as Sunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest, the Great Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese, Cozy Cottage Pancakes, You Gotta Frittata!, Swiss & Cheddar Sunday Brunch Tarts, and Mushroom-Cheese Strudel.**\n\n**Or you can get downright personal by letting your guests pull together their own ingredients for the DIY Cheesy Scramble, where their choice of Cheddar, Jack, American, and wine cheese lays the foundation for such extras as chopped bell peppers, onions, jalape\u00f1os, spinach, mushrooms, and more.**\n**_sunrise bruschetta with ricotta, powdered sugar & lemon zest_**\n\n**This radiant brunch bruschetta gets the cheesy treatment here, compliments of ricotta plus sweet and zesty twists of powdered sugar and lemon. Perfect for starting or ending a morning meal, this bruschetta also has \"treat\" written all over it when flying solo during a coffee break.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE LOAF CRUSTY VEGAN ITALIAN BREAD, CUT INTO \u00be-INCH SLICES ON THE DIAGONAL (HALVE THE SLICES IF THEY SEEM TOO LARGE)\n\nGOOD EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n2 LARGE CLOVES GARLIC, PEELED AND SLICED IN HALF\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN RICOTTA CHEESE (PAGE 40, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nSEA SALT OR KOSHER SALT\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN POWDERED SUGAR (PAGE 17, OR STORE-BOUGHT), OR TO TASTE\n\n2 LEMONS, FOR ZEST\n\n* * *\n\nSet a grill pan over medium-high heat or turn on your broiler. Brush both sides of each slice of bread lightly with the olive oil. Put the bread on the grill pan, and cook until slightly charred on each side, about 2 minutes per side; alternatively, broil the bread slices about 3 inches from the heating element, flipping them after about 1 minute and watching them very closely. When the bread is charred to your liking, remove it and rub the toasted sides lightly on one side with the cut side of one of the garlic halves.\n\nTo the side you've rubbed with garlic, add a generous smear of the ricotta cheese (best to leave it kind of messy and rustic looking), then drizzle with more olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Dust each bruschetta slice with the powdered sugar and use a fine grater to grate a good amount of lemon zest over the top. Serve immediately. Be prepared to make another batch.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 TO 10 SERVINGS\n_**the great pumpkin bread with cream cheese**_\n\n**Autumn by the loaf! This seasonal bread recipe, with the cozy flavors of nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and, of course, pumpkin, makes three loaves, so you'll have plenty to save for later. If you bake the batter in one-pound coffee cans, the round loaves will keep well in the cans with their plastic lids in place for several weeks of sensational breakfasts, brunches, desserts, or plain ol' snacking.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY GRATED NUTMEG\n\n1 TEASPOON GROUND CINNAMON\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND GINGER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND ALLSPICE\n\n2\u00bd TO 3 CUPS VEGAN SUGAR (DEPENDING ON HOW SWEET YOU LIKE YOUR PUMPKIN BREAD)\n\n1 CUP CANOLA OIL\n\n\u2153 CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n1\u00bd TEASPOONS SALT\n\n1 (14- TO 16-OUNCE) CAN PURE PUMPKIN (NOT \"PUMPKIN PIE MIX\")\n\n\u2154 CUP WATER\n\n2 TEASPOONS BAKING SODA\n\n3 CUPS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\nVEGETABLE SHORTENING, FOR GREASING THE COFFEE TINS\n\nVEGAN CREAM CHEESE (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT), FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. In a standing mixer, combine the nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, sugar, canola oil, egg replacer, and salt. Add the pumpkin, water, soda, and then the flour 1 cup at a time. Beat well.\n\nFill to about two-thirds full three greased 1-pound coffee tins or 1\u00bd-quart ungreased nonstick bread loaf pans.\n\nBake for 1 hour on the middle rack of the oven, on a baking sheet in case of spillovers. If you're using loaf pans, check the breads at 50 minutes and bake only until an inserted skewer comes out clean.\n\nThese round loaves keep for several weeks in the refrigerator covered with a coffee can lid. They also ship very well in cold weather.\n\nServe warmed, sliced, and spread with room-temperature cream cheese and an extra sprinkling of cinnamon.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 LOAVES\n_**the DIY cheesy scramble**_\n\n**This is a consummate brunch dish that you can customize for any guest list. It doubles easily for a crowd and can be most fun and interactive when transformed into the DIY Cheesy Scramble. For daily breakfasts or weekend guests, arrange a lineup of the suggested fillings or any others of choice, each in separate clear glass bowls, to create Cheesy Scrambles that are truly made to order.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (12-OUNCE) CARTON SOFT SILKEN TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON CURRY POWDER\n\nKOSHER SALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH BASIL LEAVES\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH TARRAGON LEAVES\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CHIVES\n\n\u00bd CUP GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nSMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\n_**suggested fillings**_\n\nVEGAN WINE, JACK, OR AMERICAN CHEESE (PAGE 30, 42, OR 45, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT) (OPTIONAL)\n\nRED, YELLOW, AND\/OR GREEN BELL PEPPERS, SEEDED AND CHOPPED\n\nONIONS, CHOPPED\n\nJALAPE\u00d1OS, CHOPPED\n\nSPINACH, WHOLE BABY LEAVES OR CHOPPED\n\nMUSHROOMS, SLICED OR CHOPPED\n\n* * *\n\nWhen the tofu has been properly pressed, heat the olive oil in a medium-size skillet over medium heat. When the oil slides easily across the pan, crumble the tofu into the pan, making the crumbles about the size of scrambled egg curds. Sprinkle with the curry powder and about \u00bd teaspoon of salt. Stirring frequently, cook the tofu until dry and firm\u2014but not hard\u20144 to 5 minutes.\n\nStir in the white pepper, basil, tarragon, and chives, then stir in the Cheddar cheese. Add any other fillings of choice. Let the mixture cook until the cheese has softened and melted. Plate the mixture and serve sprinkled with the paprika.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 TO 4 SERVINGS\n_**toast with the most cheese bread**_\n\n**Use the best high-density, whole-grain bread you can find for this sumptuous toast. As simple as this recipe seems, you may need to experiment a bit to find the most pleasing result. To serve this as an appetizer or as a crispy accompaniment to one of the soups or salads inChapter 3, slice the broiled cheese bread into bite-size pieces. Or layer tomato slices, mixed greens, and mustard between two slices for an indulgent noontime sandwich.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u2153 CUP VEGAN MARGARINE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK OR WHITE PEPPER\n\n6 SLICES VEGAN WHOLE-GRAIN BREAD\n\n* * *\n\nHeat the broiler. In a medium-size bowl, mix the Cheddar cheese with the softened margarine, garlic, and pepper.\n\nPlace the bread slices on a baking sheet and broil watchfully until toasted, turning once.\n\nSpread the Cheddar mixture on each bread slice and run under the broiler until bubbly. Serve promptly.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 TO 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**swiss & cheddar sunday brunch tarts**_\n\n**What a festive way to begin the week! Swiss cheese and Cheddar cheese get comfy with red and green bell peppers and red onion to give you a cheery slice of \"Good Morning!\" with every bite. Plus, any leftovers make a great lunch or snack for later.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 (8- TO 9-INCH) UNBAKED VEGAN PASTRY SHELLS\n\n1\u00bd CUPS VEGAN EGG REPLACER, OR 1\u00bd CUPS FILTERED OR BOTTLED WATER BEATEN WITH \u00bd CUP GROUND FLAXSEEDS\n\n1 CUP SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd CUP CHOPPED RED ONION\n\n\u00bd RED BELL PEPPER, SEEDED AND CHOPPED INTO \u00bc-INCH PIECES\n\n\u00bd GREEN BELL PEPPER, SEEDED AND CHOPPED INTO \u00bc-INCH PIECES\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. In a medium-size bowl, mix the cheeses and divide the mixture between the two pastry shells.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the egg replacer, soy milk, onion, and peppers. Pour half of the mixture over the cheeses in each pastry shell. Bake the tarts for about 1 hour, or until a knife inserted near the center of each tart comes out clean. Let the tarts rest for 5 minutes before cutting them into serving wedges.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 12 SERVINGS\n_**cozy cottage pancakes**_\n\n**Savory pancakes make breakfast particularly splendid, especially with the unexpected addition of cottage cheese. To translate this dish into a unique side for lunch or supper, garnish with grated Muenster cheese and fresh herbs. You'll probably need to double this, even for two people, because these pancakes will be gone in a flash!**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP VEGAN COTTAGE CHEESE (PAGE 36, OR STORE-BOUGHT), PLUS MORE FOR GARNISH (OPTIONAL)\n\n\u2153 CUP WONDRA (INSTANT) FLOUR (SEE PAGE 8)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CANOLA OIL, PLUS MORE FOR OILING THE SKILLET\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER, OR MORE TO ACHIEVE DESIRED TEXTURE\n\n\u00bd CUP GRATED OR FINELY CHOPPED VEGAN MUENSTER CHEESE (PAGE 44, OR STORE-BOUGHT), OR TO TASTE, FOR GARNISH (OPTIONAL)\n\n\u00bd CUP FINELY CHOPPED FRESH TARRAGON OR THYME LEAVES, OR TO TASTE, FOR GARNISH (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, combine the cottage cheese, flour, the 2 tablespoons of canola oil, and the egg replacer. Mix with a fork until smooth.\n\nRub an adequate amount of oil all over the inner surface of a large skillet. Heat the skillet over medium heat, and pour about \u2153 cup of the pancake batter onto the hot skillet. Cook until bubbles form on the top surface, then flip with a thin spatula and cook until browned underneath, peeking under by lifting a corner of one of the pancakes. Serve at once, perhaps with additional cottage cheese spread on top of each pancake. Or garnish with the Muenster cheese and herbs.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 SERVINGS\n_**you gotta frittata!**_\n\n**In addition to being delectable, this frittata is also quite salubrious. It brings together a who's who of fresh farmers' market veggies, such as potatoes, red bell peppers, zucchini, and tomatoes, all accented with turmeric, smoked Spanish paprika, Dijon mustard, and lots more.**\n\n* * *\n\n3 MEDIUM-SIZE YUKON GOLD OR RUSSET POTATOES, PEELED AND SLICED INTO \u00bd-INCH DICE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE ONION, PEELED AND DICED\n\n\u00bd RED BELL PEPPER, SEEDED AND DICED\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE ZUCCHINI, PEELED, SEEDED, AND DICED\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n\u00bd CUP DICED TOMATOES, DRAINED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS MINCED FRESH PARSLEY LEAVES\n\n1 POUND FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n\u00bd CUP SOY MILK\n\n\u00bc CUP CORNSTARCH\n\n2 TEASPOONS VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON GROUND TURMERIC\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1\u00bd CUPS SHREDDED OR CHOPPED VEGAN MOZZARELLA, SWISS, OR BRIE CHEESE (PAGE 31, , OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 375\u00b0F. In a large skillet over medium heat, saut\u00e9 the potatoes in the olive oil for 8 minutes. Add the onion, and saut\u00e9 until the onion is translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the bell pepper, zucchini, and garlic, and saut\u00e9 until the pepper is soft, about 5 minutes longer. Add the tomatoes and parsley, and stir for 1 minute. Remove the skillet from the heat.\n\nMeanwhile, in a food processor or blender, combine the tofu, soy milk, cornstarch, mustard, salt, turmeric, paprika, and pepper. Blend until very smooth.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the saut\u00e9ed vegetables with the tofu mixture. Spoon the mixture into a large pie pan. Scatter the cheese of choice over the mixture and bake for 40 minutes, or until the frittata feels firm at its center. Let the frittata cool for 10 minutes before cutting and serving.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**mrs. cleaver's cheddar muffins**_\n\n**Served warm in a basket, these mom-approved Cheddar muffins disappear quickly, so you might consider doubling the recipe if you've got hungry loved ones at the table.**\n\n* * *\n\n12 TABLESPOONS (1\u00bd STICKS) VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 CUPS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n1 CUP VEGAN SOUR CREAM (PAGE 17, OR STORE-BOUGHT), OR VEGAN YOGURT\n\n1 TABLESPOON BAKING POWDER\n\n3 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CHIVES\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 375\u00b0F. In a large saucepan over medium heat, melt the margarine. Add the Cheddar cheese, a handful at a time, stirring. When all the cheese is in, cook for 2 minutes, stirring. Add the flour, sour cream, baking powder, and chives. The batter will be quite thick.\n\nSpoon the batter into ungreased nonstick mini muffin tins or a regular muffin tin, filling each cup two-thirds of the way. Bake for 20 minutes, or until a tester inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Invert the tins onto a cooling rack. Serve the muffins while they're still warm.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 4 DOZEN MINI MUFFINS OR 12 REGULAR MUFFINS\n\n_**caf\u00e9 spinach & mushroom quiche**_\n\n**This caf\u00e9 bigwig is hardly the delicate custard quiche that suddenly became all the rage in the 1970s; it's better and heartier. The tahini, tofu, and soy milk add a contemporary and cheesy flavor and texture that mixes well with the red onion, shiitakes, garlic, and seasonings.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CANOLA OIL\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE RED ONION, MINCED\n\n8 OUNCES SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS, STEMMED AND CHOPPED\n\n2 CUPS CHOPPED BABY SPINACH LEAVES\n\n3 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) PACKAGE FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n\u2153 CUP SOY MILK\n\n3 TABLESPOONS TAHINI\n\nKOSHER SALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n3 TEASPOONS CURRY POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON CAYENNE PEPPER, OR TO TASTE\n\n1 VEGAN WHOLE WHEAT PIECRUST\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. In a large stainless-steel skillet over medium heat, heat the canola oil. Toss in the onion and mushrooms. Cook for about 10 minutes, until the mushrooms have released their liquid. Add the spinach and garlic, and cook for 5 minutes longer. Remove the skillet from the heat and keep warm.\n\nMash the tofu with a fork and place it in a food processor. Add the soy milk and tahini. Puree the mixture until very smooth. Add salt and white pepper to taste, and the curry powder, onion powder, and cayenne pepper. Process again until smooth.\n\nAdd the tofu mixture to the cooked vegetables and stir well to combine. Spoon the mixture into the piecrust and bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the top of the pie is golden brown. Let the quiche rest for 10 minutes before slicing.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n_**caf\u00e9 broccoli & parmesan quiche**_\n\n**The combination of tofu, soy milk, and turmeric here adds cheesy ambience to this brimming broccoli, red bell pepper, and shiitake caf\u00e9 quiche, which is finished off nicely with a dusting of Parmesan. Perfect for breakfast, lunch, or even with a salad at dinner, you can really treat yourself to this slice of heaven at any time of the day.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 RED ONION, PEELED AND DICED\n\n1 RED BELL PEPPER, STEMMED, SEEDED, AND DICED\n\n1 CUP CHOPPED BROCCOLI FLORETS\n\n1 CUP SLICED SHIITAKE MUSHROOM CAPS\n\n6 FRESH BASIL LEAVES, CHOPPED FINELY\n\n1 POUND FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND TURMERIC\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n\u00bd CUP SOY MILK\n\n1 VEGAN WHOLE WHEAT PIECRUST (STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u2153 CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. In a medium-size saucepan over medium heat, bring the olive oil to a lively simmer and saut\u00e9 the onion, bell pepper, broccoli, shiitakes, and basil until the pepper is very tender, about 10 minutes, stirring often. Set aside and keep warm.\n\nIn a food processor, buzz the tofu, turmeric, salt, pepper, and soy milk until smooth. Pour the mixture over the vegetables and mix well.\n\nTransfer the mixture into the piecrust and bake for 30 minutes, or until a metal skewer inserted into the center of the quiche comes out clean. Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese and serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n_**mushroom-cheese strudel**_\n\n**Strudel dates back to the 1600s, but this vegan strudel is thoroughly modern and proves that three is, indeed, company with its shiitake, cremini, and portobello trio.**\n\n* * *\n\n12 TABLESPOONS (1\u00bd STICKS) MELTED VEGAN MARGARINE, PLUS 6 TABLESPOONS UNMELTED, FOR SAUT\u00c9ING\n\n2 POUNDS MIXED MUSHROOMS, SUCH AS SHIITAKES, CREMINIS, AND PORTOBELLOS, STEMMED, CAPS WIPED CLEAN WITH MOIST PAPER TOWELS\n\n4 GREEN ONIONS, MINCED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CANOLA OIL\n\nKOSHER SALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON CARAWAY SEEDS\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN CREAM CHEESE (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT), AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n8 SHEETS FROZEN VEGAN PHYLLO DOUGH, ABOUT 15 BY 22-INCHES\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Grease a large baking sheet with the melted margarine, reserving the rest of the melted margarine for brushing the phyllo. Mince the mushroom caps and press them between paper towels to dry them as much as possible.\n\nIn a large skillet over medium-high heat, saut\u00e9 the mushrooms with the green onions in the 6 tablespoons of margarine and the canola oil, stirring often. The mushrooms will absorb all the liquid in the skillet. When they have released the liquid and it has evaporated, season the mushrooms with salt and pepper and sprinkle the caraway seeds over the mixture. Stir in the softened cream cheese.\n\nPlace a damp towel on a work surface. Spread one sheet of the phyllo dough on the towel, narrow end facing you. Brush with melted margarine. Repeat with second, third, and fourth sheets. Place half the mushroom mixture on the buttered phyllo sheets in a heap at the narrow end of the dough nearest you, leaving a 2-inch border at all sides. Fold in the sides, then roll up the phyllo, using the edge of the towel to get you started. Make a second strudel with the remaining phyllo sheets.\n\nTransfer the strudels to the greased baking sheet. Brush them with melted margarine and bake for 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Let the strudels rest for 5 minutes, then cut into serving pieces with kitchen shears.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** Phyllo, or filo, dough is fairly widely available in vegan forms, but it's also easy to order from a number of online sources. Read the ingredients label to be sure what you're getting is vegan. Also, make sure to keep the dough as damp as possible while you work with it._\n**_spoonable bloody queen marys_**\n\n**This unique, spoonable version of one of the world's most iconic thirst quenchers has \"showstopper\" written all over it. Served in whiskey tumblers, this brunch starter (and\/or ender), boasting such flavors as tomato, vodka, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco sauce, will be the talk of Brunch Town.**\n\n* * *\n\n2\u00bc TEASPOONS UNFLAVORED POWDERED VEGAN GELATIN, SUCH AS LIEBER'S UNFLAVORED JEL (SEE NOTE)\n\n4 TEASPOONS AGAR POWDER (SEE NOTE)\n\n3\u00bd CUPS TOMATO JUICE\n\n\u00bd CUP VODKA\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON VEGAN WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE (PAGE 23, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON TABASCO SAUCE, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n5 RIBS CELERY, PEELED AND CHOPPED COARSELY\n\n2 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS FINELY SHREDDED FRESH BASIL\n\n* * *\n\nIn a small saucepan, sprinkle the gelatin and agar powders over 1 cup of the tomato juice and let stand until softened, about 5 minutes. Set the saucepan over moderate heat and stir until the juice is warm and the gelatin and agar powders have dissolved completely, about 4 minutes. Do not let the juice get too hot.\n\nPour the juice into a 1-quart glass measuring cup and stir in the remaining 2\u00bd cups of tomato juice and the vodka. Season with the salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco sauce, then divide the juice mixture among eight whiskey tumblers. Place the tumblers on a tray and refrigerate until set, at least 6 hours to overnight.\n\nIn a blender, puree the celery with the lime juice. Strain the puree through a fine sieve and season with salt. Cover the celery juice and refrigerate until well chilled.\n\nAdd 2 tablespoons of the celery juice to each glass of tomato jelly. Top with heaping teaspoons of the Parmesan cheese and basil. Serve with long iced tea spoons.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 SERVINGS\n\n_**notes:** The gelatin and agar powders need to set for 6 hours or overnight, so plan accordingly._\n\n_If you don't have a nearby source for Lieber's Unflavored Jel or agar powder (vegan gelatins), they're available online atVeganEssentials.com._\n\nCHAPTER 3\n\n_Soups & Salads_\n\n**S erved together or separately, or as first and second courses, these soups and salads have been created to appeal to everyone's tastes.**\n\n**First up, the soups: the Fancy Schmancy Vichyssoise brings an uppity-up down to earth and Swiss Meets French Onion Soup enhances an old favorite, while Smoky Mountain Tomato & Cheddar Soup and Bucking Bronco Tomato & Horseradish Soup redefine comfort by the spoonful.**\n\n**Next, the salads do their job equally well indoors or outside, offering layers of flavor for any occasion. Lunches and picnics were made for the likes of Tomato Meets Mozzarella, Falls in Love; the Parmesan Caesar with Cheesy Croutons; Spicy Green Salad with Swiss Cheese & Pears; Three Beans Steal the Scene Salad; New Potato & Ricotta Salad; Broccoli & Cauliflower Salad; and Picnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese.**\n\n_**fancy schmancy vichyssoise**_\n\n**There's really nothing fancy here, other than the name: the magic of this vichyssoise is actually in the combination of simple ingredients, such as minced onion, celery root, potatoes, ricotta cheese, and chives that meld together beautifully. Traditionally, this soup is served cold, but feel free to break the rules by heating it up as well.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n1 SMALL ONION, PEELED AND MINCED\n\n\u2153 CUP MINCED CELERY ROOT\n\n1 LARGE LEEK, WHITE AND GREEN PARTS ONLY, SLICED INTO THIN COINS\n\n1 QUART VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK OR BOUILLON, CANNED OR MADE FROM A DRY MIX\n\n1 POUND WHITE POTATOES, PEELED AND SLICED INTO 1-INCH PIECES\n\n\u00be CUP VEGAN RICOTTA CHEESE (PAGE 40, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bc CUP DRY WHITE VERMOUTH OR DRY WHITE WINE (OPTIONAL)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\nCHOPPED FRESH CHIVES, FOR GARNISH\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large saucepan, melt the margarine over medium heat. Add the onion, celery root, and leek, and cook until glassy and soft. Do not brown.\n\nPour in the vegetable stock and add the potatoes and ricotta cheese. Bring to a very low boil, then lower the heat, and simmer slowly until the potatoes have softened, about 20 minutes.\n\nWith an immersion blender or in batches in a standing blender, puree the soup thoroughly. Stir in the vermouth (if using), salt, and white pepper. Serve sprinkled with the chives.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**swiss meets french onion soup**_\n\n**A toasted baguette slice is the cherry atop this m\u00e9lange. Caramelized onions, Swiss cheese, and a myriad of herbs conspire to pay tribute to one of the world's most famous soups like you've never tasted it before.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n5 MEDIUM-SIZE RED ONIONS (ABOUT 3 POUNDS), SLICED THINLY\n\nSALT\n\n2 QUARTS CANNED VEGAN LOW-SODIUM VEGETABLE STOCK\n\n\u00bc CUP DRY RED WINE (OPTIONAL)\n\n2 SPRIGS FRESH PARSLEY\n\n1 SPRIG FRESH THYME\n\n1 BAY LEAF\n\n1 TABLESPOON BALSAMIC VINEGAR\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 VEGAN BAGUETTE, CUT ON THE BIAS INTO \u00be-INCH SLICES AND LIGHTLY TOASTED (2 SLICES PER SERVING, TOTALING 12 SLICES)\n\n12 (\u215b-INCH) SLICES VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large soup kettle, melt the margarine over medium-high heat. Add the sliced red onions and about 1 teaspoon of salt. Stir to coat the onions thoroughly with the margarine, then cook, stirring frequently, until the onions are reduced and syrupy and the inside of the pot is coated with a deep brown crust, 30 to 35 minutes.\n\nStir in the vegetable stock, red wine (if using), parsley, thyme, and bay leaf (see note), and scrape the bottom of the pot with a wooden spoon to loosen any browned bits. Bring the soup to a simmer, and cook gently for about 20 minutes. Retrieve and discard the herbs. Stir in the balsamic vinegar and black pepper, and taste for salt.\n\nAdjust an oven rack to the upper-middle position and heat the broiler. Place six serving bowls (or four larger serving bowls) on a sturdy baking sheet and ladle in 1 to 2 cups of soup. Top each bowl with two toasted baguette slices and divide the Swiss cheese equally over the bread slices in each bowl. Broil until bubbly, about 10 minutes. Let cool for 5 minutes and serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** Tie the parsley and thyme sprigs together with kitchen twine so they can be easily retrieved when they've done their job._\n\n**_cheesy broccoli & potato soup_**\n\n**There are two secrets to successfully making this cheese and broccoli-potato soup. First, slice all the vegetables into half-inch chunks so they'll cook rapidly and at the same time. Second, try to avoid ground nutmeg, as it often tastes like sawdust! Nutmeg graters and whole nutmeg seeds (the size of small bulbs) are readily available, so seek them out.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE WHITE ONION, CHOPPED (SEE HEADNOTE)\n\n1 CARROT, PEELED AND CHOPPED\n\n2 YUKON GOLD POTATOES, PEELED AND CHOPPED\n\n1 LARGE HEAD BROCCOLI, CHOPPED INTO FLORETS AND STEMS SLICED (ABOUT 1 CUP OF SLENDER COINS)\n\n1 CUP FILTERED OR BOTTLED WATER\n\n1 CUP RICE OR SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n\u00bc CUP CUBED WHITE MISO\n\n2 TO 3 GRATES OF NUTMEG (SEE HEADNOTE)\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR OR SMOKED CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large saucepan, place the onion, carrot, potatoes, broccoli, and water. Cover and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 10 minutes.\n\nIn a standing blender, place the rice milk, nutritional yeast, miso, nutmeg, lime juice, salt, and white pepper. Puree to a fairly smooth consistency. Pour the mixture into the saucepan, return to a light boil, and serve topped with \u00bc cup of the Cheddar cheese on each serving.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**powwow mushroom soup**_\n\n**White and shiitake mushrooms practically dance right out of this flavorful Cheddar and Jack cheese concoction that's suitable for the most important kinds of power meals: family powwows and cold afternoons with friends.**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00be POUND WHITE MUSHROOMS, TRIMMED AND CUT INTO \u00bc-INCH SLICES\n\n\u00bc POUND FRESH SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS, TRIMMED AND CUT INTO \u00bc-INCH SLICES\n\n3 SHALLOTS, PEELED, STEMMED, AND MINCED\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CANOLA OIL\n\n1 QUART VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK\n\n2 TABLESPOONS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n2 CUPS SOY MILK\n\n1 CUP GRATED SHARP VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN JACK CHEESE (PAGE 42, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\nVEGAN OYSTER CRACKERS, FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large pot, saut\u00e9 the white and shiitake mushrooms, shallots, and garlic in the canola oil over medium-high heat for 5 minutes, or until the shallots soften, stirring often.\n\nPour in the vegetable stock and lower the heat. When the mixture has come to a simmer, cover the pot and simmer for 1 hour.\n\nWith a fork, combine the flour with 2 tablespoons of the soy milk until a smooth mixture has formed, adding more of the soy milk if necessary. Stir the flour mixture into the soup, then pour in the rest of the soy milk. Add the cheeses by the handful. Simmer for 30 minutes, then add the lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Taste carefully and add more salt and\/or pepper if needed. Serve with a handful of oyster crackers on the side.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**oktoberfest in a bowl**_\n\n**The dark beer here gives one of its closet pals, Cheddar cheese, a nice warm buzz in this hearty autumn soup. For a meal, pair this soup with one of the grilled cheese sandwiches inChapter 5 or create a deluxe tomato and mixed greens sandwich using the Toast with the Most Cheese Bread (page 51).**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS DARK BEER\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n3 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS SMOOTH VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD\n\n1 SCANT TEASPOON CAYENNE PEPPER, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\nSALT\n\nTOASTED VEGAN BAGUETTE SLICES, FOR SERVING\n\nEXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, FOR BRUSHING THE BAGUETTE SLICES (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large saucepan, bring the dark beer to a boil, then lower the heat and keep the beer simmering while adding the Cheddar cheese, a handful at a time, stirring constantly. Add the garlic, mustard, cayenne pepper, and paprika, and simmer for 20 minutes. Taste carefully, and add salt accordingly. Serve with toasted baguette slices brushed with the olive oil (if using).\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**chorizo-pepper-onion stew**_\n\n**Although vegan chorizo is readily available online (see note), this hearty pepper and onion stew can be made without it. Just add a bit more smoked paprika and a few more pressed garlic cloves. It will quickly become the hit of tailgating afternoons and Sunday suppers with the family.**\n\n* * *\n\n3 CLOVES GARLIC\n\n2 TABLESPOONS SHERRY VINEGAR\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, PLUS MORE, AS NEEDED, FOR FRYING\n\n4 OR MORE SPICY VEGAN CHORIZOS (SEE NOTE), PRICKED ALL OVER WITH A TRUSSING NEEDLE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE, PLUS MORE, IF NEEDED\n\n1 SMALL VEGAN BAGUETTE, CUT CROSSWISE INTO \u00bc-INCH SLICES\n\nKOSHER SALT\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\n1 LARGE RED ONION, HALVED LENGTHWISE AND SLICED\n\n1 WHITE ONION, HALVED LENGTHWISE AND SLICED\n\n1 GREEN BELL PEPPER, STEMMED, SEEDED, AND SLICED INTO \u00bd-INCH STRIPS\n\n1 RED BELL PEPPER, STEMMED, SEEDED, AND SLICED INTO \u00bd-INCH STRIPS\n\n1 PINT GRAPE OR CHERRY TOMATOES, HALVED IF LARGE\n\n1 CUP VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK, OR MORE IF THE STEW SEEMS TOO THICK\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 BAY LEAF\n\n\u00bd BUNCH CILANTRO, LEAVES ONLY, CHOPPED (ABOUT \u00bd CUP)\n\n\u00be CUP GRATED VEGAN SMOKED CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPress one garlic clove into a small bowl and cover with 1 tablespoon of the sherry vinegar. Set aside until the very end.\n\nIn a large skillet, heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the chorizos and cook, turning, until browned all over, about 7 minutes. Transfer the chorizos to a plate.\n\nIn a medium-size pan, melt the margarine. Add one layer of the baguette slices to the pan and cook until golden on both sides, about 2 minutes. Transfer the baguette slices to a plate and sprinkle lightly with salt. Repeat with the remaining slices, adding more margarine if necessary.\n\nIn another medium-size pan, heat 2 more tablespoons of the olive oil. Add the paprika and let it cook for 20 seconds, then add the onions and press in the remaining two garlic cloves. Cook, stirring, until limp, about 3 minutes. Add the peppers and saut\u00e9 until the onions are golden and the peppers are soft, about 7 minutes. Add the cherry tomatoes, vegetable stock, black pepper, and bay leaf to the pan and bring to a simmer. Cut the chorizos into chunks and add them to the pan, along with any drippings from the plate. Lower the heat to low, cover the pan, and let the stew simmer quietly for 25 minutes. Add the remaining tablespoon of sherry vinegar and simmer uncovered, until the stew thickens slightly, 7 to 10 minutes longer.\n\nRemove the bay leaf and stir in the reserved garlic mixture and the cilantro. Serve the stew topped with the toasted baguette slices and the smoked Cheddar cheese.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 TO 3 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** Two online sources for vegan chorizo are WhiteMountainFoods.com and LightLife.com_\n\n**_smoky mountain tomato & cheddar soup_**\n\n**Tomatoes and smoked cheese are a natural and intensely gratifying combination, on and off the mountain. Plus, the addition of chopped beets makes this down-home soup anything but ordinary.**\n\n* * *\n\n5 POUNDS TOMATOES, PEELED, CORED, AND CHOPPED ROUGHLY\n\n2 TABLESPOONS COOKED, CHOPPED BEETS\n\n2 TEASPOONS GARLIC POWDER\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n1 QUART VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK, OR MORE IF NEEDED\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN SMOKED CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bc CUP VODKA (OPTIONAL)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n2 TABLESPOONS FINELY CHOPPED FRESH BASIL\n\n* * *\n\nIn a very large saucepan or stockpot, place the tomatoes, beets, garlic powder, and onion powder. Pour in enough vegetable stock to cover the ingredients. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer for 20 minutes.\n\nWith an immersion blender, puree the tomato mixture, or puree the cooled mixture in batches in a standing blender. Return to medium heat, and stir in the smoked Cheddar cheese. Stir until the cheese is melted and the soup is bubbling lightly, then remove from the heat. Add the vodka (if using). Taste carefully, and season with salt and freshly ground white pepper.\n\nServe sprinkled liberally with the basil.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 SERVINGS\n_**bucking bronco tomato & horseradish soup**_\n\n**This Horseradish Cheddar cheese and tomato soup packs a WOW! with every spoonful, to put it mildly. I prefer it cold on a hot summer day, but it's also very good heated on a cold winter's night.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (2-INCH) PIECE FRESH HORSERADISH, PEELED AND CHOPPED ROUGHLY (OPTIONAL, ESPECIALLY IF THE HORSERADISH CHEDDAR CHEESE IS USED)\n\n1 SMALL CLOVE GARLIC, PEELED\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN HORSERADISH CHEDDAR OR WINE CHEESE (PAGE 28 OR 30, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT), OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n4\u00bc POUNDS RIPE TOMATOES, PEELED, CORED, AND CHOPPED ROUGHLY\n\n1 TO 2 TABLESPOONS GOOD-QUALITY RED WINE VINEGAR\n\n2 SHOTS VODKA, OR MORE TO TASTE (OPTIONAL)\n\nSEA SALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\nPARMESAN CROUTONS (PAGE 82), FOR GARNISH (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large food processor, pulse the horseradish (if using) and garlic until minced. Add the Horseradish Cheddar cheese, tomatoes, vinegar, vodka (if using), and a good pinch of salt and pepper (you may have to do this in batches), and whiz until you have a slushy mixture but not a liquid puree. Serve the soup chilled or gently heated. Garnish with Parmesan Croutons, if desired.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n_**new potato & ricotta salad**_\n\n**Lunge for this recipe the moment the first tiny red potatoes appear. And if new potatoes are at hand, so are fresh herbs. You'll probably want to double this, if you're going to the trouble. But don't crowd the potatoes in the roasting skillet or they'll steam and never achieve that roasted flavor. And be sure to serve the salad at room temperature or even slightly warmer.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1\u00bd TO 2 POUNDS TINY NEW POTATOES, A LITTLE BIGGER THAN MARBLES (HALVED OR QUARTERED IF NOT), WASHED AND PATTED DRY\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n2 TABLESPOONS WHITE VINEGAR\n\n2 TEASPOONS DRIED TARRAGON\n\n1 STALK CELERY, DICED\n\n3 TO 4 GREEN ONIONS, WHITE AND LIGHT GREEN PARTS ONLY, OR SHALLOTS, MINCED\n\n1 TABLESPOON MINCED FRESH CHIVES\n\n1 CUP (\u00bc-INCH-CUBED) VEGAN RICOTTA OR FETA CHEESE (PAGE 40 OR 35, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n1 TABLESPOON MINCED FRESH THYME, OR 1 TEASPOON DRIED\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Heat a large cast-iron skillet over high heat for several minutes. Add the olive oil, and carefully stir in the potatoes. (A splatter screen would be quite useful here.) Saut\u00e9 for 5 minutes, shaking the skillet often after the first 2 minutes. Pepper the potatoes to taste.\n\nTransfer the skillet to the hot oven. Roast the potatoes for 20 minutes, or until tender, giving the skillet a couple of shakes after 10 minutes to redistribute the potatoes.\n\nTransfer the potatoes to a large bowl. Bring to room temperature.\n\nIn a small glass measure, whisk together the white vinegar with the tarragon and let the mixture rest for 5 minutes. When the potatoes have cooled, add the celery, green onions, chives, and ricotta cheese. Toss well, then pour the vinegar mixture over the potatoes and toss again. Finally, add the mayonnaise and thyme, and toss yet again. Taste carefully. You might want to add salt. Serve as soon as possible.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**the parmesan caesar with cheesy croutons**_\n\n**True Caesar Salad should be served at room temperature. For this classed-up makeover, try to time the making of the Parmesan Croutons so they will still be just warm when they're tossed with the rest of the salad to take any remaining chill out of the romaine.**\n\n* * *\n\n3 CLOVES GARLIC\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n1 TEASPOON VEGAN WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE (PAGE 23, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TABLESPOON RED WINE VINEGAR, PREFERABLY WITH 6% OR HIGHER ACIDITY\n\n2 TEASPOONS SMOOTH VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n\u00bd CUP EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 LARGE HEAD ROMAINE LETTUCE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE, BRUISED OUTER LEAVES DISCARDED\n\n1 CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd CUP TOASTED SEASONED PUMPKIN SEEDS (PEPITAS)\n\n2 MEDIUM-SIZE RIPE AVOCADOS, PEELED, PITTED, AND CUBED AT THE LAST MINUTE\n\nPARMESAN CROUTONS (PAGE 82)\n\n* * *\n\nPass the garlic through a garlic press into a large bowl. Add the salt and pepper and mash into a paste with a fork. Whisk in the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, mustard, and egg replacer. Whisk in the olive oil until well blended.\n\nTrim the thicker ribs from the romaine leaves and discard. Cut the romaine leaves into 1\u00bd-inch pieces and place them in the bowl with the dressing. Add the Parmesan cheese, toasted pumpkin seeds, avocado, and warm Parmesan Croutons to the bowl. Toss well and taste for seasoning. Serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 AMPLE SERVINGS\n\n* * *\n\n_**toasted seasoned pumpkin seeds (pepitas)**_\n\nPreheat the oven to 250\u00b0 F. Remove the seeds from the pumpkin(s) and pull as much of the strands and pulp away from them as you can. However, don't rinse the seeds.\n\nIn a roomy bowl, stir the seeds with peanut oil or canola oil\u2014about a \u00bd cup for every 4 cups of seeds. Add a nominal amount of kosher salt. Try adding a bit of thyme, oregano, cumin, coriander, cardamom, and\/or cayenne, if you like.\n\nLine baking sheet(s) with parchment paper, available in most supermarkets. Spread the seeds in one layer on the sheets. Toast slowly for about 1 hour, checking them every 10 to 15 minutes, and stirring if they're browning unevenly.\n\nStore the toasted seeds in tightly sealed containers lined with paper towels.\n\n* * *\n_**parmesan croutons**_\n\n**These addictive croutons are an absolute must to top most salads and soups, including the Parmesan Caesar (page 81) and Bucking Bronco Tomato & Horseradish Soup (page 78).**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bc CUP EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TEASPOONS GARLIC POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON DRIED OREGANO\n\nKOSHER SALT\n\n8 SLICES DAY-OLD VEGAN BREAD, CRUSTS TRIMMED AND BREAD SLICED INTO 1-INCH CUBES\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 300\u00b0F. In a medium-size bowl, whisk together the olive oil, Parmesan cheese, garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, and salt to taste. Add the bread cubes and toss them with the oil mixture until all the cubes are lightly coated.\n\nSpread the coated cubes on a sheet pan or cookie sheet lined with aluminum foil or parchment paper. Bake the cubes for 15 minutes, then stir them around and bake for another 15 minutes, or until crispy and golden brown. Let the cubes cool, then use as soon as possible.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 4 CUPS\n_**tomato meets mozzarella, falls in love**_\n\n**Oh, if ever there was a perfect match, this close cousin to the Caprese is it! Take this opportunity to splurge a little: Use the best extra-virgin olive oil you can afford. You deserve it. Also, you can peel the tomatoes, if you wish, but I don't bother.**\n\n* * *\n\n3 LARGE RIPE TOMATOES\n\n\u00be TO 1 POUND VEGAN MOZZARELLA OR SMOKED MOZZARELLA (PAGE 31, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u2153 CUP GOOD EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n2 TEASPOONS MINCED FRESH OREGANO LEAVES, OR 1 TEASPOON DRIED\n\n1 TABLESPOON CHOPPED FRESH CHIVES\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nSlice the tomatoes into \u2153-inch slices, then cut the slices in half crosswise. Slice the mozzarella into \u2153-inch slices. On four large salad plates, alternate the tomato slices with the mozzarella slices in rows.\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, whisk together the olive oil, oregano, and chives. Season with the salt and pepper, and whisk again.\n\nPour the dressing over the tomatoes and mozzarella and serve at room temperature.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**spicy green salad with swiss cheese & pears**_\n\n**Fris\u00e9e is a sturdy, lightly bitter green that stands up to strong dressings and nicely complements the Swiss cheese and sliced pears. If you can't find it, substitute the same amount of curly endive, escarole, or radicchio, or baby spring greens (as pictured).**\n\n* * *\n\n\u2153 CUP CANOLA OIL\n\n\u00bc CUP BALSAMIC VINEGAR\n\n2 SHALLOTS, PEELED AND CHOPPED ROUGHLY\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n3 CUPS FRIS\u00c9E THAT HAS BEEN TORN INTO BITE-SIZE PIECES\n\n1 CUP (\u00bd-INCH-CUBED) VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TO 3 RIPE PEARS, PEELED, CORED, AND SLICED INTO BITE-SIZE PIECES AT THE LAST MINUTE\n\n* * *\n\nIn a mini-processor or blender, combine the canola oil, balsamic vinegar, shallots, salt, and pepper. Process the dressing until creamy.\n\nIn a large bowl, top the fris\u00e9e with the Swiss cheese and pear slices. Pour the dressing over the fris\u00e9e and toss well with your hands. Serve promptly.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 SERVINGS\n\n_**picnic pasta salad with sun-dried tomatoes & feta cheese**_\n\n**This screwy fusilli salad with its flavorful punch of sun-dried tomatoes and feta cheese travels well, making it ideal for picnics, potlucks, or as a workaday lunch treat.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CLOVE GARLIC, PEELED\n\n\u00bc CUP EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n\u00bd CUP DRAINED OIL-PACKED SUN-DRIED TOMATOES\n\n\u00bc CUP RED WINE VINEGAR\n\n1 TABLESPOON DRAINED AND RINSED CAPERS\n\n1 POUND FUSILLI\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) CAN ORGANIC DICED TOMATOES\n\n8 OUNCES VEGAN FETA CHEESE (PAGE 35, OR STORE-BOUGHT), CUT INTO \u00bd-INCH DICE\n\n12 BASIL LEAVES, CUT CHIFFONADE STYLE (SEE PAGE 12)\n\n\u00bd CUP MINCED KALAMATA OLIVES\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a mini-processor, mince the garlic clove, then add the olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes, vinegar, and capers. Pulse until the sun-dried tomatoes are chopped coarsely. Set aside to let the flavors blend.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the fusilli according to the manufacturer's instructions, stirring occasionally, until just tender but still firm to the bite. Drain the pasta and transfer it to a large bowl. Add the sun-dried tomato mixture to the hot pasta and toss to coat. Let cool, stirring occasionally.\n\nAdd the diced tomatoes, feta cheese, basil, and olives, and toss well. Season to taste with the salt and pepper. Cover and chill, but serve at room temperature.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 TO 8 SERVINGS\n_**broccoli & cauliflower salad**_\n\n**This garden fresh green and white salad can be served with toasted baguette slices for a summer lunch or it makes a fine opening for an autumn dinner.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 LARGE HEAD CAULIFLOWER, CLEANED, TRIMMED, AND FLORETS CUT INTO BITE-SIZE PIECES\n\n3 CUPS BITE-SIZE BROCCOLI FLORETS\n\n\u00bd CUP CHOPPED CELERY (ABOUT 2 STALKS)\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE RED ONION, TRIMMED AND SLICED INTO \u00bd-INCH PIECES\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) BOX FROZEN PEAS, THAWED\n\n1 TO 2 CUPS CUBED VEGAN AMERICAN CHEESE (PAGE 45, OR STORE-BOUGHT),\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n1 TEASPOON SALT\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN SUGAR\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON CELERY SALT\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the cauliflower, broccoli, celery, onion, peas, and American cheese. Toss to mix well.\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, salt, sugar, pepper, celery salt, and onion powder.\n\nPour the mayonnaise mixture over the vegetables and cheese, and toss to combine. Serve cool or at room temperature.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**three beans steal the scene salad**_\n\n**This salad is a virtual rave of beans and cheese! It can be made year-round, but it's really a showstopper as a summer lunch course or side.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) CAN KIDNEY BEANS, DRAINED AND RINSED\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) CAN CUT GREEN BEANS, DRAINED AND RINSED\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) CAN CUT YELLOW BEANS, DRAINED AND RINSED\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE GREEN BELL PEPPER, STEMMED, SEEDED, AND DICED\n\n1 PURPLE ONION, CHOPPED INTO \u00bc-INCH DICE\n\nCHEF'S CHOICE OF ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING CHEESES (1 TO 2 CUPS EACH, CUBED): VEGAN CHEDDAR, AMERICAN, MOZZARELLA, JACK, OR MUENSTER CHEESE (PAGE 28, , , , OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd CUP CIDER VINEGAR\n\n\u00bd CUP CANOLA OIL\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN SUGAR\n\n1 TEASPOON SALT\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the beans with the green pepper and onion. When you're just about ready to serve, before adding the dressing, toss the bean mixture with the cheese cubes.\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, whisk the cider vinegar with the canola oil, sugar, salt, and white pepper. Pour the dressing over the bean mixture. Toss thoroughly, then refrigerate for at least 5 hours.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 SERVINGS\nCHAPTER 4\n\n_Sides_\n\n**N ever underestimate the power of a side dish to swing a meal. The mealtime costars that follow not only shine the spotlight on the main course with complementary flavors but they can also easily stand alone as anytime snacks, tapas, light lunches, or middle-of-the-night indulgences.**\n\n**The medium of rich, wholesome flavors is, indeed, the message in such side dishes as Thyme of Your Life Baked Broccoli, where any assortment of Cheddar, Jack, American, or Muenster cheese works; Roasted Tomatoes on the Side with Wine Cheese; Balsamic Grilled Onion Rings Showered in Parmesan; and Spaghetti Squash with Browned Buttery Nutmeg Sauce (I mean, come on . . . Browned. Buttery. Nutmeg. Sauce. I am in love!).**\n\n**Oh, and did I mention the cheesy potatoes for all selection?! If you thought such delicacies as cheese fries, cheesy-stuffed potato skins, and cheesy mashed potatoes were a distant memory, think again. Say hello to You Say POtato, I Say PoTAto Gratin, Twice-Baked Ricotta Potato Skins, County Fair Cheese Fries, Cheesy Mashed Potatoes, and Jack's Sweet Potato Casserole. You can create an entire buffet or party theme around these recipes that works for tailgating, backyard get-togethers, holiday open houses, or anytime you darn well want to get your comfort on.**\n\n**Time to close mouth and chew!**\n_**thyme of your life baked broccoli**_\n\n**Even people who say they don't like broccoli lunge for seconds (and thirds) of this simple and mouthwatering Cheddar-thyme-broccoli side dish. In fact, some of us (who shall remain nameless) can even enjoy it as a meal all by itself.**\n\n* * *\n\n3 CUPS SOY MILK\n\n1 TEASPOON DRIED THYME\n\n1\u00bd CUPS GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR, WINE, AMERICAN, JACK, OR MUENSTER CHEESE (PAGE 28, , , , OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS WONDRA (INSTANT) FLOUR (SEE PAGE 8)\n\n2 LARGE STALKS BROCCOLI\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Place a large saucepan over medium heat. Pour in the soy milk and sprinkle the thyme over it. When the milk just starts to boil, add the Cheddar cheese, about \u00bc cup at a time, stirring constantly. When all the cheese has been incorporated into the sauce, sprinkle the flour over it. Stir for 2 minutes, then turn off the heat and cover the saucepan.\n\nCarve the florets from the broccoli stalks. Rinse them thoroughly, pat them dry with paper towels, and transfer them to a roomy casserole dish. Pour the cheese mixture over the broccoli and place the casserole in the oven. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the broccoli is cooked to your liking.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**spaghetti squash with browned buttery nutmeg sauce**_\n\n**Just saying the tantalizing name of this side dish, which easily can become a main course, leaves one panting for more before taking even one bite. An alternative to pasta, and especially appealing to kids, this spaghetti squash is made all the more stylized with the Browned Buttery Nutmeg Sauce.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (2\u00bd-POUND OR SO) SPAGHETTI SQUASH (SMALLER SQUASH TEND TO BE MORE FLAVORFUL)\n\n2 TO 3 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n8 TABLESPOONS (1 STICK) UNSALTED VEGAN MARGARINE\n\nPINCH OF FRESHLY GRATED NUTMEG\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F and place a rack in the lower third of the oven. With a gigantic knife, carefully split the squash lengthwise (from stem to stern). Scrape out all the seeds, then rub the cut and scraped surfaces generously with the olive oil. Place cut side down on a parchment- or foil-lined baking sheet and bake for 45 minutes. Then turn cut side up and roast until tender, 15 to 30 minutes. Of course, the size of the squash will affect the cooking time, but spaghetti squash really doesn't tend to overcook, so you'll have some leeway.\n\nWhen you're ready to serve, in a small saucepan over medium-high heat, melt the margarine and cook it until it turns brown and just begins to smoke, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove immediately from the heat and stir in the nutmeg.\n\nWith a dinner fork, scrape the flesh of the squash free of the skin and separate the \"spaghetti\" strands, mounding them in the squash. Serve drizzled generously with the browned margarine and the Parmesan cheese, and season to taste with salt and pepper.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SIDE DISH SERVINGS OR 2 AMPLE MAIN COURSE SERVINGS\n_**roasted asparagus with swiss cheese**_\n\n**Roasting asparagus\u2014or pretty much anything else\u2014concentrates the flavors, caramelizing any sugars present, which helps it complement the Swiss cheese all the more. This recipe works best with nice thick asparagus spears, which you will need to peel (easy enough, with a vegetable peeler). Time permitting, presoak as suggested in sugared water to augment the caramelization of the flavors. And, for an added touch, style the dish with toasted pine nuts and lemon slices.**\n\n* * *\n\n1\u00bd POUNDS THICK ASPARAGUS, DRY ENDS SNAPPED OFF AND STALKS PEELED\n\n2 TO 3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN SUGAR\n\n3 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, PLUS A BIT MORE TO FINISH\n\nSEA SALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN SWISS OR PARMESAN ALMOND CHEESE (PAGE 34 OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n_**extras**_\n\n\u00bd CUP PINE NUTS, SCATTERED OVER THE ASPARAGUS ONLY DURING THE LAST 5 MINUTES OF ROASTING\n\n3 TO 4 PEELED, SEEDED, AND DICED PLUM TOMATOES, ADDED BEFORE OR AFTER ROASTING\n\nFRESH MOREL (OR OTHER WILD) MUSHROOMS, TOSSED WITH A LITTLE EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL AND SCATTERED OVER THE ASPARAGUS BEFORE ROASTING\n\n* * *\n\nIn a roomy bowl, cover the asparagus with warm water and soak for 30 to 45 minutes. Drain and cover with cold water with the sugar dissolved in it. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours.\n\nPreheat the oven to 425\u00b0F. Drain the asparagus and arrange it in one layer on a foil-lined rimmed baking sheet. Drizzle with the olive oil and roll the spears to coat them. Season the asparagus lightly with sea salt and pepper.\n\nScatter the Swiss cheese over the asparagus. Finish with a bit more olive oil, if you wish, and roast for 10 to 15 minutes, until the cheese has melted completely. Also, see the variation and extra options.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 SERVINGS\n\n_**variation**_\n\nSimply roast smaller unpeeled spears in olive oil, sea salt, and fresh or dried thyme leaves. Then scatter with the Swiss cheese.\n\n_**roasted tomatoes on the side with wine cheese**_\n\n**This roasted side dish of diced tomatoes, garlic, chives, and wine cheese easily doubles as an enticing year-round lunch.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (28-OUNCE) CAN ORGANIC DICED TOMATOES, SUCH AS MUIR GLEN, WELL DRAINED\n\n4 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n3 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CHIVES OR MINCED GREEN ONIONS (USE A MINI-PROCESSOR)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS DRY MARSALA OR MADEIRA (OPTIONAL)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 CUP FRESH VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS\n\n1\u00bd CUPS GRATED VEGAN WINE OR CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 30 OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. In a large bowl, mix the tomatoes, garlic, 2\u00bd tablespoons of the chives, and Marsala (if using). Season to taste with salt and pepper, and transfer to a 1\u00bd-quart gratin dish.\n\nIn a large bowl, mix the bread crumbs, wine cheese, and olive oil well. Season the mixture to taste with salt and pepper, and sprinkle it over the tomatoes.\n\nBake until the juices bubble and the topping is golden brown, about 40 minutes. Let the tomatoes stand for 10 minutes. Sprinkle with the remaining \u00bd teaspoon of chives and serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SIDE DISHES OR 2 AMPLE MAIN COURSE SERVINGS\n_**balsamic grilled onion rings showered in parmesan**_\n\n**There's nothing like a grill to transform onions into a charred masterpiece. Also, it's time to splurge again: use the best balsamic vinegar you can afford and shower yourself with the good life in every bite!**\n\n* * *\n\n3 LARGE WHITE ONIONS\n\n3 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE SHARDS (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS BALSAMIC VINEGAR (SEE HEADNOTE)\n\n* * *\n\nHeat a grill to medium-low heat. While it heats, trim the stems off the onions, slice them in half crosswise, and separate them into large rings. Rub the onion rings all over with the olive oil and place them, large side down, directly onto the grill.\n\nGrill until blackened on the bottom, turning them as needed. You will probably have to do this in batches. If you need to, keep the onions warm in a preheated 250\u00b0F oven.\n\nWhen ready to serve, plate the onions and shower them with shards of the Parmesan cheese. Finish with droplets of balsamic vinegar.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 TO 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**parmesan garlic bread**_\n\n**I've never had one crumb of this cheesy garlic bread left over. Serve it alone as a kid-approved snack, perhaps with a favorite heated pizza or spaghetti sauce for dipping, or with pasta, soups, and salads.**\n\n* * *\n\n8 TABLESPOONS (1 STICK) VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n4 CLOVES GARLIC\n\n1 LOAF VEGAN ITALIAN OR FRENCH BREAD, HALVED LENGTHWISE\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TO 2 TEASPOONS SMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the broiler. In a medium-size skillet over medium heat, melt the margarine. Using a garlic press, mash the garlic cloves into the melted margarine. Stir well. Brush the bread halves with the margarine mixture, using it all up. Scatter the Parmesan cheese over the bread. Sprinkle lightly with the paprika.\n\nBroil until golden brown, being very careful to watch it closely. It only takes 90 seconds or so. Cut into inch-wide wedges and serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ ENOUGH FOR 3 TO 4 PEOPLE\n_**you say POtato, i say poTAto gratin**_\n\n**This oldie-but-goodie side should really just be called OMG! We're talking layer upon layer _upon layer_ of Swiss cheese, potatoes, seasonings, and vegetable stock. My friends, some things are not too good to be true!**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n2 POUNDS YUKON GOLD OR RUSSET POTATOES, PEELED AND SLICED   -INCH THICK (ABOUT 6 CUPS)\n\n1\u00bd TEASPOONS SALT\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n5 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n1 CUP VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK (A BIT MORE IF YOU USE RUSSETS\u2014THEY'RE THIRSTIER)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 425\u00b0F. Rub the olive oil all over the inside of a 1\u00bd-quart gratin dish (about 11 by 8 by 2 inches).\n\nOverlap one-third of the potato slices in one layer in the dish. Sprinkle with \u00bd teaspoon of salt, some pepper, and one-third of the Swiss cheese, then dot with margarine.\n\nRepeat with two more layers of potatoes, Swiss cheese, margarine, and seasoning. Pour the vegetable stock over the potatoes.\n\nBake in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes. Lower the temperature to 350\u00b0F and carefully tilt the pan to baste the top layer of potatoes with the stock in the pan. Bake for 15 minutes longer, or until golden brown.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 AMPLE SERVINGS\n\n_**twice-baked ricotta potato skins**_\n\n**An irresistible indulgence, these ricotta potatoes really belong as part of a romantic dinner for two, yet they'll also be a welcome sight for a table full of hungry eyes. Then again, \"midnight snack for one\" has a certain ring to it as well!**\n\n* * *\n\n2 (10- TO 12-OUNCE) LARGE RUSSET POTATOES, SCRUBBED WELL\n\n1 TEASPOON KOSHER SALT\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN RICOTTA CHEESE (PAGE 40, OR STORE-BOUGHT), PLUS MORE FOR SERVING\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN MARGARINE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n2 TEASPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CHIVES\n\nA FEW GRINDS OF BLACK PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 425\u00b0F. Rub the potatoes with a bit of salt and pierce twice with a fork (don't worry if some salt falls off). Place the potatoes on a baking sheet and bake until the skin is nice and crispy and the insides are tender when pierced with a fork, 60 to 70 minutes.\n\nWhen the potatoes have cooled enough to handle, slice off the tops lengthwise with a sharp knife. Scoop out the insides, leaving about \u00bc inch of flesh around skin; transfer the potato flesh to a bowl. Add the ricotta cheese, margarine, chives, and remaining salt and pepper; mash with a fork or potato masher until combined.\n\nStuff the potato skins with the potato mixture. Return the potatoes to the oven and bake until heated through, about 10 minutes. Run under the broiler for another 1 to 2 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and crisp. Serve hot, topped with additional ricotta cheese, if desired.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 AMPLE SERVINGS\n_**county fair cheese fries**_\n\n**There's a fair in the air! Deep-frying your own potatoes gives undeniably delish results, but this quick and easy recipe works very well with frozen purchased fries, which bake up beautifully for last-minute meals and snacks.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (28-OUNCE) PACKAGE FROZEN FRENCH FRIES\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 CUP SHREDDED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TO 3 JALAPE\u00d1OS, STEMMED AND THINLY SLICED (OPTIONAL)\n\nVEGAN KETCHUP, FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or aluminum foil. Spread the frozen fries in a single layer on the baking sheet.\n\nBake in the hot oven for 15 minutes. Sprinkle the fries generously with the salt and pepper, then scatter the Cheddar cheese evenly over the fries. Return them to the oven for 5 to 10 minutes, or until the cheese has melted. Scatter the fries and cheese with the jalape\u00f1os (if using) and serve promptly with ramekins of ketchup.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 TO 4 SERVINGS\n_**cheesy mashed potatoes**_\n\n**I know! Right?! Cheesy . . . Mashed . . . Potatoes! This is one side dish that goes with absolutely everything.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 POUNDS YUKON GOLD POTATOES, PEELED AND SLICED INTO 1-INCH SQUARES\n\n6 TO 8 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n\u00bd CUP SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd TO \u00be CUP VEGAN CREAM CHEESE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a roomy saucepan in cold water to cover, place the potato squares. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Lower the heat to medium and let the potatoes bubble away for 20 minutes, or until very tender but not mushy. Drain the potatoes and pass them through a ricer (or mash with a potato masher). Stir in the margarine, soy milk, and cream cheese, taste carefully, and season with salt and white pepper.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** If you don't have a ricer\u2014which resembles a giant garlic press\u2014get one, because it's useful in so many vegan recipes, from perfect fluffy mashed potatoes to gnocchi to mashed roasted vegetables. If you can splurge on a stainless-steel ricer, it will last for generations._\n_**jack's sweet potato casserole**_\n\n**A distant relative of the potato, here sweet potatoes join rosemary, thyme, and shredded Jack cheese to create a fantastic holiday head turner that can also easily be served anytime as a weeknight side dish.**\n\n* * *\n\n3 MEDIUM-LARGE SWEET POTATOES, PEELED AND SLICED INTO 1-INCH CUBES\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN SOUR CREAM (PAGE 17, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH ROSEMARY LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH THYME LEAVES\n\n1 CUP SHREDDED VEGAN JACK CHEESE (PAGE 42, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a medium-size saucepan with enough water to cover, cook the potato cubes for 15 to 20 minutes after the water comes to a boil. Drain the potatoes, and when they're just cool enough to handle, press them into a large bowl using a ricer (see note on page 107) or mash them in the bowl with a potato masher.\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Add the sour cream to the potato bowl and blend well with a fork. Add the rosemary, thyme, and half the Jack cheese, and stir well.\n\nTransfer the mixture to a gratin or casserole dish. Scatter the remaining cheese over the top and bake for 15 minutes, or until the cheese has melted and the potatoes are bubbling. Serve warm.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n\nCHAPTER 5\n\n_Sandwiches_\n\n**T o get you over that midday hump, whether at home or at work, the following sandwich recipes will do the job.**\n\n**If it's an old standby with a new twist you're pining for, look no further than the Grilled Cheese Trio: Grilled Cheese & Tomato, the King's Grilled Cheese & Peanut Butter, and Four-Alarm Grilled Cheese & Jalape\u00f1o draw from tradition, rock and roll, and one of the hottest veggies on the planet to go above and beyond the call of lunch duty. I guarantee you that these are not your momma's grilled cheese sandwiches!**\n\n**If it's a different kind of noontime sandwich you're craving, your lunch bucket will never be the same after boasting the likes of Avocado & Parmesan Pita Lunch Rush; Outta the Park Shiitake Sliders with your choice of Cheddar, American, Jack, Muenster, or wine cheese topper; Black Bean & Jalape\u00f1o Tacos; Lulu's Finger Sandwiches (plus julep); Smoked Seitan & Avocado Panini; the Super Hero; the Mile-High Club; and Reuben, the Magnificent.**\n\n**And, when you want to convey an authentic sense of _mi casa es su casa_ with every bite, head straight for Build Your Own Quesadilla. Here, Jack and Cheddar cheese meld with eater's choice of sliced pimiento-stuffed green olives, jalape\u00f1os, saut\u00e9ed mushrooms and onions, tomatoes, red bell peppers, and more.**\n\n_the grilled cheese trio_\n\n**Time for gourmet to meet greasy spoon, when you serve up these super-amped grilled cheese sandwiches. Because they are so simple and manageable, you can offer family and friends, from fussy six-year-olds to Velveeta devotees, their choice for a mind-blowing easy meal anytime. Also, consider rounding out lunch hour by accompanying these with a soup or salad fromChapter 3. Or call upon your inner culinary artist and play around with grilled cheese combos, such as Brie and pear, Cheddar and apple, and cream cheese and cinnamon.**\n\n* * *\n\n_**four-alarm grilled cheese & jalape\u00f1o sandwiches**_\n\n4 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n4 SLICES VEGAN SOURDOUGH BREAD\n\n4 SLICES VEGAN JACK OR MUENSTER CHEESE (PAGE 42 OR 44, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 PLUM TOMATOES, STEMMED AND SLICED THINLY\n\n2 SHALLOTS, PEELED AND MINCED\n\n2 MEDIUM-SIZE JALAPE\u00d1OS, STEMMED AND SLICED THINLY (SEE NOTE)\n\n* * *\n\n_**four-alarm grilled cheese & jalape\u00f1o sandwiches**_\n\n**Some like it hot, _really hot_! When you get a load of these four-alarm sandwiches filled with Jack or Muenster cheese, plum tomatoes, shallots, and jalape\u00f1os, the love will be scorching.**\n\nHeat a large skillet over low heat.\n\nSpread the margarine onto one side of two slices of the bread. Place both pieces, buttered sides down, in the warm skillet. Place two slices of the Jack cheese on each slice of bread in the skillet and top with slices of tomatoes, then scatter with the minced shallots and jalape\u00f1o slices. Butter one side of the remaining two slices of bread and place one over each sandwich in the skillet, buttered side up. When the bottoms of the sandwiches are well toasted, flip them over with a spatula and brown on the other side. Serve hot.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 SANDWICHES\n\n_**note:** To select your desired heat level, know that the more white flecks that appear on the outer skin of a jalape\u00f1o, the hotter it is likely to be. But the only way to know for sure is to taste one\u2014carefully! Most of the heat is contained in the white inner ribs and the seeds closest to them._\n\n* * *\n\n_**grilled cheese & tomato sandwiches**_\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n4 SLICES VEGAN SOFT WHOLE WHEAT BREAD\n\n4 SLICES VEGAN CHEDDAR, JACK, MUENSTER, OR AMERICAN CHEESE (PAGES 28, , , OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 LARGE RIPE TOMATO, STEMMED, PEELED, AND SLICED \u00bc- TO \u00bd-INCH THICK\n\n_**grilled cheese & tomato sandwiches**_\n\n**This is ultimate gratification between two slices of bread. Be careful not to serve these while they're too hot, though, as the tomatoes can really retain a lot of heat. I like to accompany mine with one or two large, thick dill pickles on the side.**\n\nHeat a nonstick skillet over medium heat. Slather one side of all four bread slices with the margarine.\n\nFor each sandwich: Place one slice, buttered side down, in the skillet. Put two cheese slices onto the bread, then one to two tomato slices, and place a second bread slice, buttered side up, over all.\n\nCook the sandwiches until nicely browned, then carefully flip them over and cook for 2 to 3 minutes longer. Serve warm.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 SANDWICHES\n\n_**the king's grilled cheese & peanut butter sandwiches**_\n\n4 SLICES VEGAN SOFT WHOLE WHEAT BREAD\n\n4 TABLESPOONS SMOOTH OR CHUNKY VEGAN PEANUT BUTTER (SEE NOTE)\n\n4 SLICES VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n3 TO 4 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n* * *\n\n_**the king's grilled cheese & peanut butter sandwiches**_\n\n**Yep, you read it correctly: grilled cheese _and_ peanut butter! Elvis would have gone gaga over these, though he probably would have added some sliced bananas. The sweet nuttiness of the peanut butter pairs nicely with the sharp twang of the Cheddar cheese to deliver a warm sandwich that is, indeed, worth a king's ransom.**\n\nHeat a large skillet over medium heat.\n\nFor each sandwich: Spread one slice of the bread with peanut butter, and place two slices of Cheddar cheese over the peanut butter. Top with a second slice of bread. Spread the margarine on both outer sides of the sandwich.\n\nPlace both sandwiches in the heated skillet. Fry the sandwiches on both sides until golden brown, about 4 minutes. Serve hot.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 SANDWICHES\n\n_**note:** Some peanut butters contain ingredients that are not vegan, so be sure to read labels and ingredient lists when making your choice._\n_**reuben, the magnificent**_\n\n**While the origins of the original Reuben are in debate and many variations have popped up like the Rachel, Grouper, West Coast, and even a Vegas manifestation, behold the birth of Reuben, the Magnificent. Swiss cheese casts a magic spell with saut\u00e9ed tempeh, sauerkraut, Thousand Island dressing, and pumpernickel to give you a new legend-in-the-making.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN LOW-SODIUM SOY SAUCE\n\n2 SHALLOTS, PEELED AND MINCED\n\n\u00bd POUND TEMPEH, CARVED INTO FOUR EQUAL SQUARES\n\n8 SLICES VEGAN PUMPERNICKEL OR RYE BREAD\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN THOUSAND ISLAND DRESSING (SEE NOTE)\n\n1 CUP SAUERKRAUT, DRAINED\n\n1 CUP SHREDDED VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. In a large skillet over medium heat, combine the vegetable stock, garlic, soy sauce, and shallots. Bring just to a boil, then add the tempeh squares. Return the stock to a boil, lower the heat to simmer, cover, and cook for 20 minutes.\n\nToast the pumpernickel bread and generously spread one side of each slice with the Thousand Island dressing. Place four slices of the bread, dressing side up, on a baking sheet and top with the sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and saut\u00e9ed tempeh. Top with the remaining bread slices, dressing side down. Bake for 10 minutes, flipping the sandwiches after 5 minutes. Serve immediately.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SANDWICHES\n\n_**note:** Many bottled Thousand Island dressings are vegan, but check the label before buying. As you know, non-vegan ingredients can pop up in some very unlikely places._\n\n**_the mile-high club_**\n\n**This is one club that's definitely worth the climb to get into! Perfect for a tree-house powwow or poolside lunch at the Country Club, three towering levels of arugula, tomato, avocado slices, smoky or spicy hot seitan (or Tofurky drizzled with liquid smoke as pictured), and the Far East flare of mung bean sprouts provide a whirlwind of flavor.**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n\u00bc CUP ROUGHLY CHOPPED ARUGULA LEAVES\n\n12 SLICES TOASTED VEGAN SOURDOUGH BREAD\n\n1 CUP MUNG BEAN OR ALFALFA SPROUTS\n\n2 MEDIUM-LARGE TOMATOES, SLICED \u00bc-INCH THICK (12 SLICES)\n\n12 SANDWICH-SIZE SLICES SEITAN, EITHER MARINATED IN DROP IT LIKE IT'S HOT OR SEITAN FLARES HOT SAUCE (PAGE 12 OR , RESPECTIVELY) OR LIGHTLY DRIZZLED WITH LIQUID SMOKE, OR TOFURKY, LIGHTLY DRIZZLED WITH LIQUID SMOKE (OPTIONAL; SEE NOTE).\n\n1 AVOCADO, PEELED, HALVED, PITTED, AND SLICED \u00bc-INCH THICK\n\n8 SLICES VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, combine the mayonnaise and arugula. Spread the mixture on four slices of the toasted bread.\n\nDivide the sprouts over the mayonnaise mixture. Top each with a tomato slice and a slice of seitan. Top the seitan with another slice of toasted bread, and top that with another tomato slice, then avocado, then seitan. Place two slices of the Swiss cheese over the seitan. Spread the remaining mayonnaise mixture over the remaining four toast slices and place a toast slice over the Swiss cheese.\n\nCut the sandwiches into four triangles and press a toothpick into each quarter to secure the sandwich.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SANDWICHES\n\n_**note:** Tofurky products are becoming more widely available in stores. For more information, go to Tofurky.com._\n**_the super hero_**\n\n**Time to break out that red cape and golden lasso! Villainous hunger pains don't stand a chance against this fully loaded super sub. The seitan, walnut, and herb balls join forces with mozzarella and Parmesan cheese to satisfy even your biggest eaters and make the world a better place, especially at mealtime.**\n\n* * *\n\nCANOLA OIL, FOR GREASING THE BAKING SHEET\n\n2 (8-OUNCE) PACKAGES SEITAN\n\n\u00bd CUP WALNUTS\n\n\u00bd CUP FRESH BREAD CRUMBS\n\n3 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH BASIL\n\n3 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CILANTRO LEAVES\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n1 TEASPOON VEGAN LOW-SODIUM SOY SAUCE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON DRIED OREGANO\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON DRIED THYME\n\n2 TABLESPOONS TOMATO PASTE\n\n1 (24-OUNCE) BOTTLE OF YOUR FAVORITE VEGAN PASTA SAUCE\n\n2 (8- TO 10-INCH) VEGAN SUBMARINE SANDWICH LOAVES\n\n10 SLICES VEGAN MOZZARELLA CHEESE (PAGE 31, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nGRATED VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Rub a baking sheet with the canola oil. Chop the seitan into \u00bd-inch cubes. Transfer the cubes to a food processor and blend until crumbs form, but not until the seitan is a paste. Add the walnuts and pulse until crumbly. Transfer the mixture to a roomy bowl. Using your hands, blend in the bread crumbs, basil, cilantro, 1 tablespoon of the olive oil, and the garlic, soy sauce, oregano, thyme, and tomato paste. Mix well and shape the mixture into eighteen balls that are a little larger than golf balls.\n\nPlace the seitan balls on the greased baking sheet and brush with the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. Bake until lightly browned, about 20 minutes, turning once or twice.\n\nMeanwhile, in a medium-size saucepan, bring the pasta sauce just to a simmer over medium heat.\n\nSplit the bread loaves and pull out some of the bread in the center of the bottoms of the loaves to make room for the meatballs. Toast the loaf halves in the hot oven for a few minutes.\n\nSpoon a moderate amount of the hot pasta sauce into the bread canals, and spoon the meatballs over the sauce. Top the meatballs with a little more sauce, cover with the mozzarella slices, and then with the loaf tops. Slice the sandwiches in half crosswise and scatter generously with the Parmesan cheese.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 TO 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** The seitan, walnut, and herb balls also make a sensational substitute in a number of recipes and dishes calling for traditional meatballs._\n**_outta the park shiitake sliders_**\n\n**Shiitake mushrooms have been prized in Japan for decades. Here, they hit a home run with a sensational alternative to everyday burgers. Also, transform them into Pizza Palace Sliders by adding warmed pizza sauce, maybe a few minced bell peppers or banana peppers, and exchanging the Cheddar for Parmesan or mozzarella cheese (page 39 or , respectively, or store-bought).**\n\n* * *\n\n8 SHIITAKE MUSHROOMS, STEMMED, BLACK GILLS SCRAPED AWAY\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE RED ONION, CUT INTO \u00bc-INCH SLICES\n\n3 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, PLUS MORE, IF NEEDED, FOR THE GRILL PAN\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n8 VEGAN SLIDER BUNS, OR STURDY VEGAN BREAD CUT INTO SLIDER-SIZE CIRCLES\n\n8 SLICES VEGAN CHEDDAR, AMERICAN, WINE, JACK, OR MUENSTER CHEESE (PAGE 28, , , , OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nBrush the mushrooms and onion slices with the olive oil, and sprinkle them with salt and pepper.\n\nHeat a cast-iron or grill pan over medium heat until quite hot. Carefully add the oiled mushrooms and cook until tender, about 5 to 6 minutes, turning once. Transfer the mushrooms to a plate and keep warm.\n\nPlace the onion slices in the hot pan, adding a bit of olive oil if necessary. Cook the onion for about 8 minutes, turning occasionally. Transfer the onion slices to a plate and keep warm.\n\nSplit the slider buns and toast them in the hot pan for about 2 minutes per side, or until just browned.\n\nOn a work surface, open the buns. Place a mushroom on each bun, and then cover each mushroom with an onion slice. Finish each sandwich with a slice of cheese. Close the sandwiches and serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 SLIDERS\n_**pita pizza in a pocket**_\n\n**The mere idea of pampering your appetite with these pita pizzas stuffed with mozzarella cheese, olives, pickled artichokes, saut\u00e9ed mushrooms, onions, and whatever else you'd like is so tempting, you may throw all caution to the wind (and you should!). Also, check out the alternative Pizza Mountain Pie recipe (page 123) that lets you take this pizza party into the wilds with you.**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bd CUP PREPARED VEGAN MARINARA SAUCE, POSSIBLY MORE\n\n2 VEGAN PITA POCKET ROUNDS, SLICED IN HALF\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN MOZZARELLA CHEESE (PAGE 31, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nFILLINGS OF CHOICE (SEE SUGGESTED FILLINGS LIST)\n\n_**suggested fillings**_\n\nSLICED VEGAN PIMIENTO-STUFFED GREEN OLIVES\n\nSLICED PICKLED ARTICHOKES SPRINKLED WITH DRIED OREGANO\n\nSLICED PICKLED JALAPE\u00d1O PEPPERS\n\nSLICED SAUT\u00c9ED MUSHROOMS\n\nSLICED SAUT\u00c9ED ONIONS\n\nSAUT\u00c9ED BROCCOLI FLORETS\n\nSAUT\u00c9ED EGGPLANT CUBES\n\nOTHER GRATED CHEESES FROM CHAPTER 1\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Generously spread the marinara sauce inside each of the four pita pockets. Stuff them with the mozzarella cheese and your selection of fillings, and place them on a baking sheet.\n\nBake the pita pizzas for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the cheese is starting to ooze out of the pockets. Let them cool for a few minutes before serving.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 TO 4 SERVINGS\n_**pizza mountain pie**_\n\n**Inexpensive and readily available everywhere (PieIron.com is one go-to source), mountain pie makers consist of a heavy cast-iron shell that's perfect for holding two slices of bread with filling, and long steel handles with wooden grips. You can also use dessert-style fillings, such as cherry and apple. Or consider using a mountain pie maker to create outdoor versions of the grilled cheese sandwiches in this chapter.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 SLICES VEGAN BREAD\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN PIZZA SAUCE, OR TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd CUP GRATED VEGAN MOZZARELLA CHEESE (PAGE 31, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nFILLINGS OF CHOICE (SEE SUGGESTED FILLINGS LIST, PAGE 122)\n\n* * *\n\nTo make one Pizza Mountain Pie: Coat one side of each slice of bread with vegan margarine. Top the uncoated side of one slice with the desired fillings, such as pizza sauce, vegan cheese or nutritional yeast, onions, bell peppers, banana peppers, mushrooms, and so on. Cover this filling or mixture with the other slice of bread, margarine-coated side facing out. Using a mountain pie maker sprayed with nonstick cooking spray, place the pie in the pie maker, and close it, locking it in place. Put the pie maker directly into red-hot coals. The cooking time will vary on the heat, so check the pie often, every few minutes, cooking until the bread is toasted and hot.\n\n_**yields**_ 1 PIZZA MOUNTAIN PIE\n_**avocado & parmesan pita lunch rush**_\n\n**For an easy-breezy lunch on the run or anytime snack, these whole wheat pita pockets combine avocado, red onion, green bell pepper, and Parmesan cheese to redefine what a mouthwatering sandwich really is. If available, alfalfa sprouts add a whimsical flair.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 VEGAN WHOLE WHEAT PITA POCKETS\n\n4 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n2 RIPE AVOCADOS, PEELED, PITTED, AND SLICED INTO \u00bd-INCH WEDGES\n\n1 RED ONION, MINCED\n\n1 GREEN BELL PEPPER, SEEDED AND DICED\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER (OPTIONAL)\n\n4 TABLESPOONS VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nHalve the pita pouches crosswise. Open them carefully, and spread 1 tablespoon of the mayonnaise into each pocket. Spoon in the avocado wedges, dividing the wedges among all four pouches. Sprinkle the minced onion liberally over the avocados, then divide the diced pepper among the pouches. Finish with pepper to taste (if using) and 1 tablespoon of the Parmesan cheese sprinkled over each pita filling.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 PITA SANDWICHES\n\n_**black bean & jalape\u00f1o tacos**_\n\n**Time to add even more spice to taco night! Black beans play host to cumin, jalape\u00f1os, cilantro, Cheddar cheese, and Tabasco sauce to give you a stuffed tortilla you'll dream about long after the last bite.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) CAN BLACK BEANS, DRAINED AND RINSED\n\n2 TEASPOONS GROUND CUMIN\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n8 CORN TORTILLAS, TOASTED LIGHTLY\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE WHITE ONION, DICED\n\n2 JALAPE\u00d1OS, STEMMED AND CHOPPED\n\n1 BUNCH CILANTRO, LEAVES ONLY, WELL CHOPPED\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nTABASCO SAUCE\n\n* * *\n\nIn a medium-size skillet, combine the beans with the cumin, salt, and pepper. Cook the beans over medium heat until warmed through.\n\nPlate the corn tortillas and spoon an adequate amount of beans into the center of each tortilla. Sprinkle with the onion, jalape\u00f1os, cilantro, and Cheddar cheese. Drizzle with Tabasco sauce, gently fold the tortillas in half, and serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 TACOS\n\n_**note:** You can use refried beans, if you wish, but check the can's label. Many brands of refried beans are made with lard._\n**_build your own quesadilla_**\n\n**Quick and easy, these Mexican delights are endlessly versatile. For parties or fun family dinner nights, set up a Build Your Own Quesadilla bar by placing fillings of choice in separate clear glass bowls for everyone to choose from. Plus, a nearby bottle of tequila, surrounded by shot glasses, for impulsive toasts will add a certain exclamation point of authenticity.**\n\n* * *\n\n8 (8- TO 10-INCH) VEGAN FLOUR TORTILLAS\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN JACK OR CHEDDAR CHEESE, OR 1 CUP OF EACH, MIXED (PAGE 42 OR 28, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nFILLINGS OF CHOICE (SEE SUGGESTED FILLINGS LIST)\n\nHOT SAUCE, SALSA, AND\/OR GUACAMOLE OF CHOICE, FOR SERVING\n\n_**suggested fillings**_\n\nSLICED VEGAN PIMIENTO-STUFFED GREEN OLIVES\n\nSLICED PICKLED OR FRESH JALAPE\u00d1OS\n\nSLICED SAUT\u00c9ED MUSHROOMS\n\nSLICED SAUT\u00c9ED ONIONS\n\n1 RIPE TOMATO, CUT INTO \u00bc-INCH CUBES\n\n1 RED BELL PEPPER, SEEDED AND CUT INTO \u00bc-INCH CUBES\n\n* * *\n\nPlace two dry 10-inch cast-iron skillets over medium heat. When the skillets are hot, place a flour tortilla in each. Toast for 1 to 2 minutes, until the tortillas just start to brown. Turn the tortillas with tongs, sprinkle an adequate amount of cheese on each tortilla, and add the fillings of choice. Then cover each with another tortilla. After 1 to 2 minutes, carefully turn the tortillas with the tongs or a spatula. Toast for another 1 to 2 minutes, or until the tortillas are tanned on the turned side and the cheese has melted. Repeat with the remaining tortillas and cheese, adjusting the heat if necessary. Serve with your choice of hot sauce, salsa, and\/or guacamole.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 QUESADILLAS\n_**cool as a cucumber finger sandwiches**_\n\n**These blast-from-the-past teatime (or cocktail hour) sandwiches are back to feed a new generation. They aim to please whether you're one of the ladies and gents who lunch, or facing a kitchen full of kiddies who have the afterschool munchies.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 LOAF VEGAN BROWN BREAD\n\n4 TABLESPOONS (\u00bd STICK) VEGAN MARGARINE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n8 OUNCES VEGAN CREAM CHEESE, SOFTENED (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE CUCUMBER, PEELED, SEEDED, AND SLICED INTO \u00bc-INCH ROUNDS\n\n\u2153 CUP MINCED FRESH DILL\n\n* * *\n\nSlice the bread and cut it into 3-inch squares. Spread each square with margarine. Spread an ample amount of the cream cheese on each cucumber slice, and place a cucumber slice on each buttered bread square. Sprinkle generously with minced dill. Close the sandwiches and serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 TO 8 SERVINGS\n_**lulu's finger sandwiches**_\n\n**I do declare! Lulu Paste is as Southern as Ms. O'Hara herself. A tray of these finger sandwiches, spread with a Cheddar cheese, shallot, pimiento, and chili sauce mixture, is mighty tasty with a round of mint juleps served on the front porch. Speaking of which, when you add Lulu's Front Porch Juleps (see recipe that follows onpage 132), every bite _and_ sip will be Derby Day.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS CUBED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n3 SHALLOTS, PEELED AND QUARTERED\n\n1 (4-OUNCE) BOTTLE PIMIENTOS, WELL DRAINED\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN KETCHUP\n\n\u00bd TO 1 TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\n1 TABLESPOON CHILI SAUCE\n\n1 CUP VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\nTABASCO SAUCE\n\n8 TO 10 SLICES VEGAN WHOLE WHEAT BREAD, CRUSTS REMOVED, TOASTED AND CUT INTO QUARTERS\n\n* * *\n\nIn a food processor, combine the Cheddar cheese, shallots, and pimientos. Process until very smooth. Add the ketchup, dry mustard, chili sauce, mayonnaise, and Tabasco sauce. Process again for 1 to 2 minutes.\n\nArrange the toast slices on a work surface. Spread half the slices gently with the Lulu Paste, top with the remaining slices, and serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 5 SANDWICHES\n\n_**lulu's front porch juleps**_\n\n**Historically served in silver or pewter cups and held by the bottom or rim, feel free to buck tradition by serving these minty juleps however, and whenever, you wish. They especially pair nicely with Lulu's Finger Sandwiches (page 130).**\n\n* * *\n\n15 TO 20 OUNCES BOURBON\n\n35 FRESH MINT LEAVES, WASHED AND DRIED, PLUS 10 TO 12 FRESH MINT SPRIGS FOR SERVING\n\n1 CUP VEGAN SUGAR\n\n1 CUP WATER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a small bowl, soak the mint leaves in about 3 ounces of the bourbon for 1 hour. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, create a simple syrup by combining the sugar and water and stirring the mixture constantly over medium heat until the sugar is dissolved, 4 to 5 minutes.\n\nIn a clear glass container with a lid, combine the minted bourbon and simple syrup. Chill, covered, in the refrigerator overnight.\n\nTo serve: Use julep cups (preferably the traditional silver, but any favorite 10- to 12-ounce glass will do). Fill the cups with crushed ice and insert a fresh mint sprig. Pour 1 ounce of the remaining straight bourbon into each cup, followed by the minted bourbon.\n\n_**yields**_ 10 TO 12 SERVINGS\n_**smoked seitan & avocado panini**_\n\n**Italian ciabatta, avocado, mayonnaise, and smoky seitan make these panini so messy-delicious, and quite filling. Fear not if you don't have a panini press: Either use this as your excuse to get one or simply use two cast-iron skillets (one fitting inside the other). Also, trade in the smoky flavor to make Red Hot Seitan & Avocado Panini by marinating the seitan in Frank's Red Hot Cayenne Pepper Sauce, Drop It Like It's Hot (page 12), or the Seitan Flares Hot Sauce (page 138).**\n\n* * *\n\n1 VEGAN CIABATTA, NOT TOO THICK, ABOUT 1 FOOT LONG BY 6 INCHES WIDE\n\n2 TO 4 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 RIPE AVOCADO\n\nVEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n4 (\u00bc-INCH) SLICES VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd POUND SLICED SEITAN, DRIZZLED VERY LIGHTLY WITH LIQUID SMOKE\n\n* * *\n\nTrim off the ends from the ciabatta and cut it in half crosswise. Slice each half down the middle lengthwise. Spread 1 tablespoon of the olive oil on the cut side of two slices, invert the slices over their partner slices, and \"share\" the olive oil. Place all four slices, oiled side down, on waxed paper on a cutting board.\n\nHeat a panini press to high heat, or heat two cast-iron skillets over medium heat until fairly hot.\n\nPeel, halve, and pit the avocado and cut it into eight slices. Spread the mayonnaise on the crusty sides of the two \"flat\" ciabatta slices and give them a good grinding of black pepper. Divide the Swiss cheese slices over two of the slices, place the avocado slices on the Swiss cheese, and top with the seitan slices.\n\nClose the sandwiches and place them in the hot panini press or between the hot skillets. Close the panini press lid and press with the handle for 30 seconds. Grill until there are nice brown grill marks all over the bread, 3 to 4 minutes. Serve at once with a sharp knife and fork.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 LARGE PANINI\nCHAPTER 6\n\n_Appetizers & Snacks_\n\n**I t would be hard to imagine any occasion, from a cozy night on the couch, after-school snack time, or small family get-together to a larger holiday celebration where cheese is not on the table somewhere. In fact, usually it's _everywhere!_ From dips to finger foods, cheese dominates, but until now, it has left most of us empty-handed and hungry.**\n\n**On the following pages, we once more infuse the \"happy\" back into a family-friendly snack time or happy hour with such dips as Blue Moon, Flying Buffalo, Amazo-Queso, Cheddar Pub, and Crunchy Leek. And get ready to behold Cheesy Hummus with such additional offerings as Blue Cheese Hummus, Hot Pepper Cheese Hummus, and Smoky Cheese Hummus. Some of the dips use the homemade cheeses fromChapter 1; others inventively spin a lineup of everyday ingredients into the cheesy flavors and texture we've so longed for.**\n\n**This lineup continues with everyday treats that light up and fire up the taste buds. Finger-licking quick bites such as the Dynamic Jalape\u00f1o Popper Duo, Cheddar Chips, Fried Olives Stuffed with Smoky Cheese Hummus, Swiss Mangoes, White Truffle Rice-Stuffed Mushrooms, and Parmesan Popcorn all prove to be guaranteed good mood food.**\n_**blue moon dip**_\n\n**This dip not only comes very close to tasting like its dairy doppelg\u00e4nger, it blows right on by it. Serve with your favorite selection of cut vegetables, such as carrots, celery, cauliflower, broccoli, and cucumbers, or potato chips and pretzels. Or serve it alongside spicy-hot dishes, such as Flying Buffalo Dip (page 144) or Seitan Flares (see recipe that follows on page 138), which are making a special cameo here from _Grilling Vegan Style._**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON TAHINI\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE\n\n1 TEASPOON CIDER VINEGAR\n\n\u00bc CUP EXTRA-FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, mix the mayonnaise, garlic powder, onion powder, tahini, lime juice, and cider vinegar. When well blended, crumble the tofu into small lumps with your hands and stir it into the mayonnaise mixture. Let the mixture rest for 15 minutes or more before serving.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**seitan flares**_\n\n**If you like hot wings, this grilled version made with seitan boasts the same texture and _knock you on your ass_ flavors as good as regular hot wings, especially when you pile on the cayenne pepper. These Seitan Flares are making a special appearance here from _Grilling Vegan Style_ to accompany the Blue Moon Dip (page 136).**\n\n* * *\n\n1 POUND SEITAN, TORN OR CUT INTO CHUNKS LARGE ENOUGH TO FIT LOOSELY ON THE GRILL GRATE, OR SKEWERED\n\nEXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n_**hot sauce**_\n\n\u00bc CUP OF YOUR FAVORITE HOT SAUCE, FRANK'S RED HOT CAYENNE PEPPER SAUCE PREFERRED\n\n3 TABLESPOONS PURE MAPLE SYRUP\n\n\u00bc CUP FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SALT\n\nCAYENNE PEPPER (THE MORE, THE HOTTER!)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH OREGANO (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nHeat the grill to medium high.\n\nMarinate the seitan in the olive oil to cover for 1 hour. Grill the seitan until lightly browned, 3 to 5 minutes or longer, turning often. Transfer to a bowl.\n\nMeanwhile, in a glass measuring cup, whisk together the hot sauce, maple syrup, lime juice, salt, and cayenne pepper to taste. Microwave the mixture on high for 1 minute or until fairly hot, or whisk the mixture together in a small saucepan and place it over direct heat on the grill until it is hot, 4 to 5 minutes or longer, depending on the grill. Add the mixture to the seitan bowl and stir gently to combine, or coat the seitan if it is skewered. Finish with the oregano (if using).\n\nAlternatively, marinate the seitan in the Drop It Like It's Hot sauce for several hours to overnight. Arrange the seitan on skewers, if desired, and place on the grill for 6 to 8 minutes, turning often, or until browned. Continue to brush on the hot sauce. Serve with extra sauce and celery sticks.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** This dish can also be prepared using a grill pan or skillet over a stove instead of a grill. Also, instead of preparing the following hot sauce, feel free to substitute Drop It Like It's Hot (page 12)._\n**_crunchy leek dip_**\n\n**Thanks to the water chestnuts, this leek dip, made with cottage cheese, has a crunch _tastic_ texture. In fact, it's such a favorite for any occasion that I've never had so much as a teaspoon of it left over.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n1 CUP VEGAN COTTAGE CHEESE (PAGE 36, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 OUNCES VEGAN DRY LEEK SOUP MIX\n\n6 OUNCES CANNED WATER CHESTNUTS, DRAINED AND CHOPPED ROUGHLY\n\n6 OUNCES FROZEN CHOPPED SPINACH, THAWED AND DRAINED THOROUGHLY\n\n1 ROUND LOAF VEGAN SOURDOUGH BREAD\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, blend the mayonnaise with the cottage cheese, leek soup mix, water chestnuts, and spinach. Chill the mixture in the refrigerator overnight.\n\nWhen you're ready to serve, slice off the top of the sourdough loaf and scoop out the bread inside, leaving about a 1-inch margin of bread all the way around the inner crust. Tear the scooped bread into chunks for dipping. Fill the scooped loaf with the chilled dip.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 TO 8 SERVINGS\n\n_**the sailor's spinach dip**_\n\n**Popeye would be in love! You may think you know spinach dip, but wait until you get a mouthful of this one. This robust dip with its additional thicker, baked option will carry you and your guests through any occasion, from game night with the kids to poker night with your buddies, or sailing on the high seas in search of adventure.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK\n\n\u00bd CUP WHITE RUM, OR 1 CUP VEGETABLE STOCK\n\n1 POUND FROZEN SPINACH, THAWED, DRAINED, AND PRESSED BETWEEN LAYERS OF PAPER TOWELS TO REMOVE EXTRA MOISTURE\n\n1 TABLESPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n1 TABLESPOON ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bc CUP FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE\n\n1 TABLESPOON CIDER VINEGAR\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\nCARROT AND CELERY STICKS, FOR SERVING\n\nVEGAN TOAST POINTS, FOR SERVING\n\nSMALL VEGAN RICE CRACKERS, FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nIn a dry cast-iron skillet, toss the cashews over medium-high heat until fragrant and lightly toasted. Transfer the cashews to a bowl, and pour in the vegetable stock and white rum. Let the cashews soak for \u00bd hour, to soften them for blending, then drain the cashews.\n\nIn a food processor, combine the spinach, garlic powder, onion powder, lime juice, and vinegar. Pulse for 30 to 40 seconds, then pour in the cashews and pulse until well blended. Taste carefully, and add salt and pepper to taste.\n\nServe with the carrot and celery sticks, toast points, and\/or rice crackers.\n\nFor a thicker version, bake in a preheated 300\u00b0F oven for 10 to 15 minutes.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT **5** CUPS DIP\n_**amazo-queso dip**_\n\n**Friday nights were practically invented for this Mexican-inspired Cheddar cheese dip! Cashews, oatmeal, and a spirited mixture of spices recharge this versatile dip, which works alone with tortilla chips or as an ingredient in such dishes as the Minced Chipotle Pepper & Cheese Dip (page 149) and Smoky Cheese Hummus (page 152).**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bd CUP RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS, SOAKED IN CANNED VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK FOR 90 MINUTES, DRAINED\n\n\u00bd CUP RAW OATMEAL, GROUND INTO POWDER\n\n1\u00bd CUPS BOTTLED WATER\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND TURMERIC\n\n14 OUNCES CANNED DICED ORGANIC TOMATOES OR MEDIUM-HOT SALSA\n\n\u00bd CUP GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TEASPOON SMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\n2 TEASPOONS FINELY MINCED PICKLED HOT PEPPERS, OR TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON CHILI POWDER\n\nPINCH OF CAYENNE PEPPER, OR TO TASTE\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a blender or food processor, combine the cashews, oatmeal, water, onion powder, garlic powder, and turmeric. Puree until the mixture is smooth. It may seem thin, but it will thicken in due course.\n\nPour the mixture into a sturdy saucepan and place over medium-low heat, stirring often to prevent sticking. Add the tomatoes with their liquid, or the salsa (if using), Cheddar cheese, paprika, hot peppers, chili powder, and cayenne pepper, and stir to combine. Taste the mixture and add salt and pepper to taste. Cook the mixture, stirring regularly, until you reach the texture you want. You can add a bit more water if it gets too thick.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 SERVINGS\n_**cheddar pub dip**_\n\n**With its time-honored pairing of Cheddar cheese and beer plus a few unique twists, this is an ultimate party dip. It's also an irresistibly tangy spread on baguette slices with chutney and diced tomatoes.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS (1-INCH-CUBED) VEGAN EXTRA-SHARP CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00be CUP DARK BEER OR STOUT\n\n2 TEASPOONS GARLIC POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD, OR TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON CAYENNE PEPPER, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SALT, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n2 VEGAN BAGUETTES, CUT INTO \u00bc- TO \u00bd-INCH SLICES (OPTIONAL)\n\nPREPARED HOT CHUTNEY (OPTIONAL)\n\nDICED TOMATOES (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nIn a food processor, combine the Cheddar cheese with the beer, garlic powder, onion powder, mustard, and cayenne pepper, and blend until smooth. Season the beer cheese with salt and white pepper.\n\nServe as a dip with pretzels.\n\nOr to make Cheddar Pub Baguettes: Place a rack 6 inches below the broiler and heat the broiler for a good 10 to 15 minutes. Spread the baguette slices (if using) with the beer cheese and arrange them on a rimmed baking sheet. Broil for about 2 minutes, rotating the pan, until the cheese is bubbling and the bread and cheese are browning around the edges. Spread lightly with the chutney (if using), top with the tomatoes (if using), and serve at once. Or serve the Cheddar Pub Baguettes with a soup and\/or salad from Chapter 3.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 TO 8 SERVINGS\n_**flying buffalo dip**_\n\n**Game day is calling and it wants a Buffalo \"wing\" dip _everyone_ can enjoy! In addition to serving this blazing dip alone with toasted pita triangles, another option is to serve it alongside homemade Blue Cheese Dressing (page 41) or Blue Moon Dip (page 136) with celery sticks for dipping.**\n\n* * *\n\n12 OUNCES EXTRA-FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18), OR SEITAN, SLICED INTO \u00bd-INCH CUBES\n\n1 CUP FINELY SHREDDED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE\n\n2 TEASPOONS CIDER VINEGAR\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n3 TABLESPOONS FRANK'S RED HOT CAYENNE PEPPER SAUCE, OR TO TASTE\n\nTOASTED VEGAN PITA TRIANGLES, FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the tofu, Cheddar cheese, mayonnaise, lemon juice, vinegar, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and hot sauce. Mix well, and serve warm or at room temperature with toasted pita triangles.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 TO 8 SERVINGS\n\n_**lucky horseradish dip**_\n\n**This fiery little treat is ready in a few minutes, but let it rest for at least a half hour before serving to let the flavors of Horseradish American Cheese, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce blend. This dip is a particularly lucky bet with French fries or fried onion rings.**\n\n* * *\n\n1\u00bd CUPS FINELY SHREDDED VEGAN HORSERADISH AMERICAN OR HORSERADISH CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 45 OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN KETCHUP\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE (PAGE 23, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN HORSERADISH SAUCE, OR TO TASTE (OPTIONAL, IF TOO STRONG)\n\n1 TABLESPOON WHITE RUM (OPTIONAL)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nIn a small bowl, mix all the ingredients. Let the mixture rest, then serve with crackers or vegetables, or French fries and onion rings.\n\n_**yields**_ 2\u00bd CUPS\n_**avocado, corn & black bean dip**_\n\n**As if it's not already yummy enough, you can further amp up this colorful blend of avocado, corn, black beans, and Parmesan cheese by using medium-hot prepared salsa and even carefully stirring in some ground cayenne pepper.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 RIPE AVOCADOS, PEELED, HALVED, PITTED, AND DICED\n\n1\u00bd CUPS FROZEN CORN KERNELS, THAWED\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) CAN BLACK BEANS, DRAINED AND RINSED\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE RED ONION, MINCED\n\n1 CUP PREPARED SALSA, PREFERABLY MEDIUM-SPICED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CILANTRO LEAVES\n\nJUICE OF 1 LIME\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CHILI POWDER\n\n\u00bc CUP GRATED VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\nPLENTY OF VEGAN TORTILLA CHIPS, FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the avocados, corn, beans, red onion, salsa, cilantro, and lime juice. Toss well, then add the chili powder, Parmesan cheese, salt, and black pepper, and mix again. Serve with the tortilla chips.\n\n_**yields**_ 10 TO 12 SERVINGS\n\n_**minced chipotle pepper & cheese dip**_\n\n**You can temper the sizzle in this dip by adding more (!!!) or less of the adobo with which the chipotle peppers are canned.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 RECIPE AMAZO-QUESO DIP (PAGE 142)\n\n1 (7\u00bd-OUNCE) CAN CHIPOTLE PEPPERS IN ADOBO, DRAINED, STEMMED, AND MINCED FINELY, ADOBO RESERVED\n\n15 SMALL VEGAN GREEN OLIVES STUFFED WITH PIMIENTOS, MINCED FINELY\n\n2 TABLESPOONS BOTTLED CAPERS, DRAINED WELL AND CHOPPED\n\n1 TABLESPOON FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE\n\nVEGAN TORTILLA CHIPS, FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large serving bowl, place the Amazo-Queso Dip. Add the chipotles, olives, and capers to the bowl and stir well. Sprinkle the lime juice over the mixture and stir again. Taste carefully, and add the reserved adobo to taste if you want more heat. Serve at room temperature with the tortilla chips.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 TO 10 SERVINGS\n_**fried olives stuffed with smoky cheese hummus**_\n\n**Smoky Cheese Hummus matched with Spanish olives makes this an unusual and addictive way to treat olives. And, while we're on the topic, check out the instructions for creating Casanova's Blue Cheese\u2013 or Feta-Stuffed Cocktail Olives (page 153) for all those dirty martinis, salads, artisanal platters, snacks, and more.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH ROSEMARY LEAVES\n\n2 SAGE LEAVES, MINCED\n\n1 RECIPE SMOKY CHEESE HUMMUS (PAGE 152)\n\n24 PITTED SPANISH OLIVES, PATTED DRY\n\nPEANUT OIL, FOR FRYING\n\nALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n\u00be CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n1 CUP FINE DRY VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the rosemary and sage with the Smoky Cheese Hummus. Place the mixture in a resealable plastic bag. Snip off a corner and pipe the hummus mixture into each pitted olive. Let the olives rest for 15 minutes.\n\nIn a medium-size skillet over medium-high heat, bring the peanut oil to 350\u00b0F. When a pinch of flour sizzles in the oil, it's ready.\n\nToss the stuffed olives with flour, then dip each olive into the egg replacer, then into the dry bread crumbs. Fry the olives until golden brown, 30 to 45 seconds. With a slotted spoon, transfer the fried olives to paper towels to drain. Serve hot.\n\n_**yields**_ 24 STUFFED OLIVES\n\n_**cheesy hummus**_\n\n**This Cheesy Hummus with its blue cheese, spicy, and smoked variations is one stop shopping for your everyday snack fix. I even like to spread it on sandwiches for an added pop of flavor. You'd best get used to the title \"Hummus Connoisseur,\" because you are about to own it big-time when you start playing around with this lip-smacking array.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n\u00be CUP CANNED VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK\n\n2 TEASPOONS GARLIC POWDER\n\n2 TEASPOONS ONION POWDER\n\nJUICE OF 1 LARGE LEMON\n\n\u00bd CUP NUTRITIONAL YEAST\n\n1 CUP CANNED CHICKPEAS, RINSED AND WELL DRAINED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS TAHINI\n\n1 TEASPOON SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\n1 TEASPOON CHILI POWDER, PLUS MORE FOR GARNISHING\n\n1 TEASPOON DRIED OREGANO\n\n2 TEASPOONS MINCED FRESH CHIVES\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH DILL (OPTIONAL)\n\nEXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, FOR DRIZZLING\n\nTOASTED VEGAN PITA TRIANGLES\n\n* * *\n\nIn a food processor, place the cashews and pulse until fine crumbs are formed, but not until the cashews become paste. Add the stock, garlic powder, onion powder, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, chickpeas, tahini, salt, chili powder, oregano, chives, and dill (if using). Pulse until you reach your desired consistency.\n\nTransfer the hummus to a bowl and drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with chili powder, and serve with pita triangles.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**variations**_\n\n**Blue Cheese Hummus:** Stir in \u2153 cup of bottled vegan blue cheese salad dressing. Or use \u2153 cup of vegan blue cheese (page 41, or store-bought) if you want the texture to be a little chunkier.\n\n**Hot Pepper Cheese Hummus:** Stir in 1 to 2 tablespoons of minced jalape\u00f1os and\/or habaneros. Careful with the habaneros! Then stir in about \u00bd cup (or to taste) of Cheddar and\/or Jack cheese (page 28 or , respectively, or store-bought).\n\n**Smoky Cheese Hummus:** Stir in \u00bd cup of Amazo-Queso Dip (page 142) and 1 to 2 teaspoons of liquid smoke. Or stir in \u00bd cup of smoked Cheddar cheese (page 28, or store-bought).\n_**casanova's blue cheese\u2013 or feta-stuffed cocktail olives**_\n\n**Now you can play matchmaker, giving dirty martinis, salads, and artisanal platters the homemade blue cheese\u2013 or feta-stuffed olives they've been pining for. Or, go solo and enjoy these zesty little gems all by yourself as a snack anytime you wish.**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN BLUE OR FETA CHEESE (PAGE 41 OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT), SOFTENED\n\n2 TO 3 TABLESPOONS SOY MILK\n\n24 PITTED OLIVES\n\n* * *\n\nBlend together the softened blue cheese and soy milk, until you have a texture that you can pipe into the olives. Place the mixture in a resealable plastic bag. Snip off a corner and pipe the cheese mixture into the olives.\n\n_**yields**_ 24 STUFFED OLIVES\n\n_**primo-pimiento spread**_\n\n**This lively spread made with Cheddar cheese, roasted red peppers, and other catchy flavors is ideal on toasted baguette slices, to add zest to cocktail hour or simply to serve with pretzels to satisfy afterschool or midnight munchies.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS FINELY GRATED VEGAN EXTRA-SHARP CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 CUP HOMEMADE OR BOTTLED DICED ROASTED RED PEPPERS\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN MAYONNAISE (PAGE 13, OR STORE-BOUGHT, SUCH AS VEGENAISE)\n\n\u00be CUP DARK BEER, STOUT, OR VEGAN VEGETABLE STOCK\n\n2 TEASPOONS GARLIC POWDER 1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON CAYENNE PEPPER, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SALT, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the Cheddar cheese, red pepper, mayonnaise, beer, garlic powder, onion powder, mustard, and cayenne pepper. Stir to mix well. Season to taste with salt and white pepper. Serve at room temperature. Keeps for up to 5 days, refrigerated.\n\n_**yields**_ 8 TO 10 SERVINGS\n_**the dynamic jalape\u00f1o popper duo**_\n\n**When appetites flare, make plenty of these hot poppers, offered here in two sizzling versions. First up are the Inferno Poppers that will leave your eyes watering for joy! Next are the Fiery Poppers with an accompanying spicy tomato-chipotle dipping sauce. Make one or both and you'll keep everyone happily filled to the brim with an explosion of flavor no matter the occasion.**\n\n* * *\n\n_**inferno poppers**_\n\n16 MEDIUM TO MEDIUM-LARGE JALAPE\u00d1OS (SEE NOTE)\n\n2 CUPS FINELY GRATED VEGAN JACK, AMERICAN, OR MUENSTER CHEESE (PAGE 42, , OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nFINELY CHOPPED HOT CHILE PEPPERS, SUCH AS SERRANO OR HABANERO\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n1\u00bd CUPS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n1 CUP DRY VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS OR PANKO\n\n1\u00bd QUARTS CANOLA OIL, FOR DEEP FRYING\n\n* * *\n\n_**inferno poppers**_\n\nLine a baking sheet with waxed paper. With a sharp paring knife, make a lengthwise slit into each jalape\u00f1o. Wearing a finger cot or rubber gloves, work out as many seeds from the jalape\u00f1os as you can.\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, mix the Jack cheese with the chiles. Pipe or spoon this mixture into the jalape\u00f1os, placing them on the prepared baking sheet as they are stuffed. Give the stuffed peppers a good grinding of black pepper.\n\nPut the egg replacer, flour, and bread crumbs into three separate small bowls. Dip the stuffed jalape\u00f1os first into the egg replacer, then into the flour, making sure they are well coated with each. Do not dip yet into the bread crumbs. Return the coated jalape\u00f1os to the waxed paper and let them dry for about 10 minutes.\n\nDip the jalape\u00f1os in the egg replacer again, and (bypassing the flour this time) roll them through the bread crumbs, making sure to coat the entire surface of the jalape\u00f1o. Let them dry on the waxed paper again for 10 minutes.\n\nHeat the oil to 365\u00b0F. Deep-fry the coated jalape\u00f1os for 2 to 3 minutes each, until golden brown. Remove the peppers from the hot oil and let them drain in the deep-fry basket or on a paper towel.\n\n_**yields**_ 16 JALAPE\u00d1O POPPERS\n\n_**note:** For those who like their jalape\u00f1o poppers with a little extra sizzle, look for jalape\u00f1os with white streaks, called striations, instead of smooth, firm peppers. You see, these hot temptresses have to stay on the plant until they mature to get the full heat in their white inner ribs (where the heat is), not in the seeds. The striations indicate that the pepper was ripened on the plant, and will therefore likely be pretty hot. That said, the only truly reliable way to determine a jalape\u00f1o's heat is to be courageous and taste a thin slice. Some people can smell the heat, but I've been fooled a few times by that method. Another solution is to use habanero and\/or serrano chiles in addition to jalape\u00f1os; that way, you get the jalape\u00f1o flavor and some serious heat._\n\n* * *\n\n_**fiery poppers with tomato-chipotle sauce**_\n\n16 LARGE FRESH JALAPE\u00d1OS (SEE NOTE ON PAGE 156)\n\n1 CUP FINELY GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR, WINE, OR JACK CHEESE (PAGE 28, 30, OR 42, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TABLESPOON GROUND CUMIN\n\n2 CUPS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n1\u00bd CUPS SOY MILK\n\n3 CUPS DRY BREAD CRUMBS\n\n1 TEASPOON DRIED OREGANO\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1\u00bd TEASPOONS SALT\n\n4 CUPS CANOLA OIL\n\nTOMATO-CHIPOTLE SAUCE (RECIPE FOLLOWS)\n\n_**fiery poppers with tomato-chipotle sauce**_\n\nSlit each jalape\u00f1o lengthwise along one side from tip to stem end and remove the seeds. Be careful to keep the bodies of the peppers intact. In a medium-size bowl, toss the Cheddar cheese with the cumin, and then stuff it into the jalape\u00f1os, pressing each slit around the cheese (the cheese will bulge out of the slit).\n\nPut the flour, soy milk, and bread crumbs into three separate small bowls. Stir the oregano, black pepper, and salt into the bread crumbs. Dip each jalape\u00f1o in the flour, then in the soy milk, and then in the seasoned bread crumbs. Be careful to cover each pepper completely, leaving no bit of pepper or cheese uncovered.\n\nHeat the oil to 375\u00b0F and fry the peppers, three or four at a time, until golden brown, about 1\u00bd minutes. Drain briefly on paper towels and serve at once with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**tomato-chipotle sauce**_\n\n1 SMALL GREEN BELL PEPPER, SEEDED\n\n1 SMALL ONION\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CANOLA OIL\n\n1 LARGE CLOVE GARLIC, PRESSED\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) CAN DICED TOMATOES, WITH THE JUICE\n\n3 CANNED CHIPOTLE PEPPERS, STEMMED AND CHOPPED FINELY\n\n* * *\n\n_**tomato-chipotle sauce**_\n\nFinely dice the green pepper and onion, and saut\u00e9 them in the oil. Add the garlic, salt, and pepper. Add the tomatoes and chipotles and simmer very briefly. Serve in ramekins as a dipping sauce.\n**_'tis the season fruit & nut ball_**\n\n**No need to wait for the holidays to present family and friends with this festive appetizer that proves it's always the season for fun and laughter. Homemade cream cheese serves as a base for a rolled mixture of dried dates, toasted coconut, raisins, vanilla and almond extracts, and chopped nuts.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN CREAM CHEESE (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT), SOFTENED\n\n1 CUP CHOPPED DRIED DATES\n\n1 CUP TOASTED COCONUT\n\n1 CUP RAISINS, BLACK AND WHITE, MIXED\n\nJUICE OF 1 LEMON\n\n2 TEASPOONS VANILLA EXTRACT\n\n1 TEASPOON ALMOND EXTRACT\n\n2 TEASPOONS WHITE RUM (OPTIONAL)\n\n1 CUP CHOPPED MIXED NUTS\n\n2 VEGAN BAGUETTES, SLICED AND TOASTED LIGHTLY\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large bowl and using your hands, mix the cream cheese with the dates, coconut, raisins, lemon juice, vanilla extract, almond extract, and white rum (if using). Let the mixture rest for 15 or 20 minutes to let the flavors meld.\n\nDivide the mixture in half, then form into two large balls. Wrap the balls in waxed paper or plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator overnight, or in the freezer for a few hours. Place the mixed nuts on a sheet of waxed paper, roll each cheese ball in the chopped nuts, transfer to two roomy plates, and serve surrounded by toasted baguette slices.\n\n_**yields**_ 10 TO 12 APPETIZER SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** The mixture must be refrigerated for a few hours to overnight, so plan accordingly._\n\n* * *\n\n_**toasted coconut**_\n\nPlace an empty stainless steel skillet over medium heat. After 4 to 5 minutes, sprinkle \u00be cup of shredded coconut into the skillet. Shake the skillet every 10 seconds until the coconut has begun to brown lightly. Stir well and transfer the coconut to a medium bowl.\n\n* * *\n\n_pecan & cranberry party log_\n\n**Cashews pureed with olive oil, coconut oil, and lemon form the base for this cheese log that turns every bite into a holiday. The dried cranberry and pecan crust not only add layers of flavor but also texture and crunch.**\n\n* * *\n\n1\u00bd CUPS RAW, UNSALTED CASHEWS\n\n\u00bd CUP EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n\u00bd CUP COCONUT OIL\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GRATED LEMON ZEST\n\n\u00bd CUP FRESHLY SQUEEZED LEMON JUICE, FROM ABOUT 2 LARGE LEMONS\n\n2 TABLESPOONS TAHINI\n\n1 TABLESPOON SALT, OR MORE, TO TASTE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS WATER, PLUS MORE IF NEEDED\n\n\u00bd CUP CHOPPED TOASTED PECANS (SEE INSTRUCTIONS ON PAGE 212)\n\n\u00bd CUP CHOPPED DRIED CRANBERRIES\n\n* * *\n\nSoak the raw cashews overnight in water to cover. When you're ready to proceed, drain the cashews and rinse them well.\n\nIn a food processor, puree the cashews, olive oil, coconut oil, lemon zest, lemon juice, tahini, salt, and about 2 tablespoons of water until smooth. You may need to add a little more water, but don't add too much.\n\nLine a strainer with two layers of cheesecloth and place it over a large bowl. With a rubber spatula, scrape the cashew blend out of the processor bowl onto the cheesecloth. Fold the cheesecloth over the cashew mixture, covering it completely, and press to begin draining the cashew mixture. Let the mixture stand at room temperature overnight or for at least 12 hours.\n\nPreheat the oven to 200\u00b0F. Discard the liquid from the bowl. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Unwrap the cashew mixture and place it on a fresh sheet of cheesecloth. Wrap the mixture and shape it into a log shape, twisting both ends of the cheesecloth to retain the shape. Transfer to the prepared baking sheet and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, turning every 10 minutes, until the log is set on the outside but still soft. Let the log cool in its wrapping, then chill in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours.\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, stir together the pecans and cranberries. When the log has firmed up, unwrap it and gently roll it in the mixture until it's covered, pressing to make the mixture adhere to the log while it retains its shape. Wrap the log in waxed paper or plastic wrap and transfer it to the refrigerator. Chill until you're ready to serve, surrounded by whole wheat crackers.\n\n_**yields**_ ABOUT 1 DOZEN APPETIZER SERVINGS\n\n_**note :** This recipe requires overnight preparations, so plan accordingly._\n**_white truffle rice-stuffed mushrooms_**\n\n**White truffle oil instantly adds an air of sophistication to these stuffed mushrooms, taking them from ordinary to over-the-top awesome. The rice filling can be made a day ahead and refrigerated to eliminate that last minute dash. Then, simply stuff the mushrooms and bake them just before serving.**\n\n* * *\n\n20 MEDIUM-SIZE WHITE MUSHROOMS\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE ONION, CHOPPED FINELY\n\n1\u00bd CUPS COOKED WHITE RICE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n2 TEASPOONS WHITE TRUFFLE OIL\n\n1 CUP SHREDDED VEGAN AMERICAN OR JACK CHEESE (PAGE 45 OR 42, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n3 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH PARSLEY LEAVES\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Lightly oil a shallow baking pan.\n\nPull the stems from the mushroom caps. Finely chop the stems and set them aside. Season the mushroom caps with salt and white pepper and place them, rounded side up, in the prepared baking pan. Bake until the mushrooms are tender and starting to release their liquid, about 10 minutes. Remove them from the oven.\n\nMeanwhile, in a skillet, melt the olive oil over medium-high heat for a minute or two, until it slides easily across the skillet. Add the mushroom stems and saut\u00e9, stirring, until golden, about 5 minutes. Add the onion, salt, and white pepper to taste and saut\u00e9, stirring occasionally, until the onion is golden, about 5 minutes more. In a large bowl, stir the mushroom mixture into the cooked rice, along with the truffle oil and American cheese. Season with more salt and white pepper to taste.\n\nTurn the mushroom caps over and spoon the rice filling into the mushroom caps, pressing gently. There may be filling left over. Bake until the mushrooms are tender, about 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes, then arrange on a tray and serve hot, sprinkled with the chopped parsley.\n\n_**yields**_ 20 HORS D'OEUVRES\n\n_**cheddar chips**_\n\n**This chip and Cheddar combo is a simple and more wholesome homemade version of all those processed nacho cheese chips. Sans the Cheddar, these chips can also fly solo with the other dips in this chapter or as part of the Artisanal Vegan Cheese Platters inChapter 10.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (12-OUNCE) PACKAGE VEGAN SOFT CORN TORTILLAS\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n3 TABLESPOONS FRESHLY SQUEEZED LIME JUICE, FROM 1 TO 2 LIMES\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND CUMIN\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GROUND CORIANDER\n\n1 TEASPOON CHILI POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON SALT, OR TO TASTE\n\n1 CUP GRATED AND MELTED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F and place a rack in the upper middle half of the oven. Slice the stack of tortillas crosswise into eight wedges and arrange them on a foil-lined baking sheet.\n\nPlace the canola oil and lime juice in a spray-pump mister, and shake well. Spray the tortilla wedges until well moistened.\n\nIn a small bowl, stir together the cumin, coriander, chili powder, and salt. Sprinkle over the chips.\n\nBake the chips for 8 minutes. Rotate the pan and bake watchfully for another 8 minutes, or until the chips are crisp but not browned. Let cool for a few minutes, then serve spread with the Cheddar cheese and your favorite salsa or guacamole.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 SERVINGS\n_**parmesan popcorn**_\n\n**Add a hefty dose of cheesiness to your next family movie night by making a few buckets of this quick and easy Parmesan popcorn.**\n\n* * *\n\n3 TABLESPOONS COCONUT OIL\n\n\u00bd CUP ORGANIC POPCORN\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE (OPTIONAL, IF YOU LIKE DRY POPCORN)\n\nSALT\n\n1 TO 3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT) OR NUTRITIONAL YEAST, OR TO TASTE\n\n* * *\n\nPlace the coconut oil in a 6-quart pot over medium heat. Once the oil slides easily across the floor of the pan, place four kernels of popcorn into the pot and cover. Listen for four pops, then remove the pot from the burner, add the remaining popcorn, cover quickly, and let the pot rest for 30 seconds, shaking every 10 seconds to coat the corn, then return the pot to the burner, tightly covered.\n\nShaking the pot every 20 seconds, listen for the corn to begin popping. When the popping has slowed to 3 seconds between each popping sound, remove the pot from the heat. After about 1 minute, pour the popcorn into a large bowl. Heat the margarine (if using) in the hot pot until it melts, then pour it over the popcorn, sprinkle with the salt and Parmesan cheese, and toss well. Serve promptly.\n\n_**yields**_ 3 TO 4 AMPLE SERVINGS\n_**swiss mangoes**_\n\n**Tropical mangoes marry well with mellow Swiss cheese in this simple yet captivating appetizer, which also makes a nice and light lunch course or tapas. Just be sure to bring everything to room temperature before serving, for the best flavor.**\n\n* * *\n\n20 (\u00bc-INCH) SLICES VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TO 3 MANGOES, PEELED, PITTED, AND SLICED AT THE LAST MINUTE\n\n2 TO 3 LEMON WEDGES\n\nWHEAT CRACKERS\n\n* * *\n\nPlate the Swiss cheese slices, surrounded by the mango slices. Squeeze the lemon wedges over the mango slices to keep them from browning. Serve promptly with the wheat crackers.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 APPETIZER SERVINGS\nCHAPTER 7\n\n_Suppers_\n\n**T oday, everyone's schedule is a crazy-busy nonstop blur of work, school, meetings, practices, housework, homework, and racing from one commitment to another. But one place still offers a safe, quiet island for everyone to gather and escape to once a day, or at least once a week: the supper table. And what's that table without an ooey-gooey icon to hold everything together? If nothing else, this chapter proves that some things, like supper with family and friends, never go out of style.**\n\n**In this chapter, such dishes as Tomato Gratin with Cheddar Crumbs & Basil Chiffonade, Hot Chili Bean Casserole, My Friend Alfredo, Angel Hair Pasta with Ricotta & Herb Sauce, Baked Cauliflower-Parmesan Penne, Super Fab Fettuccine with Horseradish Cheese Sauce, and Brie & Tomato Pasta Shells stake new claim to the sacredness of the family meal. Their simple prep and rich layers of cheese and other favorite flavors set the stage for relishing and reconnecting with loved ones.**\n\n**For a more laid-back supper, say for a family movie or game night, turn the cell phones and computers off and maybe even head for the backyard, and let the magic of the All You Can Eat Pizza Buffet do the rest of the work. Mozzarella and Parmesan star in When the Moon Hits Your Eye Cheesy Pizza Pie; Jack and Cheddar help bring it on in Tex-Mex Tortilla Pizza; and hot sauce, Tabasco sauce, and liquid smoke put any meal over the top with Flying Buffalo Pizza.**\n\n**Finally, never ever forget that the ultimate garnish for any supper dish is good, old-fashioned laughter!**\n_tomato gratin with cheddar crumbs & basil chiffonade_\n\n**A convenient year-round baked tomato dish, this could also be served as a side dish at dinner or as a lunch entr\u00e9e.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (28-OUNCE) CAN ORGANIC DICED TOMATOES, SUCH AS MUIR GLEN, WELL DRAINED\n\n4 CLOVES GARLIC, MINCED IN MINI-PROCESSOR\n\n3 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH CHIVES OR MINCED GREEN ONIONS (USE A MINI-PROCESSOR)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS DRY MARSALA OR MADEIRA\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 CUP FRESH VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS, PREFERABLY FRENCH\n\n2 TABLESPOONS PANKO (OPTIONAL)\n\n1\u00bd CUPS GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n12 BASIL LEAVES, CUT CHIFFONADE STYLE (SEE PAGE 12)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. In a large bowl, mix the tomatoes, garlic, 2\u00bd tablespoons of the chives, and Marsala. Season with salt and pepper, and transfer to a 1\u00bd-quart gratin or baking dish.\n\nIn another large bowl, mix the bread crumbs, panko (if using), Cheddar cheese, and olive oil well. Season with salt and pepper, and sprinkle the mixture over the tomatoes.\n\nBake until the juices bubble and the topping is golden brown, about 40 minutes. Let stand 10 minutes. Sprinkle with remaining chives and the basil chiffonade, and serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 AMPLE SERVINGS\n\n_**hot chili bean casserole**_\n\n**Use whatever canned beans you prefer, but I like the extra POW! provided by the hot chili beans (oh yeah, and the sparks of Tabasco!).**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL, FOR COATING THE SKILLET\n\n1 CUP DICED RED ONION\n\n2 (14-OUNCE) CANS HOT CHILI BEANS, DRAINED\n\n2 (14-OUNCE) CANS ORGANIC DICED TOMATOES, SUCH AS MUIR GLEN\n\n1 TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\nTABASCO SAUCE\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR OR WINE CHEESE (PAGE 28 OR 30, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nVEGAN SOUR CREAM, FOR SERVING (PAGE 17, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Coat a large nonstick skillet with the canola oil and place it over medium-high heat until hot. Add the onion and saut\u00e9 until tender, about 8 minutes. Stir in the beans, tomatoes, garlic powder, onion powder, and Tabasco sauce to taste. Cook until heated through completely, stirring often, about 10 minutes.\n\nTransfer the bean mixture into an 8-inch square baking dish. Sprinkle with the Cheddar cheese and bake, uncovered, for 6 to 8 minutes, or until the cheese melts. Let the casserole stand for 5 minutes before serving. Serve with the sour cream.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**triple your pleasure fondue**_\n\n**Portraying the flavor and texture of a traditional fondue, this dish takes the heart-warming concept in three new directions of fabulous for the whole family to enjoy. Choose from the Swiss, Smoked Cheddar, or Jack and jalape\u00f1o options, or serve all as a tantalizing triad, and let your dippers run wild.**\n\n* * *\n\n5 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n\u00bd WHITE ONION, MINCED\n\n3 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n2 CUPS TRIMMED AND SLICED WHITE MUSHROOMS\n\n2 CUPS SOY MILK\n\n1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n1 VEGAN VEGETABLE BOUILLON CUBE\n\n\u00bc CUP ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON CELERY SALT\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN LOW-SODIUM SOY SAUCE\n\n1\u00bd CUPS (1-INCH-CUBED CUT) VEGAN SWISS, SMOKED CHEDDAR, OR JACK CHEESE WITH FINELY MINCED JALAPE\u00d1OS TO TASTE (OPTIONAL) (PAGE 34, 28, OR 42, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n_**suggested dippers**_\n\nWHOLE MUSHROOMS\n\nBROCCOLI FLORETS\n\nVEGAN FRENCH BREAD CUBES, TOASTED OR NOT\n\nHALVED STEAMED BABY POTATOES\n\nSAUT\u00c9ED AND CRISPY BITE-SIZE CUBES OR PIECES OF TOFU OR SEITAN\n\n* * *\n\nIn a large saucepan over medium heat, melt 3 tablespoons of the margarine. Saut\u00e9 the onion, garlic, and mushrooms, stirring, until the onion has softened, about 5 minutes.\n\nIn a medium-size saucepan, combine the soy milk with the onion powder, bouillon cube, flour, celery salt, and soy sauce. Stir over medium heat until the mixture thickens. You may need to add more flour if the mixture doesn't thicken.\n\nAdd the mushroom mixture to the soy milk mixture. Puree with an immersion blender, or let cool slightly and process in a standing blender until smooth. Add the cheese of your choice to the mixture, reheat, stir well, and transfer to a fondue pot.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 SERVINGS\n_**all you can eat pizza buffet**_\n\n**Serve them alone or all together spread across a buffet or picnic table, these three pizzas take everything you ever thought about one of humankind's greatest culinary inventions and add new jolts of sheer delight. Bite by bite, this all-you-can-eat pizza party gives new meaning to quality time!**\n\n* * *\n\n_**when the moon hits your eye cheesy pizza pie**_\n\n1 (12-INCH) PREPARED VEGAN PIZZA CRUST\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n8 TO 12 OUNCES SHREDDED VEGAN MOZZARELLA CHEESE (PAGE 31, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n3 PLUM TOMATOES, PEELED AND DICED\n\n1 TO 2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n12 FRESH BASIL LEAVES, CUT CHIFFONADE STYLE (SEE PAGE 12)\n\n1 TEASPOON DRIED OREGANO\n\nRED PEPPER FLAKES (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\n_**when the moon hits your eye cheesy pizza pie**_\n\n**Mozzarella and Parmesan cheese conspire to give your pizza night the lift-off it deserves. Also, don't hesitate to add your favorite toppings, including more shredded cheese fromChapter 1, to make this pizza your very own masterpiece. And, to really go the extra mile, start with a fresh batch of Parmesan Garlic Bread (page 101) and serve it with warmed pizza sauce.**\n\nPreheat the oven to 450\u00b0F. Brush the pizza crust with the olive oil. Scatter the mozzarella cheese and tomatoes over the entire crust. Sprinkle the Parmesan cheese, basil chiffonade, and dried oregano over all. Bake the pizza for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the cheese has melted completely. Sprinkle with the red pepper flakes (if using), let the pizza cool for a few minutes, and then serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**tex-mex tortilla pizza**_\n\n**You can make this South-of-the-Border pizza nice and spicy by adding chopped jalape\u00f1os\u2014or even habaneros\u2014to the toppings. For a Tex-Mex theme meal, start with Amazo-Queso Dip (page 142) and Minced Chipotle Pepper & Cheese Dip (page 149), and then serve the pizza alongside Black Bean & Jalape\u00f1o Tacos (page 127).**\n\n* * *\n\n_**tex-mex tortilla pizza**_\n\n1 (16-OUNCE) CAN REFRIED BEANS (SEE NOTE)\n\nTACO SEASONING MIX OR CHILI POWDER\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n4 (6-INCH) VEGAN CORN TORTILLAS\n\n8 OUNCES SHREDDED VEGAN JACK OR CHEDDAR CHEESE, OR A MIXTURE OF BOTH (PAGE 42 OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd TO \u00be CUP FROZEN CORN KERNELS, THAWED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN SOUR CREAM (PAGE 17, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 PLUM TOMATOES, PEELED AND DICED\n\n4 GREEN ONIONS, WHITE AND LIGHT GREEN PARTS ONLY, CHOPPED\n\n1 RIPE AVOCADO, PEELED, PITTED, AND DICED\n\n8 PITTED BLACK OLIVES, SLICED\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. In a saucepan over medium heat, heat the refried beans, stirring often. Stir in the seasoning mix.\n\nIn a small skillet over medium heat, heat the canola oil. When the oil slides easily across the skillet, carefully place one tortilla in the skillet. After 20 seconds, flip the tortilla and fry it for another 20 seconds. Repeat with the remaining tortillas, draining them on paper towels after they've been cooked.\n\nArrange the tortillas on a baking sheet. Spread a layer of refried beans on the tortillas, and scatter them generously with the cheese(s) and the corn. Bake the tortillas for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the cheese has melted completely.\n\nSlice the tortillas into wedges and divide them among two to four warmed plates. Garnish the tortilla wedges with the sour cream, tomatoes, green onions, avocado, and black olives. Serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 TO 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** Be sure to read the refried beans' can label to make sure they aren't made with lard, as they sometimes are._\n\n_**flying buffalo pizza**_\n\n**Hot sauce, Tabasco sauce, and liquid smoke make this seitan pizza saucer a round-trip you'll enjoy taking again and again. Also, Flying Buffalo Dip (page 144) and Blue Moon Dip (page 136) are a nice way to launch this sizzling pizza feast.