DAY 5: The Moken Headman Tells All By Richard Bangs
It is the meeting of two big men, though one is two feet taller than the other. John Gray folds his hands as though in prayer and bows down to Salama Glatalay, while the headman of the Moken sea gypsies thrusts up his overly long arm for a handshake.
Salama then leads us to his little nipa palm thatch roofed hut, where he invites us to climb the ladder and squeeze in while he changes from a tattered plaid shirt to a more statesman-like sash. Salama, we learn, is not just the headman, but is also a teacher, and the spiritual leader for his people. There are 56 family houses along this beach, each looking something like a western architect’s rendition of an eco-lodge bungalow, without the flush toilets, thread-count sheets, little shampoo bottles, or any trappings, really. He says four people live in his hut, which is no bigger than a motel room, including his wife and two grandchildren. He thinks he is about 62 years old, but really doesn’t know. He had nine children, but only five survive. Four died of malaria, before the clinic was opened on the island after the tsunami this year.
John and Salama then walk to the edge of the sea and sit on a fat beach hibiscus root. Behind them is a half-sunken kabang, one of the traditional boats, a remnant of the tsunami. And John begins the conversation by telling Salama about his own experiences with the wave, how he understood the earthquake and tried to alert as many people as possible, and how he took actions that saved lives -- but not as many as he hoped, as not all who heard his warnings heeded them.
John then asks Salama of his own experiences nearly a year ago. Salama pauses, then describes a series of dreams he had before the Laboon, as the Moken call the tsunami. Three nights before he had his first dream, in which he saw the sea turn blood red and watched a western woman struggle in the waves. When he woke, he turned and prayed to the sea that it not be too harsh.
The second night the dream repeated, and when he told his wife she dismissed his premonition, saying he had too much to eat and drink.
The third night the dream happened again, and Salama was convinced nature was angry. The Moken legends tell that the sea sends in a Laboon every once in a great while to clean up what has become dirty, and Salama knew his village was not clean. He lamented that the young people had been leaving the island for the mainland allures, and returned with trash, which was littering the once pristine beach. He said he knew that morning that the sea was coming to wash his village.
He first noticed the fish in his bay were unusually roused, frisking out of the water as though in alarm. Then the sea took its big breath, and sucked the water away, and Salama knew the Laboon was coming.
He had 20 minutes to alert his people, and such was his respect and power that everyone listened. All raced to the highlands, and all but one Moken on the Andaman island of Surin survived.
John and Salama talk and laugh for a couple of hours, trading stories of the sea, recipes for raw shellfish and tales of their long lives, as they believe they are about the same age. Salama gives John some practical advice on jellyfish stings (wash with fresh water as soon as possible); John gives Salama a loving description of the princess, who has yet to travel to Surin, though her presence and beneficence are felt throughout.
Then Salama invites John to take a ride in his kabang, where he is taking a couple of his grandkids out to the reef to dive for clams and shells. The Moken are legendary as being some of the deepest free divers in the world. They carve goggles out of wood, and insert glass from washed-ashore bottles as the eyepieces. Since he is the headman, his is the only boat that has not one but two long-tail diesel engines, and we are out above the reef's edge in minutes.
Salama and the kids don their goggles and dive in, dropping down the reef face some 10 meters without flinching. One of the dive instructors on John's boat, the MV Jazz, putts over on the dinghy with a set of scuba gear, and offers to let Salama use the second regulator as he makes a 25-meter dive. Without hesitation Salama pops the regulator into his mouth, and follows the professional diver to depths with the ease of a kipper, where he plucks a conch from the floor.
Salama later explains another Moken legend: When a Moken dies he ascends to a sort of purgatory, where he awaits sentencing. If his life has not been good enough, his head is whacked off, and he is tossed to the sea where he becomes a shell of his former self. But when a Moken diver retrieves such a shell from the nether regions of the ocean bottom, he releases the lost soul through the opening, and it is allowed to ascend to the heavens.
After diving and buffeting about the bay in Salama’s dark wood plank-sided boat, John fetches a bright banana-colored sea kayak from the MV Jazz. He positions Salama in the bow, and out they go for a spirited paddle. Salama cackles with delight, as though he were one of John’s clients, overwhelmed by the nimbleness, stability and clean lines of the craft.
At the end of the ride Salama makes an offer. He says he thinks the sea kayak would be just a wonderful craft for fishing, and wants to trade his Moken kabang straight-up. John likes the idea, as he has thought about offering tours in traditional craft to celebrate and support Moken tradition.
I wince at this contrivance. I ask John whether the idea of bringing a kayak to this isolated bay might be akin to the dropping of the Coke bottle into the Kalahari as depicted in the film "The Gods Must Be Crazy." The foreign item introduced to a remote tribe becomes a totem that eventually derogates the culture. Might the introduction of modern kayaks accelerate the loss of unique traditions?
John lights into me for that notion, suggesting I'm damning the Mokens to remain museum pieces for my own romantic notions, that my thinking is little different from that of the national park authorities, who prohibited the Mokens from rebuilding with more modern, stable structures, since the image would not be as attractive to tourists.
Freedom to choose and evolve, John allows, are the most potent coins in any society, and for the privileged to wistfully wish that the less advantaged remain so for the dreamy images of tourists, or media, is a shameful fancy. Nonetheless, John doesn't do the trade, at least on this trip.
We finish the day feeding Salama’s boat with extra food and drink, and then wave goodbye as the headman chugs back to his island. I ask John if he learned anything from meeting the sea gypsy helmsman, and he nods. It was not what he expected. There was no arcanum for better knowing nature; no special wisdom about the sea, except perhaps for the hint on jellyfish stings.
But after some thought John shares that he thinks the lesson is the power of acutely in-touch leadership. It is not about just being sharply sensitive to nature, but about being attuned to people in one’s ken. John remembers how frustrated he was when he phoned hotels warning of the tsunami and was not taken seriously, and how that cost many, many lives. He tells how his own assistant, Ying, after seeing the water bowl ripple with the earthquake, called the police in a panic, but they accused her of being on drugs, and hung up. And those calls were more than an hour before the tsunami hit.
John says he really doesn’t know if Salama’s premonitory dreams actually happened. He is a skeptic when it comes to mysticism, omens and spirit messaging. But he thinks it doesn’t really matter. Salama is the inherited spiritual leader of the Moken, an ancient animist culture that believes there are spirits in trees, boats, and in the sea. And Salama is in keen touch with the spirit of his people, and in turn he receives esteem and credibility, more than any missionary, more than any soldier or philanthropist. So, when it came time to persuade his people to run, all he had to do was say he had dreamed of the Laboon, and up the mountain they ran.
"There are world leaders who could use these lessons," John says. Then he hauls his kayak onto the deck for the long passage across the oyster-blue Andaman Sea to his own island home.
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