Antipode – Chapter 11
The Good and the Fortunate
Antipode was originally published in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.
Living in a tent for months on end has its advantages. The phone doesn’t ring at three a.m., electricity bills are low, and I never find myself wandering from room to room, wondering what I was looking for. Mud wasps do build their homes on mine, though, their crusty mazes growing until I knock them off, and they must begin anew. Mold grows into the very being of my simple home, leaving behind a persistent smell, and creeping black spots. Lizards take advantage of the sleeves holding my tent poles, moving in to these new haunts that are so tight the animals have to back out when they leave. One night I woke to find a soft, slightly moving mass beneath me. Prodding it carefully, the form revealed itself as a large snake, curled up warm underneath my tent, perhaps waiting to strike at a hapless lizard emerging from the fragile walls. But these are minor inconveniences. I have free waterfront real estate, and when day breaks, I don’t need an alarm clock. The forest and I wake together.
This forest, though, is different. It is not simply that all Madagascar forests are unique. Indeed, some families of organisms are well represented both here and in the neotropics, such as the understory melastome plants, with their slightly fuzzy, latticed leaves and small blue fruits. Of course the lemurs and chameleons and leaf-tailed geckos of the Madagascar forest are wildly different from the monkeys and parrots and toucans that one is likely to see with some regularity in a neotropical forest. But there is more. This place doesn't seem saturated.
When a tree falls in a neotropical rainforest—and they do, often—it creates a light gap into which light loving, pioneer species move, using, in part, the nutrients left by the tree now fallen. There is evidence of a tree fall for many years after the fact. The canopy is no longer closed. The plants that thrive under these conditions include spongy-wooded species such as many palms, balsas, and Cecropia—light-adoring species that will disappear when the canopy above closes, and the light dims. The many vines that the tree brought down with it grow up from where they fell, producing a shrubby area, ripe with smaller, tangled vines. There is, however, often no evidence of the actual tree that fell within months of its falling. It is utterly absorbed, first by fungus and termites, ultimately by all the things that grow to take its place. There are no spare nutrients in a neotropical rainforest system, so a windfall of organic matter is immediately seized upon. When a tree falls on Nosy Mangabe, though, it lingers where it fell, not immediately sinking into itself, eaten from within by microbes and fungus. Its carcass remains an impediment to those wishing to pass for many years.
On Nosy Mangabe, in particular, many groups are simply missing. There are no members of the Carnivora. The niche that would be filled with big cats or hyaenas in Africa, or mongooses in the rest of Madagascar, is apparently unfilled. There are relatively few birds. Only four species of lemur are present, two of which were introduced by humans, or more likely re-introduced, after being hunted out many years ago. The only group that seems to be well-represented is frogs.
Even the ants are scarce. In a neotropical rainforest, when you drop a piece of food, it swarms with ants within minutes, and is completely gone soon thereafter. On Nosy Mangabe, when you drop a piece of food, it may stay there for weeks. Bananas hung on a string are a sure attractor for lemurs, but don’t generate streams of ants. In a Costa Rican forest where I worked, I had a poison-dart frog in a plastic container for the afternoon, intending to use it in a behavioral experiment the next morning. I thought, in my naiveté, that the frog should be fed, so put a very small piece of banana in the container with the frog, to attract ants, which the frog could then eat. Half an hour later, the little girl who lived there ran up to me, panicked. I had attracted ants, sure enough, and they had devoured my frog. In the neotropics, ants are unstoppable. On Nosy Mangabe, they seem to beg for encouragement.
Spiders, on the other hand, are prevalent. In my experience, people who like snakes are often repulsed by spiders, and vice versa. To my mind, the smooth muscle of a snake body is an invitation to touch, whereas spiders have far too many legs to contend with. I hate walking into spider webs. Every day, every trail I walk on has fine threads woven into elaborate patterns strung across it, and every day, I get covered in them. This gossamer string, faintly sticky and imperceptibly strong, covers me, nets my hair, drips from my arms, masks my face. Occasionally, I see them before I walk into them, and tear them down with my arm. Usually I walk unaware through the thick juicy center of the spider’s lair. When it stops raining, the spiders all put up webs. When it ceases to blow, or becomes very sunny, the spiders put up webs. And I come along and destroy them.
