Naked in Dangerous Places

by Cash Peters

  Friends and neighbors have been ordered not to come visit. My stomach hurts too much to talk. And the last thing I want right now is the Vice President of Overseas Sales (Pacific Rim) sitting at my bedside with a broad told-you-so smirk on his face. Damn him.

  But I'm not completely without company. My partner drops in twice to see how I'm doing, which helps break the monotony. And, once, I open my eyes to find a crowd of student doctors hunched in around my bed, smiling, as if I've just told the greatest joke ever. Subsequently, I find that half of them are fans of the show and wanted to come up to the ward to tell me that. One of them admits that he'd like to host a TV travel show of his own someday. (“You do? Well, great,” I mumble, unimpressed. “You can have mine. I'm pretty much done with it. Television's not for me. I'm just not suited to it. Physically, emotionally, temperamentally”)

  Otherwise, the days crawl by without incident.

  Mind you, I'm not whining. At least I'll survive. Which is more than the guy in the bed next door has got going for him.

  I heard the result of his biopsy this afternoon. The doctor stopped by after lunch and addressed him somberly, dropping his already-soft voice to a grave, guarded tone that had me craning my neck to hear.

  “I'm afraid the news is not too good,” I caught him saying. He went on to add that the cancer was far enough along to be inoperable, hinting too, without actually vocalizing it, that he may only have a few more months to live. Weeks even. It was hard to tell.

  A barely suppressed gasp rang around the room.

  That was me.

  Cancer? I didn't even know the guy, but I was shocked.

  An intense conversation followed, during which the doctor mapped out the road ahead, reeling off in a steady drone various facts about treatments, using the bleach of his authority to scrub away any last germ of hope the poor, confused man might have of survival. Once these ugly formalities were over and the doctor had left, I slid slowly back in between my sheets, watching Fox News with the sound down—it's the only way any of their arguments make sense, I find—and for the next hour, maybe more, listened to the man in the next bed sob uncontrollably into his pillow.

  It was while all of that was going on that my BlackBerry went off.

  Two e-mails arrived, one after the other. First, one of the show runners dropped me a line—aha!!—commenting, with tactical understatement, “Sorry to hear you're under the weather.”

  Under the weather??

  Are you insane? I've just lost an organ. I almost died, pal.

  But of course his hands are tied. It's never your fault, even when it is.

  The second of the two e-mails arrived less than twenty minutes later, and was even more startling. This one from the head of the network, of all people. Lovely man. I met him a couple of times during the up-fronts and he was never anything less than polite and enthusiastic. Like The Thumb, he sent his best for a speedy recovery. How thoughtful.

  It wasn't his good wishes, however, that really gripped my attention; it was a comment at the end, which I read once, then twice, then a third time in utter disbelief. The two-line message, doubtless intended to lift my spirits during a difficult time, instead struck me like a baseball bat to the face, plunging me deeper into depression.

  “If it's any consolation,” the e-mail said as I scrolled down, “I'm renewing the show for a second season. Congratulations.”

  Wha???

  Aw, shit!!!

  1 Yes, Mark was with us again. Once you find yourself on this particular merry-go-round, it's hard to get off.

  2 I do!! But at my own pace, that's all. And preferably not through sweltering untamed jungle, across ice floes, or around the rims of erupting volcanoes.

  19

  Twist of the Blade

  I've been hot-air ballooning three times in my life. It's quite an experience, cruising fifteen hundred feet above the ground across open countryside, with no birdsong, traffic noise, voices, or anything else to disturb you, only your accelerating panic at being so high up, and the occasional deafening ZZZZZZZHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTT from the propane tank as the pilot heats the air inside the envelope while flicking madly through a handbook looking for how to land the thing, because chances are he'll have to at some point. What goes up must come down, right? I believe it's one of the fifteen laws of aerodynamics.

