Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (2 page)

Part One LIFE

1                  Discovering the World of the Pirahãs

I
t was a bright Brazilian morning on December 10, 1977, and we were waiting to take off in a six-passenger plane provided by my missionary agency, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). The pilot, Dwayne Neal, put the aircraft through its preflight inspection. He walked around the plane and checked to see how well the load was balanced. He checked for external signs of damage. He drew a small vial from the fuel tank to check for water in the fuel. He tested the action of the propeller. This is a routine that has become as normal to me now as brushing my teeth before going to work, but then it was my first time.

As we prepared to take off, I thought hard about the Pirahãs, the tribe of Amazonian Indians I was going to live with. What was I going to do? How should I act? I wondered how the people would react to seeing me for the first time and how I would react to them. I was going to meet people different from me in many respects—some that I could anticipate, others that I could not. Well, I was flying there to do more than just meet them, actually. I was going to the Pirahãs as a missionary. My income and expenses were to be paid by evangelical churches in the United States so that I could “change the Pirahãs’ hearts” and persuade them to worship the god I believed in, to accept the morality and the culture that goes along with believing in the Christian god. Even though I didn’t even know the Pirahãs, I thought I could and should change them. This is the nexus of most missionary work.

Dwayne sat down in the pilot’s seat, and we all bowed our heads while he prayed for a safe flight. Then he shouted,
“Livre!”
(“Stand clear” in Portuguese) out the open pilot’s window and started the engine. As the engine warmed he spoke with Porto Velho’s air-traffic control and we began to taxi. Porto Velho, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rondônia, was to become my base of operations for all future Pirahã trips. At the end of the dirt airstrip, we turned around and Dwayne revved the engine. We sped off, the rust-red earth of the
cascalho
(gravel) airstrip becoming blurry and then falling away quickly beneath us.

I watched the jungle eventually consume the cleared land around the city. The open spaces around Porto Velho became smaller as the trees became more numerous. We flew across the mighty Madeira (Wood) River and the transformation was complete—a sea of green, broccoli-like trees arched to the edge of vision in all directions. I thought about animals that might be down there right now, just below us. I wondered if we crashed and I survived whether I would be eaten by jaguars—there were plenty of stories about crash victims killed not by the crash but by animals.

I was going to visit one of the least studied people in the world, speakers of one of the world’s more unusual languages—at least judging by the trail of disappointed linguists, anthropologists, and missionaries they had left in their wake. Pirahã is not known to be related to any other living human language. I didn’t know much about it except how it sounded on tapes and that previous linguists and missionaries who had studied the language and the people had decided to work elsewhere. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. The language, it seemed, was intractable.

The small air vent above my head in the Cessna began to blow out colder air as we gained altitude. I tried to get more comfortable. I leaned back and thought more about what I was about to do and how different this trip was for me than for the others in the plane. The pilot was doing his day job and would be back home in time for supper. His father had come along as a tourist. Don Patton, the missionary mechanic accompanying me, was getting a minivacation from the hard work of maintaining the missionary compound. But I was flying to my life’s work. I was to meet for the first time the people I planned to share the rest of my existence with, the people whom I hoped to take to heaven with me. I would have to learn to speak their language fluently.

As the plane began to be buffeted by the midmorning updrafts—typical of the Amazon in the rainy season—my reverie was rudely halted by a more pressing concern. I was airsick. For the next 105 minutes, as we flew above the forest on breezes, I was nauseated. Just as I had willed my stomach to remain quiet, Dwayne reached back with a tuna sandwich, loaded with onions. “You guys hungry?” he asked helpfully. “No thanks,” I replied, tasting the bile in my mouth.

Then we circled the airstrip near the Pirahã village of Posto Novo so that the pilot could get a better look. This maneuver increased the centrifugal force on my stomach, and I was already using every bit of restraint I could draw on to keep from heaving. For a couple of dark moments before we landed, I thought that it would be much better to crash and explode than for this nausea to continue. I admit that this was a rather shortsighted thought, but there it was.

