On our sunroom wall hangs a New Guinea war mask from the Sepik River region. We bought it from a villager on a trip we made there in 2000. It worships the crocodile king, one of the Founders of the tribes there and it has a tortoise on its headdress. When we returned home to California, we hung it our living room wall but the mask didn't seem happy there. There was no 'spark' to it. After a year or two, I took it down and relegated it to a corner of the bedroom, dark and unhappy, until we bought the house here in Superior and put it in with the things to be moved here. It was one of the first things we put up when we moved in three years ago. As soon as Bill hung it on the wall, we got tingles down our back. The warrior mask was happy. It gazed upon Apache Leap mountain and it wasn't going to budge off its wall. It seemed a curious thing to me at the time. How could a mask from a far off land like Papua New Guinea find happiness in a copper mining town of the Southwest? Evidently, it's not so far-fetched.
Today, I went uptown to get my hair cut. The beautician is lively lady, about my age, and married for more than forty years to her high school sweetheart. We have a good time discussing things while she cuts my hair. Today, she started talking about the Native Americans and their inability to drink alcohol. I commented that it was the same way with the Australian Aborigines. She agreed and told a story about her husband getting accosted by a drunken Aborigine one time. I asked her where that occurred and she said Cairns. I laughed and said, yes, Cairns was where we had run into Aborigines too. Then she said her husband worked for a mine that sent him to Indonesia and she had visited him there.
I was awestruck. "You didn't go to Irian Jaya, did you?" I asked. "It's on the same island as Papua New Guinea."
"I certainly did!" she agreed. "And it was the strangest place I've ever been. Why, when I got up that first morning and looked out the window, what did I see but this man walking down the road wearing a penis gourd!"
I whooped with laughter. "Did you visit the Spirit House too? And see their thirty foot phalluses?"
"Oh my, yes!" She covered her face with her hands while she laughed harder. A woman sitting across from us and getting her hair colored and who obviously had never visited the likes of Papua New Guinea had a puzzled smile on her face. What were these women discussing?
"I cannot believe you've been there too," I told her. "I had no idea this was such a small world."
"My dear, the copper mine industry goes all around the world. There aren't that many places where it is mined. It is one of the biggest mines in the world in Irian Jaya. So that is why the miners go there. That's the way it is." She shook her head but kept smiling.
And so it is. There aren't that many copper or gold mines in the world. This happens to be the same good region for those valuable ores. Maybe that's why our New Guinea mask was so happy to reacquaint himself with the same sort of mountains he'd come from. He recognized a kindred spirit in the mountains. I might just be being fanciful but as my grandson Sage says, this sort of weirds me out! Small world, indeed!
