I am thrust back to reality by the sound of a woman screaming. I look over my shoulder to see her jostling with the men around her for a spot at the front of the altar. Tears stream down her face. Her arm is stretching out through the crowd, desperately trying to hand over her offering. The priest hastily reaches forward and takes the small satchel from her, dumps half of the coins into the collection bucket behind his podium, then hands it back, as is customary. Before the woman has an opportunity to speak or pray, or even get a clear view, she is consumed by the crowd and shoved backwards out of the room, far from the site where her long pilgrimage has taken her. Above the chanting, her wail hangs in the air long after she has disappeared. The thick smell of jasmine burns my nostrils. My gaze turns towards its source.
The great Kurukshetra war was fought sometime around 3000 B.C. between the two families, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. At the end of the war the Pandavas sought repentance for their sins from Lord Shiva. They traveled to Varinassi, where they confronted Lord Shiva, but he fled from them. When the Pandavas again tracked down Lord Shiva high up in the himalayas in the town of Guptakashi, Shiva disguised himself in the form of a Vrisha, or bull.
Bhima, the strongest of the Panavas, eventually found the great bull and recognized him for his true identity. Bhima grabbed the bull by the tail and yanked. The tail came off in his hand. The bull sank into the ground until only the giant hump on its back stuck out. Lord Shiva then appeared before the Pandavas in his true form and instructed them to worship the remaining hump of the bull as part of their atonement. The Pandavas built what is now known as the temple of Kedarnath encompassing the bull's hump. The temple was later reconstructed by Sankaracharya in the 8th century. Today the temple of Kedarnath is one of the most important and remote Hindu shrines in the Himalayas. Pilgrims come from all over India in order to worship inside.
I have come as part of a small study tour through my university at the end of my Freshmen year. I am the youngest of our twelve person class, and have never set foot outside the east coast of the US until now.
Kedarnath is located in a remote part of the himalayas only accessible after a 16 kilometer hike. Like much of India, the trail is crowded and hectic. At the start, a flurry of merchants assail travelers, offering them various means to the top. Some merchants rent donkeys and horses. Travelers can ride them or use them to carry their belongings.
The most expedient and expensive method to the top is by palanquin – a chair hoisted onto two poles that is carried on the shoulders of four young men. These men jog the entire path up and down the mountain several times a day, carrying their wealthy payloads. In addition to the palanquins, there are a few old men who carry people individually up the mountain in a large basket on their backs.
One man – carrying another person – up a mountain – in a wooden basket – on their back.
I speculated that these older men were retired palanquin carriers because their strength and endurance was astounding. Though not nearly as fast as the palanquins these old human-in-a-basket carriers were persistent. I never once saw any of them take a break.
A few people in our group opted for a horse to carry them. Seth and I merely rented walking sticks at a cost of a few pennies, plus a few pennies more for a down payment until we returned them. Seth and I bounded up the steep stone path as it snaked high up into the mountains and disappeared into the clouds. Other merchants had set up small stands along the path selling food, snacks, sodas and water. For the first eight kilometers we stopped only briefly to purchase water or a bite of food. Beyond that our pace began to slow markedly. Our jogging turned to walking, and soon we began to break often. The air grew thin. The temperature changed from a warm summer's day at the start of the trail, to midwinter evening. We drew in deep breaths and watched as the clouds we exhaled joined the others across these frigid heights.
Eventually we came around a wide bend in the mountain trail. A few kilometers ahead, the small town of Kedarnath nestled in a valley between white mountains. Spirals of smoke rose from chimneys. We struggled onward toward the ancient town, but soon found ourselves having to stop every few hundred feet. As I sat there on a rock, my chest heaving, my eyes fixed on the distance, one of the old human-in-a-basket carriers that I recognized from several hours earlier, passed me. I stared in disbelief as the old grey haired man steadfastly and rhythmically placed one foot before the other. A continuous breath of white smoke trailed from his mouth like a steam engine. His image has come to embody, for me, the essence of perseverance and determination. I composed myself and then followed the stoic figure of strength.
The streets were filled with merchants sizzling chapatis on large stones, roasting ashy samosas in the coals of their fires, and brewing delicious cups of thick milk chai. It was nearly dusk and the sun had dipped behind the mountains. A fiery red alpenglow was cast across the boundless snowy hillsides.
The streets were also teeming with Sadhus. A Sadhu is a man who renounces his life, gives up all of his possessions, and embarks into the world on a spiritual quest as a wandering ascetic. These Sadhus typically grow dreadlocks, long beards, and mustaches. The smoking of Hashish is illegal in India, but is an age old tradition among Sadhus and is still permitted in their case.
In modern day India, where millions of people are homeless, becoming a Sadhu is often just a formality. For this reason, Sadhus can be found along the streets everywhere in India, often smoking hash and tobacco from their traditional chillum pipes. Most Sadhus are serene figures who beg in silence with bowed heads and humble eyes. In return for a small offering, they heap immense praise upon the giver, offering a short prayer with them, and often gracing their forehead with a tilaka, or traditional red dot of paint symbolizing the third eye of Shiva.
There are many sects of Sadhus and many ways of expressing their faith. In Haridwar, I spent an afternoon with a group of Sadhus who had each made an additional sacrifice in their life. One of the men had pledged not speak for two years. He had succeeded in his pledge, and renewed it. Another man had pledged not sit down for five years. He created a makeshift hammock to sleep in that always kept his body propped up at greater than a 45 degree angle.
Back in Kedarnath the Sadhus were aggressive to the point of grabbing people's arms and clothes to demand money. These Sadhus were merely there to capitalize on the generosity of the thousands of pilgrims who flocked to Kedarnath in pursuit of spirituality. My friend Darren, nicknamed Sunshine, also had dreadlocks, a long beard, and mustache. The Sadhus gave him the most trouble. They regularly harassed him for money, trying to make the appeal that they were brothers due to their similar appearance.
After making our way to the small hotel where we had made reservations months before, we discovered that they had gotten the dates wrong. There were no rooms available in any of the other hotels in town, and our group of twelve ended up cramming into the only accommodations left, sleeping four to a bed. This ended up being an asset, since there was no heating, and the temperature plummeted below freezing at night.
The morning after we arrived, four of us, Seth, Sunshine, Chris, and I, decided to follow a path that led further into the mountains to a lake known as Gandhi Sarovar, where part of Gandhi’s ashes had been spread. We crossed through the town and descended a rocky slope towards the river that drained from the mountains. The closer we got to the river the more prolific they became – piles of human feces. More and more until they could be found on every rock, resting within every square foot. It was here, I was shocked to find, that the entire town came to relieve themselves. We weaved carefully through the area until the piles began to thin out. When the river spread into several shallower braids we jumped across from rock to rock.
The snow distorted any clear sense of a path, but we climbed the muddy hill anyway, making our way in the direction that had been indicated to us. Small wood houses were built along the hillsides, accompanied by small terraces carved out and reinforced with stone. At one point the hill became extremely steep and slippery with dense snow. Chris took the lead, using his boots to dig foot holes in the shear wall of ice. We found long rocks and used them for an additional grip. We held on tight to our rock ice picks, dug our toes into the narrow ledge Chris dug out for us, and inched across the ice wall Sunshine had made the mistake of wearing sandals, and his blue feet were suffering for it.
Once we had crossed the wall of ice the trail became less steep. The winds began to pick up, and the sky became grey. After several miles, we crested a steep hill, and resting on the other side was a crystal-blue lake – one of the sources of the holy Ganges river. At the moment we reached the lake
Shiva opened his palms, patted the thick grey clouds, and sprinkled Ghandi Sarovar with a light majestic snow. We sat around the lake meditating with Ghandi's spirit amidst the sublime peaks. Silence predominated.
When we returned from Ghandi Sarovar, our professors arranged for us to enter the temple of Kedarnath. Not by standing in the long line that zigzagged from the temple door, through the surrounding gates, and down the busy streets. No, we would honored, privileged guests, accessing the temple through a separate, private entrance along the side.
Indulgences, dispensations, bribes, sacrifices. All different words to describe the powerful manifestation of a God's monetary desires and vanity. For the right price, anyone can buy first class seats at the foot of the deity of their choice.
Inside the temple of Kedarnath, the woman's cries are still echoing through my mind as I watch the burning jasmine. The priest passes the jasmine around our group on a metal pan. I want to get up and run. I want to dive through the crowd and find the woman who had been shoved aside. I want to give her my seat at the foot of Lord Shiva. In the Hindu religion idols of gods are not merely depictions, but actual manifestations of the gods themselves. I am as close to the divine as is possible. I am lost. I don't know what I'm doing, what I believe.
It's my turn now. I take the pan of burning jasmine and wave the thick smoke across my face to cleanse my soul. I clench my throat and try not to cough. I am overwhelmed with guilt.
We are in a small room, trapped between two worlds. In front of me is a window looking into an elaborate gold shrine of Shiva decorated with ornaments and candles. Shiva is holding a trident symbolizing his ability to destroy ignorance, with the three prongs representing his three fundamental shakti, or powers. Iccha – will. Kriya – action. Jnana – knowledge.
Lord Shiva is the third member of the Hindu Trinity alongside Lord Brahma and Lord Vishnu. Lord Shiva is often associated with destruction, but his cosmic significance is much broader, since in Hinduism death is closely linked to rebirth. Lord Shiva is responsible for maintaining the cyclical process of creation, preservation, concealment, disillusionment, and recreation. It is said that Lord Shiva is in the midst of a great cosmic dance whose energy sustains the cosmos, and when he stops dancing, the universe will end.
Behind me is a doorway blocked off by a podium with a priest standing behind it. Ordinary pilgrims must look through the obscured doorway, past the room where we are sitting, and into the window where the elaborate shrine of Shiva resides. A dim and obscure view of the divine.
The priest is chanting, burning, waving more incense, carrying on his rituals. He is wearing saffron robes and a rudraksha mala – a necklace of 108 rosary beads used in worshipping Shiva.
Behind me is an endless commotion of people vying for space in a shrinking world. My mind drifts back to Ghandi Sarovar, and the vast virgin lands of the Himalayas. India is as eclectic as the thousands of gods its people worship. When the ritual ends we leave and slowly begin to regroup, recover, outside the temple.
“Where is Seth?” someone asks. No one has seen him since we exited the temple. One of our professors tells us to wait while he looks around.
Sunshine also volunteers to go looking for Seth, and quickly wanders off. He returns a short time later, disturbed and despondent. The Sadhus came after him again, more aggressively this time. Several of them surrounded him in the open streets, pushing, pulling, all but grabbing the money directly out of his pockets. It was all he could do to shove through the circle and hurry back to where we were gathered.
One of the girls in our group raises her finger and points far away. A small dark colored dot is scurrying up a distant white mountainside. “Could that be Seth?” she asks. Someone goes back to the room and grabs a pair of binoculars. It is Seth.
No one follows him up the mountain.
When Seth appears at the dinner table later that evening no one presses him with questions. When Sunshine takes his seat we are shocked to find that he shaved the long beard that he had been growing for years. His lips, which we are seeing for the first time, curve upward in a modest, melancholy smile.
All of us are ruffled in unexpected ways by the confusion, the majesty, the chaos, that is Kedarnath, that is India. I admire Sunshine's decision. “If wearing my hair and beard like this makes me one of them, than that's not who I want to be,” he sighs.
I also admire the way that Seth dealt with his frustration. He delved into the wilderness, that solitary sanctuary, and summited a mountain. He followed the path of the Pandavas after they had built the temple of Kedarnath, meditated in the heights where Ghandis spirit flows, and, with any luck, caught the attention of Shiva, destroyer of evil, who cleansed his spirit with a breath of Himalayan wind.
I recognize that I have met Shiva here in Kedarnath, but not in the manifestation of his golden shrine. I met Shiva as the creator of the ancient stone temple of Kedarnath, and the vast himalayas. I recognized Shiva as the concealer in the hidden power and determination of the old human-in-a-basket carrier. I encountered Shiva as the preserver of Ghandi's spirit in Ghandi Sorovar. I watched Shiva manifest himself in our mutual disillusionment, in the pilgrim woman before the shrine, in Seth atop the mountain, in Darren surrounded in the marketplace, in myself frozen in Kedarnath temple. And in this emerging sensation of maturity and deliberation that I have never felt before, I recognize Shiva as the creator and revealer of wisdom in the most unexpected of ways.
Learning to Walk on Water
A loud whistle sounded indicating that the boat was about to embark on its two day journey down the Amazon river. I swung lazily back in forth in my hammock, crammed between two hundred other occupied hammocks on the deck of the boat. The mass of swaying bodies created the sensation that we were out at sea before the boat even embarked. As I turned the page in Mark Twain’s, Roughing It, one of his characters leapt from the page onto the ship, and approached me.
“'Scuse me,” I heard a congenial voice say. I lowered my book to find a fat, bald, middle aged man with a thick pair of glasses, smiling broadly. He introduced himself as Tim, and complimented me on my choice of reading.
I smiled back. “What books by Twain have you read?” I inquired.
He thought for a long moment. “None.”
“Oh, well, what do you like to read,” I asked. Tim stared out into the thick jungle.
“I don’t read much,” he answered. “I did read a book a couple years back. Name was Pitching for Pizza if I recall. It's 'bout a pitcher. He ain’t very good, but he’s got a pizza company as his sponsor, and he’s got to do well to make them happy. Great book. Hilarious book. I read it a few times. It was fiction.”
I liked Tim already. We spent much of the remainder of the day getting to know one another. Tim was a southern Baptist preacher who had been sent to the city of Chachapoyas in the Peruvian Andes by a small town church in “Ole Miss” to show these near-neanderthals the God-given superiority of the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Good Book. He had been living in Chachapoyas with his wife and daughter for almost six years when we met.
It was Tim's lifelong goal to explore either the Amazon jungle or the plains of Africa. Since he found himself in Peru, he decided the former was more practical. He had kissed his wife and daughter goodbye two days earlier and headed East to Tarapoto, where he boarded the boat bound for Iquitos. Since I was also there to explore the Amazon we agreed to team up. A bizarre travel companion perhaps, but I knew that Tim would make the adventure all the more unique, and disappoint me he did not.
Tim is of the delightful breed of southerner naturally endowed with the gift of ideal exaggeration, and the ability to spin a fun yarn from a simple situation. He speaks very few words of Spanish despite his six years in Peru, but is very generous with the few he does know, even when they are entirely inadequate to the task.
That evening, during dinner in the ship's cafeteria, Tim talked on and on about produce and farm life. He talked about sexing chicks, then crocks, even kittens, and though we had yet to see caimans he even speculated about how to go about sexing them too. With some animals such as alligators, I learned, you could even determine their sex before they leave the egg.
By the time we received our hot cocoa dessert Tim was going on about the castration of various animals—horses being among the bloodier and more difficult that he had performed. He even talked about a turkey he once owned that raped to death a duck, a chicken, then a rooster, before they finally had to kill it. All this, to our mutual dismay, when turkeys do not even have an observable sexual appendage.
Tim was, quite simply, a wealth of useful farm knowledge. He also grew up on a farm where he helped his dad care for 150 beehives, and had the delightful job of overseeing the production of more honey than a healthy human heart should pump in a lifetime.
If, throughout the course of this description, you have not come to establish a mental picture of Tim so coinciding with southern stereotypes as to make it seem farcical, than let me add that Tim never once changed from his single pair of overalls during the week we spent together.
That evening we learned from a local man on the boat that we would be stopping in the small town of Yurimaguas to exchange passengers and supplies later that night. The local also knew some guides in Yurimaguas who would be able to take us on a trip deep into the jungle. It would be much cheaper here, and more remote than anywhere else we could find. That night, with only this man's word to go on, I followed him off the boat, Tim sauntering in tow. The local man took us to a house where he introduced us to a woman who made all of the arrangements, outlining our trip on various maps, helping us acquire food, and collecting the money. We spent the night on the floor in one of her extra rooms.
In the morning we met our guides Alberto and Javier. The four of us drove for miles along muddy roads into the jungle, occasionally having to get out and push. After several hours we arrived at a small river where various canoes were docked along the bank. We chose two that did not have any holes in the bottom, packed them with supplies and provisions, and set out on our four-day journey.
It was the rainy season, and every two hours the sunny skies dimmed slightly, and let out a warm shower of rain. The constant precipitation had caused the narrow river to flood its banks and consume miles of land on either side. The entire rainforest was resting in two feet of water. This meant that we were totally free to wander in our canoes. We took shortcut after shortcut, veering from the river, and crossing through thick jungle.
The town of Yuri-Maguas Javier explained to me, got its name from the two largest tribes living in the region. The Yuris, and the Maguas.
“And which ethnicity are you?” I asked, first Javier, then Alberto.
Javier was a young man in his early twenties, fit and competitive when it came to staying in the lead. He shared the canoe with Tim, his strength meant to offset Tim's weight. “I am Yuri,” Javier answered proudly.
Alberto was older, in his late forties or early fifties, calm, stoic, enigmatic of the wisdom and skill that comes with age. He rarely spoke, but we quickly learned to communicate through our actions. “I am Magua,” Alberto answered proudly.
When I asked them about being from different tribes they laughed. Of course they share the same jovial sense of superiority and competition as neighbors anywhere, but their tribes had come to live peacefully, lovingly, with one another.
When the river opened up into a wide lagoon. Alberto held up his hand, motioning for us to remain quiet. He rhythmically smacked the side of the canoe with his hand. After several minutes a small spray of mist sprang from the water nearby followed by a large fin. Amazon river dolphins. They are smaller than normal dolphins, the larger females growing to a maximum length of about eight feet, and are one of the few dolphin species that live their lives in freshwater. One after the other their fins surfaced in response to Javier's ancient call. After a minute, they disappeared.
The next morning, as Tim, Javier and I awoke, Alberto came rowing up to the shore. “Where did you go?” I asked. He smiled slightly and dropped a five gallon bucket of piranhas at my feet. He had speared all of them before we even woke up. We lived off of those fish for the next several days.
