3. ON THE RUN

Winter hours, white
dune grass.
Secret
pinewoods to the ocean—now what?

Franz Wright has a point (in this week's "Four Poems of Youth"), but he needn't worry. The answer is clearly back-country skiing. As a supplement to Nick Paumgarten's "Dangerous Game: A ski mountaineer and a history of tragedy" (which isn't online, sorry), you can read up on the sporty suicide's dream hobby here on the travel-writing blog Gadling.

By the way, does anyone else find Lawrence Osborne's "Letter From New Guinea" a little offputting? His tone reminds me of ethnographies that were already musty when I was in college, and the disclaimers about the fetishization of "first contacts" and romanticization of the noble savage—not to mention phony "primitivist spectacles" staged for precisely this kind of thrill-seeking tourist—are key points but feel like an afterthought. Nevertheless, the stories are great, especially about the forests' various creatures, like a rare lizard (the comely emerald tree monitor) who's instantly transformed from nature-special material into something quite different:

The youths jumped on the dazed reptile and gaily beat out its brain with sticks. Holding it up by its tail, they showed it off—a huge, three-foot specimen with jewel-like markings—while blood dripped from its tongue. This would be their dinner, it appeared.... The island's beautiful parrots proved a still more anguishing problem. The porters liked them roasted on spits.

The placement of New Yorker ads often leads to funny juxtapositions, and there are several in this piece alone; Osbourne's close attention to penis gourds gives a new meaning to "European sophistication. Tropical dress code" (Lago Mar ad, p. 130). And having just gotten over the idea of a breakfast of roasted mouse legs—"so small that we had to eat thirty of them to satisfy our hunger. They had a vile taste, a cross between stale pork and licorice"—the reader may no longer be in the mood for a box of sixteen "signature mice," handmade in chocolate by L.A. Burdick (p. 135). Not to mention that the new Qantas ads that have been showing up in the magazine and elsewhere lately (p. 125) feature people who come neither from America nor New Guinea, nor Earth. These two should have contributed a Letter From Space.

The Kombai with whom Osbourne and his fellows make contact seem intensely acclimated to the ways of Westerners in one regard: One man in a hornbill penis gourd tells them through a translator, "When we saw you, we thought, What is that?...Then we were mad. Then we were scared." If that's not a description of people-watching in New York, I don't know what is.

In the New Yorker! [Gadling]
Penis Gourd Gallery [Rhymer; you must]