Saving Fish From Drowning

Cautious eyes darted about toward dark edges of the forest. Since Lijiang, they had not considered Bennie’s opinions to be that informed. Moving slowly, they lifted their feet, inspected the backs of their legs for blood-sucking, poisonous creatures. “That’s why I wear permethrin-sprayed clothing and hundred percent DEET,” Heidi said.

  “You sound like a commercial,” Moff joked.

  “And that’s why I’m carrying this,” Heidi added. She held up her improvised walking stick, a long slim branch.

  Dwight snickered. “You think that’s going to keep you from getting attacked by a tiger?”

  “A snake,” she said. “I plant it ahead of where I walk. See?” She turned over a leafy covering. A beetle slick with moisture scurried away. “And that way if there’s a snake or something, it’ll attack the stick first or crawl off.”

  The others began rummaging around the forest floor for an appropriately sized stick; Dwight did as well. Thus equipped, they were soon on their way. Every few minutes screeches or curse words pierced the air, signaling that one of them had found a gruesome creature attached to a pant leg. Black Spot would come over and flick the offender off.

  “What’s this place we’re going?” Bennie asked. “Is it a village?”

  “Not a village, smaller.”

  “Smaller than a village,” Bennie mused. “Okay. Hamlet, settlement, outskirts . . . private estate, enclave, gated community . . . micrometropolis, compound, jail . . .”

  Vera laughed at Bennie’s list.

  “It is a place,” Black Spot said. “We are calling No Name Place.”

  “And how much longer till we get to this No Name Place?” Bennie asked.

  “Very close,” Black Spot promised.

  And Bennie heaved a big sigh. “We’ve heard that before.”

  A few minutes later, they stopped and Black Spot pointed toward what appeared to be a creek bed running through the cleft of the mountain. “Just over this,” he said. But as they drew closer, they realized it was a chasm that ran up and down as far as they could see, about twenty feet wide, and frighteningly deep—a dizzying labyrinth of twists and turns that spiraled downward in such a way as to make it impossible to know what dead bottom was. It looked as if the earth’s core had cracked and split the mountain.

  “Could be a sinkhole,” Roxanne said. “We saw one in the Galápagos. Six hundred feet deep, that was the guess. No one knew for sure, since everyone who went down to investigate never came back up.”

  “Thanks for telling us that,” said Bennie.

  Bisecting this abyss was a flimsy-looking bridge made of bamboo slats held together with a network of ropes. The ends were lashed to large tree trunks. It did not convey a sense of architectural competence or engineering rigor. I would say it looked rather like a wooden clothes rack sitting on top of a place mat. Evidently my friends thought so, too.

  “They expect us to go over that?” Heidi squeaked.

  “It doesn’t look sturdy,” Vera agreed.

  “I can do it!” Esmé chirped, twirling her reclaimed parasol.

  “You stay right here,” Marlena snapped, and grabbed her daughter’s arm.

  Fishbones scrambled to the middle and jumped up and down to show the tourists that the bridge was safe and strong. He loped easily to the other side, covering the twenty feet in a matter of seconds, then returned halfway and extended his hand.

  “It must be safe,” Bennie said to the group. “I bet these places have to pass strict safety standards to be designated a tourism site.”

  Moff peered into the ravine, at its great yawning mouth of rocks and scrubby brush. He picked up a stone the size of his fist and tossed it in. It hit a ledge, bounced and fell another fifty feet before smashing into another outcropping a hundred feet below. The sound of the object careening downward continued long after they lost sight of it. “I’ll be the human sacrifice,” Moff said. “Just be sure to get some video, so that if I’m killed, you’ll have evidence to sue whoever made this thing.” Roxanne aimed her camcorder. “Think of this as Tarzan’s amazing adventures,” he said. He took several deep breaths, gritted his teeth, and slowly angled forward. When the bridge dipped in the middle, he let go with an elongated warbling shout—“whoa-OH-ohhh”—that matched the somersault in his stomach. As soon as he regained his balance, he walked steadily forward; then he called out to Rupert to come next. If his ex-wife could see what they were doing, he would be in jail for child endangerment. “Hang on to the sides,” he advised. “Steady as you go, as smoothly as you can, and adjust your body to the ups and downs, rather than reacting and pushing against it.”

