The Comoros: Getting Hungry?

     

     It started out the way all mornings do on the Comoros: with fried bread, a bowl of rice and a cup of the worst coffee in the world. The taste of charred Eucalyptus lingered stubbornly despite diluting it one to one to one with sugar and condensed milk. I’m not exactly sure why I kept choking down their terrible attempts at coffee. Some part of me, it seems, needed to believe there was one cafe in this country that knew it’s java; one dusty market where the coffee poured out black and smooth and perfectly roasted. I never gave up hope of finding this Shangri-La and I never found it.

     

     My friends and I left our cups (practically untouched) on the table and strolled towards the shoreline. We’d negotiated a good price for the journey out to the famed Emerald bay, to sail, snorkel, fish and dine. It was almost the best thing we did in the Comoros. Almost.

     A small swell sent long lines of tiny waves into the sun-bleached sand. On the three day car ride up to the northernmost tip of the island, we’d doled out Dramamine like candy. Now, on the brink of an all-day ocean adventure, we felt bold; we felt strong. We laughed as we tossed the untouched pills overboard. We didn’t feel stupid yet, but we would soon. 

Mark and me, pre-voyage. The idiots have no idea what's in store for them.

     Above us, the sun smiled down while the crew passed out raincoats. We examined them curiously, checking above to make sure the sunshine was not an illusion. A hole ran down the length of my coat; my friend’s had lost its waterproof layer.

     We cast our slickers carelessly aside and lounged beneath the tropical sun. The boat glided across the ocean. Pushing past us with a bucket in his hand, one of the crew members moved to aft: ready position. 

Getting his bucket ready.

     When we neared the eyelet through which we would sail out into the Indian Ocean, we discovered the reasoning behind the jackets and the man with the bucket. He began to bail, pouring the ocean back onto its side of the hull. Defiant, the water continued to invade. It rose to our ankles. We cowered beneath ineffective raingear and discussed our odds for survival. We found them slim.

     The post cards had lied. There were no sparkling emerald green waters that morning. The sea growled gray and white and the wind blew the waves back against themselves and into our raincoats. By the time we made landfall, three fourths of us were as green as we’d hoped the bay would be. We stumbled ashore, rejoicing in the way that sand does not surge when you walk across it.

     Then, the bad news. Lunch would be served only after we’d caught it. The boat crew tried to wave us back aboard. We rustled up a sacrifice; pushed our friend, Mark, back onto the arms of the sailors. Catch us some lunch, Mark. Keep your eyes on the horizon. The rest of us flopped into the sand and rested our uneasy stomachs.

I sunned on that log. Bye, Mark, catch us food!

     I lay on the beach, terribly seasick, asking my friend what would happen if they didn’t catch any fish. I’ve inherited this quirk from my aunt: I’m always wondering what my next meal will be. Even if I’m still eating the previous meal, I can’t help but worry when I’ll see food again and what it will look like when we are reunited once more.

  

     “I’m sure they have a backup plan in case they don’t catch any.”

     “But what? What will it be? What if I get hungry? I’m scared.”

Lunch!

     My fears were unwarranted. Mark and the crew returned with an octopus and a boat full of snapper. The fish we ate for lunch that day were so fresh they were still alive. I watched the cooks who slapped the still-gasping fish up onto the grill and ran their knives down the sides, pouring olive oil and garlic in through the holes.

     A feast appeared. We sat at a rickety picnic table, our glasses full of rum and coconut milk. A dozen snapper for the six of us. Carrot salad, crab, pommes frites and gallon of coconut rice. We ate until we could not think of eating any more, filling our stomachs until they stretched.

     Just when we’d tackled the meal before us, a parrotfish materialized. We gaped at him in disbelief (him, I knew, because I could see how blue he was, even cooked and covered in crispy garlic). A quote from my journal: “Holy shit. Best meal ever.” Somehow, we managed to stuff the parrot fish into our bulging stomachs. Finished at last, we leaned back as much as one can on a bench, patting our third-trimester food babies.

