Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  Their diet—a sort of Pritikin Diet enhanced by Holy Scripture—of fish and fresh vegetables, with almost no seasoning, made them excellent physical specimens. Contemplating those villagers, I began imagining a novel in which spiritual regeneration was accompanied by enormous physical vitality, the entire American package derived from between the covers of the Bible. And it made me think that so many of our habits are written on our bodies. This is not a new idea. Anyone in 1850 who had read Dickens's description of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield would instantly have grasped that Heep's pallor and red eyes indicated that he was an ardent onanist. In many cultures (Italy is just one) a man's big nose indicates that he is virile. Sitter's Butt and Drinker's Nose are familiar to most people, but I began to see Druggie's Eyes, Sweet-Eater's Fatigue, Carnivore's Gut, Smoker's Face.

  It was a happy accident, this discovery. I needed regeneration—most writers do. Unlike the life of a Pacific islander, the routine of a writer is extremely unhealthy. All serious writers work long hours and inevitably feel trapped.

  I had gone on that trip through the Pacific because writing a book at home is like imprisonment, and for that reason I have always been a traveler. I grow sick of being indoors, alone all day for several years, needing isolation and at the same time hating the hostage like atmosphere of alienation. I am sure some writers love this monkish inactivity, but a long spell of it drives me nuts. I think it is also physically unhealthy to be incarcerated like this.

  That cue from the Trobrianders suggested to me that even a writer who is trapped in his room writing a book ought to be able to find some harmony in his life. Being Seventh-day Adventists and living on a remote island, my villagers ate the simplest foods imaginable. In great contrast, I saw that islanders on Samoa and Tonga loved Spam, corned beef, and soft drinks. This careless diet turned them sullen and sleepy and mountainous. The piety of the Trobrianders seemed to explain their good health; the obesity of other islanders seemed like a logical consequence of their wayward Spam-eating, junk-gobbling, hymn-singing hypocrisy.

  In order to understand Pacific islanders' syncretic cosmology—their spiritual salad of beliefs, mixing Christianity and Polynesian animism—I read the Bible. Besides the Seventh-day Adventists' clinging to Leviticus (which reads like a tract in defense of endangered species), there were Jehovah's Witnesses, who frequently invoke their horror of eating "the blood of strangled animals"; Christian Scientists, inspired by Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health, urging spiritual self-help; and the Mormons, the most American of any religion, ubiquitous in the Pacific because of its hordes of proselytizers.

  I profess no religion, and so I read the Bible with an open mind. I discovered what many people know already, that the Good Book is full of food, full of meals, and there are plenty of recipes, some implied and others set out as systematically as in a cookbook. Of course there are the well-known mentions of loaves and fishes, and milk and honey, but also obscurer references to apricots and vetches (fitches), herbs, grains, pulses, beans, and various vintages of wine. Daniel cannot work magic unless he reverts to his old diet of lentils (Daniel 1:1–21); Ezekiel (4:9) provides a precise recipe for nourishing high-fiber bread. Nearly all Bible food is nutritious, bulky, beany, energy-inducing, low in fat and sugar.

  I started to dabble in food myself. After all, I was stuck in a room with only writing to occupy me. And what began as idle dietary speculation became more serious experimentation. At first I regarded my body as my hobby, and then it became my chief preoccupation. If you are home all day, it is very easy to turn your house into a laboratory where you are the guinea pig. I had been a casual vegetarian, but Bible-reading—and writing my book in seclusion—made me more tenacious. There is a certain amount of meat-eating in the Old Testament, and so much roasted lamb that it is difficult to read certain prophets and not think continually of mint sauce. Yet hardly anyone is carnivorous in the New Testament. Christ usually arrives at mealtime, but the expression "they sat down to meat" is often merely a Jacobean way of saying "they ate." There is a good example of this in 1 Kings 19:8—the Gideons Bible describes Elijah the Tishbite eating, and uses the word "meat," while a better translation in the Revised English Bible gives "food."

  People in the Bible eat remarkably well. "Your bowels shall sing like a harp," Isaiah says, and it is easy to see why. Only one person (Eglon, in Judges) is described as being "a very fat man." Inevitably, biblical people live a very long time. This could be due to some ancient method of reckoning years, yet a little arithmetic shows two hundred to be a typical life span. That is not an unreasonable goal.

