A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  Boyles tore into the water with his paddle as Ellison and Alvarez followed behind him. Boyles navigated into choppy waters that looked more like an ocean than a lake. The spray, the swells, and the wind made paddling difficult. Boyles stroked hard and followed the gestures from Chouinard, who was atop the rocky outcropping directing him toward Tompkins. “Doug had a dark, wild, catlike look in his eyes,” said Boyles. “He was kicking as hard as he could while holding onto my boat.” Gripping the tail, exhausted and half frozen, Tompkins sputtered orders. He took command of his own rescue.

  Ellison and Alvarez found Ridgeway minutes later. He was floating on his back, unresponsive, and apparently unconscious. But when they yelled at him, Ridgeway groaned, came to life, and latched an arm onto the bow of their kayak. With Ridgeway on the bow, forward progress was impossible. Hand over hand Ridgeway crab-walked along the edge of the kayak. One false move and he’d be whipped away by the wind and currents. Ellison went into rescue mode. In a voice loud, slow, and clear, he described to Ridgeway a near-fatal accident they had survived during a rafting trip in Siberia. The nonstop cheerleading annoyed Alvarez, who worried that it drained energy better used to paddle, but the verbal motivations worked. Ridgeway aligned himself with the stern, allowing Ellison and Alvarez to swing around and paddle toward Boyles and Tompkins—they could help in that rescue.

  A few strokes later, they realized it was futile. They too were being dragged away from shore. Instead of helping Boyles, they put all their attention toward saving Ridgeway—and themselves. Paddling with full concentration and a dose of adrenaline, they still could not advance. The horizon was unchanged, and they were no closer to land.

  Ellison spotted a small outcropping and in a final push they managed to pull their kayak onto the rock and escape the wind. They propped Ridgeway in the front of the kayak while Ellison and Alvarez unpacked the satellite phone and called for help, but it was early morning on a national holiday and no one was picking up. Attempts to raise the Chilean Coast Guard went unanswered. Desperate to see if the phone even worked, Alvarez called his girlfriend in Truckee, California. Though it was 5:30 a.m., she picked up and patched through information to Carolina Morgado at the Tompkins Conservation offices in Puerto Varas. Morgado raised the alarm with a pilot, Rodrigo Noriega, who dialed his contact at Terra Luna Lodge—the same Philippe Reuter who had organized the transfer of the group across the lake three days earlier. Morgado also rang the Coast Guard, which dispatched a rescue boat from Chile Chico that, due to the wild weather, would take nearly an hour to arrive.

  Then Ellison, with the shivering Ridgeway aboard, paddled for shore, where he made a fire. “I got Rick out of all his wet gear, and put him in a sleeping bag naked. I had a small fire going, as there was plenty of dry wood there. He was breathing, but still not responsive. As soon as he was in the sleeping bag—the fire was five feet away from him—I looked at him and said, ‘I’ve got to go get Lorenzo. I’ll be right back; hang in there.’”

  Reuter was working outside when the emergency call arrived at Terra Luna Lodge. He ran to find Alejandro Maino, a veteran of the Chilean Air Force. Together they scrambled to launch an emergency rescue flight using their Eurocopter B3, a helicopter model so strong it once summited Everest. Configured for transport and tourism, the Terra Luna helicopter sported neither a winch system nor specialized rescue equipment. Reuter figured they would find someone on the edge of the lake, waiting to be evacuated and perhaps injured. He grabbed a life jacket, a climbing rope, and an orange life buoy ring similar to those used at public swimming pools. Within five minutes of the truncated phone call from Morgado, Reuter and Maino were airborne, speeding at seventy miles an hour across the white-capped lake, headed toward El Avellano Valley. “We were looking for people,” said Reuter, who rigged a harness allowing him to lean far out the open door and scout the surface of the heaving lake.

  Pulled farther and farther out toward the center of the lake, Boyles fruitlessly paddled as Tompkins attempted to haul himself aboard the back end of the single kayak. With less drag, Boyles might be able to overcome the wind, conquer the currents, and have the energy to paddle them back to shore. As Boyles turned in an attempt to yank Tompkins out of the water, his spray skirt unbuttoned. The kayak sank deeper. Boyles managed to tug his wool hat onto Tompkins, who clenched his waist with an iron grip. Tompkins kicked with all his force as together with Boyles they angled toward shore, Tompkins shouting out advice about where to hit land. “He knew he was fighting for his life,” said Boyles. “He had so much more work to do. He wasn’t going to give up and freeze.”

