Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  Dave and I watched from cowardly safety. Several of the sea lions were circling our kayak. One was floating on its back, flippers in the air. Two others stared at us with dark, impenetrable eyes. They had the friendly faces of golden retrievers. Perhaps half a mile out to sea, a series of black fins rolled one after the other. Killer whales will attack sea lions, but this pod seemed to be moving south at about thirty miles an hour.

  The point was the most dangerous place we would have to negotiate in the kayak. It was also a great confluence of life, and this combination of peril and substance sent the spirit spinning off into various ethereal regions, in which a man might be tempted to commit philosophy.

  Oceana did indeed become my girlfriend. She sat with me at night around the fire as the adults talked. Her father, Steve, warned me never to get her excited after eight o'clock. "She'll sleep then," he said, "but if you get her going, she'll be up all night and it'll be a horror show, guaranteed."

  Dave, the scientist, said that there was "a lot of geology going on" around our campsite. He could see upthrust and erosion, all of it looking as if it had just happened yesterday, by which he meant in the last 2.5 million years, in the "the Quaternary."

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "The most recent geological period. It includes the Pleistocene and the Holocene."

  "Oh," I said, "that Quaternary."

  "I used to have me one of those," Steve said. "I never could keep a clutch in it."

  We played a game in which a person told two lies and one truth about himself. Kimmer said that in the sixth grade she could throw a ball farther than anyone in the school, that at age nineteen she had won an arm-wrestling contest, and that she had a twin sister who died at birth. We all nailed the twin as a lie. No

  one picked out Martinet lie, and she had to explain that no, the Czechoslovakian climber hadn't actually proposed to her near the summit of Mount McKinley. He had only propositioned her. Both versions were ioo percent believable.

  It was getting late, and Oceana was fading, but she was so sweet lying in my arms, so fresh, that I couldn't help asking her if she remembered what it was like in the time before she was born. Oceana misinterpreted the question to mean did she remember being born. "I was borned," she proclaimed—everyone was listening intently—"and I went 'wah wah wah wah wah wah wah.

  After the twenty-fifth "wah" or so most of the adults had absorbed the point.

  ". . . wah wah wah . . ."

  "But, Oceana," I said (here Steve caught my eye and shook his head, please no, but I was too far into my question to stop), "do you remember anything else?"

  "I was borned and I went"—Oceana was enjoying this immensely— "WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH . . ."

  The adults regarded me with a combination of loathing and animosity.

  The next morning, as we broke camp, the wasps that had been confined inland invaded the beach. There were all over everything, like a biblical plague, and they stung the children and the adults without mercy. Dave and I jammed our gear in the rear storage compartment without regard to weight distribution. I had been stung on the right forearm and would have felt intensely sorry for myself, except that poor six-year-old Loghan had been stung twice, once on the neck.

  Out on the water, a good distance from shore, we lost the last of the great horde. A few stragglers crawled over the kayaks, settling on the brightly colored spray skirts buttoned around the rim of the cockpits. We had a long paddle, four straight hours, I figured, and the exertion was pumping poison into my stung forearm. I had begun to swell, visibly. I didn't want to think about

  the awful . . . sensation ... on my legs. It felt like, well, like some kind of . . . bug . . . crawling up my leg. Under the spray skirt. On my knee. Up the thigh . . .

  It was all imagination, of course. I was acutely aware of wasps only because my right arm was beginning to look like Popeye's.

  And now, on the way back past our first campsite, we had to round another point. It was late for paddling, about noon, and the wind had picked up to fifteen miles an hour. Large, regular waves about four and five feet high were washing in toward the beach at an oblique angle, so that the kayak wanted to take them broadside. Which was what Martine called a "capsize situation." Dave and I had to paddle fast in order to keep our poorly packed kayak maneuverable. My right forearm was bigger than my bicep. It felt like a water balloon.

  And there was no stopping now, because the point was ahead of us and the water was getting choppy. Paul Dix was paddling alongside us, but I could only see him in slow-motion strobo-scopic bursts. He'd sink into the trough of a wave and disappear. And then, suddenly, the bottom would drop out from under our kayak, but there was Paul, on the crest of a booming wave, towering eight feet above us.

