Surfing and Waxing Philosophical: Notes from Kuta Lombok

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Waxing.

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We sailed into the largest city in East Indonesia, Kupang, in the beginning of August 2017. My long time girlfriend, Della, and I were completing an extended trans-Pacific crossing that started in Panama in February 2016. Sailing on other people’s boats for various legs that included stays in many of the island nations of the South Pacific including most recently New Zealand and Australia. In total we had sailed over 10,000nm, and gone nearly another 10,000 miles by land on our path to Indonesia. As soon as we landed on a small rubble-littered patch of beach in a busy section of Kupang I was surprised at how stark the difference between the other islands of the South Pacific was to this. Having spent the last 8 months in the westernized countries to the south maybe I was unconsciously expecting what I had last experienced in the more equatorial Pacific, quiet Polynesian island communities. On our first walk around Kupang, from what I immediately observed in the organization of the buildings, the way that people approached and addressed me, the image of the land and the people taken as a whole, this was going to be a completely different experience than anything we had seen thus far. While we were walking through the overrun streets, blindly hot and dusty at the end of the dry season, Della turned to me and said, ‘It feels like we’re in Asia’. It is clear to anyone that attempts to draw cultural lines on a map that such lines are slippery, naturally promiscuous, and hard to tack down, but I knew what she meant, and that in itself has meaning.

 

 

We spent 6 of the next 8 months in Indonesia, mostly living in and around Bali and Lombok but also traversing the islands from the far eastern Kupang to Lombok in the center of the archipelago, and on to the Mentawai’s to the far west where we spent a final month. During this time I thought endlessly about culture, trying to understand what I was seeing around me, the obvious good and the inescapable bad. There is no way to understand a culture, or a ‘place’ in its entirety, such a pursuit is meaningless, culture is possibly better understood as a concept, or a construct, like a triangle, and not an actual measurable phenomenon. A triangle is a useful model of the world, because it is perfectly defined, confined by known rules, whose manipulations allow for exact prediction. But the world has no triangles, only approximate triangles. The difference is subtle, but important, especially when it comes to culture; conflation of culture as a useful model and as a description of reality leads to a dangerous misunderstanding of people, and gives the false expectation that behavior is predicted by cultural knowledge, or by any sort of formulaic understanding. That isn’t to say that measuring and observing and trying to discuss culture isn’t informative, interesting and important, because it certainly is if we are going to figure out the best way to exist, coexist, and engage with each other.

 

‘Experiencing’ culture is one of the clichés that travelers trade in. And ‘authenticity’ is as complex a concept as culture itself. Certainly people want to feel that they are getting authentic cultural learning, but using authenticity as a qualifier has already made it a dangerous weapon: what decides that something is authentic, by what measure, and more importantly, by whose? The East, the far-east, the Orient, as Edward Said describes in the introduction of his paradigm setting Orientalism, is an idea that has been constructed not benevolently, but from a long history of oppression, colonialism, and exploitation. And so ‘authenticity’ and any other internally consistent conclusions about the nature of the people and the culture all stem from an assumption of ‘that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to its mere being’ (Introduction, pg. 13).

 

It’s ‘mere being’, being the thing that most interests me, because it is irreproachable, unapproachable through reason alone. If there is to be a thing called culture, or authentic culture it has to be this ‘mere being’, an ever-shifting pattern of, and battle between, dominant and subversive shared behaviors in which a single moment, observed, experienced, described (by me, the interloper), holds equal importance towards the goal of understanding as other, more methodological and quantitative, evaluations of the macroscopic structures of a culture such as organized religion, ceremony, and urban infrastructure.

 

 

In my thinking about Indonesia I jump erratically between idea and experience, between these macroscopic concepts, such as waste removal, and the images and pictures I have in my head of the people living and managing their environment, living in the details of those concepts: a grandmother in a woven grass skirt dumping a similarly woven basket full of plastic into the river that flowed by her hut; a child standing outside the IndoMart sucking dry a plastic cup of blue liquid through a straw, staring me in the face, intently, almost intentionally, tossing the cup to my feet; or the floating streams of driftwood and packaging chaff that I encountered while spear fishing, I cringe to remember the one outing when a warm evening light illuminated the silhouette of a puppy floating by, as if being hung by the scruff from an invisible mother, sleeping as it floated out to sea in the endless train of the unwanted and waste.

