Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  trance and become bebec, a duck? Nyoman said he really didn't know. It just wasn't done. Nobody knew how to act like a duck.

  I explained that in my country, there was a semireligious figure —very famous—named Donald, who was a duck. Every child in the United States can talk like Donald.

  "Show me," Nyoman said.

  And so I squawked and croaked like Donald Duck to show Nyoman Wirata how a man might become sanghyang bebec. This, apparently, was the funniest thing that ever happened in Bali. Everywhere we went—and we went all over the island— Nyoman begged me to do sanghyang bebec.

  "Do angry bebec" Nyoman begged, and I'd throw one of Donald's hysterical fits. Nyoman's stomach hurt from laughing.

  But that's about it for ducks in this book. There are one or two stories that needed to be told for reasons that will become apparent. Most of the pieces collected here, however, are about travel, or about people I've met traveling. The last few stories are about the business of risk.

  I've said this before, but it bears repeating: I believe all these stories exist in the realm of certain shared dreams. I think there was a time when all of us saw the world in terms of exotic travel and thrilling adventure. We want to be Tarzan or Huckleberry Finn, Richard Halliburton, Clyde Beatty, even Marlin Perkins. We want to be Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall or Amelia Earhart. Somewhere along the line—usually on the first day of the first real job—we find that those dreams have gone dormant. Since they were the dreams of our youth, we try to discard them entirely, in the interest of maturity.

  But it doesn't happen. Dreams are indestructible. They seethe and roil beneath the surface. There is a vague sense of discontent, and different people deal with it in different ways. Scorn is popular. Mention that trip down the Amazon you've been thinking about, the cabin you want to build in the woods, and someone is sure to call you a horse's ass. Other people have a way of making our dreams seem small. The urge to realize any early dream is labeled with names that suggest psychic aberration: the big chill, a midlife crisis, a second childhood.

  XV a INTRODUCTION

  What I have been doing for the last fifteen years is chronicling, in various magazines, that urge in all of us. I have the sense that, in my foolishness, others find inspiration. If this clown can do it, I imagine a reader thinking, so can I. There is some small and distant nobility here: For the past fifteen years I have been in the business of giving people back their dreams.

  Not that it pays to take it all that seriously. The titles of two of my previous books, both chronicles of adventure and travel, should have been a hint: Jaguars Ripped My Flesh; A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg. There were no jaguars in the former and no wolverines in the latter.

  Not long ago, as I was finishing up work on this book, a group of friends ambushed me at a dinner party. What was I going to call this third compilation? There were many suggestions: Sparrows Pecked My Spleen; Nematodes Invaded My Intestinal Tract; Gerbils Ate My Undershorts. This sort of thing went on all through dinner. There were sexual innuendos involving rhinos and elephants, moray eels and orangutans.

  I pleaded with my friends to stop. "I feel," I said, "like I'm being pecked to death by ducks."

  The phrase hung in the air.

  Pecked to death by ducks?

  "Are there any ducks at all in the book?" someone asked.

  "Of course not."

  "Then," my friends agreed, "it's perfect."

  "Sanghyang" I said.

  TIM CAHILL

  MONTANA

  AUGUST 15, 1992

  i#i UhhJiUML 1*6W>

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 4

  dashing around the burning oil fields of Kuwait in company with photographer Peter Menzel, attempting to assess the extent of the madness. But this day, toward the end of our stay, was set aside for a long, leisurely drive. The madness, we felt, had soiled us just as surely as the soot and the purple petroleum rain that fell from the drifting black clouds. This rain created lakes of oil that covered acres of desert, and when these lakes caught fire, the smoke was thick and blinding, so that directions to various wells had to be quite specific as to roadside landmarks: "Turn left at the third dead camel."

  I particularly wanted to forget the three dead Iraqi soldiers I had had every reason not to bury. They were still out there in the desert, near the Saudi border. The wind covered them with sand. And then, after a time, it uncovered them.

