Agung then discovered that Mr. X suffered from an acute and debilitating form of hydrocele. With that health condition, he concluded, Mr. X could never have walked up the hill to the cliffside.
On news of the autopsy results, Pastika returned to milepost #62. He walked to the very spot where the corporal claimed to have shot Mr. X. As he looked up from that spot, he was surprised by what he saw. The jungle was dense with foliage: the cliff wasn’t visible. The soldier could never have had a clear shot from this position.
Pastika has a reputation of being deliberate and objective in his investigations, and he didn’t rush to judgment in this case. Weeks went by as he assembled the facts and absorbed all the evidence available. He was fully aware of the risks of implicating the Indonesian military.
So much of the evidence could be argued either way. But one piece of evidence spoke to Pastika with clarity. As he finalized the classified police report, he identified the only conclusion one can reasonably draw from the appearance of the unexpected corpse:
EVALUATION ANALYSIS
It is the most possible scenario that has been proposed. Mr. X was shot to death before. Then Mr. X’s dead body was brought and placed on the side of the road in order to “invite” the police investigator team to come and to investigate the location of the incident and at the same time to … witness that Mr. X was the attacker on August 31, 2002.
The story was phony. The military had tried to set Pastika up.
“You asked me who did it,” I say to the congressional staff after describing Pastika’s analysis and his final report entry.
“I don’t know for sure who did it, I probably never will, but I do know this: there’s enough evidence for the U.S. to suspend funding the Indonesian military until the investigation is complete.”
The conference room is silent.
A congressional staffer, a close friend of mine, had led me into the room and sat beside me during the discussion. She was the first one to speak:
“I think that’s all, right, Slake?”
It was. I had no idea how long I’d been talking, but I was drained, utterly depleted. I had nothing more to say. We got up and left the room. Later, reflecting back on that moment, that staffer, my close friend, told me what she thought. “That was your humanizing moment, Slake.”
“What do you mean?” I had no idea what she was referring to.
“When you were in that room, going through all that evidence, it wasn’t about you. It was about someone else. You cared. You cared about Patsy Spier; you cared about others.”
I left that hearing room and it was then, and only then, that I went back to my surfing and climbing To Do List.
It was time to surf the Atlantic Ocean; after being consumed by the ambush for months I needed the break. I just needed to find a way to make it an interesting surf trip.
I had never surfed the east coast of the United States and doing it now seemed a bit unsatisfying. I had to get away. Gina had a suggestion. She had some friends who lived in the Dadès Gorge, an oasis in the Sahara desert. We could visit them and, along the way, I could surf the coast of Morocco.
“Great idea,” I told her. “Just one question: does Morocco have waves?”
For centuries, the search for waves was a low-tech endeavor. If you were wondering whether there were waves to surf, you had to walk down to the beach, hold your hand over your eyes to block the glare of the sun, and check for yourself. The only innovation that intruded on that ritual was a pair of sunglasses.
Times have changed.
Surf forecasting has gone high-tech. Before you even pull on a swimsuit, you can log on the Web and get reliable wave predictions at nearly every surfable beach in the world.
The Web sites rely on information beamed from several sources. Initially, there was NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite. The core of the orbiting 450-pound beast was a rotating dish antenna that emitted two pulsed microwave beams, sweeping in circular patterns that cover a broad swath of the earth’s surface. It beamed out a measurement of wind speed and wind direction roughly every 0.3 second. When a Titan II rocket blasted it into the sky in 1999, its purpose was to put the earth’s climate under a microscope and provide a steady stream of data that could inform weather forecasting. When it was devised, no scientist thought that surfers would be one of its consumers. Now it’s obvious that surfers were bound to benefit from satellites that provided detailed information on ocean behavior.
QuikSCAT was eventually replaced by five geosynchronous satellites that currently provide detailed pictures of weather patterns as they form and move across the globe. These workhorses sit in stationary positions relative to the earth nearly 24,000 miles over our heads, always staring down at the same vast patch of the globe, a constant eye on the activity of the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. We’ve all seen these satellites at work, beaming back images of a froth of clouds whipping up into hurricanes, like Katrina, that hurtle toward the Southeast coast of the United States.
These instruments provide detailed imagery of swells as well as information on developing storms, their intensity, and their direction. All of that can then be fed into computer models to give surfers the information they really want: wave height and wave frequency. In other words: How big? How often?
The forecasts of height and frequency are outputs of the WaveWatch 3 computer model, managed by the U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—NOAA. While the surfer is still dozing, before the sun has even come up, the NWW3 software is grinding through millions of calculations per second to determine wave propagation across the earth’s oceans.
The input to the NWW3 computer model comes not just from satellites, but also buoys, ships, weather stations, and airplanes sampling across the globe. The info determines wave height and frequency at the beach with high accuracy. It can even project out four to five days, although, just like any weather forecast, accuracy declines the further out in the future the projections are made.
