From the court, a beautiful city, as light as feathers, fluttered off down the coast. Perhaps – like its people – Georgetown didn’t truly believe it belonged here, and so it hovered over the water. Nothing was firmly attached. It was all built on canals and breezes, a city of stilts and clapboard, brilliant whites, fretwork, spindles and louvres. The streets were as wide as fields, and the cathedral seemed to drift endlessly upwards, reputedly the tallest wooden building in the world. One area was even called Lacytown, as if, at any moment, it would simply take off and drift away, home perhaps.

Naturally, with so much kindling, Georgetown was always burning down. During the nineteenth century, it was devastated five times by fire, and then another four times in the century that followed. There’s always a good reason for these fires, riots or an eruption at the Chinese fireworks plant. The latest victims, in 2004, were a cinema – one of the last in the city – and the Roman Catholic cathedral. Faced with these disasters, the Townies would simply cut some more sticks, and start all over again.

Water too was a constant feature of the Townies’ lives. At high tide, the sea towered five feet above the city, all held back with a wall. It was all a permanent reminder that, tropical though the city may have seemed, it had the soul of Amsterdam. For two hundred years – well over half its colonial existence – Guyana had been Dutch, and this was the town of Stabroek. Muddy, hot and flat, it may not have looked much but, during peace negotiations in 1802, it was considered a better bet than Canada. A few years later, the British grabbed it again, and named it after George III, the farmer king. Soon afterwards, the whole soggy colony passed to Britain, to be known as British Guiana.

Two centuries on, the moisture was as vigorous as ever. People often told me how, a few years earlier, their city had all but vanished under several feet of water. Most of the time, however, it was just a low-grade skirmish with the damp. The forest was constantly trying to creep back into this city, along with the mildew. Even concrete rotted here, and cars seemed to moulder. By day, the canals were silky and green, and by night they were operatic with frogs. ‘Why? Why?’ they’d sing, which made the dogs all howl. Nature, it seemed, was gradually reclaiming its inheritance.

Amongst this riot of parrots and flamboyants, the Townies could still be fleetingly British. They’d talk about things like ‘Spring’ and ‘Autumn’ whilst the weather remained doggedly hot. They could even be a little archaic, with children peeing in ‘posies’ and having ‘tennis rolls’ for tea. In the shops, too a little Britishness had survived; you could still buy Vicks Vapor Rub, a bottle of ‘Nerve Tonic’ or stack of True Confessions. Meanwhile, Fogarty’s department store was like a huge pink slab of Croydon, now quietly decomposing. Downstairs, it had a 1940s café, complete with skinny sausage rolls and dim lighting as if the war – like the café itself – was somehow still going on.

But nowhere felt quite so left behind as the city museum. Downstairs were all the odds and ends of colonial life, together with Britain’s departing gift: a tiny Austin Rolls-Royce Prince. Upstairs, meanwhile, hadn’t changed at all since 1933, when Evelyn Waugh called by. The same, faint miasma of formaldehyde still lingered over what he’d described as ‘the worst stuffed animals I have seen anywhere’. Not surprisingly I had the place to myself, and so the curator pounced on me and made me take my hat off.

Out on the street, traces of the old empire were harder to find. Of course, almost all the civic buildings were notionally British – although they didn’t always look it. Often, even the queen’s most loyal architects had let heat and fantasy go to their heads. Father Schole’s City Hall looked like a runaway dolls house, and Blomfield’s cathedral had used up so many trees that, even now, it was at risk of vanishing into the mud. It was only in the details that Georgetown’s streets were still lingeringly British; the Hackney carriages, the EIIR letterboxes, the statue of a great sewage engineer, and a pair of Sebastopol cannons. Once, however, I did see a large building site called ‘Buckingham Palace’, although – sadly, perhaps – before any resemblance had taken shape, the financing had failed.

Despite these trappings, I soon came to realise that the Guyanese were neither British nor truly South American but lived in a world of their own. Sometimes, it seemed that being foreign came so naturally to them that they didn’t even understand themselves. There were several thriving dialects, and the city would grind to a halt not just for Christmas but also for Diwali, Eid and Phagwah. Depending on who I asked, the national dish was either roti, chow mein, a fiery Amerindian concoction called pepperpot, or chicken-in-the-rough. Originally, each race had had its own political party, but now there were fifty. Amongst a mere 750,000 people, this sometimes made Guyana feel like several dozen countries all stuffed into one.

I often felt this as I walked across Georgetown. One moment I’d be passing Chinatown, then a mosque, ‘The House of Flavours’, a Hindu temple, and the Pandit Council. Then, I’d turn a corner and find myself in the middle of a ‘Full Gospel Miracle Crusade’ or a Mexican Circus (‘With Real Tigers!’). Occasionally, the different cultures seemed to elide, creating tantalising hybrids. Who I wondered, was behind all the Duck Curry Competitions? Or the ‘Festival of Extreme Chutney’? Most of the time, however, everyone kept to themselves. As I passed through each neighbourhood, the music changed – from reggae to Hindi, through soca and hip-hop, and back to calypso.

All this would be odd in a big city, and yet Georgetown was tiny. There was only one escalator in the whole town (and it still drew a crowd), and the rambling National Gallery received just twenty visits a month. Everyone knew everyone, even the men who sold horse-dung from their carts. You couldn’t do anything, it was said, without word spreading outwards through the Spit Press (‘You tell Tara,’ as one taxi-driver put, ‘and Tara tell Tara’). Only I was the odd one out: a bucra, or white man, in a town with everything but.

The post Georgetown Gone Wild | A TFT Exclusive appeared first on The Faster Times.

Then came Greenland. As I’ve flown to and from Europe more times than my addled brain can recall, I’ve often watched the oversized digital plane on my tiny in-seat television map as I crisscross the world’s largest island. Sometimes, on a day flight, I would even risk fellow passengers’ ire by raising my window blind and staring down at this vast uninterrupted glacier, 1,500 miles long. Still, I never thought that I would go there, and more honestly, I never thought that I wanted to go there.

Never came last September, however: I went for six days. My focus was southern Greenland, the “green” bit, the southern-most tip filled with fjords, granite mountains, costal grasses, whales, seals, and the occasionally displaced polar bear. (Just in case you think you’re about to get an account of arctic adventure, let me quickly note that our beloved, white furry Coca Cola lovers generally live on the east coast to the north. But particularly now, in this environmental landscape, they are the definition of “free range,” especially if they get caught on a shifting ice flow in the spring-summer thaw.)

I was taking a very good friend’s place on a pre-planned tour. He’d wanted to go, planned to go, but in the end, couldn’t. Had I had a month to ponder, I probably would have passed. My excuses: “heading into the fair, exhibit and auction season”; “busiest time of the year”; “full plate.” But with less than a week’s notice, why not?

Goethe got gone to Italy. Henry James shipped off to Great Britain and the Continent. For Jack Kerouac it was the Road, any long stretch of concrete preferably heading West. Travel and inspiration are a longstanding diptych that never makes more sense than when pondered from a train window through the Rockies or Alps, a plane crossing the patch-worked fields of the Midwest corn-belt, a ship surrounded by nothing but the big blues of sea and sky, or a car at night on a long, straight, deserted interstate, alone at 70 miles per hour. Untethered, unfettered, unbuttressed; disconnected from the distracting quotidian and plugged into the self. In one’s travels, especially to simple, remote locations, it’s possible to see–in hyper-clear high definition–both what’s in front of the eyes and what’s lurking in the gray matter behind. It’s wonderful, terrifying. It often starts as a pleasurable respite, slipping sideways in time but with the internal compass still square on the navel, and then quickly spins out of control, inducing an out-of-body, Have-I-Been-Abducted-By-Aliens? freak-out state.

Copenhagen, where I spent one night before boarding an Air Greenland flight early the following morning, sat squarely in the comfort zone. The four-star Hilton Airport Copenhagen hotel was clean-lined contemporary with a bow to Danish modernism; in the lobby, there was even an Arne Jacobsen Egg Chair on a raised cordoned-off platform, its upholstery covered in signatures, seemingly part of a design event. Trains into the city center ran regularly, to the minute, and even stopped at precisely the correct mark on the platform. My fellow guests, mostly business people, wore suits and looked stressed. The breakfast buffet, with local cheeses, lots of northern Euro cold cuts and an omelette-making chef, was excellent.

And as much as I feared it, the four-and-a-half-hour flight to Narsarsuaq, southern Greenland’s international airport, was not in any sense bumpy. The Air Greenland plane was a new Airbus, just like some fancy Dubai jet, the flight attendant uniforms and airline logo comely, and I spent almost the entire time worrying about deadlines while trying to write. Just like home.

But between paragraphs, my curiosity got the best of me: I snuck long peaks out the window, the vast sea finally yielding to the mountainous peaks demarcating Greenland’s eastern coast followed by miles and miles of snow and ice, punctuated by the occasional granite escarpment and, like sand in the desert, whipped into sculptural shapes and pirouettes of pattern. I saw, I registered. I enjoyed the view from 32,000 feet. I shivered sympathetically. I finished my sparkling water.

Personal turbulence came soon after the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac. It had something to do with the low, leaden sky, which dimmed what I knew would have been a pastel light, making the treeless landscape look less like a romantic English heath than a bad patch in the badlands of South Dakota, and the drizzle, which obscured the opposite side of the Tunulliarfik Fjord, where Erik the Red, the first Norseman in Greenland, had settled and made a farm in the late tenth century. But the more powerful jolt had to do with Narsarsuaq Airport itself.

Originally built in 1941 by the U.S. Department of Defense as an army airbase where B-25 Mitchell bombers could refuel, “Bluie West One” (as it was then known) had retained what those in the antiques trade would call an original patina. Pure drab-olive functionalism is another way to put it. No espresso maker, no duty free boutiques or flat-screens filled with the news cycle. No frills.

The airport was a way-station, pure and straightforward, a fact confirmed as I watched my fellow travelers wait for their luggage. There were Greenlanders coming home, often with electrical appliances and met by happy relatives, smiles and tears; and there were fit tourists, most sporting books and magazines dedicated to rock climbing, camping, kayaking, fishing. No frippery.

But let me defend myself for a second: I’m no hothouse flower. I was a champion athlete across several sports centered on endurance through high school, and I grew up not on the banks of the East River but on the banks of the Missouri River in Omaha, Nebraska, with all the camping, stalking, fly fishing, and hiking that entails. I was down with both the outdoors and the outdoorsy. But it had been years since I’d seen both in such high relief, and I don’t think I’d ever seen either in such unmitigated concentration.

The sky then got darker. The wind and rain picked up. The glass on the windows and doors started to fog up because the crowd did not disperse. Due to the glacier, which shifts, expands and contracts, the fjords and the distances, there are no roads between towns in Greenland. One goes either by boat or by helicopter, and for one or the other everybody was waiting. I was going to Nanortalik, among the southernmost settlements in Greenland, but had just learned my helicopter was full and that I was being rerouted to Qaqortoq, the region’s largest town (of about 5,000), where I would have lunch and then catch a later copter to my destination. Fine, no really: I would just tap into the airport’s Wi-Fi, check my email, return calls with Skype, get stuff done. Except the Wi-Fi was down, and even if it weren’t, it came via satellite and, I learned, cost a fortune.

Tap-tap-tap. Water from a leaky window frame dripped onto the linoleum next to my wet feet. The room had been chilly; now it was warm and getting warmer. Greenland … Green-land … Grrrr-eeeee-nl-aaaaa-nd. Five more days, five more days doing … doing what? My hand disappeared into my carry-on, searching for my “Trip” folder and its by-the-day itinerary.

Day 1: Arrival Nanortalik, check-in Hotel Kap Farvel, tour of town. Day 2: 09.00 Boat trip to Tasermiut–opportunity of fishing trout, including visit to settlement Tasiusaq. 19.00 Dinner Day 3–

My flight was called. Walking back across the tarmac on my way to a huge red passenger helicopter, one thought played mantra-like on my mental-repeat: So much time, so much time to be filled. When had the idea of time started to scare me? The twenty-minute flight over stunning fjords and through their connecting crags, followed by the arrival at Qaqortoq, quelled that question, at least for the time being.

The center of the region, economically, its focus on fishing and fur, Qaqortaq spreads from a central port partially comprised of Danish colonial wood buildings from the late 18th and 19th centuries, and up two steep hillsides dotted with pitched-roof houses painted bright primary colors: blues, reds, yellows that against the landscape’s green grasses and brown and gray rocks really snap, crackle, pop.

It’s unexpected, it’s charming, and it’s a color combo used throughout the country, evidencing both the Greenlandic love of strong color (as also seen in the traditional Greenlandic national costume, boots, pants, tunic and bib made with seal fur and skin, meticulous embroidery, and glass and bone beads), and a history of easy-to-use color-coded iconography once based on profession (doctor, ship’s captain or sailor, etc.).

