The last thing you want to do when crossing a channel in the deep Pacific is put your life in the hands of a couple of old drunks whose vessel is actually a glorified soda can with a plywood storage bin affixed to the top. But we were on a tight schedule and our field producer needed to shoot. Well, the bay outside the harbor dock there is flat as glass, it’s ten feet deep, and the boat is gliding out of her slip. We get out in the middle of the channel, and it’s only five miles across to Nu’utele, but a half mile from shore all of a sudden we are in ocean several hundred feet dip in fourteen- or fifteen-foot seas, big rolling waves coming under the pontoons, and this little tin can of a boat is being pushed sideways. I’m petrified. I look around—there are no life jackets … there is no radio. The vintage forty-horsepower engine that is trying to push us over to this island is failing miserably. The guy who’s driving the boat looks like the kid who carried my bags at the hotel but doesn’t seem half as confident about making it to his destination, and he’s got this worried look on his face that the boat is not going to make it. And all of a sudden, what had started as a “wow, this is sort of scary and thrilling” thing became scarier and scarier and scarier as the waves got bigger and the boat began to get pushed around more and more. The overcast sky swirled around us, the wind rose and fell, and my producer starts singing the theme from Gilligan’s Island: “Well, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tiny port aboard this tiny ship.” It was funny. The first time it was funny. The second go-round was less funny. On the third go-round, I turned to Chris and said, “If you sing one more bar of that thing, I’m going to punch your fucking lights out.” THAT was pretty funny. Chris volunteered that when he’s really scared he does that to calm himself, and I looked over at Joel, one of our videographers, and he looked really scared. I felt really scared, and I realized in a flash that we all truly felt somewhat doomed, in the middle of the ocean, on the boat ride to nowhere. After much nail biting and hair pulling, we finally got within the bosomy and calm natural harbor of Nu’utele, the sun came out, the waters were tranquil, and all we had to do was navigate through a maze of car- and bus-size rocks in this bay and try to beach the boat on the rocky shoreline. We did, and ran two lines, one to either end of the pontoon boat, then up and around the massive palm trees that stand vigil on the shoreline. Then, for about an hour, in waist-deep water, we ferried all our gear off the boat and made a temporary base camp in the trees.
Afele does a fantastic job helping us get situated under a little lean-to that is hidden in a small glade about a hundred yards up and off the beach. Dense tropical rain forest is all around you and at times you can’t see five feet in front of your face, so the clearing and the corrugated steel topper on the old tent poles is a nice resting spot. No one lives on the island, but a lot of visiting biologists and other scientists venture out to Nu’utele to aid their studies, and the shelter is a constant on everyone’s trip there. You can see the odd Danish cigarette butt or the Russian chocolate bar wrapper, and since no one spruces up and everyone uses the same area to build a little fire and stands in the same spot when it gets rainy, this uninhabited island has a little personal global village type of history that is oddly warming, and so we stow our gear and head out into the jungle and begin our botany lesson, led by this young Euell Gibbons of the rain forest.
He shows me water vines and edible snakes, we hack apart rotting palms looking for bugs and grubs, and he shows me sleeping snakes. We hack away with our machetes almost every few steps, looking for coconut grubs, and can’t find any at all. In fact, we spend all morning looking for coconut grubs—after all, it was supposed to be an important throughline of our story—and we finally get to the point where Afele, exhausted and dejected but keeping it all close to the vest, suggests we start to climb the mountain. There is only one mountain, rising up out of the center of this island, and remember—the whole island chain is essentially volcanic, so the general topographic vibe is like you are walking on a giant inverted ice-cream cone squished on top of a small pancake, and since Nu’utele’s soil is clay-based on this one side of the mountain, we are having an incredibly tough time making any headway. Vertically challenged, we press on. The rainstorm that had come through the night before and earlier in the morning kept threatening rain again, but it burned off every time the sun appeared ready to peek out. It was a bright but cloudy afternoon, but the ground was so wet and slick that you couldn’t get any traction on it even with sturdy hiking shoes. The slopes were almost a full forty-five degrees steep, but it felt worse as we slipped and slid, and one by one our crew gave up, something that had never happened before, forced to turn back, unable to climb this mountain. Everybody is carrying tripods, cameras, and equipment, so it takes us a while on the narrow path we are cutting to actually turn around. Afele sends us back on our own as he continues to scamper up the incline in his flip-flops, cruising up the mountain in pursuit of a few weevils or grubs, and we go back to the little shelter to wait for the arrival of the second group of intrepid locals coming to meet us for part two of our island experience. The mood is sour. Half the day is gone and we still have no story in the can, Afele is up on the mountain and we don’t know what he is doing or when he is coming back, and we roll into our base camp to meet the Samoan Bat Hunting Club, come to take us on a bat hunt.
