Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [59]
What really got us marveling about Mother Nature, however, was the imminent prospect of parenthood. Technically, I knew where babies came from. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel suffused with a sense of cosmic wonderment, knowing that in nine short months, I would be admiring the contents of a baby’s diaper. This was life, a life that we had created. And what a miraculous thing that is. Every day our little embryo was sprouting a limb and growing a brain. “According to the book,” I said to Sylvia, “our child presently has a tail. Do you think that comes from my side or yours?”
With each passing week, the baby developed eyes and ears, fingers and toes. Time, suddenly, took on a whole new meaning. Babies, we were confidently told by other parents, change your life in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. If you were planning to do anything at all that did not involve a changing table and a diaper bag, now might be a good time to do it. Well, we thought, it might be nice to see a volcano, and since to the best of our knowledge there weren’t any volcanoes with stroller paths, we soon found our way to Mount Yasur.
It was the same volcano that had lured Captain Cook to Tanna. He had noticed its red glow in the night and heard its constant rumbling, and so he brought the Resolution toward a small bay on the southeastern side of the island, which he named Port Resolution. There is a small black-sand beach at the mouth of the bay, and Cook soon found its shore occupied by what he estimated to be a thousand armed warriors. If it had been me standing on the quarterdeck, I would have said, “Right, Jenkins. Make a note of it—Natives hostile. Now, let’s turn this barque around and get out of here.” Captain Cook, however, decided to hop in a rowboat and pay the islanders a visit. With a few men, he rowed toward the beach. Feeling that the natives were just a little too close for comfort, he gave an order for a musket to be fired over their heads. Here, in Cook’s words, was the response: “In an instant they recovered themselves and began to display their weapons, one fellow shewed us his back side in such a manner that it was not necessary to have an interpreter to explain his meaning.”
What this conclusively proves, of course, is that mooning transcends culture. A display of the buttocks speaks a universal language. In the end, Cook was fairly well received on the island, though tolerated might be the more apt description. He tried very hard to be conscientious in naming the island. One of his men, a Mr. Forster, had pointed to the ground, indicating to one of the locals that he’d like to know the name of this place. Tanna, he was told. Tanna it is, then, wrote Captain Cook, filling in his chart, and so to this day the island remains known as Tanna, which means “ground” in the local language.
Captain Cook, however, was prevented from approaching Mount Yasur, which from his description was in a particularly active phase—“The volcano threw up vast quantities of fire and Smoak, the flames were seen to ascend above the hill between us and it, the night before it did the same and made a noise like thunder or the blowing up of mines at every eruption which happened every four or five minutes.”
We were more fortunate. Mount Yasur was currently shuttling back and forth between levels 1 and 2 on the four-point scale used by the islanders to describe the volcano’s activity. Level 4 is merely an innocuous shorthand for You’re all going to die. Level 3 says Those of you on the volcano are going to die, which was precisely the fate of a Japanese woman and her two guides shortly before our arrival. “We told her it was unsafe,” said William, the manager of the village-run guesthouse we were staying at in Port Resolution. “But she wanted to take pictures. No, no, we said. Too dangerous for pictures. But she wouldn’t listen to no from the guides. So two boys from the village agreed to take her, and they all die.”
“And at what level was the volcano