![[An interview with Tim Cahill]](cahill970402.gif)
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C O N T E N T S Welcome to Wanderlust On the Amazon: Snapshots of a Green Planet Two Sides of the Rhine My Best Holiday Experience The Dangers of Fade into Blue D E P A R T M E N T S "Pass the Butterworms" Tim Cahill - An interview with Tim Cahill Postmark: Paris Table Talk
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BY DON GEORGE |
I have been a fan of Tim Cahill's writing for years. I love his adventurous spirit, but even more, I love the way he subtly educates us about the world in his writing -- by the respect he brings to the places and people he meets, and by the narrative twists he often uses to illuminate the folly of our own preconceptions. I interviewed him a few weeks ago when he was in San Francisco promoting his new book, "Pass the Butterworms."
Why did you get into travel writing in the first place; what was the impulse behind it?
I don't know. There are two things that I love. I like to go
out and see things that I haven't seen, and I like it when my writing goes well. And my writing goes well when there is something out there that amazes me or fascinates me -- and it is a big damn world.
Somebody asked me the other day how
many countries I have been to. I never quite figured it out -- I think there are about 170 countries total now and I'd be surprised if I've been to 60.
There are still a lot out there.
Yes. And wherever you travel, you have only been on that
line that you travel. If you were traveling with me but a mile apart, the things that happened to you would be entirely different; the things you saw would be entirely different. You can never exhaust the world. There is never any reason to become jaded.
Right. You have been writing for -- what, 20 years? Looking back on your writing, do you feel like you have grown a lot in those years?
Well, some people have said that my new book, where there
is humor and places that you can laugh out loud, seems a bit more
contemplative. And maybe it is, because 20 to 25 years ago, when I was starting off, everything was new to me.
Now, when I see something, there is an urge to
compare and contrast, and to try to see it in a larger picture.
I think that in a way, the early stuff is so raw.
You are trying to establish who you are, what you are doing, what this thing is all about.
Yes. I didn't know -- what the hell was I doing, anyway? I look back at my earlier writing and then at my later writing, and the later stuff is smoother because I know tricks now to make it smooth. I know tricks to make the structure work. I know that if I am having a real hard time writing
a part, maybe the part doesn't even belong in the piece. But I also try to keep elements from my earlier writing alive -- like the sense of amazement -- and that is an adolescent thing.
People use [the term] adolescence as a pejorative, and it is -- but I think that is the time in your life when you are most open to new experience. It is also the most idealistic you will ever be in your life. And those are two qualities of adolescence that I hope I can keep.
I love that in your writing. The sense of
wonder. The subtext seems to be, "Holy shit, the world is so full of stuff;
it is so interesting!"
Yes.
With the world so full of things to do and places to see, do you have a great dream as a writer and an adventurer?
I don't know. My goal is to live a relatively contented life and do what I want to do. I would like to continue traveling and I would like to write, continue to write well on larger and larger projects, and continue to do work that I think is important. But it's terrible -- there is really no
"undone" thing. There is not that one thing I haven't done that is bothering me.
Contentment is its own form of terror. So what's next for you?
Well, I am writing about the forest in northern Congo, the former French Congo, which compares in size to Yellowstone Park, but somehow remains uninhabited and unexplored. I walked across it
with the first group of scientists, 16 Pygmies, and three Bantu villagers.
When was that?
A couple of years ago. So I'm writing a book about
that. I'm also writing about my latest trip, to the Sahara, which was fantastic.
Is it about driving across the Sahara?
Well, we drove looking for salt mines and we finally found them. There was no electricity, no roads, nothing. Until 1991, the region was a political prison. Basically, it was a death sentence to be sentenced to the salt mines.
Yes. There is that expression, isn't there?
Right.
It always seemed like a metaphor to me.
Yes. Well, it is the worst job in the world, working
in the salt mines in this baking Sahara plain, digging for salt. It's just like
this endless rabbit warren of holes with people working in the holes, and
then on the high spot of excavation, there are houses built out of blocks of brown salt, which is not good salt. So there are these blocks piled up, and since salt melts in the rain and it rains a little bit there, there are all of these
broken-down houses out there.
