Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death, and Glory in America's Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt (Random House Large Print) - Softcover

Barbarisi, Daniel

 
9780593414460: Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death, and Glory in America's Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt (Random House Large Print)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593414462 ISBN 13: 9780593414460
Verlag: Random House Large Print, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

“Daniel Barbarisi plunges into an adventure from another era when he goes in search of buried treasure, guided only by a cryptic poem, a mischievous art collector, and the footsteps another pursuer who died on the quest… Every page draws you deeper into this no-man’s-land where fortune—or tragedy—awaits.” —Christopher McDougall, author of Born to Run

When Forrest Fenn was given a fatal cancer diagnosis, he came up with a bold plan: He would hide a chest full of jewels and gold in the wilderness, and publish a poem that would serve as a map leading to the treasure's secret location. But he didn't die, and after hiding the treasure in 2010, Fenn instead presided over a decade-long gold rush that saw many thousands of treasure hunters scrambling across the Rocky Mountains in pursuit of his fortune. 
 
Daniel Barbarisi first learned of Fenn's hunt in 2017, when a friend became consumed with decoding the poem and convinced Barbarisi, a reporter, to document his search. What began as an attempt to capture the inner workings of Fenn's hunt quickly turned into a personal quest that led Barbarisi down a reckless and potentially dangerous path, one that found him embroiled in searcher conspiracies and matching wits with Fenn himself. Over the course of four chaotic years, several searchers would die, endless controversies would erupt, and one hunter would ultimately find the chest. 

But the mystery didn't end there.
 
Full of intrigue, danger, and break-neck action, Chasing the Thrill is a riveting tale of desire, obsession, and unbridled adventure.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DANIEL BARBARISI is the author of Dueling with Kings. A former journalist at The Wall Street Journal, he lives with his wife and family in Boston.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

you can’t take it with you

Forrest Fenn had it all.

The Santa Fe art dealer had crafted the perfect life. After spending nearly two decades in the air force and emerging from Vietnam a decorated fighter pilot, the restless Texas boy in him had yearned for something new. So largely on a whim, Fenn had hitched a trailer behind his truck; hauled his wife and his young daughters, Zoe and Kelly, off to New Mexico; and struck out on a career as a dealer of art and antiquities, despite knowing little about either subject.

But he had charm, and he had flair, and he wasn’t afraid of hard work, so by the 1980s, Fenn had established himself as one of the Southwest’s preeminent art dealers, and a true man-about-town in the rarified, moneyed world of Santa Fe. He hobnobbed with politicians and counted celebrities like Robert Redford, Suzanne Somers, and Gerald Ford among his clients and friends. He lived in a sprawling walled compound just outside the downtown, and worked out of a palatial gallery right by the State Capitol, whose guesthouse had hosted luminaries from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to Steve Martin. When he was feeling real nice, he’d let visitors take a sip from the brandy bottle Jackie O. left behind.

In 1988, he was fifty-eight years old, still in the prime of an exciting and unpredictable life.

And then he learned it was all about to be taken from him.

Cancer. A big, angry tumor embedded in his inferior vena cava, under his right kidney. Doctors weren’t optimistic. They gave him a 20 percent chance to live. One-in-five odds? As a man who had stared death in the face repeatedly both over and in the jungles of Vietnam, those numbers didn’t sound particularly good to him.

Fenn did what he could to process the blow. For a few weeks, he let it soak in, allowed the reality that he was probably going to die to wash over him. Then he got mad. Indignant, even. Why did he have to go? Who said? Nobody had asked him.

The moment it boiled over, he was in the study of his home with his friend Ralph Lauren, the famed fashion designer. Fenn’s study was a magical place, a floor-to-ceiling gallery of artifacts, valuables, tomes, and curiosities from his travels. One piece, a Native American bonnet covered with ermine skins and carved antelope horns, caught Lauren’s eye. Believing his friend was not long for this world, Lauren wanted to buy the piece from him, give it a new home. But Fenn wouldn’t sell.

Lauren, exasperated, told Fenn he was being crazy. “Your time here is short, and you can’t take it with you,” Lauren declared.

“Well, then,” Fenn shot back, “I’m not going.”

Lauren laughed. They moved on.