Tim may have embodied many of the stereotypes people associate with America, but when it came to eating, he impressed even Javier and Alberto. Having grown up in poverty in Mississippi, Tim knew not to be wasteful. He ate every part of the fish. The eyes, the head, the bones. The only thing left with a fish by the time Tim got through with it was a hollow skull with a dangling spinal cord. Alberto and Javier nodded approvingly. Sometimes Tim even finished off the parts of the fish that Alberto, Javier, and I couldn't even eat.
Javier and Alberto's vision was supernatural. They could spot the tiniest of animals, even at great distances. Often times I never even saw them, not even with the aid of my binoculars. Were Tim not in the process of teaching me to become a good christian I would have been inclined to doubt the very existence of some of the animals that they claimed to see. But when time and again my doubt was proved wrong I came to think of Alberto and Javier's vision as its own biblical miracle. How could it be possible, without divine intervention, for anyone to spot an eight inch iguana in a green tree in the greenest of jungles from three hundred yards away? When we finally pulled up directly beside the branch holding that iguana, I still couldn't even tell where it was until it jumped into the water.
When it came to spotting animals, monkeys were their forte.
“That is the black monkey,” Javier informs us one day—a creature not much bigger than a squirrel. “It’s the smallest monkey in the jungle.”
Wow, the smallest monkey in the jungle, I thought to myself.
And the next day, kayaking along, Alberto points out another group of monkeys. “Those grey monkeys over there are even smaller than the black monkeys we saw earlier.”
“Even smaller!” I exclaimed in surprise. “This then, is the smallest monkey in the jungle.”
“Yes,” he assures me, hesitates, then mentions another we have yet to encounter that is smaller still.
We passed a lot of trees bearing fruits of various sorts, and each time I asked “Can I eat it?”
“No,” was Alberto’s sharp reply. “Only monkeys eat it. It tastes bad.”
“Can I eat it anyway?”—“NO.”
On a different occasion we parked our boats along the bank and went for a hike. Alberto pointed out a lot of plants and told us of their useful properties.
“This one is a medicine for infections.”
“Can I eat it?” I asked hopefully—“No.”
“This one is used to cauterize wounds.”
“Can I eat it?”—“No!”
“This is one of the strongest adhesives in the world.”
“Can I eat it?”—“No!!”
Later as we kayaked along, Alberto reached up, plucked a small black fruit from a tree, and handed it back to me. Finally something I could eat. I pried into its stringy, sticky exterior. After a few bites it quickly became apparent why Alberto and Javier had not joined me in the feast. Afterwards I stopped inquiring about edible fruits.
Despite the fact that the Amazon jungle hosts the greatest abundance of life of anywhere on earth, it seemed to be entirely inedible. I am confident that with all of the local knowledge of the jungle that I learned that if I were trapped out in the Amazon for five days I would not be able to survive for one of them.
One morning as we canoed along, Alberto pointed out a sloth in a tree beside the riverbank. We maneuvered closer and as the sloth slowly descended from the tree I was able to get closer to the sloth than any animal yet. It was about two feet tall with a black head, and thick greyish fur covering the rest of its body.
“Ya know, there's two types of sloths here in the Amazon,” Tim offered. “The two-toed sloth, and the three-toed sloth. Which do ya reckon that one is?”
Tim and I sat there speculating for a while, and about the time we gave up on a conclusion, Javier pulled them up to the tree, grasped his machete, and began chopping the tree down so that we could get a closer look!
“And the police don’t mind?” I asked Alberto.
“No,” he assured me. “We are authorized tour guides.”
Authorized to molest animals in a national park—I wondered what the exam was like to get that kind of certification.
When the tree collapsed, its trunk, and the sloth’s back, slammed forcefully against the surface of the water. The sloth hardly noticed. Javier balanced along the narrow floating tree trunk, and pried open the sloth’s determined grip. We proceeded to humiliate that poor sloth, posing with him in turn, making him swim for our amusement, and cling to the side of our boat. The sloth seemed more like a stuffed animal than a wild creature.
Tim couldn't resist sexing the creature and determined that he was of the ornery male variety. The sloth tried to defend his personal notions of decency by swiping at Tim with his deadly three inch claws, but his movements were always in slow motion, and there was plenty of time to move aside.
The sloth was a good sport about the whole thing though, and after a half hour or so we thanked him and found him a new tree. Turned out he was a three toed sloth and as we drifted away I could see he had two of them toes peeled back for us.
“'Scuse me,” I heard a congenial voice say. I lowered my book to find a fat, bald, middle aged man with a thick pair of glasses, smiling broadly. He introduced himself as Tim, and complimented me on my choice of reading.
I smiled back. “What books by Twain have you read?” I inquired.
He thought for a long moment. “None.”
“Oh, well, what do you like to read,” I asked. Tim stared out into the thick jungle.
“I don’t read much,” he answered. “I did read a book a couple years back. Name was Pitching for Pizza if I recall. It's 'bout a pitcher. He ain’t very good, but he’s got a pizza company as his sponsor, and he’s got to do well to make them happy. Great book. Hilarious book. I read it a few times. It was fiction.”
I liked Tim already. We spent much of the remainder of the day getting to know one another. Tim was a southern Baptist preacher who had been sent to the city of Chachapoyas in the Peruvian Andes by a small town church in “Ole Miss” to show these near-neanderthals the God-given superiority of the Southern Baptist interpretation of the Good Book. He had been living in Chachapoyas with his wife and daughter for almost six years when we met.
It was Tim's lifelong goal to explore either the Amazon jungle or the plains of Africa. Since he found himself in Peru, he decided the former was more practical. He had kissed his wife and daughter goodbye two days earlier and headed East to Tarapoto, where he boarded the boat bound for Iquitos. Since I was also there to explore the Amazon we agreed to team up. A bizarre travel companion perhaps, but I knew that Tim would make the adventure all the more unique, and disappoint me he did not.
Tim is of the delightful breed of southerner naturally endowed with the gift of ideal exaggeration, and the ability to spin a fun yarn from a simple situation. He speaks very few words of Spanish despite his six years in Peru, but is very generous with the few he does know, even when they are entirely inadequate to the task.
That evening, during dinner in the ship's cafeteria, Tim talked on and on about produce and farm life. He talked about sexing chicks, then crocks, even kittens, and though we had yet to see caimans he even speculated about how to go about sexing them too. With some animals such as alligators, I learned, you could even determine their sex before they leave the egg.
By the time we received our hot cocoa dessert Tim was going on about the castration of various animals—horses being among the bloodier and more difficult that he had performed. He even talked about a turkey he once owned that raped to death a duck, a chicken, then a rooster, before they finally had to kill it. All this, to our mutual dismay, when turkeys do not even have an observable sexual appendage.
Tim was, quite simply, a wealth of useful farm knowledge. He also grew up on a farm where he helped his dad care for 150 beehives, and had the delightful job of overseeing the production of more honey than a healthy human heart should pump in a lifetime.
If, throughout the course of this description, you have not come to establish a mental picture of Tim so coinciding with southern stereotypes as to make it seem farcical, than let me add that Tim never once changed from his single pair of overalls during the week we spent together.
That evening we learned from a local man on the boat that we would be stopping in the small town of Yurimaguas to exchange passengers and supplies later that night. The local also knew some guides in Yurimaguas who would be able to take us on a trip deep into the jungle. It would be much cheaper here, and more remote than anywhere else we could find. That night, with only this man's word to go on, I followed him off the boat, Tim sauntering in tow. The local man took us to a house where he introduced us to a woman who made all of the arrangements, outlining our trip on various maps, helping us acquire food, and collecting the money. We spent the night on the floor in one of her extra rooms.
In the morning we met our guides Alberto and Javier. The four of us drove for miles along muddy roads into the jungle, occasionally having to get out and push. After several hours we arrived at a small river where various canoes were docked along the bank. We chose two that did not have any holes in the bottom, packed them with supplies and provisions, and set out on our four-day journey.
It was the rainy season, and every two hours the sunny skies dimmed slightly, and let out a warm shower of rain. The constant precipitation had caused the narrow river to flood its banks and consume miles of land on either side. The entire rainforest was resting in two feet of water. This meant that we were totally free to wander in our canoes. We took shortcut after shortcut, veering from the river, and crossing through thick jungle.
The town of Yuri-Maguas Javier explained to me, got its name from the two largest tribes living in the region. The Yuris, and the Maguas.
“And which ethnicity are you?” I asked, first Javier, then Alberto.
Javier was a young man in his early twenties, fit and competitive when it came to staying in the lead. He shared the canoe with Tim, his strength meant to offset Tim's weight. “I am Yuri,” Javier answered proudly.
Alberto was older, in his late forties or early fifties, calm, stoic, enigmatic of the wisdom and skill that comes with age. He rarely spoke, but we quickly learned to communicate through our actions. “I am Magua,” Alberto answered proudly.
When I asked them about being from different tribes they laughed. Of course they share the same jovial sense of superiority and competition as neighbors anywhere, but their tribes had come to live peacefully, lovingly, with one another.
When the river opened up into a wide lagoon. Alberto held up his hand, motioning for us to remain quiet. He rhythmically smacked the side of the canoe with his hand. After several minutes a small spray of mist sprang from the water nearby followed by a large fin. Amazon river dolphins. They are smaller than normal dolphins, the larger females growing to a maximum length of about eight feet, and are one of the few dolphin species that live their lives in freshwater. One after the other their fins surfaced in response to Javier's ancient call. After a minute, they disappeared.
The next morning, as Tim, Javier and I awoke, Alberto came rowing up to the shore. “Where did you go?” I asked. He smiled slightly and dropped a five gallon bucket of piranhas at my feet. He had speared all of them before we even woke up. We lived off of those fish for the next several days.
Tim may have embodied many of the stereotypes people associate with America, but when it came to eating, he impressed even Javier and Alberto. Having grown up in poverty in Mississippi, Tim knew not to be wasteful. He ate every part of the fish. The eyes, the head, the bones. The only thing left with a fish by the time Tim got through with it was a hollow skull with a dangling spinal cord. Alberto and Javier nodded approvingly. Sometimes Tim even finished off the parts of the fish that Alberto, Javier, and I couldn't even eat.
Javier and Alberto's vision was supernatural. They could spot the tiniest of animals, even at great distances. Often times I never even saw them, not even with the aid of my binoculars. Were Tim not in the process of teaching me to become a good christian I would have been inclined to doubt the very existence of some of the animals that they claimed to see. But when time and again my doubt was proved wrong I came to think of Alberto and Javier's vision as its own biblical miracle. How could it be possible, without divine intervention, for anyone to spot an eight inch iguana in a green tree in the greenest of jungles from three hundred yards away? When we finally pulled up directly beside the branch holding that iguana, I still couldn't even tell where it was until it jumped into the water.
When it came to spotting animals, monkeys were their forte.
“That is the black monkey,” Javier informs us one day—a creature not much bigger than a squirrel. “It’s the smallest monkey in the jungle.”
Wow, the smallest monkey in the jungle, I thought to myself.
And the next day, kayaking along, Alberto points out another group of monkeys. “Those grey monkeys over there are even smaller than the black monkeys we saw earlier.”
“Even smaller!” I exclaimed in surprise. “This then, is the smallest monkey in the jungle.”
“Yes,” he assures me, hesitates, then mentions another we have yet to encounter that is smaller still.
We passed a lot of trees bearing fruits of various sorts, and each time I asked “Can I eat it?”
“No,” was Alberto’s sharp reply. “Only monkeys eat it. It tastes bad.”
“Can I eat it anyway?”—“NO.”
On a different occasion we parked our boats along the bank and went for a hike. Alberto pointed out a lot of plants and told us of their useful properties.
“This one is a medicine for infections.”
“Can I eat it?” I asked hopefully—“No.”
“This one is used to cauterize wounds.”
“Can I eat it?”—“No!”
“This is one of the strongest adhesives in the world.”
“Can I eat it?”—“No!!”
Later as we kayaked along, Alberto reached up, plucked a small black fruit from a tree, and handed it back to me. Finally something I could eat. I pried into its stringy, sticky exterior. After a few bites it quickly became apparent why Alberto and Javier had not joined me in the feast. Afterwards I stopped inquiring about edible fruits.
Despite the fact that the Amazon jungle hosts the greatest abundance of life of anywhere on earth, it seemed to be entirely inedible. I am confident that with all of the local knowledge of the jungle that I learned that if I were trapped out in the Amazon for five days I would not be able to survive for one of them.
One morning as we canoed along, Alberto pointed out a sloth in a tree beside the riverbank. We maneuvered closer and as the sloth slowly descended from the tree I was able to get closer to the sloth than any animal yet. It was about two feet tall with a black head, and thick greyish fur covering the rest of its body.
“Ya know, there's two types of sloths here in the Amazon,” Tim offered. “The two-toed sloth, and the three-toed sloth. Which do ya reckon that one is?”
Tim and I sat there speculating for a while, and about the time we gave up on a conclusion, Javier pulled them up to the tree, grasped his machete, and began chopping the tree down so that we could get a closer look!
“And the police don’t mind?” I asked Alberto.
“No,” he assured me. “We are authorized tour guides.”
Authorized to molest animals in a national park—I wondered what the exam was like to get that kind of certification.
When the tree collapsed, its trunk, and the sloth’s back, slammed forcefully against the surface of the water. The sloth hardly noticed. Javier balanced along the narrow floating tree trunk, and pried open the sloth’s determined grip. We proceeded to humiliate that poor sloth, posing with him in turn, making him swim for our amusement, and cling to the side of our boat. The sloth seemed more like a stuffed animal than a wild creature.
Tim couldn't resist sexing the creature and determined that he was of the ornery male variety. The sloth tried to defend his personal notions of decency by swiping at Tim with his deadly three inch claws, but his movements were always in slow motion, and there was plenty of time to move aside.
The sloth was a good sport about the whole thing though, and after a half hour or so we thanked him and found him a new tree. Turned out he was a three toed sloth and as we drifted away I could see he had two of them toes peeled back for us.
Tanzania Mania Pt. 1: Picking Up the Pieces
"In Tanzania we have a saying that when you travel, you cleanse your eyes."
-John Wihala
Each day my Tanzanian host father wears a gray suit to work. His undershirt is a yellow and green striped soccer jersey with a giant portrait of President Barack Obama on the front, encircled by stars and stripes, and “The United States of America!” He tops it off with a gulf hat and either black and white dress shoes, or sandals. For the motorcycle ride to work he wears, on top of all this, leather biker pants and jacket with 1920’s biker aviators.
He served in the Tanzanian military, taught in primary school, declined an offer to play profesional soccer for a team in Tanzania, and worked as a miner. These jobs took him throughout Tanzania, and Zambia, until two of his brothers and their wives died of HIV leaving behind many young children. He returned to his home village of Kanani, where he adopted all of their children, and got married. Most his nieces, and nephews, and children have gone to school or moved out on their own, but even with the ones still remaining our house was a hodgepodge of relatives. He has one young niece and two nephews that live here, plus one of his sons and his son’s wife. Mr. Wihala’s wife lives about two days away by bus and is the head teacher at a primary school. They rarely see each other except during times when school is not in session.
Upon his return to Kanani he helped lobby the local authorities to install a pipe system in the village so that people would not have to walk great distances for water. His success in this endeavor gained him respect throughout the area. More recently he served on the police advisory board for Tanzania in Dar Es Salaam. Now he is in charge of several development projects back in the region where he grew up. His work in the development field has taken him to Denmark, and Vietnam. Vietnam he says is his favorite country because “there, they are very serious about development.” He added on another occasion, “I have never seen people so active!”
He was all too enthusiastic to have me volunteer at the local school, and more than happy to let me stay with him and his family. His house is quite remote. We have to walk along a dirt path for over a mile just to get to the dirt road where the “costa”--or large van-- picks up. From there it is another two hours to get to a paved road, and another hour to the city. He was recently interviewed by a newspaper for his work on one of his development projects, and one of the reporters asked him “why do you live all the way out here? You have money. You could live anywhere.” He laughed and replied, “I believe the expression is, ‘Rome was not built in a day.’”
The entire village is beautifully covered in corn and rich sunflowers. The land seems never to curve over the horizon, but sway in rolling hills forever. Our house, like all rural houses in Tanzania, is made of mud brick, with a wooden frame, and in our case, a corrugated metal roof. The house is extremely nice compared to most of our neighbors. We have solar panels, which operate lights at night, and a radio almost 24/7. We also have a TV, and a backup generator. These rarely get used. The furniture is nice, and the decorations are a fine conglomeration of carefully chosen items, and cheap advertising like the plastic coca cola and pepsi beach balls hanging from the living room ceiling.
On one of the tables sits a small framed poem in English with a few couplets about how special birthdays are. This would not seem overtly unusual, except that Tanzanians, as a general rule, do not know the date of their birth. All of their driver’s licenses and birth certificates simply say Jan 1st of the year that they were born. For this reason a common New Years greeting is “How old are you now?”
When Mr. Wihala finally settled down in his home village of Kanani, he took a job as secretary to the man who was responsible for coordinating projects between Kanani and neighboring villages. His boss was bad at his job and the other village coordinators began to rely on Mr. Wihala more and more. After a time, during one of the meetings of village coordinators, Mr. Wihala suggested that they hold regular meetings to address potential problems before they arise, rather than waiting until a problem occurs and then scheduling a meeting sometime in the future. He also suggested that someone be elected to oversee all of the village coordinators and represent them to other village districts. Everyone liked the ideas and voted in favor of them. In the same meeting they elected Mr. Wihala from secretary to leader of all of the village representatives. Since no institutions existed to coordinate projects and problems on an even larger scale, he quickly moved up to become the project coordinator for the entire Njombe region. He assists with all NGO’s and tries to weed through conflicting policies to form practical solutions.
“Have you ever thought about running for office?” I asked him one evening.
“I did once, but I did not bribe anybody,” he chuckled, “so of course I did not win. I made a lot of good speeches, but that is not enough.”
Frustrated by the system, Mr. Wihala wrote a successful grant to the UN, and used the money to teach and disseminate information—written pamphlets, speeches, and meetings—on the proper role of government, and what elected officials should be doing for the people.
“It was very successful," he concluded with his lighthearted smile. "Many people learned a lot, and I angered a lot of politicians. Now I have no chance of running for office.”