The airstrip had been cleared from the jungle two years before by Steve Sheldon, Don Patton, and a team of teenagers from American churches. To build a jungle airstrip like this, you must first fell more than a thousand trees. Then their stumps need to be pulled up, because otherwise the wood will rot in the ground, the earth over the stump will collapse, and some plane will lose its landing gear and perhaps all its passengers. After pulling these thousand or so stumps, some several feet in diameter, you need to fill in the holes left by the extraction. Then you need to make sure the airstrip is as level as it can be without the use of heavy equipment. If you are successful, you conclude this process with a strip thirty feet wide and six hundred to seven hundred yards long. These were roughly the dimensions of the Pirahã strip we were about to land on.

The day we flew in, the grass on the strip was waist high. We had no way of knowing whether there were logs, dogs, pots, or other things in the grass that could damage the aircraft—and us—on landing. Dwayne “buzzed” the strip once and hoped that the Pirahãs would understand, as Steve had tried to explain to them, that they should run out and check the airstrip for dangerous detritus (once a Pirahã house had been built in the middle of the strip and had to be torn down before we could land). Several Pirahãs did then go out and we saw them running off the strip with a small log—small, but enough to flip the plane end-over-end if we had hit it on landing. All turned out well, though, as Dwayne brought us in for a safe, smooth landing.

Finally, when the plane came to a stop, the windless jungle heat and humidity hit me full force. As I exited, squinting and woozy, the Pirahãs surrounded me, chattering loudly, smiling, and pointing with recognition at Dwayne and Don. Don tried to tell the Pirahãs in Portuguese that I wanted to learn their language. In spite of knowing almost no Portuguese, a couple of the men got the idea that I was there to replace Steve Sheldon. Sheldon had also helped them understand my coming by explaining to them in Pirahã, on his last visit, that a short redheaded guy was coming to live with them. He said that I wanted to learn to speak like they did.

As we walked down the path from the airstrip to the village, I was surprised to encounter swamp water up to my knees. Carrying supplies through warm, murky water, not knowing what might bite my feet and legs, was my first experience with the Maici’s flood stage at the end of the rainy season.

The most striking thing I remember about seeing the Pirahãs for the first time was how happy everyone seemed. Smiles decorated every face. Not one person looked sullen or withdrawn, as many do in cross-cultural encounters. People were pointing to things and talking enthusiastically, trying to help me see what they thought I might find interesting—birds flying overhead, hunting paths, huts in the village, puppies. Some men had on caps with the slogans and names of Brazilian politicians, bright shirts and gym shorts received from river traders. The women all wore the same type of dress, with short sleeves, hemmed just above the knee. These dresses had started out with different brightly colored patterns, but the colors were now obscured by a general brown stain from the dirt floors of their huts. Children younger than ten years of age or so ran naked. Everyone was laughing. Most touched me gently as they came up to me, as though I were a new pet. I could not have imagined a warmer welcome. People were telling me their names, though I did not remember most of them.

The first man whose name I did remember was Kóxoí (KO-oE). I saw him crouching in a bright clearing off the path to the right. He was tending something by the side of a fire in the sun. Kóxoí had on ragged gym shorts and wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. He was thin and not particularly muscular. His skin was dark brown and lined like fine leather. His feet were wide, thickly calloused, and powerful-looking. He glanced up at me and called me over to where he was, on a patch of sandy ground, baking hot, where he was singeing the hair off a large rat-like animal. Kóxoí’s face was kind, with a broad smile that took over his

eyes and mouth, welcoming and comforting me on this day of new experiences in a new place. He talked to me pleasantly, though I didn’t understand a single word. In my still nauseous state, the pungent smell of the animal almost gave me dry heaves. The tongue of the creature was hanging across its teeth, tip in the dirt, with blood dripping down it.

I touched myself on the chest and said, “Daniel.” He recognized this as a name and immediately responded by touching his chest and saying his name. Then I pointed at the rodent on the fire.

“Káixihí”
(KYE-i-HEE), he responded to the object of my pointing.

I repeated it back to him immediately (while thinking, Holy twenty-pound rat burger!). Sheldon had told me that the language was tonal, like Chinese, Vietnamese, and hundreds of other languages. This meant that in addition to paying attention to the consonants and vowels, I would need to listen carefully to the pitch on each vowel. I had managed to pronounce my first Pirahã word.

Next, I bent over and picked up a stick. I pointed to it and said, “Stick.”

Kóxoí smiled and said,
“Xií”
(il).

