Baboons for Lunch

by James Michael Dorsey

  When I told her of my family’s move there so long ago and of the black family that had cared for me as a child, she seemed startled. She asked my name but did not know me, and when she asked for the name of the lady who had cared for me, I could not recall.

  She stared at me for several seconds then gently took my hand in hers. “When I was a youngster, my aunt cared for a young white boy in the afternoons. He was the only one around so everybody knew him. If that was you, then you and I might have played together as children.”

  We walked to her aunt’s old home, but time and mileage had dulled my memory so I could not say if it is where I spent so many afternoons, but that did not matter. I chose to believe that it was her aunt that had taken me in and that she and I had been childhood playmates.

  My life had taken me around the world and deposited me back where I had started. While I sat there thinking about all of that, some words from the great travel correspondent, Martha Gellhorn came to me, “As a traveler I have learned that it is wise not to return to what was once perfection.”

  I did not go back to find perfection. All I needed was a homecoming.

  Our “maids”

  Limping Home from Kashgar

  It was our last night in Kashgar, China, and Pierre and I lay on our beds waiting for the phone to ring.

  The calls had come like clockwork, every night at 11:00 sharp. The sultry female voice would ask if there was anything we needed for the night, and every night we would politely decline and then giggle like schoolboys with a secret.

  The old Soviet Embassy building had maintained a bordello for its mostly male staff, and our room, now part of a “foreigner” hotel, was pale pink and green with lavender accents, lace doilies, and plastic flowered sconces. At least there was no mirror on the ceiling, but the nightly phone call told us some of the current staff still plied their former trade. Though free to come and go during the day, the compound gates were locked nightly at nine, effectively making us prisoners. The double click on our phone line whenever we would hang up was a steady reminder that we were traveling in a police state.

  My musings on China have always alternated between love and hate; love for the ancient myths, ceremony, and humanity of its people: hatred for the tyrannical regime that has ruled it with an iron fist my entire lifetime. It is unfortunate, for the Chinese people, that countries with vast populations are usually governed through fear and intimidation. This seems the only means of controlling numbers that could overwhelm their overseers should they ever become organized or literate. It is this fear of information and knowledge that arrives with every tourist from a free thinking country that terrifies the powers that be, making every visitor suspect.

  I declared myself a retired school teacher on my entry visa for two reasons; Teachers command great respect in China, and journalists of any kind must pay a heavy “tax” on their cameras. Even so, I have always drawn bureaucratic attention with the three cameras I carry to document my stories, and long ago I accepted inflated “foreigner” prices as being the norm for Westerners.

  It had been fun watching the Olympics on local television but frustrating that we could only see Chinese athletes. Each time foreign athletes were about to perform, the Communist-party-controlled television network would switch to nationalistic commercials or display the red flag and play martial music in their place. So my final night in China was passed locked inside a pink bordello, listening to military marches, and sipping warm Singha beer with a 70-year-old man in his underwear.

  In the morning, the old mamasan—that we had been calling “the hen”—had all the girls lined up in their starched uniforms to bow us on a safe journey. We assumed that she was the former madam and her girls, mostly ethnic Uyghurs, and thus second-class citizens, were given a choice after the Russians pulled out; return to mother Russia, or work as hotel maids in China; maids with benefits as our nightly caller implied. I bowed to the hen, but before I could grab my bag she pulled me into her tiny curio shop just off the lobby in a final attempt to relieve me of my last few yuan.

  I had already politely passed on all of her tourist trinkets but this time there was a strikingly beautiful walking stick lying on the counter. It was aged bamboo that time and personal use had given a wonderful golden patina that when struck by sunlight, shaded into a smoky brown. The grip was a hardwood I could not identify and had been gloriously worked into a mythical dragon’s head, the kind often employed as a temple guardian. It spoke Mandarin to me, pleading for a home. I had been ambushed and we both knew it. The hen had found my weak spot. The bartering was quick and bloody. I had to make my flight so I paid her price, grabbed my prize and headed for the cab to show Pierre. He thought it was a dandy and since both of us collected walking sticks, we discussed them all the way to the airport.

  My bag was so jammed that I had duct taped the zipper to insure it did not burst in transit, so I decided the simplest way to get my cane home would be to use it as it was intended. At the airport curb, I shuffled up and down in a Chaplinesque kind of rolling walk, leaning on it awkwardly as I had never used a cane before. Pierre made fun of me, saying I kept switching the leg I was limping on. We were both just having fun.

  Within a couple of minutes an official-looking gentleman in a suit was at my side with a wheelchair, bowing me to sit down while he shouldered my bag onto the back rack and whisked me inside leaving Pierre standing there with his mouth agape. In the spirit of the moment, I just waved to Pierre and laughed it off. We were ushered right through security with barely a passing of a wand. Once past the metal detectors, a second gentleman came zooming up in a golf cart, lifted my bag on board and turned on a flashing yellow light and loud beeping siren that made the crowd part as if we were an ambulance.