 

The issue of trash opens a flood of connection, causation and complication that I can’t or am resistant to coalesce into a single meaningful argument. In a way it is representative of a class of prominent issues that present while traveling, issues like public health, urban infrastructure, private and public space boundaries, issues that when I try to untangled reveal a stifling complexity, an intimidating network of relationships that don’t naturally conform to understanding or ‘solution’. Maybe I simply want to stay in the safe world of vaguery, or maybe I am simply afraid that a proper essay will do the complex matter injustice, as Said says,  ‘My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus.’ (Introduction, pg. 16).

 

Maybe this just goes to excuse what thin descriptions of my time in Indonesia I have managed to put together, to excuse their inability to say anything definite about the people, the culture, and the state of their lives. If anything is understood it should not be about a place but a place in time, and even then just a shard of a construction of a place in time, almost nothing if we are looking to understand the whole.

 

Lastly I want to say that I am cautious when thinking or writing about culture because, correctly or not, I have internalized the idea that cultural declamation is necessarily partisan. That, though I try to be neutral (or at least respect the idea of neutrality), I have bias, in my language and in the assumptive foundations of my cannon. Said described the problem 40 years ago;

 

…ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the Orient was created-or, as I call it, “Orientalized” -and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…

 

And so my presence in Indonesia has to be understood as part of a long history, one in which colonialism happened, one in which ideas of culture were used to justify oppression and exploitation, to dehumanize in order to legitimize this hegemony. It isn’t just writing about the experiences but the experiences themselves that are lit by this knowledge, this notion, this history. At times it is difficult to feel that there is any room for authenticity, interactions are at times difficult to enjoy simply, authenticity becomes difficult to believe in at all.

 

 

But (but!), that can’t be the last word on the matter, because we must also recognize that we are in our own time and responsible also to the moment, to interactions outside of a cage of epistemology. Outside of the particular historical narrative I am trading in, outside of the narratives we have developed to try to understand the macroscopic structures of societies we visit, there remains the interactions of humans. What is the balance between trying to understand the contemporary outcomes of historical events and allowing people to define themselves? Could an interaction be genuine (authentic?) if taken as a child (in the Buddhist sense), unlearned and unassuming? In many ways by forming a narrative about a people, who most likely do not share your narrative, is a form of disrespect, and interrupts the humanity that drives the best interactions we have as travelers. There seems to be a necessary balance between knowledge and deference, and ultimately an abiding respect and humility.

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Surfing.

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My life in Kuta Lombok was blessed by simplicity of action.  Many people, long term visitors, expats, or the people that existed in between, seasonal visitors that imagined that they were part of the community, but couldn’t really accept the details of a permanent life in a foreign land, mostly all had a purpose, real or imagined. The true expats, who were actually few in number, owned businesses, and were mostly consumed by them. Other long-term folks found work online, programming or building websites for the western business. But I was traveling, a great non-action that requires nothing of the actor but to move around. Since we had decided to stay in Kuta for a while I was suddenly a sedentary traveler, a flightless bird, a voiceless singer, a man without a purpose, which had the expected consequence of causing existential anxiety, but also opened up my days to guiltless surfing.

 

Surfing is not a sufficiently robust activity to be the sole pursuit in ones life, my life anyway. The popular narrative is of course to the contrary, and maybe for some people, for certain periods of time in their enlightenment years (roughly sixteen – twenty four: hallucinogens, rambling poetry, epiphanies) it can proxy as sufficient for satisfaction. But eventually people need more than The Search (a term that must have once meant something pseudo-spiritual, evoking the feelings you could only get coming around a remote sandy point, propped on the prow of an old patched together dugout and seeing your wave for the first time, having correctly conjectured, with the use of hard to obtain pre-war charts, the exact location of a mythical, perfectly formed paradise peeler. But now I can only think of the high-end promotional material that trades in such myths. The Search is trademarked, and has been for a long time, maybe even since the very idea was conceived. Its difficult to know if the myth wasn’t created by ad men, after all lots of guys who were part of the early California surf scene figured out how to make money from the growth of the lifestyle. So taking some thin narratives about adventure and discovery in the south seas and plying them as surf lore seems almost reasonable, if inevitably inedible). But for me the opportunity to just surf was welcomed. If I could simply play the part of a man that didn’t care about anything but waves maybe I could get some reprieve from my greater existential problems. Even if the slightly dumb, but persistently happy surfer is only a pencil character, I was sure I could get a few weeks happiness by playing that character. That is to say, I got up every day with only one purpose, surf waves.

