To the Last Breath
Page 20
The officer also cautioned us that the conflict had spread to the southeastern part of the country. The Tamil Tigers had taken control of Arugam Bay.
He warned us: “You must not go there.”
There is a perfectly sound decision that someone in our shoes might make at this point: turn around and go home. I risked repeating the same sort of guerrilla soldier confrontation that occurred in Indonesia, at the Freeport-McMoRan mine. Having dodged that bullet, perhaps I shouldn’t press my luck and head, once again, into harm’s way.
We decided otherwise. By our own choice, we were venturing onto the field of combat in a civil war. Our thinking was this: over the course of the twenty-year civil war in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers had exclusively targeted government and military instillations. Civilians were not primary targets and there was no history of kidnapping or threatening foreigners. We didn’t feel threatened; the risks appeared modest. We would go to A-Bay, cautiously, and with our eyes wide open.
Despite the resurgent military conflict, we found a driver willing to take us from Colombo on the western coast of the island, over the central mountains, and on to the eastern-side beach of Arugam. In distance, the trip was short, less than two hundred miles. The roads, however, are underdeveloped and slow-going. Still, we could finish the trip in a day, so long as it didn’t rain and slow down the driving.
At 4 P.M., the rain started.
We had left Colombo in mid-morning and by 6 P.M. we were only halfway across the island, creeping along as the wipers swept the pounding rain off the windshield. We approached the town of Haputale and the driver pulled off the road and turned back to look at us. He was concerned, apologetic.
“I’m Sinhalese,” he explained, “and I could be killed if I drive at night into Tamil areas.”
He proposed two options. He could drop us off in this village; or we could wise up, drive back to Colombo with him, and forget about going to A-Bay. He urged option two. Gina and I didn’t even have to talk it over. We stepped out of the car and into the pouring rain.
After knocking on a few doors, we were directed to the home of Mr. Jayasinghe, who rents out rooms to travelers. There was no answer when we knocked—that wasn’t surprising since he probably never expected that anyone would be out looking for a room in the pouring rain. We pushed open the door and walked into the modest hotel. Jayasinghe appeared from around the corner the moment we called out his name.
There were five rooms and five vacancies, he explained.
That was eerie. It was a disturbingly familiar scene: rainstorm, remote hotel, too many vacancies. In Hitchcock’s Psycho, the very first words out of Norman Bates’s mouth are: “Twelve rooms, twelve vacancies.”
But all that was certainly a coincidence. Our circumstances might be similar to the movie, but there was no way that Jayasinghe could be as crazy as Norman Bates. We took a room.
After changing into dry clothes, we joined Jayasinghe in the kitchen where he warmed up some rice and we fell into conversation. When I told him that we were from the United States he started a strange rant, unrelated to anything we’d been talking about.
“That Marion Jones is a cheat.”
He recounted races and dates, her performance history, the un-likelihood of her victories, all the while getting louder, more insistent.
This was bizarre. At that time, no one had ever raised the issue of Jones cheating—she’d been tested and she was Olympic gold clean. I looked over at Gina; we both had the same thought: is this guy insane?
“She takes drugs to run fast. She shouldn’t have gotten a medal. I hate people who cheat like this. It is unfair for everyone.”
He was visibly angry now. Furious. He was working himself into a froth. It was Jones’s gold medal in the 200 meter sprint in the 2000 Sydney Olympics that had him nearly screaming. She had taken steroids, he knew it, was absolutely certain of it.
“And you know who suffers from this two hundred meters?”
“The fans?” I guessed.
“My sister,” he shouts, the words an explosion of anger.
What? This wasn’t making any sense.
“I will show you.”
He stood up and walked out of the room. This was the chance for Gina and me to run, get away from this lunatic, but where would we go? Before we had a chance to talk it over, Jayasinghe returned.
He had a thick leather-bound photo album in his hands. He turned the pages until he found the one he was looking for. He laid the album down in front of us with a piercing look, expecting that the photo would provide all the evidence we needed to agree with his disjointed rant.
“This is my sister, Susanthika Jayasinghe,” he said, his finger pressing down on a picture.
The photo showed a picture of him and a woman who looked roughly his age, standing together at the dinner table in this home. On the table was a cake, thick with frosting. Iced onto the cake were five differently colored circles, the Olympic rings.
“I don’t understand,” I confessed.
“My sister ran against Jones in the two hundred meters.”
This was ridiculous; I wasn’t falling for it. He expected that this photo of a cake would make me believe his story? If he wanted to show me photographic evidence, he should have a picture of his sister in the blocks, one knee down, fingers spread out on the track, her body ready to spring forward at the sound of the starting gun.
This was all too crazy. Gina and I brought the conversation to a quick close and walked back to our room, bolting the door shut. We left Jayasinghe’s home early the next morning, quietly, leaving our money on the front desk, not wanting to awake him and then suffer through another absurd tall tale.
We walked to the village center and found two Tamil kids who were probably fifteen or sixteen years old and willing to drive us the rest of the way. A few hours later we punched our toes into the sand of Arugam Bay.
