by Tim Cahill
“Like that. A lightweight name. We needed to suggest that the kayak was both silent and deadly. We called it the Deadly Sea Snake.”
Procurement officers suggested that the Deadly Sea Snake would benefit from an enlarged cockpit that might accommodate an automatic weapon. Late that night, in a bar, Grant spoke with a man who outlined possible military uses of an improved Sea Snake. Soldiers carrying breakdown boats in backpacks could make a HALO (high altitude, low opening) parachute jump into northern Russia. Once on the ground, they’d assemble their kayaks and paddle downriver to the nearest nuclear power facility, where they would plant remote-controlled bombs. The commandos would then paddle downriver to a pickup point. In the case of war, the bombs could be activated by satellite.
This ingenious plan struck Grant as a kind of high-level madness. The manufacturers of the kayak cited karma as a determining factor in their decision not to produce the Deadly Sea Snake.
We were in the Pacific Northwest, which is to say the dawn was usually gray and wet. We broke camp in the mist and packed everything into the kayaks. Our gear was stuffed into all manner of waterproof sacks. Long sacks, short sacks, round sacks: all of them fitting into the hatches in front of and behind the cockpit like some maddening three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. It is said that it takes an hour to properly pack a kayak. However, if you carefully map out your loading plan, and then visualize that plan in sequence, it is possible to pack a kayak in fifty-eight or fifty-nine minutes.
Grant, who, like the rest of us, had never been to Esperanza Inlet, drew out the day’s route on a nautical map. On foggy days, he strapped a marine compass to his deck in case we lost sight of land during a crossing.
And then we paddled out onto the calm gray sea, through thick fog, as a fine Pacific Northwest drizzle hung in the air. The shoreline was rocky, pitted with small coves and natural arches. The sea surged into narrow fissures, then poured out, rhythmically.
One day a small harbor seal swam alongside my kayak for a few minutes. It had a friendly doglike head and curious black eyes. Hundreds of gaudy red and purple starfish were splashed across the rocks that lay just below the surface of the sea.
We crossed over to Harbor Island in the gentle rain. The sea, in the depth of the channel, was black as ebony, spectral, under vaporous gray skies. It was like paddling over a smooth black mirror. A single loon yodeled out its mad laughter.
We lunched in an island cove and strolled along the beach to a clearing that featured a four-foot-high grassy mound about fifteen feet long. It was a midden pile, an enormous pile of clam and mussel shells left by local Indians two hundred (or two thousand) years ago.
The sun was attempting to bully its way through the clouds, and I strolled into the forest behind the midden pile, to be alone. Shafts of cathedral light fell through stands of spruce and hemlock. The forest was spooky and spiritual in about equal measure.
Archaeologists and anthropologists refer to the local aboriginal people as the Nootka. The Nootka themselves prefer to be called, more simply, the West Coast People.
The West Coast People paddled dugout wooden canoes. They hunted whales and sea lions; they collected berries and greens; they netted salmon and herring. In the spring of certain years, they netted eulachon, a small fish that they boiled down for its oil. According to Della Kew and P. E. Goddard, authors of Indian Art and Culture of the Northwest Coast, “after boiling, the fish are pressed to force out the remaining oil. Formerly, the women accomplished this by squeezing the still hot fish against their naked breasts.”
This, I thought strolling through the forest, is what I like about the sport of sea kayaking. It takes you to remote areas, inaccessible by any other means; it obliges you to learn something of the people who live there; and it generates aberrant sexual fantasies that might be realized in the privacy of one’s own kitchen. With a good friend and some fish.
The eulachon oil was a favored condiment, like butter, and Indians from the interior trekked out to the West Coast along “grease trails” to trade with West Coast People.
There was some warfare, but not much. The island was so providential that the favored competition between various groups involved the conspicuous consumption of wealth at a feasting ceremony called the potlatch. Among the Kwakiutl, who lived just north of the West Coast People, an opposing chief might be given the seat of honor in front of the fire during the feast. The host, no doubt giggling maniacally, would then pour bowls of precious eulachon oil on the flames, causing them to flare up intensely. If the rival chief fled before the heat, he was considered to be humiliated by the wealth of the host. So he bravely sat there being grilled while a man wearing a “ridicule mask” danced about him, jeering. A ridicule mask is a representation of the human face carved out of wood. One side of the mask, however, is bare and featureless. It represents a man whose face has melted. Nyah-nyah-nah-nah-nah.
