Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  Such purists regard bait fishermen as Neanderthals, spin fishermen as jerks. Some even frown on the use of un-bug-like flies such as I was using. I mean it: They actually frown at you.

  It was snowing heroically. Great swirls of spring snow were spinning up the river and the flakes had given way, in the depths of the canyon, to hard stinging bits of spring snow, indistinguishable from hail.

  I had caught one fish in two days, and it seemed fruitless to flog the water with my outlandish flies and offend the purists at the same time. I sat in the bow of the raft, curled against the cold. The grassy sections of the riverbanks were bright green. The snow had begun to stick in patches, so the world was the gray of the sky, the brown of the river, and Christmas on the bank.

  A herd of mule deer stood on the bank and regarded us with some sarcasm. They stared at the rafts and turned inward for a herd conference: “These are the guys who challenged God to give them bad weather in April in Montana,” they informed one another. Or so it seemed. A large buck gave the signal: “Let’s get out of here,” and they turned, springing up toward a break in the canyon wall—twenty-seven of them fleeing from bad luck until all that was visible of them was their white back ends pogoing up the gray of a rocky draw.

  There was, I noticed, a snowdrift forming on my lap.

  God works in mysterious ways. My reading suggests that She hasn’t taken personal challenges in regard to weather quite seriously since the days of the Old Testament.

  Montana’s weather is changeable enough on the natch. Prudent drivers carry survival gear in the trunks of their cars eight months out of the year. A couple of sleeping bags and a bit of food can be lifesavers in a sudden blizzard. On January 20, 1954, in a mining camp near the Continental Divide at Rogers Pass, the temperature dropped to 70 below zero, a record low for the lower forty-eight states.

  If Montana has the record for bitter cold, it also holds all the records for changeability. On January 23, 1916, an arctic outbreak in Browning dropped the temperature from 44 degrees above zero to 54 below in twenty-four hours. Another American record concerns a warming trend: on January 11, 1980, in Great Falls, Montana, the temperature rose from 32 below zero to 15 above in less than seven minutes.

  More to the point, Montana also enjoys the meteorological oddity of severe late-spring blizzards. In the area east of Great Falls—our general location—a storm bringing 40-mile-an-hour winds dropped forty-five inches of snow on May 17, 1903. The week before, lilacs had been in bloom and people had been planting their gardens.

  Sixty-six years later, on April 24, 1969, after a week of temperatures in the mid- to high eighties, 100-mile-an-hour winds driving freezing snow killed an estimated one hundred thousand head of livestock. Drifts twenty-five feet high covered spring-green grass. Certain towns were blacked out for over a month.

  Indeed, according to meteorologists, unusually warm spring temperatures are a harbinger of the dreaded spring blizzard. Warm air can hold great amounts of moisture, and if a Pacific cold front is approaching—one of those big systems that extends in a long finger from the Gulf of Alaska to California—something nasty is going to happen. As the cold front moves eastward, it pulls warm moisture-laden air up into Montana from the Gulf of Mexico. When the cold front finally spills over the Rockies, it encounters that ridge of warm, wet air coming up from the south. The cold air swirls, counterclockwise, creating an intense area of surface low pressure.

  All of which means that in late spring, in Montana, it is possible to get a bad sunburn on April 24 and be wading thigh-deep through a severe blizzard on April 25.

  The hard wind-driven pellets of snow had given way again to fat swirling flakes that splashed against the skin like a mother-in-law’s kisses. No one was fishing anymore, and those of us who weren’t rowing sat still and morose, freezing in stolid stoicism. The drift on my lap was a foot deep. I wore wool socks over my gloves and a triple layer of jackets. I was shivering involuntarily, but almost numb to the cold. It didn’t seem to matter much anymore.

  One of the other rafts drifted by. I called to the writer, who was rowing. “A wimp, huh?”

