Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  “… diez y seis, diez y ocho …”

  The ceremony had been going on for four hours. I felt as if I were drowning, sinking into some wavering subaqueous darkness and looking up toward a surface that was receding from me at some velocity. It was an unrelenting struggle to stay awake during this, the most public, the most visible, part of a prestigious international sporting event. I felt as if I had been condemned to some fifth-century Zen monastery and sentenced to a month of “wall gazing,” that mind-numbing spiritual exercise designed to help a novice learn the essential truth that only consciousness is real, not its objects.

  The unreal objects in question were fish. Mostly, the fish looked like Bermuda chub or garibaldi: hundreds of them. All these fat drab-looking fish had been taken on this, the first day of competition in the nineteenth (the promoters favored Roman numerals XIX) Campeonato Mundial de Caza Submarina: the world breath-hold spearfishing championships. Representatives of twenty-four nations were present, here in Ilo, Peru, which is on the Pacific Ocean, in the southern part of the country, down near the border with Chile. The U.S., Japan, Spain, Italy, France, Brazil, Argentina, Tahiti, and Australia were involved in the competition, along with some countries I don’t necessarily associate with spearfishing: Croatia, Russia, Slovenia, Namibia, and Turkey.

  “Forty-five fish,” the announcer said, “for the team from Denmark.” This wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of fish. The audience applauded lightly. It would be hours until I learned if the United States team had similarly disgraced itself. Hours. I felt as if I had been flung into the fishy abyss, dark waters closing in around me, and enlightenment was not forthcoming.

  To get to Ilo, it was necessary to rent a car in Tacna, the nearest town with an airport, and drive a hundred miles east, across a high, wind-savaged plateau on the northern edge of the Atacama Desert. Several hundred miles south of that road, one great stretch of the Atacama, the dryest land on earth, has enjoyed less than one inch of rain in the past century. My road ran straight, over high desert, most of it at two thousand to twenty-five hundred feet, all arid plains and low rolling hills covered over in sand the color of sun-dried leather and cement. The steeper hillocks were ribbed with the pattern of the wind. Dust devils whirled in the distance, and occasionally one seemed to spring up out of nowhere to batter the car I was driving from the side with the booming thud of a bass drum. The car rocked sideways on its tires and the wheel twisted in my hands.

  The air was gray with blowing sand and with the perpetual winter mist that hangs over Peru’s southern coastal deserts. The mist, called the Garua, was curiously dry and did not condense on the windshield. The midday sun was a gray little ball that I could stare directly into without squinting.

  Just before the first of what proved to be three military checkpoints in a hundred miles, I stopped to pick up a man in an expensive leather coat, carrying a clipboard. He looked intelligent and respectable. I figured I could practice my rusty Spanish on him.

  The man, in fact, was a police officer, and I was allowed to work on my inflections and conjugations during a fairly mild interrogation at sixty miles an hour. He was, inexplicably, hitchhiking back and forth between checkpoints, and we played show-and-tell with my driver’s license and car-rental papers while dust devils twisted in agony on all sides.

  What was my business in Peru?

  “I go now to Campeonato. You know?”

  Happily, in Peru, they don’t arrest you for speaking Spanish like Tarzan.

  “The president,” my policeman friend told me, “will be in Ilo tomorrow, to open the Campeonato.”

  So, I asked, there is no longer any trouble with the Sendaro Luminoso?

  The Shining Path guerrillas, a Maoist cadre based in the southern mountains of Peru, had managed in their time to cause $22 billion worth of damage and to kill 27,000 people. In September 1992, the leader of the Shining Path guerrillas, Abimael Guzman, was captured. Since then, most of the other leaders have been killed or captured.

  “Absolutely no problems,” the policeman said.