We passed Catala Island under clearing skies. There were caves in the rocky cliff walls where the West Coast People were said to bury their dead. A few hundred feet off shore, a pillar of rock about thirty feet high stood guard below the burial caves. The pillar looked statuary, vaguely human: There were ferns like a wild man’s hair on its massive flat-topped head, and a sorcerer’s cape of moss fell from its shoulders. We declined to explore the caves, out of respect and fear. A loon, floating at the base of the guardian pillar, shrieked out its strange melancholy laughter.
This area of Catala was an Indian reservation, inviolable, but all along the mainland, everywhere I looked, in every direction, there were clear-cut logging scars running up the slopes of the mountains. They were ugly as greed. In fifty miles of paddling along Esperanza Inlet, we were never once out of sight of a clear-cut.
I will not criticize the timber industry out of hand. I live in a wooden house, with maple floors; I work at a large wooden desk, and my product is printed on millions of sheets of paper.
Still, the responsible complaint against the logging industry is not that they’re logging. It is which forests they’re logging, when, and the pace at which they’re doing it. Conservationists and timber industry spokesmen trot out studies by various experts to support their own point of view. A fair-minded person sometimes finds the controversy confusing.
Except along Esperanza Inlet, where ancient forests meet the sea in a kind of soaring nobility. Here, sea kayaking is a voyage of melancholy discovery; the paddler becomes, willy-nilly, an investigative reporter. He or she sees the bleak and barren hillsides, the sad mutilated lands. It is perfectly clear: The industry is going to cut down every goddamn tree that grows. It’s all utterly obvious from the cockpit of a kayak: In British Columbia, along Esperanza Inlet, the forest industry is busy translating nobility into shame.
On the day that, through very little fault of my own, the kayak I happened to be paddling capsized in the middle of a crossing, we camped in the shadow of 2,495-foot-high Mount Rosa, one of the prettier peaks on Nootka Island. Heavy accumulations of fog hung in the ridges that rose to the summit: stripes of silver and green ascending to snow in a manner that summoned up the possibility of ethereal cogitation. It was a Zen master’s wet dream.
The sky had cleared completely, and the four of us decided on a sunset paddle. To the southwest there was a reef of rocks, and beyond that, only the Pacific Ocean, stretching out vast and empty, all the way to Japan. We were paddling through calm waters, but only five hundred yards away the full force of the Pacific Ocean broke against the rocks of the barrier reef, and great plumes of spray exploded twenty feet into the air. The sun was low on the horizon and glittered through the spray, all watermelon and blood.
When we turned and headed back toward Mount Rosa, the sun lay across the water in a long golden trail. A full moon was rising behind the snowcapped mountain. I listened for wolves and heard only a freshening wind and the booming of surf.
We cooked in the wind shadow of a huge piece of gnarled driftwood, eight feet high and bone-white in the moonlight. We ate burrito
s and drank a cabernet, but in place of the ridicule-less potlatch I yearned for, the discussion concerned my handling of the Feathercraft during the morning’s crossing. Grant thought it proper to discuss his soaked sleeping bag. I sought to deflect criticism by feigning temporary nerve deafness.
Later, I strolled along the empty gravel beach as a display of northern lights swept across the sky like luminous green smoke. This was, I realized, a campsite accessible only by kayak, and the deserted beach was a rhapsody of the sport. The stars seemed preternaturally bright. I felt in sympathy with the earth and sky, and sought to explain myself to the universe at large.
“I was just practicing my bracing strokes.”
I listened again for wolves, heard only the wind, and strolled on, exploring a rhapsody by moonlight.
