by Tim Cahill
My theory was that trance is a socially acceptable way to channel violent and antisocial behavior in a culture that frowns on argument and aggression; a culture that values harmony and smooth interpersonal relationships.
“Why,” I had asked Nyoman early on, “doesn’t anyone become bebec, a duck, when they go Sangyang?” There are lots of ducks in the terraced green rice paddies of Bali.
“I think, beli, no one knows how to be a duck.”
“Where I live, every child knows.”
“Show me, older brother.”
I began talking like Donald Duck and worked myself up into a fine hysterical quacking fury. Nyoman literally fell on the ground laughing. Thereafter, I found myself obliged to be Sangyang bebec pretty much every place we went. Every new person had to meet the entranced duck. I was quacking myself hoarse.
The amazing thing was, no matter how many times I did Sangyang bebec, it never stopped being funny.
My last night in Bali, during that trip, I took Nyoman and his intended bride, Ketut, to a fancy new restaurant in Ubud.
“Beli,” Nyoman said, “you should stay here in Bali. You should marry someone here.”
“Younger brother,” I said, “I hardly know how to talk to Balinese women.”
“It is easy. You must talk sweet. Tell them they are like flowers, like colorful little birds.”
Ketut covered her mouth in the polite Balinese manner but her eyes were bright with laughter. Nyoman and I giggled like schoolboys.
And so we parted. I promised to come back. Maybe marry a Balinese woman. That was eleven years ago.
I heard news of Nyoman periodically, because I recommended his services as driver and guide to any number of Bali-bound friends. The reports were always favorable. People liked Nyoman.
A business trip to the Far East gave me an excuse to hop a short flight to Bali. People said the island had changed, and that it was now a place about tourism. The tourist dollars had bled all authenticity out of the culture, or so it was said.
My first day, I hired a car and drove from my beachfront hotel up into the mountains, where Nyoman lived, in Ubud.
Muka, my Balinese driver for the day, pointed out what was new: the double highway through Sanur, the luxury hotels, the shops where there had only been rice paddies before. Behind the shops, Muka said, there were still rice paddies. You just couldn’t see them from the road.
The road to Ubud, a winding two-lane blacktop, was similarly full of shops, mostly those of family entrepreneurs who carved, say, giant kangaroos out of wood. There were silver shops, and crafts stores, and places that sold replicas of sacred and secular masks. All new.
The people in general looked healthier than I recalled.
“It is true,” Muka said. Health care had improved remarkably in the past thirty years or so. Children were inoculated. Life expectancy in Indonesia as a whole has risen from 45.7 in the 1960s to 62.7. Even with the current economic problems, the country was a good deal more prosperous than it had been when I had last visited. Almost all the mountain villages now had electricity and running water, for instance.
We arrived on the outskirts of Ubud, always Bali’s cultural soul. The main street was choked with shops and services, with new restaurants and upscale hotels. Traffic was constant and unrelenting. Muka and I walked up to Nyoman’s family homestay, where I’d lived eleven years ago. There was a line of motorbikes parked out front, and heavy traffic was at a standstill. The sign—“Homestay Adur”—was still there, but a huge pile of rocks blocked the entrance. I climbed over, and walked up the stairs.
Balinese homes are generally walled compounds consisting of several houses. There had been three or four at Homestay Adur, but when I stepped over the threshold, I saw that all but one of the small wooden houses had been torn down. There was a huge hole in the center of what had been a graceful courtyard, and busy workmen were digging in the earth, setting the foundation for a new, central building. In the single house left standing, a dozen or more people sat at sewing machines, sweating in the heat, and making T-shirts. Nyoman, I was told, wasn’t in at present. He had gone down to his T-shirt shop on the tourist beach, at Kuta. He wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. I could, however, give him a call on his cell phone.
This, I reflected, was not the Nyoman who lived in memory.
