Using their contacts worldwide, Doug and Kris now pitched their conservation allies worldwide. This could be the couple’s final push as they bundled their land holdings into a bold conservation mega-donation. They would donate all their Chilean lands to CONAF—the underbudgeted national park service—and in exchange the Chilean government would create five new national parks, and enlarge three existing parks.
Tompkins put his design team to work. They prepared a highlight reel—a visual teaser—that showcased the benefits to Chile by branding Patagonia as a tourist mecca. Using stunning photos and simple slogans, he emphasized the benefits to Chile’s national image. What could be more modern than a country announcing new national parks and sustainable tourism development plans?
Doug was determined to forever change Patagonia as a region and as a concept. When he met government ministers and even the president, Tompkins usually knew the map better than anyone in the room. He liked to run his finger down the spine of Chile, as he rattled off the parks, including new ones he thought ought to be created. Doug offered to donate roughly a million acres of his land if the government reclassified ten million acres as national parks. Leveraging their lands ten to one was a bold proposal. Even if it was only half successful, it meant the creation of millions of acres of new parklands.
Always an audacious negotiator, Tompkins boasted the street credibility of a pioneering outdoorsman and the intellectual vigor of a debate champion. Like the conservation leaders Iain Douglas Hamilton, Michael Faye, and Jane Goodall, he was among the few who lived amid the lands and animals he so passionately defended. “If you want to spend half a million dollars buying land, you will never be able to get more bang for your buck than giving that money to Doug and saying, ‘Go for it!’” declared Buckley. “He can call the president, and talk to the cowboys.”
Despite numerous advances with the Piñera administration, the mega-donation was never sealed. So, in 2014, with Piñera’s term nearly over and Chile’s national elections on the horizon, it was time to court the candidate most likely to triumph: Michelle Bachelet. The divorced, non-Catholic, single mom was not exactly the Chilean elite’s ideal candidate, but she had already been president once for four years, and left office with approval ratings bordering 80 percent. In her first term, Bachelet had not connected with Tompkins. In fact, they had never met. With environmental protection a rising concern for Chilean citizens, however, making parks and saving wilderness increasingly garnered political prestige.
Tompkins had instructed his team to make a chart showing how many acres of national parks each Chilean president had created, a nature ranking. Since Chile’s first national park in 1926 every president to complete a full term had added national parklands. It was a republican tradition; even General Pinochet had created national parks. Understanding the competitive nature of presidential egos, Tompkins created a chart that showed Bachelet as ranking second among all Chilean presidents for most acres of national parklands created. All she had to do was approve the Tompkins mega-donation plans. “We’ll close the deal with this,” Tompkins confided to Ingrid Espinoza, a trusted member of his inner circle.
“We emphasized the importance of local economies and how tourism was a consequence of good conservation,” recalled Espinoza of the paper they crafted. “And that’s how the new political proposal came about. More than park donations, we were talking about how the territory was going to develop, and we were contributors to that development.”
* * *
He was showing us around the future Patagonia National Park and he was saying, “Well, yeah. And then when we give it to the government—” And I was thinking, How are you going to let go of this? How are you going to give this away? I mean, you’re not even finished yet. And he was such a control freak, and he did things at such a level that was completely unsustainable. Utterly. And he’s saying, “You have to. You just have to. The ultimate goal has to be a national park, and you just have to be able to let go.” I remember walking up the path with him by the greenhouses when he was saying that and I was, thinking, This does not sound like him.
—QUINCEY TOMPKINS
* * *
In October 2015 Doug invited Fay to pay a visit and explore Patagonia. Fay arrived, and Tompkins took him up in the Husky and then banked the plane hard over, on its side. The wings tilted 45 degrees off the horizon. Doug spiraled lower, one wingtip toward the dark canyon and the other skyward. Around and around he corkscrewed into the crevice, wingtips whooshing just feet from rock walls. Fay—strapped into the seat directly behind Tompkins—wondered if they could get out. After agonizingly slow minutes of descent, the cavern opened, exposing a stunning waterfall surrounded by jungle, like a movie poster for Jurassic Park. Tompkins grinned. Fay smiled and thought, Only Doug!