In Nanortalik and later in Narsaq, a fishing town north of Qaqortaq famous for its iceberg-filled fjord, I found the same urban plan: an old Danish colonial port, often incorporating Norse foundations up to a thousand years old, surrounded by contemporary, colorful houses. I also found structural similarities and outright facsimiles, both among the Danish buildings and the new homes and commercial structures, because all were constructed abroad and assembled on site (the new usually in Norway, Denmark and, lately, the U.S.). Called “type homes,” they brought to my mind the turn-of-the-century mail-order catalogue houses manufactured by companies like Sears Roebuck that once filled the Midwest and western United States: they’d arrive in crates, usually by train, and after two or three days be up and ready for the move in. (In the picture at right, the numbers carved into the wooden planks to ease reassembly are visible on Qaqortaq’s Katersugaasivik Museum, housed in a building from 1775.

As I looked at the towns from sea, air, and land over my stay, the houses’ strong, clear geometric shapes–reinforced by the contrasting vibrancy of their colors–brought to mind structure and geometric shape in art, on canvas, which in turn made me think about modernism–Cézanne through cubism, Picasso contrasted with Matisse, Mondrian and neo-plasticism.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-sna8H8MiI

A unique combination of the man-made and the natural, Greenland had made the familiar fresh, acting as a visual palette cleanser and reminding me of wonder I had forgotten while allowing me to consider that wonder in a new way not circumscribed or contextualized by a frame-up.

Less artful, or at least less readily learned or embraced, were lessons regarding time and space. Travel in Greenland is, by its nature, slow. Distances are long, and made longer by boats on water. And while one could argue the speed of helicopters, the flight schedule is infrequent by our I’ll-just-shuttle-to-Boston-or-San Francisco standards, the rates expensive. Seats are also limited and often booked in advance, necessitating a plan.

On the day after my arrival in Nanortalik, I went 45 miles up the adjacent Tasermuit Fjord, famous throughout Greenland for its unusual beauty. Wind, sea, the white noise of the boat’s engine. En route to the glacier at the fjord’s end I stopped twice: first at a small village of 80 or so people called Tasiusaq, which has one general store, a grade school where I was lucky to catch the kids playing a ball game at recess, and benches strategically placed to admire the vistas, the fjord on one side, a lake and line of mountains on the other; later at a camp site and small river bringing fresh water run-off to the sea.

More wind, sea, the white noise of the boat’s engine, and we were at the beginning of the fjord, where the Inuit guide named Panninqoq–a wisp of a woman in her early 20’s and in the second trimester of her first pregnancy, and who speaks at least three languages fluently–explained that the glacier had receded approximately fifty yards over the last several years. “Meaning the rocks you are seeing there are visible for the first time in tens of thousands of years,” she said. One single day not just to see nature but to start to feel it too, and to be put in a space to understand the gravity of seeing something that until very recently had been invisible for tens of thousands of years before the construction of the great pyramids at Giza (the glacier is the last picture in the slideshow of the Tasermiut Fjord below).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n1Vqyfvn-M

There were two other full days on the water, traveling from Nanortalik to Qaqortaq, and later from Narsaq to the airport at Narsarsuaq. They were filled with hours of starring at the pale blue sky and the deep blue, at times glass-like sea; at icebergs, waterfalls and sheer granite cliffs; of walking on glaciers and soaking in hot thermal springs; of doing nothing and a lot, thinking about little and way too much, and of being alternately present and very far away (below are icebergs, another glacier and a waterfall, all close to Narsaq).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzXL0naHYYs

Time in Nanortalik, Narsaq and Qaqortaq is also, surprise, slow. In some ways it’s similar to small towns the world over; in other ways it’s unique. Hunting and the lore of hunting are cornerstones of Inuit culture and identity, with all the separation, solitude and silences that entails. Settlements have always been a trek from one another, making interaction rare and never spur-of-the-moment. Then there’s the weather, the long winters when fjords still freeze over completely (although it’s much rarer than even tens years ago). All of these impediments mean Greenlanders place great store in hospitality and social interaction across the board–gregariousness that translates to friendliness in the street and in the shops, over the weekends at “Kaffemiks” (coffee klatches often on a town-wide scale), and over drinks after and after dinner in the hotel bar.

In these interactions I learned first-hand that Greenland is a country and culture in transition. Mining–whether to allow it, and if so, where to allow it–is a national debate. So, too, is when and how full political and economic independence from Denmark will be achieved. And yes, of course Greenlanders are aware that their hunting and consumption of whales is highly controversial (to put it mildly) in the West; in response, most of them underscore that for Greenlanders whale-hunting is a centuries-old practice, that the entire whale is consumed or used, that the number of whales killed is small and species numbers monitored. (Full perhaps shameful disclosure: I ate whale, twice. The better preparation was with onions, and the whale steak tasted like liver. I told myself, as I chewed, that one has to make allowances for eating crazy shit—no, not literally—on trips, for la politesse, etc. But these were hard pieces to swallow.)

Yet walk 10 minutes out any door, and you’re aware—again–that you’re not in some “Kansas”-like American Everywhere. Having traversed the town, reminding yourself that everything industrial, structural, or mechanical has come from far away and thus seems somehow imposed, you find yourself in a wilderness unlike any you’ve likely known. And should it be night, and should it be clear and quiet, even the sky–courtesy of those genuinely Northern Lights–looks familiar and utterly foreign at the same time.

The post Going Greenlandic appeared first on The Faster Times.

In Europe, I ended up with so many books I had to buy a suitcase to bring them home. After we landed in Philadelphia, a Customs officer asked what I had left the country for. How could I explain that the answer was right there, in that suitcase, that if for Rae, the highlight of the trip had been the older man in Florence who had offered us a personal tour of the Uffizi (shades of Ian McEwen’s The Comfort of Strangers, which I also bought, and read, that summer), for me it had been the unlikely coincidence of stumbling across a London bookstall once owned by the Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi, whose work, then as now, I revered. Trocchi Rare Books, it was called — nearly twenty-six years later, I still carry the business card in my wallet — in the Antiquarian Market on King’s Road, and I came away with a signed paperback of the author’s 1960 antimasterpiece Cain’s Book, as well as a green Olympia Press Traveller’s Companion edition of the fifth volume of Frank Harris’ My Life and Loves, which he had cranked out in 1954 for Olympia publisher Maurice Girodias in a celebrated literary hoax.

Trocchi was, at the time, a new fascination, made more alluring by the fact that, except for Cain’s Book and the 1954 novel Young Adam, an existential thriller in which a Glasgow barge worker allows an innocent man to hang for a murder he knows he didn’t commit, it was impossible to find his books. This, undoubtedly, was a function of the marginal nature of so much of his writing, which included a collection of poems called Man at Leisure, a handful of translations, and a series of so-called dbs, or dirty books, that he had written for Girodias in the mid-1950s as works-for-hire. Yet even more, I think, it had to do with the unrelenting fierceness of his aesthetic, which occupied a territory beyond conventional morality, where notions such as right and wrong, guilt or innocence, were merely “convenient social fictions[s]” and the responsibility of the artist was to exist inviolable and apart. “It is necessary only to act ‘as if’ one’s conventional categories were arbitrary to come gradually to know that they are,” he declares in Young Adam, and both the best of the dbs (Thongs, White Thighs, Helen and Desire) and Cain’s Book (it’s not called that for nothing) echo this uncompromising point of view. As Trocchi writes in the closing lines of that novel: “Ending, I should not care to estimate what has been accomplished. In terms of art and literature? — such concepts I sometimes read about, but they have nothing in intimacy with what I am doing, exposing, obscuring. Only at the end I am still sitting here, writing, with the feeling I have not even begun to say what I mean, apparently sane still, and with a sense of my freedom and responsibility, more or less cut off as I was before.”

What was the appeal of such a writer? In many ways, he was, and remains, the natural endpoint of the arc Frank Conroy had begun. Stop-Time, after all, also offers its own brand of nihilism, in its reflections on mortality as well as its author’s uneasy sense that he, too, must always stand apart. The difference is that, for Conroy, this was not so much a matter of philosophy as one of personality, less thought out than felt. His book is framed by two brief sections recalling drunken late night drives through the English countryside; the second ends with him puking in a fountain after losing control of his car and slamming into a low curb. “I was going to die,” he reflects, as the accident unravels. “As the fountain grew larger I felt myself relax. I leaned toward the door. Let it come. Let it come as hard and fast as it can. Touch the wheel, make an adjustment so it will strike right beside me. Here it comes! Here it comes!” What’s compelling about such a moment is its mix of exhilaration and resignation, the idea of looking annihilation in the face and crying: Bring it on. It’s foolhardy, full of false bravado … and yet, at the same time touched by the inevitable, by an unblinking willingness to stare down the abyss. When I first read Stop-Time, I found this so disturbing — the embrace of obliteration, the insistence that we turn into the dark — that I couldn’t make sense of it. Why veer towards death when life was so evanescent, why seek out extermination before it came? But in many ways, that’s what Trocchi is after also, although his position is more intellectual than emotional: literature as ideological stance. In Thongs, which uses the language of S&M to expose the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, who pay lip service to conventional morality while repressing their own shameful secrets and half-articulated desires, Trocchi frames a trenchant critique of “the tepid thing you call living,” arguing that only by “rais[ing] passion to such a level that life becomes extinct within it” can we ever indulge our “lust for the infinite,” although paradoxically, it will destroy us in the end.

Lest this come off as empty theorizing, Trocchi meant every word of it: By the time Cain’s Book appeared, he was already a junkie, a condition the book celebrates as a philosophical choice. “I’m going to try / to nullify my life,” Lou Reed sings in “Heroin,” a song that may as well be channeling Trocchi, so similar is its nihilism, the belief that even the most authentic life is an act of capitulation, if only because of the brittle frailness of our mortal skin. After Cain’s Book, Trocchi never finished another full-length piece of writing, dabbling with a project called The Long Book, agitating as part of the British anti-university movement of the 1960s, shooting heroin (“Trocchi believed he was so powerful, both in his mind and in his body,” recalled his British publisher John Calder, “that he could resist anything, and of course he got hooked very quickly and was never able to get off it for the rest of his life”), and eventually losing everything he loved or cared about: his family, his art, his very self. It was, one imagines, a bitter solace to know that such loss comes to everyone, that it is the essential condition of humanity, this vaporous evanescence, this whittling away.

That, of course, was part of the attraction. At twenty-two, I was drawn to the extremists, and there was something brave, I thought (and think still), about his insistence to strip away every last piece of sentimental reaction, even as he recognized the impossibility of the task. Reading Trocchi was like watching an existentialist rewrite the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism — 1) Life is suffering; 2) The origin of suffering is attachment; 3) The cessation of suffering is attainable; 4) There is a path out of suffering, the Nobel Eightfold Path — as if he were the bastard son of Jack Kerouac and Albert Camus. Like the former, he got sidetracked by the first truth and bogged down in the second. Like the latter, he understood that the only true cessation of suffering would come from the cessation of consciousness. For Camus, such contradictions resolved themselves in an acceptance of absurdity; “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he wrote. For Trocchi, this was not going nearly far enough. “You call life meaningless,” he writes in Thongs, “and you think you assert your freedom in rejecting it. But your act of suicide is just as meaningless as any other.”

This is what literature, at its best and most unrelenting, offers, a slicing through of all the noise and the ephemera, a cutting to the chase. There is something thrilling about it, this unburdening, the idea of getting at a truth so profound that for a moment anyway, we become transcendent in the truest sense. I’m not talking here about posterity, which is its own kind of fantasy, in which we regard books as tombstones instead of souls. No, I think of it more as a voice of pure expression, a cry in the dark. Its futility is what makes it noble: Nothing will come of this, no one will be saved, but it is worth your attention anyway. And yet, for that reason, perhaps — and in much the same way as Conroy — Trocchi becomes the emblem of another, more fundamentally human conflict: that of the outsider who could not escape himself. Like all of us, he was never able to escape the noise completely; he had to eat and sleep and pay his bills, to exist in three dimensions in the world. “Life is, in large part, rubbish,” David Shields writes in his book Reality Hunger, by way of suggesting how quickly an existence “consecrated to art” wears thin. For Trocchi, this meant the rare book business, which is where I almost came face-to-face with him. I recall standing in the antiquarian market, surrounded by coin and jewelry dealers, asking the middle-aged book dealer if he knew Trocchi’s work. He was tall, slightly heavyset, with a gray widow’s peak and a tweed jacket — impeccably British, I would have described him, if I’d been thinking in such terms. At the mention of Trocchi’s name, he smiled thinly, as if confirming something to himself. Then he asked if I knew the name of the bookstall, and when I told him that I didn’t, he took that business card out of his jacket and handed it to me.

