Our Bullets Will Chase You

Chapter 18 of 25 -- Head Hunters of the Amazon

Turning the Corner

Pitacunca (the Jivaro medicine man, whom they called Pete) led the way in his canoe, making giant strokes. Up de Graff reflected on Pete's size (massive), his strength (the embodiment of strength and deviltry), and considered his own security as a white man. He didn't believe he could trust them but didn't completely believe that his rifles would be enough to save himself and team. He calls the Jivaros cunning, knavish, and diabolical, with the courage of wild animals in battle but purely looking out for their own interests. I'm myself a nice guy to everyone, but I'd rather not have overnight guests.

In a few hours they were at the western mouth of the gorge, the Pongo Menseriche. They saw some monkeys and decided to take down some for food for the rest of the trip. They were after the howling monkey, called cotos. Those with shotguns were bested in the hunt by those with blow-guns. But they still ended up with around two dozen of them. Up de Graff himself got three, but his were more of a mess (shotgun spray) than those taken with a blow-gun. We used to get rabbits with a shotgun. And it's worth mentioning one of my own adventures, cleaning rabbits while wearing my mom's fur coat. It was a mess and she was mad.

It was Pete's advice not to try the passage of the Pongo that night, but to lash the canoes together, then they'd run the minimum of risk. After dark, then, they moved a ways upstream and pitched their camp on a sand-spit. The two white men kept watch, one at a time, spelling each other every couple hours. Their biggest fear was losing their allies, "who were liable to disappear if the fancy took them." But all slept soundly. And they heard the Pongo's mighty roar on the night air. That'd be great, white noise like thunder.

They were in the luck with the river the next day. It was just right for passing back up the gorge, the canoes strapped together and a log between them. Sweeping clear of the eastern mouth of the gorge, they came in full view of their camp and were greeted by their fellow explorers. Since Up de Graff and Game were a day late, the others had almost gone out looking for them (as planned). They were also glad to see the extra plantains. And Up de Graff himself appreciated the hot coffee and milk the others had. That might've been coconut milk though, probably was, we haven't see references to cows.

Pitacunca took one glance at the camp and the explorers and turned around. He and his people retreated 20 yards away, sat down, and started a dismal wailing chant in a minor key. They seemed distraught at the sight of so many white people as well as their kit. It seemed to Up de Graff that they would never stop "yowling." They continued for about a half hour, then settled themselves by the campfire.

Up de Graff needed to wait for the water to go down at the Pongo before leaving. So for safety sake he showed how accurate they were at shooting small game, as a warning to the natives, particularly the Huambizas. Get this: He said, If the Huambizas "really aroused our anger, even though they might be half a dozen miles up-stream and round three bends, we should sent our bullets off to chase them and them to sleep." But when the natives started getting restless, the explorers decided to get going, choosing to risk the river instead of the people. You see your chance, you take it. Better to get up a head of steam than lose your own head. Let's head out, folks, while we got a head to head out with!

So they set out, and waged eight hours' war against the seething waters.

Yee Haw, Maw Caw, 3 Boobys

Chapter 16 of 25 -- Head Hunters of the Amazon

Diplomacy

Seeing a Jivaro hut on the hillside was a lifesaver for Up de Graff and Game. They felt new strength and their fear was gone. They didn't even think of the possible difficulties in their path. And being indifferent to the effect it might have on the Jivaro, they let out a yell of joy. They should've thought over what that might mean to the Jivaro; was it some kind of war cry? Because that was the effect it had. We used to have a war cry as kids, which was "Yee haw! Maw caw! Booby booby booby!" The "booby" triad was accompanied by repeatedly patting our stomach. How that'd fly in South America, I'd probably be dead.

The Jivaro burst into war-whooping and howling. The idea being to impress whatever foe was out there that they had huge numbers. For three long hours they kept up the yelling, but the intensity varied. Up de Graff broke the spell by leaving his rifle behind and walking slowly up the path. Three scared youths came out for a parley.  He did hand motions like paddling a canoe and they finally followed him. In the canoe the explorers had some trade-goods, including poison in a bamboo cane. There's no mention of warning labels, so we just hope they didn't get it mixed up in the pantry.

