Porter Fox has been dubbed camp cook

Name: Porter Fox

Age: 39
Hometown: Southwest Harbor, ME
Current town: Brooklyn, NY
Job description: Writer; editor; sailor; builder
Bio: Founder and editor of Nowhere Magazine, an online travel journal; crew member of the Ocean of Blood, which recently built five sculptural boats in Brooklyn and floated them down India's Ganges River for two months; also a member of former Swimming Cities Serenissima and Switchback Sea, and Miss Rockaway Armada raft projects
Upcoming projects: Finishing a book about father's career as a boat builder and a 2,000-mile sail up the coast of Maine in the first boat that his father built; writing a magazine piece about the Ocean of Blood's journey traversing the Ganges, and a multimedia gallery show about the trip; "real project: cleaning my room. I had a writing studio in Dumbo, but it moved back when I moved into the Chicken Hut and started working from home. I'm trying building a writing studio now. It's fun but it's really a procrastination technique.")
Select links: writingofthedisaster.com


Describe your current state of mind.


I feel like I just walked out of a hamam where an old man scrubbed all the skin off my body with a brillo pad, bludgeoned me with his fists, cracked my neck and smacked my head around. I feel raw - this heightened sense of awareness and with a little bit of fear. And that's a good thing. I feel very alive.


What's your fear?


I feel very sensitive to everything, not emotionally sensitive, but my senses feel piqued, you know? I notice things that I didn't know before about myself and other people. I have a very acute sense of time and of time passing, what's meaningful and what's not, of kindness and generosity, and all of the good things about people and appreciation. I feel very humbled. I don't think I'll ever take anything for granted again. It sounds dramatic, but it's the truth. 


You recently returned from Ocean of Blood's trip down the Ganges.


When I got back, I had 24 hours of confusion. We got in at 7:30 in the morning. I didn’t know what time it was, what day it was, or what you’re supposed to do in America. It was a very sudden change from where we had been living on the river. To be totally honest, I don’t exactly remember what happened. I ended up at my brother’s house in Boston for dinner and it was both one of the most wonderful and surreal meals I’ve ever had in my life, an abundance of food after not having a lot of food for a long time. It was pretty wild.


Tell me about your role in the project.


One of the best parts about the group was that there weren't specific roles. It's also one of our worst parts. I was in charge of the water part of the trip, of getting to Fatehgarh from Varanasi on the water.


Then Orien, Angie and everybody ran the fundraising prior to that, are going to do the performance. Which they are trying to do next year. Instead of this year. We were three weeks late to our performance date and people had to get home, so we had to postpone that part of the trip. Which was really a bummer for everybody. We were just happy to have made it at that point.


Martina Mrongovius arrived a little later than you guys. She was supposed to bring provisions.


Yes, and she did. She was so incredible. I think people said, “Bring meat and cheese.” Those were the two things that we were craving. And we’d been in the country at that point for a month and a half, subsisting largely on rice and vegetables and chapati. She brought all this cheese and sausage from Germany. She had chocolate and the little red cheeses wrapped in wax. She was magical, and she had so much energy and positive vibes around her. It was a really great moment for her to arrive, and that bag of food was like a treasure chest. We would dip into it every now and then very carefully.


How much food did you originally pack?


We rebuilt boats for a little over three weeks in Fategarh. And there were markets all around. We tried to provision one week in advance when we started out, but quickly found out that the vegetables wouldn’t last that long in the heat. We also had very little space to work in, so we had to provision every couple of days. Sometimes it was easy and sometimes it was a little scary because we couldn’t find what we needed, and were running out of food.


How did you adjust to the heat?


It was really tough at first. We all had jeans on and they became like leg cuffs for your legs. We were all sweating and jeans don’t breath, so we switched immediately. We bought these $3 linen pants from a store in New Delhi, and dubbed them “freedom pants,” because you could actually move and the fabric could breathe. It was a slow adjustment but two weeks in, the weather completely changed and it would go down to 50 degrees at night, to the point where we were really cold sleeping in down sleeping bags. During the day it would get into the 80s and 90s. They called it the "50 percent point"; at night, it was 50 percent cooler than the daytime temperatures. So if it was 80 during the day, it was 40 at night. If it was 90, it would be 45.


What about the mosquitoes?