 

Among the smattering of friends and friendly acquaintances I had there was one guy who matched my daily meaninglessness and surf pursuit. There were lots of people on various length vacations that were surfing every day, and some were there for months, but the longer term travelers tended to be a decade younger than me and though I could have fun chatting them up at the bar, conversations didn’t withstand the light of day and I found myself looking elsewhere for surf buddies. So this is how I found Jeff. Like me Jeff didn’t have anything to do with his life but surf. There were details, broken hearts, sordid dealings in drugs and addiction, and even a few years in a Florida jail, but nothing was really current, nothing was keeping him or calling him home, or anywhere. So there was surfing.

 

 

Jeff was handsome and well kept in a way that I never could be bothered to be. I always liked to dress up and I enjoyed the feeling of cleaning up for a wedding or an important meeting, but I never adopted it as a lifestyle. But Jeff was of a culture of trim; new shirts, cleanly shaved up and down, and always smelling of laundry and shampoo.  He had at least ten pairs of new and almost new board shorts and an infinite set of surf themed tank tops and t-shirts. I always respected a clean man as a sign of diligence and self-respect, and although I generally stopped at good hygiene and minimal maintenance time, I liked the company of a clean man.

 

As is the case with most clean men Jeff was single and flagrant with his good looks. Being a long time not-single-man I enjoyed seeing the inside of the life of single men, like a dry-drunk going to the party and handing out drinks it was nice to just see people imbibing in each other, and when we went out Jeff would inevitably end up chatting up some nice smiling blond Germans who I would have to excuse myself from as the night fell into morning.

 

Most days I would walk across the dirt street that divided my homestay from the fenced in collection of rental houses where Jeff lived. As soon as you walked into the gates of Jeff’s little neighborhood Marsha would be side-on to your shins, trying her best to trip you up that you might stumble and fall down to her level, where she hoped, I’m sure, you would stay and pet her and play with her through the long hot day when normally no one was around to give her any attentions at all. Marsha was a cream-colored preteen indo mutt that one of the neighbors had picked up. Neglected in some gutter in Mataram she had been swept up in her search for a milk dripping teet and in all her innocence and ignorance been installed as the new kid in the tough provincial world of half wild, mostly mange infested, certainly flea bitten Kuta dog life.

 

There were already dogs in the small fenced-in area that composed the little ‘neighborhood’ where Jeff lived. There were five houses closely nested and surrounded by a high concrete fence. Mama dog and Tigre had been living in the walls for some time. Tigre, the dog associated with the Peruvian guy who was the long-term renter at Jeff’s house, but who was currently in Australia working in the mines, had lived on the grounds for at least 3 years. Mama dog’s past was cloudier. She could have been born in the culvert just outside the gates of the compound where there were currently three little pups, rolls of fuzz and fur, beginning to venture into the street. It was possible that mama dog, perpetually morose with dark patches of rough skin and hairless blotches of mange, old disused teats dragging through the grass tips, represented one of the terminal brackets of life for an Indonesian dog, with the other end closed in by the weeks old pups born already into the gutter. Born in the streets, innocent as rainbows, these dogs are quickly faced with the harsh reality of life on the bottom. Their local human-pup counterparts, exploring their understanding of coexistence, prodded them until they squealed, or tossed them into the air and occasionally caught them. While the adult dogs, maybe their parents? wandered thuggishly, looking for opportunity or chicken bones amongst the piles of trash and dead flora.

 

 

I can’t help but to be tempted to draw parallels in the lives of the local dogs and the lives of the local people, living close to the muddy ground in dirt floored huts, but the details are too dangerous, any attempt would be misunderstood, risking insult. I’m not trying to insult anyone; we’re, all of us, just creatures, born into the world, someplace or other. Some dogs are born into a good life, are loved and well fed and treated like a favorite child in an upper middle class Pleasantville, and others are born in an open sewer in Mataram. Neither chose its birth, there is no deserved position when it comes to the randomness of birth, there seems to be no room for righteousness on this account.

