Pecked to death by ducks Read online

  We discussed the possibility of putting the dead men in the back of our vehicle and driving to a place where we could dig. But the idea of having that desiccated, grinning head rolling around in the back was distressing.

  "We could just leave them here," Peter said. "To illustrate the horror of war."

  Which is what we told ourselves we were doing as we drove off into the desert, leaving three men unburied in contravention of Muslim and Christian custom. I felt mildly guilty about this and knew that I should feel very guilty about it, so I ended up feeling very guilty about feeling mildly guilty.

  I was still thinking about those dead men as I stepped carefully through the chalets that fronted the oily beach.

  "Oh, man," I heard myself shout as I moved into one of the grander chalets. It had a fine view of the mined beach and the dead fish and the glittering petroleum sheen that was the sea. And in one big room, in front of the broken picture window, were

  well over a hundred remnants of the men who had invaded this land. Souvenirs of ignorance, all in fear-splattered piles.

  Outside, not far away, contaminants released by the howling fires were poisoning children; they were creating acid rains that would kill crops so that people could starve in the name of oil; they were spawning rivers of flame that ran to the sea and killed what lived there; they were throwing 3 percent of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions into the air, intensifying the greenhouse effect that would bake the earth in drought before an alternative to the internal-combustion engine could be found. It was the beginning of the end, the environmental apocalypse, and here I was, in the oblivion of the Last Resort, thinking about the unburied dead and counting crap.

  utes. If they have to miss a day or two of work, they don't like to specify the condition: "Some stomach trouble" is how I might put it. Around home, bad bowels are an embarrassment best kept hidden. They are a hammer to the crystal of love.

  But, oh, develop the most minor irregularities on a camping trip, and everyone gets to hear about your symptoms. In nauseous detail. The more remote the campsite—the greater the perceived distance from home—the more clinical these descriptions become. This is Cahill's first law of bowel babble.

  Recently, I spent a few weeks in a third-world country known for an ailment called Delhi Belly, though the same problem is called Montezuma's Revenge elsewhere and is known, generi-cally, as traveler's diarrhea. Delhi Belly was rampant on this trip. It was an international party, and everyone, without exception, suffered some symptoms. We talked about those symptoms. Oh boy, did we talk about them. At breakfast. At lunch. At dinner. Every fifteen minutes an update.

  I took Lomotil, an antidiarrhea agent prescribed by my doctor, but this drug, while it relieves the symptoms, is not a cure. Others took antibiotics, codeine, paregoric, or double-dosed their water with iodine. Nothing worked. Nothing ever seems to work for me. Not right away.

  Once, in Guatemala, while fishing for tarpon in Lake Patexba-tum, a small, shining body of water completely surrounded by a thick, nearly impenetrable jungle, I got one of my worst cases. Near the place of my suffering there were several Mayan ruins that archaeologists had just begun excavating. The lodge where I was staying had been built by and for these scientists. When they weren't working, it was rented out to fishermen to help defray expenses.

  It seemed almost unbearably romantic, sitting on the veranda in the midst of a violent twilight thunderstorm. The clouds rolling in had been operatic, Wagnerian. The world was pure purple, punctuated now and again by neon-bright stroboscopic flashes of lightning. There were Mayan ruins, one thousand years old and older, out there in the jungle, covered over in grass and leaves. I

  was philosophic about the fragility of man's greatest achievements and, consequently, settled on the fine idea of having an alcoholic beverage. We had brought fresh meat to the lodge, and there was still a bit of dirty ice at the bottom of the cooler. I put a chunk in my glass of rum.

  The first mild cramps struck some hours later. Albert, the ancient caretaker, directed me to the outhouse behind the lodge. He was Guyanese, Albert, and he spoke an elegant, lilting brand of Caribbean nineteenth-century English. He loved to talk but had neglected to tell me about the minor problem with the outhouse. When I screamed, as I suppose everyone does on the first visit to the place, Albert shouted, 'They doan bite, mon."

