I cannot speak for fruit flies — though with all that time on their hands (wings? feet?) I expect they’ll be mastering English shortly and that sort of thing won’t be necessary — but I personally do not want my lifespan stretched like taffy. In my experience, no good comes of stretching taffy. As much taffy as you have is usually more than you want.

Likewise life. Who really wants to be around for another 150 years? Imagine it. Movies will cost $155, and most will star Adam Sandler. Seven-year-olds will be having sex. Health insurance will cost more than a mortgage, forcing people to live in their SUVs, which will by that time be larger than most single-family dwellings anyway. Economy-class airline passengers will be hung vertically on racks similar to those used by dry cleaners. The parking situation alone would be enough to keep me from signing on.

I will concede, however, that the people of the 22nd century will need some extra
time. Projections based on current figures suggest that it will take an average of 22 hours on hold to reach a customer service representative at Viacom, several weeks to cross L.A. on Route 495, and the better part of a decade to stand on line at the DMV.

And certainly there would be some pluses to living to 200; my Disney stock might finally do something, and it will be entertaining to watch bell bottoms come around for the fifth time. But by and large the idea of being alive in the year 2110 is about as appealing as saltwater taffy (current stocks of which will still be on hand in 2110).

As for stopping the aging process, pish-tush. It can’t really be done, even if you do
manage to stem the advance of physical decrepitude. For aging is more than liver spots
and cataracts. Aging is the natural and inevitable process of growing bored with almost everything, and disgusted with everything else. It begins around 35. You start to grow indifferent toward everything you once loved. Your career, your hobbies, Thai food, flirting, getting dressed up. You grow cynical. You grow jaded. Bit by bit, year by year, everything begins to seem stale and pointless. (When, in reality, it is you who is stale and pointless.)

So desperate are you for something different and meaningful that you decide to have
children. This passes the time for another 25 years. By then you’re pushing 60. You retire. You travel a bit — maybe five years, tops. (By the time you’re 70, the list of countries you actually want to visit has dwindled significantly: Canada, anything Caribbean, Ireland and any country that doesn’t put its bathrooms down the hall.)

Imagine having another 100 years. What will there be left to do? Complain. Compete with your daughters for men. Complain. Swat fruit flies (a burgeoning problem, thanks to research gone awry in the late 20th century).

The system as it stands has a certain elegance and logic. God makes you get sickly
and grotesque, so that by the time you’re on your last legs, the thought of leaving it all
behind is actually kind of appealing. You die and make room for someone new, someone
full of optimism and muscle tone and enthusiasm for today’s new music.

What would a society do with its old people if they refused to die? How would we
handle this ballooning population of healthy but deeply bored and irritable 150-year-old 50-year-olds? To be sure, there will be growth in certain industries (menopause research comes to mind), but how will we manage to employ everyone? Most of the 80-plus crowd will be forced to retire, for what company could stay in business dishing out annual pay increases to its staff for 130 years? How can cutting-edge technology companies bring in new blood if the old blood won’t go away?

So they’ll have no jobs, no income. What do we do with them? Take all the money
that would have been funneled into funeral homes and adult diapers and people hired to
drive those electric carts at airports and use it as a form of welfare? Create subsidized housing out of the thousands of cruise ships dry-docked with the advent of hale and vigorous oldsters? I don’t know. I only know I don’t want to be there.

Some would accuse me of sour grapes — that because I was born too soon to take
advantage of this Brave New World, I can only condemn it. Maybe, maybe not. But I
will say this. If the grapes are sour, you have only to leave them out in a sunny spot in
your kitchen and they will ripen, and fruit flies will appear, and when they do, you ask
them what they think about it.

Espousing, as I have, a belief that nothing is inherently disgusting, that it’s all a case of mind over culture, I have frequently, in my travels, felt the need to put my money where my mouth is and my mouth where it would rather not go. I have eaten walrus meat left buried on an Arctic beach to “ferment” for a month, a raw fish eye and its accompanying musculature, duck tongue, caribou marrow, brain, flipper, ant. I am, yes, one of those annoying travelers who boast about the disgusting food they’ve lived to tell about (and tell about and tell about).

