Firefighter Was Down, but Not Ready to Give Up

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 16, 2007

NORTH HAVEN, Conn.

The first fall should have been the catastrophe.

Dino Ferraro was at a fire in a largely abandoned clock factory in 1989 when he fell from a fully extended aerial ladder 25 feet to the concrete below, landing on his left shoulder. A different angle, he could have been paralyzed or killed. As it was, small miracle, he hit the ground and bounced up like a rubber ball. He separated the shoulder and was out for two and a half months, but lived to fight fires another day.

But you get to dodge only so many bullets. He didn’t dodge any on Sept. 23, 2000, when he came to work a little early and took a call he would have missed had he showed up five minutes later. This time he was on a ladder breaking open second-floor windows at a bedroom fire in a housing project.

The firefighters inside, not seeing him through the smoke, blasted him with a hose shooting out water at 150 pounds per square inch of pressure. He fell only 12 feet, but when a firefighter at the bottom of the ladder tried to break the fall, Mr. Ferraro landed squarely on the heel of his right foot. “When they pulled off the boot, it looked like scrambled eggs,” Mr. Ferraro said. He suffered what is called a pilon fracture. It is also known as a hammer fracture, which tells you all you need to know.

“They looked at the ankle and told me it was all over,” Mr. Ferraro, 48, recalled. “They told me before the surgery, they told me after the surgery, they probably told me during the surgery, that I was all done with fighting fires. They said there was just no way.”

There were operations, a steel plate and 13 screws in his leg, casts, boots and therapy sessions, all intended to allow him to walk normally, without pain. None were very successful. And when the ankle joint ended up 20 degrees out of alignment, the right leg an inch shorter than the left, that looked like the best that could be done.

But Mr. Ferraro, who at first wanted to become a state trooper but then caught the firehouse bug, wasn’t content with limping around, and, stubbornly, he wasn’t resigned to being a former firefighter, living on disability payments at the impeccably neat split raised ranch he shares with his wife, Annette. He wanted to walk normally. And he wanted to climb ladders, walk on roofs, smash gashes in burning buildings, fight fires.

So through his wife’s contacts as a radiology technician, he began looking for more options. In October 2002 that took him to the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan and Dr. S. Robert Rozbruch, an orthopedic surgeon and director of the hospital’s limb lengthening and deformity service, who decided that Mr. Ferraro’s case might not be so hopeless, after all. He could see that in 95 percent of cases it would be a career-ending injury. But between the advances in orthopedics and Mr. Ferraro’s dogged insistence on going back to work, he figured it was worth a shot.

So, using an Ilizarov frame, a scaffold around the leg that looks a bit like a medieval torture device, his treatment consisted of two main elements — returning the ankle joint to something near its normal alignment and using the body’s ability to grow new bone to lengthen the leg to where it had been before the accident. The frame was put on in February 2003. It was removed that July.

After almost a year of therapy, Mr. Ferraro thought it was time to see how close he was to where he wanted to be. He took out his ladder and climbed to the top of his house with its steep-pitched roof. Then several times a week he clambered over its eaves and ridges, first without his gear, then in his heavy firefighter’s outfit.

On June 8, 2005, he was allowed to return to work as a firefighter, and he has been there ever since, back at the New Haven Fire Department’s East Battalion, Truck 3 at the Lombard Street station, where he began work 21 years ago.

This past week all the terrible images came flooding back, of the firefighters rushing into the burning towers, the almost unfathomable dedication, the miracles of bravery, medicine, heart and soul that got people through that week six years ago. Mr. Ferraro marvels and shudders like everyone else about what people did on 9/11. But, though he wouldn’t make any comparisons, he is a reminder of how, in far, far smaller ways, those miracles play out in daily life, too.

“It’s just something in my blood,” he said. “I climb ladders. I walk on roofs. I fight fires. I wasn’t really out to prove anything. I just figured I was 41 years old, and that was too young to quit.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Woodstock’s Values, and Abraham’s, Too

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 13, 2007

WOODSTOCK, N.Y.

In his Rosh Hashana sermon today, Rabbi Jonathan Kligler, like many rabbis, will try to put the eternal struggle to square human fallibility with human aspiration in a context particularly germane to his own congregation.

So in the prepared text of his sermon he begins by meditating on “messianic visions of modernity,” particularly the idealism and passions of the ’60s that brought so many of his peers to this Catskill town still defined by the concert that wasn’t held here. Along with mulling over the “yetzer hara,” the capacity for evil, and the “yetzer hatov,” the capacity for good and the ancient wisdom of Rabbi Huna of Tzipori, he’ll tell his congregation to keep hope alive.

“I never want to abandon my idealism,” he says, near the beginning of the sermon. “I’m the rabbi of Woodstock, for God’s sake!”

Yes, Mr. Kligler is the rebbe of a distinctive congregation, where the High Holy Days ceremonies are always held outdoors in their beloved tent, and the first Rosh Hashana service begins with the singing of the ’60s anthem “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with the rabbi playing guitar, where there’s always plenty of singing, dancing and hugging along with the davening.

But still, two decades on, there’s a tale of modern Jewish life in the success of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation — Kehillat Lev Shalem (which means “the congregation of the full heart”). Like its members, like many Jews, it has tried to balance tradition and modernity, staying true to its core values and adapting to change, and has managed mostly to do it, even though no one began with a vision of a place that has an annual golf outing at the Rip Van Winkle Country Club.

“Our goal has always been to be truly welcoming, truly tolerant, true to the Woodstock ethos,” said Rabbi Kligler, who came to the congregation in 1988 as a student rabbi and never left. “At the beginning, no one wanted to have memberships, there was no accounting system. Our challenge was to grow without losing our vision and spirit.”

There were plenty of Jews in Woodstock, but no synagogue closer than Kingston until late 1986, when two refugees from Brooklyn, Laurie Schwartz and Nathan Brenowitz, decided to start one. First, they wanted to have a place where their son could learn to be Jewish — and they could learn along with him. Second, as Mr. Brenowitz noted, most of the Jews in town seemed to be Hindus or Buddhists, and they wanted a place with a Jewish identity that evoked the spirituality all their friends were seeking.

They placed an ad in The Woodstock Times announcing their intentions to start a synagogue that attracted 70 responses. First they planned a High Holy Days ceremony in a single room at the Woodstock Children’s Center. Then as word spread, they thought they could do it in two rooms with the prayer leader straddling the doorway between them. In the end, they rented a tent and more than 250 people attended the first service.

They operated for many years out of an abandoned flea market in nearby Saugerties. They contemplated a new building but worried that a traditional capital campaign might not be their thing. “The capital campaign consultants talked about a giving pyramid, with the big donors at the top,” Rabbi Kligler said. “That wasn’t going to work. We’re more like a giving mesa.”

But they pulled it off. This is their second year in the new $3 million, 12,500-square-foot building (which actually is in Woodstock) with the 150 purple chairs in the sanctuary donated by the Catskill Mountain Christian Center in Margaretville. There will be about 1,500 people attending the High Holy Days ceremonies, the membership is now 375 families, and the new building means the rabbi no longer has to operate out of a trailer behind the old flea market.

There have been at least two times of crisis. The first came when the congregation split over the rabbi’s suggestion that it affiliate with the Reconstructionist Movement, where he was trained (they decided to remain unaffiliated), the second the result of bitter political schisms after 9/11 and the second intifada over whether the synagogue was supporting Israel enough or supporting it too much (a few members quit, but life went on).

THE congregation is still distinctive, proud to have sponsored the bat mitzvah of a transsexual member who had her bar mitzvah decades ago. But Rabbi Kligler figures that with Judaism facing a growing chasm between the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox on one side and those more comfortable with modernity on the other, its experience isn’t just its own.

And though anyone can attend the High Holy Days services, those who’ve paid their membership dues get to park at the temple, a perk that might have been blasphemous in the old days, but no more.

“We finally have a privilege for members,” the rabbi said. “It makes a big difference. People have joined, so they can park on site.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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New Chapters in Summer’s Tales, From Paris to New Jersey

A Purple Heart design that Roger Baker mowed
in Orange County last month is being kept up.
Photo: Chris Ramirez for The New York Times

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 9, 2007

As summer fades to black, three updates — plus a late-breaking sports report — to summer tales from this space.

