FLASHBACK - Scan the Sky for Pterodactyls

Landing at the Sentani airport put right all that my 12 hours in Bali had made wrong. The mountains were mossy green and the sky was a brilliant blue; the airport buildings were hut-looking; I think I saw a cow, but I can’t remember. It was beautiful, and natural, and so different from any place that I had ever been that I really didn’t have a frame of reference within which to place it. It was disconcerting, but gloriously so.

In order to avoid confusion, I’m going to go ahead and give a quick synopsis of everywhere I went on Papua.
Sentani: the city where the Wileys live, and where I spent the majority of my time.
Wamena: The largest city in the world solely supported by air, it’s up in the mountains in the interior of Papua.
Ibole: A small village outside of Wamena.

Back to the story. After a few hours’ delay, I caught the 30-minute flight from Sentani to Wamena, and was met on the Tarmac by Wally Wiley, the father of my college friend Jared, who would be coming in a few days. Before even going into the airport, Wally ushered me over to the MAF hanger, and we got onto a small 5-man plane for a 15 minute flight into Ibole.

This plane, though, was unlike anything I had ever been on. First off, it was small. It was the kind of plane that you see Pterodactyls attacking in those low-budget Sci-Fi specials, or falling in love with in those equally low-budget late-night Cinemax specials. Most disturbing, though, was that if some prehistoric monster were to show up, it would probably do so in some place like Papua. It didn’t help matters that there was a machete stored in the pilot-side door. I never told anyone, but I definitely saw it. Sure, it’s there for jungle survival in the case of emergency landing, but I couldn’t shake the image of me trying to fend off a flying dinosaur with a glorified bread knife. Not even my over-inflated ego could conjure up a good ending to that one.

When we landed, I was met by Jacinda, who was Jared’s older sister, and a friend that I had not seen in several years. Again, by this time, the past 96 hours had been virtually bed-less. Airplane sleep doesn’t count for much, and I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t hallucinating. It was already so unbelievable, what would the difference be? Old friends showing up from nowhere? Check. I couldn’t believe it. Turns out that she and her husband were there for another week, and no one (ahem… Jared) told me.

We stayed with the Adams, a second-generation missionary family who lived in a beautiful wooden house on the side of the mountain. Todd Adams had just built a hydroelectric turbine for the nearby stream, so they were no longer dependent on a generator. They had an ingenious bucket shower system that used water from a nearby spring. It was that kind of a missionary family. The real kind. I was in awe, and felt the need to constantly qualify my own missionary experience. “Yes, we were missionaries, but … we had electricity. Yeah, my parents started a church, but … no one ever axed any of our congregants in the back of neck because they were Christians.” You know, those kinds of qualifications.

Even dinner was something out of a Spaghetti Western. 15 of us, from 2 year old Bo Adams to the more venerable Virgil Adams, were all crowded around a single long wooden table laden with that hearty American fare that could clog an artery by just being glanced at. I’ve never had a big family, but this is what I would imagine it should be like; the jostling, the multiple conversations, “Drink the orange juice, Bo, it’s delicious! -- But I don’t want delicious!”, the elbows, the passing, the empty baskets of bread, the strong coffee, the way our held hands and bowed heads created a solid ring of reverence for the food that seemed even more miraculous for being eaten on a mountainside, all these things seemed right and made me nostalgic for something I’d never known before.