Word: caving
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...differences: its only river is longer than the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, the Amazon, the Orinoco and the Mississippi-combined. And its inhabitants are not exactly the folks next door. For inexplicably resurrected on both banks of the mysterious river is every soul who ever lived, from hairy cave dwellers to modern Homo sapiens, from the totally unknown to such famous figures as Joan of Arc, Karl Marx and Hermann Göring...
Absolutist that he is, he devises a plan "to settle the question of God once and for all." He will go into a labyrinthian mountain cave and simply sit until he receives a sign. What he gets instead is a toothache, which drives him out of hiding and into the care of Allison, a young schizophrenic who has escaped from a sanitarium and is living in a greenhouse right beneath the cave. Emerging from his vigil, Will Barrett goes through the glass roof and literally falls in love...
With remarks like that assailing him from all sides, no wonder Will goes crazy. Or does he? Percy writes that he "went mad" upon deciding to enter the cave, but the point is then oddly hedged: "This is how crazy he was. He had become convinced that the Last Days were at hand, that the world had fallen into the hands of the only species which knew how to destroy itself along with all other living creatures on earth, that whenever in history this species had invented a weapon, it had forthwith used it ..." The list continues, building a case...
...suspicion mounts that Percy is secretly on Will's side. This is unfortunate, because the character has some serious, unacknowledged flaws. He is remarkably cold to those around him; he goes into the cave shortly before his daughter's wedding and worries not a whit about missing it. Evidence for his sense of mor al superiority is not provided. He rants at unconscionable length, a voice crying out not in the wilderness but on the golf course or in his Mercedes. The effect of his diatribes is peculiar, as if Swift had put his most acid criticisms...
Spring, however, brought a thaw in the official Soviet attitude toward the project. Managing Editor Ray Cave spent four days in Moscow speaking with top Soviet officials. Photographers Mark Meyer and David Burnett traveled thousands of miles across the country to take many of the issue's photographs. Reporter-Researcher John Kohan, who speaks fluent Russian and was making his fourth trip to the U.S.S.R., visited a psychiatric outpatient center, rode with an ambulance team, went behind the scenes at the old Moscow circus, spent a day at a tractor factory...