     Satisfied as we were, the knowledge that we were stranded in the Indian Ocean did not stray far from our minds. We frowned at the sea and it was clear we were all wondering the same thing. Was there any way to avoid returning the way we came? Could we just stay?

We have to go back to the ocean in this boat. Yes, this one.

     With feet of stone, we marched across the sand towards our unseaworthy vessel. In the boat, the crew instructed us to sit backwards.  My friends sat on the bench closest to the bow, so they didn’t see it coming, but I did. Straddled across my bench, I watched as one of the crew members snuck up from behind, a tarp in his hands. He tarped my friends, covered their heads with blue plastic (which alarmed us all) and then returned to his job as the constant bailer.

     “This can’t be good,” I said and tunneled my way under the tarp with them.

     While we’d snorkeled and feasted, napped and made merry, the sea had grown restless. The swells towered to ten feet above us. We rode parallel to them and though I’m not exactly a sailor, I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong way to tackle water that’s taller than your mast. Wave after wave pummeled the boat. We wondered where the life vests were.

     Drenched, Mark crawled out from under the tarp and turned to see where we were going.

     “Okay, get ready,” he told us.

     “I’m so happy I ate all that fish.”

     “Three, two, one.”

     The wave washed over us and spilled out the sides. For a moment, we went underwater.

     And then we were back in the bay, returned to a quiet sea that we drifted over, glad to be alive and well fed.

All photos courtesy of Corey Pargee, 2010.

Kiribati: Getting Hungry?

The boat’s long, upside-down shark fin of a rudder held fast to the bleached white sand beneath us. Ahead, no further away than a couple hundred meters, the sharkless shore curved up out of the sea, safe and inaccessible. The warm water licked its tongue along the vanilla ice cream sand, teasing. Hector and I were trapped behind a skirmish line of shark fins.

Draped across one of the catamaran’s two hulls, I did my best to reason with the beasts despite my drunk and sunstroked state. “It’s too hot for you, sharks,” I reminded, pointing them away, “Go back to deeper waters. Go back to where it’s not sun. Go.”

Hector continued to paddle us in to shore but the boat was firmly anchored. He was stuck, repeating an ineffectual action: Einstein’s definition of crazy.

Were there an absence of hungry sharks, we could have walked to shore; the water couldn’t have been more than waste deep. But the toothy fish whizzed around like bullets, nitrous-oxide fueled predators. We could have only made a slow-motion escape, like running away in a bad dream. No chance.

“Spear fish them,” Hector told me.

“Swim for it,” I told him, “It’s you they want with all that bleeding you’re doing over there.”

I had more snide comments to add, but Hector had rolled himself over the edge of the boat and splashed down into the water below. I sat up, rubbed the salt water out of my eyes and watched him cover the distance to shore like a hydrophobic chimpanzee, all arms and knee caps.

Mr. Stripes came in for another tasty bite of fiberglass boat hull. I threw a can of beer at him and watched Hector standing on the beach, clumsily untangling himself from the sail. Somewhere along the journey, he’d lost track of his clothes. He examined the gash on his thigh and, seeing that it was no longer bleeding, sprinted off into the shade of the palm trees. Or into a threesome with the couple we’d waved to earlier. You could never tell with Hector.

A little shark came up and probed the boat with his mouth as well.

“Stop that,” I told him and slapped him, right in the face.

I glanced around for some sign of Hector’s pants but they weren’t there. It wasn’t the first time I’d materialized in a strange location mysteriously clothed with no sign of Hector ever even owning garments. We may have been invited to the same place but we’d come for two different parties.

Hector’s side of the boat rested a good two meters closer to shore and I wobbled over there, unable to keep my footing despite the fact that the water was dead calm. Pulling myself along as much with my hands as with my legs, I arrived on the other hull and examined the rust-red stain that now covered my palm.

“Damn it, Hector,” I shouted to him, “You left your blood on the boat.”

“What?” his distant voice replied.

“You left your blood!”

“Bring it here. I need it.”

“I hate you.”

“Okay, good talk.”

