Salon Wanderlust | Your money's no good here, page 2

A complete list of Salon's Money Week coverage
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Your money's no good here
By Tim Cahill
Travels in a cashless culture
Fantasy isle
By Stephen G. Bloom
You can vacation with Oprah, Demi and Arnold -- for a price
D E P A R T M E N T S
The Surreal Gourmet
By Bob Blumer
Champagne taste on a McDonald's budget
Mondo Weirdo
Searching for roots at the bottom of the boot
Road Warrior
Business travel & beyond
Table Talk
Is there too much testosterone blowing around the windy city? Join the "Chicago: Ease up on the Testosterone" discussion in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk.

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Your virtual travel agency

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LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, Oct. 21, 1997

Women's dilemma
By Dawn MacKeen
Is solo travel worth the risk?
A full list of all
Wanderlust articles

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C O N T I N U E D
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"you carry spare change in your pack there, chief?"
I was suffering my first instance of reverse culture shock. The words "spare change" had sent me spinning.
The South American Indian people I'd just met and lived with for weeks didn't use money. Everything was set up on a barter basis. Sometimes, I couldn't help but notice, even barter didn't enter into economic negotiations. Food, especially, was just given away.
Money was not unknown in the small village of Roraima, which lay under the looming shadow of the great coffin-shaped mountain called Roraima Tepui. The place even had a small schoolhouse, and I suspect that now, 20 years later, much has changed. A paved road, I hear, was built several years ago and it passes nearby. There is likely a dirt road to the village that no doubt sports several small shops, a cantina and a restaurant.
But back 20 years ago, the people of Roraima lived in wood-poled huts. The floors were dirt. The roofs were thatch. The nearest place money would buy anything was a 10-day walk away. Buy something big and you'd have to carry it 10 days on your back. Money wasn't worth the trouble.
The people I was to meet seemed frightened when my group walked into their village one evening when cold sheets of rain were pounding down and lightning made the mountain above explode into view every few minutes. Children stared at us from open windows, peek-a-boo style, but they weren't playing.
We stood in the mud and hammering rain in the center of the village until a somber, dignified man emerged from one of the huts and asked us, please, to take refuge in the schoolhouse. No one came to see us that night. In the morning, at first light, a delegation from the village asked if they could enter their own schoolhouse. Would we like some eggs for breakfast?
One of my traveling companions, a Venezuelan from Caracas named Pedro Carniciero, thanked the delegation for its hospitality and explained that we were carrying our own food and would be happy to prepare breakfast for all. But our gray freeze-dried eggs were not a big hit with the local gourmands. The same man who had directed us to the schoolhouse said something like:
"Good Lord, gentlemen, you can't possibly be serious," and, switching from Spanish to the local dialect, said something to one of the younger men, who dashed away and returned with real hen's eggs. The yolks were bright orange and the whites bubbled up in the fry pan like meringue. They are still the best eggs I've ever eaten.
The people did not, however, have coffee, and we were able to make several even-up breakfast deals. Pedro, who'd traveled in the area previously, knew that certain trade items would be highly appreciated in the village. In Caracas, we'd stocked up on high-quality cloth. Red was the desired color. We had about a dozen yards of it apiece.
The cloth bought guide services to the top of Roraima Tepui. It bought long walks in the forest with the woman who knew the healing properties of various plants. It bought an invitation to stay in the village, and it bought answers to our many questions. It was heavy red cloth and, to some small degree, it bought us friendship. I used it to buy a bow and arrow set from the best of the village hunters. It wasn't as nice as the one he used in the forest -- this was his backup bow -- and I had it strung over my shoulder that day in New York City when the Bozo-looking man who kept calling me "chief" asked if I could spare any change.
As I rummaged through my backpack looking for an appropriate gift, my thoughts were jumbled in a process I now recognize: reverse culture shock. It is only recently that I've come across a quote that expresses exactly what I felt in that moment. In 1807, the great king of Tonga, Finau 'Ulukalala, was discussing economics with one of his first European visitors, a man named Will Mariner. "If a man has more yams than he wants," Finau said, "let him exchange some of them away ... Certainly money is much handier and more convenient, but then, as it will not spoil by being kept, people will store it up, instead of sharing it out, as a chief ought to do ... I understand what it is that makes (Europeans) so selfish. It is this money."

Just so. The only people I ever met who were completely unaware of money -- didn't know the stuff existed -- were a group of tree-house dwelling Melanesians who made their homes deep in the swamplands of Irian Jaya. The women wore skirts made of bunched grasses, the men wore leaves wrapped and tied about their penises. It was a place where red cloth was probably even more worthless than money.
The families were segregated -- women and children on one side of the tree house, men on the other. Each side cooked on its own fire, which was set on a base of river rocks. I traded hatchets, salt and fish hooks for access and conversation, though the people, these good Karowai people, freely offered me great globs of their staple food, a kind of gray-blue paste made from the sap of the sago palm. It tasted a bit like watery library paste, only a good deal more bland than that sounds. It was, in fact, this bland: When I fixed everyone a bowl of rice for all, one young man burst into tears after a single taste. He was crying, I learned eventually, because the rice tasted so good.
I looked to the walls of the tree house while the young man sobbed. There were the bones of two small fish hung up there -- the remains, I imagined, of a fine feast. The Karowai didn't accumulate money, nor wealth of any kind. And even though it was clearly a challenging task to gather enough to eat every day, these people offered me what they had. Every day. What they had was sago sap.
These people, who didn't know what a dollar was worth, were the most generous folks I've ever met in my life. OK, so they were rumored to be headhunters and cannibals. The fact is, they were highly generous cannibals and headhunters.
Navigating through that culture, and through the money-less society I first encountered in South America, taught me a little bit about my own selfishness, and about what a chief ought to do.
"Whatcha got in that bag there, chief?"
I found a few rags and remnants of the left over red cloth that nobody in Roraima had wanted and gave them to the red-haired spare change artist.
He stared at them for a moment, then shook them angrily in my face. "The hell am I supposed to do with these, chief?" he said.
I tapped him gently on the chest with my pre-industrial weaponry and told him precisely what he could do with them.
The Bozo panhandler tossed the cloth on the sidewalk and flipped me an especially enthusiastic bird.
"And watch out who you call chief," I said, which, I think, is very good advice. Call it "priceless."
Oct. 28, 1997
Tim Cahill is the author of five books, including "A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg," "Pecked to Death by Ducks" and "Pass the Butterworms."