It wasn’t bad at first, and then it got bad at the build site. A couple of guys got dengue fever. The mosquitoes just gathered. I don’t know if they found us or the weather changed or what, but it got pretty bad. So we got out of there. In some places that we camped, they were non-existent, but they were never as bad as they were on the Mississippi or even in New York sometimes, along the waterfront. But it was scary because not everyone had their malaria medication, so it made people nervous.


I read about the emergency. How did you deal with that?


Which one? The kidney stone thing was terrifying. We thought our crew mate's appendix had burst. It was terrifying. We thought his appendix had burst. He was a very good friend of mine and everybody on the boat. I’d never seen anyone in pain like that before. It wasn’t the usual stomach cramps and that kind of thing. It was something really internal and bad, and we just didn’t know what it was. If it was his appendix, we knew that we didn’t have a lot of time to get him to a hospital. And we were in the middle of nowhere.


We'd picked our camping spot at night - we started traveling at night because we weren’t going fast enough during the day - and we'd gotten hung up on sandbars and ended up pulling the boats over to the side of the river. It was muddy and there were human feces all around. It was 5 a.m. when we realized we had to get him out of there. We had to go upstream to find a village that we had passed the night before, against this really strong current. Then we had to find a vehicle. Then we had to decide whether to go to a local clinic, or try to go as fast as we could to find a hospital that could do surgery. And the whole time our friend is just convulsing in pain, and not really speaking. It was really scary. It was probably one of the top two scariest parts of the trip.


What was the other scary part?


The first was when we flipped the boats at the dam. That was something that we had talked about and made every precaution to avoid. I had told the crew that no matter what happens, "Don’t get caught in this situation." And then Charlie and I got caught in that situation. As it was happening I couldn’t believe it was happening. I thought I was watching my good friend die.


That type of wave is a recirculating hydraulic. It just doesn’t let you go. It just goes around and around. We just got lucky. We got out of it but it was two minutes, literally, when we were inside the structure of the dam, getting smashed around. It sheared an eight-foot aluminum mast off the boat. It sheared it like a pair of scissors would to paper. It snapped these stainless steel stays that were holding it down. It completely sheared everything off the deck level of the boat and flipped it over like a toy; it's a 2,000-pound, 20-foot steel catamaran. It was incredible.


How does one avoid a situation like that?


We saw it in advance, but we were told that the way they were going to open six doors of the dam and let the water level even out, that it wouldn’t be a problem, that they sent boats in like that all the time. It would be perfectly flat. They said: "It's fast, but it's flat." There are just rooster-tail rapids, no holes or recirculating hydraulics like that. We were like: "Okay, great." It took three days of getting paperwork signed and climbing the bureaucratic chain of Indian government to go.


They didn't open the gates like they said they would, though. I take the blame, squarely, because it was my call. At least for our boat, it was my call. After waiting upstream for a week and almost canceling the trip, we just had to try it. And that was part hubris, part being pissed off that they wouldn't open the gates for us. So we went for it and it was a stupid idea. The second that our boat went over, I felt deep regret for not biding our time and doing it the safe way. It would have been a harder way, but it would have been smarter.


When I spoke with Orien, he mentioned that he was doing it as his adventure, that there wasn't really an altruistic purpose for the project. You happened to be fundraising at the time. What are your thoughts on the importance of having an altruistic goal for your project, and how does that affect fundraising and pitching it to collaborators?


That's a really good question. It makes your fundraising way easier if you have a humanitarian or ecological goal. It's much easier to get people behind you, and understandably so, it's for the good of something. I'll speak to this trip, specifically. This trip was not for that reason. It was much more like the first year of the Miss Rockaway Armada, which I was not on but heard a lot about because it was such an incredible trip. One of their great responses to why they took the trip was "to see if they could do it," and ours was a very similar spirit. Attaching an altruistic goal to it so that we could get grants and fundraising just didn't seem right. I've seen a lot of projects that don't have a problem with attaching those, you know, greenwashing their project or attaching some type of humanitarian mission to whatever they're doing - when in reality, that's really not part of the goal. The goal of the trip. And the goal of our trip was to get from the start to the finish line with these sculptural boats that we had made. And good or bad, we made it. We did it. We got to the end. That was rewarding enough in and of itself. 


Right after we landed in Varanasi, [a woman] showed up on a standup paddle board. She had paddled from Rishikesh, which was even further than we went, with end-stage cervical cancer, to bring awareness to cervical cancer and how it can be prevented - especially in India. She was totally amazing and her strength and courage blew my mind. It was very touching to have seen how hard it was to get down that river and to see her pull in.


