ROBERT ONOPA

CAMPING IN THE BIOSPHERE RESERVE

 *
Bob gets much of his inspiration from his Hawaiian home. He says that the idea
for "Camping in the Biosphere" came from "the swarm-like rise in rescue
helicopter traffic which followed the opening of a new trail through Maunawili
Valley, where I live here on Windward Oahu."

The trailhead was situated at the end of the parking lot of the National
EcoParks Lodge on Kauai, at the summit of Kokee. Beyond its green steel gate lay
a switchback descent into the last undeveloped Hawaiian wilderness. The valley
at its heart, Kalalau, spread northeast between two ridges which splayed wide
and peaked like bent knees before the ridgelines descended steeply to the
Pacific. Within the valley's curtain walls the landscape undulated broad and
green with tropical softwoods and hardwoods and palms; the air was rich with the
odor of white ginger.

Among the dozens of other hikers bright with outdoor gear, Max Dugan, Ph.D:,
stood with Ghfa Candiotti; B.A., pending, in the staging area, awaiting their
assigned starting time. His feet were squirming in new hiking boots, the way he
remembered they'd squirmed in new Nike pumps the night he'd lost his virginity
with Sharon Stussy thirty years before, a week after O.J.'s low speed chase.

His heart was full. Sometimes, he told himself, life gives you these moments:
you win a prize unexpectedly, a painful struggle transforms itself unaccountably
into a triumph, a fantasy comes true.

Just months ago, Ghia had been an attractive but decidedly off-limits student in
his course English 461: Wordsworth Hypertext and Nature. Today he stood with her
looking out over Kalalau, marveling at shades of green more vivid than the holos
in the EcoPark brochures, watching her tongue and lips struggle -- with an
erotic poignancy, he thought --around the Hawaiian plant names shimmering at the
border of the holding area on tiny holoplaques.

Ghia's number had come up in the Interior Department's lottery, giving her the
right to camp for a week in one of the last wilderness areas on the planet.
She'd picked him to join her on the trip, to sleep with her in her tent.

When she'd first extended her invitation, Max had misheard: "Who's bent?" he'd
asked, lost in M.A. exams he was grading.

"Tent," she'd replied. "I'm inviting you to sleep in my tent."

He'd taken a deep breath. Ghia was very smart, just a bit plump, sweet as a ripe
peach -- he'd sleep with her in an overloaded laundry basket if she asked. But
for starters there was Acura, his fiancee, as aware as he was of the
faculty/student code engraved over the gates since the turn of the Twenty-first
Century: Am as cognis non corpus (emphasis on non). He wasn't sure, but he
guessed that if the university got wind of the trip, he could be fired before
the sun went down on Bloomington, maybe even jailed--then conceivably visited in
his cell by Acura with a DNA-altering cake. He'd settled in his office chair and
heard Ghia with a dreamy resigned smile, thinking of Coleridge and Sara
Hutchinson, of Shelley running off with fourteen-year-old girls, of Dylan Thomas
and Vassar coeds, the diseased pleasures of earlier centuries.

"See, when I won the permit, I realized that all the ideas I have about Nature
came from your class," Ghia'd told him. "Oh, I've done all the virtual games,
even camped with Girl Scouts over in the Hoosier Dome But I've never even been
to Six Flags Over Yellowstone, much less on an ecotour. All those ideas from
your class I can't really understand just by myself. You know, like Nature as
'the guide, the guardian of your heart?' 'Tintern Abbey,' right? Professor Dugan
. . .?" The Midwestern afternoon light, yellowish-gray this high in the
Humanities Highrise, gave a weird cast to the holopix of Kalalau she'd brought
along ('no greater destination in all of ecotourism'). Still Hawaii looked nice.

"Call me Max. The semester's over now. It'll make it easier for me to
fantasize."

"Max. So now I have a chance to get the experience behind the ideas, to
understand them really. I need you there to help."

"You're aware I have a fiancee who teaches in the Law School?"

"Perfect. She'll understand absolutely," Ghia'd said. "I mean your being with me
is actually a requirement now. See, if I can't make a practical connection
between the ideas from your class and my real experience, there's no
authenticity, no fulfillment. I don't wind up with a legitimate education." Her
innocent face was crossed by a dark look. "Your fiancee'll be aware that it's my
legal right to require interpretive completion of my coursework. From you. If
you look in the student/faculty conduct code? Section four, paragraph six? The
one they added last year?"

