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  Acclaim for Tim Cahill’s

  Hold the Enlightenment

  “Cahill does more than beguile with great storytelling.… What Cahill does best—while talking in your ear about the Northern Congo or great white sharks or a yoga retreat in Jamaica—is leave you wanting more. More of his empathy and humor, more of his cheekiness and intelligence.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Cahill [writes] with such self-deprecating humor and insight that you’re more than happy he enjoys putting himself in harm’s way.”

  —The New York Times Books Review

  “One of the best things about Hold the Enlightenment is [the author’s] unexpected mixture of fact, legend, seriousness and whimsy, often in rapid succession. So [with] Cahill … you’re always assured of a trip that is anything but ordinary and as far from boring as the great white sharks off South America are from a tuna melt on white toast.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Cahill has done the hard part for us. Now, all we have to do to experience exotic corners of the earth is read Hold the Enlightenment from the comfort of our fluffy sofas. Thanks, Big Guy.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Offers Cahill’s usual mix of humor, insight and carefully crafted prose.… Highly entertaining and informative.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “Hold the Enlightenment is vintage Cahill—adventures to thrill the armchair traveler.”

  —The Decatur Daily

  “Cahill returns with another collection of perceptive, hilarious and touching travelogues disguised as misadventures.… Beyond the grand hilarity and bluster, Cahill is chasing a richer world—and he usually succeeds, or at least limps home with one hell of a story.”

  —Book

  “Along with his habitual irreverence, Cahill has a fine appreciation of irony and the absurd.… A fine, funny, thoughtful and varied collection.”

  —The Portsmouth Herald

  Tim Cahill

  Hold the Enlightenment

  Tim Cahill is the author of six previous books, including A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, and Pass the Butterworms. He is an editor at large for Outside magazine, and his work appears in National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications. He lives in Montana.

  ALSO BY TIM CAHILL

  Buried Dreams

  Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

  A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg

  Road Fever

  Pecked to Death by Ducks

  Pass the Butterworms

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2003

  Copyright © 2002 by Tim Cahill

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Hold the Enlightenment” previously appeared in Yoga Journal; “Bug Scream,” “The Platypus Hunter,” “Fire and Ice and Everything Nice,” “The Caravan of White Gold,” “The Terrible Land,” “The House of Boots,” “This Teeming Ark,” “Near Massacre Ranch,” “Fubsy Hors D’oeuvres,” “Gorillas in Our Schools,” “The Entranced Duck,” “Castle and More Castles,” “Culinary Schadenfreude,” “Swimming with Great White Sharks,” “Atlatl Bob’s Splendid Lack of Simple Sanity,” “Fully Unprepared,” “Evilfish,” “Collision Course,” “The Big Muddy,” “Professor Cahill’s Travel 101,” “My Brother, the Pot Dealer,” “Dirty Money,” “Panic,” and “Trusty and Grace” all appeared in Outside magazine, sometimes in a slightly different form and often under a different title; “The Search for the Caspian Tiger,” “Powder Keg,” “The World’s Most Dangerous Friend,” and “The Cowpersons of Tanzania” all appeared in Men’s Journal, sometimes in a slightly different form and, in one case, under a different title; “Stutter” appeared in Modern Maturity.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Villard hardcover edition as follows:

  Cahill, Tim.

  Hold the Enlightenment / Tim Cahill

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-085-4

  I. Title.

  PS3553.A365 H65 2002

  813′.54—dc21 2002074263

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Rollie Bestor and Phil Cibik

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Larry Burke and everyone at Outside, both past and present. I am always proud to appear in the magazine and to work with editors like Hal Espen.

  Todd Jones at Yoga Journal let me have an awful lot of fun, and the readers didn’t cancel their subscriptions in droves, or so he said. Maybe he’s just being nice.

  Mark Cohen at Men’s Journal could get it done even when the volume got a little high. Sid Evans edited a prizewinning story under great pressure. Thanks also to John Wood at Modern Maturity.

