Risking It All

By John Skow

The spirit of adventure is alive and well

There is a priggish voice inside most of us that complains, on hearing about someone like Geoffrey Tabin, "Where would we be if everyone jumped off bridges on long rubber bungee cords?" Bobbing boozily up and down, yoing, yoing, yoing, that is where we would be. Can't have that; no one ever got any aluminum siding sold or orthodontia bills paid while dangling from a bungee cord. And Tabin, a Harvard medical student, admits that an alcohol-fueled, top-hat-and-tails leap off of Colorado's 1,053-ft.-high Royal Gorge bridge in 1980 required "no skill, just a little stupidity and a fairly calculated risk."

Thus it is gratifying to learn that Tabin, 27, who carried off his stunt with several other members of something called the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club, has moved on to more mature concerns. He is in fact a member of an American mountaineering expedition in Tibet that intends to make an ascent without oxygen of Everest's forbidding and unclimbed East Face. George Leigh Mallory, the great British climber who died on Everest while making a summit attempt in 1924, had written of the East Face that "other men, less wise, might attempt this way if they would, but, emphatically, it was not for us." Tabin, tracked down with his colleagues in China last week, said, "The most difficult and scary part is explaining to a Jewish grandmother that you're taking time off from medical school to do it." He also said that he would like to make love on top of Everest but had no realistic hope of doing so.

Tabin and Teammate George Lowe, 38, tried to climb the East Face in 1981 and failed. They are, of course, expert mountaineers, who know the formidable dangers they confront. But this seriousness presents a problem in comprehension for citizens who like to think of themselves as solid. Everest's weather is as foul and unpredictable as any in the world, the avalanches of its snow fields and the icefalls of its tumbled glaciers pick off climbers every expedition or so, and the deadly thin air toward its 29,028-ft. summit debilitates and stupefies the mountaineers it does not sicken or cripple. What craziness is this to be serious about?

There have always been adventurers, footloose and sometimes screwloose, and their careless "Why not?" has always stirred alarming and delicious fears in settled souls whose timid question is "Why?" But Dr. Livingstone has been found (alive on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, in 1871, by Anglo-American Journalist Henry Morton Stanley), the Atlantic has been flown in a single-engine aircraft (by Lindbergh, in 1927), the polar regions have been explored (by an assortment of frauds and heroes), the world has been circumnavigated singlehanded (first by Joshua Slocum from 1895 to 1898), and all of the 14 mountains higher than 8,000 meters (26,400 ft.) have been climbed. Space is there to be rummaged, but not, at least in this century, by lonely daredevils.

Today's adventurers must contend with the irksome truth that much of what is grand and gallant has already been done. What remains is to repeat the great feats of the past in a more difficult manner or to invent stunts whose nature is often, necessarily, more than somewhat bizarre. Thus we see the attempt by Mountaineer Tabin's group to climb Everest by an approach once thought foolhardy, and the astonishing accomplishment of Italian Superclimber Reinhold Messner three years ago of reaching Everest's summit alone and without oxygen.

The variety of labors that the new adventurers think up for themselves these days is rich and nutty and, in contemplation, forms a splendid fruitcake of the hu man spirit. Mighty aerial voyages are undertaken in planes as fragile as moths, and transatlantic crossings are made in sailboats only marginally longer than their pilots. There are specialists in climbing frozen waterfalls and skiing slopes too steep to stand on, and in exploring underwater, with scuba gear, caves so deep that helium must be mixed with the oxygen that is breathed, to forestall nitrogen narcosis. A couple of canoeists have just lined their craft up the Grand Canyon and portaged the Rockies. An unemployed actress named Julie Ridge swam twice around Manhattan Island this summer (about 28 miles); although the publicity did not bring her a job, she said she felt better about herself.

Glittery-eyed monomaniacs jump off cliffs and buildings with parachutes, because this is more dangerous than humdrum skydiving. People climb skyscrapers, both on the inside (in organized races up stairways) and on the outside. One of the nerveless outside operatives, "Spider Dan" Goodwin, managed to lever himself up the Sears Tower in Chicago despite efforts of affronted city firemen to hose him away. And at an airfield in New Jersey, Pilot Grace McGuire, who bears an eerie resemblance to the late Amelia Earhart, will assemble a 1936 Lockheed Electra 10E, the kind of plane Earhart used, with the intention of next year completing the famed barnstormer's fatal last flight in the Pacific. She plans to take only equipment identical to that on Earhart's plane. Her fuel will give her 21 hours of flying for the 2,556-mile first leg from Lae, New Guinea, to Rowland Island in mid-Pacific, which allows "not much reserve."