Now I am getting my come-uppance. I am getting it big-time, in a small village in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I have come here to do a story on an anthropologist named John Patton. Patton studies a tribe called the Achuar, notable for their skill in blowgun-making and their long-ago rivalry with the head-shrinking Chuar. (If you’ve seen an authentic South American shrunken head, you’ve probably seen an Achuar tribesman.) Patton’s base is Conambo, a scatter of houses along a fast, muddy river, reachable every now and again by a four-seater missionary plane. There is no hotel, no restaurant, no store. You eat what they hunt.

I am fast coming to understand that there is a huge difference, a vast yawning canyon of difference, between tasting something deeply unappealing and living on it. Anyone, if he tries, can suppress his disgust long enough to swallow a single fish eye or a mouthful of decaying walrus. Eating enough of this sort of thing to live on is altogether a different matter. I am here for five days. I’m not doing very well.

My problem at the moment is a knee. It’s a rodent knee, quietly genuflecting in a bowl of oily broth. Earlier today, the knee was attached to a happy, hairy, spaniel-sized rodent, gamboling and cavorting in the wee hours of the rain forest morning until our host happened along and plugged it full of buckshot. (Blowguns are used only on birds and pack animals like monkeys, which would be scared off by gunshot.)

The knee is one of nature’s marvels, a busy intersection of tendon, bone and cartilage. Be that as it may, “marvel” does not exactly describe my state of mind at the moment. Extreme psychic discomfort comes closer. The hunter and the chef are sitting directly across from me. Their generosity is heartbreaking. I have to clean my plate. I must force apart the gristly abomination with my teeth, work my tongue into its fissures and slimy orifices, extract anything vaguely chewable, and swallow it. I lean over to scout the contents of Patton’s bowl.

He got the ankle. The thing about ankle bones, as schoolchildren everywhere know, is
that they’re attached to foot bones. And foot bones are attached to toe bones and toenails
and those filthy little rubbery pads on the bottom of the foot. No matter how good a meat
may taste, the experience is indelibly marred by the act of spitting ghastly unchewables out
into your fingers.

Patton is undaunted. He has the entire thing in his mouth. He stops sucking and
gumming long enough to say: “The foot pads are a good source of fat.” He is enjoying
his rodent soup in the way that only a man who has been served steamed tapir fetus and
live palm beetles can. A hail of tiny foot bones accumulates on the ground beside him.

The knee awaits. I’ve finished my broth. To stall any longer would betray my
revulsion. I manage to locate a couple of pockets of reasonably normal-looking flesh. My
inclination is to chew these slowly, forever if need be, until my hosts tire of sitting here
and go off to tend the manioc garden. The problem with this tactic is that boiled rodent
flesh isn’t the sort of thing you want to have hanging around your tongue for any longer
than is strictly necessary for purposes of not choking to death. It’s not really that bad, it’s
just strong. As in overpowering, as in taste buds passing out and waving white flags. It
doesn’t, in short, taste anything like chicken. I find myself chewing with my mouth open,
hoping my hosts will take this for an endearing cultural peculiarity, rather than an attempt
to bypass the tasting portion of my meal.

I beg Patton to take my meat. (Our hosts speak no English.) Kind soul that he is, he
relieves me of the knee. The man of the house makes a comment, which Patton translates:
“She doesn’t like to eat?” He has seen Westerners who don’t have any children, who don’t
know how to shoot a rifle. Perhaps there are Westerners who don’t like eating. “She had
a big breakfast,” fibs Patton.

It was in fact a big breakfast, but I didn’t do very much having. Someone shot an
alligator, and I had some leg. (It’s a leg sort of day.) I have eaten alligator meat before, in
Florida, but someone, bless him, had taken it upon himself to remove the scales before
cooking it. (See “ghastly unchewables,” above.) I tried to pretend that the leg was
something else, something bland and comforting. After several false starts — Melba toast?
lettuce? — my brain, clearly shaken, presented me with “orange roughy.”

