Into the Blue

Give him this: Buettner understands his audience. He knows that they love him, and they want to experience these exotic locales through him and his team. His heroes are first-person, in-somebody-else’s-shoes writer George Plimpton, who Buettner met while working at NPR, and “experiential” journalists and storytellers such as the late travel writer Bruce Chatwin. Buettner’s “forensic investigations” are legitimized and assisted by the scientific community. He works, for instance, with the University of Minnesota and the National Institute of Aging, in addition to the demographers on the team, and he constantly refers to epidemiology studies by academics around the world. With the National Geographic byline that he aspired to and finally acquired in 2005, he believes he can now focus on big-picture concerns and not worry quite so much about squeezing out fresh content every day.

Tonight, he’s been at a birthday party. A woman turned 100, and the entire village of Belen came to the local dance hall to toast their matriarch with plastic cups of Coca-Cola. As a marimba band played in the background, a female reporter from Costa Rica’s major daily, La Nacion, interviewed Buettner. While Buettner answered her questions, the team’s photographer, Gianluca Colla, angled to get a shot of the birthday girl taking a swing at a piñata. Now, in the car back to Hojancha, Buettner turns to Colla to strategize about placing another photo in National Geographic. Buettner has a story on “happiness” scheduled to come out next year (a story that he researched in Asia, Europe, and Latin America a month before this quest), but he believes a photo from Costa Rica will help keep him in the public consciousness in the interim. He asks Colla what they need to execute a “home-run shot.”

Who should they photograph? One-hundred-and-four-year-old Don Felipe near the coast is quickly dismissed as being too surly; 100-year-old Abveda Panchita can use a machete and chop wood with an axe. “Do you think Jorge could find an amazingly vital sabanero who could ride a horse and lift a lasso over his head?” Buettner asks. “He wouldn’t even have to be 100. He could be in his eighties. Late seventies even.”

“Perhaps,” Colla says. “But it’s late in the week, and that would require time and a detailed search.” (Meaning Colla and the group’s fixer, Jorge, would have to go door to door asking sabaneros if they knew of a senior colleague who could ride a horse and whip a lasso over his head.)

“Well, maybe you should e-mail your photo editor and give her three options in order to save time,” Buettner says. “And the more I think about it, I see a small-aperture, low-depth-of-field shot of Panchita’s face. Either right before she brings the axe down or immediately after she splinters the wood.” 

“That might be good,” Colla agrees. “But when we were there a couple of days ago, she didn’t have any more firewood.”

“Well, we can bring her more firewood, can’t we? And see if she’ll use her axe again?”

Colla seems uneasy at the prospect. “If National Geographic ever found out, you and I would no longer be able to walk through their door.”

“Why?” Buettner says. “I’m not changing the facts. We know she cuts her own wood.”

It’s at moments like these when you’re unsure if Buettner is calculating and cynical or just willfully naive; whether he’s an existential hero who has found a way to break the chains to the cubicle world and sell the stories he wants to sell or another pragmatic, manipulative mercenary who peddles a Disney-fied self-help version of the natural world for personal gain.

“Look, Gianluca, I’ll tell you a story,” he says at last. “When I was doing Maya quest, we were down in Guatemala, waiting by these thousand-year-old ruins for ABC’s Primetime Live crew to show up. They came down with talent and segment producers and cameramen. One of the segment producers comes up to me and asks, ‘Um, would there ever be a situation where you guys, uh, might come across heavy vegetation on a trail and you might have to use a machete to hack your way through it?’

“I told him, ‘Yeah, that situation might happen.’ ”