Sampela, Indonesia
November, 2016
The chickens are learning how to fly. There is no land. There is nothing for them to peck. I saw one fly from the twisted boardwalk to the peak of a bamboo hut with a thatched roof. When I woke up this morning I could see it strutting. It was a boy chicken, I think. It was crowing.
The scavenged boards that make the railing of the porch I sleep on framed it and it looked like a picture of a chicken hanging on the wall of a mid-western kitchen. The chicken walked back and forth like a night watchman. After a while it sort of fell from the roof.
The house behind this house has a broken satellite dish that is growing out of a tree. It is a flower made of cheap metal and rust. The frame, which is most of what is left, looks remarkably similar to the octagonal clotheslines that people had when I was a kid in Indiana. You could spin those clotheslines around like alfresco tie-racks or the thing that brings you your finest suit of clothes from the depths of the dry cleaner. The people who live in the house use the satellite dish to dry clothes with too, but it doesn’t spin around.
The bleached bones of a billion polyps have been smashed and stacked up into pseudo-rectangular piles where the nicest houses sit and fall apart. It must have taken a billion years to design a system in which a microscopic plant can be born inside of a tiny animal that lives inside the hollowed out skeleton of its ancestors. Lindsay told me that the system is something like having a delicious fruit tree — like a mango tree or a grapefruit tree — that lives inside of your body and grows fruit to feed you and makes oxygen for you to breathe. I imagine it like a certified organic® Rube Goldberg engine living in your stomach.
Some of the hunks of coral that make up the foundations look like deranged skulls. Sometimes you can just make out the hollowed out eye-sockets. The rats spend their days running in and out of them before they come inside at night.
There are boardwalks that twist and trail off to nowhere. There are boardwalks that abruptly end where the ocean starts and where little kids jig for baitfish. They lasso them over their heads and fling them to sea in search of something to eat. Sometimes they catch medium size barracuda’s and bring them up onto the dry-rotting boards. They stand with their legs far apart and wait for the fish to take a break from flopping and suffocating. When the fish quiets down a child will slip his child’s hand in behind its gills and break its spine.
It is easy to make this place beautiful. All you have to do is walk out toward the edge of town and take a picture of an idyllic and isolated little hut, standing on crooked stilts with a hand-hewn boat tied to the little ladder that leads to the little porch. These houses are not connected to the rest of the houses and this makes them romantic. These pictures look like things from a National Geographic magazine — or at least National Geographic’s Instagram feed. You can send these pictures to your family and friends and they will want to come visit you.
If you want a guarantee that it will be beautiful than wait till the sun goes down and take a photograph when the golden light ignites the wisps of thatch and makes a murky, smeared oil paint, reflection in the shallow waters.
As far as I can tell, Sampela never truly sleeps. If you live here, you don’t have the time. Walk down the rickety boardwalks that connect the latticed bamboo huts with grass and cardboard roofs and you will see people sort of napping at all times of the day and night. A few days ago, I saw three children and two women with their eyes closed and half in and half out of their home as if they were murdered on their way to or from somewhere. I wonder if there were chalk outlines left behind when they got up
I have always wondered what the stars looked like before artificial light. I know that there are places on earth where the stars must look about the same as they did a thousand years ago. This has to be one of those places. Nobody here seems to care but a photographer from National Geographic was here a few weeks ago. He posted a picture of the stars. More than a million people liked it. He is very famous.
I once read a translation of the bible exactly how it was written. The author had skipped the dozens of iterations and updates that kept the story current with the times. In the original version god created a big pot and a lid to go on top. Then god put the lid on the pot but the people couldn’t breathe. He put some holes in the lid of the pot to let some air in.
When we die we float up like steam and leak out of through the stars and then we are in heaven.
Some people don’t get turned into steam so they can leak out through the stars and go to heaven. Some people are plucked out early and flung against the wall to see if they are finished.
Tonight is a moonless night and the stars are bright and shrieking against the sky. People here fling food and garbage out of their windows and shit through their floors. They all have an ocean view.