 

I don’t remember at all how we made decisions about what to do with our days. Surf? Someone would inevitably say as we sat on Jeff’s porch after breakfast. Phones would be pulled out and forecasts re-studied. For a quick look you could open the magic seaweed app, clean and simple but not very robust. Surf-forecast.com might be consulted for a better sense of the tide pattern, when was it low, how low, was it going into neaps or springs. For long-term projections a few of us studied the predictive model visualizations offered by windy-ty. From these we could see where the storms were coming from, how deep the pressures in the lows were, if and how the swell was going to deflect off west Oz. For the wind we simply looked up at the tallest palms, onshore here was offshore at Mawi, small whimpering shutters in the long stiff frond fingers meant it was probably too windy at the exposed spots. Once the reports were reviewed the decisions would be offered up for discussion, sometimes agreement would spur instant movement, ‘I think the secret spot is gonna be on, but we need to go now’.

 

Depending on the direction of things, the wind most importantly, we would gather our boards and other necessaries and head to the waves.  Sometimes other friends would join, depending if they had work, but we rarely traveled more than three.  The scooters that were readily rented in the area came equipped with a rough homemade surfboard rack on one side, usually a bent bit of pipe inexpertly mig welded to the frame and wrapped with cheap electrical tape and foam. Nothing is brought that isn’t needed in the water, board shorts are worn dry on the long scooter ride along the coast and worn wet on the ride home. T-shirts maybe, depending on the sun, sunscreen is already waiting in the compartment under the seat along with little chucks of wax and worthless local coins so light they seem like they might float if tossed in a wishing well, not that they have those in Indonesia.

 

Several breaks lie within 40min drive west of Kuta along the coast road and often enough we would simply head that direction and check each break as we came to it. A large hill enclosed the town on the west; riding up this hill became a daily emotional cycle of exit and entrance, the anticipation of impending waves, the discovery of the quality of the expected session, and on return, the pleasure and satisfaction of exercise complete and the new anticipation of beer and food, so sweet in the after-surf state. Near the top we would get our first look at the swell breaking onto an infrequently surfed reef at the entrance to Kuta bay. Slowing down and looking out and down onto the sea we would get a sense for what our day was going to be like. From such a distance it was hard to see the individual waves, but by gauging the amount of wash and foam you got a sense for the size. This was where the forecast met reality. If it was small, and the reef seemed smooth, there would be disappointment, Jeff might say ‘the swell still hasn’t hit yet’. Maybe we would turn around, abandon all hope, or head east to one of the exposed points that caught even small swells. But if there was swell forecast we would almost always continue on, with optimism that better observation would prove otherwise.

 

Soon we would be riding fast along the coastal road, heading west over the hill. Every section of road was known to us, remembered in secession, in the body, in the cached unconscious needed for the faster than thought reaction of hand from visual cues. It would be hard to recall, if asked, every turn and pot hole and deadly sand patch, but once on the bike each little detail is brought into the mind at a moment just sufficient for advanced warning. Sometimes a distracted moment would cause you to forget a needed breaking before an sharp blind corner, and the hairs of fear would spike along your back as the bike stability seemed too tenuous and about to fail, but with luck, no trucks full of rock would be in the other lane. And the race continued.

 

This sounds like a construction, an example maybe of a day, but really, it’s so many days, a flip book of days, where the image on every page is the same, or better a flipbook of days that goes into a loop.

 

The next viewpoint comes over the hill. Rampant unregulated mining has seen the hill nearly completely decapitated. Dump trucks pass in caravans and the paved road is often dangerously covered in loose earth spilt over from the brimmed trucks. In one scene that I remember mostly because it stood, silent and still, begging me to photograph it for almost a week. Though I never did, the image is likely burned deeper in my memory now for not having it stored elsewhere. At the very crest of the hill, above a cave, the machines had dug their way up to the pinnacle. The whole of the topmost nub had been removed save a spiral ramp that led along the narrow cone to the summit where a single tree had yet been removed. The backhoe was perched just below the tree, its bucket and arm poised like a scorpion tail, frozen in the moment of attack. The workers must have taken a few days off, or couldn’t quite figure out how to safely remove the tree, having dug the hillside out from around it, as if they had painted themselves onto the top of a minaret and were now standing on the top, waiting for the paint to dry. Every day I passed that tree I thought of it as the last tree on earth. The image was such a clear allegory for the battle between man and nature, taken at the end of the war, when man has clearly overcome his resilient but ultimately weaker foe.