  “Doug was conscious with me for at least twenty to thirty minutes fighting toward shore, kicking, and I was paddling as hard as I could,” said Boyles. “When he lost consciousness I had to keep his head out of the water,” he explained. “When I turned around, I lost my paddle; it went away. I was cradling him, trying to paddle with my hand.” For half an hour the two men drifted further and further into the center of the lake. They were now several miles from shore.

  From his perch in the helicopter, Reuter spotted two figures on a beach but when the helicopter hovered and prepared to land the men on the ground yelled “No, No. No!” and signaled with their hands—gesturing toward the center of the lake. The helicopter rose and blasted back out into the lake. “Finally, we found a kayak,” said Reuter. “Alone. Nobody in it.” Flying another five minutes, Reuter spotted Boyles, sitting in a single kayak. He struggled to embrace Tompkins, whose body was listless and dragging in the water. The wind was propelling the drifting men even further from shelter, and Tompkins had been half submerged in the thirty-nine degree water for well over an hour.

  Even from his vantage point inside the helicopter, Reuter kept losing sight of the men in the troughs of five-foot swells. Waves washed over the kayak, nearly ripping Tompkins away from Boyles. Lake Carrera was a clash of currents. Waves smashed and fused in a chaos that made piloting the helicopter risky business.

  As he descended, Maino relied on his instrument panel and commands from Reuter, who shouted every few seconds, guiding the helicopter upwind. Reuter tied a carabiner to the end of a rope and lowered it to Boyles with care. If the rope whipped into the rear rotor, they could all die. Maino lowered the helicopter until it was just ten feet above the waves. The entire rope was only sixty feet long—half the standard issue used by the US Coast Guard. With winds gusting to 50 mph, the margin for error was minimal. Maino maneuvered the rope ever closer to Boyles. Finally, Boyles grabbed the lifeline, clipped the carabiner onto the deck of the kayak, and clutched Tompkins.

  Gripping the safety buoy, Boyles was almost stretched apart. One arm, elbow locked into the rescue ring, kept them attached to the helicopter. His other arm braced the weight of the kayak, plus the drag from Tompkins, who was being pulled through the water. Rotor wash from the chopper blasted them both with gusts of freezing-cold air. Boyles’s face contorted in pain. Reuters shouted for Maino to slow their advance just as Boyles indicated he needed the helicopter lower. Maino refused. The rotors were spinning so close to the waves he feared they’d catch a crest and tumble the helicopter into the lake.

  At an agonizingly slow pace, the makeshift rescue operation dragged the kayak toward shore. Then in an instant, the kayak flipped. Boyles floated and Tompkins sunk below the surface. Reuters thought: “This is the beginning of the end, but surprisingly it was for the good.”

  Unable to regain control of the kayak, Boyles stuffed half his body into the rescue ring, rolled onto his back, and, using both arms, hoisted Tompkins atop his chest. Without the instability of the kayak, the operation moved far faster, yet it still took another thirty minutes of towing them through the freezing water before the helicopter neared the rocky cliff that was the shoreline.

  Boyles let go of the safety line and swam them both to shore, maneuvering a crashing surf break. He laid Tompkins out on a tiny rocky ledge. Maino balanced the helicopter with one skid on a boulder while Reuter jumped off. The
rotors spun less than three feet from the face of the cliff as Boyles shivered uncontrollably. “Don’t worry! You’re going to be okay!” Reuter shouted.

  Boyles had spent nearly two hours harnessing every last reserve of energy. Sweating hot, then burning cold, his muscles twitching in agony, his numbed mind exploded in pain. His childhood hero was white-faced, sodden, and perhaps dead.

  Despite repeated efforts to hoist Tompkins aboard the helicopter, it proved impossible. Boyles could barely stand, and Reuter weighed twenty pounds less than Tompkins. “The wind was gusting so hard that the helicopter kept buffeting wildly and it felt as if the rotors were going down and would cut us to pieces,” said Boyles. With the helicopter precariously balancing on the boulder, Boyles climbed in and they flew along the lakeshore to assist the others. Tompkins was alone, on the beach and half frozen.

