Wild Ducks Flying Backward

by Tom Robbins

  The honky dude sported a massive, saw-log erection (doesn’t phallic graffiti invariably distort in the direction of largeness?), and it was pointed at the vagina like a cannon at a clam. The clumsiness of the execution, the image’s total lack of emotional subtlety or spiritual dimension underscores the difference between so-called primitive cultures and those of the European invaders. It’s the difference between harmony and aggression, wisdom and shallowness, art and pornography.

  Although safely out of the state now, I still wouldn’t want to say that the figure is indicative of a “dick first” attitude that continues to epitomize west-central Nevada. Nevertheless, I should mention one further thing about the man carved on the rock. As he moves to possess the object of his sexual passion, the rough ol’ dude is wearing a hat.

  Esquire, 1988

  Two in the Bush

  So you tell your girlfriend you’re going to take her on a holiday to one of the most romantic spots on earth, and after she has tastefully demonstrated her gratitude and delight, she asks how she should pack. For the mountains? For the shore? For the samba clubs of Rio or the boulevards of gay Par-ee?

  “Oh,” you say, “just throw a few things together that’ll get you by in a swamp.”

  Naturally, she thinks you’re kidding, even after she notices you laying in a supply of mosquito repellant and aquasocks. And when you finally usher her into the Victoria Falls Hotel, following a spine-numbing twenty-two-hour flight, she smiles simultaneously at the pleasing surroundings and what she believes was your little joke. The Vic Falls, perhaps the lone nineteenth-century colonial hotel still operating in southern Africa, may have a run or two in its safari stockings, a few stains on its bush jacket, but it’s as romantic as the last act of a bad operetta.

  Seedily luxurious, the low, rambling wings of the Vic Falls are tickled by palm fronds, scampered over by monkeys, serviced by an attentive staff in starched white livery, and moistened by mists from cataracts so immense they make Niagara seem like a leaky faucet. Your girlfriend is really settling into the place, especially its spacious patio, but the ice has hardly melted in her second gin-and-tonic before you’ve booked passage on Air Botswana, and toward the end of the next afternoon, the two of you are flying over territory that decidedly resembles… swamp. Vast, horizon-to-horizon swamp. You’re made a trifle sad by the look she gives you.

  For reasons that are typically African (where all the clocks have elastic hands and rubber faces), yet difficult to explain, the flight from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to Maun, Botswana, arrives nearly two hours late, and as you wait for your luggage, the guide who has met you at the yam-patch airport is nervously glancing from his watch to the sky and back again. “We have a ways to go, and we’ve got to get there before dark,” you explain to your companion. When she asks, “Suppose we don’t?” you shrug. You’re afraid of what she might answer if you inquire if she’s ever spent the night with a slobbering beast.

  Before long you’re motorboating up a reedy, sullen river, exchanging waves with folks who’ve never so much as heard of George Bush, even though their relatives are Bushmen. Before you can think to congratulate them, they, their huts, and their goats have vanished, and your boat is alone on a waterway that twists through the aquatic flora like a spastic vegetarian through a salad bar, and whose banks are closing in on you from both sides. The river narrows into a channel. The channel into a hippopotamus path.

  Meanwhile, the sun has slipped below the palm-fringed horizon and the temperature is dropping so fast you think it must have fallen off a cliff. It gets later and later, darker and darker, colder and colder, lonelier and lonelier, the route more and more crooked, the papyrus beds more and more dense, and your girlfriend has to pee so bad she must gnaw on her camera strap to stifle a howl.

  Still, the emerging stars are flamboyant, the birdcalls crystalline, the frog din hypnotic, and the situation really isn’t all that horrifying, considering how lost you appear to be.

  Then you hit the WALL OF GNATS!

  You call it a wall instead of a cloud because clouds don’t usually give a person whiplash. You’re talking about the force of trillions of tiny bugs per cubic foot here, gnat cheek to gnat jowl, and you’re swallowing gnats and breathing gnats while National Enquirer headlines—COUPLE DROWNS IN GNAT TSUNAMI—dance before your gnat-blinded eyes. On you bore, meter after meter, into the LIVING WALL!, certain you’re within a gnat’s hair of asphyxiation, until the wall suddenly crumbles away as inexplicably as it materialized, and in the distance you glimpse a flicker of light that’s of apparent human fabrication.

