At first, he disliked them all, which was normal for him.
On the flight to Guadalcanal Noah sized up his fellow volunteers-to-be. There was plenty of time from San Fran to Honolulu to Cairns to Guadalcanal to do so. It was twenty hours, perhaps more than 30. But the changing of zones and crossing of the date line left his math-challenged mind temporarily baffled. The trip was a proof of people’s mental states: the level-headed ones seemed to slow down and think about their words; the nervous became at once frenetic and tired; the seemingly dull seemed brighter; the slightly strange ones became downright zany. Mentally, he began to count dropouts. Certainly the zany were prime candidates, but so were the too quiet, who might be their own kind of crazy. And the nervous might become zany any minute. How many of these people with their suddenly-high-tension demeanor be able to make it through an entire two-year Peace Corps assignment? Would he be able to make it through his Peace Corps assignment?
As he worked out which people fit into which pigeonholes, there was one person who didn’t fit Noah’s judgmental model. He looked at her and disliked her immediately. New York attitude; too much hair; clothes too perfect; air of self-centeredness; multiple magazines on her lap; eyes focused a little beyond her conversational partner as if awaiting someone more interesting; purse with tiny straps; thick eyeliner; bold hair color, probably not her own; inefficiently shaped breasts. In short, she was too pretty and too city for living two years in the forest, and too self-possessed to truly want to help others. He relished a vision of her leaving in frustration after failing to adjust to life without lattes and foi gras. It would be a benefit to him after all to have someone high and mighty from capitalism’s lofty luxury tower to set an example for the other Peace Corps volunteers by falling to earth to be made anew by her experience, or to leave in shame and failure. Noah shocked himself, almost, with his dislike of her. Was this vindictive reverie some stage in the mentally taxing process of transition to other cultural surroundings?
He knew it must be a transitional madness of his own when he saw a second vision of the red-haired woman, one he was loathe to encourage in his imagination but which persisted there in spite of his distaste. She might also discover a calling of altruism and learn to eschew the superficiality of her home life. There might be someone creative under it all. Not very deep either. But he dismissed this thought. Look at her! Glancing around for the flight attendant, fussing about the seat she’s been given, nervously digging through her handbag.
He hated her for how vain she seemed to be; wished she’d never joined Peace Corps; wished her shame and failure; prayed he’d never have to talk to her or get stuck traveling next to her to remote places. He couldn’t take his eyes off her re hair and concentrating face. How awful, he thought, she’s the most captivating and interesting woman I’ve seen in months. He wanted to smell her hair falling over his face. He wanted to be a thousand miles away from her.
The group had its share of what looked like typical volunteers. Folks with healthy biceps, a bit rough around their edges, athletic in a drill-sergeant rather than a tennis player way. Wearing sensible shoes and already attired in the lightweight and quick-drying clothing recommended in the Introductory Pre-Service Information Packet (IPSIP). The pre-determined pre-conceptions abounded (the “Pre” prefix would be forthcoming in spades). Our hero himself wore his hair a little long, didn’t shave every day, tended to prefer t-shirts with cartoon characters to polo shirts, and running shoes over leather oxfords.
Generalizations were one of the poisons of his own upbringing that he hoped to leave behind yet he couldn’t define this new family and other way but by generalizing. How could the United States Government decide it was necessary to have an aid agency? How could the agency’s in-country trainers have a sense of what to teach the trainees? How could they achieve the stated objectives of sharing American culture, and bringing the world’s cultures back home to share with Americans? How could a world of amazement and newness be a catalyst for breaking down one’s own generalizations without first being introduced to him in terms of those very generalizations?
The flight was a marathon trip from Los Angeles to Brisbane, on a plane the size of a hotel, during which there was plenty of time (and space) for walking around the cabin, and observing one’s new companions. Several hours into the flight he surveyed the three rows of recruits as they slept, read, interacted, tried to ignore one another, joked, laughed, and tried not to act as nervous as they felt. They were a healthy set of fresh-faced volunteers-to-be. Noah regionally stereotyped most of them based on very little information, and created a few categories that seemed to fit. There were a handful of heartland folks: that is, white skinned Mid-West people with clear eyes who seemed free of any history of drug use, judging by their clear eyes and sober demeanor, evident even after not a few drinks; the West-Coasters with their sedate manner and a tinge of lofty eastern demeanor, perhaps from boarding school; the Wild-West types, who, no matter where they came from, one could imagine them in bar fights, on the lam from drug charges, on oil rigs, or on construction crews. Among these groups, Noah cross-referenced a second group of types, to describe their personality attributes and behavior more than their appearance and deportment. The over-forty set bore wrinkles and friendliness to overshadow their regional stereotype, but Noah guessed them to be, in the main, grown-up Wild West-ers; the academics, who were mostly younger people who seemed like they were out of school only recently, and observed everything in their surroundings as if it followed a simple set of predefined rules (such as Noah and his personality typing). The type that Noah thought outnumbered the rest, was indeed the scariest: he called them the lost lambs. A gleam in their eyes and a song in their hearts, the lost lambs had myriad notions about how the experience of traveling overseas would improve their own lives and the developing world.