Leroy Varga, alas, didn’t make it.

The 80-year-old marathon man from Dover, N.J. (Our Towns, July 12), failed in his attempt to become the oldest person to complete the grueling Paris-Brest-Paris Randonneur, in which contestants have to bicycle 750 miles through the French countryside in 90 hours.

He had figured he needed almost everything to go right to finish the trip. Instead, he ran into the Randonneur’s worst weather in memory, which inspired a newspaper headline reading: “Never as Cold Since 1970, Never as Wet Since 1950.” Cycling through 35-mile-an-hour winds, in a relentless downpour and temperatures around 50 degrees, shivering uncontrollably and weathering a bout of heart arrhythmia, he packed it in after going about 200 miles in 18 hours. As a reward, he got to pedal the 200 miles back to Paris.

It turned out he had plenty of company. About 28 percent of the cyclists who entered failed to finish, the highest rate in memory and about double that of most years. Back in New Jersey, he’s now on a much more leisurely cycling regimen, 50- or 60-mile trips instead of the 130-mile-a-day trips he made while training for the Randonneur.

Before he left for Paris, he figured this was his last shot at the Randonneur, held every four years. He says his responsibilities at home make it very hard to consider trying again. Still, sounding like a potential presidential candidate, he said he can’t imagine doing it. But if he were able to find the time to train, and if he felt as good as or better than he does now, well, who knows? “I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it’s not likely,” he said.

With the stakes much, much higher, Richard Lapointe didn’t make it either. Mr. Lapointe (Our Towns, July 15) is the mentally impaired man in Connecticut serving a life term for the 1987 rape and murder of his former wife’s grandmother. Over the years, a loyal core of supporters, saying he could not have committed the crime, have championed his innocence. Mr. Lapointe is now represented by Centurion Ministries, which has had enormous success in freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners.

Despite new testimony backing up his alibi from his ex-wife, who did not testify at his trial, a long-awaited hearing in July came to an abrupt end when Judge Stanley T. Fuger Jr. agreed to consider a prosecution motion to dismiss efforts for a new trial.

He rejected the request for a new trial in a stinging decision on Aug. 2 that said Mr. Lapointe’s petition was an abuse of the legal system that failed to document claims of constitutional errors. His supporters plan to appeal and continue the fight. But they face the hurdle common to similar cases: Absent slam-dunk DNA evidence, an argument for innocence, no matter how compelling, is not necessarily the same thing as a compelling case for constitutional errors that would merit a new trial.

Things went much better for Roger Baker, the Leonardo da Vinci of the lawn mower, whose 850,000-square-foot Purple Heart medal mowed into a field in Orange County, N.Y. (Our Towns, Aug. 5), ended up having an extended run. Usually he does his creations (Elvis, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix) and they are soon given over to the ravages of bugs, wind and growing grass. But this piece of field art was done on county land, and county crews are keeping it mowed according to his directions. They plan to keep the image well into the fall.

Meanwhile, Mr. Baker is already thinking ahead. A huge fan of Luciano Pavarotti, whose music is often playing in his studio, Mr. Baker is already poring over photos and trying out sketches in hopes of cutting a giant Pavarotti next September on the first anniversary of the tenor’s death. His ideal canvas would be Central Park. But he’s open to whatever options present themselves. “It would really be a challenge to get it right, because of who he is and what it is , but I don’t know. Hudson Valley? Modena, Italy? Anywhere it’s supposed to be, that’s where I’ll do it. I just mow the lawn. It’s what I do.”

Oh, and the lost boys of summer, the Can-Am Grays of the Can-Am League (Our Towns, July 26), finally got to go home. Despite playing a full season of just road games from late May to early September, they delighted spouses, moms and any other fans with an impressive 24-23 record for the second half of the season. But it wasn’t enough to join the North Shore Spirit, Atlantic City Surf, Nashua Pride and New Jersey Jackals in the Can-Am playoffs.

Best wishes for a few more weeks of summer to the game-but-tired Grays, and to us all.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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The Death of a Fisherman in a Place of Good Water

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 19, 2007

AMAGANSETT, N.Y.

The eulogies at Calvin Lester’s funeral were mostly about small acts, not big thoughts.

The time he and his friend, Billy Havens, ages 11 and 12, bought a 1954 Ford for $25, ripped the doors and fenders off and turned it into a dune buggy. His daughter Kelly’s remembrances of the bliss of being with her dad salvaging lobster gear after a storm off Gardiners Island.

“I just keep thinking he hated it when I cried,” his daughter’s eulogy read. “He doesn’t want us to cry over him. We have to pick up the pieces and carry on and keep fishing.”

But there were lots of tears this month when they parked Calvin Lester’s fishing dory outside the funeral home in East Hampton and buried him at the age of 54. There were tears because he died of cancer way too young, tears because he was so good at what he did — probably the best bayman of the past 30 years, someone, it was said, who could drag a scallop dredge down a driveway and have it come up full of scallops.

And there were tears because everyone knew that when they buried Calvin Lester, they buried the most powerful link to the Hamptons’ fishing past, the person most at home in the disappearing world of South Fork baymen that was recounted in “Men’s Lives,” Peter Matthiessen’s 1986 book.

Amagansett means “place of good water” in one American Indian tongue, and for generations of Lesters who have lived here, it’s been true in the most literal way.

The eulogies at Calvin Lester’s funeral were mostly about small acts, not big thoughts.

The time he and his friend, Billy Havens, ages 11 and 12, bought a 1954 Ford for $25, ripped the doors and fenders off and turned it into a dune buggy. His daughter Kelly’s remembrances of the bliss of being with her dad salvaging lobster gear after a storm off Gardiners Island.

“I just keep thinking he hated it when I cried,” his daughter’s eulogy read. “He doesn’t want us to cry over him. We have to pick up the pieces and carry on and keep fishing.”

But there were lots of tears this month when they parked Calvin Lester’s fishing dory outside the funeral home in East Hampton and buried him at the age of 54. There were tears because he died of cancer way too young, tears because he was so good at what he did — probably the best bayman of the past 30 years, someone, it was said, who could drag a scallop dredge down a driveway and have it come up full of scallops.

And there were tears because everyone knew that when they buried Calvin Lester, they buried the most powerful link to the Hamptons’ fishing past, the person most at home in the disappearing world of South Fork baymen that was recounted in “Men’s Lives,” Peter Matthiessen’s 1986 book.

Amagansett means “place of good water” in one American Indian tongue, and for generations of Lesters who have lived here, it’s been true in the most literal way.

Calvin Lester’s father, Captain Bill Lester, fished well into his 80s. When he said, “Just as long as I can crawl, I’m going down there,” he could have been reciting the family creed. The Matthiessen book told of another family patriarch, Ted Lester, Calvin’s uncle, who, even when he was near death, “still had to jump into the car every damn morning, run down and make sure that ocean was still there.”

Calvin Lester quit school at 16 to fish full time. He learned from his father and others about tides and wind, where to find weakfish, bluefish and striped bass, how to operate fyke traps, pound traps and drift gill nets, and most important, how to run a five-man crew that set the ocean haul seines that were most effective in netting striped bass, the baymen’s money fish.

This was about skill, strength, knowledge and cunning. But it was also very much about a way of life. So he became, in some ways, the last of the Bonackers, the East End natives, born of the sea. When the Lost Tribe of Accabonac was formed in 1984 to bring together natives of East Hampton, he became its president. When people looked for the consummate fisherman, someone who could catch any fish, find clams, oysters, scallops or lobsters when the season was right, that was Calvin Lester, too.

It was never an easy life, with mornings that began at 3 and seasons that bore no resemblance to the gentle rhythms of the tourist economy. And members of the tribe feel it’s a life that’s been under assault for decades with restrictions on netting, rising costs for everything from gas to land. To him and others the harshest blow came in 1990 when the state banned ocean seines to catch striped bass, which many saw as a death blow to small fishermen.

Twenty years ago there were about 150 people working as full-time baymen. Now there are perhaps 20. His older children, Danny, 34, and Kelly, 30, do it part time. His youngest son, Paul, 28, it is said, could end up the last full-time bayman standing.

“It made him a bitter person,” Kelly said. “But he didn’t sit and cry. He had bills to pay and a family to support and he did what he had to do to stay on the water. And he was very proud that he could make a living on the water no matter what.”