  In ten minutes you’re docked at Ntswi Island, a campfire and a beefy meal in your immediate future. Ah, but any illusion that things are now hunky-dory disappears when you discover that your girlfriend couldn’t quite hold it until she reached the thatched latrine. There’s nothing like wet pants to throw a wet blanket on swampland romance.

  Add to that some loud-mouthed hippos reciting the Hippocratic oath a few-score yards from your tent, and the savage chill that is piercing your lightweight sleeping bag (in Botswana, mid-June has turned out to be midwinter: you’d think those people south of the equator could get their seasons straight), and you have a night that belongs to misery, not to Michelob. You greet the dawn with no more glee than your significantly silent sweetie.

  Gradually, however, you warm to the place and it to you. Before the afternoon is over, the temperature will have hit eighty—a fifty-degree swing that occurs each day—and the sky will have pinned blue ribbons to every lapel of the Okavango delta, irrefutably a first-prize swamp.

  The Okavango is the largest inland delta in the world. It’s formed when the Okavango River, overfed by floodwaters from the rains of Angola, runs headlong into the Kalahari Desert, and skids to a stop without ever reaching the sea. The result is seventeen thousand square kilometers of channels, lagoons, reedbeds, grass pans, and islands. The water is pure enough to drink, warm enough to bathe in, although if you splash for more than ten minutes, a drooling crocodile will usually show up and demand a wine list. In a week, however, your party sees not one poisonous snake nor one squadron of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, lest anyone think to compare it with the Everglades. As for the WALL OF GNATS!, it seems to have gone the way of the walls of Jericho, the Iron Curtain, and a flasher’s longjohns.

  What you do see in this glistening oasis of water lilies, phoenix palms, and melapo grass are storks and fish eagles, hornbills and bee-eaters; you see parrots, vultures, lilac-breasted rollers, and literally hundreds of other ornithological showpieces. Everywhere, great wings beat the air as if it were a drum, and when the day chorus of doves and cuckoos punches off duty, the more esoteric night birds come on-line.

  On the larger islands—and some are many times the size of Manhattan—there is game. Big game. Buffalo, giraffe, zebra, elephant, lion, leopard, et al.; most of the stereotypes of the African tableau, although they appear anything but stereotypical when you’re stalking them on foot, and worrying if they might be stalking you. Hiking unarmed through acacia thornbush, in fairly close proximity to the wildest of animals, gives your Okavango experience that dark edge of danger without which romance is merely the sappy side of lust.

  Tranquillity is also a necessary component of romantic adventure, and there’s no shortage of peaceful epiphanies in this watery Eden. Early each morning, your party pushes off in dugout canoes hollowed out from the single trunks of sausage trees. Powered by a native guide with a twelve-foot pole, you glide noiselessly along the hippo paths, your bow knocking a shower of dew pearls from the papyrus tops, whiffs of nectar in the air, as all about you fin, fang, and feather receive the Day-Glo kiss of the slowly rising sun.

  After a day of walking and marveling, you are poled back to tiny Ntswi Isle, where, at a primitive open-air bar decorated with skulls, that same sun, setting now, is reflected off cold cans of local beer. The dusk belongs to Lion Lager.

  And one evening, sure enough, beneath the gloriously exotic co
nfiguration of the Southern Cross—it happens to be the night after a bull elephant drank the sudsy water in which your girlfriend had just washed out her underthings, an act that filled you with a perverse mixture of revulsion and jealousy—your paramour interrupts the Okavango concert of cricket and ibis and mystery beast to whisper, “Baby, it’s a known fact that you’ve got depraved taste, but I think you may be right about this ol’ swamp. It’s the most romantic spot on earth.”

  Esquire, 1990

  Note: Water with short grass growing in it is a bog. Water with tall grass growing in it is a marsh. Water with trees growing in it is a swamp. Technically, then, the Okavango delta is much more marsh than swamp. For failing to honor that distinction back in 1990, I now voluntarily surrender my poetic license for one year.

