Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [3]
I worry about Mark sometimes for similar reasons. He's a wonderfully talented man: totally solid, dependable, you couldn't wish for better. But… well, the word “limitation” appears to be as alien to him as “adventure” is to me. That stocky frame of his, which is more athletic than it looks, belies a tremendous strength of character that I quite envy. He's able to smile through most difficulties and see light at the end of a tunnel even as it's caving in on him. That's what makes him such a great cameraman, and so perfect for our show, because he's willing to go right out on a limb and get what he wants in situations where less impulsive people—me, for instance—might hold back.
Right now, despite the brutal rocking of the plane, he's perched on the edge of his seat, belt unbuckled, camera steadied against his shoulder, relishing each violent bump and jolt and every last smoky cough of the propellers on our rapid descent.
“Eric! You're in shot,” he yells.
“Sorry.” The producer yanks in his elbows, and everyone else does the same.
Circling the clouds in uneven condor swoops, the plane bobs through a thermal current into a crossword of air-pockets, ten feet down, twenty across, up seven, down nine, causing Tasha to almost bang her head on the seat a second time …
“Holy …”
… as we try to align ourselves with the runway.
“… sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeyit!”
Braced, with teeth clenched, I glance at the cockpit for some sign, anything will do, that we're not about to die. The pilot, in a crisp white shirt to suggest competence, with impressive yellow epaulettes like the ones real pilots might wear, is sitting with his head erect, back stiff, gripping his half-moon steering wheel with the intensity of a six-year-old on his first go-kart ride. Or maybe he's praying—hard to see from this angle.
Undeterred, Mark wedges the camera in against the seat and continues. This could be his one and only chance to shoot our landing.
I do my bit as host, squinting through the porthole at the sun-speckled ocean below, and our destination: Tanna Island, a mysterious paw print of brooding jungle fringed with misty beaches and rippling banks of submerged coral that fan out from the shoreline like frilled cuffs, visible only to birds, air travelers, and, I guess, if things don't go their way, skydivers in free fall. To my left, two raised cat's tails of drifting smoke carve up the horizon, one from the distant smoldering volcano, which I know from my guidebook to be Mount Yasur, the other belching from deep within the hardwood forest, cause unknown.
If you imagine this archipelago to be shaped like a catapult, then Tanna is halfway down the handle, and contains some of the last few virginal tracts of land on the planet. For the next week, this Stone Age wilderness will be our hellhole away from home, and the closer we get to it, the more trepidation I feel. I think perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was right. Maybe dinosaurs do still walk the earth. If that's true and they're going to be anywhere, it's down below us. I can feel it.
Dinosaurs, or something far, far worse.
No one really has a clue where Vanuatu is. In that respect it's a bit like the human spleen. But basically, we're talking about a cluster of eighty-three cyclone-battered islands in the South Pacific between Fiji and the Solomon Islands.
Until tourism happened here—and it took a long time to happen, for reasons that will become obvious—the only people who'd ever been able to say with any certainty that this remote Polynesian country existed at all was a ragbag assortment