Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

was honest enough to admit it, though, and incorporated the experience into his ideas, deciding that the healthiest thing for a person was to have one foot in nature and one in civilization. Nature’s American prophet preferred his wildness benign.

From our vantage point 150 years after his death, there are also darker undercurrents to be found in the environmental ecstasy of Thoreau’s ideas. In Walking, he goes to great lengths to point out not only that he sauntered, and where, but also in which direction. He went West, and it was no accident. A deeply moral man, an energetic campaigner for the abolition of slavery, and a founder of civil disobedience, he was nevertheless a kind of imperialist. He believed in his civilization, and in its growth. “I must walk toward Oregon,” he wrote from the East Coast. “And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west.” There was a continent to despoil and plunder, and in his good-natured, wildness-loving way, Henry David helped carry the flag.

Thoreau and company have something else to answer for, too, if you ask me. It has to do with that mystical experience of nature they were so keen on. On the one hand, they convinced the world that the forest was essentially good—an idea that sparked the environmental movement and continues to nourish it today. But there was a side effect. Because they also convinced the world that the way for people to benefit from nature’s virtue was to go get it. Direct, individual experience was the ticket.

And so environmental rapture became yet another commodity to be extracted from the forest, or the savannah, or the ocean. And all the nature-loving, green-friendly people of the world are merely coveting the spiritual goods. We’re desperate to preserve what we call nature, but maybe that’s just because it’s the best place we know of to go mining for enlightenment.

In the morning they walked, but in the afternoon the sadhus napped. You shouldn’t overexert yourself in such heat.

We camped in a dusty grove a hundred yards off the road. After lunch, Mansi and I lounged in an open tent with Jai and Sunil and M.P., who had brought me the gift of a religious booklet called Preparations for Higher Life.

Sunil played his regular game: trying to get us to walk all the way to Delhi.

“You can’t leave!” he cried. “We love having you here. We’re going to put chains on you both!” He reached out and seized us each by an ankle.

Although he was a sadhu like everyone else, Sunil wore jeans and a shirt instead of robes. His parents hadn’t liked the idea of him becoming a holy man, he told us. “At least dress normally,” they had said, and so he did. The street clothes were appropriate to his air of easy competence. As yatra manager, he was the brains of the operation and by far the most sensible sadhu of the bunch. But he counterbalanced this with a maniacal sense of humor.

“Name change!” he shouted, pointing at me. “Gore Krishna!”

Mansi laughed. “He’s calling you white krishna,” she said. “He says you’re substituting the pen and the camera for the flute.”

Sunil rocked back and forth, slapping the floor of the tent as he laughed.

I asked them exactly what made a person a sadhu. Did you sign up? Did you have to be ordained?

“It’s someone’s way of life,” Sunil said. “Someone who just wants to be with God, who wants to serve.”

“Like you,” said Jai. “You’ve come here. You’re concerned for the world. Those who think for others are sadhus.”

“So I’m a sadhu?” I asked. Could you become a sadhu involuntarily?

Jai ignored the question. “This is not an easy fight,” he said. “Without pen and ink, it’s not possible.” And he wanted to make sure I had my story straight. “People used to drink Yamuna to purify themselves,” he said. “Now you can’t even touch it. Recently some pilgrims drank some Yamuna water and had to be hospitalized that same night.” The villages along the river couldn’t use it as a water source anymore.

“Can’t government provide people clean water?” he demanded. “If the government can put a Metro train a hundred feet underground, it can do this.” He chopped one hand against the other. Someone had to purify the purifier. “Until Yamuna is clean, we are not going to back off. This is higher than religion. Higher than human beings.”

Hiking with the sadhus is cheaper than taking the bus, and more scenic, but you will have to come to terms with crapping in the open, which for Westerners can be profoundly difficult. In the past, I had mocked people who worried too much about the bathroom arrangements of faraway places, but I now saw that I was one of them. Worrying about bathroom access, I realized, was a fundamental expression of my cultural heritage. All of Western civilization, in fact, had been built on a set of technologies whose only purpose was to abstract the process of dealing with one’s own feces. (Germany is the exception to this rule, with its lay-and-display toilet bowls.) In any case, I would happily have parted with a thick stack of rupees for some time alone with a chunk of porcelain.

Yatra-ing, you will also have to wrestle with the privacy issues inherent to certain parts of India: i.e., that there is none. There is someone hanging out, or working, or taking a nap, or a crap, behind every shrub and around every corner. I doubt this worries people who grew up in the Indian countryside; they don’t mind that someone could catch sight of them squatting in a field. But for a white man from New York—and for an educated young woman from Delhi, Mansi confirmed—this is just not okay. So you need a system.

FIELD MANUAL FOR CRAPPING OUTDOORS WHILE HIKING WITH SADHUS

1. CHOOSE A TIME. Everyone else goes in the morning, but this may lead to co-crapping, or at least crap-camaraderie, among you and the sadhus, which you must avoid at all costs. Afternoon is best, when everyone else is taking a nap.

2. BRING YOUR OWN TOILET PAPER. Toilet paper does not exist for these guys, who instead take a small lunch pail of water along with them for the purpose of washing—a method for which you are not trained. So pack a roll or two. The drawback to toilet paper is that, since you will leave it behind, you are flagging your turd as your own. (You are, after all, one of only two people for miles around who believe in toilet paper.) Any sadhu who comes upon your work will therefore be able to scrutinize your method.

3. CHOOSE A LOCATION. You’ve got to work the sightlines. The second day on the yatra, for instance, I found a nice spot behind the ruins of a small, brick building that screened me off from the highway, as well as from a trio of truck drivers lounging by the dirt access road. That left forty-five degrees of exposure to the south, but with nobody in sight I liked my odds.

4. CRAP. Work quickly. This is no time for an e-mail check.

5. In standard North American al fresco procedure, this step would be FLEE. But I am introducing an additional, intermediate step: PAUSE. Pull up your pants, yes, but notice, as you do, how your turd, mere seconds into its existence, has already attracted several flies. Consider for a moment the miracle of this fact. That in the vast, hot, not particularly fly-infested flatness of the province of Uttar Pradesh, three or four flies will find your shit within in an instant and start laying eggs. That in the simple act of squatting behind a brick wall, you have provided untold wealth for a generation of minuscule beings, who will make your poop their home, getting born in it, burrowing through it, eating it, until one day, grown up, they will spread their translucent wings and leave your now desiccated turd behind, to search out new frontiers for their own children.

So, pause. You are walking with the holy men. Take a moment, and observe your humble pile of feces, and remember that in Delhi they worship entire canals of this stuff, and know that the wonders of the universe never cease.

6. FLEE.

At dusk, the teach-in went mobile. We emerged from our naps, the musicians among us climbed into the pickup truck, and we set out en masse for the closest town.

It was a tiny village, modest to an extreme, a densely packed assemblage of brick and earthen houses. A buffalo or goat twitched on every other stoop. With its total absence of cars—and air-conditioners, and televisions, and electricity—the town must have represented the platonic ideal of small carbon footprint. But it was disorientingly poor. Not even a day’s drive away, I had seen Delhi’s cosmopolitan set sipping twelve-dollar cocktails in bars and lounges as chic as anything in Manhattan. Now we were here, on the other side of the planet, in a world