Nyoman’s cell phone didn’t work. I liked to think that the sacred peak of Gunung Agung, an active volcano almost ten thousand feet high and locally regarded as “the navel of the world,” was causing the problem.
The next day, I took a scuba-diving excursion to the island of Lembongan. The dive boat was a twenty-two-ton catamaran, with air-conditioned decks. The complicated process of outfitting dozens of divers was handled efficiently and with dispatch. The last time I dove in Bali, the equipment was ratty and the reef was so overfished that it was pretty much bereft of life. My Balinese guide, who wore a fairly expensive dive watch, said the cruise company, Bali Hai Cruises, had hired an independent marine biologist to monitor damage done to the reef by its operations. In fact, he said, the reefs were in better shape than before. Local education programs had curtailed the worst of the overfishing.
It is, I suppose, a commonplace observation, but people who are starving or fighting epidemics seldom concern themselves with environmental issues. I thought about this forty-five feet under the surface of the sea, as the current drove me along the reef at a speed of about 3 miles an hour. There were purple green tube sponges, and waving whips of golden soft corals. The reef was alive with moray eels and clown fish and all the darting, neon life of tropical seas.
Because this was a drift dive, it was hard to stop and examine any one thing very closely. I had to fight hard against the current simply to stay in one place. I wondered if what I had seen could possibly be right: Nyoman, a hotshot with a cell phone, running a sweatshop in what had been a graceful homestay? I felt I was swimming against the current of time, as expressed in measures of change. A melancholy epigram kept banging around inside my head: Life is a drift dive and then you run out of air.
Time and tide change all. Humans age, cultures evolve, and my own home continent hasn’t been the same since the first American stepped onto its soil sometime deep in the ice age. This was before horses and international trade in beads and blankets; before cars and electricity and books and shopping malls; before televisions, skyscrapers, computers, and booths that sell cotton candy at county fairs. Whole waves of people changed North America: Neolithic hunters, pilgrims, and mountain men; Lewis and Clark, cowboys, and Henry Ford. African slaves. Italian and Irish and Mexican and Asian immigrants. Abner Doubleday. Abraham Lincoln. Tourists like De Tocqueville.
History is a chronicle whose function is to iterate change, and humans tolerate this current of disruption to the degree that it provides us those things we want: a decent place to live, food to eat, a quality education for our children, and some leisure time to enjoy our lives and families.
I drove up to Ubud again and finally found Nyoman at the homestay. He said the place was being torn down so that he could expand the T-shirt tailoring shop. The conditions would then be better for the employees, who were, in fact, all members of his family or very close friends. No tourists wanted to stay in the place anymore. The traffic noise was unbearable.
Nyoman had married Ketut, and they had three children.
Ketut sat with Nyoman, sometimes holding his hand as she nursed their youngest child. Nyoman said he didn’t do much guiding anymore: only for friends or friends of friends. He’d traveled himself. A rich American client had bought him a ticket to the United States. He’d seen New York and Cape Cod and Miami and San Francisco. It was all very nice, especially San Francisco, but his youngest child was only four months old at the time, and he was homesick among the tall buildings.
“Remember the trancing ceremonies?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do they still do them?”
“They are better now. The people have more
money to buy better costumes. They have more time to practice, and they do them more often.”
“And the headman still gets hit?”
“Always.”
I liked the idea that as Bali changes, it somehow contrives to remain the same.
“I think you are married now,” Nyoman said.
“It’s true.”
“So you are happy?”
“I think so. Most of the time.”
We were silent for a moment.
“Do you remember the duck?” Nyoman asked.
“Very well.”
“Please do Sangyang bebec again.”
I quacked out the duck’s furious rage. I quacked about loss and change; about the current that drives us ever forward, and entombs each moment as it passes, leaving only memories before we run out of air. I quacked so long and so fervently that I could feel moisture forming at the corners of my eyes.
