by Tim Cahill
Stanley Clayton watched as "one of the brothers came
into the pavilion. He was running. When he came in, he started stumbling. He turned and flipped over and was just lying there. He was suffering. He was shaking and carrying on, spitting up his last spit, eyes turning up in his head. All of them were suffering. I was terrified and looked for a way to get out." Security men with crossbows circled the pavilion. Men with guns guarded the periphery.
Odell Rhodes made himself inconspicuous. He even held his students, the ones who called him Daddy, as they died. And he saw that the only people who were allowed through the circle of crossbows were medical personnel. He heard the doctor ask a nurse to get his stethoscope. Odell fell into step beside her. The guards stopped them, but the nurse said, "We're going to the medical office." As they stepped beyond the crossbows, Odell realized he would have to kill the nurse. Fortunately, she instructed him to look in one building while she searched the other. Odell entered the nursing office and made his way to the back of the building, where there was a senior center; most of the people there were bedridden.
"Are you the man who is going to take us up there?" an old woman asked.
"You know what they're doing up there?" Odell asked.
"We know."
"I'm not the man to take you."
Stanley too decided to risk arrows or bullets rather than take poison. He sorted through the bodies, pretending to look for people who might still be alive. There were only one hundred people left alive when he saw his chance and took it. He was lucky. It will never be known how many people were murdered, how many saw there was no escape and chose poison to arrows or bullets.
The security men were found with the rest. They, certainly, must have died voluntarily. In the end, it appears as if Jim Jones put a pistol under his right ear and ended his own life.
I missed the flight back to Miami and ended up spending a night in Curacao. There was a television in the hotel room, and I found that, after staring into the face of horror for two weeks, all I could do was sit there and watch Popeye cartoons in Spanish while my mind spun
and slipped gears.
Jones was a contradiction of everything he stood for. He denigrated sex, but he slept with any woman who pleased him.
He brought homosexuals to the floor for beatings, but had sex with men.
He stood for social equality, and ate platters full of meat while others ate rice.
He preached racial equality, and yet the leadership of his primarily black organization was mostly white.
He railed against slavery, but he forced his followers to work twelve hours a day in the fields. He fed them maggoty rice and they called him Father instead of Massa.
He feared oppression but became an oppressor.
In the end, he put a bullet through his brain, killing all those things he hated with such vehemence.
There was nothing to feel for Jim Jones but a sure, steady loathing. It was harder to think about the people of Jonestown. Many of them had suffered in America, and they had turned to Jim Jones for help.
I remembered sitting with Odell Rhodes just after he had come back from identifying bodies. Another survivor asked him if he had seen a certain woman who had been very special and very dear. Odell said he hadn't seen her. The lie was transparent.
Later, Odell told me about it. She had written on her arm in ball-point pen, u Jim Jones is the only one." It was better to think she had been murdered.
Having a theory about it helped some. Mine was that
Jones was paranoid, in the clinical sense, and that he infected others. The mechanism oifolie imposee was magnified by the classic techniques of brainwashing. The mass suicides of history—Masada (the hilltop fortress where, in 73 a.d., nearly one thousand Jews killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans) and Saipan (under invasion from American forces, one thousand Japanese took their lives in 1944)—had occurred when a people were under siege and surrounded by enemies. Jones and the people of Jonestown were no exception: for months they had been harassed, persecuted, surrounded, and besieged by shadow forces. When the final attack was imminent and undeniable, they chose to die.
I assumed in Curacao I might finally get more than two hours of sleep. Since Tuesday, November twenty-eighth, the day after the planeload of newsmen visited Jonestown, there hadn't been much to do except sit around the Graham Greene Room and touch bases for the third or fourth time with the survivors. The problem was that we had been pushing so hard, we'd been so charged with adrenaline, that it was hard to break the inertia. One network TV crew was filming a cockroach crawling across the floor. They had the lights on it and the camera going, and the soundman was crawling along next to it with a microphone.
