Hold the Enlightenment (24 page)

It was an elegant place, with ponds and bridges and fountains. When the waitress arrived at our table, I pointed to the English menu. Snake.

She said something not in my twenty-word Mandarin vocabulary,
but eventually I understood that I was to get up and discuss my dinner choice with a small man standing off to one corner. The corner, I saw, was stacked floor to ceiling with glass fish tanks containing all manner of sea life. There were also chicken-wire cages, where various terrestrial animals waited to be chosen, rather like puppies in a pet shop window.

The man took me to the snake cage. There were fifteen or twenty of them in there, all twisted up together like a ball of yarn, and I understood I was to pick one out for my dinner. I have little experience in the matter of choosing a tasty snake and simply pointed at the biggest one, a creature a little over six feet long and about as big around as the business end of a baseball bat. The man opened the top of the cage, reached in, and grabbed the snake behind the head. He stood there, speaking rapidly and in an apologetic tone, while the snake hung loosely in his hand, its tail twitching and curling on the floor.

The snake, it turned out, was not venomous, and hence less effective in generating virility. The man was terribly sorry, but no restaurants in Beijing could stock poisonous snakes for a week. This was by decree of the government.

What was the reason for the rule? The snake man gestured for me to look around the restaurant. I could see the reason for myself.

The dining room was, in fact, packed with women: women obviously from Africa, Latin women, women dressed as if they lived in Saudi Arabia or Polynesia or Thailand. It was the Fourth UN World Conference on Women, being celebrated right now, in Beijing, and the government didn’t want any international incidents, such as a foreign woman being killed by a venomous snake in a restaurant. Also, it might be better if the men these women encountered weren’t feeling excessively, uh, manly.

So I was going to get to eat a harmless snake, which would probably only increase my potency a teensy little bit. This was well and good, since I would be dining in a room full of strange women, none of whom had expressed the slightest wish to share my company, or anything else I had to offer. What good does it do to have lead in the old pencil when there’s nothing to write on?

I returned to my seat as the man dragged the snake back toward the kitchen. Almost immediately, it seemed, the waitress arrived with two small pitchers. One was perfectly clear and contained an alcoholic beverage. I didn’t catch the name.
Moa tai
. Something like that. I since have been told that the generic name is
baijiu
, meaning, literally, “white alcohol.” The other pitcher was filled with the snake’s blood.

The waitress set two shot glasses on the table. She dropped some small, slimy nugget of snake, the gallbladder, into the blood, where it slowly sank to the bottom of the pitcher. Then she began poking at the squirmy thing with what looked like a metal chopstick. It slithered around and around on the bottom of the pitcher, but she finally punctured it, and something green—the gall?—began coloring the blood. She stirred the mixture, but the green gall didn’t emulsify well, and swirled slowly around the pitcher in various viscous, amoeboid shapes, rather like a lava lamp.

That, apparently, was what it was supposed to look like, because the waitress nodded, as if at a job well done, and poured the shot glasses pretty well full with white alcohol, topped off with a dollop of lava lamp snake’s blood. We should drink a toast to the coming dinner, she said, in so many gestures.

Baijiu
is powerful stuff, 90 percent alcohol at a guess. It was best just to throw it down in a single gulp and get the whole thing over with. Except that the waitress filled the glasses right back up and disappeared into the kitchen. Back she came with the first course: batter-fried snakeskin. We were encouraged to drink a toast to the snakeskin. And another toast to the empty platter. A toast to the next course, which was stir-fried snake meat and vegetables. A toast to that empty platter. A toast to the courses to come, none of which I can remember, except to say that every part of the animal was served in one way or another, and it was necessary to toast every last bit of it, down to the eyeballs.

Snake, I thought, rather blearily, the dinner of alcoholics.

Michael and I paid our bill and bounced from wall to wall down the long hallway to our room. There, sitting on my bed, was the outsize duffel the airline had lost: several thousand rounds of ammunition
that could, I imagined, earn me a lot of disagreeable jail time. This realization was not a comfort. I lay on the bed, worrying drunkenly about all that ammo, until the snake informed me that it wanted out, and right now.