HE was, everyone said, a man of few words, who took care of others before he took care of himself — witness the cigarette invariably dangling from his mouth. But his work and the life he led spoke for him. So, like his father, he went to the sea to the end, bringing in fish from the pound traps the weekend before he died.

“Calvin had an extraordinary connection to nature, to the sea, to the creatures who lived in it,” said Arnold Leo, who worked with him in the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association. “He represented a strain of spiritual awareness and communal values, which we’re losing contact with every day.”

Calvin Lester, he said, was more than the embodiment of a quaint way of life that has to go because hedge fund managers need places to build houses on the beach. He was the embodiment of a set of skills, a turn of mind, a connection with nature that we lose at great cost.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Sounding the Alarm, or at Least Trying To

Indian Point nuclear power plant.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 12, 2007

BUCHANAN, N.Y.

And speaking of troubled infrastructure.

Admittedly, it’s a different category than the recent rash of collapsing bridges, exploding steam pipes and overwhelmed storm sewers.

Still, in a summer whose theme seems to be things that don’t work, a rimshot, please, for the ongoing exercise in malfunction at a place where you really would rather not see it: the Indian Point nuclear power plant.

True, this is not about running the reactors. Instead it’s the ongoing “Keystone Kops” episode about putting together a functional siren system that is now nearing another big deadline. That would be Aug. 24, when the updated $15 million system of 155 sirens is supposed to be ready to alert residents (let’s not dwell on what they would be alerted to) of Westchester, Rockland, Orange and Putnam Counties who are within 10 miles of the plant on the Hudson River.

The new system was initially due by Jan. 30, but Entergy Nuclear, which owns the plant, wasn’t ready and was granted an extension by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission until April 15.

Whoops! On April 12, 31 of what were then 150 new sirens failed to sound during a test. That led to a $130,000 fine.

And now? The company said 96 percent of the sirens worked properly in its most recent test. On the other hand, it’s not a great sign that with two weeks to go, the company and regulators are arguing about just how loud the sirens have to be.

Siren-Gate dates to 2005, when provisions inserted by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton into the federal Energy Policy Act required backup battery power for the sirens at Indian Point, which were installed when the plant was built in the mid-1970s.

The plans called for replacing the 156 old sirens, which had mechanical rotating horns and were activated by radio signals, with new units featuring activating systems that can be triggered by cellphone, microwave radio or Internet-based signals.

But company officials say numerous glitches have prevented the system from operating properly. And public officials say the project has become a nightmare, sucking up time, energy and resources, with the outcome still uncertain.

“This has consumed so much time for so long — half my staff on a daily basis in one way or another,” said Tony Sutton, the commissioner of emergency services in Westchester County. “And when we’re done, what will we have? An outdoor siren system born in the cold war.”

Well, one hopes it will be a better siren system, but still, the episode does raise questions.

The first, as enunciated more than once by the county executive, Andrew J. Spano, is if Entergy has so much trouble getting the sirens to work, what does it say about its ability to run, say, a nuclear plant?

Second, as Mr. Sutton puts it, is this is the level of technology we should expect now? The sirens, it turns out, are meant to be heard outside, not inside. This might have made sense three decades ago, when most people didn’t have air-conditioning and left the windows open, and shopped on Main Street instead of at a bunkerlike mall. Might not a system with text messages, e-mail links, chips that turn on television sets — something in tune with modern technology — make a bit more sense today?

AN Entergy spokesman, Jim Steets, said the company’s expertise was in running nuclear plants not siren technology. He said that the idea that the siren problems speak to the overall operations of the plant was something of a cheap shot. Still, he says, “I’ll admit that we put ourselves in a position that enabled them to say it.”

And both sides know that the siren issue isn’t really a siren issue. There’s not much margin of error on many large projects the public depends on — ask the drivers who use the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis. But there surely isn’t much on a nuclear plant at the edge of the most densely populated part of the country, which periodically has to explain things like leaks, however minuscule, of tritium and strontium 90.

The sirens, presumably, will work sooner or later. The real battle, just beginning, is the epic one over renewing Indian Point’s license to produce electricity until 2035, a matter that probably won’t be decided for three years.

And on that one, the issue is about a lot more than the sirens. It’s about why the sirens are needed, whether to renew the license for a plant that almost certainly could never be built at Indian Point today, and whether there’s any real alternative to the power it provides.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Two Crimes So Dark, Blurring the Images of Two Towns So Different

A memorial to the three people killed at a Newark playground.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 9, 2007

NEWARK

Instead of a memorial of bouquets and flowers on a landscaped suburban lawn, there are a dozen candles and as many balloons on the aluminum bleachers by the chain-link fence on an elementary school playground.

Instead of the hand-painted yard signs for flowers and sweet corn, there are the billboards offering up to $500 in a program to buy back guns and $2,000 for Crimestoppers tips.

Instead of stunned friends and neighbors who peer at the seared and boarded-up colonial on Sorghum Mill Drive as if contemplating an unknown world, there’s a stream of weary neighborhood folks and friends who venture down the alley to the playground where three young people were killed and a fourth was shot and left for dead on Saturday night. Three of the victims, including the survivor, were college students; the fourth was to begin classes this fall.

“We didn’t know them, but we’re just here to show some love,” said Ken Harris, a 20-year-old college student from the area, who stopped by the playground behind the Mount Vernon School here on Tuesday with another student, John Cavness. “It’s crazy. Young people doing this kind of thing to each other. We’re just here to show respect.”

There aren’t many places more different than the quiet suburban street in Connecticut where three members of the Petit family were murdered last month in a brutal home invasion and the mean streets of New Jersey’s largest city where four young people were shot execution-style on Saturday night.

But in an awful convergence, you could blur the two images and see almost exactly the same thing — good people who didn’t deserve to die, violence hard to comprehend, crimes so dark they took your breath away.

All murder is awful, but, in truth, not all murders are created equal. So in a town where violent death, tragically, is part of the backdrop of civic life, 17 officials led by Mayor Cory A. Booker showed up for a midday news conference on Wednesday, to speak about yet another murder.

The cameras were not there for the stated reason for the gathering — the arrest of Christopher Alexander, 21, who the police say shot and killed Quintez Waller, 23, on Sunday morning in what they described as a drug-related killing.

It was the 60th murder in Newark this year.

What makes some crimes go from horrors to symbols too glaring to ignore is not a simple matter.

In part, without doubt, it has something to do with the victims, but that’s not entirely simple, either. The Petits, who stood out as a successful and beloved family in the comfortable, largely white town of Cheshire, seemed utterly removed from the standard trajectory of violent crime.

But then the four young people shot in Newark stood out, too — students from good families who had no record of involvement in crime but who still couldn’t escape the violence around them.

In part, it’s a reflection of the extraordinary brutality of the crimes. Regardless of race or socioeconomics, there hasn’t been a crime in Connecticut in decades as brutal as the rape, kidnapping, murder and arson that played out on Sorghum Mill Drive. For all Newark’s history of crime, the execution-style shooting of four young people, in a largely middle-class enclave, left people reeling.

JOHN McCLAIN, whose grandniece, Iofemi Hightower, was one of the students killed, has been working as a Newark police chaplain for 40 years. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “This is like back in the days of Al Capone. This is what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan, not in an American city.”

And both crimes resonated so much because they seemed to carry a message. And that’s where the comparison breaks down.

The extraordinary savagery of the attack on the Petits led to a run on locks and security gear, not just in Cheshire, but far beyond. It was, people said, the most chilling reminder that no place is entirely safe from violent crime. In fact, it’s a worthy reminder. Just check out how common home invasions are on Long Island.

But no one, no matter how comfortable, has ever been given a pass from random malice. Being safety-conscious is always a good thing, but it’s not as if Cheshire and places like it are beset by widespread violent crime. What happened there is more a reflection of sickening, random evil than of something people should reasonably fear.

In Newark, the lesson is far more immediate, which is why Mr. Booker, who has staked his career on curbing violent crime here, has the look of a stricken man. Unlike in Cheshire, violent crime really is a daily, inescapable fact of life in Newark and in many other cities as well. Newark can talk about a renaissance all it wants, but the sad truth is the violence that wiped out three promising young lives on Saturday night, if not contained, will kill the city, too.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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With Pasture as His Canvas, an Artist Turns a Purple Heart Green

If Roger Baker mows it, they will come to see it, or at least fly by for a better view;
he turned this Hamptonburgh, N.Y., park into a Purple Heart.