These are the extremes of adventuring, but people who consider themselves ordinary are doing things that would have been thought outlandish ten years ago. Rafting the Colorado River now seems almost sedentary, and trekking in the Himalayas is no more than an extended outing. Sane and prudent citizens sign up for ice-climbing lessons and for bicycle tours across China. Your neighbor's teen-ager hang-glides. It is hardly worth mentioning when a 50-year-old man or woman runs a marathon, although the triathlon, which may consist of a long swim, a bike race and a complete running marathon on the same day, still raises a few eyebrows.

What is happening is that the incandescent souls who need to be thought extraordinary are being pushed to ever greater feats. These self-assigned heroes range across a startling spectrum, and some of their wave lengths are distinctly strange. Many of them breathe publicity as if it were oxygen. Others work at self-promotion without pleasure and only because their dreams cost a lot of money to realize (a major Himalayan expedition can employ several hundred porters carrying to base camp and dozens of high-altitude porters, and can cost a quarter of a million dollars or more). A few of these fearless exotics are so shy as to be detectable only on infrared film. Hang around climbers for a while, and you hear stories like this: Mountaineers C and D make what they think is a first ascent, only to find unmistakable evidence on the same slope that someone has been there before them. They grumble about this to a group including Climbers A and B, who actually made the ascent without telling anyone. A and B agree gravely that this is rotten luck and still do not reveal themselves.

Technology is another goad, and it pushes adventurers in at least two directions. Fixed-object parachutists can succeed in their scarifying dives, most of the time, because new square-shaped, directional chutes allow them to guide their descent away from the buildings and cliff faces from which they jump. Without modern self-steering gear, singlehanded sailing would be even riskier than it is. Attempts to better the land-speed record on skis (129.3 m.p.h.) and on a bicycle (140.5 m.p.h.) could not succeed without space-age equipment. Although plenty of high-tech gear is used in rock-climbing, the trend here is away from technology and back to technique and nerve: what once were aid climbs (those in which the climber's weight sometimes hangs on artificial devices) are being done as far more difficult free climbs (all of the weight on rock at all times). Difficult routes are often done alone and, sometimes frighteningly, without safety ropes.

The ultralight aircraft that waft across the landscape look less like chicks of the Concorde than like those of the Wright brothers' rickety gliders. Ultramarathon runners, who race 50 miles or more at a stretch, return to the technology of dawn-age hunters loping across African grasslands: the repeated flex of feet and knees, the drumming rhythms of lungs and heart.

Yes, but what for? To what real end? These exasperated questions, of course, are also asked about life, but ordinary people can point out that although we are stuck with life's ironies, it is quite possible to ignore those of Everest. It may be, nevertheless, that these conquistadors of the useless, in Mountaineer Lionel Terray's phrase, are instinctively acting out their views of existence: the building jumpers' that life is short and absurd, the expedition climbers' that it should be an exalting struggle, and so on.

Possibly. The fact is that even highly intelligent adventurers are notoriously bad at answering one of two questions that they are always asked (the other question is whether they have a death wish, and that answer is easy: no). Everyone remembers ad nauseam that Mallory, perhaps in some brown mood of irritation or boredom, intoned "Because it is there" when asked why he wanted to climb Everest. The pomposity of the answer is so far out of character that it seems likely that what he meant to convey was "Go away and stop asking good questions."

Peter Bird, 36, is a London-based photographer who was rescued on June 14 on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, after 296 days of rowing 9,560 miles alone across the Pacific from San Francisco. He had abandoned a successful photography business and left a girlfriend ashore, and he recalls fretting for months about why he was risking his life. "I invented all sorts of answers, but none of them was honest." The truth dawned in midocean, as he was listening to a radio interview with a man who, as he remembers, had resailed the route Captain Bligh followed after he was cast adrift from the Bounty by mutineers. "He had come up with all these reasons, to prove Bligh's logs were right, to prove Bligh was a good sailor, but none of it sounded right. It didn't fit. I thought, 'It's an adventure. You don't have to justify it. It's just an adventure.' "

Fair enough, but because the physical and psychological costs can be so high, the search for an explanation is understandable. Bird had done one long row with a friend in 1974, from Gibraltar to St. Lucia. By 1980, he says, the idea of rowing across the Pacific had filled his mind until "I couldn't think of anything else. It almost shouted and screamed at me all night."