I want to tell you that it took me a minute to gather the pieces, that there was a flash of cognitive dissonance. Or no … maybe what I want to tell you is that I saw everything in an instant, as if I were watching a circle close. Either is possible; I don’t know anymore. What I do recall was the look on the bookseller’s face, expectant, and the way he said, as soft as an insinuation: “This is his stall.”

“What?” I might have answered. Or: “No way.” Or: “Oh my God.” I know my body started racing, that I was aware of the boundaries growing porous, of being in the presence of a coincidence or connection bigger than I could fully comprehend. If this is how literature often made me feel, I wasn’t used to facing it in three dimensions, other than my oddly visceral reaction to entering a bookstore, that pulsing in my guts and in my blood. I had come upon this place by accident, attracted by the shelves of old paperbacks, by their open-ended sense of chance. I had been looking, in a general sort of way, for books by Trocchi, but now, it seemed, I’d stumbled on a passage to the man himself. “Is he here?” I heard myself ask. “Can I meet him?” The man’s face tightened, a creasing at the eyes, and I wondered if I’d crossed a line. I had the sudden realization that he was a caretaker, that his job was not only to sell books, but also to deflect people like me. Should I apologize? I wondered, but before I could, he took my elbow in the gentlest possible manner, as if he were about to lead me somewhere — away from Trocchi, I supposed. Then, he leaned across the space between us, and in a voice halfway between a lamentation and a whisper, told me, “He died six weeks ago.”

A quarter of a century later, the moment is still vivid; I remember standing there, buffeted by an almost physical sensation of a lost chance, of having come so close to something I didn’t even know was possible until it was denied. And yet, that’s not all of it, not exactly, for what would I have done had Trocchi been available to me, had he been alive? What would I have said to him … and even more, what would he have said to me? Looking back, it is almost with a measure of relief — not that he was dead but that he was inaccessible — that there was no person to interfere with the idea of him I had built up from his books.

The post TFT Exclusive Excerpt: L.A. Times Book Critic on “The Lost Art of Reading” and the Discovery of a Rare London Bookstall appeared first on The Faster Times.

The power was out when I returned to the Adventist Relief guest house, the room quite warm. I lit the candle nub, drank the remains of my ouzo from the night before, polished off the last of the ginger cookies, and sat listening to my roommate’s shortwave.

Pushing the dial down into a valley between the otherworldly squeaks and whines, something truly exotic — an American Bible program — came into the clear. I leaned toward the sound, and in the dull planar tones of another universe, a Midwestern woman was asking the host if the prophetic impulse wasn’t an aspect of the Holy Ghost and, if so, how then could each person have it? How indeed? The Nile journey so far had shown my prophetic gifts to be nil. Now, after several days of lumbering alone through Malakal, I feared I was losing track.

No one in the United States cared about a months-old spell of terror and death in south Sudan. They barely cared about Darfur, and Darfur was the rage. I needed a thread that would take me from Malakal to the oil areas, a thread to connect this stop to the next and the one after that. I needed for something to happen and I feared I might plod through the next two thousand miles as I had plodded through Malakal that day, without luck and without connection.

“You make your luck,” I said to myself. It was a rebuke: Today I hadn’t made any. Would I snap out of it? So far, the Holy Ghost hadn’t given any sign. I switched off the radio, blew out the candle, and fell to sleep.

My roommate John Ivo came back sometime in the night, still in shock over his elevation to the commissionership of Maban county. In my slumber I could hear him laughing with the others in the courtyard, their celebration punctuated by a series of pops and bangs. I had long since gotten used to the absolute lack of regard people could have when it came to the peace of others, but this — fireworks, at this hour! — was too much. In time I noticed that the fireworks were happening in many places at once, not just in our courtyard. And they weren’t fireworks.

Gunfire was popping outside our gate, near the Sudanese Armed Forces barracks up the road, and, it seemed, everywhere else. I sat up on the edge of the bed. You should be on the floor, I said to myself, and then sat there some more as my ears trained to bursts of automatic gunfire, some close and some very close, and to the creepy skin-crawling sound of ululating men running by.

I got down and squatted on the cement floor and pulled my flashlight from under the foam mattress. Where was cover? To the left were windows into the courtyard. To the right, the bedroom door of thin sheet metal, followed by the wide hall and a steel door to the back walk. Safest, I thought, to take a piss. The outhouse at the end of the walk was windowless cinderblock and would give me cover and time to clear my head. I dashed out, took a long one, and tried to think.

Would they come over the wall? They were coming over the wall.

What would I do? They would kill me no matter what I did. I didn’t want to die in the toilet, cowering over a shitty hole in the ground. I left the outhouse in a low crouch and against all sense I pressed my eye to a small hole low on the fence to see three shirtless men sprinting in the mud past the compound, rifles in hand. One appeared barefoot. All they had to do was leap over the drainage ditch that separated us from the road.

One warrior, his spiderweb-scarred chest clear for a second in the moonlight, seemed to look directly at me. He made the sound, the same creepy war call, and I pulled my head away and duckwalked back into the house.

John Ivo, Ter Majok, and the other guesthouse boys were sitting in the dark living room. What the fuck is going on? “They are shooting,” someone said. Who? “Militia. It was a shootout with police.”

The town outside was well lit — a full moon and low clouds alive with horizontal tendrils of lightning. “I saw it driving here,” Majok said. “Two cars, a joint patrol, were heading to the SAF barracks when paw-paw-paw-paw! You see?” he said to James, another Adventist Relief man. “I was right to change my route. We could have been in the middle. I came a different way.”

Apparently, a police patrol had come across some of Gabriel Tang’s fighters walking armed outside the Sudanese base. The gunfight erupted when they refused to lay down arms. Even in his absence, Tang was toxic to the city’s peace.

Everyone was reclined on lawn chairs or on string beds listening to the gunshots advance like a rippling breeze over the town. I sat on the floor in the corner, keeping my head below the windowsills. After fifteen or twenty minutes, Ter went outside to peek over the fence. “They are moving,” he whispered. After more waiting they opened the gate a foot and he peered out into the street. He gave a quiet order and they threw the gate wide while he sprinted to his abandoned Land Cruiser, cut the machine a hard ninety degrees, and drove it into the compound.

I heard bursts of AK-47 fire. I heard the single pop-pops of handguns and I heard the whooom of rifle rounds passing close, very close by, parting the air and sound itself like they were flesh. I went back to my room and sat on the floor in the corner. I ran my thumb along my sternum and ribs and thought about how fragile this body is in the face of physics, of that single round during the November fighting that had passed through two metal fences, a trailer wall, and ended up in a friend’s filing cabinet, a pristine pointed stray that simply ran out of momentum.

John poured some ouzo and drank deep. Then he walked into the dark kitchen, probably the safest room save the toilet, and sat there on a lawn chair in gloomy darkness, surely thinking of Nebraska and seven-year-old Telly. He came back twenty minutes later, slumped into bed, and was soon snoring.

I pulled my sleeping mat from the rucksack and lay on the floor in my sweaty clothes. During a lull in the shooting the bullfrogs emerged, at first slowly and then with gusto, reclaiming their sonic territory. The birds joined in, followed by the pariah dogs and the asses in an evening chorus. It went on thusly past dawn. At least once an hour someone would start shooting and the toads of Malakal would go silent and wait the bums out. I heard the last shots sometime after 5 a.m.

Along the way I dreamt I was looking through a pile of sensitive documents, maybe Somali, with a colleague who was a star reporter at a well-regarded newspaper, but I wasn’t clear if the documents were mine or his or ours or just there for the taking.

Was I glomming? Was he? The scene shifted. I was in New York, and Rudolph Giuliani was belittling me at a press conference. This had happened many times during my days reporting from City Hall, but on this occasion all the other journalists were joining in the ridicule. As if to salve that mental welt, I then dreamed I was on the precipice of seducing two long-limbed young women I had happened across at a backyard swimming pool. But the prospect of straying from marriage, even in slumber, only brought additional stress. I awoke aroused and with a migraine, stinking of panic.

I sat up at six, having slept no more than an hour, and most of that in ten-minute parcels. In the open field across the road a cluster of cows lay hobbled in a semicircle, each waiting to be milked by a man in a turban working the teats of a contented Sudanese Bessie. Women in long Shilluk tunics walked down the road in groups of three and four, and near the gate children poked at ticks in the dirt, comparing prizes. All appeared normal after the passing storm of Kalashnikovs and testosterone.

The post TFT Exclusive Excerpt: The Black Nile by Dan Morrison appeared first on The Faster Times.

Amsterdam doesn’t change. You can go years, even centuries, without setting foot in the place, and return to find everything precisely as you left it, an immaculate shrine, like the untouched bedroom of a long-dead child. You enter a building through a three-hundred-year-old door, gleaming with fresh lacquer, and glance upward to see a crooked little chimney with the year 1634 still scratched cleanly in the clay; you gaze out at the canal, at the fleet of wooden sailboats clipping calmly through the water, and you wonder for a moment if the modern world has been nothing more than a dream, a frenzied parade of ideologies and massacres and useless things for sale, passing vividly and blood-soaked through the mind’s nocturnal eye and forgotten at the first light of dawn.

But look a little deeper and the march of time is evident. The outdoor markets are no longer filled with apple-cheeked milkmaids and bewhiskered herring merchants bellowing lewd songs over the percussive thud of the cleaver, but with harried-looking women in hijab shepherding small tribes of dark-eyed children through the crowded stalls of fish and flowers and fruit. The streets are lined with kebab shops and tanned, glistening men with leather trousers slung low on their hips. Turn a corner, and the skunky pungency of marijuana masks the scent of rain and sewage that veils the air. The half-bared breasts of an Eastern bloc teenager are pressed against the windowpane of a breathtaking seventeenth-century building, as a group of bleary-eyed youths in LSU caps dare one another to the lick the glass over her pierced nipple.

There are elderly people on the street: old men drinking small glasses of warm beer in unfashionable cafés, shriveled women painstakingly negotiating their wheeled baskets of shopping over the uneven cobblestones. They still look sharp, despite their age. Not for them the glittery sweatshirts; the soft pants the color of melted ice-cream; the whimsical, childish raiments that make Granny and Gramps look like a pair of hideous balding babies left in the bathwater for a hundred years. The elders of Amsterdam are dressed in plain skirts and pants with zippers; neat cardigans and wool neckties. Some shuffle along stiff-backed, others with the waddling gait of a worried toddlers, and you can just infer the outline of an orthopedic corset or a sodden adult diaper lurking beneath the tasteful armor of tweed and wool. The inside may be rotting, but outside, all is dignity; quiet, unbending dignity. The old people are like the buildings that way.

* * *

Where the Fuck Am I? A Guide to Dutch Street Names

Amsterdam can be an impossible place to navigate.

First of all, the streets in Amsterdam are oriented around a ring, as opposed to a grid. While this may be all very well and good for morally equivocating, sexually ambiguous Europeans, a red-blooded, patriotic American used to honest concrete concepts like “east” and “west,” “north” and “south,” “good” and “evil,” “with us” and “against us” will have a hard time, particularly as said American will almost certainly be stoned out of his or her mind.

The nice thing about circular streets is that you’ll always get where you’re going eventually; the hard part is going the right way around. It can make the difference between a journey of five minutes or one of two hours. (At least as I mentioned, you’ll be stoned, which takes the edge off. Until it starts to rain and you wish you were dead.)

The only truly foolproof way to get anywhere is ask a native for directions, which they are usually happy to provide. But this too poses a difficulty, because the names of Dutch streets are, to a native English speaker, completely impenetrable. Like German, Dutch uses compound nouns, and a street name can easily have more than twenty letters, which, I’m sure you’ll agree, is completely fucking ridiculous. While embedded in the street names are clues as to their nature and positioning–straat for “street,” gracht for “canal,” eerste for “first,” tweede for “second,” etc.–unraveling their mysteries would require one to actually learn to speak Dutch. I considered doing this, but a four-week language course proved prohibitively expensive and essentially useless, and I already have a college degree in experimental theater, thank you very much.

Therefore, the best solution is simply to pronounce the unpronounceable by substituting the unfamiliar words with familiar English look-alikes. The results are informative and often amusing.

Example:

Reguliersdwarsstraat

Reguliersdwarsstraat is the main drag of Amsterdam’s gay area (which basically encompasses the entire city except for the Muslim neighborhoods). It is often referred to as “Rue de Vaséline” by locals. However, in the place-name argot of Rachel Shukert’s The Grand TourTM, it becomes: Regular Dwarf Street

You see? Reguliers, a difficult word involving several epiglottal stops and no small amount of phlegm, becomes the eminently manageable word “regular.” Is there anything more comforting that the word “regular”: with its pleasant symmetry, its happy promise of placid intestinal activity? Dwars, meaning “side,” as in a side street, becomes the charming little noun “dwarf.” And finally, straat is anglicized simply to “street.” Reguliersdwarsstraat = Regular Dwarf Street.

Of course, as this is a dwarf street, there must also be just a plain old Regular Street, which there is! Reguliersstraat.