  The Eight-Story Kiss

  At a distance—and it can be seen from bridges and causeways more than a mile away—it seems to rise out of the sea, huge and rosy, like Godzilla in a prom dress: pretty in pink. And one can be forgiven for imagining that one is gazing at the single biggest, pinkest Big Pink thing on a planet where, admittedly, not many things manage to be simultaneously massive in scale and vivid of hue. At least, not of that hue normally associated with cotton candy, Pepto-Bismol, and girlie underwear.

  I’ve never spent a night at the Don CeSar Resort Hotel in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, but I’ve been there many times. I go there to lounge in the lobby, drink in the bar, wander the grounds, and partake of a Sunday seafood buffet that, as near as I can judge, is unequaled anywhere for bounty, variety, and flavor. Mostly, however, I go there to experience the pinkness.

  There was a time when pink was the unofficial state color of Florida, a perfect chromatic complement to sunny skies, green palms, and turquoise waters. The luxurious Don CeSar, built in 1928 and periodically remodeled, is a proudly surviving relic of Old Florida, the paradisiacal, magnetic Florida that in the first half of the 20th century sweetened the dreams and warmed the fantasies of generations of snowbound Americans.

  The hotel has its counterparts in Miami, to be sure, but Miami is a scene, man; Miami is hip, whereas St. Pete Beach is so untrendy as to be genuinely cool. And the Don CeSar Hotel, along with what’s left of the Everglades and the House of Prayer Bar-B-Cue in Ft. Lauderdale, is one of the most compelling reasons for visiting a tragically overdeveloped state that has far too many concealed weapons, far too few sane drivers, and that by and large has left its pink period behind it.

  The Don CeSar’s bar—embedded in the dim inner recesses of this citadel of tropical nostalgia like a coffee bean in a kilo of aspic—is the sort of place that inspires the consumption of strawberry margaritas. One afternoon there, I was even moved to quaff pink ladies, the favorite libation of pink-haired ladies who coif pink poodles, a breed of beast not entirely absent from the hotel’s premises. In fact, the Don CeSar itself is kind of a pink poodle, although there’s nothing really frou-frou about the resort. It doesn’t sing out, “I’m cute,” but rather, “I’m relaxed. I’m on permanent holiday alongside the Gulf of Mexico, I’m comfortable and happy-go-lucky and festive and affluent and free to be any damn color I choose to be, and I choose to be—PINK!”

  Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down. Pink is the boudoir color, the cherubic color, the color of Heaven’s gates. (Not pearly or golden, brothers and sisters: pink.) Pink is as laid back as beige, but while beige is dull and bland, pink is laid back with attitude. The Don CeSar (275 rooms and all the water sports a bipedal mammal can handle) wears that attitude well. It knows that it looks as if it were carved out of bubblegum, as if it mutated from a radioactive conch patch, as if it leaked from the vat where old flamingos go to dye—but the Don CeSar doesn’t care. It simply winks, lazily flaunts its pigmentation, and like a cartoon panther who’s peddled its last lucrative roll of home insulation, turns its face to the sun.

  Because pink, unique in the spectrum, is essentially paradoxical, the decorator’s paint of choice for Mexican brothel and New England nursery, it’s called upon to signify both naughtiness and innocence. Thus when I describe the Don CeSar as architecturally affectionate, a kind of structural kiss, I’m referring not only to hot and hungry honeymoon osculation but to that chaste smooch a young Esther Williams used to blow to all the shivering northern masses just before she dove into a pellucid pool way back there in a more innocuous age.

  In a different mood, I’m also inclined to think of the Don CeSar as shrimp cocktail for the eyes. And as long as it doesn’t change color, I’ll keep stopping by every year or so for a taste of it. Someday, I may go so far as to book a room there. You can tell it to the CIA, you can tell it to the FBI, you can tell it to Jerry Falwell and all the little Falwells: when it comes to beach hotels, comrades, I’m a dedicated pinko.

  National Geographic Traveler, 2000

  The Cannibal King Wants His Din-Din

  When the roosters that scratch in the yard of Brastagi’s best hotel crowed me awake that steamy tropical dawn, I, personally, wasn’t feeling all that cocky. In retrospect, however, I suppose I might be forgiven had I rolled out of bed with a bit of attitude because—believe it or not—before the Sumatran sun would set, I, an unassuming, modern, civilized commoner with a taste for donuts and garden vegetables, would be brandishing the savage scepter of a man-eating monarchy. That’s right. Tom, King of the Cannibals!

