by Tim Cahill
ACCLAIM FOR Tim Cahill’s
Pass the Butterworms
“Adventures that make you smile.… Read Cahill at home, otherwise you might think he has more fun traveling than you do.”
—Outside
“Hilarious and informative.… Cahill shows himself worthy of his solid reputation and devoted fans.”
—Sunday Oregonian
“Transcendent … inventively shaped and rich with lyricism.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Irresistible … exciting narratives of doing thrilling things in interesting places.”
—Booklist
“Interesting, entertaining and well-written.… Cahill is an experienced travel writer whose observations are funny and poignant.”
—Library Journal
“High entertainment.… Cahill delivers all the goods—vibrancy, wit, and intelligence—anyone could hope for.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Cahill reports with wit and sensitivity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“By turns funny and poignant, quirky and insightful, Cahill leads us on adventures to the back of beyond.”
—Bookpage
“Hilarious … these essays are rollicking reads perfect for the armchair traveler.”
—The Herald (Florida)
“Cahill is an adventure traveler who writes engagingly in an unpretentiously literate way.”
—Sunday Post-Crescent (Wisconsin)
“Rife with insider travel tips.… Cahill has a gift for observation.”
—News and Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)
“Cahill is an enabler for the armchair traveler.… He is clearly having too much fun.”
—The Fresno Bee
Tim Cahill
Pass the Butterworms
Tim Cahill is the author of five previous books, including A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, Buried Dreams, and Pecked to Death by Ducks. Cahill is currently Outside magazine’s editor at large and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and Sports Afield. He lives in Livingston, Montana.
ALSO BY Tim Cahill
Buried Dreams
Jaguars Ripped My Flesh
A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg
Road Fever
Pecked to Death by Ducks
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, APRIL 1998
Copyright © 1997 by Tim Cahill
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York, in 1997.
Portions of this work were originally published in Men’s Journal, Modern Maturity and Outside.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Villard Books edition as follows:
Cahill, Tim.
Pass the butterworms: remote journeys oddly rendered / Tim Cahill.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77840-6
1. Adventure stories, American. I. Title
PS3553. A365R4 1997
813′.54—dc20 96-33142
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
To those Arizona miscreants,
my very nearly saintly brothers, Rick and David Cahill
Acknowledgments
Most of these stories appeared in Outside magazine, generally in a somewhat abridged and/or edited form. Many thanks to Mark Bryant, Larry Burke, and everyone at Outside for providing a forum and making me look good. The magazine just gets better.
“Buford’s Revenge” appeared in Modern Maturity and “Misty Crossings” appeared in Men’s Journal, where John Rasmus and Jann Wenner provided counsel and encouragement.
And once again, as always: Thanks to my literary agent, Barbara Lowenstein, and to my patient and enduring editor, David Rosenthal.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Thundermug: An Introduction of Sorts
Mongolia: Adventures in You-Cut Hairstyling
“Help, My Pilot Just Had a Heart Attack and I Can’t Fly a Plane”
Buford’s Revenge
Glacier Bay
A Darkness on the River
Uncharitable Thoughts at the End of My Rope
The Purple Sage, at 180 Miles an Hour
North Pole: The Easy Way
In Honduras He Who Laughs
This Man Cannot Speak
The Islands of Pigs
Pirates
The Lone Ranger
The Ozymandias Express
Misty Crossings
Malaria
On the River of Cold Fires
In Chief Yali’s Shoes
Bonaire
Geysers
Family Values in the Raw
Working the Crowd
The Queen Charlotte Islands: Life and Death (hee-hee) Tales from the Place of Wonder
The Tsunami Rangers
Therapeutic Perambulation
The Monks of Apnea
Search and Rescue
Among the Karowai: A Stone Age Idyll
Books by Tim Cahill
Thundermug: An Introduction of Sorts
Out where I live, in Montana, we’d call it a mild cussing.
I could do that for this nice lady writer who lives out west somewhere and makes a living as a contrarian. She recently wrote an article in a New York literary magazine that said, in essence, that the current crop of travel writers sucked real bad and just bored her spitless. She manages to slag me in the same paragraph as Redmond O’Halon, Jan Morris, and Paul Theroux, which I regard as a compliment. That’s distinguished company.
The woman, as I say, is a contrarian: Her last book—I’m forced to admit that I thought it was rather good—was titled Talk Dirty to Me and generally took the view that pornography was sorta spiffy and enriched her fantasy and sex life. This, of course, is a position at odds with the conventional wisdom. Everyone knows that women, without exception, hate and despise smut of all varieties. Simply not true, she said. Not in her case.
Apparently on the prowl for other instances in which the conventional wisdom is mistaken or wrongheaded, she fastened on travel writers, who, she felt, had become darlings of the literary scene and were unjustifiably celebrated by reviewers in influential journals both here and abroad. She seemed to feel the conventional wisdom is that, over the past twenty years, a kind of golden age of literate travelogues has developed.
