Adventure Divas (9 page)

“I have no contradiction between being a Santera and being a revolutionary,” is all she says on the matter, and I steal a glance at the gun. Eight days ago I would have considered that a party line. But I’m developing a deeper understanding of how things live together here, and I remind myself that paradoxes seemingly contradict, but in reality express a truth.

Emilia walks toward an altar. Not the one with the gun, but a different one that features a red and white drum, a red crown with a line of seashells decorating its perimeter, and a red baseball bat. Of the baseball bat, she says: “Changó is a warrior who goes to battle. Instead of me going to battle, I give him the attribute—in the form of a bat—and let him do it for me.”

Makes sense.

Every Santería worshipper has a guardian orisha
.
Emilia’s is Changó. Changó’s colors are red and white.

“I am the daughter of Changó. My religious name is Obbadele,” she says.

“Changó was born with a crown. He is the only saint born with a crown and that is why they call him
Obba—
King,” Emilia says, explaining the altar to me.

Emilia picks up an
ache,
a red and white gourd filled with seeds, and begins to shake it vigorously.

“You must call him with the
ache.
Everything you say to him, you say with the maraca, so that he will hear,” she says as she shakes the maraca. “Changó gives his initiates the power of divination. Some people say this in jest, but it happens. His initiates are divine by nature.”

“Do you have a goat?” Emilia asks me as she puts down the maraca.

“Uh, a goat? No, we don’t have a goat,” I say, looking at Catherine quizzically. Catherine explains that we have been invited to participate in a very secretive several-day-long ceremony that would include dancing, music, and trance possession. The ceremony would culminate in the sacrificial slaughter of the goat. Blood sacrifice is de rigueur for the more complex rituals and is the seminal act toward tapping into an individual’s personal spiritual power, or
asé.

We are once again bound by our schedule. I explain that we have a flight out of Havana in twenty-four hours. I don’t explain that we are down to the lone crumpled Jackson in my pocket, with no way to get more cash. We could afford the goat—it’s only a few dollars—but we cannot afford the time.

“Do you want me to call Changó?” Emilia asks.

I nod. Even though the Communist Party stopped peddling atheism in 1992 (and thus, ceasing to persecute religious practitioners), Santerían beliefs are well-kept secrets among the faithful. Cameras and recording devices are often forbidden during rituals, so I’m relieved she’s willing to do this for us.

Emilia leads me by the hand over to the altar that sits in the corner of her front room (the one with the gun), which is now ringed by burning candles, wax seeping free-form onto her tile floors. Emilia begins a complicated ritual by blowing cigar smoke onto gourds with creaturelike faces. She salutes the ancestors and orishas and asks their permission to perform the divination. Ancestor worship is a way to connect with the wisdom and knowledge of the collective past via the power of our dead relatives. She tosses coconut rinds, and begins to divine.

“Lucumi, imbaye . . . bayen tunu, guabami gua . . . imbaye, bayen unig guabami gua.”

Okay, here’s what I know. This complex system of divination,
ifa,
is said to be a sort of cosmic Google search to provide a way into humankind’s answers to fundamental questions. Put another way, through divination the will of the ancestors (wisdom, power) and the orishas (energy) is discerned. With the Santera (or Santero) as a go-between, a devotee asks questions and receives impartial answers, which lead the devotee to informed decisions and appropriate action. Fate is not set. Santería strikes me as an interactive faith, in which an individual wields a significant amount of power in destiny.

“Each of us is born with a path,” Emilia says. “The goal is to travel it. Divination provides the roadmap to our potential.”

“The Santera is the interpreter of the roadmap,” whispers Catherine, who is translating.

Emilia is a “godmother” to dozens, like Pablo, who sent us to her. She has an essential role in the community as a sanctioned third party who protects the interests of the orisha, the community, and the devotee. (In this case, me.)

“Ay Eleggua! Here I am, I am your daughter to ask you five one three . . . in this day, what for? Imbaye, baye tuni five one six . . . happier than Lucumi, inbaye, bayen, oudule, Machado, to my father, to my brother, guabami gua, bayen, five three two.”

Emilia is tossing coconut rinds and chanting and interpreting their omens and, apparently, receiving from them answers to yes-no questions. Despite the yes-no dichotomy, there is no concept of good versus evil in Santería; everything is seen in terms of fluctuating polarity. Shades of dark and light. All things are said to possess opposing yet complementary powers.

The scene is mesmerizing but wholly confusing. I feel like I’m being handed the funny underwear in the secret ceremonies of the Mormon Tabernacle without having even gotten the lesson about Joe and the Tablets. I feel slightly disingenuous dabbling in another’s spirit world, but I’m completely drawn in.