Many of the forest spiders and wasps are in a continual struggle, the wasps aiming to parasitize the spiders, the spiders hoping not to be used for someone else’s goals. Parasitoid wasps are relatively common throughout much of the world, and Madagascar is no different. Some wasps paralyze large spiders, then drag them back to a hole in the ground, where the female wasp lays her eggs in the still-breathing but immobile spider. That spider, slowly eaten from the inside by developing wasps, will feed the next generation of parasitoids. Smaller mud wasps pack huge numbers of tiny spiders into their little mud homes, where they, too, serve to feed the young wasps.
The trails are rife with spiders. Higher up, lemur troops hoot and whistle, scream and cackle. The ruffed lemurs are intensely curious, grasping branches firmly with their hands while peering down at the odd bipedal primate on the forest floor below. A mile and a half from camp, along hilly trail F, I had set up a new experiment. A troop of ruffed lemurs often hangs out in this area, making terrifying noises and peering with their improbable dog faces from the trees. They started screaming while I took data on a precipitous slope, matted wet leaf litter beneath my feet, and I fell. The tumble was minor, but annoying, and surely scared into silence the frogs I was hoping to find. The lemurs continued on, though, cackling and bounding through the trees, while I lay in a wet heap at the bottom of a tired trail in the darkening forest.
Back in camp, protected from some of the hazards of the forest, there are still few barriers between nature and people. All over the world, people invent stories to explain what they see around them, but these may serve mostly to betray human fear, rather than real understanding. Jessica and I stood at the gateway to Lebon and Fortune’s world and looked in, confused and wary.
We were sitting in the lab transcribing field notes when Lebon came to us, holding his right hand limply in his left.
“I am in much pain,” he said. He was staggering slightly as well, though this was purely for emphasis.
“What from?” Jessica asked.
“A fish bit me,” he said, producing his limp right hand as evidence.
“A barracuda?” I asked, knowing there were barracudas here, and thinking this was the only fish that would have hurt a man, except for the great whites, which would surely have done more damage. I had not yet looked at his hand.
“No.” He looked morose.
“What kind of fish?”
“A little fish,” he said, then added, “I didn’t sleep all night.” Jessica and I caught each other’s eyes, amused, confused.
“Misy maharary?” I asked Lebon, using my paltry knowledge of Malagasy to say, “Is there pain?” He looked at me startled, surprised to hear Malagasy emanating from my mouth.
“Misy maharary,” he affirmed, cringing. Yeah, there’s pain alright. I had learned the word, maharary, pain, from Bret, during our first trip to Madagascar. He had learned it from the nurse-nuns who were stitching up his leg after he ripped it open on barnacle-laden mangroves. We got him to the nearest medical facility, but they wouldn’t let me go in with him, and he spoke no French at all. They were trying to anesthetize the area so they could give him stitches, but they couldn’t read his vazaha facial expressions, so didn’t know if the anesthesia had taken yet. Finally they managed to communicate the only two phrases he needed to know. Maharary(pain)? Or, tsy maharary (no pain)? When next I saw him, he was several stitches, and one Malagasy word, better off. I needed such a simple, binary system now, with Lebon.
“Do you want something for the pain…”
“Yes.”
“...or the infection?”
“Yes,” he agreed. I tried again.
“Do you want something for the pain, or the infection?”
“Yes.” I looked gloomily at Jessica, hoping she could discern what it was that the man wanted. She asked the same question, and again received simply an affirmative answer.
“He wants some of everything,” she said to me, not surprised. Rural and small-town people in much of the developing world seem to be in awe of the human pharmacies who come in from the west. We appear to have panaceas for every disease, every physical ailment, and there is little understanding that these same cure-alls often have side-effects, and must be taken in their entirety to be any use at all.
Finally, I went over to Lebon, to look at his hand. There was a tiny cut, hardly visible.
“Is this a deep cut?” I asked him, testing.
“No,” he admitted. I went to my first aid kit and got topical antibiotic, a Band-Aid, and some ibuprofen. He held out his hand, and I put some Neosporin on the slight cut, covering it with the bandage. I handed him the pill.
“This will keep the pain away for at least eight hours.”
“Eight hours?” he repeated, looking at it.
“Yes, eight hours.” I wanted him to go away and let us get on with our work.
“I swallow it?” he asked.
“Yes,” I was exasperated with him, but the question made sense. He had little access to pills—who knows what you might do with them.
“With water?” he pursued.
