I was reading somewhere, probably not in a scholarly journal or anything, but somewhere nonetheless, about how people are unhappier when they perceive they have more choices. People stuck in a virtually unchangeable situation will generally simply accept it as a fact of life and move about within those parameters, while people who have all the choices in the world tend to flail around within them, get increasingly stressed out about having made the wrong choice, and end up depressed.

Immediately my mind jumped to Indonesia and how much less anxious I was when I realized that I was in a place where the dangers to my life were tenfold. At the time I couldn't explain this. Everywhere I looked there were things that might kill me. Me driving a motorcycle I'd just learned to drive, in the rain, with no visor on my helmet, practically blinded and flying down a 10% grade with a drop to the ocean on one side and crazy motorcyclists shouting 'BULEBULEBULEBULE!' on the other, Nick at my back, me probably angry and yelling at him over my shoulder. Bird flu closing in from all sides, first found only on Java, then on Bali, creeping over the string of islands slowly, hitting Papua in December, until finally, one week before I left, someone dying from it in Jayapura, in the section Dok VIII, minutes away from where I lived. Malaria buzzing around the perimeter of my mosquito net every night, and sometimes inside it when Nick or I flailed in our sleep and knocked the net askew. That pill that burned in my throat for days, feeling like a neverending heart attack, or scissors ripping up and down my esophagus. That time we rode through a Papuan culture parade on our way home from a day at Skow Sae and we were riding directly in between marching Papuans with flags and musical instruments, dancing and singing their way down the middle of the road, and the Indonesian military in rows at the gutter, rifles drawn.

Yet at almost no point while I was there was I gripped with the kind of anxiety I'm prone to here, where my throat seizes up and then closes, my limbs go numb, my stomach rises into my chest, and my vision nearly blacks out. Here, it's always for no reason. Like the other day, I was sitting in my office at work, a cozy mild relatively private office with a low lamp, dispatching buses around in circles. Everyone was on time, no one had been in an accident, it was only a half hour from the time I got to go home, and my plans that night included sitting around, sitting around, and more sitting around. But I almost passed out over my desk with the force of it.

It's not coming from being at home either, as I've been on padded safe vacations where I drive around in an air-conditioned car looking at life from the windows, occasionally stopping at gourmet restaurants, and I'll lay in my four-poster hotel bed at night with my hand on my heart to make sure it's still beating, the other in front of my mouth to make sure I'm still breathing.

This never happened in Indonesia, even as I realized that if I were to get seriously ill, with bird flu, or appendicitis, or food poisoning, anything, I would likely die from lack of adequate medical care. There were a few times when that realization hit me a little hard, but as soon as I realized I had no choice in the matter, it calmed down. No choice. I'm here, there are diseases, there are crazy motorcyclists and an even crazier army, and I'm not leaving for six months. This is my reality. I have no choices other than whether to cope with the reality or to fight the reality, and that's not really a choice at all. Either way, it's still reality.

I think people are actually terrified of having to make the right decision, and of the consequences of that, and of the consequences of having to deal with knowing that they may have made the wrong one, as opposed to being terrified of the situation itself. Here, if I had unexplainable agony in my throat/chest, I would have a wealth of options before me, all with the equal likelihood of being the wrong option, or having something about them go wrong. I could just wait it out, with increasing terror, and if I waited too long, I might either die immediataly from heart failure or lung failure, or a windpipe/esophageal blockage, or do irreparable damage to whatever system the lump was busy ravaging and live the rest of my life with some kind of tube attached to me. I could choose to go to the hospital, and if so, which hospital? The city hospital, which would cost less, but maybe they wouldn't know what to do and they'd make it worse, maybe in their cost-cutting they wouldn't run the test that would make the difference. Alternatively I could go to the private hospital, and become destitute in the process, wiping through every cent of my savings, and maybe at that point it would turn out to be nothing: heartburn, a pill stuck in my throat, or, worst of all, completely psychosomatic. Then I'd be mortified, and destitute for no reason, but alive. Plus hating myself.

I wouldn't want to make that choice. I mean, I should be grateful that I have the choice to have the opportunity to make that choice, etc. But I still wouldn't want to make it. It would make me crazy, ten times sicker with anxiety. I wonder what the happy medium is in this situation.
In Papua I had no choice but to think, 'Whatever happens, happens.' Qué será, será.