  So: Why not spend the day in pursuit of recreational diversion? Peter and I would climb Mount Kuwait. Go to the beach. See the emir's gardens. Maybe even take in a drive-in movie. Think about things a bit.

  Mount Kuwait sits in an area of newly formed oil lakes, south of the oil town of Al-Ahmadi, past the distinctive Longhorn fire, and a few miles off the Burgan road. Because we envisioned a long day, and because the summer temperatures in the desert often exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit, it was a good idea to start early.

  At three-thirty in the morning the air felt cool, about 85 degrees, and the streets of Kuwait City were empty. The traffic lights worked, but there was no traffic. It was a great place to run red lights, which I count as a fine recreational activity.

  A gentle breeze from the north had swept the sky clear of smoke. The city center might have been Miami, except that businesses and homes were abandoned, windows were broken, and the major hotels all showed evidence of recent fires. There were streaks of soot on most of the buildings. In March the city had been covered over in a thick shroud of smoke, and when the spring rains came, they fell black and soiled all they touched.

  By July the fires in the oil fields south of the city had been

  5 A THE UNNATURAL WORLD

  beaten back dozens of miles. More than two hundred fires had been "killed," and the best estimates had another five hundred still burning. Fire fighters were working from the north with the prevailing winds at their backs, and Kuwait City was seldom inundated by smoke. Some days were whiskey brown; others were bright and blue and hot.

  The outskirts of the city looked like Phoenix, where futuristic divided and elevated highways ran over single-story poured-concrete houses. We exited the freeway and plowed down a two-lane blacktop toward the oil fields. There was a mound of sand and a sign in English that said, road closed. As journalists, we assumed the sign did not apply to us.

  Levees of sand kept ponds and lakes of oil from consuming the road. The oil lakes seemed to glow, silver-red, with the light from the fires on the southern horizon. After a few miles the shimmering in the distance separated itself into individual fires: great plumes of flame that dotted the flat desert landscape. The shapes of the plumes themselves had become familiar landmarks. Some looked a bit like Christmas trees; some geysered up every thirty seconds; some lay close to the ground and seemed to burn horizontally. Not far past Al-Ahmadi, the most distinctive of the fires howled out of control. Two plumes shot out along the ground— one to the west, one to the east—and each turned up at the end. The fire fighters, most of them Americans from Texas, called this one the Longhorn fire.

  It was close to the road, and the western plume was directed at passing vehicles like a pyromaniac's wet dream. Here the moonless night was bright as day, only the light was red, flickering, hellish. A twenty-mile-an-hour wind carried inky billows of smoke to the south, but along this road and others in the oil fields the winds sometimes sent impenetrable clouds of gritty soot rolling over passing vehicles.

  Not far from here, on April 24, a small Japanese sedan had swerved off the oil-slicked road and into a burning oil lake, killing two British journalists. The driver had apparently been disoriented by the smoke and falling soot. Two other vehicles, a pumping truck and a tanker,
had apparently followed the tracks

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS k 6

  of the sedan into the flames. At least one fire-fighting crew had passed by the three vehicles without raising an alarm: Burned-out cars in burning oil lakes are a common sight around Al-Ahmadi. Those who finally recovered the bodies had seemed unaffected when they described the horror, but they mentioned it a lot, especially to journalists who assumed written warnings didn't apply to them.

  The sun finally rose, a sickly orange color that I could look directly into without squinting, and in the near distance a rocky butte about three hundred feet high, the highest piece of ground in all the oil fields, appeared. It took, by my watch, a little over two minutes to stroll to the top of this bump that oil workers had long ago named Mount Kuwait. It was supposed to be a joke, the name, like calling a bald-headed guy Curly.

  The whole world smelled like a diesel engine. There were fires burning in all directions, more than thirty at a count, and they thundered belligerently. The lake below was burning in streaks and ribbons, with the flames hanging low over a mirrorlike surface that was unaffected by the wind. The ground was black, the sky was black, the drifting clouds were black, and only the fires lived on the land.

  What I was seeing, it seemed to me, was the internal-combustion engine made external.