I think you’ve got the hang of it. Here are some more samples to get you started. Remember, be creative, and don’t be afraid to sound stupid! Everyone thinks you are anyhow, so you’ve got nothing to lose.

Leliestraat Lily’s Street

Leliedwarsstraat Lily’s a Dwarf Street

Laurierstraat Laurie’s Street

Laurierdwarsstraat Laurie’s a Dwarf Street

Eerste Laurierdwarsstraat Errr, Laurie’s a Dwarf Street?

Weteringplantsoen Watering Plants, Son

Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal New Side for Burgers, Y’all!

Oudezijds Achterburgwal Old-Time Actor Burgles All

Warmoesstraat Hot Mess Street (an apt description)

Kamperfoelieweg Camper Following

Kolpinstraat Klonopin Street

Rustenburgerstraat John Ratzenberger Street

Huidenstraat Houses Street

Meerhuizenstraat More Houses Street

Korte Meerhuizenstraat Even More Houses Street

Funke Kupperstraat Fucking Couples Street

Pettenstraat Petting Street

Pienemanstraat Penis Man Street

Uranusstraat Your Anus Street

* * *

In the mornings, after breakfast, I liked to linger over my coffee for minutes, writing in my journal or going over the folding laminated street map Jeroen had given me before I timidly ventured outside on my daily rounds. The apartment was near the Albert Cuyp Markt, a permanent outdoor market that went on for several blocks, and every day I walked though its entirety, buying a packet of olives or a couple of sour pickles to munch on as I ambled past the plastic tubs of poppies and periwinkle, the huge round cheeses that emitted a waxy glow like the rays of an alien sun, the silvery prawns and fat herrings staring glassily from beds of finely crushed ice. I especially liked the sweet stall, where wedged between mounds of dried apricot and shards of creamy nougat were several trays of three-dimensional chocolate penises in a variety of sizes and shapes. Some of the penises were milk chocolate with a white chocolate glans; others had white shafts, the tips coated a troubling deep brown. The penises stood erect, curving forward eagerly on the haunches formed by their molded scrotums, the smaller ones arranged carefully in front, an eager choir preparing to burst into song. Once I saw a frazzled-looking young mother snatch up one of the larger penises and thrust it roughly in the mouth of her wailing toddler. The child’s sobs subsided immediately.

It occurred to me that if my acting career failed (a possibility that seemed more likely with each passing minute) I could instead travel the world, taking artistic photographs of sexually suggestive foodstuffs… I would record the consumption of reindeer testicles among the Sami people of northern Finland and traverse the Amazonian jungle on the trail of a mythical fruit that oozed a clumpy red fluid and was fed to native boys as part of an initiation ritual; I would compose a penetrating (if you’ll pardon the pun) essay accounting for the popularity of the misleadingly named ladyfingers at the kiddush following a ritual Jewish circumcision. I would then amass all this material into a glossy, expensively produced coffee-table book, which would sell a million copies and make me rich beyond my wildest dreams.

It tells you something about me that, in the case my acting career proved a failure, my only contingency plan was to publish an international bestseller. I’m sure that you are already aware of this. I just want you to know that I know it too.

* * *

In truth, with each passing day, more and more of my time was devoted to my fantasy life, which had always been rich but was quickly becoming all-consuming. When I had first arrived in Amsterdam, I considered joining one of the language classes organized by various government agencies and community centers to help recent immigrants integrate into Dutch society. I fantasized that the experience would be very much like Dear John, the 1980s sitcom starring Judd Hirsch as a recently divorced man deeply involved with his support group. I invented a colorful cast of characters. There would be a smooth talking British playboy, a friendly Australian lady-pothead, a couple of Italians in billowing patterned shirts who would shout dramatically and inexplicably burst into tears and were also gay boyfriends to each other, and a heavily veiled Muslim woman who would shock and delight us with explicit references to her rich and varied sex life. We would meet in a brightly lit classroom decorated with inspirational posters of kittens and with disembodied hands holding flowers, and presiding over us would be our teacher, a lovably humorless Dutchman called Marcel who wore funny glasses and could never find a girlfriend. His ineptitude with the opposite sex (and his subsequent crippling loneliness) would be a source of great mirth for our class, but we would do what we could to help. Fatima, the veiled Muslim woman, would give him tips about esoteric sexual maneuvers with evocative names–the Flatulent Pita, the Hamid Karzai–which she claimed were commonplace in her country and expertly administered by her never-seen husband, a successful real estate broker called Jamal. At the mention of such exotic perversions, Marcel’s funny glasses would steam up (a running gag), and he would have to wipe them with the end of his tie. Trevor, the suave English playboy, would be constantly setting Marcel up on disastrous dates with women Trevor had recently discarded, until halfway through season three, when Marcel told him he was in love with me. As Trevor and I often expressed our simmering sexual tension through insults and various plots to humiliate each other, he would agree to help Marcel woo me, that is, until Trevor realized the depth of his own feelings for me. This would lead to weeks of addictive, will-they or won’t-they build-up until spring sweeps, when Trevor and I would accidentally be locked overnight in the Anne Frank House during a blizzard. Certain we were about to die, we would then breathlessly fall into each other’s arms and make tender yet animalistic love to each other on the floor of the Secret Annex. When this was revealed to the class, in the next episode, everyone would feign horror–everyone, that is, except for Fatima, who would calmly assert that the Holocaust was a Zionist hoax and then mention a new bedroom move that Jamal had invented, which he called “the Chocolate Treblinka” and we would officially beome a controversial, boundary-pushing comedy. In the season finale, Trevor and I would become engaged, but in a new twist on an old classic, we would leave each other at the altar–I being overwhelmed at the thought of having to deal with his snobbish, casually anti-Semitic mother; he feeling unready to give up his playboy ways. Trevor would then leave the show for a couple of seasons to pursue film projects, but we would be reunited in the series finale, when Marcel would marry Sheila the Australian lady-pothead after accidentally impregnating her during a time-travel episode set in the floating hotel in Amsterdam harbor. Their wedding would also be the first and only time we would ever see the mysterious Jamal, who would be played by Adam Sandler.

My show seemed so real to me that I even composed a set of dummy lyrics for a theme song, which was to be sung to the tune of the theme from Dear John:

Amsterdam (doo doo doo doo doo doo)

Amsterdam (doo doo doo doo doo)

Don’t know where the hell I am, Amsterdam

Amsterdam (doo doo doo doo doo doo)

Not Siam (doo doo doo doo doo doo)

Paris, France, or Vietnam, Amsterdam

The post TFT Exclusive Excerpt: Rachel Shukert on Why Amsterdam Doesn’t Change appeared first on The Faster Times.

Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter pilots Brian McLaughlin and Steve Bonn scanned the waves. It was almost 5:00 a.m., but in Alaska in winter-time, 5:00 a.m. still looks like the middle of the night. Attached to their flight helmets, the men wore night vision goggles, heavy metal optics that gave the entire ocean the neon green glow of an old-school video game.

Finally, the helicopter broke out from a snow squall, and there it was–a light. Then two, three . . . five. The four-man crew saw what looked like a poorly lit runway, a ragged string of strobes flashing on and off over a mile-long stretch of ocean. They scanned the seas for the sinking ship. But there was no sign of the Alaska Ranger.

The scene was unlike anything the Coast Guard rescuers had ever faced in the past. McLaughlin stared down at the ocean one hundred feet below. To his left, to his right–everywhere he looked he saw more blinking strobes. There were at least two dozen individual lights spread about in the waves.

Oh my God, he thought. Where do we begin?

The men knew that the Coast Guard Cutter Munro was making its way toward the disaster site, racing on its turbine engines at close to 30 knots. Still, the ship was hours away. And given the sea conditions, McLaughlin thought the Munro most likely wouldn’t be able to launch its rescue helicopter.

His aircraft was it, the only hope for these men–at least for now. They just had to choose a spot and start getting people out of the water.

Bonn pulled the aircraft over the first light the Jayhawk reached. It was one guy, alone, but alive. The whole crew could see him waving. The pilot flew a lap over the scene. There were people everywhere. Everyone they could see was in a bright-red neoprene survival suit, and no one looked obviously worse off than anyone else. Not that that was an easy judgment to make from the air.

Bonn pointed the helicopter back toward the first guy they’d seen. He was the farthest downwind; he’d probably been in the water the longest, the pilots guessed. They’d get him first.

Ryan Shuck felt like he’d been in the ocean for days. But it was still dark; it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. The fisherman was still thinking about unzipping his suit. When should he do it, how long should he wait? Then he saw a light way off on the horizon. A ship! he thought. The Alaska Warrior, maybe. He knew how long it took between when you spotted another ship in the distance and when you actually passed it side to side. He figured the boat was more than an hour away. But the light was growing closer quickly. No more than thirty seconds after seeing it, Ryan heard the rotors.

The chopper seemed to home in right on him. It approached like a missile, and stopped short just above him, maybe one hundred feet into the sky. A giant spotlight shone down. Ryan waved his arms. For a few seconds the orange machine hovered above him. Then it turned and flew away.

What the hell, Ryan thought, I know they saw me.

He kept his eyes on the helicopter as it made a giant lap over the ocean. Then thankfully, miraculously, it circled back and settled over him. The door swung open.

He was going to be saved.

As Steve Bonn came into a hover over Ryan Shuck, Coast Guard rescue swimmer O’Brien Starr-Hollow clipped his harness into a talon hook on the end of a metal cable that ran into a hoist hard-mounted to the outside of the Jayhawk. At the signal from flight mechanic Rob DeBolt, Starr-Hollow slid forward to sit with his legs dangling over the edge of the open aircraft door and unclipped from his gunner’s belt.

“Ready for direct deployment of rescue swimmer to survivor,” flight mechanic DeBolt announced through the helicopter’s internal communication system (ICS). “Swimmer is at the door.” And then, using a mechanical control just inside the aircraft door, DeBolt retracted the hoist cable, drawing Starr-Hollow smoothly up and out of the aircraft.

“Swimmer is outside of the cabin,” DeBolt reported. “Swimmer going down.”

From the pilot’s seat, Bonn couldn’t see much of what was going on behind him in the cabin, or in the waves beneath the aircraft. Through the ICS, a Coast Guard flight mechanic paints a verbal picture of the scene below, constantly updating the pilots with the information necessary to keep the helicopter positioned safely above the swimmer and victims in the water. Standard procedure during a hoist operation is for the flying pilot to turn off his radio and to concentrate only on the flight operations and the instructions of the flight mech. Meanwhile, the copilot handles all communication with people outside the helicopter. As soon as the decision is made to lower a swimmer, the flight mechanic is running the show, feeding the rest of the crew a constant stream of commands.

The conversation is scripted, the language drilled into all aircrew members from the first days of their training. From the safety checklists that the crew collectively runs through every time the swimmer leaves the cabin, to the “conning”–or positioning–commands that keep the aircraft safely placed over breaking swells, the crews are speaking a custom-made language built on succinct, declarative sentences. In the middle of the night, in the Bering Sea, for even one member of a four- man helicopter crew to be confused about what’s happening is to put the entire crew in danger. Precision. Clarity. Those are the attributes, each Coast Guard rescuer had been taught, that allow even the most complicated or harrowing rescue to proceed smoothly and calmly.

Now that the swimmer was out the door, McLaughlin would be the second eyes on the helo’s altitude. He continually scanned the gauges that covered the panel in front of him, and called out the size and frequency of the incoming swells to help DeBolt manage the hoist. The gale-force wind was working in the rescuers’ favor. Often the Jayhawk’s 100 mph rotor wash overwhelms people in the water, but with the gusts off the nose blowing most of the rotor wash behind the helicopter, the rescuers were able to fly closer to the survivor than usual.

DeBolt was kneeling at the open cabin door, attached to the roof by a canvas gunner’s belt that would hold him to the aircraft even if he tumbled out the opening. It was his job to make sure the hoist cable didn’t become tangled around itself in the aircraft’s landing gear or around a person in the water. As he lowered Starr-Hollow toward the surface, DeBolt leaned out into the darkness, eyes glued to his swimmer’s neon yellow helmet.

“Swimmer going down. Swimmer halfway down,” he continued through the ICS.

From the waves, Ryan Shuck saw the bright light of the helicopter fifty feet above, and the outline of the rescue swimmer falling slowly toward the surface.

As Starr-Hollow sank toward the waves on the thin metal line, he could see the fisherman trying to swim for him. With his harness clipped into the talon hook at the end of the hoist line, the Coast Guard rescuer had both his hands free for swimming or to grab on to a survivor. But he wasn’t close enough. Starr-Hollow seemed to be bobbing up and down, twenty feet at a time, as the waves swelled and retreated beneath him. As the aircrew struggled to keep the helo stable, the rescue swimmer found himself skimming forty or fifty feet horizontally over the water. Meanwhile, Ryan, too, was pushed all over by the waves and was fighting to move toward Starr-Hollow.