  I never expected this kind of treatment and was enjoying myself immensely although starting to feel a bit guilty about having left Pierre behind. My thoughts were cut short when the golf cart driver accelerated through the enormous duty free shop, zipping past hundreds of faceless passengers trudging to their respective flights, all craning their necks to see this obvious VIP being motorcaded through the airport. At the check-in counter a second wheelchair was already waiting and two burly attendants made sure my transfer went without incident.

  At this point, I was deposited next to the boarding ramp amongst a line of elderly people in airport wheelchairs, all in need of pre-boarding assistance. It looked like God’s waiting room. They put me first in line, next to a lady so old she resembled an apple doll, who pulled down her surgical mask to reveal a wide smile full of betel nut-stained teeth. She reached over and patted my hand then said something I could not understand but she pantomimed walking with a cane. Now I really began to feel guilty. This is not what I had intended at all. I did not want to mimic people who were truly challenged in some way, I just wanted to get my cane home, but the act had gone too far and there was no turning back now.

  An announcement came over the PA and an attendant started to push me toward the boarding entrance but I protested, pointing at the others and telling him to take them first. He leaned over and quietly whispered in my ear, “Please sir, you are a foreigner and must go first.” I realized then that he was being watched and no doubt would be severely reprimanded if I did not go first. This was the China I knew so well, the China concerned first and foremost with the façade they presented to the outside world. They had not brought a wheelchair to me because I was limping, but because I was a “Westerner” who was limping.

  This was the class-conscious China that used the army to round up the homeless of Beijing and move them to the countryside during the Olympics so the world could not see them, and it was the China that does not allow citizenship to its minorities. It is a country that wishes to play on the world stage, but treats its citizens as though they are less than nothing.

  Self-guilt or not, at this point I was all in. They wheeled me to the airplane door where I stood up, and leaning heavily on the cane, made my w
ay into coach while being hovered over by a concerned flight attendant. No sooner had I sat down than she offered me a drink and I gratefully accepted, knowing a Chinese passenger in coach would not have received the same offer.

  In a few minutes, the general crush of passengers began to file on board, pushing, shoving, and throwing elbows as is the local custom in a Chinese crowd. Pierre was swept onboard in the human tide until he fell into the seat next to me, laughing and punching me hard on the arm to punish me for abandoning him.

  Before we took off, the attendant appeared with a beautiful young Chinese girl at her side. She asked if I would mind switching seats with the young lady who had been sitting in business class and wanted to give up her seat to the foreign gentleman with the cane. I knew that she had not volunteered to do this.

  Before I could say anything, Pierre answered for me with an even stronger punch to my arm. He was not going to miss this opportunity, so I rose and bowed to the young lady, who took her seat next to Pierre who was already waving for me to leave, and so I limped forward into business class.

  It so happened that my new seatmate was an antique dealer who immediately commented on my cane, and after a few pointed questions, offered me a sum almost three times what I had paid for it. Since this entire story revolved around the cane, it could not be told properly if I sold it, so I politely refused the offer.

  China cannot help being itself with its ingrained class-conscious caste system. There seems to be something in the national psyche that each generation passes on to the next: a belief that one group of people is better than another, in general this being the Han majority. Perhaps it is national guilt for this feeling that makes them worry so much about what foreigners think of them. Each time I return to China I cannot wait to get there, but each time I leave her I am saddened to see such a grand and ancient lady self-immolated by so many prejudices.

  As the plane climbed out of the smoggy haze of Beijing, I watched the shape of the city merge into dark gray silhouettes, making all landmarks undefinable. It seemed a most appropriate exit from a country that is itself, a giant paradox.

  The orphaned whale

  Death and Remembrance

  In the sun-toasted desert of Southern Baja, Mexico, there is a lagoon where divergent species have come together for centuries. It is the halfway point of an annual 14,000-mile migration of the Pacific gray whale.

  It is a place of sanctuary where they are not hunted. They come because they know they are safe there. It is, in fact, a giant nursery where young calves learn to survive, because gray whales are born with limited natural instinct and must be taught the fine art of being a whale.

  This lagoon is the only place on earth where wild animals, in their natural habitat, routinely seek human contact, and where for 18 seasons I have worked among them as a guide and naturalist. It is a place of magic where dreams are fulfilled and fantasies come true.

  When I need solace and introspection it is where the sounds of nature drown out those of man, where the vast horizon is ringed with purple mountains and rolling sand dunes, and where coyotes sing you to sleep with towering arias to the moon. It is a land so vast and wide open as to reduce the mightiest ego to a grain of sand; part of the Vizcaino Biosphere, where a quarter of the Baja peninsula and all of its creatures, are under federal protection.

  Mother whales approach our boats with their calves to show off their handiwork, and our acceptance of each other as equals is immediate and lasting. They are benign giants who desire our companionship, and I have come to know individuals who return here year after year.