  And an all-embracing thank you to Mark Bryant, who edited stories of mine at both Outside and Men’s Journal. The finest compliment any writer can give to any editor is the one I offer you here: Mark, I’d work for you again in a heartbeat.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Unattractive to the Opposite Sex: An Introduction

  Hold the Enlightenment

  The Search for the Caspian Tiger

  Bug Scream

  The Platypus Hunter

  Fire and Ice and Everything Nice

  The Caravan of White Gold

  The Terrible Land

  The House of Boots

  This Teeming Ark

  Near Massacre Ranch

  Fubsy Hors D’oeuvres

  Gorillas in Our Schools

  Powder Keg

  The Entranced Duck

  Castle and More Castles

  Culinary Schadenfreude

  Swimming with Great White Sharks

  Atlatl Bob’s Splendid Lack of Simple Sanity

  Stutter

  Fully Unprepared

  Evilfish

  The World’s Most Dangerous Friend

  Collision Course

  The Big Muddy

  Professor Cahill’s Travel 101

  The Cowpersons of Tanzania

  My Brother, the Pot Dealer

  Dirty Money

  Panic

  Trusty and Grace

  Unattractive to the Opposite Sex:

  An Introduction

  Introductions, I feel, in my mean-spirited way, are an appropriate forum to even the score, settle old debts, avenge insults, spew a lot of invective, and basically have fun decimating the wicked or the undiscriminating. Unfortunately, I am currently living in a hell of insufficient aggravation. Critics have generally been kind, or if not precisely kind, then at least fair. In fact, two of the stories in this collection were selected to be included in the Best American Travel Writing books: “This Teeming Ark,” in 2000, and “Powder Keg,” which appeared under the title “Volcano Alley Is Ticking,” in 2001.

  The truth is, I actually had to look for someone to kick around here. Happily, after a quick root through my files, I found Hal Clifford, a columnist for the Aspen Times. Hal published his interview with me and, in what I suspect was meant to be a humorous aside, he suggested that I was “unattractive to the opposite sex.” Somehow I had not been aware of t
his previously. I wondered how Hal knew.

  Another fellow, a newspaper critic, noted that in a previous collection, I had included a piece written for Modern Maturity, the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons, and from that concluded that I was “getting tired.” It is probably for that reason I’ve included the only piece I’ve written for Modern Maturity of late. I’m not so tired that I mind drawing fire from imbeciles. On the other hand, the article in question is very short indeed, and its very brevity may supply munitions to the moron.

  Similarly, I haven’t been vigorous or virtuous enough to thank the hundreds of people who have written me letters over the years, and I’ll do it here, all in a lump. Thank you. Really. I’m glad you liked the books, your letters truly do brighten my day, and I’m sincerely sorry that I haven’t written back. It’s not you. I never write back. I do, however, spend a lot of time feeling guilty about not responding to all the well-written missives. Somebody writing to a writer works on the letter and that is obvious. To do even half as well as you in reply, I’d have to work on it too, and, hey, that’s what I do for a living. I’m not a guy who writes letters, as my mother reminds me from time to time.

  This doesn’t mean I don’t think about what people say. A perceptive reader noted that the conclusion of the story “Castle and More Castles” echoed a thought expressed by the late poet and scientist Loren Eiseley, in his collection Star Thrower. Eiseley is a favorite of mine and I’ve quoted him twice in this book, once in “Evilfish” and once in “Professor Cahill’s Travel 101.” I can’t very well argue that I am unfamiliar with the work, and the idea expressed at the end of the castle story is indeed very similar to one penned by Eiseley. Well, okay, it’s almost identical.

  So I spent days reading Eisely then rereading my own work, and wondering whether I unconsciously swiped the idea or whether such concepts might occur to folks of parallel sentiments contemplating a similar set of conditions.