But different trips have different motivations. That was the purpose of her trip. I think some people will understand that we didn't want to bullshit anybody and we wanted to do it how we were going to do it. And there are some people who think that that was a vacation of sorts. That's kind of funny. It was the craziest, most uncomfortable vacation I've ever taken. It sure felt like work.


What was left of the medical kit?

We lost the medical kit when we flipped in the dam. I thought that we had overstocked the kit, but we used every single thing that

was in there until it ran out and we had to get re-supplied. There
were lots of cuts, bruises and infections - nothing too serious
because we had antibiotic cream and we had waterproof band-aids. [I
thought] buying them at Duane Reade was really silly, like an American
tourist. Then when we had got there, we used every single thing that
we had bought, right down to the baby powder. It was tragic when we
lost it in the dam, and the first thing we did was try to reassemble
whatever people had in their own personal kits and put them into a
group kit. Robin Frohardt had, thankfully, brought a resupply of stuff
and pieced it together.


Can you talk about the cultural interaction with the locals? You were a group of Americans with self-made boats traveling down a river that they considered sacred.

It was touchy. We were very conscious of the deep meaning that this

river has. It feeds farms. It feeds people. It is the basis for much
of the Hindu religion. So we were walking lightly for that reason, but
then again, we were still a bunch of people from Brooklyn really
excited to be there, having fun and doing our thing. So there were
times of conflict where it didn't jive with the locals, and sometimes
that was awkward and intense. And then there were times where we had
total union with the people that we met, and that was more on an
individual basis. You'd notice that one of crew members has just been
gone for two days, and they had been walking around a temple with a
kid they had just met, explaining all the gods and the history and the
tradition. We could get swept away by that and have a really great
cultural exchange with the local people, you know? It was 50/50. It
was half contentious and half wonderful.


Who were your translators?


We had two guys, Satbir and Abishek, and they were the most incredible
human beings. They gave up so much to help us. They were loyal right to the end. They believed in something, in what we were trying, and helped us so much. Satbir was there the whole time and Abishek had to leave about halfway down the river, but he was with us for about six weeks or so. He'd never been on the Ganges and he had grown up in the town that we built the boats in. Our first night, he put on a life jacket and jumped into the water and was howling with joy.

How did you meet them?

We found our build site on Google Earth. We located a bunch of

buildings in this town that we wanted to start in. We started calling
the businesses, calling this college. We found a professor's name. His
daughter, Navisha, answered the phone and was incredibly sweet and
spoke perfect English. Her father said: "Yeah, we'd love to have you."
And Abeshik is her brother. So that's how we met. And then Mike met
Satbir walking through the streets of New Delhi when he scouted the route in the spring.


How old were they?

They were in their mid-twenties.

What were their occupations?

Satbir was a professional drifter. He was in between jobs, and Abeshik

had just gotten out of graduate school and hadn't started a job yet so
he had time.

I understand that there were a lot of dead bodies along the Ganges. What else did you see?

We saw the most stunningly beautiful landscapes that I think all of us had ever seen in our lives, and we saw the most horrifying sights that we had ever seen. Every single morning and every night, we saw these

incredible sunsets and sunrises. The average bedtime for the crew was
9 o'clock. Which is weird for this crew. And we were up at 5:30
in the morning to get moving again. Everything is very earth-tone, there. The Ganges basin is very much like a desert, all this white and gray sand
that the river cuts through. The banks are really tall. There's jungle
on one side and cane fields on the other. They have this bright green
edge to everything and desert in the middle. It's like a reverse
oasis. But then we'd come around the corner and  see a dog on a
corpse, ripping the cheeks off its face right in front of you. Or, a
dead old lady or dead child, stuck on a sandbar or hung up on a twig.
That was pretty shocking. But we got desensitized to it over time.
Everything just became normal. That was one of the strangest parts of
the trip; nothing was shocking at all by the end.


How did you know who to trust?

There were a lot of people who wanted things from us - money

or objects or time. And we didn't have enough to give away. We were
living pretty meekly ourselves. There was a guava farmer who hosted us
at his orchard for five days before we could go through the dam. He
showed us where the well was and showed us how to get to town. He sat
with us around the fire. Every morning, he would come out and
smoke a bidi with me at sunrise.


