| It wasn’t National Geographic, that’s for sure. The photographer was barely making enough money from the internet start-up—weirdworldtravel.com—to break even after expenses traveling to Papua. The sun was like a broiling oven, and he was the baked chicken. He had studied the language of the region for months, but he could only say “good morning” in Bahasa Indonesian to the natives, which many of them couldn’t understand anyway. Most people ignored the outsiders, not even glancing their way during the hard journey upriver.
Other than that, he felt wonderful. The assignment was to make first contact with an “undiscovered” tribe. They had sent four different photographers to the Amazon, Africa, Borneo and Papua. The Amazon correspondent was jailed in Brazil after failing to get the required permits and continuing into the jungle anyway. The man in Africa was hospitalized with malaria. The photographer’s uncle had been picked for Borneo, and traveled with him to the Philippines on his way there, refusing to take any pictures except during the “golden hours” right after sunrise or just before sunset when the light was perfect. Then the uncle made first contact—with a mail-order bride he found at a website called “Cherry Blossoms.” “She has plenty of sisters, y’know, if ya want one.” his uncle told him at a weekly meeting of the foreigners at an eat-all-you-can buffet in the local hotel. “These Filipina women are really great. They’re not like American women. It’s still the feudal system here so there’s not too many choices if they want to survive. But she won’t let me leave for Borneo. And I don’t wanna go anyway. Good food, good lovin’. What else does an Americano need?” The photographer looked at the group of men. They loved food too, shoving enormous amounts into giant stomachs, and afterwards struggled into their cars—unable to fit on the local, crowded jeepneys. It was a relief to leave the honky-tonk of the Philippines, heading up the Papuan river like a Conrad character past the mangroves of the coast. The only other foreign passenger on their small boat was a quiet missionary. Many of the photographer’s friends didn’t like the missionaries, blaming them for helping to destroy the cultures of the tribals. The photographer remembered cross-country hitchhiking trips, and how often he was picked up by open-hearted preachers when nobody else would stop. “I’m with salt,” said the missionary—easily identified by his short hair, ironed clothes and earnest manner. What did he mean? Was he talking about salt of the earth, the ordinary folks whose virtues would save the world from their sophisticated and cynical cousins? “’Salt’ means sloping agricultural land training. We teach farming on the hillsides, and of course the words of Jesus also.” It had been a week since the photographer had a conversation with an English speaker who didn’t work for the government. The smell of eucalyptus trees around a riverbend, so similar to his native California, relaxed his whole body too much. The shutter released inside his mouth. “Which words of Jesus do you teach—the blessing of the peacemakers or the ones about not bringing peace but a sword to set a man against his father?” the photographer rudely asked. “Both of course,” the missionary answered, brushing away the rudeness like a mosquito. “Fathers and mothers are only human—Jesus is Lord. If it comes down to a choice, we should pick the highest naturally.” The Southern Baptists had done their job well. They were now using the Christian Filipinos to evangelize Asia instead of doing it themselves. A brown face could blend in more easily. “There can be no second coming until everybody on earth has heard the words of Jesus and had a chance to accept Him.” “I would love to do that, amigo, but there’s a little problema. I’m Jewish, you see. Usually when my people heard an invitation to accept the words of Jesus, there was a real sword, or bullet, or gas pellet for us if we didn’t say yes.” The Filipino missionary looked sympathetic. “I’m sorry for that one.” “The tribes need for the Army to stop killing them, the mines to stop poisoning their rivers, the Chinese to stop cutting down the rainforest to make palm oil plantations. What would Jesus do about that one?” The photographer spotted a crocodile sunning himself on the riverbank. “Good luck on your travels. Hope the cannibals aren’t hungry.” The missionary smiled. “You will be the one who needs the luck. I’ve got something better than that.” The boat’s bamboo outrigger grinded on crumbling concrete steps, and the photographer’s two porters unloaded their supplies. The missionary waved and the three were left with the boat’s wake until that too disappeared. The porters went up a trail without a word, carrying heavy loads. The photographer stumbled behind, feeling oppressed by the thick jungle canopy. A heavy rain came and turned the trail into a muddy mess, and the mosquitoes swarmed over his exposed flesh. The photographer