A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (26 page)

“Looks like we’re in for a storm.”

“Ark, ark, ark.”

And every once in a while, every month or so, a freighter would steam by a few miles off the coast and there I’d be, standing in the wet sand, waving my arms, screaming for help, a damsel in distress, an innocent imprisoned in the sheik’s seraglio. “Help me! For the love of God, they think I’m a female sea lion, and the big guy wants more kids.”

No answer from the ship, but here comes the male, this six-hundred-pound tyrant, huge, dominant, terrifying. He’s sliding rapidly over the beach, using his flippers and leaving a furrow in the sand the size of an irrigation ditch. The big guy is moving fast now, not nearly so cute as he might in the circus, and instead of honking a bicycle horn, he is growling deep in his throat, making the message abundantly
clear: “Siddown and shaddup.” He glances around at the other wives as if to say, “Yeah, she’s ugly, but ya gotta admit, she sure smells different.” A chorus of sarcastic laughter here: “Ark, ark, ark.”

And then I was moving into the second kelp bed and the vertigo dropped away from me like a rock kicked over the lip of the Grand Canyon. The relief was primal, instinctive: back to the trees and safety. What the hell: trapped in some blubbery harem? What had been going through my mind? Could such a thing really happen? Or was it the fact that I’d just seen
Tootsie?

At the far reaches of my vision, in open waters beyond the kelp, a sea lion began slicing through gray waters in my direction. It looped toward the surface and the tangle of vegetation there, then dived straight down, disappearing into the cathedral of light in the depths of the kelp. I couldn’t tell if it was a male or a female.

I
recently traveled to the Philippines and chanced on a unique employment opportunity in the diving industry. The following is an outline of what you will need to know in order to get started in the glamorous and exciting field of drunken driving for poisonous sea snakes.

Where: From California, follow the Pacific Ocean west and south to the Philippine Sea. Make a sharp left turn and stop at the island of Cebu, in the Vasayan Sea. At the northern tip of the island is a jungle town called Daan Bantayan, and a tad to the north is the village of Tapilon. Stand on the sandy shore and look west. That hummock standing dark against the setting sun is Gato Island. Gato is honeycombed by caves. Sea snakes spawn in the caves.

The Snakes:
Fasciata semifasciata
is an aquatic snake about four feet long and as big around as the business end of Dave Kingman’s bat. The snake weighs over ten pounds and has alternating black and bluish-gray stripes. The skin is used to make purses and shoes. The meat and entrails are used as slop for hogs.

Fasciata semifasciata
is definitely venomous. There is no argument on this point. In recent years, one diver died from a
Fasciata
bite. Generally, a bitten diver suffers only some swelling and numbness.

“My arm became the size of my leg and I couldn’t move it for days because I couldn’t feel it,” is the way one diver
described the result of a bite. The single recorded fatality may have been due to the victim’s severe reaction to the venom. If you know you have an allergy to sea snake venom, perhaps drunken diving for poison sea snakes is not for you.

Equipment: The craftsmen of Daan Bantayan can make you a pair of goggles. These are carved from wood to conform to the contours of your face and they will fit no one else. Glass is glued to the wood and a headstrap is fashioned from an old automobile inner tube.

You’ll need a flashlight and a clear plastic bag. The bag is placed over the flashlight and secured with tape, twine, tire-strips, and glue. This is your underwater light. Get an old tire and make two rubber bracelets, one for each wrist.

Preparing for Work: The snake divers believe that alcohol, taken internally in sufficient quantities, thins the blood and renders a bite less harmful. Any liquor will do, and the stronger the better. Rum, either Anejo or Manila, is good, but coconut wine flavored with anise, called malloroca, is favored by most of the divers. They particularly like Green Parrot brand. The wine is clear and thick and tastes like licorice. It comes in a clear beer-type bottle; the cork under the cap is usually black and a little crumbly.

The last resort is called tuba. This is the rapidly fermenting sap of the coconut palm, colored with mangrove bark. In the morning, the tuba gatherers bring in the daily crop. Fresh, the liquor is sweet, orange, and there’s a white frost on the top. It is not very alcoholic and of little use to a snake diver. Tuba of a more aristocratic vintage—say three days—is more suited to your purpose. It’s bitter as a lemon and will set you howling at the moon.

The Work: A few hours before sunset, you will head out across the bloodwarm Vasayan Sea in a dugout outrigger called a banca, powered by an eighteen-horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine. You’ll relax in the bow and have some more rum—it takes an hour to cover the twelve miles to Gato.

The island is a little over an acre and perhaps two hundred feet high. Sheer rock walls rise about eighty feet, then give way to an inward-sloping tangle of dense brush. At
water level, you will see many caves set deep into the rock walls. The water inside the caves is a deep blue—the same shade of blue you see inside of fastidious people’s toilet bowls.