Malaria
I was eating breakfast on the terrace of a small restaurant in a pueblo near Sante Fe when the odor washed over our party like a fetid cloud. If stench had a color, this one would have been dark brown, thick as clay, and dense enough to cast a shadow. No one at the table sought to cast accusatory glances, because the odor was overwhelming and beyond the capacity of any one human being to produce. It seemed to have erupted out of the ground. It had, I realized, come rolling over our table from my left, where several men were gathered around an open manhole, working with a small crane mounted on a local utilities truck. The men were dragging something up out of the hole. A hint of yellow appeared above the lip of the manhole. Whatever the thing was, it was round and about the size of a volleyball … or, could it be? … a man’s head.
“Oh God, no,” someone said as the object came into full view. It was, in fact, a human body, still as death and dripping raw sewage. There was a profoundly shocked silence on the terrace.
The dead man was clad in a yellow rain suit. The workmen seemed unconcerned. Did they pull bodies out of sewers every day in New Mexico? What the hell kind of place was this?
And then, feebly it seemed, the body moved. An arm jutted out stiffly. The man was set down on his feet on the pavement. He passed a few words with the workmen, then lurched off toward the truck, still dripping sewage.
“I suppose,” Larry Burke said, “they sent that poor guy down there to scout out some obstruction.”
“Or clear it,” I said.
We took our plates out of the rolling stench and into the restaurant proper. Larry Burke is the publisher of a national magazine, the man who causes many of my paychecks to be signed. We were meeting to discuss my work, which encompasses travel to remote destinations, contact with interesting people, and a reasonably liberal expense account monitored by folks who realize high-quality magazine articles often require repeated applications of alcohol. No complaints on my end: I actually like what I do for a living. To some extent, it must show. That week, I had been contacted by a daytime television talk show. Would I appear on a program the focus of which would be “people who love their jobs”? The idea made for some queasiness. What was I, another noteworthy societal anomaly, like lesbian nuns or men who wear diapers?
The thought carried a pinprick of irritation. No one wants to think he’s completely aberrant; certainly not a daytime talk-show quality deviant. The truth is, there are times in my work when I’m at least as miserable as anyone else. There is, for instance, this snotty little work-related disease that keeps popping up.
I might even have mentioned the problem to Larry during that breakfast. But they dragged the guy up out of the manhole, and any complaints I had turned immediately to sewage. The man in the yellow slicker was the embodiment of a single undeniable fact: There are people in the world who have worse jobs than mine. Lots worse.
If various sewer-related topics hadn’t dominated the rest of the breakfast conversation, I might have told Larry that I’m not really fit for the talk shows because I suffer from an ancient disease, a recurrent fever out of time. First described by Hippocrates in the fifth century B.C., it’s now called malaria—from the Italian, meaning “bad air”—and, considered on a worldwide basis, it’s probably the most common of all diseases.
Malaria is caused by certain parasitic protozoa—one-celled organisms—of the genus Plasmodium and is spread by female anopheles mosquitoes. (Males are blameless vegetarians, living entirely on plant juices.) The female feeds on blood. If her human victim is infected, she ingests malarial parasites along with her dollop of blood. The sexual forms of the plasmodium parasite, gametocytes, mate in the female’s gut, and a fertilized sex cell forms, which encysts in the walls of the stomach. The cyst bursts after one to three weeks, spewing out what one of my reference books describes as “a large number of young sexual parasites,” which sounds to me like some frightening fantasy out of the ashes of the disco inferno.
These parasites, called sporozoites, work their way into the female mosquito’s salivary glands and are thus passed on to the next human she bites. The sporozoites settle in the victim’s liver, where they mate and multiply, eventually spilling into the bloodstream in the form of merozoites, which enter the red blood cells and reproduce themselves asexually until the blood cells burst. The newly formed merozoites migrate to intact red blood cells, where they once again reproduce, multiply, destroy the cell, and move on. It’s one big game of parasitic “Pac-Man,” played for blood.
Eventually, some sexual forms of the parasite, the gametocytes, are produced. They do not mate in the human body. If the victim is bitten again, however, the gametocytes are ingested by the mosquito, a new sex cell forms in the insect’s stomach, the young sexual parasites have a party, and so it goes. Bad air.