had foolishly ignored the warnings about coming here during the wet season. Sago palms, the staple food, were spread gracefully over the quickly dissolving trail, so there were people around somewhere. He just couldn’t see them. The photographer could hear the cries of many birds high above, without being able to identify any besides the hideously painful squawking of the cockatoo. His father’s wife kept a caged one in her house, and the photographer thought that the ear-crushing, humanoid screams were a sign of distress from being kept behind bars, a metaphor for the lives of every living being in his father’s house. Now he learned the truth. The bird sounded just as desperately unhappy here in its natural habitat. The only animals he could see were lizards skittering across the mud, and the thousands of bugs in a flight line to drain his blood. If this was paradise, he wanted to go back behind bars with the caged, crazed cockatoo. Too late. The porters spoke almost no English, and he was in their hands. They plunged further uphill, past beautiful orchids into a pine forest. “Jewboy!” he heard one of the porters say. “Hey! Who’s paying for this trip?” the photographer yelled back, offended. The porter held up the blooming orchid, and pointed at it. “Name—Jewboy.” The photographer stopped trying to think. His feet moved, his body itched and smelled, his stomach rumbled, his glasses fogged over. The sun leapt downhill faster than they went up, and now he saw strange shapes cavorting overhead in the trees. He pulled out his digital camera from its plastic bag, attached a zoom lens, and turned it on. “Dew detected,” read the screen. “No pictures allowed.” He wasn’t the photographer anymore. He was just plain Jack. There were one more shot left in his disposable camera, so he must wait until they spotted the tribe before using it. The Papuan pilots, a buggy Air Force, used the setting sun as their cue to begin a insect strafing run. Jack hurried to set up his tent, dancing crazily to defend himself from their attack. Once the tent was set up, he could hear their mournful keening outside and then, incredibly, they were piercing and biting and stinging and sucking blood, streaming through an invisible hole in the tent. Jack pulled his sleeping bag around his head, sweating in the muggy night, until he couldn’t take anymore and surfaced for a breath to the delight of his enemies. The entire menagerie of southeast Papuan island wildlife—bandicoots, tree kangaroos, flying phalangers, ring-tailed opposums, wallabies, poisonous snakes, eight hundred species of spiders and two hundred species of frogs, thirty thousand different kinds of beetles—began their free concert, louder than even the most raucously caterwauling karaoke singer auditioning for a role in hell’s choir. (continued below...) |
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| Rocky Times |
| November 27, 2007 |
| Oh Shit! |
| Guide for the climb up Mt. Apo, highest peak in the Philippines |
| Summit of Mt. Apo |
And now a Hollywood star named Sean Penn was trying to tell him what methods of travel he could and couldn’t use! Duke took his can of Pepsi and a pack of cigarettes to the restroom at the back of the plane. He would just put one cigarette between his lips and calm down. “I’m sorry, sir. You are no longer allowed to congregate at the back of the plane. Please take a seat, and wait for the restroom sign to go on.” The flight attendant was all business, another beautiful woman acting an unbeautiful role. This was another paradox the pirate would think about. “Just because I’m named Duke doesn’t mean you have to call me sir,” he answered, trying to lighten the conversation. He towered over the woman, who looked like pictures of his young mother—blue-eyed, black-haired, slim and trim and confused about what to do with such a profusion of American blessings. Damn. He should have taken Japan Air instead. No memories there. The restroom opened up, and he slipped in past the startled woman. He felt at peace once inside, untouchable. He opened up another can of Pepsi—he was living off the stuff now, he would have to watch that or suffer again—and put the cigarette between his lips. Good air in, bad air out. Good air in, bad air… What was that!? The plane pitched and yawed, shaken by invisible hands. Duke fought against a flashback. What he needed was nicotine. This had worked before. Put some tape over the smoke alarm like this. Good. Now quickly, just a few puffs and then back to the cabin. No smoking on a plane spewing tons of toxic contrails into the upper atmosphere? Breaking ridiculous laws was righteous revenge. Someone knocking at the door? Did they smell the smoke? This is like hiding in the bathroom when I was a kid, the pirate thought, worrying about being caught rocking my own world. I better throw my butt in here quick! The plane lurched again, and as Duke quickly flushed the evidence in the blue-watered toilet, the Pepsi can