The snakes hide in little nooks and crannies during the day. You will do your diving at night, when they swarm inside the caves in their serpentine mating ballet.

Take one last sip of tuba, switch on your flashlight, slip into the dark water, and duck into the cave. Train your light on the water. Drop down about twenty feet to a ledge and hang there. On a really lucky night, you’ll be in the midst of a maelstrom of snakes. Grab one just behind the head. The skin will be dry to the touch, not at all slimy.

To train yourself in the proper technique, grab your left thumb just below the knuckle with the thumb and first two fingers of your right hand. The snake is larger of course, but there is a knucklelike swelling just below the head where you want to grab him.

Now take the snake and slip his head under one of the rubber bracelets on your wrist. Find another snake. A good diver will surface with three snakes on either wrist.

What To Do If You Get Bit: Review Preparing for Work. Whether your medicine is rum, wine, or tuba, ingest an improbably excessive quantity. The boatmen will take you back in the banca. You will be lying on your back, drinking three-day tuba and singing some song half-remembered from your childhood. There will be a nasty paralytic numbness in your arm and it will swell like a goiter. You will probably not die. Snake divers seldom die. Keep repeating, “I will probably not die.”

B
elievers theorize that he came down from Mt. Hood, the 11,250-foot blizzard-shrouded peak just outside Portland, Oregon. Massive, standing nearly nine feet tall and weighing all of nine hundred pounds, he strode down the wooded ridges, north and east to the seven-thousand-foot level where the spring snow lay wet and heavy in forests fifty miles from the nearest road. At the four-thousand-foot level, the thick coniferous forests thinned and the deep mountain gorges leveled out. It was late June 1971, and the lower rivers raged with the waters of the melting snow pack.

At the three-thousand-foot level the first growths of douglas fir and oak gave way to a few scrub oak, growing singly. From a high point on the ridge that runs down from Mt. Hood called Seven Miles Hill, he could see the lights of The Dalles, Oregon, where eleven thousand people lived.

Fifteen miles upriver the Wy-am Indians, roped to their platforms perched over the boiling river, netted spring chinook salmon by the hundreds with their long poles. This they had done every spring since prehistory. The Great Food is what the Wy-am called salmon; and perhaps he had come down to the semiarid insecurity of The Dalles to scramble on the banks of the river for the Great Food during one of the largest salmon runs on the North American continent. Some who theorize about him think that he came down to this narrow point in the river where there is little current because an island breaks the swim to Washington and the Cascade Range—where the deer and huckleberries are plentiful in the summer.

To the east the land opens to treeless rolling hills. Great high-tension towers converge on the Chenowith Converter and scar the land as far as the eye can see. There was no cover for him there. But to swim the river from here, four miles west of The Dalles, he had only to cross two roads: the old highway to Portland, US 30, and the new Interstate, 80N.

Things had changed since he had last been down to the river. There was an aluminum plant nearby, a new shopping center, a Rocket gas station, a new and used car lot, and—strangest of all for him during the nights—The Dalles drive-in, which specializes in films like
Deathmaster
and
The Two-Headed Thing
. In the early daylight hours of this first day of June 1971, he stood in a small meadow above what had been a large foothill apple orchard. It was now filled with flat electrified platforms and called The Pinewood Mobile Manor.

J
oe Mederios, maintenance man for the trailer court, was watering flowers near his trailer that morning. Directly across US 30 is a large fenced meadow. At about one hundred fifty yards a rock ledge of perhaps thirty-five feet banks a higher meadow. Mederios caught a movement along the edge from a corner of his eye. He assumed it was George Johnson, the owner of the land, and went back to watering his flowers. But his mind was engaged in a curious and unconscious arithmetic. He had seen Johnson on the land previously—it wasn’t unusual—but this figure was too big … the arms were too long … the shoulders too broad.

Mederios turned to the ridge for a longer look. What he saw was a shaggy, gray figure he took to be at least ten feet tall. It had an oval face and crest or dorsal ridge along the top of its head. The face was flat, brown, and hairless.

The man turned back to his flowers and considered his situation. He was responsible to some Portland businessmen who would be down to The Dalles the next day. If he
were to report the sighting, there would be deputies and curiosity-seekers tromping all over his carefully watered flowers about the time his bosses arrived. Mederios later told the sheriff’s deputy Rich Carlson that he didn’t report the incident for fear he’d “be called a nut.”

The next day, around noon, the three businessmen met Mederios and were in the midst of discussions in a trailer-office fronting the meadow when Mederios again saw an erect apelike figure through a window. The four men ran outside and watched from across the road as it moved through a break in the ridge and came into the lower meadow, where it walked among the sparse scrub oak near the rocks. It stopped near a small tree, and from where the men stood, it appeared to be somewhat taller than the tree. The four men and the other creature stared at one another for perhaps a minute, before it turned, went up through the break in the rocks, and disappeared into the upper meadow.