The Samoan Bat Hunting Club sounds very elegant, but kind of like the Tobago Iguana Hunting Club that I spent an afternoon with one day the year before when I was scatter-gunning iguanas down in Tobago, the SBHC guys seemed an odd mix to me. They were a group of about six or seven guys, all of whom really dug going out into the woods and blasting away at bats with their guns, but they were also divided into two cliques. The first was made up of their self-appointed leader, named Paul, and the four guys who were his personal lackeys, enjoying life seemingly at his pleasure. They drank when he drank, spoke only when he seemed to approve of it, and clearly their life revolved around him. I thought I was in a weird alternate Sopranos universe—that’s what these guys seemed to mimic in their odd social fealty.
The other clique was made up of the three guys who didn’t give a whit what Paul said or did. They had some kind of independent life outside of the hunting club—one was a cop, the others local laborers—but all absent allegiance to the loudmouth who ran the show. It turned out that Paul had married the governor’s daughter or his niece and had sort of ingratiated himself into the semi-upper crust of Samoan society, and everything began to make sense. Paul, by the way, was shit-faced by the time he got to the island and kept drinking beer after beer after beer while we were mapping out what our evening hunt would look like, barking at his peeps and offering unsolicited advice at every turn. You can’t really start hunting bats until the sun starts setting, so we had quite an amount of time on our hands while we were waiting for Afele to return to camp. We enjoyed talking to some of these guys, so we began to shoot some b-roll and do some of the little nuts-and-bolts TV business that we needed to capture before the big scene, getting a safety lesson on the weapons, doing the meet and greet, and so on. Paul’s crew were all perfectly nice, and they were extremely uncomfortable as Paul became drunker and drunker. At one point, he became so verbally obnoxious that one member of the hunt club who wasn’t in Paul’s little cadre of sycophantic toadies, a guy who was also a member of the Samoan Olympic team shooting squad, basically had to take his gun away from him. It was hysterically funny looking back, but at the time it was eerily surreal. Watching this drunk guy, clearly mad on the power of being the one big fish in a very small pond, having to be dressed down by the only teammate of his that he would listen to, reminded me of being in college, where one guy in the group always seemed to be the one who needed babysitting. And off Paul went, skulking down by the boat as Afele strolled back into camp carrying a couple of grubs. Hailing the conquering hero, swept up in the excitement of our friend’s return, it took us a while to hear the shouts and ruckus down on the beach, and fra
nkly we ignored him for a couple of minutes because he was the drunk guy. But then we hear the boat driver screaming over the sound of the breakers and the wind, and we think something has happened between Paul and the pontoon shuttle crews. We run down to the beach, and at this point the sun is setting and darkness is settling in, and the boat has come loose from its moorings as the tide has come up, and the wind is whipping up again, and the three of them, Paul and the two drivers, are in the water trying to hold on to the loosed boat. It takes a while, but once we have six or seven of us down in the water holding the boat, we can get another rope on it and tie it up. I should have thought—bad things come in threes, and this is only number two—but I wasn’t really thinking straight. We almost lose our lives in the water getting turned sideways going out to Nu’utele, and now the boat breaks free of its moorings and we almost get stranded out there. Sometimes I think to myself that what we are doing is just a little too goofy and dangerous, and at that point in the evolution of the show we had no satellite phone with us and no way to get off the island if something really bad happened. The idea of being marooned was not appealing in the least.