Later, Doug picked up the rock climber Alex Honnold, the free climber who later scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan in the Oscar-winning movie Free Solo, and with Fay provided a tour of hidden valleys, never-climbed rock faces, and smoking volcanoes. Tompkins beamed as he narrated the twenty-five-year history of his purchases, his properties, the parks, the fights, the farms, and the failures. “Flying with Doug over Patagonia is like being on a tour bus,” explained Fay. “The conversation is constant, and it’s mostly Doug showing you things. He flew me down to the salmon cages and we were counting them and then he goes through a pass and shows me the volcanic eruption and the forest that it destroyed and then he flies over another farm that he’s fixing up and he shows me two or three buildings that they just rebuilt, and then he shows me the erosion from the volcanic ash in the river and how it’s changed the channel. He’s doing his tour, but at the same time he’s giving you a narrative of what you’re seeing. And at the same time, he’s cataloging those things in his brain.”
As he described the forests, the farms, the trails, and the views, Doug passionately outlined the grand scope of the Route of Parks. Like the art collection he had liquidated decades earlier, this collection was also worth a fortune. Doug never ceased in his proclamations that his goal was to give away all the lands, yet negotiations were frustratingly bureaucratic. Doug was eager to donate the parks, but President Bachelet’s team was mired in a political crisis involving Sebastian Dávalos, the president’s son. Her approval ratings plunged from the high seventies to the low thirties, as she fought for her political survival. Conservation was not a front-burner issue for her government. Doug’s long-stated promise to bequeath all his lands to the people of Chile was yet again stalled. Purchasing the lands had entailed years of frustration, setbacks, and agonizingly slow progress. Now he faced the same challenges in giving it all away.
As work on the mega-donation slowly proceeded, Tompkins poured his energy into the design of a visitor’s center at the center of the proposed Patagonia National Park. The center showcased his arguments for the creation of national parks, and the protection of nature. Jürgen Friedrich, his former Esprit partner in Europe, donated six million euros to cover construction costs for the visitor center. Tompkins envisioned the exhibits not as a rehash of the valley’s history or a summary on the number of bird species but as a call to action. How best to shape the half hour that a typical visitor might spend inside the welcome center? “He wanted people to understand the notion of a national park very deeply,” said Kris. “Why do you have to have national parks? He wanted to make sure they understood what is going on. That national parks are a necessity.”
For Doug, the messaging was clear: he wanted to first shock the visitors, then fill them with facts, and finally motivate each visitor to take action. At the end of the experience, he planned an oversized mirror with the message “What Will You Do?”
In December 2015, while the visitor center was still under construction, Doug gave a tour of the half-finished exhibits to a group of business leaders who had come down with Rick Ridgeway and Jib Ellison on a program known as the Corporate Eco Forum. The executives worked at Fortune 500 companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Disney.
They were exactly the decision makers whom Doug regularly savaged. Jib was more diplomatic. He saw a chance to teach rather than scold. In his mind, the largest corporations were often aware of their environmental sins and understood the urgency to reform their ways. Working with Walmart, Jib had convinced its owners, the Walton family, to reduce the company’s packaging by 35 percent. That single accomplishment meant that Ellison’s consultancy group, known as Blu Skye, had helped reduce landfill waste by thousands of tons.
Standing before the corporate leaders, Tompkins gave a virtuoso performance. He passionately laid out the arguments for a more profound commitment to conservation. As he spoke, his longtime friend Ridgeway could hardly believe what he heard. “He’s walking through all the rooms even though there are no displays or anything, but he’s telling them what it’s going to look like,” marveled Ridgeway. “I was listening to him describe this, and he started using pronouns that I’d never heard him use before, or never in that way. They were the pronouns of collaboration. They were we and us, and our problems, and our challenges, and we can do this together. I’d never heard him talk like that. It actually was different enough that I made note of it. I had a little smile to myself and said, ‘You know what? Doug’s been changing since he married Kris.’”