At the same time, we'd meet someone else, start this relationship and
invite them on the boats, or go do something with them, and then it
would turn into them asking for money or stuff that we had – tools,
electronics, whatever we had. It was very hit or miss. I think that's
just life; it's very hard to know who to trust and who not to trust. I
gave my bicycle to a sadhu on the last day that we were in Varanasi in
a final act of faith and trust. The next day, one of our Indian
friends came down and said he'd just sold it for 1,000 rupees in town.
So you never know.


So how did the actual trip compare to your expectations?

It was more in every way. It was lot harder than I thought it was

going to be. It was more life-changing than I thought it was going to
be. It was more beautiful. It was more terrifying. It was bigger than
I think any of us expected. I think we had thought we had already put
the hard work in, raising the money, building the boats and getting
them and ourselves over there. But that was just the beginning.


What would you do over if you could?

I think I'd do the whole thing over and that it would turn out exactly

as it did the first time. I think some things are just supposed to go
certain ways, and there's no changing that.


What tips or advice would you give to someone who wanted to do something similar?

I would suggest getting someone on the ground there in advance. I

think a lot of our logistical problems could have been solved by
running the route a month or two before we started. Mike scouted for us in the spring and did an amazing job. But in addition to that, I would put somebody on the ground right before we
get there to get the build site set up: lodging; water; food. I would
just move the scout to right directly before the trip, instead of
scouting six months in advance. Just do a week in advance or three
weeks in advance, then you'll know what the exact conditions are, what
the obstacles are. And it won't change.


How did your publication, Nowhere, come about?

There were a couple of reasons. I had been writing travel related

articles for a long time and I was getting a little tired of the very
tight edits that travel magazines had to make. And they had their
reasons. They have to fit the copy around the ads and keep
a bottom line. But the long, narrative pieces were slowly disappearing
from the magazine. I really longed to write something long-form like
you can for The Believer or Narrative magazine. I've always liked to
travel and a professor of mine from grad school had turned me on to the
old Collier's magazines and an old travel magazine called Holiday, and
pointed out all of these novelists and poets and journalists and
artists that would write travel stories as their day jobs. Hemingway
did it. D.H. Lawrence, Paul Bowles and Steinbeck did it. The modern day equivalent I would say is Paul Theroux, who writes
these beautiful novels and travel essays on everything from Patagonia to Siberia.


I just got back from a trip to Japan or Turkey or somewhere. Something
clicked and I thought: "No matter what, I have to do this now. It's
driving me crazy." It was cathartic exercise to get the designers
together and approach the writers. The process of explaining what this magazine was going to be was so inspiring to me. Wow, this is actually a good, needed thing. This isn't just a little gratuitous distraction. This is a really great read that I’d pick up if I was walking through the airport or surfing the Internet.


Putting the pieces together was incredibly arduous. I didn't know how
to program a website and I had lots of help from friends and pros in
the business. A programmer looked at the code behind the first issue
and laughed. It was so convoluted. I couldn't make the tab bar work, so I'd
hit the space bar ten times and moving things around physically - instead of programming them correctly in the first place. It was a total mess. And
then the second issue was cleaner and easier. The third issue was
easier, and then the fourth issue, that was a real dream. And we're
putting out the next one in February.


That same professor, he's been publishing 'zines since the '60s, explained this model: You don't have to have a quarterly or
a monthly or a bi-monthly publishing schedule; you don't have to have
advertising; you don't have to run it like a blog; you don't have to
do anything, just make the thing. But being in the magazine business for so long, my mind was geared towards conventionality. Which in the Internet age is totally irrelevant.


These are concepts that have been cooked up over the years to sell ads to
businesses -- so they know how often they have to buy in, how much their
ads will be seen, how long they'll sit on the newsstand and how many
hits they'll get - whatever. They're very abstract terms when it comes
to presenting a bunch of stories to people. So we threw all that out
the window.


The New York Times, New York Magazine, Huffington Post, and other
places reviewed the magazine and they always asked the same
question: "What is your frequency? " And I always answered them: " Whenever the next one is finished." I realize that it's a very idealistic way to publish a magazine. Most people have a bottom line that they have to meet, and huge overhead. That's sort of the beauty of the Internet. It does
democratize the industry in a lot of ways. But it was wonderful
thinking we were not going to release a magazine before it was finished.
And I've worked for a lot of magazines where we released before it was
finished because we had a print deadline, a ship deadline, and a
newsstand deadline.