What I
do
understand is that Emilia’s beliefs combine divine direction and individual empowerment in a way that is refreshing, especially when set next to the lightning-bolt edicts of most orthodox religion. And her gutsy decision to deny the secular powers that be (in her case, the Communist Party) and devote herself to Santería, which led the way for a community to reclaim its original faith, defines courage. I admire anyone who lives in that squishy ether of faith; anyone who gives it up for the intangible.

Somewhere in all that divination is a conclusion. Emilia tells me, in sum, that I am on the right track, but that I’ve got a
looong
way to go. I choose to take that as both an affirmation and a warning about what lies ahead on the Adventure Divas path.

“Next time, the goat,” she says quietly, and kisses me on the cheeks as we are leaving. I vaguely wonder what destiny could require blood sacrifice.

We pass a billboard
of José Martí when we enter the airport that bears his name. Martí, a poet, nationalist, and martyr, wrote the “Fundamental and Secret Guidelines of the Cuban Revolutionary Party,” although most of his prose was decidedly more flowery than that. His poetry speaks of the zeal of a free human spirit and the redemptive powers of love. Is the billboard an homage to Martí the nationalist or Martí the poet? Either way, it’s an apt final image in this country where music, love, and magic sit right alongside ration cards and dark irony.

Caribbean energy and communist rigidity are certainly odd bedfellows, but Emilia Machado, and many of the people we met, seem to soften this giant paradox through spiritual grounding. And Gloria Rolando, the filmmaker back in Havana, crystalized this sentiment when I asked her what a diva was: “For me, a diva is not something that lives in the sky. It is a woman who lives on the earth. It is a woman who suffers, is a woman who dreams, is a woman who wants to struggle. If you ask me if I am a diva, I don’t know; but I am a warrior. And the main quality of the diva-warrior is not to be scared of life. Not to be scared of the difficulties. Whether you have support or not, whether you have money or not, you need to have a spirit.”

Sky Prancer is in my brown Filson shoulder bag as we approach the customs agent in Dallas International Airport, our entry point back into the United States. We push the seven carts of equipment and shot film up to him. I will myself to
not care.
The agent rolls his slightly bored eyes. I know without looking, but with mymothermyself sureness, that Jeannie is also holding her breath. The agent does not even ask where we have been, or what is in the massive pile of shiny metal boxes. He simply waves us through.

2.

HEAD GAMES AND BOAR HUNTS

Psychiatrists, politicians, tyrants are forever assuring us that the wandering life is an aberrant form of behaviour; a neurosis; a form of unfulfilled sexual longing; a sickness which, in the interests of civilisation, must be suppressed. . . . Yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

—BRUCE CHATWIN,
THE SONGLINES

I
am a voodoo doll for a sadistic nurse who is probably suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), an affliction endemic to the United States’ Northwest and to certain Scandinavian countries. Forty degrees. A cold, relentless drizzle has fallen for two months straight; the gray ceiling of the Northwest is closing in like a dreaded inevitability. I am in the travel inoculation ward of Group Health Cooperative and it is a dark February day in Seattle. As the sixth silver needle plunges into my already throbbing arm, I think,
Why
am I doing this?

Questions like this usually don’t arise until I am two days from anywhere, one Snickers bar left, trying to suction thick-as-syrup muddy river water through a filter that falsely claims to remove all scents, tastes, protozoa, and bacteria. But this time, the reservations have hit me in the jab lab. I’ve become a junkie, weak in the face of my drug: adventure.

Peg, the nurse, tosses her modified Dorothy Hamill haircut slightly before saying, with a titch of admonishment, “You’ve come in too late to be protected for dengue fever and Japanese encephalitis. Here are the malaria pills. They’ll kill all your natural flora and fauna—”

“Um,
fauna
?” I gently interject, to no response.

“—so start taking acidophilus now. A small number of people get psychotic episodes from them, but I think you’ll be fine.

“Most importantly,” says Peg, unwrapping the final syringe, “if something goes very wrong, and things
break
or
tear
or get
severely punctured
”—she pauses and looks me in the eye—“beg for an air-evac with an IV.
Don’t
get a transfusion.

“Have fun,” she concludes cheerfully, throwing the used needle into a bin that somehow hermetically seals itself, combining
Andromeda Strain
style with HIV reality.

I tell myself it is Peg’s job to overreact. She is, after all, wearing incredibly sensible shoes.

It all started
with a phone call.

“’Allo there, Holly. Ian Cross from Pilot Productions ’ere,” boomed a congenial Australian voice over the phone from London. “How’d you like to go talk to some headhunters for us, in Borneo? Yaaaaaeh.”