I needed to get off the boat. I dangled one leg into the water, my heart pounding so fast the alcohol coursed through my veins at 8x speed. I could only see two sharks still skirting around the shallows. I hadn’t counted them before so there was no way to know how many lingered just beyond my field of vision.

Note to self: always count the sharks.

A ripple in the water ringed against my calf, shooting liquid-fire-adrenaline up my leg and through my spine. I reeled in all my limbs and balled up into my smallest self, eyes wild across the water, seeing sharks where there were only yellow tangs. I swallowed the fear and beer induced nausea back down. That would only attract more monsters.

“Hey, weirdo.” It was Hector again, standing on the shore across that last impossible length of water. “You need to get out of the sun.”

“You need some pants.”

“Shark took ‘em.”

I lowered my head onto my knees. The pounding was too loud to cope with.

“Get off the boat.”

“You get off the boat.”

The next thing I knew Hector Sharkman had me in his grip. His nails were like little razor teeth cutting holes through the soft skin on my arms, and he held fast, wrestling me the rest of the way to land.

We stumbled across the beach, each step terribly dizzy. Just beyond the grove of trees, four pagodas poked their banana leaf roofs up from the bushes. A round outdoor bar hugged the shoreline inside the atoll, complete with a smiling bartender in a pink Hawaiian shirt.

Hector, one hand on each of my shoulders, drove me to a bar stool and plopped me down on the shady side. He’d tied the sail around his body in a makeshift toga but I doubt the cheery bartender would have minded if he hadn’t.

“Ko na mauri! Welcome. What can I get you.”

“Water,” Hector told him.

“It’s happy hour,” he chided, grinning at us.

“We’d like some water please.”

“Would you like a Mai Tai or a Pina Colada instead?”

“No.”

He sighed deeply. “Okay, water.”

“Do you have anything on the menu that features shark meat?” I asked, guzzling down a liter of water and indicating that he give me a second.

Hector choked into his water bottle.

“What? I want to eat a shark. I am the superior species.”

“We have mako tacos,” our host graciously offered, “With mango salsa and tropical cole slaw.”

“Yes, bring that to me. That’ll show them.”

Hector nodded, already finishing his third water. “I’ll have what she’s having. And, how ‘bout a couple Mai Tais too.”

Read part 3: Kiribati: Getting Back

Venice: Getting Hungry?

“A beautiful woman should never have to eat alone,” purred the Italian man, his long fingers spread out against the surface of my table so close they nearly singed my skin. He paused here for a moment, his eyes lasers burning right through me.

My breath quickened; I might be melting under this stare.  

Finally he took a long breath in, patted my table twice and departed for a more divine locale. With his bronzed skin and black-fire eyes, he could have Mercury.

At least, this is what I imagine he said to me. He could have said, “This table is reserved,” or, “That book sucks, you should not be reading it.” There’s no way to be sure; I don’t speak Italian.

“American?” asked a harsh voice attached to a squirrely man whose head leaned in too close to me. He was eying the cover of my book.

“Uh, yes.”

“Me, too,” he needlessly informed, scraping a chair across the stone walkway and seating himself at my table, “Are you waiting for someone?”

I had the look of someone who wasn’t. “No.”

He spoke in a rapid-fire-monotone that was impossible to follow; his words were a sloppy car crash. “Wow. Really? You’re here by yourself? Doesn’t that bother you, being here alone? Isn’t it weird being in another country and not having anyone to talk to? Why are you by yourself?”

I lowered my book cautiously, leaving one finger tucked inside to mark my place: the unmistakable signal that this was not to be a long conversation. “It doesn’t bother me, I travel alone quite frequently. I actually came here with a friend, but he’s gone home now and I’m staying on.”

“Wow. That would be so hard, being alone in a foreign country.”

I shrugged and flashed my teeth at him, more snarl than smile. “I like to be alone. I work alone.”

“Man. I couldn’t do that. I’m here with my brothers and their wives but they went somewhere for the day so I’m here now but they’ll be back tomorrow and then we’re going to Saint Mark’s Square. I want to see the church. I’ve heard it’s beautiful.”