  “You mean, don’t do what you did,” Rupert said. The group watched him stride smoothly forward, hands free like a tightrope walker. “Man, that was cool,” he said when he reached the other side. Black Spot, Salt, and Fishbones noticed how cool.

  One by one, the rest traversed the short distance, some slowly, some quickly, others with much coaxing, or with Black Spot leading them forward. Roxanne was the last to cross. She had already handed the camera to Black Spot, who gave it to Dwight, so he could document her rite of passage. Once all were safely on solid ground, they were awash in self-congratulations, gloating and giving instant replays of their own ten seconds of peril, until Heidi reminded them: “We have to go back over after lunch.” Their elation thus doused, they moved onward.

  Still behind them, on the other side of the bridge, were the three young men with their machetes and supplies. Balanced over their shoulders were thick bamboo poles from which hung big twelve-volt batteries, a generator frame, the jackets of their guests, and assorted food supplies. One by one, these men deftly went across, and then lowered their loads to the ground. With practiced expertise, one of them began to unwind the knots that tethered the bridge to its tree anchors, while the other two unwound a rope that was off to the side, curled around the trunk of another tree to create a winch. This was the long tail of the bridge. Carefully now, the men lowered the bridge while relaxing the long rope. Down it went, until the bridge hung like a useless ladder on the opposite side. They swung and jostled the tail end of the rope still attached to the bridge until it blended with the lianas of the winding gorge and disappeared. The free end was lashed to the root of a tree that had fallen over, decades before. Ferns hid it completely.

  From this vantage point, the people of No Name Place could see the bridge. But no one approaching their secret home from the other side would know a bridge had ever been there. And that was how they kept themselves cut off, hidden in a secret world no one knew existed, they hoped. For the past year, the bridge had been brought up every other week, when they needed supplies and felt there was no risk that soldiers were in the area. If the soldiers discovered the bridge, the Karen people would run toward the deep jaws of the mountain and jump in. Better that than to be caught, tortured, and killed. And if they weren’t able to kill themselves first, if they were caught by the soldiers, they would gouge out their own eyes so they could not watch the soldiers rape their sisters and daughters, or cut the throats of their mothers and fathers. The soldiers, they remembered, liked to smile when they held the knife to make someone rise or lower, as if they were puppet masters pulling the strings of a marionette to retell one of the old Jataka tales of the Burmans.

  They feared the soldiers most during the monsoons. The rain beat down the thatches over the tribe’s small verandahs, and they lived in mud and picked off leeches every few minutes. During that season they hung bamboo-lattice hammocks in the trees where they sat and slept. It was then that the SLORC soldiers came. They could approach a whole settlement from behind and catch them on the wrong side of a raging stream, unable to escape except into the water. The soldiers, some of them boys of only twelve or thirteen, would stand on the shore, aim their rifles, and laugh when they hit a target and its arms stopped flailing. Sometimes they would toss in a grenade that exploded and sent lifeless bodies and fish floating to the top and then swirling in eddies like lily pads. A few of t
he people at No Name Place had lost their entire families this way. It was a miracle and a misery that the Great God had spared them.

  But this was the dry season. This was when the hunter soldiers were lazy, getting ready for the good times of Independence Day. The numbers of soldiers had been fewer at this season the year before, but there was no sure pattern to anything that SLORC did.

  Black Spot ran ahead of my friends, as they wearily plodded onward. Another hundred yards lay in front of them before they reached No Name Place.

  Earlier, while they had rested by the fallen log, Grease had sprinted up the mountain and into the camp to announce that the Younger White Brother and his retinue were coming. The inhabitants of No Name Place stood still. This was the miracle they had prayed for. For three years, they had given offerings that this might come to pass.

  “This is true?” an old grandmother finally said.

  “Kill one of the chickens,” Grease said. “They’re expecting a feast.”