Did it feel like a medieval sort of scene?
Yes, it did. And in fact, for centuries and centuries, it was a source of wealth because the camel caravans would take it to Timbuktu, 500 miles to the south, where they would trade the salt for its weight in gold. The camels follow the same route today that they have for those centuries. I loved the place because, of course, people didn't know where the salt
mines were -- they were too valuable. I like to go to forbidden places.
When I hear about your travels, I think, God, what you're doing is going to places where people simply haven't gone -- and we tend to think that you just can't do that in the modern world. It's getting
more and more difficult to find them.
Yes. When I started doing this, 20 to 25 years ago, you could go to Peru, go out in the forest, go look for ruins. Now they have organized a bunch of travel tours going there -- the very places that I went. It is hard to find a remote place that doesn't have an organized adventure travel tour taking you there.
Look for the "Salt Mine Tour" next year.
Well, security is a real big problem in that part of the world. You couldn't guarantee that people would come back with all their goods; for that matter, you couldn't really guarantee that people would come back, period.
What was your first vision of Timbuktu?
We were driving hard for Timbuktu
through the desert at night. It was midnight and
I came up over a rise, and there in the distance were the bright lights of
Timbuktu: 27 of them. I counted. When I got in I did some very serious and intensive investigative
reporting, and I can tell you that it is impossible to get a cold beer
in
Timbuktu on a Saturday night at 12:30. I could get a warm beer -- but
not a
cold one. Timbuktu is essentially a dusty adobe town with courtyards.
There is a mosque -- a mud mosque -- of great
antiquity but of no great distinction. At one time in the 12th century, Timbuktu was a
center of Islamic learning and there were more than 80 Koranic schools
there. They still have some of those old texts, and they are the
coolest
thing to see in Timbuktu.
The other thing is the post office, because everybody goes to the post
office and has their postcard stamped "Timbuktu."
Is there a place that stands out in your
mind as a real
surprise? Somewhere that was so different from what you
expected -- either really horrible or really great?
Well, there's this forest in the northern Congo, surrounded by a swamp. The place is uninhabited -- I know that for a fact -- and virtually
unexplored. In the middle of the area we found some rubber trees
with very old cuts on them, and I surmise that the French were
getting rubber [from the trees] during the Second World War. So there has been somebody in there, but that was the only evidence we found.
So probably you stepped somewhere no other human had
ever stepped before.
I think so. What I noticed was the Pygmies,
who were so at home
in the forest, would become -- as soon as we got out of the forest that
they
knew -- a little agitated. This struck me and I thought, well, why?
This is
just like the other forest. They have all the
skills to
survive here and they know these plants intimately.
I thought about it and I thought about it, and then I realized: I
know American cities, I have been in a lot of them, but if somebody put
me down in, let's say, Detroit at 5 o'clock at night and it was getting dark,
I would start getting agitated, too.
I'd say, "What part of town am I in? Is this a bad part of town?
Where am I going to find a hotel for a reasonable amount of money?" Even though I know American cities, I would be a little agitated. And I
think that is what scared them -- that safety element.
So we walked across this area while they were
doing an inventory of the animals there for the Congolese government. They were thinking of making the area into a national park. It is a no-brainer because there isn't anybody to displace, there are just large
herds of elephants, all kinds of monkeys, chimps, gorillas,
leopards and other forest animals. You can't see more than 10 feet in any direction, but if you
could lift up the entire forest and just look at the animals, you
would see
more animals than you see out in the Serengeti Plain. They are out
there -- and wild.
Unfortunately, you don't see them that often. But a biologist can survey the animals by walking off a transect about five kilometers [3 miles]; going
straight in a random direction; and then counting the piles of elephant
dung.
That is how they figure it out?
Yes. There are four varieties of
elephant dung, and you have a fairly
sophisticated
formula in which you plug these various transect numbers and figure out how many elephants there are. If it is a wet season, an elephant will leave 17 piles a day on
the
average. So from that you can figure out the density of the
elephants.