Finally, DeBolt placed the rescue swimmer just feet from Ryan, who reached out toward Starr-Hollow as the swimmer called to him.

“Swimmer in the water,” the flight mech announced through the ICS as Starr-Hollow hit the waves.

Ryan watched as the rescuer hit the ocean waist-deep, and was carried right to him by the wind.

“Stop swimming!” Starr-Hollow yelled.

DeBolt fed out more cable and directed Bonn to back the aircraft away from the men in the water. Starr-Hollow would remain attached to the hoist; feeding out the extra cable would give him some more room to maneuver, while backing away would help ensure that the extra line didn’t get tangled in itself, or worse, around their swimmer or survivor. If the line suddenly became taut–from aircraft movement or from a large wave dropping out from under the men in the water–Starr-Hollow and the fisherman could be jerked violently out of the waves.

“Swimmer is at the survivor,” DeBolt announced as, several stories below, Starr-Hollow grabbed on to Ryan’s arm.

Ryan could feel the swimmer’s strength instantly. He began to relax.

“How’re you doing?” Starr-Hollow yelled over the thud of the rotors above.

“Okay,” Ryan answered. “Okay.”

Starr-Hollow told Ryan his name, and asked if Ryan could keep his arms still, as tight as he could against his sides.

“Yes,” Ryan nodded, “I can do whatever you want me to do.”

Starr-Hollow had a simple harness, called a rescue strop, slung over his shoulder. It took him ten seconds to cinch it over Ryan’s chest and clip the tightened harness into the talon hook on the end of the hoist line. Then he gave DeBolt the thumbs-up, the signal to pull them out of the waves.

From the book Deadliest Sea: The Untold Story Behind the Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History. Copyright (c) 2010 by Kalee Thompson. Published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.

The post Deadliest Sea: The Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History appeared first on The Faster Times.

Readers of my work may know that as a cancer survivor I have taken to dabbling in necessary medical tourism — the trendy practice wherein a lucky patient visits different cities, and sometimes nations, for required care. Of course, unlike many others, I’m still here to tell those tales, which include a host of trips I made in 2005, chronicled in Men’s Health, and more recently in Harper’s. Fortunately I’ve had the insurance, supportive friends, and family required to make such difficult trips possible, although these travel experiences haven’t exactly been holidays or improved my financial life. And yet in the “What Choice Do We Have?” sense, that’s explicitly why my wife Lina and I have so deeply enjoyed these fun-filled sojourns: They’re our attempts at Adventure Travel. Note, however, that in the following ditty, the word “adventure” doesn’t describe zip-lining in Costa Rica with angry monkeys after rotator-cup surgery but rather what it feels like to fear life and love in a TSA holding pen.

There’s always a cheerful beginning: In January 2010 I traveled from Los Angeles to Manhattan, setting up HQ in an east-side sublet, to undergo and recover from a neurosurgical procedure that saved my life. At the time I had been writing an essay for the Financial Times Magazine about plunging into LA’s medical marijuana subculture as a (somewhat) normal-looking/functional guy assessing cannabis for legitimate medical reasons. I wasn’t a character in a stoner film, but I had briefly (and unsuccessfully) experimented with weed as a means of pain relief, and I thought I might as well have some with me in New York, where a prescription for the stuff, even from a lauded California university physician, meant nothing.

Now, as I’ve written on The Faster Times, some airports in the San Francisco area will let you fly with medical marijuana. There’s just the little issue of airlines forbidding you to have it, to say nothing of other airports looking unkindly at the prospect of you landing with a pill bottle that reads, “Bubba Skunk,” in Comic Sans. I hence figured that if I wanted this so-called remedy in New York, I might have to engage in activity even a new Angeleno and former New Yorker like me should consider stupid: procuring a most likely substandard strain from a workaday Manhattan delivery service. Sure, I knew it unsafe to use the substance shortly before and after my surgery, but why not, I reckoned, visit the 70th floor home of an “American Psycho”-esque i-banker, where I’d meet two lovely stoned Jersey girls in sweatpants and pick up some “meds” — an eighth of an ounce, to be exact? As I discussed in the FT Magazine piece, it’s not as if the FDA-approved pills (essentially opium) given to me by a hospital ICU reduced my pain, although they did help me see new colors I could only describe to dolphins, and I just wanted to have as much help at the ready as possible.

All of which is to say that as I recovered from my procedure we had some unused weed in New York, and I would forget about it in the days following the surgery. I had safe little opiates at my disposal if I wanted to mess with space and time, and ridiculous me, I was just not angry to be alive. But then, weeks passed, and it was time to visit family on Long Island before returning to LA. “Let’s just keep the stuff in the front compartment of the duffel for now,” I said to Lina as we readied our bags for the weekend. And that’s the last I saw or thought about cannabis in my carry-on. Until the day we flew home.

Fast forward, VHS-style, because that’s how the world felt in my head then: It wasn’t easy to bid farewell to family, putting in perspective the life-threatening intracranial exploration enjoyed at the hospital. But maybe this state compared to what George Harrison had felt when he left India? Or maybe I made too many pop-culture allusions due to PTSD? Regardless, as we lugged our many bags into JFK’s JetBlue terminal 5, Lina and I had serious emotions to quash. All we wanted was to slink through security, sit on some mod pod-seat and at least pretend to relax with a cocktail. And we were just about settled in our happy place, not before an affordable stop at the Muji design store when… Actually, I’m not sure what made me remember it, but it was then, as my wife and I stood in the center of Terminal 5′s foodcourt area, travelers swirling around us sucking water from Fiji bottles, the pale blue light of an upscale bar in bas-relief, that I said:

“You took that weed out of the duffel before we packed it, right?”

Lina said nothing, looked at me like I was the kind of man who would marry someone, drag her across the country to hospitals, and survive innovative neurosurgery — all while screwing around with pot like a high-school freshman.

“It’s in there. No. I Didn’t take it out. It’s in there. It’s in there. It’s in there!” Lina said.

“What?” I asked.

“The Weed. It’s in the baggg.”

“The bag we checked and sent through security?”

“Are we talking about another bag?”

“You didn’t take it out?”

“You didn’t?”

“What the — I mean, fuck, what do we do?”

“I know, because I worked in law enforcement before entering my Ph.D. program.”

“We have to get it,” I said.

“It’s checked. It’s probably already gone through.”

“With my name on it,” I said.

Silence. Then my whimpering question:

“Will they be waiting for me to board the plane?”

Lina: “I don’t know?!?!!”

I felt unusually nervous, perhaps worse than I did on the operating table before closing my eyes, potentially forever.

“Are They watching us right now?” I asked. “They are, right? Look at that couple. That little kid holding an iPhone. They could be Anyone.”

“I don’t think They are Little Asian Babies Holding iPhones.”

“This isn’t going to end well,” I said.

“I don’t know. I just think we should let it go. I mean, it wasn’t that much.”

“The bag reeked when I picked it up in your parents’ house.”

“That’s because you put it up to your face.”

“Like security dogs?”

“Ok, we have to get it.”

It would be easy: We’d just run back to the check-in area and ask the sweet guy who took our bags. Ask him to return… our drugs?

“But wait,” I asked Lina. “Won’t he ask why we need the bag back?”

“You just had surgery. You need to take medicine you packed by mistake.”

“That’s not going to make them suspicious?”

“Oh, you want to walk up to a plane, knowing that you could be taken away by federal marshals. OK.”

“That wouldn’t happen, right?”

“No, you’re not the Undie-bomber.”

“But it’s true,” I said, my pulse beating faster than “slowly,” like a bad Vanilla Ice song. “Even if I got onto the plane, they could be waiting for me in LA.”

“Yes,” Lina said.

“They could phone once I’m on the plane, watch me, and take me out once we land.”

“I don’t think they’ll ‘take you out.’ But yes, you could go to prison.”

“After brain surgery?”

“Well, that could be a bargaining chip.”

“I knew I did it for some reason.”

Lina picked up her rolly luggage-thing, her eyes locked on the TSA’s finest.

“So we should go back out then,” she said.

“Yes.”

“OK…ok… NOW!”

And we ran. And got through the gates back to check-in. Where another kind man, potentially with Navy SEALS training, stared us down as we waited in line. Again. Without bags.

“We need to get a bag back,” I told him, looking crazed, possibly blowing our cover.

“Med-i-cine. He packed medicine he needs to take,” Lina said. “We need to retrieve it.”

The man peered at us curiously, possibly thinking.

Why would someone who needs medicine with him pack it away? I looked around. A security guard picked his nose by the double-doors that led to safety, i.e. the glorious Belt Parkway.

The check-in man picked up his walkie-talkie.

“Tell me your name and flight number,” he said to me.

I did.

“You have to wait now. It could be a while. Your flight boards in an hour.”

Lina and I looked at each other, smiling spastically, phew-ing.

“Ok,” I said.

“Go, wait, over there,” said the man, pointing to the corner of the room. “I will tell you when they call.”

“‘They’ are just the baggage people, right?”

Lina kicked me. Hard.

“Just go wait there,” he said.

Lina rolled her eyes. We went to the corner, sat down.

20 minutes passed.

“They’re just keeping us here so they can arrest me,” I said.

“They’re probably just looking for the bag,” Lina said. “I bet it would have went through fine.”

“What? Really? Why didn’t you say that before?”

“I did.”

“Right, that’s true. But they also could have arrested me.”

“That’s true, too. I think this is the best thing, really. I mean, could you have sat on that plane for six hours wondering if you were going to be arrested?”

“It might not have been any worse than sitting on the plane for six hours, coming here, wondering if I was going to die in the O.R.”

“Let’s just stay positive,” Lina said.

“Ok,” I said. “Because I’m positive they’re watching us and holding us here. I’m positive I’m screwed. Will you come to jail and visit me? It won’t be as positively nice as the hospital, but–”

“YOU!!!” cried the check-out man, waving a lanky arm.

I looked for approval in Lina’s tired eyelids. She didn’t sleep the night before, that’s why she was exhausted. It had nothing to do with me, with this.

“Should we go?” I asked.

“Do you want your bag?!”

We stood up and walked to the desk. Certain death — or at least a little prison rape — seemed imminent.

“Go down to baggage claim for extra large bags,” said the man. “It’s on the far side. Farrrr side. Wait there. It will come.”

We nodded. And sprinted again.

But why, I wondered, was it coming down the chute for extra large materials? It was the size of a gym bag.

We ran faster, nearly tripping down the escalator, pushing people away like They do in John Hughes movies when They’re Late for Flights in O’Hare. Life did not, in fact, imitate bad art.

Soon, surprisingly, we were in baggage claim, but over on the side, somewhat separated from the normal-sized-bag people. We waited about 15 minutes. Then a golf bag came down and some country club douchebag, replete with Kangol cap, came up from behind me and grabbed his clubs.

I almost decked him. That’s what I told myself anyway.

I looked around. Lina pretended to speak on her phone.

I saw a security guard 30 feet from us, in another corner. Watching. Then I saw the cop. And his dogs. Two of them. 50 feet from us. Glaring.

I smiled faintly. Hello, kind sirs, I thought. Yes, that’s probably how my ancestors addressed the S.S. officers who shot them in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Then, it happened: Our black bag appeared at the top of the conveyer belt, sliding down like a child in a playground happy to see his parents.

Ok, it wasn’t like that. It actually got stuck. But then it popped loose and descended slowly. Could a bag be pissed off?

Lina took my hand. “Don’t do anything,” she said.

I loved how my wife was MacGyver now.

She picked up the bag, still on the phone, and walked to me. Then she began speaking non-sequitors.

“That’s why. It’s because of this. I’m SO glad we’re finally doing it. I know, I know…”

As she spoke, she slid her hand onto the front of the bag, shielded by my lamb chops for legs. I could hear the zipper.

I checked the fuzz. Still observing.

Suddenly Lina was pushing me from the small of my back. We were walking.

“Here, take your pills,” she said loudly, handing me a Tylenol.

The Tylenol had also been in the bag’s front compartment.

I could see the escalator that would loft us back up to check-in land. Vamanos.

“Wait, I just have to tie my shoe,” Lina said.

She bent down to make a nice bow on her Chucks. Right by the escalator. I looked up at the cops again. Still Watching.

At which point I heard The Rustle. The joyous crumply sound of a tiny brown paper bag being pushed into the trash can in front of me. It was like jingle bells, but less metallic and ringy.

“Let’s go!” Lina ordered. “We’re going to be late. Again!”

I followed her to the escalator.

“You just threw it out, right? I think you just threw it out. How did you even find it without looking? Do you have three arms?”

I couldn’t stop asking questions. I was amazed.

“Shut up,” Lina said. She was having the time of her life, that much was clear.

We arrived at check-in. The security line had tripled in length. We had 30 minutes to make our flight.

“So do you think it even went through all the way?”

“It must have,” Lina said.