“It’s tacky. I think Mark Twain described it as a big beetle-bug with its legs sticking up in the air. But you should definitely go see it.”

“Beautiful. So, what brings you to Italy?”

The waiter drifted by with an extra glass and poured this man a drink out of my bottle of Pinot Grigio. He was camping, right here at my table, squatting on my meal, drinking from my wine. Who was this man?

“I’m a travel writer,” I mumbled, practically snatching the bottle from the waiter and pouring my own glass so tippy-top full that I had to siphon a bit off before I could raise it to my lips.

“Cool. That’s cool.” He took a sip of his wine—my wine—made a face like a baboon and coughed all over the table. “What is this? This isn’t very good. What are you drinking? I thought they made good wine here. You know, what I like? White Zinfandel.”

This was neither the time nor the place to educate him about the complex bouquet that is a proper old-vine zin and the sugar juice that is its pink counterpart. Do not say it. “That’s not wine, that’s juice.”

“Really good stuff.” He drank again, scrunched up his nose again and coughed out my wine again.

“Antipasti,” announced the waiter, lowering the tray of baby Adriatic sole to the table and placing a small white plate in front of each of us.

“Wow. That looks amazing. The food here is really good. Do you mind?” He didn’t wait on a response; he just dove in, headfirst.

I wished the water were shallower.

“So, you’re a writer?”

“Um-hm.”

“And you write about travel.”

“Yup.”

“Would I have heard of you?”

“Possibly.”

With tiny fish spilling out the sides of his mouth, he cocked his head, scrutinizing me diagonally as if I might be more famous askew. He asked, “What’s your name?”

“Crystal Beran.”

“Baron like with kings and stuff?”

“Uh, no.” It was a common enough question; I couldn’t blame him for asking. “It’s spelled B-E-R-A-N and it’s Czech for ram, like a male sheep.”

“Huh. Czech. Are you Czech?”

Is that a real question? “Yes.”

“What’s that, like, Russian?”

I stopped mid bite, stuck in place with a tiny spectacularly seasoned fish halfway off my fork and into my mouth. I examined him, this madman whose brothers and sisters-in-law had abandoned him here at my dinner table. When he manifested no sign of jesting, I brought the fish the rest of the way into my mouth and chewed carefully before answering, “No, it’s Czech.”

“But, that’s like, Russia.”

“No. It’s its own country. It’s called the Czech Republic.”

“But that’s Russia.”

“It was occupied by Russia for a while, but it’s its own country.”

He shook his head at me like I was fooling him and stole the last of my fish. “My family’s from Germany and Ireland and Scotland and England and Wales.”

I refilled my wine.

“Risotto.”

The rice had been dyed black with cuttlefish ink, a black that would stick to your tongue and the backs of your teeth for the rest of the day. It was the kind of thing that was cute shared with a best friend or a lover and horrible shared with a complete stranger who’d just told me my origins were imaginary.

“How can you drink that wine?” he asked at last, his teeth already black.

“It’s one of my favorites.”

“It’s not very good. This is awesome though. How do they make it black?”

“Ink.”

He stopped eating. “Ink?”

“Yes, ink.”

“Like from a pen?”

“No, from a cuttlefish.”

“It’s from a fish? That’s disgusting.” Using the full length of his arm, he slid the bowl slowly away from him, frowning horribly at the rice.

I ate on, hoping with enough fish ink on my breath I might be granted a similar disgust. Maybe he would push himself away from my table in that same long, smooth motion.

He watched me eat for a few minutes, which I did quite cheerfully, taking long drags of my horrible wine between bites.

“So, when did you get here?”

“Last Thursday.” I signaled to the waiter to bring me another bottle and slid my book back and forth across the table impatiently.

“Wow. So you were here on Sunday. Cool. How was Saint Mark’s?”

“It looked like a beetle-bug.” Was I in a time warp?

“No,” he chided, wagging a pretentious finger at me, “How was the service?”

“What service?”