Chapter 20
Ambushed in Patagonia
All day long he was on the computer, which is kind of a crazy thing. He was talking with activists around the world, dealing with land issues. There was this great weight. He had this vision of land preservation and that time was running out, not only for the Earth. He really talked about that and kept saying, “I only have so much time to get this stuff done.”
—EDGAR BOYLES, pilot, photographer, and lifelong friend of Douglas Tompkins
Doug Tompkins was grumpy and overworked. Stuck fourteen hours a day in the office, seven days a week, as spring sprouted around his remote home in Patagonia, he deserved an expedition to replenish his seventy-two-year-old body and soul, his friends suggested. It was time for another Do Boys adventure. Their idea was to traverse the remote north shore of Lake Carrera in sea kayaks over the course of five leisurely days. The word went out to the various Do Boy members, and Jib Ellison, Rick Ridgeway, and Yvon Chouinard all confirmed. With Doug that made four. Weston Boyles, at twenty-nine, sprang at the chance to join the elite group and, together with Lorenzo Alvarez, a highly regarded guide, added youthful strength and veteran safety to the journey.
Collectively, the six men held at least a hundred years of kayaking and rafting experience. Alvarez had competed with the US national rafting team, Boyles had navigated Class V rapids, and Ellison had guided rafting trips in Siberia. Ridgeway could simultaneously kayak rapids and hold a camera steady. During his twenty-year career, he produced adventure documentaries for ESPN, National Geographic, and the Patagonia company, where he held the rank of vice president. Although not the strongest paddler, Chouinard was unfazed by the ten-miles-a-day paddle, especially since they would be hugging the shoreline. Chouinard felt more worried about which fishing flies might work. Unofficially, he was lead fisherman. Tompkins described the trip as a chance to visit with friends and told a reporter he looked forward to “stretching the muscles a little.”
The six-man expedition was divided into four kayaks—two doubles and two singles. Tompkins traveled in the same kayak as Ridgeway, while Ellison shared a kayak with Chouinard. Boyles and Alvarez paddled single kayaks weighted down with vegetables, boxes of oatmeal, bread, and boxes of red wine. The itinerary was relaxed: two days paddling, a rest day, two final days in the water, and arrival at Puerto Ibáñez on the eastern shore of the lake where their partners and friends would join them. Using the Google Earth app, they had scouted campsites along the route, and had seen interesting valleys for backcountry hikes. The lake’s remote north shore was hemmed in by steep cliffs, and was empty of roads, fences, and practically any signs of human presence. Temperatures were forecast to fluctuate from the low forties at night to the high sixties during the day. At forty-six degrees south of the equator, below any landmass on the globe except New Zealand, sunset was not until 10:00 p.m. Evening campfires could be lit during daylight.
Chouinard flew in from California. Though they exchanged letters and occasional brief visits during overlaps of travel, this was his first expedition with his best friend since Doug’s seventieth birthday bash two years earlier. Their relationship was difficult for outsiders to fathom. They could visit one another for days and hardly talk. Fifty-eight years of friendship laid the foundation for deep understanding. Like the dynamics inside many a successful marriage, they understood one another without a need for many words. The competitive urges that once drove them as climbers and businessmen still burned. Doug always pressed to climb faster, paddle harder, but it was a jovial competition that also included secretly placing five-pound rocks in the bottom of one another’s backpacks in hopes they wouldn’t be discovered until the end of a strenuous climb.
On the evening before the trip, the six expedition members, together with spouses and a small group of friends, met for dinner at El Mirador de Guadal, on the shore of Lake Carrera. December in Patagonia was an ideal month to travel, with sunny days and star-studded nights. The high season for tourism was still a month away.