[Instead,] we would just wait and wait. Four stories would be finished
and we would be waiting on the art for the fifth. Then the fifth story
would come in, and then we'd have to wait on an edit and on the art
for that, and then wait for the programmer until it was done. I was
dying to get it out there because we've been very lucky to get great content
and really amazing people to contribute. It was gratifying, though, to wait until they were finally done and send that email that the new issue was out. It actually worked on a circulation level because we have some followers. We're still new and young, but we have enough followers that people are kind of waiting for it to come out. We'll tease it a little bit on our Facebook page: "We're almost done." On our newsletter: "We're almost there. We don't really know when it's coming out, but soon." When it does, we get so many hits right off the bat. Every issue so far has gotten 14,000 hits within the first three weeks of going live, from 129 countries. I don’t really care about Internet numbers. I'm just happy that people are reading it.


It's great for the authors, too. In our last issue, there was this
story called Along the Via Dolorosa, an absolutely amazing story that author, editor, teacher, Mark Kramer, wrote. For a long time, he was the Founding Director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism
at Harvard, which is just the top of the heap in the literary/narrative journalism world. And he had had this story that he had sold to Harper’s in
the ‘80s. And they rejected it for whatever reason, and he submitted it
to The New York Times or some big name magazine and they thought it
was too long, or too abstract or whatever. He showed me the piece and
I read it and couldn’t believe it had never seen the light of day. Nowhere is that place in between. Where you can publish a story like that at full length and still get a lot of readers.


A friend of mine started an online magazine around the same time. He
he had worked for National Geographic Adventure for a long time and
started this adventure/travel website. When he saw Nowhere, he emailed
me right away and said: “How do you find this content? How are you
paying for pieces?” And I wrote him back: “We’re just finding pieces that
don’t have a home anywhere else because there isn’t a
place for them right now.” And, luckily, some writers are still more
interested in getting their stories published in their full capacity, at full length – edited only to make it better and not chop it down to
a certain number of inches so it will fit between ads. They're more interested in that than getting a paycheck. We just
stumbled onto a really great model that's working well. More than
anything, it's sustainable. We don't need a lot of money to keep
going. That's what shuts down a lot of magazines - this big push to
make it big, make it glossy, make it hip, make it the next big thing.
And you have to spend a lot of money to do that. If you don't get
advertisers in there in the first two years, maybe three on the
outside, then you're going to shut down. And most new magazines shut down in that time. So it's nice to know that there's nothing in the way of where Nowhere can go as long as we're invested in that. Long answer, sorry. [laughs]


Yes, the trajectories are sometimes more fun to read.

Everything moves in a pendulum motion. For the last ten years editors have wanted sound bytes, short charticles, little blips of information. Like Maxim Magazine. And then the pendulum swings the other way and a magazine like The Believer comes out. And it does very well, kind of moves back toward the old school, long form narrative. It goes back and forth. We're at a point now with blogs online that is completely driven by traffic or numbers. The article is judged by the number of hits it gets in a very short period of time. It's this hyper-condensed form of journalism.

In newspapers, you want to catch the reader in the first 21 words of
the article - max. In blogs, you have to catch them within the first
four words of the headline, or they’re gone. It makes for a very
frantic reading experience. People who surf the Internet and read the
blogs end up frazzled at the end of the day. I don't know if they
physically end up frazzled, but it's hectic. If you ask someone: "What
was your favorite blog entry last week?" I think a lot of people would
be hard-pressed to come up with something because it mushes into this
gray matter. Whereas, if you read a 5,000-word story, and it really
sucks you in and makes you viscerally react to the writing and the
photography…I remember stories like that that I read when I was 16
years old. It has an impact.


I want to ask you about your experience being held at gunpoint in the Dominican Republic.

It was a good times gone bad. We moved down there to live this expat

dream. My girlfriend at the time, we had just gotten off the Mississippi
River, gone through Burma on a bicycle trip looking for dissident monks who had helped start the Saffron Revolution of, I believe it was 2007. Then that spring we were like, "What are we going to do now?" Go to the Dominican Republic, write all these stories and live for cheap. Maybe go snorkeling.


And it was really amazing until the point that I turned around in the
kitchen one morning and there were two men with their heads covered
up, holding a gun to my head. It was almost comical: "What are you doing
here? You look like robbers." Then, slowly, it dawned on me that
that's what they were, and that we were very very far from anyone or
anything. Which was our first mistake. Which we know now. We were kind
of screwed. Anyway, it was a home invasion that went on for an hour
and a half to the point where they had gotten through everything. They
had gone through all the bags three times. They had gone through the
closet three times. They'd taken our money [and] our computers. Yet there was no pressure for them to leave because we were in the hills out of town. Which was the scariest thing. They could have stayed for three days if they wanted to. It was at that point that the tenor of the relationship between us and the thieves changed, and they started screwing around. They were getting aggressive with my girlfriend and trying to tie me up.