  The previous day had been interesting enough, much of it spent at a jungle outpost that functions as an orangutan rehabilitation center. No, no, Indonesia’s population of big red apes isn’t plagued by drug or alcohol problems, but some of the goofily beautiful animals (imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger crossed with Lucille Ball and the prototype for the Gerber Baby) do suffer an addiction of an even more dangerous sort. Captured as infants to be pets in the households of the rich, they develop a fondness for and a dependency on human companionship. When they grow too large and powerful to be any longer manageable around the house, the domesticated primates are turned over to a government agency that transports them to a wilding compound in the mountains where they’re gradually taught to fend for themselves and be mistrustful of men. An excellent idea, of course, since every living thing on this planet, including men, would be wise to be mistrustful of men. But I digress.

  My little group was in northwestern Sumatra to raft the Alas, a remote river that cuts through the rainforest with a silver track, offering a few thrilling rapids, but, most alluringly, daily opportunities to spy on truly wild orangutans and, if we were lucky, an Asian rhino or a tiger or two. (We tried not to consider possible encounters with cobras or kraits.)

  An exploratory party from Sobek, the California-based adventure company, had accomplished the very first rafting of the Alas only months before, and we—eight paying passengers, four Sobek guides, and an Indonesian forest ranger who spent his spare time reading Louis L’Amour westerns—were to be the second rafters ever to run the strand.

  So serenely did we conceal our nervous excitement that morning that we could have been compared to a bag of marshmallows at a Girl Scout camp. After nibbling at the hotel’s advertised “American breakfast” (chilled fried eggs, diced papaya, and processed cheese), we hurried aboard a snub-nosed buslike vehicle of unknown manufacture to be driven to the spot deep in the leafy hills where we’d be putting our inflatable boats in the water.

  Adventure travel is by definition unpredictable, however, and we never reached the Alas, alas, at least not that day. Instead, acting on a fortuitous tip from a Mobil Oil geologist that a rare daylong exhumation ceremony was about to unfold in an isolated village of the Karo Batak tribe, we detoured, parallel-parked between two water buffalo, and, following the oilman’s crude map, hiked five miles into an anthropologist’s dream.

  Aside from the occasional oil explorer, timber cruiser, or misguided Christian missionary, the Karo Batak had never been exposed to blue-eyed devils. Yet, when—blue eyes as wide as poker chips—our foreign mob suddenly appeared out
of nowhere, we were received as honored guests. So gracious was their hospitality, in fact, that after a confab, tribal leaders declared that a pair from our group would be crowned king and queen for the day.

  Being both very strong and very sweet, the guide Beth was a logical choice for queen. Why they chose me as their king I haven’t a clue. Certainly it had nothing to do with my literary reputation, although some novelists are known to practice verbal cannibalism, biting and gnawing on one another insatiably at cocktail parties or in reviews.

  At any rate, our hosts escorted Beth and me to sexually segregated longhouses where they wrapped us in regal sarongs and other colorful raiments and hung about thirty pounds of solid gold jewelry—the village treasury—from our respective necks and appendages. (They must have figured we were too weighted down to skip town.)

  There was then a royal procession back to the principal longhouse, where now on display were the remains of seven persons recently exhumed from the graves where they’d lain for years while their families saved enough money to fund the ceremony that would finally usher their spirits into the Karo Batak version of heaven. The bones were lovingly washed, dried, and stacked in seven neat piles, a skull atop each pile like some kind of Halloween cherry. Then the celebration began.

  Beth disappeared into a shadowy corner where she remained for hours (afraid, perhaps, that her regal counterpart might demand his conjugal rights?), but my “subjects” and I commenced to dance ritualistically around those graveyard sundaes. Danced around them and around them and around them. Energized by betel nut, the chewing of which stained my numb mouth the color of Buck Rogers’s rocketship, and inspired by two talented groups of drummers and snake-charmer flute tooters, I managed to learn the proper repetitive steps and to tirelessly dance the day away.