**\n\n* * *\n\n_**flying buffalo pizza**_\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN KETCHUP\n\n\u00bc TO \u2153 CUP FRANK'S RED HOT CAYENNE PEPPER SAUCE\n\nTABASCO SAUCE\n\n1 TEASPOON LIQUID SMOKE\n\n1 TABLESPOON EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n\u00bd CUP FINELY CHOPPED YELLOW ONION\n\n8 OUNCES SEITAN, CUT INTO \u00bd-INCH CUBES\n\n2 CUPS QUARTERED SHIITAKE MUSHROOM CAPS\n\n1 (12-INCH) PREPARED VEGAN PIZZA CRUST\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN MOZZARELLA CHEESE (PAGE 31, OR STORE-BOUGHT), OR MORE IF NOT USING MUENSTER AND\/OR BLUE CHEESE\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN MUENSTER CHEESE (PAGE 44, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 CUP CRUMBLY VEGAN BLUE CHEESE (PAGE 41, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 CUP WHOLE BABY ARUGULA OR REGULAR ARUGULA, SLICED THINLY\n\n\u00bd CUCUMBER, PEELED AND DICED\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 450\u00b0F, placing a rack in the lower third of the oven. In a medium-size bowl, mix the ketchup with the hot sauce, Tabasco sauce, and liquid smoke.\n\nIn a medium-size skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring often. Add the seitan cubes and mushroom quarters, and raise the heat to medium-high. Cook for 4 minutes, or until the mushrooms have softened. Turn off the heat and pour the ketchup mixture into the seitan mixture.\n\nPlace the pizza crust on a baking sheet. Spread the seitan mixture over the crust. Top with the cheese(s) of choice and bake for 10 to 15 minutes, until the seitan mixture is bubbling. Top the pizza with the arugula and cucumber, and serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 TO 4 SERVINGS\n_**my friend alfredo**_\n\n**Meet your new mealtime BFF. Unlike many heavy, dairy-based Alfredos, this one is light and smooth. The flavor combo of garlic and onion powders, Parmesan cheese, basil, and ground white pepper makes sure that this Alfredo warms your heart from the very beginning.**\n\n* * *\n\n12 OUNCES FIRM TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n1 TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n\u00bd CUP GRATED VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TABLESPOON CANOLA OIL\n\n4 BASIL LEAVES, TORN ROUGHLY OR CHOPPED\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n\u00bc TO \u2153 CUP SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd POUND VEGAN NOODLES, COOKED ACCORDING TO THE MANUFACTURER'S INSTRUCTIONS AND STIRRED WITH 2 TABLESPOONS OF VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n* * *\n\nIn a blender, combine all the ingredients, except the noodles. Blend until fairly smooth.\n\nTransfer the mixture to a large saucepan and heat to just below boiling over medium heat, stirring.\n\nServe this luscious sauce over the buttery noodles.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\n_**angel hair pasta with ricotta & herb sauce**_\n\n**This heavenly ricotta cheese and corn pasta dish accented with garlic, oregano, cilantro, and mint would be ideal served on a blustery winter evening but fits the bill anytime you want a soothing dose of _ahhhhh._**\n\n* * *\n\n1 POUND DRIED OR FRESH ANGEL HAIR PASTA (CAPELLINI)\n\n1 CUP VEGAN RICOTTA CHEESE (PAGE 40, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n4 CLOVES GARLIC, ROASTED UNPEELED AND PRESSED INTO THE RICOTTA\n\n2 TEASPOONS MINCED FRESH OREGANO LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH CILANTRO LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH MINT LEAVES\n\n1 CUP FROZEN CORN KERNELS, THAWED\n\n* * *\n\nBring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the angel hair pasta according to the manufacturer's instructions.\n\nIn a blender, combine the ricotta cheese and roasted garlic, as well as the oregano, cilantro, and mint leaves, and blend until smooth.\n\nTransfer the ricotta mixture to a large saucepan, stir in the corn, and bring to a near simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently.\n\nDrain the pasta and divide it among four warmed individual pasta bowls or plates. Serve ladled with the ricotta cheese sauce to taste.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**three-cheese screwy fusilli**_\n\n**\"Yum!\" has a new name. Accented with a smooth Dijon mustard, parsley, green onions, and white truffle oil, I challenge you to find even a single bite of leftovers when you serve this baked ricotta-Cheddar-Parmesan pasta dish to family and friends.**\n\n* * *\n\nSALT\n\n1 POUND DRIED FUSILLI, PREFERABLY MULTICOLORED\n\n\u2153 CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER OR FLAXSEED MIXTURE (\u2153 CUP FILTERED OR BOTTLED WATER BLENDED WELL WITH 2 TABLESPOONS GROUND FLAXSEEDS)\n\n1\u00bd CUPS SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN RICOTTA CHEESE (PAGE 40, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS SMOOTH VEGAN DIJON MUSTARD\n\n1 TEASPOON WHITE TRUFFLE OIL\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n\u00bc CUP MINCED FRESH PARSLEY LEAVES\n\n1 CUP MINCED GREEN ONIONS, WITH 1 INCH OF THE GREEN (USE A MINI-PROCESSOR)\n\n3 CUPS GRATED SHARP VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, PLUS MORE FOR GREASING THE GRATIN DISH\n\n\u00bd CUP FRESHLY GRATED VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN PANKO\n\n* * *\n\nIn a kettle, bring 6 quarts of water to a boil and add 2 tablespoons of salt. Add the fusilli, stir, and cook until not quite al dente, about 10 minutes. Drain thoroughly.\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mix the egg replacer with the soy milk, ricotta cheese, mustard, and white truffle oil. Add black pepper to taste, and the parsley, green onions, and 1 teaspoon of salt. Toss the hot fusilli in the sauce, then fold in the Cheddar cheese.\n\nCoat the inside of a large (2\u00bd-quart) oval enameled cast-iron gratin dish with olive oil. Spoon the fusilli mixture into the dish. Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese and panko, and drizzle with the 2 tablespoons of olive oil.\n\nBake until the top is browned, the fusilli is crisping, and the sauce is bubbling, about 40 minutes.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**four-cheese baked rigatoni gratin**_\n\n**Luxurious and satisfying (and decadent, and scrumptious, and . . . well, you get the point), this gratin boasts a quadruple burst of cheesy pleasure that's relatively easy to make. However, the longer the tomato and vermouth sauce simmers, the better and more soothing.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS PEANUT OIL\n\n1 CARROT, MINCED\n\n1 CELERY STALK, MINCED\n\n1 MEDIUM-SIZE ONION, MINCED\n\nA GENEROUS PINCH OF SALT\n\nFRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 CUP SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd CUP WHITE VERMOUTH OR DRY WHITE WINE\n\n1 (28-OUNCE) CAN DICED TOMATOES, WITH THEIR JUICE, MUIR GLEN PREFERRED\n\n12 SUN-DRIED TOMATOES, NOT PACKED IN OIL, PREFERABLY UNSALTED, CHOPPED ROUGHLY (SEE NOTE ON PAGE 21)\n\n1 POUND RIGATONI\n\n\u00bc CUP FRESHLY CHOPPED ITALIAN (FLAT-LEAF) PARSLEY\n\n1 CUP VEGAN RICOTTA CHEESE (PAGE 40, OR STORE-BOUGHT), AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n1\u00bd CUPS GRATED VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bc CUP FRESHLY GRATED VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd POUND VEGAN MOZZARELLA (PAGE 31, OR STORE-BOUGHT), CUT INTO \u00bd-INCH SLICES\n\n* * *\n\nPreferably in an enameled cast-iron kettle over medium heat, melt the margarine in the peanut oil. Add the carrot, celery, and onion, and stir until the ingredients are well coated with the buttery oil. Cook the mixture until it softens, about 5 minutes, then season with the salt and pepper.\n\nAdd the soy milk, lower the heat, and simmer until the milk all but disappears, 20 minutes or so. Pour in the vermouth and let it bubble down for 20 minutes as well.\n\nAdd the tomatoes and sun-dried tomatoes, and stir well. Let the sauce simmer very gently for at least 1 hour, and up to 4 hours.\n\nWhen you're ready to proceed, preheat the oven to 350\u00b0F, and rub margarine inside a 14-inch (2\u00bd-quart) oval gratin dish, preferably enameled cast iron.\n\nIn a large pot, boil the rigatoni in salted water just until al dente, about 7 minutes. Drain the rigatoni well, then return it to its pot and stir in the tomato sauce. Finally, stir in the parsley.\n\nPour half the rigatoni mixture into the gratin. Roughly spread it with the soft ricotta cheese, and sprinkle with the Swiss cheese and Parmesan cheese. Cover with the remaining pasta. Arrange the mozzarella slices over all.\n\nBake for about 20 minutes, until bubbly, then run the gratin watchfully under a broiler just until the cheese browns lightly and the pasta begins to crisp on top.\n\nLet the pasta rest for 5 minutes, then serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 VERY EXTRAVAGANT SERVINGS\n_**baked cauliflower-parmesan penne**_\n\n**Roasting cauliflower brings out a lovely sweetness in this vastly underappreciated vegetable that counterpoints the lusty background flavor of the olives in the sauce.**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bc CUP FRESH, SLIGHTLY COARSE VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN PANKO\n\n1 SMALL HEAD CAULIFLOWER, OR \u00bd LARGE HEAD, CUT INTO \u00be-INCH FLORETS\n\n2 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 CLOVE GARLIC, MINCED OR PRESSED\n\n3 GREEN ONIONS, WHITE PARTS CHOPPED FINELY, GREEN PARTS CUT INTO \u00bd-INCH PIECES\n\nTABASCO SAUCE OR RED PEPPER FLAKES\n\n8 OUNCES GEMELLI OR MULTICOLORED FUSILLI\n\n\u2153 CUP PINE NUTS, TOASTED LIGHTLY (SEE INSTRUCTIONS ON PAGE 30)\n\n\u00bd CUP PITTED AND COARSELY CHOPPED KALAMATA OLIVES\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 450\u00b0F. In a large pot, bring 6 to 8 quarts of water to a boil. On a foil-lined jelly-roll pan, toss the bread crumbs with the panko, and watchfully toast the mixture in the middle of the oven until golden brown, 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer to a bowl and set aside.\n\nToss the cauliflower with the olive oil right on the jelly-roll pan and season with the salt and pepper. Roast in the middle of the oven, stirring occasionally, until the cauliflower is tender and begins to brown, about 15 minutes. Set aside. Lower the oven heat to 325\u00b0F.\n\nIn a large skillet over medium heat, saut\u00e9 the garlic and green onion whites until soft, about 4 minutes. Add Tabasco sauce to taste and cook for another minute or two.\n\nRemove the skillet from the heat while you cook the pasta according to the package directions. Just before the pasta is al dente, 10 to 11 minutes, add the cauliflower, pine nuts, and half the toasted bread crumbs to the skillet. Toss the mixture well.\n\nWhen the pasta is ready, reserve a cup of its cooking water, drain the pasta, and add it to the skillet with \u00bd cup (more or less) of the cooking water. Stir in the olives and green onion greens. Transfer the pasta mixture to a 2\u00bd-quart gratin or baking dish and bake in the middle of the oven until the pasta on top begins to crisp, 8 to 10 minutes. Drizzle with the remaining olive oil to refresh the pasta, and sprinkle it with the rest of the crumbs and the Parmesan cheese. Serve warm.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 QUITE AMPLE SERVINGS\n\n_**lemony parmesan linguine**_\n\n**Lemon marries so happily with pasta, and the Parmesan cheese really deepens the complex flavors in this refreshing go-to linguine dish.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE, PLUS 4 TABLESPOONS (\u00bd STICK) FOR TOSSING THE PASTA\n\n\u00bd CUP DRIED VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS\n\n\u2153 CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n\u00bd CUP SOY MILK\n\n\u00bd CUP GRATED VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nZEST OF 1 LEMON AND JUICE OF \u00bd LEMON, PLUS MORE JUICE, IF DESIRED\n\n1 TEASPOON SALT\n\nFRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n1 POUND LINGUINE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS MINCED FRESH PARSLEY\n\n* * *\n\nIn a small skillet over medium heat, melt the margarine and stir in the bread crumbs. Stir until toasted. Set aside.\n\nBring a large pot of salted water to a boil. In a bowl, with a fork, blend the egg replacer with the soy milk, Parmesan cheese, lemon zest and juice, salt, and pepper. Taste the sauce and if you want it more lemony, add more juice.\n\nWhen the pasta is just al dente, remove and reserve about 1 cup of the cooking liquid, drain the pasta, and return it to the pot. Toss in the remaining 4 tablespoons of margarine and stir and swirl until all the pasta is coated.\n\nStir in the egg replacer mixture and turn the pasta in it, adding a few tablespoons of the cooking liquid if it looks a bit dry.\n\nPlace in serving bowls and sprinkle with parsley and the buttered bread crumbs.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**super fab fettuccine with horseradish cheese sauce**_\n\n**This is a mighty zip-zip-zippy pasta dish. And for all my fellow eccentrics out there, you can make it even zippier by grating in some fresh peeled horseradish or going for the Horseradish Cheddar cheese option.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 POUND DRIED FETTUCCINE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n2 TABLESPOONS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n1 CUP SOY MILK\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n1 CUP SHREDDED VEGAN CHEDDAR OR HORSERADISH CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN PREPARED WHITE HORSERADISH\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nBring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the fettuccine according to the manufacturer's directions. Drain the cooked fettuccine and return to the pot.\n\nMeanwhile, in a medium-size skillet, melt the margarine. Add the flour and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes. Pour in the soy milk and add the garlic. When the milk mixture comes to a simmer, add the Cheddar cheese, a handful at a time, stirring constantly. When the cheese has melted, remove the skillet from the heat and stir in the horseradish and salt and pepper to taste.\n\nPour the sauce over the fettuccine in the pot and toss until well mixed. Serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**chedda-peppa pasta**_\n\n**With a name worthy of a foodie Rap duo, Cheddar cheese busts a move with everyday spaghetti in this effortlessly smooth and creamy pasta dish, all accented with balsamic vinegar.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 POUND SPAGHETTI OR BUCATINI\n\n2 CUPS SHREDDED VEGAN CHEDDAR OR WINE CHEESE (PAGE 28 OR 30, RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT) (ABOUT 5 OUNCES), PLUS MORE FOR SERVING\n\n3 TABLESPOONS EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n1 TO 2 TEASPOONS COARSELY GROUND BLACK PEPPERCORNS\n\nSALT\n\nBALSAMIC VINEGAR, FOR SERVING\n\n* * *\n\nBring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the spaghetti and cook according to the manufacturer's instructions, until al dente. Drain the spaghetti, reserving 2 cups of the cooking water.\n\nReturn the pasta and cooking water to the pot and place over low heat. Add the Cheddar cheese, olive oil, and pepper, and stir until the cheese and olive oil have melted into a creamy sauce, about 5 minutes. Season with salt to taste and serve, offering additional Cheddar cheese and balsamic vinegar at the table.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**brie & tomato pasta shells**_\n\n**When you want to impress all those cheese snobs around the dinner table, present them with this simple and elegant Brie dish that will literally leave them speechless.**\n\n* * *\n\n4 RIPE LARGE TOMATOES, CUT INTO \u00bd-INCH CUBES, OR 1 (28-OUNCE) CAN DICED ORGANIC TOMATOES, DRAINED\n\n2 CUPS (\u2153-INCH-CUBED) VEGAN BRIE CHEESE (PAGE 33, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TEASPOONS MINCED FRESH THYME LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH OREGANO LEAVES\n\n3 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n1 CUP EXTRA-VIRGIN OLIVE OIL\n\n2 TEASPOONS SALT\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND BLACK PEPPER\n\n1 POUND LARGE PASTA SHELLS\n\n* * *\n\nAt least 2 hours before serving, in a large individual pasta bowl, combine the tomatoes, Brie cheese, thyme, oregano, garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Set aside, covered, and let rest at room temperature for 2 or more hours.\n\nIn a large saucepan, bring an ample amount of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta shells and boil until the shells are al dente, 8 to 10 minutes.\n\nDrain the shells and immediately toss with the tomato sauce. Serve promptly.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n\nCHAPTER 8\n\n_Mac 'n' Cheese_\n\n**L et's see: So decadent it should be outlawed, scrumptious beyond belief, salaciously delish, uncompromisingly yummy. And historical!**\n\n**Its European forbearers date back hundreds of years and include what's believed to be the first recorded cheesy mac recipe from a 1769 cookbook, _The Experienced English Housekeeper_ by Elizabeth Raffald. But President Thomas Jefferson is credited with making macaroni and cheese as American as apple pie from the time he first served a version of it at a state dinner in 1802.**\n\n**My friends, no Second Coming of cheese would be complete without the following all-star incarnations of the ultimate rock-my-world comfort food known simply as mac 'n' cheese.**\n\n**In this case, you can believe the hype about performances by the likes of Two-Cheese Macaroni with Caramelized Shallots; Creamy Seasoned Macaroni; Parmesan-Cheddar-Swiss Skillet Macaroni; Mac 'n' Cheese with Ground Cashews & Truffle Oil; Mac & Jack; and Spicy Hot Mac Attack!**\n\n**Served to a family night table full of picky eaters, a gathering of discerning friends, or while cuddled up on the couch, these mac 'n' cheese recipes will satisfy, satisfy, satisfy your craving for the good life, one messy bite at a time. Also, consider preparing several of them for an unforgettable buffet theme at your next party.**\n\n**BTW, I can confirm the longstanding rumors that these dishes just happen to be a remedy for mood swings, bad hair days, breakups, stressful situations, run-ins with cranky bosses, temperamental teens, negative energy, traffic jams . . . and I would never underestimate the power of mac 'n' cheese in helping to facilitate world peace.**\n\n**In fact, if good karma has a signature lineup of dishes, you're looking at them!**\n\n**_creamy seasoned macaroni_**\n\n**Mealtime doesn't get any cozier than when cream cheese, Cheddar cheese, mustard, grated nutmeg, and white truffle oil revamp this elegantly seasoned, vegan variation on a classic dish.**\n\n* * *\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n1 CUP VEGAN CREAM CHEESE OR COTTAGE CHEESE (PAGE 37 OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 CUPS SOY MILK\n\n2 TEASPOONS DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S\n\nPINCH OF CAYENNE PEPPER\n\nPINCH OF FRESHLY GRATED NUTMEG\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON SALT\n\n\u00bc TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN SHARP CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd POUND ELBOW MACARONI\n\nWHITE TRUFFLE OIL, FOR SERVING (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 375\u00b0F and position a rack in the upper third of the oven. Use 1 tablespoon of the margarine to grease a 9-inch glass round or square baking pan, or use a 2\u00bd-quart enameled cast-iron gratin dish, especially if you want a nice dark crust to form at the bottom of the macaroni and cheese.\n\nIn a large bowl, combine the cream cheese, soy milk, mustard, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, salt, and pepper. Puree the mixture with an immersion blender (or combine the ingredients in a standing blender and puree them).\n\nReserve about \u00bc cup of the Cheddar cheese for topping, and stir the remaining 1\u00be cups of cheese into the milk mixture. Stir in the uncooked elbow macaroni. Pour the mixture into the greased pan, cover tightly with foil, and bake for 30 minutes.\n\nUncover the pan, stir gently, sprinkle with the reserved cheese, and dot with the remaining tablespoon of margarine. Bake, uncovered, for 25 to 30 minutes longer, until browned and bubbling. Let cool at least 10 minutes before serving. Drizzle with the white truffle oil to serve, if desired.\n\n_**yields**_ 2 TO 4 SERVINGS\n_**parmesan-cheddar-swiss skillet macaroni**_\n\n**The fresh herbs in this everyday macaroni and three-cheese spectacular really come through, but you can always add more to taste. Also, using a cast-iron skillet will ensure a crunchy bottom crust.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 POUND SHORT PASTA, SUCH AS SHELLS, PENNE, OR FARFALLE (BOW-TIE)\n\nKOSHER SALT\n\n4 TABLESPOONS (\u00bd STICK) VEGAN MARGARINE, PLUS 1 TO 2 TABLESPOONS FOR TOPPING\n\n\u00bc CUP UNBLEACHED ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n3 CUPS SOY MILK\n\n1 TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, PREFERABLY COLMAN'S, OR TO TASTE\n\nTABASCO SAUCE\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT), PLUS \u00bd CUP FOR TOPPING\n\n2 CUPS GRATED SHARP VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 CUP GRATED VEGAN SWISS CHEESE (PAGE 34, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED FRESH THYME, ROSEMARY, AND\/OR SAGE\n\n2 CUPS COARSE FRESH VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until nearly al dente but not fully cooked. Drain it and rinse lightly with cool water.\n\nIn an 11-inch cast-iron or nonstick skillet, melt the 4 tablespoons of margarine until the foam subsides, then add the flour, whisking to prevent burning. Add the soy milk slowly, whisking constantly. Whisk in the dry mustard, Tabasco sauce, and teaspoon of kosher salt.\n\nAdd the 1 cup of Parmesan cheese, and the Cheddar and Swiss cheeses a little at a time, stirring often, until they melt into the sauce. Taste for salt and spiciness, and adjust as needed.\n\nTurn off the heat and add the drained pasta little by little, stirring to coat with the sauce. In a small bowl, combine the herbs, bread crumbs, and the remaining \u00bd cup of Parmesan cheese, and sprinkle over the top. Crumble the remaining margarine into small pieces over the whole skillet.\n\nBake until the top is browned and the sauce is bubbling, 20 to 25 minutes. Let the macaroni and cheese rest for 5 minutes before serving.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 AMPLE SERVINGS\n\n_**mac 'n' cheese with ground cashews & truffle oil**_\n\n**Even if served on the most ordinary of days, this macaroni dish with several cheese options has special occasion written all over it . . . and with white and black truffles to boot.**\n\n* * *\n\nENOUGH CRUSTLESS VEGAN BREAD TO MAKE 1 CUP OF CRUMBS\n\n1 CLOVE GARLIC, PEELED\n\n2 SHALLOTS, PEELED\n\n1 CELERY STALK, TRIMMED AND CHOPPED\n\n6 MEDIUM-SIZE BUTTON MUSHROOMS, SLICED\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE, PLUS MORE FOR A SECOND ROUND OF SAUT\u00c9ING\n\n1\u00bd CUPS DRY WHITE VERMOUTH\n\n3 CUPS SOY MILK\n\n\u00bc CUP MISO PASTE\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESH THYME LEAVES\n\n1 BAY LEAF\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR, SWISS, OR JACK CHEESE (PAGE 28, , OR , RESPECTIVELY, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN PARMESAN CHEESE (PAGE 39, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1 TABLESPOON CHOPPED WHOLE BLACK TRUFFLE FROM A GLASS JAR, OR WHOLE DRIED BLACK TRUFFLE (OPTIONAL)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n1 POUND ELBOW MACARONI\n\n\u00bc CUP CHOPPED GREEN ONIONS\n\n\u00bc CUP CHOPPED FRESH PARSLEY\n\n\u00bd CUP FINELY GROUND CASHEWS\n\n1 TEASPOON WHITE TRUFFLE OIL\n\n_**crumb topping**_\n\n1 CUP FRESH VEGAN BREAD CRUMBS\n\n2 TABLESPOONS MINCED GREEN ONIONS (USE A MINI-PROCESSOR)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n* * *\n\nIn a food processor, pulse the bread until you've made crumbs. Set the crumbs aside and wipe out the processor. Then, mince, in this order: garlic, shallots, celery, and mushrooms, pulsing the latter three vegetables just until nicely chopped.\n\nIn a heavy, large, stainless-steel skillet over medium heat, melt the margarine. Add the processed ingredients and saut\u00e9 until tender, stirring, about 6 minutes. Add the vermouth (or dry white wine) and simmer until almost all the liquid has evaporated, about 10 minutes.\n\nAdd the soy milk, miso paste, thyme, and bay leaf to the skillet, and bring just to a simmer. Reduce the mixture over low heat for about 15 minutes, then remove the skillet from the heat. Add the Cheddar cheese and stir until melted and smooth. Sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese. Remove the bay leaf and puree the mixture with an immersion blender (or carefully, in batches, in a standing blender, and return to the same skillet). Stir in the black truffle (if using). Season with salt and white pepper.\n\nHeat the broiler. In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the macaroni until just tender but still firm to the bite. Drain very well.\n\nWhile the pasta is cooking, make the crumb topping by combining the topping ingredients.\n\nThen, in a small bowl, mix the bread crumbs set aside in the beginning, green onions, parsley, and ground cashews. In a medium-size skillet over medium heat, melt the margarine. Add the bread crumb mixture and saut\u00e9, stirring, until golden and coated with margarine, about 2 minutes.\n\nAdd the cooked pasta to the sauce in the skillet, then stir in the white truffle oil (or \u00bd teaspoon white truffle powder). Toss to coat. Pour into a large gratin dish and top with the crumb topping. Broil watchfully until the topping is crisp and golden brown, 2 to 3 minutes. Serve at once.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**mac & jack**_\n\n**Be prepared to whip up this bowl of bliss morning, noon, and night to get your cheesy mac quick fix. With a little help from Jack cheese, the Tabasco sauce and dry mustard give the elbow macaroni a distinctive edge.**\n\n* * *\n\n\u00bd POUND ELBOW MACARONI\n\n4 TABLESPOONS (\u00bd STICK) VEGAN MARGARINE, CUT INTO BITS, OR CANOLA OIL\n\nTABASCO SAUCE\n\n\u00be CUP SOY MILK, POSSIBLY MORE, IF NEEDED\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n1 TEASPOON DRY MUSTARD, SUCH AS COLMAN'S, DISSOLVED IN A LITTLE WATER\n\n2 CUPS GRATED VEGAN JACK CHEESE (PAGE 42, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\nSALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Boil the macaroni in plenty of salted water until just barely done, 6 to 8 minutes. Drain the pasta and toss with the margarine in a large, ovenproof mixing bowl.\n\nIn a small bowl, mix the Tabasco sauce to taste into the soy milk. Reserving about \u2153 cup, stir the mixture into the macaroni, then add the egg replacer, mustard, and three-quarters of the Jack cheese. When well combined, season to taste with salt and pepper, and set the bowl directly in the oven.\n\nEvery 5 minutes, remove the bowl briefly to stir in some of the reserved cheese, adding more soy milk as necessary to keep the mixture moist. When all the cheese has been incorporated and the mixture is hot and creamy (which should take 20 minutes, in all), serve it at once, with a plate of vegan crackers to crumble over.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\n_**whole-grain macaroni with cottage cheese & cheddar**_\n\n**The comparatively chewy texture of the whole-grain macaroni stands up well to the gooey Cheddar cheese, while the cottage cheese brings it all together in this harmonious family-style feast.**\n\n* * *\n\nCANOLA OIL, FOR GREASING THE BAKING DISH\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN COTTAGE CHEESE (PAGE 36, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n8 OUNCES VEGAN SOUR CREAM (PAGE 17, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00be TEASPOON SALT\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON GARLIC POWDER\n\n\u00bd TEASPOON ONION POWDER\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n2 CUPS SHREDDED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE, THE SHARPER THE BETTER (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd POUND WHOLE-GRAIN ELBOW MACARONI, COOKED ACCORDING TO THE MANUFACTURER'S INSTRUCTIONS AND WELL DRAINED\n\n\u00bd TO 1 TEASPOON SMOKED SPANISH PAPRIKA\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Generously grease a 2\u00bd-quart baking dish with the canola oil. In a large bowl, combine the cottage cheese, sour cream, salt, garlic powder, onion powder, and white pepper. Add the Cheddar cheese and toss until well mixed. Stir in the cooked macaroni.\n\nTransfer the mixture to the prepared baking dish and bake, uncovered, for 30 minutes or until heated through and bubbly. Sprinkle with the paprika and serve.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n_**two-cheese macaroni with caramelized shallots**_\n\n**Cheddar and feta cheese work with Tabasco sauce and caramelized onions to transform elbow macaroni from wallflower into the life of the party anytime you want!**\n\n* * *\n\n3 TABLESPOONS CANOLA OIL, PLUS MORE FOR GREASING THE GRATIN DISH\n\n3 CUPS SLICED SHALLOTS (ABOUT 6 LARGE SHALLOTS)\n\nKOSHER SALT AND FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER\n\n\u00bd POUND ELBOW MACARONI\n\n1\u00bc CUPS SOY MILK\n\n2 TEASPOONS TABASCO SAUCE, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n2 CUPS COARSELY GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (ABOUT 8 OUNCES) (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n1\u00bd TABLESPOONS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n\u2154 CUP CRUMBLED VEGAN FETA CHEESE (PAGE 35, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 400\u00b0F. Rub a 1\u00bd-quart (smallish) gratin dish with canola oil. In a heavy, large skillet over medium-high heat, melt the 3 tablespoons of canola oil. Add the shallots and sprinkle them with salt and white pepper. Cover the skillet and cook for 5 minutes, stirring often. Lower the heat to medium. Cook, covered, until the shallots are deep brown, stirring often, 6 to 8 minutes.\n\nMeanwhile, in a large saucepan of boiling water, cook the macaroni until just tender, but still firm to the bite, 6 to 7 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain well and reserve the saucepan.\n\nIn the reserved saucepan over medium heat, bring the soy milk and Tabasco sauce to a simmer. In a medium-size bowl, toss the Cheddar cheese with the flour to coat, then add the mixture to the soy milk. Whisk until the mixture is smooth and just returns to a simmer, about 2 minutes. Stir in the al dente macaroni and season with salt and white pepper.\n\nSpread the macaroni mixture in the prepared gratin dish. Top with the shallots, then the feta cheese. Sprinkle with white pepper. Bake until heated through, about 15 minutes.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** Vegan feta cheese can be pretty salty. If you want to avoid that, swap it out for vegan ricotta (page 40, or store-bought)._\n\n**_spicy hot mac attack!_**\n\n**Saut\u00e9ed and softened hot chile peppers give this beaut a liveliness that'll leave you defenseless in the luscious wake of Cheddar cheese, garlic, thyme, rosemary, and more. Obviously, you should temper the spiciness according to your and your guests' tastes by holding back or increasing (!!!) the number of peppers you use.**\n\n* * *\n\nCANOLA OIL, FOR GREASING THE BAKING DISH\n\n4 TABLESPOONS (\u00bd STICK) VEGAN MARGARINE\n\n3 TABLESPOONS ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n1\u00bd CUPS SOY MILK\n\n8 OUNCES VEGAN CREAM CHEESE, SOFTENED (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 CLOVES GARLIC, PRESSED\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH THYME LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON MINCED FRESH ROSEMARY LEAVES\n\n1 TEASPOON FRESHLY GROUND WHITE PEPPER, PLUS MORE AS NEEDED\n\n8 OUNCES GRATED VEGAN CHEDDAR CHEESE (PAGE 28, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TO 4 JALAPE\u00d1OS, STEMMED, SEEDED, AND MINCED (OPTIONAL)\n\n1 TO 2 HABANERO PEPPERS, STEMMED, SEEDED, AND MINCED (OPTIONAL)\n\nSALT\n\n\u00bd POUND ELBOW MACARONI, COOKED ACCORDING TO THE MANUFACTURER'S INSTRUCTIONS AND WELL DRAINED\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Grease a 2\u00bd-quart baking dish with the canola oil.\n\nIn a roomy saucepan over medium heat, melt the margarine. Add the flour and cook, stirring, until bubbly. Add the soy milk, cream cheese, garlic, thyme, rosemary, and 1 teaspoon of white pepper. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture has thickened.\n\nAdd the Cheddar cheese and hot peppers (if using). Stir until the cheese has melted. Add salt and additional pepper to taste.\n\nCombine the sauce with the pasta and stir well. Spoon into the prepared baking dish and bake until bubbly, about 25 minutes. To brown the top of the dish, watchfully run it under a hot broiler for a few minutes.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 SERVINGS\nCHAPTER 9\n\n_Cheesecake_\n\n**A favorite for family night dinners, friendly get-togethers, birthday parties, anniversary celebrations, wedding and baby showers, backyard barbecues, guys' and ladies' nights out, a quiet night at home on the couch (watching a _Golden Girls_ marathon!), and even for satisfying Olympic-size cravings.**\n\n**Ancient Greeks first discovered the Fountain of Delicious known as cheesecake four thousand years ago, with evidence suggesting it was even served to athletes competing in the first Olympic games in 776 BC. The first recorded cheesecake recipe was written by ancient foodie Athenaeus in AD 230, and now, a few centuries later, the vegan homages that follow contribute a new chapter to this illustrious history.**\n\n**When you finish off any occasion with the Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, Blueberry, and Banana Cheesecake Extravaganza, Pecan-Crusted Cheesecake Bars, White Chocolate Cheesecake Petit Fours, or Cheesecake Party Parfaits, you are loudly and clearly saying, \"I LOVE YOU!\" to yourself and your guests with every single bite.**\n\n**Because these recipes have several ingredients in common, including the homemade vegan cream cheese (page 37), consult \"The Cheesy Vegan Pantry\" for more information on vegan graham crackers (page 11), vegan chocolate (page 7), and berries (page 7).**\n\n**I'm a firm believer that because our lives are so crazy-busy, it's important to treat ourselves to something every single day. The cheesecake recipes on the following pages are treats of the highest order. They are gifts that keep on giving time and again, both to us as home cooks and to the loved ones we are serving.**\n\n**Also, they definitely prove that the way to a person's heart is through his or her sweet tooth.**\n_**the cheesecake extravaganza**_\n\n**This stand-alone vanilla cheesecake recipe also lends itself to an eye-popping quartet of strawberry, chocolate, blueberry, and banana adaptations (seepage 211). Serve each alone or surprise family and friends with a lineup of two or more of these cheesecakes for an unforgettable dessert extravaganza. Just remember one thing before all caution goes out the door with the first forkful: resist the overwhelming temptation to devour this cheesecake before it has been refrigerated for at least four hours.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN MARGARINE, MELTED\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN GRAHAM CRACKER CRUMBS\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) PACKAGE EXTRA-FIRM SILKEN TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n1 CUP VEGAN CREAM CHEESE, SOFTENED (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN SUGAR, PLUS 2 TABLESPOONS FOR OPTIONAL SWIRLED TOPPING\n\n2 TEASPOONS VANILLA EXTRACT\n\n4 TO 6 OUNCES FRESH STRAWBERRIES OR BLUEBERRIES, FOR OPTIONAL SWIRLED TOPPING\n\nTOPPINGS OF CHOICE (OPTIONAL)\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Brush the sides and bottom of a 9-inch spring-form pan or glass pie plate with the margarine. Sprinkle the graham cracker crumbs over the bottom of the pan and tilt it to coat it evenly with the crumbs.\n\nIn a food processor or standing mixer, blend the tofu, cream cheese, egg replacer, \u00bd cup of sugar, and vanilla until smooth. Pour the tofu mixture into the piecrust.\n\nFor optional strawberry or blueberry swirl: Before baking the cheesecake, in a food processor, puree the berries, strain through a fine-mesh strainer, and discard any leftover pieces of the berries. Add 2 tablespoons of vegan sugar to the puree, whisking until well blended. Drop teaspoon or so size dollops of the puree on top of the cheesecake, then using a knife or toothpick, swirl the berry puree as desired.\n\nBake the cheesecake for about 30 minutes.\n\nTurn off the oven, and allow the cheesecake to sit in the oven for another 40 minutes. Remove the cheesecake from the oven and allow it to cool. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours to overnight. Before serving, if desired, top with whole or sliced fruit or nuts of choice, or drizzle with vegan chocolate or other sauces. Serve at room temperature.\n\n_**yields**_ 6 TO 8 SERVINGS\n\n_**variations**_\n\n**Strawberry Cheesecake:** Add \u00be cup of stemmed and diced strawberries to the cheesecake batter in the blender before blending. Decorate the top of the finished cooled cheesecake with fresh whole strawberries.\n\n**Chocolate Cheesecake:** Add 6 to 8 ounces of melted and cooled vegan chocolate to the cheesecake batter in the blender before blending. You might want to cut back on the sugar, depending on how sweet the chocolate is.\n\n**Blueberry Cheesecake:** Add 1 cup of fresh blueberries (or frozen, thawed) to the cheesecake batter in the blender before blending. Decorate the top of the finished cooled cheesecake with blueberries to taste.\n\n**Banana Cheesecake:** Add 1\u00bd cups of sliced very ripe bananas to the cheesecake batter in the blender before blending. You might want to cut back on the sugar.\n_pecan-crusted cheesecake bars_\n\n**When you want to mix things up a little, or for more casual get-togethers such as a child's birthday party or a morning gab session with your BFF, serve these pecan-crusted cheesecake bars. They offer a deeper, more complex flavor than most other cheesecakes.**\n\n* * *\n\n\u2153 CUP VEGAN MARGARINE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n\u2153 CUP PACKED VEGAN LIGHT BROWN SUGAR\n\n\u2153 CUP CHOPPED LIGHTLY TOASTED PECANS\n\n1 CUP ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR\n\n3 TABLESPOONS VEGAN GRANULATED SUGAR\n\n8 OUNCES VEGAN CREAM CHEESE, SOFTENED (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n2 TABLESPOONS SOY MILK\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n1 TEASPOON VANILLA EXTRACT\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. In a standing mixer or using a handheld mixer, blend the margarine and brown sugar until fluffy. Add the pecans and flour, and stir until the mixture becomes crumbly. Set aside \u2153 cup to top the cheesecake bars.\n\nWith your fingers, press the mixture into an 8-inch square glass pan and bake for 14 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool on a rack.\n\nMeanwhile, make the filling: Clean the standing mixer or handheld mixer. Beat together the granulated sugar and cream cheese until very smooth. Beat in the milk, egg replacer, and vanilla, and mix well. Spread the mixture over the cooled baked crust. Sprinkle the reserved pecan mixture on top. Bake for 30 minutes. Let the cheesecake cool completely, then serve sliced into whatever size bars you wish.\n\n_**yields**_ ENOUGH TO SERVE 6 TO 8 PEOPLE DEPENDING ON THE SIZE OF THE BARS\n\n* * *\n\n_**toasted pecans**_\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F. Lightly rub a rimmed baking sheet with canola oil, wiping away excess oil with paper towels. Spread 1 cup of raw pecans on the sheet and toast them watchfully just until they release their pecan fragrance, checking after about 5 to 6 minutes. Be careful because pecans burn easily.\n\n* * *\n\n_**cheesecake party parfaits**_\n\n**Nostalgic, yet thoroughly hip and modern. These berry and cheesecake parfaits will bring out the child in everyone from the first spoonful onward. Tall and spectacular with layers of sliced strawberries and\/or blueberries, this is about as literal as you can get in adding an exclamation point to a sensational meal with family and friends!**\n\n* * *\n\n1 (14-OUNCE) PACKAGE EXTRA-FIRM SILKEN TOFU, PRESSED AND DRAINED (SEE PAGE 18)\n\n1 CUP VEGAN CREAM CHEESE, SOFTENED (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN SUGAR\n\n2 TEASPOONS VANILLA EXTRACT\n\n6 TO 8 VEGAN GRAHAM CRACKERS, CRUSHED INTO LUMPY CRUMBS\n\n15 TO 20 RIPE STRAWBERRIES, STEMMED AND SLICED, AND\/OR 30 TO 40 BLUEBERRIES\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 350\u00b0F.\n\nIn a food processor or standing mixer, blend the tofu, cream cheese, egg replacer, sugar, and vanilla until smooth. Pour the tofu mixture into a glass baking dish and bake for about 30 minutes.\n\nTurn off the oven, and allow the cheesecake to sit in the oven for another 40 minutes. Remove the cheesecake from the oven and allow to cool. Refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight.\n\nTo make the parfaits: Arrange four to six parfait glasses or wineglasses on a work surface. The number of glasses you'll need will depend on their size. Place a tablespoonful of the graham cracker crumbs in the bottom of each glass. Add a layer of berries and a layer of the cheesecake mixture. Repeat layers until the glasses are filled, ending with a cheesecake mixture layer. Garnish with a few strawberry slices and\/or blueberries. Serve at once, or refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours.\n\n_**yields**_ 4 TO 6 SERVINGS\n\n_**note:** For best results, plan to refrigerate the cheesecake mixture overnight. If you don't have parfait glasses, use wineglasses or sleek glass bowls._\n**_white chocolate cheesecake petit fours_**\n\n**These may appear to be dainty, elegant little bonbons, but in fact these cheesecake bites topped with melted white chocolate are pretty _and_ filling.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 CUP VEGAN GRAHAM CRACKER CRUMBS\n\n4 TABLESPOONS (\u00bd STICK) VEGAN MARGARINE, AT ROOM TEMPERATURE\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN LIGHT BROWN SUGAR\n\n2 CUPS VEGAN CREAM CHEESE, SOFTENED (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd CUP VEGAN GRANULATED SUGAR\n\n\u00bc CUP VEGAN EGG REPLACER\n\n1 TEASPOON VANILLA EXTRACT, OR MORE TO TASTE\n\n2 (24-OUNCE) PACKAGES VEGAN WHITE CHOCOLATE CHIPS\n\n* * *\n\nPreheat the oven to 300\u00b0F. Line a 9 by 13-inch baking dish with parchment paper.\n\nIn a medium-size bowl, mix together the graham cracker crumbs, margarine, and brown sugar until well combined. Press the crumb mixture into the bottom of the baking dish.\n\nIn a food processor, pulse the cream cheese with the granulated sugar, egg replacer, and vanilla extract until smooth. Pour the mixture into the prepared baking dish and bake until the filling has set, about 45 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool in the pan, then refrigerate for at least 4 hours before cutting.\n\nCut the cheesecake into 1\u00bd- to 2-inch squares. Place in a container large enough to hold them in a single layer, cover the container, and place in the freezer until the squares are completely frozen, at least 2 hours.\n\nIn a microwave-safe bowl in a microwave oven on high, melt the white chocolate chips, stopping and stirring every 30 seconds, until the chocolate has melted and the mixture is very smooth. Let the chocolate cool for 20 minutes or so, until the chocolate is cool enough to taste with a spoon.\n\nRemove the cheesecake from the freezer, carefully separate the squares with an offset spatula or slender knife, and place on waxed paper over a cooling rack to keep the squares cold.\n\nWith a large tablespoon, spoon the melted chocolate over the cold squares, coating all sides (except the bottoms). Refrigerate until serving time.\n\n_**yields**_ 24 PETIT FOURS\n_**strawberry-banana cheesecake smoothie**_\n\n**Creamy, fruity, and delish! This blended cheesecake smoothie literally turns every lingering sip into a vacation. Feel free to add or substitute blueberries, vegan fruit preserves, or vegan chocolate syrup.**\n\n* * *\n\n1 TABLESPOON VEGAN CREAM CHEESE (PAGE 37, OR STORE-BOUGHT)\n\n\u00bd CUP FRESH STRAWBERRIES, OR FROZEN STRAWBERRIES (THAWED), OR TO TASTE\n\n1 RIPE BANANA\n\n2 TABLESPOONS VEGAN GRAHAM CRACKER CRUMBS\n\n1 CUP CRUSHED ICE\n\n1 CUP SOY MILK, PREFERABLY VANILLA FLAVORED, OR MORE, IF DESIRED\n\n* * *\n\nIn a blender, combine all the ingredients and process until smooth. Serve immediately.\n\n_**yields**_ 1 SMOOTHIE\nCHAPTER 10\n\n_Vegan Cheese Pairings_\n\n_**Wine, Beer & Cocktails**_\n\n**I f you think your imagination and appetite have been encouraged to run wild so far, you're about to kick it up another notch and get tipsy with it. Cheese pairings with wine, beer, and other alcohol are the ultimate chance to satisfy multiple cravings at once while taking your palate on a joyride.**\n\n**Until now, vegans were left holding the bottle, _only_ , at pairings. But that changes here and now! What follows is a comprehensive chart, pairing the homemade vegan cheeses from Chapter 1, and by association their related dishes throughout the book, with wines, beers, and even classic cocktails. This holds true for the store-bought variety of vegan cheeses as well.**\n\n**While they are extensive in breadth, giving you as much room to play as possible, in that same spirit, I have also kept the suggestions basic, forgoing any brand names of alcohol. For example, where I suggest pairing pinot grigio or dark beer with a particular cheese, go with your favorite brand or use it as an opportunity to try a few different ones.**\n\n**In addition to the pairing suggestions, in the Cheesy Vegan Table section, I lay out a variety of serving tools for all your entertaining needs. This is followed by two inventive yet easy ways to experiment and savor the cheese and spirits.**\n\n**First, the fall\/winter and spring\/summer seasonal Vegan Artisanal Cheese Platters provide a blueprint for how you might choose appropriate cheeses for certain times of the year.**\n\n**Second, I show you how you can host your very own Vegan Cheese of the Month Club or a yearlong Cheesy Vegan Pub Crawl to maximize and extend face time and a decadent happy hour with your family and friends. There aren't any rules here\u2014mostly suggestions that you can take and explore.**\n\nCHART FOR PAIRING VEGAN CHEESE WITH WINE, BEER & COCKTAILS\n\n_**american**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\nViognier\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir\n\nZinfandel (red, not too high alcohol)\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nBrown ale\n\nLager\n\nPilsner\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nCampari cocktail\n\nMojito\n\nMoscow Mule (in a copper cup!)\n\nOld Fashioned\n\nRusty Nail\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBourbon\n\nRum\n\nScotch\n\nTequila\n\n_**blue**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nIced cider\n\nPinot grigio\n\nSauternes\n\nSpatlese Riesling\n\nViognier\n\nZinfandel (white)\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nAmarone\n\nBordeaux (red)\n\nCabernet Sauvignon\n\nMadeira\n\nPinot noir\n\nSherry (sweet)\n\nSyrah\/Shiraz\n\nTawny port\n\nZinfandel (red)\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nBelgian ale\n\nEnglish bitters\n\nFruit beer\n\nIPA\n\nPale ale\n\nPorter\n\nRussian imperial stout\n\nStout\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nVodka martini (up with unstuffed plain olives)\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBourbon\n\nGin\n\nKirsch\n\nRye\n\nScotch\n\nTequila\n\nVodka\n\nWhiskey\n\n_**brie**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay (unoaked)\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling\n\nSauvignon blanc (sparkling, Aussie)\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nBordeaux (red)\n\nCabernet Sauvignon\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir\n\nPort\n\nSherry (sweet)\n\nSyrah\/Shiraz\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nFruit beer\n\nPale ale\n\nStout\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nCosmopolitan\n\nVodka martini\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBourbon\n\nSchnapps (fruity, e.g., apple, peach, pear)\n\nTequila\n\nWhiskey\n\n_**cheddar (mild)**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nCava\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nCabernet Sauvignon\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nLager\n\nPilsner\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nGin martini\n\nOld Fashioned\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBourbon\n\nBrandy\n\nCognac\n\nIrish whiskey (on the rocks)\n\nRum\n\nScotch\n\n_**cheddar (sharp)**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChampagne\n\nCr\u00e9mant\n\nFranciacorta\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling\n\nSake\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nCabernet Sauvignon\n\nChianti\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir (California or Burgundy)\n\nRioja\n\nSyrah\/Shiraz\n\nZinfandel (red)\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nBelgian ale\n\nBock\n\nBrown ale\n\nFruit beer\n\nPale ale\n\nPorter\n\nStout\n\nWheat Beer\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nGin martini\n\nIrish whiskey (on the rocks)\n\nOld Fashioned\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBourbon\n\nBrandy\n\nCognac\n\nGin\n\nRum\n\nScotch\n\n_**cottage cheese**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nPale ale\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nMint Julep (in a silver cup!)\n\nStinger\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nAmaretto\n\nBourbon whiskey\n\n_**cream cheese**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\nViognier\n\nZinfandel (white)\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais nouveau\n\nChianti\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot Noir\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nFruit beer\n\nLager\n\nRed ale\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nBloody Mary\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nCanadian whiskey\n\nScotch\n\n_**feta**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay\n\nChenin blanc\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nPouilly-Fum\u00e9\n\nRiesling\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\nViognier\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nPinot noir\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nFruit beer\n\nLager\n\nPilsner\n\nWheat beer\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nSidecar\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nOuzo\n\nSchnapps (fruity, e.g., apple, peach, pear)\n\n_**horseradish cheese**_\n\n_**(american and cheddar variations)**_\n\n**WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling (high acidity)\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nFruit beer\n\nWheat beer\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nBloody Mary\n\nRum & Coke\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nGin\n\nVodka\n\n_**jack**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\nViognier\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir\n\nZinfandel (red, not too high alcohol)\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nBrown ale\n\nLager\n\nPilsner\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nBloody Mary\n\nWhiskey Sour\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nRum\n\nTequila\n\nVodka\n\n_**mozzarella**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\nViognier\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nChianti\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir\n\nSangiovese\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nFruit beer\n\nPilsner\n\nWheat beer\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nCampari cocktail\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nSambuca\n\nVodka\n\n_**muenster**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChardonnay\n\nGew\u00fcrztraminer\n\nGruner Veltliner\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\nZinfandel (white)\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir\n\nZinfandel (red)\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nBelgian ale\n\nLager\n\nPale ale\n\nPilsner\n\nPorter\n\nStout\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nDaiquiri\n\nEl Presidente\n\nOld Fashioned\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBourbon\n\nBrandy\n\n_**nooch cheese**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nCava\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nMerlot\n\nPinot noir\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nLager\n\nPilsner\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nGin Sling\n\nMargarita\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBourbon\n\nBrandy\n\nCognac\n\nRum\n\nScotch\n\nWhiskey\n\n_**parmesan**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling\n\nSake\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nAmarone\n\nCabernet Sauvignon\n\nChianti\n\nMerlot\n\nRipasso\n\nSangiovese\n\nSyrah\/Shiraz\n\nZinfandel (red)\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nAmber ale\n\nAmber lager\n\nPale ale\n\nPilsner\n\nStout\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nBellini\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBrandy\n\nScotch\n\nVodka\n\n_**ricotta**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChardonnay\n\nPinot blanc\n\nPinot grigio\n\nViognier\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nCabernet Sauvignon (young)\n\nChianti\n\nSangiovese\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nLager\n\nPale ale\n\nPilsner\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nDirty Martini\n\nTom Collins\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBrandy\n\nGin\n\n_**smoked cheese**_\n\n_**(cheddar, cream cheese, and mozzarella variations)**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nChardonnay\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nMerlot\n\nRioja\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nBeer, beer, beer! of choice\n\nRauchbier\n\nSmoked porter\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nManhattan\n\nRob Roy\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nBrandy\n\nVermouth (sweet)\n\nWhiskey\n\n_**swiss**_\n\n**WHITE WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nAsti\n\nChampagne\n\nChardonnay\n\nGew\u00fcrztraminer\n\nPinot grigio\n\nRiesling\n\nSauvignon blanc\n\n**RED WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nBeaujolais\n\nBonarda\n\nCabernet Sauvignon\n\nMerlot\n\nPinotage\n\nPinot noir\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nBock\n\nLager (preferably dark)\n\nPale ale\n\nWheat beer\n\n**COCKTAIL**\n\n* * *\n\nBlack Russian\n\nManhattan\n\n**OTHER**\n\n* * *\n\nVermouth (sweet)\n\nVodka\n\nWhiskey\n\n_**wine cheese**_\n\n**WINE**\n\n* * *\n\nServe with wine used in the cheese\n\n**BEER**\n\n* * *\n\nAmber lager\n\nDark beer\n\n_**the cheesy vegan table**_\n\nWhether sneaking a chunk of cheese to hold you over until suppertime or putting on a dinner party, pairing, or larger bash, every bite is meant to be savored with efficiency and style. No matter the occasion, following are some essential serving tools that will leave no doubt in anyone's mind who is the cheesiest vegan host or hostess around.\n\nThe homemade vegan cheese recipes in Chapter 1 give us all a reason to either use grandma's heirloom cheese board and dome for their intended purposes or to go shopping for some fun and even artistic-looking cheese tools to add to our kitchen collections. While the following items are easily found in mainstream stores, specialty shops, and even antique stores, for a guide to online resources offering chef-grade and even whimsical tools, see the Resource Guide for Cheese Tools on page 234.\n\n**SLICERS**\n\nWhen it comes to cheese, a simple knife alone usually doesn't cut it (literally). The last thing you want to serve yourself or guests is a ragged, uneven slice of cheese. Traditional slicers come in many shapes and sizes. Depending on your specific needs, it is best to go with a stainless-steel plane slicer, wire slicer, or specific cheese\/chef's all-purpose utility knife that will insure safe, clean, and uniform slices for sandwiches or for serving alone with crackers.\n\nIf serving multiple cheeses at a party or tasting where guests will cut their own slices, use a separate knife for each cheese to avoid mixing the flavors.\n\n**GRATERS**\n\nCheese graters give you a lot of bang for your buck. They also multitask as graters for chocolate, vegetables, and more. Choose a stainless-steel grater with a firm grip and razor-sharp blades to ensure perfectly grated cheese to use as an ingredient or as a colorful topping for salads, soups, and more. Box graters are also available, usually with catch basins, but with these, be careful that cheese is the only thing being grated, and not your knuckles (i.e., keep your eyes on the prize)! Some deluxe graters offer different-size grating options, along with a slicer.\n\n**PLATTERS**\n\nWhen it comes to a serving vessel, there are a few things to keep in mind. It's best if the surface is flat, so that if you're serving multiple cheeses together they won't run together. Consider offering each cheese on its own small platter, which totally prevents the cheeses' running together and their aromas' intermingling.\n\nAs for the platter itself, a wooden cutting board will forever be the benchmark for serving cheese. These days, wooden serving boards are not limited to round, square, and rectangular but come in many shapes and sizes, even thematic designs, such as pianos, guitars, wine bottles, animals, and more. Other traditional cheese platters are also available in glass and marble.\n\n**DOMES**\n\nNew or antique, a clear glass cheese dome is one of the most charming accents in a kitchen. Inducing an instantly cozy mood, cheese domes are practical in keeping cheese from drying too much while sitting out, and aesthetically they create an instant focal point for any get-together. In addition to providing a stage for your vegan cheese to shine, domes can also be used in conjunction with serving boards, plates, or pedestals to display cookies, candies, cakes, fruit, and more. If serving more than one cheese, consider using multiple plates and pedestals to create varying levels, all covered with a collection of differently shaped domes.\n\n**CHEESE LABELS**\n\nFor all those boozy cheese pairings, it's all about the details when it comes to impressing your guests. There are such things as cheese-serving labels. Made of porcelain or other materials onto which you can handwrite a cheese's moniker, they serve as decorative nameplates for your guests' convenience when inserted into each cheese you're offering.\n\n**CHEESE TOTES**\n\nMajor Gift Alert for all the cheese lovers in your life . . . starting with you! When you want to take your Cheesy Vegan show on the road for picnics, beach adventures, campouts, and backyard parties, there are specially designed and insulated totes that have compartments for everything you'll need, from the slicers and cutting board to the cheese and wine\/beer\/beverages of choice. Often, the totes already come with the tools. Smaller travel kits with only the tools are also available.\n\n**ACCESSORIES**\n\nWe've all seen them; some of us (not naming names) may have even donned one from time to time when cheering on a favorite sports team or indulging a silly mood. But now, we can all wear one in celebration of this new era of cheese for all. Yep, I'm talking Cheeseheads!\n\nWhen the mood strikes you, the original source for the classic Cheesehead hat, which comes in adult, youth, and even . . . _Wait. For. It._ . . . doll sizes for the whole family to enjoy, is Foamation (Cheesehead.com). For the cheesy fashionistas out there, or as playful host and hostess gifts, be sure to also check out the Cheesehead fedora, top hat, cowboy hat, bow tie, necktie, earrings, pins, belt buckle, earmuffs, and so much more.\n\n_**artisanal vegan cheese platters by the season**_\n\nWhile dishes loaded with cheese as an ingredient are always a crowd-pleaser, nothing revs up the eyes and palate like a platter (or collection of separate serving vessels) brimming with different cheeses and crackers, accompanied by the appropriate fruits and vegetables.\n\nFollowing are suggestions for cheeses, in slices, cubes, and spreads per your preference, to create artisanal vegan cheese platters for fall\/winter and spring\/summer. These ideas are followed by a list of fruits and vegetables to dress up the platters in appropriate bite-size pieces. These colorful platters can stand alone as solo party or snack fare, or be served as appetizers or a first course, or even as an alternative dessert course.\n\nNaturally, the appropriate (or your favorite) wine, beer, and cocktail pairings will always be a winning and welcome combo. For pairing suggestions, refer back to the chart at the beginning of this chapter.\n\n**THE FALL\/WINTER VEGAN ARTISANAL CHEESE PLATTER**\n\nThis is the cozy, fireplace-crackling time of the year when heavier and richer cheeses and flavors are most welcome. Along with the fruits and vegetables of choice (see list on page 229), serve the cheeses with a selection of crackers and vegan mustards.\n\nOn a platter or series of separate serving plates, arrange slices, cubes, or spreads of the following homemade cheeses from Chapter 1:\n\n   Extra-sharp Cheddar (page 28)\n\n   Smoked Cheddar (page 28)\n\n   Horseradish Cheddar (page 28)\n\n   Wine (page 30)\n\n   Smoked Mozzarella (page 31)\n\n   Swiss (page 34)\n\n   Brie (page 33)\n\n   Horseradish American (page 45)\n\n   Cream Cheese (using the 'Tis the Season Fruit & Nut Ball [page 158] or Pecan & Cranberry Party Log [page 161])\n\n**THE SPRING\/SUMMER VEGAN ARTISANAL CHEESE PLATTER**\n\nAt this carefree time of the year when nearly everything is in full bloom, you're going to want lighter cheeses and flavors. Along with the fruits and vegetables of choice (see list on this page), serve the cheeses with a selection of crackers and vegan mustards.\n\nOn a platter or series of separate serving plates, arrange slices, cubes, or spreads of the following homemade cheeses from Chapter 1:\n\n   Cheddar (page 28)\n\n   Mozzarella (page 31)\n\n   Jack (page 42)\n\n   Blue (page 41)\n\n   Muenster (page 44)\n\n   American (page 45)\n\n   Cream cheese (page 37, using one or more of the garlic, jalape\u00f1o, farmers' market veggie, hot sauce, and smoked variations)\n\n**Fruits & Vegetables**\n\nWhether from your backyard or local farmers' market, or some other source, choose fruits and vegetables that speak to you. Use those that you think will best complement the colors and flavors of the cheeses you're using and the wine, beer, and cocktails you're serving. This is by no means a scientific equation, so don't overthink it. This is about experimenting, learning how new and seasonal flavors mix and match, and, most of all, having a fun time.\n\nAccompany the cheese slices, cubes, and spreads with a selection of the following fruits and vegetables, or any others you would like to use:\n\n**Fruits:**\n\n   Apple wedges\n\n   Pear slices\n\n   Grape clusters\n\n   Cantaloupe slices\n\n   Peach slices\n\n   Strawberries\n\n   Papaya slices\n\n   Kiwi slices\n\n   Olives (such as pitted kalamatas and pitted jumbo green olives, as well as Fried Olives Stuffed with Smoky Cheese Hummus [page 150] and Casanova's Blue Cheese\u2013 or Feta-Stuffed Cocktail Olives [page 153])\n\n**Vegetables:**\n\n   Tomato wedges or cherry tomatoes\n\n   Red or yellow bell pepper slices\n\n   Green onions\n\n   Cucumber slices\n\n   Carrot sticks\n\n   Asparagus spears (raw or olive-oiled, roasted, and cooled)\n\n   Cauliflower florets (raw or olive-oiled, roasted, and cooled)\n\n   Broccoli florets (raw or olive-oiled, roasted, and cooled)\n\n_**vegan cheese of the month club**_\n\nWhen I cohosted a yearlong charity pub crawl with my family's brewery, the biggest lesson I learned was: You don't need to have all the fun at once. The same goes for cheese. Whereas the artisanal vegan cheese platters offer the indulgence of one-stop shopping by the season, another equally gratifying option is to focus on one cheese every month.\n\nTo launch your own Vegan Cheese of the Month Club: Each month, choose a vegan cheese from Chapter 1 to make (or opt for a store-bought brand if you prefer; see the Store-Bought Vegan Cheese Resource Guide on page 233). Pair the cheese with the appropriate wines, beers, and cocktails (see the pairing chart on page 220), and send out the invites. You can even accompany the sliced, cubed, or spreadable cheesy happy hour with a round of appetizers and snacks from Chapter 6 and\/or a lunch or dinner course featuring a dish prepared with the spotlighted cheese of the month.\n\nIn fact, you and your friends can divide and conquer by each of you choosing a month and hosting your own pairing for a true yearlong Cheesy Vegan Pub Crawl.\n\nAnd keep in mind that homemade vegan cheese makes a unique host or hostess gift, or an anytime present for all the cheese lovers in your life. And that would be pretty much everyone, right?\n\nThe following is a suggested Vegan Cheese of the Month Club schedule to get you started. But please feel free to mix it up and run off on as many cheesy and tipsy tangents as you'd like, to make this twelve-month vegan cheese extravaganza rock the loudest (and tastiest) for you and your friends.\n\n   **January:** Swiss (page 34)\n\n   **February:** Cheddar (page 28) and\/or Smoked Cheddar (page 28)\n\n   **March:** Muenster (page 44)\n\n   **April:** Blue (page 41)\n\n   **May:** Mozzarella (page 31)\n\n   **June:** Jack (page 42)\n\n   **July:** American (page 45)\n\n   **August:** Cream cheese (page 37, using one or more of the garlic, jalape\u00f1o, farmers' market veggie, hot sauce, and smoked variations)\n\n   **September:** Wine cheese (page 30)\n\n   **October:** Smoked Mozzarella (page 31)\n\n   **November:** Horseradish American (page 45) and\/or Horseradish Cheddar (page 28)\n\n   **December:** Brie (page 33) and\/or 'Tis the Season Fruit & Nut Ball (page 158)\n\n_**metric conversions**_\n\n   The recipes in this book have not been tested with metric measurements, so some variations might occur.\n\n   Remember that the weight of dry ingredients varies according to the volume or density factor: 1 cup of flour weighs far less than 1 cup of sugar, and 1 tablespoon doesn't necessarily hold 3 teaspoons.\n\n**GENERAL FORMULA FOR METRIC CONVERSION**\n\nOunces to grams ounces \u00d7 28.35 = grams\n\nGrams to ounces grams \u00d7 0.035 = ounces\n\nPounds to grams pounds \u00d7 453.5 = grams\n\nPounds to kilograms pounds \u00d7 0.45 = kilograms\n\nCups to liters cups \u00d7 0.24 = liters\n\nFahrenheit to Celsius (\u00b0F \u2212 32) \u00d7 5 \u00f7 9 = \u00b0C\n\nCelsius to Fahrenheit (\u00b0C \u00d7 9) \u00f7 5 + 32 = \u00b0F\n\n**VOLUME (LIQUID) MEASUREMENTS**\n\n1 teaspoon = \u2159 fluid ounce = 5 milliliters\n\n1 tablespoon = \u00bd fluid ounce = 15 milliliters\n\n2 tablespoons = 1 fluid ounce = 30 milliliters\n\n\u00bc cup = 2 fluid ounces = 60 milliliters\n\n\u2153 cup = 2\u2154 fluid ounces = 79 milliliters\n\n\u00bd cup = 4 fluid ounces = 118 milliliters\n\n1 cup or \u00bd pint = 8 fluid ounces = 250 milliliters\n\n2 cups or 1 pint = 16 fluid ounces = 500 milliliters\n\n4 cups or 1 quart = 32 fluid ounces = 1,000 milliliters\n\n1 gallon = 4 liters\n\n**VOLUME (DRY) MEASUREMENTS**\n\n\u00bc teaspoon = 1 milliliter\n\n\u00bd teaspoon = 2 milliliters\n\n\u00be teaspoon = 4 milliliters\n\n1 teaspoon = 5 milliliters\n\n1 tablespoon = 15 milliliters\n\n\u00bc cup = 59 milliliters\n\n\u2153 cup = 79 milliliters\n\n\u00bd cup = 118 milliliters\n\n\u2154 cup = 158 milliliters\n\n\u00be cup = 177 milliliters\n\n1 cup = 225 milliliters\n\n4 cups or 1 quart = 1 liter\n\n\u00bd gallon = 2 liters\n\n1 gallon = 4 liters\n\n**OVEN TEMPERATURE EQUIVALENTS, FAHRENHEIT (F) AND CELSIUS (C)**\n\n100\u00b0F = 38\u00b0C\n\n200\u00b0F = 95\u00b0C\n\n250\u00b0F = 120\u00b0C\n\n300\u00b0F = 150\u00b0C\n\n350\u00b0F = 180\u00b0C\n\n400\u00b0F = 205\u00b0C\n\n450\u00b0F = 230\u00b0 C\n\n**WEIGHT (MASS) MEASUREMENTS**\n\n1 ounce = 30 grams\n\n2 ounces = 55 grams\n\n3 ounces = 85 grams\n\n4 ounces = \u00bc pound = 125 grams\n\n8 ounces = \u00bd pound = 240 grams\n\n12 ounces = \u00be pound = 375 grams\n\n16 ounces = 1 pound = 454 grams\n\n**LINEAR MEASUREMENTS**\n\n\u00bd in = 1\u00bd cm\n\n1 inch = 2\u00bd cm\n\n6 inches = 15 cm\n\n8 inches = 20 cm\n\n10 inches = 25 cm\n\n12 inches = 30 cm\n\n20 inches = 50 cm\n_**store-bought vegan cheese resource guide**_\n\nIn addition to using the homemade vegan cheeses from Chapter 1 in the recipes and pairings throughout this book, you can also use the vegan cheeses produced by the following companies. These cheeses are becoming more widely available in grocery stores and online.\n\n**Bute Island Foods Ltd**\n\nwww.buteisland.com\n\n**Chicago Vegan Foods**\n\nwww.chicagoveganfoods.com\n\n**Daiya Foods**\n\nwww.daiyafoods.com\n\n**Dixie Diners' Club**\n\nwww.dixiediner.com\n\n**Dr-Cow**\n\nwww.dr-cow.com\n\n**Edward & Sons (Road's End Organics)**\n\nwww.edwardandsons.com\n\n**Fat Goblin (Nacho Mom's)**\n\nwww.fatgoblin.com\n\n**Follow Your Heart**\n\nwww.followyourheart.com\n\n**Galaxy Nutritional Foods**\n\nwww.galaxyfoods.com\n\n**Heidi Ho Veganics**\n\nwww.heidihoveganics.com\n\n**Lisanatti Foods**\n\nwww.lisanatti.com\n\n**Punk Rawk Labs**\n\nwww.punkrawklabs.net\n\n**Ste Martaen**\n\nwww.stemartaen.com\n\n**Sister River Foods**\n\nwww.eatparma.com\n\n**The Redwood Whole Food Company**\n\nwww.shop.redwoodfoods.eu\n\n**Tofutti**\n\nwww.tofutti.com\n_**resource guide for cheese tools**_\n\nFrom fancy and expensive to everyday cheesy chic, cheese tools and accessories are available in many mainstream stores, specialty shops, and antique stores. However, it's always fun to go off the beaten path and find tools that are chef grade, or even whimsical, to make your adventures in vegan cheese truly unique and personal. Here are a few online resources that offer every cheese tool imaginable.\n\n**Chef's Resource**\n\nwww.chefsresource.com\n\n**Chef Tools**\n\nwww.cheftools.com\n\n**Cutlery Cuts & Supply**\n\nwww.cutlerycuts.com\/cheesetools\n\n**CutleryAndMore**\n\nwww.cutleryandmore.com\n\n**Fab**\n\nwww.fab.com\n\n**Food Service Warehouse**\n\nwww.foodservicewarehouse.com\n\n**Ideal Cheese**\n\nwww.idealcheese.com\n\n**igourmet.com**\n\nwww.igourmet.com\n\n**The Prepared Pantry**\n\nwww.preparedpantry.com\n\n**The Wasserstrom Company**\n\nwww.wasserstrom.com\n\n**Twisted Corkscrew**\n\nwww.twistedcorkscrew.com\n\n**Uncommon Goods**\n\nwww.uncommongoods.com\n\n**Wine Rack Station**\n\nwww.winerackstation.com\n_**acknowledgments**_\n\nMirror, mirror on the wall, who's the cheesiest of them all. . . .\n\nVegan cheese would not be half as delicious or fun, nor would this book, if not for the invaluable contributions and support from the following cheesy rock stars in my life.\n\nThank you . . .\n\nTo my agent, Steve Troha, whose hand is always at my back, nudging (and sometimes shoving) me forward, through thick and thin, and always encouraging me to be the best I can be.\n\nTo my editor, Ren\u00e9e Sedliar, who taught me that cheesy is, indeed, the new cool! \"Brilliant\" doesn't even scratch the surface to begin to describe her.\n\nTo Tom Steele, who so generously shared his culinary expertise to help make this book the cheesiest it could be.\n\nTo Amy Beadle Roth, whose keen eye and breathtaking photographs have turned vegan cheese into art as no one else can.\n\nTo the amazing-fabulous-spectacular team at Da Capo Lifelong\u2014including senior project editor, Annie Lenth; copyeditor, Iris Bass; proofreader, Lori Lewis; indexer, Heidi Blough; designer, Megan Jones; editorial assistant, Christine Dore; publicist, Jenna Gilligan; and marketing manager, Lindsey Triebel\u2014who is helping me to change the world, one slice of vegan cheese at a time!\n\nTo Beverly Carnahan, one of the world's most incredible sommeliers, who shared her extraordinary expertise in pairing great food and drink, as well as her enthusiasm for all things tipsy, proving to be an ultimate drinking buddy.\n\nTo Vince Assetta, who shared his profound talents in mixology and pairings, as well as his love for the boozy side of life, proving to also be an ultimate drinking buddy with whom I could get into a lot of fantastic mischief.\n\nTo my mom and dad, who fed me my favorite childhood lunch of sliced Swiss cheese and sliced green olives while I was still in a high chair, thus planting one more seed that has now come full circle.\n\nTo my pal, A., whose own inspiring enthusiasm and talent for creating delicious food, and whose appreciation for the sheer poetry that a cookbook can embody, remind me every day how lucky I am to do what I do.\n\nAnd, finally, to all my fellow cheese lovers of the world, who are smart enough to still believe that the moon is made of cheese! + + + + +\n_**index**_\n\nA\n\n**Agar (agar-agar),**\n\n**Alcohol,.** _See also_ Beer; Bourbon; Rum; Wine\n\n**Almonds**\n\nAmerican cheese,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nParmesan Almond cheese,\n\nSwiss cheese,\n\n**American cheese,**\n\nBroccoli & Cauliflower Salad, ,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nGrilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches, ,\n\nHorseradish American cheese, ,\n\nInferno Poppers,\n\nLucky Horseradish Dip,\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\nWhite Truffle Rice-Stuffed Mushrooms, , ,\n\n**Appetizers & snacks, 135\u2013167**\n\nAmazo-Queso Dip, ,\n\nAvocado, Corn & Black Bean Dip,\n\nBlue Moon Dip, ,\n\nCasanova's Blue Cheese\u2013 or Feta-Stuffed Cocktail Olives,\n\nCheddar Chips, ,\n\nCheddar Pub Dip, ,\n\nCrunchy Leek Dip, ,\n\nThe Dynamic Jalape\u00f1o Popper Duo, , 156\u2013157\n\nFlying Buffalo Dip, ,\n\nFried Olives Stuffed with Smoky Cheese Hummus, ,\n\nLucky Horseradish Dip,\n\nMinced Chipotle Pepper & Cheese Dip,\n\nParmesan Popcorn, ,\n\nPecan & Cranberry Party Log,\n\nPrimo-Pimento Spread,\n\nThe Sailor's Spinach Dip,\n\nSeitan Flares, ,\n\nSwiss Mangoes, ,\n\n'Tis the Season Fruit & Nut Ball,\n\nWhite Truffle Rice-Stuffed Mushrooms, , ,\n\n_See also_ Hummus\n\n**Asparagus**\n\nRoasted Asparagus with Swiss Cheese,\n\n**Avocados**\n\nAvocado, Corn & Black Bean Dip,\n\nAvocado & Parmesan Pita Lunch Rush, ,\n\nThe Mile-High Club, ,\n\nSmoked Seitan & Avocado Panini, ,\n\nTex-Mex Tortilla Pizza, ,\n\n_Avocado & Parmesan Pita Lunch Rush_\n\nB\n\n**Bananas**\n\nBanana Cheesecake,\n\nStrawberry-Banana Cheesecake Smoothie,\n\n**Beans**\n\nAvocado, Corn & Black Bean Dip,\n\nBlack Bean & Jalape\u00f1o Tacos, ,\n\nHot Chili Bean Casserole, ,\n\npantry ingredients, ,\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\n**Beer**\n\nCheddar Pub Dip, ,\n\ncheese pairings, 219\u2013225\n\nOktoberfest in a Bowl,\n\nPrimo-Pimento Spread,\n\nvegan,\n\n**Berries,.** _See also_ Blueberries; Strawberries\n\n**Berry-flavored syrups,**\n\n**Beverages**\n\nLulu's Front Porch Juleps,\n\nStrawberry-Banana Cheesecake Smoothie,\n\n**Blue cheese,, **\n\nBlue Cheese Hummus,\n\nCasanova's Blue Cheese\u2013 or Feta-Stuffed Cocktail Olives,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFlying Buffalo Pizza, ,\n\n**Blueberries**\n\nBlueberry Cheesecake,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Bourbon**\n\ncheese pairings, 219\u2013225\n\nLulu's Front Porch Juleps,\n\n**Breads**\n\nThe Great Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese, ,\n\nParmesan Croutons,\n\nParmesan Garlic Bread,\n\nSunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest, , ,\n\nToast with the Most Cheese Bread,\n\nvegan bread,\n\n_See also_ Sandwiches\n\n**Breakfast & brunch recipes, 47\u201363**\n\nCozy Cottage Pancakes, , ,\n\nThe DIY Cheesy Scramble, ,\n\nThe Great Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese, ,\n\nMrs. Cleaver's Cheddar Muffins,\n\nMushroom-Cheese Strudel, ,\n\nSpoonable Bloody Queen Marys,\n\nSunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest, , ,\n\nToast with the Most Cheese Bread,\n\nYou Gotta Frittata ,\n\n_See also_ Pies, tarts & quiche\n\n**Brie cheese,, **\n\nBrie & Tomato Pasta Shells, ,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nYou Gotta Frittata ,\n\n**Broccoli**\n\nBroccoli & Cauliflower Salad, ,\n\nCaf\u00e9 Broccoli & Parmesan Quiche,\n\nCheesy Broccoli & Potato Soup,\n\nThyme of Your Life Baked Broccoli, , ,\n\nC\n\n**Cashew butter**\n\nHomemade Vegan Cashew Butter,\n\nMuenster cheese, ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Cashews**\n\nAmazo-Queso Dip, ,\n\nAmerican cheese,\n\nBlue cheese, ,\n\nBrie cheese, ,\n\nCheddar cheese, ,\n\nCheesy Hummus, ,\n\nJack cheese,\n\nMac 'n' Cheese with Ground Cashews & Truffle Oil, , ,\n\nNooch Cheese,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nPecan & Cranberry Party Log,\n\nThe Sailor's Spinach Dip,\n\nSwiss cheese,\n\n**Cauliflower**\n\nBaked Cauliflower-Parmesan Penne, ,\n\nBroccoli & Cauliflower Salad, ,\n\n**Cheddar cheese,, **\n\nAmazo-Queso Dip, ,\n\nBlack Bean & Jalape\u00f1o Tacos, ,\n\nBucking Bronco Tomato & Horseradish Soup, ,\n\nBuild Your Own Quesadilla, ,\n\nChedda-Peppa Pasta,\n\nCheddar Chips, ,\n\nCheddar Pub Dip, ,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nCheesy Broccoli & Potato Soup,\n\nChorizo-Pepper-Onion Stew,\n\nCountry Fair Cheese Fries, ,\n\nCreamy Seasoned Macaroni, ,\n\nThe DIY Cheesy Scramble, ,\n\nExtra-Sharp Cheddar cheese,\n\nFiery Poppers with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce,\n\nFlying Buffalo Dip, ,\n\nGrilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches, ,\n\nHorseradish Cheddar cheese, ,\n\nHot Chili Bean Casserole, ,\n\nHot Pepper Cheese Hummus,\n\nThe King's Grilled Cheese & Peanut Butter Sandwiches, ,\n\nLucky Horseradish Dip,\n\nLulu's Finger Sandwiches, ,\n\nMac 'n' Cheese with Ground Cashews & Truffle Oil, , ,\n\nMinced Chipotle Pepper & Cheese Dip,\n\nMrs. Cleaver's Cheddar Muffins,\n\nOktoberfest in a Bowl,\n\nOutta the Park Shiitake Sliders, ,\n\nParmesan-Cheddar-Swiss Skillet Macaroni, ,\n\nPowwow Mushroom Soup,\n\nPrimo-Pimento Spread,\n\nSmoked Cheddar cheese, ,\n\nSmoky Cheese Hummus,\n\nSmoky Mountain Tomato & Cheddar Soup, ,\n\nSpicy Hot Mac Attack ,\n\nSuper Fab Fettuccine with Horseradish Cheese Sauce, ,\n\nSwiss & Cheddar Sunday Brunch Tarts, , ,\n\nTex-Mex Tortilla Pizza, ,\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\nThree-Cheese Screwy Fusilli, , ,\n\nThyme of Your Life Baked Broccoli, , ,\n\nToast with the Most Cheese Bread,\n\nTomato Gratin with Cheddar Crumbs & Basil Chiffonade, , ,\n\nTriple Your Pleasure Fondue,\n\nTwo-Cheese Macaroni with Caramelized Shallots, ,\n\nWhole-Grain Macaroni with Cottage Cheese & Cheddar,\n\n**Cheese, dairy-based,**\n\n**Cheese, vegan**\n\naccessibility to and availability of, , ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nvariations and substitutions,\n\n**Cheese of the Month Club,, **\n\n**Cheese pairings,, 219\u2013225**\n\n**Cheese recipes,, **\n\nAmerican,\n\nBlue, ,\n\nBrie, ,\n\nCheddar, ,\n\nCottage Cheese,\n\nCream Cheese,\n\nFeta,\n\nJack,\n\nMozzarella, , ,\n\nMuenster, ,\n\nNooch Cheese,\n\nParmesan,\n\nRicotta,\n\nSwiss,\n\nWine Cheese,\n\n**Cheesecakes,207\u2013217**\n\nBanana Cheesecake,\n\nBlueberry Cheesecake,\n\nThe Cheesecake Extravaganza, , ,\n\nCheesecake Party Parfaits, ,\n\nChocolate Cheesecake,\n\nPecan-Crusted Cheesecake Bars, ,\n\nStrawberry Cheesecake,\n\nStrawberry-Banana Cheesecake Smoothie,\n\nWhite Chocolate Cheesecake Petit Fours, ,\n\n**Chickpeas**\n\nCheesy Hummus, ,\n\n**Chiffonade cut,**\n\n**Chocolate & white chocolate**\n\nChocolate Cheesecake,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nWhite Chocolate Cheesecake Petit Fours, ,\n\n**Chorizo-Pepper-Onion Stew,**\n\n**Cocktails**\n\ncheese pairings, 219\u2013225\n\nLulu's Front Porch Juleps,\n\nSpoonable Bloody Queen Marys,\n\n**Corn**\n\nAngel Hair Pasta with Ricotta & Herb Sauce, ,\n\nAvocado, Corn & Black Bean Dip,\n\nTex-Mex Tortilla Pizza, ,\n\n**Cornstarch,**\n\n**Cottage Cheese,**\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nCozy Cottage Pancakes, , ,\n\nCrunchy Leek Dip, ,\n\nWhole-Grain Macaroni with Cottage Cheese & Cheddar,\n\n**Cranberries**\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nPecan & Cranberry Party Log,\n\n**Cream Cheese,**\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nCheesy Mashed Potatoes, ,\n\nCool as a Cucumber Finger Sandwiches,\n\nCreamy Seasoned Macaroni, ,\n\nFarmers' Market Veggie Cream Cheese,\n\nGarlic Cream Cheese,\n\nThe Great Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese, ,\n\nHot Sauce Cream Cheese,\n\nJalape\u00f1o Cream Cheese,\n\nMushroom-Cheese Strudel, ,\n\nSmoked Cream Cheese, ,\n\nSpicy Hot Mac Attack ,\n\n'Tis the Season Fruit & Nut Ball,\n\n_See also_ Cheesecakes\n\n**Cucumbers**\n\nCool as a Cucumber Finger Sandwiches,\n\nE\n\n**Egg replacer, vegan**\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nSwiss & Cheddar Sunday Brunch Tarts, , ,\n\n**Equipment & accessories, , 227\u2013228**\n\nF\n\n**Feta cheese,**\n\nCasanova's Blue Cheese\u2013 or Feta-Stuffed Cocktail Olives,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nPicnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese, , ,\n\nTwo-Cheese Macaroni with Caramelized Shallots, ,\n\n**Flavorings,**\n\n**Flaxseed,**\n\n**Flour, instant,**\n\n**Fondue**\n\nTriple Your Pleasure Fondue,\n\n**Fruits**\n\nartisanal cheese platters, 228\u2013229\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n'Tis the Season Fruit & Nut Ball,\n\nG\n\n**Garlic**\n\nGarlic Cream Cheese,\n\nParmesan Garlic Bread,\n\n**Graham crackers, vegan**\n\nThe Cheesecake Extravaganza, , ,\n\nCheesecake Party Parfaits, ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nWhite Chocolate Cheesecake Petit Fours, ,\n\n**Green beans**\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\nH\n\n**Herbs & spices, 11\u201312**\n\n**Horseradish**\n\nBucking Bronco Tomato & Horseradish Soup, ,\n\nHorseradish American cheese, ,\n\nHorseradish Cheddar cheese, ,\n\nhorseradish cheese pairings,\n\nLucky Horseradish Dip,\n\nSuper Fab Fettuccine with Horseradish Cheese Sauce, ,\n\n**Hot sauce**\n\nDrop it Like It's Hot,\n\nFlying Buffalo Pizza, ,\n\nHot Sauce Cream Cheese,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nSeitan Flares Hot Sauce, ,\n\n**Hummus**\n\nBlue Cheese Hummus,\n\nCheesy Hummus, ,\n\nFried Olives Stuffed with Smoky Cheese Hummus, ,\n\nHot Pepper Cheese Hummus,\n\nSmoky Cheese Hummus,\n\nJ\n\n**Jack cheese,**\n\nBuild Your Own Quesadilla, ,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFiery Poppers with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce,\n\nFour-Alarm Grilled Cheese & Jalape\u00f1o Sandwiches, ,\n\nGrilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches, ,\n\nHot Pepper Cheese Hummus,\n\nInferno Poppers,\n\nJack's Sweet Potato Casserole, ,\n\nMac & Jack, ,\n\nPowwow Mushroom Soup,\n\nTex-Mex Tortilla Pizza, ,\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\nTriple Your Pleasure Fondue,\n\n**Jalape\u00f1os**\n\nBlack Bean & Jalape\u00f1o Tacos, ,\n\nBuild Your Own Quesadilla, ,\n\nchopping tip,\n\nThe DIY Cheesy Scramble, ,\n\nThe Dynamic Jalape\u00f1o Popper Duo, , 156\u2013157\n\nFiery Poppers with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce,\n\nFour-Alarm Grilled Cheese & Jalape\u00f1o Sandwiches, ,\n\nHot Pepper Cheese Hummus,\n\nInferno Poppers,\n\nJalape\u00f1o Cream Cheese,\n\nSpicy Hot Mac Attack ,\n\nK\n\n**Ketchup, vegan,**\n\nL\n\n**Leeks**\n\nCrunchy Leek Dip, ,\n\nFancy Schmancy Vichyssoise, ,\n\n**Lemons & lemon juice**\n\nLemony Parmesan Linguine,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nPecan & Cranberry Party Log,\n\n**Limes & lime juice, **\n\n**Liquid smoke.** _See_ Smoke, liquid\n\nM\n\n**Mac 'n' cheese,193\u2013205**\n\n**Mangoes**\n\nSwiss Mangoes, ,\n\n**Margarine, vegan,**\n\n**Mayonnaise, vegan**\n\nCottage Cheese,\n\nHomemade Red Vegan Mayonnaise,\n\nHomemade Vegan Mayonnaise,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Milk, vegan,**\n\n**Millet**\n\nBlue cheese, ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Miso (white, yellow, or light),**\n\n**Mozzarella cheese,, , **\n\nAll You Can Eat Pizza Buffet, , , 174\u2013177\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFlying Buffalo Pizza, ,\n\nFour-Cheese Baked Rigatoni Gratin,\n\nPita Pizza in a Pocket,\n\nPizza Mountain Pie,\n\nPizza Palace Sliders,\n\nSmoked Mozzarella cheese, ,\n\nThe Super Hero, ,\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\nTomato Meets Mozzarella, Falls in Love, ,\n\nWhen the Moon Hits Your Eye Cheesy Pizza Pie, , ,\n\nYou Gotta Frittata ,\n\n**Muenster cheese,, **\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFlying Buffalo Pizza, ,\n\nFour-Alarm Grilled Cheese & Jalape\u00f1o Sandwiches, ,\n\nGrilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches, ,\n\nInferno Poppers,\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\n**Muffins**\n\nMrs. Cleaver's Cheddar Muffins,\n\n**Mushrooms**\n\nCaf\u00e9 Broccoli & Parmesan Quiche,\n\nCaf\u00e9 Spinach & Mushroom Quiche,\n\nThe DIY Cheesy Scramble, ,\n\nFlying Buffalo Pizza, ,\n\nMushroom-Cheese Strudel, ,\n\nOutta the Park Shiitake Sliders, ,\n\nPizza Palace Sliders,\n\nPowwow Mushroom Soup,\n\nTriple Your Pleasure Fondue,\n\nWhite Truffle Rice-Stuffed Mushrooms, , ,\n\n**Mustard, vegan,**\n\nN\n\n**Nooch Cheese,**\n\ncheese pairings,\n\n**Nutritional yeast**\n\nAmerican cheese,\n\nBlue cheese, ,\n\nBrie cheese, ,\n\nCheddar cheese, ,\n\nJack cheese,\n\nMozzarella cheese, , ,\n\nMuenster cheese, ,\n\nNooch Cheese,\n\npantry ingredients, ,\n\nParmesan Almond cheese,\n\nParmesan Walnut cheese,\n\nSwiss cheese,\n\n**Nuts**\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n'Tis the Season Fruit & Nut Ball,\n\n_See also_ Almonds; Cashews; Pecans; Walnuts\n\nO\n\n**Oats, rolled**\n\nAmazo-Queso Dip, ,\n\nMozzarella cheese, , ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Oils,**\n\n**Olive oil, extra-virgin,**\n\n**Olives**\n\nBaked Cauliflower-Parmesan Penne, ,\n\nCasanova's Blue Cheese\u2013 or Feta-Stuffed Cocktail Olives,\n\nFried Olives Stuffed with Smoky Cheese Hummus, ,\n\nMinced Chipotle Pepper & Cheese Dip,\n\nPicnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese, , ,\n\n**Onions**\n\nBalsamic Grilled Onion Rings Showered in Parmesan, ,\n\nChorizo-Pepper-Onion Stew,\n\nFarmers' Market Veggie Cream Cheese,\n\nSwiss Meets French Onion Soup, ,\n\nP\n\n**Pancakes**\n\nCozy Cottage Pancakes, , ,\n\n**Pantry ingredients**\n\navailability of,\n\nstandard ingredients, , 7\u20138, 11\u201314, 16\u201318, ,\n\n**Parmesan cheese**\n\nAll You Can Eat Pizza Buffet, , , 174\u2013177\n\nAvocado, Corn & Black Bean Dip,\n\nAvocado & Parmesan Pita Lunch Rush, ,\n\nBaked Cauliflower-Parmesan Penne, ,\n\nBalsamic Grilled Onion Rings Showered in Parmesan, ,\n\nCaf\u00e9 Broccoli & Parmesan Quiche,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFour-Cheese Baked Rigatoni Gratin,\n\nLemony Parmesan Linguine,\n\nMy Friend Alfredo, ,\n\nParmesan Almond cheese,\n\nThe Parmesan Caesar with Cheesy Croutons, , 81\u201382\n\nParmesan Garlic Bread,\n\nParmesan Popcorn, ,\n\nParmesan Walnut cheese,\n\nParmesan-Cheddar-Swiss Skillet Macaroni, ,\n\nPizza Palace Sliders,\n\nSpaghetti Squash with Browned Buttery Nutmeg Sauce, ,\n\nSpoonable Bloody Queen Marys,\n\nThree-Cheese Screwy Fusilli, , ,\n\nWhen the Moon Hits Your Eye Cheesy Pizza Pie, , ,\n\n**Pasta**\n\nAngel Hair Pasta with Ricotta & Herb Sauce, ,\n\nBaked Cauliflower-Parmesan Penne, ,\n\nBrie & Tomato Pasta Shells, ,\n\nChedda-Peppa Pasta,\n\nCreamy Seasoned Macaroni, ,\n\nFour-Cheese Baked Rigatoni Gratin,\n\nLemony Parmesan Linguine,\n\nMac & Jack, ,\n\nMac 'n' Cheese with Ground Cashews & Truffle Oil, , ,\n\nMy Friend Alfredo, ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nParmesan-Cheddar-Swiss Skillet Macaroni, ,\n\nPicnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese, , ,\n\nSpicy Hot Mac Attack ,\n\nSuper Fab Fettuccine with Horseradish Cheese Sauce, ,\n\nThree-Cheese Screwy Fusilli, , ,\n\nTwo-Cheese Macaroni with Caramelized Shallots, ,\n\nWhole-Grain Macaroni with Cottage Cheese & Cheddar,\n\n**Peanut butter**\n\nThe King's Grilled Cheese & Peanut Butter Sandwiches, ,\n\n**Pears**\n\nSpicy Green Salad with Swiss Cheese & Pears, ,\n\n**Pecans**\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nPecan & Cranberry Party Log,\n\nPecan-Crusted Cheesecake Bars, ,\n\n**Peppers & chile peppers**\n\nAmerican cheese,\n\nchopping tip,\n\nChorizo-Pepper-Onion Stew,\n\nThe DIY Cheesy Scramble, ,\n\nFarmers' Market Veggie Cream Cheese,\n\nFiery Poppers with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce,\n\nHot Pepper Cheese Hummus,\n\nMinced Chipotle Pepper & Cheese Dip,\n\nPrimo-Pimento Spread,\n\nSpicy Hot Mac Attack ,\n\nYou Gotta Frittata ,\n\nSee _also_ Jalape\u00f1os\n\n**Phyllo dough**\n\nMushroom-Cheese Strudel, ,\n\n**Pies, tarts & quiche**\n\nCaf\u00e9 Broccoli & Parmesan Quiche,\n\nCaf\u00e9 Spinach & Mushroom Quiche,\n\nSwiss & Cheddar Sunday Brunch Tarts, , ,\n\n**Pine nuts**\n\nBaked Cauliflower-Parmesan Penne,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nWine Cheese,\n\n**Pizza & pizza-inspired recipes**\n\nAll You Can Eat Pizza Buffet, , , 174\u2013177\n\nFlying Buffalo Pizza, ,\n\nPita Pizza in a Pocket,\n\nPizza Mountain Pie,\n\nPizza Palace Sliders,\n\nTex-Mex Tortilla Pizza, ,\n\nWhen the Moon Hits Your Eye Cheesy Pizza Pie, , ,\n\n**Platters, artisanal cheese,, 228\u2013229**\n\n**Popcorn**\n\nParmesan Popcorn, ,\n\n**Potatoes**\n\nCheesy Broccoli & Potato Soup,\n\nCheesy Mashed Potatoes, ,\n\nCountry Fair Cheese Fries, ,\n\nFancy Schmancy Vichyssoise, ,\n\nNew Potato & Ricotta Salad, ,\n\nTwice-Baked Ricotta Potato Skins, ,\n\nYou Gotta Frittata ,\n\nYou Say POtato, I Say PoTAto Gratin, ,\n\n**Pub Crawl, Cheesy Vegan,, **\n\n**Pumpkin**\n\nThe Great Pumpkin Bread with Cream Cheese, ,\n\n_Flying Buffalo Pizza_\n\nR\n\n**Ricotta cheese,**\n\nAngel Hair Pasta with Ricotta & Herb Sauce, ,\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFancy Schmancy Vichyssoise, ,\n\nFour-Cheese Baked Rigatoni Gratin,\n\nNew Potato & Ricotta Salad, ,\n\nSunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest, , ,\n\nThree-Cheese Screwy Fusilli, , ,\n\nTwice-Baked Ricotta Potato Skins, ,\n\n**Rum**\n\ncheese pairings, 219\u2013225\n\nThe Sailor's Spinach Dip,\n\nvegan,\n\nS\n\n**Salads,, 79\u201389**\n\nBroccoli & Cauliflower Salad, ,\n\nNew Potato & Ricotta Salad, ,\n\nThe Parmesan Caesar with Cheesy Croutons, , 81\u201382\n\nPicnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese, , ,\n\nSpicy Green Salad with Swiss Cheese & Pears, ,\n\nThree Beans Steal the Scene Salad, ,\n\nTomato Meets Mozzarella, Falls in Love, ,\n\n**Sandwiches,111\u2013133**\n\nAvocado & Parmesan Pita Lunch Rush, ,\n\nCool as a Cucumber Finger Sandwiches,\n\nFour-Alarm Grilled Cheese & Jalape\u00f1o Sandwiches, ,\n\nGrilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches, ,\n\nThe Grilled Cheese Trio, , 113\u2013115\n\nThe King's Grilled Cheese & Peanut Butter Sandwiches, ,\n\nLulu's Finger Sandwiches, ,\n\nThe Mile-High Club, ,\n\nOutta the Park Shiitake Sliders, ,\n\nPita Pizza in a Pocket,\n\nPizza Mountain Pie,\n\nPizza Palace Sliders,\n\nReuben, The Magnificent, ,\n\nSmoked Seitan & Avocado Panini, ,\n\nThe Super Hero, ,\n\n**Sauerkraut**\n\nReuben, The Magnificent, ,\n\n**Sausage, vegan**\n\nChorizo-Pepper-Onion Stew,\n\n**Seitan**\n\nFlying Buffalo Pizza, ,\n\nThe Mile-High Club, ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nSeitan Flares, ,\n\nSmoked Seitan & Avocado Panini, ,\n\nThe Super Hero, ,\n\n**Side dishes,91\u2013108**\n\n**Smoke, liquid**\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nSmoked Cheddar cheese, ,\n\nsmoked cheese pairings,\n\nSmoked Cream Cheese, ,\n\nSmoked Mozzarella cheese, ,\n\nSmoky Cheese Hummus,\n\n**Soups & stews, 65\u201378**\n\nBucking Bronco Tomato & Horseradish Soup, ,\n\nCheesy Broccoli & Potato Soup,\n\nChorizo-Pepper-Onion Stew,\n\nFancy Schmancy Vichyssoise, ,\n\nOktoberfest in a Bowl,\n\nPowwow Mushroom Soup,\n\nSmoky Mountain Tomato & Cheddar Soup, ,\n\nSwiss Meets French Onion Soup, ,\n\n**Sour cream, vegan**\n\nHomemade Vegan Sour Cream,\n\nMrs. Cleaver's Cheddar Muffins,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Soy sauce,**\n\n**Spices & herbs, 11\u201312**\n\n**Spinach**\n\nCaf\u00e9 Spinach & Mushroom Quiche,\n\nCrunchy Leek Dip, ,\n\nThe DIY Cheesy Scramble, ,\n\nThe Sailor's Spinach Dip,\n\n**Squash**\n\nSpaghetti Squash with Browned Buttery Nutmeg Sauce, ,\n\n**Stock, vegetable,**\n\n**Strawberries**\n\nCheesecake Party Parfaits, ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nStrawberry Cheesecake,\n\nStrawberry-Banana Cheesecake Smoothie,\n\n**Sugar, vegan**\n\nHomemade Vegan Powdered Sugar,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nSunrise Bruschetta with Ricotta, Powdered Sugar & Lemon Zest, , ,\n\n**Supper recipes,169\u2013190**\n\n**Sweet potatoes**\n\nJack's Sweet Potato Casserole, ,\n\n**Swiss cheese,**\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFour-Cheese Baked Rigatoni Gratin,\n\nThe Mile-High Club, ,\n\nParmesan-Cheddar-Swiss Skillet Macaroni, ,\n\nReuben, The Magnificent, ,\n\nRoasted Asparagus with Swiss Cheese,\n\nSmoked Seitan & Avocado Panini, ,\n\nSpicy Green Salad with Swiss Cheese & Pears, ,\n\nSwiss & Cheddar Sunday Brunch Tarts, , ,\n\nSwiss Mangoes, ,\n\nSwiss Meets French Onion Soup, ,\n\nTriple Your Pleasure Fondue,\n\nYou Gotta Frittata ,\n\nYou Say POtato, I Say PoTAto Gratin, ,\n\nT\n\n**Tahini**\n\nBlue cheese, ,\n\nBrie cheese, ,\n\nJack cheese,\n\nMozzarella cheese, , ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Tempeh**\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nReuben, The Magnificent, ,\n\n**Tofu**\n\nfreezing,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\npressing and draining instructions,\n\n**Tomatoes & tomato juice**\n\nAll You Can Eat Pizza Buffet, , , 174\u2013177\n\nAmazo-Queso Dip, ,\n\nBrie & Tomato Pasta Shells, ,\n\nBucking Bronco Tomato & Horseradish Soup, ,\n\nFiery Poppers with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce,\n\nFour-Cheese Baked Rigatoni Gratin,\n\nGrilled Cheese & Tomato Sandwiches, ,\n\nPicnic Pasta Salad with Sun-Dried Tomatoes & Feta Cheese, , ,\n\nRoasted Tomatoes on the Side with Wine Cheese, ,\n\nSmoky Mountain Tomato & Cheddar Soup, ,\n\nSpoonable Bloody Queen Marys,\n\nTomato Gratin with Cheddar Crumbs & Basil Chiffonade, , ,\n\nTomato Meets Mozzarella, Falls in Love, ,\n\n**Tortillas**\n\nBlack Bean & Jalape\u00f1o Tacos, ,\n\nBuild Your Own Quesadilla, ,\n\nCheddar Chips, ,\n\nTex-Mex Tortilla Pizza, ,\n\n**Truffles & truffle oil**\n\nMac 'n' Cheese with Ground Cashews & Truffle Oil, , ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nWhite Truffle Rice-Stuffed Mushrooms, , ,\n\nV\n\n**Vegetables**\n\nartisanal cheese platters, 228\u2013229\n\nFarmers' Market Veggie Cream Cheese,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Vinegars,**\n\n**Vodka**\n\nSpoonable Bloody Queen Marys,\n\nvegan,\n\nW\n\n**Walnuts**\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nParmesan Walnut cheese,\n\nThe Super Hero, ,\n\n**Wheat germ**\n\nBrie cheese, ,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\n**Wine**\n\ncheese pairings, 219\u2013225\n\nvegan,\n\n**Wine Cheese,**\n\ncheese pairings,\n\nFiery Poppers with Tomato-Chipotle Sauce,\n\nRoasted Tomatoes on the Side with Wine Cheese, ,\n\n**Wondra flour,**\n\n**Worcestershire sauce, vegan**\n\nHomemade Vegan Worcestershire Sauce,\n\npantry ingredients,\n\nZ\n\n**Zucchini**\n\nYou Gotta Frittata , \n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nTo the Jedi-Fairy-Sage-Dixons, the best ski team a girl could ask for \u2014 thanks for always reminding me to stop and smell the alpenglow\n\nAnd to Melissa Sarver White and Jody Corbett, who helped Mara find her way\nCONTENTS\n\nTITLE PAGE\n\nDEDICATION\n\nONE\n\nTWO\n\nTHREE\n\nFOUR\n\nFIVE\n\nSIX\n\nSEVEN\n\nEIGHT\n\nNINE\n\nTEN\n\nELEVEN\n\nTWELVE\n\nTHIRTEEN\n\nFOURTEEN\n\nFIFTEEN\n\nSIXTEEN\n\nSEVENTEEN\n\nEIGHTEEN\n\nNINETEEN\n\nTWENTY\n\nTWENTY-ONE\n\nTWENTY-TWO\n\nTWENTY-THREE\n\nTWENTY-FOUR\n\nTWENTY-FIVE\n\nTWENTY-SIX\n\nTWENTY-SEVEN\n\nTWENTY-EIGHT\n\nTWENTY-NINE\n\nTHIRTY\n\nTHIRTY-ONE\n\nAN AUTHOR'S GRATITUDE LIST\n\nTHE WONDER OF US SNEAK PEEK\n\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nCOPYRIGHT\n\nI make lists to survive. I'm not alone in this. You can't Google anything without getting hit in the face with a list. Once, I searched for \"Why do people make lists?\" Besides giving me 127 reasons why we love lists, I stumbled onto even more lists: 11 New Uses for a Paper Clip, 15 Regrettable Marriage Proposals, 23 Places to See Before You Die.\n\nWhen did we start doing that? Maybe on a wall way back in a dark cave, a shaggy-headed caveman scratched: Kill mammoth, make fire, stand upright.\n\nAs humans, we must just crave them. And after what happened to me, I need my lists now more than ever.\n\n\"What are you thinking about?\" Mom's eyes flick to me, then back to the road in front of us.\n\n\"Nothing.\" I shift in my seat, staring out the car window at the beige California scenery along the I-5. Every fifty miles or so, Mom finds a new way to ask if I want her to turn around, go home, forget this whole thing. Each time, watching the landscape outside slip farther from the bleached earth tones we left behind in San Diego, I tell her a version of I want to do this, keep driving, I have a plan.\n\nScratch that. I have a list. And I love lists. It's just not like any list I've made before.\n\nWe're heading north, tracing the 5, until eventually we will reach the highways that connect us to a dense stretch of Tahoe National Forest and, soon after, to Squaw Valley.\n\nTo Trick McHale, my biological father.\n\nThat's how Mom always refers to him. Trick McHale, your biological father. I got an A in AP bio freshman year. She doesn't have to remind me of the genetics. Besides, that's not how I think of him. Mostly, I don't think about him at all. To me, Trick McHale is another list: nine birthday cards (three with twenty-dollar bills), five phone calls, and one visit to the San Diego Zoo when I was seven. Which is why, when I blurted out five days ago that I wanted to go live with him for a while, just to take a break, to put my bad day (Mom's words) behind me, Mom's surprise was second only to my own. I don't blame her. It was random. Especially for me. It hadn't been on any list of mine anywhere. But here I am. Heading north.\n\nWhat's more shocking than the asking is that Mom said yes.\n\nThat's how bad it is.\n\nOnly it's really not that bad. It's Not. That. Bad. The day after my bad day, I made a list and taped it to the back of my bedroom door. My Get a Grip List.\n\nNo one has died.\n\nNo one has cancer.\n\nNo one has dropped me in the middle of a war-torn country.\n\nI have not been sold into child slavery.\n\nI have not joined a cult where I only eat wheatgrass and limes.\n\nI have not lost a limb.\n\nOnly it feels a little like I have. Lost a limb.\n\n\"If I turn around at this exit, we could be back home by dinner.\" Mom peers into the rearview mirror before changing lanes, passing a dusty white minivan. A little boy in the backseat watches us glide by, pressing his small hand flat against the glass.\n\n\"Maybe I'll feel like eating in Squaw Valley.\" I adjust the red half-inch binder resting on my lap. I like to put my long-term-goal lists into binders, real ones I can hold and not just electronic ones. I'm old school that way. I have a system. Yesterday, I printed out a cover for it, reading THE NOW LIST against the backdrop of a Hawaiian sunset. Nothing says live in the now like a sunset, right? I squint at it, bubbles of doubt forming in my gut.\n\nThe semi trucks on the 5 stack up like toy trains, and Mom pushes the Lexus past a line of them. We pick up speed as Mom adds, \"Or we could just turn around. I really think it's starting to blow over.\"\n\nIf by \"blowing over\" she means \"still going viral.\" The YouTube video had 616,487 views the last time I checked it.\n\nI clear my throat and try for a bright voice. \"No, I'm good. I think this will be great!\" I sound like a Disney princess on her third helium balloon.\n\nMom notices and frowns sideways at me. \"Yeah, you sound great.\"\n\nI try to dial it down. \"Seriously, think of this like my semester abroad, only I'm going for a quarter and it's Tahoe instead of Italy or South America. Like an exchange student. But without having to change money or wonder why they don't put ice in my drink.\"\n\nHer frown lines deepen, telling me she feels this trip is nothing like an exchange program. She's already told me what she thinks this is.\n\nRunning away.\n\nI still don't know what happened. Not really. I mean, I know what happened; I've seen the video footage. But I still don't know how it happened. One minute, my calculus teacher, Mr. Henly, was telling us to use a number two pencil, and the next minute I was shredding the test and sobbing, \"It doesn't matter, none of this matters, it doesn't matter,\" over and over until Mr. Henly called someone from the office to come get me.\n\n\"I swear, this is going to be great,\" I say again, my voice thin, watching the blank middle of California spool away behind me. \"I made a list.\"\n\nMom purses her lips and stares at the road before us.\n\nA few hours later, as we trade Southern for Northern, replacing palms for pines, Mom asks again, \"Are you sure you don't want me to turn around?\"\n\nI wish she'd stop asking. \"We're basically there.\" I clench my binder in sweaty hands and try to breathe in the quiet scenery.\n\nShe pulls onto Highway 89 toward Squaw Valley, passing campgrounds on our left, dark tops of picnic tables peeking through the snow, the campground sign draped in plastic. It's hard to believe we left San Diego this morning and now we're here. Where Trick lives. We stopped only once, to grab some sandwiches and more coffee, so we made good time. Mom loves to make good time when we're driving, so I don't tell her I have to pee. We're close and I can't stand to watch her check all her clocks any more than she already has. Mom always seems to have backup timepieces. On her wrist. On her phone. The car dashboard. She checks and double-checks their synchronicity. It seems to both calm her down and rev her up.\n\n\"I'm not sure what Trick's living situation will be like.\" Mom peers at the snowy road ahead. \"I'm just giving you a heads-up. He, well, lives differently than we do.\" She says it as if he lives in a tent in the middle of a field. Looking around, this seems suddenly like an actual possibility.\n\nMy only memory of Trick McHale in person is the day he took me to the San Diego Zoo. Mom had given us passes and money for lunch and told me she'd wait in the parking lot in case I needed her. Inside the zoo, Trick wandered around with me, sipping at a beer he'd smuggled in by tucking it into his sock. What I remember most about that day is the way he laughed a deep rumble at my horrified reaction to the naked mole rats. \"It says they aren't completely naked,\" he said, studying the sign where it explained that they had over a hundred hairs that helped them find their way around. \"But they seem butt naked to me.\" I lost it then, one of those little-girl belly laughs I still sometimes get with my best friend, Josie, and he looked so surprised and pleased. I didn't stop laughing until we reached the Arctic fox.\n\nAlmost a decade has passed and I haven't seen him again, the time between birthday cards and calls elongating. Mom has never told me I couldn't see Trick. It wasn't like that. There was never any animosity \u2014 only absence. All those years, she'd rarely mentioned him, and he'd never made an effort, so I hadn't, either. I was busy. I had Mom and my stepdad, Will, and my little twin brothers, Seth and Liam, and a busy school life. Our one trip to the zoo felt like a dream, but once, a few years ago, I found a children's book called Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed and sent it to Trick because it made me think about that laugh and the way it had surprised him.\n\nI don't know if he ever got it.\n\n\"You doing okay over there?\" Mom glances at me. She's been asking me that a lot lately.\n\nI fiddle with the heating vent, letting warm air wash over me. \"Yeah, thanks.\"\n\nAfter my bad day, I barricaded myself in the house for the entire holiday break. Mom and Will spoke in overly bright voices. Josie came with pizza and movies and tried to coax me to the mall, but I wouldn't go. A Christmas tree went up and down. I stared at the sea of wrapping paper and plastic toy packages Seth and Liam had left in their wake. Mostly, I tried not to think about the numbers of views my excruciatingly public meltdown was now racking up online.\n\nMiss Perfect's Epic Meltdown.\n\nWhen I watched it, just once, I barely recognized the girl with the ash-blond ponytail, wearing the pale blue O'Neill hoodie Will had bought me on a windy day in Hawaii last April. But it was my face, pinched like a peach pit, ripping my test and all those other tests into paper rain. All those bits of test confetti filtering through the shocked air of the classroom while, outside the tall windows, the palm trees bent against the blue Windex sky of San Diego. I never want to watch it again.\n\nBut I told myself it was Not. That. Bad.\n\nEach day, I added things to my Get a Grip List.\n\nI have not spiraled into drug addiction.\n\nI have not been kidnapped.\n\nI have not lost the love of my life to a terrible disease.\n\nOnly I kind of had. If the love of my life was being valedictorian and the disease had hashtags like #checkoutthisfreak and #whatadramaqueen and #ihatethisgirl.\n\nStill, I thought I could go back to Ranfield Academy. After all, my parents and Ranfield and countless movies and bumper stickers had raised me to rebound. All those years in tennis and soccer and the early years of swim team, the mottoes had been clear: Shake it off. Get up. Get back out there. It's a mental game.\n\nIt definitely is.\n\nBecause in the grocery store five days ago, my first trip out of the house, the small hairs prickled on the back of my neck as people whispered behind their hands in the milk aisle and the produce section and near the bakery.\n\n\"The girl who freaked out.\"\n\n\"That valedictorian girl from the video.\"\n\n\"What a psycho.\"\n\nFinally, I told Mom I'd just wait in the car. When she'd deposited the groceries in the back and slipped in beside me, I blurted, \"I want to go live with Trick in Tahoe for a while.\"\n\nMom told me that you can't care what other people think.\n\nJosie told me people are jerks; don't worry about them.\n\nWill told me humans have the attention span of gnats; let it go.\n\nGreat advice. I'm just not sure how to actually do any of that. Not care. Not worry. Let it go. Am I missing a certain gene?\n\nThrough the window, I see the Truckee River tumble into view on our left side, glittery in the pale sunlight. Everything in this landscape is sharp \u2014 white, blue, gray, silver. Even the green is deep and charcoaled. It will be like studying abroad \u2014 a foreign country where the only whispering sounds will be the snow falling through the pines.\n\nMom slows at a light and turns right at a large sign reading SQUAW VALLEY USA, INTERNATIONAL MOUNTAIN RESORT. \"Squaw Valley hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics,\" she tells me, gliding along Squaw Valley Road. We wind back into the valley, passing a turnoff for the Resort at Squaw Creek. As we curve to the left, a snow meadow comes into view, and beyond it, a wall of winter mountains.\n\n\"Wow,\" I breathe, taking in the snowy peaks.\n\n\"Yeah, I know. It's gorgeous.\" Mom pulls the car into a parking lot near a massive cluster of brown alpine-style buildings. \"The Village,\" she tells me, her voice holding a trace of the distaste that appears the few times I've asked her about why she left Squaw Valley when I was barely three. \"We're here.\" She shuts off the engine, hesitating, her fingers plucking the keys swiftly from the ignition. As she studies the resort in front of her, I can almost see the flashes of memories move across her features. She goes quiet, whatever it was that took her away from here crawling back out from under all the snow.\n\n\"Mom?\" She must be freaking out. Mom also makes lists, keeps color-coded files of necessary forms, and has a master Google calendar for me and for the twins with different-colored fonts for each of us. Purple. Blue. Green.\n\nMy bad day in the middle of junior year wasn't anywhere on her lists.\n\n\"Right, sorry.\" She jingles her keys slightly and then, without warning, reaches across and grabs my hand. \"You can say hello, just stay for a night and clear your head, and get in this car with me tomorrow and drive home. You know that, right?\"\n\nA vulture of doubt circles me. \"I know.\"\n\nI also know she doesn't want me to do this. She's thinking now is not the time to change directions and she's probably right. I realize that if I get out of this car and walk to meet Trick, I will take myself off the path we've planned, the one that would have me show up at school today with my head held high, not worried about everyone's whispering, the one where I do shake it off and get back on track and win a scholarship to the right sort of college. One of the schools on Mom's ever-evolving list.\n\nOn this right path, I pity the person who posted that video of me because they are mean and petty and small. I write a college essay about how I hit a rough patch but righted myself and stayed steady and faced my fears and it made me stronger. Maybe I start a support group for kids like me, victims of cyber shaming. Those future admissions committees would nod understandingly and applaud me for getting back up, dusting myself off, and making the best of a bad situation.\n\nMara James. Accepted. Future secured. Take that, high school.\n\nThat sounds a lot like what old Mara would do.\n\nProblem is, I can't seem to bring myself to hold up my chin, start that support group, write that essay. I don't feel pity or strength or resolve. I feel broken and small and confused.\n\n\"I'm ready,\" I lie.\n\nMom slips on a periwinkle knit beanie, the purplish-blue darkening her eyes. Or maybe it's disappointment that darkens them. \"Okay, then.\" She sighs. \"Let's go see how Neverland's holding up.\"\n\n1. Learn to ski: green runs, blue runs, black runs??\n\n2. Internet cleanse (no social media, no news, Skype okay!)\n\n3. Meditation \u2014 at least 10 minutes a day!!\n\n4. Sleep until 8 on a school day\n\n5. Essential oils to relax \u2014 lavender, chamomile, orange\n\n6. Simplify & downsize!!\n\n7. Kiss a cute snowboarder!! (Josie's suggestion)\n\n8. Breathe! (obviously)\n\n9. Be brave (from Will)\n\n10. Read for fun? (see attached suggested book lists)\n\nStepping out of the car, the first thing I discover is that it's freaking cold in Tahoe. I mean, I've been cold before, but this is a bite-you-in-your-face-and-shake-you-around-like-a-chew-toy sort of cold. Mom said to dress in layers. She just hadn't mentioned one of the layers should be an electric blanket. But at least I'm out of the car. I hurry in search of a bathroom, grateful to find it heated.\n\nMy phone buzzes just as I'm drying my hands. I check it \u2014 Josie.\n\nare you there yet?\n\nI call her and she picks up immediately. \"Have you frozen to death yet?\" Our connection sounds a little crackly.\n\n\"Yes. This is frozen me calling you from beyond the grave.\" On her end, I can make out the faint sounds of tennis balls hitting racquets. \"Coach Jeffers is not going to like you calling me from practice.\"\n\n\"He thinks I'm getting some Advil for my lady issues.\" With our coach, you basically just have to say lady issues, and he's done. He wants no further information. It comes in handy.\n\n\"I can't really talk. I'm in a bathroom.\" My voice echoes off the walls. \"We're about to go meet Trick.\"\n\n\"Wait, you're meeting him in a bathroom?\" Josie asks loudly.\n\n\"No, we're heading to meet him!\" I lower my voice. \"Josie, are people, you know, talking about it?\"\n\nShe doesn't answer. Instead, I hear Coach Jeffers bellow, \"Martinez, you better not be on your phone!\"\n\n\"Gotta go,\" Josie says quickly, and then she's gone.\n\nI stuff my phone into the pocket of the ice-blue down parka Mom bought me at REI and head out to find her.\n\nAfter Mom finishes a quick coffee (double espresso, no milk), we walk through the Village, past ski shops and restaurants. It's not even five but the light fades, the walkways filling with shadows, the sky an emerging bruise. Combined with the knife of cold, the beauty of it all makes it suddenly difficult to breathe in an ordinary way.\n\nIt's a Tuesday, and the Village isn't crowded. Around me, a scattering of people lounge around fire pits, sipping coffees and beers, exchanging stories about their day, their sentences peppered with words like shred and zipper line, their boots propped on the edges of the stone pits, skis or snowboards leaning against empty chairs. They remind me of the packs of surfers in Oceanside, their terminology its own barrier between them and the rest of the world.\n\nIt's quite possible my jeans have now frozen to my legs. Apparently, I will be wearing the long underwear Mom bought me all the time and not just for skiing.\n\nAfter walking the length of the Village, we find ourselves standing in front of a ski shop. A sign out front reads NEVERLAND in large white letters made to look like they'd been written in snow. The store seems to sell clothing and gear but also advertises ski and snowboard rentals. One of the bumper stickers featured in the window declares TAHOE LOCAL: MY LIFE IS BETTER THAN YOUR VACATION. Mom notices it, rolls her eyes, and pushes through the main door, sending an unseen jingle bell shivering.\n\nIt's warm inside and melting patches of snow puddle on the worn carpets where people have tracked it in on their boots. The store is packed with racks of ski pants, jackets, helmets, goggles, socks, and boots, but it's empty of people. I scan the warm wooden walls behind the register. In the center of pictures of skiers and snowboarders, a glossy sign reads NEVERLAND again, and beneath it, a quote from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan:\n\nWHICH OF THESE ADVENTURES SHALL WE CHOOSE?\n\nBefore I can point it out to Mom, a man pushes through a swinging door that reads SHOP in the back of the store. He wears faded jeans, a beat-up Santa Cruz sweatshirt that might have once been black, and a trucker hat with an orange bill.\n\nTrick McHale.\n\nI can't stop my mind from adding, your biological father.\n\nMy body buzzes with nerves. He hasn't seen us yet, and it gives me a moment to openly study him in his natural habitat. He holds something in his hand, something that looks like it should be attached to a ski. A binding, maybe? He chews at his lip, his eyes locked to the binding. I do that. When I work on a particularly difficult chemistry equation.\n\n\"Hello, Trick.\" Mom speaks first, her voice the tone she uses with clients.\n\nHis head jerks up, startled. \"Oh, Lauren \u2014 whoa, didn't see you there.\" His voice holds the deep rumble of the laugh I remember from our zoo day, all surfer-dude soft edges. He takes me in, his green eyes surprised. \"Awww, Mara, no way. Look at you.\"\n\nI don't know what to do with my body. Should I give him a hug? Would that be the normal thing to do? Nothing about this feels normal. The acceptable time window for a hug passes, and I just stand here, eyes straying back to the Peter Pan quote. \"Hi, um, Trick.\"\n\nHe nods, his eyes slipping from my face, maybe noticing I said Trick, not Dad. He clears his throat. Then clears it again. Should I have called him Dad? No, that would be too weird. I've talked to our mailman more times than I've talked to Trick McHale.\n\nThe silence around us condenses.\n\nFinally, Trick says to Mom, \"You look good, Lauren.\" His voice falters.\n\nMom pulls off her beanie and shakes out her highlighted hair. \"Oh, well, thanks.\" She doesn't return the compliment. Instead, she opens her purse and digs around for something. She does this sometimes, to look productive, even when there is nothing really to find. She's doing it now. I can tell. To avoid talking, to put some action into the middle of all the thick silence.\n\nTrick watches her, his expression growing slightly amused. Does he know she creates distractions to look busy when she's uncomfortable? He must, because he asks, \"You looking for something in there?\"\n\nMom flushes. \"Oh, wait \u2014 found it!\" She hurriedly applies the victorious tube of lipstick as if to say, See \u2014 this, I was looking for this, thank you very much. I gape at her. Mom never acts like a spaz; she's always cool, organized. What's going on?\n\nTrick grins. \"Good thing. We almost had a lipstick crisis on our hands.\"\n\nMom's expression shifts, her eyes narrowing. Uh-oh. The look. When she gives us that look, my brothers and I are usually inspired to suddenly go clean our rooms. \"Well, some of us care about how we appear to other people.\" She tries to keep her voice light but doesn't really pull it off. The look muscles must be connected to the voice muscles.\n\nTrick's smile dies. We could medal in the Awkward Olympics right now and it might be a three-way tie for gold.\n\nLuckily, the front door jingles and a pack of boys bursts into the store. There is something territorial about the way they bang through the door, laughing, their voices raised. At first they seem to move as a single unit, but eventually, I make out individual boys. Five of them. All but one wear odd, tight suits, like a quartet of teenage superheroes without their capes. They must be ski suits, because their boots look like they should be attached to skis. The tallest, his slim, athletic body clad in midnight blue with spiderwebs all over the chest, heads straight toward the counter. He moves behind it, checking shelves.\n\nTrick joins Midnight Spider-Man behind the counter. \"Here, Logan,\" he says, pulling a pair of skis from a rack. \"They're all set.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Trick.\" Logan grabs the skis and throws them over his shoulder, and the boys clomp back toward the door. The non-superhero boy hangs back. He wears a shiny black parka and jeans, slips of auburn hair curling out from under a red beanie. He crumples his empty bag of chips and leaves it on the counter. He's good-looking in an overly confident way, which usually annoys me, but when he winks at me as he follows the others out the door, I feel my face flame. Trick's gaze follows the boy's exit before he tosses the chip bag into an unseen trash can beneath the counter.\n\nMy mom has been watching them, too, her mouth slightly open. \"Was that Logan Never?\" she asks when the door has closed, leaving us alone again.\n\nTrick nods. Something passes between them, a version of the look Mom had in the car when we pulled up, that memory ghost.\n\n\"Who's Logan Never?\" I ask.\n\n\"The tall boy with the skis,\" Mom mumbles, staring at the empty door for a moment. \"His parents own this store. Matt and Jessica.\"\n\n\"That other kid was Beck Davis,\" Trick tells her, and I know he means the one who left his chip bag on the counter.\n\nMom's face noticeably alters, like she's eaten something sour.\n\n\"Who?\" I ask. The shared history that floods the room makes me feel like I missed a memo or something.\n\n\"Boys I used to know,\" she says.\n\n\"Yep,\" Trick says from behind the counter. \"We're all still here.\"\n\n\"I'm seeing a shrink?\" I blink at Mom as we drive the darkening highway back into Truckee, the mountain town we'd seen signs for on our way to meet Trick in Squaw Valley. This announcement is perhaps the most shocking part of our trip so far. Never in a million years would I have thought Mom would sign me up for therapy. Not that Mom has anything against therapy. Therapy's fine. For other people. That guy who talks to himself in front of Trader Joe's, for example, or people who decide to shave their heads and start painting their skin neon green.\n\n\"He comes highly recommended,\" she insists, chattering at me about Dr. Elliot's credentials. Blah-blah-blah UCLA. Blah-blah-blah specializes in teens. I can't get a word in over the staccato of her Manic Mom Talk. Will always jokes that Mom's brain is like one of those news tickers scrolling across the bottom of CNN. She continually makes lists, finalizes plans, and sets goals while simultaneously checking off each completed task as more multiply and take their place. That slim blue leather notebook in her purse is embossed with a gold clock for a reason. It's the hard copy of her Productivity System. It's full of the things she accomplishes, crossed through with a single inked line when she finishes them, and she simultaneously cross-checks it with the Google calendar on her smartphone and laptop.\n\n\"I don't need a therapist,\" I say when she finally breaks to take in some air.\n\n\"I gave you an option to come home. If you want to stay in Squaw Valley, you will meet with Dr. Elliot,\" Mom tells me. There is no room for argument.\n\nSeveral minutes later, we pull into a parking spot in downtown Truckee, its warmly lit lamps a stark contrast to the shock of cold when we open the car doors. I clutch my binder to my chest as if it could add some warmth.\n\nWe walk the icy cobblestone sidewalk past several brick storefronts until finding the small sign for Dr. Jonathan Elliot, where we push through the door and climb a flight of steps. Mom explained to me in the car that tonight won't be a full session, just a chance for us to meet each other and talk about how these sessions will work.\n\nI hesitate on the last step, feeling a wash of nausea. I'm not really the kind of girl who talks about her feelings. I've always tried a more head-down-eyes-on-the-prize approach to life, burying my head in a pile of textbooks until I graduate from college. I saw a psychiatrist at the hospital immediately following my bad day and it didn't go so well. After ten awkward minutes, he basically told me I'd had a panic attack. Meanwhile, I lost five pounds in sweat weight from his mile-long list of questions.\n\nA door at the end of the hall opens and a man appears in the hallway. Sweet-faced and slim, he wears a pair of thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses and his brown hair recedes just slightly. He's dressed in khakis and a wool vest with a long-sleeved tech-fabric shirt under it. So far, everyone in Tahoe looks like they just got back from hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.\n\n\"Mara and Lauren?\"\n\n\"Dr. Elliot.\" Mom moves in front of me, offering her hand. \"We spoke on the phone. Thanks for meeting us so late in the evening.\"\n\n\"My pleasure. How was the drive up?\" As Mom answers him, he moves to hold open the door to his office so we can go inside. The room, long and narrow, faces the street, a wide window running the length of it boasting a rooftop view of the building across the main street and out to the distant pines beyond. I take in the cream walls of the office, settling on a trickling fountain of smooth rocks in the corner, the Truckee River in miniature. Everything about this office whispers, You're in Tahoe, relax.\n\nI immediately feel defensive.\n\n\"Have a seat,\" Dr. Elliot says, sitting down in a velvety armchair speckled with grays, whites, and blacks as if the chair had been carved from spongy granite. There is no desk. No clipboard. The San Diego guy had a clipboard. Mom and I settle into matching burgundy armchairs across a glass coffee table.\n\n\"Help yourself to water or tea,\" Dr. Elliot offers, motioning with his hand toward a small kitchenette where the counter holds a hot water pot, a basket of assorted teas, a pitcher of water with lemon slices, and some cookies on a white plate. \"Whenever you want it.\"\n\nI glance at Mom. Therapy has cookies? This might be okay. She nods, so I stand and help myself to a snickerdoodle and a cup of chamomile tea. Chamomile's on the Now List \u2014 good for relaxation. \"Thanks.\"\n\nDr. Elliot rubs his hands together. \"Mara, I talked to your mom and she told me you've been pretty stressed out lately, that you had a rough calculus exam.\" I nod, the cookie turning to paste in my mouth. A rough calculus exam. Like describing a cyclone as a bit breezy. Is understatement part of therapy? \"Can you talk about what happened that day?\" His voice murmurs just above the sound of the fountain.\n\nI tell him about my bad day \u2014 the hum in the room, the way I felt the test shift in front of me, how sweaty my hands got, how I mostly can't remember ripping up other people's tests. He listens, nodding slightly, and waits until I'm completely finished before he says, \"Sounds like you had a panic attack.\"\n\nMaybe Dr. Clipboard and this guy went to school together at the University of Stating the Obvious.\n\nMom leans forward in her chair. \"She saw a doctor in San Diego who said the same thing.\"\n\n\"But I'm fine now,\" I tell him, smoothing my hand over my binder.\n\n\"She's only left the house twice since it happened and one time was to get in the car to drive up here,\" Mom says, her voice catching. \"That doesn't seem fine.\" She fiddles with the strap of her purse. \"At back-to-school night, they said junior year is challenging, the hardest one.\"\n\nI look down. \"I'm just overwhelmed.\"\n\nShe glances at Dr. Elliot, doing that grown-up telepathy look they think we can't see, the one that says, See what I've been dealing with? But I'm not sure Mom could understand if she wanted to. Probably because she has never seemed overwhelmed. All her lists and forms and rules keep overwhelmed on its right side of the fence, too scared to even peek over. In Lauren James's world, there is a right way (hers) and a wrong way (anyone else's). Doubt is scared to death of my mother.\n\n\"Maybe she should drop an AP class? Or a club, maybe? She's in a lot of clubs.\"\n\nDr. Elliot doesn't respond, which seems weird. Isn't he supposed to referee the conversation or something? \"I'm not sure dropping a class will help, Mom \u2014 it's not just one thing.\" Was it one thing? I scroll through the morning of the test and the days leading up to it. Normal studying. Normal five hours of sleep at night. That morning, Ranfield had posted the class rankings in our online portal. Still number one then. Not anymore.\n\n\"Do you think it would help to drop a class, Mara?\" Dr. Elliot asks.\n\nUm, isn't he supposed to be able to tell me that? \"It's not about dropping a class. It's more than that.\" I make a sweeping motion in the air with my arms, as if overwhelmed might be best portrayed as a puppet show. \"It's the bigger stuff. The world is so terrible right now. War, poverty, global warming... the Internet... all of it.\" My chest tightens. \"It's too much. And then I was sitting there and... school seemed so small and \u2014\" I mime ripping up tests. \"I'm sorry. I don't know what you want me to say.\"\n\nMy mom throws another pained look at Dr. Elliot. \"She takes too much on. She needs to block it out.\"\n\n\"Me blocking things out isn't going to make them go away, Mom. It's not like I drop Eco Club and \u2014 bam! \u2014 the world is suddenly rainbows and puppies.\"\n\n\"But would it help right now?\" she asks, clicking her manicure against the wooden arms of the chair. \"Right now you have to worry about your future, and then you can worry about the rest of the world.\" We've had this discussion before, too.\n\nDr. Elliot finally decides to join the conversation. \"I looked at your school's web page. Very prestigious and highly competitive. Could that culture be contributing to feeling overwhelmed?\"\n\nI bite my lip, but Mom is quick to say, \"That's not the problem.\"\n\n\"Maybe it is,\" I interrupt. But it's been a gradual build, like rainwater after weeks of drizzle. \"Sometimes, Ranfield feels too extreme. All the rankings and intense scrutiny. It just feels indulgent when the rest of the world is, I don't know, barely hanging on to clean water? When you stop and think about it, like really think about it, the values are screwed up.\" I take a breath, trying to organize the thoughts in my head. \"At Ranfield, they're always telling us to be global leaders, global contributors, but I feel like the real goal is to be constantly better than everyone else. All the time. With everything. Even if you're not the best, you should be trying to be.\" I imitate a PA voice, holding a fake microphone to my mouth. \"Good morning, Ravens. The rest of the world is falling apart around you, but make sure you're wearing the right jeans! Collecting the right awards! Getting the right test scores! There may or may not be a world left once you graduate because everything is going to go up in flames and earthquakes and hurricanes, but make sure you get Student of the Month!\"\n\nA smile catches the edges of Mom's mouth. \"Flames and earthquakes and hurricanes? All at once?\" She shrugs apologetically at Dr. Elliot. \"That's a bit dramatic.\"\n\nI drop my fake microphone bit. \"It's not,\" I insist. \"Also tornadoes. And homeless people.\"\n\nMom can't help herself \u2014 she laughs. \"Tornadoes of homeless people?!\"\n\n\"It's not funny!\" Okay, it's a little funny. My brothers and Will would totally go see a movie with all of that. Well, not the homeless-people part. That's too awful. But the tornado-hurricane-earthquake part. Sold.\n\nMom tucks her hair behind her ears and gives me a look usually reserved for a person poised on the edge of a bridge. \"Sweetie, you can't fix what's wrong with the whole world.\"\n\nI drop my eyes. \"I know.\" Right now, I can't even fix my own life. World, you might be on your own.\n\nDr. Elliot clears his throat. \"You mentioned the Internet. I know there was a YouTube posting that got quite a few views. Do you want to talk about that?\"\n\nMy gaze slips to the pines outside the window, dark against a deep purple sky. \"I don't care about that.\"\n\n\"Did it contribute to your not wanting to go back to school?\"\n\nI tap my binder. \"I have a better plan.\"\n\n\"Tell me about it,\" he prompts.\n\nI study the sunset cover. \"Well, obviously, in the big picture of all that is wrong in the world, my problems are pretty stupid.\" Mom wants to say something \u2014 I feel it radiate off her \u2014 but she restrains herself.\n\nDr. Elliot pushes at the bridge of his glasses. \"You alluded to that before. Why do you think your problems are stupid?\"\n\nI shrug. \"You know, I keep reading about 'first-world problems,' like being upset about a cell phone contract or being mad that your latte wasn't hot enough, and, well, being stressed out about school feels like that.\"\n\nHis eyes flit to Mom, then back to me. \"You feel like caring about your schoolwork is the same as needing your latte to be a certain temperature?\"\n\nI hurry to explain. \"That's not exactly what I mean. It's just that everywhere, people are dying in wars and kids are starving to death and I sat there staring at that test and I was so tired and it felt so small of me, to worry about tests, to worry about grades so much. I've always cared so much about each grade, award, test score, because I've set this huge goal for my future. To be valedictorian, to get into the best college I can. Everything I do is for the future and I don't even know what that is, what I want. Not really. It's just sitting out there. This huge unknown. And suddenly, all of the work, all the stress, seemed so... I just need a break. People are always saying live in the now and I've never done that.\" I hold up the binder. \"So I made some notes.\"\n\n\"About living in the now?\" He leans back and the lamplight flashes across his glasses, turning them opaque.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What type of notes?\"\n\n\"Some research.\" I flip open the cover. \"Okay, so I like to make lists and this is a list of things I can do while I'm in Tahoe to learn how to live in the now and not be so stressed out all the time.\"\n\n\"List making can be very helpful.\" He leans in, his eyes warm. Is he laughing at me? No, maybe just the light again catching his glasses. Therapists aren't allowed to laugh at you, right? At least not to your face. \"So you think living in Tahoe can help you feel less stressed?\"\n\n\"Well, sure. I mean, it's Tahoe.\" I glance at Mom, who nods in agreement. If Mom's version of Tahoe is even close to accurate, everyone here hangs out and skis and goes to parties and relaxes all day by the light of a roaring fire pit while contributing approximately nothing to the greater good of society. Now that I think of it, Mom's version looks a lot like a beer commercial.\n\nDr. Elliot cuts into my thoughts. \"What does Tahoe mean to you?\"\n\nI shrug. \"People here are just more relaxed, right? I'm hoping it's contagious.\" Frowning, I realize I might have just insulted him. I mean, he's working all day up here in this nice office. Not hanging out with a Heineken at one in the afternoon next to a chairlift. A spidery crack appears in Mom's version of this place. Which I decide to ignore.\n\nBut he doesn't look offended. \"Would you share an item from your list?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" I scan the list. \"Some of these I stole from Google searches, but a few of them I came up with on my own. And my stepdad, Will, and my friend Josie helped me.\" I flush at #7, where Josie wrote, Kiss a cute snowboarder!! Won't be sharing that one. #2 is Internet cleanse. I'm staying off the Internet and all social media while I'm here unless I need to research something for school. That one is from Dr. Clipboard in San Diego, but it seems boring, so I start at the beginning. \"Okay, number one: Learn to ski.\"\n\nMom sits up suddenly. \"Wait, no \u2014 that's not part of the deal.\"\n\nDr. Elliot and I both stare at her sudden stricken look. \"Mom, I'm in Tahoe. The first thing that came up when I Googled 'things to do in Tahoe' was skiing or snowboarding. Of course I should learn to ski. What else do people even do here?\"\n\nThis makes Dr. Elliot laugh out loud. Apparently, therapists do laugh at their clients. \"Well, amazingly, there are people in Tahoe who don't ski or snowboard,\" he insists, but motions to my binder. \"Okay, what else?\"\n\nI scan the list. \"Um, number four: Sleep until eight on a school day.\" I look up at him. \"I never get to do that. Unless I'm sick.\" Uncapping my pen, I add when I'm not sick to #4.\n\n\"Sounds good.\" Dr. Elliot picks up his tea and takes a sip.\n\nMom fiddles with her purse strap again. \"I think, though, it's important she keep a schedule while she's here. Ranfield has enrolled her in their Home Hospital program, which lets her keep her scholarship, but she can't slack off. She still has to do the work.\" She looks seriously at me. \"You aren't here to ski all day.\"\n\n\"I need PE credits,\" I argue feebly.\n\nDr. Elliot chimes in before Mom can respond. \"I think she can finish her schoolwork and manage to take a ski lesson and sleep in until eight.\" He steeples his fingers in front of his face. \"I'm curious, though, because you haven't brought up your father. You'll be staying with him while you're here, right?\"\n\n\"With Trick, yes. My biological father.\" My face flames. Why did I just say that as if Dr. Elliot needed a science lesson? He's a doctor.\n\n\"Where does he fit on that list?\"\n\nHe's not on the list.\n\n\"I don't really know him at all.\" The words hang heavy in the air.\n\nHe glances at Mom. \"And why is that?\"\n\nWe both freeze.\n\nEven with all the lists I'd written and research articles I'd printed out and organized in my binder about skiing and resting and Zen teachings and essential oils that help with relaxation, in each of my pages in the binder of ideas for living in the now, how did I not consider the fact that I don't know anything about Trick McHale? Nothing. Except that he thinks naked mole rats are hilarious and he can smuggle a beer in his sock. Not the strongest basis for a roommate arrangement.\n\n\"I, um, don't know,\" I finally say, my throat tight.\n\nMom adds quietly, \"He's never really been a part of her life.\"\n\nThe fountain burbles, suddenly intrusive, and Dr. Elliot seems to use it as his cue to stand. \"Well, Mara, we'll have plenty of time to get into all of that when you come back.\"\n\nWe thank him and hurry from the room.\n\nOutside, Truckee has faded into night. A chilly blast of air hits us as we push open the door to the street. It feels cold and remote but in a peaceful, yielding way. No billboards, no honking traffic, no newsfeed on the horrible state of the world. As Mom and I move carefully down the icy street toward the car, I hold my binder close to my chest, noticing my heartbeat steady, going quiet like the sky just beginning to blink with stars.\n\nWe slip into the car, and Mom gets the heater going. \"I think that went well,\" she says, pulling out of the parking spot. As we drive down the street, the snow warm with lamplight, I flip open my binder and add #11 to the Now List: Get to know Trick McHale.\n\nAnnoyed, Mom checks the door of Ethan's Grill again for Trick. I think she mutters, \"Typical,\" under her breath, but when I ask her what she said, she says brightly, \"Nothing!\" She spins her watch around her wrist. I sip my Diet Coke and watch the hostess seat a couple of snowboarders my age near the window. #7: Kiss a cute snowboarder!! I look quickly away, scanning the menu again. Mom will want me to have something with veggies as my green intake has been slim today.\n\n\"I'm sorry I can't stay longer to help you settle in.\" Mom pretends to read the menu for the tenth time, her eyes straying again to the door. \"Will really can't afford to take any time off from work right now, and the twins need me there.\"\n\n\"I know.