I see.
Doing a
survey of all of the
elephants in an area of the Congolese forest sounds awfully glamorous, until you realize that most of the work involves counting piles of dung.
Well, some people shovel it, and some people count it.
Yeah. I counted it, and now I'm shoveling.
Was it thickly forested or were you able to
travel by Land Rover?
No, it was all on foot and there were no roads or rivers, and it was extremely thickly forested. We just had aerial maps of the area, and we were trying to make our way across from a little town called
Bomassa to another little town called Macao.
Wow. And how long did it take to do that?
Well, we measured
every place we went
with a little gadget that you wear on your belt that is
like a dental
floss distributor. You tie it onto a tree and it clips off the
kilometers as
you walk. [At one time], we went through 800 meters of swamp
and it took us something like six hours to get through it all.
So you were just wading through it.
That's right. One thing that amazed me is what the Pygmies can do. With a machete they can whack
down limbs and create a nice walk-across bridge with a handle railing in about 10 minutes. But they won't do it unless they need
to.
They believe in the conservation of work. In five minutes, they can
build a rainproof shelter that will hold 10 people. But they
will
never build it until it is actually raining. Because what if you
build it and
the clouds go by, then you have done all this work for nothing. So
every time you sit under one of these watertight things -- you
are always wet.
What about snakes and
spiders, were they a problem?
People always ask that about the forest, the jungle
and stuff -- and I have
just not encountered snakes. You don't see them as much as they might occupy
your mind.
What was problematic in the swamps in the Congo were
bees. And we digress to the subject of salt again. The bees are on
you for
your salt. And I sweat like anything, so I had all kinds of different
bees
on me all the time, and that was problematic because I was getting
stung
several times a day. I was the biggest one there, I was the sweatiest
one
there.
So you attracted all the bees.
Yeah. These bees
did not sting as bad
as bumblebees and certainly not as bad as wasps, but it was
worse
than a horsefly bite. And then they had these bees that are stingless, called
melipons, from the
Greek word meli, meaning honey, and pons. They are like fruit flies and they are stingless
and they come at you in great clouds, so you breathe
them
in, and they get in your eyes and you blink, and they roll up in little
dirty
balls.
So people say snakes, and I say, no, bees.
Have you had any recent near-death experiences that are worth talking
about?
No. We talked about the one in the Queen Charlotte Islands, right?
When I fell off the
cliff?
What? You fell off a cliff?
Yes. See this scar here, can you see that one?
Yes, I see it. That was from
falling? What was the story?
Well, I was in the Queen Charlotte Islands and we were kayaking. But the thing about the Queen Charlottes is they are kind
of
like Canada's Galapagos. They have all different kinds
of bears, woodpeckers and so on. And we hadn't done any walking in the
forest, so we went walking in the forest. We went quite a ways and decided
that it was getting late, and I started climbing this cliff instead of going all
the way around. Well, the island is like the moss capital of the world, and this
rocky
cliff was actually covered with moss, so that to climb
it, you had to plunge your hand into this moss to get a hold of something.
It was probably about 15 feet high and I was climbing, digging
my
feet in, and I didn't know what my feet were on. And there
was a tree up there and I went to grab it, and I just saw my hand go
like
that. Boing. Into the air. I fell on my head.
How far did you fall?
Well, I don't know. But I looked down and my hand was covered with blood because your
head bleeds like anything. And I torqued my back up pretty bad and
could hardly move. I mean this is a
temperate
zone rain forest, and what was I wearing? I was wearing green rain
pants,
a green rain hat, and black boots. I thought, "They will never find me, they will never
find
me; I am camouflaged." A little while later, I started building a bonfire. Fortunately, these guys came looking for me about that time.
Was your head bleeding?
Well, I tied a bandanna around it. They called in a plane and it took me out the next
day. I would have stayed, but I thought it best for me to get out.
I think when you have a dent in your skull like that ...
Yes, yes.
God, I'm glad you survived.
I'm glad I survived, too. April 1, 1997 |
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