  The outhouse represented a serious error in judgment, an exercise in zoological ignorance. Rather than dig a latrine, the scientists had constructed the classic two-holer over a large, rocky abyss. A cave. They had overlooked a fact I would think to be somewhat important: Bats live in caves. And the bats hated what humans were doing to their home. They came belching up out of the unoccupied hole, they screeched their little sonar screeches, they rose up and gently brushed certain exposed portions of the anatomy. I thought of the place as the Throne of Terror.

  And, over the course of the evening, I had ample reason to visit the Throne of Terror several times. The bats hated me, and I hated them.

  The only person I know who was delighted to develop a life-threatening case of diarrhea is Dr. Conrad Aveling, a British biologist who specializes in wildlife conservation. Aveling was working in the Sudan when he was captured by terrorists, whose cause I will not dignify here. The terrorists didn't purify their water, and Aveling was ill for several weeks. Had he not been prepared—if he hadn't had rehydrating salts in his pack—he would have surely died from dehydration. As it was, he was merely comatose, and the terrorists decided, smart fellows that they were, that a dead hostage is worse than no hostage at all. Aveling was released.

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  Generally, however, doctors describe traveler's diarrhea as a relatively mild illness, by which they mean the victim suffers the miseries of hell for only a few days. There are descriptive terms for what doctors call peristaltic rush that I hope never to hear again. This last trip was the worst.

  And so, home again, and with a view to obviating forever the campsite conversations regarding the health of one's bowels, I talked to Dr. John Spika, an epidemiologist in the Enteric Diseases Branch of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Traveler's diarrhea, he said, is generally mild, but if the victim continues to drink water containing the bacteria that caused the problem in the first place, dehydration could be a problem. "You could lose a lot of fluids," said Spika. He recommended the rehydration salt packets, which are available in many health-food stores. You add salts, he said, to a liter of water—"good water, of course."

  Adding iodine solution to water is a good way to purify it, as is boiling it for twenty minutes. Dr. Spika said he would have to look into the filters in water purifiers, but my experience with them has been very good.

  Dr. Spika recommends against taking antibiotics on a preventive basis, which "puts a lot of pressure on bacteria to develop resistance." Additionally, some antibiotics can "give rashes that are aggravated by the sun." In rare cases antibiotics can be fatal. As traveler's diarrhea is seldom life-threatening, Spika didn't like the idea of exposing large numbers of people to antibiotics on a "prophylactic" basis.

  He did recommend carrying antibiotics for a quick cure, however. Bactrim and Septra are two of the most effective drugs, though both contain sulfa, to which some people are allergic. A doctor can recommend certain tetracycline-based antibiotics for the sulfa-allergic traveler.

  So there it is: Purify the water you drink, carry rehydration salts, and take antibiotics at the first rumbling of a problem. The situation should not last for more than twenty-four hours, and Lomotil, if your doctor prescribes it, should control the symptoms during that period.

  Do yourself a favor: Take this stuff with you on every camping trip. Take it with you on every trip outside the country. Do it so I will never again have to listen to three weeks of bowel babble. Do it for me. Do it for a pretty little girl named Betty.

  Since the names on the list were, in fact, compiled by the church—and because about two hundred local resident
s were on it—church members were out visiting these people. They meant no harm, they said. They were not praying against people whose names might be inserted in the decrees. They were praying for them.

  The Church Universal and Triumphant, called CUT, is thought to have between 75,000 and 150,000 members worldwide. Several years ago, the church bought its first piece of land in Park County. In the summer of 1986, CUT sold its California property, a 215-acre site near Los Angeles, and plans were made to move all its operations to Montana. Ed Francis, vice president of CUT, said that the church would relocate its headquarters, its businesses, and educational operations to Park County. Only about four hundred employees would move to the county and join the several hundred CUT members already in residence. CUT leaders deny that the organization is a cult. If the church has to be characterized at all, members would prefer the term "new religion."

