Hold the Enlightenment (29 page)

So why are there so many hostile encounters between wild dolphins and humans? The one reported death happened in Brazil, and the details are instructive. In March 1994, a bottlenose dolphin named Tiao began appearing on the beach near São Paulo. Tiao did not seem to be associated with any nearby dolphin group and was obviously attracted to humans. Such animals, often called ambassador dolphins, are rare. No one knows why they prefer to associate with humans rather than their own kind. But the attraction was mutual. According to the BBC “Wildlife Magazine”: “At times, Tiao would be surrounded by up to 30 people, climbing on his
back, tying things to his flippers, sticking things into his blow-hole, hitting him with sticks, even trying to drag him out of the water to be photographed with the family and kids on the beach.” In December, after nine months of this, Tiao rammed one man to death and injured several others. It is said there was drunkenness involved, and that the man who was killed had been trying to shove a stick into the dolphin’s blowhole. (“Killer Dolphin Slays High-spirited Baton Twirler.”) These days, when Tiao visits the beachfront near São Paulo, people get out of the water and accord him the respect due both ambassadors and wild animals. (“Killer Dolphin Beats Murder Rap.”)

In my film project, there is a sequence involving an abused ambassador dolphin in the Caribbean. Jojo, still another bottlenose dolphin, appeared one day near the beaches of the Turks and Caicos Islands. He seemed to be soliciting human companionship, but when people attempted to touch him or swim with him, Jojo became obstreperous. Some people were butted. There were injuries.

Something had to be done. While human swimmers were taught the essentials of dolphin etiquette, a dive instructor named Dean Bernal began swimming with Jojo every day in an effort to convince the dolphin that humans do have some manners. There have been no more human injuries, and Jojo the dolphin has since been named a “national treasure” of the Turks and Caicos.

Still, all is not well. Speedboats, jet skis, and other watercraft from beachfront resorts make swimming dangerous for both humans and dolphins. An eight-year-old girl was cut by a propeller, and Jojo has been hit eight times. Two of the deep propeller cuts were life-threatening. (“Human Merrymakers to Jojo: It’s Payback Time, Tuna-Breath.”)

The sequences of Dean and Jojo swimming together are easily the most popular among test audiences who have seen a rough cut of the IMAX documentary. They really look like two mammals at play: Dean blows an immense air bubble which expands as it rises, while Jojo follows the bubble to the surface, then scoots back to Dean as if to say, “Do it again, do it again.” Or: Here are Dean and Jojo perfectly vertical in the water, with Dean pumping his arms
back and forth, as if dancing, and here’s Jojo mimicking Dean with his pectoral fins. It is as if each mammal is looking into some strange, shimmering mirror.

In the matter of the mirrored relationship between dolphin and man, a scientist and poet named Loren Eiseley contemplated a world in which humans lived the life of dolphins, which, in the manner of his day, he called porpoises.

Eisley thought that “It is worth at least a wistful thought that someday the porpoise may talk to us and we to him. It would break, perhaps, the long loneliness that has made man a frequent terror and abomination even to himself.”

This long loneliness, it seems to me, is the foundation of all human science and philosophy. It is why we set up radio telescopes to scan the stars for evidence of life on other planets and why we want, so desperately, to communicate with the dolphin. We imagine that the dolphin is peaceful, loving, joyous, and wise because these virtues are the sum of our yearning. But dolphins are neither wise nor cruel. Not in the human sense. They are wild and free, and the lesson we might learn from them cannot be encompassed in any presently known language.

Given this, the desolation of our singular awareness, the most depressing headline I can conceive of might read: “Dolphins: Only Human, Fully Comprehensible.”

O
nce, years ago, a friend of mine, John C., took me to a restaurant in New York’s Little Italy. When our entrées arrived, he turned to the waiter, pointed to the cannelloni on his plate, and asked, injudiciously, I thought: “What are these? Fried Hoffa fingers?” The waiter colored and said that he would consult with the chef. Presently the chef arrived at the table carrying a large cleaver in what I found to be a menacing manner. He explained that we were not being served fried Hoffa fingers. “Everything here,” the chef said, gesturing vividly with the cleaver, “is
fresh
killed.” John, in a kind of ecstasy of delight, said: “I think dinner ought to be fraught with danger, don’t you?”

