When I was a young child, my family lived in one of the highlands provinces of our Melanesian country. Most of my parents’ colleagues lived one province over from us, near the central town of another mountain valley, the same one where I would spend my middle and high school years. There was one paved road between these two areas, known as the Highlands Highway. The drive from where we were living to the location of my parents’ quarterly meetings with their broader team took about two and a half hours and dropped the traveler’s elevation by about 1,500 ft.
The Highlands Highway is a storied piece of road for a reason. It winds around sharp ridges covered in misty mountain rainforest, over rivers that roar out of steep cuts in the mountainsides, and through valleys populated by enemy tribal groups regularly involved in blood feuds. On a given trip you might encounter a tribal, criminal, or police roadblock, a portion of the road missing because of a landslide, or a free-for-all as local villagers help themselves to the goods contained inside a tractor-trailer that has broken down or tipped over. Almost always, someone in your vehicle is going to get sick.
It was the morning of December 26th, the early ’90s, and I was a happy three-year-old sporting rubber boots and a curly mullet. I was happy because it was the day after Christmas and we had all received big plush teddy bears as gifts. These were hanging out in the back seat of our white ’80s Toyota Hilux pickup with my two older brothers. I was sitting on my mom’s lap in the front passenger seat, presumably enjoying the drive – until the hairpin turns started churning up my stomach.
My mom, ever practical in times like this, told me to stick my head out the window to throw up if I was feeling sick. My dad just kept on driving as I stuck my head out into the chilly wind, hoping that the wave of nausea would pass. It didn’t, and I began losing my breakfast. In later years, my brothers and I discovered that we all have distinct styles of throwing up. They would chuckle at mine, claiming that it’s like someone just turns on and turns off a faucet. The good side of this is that once I’m done, I’m done, and I can return to whatever I was doing previously with minimal bother. “You just threw up? You carry it well, brother,” as a fellow pastor would one day tell me. So, this particular bout of carsickness should have been over and done without too much of a story.
However, what my mom and I didn’t know was that one of my big brothers, the middle one, already had his head stuck out the back window. He may have been on the lookout for the local children who wait at the side of the road, selling small wreaths made of mountain flowers and ferns. Well, to his horror, he was suddenly hit in the face with his little brother’s vomit. So, he did what any six-year-old with a bad gag reflex would do in this situation. He pulled his head back into the cab and threw up all over the back seat, all over the new teddy bears. Our oldest brother, witnessing this carnage, couldn’t contain himself either and added to the horror by also vomiting all over the back seat.
What followed must have involved a lot of yelling as my dad rushed to find a spot to pull over and my mom tried in futility to contain the chain reaction happening among her children. Sadly, the teddy bears did not survive this experience. I assume they were left on the side of the highlands highway, perhaps to be carried off by some jungle animal.
The last thing I remember is driving into the main market of our destination town, a large area teeming with local people there to buy and sell garden produce. I was sitting in the back seat with my brothers – all three of us wearing nothing but our whitey-tighties, our underwear. We must have either been parked or were stuck in bad traffic because we were at a standstill and surrounded by lots of highlanders staring and smiling. The locals tended to stare as it was, but this time we especially felt it, like we were in one of those dreams where you are wearing no pants, but this time it’s come true in real life. I remember really wishing that we had tinted windows.
Now, we are not usually in full control of ourselves when we are about to throw up. But I did learn that day that if you are in a moving vehicle and about to lose your breakfast, it’s best to look behind you. If you do, you just might spare your brother from a rather traumatizing experience, spare your parents from one of the worst clean-up jobs they’ve ever been handed – and spare your new teddy bears also.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 