\" The mention of Liam and Seth sends a ripple of homesickness through me even though they can be super annoying sometimes (most of the time). People think it's adorable that I have nine-year-old twin brothers. And it's true. They are adorable. When they aren't leaving their disgusting socks on the kitchen counter or making gross noises with their armpits or creating a mine field with their LEGO pieces in the hallway that makes every venture to the bathroom a firewalk. But they were sad about me leaving. They drew me a picture of a girl wearing a snow hat (me) with a big goofy smile. Of course, this smiling me is also being attacked by mutant robots. Cute. Mom and Will told them I was going away to a special camp, which was probably a mistake. Now they both also want to go to snow camp when they get to high school. Mom told them this particular snow camp was only for girls. Girls named Mara. I'm not sure they're buying it.\n\nMom takes a drink of her white wine, watching me over the glass. Sighing, she sets it down. \"Mara, the important thing is you use this time to settle down and get your work done. You'll see. It's slow here. You'll be bored in a week.\" As she takes another sip of her wine, I sense a but coming. \"But,\" she continues (there it is), \"I want you to be careful, stay aware. This place has a way of just creeping in.\"\n\nLike Tahoe is a horror movie.\n\nBefore I can respond, a photo text comes through from my stepdad: a group of seashells and smooth rocks spelling out BRAVE. Ever since I can remember, Will and I have collected seashells and cool-looking rocks and we leave our collection on a shelf in the living room. For the last couple of years, he arranges them each week into a word or phrase like DREAM or AIM HIGH. His Shells of Wisdom, he calls them. Once, he spelled out PERSPIRE, and I laughed for days. My stepdad works ridiculously long hours as a medical malpractice attorney, but he's never failed to change the shells each week.\n\nHe texts again: Btw: What's a six-letter word for \"ability to make good judgments, quick decisions, in a specific area\"? Ends in \"N.\"\n\nWill and his crossword. Grinning, I text back: acumen.\n\nWill: Thx. That SAT prep class just paid for itself!\n\nI text back: yeah, and who knew SAT words could be so ironic?\n\nHe resends the BRAVE shell picture.\n\nMy chest tightens.\n\nMaybe Tahoe is a mistake.\n\n\"Mom?\" I start, but I'm stopped by the arrival of Trick pushing through the heavy wood door of the restaurant. He smiles at the hostess, who clearly knows him. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and laughs at something he says. Is my father funny? When he spots us, his smile falters, and motioning toward us, he crosses the room with the barest trace of a limp. He limps? I don't remember a limp from the zoo trip.\n\nHe slides into the seat across from me and next to Mom. \"Hey,\" he exhales, fumbling with the menu. \"Can I get a Sierra Nevada, Maggie?\" he says to the hostess, who nods and heads off toward the bar. He looks at Mom's almost empty glass of Chardonnay. \"You want another one?\"\n\nHer eyebrows lift slightly. \"No, thanks. I'm driving.\"\n\n\"And what about you?\" He motions to my almost empty Diet Coke, grinning. \"Shall we get you another round? A hearty IPA maybe?\" Mom narrows her eyes and his smile wavers, a shadow of annoyance passing over his rough features. \"Oh, relax, Lauren. I'm not going to actually get our kid a beer.\"\n\nOur kid.\n\n\"I should hope not,\" she says, her voice clipped.\n\nAwkward Olympics. Round two.\n\nWhen Maggie returns with Trick's beer, we order our pizzas. Then, Mom asks Trick generic questions that he answers like he's at a job interview. Yes, he still likes working in the shop at Neverland. No, he's not too worried about how terrible the snow's been on and off the last few years; that's just life in a ski town \u2014 bad years and good years. He seems surprised when she tells him she loves being a real estate agent.\n\n\"You love it?\" he echoes, his voice laced with doubt. He tries to hide it by taking a gulp of beer.\n\n\"I do,\" she responds coolly, sipping the last of her wine. \"I don't really expect you to understand.\"\n\nHe glances at me, clears his throat. \"So I don't know if she mentioned it, but your mom used to shred this mountain.\"\n\n\"You skied?\" I'm shocked. Mom has never once mentioned skiing, and we almost never travel anywhere that doesn't have palm trees, sand, and an endless stretch of blue water.\n\n\"We should probably talk about Mara's schedule.\" She sidesteps my question and flips open her clock-faced notebook.\n\nI take a bite of the pizza Mom ordered, some pine-nut-spinach-goat-cheese concoction that seems more like a salad than a pizza, and Mom walks Trick through my schedule. Trick chews his own sausage-and-mushroom pizza as he listens. He needs to drive me to my therapy sessions with Dr. Elliot. He needs to know that I'm staying off all social media (Now List #2: done). And he should make sure I'm completing my Home Hospital assignments and submitting them properly to Ms. Raff, my supervising teacher, through Ranfield Academy's online portal.\n\n\"Sounds like military school. Sir, yes, sir!\" He fake salutes me. I giggle but only until I catch the dark look on Mom's face.\n\nShe pauses over a page of my schedule. \"Ranfield is a very prestigious private school. Mara won an academic scholarship that she has maintained since sixth grade that covers a huge part of her tuition.\"\n\n\"Sweet.\" He nods at me. \"Good job.\"\n\nBlushing, I say, \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"So tuition, huh? What's that running you?\" He signals Maggie for another beer as he downs the last of his.\n\n\"We only pay fourteen thousand a year,\" I tell him proudly, then shrink beneath Mom's glower.\n\nTrick spits beer onto the table. \"Fourteen grand a year?\" He chokes, wiping his mouth and then mopping up the table with a napkin. \"Are you serious?\"\n\nMom says evenly, \"I would prefer to not discuss finances with you.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Trick mumbles into his pizza before adding, \"but that's practically what I live on each year.\" The air crackles between them and we eat in silence for a minute. Finally, Trick wipes his hand on a paper napkin and plucks the schedule from the pile of paper. \"So, okay, this is all online? She just logs in and submits all her work?\"\n\nMom looks relieved. \"Yes, they have a portal, see.\" She shows him on her phone. \"Her subject teachers assign all the work she would normally be doing in their classes and she sends it all in to Alice Raff, who coordinates it.\"\n\nTrick looks impressed. \"Man, where was all this when I was in school?\" He takes a long swallow of beer. \"You're a lucky kid.\"\n\nMom blinks at him. \"Mara would rather be at school, Trick. She'd rather not be dealing with this whole thing at all. They've given her this quarter to recover from what happened to her, but then she has to come home or she loses her scholarship. It's serious.\"\n\nHe flashes me an apologetic look. \"Right, sure \u2014 sorry.\"\n\nI pluck a stray bit of cheese from my plate, chewing it as Mom signals Maggie for the check. Mom's right. It's serious.\n\nAlways so serious.\n\nAfter dinner, we follow Trick's beat-up truck back through the shadowy valley, turning left on a road that winds up a hill. I take a minute to text Josie: getting settled \u2014 check out the snow! and send her a picture I took earlier in Truckee, the frosted pines, the purpling sky. She doesn't text me back. They have a chem quiz already tomorrow, so she's probably studying. Which is what I should be doing since I have to take it online. My stomach starts to knot.\n\nI stare out the window at the dark houses. Every so often, we pass the lit windows of houses with chimneys releasing a curl of smoke, but most of the houses we pass sit in shadow. \"Why do so many of these houses seem empty?\"\n\n\"Many are second homes,\" Mom explains, turning into a long driveway, Trick's taillights glowing up ahead. His truck crawls past an enormous glass-and-wood alpine house and around the back of it until we reach a tiny bungalow tucked against a dense grove of trees. A single porch light glows next to its front door. During our drive up this morning, Mom told me that Trick works as a caretaker for a vacation home, helps maintain the house in exchange for living rent-free in their backyard cottage. The squat rectangular box in front of me isn't what I'd imagined when she said cottage. This looks more like a storage container.\n\nTrick unlocks the door and waits for us to follow him inside. He snaps on a light, revealing a narrow space much like the inside of a motor home. To the left, a kitchenette runs the length of the wall \u2014 a counter with a hot plate, a sink, and a mini-fridge. The rest of the room seems divided into an eating area \u2014 a small black card table and two folding chairs with ratty seat cushions \u2014 and a living room, a threadbare overstuffed chair that might be trying to be a love seat and an old TV perched on a board resting on cinder blocks. When Mom told me about Trick's cottage, I'd imagined a cozy storybook type of place \u2014 a roaring fire, a warm kitchen. Not furniture that looks like someone left it by the side of the road. My brain immediately starts listing improvements:\n\nnew couch\n\nnew kitchen table with real chairs\n\nsome curtains on the bare windows\n\n\"So, have you, uh, lived here a while?\" I lick my lips, hoping that he actually moved in yesterday and is planning to replace the d\u00e9cor because the last resident was a nearsighted frat boy.\n\n\"Eight years,\" he says, looking around. \"The Stones \u2014 that's the family I caretake for \u2014 are only here, like, three or four times a year. It's free and it's warm. Can't beat that.\" He nods affectionately at the woodstove nestled in the corner behind the card table, the source of the soft warmth in the room. \"And here\" \u2014 he motions to a door \u2014 \"the bedroom. I thought you could have it.\"\n\nI peek through the open door. The room holds a full-size bed heaped with blankets, and another woodstove gives off an orange glow in the corner. There's no room for much else. I glance at Trick. \"Where will you sleep?\"\n\n\"The couch pulls out into a twin bed.\" It's generous of him to call it a couch.\n\nMom's face constricts. \"I thought you said you had room for her.\"\n\nTrick frowns. \"I do.\"\n\n\"So you're just going to sleep there\" \u2014 she motions to the chair-couch, her voice pinched and tight \u2014 \"for the next two months?\"\n\nHe shrugs, scratching his head through his beanie. \"When have I ever minded sleeping on a couch?\" He winks at me, partly settling the tremor of nerves bubbling in my stomach. \"Feel free to decorate.\"\n\nLater, I sit cross-legged on the bed, watching Mom brush her hair in the cracked and spotted mirror that hangs over the empty bookcase where Trick told me I could stack my clothes. Probably to give us a little privacy in the minuscule bathroom, Trick went out to fetch some more wood. I hear him rustling around outside. Mom catches my eye in the mirror. \"You still liking your plan?\"\n\nI tug the sleeves of my pajamas over my hands. \"If you were selling this place, you could call it cozy ski-bum chic in the ad.\" I nod at the posters of skiers all over the walls. LEGENDS OF SQUAW VALLEY, they say. JONNY MOSELEY. TAMARA MCKINNEY. MARCO SULLIVAN. The names don't mean much to me.\n\nShe glances around. \"Warm and cozy ski-bum chic,\" she agrees. She sets the brush down on top of the bookshelf and pulls back the covers of the bed. \"Scooch over.\" I make room for her as I crawl under the blankets. She wrinkles her nose, mumbling, \"Ugh, does he ever wash these sheets?\" and leans to click off the switch for the overhead light. I can still make out her face in the pale glow of the woodstove.\n\nThe room smells musty but also warm and woodsy. I like it. \"Don't worry about me, okay? Number six on my Now List is to simplify and downsize. I'd say I can cross number six off my list just by living here.\" We both giggle into the dark.\n\nShe huddles close to me in bed, both of us willing the cold sheets to soak in the heat of our bodies. After a moment, she whispers, \"Honey, I know you keep saying not to worry, but I can't help it. After everything that happened... why would you choose to come here?\"\n\nI stare up at the dark ceiling, her words knocking around my mind, triggering a secret place there I'd never noticed before. I ask, \"Why don't you ever talk about what happened with you and Trick and Tahoe?\"\n\nHer body stills. I hear the front door open and close and then Trick stacking wood in the other room. Mom exhales next to me. I can feel her hesitating, but then she shifts onto her side, facing me under the blankets, and squeezes my hand. \"Sometimes people can grow miles apart, Mara. Even in the smallest of houses.\"\n\nMom kisses me good-bye in the blue light of dawn. \"I'm going to get on the road,\" she whispers, and I see the outline of her through sleepy eyes. \"Don't get up.\" I roll over as she tiptoes out of the room and pulls the front door shut behind her. Distantly, already dozing, I hear her car start and drive away. When I wake again, sun streams through the window. I sit up, the room cold against my face. I can actually see the breath leaving my body in small clouds. Shivering, I yank on some long underwear, jeans, and black Uggs and pull on a Patagonia fleece. Still freezing, I add my parka.\n\nI find Trick sitting at the card table, eating a bowl of off-brand fruity loops. \"My room... is freezing,\" I chatter, migrating toward the glowing woodstove and holding out my hands.\n\nTrick's spoon hovers over his bowl. \"Yeah, you're going to want to leave your door open at night. Or else keep stocking your stove.\" At my confused look, he laughs. \"Here, let me show you.\"\n\nWe head back into my room where, crouching down, he shows me how to get the fire going again, how to angle the wood and stuff paper in between. \"Here, now you try it.\" I settle on my heels next to him and it's strange to be so close to him, our shoulders touching. When the fire catches, he wipes his ashy hands on the rag sticking out of the woodbin. \"Make sense?\"\n\nI feel dizzy. \"Yeah, thanks.\" I need food. I get light-headed when I don't eat enough.\n\n\"No sweat.\" He stands. \"I've got to get to work.\"\n\n\"What time is it?\"\n\n\"About eight-thirty.\"\n\nNow List #4. Done. That was easy.\n\nHe moves into the other room, asking, \"You want a lift to the Village?\"\n\n\"Great.\" I'm sure there's a caf\u00e9 where I can get some food and start my schoolwork. Grabbing my bag, I follow him into the cold morning. It snowed a bit in the night, just a dusting that disappears beneath our boots, but it still stops me. I turn a slow circle, taking in the quiet, the sugar-sifted trees, the enormous house, dormant and angular from across the wide stretch of yard. Trick watches me take it all in, this snow-globe world, from where he sits behind the wheel. Scrambling in next to him, I say, \"Sorry. You're used to it, I know, but it's just so beautiful.\"\n\nHe starts the truck. \"You never get used to how beautiful it is.\"\n\nI follow Trick into Neverland mostly because I don't really know what else to do. He didn't say anything the whole ride into the Village and hasn't offered any suggestions for where I should do my schoolwork. By now, Mom would have given me three different detailed options with a clear front-runner. Probably color-coded on index cards. She's always talking to me about being independent while inadvertently tipping my decisions toward her preference with a frown or a just-visible narrowing of her eyes.\n\nWhere are those stupid index cards when you need them?\n\nInstead, I stand marooned in a ski shop in Squaw Valley, holding on to the straps of my backpack for dear life. A man stands behind the counter. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wears a pair of reading glasses as he sorts through a stack of papers. He glances up when he hears us come in, but before he can say anything, a golden retriever appears from nowhere, all fur and slobber and energy, and jams her muzzle into my crotch.\n\n\"Oh! Hi there, nosy,\" I gasp, trying to push her away, which she mistakes for petting.\n\n\"Piper!\" the man behind the counter shouts, and the dog makes a U-turn back to him, her tail wagging. \"Sorry about that,\" he says, coming out from behind the counter. \"She's a little overzealous. You must be Mara.\" He offers his hand.\n\n\"Uh, yeah. Hi,\" I say, shaking his hand even though mine is covered in slobber.\n\n\"Matt Never.\"\n\nTrick elaborates. \"He and his wife, Jessica, own Neverland.\" The parents of Midnight Spider-Man.\n\nMr. Never pushes his reading glasses to the top of his head. \"Wow, I haven't seen you since you were tiny.\" His voice is low and kind. \"You sure have grown up.\" Then he grins. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"Nice to see you. Again,\" I add, feeling strange to have no memory of someone who seems to know me.\n\nThe door behind us jingles and Midnight Spider-Man comes into the store. Piper leaps to her feet, tail wagging, and rushes to greet him. Now dressed in street clothes, his dark hair messy, he has a cup of coffee in a stainless steel travel mug in one hand with a laptop tucked under his arm. He bends to pet Piper. \"Morning, Pipe, good girl.\"\n\n\"Oh, Logan!\" Mr. Never motions for him to come closer. \"Mara, this is my son, Logan. You two probably don't remember, but you were in diapers together.\"\n\nLogan looks a lot like his dad and gives me his version of their crooked smile. \"Hi. Sorry, don't much recall the diaper years.\"\n\n\"Me either, but nice to see you've grown out of them.\" We both quickly look away, probably because I just said the weird thing about growing out of diapers. That was slick. Almost made valedictorian, but put a cute boy in front of me and I'm a complete idiot.\n\nTrick lets his amused gaze slip from Logan to me. \"Logan's a junior in high school, like you.\"\n\n\"Why aren't you in school right now?\" I blurt, because, apparently, I'm also training to become a truancy officer.\n\nLogan just grins. \"My school has a flexible schedule. We meet two or three times a week for classes and labs and stuff, but otherwise I get all the work done on my own. So I have time to race.\" He sounds like he's clearly had to explain this before.\n\n\"Race?\"\n\n\"Ski,\" Logan clarifies.\n\nBefore I can stop myself, I morph into my mother. \"So you don't go to a real school?\"\n\nInstead of getting defensive, though, Logan laughs. \"Real enough. I take all the same classes as regular school.\" I notice he says regular with the same inflection someone might use for prison or bacteria. \"It's great, actually.\"\n\nI want to sound breezy but end up spitting out something that sounds like \"Ofcourseitsoundssupercoolandamazing,\" yet not sounding at all like I think it's super cool or amazing. Logan and Trick exchange glances, their eyes widening at my spew.\n\n\"It works for me,\" Logan says, then adds, \"I know that other type of school works for a lot of people. It's just, for me, sitting in a seat all day every day would give me hives. I'd freak out.\" As soon as he says this, though, he colors and drops his gaze, and I realize he knows exactly why I'm here in Tahoe. Logan hurries on, trying to extract his foot from his mouth. \"Whoa, sorry \u2014 I didn't mean anything by that...\"\n\nMortified, I stare at Trick, who won't meet my eyes. Is he telling people? The whole reason I'm here is so people aren't talking about me. Aren't whispering about the super-stressed-out girl who went mental on her math class.\n\n\"Right, okay,\" I stammer. \"Speaking of school, mine's the opposite of flexible and I have work I need to turn in. Is there a place, I could, you know\" \u2014 I hold up my laptop \u2014 \"plug in?\" So I can get out of here, I manage not to add.\n\nLooking relieved, Logan nods. \"You could hang next door at Elevation. Their coffee's sick and you totally have to try the cheese bagel.\"\n\n\"Sick coffee, cheese bagel, got it. Thanks.\" Without looking again at Trick, I hurry out of the store, welcoming the wash of cold against my burning cheeks.\n\nNext door, I find a table near an outlet and dump my bag and laptop, my stomach churning at the whole exchange with Logan, or, as I now plan on calling the list in my head, How to Repel a Cute Boy in Under Two Minutes.\n\nsay something weird about diapers\n\ninsult his school\n\ntalk really fast\n\nflee the premises\n\nI inhale the coffee-scented air and remind myself to breathe (#8!). Elevation is glass and chrome and glossy black tables. A few people sit in armchairs near a fire, chatting or talking on their phones or writing in journals. Everyone either wears a down jacket like mine or has one over a chair, just in different colors. Tahoe is like attending a down-jacket convention. It's clearly the staple of the uniform. As evidence, I hang my own jacket on the back of a chair and power up my laptop so it can load while I order.\n\nAt the counter, I choose a vanilla latte and, after a moment's hesitation, a cheese bagel. \"Do you want that toasted?\" The barista wears a silver beanie that matches her Elevation apron, the front silk-screened with a shot of a skier jumping across the outline of a moon. Her glossy black hair falls in two perfect braids. Her name tag says NATALIE. And underneath that, SINGAPORE.\n\n\"Um, sure.\" I pull a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and hand it to her. \"You're from Singapore?\"\n\nShe hands me my change. \"Yeah, but I've lived in Squaw for six years.\" Rolling her eyes, she adds, \"The company who owns us wants our 'home country' on our name tags. You know, international resort and all that.\" She points at the guy with white-blond hair behind the espresso machine. \"That's Finn. Netherlands.\" Finn gives me a quick wave. Natalie from Singapore pops a bagel in the toaster. \"Butter or cream cheese?\"\n\n\"Butter, please.\"\n\n\"I'll bring them out to you.\" She nods toward the table where I left my stuff.\n\nSettling into a chair, I log on to my school portal. As it loads, I pull out my English binder, the slim volume of poetry I'm reading for my project, three sharp pencils, and the tight loop of my earbuds. I plug them into my laptop and click on my study playlist, mainly classical with some new \"relaxation\" music Josie found for me that mostly consists of some form of water noise \u2014 rain, stream, ocean. If I listen to it too long, it makes me need to pee.\n\nNatalie sets down my drink and bagel, the smell of butter soaking into me. There's a snowflake in the foam on the top of my latte. \"Wow, cool design,\" I tell her, admiring the intricate pattern.\n\n\"Thanks. It's my signature. Whoa, you've got yourself quite a setup here.\" She nods to the various school supplies I've placed on the table.\n\nI flush as she notices the Now List binder, and I quickly set my poetry book on top of it. \"I promise I'm not moving in.\"\n\n\"We have plenty of room.\" Her eyes stray over my head. \"Beck, get your nasty boots off my table.\"\n\nI turn to see the Chip Bag Boy from yesterday tipped back in his chair, his legs resting on the next table, his auburn hair rumpled with an alarming case of bed head. His smile widening, he swings them off, his heavy boots thumping to the ground. \"Sorry, Nats. Won't happen again.\"\n\n\"Right.\" She disappears through a door to the back of the caf\u00e9.\n\nI get to work, but after twenty minutes of rain music, I need to pee. I yank the earbuds out and find a bathroom. Returning, I pass Beck's table, where he has been joined by two girls my age. A petite girl in a white beanie has her back to me, but as I pass by their table, the other girl briefly catches my eye over her soup bowl\u2013size mug of tea, then shakes her mane of dark red hair at something Beck has been saying, her large brown eyes slipping back to him. \"You're one hundred percent full of crap,\" she tells him. It piques my interest, and sliding back into my chair, I can't help but listen in.\n\nBeck laughs. \"I'm not, Isabel. This is the way I see it. We sit around all the time just rehashing other people's opinions. Other people's ideas. That's all school is \u2014 one massive recycling program.\" He puts on a stuffy-sounding voice. \"Here, students, let's stuff your head with everything the whole world already knows so you can go out in the world and keep up the status quo.\" He shifts out of his pseudo-teacher voice. \"It's a total waste of time. If I want to be a true independent thinker, I have to be done with school. Out of the system.\"\n\nUgh. Listen to this guy. I shake my head and try to concentrate on the assignment on my screen. I can hear the girl who must be Isabel say wryly, \"It sounds like a convenient rationalization for not doing your homework.\" Exactly, I want to say, but of course I don't because I'm not supposed to be eavesdropping. I'm supposed to be doing my English essay on Emily Dickinson. I open the book of poetry and try to skim a few lines.\n\nBut my ears steal back to the conversation behind me. Beck elaborates on his theory. \"Think about it. It's all about fear \u2014 people are so scared to step off the treadmill; they don't take any chances with their own minds. They just blindly follow everything that's been done before. I mean, seriously, nothing worth learning can be taught.\"\n\nThey must hear the low snorting sound that comes out of me because their table goes silent. Then, I hear Beck say, \"You got something to add to that, San Diego?\"\n\nMy neck prickles. Did Trick make Have you seen this girl handouts? Send out an email blast? Turning to face them, I clear my throat. \"Sorry?\"\n\nTipping in his chair again, Beck eyes me with a mix of confidence and amusement he has clearly cultivated. \"It seems like you have something you wanted to add.\"\n\nI feign innocence, shrugging. \"Nope.\" I start to turn back to my computer, catching sight of my Now binder, and Will's contribution flashes to the front of my mind.\n\n9. Be brave\n\nI turn to Beck's table. \"Actually, okay, yeah. It's just something you said struck me as... funny.\"\n\nHis eyebrows shoot up and he drops the chair back onto its four legs. \"Oh, yeah? Which part?\"\n\n\"You said something about school just being one... how did you put it? One massive recycling program for ideas?\"\n\n\"Sounds like something I'd say.\" He grins.\n\nI steady my hands against the back of the chair. \"But then you essentially rehashed Oscar Wilde. 'Nothing worth knowing can be taught.' That's Oscar Wilde.\"\n\nThe girl he called Isabel cracks up into her tea. \"Oh, wow, Beck \u2014 you're so busted. You see that on a meme somewhere?\" The other girl giggles and takes a last sip of her espresso before she starts putting on her coat.\n\nI'm surprised when Beck's grin just gets wider, his eyes brightening. \"Well, I happen to think Oscar Wilde was a pretty cool guy.\"\n\n\"Clearly enough to plagiarize him,\" I say, trying to tease him, but something about him makes me nervous and I hope he can't hear the wobble in my voice. There are kids like Beck at Ranfield, always up for an argument. They populate the debate team and student government, and use up most of the air in the AP history discussions. Only that's not why Beck makes me nervous. More likely, it's because he looks like he belongs on the cover of a magazine called Gorgeous Skier Boys. The Disarming Smile issue. I don't generally talk to boys who look like Beck. Or, more honestly, they don't usually talk to me.\n\nMy phone buzzes. It's Mom's Google calendar, reminding me I should be wrapping up English and moving on to AP history. Great. I've barely started my Emily Dickinson assignment. First morning here and I'm already behind.\n\nIsabel and her friend push back their chairs, stand, and pull on beanies. As Isabel slips into her down jacket, I'm struck by how tall she is. The word that comes to mind is Amazonian. She grabs her mug. \"Well, kids, while this I'll-show-you-my-brain-if-you-show-me-yours is a hoot for all of us, Joy and I have practice.\" To me, she says, \"By the way, I'm Isabel Hughes and this is Joy Chang.\" I notice she doesn't introduce Beck.\n\n\"Hi.\" I smile at Joy, who gives a wave before winding a scarf around her neck.\n\nTo Beck, Isabel says, \"Behave yourself, Oscar.\" The girls say good-bye to Natalie and Finn before leaving the caf\u00e9.\n\nWhen they're gone, Beck slides into the other chair at my table. \"It's Mara, right?\"\n\n\"Beck, stop harassing random customers,\" Natalie calls from behind the counter. She tries to sound tough, but her voice is fringed with affection.\n\n\"She's not random. She's Trick McHale's kid.\" He leans his forearms on the table, tipping it enough that I have to catch my three pencils from rolling off the side of it. \"I know about her.\"\n\nTo hide the tremor his words send through me, I log back into my portal, the session having expired during my eavesdropping. \"What do you think you know about me?\"\n\nHe runs his hands through his hair, only adding to the bed head. \"I know you're named after Tamara McKinney.\" At my blank look, he clarifies, \"First female skier to win the overall Alpine Cup in 1983. Grew up in Squaw Valley. Only American skier to hold that title until Lindsey Vonn in 2008. Maybe you've heard of her?\"\n\nI shake my head, thinking of the poster in Trick's bedroom. Tamara McKinney. Mom never told me I was named after a skier. Even though my legal name is Tamara, she's only ever called me Mara.\n\nWhy does this boy know things about me I don't?\n\nAnnoyed, I try for a polite smile, avoiding his hazel eyes, and stare intently at my screen. \"Listen, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm busy. I have a paper due tomorrow.\" I nod in the direction of the book of poems on the table. \"I happen to care very much about my massive recycling program.\"\n\nHe takes it in stride by not moving an inch. \"What's your paper on?\"\n\n\"Emily Dickinson.\"\n\nHe pushes back from the table. \"Righto. Then I'll leave you to dwell in Possibility. Capital P. Oh, that's Miss Dickinson, by the way. Don't want to be accused of plagiarism twice in one day.\"\n\n\"Why do you look so purple?\" I squint into my laptop screen at Josie.\n\n\"It's my new side-table light. It changes colors!\" She squints back at me, flipping her long, dark ponytail over her shoulder. \"See?\" She switches it from purple to red to blue, each light changing the hue of the white stripes on her black-and-white sweater tights. Josie is always in shades of black, gray, and blue. In tennis, we call her the Human Bruise. For many reasons. Seeing her sitting on her familiar bed in her familiar room makes me feel farther than six hundred miles away. Aside from the posters of tennis stars John Isner and Rafael Nadal plastered everywhere, her room feels like a beach, all sun-bleached colors and posters of waves. One wall is just a map of Earth's oceans and their currents. Josie wants to be an oceanographer someday like her older brother, Reuben.\n\nShe notices my expression but mistakes it for criticism. \"You don't like the light. I know, I know, it's dorky. But I love it.\" She switches the light back to purple.\n\nI shake my head. \"That's not it... I just, well, I miss you,\" I tell her, trying not to sound like a sappy idiot.\n\nShe perks up. \"Come home! What are you even doing there?\"\n\nI try to keep defensiveness from leaking into my voice. \"I think this is really going to help me, being here. I just need some time to get my head on straight.\"\n\nJosie narrows her eyes. \"Do they have special head-straightening gear in Antarctica? Why can't you get your head on straight in a warmer climate?\"\n\nFor Josie, anything under sixty degrees is Antarctica.\n\nI glance around my new room. No changing bedside-table lights here. No bedside table, actually. Outside, snow flutters past the window, dusting the green fence of trees behind the cottage. When I told Josie that I wanted to come to Squaw Valley, you would have thought I'd told her I wanted to try living in a snow cave in Alaska without electricity or light. So in my defense, I reminded her that for someone who wants to be an oceanographer, she should remember that many oceans in the world are freezing.\n\nStill, she knows this isn't about geography.\n\nJosie sips her Diet Coke loudly through a straw. \"So how are things with the biological father?\"\n\n\"Okay. He's not very talkative. But he taught me how to build a fire.\"\n\nShe looks skeptical. \"Congratulations. He's a caveman.\" I pretend to shut the laptop cover. \"Kidding!\" she pleads. When I reopen it, she says, \"I'm glad you're getting to know him better.\" I drop my eyes, and she hurries to ask about school. \"Are you bored? What do you do all day?\"\n\nI hold up a pile of books and binders. \"Impossible to be bored with the bucket-load of assignments Ranfield gave me for this whole Home Hospital thing.\" Apparently, Ranfield's version of a hospital involves producing large volumes of I promise I'm actually learning something. Maybe even more than when I was in real school. \"Oh, and Mom's making me see a shrink.\"\n\nJosie's eyes widen. \"She is?\" Tons of kids at Ranfield see shrinks, so I know Josie's reaction is about Mom and not the actual shrink part. \"That's not like her.\"\n\n\"I know, right? The queen of solving your own problems. I couldn't believe it. I guess she wants to figure out why I decided to become a human paper-shredder.\"\n\nJosie makes a sympathetic face. \"Well... why did you?\"\n\nShrugging, I push aside images from that terrible day \u2014 the numbers shifting on the page in front of me, the sound of paper ripping, my classmates' horrified faces. \"I had a panic attack.\" Before she can reply, I hurry to change the subject again. \"Want to help me figure out how to redecorate this place? Because, well, see...\" I move my laptop around so Josie can view the bed, the woodstove, the bookcase now stacked with my clothes in neat, even rows. \"It's a work in progress.\"\n\n\"What's with all the ski posters?\" she asks, her voice sounding far away. One of the things I've always loved about Josie is she doesn't press me when she knows I'm done talking about something.\n\nI set the laptop back on the bed in front of me. \"These are the legends of Squaw Valley,\" I say in my best movie trailer voice-over.\n\n\"Don't you people have a Target?\"\n\n\"Mom's sending me bedding.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm sending some better wall d\u00e9cor,\" Josie insists. \"Text me the address.\"\n\nBefore I can respond, she says, \"Oh, wait \u2014\" and she's suddenly off camera. Seconds later, she's back, holding up a pair of pants. \"Our new warm-ups.\"\n\nAnother tug in my chest. \"Oh, no way \u2014 he let us get the green ones?\" Coach Jeffers told us we had to stick to our usual dove gray for warm-ups. Figures right after I leave he caves on the pretty pale green ones we've all been begging him for since August.\n\nShe hesitates. \"I had him order you some. For when you... you know, come home.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Jo.\" My eyes sting. \"How's school for you?\" Josie and I both came to Ranfield on scholarship in sixth grade, and she's always been the only one there I can actually talk to.\n\nShe rolls her eyes. \"School is school. We have a thousand poems to read in American lit, and Mr. Roberts is trying to raise, like, a million dollars for the Eco Club trip to Costa Rica. Same old same old. Oh, and Chris Locke is having a party tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"That should be fun.\" She knows I don't really think it will be fun. I'm not much of a party girl; it's embarrassing how boring I am. Josie always ends up hanging by someone's pool with me, but listening to her chatter about it, I wonder if she'll be able to have more fun without me there.\n\n\"You know, Mar,\" Josie says. \"He was really pissed at whoever posted that video.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Chris Locke.\"\n\nI don't respond, my mind flashing to an image of Chris Locke in his baseball uniform. I don't know him very well. He's quiet and hangs out with other sporty guys.\n\nJosie mistakes my silence for disagreement. \"He is! Most people thought it was a horrible thing to do.\"\n\nMy skin tingles. \"I know.\" But I don't really know. I don't really want to think about any of it, actually. The test. My classmates' wide O mouths. The YouTube video. I shake my head. \"Most people aren't the problem.\"\n\nJosie breathes out, clearly trying to choose her words. \"Chris says it's the jerks who ruin it for everyone else.\"\n\nWhy are we still talking about Chris Locke? \"Right, key word ruin.\"\n\n\"We can't let them. I mean, they're only, like, ten percent of the population.\"\n\n\"Do you have actual data to support that? Because it seems like the jerks are winning.\" But Mom and Will said the same thing. Let haters be haters and all that. Don't give them the energy. Don't let them win by running away, which is what I'm sure everyone thinks I'm doing by coming here.\n\nA voice floats into the background of Josie's world. \"Dinner, mija!\" My mouth waters at the thought of one of Mrs. Martinez's amazing meals.\n\n\"Coming!\" Josie shouts back. \"Gotta go, Mar. Get in a little trouble, will ya? You're in Tahoe.\"\n\nLooking around the empty room, I pull my Now binder across the bed to me and add:\n\n12. Get in a little trouble\n\nNot that I have any idea how to do that.\n\nTrick waits for me outside in his truck while I have my appointment with Dr. Elliot the next morning. \"How'd it go?\" he asks after I get back into the truck. He heads out of Truckee toward Squaw Valley.\n\n\"Okay. He's nice or whatever. I made more lists.\"\n\nHe pulls into the McDonald's drive-thru. After ordering, he asks, \"What do you mean, 'lists'?\" He hands me a bag of food and my Diet Coke.\n\nI tuck my drink between my thighs and open my box of chicken nuggets. \"You know \u2014 what I'm grateful for, what I can and cannot control, beautiful things in my life \u2014 that sort of thing. Can I open this sauce in here?\"\n\nHe motions at the ratty interior, much of it patched with duct tape. \"You worried about messing up the fine upholstery?\"\n\nI pop open a barbecue sauce, licking a bit from my finger. Trick digs around in the bag on his lap for some fries as he pulls the truck back onto Highway 89. \"So these lists \u2014 they help you feel better?\"\n\n\"I guess.\" Of course, having me create lists to help me is like asking a dolphin, Have you thought about living in water?\n\nI've made these assignment lists before.\n\nLast year my sophomore history teacher, Ms. Diaz, made us keep gratitude lists as part of our current events folder. Maybe she saw it on Facebook or something. She called it the Current State of Me project. I made endless lists for her \u2014 the sun on the water, the smell of brunch on Sunday, the way my brothers laugh at funny movies. I got an A+ on it and she'd written, Such a strong sense of what's good in your life! in her scrawling purple pen.\n\nWhat Ms. Diaz and her exclamation point didn't know was that I used to sit and stare at the posters on the walls of her classroom and get these horrible stomachaches. Ms. Diaz's posters had sayings like LIFE IS SHORT; HISTORY IS LONG with pictures of a Roman building, once great, now in ruin. One poster read IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS, THAT PROBLEM'S PRETTY SMALL! written over a dot showing where our generation lands on the Time Line of Humans. I hated that poster. I wanted to write underneath it: Shut up, poster! History, she told us (over and over), teaches us that we are but small parts of a much bigger struggle and so we must make the best of where we land. So I made her list after list after list to show her I could make the best of where I'd landed.\n\nI got an A+ in the class. And dozens of secret stomachaches.\n\n\"Well, I'm glad they're helping,\" Trick says now, turning the truck down Squaw Valley Road. \"Sounds like you're a girl who knows what works for her.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I mumble, munching fries and staring out at the strange white world, not adding, Or at least convincing people I do.\n\nI officially suck at meditation.\n\nFor the past hour, I've been sitting here by this flickering fire, wearing yoga pants, with the snow falling outside, trying to follow an article titled \"5 Handy Tips for Meditation.\"\n\nI'm stuck on step 1: Quiet the mind.\n\nBut my mind won't shut up.\n\nBe quiet, mind!\n\nThing is, I don't have a quiet mind. I've never had a quiet mind. My mind is shouty and bossy and makes a weird sort of buzzing sound like a malfunctioning space heater. If I don't distract my mind by reading or studying or exercising or doing something, it gets even louder.\n\nPsssssst, growls my mind, my eyes squeezed shut, you suck at this.\n\nWhen Trick walks in with a pizza at a little after six on Thursday evening, I have stopped quieting and started crying. \"Oh \u2014 hey?\" He dumps the pizza on the card table. \"What's wrong?\" He takes in the pile of books, notes, binders, pencils, and paper I left spread all over the coffee table an hour ago. He also notices the binder I might have thrown across the room earlier, which now rests facedown in the dregs of the ripped-up sunset picture.\n\n\"I... I'm meditating.\" I look up from my cross-legged position, my face flushed from sitting too close to the fire. And from the binder throwing.\n\nHe shakes some snow from his shoulders and starts peeling off layers until he's just wearing his jeans, wool socks, and a long-sleeve shirt that says SQUAW VALLEY across the chest. \"Meditating. Okay, well, nice job on the fire.\" He hunkers down in front of it, warming his hands. He smells cold like outside.\n\nI swallow and wipe some tears from my cheeks. \"I suck at meditation.\"\n\nHe looks sideways at me. \"I thought maybe you were into some style that encourages crying. You know, lets out all the inner tension. Through your eyes. Or whatever.\"\n\nIs that a thing? Can I count this? \"Nope. Just sitting here in fail mode.\"\n\nHe gives me a funny look. \"I'm not sure that's how it works.\"\n\n\"I read three different articles telling me that I need to just accept where I am in my mind and go with it. But I don't know how to do that yet.\" I crawl to my binder and pull it onto my lap. I flip through the articles I'd printed out about meditation. I'd highlighted the line \"Settle into your mind\" and written ??? after it. \"It says to quiet your mind, but it doesn't really tell me how to do that. It's missing a step.\" I hold it up. \"These are faulty instructions.\"\n\nShaking his head, Trick stands and slips into a seat at the card table, flipping open the lid of the pizza box and grabbing a slice. The smell of pepperoni makes my stomach growl. He chews his slice halfway through before saying, \"Maybe the point is to just sit and be still and not fight it so much.\" At my blank look, he says, \"Don't try to be good at it.\"\n\nI shut the binder. \"What's the point of doing something if you're not trying to get good at it?\"\n\nHe gives me a funny look. \"To just experience it.\" He nods at the box. \"Want a slice?\"\n\nI join him at the table. \"Should I get a plate?\"\n\n\"Nah. Then we just have to do dishes.\" Outside, the sky darkens. Trick doesn't say anything else and we eat our pizza in silence, watching the fire, its warm glow reminding me of at least one thing I managed to get right today.\n\nI spend much of Friday at Elevation finishing my schoolwork for the week. A little after two, I rub my eyes, feeling slightly sick. Note to self: Three lattes and two cheese bagels do not fall under the \"healthy choice\" category for daily dining. Ready for a change of scenery, I pack up and head next door to Neverland to see if Trick might be able to run me back to the cottage. I should probably start studying for the chemistry test I have on Monday. The bells tinkle on the door as I push through it, and Logan Never comes out of the back dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that says THE FROST BOYS across the front. \"Oh, hey \u2014 thought you might be Isabel.\"\n\n\"Nope, just me.\" To fill the awkward silence, I say, \"That's a nice sweatshirt. I've seen other guys wearing them around. Are they for your ski team?\"\n\nHe looks down at it. \"Yeah, the shop partly sponsors our team, so, you know \u2014 Lost Boys, Frost Boys. Are you impressed with our cleverness?\"\n\n\"Oh, sure.\" I think of Isabel and Joy. \"But what do the girls wear?\"\n\n\"Their sweatshirts have Tinker Bell and say 'Eat my fairy dust.'\" His phone beeps and he checks it, his face falling. \"Aw, man.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe doesn't look up. \"Our friend Bodie can't make it today. He forgot he has a dentist appointment. Isabel's going to kill him.\" Logan texts back, chewing his lip.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Goggles.\" He tucks his phone back into his pocket. \"It's this program that meets on Friday afternoons at one of the middle schools up here. For at-risk kids. We play games with them and talk about how to stay on the right track.\"\n\n\"Cool.\" They have stuff like that at Ranfield, too, since we're required to have one hundred hours of community service every year, but I always end up tutoring math or something in our learning center because it fits better into my schedule, instead of having to go off campus.\n\nIsabel comes through the door in a down jacket and jeans. \"Where's Bodie? We're going to be late,\" she announces, as if Logan hasn't been hanging out waiting for her. \"Hey,\" she says, noticing me.\n\nBefore I can respond, Logan tells her, \"He's not coming.\"\n\nHer brown eyes widen. \"What?! Our entire talk today is about not skipping out on your commitments. And Bodie flakes? Great example.\"\n\nLogan grabs his jacket from a hook on the wall. \"He has a dentist appointment.\"\n\n\"We're building a 'triangle of accountability' with our bodies,\" Isabel fumes, flipping her braid over her shoulder, her eyes flashing. \"Can't have much of a triangle with just two of us. Kind of defeats the triangle part of it!\" She squeezes her hands into fists. \"I'm going to crush him into a million tiny pieces until he's just a pile of broken Bodie on the ground.\"\n\nWhoa. Kind of scared of Isabel right now. \"I can go,\" I say. \"I can be an arm of a triangle.\"\n\nLogan looks relieved. \"Great \u2014 my dad's waiting for us at the car.\"\n\nI follow them out, thinking, Bodie, whoever you are, you owe me your life.\n\nTurns out, being the third arm of a \"triangle of accountability\" means having Logan step on your face.\n\n\"Does it hurt?\" he asks, handing me the ice pack he went in search of minutes earlier, wincing as he looks at me. I sit in a metal folding chair near the stage in the multipurpose room of the middle school. After the face stomping, Isabel organized all the students into a big circle of chairs, spinning what had just happened to me as one of those lemonade-lemons lesson, like When life steps on your face, get a refreshing ice pack. I watch them out of my one good eye.\n\n\"Well, you stepped on my face,\" I say, trying to keep my voice light. \"So, yeah. It might hurt a little.\"\n\n\"Have I mentioned how sorry I am about that?\" Smiling apologetically, he pulls up a chair next to me to watch Isabel in the circle of kids. She's gesticulating wildly and they're eating it up, laughing as a group at something she says.\n\nI motion to her. \"She's great with them.\"\n\nHe pulls on the strings of his hoodie, watching her fondly. \"Yeah, she is.\"\n\nI hold the ice away from my face for a second, not sure what's worse, the throbbing or the cold. \"Does she ski, too?\"\n\nHe raises his eyebrows. \"Oh, yeah. She skis.\" The way he says it, the way he watches her while he says it, tells me there's more to Isabel and Logan than just the Goggles after-school program. I've never wanted someone to look at me like that. Suddenly, I do. He leans forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. \"Our girl over there will probably be heading to the Olympics someday.\"\n\n\"Really?\" I can't keep the awe out of my voice. I rack my brain for Olympic terms but can't remember any for skiing. \"Does she have an event?\"\n\n\"Downhill. Mostly super-G.\"\n\nI hold the ice pack back against my swollen cheek. \"Sorry, ski newbie over here \u2014 I don't know what that is.\"\n\n\"Super giant slalom,\" Logan explains, making a squiggly motion with his hand. \"Really fast. Lots of turns.\"\n\n\"I know nothing about skiing.\" Skiing. Meditation. Building fires. Clearly, in Tahoe, I'm an idiot.\n\nHe looks at me, surprised. \"You don't ski?\"\n\n\"Don't get too many snow days in San Diego.\"\n\nHe leans back in his chair. \"I just figured, you know, with your parents and all.\"\n\nIt's strange to think he has certain information and ideas about Trick and Mom. \"I just found out my mom used to ski and, well, I don't really know anything about Trick. Just that he used to be some sort of skier and got hurt. That's pretty much it. I mean, we've never been, you know, close.\" He shifts uncomfortably in his seat and avoids my eyes. Universal body language for Please change the subject. I set the ice pack on the floor and motion to the circle. \"So, pretty nice kids you got here.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Logan frowns a little, watching them. \"So many of them have these terrible lives. Seriously, Dad's in jail, or they're living in their car, or their home life is just messed up in some way. It's intense.\" He motions to a shaggy-haired boy sitting with his back to us, wearing a Burton beanie. \"Like Franco there. His dad died when he was six. Three older sisters. Mom works two jobs cleaning hotels around here. He sort of slipped through the cracks at school for a few years, but last year his teacher got him hooked up with Goggles and he's passing all his classes now.\"\n\nMy chest squeezes. \"It's cool you guys do this,\" I say. When he doesn't say anything, I awkwardly add, \"And it will look great on college applications.\"\n\nHe hesitates. \"Actually, Isabel and I aren't going to put it on our applications.\"\n\n\"What \u2014 why?\"\n\n\"This year our coach is on this whole mindfulness kick.\" Logan makes an apologetic face. \"I don't know; he read an article or something. Anyway, he challenged each of us to choose something in our lives that we decide not to go public about.\" He smiles at my confused expression. \"Look, it's not like Isabel and I won't get into college \u2014 we have plenty of other stuff. It's important to our coach that we try things like this.\" He stands, crosses to a table by the stage, and starts setting up snacks, opening bags of chips and Oreos and pulling a jug of lemonade from a cooler of ice.\n\nSitting here, it suddenly feels like more than just my face got stepped on.\n\nAfter Logan finishes setting up the snack table, I watch him settle down next to a boy with straw-colored hair and a constellation of freckles across his nose who has just scooted his chair off to the side, his face long. They talk quietly, and in a minute, Logan coaxes a smile out of him.\n\nEvery kid in this place has a life that belongs on my Get a Grip List.\n\nAn hour later, we wait outside the school until Trick pulls into the driveway. The back of his truck is heaped with pillows, blankets, and quilts. \"Hop in,\" he tells the three of us. \"We can grab some burgers and go do some meditating.\" He winks at me.\n\n\"Sweet.\" Isabel hops into the back, pulling a soft patchwork quilt over her and resting against a mound of pillows near the cab.\n\nI walk around the front of the truck and yank open the passenger door. \"I have a chemistry test on Monday to study for,\" I tell Trick.\n\n\"Right, Monday.\" He taps his thumbs on the steering wheel in time to the low music on his stereo. \"Good thing it's Friday.\"\n\nI'm not convinced this is a good idea. \"Are we even allowed to ride back there?\"\n\n\"I'll take back roads.\" He squints at me. \"What happened to your face?\"\n\n\"The hazards of accountability triangles.\" I leave my backpack in the front with Trick and go around to the bed of the truck. Isabel has her eyes closed, the quilt pulled to her chin. Standing up in the back, Logan offers to help haul me into the truck, and I try not to notice my stomach jolt when he grabs my hand.\n\nA half hour later, Trick parks in the middle of a meadow. Despite the cold, we're warm under the mounds of fleece blankets and quilts. My head propped on several pillows, I stare up at the glittery stretch of sky. Around me, the Tahoe winter night is still and silent and I want to relax into it, but instead, I'm making a list of the topics I need to study for my chem test. I try counting stars, but they blur above me as my mind shifts to the formulas I need to know for Monday's test.\n\nA flash of light slips through the sky. \"Shooting star,\" Isabel announces, her voice sleepy.\n\n\"Not actually a star, though,\" I say, remembering something from one of my long-ago science classes. \"Meteoroids. Space dust. They make that flash when they collide with the atmosphere.\"\n\n\"Shooting star sounds prettier,\" she murmurs. \"But that would explain why you're going to be valedictorian at your fancy-pants private school.\"\n\n\"Not anymore,\" I mumble, pulling the quilt up over my chin.\n\n\"Why not anymore?\" Logan wants to know.\n\nI swallow, saying the words out loud for the first time. \"I got a B in calculus last semester. So, yeah, no more valedictorian for me.\"\n\n\"That's it?\" Trick asks into the dark. \"One class. That shouldn't matter. One B.\"\n\nIt mattered to Rebecca Song, new front-runner. We'd been neck and neck since freshman year when she came to Ranfield. I'm sure she ran a victory lap when she found out about my B. Of course, Josie would argue that Rebecca's run wouldn't be very fair considering she is clearly some government experiment made out of bionic, superhuman parts.\n\n\"So you got a B.\" Logan's voice floats into the mix. \"That's normal.\"\n\nNormal. At Ranfield, the goal is not to be normal. Quite the opposite. In every possible way, we're taught to want to be exceptional \u2014 winners, leaders, the cream of the crop. Just read the brochure. No one wants to be normal. At Ran, everyone has something special, whether it's sports or dancing or debate or ceramics. One kid at our school is a world-champion juggler. And even if you aren't currently the best at whatever that something is, you're trying to be. That's the point. We set goals and if we work our hardest and give our best selves, we can achieve anything. Ranfield prides itself on being a school community nobly built from each of its distinct achievers.\n\nSeriously, that's a direct quote from the website. Go, Ravens.\n\nAnd my thing has always been my academics \u2014 the tests and essays and the 100 books you're supposed to read before you graduate from high school (3 different lists cross-checked and compiled into a list of 216 books, of which I still need to read 47).\n\nI have only, ever, gotten As.\n\nMy thing: to be the Ranfield valedictorian.\n\nSo what happens when you devote your whole self to a goal, you give your best self, but still fall short of it?\n\nI couldn't possibly have worked harder than I did, not and actually sleep, so that's not it. People think it comes easily for me, but it doesn't. I'm not like Rebecca Song, bionic human. I work my butt off for my grades. I stay up late every night, spend every weekend studying, no exceptions. I have taken schoolwork on every family vacation since I started high school. If I'm not playing tennis or sitting in class or going to choir rehearsal or eating dinner with my family, I'm working on school because I don't know how to want anything else. To be anything else.\n\nAnd then I had a very bad day and all that changed.\n\nI fell flat on my YouTube-viral-video-worthy face. So it's occurred to me in these last few weeks that somewhere along the line, I may have been given faulty information. Apparently, you can do your best and not achieve your goal. Turns out, you can't do anything just because you set your mind to it. Which changes things, doesn't it?\n\n\"It's partly why I'm here,\" I find myself telling them, my eyes tracing the ribbon of the Milky Way across the night. Then I say something that surprises me.\n\n\"I would actually love to feel normal.\"\n\nSitting in Elevation, I check my watch again. Logan and Isabel should be done in another hour and the butterflies are starting to wage war in my belly. Stargazing last night, they offered to start teaching me to ski today when they finished their race. \"You want to be normal in Tahoe?\" Logan had asked. \"We need to get you on the mountain.\"\n\nNow List #1: Learn to ski.\n\nMy whole body feels carbonated at the thought of heading up onto that mountain. When was the last time I felt this excited and nervous about something I was probably going to be horrible at? Maybe when I was eight and tried to play basketball for a season, only to discover I clearly belonged in sports that involved a net between me and the girl who was trying to smash me in the face. Still, I liked playing basketball. I just wasn't any good at it. So Mom and Will thought it would be best for me to focus on tennis, where I at least showed some natural ability.\n\nI tap my pencil lightly over my chem formulas, staring out at the winter light of Squaw Valley. It's strange to realize I haven't tried a new sport in years. I haven't tried much of anything new in years. Too risky. Stick to your strengths. Over the years, Mom and Will have encouraged me to focus on the things I'm already excelling in so I would have better chances for college scholarships. No time for dabbling. That would waste time and resources.\n\nBehind me, Elevation's door opens and, turning, I see Beck Davis stroll in, his face flushed from the mountain. His eyes light up when he sees me and he heads for my table. \"Hey, bookworm.\" Is this becoming a thing with him? The nicknames. San Diego. Bookworm.\n\nI try not to like it. \"Hi, Beck. You done racing for the day?\" Maybe Isabel and Logan aren't far behind.\n\nHe slides into the chair next to me and helps himself to a piece of my cookie. \"Oh, I don't race anymore.\"\n\n\"You're not on the ski team?\"\n\nShaking his head, he wipes his hands on his ski pants. \"Used to be. A bunch of us were on Squaw's development team when we were kids. That's the team they start you out on to see if you have the chops. I raced some gates for a few years, but it wasn't my scene. Racers are such jocks. I'm a freeskier now.\"\n\n\"I don't know what most of that means,\" I say apologetically. There it is again, Tahoe as foreign language.\n\nHe runs his hand through his tangle of hair. \"Freeskiing is not traditional skiing. It's way chill. You do your own thing. Mess around at the terrain park, you know?\n\n\"So you're on a freeski team?\"\n\nHe makes a sour face. \"Nah, they have competitions and stuff, but I don't do any of that. I ski for the fun of it, not so some guy can hand me a medal and a ranking.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" I say, slightly unnerved to hear an argumentative echo to my earlier thoughts.\n\n\"Hey,\" he says, crossing his arms and leaning back in the chair. \"How'd your Emily Dickinson paper turn out?\"\n\nSurprised he remembered, I say, \"Good, I think. It was mostly just an analysis of five of her poems.\" I don't tell him how unhappy I was with it, how I couldn't seem to get the conclusion quite right.\n\nBeck watches Finn across the room as he adds some wood to the fire. \"I heard something cool once about Emily Dickinson, that she didn't really want her poems published.\"\n\nSomething warm moves through me. \"Yeah, I read something about that, too. I'm not sure if it's true or not.\" I should research that.\n\nHe waves to someone walking by the window outside. \"Still, it's a cool thought. Especially these days. To write for yourself. To not need other people telling you how great you are all the time, to not have people commenting on it or hashtagging or reposting it all the time. To just do it for the sake of doing it. Too bad more people aren't like that.\" His eyes drift over my shoulder and his face darkens.\n\nLogan appears next to our table. \"You ready to head up?\" He nods, almost curt, to Beck. \"Hey.\"\n\nI gather up my books and binders, stuffing things out of order into my backpack. Something in the air changed when Logan came in, the heat from the caf\u00e9 evaporating around us. \"Logan and Isabel are attempting to teach me how to ski \u2014 wish me luck.\"\n\n\"Luck,\" Beck echoes, his chair scraping the floor as he pushes it away from the table, but before I can say anything else, he's leaning on the counter, his back to us, laughing at something Natalie is saying as she makes a latte behind the gleaming espresso machine.\n\nOutfitted in some old red ski pants of Isabel's, my parka, and what feels like twenty pounds of random gear from Neverland, I follow Logan toward the funitel building. \"Isabel said she'd catch up,\" he told me. \"She's still over at Northstar talking to our coach.\" Logan wears a pair of tan ski pants and a green plaid jacket. I clomp after him, my ski boots like cement blocks, noticing he clomps much less than I do. He motions for me to follow him through a gate, his goggles pushed up on his helmet, his hair curling around his ears.\n\n\"Is Northstar another resort?\" I ask, moving up to the gate. It beeps as it reads the pass Logan's dad got for me, then lets me through.\n\n\"Yeah. We take turns racing at the different resorts around Tahoe.\" We step into the next available funitel car, the wide-windowed enclosed pods that carry skiers to the upper part of the mountain where we can catch some easier lifts.\n\n\"Your first funi ride,\" Logan says, stashing our skis and poles next to him in an empty slot by the bench, and scoots over so I can sit next to him.\n\nMy stomach lurches as the funi swings out and up, and I try not to think about being suspended from a cable high above snow and rock. We soar over people lounging by a fire pit at an outside bar, over hotel tops, and as we climb, I can see the Village parking lot and the valley beyond. We climb higher. Logan doesn't seem to notice my terror, pointing out the long, sweeping curl of the Mountain Run and, as we pass especially close to a jut of granite, three plastic flamingos someone has twisted into the netting on the rock. Two are pink, but the one in the middle is a sort of washed-out gray.\n\n\"Wave at the flamingos,\" Logan says. \"The pink ones are Primp and Preen. I named the gray one Stan.\"\n\n\"Hi, Stan.\" I wave lamely at the disappearing flamingos.\n\n\"Oh \u2014 see.\" Logan points at the stretch of view suddenly emerging. From here, we see a triangle slice of metallic lake, the layers of mountains beyond fading into sky.\n\n\"Beautiful. Is that Lake Tahoe?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He nods as we drop slightly and the lake disappears. Logan shifts on the bench. \"Wait until we get up to the top of the Big Blue run. You can see even more of it.\"\n\n\"Is Big Blue a green run?\" I pull off my backpack and extract my binder. \"I read a few articles about learning to ski and they all said it's important to start with the green runs and feel really solid with those before moving to the blue runs. Also, it says there are different levels of green. Is this an easy green?\"\n\nHe fiddles with our poles, giving me a funny look. \"What's that you got there?\"\n\nI look down at the cover, now a snow-covered Swiss alp. Much more thematic than the Hawaiian sunset, I think. \"It's just some research stuff.\" I hurry to push it into my backpack. \"So is it an easy green?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" he says. \"I'll take care of you.\"\n\nRight. Don't worry about it. One of those expressions uttered only by people who already know how to do it. Little does he know I have the ever-evolving worry list. So far on this funi trip alone it looks like this:\n\nthe funi car unsnapping and us plummeting to our deaths\n\ngetting stuck in this funi car for hours because of a power failure\n\nnot being able to get on the chairlift\n\nfalling off the chairlift once I manage to actually get on\n\nlooking like an idiot in front of Logan Never\n\n\"Do I look worried?\" I manage to ask. Why do I suddenly care so much what this boy thinks of me?\n\nBefore he can respond, the funi slips into a docking station inside an open-walled building. The doors slide apart, and I follow Logan into a blast of cold air, dragging my gear. Other skiers and boarders move past me, their skis easy over their shoulders, their snowboards held casually like you'd carry a library book. I drop one of my skis, my bulky gloves not able to grip it, and it clatters to the ground. Maybe this was a stupid idea.\n\n\"Here.\" Logan bends to help me, and with a quick flick of his wrist, locks my skis together somehow and sets them gently on my shoulder. \"You'll get used to it.\"\n\nI'm not so sure about that.\n\nOutside, the sky is a shock of blue against the blinding white of the mountain. Logan helps adjust my goggles and makes sure my skis clip in properly and that I have a good grip on my poles. Watching him, I'm reminded of babysitting for three-year-old Aiden Simms, who lives down the street from me in San Diego. Whenever I take him outside to ride his Scoot bike on the sidewalk, I have to check him in the same sort of way.\n\nWhich, of course, makes me feel idiotic.\n\n\"Okay,\" he says, pulling his own goggles down. \"I'm not sure what you've read, but skiing is about balance. To start, though, I want to make sure you know how to stop once you get going.\"\n\nYes, knowing how to stop seems especially important. Biting my lip, I watch people whip down the mountain, barely slowing, even when they're near the signs that clearly read SLOW. My mind blanks on everything I've read and I try to keep my voice even. \"You should probably assume that I will most likely be killed today on this mountain.\"\n\nSmiling, he slides his skis back and forth in quick scissor-snap moves. \"You'll be fine. Just don't think so much about it.\"\n\nDid he not see the binder?\n\nHe takes me through a series of moves with food names, showing me French fries (skis parallel to each other) and how to make a pizza-slice shape with my skis.\n\n\"This is your snowplow,\" he says of the pizza shape. \"It will allow you to stop anywhere, anytime, but you can also use it to slow down and turn. You never have to move faster than you want to.\" Looking at the mountain spilling out around me, I seriously doubt that's true. \"We have to ski down just a little bit to catch the Big Blue,\" he says, his goggles reflecting the patch of sky behind me, swimming with white clouds. \"Ready?\"\n\nI wave one of my poles vaguely in his direction. \"Yes, yes, go ahead.\" He skis down the hill, and I push off, the way I might do on roller skates, and my skis slip across the snow. Pizza slice, French fries, pizza slice, I repeat in my mind over and over while I attempt to follow Logan as he curves down the mountain to the left. Off to our right, skiers zoom toward Gold Coast, a blue lift that glides up the mountain away from us. In front of me, Logan moves in slow, unfinished loops, occasionally skiing backward to check on me. Show-off.\n\nMiraculously, we make it to a flat spot near a lift called Big Blue Express. Logan jams his poles into the snow so they hold, and skis over to me. \"You did great! How'd that feel?\"\n\nLike certain death was zooming around every corner, I want to tell him, but instead, I say, \"I'm not really sure what to do with my poles.\"\n\n\"Keep your core pointed toward the downhill and use your poles to navigate.\" He demonstrates a few short turns, his poles moving in sync beside his body. I attempt to follow, concentrating on copying his form, but my skis slip out from under me and I'm suddenly on my butt. By the way, falling on snow hurts. Logan skis back to me, showing me how to position my skis and use my poles to get up. Okay, so maybe I will need my poles.\n\n\"Let's grab the Big Blue and I can show you up on the run. It's a really mellow little bunny hill.\" He skis into line. Following him, I inch forward as the skiers fill the lift benches. When it's our turn, Logan helps me get in place, showing me how to look back to meet the lift chair that comes trembling around the curve. \"Don't worry, they're slow and easy,\" Logan tells me, but it still catches me off guard and he has to practically yank me back onto the seat. Smooth. I will clearly not be impressing Logan Never today with my grace and skill. The lift lurches forward and my stomach drops as my skis leave the ground. But then, suddenly, I'm floating.\n\nIt's called a lift for a reason.\n\nAs the hum of the Big Blue line fades behind us and we move through the cold air, everything stills. I can't remember the last time I sat like this without doing something, without checking my phone or taking notes or reading a book or finishing an assignment or failing to meditate. Now, though, I just float.\n\nI breathe out, a long sigh, and Logan says, \"Feels great, right?\"\n\nNodding, I look out to my right where ski runs disappear down the mountain, and much farther off, another building sits on a distant peak. \"What's that?\"\n\nLogan leans into me, just slightly. \"That's High Camp. You can take a tram up there and they have food and a skating rink and a pool.\"\n\nUp ahead, I notice the spot where we get off the lift and my stomach pitches at the sight of a sloping mound of snow. \"How do I, um, get off?\" Logan explains that I need to keep the tips of my skis up and then just stand. We raise the bar and moments later I feel the snow connecting with my skis.\n\n\"Now.\" Logan stands, giving me a little tug so I slide down next to him. Forgetting my snowplow, I crash at the bottom. Logan hurries to help me up as other people exit the lift around me. \"Not bad.\" Really? Not bad? I'm pretty sure I can add that to the list of the worst lift exits in skiing history. He motions to his right. \"Here, follow me so we're out of the way.\"\n\nI snowplow after him and, looking up, find myself on the edge of the world. Everywhere I look, miles of snow and pine and mountains. People zoom by, heading to other runs or stopping to take pictures in front of the blue wedge of Lake Tahoe in the distance. Without warning, I tear up.\n\n\"You okay?\" Logan skis back over to me.\n\n\"This view,\" I say by way of explanation, glad for my goggles.\n\nHe studies me closely. \"It's cool to watch someone see it for the first time.\"\n\n\"Let's do this,\" I tell him, motioning to the hill, trying to get quickly past the mushy moment. What is wrong with me?\n\nLogan guides me slowly down Big Blue and I continue to fall.\n\nAnd fall.\n\nAnd fall.\n\nAt one point, halfway down, I throw my poles to the ground in frustration and sit, breathing hard. Logan skis over. \"You want a break?\"\n\nYes. But, a little embarrassed by the pole throwing, I tell him, \"No. I'm good.\" I squint up at him. \"Is it wrong that the ski lift is my favorite part of this process?\"\n\nHe offers me his pole and pulls me up. \"Not for long. You're catching on quick.\"\n\nWe finish the run.\n\nAfter an hour, every part of my body starts to ache. Even with all my tennis training, I apparently have millions of unknown muscles throughout my legs and back that have banded together to collectively scream at the top of their little muscle lungs.\n\nOn our third run, Logan waits for me partway down Big Blue. \"That looked better \u2014 no falls!\" He holds his poles up in victory over his head.\n\nI snowplow to a stop. I'm an awkward wooden puppet next to his fluid, graceful turns, but he seems genuinely happy for me. \"Thanks,\" I tell him, still breathless. \"That felt better.\" And it did.\n\nNo, wait. It didn't just feel better. At one point, my skis had smoothed out, I'd felt balanced and strong, and it felt... like what? Like flying. But without worrying I might fall from the sky.\n\n\"You're nice to take me out here. This can't be any fun for you at all.\"\n\n\"Are you kidding? I love introducing people to the sport.\" He smiles at me, and for the smallest moment, it seems like we're the only two people on the mountain. Whatever this weird energy is, he must sense it, too, because he clears his throat and leans heavily on his poles. \"I wonder what happened to Isabel?\" He pulls a glove off with his teeth and fishes his phone out of his pocket. \"She's going to meet us at Gold Coast.\" Before I can respond, he skis off toward the funi building.\n\nI follow him over to the deck at the Gold Coast building, where we leave our skis and poles in a rack. He motions for me to grab a seat at an empty table and takes off his helmet, stuffing his gloves inside it. \"Be right back,\" he tells me, and I wait, setting my helmet and gloves next to his. He emerges a few minutes later with hot chocolates and a bottle of water. \"Drink this first,\" he says, handing me the water. \"You should stay hydrated on the mountain.\" I study his messy hair. Clearly, most of the bed head I've been noticing around the Village is more a by-product of the helmets these guys wear all day long than their morning grooming habits. Or probably a combination of both.\n\nWhatever the reason, messy works on Logan Never, and I can't stop my mind from listing what else works on Logan Never:\n\ndark eyes\n\ngreat smile\n\npatience\n\nStop it, I tell myself. It's not like me to crush on another girl's boyfriend. I drink half the water to avoid staring at him. \"Thanks.\" Then I stare at him some more:\n\nfreckles\n\neasy laugh\n\nUgh. Like always, when I start making it a list, it seems to take on a life of its own.\n\nLogan takes a sip of his hot chocolate. \"So you're getting your ski legs. Wait until you tell Trick. I mean, he doesn't ski much anymore, but he'll be stoked to hear you got some runs in.\"\n\n\"Why doesn't he ski much anymore?\" His limp doesn't seem bad enough to keep him off the mountain.\n\nLogan looks uncomfortable. \"I mean, he tools around and stuff, I guess, but, you know, the accident jacked up his leg.\"\n\nMom told me he'd had a bad skiing accident when I was little, but she'd never really elaborated. \"Do you know what happened to him? With his accident?\"\n\nLogan swirls his cocoa. \"Only what my parents tell me. I mean, we weren't even three when it happened. But it ended him.\"\n\nThe cocoa tastes too sweet in my mouth and I set it down on the table. \"Ended him how?\"\n\n\"He couldn't ski anymore. At least not like before. I mean, he was amazing. I've seen pictures, some old videos and stuff. He was incredible.\" Logan waves at someone over my head. \"Oh, hey \u2014 Iz!\" he calls out, and I turn as Isabel makes her way toward us. In that movement across the deck, she reminds me of Josie, with her blue jacket and long legs in tight black ski pants and with her easy, athletic grace.\n\n\"Sorry to miss your first day,\" she says, sliding in next to Logan and taking a long drink of his hot chocolate. \"How'd it go?\"\n\n\"She crushed it,\" Logan says, his eyes slipping from me to Isabel, who leans in to casually flick some snow from his shoulder.\n\nNot crushing it now. Unless you count World's Biggest Outsider.\n\nThe next morning, Trick reads a ski magazine as he spoons huge bites of Fruity O's into his mouth. Outside, falling snow dots the gray light, but inside, the fire crackles and the smell of coffee hangs in the room. \"Morning,\" he says, looking up, spoon halfway to his mouth. \"There's coffee.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" I pour some into a red mug, add lots of milk, and then grab some of his cereal. Putting the milk back in the fridge, I notice Trick has gone shopping; the fridge has actual food of the nonfrozen variety \u2014 some cold cuts, a loaf of bread, a sack of carrots. Three cans of chicken noodle soup sit on the counter near the stovetop, next to some apples and a box of Wheat Thins. I guess he finally noticed the half dozen Post-it lists I'd left on the fridge. And in the bathroom. And on his work boots.\n\nI slip into the other folding chair at the table, smoothing out some wrinkles in the tablecloth I bought in the Village yesterday. Dark blue with tiny white snowflakes. Trick hasn't seemed to notice it. \"So I went skiing yesterday.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah?\" Trick looks up from the magazine.\n\n\"Logan took me.\" I take a bite of cereal, working up my nerve. \"Actually, he mentioned that accident you had when we were little.\" I try to sound casual.\n\nTrick fiddles with the magazine. \"That was a long time ago. I'm sure your mom filled you in.\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\nI pick at my cereal, trying to figure out how to say, I don't really know anything about you without adding too much more to the sudden change in atmosphere. \"She hasn't really told me much. About you. About that time in her life. Just that you were a competitive racer.\"\n\n\"Freeskier,\" he says. \"Not a racer.\"\n\nLike Beck. \"Right, okay, but then you crashed and, well, stopped. And you two... didn't, um, work out.\"\n\nTrick rests his elbows on the table, folding his hands in front of his chin. \"That about covers it, then.\"\n\nI don't tell him she has also said, more than once, that he just wasn't into being a dad. Anytime he'd send a card for my birthday a couple of weeks late, she would say it in a sort of offhand way. The way you might say someone's just not that into eating sushi. Or hiking. My heart hammers and I'm certain he can hear it. Maybe he hears it asking, Why didn't you tell me all this yourself? \"Do you still ski?\"\n\n\"I get up there sometimes, soak in the mountain. But it's hard... with the knee, with this bum leg.\" The quaver in his voice makes me think the knee isn't the hardest part.\n\n\"Would you take me up sometime?\" My heart thrums and I imagine he can hear it pushing the blood through my vessels.\n\nHe stands, clearing his bowl and turning to the small sink. \"Sure, though I'm not a great teacher. Logan's a better teacher. You're really better off with someone else.\"\n\nI've spooked him. Obviously, #11 on the Now List is going to be harder than I thought. \"Right, okay. I just thought it might be fun to, you know, do something together.\" I've had math tests that weren't this painful. And, with my history, that's saying something.\n\nHe runs the bowl under the faucet for longer than he needs to, and I see the tips of his ears turn pink. He sets the dish carefully in the metal dish rack. \"Sure, yeah, also we could grab dinner sometime.\"\n\nI swirl my spoon in the colored milk left behind. \"Yeah, dinner sounds nice.\"\n\nHe runs his hand nervously through his hair. \"I better get to work. You need a ride into the Village?\" He wipes his hands on a lemon-yellow dish towel. It's new, too; its tag still attached. He'd definitely seen the grocery list I stuck to the fridge:\n\ndish towel\n\nsoup\n\nmilk\n\nsomething resembling a vegetable\n\n\"I'm going to stay here. You know, mellow Sunday by the fire. Maybe I'll read a book or something. Cross a few things off the Now List.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he says, visibly relieved to be at the end of this particular conversation. He pulls on his coat and beanie and, in leaving, lets in a swirl of snow. Sipping the rest of my coffee, I watch it melt into small pools on the mat.\n\nWhich totally counts as meditation.\n\nI spend Monday at the cottage doing schoolwork: English, history, chemistry, calculus. On Home Hospital, I still have to do all the same assignments as my regular classes and there are some online lectures for me to watch. Still, this doesn't translate into a full school day \u2014 the lunch breaks, the passing periods, the after-school commitments, the classroom lecture time (where, if I'm honest, I sometimes just space out). In a typical school day, there's a lot of time occupied with the anatomy of those other parts. Teachers take attendance, we go to assemblies, spend time doing group projects or listening to guest speakers or researching things in the library. So, right now, it definitely takes less time to do the actual curriculum.\n\nAt this rate, I'll finish everything by midweek.\n\nSo much spare time makes me feel strange and defensive, like one of those puffer fish that blow up when they're threatened. I find myself sorting my socks and refolding my clothes, even getting a jump on assignments not due for another two weeks. I'm not good with downtime. It makes me feel unproductive and I've been raised to see unproductivity as a sort of disorder.\n\nJosie texts me as I'm settling down for some quality time with my SAT Hot Words list:\n\nhow's the break?\n\nMy hackles go up.\n\nwhat break? been buried in work all day.\n\nA second later:\n\nu r supposed to be kissing a cute snowboarder.\n\nMe:\n\nno boys \u2014 u know the rules.\n\nJosie and I agreed freshman year that we'd watched too many of our classmates fall into the boyfriend trap. Smart, focused girls who morphed into lovesick idiots because of some boy. Getting into the right college is hard enough without the distraction of all that ridiculous Ooooh does he like me what did he mean when he said that? drama.\n\nShe texts:\n\nthose rules only apply in certain zip codes.\n\nI smile.\n\nyeah, the zip code of my life \u2014 i'm working!!\n\nHer text smiles back.\n\ndeep thoughts... work shmurk. more kissing!\n\nI miss her.\n\nAround one, my stomach starts rumbling and I make a sandwich. Ham, slices of cheddar cheese, white bread. It's like the food Will bought last year when we rented an RV and went camping at the beach. Come to think of it, Trick's whole world seems this way, like he's camping in his own life.\n\nAfter I eat, I wander around the cottage, snooping. Trick takes minimalist to a new level, so the cottage itself is pretty empty \u2014 a couple of Warren Miller movies, a Burton sweatshirt draped over the dusty TV, and a VCR that looks like it might have voted for Bill Clinton. I find most of his things tucked onto shelving in the small closet by the front door. A down parka, two pairs of jeans, a pair of hiking boots, some long underwear, three fleece pullovers, four T-shirts, four rolls of ski socks, and, embarrassingly, five pairs of folded white underwear. Making a face, I start to close the closet door but catch a glimpse of pale yellow tucked beneath the short stack of fleece pullovers. A picture book.\n\nNaked Mole Rat Gets Dressed\n\nAt the sight of it, tears sting my eyes. I pull it out, careful not to upset the stack of fleece, and read the inscription I'd written to him in blue ink on the title page.\n\nHi, Trick. I saw this and thought of our trip to the zoo! XO, Mara\n\nInside, he has also tucked two of my school pictures. My ten-year-old one with a big smile and some unfortunate bangs. And the one from freshman year of high school. Same smile. Slightly better bangs. Mom must have sent them. I quickly slip them back inside and return the book to its place on the shelf, my hands shaking.\n\nIn the bathroom, I find a couple of ancient-looking cleaners beneath the sink because, for some reason, I'd rather scrub the toilet than sit around wondering why he never wrote me back about the book.\n\nThat evening, Trick knocks on the door of my room even though it's only partially closed. \"Come in.\"\n\nHis arms are full of ski gear. A helmet, some pants, boots, a jacket. \"Um, I got you some stuff today. And I've set some skis aside for you at Neverland. They're used but in great shape.\" He comes in and dumps everything on the bed. One boot falls to the floor with a heavy thud. He grabs at it. \"Or, you know, you can use this as a weapon.\" He mimes hurling it across the room.\n\nI run my hand over the soft fabric of the gray jacket. \"Wow, thanks.\"\n\nHe clears his throat and backs up a step toward the door. \"It's better up there with your own gear. You'll see. Just let me know if anything doesn't fit. Matt helped me pick stuff out. Logan's older sister is about your size.\"\n\nI hold up a pair of ski socks with flames running up and down their sides. There are visible chew marks on the label. \"Um?\"\n\nHe grins. \"Oh, right. Piper chewed on those, but I checked. No holes in the socks. Matt said you could have them.\"\n\n\"Cool, nothing like slobber socks to get a girl going on the mountain.\" I start peeling off the gnarled label. \"Are you sure you don't want to take me up?\" But I don't know if he heard me because he's ducked from the room, and soon I hear him rustling with wood for the fire. I go to the bathroom mirror and try on the silvery helmet, smiling at how silly and round it looks on my head, the smile wobbling a bit when I realize it's the first real gift he's ever given me.\n\nThe next two mornings, I wake right at 8:05. #4 on the Now List has clearly become a regular thing. I can't believe how much sleep I'm getting in Tahoe. I'm like a bear. I hurry to catch Trick so he can drive me to the Village.\n\nWhen we get there, he heads straight to Neverland, but I stop off at Elevation to buy Logan a bag of the cookies they sell by the register. \"Which ones?\" Natalie asks. When I tell her they're for Logan, she points out the kind with dark chocolate and coconut. \"His favorite.\" She winks.\n\nI hurry to explain. \"He's helping me learn to ski \u2014 I just want to say thank you.\"\n\nFive minutes later, the bell on the front door jingles as I walk into Neverland. Logan sits on the counter, wearing his Frost Boys sweatshirt and rifling through a stack of rental forms, but he looks up at the sound of the bell. \"Hey,\" he says in that low, easy voice of his that makes you feel like a favorite friend. \"Oh, Pipe, come here, girl, give her some breathing room,\" he calls to his golden retriever, who is showering me with love and fur.\n\nExtracting myself from Piper's enthusiastic welcome, I hand Logan the cookies. \"I got you these.\"\n\n\"Sweet, these are my favorite.\"\n\nMy limbs fill with warmth at his smile. \"Thanks again for taking me skiing.\" As he unwinds the twist tie that holds the bag shut, I hurry to add, \"I would have baked them myself, but Trick doesn't have baking stuff. Or an oven, for that matter.\" He has a frying pan, a soup pot, a can opener, and a hot plate. The next list I make him needs to be kitchen supplies:\n\nmixing bowl\n\nslotted spoon\n\ncheese grater\n\nfrying pan that doesn't look like death\n\n(toaster) oven?\n\nLogan pops an entire not-small cookie into his mouth. \"Tasty, thanks,\" he mumbles through the crumbs, and holds the bag out to me. \"Want one?\"\n\n\"It's, like, eight-thirty in the morning.\"\n\n\"Power breakfast.\" His eyes slip to where Trick comes out through the shop door, followed by a taller, older man who wears a battered black Spyder soft-shell jacket and a pair of jeans with holes in both knees. Judging by his shock of silver-black hair, he's probably in his late fifties.\n\n\"Oh, hey, Oli.\" Logan nods at the man.\n\n\"Mara,\" Trick says, racking a pair of skis. \"This is Oli. He's an old-time Tahoe boy. Been skiing Squaw since...\" He squints at Oli. \"How long now?\"\n\n\"Since I could pee standing up.\" Oli's smile adds wrinkles to his face and animates his already bright cobalt eyes.\n\n\"Nice to meet you.\" I hold out my hand.\n\nHe flashes Trick a bemused look. \"Good manners,\" he says to Trick, shaking my hand. To me, he says, \"You can thank your mama for that, because I know you didn't get them from this guy.\" He hooks a thumb at Trick.\n\n\"Well, she withheld food if I didn't greet people properly,\" I deadpan.\n\nTrick's mouth falls open. \"Is that true?\"\n\n\"Of course not!\"\n\nTrick laughs out loud, grabbing a pair of bindings someone has left on the counter. \"Right, sorry \u2014 okay, so you said you want to keep learning to ski.\" He glances at Oli, adding, \"All those years in San Diego, she never once skied.\" Under it, just a shadow, is an accusation. Then he adds, \"So I thought it might be a good idea for you to spend some time on the mountain with Oli. You won't find a better teacher \u2014 no offense, Logan.\"\n\nLogan waves him off, still working his way through the bag of cookies. \"None taken.\"\n\nI try to catch Trick's eye \u2014 I was hoping he would take me. But he doesn't glance up from the binding. \"Logan has been teaching me,\" I explain to Oli.\n\nLogan holds up the bag. \"Will teach for cookies. Want one?\"\n\nOli shakes his head but says, \"Mara, let's go out tomorrow and take some runs. It's important to also learn some respect for the mountain.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Oli. Love you, too,\" Logan mumbles. His cookie bag depleted, he returns to sorting the pile of rental forms next to him.\n\nOli scratches at the gray stubble of beard on his chin. \"No offense. I was the same way at your age. Thought the only thing that mattered was speed.\" Oli leans down to collect a stray form that has fallen to the ground and hands it back to Logan.\n\nI hurry to say, \"Logan wasn't like that. He really made sure I felt comfortable on the greens.\" A hint of a smile plays at Logan's mouth, but he doesn't look up from his sorting. \"Besides,\" I say, \"it's just skiing.\"\n\nTrick and Logan exchange sudden looks. \"Uh-oh.\" Trick raises his eyebrows dramatically. \"Now you've done it.\"\n\nOli stares at me intensely. \"It is far more than just skiing.\"\n\n\"Watch it, Mara,\" says Logan, holding up his hands in mock alarm. \"Next he's going to tell you the part about how the way you ski is the way you live.\"\n\nOli shoots him a sobering look. \"Laugh if you must, Mr. Never, but I'm an old man and mostly an idiot about everything in the world there is to know.\"\n\nTrick interjects. \"You're fifty-eight \u2014 hardly old. Talk to me in twenty years.\"\n\nIgnoring him, Oli presses on. \"I may be mostly an idiot, but not about this. I know skiing. I know this mountain. And I know that how a person skis this mountain speaks volumes about how this person walks the good earth we live on.\"\n\nWhere did Trick find this guy? \"Like if they go fast, they're a risk taker, you mean?\" I ask.\n\nOli fixes those dark blue eyes on me. \"Nah, that's just good fodder for ski documentaries. I'm not talking about black diamonds or out of bounds or any of the technical stuff. I'm talking about listening \u2014 about constant awareness and purpose and respect for the elements, for the shifting seasons and conditions, about knowing where you are in any given moment and the deep understanding of what track you're meant to take. I'm talking about love.\"\n\n\"Love?\" I glance at Trick to see if he's laughing, if this is a prank, but he's nodding as though listening to a familiar song.\n\n\"Aw, give it a rest, you old hippie.\" Logan grins, moving on from the rental forms to restock the lip balms and sunscreens in the spinning rack on the counter.\n\n\"It's a dance of love, skiing is,\" Oli says, affecting a Yoda voice. He moves a few steps toward me and I almost need to lean back. He's very tall, this snow oracle. \"I'll take you out tomorrow, introduce you properly to the mountain.\"\n\nI swallow. \"Okay.\"\n\nHe nods at Trick and heads for the exit. As the door swings shut, Logan catches my eye. \"Congratulations \u2014 you've got yourself your own personal snow guru.\" He yoga-bows at the closed door. \"Namaste, Mountain Master.\"\n\nI move to the window of the shop, peering out after Oli, but he's disappeared into the sea of people moving by with their skis and boards, getting ready for another day on the mountain. \"Um, how exactly will I find him? Will he just appear? Maybe send a droid with hologram directions?\"\n\nTrick grabs a pair of skis to take back to the shop. \"Well, he'll be parked in our driveway for the next few weeks, so you won't be able to miss him. And I don't know about the droid, but I wouldn't put it past him.\"\n\nAfter meeting Oli, I head to Elevation so I can get some work done. I feel behind and I need to study for a history quiz if I'm going to take part of the day off tomorrow to ski. After a few hours, I look up from my laptop and see Isabel at the counter, grabbing a cup of hot water from Natalie. Unwrapping her own chamomile tea bag, she dunks it, then carries it carefully to my table.\n\n\"What's up, buttercup?\" She peers at my laptop. \"AP history. That looks familiar.\"\n\nI roll my eyes. \"Fun with DBQs.\"\n\n\"Ugh, I know.\" She plops into the seat next to me.\n\n\"What are you up to?\" I ask, wondering vaguely when she has time to take an AP history course. It seems like she's always training.\n\n\"I'm going to hit the gym for an hour, then I have to study for a test tomorrow.\" She sits up a little. \"Do you want to come?\"\n\n\"To study for your test? No, thanks.\" I tap on my history book. \"Plenty of that right here.\"\n\n\"No, silly. To the gym. My mom could take us.\" She picks up her tea and takes a small sip. \"I could show you some ski-specific exercises since you're learning.\"\n\nIt's tempting. And a change of scenery would be nice. My phone buzzes, flashing CHEM! on my Google calendar. \"I would, but... I probably shouldn't. I'm supposed to be starting chemistry now. And I'm taking part of tomorrow off for some ski lessons.\"\n\nShe shrugs. \"Suit yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm going with a friend of Trick's, actually. Oli.\"\n\nShe perks up. \"Oli's in town?\"\n\nI frown. \"Is he not normally in town?\"\n\nIsabel winds the string of her tea bag around the bag itself, draining the liquid off, before she sets it on the table. \"Oli lives in his Airstream. So he lives anywhere he feels like. Sometimes he's here and sometimes\" \u2014 she pauses \u2014 \"he's not.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" He lives in his Airstream? I don't even know what that means. I picture someone hunkered down in a wind tunnel.\n\nIsabel must see the confusion on my face, because she laughs. \"His trailer. You know, those silver ones you tow behind a truck.\"\n\n\"Right, okay.\" Not a wind tunnel. That's what Trick must have meant when he said he'd be parked in our driveway. \"He lives in it year-round?\"\n\n\"Yep.\" She waves at a boy who comes through the front door. I've seen him before with Logan. One of the Frost Boys. \"Hey, Bodie. Do you know Mara?\" Bodie. The arm of the accountability triangle with the dentist appointment.\n\nHe nods at me, his blue-tipped hair falling in a fence in front of his eyes. \"My understudy! How's it going?\" He leans on the back of an empty chair. \"Iz, your mom's waiting.\"\n\nIsabel stands. \"Gotta scoot. Come hang out with us sometime.\"\n\n\"Thanks, I will.\" I watch them leave. They pass by the tall glass windows, laughing, Isabel giving Bodie a playful shove at something he says. I'm distinctly aware of how much Tahoe belongs to them, and also how much of this place I'm just borrowing while I sort myself out.\n\nMy phone buzzes again. \"Okay!\" I say to it, my face flushing as the guy at the next table raises his eyebrows at me over his coffee mug. I shrug sheepishly, hoping to convey Come on, it's totally normal to yell at your phone, especially one as bossy as mine.\n\nLater, I lean on the counter, watching Natalie make coffees for a group of skiers who just came in off the mountain.\n\n\"What's up?\" She adds a dollop of foam to each tiny cup.\n\n\"I left something in Trick's truck. Can I leave my stuff here and run out and get it?\" I motion to my table over by the fire, knowing if I pack everything up, someone will steal it.\n\n\"I'll keep an eye on it.\" She puts the four coffees on a tray and waves me out the door.\n\nI run to Trick's truck. He never locks it, so I grab my chem textbook and start heading back toward Elevation, when I hear two people arguing in the next row of cars.\n\n\"This is ridiculous, Beck. You're going, end of discussion. Your mother doesn't get to make plans on my weekend.\" A man stands near the open door of a shiny black Range Rover, frowning at the boy in front of him.\n\nBeck, his back to me, has his hands shoved in the pockets of his parka. \"Since when do you care what I do on the weekend?\"\n\nThe man folds his large arms across his chest. He has Beck's thick head of hair, but perfectly cut. \"You will show up at that dinner and you'll leave that crap attitude at home. That's not a request.\" He's not exactly shouting, but he might as well be. His voice echoes through the parking lot.\n\n\"Sir, yes, sir,\" Beck mumbles.\n\nThe man's hand flashes out and grabs Beck's shoulder. \"I'm not kidding, Beck. Lose the attitude.\" He gives him a shake, a pretty hard one, then gets in the Range Rover. Beck practically has to jump out of the way to avoid getting run over.\n\nI hurry back to Elevation, hoping neither one of them sees me.\n\nDressed in my new ski gear the next morning, I knock on the door of Oli's Airstream trailer, which Trick told me is named Powder. Oli must have rolled into our driveway late last night at some point, but I didn't hear him.\n\nHe appears in the doorway, dressed in a pair of ski pants and a flannel shirt. I have no idea what color his baseball hat used to be. I can just make out its barely readable JACKSON HOLE logo. \"Hiya there,\" he says, slurping a cup of coffee.\n\n\"Can I see Powder?\"\n\nI follow him inside the coffee-scented space of the Airstream. Trick told me over breakfast that Oli has lived in Powder for as long as Trick could remember. He travels the country in it, crashing at campgrounds and RV parks and with friends. \"How does he afford to do that?\" I asked through a mouthful of cereal.\n\nTrick's brow creased. \"He lives simply. Takes on the occasional seasonal job. I guess he figures it out,\" he said, shrugging. After a moment, he added, \"He's a master carpenter, so I suppose he makes some money that way. You should see the inside of Powder. She's a beauty, so much detail and so many salvaged things. It's a work of art, really.\"\n\nNow, standing inside Powder, I can see what Trick meant. \"Wow,\" I breathe, taking in the Airstream's cozy interior. It holds a bed covered in a faded quilt, a compact wooden table with padded bench seats, a narrow kitchen counter with cabinets, and a stall for a bathroom, all rich cherry wood, meticulously crafted. Hard to imagine fitting a whole life inside this small space, but he's done it. Photos dot the walls and he seems to have a soft spot for vintage postcards from ski resorts. Or maybe they weren't vintage when he first got them. \"This is really cool.\" My eyes rest on the row of paperbacks wedged into a built-in wood bookcase above one of the bench seats. None of the books from Ranfield's reading list.\n\n\"It's home,\" Oli says casually, but he looks pleased, like I'd complimented a favorite pet. \"You all set to get on the mountain?\"\n\nA half hour later, we're riding up the funi, our skis tucked neatly next to us. It's cold today, but bright, and I'm grateful for the smoky lens of my goggles as the funi lifts us up the mountain. As we climb, Oli asks me questions about what I've skied so far, and I fill him in on the Big Blue runs I did with Logan.\n\n\"What have you noticed so far about yourself as a skier?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe sprawls his legs out in front of him. \"What's your sweet spot? Some people like to go fast. Others like technical terrain. Some people want to feel the mountain beneath them, enjoy the ride up the lift.\"\n\n\"I just want to keep getting better,\" I say.\n\nHe studies me through his own smoky lens for a moment, then turns and points to a woman skiing swiftly down the mountain below us. \"See her?\"\n\nI follow the shot of her body before she disappears around a curve. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Did you see how clenched up on her poles she was, how her whole body was bent and rigid?\" He points out a man this time, with similar form. \"See that tension?\"\n\nI don't really see any tension; they just seem fast. \"Yeah, I guess,\" I lie.\n\n\"See how they ski \u2014 quick, aggressive? It's like a migraine on skis. Now see her?\" He points out a woman in a sleek silver parka and teal ski pants, her jet-black ponytail flying behind her. She's fast, but moves with a relaxed waterlike grace. \"She's not in a fight with the mountain. Look at that awareness.\"\n\nI'm not sure I'm seeing any awareness. I study the skiers moving below us, all so different. Some zipping past, some falling, some making wide smiles in the snow. \"And that's better?\"\n\nThe funi bumps into the Gold Coast building, and Oli gathers his gear. \"Not better. Just different. Who do you want to be on the mountain?\"\n\n\"I would like to not fall on my butt every five minutes,\" I say, collecting my skis and poles and following Oli's warm laugh off the funi.\n\nWe ski Big Blue two times, and I'm surprised at the muscle memory from my day with Logan. I figured I'd be starting from scratch, but my body sinks into the glide over the snow; it remembers. At the bottom of Big Blue, after the second run, Oli stops me. \"Remember, Mara, skiing is a dance between you and this mountain. And it's about listening. This time, as you ski down, really listen.\"\n\n\"To what?\"\n\n\"To everything.\" As he skis into the lift line, I let a giggle escape. Is this guy serious? I think of Logan bowing to him as he left the store yesterday, and stop myself from calling out to him, Yes, Mountain Master, listen Mara will. But I follow him because, hokey or not, I feel completely at ease right now.\n\nIn fact, this whole time with Oli, I haven't made a single list in my head and I haven't once felt that jittery, tense feeling I get, knowing I have homework waiting for me on the laptop.\n\nIt's a feeling I could get used to.\n\n\"Skiing?\" Josie frowns at me through the screen. \"Sounds horrifying.\"\n\n\"You'd be amazed, Jo \u2014 it's really fun.\" I sit on my bed, my knees tucked under me, the night outside purple through the window. \"Like flying.\"\n\n\"Flying's for birds. Are you a bird?\" I stick out my tongue at her and she giggles. \"Well, don't get hurt. I need my doubles partner back.\"\n\n\"Josie?\" I hesitate, inspecting my nails. \"Did you ever, you know, figure out who posted that video of me?\" Before I left, sitting on my bed back home, watching me pack, Josie had said, her voice fierce and protective, I will find out who did it, I swear. I know people say things like that and most of the time they're just words to make you feel better at the time. But, with Josie, they might actually be true. The intensity in her eyes had even scared me a little. Like maybe she might find out and then dispose of the body.\n\nNow she drops her gaze, revealing eyelids glazed in glittery silver eye shadow. \"I haven't yet.\"\n\nI hurry to say, \"It's okay. I didn't expect you to. Besides, I'm not sure I even want to know.\" In bed at night, listening to the pop and crackle of the fire, I often wonder if it would be better to know or if it's better this way. I'm far away in the mountains where I can't see any of them anyway. But then I keep wondering, wondering, wondering. I can't seem to let it go, shake it off, not worry about it.\n\n\"Mara?\" Josie peers into the camera. \"It would be fine to come back. No one's even talking about it anymore. You know people around here have the attention span of a fruit fly. Besides, last week, Jaelynn Chambers cut off all her hair, dyed it magenta, and got an eyebrow ring. A hoop. Believe me, no one's talking about you anymore.\"\n\n\"Are you serious?\" Jaelynn Chambers is student body president. Her dad is an important conservative congressman. He must be freaking out. Which, I'm sure, is the whole point.\n\n\"I think she looks great, but yesterday her mom picked her up.\" Jaelynn's mom never comes to school unless it's for a photo opportunity.\n\nMy phone buzzes next to me on the bed. A text from Logan:\n\nheard you rocked it up there today. want to go up tomorrow? i'm no mountain master but i buy hot chocolate \u2014 thx again for the cookies.\n\nHe's attached a photo of the empty cookie bag superimposed on a picture of Cookie Monster.\n\nJosie looks annoyed. \"Um, hello?!\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" I say sheepishly, pushing the phone away. \"I should go and call Mom. You know how she gets.\"\n\n\"I do \u2014 talk soon.\" She signs off.\n\nI stare at the blank screen, feeling like a lying jerk. I didn't say, That was Mom on the phone, so now I have to get going. But I implied it. Still, that's not why I feel guilty. It's that the whole time I was talking with her, I kept thinking about how I don't miss Ranfield at all. I miss Josie, but that's it. It's Tahoe. There's something about this place \u2014 the snow, the mountains, the dark green of the trees, even the cold bite of the air \u2014 that's acting as a kind of memory eraser. I felt it on the mountain today, like I'm being recalibrated by the uncomplicated pace here. By its simplicity.\n\nAnd I like it.\n\nPicking up my phone, I stare at the message from Logan. I text back:\n\ntime? place? I'll bring cookies.\n\nA minute passes. Then,\n\nfuni. 10. nom nom nom.\n\nI lie down on my pillows, my muscles already itching to be back on the mountain. Something else feels itchy, too, as if I'm forgetting something, but I can't place it. Should I have told Josie about Logan? Not that there's anything to tell. He has a girlfriend. Was I supposed to check in with Mom? I rack my brain. What else? I scan my phone, check my binders and lists.\n\nNope, nothing due today.\n\nWhatever it is, it can't be that big a deal if I can't remember, right? I'm not going to let it ruin the melty weight of my tired muscles, and before I can even brush my teeth or change into my pajamas, I'm falling into the heavy sleep a day on the mountain gives you.\n\nI get up early Friday morning to submit an assignment for AP chem. I probably should be working on my English homework today since I haven't even starting reading The Great Gatsby yet and the essay is due Monday, but I really want to go skiing with Logan. The book sits there on the coffee table, staring at me. \"I need PE credits, too!\" I say to its blue cover, its judgmental eyes following me out the door.\n\nOutside, my breath makes patches of fog in the morning air. Trick sits in his truck, letting it idle. I move past Oli's quiet trailer and notice his truck's missing. On the way down the hill, Trick glances sideways at me and clears his throat. \"So I got a call from that therapist guy, Dr. Elliot, yesterday afternoon \u2014 sorry, forgot to mention it last night before you turned in. Totally spaced it.\"\n\nMy stomach drops out. My appointment. That nagging itchy feeling that I was forgetting something last night. I missed my therapy appointment. \"Oh, no,\" I breathe, my heart skipping.\n\n\"Yeah, he said you could reschedule or just come in next week. Whatever works. Maybe give him a call later?\" Trick takes a right onto Squaw Valley Road, winding toward the Village.\n\nDespite the cold, my hands begin to sweat. \"I can't believe I did that. I went skiing. I completely forgot.\" My voice wavers in the cold air of the car.\n\nTrick's eyebrows lift at the sound of it. \"No harm, no foul. He's not even going to charge your mom for the session, which was cool of him.\" He pulls the truck into a parking spot.\n\nWhat's the chance Mom doesn't know about it?\n\nMy chest tightens. \"But is he going to tell Mom?\" I fiddle with the latch of my seat belt. \"Because that was part of the deal for me being here. That I see him. I can't believe I did that. I've never missed any appointment before.\"\n\nHe slides the keys from the ignition. \"You've never missed any appointment before?\"\n\n\"Not without calling first, without rescheduling.\" I tug more at the seat belt. Why won't it unlatch?\n\nTrick leans over and unclicks me. \"Wow, Mara versus the seat belt. Seat belt takes the first round,\" he teases.\n\nI'm not in the mood. \"Mom's going to kill me.\"\n\nHe gathers up his jacket and wallet. \"I doubt that.\"\n\nMy phone rings. Glancing at it, my heart picks up pace. We both stare at the incoming name on the screen. \"It was nice knowing you,\" I tell him. With a low chuckle, he pushes open the driver's-side door and leaves me in the truck to face the Wrath of Mom.\n\nI answer the phone.\n\n\"You completely skipped an appointment,\" she states, her voice echoing in a way that tells me she's driving.\n\n\"I know, I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"You can't stay up there if you can't stick to your commitments. That was part of the agreement. It was in your calendar.\"\n\nWait. I had checked my phone and hadn't seen it there. My body floods with hope. Could I possibly get off on a technicality? \"Mom, I checked my phone. It wasn't there.\" I don't mention that I checked my phone about four hours after I should have already been at the appointment. That doesn't seem relevant now, right?\n\nShe turns her phone into a wind tunnel with her sigh. \"Your brothers had the same thing yesterday. Their schedules were totally blank. I'm not sure what happened.\"\n\nI love technology. \"I'm sorry I didn't remember, Mom. But it wasn't there.\"\n\n\"You need to call Dr. Elliot. Today. Reschedule, okay?\"\n\n\"I will.\" Guilt needles me.\n\nBut before I can confess, she says, \"I have to run, Mara \u2014 I'm late,\" and then she's gone.\n\nLogan is waiting for me outside the funi building, checking his phone. I hurry to meet him, or whatever hurrying looks like in ski boots, like a drunken robot, probably. \"Sorry I'm late. Mom drama.\"\n\nHe zips his phone into his jacket and smiles at me. \"No problem. I don't practice today until two and I already did my gym reps.\" He takes a closer look at me, his smile fading. \"You okay?\"\n\nI try to look relaxed. \"Oh, sure. Let's get up there!\" We scramble through the gates and onto the funi. Logan leans our skis in the corner and stretches out on the bench perpendicular to mine. I try not to glance out the window as the funi lifts us out and up, my stomach clenching with that first swing out of the dock. I thought it would get easier each time, but it doesn't. Staring at my snow-caked boots, I try to shake off the list of our progress up the mountain that peppers my brain:\n\nNow we're as high as a tree\n\nNow we're as high as a three-story building\n\n\"What'd your mom want?\" Logan tries again.\n\n\"I just missed an appointment yesterday and she was checking on why.\"\n\n\"Was it important?\" He looks genuinely concerned.\n\n\"Not really.\" Logan Never does not need to know I'm seeing a therapist.\n\nHe watches me for a minute, waiting for me to elaborate. When I don't, he simply says, \"Okay,\" and rests his arm along the back of the bench. We stare out at the white world below us. \"But you can talk about it if you want,\" he adds.\n\n\"Thanks. It's really nothing.\" We're quiet, listening to the creak and shift of the funi. He's nice to even ask and my stomach gets swirly and strange watching him sit there, his long legs out in front of him. I clear my throat, trying not to think about how much I might like this boy. Because I definitely don't need to add that to the messy list of my life right now. A boy. A boy with a girlfriend. I try to focus on remembering some of the vocab for my French quiz on Monday.\n\nHow do you say Pull it together in French?\n\nEven if I don't fall as much as the first day I skied with Logan, I start off sluggish. After a couple of runs, though, I feel my body loosen and I start to trust the feel of the skis beneath me. Of course, as soon as I start to feel a sense of ease, just as I begin to move faster down the mountain, I catch an edge of my ski and end up on my butt.\n\nLogan skis over and offers his pole, but I don't reach to take it. \"Turns out, I suck at this whole skiing thing. So much for genetics,\" I say, staring up at him. \"Surprise!\"\n\n\"Are you kidding? You don't learn to ski overnight. It takes years. You're picking it up fast.\" He offers his gloved hand, and this time I grab it. As he hauls me up, my skis slip out from under me and I fall into his chest. \"Whoa, got ya.\" He steadies me, dropping his poles to put both hands on my shoulders. His closeness sends that unfamiliar shiver through me again, and I scramble to push away from him, launching myself backward. \"Careful!\" He tries to make a grab for me, but I end up on the ground again. He looks confused, but also like he's trying not to laugh at me. \"Okay, not sure what just happened there.\"\n\n\"Lost my balance.\" Because you're too cute and need to stop touching me, I keep myself from adding. I take a deep breath, thinking about that confident line I'd drawn through \"green runs\" on my Now List a couple of days ago. Not sure I've earned it.\n\nI follow him back to the Big Blue lift, wishing I could shed the feelings of frustration with each sift of snow that falls from my dangling skis. I'm not sure what's making me more frustrated, the skiing \u2014 or the way I can't stop thinking about how nice it had been to fall into Logan, to have his hands on my shoulders.\n\n\"Where's Isabel today?\" I ask brightly.\n\nHe shrugs. \"Not sure.\"\n\nMaybe I should add negligent boyfriend to the list.\n\nWhich is when it dawns on me.\n\nI'm still making a Logan Never List in my head. And it keeps getting longer.\n\nThe way he smiles with the corners of his mouth\n\nHow patient he is while he's teaching me to ski\n\nHow sweet he is with his dog\n\nHow hard he works at Neverland\n\nHow he never complains or seems stressed out\n\nHis face, in general \u2014 he just has a really nice face\n\nAnd body\n\nStop it. I don't have time for Logan lists.\n\nOr maybe I do.\n\nBecause it doesn't really count, right? I'm not breaking any rules. I'm not here very long and he's not available anyway. What was that thing Trick said this morning? No harm, no foul? I'm Tahoe Mara now. Be brave! (#9) I've never had time for a crush before. Crush, what a stupid word. What does it even mean? So what if I think he's adorable and sweet and looks really good in ski pants. I mean, who looks that good in ski pants? I'm allowed to look.\n\nAs he lifts the bar to get ready for another run, he says, \"Seriously, Mara \u2014 you're doing great out there. Trust me, it just takes time.\"\n\nIt just takes time. Good thing I happen to have a little more of that these days.\n\nBack at the top of the Big Blue, Logan and I are about to head down the mountain for a final run when someone calls out behind us. Beck slides up on skis. \"Hey, bunny hill,\" he says to me, his voice carrying a dark voltage just under the surface. \"You two want to hit Shirley with me?\"\n\nLogan kicks some snow from his skis. \"I haven't even done Gold Coast with her yet. I'm not taking her on Shirley Lake.\" He avoids looking at Beck, instead watching the light shift across the patch of distant lake. \"And I have practice in a half hour.\"\n\nBeck fiddles with his sunglasses. \"Shirley's for toddlers. She'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Do you think I can ski Shirley?\" I ask Logan, my heart quickening. \"Is it a green run?\"\n\n\"It's a blue, but you could handle Shirley.\" Logan bends down to adjust something with his bindings. When he stands, he says, \"Most parts of it at least. I have to get to practice, but don't let me stop you.\"\n\nAm I imagining annoyance in his voice?\n\nThe thought of skiing a more difficult blue terrifies me, but I don't want Logan to know that. \"Okay, yeah \u2014 I'll try Shirley.\"\n\nLogan's lips pinch together in a thin line before he exhales. \"Just remember your snowplow and try not to get going too fast, and \u2014\"\n\nBeck interrupts. \"Pizza slice, French fries, pizza slice \u2014 she's got this.\" He tugs on my jacket. \"Come on. Let's show you some real mountain.\"\n\n\"Later.\" Logan skis away, the familiar flash of his green jacket disappearing down the mountain. Wow, he's fast when he's not waiting for me.\n\nI follow Beck down the catwalk, my stomach dropping out as we come to the brim of a run. Shirley Lake looks hard and half of it is in shadow. I'm sure it's nothing to Beck, but I might as well be jumping off a building. \"Oh, wait,\" I say. \"Let me get your cell number in case we get separated.\" That's what Logan had done with me. Beck pulls out his phone, and I send him a quick text so he has my number. Tucking my phone back in my pocket, I take a deep breath. \"Okay, ready.\"\n\n\"This is an easy shoot,\" Beck assures me. \"And it's actually better if you go faster. Just follow me, okay?\" Before I can answer, he takes off down the mountain and doesn't seem to be stopping and waiting the way Logan always does. My body floods with a tingling blend of excitement and fear. Pizza slice. French fries. Pizza slice.\n\nChewing my lip, I push forward, my skis tilted inward. At first, I handle it, cutting across the mountain the way Logan showed me, carving a smile into the snow. Then I pick up pace, and suddenly it's too fast, too slippery. Halfway down, I turn too sharply, trees suddenly appearing ahead of me, a thicket of green in the blur of my vision. Too close. I can't stop, can't get my skis into a pizza slice in time, and end up yanking my body uphill to the right, the side of my helmet hitting the snow.\n\nOuch.\n\nPeople speed by me, hazy impressionistic shapes.\n\n\"Awesome!\" Beck materializes above me, blocking out the sky. \"That,\" he says, grinning, \"is what we call a yard sale!\"\n\n\"A what?\" I murmur, trying to sit up. I find snow everywhere. In my mouth, in my ear. Both of my skis have popped off. One is nearby, but I can't see the other one. Both of my poles stick out of the snow several feet away, and somehow I've managed to lose a glove.\n\nBeck hands me my other ski. \"A yard sale. Your stuff went flying \u2014 that was sick!\"\n\n\"I think I broke my face.\"\n\nBeck hoists me up, our faces so close our helmets almost touch. \"Looks pretty great from here.\" There's that magazine smile again.\n\nI hurry to reassemble my gear and put on my skis, and ski slowly to the bottom and over to the Shirley Lake lift, nestled in the deep bowl of the mountain. This is definitely a more challenging part of the mountain than what I've been skiing so far. Huge peaks rise around us, and the lifts carry skiers high up into them.\n\n\"Want to try again?\" Beck asks as we move into the lift line. He leans his shoulder into me playfully, flushing liquid nerves through my limbs.\n\n\"Better not. I think something isn't totally right with my left knee,\" I hurry to explain. \"Besides\" \u2014 I wave at the mountains around me \u2014 \"I've had enough trouble for one day.\"\n\n\"Aww, come on,\" he coaxes. \"Take another run with me. If it doesn't look like trouble, it's not worth your time.\"\n\nMy stomach must house multiple flare guns. \"Listen, peer pressure. I'm done for the day, okay?\" But Josie's newest addition to the list is poking me as we inch ahead in line. I glance sideways at Beck, at his mirrored glasses and auburn hair that curls from under his ski helmet, wondering if he's the kind of trouble she had in mind.\n\n\"Do you snowboard?\" I ask as we move into place to catch the lift.\n\n\"Sometimes. Why? You want to learn?\"\n\n\"Just wondering.\" The Shirley lift chugs into view behind us, lifting us up, up, up and out of the snowy Shirley bowl to the place where I can head back down the front section of the mountain. I settle into the shiver of the lift, the cold wind on my tender cheek, watching as, up ahead, skiers and boarders cut down the steep first Shirley shoot, snow rooster-tailing behind them, like surfers against a blank white ocean. Beck leans into me, pointing out other parts of the mountain, and the strange prickly awareness at the nearness of him feels like the start of trouble to me.\n\nLater Friday afternoon, nestled on the couch at Trick's with a bag of ice on my knee, I pull my binder onto my lap and read the essay prompt: \"How does Nick's role as an outsider impact his exploration of Tom, Daisy, and Gatsby's world?\" His role as an outsider. I should be able to answer that. If I'd actually read the book. Feeling the familiar creep of overwhelm, I toss the binder back onto the table and glance at my phone.\n\nFour messages. All from Mom.\n\nI click the fourth message and Mom's voice spills out, edged and frustrated. \"Mara, I've been trying to get ahold of you all afternoon.\"\n\nIt doesn't even ring when I call her back. \"Mara?\"\n\n\"Hi, Mom.\"\n\n\"Where have you been?\"\n\n\"I, well, I went skiing.\"\n\n\"You went skiing?\" Skiing comes out as if I'd said smoking.\n\n\"I started learning a few days ago. Logan Never took me. I was on Shirley \u2014\"\n\n\"What were you doing on Shirley Lake already?! That's too hard for a beginner.\"\n\n\"Practicing my pizza slice, French fries,\" I try to joke, but she doesn't laugh. Remembering her dark look at Beck's exit that first day in Neverland, I decide not to mention him at all. I then spend no less than five minutes proving to her that I haven't turned into a ski-bum derelict.\n\nWhen she seems more convinced, she asks, \"Did you reschedule your appointment with Dr. Elliot?\"\n\nOops. \"I will.\"\n\n\"Do that right when you get off with me, okay? I'm not sure how much longer his office will be open today. And you have a Gatsby essay due Monday.\"\n\n\"This live Google reminder brought to you by Lauren James.\"\n\n\"Mara.\"\n\n\"Mom, it's due Monday. I have the whole weekend. I've always gotten my work done on time before. You don't need to remind me.\" But as I say it, I know that even with the whole weekend, I'll be pushing it. I adjust the ice on my knee.\n\n\"Have you at least read the book?\" she presses.\n\n\"Yes,\" I lie. \"Rich people behaving badly. Otherwise known as the view out any window in Squaw Valley.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" I hear the smile in her voice. \"I'm just checking. You seem... different.\"\n\n\"I do?\" She doesn't mean it this way, but she has no idea how good it is to hear that.\n\nMaybe Tahoe is working.\n\nSomeone knocks at the front door of Trick's cottage later that evening. Oli pokes his head in, carrying a white sack of something that smells savory and delicious. My stomach rumbles on impact. \"Is there a hungry skier in here who needs some lasagna?\"\n\n\"Me!\" I set the bag of ice I've been using for my knee on the floor and toss Gatsby onto the coffee table.\n\nOli moves around the kitchen, opening and shutting drawers and the fridge, and then, miraculously, I have a plate of lasagna and salad on my lap. He sits on the coffee table next to me. \"That's April's lasagna \u2014 Isabel's mom. It's the best in the world.\" He motions for me to try it.\n\nI take a bite. Wow. \"Mmmmmm.\"\n\n\"Right?\"\n\n\"This is incredible.\" I try not to eat like a wild animal who's been starved for days, but I can't really help it. What is it about skiing that makes me want to eat a house each time I'm done?\n\n\"I ran into Logan at Neverland.\" Oli folds his long legs gracefully between the table and the sofa like someone used to maneuvering his body into small places. \"Heard you tackled Shirley today.\"\n\nI wipe my face with a napkin before answering. \"I'm pretty sure it was the other way around. And I might have done something weird to my knee.\"\n\nHe runs his hands through his hair, his blue eyes sympathetic. \"Anyone can fall anytime. None of us is a stranger to icing a knee.\" Oli picks up the sloppy bag of ice and moves to put it in the sink. \"But you were liking it up there?\"\n\n\"I was.\" Saying it, I realize this is more than just a little true. Skiing terrifies me, but in a delicious, roller-coaster way. \"I know I'm no good at all, but there's just something about being up there \u2014 the air is different, the sky. It's...\" I search for the right word. \"Magnetic.\"\n\nOli grins. \"Yep, you've got it.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The ski bug.\" He pats my arm. \"The mountain got under your skin.\"\n\nAnd like that, I realize he's right, it has. And not just the mountain. Something else. Its newness appeals to me, too. And the fact that no one is grading me. I mean, there's no chance I'm going to the Olympics. Ever. I'll never even race competitively, so I can just fall into it on my own terms without some larger system clutching its clipboard and telling me Yes, that's good or No, be better. I can't remember the last time I put time toward something just to do it and not because it might look good on a college application.\n\nOli fills a glass with water and brings it back to me. I don't know what it is that makes him unusually easy to talk to. Unlike most adults. \"Maybe you could take me up again? Teach me how to better handle the blues. I'm not sure Beck's the best teacher.\"\n\nI don't miss his frown as he moves back into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and helps himself to one of Trick's beers. I hear the pop of it, then the clatter of the bottle cap in the sink. He holds it up to my water glass. \"To getting back on the mountain.\"\n\nI clink it against his bottle. \"Cheers.\"\n\nThe next day, before he leaves for the shop, Trick makes me toast and hands me a mug of coffee with extra milk, his eyes drifting over my bruised cheek. I woke up this morning to a bluish-purple welt the size of a small peach. Trick zips up his jacket and pulls on his beanie, but hesitates, his hand on the door. \"That fire should hold up fine.\" He frowns at my laptop. \"You shouldn't be working on a Saturday.\"\n\n\"You're working on a Saturday,\" I point out.\n\n\"Fair enough.\"\n\n\"I have to get this essay done.\" Small bubbles of panic started erupting in my belly early this morning. Gone was the feeling of extra time, replaced with feeling madly behind in my schoolwork.\n\n\"Who am I to mess with a good system?\" Trick nods good-bye and disappears outside, letting in the smell of fresh snow.\n\nI sip some coffee and take a few bites of toast before pulling my computer onto my lap. I'd finished Gatsby in the small hours of morning, surprised to find myself sucked into the story, feeling a tie to Nick I hadn't expected \u2014 the outsider drawn suddenly into all the glamour and secrets of Gatsby's world. I'd jotted some notes for my essay as I read, so now I just had to write it. Except the page in front of me remains infuriatingly blank.\n\nI study the quote from the first page of the novel. I scribbled it down yesterday, the advice Nick's father had given him: \"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,\" he told me, \"just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had.\" At first, I thought he meant money and privilege, but the more I page back through the book, the more I think Nick's advantage is his ability to really see people. Maybe an outsider has this advantage?\n\nMaybe because he knows he'll be leaving soon.\n\nMy phone bleeps with a picture text from Will. His weekly Shells of Wisdom. The sight of them there, carefully arranged, floods me with homesickness. This time they spell out one of Will's favorite expressions, something he says to us to keep us going when we're on hikes or to remind us that the hard work will be worth it later on: DIG IN.\n\nI mean to dig in, I plan on digging in, but I don't. I pop one of Trick's Warren Miller movies into the VCR and watch skiers and snowboarders do crazy things on mountains around the world.\n\nI can write the essay tomorrow.\n\nLate Sunday afternoon, I give up and submit my not-very-good Gatsby essay. I feel a little sick that it's not better, but I'm tired of working on it. I stomp around the cottage, trying to wake up both feet, which have fallen asleep from my sitting so long on the couch. The cottage hums with emptiness. Trick is out somewhere with a friend. He never seems to bring his friends here, usually meets them in the Village.\n\nMaybe he's avoiding me.\n\nI can't believe it, but I actually miss my little brothers and their LEGO mine field in the hallway. And Mom yelling up the stairs for me to fold my laundry. And the smell of dinner floating through the house. My stomach rumbles at the thought, and I make some soup for dinner, crumbling Ritz crackers into it.\n\nAfter doing the dishes, I Skype with Josie. \"Your face belongs in a bad action movie,\" she tells me, which is Josie-speak for worried. \"What did you do?\" When she finds out I fell skiing, she says, \"There better be a cute snowboarder involved.\"\n\n\"Skier.\"\n\nNow she's interested. \"Oh, really?\"\n\nMaybe she can't see my blush through the bruising. \"It's nothing. He knows Trick.\"\n\n\"I want daily updates.\"\n\n\"There will be nothing to update you on, I promise.\"\n\n\"Don't make that promise.\" She sighs. \"I hate to do this to you, but I have to go. I have sooooo much chem homework.\"\n\n\"Me too. Talk soon.\" Only I don't really feel like tackling my chemistry right now. Instead, I play some music on my laptop and re-sort both of the kitchen cabinets, moving all the boxed foods into one and all the canned foods into another. I alphabetize the cans: beans, corn, olives, tomatoes. Wait, should diced tomatoes go after corn? I set both cans on the shelf and back away from the alphabetizing. I'm starting to care a little too much about diced-tomato can placement. Wandering into the bedroom, I refold all my clothes onto their small shelf, organize my toiletries along the back of the bathroom sink, dab some of my relaxing lavender oil behind my ears (#5!), and poke needlessly at the fire.\n\nI miss Josie. We used to study for chem together.\n\nIn my head, I make a list of synonyms for alone:\n\ndeserted\n\nisolated\n\nabandoned\n\nsolitary\n\nThey all seem sad and negative, and I wonder why I can't think of any positive words for alone.\n\nStill no sign of Trick, I brush my teeth and crawl into bed. Falling asleep, I imagine I can hear a storm coming in, the wind stepping up a notch, bringing snow and dark purple air.\n\nTurns out, I wasn't imagining the storm.\n\nI wake in the dawn of Monday to Trick knocking about outside in the woodbin. Curled in my blankets, I scoot to the window and pull aside the shade. I'm met with a wall of snow halfway up the window and more still falling.\n\nCongratulations, Mara. You now live in a snow globe.\n\nAfter an hour of helping Trick dig out (Will had no idea how literal his shells would end up being), we head to the Village and I find a table at Elevation. It feels good to escape my solitude and settle into the sounds of other people working around me, but outside, the snow picks up, chasing most of us home by midafternoon. Trick pokes his head through the caf\u00e9 doors at two and motions for me to follow him. We have to redig the path to the cottage we had made only hours ago.\n\nPeople spend a lot of time in Tahoe just trying to get in and out of their houses.\n\nProving my point, Dr. Elliot calls Tuesday to tell me we'll have to reschedule our appointment because he actually hasn't been able to dig out of his house. Half-proud\/half-sick, I let him know about the B+ I received on my Gatsby essay, without sharing the note at the end from my English teacher that my eyes immediately snagged on: Not as fully developed as some of your other work.\n\nMy first B of any kind on an English paper in high school.\n\n\"How'd that feel?\" Dr. Elliot asks into the phone, and I imagine him sitting in his green wool vest by a fire somewhere.\n\nI try to joke. \"Well, I didn't spontaneously combust!\" Afterward, I realize that combustion isn't what worries me. I could have made that essay better, but I chose to watch ski movies and sort the cottage and stare out at the snow instead of making it better. I didn't put in the necessary time. Only that's not really what bothers me. What bothers me is that it actually doesn't feel as bad as I thought it would.\n\nSpontaneous combustion would be easier because it would let me know I blew it. Bam! Disintegration for not trying your hardest.\n\nThis feels more dangerous, like erosion. And you don't really notice erosion until it's wiped out an embankment or something. And then it's too late.\n\nOn Thursday evening the skies finally clear. A pot of soup bubbling on the hot plate, I'm settling into the couch with my math homework when Beck texts. Attached is a picture of the gray-white haze of an incoming storm. It looks like it was taken at the top of Big Blue. Tahoe shines like a slice of nickel beneath its sleeping mountains. A scrawling script over the photo reads:\n\nMost people are on the world, not in it. \u2014 John Muir\n\nI try to ignore my sudden sensation of falling as I text back:\n\nwow, deep. you should post that on tumblr next to a photo of kittens wearing pajamas.\n\nHe texts back immediately:\n\nbrat.\n\nThen sends:\n\njust out of curiosity, is there a mr. mara in san diego?\n\nMy chest tightens.\n\ni don't have time for boys.\n\nInstantly:\n\nis that a double-dog dare?\n\nNerves buzzing, I type but don't send:\n\ni'm allergic to dogs.\n\nMy sweaty fingers leave damp prints on the phone. I've opened a door with Beck wider than I should have. Taking a breath, I remind myself, Get in a little trouble, and add a googly-eyed smiling puppy face to my unsent text, one that has little hearts for eyes, and hit SEND.\n\nSaturday morning, I push through the doors of Elevation, inhaling the warm caf\u00e9 air, the mocha-cinnamon smell of the place. I gaze around the packed room buzzing with people enjoying their late-morning coffees. With all the snow this week, the resort is crazy busy today.\n\nNatalie sees me and gives me the kind of wave she reserves for locals. Leaning across the glass case that holds the pastries, she says conspiratorially, \"You want a free latte? I made it with whole milk instead of nonfat. You'd think from the woman's reaction, I'd laced it with toilet bowl cleaner.\" Finn snort-laughs from behind the espresso machine.\n\nI grin. \"I'll take it, thanks.\" She hands it over.\n\nMiraculously, I find an empty table near the bathroom and slide into a chair. I have a disturbing amount of calculus homework to get through this weekend and want to make sure I get some time to ski. Within minutes, Natalie appears at my side, looking almost apologetic. She holds a fruity-looking scone on a plate. \"From him.\" She sets the plate down, rolling her eyes at someone over my shoulder.\n\nBeck materializes, carrying his own chair. \"Hey, Mara-velous.\"\n\n\"Clever.\" I start up my laptop, actively avoiding eye contact with him. I spent the last two days regretting the silly puppy face I'd sent him, which he'd never responded to, and secretly hoping it had been lost in some kind of emoticon, cyber-pet graveyard somewhere. I should never have texted him back. I blame Josie and her Get in a little trouble #12. \"Not hungry,\" I tell him, pushing the scone away.\n\n\"Hey, it's the second-best thing for a\" \u2014 he glances at my book \u2014 \"calculus study session.\"\n\n\"What's the first?\"\n\n\"Me.\"\n\nTrying to ignore the buzz in my belly, I take this opportunity to look him straight in the eyes. His gorgeous hazel eyes. I take a breath to steady my nerves. \"Just out of curiosity, do girls ever actually vomit when you say stuff like that? I have a really strong stomach, but, you know, some people are a little more squeamish.\"\n\nHe tips his head back and laughs. \"Wow, you sure make a guy work for it.\"\n\nDespite my assertion, I don't have a strong stomach at all. Quite the opposite. And I'm not a girl who makes guys do much of anything, except maybe move out of the way if they're standing in front of my locker. But he doesn't know any of this and my competitive side takes over. I shrug. \"I'm an overachiever.\"\n\n\"So I've heard.\" Leaning forward in his chair, he tilts his head to the side, his eyes intense yet somehow still smiling. \"Miss Perfects don't come along every day. Especially ones who can shred.\"\n\nMy body turns to liquid. He's seen the YouTube. My head swimming, I tell him, \"I actually have some work I need to do.\" Game over.\n\nHe notices, and softening his voice, he says, \"Listen, I think what you did was amazing.\"\n\n\"Right, sure you do.\" I shake my head, eyes on my screen, even though I'm not seeing anything there.\n\nHe leans on the table. \"Seriously. And brave.\"\n\nHe's really laying it on thick now. \"Don't you have somewhere else to be right now? Aren't you actually supposed to be independently studying something?\"\n\n\"On a Saturday?\" Scooting his chair even closer, so our knees touch beneath the table, he says, \"This isn't a line, I swear. I do think what you did was brave. That whole world you're in? I looked up your school's web page. It's insane. All that stress, all that pressure, all those other people telling you you're not good enough unless you compete for their praise all the time? It's a judgment factory. Personally, I don't subscribe to that whole ambition paradigm we get sold from the time we're in preschool. It's garbage. You are who you are and you know what you know and everything else is one big first-world power party. It makes me sick. So, yes, I think what you did was brave. Laugh if you want. Don't believe me, whatever. I just want to hang out with you.\" He sits back into his chair, folds his arms across his chest, and waits. Your move, Mara-velous.\n\nI wrap my shaking hands around my latte. Even if what he's saying right now feels like the truest thing I've heard in a long time, I still don't want to get sucked in. \"Is that why you stopped racing?\" I ask, setting down my coffee and closing the lid of my laptop.\n\n\"It just stopped being my scene, all that competition.\" He says it the way someone would say toxic waste. \"So I got into freeskiing instead. Racing was too much like school. Everything's about winning and rankings and being the best. I hated it. I don't exist so my dad can brag about my r\u00e9sum\u00e9 to his friends.\"\n\nFrowning, I think about the argument with his dad I'd seen accidentally in the parking lot. I'm no stranger to this type of boy at Ranfield, the I have nothing to prove to daddy boy. Most of them spend their time watching obscure independent films, quoting dead philosophers they haven't actually read, and have no guilt burning through said dad's bank account. \"But what about your own goals? Wanting achievements for yourself, not just because of your dad?\"\n\nHe shrugs. \"I live for the basic stuff, like being on this beautiful mountain with friends, or\" \u2014 he breaks off a piece of scone and pops it into his mouth \u2014 \"this scone. You should try it; it's delicious. I just want to enjoy the things I already have and not worry about all the self-imposed Oh please let me be impressive and important stuff because it's not actually as important as we all try to make it out to be.