Bird's first try ended in wreckage on the rocks at Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He spent 15 months building and outfitting another boat, sleeping on floors because he had no money. Last August, he set out again. He was delayed for three months by the troublesome El Nino current and spent the time listening to the BBC and brooding about nuclear warfare and Israel's invasion of Lebanon. In tapes he made at the time, his speech is painfully slow; photos he made of himself show a sad and serious face. When his boat broke up on the Barrier Reef, as he is careful to say, he was a mere 33 miles short of landfall.

Bird clearly feels well repaid for the three years of obsessive effort he spent on the rowing project, even though he must now lecture his way out of debt. He will not row the Pacific again ("There's nothing more to be learned"), but he admits cheerfully that the germs of more adventures are stirring in his head.

Australian Electronics Millionaire Dick Smith, 39, is another sort of swashbuckler. He landed his Bell Jetranger III helicopter in Fort Worth not long ago, after flying around the world in three stages. Smith is notorious for his publicity stunts, but his troubles were real enough. He was shot at by fishermen off Greenland, he landed in quicksand in Burma, and over the northern Pacific bad weather nearly forced him to miss a refueling ship. Smith's understated conclusion: "I was extremely lucky to get back. I would never try it again."

Any good pilot will point out quickly that adventures are precisely what you do not want to have in the air, and Don Taylor's flight across the North Pole this summer was gratifyingly dull. Taylor, 64, is a former World War II fighter pilot who built his tiny, all-metal experimental plane several years ago from a plan by retired Aircraft Designer John Thorp. He flew around the world in the little ship, which weighs 1,500 lbs. empty and has a wingspan of 21 ft. 11 in., and set a number of speed and distance records. He decided to donate the plane to the Experimental Aircraft Association at its convention in Oshkosh, Wis., and flew in from Phoenix by way of the Pole. The trip north across Canada required seven hops, and on July 31, after 10 hr. 1 min. of dodging cirrus clouds to avoid icing, Taylor became the first person to reach the Pole in a plane so small. "I overflew it, identified it, took some pictures and got the hell out," he said. "That's a really weird place."

Aviator Larry Walters had a roughly similar experience last year. He built his own aircraft, flew it to 16,000 ft. without problems, and landed well pleased with himself, though entangled with a power line. The difference is that the California truck driver's vehicle was a lawn chair supported by 42 helium weather balloons, which he popped, one by one, with an air gun when he decided to land. He was fined $1,500 by the Federal Aviation Administration, but despite that said he had carried out the dream of a lifetime.

It was only eight years ago that John Moody, lacking the money to buy a conventional light plane, put a go-cart engine on a hang glider and putt-putted 300 yds. through the air. Moody, now a Kansasville, Wis., ultralight-plane dealer, started a fad that last month took Joe Tong of Lecompton, Kans., through the amazed heavens from California to New York. Tong's 250-lb. ultralight plane made the trip in a record 18 days. But Tong was not fast enough to escape arrest for a bad check he had dropped in Grand Rapids, Minn., during the trip. Police let Tong go when he made restitution (a reneging backer had caused the check to bounce, he said), and off he flew, talking enthusiastically of making an ultralight flight to the North Pole.

This is fine, lighthearted stuff, the kind of escapade that tastes good later with a few beers. Sailors talk cheerfully about buoys disastrously missed in fog, and climbers about snow-cave bivouacs that lasted for days. Still, the risk takers know that sailors drown and mountaineers fall. There is a casualty list, and the chances of ending up on it increase with the risks. Balloonist Maxie Anderson flew across the Atlantic five years ago in his great silver Double Eagle II; early this summer he and Partner Don Ida crashed and died in Bavaria during a balloon race. In 1978 a New Zealander named Naomi James, 34, became the first woman to circumnavigate the world alone via Cape Horn, only a brief time after learning sailing so that she could share an interest with her yachtsman husband Rob. She retired from competitive sailing to raise a family, and last March her first child, a daughter, was born. Eleven days earlier, Rob had drowned in a yachting accident.