Several months ago, Ian had read about
Adventure Divas
in
Blue: The Adventure Lifestyle
magazine, asked to see some tape, and then offered me work hosting some of the Lonely Planet and Globe Trekkers travel and trekking documentaries. In the cracks of time we weren’t doing postproduction on the Cuba show (that frenetic phase of writing, editing, and penny-pinching that takes place after shoots), I’d crisscrossed the United States and done a dozen programs for Ian. On these shoots I’d received a vital crash course on how to make television
and
how to lasso charging cattle, evade a posse of pregnant tiger sharks, rapel down cliffs, sweat through a sundance, run class-five rapids, and milk everything from emotional moments to smelly goats to interviews. I’d been bit on, shit on, and hit on—all the while paying attention, and learning as much as possible about this new business. I’d asked for adventure and I’d gotten it; some days the new lifestyle teased out the fetal stirrings of my own inner diva; other days I just happily collected the paychecks that helped support my primary passion: Adventure Divas. On the Pilot programs, unlike the
Adventure Divas
series, my creative role was limited to being the on-air “talent,” a role I had mixed feelings about. In any case, my publishing days were a quickly fading memory and I was now headlong into this new medium.

“This is the first episode in our new
Treks in a Wild World
series—all international,” said Ian. “So it must be good; you gotta let it all hang out.” He explained that the program would culminate in a hunt for a wild boar with the indigenous Penan people who lived in the deep interior of the jungle, and he asked about my aim with a poison blow dart. In addition to the Penan, he said, we would film at a longhouse with a river-dwelling Dayak tribe (former headhunters), and also report on the lives of the island’s endangered orangutan population.

“Sure, I’ll do it, Ian,” I said confidently, though I wasn’t so sure about my facility with a blow dart.

I was keen to continue to widen my global perspective, and had become nearly inured to my dog’s lack of eye contact once the backpack got pulled out. My boyfriend’s justifiable grumblings were hardly registering on my domestic Richter scale. All this made it a good time to leave, especially since the wait to find out the future of Adventure Divas had become excruciating.

“Taking off again?” asked Jeannie after I hung up the phone.

“Yep,” I responded.

Jeannie and I were recently back from Alexandria, Virginia, where we’d met with Mary Jane McKinven, head of Science and Exploration at PBS. We’d sent her our Cuba pilot, and she had invited us to national headquarters. We were nervous and arrived one torturous hour early to the meeting, so as not to be late. We sat in the building’s coffee shop, picking lint off of each other’s blazers, trying to anticipate questions, and dreaming of the empire to come. At two minutes to two o’clock, we went upstairs and were admitted to a big, empty conference room. Mary Jane walked in, introduced herself, and sat down.

“Well,” she said warmly, smiling from Jeannie to me, “this is one of the best presentations I’ve seen in my years at PBS. Tell me more.”

Jeannie looked at me, her optimism now spliced with a bit of “I told you so.”

We launched into our talking points and told Mary Jane of our ambitions—prime-time series commitment, Web real estate on pbs.org, marketing dollars—forgetting, in our zeal, that most groups requesting this kind of cash and commitment were large production companies with long track records, not a linty mother-daughter team.

We left encouraged but not greenlit.

Now, back in Seattle, we were in the waiting game. Would they buy the pilot? Would they commission the series?

At 4:30
A.M.
I wrap Sky Prancer in a cheesy
I CLIMBED THE GREAT WALL!
T-shirt and wedge her in the side pocket of my gray backpack next to a dog-eared paperback edition of
The Year of Living Dangerously.
All-night bill-paying and packing sessions have become de rigeur on departure eve of these shoots. I wake up the Boyfriend: “Do you still want to come? Jeannie will be here in ten minutes. You don’t have to,” I offer.

“Is there coffee made?” he responds groggily.

Mom and the Boyfriend drive me to Sea-Tac Airport as pink takes hold of the Olympic Mountain range.

“Honey,” she says, her voice concerned as she hugs me good-bye, “I know you found some sort of, of . . . deliverance in all that blood loss last time you were in the jungle, but please be extra careful this time. I’m worried. . . . And we don’t have ‘key man,’ ” she adds bluntly, switching from Mom back to Jeannie, and referencing our production insurance policy that doesn’t cover loss of a critical employee.

The Boyfriend gives me a kiss and “that look,” which says I-can’t-believe-you-are-leaving-me-again-and-won’t-nest-with-me-but-because-I-am-an-evolved-nineties-guy-I-will-support-you (at-least-when-other-people-are-around).

Now, dear reader, I know what you are thinking: “Two people drove you to the airport at five in the morning! You are loved! You are lucky!”

Point taken.

I am.