“The church service, silly. How was church? I’m really looking forward to going tomorrow.”

“I have no idea.”

“You didn’t go to church?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Seriously? Are you seriously asking me that? I’m not Christian.”

By then the main course had arrived: whole fish grilled a stunning caramel color, heads intact, little fish lips puckering up. My friend stopped staring at their faces and turned his full attention to me; it was the first time. As he soaked in the abominable truth about me, his eyes bulged and his lips parted slightly in his best impersonation of my dinner.

 The question was almost too horrible to ask. “Then what are you?”

 “My own thing; mostly Buddhist, I guess.” I may as well have told him I was a space alien or Bigfoot.

I used the silence to pluck an eye out of one of my fish and popped it into my mouth.

He choked on the air. “Have you heard of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?”

I shook my head, not because I hadn’t, but because I was having trouble believing that this was a real conversation.

“You’re going to Hell, you know.”

“I’m going to Bali.”

My wine arrived. I plucked the cork out with my teeth and sucked the booze right out of the bottle, barely a human being.

At least he left me to enjoy my tiramisu in peace.

Kenya: Getting Hungry?

Rats do not like pepper spray.

Growing up in the sterile shine of a stainless-steel suburban society, rats were never the odious underworld creatures of dark subconscious fear. No, rats were whiskery playmates with hilariously large balls. They entertained us for hours with their surprising intelligence and we would sneak them to school in our coat pockets, passing them back and forth under our desks with sticky hands.

Cockroaches once shared a similar dismissal from the realm of the repulsive. Though never cute or pet-like, roaches were not loathsome. We remained cordial.

"It's just a beetle," I told my new roommate as I trapped the first living roach I'd ever seen under a pint glass and tossed him out into the yard.

But he returned and invited his friends and they invited theirs and the compassion I once believed I felt for all creatures slipped away. I developed a pathological bloodlust for the insects and for the pop of a soft body squeezing out through an exoskeleton. Nights find me creeping like a ninja through my darkened kitchen, dual-wielding bug spray. I slam on the lights and open fire on the fleeing legions that flicker across my granite countertop. I watch them twitch upside-down. I witness each death with a grim unbreakable gaze. They're more afraid of me than I am of them, I've always heard.

They should be.

My first night on the African continent and my dreams had come unhinged. The malaria pills hauled a series of inane images before my closed eyes. I could not fight the lunacy. When I woke, which was frequent, the dreams refused to fade and in the darkness of the room the man with the elephant trunk still stood before me, reaching out for me with his proboscis like a sex offender.

I shifted between sleeping and waking dreams in a feverish state. Rex, a friend who had graciously offered to let me stay with him, slept on, blissfully unaware of the plethora of sideshow freaks that paraded through my vision. I placed my hand against his back and drifted back to sleep.

In my dream, I lay on a plate on the surface of a thick, red ocean, clicking my fingernails against the porcelain. There was no rhythm to my song: click click click-click scratch click-clack. A deep instinct stirred within me; this was no dream-scape sound. The clicking came from somewhere in the wild African-Out-There.

I shot up, fully awake and the hallucinations evaporated. The click-scratch-tick-clunk continued on from somewhere beyond the ring of mosquito netting.

"What's that?" The words erupted from my throat.

Rex turned over onto his face. He was not a light sleeper.

"Rex." I brought my hand down against his thigh. He swatted me back. "Rex!" This time louder; a more forceful smack.

"What?"

"What is that sound? "

He listened into the darkness. My fingers squeezed around his arm. I was glad to have this strong, savvy, valiant specimen lying only a few inches away. Through his extensive Peace Corps training, Rex would have learned how to fight off hungry leopards and what to do in case of attack by giant Sub-Saharan spiders. They would have taught him these things. He would know.

We listened. The noises did not subside and even though I was fully grown, the only creature I could imagine making all of those sounds was one with long clacking yellow claws and grinding, irregular teeth. It crept around the outside of the hut and sniffed and snarled at us through the banana-leaf roof. Unearthly.