  The country of Kuwait sits atop a vast reservoir of oil, 94 billion barrels of known reserves. This reservoir is two miles deep in places, and the oil is under tremendous pressure. Drop a pipe deep enough into the ground and oil erupts to a height of thirty, fifty, seventy, one hundred feet. Wells are capped with valve assemblies, the oil is transferred to gathering centers, then piped to sea terminals for export. It is used in internal-combustion engines around the world.

  Iraqi troops had wired nearby wells to a single detonator. These wires still lay across the black sands. The explosions—dynamite directed downward by sandbags—had blown the caps off the wells and ignited the gushing oil.

  Kuwait, on this day in July, would lose about $100 million worth of oil. That was the generally agreed-upon figure, though

  7 A THE UNNATURAL WORLD

  the effects of the fires on the people and on the environment had yet to be coherently assessed. Toxic metals, released by combustion, will surely contaminate the desert soil and the sheep and goats and camels that graze there. Many of these food-borne metals might then cause brain damage and cardiovascular disorders in humans.

  Meanwhile, a month earlier, a National Science Foundation team, flying over the burning oil fields, had said that environmental damage was a "concern" and not a crisis. Environmental Protection Agency experts measured pollutants common to American cities—the results of internal combustion—and decided, mostly from planes flying twenty thousand feet over the smoking hell below, that the air quality was not deadly. Further, the flights proved that while plumes rose thousands of feet, the fires weren't propelling the heavy smoke high enough into the atmosphere to cause worldwide climatic change.

  Still, in April, about 5 million barrels of oil a day had gone up in flame. Black rain had fallen in Saudi Arabia and Iran; black snow had fallen on the ski slopes of Kashmir, more than fifteen hundred miles to the east. And no one had yet measured pollutants peculiar to this crisis: a class of carcinogens called polyaro-matic hydrocarbons generated out of partially burned oil. As I stood on the summit of Mount Kuwait, my own assessment was bleak. The desert, here in the oil fields, was both dead and deadly. It was a sure vision of the environmental apocalypse.

  By the time we scrambled down Mount Kuwait, the sun was higher in the sky. A purple petroleum rain had fallen while we'd been climbing, and the evidence could be seen as pinpricks on the windshield. Peter fired up the Land Cruiser, but it was hard to hear the internal-combustion engine over the roar of the surrounding external combustion. I thought about those unburied Iraqi soldiers out near the Saudi border; one of them had been decapitated. In the gathering heat the oil on the windshield now turned a streaky red, so that it looked like dried blood.

  On the way to the emir's gardens, deep in the southern oil fields, we saw a brown Land Rover, coated in black, gummy sand,

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 8

  parked by the side of the road. American fire fighters drove Ford and Chevy pickups, Kuwaiti oil executives drove Mercedes. The Land Rover, we knew, had to belong to our friends in Royal Ordnance, a subsidiary of British Aerospace. Composed mostly of former British military explosive experts, RO had won the contract to dispose of explosives in this area of the fields.

  When Iraqi troops blew the wells, they sometimes salted the surrounding area with antipersonnel mines to sabotage the fire-fighting effort. But what RO was mostly finding were the universally feared Rockeyes that had been dropped by American pilots onto Iraqi positions. A Rockeye is a metal cylinder, maybe three feet long. When it is dropped it splits apart, releasing 247 six-inch-long rockets designed to explode on impact. The deadly sub-munitions look like fat lawn darts. All over, all across the black desert sands, there were Rockeye submunitions buried about three inches deep. Sometimes the pilot had dropped the Rockeyes too low to the ground; sometimes the submunitions had hit very soft sand. In any event RO estimated that between 30 and 50 percent of the submunitions were still live. They were black with oil and could be identified only by their three fins. Usually, there was a blackened Rockeye canister nearby.

  Our RO friends had the dirtiest, meanest job in the fields. Whereas the fire fighters who followed them worked with the north wind at their backs, which meant that they often had blue sky overhead, the RO teams worked in heavy smoke in the midst of the fires, looking for explosives within a 150-foot radius of a burning well.