I was out of the village for five days during our school’s Easter break. On Easter day, one of Mr. Wihala’s relatives—a cousin who suffering from severe undiagnosed mental illness-slit the throat of a twelve year old boy in the village. The cousin was confused and thought the boy was trying to steel from him. The cousin was taken to jail. Mr. Wihala spent Easter day trying to see that his relative went to a mental institution rather than die in jail. A funeral was held the following day, and people came from different areas to give their condolences.
Two days later when I returned from the city, Mr. Wihala was interviewed by one of the major television news stations for his current agricultural project, ADDA (Asia Denmark Development Association). We were told that a story on his work would air that night. We fired up the generator about forty minutes before the expected time and turned on the news. The generator struggled away, power fading in and out, until finally, just as the introduction to his project appeared, the generator died. A large crack was letting air into the engine, and needed to be welded.
Everyone found the timing comical. Over the course of the next hour Mr. Wihala’s phone rang nonstop from friends and relatives all over the country. “Yes, we are watching right now…yes… thank you…thank you,” he told them in Swahili. The rest of us snickered in the background during each call. “It is sometimes easier to simplify things,” he instructed us.
One day I mentioned in passing the hospital in Paramio.
“Oh yes, I know where that is,” Mr Wihala said. “That’s where I got my leg fixed.”
“Oh? What happened?” I asked.
“I broke it.”
I inquired as to how that happened, and instead of the one sentence “motorcycle accident” explanation that I was expecting, he embarked on an incredible story.
As the leader of several different development organizations, one project that he helped to oversee was the funding and operating of a mill for a small village. With it they could mill their own corn for personal use and for profit. The mill was purchased, and as it so happened, it broke shortly thereafter. Mr. Wihala went to go inform the four heads of the committee in charge of overseeing the mill that it needed to be repaired. An extra three million shillings, or $2,000, had been set aside for upkeep and other expenses. He expected it to cost more than one million shillings to repair the machine.
When he met with the committee it quickly became apparent that they had all withdrawn money from the fund in different amounts, and simply trusted one another to pay it back honestly. They were all dishonest, and “invested the money in personal projects—” Mr. Wihala phrased generously. Ultimately they could muster only 150 shillings between them, or $.10.
Mr. Wihala gave them an ultimatum: “First, you have one week to find a way to get that mill working. Then I will be back to discuss how we will retrieve the money.”
The next morning since he was still in town he decided to go and check with the four committee members to see if they had made any decisions.
They had.
As Mr. Wihala rode through town on his motorcycle a truck idled precariously beside the road such that traffic had to pass between it and a series of large rocks on the other side of the street. Thinking little of it, he continued along. As he passed in front it sped forward towards him. He had time to leap from motorcycle, but could not get out of the way entirely. His left leg was crushed. “Bones were everywhere,” he said.
Fearing that Mr. Wihala would take them to court, and ultimately jail (a death sentence in Tanzania because of the terrible conditions), the four committee members had paid off a group of boys—too young to even have their driver’s licenses—to assassinate him.
After the truck shattered his leg he immediately got out his phone and dialed local friends, family, and the police. The boys, frightened and clueless, suspected that he was drawing a gun, and fled.
“I then asked a woman for some wood and rope for my leg,” Mr. Wihala said, “and someone else to bring me some cloth.”
“And you had to tie your own splint?”
“Yes, and I did not cry,” he declared with conviction and not mere vanity. “I am a leader here. Everyone was afraid, and if they saw me crying they would be too scared to help me.”
After tieing his own splint he meticulously gathered all of the scattered pieces of bone and tied them into the cloth.
While rural Tanzanians may not be well qualified in first aid, they are adept at exacting mob justice. They grabbed heir cars, and motorcycles, and farm tools of potential devastation, and with the help of the police, caught the boys. Fortunately the cops apprehended them first. This meant that the boys were only beaten to within an inch of their life. The mob would have gone the extra distance.
Mr. Wihala was taken to the hospital, and the last thing he remembers is giving the nurse the cloth of bones and instructing her to give it to the doctor. When he came to some seven hours later the first thing he did was ask to see the cloth. It was produced, and when he opened it his bones were still there. Angered and dismayed, he immediately requested to change hospitals.
When he arrived at the new hospital a day or two later the doctors informed him that it was no longer safe to reinsert his bones because his body was fighting off severe infection. They might even need to amputate his leg.
In the meantime the police informed him that the boys were being sent to jail. He told the police to wait. “If they do not have to cut off my leg, than they can go free. But if they do, then I hope they die in jail. In the meantime they will be praying for me, and for my leg.”
After two restless months he learned that they would not have to cut off his leg. The police demanded that they be bribed to not throw the boys in jail. Mr. Wihala refused, both on principle, and because he knew that it would be more difficult for the police to incarcerate them, than let them go.
The new doctors re-broke his leg, cut him open, and reinserted his bone fragments. After the surgery the doctors informed him that he had done an incredible job of collecting his own bones.
“Everything fit back together perfectly,” the doctors told him. “Not a single piece was missing.”
“I was very proud of that,” Mr. Wihala added—and damn right he should be!
One month after the bones were reinserted he was needed, in his role as assistant chief of the police advisory board for Tanzania, to go oversee a meeting two days drive away.
“I was important by that time,” he said smiling, “so they found me nice transportation to get me their, and I led the meeting.
The four committee members who were ultimately responsible for the attempted murder, took their stolen money and fled into hiding. Some of them reappeared several years later, sick and desperate now that their money had run out. Mr. Wihala did not bother with them when they returned.
“People respect me more after this because they could see that I was kind. Even today when I saw members of the boys families they were very polite and respectful to me. But also I think that they are afraid of me,” he laughed lightheartedly, “afraid that I am still bitter and angry at them, and that I may someday want revenge.”
-John Wihala
Each day my Tanzanian host father wears a gray suit to work. His undershirt is a yellow and green striped soccer jersey with a giant portrait of President Barack Obama on the front, encircled by stars and stripes, and “The United States of America!” He tops it off with a gulf hat and either black and white dress shoes, or sandals. For the motorcycle ride to work he wears, on top of all this, leather biker pants and jacket with 1920’s biker aviators.
He served in the Tanzanian military, taught in primary school, declined an offer to play profesional soccer for a team in Tanzania, and worked as a miner. These jobs took him throughout Tanzania, and Zambia, until two of his brothers and their wives died of HIV leaving behind many young children. He returned to his home village of Kanani, where he adopted all of their children, and got married. Most his nieces, and nephews, and children have gone to school or moved out on their own, but even with the ones still remaining our house was a hodgepodge of relatives. He has one young niece and two nephews that live here, plus one of his sons and his son’s wife. Mr. Wihala’s wife lives about two days away by bus and is the head teacher at a primary school. They rarely see each other except during times when school is not in session.
Upon his return to Kanani he helped lobby the local authorities to install a pipe system in the village so that people would not have to walk great distances for water. His success in this endeavor gained him respect throughout the area. More recently he served on the police advisory board for Tanzania in Dar Es Salaam. Now he is in charge of several development projects back in the region where he grew up. His work in the development field has taken him to Denmark, and Vietnam. Vietnam he says is his favorite country because “there, they are very serious about development.” He added on another occasion, “I have never seen people so active!”
He was all too enthusiastic to have me volunteer at the local school, and more than happy to let me stay with him and his family. His house is quite remote. We have to walk along a dirt path for over a mile just to get to the dirt road where the “costa”--or large van-- picks up. From there it is another two hours to get to a paved road, and another hour to the city. He was recently interviewed by a newspaper for his work on one of his development projects, and one of the reporters asked him “why do you live all the way out here? You have money. You could live anywhere.” He laughed and replied, “I believe the expression is, ‘Rome was not built in a day.’”
The entire village is beautifully covered in corn and rich sunflowers. The land seems never to curve over the horizon, but sway in rolling hills forever. Our house, like all rural houses in Tanzania, is made of mud brick, with a wooden frame, and in our case, a corrugated metal roof. The house is extremely nice compared to most of our neighbors. We have solar panels, which operate lights at night, and a radio almost 24/7. We also have a TV, and a backup generator. These rarely get used. The furniture is nice, and the decorations are a fine conglomeration of carefully chosen items, and cheap advertising like the plastic coca cola and pepsi beach balls hanging from the living room ceiling.
On one of the tables sits a small framed poem in English with a few couplets about how special birthdays are. This would not seem overtly unusual, except that Tanzanians, as a general rule, do not know the date of their birth. All of their driver’s licenses and birth certificates simply say Jan 1st of the year that they were born. For this reason a common New Years greeting is “How old are you now?”
When Mr. Wihala finally settled down in his home village of Kanani, he took a job as secretary to the man who was responsible for coordinating projects between Kanani and neighboring villages. His boss was bad at his job and the other village coordinators began to rely on Mr. Wihala more and more. After a time, during one of the meetings of village coordinators, Mr. Wihala suggested that they hold regular meetings to address potential problems before they arise, rather than waiting until a problem occurs and then scheduling a meeting sometime in the future. He also suggested that someone be elected to oversee all of the village coordinators and represent them to other village districts. Everyone liked the ideas and voted in favor of them. In the same meeting they elected Mr. Wihala from secretary to leader of all of the village representatives. Since no institutions existed to coordinate projects and problems on an even larger scale, he quickly moved up to become the project coordinator for the entire Njombe region. He assists with all NGO’s and tries to weed through conflicting policies to form practical solutions.
“Have you ever thought about running for office?” I asked him one evening.
“I did once, but I did not bribe anybody,” he chuckled, “so of course I did not win. I made a lot of good speeches, but that is not enough.”
Frustrated by the system, Mr. Wihala wrote a successful grant to the UN, and used the money to teach and disseminate information—written pamphlets, speeches, and meetings—on the proper role of government, and what elected officials should be doing for the people.
“It was very successful," he concluded with his lighthearted smile. "Many people learned a lot, and I angered a lot of politicians. Now I have no chance of running for office.”
I was out of the village for five days during our school’s Easter break. On Easter day, one of Mr. Wihala’s relatives—a cousin who suffering from severe undiagnosed mental illness-slit the throat of a twelve year old boy in the village. The cousin was confused and thought the boy was trying to steel from him. The cousin was taken to jail. Mr. Wihala spent Easter day trying to see that his relative went to a mental institution rather than die in jail. A funeral was held the following day, and people came from different areas to give their condolences.
Two days later when I returned from the city, Mr. Wihala was interviewed by one of the major television news stations for his current agricultural project, ADDA (Asia Denmark Development Association). We were told that a story on his work would air that night. We fired up the generator about forty minutes before the expected time and turned on the news. The generator struggled away, power fading in and out, until finally, just as the introduction to his project appeared, the generator died. A large crack was letting air into the engine, and needed to be welded.
Everyone found the timing comical. Over the course of the next hour Mr. Wihala’s phone rang nonstop from friends and relatives all over the country. “Yes, we are watching right now…yes… thank you…thank you,” he told them in Swahili. The rest of us snickered in the background during each call. “It is sometimes easier to simplify things,” he instructed us.
One day I mentioned in passing the hospital in Paramio.
“Oh yes, I know where that is,” Mr Wihala said. “That’s where I got my leg fixed.”
“Oh? What happened?” I asked.
“I broke it.”
I inquired as to how that happened, and instead of the one sentence “motorcycle accident” explanation that I was expecting, he embarked on an incredible story.
As the leader of several different development organizations, one project that he helped to oversee was the funding and operating of a mill for a small village. With it they could mill their own corn for personal use and for profit. The mill was purchased, and as it so happened, it broke shortly thereafter. Mr. Wihala went to go inform the four heads of the committee in charge of overseeing the mill that it needed to be repaired. An extra three million shillings, or $2,000, had been set aside for upkeep and other expenses. He expected it to cost more than one million shillings to repair the machine.
When he met with the committee it quickly became apparent that they had all withdrawn money from the fund in different amounts, and simply trusted one another to pay it back honestly. They were all dishonest, and “invested the money in personal projects—” Mr. Wihala phrased generously. Ultimately they could muster only 150 shillings between them, or $.10.
Mr. Wihala gave them an ultimatum: “First, you have one week to find a way to get that mill working. Then I will be back to discuss how we will retrieve the money.”
The next morning since he was still in town he decided to go and check with the four committee members to see if they had made any decisions.
They had.
As Mr. Wihala rode through town on his motorcycle a truck idled precariously beside the road such that traffic had to pass between it and a series of large rocks on the other side of the street. Thinking little of it, he continued along. As he passed in front it sped forward towards him. He had time to leap from motorcycle, but could not get out of the way entirely. His left leg was crushed. “Bones were everywhere,” he said.
Fearing that Mr. Wihala would take them to court, and ultimately jail (a death sentence in Tanzania because of the terrible conditions), the four committee members had paid off a group of boys—too young to even have their driver’s licenses—to assassinate him.
After the truck shattered his leg he immediately got out his phone and dialed local friends, family, and the police. The boys, frightened and clueless, suspected that he was drawing a gun, and fled.
“I then asked a woman for some wood and rope for my leg,” Mr. Wihala said, “and someone else to bring me some cloth.”
“And you had to tie your own splint?”
“Yes, and I did not cry,” he declared with conviction and not mere vanity. “I am a leader here. Everyone was afraid, and if they saw me crying they would be too scared to help me.”
After tieing his own splint he meticulously gathered all of the scattered pieces of bone and tied them into the cloth.
While rural Tanzanians may not be well qualified in first aid, they are adept at exacting mob justice. They grabbed heir cars, and motorcycles, and farm tools of potential devastation, and with the help of the police, caught the boys. Fortunately the cops apprehended them first. This meant that the boys were only beaten to within an inch of their life. The mob would have gone the extra distance.
Mr. Wihala was taken to the hospital, and the last thing he remembers is giving the nurse the cloth of bones and instructing her to give it to the doctor. When he came to some seven hours later the first thing he did was ask to see the cloth. It was produced, and when he opened it his bones were still there. Angered and dismayed, he immediately requested to change hospitals.
When he arrived at the new hospital a day or two later the doctors informed him that it was no longer safe to reinsert his bones because his body was fighting off severe infection. They might even need to amputate his leg.
In the meantime the police informed him that the boys were being sent to jail. He told the police to wait. “If they do not have to cut off my leg, than they can go free. But if they do, then I hope they die in jail. In the meantime they will be praying for me, and for my leg.”
After two restless months he learned that they would not have to cut off his leg. The police demanded that they be bribed to not throw the boys in jail. Mr. Wihala refused, both on principle, and because he knew that it would be more difficult for the police to incarcerate them, than let them go.
The new doctors re-broke his leg, cut him open, and reinserted his bone fragments. After the surgery the doctors informed him that he had done an incredible job of collecting his own bones.
“Everything fit back together perfectly,” the doctors told him. “Not a single piece was missing.”
“I was very proud of that,” Mr. Wihala added—and damn right he should be!
One month after the bones were reinserted he was needed, in his role as assistant chief of the police advisory board for Tanzania, to go oversee a meeting two days drive away.
“I was important by that time,” he said smiling, “so they found me nice transportation to get me their, and I led the meeting.
The four committee members who were ultimately responsible for the attempted murder, took their stolen money and fled into hiding. Some of them reappeared several years later, sick and desperate now that their money had run out. Mr. Wihala did not bother with them when they returned.
“People respect me more after this because they could see that I was kind. Even today when I saw members of the boys families they were very polite and respectful to me. But also I think that they are afraid of me,” he laughed lightheartedly, “afraid that I am still bitter and angry at them, and that I may someday want revenge.”
Looking Into the Light
"Open wide please."
Buddy strained his jaw, and squinted uncomfortably beneath the bright light. The doctor had a face of repulsive green flesh. His sweat shimmered in the light, creating the illusion of fresh decay. Buddy half expected to see maggots crawling in and out of the cavernous grey dimples and wide unearthly eye sockets. Noxious fumes of perspiration mixed with vapors of formaldehyde, giving Buddy the impression of being present for his own autopsy.
A pain distinct to the probings of sharp metal along sensitive teeth and gums was accompanied by an unpleasant serrating sound. Buddy felt self-conscious, not just because a green face with beet red eyes was baring down on him while he awkwardly contorted all of his facial features, but because beneath that hideous facade lurked an imposing otherworldly authority.
At this moment Buddy felt great pressure to appear to be a model citizen, but knew that he was less than his ordinarily immaculate self. He hadn't brushed his teeth in more than twenty-four hours. His clothes were ripped and mud-ridden.
"Would you say that you take good care of yourself?" Came a gurgley voice from beyond the bright light. The question was accompanied, Buddy felt sure, by a look of dissatisfaction. Buddy shifted nervously in his seat, but the straps restraining his body accorded him little freedom of movement. This was beginning to feel less like an examination and more like a police interrogation--a situation Buddy was all too familiar with. Buddy rotated his jaw, relaxed his flushed cheeks.
"Well, ya see, ordinarily I'ma pristine example a model citizenry. Careful with my appearance dont begin to say the half of it. But ya see, there is some extrapolatin' circumstances at the moment. Got myself into a bit of a predicament 'fore I got here. Started with this negligee, really. I was tryin it on when--" Buddy was interrupted by the sound of a drill and the harrowing silhouette of an approaching blade, eager to inflict more pain.
When the exam was complete the restraining straps were released. Buddy felt as free as a dog without its muzzle. "Have you ever looked into using a facial cream?” Buddy said, leaning closer to the doctor's face. “Herbicides maybe in your case? I happin' to be an expert pertainin' to both, and I know its not easy to sow the seeds of hygiene along ones porous pastures, but with the proper mix of chemicals one can achieve remarkable results in complexion. Personally I use a careful blend of five different--"
"That is the last of the exams,” the doctor interrupted. “You are free to go." He gestured a tentacle towards one of the orderlies. As Buddy began to leave the doctor patted him amiably on the shoulder, leaving behind a streak of slimy sweat that adhered his shirt to his skin. Buddy followed the orderly through the automatic doors and into the hallway.
Two long glowing tubes ran along the upper corners of the ceiling, lighting the hallway in a strange fluorescent glow. The walls were grey and smooth and curved endlessly to the right so you could never see more than a short distance ahead. The monotony was broken only occasionally by a small round window on the left side. Buddy stopped and peered out. A small blue and white sphere filled most of the horizon. Buddy stared at it intently.
