Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  • • •

  That evening, sitting at the bar with the MTV winners, I began talking about a record I had as a kid. It was called “Bozo Under the Sea.” Bozo met all kinds of fish who could talk, and occasionally we boys and girls had to turn a page in the book “or poor old Bozo is going to drown.”

  I did the high-pitched shivery voices of the jellyfish for John and Chuck, who chuckled politely in their miserable way. The setting sun bruised the sky, and it occurred to me that diving these reefs was like shaking hands and saying “howdy” to the ten-year-old I had once been. He’s an enthusiastic little guy, constantly astounded by the world. The kid, I know, considers me a bit of a Bozo on land as well as under the sea. I don’t get to talk to him much anymore.

  “How much longer you going to stay?” John asked.

  “A while,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I didn’t tell him that I liked diving with an imaginary ten-year-old. I didn’t tell him that after twenty years, I still needed to be astonished.

  Geysers

  A little after five in the morning, I was wakened by the call of sandhill cranes echoing across the lake. They seemed very far away and sounded like Arabian women at war.

  I was camped near the shore of Shoshone Lake, in waist-high grasses turning gold in the early autumn chill. On the hillside above, the grasses gave way to spruce, white bark pine, and lodgepole pine.

  A quarter of a mile through the conifers above, the land opens up into an entirely alien world. The lushness of the forest and the marshes is gone. Stretching out for over half a mile is a gravelly white desert of hillocks and bluffs. Everywhere steam rises in silvery plumes that sway with the wind as it swirls out of the creek below and caresses the strange primordial desert above.

  Mingling with the whisper and howl of the wind, there is the strange sound of splashing, of amplified gurgling deep within the earth: the profound grumblings of geysers massing to erupt. The cones, some of them four feet high, are white and twisted into primeval shapes. Boiling water erupts from these cones and engages the wind in a steamy fandango.

  Yellowstone National Park contains within its boundaries fully 60 percent of all the geysers in the world. It is the largest geyser field on earth, the most active, and unlike in the thermal fields of Iceland or New Zealand, the geyser basins here have not been drained dry for use as geothermal energy.

  Early white explorers sent back accounts of the boiling water and steam erupting from the earth. One East Coast publication, in 1870, rejected what now seems like a solid descriptive manuscript with the words “Sorry, we do not print fiction.” And it was in 1870 that men who wondered at the supposedly fictional geysers first expressed the thought that the entire area should be set aside as a national park.

  One of the largest of the dozen geyser basins in the park is located in the backcountry. It is a fairly easy eight-mile walk from the trailhead. At Shoshone Geyser Basin, there are no signs, there are no boardwalks, and almost no one goes there. Which is fine, if you believe, as I do, that awe is a fairly solitary experience.

  When a geyser plays, that is erupts, it will often engage in what is called preplay. The cone will fill with water, the water will bubble and boil. More steam will escape. Some of this steam smells of hydrogen sulfide, like rotten eggs, but most of it has a curiously clean odor.

  And then the geyser plays, sending scalding water boiling into the sky. The same geyser, once it is played out, may drain, the pool inside the crater sinking back into the earth with a sound that makes some people twitter in embarrassment. It is a sound familiar to the Western world since the time of Thomas Crapper, magnified somewhat by larger volumes of water.

  In the geyser basin there are pools of water that may bubble or boil, but never play. Some of these hot springs are the size of a room; some are the size of a compact disc. The water color ranges from a Caribbean-blue to coppery-brown to mossy-green.

  Glen Spring, set away from the basin in an alcove of greenery, is a greenish-brown pool, technically a geyser, though it plays very infrequently. Long ago, perhaps before the white man entered the park, someone or some group placed a log before Glen Spring. The log has very nearly been petrified by the flow of mineralized water. It has been there a very long time.

  Indians, contrary to popular belief, were not at all frightened of the geysers. There are legends of spirits fighting beneath the earth, of spirits who created the grumble and the outbreak of hell. No fears or taboos, however, and the mineralized log seems to suggest that Glen Springs was once a form of prehistoric TV.