Patton maintains that the bulk of an Achuar’s daily calories do not come from meat.
They come from chicha, a mildly alcoholic, vaguely nutritious, watered-down manioc
mash. Achuar men drink up to four gallons a day. If you like chicha, you can live well in
Conambo. In about an hour, I will get to try it. Patton’s friend Isaac is hosting a minga, a
work party for the villagers who helped Isaac’s family dig a new manioc plot. It’s similar in
concept to the Amish barn-raising, with marathon chicha-drinking taking the place of
square-dancing.

I am of two minds about chicha. On the one hand, it’s a beverage. In the land of scary
food, the beverage is your friend. It’s the Tecate that washes down the menudo, the swig
of sake that makes the giant clam neck tolerable.

On the other hand. We are talking about a beverage fermented with human saliva.
Achuar women chew boiled manioc into the desired mashed-potato texture, and then spit-spray the contents of their bulging cheeks out into the chicha urn. While I know that,
percentage-wise, we’re talking a tiny fraction of the mixture, I’m having difficulty
embracing the idea. I have a little agreement with myself: When spittle finds its way onto
the ingredient list, I find a way to say no.

“You can’t say no,” says Patton, tossing ankle carcass to a cringing, harelipped dog.
“It’s just not done.”

Patton and I are seated on a low log bench in the open-walled platform that serves as
Isaac’s living room. The man of the house whittles blowgun darts as he chats. A pair of
black horn-rim glasses sits askew on his face. One lens is violently cracked, as though
someone stepped on it, though no one here has the kind of shoes for that. The floor is
dirty but uncluttered. Decor runs to parrot feathers and jaguar skulls, a government poster
urging vaccinations for children. In the corner, a little girl has set up a chicha tea party
with her dolls, the tenderness of the scene marred only by the knowledge that the tiny
chicha bowls are made from howler monkey voice boxes.

Isaac’s wife and mother are in constant motion, serving bowls of chicha to the 10 or
so guests. Chicha is the backbone of Achuar society. As with the ankle bone and the knee
bone, you feel an unalterable pressure to accept. Chicha is the holy communion, the
Manischewitz, the kava-kava of Achuar life. It’s present at every ceremony, every visit,
every meal. An Achuar woman’s desirability rests in no small part on her skill at chicha
brewing and serving.

Isaac’s mother dips a clay bowl into an urn of eggnog-hued liquid. Something slimy
dangles off the bottom of the bowl, waving howdy-doo as she crosses the floor to our
bench. Her hand is coated with a mucilaginous yellow fluid with flecks of manioc fiber.
The sidewalk outside a frat house on a Sunday morning comes, unbidden and unwelcome,
to mind.

“It’s Miller time,” says Patton as he takes the bowl. After 10 minutes, he warns, she’ll
return to take the bowl away and give it to someone else, most likely me. It is considered
irretrievably rude to refuse a bowl of chicha, or even to set it down. (In a maddening
instance of form following etiquette, the ceramic bowls in which chicha is served are
rounded on the bottom, so that the drinker cannot set one down without spilling the
contents.)

A refusal is interpreted as a bluff and triggers a ritualized pas de deux: “No, really, I
shouldn’t.” “Yes, yes, I insist.” Woe unto the visitor: The host never backs down.

Which means I have 10 minutes to talk myself out of the revulsion that’s building in
my gut, jostling for space among the pinworms and protozoa. My mouth is full of saliva
anyway, I tell myself. What’s a little more? Myself isn’t buying it. Myself is noting the vast
and unsettling difference between oral hygiene practices around the Amazon basin and
around the basin in our bathroom at home. This isn’t a matter of disgust, I tell Patton. It’s
a matter of gum disease.

Patton wipes manioc slime from his beard. Intelligent chicha drinkers, he holds, don’t
fret about the saliva it’s made with. They fret about the giardia and amoebas in the
unfiltered river water it’s made with. It is at this moment that Isaac’s mother gets up to
retrieve the chicha bowl from Patton, fill it to near overflow and present it to me.

The first thing that hits you is the smell. Fruity and fetid, a whiff of drinker’s breath on
a late-night bus. I put my lips to the rim of the bowl, bumpy-slimy with manioc pulp. I
hold my breath and drink.