And I don't remember what that feels like. I only remember that I felt it, but can't remember feeling it, if that makes any sense.

I remember very clearly this one instance when we were in the airport in Jayapura, about to board a puddle jumper to Wamena. We were sitting on our backpacks in the giant echoing waiting area, looking at all the 'Tutup' (Closed) signs on all the check-in lines, and we could see our plane hanging out behind the smoking check-in guy, and packages and luggage were riding down the loading ramp straight onto the plane. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a filthy man with dreadlocks in a ripped T-shirt come running into the airport carrying a brown cardboard package tied with string. He dumped the package onto the loading ramp and ran back out. The plane, sitting outside, ate up the package with everything else, without comment. The check-in guy kept smoking. His eyes may actually have been closed.

I watched all of this with a strange amused detachment. I thought about what would have happened if this had happened in the U.S. Total airport shutdown. FBI everywhere. Herding passengers into lines to get into more lines to evacuate. Sobbing passengers, pissed-off passengers, passengers taking advantage of the chaos to create more chaos, passengers and airport employees taking advantage of the chaos to be openly racist, etc. I imagined how scared the atmosphere would make me.

As it was, I poked Nick. "Hey."
"Mm?"
"D'you see that?"
"See what?"
"That guy with the package."
"Nope."
"He just ran up and put this package on the plane."
"Where?"
"Right there, on the plane."
"No, I mean, where's the guy."
"Oh. He ran out."
"Mm."
"Should we care about this?"
"I don't know. It doesn't matter."

Then we went back to sitting on our luggage. I was reading Harry Potter 3, and I was probably more interested in Sirius Black than in the suspicious package. There was nothing I could do about it. My Indonesian wasn't good enough to explain to anyone what had happened, if it had been, in any case they wouldn't have cared, and what was I going to do? Not go to Wamena? I'd be wasting 100 bucks and not get to see Louise, probably ever again, plus, you know, it was hot and muggy and I didn't feel like walking all the way to the taxi station and listening to techno for 2 hours as I transferred taxis all the way back into the city. So I got on the tainted plane, which, incidentally, was a propeller plane rising through layers and layers of bumpy clouds right next to jagged mountain ranges, and everything was fine.

This is either apathy, a healthy way of viewing things, or totally batshit insane. Whatever it is, it was kind of nice, and I kind of want it back.

I am digging deep into the red dirt with all twenty of my fingers and toes. My sandals are somewhere about a hundred feet above me, hooked in Nick's belt loop. Two Papuan women are bracing their palms on my butt. Pushing me up as gravity is pulling me down. This is either a path from the beach or a cliff; I can't decide which. "Make your feet like a duck!" Nick yells down at me as the women strain against my butt. They are mostly immune to gravity because they are about five feet tall and sturdy, grounded, with strong toes that curl into any surface like roots. Both of them behind me going up. One on each side going down, linking arms with me, alternating between springing across the rocks and weeds and hesitating, motioning to me with hands that are half-encouraging and half-cautious. "Hati-hati!" they admonish. Three hundred feet of plunging crumbling grey rock two inches away from my slipping left heel.

It is the first day I have been able to carry on a conversation in Indonesian, and it has probably saved my life. Being able to say 'beach', 'I don't understand', 'we will be here for a year', 'bird of paradise', 'I am tall' and other completely random phrases has made us an instant crowd of friends who, upon seeing our growing procession, drop their cassava-farming-implements and join us, forming a parade down the terrifying cliff to the beach. This is my favorite beach - (mostly) lacking sea urchins but with high waves and with a high waterfall that pours down onto the back end of the beach with enough force to wash me completely of the coarse, sticky sand that one finds here and also to wash my hair better than any shampoo ever has or ever will. Standing under the waterfall at high tide, the ocean comes pounding up to my ankles. At high tide, there is no part of the beach that is dry. Have you ever stood beneath a waterfall cascading out of the jungle with the ocean ebbing around your feet?