\"\n\nI'm about to call him on his pretention, about to tell him that wanting to be successful in school or having dreams bigger than eating a scone doesn't make me a slave to some corrupt ambition system out there, but then again \u2014 does it?\n\nHe might have a point.\n\nI want to ask him more, but suddenly Isabel's banging on the window of the caf\u00e9, sleek in her racer uniform, cheeks flushed and hair braided into a red rope. It's Beck's turn to roll his eyes. \"Oh, goody. The morality police.\" Our eyes track her as she makes her way around the caf\u00e9 windows, pulls open the door, and comes inside.\n\nIsabel arrives at our table, her eyes just a little too wide as she glances between us. \"Hey, Mara. Beck.\"\n\n\"Aren't you racing?\" I ask, my voice light, trying to push back against some of the intensity she brought into the caf\u00e9 with her. Maybe she's pumped up on race endorphins or something?\n\n\"Trick's fixing my binding. Lucky we're racing at Squaw today. What are you two up to?\" She shoots a dark look at Beck. \"Signing her up for one of your slacker seminars?\" She tries to play it off as funny, but she's too amped and it comes out sharp-edged.\n\nHe takes it in stride, breaking off another bite of the scone. \"If I offered seminars, that would be highly hypocritical of me, wouldn't it?\" He grins up at her. \"How's my favorite praise junkie?\"\n\nShe rolls her eyes. \"Nice. Mara, you'll find that for our friend Beck here, anyone who might want to do something in life, who might actually want to try, is a praise junkie. Sorry, am I interrupting the part where you tell her that we should just live life for the moment, enjoy this beautiful mountain and nothing else?\"\n\nBeck gives me an amused look. \"I might have mentioned it.\"\n\n\"Being predictable and being laid-back are not the same thing,\" she tells him.\n\nAs they continue to argue, I stop listening. This clearly isn't their first time having this particular fight, and besides, something outside distracts me.\n\nLogan.\n\nHe and some of the other Frost Boys walk past in their racing suits, laughing as one of the boys, obviously telling a story, gesticulates wildly. Logan catches my eye and gives me that relaxed wave of his, before his gaze slips back to his friends. I force my attention to Isabel, her hands on her hips, still arguing with Beck, and I flush with irrational anger. Not all of us can have laid-back adorable ski racer boyfriends, so maybe she should mind her own business. It's not like I'm going to marry Beck. I'm not even here very long.\n\nI stand, interrupting them. \"So Beck and I were just about to head up to High Camp. Want to come?\" I start collecting my things. Beck hops up next to me, taking my new announcement in stride.\n\nIsabel frowns. \"I'm still racing today.\"\n\n\"Oh, bummer.\" Beck blinks at her, a look of mock disappointment on his face.\n\nAs I start to move past her, she tugs my sleeve, pulling me aside. \"Be careful, okay? Most girls end up needing an emotional hazmat suit with this one.\" She glares over my shoulder at Beck, who blows her a kiss.\n\n\"Thanks for the heads-up.\" My voice is colder than I mean it to be.\n\nStung, she takes a step back. \"Your funeral.\"\n\nBeck and I push through the door into the wet winter air, and I force myself not to look back at where Isabel still stands, watching us leave.\n\nAs we weave through a throng of skiers, I try to study Beck without his noticing. Which probably makes it look like I'm about to sneeze. His moss-colored down jacket is almost the same color as his eyes, which I'm sure he does on purpose. It's clear he knows how good-looking he is, but it also strikes me that he seems harmless. As far as bad boys go, he doesn't seem very, well \u2014 bad.\n\nAt least he's not your generic brand of bad influence. No motorcycle, no piercings, no drugs, no loud parties trashing his parents' beach house (at least, that I know of). He doesn't do his homework and rambles on (and on) about society's messed-up systems, but as slackers go, he never seems stoned or out of it. He broods, sure, and when he rants, he sounds a lot like the coffeehouse hipster crowd at Ranfield with their heavy-framed glasses and obscure music interests. But he's not like them, either. I don't know where he fits, and something in me, something I'm trying very hard not to listen to, wants to know what makes him come with Isabel's warning label.\n\n\"After you.\" He motions me into the wide elevator that takes us to the tram, but he's quiet as we transfer the few short yards across to the car itself, finding us two spots against the wall of windows since the benches on the narrow ends are already taken. The tram operator announces that we will now be lifting from 6,200 feet to 8,200 feet and it will take eight and half minutes to get to High Camp.\n\nMy stomach lurches as we lift up out of the valley, and I see Beck watching the ski race over by the Red Dog lift, the sponsor banners bright against the white hill, the packs of racers moving about in their sleek uniforms.\n\n\"Do you ever miss it?\" I ask, following his gaze.\n\nHe looks guilty at being caught watching it. \"What? No, not ever.\"\n\nI wonder if that's true.\n\n\"It's weird,\" he says, turning and leaning against the glass wall. \"I can actually pinpoint the day it changed for me. It wasn't anything gradual; at least I didn't think so at the time.\" The tram carries us up through the sky, the wide snowscape stretching all around and below us, the parking lot of the Village growing small in the distance.\n\nMy body feels shivery and strange, suspended in too much air, and I want him to keep talking to distract me from the thought of plummeting to my death.\n\nNow we're as high as a tree\n\nNow we're as high as a four-story building\n\n\"When was that?\" I manage.\n\nHe slips his hands into his jacket pockets. \"I was fourteen. We were racing at Sugar Bowl and I'd just finished a particularly grueling round of gates. It wasn't my best run, but it wasn't my worst. I'd placed maybe third. But when I got to the bottom, I pulled off my goggles and looked around at all the people cheering, at all the sponsor banners, at all the other racers, and there was my dad in the crowd, standing with his arms crossed. And he just looked so... disappointed. Right then, a switch flipped. I took off my skis and walked away. That was it for me.\"\n\nA shadow ghost of something passes through me. \"Because of too much pressure from your dad?\"\n\nHe shakes his head. \"Nah, it was all of it. Never being good enough for him, sure. But also the whole scene \u2014 the busy weekends, the constant worry about times, the workouts in the gym, the practices, the other skiers and their intense attitudes, everyone competing with each other, backstabbing each other even though we were supposed to be teammates. The stress. It made me question everything, how driven we all are by these arbitrary goals. I was so sick of it.\" He pulls out a pair of mirrored Maui Jim sunglasses and slips them on against the glare of the bright day. \"What changed for you?\" he asks. \"What made you go all Captain Paper Shredder?\"\n\nI try to chuckle at his joke, but it catches in my throat. It still makes me sick to think about that terrible day and the YouTube video. I stare down into the sweeping valley, the rooftops, and the wide snowy yawn of Squaw Valley beyond. Since sixth grade, I've spent all my time building my life at Ranfield, a life that would turn into a golden key to an unknown future door. It's crazy how quickly it has evaporated like fog behind me, how far I feel now from everything that had seemed so important and crushing and desperate.\n\n\"It was a little like what happened with you,\" I say.\n\nWe watch the valley spool away beneath us, swaying into each other with the swing of the tram as it passes the tower. We stay like that, our sides pressed against each other, pretending to listen to the tram operator talk about how Walt Disney, who was acting as the grand marshal of the 1960 Winter Olympic Games, saw these rocks beneath us and got the idea for the Thunder Mountain ride. The operator goes on to tell us that at the highest point of this trip, we will be 550 feet up, high enough to fit the entire Washington Monument underneath us, but I register his crackly voice as backdrop, my whole body fixating on the heat of Beck next to me, on how nice it feels to just float up the mountain with this boy who thought it was brave of me to rip up those tests. I even forget to worry about the car snapping loose and dropping to the valley floor below. Well, at least I mostly forget.\n\nFinally, the car docks, the sliding door opening so we can exit to High Camp. I follow Beck out into a hallway, trying not to give away how nice it feels to be on solid ground. We move up some stairs and out onto a sundeck. He points out the pool, caked with snow, a few blue bits peeking through, and the circle of blue hot tub steaming. We dodge a pack of tiny ski-lesson kids, one sobbing, \"There's a bug in my jacket,\" and I smile sympathetically at the young ski instructor who tries to get the little girl's coat off over her gloves, mumbling, \"Probably not a bug, honey.\" It makes me miss Seth and Liam. Mental list:\n\nSkype with brothers\n\nsend them Squaw stickers for their scooters\n\nWe pass a massive glass dome that spills light into the restaurant on the level below, and head to the railing, taking in the view of Lake Tahoe and the mountains beyond. From here, everything is rock and snow and pines and that wide blue lake. \"You must never get tired of this view.\" I breathe deep, the wind catching my hair so I have to hold it back with one hand.\n\nBeck shakes his head. \"Never.\"\n\nA woman walks over and leans on the railing near us. She wears a down jacket that shines pale pink like an abalone shell and has her back to the view, her glossy dark hair spilling out from under a fuzzy white hat that looks like someone fastened a baby polar bear to her head. She snaps her gum and fiddles with her phone. \"Come here,\" she says to the guy with her, and they take a selfie with the view in the background. She fiddles with her phone again, probably posting the photo somewhere.\n\nHe stares out over the vista, his hands in the pockets of his designer jeans. \"See, babe, it's totally worth it, right? Coming up here?\" He tries to catch her eye, but she doesn't look up from her phone.\n\n\"There.\" She pockets her phone. \"Ugh, this is boring. Let's hit the bar.\" The man looks disappointed as they head in the direction of the restaurant.\n\nBeck frowns, his gaze following them, and even though I can't see them, I can feel his eyes narrow behind his sunglasses. \"I hate people like that. They come up here, but they don't even see any of it.\"\n\nThe couple disappears back inside the tram building. I shrug. \"Some people just don't think about things like views. They're probably not, you know, nature people.\"\n\n\"Idiots,\" Beck growls, his tone surprising me. \"Just watch \u2014 because of people like that, we'll end up having to live on the moon in tiny metal boxes.\"\n\nI turn back to the view and give him a small nudge with my body. Trying to lighten the mood, I tease, \"Well, we should go push them off the tram. I have no interest in lunar condo living.\"\n\nHe gives his head the tiniest of shakes as if clearing an unwanted thought and tries to smile, but that shadow of annoyance lingers. \"Sorry. But if you're going to be such a clueless moron, don't come to my Tahoe.\"\n\nA burst of laughter and stomping feet fills the deck behind us. I turn just as a bride emerges from the side door of the tram building, her dress fluttering beneath a white down jacket. Already on the deck, the groom wears a black down jacket and tux pants and it takes me a minute to realize they're both in ski boots. They're surrounded by a pack of bridesmaids and groomsmen hauling skis and also dressed in ski-themed bridal outfits. Laughing, the group heads toward the slopes near Bailey Creek Run. \"Hey, look.\" I tug at Beck's jacket sleeve. \"They love your Tahoe.\"\n\n\"Awesome,\" he says, though without much energy behind it. Awesome, I'm learning, is a go-to placeholder word in Tahoe. Beck's mood seems to have diminished along with the oxygen levels.\n\n\"Want to show me around inside? Isn't there an Olympic museum?\"\n\nInside, we wander around the small museum, squinting at the black-and-white photos and watching a short video about the 1960 Games. Near a wide window, we come across a life-size cutout of a man in an Olympic racer suit. I get an idea. \"Hey, take a picture, okay?\" I hand Beck my phone.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\nI lean in and plant a big kiss on the cutout face of the skier. \"Take the picture,\" I mumble through the smooch.\n\nShaking his head, Beck takes the picture, but he's smiling again. \"What's that all about?\"\n\n\"Now List number seven. Kiss a cute snowboarder,\" I tell him, grabbing my phone and texting the picture to Josie.\n\nBeck tucks his hands in his pockets. \"Um, that's Jonny Moseley. He's a skier. And, like, forty years old now.\"\n\nI squint at the cutout. \"He doesn't look forty.\"\n\nClearly enjoying this, Beck says, \"Old picture.\"\n\nShrugging, I check the photo again. \"Hmmm... So I guess I just sent a super-creepy picture to my friend.\"\n\n\"Little bit, yeah.\" He takes a step toward me. We're alone in the museum, the late-morning sun lighting up streaks of dust in its beams. \"But if you're looking to kiss a snowboarder to, you know, check that off a list, I'm happy to oblige.\"\n\nMy mouth turns into a desert. \"Oh.\" Oh? A boy wants to kiss me and I just said, Oh?! I try to recover. \"I said cute snowboarder.\"\n\n\"Aww, be nice \u2014 I'm a little bit cute.\" He's very close now \u2014 I can smell his spicy soap. He tips his head down, waiting for me. My mind makes a ten-second speed list.\n\nReasons to kiss Beck:\n\nHe's magazine cute.\n\nHe has a good mouth.\n\nHe smells like pine trees and spice.\n\nHe's offering.\n\n#7!\n\nBut in the exact same ten seconds, the opposite list tries to scribble over it:\n\nHazmat suit!\n\nI don't really feel like that about him \u2014 do I?\n\nHe's not Logan (grrrrrr, stop thinking about Logan).\n\nI'm not a girl who kisses random boys.\n\nAnd yet, maybe in the spirit of Tahoe Mara, I go with list 1.\n\nSo I kiss him. I grab him by his down-jacketed shoulders and pull him into me. Apparently, it doesn't matter how much I think I like or don't like Beck Davis, because kissing him feels like that moment right before falling on skis \u2014 that exhilarating stomach-dropping tug \u2014 and his warm mouth erases everything on list 2.\n\n1. Learn to ski: green runs, blue runs, black runs??\n\n2. Internet cleanse (no social media, no news, Skype okay!)\n\n3. Meditation \u2014 at least 10 minutes a day!!\n\n4. Sleep until 8 on a school day when I'm not sick\n\n5. Essential oils to relax \u2014 lavender, chamomile, orange\n\n6. Simplify & downsize!!\n\n7. Kiss a cute snowboarder!! (Josie's suggestion)\n\n8. Breathe! (obviously)\n\n9. Be brave (from Will)\n\n10. Read for fun? (see attached suggested book lists)\n\n11. Get to know Trick McHale\n\n12. Get in a little trouble\n\nKissing Beck translates into an afternoon of manic energy at Trick's cottage. I do four homework assignments and make dinner, but I can't seem to stop picturing the moment I pulled Beck in to kiss me. Even with chem formulas swirling in my brain, I can't stop thinking about how soft his mouth was or the weight of his hands on my back.\n\nI'd scratched out #7, but I'm pretty sure it was a bad, bad idea.\n\nI blame Josie.\n\nOn the other hand, I think this means I can cross off #12, too.\n\nTrick comes through the door just as I'm spooning from-scratch minestrone soup into bowls. As he hangs up his jacket, I set out a plate of warm, sliced French bread with butter and a green salad.\n\n\"Whoa, what's all this?\" He pulls his beanie off and tosses it onto the couch. \"What's the occasion?\"\n\nI keep myself from shouting, I kissed Beck Davis! and slip into my chair. \"In the real world, you don't need an occasion to make dinner. You just get hungry, go to the grocery store, and, you know, survive.\" I sprinkle parmesan cheese onto my soup, praying he doesn't notice my hands shaking.\n\nHe takes a slurp. \"You made this?\" I nod, and he adds, \"Your mom taught you.\"\n\nI look up at him, surprised. \"She did, yeah.\"\n\n\"I remember this soup,\" he says, his head bent over the bowl as he eats. His words twist in me, and for a few moments, we eat without talking. I wait for him to say more, maybe tell me a story about Mom making this soup for him, but he doesn't say anything. Just eats his soup.\n\nI'm still trying to read Trick like a map. The obvious stuff came quickly, the similarities in our eyes and the color of our hair. Mostly, though, I'm noticing myself in his quiet ways, how he seems more content to observe than to dictate a conversation. I've always been quiet like that. But this hush right now makes me uneasy. At home, dinner is never quiet. Mom always takes the lead, asking questions and getting answers. If we don't talk enough, she has a box of conversation cards that sit on our buffet to get the ball rolling. Will usually talks about work or sports during dinner (when he's not answering What kind of domesticated pet would you be?), and the twins are loud and rowdy. Labradoodles. Both of them. Trick's on the opposite end of the spectrum. If I don't say something, we'll pass the whole dinner without speaking a single word.\n\n\"You're one of those quiet cats who sits in the window of a bookshop,\" I blurt over our slurps and chewing.\n\nHe jerks his head up. \"Huh?\"\n\nOh, right. It helps to actually intro the card game. \"If you were a domesticated pet, you'd be a quiet shop cat.\"\n\n\"Um, okay.\"\n\n\"Sometimes, at home, Mom makes us play games to get the conversation going at dinner. Like, what color of the rainbow would you be?\"\n\nHe shrugs, reaching for some bread. \"I don't know, blue?\"\n\n\"Why blue?\"\n\n\"Red?\"\n\n\"You have to explain your answer.\" He looks pained. \"Forget it.\" This isn't going well; our words seem wispy and fake, like whole rivers of other words swirl in the spaces between them. No more rainbow colors or bookshop cats. \"Trick?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"What happened after you got hurt? Is it why you and Mom split up?\" It's amazing how certain words asked in a certain order can change the entire atmosphere of a room.\n\nHe sets down his spoon and rubs his eyes. He looks at me for perhaps the first time all evening. \"Can we go back to that question about the rainbow? Blue, definitely blue.\" I stare at him, waiting. He picks up his spoon again, swirling it through the dregs of his soup. \"I guess I was pretty messed up for a while after.\"\n\n\"You mean your knee?\"\n\nHe sighs, looking hard enough at me to make me suddenly very interested in my own soup. \"Physically, sure. I completely jacked up my knee, my whole leg. I shattered it in multiple places, so I couldn't compete anymore. I lost sponsors. I couldn't ski at all, really. Not for a long time.\" He takes a slurp of soup, dropping his eyes. \"But that wasn't the main issue.\" I swallow, not wanting to move, not wanting to even take a bite of bread lest it upset this sudden flash of openness. He stares sideways out the window at the dark blue fade of late evening light. \"When I couldn't ski anymore... when I couldn't ski like myself anymore, well, it just took everything else away with it. It's like I fell into a sinkhole I couldn't get out of. Your mom tried, she really did. I don't want you ever thinking your mom didn't try.\"\n\nI know this about my mother. She's nothing if not solution oriented. \"But then you both stopped trying?\"\n\n\"Mostly me... a long time before she did.\" On the table next to me, my phone buzzes, startling both of us. I hurry to shut it off but not before I see it's a text from Beck. Looking relieved, Trick nods at it. \"You should take that.\"\n\n\"It's nothing,\" I tell him, but he's already standing, collecting his dishes.\n\n\"Dinner was fantastic,\" he says, his back to me as he sets his dishes in the small sink. He's already gone, even before pulling on his coat and heading out to gather some firewood.\n\nFrustrated, I check the text.\n\nsick stars out tonight. come hang. i'm close by.\n\nHe includes directions to a house one street over. The thought of staying here in the silence makes my head want to explode, so I go into my room to change and brush my hair.\n\nWhen I emerge, I find Trick reading a ski magazine on the couch. \"I'm going to take a walk.\"\n\nHe looks up, one arm propped behind his head. \"Now?\"\n\n\"Just want to get some fresh air, maybe sit and look at the stars for a while.\" Avoiding his eyes, I wind a scarf around my neck and pull on my beanie. I hold my breath, waiting for the usual parental Where are you going, who are you meeting, when will you be home?\n\nOr maybe even: Are you about to kiss the wrong boy? Again.\n\nInstead, he says, \"Take a flashlight,\" and returns to the pages of his magazine.\n\nOutside, a wall of cold hits me, but the stars are spread out above like someone has spilled an entire bottle of silver glitter on the night. Totally worth the frostbite.\n\nI start walking toward the next street, careful to stay in the center of the road to avoid icy patches. My boots crunch on the sanded streets. Most of the houses here are dark, their residents living elsewhere most of the year, so I can see the lights of a massive house up ahead glowing like a golden Oz.\n\nBeck waits out front in the shoveled driveway, his hands jammed in the pockets of a silver down jacket, puffs of his breath illuminated in the air around him by the glow of the house. Seeing me, he breaks into a smile and holds up a folded blanket. I hesitate, my brain telling me to turn around and go home and do my math homework.\n\nFunny how the heart can have a whole different checklist from the brain's.\n\n\"Whose house is this?\" I follow him toward a row of stairs along the outside of the house that twists up to what looks like the third level.\n\n\"Just a guy I know. Watch that ice there.\" He holds the handrail as he climbs ahead of me. We reach a tiny deck and Beck settles onto a bench that has been converted from an old ski lift. From here, we can look out over the dark valley, the glittery sky immense and close.\n\nSki lift bench. Quilt. Starry sky. Trouble.\n\nI sit down next to him, my teeth chattering. Noticing, he covers us with the blanket. \"Better?\"\n\n\"Trick thinks I'm taking a walk,\" I blurt.\n\n\"Does he know you're with me?\"\n\nI shake my head, looking sideways at his shadowed face. \"He didn't ask, but I'm not sure he'd approve. Isabel doesn't seem to.\" I pull the quilt tighter, our bodies growing warm beneath its folds. \"Why is that, by the way?\"\n\nHis laugh floats out over the dark houses below. \"My dear friend Isabel doesn't approve of my lifestyle. Thinks I'm wasting my opportunities.\"\n\n\"Are you?\"\n\n\"I see it as doing the opposite.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Because I actually enjoy my life and don't care about setting goals or being perfect. Isabel gets annoyed because I don't try with school. But I read, I get an education \u2014 it's just my version. I think school makes you dumber, not smarter. It makes you conform to one set way of thinking. Isabel's all about getting approval from whatever system she's in \u2014 her skiing, her grades, her friends.\"\n\n\"School's about way more than being smart,\" I argue. \"It's also about making sure we can get stuff done on time, following directions, building a work ethic so we can move on to the next step.\"\n\n\"It's jumping through hoops so we can go jump through more hoops.\" He shrugs. \"Where does it end?\"\n\nI hesitate, my body tingling. He's hit on something I've been thinking about lately. Where does it end? When I stare out into the future, what I'm actually doing out there is hazy and blank. Because I work hard, people think I have some huge goal, like how Josie wants to be an oceanographer. But I don't know yet what sort of practical, day-to-day life I want after college. No driving force that wants to be a doctor or a professor or an attorney. The drive has always been the perfection \u2014 the grades, the awards, the test scores.\n\nStill, I can't help but say, \"You can't just spend your whole life winging it.\"\n\nHe slides toward me on the bench, and his hand covers mine. \"Why not?\"\n\nMy breath catches. \"You need a plan.\"\n\nHe leans in, his face close enough for his breath to warm the cold air between us. \"Oh, I have a plan.\"\n\nI know I should leave, but my legs don't seem to work under the heavy blanket. It feels good to sit here, with someone who isn't demanding I work harder, do better, improve. Beck's like an antonym for self-improvement.\n\nself-deterioration\n\nself-destruction\n\nself-corrosion\n\n\"Your plan sounds a lot like instant gratification,\" I say softly, my lips nearly touching his.\n\nHe grins. \"You should try it sometime.\"\n\n\"Instant gratification it is.\" I lean in, and his mouth, cold at first, warms quickly. He tastes like snow and peppermint gum, and as his hands move to capture my face, everything \u2014 the night, the stars, the snow, even my lists \u2014 evaporates around us.\n\nBack at the cottage, I open the door as quietly as I can. The only light is the flickering fire. Trick is stretched out on the foldout twin bed, one arm tucked behind his head. As I tiptoe toward my room, his voice emerges from the darkness. \"Nice walk?\"\n\nI start and feel a blush creep up my cheeks. \"Oh, yeah \u2014 thanks. It's gorgeous out there. So clear.\"\n\n\"Be careful with all that ice.\" He sits up a bit in his bed. I can feel him watching me from across the room. \"One minute you're on solid ground and the next you're flat on your butt.\"\n\nWe both know he's not talking about the weather.\n\nThe next morning, my phone buzzes on the bookcase next to my bed:\n\nmorning, sunshine.\n\nIt all comes flooding back \u2014 the Olympic museum, the ski lift bench beneath the stars, Beck's peppermint kiss. My stomach twists and I double over. Maybe I'm not built for this instant-gratification-impulsive stuff. To make impulsive work, it's probably best not to feel crippling regret the next day. I'm guessing that's not really the point of it.\n\nWhat am I doing? I came to Tahoe to sort out my head, to figure out where I stand with school, and maybe even with Trick and what happened between my parents. But certainly not to turn into some snowbound boy-crazed mess. It seems, though, this is exactly what I'm doing.\n\ngiving Logan cookies\n\ntaking off on skis with Beck\n\nkissing Beck \u2014 twice\n\nActually, in list form, it seems sort of exciting. Except that I feel like throwing up. I hurry to the bathroom, trying to take calming breaths. I'm always hearing how it's healthy to step outside your comfort zone, but I'm pretty sure #8 on my list did not imply gasping for breath next to the toilet.\n\nOver the years, people have given me various definitions of my personality. Sometimes the spin can be positive: motivated, focused, productive. Or those qualities take on their more negative shadows: tightly wound, high-strung, stress case. Regardless, I'm tired of waking up tangled, regretful, and overthinking everything. Other girls I know at Ranfield would be posting about kissing a cute skier boy on Instagram, with hashtags like #hesjustthatcute or #studybreak!\n\nMy hashtag would read #peptobismolmoments!\n\nI shouldn't have kissed Beck. It's complicating things. I reach for my glass vial of lavender oil on the sink, but instead of grabbing it, I knock it onto the tile floor, where it shatters, the scent of lavender instantly permeating the room. Not in a relaxing way. Gagging, I try to mop it up with a wad of toilet paper.\n\nMy phone rings in the other room. Standing, wobbly, I cross to my bed. Crawling back under the covers, I answer it. \"Hi, Mom.\"\n\nIt's 9:04 on a Sunday. Mom has probably already run five miles, organized dinner for that night, and read most of the Union-Tribune. \"Honey, I just spoke with Ms. Raff.\" And talked with my Home Hospital coordinator.\n\n\"Oh, yeah?\" I take a sip from my water bottle, letting the cold water soothe my throat. I wince. It tastes like lavender.\n\n\"It's about chemistry.\" She sounds distracted. Probably measuring ingredients for dinner prep. Never do one thing when you can do two, she's always telling me.\n\nI try to figure out which assignment I could have missed. \"I'm pretty sure I turned everything in for chem this week.\"\n\n\"It's about the wet lab. They thought you could do it online, but now Ranfield says you have to find a lab locally or you can't get AP credit.\" I hear clinking and what sounds like rice against a glass cup. She's definitely prepping risotto.\n\n\"So I should wander around Tahoe until I can find a random lab to crash? That sounds likely.\" On the other end of the phone, the fridge door opens and shuts. \"Are you making risotto?\" I can almost taste the buttery rich grains.\n\nShe pauses. \"Mara, maybe you should come home now.\" The only thing that surprises me is that it has taken her this long to suggest it. \"I know they said you could stay on Home Hospital for this quarter and keep your scholarship, but, well...\" I can almost see her mind sifting through all the possible ways to tell me she thinks I've overstayed my welcome, both in Tahoe and with the administration at Ranfield. \"I think maybe it's time to come home.\"\n\nIt would be so easy.\n\nNo more Beck. No more Logan and Isabel, the World's Cutest Ski Couple. No more Trick the Enigma. I could slip back into Ranfield and remember the student I used to be, before I ripped up all those tests. The one who had her life on track. I'm so tempted to say, Yes, please, come get me. I'm messing everything up here!\n\nMom would set record time getting here.\n\nBut, for some reason, I don't. My voice feeling like something separate from me, instead I say, \"I'd like to stay.\" Outside, sunlight glitters on the wet pines, the day clear, but I know it's nowhere near as warm as it looks. \"Mom?\" I ask, when she doesn't say anything. \"Can I stay?\"\n\nShe sighs, in that way she does when she takes the rare moment to stare out our kitchen window at the meticulously landscaped yard beyond. Finally, she says, \"See what you can do about that lab, okay?\"\n\nAfter I hang up with Mom, I clean as much of the lavender spill as I can, but it still reeks. Then I curl up on the bed and start writing a new Now List.\n\n1. Get Trick to talk more!!\n\n2. Let my phone run out of power\n\n3. Focus, Mara!\n\n4. Be brave (thanks, Will)\n\n5. Ski blue runs with confidence. Black runs?\n\nI decide to focus on #3 on the Now List II probably because I'm just hardwired that way. Texting Beck, I tell him I'm going to be busy for the next couple of days, lots to do for school: you know me, the hoop jumper! I try to joke, but he doesn't text back.\n\nI tape a sign to the bathroom mirror: Sorry for the hazardous oil spill!\n\nI hole up in my room for the next twenty-four hours, barely sleeping, eating piece after piece of peanut butter toast, and turning in massive loads of schoolwork early. I keep an eye on the battery marker as it drains to dead on my phone (#2!). Beck doesn't text back. When the little red slash of the dying battery line becomes a sliver, I almost lose my nerve and plug it back in. I have never in the history of owning this phone allowed its power to completely drain. Which is ridiculous. Because it's not that big a deal. The Things More Upsetting than Running Out of Phone Power List I make in my head goes something like this:\n\npoverty\n\ndrug addiction\n\nsexism\n\nterminal disease\n\nTiny subsets of my Get a Grip List. But they only make me feel worse and I start wondering if maybe I'm making the wrong sorts of lists.\n\nWhen I start to feel like my phone is actually staring at me, pleading with me to just plug me in, I'm dying!!, I stuff it into the depths of my bag and tackle my calculus homework. Knowing it's in there, dead, fills my stomach with acid. That can't be healthy, that kind of attachment to a dead phone; it's not like it's a pet or something.\n\nEven if I do spend more time with it than any pet I've ever had.\n\nWhich is just sad.\n\nEarly Monday afternoon, as I bask in the glow of the school report Ms. Raff emails me (Best work yet! Fantastic insight!), Beck's words surface in my mind: praise junkie. Am I a praise junkie? Do I work feverishly like this, put all this energy and time into school, because I crave this kind of approval?\n\nOr because I like the excuse it gives me to block out the world?\n\nAre either of those reasons wrong?\n\nDesperate to get out of my head and onto the mountain, I eye my ski gear hanging on the back of the door. My helmet sits on the shelf. An hour on the mountain couldn't hurt \u2014 I've gotten so much done already.\n\nI knock on Powder's door, and moments later, Oli pops his head out. \"What time do the lifts close?\" I ask, staring up at him.\n\nHe grins. \"We got time.\"\n\nA half hour later, we're taking the funi up the mountain, the day clear and cold, but with a swirl of inky clouds moving in. The mountain seems empty, mostly locals. We're the only two people in the funi car and Oli leans back against the bench across from me. From my own bench, I watch as a man flies down Mountain Run, his form graceful and clean. I want to ski like that someday. Studying him, my body floods with a type of sadness, that feeling of already knowing that you'll miss something even before you've left it. Looking out at the snowy mountains above, I sigh.\n\n\"I believe they call that a heavy sigh,\" Oli says, stretching his long legs out in front of him.\n\n\"I was just thinking about going home.\" And trying not to think about the mess I've made of my time in Tahoe.\n\n\"You miss it?\"\n\nI watch the clouds, their varied layers of dark and light. We don't get clouds like this in San Diego. \"I miss parts of it. Will and Mom and my little brothers. My friend Josie. The beach. Not that I ever had much time to go to the beach.\"\n\nHe looks surprised. \"How is that possible? You're sixteen; that's all you should be doing.\"\n\nWe're almost at the dock, and I start to collect my poles and skis. \"Ranfield keeps me on a pretty tight schedule. I don't really have time.\"\n\n\"We all have the same number of hours, kiddo,\" he says, standing as the car bumps into the funi building. I bristle at the kiddo, like I'm some dumb kid who doesn't know how many hours a day holds.\n\n\"Yeah, I learned the analog clock in, like, kindergarten,\" I mumble, following him out of the funi car. We ski down to the Big Blue Express. On the lift ride up, I tell him, \"Ranfield is worth it, all the stress and time, for what it will get me in the end.\"\n\n\"Which is what?\" Oli kicks some snow from his skis.\n\n\"It will help me get into the right college.\"\n\nOli looks sideways at me. \"And what will the right college get you?\" I know he's just curious, but I still feel defensive.\n\n\"I'm keeping all my doors open, but I definitely want a tier-one school.\" Looking over at High Camp, I add, \"I just don't want to be ordinary.\"\n\nOli leans back into the ski lift, his arm draped over the side. \"Everyone builds their own specific life. Nothing ordinary about any of us.\"\n\nOli's definitely not ordinary. But not all of us can whoosh around the country in a silver box, collecting postcards. As if reading my mind, he says, \"My life wasn't always so different from yours, Mara. Busy, busy.\"\n\nOkay, this guy might really be a Jedi. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe leans forward onto the bar. \"I did the right stuff, too. Went to Berkeley. Became a banker. I spent most of my twenties that way.\"\n\n\"A banker? Like in a bank?\"\n\n\"Yes, in a bank. In San Francisco. I had a suit and everything.\" He makes an overdramatic gasping sound and smiles with his whole face at my look of shock.\n\nI eye the stubbly beard he clearly hasn't shaved in days. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"It was gradual, not some huge moment or anything. I kept looking around and thinking I had this gorgeous life, this lucky life, but instead of basking in it, I was fighting it. So I bought Powder. Fixed her up at a friend's. I wanted to cultivate something small and mine. But I built up to it. We all have to decide what's enough to fill up a life. And it's different for each of us.\"\n\nThe lift bumps toward the exit. We push the bar up and ski off to the right. Fiddling with his goggles, he adds, \"But I don't want you to think it was an easy choice. Or an obvious one. It wasn't. It took time. For years, I got up early, slogged through my commute, sat with all those other suits at lunch, eyed the clock all the time. After a while, I just thought, What am I doing here? This isn't where I'm meant to be. Then again, some guys I worked with \u2014 they loved it, the game, the competition, the grind. Someone is always going to have more, someone is always going to have less. Eventually, you have to choose what's enough for you and not what's right for other people.\"\n\nI stare down at my skis. \"I don't care what other people think of me.\"\n\n\"You sure about that?\"\n\nEven though he said it gently, it feels like having snow dumped down the back of my jacket. Stupid Jedi Mountain Master. He doesn't know why I'm here; I don't even know why I'm here.\n\n\"Are we going to actually ski sometime today?\" I ask glibly, fiddling with the straps of my poles, noticing the snow starting to fall, the bits of ice collecting on my goggles.\n\nHe belly-laughs loud enough to attract attention from passing skiers. \"Yes, we are. Let's get a run in before this storm hits.\"\n\nI wake shivering in the muted Tuesday morning to no power and a steady snowfall adding to the pile outside. My fire died out during the night, so I wrap myself in my quilt and pad into the living room, where Trick has a camping lantern glowing as he stokes the woodstove out here. \"I'm out of wood,\" I say.\n\n\"I'll get yours going in a sec. Power's out at the store, too. All over the valley.\" He wipes his hands on his jeans and grabs an armful of wood for my stove. \"After this, I'm going to snowshoe over to the store and help the Nevers deal with a few things. These fires should hold you until I get back.\" He motions toward the woodstove, where a metal coffeepot percolates. \"There's coffee if you want it, but take that pot off soon or it'll burn.\" He's wearing the Santa Cruz sweatshirt he wears often, the one he had on that first day I saw him in Neverland.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I say sleepily. Watching him disappear into my room, something shifts in me, squeezing my heart. I hear him in there, fiddling with the stove, crumpling paper, closing the little iron door, and I start to cry.\n\nHe emerges and catches sight of my tear-streaked face. Looking alarmed, he asks, \"Oh, no \u2014 what?\"\n\nI shake my head, trying to blink away the gluey wave of emotion threatening to surface again. \"Nothing, nothing. I just need coffee. This is my I need coffee face.\"\n\nShooting me an odd look, he grabs the pot and pours me a cup. He adds milk and hands it to me, which, ridiculously, brings on another hiccupy sob. Uncertain, he takes a step back. \"Oh, well \u2014 are you sick or something?\"\n\n\"No.\" I bury my face in the hot, sharp smell of coffee. How can I explain about the Santa Cruz sweatshirt and watching him build a fire? How can I tell him that him knowing I take milk in my coffee makes me miss all the years he didn't know what kind of breakfast I liked?\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\nWhen I nod, he heads for the door, casting me another funny, quiet look, before heading out into the falling snow.\n\nAn hour later, someone knocks on the door. I open it to find Isabel and Logan frosted with snow. \"Put these on,\" Isabel says, holding up a pair of snowshoes. \"You're coming with us.\" She notices what I'm wearing. \"And you're very welcome to wear your pajamas, but you might want to throw on your ski pants over those so you don't get soaked.\"\n\nI point at the books piled on the coffee table. \"Oh, I should probably work \u2014\"\n\nIsabel cuts me off with the raise of her gloved hand. \"You should probably go put on your ski pants.\"\n\n\"And come with us,\" Logan adds, brushing some snow from his beanie. \"It's a snow day.\"\n\nTen minutes later, I follow them awkwardly on snowshoes through the storm, the snow eddying around me. It's incredible how small the world becomes in a snowstorm, how quiet and still, like all peripheral vision has been erased. As we crunch along, it dawns on me that it feels nice to put life on hold for a day.\n\nAfter what seems like an hour but is probably twenty minutes, we arrive at a house. We stomp up some stairs and onto a wide deck. Logan opens the front door, letting us into a fully enclosed glass-and-wood entryway with pale stone floors and hooks on the walls for our gear. We leave the snowshoes on the ground by a bench that looks like someone built it out of polished tree branches and hang up our pants and jackets. When we're ready, Logan pushes open another glass door and leads us into a great room, its lamps glowing warmly.\n\n\"Wait, you guys have power?\" I ask, taking in the high ceilings, the living room with cozy couches and an enormous fireplace, and beyond that, a kitchen separated from the living space by a kitchen island with dark granite countertops.\n\n\"We have a generator.\" Logan heads toward the kitchen as Isabel settles onto one of the suede sofas, clearly at home here, and starts sorting through a pile of board games on the coffee table in front of her.\n\n\"Cool house.\" I join Isabel on the sofa.\n\nLogan puts a pan of milk on the stove and opens a jar of cocoa powder, spilling some on the counter. \"Thanks, we like it.\" He moves around the kitchen. Finally, he sets down three steaming mugs and a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table, grimacing when he notices that Isabel has set up a game called Chat Room. \"Can't we just play Monopoly?\"\n\nIsabel flips up the first card. \"This is a good starter game.\" She pauses shuffling cards to look out at the dense snow that has only grown thicker in the last half hour. \"I don't think we'll be going anywhere for a while.\"\n\nLogan fetches a beanbag from near the fire and flops into it on the other side of the coffee table. \"Fine, but let's just play the talking way. I don't feel like writing anything down.\"\n\nIsabel puts the little pads of paper away. \"Well, we wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.\"\n\nI sit cross-legged on the couch next to Isabel, glad I stayed in my pajama bottoms, and pull a fuzzy ivory blanket over my lap. With the fire glowing and the smell of hot cocoa and popcorn permeating the air, I could fall asleep. \"How do you play?\"\n\nLogan grabs a handful of popcorn. \"The way it works is, Isabel uses this game as an excuse to pry into your personal life.\"\n\n\"You're onto me,\" Isabel says, flipping up the first card. \"Okay, here's the first question: If you could invent anything, what would it be?\"\n\n\"A homework machine!\" I blurt out. Then, blushing, I add, \"I probably should've said something that cures cancer, right?\"\n\nLogan considers this. \"How about a cancer-curing homework machine?\"\n\n\"Yes, that! I would invent that,\" I say gratefully. We play through several questions, the game feeling a lot like a dinner with Mom.\n\nWhat would you do with a million dollars?\n\nWhat would you name a constellation?\n\nWould you rather live in a house made of candy or gold?\n\n\"Well, that's obvious.\" I frown. \"Gold. Candy would be so sticky and gross. Especially if it rained.\"\n\nIsabel draws another card. \"If you were a household appliance, what would you be?\"\n\nLogan immediately answers, \"An oven.\"\n\n\"An oven?\" I ask, the cup of cocoa warming my still-cold hands.\n\nHe shrugs. \"I like to cook and I have a warm personality.\" He smiles in that way I feel down to my toes. He adds, \"Isabel is an espresso machine.\"\n\n\"I get to answer for myself! But, yes, that seems right.\" This small affectionate exchange stabs at me, erasing the nice toe-warming feeling.\n\n\"My turn,\" I announce. I sift through possible appliances I could be. Refrigerator, hair dryer, washing machine. I decide: \"Blender.\"\n\n\"Why?\" They both ask at the same time.\n\n\"Because my life is a big mixed-up mess right now.\"\n\nIsabel nibbles some popcorn, watching me closely. \"Is that why you tore up all those tests?\"\n\nUgh. Everyone knows.\n\nLogan frowns at Isabel. \"Pick another card, nosy. No follow-up questions.\"\n\n\"It's fine.\" I stare into my hot chocolate. \"Okay, yeah.\" A log crackles and shifts in the fireplace, and I sit up straighter and put the mug on the coffee table. \"I mean, I didn't plan it. I didn't wake up thinking, Today I'm going to make a huge scene in calculus! But I just got so overwhelmed and freaked out.\" My shoulders sag. \"Kind of insane, I know.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know.\" Isabel passes me the bowl of popcorn. \"I've always been a fan of a dramatic exit.\"\n\n\"But the thing is, I'm not,\" I tell her, helping myself to a handful of popcorn. \"I've always just been the girl who gets the work done.\" Studying the snow falling outside, I fill them in on what happened at Ranfield. \"I just needed a break \u2014 from all the competitive, comparative intensity there.\"\n\nLogan and Isabel exchange an uneasy glance. Great. I said too much. But then Isabel asks, \"So you came to Tahoe?\"\n\nI nod. \"It's just so much more relaxed here.\" Isabel cocks her head to one side, making a \"huh\" noise. Something in the sound of it makes me wary. \"What?\"\n\nIsabel pulls herself into a cross-legged position on the couch. \"I'm not sure it actually is. Don't let all the crunchy-hippie-mountain vibes fool you. People in Tahoe can be just as hypercompetitive as anywhere else.\" I must look skeptical, because she says, \"Not about the same things, maybe, but they are. Here, it's all about how hardcore you can be as a skier or kayaker or anything in the outdoors, really. Or it's how hardcore you can be about yoga or organic food or your carbon footprint. You want to see some self-righteous intensity? Try talking to a vegan about why you eat cheeseburgers. Or, if you're a vegetarian, to some meat eater about why you don't eat cow. Free-range, grass-fed cow, of course.\"\n\nI smile; San Diego has plenty of that. I think that's just California. \"Well, it seems more relaxed to me.\"\n\nShe leans forward, lowering her voice. \"It's an illusion. What's annoying is, everyone here wants you to think they're so chill, so mellow \u2014 so inclusive. But it's the same competitive crap as you've got everywhere. It's still the United States of Do It My Way. I don't care how much they talk about their chakras. At least at your school, it sounds like they're up front about it.\"\n\nNodding, I think about what she's saying. Did I assume life would be so much easier in Tahoe because Mom always talked about Trick being such a slacker? Because he's not, really. A slacker. He works hard at the shop, shovels snow, chops wood. He just keeps things simple. I know I'd been hoping to find simplicity in Tahoe \u2014 original Now List #6! But nothing seems simple. Not really. I'm still confused. What I know for sure, though, is something wasn't working at Ranfield. \"I just got so tired of playing the whole game. I thought a change of scenery would help.\"\n\n\"I get that.\" Isabel nods over the rim of her cocoa mug.\n\n\"Speaking of games,\" Logan says, clearing his throat. \"We don't have to keep playing this one.\" He moves to pack up the cards.\n\n\"No, it's fine,\" I hurry to tell him. \"It helps to talk about it.\"\n\nAnd for the first time, it's true.\n\nWe play Chat Room for another half hour, almost quitting when Isabel and Logan get into a heated argument over the question of favorite superhero because, according to Isabel, Iron Man doesn't count. \"He has no actual powers! And everything he does is for his own gain. Veto!\"\n\n\"You can't veto my answer!\" Logan's face flushes. \"Batman doesn't have any actual powers and that doesn't stop him from being a superhero.\"\n\nIsabel shakes her head, dead serious. \"That's different. Batman's a superhero subcategory \u2014 vigilante. Everything he does is to make Gotham a better place. Unlike Tony Stark, who just tries to make Tony Stark's life better.\"\n\nLogan leans back in the beanbag, crossing his arms. \"I'm allowed to pick Iron Man. It's my answer. The suit he built made the world a better place.\"\n\nIsabel shoots back, \"He built his suit to save his own butt. Veto.\"\n\nLogan bursts out laughing. \"No veto \u2014 you don't get a ruling when your favorite superhero is Batman, the manic-depressive of Gotham City.\"\n\nShe chucks a playing card at Logan, who ducks, and it ends up in the fire, instantly engulfed in flames. She giggles. \"Oops.\"\n\nI crack up. \"You two are so funny. Seriously, you're the cutest couple ever \u2014 it's revolting, actually.\"\n\nIsabel sits up, coughing. \"Wait... what did you just say?\" She and Logan exchange a confused look. \"You think we're together? Ewww!\"\n\n\"Aww, thanks, that's nice, Iz. Feeling the love.\" Logan stands, gathering our empty cups and carrying them to the kitchen sink.\n\n\"Wait.\" My heart thrums in my ears. \"You aren't together?\"\n\nIsabel shakes her head violently. \"Oh, gross \u2014 he's like my brother. No offense, Logan. You're a total catch but...\" She looks back at me, her body shuddering. \"Ewwww, gross.\"\n\n\"I'm wondering if you could mention again how gross that would be,\" Logan says drily from behind the kitchen counter. \"In case she didn't quite catch it.\"\n\n\"Sorry! But it is,\" she mumbles, putting the rest of Chat Room away and pulling another box from the stack. \"Now, who wants to get their Monopoly on?\"\n\nLogan pulls lunch stuff from the fridge, making us another round of hot cocoa. At one point, he glances up, catches me watching him, and gives me a strange half smile. Surprise, it seems to say.\n\nFor lunch, we eat turkey sandwiches and share a bag of Doritos. The snow seems to be letting up a bit, but all the nearby houses remain dark, either unoccupied or the power not yet back on. When I'm done with my sandwich, I push myself off the couch. \"Can you point me toward the bathroom?\" Isabel motions toward the long hallway past the kitchen.\n\nOn my way back to the living room, I stop to look at the dozens of framed photos lining the hallway. Most of them feature snow in some way: Logan and his older sister in racing uniforms; Logan's family snowshoeing; the family in front of the Squaw Valley Neverland, its windows trimmed for the holidays. There are other pictures, too: his parents standing in front of an old building that might be in Europe somewhere, a shot of the family on the bow of a boat with Tahoe's blue waters behind them, a picture of Logan and his sister dressed as Harry and Hermione from Harry Potter. This one makes me grin because Logan is the one dressed as Hermione.\n\nMy gaze falls on a group shot, with everyone dressed for summer \u2014 board shorts, T-shirts, sundresses. The kids sit on top of a picnic table, Lake Tahoe in the background, and the adults stand behind them, some in profile, clutching water bottles or beers. The shot seems half-candid, half-staged. The kids look straight at the camera, but many of the adults seem caught in conversation with one another. I can see Isabel right away, all that wild red hair and big smile. A woman who must be her mom stands behind her, her hand on Isabel's shoulder. Next to Isabel, a child-size Beck stares down the camera, looking annoyed, the same look he had staring after those tourists at High Camp the other day. Two or three other kids sit there, too, smiling while the adults chat behind them.\n\n\"We were ten in that picture. Fifth grade, I think.\" Isabel comes up beside me, studying it. \"It's funny how many times I walk by this and never look at it. Look how cute we were. Look at Joy's hair!\" She points out the girl from Elevation that first day, her oil-black hair in two high ponytails shooting out from her head like antlers.\n\nI point at Beck. \"Why so grumpy?\"\n\nIsabel squints at it. \"That's just Beck's face. He's always looked like that.\"\n\nI hear Logan rattling around the kitchen, the whirr of the espresso machine. Still studying the picture, I say, \"You've known Beck a long time.\"\n\nIsabel nods, moving down the line of pictures, examining each closely. \"Since we were babies. Technically, you've known him a long time, too. And us.\" She points at a picture I haven't yet seen. \"See? Us.\"\n\nI move to see the photo, my body tingling. It's a group of small children in ski suits, each with a bright yellow vest reading SQUAW KIDS SKI SCHOOL. We hold our tiny helmets, our hair mussed, our cheeks pink. I see Isabel, Beck, Logan, and Joy, and off to the side, I see almost three-year-old me with dark blond pigtails, holding a pink helmet in my starfish hands. Next to me, Trick stares at the camera, the word COACH embroidered on his jacket, his goggles pushed into his hair.\n\nI swallow, unsettled, a whole world that might have been suddenly unspooling behind me. \"I don't remember any of this. Any of you. Not you or Logan. Or Beck.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" Isabel drops her gaze, her face creased with sympathy. \"It must be really weird. This whole world that just went on without you after you left.\"\n\n\"It is.\" I lean in to look at three-year-old Beck grinning from under his too-big helmet. \"Look, he's smiling in this one.\"\n\n\"Oh, he smiles,\" Isabel concedes, running a finger across the glass as if she could reach back in and touch our little-kid faces. \"It just never lasts.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nShe takes a step back. \"Nope, no way. You made it pretty clear you don't want my thoughts about Beck Davis. So I'm going to stay out of it. You can kiss whoever you want at High Camp.\"\n\nMy stomach drops. \"How do you know about that?\"\n\n\"You kissed Beck?\" I hadn't noticed Logan appear behind us in the hallway, holding a dish towel, but there he is, looking at me with too-wide eyes.\n\n\"Not really,\" I hurry to say. \"Okay, yes. Accidentally. It's this stupid list I have \u2014\"\n\nHe interrupts. \"Accidentally?\"\n\nI drop my eyes. \"Twice.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" He takes the slightest step back. \"Coffee's ready.\" He disappears toward the kitchen.\n\nI officially hate snow days.\n\nThe days following the crushed look on Logan's face morph into a list, informally titled: How to Tell the Boy You Like Way Too Much Is Avoiding You Because You Made the Wrong Assumption and Messed It Up. It's a working title. A little long, I know.\n\nEvery time you see him at Neverland, he suddenly has to \"sort through an order\" in the back. And disappears. Every time. No store has this many socks to stock.\n\nWhen you see him at the caf\u00e9, he pounds his latte and leaves in under thirty seconds. Seriously, it hurts to drink a hot latte that fast.\n\nHe pretends not to see you on a ski lift. Three times.\n\nHe doesn't reply to texts. Eight of them.\n\nThe bag of cookies you leave him sits unopened on the shop counter. For three days. You're pretty sure Piper finally ate them.\n\nYou run into him (actually run into him) leaving Neverland and he turns and walks the other way, as if he hadn't just been heading into the store you were leaving, as if he hadn't just run right into you.\n\nI can't really blame him, though. I've been doing the same thing to Beck all week. Not answering texts. Pretending not to see him. The latte strategy. Ouch. Seriously, I don't recommend it. The whole thing makes me think about how much time humans spend using avoidance as a general lifestyle strategy.\n\nJust ask Trick. He's been perfecting it most of my life.\n\nLate Saturday afternoon, Isabel texts to see if I want to meet for dinner at Ethan's Grill after her race. She and I find a table by the window and order some burgers. I start to ask, \"How was your...\" but trail off, my voice catching as Logan and Bodie push through the front door. Isabel sees them and waves them over. I don't miss Logan's hesitation before he follows Bodie over to our table. Isabel shoves over on her bench to make room for Bodie, and Logan, actively avoiding my eyes, slips into the chair next to me. When his leg brushes mine, my cheeks burn.\n\n\"Hey.\" Bodie nods at me, his mop of blue hair flopping over his forehead. He asks Isabel, \"Did you order for us?\"\n\n\"Why would we do that when we didn't know you were coming?\" Isabel glares at him pointedly. Wait, did Isabel invite them?\n\nBodie's eyebrows shoot up. \"Oh, right! We totally didn't know you were going to be here.\"\n\nShe looks quickly between me and Logan, her face hopeful. Yup, she invited him.\n\nLogan pretends not to notice the mound of awkward between us. He motions to our waiter, who is en route with burgers for Isabel and me.\n\n\"Hey, Logan,\" he says, handing me my burger. \"Get you something?\"\n\n\"Two more of those? Thanks, Dex.\" He turns to Isabel. \"Hey, congrats on the race today. You killed it out there.\"\n\nFrowning, she makes room so Dex can set down her burger. \"Still can't quite get the time where I need it to be.\" When she notices Bodie's eyes following the burger longingly, she pushes it to him. \"Oh, you're so pathetic. Here.\"\n\n\"Seriously? Sweet. Thanks.\" He takes a huge bite.\n\nLogan takes a drink from his Coke, then looks sideways at me. \"Hey, Mara.\"\n\nFigures he chooses to acknowledge me for the first time in days when I've just taken the World's Largest Burger Bite. \"Mmmm, hi,\" I manage to get out through the mouthful. Swallowing, I add, \"Did you get my texts?\" I try to suppress an emerging ripple of anger with a mouthful of fries.\n\nHe drags one of Bodie's fries through some ketchup. \"Yeah. I've been busy with skiing and school.\"\n\nToo busy to answer a text? Weak.\n\nDex returns with two more burgers.\n\n\"Speaking of school.\" I put my burger down. \"You guys don't happen to know if your school has a wet lab for chem, do you?\"\n\nBodie chuckles, helping himself to some of Isabel's fries. \"Wet lab. That sounds dirty.\"\n\nIsabel elbows him. \"Grow up.\" To me, she says, \"Logan and I are in AP chem this year. We meet on Tuesdays to do all our labs. All the racers do. Well, not all the racers.\" She nods at Bodie, who shrugs good-naturedly.\n\nI perk up. \"Do you think they would mind if I came to it? It's just that if I don't find one, I might lose my AP credit for Ranfield.\"\n\n\"The horror, the horror,\" Bodie says in a whisper-ragged voice, bugging out his eyes.\n\nIsabel ignores him. \"Come Tuesday. Our teacher's really cool \u2014 you'll like her. I'm sure Logan's mom could give you a ride back to the valley after, if you can find a way to get to Truckee?\" When he doesn't say anything, Isabel asks again, \"Logan? Could she catch a ride back to the valley after chem lab?\"\n\n\"What? Oh, yeah, sure \u2014 no problem.\" Only he says it like he might, in fact, have a problem with it.\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" I say, trying to keep my voice even. \"I'll figure it out.\"\n\nSunday morning, I wake up still annoyed with Logan, my body tense. Why is he being so distant and weird?\n\nMy phone buzzes. It's Will. Sending a whole sentence for my Shells of Wisdom photo this week:\n\nStop and smell the alpenglow.\n\nI laugh so hard it brings Trick into my room, his eyebrows a question mark. I hold up my phone. \"Will just told me to stop and smell the alpenglow.\"\n\nTrick nods. \"Good advice.\" He disappears back into the other room and I can hear the clink of his spoon against his cereal bowl.\n\nOutside, small flecks of snow fall through the dark trees.\n\nI take a deep breath and add his line to the Now List II.\n\nTuesday, I borrow Trick's truck and drive to Truckee on my own for the first time. I turn left at Monster Taco and wind up a street until a brown building resembling a loaf of overbaked bread (Isabel's description) appears at the end of the narrow road, its roof sagging under mounds of snow. The parking lot has been cleared, and I pull Trick's truck into an open spot and shut off the engine, which rattles and coughs at the end, like it always does.\n\nThe building doesn't look like a school. With the exception of a small wooden sign reading CREST CHARTER SCHOOL, at best it looks like a dentist's office. I push open the heavy door of the truck and head toward the building entrance. Isabel is waiting on the other side of the glass and waves when she sees me, scurrying to push open the door. \"I give good directions, right?\"\n\n\"Excellent directions.\" Inside, warm air greets me, and Isabel gives me a ten-second tour. \"Okay, student lounge, classrooms over there, chem lab this way,\" she says as she heads down the dimly lit hall, clad in jeans, Uggs, and a teal sweatshirt. The walls are covered with pictures of students, all of whom seem to be doing something athletic \u2014 snowboarding, skiing, hiking, rafting. In one picture, a girl poses in black martial arts robes and glares fiercely at the camera. \"Are all the kids who go here athletes?\" I ask, squinting at a small, faded picture of a snowboard team.\n\n\"Not all of them. We've got artists, musicians, math geeks, and, you know, your occasional stoner.\" She turns and winks at me in a cryptic way. I've never seen Isabel so much as sip a beer, so I don't really know what all that winking is about.\n\n\"But you only come a few days a week?\" I try to keep the judgment out of my voice, though I'm not very successful.\n\n\"Classes are two to three days a week depending on the class, but you're assigned an advisor and build the rest of your schedule with them; you can pick and choose from different options so you create the program that works best for your schedule.\"\n\nScratch camp, this school sounds like a salad bar. Um, would you like croutons with your French class? But I'd never really thought about anything other than the schedule we have at Ranfield. School has always just looked like, well, school.\n\nShe glances curiously at me as we turn down a hallway. \"You probably get some flexibility in your school \u2014 I mean, all those rich kids. Seems like they would want a little more say.\"\n\nI'm not sure how much say we get. We're basically told what we should be doing so that we have the best possible transcripts. \"It's rigorous,\" I tell her. \"But we have one free period a day.\" Which most of us spend taking an extra elective.\n\nShe gives me a look like I'd just confessed they force us into dark basements once a day and feed us worms. \"I would hate that, too rigid. But, you know, everybody's got to do what they got to do.\" I've heard Trick use that expression before. It seems like the kind of thing you can say and not have to mean anything by it. I try to ignore it, but something about this school makes me bristle. It's not like I haven't been working hard while on Home Hospital. I get that this schedule is more like college, but still, it seems like a vacation compared to going to school every day and then doing all the work. It doesn't actually seem fair that other people can make this the whole high school package.\n\nI follow Isabel into a small room that smells sharp and citrusy. She waves to Logan, who is standing with another girl and a boy who is so tall and thin, he seems like a human pencil. They all wear lab aprons and safety glasses. A young woman comes through the door. She wears a Patagonia vest and jeans tucked into glossy black boots and can't be more than twenty-five. \"Okay, all \u2014 let's get this party started.\" She pauses when she sees me. \"Oh, you must be Mara. I'm Malika, the AP chem teacher.\"\n\nWe call her by her first name? I shake her hand. \"Thanks so much for letting me come.\"\n\nShe waves as if to say, It's nothing, and grabs an apron off a hook, handing it to me with a pair of safety glasses. \"No problem. Someone actually asking to come to lab? It's fabulous.\"\n\n\"Should I, um, join a group?\" Isabel seems to have joined Pencil Boy at one station, while Logan stands with the blond girl at another.\n\n\"You can jump in with Logan and Amanda.\" She motions toward them.\n\nGreat.\n\n\"Hi, I'm Mara,\" I say, walking over and standing across the counter from them.\n\n\"Amanda.\"\n\nHolding up a graduated cylinder, Logan explains, sounding overly formal, \"We're determining the molar volume of hydrogen gas at STP.\"\n\nAmanda waggles her eyebrows. \"Thrilling stuff.\" She seems sweet.\n\n\"Are you a ski racer, too?\" I ask her.\n\n\"Nah, I snowboardcross.\" She twists at her ponytail, her eyes large and green behind her safety glasses. She has that tan glow of snow athletes who spend so much time on the mountain.\n\nI vaguely remember that event from watching the last Winter Olympics with Will. \"Is that the one where they knock each other off course?\"\n\nAmanda nods enthusiastically. \"Not on purpose \u2014 okay, sometimes on purpose \u2014 but, yeah, it's rad.\" She goes back to her lab notebook, which is decorated with snowboard stickers and photos.\n\nFor the next hour and a half, we work through the lab, the atmosphere relaxed and peppered with jokes, but I'm hyperaware of Logan avoiding my eyes.\n\nI try to concentrate on the lab and finally lose myself in collecting data. Malika watches and guides us. I like the way she explains things; she's clear and obviously loves her subject. Her enthusiasm infuses the whole process and I find myself caring a lot more about molar volume than I imagined I could. A ribbon of energy moves through me and I realize that I've missed this, working on a project with other students. The classroom. And this is extra nice because everyone seems to want to be here. In AP chem at Ranfield, my lab partner, Branson Tucker, never stopped reminding me that he was only taking the class because he was applying to Princeton and you couldn't get into Princeton without it. But even though Branson Tucker said Princeton about ten times a day, all he seemed to do during our lab time was try to light his hoodie strings on fire with the Bunsen burner.\n\nAs we finish cleaning up, Malika signs the form Ms. Raff emailed me this morning, verifying my time in the lab. \"Good job today,\" she tells me, handing it back to me. \"See you next week?\"\n\nI'm already looking forward to it.\n\n\"You guys want to get coffee?\" Isabel suggests, hanging up her lab coat. Amanda declines. She has an essay to finish for English and wants to get it done so she can get enough time on the mountain tomorrow. She gives a little wave as she leaves, pulling a beanie over her ponytail and grabbing a huge red down jacket from a hook. Logan has his back to us, sorting through his backpack. He doesn't say anything.\n\nClearing my throat, I tell Isabel, \"I actually brought Trick's truck, so I'm up for it.\"\n\nHe turns. \"So you don't need a ride?\" His voice has that same odd clipped tone he used to talk about molar volume. I shake my head. \"Cool \u2014 later, then.\" He disappears out the door.\n\nI catch Isabel's eye. \"He's been like that since the snow day.\"\n\nShe searches for something in her bag. \"Maybe he's just busy. The store is crazy this time of year.\"\n\nWe both know it has nothing to do with the store. \"Yeah, maybe. Hey, is there a drinking fountain?\" I return my glasses to their white plastic bin and hang up my lab coat.\n\n\"By the student lounge,\" Isabel says. \"We can do coffee another time if you're not feeling up to it.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's better. I have a ton of schoolwork to do and I should send in this lab form before my mom freaks.\"\n\nWe say good-bye and I find the fountain against the wall in the hallway running the length of the student lounge. Next to it, a glass window looks in on the lounge. A dozen or so kids sprawl on the four worn couches and a few others sit at round tables, textbooks open in front of them.\n\nI almost miss him because he's sitting in profile. Beck. He's kicked back on the sofa that comes out perpendicularly from the wall, reading from a book to a small group of girls sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him. I can't make out the title, but it's a paperback and has a picture of a man on the front, a philosopher-bust type of picture. His listeners stare at him, rapt, and behind the couch, a girl with short pink hair massages his shoulders in a steady rhythm, nodding at whatever he's reading aloud. She tips her head back, laughing, and leans to kiss him quickly on the cheek. I duck away before he can see me and hurry from the building as quickly as possible, welcoming the cold blast of outside air.\n\nIt shouldn't bother me, seeing him like that. I'm the one who has been avoiding him.\n\nBut it does.\n\nMom calls the next afternoon and the first words she says are, \"Did you connect with Dr. Elliot about your next appointment?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\" I pick at some fuzz on the edge of Trick's couch. \"Actually, I'm thinking I don't really need to have any more meetings with him.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Mom?\"\n\n\"Meeting with Dr. Elliot was part of the deal, Mara. You agreed.\"\n\nI take a breath. \"I don't really want to go.\"\n\nSounding tired, she says, \"This isn't about what you want. It's about doing your job. Life's not fair.\" Two of Mom's Core Principles: Do your job. Life's not fair.\n\nIt's that last one I catch on. I know she means sometimes things don't work out the way we want, but lately I've been thinking about how my life seems more than fair. I've been born into a privileged world. Expensive school, parents with important jobs, beautiful San Diego. It's amazing, actually \u2014 my luck. Yet so much of what I hear from everyone at Ranfield is I'm so busy, I'm so stressed, my life is harder than yours. Kids brag about getting no sleep, that the homework took six hours, that they barely made it out alive from that French test. Is it just human nature to be constantly competing for the suffering award? How much of it is just manufactured to seem like legitimate struggle?\n\nI think of Oli with his simple life, his choice to leave the pressured world behind. Not that I want to live in an Airstream, but how much of my stress is environmental? I've come to Tahoe, but I'm still trying to win at the Ranfield game. All I did was change the view.\n\nThe realization hits me. For all my listing and living in the now, I'm still trying to impress the place I left behind, the place that wrecked me.\n\n\"Mara?\"\n\nI spaced on Mom. Clearly not doing my job right now. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"I'm meeting a client. Reschedule today.\" She hangs up.\n\nWalking through the Village late Thursday afternoon, I see Logan come out of the frozen yogurt shop with a heaping sundae. He notices me and freezes. \"Oh, hey. You caught me. Fro-yo addiction.\" He holds up a tub topped with what looks like a pound of candy. \"Want one?\" He motions back over his shoulder with his spoon.\n\n\"No, thanks, but I'll take a Sour Patch Kid. A red one.\" I help myself to one of the many sugar-drenched clumps on top of his yogurt, taking an overly long time to chew because the air feels strange between us. \"I'm still not used to the blue Sour Patch Kids,\" I announce, just to have something to say. \"Not sure I'm a fan. I think they're supposed to be berry flavored, but they taste like acid.\"\n\n\"Because you know what acid tastes like?\" His chocolate eyes seem guarded.\n\n\"I'm just saying.\"\n\n\"I think it's fun to try out new flavors. But I'm more a fan of the orange ones. And I like that they get more chewy when they're cold.\" This could be the most detailed discussion of Sour Patch Kids in the history of conversations about sour candy.\n\n\"Logan?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" He fiddles with his yogurt but doesn't eat any. His expression seems halfway between panic and interest. I'm hoping for interest.\n\n\"Um, so about what happened with Beck.\" I stuff my hands into my parka pockets and look anywhere but at Logan. \"I thought you were with Isabel and, well, I \u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" he interrupts. \"You're free to kiss whoever you want. Not up to me.\" He takes a big bite of sundae and makes an overexaggerated face, as if to imply Nothing matters when you've got fro-yo!\n\n\"Okay.\" Maybe he wishes we were still talking about Sour Patch Kids. Or Skittles, maybe? Junior Mints? Even with my stomach churning, I know I shouldn't let him off the hook like that. \"It's just... well, you seem sort of mad.\"\n\nHe shrugs. \"I'm not.\"\n\n\"Great,\" I manage. \"So we're good.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He waves me off. \"Friends.\" But he still won't really look at me, stares instead over my shoulder at the ebb and flow of the Village.\n\n\"Sure, friends,\" I echo. \"Awesome.\"\n\nMy schoolwork done for the week, I catch a ride to the Village with Trick on Friday morning. I'm meeting Isabel for a quick coffee when she gets done with the gym and then I'll find Oli on the mountain at ten when she heads to practice.\n\nMy phone rings. Josie. With a pang, I realize I haven't talked to her in forever.\n\n\"Hi,\" I say, standing in a patch of sunlight outside of Elevation.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" she asks. \"I texted you twice yesterday!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Jo. Just busy.\" Ugh, there's that word again.\n\nShe sighs. \"Tell me about it. You wouldn't believe the number of SAT words we have to memorize for English.\" Something in the way she says it makes me imagine the white tape of a finish line, both of us struggling to cross it first.\n\n\"Yeah, me too.\" Ms. Raff sent me the list yesterday. My 500 Must! words for the SAT, with the overbearing exclamation point. I haven't even looked at it yet. Josie chatters on \u2014 something about junior prom, which she assures me is going to be totally lame because they picked the dumbest theme ever. I'm only half listening. Through the window of Elevation, I see Beck sitting at a window table. I take a few steps back into a little shadow. He texted me earlier this week about hanging out, but I haven't written back. His head bent over his phone, he hasn't seen me standing outside yet.\n\nThe Ski Lift Bench seems like a year ago.\n\n\"Mara? Are you there?\"\n\nI start. \"What? Oh, sorry \u2014 the theme. Yeah, it sounds totally dumb. See, this is why I don't go to school dances.\"\n\n\"Seriously, right?\"\n\nBeck looks up from his phone, his eyes catching me watching him through the window. He gives a short wave. No avoiding him now. \"Um, Jo \u2014 I have to run.\"\n\n\"Oh \u2014 okay.\" She sounds hurt, but recovers quickly. \"Well, call me soon.\"\n\n\"Definitely.\" I head into Elevation and cross to Beck's table. \"Working hard?\"\n\nHe shows me the game he's playing on his phone, something with brightly colored blobs that seem to be flinging other brightly colored blobs at each other. \"I make it a habit to never work hard at anything.\" He tries for charming but mostly just seems tired, his hair even more disheveled than usual, bruised dark patches beneath his eyes.\n\n\"Everything okay?\"\n\nHe leans back in his chair. \"Okay, sure.\" Drained of his normal swagger, he seems smaller somehow. \"Had a fight with my dad, so, you know, typical Friday morning.\"\n\nI think of that day in the parking lot, his dad's too-aggressive grab. I glance at his nearly empty coffee cup. \"You need a refill?\"\n\nHis smile doesn't make it to his eyes. \"Sure.\" Just then, Isabel and Logan come through the door, stopping when they see us. Beck leans forward, his forearms resting on the table. \"Great. The model citizen brigade.\" He goes back to his game.\n\nI grab his cup and, at the counter, refill his coffee. Isabel comes up behind me. \"Someone looks crabby,\" she says, her eyes flicking to Beck.\n\n\"Fight with his dad.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Isabel nods. \"So just your average Friday.\" She hands her mug to Natalie. \"Can I get some hot water, Nat?\"\n\nI order a latte, then take Beck's coffee to his table. \"Do you want to come sit with us?\" I motion to where Isabel and Logan huddle at a far table, whispering.\n\n\"I think I've had enough behavioral modification lectures for one morning.\" He takes a sip of his drink. \"Thanks for the refill, though.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" I hesitate, then add, \"Sorry about your dad.\"\n\n\"Give me a call sometime,\" he says, his voice flat, \"or keep avoiding me \u2014 your choice.\" He returns to his phone, his shaggy hair falling into his eyes.\n\nI meet Oli at the top of Big Blue. Something about being up here, the slight wind in my face and the stretch of Tahoe scrolling out in front of me, lightens the heaviness of seeing Beck. Oli motions for me to follow him down the catwalk to a Shirley Lake shoot. I take wide turns until I snowplow to a stop at the bottom, grinning. I'd managed the whole run with ease, that light feeling I had at the top intensifying.\n\n\"Look who's skiing blues like a star!\" Oli waves a ski pole in a victory loop. \"Take that, Shirley Lake!\"\n\n\"Miss Perfect rocks Shirley Lake,\" I blurt out, feeling like an idiot the second the words emerge. Where did that come from?\n\nThe wind flutters the sleeves of his jacket. \"That whole video thing really got to you, didn't it? Those dumb kids putting it on the computer.\"\n\nI poke at some built-up snow on my skis with one of my poles, watching skiers move past in the deep bowl of Shirley Lake. \"I guess.\" I brace myself for whatever version of the You shouldn't let other people bother you advice that will now undoubtedly come my way.\n\nBut Oli just sighs, studying the lift carrying people back up the mountain. \"It must be tough these days, what you kids deal with. It's hard enough to be a teenager, but with the Internet now...\" He whistles through his teeth. \"I actually don't even know much about that MyTube Tweeter stuff. It all seems so brutal.\"\n\nI burst out laughing at his botching of the names. \"YouTube and Twitter, you mean.\"\n\n\"Whatever.\" He shrugs. \"Bunch of nonsense.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't care what other people think of me.\"\n\n\"Hard not to,\" Oli says. \"But I think the important thing to remember is that most people aren't.\"\n\n\"Aren't what?\"\n\n\"Thinking about you.\" He scissors his skis back and forth. \"In my experience, most people are just trying to find their car keys.\"\n\nHe skis off toward the Shirley lift.\n\nI blink twice before I register her. Josie. Standing on our porch, the twilight deepening the charcoal of her down jacket. \"Wait \u2014 what?!\" I manage before she engulfs me. Her brother, Reuben, and a petite woman with short black hair stand behind her, grinning. \"You're here?\" I keep repeating into her down-jacketed shoulder.\n\n\"Inside! I'm freezing!\" She pushes me back into the cottage, introducing me to Reuben's girlfriend, Lucy. Josie's eyes sweep the room. \"Wow, Mar, this is tiny.\"\n\n\"Cozy,\" I remind her.\n\n\"It's darling,\" Lucy says, her pale blue beanie bright against her dark skin.\n\nThey stand like mirages in my living room. \"How did... what are... ?\" I stammer.\n\n\"We're surprising you, silly!\" Josie tucks some hair behind her ears. \"I was calling to tell you this morning, but you rushed off the phone. For the weekend! I even took the last three periods off from school today. Reuben and Lucy have been wanting to take a ski weekend up here and I convinced them to let me tag along! We're staying at a fancy hotel! Are you excited?\" Josie can seem to talk only in exclamation points or question marks. \"Come have dinner with us! Are you surprised? We just got here!\" She squints at me. \"Trick didn't tell you, did he? I made him swear he wouldn't tell you.\"\n\nHer energy like a tidal wave, I take a step back. \"You talked to Trick?\"\n\n\"We called him at his work \u2014 at Neverland. He didn't tell you, right? You're not just pretending to be surprised.\" She stares at me intently, decides I'm authentically surprised, and hugs me again.\n\n\"Tranquilo.\" Reuben comes up behind his sister and puts his hands on her shoulders. \"Give a girl some air.\" His brown eyes are warm. I've always adored Reuben. Best big brother ever. \"Mara, would you like to join us for dinner? We're staying at PlumpJack.\"\n\nI'd never been inside the hotel, only walked by it. \"Yeah, great!\" I say, still feeling breathless but trying to match Josie's energy. \"Sorry, I just can't believe you're here.\"\n\nLater, Josie and I sit on one of the queen beds in their hotel room, giggling over our cheeseburgers and fries. Reuben and Lucy decided to eat downstairs in the bar, but they ordered us room service. Reuben claimed they wanted to talk about \"boring oceanographer stuff,\" but I know he wants to give Josie and me time to hang out in private.\n\nJosie finishes a story about a party she went to last weekend with two of the other girls from the jazz band. She drags a fry through some ketchup on her plate. \"The cops had to come and tell us the music was too loud, but they said it was the first time they had to tell a bunch of teenagers to turn down jazz. So funny.\"\n\n\"Sounds funny,\" I agree.\n\nShe tilts her head, her eyes suddenly serious. \"It's so great to see you. When are you coming home?\"\n\nI take an extra-long sip of Diet Coke. \"I'm not really sure.\"\n\n\"But you'll be back in time for our first match, right? First week of March? I want Coach to sign you up for doubles with me. Should I tell him?\" She pulls out her phone.\n\n\"I haven't been playing at all,\" I say, but she's already texting Coach Jeffers.\n\n\"Catch me up,\" she says, taking a huge bite of her burger. While she eats, I tell her about skiing, about getting into a rhythm with Home Hospital, about finding the chem lab at Crest Charter, but mostly I talk about Isabel and Logan. \"I spent the first few weeks thinking they're a couple, but they're not \u2014 isn't that funny?\"\n\nShe gives me an amused look. \"Is it a good thing for you that they're not a couple?\" she digs.\n\nI flush. \"What? No, nothing like that.\" I take an unnecessarily large bite of burger.\n\nShe looks unconvinced. \"If you say so.\"\n\nI wipe my hands on the white cloth napkin and find myself telling her something that's been niggling at me for weeks. \"Anyway, the craziest part of being here is that I'm getting to see this whole other life that got swapped out for the one I actually ended up living. It's so weird.\"\n\n\"Because you almost grew up here?\"\n\n\"Yeah. This could have been my life. And, I don't know, don't take this wrong, but there's part of me that wishes it was.\"\n\nJosie frowns at her half-eaten burger. \"Maybe your mom wanted you to have a better life than you could have had here?\"\n\n\"People have good lives here, Josie. It's not all beer and ski parties.\" She looks doubtful. \"There's just something about it that sometimes feels like it fits me better than San Diego.\" I feel like a traitor for saying so, but it's the truth.\n\nJosie sips her soda, carefully choosing her words. \"It seems like a lot of people up here are on the fringe, like they're hiding from something. I mean, Trick works at a place called Neverland. There's a reason that's funny.\" She shakes her head. \"I'd go crazy here.\"\n\n\"Don't you think you're being a little judgmental about a place you don't even know?\"\n\nJosie looks surprised. \"I'm sorry. I don't mean to be. It's just, this place. It kind of is Neverland. It's a vacation spot, here so people can take breaks from their real lives.\" I start to argue with her, but she holds up her hand. \"Okay, okay, I heard the judgment on that one, sorry. I'm sure people have great lives here, but you've worked too hard to just toss it all away to be a ski bum.\"\n\nI dunk a fry in my ketchup. \"Wow, talk to my mom much lately?\"\n\nHer voice soft, she says, \"Your mom knows that part of the reason you've worked so hard is because you have a fire in you. It's not just Ranfield causing that fire \u2014 it's in you. You're one of the hardest workers I know. Seriously, you have been the whole time we've been at Ran.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I agree, my body deflating with a realization. \"But what if that's not such a good thing?\"\n\n\"Welcome to Neverland.\" I stop in front of the shop with Josie, Reuben, and Lucy the next morning before the slopes open. \"Let's get you some gear,\" I say, my voice over-bright. I'm trying too hard. Josie notices, shooting me an odd look as I hold the door open for them. After our conversation last night, I'm sure it seems like I have something to prove. \"I'll get Trick.\"\n\nI wave to Mr. Never as I pass him at the counter. Pushing through the door to the shop, I find Trick waxing a pair of expensive-looking skis, Piper snuggled in a curl near his feet.\n\n\"Oh, hey.\" He stands, Piper also jumping to her feet with her tail wagging. He wipes his hands on a tattered rag. \"They here?\"\n\nI nod, wondering what they'll see when they look at Trick, if they'll search him for signs of me.\n\nOf course, maybe I'm the only one looking for these small signs that connect us because he still feels so far away, still a blurry constellation I can't quite make out but know is there.\n\n\"He's nice,\" Josie says as we take the funi up. She sits next to me on a bench, and Reuben and Lucy sit across the funi from us, talking softly in Spanish. \"You kind of look like him.\"\n\n\"I do?\" My skin tingles.\n\nShe nods, staring out at the expanse of snow. \"In the eyes. Not the color. The shape.\" She looks down at her boots. \"So, not a huge fan of these cement blocks, but if you like 'em, I'm game to try.\" She studies the snow-covered mountains and trees. \"Wow, it's freezing, but it's beautiful.\"\n\nI reach over and squeeze her gloved hand. \"Thanks for coming here.\"\n\nI take Josie, Reuben, and Lucy on Big Blue. Lucy's already a good skier, but it's fun to show Reuben and Josie how to make wide smile turns and pizza slices with their skis. I find myself telling them things Logan and Oli have taught me, passing along hints about balance and turning.\n\nAt the bottom of Big Blue, Josie snowplows to a stop near me. \"Wow, you're good.\"\n\n\"Thing is, I'm not,\" I tell her. \"You should see these kids I ski with up here. Logan's amazing and Isabel might make it to the Olympics someday. Actually, they're racing today \u2014 I was planning to go watch them if you want to come?\"\n\nJosie nods, and says, \"Sure, of course,\" but there's a trace of annoyance beneath it. I know I've been talking about them too much, my new friends, and she must be sick of hearing it.\n\nI change the subject while we wait for Reuben and Lucy to catch up. \"Are you entering the science fair again this year?\" I ask, knowing full well that barring some sort of catastrophic event, she wouldn't miss the science fair.\n\nSpeaking of natural disasters, she tells me her idea in a spill of words, something about a simulation of the oceans and hurricanes and temperature change. \"Reuben's getting me a special measurement program for my computer.\" She beams. \"So I can geek out on all that data.\"\n\n\"That's great, Jo.\"\n\nAfter a quick break for lunch, Reuben and Lucy head back out to the slopes, but Josie comes with me to watch Logan and Isabel race. \"We don't have to go,\" I insist. \"I can see them some other time at a different resort. This just might be the last time I can watch them race at Squaw.\"\n\n\"Sure, let's go.\" I can't read her eyes behind her mirrored glasses, but she shrugs. \"I'm done for the day anyway \u2014 my muscles feel like jelly.\"\n\nWe shiver at the bottom of the race hill, the day cold, the sharp metal smell of snow permeating everything. The red and blue flags that dot the downhill racecourse snap in the wind. People mill around us, mostly spectators, but there are also a few of the younger racers in their sleek spandex outfits. Josie nods in the direction of a boy in a liquid-blue suit. \"What exactly is Aquaman over there wearing?\"\n\n\"A racing suit.\"\n\n\"Attractive.\" Josie jumps up and down in an attempt to stay warm. \"Explain again why this is fun. And why there isn't coffee.\"\n\nI point a gloved hand up the hill. \"We'll just stay long enough to see Isabel and Logan.\"\n\nBefore I can say more, the crowd seems to buzz as a whole organism, their combined whispers boosting the level of energy in the space all around us. Isabel must be about to race. Logan told me it's easy to tell when she's about to race because everything around you \u2014 all the attention, hope, and energy \u2014 suddenly cranks up a notch. It's a good description. I squint up the mountain, through the steely air of the day, watching as the slate-gray streak of Isabel takes form. She shifts and bends around the flags, her body almost parallel to the snow on certain turns. Even from where we stand, it happens fast, and like flash lightning, she crosses the finish to a whooping cry from the collected spectators. I shiver but I'm not cold. Josie doesn't realize it, but I've never seen Isabel race before. Not live. I've seen video clips and heard stories.\n\nLike most things, it's different live.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Josie breathes, clutching my arm.\n\nWhoa doesn't begin to describe it.\n\nWe watch a few more racers, none of them with the same grace and speed as Isabel. At a break in the race, as they move from the girls to the boys, Josie leaves to find us mochas and returns with two steaming cups. \"Hot beverage?\" I take it gratefully.\n\nSoon, it's Logan's turn to race. He barrels down the mountain, his body in rhythm with the red and blue flags, his movements clean, but something goes wrong. An overcorrection of a turn or a split-second catch of an edge, maybe? Whatever the reason, he goes down \u2014 hard \u2014 his body skidding down the mountain like a stone skipped across a pond. The audience gasps. I see a woman, probably Logan's mom, rush forward, grasping the arm of a guy with a walkie-talkie.\n\nLogan doesn't get up.\n\nI don't realize I'm chewing the plastic lid of my cup until Josie gently nudges me, saying, her voice concerned, \"Mara, he'll be okay,\" and pulls the cup away from my face.\n\nI nod, feeling ill, a liquid stomach-dropping-out-from-under-me sick, and I have to consciously tell myself to focus, to watch, to wait. Be okay. Be okay. Be okay. In that moment, I'm certain that time is elastic, that there is no way it always moves in the same ticking sixty-second minute we've been taught to believe in.\n\nFinally, a murmur moves through the crowd, morphing into a cheer. With help, Logan walks off the course. \"Wind knocked out,\" someone says. \"Nothing broken,\" says another voice behind me. I pick up my stomach from the snowy ground, my knees wobbly, my heart beating as if I'd been running.\n\nJosie tilts her head, an amused smile playing at the corner of her mouth. \"Yeah, you're right \u2014 you don't like this Logan guy at all. Oh, wow, Mara, if you could see your face right now.\"\n\nThat night, Isabel invites us to a party at a friend's condo in the Village. She gives us directions through the maze of buildings and doors and we end up on the top floor. Isabel waits for us in the hallway outside the condo door, leaning against the wall, texting. She hears us coming. \"You found it!\" She leads us inside to the main room. Music pulses and a couple dozen people mill about, the wide windows showcasing views of the mountains and the purple sky. A fire flickers in a stone fireplace, casting an orange warmth into the room, and Isabel waves to a girl sitting curled in a beanbag near it; she's knitting and talking animatedly with two other girls sitting on the floor in front of her. \"That's Kelsey,\" Isabel tells us. \"She races with me. This is her parents' place.\"\n\nJosie squints at her. \"Is she knitting?\"\n\nIsabel nods. \"Oh, she's always knitting. Actually, she knitted this hat.\" She points at her own sea-green beanie. \"Cute, right?\" We nod in agreement, as if everyone knits hats in their spare time. Isabel smiles. \"You two want a drink?\"\n\nAs Isabel heads toward the kitchen, Josie whispers, \"Okay, I've changed my mind. You should live here forever. Right here. In this condo. I'll bring you food while you learn to knit.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I just happen to have spare millions here somewhere.\" I pat at the pockets of my jeans. Probably because we're so nervous in this fancy space, we find this lame joke hilarious and collapse into giggles.\n\nIsabel returns with two icy cups of red punch. \"Oh, good, you're having fun.\" She pushes the cups into our hands. I take a sip. Ick. Fruit punch and vodka. It tastes like someone spit in it. Isabel waves to someone across the room. \"Let me know if you want something else,\" she says before moving away to talk to a guy I recognize as one of the Frost Boys always hanging out with Beck. His name sounds like a pharmaceutical company. Bayer? Bristol? Something like that.\n\nI sniff my drink. I know it's not cool, but I prefer fruit punch to be the only thing in my fruit punch. Josie leaves to empty her cup into the kitchen sink and refill it with water.\n\nWhen she comes back, she says, \"So spill it.\"\n\n\"My drink? Gladly.\" I pour it into an empty cup someone's left sitting on a table.\n\n\"Logan,\" she clarifies.\n\n\"It doesn't matter, Jo. He just wants to be friends.\" I let the words out the way you let air out of a balloon, and it's stupidly painful to hear them out loud.\n\nShe shakes her head. \"You're going to need to give me the lead-up to why you think that.\"\n\nI fill her in on the details, leading up to \"and then he found out I kissed Beck.\"\n\nJosie's eyes practically pop out of her head. \"Wait, what?! Who?\"\n\nAs if summoned, Beck materializes from somewhere upstairs. If he had a caption, it would read ADORABLE SKIER BOYS WE LOVE TO HATE. He even pauses to run his hands through his tousled hair before moving smoothly across the room.\n\n\"Meet Now List number seven.\" I nod in his direction.\n\nI have struck Josie dumb, left her gaping at Beck as he moves through the room. He waves at someone, flashing his white smile, and a different girl from the one I saw at their school squeals when she sees him, attaching herself to him like one of those gooey rubber toys my brothers are always throwing at the windows of our house, the ones that slowly unstick and then creep down the wall.\n\nWhen he's out of view, retreating into a shadowy nook of the kitchen with Sticky Girl, Josie finally peels her eyes away and turns to me. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Tahoe Mara,\" I explain weakly.\n\nShe holds up her water in a cheers. \"Well, it's nice to meet you, Tahoe Mara. And what have you done with San Diego Mara?\"\n\nI stare glumly into my empty cup. \"Oh, she's still here, botching things up.\"\n\nJosie puts an arm around me. \"We can go if you want.\"\n\nI lean into her. \"Yes, please.\"\n\nThe next day, I say good-bye to Josie, Reuben, and Lucy out in front of PlumpJack. They have to leave by two to catch their flight in Reno, but we got a couple of good skiing hours in this morning and ate lunch at Ethan's.\n\n\"Thanks for coming,\" I say, hugging Josie. \"And for \u2014 you know.\"\n\nAfter leaving the party last night, we'd gone back to Josie's hotel room and I finished filling her in on what had happened with Beck and Logan.\n\n\"I can't believe I had to pry this out of you.\" She'd changed into her pajamas and sat cross-legged on her bed, running a brush through her dark hair. She pointed the brush at me accusatorily. \"You should have told me. Especially because it was my list number.\"\n\n\"I was embarrassed. He's, well\" \u2014 I grimaced \u2014 \"as you saw, he seems to always have a different girl attached to him. It's like he needs them for life support or something.\"\n\nShe tossed the brush into her suitcase on the floor. \"There are plenty of guys like that at Ranfield. And girls. You should have told me.\" After a minute, she asked gently, \"And what about Logan?\"\n\n\"We're just friends.\"\n\nShe pulled her hair into a rope and started braiding it. \"Yes, you keep saying that. But I'm asking you how you feel about him.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. Besides, we're taught from birth not to make any choices because of a boy. To not let some guy influence us, right?\"\n\nHer expression was hard to read as she wrapped the end of her braid with an elastic band. She sighed. \"That doesn't stop it from happening.\"\n\nNow, standing in the wind outside PlumpJack, she holds on to me a little longer than she normally would. \"See you soon, okay? Enjoy the rest of your time here. But then come home.\"\n\nI nod into her shoulder as I hug her back.\n\nI wake the next morning, my mind cloudy from dreaming about that horrible day in calculus, the way I looked in the video, my peach-pit face, the confetti of tests. Sweating, nerves buzzing, it takes a moment to remember I'm here in Tahoe, far north of it all.\n\nThe dream fades, replaced by warm blankets, the sight of snow floating past my window, the hot wood smell of the fire. More than a month ago and it's obviously still bothering me. What had Oli said? Most people aren't even thinking about you \u2014 they're just looking for their car keys. Is that true? That most people don't even notice what happens to everyone else?\n\nIt seems like the whole world watched that video.\n\nI sit up and rub my eyes, feeling suddenly sad that we live in a world where most of the time we're practicing detachment exercises just to get through the day.\n\nI push the covers back, get dressed, and catch a ride to the Village with Trick. I want to buy cookies for Logan at Elevation. Isabel texted last night to tell me he was going to be fine after his fall, but that he'd bruised his hip pretty badly and had to stay off the mountain for a few days.\n\nLater, cookies in hand, I push through the door to Neverland, and Piper greets me with her slobbery kisses and flurry of golden hair. \"Hey, sweetie,\" I say, petting her. Satisfied, she trots back to where she was sleeping next to a space heater. A woman stands behind the counter, flipping through a catalog, her tangle of dark curls pulled into a loose ponytail. Logan's mom, Jessica Never. I recognize her from the photos at Logan's house and from Saturday at the race, only her face is no longer furrowed with worry.\n\nChewing the end of a pencil, she looks up. \"Mara!\"\n\n\"Oh, hi.\" I hang close to the door.\n\n\"Sorry, I'm Jessica.\" She hesitates, then adds, \"We haven't officially met yet, I guess. Even if I did change your diapers.\"\n\nWhat is with these people and diapers? \"Oh, right,\" I say, chewing my lip and wondering if it would be rude to just turn and flee the building.\n\nShe shakes her head, looking uneasy. \"Sorry, that was a totally weird thing to say.\"\n\n\"No, it's fine.\" It was weird. It's been strange to have so many people squint at me the way you would into a grainy old photo album. \"Um, is Logan here?\" I hold up the dark-chocolate coconut cookies. \"I wanted to see if he was feeling better.\"\n\n\"That's so sweet!\" She tugs absently at the end of her ponytail. \"He's not here. Do you want to leave them with me? He's at the other store with Matt.\"\n\n\"Um, no \u2014 it's fine. I'll catch him some other time.\" I turn to leave.\n\n\"Mara?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\nJessica has both hands flat on the counter and she's studying me with Logan's dark eyes. \"How... well, how's it going up here? With... everything?\" Her eyes flick to the counter once before adding, \"Are things going okay with Trick?\"\n\nMy stomach evaporates, like it's suddenly trying to float away from the rest of my body. \"Um, I think so.\"\n\nShe fiddles with the catalog. \"I know it's none of my business, but I just want you to know... he never meant, well, he thought it was for the best, okay? Your mom had a plan and he was just trying to honor that.\"\n\nWhat is she talking about? What plan? \"Okay.\"\n\nThe bell behind me jingles, and I turn to see Trick standing there, looking strangely at Jessica. \"Hey,\" he says, rubbing some snow from his hair.\n\n\"Cookies!\" I blurt, holding up the bag.\n\n\"Sure, thanks.\" He takes them.\n\nJessica stares intently at the catalog.\n\nI mumble something about school and this time flee the store for real.\n\nWalk it off, let it go, don't worry about it.\n\nI owe Logan some cookies.\n\nDr. Elliot called me yesterday afternoon, leaving a sweet-voiced message on my phone \u2014 Give me a call if you think it would be helpful.\n\nIf I think it would be helpful.\n\nSo even though I actually like Dr. Elliot, I don't call him back. He seems perfectly nice in his mountain-hued, fountain-humming office, but I can't bring myself to drag myself up those stairs. Of course, Mom will not appreciate my taking advantage of his generous if, that tiny two-letter word of wiggle room. Now I'm just deliberately not doing my job.\n\nOn Tuesday, I go to chem lab, and afterward Isabel and I walk to the Second Story, the restaurant her mom manages on the actual second story of an old building just off the main stretch of downtown Truckee. Logan didn't come to lab today, so I have another bag of cookies jammed into my backpack. \"I thought his hip was better?\"\n\nIsabel looks sideways at me, her breath making patches of fog in the freezing air. \"Why don't you text him?\"\n\nI shift the weight of my backpack where my chem book is digging into my spine. \"I don't want to bother him if he's recovering.\"\n\nShe shoots me a funny look but doesn't say anything as we climb the stairs. The restaurant has an old glass door, its name etched into the glass over an emblem of an antique typewriter. Inside, its books-and-writing theme hits me. Poster-size copies of famous novel covers line the walls, and a bookshelf crammed with endless titles takes up a full wall. Even the napkin holders look like books.\n\n\"Oh, I get it. The second story. Cute.\" I pick up a menu, my eyes scanning the literary-themed sections: Brave New Salads, As I Lay Frying, The Catcher in the Pie. There is even one whole section just for burgers and hot sandwiches under the heading To Grill a Mockingbird. I point this out to Isabel. \"This does not sound appetizing at all.\"\n\nIsabel surveys the semi-full restaurant, waving to a gray-haired man reading a newspaper at one of the corner tables near the window, in front of an open laptop. \"The woman who owns this place is a total book nerd.\"\n\n\"Clearly.\"\n\nShe leans in close, nodding at the gray-haired man. \"That's her husband. He writes creepy murder mysteries.\"\n\nI stare at the man's kind face, his casual jeans and sweater. \"Really?\"\n\nFrom the back, Isabel's mom emerges, checking a clipboard. Looking up, she sees us. \"Hi, girls!\" She tosses the clipboard on top of the glossy wood bar. Her hair is a carbon copy of Isabel's, only with streaks of white shooting through it.\n\nIsabel slides into a chair at a table near the bar and flips through a paperback someone has left on the table. \"Can we have some fries?\"\n\n\"You must be Mara. I'm April.\" Isabel's mom comes out from behind the bar.\n\n\"Hi.\" I smile awkwardly at the same knowing look she has that Jessica Never was wearing when I went into Neverland yesterday. I guess Tahoe is full of Ghosts of Diaper Changes Past.\n\nShe nods at the menu in my hand. \"You hungry?\"\n\nI set it down. \"Oh, I'm fine.\"\n\n\"We'd love some fries,\" Isabel mentions again, reading the back of the book.\n\n\"Yes, we know.\" April shakes her head, heading back to the kitchen. \"Only I missed the part where you said please and told me how nice I look today.\"\n\nIsabel flashes her mom an overwide smile. \"Great hair day, Mom! How about those fries, pretty please?\"\n\n\"Your sincerity is staggering.\" April disappears through the kitchen door.\n\nI slide into the chair across from Isabel. \"Your mom seems nice.\"\n\nIsabel sets the book down. \"She's a good mama bear.\" We don't say anything for a minute, the air around us peppered with the conversations of the other diners, the clinking of utensils on plates, and the swing of the kitchen door as a server brings us a basket of fries and some ice waters. Nibbling a fry, Isabel studies me.\n\nUncomfortable with the stare-down, I ask, \"What? Why are you looking at me like that?\"\n\nShe shakes the ketchup bottle, looks annoyed at the lack of its progress, then beats the back of it until a small trickle of ketchup emerges. Isabel will not be bested by a ketchup bottle. Victorious, she sets it down. Chewing at last, she points half a fry at me. \"Why don't you talk to Logan? You clearly like him.\"\n\n\"What?\" I sputter. \"No, I don't \u2014 I mean, he's fine. Whatever.\" It's my turn to battle with the ketchup bottle, which might be the exact color of my face now.\n\nShe cocks an eyebrow. \"Convincing.\"\n\nApril returns to our table, rescuing me from further interrogation, and sets down a small oval platter of sliders. \"You need some protein, too.\"\n\nIsabel and I each grab one. \"Lord of the Sliders,\" I say, holding up the tiny cheeseburger.\n\nApril laughs. \"That's good. We should change the name.\" She disappears back into the kitchen.\n\nIsabel does not release her death stare at me until I say, \"Okay, look, Logan's great, but it doesn't matter anyway. He said he just wants to be friends.\"\n\n\"Oh, did he?\" She snorts into her slider. \"That figures.\"\n\n\"Why?\" I press, but then hurry to say, \"Never mind, it doesn't matter. I should just focus on getting my life back on track.\"\n\nShe leans a bit forward. \"But I thought you came up here to take a break? Have some fun?\"\n\n\"Right, fun.\" I stare at the mystery writer. He has put his paper away and is typing intently on his laptop, maybe killing off a character. I haven't read a mystery novel since Nancy Drew. I think of all the things on my first Now List I crossed off when I first got to Tahoe and then never did again. \"I sort of suck at having fun.\"\n\nFinishing her slider, she nods, her mouth full. \"Yeah, Trick told us that.\"\n\n\"Wait, what?\"\n\n\"When you first got here. He told us you were this super-serious workaholic and that we should show you some fun while you were here.\"\n\nMy head starts to throb. I set down my half-eaten slider. \"Wait, so he, like, told you guys to hang out with me?\"\n\nShe sees my face. \"It wasn't like that. He was looking out for you. I mean, you'd just had that huge meltdown and he was worried.\"\n\nMy skin prickling, I say, \"Well, he doesn't exactly talk to me, so I really wouldn't know.\" Clearly, Trick talks to other people, though \u2014 just not his own daughter.\n\nShe bites her lip. \"Don't be mad. He was worried. He said that video really messed you up. Actually, he thinks that school is messing you up. Wait,\" she pleads. \"Don't tell him I told you that.\"\n\nI fold my arms across my chest, my heart racing. \"You wouldn't have to if he'd try talking to me about it.\"\n\nIsabel frowns. \"I'm sorry I said something. He was being sweet, seriously. He's a good guy.\"\n\nI don't say anything, just pick at the basket of fries. I can't believe Trick told them to hang out with me. How humiliating. Like I'm in preschool or something and he's setting up a playdate.\n\nWatching me, Isabel swallows hard but then brightens. \"You know what? Bodie was in a YouTube video once that got a bunch of views. His pants fell down during a race, tripped him, and it was a complete shot of his butt.\" She holds up her hands like a director surveying a shot for a movie. \"Full. Moon.\"\n\nShe succeeds in getting a smile out of me. \"Knowing Bodie, that sounds like something he would be proud of.\"\n\nShe nods. \"True. He was. But it got, like, ten thousand views or something.\"\n\nI play musical salt and pepper shakers, my smile fading. \"That's the difference, then. He was proud of it.\" Outside, the Truckee sky starts to darken, that purple stain like grape juice soaking into cotton that starts early here. It must be close to four-thirty. \"And mine had over six hundred thousand.\"\n\nShe looks shocked. \"Seriously?\"\n\nI guess she hasn't seen it. \"Miss Perfect's Epic Meltdown. After it happened, reporters called to interview me.\" I put on a mock interviewer voice. \"Was the pressure of being a driven teenager too much for you? Do you think you're a casualty of the perfectionist teen culture? How did you feel when you ripped up all those tests?\" I shake my head and toss my uneaten fry onto the plate. \"It was mortifying.\"\n\nHer sympathy takes its most common form, the head tilt. \"Listen, Trick was just trying to watch out for you.\"\n\n\"Well, that would be a first.\"\n\nIsabel hesitates, then digs through her bag. She pushes a polished, red-orange stone across the table to me. \"Here.\"\n\nI pick it up, its smooth red surface streaked with pale orange and almost translucent, like glass. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"It's a carnelian stone.\" At my puzzled expression, she explains further. When she was in eighth grade, she went on a trip to Carnelian Bay on Lake Tahoe, which was named for all these red-orange stones on the shore. That day, the guide told them how these stones held protective and healing properties, how they were used to ward off difficulty or evil. \"I know it sounds a bit lame and hippie-ish, but I give them to all my friends \u2014 Logan, Bodie, Joy, Amanda \u2014 a bunch of people. Only I think Bodie lost his. Because he's an idiot. Anyway, they're to protect you from other people, mostly from how selfish and jealous people can be and how that can spill over onto us all the time if we're not careful. Believe me, I know. So I keep my carnelian with me like an amulet.\" She pulls a small stone from the pocket of her jacket and holds it up. \"I don't race without it.\" I must look unsure, because she shrugs. \"I know, I know, it's superstitious and weird but it works. Anyway, I got you one. For you to keep with you because, you know, it seems like you might need it.\"\n\nI turn the glossy stone over in my hands, my eyes welling. \"Thanks, Isabel.\" Tucking it safely in my pocket, I blink quickly. \"What are you up to this week? Want to try to ski a little on Friday or something? I mean, I know I'm terrible, but Oli says I'm getting a lot better.\"\n\nHer face falls. \"I can't \u2014 we're leaving Thursday for Mammoth. We have a race there this weekend.\"\n\n\"Oh, right \u2014 okay.\" I try not to look disappointed. \"Well, have fun!\"\n\nThere's that word again.\n\nWednesday morning, I stare into a latte at Elevation and think about having fun. What do I do for fun? I guess I'd always thought tennis was fun, only the last year or so, it has kind of felt like one of my jobs. School used to be fun. I was that kid in elementary school who earned all her monthly STAR STUDENT! buttons (which I still have in a shoe box under my bed). And sometimes learning is still fun; it's just that there's too much of it. Too many essays and tests and SAT words and reading and studying and starting all over again each week. At what point do we reach a saturation point and there's no room left?\n\nNot that Ranfield's not fun. We have a hyperactive student government who are always creating dances, activities, charity drives, festivals. But I don't go to many of those because I'm busy trying to keep afloat in the school part. And also because most of their events feel stressful and competitive. How many cans of food can you bring for the needy? How many laps can you do to raise money for the homeless shelter? How many pages can you read to earn books for the library downtown? Everyone's always trying to win at everything all the time. Even when it's for a good cause. It's exhausting and really doesn't feel that fun at all.\n\nOr maybe I just don't know how to have fun.\n\nCould I be having fun right now? I look around the caf\u00e9. It's sort of fun to study here by the crackling fire, with a steaming latte, listening to that new indie band Natalie has playing low on the speakers. Maybe I should buy a chocolate chip cookie? Cookies are fun. I stare at my AP history textbook. Fun's not so easy when I'm supposed to be reading a section called \"America Chooses Imperialism.\" Maybe it would be fun if it were American Imperialism: The Musical, featuring the songs \"Three Cheers for Oppression!\" and \"Just Give Me That!\" Actually, that gives me a good idea for the next project.\n\nI'm scribbling notes when I feel someone standing over me. \"Hey, San Diego.\" Beck slides into the seat across from me. \"Still avoiding me?\"\n\n\"Obviously not very well.\" I give him a quick smile but make a show of flipping a few pages of my history textbook.\n\nHe pouts. \"You didn't even say hi at the party the other night.\"\n\n\"You had something attached to your face.\" I pretend to think about it. \"I think her name starts with an M. Madison, maybe? I don't know. Do you even keep track?\"\n\nHe laughs in that charcoaly way of his that I'm sure he practices in front of a mirror. \"Wow, jealous. A nice color on you.\"\n\n\"Not jealous. Concerned. I know how you don't like to work too hard. And keeping track of all of your girlfriends seems like a time management issue for you.\"\n\n\"Not really.\" He stands up, waving to someone outside. Not a girl, for the record. \"And I always know where to find the ones I like best.\" He gives my shoulders a little squeeze and saunters out.\n\nCan it count as fun to love-hate someone? I open my Now List II where I'd carefully written HAVE MORE FUN in all caps as #7. (I'd also added \"Be more spontaneous!\" as #8 for good measure. And \"No boys!\" for #9.)\n\nI'm totally crossing off #7.\n\nA few hours later, I'm almost done with my AP history notes when suddenly someone is hiding under my table. \"Um, hello?\" I peer beneath it.\n\nLogan crouches there, a finger to his lips. \"Shhhh. Look like you're studying.\"\n\n\"I am studying.\"\n\n\"Shhhh.\"\n\nSomeone's feeling better. I return to my notes. Minutes later, Bodie flashes by outside the window at a run, looping back when he sees me. Jogging in place, he mouths, \"Logan?\" I shake my head, shrugging a haven't seen him, and he takes off at a run again around the corner of the store.\n\n\"He's gone,\" I say in an overexaggerated whisper.\n\n\"Give it a minute.\" Logan's voice floats out from his hiding spot.\n\nHe's right. Bodie flashes by the window one more time, going in the opposite direction. I dutifully study my notes, but who am I kidding? No way am I absorbing any relevant information about the Progressive Reforms of Theodore Roosevelt when Logan Never has wedged himself beneath my table, his back pressed into my shins.\n\nLogan pokes his head above the table. \"Okay, that's plenty of time.\"\n\nI smile at his hair, messed up from the table. \"What was that about? You're lucky you don't have gum in your hair.\"\n\nHe checks for it anyway. \"Snow tag.\" He slips into the chair next to me. \"What are you up to?\"\n\n\"Nothing as fun as snow tag.\" I close the book. \"Which is what, by the way?\"\n\nHis eyes slipping to the window again, just in case he needs to duck at any moment, he explains that he and some of the other Frost Boys created this elaborate game of snow tag years ago and it kept evolving into an ongoing thing they play. They hound one another all over the mountain, following clues from people they know who are willing to rat someone out, until they tag someone who needs tagging.\n\n\"But that could take days.\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" he agrees. \"But mostly not.\" He looks at my closed book. \"Want to come?\"\n\nHave more fun. \"Do I need to be in my ski stuff?\"\n\n\"It helps.\"\n\n\"I don't think I like this game,\" I say, peering over the edge of the chairlift into a wide canyon. Logan talked me into taking the Red Dog chair over to the Squaw Creek resort, and it feels way sketchier than the other ones we've been on as it shivers and creaks over a deep ravine. \"Yeah, I don't like this lift at all.\"\n\nLogan kicks back in the chair. \"It's fine.\"\n\n\"That doesn't look fine,\" I say, pointing down. \"That is what death looks like.\"\n\nChuckling, he slings an arm across the back of the lift, his glove just brushing my shoulder. \"You worry a lot.\"\n\n\"Wow, Logan Never with the insightful observations.\" My nerves don't let the tease come out lightly and instead I sound defensive.\n\nHe notices and lets his gloved hand fall to my shoulder, giving it a reassuring squeeze. \"I won't let you die on Red Dog.\"\n\nNot convinced, I study a ski patroller who glides by beneath us in his red jacket, wondering how many people he's had to pull down the mountain today in one of those little sleds I've seen zipping by. \"Is it much longer?\" I try to look ahead to see the end of the lift, but suddenly, the whole chair shudders. Then stops. I seize the bar in fear. \"What's happening? Why are we stopping?\"\n\nLogan looks behind him. \"Don't know. Sometimes they have to stop the lift because someone falls off.\"\n\nOne hand on the front bar, I clamp my other hand on the side rail for support. \"What do you mean, someone falls off?\"\n\n\"Not from up here. Usually when they're trying to get on or off. Or they had a mechanical thing. It happens.\" He is way too casual about dangling up here midair.\n\n\"How long?\"\n\nHe shrugs, craning his head to see up ahead, where the lift in front of us sways, the two guys on snowboards jostling each other. To distract myself, I take off my gloves, pull out my binder from my backpack, and flip it open to the Now List II. I scribble a huge star by Will's Be brave. Then I add another star next to it. I've earned at least two sitting up here. I also cross off Be more spontaneous! because this totally counts.\n\n\"What's that?\" Logan motions at the binder.\n\n\"Nothing.\" I try to jam it back into my backpack, but Logan's too quick and he grabs it. He has the whole not-scared-to-be-suspended-above-a-ravine thing going for him, which makes him agile. You'd think he was sitting in a porch swing.\n\n\"Please don't read that,\" I say without much heart behind it. Maybe fear makes me docile.\n\n\"'The Now List II,'\" he reads. \"'Be more spontaneous!' Crossed off.\" He flips a few pages. Grinning, he looks up. \"Wait, you made checklists? For living in the now?\"\n\nI tuck my poles farther under my legs. \"It helps me.\"\n\n\"'Be more spontaneous!'\" he reads again. \"You know, writing it down is actually the opposite of being spontaneous.\"\n\nI take a shaky breath. \"Can I have my binder back, please? Ack!\" The lift trembles and starts to move forward again.\n\n\"See, we're going again.\" He flips through the rest of the binder, the scratched-out former list, the articles and highlights, and all my notes. \"This is... well, I've never seen anything quite like this before, Mara.\" But his voice is affectionate. He closes it and holds it up. \"Nice cover. Very now.\" A picture of one of the Squaw Valley fire pits.\n\nI try not to laugh. Seeing him there, holding it, it all suddenly seems a little silly. I shrug. \"It works for me.\"\n\n\"To be more spontaneous?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nThen Logan Never tosses my Now binder off the ski lift.\n\n\"WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?!\" For a second, as I watch it sail through the air and hit the snow below, where it slides and then comes to a stop, I forget I'm scared and lean heavily forward on the bar, rocking the lift back and forth. I stare at Logan, stunned. \"You did not just throw my binder off a ski lift?!\"\n\nHe feigns a look of surprise. \"I was being spontaneous.\"\n\nShaking my head, I sit back, my body flooding with nerves and disbelief. \"Like I don't have a backup copy.\"\n\nWe spend an hour skiing into the Squaw Creek resort area. Exhausted, I collapse into a wide chair near a large glowing bonfire. A few minutes later, Logan brings me a hot cocoa, setting it on the arm of his side of the chair.\n\nA flash of red catches my eye. I sit up, my cocoa sloshing on my sleeve. \"Hey! I think that kid is sledding on my binder!\" I point to a group of three kids in ski bibs taking turns sliding down a snow bank. The youngest one, in a white-and-chocolate-brown suit that makes him look like a s'more, clamps his small hands on the edges of the binder as he zips down the bank.\n\nLogan leans in and says in a teasing whisper, \"He's living in the now.\"\n\n\"Oh, forget it,\" I say, leaning back to sip my cocoa and let the bonfire warm my face. \"Good for him.\"\n\nWithout warning, Bodie springs out from behind us. \"Tag!\" he shouts, grabbing Logan's shoulders.\n\n\"Oh, no! He found you because you were sitting out here with me instead of hiding.\" I watch Logan mop hot cocoa off his pants while Bodie does a victory dance that compels the couple next to us to actually get up and leave. Probably because he's making noises that sound like a sick rooster.\n\nLogan glances up and meets my eyes. \"Totally worth it.\"\n\nMom Skypes with me on Thursday night as I'm settling into bed with my laptop, which is weird because she hates to Skype. It doesn't let her do twelve other things at the same time. \"You're not answering your phone?\"\n\nMy phone is currently dead at the bottom of my bag. \"Hi to you, too.\"\n\n\"Hi. Why aren't you answering your phone?\" She's sitting at our kitchen table. I catch a glimpse of the granite island behind her and can hear the low whoosh of the dishwasher.\n\n\"It ran out of power. Hold on, I'll charge it now.\" I throw off the covers, dig it out, and plug it into the wall.\n\nWhen I'm back in front of the screen, she asks, \"Did you reschedule with Dr. Elliot?\"\n\nMy body's sore from a day of skiing, and with the warm glow of the fire, I could fall asleep in about five seconds. \"Not yet.\"\n\n\"Mara!\"\n\nI burrow deeper into my pillow, watching the flames twitch and shift through the glass door of the woodstove. \"Dr. Elliot said I should only come in if it felt helpful.\"\n\n\"How Tahoe of him.\" No one does patronizing quite like Mom.\n\nI try to distract her. \"How're the twins? Can I say hi to them?\"\n\n\"It's nine. They're in bed,\" she says, as if I've asked to fly them to the moon in a helicopter made of cheese.\n\n\"Oh, yeah. Bedtime.\"\n\nI listen to her report on the twins' science projects taking up half the kitchen, the difficult case keeping Will up all hours of the night, and the condo she just sold near where we live in North Park to the most annoying hipster couple ever. Finally, she says, \"Okay, I won't bug you anymore about scheduling.\"\n\n\"Really?\" A log shifts in the woodstove, sending the shadows on the ceiling dancing. \"No more Google calendar alerts?\"\n\n\"You're obviously not using them.\" Mom clears her throat, then says, \"Actually, I'm mostly calling because I wanted to let you know I'll be coming up tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow?\" Who needs a Google calendar when you can monitor at close range?\n\n\"I'll be flying into Reno in the late afternoon. I should be there by dinnertime if it doesn't take a million years to get my rental car. Will you make reservations for dinner?\"\n\n\"Valentine's Day's not until Sunday. We probably won't need reservations tomorrow.\" I hesitate, then bravely add, \"What's this trip about?\"\n\n\"Maybe I want to see my favorite valentine?\"\n\n\"Right.\" But there has to be more to it than that. I should have just rescheduled the stupid appointment.\n\n\"Make reservations for dinner, okay? Somewhere in Truckee; let's get you out of the valley for a bit. You must be going stir-crazy.\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\nHer silence hums with disappointment. \"Okay, then \u2014 wherever you want to eat. A place with vegetables. I don't even want to think about what you're eating while you're there.\"\n\n\"I had vegetable soup for dinner.\"\n\nShe exhales a wind-through-a-shell sigh. \"Probably from a can. Listen, I have to go. I have contracts I need to get out to people.\" Leaning into the screen so her face seems to swell dramatically, she says, \"Mara, when I'm up, we need to talk about how to best reintegrate when you come home.\"\n\nReintegrate. It sounds like something someone dressed in khaki does with a wild animal.\n\nAfter we hang up, my stomach blooms with nerves, making it almost impossible to concentrate on the imperialism essay I'm finishing. My history teacher had vetoed my American Imperialism: The Musical idea. Apparently, he didn't think it was very appropriate to make fun of something like imperialism, and I didn't have the strength to argue the power of satire with him via my Home Hospital coordinator.\n\nThrowing back the blanket, I wiggle into some jeans and zip a parka over my pajama top. As I slip into my Uggs, I grab a beanie, gloves, and a scarf and walk into the main room. Trick sits on the couch, watching a ski movie. I know enough now to see it's a Warren Miller film he's watched a million times. \"I'm going for a quick walk.\"\n\n\"Now?\" He sits up a little, scratching his stubbly face. He leaves a little smudge of ash on his cheek, his hands dirty from the fire.\n\nI yank my beanie down over my ears. \"Just for, like, ten minutes. To clear my head. I'm having a hard time on this paper I'm writing.\"\n\n\"Was that your mom?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" I wind the scarf around my neck. \"She's coming up tomorrow.\"\n\nA flash of panic crosses his features. \"Tomorrow \u2014 why?\"\n\nI make a face. \"She claims she misses me, but I think she wants to talk me into coming home.\" I hold the words out to him almost like a litmus test.\n\nHis eyes lock with mine for a moment, but he only says, \"Well, take the flashlight. It's pitch-dark out.\"\n\nOutside, the air might actually have teeth. I'm shivering before I even pull my gloves on. I walk down the sanded street, moving as quickly as I can without slipping. Questions pulse through my brain, forming a list of the things I can never quite bring myself to say out loud to Trick:\n\nDo you want me to go home?\n\nWhy did you think I couldn't make friends on my own?\n\nWhy haven't you taken me skiing?\n\nWhere have you been all my life?\n\nA flash of anger warms me. Why should I always have to ask the questions? Doesn't he have anything to ask me? To say to me? Like, for example, Gee, biological daughter, what have you been up to for the last thirteen years?\n\nAt the end of our street, I stomp up a sloped hill that leads to a view of Squaw's famous KT-22. Reaching the crest, I stop, my breath making puffs in the air around me. Clouds obscure the moon, leaving it a glowing smudge against black sky. Up on the mountain, far away, a single groomer moves in lonely sweeps across the slopes, its light cutting a swath across the face of the mountain. I can just make it out, sailing like a ship along the dark mountain, and it's nice to know I'm not the only one out here tonight. I watch its sluggish light until it starts to snow again and I can barely feel my face before heading back.\n\nThe snow stopped sometime during the night, but there is enough of it that we need to dig ourselves out this morning. Mom will be here tonight and Trick wants to make sure she can get in the driveway and up the path to the house. I notice he's doing an especially detailed job. I bundle up and join him. He hands me a battered wide-mouth shovel that has clearly seen years of use and shows me where to begin on the path. Then he heads back to the driveway.\n\nTrick was asleep last night when I crept back into the house, his heavy breathing even and measured \u2014 not worried at all if I'd frozen to death outside on my walk. The covers pulled to my chin, I'd missed my mom terribly as I fell asleep, even with all her spreadsheets and Google calendars and seashell sighs through the phone. She would have waited up for me to come home.\n\nNow I shovel snow off the path, heaping it into a berm on the side of the driveway, the shovel scraping against the stone pathway. My cheeks flush and my breath quickens as I hurl shovelfuls of it to the side. I think about all the things I don't know about my life when I lived here, how as a three-year-old I was just whisked away and life here went on without me. People skied and Logan and Isabel went to picnics by the lake and Trick worked at Neverland and buried my naked mole rat book beneath a pile of fleece pullovers. And I went to Ranfield and melted down in front of a classroom of teenagers, one mean enough to film it so more than six hundred thousand people could watch it.\n\nBut it could have all been different.\n\nI could have been living here, picnicking by lakes and skiing down mountains and tucking carnelian stones into the pocket of my jeans. It was a kind of theft, what was taken from me. This could be my life right now if two people had decided it was worth it to figure it out. I wouldn't just be taking a break.\n\nIt would be my whole life.\n\n\"Hey, Mara \u2014 not so high on that \u2014\" Trick starts to say, but I whirl on him, sending snow flying, and he ducks, shocked at what must be the rage on my face.\n\n\"What happened with you and Mom? What could possibly have been so bad that you couldn't work it out? Your stupid skiing career? That was more important than knowing your own daughter?\"\n\n\"Whoa, wait \u2014 what?\" He holds his hands up in defense, as if I might hurl more snow in his direction. Or throw the shovel at him.\n\n\"And then \u2014 what? You just gave up? You just said, oh, well, the kid's gone now... and what? Shoveled the driveway? Got a beer? Thirteen years and I saw you once! What is wrong with you?\" I toss the shovel into the snow and storm back to the house.\n\n\"Hang on \u2014 Mara!\" Trick tries to follow me but slips on the icy unsanded drive.\n\nI track snow into the room and grab my phone from the coffee table. Isabel and Logan are gone \u2014 in Mammoth. I might be in Mammoth right now if my parents weren't so selfish. My eyes land on Beck's number. With shaking fingers, I text him.\n\nyou have to come get me at trick's! i'm freaking out!\n\nHe immediately writes back.\n\nbe right there.\n\nI stomp into my room, slamming the door, but Trick doesn't come inside. Fifteen minutes later, an old Jeep Wagoneer in mint condition pulls into what's cleared of the driveway. I hurry outside to it, wading through snow to my knees in places. Trick sits on the pile of snow I'd made earlier, his face in his hands. Seeing him, I have a stab of guilt, so I try not to look at him as I move around to the passenger side of the Jeep and climb in. I'm not even supposed to be driving with Beck. California law. But I don't care right now.\n\nBeck studies Trick sitting there. \"Where to?\"\n\nI snap my seat belt into place. \"Anywhere.\"\n\n\"Gotcha.\" Beck backs out of the driveway. We drive in silence down the hill, turning left onto Squaw Valley Road. Finally, as we turn right on Highway 89 toward Tahoe City, he asks, \"You okay?\"\n\nWe sail past the turnoff to Alpine Meadows and the River Ranch. I study the heaps of snow clogging the Truckee River as it snakes alongside us on the right, a silent, wintry yawn. \"Not really.\" Occasionally, I see a house on the other side of the river, footbridges arching across a stretch of winter water. I wonder who lives in those houses or if they're empty like so many of the others.\n\n\"I'm glad you called,\" Beck says, driving through an intersection that leads us into the main stretch of Tahoe City, passing the Tahoe City Neverland store on the left. \"You can always call me.\" He puts a warm hand on my knee. Or maybe the warmth is from the guilt washing through me. I wouldn't have called him if Isabel or Logan had been in town.\n\nBeck finds a parking spot on the street in front of Syd's Bagelry. I get out of the car, momentarily struck with the wide expanse of Lake Tahoe suddenly in view. \"Wow,\" I breathe, my eyes drinking in the inky whitecapped water, massive against the distant snow-covered mountains. The water is empty of boats; only white buoys here and there dot the surface near the shoreline. Beck joins me, his hair whipped by the wind, and tugs me toward the door of the caf\u00e9.\n\nWe head inside and I find a table while he orders coffees. Beck checks his phone, cursing at something he reads there, then crosses to our table, sliding into the seat next to me. \"You're a sight for sore eyes. I've had the worst week ever.\"\n\n\"Oh \u2014 I'm sorry.\" I stumble at his sudden shift of mood.\n\nThe waitress brings out steaming coffees for us, both black. I head to the counter and pour a generous amount of milk into mine. As I sit back down, he launches into a story about his parents, how they fight all the time, how even though they got divorced last year, they still can't stop constantly screaming at each other. Mostly about him. About what a huge disappointment he is to both of them. He leaves twice to refill his coffee. Sitting back down, he blurts, \"And I just found out if I don't pass math, I can't graduate a year early like I planned. Some stupid requirement.\" He stares glumly into his already half-empty mug.\n\nWhat happened to School is just a system of tyranny? \"I thought you didn't care about society imposing standards on you or whatever? Wouldn't that include a high school diploma?\"\n\nHe looks at me sharply but tries to hide it behind a shrug. \"I don't. It's a stupid system that only rewards rule followers. It's the opposite of an education.\" I've heard this argument before. \"But my dad says I have to graduate or he's cutting me off.\"\n\nBut this detail is new. \"What math are you in?\"\n\n\"Geometry.\"\n\nI sip my coffee. \"I can help you with that.\"\n\nHe sits up. \"Seriously? That'd be great. Just enough to pass. I mean, a diploma is a totally arbitrary piece of paper, but it's part of the deal I made with Dad the Despot.\" He finishes his coffee in a long gulp. \"Four more months and then I'm out from under it all. On my own.\" He leaps out of his seat and I see him hurry to his car, open a back door, and pull out a backpack.\n\nI can't help but think that he will not actually be on his own if his dad continues to bankroll his life, but I'm pretty sure he won't be interested in that particular observation right now. He returns, dumping a geometry book on the table.\n\n\"Wait, now?\"\n\nHe flips open the book. \"Sure, why not?\"\n\n\"Oh, I just, well, I \u2014\" I almost tell him about Trick, about our fight, but he doesn't really seem to be listening. Instead, I opt for \"My mom's coming to town this afternoon, so I'm not sure I have time.\"\n\nThe barista walks by, carrying a sandwich to a table, where she chats with two guys in beanies and ski pants. Beck eyes their plates. \"Whoa, that looks great. Want one?\"\n\nHe jumps up again. He's jittery and weird, not his usual calm swagger. No more coffee, Mr. Davis. I deposit his mug in a nearby busing tray while he's at the counter.\n\nWe sit in the caf\u00e9 as the late morning turns into afternoon and it starts to grow dark outside, storm clouds clogging the sky again, the air holding just a few glints of snowflakes. Our empty sandwich plates pushed away and two chapters of geometry later, I sit back and study the paintings on the wall by a local artist, mostly abstracts.\n\nOne is called Sorrow.\n\nI tell Beck about a site I used to follow. \"It's called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Have you seen it?\" He shakes his head, rubbing his math-bleary eyes. \"It's all these made-up words for emotions that don't have names. One I really liked was nodustollens: the realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense anymore.\"\n\nHe looks up from the problem he's working on. \"Does the plot of your life not make sense?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\n\"Bummer.\" He returns to his scribbles on the page.\n\nBummer?\n\nOutside, the snow is floating in thick flakes past the window. The tangle in my stomach begins to shift. \"It's starting to snow pretty hard. I think we should head back.\"\n\nHe looks over his shoulder at the snow. \"It's not bad. But if you want to leave, we can.\"\n\n\"I should go. My mom's coming soon and she's already furious with me. One more thing and she might pack me on a plane back to San Diego tomorrow.\" And I really don't want to sit here with you anymore because you only care about yourself, you big jerk, I don't add. Standing, I carry our plates to the busing tray.\n\nWe head out into the storm and climb into the Jeep. Beck makes a U-turn and heads back toward Squaw Valley. The snow picks up, swirling into the windshield. We pass only one or two other cars. Beck leans the Jeep into the oncoming snowfall, moving us faster and faster along the silent highway.\n\nHe's going too fast and I feel the Jeep slipping on the fresh snow beneath the tires. \"Maybe you should slow down?\"\n\nHe looks surprised. \"You don't need to worry \u2014 this isn't fast.\"\n\n\"It's just the weather seems bad.\" I hold the seat beneath me with both hands.\n\n\"I've been driving in snow since I was twelve. This is nothing.\" He pushes harder on the accelerator, his eyes intent on the road ahead. We fly down the highway, the car slipping and skidding through the storm. My heart hammers and my stomach drops.\n\nIt's too fast.\n\n\"Beck, slow down.\"\n\n\"It's fine.\" But it's not fine. He overcorrects around a turn and the Jeep skids to the side. He catches it, but we both know that, for a scary moment, he'd lost control.\n\nHe slows down and we make the rest of the trip to the Squaw intersection in silence. As we wait for the light to turn green, he looks at me, his expression sheepish. \"I really wasn't going that fast.\" Clenching my jaw, I ignore him. When I don't say anything for a minute he adds, \"Seriously, you need to relax. You'll end up being afraid of everything with that attitude.\"\n\nNot turning to him, I say quietly, \"I'm not sure I need a lesson in bravery from you.\"\n\nHe doesn't respond, winding the Jeep through the valley as outside the world grows heavy with snow. Finally, as we near Trick's place, he mumbles, \"It wasn't that fast.