Then there was the redhead. What did he hate about her? Too self-assured, too polished, too quiet? Too well-focused on her books? Too clever in her choice of books, which he noticed went quite beyond the ordinary travel guides and tired mid-to-late century popular fiction? He told himself she seemed like a selfish materialist who had no business volunteering but something more instinctive commanded his judgment, would continue to do so where the redhead was concerned. He knew her name but he chose to think of her as, simply, somewhat derisively, Red. His dislike of her had as much to do with her lack of discernible pigeonhole as his sudden fascination with her had to with her apparent love of reading. He looked over at her, a couple rows back, dozing over Generation X. But hadn’t she been reading something by Virginia Woolf a couple hours before? And the magazines, too. There was Mother Jones, something or other poetry review, and a New Yorker or two.
Bothered by his own thoughts, Noah joined a conversation with two men he had dubbed Blocko and Pete, trying hard not to imagine Red on the beach in a fabulous knit bikini, gathering coconuts or weaving a fishing net or some other Pacific island activity. The IPSIP had told them to expect many, many insects, so a bikini would probably not do. Naturally, as if reading Noah’s thoughts, the two men turned to the topic of women. Island girls. Dark skinned beauties that carried baskets on their heads and wore only the lavalava, a single piece of cloth wrapped wonderfully around a young, athletic body, always threatening to fall off as she frolicked in the sun. They weren’t sure what to envision? Islanders diving for pearls like the girls in Japanese stories? Fishing? Weaving? Climbing tall trees in search of exotic fruits? Anyway, beauty and newly wet breasts were part of what Noah envisioned as the two men cooed their approval that it should be their fate to be sent to such a wonderful part of the world. “We’re going to get paid for this.” Pete, the older of the two, exclaimed. Noah looked at his face, wondered how many experiences like this Pete had seen. He was one of the least stressed-out looking people in the group. By contrast, Blocko, a young and
quite fresh-looking, outdoorsy Midwesterner, appeared to be quite nervous and maybe a bit worried about what was coming. He masked it with a bit of swagger and some measure of frat-boy exuberance.
“I’d love to get me some of that redhead.” Blocko declared. Noah forced himself to quickly reply, “Oh, yeah?”, quickly and nervously enough to indicate she’d been pretty close to his thoughts as well. Pete, easily twenty-five years older than Blocko, proclaimed all the American women onboard to be “lovely”, but poetically dismissed the notion of wanting “a piece” of any of them. “I’m so old now and so set in my ways, I can’t imagine any other women. Noah made a mental note that the Wild-West category needed to have philosophical as one of its attributes. “If a girl that young came on to me I’d figure an old army buddy of mine had put her up to it just to get me in trouble with Carol.” Noah’s judgmental side was pleased to hear him display so much class. Blocko shook his head with a you-are-so-full-of-shit attitude, smiled, and pursued in the get me some vein despite the older man’s hints.
“I bet Carol was fiiii-ine when she was in her twenties.”
“She’s fine right now, looks like”, Noah interjected, weakly. He furrowed his brow at Noah and thought how unfortunate Blocko’s timing was. Pete didn’t flinch, only nodded to Noah for the support.
“She was a looker all right. She was married to a jackass too. I had to steal ‘er away. Wasn’t too hard. It was his turn to display a twinge of swagger.
“You just showed her what a real man was like”, Blocko snorted. Noah saw him as more cartoonish with each phrase he spoke. His muscular frame rocked back and forth emphatically in the seat as he nodded his stony head at Pete, questioningly. Noah hoped Pete would counter with humor instead of feeding Blocko more fodder for boyish commentary.
“I showed her my cooking,” was the rejoinder. Perfect. Blocko could not have guessed that answer was coming, Noah thought, Perfect.