Truth is, I do feel slightly guilty about leaving Jeannie holding down the Diva enterprise, and the Boyfriend with the dog. But I also resent that guilt. Why is it that when Robert Redford–cum–Denys Finch Hatton flies away in the golden glow out in Africa, he is pursuing his destiny? And when I walk away I’m just a chick who’s scared of commitment and on the run, who’s weird for ignoring
Glamour
magazine’s prediction of her eggs drying up?

Leaving is an underrated form of liberation.

Rarely in the books and movies of popular culture, much less in life, do we ladies get to go on a genuine non-male-identified adventure—and avoid punishment. Thelma and Louise, long touted as feminist adventurers—sheesh, well, they got theirs. The nutgrab: You have to be dead to be liberated. Part of the Adventure Divas’ mission is to put new
real live
icons on the screen. Women who face challenge, gaze beyond their (possibly pierced) navels and white picket fences—and make it to the other side of the canyon. Xena, Warrior Princess, is an exception, if a fictional one. She travels the world with her best friend while slaying injustice. She doesn’t even bother to have a home. It figures that one of TV’s most divalicious characters also has superhuman powers and D-cups.

So despite my fear of becoming talent, of the twenty kinds of invertebrates that infest the jungles of Borneo, and of the Boyfriend, who is none too pleased that I am once again leaving, I am committed to this adventurous lifestyle. “It’s in my job description,” I now say with legitimacy, embracing the nomada growing within me.

The good-byes leave me feeling guilty, irritated, and thrilled to be escaping, even though, according to my understanding of the globe, I am being sent the wrong way. (Seattle to Borneo via London?) Details aside, my excitement ramps, and the tray table bows, when I plop down the research that the producer has sent.
I HEAR YOU LIKE TO READ UP,
says the hurriedly scrawled note attached to a six-inch-thick stack of paper.

I start highlighting:
The Malaysian jungles are some of the oldest undisturbed areas of rain forest in the world . . . existed for about 100 million years. . . . Orangutans are one of man’s closest relatives and have proved highly intelligent. . . . Sarawak is one of the great battlefields between conservationists and timber merchants. . . . Ensure that you have a bag of tobacco leaf to rub on yourself to prevent leeches.

I also learn that Borneo is the third largest island in the world (right behind New Guinea and Greenland) and is divvied up between Indonesia and Malaysia. The split is just one result of a long history of vying—by white rajahs and the British Empire, among others—for this island’s rich natural resources, primarily oil, timber, pepper, and rubber. Sarawak and Sabah, the states where we are going, became part of the then-new country of Malaysia in 1963.

Ten hours after
leaving Seattle, the plane noses down in Heathrow and my crew meets me on board. “How’s my favorite Yank?” Georgie Burrell greets me with a thump on the back, and heaves her camera bag into the overhead. Georgie is a lanky, long-haired blond Londoner most often found in a T-shirt with a cig hanging out of the side of her mouth. For Pilot Productions and in the name of television, she and I have lashed together a survival lean-to and spent a long stranded night staving off a flash flood with our prayers, and hypothermia with the bubble wrap that protected her camera. We have rappelled down cliffs into raging rivers in the pitch black, and known the blue-green glare of more than one emergency room. Georgie is a tough girl whose only high-maintenance tic is her oft-stated declaration, “I don’t do cold,
dahhllling.
” Meaning, Georgie will only take international film shoots in locations between the latitudes of thirty-five degrees north and thirty-five degrees south. Cold will not be our nemesis on this shoot. We are headed for 115 degrees longitude, zero degrees latitude. Equatorial Borneo: red, hot, and wet. “Should be a piece of cake, this one,” says Georgie. “What’s a wee walk through the jungle?”

“Yeah,” says red-haired, pale, and understated Scottish soundman John Burns, “and we’ve brought enough cigarettes to burn off every leech in the country.” He holds up a carton of Silk Cut.

Eleven overpackaged meals, thirty-seven wet-naps, one flip-flopped magnetic field, and a day and a half after leaving Seattle, I’ve entered that jittery netherland in which the body’s hardwiring goes color-blind; the red wires are wrapped up with the green, and the black one just dangles. The brain is completely flummoxed about what that black one is for. Hunger is a vague, tinny presence that cannot be sated. I look around at my fellow passengers and feel like my entire person is an appendix: irrelevant, useless, taking up space amid much more worthy organs.

We are on the sixth and last leg of the journey, closing in on Borneo—still in the air, mind you—and clearly I already have
circadian desynchronosis,
as my aerospace engineer brother Dan, the oldest of my siblings, explained it: jet lag. “Increase pressure in the nasopharynx by performing a Valsalva maneuver [read: hold your nose and blow],” he advised. “And don’t worry about the gamma radiation on those international flights; the only place you really get zapped is over the poles, where there’s less geomagnetic field to protect you. Equatorial area, you’re fine—the field’s pretty thick there,” he said, earnestly.