Few people, I suspect, would agree with John that veiled death threats are an aid to digestion. In fact, most people think my friend John is a jerk.

I found myself contemplating those cannelloni, jerks in general, and the pleasures of mortal peril before going off to spend several weeks this past summer in a very dangerous place with Robert Young Pelton, the author of the bestselling guidebook
The World’s Most Dangerous Places
. Pelton, if I understand him correctly, believes that extreme jeopardy, encountered abroad, can be both life enhancing and numinous. The book, which Pelton insists is required reading at the CIA, is, in fact, exceptionally useful to those whose work carries them to insalubrious and sanguinary places: journalists, missionaries, mercenaries, aid workers, scientists and the like,
not to mention kamikaze packbackers and other frenzied travelers. Most guidebooks focus on what is glorious;
Dangerous Places
draws a bead on what is goriest. It is a morbidly compelling compendium of horror, deeply disturbing, and often laugh-out-loud funny, which is to say, it’s really good bathroom reading, and pretty good political science to boot.

The book—and Pelton’s Discovery Channel TV show of the same name—consists of dispatches from the world’s hot spots, along with reams of appalling statistics. There are impertinent interviews with Afghan warlords, conversations with professional assassins or with obscure rebel chieftains, not to mention such helpful advice as this on surviving a drive through a minefield: sit on your flak jacket.

Most of Pelton’s readers and viewers, of course, have no intention of ever putting this counsel to use, but simply find it entertaining in a reality-based, Survivor-with-more-bite sort of way. Other people, particularly those such as foreign-aid workers and war correspondents who have no choice but to brave danger on a regular basis, are skeptical that Pelton is ever really in a great deal of peril. And if he is, then, said a distinguished friend of mine who has spent the better part of the last five years in war-ravaged Chechnya, “he’s a voyeur of violence.” So Pelton can’t win: he’s either a liar or a ghoul. A jerk, in other words.

Now, in my own twenty-five-year journalism career, I’ve traveled constantly and—always inadvertently—have found myself in a number of urban riots, negotiated with rebel factions for my safety, run from areas where various armies were shooting at one another, and been held at gunpoint more times than I care to remember. If the skeptics were wrong about Pelton’s level of exposure—if he acted recklessly in seriously terrifying situations—I’d just make myself scarce and let him deal with the fallout. Jerks die.

Pelton and I conferred by phone and picked Colombia. With a suddenly booming kidnapping business; a bloody, forty-year-long civil war; two major violent leftist guerrilla factions, and even more violent rightist paramilitary groups; a military often accused of
human-rights violations, not to mention the world’s most active drug trade, this midsized Andean nation spans South America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was, hands down, the most dangerous destination we could have chosen in the Western Hemisphere. Our plan, as Pelton described it, was simple: we’d fly down to the capital city of Bogotá, and observe some scheduled military “operations” designed to show outside journalists that the army wasn’t really the corrupt band of human-rights abusers everyone thought it was, then shake our hosts, and slip off into the bush to interview some seriously heinous guerrillas, the kind of “driven, resolute” people who, as Pelton describes in his newly released autobiography,
The Adventurist
, “burn fiercely, but briefly.” If all went well, he told me, he should get some excellent footage for an upcoming
Dangerous Places
episode, and I’d be back fishing at my Montana summer cabin in under two weeks.

As Pelton worked out the details, I did some research of my own, boring stuff which I always find scintillating when my life is at stake. A few months earlier, I discovered, the U.S. State Department had issued an advisory that said while “U.S. citizens are warned against travel to Colombia at any time,” recent events presented “additional opportunities for criminal and terrorist elements to take action against U.S. interests.” The risk of being kidnapped in Colombia, the report said, was now “greater than in any other country in the world,” with left-wing guerrillas accounting for most of the action and common criminals the rest, although the criminals sometimes made a quick buck wholesaling their richest hostages to the guerrillas.

