2008jan17. Excerpts from Tim Cahill’s Pecked To Death By Ducks.
There was no one at the guard station that flanked the entrance to the emir’s gardens, a weekend retreat for Kuwait’s ruling family. [ ... ] Presently, I saw a man-size break in the wall and moved toward it through the swirling, granular darkness. The inferno beyond lit the break with a shifting, red-orange light, and I could feel the heat on my face like a bad sunburn. Everything that wasn’t burning was black: the earth, the familiar shapes of the trees, the animal carcasses that littered the place. This was ground zero for the largest man-made environmental disaster in history. It was a perfect vision of hell. I moved through the break in the wall and stopped. The next step would put me in the burning lake, which was throwing up the thickest, grainiest smoke I had yet encountered. It blinded me and made my eyes water. Despite the bandanna I wore over my nose and mouth, I found myself choking, and then I was coughing in fits that bent me over at the waist. [pg 9]
The Marquesas have never attracted tourists, a fact that has attracted artists. Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville both spent time on the northern island of Nuku Hiva. The Belgian-born songwriter Jacques Brel died on Hiva Oa. In 1900 the French artist Paul Gauguin came to Atuona, on Hiva Oa, looking for inspiration in “unspoiled savagery.” There was some tension between the artist and the local bishop regarding Gauguin’s relations with various island women. Gauguin nailed obscene pictures to his door and called his place the House of Pleasure, using a word that, in French, has a sexual connotation. There were legal problems fueled by the bishop’s rage. Gauguin died in 1903, and he is buried in a small graveyard above Atuona. His grave is neatly tended and much photographed. The bishop is buried there as well. You have to clear away the weeds to see his stone. [pg 45]
The next morning, at breakfast, I asked the mayor’s wife what she had said to the old man. “Parachute,” she told me. Just the thought of it got her giggling, and her husband had to tell me the story. About thirty years ago, he said, the man with the bad legs lost his grip and fell, but not before tearing off a palm frond, which he tried to use as a parachute. The man had broken both his legs. The mayor, his wife, and their three sons and two daughters were rocking back and forth with laughter. Now, the mayor said, hardly able to continue, whenever anyone saw the fellow limping along a path, they thought of the failed green parachute. It was a joke that had kept everyone in Puamau laughing for thirty years. [pg 46]
On certain lakes, hundreds of fishing shacks are set out side by side, in a kind of town grid, and a mayor is elected. Other men may be engaged in more distracting activities. It is said that an incredibly hardy band of hookers work the frozen ice cities. [pg 161]
The worse thing the sheep did, Alejandra said, they did on hot days like this. (It was about 70 degrees.) The brainless beasts would wander down to the lake, where, for whatever reason, they would hurl themselves into the cool water and sink like so many stones. Then you’d have to stand on a rock and stare into twenty feet of clear, cold water to see the sheep on the bottom, white or black against green mossy rocks, held down by all that waterlogged wool. [pg 220]
Above, the night sky was clear and black, full of luminous and unfamiliar stars. At this altitude, the stars did not twinkle. They were great globules of light, and their colors were brilliant: white, blue white, red, green, gold ... [pg 223]
Happily, the producers of the American TV show That’s Incredible! paid the club eighteen thousand dollars to attempt a bungee-cord jump off the world’s highest bridge, the 1,260-foot-high Royal Gorge Bridge spanning the Arkansas River just outside Canon City, Colorado. It was an entirely successful endeavor. “If there is any terror that unites us,” Kirke said of the members of the Dangerous Sports Club, “it’s the terror of having to take a conventional job.” [pg 359]
Kirke flew four and a half hours at two thousand feet [in an ultralight over the English Channel], landed in a field, and almost immediately heard the far-off sounds of police sirens, coming closer. A woman in a nearby farmhouse motioned to him: hurry, hurry. Kirke packed up his gear, and the woman guided him to a hidden attic room. “As it happened,” Kirke explained to me, “during the Second World War, when France was occupied, this courageous woman had hidden downed British pilots in that very room. She had a certificate of appreciation from the Dutch and British governments.” Kirke had hid out for a day, savoring the romance of the situation, then escaped. [pg 361]
A ball seventy feet in diameter contains about two tons of air. The rogue melon rolled into a cement light post twenty-five feet high and “mashed it.” It finally came to rest against an electric pylon, toppled it slightly, and effectively blacked out the town of Telford for some time. [pg 362]
Kirke rigged a chair and had himself catapulted over a 650-foot-cliff in Ireland. He took ten Gs, did not pass out, went from zero to six in a second and a half, and managed to deploy his parachute with, oh, dozens of feet to spare. This stunt was for a Japanese television program, and Kirke was touched that some of the female production assistants had burst into grateful tears when they saw him land safely. Usually, he gets arrested. [pg 363]
