True short tales of absurd things that have happened to me around the world

Cairns, Australia

Five Australians and four Americans walk into the rainforest one night bearing two flashlights*, four military-grade glowsticks, two backpacks full of tinnies, and eight pairs of shoes. The mission? To find one of the world’s most venemous snakes. The guy walking barefoot into the rainforest swears he saw one last night, choking to death while trying to swallow a poisonous toad. Excellent.

Somehow I’m lucky enough to start out with a flashlight. This ain’t my first rodeo with the Australian rainforest, so I fall into line behind someone who outgrew me by a good 20 cm and will unwittingly act as my own personal golden-orb-spider-web destroyer. A superhero in disgusting silken cape.

There are few things as beautiful as a nighttime rainforest soundscape. So many wingbeats and rustles. The calls of a thousand-critter conversation. Birds whose cries sound like screaming women. And of course actual screaming women, who realized a little too late that they’d just walked into the rainforest at night. I hand over my flashlight and grab a glowstick, although in the pitch black it does more to blind me than it does to to light the slick path in front of me. I shield its green glow with both hands – Luke I am your cousin – and hover a foot from the ground, determined not to step on anything that slithers. The fact that this posture brings my face and hands closer to any bitey things on the ground apparently escapes me. Somewhere over my left shoulder I can hear a family of 400-pound wild boar rooting around in the undergrowth.

We never do find a King snake, to our immense disappointment and relief, and nothing is killed except the beer. At the end of the excursion we leave our barefoot forest guide in the middle of nowhere so he can either string up his hammock and go to sleep, or to disappear and find a new group of unsuspecting youths to lure into the midnight rainforest. Who knows.

*This was in 2007, before phone flashlights were a thing

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Somewhere outside Rotterdam, the Netherlands

I’m 100 kilometers deep into a bicycle dayride through Zeeland, and the sun is sinking fast at my back. I have started beelining across the endless pancake farmlands to reach Rotterdam before dark, and I’m starting to wonder whose harebrained idea this was in the first place. The day had begun so leisurely! At first I’d stopped every few miles to beachcomb across the eerily wide beach. I’d lolligagged across the famous Dutch waterworks that literally keep the North Sea out of the Netherlands. It was only after I noticed that the usually-shy Dutch sun was beginning to burn me as it crossed over into the afternoon sky that I’d begun to pick up speed.

I’m paused at a trailside map to get my bearings when a stranger on a bike pulls up beside me. He points in the direction we’re facing and asks in Dutch: “Is this the way to Rotterdam?” Now I don’t actually speak Dutch, but hearing something like “garlbe bragoo da la Rotterdam?” has a pretty unmistakable ring to it. So I helpfully decided to answer “yes.” Unfortunately, in my sun-cooked brain, all the languages I’ve ever learned have been simmered into a useless alphabet soup.

I like to think I have a pretty good grasp of English, and most Dutch also speak it fluently. I have a decent understanding of German, which most Dutch also decently understand. Either of these choices would have been fine. Meanwhile, neither I nor most Dutch are terribly familiar with Spanish. So naturally, the response that came out of my (clearly not-Spanish) mouth was “Si, dale.” While I was still processing how my wires had gotten so crossed over a simple response, he laughed and rode away. As he went, he tossed a “Xièxie!” over his shoulder. ‘Thanks,’ the Dutch guy had said…in Chinese.

The world is a silly place, inhabited by very silly people.

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Hot Water Beach, New Zealand

You know the sense of disorientation when you shift to a more comfortable position and are just about to discover that your foot is dead asleep? In that split second before the pins and needles attack, when you know something is off but haven’t quite put your finger on it yet? Well this was almost, but not quite, totally unlike that.

There are a lot of warning signs I should be paying attention to. The bank of steam rising from the otherwise calm and sunny beach, for one. The volcanic boulders hunkered down in the mist. The literal skull-and-crossbones staring at me from a sign a little ways down the beach. But I just stand there, watching the other early risers gingerly digging their personal hot tubs into the sand with full-sized shovels.

At any rate, it finally hits me like a sack of hot lava. My feet are boiling. To be more scientific, while I was standing around rubbernecking, I’d also been sinking into a subterranean pool of volcanically-heated quicksand. To be less scientific, AAAAHHH. I look down and realize the beach has already gobbled me up to the ankle. My childhood nightmare of being swallowed by quicksand (thanks, 90s TV) is becoming reality, and now it’s hot, too?! I yank myself free and try to sprint to the edge of the Pacific, but considering it’s quicksand, this obviously doesn’t go exactly as planned. Like some hellish Wile E. Coyote cartoon, I was sinking vertically almost as fast as I could run horizontally. And unlike sun-heated sand where the heat is most intense at the surface, the deeper I sank, the hotter the sand became.

Only after I crash into the surf can I calm down and realize the warm water is really quite pleasant. But still, lesson learned: volcanoes aren’t toys.

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Isle Royale, USA

Look, everyone has irrational fears, right? Fear of things that can’t physically hurt you, yet they still cause the same level of panic as being trapped in a cage with a starving lion. Maybe it’s public speaking, or butterflies, or clowns, or using the telephone to actually talk with someone (ugh). My point is we’re all a little weird, so don’t judge what I’m about to tell you too harshly.

It’s a beautiful late summer day with just a hint of breeze, and we’re out canoeing across one of Isle Royale’s unspoilt bays. No other sign of humanity exists outside our family of four and our two shiny canoes bobbing gently on the waves. Loons sing in the distance. A raft of ducks paddles by. It’s so calm, and so at odds with my heartrate, which is through the roof. What do I fear? Not the cold water, nor the birds, nor the solitude. Oh, no. I fear something much worse: the very thing we are out here trying to find.

A shipwreck.

Yep, I am petrified of shipwrecks. Not of being in one, mind you. I was a competitive swimmer in high school, and deep water itself has never bothered me. No: I am afraid of the wrecks. All that twisted metal, just silently lurking down there on the lakebed, doing whatever it is they do. To be clear, I am terrified of all human-origin things underwater, not only the slightly more rational ones whose destruction may have caused human death. Seeing buoy chains while snorkeling causes me to hyperventilate (which is extra fun through a snorkel). Jumping off a sailboat and seeing the keel underneath makes my muscles lock up. Surely there’s some deep psychosis at work here, but I’ve never managed to figure it out.

I’m not about to work it out today either, what with my adrenaline surging. Three pairs of eyes are looking down into the glassy water, searching for some visible bit of an old shipwreck that lies under just a few meters of water. My one pair of eyes is stubbornly ignoring every square inch of the lake, which is especially hard when you’re supposed to be steering the canoe. My brother sits in front calling out a combination of navigational cues and taunts about my obvious terror as he scans the lakefloor. Every accidental bang of my flailing paddle hitting the side of the canoe makes me jump.

I want to say we never found anything, but it’s entirely possible we did, and my subconscious just buried the memory deep in the thought-basement to haunt me another day. It sure would explain a lot.