These were gifts, and that settled everyone down. From their tribe the natives brought a gourd full of drink called giamanchi, and it ended up being a lot. The Jivaro were quite open by now and the ice broken. But they still couldn't converse, so they tried sign language. The tribe ended up sending a special envoy to the Chief (named Lazaro), and they waited for him. Which only took about an hour.

Of course Lazaro was very interested in what the explorers were up to. They told him they were looking for gold and about their current camp. They accepted an invitation to stay with the tribe. But they still thought they should stay on a small island nearby. The concern had to do with the great health of the Jivaro and the comparatively poor condition of Game. He had old scars from having scratched sand-fly and mosquito bites. And many of them were reopened and resembled a nasty rash. The Jivaro saw it and practically stampeded, but they were fearing smallpox. Running sores are terrible and that's not a running joke.

Up de Graff persuaded the chief that Game didn't have smallpox. Next the Jivaro provided some hospitality. Their medicine man paddled them toward the small island. Once there, they set up a house, started a fire, etc. In an hour they had a decent shelter and fire, plus supper of roast yuca, roast corn on the cob, roast plantains, with peanuts and wild honest for dessert. My graphic makes it look like an upscale restaurant, but I'm just exaggerating, which might've been a mistake, since I started laughing to the point of tears, slapping my knee, and ended up choking on a piece of my own dinner, chicken. I could've used the chief to step me through the Heimlich maneuver. And a house built in an hour would've been nice.

The explorers rested, nursed their feet, ate, and chatted, passing four days on the island. The chief then proposed that he should accompany them through the Pongo. His motive, a great one, was to get the other presents. But it was greater news for Up de Graff and Game, because it meant good help by real river experts.

February Totally Bites

WORKING WITH A NATIVE GOD,
IN HIS POWER, WE RUN FEBRUARY
THROUGH WITH A BUTCHER KNIFE

AND CEREMONIALLY TURN IT OVER

TO THE FLAMES FOR JUDGMENT

I have been working in the deepest intuition through 2015, discerning things at their most basic level. It's frankly blown my mind, or, rather, expanded it, giving me once again that Super Brain feeling I've known numerous times in my life. As a kid I used to conduct a census on dust motes floating in my room -- learning much in the process -- before letting them collapse and vanish when I went down for breakfast.

That said, January has presented me with one enormous insight: That February is an aberration in time and time-keeping. The evidence against February flashed in rapid procession in my spirit. Like the dust motes of old, but a lot more apparently high tech, like 100,000 JPG thumbnails flashing by. This has to do with the honing and greater use of my mind over the years, along with incidental aspects that may have come from movies or TV. (If I have been bionically enhanced, I don't consciously remember it.)

Be that as it may, I don't feel I need to justify this too much. After all, we're only talking about stinking February. The worst month on the calendar, a short little hobbled period of time, maybe not even technically a month, a la Pluto not really being a planet. January's a month, March is a month, February's a rest stop in the middle! And not even one with major facilities, but one like truck drivers use to blow carbon out of their rigs, perhaps catching a bit of shuteye, and whatever other quickie XXX activity they may be into.

My great revulsion against February is fairly recent. But I do seem to remember being at least slightly queasy about February all my life. What other month do we feel so sorry for that we add a day every few years? There's none, just this stubby little passel of days. And if they weren't actual days of time, but existed simply on a pretend calendar, I'm sure we wouldn't be so merciful. We'd take it, rip it out, and burn it.

You know what? I feel led right now -- this is true, from on high -- to symbolically, ritually, cleanse ourselves of February. Which doesn't mean we won't have February this year, but it might be more tolerable. That's what a lot of ritual is for, to make life easier; you feel badly for your sins, so you sacrifice a lamb. You call in sick from work, then to compensate for it you actually get sick.