The air in the swamplands of Irian Jaya, in west New Guinea, was a miasma, muggy and thick. It was, in fact, like living inside an open wound. And there were lots of mosquitoes. The bad air was full of them. They were, I now know for a fact, anopheles mosquitoes.
My malarial sufferings are, the books tell me, fairly typical. Here’s the way it started for me. Six weeks after I got home from the swamps of Irian Jaya, I started feeling stiff. My joints ached. Someone asked me why I was limping. I hadn’t realized that I was. I was working on a deadline, writing, in fact, about the swamps of Irian Jaya and drinking entirely too much coffee. Was that why my urine was brown, like muddy water? Coffee, in my experience, tends to have the opposite effect.
I didn’t realize for a few days that I was pissing away broken red blood cells. I felt woozy and tried to focus my attention on the problem at hand, which was my story about the swamps and the people who lived there. The tribe I had visited lived on platform houses set fifty feet up in the trees, well above the choking clouds of mosquitoes that owned the forest floor. Tribal men generally kept to the trees, but the women climbed down daily to collect food, firewood, and water. All of the women carried circular scars up and down their arms. Burning the arms with coals, I learned, was thought to be a cure for the “shivering sickness.” Which seemed to be epidemic.
I sat for hours below one of the tree houses while two of our party parlayed with the men above. Waiting below during the lengthy negotiations was hateful. Six weeks later, with aching hands, I wrote about the experience: “Mosquitoes attacked those of us on the ground in thick clouds. They were very naughty and probably malarial.”
In retrospect, I see now that only a very sick man could write a sentence like that last one. The next afternoon, I began shivering uncontrollably. It was 90 degrees outside, a brilliant Montana summer day, and my teeth were chattering. I’d seen people all over the tropical world in this initial stage of a malaria attack. I had it.
The chills last about an hour, and are followed by what is called the febrile stage, which starts with a feeling of intense heat, headache, and a very high temperature. Since my initial chills are fairly severe, I shake until I’m exhausted, and generally fall asleep just as the fever hits. The dreams are exceptionally vivid. Sometimes they are experienced in a vague waking state, and can be considered a form of delirium.
The febrile stage lasts around two hou
rs and is followed by a period of intense sheet-soaking sweats, accompanied by some vestiges of headache and a feeling that the synovial fluid around every joint has been replaced by a mixture of sawdust and ground glass.
It’s all over in about five hours.
A day or so later, you get to go through the whole thing again. Sometimes the interval between attacks may be longer: two, three, or four days. It all depends on the rate at which the asexual parasites are multiplying and bursting out of the red blood cells.
I was on a precise twenty-four-hour cycle. “Sorry,” I’d tell my friends. “It’s four o’clock. I have to go have malaria now. But, hey, let’s eat at ten.”
There are four varieties of Plasmodium that cause malaria. P. vivax is the most common; P. falciparum is the most severe and the most frequently fatal. From 1980 to 1988, 1,534 cases of P. falciparum among U.S. civilians were reported to the Centers for Disease Control. Eighty percent of the cases were acquired in tropical Africa, with the rest of the cases fairly evenly spread out among Asia, the Caribbean, South America, and other parts of the world. Of the thirty-seven fatalities, twenty-seven cases were acquired in Africa. A falciparum infection can, with vicious suddenness, cause liver, kidney, or respiratory failure. It may block the small blood vessels in the brain and cause coma.
Photographer Chris Rainier once told me a haunting and terrifying story about just how quickly P. falciparum can kill.
Several years ago, Chris was traveling in the Sudan, in company with a group of doctors from the World Health Organization who were inoculating people in remote villages. One day, at ten-thirty in the morning, a volunteer nurse began shivering in the heat. She lost consciousness two hours later. By four-thirty that afternoon she was dead.
A week or so later, Chris came down with the classic symptoms: aching bones, brown urine, chills, chattering teeth, uncontrollable shivering. The doctors told him they’d do everything they possibly could to save his life. They also suggested that he might want to write a last letter home. He had, they thought, perhaps an hour of consciousness left.