“Yes, with water, swallow it with water.” He limped off. We never heard anything more about the aggressive little fish. Probably, though, it was not a bite he had suffered, but contact. We later learned that stonefish were common off the shores of Nosy Mangabe. Contact with the extremely toxic spines of these bottom-dwellers can be deadly, and are reputed to be fiercely painful. Lebon didn’t have the words in French to explain this to us, so he said simply, if incorrectly, that he was bit. He was always trying to prove his manliness to us, and this unexpected display of weakness made no sense unless he had truly been in distress.
Later that week I was going into town to get provisions. Lebon took advantage of the boat I had arranged to get to town as well.
“Why are you coming to town?” I was curious.
“My wife and child are very sick.”
“Your wife?” I couldn’t help myself. “But you said you didn’t have a wife…”
“Uh,” he stammered, “my future wife, and her kid.” The next day, when I was returning to the island with provisions, he met me while I was waiting for the boat. “Um, Erika, I will not be coming back today...my wife is still very sick, uh, future wife.”
“And the child?” I asked.
“Child?” he echoed.
“You said the woman and her child were very ill?”
“Oh, yes, the child,” he looked bewildered, as if the child were a figment of my imagination.
“Do they have malaria?” I asked. Just a guess, but since it was a common disease, it seemed a good one.
“Yes, malaria,” Lebon nodded, once again looking morose. I’d seen him wandering around town with his buddies the week before, not looking in any particular hurry to attend to a sick woman, but he seemed affected now.
“Does she have medicine?” I pursued.
“Oh, yes,” he affirmed, enthusiastically.
“Nivoquine?” I prodded, knowing that I was breaking one of the first rules of third world communication—never suggest the answer you are expecting. You will almost inevitably get that answer, and then will know nothing. In this case, though, my slip didn’t cost.
“No. Aspirin.”
“Aspirin?” I repeated, dumbfounded. Aspirin is medicine for malaria? “Is there no nivoquine in Maroantsetra?”
“Oh yes, there is nivoquine...” He trailed off. I didn’t pursue this, understanding that if it was available and she didn’t have it, it must be too expensive for them to buy. It occurred to me that I might buy it for them, but her malaria is likely chronic—given that I couldn’t afford a lifetime supply, how much would I buy?
The conservation agents were a mystery to me. Sometimes they reminded me of Stoppard’s reimagining of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But in this case, Lebon and Fortune were not dead, only highly ineffectual.
After several weeks on the island, I had never seen the conservation agents enter the forest. They frequently walked along the coast down to the fisherman’s camp, when there were boats moored down there. But they didn’t go inland. Partly, they were afraid. Every day at lunch, in almost reverent tones, they asked Jessica and me if we were going back into the forest. Sometimes they made excuses, asserting that, since we would be in the forest, it was not necessary for them to go. They eyed chameleons warily, too, unnerved by these marvelous lizards.
One day I found Lebon and Fortune giddy with joy, jumping off the dock into the pale green bay, splashing with excitement. Each time one of them hit the water, the other would laugh like a little boy. Most Malagasy don’t swim, so this was a surprise, not least because they were so carefree and exuberant. It was also inconsistent that they should be afraid of the mostly harmless forest, but at home in a sea known to harbor sharks and barracuda.
Even though I understood that they suffered from forest fear, I had little sympathy. It was part of their job to clear trails, and keep unpermitted people off the island, and they weren’t doing either. At my research sites, particularly in the bamboo stands, I began to notice clear signs of human intrusion—axe marks on bamboo, trees gone missing. There were often boats, of all sizes and types, moored in the little bay. At lunch one day, we asked the conservation agents why there were boats here.
“Because they are too big to dock in Maroantsetra, so they come here with their cargo.”
“But…” I began, then stopped. Protesting that this was a nature reserve wouldn’t do any good. Lebon understood that I was annoyed. That afternoon, I watched as the crew of one boat unloaded hundreds of bags of cloves onto land. They then sat around smoking, then strolled through the forest looking for fruit, terrified each other with chameleons, and chopped trees. From the bowels of the spice boat spilled jarring, garbled Malagasy rap music, which permeated the forest. Some of the men spent the day in camp with Lebon and Fortune, where the smell of marijuana was thick. Fortune looked glazed.
The next day the spice boat was still in the bay. A wholly different breed of seafarers, a family of fisher people, floated past in their pirogue, making landfall to smoke their fish. Fisher people, unlike sailors, are always local, and often travel in small, family groups. They are also extremely poor, and usually landless, needing just a small dugout canoe and their own ingenuity to survive. The fisher family set up a fire, and the smell of aging fish smoldering slowly wafted through the forest. Much more pervasive was the sound of chopping wood by the spice boat, the yells of sailors on land. That night, over our bowls of rice, Lebon announced that he had made the fisher people leave. He thought I would be pleased. I was ashamed.
