Travels (50 page)

Naturally I am interested to learn which of these answers is correct. But I never do. I don’t even find out how Hebrew will learn of a fight in Mount Hagen, which is more than a hundred miles away, over a range of rugged mountains. How does he find out?

Hebrew laughs: “Don’t worry. I will hear of it.”

It turns out that clans intermarry so that each village will have its spies, to report back to their families about anything that is being planned. Furthermore, children take the clans of both father and mother, so a Tari person may end up belonging to seven or eight clans. Everyone thus has multiple allegiances, and it is extremely confusing.

Then there is the romance of the visiting sophisticate, Bwana Michael in his khaki shirts with epaulets. Photographing the colorful tribal rituals with his trusty Nikon. I am particularly interested in their methods of warfare, which are traditional—axes and bows and arrows. The men avoid modern weapons such as guns, because such killings can be traced by the police. But I cannot conceive that bows and arrows are really dangerous, really lethal.

Hebrew and his friends laugh at me. One morning they show me their arrows, which are straight pieces of wood, without feathers, the tips hardened in a fire. The arrow might bring down a bird, but can such arrows really kill a person? Hebrew sets up a bamboo stalk, perhaps four inches in diameter, in the middle of a field. From a distance of fifty yards, he invites me to shoot at this slender target. But I am clumsy; the unfeathered arrows fly off in all directions.

Hebrew draws the bow. His wooden arrow entirely pierces the hard
bamboo. I am stunned: that arrow would pass through a human body easily. The other men shoot in turn. They all hit this narrow target fifty yards away.

Then there is the romance of the pastoral primitive. A little time among Rousseau’s noble savages. The uncorrupted natural man, unburdened by the junk of materialist civilization. Unfortunately, Hebrew and his wife fight constantly. Their infant screams. The younger children look unhappy, try to stay out of the way.

One day the betrothed wife number three shows up at the hut, armed with a baseball bat. Her arrival constitutes a provocative act; Rose immediately attacks the new wife with a kitchen knife. Friends and relatives surge in to separate the brawling women; there are shouts and traded insults; Rose’s knife is taken away from her; the third wife is relieved of her baseball bat and urged to leave, but she refuses. The situation is ugly and we visitors are the audience. Nemo proposes we leave for a while, to let things cool down. We climb into the Land Cruiser. As we drive out, Rose flings herself, with her infant, on top of the car. We stop, get out, argue some more.

To a modern sensibility, all this seems to take hours. But the participants are unhurried. There is no need to resolve disputes quickly. There is no need to resolve them at all. There is no reason why we shouldn’t spend all day in front of the Land Cruiser, arguing about things.

Finally the provocative third wife departs, taking her cudgel with her. Rose is calmer. We leave, going out into the countryside.

Ah, the romance of primitive nature. Unfortunately, everything in New Guinea is owned. All the land, all the trees, all the animals. If you touch or take anything, you can be killed for it. The high earthen ramparts transform the landscape into something that looks like the Maginot Line. There are no open vistas, no untouched spaces. You are in a war zone, and although people are friendly, the atmosphere is one of perpetual suspicion.

A hike to a waterfall will set things right. There’s a lovely waterfall we must see. We drive to a farm, then spend half an hour finding the farmer to ask his permission to enter his lands. There is no thought of entering the lands without such permission; if we can’t find the man, we must go home again.

We see a wooden sign that shows a red human hand, with the words
ITAMBU NOGAT ROT
. I ask what this means, and Hebrew looks at me oddly: can’t I read simple English? (It means “It Taboo No Got Right”—in other words, “Keep Out.”)

Finally the farmer is found, permission is granted, and we set off for
the waterfall. Almost immediately we are descending a sheer forested incline. I slip and slide and stumble down this muddy jungle track. Hebrew points out local sights, the pandanus tree and something called “plenty-nut,” which is like coconut, and particularly favored by the
cuscus
, or possum. Or the “lipstick plant,” a fuzzy red shell containing seeds that produce a red dye for painting the warriors.

I am grateful for all these interruptions, any excuse to catch my breath and my balance. We continue down for about an hour, but, as Hebrew says, “Down is easy.
Up
is hard.” Eventually I hear the roar of the waterfall. Another fifteen minutes and the foliage is soaking wet, the ground sucking mud. We are sinking to our knees in the mud. The trail is still vertical.

At last we emerge at the base of an incredibly powerful waterfall. We cannot see it well for the dense mist it throws up. We slip over giant rocks to stand at its base, unable to speak to one another over the roar. This is not placid nature. This is raw power. It is like standing too close to the speakers at a rock concert. I am uncomfortable and soaking wet. We head back.

It takes an hour to climb back up to the top. The mud drags. My feet are heavy. Frequent stops to remove the leeches. I stagger back to the car and collapse on the seat.

“Quite a vertical country,” Nemo remarks, in what I find extreme understatement. “No wonder these blokes are fit.”

We drive back to attend the sing-sing.

A sing-sing is what most people associate with New Guinea. Warriors paint themselves with elaborate designs, dress in traditional headgear, and dance and sing together. The Tari men have one of the most beautiful decorative motifs: the men paint their faces bright yellow, and wear elaborate headdresses involving everlasting flowers, and feathers from birds of paradise. While they are dressing, a large crowd of local people gathers. An air of expectancy settles over the watchers. Soon the sing-sing will begin.

But the dance itself is oddly disappointing. The men form lines and chant and stomp for about thirty seconds. Then they stop, talk, smoke, laugh. After a minute or two, they sing again for a brief time. Then they stop again. Then they sing again. The whole procedure, with its abrupt starts and stops, has a desultory quality that is startling to Western eyes accustomed to a performance at least as long as a three-minute popular song. But that is the way it is done, and the enthusiasm of the crowd
indicates that nothing is wrong. I take pictures. By now I know many of the men, but in their paint and costumes their demeanor is entirely changed, and they pose fiercely.

