Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  The issue of disguise and birds was on my mind. The women who worked the brothels, such as Minnie’s Sporting House, were euphemistically called “soiled doves.” They arrived in the booming town carrying a trunk and, folded neatly at the bottom of each of these trunks, almost without exception, was an elaborate white wedding dress. It is true that sometimes whores married miners or shopkeepers, but more often the wedding dress was funereal garb. The soiled doves were most often buried in these gowns, and so they went into that dark night as virginal brides.

  And the bust:

  The year after Castle was incorporated, production of silver began to dwindle. There was a financial panic in 1893, as well, and President Grover Cleveland was convinced that the government’s mandatory silver purchase program was the cause of the depression. He called a special session of Congress that summer to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Silver prices plummeted and, in Castle, the Cumberland mine closed down immediately.

  The Cumberland boardinghouse had served 135 meals the last night the mines operated. Three days later, it served 6 men, who remained to dismantle machinery. The town literally emptied out in seventy-two hours. A few families remained, but for all practical purposes, Castle was dead.

  By 1936, only two people lived in the old town: the seventy-five-year-old self-appointed mayor, Joe Kidd, and the seventy-year-old constable, Joe Martino. The snows came early the winter of 1936–37, and winds drifted the snow in the coulees to forty feet or more, so that sometimes deer fell through the crusts of snow and could be found, after the thaw, starved and frozen in the tops of cottonwood trees.

  There was one blizzard after another that year. Supplies were running low and Mayor Kidd hitched up a team of horses to a cutter, a light sleigh, and set out for the small ranching town of Lennep, seven miles down the canyon. He made three miles the first night, and stayed with some shepherds at their camp. At Lennep the next day, he picked up the mail, stayed the night at a local ranch, and headed back the next morning. A mile from Castle, the horses gave out and Kidd walked to Martino’s house, arriving at 9 P.M. He had a cup of hot coffee and left for his own house. It was only five hundred yards away, but the mayor collapsed and died in the snow.

  Martino was unable to carry the body, so he skied down to the sheep camp, and the shepherds got word to the nearest big town, White Sulphur Springs. The sheriff and coroner skied into Castle and carried Kidd’s body out on a toboggan. Leaving Joe Martino as the last full-time resident of Castle. And then the rodents took over.

  The big houses that so impressed the Chinese are, for the most part, trophy homes built by out-of-staters and occupied sometimes for as little as one or two weeks a year. They are springing up all throughout the West like a plague of poison mushrooms. I believe that the twenty-year bull market—what is called the wealth effect—has allowed people to build these trophies. In America, I should have told the Chinese, wealth is sometimes measured by the amount of land a person is able to post “No Trespassing” signs on.

  No one knows how long the bull market will last, least of all me, but all good things come to an end. [Note: And the bull market did shortly after I wrote this.] Ask the dinosaurs. One geological moment they’re standing in some fern glade of redwoods, bellowing brainlessly, masters of the earth. We were there: the mammals, or protomammals, small rat- and weasel-like creatures with sharp teeth and shining eyes. And when the dinosaurs died—when their life cycle went bust—we moved out of the shadows and took over the earth. We are the most fearsome predator the earth has ever spawned, and those creatures that know us, fear us.

  Walking through the ruins of Castle, I had a sense of man as the dinosaur of this particular geological moment. There were shining eyes, watching from the shadows of ramshackle buildings. The others were there. I could hear them scurrying about when I looked in the windows where soiled doves once plied their trade.

  There were others of their kind: eyes in the woodlands, under the aspens, and these eyes are watching the big trophy homes that have begun to dominate the Western landscape. There will be a bust to the boom, sooner or later, because that has always been the way. The big homes, too expensive for local folks, will fall into disrepair. The paint will peel from the walls, and the bare boards will bleach out, like bones under a desert sun. And then the watchers in the wood will move into the tumble-down buildings. The castles built by the wealth effect will lie broken and still under a merciless blue sky. And in the shadows under the shattered windows, the new inhabitants will scurry this way and that, their eyes shining, masters of all they survey.