We had been given a tip on a bakery with terrific coffee, so we walked up the one street in A-Bay, alert for the smell of roasting beans. There wasn’t a single person in sight as we wandered down the road. Perhaps they were all still sleeping; it was still early and this was a beach town.
“We’ve been walking a while; did we pass it?” Gina wondered.
She was right, we were nearly at the end of the street and the bakery should have been near the beginning, where the kids dropped us off. We doubled back.
Standing in the middle of the street, staring up at the shuttered windows, we realized the bakery was closed—for good. And then the veil lifted. The main street was empty; store after store was boarded up. It wasn’t because people were sleeping in; the people weren’t here.
There was a grouping of thatch huts near the beach and someone was swinging in a hammock tied up between two banana trees. It turns out this was a hotel, and he was the owner.
“I haven’t had a guest here in seven months.”
Two things had conspired to crush his business. The town had been nearly erased by the tsunami of December 26, 2004. The locals tell the tale of fleeing to their rooftops as the giant wave slammed into their floors below. One of the restaurant owners had run up to his second-floor balcony and grabbed ahold of a stranger in order to survive the surging water. They were now husband and wife, a child on the way.
It had taken more than a year to rebuild the town and recover from the destruction of the tsunami. And now, two years later, just as tourist interest began to rebound, the peace process had collapsed and the civil war had reignited. Numerous countries, the United States included, were now issuing travel warnings about Sri Lanka and cautioning against travel to A-Bay.
We had seen soldiers in the jungle when we approached the beach a couple hours earlier, but they didn’t seem threatening. The hotel owner agreed. There had never been any violence, never a threat to tourists staying at A-Bay. The Tamil Tigers, bloody as they were, did not threaten the livelihood of the local businesses. A-Bay was an oasis: always had been, always would be, he insisted.
The people were wonderful, the scenery spectacular. I wish I could have said the same about the surfing.
I stepped out of the thatch hut early the next morning and strolled to the beach. The water was as flat as glass. This wasn’t the Indian Ocean; it was the Indian Lake. There would be no surfing that day. And, as it turned out, it was also glass the next day.
And the next.
And the next.
Sure, satellites and ocean surface modeling can accurately forecast waves, but they can’t create the waves, and the waves weren’t coming. In a town that had been submerged by a tsunami, I wasn’t getting even a ripple.
I pushed Gina’s patience and asked to stay one more day. We did, and the ocean was glass again.
The surfing trip was a bust. I had dragged Gina down here, a thousand miles out of the way of a straight trip home. We worked our way across Tamil Tiger–held regions of the country only to find a desolate town and a flat ocean.
I decided I would make it up to Gina. On the long flight back to the United States I told her she could plan the next trip.
“We can go anywhere you want,” I offered. “So long as it’s on the Indian Ocean.” I still had to check that box.
Gina began studying the map in the flight magazine in front of her. A few minutes later she poked me in the shoulder and glared at me with a finger on Bali.
“You surfed here, right?”
Of course. She knew that. Five years earlier I had surfed around Bali.
“Well, look at the map. It’s on the Indian Ocean.”
I’ll confess, geography has never been my strong suit. This entire surfing and climbing record had required me to dig through map after map, consult with geographers, find routes in local guidebooks. I had been careful except, evidently, when it came to Bali. At some point I had casually scanned the Internet, a bit too quickly obviously, and decided that Bali was in the South Pacific. The map in my hand showed that wasn’t so.
Gina stated what was now all too clear: “We didn’t need to go to Sri Lanka for you to surf the Indian Ocean. You already surfed it when we were in Bali.”
When we got back to the States I went to the Internet to find out how I could have gotten it wrong. There are hundreds of thousands of Web sites that mention Bali and the South Pacific. That’s exactly what I found before; this time I went one click deeper. When I clicked into those links I found the lyrics to “Bali Ha’i,” a show tune from the 1949 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical South Pacific.
When I clicked into maps, instead of show tune lyrics, I found that every one of them showed Bali on the Indian Ocean.
I drew a couple lessons from this. There is the obvious point, of course: always show great care when using the Internet as a resource. The other: you can never map out how life will yield its lessons.
“Good afternoon, everyone. I am Marion Jones-Thompson and I’m here today because I have something very important to tell you … It is with a great amount of shame that I stand before you and tell you that I have betrayed your trust. You have the right to be angry with me.”
The press conference is high drama and it comes just a few months after our trip to Sri Lanka. Admitting to steroid use, Marion Jones gives up three gold medals and two bronze medals from the Sydney Games.
The Olympic Committee responded with a reallocation of medals. There was one particular event, one person, I was curious about.
In the 200 meter, the Olympic Committee would now award the silver medal to a Sri Lankan sprinter: Susanthika Jayasinghe. I looked at the photo in the news story. I had seen that face before, standing over a cake iced with five Olympic rings.
As crazy as that innkeeper in Haputale had seemed, he actually had been telling the truth. His cake photo was unconvincing, but the evidence was clear now.