Eventually, we got the boat squared away, the dust began to settle and the magic begins to happen. The weather has cleared up, the humidity has dropped, the ruckus is settling down over this abandoned island, you see the shadows come out on this mountaintop, and we stand vigil underneath the ripe bread fruit trees and wait for the bats. Well, the bats on Nu’utele are not very far-ranging, and when I say bats, you’re probably thinking of something flitting around the backyard in Connecticut on warm summer nights, a pest that weighs a couple of ounces and occasionally flies by accident into your living room, and you fetch a tennis racket and shoo it out the kitchen door. Guess again. These are fruit bats topping the scales at five kilos, giant tropical fruit bats, also known as flying foxes because they are so ferocious-looking, supersized and furry. This bat has as much relation to a bat in your backyard as my sitting in your garage makes me your car. It is an awesome sight to see hundreds of these things pinwheeling in the sky, circling down, down, down from the mountaintop caves they live in toward the bread fruit trees dotting the shoreline. All these bats do is sleep, poop, and eat ripe bread fruit. These animals are a rarity in the animal kingdom in that once you do kill them and begin preparing them for eating, you don’t even have to clean them in the traditional butchery sense of the word. Even the stuff in the intestinal tract is good to eat, and the natives eat all of it. These animals are not purged or bled after harvesting; these things are simply held by two men over an open fire (with a six-foot wing span, it takes two to tango) to be scraped of their fur and roasted whole, simply scored with a little X mark in the chest so they cook evenly. These animals are supremely clean. All they eat and digest is bread fruit, and since that’s all that’s in their system their gastrointestinal acids and enzymes are relatively mild, so you can eat the whole animal with impunity. That’s quite an unusual thing to partake of in the food world, an animal so clean and limited in range that you can eat every edible portion without cleaning it.
So we position ourselves in the jungle, spread out in a line in the little clearing between a couple of bread fruit trees heavy with ripe fruit, and we begin shooting bat after bat after bat as they soar into the trees, dropping four or five fairly quickly. The cop who was a member of the shooting team made one of the most miraculously hunting shots I’ve ever seen in my life. Out of the corner of his eye—I don’t know how he could see it given that it was pitch black at night—he sees something fluttering about eye height and he dropped it on the fly in the dark about forty feet out. Turned out it was a true wild chicken, taken on the wing.
We had the five or six coconut grubs that Afele had scrounged up, we had a half-dozen bats and a wild chicken. Things were looking up. We head back to our shelter, burn a couple coconut husks, and start a roaring fire. We clean the bats one by one, stretching the animals across the fire, scraping their fur off as they scorch, and score the bats across the chest. We toss the bats on the coals and squat on our haunches, turning them every few minutes, getting hungrier and hungrier, just like a Sunday-afternoon weenie roast back home. Almost. Holding a bat whose wing span is about five or six feet from tip to tip, stretching one of these critters over an open fire to singe the fur, scraping off the hairy soot, taking a sharp knife and putting an X mark in its chest, opening it up so it cooks evenly, watching as the the guts start to puff out as the meat cooks—well, this is really caveman-style eating, to say the least.