fell into the magic vacuum too. The aeronautical plumbers had contingency plans for their flying outhouse. When the pressure inside a clogged storage container underneath the toilet was too much, its contents were silently and automatically released into the atmosphere. Duke slipped past the flight attendant standing outside the restroom. “Don’t worry, my dear. Everything came out o.k.” “In the end?” she answered with the punchline. I’m not cutting my hair, Duke thought. My act still works. Thirty thousand feet below the potty jokes, Jack tried to become a photographer again with his one last chance. The porters had been courageous and true. The three of them had crept behind acacia trees, watching a primitive scene for an hour. The natives wore no more than penis gourds for the men, and the smallest grass skirts for the women. Their huts looked like they were built without hammers and nails. They were communicating to each other using their hands only, a sign language. There was no recorded tribe living in these mountains. Jack just wondered how the three travelers had come so close without being detected by these children of nature. No matter. This was first contact. Jack got out his disposable camera and stepped into the clearing, right hand open to show peaceful intent and left hand ready to record the historic moment. The natives looked up at the sky, which seemed to be whistling. Jack’s picture, delivered to him later on his hospital bed, showed the shocked chief of the tribe—wearing his ritual cendarawasih feather—covered from head to toe with shit and piss, holding a Pepsi can that had dropped at his feet. It was not first contact. The tribe was the Arapesh, last studied in the 1930’s by Margaret Mead. She had described them as “a society unaccustomed to violence, which assumes that all men are mild and cooperative.” Though there was no record of them ever having been headhunters, they spent two and a-half hours arguing quite passionately if this was not a message from the gods that it was good time to start. |
(continued from above) It would be a long night. The subscribers of weirdworldtravel.com—all three hundred and sixty-four of them—were going to have some fun clicking when, or if, Jack ever got back home. The pirate hated Freud, and everything having to do with his quack doctoring. If only it was really true that the pipe-smoking headshrinker had been boinking his wife’s sister, and covering up with his fake Oedipal complex for all the rich daddies diddling their daughters. At least that would put some blood, passion and life into those pseudo-scientific theories that tried to strip all the damn mystery from life! And yet the pirate, Franklin Duke—and how he hated his last name—didn’t know what he didn’t know. There were many parts of his subconscious mind that he couldn’t understand. For instance, Duke wasn’t aware that there was a direct link between military service and behavior on board airplanes. At the height of the Vietnam War protests, the Air Force had the brilliant idea to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of World War Two’s spectacular end by flying the Enola Gay—which had dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima—at air shows all over the country. Lieutenant Franklin Drake’s last duty was to escort the original pilot, Paul Tibbets, from city to city. Tibbets told the young lieutenant, “I talked to Orville Wright after we stir-fried Hiroshima and the old guy said to us, ‘Of course I don’t regret inventing the mechanical flight along with my late brother, gentleman. The airplane is like fire—it can be used for good or evil.’” But when Lieutenant Duke lifted the window shade while Tibbets was sleeping, the rising sun airburst onto the old bomber’s face and he woke up startled, mouth open in a silent scream. Duke looked at the pretty blonde next to him, reading a report on the environment. He had always loved the romance of travel, and now that the Duke was losing his latest Dutchess by divorce, he wanted that romance again. He had even met one of his wives on a Greyhound bus as they shared the large if smelly back seat. Duke turned and spoke to his seatmate.“That looks like some interesting reading there. Just remember though what the Bible says. ‘Good works is the key to heaven…be ye doers of the Word and not hearers only.’ That’s from the first book of James” Maybe this was not a good opening line. The woman buried her nose deeper into the magazine without even acknowledging his existence. Was he getting old? Was the wild mane of long white hair, the greybeard and moustache, not working as in the days of old? His stomach churned. The pirate’s insides were not doing well on airplane food. He felt trapped in the tin tube flying above the clouds he had so often seen better from down below, on boats taking their time to cross the ocean. Duke was an angel who didn’t think he had earned his wings. |
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