I also learned that, as homicide was now the leading cause of death for Colombians above the age of ten, an antiviolence children’s movement had sprung up. A ten-year-old leader of the movement had recently appeared on television pleading for an end to the violence. Several days later, three men carrying grenades and pistols dragged the fourth grader off his school bus and spirited him away, apparently as a warning to any other loudmouthed children with similar ideas. A few days later, a TV and radio satirist described as the country’s most beloved humorist was brutally murdered
when gunmen on motorcycles machine-gunned his Jeep Cherokee.

Robert Pelton fired off a number of e-mails to me describing many of these same events. The one he headed “Bring your bank statement” concerned the leftist Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, the largest leftist insurgency in the Americas. One of their field marshals, a man whose nom de guerre is Mono Jojoy (pronounced
moan-oh ho-hoy)
, had announced that FARC would begin kidnapping millionaires, a necessary step, he said, to counter government aggression fueled by its taxes on multinational organizations and “Yankee imperialism.”

Research suggested that it was the worst possible time to go to Colombia, and Pelton was greatly encouraged. “Our timing,” he e-mailed me, “is impeccable.” You never knew what was going to happen, he continued, but there was every indication that our visit to Colombia would be exceedingly eventful. There would be five of us traveling together. “Freak-outs,” he warned—facetiously, I think—“will be sold to the highest bidder.”

On a flight to Los Angeles, where I would meet Pelton for the first time, I finished thumbing through
The Adventurist
. Pelton has stated that he considers himself “only a passable writer,” and some reviewers have savaged him, though other readers, and I am one, have found the book perversely fascinating, despite the occasional purple extravagance in what is otherwise a pretty straightforward work.

There are gloomy descriptions of his bleak childhood on the plains of Alberta. After his parents’ divorce, at the age of ten, he was sent to St. John’s Cathedral Boys’ School in southern Manitoba, the youngest kid in what was then known as “the toughest boys’ school in North America.” It was a place where kids ran fifty-mile snowshoe marathons, and paddled huge freight canoes on one-thousand-mile journeys that followed the historic routes of French fur trappers. (Twelve boys and one teacher drowned on one such escapade when their canoe capsized in the frigid waters of Lake Timmisskiming.)

Later, when his mother and her new husband decided it was time for Pelton to leave the nest, he bought a $175 Nash Rambler and lived out of the car, picking fruit to survive. He was sixteen. There are also testimonies to the lessons Pelton picked up while clawing his way to the top of the dog-eat-dog world of setting up audiovisual presentations for corporate conferences. At the pivotal moment when he decides, while standing at his father’s snow-swept grave, that he’s destined for something more than the AV business, he writes, in one of the most unfortunate passages in the book, that “It was time to live like the wind and die like thunder.”

Still, the most dramatic parts of
The Adventurist
are those in which he details his success with his current enterprise, passages made all the more compelling by the fact that they’re wholly confirmable by other sources. In the years since the minor AV tycoon cashed out of slide shows and used the proceeds to buy the old Fielding Guides out of bankruptcy, Pelton has transformed a moribund guidebook company into an entire travel and danger-themed conglomerate, selling books, producing the Discovery Channel’s highest-rated program, and hawking
World’s Most Dangerous Places
hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and stickers, all of which are festooned with the logo of a laughing skull—“Mr. DP”—that Pelton designed himself.

I first met Pelton at the Los Angeles airport, about a thirty-minute drive from his house high on the headlands over the Pacific Ocean, where he lived with Linda, his wife of twenty-five years, who told me it was a waste of time worrying about Robert on his trips: he always comes back. Pelton’s stunning sixteen-year-old twin daughters were both athletes: one an accomplished horsewoman, the other an avid surfer. He doted on them. He was a big man, six-foot-four, with large hands and feet, and a prominent beak of a nose, all of which, combined with a pair of piercing gray eyes, gave him the look of a slightly goofy eagle. He could, if he wanted, be intimidating, which is how I imagine lines such as “die like thunder” got by any number of editors. (“I’m not going to tell him.
You
tell him.”)