A few of the survivors were charging for interviews, and it seemed to me that some of them sold their exclusive story several times. (When one reporter phoned his editor in New York and asked, "What am I authorized to offer?" the editor replied, "Offer him a glass of Kool-Aid.") I didn't pay anyone, but I didn't begrudge them the money. It was the first time many of them had had cash in their pockets in years, and some hired prostitutes from a nearby brothel to stay with them, there at the Park Hotel.
Some people—other survivors and newsmen—were out-
raged by the situation. It struck me differently. I remembered the attitude toward sex at Jonestown, and I saw that these men and women treated each other with affection. In some way it seemed to me a bittersweet affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit.
were the houses of Innsbruck, far below. How insignificant were civilization and its discontents. And I... I was a giant of a man, towering above all that was petty and small; a man naked and unashamed; a man in tune with the power of nature, in tune with—
"Fal der reeeeeeee . . ."
The singing was coming from some short distance below.
"Fal der raaaaaaaa . . ."
The voices were high and pure and sweet: children's voices. I had thought I was alone but had not counted on the Austrians' love of hiking.
"Fal der reeeeeeee . . ."
The song was louder now, and the children were very close. The trail passed directly under the rock where I stood, and my clothes were twenty yards away, somewhere on the other side of the rocky path. I considered a frantic dash, then discarded the idea, certain that my body, such as it is, was not one of the wonders of nature these children had climbed a mountain to see. Soon they would be topping the ridge and coming around the bend. Miserably naked, I crouched behind a rock, holding my breath. And here they came, a kind of Scout troop, twelve-year-old boys and girls together, led by a stout, muscular man in lederhosen and knee socks.
"FAL DER RA HA HA HA HA HA . . ."
An entirely naked man, crouched in shame and fear behind a rock, is obliged to consider the symbology of Genesis. In the second chapter of the Good Book, before their expulsion from the Garden, Adam and Eve were "both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." Good for them. But soon they began humanity on its passage from a state of innocence and bliss into the knowledge of evil, misery, fast food, and North Dakota. Driven from the Garden and possessed of guilty knowledge, Adam and Eve gathered up fig leaves and made themselves aprons. (Try that on a talus slope a few thousand feet above Innsbruck.) When God called them, they hid, because, as Adam later explained, "I was afraid, because I was naked . . ."
All of us, religious or not, seem to have some dim vision
of the Garden, an archetype that lives in the racial memory as surely as the fear of falling or the hatred of lawyers. Nearly five thousand years ago, in what is now southern Iraq, the people of the land of Sumer developed the world's first written language. One of the grand Sumerian epics concerned an earthly paradise—probably located in southwest Persia—where the first man and woman went proudly naked. According to cuneiform script scratched into rock five millennia ago, the first couple was persuaded by a fox to eat one of eight fruits that had been specifically forbidden to them. Big mista
ke. The landlord evicted the couple, and their descendants were forced to wear message T-shirts and designer jeans.
Ever since, cultured individuals have equated clothing with civilization. Once, in Africa, I talked to a colleague who had applied to visit the pygmies of the Ituri forest. The bureaucrat who denied the application, my friend discovered later, routinely forbade journalists to visit the Ituri. He believed that depictions of the pygmies' lives would be detrimental to the image of Zaire and make it appear less than completely civilized to the rest of the world. "They wear few clothes and you will surely be offended, n'est-cepas?" the bureaucrat had said, frowning intently. The bureaucrat, my friend told me, wore a double-knit leisure suit.
When supposedly civilized individuals are discovered nood, in the farst, charitable people simply assume they are insane. Something like this happened to the writer Farley Mowat when he traveled up above the Arctic Circle to study wolves several decades ago. In his memoir of a season with the wolves, Never Cry Wolf, Mowat writes about a warm August day on the tundra: "I decided to take advantage of the weather and have a swim and get some sun on my pallid skin, so I went off a few hundred yards from the Eskimo camp (modesty is the last of the civilized vices which a man sheds in the wilds), stripped, swam, and then climbed a nearby ridge and lay down to sun-bathe."