“Nice view a the ocean,” Buddy declared. “I always wanted to live somewhere I could see the water. Ain't got much where I come from.”
The orderly waited impatiently while Buddy admired the view. He shifted his gaze from the earth to the sun just over its horizon, where he stared until his eyes began to hurt. The orderly tugged on his shirt and the two of them continued walking. Buddy rubbed his eyes.
"Exams check out okay?" Buddy inquired.
"We did find a growing cluster of benign cancer cells in one of the earlier exams, but we had it evexerated. You will never get cancer again."
Buddy blinked slowly. Nodded. "Preciate that. Cant wait to tell my mother. She's always worryin bout me gettin the cancer. Been sayin for years that rectal cancer is the second most deadly form of the cancer after the lung cancer and if I keep fraternizin I's bound to catch it. God's way of punishin me, she said. Recommended that I take up smokin instead. I said two wrongs dont make a right. She said it ain’t wrong. I says which, the smokin or the fraternizin?"
"Whoops, this is the wrong way," the orderly said. The two of them had dead ended in a small room, empty, except for a tank of water on one side.
"Whatsit for?" Buddy wondered.
"It's an experiment."
"It's empty."
"Precisely. Empty of life that is. Yet it contains all of the necessary ingredients." The orderly smiled proudly. "When electricity is passed through this tank of water and basic elements, it transforms itself into amino acid chains not unlike DNA."
"Transforms itself?" Buddy repeated slowly, curling his long beard around his finger.
"Well, it does so in a similar sense that ropes, when left to the whims of the wind, will tie themselves into various knots."
Buddy nodded. He understood knots.
“But unlike knots it has been observed that amino acid chains, while they are not alive, follow certain rules of natural selection. The amino acid reactions compete with one another, gobbling up the limited resources at different rates. As lightning struck our early planets, it drove the construction of these amino acid chains. As the amino acid natural selection grew more complicated it produced some sort of primitive primordial cell. Computers are constantly monitoring the progress of this tank for signs of life."
"Huh. So how long fore you expect the water to get murky?"
"Current estimates put the span of time that it took for life to emerge on earth at around one billion years. Everything is based on probability, so if you scale down the size of your oceans, to this hundred liter tank, than we can expect to see results any time within the next eight trillion years. Needless to say we have all been feeling apprehensive with suspense since we began the experiment last week."
Buddy hunched over and squinted inside the tank, tapped the glass, smiled longingly. "I had a fish tank once with a fish in it. It was bright orange with a blue stripe round its neck. My first fashion inspiration really, but my parents wouldn't let me wear the matching fish outfit I made. Broke ol' Fishy's heart. Fishy was 'is name ya see. My Pop never proved a Fishy. Said hangin round spicious charachters 'ad gotten 'im into trouble his whole life and he didn't want me follwin 'im down the same dirt road. Stick to the pavement Pop always said. But always keep an eye on the rearview mirror.
“Pop wasn't always great at followin 'is own advice. It was damn near impossible, he would say, to keep one eye on the road, and one on the mirror when ya had to tilt your head back to put the bottle to your lips. Somethin had to give. Most often it was the mirror first, sometimes the road. Us kids was with 'im once when that happened. Plowed straight through a house like a rotten fence we did. Wood boards was flyin all round us like a goddamned tornado. Sounded like momma's cookin.
“By the time pop finished his swig we was out the other end. If he was aware a what happened he never let on. Sides a that truck had so much character from all a pop's multitaskin ya couldn't hardly notice a change. Only evidence a the incident was a magazine that had flown up from the livin room and landed itself on the windshield. It was flipped to an advertisement: there was a cowboy ridin on a white horse with a lady sittin behind 'im. Yonder was a big red barn with an open door. The cowboy was holdin a lasso he'd used to catch two young men that peered to a scaped from the barn. Them boys had greased back hair and was wearin fine suits and sodden expressions. Below the advertisement it read 'Dont Be a Filthy Stray!' The cowboy was awful proud a hisself, but then again, I woulda been too if I'da managed to wrangle them two boys with one lasso. When my pop saw that picture he let out a good whisky wind a curses bout them damn homosexules.
“But ya know what the funny thing was? The windshield wipers got jammed on that magazine. Just stuck there in front of me. Real symbolic like. Never could figure out what they was really advertisin. I dont know if I was just gettin rebellious like them wipers or what, but I felt for those boys. Didn't seem right to call'em filthy when they was dressed so nice. They was my second fashion inspiration after Fishy.
“Poor Fishy. He was a martyr, he was. One day my brother dropped a rat in the tank. Rat ate poor Fishy, him bein trappen and all. Rat drowned 'for it could 'scape though so I suppose Fishy got 'is revenge in the end. Guess what I been tryin to say is, well, the therapist down at the correctional facility always tell me with a double dose of optimism and persistence you can make anythin happen. If you mix in them two ingredients I bet you could have a bloated up rat in that thar tank any day now."
The orderly shook his lumpy green head. “If all that was able to manifest itself from the void between your ears than I am confident that the universe is capable of anything.”
“Preciate that,” Buddy said with a smile.
The two doubled back and continued through the halls. At last they stepped into a large cafeteria. An eclectic group of people was huddled together at the center of a long table. When the door behind Buddy closed with a mechanical swoosh, the group turned in unison and stared with timid silence. Buddy nodded at them and tipped the hat he didn't have.
Buddy was led over to a counter where another orderly plopped several mounds of multicolored mush onto a tray and handed it over to him. He was directed to sit.
"Good God what have they done to you?" Exclaimed a British gentleman in a ruffled suit.
"Oh you mean this?" Buddy said looking down at his scrapes and scratches and torn clothes. "They ain't done this. They been real good to me. Cured me a the cancer."
"Only to use you as the carrier to a deadly new plague no doubt."
“I ain't feelin sick. Thanks for askin though. Name's Buddy.”
“I am Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd.” He extended Buddy a hand. “Please excuse the rest of the company, as they do not speak English. The womman here beside me is Filipino. I recognize that beautiful language from my vacation soiree there just last year. The fat man beside her, Mongolian perhaps. That pygmy off to the side there has been keeping to himself for the most part. He appears quiet and harmless, by I am nevertheless suspicious of those frightening feral eyes. There were more of us in here you know, but they keep shuffling us in and out like cattle. Its been hours since they came to claim someone. Their restraint over their obvious bloodlust must be wavering. I'm afraid we haven't much time left."
"What makes you think them aliens is ill intentioned?" Buddy asked. "They seem like friendly folks to me."
"The fact that they have taken me, of all people, makes their violent intentions painfully obvious."
"Why's that?"
"Don’t tell me you are as naive as the rest of these heathens. I, Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd am an esteemed member of the House of Lords. I was in the midst of regaling my people with a speech--a tribute to the sensibilities of British freedoms and rule—when these green gestapos mistook me, no doubt, for the leader of earth. An honest mistake really. In the midst of my powerful pontifications a light appeared over me. I thought nothing of it naturally, until my feet suddenly left the ground. But as London shrank beneath my feet I was not concerned for my own well being.” Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd stood up and placed an emphatic hand against his chest. “Like a true leader I felt concern only for my subjects. How lost and frightened they must feel to lose their leader, their shepherd. I just hope that they are able to maintain some minimal sense of order in my absence."
"That there is awful unusual, but if your right, I cant figure what them aliens want me for."
"What were the circumstances of your abduction?"
Buddy stared blankly.
“How did you get here?”
“Well I guess you could say it all started with this here negligee. I'd seen it when I was in Bloomingdales the other day, and I thought it'd look awful perty on me. I dont got the money for it though, so I decided to hide in the janitor's closet and wait til the store closed. When I crept out the closet it was real dark. Could hardly see where I was goin. But I found that dress and went to the changing room and tried it on, and it fit real good. I was delighted, and got to talkin to one a them perty plastic people they always got hangin round. 'Oh, I jus love your new negligee she said.' I laughed cause we was wearin matchin outifts. 'Youre lookin mighty fine yourself' I said, slidin an arm roun her waste. Everythin was goin real nice til a light shined in my face and I heard a man shout. Next thing I knew I heard a gunshot, and that poor lady's head exploded into tiny plastic bits against the side a my face. It was right about that time that I decided to leave. I left through the backdoors of the loading dock, to where I'd parked my car, and sped off. Made it to the highway fore them police got in behind me.
"Ya know I tried to stick to the road my whole life like my pop said but I always felt maybe the road just ain't right for me. It started to rain a bit and I switched on the windshield wipers. Lookin at them wipers got me to feelin rebellious all over again. I felt like my whole life had been one big ol' circle. I'd had enough. I decided to spin the wheel of fate, and by that I mean the steering wheel. I crashed through a white fence, and drove through an open field til the car got jammed in a ditch. I didn't know what else to do, so I got out, kicked off my high heels, and started to run and scramble through the brush and the trees. When a light appeared over my head I stopped runnin. Figured the cops 'ad caught me and it was time to give up.”
“Strange,” said Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd.
“Yea, I guess you could say Iv'e always been kinda different. Ain't always been easy. Tried to kill myself once. Took the top off a bottle a sleepin pills, stuck it under the faucet, and gulped it all down. Turns out that my younger brother, bout fourteen at the time, had been stealin mamma's medicine from the cabinet. When she found out she decided rather than yell at the boy, she'd jus switch around the pills in them bottles to teach 'im a lesson. When the fifty alka seltzer exploded in my stomach one right after the other I spent the next two days in the bathroom plop-ploppin from one end, and fizz-fizzin out th'uther.”
Buddy rambled on for a while, until the group fell back into the silence that Buddy had found them. The uneasiness in the air was palpable, but no one knew what to do. Suddenly Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd raised his hands above his head, “I've had enough of this!” he shouted, and then slammed his fists down.
The plastic fork beneath his fist ricocheted off the table and flew towards the pygmy's face. With savage speed the pygmy pulled his food tray in front of his face, shielding himself from the four-pronged attack. Dining debris scattered from the tray across the table and into the lap of the flabbergasted Filipino. In one swift motion the pygmy lunged forward and sunk the fork into the tense tendons of Charle's beefy left hand. The force of the stab cracked the plastic fork in two. The “click” of the breaking plastic punctuated the air like the crescendo of a classic pygmy punchline. The pygmy jumped back and began to laugh.
"Bloody hell!" The politician hollered, leaping to his feet and waving his half forked hand in the air.
“I demand a surgeon and four bandages, lest I rally the forces of the British navy in their entirety for the purpose of cremating this coal colored cretin and sending this flimsy flying frisbee falling to the depths of the British channel!"
People from England talk like poetry, Buddy mused.
Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd marched up to the food counter. “That mischievous midget is not an accurate representation of our species," Charles barked at the orderly. "We are a highly sophisticated race with advanced nuclear weapons capable of more than sufficient retaliation."
"We are well aware of your level of sophistication," the lunch line orderly groaned indifferently.
You could wring enough con-den-scension out a them words to fill a trough, Buddy thought.
"In that case I am willing to negotiate a ceasefire," the politician continued.
"Our ship is not fitted with weapons and the nations of your planet are unaware of our existence. We are a research vessel. We have no interest in colonizing your planet."
"I will not stand here and meet your threats with passivity," Charles bellowed.
"Sir? Sir? Are you listening to me?"
"We have been stockpiling nuclear weapons all these years, not so that we can destroy ourselves--though at times I'm sure it has appeared that way--but out of keen foresight for the inevitable battle with extraterrestrial life over limited resources!"
"Sir space is infinite. There is hardly a lack of--"
"Alright. Your steadfast perseverance indicates a great deal of experience in the hostage negotiations of planets. We will give you Australia. They have been led to believe by their figurehead government that they are now independent of the crown, but I speak on behalf of the entire commonwealth when I say that the deal is more than generous, and that, if anything, their false sense of autonomy should make the exchange all the more expedient."
The orderly slithered away. Charles shouted after him.
"Your not going to get a better offer than THAT I'm afraid. I will wait while you pass on the message to your leader!"
Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd paced the floor in front of the food counter for nearly an hour.
"The arrogant bastards have refused my offer" Charles declared . "It's war they want, bloodshed. They need our women as walking wombs, our children as batteries. They brought us here to study our weaknesses but they did not consider that this plan could backfire. They have lured the fox into the henhouse as they say. We are in the unique position of being able to strike at them from within. It will be a noble self sacrifice, but I was destined for it. The Great Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd was divinely lifted into the sky to save the world. The second coming they may say. And whose to say they're wrong? In short, I am sacrificing myself, not for their sins, but their lives!"
Warren stepped closer to the table, gestured for everyone to lean closer, "This is what we have to do..."
When the doors to the cafeteria swooshed open the doctor slithered into the room. Buddy approached the doctor, holding the sides of his polka dotted neglige and walking with careful grace.
“Howdy doctor,” Buddy said, flashing the doctor his most innocent bearded smile, and blinking repeatedly.
“Now!” The Great Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd shouted and began waving his arms in the air like an orchestra conductor.
Buddy lifted his neglige and amidst a ferocious blur of polka dots the pygmy leapt as if from the thick bush of his African home and stabbed the doctor repeatedly with his favorite fork. The Filipino appeared from under a table and began flinging the rest of her cutlery with ninja-like accuracy. Even the spoons stuck into the doctors soft flesh. The Great Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd raised both of his hands high in the air, balled them into tight fists and then swung them downwards in a dramatic display of force. The massive Mongolian fell from the rafters above and landed on the doctor, flattening him like a slug.
"We have done it!" Charles exclaimed. The others stood hunched over, panting and covered in the green grease of victory. "Their hostile alien conquest is nearly thwarted. We must be off to the main computer!"
In one fluid snake-like motion the doctor's body coalesced back together and rose to a standing position. The depressions in his body where their blows had landed began to restructure themselves into their original position.
"You are all idiots and fools," the doctor remarked. "We didn't come here to invade your planet, or murder its inhabitants, an all too human fantasy. We are nonviolent by nature, but after minimal interaction I now completely empathize with your race's propensity to the contrary."
"Does that mean that we can go back to earth?" Buddy asked cautiously.
"It means your not fit to go anywhere else. Its a miracle you have survived at all. The existence of your species is antithetical to all known laws of the universe."
Buddy hung his head, feeling once again as if he had been a disappointment. He didn’t want to stay, but he didn't want to go back home either. There was nothing there for him but a jail sentence, a wrecked car, more disappointed faces.
As they led him down the hall to the exit platform Buddy mustered the courage to ask the orderly a question. The answer, terse at it was, filled Buddy with a new sense of hope and delight.
When the blinding flash of light subsided Buddy's eyes looked out at a whole new world. Buddy finally felt at home. Above the Eifel Tower a distant dot disappeared with a wink.
"Pardon me maam," Buddy said to a passing stranger. The seething look of disdain that was cast down on him--centuries ahead of its American counterpart in refinement--was overlooked by Buddy. "Do you know where I can find a Bloomingdales round here? I just hafta get outa these clothes quicker than honey in a hive fire!"
Buddy strained his jaw, and squinted uncomfortably beneath the bright light. The doctor had a face of repulsive green flesh. His sweat shimmered in the light, creating the illusion of fresh decay. Buddy half expected to see maggots crawling in and out of the cavernous grey dimples and wide unearthly eye sockets. Noxious fumes of perspiration mixed with vapors of formaldehyde, giving Buddy the impression of being present for his own autopsy.
A pain distinct to the probings of sharp metal along sensitive teeth and gums was accompanied by an unpleasant serrating sound. Buddy felt self-conscious, not just because a green face with beet red eyes was baring down on him while he awkwardly contorted all of his facial features, but because beneath that hideous facade lurked an imposing otherworldly authority.
At this moment Buddy felt great pressure to appear to be a model citizen, but knew that he was less than his ordinarily immaculate self. He hadn't brushed his teeth in more than twenty-four hours. His clothes were ripped and mud-ridden.
"Would you say that you take good care of yourself?" Came a gurgley voice from beyond the bright light. The question was accompanied, Buddy felt sure, by a look of dissatisfaction. Buddy shifted nervously in his seat, but the straps restraining his body accorded him little freedom of movement. This was beginning to feel less like an examination and more like a police interrogation--a situation Buddy was all too familiar with. Buddy rotated his jaw, relaxed his flushed cheeks.
"Well, ya see, ordinarily I'ma pristine example a model citizenry. Careful with my appearance dont begin to say the half of it. But ya see, there is some extrapolatin' circumstances at the moment. Got myself into a bit of a predicament 'fore I got here. Started with this negligee, really. I was tryin it on when--" Buddy was interrupted by the sound of a drill and the harrowing silhouette of an approaching blade, eager to inflict more pain.
When the exam was complete the restraining straps were released. Buddy felt as free as a dog without its muzzle. "Have you ever looked into using a facial cream?” Buddy said, leaning closer to the doctor's face. “Herbicides maybe in your case? I happin' to be an expert pertainin' to both, and I know its not easy to sow the seeds of hygiene along ones porous pastures, but with the proper mix of chemicals one can achieve remarkable results in complexion. Personally I use a careful blend of five different--"
"That is the last of the exams,” the doctor interrupted. “You are free to go." He gestured a tentacle towards one of the orderlies. As Buddy began to leave the doctor patted him amiably on the shoulder, leaving behind a streak of slimy sweat that adhered his shirt to his skin. Buddy followed the orderly through the automatic doors and into the hallway.
Two long glowing tubes ran along the upper corners of the ceiling, lighting the hallway in a strange fluorescent glow. The walls were grey and smooth and curved endlessly to the right so you could never see more than a short distance ahead. The monotony was broken only occasionally by a small round window on the left side. Buddy stopped and peered out. A small blue and white sphere filled most of the horizon. Buddy stared at it intently.
“Nice view a the ocean,” Buddy declared. “I always wanted to live somewhere I could see the water. Ain't got much where I come from.”
The orderly waited impatiently while Buddy admired the view. He shifted his gaze from the earth to the sun just over its horizon, where he stared until his eyes began to hurt. The orderly tugged on his shirt and the two of them continued walking. Buddy rubbed his eyes.