  He smiled his bright smile, full of false good cheer, and nodded upriver. We were coming into a deep part of the canyon. The storm had brought scads of wildlife down to the River of Cold Fires: There were deer and raccoon on the banks; there were beaver and coyotes. Someone thought he saw a few mountain goats on the lower ridges of the canyon wall. It was hard to tell if the patches of white were goats or small snowdrifts. There were fir and pine trees clinging impossibly to tiny niches in the canyon walls. They were all covered with a dusting of snow. Downriver, in the wind tunnel of the canyon, snow was falling in twisted ribbons, dancing toward us in a swirling glacial polka.

  It was beautiful, in a savage and entirely unsettling manner. Few people, I knew, were dumb enough to risk the River of Cold Fires in the season of spring blizzards. So the sight belonged to me. It was beautiful and it was mine: the River of Cold Fires in the season of snow. I thought, This is one of those intangible things I’ll own forever because I’ve paid for it, paid for it in equally intangible dues. The idea was wondrous cold comfort. There was a physical sensation that belonged to the idea: some strange combination of cold and inspiration. A rivulet of ice water found its way down my spine and I felt the entire surface of my flesh blossom out into goose bumps.

  In Chief Yali’s Shoes

  “Wabintok Mabel,” Chief Yali Mabel whispered, by way of reverent introduction.

  He held a lit candle under Wabintok’s black and desiccated face. Flickering yellow light illuminated the mouth, which was open wide in a soundless, twisted scream. It was, I understood, a privilege to view Wabintok here, in the sanctity of the men’s hut.

  “Wah,” I said. The Dani expression is, in my opinion, the finest word for “thank you” in the human vocabulary.

  “Wah,” Chief Yali replied politely.

  “Wah,” a number of the other men said.

  The small circular wooden hut smelled of straw, of countless fires, of singed pig fat. Wabintok himself smelled of smoke, and, yes, singed fat. He was, by some village estimates, four hundred years old. I’d never slept in the same hut with a smoked mummy before.

  Chief Yali spoke with some awe about Wabintok, who was his ancestor and a great hero of the Mabel family. “Bintok,” Yali explained, is the Dani word for bamboo knife. Wabintok means “Thank you, Bamboo Knife.” Chief Yali’s ancestor had been a great warrior, a master of the bamboo knife, in the time of ritual war, before the first outsiders came to the valley of the Dani four generations ago.

  The valley, the Grand Baliem Valley, is located in the highlands of New Guinea, specifically in the Indonesian western half of the island, called Irian Jaya. The valley is a mile high, almost fifty miles long, and is home to an estimated one hundred thousand Dani people, short sturdy Papuans who, according to one guidebook “are just now emerging from the Stone Age.”

  I suppose that’s so. Dani women wear grass skirts. The men often wear nasal ornaments made of bone. They sometimes wear feathered headdresses and paint their bodies with special-colored clay, The Dani men are phallocrypts, which means that aside from feathers and bones, they wear penis sheaths. And nothing else.

  In the men’s hut, where Chief Yali invited me to spend the night, the Mabel family men all said that the time of ritual war was past. It was forbidden by the government, illegal. And yet, Yali, a handsome, powerful man who looked to be in his late thirties, sported at least five small circular scars.

  If there was no war, I asked in a roundabout manner, who had fired all those arrows into Yali’s chest and back? Well, it seemed that while there was no war, there were battles now and again.

  And so I spent the night around a smoky fire, gnawing the charred remnants of what had been a piglet a few hours before. We laughed and sang and pounded on logs and talked of glorious battles. We pledged a kind of brotherhood and spoke of the spirit each man feels in his belly and in hi
s heart.

  It seemed to me that Yali could make a hell of a living in America leading “wild man” weekends. He made me promise that I’d come back and visit him, with at least one of my wives.

  Just last month, I mailed Yali a present he had desperately wanted and I had solemnly promised to send him. Certain culturally aware friends thought the gift insensitive. Such goods would “spoil” the naked Dani. Well, a promise is a promise, a brother is a brother, and screw the culturally aware. I like to think of the chief in his feathered headdress, his body paint, and his penis gourd: Yali Mabel, standing proud, wearing his new leather Redwing boots. I know what Yali said when he got the package.

  He said, “Wah!”

  Bonaire

  I could see them, sitting at the bar, disappointed.

  This is it? they were thinking. This is the nightlife? Crab races?

