1. Fish Farming (draft)

Kurt found the shallow-bottomed canoe awkward. Sitting down, he feared a wrong move would capsize it, and kneeling hurt his hips and ankles. And why wasn’t the paddle wider? Each effort of sweeping it through the water led to a pitiful amount of forward propulsion.  

When a local spotted him in the canoe, they laughed. That was expected. But Kurt felt good that Budi trusted him to drop the fish feed into the cages. Kurt did this every morning, happy to have some physical activity. To further fight the creep of sloth, after a light breakfast of banana, papaya, and coffee, he crossed the road and ran up the jungle-covered caldera wall until the path became steep and slippery. Along with the fruit, this regime stopped the constipation caused by a rice-heavy diet and the jitters from too much coffee.

Budi complained about how much water Kurt drank. He bought ten-litre bottles of drinking water in town and Kurt downed half a bottle daily. Kurt didn’t trust boiled tap water, not even for coffee. Budi would bring three or four bottles back on his scooter whenever he made the trip to town. Kurt wondered why he didn’t get water delivered.

One morning, about a month after he’d arrived, Kurt decided to improve the harmony of their near cohabitation – they had separate huts but shared the kitchen and dining area – by taking on the responsibility of buying water. He set out for town at seven. Budi had already left to pick up his kids and take them to school. The kids lived in a house with their mother. Kurt had no idea where the house was. Budi said his wife travelled for work. But Budi always slept in his hut by the lakeside. Kurt assumed a grandparent was in charge of the kids when needed. Later when he left the lake, Kurt wished he’d asked more questions.

Kurt marched down the road which circumvented the lake, sweating in the thirty-degree-plus heat. Motorbikes whizzed by, close and fast. Kurt didn’t have a scooter. Neither did he want one even though Indonesia was set up for motorbikes. He’d heard horror stories about the number of crashes that happened. The three-kilometre walk to town featured jungle-covered hills on one side of the road, and the lake on the other. A narrow stretch of tarmac at its best moments, the road turned dusty through a couple of gritty villages with markets full of old ladies taking to chicken carcasses with cleavers.

The town had five thousand people, five mosques, and two ‘super’ markets. He walked along the main street until he found somewhere suitable to drink coffee. Air conditioning was out of the question but he found a place with decent fans.

At eleven o’clock, he decided on an early lunch at one of the dozen Nasi Padang restaurants with dishes displayed in the front window. The waiter took ten small bowls and spooned something different into each from the dishes in the window. He laid the bowls out on Kurt’s table, as well as a large helping of rice. Kurt would be charged according to how many of the bowls he sampled. In a good mood, he took a photo of this set up and sent it to his mother. The waiters spotted him with the camera and wanted a selfie. He normally wasn’t a fan of this getting a photo with a foreigner but he obliged. The waiters, one with a bung eye, the other horse teeth, both in blue jackets were likeable.

Kurt ate beef rendang, chilli eggplant, and kangkung water spinach. He went easy on the rice, mindful of constipation and not eating too many carbs. 

For dessert, he had es cendol ampiang durian from a street cart. This was a glass of sago—a starchy substance made from tropical palm, sticky rice, durian flesh, brown sugar, and ice cubes. Addictive stuff. Not fancying walking back carrying two ten-litre bottles, Kurt waited half an hour inside a bus at the terminal before it filled up with passengers and left.

Apart from an irregular bus service, public transport around the lake took the form of vans or cars called opolets. On his second water-buying mission, which didn’t happen as quickly as Budi would’ve liked, Kurt waved down an opolet. Kurt didn’t speak much Indonesian but he understood that the driver, a man of about forty-five, wanted him to go to his house for dinner one day. Kurt politely exchanged phone numbers.

‘Careful,’ Budi said when told about the incident. ‘This guy wants to set you up with his daughter. Don’t marry a Minankabau woman, Kurt. This is a matriarchal society and she’ll take ownership of your share of the fish.’

‘I’d have to convert to Islam too, right?’

‘Of course.’

“OK, I’m out.’

Budi laughed, he wasn’t sensitive about the faith.

‘Even if they aren’t trying to marry you, they’ll be thinking about what they can get from you. Society is like that now. Under Suharto, people had more values. The New Order Government gave us stability.’

How many men and women around the world looked back fondly on the time when their country had an authoritarian government? Millions, if not billions.