I grew up in Northern Maine and we always had guns around the
house. We hunted. I know how guns work, and I was taught how they work
from a very young age. I just noticed that the gunman didn't really
know what he was doing with his pistol. He kept trying to scare us
with it by cocking it, and the way in which he reloaded the gun by
taking the clip out, left the gun with no bullets in it for 10 seconds
- however long it took him to reload it. The short story is, I
whispered to my girlfriend that I was going to run for the door the next time he did that, thinking that at that point, honestly, I don't care if I
get shot. I don't care if anything awful happens. Nothing is more
awful than being imprisoned with these people with nobody on the
outside knowing what was going on. It was like there was a bubble
there, and I think my girlfriend felt that way as well. We wanted to burst through that wall so desperately and be like, "Help!" So he did it again, I ran, and he chased me out. my girlfriend ran and he fired three or four shots at me. One of which hit a few feet to my right off of the patio, and one hit to my left. I could see the puff of dirt, hear the bullet ricochet. I
had never felt such euphoria in my entire life, having released this
awful secret to the world that these people had taken us captive. And now, at least something was going to happen, whatever it was, and everybody would know about it – instead of it being this dirty little secret within the walls of this house.


The chase went on for another 45 minutes or so. It turns out that they
weren’t chasing us the way that we thought they were. They continued
firing the gun and we met some people, a gardener and a security guy.
There were some questions as to if they knew what was going on. We had
to escape them and run across the field. When we finally got to the
police station, it started a whole other chapter of the adventure. We went to court and the police station numerous times. I was in a
sting operation to catch the guy who bought my stolen computer. It was a
totally comical, Keystone Kops sting operation that involved a
Renault Alliance sedan, three cops who didn’t speak English. They just sent me out on the street and said: “Go find him and bring him back to us.” So I did and he went to jail. Then they released him the next day.


What about the other robber left behind with your girlfriend?

I bolted and [the first thief] came right after me through the door.

And then my girlfriend ran after him. The other guy didn’t do anything. The second thief just stayed in the room. I had the feeling that he
wasn’t really a partner in it. I wrestled with him a little bit as he
was trying to tie me up and he whispered: “Lo siento,” which means “I’m sorry.” So he didn’t come after us.


As the court case unfolded, we met some other people who were robbed
the day before or the day after us, two families. Then I started
researching this story because I was so freaked out by the whole
thing.  I wanted to figure out what had happened and I just started
driving around on this dirt bike that we had rented, and interviewing
people, saying: “What happened? Tell me about what happened…” It was like reliving this experience over and over again. And I met so many people
who had been robbed in the last six months, some in the last
couple of weeks.


It seems like they shared the "dirty little secret", too, that it was

something no one talked about.

And that’s the way the expats were. It was the most incredible thing. I don’t know why they didn’t want to fix this problem. Or, maybe they were smarter than me and realized this would never change and they wanted to live their days out like most retirees there. A lot of them couldn’t afford a place in another parts of the Caribbean. It’s very cheap in the D.R. and it’s so beautiful, the most beautiful island that I had ever been to in the Caribbean, just so rustic and pristine. Which is strange – to see that beauty and be a part of a violent encounter, and then to see it in the streets

and then to talk to other victims. A guy who had lived there for 20 years or so had bars on his windows and a fancy alarm system. He
 came home one day – the day before I interviewed him—and these
thieves met him outside his house with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. He was a veteran; he knew what he was doing. There was nothing
he could do. They tied him up to the bed and beat him up a little, and
took everything he had. It’s terrifying. Unfortunately, I think it was
tied to the pace of development, the billions of dollars that were pouring into this fishing town, the migrant workers that were coming in by the hundreds to build hotels. It was just out
of control.


So you had a middle man, but couldn't he have sold you out?

He was my fixer, and he was also the reason why we left.

