A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (39 page)

The men behind all this—the organizers of this mayhem—were writer Charles Gaines and a New York stock trader named Hayes Noel. For years, Noel had contended that in such a simulated survival situation a city boy, whose nerves are raw, whose responses are quick, might hold an advantage over a good woodsman whose tranquil life has left him unable to cope with more visceral human challenges.

The game had merely been a matter of discussion until photographer George Butler discovered the Nel-Spots in a farm catalogue. “The guns made the game possible,” Gaines told me. “The dye pellets raise a welt, but if you are wearing safety goggles, as we require, they cause no serious injury. Secondly, the guns are much more symbolically weighted than, say, a thrown tomato.”

It was, of course, that very symbolic weight that generated the firestorm of negative response. It was that same symbolic fact that got the animal juices flowing in each of the competitors.

O
n the morning of the competition everyone assembled at Charles Gaines’s home. Each entrant had chosen to wear full camouflage gear. (The rules insisted that each player wear only a single layer of normal-weight clothing, perhaps because an over-zealous competitor had made a suit of foam padding after ascertaining that dye pellets invariably bounced off the foam without bursting.) Aside from the camouflage, each competitor wore a heavy holster containing the ominous-looking Nel-Spot. God knows what the neighbors thought. It looked as if Gaines and his cohorts were on their way to invade Dominica. The competitors were dispersed separately, in various parts of the woods, and all were started at ten sharp.

As a nonplaying observer, I stumbled onto the first sustained Nel-Spot fire fight a half hour into the game. Gaines and Simpkins were banging away at each other when Simpkins lost the charge on his CO
₂
cartridge. Just then, Gaines hit him fairly with a pellet that didn’t burst.

“You got me.”

“No, you’re not marked.” The writer stood three feet from the turkey caller. “Give up,” Gaines said. “I don’t want to shoot you at this range. It’ll leave a welt for a month.” Simpkins, who knows Gaines for the savage competitor he is, assumed the writer’s gun had jammed. He turned and escaped into the deep woods. Gaines stood there with a perfectly functioning pistol. “You learn a little about yourself in this game,” he told me later. “I guess I’m a little softer than I like to think.”

Of course it was Gaines’s lack of killer instinct that allowed Simpkins to eliminate Bob Gurnsey later with the hand-held dye pellet. The game carried its share of fate.

Different competitors had different strategies. Hayes Noel, for instance, was doing very well, proving his point about city boys by making the most of being a good runner in excellent condition. His idea was to sprint from flag
station to flag station and depend entirely on his reflexes and marksmanship, when the noise he made drew another competitor into his range. He had three flags and was on his way to the last when somebody wasted him.

Other players, notably Bob Carlson, a doctor from Alabama who eliminated two players he had bet on heavily to win, blasted away at any and all comers.

That was exactly what G. Ritchie White wanted to avoid. A registered professional forester, White was clearly the best of the competitors with a map and compass. His strategy was to move slowly and silently, using the contours of the land to hide himself. Where another player might run parallel to a creek bed on the straightest line between two stations, White took the more arduous and circuitous ridge route. White planned to engage no one in a shooting battle. It was the winning strategy.

White emerged from the woods unmarked, holding four flags, two hours and fifteen minutes after the contest had begun. “I hunt deer,” he told me, “and you have to concentrate. But there is an extra dimension in this. The idea of being hunted in return. You have to concentrate on every sound, every movement. I was mentally exhausted after the first hour.”

The results of the game were probably inconclusive, but it was instructive to see how people react in a survival situation—even a mock survival situation. Certainly the two city boys in the competition had done remarkably well—better, perhaps, than country boys might have done in a competition that involved a New York subway map and cashing a check in Manhattan on a Sunday.

“I believe in competition for its own sake,” Gaines told me later. “I also believe that we have very little real wilderness left anymore. The outdoors, then, is a backdrop, a screen for what you want to project upon it. You either give in to the concept that there is no more challenge in the outdoors, or you throw your own projection on the woods. I mean, if you climb ice or run rapids, you impose your own rules. And you do this to pull out responses similar to real survival situations.”

Gaines was probably right, at least for those of us who enjoy this constant testing and attendant adrenaline rush. It is a way of finding out who you are, and even those who object to the concept of the game, to its emotional weight, look for the same kinds of answers—by whatever means available. I know for a fact that quite a few of those who said they found the idea “sick” spend twice-weekly sessions with a man who says “uh, yes, uh-huh, and how do
you
feel about that?”

It also seemed to me, in the aftermath of the game, that there was something vaguely funny about it, something humorous in a cosmic sense. The invitational letter had ended with a quote from Menander, a Greek: “A man’s fate is but his disposition.” True enough, until one is maimed by a runaway pie truck or struck by lightning, or buried beneath thirty tons of concrete when a hotel walkway collapses in Kansas City. The game, it seemed to me in its aftermath, was just another way of whistling past the midnight graveyard that exists in all of us, an image one may find frightening or funny, depending on his disposition.

Menander lived about 300
B.C.
, and is considered one of the first full-blown comedians in dramatic history.

“A
h,” N. N. Badoni said, “your master will not seek you. You will seek your master. I believe you are seeking your master even while you deny this to me and to yourself.”