That was my last dinner in China. Now I was watching the Chinese deal with the jellied mess on their plates, and a small, unworthy part of me thought: lutefisk is the revenge of the reptile. But they liked it. Or two of them did. Brian didn’t go back for seconds, and told me later the fish wasn’t “to his taste.” He was polite about it, as good travelers are in foreign countries, and we laughed about the lutefisk, I perhaps more than Brian. I was pretty sure he didn’t have a gun.

T
he great white shark slowly cruising outside the flimsy, submerged cage in which I’d imprisoned myself was probably only twelve or thirteen feet long and weighed, at a guess, two thousand pounds. It seemed quite docile, and menacing only in its profound grace. The great white rose up to the surface, where there was a floating and iridescent smatter of chum: fish oil and sardines ladled into the water specifically to attract sharks. A disembodied seal’s head floated nearby. The head was affixed to a thick yellow rope. The shark hit the seal bait with no sense of urgency whatsoever. It twisted its head slightly, in the way a human might tear at a strip of beef jerky. And while this was happening, someone above, aboard the dive boat I’d hired, was pulling on the rope attached to the seal’s head so that the shark was being drawn toward the cage, where I stood breathing hard through a scuba regulator.

Presently, all I could see of the animal was its belly, white as a bedsheet. The sheer size of the fish filled my vision to its periphery, and when its leathery flesh actually touched the wire of the cage, there was an instant, thrashing jerk—all those muscles whipping and bunching inches from my face—and some part of the shark bashed into the cage, twice. It felt rather like being in a minor pile-up on the freeway: thrown helplessly forward, thrown helplessly backward,
bang
, against this side of the cage,
bang
, against that one.

The shark cut a wide circle through the sea, then disappeared into the blue-green distance.

Great whites—known to be man-eaters and sometimes called “white death”—can be found in all temperate and tropical oceans on earth. But they are most easily observed, in the wild, off South Africa, where there are an estimated two thousand of the creatures cruising between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. The premier viewing area—probably the best spot on the planet to encounter great white sharks—is near Dyer Island, which is about seven miles off Gans Bay, a small fishing village a few hours’ drive south and west of Cape Town.

Dyer Island itself is pretty much covered over in gulls and other seabirds, so that occasionally, as if on a signal, half the island seems to rise up into the air and circle about overhead, shrieking in a shrill and self-righteous manner.

Set just off Dyer Island, there is another, smaller body of land, a long, graceless pile of stones ten to forty feet high at most, and this is called Geyser Rock. It is the home of an estimated seventy thousand southern fur seals, a favorite prey of the great white shark. The seals bask in the sun on Geyser Rock, but must periodically enter the water to hunt and eat. They also become overheated in the sun, which is potentially fatal. The fur seal choice is this: stay out of the water and surely burn to death under the sun, or, what the hell, take a nice, refreshing dip in the ocean, and maybe get eaten by a huge, hungry shark.

Great white sharks circle Geyser Rock, which they seem to regard as a kind of fur seal McDonald’s.

In places, less than one thousand yards separate Dyer Island from Geyser Rock. The channel between these two islands is called Shark Alley. Interested parties—tourists, photographers, scientists—can hire a “shark operator,” that is, someone who owns a ski boat and a chicken-wire shark cage, and get right in the water with several great white sharks. It costs about $150 to look white death in the eye.

Gans Bay is a very small town of neat lawns and wood-frame houses, mostly painted white. It has the feel of small-town America, rural America: a place, one imagines, that values neatness and hard
work; personal honesty and public decency. It sits on a coastline that could hardly be more appealing: These are the Scottish moors, with six hundred or more varieties of heather flowering in idiotic profusion because the climate is not drear and chill. It’s Southern California here. Sun. Sea. Surf. A view toward Cape Town featuring purple mountains, range upon range of them, disappearing into the setting sun.

An American, standing in the midst of such soul-stirring beauty, feels, instinctively, that something is missing. Where are the trophy waterfront homes, the shopping malls and arcades and cheap amusement parks and saltwater-taffy vendors? Who left this place alone to stew in the economic stagnation of hard work and decency?