Photo by Chris Ramirez for The New York Times

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 5, 2007

HAMPTONBURGH, N.Y.

First came a chance encounter at the antique store he and his wife run in Ellenville, 90 miles north of New York City, then a trip to the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor in nearby Vails Gate, and along the way an idea he could not get out of his head.

So, almost inevitably, there was Roger Baker prowling around an immense, sweltering field of grass and clover here on Thursday in work boots, blue jeans, green plaid shirt and engineers cap, taking swigs from the jug of Leisure Time spring water and contemplating his latest adventure in field carving, lawn mower art and large-form Americana.

By Friday, it was pretty much done, an 850,000-square-foot Purple Heart medal, more than 1,000 feet long, each detail precise down to the seven 36-foot laurel leaves on each side of the three gold stars above the portrait of George Washington.

“Hi,” he said when he made his pitch to Orange County officials in June. “I’m Roger, and I mow the lawn.”

On one level, that’s pretty much it, though, even including the space aliens who carve mazes in Kansas wheat fields, he may be the greatest lawn mower who’s ever lived. On other levels, well, pick your own job description for a guy who carves titanic portraits, most of them visible just from the air, into summer fields, which within days give way to grass, bugs, dust, butterflies and nature’s heedless currents.

Beginning in 2000, Mr. Baker, now 53, has created field portraits ranging in size from 500,000 square feet to more than a million: the Statue of Liberty, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix. When last seen in these pages, he was contemplating his next act after a portrait of the late custom motorcycle builder, Larry Desmedt, known as Indian Larry.

His instincts this year were pulling him sax-ward — either John Coltrane or Boots Randolph (a personal favorite) — until May, when he met Bill Bacon, an official with the Military Order of the Purple Heart, who was passing through Ellenville. Mr. Bacon was planning events in conjunction with the 75th anniversary of the Purple Heart medal.

The more they talked, the more the idea of a giant Purple Heart took hold. Mr. Baker visited the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, where the director, Anita Pidala, was instantly intrigued. He made a drawing, using as his model the Purple Heart of Art Livesey, 88, of Middletown, N.Y, who was a marine who fought on Iwo Jima in World War II.

And when he and Ms. Pidala found the site 16 miles from the Purple Heart Hall of Honor, off State Road 416, at the edge of Thomas Bull Memorial Park, he had to catch his breath: It was a gorgeous sloping field, thick grasses, even gentle strains of purple clover. “I thought,” he said, “that’s one of the nicest fields I’ve ever seen.”

And so, after getting permission from the county, which owns the park, he began work a week ago, walking the field with his Craftsman Hi-Wheel gas-powered push mower.

He did the detail himself, like the 260-foot-long portrait of Washington, while county workers on brushhogs did much of the large-scale mowing. He gets different colors and shades by changing the height of the blade. The piece will be unveiled today at an 11 a.m. ceremony.

EACH piece is different. The biggest new element in this one is that because of the slope of the land you can see it from the ground — “not perfect — it will look like a bad haircut — but it gives you a sense, and then I know from the air it will be something.”

Mr. Baker, a sculptor, artist, cartoonist and whatever comes his way, has no cellphone and no computer. He’s not political and he won’t make any money from the project. He did it because in a visceral way it hit him like a sudden burst of wind — his attempt, at once large and small, to make sense of and to honor the sacrifice people make in battle.

He said when he began, he looked, as usual, for reasons not to do this one. How about, he was asked hypothetically, the notion that many people won’t be able to think of it apart from the passions surrounding the war in Iraq?

“My thought processes never went there,” he said. “Not one time did that enter my mind. I look for things — aesthetic, personal, artistic, technical — that draw me. What I’m concerned with is my craft and doing this as if it’s the last time I’ll ever have a chance to.”

One thing he loved about the Indian Larry project, he said, was how Mr. Desmedt’s friends and family came to the site, and then walked it as if touching his spirit in the furrowed fields.

Mr. Baker hopes that happens even more this time — no simple answers or message, just a chance for people to silently traverse a country field to pay tribute, to give thanks, to contemplate heroism, to find peace.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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‘In Cold Blood,’ Re-enacted in Our Time

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 2, 2007

CHESHIRE, Conn.

Shortly after noon yesterday, the Cheshire United Methodist Church was engulfed in what seemed like a disconcerting occurrence: normalcy.

Vacation Bible School was getting out. In the middle of an excited gaggle of children and moms — in tan shorts, a knit shirt and rainbow visor — was the church minister, the Rev. Stephen Volpe.

For the past week, Mr. Volpe has been at the center of a very different kind of scene, the extraordinary outpouring of grief and shock that followed the horrific break-in July 23 that left three of his parishioners dead.

So as he tried to balance the stirrings of new life with the horror of the past week, Mr. Volpe did his best to make sense of the way the crime had reverberated across Connecticut and far beyond, a reaction that lawyers say has probably exceeded any crime in the state in decades.

Part of it was the stunning brutality of the crimes, which left two career criminals facing capital murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, burglary, arson and other charges. The attack killed Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters Haley, 17, and Michaela, 11, and left the family’s father, Dr. William Petit Jr., badly beaten. Much of the reaction reflected the degree to which the Petits were loved and admired.

But beyond that, Father Volpe said simply, “I guess a lot of it’s about the kind of place Cheshire is perceived as being.”

Which is to say a place where the local hardware store, R. W. Hines Ace Hardware, dates back to 1910 and every transaction seems more a colloquy than a mere sale. A place not in a city, not in a faceless hodgepodge of fancy new subdivisions and McMansions but in a sliver of New England with deep roots in old soil.

As the dismal refrain often goes, this is not the kind of place where this is supposed to happen. What place is? But what resonated with such force was the utterly random nature of crime and locale, as if it should have some logic, some lesson, something that makes it fit into some cautionary narrative, but instead is a blank slate of random, senseless malice.

So people run out to get gun permits at the police station (10 the other day, compared with an average of 2 a week). They hurry over to R. W. Hines in search of new locks and bolts. Jay Markella, a lieutenant with the Cheshire Police Department, said even he’s changed his behavior. He had bought a tent for his children to use in the backyard. Now, maybe not. He used to be casual about locking his doors. No more. “That’s the thing about this,” he said. “Usually, there’s something you can point to. Someone was having an affair. It had to do with drugs. It was in the inner city. You can look at it and say, that’s not me. This time you can’t.”

Lawmakers have gone into overdrive reviewing parole and sentencing procedures. No doubt there’s much to learn. One glaring problem, lawmakers say, is the routine failure to follow a law requiring that sentencing transcripts are available to parole officials.

But the state is already at the upper reaches of prison capacity, 19,000 in a system meant for 17,000, said State Representative Michael P. Lawlor. Finding the potential time bombs, he said, can be like finding a needle in a haystack.

SO the most compelling commentary on the case may be one that’s not about it at all. It’s Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” with its account of a nightmare from another time, the 1959 murders of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kan. In it, two parolees invaded the Clutter home while four people slept and then terrorized and killed them. That was about a prominent and beloved farming family in the heartland. This one, about a prominent and beloved doctor’s family in New England, is like a cautionary retelling of the same horrid meditation on evil, chance and fate.

To get to the Petits’ house on Sorghum Mill Drive from the main part of town, you turn onto Higgins Road, with its hand-painted signs reading “Flowers for Sale” and “Sweet Corn.” You drive through a neighborhood that’s neat, green and orderly until you come to the house that’s incongruously battered, smoke stained and boarded up. There are still welcome signs in the flower bed and on the garage. The mailbox, surrounded by black-eyed Susans, is decorated with pictures of bird feeders. There’s a white plastic chair in the shade, as if waiting for someone to take in the early evening air.

In the makeshift memorial of dozens of bouquets is a single red rose enclosed in plastic. Wrapped inside is a piece of paper. It reads, “May God watch over all of you and bless your beautiful souls.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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My House, My Rules. Or So One Might Think.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 29, 2007

It began with a door that had the wrong paint color.