  Not here anyway, I thought. If what was left of the Shining Path wanted to disrupt the World Spearfishing Championship, they’d have to come down out of their camps in the forested mountains to the east, march across a hundred and more miles of empty desert, and make their way past at least three major military bases, complete with tanks, helicopters, and fighter planes. Taking out a marching column of guerrillas in this desert would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

  The international spearfishing event, it seemed, was partially an effort to demonstrate Peru’s military progress to the rest of the world. A pacified Peru could hold itself out to various financial markets as a swell investment opportunity.

  I asked the policeman if things were better in Peru these days.

  “There is more money,” he said, “but the same people still get rich.”

  The road to Ilo rose over coastal mountains of about three thousand feet, then dropped down a steeply precipitous route to the coast. Wind-driven sand piled up on the road like heavy gray snowdrifts, and a crew of twelve men worked with shovels and wheelbarrows to clear the highway. The men’s clothes were sandblasted, gray, and they wore bandannas over their mouths. What could be seen of their faces was the color of the sand and the sky and the sea. They were gray men shoveling sand in a sandstorm every day of the week, every day of their working lives.

  The city of Ilo was hunkered down in a block along a desolate coastline, where heavy seas pounded against pinnacles of rock set at various distances from the shore. The sea stacks were a darker gray than the sea itself, and even on the road, five hundred feet above the shore, I could see great waves exploding against rock. Spray burst off the islets, momentary silver eruptions, bright against the dirty sky. Ilo itself looked bleak: thousands of small, square gray cement buildings huddled together before the pitiless immensity of the Pacific Ocean.

  One of the outlying neighborhoods was called the City of Flowers, and it sat on a flat beach, some distance from the downtown area. There were no flowers, no gardens, no lawns. The City of Flowers was a conglomeration of one- and two-story cement houses, set square on the hard-packed desert. There was no color anywhere, not in this area, where blowing sand would peel paint back to bare concrete in a matter of months. All the houses were gray, cement-gray, and the only paint I saw was that stenciled onto every fifth building, a fading announcement advising passersby that there was CEMENT FOR SALE.

  The people from the City of Flowers, from the barrio of Kennedy, from everywhere: They were all downtown. There was some kind of parade rolling down the main street, with marching bands and floats and men on horseback, who waved at the cheering crowds that lined the streets. A group of little girls wearing great tin-foil wings painted gold marched by, and because they looked more angelic than anything that ever came out of the Italian Renaissance, I imagined they were meant to be angels.

  The angels marched under large, colorful, very professional-looking banners that stretched across the street. The banners, in Spanish, read: WELCOME TO THE XIX WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP SPEAR-FISHING CONTEST and NEIGHBOR, REMEMBER: THE TOURIST IS YOUR FRIEND and IF YOU LIVE IN ILO, WORK FOR ILO, LOVE ILO and I LOVE ILO. Love was represented by a red heart. Soldiers in full combat gear, carrying automatic weapons, manned the parade barricades.

  In what looked like the town’s largest hotel, the lobby was packed with sophisticated international travelers speaking Greek and Italian and Danish and Portuguese. Were there any rooms available? The desk clerk said it was to laugh. The hotel had been booked up in advance for months. One of the French speakers, a man named Philippe Lavarelo, stepped up to help. He worked in the French embassy in Lima, and the French were a big presence in the hotel. There was even a video team poised to document what looked like a good chance for a French victory. With Philippe’s help, the clerk was able to find me a windowless basement room.

  Philippe said that the French team had already been in Ilo for five weeks, scoutin
g the waters. Since it was difficult to bring boats into Peru, Philippe had used his consular connections to secure two quick Zodiacs for scouting purposes. Most of the rest of the international teams had to make do with the slow, clunky wooden scout boats supplied by the city of Ilo. A brass band marched by outside. Somewhere down on the waterfront, a huge crowd cheered some announcement—the sound of a touchdown two blocks from the stadium.

  And tomorrow, the president of Peru would arrive to open the ceremonies.

  The American team didn’t believe it.