In a calculated move to stop the Australian making potentially dangerous social ties, Budi told Kurt he could get him a girl to give him boom boom to come down from Bukittinggi if he needed it.

“Not needed, for the time being,” Kurt told him.

With four million, the Minangkabau people in West Sumatra formed the largest matrilineal society in the world. Property and the family name got passed from mother to daughter. Perhaps Kurt should have insisted on meeting Budi’s wife: his real business partner. If she wanted Budi to get out of the fish farming business, could he do anything about it? With mosques everywhere and all the women wearing jilbabs, the Minangkabau took Islam seriously—in public, at least. Kurt wondered how a society could be both matriarchal and Muslim. He never got the time to find that out. Again he should have asked more questions.

Budi told Kurt the lake had once been a happening tourist spot. Before 9/11, the Bali bombing, and the tsunami, Sumatra had been on the backpacker banana pancake trail. This was a route through Asia that had its spiritual origin in the hippie trail overland to Asia from Europe popular in the 70s. While the hippie trail centred around smoking hash in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the banana pancake trail focused on places in Indochina that Lonely Planet guidebooks thought worthy in the 90s and early 2000s.  

Back in the 90s, Budi ran a bar by the lake with another Australian. Good times, filled with magic mushrooms and foreign women. The Australian died of a heart attack in 2000. Budi tried to keep the party going but ended up having a minor stroke. He suspected the mushrooms and booze caused it, and told Kurt he still had problems with his short-term memory. The rest of the tourist businesses by the lake were killed off by the disasters already mentioned. Bali, where the actual bombings took place, bounced back quickly. Some islands have all the luck.

“Kurt, you must tell tourists to come here online. We can paint the huts, make them look good. Make banana pancakes. Hire motorbikes out.” Budi didn’t have a laptop, and neither did Kurt. Internet access via cell phone networks was patchy. Attracting tourists again seemed a fantasy. Kurt had come here to farm fish because Budi said it was a sure earner. Kurt wanted a quiet life, he didn’t want to get into tourism. Nothing to do with customer service ever again, he told himself. Apart from Budi’s hut and his own there were two others—they were open to tourists. If they ever came. Budi’s hut was more of a house—with a kitchen with two gas burners and a kettle, and a covered patio area with a view of the lake.

If bloody tourists did come, Kurt’s fantasy was to lead them up the crater wall to find Rafflesia Arnoldii, the largest flower in the world. It smelt of rotten meat. Kurt hadn’t seen one yet, but Budi told him he’d show him one when they were in season. Kurt could take people on tours to see the flowers and gibbons—creatures he’d heard on his jungle runs but again not seen yet. He could point out the giant orb spiders weaving their webs and the carnivorous pitcher plants, trumpet-shaped killers emitting smells to attract bugs to land on their slippery bells. The unfortunate insects fall into the plant’s liquid depths to get slowly digested. Kurt knew in his heart that even if he had the opportunity to be a tour guide, he’d turn it down. From his teaching days he knew he didn’t like the pressure of having to entertain an audience.

Being a teacher or tour guide suited a talker. He couldn’t stand talkers. He’d worked with many. Your natural talker was a phenomenon of nature. Their company could be interesting at first, as the lack of conscious effort to produce a cascade of words inspires awe. Sentences flow out like punch combinations by a boxer at the top of their form. After ten minutes your talker begins to repeat themselves, but rather than running out of steam, they pick up the pace and find different combinations of words to make the same point over and over. A ten-minute story turns into a three-hour odyssey. And after a day’s teaching or guiding, they go home energised. For other kinds of personalities like Kurt’s, there is a lurking gloom from the knowledge the same crap needs to be repeated the next day. However, the talker is in heaven knowing tomorrow they’ll get to perform again and get paid for it.

Fish farming wasn’t a fantasy. Budi and Kurt’s first harvest turned out to be a winner. They cut the cages loose from their moorings, tied them to the canoe, and dragged them to shore. In preparation, they’d laid out forty shallow plastic buckets on the muddy ground of the paddy and filled them with water. The slippery job of transferring live fish from the cages to the buckets needed to be done quickly. Many fish jumped or fell into the paddy and had to be rinsed off. With this step of the process completed, Budi disappeared on his motorbike, and Kurt stayed by the buckets, making sure there were no escapees. Half an hour later, Budi returned in a borrowed truck, into which they loaded the buckets of fish.