  On the white pebbly sand, called sinter, created by the outflow of the geysers, there are the skeletons of trees; some are thirty feet high, some are sixty. The trees were overrun by sinter. They stand alone, branchless, without bark, weathered by the wind and the steam: ghost trees, casualties of a land where the spirits battle underground.

  There is evidence of further casualties in the basin. The bones of elk are scattered across the sand, spread by feeding coyotes. Elk move into the geyser basin for warmth in the impossible silence of 50-degree-below-zero winter days. But the spare brown grasses in the sinter sand are grazed off rapidly so the warmth is a killing comfort.

  Shoshone Geyser Basin has claimed other lives. One winter a cross-country skier was scalded to death in a hot pool. He was alone, and rangers could only guess as to what happened. The hot pools form in caverns and often build thin ledges over the boiling water, ledges that can crack under the weight of a man. The water is scalding hot. It is almost immediately deadly.

  Black Sulfur Geyser is continually at play, what is called a perpetual spouter. It is positioned on the sloping bank above Shoshone Creek, so it plays almost horizontally, spitting boiling water out into the fast-flowing creek.

  It is illegal to bathe in the thermal features of Yellowstone Park, not to mention deadly, but where flowing or spouting water enters a river, it ceases to be considered a thermal feature. People may bathe there, in what are called hot pots. Finding the perfect temperature is a matter of moving closer to or further from the place where the boiling water meets the creek or river. These wilderness Jacuzzis are the joy of the geyser basin. You have to find them yourself. No one tells you where they are.

  The shallower hot pools are brilliantly colorful: They are green or yellow or brownish-green and take on the color of strange life forms, a kind of furry-looking iridescent bacterial slime that thrives in the scalding springs. One unnamed hot pool is perhaps eighty feet across, nearly circular, and the vent is set off toward the western periphery of the spring, like the hub of a badly set wheel. The vent itself is a creamy white, with a greenish-blue tinge, and everywhere surrounding the vent on the floor of the geyser is a layer of algae a few inches thick. Nearest the vent, where the water is hottest, the algae is light brown, and farthest from the vent, in increments, the water becomes a dark coppery brown.

  A companion described the algae as living slime, a description I had previously reserved for an individual who sold me a used truck in 1983.

  At sundown the plumes of playing geysers take on the color of the setting sun and a freshening wind whips the crimson pennants into drifting weightless shreds of color. At the campsite, the first stars seem preternaturally bright. As the light dies, there is the deep grumbling and hiss of a large geyser at play and this sound mingles with the loony haunting call of cranes in a twilight symphony too strange for fiction.

  Family Values in the Raw

  “You cannot,” the fundamentalist missionary complained, “get the Dani to wear clothes. They just won’t do it.” The first missionaries arrived in New Guinea’s Grand Baliem Valley in 1959, anxious to convert the Stone Age tribesmen who lived there. They’ve done all right, I suppose, these missionaries, but the question of clothing still devils the least flexible among them.

  The fundamentalist sipped his tea. Aside from the “self-evident indecency” of human nakedness, he said, “it gets cold here at night.” And he posed a qu
estion to me, since I had been defending the Dani’s right to dress (or not) as they pleased: “Why wouldn’t a man wear clothes when it gets cold?”

  It’s not precisely true that the Dani go entirely naked. A few days earlier, in the village of Soroba, set hard against a great cliff of gray rock, Pua, the headman, had agreed to show me how the Dani men grow their clothes. Soroba was a horseshoe-shaped compound composed of a dozen huts thatched with straw.

  Pua led me over a low wooden barrier designed to keep pigs out, and together we walked out behind the men’s hut. There were thirty or forty banana trees set against the rock wall, and nearby was a shaded area, trellised and overhung with leaves, like a grape arbor. Yellow squash hung from the vines atop the trellis. The squash—responding to the tug of gravity—grew in a long, narrow fashion. The vegetables looked a bit like giant carrots. In time, Pua said, the men would pick the squash, cut off the thick end, scoop out the seeds, bake the husks lightly, dry them for a year, and then use the gourds as penis sheaths. The gourds are secured with a bit of bark twine tied around the waist. This is the extent of male adornment in the Grand Baliem Valley, where the polite salutation “How are they hanging?” is superfluous.

