Getting Stoned With Savages by J. Maarten Troost

Author:J. Maarten Troost
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Australia & Oceania, Vanuatu - Social Life and Customs, Humour, Fiji - Social Life and Customs, Travel, Troost, Essays & Travelogues, General, J. Maarten - Travel - Fiji, Adventure, Vanuatu, Vanuatu - Description and Travel, J. Maarten - Travel - Vanuatu, Fiji, Fiji - Description and Travel, Biography
ISBN: 9780767921992
Publisher: Broadway Books
Published: 2006-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

IT BEGAN, for us, inauspiciously. Attached to the house was a heavy wooden shed where the cyclone shutters were kept. I pried the door open and immediately knew that creepy things lived inside. In the tropics, creepy things can reliably be found in damp, dark places, and the shed was particularly damp and dark, with innumerable nooks and crannies. I startled an impossibly large spider, as big as my hand, and it scurried behind one of the shutters. What else could there be? I wondered. More centipedes? My mind turned to snakes. One of the neighborhood youths had recently caught a six-foot-long Pacific boa constrictor. He was in the habit of walking around with it, dangling it from his arms. I had always given him a wide berth.

I entered the shed and reached for the nearest shutter. It was heavy and ungainly, and as I pulled it free, a centipede ran toward my feet. I shrieked, managing to hit an octave I’d thought I had lost with the onset of puberty.

“What?” Sylvia cried, running out of the house.

I offered a colorful tirade of cuss words in response.

“Okay,” Sylvia said. “But what did you see?”

I jiggled the shutter. Out ran the centipede.

“Oh my God,” Sylvia gasped. “That’s a centipede?”

This time, however, I knew what to do. I went back inside the house and changed into my jeans and work boots. I grabbed a shovel, reentered the shed, and did battle, eventually chopping the centipede into two and then four squirming pieces. Splat! it went as I crushed each segment with my boots.

With much fear and trepidation I dragged each of the shutters out, laying them on the ground, where I inspected them closely to see whether there might be another centipede clinging on, hoping to avenge its lost brethren. The first bands of rain had arrived. The clouds above had begun to swirl, and they had taken on a peculiar orange hue. As we affixed the shutters over the windows, the rain steadily increased. We had a steep dirt driveway that sloped toward the house from the road above, and soon water was rushing down it, carving gullies that channeled the water directly to our front door, where it began to pool alarmingly. If I had known that cyclones involved so much work, I reflected, I might not have been so looking forward to experiencing one. Something needed to be done about the water immediately, or we would soon find ourselves flooded. I grabbed the shovel.

Out on the road, Sylvia and I encountered the neighbors across the way. The children were gleefully celebrating the rain. It had begun to truly pour, a copious drenching that laid down thick walls of water. I had seen such rain before, during the brief peak of a Mid-Atlantic summer squall, but I had never witnessed such a sustained downpour, and it only seemed to grow in intensity. The neighbors were laying cinder blocks on top of their corrugated-tin roofs. “If you want to take shelter in our house,” I said to one of the mothers, “please don’t hesitate to come down.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.