  Culinary Schadenfreude

  I looked down at the quivering, white, gelatinous globules on my plate, and glanced over to the table where the Chinese were sitting. There were three of them, two men and a woman, scientists and scientific technicians: bone workers on their first full day in Livingston, Montana. They were in my hometown to help disassemble a display of Chinese dinosaurs at the Natural History Exhibit Hall here, and I had run into them at the Seattle airport the previous day. They had flown in direct from Beijing.

  The only one of these distinguished visitors who spoke English asked me to call him “Brian,” which, he said, sounded a bit like his actual name but was easier for Americans to pronounce. And now, after an uneventful flight, Brian and the other two Chinese folks were sitting at a long table in the basement of the local Lutheran church staring at heaping plates of lutefisk, a traditional Norwegian Christmas dinner.

  Lutefisk, a fishlike substance, seems, at first glance, a revolting, jellied putrescence. Consumption is a matter of some courage. I found it necessary to sit before my plate and center myself, breathing deeply and consciously, staring at the plate as I would at a meditation mandala. Steam rose like an offering, like the soul’s longing for oneness. Lutefisk, I proposed to myself, is consciousness made tangible, in the form of fish, and when I eat it, I partake of the Universal. Thus fortified, spiritually and morally—and with my courage on the ascent—I finally allowed my eyes to refocus on the plate before me and see lutefisk for what it truly was: a revolting, jellied putrescence.

  Traditionally, in the ranching and farming communities of the West and Midwest, lutefisk dinners are served in Lutheran churches during the winter, just before Christmas. These are fund-raising events, and it is said that some eat lutefisk to show their devotion to Lutheran doctrine, rather in the manner of medieval saints flogging themselves bloody with whips.

  The word “lutefisk” means “lyefish,” which refers to the ancient Viking manufacturing process of drying fish and soaking it in lye. Lutefisk, a staple on long voyages, fueled the Viking conquest of much of Europe. This is because any person forced to eat lutefisk two nights in a row is certain to become a savage warrior.

  Lutefisk won’t actually kill you, though there is a rumor that, in the tiny rural town of Wilsall, about fifty miles from where I live, lye-soaked scraps were left out in back of the church—the fish is sometimes boiled in tents outside, so that the odor doesn’t permeate the building for the rest of the year—and that cows from a nearby field got through the fence, ate the fish, and died.

  In fact, I called the distributor of the lutefisk used there and in many other communities throughout America. The Olsen Fish Company of Minnesota sells about half a million pounds of lutefisk a year. A representative of the firm assured me that the dried fish is not “luted” in lye but in caustic soda, or sodium hydroxide, a kind of bleach used in laundry products as well as in the manufacture of explosives. Caustic soda’s main virtue, in regard to dried cod, is that it breaks down fats to form soaps. Which is why lutefisk is a sort of jellied fish.

  The Olsen Fish Company buys its dried cod direct from Norway, lutes it, then sends it through several rinses. When the consumer receives a shipment, it is free of toxicity, ready to boil and eat. So the rumor of the cows dying from eating lye is entirely false. They died from eating lutefisk.

  I’m kidding. Lutefisk is something you kid about, anyway. I ea
t it and enjoy it precisely twice a year: once at the Lutheran church in Livingston, and once at the church in Wilsall, where you have to climb over piles of dead cows to get in the door.

  In Livingston, I watched the Chinese as they regarded their plates of lutefisk. We had gotten there late, which is to say, somewhere around six-thirty. Latecomers don’t get large gelatinous portions of fish, but only small, quivering bites, the size of marbles, which are difficult to manipulate with a fork. It is, in the words of the late poet Richard Brautigan, like trying to load mercury with a pitchfork.

  The Chinese hadn’t yet tried a bite. Instead, they were speaking urgently among themselves.

  I could sympathize with the Chinese, but there was another emotion tugging at me. As a travel writer, I’m usually the guest sitting at the table, staring at the food before me and wondering: Are they making fun of me here?