  Trouble is, you don't really “land” a balloon. It's tempting to think you do. That it's some kind of primitive elevator, with a button that you press—G for “Ground”—and, after a slight bump on impact, you casually step out of the basket, adjust your hair, and go about your day. But it's not like that, which is probably why it never caught on and people still prefer to take airplanes instead. In fact, each time I've been hot-air ballooning, the basket just dropped out of the sky, period, the way meteorites do, or derailed roller coasters, smacking into the ground with a terrible force, and then, as I and the other passengers were heaving a sigh of relief at still being alive, and just as we were adjusting our hair and getting ready to go about our day, the wind picked up suddenly and dragged us with a jolt for another ten minutes or so, through fields, ponds, and hedges, slithering, hopping, and tumbling, until it shuddered to a stop in a ditch and tossed us out like slops. I'm shocked nobody was killed.

  Anyway, that's ballooning.

  Now, why was I telling you this?

  Oh, I know! Because it's exactly what making season two of the show felt like.

  “Did you hear, did you hear what happened?” gasped the excitable hobbit on my first day back after my operation, her voice an unoiled hinge.

  Unable to walk fast, or even fully breathe due to the hole between my ribs that was (according to Science) meant to be healing, I sank deep into one of the plush square armchairs in reception, wincing all the way down.

  “For the new season, the network is moving the show forward by an hour, to Mondays at 8 P.M.”

  “No!”

  A great pit opened up in my stomach. Just below the pit between my ribs.

  To me, this was the worst possible news.

  Time slots are crucial. They tell you everything about a show: 9 P.M. means “adult;” it hints at grown-up situations, intelligent humor; it's a warning to pack the kids off to bed and maybe put a paper bag over the head of any old folks and wheel them back into their “special cupboard,” because something a little more challenging and racy may be on its way. Whereas 8 P.M.—that's what's called “family viewing.” Ugh. My heart sinks every time I hear those words. Years ago, it used to be a good thing, but not any more, not since the word “family” was hijacked by the Christian Right and came to be synonymous with safe, mediocre, insipid, condescending, predictable, derivative programming from major networks feverishly pandering to the self-righteous sensibilities of the Dimwit Demographic. Nowadays, with few exceptions, 8 P.M. is the dumping ground for pap fare. Mass blah entertainment. Shows to shoot yourself by. A time when everyone watching TV pretty much knows they'll be treated as if they're five.

  “Are you okay?” the hobbit asked, seeing my face turn even paler than it usually is.

  “It's fine. I'm fine.”

  It wasn't, though. And I wasn't.

  Predictably, when the new season of fourteen shows debuted, the time slot confused many viewers. Six weeks into the season, I was still getting e-mails from fans.

  Hi,

  Love your show, but I have not seen a new episode for a couple months. Do you have any insight?

  —Tom.

  Hey, are you taking a break? Haven't seen your show lately.

  Later, Randy.

  Of course, I did what I could. Wore my thumbs to stumps on my BlackBerry, updating them about our new time slot and how fabulous it was; so much better than our old time slot at 9 P.M. because … well… I have no idea what cockamamie excuse I gave; I just made something up, aware as I was writing that my efforts wouldn't make even a tiny dent in the number of mystified viewers who scanned the schedules every Monday and, not finding us where the
y expected us to be, gave up looking.

  Shame, because, to my surprise, everyone went into season two feeling so much happier. Rifts had been patched up, apparently, and sources of crew annoyance addressed; Fat Kid even chose to speak more softly a lot of the time, which was a huge step forward. Additionally, having been forced over the previous few months into addressing the worst of my phobias—in particular speed, wild animals, heights, spiders, horses, and water1—I was feeling a lot more relaxed about the adventures to come. But above all, the shows were simply better-produced, thanks in the main to Jay's superior story-telling skills, even if individual situations within those stories were so contrived that they could only have been devised by monkeys high on methamphetamine.

