Taroko Gorge. Jacob Ritari
Читать онлайн книгу.
I said. “You can walk most of the gorge, and on the little trails the bus won’t go down. It’ll be good for you.”
“Fuck, man. I ate all vegetarian yesterday, I dunno.”
“I thought you ate all vegetarian every day. Fucking Buddhist hippie.”
“I try,” he said.
“You stay on the bus, they drive so close to the railing you swear the thing is going in the drink. It leans, man. Fifty feet straight down to the water. Railing a foot high, made out of tin. The Taiwanese are crazy; they don’t care; they’ll drive you anywhere. They’ll take you anywhere in the back of their truck. They just say Omitofo and that’s the end of it.”
Omitofo was Amithaba, the Buddha of Infinite Light. He was popular in East Asia, so much so that he made Sakyamuni look like a chump. Reciting his name was supposed to protect you from snakebites, rockfalls, all kinds of things; another thing that had rubbed Pickett the wrong way at the monastery.
“It’s true there ain’t no seatbelts on those buses,” he said. “I dunno.”
“Walk. Take your pictures.”
“I’ll take my pictures.”
His camera was old but good, a Nikkon F SLR. I’d seen those cameras before in places where they got dropped or even shot at. I guessed an uncle or something had passed it down to him.
We swung by the visitors’ center, where I heard people speaking Korean and Japanese (both languages I had a better grasp of than Mandarin), and there was a big relief map of the gorge as high as your waist. Pickett whistled.
“To make it look good they show the whole mountain range,” I said. “We’ll just be down in this part here.”
They also had a few stuffed specimens, all of them aged and a bit sad-looking, of local fauna.
“Damn,” said Pickett, looking at a viper with seams showing in its open mouth, “I wanna see a snake. They don’t have snakes where I’m from.”
“Nor where I’m from.”
“You think we’ll see one?”
“I don’t know if they have snakes. Squirrels they have. I mean the snakes are out there but they’ll keep their distance. Don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with you.”
“Shit, just like me,” said Pickett. “That’s my kind of animal.”
Before we set off we bought a four-pack of Yuenling lager from the store, which Pickett carried in a huge plastic sack.
“Hey, man. You think you could make it all the way from one end of Taiwan to the other, just drunk all the way?”
“Omitofo,” I said, and we both laughed.
“Fuckin’ Omitofo.”
As we went down the path, Pickett moving with wide, swinging steps as the lager bounced on his hip, he started to sing a song of his own invention to the tune—very, very roughly—of “Dixie”:
Oh I wish I was in Taiwan
It ain’t China or Japan
And they got big cheesy statues
That they worship like they’re idols—
Oh I like to be in Taiwan
I drink cheap beer all day long
And something, something, da na na—
Omitofo, Omitofo
Omitofo, you motherfuckers
I got this motherfucker with me
His name be Crazy Pete
I just made up the “Crazy” part
But he’s pretty fuckin’ crazy
That dude says he was in the Gulf
But I don’t know ’bout that
Next he’ll tell me he cut off Saddam’s ass
And wore it like a hat….
I joined in for the last chorus:
Omitofo! Omitofo!
Omitofo! You motherfu-u-uckers!
We got a few strange looks, and, guilty, I quieted down.
I’m getting to the important part. I should be careful.
It was a Tuesday, so the paths weren’t too crowded. The last time it had been Sunday and the buses had been crawling down the roads. We took a footpath up through the jungle, behind a Korean family with two young boys, and the mother kept yelling at them not to touch anything. Halfway up the rise we both started wheezing because of the cigarettes and I doubled over.
“Stupid old man,” said Pickett.
His mood was improving.
The bright, hot Taiwanese jungle. All of this so close by the road. Everything seemed painted in one pure color—green leaves, blue sky, red flowers. Birds calling. Some furry thing scuttled into the trees before I could get a good look at it.
“Nice weather,” said Pickett.
“Isn’t it?”
He set down the lagers and we each cracked one open. We sat on a rock that looked like Oreo ice cream and all of a sudden Pickett jumped up, shot lager across the path, and yelled.
Across from us, between two trees so far apart that it might have been levitating on its own power, was the biggest spider you had ever seen. Well, evidently the biggest spider Pickett had seen. Its body was black and yellow and it had legs as long as fingers.
I laughed into the mouth of my bottle. The spider was perfectly still.
“Man, I told you,” already adopting so thoroughly his way of speaking. “Don’t fuck with them and they won’t fuck with you.”
“Fuck, man,” he said, wiping a stain on his jeans leg. “Scared the fucking shit out of me. Thing’s big as my fucking head.”
“He’s just chilling out right there. He’s cool.” I raised my bottle to the spider. “I drink to you!”
“I fucking hate spiders.”
“Hey, hippie, don’t you think that was some dude in its previous life?”
“Fuck you, man. Maybe a real nasty-ass person. Like Jeff Dahmer.”
He sat back down, his legs shaking a little. The spider was about five feet away from us.
“Have a drink.”
“I will have a drink.”
I love the way that alcohol and nicotine combine in your blood. When I drink I want to smoke, and when I smoke I want to drink, but I’m still alive. I lit another Double Lucky and so did Pickett.
For a second it seemed like I’d found that paradise after all—the one that was always just around the next bend. Always like that. There one second; the next, gone.
Kyoo-kyoo-kyoo, went the birds.
“So you love snakes,” I said, “but you’re terrified of spiders.”
“Not terrified, I just hate the things.—When do we get to see this gorge, anyway?”
“When