\" He tries to pat my leg, but I angle my body away from him, a new made-up word flashing through my mind.\n\nCherk: a charming jerk. Beck Davis is a cherk.\n\nI stare out at the snowy world and don't reply. As he pulls into Trick's driveway, my stomach drops for the second time. Mom is already here, getting out of her rented SUV. Her eyes go wide when she sees me pull in with Beck, her mouth falling open. She takes the distance between our cars in huge strides, and before I can unbuckle, she whips the door open. \"Out of the car.\"\n\n\"Mom, I got it.\"\n\n\"No, Mara. You clearly don't got it. Out of the car.\" She keeps her voice low, but her anger vibrates more intensely than if she'd been yelling.\n\nI get out of the car.\n\nLater, I sit across from Mom at a back table at Ethan's (where I had not, she noted, made a reservation). After she seats us, Maggie looks worriedly in my direction and brings us a free fried zucchini appetizer. Mom's still mad; it radiates off her like those heat shimmers that rise up from hot pavement in the desert.\n\nFinally, she says, \"I'm trying to understand, Mara, I am. I'm trying to find a reason why you thought it was okay to get into that car today with Beck Davis. Not only did you break the law, worse \u2014 you put your life in danger driving with him in this kind of weather.\" She shakes her head. \"It's not like you to cause this kind of trouble.\" Get in a little trouble. Check. Only, the funny part is I'm no good at it. I try to focus on what Mom's saying across the table. \"You're not going to your counseling sessions, you're pulling stunts like today. This is obviously not working.\"\n\n\"It is working,\" I mumble, more to the plate of zucchini than to her.\n\nShe rubs the skin beneath her eyes with the pads of her fingers, something she always does at the end of a long, exhausting day. \"Okay, then, why don't you explain why I should let you stay in Tahoe when all you make are bad choices?\"\n\nAs if I've been making heaping piles of them. \"What other bad choices have I been making?\"\n\nShe taps her fork on the napkin. \"I'm concerned about your schoolwork.\"\n\n\"Ms. Raff told me my last AP history DBQ was the best so far.\" My mouth feels like sand. Where is Maggie with my Diet Coke? \"And I found that lab all on my own. My schoolwork is fine. Better than fine, because I'm getting it all done but I'm not so stressed out. I'm getting enough sleep. And best of all \u2014 no one has posted a humiliating YouTube video while I've been here.\" Maggie sets down a glass of white wine for Mom, who is overly showy about thanking her, taking a long sip of it to delay responding to me. \"You know what's funny, Mom?\" I ask when we've exhausted the avoid-talking-by-drinking option.\n\nShe raises her eyebrows. \"I would love to know what's funny right now.\"\n\n\"I can't even really get into trouble. That was on my list, you know. From Josie. Get in a little trouble. Number twelve.\"\n\n\"Great.\" She swirls her wine in the glass. \"Great advice.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter because I can't do it. You know what happened today with Beck? What terrible awful things happened?\" She holds up a hand as if to ward off a shot to the face, so I lean in dramatically. \"I ended up tutoring him in math and telling him not to drive so fast. I really let it all hang out there.\" I drop my head onto the table.\n\nShe sets down her glass and runs her slightly shaking hand over my hair. \"Oh, honey.\"\n\nI peer up at her. \"Still, you don't even trust me. And you should. Because I don't get in trouble, don't you see? Even when I try. But don't worry, if I did, I'd feel sick about it for days, so you win.\"\n\n\"This doesn't feel like winning,\" she says, removing her hand, dropping it into her lap. \"Mara, I just... I don't want you involved with the Davis family.\"\n\nI sit up. So this is about Beck. Not my schoolwork. Not even my appointments with Dr. Elliot. If I'd climbed out of that car with Isabel or Logan, would she have reacted the same way? Still, she's not giving me credit for seeing through him on my own. Which I have. \"Mom, you don't need to worry about Beck Davis.\"\n\nShe frowns. \"I'm not sure how much you know about Beck yet or if Trick's told you anything.\" I shake my head at that. She hesitates, then says, \"Let's just say it's much easier to be a rebel when you have nothing to lose, when you have his father's bank account as a safety net. You're on scholarship, Mara. And Will and I do fine, but we're nowhere near the Davises' league. You don't have the luxury of making Beck's brand of bad choices.\" Her brow furrows as she picks the breading from a zucchini stick before dropping it, uneaten, onto the plate. \"But it's more than that. It's that family.\" She stares into her wine. \"The Davises don't care about anyone. I'm not sure if narcissism can apply to a whole family, but if it could, they'd be the poster family for it.\"\n\nHadn't I felt that exact thing earlier today when Beck launched into his geometry drama? \"Trust me, I don't care about Beck. He has nothing to do with what I'm feeling about being in Tahoe.\"\n\nShe looks skeptical. \"Really? And how are you feeling?\"\n\nI'm not sure I can even articulate it, but I try. \"You know what I love most about Tahoe? I'm not made up almost entirely of knots. Which is how I feel in San Diego at Ranfield. All the time.\" She winces, but I need to tell her this, to try to make her understand, even if it's hard to hear. \"The best part of my time here is I actually have just that \u2014 time. And I'm figuring out that I don't want all the same things you and Will do, that I don't want to be stressed and busy and competitive all the time \u2014\"\n\n\"You wanted to go to Ranfield,\" she interrupts. \"We've been supporting what you wanted.\" But even as she says it, she can't meet my eyes.\n\n\"You want me there, too.\" I try to keep my voice low. \"You love having a daughter who's at a school like Ranfield. I hear you talk with your friends. With your clients. And now you're upset because I might not want the life you designed for me. But that's just it. I'm not some renovation project \u2014 put the stone wall here, put the atrium there. I'm not a project at all, I'm a person!\" Now she just looks confused again. I let my point get away from me and I'm just rambling in weird house-remodeling metaphors. \"It's hard to explain,\" I end lamely.\n\nTo my surprise, though, she dissolves into tears. Big tears. Mom is not a crier, especially not in public. She drops her face into her hands, her hair falling forward in a blond fringe. I have never spoken to her like I just did and my stomach lurches as I watch her cry. \"Mom?\" I reach tentatively toward her.\n\n\"Um, can I, um, set this down?\" Maggie, eyes wide, holds our pizza aloft. She glances from Mom to me, apologetic.\n\n\"Here, set it here, thanks.\" I move my Diet Coke out of the way. Mom has not emerged from behind her hands. \"Thanks,\" I say again. Maggie hurries away. The smell of the pizza makes my mouth water, but I don't take a piece. I let it sit there and congeal until Mom finally takes a shaky breath, wipes beneath her eyes with a napkin, and takes a piece for herself, as if she hadn't just sobbed in the middle of Ethan's, as if we hadn't said anything to each other at all.\n\n\"Mom?\" I try again.\n\nShe concentrates on eating. \"I'm really tired, Mara. Let's just eat our pizza.\"\n\nThe next day, Mom and I drive into Tahoe City, not talking. She hums along to the radio, no sign of last night's tears, but the air in the rental car feels dense, as if I could actually scoop out chunks of it and roll it in my hands. The storm has blown out, leaving a bluebird day, and my stomach tugs, wishing I could be up on the mountain. Geez, maybe I am turning into a ski bum?\n\nWe pull into the empty parking lot at Commons Beach and get out. Snow covers both the park and the beach, and the lake is caked at its edges with ice, making the bits of blue jagged fingers look like broken pieces of mirrored sky. We pick our way over the icy parking lot to the snow-covered shore and stand watching how the white gives way to the indigo water of the lake.\n\n\"I think you should come home, but I'm not going to decide for you,\" Mom says finally. Surprised, I swipe at the hair the wind whips into my face. Mom tugs her beanie over her ears. \"You think I don't understand, but I do.\"\n\nOver the years, Mom has told me bits of her childhood, how she lived in Colorado with my grandparents, how she didn't end up going to college because she got involved with real estate. Even as successful as she is now, Mom has never hesitated to tell me she wished she'd gone to college. \"You know that's a regret of mine,\" she tells me again now, watching the choppy water. \"One I don't want you repeating if I can help it.\"\n\n\"I still want to go to college,\" I say. \"This place hasn't changed what I want; it's just put certain things in perspective. Besides, I won't be going to college if high school kills me first. That's not a good strategy.\"\n\nShe shakes her head. \"I just wish you would have talked to us, to Will and me, about how stressed out you were. Why didn't you talk to us?\" Her voice sounds young and afraid.\n\nI study the snowy mountains out beyond the water. \"I'm not sure I even knew, Mom. I just wanted to do my best. You always tell me and Seth and Liam \u2014 Do your best. Be your best. Then, I just collapsed under all that best, you know, and suddenly I was at my worst.\" I bite my lip to ward off tears.\n\nShe slips an arm around me and pulls me to her. \"I love you so much I think it sometimes makes me a crazy person.\" I can't remember the last time Mom held me like this; not in a long time. \"But being your best doesn't mean being perfect. It means doing right by yourself each day. It means having goals and being a good, hardworking person. That's what Will and I want for you kids. We don't expect you to be perfect.\"\n\n\"I might have missed that distinction,\" I mumble into the collar of my jacket.\n\n\"I know how much pressure you've been under. All you kids at Ranfield. I know how hard you work,\" she admits. \"I just thought you were handling it.\"\n\n\"I wasn't.\" How can two small words be filled with so much shame?\n\nShe hears it and gives my shoulder a squeeze. \"Honey, you have to learn to self-regulate. You can use your snowplow, even in San Diego. You didn't have to run away.\"\n\nI bristle. \"Why does wanting a change have to be called that?\"\n\nShe looks apologetic. \"I'm sorry \u2014 it's just this place.\" She sighs, staring out over the water. \"It's hard to be immune to its siren song.\"\n\n\"And you're worried it's going to dash me against the rocks.\" She squeezes me tighter as if she could be like Odysseus's crewmen, lashing me to the mast to keep me safe. I guess tying us to masts is part of a mom's job description. It just feels like mine forgot to keep loosening the knots as I got older.\n\n\"I have a lot of memories here.\" She sighs. \"Good and bad.\"\n\nWe watch the water for a few minutes, and from somewhere deep within me, a memory of my own surfaces. I'm not sure what reminded me, maybe the wide stretch of inky water, but suddenly the memory appears as if it happened yesterday.\n\n\"Mom?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Remember when we were in Maui a few years ago? At the Hula Grill in Kaanapali?\"\n\nShe stiffens against me as if the memory comes suddenly to her, too. Every other year, we take a short trip to Maui. Just five or six nights because Mom and Will don't like to be away from their work much longer than that. This particular trip I was thirteen, I think, and it was April. We'd spent most of the day snorkeling in the turquoise water near Black Rock, eating lunch by the hotel pool while Seth and Liam made trip after trip down the water slide, and then resting in our room until dinner, the boys watching a Harry Potter movie on Will's iPad. At dusk, we had meandered down the slim promenade in front of the hotel to the Hula Grill. I walked ahead with Mom, and Will had Liam and Seth in tow, sunburned and tired from the day. We'd just been seated in the outdoor patio when we heard a voice behind us.\n\n\"Lauren?\" An auburn-haired man with broad shoulders and mirrored glasses approached. \"I thought that was you.\" He nodded amiably to Will but I noticed, before Will turned on his lawyer smile, that his face had darkened. He stood and shook hands with the man, his gaze slipping to Mom, who was watching the man coolly.\n\nI noticed she didn't shake his hand. \"Jason, you remember Mara. And these are our twins, Seth and Liam.\" Mom motioned to each of us in turn.\n\nJason's eyes settled on me longer than on my brothers. \"Well, look at you, all grown up.\" He pushed nervously at his sunglasses as if they were slightly big and turned again to Mom. \"Life in San Diego seems to be treating you well.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mom replied, her voice businesslike.\n\n\"Mom, I have to pee.\" Liam wiggled in his chair, clutching the crotch of his board shorts.\n\nLooking relieved, Will hurried to pull his son's chair out. \"I'll take him. Let's all go.\"\n\n\"I don't have to,\" I started, but then noticed the pointed look Will gave me and followed my stepfather and brothers toward the bathrooms, leaving Mom to talk with the man.\n\n\"Who was that guy?\" I asked Mom when we returned from the bathrooms, the man nowhere in sight.\n\nFiddling with the straw of her mai tai, she intently studied the menu. \"Oh, just someone I used to know. Don't the fish tacos here look amazing?\"\n\nNow, leaning into her down jacket, the view of Tahoe in front of us a glacial and indigo mass, I say, \"That was Beck's dad, wasn't it? That guy in Maui? That was Jason Davis. I saw him once here. He was fighting with Beck in the parking lot.\"\n\n\"That was so random,\" she breathes, uncurling her arm and stuffing her hands into her pockets. \"I'm surprised you remember it.\"\n\n\"I didn't really, until just now. You and Will were both acting so weird. What happened with him?\"\n\nShe jumps up and down in place. \"It's freezing. Let's go get brunch somewhere.\"\n\nOver brunch, she fills in some of the gaps she has never shared before. She skied growing up in Colorado, even raced on her high school team for a couple of years, but had plans to attend college in Southern California. \"I wanted to be a nurse,\" she tells me, examining the tomato she'd speared on her fork. Senior year, she and her parents took a ski trip to Squaw Valley, and she had met Trick, a sponsored freestyle skier who had spent his childhood racing. Her expression turns dreamy. \"He was three years older and just so cute and funny and... fun, you know? That week we went to parties and he taught me some tricks on my skis and we just, well...\" She blushes, brushing a strand of hair out of her face. \"We just had to be together.\" For a minute, I can see exactly what she must have looked like when she was my age.\n\nLike me. She must have looked so much like me.\n\n\"At the end of that week, my parents had to drag me back to Colorado,\" she says now. \"But the second I graduated, I was on a bus to Tahoe. Forget college. Forget being a nurse. I had my skis and I had Trick waiting for me in one of the most beautiful places in the world.\"\n\nMy mom threw away her plans for a boy? She would have surprised me less if she'd confessed she had once joined the circus. \"I had no idea. Grandma and Grandpa have never said anything.\" We see my grandparents at least twice a year, but they'd never mentioned a word about Tahoe.\n\n\"I asked them not to. Not that it was all bad. Bad things often start out great.\" At first, she tells me, they had the best lives she could imagine \u2014 sleeping on people's couches, skiing all winter, kayaking in the summers. \"Trick trained a lot and I'd train with him. We were in great shape. And we had a blast. I mean, we had no money and that sucked. But we had fun.\" But then, she says, she had started to realize what she'd thrown away. She started to think about enrolling in college.\n\nBut when she was twenty, I happened. \"You... surprised us.\" She takes a bite of salad and chews thoughtfully. \"You were such a beautiful baby, of course, but we were idiots about being parents. We didn't even know who we were yet as people. We definitely weren't ready for a baby.\" She has told me this part of the story before, never hesitating to advise me, Don't be stupid and have a baby too early like I did. Which feels awesome, naturally, even if she assures me she'd never trade me being born for anything.\n\nI set my fork down. \"When did you meet Beck's parents?\"\n\n\"When you were about six months, Trick and I met the Davis family in a baby group along with Logan's parents.\" As she picks at an egg in her Cobb salad, Mom explains that even though the other two families were much older and more professional, they all became fast friends, all of them skiers, all of them with a new baby. \"And the Nevers already had Logan's sister, so Jessica was so helpful. The expert.\" She remembers it all for a moment, then frowns. \"But we had a falling out with the Davises. You were almost three.\" She gazes out at the water.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\nShe looks back at me. \"Beck's dad was doing really well in real estate up here, and he approached us and the Nevers with this no-fail opportunity. That's how he sold it to us: no-fail. My parents had given us some money for a down payment on a condo.\" She taps her fork nervously against the side of her salad bowl. \"I told Trick no way was I going to use that money for something like that \u2014 so uncertain.\" She looks ill at the memory. \"But Trick gave it to him anyway. And we lost everything. The Davises weren't even sorry. I remember the way Jason told us, like it was nothing. This just happens sometimes in real estate, he said.\" She stares glumly into her salad. \"The Nevers were lucky they didn't lose the store.\"\n\nI reach across the table and grab her hand. \"I'm sorry, Mom. I didn't know.\"\n\nShe stares out the window at the windy lake. \"Trick got hurt a few months later.\" She runs her hand through her hair. \"Wow, that was a terrible year. But I met Will when he was visiting Squaw Valley on vacation and, within a few months, I moved to San Diego and put things back together. I got lucky.\" She squeezes my hand. \"We both did.\"\n\nUntangling her hand from mine, she signals for the waitress. I eat the rest of my pancakes while Mom silently pays the check. Trick had gone behind Mom's back and lost all their money. He'd gotten hurt. More than that, though, something broke between them that she couldn't fix. My mother, the fix-it queen, couldn't make it right. Watching me here must make her want to reach back in time and yank her former self out of harm's way. I don't blame her. Because I would do the same if I could.\n\nJosie shouts, \"Hello, valentine!\" and holds up a shiny red heart that fills the laptop screen. But it's not just any shiny red heart. It's been decorated to look as hideously overdone as possible, with bows and glitter and curlicue ribbons shooting out from all parts of it. She has also attached a tiny stuffed cat with pink jeweled eyes. So it doesn't even look like a heart anymore. It looks like the cat is exploding with maniacal valentine glee.\n\n\"Oooooooh,\" I breathe. \"That's a good one.\" Starting in seventh grade, Josie and I had agreed to be each other's valentine every year by giving each other the most extreme valentine heart we could create in thirty minutes or less. That was the rule. \"Are you sure that was under the time limit?\"\n\n\"Twenty-eight minutes, thirty-six seconds, thank you very much,\" she says proudly.\n\nI hold up mine. \"Okay, so supplies were limited, but, still, twenty-two minutes, eleven seconds.\"\n\nShe claps her hands together. \"Very nice. Very... alpine.\" Late this morning, I'd smothered a heart cut from a brown grocery bag with pine needles and cones and dozens of random ski stickers that Trick didn't want anymore. Then I'd sprayed the whole thing in silver paint Trick found in the Stones' garage.\n\nJosie sets down her heart. \"How was the visit with your mom?\"\n\n\"Enlightening.\"\n\nShe frowns. \"Good enlightening or bad?\"\n\n\"Both.\" I fill her in on some of the things Mom shared with me. \"And I got snacks and some cute pj's.\" I hold up a box of my favorite chocolate and the snowflake-spattered flannels Mom had given me for Valentine's Day before she left this morning.\n\n\"I'm glad you two talked.\" Josie shifts on her bed and I notice a huge bouquet of red roses sitting on the dresser behind her.\n\n\"Um, hello, roses!\"\n\nShe flushes. \"Oh, well, no \u2014 those...\" She waves her hand. \"Whatever.\"\n\n\"Wait, Jo \u2014 those are from your parents, right?\"\n\nShe picks at some lint on her blue sweater. \"Not exactly.\"\n\n\"Then who?\" My heart is beating too fast. It shouldn't matter who they're from, but for some reason, it does. \"You're the color of a stop sign \u2014 tell me!\"\n\n\"Chris Locke.\" She gets very close to the screen, her inky eyes huge. \"I was going to tell you.\"\n\n\"Um, I hope so, because you got super mad when I didn't tell you what happened with my crazy Tahoe boy situation.\" There's a metallic flavor in the back of my throat. Whatever this is I'm feeling \u2014 confusion, hurt, frustration \u2014 tastes like swallowing loose change.\n\nShe settles back away from the screen, tucking her knees to her chin. \"I know, but you always get so intense about that deal we made. You take that stuff too seriously, Mara. And this whole thing with Chris is brand-new. I wanted to make sure there was something there before I even mentioned it.\"\n\nWhat is she talking about? We both made the deal. \"I don't take it too seriously. I know things change. You don't see me wearing those green overalls I was obsessed with in sixth grade anymore even though I told you I'd never grow out of them.\"\n\n\"That's different.\" She sighs. \"This feels different. You and I don't always, I don't know, do that normal giggly girl stuff. We mostly make fun of girls who do that.\" She's right. We do.\n\nI struggle to find the right words. \"How did... it happen? How did Chris happen?\"\n\n\"I went to that twenty-four-hour dance-a-thon to raise money for Costa Rica.\" Now she actually giggles. \"And he was there. We just started... talking. He's pretty great.\"\n\nI stare at her dresser. \"Those are some nice roses for just talking.\"\n\nAs she studies them, she can't stop smiling. \"Look, Mara. I'm just going to see where it goes.\" She shrugs. \"It's fun.\"\n\nMy list brain racks up questions and they spill out: \"Is he being casual, too? Is that the plan \u2014 to just see where it goes? Is it going to change what you want \u2014\"\n\n\"Mara,\" she interrupts, annoyance fading her smile. \"I don't know. I'm not making plans. I haven't made a pro and con list or a spreadsheet for all possible relationship outcomes.\" Because I'm not you, she doesn't add. She doesn't have to. I hear it.\n\nI take a short, clean breath. \"Okay. Well, if you're happy, I'm happy,\" I say, trying to mean it.\n\nHer eyes brighten. \"Really? Thank you. Because, well, I am.\"\n\nI give her the best version of my smile I can muster. Sometimes being the friend you're supposed to be in a certain moment is harder than any chemistry equation.\n\nShe unfolds her legs and leans toward the screen. \"So... are you doing anything tonight?\" she asks. \"Like with Logan, maybe?\"\n\n\"He's not back from Mammoth yet.\" I fiddle with a loose string on the bedspread. \"Not that we would do something if he was.\"\n\n\"The lady doth protest too much.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Shakespeare. This lady doth not need a boyfriend complicating an already overly complicated life.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should text him. Ask how his race was? You guys could hang out when he gets back. Lately, I've been going to more stuff here at Ran and it's really nice to just hang out with people. Your most meaningful relationship shouldn't be with your history textbook.\" Her cell buzzes next to her on the bed. She picks it up and the goofy look she gets gives away the caller.\n\n\"Say hi to Chris for me,\" I tell her, motioning for her to take the call. I shut my laptop and look around me. The fire shifts with its dim glow, my clothes sit in even rows on the bookcase, and the pile of books beckons me from the floor.\n\nHappy Valentine's Day.\n\nTrick and I move awkwardly around each other for the next few days. Like so many things with him, our fight before Mom got here just melts into silence, becoming part of the past. Trick might have once been a sponsored freeskier, but he's an Olympian at avoidance.\n\nEarly Wednesday morning, my phone buzzes. Isabel.\n\ncheck your email.\n\nI pull my laptop onto the bed. The subject line reads: Isabel has sent you a playlist! I click it open.\n\nGet your gear, download this playlist, and get your butt on the mountain. We'll meet up after practice. Start this playlist right when you get on the funi and play it all the way through at least three times before taking a break!!\n\n\u2014 Isabel and Logan\n\nI push off the blankets and grab my ski stuff.\n\nOn the funi, I click track one, a mellow indie-edged song with a nice beat. I listen, my head bobbing along to it as I watch people sail down the mountain. I might be rocking out a little too much, because the guy next to me, a middle-aged snowboarder in duct-taped Burton pants, grins at me and gives me the peace sign. I give it back.\n\nAs I ride the lift up Big Blue, I stare at the winter landscape, all that graphite on white, gray sky and mountains layered with snow, and in the floating beat of a new song, I think about what fastens me to the world. Maybe, all those years at Ranfield, I stayed busy as a way to not float away into the atmosphere. Each piece of homework, each activity, each club meeting was a way to staple me to a life, to say, I am here, I am here, I am supposed to be here...\n\nBut, honestly, I partly worked as hard as I did to avoid a lot of the social stuff. I never truly felt a part of things at Ranfield, always felt like I was borrowing someone else's life. The only thing about Ran that ever felt like home was Josie. I hadn't applied for the scholarship \u2014 it had been offered to me. Sitting in my fifth-grade public school classroom in the late spring light with my mom and Will, my teacher, Miss Kelly, had beamed as she handed us the invitation letter. Because of my test scores, my academic performance, I'd been singled out for this amazing opportunity. I loved Miss Kelly, and she and Mom and Will had looked so proud of me. Maybe all these years I've worked hard simply to be worthy of their expressions, of being chosen like that.\n\nI've worked to be the best.\n\nBut is it what I want?\n\nNow all the hard work feels attached with Velcro. Which freaks me out. Because Velcro tears away so easily, just that ripping sound and then empty air. Moving down the mountain, it feels so easy to imagine staying here forever. For the next few hours, I fasten myself to the mountain, skiing up and down Big Blue and Gold Coast, the new playlist looping in my ears. Each song seems to be about finding something \u2014 a place, a love, a dream.\n\nBack behind the music, though, two competing lists keep trying to form on the dark, hidden walls of my brain. Reasons to stay: the ease of Tahoe, Trick, Logan, friends. Reasons to go: Josie, my brothers, everything I built at Ranfield.\n\nPushing away the anxious rumblings that threaten to grow out of the lists, the mountain lets me ignore them both, even if just for now.\n\nThat afternoon, my body exhausted from its hours on the slopes, I slide into a booth at Ethan's across from Logan. \"Where's Isabel?\"\n\nLogan slips his phone into a pocket. \"Talking to Coach. She's bummed about the way she skied at Mammoth. She'll be here in a few minutes.\"\n\n\"Did you have a good practice?\" I ask. He almost never talks about his own skiing.\n\n\"Fine. I just hope Isabel snaps out of it. She's too hard on herself.\" We order a pizza and some drinks from Maggie. Passing her our menus, Logan asks me, \"Did you get your playlist?\" Maggie ducks away, but not before I see the smile playing at the corners of her mouth.\n\nI can still feel the mountain in my body, the feeling of gliding over snow with their music in my head. \"Yeah, thanks. I played it all morning while I skied. By myself!\"\n\nHe high-fives me. \"How'd it feel?\"\n\n\"Like flying.\"\n\nHe nods knowingly, running a hand through his shaggy dark hair. \"Always nice to just get on the mountain, plug in, and tune out. It's my happy place.\" Grinning, he catches my eye. \"I'm glad you liked the list.\" When Logan smiles like that, I can see the little boy in him, all mop-haired and toothy and adorable. I fiddle with my napkin and avoid his dark eyes.\n\nHis phone beeps. Checking it, he frowns. \"Isabel's not coming. She said she's going to go home and scream into her pillow.\"\n\n\"Was it really that bad?\"\n\n\"She crashed. And today she kept falling. Her confidence got rattled. It happens.\"\n\n\"But she's okay, right?\"\n\n\"She's not hurt.\" Frowning, he moves the ketchup and mustard bottles around in front of him to make room for Maggie to set down our drinks and some empty plates for our pizza. \"But she was so close to having her best time last weekend and I'm sure she feels like she messed that up.\"\n\nI pull out my phone and text her, sending five hearts in a row and the message:\n\ndon't go home! i need to thank you for my playlist!\n\nIt's buzzing before I set it back down, but it's Beck, not Isabel.\n\nstill mad at me?\n\nHe's like a virus I can't get rid of. A broad-shouldered virus.\n\nLogan asks, \"What'd she say?\"\n\nI hesitate. \"It's actually Beck.\"\n\nLogan rolls his eyes and helps himself to a slice of pizza.\n\nI put my phone in my bag. \"You don't like him, do you?\"\n\nHe just shrugs, concentrating on pulling a piece of pepperoni from his slice. \"What's to like?\"\n\n\"I feel a little sorry for him. His dad's pretty awful.\"\n\nLogan grimaces. \"Yeah, but that's just become part of his act, you know? Yes, his dad is the worst. He's this big developer in Tahoe, and he's involved in a bunch of deals here in Squaw that make him very unpopular with the locals. My family included. He's not a good guy. But Beck uses it, you know? Makes him out to be this sinister supervillain.\"\n\nI picture Beck's dad with a huge black mustache and a cape. Wait, do villains usually have capes? \"Does he dwell in his mountain lair making evil weapons designed exclusively to torture his unsuspecting son?\"\n\nLogan grins. \"Right? It's so melodramatic. I mean, he is a jerk. He's rich and aggressive and intense. He owns, like, three houses in Squaw Valley alone. And nothing is good enough for him. When we all skied together, they always had these crazy screaming matches in the parking lot or on the mountain.\" He shudders a bit, remembering. Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he adds, \"But Beck just keeps it going. Everything is always so difficult for him.\" He grabs another slice. \"He's such a drama queen. It gets old.\"\n\nI swallow a bite of pizza. \"I thought he seemed interesting at first \u2014 all his ideas about school and society. But mostly it's like he tries to be the biggest possible screwup just to get back at his dad. Nothing original about that. There are dozens of guys like that at my old school.\"\n\nMy old school. As if I've already moved up here for good. He hears it, too. I can tell by the look on his face.\n\nHe plays with his napkin, not meeting my eyes. \"He must be doing something right with all the girls following him around.\"\n\nLeaning my elbows on the table, I say quietly, \"I only kissed him because of my stupid list. Josie told me to kiss a cute snowboarder. So I did. But someone I know threw that list off a chairlift.\"\n\nHe grabs another piece of pizza. \"Someone who's a genius, you mean?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\nHe catches my eye, about to say something, just as Isabel flops down next to me, her face dark. \"Okay, I'd love to hear about someone else having a good day. Because mine stank up the mountain.\"\n\nThat night, curled on my bed, I squint into the screen at Josie, who's in the middle of telling me how hard the AP chem test was today. I nod sympathetically. \"Sounds brutal.\"\n\n\"You have no idea,\" she groans. I do have an idea since I took the online version an hour ago. She's sitting on her bed, too, and her dark hair falls around her face as she rubs lotion into her legs. \"You're so lucky you just get to chill in Tahoe.\" She sighs. \"Maybe I should have a meltdown in math class.\" She freezes, looking up at me, her eyes huge. \"Oh, whoa. Sorry, Mar \u2014 I didn't mean that.\"\n\nMy skin shivery, I try to play it off. \"It's not all it's cracked up to be.\"\n\n\"Still, I'll be honest,\" she says, capping the lotion. \"I am the tiniest bit jealous. I'm so sick of school.\"\n\n\"I still have to do all the work.\"\n\nShe hesitates, looking pained. \"Yeah, but, it's not like school school. It's not as hard.\"\n\nTranslation: My life's harder. I win. You lose.\n\n\"Why does everything have to be hard to count?\" I think about what Logan said about Beck making everything so difficult. Do we all have different versions of doing that? \"Maybe most of us make things harder than we need to. I don't think being stressed out lets you get more out of anything, including school.\"\n\nShe doesn't say anything, just makes little clicking sounds with her tongue as she inspects her manicure. \"Yeah, you're probably right.\" She's being generous. She doesn't think I'm right at all.\n\nIt's Ski Week in Tahoe.\n\nOr, as Logan and Isabel call it, the Week Everyone in California Remembers They Ski.\n\nBecause of the swell of tourists, the resort kicks the fun activities up a notch. Today it's Eighties Saturday on the mountain. Trick almost spits out his cereal when he sees me emerge from my room. \"Oh, no way \u2014 sweet.\"\n\nI'm dressed as Madonna. Mid-eighties Madonna with the teased blond hair, the layered messy skirt, the lace shirt, the bracelets. All of this over my ski parka and pants. I'm meeting up with Isabel and Logan after their race this afternoon. I twirl so Trick can see the full effect of the skirt. \"Isabel and I went to the thrift store yesterday. She's going as Cyndi Lauper. Girls just want to have fun, right?\"\n\nHe nods, impressed. \"Very nice.\"\n\nI'm proud of my costume. Especially because I've never been a costume girl. At Ranfield, a lot of other kids get really into it at Halloween, but I'd always felt like it was a waste of time.\n\nIsabel begged me, though, and as part of my have-more-fun goal, I tried it, and guess what. It's fun. I squint at Trick. \"Are you dressed up?\" He's wearing jeans and a white T-shirt under a black down jacket.\n\nHe holds up a red baseball cap and tucks it into his back jean pocket. \"I'm the Boss.\" I must look puzzled when he turns around, because he adds, \"Bruce Springsteen,\" and sings a few lines from \"Born in the U.S.A.\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\"\n\nLater, on the chairlift, I need help figuring out Logan's outfit: tan ski pants, a white linen blazer over a pale pink T-shirt, and black Ray-Bans. \"Duh, Miami Vice,\" he tells me.\n\nOh, right. My pop culture history has always been a weak spot. If I wasn't going to be tested on it, I didn't let it rent space in my brain. Even though the afternoon sun is bright, the wind has picked up. \"You must be freezing!\"\n\n\"Nah, I got Chillys on.\" He lifts his pink T-shirt to reveal long underwear called Chilly Peppers, which so many of the racers wear. Below us, people zip by in head-to-toe neon spandex, parachute pants, ripped sweatshirts, and fingerless gloves over their regular gloves.\n\nI peer over the lift bar. \"Look at everyone!\"\n\nLogan studies the people skiing and boarding below our dangling skis. \"Wait until you see Isabel.\"\n\nYou can't miss her. She waits for us at the top of Big Blue, clad in what looks like everything Cyndi Lauper ever owned. She has fastened a candy-apple red-blond hairpiece to her ski helmet and wears bright blue and orange Cyndi Lauper makeup. Her crazy layers of skirts and dresses are finished off with a black chain wrapped around her torso. \"Time to be totally radical,\" she calls, skiing off down the catwalk toward Shirley Lake.\n\n\"They didn't have any Diet Coke,\" Isabel says, pushing a Sprite into my hands and settling onto the couch next to me with a huge plate of self-made \"nachos.\" Her plate bulges with tortilla chips, bean dip, baby carrots, salsa, and what looks like trail mix. \"Want some?\" she mumbles, her mouth full. \"It's a tasty treat.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I say, helping myself to a loaded chip. Chewing what is clearly an M&M with my bean dip, I take in the dozens of people milling around, sitting on the floor, leaning against the kitchen island, most in various states of eighties wear, disheveled from their day on the slopes.\n\nWhen the slopes closed, Eighties Day migrated to Joy Chang's house. Her hair pulled into a wild, side-swept ponytail, Joy stands on the raised tile hearth of the roaring fireplace, acting as master of ceremonies in a lip-synch contest. Or, as she announces it now to the room, her voice in all caps: \"OUR EIGHTIES LIP-SYNCH EXTRAVAGANZA!\" When people keep ignoring her, she finally shouts, \"Everyone, shut up!\"\n\nThat does the trick.\n\nMuch of the furniture in the living room has been pushed back against walls to make room for a stage. One at a time, different people jump up to lip-synch to eighties hits. I almost pee my pants at Bodie's enthusiastic Cher impression, complete with a long curly black wig and purple eye shadow.\n\n\"Well, we can't turn back time,\" Joy comments at the end of his act. \"Or I'd ask for the last three minutes of my life back.\" Bodie feigns a hurt look. \"Just kidding, Bodie. You're a gorgeous diva.\" There's a lull in the festivities as Bodie hurries out of the room. I turn, searching the room, wondering where Logan went. No sign of him.\n\nSomeone dims the lights. \"Okay, we have one last lip synch to share with you tonight,\" Joy announces mysteriously, silhouetted against the flickering orange of the fire. \"Sometimes you've got to fight for the right, so put your hands together for the Frost Boys! And Amanda,\" she adds, grinning.\n\nLogan, Bodie, and snowboardcross Amanda burst into the room dressed as the Beastie Boys. People whistle and scream. Wearing a black leather jacket and backward trucker hat, Logan struts around the room, chains swinging from his neck. He goofily hops around the stage one hundred percent committed to his role.\n\nI can't take my eyes off him.\n\nIsabel, watching me, shakes her head.\n\n\"What?\" I whisper, my face heating.\n\n\"Nothing.\" She nibbles a bean-dip-soaked baby carrot, her eyes slipping back to the show, where Logan ends by dropping his fake mic and strutting from the room.\n\nAfter, someone hooks up their iPod to Joy's speakers and people spill into the empty space to dance. Isabel wipes her hands on her jeans, waving to Logan as he comes back into the room, dressed in jeans and a Dakine sweatshirt. \"Good stuff, Never.\"\n\nHe takes a quick bow. \"Why, thank you.\"\n\nI brush some hair out of my face. \"You were hysterical. I didn't know you had it in you.\"\n\nHe smiles, but his dark eyes send a current through me. \"Well, you should get to know me better.\"\n\nI emerge sleepily from my room the next day to find Trick reading a ski magazine. \"Morning,\" he says.\n\nI pour some cereal. \"Morning.\" I slide into the seat across from him.\n\n\"You were in late last night.\" He doesn't look up from his magazine.\n\nMy chest tightens. Is he mad? I should have called. \"Yeah, sorry.\"\n\n\"No prob.\" He stands and starts to clear his bowl. Tucking the cereal box under his arm, he moves toward the kitchen sink.\n\n\"Wait\u2014that's it?\"\n\nHe turns at the edge in my voice. \"What?\"\n\n\"Well, this would be the part where a normal dad says, Where were you? Why didn't you call? This is the part where you're supposed to say something like that.\" I slap my hand on the top of the table, making my spoon rattle against the cereal bowl. We both look at the bowl, at my hand. I am not a table slapper and it feels childish. \"And then I would say, Well, actually, I went to a party, but I should have called!\"\n\nHe sets his bowl in the sink. \"Sounds like you've got this conversation covered.\" I glare at him and he clears his throat. \"I'm sorry, but when have I ever been a normal dad to you? That ship, I think, sailed a long time ago.\" He makes a move for the door, pulling his parka from the back of the chair he'd been sitting in.\n\n\"Trick!\" Another hand slap.\n\nTurning, his eyes wide, he asks, \"What? What do you want me to say?\"\n\n\"Something resembling what a real dad should say!\"\n\nTrick fiddles with the zipper on his jacket, his eyes darting around as if he's seeking escape routes. \"You have Will for that stuff. He's better at it anyway.\"\n\n\"Yeah, he is.\" I blink back the ghosts of tears starting to circle behind my eyes, my whole body shaking. \"But that doesn't matter. People aren't batteries. You don't swap one out for another. You're my father. That's biology. But I'm giving you a chance to be a dad and you keep ruining it.\"\n\nHe swallows, avoiding my eyes, and doesn't say anything. As usual.\n\nSomeone knocks at the door and Trick hurries to open it. A tall man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and a gunmetal down jacket that I know for a fact sells for $375 at Neverland takes a step into the room. Something about him, not just his height, fills the whole space, and the cottage quickly feels the size of a breadbox.\n\n\"Trick?\" His voice is polished, crisp. He slips his hands into the pockets of his designer jeans, and his gaze sweeps the room like a search lamp. \"Sorry, didn't mean to disturb. Just wanted to let you know we're here. Decided to come for Ski Week after all.\" The Stones. The family who owns the massive house and this cottage.\n\n\"Right, is everything okay with the house? I turned the water on, got the stoves all going.\" Trick looks uncomfortably from Mr. Stone to me. \"Chuck, this is my daughter, Mara. She's staying with me for a few weeks. Mara, this is Chuck Stone.\"\n\nMr. Stone has a hard-angled face that must dominate in boardrooms, the kind that so many of the fathers of kids at Ranfield have. When he smiles, his gray eyes shine with a practiced light. \"Mara, a pleasure.\"\n\n\"Nice to meet you,\" I say through a dry mouth. None of this feels pleasurable. In fact, something unpleasant definitely simmers beneath his words.\n\n\"Well, I'll let you two get back to your morning,\" he says to Trick. \"Perhaps we can talk later? I'd like to discuss the Airstream currently parked in my driveway. When you have a minute.\" He flashes another polite smile in my direction.\n\n\"Um, yeah, sure.\" Trick shakes Mr. Stone's hand awkwardly and closes the door behind him.\n\n\"Did he know I was staying with you?\" I ask, after I hear the crunch of Mr. Stone's boots on the snow fade away. \"Or that Oli was staying here?\"\n\nTrick sighs. \"Nope.\"\n\nLater that morning, Oli pulls his Airstream out of the Stones' driveway. Leaning out the driver's-side window of his truck, he asks if I want to come with him and get some runs in on the mountain. I grab my gear.\n\nOn the hill, I keep falling. I can't concentrate. People jostle and push at the lift lines and cut people off on the hill more than usual. Their energy, combined with my earlier fight with Trick, makes me sloppy and frustrated. Oli shoots me a concerned look as we ride silently up the Big Blue, but I ignore it, studying the contrast of sky against snow.\n\nFunny how our moods can determine the shape humanity takes around us. Today, I almost hate everyone. After a near miss with a snowboarder at the base of Gold Coast, I sit in a clump, near tears, until Oli skis over to me. \"You okay down there?\"\n\n\"I hate people.\"\n\nHe tries to hide a grin. \"Anyone in particular or just all people?\"\n\n\"All of them. Not you,\" I hurry to add. He laughs in his easy way, and the sound of it lifts part of the heaviness from my chest. A smile twitches the corners of my mouth. \"And not that guy,\" I say, nodding to a man gliding happily behind his three-year-old son, who wears a ski leash and an Edgie Wedgie to hold his skis in place. \"But definitely that guy.\" I point at the thirtysomething guy in a splashy ski outfit who pushed in front of us in the lift line earlier.\n\nOli follows my gaze. \"Well, that guy's a tool.\" He offers his hand to help me up. \"Want to call it a day?\"\n\nI grab his hand and let him lift me up. The mountain has cleared a little and I feel suddenly brave. \"Actually, can we ski Mountain Run?\"\n\nMountain Run is the highway of Squaw Valley. It connects the upper mountain to the lower, spitting out just behind where the funi takes off. It's an especially long run, but I make it all the way to the bottom without taking a break. Oli skis near me the whole time. Even when I can't see him, I can feel his presence close by, making sure I'm safe.\n\nWe ski as far as we can before we have to take off our skis. Loading them on our shoulders, we clomp by people lounging at the outside bar with plastic cups of beer or hot chocolates, red cheeked from a day on the mountain. \"You want something? Coffee or something?\" Oli asks as we walk into the main stretch of the Village.\n\n\"I'm sorry the Stones made you leave.\"\n\nHe sets his skis in a rack near Elevation. \"Their house, their rules.\"\n\nI'm angry at the Stones for their dumb rules, angry at Trick for not making it work out, for not trying harder, for not caring where I was last night. For a lot of things. \"It's not fair.\"\n\nHe turns back to me, his hands in the pockets of his parka, his eyes like the slice of Tahoe visible from Big Blue. \"I don't waste my time with what's fair and what's not. Not when someone just crushed Mountain Run. With no falls! Come on, that's at least worth something warm to drink. Do you kids still drink regular hot chocolate or does it have to be something mixed with fifteen different types of fancy syrup and have a name I can't pronounce?\"\n\nI prop my skis next to his, pulling off my helmet and running my fingers through my messy hair. Following him into Elevation, I marvel at how he just rolls with what happens, doesn't try to fight what he can't control. \"I'd love a regular old hot chocolate.\"\n\nLogan meets me at the funi at nine on Wednesday. \"Ready?\" We hit Gold Coast first and then take the Big Blue for some runs on Shirley Lake. My skis feel strong beneath me and I find myself picking up speed, my body warm even though the day is cold and leaden. On the lift, we do the Venn diagram thing with the movies, books, and music we like, trying to find the places where they overlap. I'm surprised by all the shared space. We both like spy movies and reading books set in foreign countries. We both loved Harry Potter as kids. \"You should come over this weekend and we can have a Harry Potter movie marathon,\" he says. \"I'll make you pizza.\"\n\n\"You'll make it?\"\n\n\"I make great pizza. What do you like on it?\"\n\n\"Mushrooms and olives.\"\n\n\"I make my own dough and sauce. That's the secret.\" He raises the safety bar as we approach the end of the lift. \"But if you've got other stuff going on, no big deal.\" I can tell he's trying to keep his voice light.\n\n\"I have absolutely nothing else going on,\" I say, and even mean it a little. We exit the lift, gliding to the right toward Shirley Lake. I follow Logan down the shoot, my body smooth even as I push my muscles, feeling them heat and burn. Logan is a beautiful skier, his lanky body like liquid. He makes wide smiles with his skis, encouraging me to track him, and as we play follow the leader, I study his comfortable form as he moves down the mountain. Oli's right \u2014 it's also very much how he moves through life.\n\nWe hit the lift line at Shirley. I pull my goggles away from my face, letting the patches of fog that built up on the last run fade from the lens. \"How'd that feel?\" Logan leans into me just barely, his arm firm against mine. \"You're doing great out there.\"\n\nMy whole body warms, but it's not from the compliment; it's from how close he is, the weight of his body leaning into me. \"Thanks.\" I peer up at him, taking in his slightly chapped lips, the color the exercise and cold make in his cheeks, the laid-back focus of his eyes through his goggles as they study the line of people in front of us. In line, he always takes the outside because he knows I don't like being on that side of the lift. It's a small thing, but it feels huge all of a sudden.\n\nHe catches me scrutinizing him. \"What?\"\n\nI'm sure my face is already flushed from cold and skiing, so I don't have to worry about his noticing how it heats for all sorts of other reasons. \"I'm looking forward to that pizza.\"\n\nHis face melts into a smile. \"Excellent \u2014 how about Friday?\"\n\n\"Friday,\" I echo. The air is supposed to be thinner at elevation, but in this moment it solidifies around us, swirls with the weight of the way Logan is looking at me.\n\nA voice cuts in. \"Looking good, San Diego!\"\n\nBeck Davis, auditioning for Guy with the World's Worst Timing. I struggle to remember what I found so interesting or charming about him those first few weeks. He and a couple of the Frost Boys hover just outside the Shirley lift line. I stare straight ahead, sliding up in line, the air around us thinning.\n\nBeck scoots forward on his skis, mirroring our progress in line. \"Awww, come on. Are you still mad about the stupid car ride? I wasn't going that fast.\" Other skiers notice, their gaze darting between Beck and me. I don't respond.\n\nLogan's body turns rigid beside me. \"What car ride?\"\n\n\"We're hitting Granite Chief,\" Beck calls out. \"Come with us.\"\n\n\"We're good, thanks,\" I say, still looking straight ahead. Logan says nothing, his face blank, no trace of the smile left.\n\n\"You can ski Granite Chief,\" Beck insists, even if we're almost at the front of the Shirley line. \"Come on, where's that overachiever I know and love? Push yourself.\"\n\nLogan and I hop onto the lift and it carries us away. After pulling the bar down, Logan says stiffly, \"He's right, though. You could ski Granite. At least some parts.\"\n\n\"Isn't it a black? I haven't skied a black yet. I know I should try it, but I don't even feel comfortable on blue runs yet.\" Even though I crossed that one off the list. \"You can go ski it if you want. Don't let me stop you.\" My voice comes out jagged, still edged with leftover annoyance from Beck's ill-timed arrival.\n\n\"Hey.\" Logan puts his hand on my leg. \"I'm not saying you should ski Granite Chief. I'm just saying you could. But there's always next season.\"\n\nHis kindness sands away some of the edges. \"I know. It's not you. It's Beck. I'm just so sick of him.\" I tell Logan about the car ride the Friday he and Isabel were in Mammoth.\n\n\"You can't let him get to you. This is what he does.\"\n\nWatching the skiers zip down Shirley's bowl below us, I say, \"You know, for someone who claims to be so chill and philosophical, Beck sure needs his friends to agree with him all the time.\"\n\nLogan laughs and leans back into the lift chair, his skis swinging. \"Beck doesn't have friends. Beck has disciples.\"\n\nI smile when Logan's number comes through my phone. Pizza date tonight. \"They better not be out of olives.\"\n\n\"Come to the store.\" Logan's voice sounds frightened.\n\nI sit up on the couch, my chem textbook falling to the floor, my body buzzing with the worry in his voice. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Oli's missing. He went backcountry skiing and there was an avalanche and \u2014\" He breaks off to talk with someone, their voices muffled as if he's put his phone against his chest, then says, \"Just come over.\"\n\nMy throat grows tight. \"I'm at Trick's \u2014\"\n\n\"Beck and Isabel will pick you up.\" He hangs up.\n\nTen minutes later, Beck's Jeep pulls into the driveway and I jump in the back before he pulls to a full stop. Isabel fills me in. Oli and a couple of his friends went out on their Tele skis in an out-of-bounds area in Alpine Meadows this morning and there was an avalanche. Beck makes the right turn onto Squaw Valley Road, adding, \"They're experts and they have the gear. They'll be okay.\"\n\nIsabel stares out the window, and I can see the fear in her profile. I can't quite hear her, but I think she says, \"Maybe.\"\n\nWe run through the Village, pushing through the door at Neverland. It's busy in the way that waiting for news creates busyness, people milling around, making calls, talking in hushed voices \u2014 the whole room crackling with uncertainty. Isabel makes a beeline for her mom. April leans against the counter, a cell phone pressed to her ear. She nods and nods but says nothing. She disappears into the back before Isabel can reach her.\n\nI'm left standing with Beck. \"How does April know Oli?\" I ask, mostly just to toss some words into the awkward silence.\n\nBeck's worried eyes settle on me. \"I keep forgetting how new you are to all of this, how much you don't know.\" He isn't being mean. He just says it, simply. As fact. But I realize it's what drew me to him in the first place. Sometimes, we need people who don't know our histories, who haven't already built up their view of us, because we hope they will see us in a new way. We need them to. And he did.\n\nHe nods toward where Isabel waits for her mom. \"When Isabel's dad left, when she was six, they both had a hard time. I don't really remember it. We were just kids.\" Beck clears his throat. \"But Oli took care of them.\" He swallows, his eyes on the group of men standing by the far wall, all dressed in jeans and Patagonia jackets. \"I should go see what they know.\" He walks away.\n\nOutside, the afternoon darkens. Feeling helpless, I cross to Isabel. \"Can I do anything?\" I ask. \"Do you need anything? I can go get us tea?\"\n\n\"Thanks, no \u2014 Logan went to get some.\"\n\nI notice she's holding a card. I can't quite see what it is as she absently runs her thumb over it.\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\nShe reddens slightly, slipping it into her pocket. \"Nothing \u2014 you'll think it's dumb.\"\n\n\"I'm surprisingly open-minded.\"\n\nShe pulls it out and hands it to me. \"It's my mom's.\"\n\nI study it. The card is ink blue with a hooded robed figure holding a lantern and a staff. He stands on top of a snowy mountain looking down. \"What is it?\"\n\nShe peers at it. \"I don't know that much about it. It's a tarot card. The Hermit. That's Mom's nickname for Oli.\" Isabel thinks for a minute. \"Mom says the Hermit is one who lives in solitude by choice, and in his solitude is at peace. He's comfortable with who he is in the world and doesn't seek outside approval.\" She shows me the card again. \"See here, he's looking down because he doesn't need to look around and see who's watching him, who's noticing. He lights his own way.\" She clears her throat. \"Anyway, Mom wanted me to bring it to her so she could, you know, hold on to it.\" Her voice catches and I feel its waver in my gut.\n\n\"That's nice,\" I say quietly. Any way someone wants to hold on to her hope in a moment like this one makes sense to me.\n\nSoon, April comes out from the shop and Isabel looks at her expectantly, but April simply crosses to her, her long arms encircling her daughter.\n\nThey don't know anything yet.\n\nAcross the store, I see Trick slip out the front door and disappear. Following him, I find him several stores away around the corner sitting on a bench, his breath powdery in the cold dark. The falling night in Squaw tastes like metal, and I shiver as I take a seat next to him. \"Trick?\"\n\nHe stares straight ahead, wiping quickly at some tears edging his eyes. \"I keep telling myself he's fine. But it's been a long time. And it's getting dark.\"\n\n\"They'll find him.\"\n\nHe lets out a shaky breath. \"You know, when your mom left, I lived with Oli for about four months. He was like that for people. If someone left or got hurt, he'd fill in for a bit until things started to right themselves. He did that for me, for April. He even took Beck in once when he was about fourteen when Jason threw him out.\" Trick stares at something far away \u2014 a memory \u2014 or maybe nothing at all. Finally, he mumbles, \"I just want them to find him.\" His head dips, his hair shaggy, curling over his ears. He doesn't even have a hat on. Something about this detail \u2014 about how exposed he seems out here in the cold \u2014 thickens an ache in my chest. Why haven't they found him yet?\n\nI chew at one of my fingernails, watching him. \"Listen, it's freezing out here. Can I get you a beanie or some gloves or something?\"\n\nHe shakes his head. \"You know the thing about Oli? He never judges you for whatever baggage you show up with. He says people get dealt crazy hands and then spend most of their lives just trying to put the cards in order. He thinks our one job as humans is to not keep adding messed-up cards to the pile.\"\n\n\"That sounds like something he'd say.\" I think of Oli following me down the mountain with that same spirit, always a steady presence in case I fell, and the thought of him lost out there sends tears spilling down my cheeks. I wipe quickly at them. \"When we were skiing once, he told me we shouldn't worry what other people say or think about us because most of the time they aren't thinking about us at all. Most people are just trying to find their car keys.\"\n\nA smile glimmers on Trick's face. \"That's classic Oli.\"\n\nAfter a few minutes, he takes another shaky breath. \"I need to tell you something, Mara.\"\n\nIt's as if all the cold from the air around us concentrates in my body and I'm afraid to even breathe. Still, somehow, I manage to say, \"Okay.\"\n\n\"About my accident.\" He turns to me on the bench, his green eyes searching my face. \"It was... the thing is... you were with me.\"\n\nMy body goes liquid. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You were with me, skiing. I had you on my shoulders. I was goofing around \u2014 I'd do that sometimes because it would get you laughing... this belly laugh that just lit up the world. Anyway, I had you on my shoulders and I caught an edge. You went flying and I tried to... I tried to catch you, and that's when I jacked up my leg. And then there you were, just this little crumple in the snow, not moving.\" His voice shakes with the memory. I can't feel my face anymore or the tears helping to freeze it. \"Your mom tried not to blame me and I tried not to blame myself, but, well, you were so tiny in that hospital bed, with all those wires and those beeping machines.\" He drops his eyes, his face pale.\n\nI don't remember any of this. \"But I was fine.\"\n\nHis face pained, he whispers, \"You almost weren't... fine. You almost weren't. You were lucky. As bad as it first seemed, you just had bruises and a sprained knee. But when your mom saw you in that hospital bed, she had every right to leave.\"\n\nI shake my head, running my hands absently over my knees. It's weird to not remember. \"Oli said anyone can fall.\"\n\n\"I should never have had you on my shoulders. I was cocky and careless. I was careless with you.\" His voice breaks and he slides away on the bench, angles his back away from me, his shoulders shaking.\n\nFeeling paralyzed, I study his back. Around me, lights come on in some of the windows of the Village, yellow and soft, and there is a band playing in a restaurant somewhere near the main corridor. Two guys walk by us, en route to the main drag, their banter full of the day they just had on the mountain, their faces bronzed. They glance at Trick, their laughter dying down as they quicken their pace through the empty corridor past where we sit, until their voices fade completely.\n\nQuietly, Trick says, \"She decided it would be better if I just wasn't in your life.\"\n\n\"She did?\"\n\n\"She was right.\"\n\nI slide closer to him on the bench. \"No, she wasn't. She was angry.\"\n\nHe doesn't respond because the air fills with footsteps slapping on the icy walk and a flurry of color emerges from around the corner. Isabel and Logan appear, panting. \"They found him. They found him. He's okay. Broken arm. They're taking him to the hospital in Truckee.\"\n\nHis eyes pained, Trick looks at me. \"Go,\" I tell him, my limbs flooding with relief.\n\nHe races back toward Neverland.\n\nI sit by the fire Saturday afternoon at Elevation, sipping a latte and reading Catcher in the Rye, when I see Logan pull open the door of the caf\u00e9. \"Hey!\" He crosses to me. \"I was looking for you. Did you get my text?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"I owe you a pizza.\"\n\n\"Last night was a little nuts.\" I went with April and Isabel to the hospital to see Oli, who didn't look at all like he'd been caught in an avalanche except for his left arm in a cast. \"She'll get me someday,\" he said of the mountain. \"But not today.\"\n\nLogan takes in my ski clothes. \"Did you already ski today?\"\n\n\"Just a few runs this morning.\" I'd woken feeling both wound up by and exhausted from the drama of last night, so I'd let the mountain work out the knots.\n\nHe's also wearing his casual ski stuff. \"You want to grab a few more before the slopes close?\"\n\nMy eyes stray to my laptop. \"I have to write a Catcher in the Rye essay. I can't put it off any longer.\"\n\n\"How much more do you have?\"\n\n\"Haven't started.\"\n\n\"We can write it on the mountain.\" He bends over and starts packing up my stuff.\n\nLaughing, I rescue my laptop before he can shut it down. \"How exactly are we supposed to do that?\"\n\nHe plucks the book from my hands, studying its plain white cover before stuffing it in my bag. \"I've read it. What are you writing about?\"\n\n\"I have to write about why Holden is an unreliable narrator.\"\n\n\"Who isn't an unreliable narrator? There, essay done.\" He stashes my stuff behind the counter and makes for the door.\n\n\"Wait, what do you mean?\" I ask curiously, following him out of Elevation. \"Logan!\" But he's heading toward the funi.\n\nA half hour later, we head up Big Blue, our skis dangling below us as we float through the bright, cold air. \"Explain again how this is writing my essay?\"\n\nWe're the only two people on the lift and Logan leans lazily in the corner, using his poles to knock snow from his skis. \"You're not going to let this go, are you?\" He looks up, the blue sky reflecting in the mirror of his goggles.\n\nI shake my head. \"I want to know what you meant about everyone being an unreliable narrator.\"\n\nHe leans forward on the bar, which still makes me nervous, and asks, \"You want to ski Shirley or do a warm-up down Mountain?\"\n\n\"Logan!\"\n\nHe drops his head into his folded arms. \"You're unbelievable, you know that? Such a good student.\"\n\nHe's lucky I don't hit him with one of my poles. \"Yes, I am. And I think maybe you said you'd help me just to get me out here and you don't really have an idea one way or another about my essay.\"\n\nHe shoots me an impressed look. \"Oh, right, play to my competitive side.\"\n\n\"Stalling...\"\n\nHe sits back again, watching a skier zip by beneath us. \"No, wait \u2014 I do have an idea about this. Holden's unreliable because he's telling us a story, but it's his version, and we don't really know if what he says is true.\" He raises the bar as the lift approaches the top of Big Blue. \"So here's what I think: Isn't that everyone? Everyone only has one version, right? One way of looking at the world. Mostly, we tend to see what we want to see in it, so aren't we all, essentially, unreliable? Bam! Essay written.\" He pushes off the lift, and slightly stunned, I almost forget to follow him off.\n\nI ski up to him. \"Um, what was that?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm full of surprises,\" he says. \"You'll see,\" he adds before skiing down the catwalk toward Shirley Lake.\n\nAfter a few runs on Shirley, we hit the Gold Coast building for some fries. At this hour, the deck is almost empty. The day is unusually warm and it makes me sleepy. After we eat, we kick back on a bench seat, dropping our helmets on nearby chairs, and take in the warm light, our eyes closed.\n\nAfter a moment, I feel him watching me.\n\nMy eyes flutter open just in time to see how close his face is to mine and his kiss catches me off guard. He tastes like salt and the sweetness of the Coke he just drank. Without thinking, I lean in, the kiss unwinding me, its sweetness much more than just the soda.\n\nBefore I know it, I'm crying.\n\nHe pulls back. \"Oh, wait \u2014 you're crying?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I mumble, trying to pull it together.\n\nHe looks embarrassed. \"Okay, crying. That's an all-time low. I had a girl laugh once. But, yeah, never crying.\"\n\nI shake my head. \"It's not what you think. That was exactly right \u2014 it was amazing and exactly right.\"\n\nHe pulls back from me on the bench, reaching for his helmet. \"Yeah, I can tell, what with all the sobbing.\" He hurries to put his helmet on.\n\n\"Why did you have to be like this,\" I blurt, wiping at my cheeks. \"I came up here to take a break and get my head on straight and then you... you happened.\"\n\nHe snaps the buckle closed on his chinstrap. \"Sorry?\"\n\nWords start spilling out. \"You had to be so... you. So wonderful and sweet. I came to Tahoe to sort things out, to Live in the Now, but I can't do it! I keep worrying about what's next, what it all means for the future. I'm the worst Now Liver to ever... live. F-minus for Mara!\"\n\nHe tries to hide a smile behind his glove.\n\n\"Right, laugh at me. I'm a mess. I make all these lists that I end up tripping over and waste time on stupid rules when, clearly, this whole time, I should have been, I don't know... I should have been kissing you.\"\n\nAs I try to stand, he grabs my arm, lightly. \"I agree.\"\n\nI shake my head. \"I'm leaving next week! We have a week to hang out. That's not enough!\"\n\nHis eyes flick to the side. \"Actually, I'm skiing a race in Utah this weekend, so I'm not back until late Monday night.\"\n\nMy heart sinks. \"Ugh, I have the worst timing. Two months I should have spent with you and they're just wasted, completely wasted.\"\n\nHis arms move around me. \"Not wasted.\" He unhooks his helmet, tossing it on a nearby chair, takes my face in his hands, and says, \"Kiss me now, and this time, try not to cry all over me. We'll talk about that other stuff later.\"\n\nI'm barely able to move, but I whisper, \"Okay.\"\n\nHis kiss sends a shock wave through me I've never felt before. He tightens his arms around my back, moving one hand into my hair at the nape of my neck. When he pulls away, his brown eyes meet mine for a moment before he hugs me to his chest. As I rest against him, he leans his chin on the top of my head. I hear Squaw around me \u2014 the slice of skiers and boarders moving through the snow, the wind, the creak and whirl of the lifts. It's like the music they play for babies to get them to sleep.\n\n\"You okay?\" he finally asks.\n\n\"For now.\"\n\nI pull my safety goggles off and make one last notation in my lab notebook. \"Done,\" I say to Isabel, who has been hanging out on a stool nearby for the last five minutes waiting for me to finish. \"Or at least as done as it's going to be.\"\n\n\"Well, it's hard to do chemistry through the googly eyes you and Logan were shooting at each other the whole time.\" She laughs, pulling her backpack on. We wave good-bye to Malika and head out the door. She nudges me. \"He told me, by the way.\"\n\n\"About my crying. Yeah, that was awesome.\"\n\nShe grins. \"He thought so.\"\n\nA man passes us in the hall, a lanky history teacher named Micah, and he gives me a familiar wave. \"When are you just going to enroll?\" he teases as he walks past us.\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" I joke back, which is what I've been saying each time he asks.\n\nThis time, though, Isabel, stopping to tie her shoes, says, \"You should.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Enroll.\"\n\nI roll my eyes. \"Right.\"\n\nStanding, she adjusts the straps of her backpack. \"Why not? You like it here, we like you, Logan really likes you.\" She grins at my flush. \"You should just stay. This shouldn't be your last week.\"\n\nI follow her into the student lounge. \"I can't just stay.\"\n\nIsabel flops down on the couch next to Amanda, who is French-braiding her own hair. \"What's up?\" she asks, wrapping an elastic band around the end of a braid. The other half of her hair hangs waiting, and she starts gathering it in her fingers.\n\nIsabel fills her in. \"I think she should stay and go to school here for the rest of the year.\"\n\nAmanda nods as enthusiastically as she can without wrecking her hair. \"Oh, totally.\"\n\nBodie wanders in, carrying his guitar. \"What?\"\n\n\"Mara should stay and go to school with us,\" Amanda tells him.\n\nHe looks confused. \"How would that be different from now?\"\n\n\"She was just here for a break,\" Isabel reminds him. At his blank look, she adds, \"You're coming to her going-away party at Logan's this Friday night. She's going back to San Diego, remember?\"\n\n\"Lucky,\" he says, strumming his guitar. \"San Diego has sweet surfing.\"\n\n\"I don't surf,\" I explain, even though this is not the point at all. \"It doesn't matter anyway. My mom would never let me stay.\"\n\nAs I say it, though, I shiver with the start of an idea. Would she let me stay?\n\nI wake up off and on all night, my mind spinning with lists. Staying lists. Leaving lists. I can't seem to stop the cycle. The fire crackles \u2014 awake! Asleep again. The cottage creaks \u2014 awake! With each jolt, I lie in bed, staring into the dark, thinking, Can I stay? Or do I leave on Saturday as planned?\n\nI think about all the goals I made to live in the now while I was in Tahoe \u2014 meditate, sleep in, kiss a boy, stay off social media, slap on lavender oil.\n\nCheck, check, check, check, check.\n\nHave I completely missed the point?\n\nWednesday morning, I open my backup binder and look at the original Now List.\n\n6. Simplify & downsize!!\n\nDone.\n\nI crossed it off that first night in Tahoe because of living with Trick, because I brought only four pairs of socks and three sweatshirts. But I never truly simplified my life. If anything, I made things more complicated. In trying to maintain all of my Ranfield work and goals and plans, plus adding my two different versions of the Now List, I just made everything harder.\n\nMaybe I can fix that.\n\nDressed in jeans and my parka, I grab the first tram up to High Camp. Stretching out around me, the snowcapped mountains give me courage and my idea churns through my mind. A couple from Wisconsin distracts the cable car attendant through our glide up the mountain, so he doesn't try to talk to me. I bask in the solitude, the ride its own brand of meditation. Check.\n\nWhen we dock at the top, I make my way off the car, head inside, and find a spot in the restaurant by the window. Almost dizzy from the sweeping views (more likely it's the email I'm about to write), I sit down to make a third version of my Now List, the one I dreamed about last night. The one that jolted me awake for the final time in the thin light of dawn.\n\nOnly it's not really a list.\n\nIt's an explanation to Mom. Turns out, I've been going about this whole Now thing all wrong. I thought Now was a single place in time, an isolated moment when people do crazy-brave stunts like skydiving or learning to ski or kissing a random boy without worrying about the consequences.\n\nBut Now isn't any of those things.\n\nI open my laptop and begin an email to my mom.\n\nSubject: The Now List III\n\nGuess what. I figured out what Living in the Now means to me. Now isn't isolated moments on a checklist. It's not meditating or drinking a kale smoothie. Now is the time when you look hard at everything, weigh it, and then take the next step. Now is everything that happened before, leading to everything that might someday be possible. Which makes Now this crazy-powerful thing, right? It's the ultimate hybrid. And it's different for everyone because it's my specific past balanced with my own potential. To live in the now, I have to respect everything from before while at the exact same time opening my heart to everything I might change so I can create the future I want. Now is the ultimate tightrope walker, the sweet spot in tennis, the snowplow (pizza slice, French fries, pizza slice).\n\nNow is the choice right before Next.\n\nI want to stay in Tahoe, Mom. I feel balanced here. I'm pretty sure it's my sweet spot. The great thing is that the reason I know this is because of everything that came before, because Ranfield (all the competition and busyness and stress) built me and wrecked me and then put me here. For a reason. So I want to stay. This is what my Now taught me.\n\nThank you for letting me come here and figure this out. Please say yes.\n\nLove,\n\nMara\n\nP.S. I included a link to Crest Charter's schedule and college acceptance list (UCLA, U of Oregon, Pomona, Dartmouth! to name a few) and a list of classes.\n\nNote: Advanced Naps and How to Party Like It's 1999 aren't on there!!\n\nI read it over a few times, making small changes, taking breaks to let my eyes rest on peaks out the wide windows of the restaurant. I should probably call her, but I want her to be able to read this all the way through before she starts arguing with me, before she starts giving me reasons why I'm wrong.\n\nI press SEND.\n\nThe next morning, I'm curled up in bed reading a book Isabel gave me about a teenage ghost detective (a book on no suggested reading list anywhere). I'm trying to ignore the fact that Mom hasn't responded to my email yet. Or to the six texts I sent since the email. Mom never waits this long to respond to anything, so my mind spins possible reasons:\n\nShe dropped her phone in the ocean.\n\nShe has driven off a cliff.\n\nShe is being held hostage.\n\nI shared all of these options with Logan at dinner last night. He suggested that maybe she just hasn't decided yet, but I kept checking my phone anyway until he finally took it away so we could have an actual conversation.\n\nNow I notice Trick hovering in the doorway. He wears neon-blue ski pants and a black parka. \"I'm taking you skiing.\"\n\nI sit up, my heart catching. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Get dressed.\"\n\nI motion at his pants. \"What are you wearing?\"\n\n\"What \u2014 these?\" He models the ski pants, turning around so I can fully appreciate the hot-pink accents on the back pockets. \"These are rockin'.\"\n\n\"I think the word you're looking for is relic.\"\n\n\"Don't question the pants.\" Laughing, he heads back into the other room, calling out, \"Get dressed. We'll miss all the good snow.\"\n\nI can't stop smiling as I hurry to yank on my ski gear.\n\nA half hour later, we're heading up the funi. Like Oli, Trick doesn't talk much when he's skiing. We take a few runs down Big Blue, head over to Gold Coast for a run, and hit a couple of different shoots on Shirley. Trick's leg makes him slow, which is fine with me because I tend to prefer the wide turns and breaks, but his form comes through. He has a steady ease on the mountain that I'm not sure I'll ever have. At one point, we ski near a small terrain park where boarders and skiers do flips and jumps and other tricks on the half-pipe. Trick slows to a stop a dozen yards away, watching them, his eyes unreadable behind his mirrored goggles.\n\nOne boy skis backward on his skis, picking up pace until he's speeding up the side of the half-pipe, twisting his body into a knot, and then landing face-forward. \"Wow, that was cool.\" I glance at Trick.\n\nHe pinches his lips together. \"Not bad. Come on,\" he says, pushing off on his poles and continuing down the hill.\n\nAfter another run, we stop at Gold Coast for some lunch. While I stack our helmets and gloves on a nearby chair, Trick opens the small backpack he's been carrying and pulls out a metal water bottle, salami, crackers, cheese, chocolate-covered almonds, and some baby carrots. \"Set this stuff up,\" he tells me before heading inside to get us some hot chocolates.\n\nAs we eat, we watch the skiers and boarders sail past us. The sun warms my shoulders, and a slight breeze moves the hair from my face. I almost stop thinking about Mom not getting back to me yet. Finally, my phone buzzes just as we're packing up.\n\nThe food lumps in my stomach. She writes:\n\nHas Trick talked to you yet?\n\nWait, what is he going to say to me? That I can stay? That Mom and Will said yes? Before I can help myself, I start speed-listing images of my life in Tahoe:\n\nwalking the hallways at Crest\n\nskiing with Logan and Isabel\n\nbonfires\n\nmore eighties dress-up days\n\nLogan making me pizza while I sit by his fireplace\n\nStop it. She hasn't said yes yet.\n\nFireplace, fireplace, fireplace.\n\nI text back: not yet.\n\nNo response.\n\n\"Let's go.\" I hop up, gathering up the remains of our lunch.\n\nWe pause at the top of Big Blue. Trick motions to a spot farther down the catwalk. \"You want to do a different shoot on Shirley this time?\"\n\n\"Trick? Can I ask you something?\"\n\nHe literally braces himself, putting weight on his poles, as if he knows what I'm about to ask. \"Sure.\"\n\nMy mouth dries out, but I manage, \"I'd like to stay in Tahoe, live here, and go to school here.\" I'm not sure I've ever lived more in the now than right now. This moment.\n\n\"Yeah, I talked to your mom last night.\" He swallows and fishes his water bottle out of his pack. Maybe dry mouth is a genetic condition. \"It's why I took you out today. So we could talk.\" We have been doing no talking whatsoever.\n\n\"Oh?\" I can't bring myself to say anything else. People whoosh past us, some stopping to take in the view and others just transitioning right into the run on their boards or skis.\n\n\"I don't think it's a good idea,\" Trick says, tucking the water bottle away.\n\nThe world tumbles around me \u2014 all the wind and sky and pine and snow and slice of blue Lake Tahoe spinning away. \"No, it's a great idea, see \u2014 I could live here. And finish high school here. With you.\"\n\nSighing, he shakes his head. \"Listen, I know it seems like a good idea right now. It seems easy and beautiful and fun.\"\n\nI nod. \"Right, yes \u2014 all those things.\"\n\n\"Those are my genes,\" he says sheepishly. \"Path of least resistance. All those years ago when your mom said you would be better off without me in your life, I just accepted that. It was easier that way. No struggle. But I was wrong about that, Mara. Absence, avoidance \u2014 they're sometimes necessary but shouldn't become a lifestyle choice.\"\n\nI shake my head. \"But that's not what I'm doing. I'm choosing what's better for me. The slower pace, the mountains. I love it here. I belong here.\"\n\n\"Maybe you do. But Tahoe's not going anywhere. And you have some unfinished business at that fancy school of yours. I was a coward all those years ago and I have to live with that. I have to find peace with that and it's not easy, trust me. But you \u2014 you have a chance to make it right. Now. To walk in there and show those kids it didn't beat you, that it didn't break you.\"\n\nQuietly, staring down at the snow on my skis, I say, \"But it did.\"\n\nHe puts a gloved hand on my arm. \"No, it didn't. It changed you. And the most important things in our lives change us in some way. When we let them. Go back to Ranfield, make peace with what happened there. Like I said, Tahoe isn't going anywhere. You can always come back. You know it's here when you need it.\"\n\nMy lip quivers dangerously. \"Great, just great, you choose now to start acting like a dad. Just my luck.\"\n\n\"You're very lucky. I think you know that.\"\n\nI can't believe this. From Trick McHale of all people. \"What about how stressful San Diego is? You told Isabel I needed to have some fun.\"\n\nHe sighs. \"Fun's great. It's essential. But I don't think you'll be happy without both. The fun and the hard stuff. Not in the long run. Am I right?\"\n\nWhatever. I adjust my pole straps. \"You know what? I don't really feel like skiing with you anymore.\" Without waiting for his response, I take off down the mountain.\n\nI call Mom from a quiet bench tucked away in one of the side alleys of the Village. She picks up instantly. \"Oh, sweetie. Trick told you, didn't he?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Tears. The embarrassing kind with the ragged breathing and the snot.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mara.\"\n\n\"I... I... have to come home,\" I manage, wiping my nose with the sleeve of my jacket.\n\n\"I know. He told me. But it's really for the best, honey.\" She keeps her voice kind, but I detect a smudge of victory underneath. \"I know you don't want to hear it, but I agree with Trick on this one. It's best to come home on Saturday like we planned. I've let Ranfield know you'll be back on Monday.\"\n\nI watch the people move past with their skis, with their snowboards, with their white-lidded cups of coffee. \"I just thought I found the right place, you know? I'm ready to be here now.\" Now. That word keeps changing shape on me.\n\n\"Life doesn't always work out the way we want at every turn. You have to grow up.\"\n\nAll the people who tell you to grow up always seem to have the luxury of having already done it, so maybe they should stop being so pushy. \"Mom, you say that like growing up's a light switch. On. Off. And it's not.\"\n\nShe pauses. \"That's not what I meant.\"\n\n\"I have to go.\" I click off my phone, my hand shaking. I pull my legs into my chest and look up. Minutes ago, the sky had been blue, but now the Squaw Valley sun is more a sheen on the sheet-metal clouds than a single source of light.\n\nIt starts to snow. Single, quick flecks. Tiny bits of cut crystal. As if to say, I am quicksilver and cold and always changing, and I will surprise and surprise and surprise you.\n\nFriday evening, I sit with my bags on the couch beside me, watching the flames dwindle through the glass of the woodstove. Today, I packed my life into three neat duffel bags. Only three. And I threw out all of my Now Lists and binders.\n\nMy phone says 7:14. I'm supposed to be at my going-away party right now at Logan's house, but I can't seem to get off this couch. In twelve hours, Trick will take me to the Reno airport, load me on a plane, and send me back to San Diego.\n\nSomeone knocks at the door, and Logan pokes his head inside. His hair curls out from under a beanie the color of hot chocolate. \"Thought you might need a ride.\"\n\nA few minutes later, Logan pulls his car into the plowed driveway of his house. He looks sideways at me, cutting the headlights so the tiny red chili pepper lights glowing over the front door stand out in the dark. He sees me notice them. \"I couldn't find the box with the Christmas lights. Just the box marked BBQ. But I thought they'd look nice. Festive.\"\n\n\"I'm a chili pepper fan,\" I joke, but my voice catches.\n\n\"Listen,\" he says, leaning toward me, his arm resting on the center console, where he keeps a stainless steel coffee mug and a pair of battered white sunglasses. \"I know this isn't how you wanted it to work out. I know you wanted to stay. Believe me, I did, too. But let's not get too sad, okay? I made you your pizza. Olives and mushrooms. Isabel brought Skittles. Bodie has his guitar and he does a few passable Nirvana covers. Let's not think of this as some huge good-bye. You're not moving to a remote outpost in the Gobi Desert. It's not like we'll lose all contact.\"\n\nLike an idiot, I start to cry. \"I know.\"\n\nHe takes my hand, his touch that strange combination of electricity and comfort. \"Because the thing is \u2014 this isn't an ending.\" He clears his throat, and even in the dark, a red flush crawls across his cheeks. \"I was hoping to think of this more as the start of something. We can keep getting to know each other. I can call you. You can call me.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can handle the whole long-distance thing.\"\n\n\"Then let's not call it that, okay? Let's figure it out as we go. Without lists and rules.\" He clears his throat again, looking nervous. \"I like you, Mara. A lot. And at some point in our future, I'd like to kiss you without it starting with tears.\" He wipes at some of the ones currently taking up residence on my face.\n\n\"It's good to have goals,\" I sniff.\n\n\"Come on.\" He opens the door and scrambles out.\n\nInside, Isabel is yelling at Bodie. He stands on a swivel chair, wearing a T-shirt that reads SAVE IT FOR FACEBOOK, and clutches one end of a half-drooping sign in his hand. Isabel holds the other end. \"You have to attach it to something, genius \u2014 this won't reach!\" She spots Logan and me. \"Oh, hey, sorry \u2014 we would have the sign up, but Frank Lloyd Wright over there thinks he can get a better angle.\"\n\nBodie frowns, the sign dipping again. \"The Phantom of the Opera guy? What does he have to do with anything?\"\n\nAmanda giggles on the couch, paging through a snowboarding magazine and eating straight from a bag of barbecue potato chips. \"That's Andrew Lloyd Webber. Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect.\"\n\nLogan crosses to the kitchen. \"Did you at least put the pizza in?\"\n\nThey all look at one another. \"Oops.\" Bodie shrugs. \"Sorry, bro.\" He tapes the sign quickly to the kitchen island. In wobbly Sharpie letters, the sign reads SEE YA, MARA!\n\n\"Bodie made the sign,\" Isabel says apologetically, pushing bowls of chips and salsa in my direction.\n\n\"Yeah, I did.\" He nods, proudly studying his work.\n\n\"It's a great sign, Bodie.\" I grab a chip from the bowl and jam it into my mouth, a chip shield to hold back any tears threatening to resurface.\n\nMy body grows heavier as I watch them. Logan puts the pizza into the oven. Isabel moves the poster back to where she must have wanted it in the first place. Bodie takes a running leap, hurtling over the back of the couch and landing next to Amanda, and crunches her bag of chips. \"Nice,\" she says, her curtain of hair hiding the obvious eye roll I hear in her voice. Bodie unearths the bag and tips the remaining crush of chips into his mouth.\n\nThey will go on like this here. I will leave tomorrow and they will make pizza and race one another down mountains and see the alpenglow wash the evening mountains with rose-colored light. And I will be gone.\n\nThe front door opens.\n\nBeck.\n\nLogan pauses at the counter where he was about to roll out another pizza, and his eyes dart to Isabel, who shakes her head as if to say, I didn't tell him. Beck slips off his beanie and stuffs it into the pocket of his green parka. This is his secret, I realize, watching him \u2014 he makes disinterest and messiness so appealing.\n\n\"Didn't want to miss the grand good-bye,\" he says in that way of his. Some people can say the simplest things and still make them sound like they're predicting misfortune. \"You doing okay, heading back into that police state you call a school? Back to being a drone.\"\n\n\"Stop it, Beck,\" Isabel says from behind the counter, unwrapping a package of mozzarella.\n\nBeck's eyes glint with a dark amusement. \"I was just asking.\"\n\n\"Well, just stop asking.\" Isabel violently grates the cheese.\n\nThe room grows warm with the smell of pizza. The fire crackles and casts a flickering light into the room. They just want to say good-bye to me \u2014 pizza, some board games, Bodie's guitar \u2014 nothing major.\n\nBut Beck has to bring in an ice storm.\n\n\"Why is this what you do?\" I ask him as he moves past me toward the counter to grab a handful of chips.\n\nHe pops a chip in his mouth. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Did you not notice that when you walked in the door, the temperature dropped about forty degrees?\"\n\n\"If you say so.\" He turns his back to me, picking through the open can of olives.\n\nThe other thing about leaving? It makes you brave. \"But since you asked, I'd like to answer your question, even if it was just you being predictably rhetorical and obnoxious.\" This last bit gets a snort of laughter from Amanda and Isabel. \"The answer is no, I'm not excited about heading back into that police state I call a school. But I'm not a drone. You've got that wrong. Just because I get good grades and work hard and \u2014\"\n\n\"Jump through hoops like a trained monkey,\" Beck interrupts, barely turning to me.\n\nLogan leans into the counter, wiping his hands on a towel. \"Hey \u2014\"\n\nI stop him. \"No, it's okay. I got this.\" And surprisingly, it's not anger I feel. Quite the opposite. I start laughing. \"Yes, Beck. That's what I am. A trained monkey. Because I want to do well in school and go to college and find a job I actually like. Yep, I'm a huge conformist idiot.\"\n\nHe turns to give me an odd look. \"Your words, not mine.\"\n\n\"You know what, Beck? At least I care. You think you're so anti-system but you're not. Because we all choose a system, whether we like it or not. Yours seems to be of the Dad's a jerk so I'm a victim and the whole world sucks variety. Congratulations. But you're not as deep as you think you are. It's not deep to trash things all the time. It's not deep to make other people feel small because they want something different from you. That's not deep. It's sad.\n\n\"You know what I've realized here in Tahoe? That I would love to have this life. I just can't right now. Maybe someday. But I'm not going to sulk back to San Diego. I'm going to go back and work hard because that's how I want to show up in the world. I can't fix everything that's wrong, like hurricanes and homeless people and war, but I can work hard and be a decent person. That's a choice. So are the excuses we make. You're not the only one in this room who has a dad who let you down. It's not fair, I get it. But hiding behind your pseudophilosophies and being such a jerk all the time? That's on you.\"\n\nThe air in the room has thickened into an uncomfortable hush. Beck looks like he might respond. It would be his right to say something like Really, all this from the girl hiding out in Neverland? But he doesn't. He just lowers his eyes, moves across the room, and leaves.\n\nIsabel goes to the door, staring out into the dark. Bodie and Amanda check their phones so they don't have to make eye contact with me.\n\nBut Logan does, and the way he looks at me feels like warm towels from the dryer. I unclench my hands, feeling the little moon-shaped nail cuts left on my palms throb. My whole body shakes like I've just run a race. \"I guess that was kind of harsh.\"\n\nLogan holds a piece of pizza on a paper plate. \"You just said what we were all thinking. Much more articulately, though.\" He holds out the plate. \"Mushrooms and olives?\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" I take a bite. It's delicious, and as I eat, some of the adrenaline begins to drain away.\n\nLogan watches me eat. \"It's good, right? I make a pretty awesome pizza. Not as awesome as your speeches, but close.\"\n\nMy phone buzzes on the counter and Logan frowns at it. \"It's Beck,\" he says, handing it to me. Wiping my fingers on the cuffs of my sweatshirt, I check it. It says simply, have a safe trip, san diego.\n\nIsabel comes and peers over my shoulder at it, shaking her head.\n\n\"He must know how sick we get of him being such a downer all the time, right?\" Amanda asks.\n\nI wonder if Beck knows, if any of us truly knows. Do we deep-down know who we are in the world? How we affect other people? We must have an inkling, right? Based on the way other people move to surround or avoid us? Maybe some of us don't care. Or maybe we can only know if we choose to be honest with ourselves and stop pointing fingers in opposite directions. The world is a mirror that reflects us, but having the courage to look must be one of the hardest things we do as humans. Because it's not always pretty what's staring back. Sometimes it's a scared, exhausted mess who would rather hide in the mountains than deal with the aftermath of her own perfectionism.\n\nStill, we have to look if we want things to change, right?\n\nLogan pulls into Trick's driveway a little after eleven and cuts the engine. He looks sideways at me, his hand still resting on the keys in the ignition. \"What time's your flight tomorrow? You all packed?\"\n\n\"All packed. We're leaving at seven.\"\n\nHe hands me a package wrapped in grocery-bag brown paper and tied with what looks like the lace of a snowboard boot. \"Um, I got you this.\"\n\n\"Nice wrapping job.\" I try to be light, but his gift sends an ache coursing through me. I open it, and inside rests a black Frost Boys sweatshirt and a CD titled Songs to Bring You Home. \"I love it.\" I pull a pack of dark-chocolate coconut cookies from my bag. \"For the record, your gift's better than mine.\"\n\nHe holds my gaze. \"Not a competition.\"\n\nI study his shadowy face, the curve of his jaw. \"You are the sweetest guy, you know that?\"\n\nHe looks away, running his hands over the top of the steering wheel. \"I know, I know, I think I need to be more of a jerk. The jerks get all the girls.\"\n\n\"Not all of them.\" I put my hands on either side of his sweet Logan face and pull him in to kiss me. \"Look, no crying.\"\n\nHe wraps his arms around me and I melt into the warmth of his kiss, at the way it takes a delicious eraser to my world. Because right now, there's nothing else. No wash of winter stars, no plane leaving tomorrow, no mountains to race down or futures to plan. Of everything in Tahoe, I will miss Logan the most. He's the fire in the woodstove you take totally for granted but, when it goes out, leaves everything cold.\n\n1. Get Trick to talk more!!\n\n2. Let my phone run out of power\n\n3. Focus, Mara!\n\n4. Be brave (thanks, Will) * *\n\n5. Ski blue runs with confidence. Black runs? (Next season?)\n\n6. Stop and smell the alpenglow\n\n7. HAVE MORE FUN\n\n8. Be more spontaneous!\n\n9. No boys!\n\nAs we drive out of Squaw Valley, the rising sun turns the stretch of sky amethyst. We're silent until Trick pulls into the passenger unloading zone at the Reno airport. \"Here we are.\" He gets out and lifts my bags from behind the truck seats.\n\nWe stare at each other.\n\n\"You got everything?\" he finally asks.\n\n\"I think so.\" I clear my throat, swinging my carry-on over my shoulder.\n\n\"Mara?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\nWithout saying anything more, without meeting my eyes, he pulls me into a hug that smells like wood smoke and snow. Figures with Trick, my first hug from him would be when I'm leaving and absent of words. But it's okay. We have started something here, something we can cultivate. Somehow in so much silence, we've managed to grow a few roots.\n\nInside, I check in at the counter with the tired-looking Southwest desk clerk as he hefts my bags onto the conveyor belt. I move through security, thinking about the carnelian stone and Frost Boys sweatshirt tucked safely into the carry-on bag I place in the beige airport tub. Once through, I find a caf\u00e9 and hand a woman five dollars for a latte in a white paper cup with a black plastic lid. The guy behind me shuffles, annoyed, mumbling comments about how long the line is, how long it's taking. When he finally gets to the counter, the barista says, \"Thanks for your patience,\" and for some reason it makes me think of Natalie and Elevation, and I walk away smiling.\n\nOn the plane, I study the other people coming up the aisle, looking for a nook for their own bags. It strikes me that each of these people has a single life, with dreams and defeats and joy and sorrow, and each has to go through the daily steps to get where they want to go.\n\nOli said most people are just looking for their car keys. Which means they aren't looking at me at all. It's up to me to put what I want to be in the world and deal with the consequences. How people respond is out of my control. That video hurt \u2014 the comments, the whispering, the thousands upon thousands of views \u2014 and I'm still ashamed of what happened. But I can't change it. It partly happened because I spent so much time trying to be perfect, I forgot to be, well, just Mara. Not Tahoe Mara. Or Miss Perfect Mara. Just Mara.\n\nNow I have a choice. I can either let the world turn me sour and hateful and afraid. Or I can be the Mara I want to be and face it with as much grace and humor as possible. Wherever I land, I'm the common denominator in my own life. It's not about geography. I can work hard for something out there in the future, but I need to take breaks to appreciate the things I already have. For those of us lucky enough to be born into my type of life, it's often about our point of view, to believe we're already winning just by getting out of bed.\n\nWhen I land, Mom meets me outside, her Lexus idling. I have my stuff mounded onto one of those pushcarts and she looks relieved, as if she's thinking, At least I've raised a daughter who knows how to pile her things on a pushcart and make her way home. As we leave the airport, Mom turns the Lexus onto Harbor Drive. The view both familiar and strange, I stare out the car window. On the right, sailboats dot the glittering water of the bay. I see the single cruise liner, the Star of India, docked, and the USS Midway museum aircraft carrier with the Coronado Bridge beyond. On the left, we pass the pink art deco administration building and then there is the high-rise cityscape of San Diego. Palm trees and bleached stucco and vast blue water.\n\nHome.\n\nMom is talking but I've missed most of the beginning of what she is saying, and now she's handing me a folder. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"It's the packet from AYS. You don't even have to reapply. You're in.\" She looks so happy for me. I stare down at the yellow folder. AYS stands for America's Young Scientists, a six-week summer program I took last year after a grueling application process. \"Very elite,\" my counselor said. \"It'll look great on your college applications.\"\n\n\"Actually, Mom. I don't think I'm going to do AYS this summer.\" I set the packet at my feet.\n\nShe bites her lip, frowning, but waves it off as she changes lanes. \"You don't have to decide that now. Oh! \u2014 and I made you an appointment with a woman named Ashley Callahan. She specializes in college advising with students who have unique circumstances like yours. You can talk with her about it.\"\n\nI turn back to the window, hiding a smile. It strikes me as funny that someone has a job specializing in kids like me, ones with unique circumstances. Aren't circumstances, by definition, unique? I would love to see her list of clients. A bunch of privileged kids whose parents think not being able to get into a first-tier school qualifies as a crisis. I can just picture our first meeting. Hi, Mara. Your life won't be as perfect and award-winning as you initially thought, she'll say, adjusting her six-hundred-dollar glasses, but we'll find you something else. That will be two hundred dollars per hour, please. I tip the air-conditioning toward me; it's probably fifty degrees outside but it feels hot. Something else. I smile into the flow of air. Something else will be just fine.\n\nMom looks sideways at me. \"Are you hungry? Do you want to stop for a salad somewhere?\" I shake my head, staring out at the passing traffic, my senses recalibrating to San Diego zipping by outside. \"It feels good to have you home,\" she tries again.\n\n\"Thanks, Mom.\" Before I left, I heard Trick on the phone with her, letting her know he'd told me about the accident. Staring out at the passing cars, I wonder if she'll ever talk to me about it, or if, like so many things with people, it will be left unsaid. Maybe the knowing is enough.\n\nI take a deep breath. San Diego is a beautiful place. Busy and fast and full of the vibrant things that make up cities everywhere.\n\nBut right now, it's not my favorite beautiful place.\n\nIt's not San Diego's fault. This is Josie's place \u2014 she seems made to be here, made of sand and salt water and sea air. Not me, though. Turns out, I belong tucked into a mountain range somewhere. Some people feed off the busy, but I have the opposite reaction. I need the stillness, the smallness, to remind me to settle, to breathe. But the gift of Tahoe is that I know this now. I know that no matter what happens here, I will always have a place I can return to when I need it. My geographic insurance policy.\n\nMy body feels light, like snowfall, and studying Mom's profile, her blond hair newly trimmed and highlighted, her linen suit stylish, her French pedicure perfect in her sandals, I realize this is her place. Where she feels the most like herself. Maybe San Diego saved her when she was at her lowest point the way Tahoe saved me when I was at mine. I fill with a silly kind of childhood love for her \u2014 all her Google calendars and spreadsheets and checklists.\n\nBecause sometimes love looks like a spreadsheet.\n\n\"Actually, I would love some Mexican food.\" I smile sideways at her. \"Tahoe just didn't have the Mexican food I'm used to.\"\n\nA stripe of late afternoon sun brightens her face as she moves back into the slow lane. \"Absolutely. I know the best place,\" she says, turning on her blinker and taking the next exit.\n\nA lit-up sailboat moves across the dark waters of the ocean. Josie points it out before pulling a Ranfield Ravens sweatshirt over her head. We sit on the cool sand of the beach at La Jolla Shores, where we came to eat sandwiches and watch the water grow black. A breeze blows the salty ocean air through my hair. The windows of the houses to the south begin to twinkle in the dark, the pier is drenched in shadow, and the crumbly waves move against the shore. A shaggy-haired man in a faded sweatshirt and jeans walks barefoot down the beach, and it strikes me that people come here to disappear, too. Tahoe has ski bums. We have beach bums. Maybe everywhere has its own version of people who duck under the radar.\n\n\"You can feel free to add to that.\" I motion at the present I've just given Josie. \"It's a work in progress.\"\n\nJosie uses her phone as a light to read it. \"This is cool, Mara \u2014 thanks.\" She studies the Be a Better Friend to Josie List I made. I'd even decorated it with some sparkly ocean stickers and slipped it into a clear plastic sleeve.\n\nGo with you to parties even when I don't want to.\n\nTalk about boys when you want to talk about boys.\n\nTalk about everything else, too.\n\nSpend Friday nights not studying.\n\nWatch boring ocean documentaries.\n\nTell you how I'm feeling (most of the time).\n\nShe tucks it into her bag along with her phone, and the sand turns shadowy around her again. \"First day back tomorrow,\" she says. \"It'll be great \u2014 you'll see.\" She returns to watching the boat's slow progress. \"Don't be nervous.\"\n\nI run sand through my fingers. I am nervous. There is no way I won't be nervous. It's my nature in the same way I can't help but have blue eyes or the freckles that pop up when I get too much sun.\n\nTomorrow, I will walk into calculus with the tall windows and the desks set in rows and my stomach will twist into a thousand knots and I'll feel like I might faint.\n\nBut I will survive it.\n\nI will go through the steps: walk through that door, sit down, take notes, write down the assignment, listen to the lecture. And then it will be over. And I'll have done something that two months ago I was pretty sure I'd never be able to do again.\n\n\"You're nervous, I can tell.\" Josie tugs the end of her glossy ponytail, her dark eyes concerned.\n\n\"I can't not be nervous, Jo. Mostly because I don't know how to feel anything other than how I already do. But I'll be okay.\" I wiggle my toes in the sand. \"One of the hardest parts is that I still don't know who posted the video. I'll walk into class not knowing and that person will just be sitting there. I'll see all those faces and think, Was it you? Was it you? Or you?\"\n\n\"I know.\" Josie follows my gaze across the waves, the light of the moon wriggling across them. \"But you're forgetting the most important part.\"\n\n\"Which is what?\"\n\nShe threads her fingers through mine. \"You know who it wasn't.\"\n\nAnd so I do it. I walk into calculus, my chest in a clench, my palms slick with sweat. Students sit at their desks or on top of them, chatting with each other. A couple of kids seem to be hurriedly finishing last night's assignment. Mr. Henly writes out tonight's homework, his black dry-erase squeaking across the stretch of whiteboard. This morning, before school, I brought him a paper shredder from Costco with a shiny red bow. He'd looked up from where he sat grading papers at his desk and said, \"Good girl.\"\n\nEyes swivel in my direction and, for a moment, nothing \u2014 and then some murmurs, some whispers, and the hair on my neck stands on end. I'm about to ask Mr. Henly where I should sit, navigating the silence like a dark alley, when Jaydon Barris, a senior boy who spends most of his time trying to get everyone to come see his improv group perform at a random caf\u00e9 somewhere, pops up from a desk. \"Mr. Henly, I can't find my phone! I need the pass \u2014 it has all of my new sketches on it.\" He darts down the aisle, nearly knocking me over. \"Oh, hey, Mara \u2014 wait, did you have mono or something?\"\n\n\"What?\" I barely manage. \"No.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Jayden grabs the oversize protractor, which Mr. Henly uses as a pass, from its hook by the door and bolts from the room. Not just car keys, Oli, I think \u2014 sometimes also phones.\n\nMr. Henly catches my eye. He wears one of the plaid shirts he always wears, tucked into a pair of navy blue trousers. \"Mara, same seat,\" he offers, with a wave of his hand toward the row where I'd ripped up all the tests, where everything had gone blurry, where someone had filmed it and posted it for hundreds of thousands to see. He motions again, giving me a faint math-teachery smile.\n\nI sit down, opening my binder to a blank piece of paper. The board reads Differentiation Formulas in Mr. Henly's crisp, boxy handwriting. Just as the bell rings, Chris Locke slides into the seat next to me. \"Hey,\" he says, flipping open his green binder. \"Welcome back.\"\n\nIn the last week of May, we sit on our patio, the dregs of Saturday dinner in front of us. The twins play paddleball on the lawn, or their version of it, which is mostly trying to bean each other in the head with the rubber ball. Mom gets up to refill my iced tea. Will holds up his iPad from across the table. \"Look, Mara. Dog shaming.\" He shows me a picture of a cream-colored French bulldog, his muzzle stained green, with a sign hanging around his neck reading I ATE ALL THE JELL-O. \"Look how many views he got.\" Over a million.\n\n\"I know how that dog feels,\" I quip, pleased that I can actually joke about the YouTube video now. I return to the novel I'm reading. It's not for school. It has mermaids and aliens in it. Mom saw it at Costco and bought it for me, which is her way of trying to ease her own foot off the gas pedal.\n\nWill laughs, scrolling through more pictures. \"Lots of shameful dogs in this world.\" He shows me another one. Amused, I study my stepdad, my heart swelling as I remember the Shells of Wisdom he had waiting when I got home from Tahoe.\n\nMISSED YOU\n\nMom slips back into her chair with a glass of white wine. \"What finals do you have on Tuesday?\" She tries to sound offhand, like she's just remembered I have finals next week and hasn't secretly been planning a study schedule for me in her head.\n\nShe's gotten better, but she's still Mom.\n\n\"French and English.\" She starts to say something, but Will flashes her a warning look. \"I'm studying with Josie tomorrow at her house,\" I tell her. Closing my book, I add, \"But just so there are no surprises, I'm getting a B in calculus and probably one in AP US history. Maybe an A-minus.\"\n\nHer mouth, whether she likes it or not, makes a thin line. \"Okay, well, I'm sure that will be fine.\" Fine is a sour taste in Mom's mouth. Like I said, she's trying.\n\nMy cell rings. Looking down, I see the caller ID: Trick.\n\nHe's called off and on since I've been back from Tahoe. Predictably, the conversations are mostly short. He tells me about the store and stuff I already know about Isabel and Logan since I talk to both of them more than I do to him. Isabel continues to inch closer to qualifying for the US Ski Team. Not yet, though. Not this season. In April, I sent a congratulations card for a great season. I might be more impressed that she keeps trying than if she had actually made the team. Trick never talks about Beck and I don't ask. And Logan. Well, my Things That Make Logan Amazing List just keeps getting longer.\n\nNow I hold up the phone. Mom doesn't like us to answer phone calls during dinner, and technically, even though I'm reading, we're still all sitting here. \"Do you mind if I take this?\" I ask, and she motions for me to answer it.\n\n\"Hi, Trick.\"\n\n\"Oh, hey \u2014 didn't know if you'd answer. Any big Saturday night plans?\"\n\nI look around the yard. \"Yeah, huge.\"\n\n\"I won't keep you,\" he says hurriedly.\n\n\"I'm sitting in the yard. Not really breaking any party records tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh, okay. Anyway, I was talking to Matt Never today and he's looking for someone to work at the Tahoe City shop this summer part-time, and, well, I thought of you.\"\n\nI sit up. Mom and Will exchange a look. I repeat his offer. \"I'm putting you on speaker with Mom and Will.\"\n\nMom leans toward the phone. \"Hi, Trick. That's a really nice offer, but Mara's busy this summer. She has a six-week science program she's enrolled in.\" I shake my head at her. \"No,\" I mouth, but she waves me off, which lights a flame of annoyance in me.\n\nSilence on the other end, until, finally, \"Okay, right. You already have plans. I didn't think about that. When I was a kid, summer was just, you know, summer.\"\n\n\"It's not like that anymore,\" Mom says, gripping her wine glass.\n\nIt might be like that, though, for some kids.\n\nHe clears his throat. \"Okay, well, I just wanted to throw it out there. Think on it.\"\n\n\"Thanks, anyway,\" Mom calls out, standing, collecting plates, glasses, forks.\n\nI hang up and help her carry some dishes into the kitchen. \"Mom, I'm not doing AYS this summer. I told you that.\"\n\nShe yanks open the dishwasher. \"We hadn't really made a final decision about that.\"\n\n\"Yes, I did.\"\n\nShe puts the lasagna pan in the sink to soak. \"Tahoe's not an option.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Tahoe for the summer. I'm itching to text Logan and Isabel.\n\nShe scrapes lasagna off a plate into the garbage disposal with a little more force than necessary. Liam's plate. He always picks out all the mushrooms. \"Because you have commitments here. You need to start your college applications.\"\n\n\"I can start my college applications in Tahoe. Squaw Valley has Wi-Fi.\" What she really means is I need to be with you while you start your college applications.\n\n\"You can't just hang out at Neverland all summer.\" The way she says it sounds like I might be considering starting my own meth lab.\n\nI move the rest of the lasagna into a Tupperware. \"Why?\" I really want this to be my summer.\n\nShe stacks our plates and glasses and silverware into the dishwasher in her ordered way. \"You know, Mara, there's a reason Wendy leaves Neverland. She realizes she has to live her real life.\"\n\nI'm surprised she hasn't brought that up before. Taking a moment to choose my words, I try to explain an idea that's been stirring in my mind for the last few weeks. \"You know what? I think Neverland has nothing to do with geography. I think maybe it's a state of mind, an attitude, and not a place at all. Anyone, anywhere, can choose to check out, to not grow up, to be selfish or live only in dreams or shirk responsibility. Anyone can choose that. No matter where they live.\" To appease her, I even add, \"I think I might write my college essay about it.\"\n\nShe blinks, seeming momentarily impressed that I've put some thought into my essay already. Drying her hands on a striped kitchen towel, she starts the dishwasher. \"I know you're going to think I'm being condescending, but I need to say something to you. I think you will regret not taking the opportunities you have right now if you throw them away to go hang out by a lake. You can only do AYS for one more summer. And it will look great for college.\"\n\nI listen to the whoosh of the dishwasher for a moment. \"AYS isn't my only opportunity. I think going to Tahoe is its own kind of opportunity, Mom. To know Trick better, to live in the mountains, a place where I feel like I belong.\" She shakes her head, turning away from me to scrub the lasagna pan under hot water. \"Besides,\" I add, \"isn't growing up about making choices and then dealing with whatever happens because of them? I'd be doing that. Clearly with a great deal of warning from you.\" Her shoulders sag, but in their release I can feel her yielding. The possibility of Tahoe hits me.\n\nWill appears in the doorway, clearing his throat. \"Hey, just checking on you two.\" He smiles gently at me and I am awash with gratitude for my stepfather. For his steadiness and sense of humor. \"So, Tahoe could be cool. I've always wanted to rent a house there for a week. Maybe mid-July?\"\n\nHer eyes downcast, she gives the lasagna pan a final rinse. \"Okay.\" She hands me the pan. \"Dry this.\"\n\nSmiling, I dry the pan, letting the towel do an extra victory lap for me.\n\nTahoe City looks different in June. The lake sparkles in the warm sun, but the far mountains are still topped with snow. People boat, paddleboard, and kayak on the blue water. Trick pulls the truck into an empty spot in front of Neverland's Tahoe City store.\n\n\"I didn't tell him you're coming.\" He grins, leaning on the steering wheel. \"Just like you asked.\"\n\nI try to catch a quick glimpse of my reflection in the truck's side mirror. I chopped my hair to my chin last week, hoping for a cute, boxy look, but I'm afraid it might be more fussy news anchor than I'd hoped for. \"It looks great on you,\" Trick assures me. I open the door and step onto the sidewalk, swinging the door shut behind me. Before Trick can pull away, I rest a hand on the open window.\n\nHe sees me and turns the music down. \"What's up?\"\n\nI lean in. \"Thanks for having me here this summer.\"\n\nHe lifts his trucker hat and runs a hand through his hair before pulling it back on. He drums his thumbs on the steering wheel, which I'm learning means he's thinking about something. \"Mara, I know as far as dads go, well, I've been pretty much junk.\" He stares straight ahead, his thumbs still drumming. \"But all those years... I was always your dad, even if it looked like, well, like I wasn't. I just figured being out of your life was the best thing I could do for you, but it turns out \u2014\" He shakes his head, looking pained. \"I guess I'd just like to not keep screwing up with you if I can manage it.\" His voice breaks off, and he takes his hat off and on again.\n\n\"Trick?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"I know. All we can do is go from now with the cards we've got, right?\" I hand him a slip of paper, a grocery list I'd written on the plane. \"Speaking of now, here's a food list. Can you pick this stuff up before tonight? I know what your kitchen looks like when I'm not here and I don't want to starve.\" Looking relieved, he takes it, and I wave as he drives off.\n\nTurning, I look at Neverland, and this time the whirls in my stomach are definitely more butterflies than knots. A sheet of sun gleams on the storefront, but as I get closer to the shop, I fall into the shadow of the overhang and can see Logan through the window. He stands in the center of the store, wearing Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. He's holding a kayak paddle, demonstrating the swing you use to a silver-haired woman in board shorts and water shoes. He sees me through the window and freezes, his face shifting from surprise into a smile. He has clearly stopped mid-sentence, because the woman's eyes move to me away from the demonstration. Handing the woman the paddle, Logan motions for me to come inside.\n\nI open the door and step into Neverland. \"Hi.\"\n\n\"Excuse me for a minute.\" He smiles at the woman. Slipping his hands into his pockets, he takes a few steps toward me. \"You took the job?\"\n\n\"I took the job.\"\n\nHe motions to the blue binder I have tucked under my arm. \"What's that you got there?\" The kayak woman still stands next to him, holding her paddle, her eyes locked on us, interested. When she sees me notice her, she pretends to examine a dress on a hanger nearby, but her eyes keep slipping back to us.\n\nI show him the binder. \"Oh, this? It's my Summer in Tahoe List. I actually made it for you.\"\n\nHe raises his eyebrows. \"Great. Another list. Too bad we're nowhere near a ski lift right now.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to check it out?\" I offer it to him.\n\nHe walks down the store aisle and takes it, flipping it open to reveal the single sheet of paper inside. On it, I've printed one word:\n\nLogan\n\n\"Nice list,\" he says, flipping it shut, his eyes sending shivers through me.\n\nI hold his gaze. \"And, you know, I'd also like to learn to paddleboard.\"\n\nA smile plays at his mouth. \"I think we can manage that.\"\n\nI grin back. \"And also kayaking and hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and \u2014\" I add until he smothers me in a bear hug, probably to shut me up.\n\nIt works.\n\n1. The Possibility of Now would not exist without the hard work of two amazing women: my editor, Jody Corbett, and my agent, Melissa Sarver White, who (insert favorite climbing-a-mountain metaphor of your choice here) patiently guided me through multiple drafts of this novel. A special thank-you also needs to go out to the wonderful people at Scholastic, who work in countless miraculous ways, but especially Yaffa Jaskoll, Beka Wallin, Sheila Marie Everett, Roz Hilden, Alexis Lunsford, Elizabeth Whiting, and Anna Swenson. And shout-out of gratitude to Molly Jaffa at Folio Literary for her tireless efforts on all things international.\n\n2. Every writer needs her people, and I'm lucky to have a whole local bookstore full of them \u2014 thank you to the staff at The Book Seller in Grass Valley, California. I'm also particularly grateful to Gary Wright and Mark Wiederanders for their writer minds and hearts and support along the way. Michael Bodie and Loretta Ramos give the best pep talks, and I'm so grateful. Once again, thank you to Tanya Egan Gibson, who has read more of my novel openings than she probably cares to be reminded of \u2014 thanks for always being my go-to girl. And to my writing group: Kirsten Casey, Annie Keeling, and Jaime Williams \u2014 well, ladies, I simply don't know what I'd do without you.\n\n3. Thank you to Tahoe, a very real and special place. I tried to remain true to the world there, but I did take some liberties with certain details and facts (especially in relation to restaurant and store names and the ski racing\/ski practice\/ski week schedules). Many people helped me make this world as authentic as I could \u2014 any mistakes are mine, not theirs, or just my stretching the lovely taffy that is fiction to fit the health of this story.\n\n4. Like Mara, I'm new to skiing and want to thank the people who have been so patient with this novice: Lillian Llacer and Gary Reedy took me out that first day (after much coaxing from my daughter!), and, in the days since, the Dixons, the Thiems, and the Hatchers have been so patient with wobbly, slow me. I want to also thank Sean Costley of Squaw Valley Ski Patrol for his mountain experience. Finally, thanks to Amanda Courtney and Cody Lamarche for the ski conditioning you put me through so I could actually survive a day of skiing. It was, as you knew it would be, totally worth it.\n\n5. Maybe all writers are like this, but I seem to spend a lot of time processing my work and couldn't do it without my friends and family, who always lend an ear (and a shoulder and a heart!) when needed. There are too many to mention, but I want to especially thank Dawn Anthney; Erin Dixon; Crystal Groome; Sands Hall; Krista Witt; and my parents, Linda and Bill Culbertson, for their unwavering support (or at least being really skilled at nodding along and seeming interested!). Thank you, too, to my San Diego sensory detail reconnaissance team, Brandon and Erika Culbertson, who didn't bat an eye when I texted questions like, \"What do you smell at La Jolla Shores at night in early March?\"\n\n6. A special mention must go to Emily Gallup, who generously shared her skills as a therapist and spent hours with me discussing the struggles we're both seeing in many of the teens we work with regarding anxiety, stress, and current cultural expectations. Thanks, Em.\n\n7. Over the years, I've had incredible students in my high school classes. They have shared their dreams and fears, and a huge part of this book is for all of them, but a special thank-you goes to Autumn, Bobby, Davia, Bethany, and Aliyah, who gave me some much-needed insight during the writing of this book.\n\n8. Finally, the biggest thank-you to Peter and Anabella, who are always and forever the most important parts of any list I make.\n\nKim Culbertson is the author of The Wonder of Us; The Possibility of Now; Instructions for a Broken Heart, a Northern California Book Award winner; and Songs for a Teenage Nomad. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter, her favorite travel companions. For more about Kim, visit www.kimculbertson.com.\nTurn the page for a special preview of The Wonder of Us, another Kim Culbertson novel!\n\nI have a history of getting stuck in bathrooms. Back home in Yuba Ridge, I've been trapped in at least eleven different bathrooms around town. Sierra Theaters. The Gas & Shop. Dave's Deli. I got stuck six times in the Blue Market employee bathroom before Dan, my manager, made a special sign for me to hang on the doorknob so I don't have to lock it. It says, Abby occupied, stay back! Dan thinks he's hilarious. But it's not like I panic about it. I've grown up knowing I have a tendency to lock myself into places. A latch gets stuck. My hair gets caught on the towel hook on the back of the door (long story). The door swells and sticks. The lock spins and spins but won't open. \"Ha-ha,\" I say when I finally emerge. \"Got myself stuck in a bathroom again.\"\n\nBut this is the first time I've been caught in an airplane bathroom miles up in the sky. And this time, I might have panicked slightly. I might have banged too loudly on the unmoving accordion door, the metal latch not clicking back to Vacant. The poor flight attendant on the other side of the door clearly read it as panic, because she keeps saying, \"Don't panic,\" every minute or so. \"Don't panic, honey,\" she murmurs through the door. \"I'm getting someone to help. The little lever thingy must be jammed.\" Jammed airplane lever thingy. Add that to the list of reasons Abby's been stuck in a bathroom. \"So weird,\" I hear her say to someone who has come to assist her, someone who is now jiggling the door. As if I hadn't tried just jiggling it myself. \"This never happens,\" she adds.\n\nFigures. I can practically hear Riya saying, \"Because this airplane isn't Abby-proof.\"\n\nRiya.\n\nMy best friend.\n\nCan I still call her that? I haven't seen her in person since last August, almost ten months ago. And I haven't talked to her for longer than five minutes since the end of April. Is someone still your best friend if there's a chance you don't know her anymore?\n\nThe door folds open with a whoosh. \"Oof, there.\" The flight attendant blows a lock of black hair from her sweaty face. \"Wow. You really got jammed in there. That took some effort.\" I'm not sure if she means the actual getting-trapped part or her work to free me. My face flames as the people sitting nearby burst into applause. Mumbling an embarrassed thank-you, I slink back to my seat.\n\nSeveral hours later, the plane hums with landing noises: people waking and shifting around, wadding up their thin blankets, snapping open the airplane window blinds to let in sheets of eye-stabbing light. I sit up, tug off my glasses, and rub my eyes with my free hand. When did I doze off? I couldn't sleep for hours after getting on the plane in San Francisco, restless in my seat, so it must have only been in the last hour. Which is worse than getting no sleep at all. Groggy, I swallow thickly, and for about the tenth time since getting on the plane, read Riya's letter again:\n\n> Ab,\n> \n> Yes! That other thing in your hand right now is a ticket to Florence, Italy\u2014for you!!! Surprise! My nani is sending us on an incredible multi-city trip this summer. She's giving me my eighteenth birthday trip four months early. Two and a half weeks of European fun! I know this year has been the worst for you, and when I was telling her about it, she said we need this trip because \"travel cures all ills\" (sounds like her, huh?). And she will not take no for an answer. You're coming. No excuses\u2014no: \"I've got SAT classes\" or \"I'm working at the Blue Market\" or \"I'm so mad at you right now.\" I know you're mad at me\u2014I can feel the Abby-chill all the way across the Atlantic. We're both mad. And we have a million things to talk about. So don't tell me you don't have time and blah, blah, blah. If you want to fix things, you'll get on that plane! Courtesy of Bharti Nani.\n> \n> Because we need this, Abby.\n> \n> You have your Seven Ancient Wonders. And we have the wonders from being best friends since preschool, but here's what we need right now: We need NEW wonders. And we need to find them together. In Europe. This summer.\n> \n> See what I'm doing here?!\n> \n> Aren't you impressed with me?!\n> \n> So pack your bags and meet me in Florence.\n> \n> (Wow, I really like the sound of that, don't you?)\n> \n> xoxoxoxoxox R\n\nI fold the letter back into a square, its edges soft like tissue, thinking about the moment last summer when Riya told me she was moving to Berlin for a year with her parents. It had been an ordinary evening\u2014could have been any one of our days spent by the river that cut through the back of Riya's property where her dad built his family a cedar-planked cabin.\n\nI guess everything is ordinary until it's not.\n\nWe were sitting on our favorite flat rock that juts out into the water. \"You don't even speak German,\" I said to her, the river moving its green ink around us. \"You can't move to Berlin. They speak German there.\" I rolled onto my back, watching as the Northern California sky grew a mockingly cheerful shade of pink.\n\nRiya sat up, crossing her legs and flipping her thick black braid down the length of her back. \"Abby, they speak English, too. It's an English-speaking school. And I can learn some German.\" As if that explained it. As if that was enough to explain a move across the world to a German place with German buildings and German food and new German friends. \"It's just a year,\" she said.\n\n\"Did you know the Gregorian calendar we use today was named after a pope? In 1582. Pope Gregory XIII.\"\n\n\"Fascinating.\" She shooed away a dragonfly hovering nearby. \"This history tidbit brought to you by Abby Byrd, Wikipedia addict.\" Pawing through her ancient blue-and-white cooler, she said, \"See, I'll miss that. You'll have to send me tidbits when I'm in Berlin. It can be one of our things while I'm gone.\" It was Riya who'd named my random history facts \"tidbits\" in fourth grade. That year I'd had a borderline unhealthy obsession with Greek mythology, and, for reasons I can't remember, the crested porcupine. And the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That hasn't changed.\n\nI remember Riya pulling the silver foil from the top of an organic strawberry yogurt. She licked it, folded it delicately in half, and tossed it back into the cooler. She'd been doing that exact move for years, but seeing it follow her Berlin news made me want to dive into the river's depths and pile the gray-blue stones on my back to fasten me to the bottom. There was a good chance the tiny silvery fish that darted around down there wouldn't move to Germany on me, right?\n\nBut I tried to appear cool that day. I was sixteen then, not eight. I knew I was supposed to say something like \"you'll have a great time\" or \"how exciting\" or \"I wish I could take my junior year abroad,\" but I only wondered how you say \"this sucks rocks\" in German, and I didn't say anything at all. Riya didn't mind, though. My silences were as familiar to her as the river she'd grown up by.\n\nWe studied the water growing silver as the sun dipped behind the pines. Finally, she said, \"If the whole world can go on after some pope changed the calendar, we can be fine for a year.\"\n\nSometimes my history tidbits backfire on me.\n\nWe haven't been fine, though. Nothing about this year has been fine.\n\nBut I can't turn back now even if I wanted to. The plane is landing. The man next to me, who still looks crisp in his black suit and white shirt, pulls a plastic bottle from his seat-back pocket and swishes water around his mouth. I do the same with my bottle, giving him a look that I hope says, Yeah, here we are. Done this before. Only I haven't ever done this before. I've taken two flights in my whole life: Sacramento to LA for a cousin's seaside wedding, and Sacramento to Portland, Oregon, to check out colleges for my older sister, Kate. Until today, Europe had been a multicolored blotch on my world map and the background for countless History Channel documentaries.\n\nI stuff the worse-for-wear bottle into the seat back. I bought the Vittel water in Frankfurt, where I nearly missed my connection to Florence. Now I'm pretty sure I resemble the bottle\u2014crumpled, drained. My jeans and black T-shirt look like I pulled them from the depths of a laundry hamper before flying in them. Funny how eighteen hours of travel can make hours feel like weeks. Still, less than a day to fly from San Francisco to Italy amazes me. In the 1600s, it took months to make this kind of crossing, maybe even a year. I resist the urge to text Riya this particular history tidbit. I'd stopped sending her much of anything these last few months.\n\n\"Il Duomo,\" the man murmurs, motioning at Brunelleschi's looming burnt-orange icon as the plane settles lower into the Tuscan sky. I've seen pictures of the famous Santa Maria del Fiore, but to be suddenly flying by it... I must make some sort of awed noise, because the man asks, \"First time in Florence?\" Somehow he smells like citrus and cinnamon, which is impressive after such a long flight. I'm pretty sure I can smell my own feet.\n\n\"Yes, I'm meeting a friend.\" The plane bumps down. Italy. My head spins. I've crossed an ocean to meet Riya in Florence, where she'll be waiting for me after customs. Customs! I've never been off the West Coast and soon I'll be clearing customs in Italy. Maybe it was better when it took months to get here. Made you feel like you'd earned it.\n\nWhen I peel my eyes away from the window, the man waits in the aisle, his black bag smartly tucked under his arm. \"Ciao.\" He winks as the line begins to move sluggishly toward the exits. I bet he never gets trapped in airplane bathrooms. I tug my bag from the overhead bin (pack light, Riya had said, some layers, we'll shop!) and follow the other weary passengers off the plane.\n\nI don't recognize Riya at first. She's cut her waist-length hair and it's not just her usual trim. It's half a foot shorter and has actual layers, touseled but purposely so. She wears a plum-colored tank dress with a chunky belt, dangly silver earrings, and aviator glasses.\n\nApparently, Europe looks good on Riya.\n\n\"Abby!\" she squeals, spotting me, and hurries to engulf me in a floral-scented hug. After a year, after this stupid, harsh year, I thought I might be too angry to hug her, to pretend we aren't furious with each other, to act like we never said all those things the last time we talked, but it's Riya and she's hugging me, and I've missed her so much and I'm exhausted from the travel and from this year, so I melt into her. After a moment, she steps back, takes my bag, and slings it over her shoulder. \"How was the flight?\"\n\nExhausted, I babble random history thoughts at her. \"I couldn't stop thinking about how a hundred years ago, people were just starting to consider that a transatlantic flight was possible. Weird, right?\" Nodding, Riya tries to follow my line of thought as she leads me toward the airport exit. \"I mean, I couldn't stop thinking about Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis and how he was just alone up there in the sky above all that dark water.\"\n\nAs we walk into the hot Italian air, Riya takes my hand. \"I missed you.\"\n\n\"Missed you more.\"\n\nIn the back of the taxi, I study Abby as we speed toward the city center. She looks exhausted, and I know it's not just the long day of travel etched in those dark smudges beneath her eyes. It's worse than I thought. I poke her. \"Try to stay awake. We'll hit the hotel so you can change into something cooler, and then we'll go to dinner. Seriously, you have never tasted pasta like this\u2014try not to sleep until at least ten.\"\n\nAbby slouches into the worn leather of the taxi seat, fighting her heavy lids. \"Does jet lag feel like the stomach flu?\"\n\n\"It can.\" As Abby's eyes slip shut, I jostle her again. \"Don't sleep!\"\n\nShe jolts, eyes wide, and tugs at her black T-shirt. \"Ugh, it's humid.\" She motions to the driver. \"Can he turn on the air?\"\n\nI shake my head. \"Get used to no air-conditioning. It's actually better. Just let your body acclimate to the heat.\"\n\n\"How is sweating like a farm animal better?\"\n\nI grin\u2014there's my Abby. As she paws through her bag, I notice an entire box of full-size Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. \"What you got there?\" I motion to the box.\n\n\"Oh, that sounds good, actually.\" She tears open the box and grabs an orange package. \"Maybe the sugar will wake me up.\"\n\nI watch her unwrap the candy. \"Did you think they wouldn't have sugar in Italy?\"\n\nShe unpeels a cup and takes a bite. \"It was a gift. From Dan. He said when he went to Europe, it was super hard to find peanut butter anything.\"\n\n\"Yet somehow I survived.\"\n\nShe ignores this. \"Want one?\"\n\nI take the other cup. \"Glad to see Dan's still encouraging healthy eating habits in his employees.\"\n\n\"Don't start on Dan.\"\n\nAbby's been weirdly protective of her boss since she started working at the Blue Market her freshman year, so I don't say anything more. \"Here.\" I hand her a bottle of water. \"Stay hydrated.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" She takes a drink, her eyes tracking the road ahead of us. \"So, why Florence?\"\n\nI hesitate. She made it clear when we fought in April that she was sick of my Europe stories. So I keep it short. \"I came here last year with my parents and just couldn't wait to come back.\" Then I sweeten the deal. \"You're going to love all the history stuff. And the gelato.\"\n\nThis gets the flicker of a smile. \"And after Florence?\"\n\n\"It's a surprise. I'll tell you when we're about to head to the next stop.\"\n\n\"Seriously? You're still not going to tell me where we're going?\"\n\n\"It's more fun this way!\"\n\n\"For who?\" She frowns out the window. I knew this would bother her, not knowing our full itinerary, but it's good for her to be surprised. Abby always takes too much on with planning things. She's usually the one helping Dan sort out the Blue Market schedule or making sure her dad books camping reservations for our favorite Lake Tahoe spot six months in advance. It's time for her to just sit back and relax. Not an easy task. A funny look steals across her face as she glances back at me. \"Do my parents know where our next stop is going to be?\"\n\nI know what she's doing. \"My mom sent them our itinerary, but don't ask your dad to tell you. That's cheating.\"\n\nShe turns back to the window, the dark look lowering her lids again. \"I wasn't going to do that.\" Yes, she was.\n\n\"Speaking of your parents, did you let them know you landed?\"\n\nAbby caps the water, tucking it into her backpack. \"Both of them. I have to do everything twice now because they can't handle being on a group text together.\"\n\nMy stomach twists. \"I'm really sorry, Abby. We were so shocked. My parents didn't even believe me when I told them.\" I glance down at the text my mom just sent. \"They say hi, by the way.\"\n\n\"Hi, Anju and Dean,\" Abby sighs. She looks hollowed out like a pumpkin. I've heard traces of it in her voice since January, but seeing her now makes me wish I'd flown home last spring instead of just letting her tell me that she was fine. That things were fine. They clearly weren't.\n\nI follow her gaze. The outskirts of Florence slip by: plain apartment buildings with clothes flung over railings, squat storefronts, the giant Coop sign with the clock announcing 18:24. A few more hours and then I'll let Abby sleep. \"I wish you'd told me how bad things were.\"\n\nAbby's eyes slide to mine. Even as hot as it is, she gives off her trademark chill, what my dad calls her \"Abby Armor.\" She shrugs. \"It is what it is.\"\n\nTypical Abby. She doesn't like to dredge things up. But we haven't talked about our fight, or about the silence since, and we'll need to before this trip is over. Such a stupid fight. I've gone over it in my head a million times. I Skyped at the end of April, just to say hi, and she was red-eyed, distracted, so I tried for overly upbeat, hoping to coax a smile out of her, telling her how I'd tagged along with Mom on a business trip to London, how much I'd loved the city, but before I could finish, Abby snapped, \"You know what, Riya? You'll excuse me if I'm not really in the mood to hear you brag about your jet-setting lifestyle right now. I'm busy living in the sucky real world.