Dining on bats in the great outdoors is a very greasy, smelly affair. You chew and tear as you go, the meat and sinew are fairly tough, and the process is slow and sloppy. We rinse ourselves off with buckets of rainwater, and finally cut down the cameras and the lights and pack up all of our stuff, but by this time it’s about 11 at night and we are exhausted. We head down to the boat. We load all our gear into the boat. By this time, the shooting club guys have gone off as quickly and mysteriously as they arrived, piling into their boat and heading off to Upolu. We start to putt out of the protected harbor beach area on Nu’utele, only to find that with the tide up you can’t see all the giant rocks that were so easy to cruise around and through on the way in. The “crew” of our little tin dinghy that we rode over in had no idea how to get us out of the teeny little bay on Nu’utele, and we discover that in fact they have never left the island after dark. We also come to learn, as we are going back and forth performing K-turns in vain attempts to get out into deeper water, that the crew is not sure how to get us across the channel to where the water is hundreds of feet deep, but then again we are feeling anxious. The water we are heading into is so deep that the angry swift current creates those huge waves between the big island of Upolu and the little island of Nu’utele just off the coast. The speed of the current in this deep V-shaped trough is scary fast, but eventually we get turned toward it in our little vessel more suited for flat lazy lakes than the deep South Pacific. We get about a half mile off the island, and despite the whistling winds and boiling seas you can hear the sickening scrape of rock against metal. I will tell you there is no worse feeling in the world than standing in a little tin can of a boat with no radios and no life preservers, with a bunch of crazed, unseaworthy crew members, half in the bag at worst, hungover from their daytime drinking at best. That scrape of rock against boat meant just one thing and we all knew it, and if we hadn’t already gashed open one of the pontoons and the boat was going to sink, it was about to. I considered my options quickly and figured out that if the boat started to sink, we could all make the decision to try to swim to shore for ourselves, but what was really scary was that the boat was stuck on top of one of these rocks, and because the rocks were close to the surface they allowed rollers out in the open ocean to become breaking waves and so the waves threatened to swamp the boat after flipping it over, which would have been disastrous. That’s the type of scenario where people really get hurt and was when, we all realized at the same time, panic begins to set in on the boat. Everyone is screaming at each other. The guides and the crew were all vainly grabbing at poles that were stowed on the boat to push us off the rock. Two, three, or four waves in a row almost loosed us from atop this rock, but in doing so also almost flipped us over each time they swirled and crashed around the rock and our craft. Out of nowhere, Afele tosses aside his T-shirt and dives into the water in the middle of the ocean, swims around to the edge of the boat where the rock has snagged us, waits for the next wave to come, puts his little flip-flop feet up on the rock, and pushes the boat off from where we had been wedged as the water crashes over him. He nonchalantly hops back onto the boat, grabs the handle of the little outboard engine for our incompetent captain, and motors us off into the deeper channel.
Out in the deep water the rollers were surprisingly big and soft and the wind was nil. We flitted and threaded between the waves all the way back to the safe harbor on the big island of Upolu that we had embarked from fourteen hours e
arlier, capping one of the most energizing and thrilling evenings of my life. On this night I had thought on several occasions that I might lose my life, and it turned out to be one of those great days, a day that you look back on and say, yeah, I did that, making my bat meal taste all the sweeter each time I thought about it.
Journey to the Source
Why the Shortest Distance from Sea to
Plate Makes for Amazing Meals
am a traveler. I am not a tourist. Occasionally, I do touristy things. But I have spent about ten weeks’ total time in the People’s Republic of China and never seen the Great Wall. Go figure. Long ago, I developed a way of exploring a country by diving into their culture mouth first, mostly because I’m obsessed with food in a way that makes most cuisine-conscious culinistas seem only casually interested by comparison. As a young boy, I traveled a lot with my family, and it was through them that I got turned on to a new way of interpreting how to spend time in a foreign country. My dad and I spent as much time cruising the aisles at Harrods, exploring Chinatown, or shopping for socks at Marks and Spencer as we did looking at the British Museum’s Elgin Marbles. I learned early on in life that you could view as much of Roman culture ordering shirts at Brioni as you could sitting in a tour, perambulating the Coliseum.
We traveled to eat, and often that meant going great distances in the opposite direction of the herd. In the mid-seventies, we were skiing in Val d’Isère and on our second day it started to snow heavily. When it stopped six days later, food delivery to the little ski town had been halted for three days. We ate sardines and crackers in the lobby of the hotel, and as the snow stopped falling, we anxiously awaited the first new truck deliveries through the pass, as well as some superb skiing. We were wrong. The pistes needed to be blasted with dynamite to make the runs safe from avalanches, and while cars could go out the pass when it was plowed, the four-wheelers were still a day away. No food, no skiing. So Dad piled everyone in the van and drove all day across France to Lyon, where we ate a dinner for the ages at Paul Bocuse, in the era when his eponymous restaurant was universally regarded as the world’s finest. We spent the night driving back, skied the next day, and enjoyed the rest of our vacation. I remember the ease of the decision to bolt for Lyon as well as I remember the thumbnail-size mousse de foie gras course or the truffle soup en croute.
The Bizarre Truth Page 4