Ken Sleight is 77 years old, lean, dusty-booted, hard of hearing, wears old jeans and long-tailed shirts untucked. It is said that as a younger man he was the model for the lapsed Mormon renegade Seldom Seen Smith in Edward Abbey's novel "The Monkey Wrench Gang," which itself became the incendiary model for eco-saboteurs such as Earth First. Sleight owns a horse farm called Pack Creek Ranch, up on Abbey Road, outside Moab, Utah, in the high red desert of the canyon country, where for the last five months I've been renting a cabin 33 steps from the door of his lodge. I see him every day in his old blue Ranger pickup, or tending to his Appaloosas and Arabians with his wife, Jane, or laying gravel with his tractor and shoveling manure for shade trees.

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American Indians referred to the coyote as Trickster: the sneak, the fooler of fools. This explains events in Manhattan last week when a coyote from the city's northern greenswards led cops, photographers, reporters, tourists and helicopters on a two-day chase across Central Park before finally succumbing to a tranquilizer dart.

The canid himself was no anomaly, no confused wanderer. He was a colonist, looking for new terrain, probing the limits of his range. At one point, cops cornered him near a duck pond but he dove in the water, swam to shore and was gone. Nicknamed "Hal" by park workers, he was not the first coyote to visit Manhattan this year. Six weeks earlier, on Super Bowl Sunday, a coyote was found smashed up by the side of a road on the Upper West Side. In January 2004, a coyote was seen bounding among the ice floes on frozen Rockaway Inlet, in Queens, near the piney dunes of Breezy Point, 23 miles south of Central Park.

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"The government can't afford to let this thing succeed," Simcox tells the anxious men. "So stick to the SOP. That's the most important thing." Standard operating procedure is to call the U.S. Border Patrol at the sight of anyone trying to sneak across the border. Added to the tension is the news that Simcox has received death threats, supposedly from a Central American gang lord; he wears a bulletproof vest.

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What you will not hear is that secessionism is as old as the states themselves, that it was not always a reviled idea, that it cleaves to the heart of a celebrated but perhaps outmoded American principle -- the rebellion against centralized power -- and that it is a founding American act enshrined in our most revolutionary document. "[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive," counsels the Declaration of Independence, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

Although secessionism today is politically impossible, if tenuously legal, the secession specter has arisen again, waking to the Declaration's call to self-governance. In 2005, it is the blue-state Northerners, bitter from the defeat of Nov. 2, who are, ironically, wearing its robes.

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Yet Bush's apparent inanity conceals his immense talent as a political speaker. If one applies the principles of duckspeak to Bush's performance, he is a doubleplusgood doublethinker. Duckspeak, of course, is the language celebrated in George Orwell's "1984." Characterized by mindless invocation and the repetition of slogans, it was the highest form of speech in Orwell's nightmare demolition of the English language, Newspeak. Orwell wrote:

"Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning 'to quack like a duck'."

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Fattened on the current budget crisis, where garbage pickup goes laggard and city exterminators turn deadbeat, New York rats are famous again, as they were in the crumbling 1970s: there are eight of them to every human, which places their number at around 60 million. Problem's out of control, reports the New York Times. To bring home the point of this slow-summer hysteria, the dailies frontpaged the infamous tale of the rat firehouse in Queens, where the creatures quite simply took over the walls and beams, the very structure, and earlier this month evicted the firefighters. "We thought we were winning the war initially," the fire chief told the Daily News, "but later it became clear that the rats are winning the war."

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Great. Put me down for $20 on everything, and pass the cyanide pills.

BETonSPORTS, based in Costa Rica, is one of several offshore gambling sites -- illegal in the United States -- that for years have booked bets on sports and finance, crude oil and currency, Oscar nominees and celebrity trials and where the next big earthquake will hit. Now, in the "shock and awe" dawn of global American preemptive war, the e-bookies see profits in the wages of empire.