“So I could have basically gotten away with this.”

“I don’t know, Ad.”

I touched her flushed cheek. She flinched.

“You saved me,” I said. “I won’t go to jail now… I promise that I’ll never try to smuggle drugs through airport security and then try to get them back so we can throw them out in front of cops again.”

Follow Adam Baer @glassshallot and @FasterTravel on Twitter.

The post High Flying: How We Got Marijuana through JFK appeared first on The Faster Times.

In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea. The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship — and would complain that the food in miniature plastic beakers before them was not quite as tasty as the sort they could prepare in their own kitchens.

The elders would add that the skies, now undisturbed except by the meandering progress of bees and sparrows, had once thundered to the sound of airborne leviathans, that entire swathes of Britain’s cities had been disturbed by their progress and that in an ancient London suburb once known as Fulham, it had been rare for the sensitive to be able to sleep much past six in the morning, due the unremitting progress of inbound aluminium tubes from Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States.

At Heathrow, now turned into a museum, one would be able to walk unhurriedly across the two main runways and even give in to the temptation to sit cross-legged on their centrelines, a gesture with some of the same sublime thrill as touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one’s fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator’s marble bathroom.

Everything would, of course, go very slowly. It would take two days to reach Rome, a month before one finally sailed exultantly into Sydney harbour. And yet there would be benefits tied up with this languor. Those who had known the age of planes would recall the confusion they had felt upon arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel.

This new widespread ‘camel pace’ would return travellers to a wisdom that their medieval pilgrim ancestors had once known very well. These medieval pilgrims had gone out of their way to make travel as slow as possible, avoiding even the use of boats and horses in favour of their own feet. They were not being perverse, only aware that if one of our key motives for travelling is to try to put the past behind us, then we often need something very large and time-consuming, like the experience of a month long journey across an ocean or a hike over a mountain range, to establish a sufficient sense of distance. Whatever the advantages of plentiful and convenient air travel, we may curse it for being too easy, too unnoticeable – and thereby for subverting our sincere attempts at changing ourselves through our journeys.

How we would admire planes if they were no longer there to frighten and bore us. We would stroke their steel dolphin-like bodies in museums and honour them as symbols of a daunting technical intelligence and a prodigious wealth. We would admire them like small boys do, and adults no longer dare, for fear of seeming uncynical and unvigilant towards their crimes against our world.

Despite all the chaos and inconvenience of our disrupted flight schedules, we should feel grateful to the unruly Icelandic volcano — for allowing us briefly to imagine what a flight-less future would envy and pity us for.

The post Alain de Botton on a Future Without Flying appeared first on The Faster Times.

Back in the fall of 2007, before anyone knew for sure that the Cuero chupacabra was really just a hairless coyote, I drove down to the South of Texas, past tiny towns with names like Pandora, Nixon, and Smiley — population 453 — to investigate the alleged discovery of this mythical animal. It is good driving country down there: big and rolling, fields of yellow flowers, cows huddling beneath the shade of lone juniper trees, the smooth road before you. It is good chupacabra country, too: big skies, lonesome land stretching endlessly off towards distant horizons — the kind of place the imagination has room to breathe, and swell, and see things that might not be there.

Supposedly, the Cuero chupacabra really was there. A woman named Phylis Canion had discovered the thing (and two others like it) dead on the side of the road near her ranch, killed by passing motorists as if they were common armadillo. She’d decided to keep one, the largest, some forty-odd pounds of mysterious beast. (Her neighbors, out of fear, had burned the others.) She’d sent a skin sample off to the University of Texas to get its DNA tested. In fact, at this very moment, its head was sitting in her freezer. Yes, whatever it was, this thing was no product of the imagination — I’d seen pictures of it online — dark blue hairless skin, short, shriveled front legs, big jaws, long canine fangs.

Whatever it was, this thing was real. And maybe it was this that was creating such a sensation in the media. It was as if the Lochness monster had washed up dead on the shore like a poisoned fish, or as if Big Foot had been discovered drowned in someone’s pool like a mouse. Something had leapt the boundaries of myth and vaulted itself into reality. Who knew what other legends could be true now, had been true forever, existing right beneath our noses: maybe we would awaken tomorrow to find unicorns and centaurs grazing in our back yards, griffins and dragons swirling in the heavens, and in the hollows of old trees, stolen and compiled by mischievous gremlins, colorful stashes of thousands of single, unmatched socks…

***

The Internet — tangled web of hearsay, gossip, opinion, urban myth, legend, and general mass hysteria — seemed an appropriate place to research a creature like the chupacabra, and so that’s where I began. As with most myths and legends, so it is with the chupacabra: nothing is certain. All is theory, and it’s wonderfully good stuff: the chupacabras are alien pets, escaped from a UFO; they are genetically manufactured mutations, broken free from government labs; they are creatures from another dimension, brought here through a quirk in electromagnetic fields.

The eyewitness accounts seem as inconsistent and varied as the theories, almost as if the beast were capable of morphing, shape-shifting — definable, in the end, only by its indefinability. As soon as a chupacabra alights in one place as a gargoyle-like demon with wings, it pops up somewhere else as a vicious “vampire kangaroo” that can hop twenty feet; and as soon as one person describes it as a dog-like creature that stands on two legs, someone else swears it’s a lizard with quills running down its spine. Or maybe it’s none of those: maybe it’s really a humanoid with huge oval alien eyes that glow red when it shrieks. Or maybe it’s all of those, yes, maybe the real truth is that the chupacabra can be anything, really, almost as if any unidentified creature can be rightly called a chupacabra, much the way any unidentified flying object can rightly be called a UFO. If you do not know what it is, call it a chupacabra, and you’d be right, as far as anyone knows.

Yes, no one knows anything about the thing, in the end, which results in some rather amusing questions. Consider the sense of nausea and paralysis some have reported upon seeing the beast — is this due to its glowing red eyes, its sulfur-like stench, or its terrible shriek that resembles a woman’s scream? And what about its vampiric method of feeding — does it suck the blood (and sometimes the organs) out of its victim through one hole, two holes, or three?

And what about its origins? It was given its name — chupacabra literally means “goatsucker” — in Puerto Rico in 1995 during a spree of animal slayings, though there is evidence that the beast was around long before that. In 1975, a creature known as the Moca Vampire had terrorized livestock in Puerto Rico, and some believe that the Jersey Devil, which has haunted the pine barrens of southern New Jersey since the 1700′s, is a close relative. At any rate, there is no doubt that it was in 1995, when the creature was held responsible for more than a thousand deaths in Puerto Rico alone, that the chupacabra first swooped into the world’s collective consciousness, and it’s been huddled there in the shadows ever since, mutating and expanding and spreading like some strange virus.

Since 1995, the chupacabra has been blamed for thousands of deaths everywhere from Chile to Maine, and Australia to Russia, though the majority of sightings have come from Hispanic communities. Its taste for blood knows few boundaries, either — it’s attacked ducks, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, cats, dogs, horses, cows, and of course, goats. Allegedly, the vicious bloodsucker even tore the stuffing out of a little boy’s teddy bear.

***

Driving into Cuero, I am stopped on the outskirts of town by a train clanking lazily by. It’s carrying biochemicals in huge cylindrical tanks — vinyl chloride, methyl something or other, other vicious brews I cannot pronounce — and I cannot help but to wonder if maybe some chemical spill gave birth to the beast they’re calling the chupacabra: some giant poison cloud of toxic gas escaping a wrecked train in the desert and descending on a hovel of coyotes, the things emerging mutated, hairless, blue, and thirsty for blood… Maybe there were giant ants out there, too, making their homes in cacti the size of skyscrapers. Maybe cows had shrunk to the size of toads, and when discovered, would become the perfect little black and white pocket pets — every kid would want one… But the train passes without incident, and I continue on into town.

Cuero is bigger than I imagined, but emptier, too. There is a long, broad Main Street and some good-sized side streets, and the buildings are red-brick, two stories, solid-looking –but many seem abandoned, spaces up for sale or rent, and though it is Monday afternoon, almost all the shops are closed, and I can find no open restaurant in which to lunch.

Strangest of all, absolutely no one else is walking around. I’m the only one on foot. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s 92 degrees in late September — everything beaten down by the South Texas sun — and everyone else is smarter than me, keeping cool in the AC of their cars. But I cannot help but to wonder if this is the way places become ghost towns: soon enough, no one gets out of their cars anymore, and everyone just drives on through.

I wander down one of the side-streets till I show up at the Dewitt County Courthouse of 1896, a beautiful red-and-sand-colored stone building in the midst of being preserved by the Texas historical commission, though no one is working on it at the moment. (The clock on its tower is stuck at 3:05, which, strangely enough, is only ten minutes off from the true time.) A sign directs me down another street towards the Chamber of Commerce, where I drop in and speak to a nice young woman by the name of Ronii Diez, ask her what she thinks of the whole chupacabra thing. She smiles big, gets excited, tells me that it’s given Cuero exposure on a whole new level — “I mean, I hear it was on the Colbert Report,” she says. “We’ve been getting a lot more phone calls, and there’s been a lot more traffic in town, too.”

But when I ask her what she thinks about the whole thing, personally, the smile shrinks a little bit, and something like reverence opens up in her eyes. “Growing up Hispanic, the chupacabra was like a part of our heritage,” she explains. “It was folklore, you know, like stories of the bogeyman. And then to find out that it’s real-life now?” She shakes her head in wonder. “It’s kinda scary…”

Not all the locals were so convinced, however. Later that day, at the motel where I was staying, I spoke to a pretty brunette receptionist who chose to remain nameless:

“Personally, I think it’s a load of crap,” she admitted.

“Can I quote you on that?”

“No.”

We both laughed, and then she continued… “I mean, I just don’t know why everyone’s making such a big deal out of it… I mean, come on…”

“You haven’t had any chickens taken then, I take it…”

“I don’t have any chickens.”

***

My original plan had been to spend the night on the ranch where the creature was discovered — await it in the night with perhaps a chicken at my side as bait — and write about it. (Maybe, some sick part of me hoped, the chupacabra would disregard the chicken and attempt to take me instead. As long as the chupacabra didn’t manage to immobilize me with its glowing red eyes, its hissing shriek, and that foul stench of sulfur, an epic battle would ensue, there in the Texas night, me and this legendary beast in hand to paw combat, foot against fang, and our howls would thunder through the night, and dust would blot out the moon from our scuffling, until finally I would emerge victorious, the beast, still alive, but exhausted, drained of all willpower, my live captive at its side.)

But the sad truth is that before I even arrived in Cuero, I’d stopped the car at the side of the road to investigate a historical marker, and saw a spider, yellow and black-banded, clinging viciously to its web in the warm wind. With its legs spread out it was almost as big as my hand, and I decided there and then that maybe spending the night out in this countryside was not such a good idea. (An arachnophobe at heart, I am willing to face a 40-pound bloodsucker, but not a four gram one.)

Not that Phylis Canion, the woman who discovered the mysterious roadkill, would have let me spend the night on her ranch, even if I had asked her, which I did not. When I first met her at her Cuero t-shirt shop, I could immediately tell that she was a tough, no-nonsense woman: hair, close-cropped and blonde, skin craggy from wind and sun, frame wiry with muscles. She had fire in her walk, which was quick and pointed and full of purpose, as were all her movements. She wore glasses, but in the manner that Clark Kent wore them, as if to hide the fact she didn’t really need them. She was a doctor of Naturopathic Medicine. She drove a Hummer. She was, to say the least, a little scary.

But it wasn’t just the intimidation factor that made me reluctant to ask her questions. I mean, here I was, another reporter arrived unannounced to talk to her about the stupid chupacabra, and my initial impression was that she was a little sick of the whole thing. It was late afternoon at her store, 7C Unlimited — one of the few stores actually open in town, it appeared — and she seemed tired, not just from a long day of work, but from a long couple months of chupacabra mayhem.

Mayhem it had been. Back in July, the AP had picked up the story, and it had appeared all over the world. Behind her desk at the shop hung a framed copy of the most unlikely periodical to have run the story, the Arab News Daily, the world’s largest Arab newspaper in English. And more than two months later, the press madness still continued. The following morning a TV crew from Japan was flying in to interview her.

And then there were the t-shirts, 6,000 plus “Summer of the Chupacabra” t-shirts (not to mention the beer coozies) that she’d sent all over the world, and to every state but two. (The t-shirts had a cartoon depiction of the chupacabra, which looked like a vicious rat running on two legs, and she would later sell me one almost reluctantly: “These things are in very high demand, you know.”)

So it was that in between bustling about her store and taking orders for t-shirts and such, she was kind enough to explain how it had all begun: with the chickens. She’d had some 28 chickens taken, most of them over a two-month period. Now this wasn’t so strange in and of itself — down in this part of Texas, coyotes and bobcats are always running off with people’s chickens. What was weird was how some of these birds were taken. “I mean, most predators will take food off to eat it. Not this thing. Whatever this thing was — all it did was kill them and leave ‘em lay… And then there was the one it left on my porch, and there was no blood left, which is how I knew something was strange. Cause when you kill a chicken, there’s blood everywhere… That was the last straw, when it left one on my porch. I was there by myself. This thing sees me, it knows I’m there by myself.”