Reinhold Messner, 38, the solo climber of Everest, has paid a price for his fame as the world's strongest expedition climber. He talks with the rocklike confidence of all the mountain world's hard men, saying, for instance, that Everest by the traditional Hillary-Tenzing route is "a good holiday, but not really challenging." Messner has never used oxygen in his life, he says with a trace of pride. But he offers freely the opinion that his memory has been dulled by long periods of oxygen deprivation. There have been other prices. His brother Gunther died in an avalanche while climbing with him on Nanga Parbat, in the Himalayas. Messner has lost several toes and parts of three fingers to frostbite. And he admits that it was not worth it. "If somebody had told me, on the next expedition you will lose your toes, I wouldn't have gone. But you don't know what will happen before it happens. It's like asking, 'Is your life worth your death?' "

What seems clear is that no adventurer, in his own mind, is a daredevil. Even the most extreme risk taker talks like an astronaut of safety gear, of weather carefully calculated, of redundant strengths to cushion failure. What really protects them, however, seems to be their abnormal awareness of how very much alive they are. "You know about accidents," says a rock-climber. "But it's always the guy next to you, never you." How could it be you? But this inspired state does not often last a lifetime.

Climbers have seen the pattern again and again: three years of stupefying ascents, of moving confidently upward along cracks so subtle and fine that normal fingers cannot even feel them, and then the prodigy loses his magic, backs off, gets serious about a love affair, goes to graduate school, finds a reason to avoid those nearly supernatural 5.13 pitches (rock climbs are graded in difficulty from 5.1 upward, and until the present generation came along, 5.10 was considered the unreachable ultimate).

John Bachar, 26, is a Yosemite climber who has pushed strength and skill to a level that astonishes even other good rock apes. Equipped with nothing but boots and gymnast's chalk, and unbelayed by safety ropes, Bachar flows up pitches graded 5.8 or better. Gym workouts have given him steely arm and finger strength, but superb technique and unshakable concentration are his most powerful adhesives. He may work out a sequence of ten or so moves to take him up an overhang hundreds of feet in the air, then discover that the route cannot be forced any farther. Without delay, before his muscles begin to tire and shake, he must then perform the ten-move ballet perfectly in reverse order. "You can't forget the fact that you're right next to the edge all the time," he says. "If you make any kind of mistake, you're going to die."

Such an acute focusing of effort cannot be repeated endlessly. A German mountaineer who in his 20s spent three frightful weeks on the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland during midwinter laughs about the recollection and says that he does not do such things now that he is in his 30s. He pulls out his wallet like a traveling businessman and shows a picture of his wife and two sons. "This is what I think about now."

Ah, but the craziness has a fine ring to it while it lasts. One of the most appealing adventure stories of recent years is what might be called the Every Now and Then Transatlantic Singlehanded Ridiculously Small Boat Derby. The first entrant was the late Robert Manry, a Cleveland newspaperman who in 1965 sailed across the Atlantic in his 13 1/2-ft. Tinkerbelle, a craft so tiny that it looked like a bathtub toy. Years passed--it takes a certain sort of person to enter the Ridiculous--and last year Briton Tom McClean sailed from Newfoundland to England in an absurd craft called the Giltspur, more than 3 ft. shorter than Tinkerbelle.

McClean, now 41, a former Special Air Service warrior who runs a survival camp on an island near the Hebrides, had already rowed singlehanded across the Atlantic west to east in 1969, and his record of 70.7 days still stands. But his Ridiculously Small Boat celebrity vanished in only two weeks, when Bill Dunlop, 42, a former truck driver from Mechanic Falls, Me., bobbed into the harbor at Falmouth, England, in Wind's Will, a teapot just over 9 ft. long that he had sailed from Portland. The two became friends, but McClean was not having second best; he told Dunlop that he would chain-saw several inches from Giltspur and sail the Atlantic again.