In Carroll Ballard's brilliant cinematic version of Never Cry Wolf, Charles Martin Smith, the actor playing Mowat, dozes, then wakes to find himself in the middle of a huge,
migrating caribou herd. Rather than lose the opportunity to study the interaction of wolf and caribou firsthand, Smith, entirely naked but for his boots, runs with predator and prey, a scene of beauty and splendid savagery.
What Ballard chose not to film was the aftermath of the chase. "I gave it up then," Mowat wrote, "and turned for home. ... I saw several figures running toward me, and I recognized them as the Eskimo woman and her three youngsters. They seemed to be fearfully distraught about something. They were all screaming, and the woman was waving a two-foot-long snowknife while her three offspring were brandishing deer spears and skinning knives."
Mowat sprinted back to his camp, pulled on his pants, and picked up his rifle. Later, when things had quieted down, he learned that the woman had heard from one of her sons that the wolf man had gone galloping out over the hills, quite naked. "She, brave soul, assumed that I had gone out of my mind (Eskimos believe that no white man has very far to go in that direction), and was attempting to assault a pack of wolves barehanded and bare everything else. Calling up the rest of her brood and snatching up what weapons were at hand, she had set out to rescue me."
I was thinking about this story, about the Garden, and about conditions inside Austrian jails, as the parade of re-voltingly cheerful children marched by my rock, singing like little banshees. It took them weeks to pass. I yearned for dwarfdom and wished the children of Austria mortification and porridge for dinner.
"Fal der reeeeeeee . . ."
When the little cretins were finally gone and I could hear them only faintly, I found my clothes and started trudging mournfully down the mountain, thinking uncharitable thoughts. The Garden is a secret spot and one not gladly shared. It took me fifteen full minutes in a pair of pants before the situation began to seem even vaguely amusing.
SHADOW
OF THE
MOON
Searching for Grand Terror in Big Sky Country
N
Seattle in the sun is splendid, but Interstate 5 this day was slick and the rain fell like a fine mist. To say it was raining in Seattle is like pointing out that bears tend to relieve themselves in remote wooded areas. People who live in Seattle have a puddle on the back stoop 365 days a year, and some experts attribute a significant portion of the city's suicides to its damp and pearly, sunless skies. I have always imagined that Venus, under its cloud cover, would look like an infrared Seattle. Grappling with these morbid and otherworldly thoughts, I turned east, where the weather got worse.
Snoqualmie Pass was closed for an hour because of an avalanche, and the sun's light was a dead-gray glow that barely filtered through the falling snow. 1-90 eastbound out of Spokane was a trucker's nightmare; big rigs were either jackknifed in the ditches or sitting safely on the side, defeated by some snow-packed pass. In Idaho, at 3 a.m., the sky simply collapsed, and wind-driven drifts spread across the icy pavement. Dawn in Missoula, Montana, consisted of a certain hazy brightness under glacial skies. The last total eclipse of the sun in the continental United States in this century was due in three days, and meteorologists working on special forecasts set the chances of heavy cloud cover at
137
about 90 percent. The odds for actually seeing the phenomenon were dismal.
Locals took that news much better than those of us who had spent considerable time and money to be in Montana in the dead of winter. I was sitting in a bar all festooned with lumberjack paraphernalia, bitching over a beer, when a three-hundred-pound log peeler suggested that I could go through the door marked gentlemen, turn off the light for several minutes, and get the same effect.
Not exactly true, I thought. There just isn't all that much in the way of Grand Terror in the men's room. Eclipses ought to be awesome, as they were for our distant ancestors. When the lights went out at noon, those folks surely figured it was a message from Mr. Big that He wasn't entirely happy with the way things were going.