You're invited to join me in this sacrifice. As I type this, I'm also cutting the little month of February off my checkbook calendar. (The ceremony is illustrated above.) Now I'm holding it up. Notice how small and harmless it is, physically as well as small compared to the other months. OK, the rest of the ritual will be in two steps. 1) I'm holding it up and lighting the bottom corner with a match. Now as the flames rise higher, I'm rotating it and trying not to get burnt. Repeat after me: "I burn you to ashes. You shall never again arise." 2) I'm putting a little piece of PostIt® note in the hole and drawing an arrow from January to March.

Wow, that feels good. Except I've got this cursed little bit of ash leftover, which could simply go in the trash or be cast to the wind. But I will carry the ritual through to the end, by putting it in the garbage disposal, with these words of power: "How dare you, unspeakable so-called month, pollute my life? Now I am cleansed of you. Now I am free."

I'm giving my readers a special thanks today for standing with me. To be in agreement as we are is very valuable for the cleansing. We now have the power to carry on, at least for this day. Let us resolve, if not this year then next, to go directly from January to March!

Post-It® Brand is a trademark of 3M.

My Last Brush with Savages

Being a lowly blogger in a world wholly immersed in information, I cannot be sure that my words here will be much noticed or long remembered. And it's frankly doubtful that I will be able to match the historical significance of the Last Night of Porky's. But sometimes, in the course of human events, it simply becomes necessary to do the right thing as you the individual are so moved. With no hope of reward.

That moment has now come for me. Whether I've been internally provoked by the controversy over the Washington Redskins name, Abraham Lincoln's alleged racism, or a visceral disgust at what comes out of Republicans' mouths daily, I've decided to live and let live. No more mental and verbal dissing of the so-called "savages" of the world. That's all behind me now.

Like everyone else my age, I grew up with a pretty huge disgust for what we called at the time savagery. (I just changed in the last couple days, so I hope I don't have any relapses in the course of this post.) The savagery of the world, particularly in the vile acts of cannibalism, the disgusting shrinking of heads, and the perverse roasting of missionaries, was driven home to me, touching me deep in my soul. Just saying it now, I still recoil at the idea that these people -- perhaps for good reasons only they knew (at this point I won't quibble) -- would think any of that was good.

There are, however, customs and cultural differences, which even if they don't make sense to me are probably to be respected. I'm not the judge and jury. There's another they'll have to answer to, and perhaps they'll be commended for following His light, or perhaps not. That's not for me to know. Let's take cannibalism as a cultural difference. Of course it's not my cup of tea. But if you think about it, what's the difference? The guy's dead ... why let him go to waste? Let's say a tiger eats him; it's the same difference. It's not that savage of an act.

The other two -- the shrinking of heads and the roasting of missionaries -- could also be justified. If you're hoarding heads for some reason, to possess the power of their souls (or whatever), if you shrink them they take less room. And they'd make nice toys for the kids, just like we in "civilization" played with gourds. Both heads and gourds are part of nature and make good gifts. The brain inside dries up, and when shook makes a fun noisemaker. As for the roasting of missionaries, my church used to send missionaries overseas. The missionaries then would come home every couple years on furlough, always claiming it'd cost $10,000 more to send them back. Now I realize why: they didn't want to go back. They didn't think we could raise the money. Haven't heard from them now in years...

The basic thing about this switch in vocabulary is as simple as this, the world's changed. We now respect other cultures. And something else has changed. We've been able to look at ourselves more closely, whereas before we only looked out. In those years, we made ourselves the standard of good and right. We were quite definitely blinded to the ways of others, and even to the humanity of others. You'd see it when native peoples were naked, smeared with paint, bones in their noses, etc., and whooping and hollering while dancing around a fire. It never occurred to us that these were rituals of power, pride, oneness with nature and world, and a good way to recycle bones.