  “A reporter,” Jon Bergren said. He was the captain of the team.

  “No one covers us,” Bill Ernst said.

  The other team members—René Rojas, John Plikus, and Beuchat Picasso Mares—agreed.

  Spearfishing was big in Europe. There is even a glossy European magazine about breath-hold events. It is called Apnea, a Greek word meaning a transient suspension of respiration. For the Europeans, a win in this event meant a breathless spread in Apnea; it meant big money in equipment endorsement. The top European divers, men like Italy’s Renzo Mazzari, were international celebrities, on a par with downhill racers and top-notch cyclists. The Italian team, it was rumored, had spent $100,000 on preparations for the event.

  There was a lot of international pride and prestige involved as well. Many countries sponsored divers through the military.

  The American team, by contrast, had precisely nothing in the way of sponsors. Its members paid their own way, had to figure some way to take two weeks off from work, had no hope of lucrative commercial endorsements and no one at the American embassy working overtime on their behalf. The last thing they expected was coverage in the media.

  It was a disparate group of athletes. Jon Bergren, for instance, had some real estate investments in Connecticut and was working overtime to survive in a bad market. Bill Ernst was a fireman. Beuchat Picasso Mares, of Miami, originally from Cuba, was possessed of an exuberant personality—you could envision him wearing one of those fluorescent ruffle-sleeved mambo shirts—and is the only world-class diver I ever met whose business card identifies him as a “world-class diver.” René Rojas, originally from Chile, was a quiet, self-effacing man who ran a commercial diving operation out of California. He collected sea urchins for the Japanese market, and dove wearing a helmet. It was a one-man operation, and René said that when his topside pump gave out, the air down below got thin and that was his signal to swim to the surface. I got the impression that if René weren’t a top-notch breath-hold diver, he’d be pretty much defunct.

  The teammates, who had all the reason in the world to act like Shriners on convention, were for the most part self-contained, even thoughtful men. Nobody was drinking alcohol, looking for nooky, or spoiling for a fight. They displayed precisely none of the dumb-ass loutishness that characterizes the downside fringe of hunting. John Plikus, at thirty, was the youngest of them. Spearfishing, it seemed, was one of those sports, like high-altitude mountaineering, that rewards experience and judgment over youth and strength.

  The team, as a whole, seemed secure, even contemplative. They were chock-full of self-knowledge—or so I imagined—and appeared to be guys who had actually found a measure of enlightenment in the fishy abyss. I wondered if it was something about the sport itself that generated such calm self-assurance. These guys might have been a delegation of monks, except that they hadn’t even begun to master the squirming basic human urge to kick ass in international competition.

  I asked if the American team had a chance to win.

  Only, it seemed, if they got lucky. The Chileans and Peruvians knew these waters and were in their home arena. The big European teams had been scouting for over a month. They had fish-finding sonar equipment, and Global Positioning Devices to locate underwater pinnacles where fish congregate. The American team had been in Ilo for one week, and they scouted the waters the old-fashioned way, which is to say they spent a lot of time swimming around with their eyes open. Since world-class divers were fairly evenly matched, scouting made all the difference in these competitions: You had to know where the fish were going to be.

  What the Americans had going for them was this: the rough, cold, gray waters exploding off sea stacks; the kelp beds; the limited visibility of five to thirty feet—these were similar to conditions off the coast of New England, and off the Pacific West Coast.

  I’ve done a little spearfishing myself, but I knew precisely nothing about spearfishing competitions. Consequently, before my trip to Peru, I had made a few calls. Bob Lea, a marine biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, said that the state had been monitoring competition sites since 1958 and that he himself had been doing it for fifteen years. There were regulations that had to be followed, as there were in Peru, and he felt that spearfishermen had no more effect on the “resource” than hook-and-line sportsmen did. Repetitive competitions in the same area could damage a fishery, but even in Peru, with a small army of the best underwater hunters in the world working six hours a day for two days, there would be no long-term deleterious effect. It was a one-time event.