Even with all this data and modeling, there are surfers who want to see the wave before making a decision. In that case, the surfer still doesn’t have to leave home. Numerous beaches boast “surfcams,” accessible over the Web, to save a surfer the trouble of having to walk down to the beach and get sand between the toes.
Despite all of this technology, despite the up-to-the-minute ocean conditions and coastal details that are available, it is still up to the surfer to catch the wave. For that to happen, in order to ride a wave, a surfer must, literally, become one with nature. That sounds so ridiculous it requires some explaining.
In order to ride liquid a surfer must get the speed of the board to match the speed of the incoming wave. If you paddle too fast, you outrun the wave. If you paddle too slowly, the wave moves out from under you and passes you by.
But when you paddle at just the right speed, when your board speed matches the speed of the wave, a remarkable thing happens: you are taken up by the wave. You can feel the very moment through the board when your speed and the wave’s speed are in sync; then, you stop paddling, stand up, and ride the wave to shore. You are literally lifted and carried by the water, propelled by nature, part of it.
That experience, surfing’s harmony with nature, is the antithesis of high altitude mountain climbing.
Climbing is a battle, every step a push against nature. Gravity tugs down on your boots, resisting their pull out of the snow. It drags at you, taunts you, whispers in your ear that you can’t possibly get any higher, that you should turn around and go home. And in the meantime the storm blinds your vision and the wind whips at your skin. To survive in that environment, you need to be encased in gear, limiting all exposure to the elements, restricting nature’s ability to freeze you on the spot.
Compare that experience to surfing.
With surfing, the storm is your companion and gravity is your ally. The storms churn up the perfect swells far out at sea that become smooth and periodic as they move toward the coast. Gra
vity collapses the incoming swell, creates the curl, and pulls you down and forward; you literally drop into the trough of the wave.
Yvon Chouinard, a king of El Cap rock climbing, is also a surfer. He once said he thought that surfing and climbing were a perfect pairing of sports because they are both equally useless. That’s true. But there is also this: climbing and surfing are the yin and yang of athletic endeavors. One is in a battle with nature; the other is in harmony with it. One manages the mountains, the other the troughs.
At one time in my life I was yin-less. Only the battle, the isolated struggle and disconnection, appealed to me. But things changed. After experiencing the pure deprivation of Antarctica, after dodging a bullet in Indonesia, harmony now had appeal.
In Morocco, I found that harmony on a beach called Plage des Nations. The surfing there couldn’t have been any more peaceful. Getting around the country, however, was a battle that almost cost Gina and me our lives.
The radio is at full volume as we round the turn, the driver talking at the top of his voice, yelling to us over the sounds of the blaring Arab music.
We found Hassan, the driver, in the coastal town of Essaouira and negotiated a bargain price for him to take us over the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to our friends who lived in the Dadès Gorge, at the western end of the Sahara.
A driver would be quicker and cheaper than taking a bus. The problem, we now realize, is that you get what you pay for. Our driver is evidently clinically insane.
“I’m four-star driver,” he screams over his shoulder. “The best.”
Hassan is a hulk. His body fills the front seat like it’s an undersized suit, his left shoulder nearly touching the glass of the door window. He leans slightly forward making it look like the entire car is too small to contain him. The steering wheel looks tiny in his blocky hands that are both pivoting wildly, his elbows rising and falling, weaving the car around the road as if he’s trying to dodge phantoms streaming in low toward the windshield.
I was tolerating his drifting around the two-lane road when we were on flat ground and could see a mile ahead of us. Now we’re starting to drive up into the mountains and we can’t see what might be around the next hairpin turn. Gina and I snap on our seat belts.
“Stay in our lane. Stay in our damned lane.” I’m the one yelling now.
“You don’t believe me?”
That he’s the best driver in Morocco? No, of course I don’t believe him. He can’t possibly think he’s fooling me; I can see that we’re weaving all over the pavement. In fact, right now, as we approach a blind turn on this narrow mountain road he is entirely in the other lane.
I cringe, Gina cringes, he sings. We turn the corner and there is no other car in sight. He swings wide and we return to our lane.
I don’t care if he knows this road. A car could have been in that lane and we would have a head-on collision on a mountain road with no guardrail. This is insane.
“I show you.” He pulls his driver’s credentials off its perch above the rearview mirror.
“NO. Just drive.” Gina yells this time.
We’re stunned by what he does next. To prove to us just how good a driver he is, he turns around and hands us his driver’s credentials. He’s completely pivoted at the waist, facing back toward us as the car speeds forward. He’s grinning.
“What the hell are you doing? Turn around and look at the road!” I yell.
I grab the credentials out of his hand in hopes that he will now turn around and face the front.
He pivots back into his seat and talks over his shoulder.
“See the stars?”
Sure enough, there are four stars on the bottom right corner of the card. It looks official, government-issued. There is no possible way a star could mean the same thing in Morocco as it does in the States. Maybe this is four stars out of a possible ten stars—or out of one hundred. Maybe the government puts a star on the card to mark every head-on collision the driver has suffered.