  The idea of living a long time becomes increasingly attractive as I grow older. Time matters more to me now. And it has been shrewdly observed that an obsession with longevity is a characteristic of the very rich. The German physician and literary critic A. L. Vischer described the consequences of this phenomenon when discussing Tolstoy's fictional character Ivan Ilyich: "Simple uncomplicated souls who do not attach such great importance to their own life are able to accept their fate; life and heart have done their work, time for them to go. By contrast, successful and self-assured people are usually at a complete loss when faced by the reality of a physical collapse."

  By the time I had finished The Happy Isles of Oceania, I had assembled the elements of some key scriptural doctrines related to diet—chapter and verse of the Bible's health-giving passages. I was not a prophet, but wasn't it possible to be a sort of messenger? A novel allows latitude for such speculation. I began Millroy the Magician, and I continued to experiment. I baked Ezekiel bread. I made Jacob's pottage and Daniel's lentils. I ate loaves and fishes. I drank a little wine for my digestion. I comforted myself with apples, with milk and honey; I cooked with bitter herbs. I gave up meat entirely. I wrote all day, and late in the afternoon I exercised—used a rowing machine or went paddling in my kayak. I weighed myself morning and evening, and I watched TV, taking special notice of the beefy evangelists who looked as though they might profit from a diet of Ezekiel bread or lentils. I felt wonderful.

  I became convinced that a new sect could be founded in America. It would offer complete salvation, on earth and in the hereafter. It would advocate Bible food, all of it healthy eating. It would promise longevity—biblical life spans. It would purify; it would be uplifting and strengthening. This reaction against reading junk and eating junk was not a frivolous speculation. I had the evidence that it actually worked. I had been restored to health. Anyone else could do the same. The proof was a person's physical health, and since this was Bible food, that strength would also be an index of spiritual health.

  That was Millroy's message, and I suppose it helped the writing of my book that I believed it too. Nearly every American novel about an evangelist (Elmer Gantry is the classic) is denunciatory in tone and mainly about hypocrisy and scandal. My Millroy is scandalous, but he is not a hypocrite. How could he be? Writing this book restored me to health. So Millroy must be right. Eating this holy food was a form of piety, even prayer; and following the Bible diet, you would become pure in body and soul, destined for Heaven, immensely long-lived, with buns of steel.

  Palawan: Up and Down the Creek

  I LIKED THE LOOK of Palawan on a map: the sausagey shape of it, the way it linked Indonesia to the Philippines, its great distance from home, its apparent insignificance, with only one town-dot of any size, its fringe of a thousand scattered islands—some in the Sulu Sea, the rest in the South China Sea—and it was nearer to Borneo than its own mainland. All this stirred me. It had just the right profile to be a great place for kayaking.

  My ideal in travel is just to show up and head for the bush, because most big cities are snake pits. In the bush there is always somewhere to pitch your tent.

  But I knew nothing about Palawan, and even the guidebooks were pretty unhelpful. All my ignorance made me want to travel there and hop those islands. Whenever I talked about it, people said "Don't go," because the very mention of the Philippines brings to the narrow mind i
mages of dog eaters and cock fights, urban blight and rural poverty, and Mrs. Marcos's ridiculous collection of shoes. It was where the visitor industry consisted mainly of sex tours, money launderers, and decaying old white men looking for doe-eyed Filipinas to marry, or else for willing catamites in Manila—and of course the furtive visits of European branches of Pédophiles Sans Frontières.

  The Philippines general election loomed. Campaigning—so I was told—involved high-caliber crossfire, the supporters of one candidate raking the opposition in a bloody enfilade of horrific gunplay. It was a country of ferry disasters and kiddie porn and government thievery on a grand scale. In other respects it was what Ireland had been in the nineteenth century—a producer of menial workers for the world. Name almost any country and there were Filipinos in it, minding its children and mopping its floors. The Philippines was a place that people fled; so why would anyone want to go there?

  Some of this was incontestable, yet I remained curious. Palawan looked like what it had obviously once been, a land bridge, and I could just imagine the fauna and flora that had tumbled across it. With three weeks free, I wanted to disappear and go paddling my folding kayak somewhere I had never been.