  In fact, Bob Lea knew Bill Ernst. “A lot of these guys,” he said, “are very conservation-oriented.”

  In Peru, I discovered something else about them: something admirable, and self-contained, and almost—how to put this?—almost, well, Zen-like.

  I found a press office, and asked a few of the bright young people—college students majoring in communications, I imagined—where all the speared fish would go. They were, I was told, to be given away to “mothers’ clubs”—groups of mothers banded together to feed their families—and to comedores populares, inexpensive and subsidized restaurants serving poor neighborhoods.

  Was it possible to see the fish being distributed?

  This was treated as an odd request. The Campeonato was about parades and ceremonies and international fellowship. It was about Peru’s place in the community of nations. Why would a reporter want to watch the government give away food to poor people?

  I explained—tactfully, I thought—that in my country, the government might be so interested in the ceremony or the competition that the fish would be allowed to rot. Either that, or some clever hustler—the mayor’s nephew, for instance—might make a lot of money on a couple of truckloads of free fish.

  One of the women said she’d see what she could do. I could come back later.

  The next day, there was another parade: the military band and the angels and the men on horseback, along with teams from twenty-four nations—all of them marching down to the town’s central plaza, where President Alberto Fujimori spoke. The place was packed. Even the rooftops were thronged. Fujimori never mentioned the Shining Path guerrillas, but he said that the fact that such an event could be held in Peru proved beyond doubt that the country had finally been pacified. The underlying message was, as I thought it might be, that Peru would be a great place for foreigners to invest money.

  I gave several Australians a ride back to a hotel two miles out of town, where the competitors were to meet the president in a more private ceremony. I pulled into a likely spot, but a soldier tapped on my window with an automatic weapon and told me that I had to park in another lot. There were six more soldiers watching the car, a few standing on the rocks overlooking the beach, and another half dozen of them watching the road. “Geez,” one of the Australians said, “they’re serious about parking here.”

  The Americans posed for photos, then went up to their rooms, where they worked on their equipment. The spearguns looked to be about twelve to fifteen feet long and were powered by two lengths of stretched surgical tubing. Each team consisted of five men: three divers, an alternate diver, and a captain.

  I had brought along my own gear, and I asked if I could dive with the American team during the competition. It wasn’t even remotely possible. The rules were very strict. Someone diving as an observer, for instance, might have a speargun stashed underwater and would be able to pass fish to a competing diver.


  “Do people do that sort of thing?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” Jon Bergren said.

  International spearfishing, it turns out, is a cut-throat sort of sport. Bill Ernst told me a story about an event in which a diver spent the month before a major competition illegally feeding fish in a large underwater cave. On the day of the event, he took up a position at the mouth of that cave and got quite a few fish. Not many more than nearby divers, but an hour into the hunt, all the fish in the competition area began migrating to the cave, where they had been fed for the last month. The diver cleaned them out. Nowadays, judges watched for that sort of thing.

  In any case, it was unlikely I could keep up. The fact that I had once been a pretty fair freestyle sprinter, good enough to compete on the national level, didn’t cut much ice.

  “You could recruit an Olympic champion,” Jon Bergren said, “and it would take him at least two years to start winning competitions just on the local level.”

  Sure, short bursts of speed were important, but the event is six hours long. A diver wants to control his metabolic processes—he wants to keep his heart beating at a low rate: forty, fifty times a minute. I thought, Great Holy Buddha on the mountaintop: It is a Zen kind of deal.

  And there were dangers not immediately obvious. If you breath-hold dive enough, the body seems to get it. Oxygen-rich blood is not pumped to the extremities. Good divers reach a place where the body no longer screams at them to breathe. This poses a danger. In 1986, during a Florida competition, Phil Whisniwski died while trying to pull a fish he’d speared out of a cave in eighty feet of water.