"Exams check out okay?" Buddy inquired.
"We did find a growing cluster of benign cancer cells in one of the earlier exams, but we had it evexerated. You will never get cancer again."
Buddy blinked slowly. Nodded. "Preciate that. Cant wait to tell my mother. She's always worryin bout me gettin the cancer. Been sayin for years that rectal cancer is the second most deadly form of the cancer after the lung cancer and if I keep fraternizin I's bound to catch it. God's way of punishin me, she said. Recommended that I take up smokin instead. I said two wrongs dont make a right. She said it ain’t wrong. I says which, the smokin or the fraternizin?"
"Whoops, this is the wrong way," the orderly said. The two of them had dead ended in a small room, empty, except for a tank of water on one side.
"Whatsit for?" Buddy wondered.
"It's an experiment."
"It's empty."
"Precisely. Empty of life that is. Yet it contains all of the necessary ingredients." The orderly smiled proudly. "When electricity is passed through this tank of water and basic elements, it transforms itself into amino acid chains not unlike DNA."
"Transforms itself?" Buddy repeated slowly, curling his long beard around his finger.
"Well, it does so in a similar sense that ropes, when left to the whims of the wind, will tie themselves into various knots."
Buddy nodded. He understood knots.
“But unlike knots it has been observed that amino acid chains, while they are not alive, follow certain rules of natural selection. The amino acid reactions compete with one another, gobbling up the limited resources at different rates. As lightning struck our early planets, it drove the construction of these amino acid chains. As the amino acid natural selection grew more complicated it produced some sort of primitive primordial cell. Computers are constantly monitoring the progress of this tank for signs of life."
"Huh. So how long fore you expect the water to get murky?"
"Current estimates put the span of time that it took for life to emerge on earth at around one billion years. Everything is based on probability, so if you scale down the size of your oceans, to this hundred liter tank, than we can expect to see results any time within the next eight trillion years. Needless to say we have all been feeling apprehensive with suspense since we began the experiment last week."
Buddy hunched over and squinted inside the tank, tapped the glass, smiled longingly. "I had a fish tank once with a fish in it. It was bright orange with a blue stripe round its neck. My first fashion inspiration really, but my parents wouldn't let me wear the matching fish outfit I made. Broke ol' Fishy's heart. Fishy was 'is name ya see. My Pop never proved a Fishy. Said hangin round spicious charachters 'ad gotten 'im into trouble his whole life and he didn't want me follwin 'im down the same dirt road. Stick to the pavement Pop always said. But always keep an eye on the rearview mirror.
“Pop wasn't always great at followin 'is own advice. It was damn near impossible, he would say, to keep one eye on the road, and one on the mirror when ya had to tilt your head back to put the bottle to your lips. Somethin had to give. Most often it was the mirror first, sometimes the road. Us kids was with 'im once when that happened. Plowed straight through a house like a rotten fence we did. Wood boards was flyin all round us like a goddamned tornado. Sounded like momma's cookin.
“By the time pop finished his swig we was out the other end. If he was aware a what happened he never let on. Sides a that truck had so much character from all a pop's multitaskin ya couldn't hardly notice a change. Only evidence a the incident was a magazine that had flown up from the livin room and landed itself on the windshield. It was flipped to an advertisement: there was a cowboy ridin on a white horse with a lady sittin behind 'im. Yonder was a big red barn with an open door. The cowboy was holdin a lasso he'd used to catch two young men that peered to a scaped from the barn. Them boys had greased back hair and was wearin fine suits and sodden expressions. Below the advertisement it read 'Dont Be a Filthy Stray!' The cowboy was awful proud a hisself, but then again, I woulda been too if I'da managed to wrangle them two boys with one lasso. When my pop saw that picture he let out a good whisky wind a curses bout them damn homosexules.
“But ya know what the funny thing was? The windshield wipers got jammed on that magazine. Just stuck there in front of me. Real symbolic like. Never could figure out what they was really advertisin. I dont know if I was just gettin rebellious like them wipers or what, but I felt for those boys. Didn't seem right to call'em filthy when they was dressed so nice. They was my second fashion inspiration after Fishy.
“Poor Fishy. He was a martyr, he was. One day my brother dropped a rat in the tank. Rat ate poor Fishy, him bein trappen and all. Rat drowned 'for it could 'scape though so I suppose Fishy got 'is revenge in the end. Guess what I been tryin to say is, well, the therapist down at the correctional facility always tell me with a double dose of optimism and persistence you can make anythin happen. If you mix in them two ingredients I bet you could have a bloated up rat in that thar tank any day now."
The orderly shook his lumpy green head. “If all that was able to manifest itself from the void between your ears than I am confident that the universe is capable of anything.”
“Preciate that,” Buddy said with a smile.
The two doubled back and continued through the halls. At last they stepped into a large cafeteria. An eclectic group of people was huddled together at the center of a long table. When the door behind Buddy closed with a mechanical swoosh, the group turned in unison and stared with timid silence. Buddy nodded at them and tipped the hat he didn't have.
Buddy was led over to a counter where another orderly plopped several mounds of multicolored mush onto a tray and handed it over to him. He was directed to sit.
"Good God what have they done to you?" Exclaimed a British gentleman in a ruffled suit.
"Oh you mean this?" Buddy said looking down at his scrapes and scratches and torn clothes. "They ain't done this. They been real good to me. Cured me a the cancer."
"Only to use you as the carrier to a deadly new plague no doubt."
“I ain't feelin sick. Thanks for askin though. Name's Buddy.”
“I am Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd.” He extended Buddy a hand. “Please excuse the rest of the company, as they do not speak English. The womman here beside me is Filipino. I recognize that beautiful language from my vacation soiree there just last year. The fat man beside her, Mongolian perhaps. That pygmy off to the side there has been keeping to himself for the most part. He appears quiet and harmless, by I am nevertheless suspicious of those frightening feral eyes. There were more of us in here you know, but they keep shuffling us in and out like cattle. Its been hours since they came to claim someone. Their restraint over their obvious bloodlust must be wavering. I'm afraid we haven't much time left."
"What makes you think them aliens is ill intentioned?" Buddy asked. "They seem like friendly folks to me."
"The fact that they have taken me, of all people, makes their violent intentions painfully obvious."
"Why's that?"
"Don’t tell me you are as naive as the rest of these heathens. I, Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd am an esteemed member of the House of Lords. I was in the midst of regaling my people with a speech--a tribute to the sensibilities of British freedoms and rule—when these green gestapos mistook me, no doubt, for the leader of earth. An honest mistake really. In the midst of my powerful pontifications a light appeared over me. I thought nothing of it naturally, until my feet suddenly left the ground. But as London shrank beneath my feet I was not concerned for my own well being.” Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd stood up and placed an emphatic hand against his chest. “Like a true leader I felt concern only for my subjects. How lost and frightened they must feel to lose their leader, their shepherd. I just hope that they are able to maintain some minimal sense of order in my absence."
"That there is awful unusual, but if your right, I cant figure what them aliens want me for."
"What were the circumstances of your abduction?"
Buddy stared blankly.
“How did you get here?”
“Well I guess you could say it all started with this here negligee. I'd seen it when I was in Bloomingdales the other day, and I thought it'd look awful perty on me. I dont got the money for it though, so I decided to hide in the janitor's closet and wait til the store closed. When I crept out the closet it was real dark. Could hardly see where I was goin. But I found that dress and went to the changing room and tried it on, and it fit real good. I was delighted, and got to talkin to one a them perty plastic people they always got hangin round. 'Oh, I jus love your new negligee she said.' I laughed cause we was wearin matchin outifts. 'Youre lookin mighty fine yourself' I said, slidin an arm roun her waste. Everythin was goin real nice til a light shined in my face and I heard a man shout. Next thing I knew I heard a gunshot, and that poor lady's head exploded into tiny plastic bits against the side a my face. It was right about that time that I decided to leave. I left through the backdoors of the loading dock, to where I'd parked my car, and sped off. Made it to the highway fore them police got in behind me.
"Ya know I tried to stick to the road my whole life like my pop said but I always felt maybe the road just ain't right for me. It started to rain a bit and I switched on the windshield wipers. Lookin at them wipers got me to feelin rebellious all over again. I felt like my whole life had been one big ol' circle. I'd had enough. I decided to spin the wheel of fate, and by that I mean the steering wheel. I crashed through a white fence, and drove through an open field til the car got jammed in a ditch. I didn't know what else to do, so I got out, kicked off my high heels, and started to run and scramble through the brush and the trees. When a light appeared over my head I stopped runnin. Figured the cops 'ad caught me and it was time to give up.”
“Strange,” said Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd.
“Yea, I guess you could say Iv'e always been kinda different. Ain't always been easy. Tried to kill myself once. Took the top off a bottle a sleepin pills, stuck it under the faucet, and gulped it all down. Turns out that my younger brother, bout fourteen at the time, had been stealin mamma's medicine from the cabinet. When she found out she decided rather than yell at the boy, she'd jus switch around the pills in them bottles to teach 'im a lesson. When the fifty alka seltzer exploded in my stomach one right after the other I spent the next two days in the bathroom plop-ploppin from one end, and fizz-fizzin out th'uther.”
Buddy rambled on for a while, until the group fell back into the silence that Buddy had found them. The uneasiness in the air was palpable, but no one knew what to do. Suddenly Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd raised his hands above his head, “I've had enough of this!” he shouted, and then slammed his fists down.
The plastic fork beneath his fist ricocheted off the table and flew towards the pygmy's face. With savage speed the pygmy pulled his food tray in front of his face, shielding himself from the four-pronged attack. Dining debris scattered from the tray across the table and into the lap of the flabbergasted Filipino. In one swift motion the pygmy lunged forward and sunk the fork into the tense tendons of Charle's beefy left hand. The force of the stab cracked the plastic fork in two. The “click” of the breaking plastic punctuated the air like the crescendo of a classic pygmy punchline. The pygmy jumped back and began to laugh.
"Bloody hell!" The politician hollered, leaping to his feet and waving his half forked hand in the air.
“I demand a surgeon and four bandages, lest I rally the forces of the British navy in their entirety for the purpose of cremating this coal colored cretin and sending this flimsy flying frisbee falling to the depths of the British channel!"
People from England talk like poetry, Buddy mused.
Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd marched up to the food counter. “That mischievous midget is not an accurate representation of our species," Charles barked at the orderly. "We are a highly sophisticated race with advanced nuclear weapons capable of more than sufficient retaliation."
"We are well aware of your level of sophistication," the lunch line orderly groaned indifferently.
You could wring enough con-den-scension out a them words to fill a trough, Buddy thought.
"In that case I am willing to negotiate a ceasefire," the politician continued.
"Our ship is not fitted with weapons and the nations of your planet are unaware of our existence. We are a research vessel. We have no interest in colonizing your planet."
"I will not stand here and meet your threats with passivity," Charles bellowed.
"Sir? Sir? Are you listening to me?"
"We have been stockpiling nuclear weapons all these years, not so that we can destroy ourselves--though at times I'm sure it has appeared that way--but out of keen foresight for the inevitable battle with extraterrestrial life over limited resources!"
"Sir space is infinite. There is hardly a lack of--"
"Alright. Your steadfast perseverance indicates a great deal of experience in the hostage negotiations of planets. We will give you Australia. They have been led to believe by their figurehead government that they are now independent of the crown, but I speak on behalf of the entire commonwealth when I say that the deal is more than generous, and that, if anything, their false sense of autonomy should make the exchange all the more expedient."
The orderly slithered away. Charles shouted after him.
"Your not going to get a better offer than THAT I'm afraid. I will wait while you pass on the message to your leader!"
Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd paced the floor in front of the food counter for nearly an hour.
"The arrogant bastards have refused my offer" Charles declared . "It's war they want, bloodshed. They need our women as walking wombs, our children as batteries. They brought us here to study our weaknesses but they did not consider that this plan could backfire. They have lured the fox into the henhouse as they say. We are in the unique position of being able to strike at them from within. It will be a noble self sacrifice, but I was destined for it. The Great Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd was divinely lifted into the sky to save the world. The second coming they may say. And whose to say they're wrong? In short, I am sacrificing myself, not for their sins, but their lives!"
Warren stepped closer to the table, gestured for everyone to lean closer, "This is what we have to do..."
When the doors to the cafeteria swooshed open the doctor slithered into the room. Buddy approached the doctor, holding the sides of his polka dotted neglige and walking with careful grace.
“Howdy doctor,” Buddy said, flashing the doctor his most innocent bearded smile, and blinking repeatedly.
“Now!” The Great Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd shouted and began waving his arms in the air like an orchestra conductor.
Buddy lifted his neglige and amidst a ferocious blur of polka dots the pygmy leapt as if from the thick bush of his African home and stabbed the doctor repeatedly with his favorite fork. The Filipino appeared from under a table and began flinging the rest of her cutlery with ninja-like accuracy. Even the spoons stuck into the doctors soft flesh. The Great Sir Charles Alfred Humphrey Warren the 23rd raised both of his hands high in the air, balled them into tight fists and then swung them downwards in a dramatic display of force. The massive Mongolian fell from the rafters above and landed on the doctor, flattening him like a slug.
"We have done it!" Charles exclaimed. The others stood hunched over, panting and covered in the green grease of victory. "Their hostile alien conquest is nearly thwarted. We must be off to the main computer!"
In one fluid snake-like motion the doctor's body coalesced back together and rose to a standing position. The depressions in his body where their blows had landed began to restructure themselves into their original position.
"You are all idiots and fools," the doctor remarked. "We didn't come here to invade your planet, or murder its inhabitants, an all too human fantasy. We are nonviolent by nature, but after minimal interaction I now completely empathize with your race's propensity to the contrary."
"Does that mean that we can go back to earth?" Buddy asked cautiously.
"It means your not fit to go anywhere else. Its a miracle you have survived at all. The existence of your species is antithetical to all known laws of the universe."
Buddy hung his head, feeling once again as if he had been a disappointment. He didn’t want to stay, but he didn't want to go back home either. There was nothing there for him but a jail sentence, a wrecked car, more disappointed faces.
As they led him down the hall to the exit platform Buddy mustered the courage to ask the orderly a question. The answer, terse at it was, filled Buddy with a new sense of hope and delight.
When the blinding flash of light subsided Buddy's eyes looked out at a whole new world. Buddy finally felt at home. Above the Eifel Tower a distant dot disappeared with a wink.
"Pardon me maam," Buddy said to a passing stranger. The seething look of disdain that was cast down on him--centuries ahead of its American counterpart in refinement--was overlooked by Buddy. "Do you know where I can find a Bloomingdales round here? I just hafta get outa these clothes quicker than honey in a hive fire!"
Anderson Pass
The only thing there is to do for fun in Alaska is trudge out into Mother Nature and let her kick the crap out of you. Alaskans say there is no such thing as good weather, only good equipment—a fact I slowly came to realize after months of hiking and camping in Denali’s back-country. In my spare time I spent hours poring over topographic maps, daydreaming and planning, always coming up with an expedition more challenging than the last.
After months of research I identified the most difficult trek that can be undertaken without technical climbing equipment—though it is still recommended. The four day journey would begin sixty miles into the park where we would be dropped off by bus in the middle of nowhere. We would then hike up the Muldrow Glacier—the largest glacier on the north side—climb over top of the Alaska Mountain Range through a narrow gap called Anderson Pass, descend across the West Fork Glacier on the other side, raft twenty miles down the West Fork of the Chulitna River, then hike back up to a highway where we had no reliable plans for catching a ride back.
This trip is only made possible by an ingenious piece of Alaskan engineering - the packraft. A packraft is a one man raft that maneuvers like a kayak, is extremely durable, built to withstand whitewater rapids, yet ultra lightweight.
I was having trouble convincing anyone to accompany me on this endeavor, so when my friend Steve announced that he would be coming to visit, the timing sounded perfect. During the planning stages I had two main concerns. The first was the cold. I had never camped at elevations as high as the ones we would be crossing. The second was our ability to raft safely down the river. As it later turned out my list of concerns ought to have been much longer.
As Steve later put it, “it was the hardest four days of my life.”
With these concerns in mind I briefed Steve long before he came to Alaska about what equipment he would need to acquire, and what equipment I had for him already. Rain gear I stressed above all else. In Denali rain is a cold, cold reality. It rained during every camping trip I had been on in the previous three months. It was inevitable.
We stayed up late packing our bags and triple checking to make sure that we had all of the equipment necessary for any possible scenario. The next morning at breakfast we met up with a friend of mine named Drew. Drew is short and stocky with a long beard, a seasoned hiker, and, I suspect, a direct descendant of one of Tolkien’s dwarfs. He is the only person I had ever met who climbed Mt. McKinley, or who owned a packraft. Drew was supposed to accompany us, but that morning he began to have second thoughts. He had intended to skip work that day, but was suddenly worried about tarnishing his history of perfect attendance. He decided that he would catch up to us after work, and we arranged to meet the following day at noon.
During our five hour bus ride into the park, the bus driver took great concern with our plans, and Steve’s attire. She warned Steve about using cotton as an under layer, and cautioned him about the frailty of his shoes. She told us about her experience working in Antarctica, and her familiarity with hypothermia.
When we got off the bus at our destination and began to unload our bags, the bus driver walked up to Steve, put her hand on his shoulder, and said “You know you don’t have to do this.” Her words frightened both of us, but when Steve looked back at me, I merely shrugged and gestured us onward.
“You’re going to get so cold and wet!” she added.
“Look, we are fully prepared,” I said, displaying a confidence I did not entirely feel. “If our bags were to be fully submerged in water not a single article of clothing we have would get wet.” Anything less than this level of preparation could prove disastrous.
It was an unusually perfect and sunny day though, and it was hard to imagine anything going wrong. After several hours of hiking we began to encounter glacial features. Most glaciers in this part of Alaska are not the flat frozen sheets of ice people typically think of. Instead they are covered with lots of rock and debris. Even small plants manage to cling on in some areas. These features are called glacial moraine. Amidst the moraine we discovered a lake that had formed on top of the Muldrow Glacier, surrounded on most sides by giant ice cliffs.