After putting some trust in him, I wanted him to help me find the
robbers and set up a meeting somehow, through an intermediary - maybe
not face-to-face - but I wanted to know about them. I wanted to
know where they were from. And it wasn’t even for the story anymore.
It was this psychotic goose chase that I was on. I actually did want
to sit down in the same room with them after learning that the cops
had set up most of the robberies, that the cops were taking kickbacks
on all the drug deals. After discovering all of that from high-ranking
sources in the government, I actually felt bad for the robbers, that
they ended up giving 90-percent of the loot to the cops, who probably
ended up with our stuff. They would tell robbers that, “If
you don’t keep doing this, then you’re a dead man.” So that kid
was trustworthy at first, and I was paying him to work for me [to get]
information on these guys. He was Haitian, and lived in the same
neighborhood where these guys lived. He found them and after a few weeks he came to me and he said, “It’s really hard keeping your name and the hotel where you’re staying at secret from these guys.” He made a threat.
He was like: “I can’t keep this information secret unless you give me
more money.” I told him to get out and to not come back. And we left
three days later.


Why did you want to interview the robbers and potentially endanger yourself again?

I think that’s a good question for a psychiatrist. But it was two

parts. I was writing a story at that point. I was reporting, and I like to report deeply and have more information than I need. I was always taught in journalism if you want to interview somebody in the U.S. government, you approach the President, that you go to the highest source for the information. That was these two guys. We had shared one of the most intimate moments that I’ve ever had in my life. When somebody is holding your life in their index finger, that they’re an eighth of an inch away from ending your life, all he has to do is twitch and pull that trigger. That gun was cocked and loaded. I saw it very clearly. It’s a bonding moment, and I wondered if military people go through this, if people who had been assaulted go through this, if they have any desire to go and see the perpetrator or get to know them. I have a feeling that it must happen
to other people because it was a really strong feeling. I ended up in
some weird places in the Dominican after the robbery.


How did your girlfriend feel about you pursuing the robbers?

She was recuperating herself in her own way so she was a little bit

oblivious to it. I also wasn’t totally forthright with her. I didn’t want to scare her more. When I went to the police station, they called me and said, “Hey, come over here, we have the guys,” they took me around to this outdoor jail cell and in broad daylight marched me right in front of them. They all identified me; they all saw my face. And the cop said, “Which one was it?” And I was just like: “You have to be kidding me!” So I didn’t tell her about that or about when one of the cops on our case did a drug deal in another room in the hotel. It would have just scared her.


Three days seems like a lot of time to wait to go, no?

We stayed three and a half weeks after the robbery. The last three days was a very intense time.

They could have come back for you within 24 hours.

We didn’t tell anyone we were leaving when we finally decided to go We didn’t leave the hotel room very much. We just got ready to go and split that morning, really early in the morning. I didn’t feel safe until we were in our apartment in New York and the window and the door was locked. It was pretty rattling.

Right after it happened, my girlfriend was devastated and I was just on the
phone booking tickets. She was like, “I don’t want to leave," and I
was totally shocked: “Really?!” She was like: “No, I want to deal with
this here. I don’t want to bring this home.” So that’s why we stayed.
It was pretty amazing of her. I didn't have that kind of courage.


So how does a traveler stay safe in place like the Dominican Republic?

Have a local contact. In journalism, they call it a fixer. In life,

it's someone you trust. And we got some bad information about where to
live. There are some people who go down there and they're fine; they
make the right moves. They stay close to town and aren't in the
boondocks. Most of those things are very obvious. Locals know what the
score is. They know how their town or their city works.


What's your idea of happiness?

Freedom. Not feeling tied down or pushed one way or another. Just

feeling like you can be who you are and let that be all right.


What's difficult?

Conceiving of what your life should be and its relationship to what

your life is. That idea of what your life should be comes from a lot of outside expectations, in addition to your own. What your life is…is what it is right then, and that's okay. But the constant comparison in the
back of people's minds leads to a lot of heartache and disappointment.
Like Springsteen says, “Throw away the dreams that break your heart.”


Tell me about your childhood.

I was a spazz.

What kind of spazz?

I grew up on an island off the coast of Maine. My dad had been a

corporate guy in New York and New Jersey, and he and my mom decided
one day when I was 3 years old, my sister was three months old, [and]
my brother was 5, to start fresh in the north woods of Maine. He
wanted to build boats. So we grew up with the boatyard in our
backyard. That was a huge part of our lives. He slowly learned the
trade and became an incredible boat builder. That shaped the course of
my childhood. We were always on boats. We were always on the water. I
started working on boats when I was 11 years old, I think, for my
grandfather on his boat and then on other boats. In the wintertime,
we'd sail ice boats across the lakes. I had great parents
and a wonderful community on the island, very tight-knit. My friends
from high school still make up the majority of my best friends
today.