  Landing a few miles away at the other rescue site, Reuter spoke: “I regret to tell you but Doug is dead!” Chouinard broke into tears. Weston refused to give up. He suggested that several of them fly back and try to load Tompkins, then fly him to the nearest hospital. Hypothermia experts often say a patient is not confirmed as deceased “until they are warm and dead.” Extreme cold essentially puts certain bodily functions in hibernation, and Alvarez knew about hypothermia cases in which patients thought to be dead had recovered after far-worse exposure.

  Ellison and Alvarez, the only two expedition members with any remaining strength, climbed into the helicopter. Back at the rocky beach, as Maino hovered above Tompkins, the two men jumped out of the moving helicopter. Working together, they hefted Tompkins into the bay of the chopper. Flight time to the Coyhaique Hospital was just fifteen minutes and, having been alerted to the hypothermic condition of the incoming patient, a trauma team awaited.

  Hearing about the accident in Chacabuco Valley, Kris needed to be alone. “I left everyone in the office and moved like a stone out in front of the restaurant where both the Cessna 207 and Doug’s Husky were tied down,” she said. “I crawled under the belly of the Husky and lay flat against the grass, digging my fingernails into the dirt moaning a sound like wolves calling in the night. I would not leave the Husky and I held onto the grass with all my might until someone pulled my feet and drug me out. I knew that if I lost contact with his Husky, I would lose Doug.”

  Dagoberto Guzman, the Patagonia Park superintendent and a longtime collaborator of the Tompkinses in many conservation projects pulled Kris into a 4 × 4 and sped toward the Coyhaique Hospital. It was a dangerous, gravel road journey that could take at least six hours. But they found the road closed for repairs. Jumping from the car, Dago informed the road workers that “Don Doug is injured” and that Kris was in the car, rushing to see her husband. The workers opened the road and as Kris rode by, each man removed his helmet, placing it over his chest in silent respect.

  At the Coyhaique Hospital a team of doctors and nurses battled to revive Tompkins, who had arrived with a body temperature of sixty-nine degrees. Witnesses told the medical team that Tompkins had been in the frigid water nearly two hours. As Kris sped closer, news spread of Doug’s accident. A crowd gathered outside the hospital. Word ricocheted throughout the close-knit Patagonia community that Doug Tompkins had been gravely injured. Then news arrived that Doug was dead. But soon after, the news was uplifting—Doug was alive again. He’d been revived! The messages were incomplete, contradictory, and terrifying.

  Kris followed it all via phone and text as she and Dago careened toward the hospital. Mladinic, the sociologist and key aide, was inside the emergency room. He provided minute-by-minute updates, allowing Kris to hear firsthand the state of her husband. As Tompkins slipped away, Mladinic placed the phone by Doug’s ear and told Kris it was time to say goodbye. Fifteen minutes before she arrived, just after 6:00 p.m., the unbelievable news was confirmed: Doug Tompkins was dead. Kris collapsed. Her Eagle was gone.

  Chapter 21

  Year 1 A.D.—After Doug

  If your life’s work can be accomplished in one lifetime you’re not thinking big enough.

  —WES JACKSON, founder, The Land Institute

  Yvon Chouinard was in shock. In the lee of the blasting wind, the veteran outdoorsman sat in tears. Rick Ridgeway lay naked in a sleeping bag, shaking in convulsive fits. Weston Boyles, bundled in the same sleeping bag as Ridgeway, was incoherent, his lanky 6′3″ frame unable to hold heat, his brain on fire, and his muscles exploding in pain. After grappling with waves, wind, and the weight of towing “Uncle Doug” back to shore, Boyles felt broken. Around a campfire a few yards from the crashing surf of Lake Carrera, the remaining three members of the six-man expedition huddled as they waited for the Chilean Coast Guard rescue ship.

  The Coast Guard bundled the three men into the cabin of their patrol boat and motored back to port in the village of Chile Chico. The officials needed to debrief the survivors. There were many questions, and the media was barraging them with frenzied calls about the fate of Doug Tompkins. There was paperwork to be filled out, questions to be answered, and an overabundance of Chilean bureaucratic protocol. To the shell-shocked survivors, the interrogations felt like torture. They desperately wanted to abandon ship and go home but the formal investigation stretched on hour after hour. Finally, they were permitted to leave. Chouinard, Boyles, and Ridgeway boarded the Eurocopter to fly back to Terra Luna Lodge where, four days earlier, under a perfect dawn sunrise, they’d chortled and laughed while embarking, like schoolboys playing hooky.