I was ecstatic and decided to put our rafts to good use. We climbed down the side without a cliff and launched our boats in an area that was free of icebergs. Out on the lake we watched as rocks fell from the melting cliffs, slamming into lower ice shelves, and causing a growing cascade of debris. This also turned out to be a valuable crash course for Steve with the packraft.
We had intended to reach the base of Anderson Pass before nightfall, but that evening Steve’s knee began to cramp and spasm with pain. Our backpacks weighed about sixty pounds, and after miles of hiking the strain had taken its toll.
We were forced to camp early. “I hope this doesn’t mean I have to turn back,” Steve told me. For almost anyone else it would have. The next morning the pain in his knee had subsided only slightly, but Steve was determined to continue.
When we did finally reach the base of Anderson Pass later that morning the view of Mt. McKinley was phenomenal. The mountain itself is so vast that it manipulates the weather systems around it, and shrouds itself in clouds 75% of the time. That morning though we had a clear view of the Muldrow Glacier climbing up the East side of Mt. McKinley.
Noon came and went and Drew was nowhere to be seen. At 2:00 I began jogging back down the trail. At 2:30 I climbed to the top of a hill and peered several miles back with my binoculars. This gave Drew the equivalent of an extra hour to catch up with us, and still I did not see him. We had no choice but to go on without him.
Before we started the trip I warned Steve that even though it’s called a “pass” it’s going to look like were climbing a mountain. Even after saying it aloud I was unable to heed my own advice. Looking in the direction of Anderson Pass our view was obstructed by giant hills of moraine.
“Is that Anderson Pass?” Steve asked, pointing to a steep slope off in the distance that rose to the height of the snowline—a difficult feat given that it’s the end of summer.
“No dude,” I said condescendingly, “that’s obviously a mountain on the other side of it, much farther off in the distance.”
After hours of navigating across dangerous moraine and giant sheets of ice we stood panting and staring as Anderson Pass curved parabolically towards the sky until it reached the ridge that Steve had pointed out. Hail began to dance on the rocks around us. We labored onwards, scrambling on all fours as we neared the top.
The crest of Anderson Pass marked the height of our elation throughout the trip. We could see through our binoculars the route we would take, where far off the glaciers gradually melted into green. It was raining in that distant land. A rainbow wedged itself almost perfectly across the valley. It’s all downhill from here we wrongly agreed.
“Let’s pretend that its paradise,” Steve said.
“Compared to the inhospitable land around us, it more or less is,” I said. “Our goal today is to get to the edge of paradise, to hike to the end of that rainbow.” Steve frowned. “It’s just a joke.” Steve knew that already, but he could also see just how far away paradise really was. It turns out this goal was no more feasible than any other attempt to the end of a rainbow.
We threw back a few shots of whiskey and skipped excitedly down the mountain. The glacier on this side of the Alaska Range fit a more stereotypical description — a large white sheet of ice flowing out of the mountains. We hiked across it, cautiously stepping over the hundreds of tiny creeks that cut their way down the glacier’s surface. When the glacier merged into moraine we were careful to heed the advice of the park rangers and stick to the ledge on the left side of the valley. Giant crevasses formed around us.
After two hours of hiking our path narrowed to a small slanted bridge of ice about eight feet wide that crossed over a giant bottomless pit. I imagined myself crossing it, straddling death, and fell breathless with fear. I began to worry that there might not be a way off the glacier. Our enthusiasm was swallowed into the abyss. We turned back.
The crevasses had grown deeper exhibiting steep icy cliffs where before there had been hills of rock. After about twenty minutes of backtracking I found what looked like a plausible crossing point. Needless to say, descending into the crevasse was easy, but once at the bottom I struggled with what had appeared in the distance to be moraine. The rock layer was less than a half inch thick and every time I tried to pull myself up or dig down with my walking stick, I slid back down in an avalanche of rocks. After flailing against the wall with little success I learned to turn my walking stick sideways and gather just enough friction to inch upwards.
At the top we were both tired, but I pressed on hard, determined not to spend the night sleeping on rock and ice. Steve was beginning to understand the bus driver’s warning about his choice of shoes. With every step he could feel the rough edges of rock as they dug through his thin soles. It was nearly 11 PM and darkness was approaching. My fear of camping on the glacier, and Steve’s fear of hiking in the dark elevated into a shouting match. Exhausted, we gave up and collapsed on the flattest ground we could find.
We awoke amidst a thick fog. As if hiking through a maze of moraine was not enough, we could no longer see more than fifty yards in front of us. I had a general idea of where we needed to go though, so we proceeded.
“How do you know which direction were heading in?” Steve asked.
“I can see the outline of the mountain range through the fog, and I know that we need to be hiking parallel to it,” I explained. As the fog lifted over the next hour we realized that what I had taken for a distant mountain was in fact a massive cliff of ice gouging into the sky nearby.
As water travels across a glacier’s surface its forced deeper underground. At the base of this glacier all of the water suddenly exploded upwards through the earth, forming, in a single spot, the beginning of the West Fork of the Chulitna River.
Now rested, rehabilitated, and finally finished with glaciers, our moral had returned. I had been looking forward to rafting as the most fun part of the trip. The park rangers had told us that the first four miles of the river are treacherous, filled with rapids class three and up. After hiking a few hundred yards downstream Steve and I decided — based on the almost no river rafting experience between us — that the water didn’t look so bad, and that this warning, like the one we had been given about the glacier, was probably wrong.
We geared up and launched. The river was an unsettling sort of fun, the kind of fun you feel only during the brief moments between averting disasters. After ten minutes the river had given us not a single moment to rest. I launched over a rapid, and feeling my raft begin to slow down I let my arms collapse from the exertion. Seconds later my raft began to spin and drift backwards. I turned around just in time to see myself get sucked into a giant rapid.
I gasped before tumbling under, then, in an explosive burst of energy I tore myself loose from the raft. My head broke the surface with just enough time for me to take a second breath before being sucked back under. Moments later I was free of the rapid, tumbling downstream, desperately holding on to the raft, my knees slamming into jagged rocks. I dragged myself and the raft to shore. I ran back up stream, and when Steve came around the corner I shouted and gestured emphatically for him to swerve around the rapid I had crossed. My words were muted by the rushing river, but the scene alone conveyed the message.
As he passed nearby I shouted at the top of my lungs “GET MY PADDLE! I’M FINE! JUST GET MY PADDLE!” Steve stopped a few hundred yards downstream, and I began to untie the ropes to break down the raft. I untied the final knot just as my body began to shake uncontrollably. The water was cold — I mean just thawed from an ancient glacier a few hundred yards ago cold, the kind of cold that sucks the heat from your body and leaves you gasping as if you’ve been running for hours kind of cold. I swung my backpack on, grabbed my raft in one arm, rope in the other, and began walking quickly to try and heat up my body.
I had recently begun reading a book about an adventure in the arctic. The main character had run into a similar situation. He warned that running would waste too much energy and draw in cold air, without giving the body’s muscles sufficient time to warm up. Walking was the best answer. As I walked quickly, it dawned on me that I had put the book down in the midst of this scenario, and never found out how the situation was resolved.
Walking didn’t seem to help. My jaw clattered so violently that it began to cramp up. I grabbed my face to massage it, not realizing that I had dropped the rope in the same motion. A disorienting lack of clarity is symptomatic of the first stages of hypothermia. When I noticed this happening I forced myself to concentrate hard on every thought. It felt like squeezing the last drops of toothpaste from a tube.
I tried to backtrack and find the rope, but a white rope amidst white and grey rock seemed invisible and I could not manage to remember where I had walked only a minute before. I gave up.
I concentrated and weighed my options. Normally I could just change clothes, but that cold cold rain had just begun to set in. If I changed now, and my backup clothes got wet, I would have nothing to sleep in that night, and that is the most dangerous of all scenarios. If need be we could set up the tent, I could crawl inside and warm up, while protecting my dry clothes from the rain. But it was early in the day, and with all the setbacks so far, I didn’t think we could afford to waste that kind of time. Again we pressed on.
Even though he had not flipped Steve’s raft had filled up with water, and he was forced to pull over before catching up with my paddle. I cursed the river up and down and Steve along with it.
“I thought I saw the bear mace floating down the river. Did you lose it when you flipped over?” Steve asked.
“Yes!” I shouted. “You saw a red bear-mace-looking object floating down the river and you didn’t grab it? What else could it be?” I was overreacting. Grabbing anything out of that river is about as easy as planes refueling mid-air in the midst of turbulence. We were, however, crossing the border into bear country.
As it turned out it was lucky that I flipped early. Walking alongside the river we watched the rapids get much worse. Occasionally the river narrowed to where only a few large jagged rocks forced water through gaps too small for our rafts to fit.
In my haste I had neglected to look at the map, and did not realize that we got out on the wrong side of the river until we came to a dead end. The rapids ran up against a cliff for a quarter mile before turning away. We stopped to weigh our options. The rapids looked as dangerous as ever, and neither one of us wanted to give them a second try. The only other option, it seemed, was to boulder along the side of the cliff until we reached the other side. This looked so risky however, that we even considered climbing over the entire mountain rather than boulder the cliff. But the mountain looked dangerous too, and there was no telling whether or not we would be able to climb down the other side.
In an attempt at safety, we put on our lifejackets, and unbuckled the straps on our backpacks so that in case we fell in, we could slip them off easily. Our progress was painfully slow, and at times the cliff became so sheer and slippery from the rain that we were forced to drop down into the river and wade along beside the icy rapids.
We made it across without incident and cooked ourselves some warm food on the other side. It wasn’t long however before we found ourselves trapped again. This time the West Fork of the Chulitna River was merging with the North Fork, and we were right in the middle. We had no choice but use the rafts, if only to cross to the other side.
At this point I began to feel the pinch of another unforeseen factor — time. At the pace we were going we would not get out of the wilderness in time for Steve to catch his plane three days from now. We had emergency provisions for such a scenario, but only as a last resort. The packrafts were intended to save us considerable time. Using them we could span a third of the trip in a few short hours.
In addition to our new, healthy paranoia of the river, we were left with only one paddle between us. However, this was the point where the river was supposed to get calmer. Despite the grim outlook Steve was optimistic, and gave me some words of reassurance. This was my lowest moment during the trip and his enthusiasm was invaluable. The only other thing that helped to stifle my fear was an indifference to plunging back into the river. I had been shaking for hours. I was so cold that I didn’t think that the water could possibly make it any worse. We broke Steve’s paddle in half and challenged the river yet again.
After twenty minutes our fears had dissipated and we felt a renewed sense of excitement. Rafting this section of the river was all the fun we had hoped it would be, and we were making great time - about four miles an hour as it later turned out. We doubled the distance we had traveled that day in an hour and a half.
The next morning we got back in the rafts and paddled another ten miles downstream. We both recognized immediately the landmarks that indicated where we needed to disembark. Once again morning fog obstructed our use of large mountains as directional indicators, but we had a map and compass.
After about an hour of hiking we had gone little over a half mile and I was beginning to worry that we wouldn’t make it the four short miles back to the highway before nightfall. The weather in this region comes from the south, and when the clouds hit the Alaska Range they slow down or stop completely, dumping far more precipitation on this region than the North side where we started. Instead of tundra this land is covered in underbrush as thick as a jungle.
Finally, after days of setbacks we ran into a miracle - an old dirt road originally used by miners. I came across the road on maps when I was planning for the expedition, but I never even considered the possibility of finding it amidst so much terrain.
“This is victory road,” I said. “At least now we know for sure that we will make it out before the end of the day."
Further up the road we ran into train tracks. This meant that we had been heading in the right direction, but now there were several different roads to choose from. We saw some people through the trees, and despite signs warning us to stay off the private property we decided to introduce ourselves.
A mother, a daughter, and two dogs greeted us, and told us which road to take.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a phone we could use would you?” I asked.
“Of course! Come on back to the trailer.” We sat down and she handed me the phone. “You guys want a beer?” She asked. How could we refuse?
“This is the best beer I’ve ever tasted in my life!” Steve exclaimed. I called Natasha, and arranged to get picked up in about two hours.
“In the meantime do you guys wanna come back to our cabin and warm up?” The woman asked. “I’ll fix you guys some food. You don’t need to worry about doing any more hiking. We’ll drive you back up to the road when you need to go.”
We went back to their heated cabin that they had built by hand years ago. We changed into warm clothes and ate halibut tacos with all the fresh fruits and veggies you could want, even homegrown tomatoes from the greenhouse, even avocados. We swapped adventure stories, and had a great time.
“You went out in those shoes?” They asked Steve. We could finally laugh about it. “And yall didn’t bring no guns with ya? I mean we go out that far all the time, but we bring a truck, guns, and backup gear.”
When the time came one of the younger guys drove us back out to the highway where Natasha was waiting to pick us up.
We shook hands before departing and thanked him for the help. “Yall’s a bunch a crazy sons a bitches!” He told us, and then sped away, sandwich in one hand, swigging a beer from the other.
After months of research I identified the most difficult trek that can be undertaken without technical climbing equipment—though it is still recommended. The four day journey would begin sixty miles into the park where we would be dropped off by bus in the middle of nowhere. We would then hike up the Muldrow Glacier—the largest glacier on the north side—climb over top of the Alaska Mountain Range through a narrow gap called Anderson Pass, descend across the West Fork Glacier on the other side, raft twenty miles down the West Fork of the Chulitna River, then hike back up to a highway where we had no reliable plans for catching a ride back.
This trip is only made possible by an ingenious piece of Alaskan engineering - the packraft. A packraft is a one man raft that maneuvers like a kayak, is extremely durable, built to withstand whitewater rapids, yet ultra lightweight.
I was having trouble convincing anyone to accompany me on this endeavor, so when my friend Steve announced that he would be coming to visit, the timing sounded perfect. During the planning stages I had two main concerns. The first was the cold. I had never camped at elevations as high as the ones we would be crossing. The second was our ability to raft safely down the river. As it later turned out my list of concerns ought to have been much longer.
As Steve later put it, “it was the hardest four days of my life.”
With these concerns in mind I briefed Steve long before he came to Alaska about what equipment he would need to acquire, and what equipment I had for him already. Rain gear I stressed above all else. In Denali rain is a cold, cold reality. It rained during every camping trip I had been on in the previous three months. It was inevitable.
We stayed up late packing our bags and triple checking to make sure that we had all of the equipment necessary for any possible scenario. The next morning at breakfast we met up with a friend of mine named Drew. Drew is short and stocky with a long beard, a seasoned hiker, and, I suspect, a direct descendant of one of Tolkien’s dwarfs. He is the only person I had ever met who climbed Mt. McKinley, or who owned a packraft. Drew was supposed to accompany us, but that morning he began to have second thoughts. He had intended to skip work that day, but was suddenly worried about tarnishing his history of perfect attendance. He decided that he would catch up to us after work, and we arranged to meet the following day at noon.
During our five hour bus ride into the park, the bus driver took great concern with our plans, and Steve’s attire. She warned Steve about using cotton as an under layer, and cautioned him about the frailty of his shoes. She told us about her experience working in Antarctica, and her familiarity with hypothermia.
When we got off the bus at our destination and began to unload our bags, the bus driver walked up to Steve, put her hand on his shoulder, and said “You know you don’t have to do this.” Her words frightened both of us, but when Steve looked back at me, I merely shrugged and gestured us onward.
“You’re going to get so cold and wet!” she added.
“Look, we are fully prepared,” I said, displaying a confidence I did not entirely feel. “If our bags were to be fully submerged in water not a single article of clothing we have would get wet.” Anything less than this level of preparation could prove disastrous.
It was an unusually perfect and sunny day though, and it was hard to imagine anything going wrong. After several hours of hiking we began to encounter glacial features. Most glaciers in this part of Alaska are not the flat frozen sheets of ice people typically think of. Instead they are covered with lots of rock and debris. Even small plants manage to cling on in some areas. These features are called glacial moraine. Amidst the moraine we discovered a lake that had formed on top of the Muldrow Glacier, surrounded on most sides by giant ice cliffs.
I was ecstatic and decided to put our rafts to good use. We climbed down the side without a cliff and launched our boats in an area that was free of icebergs. Out on the lake we watched as rocks fell from the melting cliffs, slamming into lower ice shelves, and causing a growing cascade of debris. This also turned out to be a valuable crash course for Steve with the packraft.
We had intended to reach the base of Anderson Pass before nightfall, but that evening Steve’s knee began to cramp and spasm with pain. Our backpacks weighed about sixty pounds, and after miles of hiking the strain had taken its toll.
We were forced to camp early. “I hope this doesn’t mean I have to turn back,” Steve told me. For almost anyone else it would have. The next morning the pain in his knee had subsided only slightly, but Steve was determined to continue.
When we did finally reach the base of Anderson Pass later that morning the view of Mt. McKinley was phenomenal. The mountain itself is so vast that it manipulates the weather systems around it, and shrouds itself in clouds 75% of the time. That morning though we had a clear view of the Muldrow Glacier climbing up the East side of Mt. McKinley.
Noon came and went and Drew was nowhere to be seen. At 2:00 I began jogging back down the trail. At 2:30 I climbed to the top of a hill and peered several miles back with my binoculars. This gave Drew the equivalent of an extra hour to catch up with us, and still I did not see him. We had no choice but to go on without him.
Before we started the trip I warned Steve that even though it’s called a “pass” it’s going to look like were climbing a mountain. Even after saying it aloud I was unable to heed my own advice. Looking in the direction of Anderson Pass our view was obstructed by giant hills of moraine.
“Is that Anderson Pass?” Steve asked, pointing to a steep slope off in the distance that rose to the height of the snowline—a difficult feat given that it’s the end of summer.
“No dude,” I said condescendingly, “that’s obviously a mountain on the other side of it, much farther off in the distance.”
After hours of navigating across dangerous moraine and giant sheets of ice we stood panting and staring as Anderson Pass curved parabolically towards the sky until it reached the ridge that Steve had pointed out. Hail began to dance on the rocks around us. We labored onwards, scrambling on all fours as we neared the top.
The crest of Anderson Pass marked the height of our elation throughout the trip. We could see through our binoculars the route we would take, where far off the glaciers gradually melted into green. It was raining in that distant land. A rainbow wedged itself almost perfectly across the valley. It’s all downhill from here we wrongly agreed.