  In each case, the resulting train of events was entirely believable, but only if you didn't stop for a second to think about what you were being told, or to ask awkward questions. Questions such as—off the top of my head—how is it possible for an ordinary man, on his first trip to Seattle, to be invited into Microsoft's headquarters, casually bypassing security measures that couldn't be breached by a crack team of Marines armed with F-16s and nerve gas, and run around playing freely with their new inventions? And maybe I'm naive, but what are the chances of a guy who's all washed up in Philadelphia taking shelter from a rainstorm in the doorway of a boathouse and, within half an hour, being recruited to row with the Vesper Boat Club's ladies’ Olympic rowing team? Or, even more ludicrously, to be standing staring at the grandeur of Niagara Falls one minute, and the next find himself being best man at a complete stranger's wedding?

  I mean, sure, any one of these things could happen. Possibly. At a stretch. Once in a lifetime. But in every episode?

  In fact, while we're on the subject, what are the chances of someone wandering aimlessly in a hundred-degree heat through the bush in Amboseli, Eastern Kenya, for three days and not getting eaten by lions or hyenas? No, wait! That's one question I can answer. They're zero!

  1 In particular, I broke the back of my fear of horses on one of the domestic trips. In Idaho's Salmon River Wilderness area I hooked up with a posse of cowboys (really just a bunch of students who happened to be staying in our hotel and liked the idea of being on TV) and was coaxed into the saddle. Turns out, there's really nothing to it. You sit on its back for as long as the horse allows you to, then get off before you're thrown off. Simple. A day later, I cracked my fear of water, too. Waving aside the doom-laden prophecy of that psychic I told you about, who predicted my death by drowning, I was persuaded by Mark onto a dinghy on the Salmon River with the words, “It's safe, I promise,” then sent hurtling into one of the most dangerous rapids in the whole of North America. A ten-foot thrashing, pounding, churning monster renowned for capsizing boats, knocking the unwary unconscious on hidden rocks, and, the week after I was there, actually killing someone, I heard. In case of accident, a rescue boat was moored nearby and a helicopter primed to rush me to hospital, so clearly someone was worried for my safety. Yet, miraculously, while the two rafting experts alongside me emerged from the rapids drenched and gasping and thanking God for sparing their lives, I was almost completely dry. It was quite unusual. According to bystanders on the bank, the waters parted at the last second, the way they did for Moses, and not a single speck of water touched my body. Since then, I've not been scared of water at all. And am, coincidentally far less likely to trust psychics.

  20

  Aaaaaagh—Lions!

  On the first day of our Kenya shoot I'm befriended by a group of Masai tribesmen.

  Things like that are happening to me a lot these days.

  I was picking my way across the scorched dusty plain outside their village, stepping over the thighbone of an impala that had been torn apart by wild predators then scattered over a wide area, followed by the bleached skull of a buffalo that fell and never got up, wondering how long it'd be before the same thing happened to me, when nineteen Masai warriors in full tribal gear walked out in a long line to say “hello.” Or jambo, as it is in Swahili.

  Two things strike me about them immediately. First, they have no trousers on. That always sets off alarm bells. Also, their lean, angular bodies are swathed in blankets dyed a threatening red, contrasting starkly with the lush greens and sandy yellows of the bushland around us. On their feet they wear homemade rubber sandals fabricated from motorcycle tires. Multicolored bracelets jangle at their wrists. Additionally, several of the men have their earlobes stretched into a hoop so large you could thread a hotel bath towel through it. Or hang lanterns.

  As it turns out, their leader happens to speak excellent English—am I the luckiest guy in the world, or what?—and seems particularly well educated. Looks different from the others too. Healthier. Better fed. Suggesting that maybe he flew in specially to be on a TV show, though nobody's 'fessed up to that one yet, and after the disaster with “Mohammed” in Marrakech, I'm reluctant to jump to conclusions. Bald and cheerful, his name is Wilson.

  “This,” he says, leading me through the village, “is where we keep the animals at night for protection.”