Still we listened.

No, Rex had fallen back asleep.

"Rex," I hissed, "What is that sound?"

"What?"

I poked my finger into his eye. I was fast-tracking my expulsion from his bed.

Rex did his best to disentangle himself from the wild claws and gnashing teeth I had become. I was all fear. "Rats," he grumbled at last, throwing me to the far side of the bed and promptly falling back asleep.

Rats.

Beyond the soft ring of mosquito netting, my headlamp dangled off the edge of the nightstand. I reached one shaky hand past the netted safe-zone and pulled it over to me, illuminating at first only the world encapsulated by white cloth. Bravely, audaciously, without pants, I exited the bed and turned the corner into the kitchen.

Dozens of flat, black eyes turned for a moment to meet my gaze. The sticky, nauseous rush of adrenaline oozed out from my pores. The rats stared unblinking and then returned to their task of lifting the lid from the pot and scooping out handfuls of our leftovers. Rex had promised them to me for breakfast. The rats would dine first.

One large male strolled lazily across the room, dragging his testicles over the same floor I stood on with my bare feet. Two leaps returned me to the bed and shuddering, I tried to burrow under Rex. I preferred the imaginary monster that lurked around the edge of my mind.

In the morning, we discovered the large pot on its side, covered with greasy rat-prints. They hadn't left any breakfast for us, but we would have passed regardless. Scooping up the pot and portioning out only the tiniest droplet of soap, Rex rinsed the rat feet away. Were it my house and my kitchenware, the thing would have been declared infected and discarded in the dumpster. It had permanent rat cooties. Circle-circle, dot-dot wasn't cutting it.

Rex teased me and invented ways to make me jump. I wasn't displeased to see him off to work and I headed out into the village on my own. But everywhere I saw rat-shaped shadows. They followed me into the shops, their button-eyes staring pupiless out from behind wooden masks. They invited themselves along for lunch, dining just beyond the reach of my peripheral vision. At a liquor store I bought a fifth of vodka and a can of mace.

I was already drunk when Rex came home. He tried to regale me with stories of humanitarian projects but I heard only the squeaking of rodents. At dinner I stirred my food without bringing it to my lips. At bedtime I lay rigid on top of the sheet.

The malaria pills kicked in and conjured up beasts equipped with buckteeth and snaking worm-tails. I rolled onto my side, still wearing my headlamp, feverishly clutching my pepper spray. I wanted to leave: cross the border and on to my Kilimanjaro climb. Surely the rats would not find me there.

I must have dozed off for I awoke once again to tiny fingernails scraping against the dinner I lacked the courage or sense of propriety to choke down. Rex had his head under the pillow. I switched on my lamp and stole away, this time armored with socks against the rat-testicle-defiled floor.

There they were, two of them only: a young female, and Big-Balls himself. He looked at me, curling his black lips back into a snarl. She worked on the lid, this time held down by a large leather-bound atlas. I drew forth my pepper spray. The rat turned away and resumed his examination of this new puzzle.

"Go away," I warned. It was only fair.

He turned back to me once more but did not withdraw.

I maced the rat. I don't know what I expected to happen. Perhaps that he would slink away into the night, his floozy girlfriend following. Perhaps that he would flip over to his back like the roaches, legs twitching for a minute as his brain misfired in the last throes of death.

But the rat let out a pit-bull-sized snarl and shook his face at me, his teeth glinting in the beam from my torch, his eyes point singularities sucking me in. I maced him again, but still he came towards me, spitting, frothing, nearly breathing fire. I let him back me up in an arc until I was only inches away from the girl rat who seemed to shake her head sadly at me as if she knew. What had I done? I swept the book off the top of the pot and grabbed the lid but its handle, holding it out in front of me to shield my naked legs from the steady advance of the rat.

I sprayed him again; he lunged. I deflected his attack with a side swipe of my shield, sending him flying across the room, and used the opportunity to dive back into the bed.

Rex spoke to me from beneath the pillow. "Let's get you a hotel for tomorrow night, okay?"

"Okay."