Column One

A track hoe sidled up to the modest yellow brick church, paused for a moment to position itself, then drove its teeth into the roof with brutal efficiency. Shingles tumbled into the sanctuary. With the second blow, the wall buckled. The track hoe worked its way across the building, finally smashing the wall where a simple cross was emblazoned in red brick. Within 20 minutes, the First Baptist Church was rubble, ready to be loaded in waiting dump trucks and hauled away. Behind the church, a water tower that serves six households bears the legend "Picher Gorillas since 1918.

Jeff Sikich shinnied up a charred oak in the Allegheny Mountains of western Virginia, shined his flashlight down into the hollowed-out trunk and gazed into the wary eyes of a mother bear 10 feet below. As he fired a sedative dart into the black bear's shoulder, another biologist on the ground hollered for Sikich to block the opening to keep the bear from climbing up and out. Sikich leaned his long torso into the trunk's interior as the bear raced up, stopping about a foot from his nose.

"First," he says, "we're going to float. " Float? Doesn't he know I'm terrified? I've never been able to float; I sink in water like a bag full of barbells. The tall, tattooed black man standing before me in his swimming pool has no patience for excuses. Our bodies, he says, are remarkably light. Our lungs are like life jackets. He lies back. Sure enough, he floats. "Your turn," he says. I hesitate. The hair stands on the back of my neck. Trying to keep calm, I lie back - but the next few seconds feel like forever.

A middle-aged man in a neon orange polo shirt and baggy blue gym shorts sat at a conference table in West Hollywood one recent afternoon interviewing a prospective ghostwriter. "It's called 'Redemption,'" said Aaron Tonken, the man with the story to tell. "It's going to be big. " When Tonken was marched off to federal prison six years ago in a charity fraud scandal that embarrassed a slew of A-list celebrities, it was difficult to imagine him returning to Hollywood, let alone persuading a major literary agency to shop a book and movie deal about his life.

Walking through the doors of a crowded San Francisco bar, Kristin Curtin was all business. Her eyes moved from face to face before coming to rest on a pretty young woman chatting up a male patron. "You could just tell the way she was interacting with him that he was mesmerized. There were hundreds of people in that pub, but she just captured my attention," recalled Curtin, a freelance casting producer. She gave the woman her business card and a pitch about why she might want to try out for a new NBC reality show that combines love and adventure.

Paul Zuckerman was sifting through resumes when he paused, "astounded," over a particularly strong applicant for a law clerk opening: Ivy League undergraduate, top-notch law school, legal work for two judges in Washington. Zuckerman's Los Angeles County firm handled personal injury cases - auto accidents and slip-and-falls. He figured the applicant, whose credentials marked him for a prestigious "white shoe" firm, had applied to the wrong place. Then he read the cover letter. Stephen Randall Glass wrote that he was a disgraced former Washington journalist.

On an unseasonably warm day in May 1997, Isaac Guillen marched in a stream of graduates to collect a diploma marking a new stage in his life: Juris Doctor. Beneath his gown were tattoos of barbed wire, reminding him of his violent younger days and the years he spent in juvenile lockup. This was the first time many of his friends and family had set foot on a college campus. Surrounded by a pearls and cashmere crowd, they cheered loudly for the triumph of one of their own. On stage at the UCLA commencement, a graduate crooned a Beatles tune: I know I'll never lose affection For people and things that went before I know I'll often stop and think about them Guillen, then 36, had struggled to escape a difficult past.

When Karin Hauenstein led her three horses down Vine Street, the girls in short skirts stilled their stiletto-heeled sashays, the incense hawkers stopped calling out to passersby, and Trader Joe's shoppers gaped through the glass at the convoy clip-clopping up the far right lane. Whether anyone registered more than surprise is hard to say. But on that recent afternoon, Hauenstein was making a statement. The 39-year-old horse trainer has come south from Santa Barbara County to protest the commercial slaughter of horses.

She had hoped by now to be free of terrible things. The mutilated hands of her son that came to her in dreams. The image of the samurai sword police found near his body. Her grandsons' tiny bodies lying so still in their shared bunk bed. More than three years have passed since Jan Williams' son and two grandchildren were killed in their Rowland Heights condo, but the trial of the accused murderer ? her daughter-in-law ? was built on grisly descriptions that haunted her by day, then mutated into ugly nightmares.

Reporting from Sebastopol, Calif. -- In an old, shingled house not far from the center of town, the trim crew hunkered over trays in the living room, snipping away at the strain of the day, Blue Dream. Its pungency knifed the air, like a medley of French roasted coffee beans and roadkill skunk. Sheets and a sleeping bag blocked the windows facing the neighbors. Panels of jury-rigged fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling. Johnny Cash sang "The Man Comes Around" from a laptop. Jeremiah, from Oregon, presided at the head of the table, wearing plug earrings shaped like bolts, a bracelet with a beetle in resin, and a cap with an old brass lock and a keyhole he calls his third eye. He had been coming south to Northern California for the marijuana harvest for four years.