  But the ocean is a harsh master and there is a natural death rate among these creatures that is heartbreaking. This story is about one of those deaths…and how it revived a life

  Much of my free time in San Ignacio is spent in a kayak, gliding silently through miles of shallow channels lined with mangroves. There I lose myself as just one more cosmic speck in the universe. Countless sea birds that line the shore have no fear at my approach, and rainbow colored fish huddle beneath my hull, while red and orange crabs scurry along the bottom, running from overhead shadows. Osprey soar high overhead before diving like kamikazes to take surface fish and the seagulls have learned to drop clams on the rocks to break them open. To all of them, I am an errant log floating by, a simple observer of the grand ballet of nature that performs each day on this epic stage. It is a land rich with life, but tempered by the equality of death, and it was on such a morning that I spotted the dead whale.

  We call them floaters and they are a natural byproduct of a 7,000-mile swim that brings these creatures from the frigid northern waters of the Bering and Chukchi seas north of Alaska where they summer. Part of my job is cataloguing such heartbreak, and I approach this whale to look for an obvious cause of death.

  She is a mature female, perhaps 30 feet long; her side stove in, most likely from a massive wave cutter that is so common on the prow of today’s cargo ships. As she rolls back and forth on the tide, voracious gulls have already begun to strip the carcass. By tomorrow the crabs will find her, and in three days, all that remains will be a skeleton. When it comes to death, nature is an efficient mistress. I know this whale by a large white saddle patch on her right flank. I have seen her before. As I circle her I am stunned to find a calf huddled close, nudging her, trying to awaken her. This mother had no calf when I encountered her two seasons ago. Grays bear their young every other year after a thirteen-month gestation. I figure this calf to be no more than a couple months old, and without its mother, the end will come soon.

  Grays are not known to adopt orphans, and a whale this young is entirely defenseless, let alone clueless. I slowly back off, feeling myself an intruder, but as I turn to paddle away, the young whale breaks from its mother, and swims to me. She turns parallel, spooning my boat, hugging me as only a creature with no arms can. With her mother gone, she desperately claims me as a surrogate. She presses against my boat and I run my hand along her rubbery skin. This is a phenomenon called transference that is new to me. I am now this whale’s universe.

  She hangs there in the water, her eye imploring mine, begging for something I cannot give. I am slow to tears, but her grief triggers something deep inside, and suddenly all of my own personal losses wash over me as the animal’s pain merges with my own. I stroke the young whale’s head; run my hand along the line of her mouth, as tears return me to the day my own mother died.

  I could not cry for her then, not real grief tears. Mine was a grief of denial. It took months for the reality to sink in and the depth of that loss to hit me. When it did I was emotionally crippled for a long time, so I buried my feelings along with her ashes, and whenever the memory tries to come back to me, I turn it away.

  Now, as I look into that young whale’s eye, I am looking into my own mother’s, and the past is returning against my will. Once again she is lying on that bed waiting for the end, her smile telling me she loves me and that it is all right, but her eyes plead with me not to let her go. Once more after so many years, that same sense of helplessness blindsides me, and I scream like a berserk demon as the wind carries my lament away, unheard, over the waves.

  I want to fight the universe, I want to yell at God, but long ago I accepted the cruelty of life. I know what this whale feels. Now is not my time, it is hers, and now she is my charge and I know what I must do. I slip out of my boat, inflate my vest so I don’t have to swim, and hang there in the water with my arms around the grieving whale. It does not fight or move, but allows me to hold it as I cry for both of our losses, hers recent, and mine from so long ago. I am a poor substitute for her loss, but experience has taught me the importance of touch to these creatures. It is all I can offer.

  I am unaware of time until eventually I slide back into my boat and head for open water, knowing the newborn whale will follow. If it returns to the sea, death will claim it quickly, and that is preferable to the slow torture of starvation. I paddle hard into the face of the i
ncoming waves and see the little whale trying to keep pace while being overwhelmed by the surf that is reclaiming her.

  Bracing against the waves, I pray not to see her again. I yell for God to take her…and then she is gone.

  I have been present at countless deaths upon the water over the years but none has affected me this way. How did this animal return my buried emotions to me? I want to believe she is a sign, perhaps even sent by my mother to reconnect with me, but that is just a wishful fantasy.

  Alone in a kayak, bobbing like a seabird; all those years of love and kindness come back to me. On the vast canvas of the endless sky, I see my mother’s face as I remember her from my childhood, a face that has turned opaque in my mind after so many vacant years. Suddenly she is young and beautiful once more, and her smell envelops me as she takes me in her arms. I too am young again for these fleeting moments, happy as memories return to me, and feeling a peace I have not known since she died. For these precious moments we float there on the water together; the only two people on earth. Locking her inside my heart once again, I turn and paddle for camp as the wind dries all my tears.

  We never know what will trigger a memory; the song of a bird, the flight of a butterfly, or even a grieving whale.

  Nature is cruel, but she also has a soft side. On this day she took one mother away, but gave another one back.

  PART FIVE

  Personal Stories

  Hermit monk

  Photo Ops with Buddha

  There are places that imbed themselves inside a traveler so deep that you take a piece of them with you when you leave.