The villagers have a little orange blow-up basketball. They want to play volleyball with it in the water as they point at things, shout their names in Indonesian, and inquire eagerly 'bahasa Inggris?' How do you say it in English? After 'beach', 'swim', and 'waves', they lose interest, and focus on correcting my water-volleyball technique, which I can't really figure out because there are no boundaries, no teams, no points, and occasionally a big set of waves will come and wash someone out to sea or deposit them roughly on the shore. They are mostly unconcerned about drowning, or about anything, really. I am gearing up to serve in what has been mild water when suddenly this 15-foot wave comes charging up and I don't have time to think about what to do. It comes crashing down right into my left ear, lifts me, wildly flailing and sort of surfing, but mostly just tumbling, and, as the beach rises before me, shoves my jaw and most of my head into the sand, and recedes. Children are rising, unruffled, around me, but my head is pounding so loudly that I feel like the entire ocean has been washed through my ear into my brain. My jaw is out of alignment and clicking. I sway and go down again. Nick washes up on the shore with the next wave and puts his arms around me, which causes everyone to shriek with giggles and to clamber over some rocks, singing a song in harmony and screaming every time the sea sprays over their rock. They are correct, of course, and in five minutes we are up and sharing our peanut butter and jelly, teaching greetings and colors in English because that's all they want, to learn English, and a great bargain it is, in exchange for saving me from plunging to my death about four or five times! Every time Naomi, the first to join our initial beach parade, speaks a word in English that hasn't been specifically modeled for her, she claps her hand over her mouth and collapses in giggles, out for the count for at least a minute. On the way back, I can hear one of the children chanting, "Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black. Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black!"

I begin wishing that I could quit my job teaching structured, boring English to rich people and kids with rich parents in exchange for a paltry salary and just teach fun, relaxed English to a village full of Papuans in exchange for food and shelter, and in between, we could play beach volleyball with no rules, get pounded by freak waves, pull the pineapples that grow, with no provocation, everywhere, and generally just wander around in the jungle looking at stuff. I'm not usually that kind of person, but I must admit that that would be THE life.

It's drizzling the kind of jungle drizzle that's just enough to slicken the ground, but not quite enough to turn all the red dirt into a full-on mudslide. It is, however, enough to turn the area between my rubber flip-flops and my feet into a sea of orangish paint, impossible to grip. Each step up is a struggle, not only to push myself up the nearly vertical cliff, but to keep my feet in my shoes. There is a Papuan man and his three children going much slower than they otherwise would be, trying to politely make sure that we don't die. The man speaks little English, and when he does speak, I am easily distracted by his bright red teeth and his knife, which he uses to slash plants out of the way as we ascend. Both of his sons, from what I can gather, are named after Bob Marley. His children, running ahead in their bare feet, sing the Sonata in G Minor - honestly, they do. It's extremely incongruous.

We found the family because we decided to just get on our bike and ride until we dead ended near the jungle. When we dead ended, they were just coming around the corner, saying something about a beach. "Can we follow you?" Nick asked. The man nodded vigorously, though I'm fairly sure he had no idea what he was agreeing to.

Let me just say that if this were a hiking trail in the United States, it would be illegal to hike it. There are times when the grade gets so steep that it is necessary to climb on all fours. There are areas where a drop of over 2000 feet is an inch away from the trail, which is often, as I said before, paintlike in consistency. One slip and you would fall, straight down, impeded only by the occasional spiky-leaved plant, into, if you were lucky, rock outcroppings, but if you were unlucky, the rushing river that runs through the bottom of the canyon and would break your fall only long enough for you to catch your breath before it would then plunge you over the edge of one of its countless waterfalls, which are all at least twenty feet tall.

The final descent to the beach might as well be made on your ass for all the time I spent falling down. But then you're there. It's a tiny bay, but far west of the bigger Jayapura bay, so it's completely clean, and fed by a mountain stream, so marginally cooler, too. It's only accessible by the path from hell, so the only people there are people who live around there, people who get their food from the ocean and the surrounding mountains. Unfortunately the bay is also inhabited by sea urchins, and so now is the last joint of my middle finger and the middle of the bridge of my foot.

Yesterday, I had a day that would make mothers everywhere turn over in their graves, and... wait... my mother isn't dead and I'm mixing my idioms. What I mean to say is I had a day yesterday that would make mothers everywhere (and not just my mother, for whom my being in Papua at all is a horrifying prospect, but mothers everywhere) shit bricks.