What were the odds that I would meet the one and only Sri Lankan innkeeper with a sister who was an Olympic sprinter who had lost to a steroid user? It appeared to be another one-in-a-million possibility to add to the growing list of seemingly improbable tales.
It was time I confronted those unlikely events head-on. How could these things keep happening to me?
I had regarded so many of the events in my journey as preposterously unlikely. I had calculated the probability of meeting Gina and pegged it at less than a million to one.
But with more thought, and my broadening perspective, I realized that when I did that Gina calculation years ago I was still mistakenly viewing the world in discrete pieces, unrelated, a collection of noninteracting parts. But after my trip to Asia I saw that the parts are in fact connected, and the improbabilities of my journey fell into context.
Gina had decided on going to Everest because her mother knew a woman who was running a trek—that was a link that my statistics didn’t show. That’s what underlay the apparent improbability.
Meeting Jayasinghe seemed unlikely. But the reason we ended up at his home is because he knew everyone in town, so the moment we knocked on a door we were bound to be sent his way.
And then there was the Fixer. He knew how interconnected people are, of course, and he put it to practical use. You have a problem? He’ll solve it no matter how improbable it may seem. Yes, he could get us on a plane out of Lhasa because he had a friend with an uncle who knew an airline pilot.
What I hadn’t realized until now is that we live in a world of bound threads. It is a world where ordering a cup of tea results in a one-hundred-year-old wedding dress getting stuffed into Gina’s backpack, or where a conversation around a water cooler at work sets up a trip to Bhutan.
It is a world where time itself is interconnected, where a collision of continental plates millions of years ago can manifest itself today, this instant, when I look at a Namtso seashell resting in the palm of my hand. The past can be present, a seemingly incalculable paradox, but real nevertheless.
And, yes, it is a world where, as baffling as it seems, a Snake Goddess can live on a mountainside and a Lama, older than me, thinks he’s my son. Such is the tangle and weave of the world.
So that is what these events in Asia taught me: interconnectedness. If those interconnections were actually visible, we would see thick thread spun off of us, entwined with others, like a massive luminescent ball of yarn.
And here is the corollary: some things stand apart from scientific calculation. Those things are the stories, the color, the texture of life and reducing them to equations would be like trying to trap a warm welcome breeze in my fist.
Now that I recognized the interconnections, this bond among people and the world, I would make even more changes in my life.
Chapter 9
A MAP COMES ALIVE
The cinder block balanced on my stomach is pressing me down into the bed of nails that I’m lying on. I glance over at the TV producer on this soundstage in Hollywood and he seems satisfied. I realize only then that this isn’t what I should be doing with my time.
“Ready?” the Sidekick calls down to me as he readies the sledgehammer.
“Do it,” I respond. He swings the sledgehammer over his head and brings the full weight of it down on the cinder block, mashing me into the bed of nails.
What exactly was I doing here?
What happened after our trip to Asia was inevitable. For the last decade, I had spread maps out across my desk, searching for the next location to surf or climb. When I returned from Asia, recognizing now how interconnected we all are, I stopped looking at the earth as just a playground. The map came alive.
There had always been diamonds scattered across the map’s surface: black for places I’d climbed, blue where I’d surfed, clear where I planned to go next. But now I looked past those diamonds and I saw the characters and the stories that filled those places. Out of the map rose huts and villages. Mountain trails and La
mas cut through the lines of latitude; dusty footpaths and tribesmen severed the longitudes. I saw struggles and embraces, heard sighs and felt loss. I remembered faces, their expressions, and the furrows running across their brows that were etched by the joys and hardships of long days.
“We are in a world of darkness, and people are sleeping through it,” Kinle, the Lama of Dhorika, had said to me in his incense-filled prayer room in Bhutan.
I’m a scientist, so I see challenges, not darkness. Still, I agree with Kinle on this point: it’s time I woke up to those challenges. I looked down at those maps on my desk, this time thinking back to each place where I had traveled and the problems that people faced there, problems that I had climbed or surfed past without consideration.
What had Estomii Molell, the Masai elder, said so many years ago when I first walked into his hut?
“There is no extra water for washing. A woman travels fifteen kilometers to get water,” Estomii had said. The problem he identified hadn’t registered with me when he said it; now it did. No one in his village had a spigot in their kitchen. No hose was coiled tightly on a ring outside the hut. The only source of clean water lay ten miles away and every day the women in his village would trek those long hard miles, shreds of car tires bound around their feet, dust kicking up behind them as they walked.
And while his village struggled to find water, in other places I had visited, people were battling malaria or desperately trying to find food.
As these global challenges came into focus, I remember thinking at the time: how hard can they be to solve? What I discovered, as I started probing them more deeply, is that even basic human problems—disease, finding enough food and clean water—are hundreds, thousands of times more difficult to address than the neatly constructed physics problems that I was used to solving on my classroom chalkboard.
So I looked for an opportunity to alert people to the global challenges. The bigger audience the better, I thought. Now, where could I find the biggest audience?