Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [16]
“Okay, guys!” Mark, our young, upbeat director, claps his hands to move everyone out. His face, half-hidden behind a drape of mousy bangs that don't quite meet in the middle, is bleached white. Poor guy, he's sick again. Been plagued by stomach problems since the Australia shoot last week, although he assures me he's feeling a little better today, which is a relief. You don't want to be falling ill in a place as remote as Tanna Island, that's for sure.
“Let's go, people,” Eric shouts. The cheap sunblock he's just slathered on his forehead twinkles in the frosting of premature gray at his temples. “We're late.”
Things are really cooking in the neighborhood today. The narrow byways of Tanna are teeming with people, mostly young women in bright summer skirts migrating along the roadside with languorous strides. Some are accompanied by kids, whom they steer onto the hard shoulder at the last moment to avoid oncoming traffic. And when I say oncoming traffic, I mean us. I don't think I've seen another motorized vehicle the entire journey. Most people can't afford a car, and, strictly speaking, don't need one anyway—it's a small island; where are they going to go?—so they walk.
Lurching into the bush, we plow along curling canyons of tall grass, passing more women along the way, tiny babies swinging from their shoulders in loose cotton papooses. Some carry woven palm-leaf baskets laden with okra, bananas, and mangoes. Others just stand there and watch us go by, one arm slung casually over a cow's neck.
Incidentally, we've been here almost twenty-four hours already and I've yet to see a man do this: shoulder anything, carry anything, or sling his arm over a cow's anything. Every time you lay eyes on a guy on Tanna he's either loafing around laughing with his pals, sitting on the ground in a watchful stupor, or dawdling among the trees, swinging a zig-zaggy tree branch he's turned into an improvised weed whacker, which he clearly thinks gives the impression that he's busy mowing, when it's obvious to everyone that it's just a useless stick and the women are doing all the bloody work.
In time, the heavily wooded trail narrows to the point of being impassable and we have no option but to continue on foot, each of us lugging a piece of Camera Mark's equipment: the tripod, a battery pack, a light, a bag with filters and lenses in it.
Eager to be a team player, I do my bit. I carry his Pepsi.
“Wait here, Cash,” Director Mark orders after a few yards. “I don't want you to see what's up ahead.” That's how they maintain the element of surprise.
Waving everyone on, he leads them through a clump of bushes until they disappear, abandoning me in the woods alone.
The setup for one of these shows is complicated. It takes ages to block out camera angles and to frame things—where the sun is, where I will walk, where the crew will stand so as not to be in shot, basically fielding all possibilities before we get around to shooting anything. That's the problem with spontaneity; it takes so much planning.
Usually, while all of this is going on, I'm left by myself.
I don't complain. I'm aware it has to be this way. It's the hook of the show, not knowing where I'm being taken. But that still doesn't make the alone times any easier to deal with. We've shot just three episodes so far, but already there's an odd “us and him” situation developing. If this continues I can see us eventually splitting into two groups: the in group and the out group. The out group being me. It's a shame, but as host of the show I'm not strictly a member of the crew, so I tend to be excluded from all meetings, discussions, excursions, planning lunches, and so on. As a result, all too often I'm left limping along behind the herd