\"\n\nHer words shot through me, and I blinked into the screen, stung by her hard stare. In all of our years as best friends, in all of our school years and sleepovers and vacations and summer camps, she never snapped at me like that. Before I could stop them, my own terrible words spilled out. \"You're not the only one in the world whose parents are getting a divorce, you know? You're acting like you invented it.\" She ended the Skype call, and I imagined her slamming the laptop screen shut. The next day, I sent three texts. Unanswered. I tried FaceTime. Nothing. Skype. Nothing. Forget it, I thought. I'm busy, too. My life wasn't all trips to London this year. I'd dealt with tough things, too. She was acting like her problems were the only ones in the entire universe.\n\nAfter three days of silence, I texted: you're being so immature. grow up!\n\nNot the best thing to say. But it got her attention.\n\nShe immediately texted back: i hope you stay in germany.\n\nI threw my phone across my bedroom, where it hit the wall, the screen cracking. I've been carrying around that visible crack ever since.\n\nAfter that terrible text, we didn't have any form of communication for three weeks. It was the longest I'd ever gone without talking to her. Finally, I express-mailed her the package for our trip and waited.\n\nA week later, she called to say she would meet me in Florence the last week of June. \"Thanks for the drawing,\" she added, her voice quiet, hard to read. \"It's hanging on my board.\" Along with the letter and a printout of her ticket, I'd sent a picture I sketched of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, her favorite wonder, only I'd drawn it looming over our own river back in Yuba Ridge. I pictured her tacking it to the layers of pictures and concert ticket stubs and other paraphernalia Abby keeps on an enormous, messy bulletin board in her room.\n\nWe texted off and on again since, but nothing real. Just trip stuff. What to pack. What the weather might be like in Florence. Little pebbles to rebuild the crumbled bridge between us.\n\nNow Abby watches the modern buildings move past us. \"This isn't how I imagined Florence.\"\n\n\"Just wait.\"\n\nSoon, the scenery shifts from the more modern outskirts to the historic center of the city, the buildings going back in time, turning into towers and arches and wide stone, the colors muted with sepia tones. Abby perks up, sitting forward, practically pressing her nose flat to the glass. Abby's history addiction spans much wider than Wikipedia and history tidbits. Sitting here, I can sense her excitement for the history passing by us, but I feel something else there, too, the faint trace of the invisible ribbon that has always connected us. I can't help but smile. This is exactly what we need. This will fix us.\n\nThe taxi driver stops at the corner of Via del Proconsolo and Via del Corso. \"We're going to the Albergo Firenze,\" I tell him, frowning.\n\n\"You walk from here.\" He motions vaguely in the direction of the hotel. \"Is close.\"\n\nWe step out onto the buzzing street corner, hauling Abby's duffel and backpack out with us. I'd checked in earlier and it's not that close, our hotel. As we start walking, a group of young Italian guys wave to us, offering to help carry our bags, but I wave them off: \"No grazie.\" They mime being seriously wounded by our rejection. Abby's eyes go wide at their exaggerated pouts, and I laugh. \"Get used to it.\"\n\nWe trudge through the hot sun. I turn to point out the hotel awning up ahead, but Abby's fallen behind, kneeling next to a scruffy beige dog, scratching him affectionately behind his fanlike ears. His owner, an old man in trousers, a matching vest, and long-sleeved white shirt beams down at them. She sees me waiting, gives the dog a final scratch, and catches up. \"Cute dog.\"\n\n\"You're here ten minutes and you find a dog to cuddle.\"\n\n\"They find me.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" I tug her toward the awning. Almost there.\n\nAt the hotel entrance, she pauses, turning to me. \"I can't believe this, Riya. I can't believe we're in Italy. I will never be able to thank your grandma enough.\" She looks more stunned than happy.\n\n\"You can thank her by loving it here, by seeing the sights and shopping and eating great food, okay?\" I usher her through the front door. \"Come on. This hotel is next to the Torre dei Donati, where Dante's wife was born. Just one of the soon-to-be-many fabulous history tidbits you will learn on this trip.\"\n\nMy promise draws a smile to Abby's face, even if it looks like a ghost there.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2016 by Kim Culbertson\n\nAll rights reserved. Published by Point, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, POINT, and associated logos are trademarks and\/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.\n\nThe publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.\n\nThis book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nCulbertson, Kim A., author.\n\nThe possibility of now \/ Kim Culbertson. \u2014 First edition.\n\npages cm\n\nSummary: After years of overachieving at her elite school, Mara James has a complete meltdown during her calculus exam and, embarrassed by the incident and the viral video evidence, goes to live with her ski bum father in Squaw Valley, where she hopes to find a place to figure out where her life is headed, and maybe even finally understand her father.\n\nISBN 978-0-545-73146-1\n\n1. Life change events\u2014Juvenile fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters \u2014 Juvenile fiction. 3. Squaw Valley (Calif.) \u2014Juvenile fiction. [1. Self-perception \u2014 Fiction. 2. Perfectionism (Personality trait) \u2014 Fiction. 3. Fathers and daughters \u2014 Fiction. 4. Squaw Valley (Calif.) \u2014 Fiction.] I. Title.\n\nPZ7.C8945Po 2016\n\n813.6 \u2014 dc23\n\n[Fic]\n\n2015016518\n\nFirst edition, February 2016\n\nCover design by Yaffa Jaskoll\n\nCover photography by Michael Frost, \u00a9 2016 Scholastic Inc.\n\nStock image: Damir Frkovic\/Masterfile (mountains)\n\nExcerpt from The Wonder of Us by Kim Culbertson. \u00a9 2017 Kim Culbertson. The Wonder of Us cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll. Cover photography by Michael Frost, \u00a9 2017 Scholastic Inc. Stock image: \u00a9 Wayne0216\/Shutterstock, Inc. (platform)\n\ne-ISBN 978-0-545-73147-8\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2007 by Ganga White. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means\u2014electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise\u2014without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.\n\nPublished by _North Atlantic Books_ _P.O. Box 12327_ _Berkeley, California_ 94712\n\n_Cover and book design by_ _Suzanne Albertson_\n\nUnless otherwise noted, all photos are from Ganga White's archive collection.\n\n_Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice_ is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.\n\nNorth Atlantic Books' publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, call 800-733-3000 or visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nWhite, Ganga.\n\nYoga beyond belief: insights to awaken and deepen your practice \/ by Ganga White ; foreword by Sting.\n\np. cm.  \nSummary: \"An integrative, new vision and context for yoga, illuminating its internal dynamics, providing inspiration and guidance for a lifetime of practice, and appealing to anyone practicing this tradition\u2014from beginner to experienced student\u2014this book offers a coherent explication of yoga's philosophy and practice\"\u2014Provided by publisher.\n\neISBN: 978-1-58394-335-9  \n1. Hatha yoga. I. Title.  \nRA781.7.W493 2007  \n613.7\u2032046\u2014dc22\n\n2006024363\n\nv3.1\n\n_Dedicated to the development of the total human being_\n\n# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nFirst, I would like to acknowledge the teachers and lineages who have handed down and expanded yoga through the ages. I especially acknowledge those who have given themselves the freedom and liberty to question, to test the boundaries, and to grow beyond the limitations of tradition into new expressions and new revelations. I honor my many teachers and many friends who have taught me what yoga is and, equally important, what it is not.\n\nThanks and appreciation go to my friend and compatriot, Mark Schlenz, for his editing wizardry. Great appreciation to Frank Rothschild and Evelyn de Buhr for their help, encouragement, and insight, and to Diana Alstad and Joel Kramer for many wonderful hours and long nights in the shared joy of inquiry.\n\nSpecial thanks and appreciation go to Sting, David Gordon White, PhD, Jason Saleeby, PhD, Brent Derry, PhD, Joel Gotler, Jane Freeburg, Venkatesa\u2014the laughing swami, J. Krishnamurti, all the editors and staff at North Atlantic Books, the staff of the White Lotus Foundation and Retreat in Santa Barbara, and so many others along the way.\n\nAnd finally, with immeasurable gratitude, none of this would be possible without the love, support, joy, and partnership of the sublime, graceful, beautiful, and brilliant yogini, Tracey Rich.\n\n# What If...\n\nWhat if our religion was each other  \nIf our practice was our life  \nIf prayer, our words\n\nWhat if the temple was the earth  \nIf forests were our church  \nIf holy water\u2014the rivers, lakes, and oceans\n\nWhat if meditation was our relationships  \nIf the Teacher was life  \nIf wisdom was self-knowledge  \nIf love was the center of our being.\n\nGANGA WHITE, for the Rainforest Benefit,  \nNew York City, April 1998\n\n# CONTENTS\n\n_Cover_\n\n_Title Page_\n\n_Copyright_\n\n_Dedication_\n\n_Acknowledgments_\n\nFOREWORD The Yogi and the Shower Singer, by STING\n\nINTRODUCTION Awakening Insight\u2014Ganga White's Approach to Yoga, by Mark Schlenz, PhD\n\nCHAPTER ONE Standing On the Shoulders of the Past\n\nTradition and Interpretation\n\nFreedom from the Known\n\nA Fresh Point of View\n\nCHAPTER TWO The Many Yogas\n\nRaja, Hatha, and Tantra Yoga\n\nBhakti Yoga\n\nJnana Yoga\n\nKarma Yoga\n\nThe Wholeness of Yoga\n\nCHAPTER THREE Hatha\u2014The Yoga of Sun and Moon\n\nThe Origins of Hatha Yoga\n\nThe Ten Body-Mind Systems\n\nCHAPTER FOUR Finding the Ah Ha! in Hatha\u2014Principles, Hints, and Insights into Yoga Practice\n\nPresence: Start Where You Are\n\nThe Long View\n\nThe Asanas Are Tools, Not Goals\n\nFeedback: Learning to Listen\n\nStrength and Flexibility\n\nHeating and Cooling\n\nThe Rhythms and Seasons of Practice\n\nTension Is Your Friend\n\nInner- and Outer-Directed Practices\n\nMental Limitations\n\nFear As a Limitation\n\nCompetition and Comparison\n\nYoga Is for Every Body\n\nThere Is No Such Thing as Perfection\n\nDiscipline\n\nConcentration and Attention\n\nUsing the Breath\n\nThe Ujjayi Breath\n\nToning the Spine\n\nSymmetry and Alignment\n\nThe Three Qualities\n\nThe Three Root Principles\n\nRelaxation\n\nFlow and Grace\n\nPersonal Practice\n\nIntegrating Yoga into Daily Life\n\nEnjoying Your Practice\n\nCHAPTER FIVE The Internal Alchemy of Hatha Yoga\n\nThe Dance of Energy\n\nAligning and Adjusting Asanas from Within and Without\n\nSurfing the Edges\n\nFlow, the Dance of Control and Surrender\n\nPranayama\u2014The Mastery of Energy\n\nUsing Locks, or Bandhas\n\nTraction, Torque, and Leverage\n\nThe Nature of Balance\n\nAdvancing in Yoga\n\nCHAPTER SIX Useful Styles and Modes of Practice\n\nFlow Yoga\n\nIntuitive Flow Yoga\n\nStructural Integrity and Structural Archetypes\n\nActive and Passive Holding\n\nLong Holding\n\nOdd-Day Practice\n\nCar Yoga\n\nThe Neck and Lumbar\n\nThe Psoas, Quadriceps, and Hamstrings\n\nSeven Classes of Asana\n\nCHAPTER SEVEN Injury, Pain, and Healing\n\nPain Is Your Friend\n\nThere Is No Such Thing as Pain\n\nLocal Intelligence\n\nSympathetic Resonance\n\nCauses and Prevention of Injury\n\nWorking with Injuries\n\nCHAPTER EIGHT Chakras\u2014The Play of Matter and Energy\n\nThe Chakras' Relation to Science\n\nSeven Energy Centers\n\nChakras and Levels of Being\n\nThe Cosmic Polarity\n\nChakras and Daily Life\n\nCHAPTER NINE Meditation Is Your Life\n\nWhat Is Meditation?\n\nCan Meditation Be Practiced?\n\n(There Is No) How to Meditate\n\nUseful Meditation Practices\n\nHow Much to Practice\n\nCHAPTER TEN Spirituality, Enlightenment, and the Miraculous\n\nOur Relation to the One\n\nOneness and the Loss of Diversity\n\nSpirituality Beyond Belief\n\nEvolutionary Enlightenment\n\nThe Mystery: Death and Time\n\nNavigating Life\n\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nPHOTO INSERT\n\nNOTES\n\n# FOREWORD\n\n# The Yogi and the Shower Singer  \nby STING\n\nIt may surprise you to read that someone who sings for a living like I do would enjoy singing in the shower as much as anybody else.\n\nMy shower, I suppose like most, has the kind of hard surface that reflects the notes back at you with a satisfying and friendly echo, almost as effectively as the walls of a church or an underground cavern or even the electronic reverb in a professional studio.\n\nAdmittedly, I don't sing what anyone would recognize as songs per se, nor do I use the shower fitting as a fantasy microphone, but instead limit myself to vocalizing long resonant tones. I will sustain a single OM for as long as my lungs can hold out, and advance semitone by semitone of the chromatic scale, beginning near the bottom of my range and gradually rising high enough for the sound to disturb the Labradors sleeping in the kitchen below. When they start to howl in sympathy (or agony, I can't tell which), I know it's time to dry off, shave, brush my teeth, clothe myself, and start the day.\n\nAs I enter the kitchen, the youngest of my six children greet me ironically, seated cross-legged at the breakfast table, chanting their own tuneless but grand, guttural OMs, eyes crossed and little hands flipping the bird in irreverent imitation of those mudras they've watched me assume at the end of my yoga practice.\n\n\"Good morning, my little philistines!\"\n\n\"OHMMMMMMM ohmmmmmmm ohmmmmmmmm!\"\n\n\"Why do you make that noise, daddy?\"\n\nNoise? Noise? I feign professional outrage while reaching for the coffee, black and bitter. Well, I suppose it's a fair question. Why _do_ I make these noises? And why do I spend a good deal of my morning attempting to turn my body into a pretzel, while breathing like a telephone stalker, or chanting ancient unintelligible sounds in the echo chamber of my bathroom?\n\nWhen my good friend Ganga requested that I write a foreword for his new book on yoga, I was both flattered and daunted by the task. While I've been practicing for more than fifteen years now, what do I really know about yoga? And has my fifteen years of practice changed me to any significant degree?\n\nIn fact, I don't spend a lot of intellectual energy thinking about yoga, or trying to articulate the processes it awakens, because, for one, I don't have to teach it, and, two, it's become an intrinsic part of my whole life, permeating it to such an extent that I don't really know where it begins or ends.\n\nI have benefited from the wisdom of many teachers whose example has inspired me to undertake a voyage of discovery as complex and fascinating as music, through a realm that is mysterious, unexpected, and startling.\n\nI have made a space for myself and my yoga practice every morning for fifteen years. I can perform feats of flexibility with my fifty-five-year-old body that I couldn't do when I was an athlete. That never ceases to amaze me, but is it the point?\n\n\"Part of yoga practice,\" Ganga has often reminded me, \"is to connect.\"\n\nAnd he makes his point clear: To connect flexibility and strength, balance, concentration, sexuality, consciousness, and spirituality, so that what may have begun solely as a physical practice can evolve into an integrated and holistic approach to all aspects of one's life.\n\nFor example, after Ganga's advice, my chosen profession of singing has morphed into yoga and yoga into singing.\n\nGetting back to my shower practice, I will choose a low resonant tone and after a little practice I have learned to become aware not of this note I have chosen, but the subtle and ghostly harmonic five semitones above\u2014the \"dominant,\" as it is known. This note appears almost miraculously whenever you give it some attention. With a little more practice, further and yet higher resonances from the overtone scale reveal themselves, all related mathematically to the \"tonic,\" my original note. Physics and metaphysics begin to blur here, as harmonic resonances beyond our hearing connect us to other realms.\n\nNada Brahma... the world is sound, so the sutras say.\n\nWhatever seems solid and impermeable in this world is, at the molecular level, vibrating at pitches way beyond our range of perception. And this is the ultimate connecting principle.\n\nMy shower singing connects me at a molecular level to everything around me, to the frequency of the earth, and indeed with a leap of the imagination, to the cosmos or realms of dark matter.\n\nAnd yoga, as my dear friend says, is to connect.\n\nI've come to think of the asanas this way too\u2014each position changing the frequency with which our bodies vibrate. To be conscious of this, as we breathe, turns the physical practice into a devotional one, connecting us via resonant vibration to the cosmos, tuning the instruments of our bodies to a higher \"symphonic\" purpose. A well-tuned instrument is a healthy instrument; yoga helps us resonate more efficiently with the universe.\n\nI've also come to believe that the highest form of prayer is to pray and yet ask for nothing,\n\nTo resonate with awareness, acceptance, and gratitude is surely to pray,\n\nTo breathe and accept gratefully the air that surrounds me into my body.\n\nWhy a new yoga book? The world is chock full of orthodoxies\u2014religious, pseudo-religious, political. These orthodoxies tend to assume that mankind is a finished product, that the \"sacred\" word is the final word. Such absolutism means that most of these true believers are unhappy with the idea of evolution, and some actively work to suppress it. _Yoga Beyond Belief_ steps out of that limited mold. It will strike a chord with people seeking a new level of awakening and freedom in yoga and in their life. This book offers a flexible and modern perspective that is needed more than ever to live in these times of accelerating change.\n\nYoga has been pivotal and transformational in every aspect of my life. I regard myself as a work in progress. Yoga to me is an evolutionary, and indeed evolving, science, and orthodoxy needs to be challenged wherever it plants itself like a roadblock to progress. Of course, what is worth keeping will survive and continue to nourish future generations; whatever is moot and expendable will be proven so.\n\nI am confident that Ganga's contemporary vision of yoga and the many tools he shares will be catalysts to aid readers in cultivating personal transformation. By combining ancient disciplines with cutting-edge knowledge and insights, this book can make yoga a living part of growth and development for those who practice any level of yoga and who have an interest in how yoga can be pertinent to modern living.\n\nGanga's lifelong study of yoga has not ossified into rigid modes of belief; indeed, his thinking is as flexible and improvisatory as his practice. His discipline is matched by his iconoclasm, his respect for the past by his courage to question authority in elucidating a new vision of yoga. Our human species' need to evolve has never been more critical. Yoga is one of the tools that can help us make that evolutionary leap and I believe this challenging book can help us redefine who we are and where we are going.\n\n# INTRODUCTION\n\n# Awakening Insight\u2014Ganga White's Approach to Yoga  \nby Mark Schlenz, PhD\n\nGanga White has led the evolution of yoga in America for nearly four decades. He helped host yoga's arrival in this country during the sixties and seventies. He nurtured its development through the remainder of the twentieth century. Today, he remains at the forefront of yoga's ongoing transformation into the twenty-first century.\n\nOnce an officer in the Sivananda organization, Ganga established the first yoga centers in Los Angeles and several other major American cities. In 1968, his newly created White Lotus Foundation offered one of the first in-depth yoga teacher training programs in this country and established the working model for numerous programs that have since proliferated. Ganga's departure from Sivananda stimulated a major transformation in yoga's growth. Disillusioned by financial and ethical scandals involving the swamis, Ganga broke ties with traditional hierarchies of India, led the White Lotus to independence, and rededicated the foundation \"to the development of the total human being\" and to \"elucidating a free, open, and contemporary approach to yoga.\" Since then, thousands of yogis now teaching in the United States and around the world have trained with Ganga at White Lotus and share his liberating perspectives with thousands more of their students.\n\nAs a leader of yoga's modern development, Ganga has always been nourished, rather than bound, by the past. Today, yoga's current popularity has given rise to a myriad of new market-driven forms and newly minted yogis. Much of what is currently marketed seems completely cut off from the vast richness of yoga's deep history. Yoga's age-old potential for fundamental transformation of the whole person is too often diluted to appeal to fashionable desires for physical attainments. Ganga's scholarly study and thorough immersion in the literature, philosophy, and techniques of ancient yoga traditions inform and inspire the evolution of his own dedicated practice and teaching. With this deep grounding, Ganga's innovative contributions build upon the vital essences of yoga's timeless gifts without subservience to archaic institutions or doctrines.\n\nWhile many current yoga trends seem to disregard historical contexts, others tend to romanticize the past, fetishizing certain practices and depriving them of relevance to our current situations. Ganga's deeper understanding of yoga's many traditions recognizes how various practices emerged from specific historical, cultural, and social conditions and, even more important, how they have been consistently adapted as these conditions have inevitably changed through time. This dynamic sense of history nourishes Ganga's efforts to make yoga more relevant to our present _and_ to our future. Through all its manifestations, yoga has always offered liberatory alternatives to rigid hierarchies that threaten the survival of the human spirit. At this moment, that spirit, and in fact all life on the planet, is more threatened than ever before. Our present potential for global annihilation, whether by our explosive weapons of mass destruction or by our escalating devastation of our own ecosystem, requires new orientations to preserve the human spirit's potential for creativity, healing, and love.\n\nIncorporating essential wisdom from yoga's heritage with progressive insights of science and modernity, Ganga's evolutionary approach makes yoga more applicable than ever to addressing the overwhelming problems that currently confront every person. The crux of his insight is that we can certainly change the future of our species by constantly developing the ways we perceive and value our individual selves. Through constant self-examination and ongoing reflection, one's personal yoga practice becomes an invaluable tool for continual self-discovery and transformation.\n\nGanga's insights into dynamic principles animating the asanas enable his students to approach the poses as unfolding paths to personal evolution rather than as cul-de-sacs of arrested perfection. His teachings empower his students and allow them to let their own experiences guide them into deeper possibilities of personal growth and freedom. That is why this book, in contrast to so many yoga books written to formulas and dictates of the publishing market, offers principles rather than prescriptions.\n\nMost yoga books currently published exploit niche market appeal by prescribing specific practices that promise certain benefits to particular audiences. Many claim the ancient authenticity of a particular tradition or lineage of teacher for their authority. Others rely on charismatic teachers or celebrities to underwrite their inflated promises. A growing number of hybrid approaches claim benefits only possible through newly created combinations of yoga with something\u2014almost anything, it seems\u2014else. _Yoga Beyond Belief_ presents a unique, non-dogmatic, integrative vision of contemporary yoga. It is an inspiring manual for beginners and experienced students alike.\n\nWhat most available books share in common is the premise that they can give you something special by _telling you how to do yoga their way_. In this book, by contrast, Ganga _shows you how you can learn to do yoga your way_. What Ganga shares in the following chapters is not based on passed-down authority, fashionable popularity, or eclectic gimmickry. It is based on working principles of careful inquiry, experimentation, and observation.\n\nThose of us who have had the fortune to learn from Ganga have learned much from watching his characteristic responses to questions from students. Perhaps an alignment he suggests contradicts an instruction a student has been taught by another teacher or has read some where, and so the student asks which is the right way. Older students who may have heard this question posed and answered more than once before know not to expect a definitive, or even the same, answer from Ganga.\n\nWhat we know to expect instead is a demonstration of sincere inquiry, often enlivened with his spontaneous wit and infectious laughter. Almost invariably Ganga will experiment in the pose with the juxtaposed alignments before commenting on their relative merits and limitations as they might apply to different bodies, physical conditions, or stages of learning. Despite the newly discovered insights he might share in any instance, the consistency of his response is that it is definitely based in his immediate investigation as it builds upon his lifelong experience. Attentive students learn that this process, not the particular answer to any particular question, is the lesson.\n\nThat lesson is generously and repeatedly shared, along with splashes of Ganga's wit and stories, throughout this synthesis of his life's work. After providing a holistic overview of yoga traditions, _Yoga Beyond Belief_ shares a wide range of functional principles, practical skills, and realistic attitudes that will empower you to evolve your own yoga practice. It encourages processes of self-discovery that will truly free and deepen your practice and your life and, so, enrich our world.\n\nThe introductory chapter, \"Standing On the Shoulders of the Past,\" inspires an evolutionary perspective for contemporary yoga practitioners. This perspective is strengthened in the next chapters of the book through a comprehensive survey of various yoga forms in \"The Many Yogas\" and through a detailed analysis of the origins, history, and psycho-physical-spiritual principles in \"Hatha\u2014The Yoga of Sun and Moon.\"\n\nIn the book's central chapters, the practical insights of an evolutionary perspective are applied to specific aspects of Hatha yoga practice. \"Finding the Ah Ha! in Hatha\u2014Principles, Hints, and Insights into Yoga Practice\" deals directly with many of the overarching questions, internal techniques, and attitudes yogis grapple with in developing a sustaining and dynamic personal practice. A practical context for pursuing a lifetime yoga practice is strengthened with more applications of concrete insights and experiential observations in \"The Internal Alchemy of Hatha Yoga\" and in \"Useful Styles and Modes of Practice.\" Together, the contents, experiments, instructions, recommendations, and insights offered in these central chapters can liberate yoga students to learn from their own yoga practice and become their own yoga teachers. Practical considerations become particularly focused in \"Injury, Pain, and Healing,\" where insights for healing and for learning from injury are offered from the author's experience.\n\nThe last group of chapters returns to a deeper exploration of philosophical contexts of yoga traditions in relation to contemporary practice. Yogic mappings of the subtle body are considered from an evolutionary perspective in \"The Chakras\u2014The Play of Matter and Energy.\" Then the nature of daily life itself is explored as a personal path of unfolding enlightenment in \"Meditation Is Your Life\"; in this chapter he shows that the real essence of meditation is free from obligatory, routine practices and techniques. Finally, \"Spirituality, Enlightenment, and the Miraculous\" reconnects the practical with the philosophical and rejoins the personal with the planetary as the evolutionary potential of the human spirit is reoriented to a liberating navigation of inquiry and insight. This final chapter challenges established definitions of enlightenment and presents a new, accessible vision of spirituality for modern times.\n\nAttentive readers will learn how to apply insights offered here to their own experiences. Yoga students of all levels, from beginner to teacher, will learn to form and answer questions about their own practice through their own inquiry. As a result, this book offers yogis the most important benefits of yoga. _Yoga Beyond Belief_ offers approaches to yoga that open possibilities for deep and liberating transformations of the self. It can certainly help guide all readers to an awakening of insight, free of archaic dependencies and romantic beliefs, and ready to meet the accelerating challenges of the twenty-first century.\n\n_Dr. Mark Schlenz is a professor of creative writing and environmental studies at UC-Santa Barbara and a certified yoga teacher_.\n\n#\n\nYoga's growing popularity in the West raises many questions. For example, is yoga becoming \"Americanized\" and does that Americanization degenerate the purity or authenticity of the teachings? If yoga is being changed in the West, what right do we have to make these modifications? These concerns also raise deeper questions: What is the nature of tradition and authority? Can we truly know exactly what was taught and practiced in the past? Is there any actuality to the concept of \"pure teachings\" from the past?\n\nI first realized the importance of these questions at a lecture series in the early seventies on one of the foundation texts of yoga, _The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali_. The lecturer was my great friend and mentor, Swami Venkates (1921\u20131982), a much-loved and respected yogi and Sanskrit scholar from India. He explained that very little is actually known with much certainty about Patanjali, whom many consider one of the early codifiers, if not the father, of yoga. I use Patanjali as an example because his yoga sutras are used by many teachers as the touchstone of yoga, yet the text can be interpreted in widely differing manners. My swami friend emphasized that any translation or commentary on any text always involves someone's point of view. In fact, the translation process itself is interpretation. Even if we read or listen to a text in its original language, we must acknowledge that a large amount of personal interpretation still goes on in the way we receive it.\n\nLanguage usage, meaning, and circumstance change over time. We have heard the story in Psychology 101 of the man who runs menacingly into and out of a classroom with a banana and the students are asked to write a report. Nearly everyone describes having witnessed the man doing different things; some saw the banana as a gun, a flashlight, or a telephone. What does this case of multiple interpretations of a single event imply about the possible purity of subtle teachings handed down over thousands of years? What should we learn about the limits of tradition and authority from our observation of the phenomenon of every major religion and tradition breaking down into dozens of sects and subgroups with conflicting opinions, often with each one asserting that only its members have the actual truth? Even secular laws written in contemporary times with clear intent are prone to conflicting interpretations. Carefully written laws can be stretched, interpreted, and argued in different directions. Spiritual concepts and teachings, especially from the ancient past, are far more vulnerable. Spirituality is not an exact science to be laid out in narrowly defined paths.\n\n## **Tradition and Interpretation**\n\nAn adept scholar can find many different, often contradictory, meanings in the ancient texts. There are many examples in every tradition where, in order to support various philosophical positions, the same texts are translated in different ways. For example, some teachers believe Patanjali was an advocate, if not one of the originators, of Hatha yoga, while others assert that Patanjali's sutras do not support the practice of physical yoga at all. When I first started teaching, I mentioned in a class that I was taught that the sutras were the foundation of Hatha yoga. A few days later a well-known elder swami from another organization called me and angrily chastised me, asserting that Patanjali was not at all an advocate of physical yoga. He stated that Patanjali's mention of _asana_ and _pranayama_ , posture and breathing, only referred to sitting quietly and stilling the breath for meditation. The swami said spending time and energy to cultivate the body would lead to attachment, body consciousness, and would detract one from the true spiritual path. This opinion is the antithesis of what most modern, Western yoga students believe.\n\nAnother example of differing opinions in the yoga sutras is the word _brahmacharya_. Usually translated as celibacy and abstinence, brahmacharya has also been reinterpreted by some teachers in modern times to mean responsible sexuality or spiritual sexuality aimed toward God. This shows how the same text can be assumed to have opposite meanings. There are texts that prescribe renunciation in order to attain god-hood and those that say indulgence is the path. Some ancient scriptures say the doors of heaven are only open to vegetarians and others that say the opposite. I remember Swami Venkates pointing out that yogic texts and teachings are so vast and so complex that we can find traditional support and authority for almost anything we want to do. In spite of these limitations, students and teachers often spend great energy in debate to try to bolster an edict or find an exact meaning of a Sanskrit sutra in English. This quest may ever elude them. How can truth or the immensity of life and spirit be confined and captured in explanation? How can wisdom and spiritual realization be attained by mechanical processes or the practice of specific techniques? In this book you will see how these questions or problems should not cause us despair but, rather, strengthen us in following our hearts and minds.\n\nYoga is a cherished and valuable tradition. We can learn from and use the tradition in an approach tempered by the realization that what we call tradition is truly our own, or another's, interpretation of what something _may have been_ in the distant past. My swami friend Venkates suggested that we use ancient writings to stimulate our inquiry and to catalyze our direct perception and understanding of our own lives without becoming overly dependent on tradition. Relying too much on doctrines and texts for guidance in living cuts one off from direct perception and from the living awareness of insight. Yoga should be viewed as an art as well as a science. Structured, more scientific, aspects of yoga and techniques also involve unstructured, indefinable dynamics that require artistry and awareness to apply. Living in wholeness and creativity has structural components, but life is more an art than a science. Even in asana practice there is structure as well as the artistry of application to the individuality of the person and the moment. Yoga is practiced within the tradition but must be applied according to the uniqueness of each person's life and situation. We should not simply idealize the past and assume that teachings, purportedly unchanged from the ancient past, are perfect, superior, or appropriate for the present. It is impossible truly to know the ancient past. Giving teachers, and even teachings, the status of perfection is the beginning of authoritarianism and a recipe for abuse. When teachers say they are presenting a perfected teaching, there is the veiled implication of unquestionable authority. The teacher is elevated as the pure vessel of this perfected path. It is important to be aware of what power, stature, and position a particular viewpoint gives to the teacher expounding it. There is no single interpretation of yoga. We cannot learn to fly by following the tracks left by birds in the sand. We must find our own wings and soar.\n\nAnother great teacher, J. Krishnamurti, said, \"The observer is the observed,\" meaning, among other implications, that when we study something it is affected and colored by our own interpretations and projections. This influence is also a problem in setting up scientific experiments. The way the experiment is set up affects the outcome. Is light matter or energy? It turns out that it depends on how we look at it. The method of observation has a direct relationship to the way the observed object is perceived. Krishnamurti also said, \"Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static.\" He pointed out that because we have exactness and authority in the technological world, we unconsciously carry the ideas of authority and structure over to the spiritual arena where they have no place. We are living, changing beings. We can learn from and honor tradition and we can also grow beyond it to develop the ability to listen to our own uniqueness by incorporating contemporary insights and discoveries. If we are too busy trying to relive the past, we may miss birthing the new. We do not have to limit ourselves to searching backwards through the musty corridors of the ancient past for answers to the mutating and constantly changing questions of the living present. Tradition can be valuable and useful, but we should not forego the much more relevant insights that can be found right here and now on our own yoga mats, and in the laboratory of our own lives.\n\n## **Freedom from the Known**\n\nAn insatiable appetite and energy for learning and a fresh inquiring mind are among life's greatest assets. This is why the concept of _beginner's mind_ has been emphasized in the East. When we come to learning as a beginner, we are open, questioning, looking. When we approach a subject as an expert, we are more closed and fixed in the accumulated information we have gathered, in the past experiences we have had. When we're an expert, or experienced, when we _know_ something, even a yoga posture, we tend to approach it mechanically, from the past. We lose the freedom of discovery, the freedom of being fresh and new.\n\nAs our journey in the unending process of learning and growing in wisdom progresses, we must endeavor to keep a fresh context, a fresh attitude, a beginner's mind. We must keep the content we acquire from hardening and clouding the context in which we hold information and experience. Our context, the ground of being with which we hold the information, should be kept open, flexible, and free.\n\nThere is an ancient saying: \"He who knows, knows not. And he who knows not, knows.\" Or: \"He who knows doesn't say. And he who says, doesn't know.\" One of the messages of this saying is that there is much more to wisdom and understanding than mere knowledge and information. Knowledge and information are limited, as there is always room for growth and change. One who thinks he _knows_ doesn't understand this limitation and has therefore a restricted perception. One who sees his or her own limitations, and the limits of knowledge, may actually see more clearly. The word _intelligence_ , from _inter legere_ , means to see between the lines. Intelligence is seeing between the hard lines of fixed information and knowledge, having the subtle, flexible perception that can see beyond the norm, beyond limited definition and formula. I once heard a very wise man discussing this concept and also what brings about a state of clear intelligence and penetrating perception. His inquiry revealed that the necessary ground for awakening intelligence is an open state of consciousness that begins with _not knowing_. Saying \"I don't know\" is the beginning of the awakening intelligence. As this wise man was explaining this, he looked up at his questioner and said, \"And you don't know either!\" pointing out that this type of seeing does not happen by looking to others to fill our void. The vulnerable state of humility, of saying \"I really don't know\" opens one to discovery\u2014but we must also be vigilant not to allow ourselves to become susceptible to those who would like to fill us with their dogmas and doctrines.\n\n## **A Fresh Point of View**\n\nA famous Zen story is told about a student coming to learn from a wise teacher. During the introductions the student tries to show his worthiness to the teacher by narrating a history and explanation of his studies. The teacher begins to pour the student a cup of tea while listening to the monologue. He fills the cup, then keeps pouring until it overflows onto the table and into the student's lap, causing him to jump up and shout at the teacher, saying, \"How could you! You're supposed to be an aware person; can't you see my cup is full?\" The teacher replies, \"Yes, your cup is full. You're so full of yourself, in fact, that there's no room for anything new. Please come back when your cup has some space in it.\" This story points out that we must have inner space and receptivity to learn. But I have never heard this popular parable looked at from the perspective of the student. Spiritual teachers are usually assumed to have authority and higher knowledge. The story can be seen to cut both ways, however, and can also point to the teacher being so full of himself and what he has to offer that he devalues the student's knowledge and chastises him.\n\nThe idea of keeping a fresh, open context and not getting stuck in explanations, words, and descriptions resonates in the first verse of the honored, ancient text, the _Tao Te Ching_. Verse one of the Tao says, \"The Tao that is explained is not the Tao. Now an explanation of the Tao.\" With that opening paradox and contradiction, the teacher cautions that his explanation only points toward something\u2014toward direct perception and revelation. We need to teach and educate each other, but we must be careful not to get stuck in the words we use to do so. We are cautioned in the beginning not to get stuck in the text, the words of the Tao that follow. Instead, we are urged to see beyond words, to see what the words are pointing toward.\n\nIn Sanskrit, a _mahavakya_ refers to a great saying or formula that should be contemplated. _Tat Twam Asi_ , meaning Thou Art That, is considered by many to be one of the greatest mahavakyas. We see in many ancient Sanskrit texts the word _Tat_ , or That, used to point toward the sacred, the immeasurable. The English word _that_ comes from the Sanskrit word Tat. It is interesting and informative to note that this great saying uses the word _that_ instead of a description, a specific name, or a less abstract word. _That_ is a word used to point. When we point our finger we often say \"that.\" This word was chosen in this great saying to remind us it is pointing toward something we should not overly describe and limit with words and names. Overly describing, defining, or personifying the sacred leads to division and religious conflict. We are all part of the infinite, the immeasurable, the ineffable. _You are that_.\n\nThe word _Vedanta_ also points toward freedom from the limitations of knowledge. Vedanta is one of the ancient yogic philosophical systems. The word _Veda_ means knowledge and _anta_ means _the end_. Vedanta is the end of the ancient Vedas and is often said to imply the end philosophy or the highest philosophy. The double entendre and hidden message in the word Vedanta is that it also means the _ending of knowledge_ , or freedom from the known\u2014that which is beyond the known. A central practice in Vedanta is negation\u2014discovering the actual by removing, or negating, what it is not. For example, if you negate or remove arrogance, humility may come into being. There is a related form of inquiry or meditation approach called _Neti Neti_ \u2014not this, not this. Neti Neti aims one toward the realization that the transcendent cannot be contained in an object. We can explain love but love itself remains beyond words. By removing what is not love from our lives, we create more possibility for love to come into being. The greatest things in life are not obtained simply by acquiring knowledge of them.\n\nAs a final example to point out the distinction between context and content, between the accumulation of knowledge and that which is beyond, consider a modern koan. A _koan_ is a cosmic riddle pondered to achieve an insight that catalyzes a nonrational flash of understanding and illumination. One of the most famous such koan questions is, \"What is the sound of one hand clapping?\" In koan style inquiry, one isn't supposed to circumvent the process by giving the answer. The process of questioning, pondering, and breaking the riddle yields a light of understanding.\n\nA humorous, modern Zen koan addresses the paradox of contradiction encountered when trying to convey the teachings. In this story a teacher gives a student a question to solve: \"How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb?\" After working for weeks on the riddle, the student finally has a flash of seeing. \"It takes two,\" he says. \"One to screw the light bulb in and one _not_ to screw it in!\" The student saw that the true meaning of Zen lies in the explanations and at the same time is beyond them. Words and descriptions can only be part of the equation, part of the actual. That which lies between the lines cannot be conveyed in words.\n\nThis book raises many questions, perhaps more than it answers. It is often more important to question our answers than to answer our questions. The process of questioning and holding a question within ourselves becomes part of the light on the path of discovery, softening and opening us to new realizations. When we trust ourselves enough to begin to question tradition and authority, we begin the process of direct discovery. It has been said that the highest learning comes in four parts: One part is learned from teachers; another part from fellow students; a third part from self-study and practice; and the final part comes mysteriously, silently, in the due course of time. Inquiry and questioning can free us from the rigid, mechanical life of strict adherence to one belief, and can move us into the joy of continuous learning.\n\nOnce, while walking in the mountains, an old Chinese teacher said to me, \"If I teach you, you must stand on my shoulders.\" This is a beautiful metaphor. We don't throw away tradition: we stand on the shoulders of the past to find how we can see a bit farther.\n\n#\n\nIt usually is not long after one begins study of yoga that a myriad of types of yoga are encountered. A few types are _Hatha, Jnana, Bhakti, Karma, Kundalini, Kriya, Atma, Agni, Buddhi, Parama, Tantra, Laya_ , and _Mantra_ yogas. These divisions can become quite confusing. The word _yoga_ comes from the word _yuj_ , which means to yoke, or connect. The English root, _jug_ , as in jugular or conjugate, has the same origin. Yoga signifies _union_ , to unite or make whole. How has this science of reintegration itself become divided into so many seemingly conflicting parts? In order to understand this we must first look at a few of the major systems.\n\nThough there are many different lineages, or names, of yoga systems, modern yogis tend to categorize yoga into four or five major branches. These are sometimes referred to as The Four Yogas. When analyzing just about any approach, or brand, of yoga, one usually finds it is made up of components from the major four branches. I will offer here a simple introduction to the big four and some of the strengths and possible pitfalls of each. It is important to realize that modern interpretations of yoga, and Hatha yoga in particular, are actually syncretic amalgams taken from many ancient and contemporary beliefs and practices. Any definition of yoga is interpretive; the presentation here is limited to the basics of these yoga systems, with a new perspective on them.\n\n## **Raja, Hatha, and Tantra Yoga**\n\n_Raja_ means king, and Raja yoga is known as the kingly yoga. This yoga is usually attributed to Patanjali, who first codified this system, although he did not call it Raja but simply a vision of yoga. It was actually Swami Vivekananda (1863\u20131902) who popularized and systemized this approach. Patanjali's teachings are found in a treatise consisting of four volumes of _sutras_ , or brief aphorisms, which go into the analysis and explanation of psychology, mental states, the cause and removal of suffering and delusion, and psychic and magical powers. His two most-quoted sutras are _Yogas chitta vritti nirodaha_ and _Yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, samadhi_. These aphorisms are translated in various ways, often with subtle or profound differences in meaning. The first one, for example, is often translated as \"Yoga is the stilling of mental turbulence\" or \"Yoga is the control of the mental modifications.\" The second sutra is a list of eight practices and might be translated as \"Yoga consists of observances, abstinences, posture, control of life force, turning the senses inward, concentration, meditation, and super-consciousness or reintegration.\" Followers of Raja yoga usually see these as the eight limbs or steps of yoga and hence this system is also called _Ashtanga_ yoga, or eight-limbed yoga. Hatha yoga is often included as part of Raja yoga, because of its second and third limbs, asana and pranayama, but Hatha almost certainly evolved several centuries later. Many practitioners also see Hatha yoga as a separate and complete system.\n\nAlthough many modern proponents of Hatha yoga attribute its roots and foundations to Patanjali and to Raja yoga, Hatha's origins are actually more connected to a later form, Tantra yoga. Tantra differs from traditional yoga, which tends to center around ascetic and renunciative practices and beliefs, in that Tantra seeks spiritual development through the mundane. The Tantric path cultivates awakening in daily life through the feminine, goddess worship, sexuality, and even limited intoxication. Modern definitions of yoga, Hatha yoga, and Tantra are actually blended from many ancient and contemporary beliefs and practices.\n\nSome forms of contemporary yoga and Tantra involve sexual practices and meditations. Sex can be one of the deepest and most profound meditations and influencers of consciousness. It is the meditation of birth and death with the potency of the wholeness of life. To deny sexuality is to deny the creative force of life. One could say a lot about Tantra, and the yoga of love, but modern Tantra can be distilled down to exploring how to discover and strengthen love, relationship, and connection, while riding the waves of creative force that is the dance of sexuality. Some yogic lineages suggest that it is necessary to limit or deny the sexual in order to be near what they call the purity of God. It may be possible to connect with God and Goddess spiritually through such renunciation and denial, but this far more often leads to repression and neurosis than it does to spiritual awakening. Denial, or attempted sublimation, is much more difficult than is riding the wave of all the senses, of sexuality, connection, love, and relationship. Raja yoga puts its emphasis on controlling ourselves while Tantra shows the importance of letting go to life and merging in the bliss of love.\n\nOne of the appealing things about Raja yoga is also its very limitation. It appears to be a scientific, step-by-step path to truth or enlightenment. This makes it especially attractive to the Western mind which seeks order and explanation for everything. It is the yoga of control, and what is more controlling than a king? Most interpretations of Raja yoga emphasize controlling the mind, the senses, the life force, thought, breath, and most other aspects of life. Control is a seductive concept because it mesmerizes us with the illusion that if we could only completely control ourselves, control our actions, do our practices properly, and follow the rules, we would live in harmony and attain the goal of life and highest wisdom. On the contrary, the more controlling we are, the more hardened, rigid, and out of tune with the flow of life we can become. We must learn the importance of control in our lives but also its limits. Control is necessary, but an excess limits us and we can become rigid and mechanical.\n\n## **Bhakti Yoga**\n\nBhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion, consisting of prayer, singing, devotional practices, study of scriptures, remembrance of God, service, and rituals. It is the branch of yoga most similar to world religions. Bhakti yoga is based on cultivating faith and devotion and its goal is total surrender to God. It acknowledges that our own mind and understanding are limited, and therefore it behooves us to attune to and serve God, or, for the less theistic person, to serve and endeavor to live in tune with higher intelligence in the universe. Bhakti yoga seeks to lead us toward what is described as the bliss and ecstasy of oneness with God. It points out the limits of personal will, effort, and control, and the necessity of learning to surrender to the higher powers of life, death, and divinity. Bhakti suggests there is a limit to what we can attain by ourselves and purports that divine grace is necessary for spiritual development. Bhakti is the path of the heart, but followed blindly or to extremes can lead to the ignorance of ritualism, emotionalism, and mindlessness.\n\nA modern approach to Bhakti yoga is directing devotion to the magic, mystery, and beauty of life and the operation of higher levels or orders of intelligence. Devotion can take many forms and is not limited to external prayers, chanting, and rituals. This understanding is not just a matter of belief. It is possible to go beyond the type of faith that is the belief in the promises of doctrines and the assertions of others. This deeper level is devotion to the movement of constant discovery and unveiling of deeper layers of meaning and order that opens the doors to new discoveries and to questioning the realizations of today, so the possibility remains of broadening and deepening awareness each moment. The devotional path instructs us to learn to live from our hearts, guided by love, faith, compassion, and the interconnectedness of all things.\n\n## **Jnana Yoga**\n\nJnana yoga is the yoga of wisdom, based on the study of oneself and everything in life. This yoga suggests that we cannot merely cultivate the supreme qualities in life, such as divine love, truth, or God consciousness. These _non-things_ cannot be brought into being by our limited minds and limited actions. Rather, they come into being when we remove the obstructions of our own ignorance and illusions. In its non-dualist forms, Jnana even denies that we are ever separate from God. It asserts that acts of worship or seeking of God in fact strengthen our separateness and deny the oneness that already exists. The famous saying Tat Twam Asi (Thou Art That) points to the fact that we are already at one with the sacred. As we have shown, this saying not only asserts oneness but carefully uses the word _that_ to point to truth instead of naming or defining it. Rather than being based on faith, Jnana yoga encourages inquiry and questioning. In that sense it is very scientific. It is the yoga of seeing and being, asking us to question, look, and discover rather than to follow and believe. Faith is elevated in so many religious perspectives while questioning and doubt are limited or denigrated. Einstein said, \"The important thing is never to stop questioning.\" Questioning and doubt are important allies that guide us and push and lead us to so many discoveries and insights.\n\nQuestioning does not imply a lack of faith and devotion. It is faith and devotion operating at a different level\u2014the faith that comes into being through direct perception. A Jnana yogi sees the magic, mystery, and beauty of life and the operation of higher levels of intelligence. He or she aims to go beyond the faith that is the belief in the words and promises of doctrines and the assertions of others. A modern approach to Jnana and Bhakti yoga encourages devotion to more essential higher principles of life rather than to sectarian religious deities. In this time of intensifying religious wars, we must constantly endeavor to understand and deprogram our consciousness from ritualistic and sectarian beliefs, however old and cherished, that divide us and are the cause of so much killing and planetary degradation. We might better direct our devotion toward the great common denominators of higher perception, the great guiding principles of love, truth, common humanity, the sacredness of life and our planet, and the highest good of all. This is not just a secular, humanist point of view\u2014it is the essence of spirituality.\n\nJnana yoga has been called the _pathless path_. It endeavors to free us from conditioning and the limitations of knowledge. It shows us that when we open our eyes and begin to see the beauty and sacredness around us we have less need of techniques, rituals, or beliefs. An ancient yogic text, _Bhagavad Gita_ , says, \"For one who has seen the infinite, all the sacred texts are of as much use as a container of water in a place where there has been a flood.\" We need to end our illusion and delusion. This happens through the awakening of perception and watchfulness in our daily life. But imbalanced practice of Jnana can lead to cynicism, excessive intellectualism, or dry, mental self-indulgence.\n\n## **Karma Yoga**\n\nKarma yoga is the yoga of action, the yoga of doing. We must live and act in the world, and this branch of yoga seeks to bring more awareness and artistry into our actions. It deals with both the quality and the motivation of action and could be called the _yoga of doing_. Karma yoga urges us to learn to act with clarity, wholeness, artistry, and meditation in action. Our businesses, our bodies, our relationships, and even how we do the dishes, with right understanding, all become expressions of our yogic awareness. Our actions are the manifestation of our inner reality. As is often said, we can talk the talk, but do we walk the walk?\n\nKarma yoga is the place where all yoga systems can come together. No matter what our point of view, when spiritual awareness awakens and the heart opens with love and compassion, its expression is in sharing it with others. A danger of yoga, and of life itself, is excessive self-centeredness. Most yoga practices deal with improving our minds, bodies, and hearts so we must be vigilant about becoming preoccupied with ourselves. Yoga is something far deeper than developing the body beautiful or increasing personal bliss. Karma yoga also reminds us to think of and serve others, especially those who cannot help themselves\u2014the poor, the sick, the elderly. Karma yoga asserts that \"you are the world.\"\n\n## **The Wholeness of Yoga**\n\nTo our unawakened eye these branches of yoga may seem to contradict each other. Bhakti says have faith, while Jnana says question everything. Raja says control your mind, while Jnana says the controller is that which you are trying to control. Bhakti says pray, serve, and surrender to God, while Jnana says prayer and ritual can strengthen separation\u2014that we must see instead that we are already one with God. We may perceive the unity of these branches when we understand that yoga practices are tools to help us on our journey, rather than means or paths to an end or goal. When we have seen that there is no path to truth, that truth and spirit are living things, then the limbs of yoga can serve us as useful practices and guiding tools that we use on our journeys.\n\nPerhaps the metaphor of a sage will help. He likened the four yoga branches to the parts of a bird. Raja yoga is the tail, steering, steadying, and guiding the bird with control. Karma is the yoga of action; it is the wings propelling the bird onward. Bhakti is the heart, guiding with love and compassion. And Jnana is the head, piloting the bird toward the light with perception and vision. Which part can we deny and still fly?\n\nThe four yogas actually point to four key qualities or capacities that balance each other\u2014faith balanced by questioning or doubt, and control balanced by surrender or letting go. These qualities are essential polarities in our internal guidance systems. Any one of these can be out of balance, but used together they give different perspectives that guide us on our path.\n\n#\n\nWhen most people think of yoga, they immediately think about the most popular form of yoga in the Western world today: Hatha yoga. Today, we find images of yogis and yoginis in every type of attire, situation, and exotic pose in nearly every popular media around the globe. Still, just as comparatively little is generally known about the other branches of the yoga tradition, the term \"Hatha yoga\" is often lost in a confusion of various _brand names_ such as Power yoga, Fire yoga, Water yoga, Flow yoga, Ashtanga, and myriad other types of yoga named for or by influential teachers. All of these approaches, however, have common roots in Hatha yoga, the yoga of sun and moon. Made up of the syllables _Ha_ meaning sun and _Tha_ meaning moon, the word _Hatha_ (pronounced ha tuh) actually means \"intense\" or \"vigorous\" and refers to the physical practices of yoga.\n\nThe reasons for the great popularity of this form are many. It has benefits that one can experience from the first practice and it may be the original system of holistic health dealing with all aspects of living. Hatha yoga is also endless\u2014we can swim its seas as far or as deeply as our interest and energy carry us. The nuances and subtleties of discovery are boundless. There is no end to the potential of learning and no limit to the frontier, which is why it has been called a fount of perpetual wisdom. We will certainly pass through difficulties and pains, but there is so much enjoyment and benefit to the practice that it carries us throughout life.\n\nWhile Hatha yoga refers to physical yoga, and it is certainly the branch with the most physical techniques and practices, it is not merely an exercise system. The very word Hatha implies a perspective of universal polarity and interplay of opposites. Remember, while the word Hatha actually means forceful, intense, or vigorous, Hatha creates awareness of subtle energies and the play of dynamic opposites. Hatha yoga is both a vast art and a science. It is a science because of its highly refined practices and techniques, and an art because the ever-changing nature of life cannot be limited merely to a definable system or mechanistic structure. Hatha yoga involves the physical practices of asana (yoga postures), pranayama (control of breath and energy), bandhas (muscular locks and contractions), mudras (seals and gestures), kriyas (internal cleansing techniques), philosophies, and meditations.\n\nThe word yoga in the West is nearly synonymous with Hatha yoga, but this is not so in India, its birthplace. There, yoga refers to a large array of spiritual philosophies and disciplines of which Hatha is just one part. Thousands of yogis and yoga lineages in India have no Hatha or asana practice at all. They focus on meditation, devotional, or philosophical practices. Some lineages actually denigrate physical practices. They believe that attention to the physical body detracts one from spiritual life and creates inappropriate attachment to the body. Hatha yogis deny this separation.\n\nI once heard a story about an incident at a yoga congress in India. A Hatha yoga master just completed a demonstration and talk on the importance of caring for the body and the body's effects on mental and spiritual life. The organizer of the conference, hoping for some fireworks, had mischievously followed this speaker on the program with a swami who was known to disagree with Hatha practice. He represented a philosophical system that emphasized purely mental and inner practices.\n\nThe swami began his talk, in which he \"humbly\" pointed out that, as impressive as Hatha practices are, they actually create illusion and attachment to the body. He went on to assert that the body is just an aging sack of bones, blood, and hair that will die no matter what we do. (This description may sound grotesque, but it is not that uncommon to find the body referred to this way in ancient texts that promote renunciation and detachment from the physical.) The swami continued, getting heated up and raising his voice with authority declaring that when one attains spiritual insight he would pay no attention to the body whatsoever. At this moment the first speaker got up from his chair on the stage, slipped behind the swami, and removed the thick eyeglasses the swami was wearing! \"Don't pay any attention to your body whatsoever, Swami! Detach, detach!\" he shouted. \"Maybe you shouldn't even eat or take medicine either. Where do you draw the line?\" The debate went on, I'm told, until the nearly blind swami was forced to plead for the return of his glasses.\n\nOne of the beauties of Hatha yoga is that it acknowledges the interrelationship of body, mind, and spirit and explores the interactions and relationships along the body-mind continuum. Hatha yoga is predicated on the perception of a relationship between body, mind, and spirit and the appreciation of the journey of constant learning from the intelligent forces dwelling within all things. The laws of the external universe are also the laws of the internal universe. Hatha yogis see the physical and spiritual as reflecting and affecting each other, and as one process and interplay along one spectrum of energy. What happens within the body affects the mind, heart, and spirit\u2014and the reverse is equally true. The divinity we see outside ourselves is part of the same sacred energy of life that is the body. The deeper levels of Hatha aim to bring this perception to the practitioner.\n\n## **The Origins of Hatha Yoga**\n\nMany beliefs and theories claim to explain the origins of Hatha yoga. They range from the scientific, based on archeological, anthropological, and etymological studies, to the folkloric, religious, and mythological. Scientists and scholars study and give credence only to actual historical proof to support their positions. Historical evidence has shown that the twelfth- and thirteenth-century teacher, Gorakhnath, was the original synthesizer of Hatha yoga and that, according to traditional lore, Matsyendranath (assumed to be of the tenth century) was Gorakhnath's guru, although there is no evidence for this belief.\n\nTraditionalists, gurus, and believers rely on oral transmission, personal meditations, and the beliefs of their lineages. Yoga origin beliefs abound in India. Many Indian yogis assert that God or divine incarnations revealed or handed yoga down\u2014it is a gift from the gods. Others suggest that great sages discovered yoga through meditation and divine communication or that they developed it through self-study and observation of animals. The exact origins of yoga may remain unknown and lost in antiquity. What is known is that these teachings have been preserved, expanded upon, and handed down through the ages from teacher to student because of their cherished value and benefits, as well as for the power thus assured for the teacher.\n\nIn Hindu mythology the domain of yoga, especially Hatha yoga, is often given to Siva, who is known as the destroyer in the Hindu trinity of gods that also includes Brahma, the creator, and Vishnu, the preserver. The concept of Siva as destroyer actually points toward the process of transformation because energy changes form\u2014it is transformed, but is not destroyed. So Siva's destructive power can also be understood as a release of creative energy. In this role, then, Siva is the god of transformation, and because yoga is the art and science of transformation, Siva is also called the lord of yoga. Yoga seeks to transform the lower into the higher, ignorance to wisdom, and sickness to health.\n\nThere is a great origin myth for Hatha yoga. In one variation of this myth, Siva was visiting Earth with his wife or consort, Shakti. By the banks of a lake he decided to give her a demonstration of yoga asanas. It is said there are 840,000 different yoga postures and since Siva, the creator of this yoga, would certainly know them all, this performance must have taken a good bit of time. Shakti became bored after awhile with his long display and fell asleep. When Siva noticed her inattention he was angry that his fabulous spectacle was being wasted on his wife. Then he noticed that a fish was near the lake's surface intently watching everything. Siva thought, \"This fish has better concentration and is more interested in yoga than my sleeping wife. I will make him a great yogi.\" The fish was turned into a man, called Matsyendranath, which means lord or king of the fish, and Matsyendranath became the first yogi. There may have historically been a man named Matsyendranath who lived during the tenth century and who actually was one of the earliest originators of Hatha yoga.\n\nIn much of modern belief and folklore, East and West, Hatha yoga is said to be thousands of years old. Scientific and academic research has found no validation for this claim. The broader philosophical and spiritual dimensions of yoga and other branches do go back millennia, but Hatha is probably much younger, originating around the first millennium CE (of the Common Era, or Christian Era). Modern folklore and many traditional yogis tend to idealize Hatha yoga's past and feel that very early on it was a highly perfected form of physical and spiritual development with practices for health, well-being, and mental clarity. On the contrary, academicians have asserted that the earliest forms of Hatha were oriented toward the attainment of supernatural and magical powers or physical immortality. The teachings and definition of Hatha yoga have grown and expanded enormously in modern times, incorporating many new discoveries and innovations, and integrating much from science. These changes and developments do not devalue the practice but, on the contrary, have strengthened and built it far beyond its humble origins. They further emphasize the evolutionary nature of yoga and the importance of constant questioning, vigilance, and feedback in the process.\n\n## **The Ten Body-Mind Systems**\n\nHatha yoga, intelligently practiced, has extraordinary, beneficial effects on many levels, physically, mentally, and spiritually. As it has been handed down and expanded through the centuries, it has evolved, continually, into the most complete and sophisticated system of physical culture, health, and well-being ever known to humanity. Yoga practices work with and balance many interrelationships within body and mind. In order to have a more holistic understanding of how yoga works, ten body-mind systems can be taken into account. The spectrum of the ten systems, from the dense, physical bones of the skeletal system to amorphous consciousness of the mental system, is a holographic parallel to the matter-energy continuum of the physical universe and to the levels of energy of the chakra system, which we will explore in a later chapter. These ten systems are closely interrelated and their functions overlap. Getting a sense of the actions and relationships of these ten can be very useful in the practice and understanding of yoga.\n\n### **The Skeletal System**\n\nOur bones are the densest parts of our bodies. Though we might tend to think our skeletal system has grown and developed to a complete and static form and strength by the time we reach maturity, in fact our bones are living tissue that can be strengthened through use or weakened by inactivity throughout life. This dynamic fact was clearly evident to astronauts living in the weightless environment of space. Beyond Earth's pull of gravity, astronauts' bones begin to decalcify and their muscles weaken. As a result, systems of exercise that use springs and internal tensions are necessary in space travel and space stations are designed to revolve, simulating gravity with centrifugal force. The skeletal system is stimulated to strengthen and remain strong by the weight-bearing effects of yoga practice. Additionally, yogis learn how to move and mobilize all of the joints, where bone meets bone, in the body. A balanced practice has upper-body work and weight bearing on many body parts and moves and articulates all of the body's joints.\n\n### **The Muscular System**\n\nThe skeletal structure is supported and articulated by the muscular system. A healthy, balanced muscular system requires more than just strong, toned muscles. To maintain the symmetry and alignment of the body, muscular tensions on different sides of the body and within opposing muscle sets are equalized by yoga practice. Excessive resistance and tension within the muscles waste energy. Muscles strengthened and lengthened by yoga are less prone to injury than short, tight muscles and they work and use energy more efficiently. Yoga asana practice teaches us how to use, tone, build, and balance the muscular system.\n\n### **The Circulatory System**\n\nNumerous medical studies have shown the important health benefits of building and maintaining good circulation in the cardiovascular system. Good circulation involves blood, lymph, and all the bodily fluids. Good health, vitality, and immunity require keeping fluids moving well in veins, arteries, capillaries, the lymphatic system, and even in the bones, marrow, and spinal disks. Pumping and working the circulatory system on a daily basis is key for health, well-being, detoxification, and the relief of tension. Asana practice has many unique circulatory effects. Many postures direct circulatory flows to specific body parts, glands, or organs. Using inversions like the Headstand, Shoulderstand, and even Downward Dog, for example, bring increased circulation to the upper body, the head, neck, face, and scalp, as well as the thyroid, pineal, and pituitary glands. The many compressing and squeezing actions in yoga postures assist the heart in keeping fluids moving, preventing stagnation. These circulatory benefits and effects also work on the lymphatic system fluids, which are vital to health and the immune system. Health experts have long pointed out that pumping and circulating one's bodily fluids through exercise is one of the most important factors in health and disease prevention.\n\nThe circulatory system offers a spiritual lesson too. After the lungs oxygenate the blood, the heart pumps the first, best, and freshest blood back to itself. The heart has learned and instructs us in the lesson that \"charity begins at home.\" Serving others is a key part of yoga and loving and caring for ourselves and our own bodies are essential to serve others well. Follow your heart. In all ways give your best energy to your own heart.\n\n### **The Respiratory System**\n\nBreath occupies a central role in Hatha yoga, both in the practice of asanas and as its own field of practice, pranayama\u2014the control of breath and energy. Breathing capacity is proportional to the ability to control the breath and to the strength and flexibility of the thoracic area.\n\nIf chest, ribs, and intercostals are stiff, and if we are unable to fully utilize the diaphragm, breathing capacity is limited. Yoga brings flexibility to, gives fine control over, and increases the capacity of the respiratory system. Yogis have shown that health, vitality, longevity, and mental and emotional states are directly related to the breath. These relationships are discussed in more depth in the section on pranayama in Chapter 5.\n\n### **The Digestive System and the Eliminative System**\n\nThe digestive fire is stoked and toned by exercise. Appetite and the ability to digest foods are greatly increased after exercise. Inverted poses, twists, and forward bends increase the flow of energy to the digestive and eliminative systems, both by directing energy toward these organs and by releasing compression in the spine to increase nerve flow to the digestive organs. Yoga also brings great attention to diet and nutrition. Eating a clean, healthy diet, free from harmful chemicals and toxins, is part of maintaining the digestive and eliminative systems.\n\nPumping bodily fluids through the body with exercise aids the vital internal organs\u2014kidneys, liver, intestines\u2014in their work. The skin is the largest organ of elimination. Exercise and sweating help the skin eliminate toxins and take the load off other organs. Yoga also uses forward bends, twists, abdominal lifts and churning, and internal cleansing practices to stimulate peristalsis, elimination, and \"to keep things moving.\"\n\nHealth is often judged by the externals of muscle tone, strength, and endurance. But the foundation of health lies in the organs of assimilation and elimination. Yoga practice works toward the health of internal organs not only through the benefits of asana practice but also directly through lifestyle, internal cleansing _kriyas_ , and by encouraging a clean and healthy diet. It is very important to be attentive to our food intake and to learn the constant, lifelong process of tuning and honing our diets for optimal wellness.\n\n### **The Endocrine System**\n\nThe endocrine glands of the hormonal system affect all aspects of growth, development, and function in the body. Hormones are complex and mysterious chemical messengers that transfer information and instructions between cells. They regulate our mood, tissue function, metabolism, and sexual function, pregnancy, and other reproductive processes. Asana practice, especially inversions, backbends, twists, and breath control, are believed to have strong, beneficial effects on keeping the endocrine system in balance.\n\nAfter I had been teaching only a few months, one of my first students began having difficulty with her metabolism and energy level after a couple weeks of practice. She told me she was on thyroid medication and I recalled that the Shoulderstand was said to help regulate the thyroid. She was doing a five-minute Shoulderstand each day. I suggested that she have her doctor check her thyroid again. Her doctor found that her thyroid had become more active and was able to reduce her medication. This occurred a couple more times over the months until she was able to go off the medication entirely. This example may be exceptional, but many other cases have shown yoga to help bring mood, energy, and metabolism into a more satisfactory balance.\n\n### **The Nervous System**\n\nThe nervous system is a vast network that conducts vital information throughout the body and consists of the brain, spinal cord, nerves, ganglia, and parts of the receptor and effector organs. Yogis pay special attention to the nerves in the spinal cord, which is seen as part of and an extension of the brain. Nerves traveling through the spinal cord control and affect many organs and muscle systems. These nerves exit the spine through small openings called spinal foramina. As disks and ligaments wear, these openings get smaller and can restrict the flow of energy through the nerves to the corresponding muscles or organs. When we see elderly people walking with canes, often the weakness in their knees and leg muscles is a sign that nerve flow from the spinal cord has been impinged.\n\nAsana practice works to lengthen the spine, maintaining and giving more space to the nerves. Nerve flow can also be improved by breathing and by the practice of directing energy flows along the nerve channels through the use of imagery, intention, sensate awareness, and even by subtle movement in the intended part of the body. In asanas like the Seated Boat, and in standing poses like Half Moon and Balancing Warrior, learning to direct and extend nerve energy out to our extremities, especially into the toes, will keep the nerves active and alive. Yogis can develop a lot of control over their nervous system and can learn to manipulate displaced nerves back into their proper channels. Learning to energize the nerves to keep all parts of the body active and dynamic improves mental capacity, attention, and mental power.\n\n### **The Pranic Energy System**\n\nIn earlier stages of learning Hatha yoga, more attention is placed on physical aspects of the posture such as position, strength, and flexibility. Simply put, in the beginning we are mainly concerned with how to get into a pose and, just as important, how to get out of it. With progress, we begin to develop more awareness of subtler levels.\n\n_Prana_ (prah nuh) refers to life force and to subtle flows of energy. Learning to create and direct flows of energy is essential in yoga and in learning inner control, self-healing, and self-development. We discuss the energy body and the breath more extensively in later chapters.\n\n### **The Mental-Emotional Systems**\n\nMany practitioners consider Hatha yoga to be primarily a mental discipline directed toward the understanding and expansion of consciousness. Developing mental awareness, mental clarity, and insight are at the core of yoga. Although Hatha practice is very physical, it involves a great deal of mental conditioning and development. We learn to expand our attention to all areas of the body while simultaneously directing focus to specific parts. This ability improves powers of mind. Concentration, mental fortitude, and endurance are developed by holding difficult asanas for long periods. Discipline and strength of character come from creating and maintaining a regular practice and all of these qualities are carried over into other areas of life.\n\nThe mind and emotions affect one another and are closely related. It has been shown that the nervous and muscular systems store emotional tension and trauma. Massage therapists and body workers often assist their clients in releasing stored emotional tension. Yoga practice is self-directed body work that releases these stored gestalts.\n\n#\n\nThe principles, hints, and insights shared here have been gathered and distilled from many years of study and teaching. I hope that they inspire broadening perspectives and open doors to new levels of possibility in asana practice. These insights and the perspectives they invite can be applied to learning Hatha yoga and they are applicable to many other areas of life as well. They are offered to enrich and add new dimensions and nuances to your yoga experience.\n\n## **Presence: Start Where You Are**\n\nTime is the movement from timeless to timeless within timelessness.\n\nATTRIBUTED TO ARISTOTLE\n\nOne of the first questions yoga teachers hear from new students is, \"How long will it take?\" The question not only refers to how much time will be necessary for practice, but also to how long it will take to actually learn and master yoga. Time has been called the poverty of our era. The hurried pace of modern life drives us to feel we have little time for the things we want or need. Time has always been precious but too often we allow our lives to become frenzied and stressful. The new student wants to know how much time he or she must dedicate, how much of the day this yogic endeavor will require, and how long it will take to reach the goal. I have often answered these questions by saying, \"It will take the rest of your life.\" This is actually good news. Yoga is not a goal at all\u2014it is a lifelong process of living and learning that nurtures our being and that enriches the quality of our days. Realizing the significance of this insight removes unproductive pressures we may otherwise bring to our approach. We have our entire lifetimes.\n\nWe will always have much to learn and more to develop in the ways of skill and techniques, but the essence of yoga is deeper\u2014it is always immediate and available as it grows from refining our attunement to the flow of life, and life force. Our bodies constantly change and adjust to our internal and external states, not only day to day but through many stages of a lifetime. That is why a more meaningful practice promises no end but provides a constant journey of learning and discovering. Advancing our practice implies refining our ability to see and listen to our body on deeper and subtler levels. Cultivating this internal perception is more important than merely attaining more exotic postures. We can develop great strength or flexibility but miss the heart of the practice. I have seen some teachers, and even some students, quickly master very difficult and impressive postures. Many of their fellow students regard them with awe as highly advanced yogis. On closer observation it might become apparent that a seemingly advanced yogi may be practicing arrogantly, aggressively, or competitively, with little awareness of the subtle, internal levels of his or her experience in asanas. Someone may be able to twist into a pretzel while balancing on one finger and still be a novice who misses the heart and essence of yoga.\n\nMaking the time for a yoga practice means to honor and love ourselves enough to dedicate time each day to our own well-being. Serving ourselves is part of serving others. Only when we take care of ourselves can we have more abundant energy to give to others and to our endeavors. When a student tells me, \"I can't find the time to take out of my daily life for practice or exercise,\" I reply, \"Neither can I.\" They usually look a bit shocked until I explain that I have quite a bit of responsibility with a lot of office work to do, projects and staff to supervise, as well as an occasional crisis to manage. Often it seems there are not enough hours in the day. I don't have time to \"take out\" for my yoga practice either, and yet I keep up a regular practice. I certainly know that I have much more energy, much more quality time and freedom, and much better health than would have been possible without having allowed myself time for asana. In truth, yoga doesn't \"take time\"\u2014it gives time.\n\nCan we approach yoga in a way that is free of time constraints and free from unproductive pressures we impose on ourselves? Consider the old saying, \"Start where you are and stay there.\" Pondering the wisdom of this apparent paradox reveals the importance of keeping our attention on the moment and not only on our goals. It reveals the need to be present. Starting where you are implies tuning into your body and accepting and moving from your present state. Staying where you are implies keeping the attention in your asanas on your actual abilities in each moment of your practice. When we first start something we are infused with excitement, energy, and humility; we want to learn, we ask many questions. How do we maintain this beginner's mind? This is the lesson we need to learn from the joy and exuberance of children. When we are young, we are filled with excitement for learning. As our knowledge and experience grow, our attitude begins to crystallize and harden into the state of mind called \"I know.\" All too often the more we know, the less we understand. Knowledge can harden us if we don't keep our quest for insight alive. Keep a beginner's mind\u2014a fresh, questioning approach unburdened by baggage from the past.\n\n## **The Long View**\n\nBeing present is balanced and tempered by keeping a long view, a lifetime perspective. Every body ages. A person twenty years of age is less apt to pay attention to this inevitability than a sixty-year-old, but the earlier we become aware of aging the more we will learn from the process. I was on a swimming team in high school and clearly recall having the thought, at about age fifteen, that if I swam a mile regularly I would be able to swim well and be fit when I was eighty or ninety, so I decided to try. I was fortunate to have this kind of intention early and it greatly increased with the study of Hatha yoga. In the early days of our Los Angeles yoga center, which was on the second floor across from a meeting hall, I would look out the window and watch people arriving and leaving for events. There would be supple, energetic kids running up and down the stairs and playing. Then I'd notice many middle-aged and older folks coming in with stooped shoulders, bent frames, stiff bodies, and worse. I realized that the bodies of the older people were essentially the same as those of the younger people, just a few years later. Without endeavoring, without regular work to maintain strength and flexibility, people can lose their mobility.\n\nHow would you act if you received a wonderful new car when you were sixteen years of age but were told that this was to be your only vehicle for your entire lifetime? How would you care for it? Although our bodies change and are self-healing, we do in fact have only one body for our lifetime. Acknowledging this fact and treating the body accordingly is an important part of taking the long view. We are all subject to setbacks from circumstance, accident, injury, or illness. Yogis learn and gather tools to rebalance themselves and to become self-healers. Where will we be ten or twenty years from now if we do not have a personal yoga practice? Many students are concerned or worried that they do not make progress quickly enough. It is actually fairly easy to stay where you are now, maintaining current levels of strength, flexibility, and endurance for many years. Most people would be pretty happy if they could be in the physical condition they are in today twenty years from now. In the long view, even staying in the same place is a great attainment. Young people often push aggressively in their yoga practices and cause long-term, long-lasting injuries. Joints and ligaments can be injured or worn out. Are we practicing in a way that builds and maintains our body's parts or that wears them out? Are we even asking that question? Holding such questions during practice is important. Even if someone fifty, sixty, or seventy years of age just beginning yoga could maintain his or her current level of physical ability for the next quarter century, it would be of great value and benefit. Practice with the long view by holding an entire lifetime in perspective. We need to practice so that, looking back years from now, we'll be content with ourselves.\n\n## **The Asanas Are Tools, Not Goals**\n\n\"Have no goal!\" is another common expression we hear attributed to Eastern philosophies. We're told that goals lead to pressure and conflict\u2014between the present actuality and the desired possibility. The message encourages us to live only in the moment, but is this even possible? Deeper questions often end in paradox or, perhaps better said, polarity. Does time exist or is there only eternity? Is light matter or energy? These questions have no single answer. The answer depends on how you look at the question. Should I have goals in my practice or no goals? The answer is yes, to both. We can have goals of strength, endurance, and flexibility. We may want to attain a certain asana or master certain techniques. But underlying the goals a softer core of _non-goal awareness_ is needed. We begin to see that our abilities, like all things, wax and wane. The process and constant attunement with the actuality of the moment is more important than any attainment. When goal orientation no longer drives us, we can move from an inner place of being rather than from the harder outer place of doing. It is important to balance _attaining_ with _attuning_. We may want to attain a stronger, better asana, but it should not be at the expense of attuning to our body's capabilities in the moment. It is possible to have goals _and_ have no goal at the same time.\n\nIn addition to balancing our overall goal orientation with an inward approach, we need to consider how we tend to make each asana a goal in and of itself. We see the Lotus pose, a beautiful backbend, or the Headstand, and it becomes our goal to achieve it. This desire can create an aggressive or competitive practice and lead to injury. It is a common mindset to try to power through our weaknesses. I recall an overanxious student who, regardless of all warnings and advice, zealously pushed his legs toward the Lotus posture. He would sit with his foot on his thigh, alternately bouncing each of his knees down to loosen his hips. Then he would force his legs into the posture, sitting with a winced smile on his face for the two seconds he could maintain it. Eventually he injured his knees and it was years before he healed and could do the pose again. Sometimes going slower is going faster.\n\nAnother lesson we can learn when we begin to see yoga practices and asanas as tools is that we need to learn the proper and skillful use of these tools. It is important to understand that asana practice isn't automatically beneficial. Yoga practices can heal, but they can also injure. Although they are predominantly benign and in most cases beneficial, it is more intelligent to be aware of potential harm and endeavor to increase our skills in the personal application of yoga.\n\nAsanas are tools, used to work on our bodies, to heal or to build strength, flexibility, and endurance, much more than asanas are goals. They are also great metaphors to see our nature, our character, and the ways we move through life. _The asanas are tools and their purpose is to serve our body, mind, and spirit_. They are not just goals to be attained. A story of a famous tailor in India named Hamsa-ji illustrates this point. One day Hamsa-ji was in a hurry to leave his shop when a customer, walking tall, came in to buy a suit. He said he must have the suit right away so he could wear it for a special occasion that very evening. Hamsa-ji pulled out a suit and gave it to the man to try on. The man quickly slipped into the suit and stood before the tailor in front of a mirror. The right leg and left arm were a bit too long and the jacket seemed large, so the man asked that they be fixed, but it was late and Hamsa-ji had no time. \"The problem is all in your posture!\" asserted the tailor. He instructed his customer, \"Please lift your chest, now drop your right shoulder a little. Good. Now, please, raise your right hip when you walk. Look in the mirror now, my dear sir. Does this suit fit or does it not?\" The man smiled at his contorted figure in the mirror. The suit was a perfect fit, so he happily paid Hamsa-ji and hobbled out of the shop in his new outfit and new posture. A couple of the neighboring shopkeepers were chatting in the street as he left. One commented, \"Brother, look at that poor cripple. Only Hamsa-ji, the great tailor, could fit a man like that!\" We shouldn't try to cram ourselves into asanas like Hamsa-ji did to that man; rather, we can learn how to use and adjust the asanas to our needs.\n\nPostures and practice should be adjusted to the needs and levels of each practitioner, not the other way around. Yet more often than not, students approach limitations in reverse and force themselves into postures. It is said that there are 840,000 asanas. In one way this mythic figure is a metaphor for a flexible approach to finding the appropriate poses for particular purposes, as it suggests there is a variation or adjustment of every pose for any body. Goals have their place. They give us energy and move us forward. They give purpose and direction and motivate us to achieve. However, focusing excessively on goals can cause aggressive practice that takes us out of the moment and out of attunement to the journey. Softening our goal orientation can help overcome aggressiveness and effort in yoga practice so we are more able to enjoy the journey. Goals are the finish line of a race, while yoga is an ongoing process throughout life. We need goals, and we need to keep them in their place.\n\n## **Feedback: Learning to Listen**\n\nExternal learning and observation must be balanced with awakening an internal awareness. Yoga brings our attention to both the inner and outer aspects of our being. An important part of inner attention is learning to listen to the intelligence that lives in the body. Though it may not speak in words, the body communicates loudly and clearly when we listen. It will teach correct movements and point out mistakes, singing when we work hard and asking for rest too. The body's myriad feedback loops resonate together at higher levels of complexity. In the same way we watch how nature's systems interrelate and affect each other, we can learn to monitor the relational effects of our body's internal systems. Our breathing affects the mind, our thoughts affect the immune system, what we eat affects our mood, physical activity affects emotions, and so on and on. Watching these interactions and learning to work with them is an important part of the inner process of yogic development.\n\nLooking back on an experience I had as a teen helped me to understand this. I had just turned sixteen and made friends with an older, more experienced kid who had just moved to town from Detroit. We went together to the house of a young girl my friend was trying to woo. She pulled out a cigarette and he whipped out his metal lighter and, with a practiced movement, opened it, quickly gave her a light, and snapped it shut with a loud metallic click. Then he got out his pack of Marlboros, popped one in his mouth, and offered me one. \"You smoke, don't you?\" he asked. \"Of course,\" I replied, having never had a puff in my life. He lit our cigarettes with the same snapping movements, and I was really impressed. I took a deep drag of smoke. To this day I remember the nausea, the room spinning around, and the intense urge to choke and cough. I would love to see the expression on my face as I sat there using every ounce of will power to fight off the sensations and look cool as I took repeated drags.\n\nWhat I later learned was that my body was telling me in every way it could that this was a toxic substance. It screamed, it shouted, it sent coughs and mucus, but I fought back, saying essentially, \"Shut up!\" So in a short time it gave up and stopped using energy to shout on deaf ears. Instead, it adjusted by creating the inner systems necessary to process the toxic, new chemicals. This is how the addiction process works. I went on to eventually smoke a pack of cigarettes a day until one day, a couple of years into college, I took a fresh look at my habit. With the same will power I used to fake it before, I threw my cigarettes in the trash, never to smoke again. Our bodies can teach us and speak to us (as silly as that may sound). When we do not listen, the body stops wasting energy and just adjusts to our bad habits. When we begin to live more sensitively and to watch and tune in, the body will tentatively begin giving us feedback again and the process reverses. Our own bodies can become our most important teachers. When watching and listening to feedback, it is important to pay attention to the immediate effects as well as intermediate and long-term effects of the practices. We keep an eye on how our practice affects us in the moment, what the effects are the next day, and several days later. We may not be able to see all the effects exactly or specifically, but staying as attentive as possible will go a long way.\n\nI also learned a lot about listening from an Indian yogi in Europe. The yogi was not an advanced Hatha practitioner by ordinary measures\u2014the ability to perform feats of strength or flexibility\u2014but he was truly a master of more important levels of yogic practice. He pointed out that we must balance the inner voice with our intellectual knowledge. One morning he came into the room where we were all going to practice together, did a few stretches, sat for a few minutes, and then got up and left. At lunch I asked him what happened. He said that he felt tired and uninspired so he took a look at it. He \"asked his body,\" which he said replied that it had a hard and very physical day yesterday with lots of interviews and it needed rest now more than work. He also pointed out that this message could be a sign of laziness so one must look at all levels of feedback and think them through. We should make use of all the capacities available to us, including our minds, intellectual knowledge, and the internal feedback from the body's intelligence. It is millions of years old, which gives it seniority even to tradition.\n\nThe yogi's behavior contrasts sharply with another experience I had. When traveling I visited a teacher well known for being a strict disciplinarian and for an uncompromising approach. After a morning class he took written questions in a formal way, without any dialogue or interaction. I asked him what he thought of listening to the body's intelligence. What should we do if one morning we feel our body is telling us to take it easy or take rest? His brow furrowed and he got fiery and intense. He said that he couldn't believe a \"senior\" yoga teacher would ask a question like this. He said that if he started his practice and his body told him to rest, he would do a double practice that day. He didn't ask his body what to do, he _told_ his body what to do. Perhaps there are times when an approach like his can be valuable\u2014and it is safer in youth\u2014but in a lifelong practice a more cooperative relationship yields better fruit. There is also another big difference in the two teachers. One is open-minded, willing to listen and dialogue showing humor, happiness, and self-actualization; the other is somewhat self-righteous, authoritarian, and irritable. I do not know which came first, the attitude or the approach, but certainly a rigid practice did not help to soften the second yogi. So I recommend that we learn to work with the balance of control and surrender, internal feedback and external information, and the myriad other polarities in life.\n\n## **Strength and Flexibility**\n\nAn important aspect of working with physical polarities is to understand the interplay of strength and flexibility. Our bodies require healthy integration of both in the right balance to function properly. When yoga first arrived in the West, it generated an enormous fascination with flexibility, probably due to the exotic pretzel contortions the early yogis demonstrated. Even now, many people associate yoga with flexibility postures. When I mention that I do yoga, a common response is, \"Yes, I do some stretching too.\" Or conversely, \"I can't do yoga, I'm too stiff.\" A yoga practice involves far more than merely being limber. When I first learned Hatha yoga, a great emphasis was put on flexibility. My teacher, a respected yogi from India, rarely emphasized building strength. Instead he focused primarily on attaining the difficult pretzel poses, which were said to have mysterious and mystical benefits. I was an athlete and already fairly strong, but I was very stiff, so the strange positions from India were attractive. We were taught about subtle energies and strange forces, and I didn't think that the principles I had learned in sports applied here. Warming up was considered \"stretching out\" before getting into deeper poses. We rested and cooled down after each position. The major emphasis was \"to attain the asana and get the benefits.\" After a few years of practicing this way, I started to have back pains, neck pains, and eventually serious injuries. It took some time to analyze what was wrong and begin to correct it.\n\nAs we have seen, the syllable _Ha_ in _Hatha_ means sun, which implies masculine energy and symbolizes heating, expansion, and strength; _Tha_ means moon, which refers to feminine energy and symbolizes cooling, contraction, and flexibility. It is vitally important to bring these principles into balance. Too much flexibility and cooling can be as problematic as too much strength. Flexibility without strength leads to fragility. Strength without flexibility leads to rigidity. As you practice, become attuned to the relationship of these principles and aware of which principle needs emphasis. Women tend to need to work a little harder on strength, men on flexibility, but the balance of the two changes in each person each day. If I have been doing a lot of hiking and strenuous physical activities, then I usually have a softer practice with more flexibility work to restore equilibrium. When I have been sedentary, my practice is more vigorous and dynamic. Don't hold your poses too rigidly, with too much _Ha_ , or too passively with too much _Tha_. Watching the interaction of strength and flexibility is one of the things that holds my interest and keeps my practice fresh.\n\n## **Heating and Cooling**\n\nWatching the principles of sun and moon also teaches us to balance heating and cooling. My first teacher somehow omitted this important concept. He either did not know about it or, perhaps, being from the hot climate of India where properly warming the muscles is less critical, he overlooked it. On many days rather than warming up, we would start our practice by simply stretching cold muscles until they loosened, and then we would move on to stronger work. We were told to rest after every posture, which cooled us down again. When I began to see the problems caused by practicing cold and moving hard muscles too quickly, I learned to warm up properly and to stay warm, and soon discovered that it took less time to loosen warm muscles.\n\nWarm muscles stretch farther and easier with increased circulation, greater strength, and less risk of injury. Don't confuse stretching with warming up. A warm-up is one of the basic stages of any standard physical workout, yet many yoga students do not include it. Exactly what it sounds like, a warm-up is an activity to get the body warm and soft, with increased circulation. Move carefully into postures while you are cold. Avoid going to your normal maximum until the body complies easily. Slowly increase your movements as the muscles become warm and pliable. I generally do not recommend resting between poses either, except in instances where a short rest is needed after an intense pose or in specific cases such as hypertension, illness, or old age. Many poses may be used to warm up, but Sun Salutations or a series of standing positions are often the best. Ease into them, staying well short of your maximum edges or going only to your minimum edge\u2014where you first feel stiffness or resistance. With each successive repetition, with each breath, you will slowly and effortlessly move deeper and more fully into the posture. Finally, make sure you stay warm during the practice until you begin the cool-down phase. You will have more energy, increased benefits, and greater enjoyment.\n\nPhysically generated heat can also purify and detoxify our bodies. The skin is the largest organ of elimination. When we get hot during practice, the increased circulation filters more blood through our organs and the increased heat also allows detoxifying through sweating. These conditions allow a sort of burning, washing, and breathing out of toxins. This detoxification occurs whether or not we physically sweat, but there is a unique type of high and feeling of release of tension after a workout in which we break a sweat. Some students hold onto the erroneous concept that we should not work hard or sweat in yoga. They might confuse working the body with straining it. \"Never strain,\" they say. This is true, but strain means to overexert or go beyond your limits. Pain, shaking, or too much \"efforting\" evidences straining. Don't confuse the principle of not straining with not working. We can work very hard and still not strain.\n\nSome believe that sweating or working hard may be appropriate for gymnastics or calisthenics but not for yoga. This is a foolish notion. Conversely, some teachers assert that you must work hard, sweat, and generate lots of internal heat in every session or you are not practicing properly. \"No pain, no gain,\" they may say. This approach, while energizing and invigorating, can also lead to imbalances. Practitioners who work with too much heat can develop a strained look about them. They sometimes have bags or circles under their eyes or look gaunt from the stress of too much heat. Nature does not behave in this single-minded way. Everything in nature moves in cycles, always balancing itself\u2014inner to outer to inner, heating to cooling and then to heating, winter into spring, and on into summer into fall. The extremes of sweating all the time or of never working hard enough to sweat both miss the subtlety of learning to work with the balance of hot and cold in the organism. Either principle, hot or cold, can be overemphasized and brought out of balance. Each of the various ways to practice yoga has its appropriate place and time.\n\nOnce on a trip deep into the Himalayas, I finally caught up with a renowned magical yogi I had heard about for years. He had enormous charisma and seemed to have the power to know people from the inside. He was staying at a temple, and being a fire yogi, he sat by the sacred fire surrounded by many exotic _sadhus_ , or renunciate wanderers. They would sing and chant beautiful ancient texts together for hours a day, making wonderful music and creating an extraordinary sight. I sat for a day and a half just observing the scene, and he never once looked at or seemed to notice me in the crowd. Finally, I decided I was ready to go up and meet him. At that exact moment he swung around in his chair, looked right at me, smiled mischievously, and waved me toward him. I went up, said \"Namaste,\" and we exchanged some greetings. He asked me what I did in America. I hesitated, anticipating his response in the midst of this extraordinary gathering of fakirs and yogis. But I stuck my neck out and said I was a yoga teacher. He gave me another bizarre look and said, \"Okay, go give a yoga class to those men over there!\" He pointed to a circle of the glorious and frightening men. They were mountain yogis, many of whom lived in Himalayan caves. Some had long matted locks piled on their heads, some were naked, some smeared in ashes from the sacred fire. They were muscular and severe looking, but friendly. They were yogis who had mastered the inner heat principle and could live in the freezing cold without clothing, going days without food. His message was obvious. There is much more to yoga than only the surface practices.\n\n## **The Rhythms and Seasons of Practice**\n\nWe do not have to sit naked in the Himalayas to master yoga, but the Hatha yoga student would do well to learn about the play of opposites represented by the sun and moon. Start with something as simple as learning about heating and cooling in your body. Our practice needs to work with balancing these energies. A practice of yoga might cycle like the seasons. All things move in cycles of change. Spring brings blossom and growth. Summer brings more light and nourishment. The inner flows and expresses itself outwardly. In the fall, energy is gathered and stored, and in winter, reserves are used and inner processes dominate. The changing cycle of seasons in nature can inspire and guide our practice. Our bodies move through seasons of change from childhood to old age. The seasons of our practice change with the natural seasons, in subcycles of their own and in the cycles of life from youth to old age.\n\nOur process of yoga can grow and adjust with the cycles and subcycles of living. This suggests tuning into the rhythms in the body. Many changes occur within us each day as well as from week to week. We do not live in just one season either, so we must think and feel beyond just the calendar. In the winter, we heat our homes; in the summer, we use shade and cooling. Similarly, our practice always involves a mixture and interplay of many opposites. Sometimes we need more Ha, or sun, type sessions that are stronger, more vigorous workouts. At other times we need the moon, or softer, more relaxing sessions. No fixed formula dictates which to do when; only the subjective process of learning to listen and balance can guide us to self-healing. When we understand and do not resist, our bodies want to move toward balance. Remaining in extremes actually creates the difficulties. Nature will always throw us back from an extreme to the middle or to the other, opposite pole. The body's intelligence often finds its own way to stop excess. Paying attention to sun and moon, hot and cold, and their ever-changing cycles will help in learning the balance of yoga.\n\n## **Tension Is Your Friend**\n\nMuscular tension is necessary. The body constantly adjusts and changes its levels of muscle tension to support the skeletal structure, to protect the joints, and to absorb shock. The musculature of the body acts on the skeletal system like a series of interrelated springs and tensions that are constantly resetting each other at levels appropriate to the particular activities we engage in. These \"springs\" are composed of multiple processes of varying tensions, strengths, flexibilities, and hard and soft structures. Tensions interact and combine in many variations to reach higher levels of order and performance.\n\nStiffness is not a hostile adversary; rather, it is the operation of intelligence in the body. It is probably more appropriate to think in terms of keeping tension in the right balance than of eliminating it. A construction worker needs a different balance from that of a dancer. Hard work carrying lumber and bricks strengthens and hardens the musculature in different relationships than a dancer might desire. When we hike or do heavy work, the body naturally tightens. When we sit for a long time, the body adjusts its tensions accordingly. When we stand up and walk after sitting for a long time, we feel stiff. What we're feeling is residual stiffness from the previous activity dissipating as the body resets its tensions for the new activity. If we do not keep the muscles pliable and able to reset, we may create imbalances that result in stiffness, pain, immobility, or lack of skeletal alignment.\n\nBoth our activities and our inactivities affect the tension balance in our bodies. One purpose of yoga practice is to keep limits of strength, flexibility, tightness, and softness malleable and transformable. Broadening the limits of flexibility and the body's capacity to adjust is one of the purposes\u2014and effects\u2014of the asanas. Yoga practice leads to spring tensions that are more easily set and changed and can reach the right balance for the lifestyle we lead. Simply put, with a regular yoga practice, the body can more easily restore equilibrium after stiffening from hard work, strenuous physical activity, or even from periods of inactivity.\n\n## **Inner- and Outer-Directed Practices**\n\nAsana practices can be divided into two broad categories. The first includes \"outer-directed\" practices that follow a specific form, sequence, or structure. The Flow Series we teach is an example of this type. Outer-directed practices have many advantages. These series are balanced sessions that give the benefits of proper sequencing, many types of poses, and complete practices. Fixed sequences allow us to flow through our practice with concentration and awareness, without having to figure out what to do next. We can also more easily gauge our progress\u2014many feel improvement is made more rapidly by regularly following well-designed, fixed sequences. The second category, \"inner-directed,\" refers to practices that are more intuitive. They are designed more specifically for an individual or are created by the practitioner by attuning to the needs of the moment. The practice may vary each day, and one endeavors to listen, respond, and adjust to the specific feedback from within.\n\nSome adherents to fixed sequences say their teachings have remained unchanged since great souls or \"masters\" revealed them in ancient times. Unquestioning belief in the perfection of a system can be a key ingredient in a recipe for abuse and authoritarianism. Usually these \"perfect\" systems can be easily disproved, if the adherents will even listen to other points of view. Fixed practices may not be open to growth, evolution, or feedback. Those who believe solely in the intuitive approach argue that fixed sequences are rigid and inappropriate because they force the person into the system rather than adjusting the system to each individual. But those who practice solely in an intuitive manner miss the unique benefits of following a well-designed fixed sequence.\n\nInner-directed practice and outer-directed practice are two sides of an equation that are related to and balance each other. Both methods can also overlap and contain each other. For example, if you are practicing a fixed sequence, you can still do so in an intuitive way within the sequence. You are listening to your body and adjusting the poses, their intensity, length of time, and other factors uniquely in the moment. Similarly, if you are practicing and creating an intuitive, inner-directed sequence, you still use the forms, structures, and rules of asana practice.\n\nBoth types of practice are unique and useful\u2014I use both of them. There have been periods of months and even a few years where I practiced essentially the same sequence of poses as an experiment or because I was deriving particular benefits. I learned never to tire of the regimen because, even though the sequence was the same, my experiences of it in my body were different each time. The subtleties and nuances changed during each session. At one point I even realized, only half humorously, that I had \"never practiced in a body this old before\" and that this in fact was true every day. My attention focused on how I was feeling and the effects of the poses. I suggest you take advantage of both options. There are days when following a fixed series may be just what the doctor ordered, and other days where going with the flow is the order of the day. Why limit yourself to one or the other when both have unique benefits and appropriateness?\n\n## **Mental Limitations**\n\nYoga requires mental practice as much as it involves physical discipline. A student of yoga always seeks to learn physically, mentally, and spiritually. Our minds can limit our practice as much as our bodies do. The body may have ability and energy but the mind can easily become bored, lazy, or distracted. That is why involving and using one's mind and attention are at the core of yoga practice. The concepts we hold about ourselves can be real stumbling blocks. We form these concepts and beliefs and continually reinforce them through word and thought. Many students repeat negative statements such as, \"I get tired easily,\" \"I have no discipline,\" or \"I have terrible balance.\" These assertions may have some truth, but constantly repeating them like mantras only strengthens them. The power of mind cuts both ways. I have been able to assist students in moving through blocks or inabilities simply by getting them to say, \"I have the energy to do it,\" or \"I am learning to do this pose.\"\n\nEven positive self-images create problems. We may approach our practice with a concept of what we can or should be able to do, or of what we have done in the past. By focusing on the concept or memory instead of on our actual ability in the moment, we may push too far. I have seen this undesirable tendency not only with people trying to do today what they know they could do yesterday, but in longer cycles too. Many times someone wants to get into shape after years of neglect. Though it has been a long time since they had a physical practice, it might seem like only yesterday, so they push too hard at first. This tendency can be more serious for older people and seniors. It is difficult to accept our decline, and too often a seventy-year-old tries to his or her detriment to keep up with a twenty-five-year-old in the same class. _Start where you are and stay there_. Watch your mental projections, images, and concepts and use them wisely. Positive self-images, when tempered with reality, can bring inspiration and energy.\n\n## **Fear As a Limitation**\n\nFear can prevent students from moving forward or from doing certain postures. Inverted poses such as Headstand or Handstand and more difficult backbends and other poses that challenge strength and balance commonly cause some people to tense up or shy away.\n\nMost fear in yoga practice is created by anticipation and by projecting thought forward. In the moment of true danger there is actually no fear, only reaction or action. If you are crossing the street and suddenly a car comes at you seemingly out of nowhere, you immediately jump out of the way. The fear comes afterwards when you think about what could have happened and your heart races. Or the fear comes the next time you go to cross that street and you think about or anticipate what might happen.\n\nThis same kind of fear reaction can occur when learning a difficult position. The deep instincts we have of fight or flight cause us to send many signals coursing through our nervous systems that tense and stimulate the muscles. Fear also comes from our unfamiliarity with how to execute a new and challenging pose. Our uncertainty results in tensing or energizing many muscle sets at once instead of only the necessary ones. This excessive effort can sap energy and even cause strain or injury. Many times when teaching more challenging postures, I see the student's body become hard, rigid, and heavier than normal. When I explain this process, students learn to soften and relax as they explore new positions.\n\n## **Competition and Comparison**\n\nYoga teachers often say that we should practice without competition and comparison to others. On closer examination, we see it is really neither possible nor desirable to do this. We constantly compare ourselves to more and less advanced students, to our teachers, to the \"ideal\" pose, and to what we can or want to be able to do. These comparisons contribute greatly to the learning process. Even if we try to practice only for our own well-being or excellence, that intention itself involves subtle forms of comparison and competition. A better connotation of the advice not to compete nor compare suggests we take pressure off of ourselves by releasing our thoughts of inferiority or superiority in our practice. Your practice is for you\u2014for your growth, development, and well-being.\n\nYoga is a field where everyone can win, because winning is not about who does the best asana but about learning to do the best asana for your body in each moment. The usual competition with others for a prize or recognition is not involved and so comparison has no relevance except for the purpose of learning. Watching a more advanced student can be a source of inspiration and instruction. Practice to learn and grow, not to win or defeat. Yoga is one of the few arenas in which everyone wins.\n\n## **Yoga Is for Every Body**\n\nMany people have fixed ideas about what physical body type is suitable for yoga practice. Remember, asanas are tools we learn to use to maintain our well-being, and that among the legendary 840,000 postures there is certainly something for everyone. In my years of teaching I've seen people with virtually every type of body learn and benefit from yoga. I've had the opportunity to teach the tall, short, fat, thin, weak, and disabled. I've seen quadriplegics benefit from doing only the breathing techniques. I met a teacher who began bedridden with paralysis, started only with breathing, progressed to walking, and eventually mastered many postures. There is no perfect yoga body\u2014yoga is perfect for every body. Nature in her wisdom creates myriad forms and none have overall superiority. The Adonis body may be best suited for one task and the weakling another. It takes all kinds.\n\nWhen I opened my first center, the Center for Yoga in Los Angeles, the very first student through the door was a man named Charles Hobby. I didn't know then that Charlie was to become an important teacher for me. He was a court reporter, the best in town, with his choice of all the top trials. I was twenty-one and he was forty years old, short and stocky with a great deal of stiffness aggravated by the necessity to sit and type for at least ten hours a day. \"I am very stiff and I sit all day. Will I be able to get flexible and do all those poses if I practice diligently?\" he asked. \"Of course,\" I replied with conviction, for I had heard many testimonials and anecdotes from my teachers. I had only been teaching a few months when he arrived. I must admit I had plenty of doubts, but I didn't want to discourage him. \"I'll do it,\" he said, \"as long as I don't have to get into spiritual mumbo jumbo.\"\n\nCharlie practiced more regularly than any student I had known. He took pride in attending class every day, six days a week. When he started he couldn't touch his toes and he could hardly twist. Backbends were but a distant hope. His progress was barely noticeable for a long while, but he started getting benefits right away. His tension, aches, and pains diminished by the day, so he kept on. He would often ask if he really would ever attain the flexibility to get into the most basic postures. After several months he could touch his toes. After a year and a half he could fold in half in his forward bends. He was elated and radiant. Now he was asking if he could ever do the Lotus and backbends. Again I answered in the affirmative, with my lingering inner doubts. In a few more years Charlie was doing the Wheel and Camel backbends. I'll never forget the day he walked in front of the class, smiled, and slowly pulled his legs into the Lotus posture. I looked at him that day and realized it was as if he had reincarnated into a different body from the one he came in the door with years earlier. He was still short and stout, but now he was muscular, leaner, and he had a glow around him. He was full of health and vitality and his aches and pains were now the distant memory. To my astonishment, Charlie then announced that he wanted to learn about meditation and the spiritual aspects of yoga. Getting the stiffness out of his body changed his outlook. Now he could also bend his mind. Charlie taught me the power of patience and perseverance and showed me that all things are possible.\n\n## **There Is No Such Thing as Perfection**\n\nWe have a natural tendency to create and project images and goals of perfection. Some branches of Eastern philosophy even describe attaining perfection as the goal of life. Seeking perfection can be counterproductive in one's yoga practice. It can bring struggle and conflict. I had the good fortune to study science and physics in college, and I learned a principle then that proved useful when applied to life. In a sense, there is actually no such thing as perfection. We can create mathematical equations for a straight line, a perfect circle, or a perfect sphere. But in reality these perfect forms do not exist. There are no straight lines, no perfect circles nor perfect spheres in nature. In fact, space is curved and time is warped. Although we perceive linearity in nature, upon closer inspection or by breaking physical measures down to the lower levels, we find deviations from linearity. Everything seems to contain at least small imperfections. Even evolution, it is interesting to note, progresses through error, mutation, and selection.\n\nA look at art also underlines this insight. The most striking art is full of imperfection. The most boring art is a dull reproduction. If you tuned a piano to perfect frequencies, an exact octave, for example, it would sound dissonant and some say it might damage the instrument. That is why piano tuners have to seek the slight imperfections in the frequencies so chords and octaves sound right to the imperfect human ear.\n\nWe waste too much energy projecting images of perfection and trying to live up to unattainable goals. We beat ourselves up too easily with expectations we create of how we _should be_ in our postures and in our lives. It is a natural tendency to envision an idealized pose and then work\u2014or worse, struggle\u2014to attain it. Unfortunately, our efforts at perfection can be counterproductive and can take us away from being in tune with the needs and actualities of the moment. It may be more fruitful simply to tune in to our own needs and levels of ability, not push ourselves unreasonably, and to work within our limits. But here paradox raises its head again because it is also important to work on improvement and to use the examples of more advanced students and more refined postures to motivate and guide us. Sometimes pushing oneself onward and exerting a bit more can lead to breakthroughs and leaps in ability. The bottom line again is sensitivity, balance, and learning to listen to know what will be most productive and healthful. Understanding what natural laws show about perfection can guide us as we learn through our own errors and it may help us to lighten up on ourselves a bit. This understanding may apply usefully to other areas of life too. Looking back, we see that some of our greatest lessons came from our errors. If everything is perfection, then imperfection is part of the process, part of the perfection of all things.\n\n## **Discipline**\n\nI often hear students say, \"I don't have the discipline to keep up a regular practice. I really would like to but somehow I'm just not disciplined enough.\" Does this sound familiar? People often comment about how disciplined I seem to be. I actually don't feel disciplined at all, at least in the usual sense of the word. We often hold discipline to mean the effort to do certain things we think we need to do, or should be doing, but in fact we don't have the energy or will to do. Where do we get the energy, then? When we are really interested in something or really enjoying something, we do not need what we call discipline to do it. In fact, the root meaning of the word comes from _discere_ , which means _to learn_. I've learned to enjoy my practice and to keep it fresh and interesting. I do this by following my interests, approaching each session freshly, and by not beating myself up when I don't feel like working. Staying in touch with the benefits, energy, and well-being that my practice gives me is what keeps my energy flowing.\n\nDeveloping regularity in our practice is very important, but regularity differs dramatically from routine and regimentation. It is more important to be free, open, and responsive to the needs of each moment than to have a regimented daily practice. At the same time, we need to avoid irregularity and sporadic practice. Routine or regimentation can imply a rote, mechanical process that soon becomes boring and tiring. Staying in tune with the process and benefits you experience keeps energy to practice flowing. We can become hooked, in a positive sense, on feeling good, strong, and flexible. If, due to circumstances, we miss too many days, we will begin to notice undesirable differences in our bodies and this awareness will give us the energy to get going again.\n\nTaking time off occasionally, by choice or necessity, allows the body to rest and heal. I take at least one day a week off and find this aspect of my practice very beneficial. But it isn't necessary to schedule my day off\u2014circumstances provide it. Many times after intentionally or inadvertently missing a few days, I come back stronger and _more_ flexible. In a lifelong practice, even the down times become part of the process and learning experience. Don't beat yourself up for missing some days, but also don't develop the habit of being \"regularly irregular.\" I have witnessed people so fanatical about their routines that they miss out on many of the joys of living. I recall traveling with a yoga teacher who missed a beautiful tour of a foreign city and a sunset cruise on a river because he wouldn't skip his morning practice. My practice that morning was the adventure and my yoga lost nothing.\n\nIt is also important, especially for newer students, to develop and maintain a momentum or constancy of practice. Building a strong foundation through periods of consistent dedication carries us through the lean times when we cannot practice and helps establish a lifelong practice. We can learn to see our practice as an opportunity instead of a chore. We can see our practice as a journey in which we are always learning and make the shift from saying, \"I have to do my yoga\" to \"I get to do my yoga.\"\n\n## **Concentration and Attention**\n\nConcentration means focusing awareness toward one point. A story about the great warrior-archer, Arjuna, tells how he and some fellow students were being taught how to shoot the bow to hit an apple on a post. The teacher asked the first student what he saw as he drew his bow. He described the mountain scene, the post, and the apple. The second student described the post and how the apple was sitting on it. Arjuna's turn came and, as he drew his bow back and took aim, his teacher asked what he saw. \"I only see the apple,\" he replied as he let go of the arrow and sliced the target in half. That is concentration. Attention is different: it is broader, more inclusive, contextual, and not limited to one activity. Attention implies awareness of many things at once. A mother can be speaking on the phone and cooking a meal, but she is still aware of her baby's every sound.\n\nIn the early stages of Hatha practice we have difficulty staying aware of everything required in a posture. There is breathing, specific alignments, movement of musculature, and energy. Concentration by its very nature has to move from point to point. Students often find that as they concentrate on one point, they lose another. The legs are energized and aligned and the arms go limp, for example. After some practice and progress, concentration begins expanding into a more all-encompassing attention. Be careful, though: If attention is forced, it becomes concentration. During your asana practice, you should develop a quality of attention that is naturally aware of every part of your body, the flow of energy, your breathing, alignment, and even the room you are in. Students will learn to keep all parts of their body active, alive, and energized in the pose. Once this ability is developed, it is even possible to simultaneously concentrate on one area of the body without diminishing _attention_. This exercise in awareness and focus helps increase the powers of mind.\n\n## **Using the Breath**\n\nThe breath, like attention and awareness, is central to your practice. The quality and manner of breathing have a great effect on the character of the practice. While the breath may be used many ways, the main point is to become aware of your breathing while you practice\u2014watching the quality of breathing and endeavoring to keep it smooth, even, and rhythmic. This process will bring these same qualities to the postures and movements. Let breath flow freely while equalizing and creating a balance between inhalations and exhalations. Most of the time it is best to breathe through the nostrils instead of the mouth. The nasal passages filter and warm the air, absorb more pranic energy, and help balance the sun and moon energies of the body.\n\nInhalation increases energy while tightening and strengthening, while exhalation releases energy, softening and lengthening. We can use this biomechanical understanding of the breath in the poses. For example, in a forward bend you can use the strengthening of inhalation to help lift the chest and elongate the spinal cord, and then use the softening of exhalation to stretch farther forward into the movement. The same thing would be done in the Spinal Twist, inhaling to lift the spine and sit up taller and exhaling to rotate deeper into the twist. Once you are holding the position, you can continue to use the breath this way but in a subtler manner. Generally, inhalation is used to lift out of a position and into movements that open, expand, and need strength. Exhalation is used to contract or to stretch and release deeper into postures.\n\nLearn to \"move with the breath.\" This subtle concept involves using the breath to regulate the pace and quality of movements. For example, if you are raising your arms over your head for the Sun Salutation, inhale to lift the chest, shoulders, and arms while keeping your movement and breath timed together. Raise the arms slowly and gracefully and make your inhalation slow and even. Pace breath and movement so that your lungs are full when the movement is complete. When doing a Forward Fold, bend, stretch, and exhale. Continue exhaling while stretching slowly into the pose, finishing the final subtle movements into the stretch at the same time your lungs reach empty. With practice and experimentation, you will understand and master this principle.\n\nYou can use your breath to release pain and stiffness. When you have a stiff, tight, or sore area, you can concentrate on your breath and use it to direct energy to the area. Many teachers will say, \"Breathe into the painful or tight area.\" You will find that directing the breath to a location actually works to relax and release it. Using your attention to literally send and feel healing energy and prana move to the place in need relaxes and releases tensions there. This concept is not just a metaphor but a fact, even physically. Oxygen, which is part of the breath, reaches every part of the body. You actually can _breathe into your toes_.\n\n## **The Ujjayi Breath**\n\nThe word _ujjayi_ (pronounced oo jaah ee) means \"to become victorious\" or \"to gain mastery,\" and refers to a special type of breathing used to empower Hatha yoga practice. Ujjayi is done by gently constricting the throat or glottis in order to make a hissing sound. We more or less all know how to do this because it is what we do to give sound to our breath when we whisper. If you say the word \"whisper\" and prolong the _prrrr_ sound, the hissing sound you are making is ujjayi. However, ujjayi is usually done through the nostrils instead of the mouth. The throat is constricted in the same way as is done to whisper, making the same sound on both inhalation and exhalation. To see if you are doing it properly, it is best to be checked by a teacher or experienced student.