The taste is not awful. It’s chalky, rummy, indifferent. But this was never about taste.
It’s about distaste. Did you ever drop something into a toilet and have to roll up your
sleeve and retrieve it? That’s how I’m feeling right now. Only I’ve got to keep going. I’ve
got to lift the lid, step right in, and hunker down in the toilet bowl. As soon as the level of
chicha lowers visibly, Isaac’s mother will step up to refill the bowl.

I disappoint and surprise myself. I come from a tribe that eats Vienna sausages. I
should be able to cope. But I can’t. I cannot drink this bowl of chicha.

An idea alights. I ask Patton to hold my bowl and rummage in my backpack for the
crinkle of airtight cellophane: a raspberry-chocolate Trader Joe’s energy bar. The room
falls abruptly quiet. Foreigner’s backpacks are known to hold all manner of otherworldly
wonders: sugar packets, earplugs, contact lenses. (The concept of bits of plastic aiding
vision is not easily absorbed. I recall the tale of a tribesman who pointed to a baby bottle nipple and asked, “Could I as well put
a piece of this in my eye?”)

The energy bar makes the rounds. A few of the men sniff at
it. Only Isaac takes a bite. He chews vigorously at first, then stops, suddenly and with
alarm, as though someone had snuck up behind him and put a gun to his head. His
eyebrows bunch together like drawn drapes. His lips go all abstract and jumpy. He stands,
grabs hold of a roof post, and spits forcefully. He coughs, arrghs, hawks, spits again.
Every few seconds, he looks back at me, his face changing channels from disgust to
bewilderment and back. After a good minute of this, he hands back the energy bar,
grinning now that the taste is gone, shaking his head at the foreigner’s unfathomable tastes.

The way I see it, permission has been granted to back out of the next bowl of chicha.

The Head Pull is pretty much what it sounds like: big strong men pulling on each other’s heads. Two Inuit lie face-to-face on their bellies, heads linked by a loop of canvas cargo webbing. At the signal, they attempt to pull one another, by the head, over the line between them.

The Inuit Games guidelines list 12 pulls. Not all of them will be part of the week’s events. The Ear Pull, for example, has been omitted owing to health and safety concerns. Ditto the Mouth Pull (“Competitor grabs mouth of opponent …”) and the Ear Lift (“The weight is looped around any ear and the competitor … walks forward, carrying it with his ear for as far a distance as his ear will allow”).

Aside from an occasional tendency toward the gruesome, the main identifying feature of Inuit sport is its compactness. Games are divided as follows: Pulls, pushes, reaches, kicks, twists and rotations. The entire Olympiad could be staged in a large walk-in closet.

It’s not for want of space. North of the tree line, space is the prevailing — one might almost say the only — geographical feature. Baffin is tundra, a scrabbly blanket of moss and shale laid out without a wrinkle. Up here, minute changes of elevation are optimistically dubbed hills. Caribou antlers are nailed up on posts, as though to compensate for the missing trees. (Lest you think it an unalluring locale, imagine a four-hour, 360-degree sunset at midnight.)

Inuit Games are compact for the simple reason that they are indoor sports. The Inuit practiced plenty of outdoor athletics — hunting, sledding, marathon walking — but this wasn’t sport, it was life. The Games were what you did to pass the time when the blizzards hit and you couldn’t see to hunt. And igloos were small — not much larger than the jump circle on a basketball court.

That is, in fact, where this week’s games are being staged: center court in the Ataguttaaluk School gymnasium. Igloolik has no sports arena or landscaped playing fields. This is less a matter of funding than of geology. North of 60 degrees latitude, the ground is permafrost: rock-hard most of the year, muck the rest of it. Grass won’t grow. Buildings have to be set on posts to keep from sinking in the thaw. Architectural diversity is more trouble than it’s worth; the town is basically boxes on a flat surface. I saw a picture of it in winter. It looked like inside my freezer.

The official motions for quiet. As the crowd numbers fewer than 100, this is not hard to achieve. However, as many are children, it is somewhat hard to maintain. A pair of toddlers are carrying out a competition of their own, the winner being the one who can shriek the loudest while running wind sprints across the gym floor. The athletes barely pay it mind. I remark on this to one of the coaches. “Why would they get mad?” he says. “If something messes you up, oh well. There’s other events.”