“Did you ever see it while it was alive?”

“Oh, yeah, I’d seen it moving through my pasture on several occasions – because its front legs are so much shorter, it runs different – more of a hopping effect than a gallop.”

“And did the thing ever make any noise that you can remember?”

“People tell me that the sound it’s supposed to make is like a woman screaming, but I never heard it. The times I saw it running through my pasture, it never made a sound…”

“Do you still have chickens?”

“No, not anymore. I mean I was just giving ‘em out to these creatures. Actually, it was when I finally stopped feeding them chickens that the things started showing up dead.”

Supposedly, this wasn’t the end of it, though. Just the week before, her neighbor had seen one of the beasts running in her pasture again. When she tells me this, she shakes her head, not so much out of fear-after all, Phylis Canion is a tough cookie-but out of a kind of exhaustion. There’s more of these things? Why do they have to be running through my pasture? And just how goshdarn long will this whole thing go on?

Towards the end of our conversation, I ask her about this, point blank: “I’m sure you’re getting a little sick and tired of the whole chupacabra thing. Is there a part of you that wishes it had never happened?”

“Oh, no, no” she said, and as if catching herself, she let go of her tiredness, and her voice immediately regained a sense of wonder and reverence. “It’s been fun and interesting and you know, I’ve talked to hundreds of people from all over the states, and the whole thing’s been phenomenal, it really has. I just had no idea that people had so much interest in chupacabras.” Sure, it’s been a lot to handle — after all, being the PR person for a mythical beast was never something she really wanted — even the t-shirts, which she sold for five dollars each, were never the point: in fact, her t-shirt shop’s just a thing on the side. Her real job is as a nutritionist and doctor of naturopathic medicine — later this afternoon she will be heading over to the clinic, where she will be working with diabetics and patients of cancer and heart disease.

But for some reason, she’s made time for the whole chupacabra thing, too. It’s like she almost innately respects the magic of it, of what it’s done: how it’s opened up people’s worlds, made life larger and more mysterious, infused the universe with a sense of endless possibility. It’s bigger than her, she seems to know, more important than her, and she’s been willing to sacrifice herself and her time and sanity to get the story out there. “People have been enjoying reading about something different than politicians and the war in Iraq,” she says, simply.

***

Later that afternoon I drove out into the ranchland on the outskirts of town and parked on the side of the road and looked out over the land as the sun dipped and the shadows grew longer and night began to fall. I could see cows out there, the shapes of them moving against the fading light, and could hear their occasional lowing, but I saw nothing that could be mistaken for a chupacabra. On the sweet, warm wind, there was no hint of sulfur, nor the hollering of women, and when night fell completely, I saw no red eyes glowing in the dark. I got back in my car and drove back to my hotel, and in the morning, I dropped by the store and said goodbye to Phylis and her husband Steve, and drove west from there, into Southwest Texas, Big Bend country, where mountain lions and Mexican bear roam and silver mines are swallowed up by the mountains, in search of further myths.

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The Northermost of these Islands, as I have before observed, is called by the Natives Aeheinomouwe and the Southermost Tovy Poenammu. The former name, we were well assured, comprehends the whole of the Northern Island; but we were not so well satisfied with the latter whether it comprehended the whole of the Southern Islands or only a part of it. This last, according to the Natives of Queen Charlotte’s Sound, ought to consist of 2 Islands, one of which at least we were to have sail’d round in a few days; but this was not verify’d by our own Observations. I am inclinable to think that they know’d no more of this land than what came within the Limits of their sight. The Chart which I have drawn will best point out the figure and Extent of these Islands, the situation of the Bays and Harbours they contain, and the lesser Islands lay about them.

And now I have mentioned the Chart, I shall point out such places as are drawn with sufficient accuracy to be depended upon and such as are not, beginning at Cape Pallisser and proceed round Aeheinomouwe by the East Cape, etc. The Coast between these 2 Capes I believe to be laid down pretty accurate, both in its figure and the Course and distance from point to point; the opportunities I had and the methods I made use on to obtain these requisites were such as could hardly admit of an Error. From the East Cape to Cape Maria Van Diemen, altho’ it cannot be perfectly true, yet it is without any very Material error; some few places, however, must be excepted, and these are very Doubtfull, and are not only here, but in every other part of the Chart pointed out by a Pricked or broken line. From Cape Maria Van Diemen up as high as the Latitude of 36 degrees 15 minutes we seldom were nearer the Shore than from 5 to 8 Leagues, and therefore the line of the Sea Coast may in some places be erroneous. From the above Latitude to nearly the Length of Entry Island we run along and near the shore all the way, and no circumstance occurd that made me liable to commit any Material error. Excepting Cape Teerawhitte, we never came near the Shore between Entry Island and Cape Pallisser, and therefore this part of the coast may be found to differ something from the truth; in Short, I believe that this Island will never be found to differ Materially from the figure I have given it, and that the Coast Affords few or no Harbours but what are either taken notice of in this Journal, or in some Measure pointed out in the Chart; but I cannot say so much for Tovy Poenammu. The Season of the Year and Circumstance of the Voyage would not permit me to spend so much time about this Island as I had done at the other, and the blowing weather we frequently met with made it both dangerous and difficult to keep upon the Coast. However, I shall point out the places that may be Erroneous in this as I have done in the other. From Queen Charlotte’s sound to Cape Campbell, and as far to the South-West as the Latitude 43 degrees, will be found to be pretty Accurate; between this Latitude and the Latitude 44 degrees 20 minutes the coast is very Doubtfully laid down, a part of which we hardly, if at all, saw. From this last mentioned Latitude to Cape Saunders we were generally at too great a distance to be Particular, and the weather at the same time was unfavourable. The Coast, as it is laid down from Cape Saunders to Cape South, and even to Cape West, is no doubt in many places very erroneous, as we hardly were ever able to keep near the Shore, and were sometimes blown off altogether. From the West Cape down to Cape Farewell, and even to Queen Charlotte’s sound, will in most places be found to differ not much from the truth. [ed. note: It only took Cook six-and-a-half months to draft the above "chart."]

Mention is likewise made in the Chart of the appearance or aspect of the face of the Country. With respect to Tovy Poenammu, it is for the most part very Mountainous, and to all appearance a barren Country. The people in Queen Charlotte’s sound–those that came off to us from under the Snowy Mountain, and the five we saw to the South-West of Cape Saunders–were all the inhabitants, or Signs of inhabitants, we saw upon the whole Island; but most part of the Sea Coast of Aeheinomouwe, except the South-West side, is well inhabited; and although it is a hilly, Mountainous Country, yet the very Hills and Mountains are many of them cover’d with wood, and the Soil of the plains and Valleys appear’d to be very rich and fertile, and such as we had an opportunity to examine we found to be so, and not very much incumber’d with woods.

It was the Opinion of every body on board that all sorts of European grain, fruit, Plants, etc., would thrive here; in short, was this Country settled by an industrious people they would very soon be supplied not only with the necessaries, but many of the Luxuries, of Life. The Sea, Bays, and Rivers abound with a great Variety of Excellent Fish, the most of them unknown in England, besides Lobsters, which were allowed by every one to be the best they ever had eat. Oysters and many other sorts of shell fish all Excellent in their kind. Sea and Water Fowls of all sorts are, however, in no great plenty; those known in Europe are Ducks, Shags, Gannets, and Gulls, all of which were Eat by us, and found exceeding good; indeed, hardly anything came Amiss to us that could be Eat by Man. Land fowl are likewise in no great plenty, and all of them, except Quails, are, I believe, unknown in Europe; these are exactly like those we have in England. The Country is certainly destitute of all sorts of beasts, either wild or tame, except dogs and Rats; the former are tame, and lived with the people, who breed and bring them up for no other purpose than to Eat, and rats are so scarce that not only I, but many others in the Ship, never see one. Altho’ we have seen some few Seals, and once a Sea Lion upon this Coast, yet I believe they are not only very scarce,but seldom or ever come ashore; for if they did the Natives would certainly find out some Method of Killing them, the Skins of which they no doubt would preserve for Cloathing, as well as the Skins of Dogs and birds, the only Skins we ever saw among them. But they must sometimes get Whales, because many of the Patta Pattoas are made of the bones of some such fish, and an Ornament they wear at their breast (on which they set great Value), which are supposed to be made of the Tooth of a Whale; and yet we know of no method or instrument they have to kill these Animals.

In the woods are plenty of Excellent Timber, fit for all purposes except Ships’ Masts; and perhaps upon a Close Examination some might be found not improper for that purpose. There grows spontainously everywhere a kind of very broad-bladed grass, like flags of the Nature of Hemp, of which might be made the very best of Cordage and Canvas, etc. There are 2 sorts, one finer than the other; of these the Natives make Cloth, rope, Lines, netts, etc. Iron Ore is undoubtedly to be found here, particularly about Mercury Bays, where we found great quantities of Iron sand; however, we met with no Ore of any Sort, neither did we ever see any sort of Metal with the Natives. We met with some stones at Admiralty Bay that appear’d to be Mineral in some degree, but Dr. Solander was of Opinion that they contain’d no Sort of Metal. The white stone we saw near the South Cape and some other parts to the Southward, which I took to be a kind of Marble, such as I had seen on one of the Hills I was upon in Mercury Bay, Mr. Banks–I afterwards found–was of Opinion that they were Mineral to the highest degree; he is certainly a much better Judge of these things than I am, and therefore I might be mistaken in my opinion, which was only founded on what I had before seen not only in this Country, but in other parts where I have been; and at the same time I must observe we were not less than 6 or 8 Leagues from the Land, and nearer it was not possible for us at that time to come without running the Ship into Apparent Danger. However, I am no Judge how far Mineral can be distinguished as such; certain it is that in Southern parts of this Country there are whole Mountains of Nothing Else but stone, some of which, no doubt, may be found to contain Metal.

Should it ever become an object of settling this Country, the best place for the first fixing of a Colony would be either in the River Thames or the Bay of Islands; for at either of these places they would have the advantage of a good Harbour, and by means of the former an Easy Communication would be had, and settlements might be extended into the inland parts of the Country. For a very little trouble and Expence small Vessels might be built in the River proper for the Navigation thereof. It is too much for me to assert how little water a Vessel ought to draw to Navigate this River, even so far up as I was in the Boat; this depends intirely upon the Depth of Water that is upon the bar or flat that lay before the narrow part of the River, which I had not an opportunity of making myself acquainted with, but I am of Opinion that a Vessel that draws not above 10 or 12 feet may do it with Ease. So far as I have been able to Judge of the Genius of these people it does not appear to me to be at all difficult for Strangers to form a settlement in this Country; they seem to be too much divided among themselves to unite in opposing, by which means, and kind and Gentle usage, the Colonists would be able to form strong parties among them.

The [Maori] Natives of this Country are a Strong, rawboned, well made, Active People, rather above than under the common size, especially the Men; they are of a very dark brown colour, with black hair, thin black beards, and white teeth, and such as do not disfigure their faces by tattowing, etc., have in general very good features. The Men generally were their Hair long, Coomb’d up, and tied upon the Crown of their Heads; some of the women were it long and loose upon their Shoulders, old women especially; others again were it crop’d short. Their coombs are made some of bones, and others of Wood; they sometimes Wear them as an Ornament stuck upright in their Hair. They seem to enjoy a good state of Health, and many of them live to a good old Age. Many of the old and some of the Middle aged Men have their faces mark’d or tattow’d with black, and some few we have seen who have had their buttocks, thighs, and other parts of their bodies marked, but this is less common. The figures they mostly use are spirals, drawn and connected together with great nicety and judgement. They are so exact in the application of these Figures that no difference can be found between the one side of the face and the other, if the whole is marked, for some have only one side, and some a little on both sides; hardly any but the old Men have the whole tattow’d. From this I conclude that it takes up some time, perhaps Years, to finish the Operation, which all Who have begun may not have perseverance enough to go through, as the manner in which it must be done must certainly cause intollerable pain, and may be the reason why so few are Marked at all–at least I know no other. The Women inlay the Colour of Black under the skins of their lips, and both sexes paint their faces and bodies at times more or less with red Oker, mixed with fish Oil.