  The valley, nearly forty miles long by ten miles wide, is located on the western, Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea. Carved out of lush tropical highlands by the glittering cocoa-colored Baliem River, the central valley is home to an estimated one hundred thousand Dani—short, powerful people who formerly practiced ritual war to strengthen various life forces and to appease cranky ancestors.

  The valley is nearly a mile high, which means the evenings are, as the missionary pointed out, quite cool. During my visit, I generally wore a light rain jacket after sunset. The indigenous Dani wore what they wore during the heat of the day: grass skirts for the women; gourds for the men.

  The Dani wear gourds as a fashion statement—a defiant affirmation of their own culture. Clothes are available to them at no cost. During a short-lived government push to clothe the Dani, for instance, headmen in each village were given shirts and slacks. It was thought that people would naturally see the manifest benefits involved in clothing: the dignity of pants; the elegance of cotton T-shirts (most of which had been collected in missionary clothing drives and featured slogans regarding Ninja Turtles and muscular men in masks who fly like bats).

  The effort was largely a failed one.

  In the valley’s central town, Wamena, a government administrative center, it is rare to see a Dani out after dark. For example: Here it is, 55 degrees, drizzling, and some poor fellow, naked except for his gourd, is standing on the side of the road, alone, with his hands clasped behind his neck and his elbows down around his chest. It’s a Dani attitude of abject misery, this posture. It says, “I’m freezing.” It says, “I am, at this point in time, a completely forlorn individual.”

  A visitor in a rented vehicle feels a kind of obligation. He picks up the gentleman on the side of the road and drives him out along a dirt path fourteen miles to the village of Soroba. The formerly forlorn Dani, whose name is Pua, invites his benefactor to dinner.

  This is served in the long, rectangular cooking hut, where six different families are sitting around six different fires. It’s warm inside the hut, and dry. Everyone is cooking the same thing: potatoes. The Dani are master agriculturists, and these aren’t just any potatoes; they are the best-tasting potatoes grown on the face of the earth. They are huge, big enough to kill the cat if one rolled off a table, vaguely sweet, and white as snow. The Dani grow seventy different varieties of potatoes, and each kind tastes better than the last.

  After dinner, everyone crawls out a low doorway and hustles through the rain, across the compound, to another large rectangular hut, where three fires are already blazing away. Family groups mingle and merge at the fires. Men sit fondly with their wives, children play, infants sleep soundly in their mothers’ arms.

  One man plays a kind of wooden jaw harp, modulating the sound with his tongue, with the shape of his mouth. And the rhythm suggests a song. The oldest of the women seems to be the choir director. She sings a verse, then a select few voices respond, and finally everyone joins in.

  The songs are a delight, sweet or rousing or romantic, and favorites are repeated several times. At Soroba, they must do this a lot. There is a practiced harmony to the singing, a passion and a drama. Soon enough, the children are asleep. Some of the men have gone off to lie down with their wives in individual huts; others remove to the sacred men’s hut for important talk.

  And the visitor is left to return to his rental car. He has a room, by himself, in a cheap hotel. There is no one at the hotel to sing with, no one to sleep with, and he misses his own family. The night, he thinks, has been a celebration of simple probity and virtue. Everyone had seemed so content. The visitor drives back through the chill rain, and there are no Dani anywhere. A man would be a fool to stand around naked on a night like this. Better to go home, sit comfortably around the fire, play with your children, sing the finest songs you know, and flirt with your wife.

  An evening to think about when someone asks why the Dani would choose to go naked in the cold.

  The missionary had been pondering the problem for some time. He thought it had to do with the vestiges of paganism, with the sure and subtle influence of Satan.

  I couldn’t agree. You never see a Dani man standing on a Wamena street corner at midnight drinking cheap wine and saying “Hubba-hubba” to passing women. No, each evening’s chill sends Dani people scurrying back to the warmth of hearth and home. Satan was pretty much frozen out of the equation. Going naked in the cold, as I saw it, was an expression of strong family values.