But later that night, lying in bed, Fenn had a revelation: What if he could take it with him? Just a year earlier, his father, Marvin, a school principal, whom Fenn revered, had passed on—had taken his own life, actually. Marvin Fenn had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He’d been given six months to live. Eighteen months later, the resilient Marvin told his son Forrest that it was finally time for him to go. Marvin was going to take fifty sleeping pills that night, he said, and that would be that. Forrest pleaded with his father to wait—he had a plane, he said, and he’d fly up the next morning. The father matter-of-factly told the son that by then, it would be too late. It was.

Rather than being upset, Fenn saw wisdom in his father’s controlled exit, saw it as a dignified way to go. Fenn liked the idea of taking charge of his own departure. But he also liked the idea of taking it all with him. What if, he mused, there was a way for him to do both?

An idea started germinating in his head. He would get a chest, fill it with valuables—gold, jewels, artifacts he had collected over his years in the art world—and seal it up tight. It would be a real-life treasure chest.

Then he would write a poem—more of a riddle, really—containing nine distinct clues in consecutive order. If the clues were solved perfectly, they would lead the finder directly to the treasure. But this treasure map in a poem wouldn’t just lead to Fenn’s treasure chest. It would bring the reader to Fenn himself. Fenn planned to take his chest to the special spot identified in the poem, take pills, as his father had, and quietly leave this world. Eventually, he believed, someone would solve his riddle, and there they would find him, in his eternal rest: his sun-bleached bones, and with them his treasure.

Not long after doctors removed the tumor, and also his right kidney, Fenn began to set his plan into motion. Fenn learned a friend owned a twelfth-century bronze Romanesque lockbox, ten inches by ten inches by five inches, which he believed would make an ideal treasure chest, and he paid $25,000 for it on the spot. He started to fill it with loot. He began writing the poem. His plan was coming along perfectly. There was only one problem.

He got better.

Against all odds, Fenn beat the cancer. He had his life back. He sold his gallery that same year, and comfortably shifted into a sort of semiretirement.

But the idea stuck with him. It hadn’t been merely a moment of desperation, some end-around way of wriggling out of death’s grasp. Well, even if it was that, it was also something more. Fenn believed he had hit on something special, and he intended to follow through with some version of his treasure-hunting plan, even if his corpse would no longer be a part of it.

Over the next twenty years, Fenn filled the chest with all manner of valuables. Eventually, it would come to hold a truly magnificent fortune: 265 gold coins; dozens of gold nuggets; a gold dragon bracelet with ruby eyes, studded with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies; 2 gold frogs; a Mayan gold bracelet; a seventeenth-century emerald-and-gold Spanish ring; 2 pre-Columbian gold mirrors; gold dust; 2 gold nose rings; a Tairona fetish necklace thousands of years old; several jade figurines; 2 pre-Columbia wak’as—objects of ritual importance or power—and more, plus a copy of Fenn’s as-yet-unseen autobiography, stuffed into an olive jar. There was also a turquoise bracelet that had sentimental value to Fenn, a piece crafted from beads that explorer Richard Wetherill found when he discovered the Mesa Verde complex; Fenn won it playing a game of pool, and he said he would like to buy it back from whoever found the chest. The chest’s contents have generally been valued at somewhere between one and two million dollars, though some wildly generous estimates climb as high as four to five million dollars.

Fenn kept the chest in a walk-in vault in his home, occasionally altering its contents, and regularly bringing friends by to see this delightful conversation piece sitting on his shelf. Over time, he tweaked and refined his poem, as well. But perhaps most important, he set to work on the vessel for carrying the poem itself: his memoir.

Originally, when he believed he was dying, Fenn had hoped to have one of his many author friends write the memoir for him. But they all found the idea too morbid. So, long after he had recovered, close to the time when he actually hid the treasure, Fenn wrote it himself, crafting a hokey, folksy telling of his life story. The book, broken into small chapters and conversational vignettes, told of his time growing up in Temple, Texas, as the son of a school principal, and of the misadventures that he and his siblings would get into. It described how they would head to West Yellowstone, Montana, in the summers, and how Fenn fell in love with the place. How he served as a fishing guide, how he’d swum naked in the park’s warm pools,...

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Verlag
Random House Large Print
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593414462
ISBN 13 
9780593414460
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
576
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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