  And goddammit, if there was a wasp under my spray skirt it was crawling up my shorts, and this was intolerable, it would not happen, and in the mushy-handling kayak, between what seemed to be monumental waves, I pulled off the spray skirt, and yes, a long yellow wasp crawled out onto the deck of the boat just as a wave hit us broadside and splashed up onto the deck and washed the wasp into the Gulf of California. There was a wave of adrenaline, a shot in the belly, that sensation of falling before you actually fall. . . .

  We leaned over close enough to kiss the sea, but managed to right the kayak and work up enough speed to regain control. We headed in, lickety-split, toward shore and the campsite. The point had given everyone else some trouble, too, and we were all talking at once on the beach.

  "Dave," I informed the company, "was crying the whole way."

  183 a THE NATURAL WORLD

  "Tim," Dave pointed out, "kept using his bilge pump for something."

  And then people had to laugh about the wasp in my shorts for entirely too long a time. It wasn't that funny at all.

  "Tim," Dave said, "knows some very colorful language."

  "Latin terms for wasp," I explained.

  Some time later, I opened a plastic sack containing several different kinds of cheese. A wasp staggered out onto the rock, woozy from the heat. It was so full of cheese that it couldn't fly, and I stomped it flat.

  "POPEYE MY ARM, WILL YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

  I jumped up and down on the wasp, and screamed at it and cursed it and stomped on it in a mad jig of murder and vengeance. It occurred to me that there might be people about, and that I could be overreacting. Indeed, Loghan and Oceana were staring up at me with large, innocent eyes.

  "Wasp," I said, nodding at a yellow smear on the rock.

  "It's dead," Oceana pointed out.

  "It was dead a long time ago," Loghan added.

  "What's a basser?" Oceana asked.

  Our campsite was set on beach that fronted a bay shaped like an hourglass. The water in the inner bay was calm and blue-green, and there was a lot of geology going on everywhere. A large, sloping flat-topped rock stood in the middle of the inner bay. Grasses and shrubs and cacti grew at the summit, but the rock was crumbling away on all sides. Calm water arches under the fallen rock framed the sea beyond.

  There were four Mexican fishermen camped nearby. Paul Dix and I went over to talk with them, and they offered us fresh clams with salt and lime. You dive for these brown-shelled clams at low tide, the men explained, out near the rock. One of the fishermen said that eating such clams made a man very virile. We all laughed at that, as men are supposed to do. I translated the phrase "lead in the old pencil," and we all laughed some more, in an obligatory way, though I found myself wondering what good

  it did to have lead in the old pencil if you had nothing to write on.

  The fishermen gave us a large yellowfin tuna for our dinner, and we invited them to share it with us. Long after sunset they still hadn't come over to our camp.

  "They're very shy," Paul said.

  "We'll fix them," Steve said. He had brought along some bottle rockets to amuse the children this last dark night on the beach. We set them off one at a time, and called out the names of the
fishermen: Jorge—boom—Mauricio—bam—Rene—ka-bloom— Ramon.

  The fishermen could hardly refuse. After dinner Oceana abandoned me for Mauricio, a handsome, curly-haired young man. She sat on his lap, half under his jacket, and made him hold her doll. You had to be careful with a baby, Oceana explained. And sometimes they pooped. Did Mauricio know about the poop? He nodded his head gravely. Mauricio couldn't speak a word of English. Oceana prattled on for over an hour.

  Jorge said he drove the catch all the way to Mexico City. It was a scary place, and he never went out after dark there.

  We passed around a small bottle of tequila, but Mauricio shook his head when I offered it. He didn't want to disturb Oceana, who was asleep in his arms.

  The next day, the same Mexican driver we had before pushed his van down the red rutted road, and we packed up our gear in a little less than an hour. When we hit the paved highway, I suggested we stop at the first roadside cantina for a cold beer. I wanted to say good-bye before we hit Loreto and scattered.