  It did not concern me much that in Hawaii, toothy comedians made whole careers out of mimicking the Filipino accent and the funny names and the dog-stew business. Oddly enough, almost the first person I met in Manila was a man named Booby. "An Australian said to me that my name means 'poolish,' but my farents give me this name!"

  Booby had a dog recipe. Everyone had one. Just for the record, Dog Stew: "Don't get a Dalmatian! Too expensive! Find an aso kalye—street dog—chop him up and morrinate in Seven-Up. If you can't find Seven-Up, use Sprite. It takes the smell off. Then drain. Morrinate again in soy sauce and calamansi leemon for one hour. Drain again. Fry the drained aso in garlic, onion, and pootato. Add tomato sauce and pineapple shunks. Stew for one hour or more. Oh, and before removing it, add sheesh and wait until it is meelted. Serve with rum or strong olcohool, and a pockage of crockers."

  But the stereotypes seemed to slip away after Manila and—to skip ahead a bit—I had a wonderful time. I camped on empty islands and went up rivers and saw snakes in trees and had my tent butted by monitor lizards, and in seaside villages everyone complimented me on my tattoos, and I had several proposals of marriage. I teamed up with a man named Acong—Acong was his palayaw, or nickname, as Booby was Eduardo's; Filipino friendliness is often expressed in this way, for a nickname makes you approachable.

  Acong told me, "I am a native. I am a Tag Banua. When I was a small child there were only natives here." He also said, "There were so many fish in the lagoons that we killed them by standing and shooting arrows." And: "The rivers were deep when I was a boy, but they started to cut trees and the mud came. And now it is shallow." And: "Most of these people you see in Palawan are not natives. They come from Visaya and Luzon."

  Acong ate dogs, monkeys, monitor lizards, and snakes. He loved wild pigs, because they tasted so much better than village pigs. He was forty and looked sixty. He knew why: "My face is old because my life is hard." Also, his wife had run off three years before and left him to look after his four-year-old. He did not call her a perfidious bitch. He just shrugged and said, "I don't know where she is." He lived in a coastal village. He lamented the changes in Palawan: the loggers, the illegal fishers, the loss of trees and fish. "When I was a small boy..." he would begin. It was only thirty-odd years ago, but Palawan was an Eden then, so he said.

  I was camped on a little island in the middle of Pagdanan Bay, about six or seven miles out of Port Barton, and met Acong almost every day for a week. We paddled along the coast and up the hot, airless rivers, he in his banca with the double outrigger, and I in my kayak. We looked for beehives, monitor lizards, monkeys, and snakes, of which there were many, coiled in tree branches. Every now and then Acong would call out, "So, what do you think of my place?"

  He meant this coast of Palawan, the whole of it.

  I said truthfully that it was one of the best places I had ever been.

  All that was ahead of me, the pleasure of island-hopping and camping and congratulating myself that I had come.

  The shape of Palawan had fascinated the Spaniards too: it was so long and slender they had called it La Paragua, because it was shaped like a rolled umbrella. There are various etymologies of the word "Palawan," which is also the name of one of the indigenous peoples. It is pronounced Pah la wan; in Malay this means "heroic warrior," suggesting an obscure mythology. A mountain spine runs down the middle. "Few paved roads," says my guidebook. That was promising. "Thinly populated." Even better. "Thousands of uninhabited offshore islands." That was what did it for me. I set off with some hot-weather clothes, camping equipment, snorkeling gear, and my folding kayak.

  I happened to be in Hawaii. It is an eleven-hour flight from there to Manila. I stopped for the night in Manila—snake pit—and flew the next day to Puerto Princesa, the capital of Palawan, a town on one long street of pawnshops, grocery stores, sign painters, and offices; the place was dusty and full of election posters. The gunplay (twenty-nine voters dead) was back in Mindanao. In Palawan, as far as I could see, an election meant flapping posters and free T-shirts with slogans printed on them.