Poppycock, she said, or words to that effect. The woman complained of feeling that she herself might not be welcome on a journey undertaken by any of these writers, which, I think, is not an unreasonable assumption.
I was also taken to task for the manner in which I titled my three previous collections of travel-related writing, all of which remain in print and continue to sell. The first, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, was a joke, meant to rile colleagues with whom I’d worked closely.
Over twenty years ago, in 1975, I was among a group of editors assigned to develop a new magazine about nonmotorized outdoor sports. It was to be a literary effort, and I suggested that we might include articles about remote travel in difficult situations. The other editors objected vociferously. Such articles were then found in magazines with titles like Man’s Adventure and were directed, apparently, at semiliterate, semi-sad bachelors interested primarily in the “nymphos” who, in this genre, seemed to populate
the jungles and mountains at the various ends of the earth. The events reported in these stories were generally of dubious veracity and the authors were not darlings of the literary scene. If in 1996 we are living in a golden era of literary travel writing, 1975 was pretty much the stone age.
The articles in Man’s Adventure, my colleagues said, were “subliterate” and always had imbecilic titles like “Jaguars Ripped My Flesh.” I argued that it was possible to write well about travel and the outdoors, that writing about wilderness of all varieties was a staple of American literature, and that, goddamnit, I’d just bought a good backpack and a stout pair of hiking boots.
The magazine we developed was called Outside. It very quickly became the literate forum we envisioned back in 1975. (And, for what it’s worth, Outside is not, and never was, a man’s magazine. Its readership, and my own, is about 45 percent female.) For over twenty years, I’ve written about remote travel for Outside, which in 1996 won a second National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
When publishers first approached me about collecting some of my work in book form, I knew the title right away: Jaguars Ripped My Flesh. It was an inside joke, meant to be a poke in the eye with a sharp stick for all my friends who said the kind of work I preferred to do couldn’t be done or, if it could, would never be accepted.
The next collection, a stinging left jab at those same colleagues, was titled A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg. I cribbed it directly from a story in an old magazine actually titled Man’s Adventure. My third anthology, Pecked to Death by Ducks, took the joke about as far as it wants to go.
The contrarian writer found my titles “precious.” This, mind you, from the author of Talk Dirty to Me. Still, the woman does have a point. Readers don’t know what to expect from these oddly titled books. I’ve found them filed on bookstore shelves under “humor,” or “fiction” or “literature,” and sometimes even “travel.” Worse, an animal-protection society in upstate New York once demanded that my publisher send them a copy of Jaguars. The letter was rather forcefully stated, and I believe they imagined the book was about some guy who battled tigers with a penknife. That sort of thing. I’m happy to say that the group, after a close perusal of the text, saw fit to review the book in a glowing manner in their newsletter. Ignore the title, they said; this guy’s mostly on our side.
Well, I thought, maybe this time I should try for a perfectly descriptive title, something you might see hanging from a wooden shingle in Kansas City circa 1890, when people needed to know exactly what it was that happened behind the storefront. Such shingles might be emblazoned CHARLES WELLINGHAM CURTIS, ESQ., ATTORNEY AT LAW, or PETE WATSON, GOOD BLACKSMITHIN’ DONE CHEAP. Mine reads: TIM CAHILL, REMOTE JOURNEYS ODDLY RENDERED. It’s what I do. Exactly.
But did this reformulation of the titling process please my discriminating editor, the ever tasteful David Rosenthal? It did not. Missives flew out of his office in New York: “Smart-ass titles,” he averred, tastefully, “help make you palatable to America.”
Palatable? I thought about the word for a bit. And it occurred to me that there was something of an epicurean subtext to the book at hand: Aside from my recommendations for the Malaria Diet, the book contains descriptions of a sautéed sago beetle lunch in Irian Jaya and a drinking session featuring premasticated manioc beer in the Amazon basin. Delicacies. The book’s full of them. Hey, pass the butterworms.
And the question came down from the New York editorial office: Shouldn’t the animal in the title rip your flesh, or eat your leg or something? Don’t the creatures in your titles tend to cause you distress?
Precisely, I replied. Ever eaten a big mass of butterworms?
So there you have it: another precious title.
But, hey, if the contrarian writer from Oregon still wants someone to talk dirty to her, I could do that. It’d be sort of a mild Montana cussing and would probably feature the precious noun thundermug. (This is a local euphemism for a container found under the bed in certain cabins that lack running water. You could use it, I suppose, to pass the butterworms.)
August 27, 1996
Hideout Cabin
Montana
Mongolia: Adventures in You-Cut Hairstyling
There were a dozen of us, riding the immense central Asian grassland on sturdy Mongolian horses. When I glanced back for a view of the glacier and the sacred mountain we had just visited, I saw two tiny specks inching down the steep windswept hillside, moving in our direction. I turned on my horse and glassed the hill with a little four-power Russian monocle. The pursuing riders were coming toward us at a stiff trot. They were at least two miles back and about a thousand feet above us. Each man held something in his right hand. I could plainly see the glint of metal.