  Known as a manyatta, it consists of a series of thorny acacia hedges and mud huts arranged in concentric circles like a large target, which as far as neighboring predators are concerned is exactly what it is. At the center stands a huddle of nervous livestock. Skinniest damned cows I've ever laid eyes on. And the goats are almost two-dimensional. Handy if you want to stack them in a cupboard, I suppose, but not if you're hungry. There's barely an ounce of meat on them anywhere.

  Now it registers: protection. “To protect them from what?”

  “Lions, cheetahs, and hyenas,” Wilson replies.

  “So if you didn't put your animals in here, they'd be eaten by lions?”

  He nods solemnly. “Eaten by lions.”

  Okay. “And what's to stop the lions eating you?”

  “We have warriors. The young generation. They walk around the village and protect the community.”

  You're telling me that the village's first line of defense against an attacking five-hundred-pound predator powerful enough to fell a buffalo and scatter an impala over a wide area is a gang of college-age boys?

  A couple of these morani, as the Masai call them—or Breakfast and Lunch, as the lions and hyenas call them—acknowledge me with a polite “jambo,” then look away.

  “How many people have the lions eaten?”

  “Six people.”

  “The lions have eaten six people???”

  “Yes.”

  “Recently?”

  “Recently—sure.”

  OH MY GOD!!!!!

  “So in the middle of the night, every night, the lions come and attack your village?”

  Wilson smiles. “Right.”

  Jay's standing off to one side out of camera range, squinting at his clock. Looking up, he nods his answer to the silent question I'm asking in my head: “Yes, this is where you'll be spending the five hours we call night tonight.”

  In short, I'm as good as dead.

  The Masai are pastoral gypsies. Sweeping down from the Sudan in North Africa hundreds of years ago into Kenya and Tanzania, they set about fearlessly rustling other people's cattle while looking for lush plains to graze their own. Mind you, that was in Historical Times, when you could get away with almost anything.

  At one time Masailand was vast, covering eighty thousand square miles of territory, giving the tribes plenty of room to maneuver. But everything changed, and centuries of harmony were squashed to dust, once the usual roster of avaricious European colonialists arrived. Germans to begin with, followed in the 1890s by my British ancestors,1 who took over large chunks of Kenya, enslaving the people, exploiting them, and revolutionizing their primitive society with rifles, railroads, and, most curiously of all… trousers, which, as an act of defiance, the Masai refused—and still refuse—to wear.

  More critically, the British decided that the local wildlife population, the lions, leopards, hippos, hyenas, buffalo, etcetera,
that were so profuse in this region, wouldn't be profuse for much longer if the tribespeople's cattle kept chewing up all the foliage. So, in 1899, as a way of protecting the wild animals, the authorities cordoned off an area 150 miles square on the Kenyan-Tanzanian border in the shadow of snowcapped Mount Kilimanjaro, declaring it a game reserve, an arrangement that stayed in place for over seven decades, until someone with a keen eye for detail pointed out that the phrase “protecting the wild animals” was being defined a little too broadly and seemed to include killing them in large numbers for sport, after which its title was quickly changed to Amboseli National Park and all hunting banned. Good news for the wildlife; not so good for the Masai, who were banished entirely from the lush parkland, which was theirs in the first place, and confined to the dry bush plains beyond its perimeter, a move that caused outrage at the time. And believe me, they're still pretty cut up about it.

  Today's a big day for Wilson. He's moving into a new house in the village. The structure reminds me of a freshly risen bun loaf: one story, short sides, large, bulbous, crusty roof, no windows. It's in a prime position, midway along a desirable avenue of similar mud huts, offering a broad, prestigious view over the livestock pen.

  As we arrive to take a look, only the roof remains to be completed. No worries, Wilson assures me. We're leaving to visit a nearby water hole now; by the time we get back it'll be finished and he'll be able to move straight in.

  “So you built this?” I ask, indicating the house.

  My question generates the strangest of looks, part bemused, part aghast. “No,” he says. “My wife built it.”