  John and Chuck were winners. They had matched up such elements as “a bathtub in Paris” with the name Jim Morrison. They had identified Billy Idol videos and elucidated storylines on the basis of a single ten-second scene. They had won an MTV contest, these two New York guys in their mid-twenties, and now here they were, on Bonaire, a bucolic Caribbean island in the Netherlands Antilles lying fifty miles north of the Venezuelan coast.

  There was a bar, open to the trade winds, and you could watch the sun set somewhere in the neighborhood of Lake Maracaibo, except a layer of whitish clouds hung on the western horizon every day. The sunset was muted, sickly yellow, except for the occasional purple thunderhead, so that the western sky looked like a bad bruise, slowly healing.

  And now, under this wounded sky, John and Chuck picked numbers from a hat carried by a waitress. Someone turned over a plastic bucket on the cement floor, and several crabs scuttled to illusory freedom. The one labeled “15” crossed the finish line first.

  My crab, number 18, was second and earned me a free drink. Chuck and John wandered over to offer their congratulations. They were, they said, miserable. The island was like a prison. There was a dismal dearth of available fabulous babes. And the nightlife consisted of crab racing. Crab racing!

  Bonaire, it seemed, was not an MTV kinda island.

  Nearby Aruba was alive with glitz, with duty-free shopping, with an ambience not unlike Cancun or Waikiki. Bonaire, by contrast, was sleepy, almost drab, and comparatively undeveloped.

  “Why,” John wondered, “does anyone come here?” He sipped at his Amstel beer and stared at me with genuine astonishment.

  “My favorite island on earth,” I said.

  “Why?” A chorus from John and Chuck.

  “Scuba diving,” I said. Chuck cocked his head in an anticipatory manner, waiting for the punch line. But there was no knee slapper involved. Just a long, convoluted story about travel and water and astonishment. It’s a love story.

  I was whining, as ten-year-olds will, about the fact that life was passing me by. Waukesha, Wisconsin, was too small for me. I yearned to travel, to drink in the heady aura of such exotic towns as, oh, Janesville, Beloit, Kenosha. My father, pragmatic man, suggested that I try out for the YMCA swimming team, which traveled the state.

  It was, I think now, a lust for travel that fueled my preteen desire to turn myself into an outboard motor. A yellowed newspaper clipping from the time reads: “Young Tim Cahill recently set a new record in the 20-yard freestyle at a YMCA meet in Green Bay.” I competed in high school and was successful enough to earn an athletic grant in aid from the University of Wisconsin. The UW swim team flew to South Bend, Indiana; to Ann Arbor, Michigan; to Columbus, Ohio. I had never been on an airplane before.

  After graduation, I took a series of part-time jobs of the sort commonly attributed to authors of first novels. I was a longshoreman, warehouseman, landscaper—all that. Some of my journalism was getting published, and when the editors of a scuba-diving magazine asked me to write for them, I signed on gladly. Water was a remedy: Swimming was succor and abundance. It had afforded me some notoriety in my athletic career and paid my way through college. Now it would send me around the world. The South Pacific, Australia, the Caribbean …

  And maybe because I was reasonably good at writing about the life of the sea—the poor man’s Jacques Cousteau—other magazines began sending me to remote and exotic locales, many of which were a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.

  I’ve been making my living in this way for twenty years. Sometimes, I think, I’ve gotten a little jaded.

  In my third year of scuba travel, I dove Bonaire. Experts consider the island one of the three best scuba destinations in the world. This, of course, is a subjective judgment, so the other two “best” dive sights might include Truk, Palau, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the barrier reef off Belize, the Red Sea, Fiji, the Coral Sea, or New Guinea. To my taste, Bonaire was, and remains, the pinnacle of safe hassle-free diving. Rental equipment is in good repair, dive boats leave on schedule, and dive masters are knowledgeable. Which wouldn’t make a whole hell of a lot of difference if the underwater gardens weren’t so spectacularly baroque.