  The prettily named Puerto Princesa was surprisingly orderly. Instead of cars there were motorized tricycles—part motorbike, part rickshaw, 20 cents a ride. The market was vast and dark, full of dried cuttlefish and wild honey and the cashews that, with rice and bananas, were one of the island's cash crops. I had arrived on a Friday. Men were praying at the mosque, and a mixed crowd at the cathedral were listening to a priest holding a bilingual service, reading from John, the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The large youthful congregation looked hungrily hopeful. I walked on and saw a small, neglected marker, printed "A Grim Reminder of the Realities of War." It went on to say that in December 1944, just in front of the cathedral, soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army forced 154 American prisoners of war into a tunnel, poured gasoline on them, and set them alight—143 died, 11 escaped. The survivors' names and hometowns were listed on the plaque.

  That massacre, and much else in Palawan—its dusty simplicity, its empty mountains, its remote villages, and its indigenous creation myths about "the Weaver of the World"—made it seem a ghostly place. But I had not been there long before I began thinking that there was nowhere else I would rather be, and its air of being haunted only added to my pleasure.

  The hauntedness was not merely an aspect of its ambiguous past, its being on the old Spanish and Chinese trade routes, the refuge of pirates and wartime cruelty. Because it had been off the map and rich in resources, it was the site of a great deal of plundering. Palawan was famous for its splendid hardwood forests of mahogany, ipil, narra and camagon—prized for furniture. The waters were full of fish and pods of dugong, known locally as sea cows.

  In the 1930s British loggers began clear-cutting the west coast and giving English names to the bays, harbors, and islands: facing west at Port Barton (a corruption of "Burton"), almost every island and headland you see has an English name. After the Spanish-American War (1898), American administrators and missionaries settled in Palawan. One of the enduring American legacies is the large rural prison at Iwahig, about twenty miles west of Puerto Princesa. Several buildings, put up in the 1920s, still stand, including an elegant recreation hall. I spent a day there marveling at what enlightened prison management can achieve. Prisoners mix with visitors. I was shown around by Luis, who was serving seven years on a drug-smuggling charge—"a whole jeepneyful!" He introduced me to his fellow inmates, all of them heavily tattooed.

  "'To Trust a Woman Is Death,'" I read on one man's arm. "You think that's true, Amado?"

  "In my life, yes, Joe."

  "Sputnik" was tattooed on Amado's belly. Sputnik was a protection gang Amado himself had started twenty-nine years ago, when he was imprisoned for murder.

  Iwahig with its fifteen hundred inmat
es (known as "colonists") is completely self-sufficient in food; some revenue is earned by inmates making souvenirs—carvings, walking sticks, picture frames, furniture—that are sold in Puerto Princesa. Many of the prisoners are lifers or long-termers—multiple murderers, armed robbers, drug dealers—and some of these, thirty at least, live with their families, their children playing on the parade ground while their inmate fathers work in the fields. The inmates have not lost their sense of humor. When I passed one work gang on my motorcycle, they called out, "Daddy! Daddy!" and laughed.

  After World War Two swept through Palawan, and the Japanese, and chaos, many more loggers came, most of them illegal, denuding the mountain slopes and driving the indigenous people deeper into the forest. Drought and misery and overfishing in the rest of the Philippines meant an influx of Filipino migrants. I saw these people up and down the coast and at the edges of many islands. "Officially these villages do not exist," a Dutch geographer told me. "They are not on any census." They were people from the populous and desperate parts of the Philippines, where marine stocks had been depleted.

  "They say, 'When the fish are gone we will leave and go where the fish are,'" said Yasmin Arquiza, an eco-journalist and editor in chief of the environmental magazine Bandillo ng Palawan. "They always assume there will be another place to go."

  When times are tough, some hard-pressed villagers pass the hat and scrounge up an airfare, and one of the young, strong unmarried girls of the village is chosen to go abroad—to Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, or wherever there is work—and she will send a large proportion of her salary back to her sponsoring village.

  Yasmin herself was from Mindanao. Ed Hagedorn, the mayor of Puerto Princesa, who was about to be reelected to a third three-year term, was born in Paranaque, in Luzon. The people with status or power or money in Palawan all seemed to come from somewhere else. For her investigative journalism, Yasmin had been the object of the mayor's scorn, and he had attacked her in an open letter to the local newspaper. Hagedorn was a self-confessed crook and was known to have boasted of his shady past, so I sought him out while he was campaigning.