A day before, rafting on a river that drops out of a snow field in the Himalayas, I had been thrown out of the boat in a rapid where I spent some time tumbling underwater in nature’s frigid spin-and-rinse cycle. This was followed by a fast rush through a couple more downriver rapids that featured numerous unpleasant collisions with boulders of varying sizes and unvarying solidity. The successive impacts necessitated some predictably unsuccessful attempts to breathe underwater. My life had not passed before my eyes, but somewhere in the middle of the third rapid, cartwheeling along ass over teakettle, caroming off rocks, the phrase “holy shit, this is serious” began ringing through my mind. It was high noon and, even deep underwater, I could see the bright mountain sun above. It shimmered on the surface of the water, nuclear bright, and I fought toward it, feeling the surface retreat from me even as I swam. It was like a bad dream, a real tooth-grinder, and I longed to rise to the light, to breathe, to break through to the other side, the other side of the sun.

Now, thirty hours later, sitting in a hotel restaurant, there was a lingering congestion in my lungs, and I felt as if someone had taken a baseball bat to my entire body.
N. N. Badoni, a sweet shop owner in this north Indian town of Dehra Dun, suggested that I might consider my swim a religious experience. N.N. was an avid trekker and devout Hindu.

I am not much of a fan of the Hindu religion, associating it as I do with the pestiferous weenies known as Hare Krishnas whose panhandling presence in American airports results in such mind-boggling exchanges as “We’re giving away copies of this book: it’s five thousand years old.”

“Five thousand years?” Stunned disbelief. “It looks brand-new.”

My experience with holy types in India thus far, I told N.N., made the Krishnas seem like a class act.

N.N. agreed that some of the holy men who populate the subcontinent like rats in a grainery were undoubtedly transparent frauds and despicable money-grubbers. Still, he felt there were teachers of spiritual distinction: teachers who did not come to you. They were men you searched for in your soul. And when you found them, you would know. He mentioned a pair of swamis, now deceased, whose teachings had enriched his life.

I nodded politely, and N.N. bought me another beer. He was of the priestly Brahmin caste and did not, himself, drink. N.N. had provided research for Gary Weare’s book
Trekking in the Indian Himalaya
, and had spent many years studying the Garhwal region north of Dehra Dun, where I had just been. Located in the lush Himalayan foothills that rise above the blistered plains of northern India, the Garhwal is considered the Abode of the Gods, and is replete with Hindu pilgrimage sites: Gangotri, near the source of the sacred Ganges river; Yamunotri, at the head of the Yamuna river where pilgrims boil rice in the hot springs below the temple to the goddess Yamunotri so that they may eat the “food of the gods;” Kenarnath, the divine resting place of the god Shiva; and Badrinath, the home of the god Vishnu. The Garhwal is the holiest and most sacred area in all of India.

I had been rafting the Tons, one of the innumerable glacier-fed rivers of the Garhwal. It is a little-known tributary
of the Ganges, and at its source are the snowfields of the 20,720-foot-high mountain called Bandarpunch, the monkey’s tail. The Tons is considered holy to Shiva, one of the most complex of the Hindu gods. Shiva blows hot and cold: he is at once Shiva the Beneficent and Shiva the Avenger. In the homes along the Tons, there are small altars where candles burn below bright printed posters of the ambiguous god. Here is Shiva carrying, in his four hands, a trident, a deerskin, a drum, and a club with a skull at the end; Shiva with a serpent around his neck; Shiva wearing a necklace of skulls. The streak of blue in his hair represents the Ganges, for it is Shiva who brought the Holy River to earth, breaking its fall from heaven by allowing it to trickle through his matted hair. Shiva is usually depicted as having a third eye in the middle of his forehead. When the extraneous eye is closed, Shiva is pacific, and the figure symbolizes a search for inward vision. When the third eye is open, Shiva the Wrathful rains fire and destruction upon the earth.

N.N. said that these tales of the gods weren’t necessarily the literal truth of creation. They were a way of
thinking
about creation, life, and the meaning thereof.

It is a commonplace observation that India, and northern India in particular, has been a hotbed of innovative spirituality since the dawn of civilization. Hindus, Moslems, Jainists, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, exist side by side and all react one upon the other so that over the centuries, it has become religion—colorful, earnest, variegated—that defines the country. Indians, as a people, are intoxicated with religion, and even a visitor of sharp and jaundiced opinions is likely to be tumbled willy-nilly in the torrent of spiritual concerns.

N.N. was right, of course. My little swim in the Tons was an exercise in perceived mortality. Food for compulsive thought. I couldn’t, for instance, shake this terrifying religious image. It is Shiva as I had seen him in the posters, Shiva the Pacific, the inward-looking. Suddenly, the third eye snaps open and there is piercing fire, nuclear white, and final.

I thanked N.N. for the beer and the conversation then hobbled off to my room. When you begin to imagine strange three-eyed gods winking at you, it’s time to regroup, reconsider, change your religion, even finish the last beer and go to bed.

D
elhi is the capital of India, and its administrative center, New Delhi, is often described as a city of gardens. Unfortunately, I had come to this otherwise graceful city in the worst of times, which is to say, during the month of May. Afternoon temperatures rose to 110 degrees and would hold there for another month until the cooling rains of the monsoon. Dust, fine as talc, floated over everything and colored the sky a dull whisky brown. In the countryside, whirlwinds swept over the baking plain and, at a distance, it was impossible to tell the sky from the earth.

Delhi’s heat, in the month of May, tries men’s souls. In 1986, on May thirteenth, a man named Gupta killed his wife because he believed she was sleeping with another man named Gupta. Eight persons—members of a wedding party who had asked for some water at a temple—were injured in a fracas with temple keepers who believed the water would be used to mix alcoholic drinks. A civil servant who had not been promoted at the dairy board killed himself and left a note excoriating his superiors.

There was a Santa Ana tension in the still, burning air of the city, but May and June are also months of snowmelt in the Himalaya, the months the foothills erupt in wildflowers, the most auspicious months for a pilgrimage to the cool beauty of the sacred Garhwal.