  What I mean to say here is that the letters do not fall on deaf ears, or, more appropriately I suppose, on blind eyes. I read them. I think about them. Some, like the Eiseley letter, challenge me for days.

  And I really do intend to answer them. Really. I put them in a large file box that is placed on a prominent shelf in my office. The box is labeled “Correspondence 2002,” or whatever the year happens to be. Every time I see the file, which is every day that I work in my office, I feel exceedingly guilty and know that I am not a good person. Generally, almost always in early January, I seal up the box, add the word “Unanswered” to the label, and carry it out to my garage. I have yearly file boxes—“Unanswered Correspondence”—from almost three decades out there. There is no room for my truck anymore, only for the rows upon rows of boxes, mute accusations, piled high over my head. Sometimes I have nightmares about them: angry boxes on a mission of vengeance.

  So, to decades’ worth of letter writers, many thanks and my sincere apologies.

  And as long as I’m thanking folks, I would like to mention those anonymous people who have brightened the darkest portion of my life: the time spent on airplanes. Occasionally, I walk down the aisle and someone is actually reading one of my books. Sometimes, that person will laugh aloud, and I want to glance over her shoulder and see what it was that got her. Which piece, what part? I enter the rest room knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I am the God of Humor.

  But that’s not so. I’m reminded of that every time I do a vanity search on the Internet and discover a site where ordinary folks—as opposed to big-deal journalists—review books. Most people say nice things, but sometimes there are warnings, and quite appropriate ones at that: this guy, the reviewers say of me, is certainly worth reading but he is not as funny as Dave Barry. True, but nobody is as funny as Dave Barry. Except for P. J. O’Rourke. Nobody is as funny as P.J. Or Bill Bryson, for that matter. Or, well, there are a lot of writers who are funnier than I am. The sad fact is that I seldom set out to be funny at all. It just happens and it always surprises me when it does.

  On those rare occasions when I have actually tried to be funny, I’ve failed. Miserably. Witness the story “Panic,” which is about a hairy-chested adventure guy—me—with the worst case of stage fright in television history. Now, that is funny on the face of it, but the essay was not a knee-slapper and turned out to be about mortality, chaos, the organizing principle of story, and one tiny redemption. (I’m serious: The story was recently anthologized in A Man’s Guide to Simple Abundance, which is full of enlightening and redemptive essays. My presence there has a sort of a sore-thumb resonance.)

  Longtime readers may recognize an adventure or two from previous books. The climbing aspect of “Panic” is a prime example. As the years close in on me—I’m in my mid-fifties as I write this—it occurs to me that I ought at least to try to figure out what it all means. I doubt that I will, but my thoughts on enlightenment altogether can be found in the first story in this book.

  “Stutter,” a small piece from Modern Maturity about the guide Grant Thompson, is partially about a bad fall I took climbing in the Queen Charlotte Islands, as is “Fully Unprepared,” which is also about the death of a loved one. I’ve written about that trip, but never about the full extent of the injuries I suffered, the fact that I literally couldn’t walk for months, and the operation that got me back on my feet. The story is a contemplation of mortality.

  Of course, this collection does have some basic episodes of adventure—diving with great white sharks in South Africa, for instance—but many of the dangerous obstacles here are human. This is new. Part of my job, as I see it, is to get to the most remote and inaccessible places on earth. It used to be easy to find such places, but now adventure-travel tour packages take people all over the earth, even to the summit of Everest. What the guides can’t do is take folks to areas that are politically unstable and they can’t do this because they can’t get insurance.

  These days, “remote” is defined as far away plus armaments, and factions, and ancient enmities. To truly get “Out There,” as the column I write is called, I often feel I’m being funneled into places where people point guns at you. The Cold War is over, and there are places in the former Soviet Union—and elsewhere—that have been pretty much closed to this day. Tribal enmities flare, warlords rule, and if you want to get farther than the end of the road, you have to get by the line of guns. The weapons are most evident here in stories such as “The Search for the Caspian Tiger,” “The Caravan of White Gold,” and “The World’s Most Dangerous Friend.”