The spice boat was leaking gasoline, leaving a rainbow sheen on the water. Earlier a tanker had spilled oil in the bay, and for a week I went to sleep in my tent with the acrid taste of oil on my nostrils. Lebon’s position is that the bay is not the reserve, and is therefore outside of his jurisdiction. When wealthy Frenchmen arrived in a yacht, cruising the Indian Ocean and wanting to walk the beaches of Nosy Mangabe, Lebon welcomed them on shore without permits. These tourists, like me, were exactly the people who should have been paying for access, but Lebon didn’t want to upset them. Besides, he argued, the beach is not the forest, and Nosy Mangabe is only a forest reserve. The border between protected and unprotected nature was fluid.
To Lebon and Fortune, this was a job to be taken advantage of at every opportunity. If they didn’t follow the instructions, it was just the ungrateful and stingy boss who was losing a few pennies over his employees’ behavior. But the bribes didn’t cost Projet Masoala, CARE, or WCS—all of the larger, faceless organizations—a few pennies. These bribes ran against the very philosophy of conservation. As Jessica and I had daily interactions bordering on dangerous with sailors, Lebon and Fortune sat back at camp, lounging.
“It is lonely here, with just the two of us,” Lebon explained over rice one evening. “The work is hard, and the island so big, it is impossible to do everything that an island of this size requires. We are always patrolling. And we do not even have a boat. And there is no radio, no music. Now that you are here, though, things will be a little better.” Lebon smiled at us.
It was true that they had no motor boat. They had a pirogue, which Lebon sometimes fished in. But the island isn't that big, and they put in no effort. Every time I returned to camp, expectedly or no, the two of them were there. Sailors frequently gifted them with fish and marijuana; in exchange, they looked the other way when the island was abused.
They were lonely, though, and this made their jobs more difficult than I could understand. Across the water from their families and friends, all they had was each other, the two distant vazaha women, and whomever came by boat. They had little in common with the fisher people—of the lowest class, uneducated—and so it was these people whom they kicked off the island when the mood struck them.
Fortune did even less than Lebon. Every morning, he got up and raked the camp, leaving parallel lines of sand among the water-apple trees and tent platforms, totally incongruous in the forest. He reminded me of the children’s poem about an old woman who rakes the beach, keeping things neat and tidy until the tide comes in again, but making no difference in the larger world. After raking, he was done for the day. A pot-bellied, quiet man, he sat on a rickety bamboo bench and stared into the middle distance, wearing a pair of old shorts that was ripped at the hem. When he went into town for vacation, he put on a shirt and flip-flops. On the island, he wore just shorts, and sometimes, a flowered hat.
Women in town weave baskets and hats out of plant fibers. The most decorated hats have plastic flowers on them—a pink rose, a white carnation. In town, men don’t wear flowered hats. But on the island, Fortune wore one adorned with a large pink bloom. Rooted on his bamboo bench and stoned most days, he scowled, watched Lebon cooking rice or chopping wood, and wore his flowered hat.
One day Felix came to the island with a tourist. Fortune wasn’t feeling well, and languished on the bamboo bench, looking stricken. When I returned to camp after focal observations, I found Felix on his knees, giving Fortune a foot rub. Fortune, still wearing his flowered hat, was looking much better.
While Fortune hardly interacted with us at all, Lebon tried to impress us with his knowledge. His French was about as good as mine—which is to say, not very—but we had largely non-overlapping vocabularies, and he wanted to learn English. One day he sat in camp on the bamboo bench with a book in front of him. He looked studious, and turned the pages at appropriate intervals. The book was in English. It was also upside-down.
At night, when there were boats in the bay, Lebon and Fortune waited until they thought I was asleep, and snuck past my tent platform to the fisherman’s camp to cavort with the sailors. They would come back an hour or two later, trying to stifle their laughter, tripping over themselves, high as could be. When the sweet smell of marijuana hung over their cabin during the day, Fortune would, once again, sit on his bamboo bench and stare, watching time pass.
Next week: Chapter 12 – Naked Sailors
Too many spiders! I don't know how you did it, really.
Beautiful photo at the close. Pushes out the thoughts of the spiders.
Thanks again for an entertaining and educating chapter.