  Working the Crowd

  Three days of walking, and, ah, here’s the outskirts of a remote village. Doesn’t matter where, really. Could be Tonga or Peru or New Guinea or Rwanda or a Siberian Chukchi settlement. Time to gear up for fellow human beings. The dogs are going crazy, and they follow you in ragged packs. Walk into the center of the village. More than likely, children will form the advance guard. Dozens of them surround you. Soon enough, older people—adolescents—will develop the courage of children. The responsible adults usually come last.

  And here’s what happens: Sometime within the first twenty minutes of pleasant social interaction, someone will insult you. More than likely it’s one of the teenage males, who will be surrounded by a knot of other young men. Could be you’ve concealed a slight knowledge of the language in order to test the waters. Maybe not. In any case, the kid is rattling away in the local idiom, and people are laughing. They are laughing at you. It’s a mean, denigrating laughter. The village bully has got you in his sights. He has probably called you:

  A gringo son of a goat; a Zionist barf bag; an imbecile, moron, pervert, suck fish, bastard, and a floating turd, as well as the accursed spawn of filth-devouring evil. You are, according to your tormentor, a stench upon the land; a bowl brimful of vomit and urine; an illiterate dim bulb; a butt breath; the instigator of various incestuous relationships. You’ve been labeled a pig-dog, a snot ball, and a cow flop, not to mention a fatty, a dummy, a heretic, and a coprophaginist.

  The urge, of course, is to let the assembled multitudes understand that you know precisely what is going on, and that you are not a person to be trifled with. The urge is to respond in kind and to insult the bully in idiosyncratic English. You want to get in his face—let him know that he’s a sack of pus, a scum-sucking pig, a walking hemorrhoid, an idiot, and an oaf. You want to tell him, quite firmly, that he’s a species of subhuman corruption, a jerk-off, a twit, a pathetic little needle-dicked shit weasel, and that you’d be delighted to introduce him to the dumb end of a baseball bat.

  Such a response, in my experience, is more trouble than it’s worth.

  In places that lack TV, a stranger’s visit is the evening’s entertainment. Respond to abuse with more abuse, and the game has suddenly become that form of bear-baiting known as “humiliate the
foreigner.” Suddenly everyone has another insult to hurl, everyone dashing in to figuratively pull away a bit of your flesh—your equanimity, your dignity—like piranha in a feeding frenzy.

  What I do—what I’ve done in Tonga and Peru and Rwanda and New Guinea and certain Siberian villages—is laugh right along with everyone else when the first insults start flying. There is always a moment when the bully assumes he’s cornered a fool and there are more insults to endure. I continue to laugh along, just as merry as all get-out. It’s smart to seem a little confused.

  I look to one of the adults—someone who seems bothered by the attack—and, smiling, gesture for some translation. What are we all laughing at? The fellow may not be able to meet my eyes. He stares at the ground. The insults begin dribbling off to a muttering ambiguity, and there is much less laughter. More folks are staring at the ground. The crowd seems shamed. There is a new tension in the air.

  Tension, of course, is the comedian’s friend. Make them laugh here, and you’ve got ’em. Slapstick is universal, and you can certainly work out your own schtick, but I’ve found that singing “Tea for Two” in a Donald Duck voice while tap-dancing usually works. The tension is broken, the bully defused, and everyone’s laughing. Now you can get on to the serious business of making friends.

  The Queen Charlotte Islands: Life and Death (hee-hee) Tales from the Place of Wonder

  A guidebook I’d paged through at a Prince Rupert newsstand had opened with an admonition that, as nearly as I can recall, read: “In the Queen Charlotte Islands, you should put your troubles and cares in your pocket, but leave plenty of room for high spirits and adventure.” I’d puzzled over that bit of advice. Was I supposed to have high-spirited adventure in the same pocket that contained my troubles and cares? Why couldn’t I have a couple of adventures in an entirely different pocket altogether?