Competition runs somewhat counter to the Inuit character. To survive an Arctic winter, communities worked together and everything was shared. A great hunter had no more food than the next guy; he just threw more dinner parties. Why, then, have the games been turned into a competition? Because otherwise there would be no Inuit Games. Left to their own devices, modern Inuit teens prefer to spend their time playing basketball and watching Much TV (Canada’s answer to MTV). An impromptu survey of T-shirts and baseball caps in the gym today reveals 17 sports logos and 11 heavy metal bands.

This is not to say that the athletes don’t care whether they win. The winning team has a chance to compete in the international Arctic Winter Games. Depending on which country is hosting them, this could mean a trip to Russia, Finland, Greenland or Alaska.

Down in the ring, the winning head is nodding and grinning. It belongs to a local heart-breaker named Bobby. Someone has written “I love you, Bobby” in ball-point on his arm. Bobby wears a cigarette lighter in a fringed leather pouch around his neck, as though it were an ornament. Given that a pack of Rothmann’s costs more than $10, it may well be.

The irony of 24-hour daylight is that it happens where you need it least. Polar
towns provide the longest days in the world and very little to fill them with. Igloolik has
no restaurants, bars, movie theaters or museums. (Graffiti on the town water tank:
“What to do?”)

Games week is an exception. Every night there’s a community event: harpoon
throwing, drum dancing, a whipping contest (empty pop cans standing in for sled dogs).
Tonight it’s bannock-making. Bannock is a Scottish quickbread, introduced, along with
jigs, tea and tuberculosis, by whalers in the 19th century.

Bannock-making is part of the Good Woman contest. Before Inuit women won the
right to pull heads and twist fingers, their participation in the Northern Games was largely
limited to Good Woman competitions. “The Good Woman,” to quote official Games
literature, “is chosen for her skills and talent (seal-skinning, bannock-making, caribou-cutting, etc.) rather than her looks.”

The schedule says 7 p.m., but it doesn’t say where. Someone suggests the baseball
diamond. People up here are laboring under the delusion that it’s warm outside (it’s 40
degrees) and have scheduled most of the evening activities outdoors.

People are on the baseball diamond, but they’re not making bannock. I’m not altogether
sure what they’re doing. A batter has hit a fly ball, and a catcher has caught it. Rather than
return the ball to the pitcher, the catcher chases the batter and throws the ball at him. The
batter returns to the sidelines. He is apparently out, or perhaps just sore.

The man standing beside me says it’s a combination of “Northern” and regular baseball.

“How many strikes?” I ask him.

“They’re still trying to decide that.”

The Inuit are not big on rules. Earlier, I asked a Games official how many people there
are on a Northern baseball team. He replied that it didn’t matter, so long as “there’s lots of
people.” One of this evening’s teams appears to be a bit short. “Where are the
outfielders?” I ask the man next to me. He ponders this quietly. “They’re not out there. I
don’t know why.”

The bannock contest, it turns out, is over at the outdoor skating rink. As it’s summer,
there is no ice in the rink, only gravel and dirt. Igloolik’s skating rink looks very much like
its baseball diamond, which both look very much like the lawns, the hotel grounds and the
beach.

Women are hunkered down in front of portable Coleman stoves and great hulking
icebergs of Crisco. The winning sample is passed around. It’s sort of a round, oily biscuit,
or round, biscuity oil. I seek out the judge to ask how the winning entry tastes different
from the others.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t had any.”

“So how do you know hers is the best?”

“She finished first.” In a land with no timber and $1-an-ounce propane, a Good Woman is
one who can make four batches before the fire goes out.

Julie Oolayou is the Flo-Jo of the Inuit Games. She’s broken three records and is about to
break another, the One-Foot High Kick. Clarification: “One foot” refers to the number of
feet with which you kick, not the height of the kick (unless you are a visiting spastic
journalist, in which case it refers to both).

The high kick is one of the few Inuit games that require equipment. As a rule, Arctic
nomads tended to shun athletic endeavors that necessitated hauling racquets and shoulder
pads across the tundra. What little equipment is used tends to be things you’d find lying
around the igloo. Under the equipment heading for Parka Rotation, for example, the text
reads simply, “big parka.” Traditionally, the high kick target was hung from the ceiling
of the igloo. Here, it hangs from a wooden high kick stand, a simple, spindly gallows,
like what you draw to play Hangman.