"Gimme a minute?" he'd asked. As Ghia wandered along his collection of antique
Twentieth Century books shoved among the storage cubes in the adjoining media
room, Max punched up Acura's home number on the keyboard of his desk terminal --
she'd be starting dinner--toggled video on.

"Well," Acura conceded from her kitchen, whacking a turkey sausage on the
cutting board with unusual vigor, "your ex-student happens to be right. You have
a pedagogical responsibility; the Dean can fire you if you don't go with her.
That's now the law."

Max tried to look piously dismayed. Acura waved the knife around, splatting
turkey product on the kitchen wall, on her suit, on the blue tie he'd bought her
for Law Day. When the screen went blank he remembered the times he'd smiled at
Ghia in class, a distant longing in his heart -- well, maybe not his heart. Had
he brought this on himself? Was life wonderful or what?

"'Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.'" He smiled when she
returned.

"'Tintern Abbey' again." She grinned. "William to Doroths. This is going to be
fun."

So precisely at ten that late summer morning the Interactive Ranger Terminal
inspected Ghia's permit, certified their Emergency Position Locating Devices,
scanned and approved their shoes, then propelled them through the gate. Max
stepped behind her down the trail -- the IR Terminal's last audio was a warning
that it was paved only for the first kilometer. On the upslope a wall of pink
heliconia defined the route m a disciplined rank of plants so healthy they
looked artificial. Downslope beyond a rock wall the pall fell away dramatically
over a paradise of flowering trees and vines and half-hidden waterfalls. They
seemed to be floating in mid-air in a dream of Eden.

Though Max was having second thoughts. He hadn't actually seen Ghia again until
they'd met at the big Lihue jetport after separate flights from the mainland. It
had been one thing to bathe in the envy of other middle-aged men (hair thinning
just like his) as they'd watched him pair up with an attractive young woman,
quite another to assume she'd really brought him here to snuggle in her tent and
do the nasty.

Yet hadn't she called two weeks before to remind him about his flight time
wearing only a fetching mini-jumpsuit? Hadn't she spent longer than necessary
brushing his clothes for possible alien seeds as they'd waited at the trailhead?
Hadn't she even seed-combed his hair, stroking slowly, twirling strands around
her fingers? They'd groom ed each other, now that he thought about it, like
animals about to mate. Hadn't they? "Ghia," Max began, shifting the sixty pound
pack on his back, "I think we need to get something straight."

She turned to him clear-eyed and smiling uncertainly at the hitch in his voice.

He lost it again, and blushed, unable to be direct; he'd been born in the wrong
century, he supposed. "You, uh, could have hiked with a younger friend," he
found himself saying.

"It's you I want to be with." She shrugged shyly, running her hand along a tall
row of erect leaves.

Among them were flowers, orange and red, parrot-colored, shaped like beaks under
feathery hats: Birds of Paradise, the first he'd ever seen. Yet something in the
rank of foliage bothered him. "Say, if we're in the wilderness, why are these
flowers in such a straight line?"

"We were talking about us?"

"Sorry. I guess we have to get beyond the paved part of the trail to see, uh,
raw nature." He sucked in a breath and tried again. "And speaking of raw nature,
what I was trying to say was, I mean, there we'll be, me wanting to be with you
too, in the same small tent. That's kind of intimate for, uh. . . ."

"It should be," she admitted. "I want to get to know you really well. The
Wordsworth stuff was a bit of an excuse."

"Ah. Because . . .?"

She stopped now and he could see in her eyes that she was calculating an
admission, see it coming in the way she stiffened her back. "If it's all right
with you, I want to have your baby."

"Ah. Okay," Max said, his voice rising on the second syllable, taking another
deep breath, returning the hug that she'd stopped to offer, pressing her soft
breasts against him. See? he told himself. He'd been reading her right all along

Still, it was a bit strange how she slipped away from turning the hug into an
embrace, laughed and skipped down the trail. He tried to keep up but the weight
of his pack made him stagger.

Then the switchback doubled a ridge and became a dirt path. Ghfa stopped and
took it in. "Uh, 'My heart jumps . . . up?'" she recited speculatively. Before
them lay a particularly lush pocket of the valley that had been obscured from
the parking lot. A trade wind shower drifted by in the distance and set a
rainbow over an enormous stand of red-blooming African tulip trees. She kicked
some trail dust. "We're in the wilderness now."

"'My heart leaps up/When I behold a rainbow in the sky,'" Max recited properly.
"Wordsworth had that right."