  This new religious group has become the second-largest landowner in my county. Aside from the twelve-thousand-acre Royal Teton Ranch that abuts Yellowstone Park, CUT also owns the thirteen-thousand-acre Lazy W Ranch, the thirty-three-hundred-acre O-T-O Ranch and a five-thousand-acre residential subdivision. Some residents have expressed concern that CUT may try to take over the county economically and politically, in the manner of that famous Rolls-Royce collector and Bhagwan, late of Antelope, Oregon. Others worry about CUT's plans for development on the environmentally sensitive land north of the world's first national park.

  I had, in fact, been talking with Outside editors earlier in the day about CUT's plans to draw hot water from a 458-foot geo-thermal well near La Duke Hot Springs. Ominously, the La Duke well is just ten miles north of Mammoth Hot Springs, in Yellowstone Park. Mammoth is a series of five multicolored terraces flooded by steaming water released from various springs. The high terraces consist of sedimentary rocks formed as minerals precipitated out of the natural flow from boiling springs. The

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  terraces are brilliant with the colors of various minerals and look, in total, like some great dirty rainbow of a cataract frozen in stone. The formation is considered to be one of the park's treasures.

  Geologists have stated flatly that CUT's use of geothermal energy could affect the Yellowstone's geysers, and specifically, Mammoth Hot Springs. Dr. Irving Friedman, a research geo-chemist with the U.S. Geological Survey says that "when there has been geothermal development next to features such as geysers, it has severely affected them—dried them up in fact. Once you've disturbed them, there's no way to turn the water back on."

  The church, for its part, contends its use of the geothermal energy it owns should have no effect at all on the geothermal features of Yellowstone Park. They insist that La Duke Hot Springs discharges as much as five hundred gallons per minute naturally, the amount of water the church intends to use. Unfortunately, the spring where the water is discharged is located inconveniently, across the Yellowstone River from CUT's proposed greenhouse, swimming pool, and buildings. Hence the need for a 458-foot-deep well to intercept the naturally occurring discharge.

  A hydrological report, commissioned by the church, "supports what we've said all along," CUT vice president Ed Francis maintained in a press release. "The well was drilled only to access the La Duke Hot Springs aquifer, and our relatively minor use of the spring water will have no impact on Park resources." To its credit, the church released copies of this report to the media. Prepared by the consulting scientists and engineers of a firm called Hydrometrics out of Helena, Montana, the report stated that since the well is about ten miles from Mammoth and five hundred feet lower in elevation, "it is quite unlikely that hydraulic impacts from pumping could be transmitted to Yellowstone Park"; that the geologic structure makes it "highly improbable" that there is any connection with Mammoth; and that it is "highly unlikely that a discharge point such as the thermal well would have any impact on ground far upgradient . . ."

  The terms "highly unlikely," "quite unlikely," "highly improb-

  able"—and this from CUT's own commissioned report—were not as convincing to some as they were to the church. Paul Var-ney, Yellowstone Park's chief of research, said, "We would have hoped that they would have been a little more cautious." The Park Service, Varney said, does not have "hard evidence" to support a claim that La Duke and Mammoth Hot Springs are connected. It's all circumstantial. "There appears to be a common chemical signature," Varney said, and this indicates "a common aquifer." Varney wasn't so sure that ten miles of distance and five hundred feet of elevation made it "unlikely" that Mammoth and La Duke might be connected. There is evidence, for instance, that suggests that Mammoth and the Norris Geyser basin are connected by underground faults. Norris is twenty-five miles south of Mammoth and one thousand feet higher. Varney echoed Dr. Friedman's concerns. Experience in other parts of the world, he said, has shown that each time man has tampered with geother-mal areas, the natural geothermal systems that existed before have been permanently destroyed.

  In discussing the controversy with Outside'% editors, I said there really wasn't a column in it. "By the time a column would appear," I said, "CUT leaders will have come to their senses. They are not stupid people."

  Two hours after I told Outside I didn't want to do a column about the geothermal controversy, a pair of church members arrived at my house to discuss the blue lightning bolts. Tim Connor I knew. A well-dressed young man of yuppie mien, Connor is CUT's business manager, though he sometimes deals with the press. The other man, Edwin, was a rangy fellow dressed like a rancher. I didn't catch his last name.