“Let’s pretend that its paradise,” Steve said.
“Compared to the inhospitable land around us, it more or less is,” I said. “Our goal today is to get to the edge of paradise, to hike to the end of that rainbow.” Steve frowned. “It’s just a joke.” Steve knew that already, but he could also see just how far away paradise really was. It turns out this goal was no more feasible than any other attempt to the end of a rainbow.
We threw back a few shots of whiskey and skipped excitedly down the mountain. The glacier on this side of the Alaska Range fit a more stereotypical description — a large white sheet of ice flowing out of the mountains. We hiked across it, cautiously stepping over the hundreds of tiny creeks that cut their way down the glacier’s surface. When the glacier merged into moraine we were careful to heed the advice of the park rangers and stick to the ledge on the left side of the valley. Giant crevasses formed around us.
After two hours of hiking our path narrowed to a small slanted bridge of ice about eight feet wide that crossed over a giant bottomless pit. I imagined myself crossing it, straddling death, and fell breathless with fear. I began to worry that there might not be a way off the glacier. Our enthusiasm was swallowed into the abyss. We turned back.
The crevasses had grown deeper exhibiting steep icy cliffs where before there had been hills of rock. After about twenty minutes of backtracking I found what looked like a plausible crossing point. Needless to say, descending into the crevasse was easy, but once at the bottom I struggled with what had appeared in the distance to be moraine. The rock layer was less than a half inch thick and every time I tried to pull myself up or dig down with my walking stick, I slid back down in an avalanche of rocks. After flailing against the wall with little success I learned to turn my walking stick sideways and gather just enough friction to inch upwards.
At the top we were both tired, but I pressed on hard, determined not to spend the night sleeping on rock and ice. Steve was beginning to understand the bus driver’s warning about his choice of shoes. With every step he could feel the rough edges of rock as they dug through his thin soles. It was nearly 11 PM and darkness was approaching. My fear of camping on the glacier, and Steve’s fear of hiking in the dark elevated into a shouting match. Exhausted, we gave up and collapsed on the flattest ground we could find.
We awoke amidst a thick fog. As if hiking through a maze of moraine was not enough, we could no longer see more than fifty yards in front of us. I had a general idea of where we needed to go though, so we proceeded.
“How do you know which direction were heading in?” Steve asked.
“I can see the outline of the mountain range through the fog, and I know that we need to be hiking parallel to it,” I explained. As the fog lifted over the next hour we realized that what I had taken for a distant mountain was in fact a massive cliff of ice gouging into the sky nearby.
As water travels across a glacier’s surface its forced deeper underground. At the base of this glacier all of the water suddenly exploded upwards through the earth, forming, in a single spot, the beginning of the West Fork of the Chulitna River.
Now rested, rehabilitated, and finally finished with glaciers, our moral had returned. I had been looking forward to rafting as the most fun part of the trip. The park rangers had told us that the first four miles of the river are treacherous, filled with rapids class three and up. After hiking a few hundred yards downstream Steve and I decided — based on the almost no river rafting experience between us — that the water didn’t look so bad, and that this warning, like the one we had been given about the glacier, was probably wrong.
We geared up and launched. The river was an unsettling sort of fun, the kind of fun you feel only during the brief moments between averting disasters. After ten minutes the river had given us not a single moment to rest. I launched over a rapid, and feeling my raft begin to slow down I let my arms collapse from the exertion. Seconds later my raft began to spin and drift backwards. I turned around just in time to see myself get sucked into a giant rapid.
I gasped before tumbling under, then, in an explosive burst of energy I tore myself loose from the raft. My head broke the surface with just enough time for me to take a second breath before being sucked back under. Moments later I was free of the rapid, tumbling downstream, desperately holding on to the raft, my knees slamming into jagged rocks. I dragged myself and the raft to shore. I ran back up stream, and when Steve came around the corner I shouted and gestured emphatically for him to swerve around the rapid I had crossed. My words were muted by the rushing river, but the scene alone conveyed the message.
As he passed nearby I shouted at the top of my lungs “GET MY PADDLE! I’M FINE! JUST GET MY PADDLE!” Steve stopped a few hundred yards downstream, and I began to untie the ropes to break down the raft. I untied the final knot just as my body began to shake uncontrollably. The water was cold — I mean just thawed from an ancient glacier a few hundred yards ago cold, the kind of cold that sucks the heat from your body and leaves you gasping as if you’ve been running for hours kind of cold. I swung my backpack on, grabbed my raft in one arm, rope in the other, and began walking quickly to try and heat up my body.
I had recently begun reading a book about an adventure in the arctic. The main character had run into a similar situation. He warned that running would waste too much energy and draw in cold air, without giving the body’s muscles sufficient time to warm up. Walking was the best answer. As I walked quickly, it dawned on me that I had put the book down in the midst of this scenario, and never found out how the situation was resolved.
Walking didn’t seem to help. My jaw clattered so violently that it began to cramp up. I grabbed my face to massage it, not realizing that I had dropped the rope in the same motion. A disorienting lack of clarity is symptomatic of the first stages of hypothermia. When I noticed this happening I forced myself to concentrate hard on every thought. It felt like squeezing the last drops of toothpaste from a tube.
I tried to backtrack and find the rope, but a white rope amidst white and grey rock seemed invisible and I could not manage to remember where I had walked only a minute before. I gave up.
I concentrated and weighed my options. Normally I could just change clothes, but that cold cold rain had just begun to set in. If I changed now, and my backup clothes got wet, I would have nothing to sleep in that night, and that is the most dangerous of all scenarios. If need be we could set up the tent, I could crawl inside and warm up, while protecting my dry clothes from the rain. But it was early in the day, and with all the setbacks so far, I didn’t think we could afford to waste that kind of time. Again we pressed on.
Even though he had not flipped Steve’s raft had filled up with water, and he was forced to pull over before catching up with my paddle. I cursed the river up and down and Steve along with it.
“I thought I saw the bear mace floating down the river. Did you lose it when you flipped over?” Steve asked.
“Yes!” I shouted. “You saw a red bear-mace-looking object floating down the river and you didn’t grab it? What else could it be?” I was overreacting. Grabbing anything out of that river is about as easy as planes refueling mid-air in the midst of turbulence. We were, however, crossing the border into bear country.
As it turned out it was lucky that I flipped early. Walking alongside the river we watched the rapids get much worse. Occasionally the river narrowed to where only a few large jagged rocks forced water through gaps too small for our rafts to fit.
In my haste I had neglected to look at the map, and did not realize that we got out on the wrong side of the river until we came to a dead end. The rapids ran up against a cliff for a quarter mile before turning away. We stopped to weigh our options. The rapids looked as dangerous as ever, and neither one of us wanted to give them a second try. The only other option, it seemed, was to boulder along the side of the cliff until we reached the other side. This looked so risky however, that we even considered climbing over the entire mountain rather than boulder the cliff. But the mountain looked dangerous too, and there was no telling whether or not we would be able to climb down the other side.
In an attempt at safety, we put on our lifejackets, and unbuckled the straps on our backpacks so that in case we fell in, we could slip them off easily. Our progress was painfully slow, and at times the cliff became so sheer and slippery from the rain that we were forced to drop down into the river and wade along beside the icy rapids.
We made it across without incident and cooked ourselves some warm food on the other side. It wasn’t long however before we found ourselves trapped again. This time the West Fork of the Chulitna River was merging with the North Fork, and we were right in the middle. We had no choice but use the rafts, if only to cross to the other side.
At this point I began to feel the pinch of another unforeseen factor — time. At the pace we were going we would not get out of the wilderness in time for Steve to catch his plane three days from now. We had emergency provisions for such a scenario, but only as a last resort. The packrafts were intended to save us considerable time. Using them we could span a third of the trip in a few short hours.
In addition to our new, healthy paranoia of the river, we were left with only one paddle between us. However, this was the point where the river was supposed to get calmer. Despite the grim outlook Steve was optimistic, and gave me some words of reassurance. This was my lowest moment during the trip and his enthusiasm was invaluable. The only other thing that helped to stifle my fear was an indifference to plunging back into the river. I had been shaking for hours. I was so cold that I didn’t think that the water could possibly make it any worse. We broke Steve’s paddle in half and challenged the river yet again.
After twenty minutes our fears had dissipated and we felt a renewed sense of excitement. Rafting this section of the river was all the fun we had hoped it would be, and we were making great time - about four miles an hour as it later turned out. We doubled the distance we had traveled that day in an hour and a half.
The next morning we got back in the rafts and paddled another ten miles downstream. We both recognized immediately the landmarks that indicated where we needed to disembark. Once again morning fog obstructed our use of large mountains as directional indicators, but we had a map and compass.
After about an hour of hiking we had gone little over a half mile and I was beginning to worry that we wouldn’t make it the four short miles back to the highway before nightfall. The weather in this region comes from the south, and when the clouds hit the Alaska Range they slow down or stop completely, dumping far more precipitation on this region than the North side where we started. Instead of tundra this land is covered in underbrush as thick as a jungle.
Finally, after days of setbacks we ran into a miracle - an old dirt road originally used by miners. I came across the road on maps when I was planning for the expedition, but I never even considered the possibility of finding it amidst so much terrain.
“This is victory road,” I said. “At least now we know for sure that we will make it out before the end of the day."
Further up the road we ran into train tracks. This meant that we had been heading in the right direction, but now there were several different roads to choose from. We saw some people through the trees, and despite signs warning us to stay off the private property we decided to introduce ourselves.
A mother, a daughter, and two dogs greeted us, and told us which road to take.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a phone we could use would you?” I asked.
“Of course! Come on back to the trailer.” We sat down and she handed me the phone. “You guys want a beer?” She asked. How could we refuse?
“This is the best beer I’ve ever tasted in my life!” Steve exclaimed. I called Natasha, and arranged to get picked up in about two hours.
“In the meantime do you guys wanna come back to our cabin and warm up?” The woman asked. “I’ll fix you guys some food. You don’t need to worry about doing any more hiking. We’ll drive you back up to the road when you need to go.”
We went back to their heated cabin that they had built by hand years ago. We changed into warm clothes and ate halibut tacos with all the fresh fruits and veggies you could want, even homegrown tomatoes from the greenhouse, even avocados. We swapped adventure stories, and had a great time.
“You went out in those shoes?” They asked Steve. We could finally laugh about it. “And yall didn’t bring no guns with ya? I mean we go out that far all the time, but we bring a truck, guns, and backup gear.”
When the time came one of the younger guys drove us back out to the highway where Natasha was waiting to pick us up.
We shook hands before departing and thanked him for the help. “Yall’s a bunch a crazy sons a bitches!” He told us, and then sped away, sandwich in one hand, swigging a beer from the other.
Bouncing On Top of the World
Inupiat crews embark into the 24-hour blackness to hunt for one of the largest animals that has ever lived. These people have adapted to their environment so well that not even modern technology has altered their fundamental way of life. Their culture is both defined and sustained by their annual hunt for the bowhead whale.
For ten months of the year, a four-foot layer of jagged ice extends a half-mile from the shore. It takes a whaling crew two weeks to carve out a path for their tough sealskin kayaks to reach the edge of the sea. Bowhead whales migrate near the ice during spring. When a whale is spotted, an eight-to-twelve-person kayak is launched. They paddle quickly and quietly out to the whale. The first harpoon thrown has a sealskin flotation sack attached to it. When the whale dives, this buoy drags it back to the surface. When one crew harpoons a whale, all of the others nearby join in. Together they continue to spear the whale as it flees, sometimes twenty miles out to sea.
When the whale is finally killed, all of the hunters gather their boats around it and offer a prayer. After months of work and preparation, after harpooning a whale and chasing it across the ocean, they give thanks; not for their incredible perseverance or astounding skill as hunters, but to the whale, who they believe freely gives himself up, and to God – the only being powerful enough to create so vast a creature.
The kayaks work together to tow the bowhead – which can weigh up to 150 tons – all the way back to shore. This process can take days if they have to fight the current or cross a great distance. When they return to the shore of ice the whale is cut apart. The entire village—including children—shows up to rejoice and help pull the colossal whale onto the ice. Traditionally, the Inupiat used the meat to feed themselves throughout the year, the whale oil to provide light and warmth during the three months of darkness, and the whale bones to frame their sod houses.
Natasha and I arrived in Barrow, Alaska — an Inupiat village for more than a thousand years — on the day after the summer solstice. There is no celebration for the solstice. They have no need to celebrate the longest day of the year because they have three months of continuous sunlight. To us it felt like the middle of winter.
We admired the field of ice that covered parts of the beach, and extended far out to sea. Nearby, a group of little girls was playing in the sand, barefoot and in shorts.
“Aren’t you cold?” Natasha asked. We shivered beneath our five heavy layers.
“It's warm out today!” The little girl exclaimed cheerfully. The high for the day was 41 degrees.
The buildings of Barrow rarely reach above two stories. The permafrost makes it difficult to anchor any deep, sturdy foundation. In front of most houses, there is a snowmobile, ATV, pickup truck, and powerboat, all in various stages of repair. Barrow is a society of hunters and proficient mechanics, many of whom have no formal job.
When we tired of wandering about the city, we took a taxi to the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL), where we had reserved our accommodations for the next five days. NARL was created in 1948 as part of the war effort. It was home to an advanced missile detection facility. The giant dishes that are communicating with geosynchronous satellites are pointed almost perpendicular to the ground to compensate for the high latitude.
In the 1980s, the Navy abandoned NARL, leaving it in the hands of the city. Today it is still used to conduct cutting-edge scientific research on local plants and animals and to study the effects of global warming. It is also home to the small Ilisagvik College and local businesses.
Within the compound there is a hotel. Signs inside declare that it is strictly for scientists, college affiliates, or workers doing construction at NARL. Apparently this rule is not enforced. I made reservations weeks earlier and they never asked me for my scientist badge of authenticity.
The next day we found a shop within NARL that repairs and rents ATVs and snowmobiles. The shop’s owner, Charlie, agreed to have an ATV repaired and ready for us to rent the following morning. We originally planned on walking to Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of the United States, but during our chance encounter with Charlie, he warned us otherwise.
"There are only two animals in the world that actively hunt humans," Charlie told us, "tigers and polar bears. And we don't got no tigers around here. My ATV died on me once when I was out at Point Barrow. Had to walk most of the five miles back, and while I did, I noticed a polar bear had begun stalking me aways in the distance. Fortunately, I was able to catch a ride along the road before that bear managed to close the distance."
The next day, we rode our ATV out to the tip of Point Barrow, originally named Ukpeagvik in Inupiat. It means "the place where we hunt snowy owls." The peninsula had a giant whale graveyard with twelve-foot-tall carcasses settling into the sand. Pieces of meat clung to the bone. A thin layer of filmy flesh spread out across the surrounding sand. It clung to the bottom of my boots when I stepped off the ATV to walk closer. The stench of rotting decay was overpowering.
We returned to the city center to join the Nalukataq celebration. A giant white fence had been constructed in the shape of a U to protect crowds from the fierce, unrelenting wind. It is against the law and tradition for whaling crews to keep more than their share of the whale that they catch. During the annual Nalukataq celebration thousands of pounds of whale meat are freely distributed to the community. Each day of Nalukataq celebrates the success of different whaling crews. It is the members of the crews who are responsible for wandering around and distributing everything to the community.
We made friends with some locals and borrowed cups and bowls. The feast began with a choice of duck or caribou soup. Afterwards, aqavic—whale meat—was distributed in various forms. We were first given Mikeluk, a bowl of whale muscle, kidney, tongue, heart, and intestine. The tongue is considered a delicacy. The heart felt like chewing on tire. The intestine, I decided I didn’t need to try.
Most of the whale was already cut up in boxes. Some chunks, like fins, were set out on pallets. Men came with giant knives on sticks, and cut massive whale steaks from it. Certain parts of these steaks, near the blubber, yielded the most delicious sashimi I have ever tasted.
Next, we ate Miki-yuk, or raw fermented whale meat and blood—surprisingly the most delicious of all the different types of whale. “If you fall asleep, or your kids get drunk, don’t blame me!” One of the captains declared over the loudspeaker, and everyone laughed.
If we had wanted fifty pounds of whale meat, all we had to do was not refuse it. Despite politely declining over and over, we were given about five pounds of whale which we took back to NARL. The next day, when preparing ramen, I looked at Natasha and reminded her that we did have five pounds of whale meat. “Alright,” she agreed, “I guess we’ll be having whale ramen for lunch.”
At the celebration, one young man mentioned that he had caught a whale by himself this year. I laughed and joked and patted him on the shoulder. Everyone was deadpan.
Turns out he was serious.
He spotted a whale swimming next to the ice, harpooned and fought it one-on-one until it gave up. This man deserves a medal more than any sports team in history—whose combined mass is but a small fraction of this man’s adversary.
We were quick to learn however, that glory does not come without cost. “There have been a few major whaling accidents during my lifetime,” an old man told us. “When I was younger, a crew harpooned a baby whale. Its mother attacked and flipped over the kayak. My brother was on that boat. He drowned.”
In the center of the celebration is the nalukataq, which has been commonly translated as “blanket toss.” This is a poor translation—a misleading understatement. The “blanket” is made from the sealskin of the kayak that successfully caught the whale—a coarse and non-pliable material that in no way resembles a blanket. “Launch” is more accurate than “toss.” Think along the lines of a giant human slingshot aimed at the sky. The force comes from ropes, springy wood planks, and the strength of about twenty-five people that hurl you into the air. The heights reached during the blanket toss are much higher than a typical trampoline. The record out of all the tribes is held by a teenage girl who reached a height of over two stories. It is not uncommon for people to approach this height.
Kids play on the nalukataq during the day, but when evening rolls around they are kicked off promptly. Whaling captains and their crews get the first opportunity at the nalukataq. They get on with bags of candy and as they are hurled into the air, they throw the candy into the crowd. Kids waiting anxiously below scramble to pick it all up.
We knew beforehand that accidents were common, and indeed one girl sprained or broke her ankle within the first twenty minutes. An ambulance was radioed in immediately and the girl was taken to the hospital. As this was going on, the men took the opportunity to go around and tighten all of the knots, and fix the planks to maximize the height of each launch. When the injured girl was gone, the blanket toss continued unabated.