Ten minutes later, rainbow still in sight, he heard her say, "How would he
describe. . .?"

"'These beauteous forms . . . '" Max offered with a confused mumble, waving his
hand at the trees, having caught himself focusing on the curves of Ghia's tight
hiking shorts.

"Not the trees, silly. These gardenias. I don't see any straight rows. Virgin
landscape for sure."

There were indeed gardenia bushes clumped randomly alongside the trail, their
leaves deep lustrous green, their flowers paper white.

"Mmmm," he said. "Except these gardenias aren't originally native to Hawaii. I
downloaded a native plant database while I was waiting for you in Lihue. Like
those trees you pointed at. African tulips. Introduced species."

"You're being too technical. That doesn't mean they're not wild."

"Right, though, um, technically, this bush has been, uh . . . trimmed," Max
said. He pointed to stem cuts below the first layer of leaves.

She looked at him peevishly. "You're really a perfectionist."

"I'm sure if we keep hiking. . ." he said to cheer himself up.

Which turned out to be hot work, the hiking. After the coolness of elevation and
the appealing descent, the trail crossed a dry section and climbed a side ridge,
all crumbly rock and hard on the hands. They found themselves in a long hollow
blocked from the breeze, traversing a dusty xeriscape of stunted vegetation.
Under an increasingly intense sun they scrambled over car-sized boulders for an
hour, finally crossed a parched stream bed, pulled themselves up a second ridge,
and then dropped into tropical forest again. But now the coolness of the higher
section was only a memory. This forest was humid; and huge mosquitoes buzzed in
the air.

They stopped for lunch. When he raised his Vegamite sandwich to his mouth, Max
realized he was starting to smell.

"I don't know," Ghia said, her face glistening with perspiration. "Am I supposed
to be feeling a kind of oneness?"

He could see the couple who'd started ten minutes before them sitting with their
lunch two hundred meters ahead, and there was of course the couple behind, who'd
caught up twice and had fallen back, muttering--they were glowering behind a
cluster of mossy boulders three hundred meters back. "At this point, no, not a
oneness," he lectured amiably. "Though of course, as Wordsworth tells us, Nature
connects. You want to first concentrate on a kind of twohess, say." He realized
to his shame he was at it again, visualizing his metaphors as her sexual parts,
this time staring at her breasts.

"The oneness comes later?" she asked.

He thought of the two of them in the small tent. "You're reading my mind."

So he'd have to bathe in the mountain-fed stream he'd read ran beside their
assigned campsite -- icy water would get him close enough to raw nature, he
supposed. For the moment he reached out for her and they hugged again. Whether
she was actually responding, making a genuine move of her own or not, or whether
her gesture was just the signature of growing physical exhaustion he couldn't
quite tell, but she put her head on his shoulder and started panning her fingers
through his hair.

So he buried his face in her hair too, her lovely auburn hair, and nuzzled.

"Gee, you're sticking your whole face in it."

She was such a Twenty-first Century woman; she made romance seem as attractive
as exchanging bodily fluids with a dog. "Well, what are you doing yourself?" She
still had a grip on a strand of his hair.

"Do you remember," she asked, "telling the class that back in Wordsworth's time
couples exchanged locks of hair?"

"Sure."

She let go and looked him in the eyes. "It's such a wonderful idea. I've been
thinking about it for a month. And I realized that sure enough I got it from
your class too." Ghia smiled. "I love the way you inspire me." Now she blushed.
"That's why I want to have your baby -- there's something in your genes that
anticipates me, takes whatever's in me one step further."

He was thrilled to hear her say it again, knew he was beaming and looking silly.
He felt one with Shelley now, with Keats and Fanny Brawne, with Wordsworth and
Annette Vallon.

"Professor . . . I mean, Max. Let's do it now."

Max looked with skepticism back down the trail where the couple who had started
behind them was waiting again. "I, uh, thought maybe we'd set up camp, have a
nice dinner, have a bath. . "

"To exchange locks of hair?"

"Right. No. I mean yes." Max dropped his pack and fumbled for his EC Army knife,
the one with the little scissors.

"What kind of deal is this?" he asked when they reached the campsite. For all
the mosquitoes and centipedes hovering around the perimeter, the tent site
turned out to be a TerraTurf "mudless" pad abutted by a numbered pipe-sized
post. The cold stream ran nearby all right, but it had been set off by rocks to
run behind the site like a fence-- at least it cut off the ants, whose mounds
were a meter high. The ocean was still so far away they could barely hear the
surf.