\n\nWhen I first began yoga, we learned and used ujjayi only within pranayama breathing practices. We were taught to breathe deeply and evenly or to leave the breath alone during asana practice. I practiced for years this way until I began meeting teachers who emphasized using ujjayi during yoga practice. I experimented for a time with using ujjayi throughout most of my practice and found many positive differences. It improves concentration and endurance while increasing the ability to flow gracefully. Ujjayi improves concentration because it keeps the breath smooth and even. Since this is the breathing pattern that naturally accompanies concentration, it can also be used to aid concentration. With smooth ujjayi, you can become more absorbed in your practice, hold poses longer, effectively regulate heat, and relieve tension. I find using ujjayi in my practice gives an enhanced ability to sense and control energy flows and a general increase in beneficial results.\n\nSome proponents of ujjayi claim it was a long-held secret that unlocks more of the power of asanas. Others advise no control, and argue that the breath should be left free in asana because it will naturally fall into the right groove. Once I was practicing next to a respected Indian yogi who recommends against ujjayi. But he was doing it throughout his practice. When questioned about it, he curtly said, \"It is happening naturally because I am doing the poses correctly.\" However, in my experience, it works both ways. Why wait for the benefits of ujjayi until the postures might correct the breath? Ujjayi brings its own effects and immediate benefits. I recommend experimenting to learn the differences between practicing with and without ujjayi, so that then you will naturally learn how and when to use it. Most students and teachers I suggest this experiment to end up incorporating ujjayi into their practice. This recommendation doesn't imply using ujjayi breath all of the time, but having experimented, you will know its benefits, when to use them, and when to breathe freely. Your breath itself will guide and teach you in myriad ways when you listen to it. Ujjayi can probably be learned from these written instructions, but if you have any doubt, consult a qualified teacher or experienced student. Pranayama, the yogic science of breathing, is also discussed in Chapter 5.\n\n## **Toning the Spine**\n\nOne negative effect of gravity is compression of the spinal column. Spongy, fibrous disks separate the vertebrae of the spine. These disks allow the back to move and they cushion shock and impact. When we sit, stand, or walk, gravity's pull compresses our spinal joints. Many nerve trunks connect the brain and specific body parts or organs through the spinal cord. These nerves exit the spine between the vertebral foramina. When the back is compressed, out of alignment, or if the disks are worn, the nerves can become impinged\u2014cutting the flow of energy and weakening the connecting muscles or organs. A central focus of yoga practice is to maintain or restore suppleness to the spine.\n\nMany yogis measure aging or youthfulness by the flexibility of the spine. I have often seen yogis walking through their classes and pushing on a student's back to test flexibility. When they find an older person with a pliant, limber backbone, they might comment, \"Very young man.\" Conversely, when they see a young but stiff person, they might say, \"And here is an old man!\" In youth we tend to be flexible and softer, and as we age we tighten and harden\u2014in more ways than just physically. In addition to the effects of gravity, the spine stiffens with age through lack of proper care and use, through injury, and through normal loss of circulation. Our vertebral disks have a venous blood supply until our early twenties. That explains why young people's spines are so resilient and forgiving. By the early twenties the veins that supply the disks have slowly atrophied. Now essential circulation is only obtained through movements of the spine that squeeze and massage nutrients and waste products into and out of the disks. A sedentary person, or even an active person who does not move the entire spine, will slowly lose mobility. Here the saying \"use it or lose it\" applies clearly.\n\nHatha yoga focuses a good deal of attention on keeping the spine healthy. The asanas twist or bend the back into every possible position\u2014and even a few of the impossible. These movements keep the disks healthy and pliable. They increase circulation and tone the spine. Many postures work to lengthen the spine and increase spaces between the vertebrae to release nerve impingements. Yoga students also work consciously to hold better posture and to sit erect, which keeps them more alert with more energy flowing to the brain. This generally healthy habit can be overemphasized too. I've seen students become obsessive about keeping the back straight to the point where they seem rigid, mentally and physically. The key is always balance. There is nothing wrong with lounging in a chair or relaxing your posture. When you practice yoga be aware of the effects on the spine. Keep the spine flexible, lengthened, toned, strong, and soft.\n\n## **Symmetry and Alignment**\n\nThe muscular system supports and mobilizes the skeletal structure. Ideally, the muscle sets on both sides of the body would be developed equally to support the body uniformly. Balanced development is especially important along the spinal column where uneven muscle balance can result in misalignment and back problems. Our habits and patterns of movement, however, usually work against maintaining an ideal equilibrium. Most people are right- or left-handed, and most sports are one-sided or unbalanced. For example, golfers and baseball players use either right- or left-handed equipment. Runners often overly tighten the legs, and overwork the lumbar and knees. We usually favor one side of the body when we carry, lift, and exercise. We may also habitually and unconsciously lie, read, or support ourselves more predominantly on one side. In time this tendency overly develops certain muscle sets and creates imbalances in the carriage of the body.\n\nYou can try a simple experiment to notice these patterns in your own body. Fold your arms on your chest; then reverse the way you crossed your arms and notice the awkward feeling you get from doing this in an unfamiliar way. Clasp your hands; then change the way you interlocked your fingers and note the feeling. We have become _one-sided_.\n\nThe body is also very forgiving and not limited to narrow parameters of alignment. If this were not so we would injure ourselves constantly by poor posture and uncontrolled movement. Asanas are very potent forms. With relatively short holds, of seconds or minutes, asanas can counteract hours of bad posture and misaligned carriage. During asana practice it is important to keep our poses within the range of _structural integrity_ \u2014movements that serve and enhance well-being. Learning proper alignment and asana kinesiology while maintaining a softer context that allows some latitude in the way the pose is held is an intelligent approach. Being too rigid about alignment sacrifices flow and grace.\n\nHatha yoga practice constantly and consciously aims to restore and maintain symmetry and alignment. Practices are designed to work both sides of the body equally, with many postures involving oppositional dynamics. And there is the principle of pose and counterpose in any good sequencing of asanas. Backbends are balanced and complemented by forward bends, and stimulating poses are balanced by tranquilizing poses. Through exploration of well-sequenced poses, the practitioner quickly becomes aware of areas that are misaligned, stiff, weak, or underdeveloped. It is important to become aware of these imbalances and to study changes to the symmetry and alignment in your body when you practice. You can start by observing yourself in a mirror, beginning to notice your body structure. Is one shoulder dropped or lifted? Is there a torque or twist to your frame? Is the pelvis tipped or twisted? Pay attention to particular physical tendencies when you practice the postures and give some extra time to your weaker or stiffer sides in the poses. Students sometimes carelessly do the opposite, once again favoring the stronger or easier direction. Remember, the body's spring tensions have set to hold the body in the positions and attitudes that are habitually held. When you start restructuring and repositioning the body to hold itself in better levels of alignment, you may initially feel awkward and have some resistance from the muscles until the spring dynamics reset to hold at the new levels of balance. Go slowly. Use the postures as tools to restore alignment and start becoming more aware of using your body in more balanced ways during the day. Bring the awareness you develop in yoga to your daily life. Notice when you are holding tension in the muscles. Watch your patterns of sitting, walking, lying, and picking up and carrying things as you move through the day, to see if you can use and balance both sides of the body in ordinary activities. Symmetry of the body is one of the important signs of good health. Asana practice reminds us to look at all sides of things.\n\n## **The Three Qualities**\n\nYoga philosophy defines three qualities of nature, called the _three gunas_ (goon nah) in Sanskrit. The lowest is _tamas_ (pronounced tah muhs), or inertia; the middle is _rajas_ (rah juhs), or activity; and the highest is _sattwa_ (saht wah), or light. Tamas refers to heaviness, dullness, lethargy, and laziness. Rajas refers to motion, stimulation, intensity, and activity. Sattwa represents clarity, peace, purity, and joy. All things\u2014foods, activities, places, and everything in nature\u2014have one of more of these qualities. We may endeavor to cultivate the higher qualities and higher energies, but the easiest movement is downhill toward tamas, lethargy, or into rajas, activity. It is more difficult to ascend into sattwa, clarity. We tend to stimulate ourselves into activity until we tire ourselves into lethargy, rarely reaching peace and clarity. Knowledge of the three qualities can be applied in an asana practice aimed at balance of the three. All three qualities work together and balance each other. An excess of tamas\u2014or a dull, unconscious practice\u2014results in lethargy and boredom, but in a balanced amount tamas is rest and rejuvenation. Excessive rajas\u2014or an aggressive, overactive practice\u2014can result in nervousness, irritability, or even in tamas. In balance, rajas is energetic and vital. Excessive sattwa, or even too much mental activity, can result in airiness, disorientation, and a lack of grounding, while in balance sattwa brings awareness, peace, and insight. Once again, the three gunas represent a yogic principle that guides us toward achieving balance.\n\n## **The Three Root Principles**\n\nThe triangle is a basic building block in geometry and it is the first stable structure used in construction. A square wall is stabilized by a diagonally placed crossbeam that forms two triangles, adding strength and structure. In the same way, using the Three Root Principles strengthens your foundation in yoga. In the _chakra_ system (to be explained in detail later), the root chakra resides at the base of the spine. Inside the symbol for this center is an upside-down triangle. The placement of this basic geometric figure symbolizes both the mystical aspects of the sacrum, which is also an inverted triangle, and also the three principles of _iccha, kriya_ , and _jnana (_ pronounced itch uh, kree yuh, and nyaah nuh, as in ma\u00f1ana).\n\nIccha signifies will power or intention; kriya means the power of action or technique; and jnana refers to the power of knowledge. By using all three of these powers we form a triangle in our practice that is a stronger and more effective structure than we could build from any one principle alone. When performing any asana or pranayama, the benefits are increased by using and executing the proper form and technique (kriya), having knowledge about the technique and its function (jnana), and, finally, by using our will and focused intention (iccha) to enhance and direct the desired effects. Maintaining a balance of these principles becomes another form of conscious practice wherein we seek to stay present while directing the form and energy of the asana or pranayama.\n\n## **Relaxation**\n\nModern life has unfortunately made scarcities of peace and freedom from tension. Many people come to yoga solely for its tension-relieving qualities. Stress is a major factor in aging and the degeneration of health. It has also been shown to cause dysfunction of the immune system and cancer. The body and mind need regular rest and relaxation, but true relaxation is more than merely resting. True relaxation involves balancing and restoring energies. Yoga excels in providing rejuvenating relaxation. Deep relaxation and restoration of equilibrium require the release of pent-up energy and stored blocks. Yoga asanas and breathing circulate life force and release blockages.\n\nPhysical memories of emotional experiences and psychological trauma can be stored in the musculature. Our instincts cause us to tense our necks and hunch forward when fearful or frightened in order to protect our vital organs. Emotions affect the body and organs in myriad ways. The circulatory effects, deep stretching, and energetic releases experienced with asana practice can remove old, stored emotional blocks. Students very often experience an emotional and psychological catharsis from the postures. During practice it is not uncommon for someone actually to experience a release of pent-up anger or fear or to recall the experience that caused it. This process is an important factor in stress relief, whether or not we are conscious of our accumulated tensions. Even the small irritations we endure each day can cause neck, chest, or low back tensions that should be relieved each day.\n\nA simple experiment can demonstrate how storing tension affects consciousness. Tense your neck slightly while pushing your chin about an inch forward. Notice how this makes you feel. Hold that position for a few moments as though that tightness was permanently in your neck. When you release this position, you should notice a great relief. More profound shifts in attitude can be experienced when deeper, more unconsciously held tensions are eliminated.\n\nRelaxation balances activity and activity balances relaxation. Each creates a need for the other. I advise regularly taking a day off each week from your practice. This day off can be a fixed day of the week or a \"circumstantial\" day\u2014when situation or obligation prevents practice. I know teachers who claim to practice every day without a rest for any reason. Rest is part of balanced living and a weekly day of rest is found in traditions all over the world. It is also important to have a period of rest after your practice session. The final posture in every practice session should be _Savasana_ , the Corpse pose. What is more relaxed than a corpse? Savasana implies a special quality of conscious relaxation and the separation of awareness from the outer body. \"Getting out of the way\" by withdrawing from external awareness allows one's inner somatic intelligence to put things in order. This self-directed process is very effective in restoring balance and energy in a short period of time. It may be very tempting to skip over Savasana but it is important to include it. Practice should be a means of self-healing. If we think of asana practice as a kind of _self-surgery_ , final relaxation in Savasana is analogous to going into the recovery room after an operation to allow energy to circulate and the body to heal and balance itself.\n\n## **Flow and Grace**\n\nAs we progress in asana practice, it is very beneficial to develop qualities of grace and flow in moving between the poses. In the same way that we compartmentalize our lives, we may tend to fragment our practice into a series of syncopated movements. We may focus on the goal of reaching the posture we are moving toward and pay less attention to interesting processes of transition. This static focus leads to mechanical movements and less graceful practice. You can bring a gracefulness and fluidity to your movements by making the journey between postures as important as the destination of the finished pose.\n\nIn addition to moving smoothly with a dance-like flow, there is another, more elusive, quality to discover and develop in the poses and through the transitions between them. I call it _laghima_ , a Sanskrit word meaning to float or levitate. Great dancers or athletes seem to glide and float effortlessly through their movements. They have worked hard to attain their performance levels, but they are no longer forcing it. They are moving in grace and joy. Laghima is a combination of strength, flexibility, flow, and balance. It may be difficult to describe, but we have all seen it and any of us can learn it. This lightness and floating sensation also relates to balancing the flows of upward and downward moving energies, and the relationship of control and surrender described in the next chapter. Even a beginner can start learning to flow gracefully through the practice. Remember, Siva, the mythological first yogi, was also the great dancer. By learning to dance through our practice, we will find more benefit and more joy.\n\n## **Personal Practice**\n\nThere are many ways to learn yoga\u2014studying from books, teachers, fellow students, taking classes, or using the many videos available today. However you learn, it is important to develop a personal practice you do yourself. One of the great things about yoga is that it can be done almost anywhere, with little space and with no special tools or equipment. Some unique learning possibilities and qualities of experience can only happen when practicing solo. You can learn to follow your own flow of energy and to tune into your specific needs for that moment. Practicing alone can make it easier to get into a deeper inner space, communion, and personal flow. As you advance in your ability to maintain a personal practice, a special quality of experience can also develop. The innate intelligence of the body actually begins to guide the practice and an inner-directed process that can be very healing and nurturing begins to unfold.\n\nGroup practice also offers particular advantages for learning and can be very valuable. We receive a lot of energy and inspiration when practicing with others. Group practice is synergistic\u2014each participant seems to get more out of the class than he or she puts in. When practicing with a group or leader, however, it is harder to synchronize with and create your own inner flow as well as you can when working independently. Many students become so dependent on external supports for their practice that they cannot practice or continue on their own when necessary. For teachers, the strength of teaching is intimately related to the strength of personal practice. For these reasons I recommend that serious students\u2014and certainly yoga teachers\u2014benefit from their own personal sessions regularly. If you have the opportunity to take classes consistently, you may only work alone on occasion, but it is important to do so. Personal practice will lead to many discoveries, to self-reliance, and your yoga will develop its own momentum.\n\nWhen you approach yoga practice as a personal process of learning to listen, to work with, and respond to your own inner feedback systems, you become your own teacher. Discoveries unique to your body and your own special energy are available to you alone. Instead of just learning a particular series of selected poses, you develop a process of constant discovery that continues to grow and evolve. Personal practice may stay the same for a period of time, then it may change occasionally or more frequently during different periods of life. The varying circumstances of each day affects your needs and your practice. The context of yoga is your whole daily life and an entire lifetime, and in this context of practice grows and changes with you as you move through the circle of life. This broad context includes everything you are doing, and not doing, with your body, and how all these things affect you physically. Learn to use yoga to tune yourself physically and to balance all of the things you do.\n\nYoga practice complements and balances all other activities, and inactivity, as well as providing the very unique benefits of Hatha yoga. Walking, hiking, athletics, long sitting, rest, and sleep are all part of the mix and part of the whole life context you work with in your personal practice. Looking upon your personal practice as continuously discovering and rediscovering, honing and fine tuning makes it your own unique yoga, specifically for yourself. Personal practice is a well to draw from; it is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves, and it is ultimately a gift to others too.\n\n## **Integrating Yoga into Daily Life**\n\nThere are numerous ways to integrate yogic practices into the day. Many techniques in the tradition were gleaned from watching animals. An animal will stretch several times a day to relieve the stiffness from inactivity. Humans, on the other hand, tend to compartmentalize life. If our workout class is at five, we may be sedentary the rest of the day and not give exercise a thought. Many people will even circle around and around the parking lot looking for a space a hundred feet closer to the door of the gym they are going to work out in.\n\nLook for opportunities to walk, and walk briskly, or use the stairs when possible. In order to stay flexible, get in the practice of stretching out stiffness after sitting for long periods. A simple standing forward bend, a back arch, and twist will make a real difference. Stand up, breathe, and move around at regular intervals to break up long sedentary periods. Create your own \"chair yoga\" by learning to do twists and forward bends occasionally at your desk or in the car. Sit a good portion of the time with a straight spine and practice walking some of the time with alignment and awareness. Watch how you carry things. When picking things up, consciously use the alignment you learn from your yoga practice and make a forward bend asana out of the movement. Start using both sides of your body evenly. If, for example, you are leaning or reading on one side for a time, balance yourself by switching to the other side. Your yoga practice will also make you more aware of your tendencies to hold tension. Do you tense your neck when you write, type, or even when you watch movies or television? Try using some of your television time to do some easy stretches or passive asanas while watching. Become more attentive during the day so that you notice and eliminate bad postural habits. You should also be mindful not to get carried away by all this self-observation\u2014a little bit goes a long way. You do not want to be constantly controlled or contrived in your actions; you just want to be aware and occasionally restore balance. It is more important in the long run to be relaxed and spontaneous than to be overly self-conscious and controlled.\n\nThe other day a few friends and I had the chance to visit a great museum. One member of our group was an avid, perhaps fanatic, yoga practitioner. Even though he had been regularly practicing for many days, he said he could not go with us because he would miss his morning practice. He reminded me of the friend described earlier who wouldn't go on the city and river tour with us. I told him that one of the reasons I practice yoga is to enjoy life; I suggested that we could go, but not miss our practice, finding a way to work it in. As we walked for hours touring the museum and grounds, we found a way to inconspicuously do many postures and stretches. We used railings to do twists and forward bends and did some squat poses to release tension accumulating in our legs and lower backs. We even did a couple of partner poses. All this was woven right into our day. That night we felt the glow of a good physical workout and spirits lifted by art, conversation, and insights. My legs were a bit sore from climbing and walking so much, so before bed I used about ten minutes of forward bending and lunges to release the tightness. My friend was happy he had changed his routine. This is another example of how yoga can be incorporated during daily activities and how it complements our lives without taking out time or preventing us from our activities.\n\nWe weaken our backs by habitually reclining on chairs and couches. It is invaluable to learn to sit on the floor without support. When you first start, simple sitting can be difficult and uncomfortable but staying with it will increase flexibility and the tone of back muscles. I was once spending a weekend at the home of a friend and former yoga teacher. He hadn't practiced in several years and had gotten stiff and paunchy. I happened to be sitting with my feet crossed in the Lotus posture, talking to my friend who slouched on a couch. He was explaining that he no longer had time to keep up his practice. I realized that I was actually doing yoga while we spoke, by sitting in the Lotus pose, and I pointed that out. I told him about an old text I had read that said one could get many of the benefits of practice simply by sitting for a time each day in the Lotus pose. When I first read it I thought it was just glorifying the benefits of that famous asana, but later I realized that it was true. Sitting on the floor in any cross-legged pose brings flexibility to the hips, legs, and ankles while toning the spine and creating a flow of energy throughout the whole body. No matter how busy we are, we can find time to sit on the floor. Many yogis even enjoy sitting cross-legged in chairs. When done properly, sitting this way can actually be more comfortable and better for circulation.\n\nAt the end of the day, before bed, it's a good idea to spend a few minutes for an evening rebalancing and unwinding. Do some forward bends, twists, or stretches to relieve any tightness or tension in the body. A relaxed Shoulderstand can also be very helpful at the end of the day, too. There is great benefit to completing the day this way and it doesn't take much time. Even a few minutes of calming poses will bring hours of better sleep and help to maintain overall flexibility and energy from day to day. As you begin to bring awareness of your body's energies into daily life, you will find many ways to incorporate the benefits of yoga into the day without taking any extra time. In fact, it will add much time and energy to your days. In the same way, many of the principles explained in this chapter can be applied to other areas of living. Then all daily activities and the insights gained from them can contribute to yogic practice and to general well-being. This awareness and these mini practices may take a bit more energy in the moment but will reward you with much more strength and energy in the long run.\n\n## **Enjoying Your Practice**\n\nIn the section on discipline we discussed the importance of learning to enjoy one's practice. As a teacher I've noticed that students who enjoy their yoga are the ones who stay with it over the long term. Some people make their practice, if not their lives, a constant struggle. They seem to be always pushing their limits, working on their form, or weighing and measuring themselves\u2014trying to get to _where they should be_. Their approach becomes forced and tense. It has served me to approach yoga more softly\u2014to learn to enjoy it. We need to work hard and with discipline, but we also have to lighten up and remove the tendency toward regimentation. I recommend, even to my newest students, that everyone spend some of their practice time working at a level they can enjoy and that they regularly stay within their level of enjoyment for entire sessions. Even for a beginner with limited abilities, there is an enjoyable level of practice. I have taught more than one person in a wheelchair who discovered more joy of movement than many of us may ever find.\n\nWe can also work hard and still stay within enjoyment. We can all push the envelope and work near our maximum edges. Certainly we need to make special efforts at times in order to make progress, but if we always struggle to do our utmost, we lose energy and tire.\n\nWe all have a range of movement where we must exert and another range where we can move more freely. I recommend practicing in the latter at least as often as the former. We can find that range of movement where we feel good, flowing in the joy of exercise and motion, and visit it often. We can learn to use yoga to get into higher, elevated states, making it fun, enjoyable. It's a great secret for maintaining a lifelong practice of yoga.\n\n#\n\nAlong with the physical, Hatha yoga involves mental and internal processes of development. As one progresses through the asanas, the inner process takes on more importance and moves the practice to subtler levels that yield benefits in many areas of living. Learning about and bringing attention to the inner dynamics in asana will open new dimensions and possibilities in practice. Over time, cultivating an inner focus will make our physical practices far more interesting, engaging, and effective. There is literally no end to the exploration of the psychophysical organism.\n\nWhen we begin the practice of Hatha yoga, we primarily focus on the more obvious challenges posed by the physical movements. New students commonly ask, \"How can I become more flexible?\" \"What do I need to do in order to twist into that pose?\" Or, \"Will I ever be able to do the Headstand?\" As we gain more mastery of alignment and structures in asanas, we turn our attention toward the poses' subtler aspects\u2014toward the movement of internal energy and the inner dynamics. Alchemy, a magical process of transmutation of the mundane into the precious, originated in the search for ways to change base metals into gold. This search for material transformations was the beginning of modern chemistry, but alchemists also pursued a more secret and inner quest in the search for an elixir of longevity. In this chapter, as in Chapter 4, we explore the interplay and interaction of physical, mental, and spiritual components in yoga that help us in the magical, alchemical transmutation of our practice from common physical exercise into radiant health, awareness, and longevity.\n\n## **The Dance of Energy**\n\nScience has shown dramatically how energy and matter are part of a single spectrum. The two, like particles and waves, are, in fact, one relationship\u2014what modern physicists call a \"field.\" All of life can be seen as a dance of the universal energy field. Hatha, the yoga of balancing sun and moon polarities, has its foundation in this transformative dance. The mythological source of this yoga of transformation is the god Siva, who is symbolized as the great dancer, dancing in a ring of fire. This image of a dancing divinity implies the cosmic dance of energy, birth, death, and transformation. Everything that enters fire is changed. Learning about the movement and flow of energy is one of the core principles of Hatha yoga.\n\n### **The Energy Body**\n\nIn yoga practice we can experience both physical and nonphysical forms of energy. Physical forms also include many energetic fields\u2014metabolic, electromagnetic, gravitational, thermal. Nonphysical energy forms include the movement of prana, or life force, healing energy, feelings of well-being, and the flow of consciousness, attention, and awareness. In the Triangle pose, for example, electrical currents and consciousness flow back and forth between the brain and muscles throughout the body. A lifting feeling comes from pressing the feet into the ground and an equal and opposite descending feeling meets it. A sense of well-being and pranic energy can be made to flow in the body and there is mental concentration moving to different points while attention sees all parts of the body simultaneously. All of this can be referred to as awareness of the energy body. Becoming aware of the energy body in all postures is the beginning of cultivating the inner practice of yoga.\n\nEvery posture has important principles of structure, alignment, and kinesiology, but equally important to these mechanical aspects of asana is learning about the internal movements of energy. Muscles and bones are articulated and activated by flows of energy. Our practice can be broadened and deepened by expanding it beyond attention only to external form and including awareness and emphasis on the quality of energy and feeling in the postures. It is not only how far we move into a given posture that matters, but also improving the quality of the flow of energies. Energy flows can be strengthened, made more dynamic; energy currents through the nerves can be increased, and healing qualities improved. All of these dynamics and benefits make yoga more effective and enjoyable.\n\nI was watching a friend do some yoga informally while watching TV. I saw her struggling farther into the Forward Fold pose. I came over and offered to share an insight with her. She immediately said, \"No, no, it will hurt, I'm stiff, I can't go any farther!\" I told her my suggestion wasn't about going farther into her edges, but about developing a deeper inner quality. She tensed and said she was already doing all she could. I noticed her resistance and fear and just asked her to back off in the pose, not to stretch as far. She was trying to grab her toes, and I suggested she grab her ankles instead. Once she was no longer struggling, I was able to have her lift her chest, extend her torso, and drop her shoulders to release tension in the neck area. Through acknowledging her fear and resistance, I guided her into a variation of the posture wherein she could feel good energy flow in her legs and along her spine, and where she could experience a general sense of well-being in the posture. This was the first time she had done an asana that way. She had thought she always had to go to her maximum, pushing her maximum edge. It can be beneficial to push to a maximum edge or limit of flexibility or strength at times, but it is equally important, if not more important, also to have regular practice in an enjoyable range of movement and ability that focuses on better feelings and internal energy flows. Both approaches to asanas are useful and have different ends.\n\n### **Upward and Downward Energy**\n\nThe body has two principle directions of energy, upward moving energy and downward moving energy. In youth, upward moving energy is rising and at its peak, like plants growing and rising toward the sun. Children seem to have an endless supply. They are always in movement, at times almost \"bouncing off the walls,\" and we often advise them to \"settle down.\" Children are hard to keep down, while the aged are hard to get up. Throughout youth we are growing taller, lifting and expanding. Ideally in adulthood the two energies are balanced. But, as we age, upward moving energy begins to decrease and we're more affected by the downward pull of gravity. Our bodies begin to shrink, sag, hunch over, and stoop down. In the womb we are like a seed; our body is in the embryo position waiting to grow and expand, and then outwardly blossoming throughout the period of youth. As we become older our bodies tend to fold and shrink inwardly back toward the womb. Many of our elders are no longer able to stand erect. They bend at the knees and waist and have curved upper spines, often needing a cane to walk. The aging body folds back toward the embryo position. These patterns can be changed, or at least greatly slowed down, with yoga.\n\nUpward moving energy should be cultivated and consciously strengthened during practice. Downward moving energy, aided by gravity, tends to take care of itself. Gravity is essentially a compressional field. Our bodies are being pulled down, or compressed, by gravity, and the structure of our physical bodies has evolved to lift and extend against gravity. Many asanas create an extensional field of energy and movement that works in opposition to, and in concert with, gravity. Gravity is a major factor in aging and the slumping and sagging of the body, but it is not our enemy. We have discussed how our dependence on gravity has been demonstrated by some of the physical problems astronauts must deal with in a weightless environment. Through prolonged periods of weightlessness, their muscles would atrophy and their bones would decalcify unless they work out with springs and isometric tensions. Our bodies require a dynamic field to work against and take root into in order to function properly. Gravity is our friend.\n\nA simple experiment will show you how to begin to become aware of how you function in the gravitational field and how upward and downward forces work together. Come into a basic standing position with feet parallel and a couple of inches apart. Slightly bend the knees and slightly curve your spine forward, allowing the shoulders to stoop and the neck to bend. Take notice of how you feel and of the increase in the downward pull; also take careful notice of the change in consciousness. Now begin pressing your feet down into the floor. This _pressing_ is actually a lifting of muscular energy created biomechanically. Use this lifting feeling to straighten the knees and continue bringing this lift up through the hips and spine until you are standing as tall as possible. Finally, lift your chest and let the shoulders roll backward. Again, notice the difference in consciousness and in how you feel. Hold this standing position and continue pressing your feet down to increase the upward flow of energy. Even if you stop pressing the feet you should still be able to feel the upward flow.\n\nAs an additional experiment, add Mula Bandha, the contraction and lifting of the anal sphincter muscles, to the pose. See if you can notice the difference in the upward energy. Now add conscious breathing. When you inhale, feel the lifting; when you exhale, maintain the lift while allowing energy to circulate. Using ujjayi breathing will further increase the effects. These techniques can be applied in the practice of many of the asanas. Holding this standing position statically while creating an inner, upward flow of energy creates what I call a \"standing wave\" in the body.\n\n### **Standing Waves**\n\nStanding waves are an underlying dynamic structural pattern in the universe. Standing waves are nontraveling waves of energy or vibration that maintain fixed wavelengths and frequency. In other words, they have lots of energy moving through them but they look like they are standing still. When a river drops over an irregularity in its bed, or over a large rock, a standing wave develops with its curl facing upstream. This standing wave will look like a large mound of water and appear to be relatively still and stable, but the river is literally pouring through it. When a strong wind lifts over a mountain top, a standing wave in the air flow develops across the peak, often expressed as an elliptical shaped cloud.\n\nAsanas themselves actually are, in a sense, standing waves. Energy can flow dynamically within the body even as a pose is held statically. Standing waves appear to be still but have constant movement within them. Standing waves demonstrate a delicate interplay of static and dynamic opposites balanced in time. An ancient yogic text states, \"A yogi is one who sees movement in stillness, and stillness in movement.\" Generating and riding standing waves and _surfing_ internal waves of energy in asana practice is one way to experience this. There is the stillness of asana with the internal dynamic movement of energy. This is contrasted by the stillness of attention and awareness within the dynamic movement of asana and energy. Physical standing waves can be created by balancing opposing, internal tensions and by bringing equilibrium to the interplay of strength and flexibility. They create feelings of inner power and well-being, bringing a sense of wholeness to the posture. Discovering this is a revelation and brings a forward leap in one's practice.\n\n### **Lines of Energy**\n\nThe concept of lines of energy refers to the intentional creation of energy flows along channels or directions in the body. Working with and developing lines of energy in yoga poses refines and increases the benefits of the poses. Yogi Joel Kramer, who articulated this concept, defines it as follows: \"Lines of energy are vibratory currents that move in different directions within each posture. The intensity of these currents in the nerves can be controlled by the muscles and has a feeling that moves in an outward direction.\"\n\nYou can easily experience this directional energy flow by coming again to a standing position. Raise your arms directly out to your sides, parallel to the floor. Extend and lengthen the arms outward, toward the side walls of the room. You can now experience the extensional feeling from the lines of energy moving along the arms. This flow can be increased by making sure your arms are extending all the way to the ends of the fingers, and even beyond to the walls, without breaking or bending at the joints. This extensional movement energizes and brings vibrancy to the arms, but it also opens the neck and shoulders. Next, begin pressing the feet until you feel lines of energy moving down into and coming up from the floor. Try to allow this flow from the floor to connect with and move out through the flow along the arms. Connecting and linking the various energy flows creates more beneficial effects and structural integrity in the postures. All postures have these lines and flows to be discovered and worked with. Don't increase the flow to a point of tension, overexertion, or contraction. The energy lines will help you align and adjust your postures because when the flow feels good and moves freely internally, the posture is usually properly aligned.\n\nIn addition to moving particular lines of energy through the limbs and torso, you also want to experience a general feeling of movement of the entire energy body. In a twisting pose, for example, the energy body itself feels like it is twisting. In a backbend it feels like it is arching back. Often when students see themselves with video or photographic feedback, they are surprised that they feel like they are bending farther than the picture shows. This is usually because they feel the movement of the energy body more than the physical body actually moving. I discovered this difference once when having an instant photo made of an asana I was doing. I wanted to see how far back I was bending and had a friend take my photo. I felt like I was bending much farther than the actual pose shown in the picture. With some experimentation I realized that my energy body was bending much more than the physical body. It is good to be able to sense this nonphysical movement and to use and accentuate it in postures. Whether or not you are able to move fully into a pose physically, you can still move the corresponding internal energy. This inner movement actually creates and maintains physical structure and support and, in time, you will be able to move into a fuller pose. Actually all physical movements are preceded and controlled by this flow of energy.\n\nKeeping your energy active makes the body radiant and vibrant in the postures and prolongs youthfulness. The awareness and posture you cultivate will carry over from yoga practice to daily life. We eventually learn to walk taller, keep our spines supple and straight, and keep our energy channels open throughout the day. The effects of gravity and aging are balanced and our vitality increases. Lifting your energy up will help to uplift you too. Smiling lifts the spirit and is an indicator that your energy is flowing upward. One of the goals of yoga is the alchemical transformation from being down, heavy, sad, and lethargic to being up, happy, high, energetic, and clear.\n\n### **Withdrawing Energy**\n\nWe concentrate more often on creating and extending energy into parts of the body. Learning to withdraw energy is the other, equally important, side of this coin. You can learn to pull energy out of a limb or body part. When you do a pose more passively, energy is withdrawn and the limb is moved or stretched. For example, in a forward bend, instead of energizing the leg muscles they can be made passive, the energy withdrawn, and then the muscles are stretched by using leverage from the arms and weight from the trunk. Savasana, the Corpse pose, is the ultimate in energy withdrawal. You learn and develop the ability to consciously withdraw your energy body and your conscious awareness from all parts of the body. This total withdrawal happens naturally in sleep, of course, but in Savasana it is a cultivated ability that, once learned, permits you to recharge and renew your energetic and physical bodies in a very short period of time.\n\n### **Mental Energy**\n\nUnderstanding the dance of energy includes becoming sensitive and aware of how certain patterns of thought, feeling, and mental energy can lift you up or pull you down, lowering your life force into weakness, lethargy, and even illness. By seeing downward tendencies when they rise in predominance in yourself, you can learn to generate the inner positive thought force to transform them into upward moving energy. This transformation must be in balance, allowing natural rhythms of relaxation, passivity, and inactivity to flow through their normal cycles in daily life. One simple measure of upward or downward moving psychological energy is the smile and frown. Smiles, of course, raise our energy and vibration. We could all learn to use the benefits of smiling more often.\n\n## **Aligning and Adjusting Asanas from Within and Without**\n\nLearning how to align postures properly for your particular body, age, and stage of development is another example of learning to balance internal and external information systems. By external information, I refer to the way asanas are shown in books, by teachers, in photographs, and in classes. These are not always just idealized postures but often represent what a particular school, lineage, or teacher feels is the correct way to do specific asanas. Of course, there are differing, sometimes opposing, opinions among various lineages and schools. Internal information refers to the immediate feedback of information and effects that a pose gives you during your own practice. Both external and internal information should play important roles in guiding your practice.\n\nAs we have discussed, Hatha yoga developed from inspiration, experimentation, watching animals, and the discovery of structural, archetypal movements inherent in the body. All these sources have formed a body of information and tradition that we now draw from in our study of yoga. Whether or not one puts great faith in tradition, we have seen that there is no one yoga approach and that opinions differ about even the most basic alignments of particular asanas. How, then, is one to find one's way?\n\nAn essential part of learning how to find the right asanas, practices, and alignments is learning to listen to the effects\u2014hear the feedback from your body, and develop your awareness of how the postures affect you in the moment and over time. This development of internal awareness and attunement is balanced and enhanced by external knowledge and information. Some people try to delineate which postures are appropriate for different body types, constitutions, times of year, for males, females, certain age groups, and so on. While this information may be useful, theoretically, and possibly accurate, it must be balanced by developing the ability to respond internally to your actual practice with all your capacities and all your senses. Using both internal and external information systems, you can circumvent practicing solely by technique and belief and, instead, learn and develop from your own direct experience and perception. The internal and external offer two differing vantage points that balance and guide each other. Sometimes holding a posture in a particular form can feel good, but a book or teacher might show you that you are not holding the pose in a beneficial way. You may have become accustomed to an improperly aligned position and it began to feel good. External feedback from another person, or even a mirror, can help improve your pose and correct your inner guidance system. Similarly, holding a beneficial alignment sometimes doesn't feel as good as the incorrect alignment until the body is brought into balance. Either internal or external information is sometimes incorrect, but using and developing awareness of how both perspectives balance each other will guide your practice.\n\nA posture I use to exemplify this is the Extended Warrior pose, _Parsvakonasana_. You will be able to follow the theory given here even if you are not familiar with this posture. The Extended Warrior is the standing pose done in a single plane with the back leg kept straight, the front shin at a right angle to the floor, and torso extended out over the front leg, weight on the lower arm through the hand on the floor. There are differing opinions among leading teachers about where the front hand and arm should be. Many books and teachers show the front hand placed on the floor along the outside edge of the front foot; others teach the hand being moved to the floor along the inside of the front foot arch. As an additional variation, the front arm can be bent supporting the trunk with the forearm placed on the thigh, but many teachers object to this adaptation, saying it compromises the classical position. Guidance can be found in listening to the effects of the pose.\n\nTwo of the purposes of this Warrior pose are toning and strengthening the whole body, and improving concentration and attention. Different front hand or arm placements have little to no effect on these aspects of the posture. Similarly, different front hand or arm positions have little effect on the flexibility-building aspects of this pose. But another key benefit of this position is relieving tension and compression in the lumbar spine, and hand placement has a big effect here. As one extends forward into the posture, the torso is rolled open while the chest is lifted. This twisting, opening extension relieves tightness and pressure in the lumbar. Moving the hand position to the inside of the foot frees the torso to twist and open more. I have experimented with many students and body types in this pose and find very few who can place their hand in the accepted position, to the outside of the foot, and get as many beneficial effects, as they do when placing their hand by the inside of the foot\u2014yet many teachers still say this placement is not correct. Furthermore, by bending the arm and supporting their torso on the thigh, the majority of students are able to get even more opening and benefit while sacrificing nothing\u2014it is an improvement, not a compromise. When you tune into the effects of the pose as you experiment with the different hand placements, you will notice which modification gives you the most freedom, opening, the best flow of energy, and sense of well-being. I use this example to show how we can use traditional information about the poses but also need to listen within to guide and move our postures to the optimal position for our individual needs and abilities.\n\nIn earlier stages of practice, perhaps for several years, it is important to follow predominantly the teachings, practices, and techniques learned from qualified sources. During this time you should allow your own unique inner process to awaken and develop, and look for teachers who encourage this personal development. This inner process can develop from the beginning, even while you follow instructions and practices from a teacher. While learning, you emphasize receiving information, and as you progress you put more emphasis on your own inner process. Don't focus only on getting into the posture, but consider also what you are getting out of each posture. _Form follows function;_ this principle of design can also be applied to asana. The form of the asana is secondary to the desired effects it produces. Adjust poses by using the alignment that creates the best energy flow, by means of internal feedback and internal effects of the pose. When you are not sure of how to align an asana, pay attention to what others have said and also to which modifications give you the best results and best flow of energy. This is the bottom line\u2014not a picture in a book or a teacher's assertions, but what your body is telling you. Making sense out of conflicting opinions about asana practice involves balancing what you have learned from others with your own experience and inner guidance.\n\n## **Surfing the Edges**\n\nEvery yoga posture has different levels and intensities of engagement, and every body has its own limits. You can learn to adjust and modulate these levels, or _edges_ , in order to get different effects and benefits out of the asanas. This technique was also pioneered in yoga in the sixties by Joel Kramer, who called it \"playing the edges.\" I use the term \"surfing\" because it implies flow, balance, adjustment, and enjoyment\u2014while riding on a wave of energy. Learning to surf and to experiment with the many different types of edges can add beneficial dimensions of subtlety to your practice.\n\nSome useful edges to learn and be attentive to are edges of strength, flexibility, balance, endurance, fear, and pain. The concept of working with edges is taking hold in yoga, but it is often presented in a limited manner that misses the subtlety and sophistication of this process. The concept is not limited to the idea of \"staying on your edge,\" or working near your maximum. Instead, it embraces an entire arena involving working with many different types of edges and many different levels for each type of edge. Surfing the edges does not only refer to \"pushing the envelope\" or working near your maximum limits of possibility, but includes riding the waves, understanding and using the whole range of levels within your ability for various effects and benefits.\n\nFlexibility is a good place to begin to learn how to work with your edges. The measurement of the edge is noticed at the minimum and, more important, the maximum limit. As you begin to move into a posture, the place where you start to meet the first sensations or feelings of resistance and stiffness is called the minimum edge. The maximum edge is the point where you feel you can move no further into the posture without pain or injury. The intermediate edge is halfway between these two points.\n\nEdges of strength are defined in the same way or can often be noticed by increasing strain, \"efforting,\" or shaking. These are important demarcations of beginning, intermediate, and maximum edges of flexibility. Working with edges is like using a volume control in your practice to adjust the intensity and level of the postures. You can learn the differences between practicing at minimum edges, maximum edges, and varying points in between, simply by beginning to use these levels. Experiment with them and watch how the different levels affect the alignment of your poses and the inner experience of your practice. Once you get the sense of surfing edges in one area of your practice, it is easy to learn in others.\n\nRemember, working at the maximum edges can be exhilarating, but always working at the maximum edges of strength and flexibility can become frustrating, exhausting, and possibly lead to injury. Backing off and working at a 75-percent edge can increase the level of enjoyment\u2014another important edge. Backing off to intermediate edges, even in simple poses, can allow work in other areas such as alignment or endurance, or exploration of the counterplay of isometric and isotonic pressures\u2014pressing externally and resisting internally to change effects of the posture, explained in a later section. (Using pain as an edge and teacher for healing is more complicated and will be explained in Chapter 7.)\n\nFind your edges by beginning to move and then noticing the sensations. Stay well short of the maximum edges until your body is warmed up. You may sometimes be able to bend completely in half, for example, but your maximum edges of resistance will come well before that until you are warm and have good circulation. Let's say you are starting with a series of Sun Salutations. Don't begin with your best, most technically perfect poses. Don't start at your maximum edges. Instead, warm up and slowly approach your maximum edges with successive repetitions of the salutations. This actually makes warming up easier and you will have less muscle soreness and much less risk of injury. It is like recapitulating the steps through which you progressed and learned from the beginning.\n\nEach time you begin your practice, pay particular attention to where your edges are that day. Edges are on the move constantly, day to day and breath to breath. Where you work in relation to these edges will have a large impact on the quality and result of your practice. Every day you have a different body. The time of day you begin, the foods you have eaten, and your activities the previous day all have a big effect. By watching these relationships you will learn a lot. Your own body and your own practice will teach you how to surf the edges.\n\n## **Flow, the Dance of Control and Surrender**\n\nHatha yoga has a close relationship with Raja yoga, the eight-limbed path we have already discussed. The third and fourth limbs of this eightfold path are asana and pranayama\u2014posture and breath. One of the core principles of Raja yoga is control. This system seeks mastery in living through a refined ability to control the mind, body, senses, breath, and consciousness itself. We need not look far, however, to see that there are vast areas beyond our control. In fact, we are able to control only a very small arena in our lives. Beyond control, we must also learn to surrender and dance in harmony with the many crosscurrents of life in which we find ourselves. Watching and learning from the interplay of control and surrender in asana is an important dimension to include in one's practice.\n\nThis insight was brought home to me while swimming in the rapids of a river in California. It was a beautiful summer afternoon and I was sunning on a large rock next to the river and watching some fish swimming. I decided to join them and jumped in the river. I first swam upstream against the swift current. After using up a lot of energy and making little progress, I tired and started swimming downstream, carried by the current. I decided to relax completely, to surrender to current and let it take me. It wasn't long till I was nearly crashed on some rocks. So I started controlling and swimming strongly, but again this was crashing me into the rocks. Soon I discovered what the fish were doing. I found an exhilarating balance of control and surrender, constantly adjusting my efforts on this interface so that I could jet down the river, riding the current and darting around the boulders. I then turned upstream and experimented swimming in different intensities of the current and finding eddies to help me travel back up to my starting point. I spent the afternoon playing on this edge of control and surrender and the lessons learned changed my yoga practice, even my life.\n\nGreat athletes and great dancers seem to glide effortlessly through their movements. We know how much work and effort they must have gone through to reach the place of flowing in effortlessness. To become a great runner, swimmer, dancer, or yogi, we must cross the threshold between the mechanical action of effort to the realm of flow and grace. We must first learn the mechanical movements, then later let go of them. At the level of flow, the body seems to move freely and gracefully by itself, out of its own intelligence. The flow itself dances, swims, or does yoga.\n\nWe often start out in a new physical endeavor with struggle, strain, awkwardness, and tightness\u2014we are fighting to gain and learn control. When we reach a level of mastery and effortless flow, it is no longer control or surrender, but the birth of a new expression born of these two. Flow is an interplay of pushing through and backing off, of holding on and letting go, of upward moving energy and downward moving energy, and of structure and free form. When all of these polarities come into play, they yield a fruit that is beyond any one of them. The word Hatha points to these poles. _Ha_ reminds us of the sun, of structure and control. _Tha_ reminds us to let go, back off, to surrender. How do we attain the balance of the two? It is not attained; rather, it is discovered. If we explain in too much detail about how to attain a balance of control and surrender, it eludes us and becomes only control. If we surrender too much trying to give up control, we are dashed on the rocks. I learned this lesson the hard way in the mountains. I was skiing down a steeper hill than I usually attempted, behind a friend who was an Olympic skier. He suggested I follow him and glean something from his movements. He seemed to float gracefully, effortlessly down the hill, dancing from side to side. I followed him and picked it up, flowing and dancing my way behind him. Then I thought, \"Great, now I know how to do this, I just balance control and surrender!\" But when I started to think and analyze, I had moved out of the flow and back in to the rigidity of control. The next thing I knew I was flying through the air and I landed on my head, my body in a knot. Fortunately, I had done yoga that day and didn't get injured like I might have had I been too stiff or tight. My body said, \"I'm glad that I've been in this position before.\" We can learn about the interplay of control and surrender in asana by experimenting with pushing through and letting go, with tightening and softening, holding poses dynamically and actively, or passively. We can emphasize the control side of the equation by strengthening the lines of energy, actively holding the pose and working nearer our maximum edges. This emphasis will tone and energize the body. Practicing on the surrender side of the equation, we can soften, let go, and let gravity do the work, easing our emphasis on alignment and letting the stretch go deeper into the muscles. Become aware of these polarities and the dance will lead to their marriage and the fruit of joy, flow, and grace.\n\n## **Pranayama\u2014The Mastery of Energy**\n\nThe word _pranayama_ is usually translated as breath control. _Prana_ means \"to breathe forth\" and it also refers to life force or the energy of life. _Yama_ means to restrain or control. The yamas are the restraints and controls in the first limb of Patanjali's yoga and Yama, curiously, is also the name of the god of death. Pranayama is the study of our breath and life force. Yogis have pointed out that, although we feel like separate individuals, we are not as separate as we feel. Our continuous inhalations and exhalations remind us that we are interdependent on and interconnected with all things\u2014with the matrix of life. The sound of the breath itself is considered a sacred mantra of power that is capable of revealing many secrets. Yogis have asserted a direct relationship between a person's breathing potency and his or her life force and personal power.\n\nAt the moment of birth the breath enters our lungs as we separate from our mothers, and the breath's final departure marks our death. Our breathing animates and empowers all of our actions and movements, and reflects our every state of mind and every emotion, yet very few of us observe and study this foundation of life. Hatha yogis have pointed out the importance and value of working with and developing the bioenergetic system. They have shown that the breath not only reflects our mental and emotional states but also can affect them. We unconsciously use breathing in many ways. When we concentrate, we breathe very slowly and quietly, or we stop breathing completely to focus. When we listen to children, or an emotionally charged friend, we are on some level monitoring the quality of their breathing for feedback and information on their mental-emotional state. When we are tense or angry, our breathing pattern changes. If we cut or bruise ourselves, we often clasp the injured place and breathe attentively, making an ujjayi-type sound, to relieve the pain. If a loved one is in pain, we instinctively place our hands on the area and breathe consciously to direct healing energy to the place in need. Sometimes after a stressful situation, we need to \"just breathe\" to recharge or balance ourselves. These are a few examples of our use of prana and energy.\n\nPrana refers to both physical and nonphysical, even psychic, forms of energy. Although the existence of nonphysical energies cannot be conclusively proven, they seem to follow the same rules as physical energies. A mystic might say we are directing mysterious energy psychically when we practice, and a scientist might counter that it is faith or mental energy, but either way, something seems to be happening. Whether you believe in prana or not, pranayama works.\n\nBreathing is both conscious and unconscious. The breath floats on the threshold of the conscious and the unconscious mind. We cannot even think of the breath without influencing it and without it coming back under conscious control. You can easily try this. If you're thinking of your breath now, you are controlling it. If you try to stop controlling it, you can't\u2014it has to just happen by itself. Any attempt to stop controlling it is still control. I once had the opportunity to do some meditation research with a polygraph lie detector. While being trained to use it, I was shown that the most sensitive graph being monitored was the breath. Our slightest emotional tension is immediately reflected in our breath. Yogis discovered that our mental-emotional state and breathing both reflect and affect each other. We can change mental, emotional, and energetic states with the breath. This is the basis of pranayama.\n\nAll asana practice actually involves pranayama practice\u2014whether breath work is done consciously or unconsciously. When the breath is left alone, the asana affects and creates the breathing pattern. It is best to learn about the effects of breathing in poses by experimenting and paying closer attention. Watch the difference in your postures when breathing softly or strongly, actively or passively, when breathing freely, or when using ujjayi breath.\n\nOne of the best ways to access the power of breath is with a pranayama practice. I have found that if students will take enough time, usually a few months of regular practice, to develop mastery of the techniques, and to discover their connection with their breath, the benefits can be lifelong. Once you have accessed your pranic, bioenergetic system, it will always be available to you. There are hundreds of pranayama techniques. The most important are _ujjayi, kapalabhati, bhastrika, alternate bhastrika, anuloma viloma_ , and _sitali_. It is possible to learn a lot on your own and with good books, but it is best to learn these practices, and pranayama in general, directly from a competent teacher.\n\nThere are five different levels or stages in pranayama practice.\n\n  * Learning subtle control and mastery of the lungs and respiratory system. From our first breath at birth, breathing is our constant companion. It is rare to receive any breath instruction, unless as a singer, martial artist, or musician. Control and mastery implies learning to breathe both correctly and incorrectly, getting control over the diaphragm, being able to fill the lungs completely from the bottom up or from the top down, being able to fill the lungs laterally and even individually, and being able to inhale and exhale very slowly, and very evenly.\n  * Strengthening and recharging. The second stage involves learning to increase your breathing capacity and the strength of the respiratory system. The breath can be used to balance and recharge the psychophysical system. Yogis point out that the lungs are the inner sanctum of our bodies. There is but a thin membrane separating our bloodstream from the outside air, so it's a foundational principle of health and wellness to keep our lungs toned and strong.\n  * Changing the mental-emotional state. Pranayama can be used to relax, release tension, build energy, release fear or anxiety, and charge emotional batteries.\n  * Healing. We can learn to direct healing energy within ourselves and to others.\n  * Altered states. Advanced breathing practices can lead to altered, mystical, and visionary states of consciousness. Like any powerful tool, advanced practices require care, attention, and proper guidance.\n\nIn the early days of yoga in America, it was hard to interest people in asana practice. Jogging and other fitness regimes seemed more engaging. But, as people discovered, yoga practice can have far more depth and can be much more interesting and engaging than other fitness regimes. Working with the breath is similar. At first, it can seem boring or passive, but it actually has great depth. Many yogi elders have told me that over the years they found breath work as important, and even more important, than the practice of postures.\n\nThe breath is an entire information feedback system that lives on the interface of the conscious and unconscious, of control and surrender, the physical and nonphysical, fullness and emptiness, birth and death. When you learn to listen to and watch your breath, it is like listening to the waves of the sea. Like hearing the sound of a coming train or waves breaking, you begin to understand the subtle differences in modulation, frequency, and tone. These sounds convey information about what the waves are doing, their strength, how the water is spreading across the sands, and the breakdown of the wave as it crashes on the shore. You can discover and sense the messages and teachings in the sounds and qualities of the breath\u2014the life force ebbing and flowing within us. The breath can be one of our greatest teachers.\n\n## **Using Locks, or Bandhas**\n\nSeveral types of muscular contractions, called _bandhas_ (pronounced buhn duh, and meaning to lock) are used in Hatha yoga, both in pranayama breathing and asana practice. The most important are: the root lock, or _Mula Bandha_ (moo luh, meaning root); the chin lock, or _Jalandhara Bandha_ (juh luhn dah ruh, meaning water pipe); and the stomach lock, or _Uddiyana Bandha_ (oo dee ah nuh, meaning upward).\n\nMula Bandha is done by contracting and holding the anal sphincter muscles while creating a lifting sensation that slightly firms the lower abdominals. It is important also to contract the pubococcygeus muscles at the same time. These so-called PC muscles are easy to identify and control because they are the muscle sets we use to stop the flow of urine. They normally contract in tandem with the anal sphincters. Simply contracting and firmly holding the root sphincters should call all the necessary muscles into play.\n\nSome Hatha yoga lineages advise holding Mula Bandha during the practice of asanas, and of course there are varying opinions. I have experimented and found many benefits to holding this lock during many postures or movements. It strengthens the abdominal muscles, tones the sexual organs, increases heat and concentration, builds upward moving energy, and can protect the lower back. Mula Bandha can be applied during any posture and even used throughout an entire yoga session. I have often found, however, that even when students try to hold Mula Bandha continuously, they in fact are holding it intermittently. When you are trying to hold it, you will notice from time to time that you have let go. Simply begin holding the lock again. You can also practice contracting and releasing Mula Bandha with twenty or thirty repetitions a couple of times a day in order to tone important muscles and the sexual organs. I don't agree with those who say you must always hold the root lock during asana sessions. My good friend and mentor, Swami Venkates, had a great saying: \"Always is always wrong, and never is never right.\" Rather than giving a series of rules and specifying asanas and times to use the lock, I suggest experimenting with bandhas, experiencing their effects, and determining when they are appropriate. With practice, patience, and attention you will learn the secrets of this lock in time.\n\nJalandhara Bandha is activated by pressing the chin into the jugular notch in the collarbone while rolling the tongue back to touch the soft palate. It is used in certain breathing practices, especially on retention, and occasionally in asana.\n\nUddiyana Bandha is a lifting or a firming and contracting of the abdominal muscles. It increases strength and energizes the postures. The lock is best learned from a qualified teacher because one can easily cause incorrect breathing if it is not properly applied. This is because when holding this bandha one may tend to stop using the diaphragm or to use it in a tight or backward-moving manner.\n\nAll three of these locks can be applied simultaneously during retention in pranayama to build strength, to increase heat, and to circulate energy flows. Uddiyana Bandha, augmented by Mula Bandha, strengthens the physical body, the musculature, and the energy body. This strengthening effect can be demonstrated with muscle testing, and a well known similar principle in martial arts is to hold the solar plexus area, called the _hara_ point, firmly. Using bandhas during practice helps keep these muscles toned and activated so they function properly when needed by the body.\n\n## **Traction, Torque, and Leverage**\n\nOne of the wonderful things about yoga practice is that it can be done almost anywhere. Many poses can be accomplished in only the space the body occupies. Yoga requires little or no equipment and the body itself becomes the player, the instrument, and the music. After you are able to hold an asana comfortably with good alignment, you can start experimenting with using traction, torque, and leverage. Leverage can be created against external supports, such as the floor or a wall, or generated from within internal alignments of muscle and bone. Using one part of your body to push on another part combines internal and external leverages.\n\nUse leverage and traction to create internal torque and precise articulations of joints and muscles. These biomechanics build strength, create internal opening, and relieve compression. For example, in the Plank pose, Downward Dog, or Headstand, you can press against the floor to create more lift in the spine. You can also press your legs against each other to strengthen muscles and create an opening in the sacral area that releases back tension.\n\nBecoming aware of and learning to use _isometric_ and _isotonic_ tensions is also very helpful. Isometric tension pushes against a fixed resistance so that the muscle's length remains the same. Pushing the palms together against each other creates isometric pressure. You can also use isometric pressures to learn how to press different inner energy planes into external objects like the floor or wall. For example, you can press an energy line up the inner side of your legs by pressing down through the arches of your feet to the floor. Similarly, you can create a line of energy up the outer edges of your leg by pressing the outer edges of your feet into the floor. To experience how this works, try holding a ledge, table, or sink with your hands, and then push, pull, or lean away to experiment with some isometric levers.\n\nIn isotonic movements, resistance remains constant while muscle length changes. Push-ups, chin-ups, and pull-ups are isotonic exercises\u2014they use one's body weight as the resistance. Extend your arms out to the side and raise them slowly over your head while resisting with opposing muscles in the arms and side body\u2014this is an isotonic movement flow. Graceful flowing movement often requires working with internally created resistance. Isotonic pressure generates different levels of intensity with your own internal muscular resistance. Work with and against your own muscular forces to build strength, intensity, and core stability.\n\nWhen you begin using and experimenting with levers and internal forces, your body will communicate with you and guide you from within. Everyone has experienced this to some degree. When you feel tightness or blocked energy, you often instinctively start moving opposing muscles to gain leverage, responding to inner signals until the block or pinch is released. I'm sure you can remember a time when your neck or shoulders were tight or locked, and you instinctively tightened your neck and dropped your head and shoulders while creating an internal resistance to work against to create opening. Or you clasped your hands together and pushed and pulled to create a needed effect guided from within until you released the energy and tension. Learning to feel and manipulate internal nerves, joints, and musculoskeletal dynamic tensions and relationships is not something that can easily be taught, but realizing that this is possible will direct your attention and makes it more easily achieved. You are already doing this to some extent and you can expand and build upon this process in your yoga practice. You can become proficient at internal skeletal and nerve adjustment and self-healing.\n\nYou can also learn to use levers by experimenting with different pressures and resistances in postures. In different asanas try pressing, lifting, extending, tensing, and relaxing different body parts in different combinations. For example, come only halfway into your usual seated Forward Fold. Then try pressing the legs and back of the knees into the floor, using that press to help lift the chest. Grab your ankles with the hands and push with the feet while pulling with the hands to further open the spine. At the same time you can create more internal leverage and opening by dropping the chin and lifting the back of the head and neck. Taken together, all of these should feel good and create a lengthening and release of tightness along the spinal column. Try this right now, get the feel for this process, and connect with your internal guidance system. There are literally hundreds of ways to use levers and internal resistances. As you progress, learning to manipulate your muscles and joints with internal leverages and torques is essential to gaining deeper levels of efficacy in yoga practice. Once again, your own body will teach you many ways to use these internal dynamics when you simply begin to watch and experiment.\n\n## **The Nature of Balance**\n\nThere is an ancient, often quoted, definition of yoga: _Samatvam yoga uchyate_ , or \"Yoga is balance.\" Many students of yoga seek to find physical, mental, and spiritual harmony and balance in their lives. But it is important to see that balance is not a static place to reach; it is a constantly moving equilibrium of relationships. This insight not only applies to asana practice but to all areas of life. Our own personal balance will not be found in systematized or formulated modes of living and being, but in developing a sensitive awareness that responds and adjusts to the shifting moment. We can learn and experience the dynamic nature of balance in any balancing posture. Try a pose such as the Tree, in which you balance on one foot. No matter how still and statue-like you become, you will notice that you are continually adjusting and reacting in the moment. We must sensitively listen, feel, and respond. Harmony, in the same way, implies attuning, listening within and without, mutual interaction, and working in concert with oneself and others.\n\nInstead of seeking to attain balance, we are better directed to learn the art of balancing. Balancing involves correcting errors and then in turn correcting any overcorrection of error. When you start moving or falling too far in one direction, in asana or in life, exert a bit to the other pole. Refining this ability, you become more stable, and the movements and adjustments become more subtle. To an external observer you may appear to be still or \"in balance,\" but from the inside you see there is continual adjustment within this stability. This is another form of movement in stillness and stillness in movement. Maintaining balance and equilibrium is one of the precious goals in yoga. Our busy, modern lives cause many of us to seek to reestablish wholeness through exercise, right eating, and inner work. It is all too easy to overfill our days with constant input and activity\u2014all too rarely taking the time to find balance present in the world around us. Both ancient and modern wisdom point out that nature is a dynamic state of balance. Where can we better learn about balance and harmony than from close communion and connection with nature? Sometimes it takes going into the balance of nature to find the nature of balance.\n\n## **Advancing in Yoga**\n\nThe insights and principles outlined here are offered to assist you in refining your ability to see and listen inwardly and outwardly, on deeper and subtler levels, as you progress in your yogic journey. This awareness is more important than merely attaining more and more exotic postures. Think of your yoga practice as learning, gathering, and developing the tools for a lifetime practice of self-therapy, self-healing, and keeping your body in balance\u2014remembering that balance is not a fixed place at which you arrive, but a constant adjustment process to the circumstances of each moment.\n\nAdvancing in yoga is more related to refining than to attaining. If you want to know if you are advancing in yoga, ask yourself these questions: Am I gaining greater understanding of my body? Am I learning how to heal myself? Am I learning subtler and different ways of using the poses and how each asana affects the body to produce different results? Am I gaining an understanding of the energy fields in the body and how these energies flow? Am I beginning to get some control of my own autonomic nervous system and some of the unconscious processes of the body? Am I less rigid in my beliefs and less fixed in particular systems and structures? Am I alive and awake in my practice, constantly questioning and willing to vacate my position\u2014figuratively and actually? Am I questioning, not only of others but of myself? Is my mind becoming more open, compassionate, more peaceful? Growing in these perceptions and capacities provides the necessary ingredients for the evolutionary process of alchemical transformation into radiant health, high consciousness, and wisdom.\n\n#\n\nYoga incorporates a marvelous body of knowledge, practices, and techniques. For any individual, some of these practices can be incredibly effective, others must be undertaken with great care, and still others should perhaps be cast aside. A particular asana or movement that benefits one person greatly may or may not be as suited for another. The task in practicing yoga is to learn various forms and modes of the practice and then apply them effectively and sensitively for ourselves in order to keep our psycho-physical-spiritual organism operating at the best levels for our particular body type, the activities we engage in, and the lifestyle we love. That relationship between the individual and lifestyle changes and evolves through the different cycles, phases, and stages of life, through the different seasons of the year, and even through the activities of each day. We need to relearn to dance life's dance with wholeness, wellness, clarity, insight, and love\u2014growing our practice so that it adds more dimensions and levels of attunement, awareness, and understanding to life. One of the meanings of being _multidimensional_ is learning to see and understand the appropriate uses of the many different dimensions of all things.\n\n## **Flow Yoga**\n\nFlow yoga, also called _Vinyasa Flow_ , has become one of the most popular forms of Hatha practice in the world today, so it is important to examine some of the meanings and implications of flow. When we think of _flow_ , the first thing that comes to mind is the flowing quality of water. Most people tend to think of flow in terms of adjusting and being pliable and flexible with circumstances and to the moment, like water adjusting as it goes down a steep canyon. But less immediately obvious is the fact that water needs something to flow through or upon. You cannot have the flow of liquid without the firm, supportive structure through which it flows. The interaction between the hardness of structure and the fluidity of liquid creates flow. Inherent in flow, and the lessons we may glean from it, are also the lessons of using structure and form. The interplay of structure, rigidity, and form with formlessness make up the movement of life.\n\nFlow yoga usually implies an asana practice in which the movements link fluidly together in a graceful manner with a meditative awareness and attention to breathing. Flow yoga can be practiced in a vigorous, dynamic, and stimulating manner and also as a soft, gentle, restorative practice. Flow is sometimes misinterpreted to mean keeping up continuous movement without holding poses. Constant movement may be used when needed and desired, but individual asanas may also be held for long periods of time in a flowing practice. The dynamic flow of breath and energy continues uninterrupted during the external stillness of the pose, much like peaceful but powerful eddies of the strong river. Flow yoga implies a practice with a theme or purpose with poses linked or associated together. Many possible themes can guide the practice\u2014relaxation, recharging, strength building, endurance, structural alignment, various therapies, focusing on specific bodily areas, enjoyment, or a complete practice, to name a few. Flow yoga uses proper body alignment, attunement with breath, focused attention, and development of a balance of strength, flexibility, and endurance.\n\nBeing in the flow also informs us to stay fresh and alive, like a river, and to stay in touch and present with the flowing changes of the moment in our practice and in our life. The meaning of Flow yoga also implies learning to practice and to \"get into the flow\" with what is appropriate for our own body in the moment. Most of us live inactive and overly sedentary lives, and we don't move many of our muscle sets and joints. A good, well-balanced yoga practice will stretch every muscle, move every joint, and work all ten psychophysical systems in the body to build strength, flexibility, endurance, firmness, softness, upward moving energy, and downward moving energy, while bringing a balance between the feminine and masculine within each of us.\n\nThe _Flow Series_ yoga practice contains all seven classes of asana discussed later in this chapter. This series is designed as a complete, core yoga practice that can be used regularly. It incorporates a full complement of postures that are accessible to most students and the sequence incorporates the most important asanas and their counterposes. It is designed to build strength, flexibility, and endurance quickly and to provide a well-balanced yoga practice.\n\nWe have already discussed creating a balance and interplay between what we called inner-directed practices and outer-directed practices. Outer-directed forms rely more heavily on established sequences and structures. Inner-directed practices are more intuitive and concentrate more directly on listening and responding to the needs and impulses of the body. Both types are useful and have their strengths and benefits. A well-balanced practice draws from inner- and outer-directed approaches. As we advance in yoga, we learn to use these modalities more appropriately to serve well-being and wholeness. We must also remember that part of the flow is the ebb. Off time, rest, and even periods of nonpractice can be an essential part of balance, long-term flow, and learning.\n\n## **Intuitive Flow Yoga**\n\nA powerful form of healing and balancing yoga practice is what I call _Intuitive Flow yoga_. Intuitive Flow is strongly guided and directed from within. In this form we try to get keenly in tune with the sensations and messages coming somatically from the body and let those feelings and the body's inner intelligence guide and direct our movements. It is easier to grasp this concept by seeing that we all have bodily experiences that happen naturally and that seem similar to this description. For example, when you yawn and stretch, usually your movements are directed by inner feelings and impulses. Try it right now: Simply create a yawn and stretch with your arms and let the inner sensations guide how you tense, move, and stretch. It is not hard to let inner bodily feeling create and guide your movements. For another example, recall an occasion when you have had slightly cramped muscles or pinched nerves. When this happened, you probably spontaneously tensed, stretched, and moved, or even contorted, in an unpredictable manner, guided from within, until you felt what was needed to get back into alignment. These are examples of Intuitive Flow. In this yoga form, you create and emphasize these qualities until they guide your practice.\n\nIntuitive Flow is more _feeling_ guided than it is _thinking_ guided\u2014it does not use a lot of logic. For example, the poses and movements may not follow the usual principles of alignment and may not necessarily be balanced on each side. When you truly follow the body's inner guidance system, you cannot really predict how the movements will flow. They may not repeat on the other side of the body or they may be completely different by the time the flow gets to that side. That means that you cannot really do this form incorrectly. You create and move with the flow that the body's inner guidance system gives to your practice. The common design principle that form follows function can be useful here. The form of the posture is secondary to the functionality you want to create with the asana. Your focus is on the feelings and effects of the pose instead of the form and alignment of the pose. This form of practice has led to the discovery or birth of many poses.\n\nTo practice Intuitive Flow, start with inner quiet, emptiness, and inner attunement. Then let the needs and messages of the body unfold your practice. Usually this form is done slowly, with closed eyes, but even here, let the flow decide. You can get the process going by moving slowly, feeling any tight areas, and then letting the yawn- or stretch-like feeling arise and then guide the movements. Develop what I call a _healing feeling_ , then focus on it, and follow where it leads. With practice, your ability to accomplish this will improve, and the practice will get better and more effective as you refine the process. Intermediate students who have a good feel for the asanas and who are in touch with inner energy flows will have the best results with this yoga form. It comes quite naturally. I use this form regularly and have taught it to many students who quickly find great value and wonderful results in healing, balance, and well-being.\n\nOne morning after an Intuitive Flow session, I took some notes that can be used as an example to understand the technique and help develop this type of practice. Here is what one morning flow was like for me: I started sitting cross-legged on the floor and noticed tightness in my back and shoulders. I clasped my hands and stretched them overhead. After holding the extension for awhile, energy began to flow through my arms and shoulders, but my back was still tight. I slowly leaned and curved my body to the left, held it, and then leaned to the right. Then I began to feel my body beginning to round and twist to one side and my arms followed until I was sitting in a somewhat rounded twist that released all the tension in my back. In a normal practice or class I would correct the alignment of this pose, but in this moment it was the perfect movement to get a release. Holding the position for awhile, I began to tune into some of the subtleties of the twist and the internal levers I was using. I pressed my knee into the ground, rounded my spine into the twist to increase the leverage along with the feeling of well-being and tension release. I continued to experiment with adjusting the pose to increase the energy flow and feeling of release, and ultimately discovered a new variation of the sitting twist in the process. After twisting, my legs seemed to want to extend into a long forward bend. I went into a Forward Fold and held it dynamically, but soon realized the \"long\" part of the urge was in my mind because my body seemed to want to move. I sat up and did a sitting twist with legs extended. This led to a Lunge pose and then into forward splits on one side. I ended up doing a sequence of movements on the left, followed by a similar but differing process on the right. So far I had been practicing about twenty minutes and I felt energized with a release of all the tensions I had started with. The process continued for another half hour and included some dynamic movements and long holding of certain positions.\n\nIntuitive Flow incorporates and uses, but is also free from, tradition. If you are limited by a specific idea or definition of yoga, or a certain manner of practice and posture, creative discovery and new possibility are limited. Intuitive Flow is about listening your way into the practice instead of thinking your way in.\n\n## **Structural Integrity and Structural Archetypes**\n\nDeveloping an understanding of the concept of _structural integrity_ will help guide your practice and your Intuitive Flow. In terms of yoga practice, structural integrity implies a movement or posture of the body that has strengthening, healing, and balancing effects and does not exceed the body's limits of stress or torque.\n\nAs you learn to read the subtle signals from muscles, joints, ligaments, and nerves, you become more conversant with the information systems in your body. Learning to use these inner information systems is part of becoming guided from within in your movements. It will give feedback and warning signals, so you will usually know before overexerting, overstretching, or overtorquing. I used the word _usually_ to point out that no system is 100 percent reliable.\n\nAs our art and science of asana practice grow, develop, and are refined, the practice moves from an imitation of the classical poses from the past, or learned from others, into the fresh movement of discovery of _structural archetypes_ in our body. A structural archetype is a naturally occurring, beneficial movement or position in the architecture of the body. These movements and positions are dynamically therapeutic and beneficial when properly executed.\n\nAttunement to structural integrity and structural archetypes has probably been the genesis of most asanas in practice today. You can discover these movements in your own practice by attuning and listening within. You can grow and refine your ability to feel and follow the energies of healing and well-being in your own body. Then begin to adjust your poses by tuning in to the structural integrity of the posture or movement you are using. When experimenting with this integrity of action in your body, you will naturally come upon many beneficial asanas and movements. Generally, it is better to first learn what structural integrity and balance feel like in the body from proper instruction and practice before experimenting and improvising.\n\n## **Active and Passive Holding**\n\nDynamic holding of asanas is an important mode of practice. This mode can be used in most postures and provides many unique benefits in a short period of time; thus, it is an important mode of practice in which to become proficient. Dynamic holding implies executing the asana actively in a way that, simultaneously and harmoniously, activates and sends energy through as many nerve circuits and muscle sets as possible while keeping attention expansive, all-inclusive, and in touch with all of these areas. Practiced in this manner, even simple poses like the Tree or Standing Forward Fold can become extraordinarily useful and effective. A simple pose can become more healing, energizing, toning, and enlivening while bringing many other benefits to the psychophysical organism. For example, _Paschimottanasana_ , the Seated Forward Fold (sitting on the floor, legs extended, and folding forward over your legs), can be done passively or actively. To hold this pose actively, depending on your abilities, you might extend energy through the legs, pull the toes back, press the backs of the knees to the floor, lift the chest, drop the shoulders, extend the neck, and try to activate as many muscle sets as possible while holding the pose.\n\nPassive holding, on the other hand, uses the minimum amount of energy and intention necessary to maintain an effective position or variation of a posture. Passive holding implies allowing the body's natural internal spring tensions, circulatory energies, and kinesiological structures of the asana, to create the effects of the pose. For example, in the Seated Forward Fold, you would sit and bend forward, folding your torso in half at the hips. In a passive variation you might relax your legs, possibly letting the knees bend while letting gravity and the structure of the pose do the work and give the benefits. Holding postures passively gives unique, beneficial effects, and results not obtainable with other manners of practice. Even the Shoulderstand and Headstand have dynamic and passive variations with differing effects.\n\nRather than simply being opposite ways of holding poses, active and passive holding can be applied in a range of possible combinations at different levels. You can hold some muscle sets in a given pose actively while holding others passively. In our example of the Seated Forward Fold, you could dynamically work your arms and legs, pressing the knees down and lifting your chest while relaxing your lumbar in order to create space between the lumbar vertebrae.\n\nYou can learn to use passive relaxation and dynamic tensions of muscles and joints in different ways for different effects. Different amounts of energy can be moved through the muscles to get different openings and effects. Learning to listen in the postures, while experimenting with different combinations of activity and passivity, will greatly expand your ability to tune poses to desired needs and effects. It is better to learn to use this insight in your own body rather than to be given specific applications in certain postures. There is no one way to hold a pose and many shades of grey exist between active and passive.\n\n## **Long Holding**\n\nSome beneficial effects in poses are only obtained by holding a posture for a long period of time. The amount of time that defines a long hold is relative and subjective, depending on the difficulty of the posture and the ability of the practitioner. A long hold can be from thirty seconds or a minute to several minutes. Holding asanas for longer periods of time can allow deeper openings, releases of deeply held stress or tension, and release of holding patterns in the musculature that lead to better alignment of muscles, bones, and nerves.\n\nLong holding allows you to penetrate into deeper and subtler areas of the body, to tune into more subtle levels of the dynamic of the pose, and to learn to use torque, leverage, energy flows, and openings that occur. How long to hold is directed by tuning into the effect and the release you are receiving as well as to the qualities of energy and other messages from the body that will guide the movements needed to strengthen, heal, or balance a given structure or complex of structures. If you only practice with constant movement and short holding, you cannot take advantage of the unique benefits of long holds. Many principles in other chapters and particularly in the chapter on pain and injury offer guidance in the application of long holding.\n\n## **Odd-Day Practice**\n\nMost people have a favored side in sports or habitual movements; that side is stronger, more flexible, and more focused. It is easy to develop the habit of practicing on the better side first and holding poses on that side for longer periods. This is because we gravitate toward the things we excel at. A good trick to counterbalance this tendency is to practice on the weaker or tighter side first.\n\nYou might find, for instance, that a forward bending, twisting, or balancing pose is much better on your right side than on your left. If you do your strong side first, you have an unconscious tendency to try forcing the weak side to the same level and may overly push yourself. You might get frustrated when doing your weak or tight side after the strong, flexible side and tend to spend less time with it. If you do the weaker side first, however, it is easier to devote more energy to it. Moreover, if you do the weak side first, you can always do it again after doing the strong side, to give the weak side extra attention to help bring it into balance sooner. A tool many yogis have found useful is to focus on their difficult side, their _odd_ side, on odd-numbered days of the week.\n\n## **Car Yoga**\n\nA wonderful attribute of yoga is that many elements of the practice can be applied in many unexpected places. Friends may think us foolish or fanatical when we do yoga poses in a car, but some postures can be very beneficial, especially on long drives. In the early seventies I toured the USA to give yoga lectures and demonstrations. A friend and I drove thousands of miles in a station wagon and I adapted a fairly complete practice that could be done in the back of the car while he drove. I am sure many other yogis have done similar things. I also created some movements to use while driving myself that keep my spine from cramping and tightening.\n\nYou can do the same. One of the most useful movements while driving is a snaking practice. Use your grip on the steering wheel along with a gentle press of the heels for support and snake your spine around by rocking your pelvis forward and backward, side to side, and in clockwise and counterclockwise circles. As you do this, let these motions translate up and down the entire spine. A few minutes of this practice lubricates and hydrates the spinal disks and releases compression and tension. Similarly, twist your pelvis from side to side a few times and then roll your shoulders in circles. These movements can transform a road trip from a body-stressing event of spinal compression, to a body-balancing yoga session. Obviously you must be careful and attentive and should not do anything that compromises your driving abilities.\n\n## **The Neck and Lumbar**\n\nThe neck, or cervical spine, is one of the most mobile areas of the body. We constantly turn and move our heads around, and hence the neck is one of the first areas to show wrinkling and signs of aging. Since all nerves from the brain to the lower body pass through the neck, it has been referred to as the \"Grand Central Station\" of nerve trunks. This complex circuitry and intense flow of information and energy through the neck make it one of the body's major areas for tension and pain\u2014hence the expression \"pain in the neck.\" We have been animals for far longer than we have been _Homo sapiens_ and we have a deep, primal drive to protect our necks\u2014the area most vulnerable to attack by predators. When we are fearful, we instinctively drop the head toward the collarbone, protecting the neck with the jaw. We also round our torso forward to protect our internal organs. People who are emotionally fearful or protective often have the effects of this demeanor internalized in the body, with a rounded, hunched posture and a closed chest area. You can try an experiment now by stooping your posture, sinking your chest in, and dropping your head a bit. Sit or stand that way a few moments and notice the effects it has on your mental and emotional state. Now do the opposite. Sit tall, lift and open your chest, and hold your head high. Feel the difference? For another experiment, tighten your neck a little bit, slightly tense your jaw, and just hold that awhile. Feel the tension's effect on your mind and emotions, almost like a state of anger. We all have some amounts of stored tension in the body. If it is chronic we probably will not feel it until it is released with yoga or body work. Doing the Shoulderstand helps free the cervical spine and release neck tension; backbends help open the chest, improve posture, and strengthen the mental-emotional body.\n\nDuring yoga practice you can learn to break the habit of holding tension in the neck area. By paying attention to the cervical spine during various poses, you will notice when you unnecessarily tense the neck; then you can break that pattern. When learning to let energy flow through the cervical spine and develop neck freedom and awareness during asana practice, you will naturally carry the experience over into your day.\n\nThe cervical and lumbar spine areas tend to reflect and affect each other. Tension in the lumbar can translate up the spine into the neck, and vice versa. The lumbar is another major nerve trunk area and it has the additional burdens of supporting the torso, absorbing the shocks of movement, and supporting any loads we carry. Proper movement in forward bends, backbends, and twists is the key to keeping the lumbar healthy, as is developing an understanding of the dynamics of this area and the relationship of the hamstrings, psoas, and quadriceps.\n\n## **The Psoas, Quadriceps, and Hamstrings**\n\nThe psoas, quadriceps, and hamstrings are key muscle groups and it is very important to learn about their relationship to spinal health and balance. When these muscles are overly tightened, they can cause back pain and immobility. The effects these muscles have on the pelvis also reflect up the spine into the thoracic and the cervical areas.\n\nMost people are not even aware of the existence of their psoas muscles because they are rarely discussed and are not visible or tangible where they reside inside the torso and pelvis. The psoas are two very strong muscles that attach to the side and toward the front of the twelfth thoracic vertebra and all of the lumbar vertebra. From there they travel down through the pelvis to attach to the top of the femur, or thighbone. Because the psoas lift the legs, flex the spine, and rotate the hips, they are involved in nearly every asana. Many of us, especially athletic and active people, have very tight and shortened psoas and hamstrings, because these muscles are constantly used to walk, run, dance, and lift. Tight psoas muscles can pull on and cause pressure in the lower spine. The hamstrings connect from the back of the knee to the sit bones. The quadriceps are the large four-part extensor muscles at the front, or top, of the thighs. The quads work in concert with the hamstrings and psoas to move the legs and mobilize the hips.\n\nWhen you bend forward, the limiting factor is usually inflexible hamstrings. If you sit or stand and start folding in half from the hips, you are only able to keep your back straight as long as the hamstrings have the flexibility to lengthen. As soon as the hamstrings are taut, you can only continue forward by bending and rounding the spine. If you pull downward and forward too aggressively, the give will usually have to come from the posterior spinal joints, which can undesirably weaken ligaments. This is why it is important to slowly stretch out and lengthen the hamstrings over a period of time. People who have overly shortened hamstrings are likely to stress the posterior spine every time they bend forward or pick something up. This is one of the common causes or aggravators of low back pain. Loosening the hamstrings is part of the formula for relieving back pain, as long as the forward bends are done without aggravating the posterior spine. Flexible hamstrings are crucial to mobility; hence the expression \"hamstrung\" is used to denote hindered efficiency and frustration.\n\nSimilar to the way hamstrings limit forward flexion, when you bend backward the limiting factors are usually tight quadriceps and psoas. When you start bending backward, the ability to tuck the tailbone, rotate the pelvis back, lift the chest, and take the foundation of the back extension down into the hips and legs will be limited by tight or shortened quads and psoas. These muscles must lengthen to allow the pelvis, chest, and spine to lift and extend backward. Stretching and lengthening these muscle groups can have amazing, beneficial effects on hip and spinal mobility and help relieve and prevent low back pain. I've seen this time and again with students and have experienced great benefit myself through keeping these muscles long and flexible by stretching them on a regular basis. Poses like the Lunge, Reclining Warrior, Upward Dog, and even simple backbends can be used to bring flexibility to these muscle groups. You may have enough information here to learn properly to work with and balance these muscle groups yourself, but if you are not clear about it, please consult a knowledgeable instructor.\n\n## **Seven Classes of Asana**\n\nAt least seven types of asanas can be delineated. A complete and balanced practice will contain some form of all seven. These types can overlap each other, and many asanas contain elements of more than one type. Increasing your awareness of the different types and key principles of each type will help you to envision and design your personal practice.\n\n### **Moving Sequences**\n\nA philosopher once said, \"Mobility is nobility.\" All life is movement and in movement there is great joy. While one of yoga's unique principles involves coming into a specific posture, and holding it without movement to get specific benefits and effects, Hatha yoga also contains moving sequences. The most well known are the various Sun Salutations. Many other moving sequences are made possible by linking different poses in Headstand and Shoulderstand cycles and in various standing series. Moving sequences give the most opportunity for cardiovascular work and they can teach us to flow gracefully and bring dance-like elements to our practice.\n\nI first learned the joy of movement through swimming and experiencing the delight of gliding weightlessly through water. Later I found the same feeling in yoga, the pleasure of moving Sun Salutations, Headstand series, and Flow yoga. Many elder yogis have advised that to maintain our mobility throughout life, we must keep moving\u2014\"Use it or lose it.\" I've observed native peoples all over the world staying mobile into old age by keeping themselves moving no matter what the challenges. Movement is the basis of life and an important element to consider and to include in our practice.\n\n### **Standing Poses**\n\nStanding poses develop strength, grounding, and rootedness. They strengthen and tone the whole body, and over a period of time they prepare us for more difficult movements. Standing postures can provide a full range of movements and stretches that can give a complete workout. They can be practiced at the beginning, middle, or end of a session. They strengthen the nerves to the legs and teach the ability to keep attention over the entire body. They teach concentration and focus and bring awareness of the building blocks of geometry and bodily architecture.\n\nIn any asana, and especially in standing poses, it is good to build a good and properly aligned foundation from the base of the pose\u2014from the ground up. Standing poses are good for warming up, building strength, learning symmetry and alignment, and discovering imbalances in the body.\n\n### **Balancing Poses**\n\nBalancing poses teach poise and equilibrium. The body finds balance through cues from the inner ear, visually, and from receptor sites located in the muscular and nervous systems. One of the great lessons balancing poses demonstrate is that balance is not a state or place to arrive at, but involves constant attunement, correction, and adjustment to changing conditions of the moment.\n\nIt is easier to maintain balance than to regain it once lost. When practicing balance poses, we need to move slowly into deeper levels of the posture. Don't proceed faster than your ability to maintain stability. Your stability will gauge how far and how fast to move into the pose\u2014another lesson also applicable to life.\n\n### **Backbends**\n\nBackbends warrant special attention and explanation. They are, in a sense, the most _unnatural_ positions for the body. By unnatural, I mean that we only rarely bend backward in our normal, daily movements. Our bodies are mostly oriented in various degrees of forward bending. Sitting, walking, lifting, running, biking, and the majority of our movements are essentially forward bends. The only backward stretch many people receive is if and when they lie on their stomachs propped up on elbows to read. For other primates, swinging through the trees gives a regular interplay of forward and backward movements that help maintain spinal balance. Living without back extensions is a major contributing factor in back pain, stooped shoulders, poor posture, and a host of other spinal problems.\n\nAfter birth we slowly grow and mature from the rounded child's positions of creeping and crawling to the upright, erect postures of the adult human\u2014the only animal that walks upright. In this sense, backbends have been called \"evolutionary\" and \"farthest from the womb.\" As we age, without the benefits of yoga, we slowly round and hunch forward and lose our ability to maintain an upright posture. Backbends, in a complete yoga practice, can prevent and reverse this process. Because we are not accustomed to bending backward in our usual daily movements, backbends, especially the deeper variations, require special care and awareness to prevent injury. Backbends have powerful, anti-aging effects. They help counter the negative effects of gravity. They stimulate the endocrine system, keep the spine pliable and balanced, and maintain good flows of nerve energy through the spinal column.\n\nBackbends require the most attention and awareness in asana practice, so I would like to present some key points for attention. When backbending, keep in mind the following important principles:\n\n  * Always be fully warmed up before going into deeper backbend poses.\n  * Stay attentive and tuned into what you are doing and feeling. Backbending can distract you by altering consciousness, and you also can't easily see what you are doing.\n  * It is very effective and helpful to stretch the quadriceps and psoas muscles before backbends.\n  * Maintain a strong, well-placed foundation with the legs\u2014or with the arms in inverted backbends.\n  * Keep the feet and legs as parallel as possible.\n  * Tuck your tailbone to help prevent overextending the sacrum and lumbar joints.\n  * Many people find using Mula Bandha, or contracting and holding the anal sphincter firmly, protective of the spine and helpful in back extensions.\n  * Bend evenly along the spine. Keep the chest lifted, letting the upper body take more of the bend than the lumbar area.\n  * Keep a gentle to moderate energy flow, or lines of energy, into the legs.\n  * Slowly progress from simpler backbends to the deeper variations.\n  * Don't overextend the neck. Avoid the tendency to lead with the head and bend it as far back as possible.\n  * Inverted backbends, such as backbending from Headstand or Elbow Balance, can be easier on the spine. The same is true for supported backbends over a ball, bolster, or the arm of a couch and for backbends from the Lunge pose. They keep weight and compression out of the spine.\n  * Come out of the poses slowly and attentively.\n  * Always remember to rebalance the spine after backbends by easing into forward bends and twists. The body's spring tensions will reset to the normal balance of forward bends.\n\n### **Forward Bends**\n\nForward bends relax and stretch the muscles, soothe the nervous system, and tend to lower blood pressure. They relieve muscle cramps or tightness accumulated throughout the day or in other poses and improve posture and body alignment. Forward bends may be practiced at almost any time during a session. Most often the limiting factor in forward bends is tight hamstring muscles. Spinal health and balance require flexible hamstrings. The relationship of these muscles and the spine is described below. Leg muscles are built up and tightened by nearly all physical activity such as walking, hiking, dancing, and biking. It is important to include enough forward bends in your practice to counteract tightness in the legs and back and to regain and maintain flexibility.\n\nGive yourself a long period of time to lengthen the hamstring muscles if they are very tight. Think in terms of many months, or even a year or two, to lengthen these muscles, depending on your age and relative tightness. Be careful to take the forward stretch in the muscles\u2014not by overly pulling and flexing into the spinal joints. Make sure you do not pull your shoulders up toward your ears, shortening and tensing the neck. Holding the pose dynamically for a time and then relaxing more and holding it passively for awhile usually brings faster results. By including some simple forward bends, such as the Standing, Hanging Forward Fold, a few times during the day, you can accelerate regaining flexibility and get the benefits of these invaluable postures.\n\n### **Twists**\n\nSpinal twists relieve pressures on the spinal nerves, align the vertebrae, and lengthen the spine. They are used to balance the spine after backbends and after intense forward bending. Twisting poses can be done near the beginning of sessions, as well as toward the end of sessions, to release any residual tension or compression. It is important to keep the spine straight during twisting to ensure the correct effects. Rounding the spine while twisting can undesirably concentrate the effects of the twist into one or two vertebrae. It is usually best to lift the chest and sit straight or keep the spine straight during the pose. Twists can release and prevent nerve impingement and improve the flow of energy to the internal organs and legs. Twisting postures should feel good and bring sensations of releasing tension and pressure and a realignment of the spine.\n\n### **Inversions**\n\nInverted postures such as Headstand, Shoulderstand, Handstand, and even Downward Dog are tonics for circulation. They tone the whole body, counter the effects of gravity, and balance the endocrine system. The Headstand, called the king of asanas, stimulates the pituitary and pineal glands and increases blood pressure. The Shoulderstand, called the queen of asanas, complements the Headstand and lowers blood pressure, balances the thyroid, and is considered the great tension-relieving posture. Inversions drain stagnant blood from the extremities, tone the internal organs, improve complexion and eyesight, and have many beneficial effects on the mental-emotional system.\n\nIf you cannot do the Headstand, the Shoulderstand will give most of the same benefits. If you are unable to do the Shoulderstand, you can get many of the benefits by placing your legs up the wall or even by holding the Downward Dog pose. Inversions can be practiced near the beginning of a session, in the middle, or at the end, to balance and restore energy.\n\n#\n\nWellness, healing, relief from pain, and prevention of injury are primary motivations for many people to practice yoga. The long, lean muscles developed through asana practice are less prone to injury, use energy more efficiently, and heal faster. But even experienced yogis may overreach themselves attempting new poses, and it is not unusual for yoga students and teachers to become disheartened if they or others get injured from practice. In my early teaching days, I sometimes got discouraged when people would come to class feeling great and then pull something doing a pose. I would think, \"Oh my god, maybe this person shouldn't be doing this yoga. Maybe he or she was better off before.\" Then I started observing more people and found that those who don't practice yoga had just as many, if not more, problems and injuries. They might hurt their back just by picking up a shopping bag, by sleeping in the wrong position, or by the way they carry their purse or child. Many things may cause the body to go out of balance, even to a point of injury. However, yoga practitioners who practice regularly and for a long period of time learn how to heal their own injuries and, more important, how to prevent them.\n\nOur bodies always change, and go through many different cycles, strengthening, weakening and, as we have discussed, constantly changing internal muscular spring tensions in response to changes in our activity, inactivity, and lifestyle. Over time we can learn to develop and tune our yoga practices to create balance and wellness through the many phases of our multifaceted lifestyles.\n\nMany people think they are not suited for yoga practice because they have stiffness, weakness, or particular physical problems. Back and joint problems run in my family. Though I was never naturally athletic, I was drawn to swimming and worked hard at conditioning myself. When I was about eleven, I started learning to swim in a large pool at the high school near our house. I loved it, so I went out for the swimming team when I reached high school. During tryouts, I barely made it across the pool and had to talk the coach into letting me on the team. I was always last and the older kids on the team would hold me under the water till I thought I would nearly drown. Somehow my tenacity paid off and by the time I graduated, I had won several medals in swimming. When I first started yoga, it was the mysticism, the philosophy, and spirituality that drew me. I had no idea about physical components of yoga, and when I heard about them, I was not only surprised, but thought it absurd that a workout could have anything to do with spirituality. I now feel quite fortunate that I encountered yogis who included physical practice in their definition of spiritual inquiry and growth.\n\nWhen I started Hatha yoga, I was quite stiff, couldn't touch my toes, and already had some low back trouble. Many poses seemed excruciating and I struggled at them. Sometimes I pulled muscles or pinched nerves and I had to learn to work with and through those problems. My brother became interested in the physical aspects of yoga and started practice too, but every time he experienced some joint pain or ran into some difficulties he would get very discouraged, say he was not athletic, and want to quit. I tried to inspire him with my stories but he eventually gave up. His back pains, immobility, and body problems grew worse. Now I know that people will potentially have more injuries and more problems from _not_ doing yoga than from doing it. No one wants pain or injury, but we should not let fear of it stop us from feeling the greater health yoga can bring.\n\nIt is not my intention here to prescribe specific therapeutic techniques for particular injuries. However, what I can offer may be even more useful and practical. I want to help you begin to shape a context and begin developing a process that will inform and guide you in working with any imbalance or injury. You can actually learn to receive your own body's feedback and guidance from any injury or physical problems. Specific recommendations someone else may make are only useful to a point, since every injury is different and responds differently, even when seemingly of the same type. For example, I cannot count the times I've been asked, \"What poses should I do for low back pain?\" Lumbar pain is one of the most common ailments we suffer. But even if ten people have similar problems from, say, degenerated or ruptured fifth lumbar disks, none of those degenerations will behave exactly the same, nor will they respond to prescribed poses in the same way. Certain general practices and treatments may aid healing lumbar problems, but what is most useful is to learn the process of listening to your own body's guidance system.\n\n## **Pain Is Your Friend**\n\nWhen we think of pain, most of us probably feel we would rather not have any. We spend a lot of time seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Once I traveled in the Himalayas with a swami friend who headed an _ashram_ , or yoga monastery. The swami was committed to service and operated a few leper ashrams in the nearby foothills, so he took me to visit a colony. His lifetime personal assistant was once an impoverished leper whom he helped to heal; later, together, they created this amazing service project. All over India I had seen lepers who were missing body parts and seemed to be wasting away. Leprosy is a horrifying and terrible disease that makes most people recoil or run away. I confess I was quite nervous about going to a leper colony, but it was a powerful experience (similar to the death meditation discussed in Chapter 9); I was moved and learned a lot. For our arrival the lepers put on a joyous dance in a dusty courtyard between their mud huts. There wasn't a lot of funding for their facilities and they slept on hard cots and wore torn rags. Many had dreadful scars and were missing limbs, fingers, or toes. I was shocked to notice that though they were all reduced to the same lot in life, they still segregated themselves according to caste and their former stations in life, much to the chagrin of their caretakers. The swami explained to me that much of the loss of body parts and the other horrors they suffered happened from loss of sensation and pain caused by the disease. The victims would not know when they injured themselves\u2014they would not feel it\u2014and therefore they suffered frequent infections and gangrene. Loss of pain actually makes us very vulnerable to further injury. Pain announces and guards the edges of our limits.\n\nI saw something similar when visiting a methadone clinic with a therapist friend. She explained that many addicts mask or cut off their physical and emotional pain with strong depressant drugs like heroin. She also said many of the patients were very abusive to loved ones and further damaged precious relationships. Numbing their pain and damping down their physical-emotional feedback system led to self-destructive behavior. I began to realize that pain, within reasonable limits, was a friend we needed.\n\nOne time in Northern California, when I was about twenty-five, a friend and I were hiking in the rolling green foothills. We came into a beautiful glade and saw several horses grazing on the spring grasses. We were both experienced riders, but obviously not experienced enough, because we thought it would be a great idea to jump on one for a ride. When we slowly walked over toward the horses, several trotted away, but we were both able to hop on a lovely, golden mare. My friend sat in front trying to guide the horse by holding her neck and mane. The mare trotted around a bit, then all of a sudden noticed the other horses had moved far across the meadow to the other side of a ravine and she took off at a gallop. As we approached the ravine, we realized she was going to jump, and my friend panicked and jumped off. I was thrown and landed flat on my back. I could hardly move, but slowly made my way home. This was my first big injury and the beginning of a long process with my lumbar. I recovered in a couple weeks but my low back was more sensitive afterwards.\n\nDuring my first year of yoga study, I practiced asana daily for ninety minutes, often morning and evening. I worked hard at it and within a year or two could achieve even the most intense backbends, twists, and forward bends. The Sivananda organization I was involved with and its head swami in America paid little or no attention to sequencing, structural dynamics, alignment, and physiological principles of kinesiology. The greatest emphasis of instruction was given to just achieving the postures, the more extreme the better. Attention was mostly paid to the metaphysical and spiritual side of the practice. I advanced quickly and often, after long periods of sitting for lectures on cold mornings and evenings without a chance to warm up, I was called on to show difficult backbends like the Full Bow, Full Wheel, or Handstand Scorpion to large groups. I was also taught the erroneous concept that it was necessary to lie down and rest for a couple minutes after performing each asana in order to \"get the benefits.\" After barely warming up, this caused us to cool down repeatedly. We questioned the physical safety of this procedure and were told that we were doing mystical or metaphysical practice and therefore normal physiological principles didn't apply. Soon I began to develop back pain, pinched nerves, and other problems. I asked for guidance, but got no satisfactory answers, and was only told to rest a couple of days or to massage myself. The problems worsened. As I traveled around the country and to Europe giving demonstrations to groups and on television, my back would often lock up for days afterwards.\n\n## **There Is No Such Thing as Pain**\n\nOne cold winter day, about 1975, as I practiced in my living room while feeling a bit cold and tight, a friend came in and asked if I would lift him up and give him a back adjustment. As I lifted him up into the adjusting movement, I heard a crunch and felt a pinch in my low spine. Slowly the pain increased and my back began tightening up. Not thinking clearly, I lay down, but as that cooled me off I tightened up more and the pain became excruciating. I foolishly went to the emergency room and was shot with muscle relaxants and prescribed painkillers and strong anti-inflammatory medications. For a month I had to stay in bed and could hardly walk. One day a teacher I had trained came to visit and said he had a great idea for my healing. I asked him what that was and he replied, \"Why don't you try yoga!\" I had to contemplate the irony of getting the insight I needed from my own student while I was lying in bed, and not using the knowledge I had passed on. I stopped the medicines and started one of my greatest learning experiences.\n\nInitially, the pain limited me to only the simplest of poses and I could not bend much at all. Most curious to me was how some of my muscles did not seem to function at all, even though they had a range of motion. For example, in order to pick up something off the floor I had to use the wall or a chair for leverage and support in order to bend over. My body could bend over, within limits, but didn't have the strength or ability to do so on its own. I began to experiment as I moved up and down with the aid of the wall to see what was going on with the related nerves and began to understand subtle levels of my body's intelligence, pain, and feedback system.\n\nI realized that there is no such thing as one kind of pain. I saw, instead, that pain is a language, an entire information system. When we resist pain, and lump it into one category we label \"pain,\" we miss the many layers and nuances of information being conveyed. Pain is one of the voices of the body's intelligence. Pain is necessary and defines the limits and the edges of strain and injury. Some pain sensation messages demand us to \"Stop!\" while other messages tell us, \"Yes, do more of that, but go slowly.\" In fact, pain encompasses a whole spectrum of physiological information that actually begins with our first stretching or moving sensations in the muscles and increases in intensity until we near our maximum range of motion, at which point the sensations become very intense and we call them painful.\n\nYou can experience this range of sensation and information in many movements. For example, take a moment and do a seated forward bend. Slowly start bending forward while paying careful attention to the sensations. At first these sensations may be quiet or subtle, but notice you receive information from them. As you move farther forward, you will feel more muscular resistance and probably what you could call a pleasant stretch. If you pay careful attention to this, you will notice it is actually a very similar feeling to a lower intensity of pain\u2014that it feels like _a good pain_. Continue moving farther into the stretch and, as you near your maximum range of motion, the intensity increases rapidly until it actually becomes unpleasantly painful and even commands you to stop! You can try the same thing in most any movement, such as by simply and slowly rotating your head in one direction and listening to the sensations and feedback.\n\n## **Local Intelligence**\n\nAs I watched and worked with my back injury, I noticed that every morning I awoke with pain and a lot of stiffness and could barely bend forward. Something in my muscles seemed to fight me and resisted any attempt I made to bend forward or to twist. I noticed that if I would move very slowly into a forward bend, holding it a long time, often for twenty or thirty minutes, these fighting, resisting muscles could be _coaxed_ to relax and let go, and eventually I would be able to move fully into the pose. More important, by doing these long forward bends, the pain and tightness would be dramatically relieved.\n\nI began to explain this to myself and actually experience it with a metaphysical, but fairly accurate, concept. The body organism has many levels and layers of consciousness. For example, there is our self-awareness and self-consciousness, the consciousness in the muscles and organs, the metabolic intelligence, and the consciousness in cells, nerves, and groups of muscles. I will keep this concept sufficiently simple for this example without debating or defining the ultimate nature of consciousness. I will call presence, thought, and awareness _self-consciousness_. Self-consciousness tells the body to act or move. To raise your arm, you merely think it and, voil\u00e1, the arm lifts. How it does that is mostly up to the _local_ consciousness or intelligence in the muscles and nerves of the arm. If we had to know the muscle kinesiology and structural dynamics to do this, we would not get very far. Take a moment and extend your arm firmly out to your side\u2014you are putting your self-consciousness strongly into your arm. Now remove this self-consciousness completely and let the arm drop and hang at your side as if it were dead. This experiment demonstrates how energy and awareness move into and out of different areas of the body. We take this ability for granted, but when we have injuries, it can be severely compromised.\n\nNormally when we want to raise our arm, turn our head, or twist our torso, we simply think and the movement follows\u2014the local intelligence carries it out. But when there is an injury, the local intelligence can literally seal off an area of the body and prevent movement, to protect itself from further injury. We might say \"head turn right,\" or \"torso turn right,\" and after a few inches, either from pain or actual inability to move, we cannot go farther. The local consciousness says, \"Hey, I listened to you before and look what happened! Now, say what you want, I'm protecting myself. Push any more, and I'll yell really loudly.\" Injuries can create self-perpetuating feedback loops that exacerbate and aggravate the problem. For example, a person might have a slight nerve pinch in the neck from moving or sleeping incorrectly. The impinged nerve causes local tightness and tensing. Then, in turn, that tightening further irritates the nerve, causing more tightening. However, when we cooperate with the body's intelligence, moving slowly and sensitively, listening and responding to the feedback, the body guides us and lets us in, accelerating the healing process by bringing back circulation and mobility.\n\nWhen I say there is no such thing as pain, I want to communicate the importance of not lumping all pain together into one homogenous entity that we resist. It is much more useful, and accurate, to see that pain is an entire spectrum of information and a language of the body, acting in a similar way to sound or music carrying entire spectrums of information. What we call pain really refers to a myriad of messages that can inform us and our practice as we learn to understand its communications. Sharp pains can mean \"Stop!\" Dull pain can mean to go slowly and breathe as we move energy into new areas. As I learned to listen and understand subtler levels of information from my injury, I began to see how these inner messages literally guided me to adjust my movement's subtlety and showed me the way to heal myself.\n\nI remember the feelings and excitement of learning this inner process. In the morning I would awaken stiff and immobile from my back injury, and I would get moving with gentle forward bends and embryo positions. Then I would do a seated, Half Forward Fold, moving into it very slowly and holding the pose for ten or fifteen minutes on each side, surfing the edges of stiffness and flexibility. If I pushed too far into painful areas, my body would yell and cause me to slow down and recoil. This short-term feedback guided me and the intermediate-term feedback of feeling good afterwards confirmed the healing benefits of the movements I was using. Sometimes I experienced setbacks, which I realized were also part of the learning, healing cycle.\n\nI recall having a great \"ah ha!\" and realization in spinal twists. I was still doing twists as instructed by my first Sivananda teacher\u2014with a rounded back and not much internal, dynamic energy. This rounded form actually hurt and pinched my spine. But by listening within, I noticed that when I lifted my chest and spine as I twisted, and when I created internal leverages and torques by pressing and lifting with arms and feet, my pain not only subsided but was released. The body literally showed me how to recreate space in compressed lumbar vertebrae and relieve the nerve pressure and impingement. This inner process of listening to and working with the body's intelligence can be used and applied in every asana.