  The CUT emissaries looked apprehensive, but soon enough we were sitting in the living room, talking and laughing. The list, Connor said, was not a hit list, and not a shit list. He delicately spelled out the word "s-h-i-t." The compilation of names was really "an informational fact sheet" distributed to church members. (One section of the original fact sheet was headed "Local Groups and Individuals—Negative attitudes and Malintent Expressed Against US." A malintent of my acquaintance believes he

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  "made the list" simply because he told some church members he does not approve of mixing real estate and religion. The version of the informational fact sheet that had been circulating around town, Connor pointed out, had been typed from the original fact sheet by a persistent local critic of the church named Marie Mar. She had probably gotten the original from a dissident ex-member of CUT. It was Marie Mar who had attached the decrees to the list.

  The blue-bolts-of-lightning decree had come from a book of church prayers. There were probably two hundred decrees in that book. If I looked very closely, I would see that these prayers, which are chanted so rapidly it is impossible for an outsider to understand the words, do not call for harm to fall on the person named. For instance, the decree titled "For the Electronic Presence of Saint Germain" contains the sentence "Roll it back and mow them down, roll it back and mow them down, roll it back and mow them down now those demons and discarnates." The decrees then, were calling destruction down on discorporal beings whose malintent might have caused people to speak ill of CUT. The decrees were prayers of love.

  Connor explained to me that a person could be good and yet occasionally possessed by demons that other well-intentioned folks might want to mow down. "Jesus said, 'Get thee behind me Satan,' " Connor explained, "and yet he was talking to Saint Peter."

  Edwin, meanwhile, had noticed the large Buddha on my mantelpiece and mentioned that the lord Buddha was one of CUT's ascended masters. The ascended masters—Buddha, Jesus, Saint Germain and Hercules and others—speak through church leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet, affectionately known in CUT as Ma Guru. Edwin was trying to establish some common theological ground and failing badly. It's true that I am a fan of the Buddha's teaching. I'm also a fan of Larry Bird's, and I can't sink two free throws in a row.

  Tim Connor said he was concerned that people might get some wrong ideas from the article in the Livingston (Montana) Enterprise, written
by Tom Shands. Connor pointed out a sentence

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  that particularly bothered him. "The decree calls for two of CUT's ascended masters to expose those who lie about the church and to 'Roll it back and mow them down.' " Connor said, "See how he puts church critics in the same sentence with 'mow them down?' "

  "I'm not a journalist," Connor said, "but I could tell you some things." He shook his head sadly. CUT feels it is often misunderstood by the media, and that reporters rely on information from dissidents who have left the church, like former CUT president Randall King, who told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that "when I left the Church in 1980, we had a monthly budget of a quarter million dollars and most of it came from donations. We didn't mess around with a 10 per cent tithe. If a guy was worth 150 grand, we figured 100 grand was ours the first year." Former church member Raphael Dominguez, grandson of former Dominican Republic dictator Raphael Trujillo, told Los Angeles TV station KCBS that CUT's ascended masters, speaking through Elizabeth Clare Prophet, kept sending dictations to the effect that the Dominguez family should fork over a cool $750,000 to the church.

  In a letter to People magazine, after it published a story the church deemed negative, CUT vice president Ed Francis explained how all this negative publicity comes about. Ex-members of CUT and "other churches have discovered a sure-fire scheme to make big money," he wrote. "The formula is simple: sue for damages claiming mind control and brain washing, then go to the media and generate negative and sensational publicity (a temptation the media can't resist), then either try to collect the money in settlement negotiations or convince a jury to assess damages by putting the unorthodoxy of the religion on trial."

  Edwin, Connor, and I talked for a while about journalism and karma. I was given to understand that the law of karma, as interpreted by CUT, meant that people would get what was coming to them in the fullness of time and in the natural course of events. CUT did not take it on itself to punish its detractors or dissident ex-members. In fact, such actions would be against their religion.