“They carrying?” one of the Americans asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Both of them.”
Bayaraa Sanjaasuren, our translator, conveyed the information to the Mongolian wranglers. This was serious: We had yogurt riders on our tail. Again.
“Tchoo,” half a dozen men shouted at once.
Tchoo is the Mongolian equivalent of “giddyap.” Mongolian horses respond smartly to tchoo, no matter who says it. Guy next to you says “tchoo,” you’re off at a gallop. We were riding a dozen men abreast because Mongolians do not ride in single file. A defeated army, they say, rides single file. And now, with the dreaded yogurt riders in pursuit, our little party sounded like the whole first grade trying to imitate a locomotive.
“Tchoo, tchoo …
“Tchoo, tchoo, tchoo …”
Significantly, there is no Mongolian word that corresponds to “whoa.”
We’d been riding eight to twelve hours a day, every day, for a week, and I was fairly comfortable in the old Russian cavalry saddle I’d been given. It was a pair of metal hoops on a wooden frame, covered over in peeling leather stuffed with horsehair. The stirrups were metal hoops connected to the frame with rawhide straps. The Mongolians in our party rode ornate hand-carved wooden saddles, the best of them festooned with beaten silver medallions.
“Tchoo,” I said, and stood up a bit in the saddle so my horse could stretch into his long gallop.
The ground we were approaching, however, was humped up in the marshy tussocks characteristic of soil that is permanently frozen a few feet below the surface. We were only at about 48 degrees north—about the latitude of Seattle—but cold fronts originating in Siberia, to our north, seem to flow down the great Yenisey River, northern Asia’s Amazon, and funnel into Mongolia. Nowhere else in the hemisphere does permafrost extend so far south.
Trees cannot grow in permafrost, and here, in the shadow of the mountain called Otgontenger, with bare hillsides rising to ten thousand feet on all sides, we were sitting ducks. We could run, but we couldn’t hide. There were no fences, no roads, no trees, no telephone poles, no buildings, no cattle or livestock of any kind. It was just us: a dozen or so men, one woman, along with several pack horses and a string of remounts, all of us dwarfed under the immense vault of the sky.
If our party had consisted solely of Mongolians, it might have had a chance. But there were seven Americans in our group and—with one exception—we couldn’t outpace a pair of determined Mongolian horsemen with only a two-mile lead.
As we hit the hummocky marshland, our horses settled into a short hammering trot, which is the gait favored by Mongol riders who want to make time. Mongolian herdsmen churn butter by strapping a jug of milk to the saddle and trotting for ten minutes. This is the truth. I had a bottle of aspirin in my saddle kit, and it had long ago been reduced to powder.
Every night, as I tried to massage whatever it was that was sore and measured out my dose of powdered aspirin, I thought about this: Mongols have a reputation of being the best horsemen on earth, while their horses have what must be the world’s most punishing gait. It was, I concluded, the nature of the land itself that produced this jackhammer trot.
Often the ground was marshy but studded with grassy hummocks, so a horse either
ran tussock to tussock or it stayed in the equally uneven footing of the marsh. Additionally, there were marmot holes everywhere. In places where springs flowed out of rock walls, the relatively warm water melted the permafrost below, and on a warm summer day, a horse could sink into mud up to its withers.
The horses knew the land, and they made their way over it in a jouncing weaving sort of way. The short, punishing gait—I wasn’t the only American who called it the Mongolian Death Trot—fit the terrain perfectly. A horse that extended—that stretched out his trot or gallop—was a horse that was going to break a leg, which is to say it was a dead horse. Mongolia is a harsh land, and only the fittest survive.
Our Mongolian companions, raised in the saddle, simply stood up in their stirrups on legs made of spring steel and pneumatic shock absorbers. The trot was too jouncy for me to raise and lower myself in the saddle, as Western riders do. I could stand, like the Mongolians, but for only a few minutes at a time. Sitting, I had the sensation of internal organs shaking loose. When I looked back after an hour, the yogurt riders had halved the distance between our parties.
Mongolia, sometimes called Outer Mongolia, is an independent country. Inner Mongolia, which borders Mongolia on the east, is part of China, and it was the Chinese who coined what has become a hated terminology: Inner Mongolia is closer to Beijing; Outer Mongolia is further away.
In fact, the country isn’t outer to anywhere. Mongolia is set square in the center of Asia, and lies between Russian Siberia to the north and China to the south. It is protected by impressive natural boundaries: The Altai Mountains rise to fourteen thousand feet in the west; to the north are the dense forests of the Siberian taiga; to the south and east is the Gobi Desert, the coldest, most northerly desert on earth, a place where trekkers still find dinosaur bones scattered across the wind-shattered gravellike sands. These natural boundaries protect the grazing lands of the steppes, in the interior of the country. The average altitude is just about a mile above sea level, making Mongolia one of the highest countries in the world.