  The island, only 12 degrees north of the equator, is situated directly in the warm water reef building zone. Substantially south of the trajectory of most hurricanes, the reefs are seldom savaged by the kind of storm that has devastated more northerly islands. Bonaire, in fact, thrives (modestly) on scuba tourism. Farsighted local dive operators—Don Stewart and Peter Hughes, among others—have seen to it that the surrounding coral gardens have been protected for thirty years now.

  Corals, of course, are living communities of tiny polyplike animals that have surrounded themselves with a limestone shell. Each community devises its own structure, so some corals branch out like elkhorns, some form sheets against the rock, and others look like rounded balls with curious lobelike indentations and are called brain coral. Off the beach near a place called Karpata, deep ravines run down to 120 feet; there, green “sheeting” coral covers subaqueous rocky spires, so they look like armored pagodas. Woven into the deep green of this sheeting coral are strands of iridescent purple.

  A different form of coral, the soft corals—sea fans and whips and rods and fingers—sway gently. The fans, some of them ten feet high, ten feet across—are perfect examples of psychedelic macramé.

  Nearly transparent trumpet fish hang head down in a forest of golden sea whips, waiting for an inattentive meal. The big clownish-colored parrot fish, with their horny mouths, tear away at the rocky coral—the polyp’s limestone shell—to eat the algae forming there. These fish—several varieties of red and green and blue parrot fish, some of them two and a half feet long—don’t much mind divers watching them feed, though if you get above one and cast a shadow, it disappears in a series of sharp angles. Startled, the fish usually engages its waste disposal system. The finely ground limestone emanating from the back end of countless parrot fish has formed the flourlike white sand beaches of Bonaire.

  There are shimmering clouds of foot-long black-and-blue-and-green triggerfish. Smaller tangs—gold or blue or some combination of those colors—go about their business, in company with black or blue-green angel fish; with longsnout butterfly fish; with jackknifes, and sad-eyed red squirrel fish and rock hind. On a late afternoon dive, when the sky is cloudy, a single pillar of celestial light sometimes enters the water at a slanting angle, and there, amidst the coralline pagodas, with shifting schools of scenic fish on all sides, the diver feels at one with the flash and shimmer of life itself.

  Liquid heaven, one diver of my acquaintance calls it.

  The dive boat leaves at nine in the morning. Get up, pull on a swimming suit and maybe a T-shirt. Walk down to the pier, pick up your gear bag, which is numbered and hung on a wall leading out to the water. There are eighteen divers, suiting up en route. It is never very far to a good dive site on Bonaire.

  Putting on the gear—weights to hold a body down in the buoyancy of seawater, an inflatable vest to compensate for the weights, the tank, the mask, the fins—is the most difficult physica
l work involved in the dive.

  I am still barely awake when the boat stops at the north end of the island, where giant cactus march up sun-blasted slopes that look a little like the deserts of Baja California on steroids. The cacti are so plentiful that local farmers build highly effective fences with the thorny monsters.

  Roll into the blood-warm sea. The gear renders me neutrally buoyant underwater. Inhale, and I rise a few feet; exhale, and I descend a like amount. Kick once and I am flying over rolling, multicolored reefs. My style—this compulsion to cover a lot of territory, fast—is called reef running.

  I like to overload the sensory neurons with color and movement and life. Coral gardens have always snapped the thread of linear thought for me. The sensation is a timeless blast of déjà vu. I am weightless; I am flying now, yes, exactly as I fly in my dreams.

  I stop to examine a truly alien being. The peacock flounder is a flat gold-and-purple-spotted fish, quite round and about the size of a 33 rpm record. The creature was born a symmetrical fish, but a few days after its birth, one eye migrated to the other. The fish swims a few inches above a sandy bottom, looking up at me, mildly, with two closely spaced extraterrestrial eyes.

  And not far away is a favorite site. In a forest of swaying golden sea whips, is an alcove in the reef wall containing a flat green barrel sponge that looks like an easy chair for an underwater hobbit. A twisting purple tube sponge with several branches grows next to the chair, like a shade tree. In back of the chair there is a small white sea fan set against red and green sheet coral, like a picture on the wall. All around me, on all sides, clouds of scenic fish—purple-black damsels and golden butterflies—shift and sway, catching the afternoon light in a prismatic rhapsody.