Book: Headhunters on My Doorstep by J. Maarten Troost

A True Treasure Island Ghost Story

Sort of….this isn't really a ghost story but rather a story about footloose J. Maarten Troost as sails the South Pacific, sort of following Robert Louis Stevenson's island journeys. He is happy as he wanders about, writing of earlier famous visitors, most especially stories of Stevenson's life, observing tourists and the indigenous peoples, reveling in the hot sun and warm seas.

He had also stopped drinking a year previously and had substituted an addiction to running.

"If you can drink  liter of vodka, you have what it takes to become an Ironman. It's true. It takes years of steadfast devotion, untold months of anguish, an unwavering commitment to solitude, a fondness for taking things to the edge, and a constitution that embraces pain for you to succeed at either endeavor. You never start out believing that you can down a bottle vodka but with enough practice and diligence, you find that it becomes second nature. The important thing is persistence. And so it is with running. A year earlier, if you had told me that one day I'd be running mile after mile up a steep-sided slope in withering heat on a faraway island--for the fun of it no less--I would have looked at my wobbling gut and snorted with laughter. Not bloody likely. Which goes to show you now unpredictable life can be."

Stevenson and his amazing wife, Fanny:
"It was an odd party that'd boarded the Casco: There was Stevenson of course; his wife, Fanny; his mother too; his stepson, Lloyd; and a maid,Valentine…The boat was captained by A. H. Otis, who'd read Treasure Island and thought little of Stevenson's knowledge of seafaring ways. He also didn't think it likely that the author, thin and emaciated as usual, would survive the voyage, and accordingly he'd stowed what he'd need to bury him at sea. And this business of bringing his elderly mother along? Pure madness…For more than month they sailed. Land was becoming but a distant memory, their only company the occasional seabird seeking a handout…And then, as the sun crested the horizon, there lay the Marquesas…And this, of course is why we always get on the boat."

Troost is funny in the edgy Rolling Stone way…

One evening, he leaves his fellow traveler, an Israeli who is traveling the islands with his girlfriend "trying to get the locals to depart with their gold. You can buy it here for about two or three hundred dollars an ounce. In Tel Aviv, you can sell it for twelve hundred or more an ounce…bade them goodnight and settled down with my Kindle, browsing through the Sober Lit I'd downloaded. Infinite Jest was my go-to book for when I was craving hard. I'd just need to read a few pages about Don Gately, during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergrment, as he attended to his commitments at Boston-area AA meetings. No one writes about the gawping maw, the horror, of addiction and the pain-in-the ass, life-or-death struggle of early sobriety like David Foster Wallace."

The theme of staying sober runs through this book as background, but compelling as a back story.

Maarten hires a local lady and goes horseback riding: "Isn't there a beginner's course around here? A pony park? Did I misrepresent myself? Sure, I'll wear a Stetson, I'll drive a pickup truck. But I'm an urban cowboy, lady. If you want to line dance I'm your guy. But barreling up muddy, rocky, slippery, steep slopes on massive horses, beasts that I senses are ready to topple at any moment, well, let's just say that it left me a trifle uncomfortable….We dismounted and took a gander at the view. Below us was a plummeting precipice, a couple of thousand feet at least, cascading down into a valley so serene and lovely and breathtaking that if God ever made a cathedral of His own it would be here, and this would be it."

He gets a tattoo. "They let nine-year-olds stab ink-stained needles into people around here?"

Snorkeling: "Have you ever shared a tight, confined space--say about six feet wide, a watery alleyway--with a half-dozen sharks? Exciting doesn't even begin to describe it. It's more like Holy F___ Holy F___ Holy F___…there were hundreds of sharks swarming below now…and a gazillion tropical fish, schools, no universities of them, hugging the cliff wall and all around were the sharks--blacktips, whitetips, vast amounts of greys and a few massive, beefy silver tips…It was shark nirvana…I've snorkeled all over the South Pacific, but nowhere have I seen a place more bewitching than the South Pass of Fakarava. We emerged, speaking a Babel of languages, all expressing our amazement, as Shark Boy, who had returned with his catch, stood cleaning fish while the blacktip reef sharks stirred themselves into a frenzy. He threw a rock from time to time to keep them at bay, but otherwise remained in the shallows, unconcerned. This guy, a kid really, needs his own TV show."

"I was captivated. I didn't know what was coming over me. Tattoos. Sharks. And I wanted more. Well, that part was familiar. I have a head for more, of course.." And he gets the bejesus scared out of him…

He goes to Tahiti, musing on Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh and Captain Cook. And stops in Fiji on the way to Kiribati in the Gilbert Islands. In Fiji he sees a newspaper with the headline "ENTIRE NATION OF KIRIBATI TO BE RELOCATED OVER RISING SEA LEVEL THREAT." Think about that…

On to Samoa where Stevenson is buried with his famous epitaph written 15 years before his death: "Under the wide and starry sky….."

Troost writes of Jacques Brel and of Paul Gauguin, a thoroughly dissolute man. The author tells a story of local boys harassing tourists by riding furiously down the beach "through clumps of visitors…then I noticed their big noses and figured that here were a bunch of little Gauguins. These apples, clearly, didn't fall far from the tree."

These same world travelers on the beach (the intrepid ones) continually got surprised by the waves and "no matter how often you yelled Attendez it would happen over and over again causing me to doubt in the healing power of neuroplasticity, because here, very clearly, was some novel stimuli that demanded a swift adaptation in behavior and yet it never came. Again and again it happened to the very same people. Just turn the f___ around, I felt like yelling, as I cringed every time they were smashed and held under and swept forth in the collapsing froth. Man, I though, how is it that some of you are still in the gene pool?"

I have quoted more than wrote anything new here, but I find this author absolutely so much fun to read (which I did on a recent never-ending Amtrak trip, wishing the book were 1000 pages instead of 250). And I like that he was born in the Netherlands.