John Long - Stories from the Dirt: Indiscretions of an Adventure Junkie

Stories

from the

Dirt

Indiscretions of an Adventure Junkie

John Long

Guilford, Connecticut

An imprint of Globe Pequot

Falcon and FalconGuides are registered trademarks and Make Adventure Your Story is a trademark of Rowman & Littlefield.

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2017 John Long

Cover design by Diana Nuhn

Front cover photo iStock.com/vovik_mar; back cover photo by Dean Fidelman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-4930-3095-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4930-3096-5 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Authors Note

M ost of these stories were written (over 3 decades) for magazines or journals, meaning they were all one-offs. They were never written to be of a piece. With so many miscellaneous parts, it made sense to order them in some way. But instead of starting at the beginning, Ive put most of the last ones I wrote up front. That way instead of getting tired and jaded, we get younger and more reckless as we go. Andale, pues!

Foreword

Swimming for It

By Jeff Jackson

J ohn Long and Dwight Brooks were somewhere deep in the interior of Papua New Guinea talking to an official named Tsigayaptwektago Sorari who theyd found by reading the disciplinary reports in the Record Bureau in southwest Enga. As they plied him with questions, Sorari spun out a fantastic story (Bikpela Hol, p. 130) about a huge cave that was home to a 1,000-foot serpent. The site was a 17-day march, Sorari explained, adding that the people along the way were possessed by evil bush spirits.

It was the mid-1980s and Long was working as a producer for the TV show The Guinness Book of World Records , dreaming up mad world-record stunts like the longest Tyrolean traverse, the highest BASE jump, longest rappel, etc. Not only did he concoct these exploits, but sometimes he pulled them off himself. This trip to the unexplored Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea was a scouting mission. So, propelled by his own gonzo-adventure ethic and... well... because it actually was his job, he and Brooks enlisted the help of two local boys and set out for the cave with the giant snake.

Fourteen days later, they hacked through the last bit of undergrowth and arrived at a limestone cliff ripped by a cavern. Undeterred by the proverbial snake, they waded down into the passage and followed it for six hours until it funneled into a pool of standing water that disappeared into a rock wall.

Well swim for it, Brooks said.

Swim for what?

When it comes to writing adventure-travel narrative nobodyand I mean nobodycan do it like John Long. For one thing, nobody got as far out there as Long. For a quarter century Largo (Longs nickname) charged hard, establishing the worlds hardest rock climbs, exploring jungles, and even finding his way to the North Pole.

But its not just his prowess as an adventurer that sets Long apart. Hes a darn good writer, too, with a one-of-a-kind styletight prose with spirited verbs and stories that seem to pick the reader up and transport her to someplace entirely other.

I had the pleasure of discovering Longs writing in the late 1970s and for a long time his book of collected stories, Gorilla Monsoon , was something of a hybrid writing manual cum Bible to me. I read and reread stories, underlined passages and stole from it all I could steal on my way to becoming a writer myself. You could say Gorilla Monsoon changed my life. Years passed and then, with the kismet of a John Long story, this book, Stories from the Dirt , an updated collection of Longs stories, landed in my hands to edit.

I glanced through the table of contents. Some of the stories were old favorites, some were brand new. There was only one thing to do. Like Brooks and Long in the mythical cave in New Guinea, I took a deep breath, and dove inas should you.

The Ride

W e pulled into Del Rio at high noon, mummified by dry heat till another Talon fighter jet streaked in from nearby Laughlin Air Force Base and startled us back to life. We came for the annual George Paul Memorial Bull Riding challenge, The Toughest Rough Stock Event in Tarnation, according to promotional flyers tacked around the Texas border town. The promo fliers, now collectors items, were Lone Star reboots of the Return of Godzilla movie poster, where the monster, with glassy eyes bugging and giant teeth barred, clawed air swarming with squadrons of Japanese fighter planes. The Del Rio flyer had swapped out the monster for a fire-breathing Brahma bull, with supersonic Talons jetting between its horns.

Many champions, past and present, were there in Del Rio, including the current points leader out of Henrietta, a five-time world all-around champ and the only man on the circuit to ride each rough stock event: bareback, saddle broncs, and bulls. But wed come to shoot Jaime Legs Maldonado for Telemundo , a Spanish-language TV channel that I occasionally worked for in the late 1980s.

Back then, Legs was one of the few Mexican Americans on the pro rodeo circuit. Whenever a rodeo hit Texas, Arizona, or New Mexico, or wherever there were other Mexicans, they all turned out to watch Legs ride. Only 24, Legs labored to milk high scores out of pedestrian bulls. But on rank stock, where even the best hoped only to stay on board for 8 seconds (a qualified ride) and to escape without bleeding, Legs shone.

The long-forgotten Telemundo show was an early iteration of the Bulls Only rodeos that, 3 decades later, would pack venues from Madison Square Garden to the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Shortly after the Del Rio event, twenty-one cowboys gathered in a hotel room in Scottsdale, Arizona, and threw $1,000 each into a collective kitty to fund the start of a pro bull riding circuit. If you were one of the original investors in Professional Bull Riders, Inc., your seed money is now worth over $4 million in a sport broadcast into more than half a billion households in fifty nations and territories worldwide. But this was 30 years ago, when the overall winner took home a silver buckle and $2,500 cash money, and when bull riding clips were used as filler on late night cable, between cooking shows and Bonanza reruns.

As the writer on a proposed documentary on Legs (which never came off), I had zero qualifications, having never seen a rodeo. My grade-school friend, director Ruben Amaro, gave me a 3-hour crash course on Legs, Del Rio, and bull ridingthe worlds most dangerous organized sportduring the flight down from L.A. Brazilian riders were climbing up the world standings, said Ruben, complaining that the sport was getting outsourced. But what I saw was rawhide (American) all the way.

Most of the crowd had spent the day just over the border, in Ciudad Acua, and many had a load on by the time the rodeo kicked off. When the stadium lights clicked on, the sun guttered on the horizon like an open wound. It was dusty and heat waves rippled off the blind above the bleachers. A water truck rolled through the arena and dampened the dirt, then made a second pass with one hose turned on the stands where men stood bare-chested with brown reservoir water gushing over them and into their open mouths and blowing the hats off their heads. Then the announcer, who went by the stage name of Ferris Irons, shuffled around the arena with a wireless microphone, and over a John Philip Sousa march blaring out of the P.A., in a drawl thick as linseed oil, gave a speech about these great U-nited States.