"Thank god," Ghia said, "I'm ready to stop."

Max heaved off his pack and detached the self-assembling tent. Ghia disappeared
into the bush to collect bugs -- he'd learned to his dismay that she was an
insecto-vegetarian, and that for dinner he'd have to endure grubs. He'd been
forewarned by the EcoPark brochure ("featuring the incredible variety of the
last largely unexploited food source on earth"), even preconditioned at the IU
faculty club ("where meal worms make a meal"), but he'd hoped she'd go for the
sirloin he'd brought along. The self-assembling tent popped right up, though
staking it down reminded him of Odysseus' struggle to subdue the shape-changer
Proteus. As he sorted out the prepacked gear they'd received with her permit, he
marveled at the new Emergency Position Locating Devices, little disks the size
of headphone earpieces. They were topped by red pull-tabs you wanted to be very
careful handling: once you pulled out the tab the Rangers up at the summit
mobilized for an extraction. The rest of his chores were grunt work: setting up
a rain fly and dining canopy, cleaning the fire pad, gathering some deadwood,
digging a latrine. He wound up slimy with sweat and streaked with mud-- "mudless
mud," he supposed. He grabbed the folding bucket and picked his way over sharp
rocks to the clear water of the stream. The steamy air had made him think it
wouldn't be cold after all. He'd thought wrong.

"I heard you yelling" Ghia said when she returned. "Are you okay?"

Max told her about his icy shower.

"Why didn't you use the hot water?" she asked, moving what turned out to be a
valve on the numbered pipe he'd taken to be a marker for the campsite -- now he
could trace it across the path and straight up to a solar array half-hidden in
the treetops.

"Christ," he said, "isn't there anything remotely natural here?"

"Please don't be so annoyed, You remind me of my father."

"Look," he said, "I think we have a right to expect an EcoPark to maintain. . .
. "

"Of course it isn't all natural here. There hasn't been anything 'all natural'
on the planet for a hundred years. You taught the class that: there's plastic in
the deepest ocean, man-made chemicals in every cloud, civilization's debris in
every landscape."

"I guess I should have known better." Max sighed. "At least there's Wordsworth."

"Who didn't spend any of his time in any wilderness either, if I remember you
pointing out. Did we read about mud in his poetry? Snakes? Vicious mosquitoes?
You said he wrote like he was out for a picnic in a park."

"Oh, all right," he said, tired and horny and irritated at hearing his own
lecture spit back at him. "Let's just set up the damned sleeping bags."

"You're mining it for me too." Ghia had her hands on her hips in the same
posture Acura used when she was pissed and going to cut him off. It was
alarming.

"I've got an idea," Max said. "What if we just camp somewhere else? Who's to
know? Let's go up on that little hill, say." Max pointed to a lush knoll back
toward the ridge. Through the trees he could see it was topped with a grove of
palms and a grassy clearing. "We'll have a great view. We'll both be happy."

It took more than an hour to get the tent back into its stuff sack and to repack
the gear. Then a short hike, then they had to set up again on the lumpy site--
but the view all the way south to the dramatically steep mountains, all the way
north to the wide blue ocean, was breathtaking.

By sunset the new campsite was squared away. Max thought it might be time for
him to make his move. He was scraping the last bit of grub stew off his plate as
Ghia told him now how spiritual his rejection of the authorized pad had been,
how the fading light stimulated her in a way she'd never experienced.

Max felt her leaning against him, warm and sweet smelling -- she'd tucked
plumeria blossoms behind her ears.

"What a beautiful colors," she hummed.

He dredged his mind for some lines to rehabilitate Wordsworth, found them:
"'Live in the yellow light,'" he recited, '" ye distant groves !/And kindle,
thou blue Ocean! such hues/As veil the Almighty Spirit. . . . '"

A crash sounded in the thicket behind them, then another. Then the bush itself
began to move: a troop of Boy Scouts in tropical camo marched up the hill taking
bearings with their sat nay wristwatches. They marched directly into their
campsite and spread out. One of the kids asked if they were part of the night
mapping exercises on the hill.

Max wrestled with the tent; it was nearly dark as he and Ghia hiked back to
their authorized camping pad.

BY THE TIME he set the tent up for the third time it was eleven P.M. This time
he took a hot shower. As midnight approached he had the satisfaction of
velcroing the two sleeping bags together into a double bag with just enough room
for them to seriously cuddle.