 

Just past the last tree there was a dirt platform much like a parking lot that looked over the west side of the hill toward Are Goling. We would peer into the cove and count the black dots, do the math, wave consistency times the likelihood of similar conditions at a less crowded spot minus the number of people in the water weighted by the quality of surfer that was known to be around and surfing that wave. If we thought we could get some waves we would take the left at the bottom of the hill and ride the muddy road to Are Goling, lament the locals that, some said, used to be nice, but through interaction with some French expats that had bought land in the bay had learned the way-of-the-surf-jerk and were dropping in, posturing, and intimidating, and generally lowering the chance of fun.

 

More than likely we would continue west onto a stretch of road that was better paved and less used. This could be the best part of the ride, uninterrupted, fast, the kind of feeling you get in a convertible on the highway on a warm summer night, the feeling that makes you smile, the feeling that life is good.

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Fishing.

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I can’t remember the day of the week, those weren’t so important then, but I think it was in November and we were just coming into the rainy season, as the wind was quite and the swell was small. I drove over to a friend’s house, just a few roads down from my own. Steven lived with his Indonesian wife and her nephew who they were raising. During the late morning I could always find him sitting on his porch fiddling with his spear fishing gear. He was a surfer that had found spearfishing and now looked more forward to the coming flat periods than he did the swells. He was older than me and a fellow American. He was direct with his words and seemed happy to keep his life simple. The small house he lived in had only a few rooms, surf boards and spear gun stocks from guns he was shaping were piled in the corner making the place feel smaller than it was. There were papaya and banana trees among the palms around the property and you could tell from the piles of fruit on his porch that they ate the fruit as part of their diet along with the fish he caught, which was cooked on a low brick grill in the front yard. He was the type of fisherman that caught fish to eat, to sustain a lifestyle and because he was addicted to the act. If he could, if the waves and wind allowed, he was going spearing.

 

That day I arrived and he was sitting on his porch making up some new bands for an old gun he no longer used but was going to let me try. I had a nice Rife that I had been carting around the world since Fiji when my brother brought it on a visit. I had shot fish in Fiji and New Zealand and had been in the water constantly for the 4 months I had already been in Indonesia. I had found Steven through a mutual friend when I had begun asking around about people who speared in the area. There weren’t many and Steven was one of the most devout.

 

We loaded the gear into a board bag and strapped it onto the bike. We would be sharing a bike that day because his wife wanted to use the one that they shared. She was pregnant and running a clothing store in town. As far as I could tell the store was something to do, not really a money maker, more of a diversion. Steven talked about opening a spear fishing operation, a shop and tour set up, but I think capital was tight and plans were just developing. I always got the sense that things weren’t going poorly, but that they weren’t going too well either. Steven explained that he moved to Kuta because it was a growing market with the opportunity to start a business in Indonesia and maybe get some surfing and spearing in. He didn’t really like the place, thought the locals were corrupt and deceptive, but it was the only good option in his mind that met his goals. The businesses were slow to develop or in the planning stages. Mostly I found him on the porch, tinkering with his gear, thinking about fish.

 

Steven often complained about the locals being lazy or deceitful. It’s easy to discount these comments as racist or colonialist, especially because they are so recurrent in expat communities. But in this case something was a little different, not that his claims were more or less true, but he contended that it was a cultural facet of the local people in Kuta, it was not that Indonesians were lesser, it was simply that some part of the local culture was broken. He claimed that even hundreds of years ago they were looked on by other groups in Lombok as being morally corrupt. Is it possible that there could be some truth in it? Looking into it is nearly impossible, maybe crime statistics, but there are always other factors behind numbers. I’m always tempted to imagine the bias of the accuser, white man critiques the brown man, calls him savage, clearly it’s a passed down narrative developed to legitimize oppression and exploitation, an emergent capitalistic narrative required to keep the development going, but I had begun to see another side, not that the narratives weren’t influencing how we thought about each other, how one culture interpreted the actions of the other, but there was also the possibility that some part of a culture could become corrupt. That, although I had always ascribed to some sort of cultural equivalency, the belief that all people are good, that all cultures have equal value and should be preserved, there didn’t seem any reason I could think of that some aspect of some group behavior couldn’t become corrupted, that some group behavior might just be shitty.