We hand the card back, and he snaps it into place above the mirror. Just in time. We’re approaching another turn. Once again, he’s in the wrong lane, sweeps wide around the blind turn, and eases into our lane. There are no approaching cars in sight.
As we near the next blind turn, a mountain wall on our left and guardrail-less cliff on our right, I am actually starting to relax. The road was obviously empty so his drifting around wasn’t adding any risk. In an hour we would be over the mountains. Perhaps there was nothing to worry about.
We were going about thirty miles an hour as we rounded the corner, entirely in the wrong lane. We all saw the oncoming truck at the same time.
Hassan jerked down his right elbow and our front left bumper took the impact, crushed flat by the full force of the truck. We began sliding across the road toward the cliff.
There wasn’t a word spoken in the car as it continued its glide to the cliff edge. I don’t even remember the sound of the radio, as if it too were holding its breath in anticipation of what was to come. Then friction finally took full hold and we came to a stop.
I turned right and looked out Gina’s window. There was no going out that door—it was hanging over the cliff edge.
“Better go out your side,” Gina observed as I swung open my door and was relieved to look down at pavement.
Her suggestion was nearly drowned out by Hassan. He had slammed his shoulder into his door, burst out of the car, and was now running up to the dump truck screaming at the top of his voice. We had just eluded death and rather than pause and exhale in relief, Hassan was a frothing bull.
We unclipped our seat belts and stepped out onto the road.
The dump truck driver had stepped down from his cab and he and Hassan were now screaming, noses nearly touching, eyes fixed on each other. Their hands were chopping at the air, the words pouring out in thick superheated streams.
We didn’t intervene in that melee. Instead, Gina and I sat down on the side of the road to wait it out. Surely, at the pace they were going, they would wear out in a few minutes.
“Take a look up there,” Gina said pointing up at the mountainside. “This must be Dead Man’s Turn.”
Dozens of rock cairns, stone memorials, were stacked on the incline rising up from the road. We weren’t the first to have trouble turning this corner. No doubt, we wouldn’t be the last.
The first hour of the drivers’ argument went by with almost no discernible decline in intensity. Evidently, a Moroccan’s well runs deep. Not mine. I stood up and strolled to the car to bring us back some water.
I can’t remember who said it first, Gina or me. Either way, we were both wondering the same thing. Hassan was entirely at fault: “What could he possibly have to scream about?”
To this day I don’t know the answer to that question. Some things simply defy explanation.
If Hassan was right about one thing it was this: cars don’t come down this road very often. I would guess it was another half hour before the first car arrived.
The responses of Hassan and the dump truck driver were immediate and identical. They turned, saw the car coming, and ran toward it. Inexplicably, they both began yelling at the new driver on the scene. Rather than being disturbed, the new arrival became immediately engaged, animated by the argument.
The three were now standing in a circle, the third person now creating a bit of space, broadening the battlefield. The hands that once served as axes, chopping at the air, now were more expressive, reenacting the scene for the objective third party. Hassan was clearly yelling out his version of the events, pointing back at the dump truck, then pivoting his palm parallel to the ground, sweeping it across the air mimicking the slide of his car. The dump truck driver was yelling his version at the same time, looking straight into the eyes of the new arrival.
What else could the new driver do? He wasn’t going anywhere: the road was blocked by the dump truck and our car. So he started yelling also.
A second car pulled up and the three men now
ran to the latest person to arrive on the scene.
A half hour later a car pulled up behind the dump truck, trying to go down the mountain. Again, the clot migrated to the new driver, pulling him in, expanding their numbers, circling, like players in a rugby scrum.
A second hour ticked by.
The end came abruptly, unexpectedly. The shouting simply stopped. The drivers dispersed and went back to their cars, the dump truck driver stepped back up into his cab.
No money was exchanged. No one took out paper and pen to write down the name of an insurance company or a license plate. It didn’t end happily; there were no slaps on the back or merriment. But there was no bloodshed either, no fists thrown. It just ended.
But one thing was clear: each new driver had become engaged in the event. This wasn’t about figuring out who was at fault; no one was accused in the end, no retribution paid.
It wasn’t conflict resolution. But it wasn’t pointless Y chromosome bluster either. It simply seemed to be an opportunity, a stimulating occasion to socialize, like women in Tanzania crowded around the community well, chatting while filling their buckets. They all wanted to experience a shared purpose.
There was a desire by all of the drivers on the road that afternoon to be part of something outside of just themselves, and this happened to be what came along. Years ago, I wouldn’t have cared about any of this. Now, I confess, I understood it, and there was an undeniable appeal to it all. If I had spoken the language, I would have willingly stepped into the clash.
As Hassan started heading back to the car, we stood up.
He grabbed what was left of the quarter panel, pulled it off, and heaved it down the side of the cliff. He opened the door, sat down in his seat, and turned the key. Our car started, as did everyone else’s along the road. Before driving ahead, he turned around in his seat and faced us.
To the Last Breath Page 16