  And then the tribe members ran in different directions. There was barely enough time to ready themselves. Women pulled out their best clothes, black boxy jackets woven with checkerboards of red and gold diamonds. The old women dug out of the ground the last of their silver bangles. Some ladies covered their chests with a profusion of ropy necklaces made of glass beads from the old traders and Chinese beads that had been in their families for hundreds of years. Others had only plastic.

  Grease heard Black Spot’s whistle, a signal that he had crossed the bridge. He returned the call with two shrill blasts. Half a minute later, Black Spot rushed in and his friends surrounded him. They spoke rapidly in the Karen language, unable to contain their happy disbelief. “You got so many to come!” one man said. “God is great!” said another. “Which one is the Younger White Brother?” And Black Spot replied that it was clear, if they used their eyes. They looked at their approaching saviors, my friends, lifting one heavy foot after the other, all of them exhausted, except for Rupert, who could have run circles around them, and was now striding forward, yelling, “Come on! We’re almost there.”

  A thin little girl of three ran forward and grabbed Black Spot by his legs. He lifted her in the air and examined her face, before concluding that her laughter and smiles were signs that she was well, the malaria gone. He set her atop his shoulders and walked farther into the camp. Black Spot’s wife watched this, but did not smile. With every reunion, she would think, Will we remember this as the last?

  Black Spot was the headman of this small tribe of people, the survivors of other villages. He guided them toward consensus by providing them with sound reasoning to solve squabbles. He often reminded them of their tradition to remain unified. Like all Karen, they stuck together, no matter what.

  My friends entered the encampment and were instantly surrounded by a dozen tribal people who pushed and jumped to get a glimpse. They heard the natives uttering a pretty garble of sounds. Some of the old women had their hands clasped and were bowing rapidly. “It’s like we’re rock stars or something,” Rupert said.

  Bennie saw that some of the men had slung their arms around Black Spot and were offering him a cheroot. Others jumped on the backs of Salt and Fishbones and hooted. “These people sure are friendly with those guys,” Bennie remarked. “Walter must take people up here a lot.” My compatriots were disappointed to think that the formerly “rare opportunity” might be a common tourist destination.

  “What tribe are they?” Vera asked Black Spot.

  “They are Karen,” he said. “All good people. The Karen are the original people of Burma. Before there are Bamar or others tribe coming to Burma, the Karen people are already here.”

  “Kah-REN,” Roxanne repeated.

  “You like Karen people?” Black Spot asked with a grin.

  “They’re great,” she said, and this was followed by a chorus from my friends, affirming the same opinion about a people they as yet knew little about.

  “Good. Because I am Karen, too.” Black Spot pointed to the other boatmen. “They are Karen, too. Same. Our families are living here in No Name Place.”

  “No wonder you knew the way up here so well,” Bennie said.

  “Yes, yes,” Black Spot said. “Now you are knowing this.”

  A few of my friends suspected that Walter and Black Spot had a deal going on under the table. But if they did, what did it matter? This was an interesting place.

  With a throng of Karen people trailing behind them, my friends came into a larger clearing, an area about fifty feet in diameter. Above, the sky was barely visible through the overlapping tree canopies. The campsite was partially covered with mats. Close to the center was a stove made of stacked rocks, with a maw for feeding wood. Flanking that were teak logs used as tables, on top of which were assorted bowls of food. The surprise Christmas lunch. Fantastic.

  They glanced about. At the edges were rounded huts the size of children’s tree houses. Upon closer inspection, my friends saw that they were tree houses, each the hollow of a tree base just large enough for one or two people. The walls were formed of the long skeletal roots, their spacings woven with palm thatch. The roofs were low, and bound with interlaced vines and runners. Other tree huts and various small shelters lay beyond the perimeter.

  “It’s so unchanged,” Wendy whispered to Wyatt. “Like the twentieth century forgot to come here.”

  “You like?” Black Spot said. He was bursting with pride.