As he was preparing to do so, another American, an unemployed computer technician named Wayne Dickinson, washed up on the rocks of Ireland in God's Tear, 142 days after setting sail from Point Allerton, Mass. God's Tear, indeed; Dickinson's boat was about 2 in. shorter than Dunlop's. McClean now had two American tiny-tub artists to beat, and earlier this month he succeeded, despite a broken mast in the Bay of Biscay, reaching Portugal in the bobtailed Giltspur, now a mere 7 ft. 9 in. overall. "The more people say a thing can't be done," said he, "the more I think I can do it."

Giltspur could diminish even further; its owner is only 5 ft. 6 in. tall, and he still has his chain saw. But Dickinson is not rushing to challenge the record. Dunlop, meanwhile, could not be bothered about such trifles. Three weeks ago, he left Portland, Me., to sail Wind's Will around the world. He said he would be back some time in 1986, although he would not say just when. "I might be a day or two late," said Dunlop. "I don't want anyone down on the dock waiting for me."

The Ridiculous Boat concept could be extended; sailors with money might begin to wonder, for instance, what is the largest craft controllable by a single person in a transatlantic run. But to a certain breed of determinedly independent risk takers, sailing lacks originality. Sailing has been done. Mountain climbing has been done. What has not been done? Ben Colli, 36, an Atlantan who specializes in washing the unwashable window--the exterior of the blue dome of Atlanta's Hyatt Regency hotel, for instance--thought about this a few years ago. Then on New Year's Eve in 1976, as a party stunt for the hotel, this wiry and deceptively calm-looking man, by descent part Italian and part Algonquin Indian, took off his clothes, put on a baby diaper and, holding a long mountain rope, jumped from the dome of the Hyatt Regency's 22-story atrium. He fell free, then slowed himself with the sort of rappel brake that climbers use and landed to cheers from the crowd. Colli, who had practiced for three weeks, says now that he did not know then how dangerous the jump was. But he kept on jumping, and now every July he jumps off the 75-story Peachtree Plaza hotel in Atlanta. He bounces down his 7/16 in. nylon kernmantel rope in 150-ft. to 200-ft. swoops, and the 750-ft. fall takes 28 sec. He wears padded gloves to work his J bar, or rappel rack, which creates the braking friction.

"There's a breeze up there that I love.

It keeps me away from the building," he says. The rappel rack is dangerous: "If you got your hair caught in the bar on the rope, it could jerk your scalp off." He must miss a retaining wall at the bottom and land facing the building on 2 in. of frame. Colli, a soft-spoken man who says, "I'm looking for a good time," has a wife, Jill, who water-skis and snow-skis with him, and three daughters by a previous marriage. He is in demand around the country among hotel managers whose establishments are in need of being jumped off of. Two months before a big jump, he starts preparing himself mentally. He loves the sensation. "You feel these free falls in your heart," he explains. "You are euphoric. When I'm in the jump, I hate to see it coming to an end."

Listen to Carl Boenish: "Jumping is like a knife cutting through all the malarkey of life. Truth is radical."

Boenish, 42, is a California parachutist who finds a surprisingly lyrical kind of satisfaction in jumping off of buildings, bridges and cliffs. He and his friends are shunned by the conventional skydiving establishment, which regards them as airborne Hell's Angels, mostly because the trespassing often involved in fixed-object jumping (but not the leaps themselves, Boenish quickly points out) is illegal. One of the great early jumps, from which springs the present fad of BASE (for Buildings, Antenna towers, Spans and Earth) jumping was made in 1970 by Rick Sylvester. He skied off of Yosemite's 7,569-ft. El Capitan, popped a chute and floated down to the meadow below. Some 120 bandit jumps followed, and finally, in 1980, the park grudgingly began handing out permits, a futile and short-lived exercise in imposing bureaucracy on a sport that is inherently anarchic. Boenish, said to be among the more responsible BASE jumpers, seems to hunger for respectability when he says, "We have been trying to educate the public as to why we do it." This is a difficult educational problem, as he admits, because it involves, for one thing, explaining to an uncaring world why he on one occasion jumped off of El Cap on a pogo stick.

At times it seems that almost everyone who has laced on climbing boots or set a spinnaker has written a book about the experience. Although reading such stuff can be fun, the armchair adventurer feels a certain guilty unease. At this very moment, for instance, while the reader's arteries are slowly clogging, alarmingly energetic people like David Horning are out there somewhere, training for races like the Alcatraz Challenge. This is a particularly gruesome example of the newly popular self-torture called the triathlon: a 1.5-mile swim in cold and swirling water from San Francisco's Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park, a 20-mile bicycle trek that crosses the Golden Gate Bridge, and finally a 14.5-mile run from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach across Mount Tamalpais.