When the sing-sing is over, they remove their headdresses, wrap them in plastic, and take them home to their huts. Headdresses are extremely valuable, and great care is taken with them. But the men leave the paint on their faces. That night, around the fire, they are all red and yellow as they laugh and smoke. They delight in personal ornament. During the day Hebrew will sometimes decorate his hair with small green leaves. At night he puts fireflies in his hair, so his head winks and glows like a Christmas tree.

Their makeup has a purpose: to disguise the warriors. Thus, if a warrior kills an enemy in battle, the enemy may have trouble distinguishing which warrior actually did the killing. Yet in practice everybody knows who did the killing—one more contradiction too difficult to resolve for an anthropologist on a time schedule.

But I would like to see a tribal war. I have only read anthropological accounts of these battles, which are formal affairs lasting all day. In the early morning the two sides meet at a field, and begin by prancing and exchanging insults. Later some spears and arrows will be shot. As the day continues, combat will become progressively more serious, until finally someone is killed or mortally wounded. Then everyone goes home.

If there is a battle, spectators are allowed to watch, and even to move among the warriors, snapping pictures. I say I would like to see such a battle.

One man who drove tourists in a bus told me that on a certain day he had come upon a tribal war, and all the tourists—they were Italians—piled out of the bus to take pictures. While they were taking pictures, one warrior beheaded another with an ax. Right there in front of the tourists!

But the tourists never saw it. They were preoccupied with the pageantry, the colorful costumes. They never saw the head cut off and the blood spurting and the body twitching.

But the driver saw it. “I do not like to see such things,” he said. “They are too real.”

In the night, when everyone is sitting around the fire, the subject of snakes comes up. Nemo describes the poisonous snakes of Australia. The Tari men listen. One of them then says he once saw a movie about snakes.

The Tari man becomes very excited as he talks about the hero in the movie, whose name was Hindy. Hindy was afraid of snakes, and in the movie he came upon a room that was entirely filled with them, crawling and hissing all over the floor. Thousands of snakes, terrible snakes. To conquer his fear, the man Hindy had to enter the room, and he did! And he fought all the snakes, until he killed them all, and he won! The Tari man says he would never enter such a room, but Hindy did. The snakes were very exciting!

I ask the man if he remembers anything else from the movie. He says no, that it was a story about a man and snakes, and the rest of the movie was just leading up to that.

So there it was, the Italian tourists taking snapshots and literally not seeing a man beheaded, and the New Guinea tribesman seeing
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and considering it a movie about a man and his snakes. The longer I stayed in New Guinea, the more profound the gap between our cultures appeared. I was losing my romantic illusions, but I wasn’t getting clarity in its place. I was getting hundreds of flea bites and a lot of confusion.

Eventually I left the Highlands and went to the Sepik River, where dense clouds of mosquitoes hung in the humid air, and tribespeople looked and acted entirely different. The Sepik River people do not fight with weapons. They kill one another with sorcery.

Finally I went to the coast. On my last day in New Guinea, I dived on a sunken B-24 bomber, a relic of World War II. The wreck was overgrown with corals and quite beautiful, but the most surprising thing was its size. The airplane was so small. In the 1940s the B-24 had been a large plane. Seeing it there on the bottom was a striking reminder of how much the world has changed, and how swiftly the change continues. When I got to the surface, I asked about the plane. Did anyone know its history, how it got there, why it had crashed? No one did. There were only stories, and theories, and possibilities.

Spoon Bending
 

In the spring of 1985, I was invited to attend a spoon bending party. An aerospace engineer named Jack Houck had become interested in the phenomenon, and from time to time had parties at which people bent spoons. I was given a street address in southern California, and told to bring a half-dozen forks and spoons I didn’t care about, since they would be bent during the evening.

It was a typical suburban California house. About a hundred people were there, mostly families with young kids. The atmosphere was festive and a little chaotic, with all the kids running around. Everybody was giggly. We were going to bend spoons!

We all threw the silverware we had brought into the center of the floor, where it made a great metal pile. Jack Houck then dumped a carton containing more silverware onto the floor, and told us what to do. He said that, in his experience, to bend spoons we needed to create an atmosphere of excitement and emotional arousal. He encouraged us to be noisy and excited.

We were supposed to choose a spoon from the pile and to ask the spoon, “Will you bend for me?” If we didn’t think the spoon would respond, we should toss it back in the pile and choose another. But if we had a positive feeling about our chosen spoon, we were instructed to hold the spoon vertically and shout, “Bend! Bend!” Once intimidated by being
shouted at, the spoon was to be rubbed gently between our fingers, and pretty soon it would bend.

That’s what Jack Houck said.

People were looking at him pretty skeptically.

The party began: a hundred people selecting spoons and saying, “Will you bend?” and tossing them back in the pile if the feeling wasn’t right. Then all around me, I heard people shouting, “Bend! Bend!” at their chosen spoons. A lot of people were laughing. It was hard not to feel self-conscious, holding up a spoon and shouting at it.

I was sitting on the floor next to Judith and Anne-Marie. They had finished shouting at their spoons, and now were rubbing them between their fingers, but nothing was happening. I was also rubbing a spoon, but nothing was happening for me, either. I felt foolish. As we rubbed, a gloom descended over the three of us.

Rubbing her spoon, Anne-Marie said, “I don’t think this is going to work. This is silly. I just don’t see how it can work.”