felt OK again. It was the ultimate therapy, in a strange sort of way.”

Then, in summer 2008, Johnson started seeing Kate Prusack, a passionate cyclist and Santa Fe realtor. Early in their courtship, Johnson gave her a copy of Ayn Rand’s free-market manifesto Atlas Shrugged. “If you want to understand me, read this,” he said.

That fall, he invited her to go with him to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, a trip that would mark two major turning points in his life: cementing his relationship with Prusack, and losing 75 percent of his liquidity when the stock market collapsed in October. “I was on the mountain when it happened,” Johnson said. “When I finally got to a computer, I came back and said to Kate, ‘The world has changed, and Ithe long shot, but I never expected I wouldn’t even get a place at the table.”

In response, Johnson produced a YouTube video in which he answered every debate question, painstakingly cutting footage of the moderators in with his own talking-head responses. He also appeared on Fox’s Stossel Show and earnestly debated a President Obama impersonator named Reggie Brown. At one point, in what appeared to be genuine exasperation, Johnson started thumping his forehead on the podium. In August, on the same weekend that Michele Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll and Texas governor Rick Perry made his campaign announcement in South Carolina, Gary Johnson was racing his mountain bike at Colorado’s Leadville Trail 100. A couple weeks later, Johnson spoke at the National Press Club, where his (apparent)