  The cantina was a porch, open to the wind. We were sipping beers and reminiscing already, as if the trip had happened a decade ago. What about those sea lions near the arch? And the fishermen: great guys. That last sorta scary point. The wasps . . .

  Oceana said she would not come back to Montana with me and be my little girl. Her parents might cry if she came with me.

  "I have to go back to Alaska," she said seriously.

  It felt like the last scene in Casablanca.

  "We'll always have Paris," I said.

  "I like you very much," Oceana said. Human females, I thought, it's in the genes.

  "When you go back to Alaska," I said with what I thought was a good measure of nobility—Oceana nodded seriously—"don't eat the yellow snow."

  "Why?" She cogitated on the matter for some moments. "Because of pee?"

  "That's right," I said, and then we all had to pile into the van, go back to Loreto, fly north, and face up to the various varieties of yellow snow in our lives.

  tpeak Oz

  Most of us flaming septics visiting Oz either shoot through like the Bondi tram or muck about playing silly buggers and never properly apprehend the lingo. I was pondering this phenomenon one day while demolishing several dozen stubbies in the cattle-ranching country of far North Queensland, specifically at a rub-bity in the town of Coen, whose quaint motto is "Eat Beef, You Bastards." Three weeks into my trip to Australia I was aware that "bastard" is a term used to describe acceptable and pleasant members of the human race. The rubbity was located in what had been the Exchange Hotel, but the new owner—in the interest of economy and typical Aussie bullsh—had altered the name with a single letter, so that the only sign of any size in this town of some forty houses now read, drink at the sexchange hotel.

  One of the bastards doing just that was having a go at me: "Geez," he said, "there must have been fifty flaming roos out there that night." The image of fifty kangaroos leaping and lurching about in an agony of fire tugged at the mind, though I knew perfectly well that "flaming" is a universal adjective often applied to perfectly uninflammable objects, just as the word "bloody" is used to modify any noun: "I twisted me flaming ankle on a bloody rock."

  Much of what is unique about Australian English derives from the flash talk of transported criminals, and rhyming slang—"I have some Gene Tunney [money] in me skyrocket [pocket], and I'm going to the rubbity [dub-pub] for a pig's ear [beer]"—is dinki-di (a dinkum Aussie term meaning genuine Oz speak.) Another ridgi-dige bit of lingo has it that Americans are "seppos" or "septics" (septic-tank Yank.)

  As the only septic at the Sexchange, I had to ask directions to the snakes (rhymes with snake's hiss) so I could unbutton the mutton and wring the rattlesnake. There are dozens of phrases for this particular activity, and they range from drain the dragon to syphon the python to simply "go a snakes."

  In a rubbity like the Sexchange a bastard would be a flaming galah not to demolish several dozen stubbies (small bottles of lager), and a polite bastard steps out back to have a bit of a chunder. This process of enjoying oneself in reverse may be one of Australia's most popular indoor and outdoor sports, judging by the sheer number of phrases used to describe it: "cry ruth," "hurl," "chunder," "play the whale," "do the big spit," "park the tiger," "have a nice technicolor yawn," "laugh at the ground."

  Since there were no jam tarts in evidence, a bit of the talk concerned certain Sheilas with norks like Mudgee mailbags. One potato in particular was known to root like a rattlesnake, and one of my companions expressed a desire to be "at her like a rat up a drainpipe." The preferred organ in an R.U.A.D. situation is known as "the wily old snorker," or, alternately, and more graphically, "the beef bayonet," the "pork sword," or the "mutton dagger."

  In all fairness I should mention that certain proper residents of Australia—wowsers of the worst ilk—object strongly to such conversation and feel that some of the words and phrases used here are "best left written on the wall in an outback dunny." This attitude, I think, does not do justice to the distinctiveness of Australian usage. All the above words and phrases may be found in the new Macquarie Dictionary, a dinkum Aussie dictionary published by Macquarie University, New South Wales, after eleven years of research.