Lorenzo Alvarez looked down the dinner table and listened carefully. These were legends of kayaking and climbing. Besides first descents on half a dozen Chilean rivers, Tompkins also had bragging rights to a first descent in a kayak of the Zambezi River in Zambia as he skirted ten-foot-long crocodiles congregating just below the waterfalls, waiting for prey. Rick Ridgeway, sitting across the table, was Doug’s companion on a half-dozen epic trips. He’d reached the peak of K2 in the Himalayas without using supplemental oxygen.
Tompkins and Chouinard laughed at their own frailty. Reminiscing about the romantic energy of themselves as young surfers, now they jokingly called themselves the “Done Boys,” which quickly morphed into the “Never Done Boys.” “The fact that we were going paddling for four or five days and trying to cover one hundred kilometers from port to port didn’t even come up in the dinner conversation,” Alvarez said later. “It wasn’t like, ‘Okay, let’s pull out the maps and see how far we’re going to go each day. And let’s make sure we keep an eye on the weather.’ It was all more like, ‘Hey, we’re having this great opportunity to see each other again!’”
* * *
We started the trip with a full-tilt ceremony at the Victoria Falls overlook, with the president of Zambia, and da-da-da. We take off down this river. Doug is one of two kayakers; the rest of us are in rafts. I’m working from a raft, doing the filming. We’re right at the base of Victoria Falls; it’s just insane. Here’s this wonder of the world, and you’ve got kayaks playing around near the base. It was an out-of-this-world vision. We head down the river, and go through these rapids that just drop into a placid pool. And boy, this is wonderful! Our Sobek guide friends said, “If a crocodile comes up out of the water, you can throw a rock at them and they go away.”
The crocodiles would sit in the pool below the rapids waiting for big fish to come through which they would grab. One day one of them grabbed one of the rafts, and exploded a section of the raft. There was a whole scene of Jim Slade from Sobek beating the crocodile over the head with a wooden oar to get him to let go of the raft. Doug is kayaking that and rolling. He was fearless.
We would sleep on the sand at night. It was really lovely because we didn’t have to be in tents. There were no bugs. It was kind of like being on a desert trip in Utah. One morning we woke up, we’ve rolled up our sleeping bags and stuff, and we find these big tracks in the sand not very far from us. We realized that it was a croc that had either slithered up out of the water or had come down from somewhere back into the water, and went right by us sleeping in sleeping bags on the sand.
—EDGAR BOYLES
* * *
One of the few details discussed during the three-hour meal was the need to d
ress in foul-weather gear the following dawn. Winds whipping off the nearby ice fields would be bone chilling. Locals joked that visitors to Patagonia could experience summer, autumn, winter, and spring on the same day. “My very good kayaking buddies told me, ‘You’ve got to be very careful of Lake Carrera,’” said Alvarez. “Because it’s a glass lake but it can turn into a wild, wind-struck ocean.”
At 5:45 a.m. on December 5, 2015, the six kayakers climbed into a small boat, dressed in rain gear and prepared for the onslaught of a bouncy ride, splashing waves, and a wind-chill factor near freezing. Tompkins sported cotton trousers, loafers, and a button-down wool sweater. He topped off the outfit with a beret that looked like a golf cap. “We were like, ‘Well? Where’s your foul weather gear?’” said Alvarez, describing the Where’s Waldo situation. “One of the wives said, ‘One of you doesn’t look like the rest of you.’ And Tompkins looked around, like, ‘Well, what?’”
During the commotion of the send-off, Kris slipped a satellite phone to Ellison. Doug was not to know. Hi-tech gadgetry annoyed him. Forrest Berkley, a Boston-based philanthropist dedicated to land conservation, had given the phone to Kris, and she had written emergency numbers on the inside cover. She included the local police, the Tompkins Conservation office, her top aide Carolina Morgado, and the local Coast Guard station with jurisdiction for Lake Carrera.
All kayak expeditions on the lake were expected to file an itinerary with the Coast Guard as well as to contact duty officers during a daily check-in call. The Do Boys never gave a thought to informing the authorities. “Like that zen painter who always leaves part of his painting unfinished,” Chouinard said, “we always left room for disaster.”
A Wild Idea Page 29