It was an inspired performance. Probably the best Sangyang bebec I’ve ever done. Nyoman and Ketut collapsed in helpless laughter. The baby in Ketut’s arms looked up, amused by the commotion, smiling and gurgling happily. I quacked on, a little happier now.
Time and tide change all, I thought, but the entranced duck always gets a laugh.
Castle and More Castles
All that was left of the town were its broken and weathered bones: a few ramshackle buildings with Victorian pretensions, all listing dangerously to one side or another, manifestly losing their slow-motion fight with gravity. There were some stone foundations and several piles of crumbling boards, bleached gray under a merciless blue sky. That and nothing more. Castle, Montana, dead now for over a century, is a fit subject for the most fatuous of meditations. Man is vanity, one might conclude, and yet the earth abides. Or something equally solemn and silly. If the people who populated Castle were alive today, one imagines, they’d be heavily invested in Internet stocks.
I didn’t enter any of the buildings: they were prime breeding ground for hantavirus, a disease that made its appearance in 1993. It is spread by deer mice and other rodents, contained in their urine and excrement. A footstep in an abandoned building raises dust, which harbors the deadly virus. People die of respiratory complications.
So I passed near the tumble-down buildings and had a sense of unseen eyes, watching, watching. Castle now belonged to the rodents, and the virus.
There must have once been a grid of streets, but they were gone now, grown over with sage and wildflowers. My dog and I wandered through the ghost town, occasionally scaring up white-tailed deer that pogoed off into the trees, their long tails wagging over their backs like flags.
Above the town, set at the summit of the mountains, was the castle that gave the town its name: several crenellated towers that looked a bit like medieval battlements. The old town site was set on a series of rolling hills and mountain meadows alive with wildflowers. There were purple asters and lacy yarrow, along with wild roses and Indian paintbrush and mountain bluebells. The air was alive with the hum of bees, and the wild, silvery odor of sage floated on the breeze.
The town had a six-year run of incredible prosperity, and then it died, bang, like that, in a matter of seventy-two hours. The first two hundred people had settled alongside Castle Creek in April 1887. There was silver in them thar hills, and the Cumberland mine, along with a dozen others, drew workers from all over America and Europe.
Miners made about $4 a day, which was damn good money in those days. A cowboy, by contrast, earned about a dollar a day. In Castle, early on, a house with outdoor bathroom facilities and a dry kitchen could be purchased for $100, so that an ordinary working man could buy a modest place for a little less than a month’s wages. Try that today. European workers with experience in digging and blasting, notably Cornishmen, called, for some reason, “Cousin Jacks,” were highly valued. There were Irishmen as well, along with a few Chinese, called “Celestials,” because, at the time, China styled itself the Celestial Kingdom. The Chinese worked the tailings, piles of scrap ore Europeans and Americans could not process profitably.
A few days before my visit to Castle, I was chatting with a delegation of Chinese scientists and technicians from the Beijing Natural History Museum. They were visiting Livingston, Montana, to work with Matt Smith, of the Livingston Natural History Exhibit Hall. Matt is an artist who builds dinosaurs from bones and casts sent to his shop from all over the world. They arrive in big, battered wooden cases that look like props from an Indiana Jones movie.
Matt Smith reconstructs the dinosaurs, puts them on exhibition, then sends them off to paying customers like the Museum of Natural History in New York. He’s built dozens upon dozens of creatures, including ice-age mammals, several tyrannosaurs, and a couple of quetzalcoatls, which are the largest creatures ever to fly, with a wingspan of thirty-eight feet, about as long as a school bus. More to the point, of the fifty species of dinosaurs that once existed in what is now China, Matt Smith has built or is building twenty-five of them in Livingston, Montana.
Guan Jian, the director of the Department of Paleontology at the Beijing Natural History Museum, invited Matt to a dig in southern China in December 1996, and the two men have worked closely together ever since. Matt Smith’s artistry, Guan told me on one of his visits, begins at the excavation site. The biology of the creature, how it functions, is important. The geology of the region will dictate excavation techniques. Taphonomy, the study of what happens to the creature the moment it dies, is of supreme importance. How, in fact, did it die? Were the bones disarticulated by scavengers? How is it that some of the animal is preserved while other parts are missing?