That was in 1993, the first time Margaret and Haim Bar-Akiva ran afoul of the Twin Rivers Homeowners Association, which oversees the community of about 10,000 people where they live in East Windsor Township, N.J.

Along the way was another dispute over bars on a storm door, which, Mrs. Bar-Akiva said, led the association to spend $100,000 in legal fees. But that’s another story.

It all culminated, sort of, in a ruling on Thursday by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which went as far as any court has gone in defining the rights of the ever-growing number of people who live in private communities regulated by homeowners’ associations — even if it left an awful lot up in the air.

We may not all end up soaking up the sun like the elder Seinfelds did at Del Boca Vista, and we may not stop in Twin Rivers, a square mile of condominium duplexes, town houses, single-family homes, apartments and commercial buildings in central New Jersey. But one of the immutable long-term trends in American life seems to be that more and more of us at some point will live in the Neverland of places that are not quite public, but not entirely private either, where the rights you might expect in your own home or even at the mall are not necessarily guaranteed.

So, in New Jersey, about 1.3 million residents, nearly 40 percent of all private homeowners, live in communities where homeowners’ associations set and enforce the rules. Nationally, it’s more than 50 million people.

This, as many have come to know, can put one in an inscrutable world where maybe you can put out a yard sign for a favored candidate, distribute leaflets and knock on doors, or maybe you can’t. Maybe you can fly a flag, or maybe not. There can be restrictions on fences and paint colors, shutters and lawn art. Maybe you can drive a pickup truck or motorcycle, maybe it’s against the rules.

This is not an entirely new world, but it’s still a vexing one, where the rules are still being sorted out and where many homeowners feel the field is tilted in one direction: associations with a phalanx of lawyers, the dues of members and the lobbying clout of the powerful Community Associations Institute, a national trade group, on the one hand, individual homeowners on the other.

“Boards have all the powers of mini-governments but none of the corresponding accountability that goes with it,” Mrs. Bar-Akiva said. “They can fine you, assess taxes in the form of maintenance fees, put a lien on your house, but there’s nothing that balances those powers on the side of homeowners.”

Which is why the New Jersey case was viewed as so important. Fought over fairly small issues — an ordinance that originally allowed only one political sign in a flower bed or a window, use of the community room, access to the association’s monthly newsletter — it was followed closely nationally as the most concerted challenge to the notion that communities run by homeowners’ associations should be seen as businesses largely exempt from constitutional protections on issues like free speech.

After all, Twin Rivers feels like a town with its multimillion dollar budget, more than 20 employees, parks and swimming pools, and services that include lawn maintenance, snow removal and street lighting.

Indeed, the earth seemed to move last year when a New Jersey appeals court ruled that homeowners did not give up their constitutional rights when they moved into a privately governed community. And it held that in terms of free speech, board members were “constitutional actors,” not representatives of an exempt private enterprise.

But industry representatives said that was too sweeping and imposed quasigovernmental standards on private enterprises. The State Supreme Court largely agreed, saying that residents of the communities must accept limits on their free speech rights and that private developments, no matter how ambitious or powerful, were not the same as towns. Not that anything definitive was settled. The court threw a bone in the other direction, saying homeowners might have valid claims against “unreasonable” restrictions of their rights to free speech.

Which means, for the most part, that the issues don’t go away. They become grist for state legislatures, like a proposed national code for homeowners’ associations being considered by many states, including New Jersey. Or else they play out as narrow legal spats that have made this the hottest new area in property law litigation.

The industry representatives say people are overwhelmingly satisfied with their experiences in private communities, and, after all, they can choose where they live.

But here’s the catch. Increasingly, there isn’t an option. Many municipalities now require new developments to have homeowners’ associations. If you want to retire to many communities, there’s often no option other than ones run by homeowners’ associations.

Once rare blooms, places like Twin Rivers are becoming, if not quite the new normal, a new normal. Governments and courts are only now figuring out just what that new normal should be.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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There’s Joy for Ballplayers With No Home

For the Can-Am Grays, a minor-league team, all the games are away games.
Their team bus, the one constant in their season, is the closest thing to a home.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 26, 2007

LITTLE FALLS, N.J.

Dan Shwam has been all over North America on baseball’s lower rungs in his 14 years as a minor league manager with the Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks, Mohawk Valley Landsharks, Newburgh Night Hawks, Elmira Pioneers, Catskill Cougars, Evansville Otters, Jackson Senators and Laredo Broncos.

Of course, you can’t have the cushy jobs all the time. Hence his current berth with the Can-Am Grays, the lost boys of minor league baseball. The Grays, after all, have no home, no stadium, no mascot, no sponsors and no fans, other than an occasional mom or girlfriend willing to travel. For a while they had the Toyota 4Runner owned by the hitting coach, Larry Van Allen, but it was totaled when he hit a moose on the way to a June game in Canada.

And yet, Mr. Shwam, 48, seems not at all unhappy with his lot with the Grays, who from late May to early September live in hotel rooms and a bus full of baseball DVDs, playing road games from Atlantic City to Quebec. So, if we could interrupt the sports chatter about dog fighting, fixed basketball games and baseball pharmacology, here’s a second salute (after Sunday’s column on Joel Bennett of the New Jersey Jackals) to baseball where the paychecks are small, the dreams are big, the grass is real and life seems that way, too.

The Grays are not baseball’s first homeless team. In fact, the Can-Am League, whose teams are not affiliated with any from the major league, and its immediate predecessors have had three. The Aces were formed in 2004 when the Allentown Ambassadors went bankrupt, taking their name because they were able to get uniforms from the equally defunct Alexandria Aces of Louisiana (who were resurrected in 2006). Two years ago, when the Bangor Lumberjacks bailed out just before the season started, they became the Grays (wearing the Aces’ old gray pants).

And this year’s version of the Grays (the league splurged on new gray pants) was born when the league had an odd number of teams and needed another to even out the schedule.

“It’s not something you want to do all the time,” said Miles Wolff, the league commissioner. “These guys definitely have it rougher than the other teams, but it still beats working for a living.”

It can definitely get lonely. Willie James, this year’s original shortstop, missed his family so much that he packed up and went home in mid-July. Mr. Shwam’s wife, a baseball lifer, visited briefly from Salt Lake City, where she and Mr. Shwam live, and decided that even by the standards of minor league baseball, being in a different hotel room every fourth day was too depressing. She left, too.

Mr. Wolff, who owns the Quebec Capitales, said he encouraged some of his fans to root for the Grays when they played there. Still, Everett Stull, a Grays pitcher and former major leaguer with Montreal, Atlanta and Milwaukee, said having no field to come home to went counter to the DNA of sports. “You look forward to playing at home, saying, ‘We’re going to protect this house,’ ” he said. “Well, our house is the bus.”

Still, he said, “baseball is baseball,” and the team’s players have learned to stay positive and stick by one another. And being homeless is not all bad. Since they’re always on the road, they get the $18 meal money every day, unlike players for the other teams, who get it only when they travel. There are no expenses for a car or rent for the season. And, at the moment, they’re in the middle of their nearest thing to a homestand, three series in a row against the Jackals and the nearby Sussex Skyhawks, which means 11 nights in a row at the Ramada Inn on Route 10 in East Hanover. (They also get to bat last this series, one way to balance things out a little).

AND life has its surprises. When they showed up at the Jackals’ Yogi Berra Stadium here on Tuesday, the Grays even had fans, two of them, in the persons of Jared Siegel and Michael Goldin, 17-year-old high school seniors from Cedar Grove. The teenagers said they used to root for whomever the Jackals were playing, and got such friendly receptions from the Grays players that they committed. So they sat by the Grays dugout, in their homemade gray Grays T-shirts, waving homemade signs and yelling out encouragement to the catcher J. B Tucker, the outfielders Sean Gamble and Chad Gabriel, the feisty second baseman Josh Colafemina.

The game seesawed back and forth into extra innings, the tension building (and the crowd dwindling), until the new shortstop, Chuck Jeroloman, hit a game-ending single for a 5-4 win in the 12th inning. The Grays mobbed him at home plate, savored their postgame feast of whatever was left over from the concession stands and got back to the Ramada Inn at 12:30 a.m. They would be back on the bus to the stadium at 3 the next afternoon, but for a night — with their second-half standings at 5-3, tied for third place, and both fans thrilled — all was well in Grays Nation.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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A Phillie (Briefly), and Now a Jackal, but at Age 37, Still a Boy of Summer

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 22, 2007
********************

LITTLE FALLS, N.J.