The answer is that most of the rest of the world did. In the days of apartheid and sanctions, for instance, South Africa’s share of the world’s tourism dollars was one quarter of one percent. These days, tourists visit local wineries, experience some of the best whale watching on earth, walk the nearly deserted white-sand beaches, and surf the perfect wave. It’s heaven, as envisioned by the Beach Boys.

The emerging tourism industry, however, is not much regulated, and because South Africa is not a highly litigious country, it has, over the past few years, become one of the few places on earth where the risk-obsessed can go to put their lives on the line, with (sometimes dangerously inexperienced) outfitters offering rock-climbing or whitewater-rafting expeditions. “Sharking” is one of the new risk enterprises.

There are currently six shark operators working out of Gans Bay. Anyone with a ski boat and a welding torch can build a cage and became a shark operator. A permit or experience is not required and the money is good. The average wage in the area is about 5,000 rand (about $100) a month. Sharking pays better: a boat carrying eight paying guests at 500 to 800 rand a day ($100 to $160) is a month’s wages in pocket. A year’s wages in two weeks!

Consequently, competition among sharkers is fierce, and, behind the orderly and idyllic facade of the town of Gans Bay, passions and
tempers run high. One sharker claims to have been shot at, probably by a competitor. Each of the operators is critical of the others, such criticisms sometimes degenerating into fistfights at the boat launch. One operator is faulted for using pig’s heads as shark bait, which tourists find aesthetically unpleasing. Some operators have offended tourists by tossing cigarettes and garbage into the sea. Other sharkers are guilty of pulling great whites up to the transom of their boats so that they will thrash about in a dramatic manner, which the more aware sharkers feel is degrading to the animal, and an affront to South Africa, the first country on earth to protect great whites.

The most cogent critiques have to do with safety: Do you really want a four-thousand-pound great white shark thrashing against a boat that has no guardrails, that may be overcrowded, that is carrying tourists who range from families in matching Bermuda shorts to hot young divers from Europe and America? Shouldn’t the shark cages have tops on them? Or at least extensions that rise above the sea? Shouldn’t someone regulate the number of people an operator can cram onto his boat, boats that, after all, have to be able to handle ten- to sixteen-foot swells on the trip from Gans Bay to Dyer Island?

The operators and the South African Department of Transportation have been talking about regulations, a code of conduct, rules that would require a dive master and a pilot on each craft; mandate a sturdily constructed shark cage, free of rust; require operators be trained in trauma treatment and, at least, have a radio on board. Radio links to rescue helicopters have also been discussed.

But no one in Gans Bay believes new regulations will be effectively enforced. What every sharker in town knows is this: someone is going to have to die first. No one wants this to happen. Gans Bay operators are decent folks, first and foremost. And a death, or several, would be very bad for business. Still, no one doubts that the tragedy is coming, and coming soon.

The folks I chose to go with, the Great White Shark Research Institute, had the largest and safest-looking boat, a thirty-foot Dive Cat,
complete with an enclosed wheelhouse, a toilet, and two clean, well-maintained 200-horsepower outboards.

The skipper, a Swede named Frederick Ostrum, brought the boat down to the dock trailered behind a battered Ford truck. The shark cage sat on the stern of the boat, and it was not the expected and reassuring rectangle of sturdy iron bars. It was, in fact, a cylinder about ten feet high and three feet in diameter, made of galvanized iron woven together in a diamond pattern. The wire was not nearly as thick as that in a Century fence, but it was somewhat stronger than chicken wire, which it closely resembled.

The cages float free, on a rope, so that they swing away from an attacking shark. The same principle makes bobbing for apples difficult. But not impossible. A spokesman for the South African Department of Fisheries has said that “if a great white wanted to destroy one of these cages, it could.” Which seems reasonable on the face of it.

The Great White Shark Research Institute is sometimes criticized for being a tourist operation in the guise of a scientific institute. Whatever the fact of the matter is, on the two days I chose to dive with the GWSRI, there was an American scientist aboard, doing actual scientific work. Richard Londereraville, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Akron, had a grant to take blood samples from great whites. His mission was to find out if the ancient fish carried the hormone leptin in their blood. Leptin is created by fat cells, and controls appetite in creatures as diverse as mice and men. Sharks, however, have little or no fat. Does that mean they don’t have leptin in their blood? Inquiring minds wanted to know.