  Flying into the wind, fighting gusts, pilot Alejandro Maino sweated as he maneuvered his helicopter. The Eurocopter engine boasted 850 horsepower and a top speed of 160 mph, yet Chouinard sitting in the back couldn’t believe it—the chopper didn’t advance. Were they also doomed? Would they have to abort the flight, turn around, fly downwind in search of a clearing for an emergency landing? To no one in particular, Chouinard growled that it was the “slowest fucking helicopter flight of my life.”

  Maino’s experience flying military aircraft (especially under simulated battlefield conditions) guided the craft home. After twenty minutes of jarring turbulence, they hovered near Terra Luna Lodge, then touched down. The survivors were welcomed with hugs and wettened by tears. How? Why? Where? All that could wait. Raw emotions poured out as the lodge filled up.

  In a villa outside Milan, Italy, as the photographer Oliviero Toscani brewed morning coffee, he was jolted when the news of Doug’s accident rattled over the airwaves. Doug Tompkins! His co-conspirator! Dead? Toscani was irate. He wanted to smash the coffee pot. For all those years that his friend Doug had invested in nature, protecting and cherishing wilderness, hadn’t he been screaming “Be careful! Nature is a brutal beast”? Oliviero had scolded Doug how many times? Toscani felt the weight of his warnings. “I’d always told Doug nature is dangerous. ‘Why do you work so hard to be so close to nature?’ And then, nature killed my friend. I hate nature.”

  Mike Fay, the National Geographic explorer who flew often with Doug, was in Tanzania when “Conservationist Dead” scrolled on the screen. Immediately he knew it was his friend, ally, and copilot. “Conservation is kind of like war for me,” said Fay, who had mourned dozens of colleagues, some murdered by poachers and others by anonymous assassins. “When something like this happens, you’re not surprised at all. You’re not shocked. You’re not in disbelief. You are ready for it already. It’s not necessarily a period of sadness because you’ve already absorbed that sadness before it happened.”

  In London, Sir Norman Foster was “beyond disbelief” when he heard that Tompkins had died in a kayak. “It was as if they were physically and mentally joined,” said Lord Foster, the architect who designed Esprit showrooms with Tompkins in the ’80s. “Doug’s energy was contagious,” he mused. “He had a combination of intensity, curiosity, and conviction. Normally somebody with conviction will have a closed mind, but I didn’t sense he had a closed mind; I sensed he was open. He was a force of nature.”

  In Argentina, senator Sergio Flin
ta did not know that Tompkins was drowning when he entered the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. Flinta presented conservation plans to the tourism minister, Gustavo Santos. “I brought the Tompkins Conservation books, to tell him about the Iberá project,” said Flinta. “And Santos told me, ‘This is an extraordinary project—marvelous!’ and took it as his own, which was perfect. When I got back to my hotel, I got a call telling me that Doug had died. At the same time that he was dying I was getting the [Argentine] national government to take the Iberá project as its own.”

  Kris was distraught, living in a “well of ache.” She and Doug had spent numerous nights formulating contingency plans for the accidental death of one, the other, or both. Flying almost daily in small airplanes above the windswept Patagonia landscape was the most obvious risk. Doug’s lifelong aversion to seatbelts (“they give you a false sense of security”) while speeding 80 mph on rural dirt roads was another. But a kayak accident near his home? Despite a grief she described as “a hatchet to the head,” Kris sought to channel Doug’s strength. “It was not a loss,” she said. “It was an amputation.”

  Doug’s carpenter and furniture makers in Patagonia worked all night as they crafted a solid casket from Alerce wood. Known as the “Redwoods of the Andes,” the towering Alerce trees had initially motivated Doug to defend the forests of Chile. After a quarter century of nonstop battling, Doug Tompkins lay on the coppery-red swirl of fine-grained Alerce plank. Finally, he was getting a rest.

  At the Puerto Varas office of Tompkins Conservation, a memorial service was organized. Charter flights arrived. The Chilean first lady, Cecilia Morel, as well as Chilean politicians and friends from Washington, DC, streamed into the tiny Puerto Montt airport nearby. They passed a sole protester, who greeted the arriving mourners with a sign that read “Patagonia Without Tompkins.”