  Attentive readers will note that certain of my friends, people I’ve written about in the past, make multiple appearances in the book: Matt Smith is here, along with my pals Joel Rogers, Atlatl Bob Perkins, Linnea Larson, Nick Nichols, Michael Fay, Cynthia Moses, and Grant Thompson.

  Occasionally, a reader more anal than I writes to ask why I don’t organize my collections in some fashion—all deserts in this section, for instance, and forests in that, arctic ice here, animal stories there. And what about some sinew of connection between the pieces? Once again, I’ve read those letters, and contemplated them, and in this collection, I played around with the order of the stories, such as it is. It seemed entirely artificial to me. The stories are not arranged chronologically, but they are a fairly representative sampling of my life. Looking at them, I feel as if time has folded in on itself, and that my various travels have the chaotic logic of a pinball in urgent play. What can I say? I have a low threshold of boredom and this is the way I live my life.

  If there is any organizing principle at work here, it is emotional, though, Lord knows, the stories can be read one at a time and in any order without damage to the intended construct. But let me be among the many to warn you: not all the stories are funny. I want to make you laugh, sure, but I also want to make you cry. I used to tell my students in writing seminars that if you can do that—make ’em laugh and make ’em cry in the same work—then you’ve created the “illusion of depth.” I’ve been thin
king about that lately and am willing to amend my thought: I now believe the profundity is genuine and not illusory.

  Not that there’s a lot of deep thinking in, say, the opening piece, “Hold the Enlightenment,” an account of a yoga retreat I endured (and enjoyed) in Jamaica. In fact, as I reread the story, it seems to be a wholesale rejection of wisdom, insight, and understanding altogether. Enlightenment, as I try to explain, is a poor career path for a writer.

  The last essay here, “Trusty and Grace,” is a personal piece that echoes biblical psalms, involves canine flatulence right up there in the first paragraph, and, in the end, made me, the author, cry. I had no idea that it would do that. I first read the story aloud, live, on National Public Radio. When I got toward the end, I choked up, stumbled on the words “brave little girl,” swallowed, and then faltered again on “brave woman.” My eyes smarted, my voice broke. My carefully cultivated reputation as your typically insensitive guy went up in flames. You’ll see me trying to retrieve that status throughout this book.

  In any case, whatever the emotional weight of any of these essays, the prose in each has been honed to the best of my ability and is meant to be attractive to members of all sexes. I suppose psychologists would call that overcompensation.

  Tim Cahill

  Montana

  December 2001

  Hold the Enlightenment

  I am not a yoga kinda guy. Yoga people are sensitive, aware, largely sober, slender, double-jointed, humorless vegans who are concerned with their own spiritual welfare and don’t hesitate to tell you about it. They are spiritually intense and consequently enormously boring in the manner of folks who, in their own self-absorption, feel you ought be alerted as to the quantity and texture of their last bowel movement.

  Or so I used to think.

  But there I was, taking my first yoga class, in an open-sided bar/restaurant while, a few hundred feet below, the Caribbean Sea exploded off the high coral cliffs of Negril, Jamaica. I was doing some position, an asana, that was something like what I’d call a wrestler’s bridge: it required balancing on my head and hands up top, and the soles of my feet below. Hotel employees had removed tables and chairs from the restaurant for this class, and, because I was apprehensive, I’d positioned myself in the area where I felt most comfortable, which is to say, next to the bar. In the field of my vision, I could see an upside-down line of several bottles of rum, and, above them, a black-and-white picture of Bob Marley, the patron saint of Jamaican reggae. There is a picture of Bob Marley in every single bar in Jamaica. I know: I’ve done the research. One of Marley’s best songs has a line that goes “Every little thing, is going to be all right.” That, I decided, was my mantra.