 

Extreme examples from history are available: the incest of the Pharaohs, the child sex trade of Pitcairn Island. You might want to argue that these were not examples of culture but of individual actors. But how many people have to exhibit a behavior for it to become cultural? What about slavery in the American south, that was clearly a cultural norm. It’s clear in the extreme that some cultural behaviors are abhorrent, but what about in the middle ground, can we judge other cultures not our own? The boundaries of culture are not even well defined, and less and less so in the globalized now. Is it inappropriate to make value judgments about other cultures? Or maybe it’s a responsibility? Who is the judge of such matters? Steven had lived in the area for almost a decade, spoke some of the language and was married to an Indonesian. He at least had some more authority in the matter than I did, why should I quickly discount his complaints as invalid, as though my academic conception of cultural interaction completely described the situation he was living in.

 

Maybe the people in Kuta were not taught that deception was wrong, like they weren’t taught to brush their teeth or wash their hands with soap. Maybe it was simply a moment, cultures change, are ever changing. Indulging in a thought experiment: what if some hundreds of years ago a particularly rude fellow, maybe even a clear physcopath with some early form of narcissistic personality disorder became an important man, a respected and powerful man, a man who people emulated. And even though his deception and cruelty were not the cause of his ascension, people saw how he behaved and that his life was good, so naturally they connected the two. It’s not hard to imagine such a corrupting influence in a community and how generations later it might still be expressed in the behavior, or lack of empathy and corrupt community values of the people. This isn’t an argument for cultural hierarchy, just a nod to the chance that some parts of some cultures might be corrupted and that it was okay to think so, to say so. That maybe Steven was right and the people in Kuta were more deceptive than others on the island because they had learned to be, or had never learned not to be.

 

With the gear loaded on the scooter we clumsily bumped out his muddy and rutty drive to the main road and headed west toward Selong Belenok, a beach with a small fishing village an hours drive west. We arrived at the beach and passed the first entrance, which was framed in hand written signs aimed at attracting the business of tourist. The beach is known as a learners spot and many young Europeans, anxious to learn to surf, to get in on the cool of it, rolled into the place and were accosted before they had the chance to dismount by westernized surfer boys, local teens that pulled them toward their particular surf school. The bad taste of the scene was almost too much to deal with. I more than once thought, surfing won’t survive, when I saw the surf schools lining the beach, the hundreds of giant blue foam boards, the groups of uncomfortable, ambling tourists looking somehow mis-developed, like stretched out babies, in their matching t-shirts, elbow fat dusted red with sunburn and knees that awkwardly turned in as they tried to look cool, dragging their over sized instruments of wave destruction through the sand.

 

We turned left at the next driveway and crossed a small bridge over what looked like a stream but contained a sort of steaming mud and plastic soup. Entering the small fishing village from the back we cumbersomely scooted the bike down a narrow footpath between the upper beach on the left and the outwardly facing living quarters on the right. It was late morning and the sun was already strong. The local people were out and about but collected mostly into pockets of shade, or were lying in the corners of sheltered living areas inside the darkened rooms. Long open fiberglass boats were pulled up with their prows sticking into the path. Fishing gear and construction materials, in mostly broken and jagged poses, were stacked or haphazardly lying about the area.