  191 A OTHER PEOPLE S LIVES

  Very few of the bastards at the Sexchange were concerned with verbal propriety, however, possibly because most of us were full as a bull's bum. The English language as spoken by Aussies— toilet talk and all—seemed robust and important. Several dozen stubbies'll do that to a bastard, of course, and when someone referred to the local dentist as a "fang-ferrier," I got to laughing in an entirely hysterical manner. Someone decided, quite loudly, that "the bleeding septic is as silly as a bagful of arseholes," and I couldn't stop laughing.

  "He's gone troppo," they said.

  "Fair dinkum."

  "Meself," one bastard opined, "I blame the climate."

  ning amok. Oh, I tell you, the man who is sanghyang has much strength. Sometimes it takes twenty men to hold him down and bring him out of the trance."

  On the island of Bali men and women routinely fall into bizarre and sometimes violent trance states during certain carefully prescribed religious ceremonies. Bali is a small island, just one and a half kilometers east of Java, one of the over thirteen thousand islands that comprise the nation of Indonesia. The people, to Western eyes, are uncommonly attractive. They are fond of music, dancing, stage plays, and festivals. The extraordinary trance dances occur in a state of spiritual ecstasy and are religious in nature.

  In the seventh century a.d. Indian traders brought the Hindu religion to Bali. When Islam triumphed over Hinduism in the sixteenth century, Bali became a refuge for Hindu intellectuals and nobles. Today it is the last bastion of Hinduism in Indonesia.

  Balinese life is centered around the religion known as Agama Hindu. It is an amalgam of Tantric Buddhism, Malay ancestor worship, magical beliefs, and various animistic rituals that have survived a thousand years or more on the island. The ancient animistic faith is strong and has been incorporated into the overlying Hindu belief structures.

  To an outsider it sometimes seems that the old animistic beliefs properly define the people and religion of Bali. Often the rituals of classical Hinduism seem a mere afterthought, especially in the extreme case of violent trancing ceremonies.

  The animistic elements of Agama Hindu are so ingrained in the people that few can actually explain their meaning. When asked why a man goes into a trance at a certain time during a certain ceremony, people will shrug politely. It is a question that has little meaning to the Balinese. "It is the way we do things," they will tell you. In Europe there are few animistic rituals still surviving, though I suspect very few people could explain the "meaning" of the Christmas tree. "We do it because we have always done it," people will say. "We have Christmas trees because we like them." So it is with the Balinese.

  As in Europe, there are some few people familiar with the origin and me
aning of the ancient rituals. I. Ketut Suwena was one. He was fifty-two, the klian, or headman, of the banjar of Jangu. A banjar is an organization of households—usually several hundred of them—and is the most important social unit on the island. The banjar dispenses justice according to the traditional law called adat.

  The banjar of Jangu is famous for its folk trances: nighttime ceremonies in which the people gather and sing while men in a state of trance perform feats of strength or dexterity that they could not do in a waking state. They climb trees like monkeys, lift heavy objects with the small finger of the right hand, or run barefoot through three-foot-high mounds of blazing coconut husks.

  The trances, or sanghyangs, Ketut explained, were originally performed in times of trouble, especially when the banjar was threatened by disease. "You see," he said, "when Sira Mede Me-caling came to Bali from the island of Nusa Pinida, he brought with him many butas and kalas." Mecaling is considered the overlord of the evil spirits. Butas and kalas are various demons whose joy in the spirit world consists of tormenting human beings with grief and illness. The overlord went to Bali's most powerful benevolent god, Ida Batara Dalem Besakih, and asked permission to bring sickness on the land. Permission was granted, though the butas and kalas could not afflict those villages where the proper sacrifices were performed.

  "But," Ketut explained, "Sira Mede Mecaling is evil and sometimes does not keep his promises." Sometimes, even after the sacrifices are performed according to ritual, the demonic followers of the evil god visit sickness upon the land. The rice crop may fail. Epidemics may occur.

  "If my family is sick," Ketut said, "I am helpless. Then I may see a monkey at the door. I know this monkey is an evil spirit, and I chase it away, but I cannot catch it, because I am not strong enough or fast enough. So I go to the god of my banjar, and I make an offering of flowers and food. I ask for the strength to chase the evil spirit. And the god allows me to go into a trance