that’s a fact. Take it from me, I wouldn’t go there without a very reliable local guide.”
I’d heard as much, although it had been years since I’d smoked.
You started to see the signs for Taroko long before you got there. This heightened that unbearable anticipation I’d felt the first time, along with a directional sign that read—I swear to God—to the “promised land.” I don’t know if this referred to Taroko or to some other place. In any case the whole area was a bit strange. There kept being bigger and bigger cliffs, and you wondered, is this Taroko now …?
But as I said, when you got there it was a letdown. The bus let us off nowhere in particular, by a rest stop, the other tourists wandered off, and Pickett looked around blinking.
“We here?”
I nodded. “We here.”
“Big rocks,” he said, as if to humor me.
We weren’t yet in the gorge proper; there were still the mountains on either side of us. The gorge itself only substituted sheer rock for the foliage.
“Big rocks,” I said.
He began to unpack his camera. “I bet I could get some good shots here. Maybe sell ’em someplace else …”
“Or just put them in with the piece. We can say we took them at the temple; they’ll never know.”
“Hah. Yeah. Dumb fucks.”
“Dumb fuckin’ fucks. Howie,” that was my current editor, “thinks all East Asia is just one big jungle around a temple. And Tokyo.”
We were both a bit vague with our hangovers, in the bright sunlight all of a sudden.
We lit up Double Lucky cigarettes from the bright red cartons. Double, lucky, and red, all the constituent elements of Chinese culture. It crossed my mind that the Chinese emphasis on luck was just about as far from Buddhism as you could get, even further than Christianity. At least they both had an element of providence. But there it went with the skillful means again.
Pickett touched his head. “Pete, I’m not so sure about this. This whole getting off the bus thing. You ever see Apocalypse Now? ‘Stay on the bus, man’?”
“Walk,” I said. “You can walk most of the gorge, and on the little trails the bus won’t go down. It’ll be good for you.”
“Fuck, man. I ate all vegetarian yesterday, I dunno.”
“I thought you ate all vegetarian every day. Fucking Buddhist hippie.”
“I try,” he said.
“You stay on the bus, they drive so close to the railing you swear the thing is going in the drink. It leans, man. Fifty feet straight down to the water. Railing a foot high, made out of tin. The Taiwanese are crazy; they don’t care; they’ll drive you anywhere. They’ll take you anywhere in the back of their truck. They just say Omitofo and that’s the end of it.”
Omitofo was Amithaba, the Buddha of Infinite Light. He was popular in East Asia, so much so that he made Sakyamuni look like a chump. Reciting his name was supposed to protect you from snakebites, rockfalls, all kinds of things; another thing that had rubbed Pickett the wrong way at the monastery.
“It’s true there ain’t no seatbelts on those buses,” he said. “I dunno.”
“Walk. Take your pictures.”
“I’ll take my pictures.”
His camera was old but good, a Nikkon F SLR. I’d seen those cameras before in places where they got dropped or even shot at. I guessed an uncle or something had passed it down to him.
We swung by the visitors’ center, where I heard people speaking Korean and Japanese (both languages I had a better grasp of than Mandarin), and there was a big relief map of the gorge as high as your waist. Pickett whistled.
“To make it look good they show the whole mountain range,” I said. “We’ll just be down in this part here.”
They also had a few stuffed specimens, all of them aged and a bit sad-looking, of local fauna.
“Damn,” said Pickett, looking at a viper with seams showing in its open mouth, “I wanna see a snake. They don’t have snakes where I’m from.”
“Nor where I’m from.”
“You think we’ll see one?”
“I don’t know if they have snakes. Squirrels they have. I mean the snakes are out there but they’ll keep their distance. Don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with you.”
“Shit, just like me,” said Pickett. “That’s my kind of animal.”
Before we set off we bought a four-pack of Yuenling lager from the store, which Pickett carried in a huge plastic sack.
“Hey, man. You think you could make it all the way from one end of Taiwan to the other, just drunk all the way?”
“Omitofo,” I said, and we both laughed.
“Fuckin’ Omitofo.”
As we went down the path, Pickett moving with wide, swinging steps as the lager bounced on his hip, he started to sing a song of his own invention to the tune—very, very roughly—of “Dixie”:
Oh I wish I was in Taiwan
It ain’t China or Japan
And they got big cheesy statues
That they worship like they’re idols—
Oh I like to be in Taiwan
I drink cheap beer all day long
And something, something, da na na—
Omitofo, Omitofo
Omitofo, you motherfuckers
I got this motherfucker with me
His name be Crazy Pete
I just made up the “Crazy” part
But he’s pretty fuckin’ crazy
That dude says he was in the Gulf
But I don’t know ’bout that
Next he’ll tell me he cut off Saddam’s ass
And wore it like a hat….
I