At the market in town, most of the harvest got hit on the head and put on ice for transport further afield. At least that’s what Kurt imagined what happened. He didn’t get into the truck and head to town with Budi. Showing his white face at the market would be a hindrance to getting a good price. As promised, Budi came back with a nice profit. Given the largest Indonesian note of 100,00 rupiah was about eight US dollars, it looked like he’d robbed a bank.

“They have a lot of cash on hand at the market,” Kurt said.

“Of course, people don’t like doing bank transfers here.”

That made sense. Avoiding taxes no doubt. But did they keep their money in rupiahs? Surely that was foolish. A devaluing currency.

“Where are you going to put the money?”

“In the bank of course.” Budi rolled his eyes. His former foreign business party, the fat Aussie, had been more astute.

They reinvested. Eight cages this time. They needed to borrow, but Budi’s credit was good. They made a gentleman’s agreement that Kurt’d take on half the debt. To make Budi even happier, Kurt agreed to a buffalo calf. Not that Budi needed Kurt’s go-ahead. Kurt lacked an in-depth knowledge of the culture he found himself surrounded by but he knew buffalo were important in Indonesia as a symbol of wealth and strength.

After the effort of the harvest and the emotion of seeing the bundles of cash, Kurt felt pleasantly tired. He sat on his bed in his hut studying a photo he’d taken out on the road five minutes before. The picture showed an unkempt rice paddy backed by palm trees standing out against the lake. Between the trees bamboo matrices floated on the lake’s surface. Fish cages— empty for now and not visible in the photo—rested below. At the top of the image, the volcanic walls surrounding the lake broke open at one point creating an opening for the red-orange evening sky. This was Kurt’s world now.  

When the rains began in November, the jungle path quickly turned into un-run-on-able mud. That was no big deal, Kurt replaced his runs with push-ups and squats. The thunder storms at the start of the new year came accompanied by rain much stronger than Kurt had seen during flood season in Jakarta. The roof of his hut started leaking. The paddies flooded. With water up to his knees and the buffalo calf’s neck, he considered untethering her and pulling her to the road. But then the rain stopped and they had two fine and still days. Then the winds came, howling around the lakeside palm trees. This unsettled him, but he enjoyed finally seeing some movement on the surface of the glassy lake.

As Kurt slept, evil was doing its work in the depths of the lake. In a process known as upwelling, the wind forced the denser water thick with fish carcasses and uneaten feed up from the depths. This sludgy water reaching the surface caused the deoxygenation of the lake. In addition to this, the toxic sulphur at the bottom lake had been disturbed.

Kurt woke to a calm morning. He took his coffee down to the edge of the lake. Before he took his first sip, he noticed a number of dead fish in the water lapping the lakeshore. He counted thirty bodies and then stopped. He hadn’t seen this before but decided not to panic. Budi didn’t put in an appearance for the entire day. Kurt had a sinking feeling.

Over the next few days the surface of the lake turned white. Fish belly white. It took time for bacterial decomposition to fill all the bodies of the thousands of tonnes of dead fish in the lake with enough air for them to float.  Dead fish float in water because decomposition fills the fish’s gut with buoyant gases. The reason fish typically go “belly up” is because the spine of the fish is more dense than its belly. But why had the storm killed them all? 

He didn’t want to speak to Budi and it looked like the feeling was mutual. But eventually they had to face up to what’d happened.

After they calculated their losses, Kurt had enough to pay his debts, a plane ticket to Jakarta, and maybe two weeks’ food and accommodation there. That was ample time to find a teaching job. Square one.

Searching online, Kurt found one article in English mass fish death in the lake six years earlier. The phenomenon was variously blamed on global warming and overfishing. Budi had never talked about storms and sulphur in the water. An optimist often leaves certain eventualities out.

“Really we needed more to start with—business like this ten year time period up and down but make money in the end.”

All well and good, it would have been better to know this at the beginning. But when you’ve been in a country for five minutes and don’t know the language can you really blame the locals for not filling you in on all your areas of ignorance? Perhaps yes on the ones which would lead to potential financial ruin. But Kurt couldn’t be angry with Budi. In fact he wanted to come back with more money and start fish farming again. It was better than the alternative. One alternative? There were many alternatives but Kurt couldn’t or wouldn’t see that. Pronouncing the five-syllable name of the lake in Indonesian had given Kurt trouble—but now he had another name for it, one easy to say: Sulphur Lake.