What's the key to being a good sailor?

I know the answer to this. You have to see 90 seconds into the future, and you have to be prepared when that 90 seconds is up and it's happening. So you have to see what's going to happen before it happens. Because after it happens, you're fucked. Same thing on boats on the river. That just takes experience.

What brought you to New York?

I was born just north of the city and I lived there until I was 3. A lot of my

mom's family lives in the city, and I just always loved New York. We
had some holidays here when I was a kid. We'd always visit my aunts
and uncle, and go to a Broadway play, [or] the Empire State
Building. It was a like a fantasy kingdom in my mind, having grown up on the island So I'd been angling toward New York since a few years after college. I kind of wanted to go back and I ended up getting a job in California, and some other things deviated from that course. Then I applied to grad school there and I got in. That's why I came back when I did.


If you didn't live here, where would you live?

Nowhere.

I've never spent that much time in Manhattan. My whole life has been
in Brooklyn since 2002. It's coming on 10 years now. Everywhere I
lived before, I felt like I was behind the curve. I moved out to
Jackson Hole, Wyoming to be a ski bum after college and
everyone was like, "You should have been here 15 years ago. It was amazing." Even up in Maine and in California, everyone's like: "You're 10 years behind." Brooklyn was the first place where I felt like I got to watch it happen, and granted I was still late, but it's still happening right now. It's the most wonderful place. Wherever I am, I always want to come
back.


If you could have more of something, what would it be?

More free time with nothing to do.

And less?

Less angst about how things change.

What's something that you'd change if you could?

I think I would change the education system in the United States. High

school through college. Mostly college. It's one of the most backwards
things in our country. It's unfortunately left us uneducated and very
not worldly. Which leads to xenophobia and a lot of bad things.


What's romantic?

So many things. I'm a bit of a romantic. Sharing a space with somebody

without talking. Just being together. I think that's very romantic.


What's tragic?

Ego.

How would you describe your eating habits?

When I like something, I really like it and I'll eat it for a year.

When we were in India, I could visualize a slice of pizza or a
pastrami sandwich. I felt like I was hallucinating, and it hurt me so
deeply that I couldn't go find it somewhere. But I think we all have
those cravings.


I'm a carnivore. Somebody once told me that I was a "camp cook." And
then they explained that camp cooking is making something out of
things that aren't necessarily supposed to go together.


What's something that you enjoy making?

Grilling pork shoulder and smoking it. I also like to make sushi. I

love to make breakfast; that's my thing. And I love to wake up early.
I like cooking while other people are sleeping. I don't know
what that is. It's really wonderful.


What's something that you want to do before you die?

This is going to sound really abstract, but I want to learn how to

completely open up. And I feel like I have been learning this my entire
adult life, lowering my defenses and dropping preconceived notions. I did grow up in the Northeast. There is that Northeastern stoicism in my blood, really, but just really opening up my heart and my mind and my body to anything - to be able to live anywhere and spend time with anyone and not judge and not worry. Just to be. Sounds very New Age.


What's your greatest fear?

Dying. I don't want to die. I’ve always felt that way. I truly love every

moment of every day. I think that's why I get up so early. I love the
morning and having this fresh canvas in front of you, and not knowing
what's going to happen and getting through that day and staying up as
late as you can until you just fall over on your face and get up as
early as you can, and start again. I do really love being alive. It
makes me think that I should probably stop taking these trips.


They're getting a little risky. It's a risk that comes with living fully. I
don't want to live in a cubicle or a sheetrock white apartment. In my
heart, I would die in that situation. I've worked those jobs before
and I felt myself dying, completely curling up. And thank God in this
time and place and community that we live in, you don't have to do that.
I've never been around so many people living so fully in my life. I
feel blessed to be here, right now.


Is it harder to start or finish something?

Finish. Anyone can start something, [but] to see it through the way

this crew saw the India project through, I'll have admiration for them forever. They survived against all odds. They would not quit, no matter what. Getting kicked when we were down, they wouldn't quit. It was inspiring and  sad when it was over.


Is there anything that you'd like to add or ask?

How many words can you type per minute?

I know that answer: 80.


Impressive. Do you hunt and peck or do you type like you're supposed to?


I can't do this [typing and pecking].


That's what I do. I look like a monkey trying to make the computer work.


Thank you, Porter.


Wow. That was a really intimate interview. My palms are sweaty.


Really.


Yeah.


I'm glad I could make that happen for you.