A lot has happened to Joel Bennett since he was chosen by the Boston Red Sox in the 21st round of the 1991 baseball draft.

There were the brief stops in the bigs in 1998 and 1999 with the Orioles and Phillies. Could they have been longer? Doesn’t matter now.

There was the Arizona Fall League in 1994, where he played on the same team as Michael Jordan (on Sundays, Mr. Jordan rented out a gym so they could all play basketball); the 221 Carolina League strikeouts in 1993, behind only Randy Johnson and José Rijo in all of organized baseball; his Kevin Costner moment in the New Jersey Jackals’ miracle championship in 2004.

At 37, Joel Bennett is not Roger Clemens. In the end, he’s just a phys ed teacher from outside Binghamton, N.Y., who pitched 19 innings in the majors, with a 2-1 record and an 8.53 earned run average.

Still, if (big if) this turns out to be his last season in baseball, how many players have had a nicer run than Mr. Bennett, a reminder that, at least in the minor leagues, there’s still some truth left in those dappled “Field of Dreams” images.

“He said last year was the last one, and he said it the year before that, but he starts doing his version of spring training with the high school kids, and then here he is,” his wife, Jennifer, said as she watched the Jackals beat the Can-Am Grays, 12-5, on Thursday night. “It’s in his blood.”

It’s a long way from the majors to Yogi Berra Stadium at Montclair State University, where the Jackals play in the Can-Am League, which used to be the Northern League and the Northeast League. It’s an independent league, so the players tend to be former college athletes who didn’t get drafted or veterans hoping to get a second or third or fourth look in someone’s minor league system. Grabowsky Development advertises on the foul poles; Catholic Cemeteries, Archdiocese of Newark, on the outfield wall. A couple of thousand fans is a nice crowd. No one is getting rich.

But then Mr. Bennett’s sons, Jonah, 9, and Jesse, 7, come to all the home games as the Jackals’ ball boys. He gets to travel to Canada to play against the Quebec Capitales, where the fans spend the game singing in French. His family — the boys, his wife and their daughter, Jaylen, 6 — come along for the more desirable road trips, like the one this weekend against the Brockton Rox in Brockton, Mass., where they went whale watching last year. He’s lost a little on his fastball, which seldom got to 90 m.p.h. anyway, but he was always a curveball pitcher and can still strike people out. And in a league where players tend not to last more than a year or two, he’s a venerable star sought out for autographs.

He’s seen minor-league friends — Tim Wakefield, David Eckstein, Nomar Garciaparra — end up rich and famous. Like most of us in whatever we do, he shakes his head at some he saw in the minors who made it big but didn’t seem any better than he was. If he got to pitch more with the Phillies, where his appearances were few because Curt Schilling started every fifth day, who knows? But Mr. Bennett, who takes his Christianity seriously, just shrugs.

“Of course, it gets to you at the time,” he said. “You go from being in the big leagues to no one being interested in you. But I think it was a reward for work done well, and the Lord wanted me to have that pedestal to stand on for my life around kids now. You try to figure it out, but like my wife says, the one thing you know about baseball is that you never know.”

When he caught on with the Jackals in 2001, it must have seemed like a last shot, but six years later, an eternity in the minors, he’s still there. His greatest moment came in 2004, in the league championships against the North Shore Spirit of Lynn, Mass.

The Jackals lost the first two games of a five-game series. School, the real world, was starting back home. He had pitched Game 2. He figured the season and maybe his career was over, said his goodbyes.

But the Jackals won Games 3 and 4, and his manager begged him to come back to pitch Game 5. He said he couldn’t because it was the first day of classes, but he finally got permission from his principal.

He and his wife got up at dawn on a Monday and drove the six hours from Binghamton to Lynn, and he pitched seven innings on three days’ rest. The Jackals won 5-3.

“When you’re playing for the championship, it’s the best feeling in the world, no matter where you are,” he said back then.

“I don’t care if I’m in the major leagues, Triple A, Double A or Single A or independent ball. Every championship is a special feeling.”

Then they drove through the night, got home at 5:30 in the morning, and he left for school an hour later.

So some things don’t change. Box seat: $9.75. Hot dog: $2. Taking that championship from the North Shore Spirit: priceless.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Hardy Trail and Its Fans Age Together

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 19, 2007
===================

HARRIMAN STATE PARK, N.Y.

As a newlywed, married two weeks ago, Paul Dodson may have been skating on somewhat thin ice by leaving his bride behind so he could attend the conference of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the 80-year-old group that supports America’s most famous hiking trail.

But then, two months after he had his left knee replaced a few years back, he was out hiking mountains in New Zealand, which says something about Mr. Dodson, 70, and about the demographic that turned out over the past week at Ramapo College in Mahwah, N.J., for the 36th biennial conference of the conservancy (it used to be called the Appalachian Trail Conference).

Completed in 1937, maintained by hardy volunteers and rendered fleetingly trendy by Bill Bryson’s 1998 book, “A Walk in the Woods,” the A.T. is one of the true wonders of American life, even if no one really knows how long it is (the conservancy now puts it at 2,175 miles).

But if the image that comes up is of footloose granola-heads badly in need of a shower trekking from Georgia to Maine, the reality this week turned out to be another snapshot of the graying of America. The biggest age group at the conference was 60 to 69. The entertainment was the venerable folk-rock duo Aztec Two-Step and (yikes!) 1910 Fruitgum Company, and, in addition to the glories of the trail, the frailties of the flesh was a common theme.

“Old men, old boats and old cars are a pain,” muttered Glen Pyles, 74, after a mild tumble during a 5.5-mile hike Monday. He’s done 875 miles of the trail but figures doing the whole thing is probably out of reach.

Attendance was 855 people, down a bit from recent years, which organizers ruefully attributed to anti-New Jersey prejudice. Apparently many hikers think the A.T. in New Jersey wraps around the New Jersey Turnpike.

At the conference, held every two years, the faithful attended sessions on nature and history. But most sessions, held all day and into the evenings, had to do with the varieties of the trail experience (Hammock Hiking, What’s New in Tents, What to Do if Lost in the Woods, Beginning G.P.S. Usage) or staying healthy (Orthopedic Injuries on the Trail; Care of the Feet, Infections and Other Medical Problems on the Trail).

And mostly they hiked — a mile to 20 miles. The group that included Mr. Dodson and Mr. Pyles on Monday did Section 11 of the trail in New York, a lovely slice of Harriman State Park, about 15 miles from Mahwah, filled with abandoned iron mines, which date back to the 1730s.

They scaled Fingerboard Mountain, passed by the old Greenwood Mine, navigated the Lemon Squeezer — a narrow passage between mammoth chunks of rock — passed by Island Pond, reached the summit of Green Pond Mountain, turned onto Old Arden Road, which once connected the estate of the Harriman family to the town of Tuxedo, and ended at the Elk Pen parking area near the place where the Harrimans had unsuccessfully tried to establish an elk herd.

If you didn’t bring enough to eat, there were plenty of wild blueberries. There are many, many worse ways to spend a day. Many of the hikers are part of the 5,500 volunteers who essentially maintain the trail, which meanders through 14 states. Whether a generation raised on Xboxes and video games will do the same thing is a question that people are beginning to wonder about.

LEST it seem that only those with an AARP card hike, the highlight of the day was running into the through-hikers headed toward Maine, working on finishing all 2,175 miles.

First came Aaron Faust, a 25-year-old graduate student at Bard College, then Sharon Petersen, a quilter from Vermont, who is a 57-year-old grandmother of two. Then came a middle-aged couple barreling through as if they had a train to catch, and finally three hikers in their 20s: an Iraq war veteran, a guy lugging his guitar and a woman whose trail name was Singe.

These days, they do the trail with iPods and cellphones, so even the A.T. isn’t the ultimate wilderness experience. Still, only about a quarter of those who start finish. Mr. Faust said the hiking itself was the easy part. “You miss your friends, you miss your family, you overthink every aspect of everything,” he said. “I’ve been out here a quarter of a year, and it takes its toll.”