[Maori Fashion]

Their common Cloathing are very much like square Thrumb’d Matts, that are made of rope Yarns, to lay at the doors or passages into houses to clean ones shoes upon. These they tie round their necks, the Thrumb’d side out, and are generally large enough to cover the body as low as the knee; they are made with very little Preparation of the broad Grass plant before mentioned. Beside the Thrumb’d Matts, as I call them, they have other much finer cloathing, made of the same plant after it is bleached and prepared in such a Manner that it is as white and almost as soft as flax, but much stronger. Of this they make pieces of cloth about 5 feet long and 4 broad; these are wove some pieces close and others very open; the former are as stout as the strongest sail cloth, and not unlike it, and yet it is all work’d or made by hand with no other Instrument than a Needle or Bodkin. To one end of every piece is generally work’d a very neat border of different colours of 4 or 6 inches broad, and they very often Trim them with pieces of Dog Skin or birds’ feathers. These pieces of Cloth they wear as they do the other, tying one End round their Necks with a piece of string, to one end of which is fixed a Needle or Bodkin made of Bone, by means of which they can easily fasten, or put the string through any part of the Cloth; they sometimes wear pieces of this kind of Cloth round their Middles, as well as over their Shoulders. But this is not common, especially with the Men, who hardly ever wear anything round their Middles, observing no sort of Decency in that respect; neither is it at all uncommon for them to go quite Naked without any one thing about them besides a belt round their waists, to which is generally fastened a small string, which they tye round the prepuse; in this manner I have seen hundreds of them come off to and on board the Ship, but they generally had their proper Cloathing in the boat along with them to put on if it rain’d, etc. The Women, on the other hand, always wear something round their Middle; generally a short, thrumbd Matt, which reaches as low as their Knees. Sometimes, indeed, I have seen them with only a Bunch of grass or plants before, tyed on with a piece of fine platting made of sweet-scented grass; they likewise wear a piece of cloth over their Shoulders as the Men do; this is generally of the Thrum kind. I hardly ever saw a Woman wear a piece of fine cloth. One day at Talago I saw a strong proof that the Women never appear naked, at least before strangers. Some of us hapned to land upon a small Island where several of them were Naked in the Water, gathering of Lobsters and shell fish; as soon as they saw us some of them hid themselves among the Rocks, and the rest remain’d in the Sea until they had made themselves Aprons of the Sea Weed; and even then, when they came out to us, they shew’d Manifest signs of Shame, and those who had no method of hiding their nakedness would by no means appear before us.

The Women have all very soft Voices, and may by that alone be known from the Men. The Making of cloth and all other Domestick work is, I believe, wholy done by them, and the more Labourious work, such as building Boats, Houses, Tilling the ground, etc., by the Men. Both men and women wear ornaments at their Ears and about their Necks; these are made of stone, bone, Shells, etc., and are variously shaped; and some I have seen wear human Teeth and finger Nails, and I think we were told that they did belong to their deceased friends. The Men, when they are dressed, generally wear 2 or 3 long white feathers stuck upright in their Hair, and at Queen Charlotte’s sound many, both men and women, wore Round Caps made of black feathers.

[Maori Warring]

The old men are much respected by the younger, who seem to be govern’d and directed by them on most Occasions. We at first thought that they were united under one head or Chief, whose Name is Teeratu; we first heard of him in Poverty Bay, and he was own’d as Chief by every one we met with from Cape Kidnappers to the Northward and Westward as far as the Bay of Plenty, which is a great extent of territories for an Indian Prince. When we were upon the East Coast they always pointed inland to the Westward for the place of his residence, which I believe to be in the Bay of Plenty, and that those Hippas or fortified Towns are Barrier Towns either for or against him; but most likely the former, and if so, may be the utmost Extent of his Dominions to the Westwards, for at Mercury bay they did not own him as their Prince, nor no where else either to the Westward or Southward, or any other single person; for at whatever place we put in at, or whatever people we spoke with upon the Coast, they generally told us that those that were at a little distance from them were their Enemies; from which it appear’d to me that they were very much divided into Parties, which make war one with another, and all their Actions and behaviour towards us tended to prove that they are a brave, open, war-like people, and void of Treachery.

Whenever we were Visited by any number of them that had never heard or seen anything of us before they generally came off in the largest Canoe they had, some of which will carry 60, 80, or 100 people. They always brought their best Cloaths along with them, which they put on as soon as they came near the Ship. In each Canoe were generally an old Man, in some 2 or 3; these used always to direct the others, were better Cloathed, and generally carried a Halbard or Battle Axe in their hands, or some such like thing that distinguished them from the others. As soon as they came within about a Stone’s throw of the Ship they would there lay, and call out, “Haromoi harenta a patoo ago!” that is, “Come here, come ashore with us, and we will kill you with our patoo patoos!” and at the same time would shake them at us. At times they would dance the War dance, and other times they would trade with and talk to us, and Answer such Questions as were put to them with all the Calmness imaginable, and then again begin the War Dance, shaking their Paddles, Patoo patoos, etc., and make strange contortions at the same time. As soon as they had worked themselves up to a proper pitch they would begin to attack us with Stones and darts, and oblige us, wether we would or no, to fire upon them. Musquetry they never regarded unless they felt the Effect; but great Guns they did, because they threw stones farther than they could Comprehend. After they found that our Arms were so much superior to theirs, and that we took no advantage of that superiority, and a little time given them to reflect upon it, they ever after were our very good friends; and we never had an instance of their attempting to surprize or cut off any of our people when they were ashore; opportunity for so doing they must have had at one time or another.

It is hard to account for what we have every where been told, of their Eating their Enemies killed in Battle, which they most Certainly do; Circumstances enough we have seen to Convince us of the Truth of this. Tupia, who holds this Custom in great aversion, hath very often Argued with them against it, but they have always as streniously supported it, and never would own that it was wrong. It is reasonable to suppose that men with whom this custom is found, seldom, if ever, give Quarter to those they overcome in battle; and if so, they must fight desperately to the very last. A strong proof of this supposition we had from the People of Queen Charlotte’s sound, who told us, but a few days before we Arrived that they had kill’d and Eat a whole boat’s crew. Surely a single boat’s crew, or at least a part of them, when they found themselves beset and overpowered by numbers would have surrender’d themselves prisoners was such a thing practised among them. The heads of these unfortunate people they preserved as Trophies; 4 or 5 of them they brought off to shew to us, one of which Mr. Banks bought, or rather forced them to sell, for they parted with it with the utmost reluctancy, and afterwards would not so much as let us see one more for any thing we could offer them.

In the Article of Food these People have no great Variety; Fern roots, Dogs, Fish, and wild fowl is their Chief diet, for Cocos, Yams, and Sweet Potatoes is not Cultivated every where. They dress their Victuals in the same Manner as the people in the South Sea Islands; that is, dogs and Large fish they bake in a hole in the ground, and small fish, birds, and Shell fish, etc., they broil on the fire. Fern roots they likewise heat over the fire, then beat them out flat upon a stone with a wooden Mallet; after this they are fit for Eating, in the doing of which they suck out the Moist and Glutinous part, and Spit out the Fibrous parts. These ferns are much like, if not the same as, the mountain ferns in England.

They catch fish with Seans, Hooks and line, but more commonly with hooped netts very ingeniously made; in the middle of these they tie the bait, such as Sea Ears, fish Gutts, etc., then sink the Nett to the bottom with a stone; after it lays there a little time they haul it Gently up, and hardly ever without fish, and very often a large quantity. All their netts are made of the broad Grass plant before mentioned; generally with no other preparation than by Splitting the blade of the plant into threads. Their fish hooks are made of Crooked pieces of Wood, bones, and Shells.

WAR CANOE OF NEW ZEALAND

The people shew great ingenuity and good workmanship in the building and framing their boats or Canoes. They are long and Narrow, and shaped very much like a New England Whale boat. Their large Canoes are, I believe, built wholy for war, and will carry from 40 to 80 or 100 Men with their Arms, etc. I shall give the Dimensions of one which I measured that lay ashore at Tolago. Length 68 1/2 feet, breadth 5 feet, and Depths 3 1/2, the bottom sharp, inclining to a wedge, and was made of 3 pieces hollow’d out to about 2 Inches or an Inch and a half thick, and well fastned together with strong platting. Each side consisted of one Plank only, which was 63 feet long and 10 or 12 Inches broad, and about 1 1/4 Inch thick, and these were well fitted and lashed to the bottom part. There were a number of Thwarts laid a Cross and Lashed to each Gunwale as a strengthening to the boat. The head Ornament projected 5 or 6 feet without the body of the Boat, and was 4 feet high; the Stern Ornament was 14 feet high, about 2 feet broad, and about 1 1/2 inch thick; it was fixed upon the Stern of the Canoe like the Stern post of a Ship upon her Keel. The Ornaments of both head and Stern and the 2 side boards were of Carved Work, and, in my opinion, neither ill design’d nor executed. All their Canoes are built after this plan, and few are less than 20 feet long. Some of the small ones we have seen with Outriggers, but this is not Common. In their War Canoes they generally have a quantity of Birds’ feathers hung in Strings, and tied about the Head and stern as Additional Ornament. They are as various in the heads of their Canoes as we are in those of our Shipping; but what is most Common is an odd Design’d Figure of a man, with as ugly a face as can be conceived, a very large Tongue sticking out of his Mouth, and Large white Eyes made of the Shells of Sea Ears. Their paddles are small, light, and neatly made; they hardly ever make use of sails, at least that we saw, and those they have are but ill contrived, being generally a piece of netting spread between 2 poles, which serve for both Masts and Yards.

[Maori Digs]

The Houses of these People are better calculated for a Cold than a Hot Climate; they are built low, and in the form of an oblong square. The framing is of wood or small sticks, and the sides and Covering of thatch made of long Grass. The door is generally at one end, and no bigger than to admit of a man to Creep in and out; just within the door is the fire place, and over the door, or on one side, is a small hole to let out the Smoke. These houses are 20 or 30 feet long, others not above half as long; this depends upon the largeness of the Family they are to contain, for I believe few familys are without such a House as these, altho’ they do not always live in them, especially in the summer season, when many of them live dispers’d up and down in little Temporary Hutts, that are not sufficient to shelter them from the weather.

The Tools which they work with in building their Canoes, Houses, etc., are adzes or Axes, some made of a hard black stone, and others of green Talk. They have Chiszels made of the same, but these are more commonly made of Human Bones. In working small work and carving I believe they use mostly peices of Jasper, breaking small pieces from a large Lump they have for that purpose; as soon as the small peice is blunted they throw it away and take another. To till or turn up the ground they have wooden spades (if I may so call them), made like stout pickets, with a piece of wood tied a Cross near the lower end, to put the foot upon to force them into the Ground. These Green Talk Axes that are whole and good they set much Value upon, and never would part with them for anything we could offer. I offer’d one day for one, One of the best Axes I had in the Ship, besides a number of Other things, but nothing would induce the owner to part with it; from this I infer’d that good ones were scarce among them.

Diversions and Musical instruments they have but few; the latter Consists of 2 or 3 sorts of Trumpets and a small Pipe or Whistle, and the former in singing and Dancing. Their songs are Harmonious enough, but very doleful to a European ear. In most of their dances they appear like mad men, Jumping and Stamping with their feet, making strange Contorsions with every part of the body, and a hideous noise at the same time; and if they happen to be in their Canoes they flourish with great Agility their Paddles, Pattoo Pattoos, various ways, in the doing of which, if there are ever so many boats and People, they all keep time and Motion together to a surprizing degree. It was in this manner that they work themselves to a proper Pitch of Courage before they used to attack us; and it was only from their after behaviour that we could tell whether they were in jest or in Earnest when they gave these Heivas, as they call them, of their own accord, especially at our first coming into a place. Their signs of Friendship is the waving the hand or a piece of Cloth, etc.

We were never able to learn with any degree of certainty in what manner they bury their dead; we were generally told that they put them in the ground; if so it must be in some secret or by place, for we never saw the least signs of a burying place in the whole Country. (ed. note: Maoris kept the locations of their burial lands secret. First, they buried a dead body; then they exhumed the corpse, cleaned the bones, and hid them in a cave or break in the rocks. It was important to hide bones, as people made weapons out of them.) Their Custom of mourning for a friend or relation is by cutting and Scarifying their bodys, particularly their Arms and breasts, in such a manner that the Scars remain indelible, and, I believe, have some signification such as to shew how near related the deceased was to them.

[Maori and Tahiti Lingo]

With respect to religion, I believe these people trouble themselves very little about it; they, however, believe that there is one Supream God, whom they call Tawney, (ed. note: Maoris did not pray, so this was probably the “creator” of animal and vegetables) and likewise a number of other inferior deities; but whether or no they worship or Pray to either one or the other we know not with any degree of certainty. It is reasonable to suppose that they do, and I believe it; yet I never saw the least Action or thing among them that tended to prove it. They have the same Notions of the Creation of the World, Mankind, etc., as the people of the South Sea Islands have; indeed, many of their notions and Customs are the very same. But nothing is so great a proof of their all having had one Source as their Language, which differ but in a very few words the one from the other, as will appear from the following specimens, which I had from Mr. Banks, who understands their Language as well, or better than, any one on board. [Ed. note: See Banks's linguistic codification below.]

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