"A real challenge," says Horning, 35, a Berkeley sports entrepreneur and marketing consultant who is one of the country's top triathletes. (This week he is off to China to promote the first triathlon in the People's Republic.) Horning has broken his back and both legs in separate skiing accidents, and he was born an epileptic, but he discounts these liabilities. The biggest barriers are self-created and psychological, he tells people whom he is trying to hook on the triathlon. "People are always saying 'I can't.' Well, if you say that, you probably won't."

And if you won't, you will never find Waring's bear. He is out there somewhere, that bear, but you have to go looking for him. George Waring, 42, is an ophthalmic surgeon from Atlanta who does a lot of big-water expedition kayaking. Once in Alaska he and a friend were sluicing at high speed along Prairie Creek, in the neighborhood of Mount McKinley. The creek was 30 ft. wide, and it was fast and rocky. Salmon slapped the bottom of their kayak. Abruptly they came upon a grizzly in the water, fishing for salmon. There was no way to stop or get out of the creek, so Waring and his friend went on paddling. They passed 20 ft. from the grizzly, which ignored them and perhaps did not see them.

They will see that bear, however, until they are old men. And if adventuring needs a justification--Peter Bird is probably right that it does not--this may be it. Candidates for bear-watching escapades who hesitate because they are middle-aged might consider the case of Phil Weld, a former newspaper publisher who will be 70 next year. He had led a fairly active life--he served during World War II behind Japanese lines in Burma with Merrill's Marauders--but until 1970 he had done no deepwater sailboat racing. He had read Sir Francis Chichester's books, however, about transatlantic sailing, and began to learn. By 1976 he had built a big trimaran called Gulf Streamer, and was heading for England in the boat to take part in the Ostar singlehanded transatlantic race. A huge wave turned Gulf Streamer turtle, and Weld and a friend were trapped in the upside-down hull. It took them three hours to cut their way out, and they rode the hulk for five days before being rescued by a Soviet freighter. In 1978 Weld was back to run the Ostar in another trimaran, this one wryly named Rogue Wave. He did not finish in the money, but he finished. Weld finally won the Ostar in 1980 and set a record for the race in a third trimaran, called Moxie.

Last week Weld, once again sailing Rogue Wave, ghosted home into port in light air. He had just won a race off Maine's Monhegan Island, but his mast had come loose during a blow off Cape Elizabeth, Me., and he had needed the help of two powerful young crewmen to get it tethered again. The experience left Weld, who had intended to race in the next Ostar, convinced that he no longer had the raw strength necessary for it. He said, without bitterness, that he would write a letter of withdrawal to the race committee.

His new challenge, Weld added cheerfully, was learning how to be 70. He has plenty of projects. He is interested in wind power: "This is not for the beard-and-sandals set; it's hard-nosed utility stuff." He is involved in a project to design small, cheap trimarans for Third World fishermen. And, yes, he will still do some ocean racing, with friends as crew. In the meantime, this tall, well-weathered sailor had some observations about voyaging:

> It nourishes the explorer instinct. It provides the sense of adventure that animates youthful souls.

> Voyaging hardens the physique. New sleep patterns, enforced low alcohol in take and unsullied air clean the senses. One loses weight. It is a health cure.

> Solo voyaging sharpens perceptions. The lone sailor must develop animal cunning to avoid hurt. Forethought can prevent the cuff on the ear from the flailing genoa sheet.

> Voyaging requires learning new skills: pilotage, navigation, meteorology, the use of tools. Such schooling stimulates the brain.

> Alone at dawn, one has time and quiet to ponder the verities. One achieves a sense of the earth's rotundity, and acquires some hints of The Scheme.

What else does one learn? Ah, said Weld, one learns that trimarans turn over. One learns to stash cutting tools in the bilge. And smiling, he went off after this latest of many voyages to his seaside home in Gloucester, and Anne, his wife.

-- By John Skow

Reported by Steven Holmes/Los Angels, Joyce Leviton/Atlanta and Peter Stoler/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Steven Holmes, Joyce Leviton, Peter Stoler This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.