"I suppose that's the way," Ghia muttered over his shoulder. At her insistence
he'd set one Emergency Position Locating Device and a flashlight at each side of
the bag. "You don't know what can happen out in the wild like this," she'd said

He discreetly left the tent as she changed into her sleeping clothes. He set the
PowerCoals on the campfire pad to glow romantically, doused the indium lantern,
and took off his own clothes and folded them over a low branch. When he crawled
into the dim tent and slid his leg into the bag, he was naked.

"Now," Max said, "I'd like to show you something actually natural for a change."

The precise moment his bare thigh brushed her skin she screamed, a huge
deep-lunged scream, her mouth near enough to his ear to set his head ringing.

Max lurched to his knees and grabbed his flashlight -- but when he switched it
on he was holding it backwards. The bright beam unfortunately spotlit his
privates, then partially blinded him. She continued to scream. Finally he aimed
the light out the tent door, stumbled out through the flap, saw nothing, tripped
back in, slapping at the bite of a particularly aggressive mosquito. The first
thing he noticed was how fetchingly tight her synsilk nightshirt was, how her
nipples had come erect synergistically with his own anatomy. Then he noticed the
red cycle light blinking on an Emergency Position Locating Device upended at the
head of the sleeping bag.

"What did you do? There wasn't anything out there. What . . . what. . . . Oh my
god. Now they're going to extract us."

"I'm sorry," she said.

Max dragged the disordered bag around his waist, appalled at the cycle light,
trying to take in their new situation. "Sorry? Christ, Ghia! Rangers'll be here
in twenty minutes."

"I said I'm sorry. The way you went outside to check for like a wild animal? I
guess you really do only mean well."

"Look," he said, "we have a little under twenty minutes. There's just time. . .
. We can still get it on."

"Don't be gross," she told him.

"You're the one who said you wanted to have my baby."

"Sex is for my boyfriend," she told him.

"Listen to me Ghia: you're the one who said you wanted my baby." The tent seemed
to be spinning around him.

"Right," Ghia said. "And now that I have a lock of your hair, I have a sample of
your DNA. I can have your baby when I want to have a baby. What did you think .
. . ? Gee, you know, you're the one who gave me the idea about the hair. But to
have sex with a man as old as my father? God, what a gross idea."

"Thanks a lot."

"Don't be so mad. To tell the truth, I'm almost tempted. It's going to be a
whole week before I hike out of here and see Bruno."

"What do you mean, a whole week? You don't understand. You pop the alarm, the
law says you go out with the Rangers. There's a forty thousand dollar fine for
false. . . . "

"Well actually, I don't have to go out. I only tripped your locator. See? You're
the only one who has to go." Sure enough, the EPLD at her pillow lay inert.
"Honestly, I'm disappointed too," she went on. "I really learned a lot about
Wordsworth today. Now there won't be any more lessons for me."

"Yes, there will," Max said, reaching over and lifting the headphone shaped
device from beside her pillow. "Here's a lesson about raw human nature."

"Oh, my god, don't. . . . "

Her emergency locator made a barely audible whirring sound when he ripped out
its red tab. He wondered if the muffled sound of a helicopter he could already
hear in the distance was for them.

"And give me my hair back," he said in the blinking light.

Back in Bloomington the streets were empty, a contrast to the crowded lodge at
Kokee, the swarming trails around the volcano on the Big Island, the gaudy
casinos at Waikiki.

Acura picked him up at the airport wearing a trenchcoat, which he thought was
very odd for a sunny day, but when they got to the parking lot, she flashed it
wide open. His surprise made him drop his backpack Beneath the coat she was
wearing only scanty lingerie -- a kind of tiger outfit with a push up bra and
high cut on the hips.

"Wha . . . ?"

"Call me Wild Thang," she said. "I did some soul searching while you were gone.
This is the real me."

He was discreet enough not to mention the possible role jealousy might have
played in her deliberations, not that afternoon, or that evening, or that night,
or the next morning, when she'd finally drank all the champagne, exhausted them
both, and nearly physically handicapped herself for life.

"Lord," he said, "that was wonderful."

"Mmmm. What are you thinking.?" she asked. "Really."

"Really? I'm remembering some Wordsworth."

"Recite it for me."

"The lines are from 'The Prelude': 'Not in Utopia,' Wordsworth wrote, 'Or some
secreted Island, Heaven knows where!/But in the very world, which is the
world/Of all of us, --is the place where in the end/We find our happiness, or
not at all!' What it means, counselor, is that I'm happy to be home."