  In northern Australia, I was served baked turtle lung, which tastes a great deal worse than it sounds. In the Peruvian Andes, I wondered what to do with the rooster’s head floating in the soup, and whether I was really supposed to eat the little, stringy portions of guinea pig I’d been proudly served. My hosts in Irian Jaya treated me to a plate full of fried sago-beetle grubs, corpse-white, wormy-looking little guys about the size of my index finger from the second knuckle up. They were pretty good and tasted rather like creamy snail.

  Western travelers often discuss various bizarre foods they’ve consumed either out of politeness or curiosity. In fact, two of my favorite recent books chronicle bizarre gustatory adventures. Man Eating Bugs by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio (with a foreword by Tim Cahill) concerns itself with the human consumption of insects from Uganda to Indonesia, from Australia to Cambodia. Peter had also sampled sago grubs in Irian Jaya and describes them as tasting “bacony.” We get together to argue about this about once a year.

  Strange Foods by Jerry Hopkins, who has eaten with local folks on six continents, features descriptions and pictures of pig ear cartilage in garlic sauce, worm-meal shakes, and five-penis wine. Jerry’s thesis? “What is repulsive in one part of the world, in another is simply lunch.”

  Or dinner, in the case of lutefisk. Perhaps the Chinese were wondering if the mess on their plates was an elaborate joke. The tables, I thought smugly, have turned. Consider, for instance, my last dinner in Beijing.

  I had arrived in Beijing carrying a pair of rifles: one .30-06, and one .22. They were for my Mongolian guides, and I had a two-day layover in Beijing before the flight to Ulan Bator. Carrying rifles out of the United States, into Canada, through Beijing, and into Mongolia was a nightmare of bureaucratic paperwork. They were expecting me at the Beijing airport, where I walked down a long corridor with armed guards in front of me and behind me. We stopped at a large room, with two couches, where a man in a Western suit asked me if I would like tea. The proper papers were signed, the guns were put into a locked safe. I was given a receipt. Then we all drank tea, with nothing much to say to one another.

  I didn’t want to tell them that the airline had lost one of my bags, the heavy one, containing several thousand rounds of ammunition for the rifles.

  We began talking about food and the man in the suit said that, while I was in China, I absolutely had to have a traditional snake dinner. It was a man’s dinner, for real men, and, as such, was manly in a vigorous, masculine manner. I gathered snake was one of those foods thought to put lead in the old pencil. Chinese men, apparently, dined on snake in large groups, all of them becoming more virile and potent with each bite. In America, the same process is associated with beer. Which, as I discovered, was not too far off the point.

  I was traveling with an American named Michael Abbot and we had to make do with a two-man reptile feed. The restaurant in our hotel, as it turned out, was famous for its snake.

  It was an elegant place, with ponds and bridges and fountains. When the waitress arrived at our table, I pointed to the English menu. Snake.

  She said something not in my twenty-word Mandarin vocabulary, but eventually I understood that I was to get up and discuss my dinner choice with a small man standing off to one corner. The corner, I saw, was stacked floor to ceiling with glass fish tanks containing all manner of sea life. There were also chicken-wire cages, where various terrestrial animals waited to be chosen, rather like puppies in a pet shop window.

  The man took me to the snake cage. There were fifteen or twenty of them in there, all twisted up together like a ball of yarn, and I understood I was to pick one out for my dinner. I have little experience in the matter of choosing a tasty snake and simply pointed at the biggest one, a creature a little over six feet long and about as big around as the business end of a baseball bat. The man opened the top of the cage, reached in, and grabbed the snake behind the head. He stood there, speaking rapidly and in an apologetic tone, while the snake hung loosely in his hand, its tail twitching and curling on the floor.

  The snake, it turned out, was not venomous, and hence less effective in generating virility. The man was terribly sorry, but no restaurants in Beijing could stock poisonous snakes for a week. This was by decree of the government.

  What was the reason for the rule? The snake man gestured for me to look around the restaurant. I could see the reason for myself.