We're invited up to Sentani, about an hour and a half away, by one of the Australian teachers, Louise, who (along with everyone else here) is notoriously vague, and in order to get there we have to take an indeterminate number of taxis, all of which quote wildly different prices and wildly different destinations as they wave their arms and try their best to speak English while we try our best to speak Indonesian. Unfortunately, the English they know is always oddly translated ('no problem' becomes 'no what-what', 'enjoying the day?' becomes 'walking-walking, ya?', etc.) and my Indonesian consists of numbers and 'where's the bathroom?' (Nick's consists of nothing - he hasn't bothered to learn).

We get there, though, at least halfway, to Abepura, and I'm carsick from hot and bad 90's music and clove cigarettes everywhere, so I ride up to Sentani on the back of Louise's motorcycle - helmetless, though I do have an old baseball cap to shield my non-helmeted head from the dumber ones among the cops. Flying at 60km around Lake Sentani (teeming with fresh, delicious fish, by the way) the cap flies off. 'Oh no!' I yell into Louise's helmet without thinking about how you're not supposed to yell 'Oh no!' at people driving motorcycles unless you really mean it, and she swerves, but regains control.
'What?!'
'I lost your cap!'
'Oh! Well... we'll get it on the way back, she says, just as another motorcycle roars up right next to us, the man in the front holding the cap. When it flew off, it must have flown right into his face. He tries to make a handoff at speed, but by frantically waving our hands, we communicate we want to pull over. Everyone here does the most reckless things driving, but because of that, oddly enough, everyone is an amazing driver.

Louise failed to mention that the 'little walk' up to the waterfall pond was actually a full on hour-long trek through thick, pathless, inclined jungle, so I'm wearing a skirt and flip flops, pushing big-enough-for-a-dog-to-sleep-on banana fronds and chest-high grass and spiky fluid-filled leaves aside. AND THEN WE GET LOST... because there are these two angry dogs barking at us from a small farmed field of cassava, where our path is, and we don't want to walk next to them even though a smiling grizzled old Papuan man is yelling sternly at them from across the field. And it's dusk. And every five minutes Louise says she knows where she is, but then directly afterwards, she takes it back, and a rock falls on my ankle, and it hurts.

Yes, it is worth it. Of course it is worth it. The gleam of Louise's motorcycle is obvious when we're close enough to it to nearly reach out and touch it, and on the way there's butterflies the size of birds and blue bugs with a very odd number of legs (14, maybe?) and the sheer mass of plant and insect life is like nothing I could have imagined before actually getting to see it. Things grow here. Mostly on things that aren't meant to have things growing on them. Like my towel, or our walls. Or a cut coconut. Even in the fridge, it was yellow in three days. Everything is gorging itself on the thick, humid air. I couldn't have picked a more polar opposite place to move to from Colorado.

What else made up the mother's nightmare? Oh yeah, riding back from our getting-lost-in-the-jungle experience three-to-a-motorcyle, holding my feet up off the flying pavement so that my arches cramped, using my arms not to hold on, but to hold Nick's legs up in the air. Going to a fish place where the cook opens a cooler full of fresh fish, lets you pick your particular victim. Drinking a pink coconut drink and staggering, full, onto a taxi which just might be going the right way, but maybe not... and on the way, stopping to shake hands with a drunk guy who, once encouraged, won't stop following us.

It's enough to make my mother's heart stop beating, so let's not tell her, okay? But here's the thing: I've been scared of many things in my tumultuous adolescence, and even into my twenties - closed-in places, vomiting, bad drug reactions, telling people I like that I like them, airplanes, illness (heart attacks in particular) - but I'm not scared here. Not like I was at home. It seems absurd. Why worry about how you will appear to groups of Indonesian teenagers when you're got a motorcycle exhaust burn on your leg that, in a tropical climate, you've got to clean every two hours or else it'll start growing plants of its own? Or, why worry about closed-in places when everyone is friendly enough that a New Guinean border guard taking charge and setting up a special detour on the city bus to your hotel for you is normal?

Sometimes things seem unrelated, but they aren't. They aren't.