happy. I stand on the porch looking out into the jungles, an empty beer bottle dangling between my fingers. Suddenly, every single light in the village clicks off. The whir of the town’s only generator spins down to silence and is replaced by the stinging buzz of insects. The power is gone for the night. Even the preacher has called it quits. There’s an immediacy to the stillness that’s unnerving. I use a headlamp to navigate back to my room and drift off to sleep in the pitch-black night.
Up before the sun (and well before the generator), we pack quietly and hit the road—or what’s left of it. By mid-morning we finally arrive in Nokon Village. We’re totally off the grid now. There’s no power, no running water, and only tribal law. Our jeeps are immediately swamped by machete-carrying locals who greet us warmly and welcome us to the village. Some of the children seem scared; no doubt they haven’t seen many “dim dims,” or white people, in these parts.
Steve acts as a vital go-between, since he can speak the native Tok Pisin, a pidgin English. For those who have never had the confused pleasure of encountering this hand-me-down language, it is genuinely bizarre. It consists largely of English words picked up by laborers and then repurposed throughout the Pacific as a unique language. Though the vocabulary sounds familiar, without an understanding of pidgin idioms, it’s gibberish. For instance, a helicopter is called a “Mixmaster belong ’em Jesus.” A “Mixmaster” is a blender with spinning blades and “belong ’em Jesus” refers to the fact that these aircraft seemingly appear from the heavens. To ask someone’s age one would say, “How many Christmas you?” To move quickly is to “hariup” (hurry up). A “Do not disturb” sign would read “Yu no ken kam insait” (You cannot come inside). While Steve is translating, a local picks up a pair of our binoculars and calls them “glasses belong ’em kaptin,” a reference to colonial sailors from centuries past. In short, the language is bonkers.
I try to follow along, but half the time it sounds like they’re drunk or talking shit about me.
We ask to speak to the village chief, who then comes loping out of a nearby grass hut. A stocky, white-haired old man with his mouth stained bright red and naturally, he’s wearing a decades-old Donkey Kong baseball cap. Not exactly Hiawatha. Still, he’s the elder of the community, and his favor is critical to our expedition. In PNG, even the elected officials defer to these traditional leaders. And considering the fifty machetes within our twenty-foot radius, if the boss here doesn’t approve of our presence, we’ll be leaving quickly. Fortunately, he’s more than happy to see us, spitting a huge wad of saliva on the ground to smile broadly with his few remaining teeth. He leads us into the main village, a scattered collection of huts along a sandy beach. We sit with the villagers and discuss the mysterious sightings.
For years, people here have seen what we would call a mermaid, though the Papuans refer to it as a “Ri.” Specifically, they see a figure bobbing at the surface of the water, which then descends beneath the waves. When pressed to actually describe the creature, however, the witnesses defer to the generic image of a beautiful nymph. The interviews illuminate one of the critical lessons learned while making Destination Truth : that truth itself is relative. Our Western obsession with objectivity and demonstrable evidence holds little sway in certain cultures. Places like Papua New Guinea have sliding scales when it comes to the value and interpretation of events. In this community, oral tradition is sacrosanct, and a storyteller’s narrative is true regardless of whether it’s factual. There’s little need for empirical evidence. It’s simply not a part of their belief system.
We hear a story about a man in possession of mermaid bones that (unsurprisingly) turns out to be
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