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"Diana," murmured Syringe, junkie of name unknown, old soiled longhair, nodding out and toothless and splayed -- "Diana," then he passed out. Justin watched with interest. Syringe looked like Kentucky Appalachia, but talked Brooklyn, old Italian Brooklyn, that is, no niggas or yo or bro, an old junkie-hippie in jean jacket and dirty jeans with a blue bandanna across his forehead; he carried a syringe -- no drugs, just a syringe.

"I wasn't doin' nothin', walkin' along, mindin' my business," he had told us. "I'm not an asshole, I'm not breakin' anybody's balls, I'm walkin' along, they fuckin' stop me --"

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When I showed up, the firefighters had already made their loud vote, and Sean was gone on the "meal run" with the new men of the 279, driving the old rig, the same rig he drove on Sept. 11. The rig had made it out that day; five of the men who rode it did not.

Jerry Sweeney, a compact guy with thin lips, 10 years with the 131, opened the door, nodded, and went back to the "housewatch," a booth where there's a dispatch line and a computer and a TV with the sound turned down.

"Giants game is on tonight," said Sweeney, taking the phone calls, listening to dispatch, planning his evening around a strange Thursday-night football-season opener, New York Giants vs. San Francisco 49ers. If a call comes in -- fire, car accident, a man sick in the street -- Sweeney opens the P.A., the "bitch-box," with a chirrup that echoes through the building. When firefighters hear this sound, they stop everything. Their faces go blank, their eyes dart.

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We descended around midnight through a locked manhole near the Jardin de Luxembourg. We wore blue jumpsuits tucked into knee-high rubber boots, and thick gloves, and raggedy utility belts dangling Mag lights and Leatherman hand tools and battery packs that fed lamps atop yellow miner's hats -- not a high Paris fashion, but we looked like sewer workers; the few people on the streets ignored us when we brought out a special key, flipped the manhole up on its hinge and shot into the ground.

The manhole, however, would not close tight, so the grinning loudmouth named Lezard Peint, our leader, peeped out and yelled to a cardiganed grampus passing by. "For purposes of security, Monsieur," Lezard tooted in his splendid professorial French, "would you please jump up and down on this manhole when I shut it?" "What, young man?" the old man grumbled. "We require a push from above to get it closed. For purposes of security, Monsieur." The old man hopped, no doubt looking ridiculous, and the manhole thudded tight, and we could hear him thumping away as we fled into the darkness.

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As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in what it called an "organized intelligence gathering activity." But to what end, and for whom, no one knew.

Reports of the mysterious Israelis with an inexplicable interest in peddling art to G-men came in from more than 40 U.S. cities and continued throughout the first six months of 2001. Agents of the DEA, ATF, Air Force, Secret Service, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service documented some 130 separate incidents of "art student" encounters. Some of the Israelis were observed diagramming the inside of federal buildings. Some were found carrying photographs they had taken of federal agents. One was discovered with a computer printout in his luggage that referred to "DEA groups."

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"Fuck this guy, lock that fucking guy up before I kill him!" yelled one man, and a chorus of obscenity followed. Their faces turned ugly, and still William Harvey stood his ground, even as the crowd swelled to over 60 people and spilled into the street. Traffic came to a halt; horns blared, sirens sounded. The police showed up, elbowed in, surveyed the situation and arrested the offending parties -- William Harvey and his leaflets. Incredibly, Harvey was charged with disorderly conduct, though he apparently did nothing more than speak his mind.

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Tracking the cougar was soon his specialty: He learned their furtive, intelligent ways, and he came to like them.

In the winter of 2000, Hall was the hunted one. The local papers showed him chuckling about it afterward from his hospital bed, the reporters took photos of his riven cheeks and chewed-up neck, and within a day he was up on his feet, within a week he was out once more with his dogs and tending his farm, where he raises turkeys, pigs and chickens and has a garden and an orchard of fruit trees. When I called him last summer to ask what's it like to battle hand-to-hand with an 80-pound lion, he said, "Oh my goodness! Well, let me tell you ..." Then he told me what happened on that gray day in January.