  The dining room was, in fact, packed with women: women obviously from Africa, Latin women, women dressed as if they lived in Saudi Arabia or Polynesia or Thailand. It was the Fourth UN World Conference on Women, being celebrated right now, in Beijing, and the government didn’t want any international incidents, such as a foreign woman being killed by a venomous snake in a restaurant. Also, it might be better if the men these women encountered weren’t feeling excessively, uh, manly.

  So I was going to get to eat a harmless snake, which would probably only increase my potency a teensy little bit. This was well and good, since I would be dining in a room full of strange women, none of whom had expressed the slightest wish to share my company, or anything else I had to offer. What good does it do to have lead in the old pencil when there’s nothing to write on?

  I returned to my seat as the man dragged the snake back toward the kitchen. Almost immediately, it seemed, the waitress arrived with two small pitchers. One was perfectly clear and contained an alcoholic beverage. I didn’t catch the name. Moa tai. Something like that. I since have been told that the generic name is baijiu, meaning, literally, “white alcohol.” The other pitcher was filled with the snake’s blood.

  The waitress set two shot glasses on the table. She dropped some small, slimy nugget of snake, the gallbladder, into the blood, where it slowly sank to the bottom of the pitcher. Then she began poking at the squirmy thing with what looked like a metal chopstick. It slithered around and around on the bottom of the pitcher, but she finally punctured it, and something green—the gall?—began coloring the blood. She stirred the mixture, but the green gall didn’t emulsify well, and swirled slowly around the pitcher in various viscous, amoeboid shapes, rather like a lava lamp.

  That, apparently, was what it was supposed to look like, because the waitress nodded, as if at a job well done, and poured the shot glasses pretty well full with white alcohol, topped off with a dollop of lava lamp snake’s blood. We should drink a toast to the coming dinner, she said, in so many gestures.

  Baijiu is powerful stuff, 90 percent alcohol at a guess. It was best just to throw it down in a single gulp and get the whole thing over with. Except that the waitress filled the glasses right back up and disappeared into the kitchen. Back she came with the first course: batter-fried snakeskin. We were encouraged to drink a toast to the snakeskin. And another toast to the empty platter. A toast to the next course, which was stir-fried snake meat and vegetables. A toast to that empty platter. A toast to the courses to come, none of which I can remember, except to say that every part of the animal was served in one way or another, and it was necessary to toast every last bit of it, down to the eyeballs.

  Snake, I thought, rather blearily, th
e dinner of alcoholics.

  Michael and I paid our bill and bounced from wall to wall down the long hallway to our room. There, sitting on my bed, was the outsize duffel the airline had lost: several thousand rounds of ammunition that could, I imagined, earn me a lot of disagreeable jail time. This realization was not a comfort. I lay on the bed, worrying drunkenly about all that ammo, until the snake informed me that it wanted out, and right now.

  That was my last dinner in China. Now I was watching the Chinese deal with the jellied mess on their plates, and a small, unworthy part of me thought: lutefisk is the revenge of the reptile. But they liked it. Or two of them did. Brian didn’t go back for seconds, and told me later the fish wasn’t “to his taste.” He was polite about it, as good travelers are in foreign countries, and we laughed about the lutefisk, I perhaps more than Brian. I was pretty sure he didn’t have a gun.

  Swimming with Great White Sharks

  The great white shark slowly cruising outside the flimsy, submerged cage in which I’d imprisoned myself was probably only twelve or thirteen feet long and weighed, at a guess, two thousand pounds. It seemed quite docile, and menacing only in its profound grace. The great white rose up to the surface, where there was a floating and iridescent smatter of chum: fish oil and sardines ladled into the water specifically to attract sharks. A disembodied seal’s head floated nearby. The head was affixed to a thick yellow rope. The shark hit the seal bait with no sense of urgency whatsoever. It twisted its head slightly, in the way a human might tear at a strip of beef jerky. And while this was happening, someone above, aboard the dive boat I’d hired, was pulling on the rope attached to the seal’s head so that the shark was being drawn toward the cage, where I stood breathing hard through a scuba regulator.