The very next boy, a young teenager, was launched high into the air, soared over the heads of the crowd around him, and landed a good twenty feet away from the trampoline, narrowly missing a small child. He was unharmed and undeterred. He jumped back on immediately.
“What you are seeing here, what your experiencing here,” one local told us, “is what has kept this community strong for over a thousand years.” Indeed the origin of Nalukataq fades back through the centuries of forgotten Inupiat lore.
Watching the kids play with the nalukataq is misleading. There is a form and skill to operating it that is difficult to master. Everyone must work together harmoniously, and it is obvious when this is not achieved. There is also skill to jumping on the blanket. Some people were unable to maintain the rhythmic jumping while experienced old ladies were able to jump around until the crowd’s arms grew too exhausted to keep throwing them.
I was nervous to jump on the nalukataq. Not because I thought that it would be difficult, or because I was afraid I would get hurt, but because I did not know how to cut in amidst all of the locals and vie for a turn. Natasha mustered the courage first. With the help of one of the locals who she had befriended, she climbed up onto the blanket and gave it a try. The crowd jeered and joked every time a foreigner got up. My turn came about ten minutes later.
I steadied myself. When everyone shouted and heaved, I jumped. Looking down from the top of the world, I could see over the surrounding fence. Barrow stood grey against a grey sky. The sun moved in small lazy circles overhead. I still could not spot the end of the sea ice and the beginning of the sea. The cold wind slapped my face and I careened back to earth.
In one swift motion, the crowd caught me in the blanket, lowered it again, and then whipped me back up into the sky. I managed to keep my balance and time my jumps for over a minute before falling. I climbed off of the nalukataq to the sight of smiles and thumbs up.
“Not bad for a first try,” said Herman, the man Natasha had befriended.
After the celebration he invited us back to his home. He was a whaling captain, proud to show off his skills and his culture. When we walked into his house, his wife and daughter were busy sewing wolf and wolverine coats.
Herman showed us his harpoons, his brass gun, and told us all about the history of whaling. Europeans first arrived in the area in 1826, and by the 1850s Barrow had become a critical stop for commercial whaling vessels. The Europeans brought with them new ships and new ways to hunt. Traditionally, the Inupiat used stone-tipped spears. Europeans brought brass guns loaded with small grenades that pierced the whale's thick hide and then exploded.
By 1914, over-hunting brought the bowhead whale to the edge of extinction and the commercial whaling industry to an end. Treaties were later signed to protect the bowhead whale and the rights of the Native Americans to hunt them. Under these treaties, the number of whales that could be caught were strictly limited and the methods of catching them strictly defined. The Inupiat could no longer use their traditional spears, but were instead forced to use the brass grenade guns introduced by the Europeans. It was argued that this was a more humane way of killing the whale since it died faster. Even today, the Inupiat are forced to use this technology dating back to the 1800s. There is only one company, located in Boston, that still produces the brass guns and old-fashioned grenades. However, after decades of diligently following the quotas imposed by the treaties, the population of bowhead whales has regrown, reaching approximately 90% of its original size.
"You know we still catch whales that have old spear points in their blubber," Herman told us. "They are literally harboring artifacts from the 1800’s." Bowhead whales are believed to be one of the longest-living animals on earth, at 150 to 190 years.
Herman showed us a few home videos that he had made of his crew hunting and killing the whales. He even showed us a National Geographic documentary on whale hunting that he starred in.
While he drove us back to NARL Herman told us about the time Barrow was overrun with polar bears like the plot of a sci-fi flick.
"One year the ice along the shores thawed too quickly. The polar bears, who normally ride the ice as it disperses, were trapped here on the peninsula. Hundreds of polar bears, and not nearly enough food for them all. We had to set up a bear patrol to keep an eye on the edge of town, and scare them off when they came. One day a polar bear got by, and came upon a young couple. The woman was pregnant. Her husband told her to run while he sacrificed himself to distract the bear."
When we stepped out of his car near the entrance to NARL, Herman pointed out a large inedible pile of discarded whale matter that the crews had left out on the ice. A polar bear had been spotted snooping around it the day before, but we had not been around at the time.
The next morning I woke up early to check the site, determined to spot a polar bear. While I strolled across NARL, I noticed a building that had not previously been open. A sign indicated that it was owned by the NARL base. Inside was a garage filled with ATVs. There was one guy on duty, cleaning the shop.
“Are these ATV’s for the scientists here at NARL?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he replied. “Would you like to take one out?”
“Do we have to rent them?”
“You just sign them out.”
I left to retrieve Natasha, and came back a half hour later. The guy got out a clipboard and began filling out some paperwork.
“So what project are you working on?” he asked.
“Were searching for polar bears,” I said without hesitating. He regarded me for a long moment, shrugged, then continued filling out the forms.
We took the ATV back out to Point Barrow, where we were indeed searching for polar bears, just without the pretense of advancing scientific understanding. We still had no luck with polar bears. However, after days of stopping anxiously to train our binoculars on black specs only to find that they were plastic bags, we were excited to find that three black dots turned out to be seals.
A few miles farther south, the effects of summer were becoming evident. After a week in Barrow we only needed four layers to stay warm. As we walked along the beach where we had encountered the little girls on our first night in town, Natasha pointed out to sea.
“What is it?” I asked, searching the distance.
“It's gone,” she replied.
Overnight, warming weather and tidal forces had ripped the mile long stretch of ice from the shore and ferried it out of sight into the distant ocean.
For ten months of the year, a four-foot layer of jagged ice extends a half-mile from the shore. It takes a whaling crew two weeks to carve out a path for their tough sealskin kayaks to reach the edge of the sea. Bowhead whales migrate near the ice during spring. When a whale is spotted, an eight-to-twelve-person kayak is launched. They paddle quickly and quietly out to the whale. The first harpoon thrown has a sealskin flotation sack attached to it. When the whale dives, this buoy drags it back to the surface. When one crew harpoons a whale, all of the others nearby join in. Together they continue to spear the whale as it flees, sometimes twenty miles out to sea.
When the whale is finally killed, all of the hunters gather their boats around it and offer a prayer. After months of work and preparation, after harpooning a whale and chasing it across the ocean, they give thanks; not for their incredible perseverance or astounding skill as hunters, but to the whale, who they believe freely gives himself up, and to God – the only being powerful enough to create so vast a creature.
The kayaks work together to tow the bowhead – which can weigh up to 150 tons – all the way back to shore. This process can take days if they have to fight the current or cross a great distance. When they return to the shore of ice the whale is cut apart. The entire village—including children—shows up to rejoice and help pull the colossal whale onto the ice. Traditionally, the Inupiat used the meat to feed themselves throughout the year, the whale oil to provide light and warmth during the three months of darkness, and the whale bones to frame their sod houses.
Natasha and I arrived in Barrow, Alaska — an Inupiat village for more than a thousand years — on the day after the summer solstice. There is no celebration for the solstice. They have no need to celebrate the longest day of the year because they have three months of continuous sunlight. To us it felt like the middle of winter.
We admired the field of ice that covered parts of the beach, and extended far out to sea. Nearby, a group of little girls was playing in the sand, barefoot and in shorts.
“Aren’t you cold?” Natasha asked. We shivered beneath our five heavy layers.
“It's warm out today!” The little girl exclaimed cheerfully. The high for the day was 41 degrees.
The buildings of Barrow rarely reach above two stories. The permafrost makes it difficult to anchor any deep, sturdy foundation. In front of most houses, there is a snowmobile, ATV, pickup truck, and powerboat, all in various stages of repair. Barrow is a society of hunters and proficient mechanics, many of whom have no formal job.
When we tired of wandering about the city, we took a taxi to the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL), where we had reserved our accommodations for the next five days. NARL was created in 1948 as part of the war effort. It was home to an advanced missile detection facility. The giant dishes that are communicating with geosynchronous satellites are pointed almost perpendicular to the ground to compensate for the high latitude.
In the 1980s, the Navy abandoned NARL, leaving it in the hands of the city. Today it is still used to conduct cutting-edge scientific research on local plants and animals and to study the effects of global warming. It is also home to the small Ilisagvik College and local businesses.
Within the compound there is a hotel. Signs inside declare that it is strictly for scientists, college affiliates, or workers doing construction at NARL. Apparently this rule is not enforced. I made reservations weeks earlier and they never asked me for my scientist badge of authenticity.
The next day we found a shop within NARL that repairs and rents ATVs and snowmobiles. The shop’s owner, Charlie, agreed to have an ATV repaired and ready for us to rent the following morning. We originally planned on walking to Point Barrow, the northernmost tip of the United States, but during our chance encounter with Charlie, he warned us otherwise.
"There are only two animals in the world that actively hunt humans," Charlie told us, "tigers and polar bears. And we don't got no tigers around here. My ATV died on me once when I was out at Point Barrow. Had to walk most of the five miles back, and while I did, I noticed a polar bear had begun stalking me aways in the distance. Fortunately, I was able to catch a ride along the road before that bear managed to close the distance."
The next day, we rode our ATV out to the tip of Point Barrow, originally named Ukpeagvik in Inupiat. It means "the place where we hunt snowy owls." The peninsula had a giant whale graveyard with twelve-foot-tall carcasses settling into the sand. Pieces of meat clung to the bone. A thin layer of filmy flesh spread out across the surrounding sand. It clung to the bottom of my boots when I stepped off the ATV to walk closer. The stench of rotting decay was overpowering.
We returned to the city center to join the Nalukataq celebration. A giant white fence had been constructed in the shape of a U to protect crowds from the fierce, unrelenting wind. It is against the law and tradition for whaling crews to keep more than their share of the whale that they catch. During the annual Nalukataq celebration thousands of pounds of whale meat are freely distributed to the community. Each day of Nalukataq celebrates the success of different whaling crews. It is the members of the crews who are responsible for wandering around and distributing everything to the community.
We made friends with some locals and borrowed cups and bowls. The feast began with a choice of duck or caribou soup. Afterwards, aqavic—whale meat—was distributed in various forms. We were first given Mikeluk, a bowl of whale muscle, kidney, tongue, heart, and intestine. The tongue is considered a delicacy. The heart felt like chewing on tire. The intestine, I decided I didn’t need to try.
Most of the whale was already cut up in boxes. Some chunks, like fins, were set out on pallets. Men came with giant knives on sticks, and cut massive whale steaks from it. Certain parts of these steaks, near the blubber, yielded the most delicious sashimi I have ever tasted.
Next, we ate Miki-yuk, or raw fermented whale meat and blood—surprisingly the most delicious of all the different types of whale. “If you fall asleep, or your kids get drunk, don’t blame me!” One of the captains declared over the loudspeaker, and everyone laughed.
If we had wanted fifty pounds of whale meat, all we had to do was not refuse it. Despite politely declining over and over, we were given about five pounds of whale which we took back to NARL. The next day, when preparing ramen, I looked at Natasha and reminded her that we did have five pounds of whale meat. “Alright,” she agreed, “I guess we’ll be having whale ramen for lunch.”
At the celebration, one young man mentioned that he had caught a whale by himself this year. I laughed and joked and patted him on the shoulder. Everyone was deadpan.
Turns out he was serious.
He spotted a whale swimming next to the ice, harpooned and fought it one-on-one until it gave up. This man deserves a medal more than any sports team in history—whose combined mass is but a small fraction of this man’s adversary.
We were quick to learn however, that glory does not come without cost. “There have been a few major whaling accidents during my lifetime,” an old man told us. “When I was younger, a crew harpooned a baby whale. Its mother attacked and flipped over the kayak. My brother was on that boat. He drowned.”
In the center of the celebration is the nalukataq, which has been commonly translated as “blanket toss.” This is a poor translation—a misleading understatement. The “blanket” is made from the sealskin of the kayak that successfully caught the whale—a coarse and non-pliable material that in no way resembles a blanket. “Launch” is more accurate than “toss.” Think along the lines of a giant human slingshot aimed at the sky. The force comes from ropes, springy wood planks, and the strength of about twenty-five people that hurl you into the air. The heights reached during the blanket toss are much higher than a typical trampoline. The record out of all the tribes is held by a teenage girl who reached a height of over two stories. It is not uncommon for people to approach this height.
Kids play on the nalukataq during the day, but when evening rolls around they are kicked off promptly. Whaling captains and their crews get the first opportunity at the nalukataq. They get on with bags of candy and as they are hurled into the air, they throw the candy into the crowd. Kids waiting anxiously below scramble to pick it all up.
We knew beforehand that accidents were common, and indeed one girl sprained or broke her ankle within the first twenty minutes. An ambulance was radioed in immediately and the girl was taken to the hospital. As this was going on, the men took the opportunity to go around and tighten all of the knots, and fix the planks to maximize the height of each launch. When the injured girl was gone, the blanket toss continued unabated.
The very next boy, a young teenager, was launched high into the air, soared over the heads of the crowd around him, and landed a good twenty feet away from the trampoline, narrowly missing a small child. He was unharmed and undeterred. He jumped back on immediately.
“What you are seeing here, what your experiencing here,” one local told us, “is what has kept this community strong for over a thousand years.” Indeed the origin of Nalukataq fades back through the centuries of forgotten Inupiat lore.
Watching the kids play with the nalukataq is misleading. There is a form and skill to operating it that is difficult to master. Everyone must work together harmoniously, and it is obvious when this is not achieved. There is also skill to jumping on the blanket. Some people were unable to maintain the rhythmic jumping while experienced old ladies were able to jump around until the crowd’s arms grew too exhausted to keep throwing them.
I was nervous to jump on the nalukataq. Not because I thought that it would be difficult, or because I was afraid I would get hurt, but because I did not know how to cut in amidst all of the locals and vie for a turn. Natasha mustered the courage first. With the help of one of the locals who she had befriended, she climbed up onto the blanket and gave it a try. The crowd jeered and joked every time a foreigner got up. My turn came about ten minutes later.
I steadied myself. When everyone shouted and heaved, I jumped. Looking down from the top of the world, I could see over the surrounding fence. Barrow stood grey against a grey sky. The sun moved in small lazy circles overhead. I still could not spot the end of the sea ice and the beginning of the sea. The cold wind slapped my face and I careened back to earth.
In one swift motion, the crowd caught me in the blanket, lowered it again, and then whipped me back up into the sky. I managed to keep my balance and time my jumps for over a minute before falling. I climbed off of the nalukataq to the sight of smiles and thumbs up.
“Not bad for a first try,” said Herman, the man Natasha had befriended.
After the celebration he invited us back to his home. He was a whaling captain, proud to show off his skills and his culture. When we walked into his house, his wife and daughter were busy sewing wolf and wolverine coats.
Herman showed us his harpoons, his brass gun, and told us all about the history of whaling. Europeans first arrived in the area in 1826, and by the 1850s Barrow had become a critical stop for commercial whaling vessels. The Europeans brought with them new ships and new ways to hunt. Traditionally, the Inupiat used stone-tipped spears. Europeans brought brass guns loaded with small grenades that pierced the whale's thick hide and then exploded.
By 1914, over-hunting brought the bowhead whale to the edge of extinction and the commercial whaling industry to an end. Treaties were later signed to protect the bowhead whale and the rights of the Native Americans to hunt them. Under these treaties, the number of whales that could be caught were strictly limited and the methods of catching them strictly defined. The Inupiat could no longer use their traditional spears, but were instead forced to use the brass grenade guns introduced by the Europeans. It was argued that this was a more humane way of killing the whale since it died faster. Even today, the Inupiat are forced to use this technology dating back to the 1800s. There is only one company, located in Boston, that still produces the brass guns and old-fashioned grenades. However, after decades of diligently following the quotas imposed by the treaties, the population of bowhead whales has regrown, reaching approximately 90% of its original size.
"You know we still catch whales that have old spear points in their blubber," Herman told us. "They are literally harboring artifacts from the 1800’s." Bowhead whales are believed to be one of the longest-living animals on earth, at 150 to 190 years.
Herman showed us a few home videos that he had made of his crew hunting and killing the whales. He even showed us a National Geographic documentary on whale hunting that he starred in.
While he drove us back to NARL Herman told us about the time Barrow was overrun with polar bears like the plot of a sci-fi flick.
"One year the ice along the shores thawed too quickly. The polar bears, who normally ride the ice as it disperses, were trapped here on the peninsula. Hundreds of polar bears, and not nearly enough food for them all. We had to set up a bear patrol to keep an eye on the edge of town, and scare them off when they came. One day a polar bear got by, and came upon a young couple. The woman was pregnant. Her husband told her to run while he sacrificed himself to distract the bear."
When we stepped out of his car near the entrance to NARL, Herman pointed out a large inedible pile of discarded whale matter that the crews had left out on the ice. A polar bear had been spotted snooping around it the day before, but we had not been around at the time.
The next morning I woke up early to check the site, determined to spot a polar bear. While I strolled across NARL, I noticed a building that had not previously been open. A sign indicated that it was owned by the NARL base. Inside was a garage filled with ATVs. There was one guy on duty, cleaning the shop.
“Are these ATV’s for the scientists here at NARL?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he replied. “Would you like to take one out?”
“Do we have to rent them?”
“You just sign them out.”
I left to retrieve Natasha, and came back a half hour later. The guy got out a clipboard and began filling out some paperwork.
“So what project are you working on?” he asked.
“Were searching for polar bears,” I said without hesitating. He regarded me for a long moment, shrugged, then continued filling out the forms.
We took the ATV back out to Point Barrow, where we were indeed searching for polar bears, just without the pretense of advancing scientific understanding. We still had no luck with polar bears. However, after days of stopping anxiously to train our binoculars on black specs only to find that they were plastic bags, we were excited to find that three black dots turned out to be seals.
A few miles farther south, the effects of summer were becoming evident. After a week in Barrow we only needed four layers to stay warm. As we walked along the beach where we had encountered the little girls on our first night in town, Natasha pointed out to sea.
“What is it?” I asked, searching the distance.
“It's gone,” she replied.
Overnight, warming weather and tidal forces had ripped the mile long stretch of ice from the shore and ferried it out of sight into the distant ocean.
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