I repeated,
“Xií.”
Then I let it drop and said, “I drop the
xií.
”

Kóxoí looked and thought, then quickly said,
“Xií xi bigí káobíi”
(iI ih bigl KAo Bli). (As I later learned, this literally means “Stick it ground falls,” with the words in that order.)

I repeated this. I pulled out a notepad and pen I had put in my back pocket in Porto Velho just for this reason and wrote these things down, using the International Phonetic Alphabet. I translated the last phrase as “stick falls to the ground” or “you drop the stick.” I then picked up another stick and dropped both sticks at once.

He said,
“Xií hoíhio xi bigí káobíi,”
“Two sticks fall to the ground,” or so I thought at the time. I learned later that this means “A slightly larger quantity (
hoíhio
) of sticks falls to the ground.”

I then picked up a leaf and went through this entire process again. I moved on to other verbs, such as
jump, sit, hit,
and so forth, with Kóxoí serving as my willing and ever more enthusiastic teacher.

I had listened to tapes of the language given to me by Steve Sheldon, and I had seen some short word lists that he had compiled. So I was not completely unfamiliar with the language, even though Sheldon had advised me to ignore his work, since he was unsure of its quality, and though hearing the language was very different indeed from seeing it written.

To test my ability to hear the tones of the language, I asked for some words that I knew to be distinguished mainly by tone. I asked for the word for
knife.

“
Kaháíxíoi
” (ka-HAI-I-oi), he said.

And then the word for
arrow shaft.

“
Kahaixíoi
” (ka-hai-I-oi), he answered as I pointed at the shaft of the arrow at the side of his hut.

The field linguistics classes I had taken with SIL before coming to Brazil were very good, and I had found a talent for linguistics that I did not realize I had. Within an hour of working with Kóxoí and others (as interested Pirahãs surrounded us), I had confirmed earlier findings by Sheldon and his predecessor, Arlo Heinrichs, that there were only eleven or so phonemes in Pirahã, that the basic organization of their sentences was SOV (subject, object, verb)—the most common ordering among the world’s languages—and that their verbs were very complicated (now I know that each Pirahã verb form has at least 65,000 possible forms). I grew less worried about the situation. I could do this!

I
n addition to learning the language, I wanted to learn about the culture of the people. I looked first at the spatial layout of the houses. The village arrangement seemed to make little sense at first. There were huts clustered in different places along the path from the airstrip to Steve Sheldon’s old home, now mine. Eventually, though, I realized that all the huts were on the side of the path closer to the river. And they all had views of the river from bend to bend. They were built close to the riverbank, none more than twenty paces from it, and parallel to it lengthwise. Jungle and undergrowth surrounded every home. There was a total of about ten huts. Brothers lived near brothers in this community (in other villages, I later learned, sisters lived near sisters, and in some villages there didn’t seem to be any obvious kinship pattern of settlement).

After unloading our supplies, Don and I began to clean a small space in Sheldon’s storeroom for our small pile of supplies (cooking oil, dried soup, canned corned beef, instant coffee, some salted crackers, a loaf of bread, some rice and beans). We walked with Dwayne and his father back to the plane after they had taken pictures and looked around. Don and I waved as they took off. The Pirahãs screamed with delight when the plane lifted up, all shouting, “
Gahióo xibipíío xisitoáopí”
(The airplane just left vertically)!

It was about two in the afternoon. And I felt for the first time the surge of energy and sense of adventure that comes naturally on the Maici with the Pirahãs. Don went to put Steve’s imported Sears & Roebuck fishing boat (a wide, stable, aluminum boat with a cargo capacity of nearly one ton) into the river and test the outboard engine. I sat down in the middle of a group of Pirahã men in the front room of Sheldon’s house, which was built like a Pirahã house, though larger. It was raised on stilts and had only half walls—no doors, no privacy, except in the bedroom for the children and in the storeroom. I got out my pad and pencil to continue language learning. Each man looked fit, lean, and hard—just muscle, bone, and gristle. They were all smiling broadly, and it seemed almost as if they were trying to outdo one another in their expressions of happiness around me. I repeated my name, Daniel, several times. One of the men, Kaaboogí, stood up after huddling with the others and addressed me in very rudimentary Portuguese:
“Pirahã chamar você Xoogiái”
(The Pirahãs will call you OO-gi-Ai). I had received my Pirahã name.