Being blinded, then, we didn't see that many of our own rituals were just that, rituals. With the big difference between us and the "savages" being that we had emptied our rituals of power and made them secondary to our "real life," the daily grind. We traded our oneness with nature and world for a few disposable trinkets -- crass materialism and man-eat-man capitalism (cannibalism?) -- and all this time, in our terrible emptiness, we set up ourselves as the standard of excellence! While destroying our environment. Makes me feel bad, a little. I don't know if I can go on...

OK, scratch all that. We're not so bad. If we keep going like we're going, we surely have a good 50-100 years of civilization left, OK? ... It's not that dire. Surely we can steward our water and other resources for another 100 years before they're gone. Ouch, I just had a thought, a terrible thought. That when we're gone, when we've gone the way of the dinosaurs, some of those tribes in Africa, the ones you read about in National Geographic, "untouched" by civilization, will still be going strong. Maybe the "savages" are on to something!

Foreigners Are A Little Too Foreign

I was at a meeting the other day (absolutely true story, my hand's up), where the supposed benefits of foreign travel were set forth. The guy had been to Africa, and in his life, Pago Pago, Timbuktu, Europe, and probably Copacabana. And he had a display of rough handmade trinkets to prove it!

I sat there respectfully, for the most part, only clearing my throat and shifting uneasily in my chair a couple times for effect. As I watched his slides, replete with straw huts, shrunken heads, headdresses, nose-bones, and bare-breasted women, and everyone living in close proximity to trees, I felt a little queasy. But I was thankful, thankful that I'm not a foreigner!

I don't know how many of you have been to a foreign country. I actually have not been anywhere but right here on home soil, the homeland. Not even Canada. And certainly not Mexico -- God forbid. You can't even drink foreign water.

It always turned me off, what we used to hear about foreigners, and even now I feel the same revulsion at how they do things that are basically crazy. Such as the things they eat. Human flesh is of course the worst thing. But even the stuff we might consider better is still stuff they're fighting monkeys and anteaters for.

Foreigners. Even the word has a foreign sound to it. Because that's what they are, the other, something or someone apart from civilization. They're out there doing their thing, more or less one with nature. Nature as it was lived by primal man thousands of years ago. Nudity is natural. It's still how we're born. But in their case, it's also how they stayed! They're closer to nature in that.

One tribe of foreigners I saw on TV -- and it's an image that's seared in my memory, regrettably -- had big long sticks on their penises, like maybe 18 inches long, with something, maybe a string hooked to a counterbalance behind their ass to keep it erect. I saw that and spit my drink, "No! Don't tell me!" I fell to the floor laughing, and the ridiculousness of it all still makes me chuckle, after all this time.

I don't see any penis sticks in my top picture. But there's plenty of sharp erect dealyboppers on their heads. And I love the caption! "The chilling sound of the Boo-Boos!" You get poked with one of those spikes and you'll have a Boo-Boo! LOL. But for them it's "a summons to frenzied dances." If they go at it too hard, someone's going to lose an eye! Myself, I wouldn't approach to within 50 feet of that, let alone dance barefoot in such a crazy crowd!

And look at the other picture. Our civilized man is shaking hands with the foreigner, who's obviously sizing him up for a meal. But such plans could be hasty and premature, as we see that we're armed and ready to defend ourselves. The situation is clearly perceived to be potentially dire, as even the lady is armed. But it looks, amazingly, like the savage is armed as well, meaning it's more dangerous than I'd like, since I'm thinking he stole the gun from one of our guys, possibly his breakfast.

You noticed I called the foreigner a savage. Yes, I realize nowadays that's usually thought of as a politically incorrect word. But I feel we can use it anyway, especially when we reflect on its meaning. Since they are savages, we may as well call them that. And they don't know what we're talking about anyway. To them "boog-uh-de-boo" is a word. They're babbling gibberish, so of course they're not going to be real offended. And even if they are, it probably wouldn't take a lot of persuasion and they'd agree, they are pretty wild.

No, my friends, I'll leave the rest of the world to you. I'm happy right here! I seriously don't want to deal with foreigners!