Mrs. Petersen said it’s still a cruel world on the trail. “We women don’t even lose weight out here,” she said. “You eat so much junk food; there are 240 calories in all those energy bars. You eat one and you’re hungry again in a half hour.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Supporters See Innocent Man Serving Life

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 15, 2007
==================

WEST HARTFORD, Conn.

He is short, clumsy and mentally impaired, with thick glasses and hearing aids in both ears, given to telling the same stale jokes over and over. His nickname was Mr. Magoo. He once was a dishwasher. He’s now a convict serving a life term for rape and murder.

They are people who befriended him without knowing him: advocates for the disabled, lawyers, writers, a detective, nurses, business people, psychologists, teachers, perhaps 100 in all at different times, a core group of perhaps 25. For years, many of them met every other Wednesday at the Burger King in Wethersfield near here to plot strategy.

They have long since abandoned the Burger King. Some of them have died. But 15 years later, the Friends of Richard Lapointe have not abandoned Mr. Lapointe, who was convicted of crimes they say he could not have committed.

After years of legal setbacks, Mr. Lapointe has a hearing beginning Monday in Superior Court in the Tolland Judicial District seeking a new trial on grounds of ineffective counsel and suppressed evidence. Two remarkable stories will play out. The first is an uphill legal one that reflects the enormous hurdles facing any convict lacking the game-over DNA evidence that has freed more than 200 inmates in recent years. The second is a human one, how the Friends of Richard Lapointe have kept the faith all these years, sticking by a humble dishwasher like family when he was poised to disappear forever.

“These are people responding with absolutely pure hearts, who have put their money where their mouth is, their time where their mouth is, for someone they didn’t even know,” said Kate Germond, a lawyer with Centurion Ministries, which has had enormous success in freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners and is defending Mr. Lapointe. “They’re heroes. They really are.”

The case began on March 8, 1987, when Bernice Martin, 88, of Manchester, was raped, stabbed 11 times and strangled, and her apartment set on fire. She was the grandmother of Mr. Lapointe’s wife and someone with whom he regularly watched Red Sox and Celtics games.

For two years, the case went unsolved. On July 4, 1989, Mr. Lapointe, then 43, was preparing for a picnic with his wife and 9-year-old son. The police called and asked him to come down to talk about the case. He’d be back in time for the picnic, they said. When he arrived he was confronted with a bewildering display of exhibits and evidence, much of it bogus, purporting to prove he was the killer.

He was interrogated for nine hours, until 1:30 in the morning. No recording was made. During that time he signed three inconsistent confessions. He later said he signed them so he could go to the bathroom or leave. The first said he was responsible for the death but it was an accident, and his mind went blank. The second said if the evidence showed he did it, he did it, but “I don’t remember being there.” The third had details of the crime, some consistent with known facts, some not. At a 1992 trial, he was found guilty of capital felony murder and eight other charges. That should have been the end of it.

But one of those attending the trial was Robert Perske, a writer with a special interest in cases involving people with mental disabilities. He watched in horror, convinced that Mr. Lapointe was being railroaded on the basis of coerced confessions. He sent an alert to some friends, who attended the trial, too. When it ended, they raised money for appeals, visited Mr. Lapointe in prison, hired lawyers, generated publicity, organized a forum on wrongful convictions.

They say the case is preposterous, that Mr. Lapointe, a victim of numerous mental and physical infirmities, was not capable of such conduct. They say to commit a crime of astounding brutality, Mr. Lapointe, who had no history of violence of any kind, would have decided to sneak out in a 45-minute interval while his wife and son were upstairs. He would have taken a short walk to Mrs. Martin’s apartment, raped her, stabbed her, strangled her with a ligature that required far more dexterity than he had ever shown and set the place on fire.

And then, with no one seeing him come or go, he would have returned home, with no wounds, no blood, no smell of smoke, in time to calmly watch a National Geographic special with his family.

“He didn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it,” said Irv Hargrave, a retired business executive who is one of the supporters.

Supporters of Richard Lapointe
at one of their frequent meetings.
***************

The jury disagreed. Michael O’Hare, the assistant state attorney supervising the case, said the confessions, a semen sample found at the crime scene consistent with Mr. Lapointe’s blood type and statements he made the night of the murder (which the state contends reflected knowledge of the crime not available at the time) provided ample evidence, and that Mr. Lapointe received excellent counsel. Because of the heat from the fire, no identifiable DNA was recovered.

“I’m sure they’re well-meaning,” he said of Mr. Lapointe’s supporters. “But I don’t believe their beliefs are supported by the evidence, which shows he is guilty and was properly convicted.”

The legal obstacles facing his primary lawyer, Paul Casteleiro, in seeking a new trial are daunting. His supporters could be excused if the whole thing is feeling Sisyphean or worse.

It’s been a long, long road without much to show for it, but some of them met this week to discuss the case and plan what they’ll do if he’s released. Mr. Lapointe still talks about the lobster dinner he ate once at Red Lobster. They’d like to get him a second one.

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For an Old Hand at Cycling, Just Another 750-Mile Ride

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 12, 2007

DOVER, N.J.

Many years ago, LeRoy Varga took a bike ride.

Using an old, gray, single-gear bike given to him by a neighbor who had gone off to join the Army, he left his home here in northern New Jersey and headed off one morning for a summer place his aunt and uncle ran in the Catskills.

He left at dawn. He got there before sundown. It was about 125 miles away. He was 12 years old.

“I don’t know,” he says, thinking back. “It was just something like Mount Everest. It was there, and you felt you had to do it.”

In August, Mr. Varga will take another bike ride. It’s known as the Paris-Brest-Paris Randonneur, and it begins outside Versailles, then winds through the French countryside to the port city of Brest and back to Paris. It covers 750 miles. It has to be completed in 90 hours. He’s 80 years old.

It’s hard to be sure what to make of Mr. Varga, a retired mechanical engineer with three children and five grandchildren, who lives in the same house, full of ceramic busts of family members made years ago by his mother, that he and his wife have lived in since 1963.

Uncanny bionic combination of good genes and epic willpower, or slightly scary example of a new breed of hyper-fit seniors you see frequenting health clubs with their ripped abs and weight-lifting belts?

As he sat in his un-air-conditioned home on Monday, seemingly oblivious to the killer heat, you thought it had to be some of both.

Mr. Varga has a full head of hair the color of steel wool, and a wiry frame seemingly devoid of body fat. He was wearing a white T-shirt, burgundy Bermuda shorts, black socks, black shoes. He talked in a calm, reedy voice about his attempt to become the oldest man to complete the Paris-Brest-Paris Randonneur like someone who had taken an engineer’s slide rule to the whole thing and figured it was worth a shot.

He did, in fact, complete the event, held every four years, in 1987, 1991 and 1995. He tried in 2003 but didn’t make it, though he’s not sure how much was mechanical failure on the part of the bike and how much was the frailty of flesh.

“I don’t know if it’s stupidity or something else that’s driving me,” he said, sounding as if it didn’t much matter. “I give myself a 50-50 chance of completing it. But I’m going there with the idea I’ve done it before, and I can do it again, and that either way, this is my last hurrah. I wouldn’t consider it after this.”

Mr. Varga had long since stopped riding bicycles when he read Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper’s first book on aerobics about 40 years ago. Mr. Varga tends to do things whole-hog, be it his 25 years as a scoutmaster, or the marathon income-tax counseling he still does as a volunteer. So he decided to get serious about aerobics.

But running was tough on his knees, so he dusted off a three-gear bike that had belonged to one of his two sons and tried that. Soon, with better bicycles, he took to riding to work, taking longer and longer trips, joining the Morris Area Freewheelers bicycle club.

He and two friends biked across the country 15 years ago. Now, when he needs to stay in top condition in the winter (and when his wife is not home), he rigs up a stationary bike, turns off all the heat in the house and pedals for hours and hours on end. To stay in shape, he does a 125- or 150-mile-long ride twice a week, out Route 513 toward Frenchtown, and then north or south.

Julian Orleans, who cycled cross-country with Mr. Varga, said he’s not surprised that Mr. Varga has become the consummate two-wheeled marathon man.

“LeRoy was never one to do that much sightseeing,” he said. “Once I wanted to stop at an Indian reservation. He just kept going on. He’s the type who never wants to stop until you get there.”