The sun-worshipping Aztecs liked to sacrifice hunchbacks and dwarfs during an eclipse, which was apparently their way of saying, "We're sorry." In 840 a.d. when the moon got between the earth and the sun and its shadow fell on Louis of Bavaria, son of Emperor Charlemagne, his heart clogged up with a greasy sort of fear, and he fell to the ground, lifeless as a rock. Louis of Bavaria, like a lot of big-time kings of the day, interpreted everything personally.
The ancient Chinese were able to predict eclipses, but they preferred not to take any chances. Moonshadow or no, the appropriately forewarned populace hammered away on drums and fired arrows at the sun to frighten a celestial dragon bent on dealing with the sun as if it were a macaroon. Legend has it that in 2134 b.c. two astronomers, Hsi and Ho, sampled local wines to excess and failed to predict an eclipse. They were subsequently beheaded for incompetence.
These days incompetents are seldom decapitated, and there are a growing number of people who go out of their way to be in the shadow of the moon as it sweeps across the earth somewhere on the average of once a year. I know three of these self-proclaimed eclipse addicts personally. One, an award-winning science writer, traveled to Africa—
to Mauritania—to witness a total eclipse visible there in 1973. Now, Mauritania is one of the most Godforsaken places on the face of the earth, a scorching, poverty-stricken, sandstorm-wracked desert hellhole where his lips cracked and his brain boiled and where he lost twenty pounds after getting amoebic dysentery. He returned to the States a shriveled, wind-burnt hulk who babbled, not entirely coherently, about the transcendental experience of totality.
The other two eclipse addicts I know have no special interest in astronomy. One is a lawyer, the other a Sierra back-country guide. None of the three has ever been able to explain to me just what it is they find so fascinating about an eclipse—or why they are willing to spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for a few minutes' thrill. All agree only that a total eclipse is worth the effort; beyond that, they say, it's a situation in which "ya hadda be there."
This time I had arranged to be there, viewing it all through a glass darkly. After the dragon ate the sun and spit it out, I figured I'd know if there was anything to this eclipse-addict business.
The trouble was, the weather didn't seem to want to cooperate. My science-writer friend and I had conferred on this point. He had been collecting a lot of material from people who spend a lifetime studying something called "eclipse meteorology," and had decided to go to a little town in the rainshadow of the Cascades. The path of totality was a band of darkness about 170 miles wide, north
to south. It would sweep in out of the west, hitting Portland, Oregon, then curve gradually north through Walla Walla, Washington, and up to Missoula, Helena, and Lewistown, Montana.
Montana looked best to me. Mobility would be the key. If short-range forecasts showed clouds west of the Continental Divide, I'd run for the east. If there were clouds there, I'd head up to the high plains of north-central Montana. I suggested to my friend that if the Cascades were socked in, he'd have no alternative viewing site. He smiled smugly and waved his sheaf of eclipse forecasts. As it turned
out, forecasts three days before the event indicated that a big Pacific storm was riding in on the jet stream and that both of us were shit out of luck.
The Eastgate Liquor Store and Lounge in Missoula is a good place to have a drink and complain about the prevailing cloud cover. But the bar chatter there wasn't about the weather; it was about some poor guy from Seeley Lake who had died an awful death the day before. He had been plowing the lake in preparation for a snowmobile race, and his thirteen-ton Allis-Chalmers road grader had cracked through the ice like a bowling ball through the top of a glass coffee table. It was, everyone agreed, the kind of thing you have nightmares about. Imagine coming up under the ice, searching for the hole, feeling the burning in your chest, trying to control the overwhelming desire to gulp that frigid water into your lungs. The ice is no more penetrable than a layer of solid steel, but you hammer against it, weakly, knowing then, with horrifying certainty, that you are dead.
The peculiar thing about the entire tragedy, they said at the Eastgate, was that the driver, Edward V. "Mike" Kelley, didn't have to go out on the ice. Everyone in town had told him not to. A much lighter bulldozer had gone down only two weeks earlier, and the operator had been lucky to escape with his life. I wondered why someone would take a chance like that—money, machismo, job pressure, what?