 

We came to a stop in front of an nondescript shack with a few local women squatting and picking at a dirty matt with beans on it. Life is low to the ground in Indonesia, and in the times that I was able to visit the more remote and less populace places this seemed appropriate. Without the need to build flat raised surfaces the human environment seemed more seamlessly, integrated into the natural one. Men and woman were accustomed to squatting to do their work on, to pick the edible from the inedible and dry it in the sun on a large woven matt. They sat to eat, they squatted to wash the dishes, they squatted to shit. But here, in the dense packing of humans by the sea the ground was covered with the foul consequence of man. Not able to sustain any of the plants needed to firm it up the terrain underfoot was mud. From the smell, it seemed that the sewage from the village was not far, or more likely was too much for the wet earth to absorb and was running into the paths, into the open streams that cut indiscriminately through the village on their short pilgrimage to the sea. Mingled with the smell of humus and feces was that of cast off fish parts. In the casual way that is common in Indonesia the areas for gutting and processing fish were not well distinguished from the rest of the living spaces, private or public. Grey water from cooking or cleaning was dumped either in the open ditch drains or beside the house. There didn’t seem to be any collection and removal, though I had come to expect this, come to understand that collection and removal was quite complex to organize and maintain, and that with the small and often dissociated, or heavily tribal and localized structure of Indonesian governance, with the lack of tax revenue, with the lack of general funding, with the endemic corruption, collection was rare. And perhaps in addition to, or maybe as a consequence of, the people had developed a tolerance to trash and sewer, it was not even strange that the food waste and plastic waste and fish waste and human waste were all mingled in streams, or packed into the mud earth having been casually thrown onto the earth, there being no other place for such things could go.

 

Often while in Indonesia I would see people living amongst the trash, standing tall on piles of waste, casting fishing lines into a foul river, and wonder if I was looking not into past, as westerners like to imagine developing nations represent, but instead into the future where plastic waste goes unseen, and drinkable rivers are unknown. Will children born now look onto this environment as perfectly good? I kept coming back to one uneasy thought when I would find myself in a particularly degraded environment: it can get so much worse, and people will still live here, children will still play here. Will the whole world be befouled? We imagine we are on the brink of positive change or collapse, but what if it’s only the beginning and we can survive much much worse.

 

I sat down next to the bike as my friend went to find a boatman willing to take us for a reasonable rate, which would be something like $20. People began to press in my general direction, smiling as all Indonesians are taught to do. The children were thin and shoeless, the men were thin and wearing well worn cotton shirts or they were shirtless, mostly wearing flip flops. Because of the smoking, all the men seemed prematurely old, by mid life the smoke and sun gave their faces a heavily creased look. A group of black ducks waddled in my direction and I could not help but be struck by how ill they seemed. I guess it could be expected in that squat village without any collections of clean water to bathe that eventually the birds would develop some sickness, but to see their feathers falling out like the hair of the local dogs with the mange, to see open wounds and bits of hardened filth caked up in the crevices of their beaks had a strong effect on my sense of comfort. I looked around for my friend. A man who had positioned himself close to me smiled as my gaze passed his, as if to show off his last worm eaten tooth. I tried to smile back. No one said anything.

 

It’s hard to know what to say about places like this, little corners where humans live in squalor, to use a word from a time when it meant something more. This place disgusted me, it was filled with trash and sewer and disease and neglect and abuse. Its hard to accept that some places are better than others, that there are reasons why some places are beautiful and others are unbearable. But what causes the difference? The land, the people, the access to money, and education, the population density, the access to water, to government, or can we blame the individuals? Can we blame the culture? And if one boy fed up with the ill state of his town grew up to be the person that cleaned it up, would it have been an individual, a culture, a financial constraint? How is it that one town, down the road from the next is wonderful and livable and peaceful, and the next fits well into the rings of the inferno, full of demons and suffering. What difference in us or in the land causes this?

 

I wonder this only as I wonder if one requires the other, as seems to be the proposition of capitalism. People will measurably show that life on earth has gotton ‘better’ for humans, more access to clean water, less famine, but is some future where no places like that fishing fillage in Lombok exist possible? Is this just a moment, one in which future humans will look down upon, that we would let it get like this, that we could even visit such a place and not immediately spend the rest of our lives fixing it. Or will my, our, capacity to be disgusted and flee persist until the world is divided, like dantes universe, into paradise, ghetto, and purgatory, the rich, the poor, and the discontent.

 

Eventually my friend returned and we loaded our gear into one of the boats and dragged it into the surf. The children were quick to lend us a hand and waved as we motored into the small breaking seas and out into the bay, a maze of floating fishing platforms and small moored canoes. I looked back at them, standing in the dark sand, their squat homes leaning on each other behind them like a pile of multicolored cardboard cartons. They smiled, as Indonesians always do, as we left them behind.