Out in the garage is Mr. Varga’s 27-speed aluminum frame Trek 2300 bicycle. It has a black silicon foam covering he added for gripping the handlebars, a two-cushion seat, an electronic readout that measures altitude, distance, height, speed and temperature, and another that serves as a heart monitor.

He’s done it before; he knows the drill. So part of him looks forward to the rigors, and the hoopla, of the ride. And most of him is thinking about getting done what needs to be done.

“It’s like a jail sentence right now,” he said amiably. “I have to gauge what I do based on whether or not I’m doing what I think I have to do.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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In a Corner of the Woods, Teenagers Escape From the Trials of Military Life

At a session for children of service members held at Camp Deer Run
in upstate New York, discussions of stress and fear were balanced
by activities like a ropes challenge course,
intended to build self-esteem and teach teamwork.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 8, 2007
==================

PINE BUSH, N.Y.

“I don’t want this to sound rude,” said Alicia Jade Geurin, who is 13. Rude was the last word that came to mind. “But civilian kids just don’t understand. You say your dad’s away, and they say, ‘Oh, that’s O.K.’ They think it’s like being away for a week on a business trip. That’s what’s so cool about this camp. You don’t have to say a word, and everyone still understands how you feel.”

At Camp Deer Run in the foothills of the Shawangunk Mountains last week, the 59 teenage campers, all with parents in the military, could take on the Eagle’s Nest ropes challenge course, scale the rock climbing wall, wander down by Plattekill Creek.

They could also listen to a soldier just back from Iraq describe what it was like there and hear his family talk about the impact of the deployment on them. Along with other fare (excellent paella with kosher chicken the other day), they could sample military M.R.E.’s. They could literally share war stories or, their common ground established from the day they arrived, use the time to get away from it all.

The camp sessions, known as Operation Purple, last one or two weeks and are organized by the National Military Family Association. This was one of the camps held at 34 locations in 26 states, serving close to 4,000 children for free across all the military branches. But the really striking number is a different one: 155,000. That’s about how many children have a parent serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to the association. That’s an awful lot of kids under an awful lot of stress.

“One of the favorite comments I heard was from a 15-year-old boy who said, ‘People don’t realize that we serve too,’ ” said Kuuipo Ordway, a behavioral health care consultant for the camps. Which is not to suggest a cadre of mopey kids pining for distant parents. Instead, a visitor gets two contradictory impressions: how unnaturally mature and self-sufficient some of them are, and how much of a quiet burden others seem to carry.

In the first category, you could put Alicia, who lives at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey and whose dad recently returned from a tour with the military police in Afghanistan. With the élan of a gung-ho cadet, she seems on a different planet from many of her pampered peers in the MySpace/iPod/Abercrombie generation.

“Two parents have responsibilities, and if one isn’t there, whatever they can’t do, you have to do,” she said matter-of-factly. “But if you know you don’t have Mommy around to hug every night, or Daddy, you learn to be self-sufficient. I know I can go anywhere, introduce myself, I’m not going to be someone sitting in the corner. I love the military life. I love it.” She wants to be a marine.

But for others the anxiety, even in the green repose of the woods, is almost palpable. You can hear it in the questions they ask of visiting service personnel from Iraq, some sort of playful (How big are the spiders? How often do you get to wash your socks?), some as playful as a hand grenade (Have you ever killed anyone? What is it like when a bomb goes off? Are you really sorry when you miss your son’s soccer game?).

For those with a parent in Iraq, like Elizabeth and James Darney of Virginia and Chris Seger of Kingston, the stress is particularly acute. So ask Elizabeth about a military career, and she says no, thanks. Too hard on the family. Chris has it all figured out: Study accounting at Pace University and open a pizzeria.

A lot of the challenges addressed by Operation Purple seem like the problems of modern life, but amplified: divorces and blended families on top of deployments abroad. But Ms. Ordway, the psychologist, says this moment is particularly tough on military kids. Deployments are longer and less certain, and there is a nonstop din of gruesome war coverage. There are more older soldiers, with older kids at more complicated times in their lives, and many parents are returning with grievous injuries or, increasingly, with post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s not likely that a week or two in the woods will solve all that, but if it shows kids there are others in the same boat, if they get to ask questions they can’t ask anyplace else, maybe that’s a start.

Up on the ropes course, snug in a harness, was Samantha Santiago, Alicia’s pal. Over the past two years or so, her grandmother died of cancer, her mother served in Germany for more than a year as a nurse, and her parents divorced after her mother’s return. Samantha, who wants to join the Navy, clambered along ropes ending at a platform 35 feet above the ground. From there, the goal was to end the exercise with “the leap of faith,” jumping from the platform toward a bell hanging from the cable.

With the other kids hollering encouragement from below, she hesitated. Then she jumped, and for a fleeting moment, Samantha Santiago flew.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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A Plea to Let a Punishment Fit the Prank

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: June 21, 2007

MONTROSE, N.Y.

It is not Iraq. It is not Katrina. It is not Virginia Tech.

There are many injustices far worse than those visited on the Montrose 19, the high school seniors in Westchester facing felony charges and not allowed to take part in their graduation, scheduled for tomorrow, because of a prank that went awry.

But sometimes small stories say a lot, so let us return to a familiar place: high school, graduation weekend, kids doing something dumb and adults doing something dumber.

For those who missed it, this tale began on June 10, a Sunday, when 19 students at Hendrick Hudson High School here, using a key they were not supposed to have, entered the school at night and left dozens of cheap alarm clocks in the shape of butterflies or houses scattered about. Some were covered with duct tape to make it harder to shut them off or remove the batteries. They were set to go off at 9:15 the next morning, the last day of classes.

The idea was for the seniors to respond to the alarms by walking out of the building in triumph — 13 years of school and one great senior prank accomplished. Instead, when the police responded to an alarm at the school, they thought the clocks might be bombs. State troopers with bomb-sniffing dogs descended on the premises. It soon became apparent that the clocks were just clocks, but the 19 students were charged with a second-degree felony, placing false bombs, and were barred from the graduation ceremonies. And 31 who contributed money for the clocks were forced to do community service, mostly cleanup at the school, in order to join their classmates at the graduation.

If the e-mail response to my Sunday column about the Montrose 19 and interviews around town are any indication, most people seem to see the students’ behavior as clearly inappropriate and deserving of some punishment. They also see a gross overreaction on the part of the adults that says a lot more about the on-edge world these kids are stepping into than whatever graduation wisdom is likely to be dispensed at the ceremony they’ll miss tomorrow.

“When a harmless prank results in 19 high school students being charged with felonies, we have surely traded our liberty for security, and faux security at that,” wrote one reader. “I would like to hear how we are safer if these kids go to jail.”

Well, it’s not likely anyone will go to jail, and chances are the charges will be reduced somewhere in the legal process. School officials said they were standing by their decision to bar the 19, who include many of the top students and athletes in the class, from participating in tomorrow’s ceremony. One father said that he and his son intended to show up and sit in the audience, though he did not want his name used for fear of further provoking school officials. “If they want to make a scene by kicking me out, I’ll make a bigger one by not leaving,” he said.

High school pranks may be as old as high school, but it seems that with Web sites offering a menu of pranks du jour and everything finding its way to YouTube, the standard of excellence is being raised at the same time that society’s tolerance level is being lowered. This is not a good thing.

TO take a much stupider example, there was probably never a good time for one recent prank in Stamford, Conn., where five teenagers staged phony kidnappings by stuffing a friend into a car trunk, speeding out of a crowded parking lot and recording the episode for posterity. This would be bad at any time, but is worse in the post-9/11 era.

Nothing in Montrose compared with any of that, and interviews with students indicated that part of the appeal of this prank was that it seemed harmless: no damage, nobody hurt. But if there are graduation life lessons here, you can begin with these.

For the students: Actions have consequences. It’s a pretty nervous world out there. Just because something seems harmless on first or second glance doesn’t mean one shouldn’t give it a third look. Life is like high school, only the penalties get bigger for messing up. Your parents and grandparents get only one chance to watch you graduate from high school. Don’t blow it.

For the adults: Actions have consequences. It’s a pretty nervous world out there. Just how intent are we on jacking up the paranoia level? Life is like high school, only we ought to be sure that the penalties fit the offense. Parents and grandparents get only one chance to see their kids graduate from high school. You’d better have an awfully good reason and no better alternative if you want to take that moment away.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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