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You walk by the tall fences of ground zero on one of those cold, unhappy New York afternoons -- tourists are peeping at the destruction through slits in the walls, street vendors are grinning, they're selling out their FDNY baseball caps, they're getting a piece. Where's yours?

The Axis of Evil Equity, a new mutual fund that's crushed the indexes since 9-11, may be for you. The logical choice for the jingo investor in wartime, the Axis fund is a compendium of companies that stand to make a killing in the war on terror. Axis is designed to profit in times of hostility and fear.

Alas, dear investor, it's too evil to be true.

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The guy in the Explorer next to me is getting angry, and at this point I imagine he'll soon be spraying the windshield with dung backed up into his throat. I wanted to help him, get out of my car and hold him, but he was yelling at the traffic and then singing to music and yelling some more; his music all beat and bass drum, meant for movement, getting laid, being heard, and that's why he's got his window open to the hot poison summer air. No air conditioning for him, he's big and proud, he guns the car a glorious 250 inches.

Unfortunately, our little New York jam on the Brooklyn Bridge has got him by the balls; no way out except over the side into the river; his whole manliness is in question. This is a national problem. There are places in this country where rush hour is starting to last all day.

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Farmer once had $700,000 in her 401K -- her life savings, all in Enron stock, built up over 16 years with what had been the seventh largest company in the United States, a company touted by the press, the execs, the Wall Street analysts as the future of American business. The money's gone; what remains is sorrow and astonishment.

"I was proud to invest in Enron stock," Farmer told a Senate committee last December, one of seven now investigating the Enron collapse. "We were a loyal and hardworking group of employees. We lived, ate, slept and breathed Enron because we were owners of the company. I trusted the management of Enron with my life savings.

"Senators, I won't mince words here," Farmer told the chamber. "They betrayed that trust."

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Most gun nuts are also hunters. I count myself in neither camp, but I can converse easily with both, as long as no mendacious arguments about "constitutional privilege" come up. To the Second Amendment zealots I always say, "Guns are merely an extension of the fist, and their ultimate purpose is not defense, but the increase of power. That's why they're so much fun."

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Much of the city has become like my friend, though people don't like to show it. Because the city has been hit with information it cannot process, at least not yet, not for a long time, and surely not if this happens again, which is what everyone expects.

I called a therapist at the New York City Mental Health Association, a calm-voiced man of 42 named Dr. John Draper, who is the director of the association. I called him for two reasons: to find out the symptoms of those who are calling his hotlines for help, and to ask him for help myself.

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The bodies began to fall from the sky, horrible sounds of smacking, of somebody getting hit in the face, but amplified a thousand times. A body fell and killed a firefighter. "I didn't look for more than three seconds," Halper said. "I looked, and I turned away: Between the moment I saw the people falling through the air and the moment I heard them hit was an eternity. I did not see what they looked like after they fell. I watched other people's faces, the horror on people's faces, I watched their heads following the bodies coming down and I put my fingers in my ears."

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I was the only reporter there when they dug him up at 1:15 a.m. Wednesday morning, 15 hours after the towers fell. There was ash and asbestos in the air, and gray drifts of millions of sheaves of paper, and mud in paddies where the tangled hoses had burst or the water had streamed from the ruins. Firefighters lay in makeshift forward triage units set up in buildings named after the Dow Jones Company and American Express, old strange names, inappropriate now. Now this was Zone 1, Ground Zero, and in the fiery hours of the night of Tuesday, Sept. 11, I slipped past the National Guard perimeter with a Red Cross team, handing out water bottles in the smoke, holding flashlights while medics gave eyewashes to the blinded firefighters. I was stumbling, not knowing how to help, so the medics stuffed my pack with gauze and saline and water and masks, and I tried not to get lost in the unreality and the darkness.

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