Oolayou removes one shoe and one sock, revealing an ankle bracelet and an Edmonton
Oilers rub-on tattoo. She takes three easy strides, crouches and springs, clearing seven
feet the way other people hop a curb.

Next up is Oolayou’s rival, Leona Nakashuk. She spits on her sneaker soles. She eyes
the target, a small sealskin seal hanging at eye level. In the stands, an old man begins
chanting songs of the elders. Rattled, Nakashuk breaks her advance. “Anaq!” (This is a
word in Inuktitut, the Inuit native tongue. It means, “Shit.”)

Six minutes and as many false starts go by. There seems to be no time limit. This
doesn’t surprise me. Where day goes on all night and night is six months long, time is a
fuzzy concept. Ask someone how long it takes to cross the bay by motorboat, and he’ll
answer you in gallons, not minutes. I ask games coordinator Angie Luciani if the lack of
time limit has to do with the Inuit concept of time. Actually, it has more to do with the
Inuit concept of planning. “There’s supposed to be a three-minute limit,” Luciani says.
“But nobody brought a stopwatch.”

To understand the Knuckle Hop, it helps to have played Bloody Knuckles. To be sure,
strength and skill are required — you are hopping on toes and fists with your body flat-out
rigid in between. But what is key here is that you are landing on your knuckles. With no
gloves. On a wood floor. The Knuckle Hop, says acting official Gabriel Nirlungayuk, “is
about how much pain you can endure.”

The most coveted seats, therefore, are the ones with a view of the nurses’ station. I
watch as a succession of grimacing men run up and plunge their fists into bowls of ice
water. Their knuckles are dotted with round raw nicks, as though someone went after
them with a potato peeler.

There is no Women’s Knuckle Hop. This is either outrageous sexism on the part of the
men, or outrageous good sense on the part of the women.

I can’t tell you much about the closing ceremonies, as they’re being held in Inuktitut. The
mayor is giving a speech, and the audience has taken the opportunity to chat with their
friends about the polar bear spotted outside town and the rumor that star athlete Kristine
Ootova has a hickey beneath her scarf. It is unclear whether this has to do with the
popularity of the mayor (low) or the popularity of speeches (very low). (Earlier this week, a
visiting politician stopped his speech to reassure his straying audience that he was “almost
finished, OK?”)

The mayor passes the ceremonial blubber lamp (Baffin’s answer to the Olympic torch) to
the mayor of Hall Beach, site of next year’s games. The Inuit Games are officially closed.
A group of athletes pushes aside the folding chairs and the High Kick seal and breaks out
a box of basketballs.

McCormick, a 48-year-old mountaineering guide from Colorado, is at this moment lecturing on an extremely white weather condition called whiteout. Every fourth or fifth sentence he breaks stride for a swallow of coffee, which he takes black. Whiteouts are snowstorms so trumped-up and incorrigible that ground and air, horizon and sky, are indistinguishable, a colorless, directionless chowder of fog and snow. McCormick has seen people get lost on the 50-foot walk from his classroom to the outhouse. (Another reason to be wary of ice-sheet outhouses: Seals occasionally use the opening in the ice as a blowhole. While there’s nothing inherently dangerous about a suppositorial blast of hot seal breath, it is, in the words of one shaken veteran, “a disquieting way to start your day.”)

McCormick tried for years to come up with an accurate description of what it’s like to be in a whiteout. What he finally settled on was being outdoors with a white plastic garbage pail over your head. This gave him an idea. To make his search-and-rescue exercises more challenging for his students (and more entertaining for himself), McCormick requisitioned a stack of white plastic garbage pails.

In this afternoon’s search-and-rescue exercise, McCormick is taking the role of the lost victim. A small group of students is given a coil of rope, a sheaf of trail marker flags, garbage pails and instructions to go out and find their instructor without getting lost themselves. That done, McCormick disappears into the almost painful brightness of an Antarctic afternoon.