Chinese workers, Guan said, were fast and efficient, but they weren’t “attentive.” Digging dinosaurs was a kind of hard rock mining to them.
I sort of liked the idea that—one hundred years after Chinese miners worked the discarded tailings in Castle—Matt Smith was working digs in China in a similar way.
The visiting Chinese technicians would work with Matt in Livingston. Most of them had never been to the United States. They flew into Seattle, where Matt picked them up in a rented van. Then they drove 750 miles to Montana.
In essence, all the technicians knew of the United States at the time I spoke with them was encompassed in a two-day road trip. Their impressions had to do with cars, and highways, which they found impressive and even artful. The “system of transportation” was “beautifully constructed,” and it wound through a land they thought was virtually deserted. Even when they pulled into some town for lunch, the first thing they asked Matt was “Where are all the people?”
They had seen beaver and deer and eagles, which was very exciting. The United States was different from China is so many ways. For instance, if you sat down in a restaurant in America, the waiter would give you a glass of cold water, without asking. In China, you’d get a pot of hot water.
One of the technicians said, “America is only two hundred years old, and yet you are all so very interested in your history.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“Because every town we stopped in had one or more shops that sold old things. Everywhere you go you see the sign: ‘Antiques.’ ” I wasn’t sure this didn’t say something about the acquisitive nature of Americans, but kept my own counsel on that one.
“What we especially noticed,” one of the women said, “was that rich people live out of town, with a lot of land all around them. We wondered: Do they do that because they are afraid of the poor people?”
Were they? Or did it have more to do with the boom-and-bust cycle of the American West? Something to think about, anyway.
The boom:
In Castle, over one hundred years ago, shopkeepers supplied the miners, and by the time Castle’s population reached several hundred, lot jumping was common. A man might find his town lot, purchased from the Castle Land Company, occupied by armed men who drove him off. A vigilance committee was formed, headed by the local postmaster. The toughs hung out in a log
cabin on the slopes above town. The vigilantes rushed it one night. A man inside shouted out that the first man through the door would be shot, but the vigilantes broke down the door with a log. The lot-jumping toughs escaped through a back window, never to return.
Castle reached its peak in 1891, the year it was incorporated. It had nine stores, one bank, two barbershops, two butcher shops, two livery stables, two hotels, a photo gallery, a dance hall, a schoolhouse, fourteen saloons, one church, and seven brothels. Aside from the vigilant postmaster, there was a deputy sheriff, a justice of the peace, a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and four newspapers. There was a permanent population of 1,500 folks. By day, the main street was jammed with outbound ore wagons pulled by teams of horses and inbound teams pulling produce, with buggies, with men on horseback, with coaches and pedestrians. People arrived daily on stagecoaches, among them prostitutes ready to work at the local “sporting houses.”
The main street was now a gravel road leading up into the national forest land, high above in the Castle Mountains. All the buildings that had once lined the street were gone. To the west was the three-story skeleton of a major boardinghouse, and south of that were several weathered buildings with large bay windows looking out at the mountains above. They must have seemed graceful and luxurious in their time.
To the east, across the gravel road, was what had been the disreputable part of town. Most of the saloons and brothels had been located there, and the remains of Minnie’s Sporting House lay dreaming in a high meadow.
My dog found a dead ground squirrel to roll in, and she lay on her back, paws in the air, wiggling about in what appeared to be an ecstasy of putrescence. She’s a bird dog, and I believe she wants to disguise her odor. Somewhere, deep in her demented hunter’s brain, she must imagine that sage hens and ruffled grouse, upon being presented with a creature streaking up on them from a distance, barking hysterically, must think: Hey, nothing to worry about here, it’s just a dead squirrel.