  Three teams of ten apiece were now walking the hellish landscape. I could just make them out through the shifting clouds of soot that blotted out the desert sun. They were illuminated, in silhouette, by a nearby plume of fire some eighty feet high. They walked with their heads down, very slowly, looking like a precision-drill team composed of very depressed men. The Rockeyes were marked with red-and-white tape fluttering at the end of a metal stake driven into the sand.

  Later that day another man would come through the field, stopping at each of the markers. He would dig a hole next to

  9 A THE UNNATURAL WORLD

  each of the Rockeyes, place a wad of plastic explosive in the hole, string a long wire, and detonate the deadly submunitions from a safe distance.

  Now, however, Lance Malin was standing by the Land Rover, coordinating the three teams currently walking the sand. The process of locating and destroying live ammunition was called explosive ordnance disposal, or EOD, and I knew it amused Malin that American fire fighters were using the acronym as a verb: "Has this area been EODed?"

  He was talking to a man wearing heavy leather gloves. There was a large spiny-tailed lizard, about two and a half feet long, dangling from the man's index finger. The RO men had found a lot of these lizards, known locally as dhoubs, stuck in the sand, too weak to free themselves. They took them back to their headquarters in Al-Ahmadi and fed them bits of apple until they regained their strength and snapped at anything that moved. Finally, the lizards took a ride in one of the Land Rovers and were released in the relatively pristine northern desert.

  The RO men had no choice. They were British. They had to rescue the lizards.

  Malin stowed this particular dhoub in the Land Rover and asked if I had been to the big mine field that RO was working near the Saudi border.

  A couple of days ago, I said.

  "The Iraqi corpses still there?"

  We admitted that they were. Right where everyone had left them. Unburied. For five goddam months.

  There was no one at the guard station that flanked the entrance to the emir's gardens, a weekend retreat for Kuwait's ruling family. It would have been cruel to station a man there. Fire-fighting teams had not yet reached the large walled compound—they were working far to the north—and the fires burning on all sides k
ept the area shrouded in heavy smoke no matter which way the wind was blowing. It was, at ten o'clock on a desert morning, dark as dusk, and the temperature under the smoke stood at 80 degrees. It was 105 in the sun.

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A IO

  We drove through a shallow pond of oil at the entrance and onto a circular driveway fronting a modest group of buildings. There was a children's play area nearby: teeter-totters and monkey bars coated in oil. On the ground were the oily remnants of a cow that had been slaughtered, presumably for food, by occupying Iraqi troops. There were other black cowlike shapes on the ground, interspersed with the corpses of several large birds, presumably from the compound's aviary. The largest and highest plume of flame I saw in Kuwait—I estimated its height at two hundred feet—boomed and thundered just beyond the north wall.

  This fire was a smoker, and it had formed a lake that abutted the eight-foot-high wall. Where there were breaks in the blackened cinder blocks, tongues of oil seeped into a low-lying palm orchard. These small rivers were burning and running down irrigation ditches, where they lapped at the tree trunks.

  My boots were caked with a black sandy muck so that I walked in a clumping, stiff-legged manner, like Frankenstein's monster. Visibility was limited to about fifteen feet, though I could see, through the falling soot, the large fire and half a dozen others leaping above the north wall. I moved toward them, careful to avoid stepping on the nubbly tracks of coke, a rocky, coallike by-product of the burning oil. In some places the coke was several feet deep, but it was also possible that the coke could be mere scum over a burning stream below. Crack the coke, I thought, and the entire track could reignite.

  Presently, I saw a man-size break in the wall and moved toward it through the swirling, granular darkness. The inferno beyond lit the break with a shifting, red-orange light, and I could feel the heat on my face like a bad sunburn. Everything that wasn't burning was black: the earth, the familiar shapes of the trees, the animal carcasses that littered the place. This was ground zero for the largest man-made environmental disaster in history. It was a perfect vision of hell.