  The camp now massed with its residents—I counted fifty-three—many of the older ones wearing turbans and red-and-black smocks. My friends saw crackly-faced grandmothers and smooth-cheeked girls, curious boys, and men with red betel-nut juice staining their teeth, making it seem as if their gums were bleeding from an ulcerating disease. The people cried in the Karen language, “Our leader has come! We’ll be saved!” My friends smiled at this welcome, and said, “Thanks! Good to be here.”

  Three children ran over to get a closer view—foreigners in their jungle home! They stood in awe. Their young faces were solemn and watchful, and as soon as Moff and Wyatt crouched down, they shrieked and ran off. “Hullo!” Wyatt called after them. “What’s your name?” Girls in white sackcloth dresses stood at a safe distance, avoiding eye contact. When the white man was not looking at them, they gradually moved closer with shy smiles. One of the boys ran close to Moff, the tallest of the foreigners, and in that universal game of dare, he slapped the back of Moff’s knee and darted off with a high-pitched shout before the ogre could strike him down. When another boy did the same, Moff let out a groan and pretended to nearly topple over, much to the delight of the children.

  Two more children appeared, a boy and girl, who looked to be seven or eight. They had coppery brown hair, and both were dressed in cleaner and more elaborately embroidered clothes. The boy had a long white chemise, the girl a Western christening dress with lace edging. Vera noted with dismay that they were smoking cheroots. They were actually twins, and according to the tribe’s beliefs, they were divinities. They boldly pushed past the others, grabbed Rupert by his hands, and led him toward their grandmother, who was tending a pot on the rock hearth. The old woman scolded the children as she saw them approach. “Don’t drag him around like that. Hold his hands with respect.” When Rupert was before her, she shyly averted her eyes and offered Rupert a stump to sit on, which he refused. He shook loose from his admirers and walked about the camp.

  Marlena observed that except for the twins and older people, few wore the distinctive costumes seen at most dance and cultural spectacles. Could this be an authentic tribe and not one designer-garbed to look ethnic? The head wraps on the men and women were clearly functional and not decorative. They looked like dirty Turkish towels wound without regard to fashion. And the women and girls in sarongs had chosen loud plaids and cheap flowery designs. The men were clothed in raggedy pajama bottoms and dirty tank tops that hung to their knees. One wore a T-shirt that said “MIT Media Lab” on the front, and on the back, “Demo or Die.??
? Who left that behind? Only a few had rubber flip-flops, leading Marlena to recall childhood warnings to never let your bare feet touch dirt lest tiny worms pierce them, crawl up the insides of your legs, into your stomach, ever upward until they lodged in your brain.

  Moff stepped closer to the tree houses. Finally realizing what they were, he became excited and called Heidi over. He pointed out the vast roots. “They’re mature strangler figs. I’ve seen them in South America, but these are absolutely huge.”

  “Strangler,” Heidi said, and shuddered.

  “See up there?” And Moff explained how the seeds had taken hold high in the scummy crannies of host trees. Aerial roots spread downward and girdled the host tree, and as the host grew, the vascular roots thickened in a deadly embrace. “Kind of like a marriage I was once in,” Moff said. The host tree was choked to death, he went on to say, then decomposed, thanks to armies of insects, fungi, and bacteria, leaving behind a skeletal trunk. “The result,” Moff said, “is this hollow, a cozy bungalow for rodents, reptiles, bats, and apparently, the denizens of the rainforest.” He looked up and whistled. “I love this. I’ve written a few articles about rainforest canopies. My goal is to get something published in Weird Plant Morphology one day.”

  From another part of the small camp came shouts of jubilation. The tribe was watching Rupert taking whacks at timber bamboo with a machete that Black Spot had given him. With each swing, the tribe cheered. Black Spot said in Karen: “You see his strength. This is another sign that he is the Younger White Brother.”

  “What other signs did you see?” a middle-aged man asked.

  And Black Spot answered: “The book and the Nat cards. He manifested the same Lord of Nats. He then made him disappear and jump out in another place.” More people came into the crowd to catch a glimpse of the Reincarnated One. “Is it really him?” the jungle people asked among themselves.

  A young woman said, “You can tell he is the one by the eyebrows, thick and at a slant, those of a cautious man.”