\n\nI began to experiment more on my own to help my back and improve my practice with sequences and alignments different from what my early teachers and swamis instructed. I learned to do forward bends and twists to release and balance after backbends and to keep the spine extended and open in many poses. The injury became one of my greatest asana teachers. I learned that, though my L5-S1 lumbar disk had degenerated completely, I could compensate by increasing the intervertebral space with internal leverages and torques and by strengthening the spinal muscle column. In 1976 I met and hosted B.K.S. Iyengar in Los Angeles, and his instruction confirmed and expanded greatly on my own discoveries about the internal dynamics of asana.\n\nDoctors had told me to stop practicing yoga and said I would always have back trouble. Surgery was suggested. I continued with my practice and within a couple of years I regained nearly all of my flexibility and strength on my own. Ten years later I relearned the lessons of the body when I got too involved in the construction of our retreat center and re-injured my back by foolishly carrying lumber and ninety-pound bags of cement. This time, however, I was able to cycle through the injury in a few weeks instead of years by following the principles I had learned with the earlier injury.\n\nI used to be hesitant to discuss these experiences with students. I was concerned that they would be disheartened with yoga and they might conclude that if teachers and advanced students received injuries, yoga must be flawed or detrimental. But I found that the reverse was true. Students were inspired to see how healing was possible, to realize that no one is beyond the possibility of error or injury, and to be reminded that we all are human. There is no magical technique or practice that will keep us free from harm, injury, or physical problems. Any of us may exceed our limits, push too hard. Holding on to the ideas that we are practicing magical or perfected techniques is what puts us to sleep. It is staying constantly alert and vigilant that will guide us in the right direction.\n\n## **Sympathetic Resonance**\n\nHealing and wellness also have components similar to tuning the strings of musical instruments. _Sympathetic resonance_ is the phenomenon where one plucked string will also cause others strings in the area that are in tune to vibrate. When we are sick or injured, other old injuries and problems tend to resonate with the current one and get set off again. For example, if you hurt an ankle, an old neck injury may start bothering you. Fortunately, the converse is also true. When you have a problem or injury and do what feels good with a practice that gets your energy moving, you will set up a _healing resonance_ that helps the injured areas come back into alignment and wellness. By creating a strong enough field of well-being and mental intention, you can bring the whole body into this beneficial resonance.\n\nIt is important to trust your inner senses and to learn to listen and respond. You must be very careful not to push too far into painful areas during early or acute stages of an injury\u2014to stay in back of the edges of pain until you are more confident. Competent teachers can demonstrate these abilities to some extent, but they cannot actually teach them to you. You must learn them for yourself. It is not difficult, though; just begin by listening and tuning in.\n\nDealing with injury is not that different from the way you should approach your entire yoga practice. Listen and respond to guidance from the body's intelligence, assisted by the knowledge and information as well as the techniques and modalities you have learned, in order to create a process that accelerates healing of the body.\n\n## **Causes and Prevention of Injury**\n\nInjuries have many possible causes. Increasing awareness of these causes will aid in prevention. Here are several of the most common types of injury, and ways to avoid what causes them.\n\n### **Accidents**\n\nWe are all subject to unexpected injury. Yoga practice not only helps prevent injuries, it also trains us to accelerate healing. The following story shows how yoga makes the body far less prone to injuries. Once, when learning to ski, I came down a beginner's slope next to the lift lines. Watching the people in line and not paying attention to my skiing, I caught the edges of my skis in a wide snowplow and my feet and legs went out sideways until they were in wide, standing straddle splits. It looked like I would split in half and the people in line gasped. But I was flexible, and had even done the straddle splits that morning, so I was able to readjust my legs, aim the skis together, and pull back into the proper position as I skied by the line of shocked-looking people at the lift. My body had just said, \"Oh, we're doing these straddle splits again,\" and I avoided what could have been an unpleasant injury.\n\n### **Congenital Weaknesses**\n\nOur heredity can leave us with known or unknown physical weaknesses. Yoga practice aids in discovering and learning about these areas and also in strengthening and bringing them into balance. Similarly, old injuries and traumas may still be stored in the body and as you progress deeper into poses they may surface again in the process of healing and rebalancing the body.\n\n### **Aggressive Practice**\n\nNo one wants to be left behind, and we all want to make good progress in our practice. Pushing through limitations can bring some benefits, but you must also have sensitivity and take care to learn your limits without letting enthusiasm get out of hand. Pushing through a challenge must be balanced by paying attention and knowing when to back off.\n\n### **Irregular Practice**\n\nOnce you have established a good yoga practice over a long period of time, you will usually be able to quickly reestablish your normal abilities after missing some days or even months. Of course, consistent practice is better, but life often has other plans. Try to be as consistent as possible and work back slowly to your normal levels after a long hiatus. Injuries can also be caused by cooling off from starting and stopping practice within a given session. If you must stop for an important reason during a session, warm up and ease back in the flow. Practicing unconsciously and mechanically can lead to injury. It is important to stay warm, tuned in, and to practice with awareness, according to the body's own limits. Demonstrating poses to friends or students, without being warmed up, can also cause injury. Teachers must also be careful if they demonstrate incorrect ways of doing poses. Lifting and adjusting students into postures is another area where teachers must be careful not to strain their backs and joints.\n\n### **Old Injuries**\n\nA well-thought-out asana practice eventually works its way into every nook and cranny of the body. Where there are old injuries, adhesions, weaknesses, or scar tissue, the asanas will sometimes cause the injury to resurface as the body is healing and restructuring. Be careful to move very sensitively and gently when working with old injuries. It's also important to consult an experienced body therapist or yoga teacher and use the internal feedback system described in this chapter to work with injuries.\n\n### **Other Causes**\n\nWe have already discussed many other important tenets of practice in the Ah Ha! chapter. Whatever the difficulty, weakness, or injury, your yoga practice can develop beyond mere fitness conditioning into your own powerful, self-healing system, but it's important to remember always to deal with your whole lifestyle when looking for causes of difficulties. I forgot this once when teaching a medical doctor who kept getting headaches after his yoga practice. I experimented with various adjustments and sequences a few times in class before remembering to ask questions about his lifestyle. When I did, he told me that he drank ten to fifteen cups of coffee each day! He said he would cut back before coming to class, and this detoxification manifested the cause of his problem. After reducing his coffee addiction and drinking more water, his headaches ceased. No amount of asana adjustments would have helped him.\n\n## **Working with Injuries**\n\nMuscles, tendons, ligaments, or nerves can experience strain or injury. Usually the time it takes to heal follows in the same order. Depending on the severity, of course, muscle injuries tend to heal faster than similar-scale injuries to ligaments or nerves. Medical and physical therapists once advised rest, support, and immobilization of injured areas until they healed. Contemporary wisdom and experience has shown that getting an area moving again, as soon as movement is not detrimental, accelerates healing and allows the area to heal better, stronger and without adhesions.\n\nMany therapists suggest an acronym, called RICES, to guide treatment:\n\n  * R is for Rest\u2014resting the injury during the acute phase before it is advisable to start movement.\n  * I is for Ice\u2014icing injured tissue helps prevent swelling and speeds recovery.\n  * C is for Compression\u2014wrapping an injury can help immobilize the area and reduce swelling.\n  * E is for Elevation\u2014keeping the hurt area at or above heart level helps with circulation and prevents fluids from accumulating.\n  * S is for Support\u2014supporting the injury with a sling or taking weight off a strained area such as legs, back, or ankles with a crutch or cane.\n\nRICES can be useful to guide you in using or administering first aid during the initial moments and first few days after a strain or injury. If the problem is not resolved and healed, then professional help as well as using the other principles in this chapter may be necessary.\n\nHatha yoga tends to be preventive, focusing more on health and wholeness rather than sickness, but it also is used as a therapeutic practice. A great teacher and information system, pain is not something we voluntarily seek out; nonetheless, it often provides a key catalyst in major times of learning and growth\u2014both physically and psychologically. If we look back on some of our greatest experiences of growth and learning, we will find they often involved some pain.\n\nDon't let injuries stop you. Learn to activate and assist your body's powerful healing energies. When working with sickness or injury, pay attention to any feelings of wellness and wholeness and give your energy to building and increasing them. Balance internal process and awareness with external input and feedback from teachers, healers, and body workers. Experiment with a good repertoire of poses and practices. You will not always find the right approach logically, as it often reveals itself serendipitously. You might just stumble on the perfect movement or asana by trying something new, taking a class, or letting your body guide you. An injury is a moving target, so your approach must be a living approach that attunes and adjusts to the movement of the process. We do not reach health and wholeness as a permanent, fixed state of balance, but as an ability to adjust continuously and dance with the changing realities of each moment. This living process will grow and evolve as it guides you through all the stages and changes of life.\n\n#\n\nThe chakra system (pronounced chuh kruh) is an ancient mapping of psychic phenomena and layers of consciousness. Though myth and folklore often date its origin back millennia, most academics believe the concept of the chakra system originated within the last several hundred years. Many view the chakras as having been \"revealed,\" discovered or perceived intuitively, but scientific evidence suggests that their depiction probably grew out of religious practices and beliefs. Descriptions and definitions of the nature of the chakra system differ widely. The belief in this system may have started with external diagrams, sorcery, and the worship of goddesses, mystical beings, and power entities. The chakras have been described as wheels of energy, loci of power, and mystical power centers that exist in the subtle, or _astral_ , body. They have been used as magical diagrams for sorcery or protection from demons, the appeasement of gods, and the control of supernatural forces or entities.\n\nAs it is viewed today, the chakra system has evolved through many, sometimes contradictory, phases of mapping and delineation often related to stages or levels of consciousness, awareness, and spiritual development. Various earlier chakra concepts have included four chakras, twelve, sixteen, and more. The story that this subtle, scientific \"energy system\" was discovered by mystics through inner vision is mostly legend. The currently accepted number of seven chakras was probably solidified in time and thought with the advent of the printing press and strengthened by the publication of Sir Arthur Avalon's books in England, _Kundalini_ and _Sakti and Sakta_. His diagrams and presentations of the seven-chakra system have become the most widely accepted. Avalon's seven-chakra system technically includes six chakras plus one, with the additional seventh chakra representing infinity and the synthesis of the other six. However, Avalon's chakra color rendition follows no apparent logic. Contemporary chakra renditions are often linked to the physical sciences, following the progression of colors in the rainbow from red to violet and pure white light.\n\nWhether by coincidence, selective observation, synchronicity, or even divine revelation, the seven-chakra mapping seems to align holographically with many observable scientific principles. There are, for example, seven colors of the rainbow, seven days of the week, and seven notes of the musical scale before it repeats on the next octave. The seminal works by Professor David Gordon White, _The Alchemical Body_ and _The Kiss of the Yogini_ , historically trace the development of the chakra system through the ages.\n\nPhilosophers and sages have debated about the origin of spirit and matter and the nature of consciousness for eons. Did consciousness arise out of matter? Did spirit or consciousness create matter? Or are they actually one and the same? The age of science has given much weight to the former argument\u2014that consciousness evolved out of matter. The materialist viewpoint argues that the interaction of elements, energies, and sunlight created ultimately the chain of life from plants to what we call life's paragon\u2014humankind, with its self-reflecting intelligence. Religious people have argued the opposite\u2014that spirit brought matter into being. There seems to be no way to prove or disprove either position. The chakra model, however, shows consciousness and matter to belong to one interdependent continuum. Consciousness, or spirit, seems to require matter to express itself or to be known. Even an envisioned or perceived pure spirit realm contains a material component. To have shape, structure, space, and difference of any measure requires a defining structure. Which came first, matter or consciousness? It is possible that they are mutually embedded in each other. Matter, energy, spirit, and consciousness may be part of one interdependent interplay.\n\n## **The Chakras' Relation to Science**\n\nThe system of chakras refers to a metaphysical or mystical aspect of yoga and Eastern philosophy. Being esoteric, the theory is difficult to prove or demonstrate and therefore easily lends itself to misinterpretation and misconception. Therefore, I would like to present an explanation of the chakras that is useful and practical (though less mystical) for the practice of yoga. After a number of years of study and experimentation with the esoteric aspects of this energy system, I began to see some direct correlations between the chakras, science, and various levels of experience and being. This proved to be congruent with mystical and spiritual levels as well. Early training in physics and science allowed me to find common ground between spiritual philosophy and scientific knowledge. I found correlations between the ancient chakra mapping, the energy-matter continuum, the periodic table of the elements, and the structure of the body.\n\nThe chakra system moves in ascending energy levels from earth, or solids, to cosmic energy. In a somewhat similar manner, the periodic table of elements charts how high energy coalesces down level by level from light, to gases, liquids and finally to matter. The chakra system can be seen as a holographic reflection of the cosmic continuum from matter to energy. It can also be used to map and explore the correlations of the movement from energy to matter with different levels of consciousness. _Holographic_ has come to refer to phenomenon where the properties of a greater whole are contained or reflected in the parts. A _hologram_ is a three-dimensional image made by the coherent light of lasers. Each part of the hologram, a holographic photo, contains information for the whole image. Fractals, geometric patterns that are repeated at ever smaller scales, are similar to holograms and are found in nature. For example, some ferns are generated by the plant repeating the same geometrical patterns, which build and combine to make the final plant structure. Each part contains the formula for the whole.\n\nThe word _chakra_ means \"wheel\" and refers to certain _wheels_ or _balls_ of energy in the subtle or psychic body. Many ancient yogis believed that our physical bodies are animated by an energy body or astral body composed of subtle energies. This subtle or astral body is in turn created and animated by the field of consciousness. The chakras are seen as nonphysical energies that cannot be measured directly but that can be felt and experienced. To illustrate this concept, we might repeat the experiment from Chapter 7: Let your arm hang and swing freely from your torso over the edge of a chair or table, then withdraw your active consciousness from your arm and let it swing loosely like a pendulum. When the energy is withdrawn, the arm seems inert and almost dead. You can animate the arm again by directing your consciousness and energy back into it, even lifting it or swinging it forcibly. This is a simple way to feel how consciousness and the energy body is activated and withdrawn in your arm.\n\n## **Seven Energy Centers**\n\nThe chakras are described as a series of seven energy centers located along the spinal column. The subtle body is said to be composed of 72,000 energy channels called _nadis_. In the same way that blood flows through veins, prana, or life force, flows through these nadis. They are similar to the concept of meridians in acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Of the 72,000, three are of prime importance: the _ida_ , or moon, and the _pingala_ , or sun, which balance heating and cooling qualities, and the _sushumna_ , or \"most gracious,\" which is the central channel along which the seven centers are strung.\n\nAt the bottom of our spinal column is the base chakra, which is said to be a coiled, mystical latent energy that can be awakened. This mysterious, latent energy residing at the base of the spine is called _Kundalini Shakti_ , which means the \"coiled energy,\" and is usually symbolized by a serpent. Serpents symbolize esoteric, hidden energy. Snakes live and hide underground and they invoke feelings of power and fear. In the East, _naga_ , or serpent imagery, often represents esoteric, mystical, or divine powers. Many of the gods have serpents as canopied thrones, showing they have controlled or mastered these energies and powers. In the West, on the contrary, the serpent is often a symbol of evil, as in the story of Adam and Eve. The Western dragon actually better captures the ambiguity of the Indian naga than does the serpent. Some researchers have suggested that proponents of opposing religious viewpoints often recast the religious symbols of their adversaries, in this case the serpent, into symbols of evil. In any case, dragons, serpents, and snakes have always been powerful, evocative symbols.\n\nThe lowest and first chakra, called _Muladhara_ , meaning root or base, is located in the sacrum (\"sacred bone\") and holds the latent, mystical serpent power, Kundalini. This first center represents the earth, or matter, center. The second chakra, called _Svadishhtana_ , meaning \"one's own place,\" is the water center. The third chakra is the fire center, and is called _Manipura_ , which means \"the jeweled city.\" The fourth chakra, the air center, is the heart chakra called _Anahata_ , meaning \"unstruck sound.\" The fifth is the sound center, called _Vishuddha_ , meaning \"the wheel of purity.\" The sixth is the third-eye center, called _Ajna_ , meaning \"the command center.\" The seventh and highest, is the crown center, _Sahasrara_ , or \"thousand-spoked wheel.\" One of the purposes of yoga is to bring awareness to these centers and to help awaken, balance, and keep them functioning properly.\n\nThe chakras are often described in great detail with specific colors, shapes, and numbers of lotus petals and associated sounds. Mystics have reported metaphysically seeing these wheels of energy in the astral body on the subtle planes. In visionary experiences we may see and experience the light body and many wonders, but we must use critical scrutiny to make sure we are not merely seeing our own inner projections. Energy manifests in myriad layers of reflective complexity. Psychological, physical, mental, or spiritual energy can also be projected through avenues of self-deception and exploitation. In other words, the mind can easily create and then envision self-serving, vivid manifestations of its own projections. Discerning the actual from the imagined or projected can be difficult or impossible and separating the two has been the subject of research and debate. In dreams and in meditation, we tend to see what we think about or elevate in importance. It is also possible to have true inner visionary experiences, seeing many layers of mathematical intricacy and geometrical relationship of matter, energy, and information as they integrate at higher levels of complexity and order. There are many ordered fields of energy around the body, and around and within atoms and molecules. Though the beauty of this holographic vision is ultimately beyond description, it nonetheless inspires many drawings of chakras, mandalas, and other artistic attempts at graphic representation.\n\n\"Awakening Kundalini\" refers to awakening each person's seven latent spiritual and creative energies\u2014physical\/material, sexual\/sensual, will\/intent, love\/compassion, expression\/communication, mental\/intellectual, and spiritual\/universal. Awakening Kundalini can also be understood simply as awakening and manifesting our full creative potential. This understanding does not sound threatening, like awakening a mystic serpent in the spine, but it is essentially the same thing. As we have seen, power is neither good nor bad, but can be manifested or used in either direction. Releasing energy from the atom, or even by burning wood, is an example of the same kind of process\u2014 freeing latent energies. Fire from wood can be used to cook our food or burn down our house. Used intelligently, it is quite safe. To awaken our potential fully, we must give attention to all the levels of consciousness being described in the chakra mapping. This essentially is the message of this map of the subtle body.\n\nUnderstanding this subtle body mapping can aid in balancing our lives. There are people who \"test\" chakras and others who \"read\" chakras. This practice is sometimes possible and might be helpful, but we do not need to use a pendulum or a psychic to know ourselves. With self-observation and reflection, we can learn to discern whether we are grounded, whether we are balanced in our physical and material lives, if our sensual and sexual energies are off, if our love channels are closed and need attention, or if we have lost our spiritual connection. Some teachers speak of mechanical methods of opening chakras and their associated levels of consciousness. These methods may have some use, but are not complete in themselves. For example, to develop the throat chakra, the communication center, some people use certain postures, breathing exercises, sounds, or even crystals, but we must also learn to communicate and express ourselves in social contexts. Or, if sexual energies are blocked, certain postures, breathing techniques, and chants may be of some help and aid in focusing, but we will still have to work directly on the issues causing the problem. The chakras can be an outline, a metaphor, or perhaps a barometer guiding toward wholeness, but no map is ever the terrain, and we must always walk the actual ground of experience to reach insight and understanding.\n\n## **Chakras and Levels of Being**\n\nThe chakras not only represent mysterious esoteric qualities, but actual levels of being in all aspects of life and in all areas of experience. The first chakra, the earth center, corresponds to the physical, material level of life. It is located in the sacrum, where we sit on the earth and where our bowels move earth out of our bodies. Being \"grounded,\" keeping our \"earthly\" needs of food, clothing, shelter, and finances in order, relate to this center. No matter how high we get on the spiral of energy and awareness, we must always stay grounded back to the earth. We must have a connection or grounding and outlet for the higher levels of energy for which we become a conduit. Grounding implies keeping our lives in order on the earth plane within our bodies, our livelihood, and our relationships.\n\nThe second chakra, or water center, located a little farther up the spine in the area of the bladder, ovaries, or prostate, is the center of sensation, sensuality, and reproduction. Reproduction is an activity involving an exchange of fluids and swimming cells. Balancing this center involves harmonizing our sensual and sexual energies. The third center is the fire center of power, intention, will, and force. It is located at the center of gravity in the body near the level of the navel and corresponds to the digestive fire and solar plexus. This is the place where fire burns in the body, where our personal power resides.\n\nThese first three chakras, the lower centers, are considered centers of our basest powers. This is because if we function without being informed by higher qualities of love and awareness, we may be selfish, immature, or even violent. We may be motivated solely for power, sensation, or acquisition. The power center can dominate the sexual or earth levels. Working with this level involves balancing personal power. Power, we know, has an enormous potential to corrupt. The more power we have, the more self-examination and introspection we need to have integrity with the potential of that power. Similarly, the more power someone outside of ourselves has, the more scrupulous and watchful we must be in questioning and critiquing that person.\n\nThe fourth wheel of energy, the heart or air center, corresponds to the lungs and heart in the body. Opening this center implies the awakening of love and compassion. The heart and chest area are where we breathe and feel love, spirit, and compassion. This chakra is considered the first of the higher centers\u2014with love, everything in life resonates at a higher level. At this center we transform from the lower level of the love of power, to the higher level of the power of love. This chakra is considered the source of music, even though the next, the fifth, is the center of sound. The heart chakra also represents the power of music to transform and open the heart.\n\nLocated in the throat area, the fifth chakra represents sound and communication across space. Clarity of speech and communication, writing, and poetry are qualities of this level of being. Sound carries unique qualities of feeling and information. A simple statement can communicate many levels and layers of information with differences in the tonal quality, pitch, volume, and modulation of sound. The sixth chakra is the center of consciousness. It is also called the third-eye center and corresponds to the frontal lobes of the brain and the mysterious pineal gland. This gland performs many known and unknown functions and can release hormones and neurochemicals during birth, death, and moments of intensity that unlock pathways in the brain, bringing mystical experience and transcendent perceptions. This chakra is the light center of awareness, thought, psychic power, and perception.\n\nThe seventh chakra, which corresponds to the crown of the head, is also called the thousand-petaled lotus, which symbolizes infinite energy. It represents cosmic consciousness and the union of all polarities and the godhead. Some say this center is the source of the expression \"seventh heaven.\" This center is both a chakra and not a chakra: It is everything and nothing, unity and diversity, male and female, the union of god and goddess, the One. Seated in this chakra, the god Siva and the goddess Shakti exist in sexual union, representing both oneness and duality. This center connects us with all that is.\n\nSubstantial evidence supports the theory that the universe is holographic. This means that in some way each part contains a pattern of the whole. Chakra theory, it turns out, corresponds to the patterning and play of energy in the physical universe. One of the first things we learn in the study of electronics is that electrical energy is in fact a polarity, a potential difference. A battery, for example, must have a positive pole containing a deficiency of electrons and a negative pole containing an excess of electrons. The stored power of the battery is the polarity, or potential, of the excess wanting to return to the deficiency. Matter and energy may represent the ultimate polarity. At the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, we have an enormous concentration of energy, most readily experienced as light. As this energy moves out from the galactic center, it \"cools\" or condenses into lower levels of vibration, creating all forms of matter along the way. Some of the steps in this movement are expressed in the patterning of matter graphed in the periodic table of the elements. Each step across the periodic table represents the incorporation of greater levels of energy into the atomic structure. In a similar way, each step up the chakra system represents a higher level of energy.\n\n## **The Cosmic Polarity**\n\nMatter is essentially energy condensed to the point of having a nucleus with protons and electrons. Einstein showed that matter and energy belong to one spectrum\u2014that they are in fact one. They are the opposite poles of a polarity. His famous formula E = MC2 proved that there is tremendous energy stored in matter. The amount of energy is equal to the mass of the matter multiplied by the constant speed of light squared. This explanation has shown that the energy from the Milky Way galactic center is stored in the matter that makes our Earth. Triggering the release of this energy with the atomic bomb is a dramatic demonstration of this law. The bomb releases the many forms of energy\u2014heat, sound, waves, radiation, and light\u2014that was bound up in the form of matter and reveals the whole spectrum along the continuum between the matter and energy poles.\n\nIn Eastern philosophy, this cosmic polarity is represented by Siva and Shakti. Siva is the static masculine principle in the universe and Shakti is the active feminine principle. Shakti literally means energy. The dance between Siva and Shakti is said to create everything in the universe, which is, in fact, how all things are created by the interplay of matter and energy. The highest level of energy is considered the actual source of all things because it contains both Siva and Shakti, matter and energy, as well as the laws that allow it to become diversity. The mystic says everything is the mind of God. Many scientists say that at the core of atomic structure is information. Pure energy is both Siva and Shakti in union as one. When physicists designed experiments to determine whether light is a wave (a form of energy) or a particle (a form of matter), the result showed that, in effect, both are true. The answer is \"it depends how you look at it.\" The way in which the experiment is designed and observed affects the outcome. (The philosopher, J. Krishnamurti, often stated, \"The observer is the observed,\" as was also pointed out by the scientist, Werner Heisenberg, in his well-known Uncertainty Principle. The _Bhagavad Gita_ talks about learning the difference and relationship between the \"field\" and the \"knower of the field.\") Light is both a wave and a particle, with qualities of energy or matter, depending how we observe it.\n\nRegardless of how much energy or matter you remove from Earth, it remains essentially the same. This is because it is already one side of the polarity. When energy is added back into matter, it recapitulates the stages of matter's creation as it coalesced down from light and seems to follow the levels mapped by chakras. For example, if we slowly add energy to a solid, it remains essentially the same until a specific critical quantum point is reached; then it jumps to the next level or plateau\u2014liquid. Continue adding energy and it goes through the stages of fire and gas. Releasing the energy of gas, like splitting the hydrogen gas atom, is the last material stage before a quantum leap that yields a release of wave energy (sound), information, and light that merge back with the oneness of energy. Earth-matter, water-liquid, fire-gas, sound-waves, and light are stages along the way. The seven corresponding levels, which relate to the chakras, are (1) earth-solid-matter; (2) liquid; (3) heat-fire; (4) gas; (5) dematerialization into wave energy or sound; (6) mind-thought, consciousness, information; and (7) infinity\u2014oneness, pure energy, everything, and nothing.\n\nEarth spins in an outer spiral arm of our galaxy. Seen in this way, the planet Earth is a cooled manifestation, or lower frequency, of the same energy that created it. Putting religious perspectives aside, we see that life is created from the interplay of cosmic energy and matter. This broad spectrum\u2014light, cosmic rays, and energies irradiate the earth to create Gaia or the web of life. Microscopic plants are the first children of Gaia. Plants take the energy of the sun and combine it with the elements in earth to make life. In an actual sense, then, Gaia constitutes a polarized re-expression of light, which then creates its own self-reflecting children. The circle of light creates the circle of life.\n\n## **Chakras and Daily Life**\n\nChakra theory holds wisdom applicable to daily life. Some teachers map the chakras like a ladder to climb, rung by rung. On the contrary, the view presented here shows how each chakra signifies an important level of being that operates simultaneously with all the others. We can work concurrently with all of these levels in ourselves. Electronic law teaches that for energy to flow properly it must have a ground. The root chakra's message is to keep your feet on the ground, to stay rooted and to keep your physical needs and affairs in order. The message from the water center teaches us to learn to flow and remain adaptable and to give conscious attention to sensual and sexual balance. Fire instructs in developing will and intention, and accepting change and transformation. Fire purifies and changes the form of that which passes through it. It is the doorway from the tangible to the intangible. The log in the campfire is transformed back into earth, sound, heat, and light. We must keep our personal power and fire stoked and alive, developing strength of intention and will.\n\nThe heart chakra serves as a fulcrum for all the other centers\u2014the three higher and three lower. This center lies midway along the chakra system, where it can resonate equally above and below and balance the higher and lower. It instructs us to make the heart and love the center of our being. It implies that love should resonate through all the other levels. It is the balance of male and female. This center lies at the doorway to the higher planes and at the quantum threshold where matter transforms into energy. The symbol of this center, the six-pointed star made by the equal intersection of two equilateral triangles,   shows the meeting and balancing of the higher and lower, the masculine and the feminine. Earth rises   to meet heaven, and heaven descends   to meet earth through love at this fulcrum. Love is the turning point of materialism to spirituality.\n\nThe sound center instructs in communication and creative expression, as well as developing the ability to speak with truth, love, clarity, and poetry. The third-eye center inspires awakening inward perception, learning to look within. We have two eyes to look outwardly and a third that provides inner vision\u2014\"insight.\" The inner creates and reflects the outer. Inner vision leads to clarity of thought, intuition (to \"see into it\"), psychic energy, insight, and clairvoyance\u2014\"seeing clearly.\"\n\nThe highest center is above the Ajna, the command center. It is beyond our command or control. We exist by the grace of the Source. The idea of awakening or controlling this infinity is immature. We can, however, feel and perceive our cosmic connection with all that is. Silence is the quality of this level. Meditation, in which the observer dissolves and _is_ the observed, is the realization of the thousand-petaled lotus of light.\n\nThe practices and concepts of chakra and Kundalini philosophy have been linked in origin to the long alchemical search for changing base metals to precious metals. Stills and other apparatus were used in attempts to heat, cook, and distill lead or mercury into gold or magical potions. This external process was eventually internalized to try to \"cook\" bodily fluids at the base of the spine and distill them upward through the spinal cord to the brain in order to gain magical powers or to attain physical immortality. The symbolic analog of this process may be far more important, however: Turning a leaden life into a golden life may be the real esoteric teaching of this form of yoga and the greatest of all alchemy.\n\n#\n\nYour entire life is your meditation. All other specific forms of meditation technique are secondary. By integrating qualities of attention, awareness, caring, and insight into all arenas of living, we reach the deeper core and more essential meaning of meditation. This is an important contextual perspective to elucidate before proceeding farther in an inquiry into specific meditation techniques. Rather than simply asking how to meditate, it is better to explore first the essence of what meditation is.\n\n## **What Is Meditation?**\n\nMeditation practice is often described as the most essential and special aspect of yoga necessary to provide meaning and direction for ordinary life. We are often promised endless benefits from practicing meditation\u2014from relief of tension and anxiety to much loftier goals including freedom, the ending of suffering, and enlightenment. But promising such lofty goals in describing meditation practices also gives them great weight and can make meditation one more source of pressure or conflict in our lives. We may worry about learning how to meditate and finding the right meditation technique among the myriad approaches. We can be troubled about whether we are meditating properly or for enough time, and whether we can control our minds. All these conscious and unconscious pressures can make meditation, which we have sought for peace, harmony, and wisdom, another burden we carry.\n\nAs soon as we ask _how_ to meditate, we are thrown into the field of techniques and practices. Instead of limiting our discussion of meditation to descriptions of specific practices, I would like to point out two broad, general approaches to meditation. The first approach defines meditation in terms of specific practices, techniques, and more structured characterizations. This _prescriptive_ approach tends to be mechanistic and arbitrary. Literally thousands of formal meditation practices\u2014including repetition of mantra, prayers, or affirmations; gazing at candle flames, mandala drawings, or photographs of teachers or divinities; watching the breath, and many more\u2014promise specific results. The majority of these formal practices can be characterized as _mind control systems_ \u2014learning and developing the ability to control your mind and thoughts, through the practice of a technique. Such meditation practices can be useful and beneficial, but the deeper meaning of meditation also implies a state of seeing and being and not merely a controlled _doing_ \u2014not another formal discipline. Our lives today have enough psychological difficulty and internal struggle and we certainly do not need to add more. How can we escape mental pressure through yet another form of effort and control?\n\nFortunately, meditation can also involve spontaneous awakenings of perception, artistry, and insight that inspire a very natural flow and state of being that pervades our entire life. It does not necessarily require years of practice, effort, and mind control. This second broad approach of meditation is more mysterious and indefinable; it sees the essence of meditation to lie beyond form and mechanical practice. This approach to meditation involves a living, evolving energy of perception that has a beginning, but no end, and no specific formal practice.\n\nThis \"formless form\" is without limitation and can take place any time, any place, and encompasses meditation as a quality of insight and awareness that, when awakened, can move through and integrate all parts of life. It is not desirable to give detailed description of formless meditation because to do so makes it into another technique. It is better to point toward this possibility and not give it too much definition. We begin to see all things in life as part of meditation. But this does not imply living in a controlled, stiff, self-conscious, nonspontaneous manner\u2014it is quite the contrary. The formless can work through the form, but the structured can never become the formless. Understanding this broad dimension beyond form and technique is the most important foundation of vital and dynamic meditation\u2014the meditation that is your life.\n\n## **Can Meditation Be Practiced?**\n\nIf we were to ask ourselves why we wish to meditate, part of our answer would probably include gaining greater self-knowledge and understanding, growing as a person, growing in love and connection, moving toward wisdom and insight, discovering the mystical, moving into spiritual energy and awareness, and finding greater peace and harmony. I suggest that any and every activity in life holds the possibility of moving us in these directions and therefore all activities of daily life can be meditation. Everything in life has the potential of moving us to greater understanding and wisdom\u2014and we cannot predict where the greatest lessons will lie. We may think of meditation primarily as sitting silently, but often our greatest growth and awakenings happen in the turbulence of daily life, in a moving experience, or in the magical colors of a sunset\u2014and even in painful experiences. This realization is another way of pointing out that meditation can take place any time and is not limited to specific practices.\n\nAn old story may help illustrate this point. There was once a group of monks living in a remote monastery. Every few months they observed a very intensive sitting meditation practice wherein they would sit for sixteen hours a day for a week. One monk could not bear doing this yet again, so he placed himself at the end of the line as it filed into the dark meditation hall, and then slipped away as his brethren entered the hall. Going to the kitchen, he grabbed enough rice and apples for a week, then took his sleeping sack and hiked into the mountains until he found a beautiful meadow in a clearing. There he watched the flowers, birds, and animals, and each night he gazed into the cosmos. He contemplated his regimented life and practices and became absorbed in the beauty of the earth and stars. After the week, he felt completely reborn and renewed, and had a refreshing glow about him. He returned to the monastery just in time to rejoin the line of monks leaving the hall. As they all went to share a meal, the bretheren noticed the change and glow that had come over their fellow monk. They asked him to share how his meditation had been so evidently effective. What did he do? What technique did he use? He confessed leaving the hall and missing the intensive. After he described his experience in the meadow, the other monks leapt from the table, desperately asked him exactly how much rice and how many apples he took, and then they rushed off to find that meadow of enlightenment. Of course, they could not repeat his awakening.\n\nWhen we look beyond static prescriptions and define meditation as anything that gives us self-knowledge, understanding, wisdom, artistry in living, awareness of the miracle of existence, and love, it becomes easier to see how this process can take place during any activity. Instead of meditation being one more thing to do and practice, everything we do in life becomes part of meditation.\n\nMany define the goal of meditation as a silent, even empty, mind. But we must also realize that there are numerous other petals to the flowering of the mind, and of life, beyond the singular ability to have a calm or silent mind. The blossom in its fullness is made up of far more than one petal. While extraordinarily important, inner silence is still only one petal of the flowering mind. A vibrant mind, an active mind, a sharp mind, a clear mind, a penetrating mind, a questioning mind, an aware mind, an intelligent mind, an efficient mind, a mind that knows its own limits, a reality mobile mind, a flexible mind, a receptive mind, a free mind, a multidimensional mind, and of course, an open mind\u2014these are just a few of the myriad valuable capacities of the mind. There is no end to the possibilities of a mind free to resonate at different levels and frequencies. Because our minds seem so overly active and agitated, the value of a silent, empty mind has been, perhaps, overemphasized. Considering other qualities and possibilities of mind reveals their importance and cultivates the ability to access different realities, and different states of consciousness. To have insight into your mental dynamics, structure, and inner nature is part of the essence of meditation, and part of life itself. The deepest insight will not come from studying someone else's sutras, though they may be of some help. Seeing comes into being through the study of yourself in daily life. Sitting meditation is only one part of self-realization. It is also important to develop a full repertoire of possibilities, levels, and dimensions of mind and not overly, nor exclusively, focus on emptiness and silence. Meditation is the exploration of the myriad possibilities of mind, all the petals of the lotus of consciousness.\n\nWe seem to be habituated to sanctifying instructions and prescriptions from the past. This is probably because prior to the modern era an ordered society depended on unquestioning obedience to elders and ancestors. Obedience to elders and authorities lies in deep strata of our social, cultural, and religious conditioning. Many modern yogis seem to have such a need for validation from past authorities; they feel it necessary to find justification, in past texts, for every discovery and every innovation in yoga. Patanjali's sutras, for example, are relied upon for answers to everything about life and therefore have been extrapolated in every possible way and stretched to include every possible meaning. These sutras may still hold useful teachings, but we must also acknowledge that these texts came out of archaic worldviews and do not have all the answers. For example, Patanjali had little or nothing to say about nature, relationship, and love, and he dealt mostly with areas of practice and mind control. The sutras, other ancient writings, and contemporary teachings can all stimulate and guide, but you must go through the doorway of your own self. Your own mind is the sutra, your own consciousness, your own life, is the meditation. Everything in life contributes to unfolding awareness.\n\n## **(There Is No) How to Meditate**\n\nIt has been said that \"meditation cannot be taught, but meditation can be learned.\" This implies that meditation involves subtle dynamics and not just mechanical practices of technique. Structured meditation practices can be useful and valuable. Sitting meditation can contribute with great value to inward awareness, stilling the mind, relieving tension; it can become a catalyst and impulse for creativity and new ideas. Sitting can be part of increasing self-knowledge and understanding, learning the nature of mind and thought, and entering the inner world. At the same time, it is wise to realize that any tool can be either beneficial or detrimental. It takes sensitive and careful awareness to perceive the appropriateness and usefulness of any practice at any given time.\n\nFormal spiritual practices tend to be put forth as intrinsically good and always of positive value. However, we would be better served by understanding that all things can cut both ways, even if intended to have only positive effects. Spiritual practices, such as meditation, chanting, prayer, or even asana practice, can have beneficial _or_ detrimental results. If we ask, \"Is a knife good or bad?\" The answer is yes\u2014it is both. It always depends on the use and intent. There are certainly rules and principles about using a knife safely and correctly, but the real essence of using powerful tools is an indefinable sense of awareness and sensitivity in action in each moment. Although practices enable us to get better at what we practice, they can also lead to habitual, unexamined behavior or self-righteousness. Getting better at anything is also double-edged. Improved abilities can be used for good or for harm\u2014there is no guarantee of always being one or the other. What is important, then, to one sincerely seeking spiritual growth is to keep attention on the feedback and results, both short-term and long-term, of all of practices. Once again, questioning and inquiry are a light to guide us along an ever-changing path.\n\nWe are better off, and more likely to use practices wisely, when we see that our mechanical techniques are not certain to lead us to greater awareness. If we look around, it is not hard to find people who have meditated for years and who have become more closed and more insensitive. Some who practice yoga and asana grow and blossom, while others harden and seem to regress. Realizing these differing possibilities is part of the light of awareness that increases the positive potential of the practices we choose to use. Developing our ability to question, to listen, and to be sensitive to the feedback and the effects of our practices is key. The vast unconscious, the unknown, the mystery of life, is not at our beck and call. We are not going to invite the infinite and control our destiny with tiny mantras, mechanical contrivances, or simple techniques of repetition. Repetitive practice and behavior quickly becomes automated and unconscious. Real meditation is more of a \"happening,\" similar to sleep, or even love, rather than just something we do. There is no formula for falling asleep. Although you can prepare and relax, the more effort you apply, the less likely sleep will come. Similarly, while it may be important to prepare for love by being more caring, more sensitive, and less aggressive and self-centered, love comes when it will. Love is bigger than we are. A great teacher once said, \"Every effort at meditation is the abject denial of it.\" We cannot _program_ ourselves to love or to meditate. Meditation is more about deprogramming than programming. Meditation is not dull, mechanical, repetitive behavior chasing the magical, mystical, and spontaneous. Moving toward insight, wisdom, and clarity does not result from following systems, but from awakening. This awakened perception can act in all facets of life.\n\nThe majority of formal meditation practices involve self-control, mind control, or the perfecting of techniques and systems. Some define meditation as the perfection of concentration. Concentration, however, is only one power of mind and consciousness, and it comes naturally in direct proportion to our interest. We have excellent powers of concentration when we are very interested\u2014just observe the motionless, rapt attention people exhibit for hours during good movies. Studying and understanding the nature of interest can be more useful than cultivating concentration techniques. Many people find the meditation practices that have been prescribed for them to be boring, and perhaps rightly so. If we were truly interested, we would find them engaging and absorbing.\n\nOut of habit we look to systems and techniques for solution to problems. When faced with a problem or difficulty, we say, \"What should I do?\" Many areas of life, especially the technological and physical, involve learning and mastering techniques. But psychologically and spiritually we need space and freedom. When we live according to doctrines and dogmas, however sophisticated, we often sacrifice creativity and aliveness and become mechanical and automated. Real meditation must be a powerful solvent that penetrates the deeper layers of conditioning and programming to free the mind and consciousness to see farther and deeper than ever before. Meditation does not come from the repetition of the belief of another person or system. Awareness and personal understanding are necessary to neutralize and go beyond conditioning. To free the mind and consciousness, we must become aware of our internal programming and learn to deprogram ourselves. Meditation is not programming the mind with thoughts and beliefs or the patterned, repetitious behavior of practices. Rather, it is _seeing;_ it is the opening of insight, perception, and understanding. This insight into meditation permeates oneself, inside and out, in all arenas of living. It opens the possibility of seeing and being touched by the sacred, miraculous intelligence that is life, that is the universe.\n\n## **Useful Meditation Practices**\n\nIn the context of this broader understanding and vision we have been exploring, meditation techniques take their proper place as tools we may choose to use when we are served by them. Several useful meditation tools are offered here.\n\n### **Sitting Meditation\u2014\"Don't Just Do Something, Sit There\"**\n\nSitting is the most commonly practiced mode of formal meditation technique. Our daily lives tend to be filled with activity, even the passive activity of entertainment, television, and reading. Having a formal sitting practice acknowledges the importance and balance of silence and recognizes that some inner domains and inner states of awareness are accessible only by silent entry, when one is very still and inwardly attentive. A Zen master was once asked, \"What is meditation?\" He replied, \"Just sit.\" That was the extent of the instruction. Sitting is its own reward. In sitting meditation we learn about stillness, and the nature of the mind and thought. We learn to watch and learn from inner processes, and there are many deeper, even unconscious benefits. Sitting helps balance our constant activity and validates the inner journey. A good deal of current scientific research has shown tangible physical and psychological benefits of sitting meditation. After even a short period of sitting, we usually emerge less irritable, more relaxed, and more peaceful. We often find answers to problems or questions, without having consciously thought about them. Sitting meditation seems to bring an ordering of mind. Our culture has an excess of doing and a poverty of being. We could do with a lot more self-reflection, but to the conditioned Western mind the concept of inactivity is seen as wasteful. \"Don't just sit there, do something!\" is all too familiar. Sitting meditation teaches us the other side of the coin: \"Don't just do something, sit there.\"\n\nWe need not use complicated techniques, nor do we need expensive initiations to access sitting meditation. A practice can simply involve sitting and watching the breath, gazing at a candle flame, or watching the inner landscape. Or it can be as simple as slowing down and taking notice of a moment in the journey. The simplest practices are often the most effective. Find a comfortable sitting position for the body. Most meditators prefer a cross-legged position on a mat on the floor with a pillow or folded blanket under the hips to elevate them four to eight inches. Elevating the hips makes sitting easier and helps to keep the spine straight. If you are not able to sit comfortably on the floor, use the edge of a chair. It is better not to support the back by leaning on a wall or chair back because, when leaning back or reclining, the tendency to fall asleep is greater. Similarly, it is preferable not to lie down for meditation\u2014you will fall asleep more easily. Sitting with a straight back aids awareness and attention and is good for the spine. After getting comfortable, relax the body, take a few deep breaths, and allow a feeling of stillness to arise as you move into your period of sitting. I am reminded of a quick story pertinent to this point in the instruction: After sitting several minutes, a young student leaned over to an old master sitting next to him, and asked, \"Okay, now what?\" The old man replied, \"Nothing, this is it!\"\n\nFrom this point, sitting practice can take several directions. Your only task is to keep attention inward and begin what is called _witness_ consciousness\u2014simply witness or watch whatever is happening inside, without trying to change or control it. Watch thoughts and feelings arise and subside. The thoughts will try to grab you and get you involved. Sometimes, until you notice it, you will have boarded a thought train and ridden it to another destination. However, as soon as you see that, come back to your center and the practice of just sitting, just watching. Try not to control yourself or your mind beyond sitting quietly and watching. You are not trying to _shut up_. The only thing to do is let your body become still, let your breath become still, let your eyes become still, and let whatever unfolds, unfold. There may be thoughts about how you are wasting time, about how noisy the mind is, about whether you're doing it right, and many, many more similar concerns.\n\nAt some point\u2014after a few, or even many, meditation sessions\u2014the realization might come that you are not always conscious of all levels involved in this process. This is because the conscious mind cannot plumb the depths of meditation. You will see the results of the practice, though; you will see tracks of it in your life, such as more peace, clarity, and understanding. Be very careful not to fight with your mind or try to force stillness during your sitting meditation. Effort prevents results. That part of the mind that tries to enforce quiet is actually the same part that is chattering. You can only stop the battling process, and the resistance caused by fighting to control thought, by seeing that this battle is futile and giving it up. The mind cannot be stopped by battling. You are the battle.\n\nSitting practice cannot be done incorrectly. Anything that happens is part of it. There are no disturbances. Any noise, thoughts or distractions become part of the process. Sitting meditation can be a wonderful balm for the mind and nervous system. You can learn about the nature and dynamics of thought. You can learn to release stress, calm the mind, and improve concentration. Too much sitting practice or regimentation, however, can also dull the mind, so be watchful. Find your own rhythms and the amount of practice right for you. This may be every day for a period of time or simply a spontaneous practice. It can be good to try a daily practice for a period of time to learn about the effects and results of sitting. Many people find great benefit in maintaining a daily sitting meditation practice.\n\n### **Breath Meditation**\n\nAnother form of sitting practice focuses meditation on the breath. Using the same guidelines above, sit for meditation and put your attention on your breathing. As noted in our discussion of pranayama, it is very difficult to observe the breath without influencing it. Respiration dances on the threshold of the conscious and unconscious. Any attention to breath brings it right back to conscious control. In breathing meditation, simply watch the breath as it moves into inhalation and exhalation and observe any pauses in between. Listen to the sound of the breath and feel its life force.\n\nAfter some minutes, your breathing may slow and deepen and become quieter. You may begin to flow with the natural rhythms and movements of breath and life. Sometimes the breath may stop for a time. Control of inhalations and exhalations will fade as you watch the breath breathe itself. If attention wanders or lapses, simply bring it back again. Breath meditation is very relaxing and it soothes the nervous system.\n\n### **Candle Meditation**\n\nFire has been part of ceremony since ancient times. Yogis see fire as a portal or doorway to other dimensions and perceptions. Fire exists on the threshold between the tangible physical world and the invisible world of energy and waves. Fire purifies and reduces things to their essential components. Flames have both form and formlessness, and they contain the three primal elements\u2014darkness (smoke, ash, and the dark center of the flame), heat (perceived as motion and energy), and light. Meditation on a flame can bring mystical, spiritual, and religious feeling. Even a single candle flame exudes golden light and beauty. The flame demonstrates stillness in action. When we gaze on a flame in a windless place while sitting quietly with soft breathing, the flame appears to become completely still and unmoving, but it is actually full of great energy and motion. Like a held asana, it is another of nature's standing waves.\n\nThe flame has been a great teacher to yogis since ancient times. Even a small candle flame is connected to the sacred fires of all times. Fire teaches us about the circle of life from light and energy, to matter and plant, and back to sound and light.\n\nCandle gazing, called _tratakum_ in Sanskrit, can be practiced in the light or in the dark; however, a darkened room is usually preferable. Place a candle at or near eye level and come into sitting meditation position. Gaze at the candle steadily with open or half-open eyes, absorbing yourself in all aspects of the nature of the flame. Naturally, after a time, your eyes will close. You can visualize or feel the presence of the flame within and sometimes you may even continue to see it inwardly. Spend a period of time in the healing, transformational energy of fire.\n\n### **Sound and Music**\n\nSound and music are integral parts of meditation. The yoga tradition includes unique practices of using pure sound structures for concentration and meditation. The most common is meditation on the ancient, primordial sound OM. We hear the sound of OM in the wind, the ocean, or even in the din of a crowd or traffic. As a syllable, OM refers to everything, and to nothing; it has no specific meaning but points to all things and to their source. Chanting OM alone or in a group harmonizes and aligns many subtle vibrational frequencies.\n\nListening to good music nourishes the soul. Music is one of the most important changers and movers of consciousness, and it is a powerful conveyer of evolutionary information. Sound and music reach layers and levels of resonance and communication not possible through other forms of expression. Music plays an important role in a broad definition of meditation and should be included in any discussion of it. We usually think of meditation in terms of silence, but sound and music are also portals to different dimensions of consciousness. Listening to potent music can become a meditation in and of itself, as important as sitting in silence.\n\n### **Mantra Meditation**\n\nA common form of meditation involves using a mechanical tool like a _mantra_ \u2014a sound, syllable, or phrase that is repeated during the meditation practice. Popular mantras include OM, of course, and _ram, shanti_ , and _soham_ \u2014and there are thousands more. The practice usually involves sitting quietly for a period of time and saying the mantra silently and mentally, sometimes using mala or a rosary. Repeating mantras can calm the mind and have beneficial physiological and psychological benefits. The practice is not hard to learn. Simply sitting and repeating OM silently for a period of time calms the mind and body and gives other benefits.\n\nUnfortunately, a lot of magic and superstition often accompanies some mantra practices. Mantra repetition is one of the oldest forms of mind control. Mantras can be used to calm and control the mind, but also can subject a person to another's control. A mantra cannot be repeated without also unwittingly strengthening the belief system conveyed with and surrounding that mantra. Following the prescription for repetition implies the acceptance of the associated beliefs about the power of the mantra and the importance of its use. We can get high, feel good, and get benefits from mantra repetition, but like any tool, it cuts both ways and can also detrimentally program us to become mechanical, dull, and repetitive. Overuse of mantra can also lead to inability to _stop_ repeating the mantra in the same way that singing a song or jingle too much gets it stuck in our head. I am not saying not to experiment with or use mantra meditation. It can be beneficial if practiced wisely, attentively, and judiciously.\n\n### **Body Meditation**\n\nHatha yoga philosophy frames our work, practice, and experience in the body as essential parts of meditation. Human life and the human body express the greatest of life's miracles. The vast intelligence of the universe presents itself microcosmically in the body. As a complete and sophisticated system of physical culture, Hatha yoga is a meditation in and of itself. Caring for the body, learning to listen to the body's intelligence and feedback, and watching the body's cycles through the months and years is part of meditation. Asana practice creates the ever illuminative process of constant learning from the psychophysical intelligence and life force. Hatha yogis know that yoga practice restores deep levels of balance and energy and constitutes an integral part of meditation and spiritual awareness.\n\n### **Self-Study**\n\n_Swadhyaya_ , which means study of self, or meditation on oneself, is part of the fullness of meditation. Swadhyaya refers to self-watchfulness, self-awareness, and also to the study of illuminating writings or texts. Self-study, watching and learning about the self, is another form of meditation. Studying and meditating on oneself should not become the stiff, contrived behavior of self-consciousness, but remain a dynamic process of seeing and learning.\n\n### **Solitude**\n\nWe may observe that birds landing on a long wire place themselves with perfect spacing\u2014each bird allowing the personal space to spread wings and fly. This observation offers a valuable lesson about each person's need for space and freedom. Yogis have long emphasized the value of taking some personal, alone time to recharge, center, and reconnect with our own essence. Solitude includes personal, silent time. Some lessons are only learned in silence and silence is a lesson in itself. Solitude is balanced by s _atsanga_ , or gathering with the wise, which implies spending time, and cross-pollinating, in community with other yogis to trade ideas, opinions, and insights.\n\n### **Relationship**\n\nMeditation is usually viewed as a solitary practice, a movement within. A yogi I met said, \"You know, we're all saints when we're alone. It is much easier to be saintly when you're by yourself, when there is no one to rub up against. We need relationship to discover our true selves and to see how we're doing.\" We cannot see all of ourselves without a mirror, a reflection. Relationship and daily life offer that reflection. The mirror of relationship reflects and reveals parts of us to ourselves. Relationship is the dance of control and surrender in the balance and discovery of love, cooperation, creation, and mutual reflection. Our relationships define us in context\u2014with family, friends, loved ones, society, the world, with the planet, and with all things. When more of us learn to see and operate from this perception, we will create a different, better world.\n\n### **The Spirituality of Nature**\n\nLook deep, deep into nature and then you'll understand everything better.\n\nALBERT EINSTEIN\n\nAny definition of meditation, any spiritual perspective, that does not hold within it the importance of communion, attunement, and learning from nature seriously lacks perspective. Nature is the ultimate healer and the powerful balancer of energy. Communion with nature is a key part of enlightened living\u2014the essence of the wholeness of living. Sitting by a waterfall, by a river or the sea, by a tree, under the stars or the moon, facing the sunrise or sunset\u2014all these are as much a part of meditation as anything else. A solitary walk in a beautiful, natural place (an opportunity becoming tragically limited) is the perfect ingredient for wellness, joy, and insight. We cannot say where or how deep insights or revelations might occur. They are as likely to take place in nature as on the meditation cushion.\n\nPractitioners who spend far too many hours in temples and darkened rooms practicing control or mental repetition frequently neglect nature meditation. This is not meant to demean the inner journey and experience. Inner visionary experience can be divinely magical, immeasurably beautiful, enrapturing and mystical. The inner visionary experience allows us to see into many dimensions, through biochemical and mystical doorways penetrating into the many layers of consciousness. These perceptions can take us to the place where the line between physical and nonphysical, even between this dimension and another, between life and death, cannot be drawn with certainty. But the outer world of nature and the cosmos are of the same infinite, intricate order and offer the same level of perceptual experience.\n\nWe too often move through life without tuning into the world of natural beauty and power all around us. Are we in tune with the cycles of the moon, tides, wind, and weather? We spend so much time in environments where we control the temperature, the light, the sounds, even thought. Nature is too easily framed as another source of entertainment. People often go to forests and rivers in the same way they go to amusement parks. They look at the trees, have some fun, take a few photos\u2014but have they learned how to commune deeply?\n\nWe cannot exist without nature\u2014in fact, we _are_ nature. We breathe in the oxygen that the trees and plants exhale. We exhale carbon dioxide and the world of plants breathes it in. We eat the gifts of the plant kingdom and give back fertilizer. In fact, the magic of photosynthesis from matter, light, and cosmic energy _is_ the source of all life. The light of the sun feeds and illuminates the earth, and helps form the clouds that travel the planet bringing the rains, creating the lakes and rivers. The water we drink is made of cloud and sun. Therefore, the body is made up of earth, sun, clouds, and rivers. In our solar system, the Sun and planet Earth are smoldering stardust, still hot at the core. So it is not only poetic to say we are the stars, we are the rivers, we are the sun, we are the earth. We have the opportunity to see and live in this harmonious perception. Seeing this _is_ meditation, and not just _a_ meditation. We need not sit in our rooms and mentally repeat \"Tat Twam Asi. I am the earth. I am the stars. I am the trees.\" That is only thought and thinking. We can see this circle of life, this living organism of which we are a part, through communion with nature. We learn the nature of balance by going into the balance of nature.\n\nThe wonderful book _Siddhartha_ , by Herman Hesse, illustrates the power of nature to heal and enlighten. Siddhartha spends his life in search of spirituality and self-knowledge. He becomes a mendicant wanderer, studies with every manner of teacher, does extreme ascetic practices, fasts till near death, and becomes a yogi. Finally, he quits the ascetic life and becomes a wealthy businessman. In his old age he goes to live with a boatman with whom he crossed a river many times. In the end he finds self-realization and enlightenment by giving up the search, communing with the river of life, and watching the river flow.\n\nWe spend most of our time living in worlds of our own thought and creation\u2014cities, houses, cars, ideas, conversations, thinking are all our own creations. But nature is not our creation\u2014it _is_ creation. When in nature, we are in creation itself. Even a short time by rivers or trees, or spending time in a park, or sitting in the light of the moon, leaves one more whole and recharged. The wind is our breath, the water our circulation, the mountains and stones our bones, and the plants our skin. We can often learn more from a tree, the wind, or the sea than from authorities or volumes on meditation. The earth is an organism. Every plant, person, animal, and river is part of the balance. We are not here to renounce the earth but to learn from it and take care of it. And we must remember, in all of our arrogance about taking care of the earth, that actually it is the earth that is taking care of us. The only compassionate, intelligent, and loving response is to do the same in turn. This is the vision we need to operate from. When more of us have this understanding, we will stop destroying our home.\n\nAnother of the great lessons we can learn from nature is that change, growth, and evolution occur through errors and mistakes. When we are not afraid of error, we are more open to growth and our past mistakes transform into the stepping stones of future success and deeper understanding.\n\nThe inward journey seeks the god, _within;_ the outward journey finds god and goddess, _without_. Divinity exists in the outer world; it is all around us. Divine energy flows in the ever blossoming, eternal present of nature. Every corner of nature emanates that sacredness we seek in our rituals, beliefs, and practices. Nature's teaching is immediate, ever present, and infinite. We are totally immersed in the infinity of nature, the nature of the earth, and of the cosmos. It is beginningless and endless. The one and the many, unity and diversity, reflect and create each other in the same way matter and energy are one and the same. Entering into deep communion and connection with nature, which is not of human creation but _is_ creation, is one of the integral parts of whole living, meditation, and spirituality.\n\n### **Soma, Nectar of the Gods**\n\nNo exploration into yoga and meditation would be complete without a look at the ancient lineage of sacred plants and herbs that, many assert, are at the origins of religious experience and spirituality. We live in a time of drug hysteria that calls for a more intelligent understanding that doesn't lump every psychoactive substance, plant, or herb into the category of dark and dangerous. _Soma_ was an ancient brew or drink prepared by sages and yogis that was said to bestow health, strength, insight, spiritual visionary experience, and communion with divinity. This sacred drink, also called _amrita_ or nectar of the gods, opened the mind, heart, and inner landscape while purifying and healing the body. The word _amrita_ means nectar. It comes from the word _mrita_ , which means death, and the addition of the _a-_ to make _a-mrita_ , which thus means nondeath or immortality. Soma use dates back to the ancient time of the Vedas and origins of yoga.\n\nResearchers have suggested that soma was made from psychoactive mushrooms or possibly from a combination of plants, like the Middle Eastern _haoma_ , or Syrian Rue, and various herbs. The formula and exact nature of this \"nectar of immortality\" has been lost, possibly forever, in the mists of antiquity. The Amazon region holds what is probably a similar sacred brew, called _ayahuasca_ , which means vine of the souls or vine of the dead. For centuries, and probably thousands of years, such plant admixtures have played a primary role in indigenous people's spirituality, healing, and their discovery of a vast pharmacy of medicines and healing herbs. We owe much of our pharmacopeia to the legacy from indigenous peoples, their sacramental practices, and great knowledge of medicinal plants.\n\nI touch on the topic of plant sacraments because it is a timely subject and something I am repeatedly asked about. I was very fortunate, early in my studies of yoga and mysticism, to have had the opportunity to meet and practice with researchers and explorers of the soma tradition and other entheogens. It is important to realize that there is a right place and proper use for everything. Plant intelligence has informed human consciousness since the beginning of time. We are dependent on plants and live in symbiotic relationship with them. To make certain plants illegal is ignorance. Rather, we need to learn their language, receive their gifts, and learn the right and intelligent use of all things. As Paracelsus, an alchemist and a founder of modern medicine, stated, \"The difference between a poison and a medicine is dosage.\"\n\nThere are neural pathways in the brain that are more ancient than our beliefs, philosophies, and religious proscriptions. There are keys to the doorways of the rich interior landscape that open dimensions of beauty, order, intelligence, immense complexity, and sacredness beyond measure. These realities can be so powerful, brilliant, and intense that, while visiting them, our world seems like a distant hallucination, in the way that these other realities can seem hallucinatory from this one. Seeing and being touched by these mystical experiences can change us and help us in positive ways with insights into self-healing, enlightened living, and the wholeness of life. Our bodies and brains operate on chemical messengers and information exchange systems in nature. Some scholars and evidence show that medicinal plants were probably at the origin of religious and mystical experience. To say plant sacraments are unnatural, and that practices, rituals, and belief systems created by man are natural, is an absurdity. It is a shame that fear and conditioning can preclude the greatest journey... within.\n\n_Soma, soma, devamritam, parama jyoti, namo, namah_. \"To soma, nectar of the gods, who reveals the divine light, salutations, again salutations.\" I quietly offered this ancient chant as we floated down the jungle river hanging in hammocks. The Amazon reflected the night as lightning bugs lit the sky opening up mysteries of the cosmos, revealing beatific sights in holographic worlds of light, intricacy, and geometric, oscillating wonder. We were drifting in and beholding the matrix of life. We floated into a void of darkness that took shape and form, turning into corridors of color, opening into the field of dreams. All my relations, the sweat lodge prayer of Native Americans, took on new meaning as each relationship in life paraded before me, viewed with the lens of insight from the sacred vine.\n\nThere are keys to the doorways of mind and consciousness that are guarded by phantom demons of fear and certainty. They bring dread to the brittle-minded and self-righteous, preventing entry. These demons may guard the entrance but the reward inside, ironically, is the gift of responsibility and the wisdom of uncertainty.\n\n### **Astronomical or Science Meditation**\n\nPersonal mystical experience, and the experience of Oneness and the interconnectedness of all things can occur spontaneously, and through meditation, drumming, shamanic practices, plant teachers, from fasting, near-death experiences, and from communion with nature. This Oneness experience also seems to be accessible from meditation on the cosmos, through deep contemplation of astronomical and scientific principles. The Oneness experience becomes a deep foundation and field of reference that informs and fills our hearts and consciousness with the infinite, the source of all. Both religious and scientific inquiry can take us to the infinite reaches of the universe where the individual self dissolves.\n\nWe can learn to raise our awareness, perspective, and frame of reference to cosmic proportions. Allowing consciousness to move out toward the vast perspective of galactic and intergalactic proportions, and into the relationships of matter, high-energy particles, white holes, and black holes of immeasurably large numbers has a profound effect on consciousness. Viewed from the cosmic perspective, the human frame of reference is nearly infinitesimal in comparison, almost illusory in that vast sea of time and space. We can access this vision by gazing at the stars, the Milky Way, and out into the mysterious universe. We can also access it by contemplation of cosmic proportions. The beauties and revelations of science provide an extraordinary meditation journey. A few of these numbers are offered here.\n\nIt took many centuries for humanity to learn more about the nature, size, and scope of even our tiny corner of the universe. For millennia we assumed that the planet Earth was the center of an unchanging universe. It was only in 1609 that Galileo invented the telescope. Now we have learned and seen the vastness of our galactic home. Let your mind take the astronomer's and mathematician's journey.\n\nLight travels at a speed of 12 million miles a _minute_ and now we know that the nearest stars lie 5 light _years_ , or 31,500,000,000,000 miles away! This distance would require approximately a 100,000-year journey in today's spacecraft. Our Milky Way spiral galaxy consists of 100 billion stars. Think about that for a moment. Galaxies are composed of countless numbers of stars. Our galaxy is enormous beyond conception but it is only a part of clusters of galaxies of astounding size\u2014galaxies that span hundreds of millions of light years across.\n\nOur current science and instruments can see about 15 billion light years. The Milky Way itself is about 10 billion years old with millions of stars forming and dying all the time. Supernovas create components of life, such as oxygen, gas, and the elements. Earth itself is truly stardust, a speck of our galactic center cooling off. Aside from these vast cosmic distances with black holes, white holes, supernovas, and star systems, there is the microcosmos with quarks, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, and possibly antimatter.\n\nGases, rain, radiation, and bombarding cosmic elements shaped Earth. Our planet revolves around the Sun at 900 miles per hour. The stars move away a million miles a day at about 40,000 miles per hour. The outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, where Earth resides, is 100,000 light years wide. Our galaxy is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, many of which are far larger.\n\nIf we lived the entire history of the earth in one hour, in the first 50 minutes we would be in a world of single-cell organisms. Animal life existed only in the last ten minutes, and all of human history would have occurred in the last one-hundredth of a second of that hour.\n\nOur Earth actually exists on an energy-matter, space-time continuum: From our galactic Milky Way center, our energy source, through time and space, through the creation of all the elements of the physical universe, from cosmic energy and radiation, to light; and then coalescing down to the creation of every molecule and element on this speck of stardust called Earth, which is bathed in the light of the sun and the radiation from the galaxy, and on which self-reflecting humans were born to marvel at the wonder of it all.\n\nWe have no way to understand truly these massive numbers, times, and distances\u2014and that is the point. Contemplating the vastness of the universe can be a catalyst for transcending the normal limits of consciousness. When we actually hold these perspectives in awareness, they become a dissolving and illuminating, transformational perception of the immeasurable. This vision becomes a form of cosmic consciousness. Whenever you have the opportunity, on a starlit night, lie back, meditate on the cosmos, and take yourself on that cosmic voyage.\n\n### **Death Meditation**\n\nMeditation on death can open our hearts and fill us with love and compassion. Thinking about our own death can, after moving through the fear, lead to cherishing each moment we have. We don't like to think about death, and we usually push the idea of our own end into the distant future. But death is ever present, all around us, and even sits on our shoulder. The word yoga means, and reminds us about, connection and reintegration. Death teaches us about the inevitability of separation, ending, and that all things must pass.\n\nOn my first trip to India, a yogi took me to the funeral pyres near a river. Cremation is very common in India and some yogis even make a meditation practice of watching the fires and burning bodies. My yogi friend suggested we try to watch a burning body, crackling and charring as it disappears into its essence of dust and light. To our Western mindset and conditioning, this practice may seem macabre, even diabolical. But in the East, the death meditation is often seen as a way of awakening us to our ephemeral nature and opening our hearts to care and love. We do not emphasize this aspect of death, nor talk about it much in our culture, but we have similar experiences. When we attend a funeral of a loved one, we usually leave with a full heart, more sensitive to others and more caring. I remember making a call to my aging father, who was normally a bit stiff and self-absorbed, and finding him unusually open and caring. He asked a lot of questions about how I was doing and how my life was going. Sensing how differently he was behaving, I asked him if anything unusual or important had happened. He said no. I asked what he did that day and he said he visited my mother's grave at the cemetery and had been looking over arrangements he had made for his own burial plot next to her. I realized that my father was doing the death meditation and that it had opened his heart.\n\nAs I watched that body burn on a pile of logs by the River Ganga, my horror and revulsion slowly began to subside. My heart began to soften and open and I saw deeper into life and death through the doorway of flames. We sat by the sacred river and watched the body melt away into a film of ash floating downstream. In the evening light, long clouds lined the sky. There was sadness and joy, ending and beginning. An extraordinary stillness and beauty filled the night with the pink glow against the blue sky reflecting and enhancing the delicate, green spring grasses lining the hills. Slowly the light, and with it the beauty, faded and I almost began to mourn its brevity and departure, as we do the inevitable loss of things dear. But the moonlight arrived and began to light the skies, trees, and clouds. Beauty began revealing itself, reborn again in new ways. We can mourn the loss of the past or keep our eyes on the ever-present, constantly changing dance of dissolution and creation.\n\n### **Looking Forward, Looking Backward**\n\nAnother form of meditation or contemplation involves one or several sittings, during which we try to project and experience self in old age, near the end of life. The meditator visualizes him- or herself with diminished capacities and abilities, such as much less energy, mobility, and eyesight, and imagines the other unpleasant qualities of old age. Why do such a seemingly depressing exercise? Because it is a common folly of youth to feel \"these things will never happen to me.\" In the naivet\u00e9 of youth, we feel we will overcome the problems of sickness and old age. We will practice yoga, we will eat properly, and learn to heal ourselves. Fortunately, we can preserve our vitality to a great extent, but bodies do wear out and age. The body is not a perpetual motion machine. Other than the universe and life itself, perpetual, eternal machines do not exist. The realization that these things could happen to us offers a source of wisdom, and like the death meditation, this awareness can inform life, infusing it with appreciation, care and attention, and awareness of life's preciousness.\n\nThis contemplation is not a negative approach, but actually the seed of something positive and illuminating. When the Buddha was born into a royal family, an astrologer advised his father that this new son would either become a great king or a great monk. Fearing that his son might leave the kingdom, the father brought him up isolated from exposure to sickness, old age, and death. When he got older, the Buddha toured his kingdom, and saw the sick, aged, and dying for the first time. He was powerfully thrown into this meditation and it eventually led him to his own awakening and the discoveries he went on to share and teach.\n\n## **How Much to Practice**\n\nAll of these forms of meditation practice can be beneficial and enjoyable, and can be used in any combination. Opportunities for them abound. There are no formulas on how much or how often to use them. They offer an ongoing journey of experimentation, practice, and learning from experience.\n\nAfter several years of traditional yoga study and practice, I had the opportunity to travel in India and Europe with a bright, unconventional yogi. He encouraged and enjoyed _vichara_ \u2014the process of deep inquiry, questioning, and discussion. At that time I was still very steeped in traditional thinking, and I believed meditation must be structured and practiced daily as part of one's routine. The yogi, who led meditation classes, kept taking the opposite viewpoint, emphasizing the spontaneity and freedom of real meditation. After a couple of days of debate, I finally began to see his perspective on meditation as something that has to occur naturally without contrived effort. I began to feel free, and excited, letting go of effort. I got up, and as I was leaving the room, I said, \"Thank you very much. I feel very freed up and now see meditation as something that occurs naturally, a _happening.\"_ As I was closing the door, he smiled and said, \"One more thing, Ganga. Be sure to let it happen regularly!\" Now that he had swung me the other way, he was sure to get in the last blow. Both sides of the argument have their validity. There is a need and benefit of learning control and there is also that which is beyond control.\n\nMeditation balances an interplay of control and surrender, faith and questioning, reverence and self-empowerment. It is selflessness balanced by individuality, or _self-fullness_. It requires holding firmly and letting go. It brings grace and harmony. It perceives the miraculous and the sacred. Meditation is all of life, the wholeness of life, the ending of time, and the essence of yoga.\n\n#\n\nOur deeply rooted concepts of spirituality developed over millennia in religious traditions from around the world that had their beginnings ages ago in times when human consciousness and the state of our knowledge were very different from what they are today. Tradition was a necessary means of passing knowledge from generation to generation. Strong controls on society were needed, since survival depended on generations living as their ancestors had taught. Centuries, even millennia, may have passed with little or no profound change in traditions. Memory, custom, and repetition were requisite for the survival and maintenance of societies and cultures without books, tape systems, computers, and other mechanisms of mass information storage and distribution. The advent of science and technology introduced huge challenges that upset the ancient equilibrium of religious thought and culture. Science allowed many inexplicable and seemingly miraculous things to be proved, explained, demonstrated, and acted upon while creating many new miracles beyond even those reported by religion. There are legends, for example, of yogis levitating or hovering above the ground, but now we can \"levitate\" hundreds of people at once across the seas at thirty-five thousand feet.\n\n## **Our Relation to the One**\n\nWe now live in a very different world. There are many beautiful principles and gems of wisdom in ancient religion, but human knowledge has grown exponentially. Given the many insights and advances in our culture, many of the ancient beliefs, practices, and philosophies no longer seem appropriate or consonant with broader, modern perspectives. Much Eastern philosophy grew from the explanations and teachings of mystics who claimed experiences of divinity, or of the Oneness of the universe. The core belief in this perspective is that the underlying truth and reality in life is the One, and that the everyday world of diversity and individuality in which we live is actually an illusion, called _maya_. Worldly existence is often regarded merely as a means for getting us back to union with the One, with God, or to enlightenment. Thought, ego, self-centeredness, desire, and attachment are usually defined in these traditions as obstacles to be eliminated in order to go beyond separateness into Oneness and reintegration. While this common yogic perspective has given us many useful insights and transformational practices, it can also be a limiting, _one_ -sided perspective.\n\nSeeing Oneness as the only essential true reality can lead to a devaluing of the earth, of life, and personal relationships. In this perspective, our relationship to the transcendent, to the mystical, or to the Teacher, the Guru, is often put above our closest personal relationships, even that with our children. (For example, the Buddha and many other spiritual exemplars are reputed to have left their wives and children to pursue their personal goals of enlightenment.) In fact, a healthy and balanced amount of desire, attachment, and even ego, can be shown to be necessary, inseparable aspects of life with purpose and use. Eastern thought often defines these aspects of life essentially as the obstacles to enlightenment, but it may be wiser to learn to live intelligently with these inherent dimensions of ourselves rather than try to annihilate them. Every living organism, arguably even every physical element and atom, by definition, needs self-defining, self-protective characteristics. Both boundary and permeability are necessary in the universe. We need to understand unity and interconnection, and to value diversity.\n\n## **Oneness and the Loss of Diversity**\n\nOne of the greatest tragedies of modern times is the accelerating loss of diversity, both in nature and culture. We seem to be homogenizing our planet into a oneness of asphalt, TV, and global franchises. This disturbing trend was driven home to me on a journey deep into the Brazilian Amazon with some forest dwellers and shamans.\n\nWe had outfitted and taken a boat along a marvelous, snaking river. Two days into the dense jungle, we tied the boat at the river bank and hiked into the forest to see the animals among enormous, ancient trees and vines. It was extraordinarily hot and humid, and after a couple hours of trekking we were all very thirsty and hungry. Suddenly, a loud roar shook the ground. I expected a fleet of army helicopters to pass over but the source was huge, black clouds, which quickly passed overhead with exploding thunder and lightening. The cloud bank began to pour relentless torrents of rain and we were immediately drenched. We only had to cup hands to fill them and drink as if from a faucet.\n\nWe ran through the woods, looking for shelter, and came upon a very small village of shabby wooden huts with thatched roofs. Beautiful, smiling children ran to greet us and welcome us into their home. They served us dried coconut and banana and we threw the scraps to their chickens. As I was standing in their living area, I heard some strange, garbled sounds coming out of the next room. I poked my head through the door and was astonished to see a small, old television set with our jungle friends seated around it, watching _Dallas_. I looked outside and saw a small power line and cable line strung through the primeval forest we came to honor. Our modern lifestyle is consuming our ecosphere and also our _ethnosphere_ \u2014the diversity of ethnic cultures and wisdom. The greatest terrorism of our time is the terrorism against our environment\u2014the effects and loss are not only immediate, but will last for generations to come. It is not only a disgrace to lose this diversity, and the unique beauty of different cultures and different parts of the earth, but the earth cannot support a just and equitable distribution of resources at the levels at which we are living in North America.\n\nDiversity is the fabric of life. In the same way that matter and energy are part of one continuum, the One and the Many are a natural, mutually embedded polarity in the universe. In fact, they are necessary counterparts of each other. Diversity is as sacred as unity\u2014the many as relevant, important, and sacred as the One or God. In fact, neither could exist without the other. This perspective can be positive and freeing. Both science and religious mysticism offer insights and pieces of the puzzle of existence. There are many gems and gifts from the past and the understanding and insights presented in this work would not be possible without our ancestors and traditions. While we honor their contributions and their place in the past, it is also the moment to step beyond them. Thousands of years of these ancient ways have brought us to this critical point in our history. Now is the time for something new, a new awakening, a new vision, a new liberation.\n\n## **Spirituality Beyond Belief**\n\nWe need to look at our many long-held beliefs and dogmas to shed new light and to awaken a new perception, a new insight, and a new paradigm of spirituality that better bridges science, technology, and religion, and that stops the degradation of the earth and society. This is more important now than ever before because on many fronts our destructive powers have become global, threatening life as we know it.\n\nSpirituality, and our relationship to it, must change and grow. Spirituality is an evolving, immeasurable energy that is not fixed in definitions, descriptions, and pathways defined for all time thousands of years ago, by cultures without science-based knowledge we now take for granted\u2014biology, astronomy, psychology, archeology, geology, anthropology, quantum physics, evolution, and the many other remarkable discoveries of our times. Right here and now in this new millennium we have the possibility of standing on the shoulders of the past in order to see farther and deeper than humans have seen before. We can open the doorway into lives of exciting adventure, sharing this extraordinary moment in history.\n\nSpirituality and self-realization rest at the core and essence of yoga philosophy. Many people come to yoga primarily for fitness, physical health, and well-being, but even among this group there is often interest and appreciation for the holistic and deeper aspects of yoga. Any exploration into yoga would be incomplete without an inquiry and examination of its spiritual essence. While there is a lot of interest in spirituality among students of yoga, there is often a lack of clarity and understanding. Roughly two broad categories distinguish viewpoints on spirituality. As we have discussed in the area of meditation, one viewpoint is that there is an eternal, spiritual path that has been mapped, discovered, and revealed. This viewpoint assumes we must follow that path as defined by its practices, rituals, and beliefs. The other viewpoint defines spirit and spirituality in a more relativistic manner, seeing spirituality as living and evolving. The first perspective describes spirituality more in terms of specific beliefs, rituals, and defined behaviors, while the second perspective sees the approach to spirituality requiring flexible, living awareness and attunement in order to move and flow with spirit.\n\nLooking at music as an example may help us understand the evolutionary nature of spirituality. Music is not the same as it was when it was first developed. Early forms of music were very limited in range, pitch, and complexity, with simple rhythms and fewer possibilities of instrumentation. Over the centuries music has evolved into many genres and highly complex symphonies that communicate broad ranges of feeling, emotion, and meaning. Similarly, our understanding of spirituality needs to grow and evolve beyond the limits of tradition and ancient mappings.\n\nSpiritual practices are often seen as the essential core that defines and measures spirituality, but it may be wiser and more useful to hold spiritual practices in a similar way that we might hold medicines, and treat ritual, custom, and belief as things to learn the appropriate need and use for on an individual and relative basis. Certain medicines might be very useful to a particular person at particular times but unhelpful or adverse other times. Too often spiritual practices are promoted like snake oils\u2014the cure for all our ills. We may have and need spiritual practice and we must also keep open the possibility of freedom in the way we hold and use them. A free context will keep us open to the awareness and revelations that can only come spontaneously and uninvited, in unstructured, timeless moments. A growing number of yogis see life, not as following a specified path, but rather as a journey into untold possibility. This unfolding understanding requires a constant vigilance of awareness and sensitivity that responds to the moment, guiding us on our way through life's changing seas.\n\nSpirituality is not simply a mechanical process and not something finally obtained or acquired. Important elements contribute to spirituality, such as ethical behavior, right living, right livelihood, caring, and compassion, but the deepest essence lives beyond practices, beliefs, descriptions, and words. It is not advisable to explain or define spirituality with too much detail, and it cannot be captured, owned, or stored up. Ironically, the Sanskrit word for illusion\u2014maya\u2014also means to measure and to define. When we measure and overly structure spirit, we may lose it.\n\nWhile traveling in the Himalayas, I met many swamis and yogis who seemed caught up in what has come to be called _spiritual materialism_ \u2014the concept that spiritual merit can be stored up and accumulated. Some of the swamis seemed condescending to anyone who had not achieved as much as they had. I remember one swami bragging about nearly completing a _puruscharana_ , or the repetition of his mantra hundreds of thousands of times. He asked me and others how long we had repeated our mantras; he claimed great wisdom, but he seemed stale and automated. He exemplified spiritual materialism, seeming to see his spirituality as an accounting system in which he had a very good balance sheet. Neither life, wisdom, nor love work like a bank account. Great attainments and lifetimes of merit can evaporate in a moment, and awakening or compassion can come in a flash.\n\nA funny story demonstrates this idea. Once there was a billionaire businessman who had cheated and lied throughout his lifetime to make his fortune. On his death bed, however, he realized his fate and donated his entire estate to charity. When he died, the lords of karma were in a quandary about what to do with his soul. He had done so much evil and had millions of dollars in bad deeds, but because of his gift he ended up ten dollars in the black! The karmic accountants were in a dilemma and appealed directly to God for a decision in this difficult case. God looked over the man's deeds and the balance sheets and replied, \"Give him back his ten dollars and tell him to go to Hell!\" It is silly to reduce life and spirituality to a measurable system of accounting.\n\nSpirituality can be discovered and touched, and it can touch us, leading to deepening love, insight, and wisdom. It is larger than we are; we exist within it. Our most eloquent words are at best only approximations. Spirituality is like an exquisite flower that blooms when it will. It is not possible to cheapen it so that it can be fully explained or captured in formulated living. It is more like the round, fiery, rising sun peaking through fingers of cloud. Can you convey in words what the sunset is? Even a photograph is a poor approximation. The sunrise can only convey itself.\n\nWe may do our sitting practices, our rituals, and mantra repetitions, and become better human beings\u2014or not. History is replete with examples of spiritual practitioners who became or remained tyrants. The message and teaching here is that spirituality cannot be mechanized or automated into systems of practices. Practices have their place, but we must always be vigilant and aware. Spirit is the mysterious, ineffable, flow that reveals itself occasionally in synchronicity, magical moments, and the beauty of perception\u2014as being touched by a sunset or a smile. Synchronicities can be cosmic signposts of the unseen hand of the mysterious and the miraculous. Love is the essence, heart, and the expression of spirituality. Spirituality is the art of living\u2014living with the highest possible excellence, compassion, passion, creativity, artistry, and awe.\n\nWe must be careful about organizing and codifying our spirituality. A couple of memorable stories speak to this. In the first, a wise man and his student are walking along the beach. The wise man is instructing his student, who is finally beginning to have flashes of illumination and insight, glimpsing the meaning and depth of life. Following the two men are a devil and his student. The devil's student observes the wise man's student beginning to awaken and is quite nervous and upset. \"Do something quickly, master. His student is about to get it!\" he says. \"Relax, no problem,\" replies the devil. \"Nothing to worry about. After he gets it, all we have to do is help the boy organize it!\" Awakening and insight are lost when we apply too much structure and organization. Religion is institutional, spirituality is deeply personal. Direct personal perception that there is no mechanical path to spirituality creates an inner revolution that is the ending of struggle and the awakening of a new energy that is creative and free.\n\nWe create similar problems of rigidity by depending on rituals and practices for our spirituality without keeping our eyes and hearts open, as the next story points out. A spiritual seeker spent his life pursuing God, enlightenment, and cosmic consciousness. He lived in monasteries, made pilgrimages, and read all the holy books. In the twilight of his life, he gave up his search and decided to end his days peacefully in the beauty of the mountains and forests. He went deep into the woods and built a camp, where he spent his time in solitude with only the trees, animals, and stars, and eating wild fruits and nuts. Before his death he found peace for the first time, and realized that all his efforts, rituals, and practices seemed more of a hindrance than a help. He found his awakening all around him in life and wanted to share his realization with others but was not strong enough to return to the city where he had lived. So he decided to make a carving that might convey his insight. He cut a tree and carved a beautiful statue of a man with one hand pointing up toward the stars, the other pointing outward toward life; the statue's face was peaceful and smiling. The seeker happened to die one day while sitting in the Lotus position. Many years later, his statue and his bones were found by some pilgrims. They marveled at the bones still resting in the Lotus pose and they pondered the meaning of the statue. \"These are the bones of a great yogi,\" they said. \"He left this statue in a mudra of great meaning, and his teachings and this place are obviously very holy.\" So they built a temple and enshrined the bones and statue. Each day they offered flowers to the carving and sat in the temple to meditate, never seeing the beauty nor the essence toward which it pointed. It is often our habit and mistake to turn living perceptions into ritual and repetitive practice.\n\nWe may be living during the time of the birth of a new spirituality. This spirituality is free from restricting dogmas and beliefs that divide. It is deeply connected to the sacredness of the web of life, our planet, and the matrix of symbiotic interrelationships in the diversities all around us. We are all part of that web, that life, that wholeness. Our technologies are here to stay and we must learn to use them properly to serve the well-being of all instead of in service of narrow doctrines, or in service of greed. We need to live and act from a perception of the deepest principles of the interconnectedness and sacredness of life, to see our responsibility to leave our planet better than we found it, and to become more conscious of the consequences of our lifestyles in the near and long term. We could all use a good dose of the ancient principle of _santosha_ , or contentment with the pains, joys, and beauties in the simple\u2014but extraordinarily potent\u2014activities of daily life. This spirituality has at its core a new insight, a new awareness, a new consciousness unburdened by limited beliefs, and open to light, love, truth, spirit, and the art of living, choosing the highest levels of action and awareness each moment.\n\n## **Evolutionary Enlightenment**\n\nEnlightenment is not a place we get to, nor an attainment, but an endless journey of seeing, learning, awakening, and reawakening. Rather than viewing enlightenment as a state of all-knowing perfection, we are better off seeing it as an endless process. It is beyond the scope of this book to go into a comprehensive critique of the enlightenment paradigm, a common spiritual worldview held by yogis that frames final enlightenment as the end, goal, and purpose of life. I am hoping the approaches to personal practice and insight we have explored demonstrate a more dynamic alternative. Rather than viewing enlightenment as a final condition that leaves us in an all-knowing, and often self-righteous, state, it is more valuable to see enlightenment as a continuous, ongoing, ever-changing process\u2014a movement that by nature and necessity must ebb and flow. If our heads are always in the clouds, absorbed in the One, we cannot navigate well among the Many.\n\nIn some traditions this _natural_ , or temporary, enlightenment is considered a lesser attainment. Is it? What are the implications of considering someone, or considering oneself, to be permanently enlightened? There are no errors for these people; all their deeds and words are in perfect harmony with the universe. Every act is pure love and truth. Being in their presence is seen as a blessing. This is the formula for abuse and megalomania. There are those who may take issue with this perspective and point to perfected ones of the past or present as faultless masters. I suggest being very cautious of such claims or they may become the ultimate seduction. Trust yourself and the development of your own insight.\n\nTo oversimplify, it may be spiritual to do what feels good, what serves us and the world, what turns us on, and what improves our wisdom, self-knowledge, understanding, and self-esteem. We can base the practices we choose on these guiding lights, not only on what people say we should do to become whole. The bottom line is each one of us must decide what is right and appropriate for ourselves. We all depend on and learn from each other and from our teachers. Education is the foundation of living, but unquestioning obedience to, and worship of, teachers\u2014long a tradition in India\u2014supports authoritarianism, exploitation, and coercion. We must question our teachers, ourselves, and our beliefs. It has been said, \"Don't believe what you think.\" Thought is fallible and belief is often blind. The word _belief_ itself is spelled with _lie_ in the middle.\n\nOnce in discussion, a wise yogi showed me how holding enlightenment as a goal was a misconception. We were having a lively and profound discussion in which he was leading me into a trap that would free me from this idea. I was questioning him about the nature of enlightenment and obviously I was holding onto the idea of a _final_ enlightenment. I kept phrasing my questions with \"When you get enlightened...\" or \"After you're enlightened...\" My friend kept pushing me and replying, \"Yes, WHEN?... when you get enlightened? Then? Then what?\" I struggled with his questions and kept replying in a way that framed enlightenment as an attainment or final goal to reach, after which one would be totally clear and wise. He retorted to my replies until finally he got me to see and realize something and I exclaimed, \"Ah ha, you 'get there,' you get enlightened, and think you've arrived, so then you can go back to sleep!\" Right in chorus with me, he said, \"Then you can go back to sleep!\" There was a pregnant silence and then he added that there is no final destination. Thinking one has arrived is darkness once again. He went on to explain further how he saw enlightenment as enlightened living, constantly reawakening and always being alert, questioning, and watchful.\n\nEnlightenment also implies light\u2014light itself. Light comes in many forms\u2014insight, awareness, illumination of the dark corners of our consciousness, illumination of the darkness of our fears and neuroses. Light dispels darkness. Light is also the beauty of nature, both inner and outer. Light can take us on transformational journeys deep inside our own consciousness, revealing countless and immeasurable mysteries and visions of multi-hued, jeweled inner worlds. Light permeates the universe. Even matter is another form of light. All that we see as manifest creation\u2014planets, stars, the sun\u2014are, in a sense, just a part of the smoldering, cooling light energy in the universe. Light illumines our paths and worlds, yet itself remains one of the greatest mysteries.\n\nEnlightenment is the discovery of the sublime, the mystical, and the mysterious. It is seeing connection and separation; it is merging into the interconnectedness of all things. _Interconnectedness_ is a good term because it implies both oneness and separation. At deep levels of perception there is neither up nor down, left nor right, neither the experiencer nor the experience. Enlightenment explores and resides at the indefinable edge where life and death meet. It wanders in the mystery of the Divine, beyond the mind of man. But we must also be very careful because enlightenment can become the ultimate driving desire, the cosmic carrot on the end of a stick, pulling us into a life of struggle toward unattainable goals of perfection, purity, and perpetual bliss. Like all things, seasons and cycles come and go. We may have timeless moments of enlightenment, deep insight, revelation, and realization. We may merge into that which is beyond us, into the source that sustains us. Then we must come back down the ladder of consciousness into the daily moments of living. The time of the light, the time of vision and perception, later becomes a distant guiding vision. That light itself lives only in its own moment. When we rely too heavily on past insights and realizations, we may lose the light of perception that lives in the present moment. The enlightenment of today can become the ignorance of tomorrow, if one isn't vigilant.\n\nPart of enlightenment involves lightening up a bit. This does not imply that we should not take things seriously, but that we should see the humor in life and in ourselves. Lightening up also points to the importance of ridding ourselves of some of the mental and psychological baggage we have accumulated. To let go we must also let go of the fear of standing alone\u2014of being without supports or crutches. To move beyond our hopes of being saved by gurus or perfect paths, we must go through our fears. The demons of fear guard the gateways to freedom. When we let go of the weight of enlightenment, as a permanent state of supreme wisdom and all-knowingness\u2014which may be nothing more than an abstraction or concept\u2014we are closer to the possibility of seeing the insight, light, and delight in each moment in the world outside us, and in the infinite worlds within us.\n\n## **The Mystery: Death and Time**\n\nDeath is the greatest mystery and the ultimate unknown. As we have seen, death embraced is a great teacher, a potent meditation, and life is the greatest guru. Living and dying, beginning and ending, are intertwined. Death is part of life's teaching. Yoga, religion, and spirituality concern, at the core, our relationship with death. I use the word _relationship_ , instead of _knowledge_ or _understanding_ , because death has its own life; it is the essence of change and mystery. We cannot completely know death. As we grow older and experience the deaths of loved ones, this relationship with death can bring insight, love, maturity, compassion, and appreciation for our own mortality. Having beliefs in philosophies and hopes about the meaning of death does not inform and enlighten living in the same way that having a relationship with death does\u2014seeing death, change, beginning and ending, in the movement of living.\n\nSeeing the presence of death in life gives life its preciousness. Over millennia philosophers, yogis, and sages have discussed and inquired into the possible limits of understanding death. In mystical experiences, altered states, and meditation, it is possible to experience entire lifetimes, even eternity, in very short spans of time. Many have reported back from these experiences and described feeling they lived vast periods of time in short moments. This points to the elasticity and relativity of mind states and mental time. The concept of the relativity of time appears occasionally in ancient texts such as _The Yoga Vasistha_. A story is told there of the god Vishnu walking and enjoying the beauty of the earth with his student, Narada, who is a wise and advanced student. Narada is in such joy walking with his teacher and wants to understand why people suffer in illusion. He asks Vishnu to please explain the power that time, delusion, and illusion hold over people. Vishnu says it is much too complicated for such a beautiful day and he sits down on a log on a mountain ridge. Their canteens are empty so he asks Narada to please find them some water.\n\nNarada leaves and has to hike a long way before he finds a river. As he is filling the canteens, he sees on the other bank a beautiful young maiden bathing naked in the river. He is entranced by her full breasts, long hair, and shapely legs as he watches her bathe. After she dresses he crosses the river and introduces himself. They are both quite taken with each other and Narada decides to stay awhile. After some days they fall completely in love, and he asks her father for her hand in marriage. They are wed, and have two beautiful children. One day a huge storm arrives, bringing incessant rains. The river swells and starts to wash away the village, with his wife and sons. Narada, in great fear and panic, desperately tries to rescue his family from the rising torrents, but they drown in front of his eyes. He struggles to the banks of the river, barely saving himself, and sits on the shore wailing. Sobbing in overwhelming grief, he feels a tap on his shoulder. It is Vishnu, who says, \"Narada, where have you been? It has been two hours since I asked you to fetch us some water!\" Narada comes to his senses, looks around, and sees there is no village, no flood. He realizes he has dreamed or experienced a lifetime in a few minutes. Vishnu winks at him with a look that reminds Narada he had asked to see the power of mind and illusion. This story is sometimes used to denigrate sexuality, relationships, and attachments, purporting them to be dream, illusion, and a lower level of reality. But the story also has the subtler message repeated in this old text that time is fluid, mental states are relative, and time can expand and compress in near-death experience, altered states, dream, and reveries. In a flash, time collapses from years to minutes for Narada, and he realizes the pliability of mental time and mental suffering. He sees how in the twinkling of an eye everything can change when life taps us on the shoulder. Life can tap any of us on the shoulder at any moment, and then we can see things in a whole new way.\n\nScience too has shown that time is warped and space is curved. Philosophers have argued that even if people report back from near-death or altered states about having personally experienced reincarnation or other lifetimes, their experience could in fact actually all have occurred in the final moments, the final powering down, of the brain itself. So, even to one who believes in or has experienced reincarnation or the eternity of time in a single moment, a deep, objective inquiry reveals that death remains and veils the great mystery. In death is the force of change and transformation that can come as a gentle wind or a tempest. That is why the mystery of death is given a central role in the spiritual process of moving into deeper awareness and understanding. Desire to understand what lies behind the doorway of death has given birth to religious belief and philosophy.\n\nThe doctrine of karma and reincarnation is an attempt to explain this mystery. Reincarnation is central in many Eastern philosophical traditions. We need not overly burden ourselves trying to determine whether this belief is true. If the doctrine of reincarnation is true, then what we do with our present life is of crucial importance. How we live now will determine our future incarnations and potential freedom. However, if this life is our only life, then in the same way, how we live now is again vitally important. If this is our only life, it is our only opportunity. In both viewpoints we are left with the importance of the present moment.\n\nWhen death remains the mystery uncovered by hope and belief, then joy and presence in the moment take on their rightful significance. Mystery gives life depth and meaning. If we knew everything about our future, life might become boring and lose meaning. In a similar way that explaining a joke or revealing the end of a story or movie can take the life out of them, removing the mystery and uncertainty from life would make living barren. Mystery is immense and cannot be removed. No matter how much we uncover, the mystery still remains. We can only remove our awareness of the immensity of mystery by covering it, and deadening it, with beliefs and certainties. What we want is certainty, but what we have is relativity. There is great beauty in the mystery of life. Part of life is mystery, and remains mysterious, beyond teaching, thought, or explanation.\n\n## **Navigating Life**\n\nAll navigation systems use at least two points of reference. We cannot navigate and find our location, our way, and our destination with only one point of reference. To perceive location and depth, we use two vantage points, such as our two ears and our two eyes. This principle can be applied to navigating through life. For example, there are _heart-centered_ people who say that we should listen only to our hearts, and always follow the heart. There are _mind-centered_ people who say we should primarily rely on intellect, mind, thought, and brain power to find our way and solve our problems. Why not see that both heart and mind, male and female, control and surrender, and the many other polarities of life are necessary vantage points for reference and navigation? To steer ourselves through the constantly changing experience of life, we need to use the polarity of opposites. We do not live in a black-and-white reality. Black and white may be at the ends of a spectrum of navigation, but the matrix of life and living takes place between in shades of gray and in the multiplicity of nuance of color, shape, and form. The heart is balanced by the head, the head by the heart. Personal intuition is balanced by external knowledge and feedback. Both the One and the Many, our interconnectedness and our individuality, create and reflect each other. Giving different perspectives, these many vantage points guide us and bring our paths into view.\n\nWith your own light, enhanced by the light of teachers, friends, and others, you can navigate your life, your meditation, your spirituality. However dim and flickering, your light will grow and begin to illumine that way that is uniquely yours, that only you can discover for yourself. Your own journey can be a constantly enthralling, endlessly fascinating, description-defying movement in the enchantment and mystery of living. _Become a light unto yourself_.\n\nAre you ready for total inner freedom? Can you live free from dependencies on dogmas, beliefs, gurus, churches, and temples? Can you loosen the bondage of your own fixed ideas? This freedom, beyond fear and acceptance, lies across the void of your own failings and ignorance, and lights your own unique path, a path that can never be walked by another. Can you be free from images and spiritually adolescent cosmic fantasy, living in the potent presence of the mysterious and the miraculous, the sacred in all things, seeing the play and constant movement of life and death that is awakening? Can you live beyond images and personifications of the infinite in the freedom, joy, and aliveness of the unknown? These questions have no answers\u2014they are the light on the path.\n\nMeditation and spirituality can be simple and natural, or made into complex forms of mental contortion and inner battle that supposedly take years of effort to master. What is one to do instead? Be quiet, sit, and breathe in a place of beauty or with the simplicity of a candle flame. Sit under the stars with a quiet mind and no goal. Be attentive to all things in life. Honor yourself. Laugh at yourself. Listen to the voice of your own body. Carry joy and light on your path. Listen to the wise, but always question. Truth and love are simple and ever present.\n\nWe need not seek initiations and intermediaries. We need only the awakening that allows us to see. Awakening comes uninvited from a flower, a person, a word of love, a crisis, or the wind on the water. This awakening may not even require a big experience, or a mysterious inner light. Inner visionary experiences can be overwhelmingly beautiful, but they are no more so than the outer visions we see each day in the universe. We have just become used to, numb to, the miracles in which we are living.\n\nMeditation and spirituality come into being in the twinkling of an eye in any moment that allows us to pierce the veil of the ordinary, the repetitive, the dull. We need only the sensitivity of understanding and awareness\u2014insight that reveals that we are already immersed in the miraculous, the holy, the sacred. It is the earth, the trees, the wind. It is the rivers, the stars, and the cosmos\u2014and each person. It is the miracle of life, of consciousness itself; it is the immeasurable. The beauty of nature, the body, the hand, the eye, and the existence of love are all facets of this miraculous jewel. The self is not a tiny spark in all these things\u2014it is all of these things. It is the All, and the universe is its face. We are at once the infinite and the infinitesimal, the eternal and ephemeral. We stand on the shoulders of the past seeing farther than ever before. We are the self-reflecting part viewing the whole, the observer and the observed, time-bound and timeless, our lives the prayer. Tat Twam Asi, _you are that!_\n\nGanga in Fatehpur Sikri, India. 1971.\n\n# About the Author\u2014  \nA Short Biography\n\nGanga White is a lifelong adventurer, explorer, and student of yoga. His odyssey began when he was eleven years old and saw the word \"yogi\" chalked on a school sidewalk. It being the late fifties, no doubt it was some baseball fan's favorite-player graffiti, but for Ganga, it seemed something foreign and the strangeness in it needed deciphering. He asked a kid on the playground, \"What's a yogi?\" and was told that yogis were \"these guys in the Himalayas who could wave their hands and make a flower appear.\" In that instant he resolved to go there someday.\n\nThis vignette illustrates the offbeat leanings of Ganga's mind and the strength of his curiosity, even from an early age. The image of a yogi making flowers appear never left him. Always fascinated by nature, science, and electronics, he earned his amateur radio operator's license at age fourteen and spoke with people around the world on ham radio. He raced hot rods and earned his California State University tuition by fixing TVs and managing an electronics store. In 1966 he and a friend read _Black Like Me_ and Errol Flynn's autobiography and decided to drop out and explore life, the civil rights movement, and the turbulent sixties. They traveled the country hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, eventually landing back on Sunset Strip in the heyday of the counterculture and participating in and conducting visionquests using the _Tibetan Book of the Dead_.\n\nGanga began his study in 1966 of yoga and comparative religion with the scholar Dr. Framroze Bode, a Zoroastrian high priest and Doctor of Religion in Los Angeles. Within a year he was living at the Sivananda Yoga Ashram in Canada, fixing their electronics and sound systems and meeting yogis and swamis from around the world. After a couple of years he mastered the most advanced asanas and practices. In 1967 he founded the Center for Yoga in Los Angeles and served as principle teacher for twenty-five years. He was credited with helping spearhead the new wave of yoga in America and hosted a continuous stream of yogis and masters, many on their first visits to Los Angeles, making their way to the U.S. and Canada. The list of luminaries includes Vishnudevananda, Venkatesa, Chidananda, Muktananda, Satchidananda, Pir Vilayat Khan, Ram Dass, Kalu Rimpoche, Allen Ginsberg, BKS Iyengar, and K. Pattabhi Jois.\n\nAlong the way Ganga founded yoga centers in major U.S. cities and served for five years as vice-president of the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers. He was designated the successor to Swami Vishnu, but left in 1973 due to philosophical differences so he could pursue and begin developing a non-dogmatic, contemporary vision of yoga. Throughout the late sixties and seventies, he traveled around the U.S. and the world, teaching and lecturing at universities and institutes and appearing on numerous television programs. Ganga has taught yoga to stars and celebrities, consulted on movie sets and television specials, and traveled with yogis and swamis in the U.S., Europe, and India. He organized and led yoga tours and pilgrimages to India, assisted in and conducted the first yoga teacher trainings in North America, and organized the first American fire walk with sacred firewalkers from South India, walking on hot coals himself in 1970. He participated in peace gatherings and flew in the Peter Max-painted peace plane dropping leaflets over the San Francisco war moratorium gathering in Golden Gate Park. He has been called one of the \"architects of American yoga\" and a \"pioneer of yoga\" by the _Yoga Journal_.\n\nAlways characterized by an inquiring mind, Ganga worked with polygraph expert Cleve Backster on plant responses in New York and with the Findhorn Community in Scotland in 1974, and in the mid-seventies to early eighties he studied with J. Krishnamurti in California, Switzerland, England, and India. In the early eighties he trained in homeopathy at Sivananda Homeo Clinic in the Himalayas and studied with BKS Iyengar in India and Ashtanga yoga with K. Pattabhi Jois.\n\nIn 1991, Ganga participated in the first international conference on Ayahuasca and medicinal plants in Brazil. He invited the leaders and shamans back to the U.S. to continue exploring these healing traditions and comparing them to the practices and teachings of yoga. Ganga was an invited delegate to the Wisdom Keepers Gathering at the Earth Summit in Brazil, journeyed in the Amazon region, and hosted a series of meetings with elders and scientists researching entheogens.\n\nWhile Ganga has had extensive classical training in several prominent lineages of yoga, in Sanskrit, and yoga philosophy\u2014he received the teaching title _Yoga Acharya_ three times from the Sivananda Ashram, the Yoga Vedanta Forest University, Rishikesh, Himalayas, and the Yoga Niketan in India\u2014he has always been an innovating and startlingly original yogi. He created partner yoga, and in 1981 Viking Penguin published his beautifully illustrated _Double Yoga_ , still the definitive volume on this unique system for partner practice. Also during the seventies, Ganga was one of the early developers of Flow Yoga and introduced it at centers all over the country. Flow is now one of the most popular systems of yoga practice.\n\nThe first-ever yoga workout video, _The Flow Series_ , was released in 1990 in collaboration with Tracey Rich, Ganga's wife and fellow teacher of more than twenty-four years. Their second video, _Total Yoga_ , published by Gaiam\/Living Arts in 1994, has sold more than 1.4 million copies and has set records as the number one yoga video in the U.S. and worldwide, and fourth best selling exercise video. In 2002 TimeWarner published a three-volume video series, _Total Yoga, The Flow Series\u2014Earth, Water, Fire_.\n\nIn 1983 Ganga and Tracey founded the White Lotus Retreat in the hills of Santa Barbara, which the couple has directed ever since. To these forty acres in the coastal mountains, thousands of students from around the world have come for yoga workshops, continuing education, and advanced studies. Highly respected in yoga circles, the White Lotus Foundation and its beautifully rustic hillside retreat is a premier institute for yoga and teacher training in the U.S.\n\nStudents and colleagues have long appreciated Ganga as an inspiring and insightful instructor. He's able to communicate yoga's complex teachings and intricate dynamics, relating to others through his use of anecdotal experience, his down-to-earth way with language, and a wonderful sense of humor. Though Ganga has been bestowed\u2014from Swami Venkatesananda\u2014with the rare, honorific title _Yogiraj_ and has a Sanskrit name, he is an iconoclast in the truest sense, a critical and free thinker who always questions traditional and ritualized beliefs, dogmatic systems, and authority of all kinds. His revolutionary teaching empowers the individual while retaining the essential truths of yoga.\n\nA chalked sidewalk epiphany is a rare beginning for a world-renowned career, but within that young boy's need to know was a pattern of intellectual and experiential curiosity that has formed Ganga White and his unique perspective on life and the physical and spiritual discipline that is yoga.\n\n\u2014Evelyn de Buhr  \n8\/15\/2006\n\nWith Swami Vishnudevananda at the opening of Ganga's first yoga center. Los Angeles, 1967.\n\nFirewalking ceremony with village priests from India. Val Morin, Canada, 1970.\n\nLeading the U.S.'s first yoga teacher training. Los Angeles, 1969.\n\nKing Cobra Pose. Grass Valley, California, 1971.\n\nDiamond Pose. Mendocino, California, 1977.\n\nTeaching on tour with Peter Sellers and the Peter Max Peace Plane. Ireland, 1971.\n\nSwami Venkatesananda. Grass Valley, California, 1972.\n\nCBS special series on Eastern religion. 4977.\n\nPrivate demonstration for Mohammed Ali (Full Bow Pose). Miami, 1970.\n\nFilming _Aliens on Planet Earth_ with musician Donovan. Malibu, California, 1976.\n\nTouring with J. Krishnamurti. Rishi Valley, India, 1980.\n\nIndia jungle tour. Mudumulai, India, 1980.\n\nSitting meditation. Mendocino, California, 1977.\n\nFlying Insect Pose. White Lotus retreat, Santa Barbara, California, 1990.\n\nCover photo of Ganga and Tracey for _Healing Lifestyles and Spas Magazine_ (Stacked Lotus Pose). 2000.\n\nAmazon jungle shamanic journey (Arm Locked Extended Warrior). 4993.\n\nTracey and Ganga assist Sting teaching his first yoga class. Los Angeles, 2003.\n\nDouble Lunge Pose With Tracey. White Lotus retreat, Santa Barbara, California, 2000.\n\nLeg Head Tiptoe Balance Pose. Kennebunkport, Maine, 1987.\n\nLotus Forearm Balance Pose. Los Angeles, 2004.\n\n# Notes\n\n1. There are thousands of translations of this important text, and Swami Venkates wrote one of his own: Swami Venkatesananda, _Enlightened Living: A New Interpretive Translation of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali_ , Sebastopol, Calif., Anahata Press, 1975.\n\n2. J. Krishnamurti, _Freedom from the Known_ , San Francisco, Harper, 1969, p. 15.\n\n3. Pose? Posture? The words are interchangeable. Pose is more common, perhaps, but they mean the same thing.\n\n4. Arthur Avalon, _The Serpent Power_ , Madras, India, Ganesh and Co., 1924, and reprinted in 1974 by Dover Publications; also by Avalon, _Sakti and Sakta_ , Madras, India, Ganesh and Co., 1918, reprinted in 2001 by Nesma Books India.\n\n5. David Gordon White, _The Alchemical Body_ , Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996; also by White, _The Kiss of the Yogini_ , Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003.\n\n6. _Siddhartha_ , reprinted in 1981 by Bantam Classics.\n\n7. Swami Venkatesananda, _The Concise Yoga Vasistha_ , New York, State University of New York, 1984, a translation of the ancient text.\nFor more information about Ganga White, his workshops, books, videos, and DVDS, visit:\n\n**The White Lotus Foundation**  \nSanta Barbara, California  \n(805) 964-1944  \n _www.whitelotus.org_  \n _info@whitelotus.org_\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}