The Wreck
I had come to Bali to experience life at its most sublime — 50 feet under the water. But at 5:45 am, thoroughly jetlagged and heads still hurting from a few too many cocktails the night before, Rachel and I ate in silence — burnt toast, runny eggs, sliced dragon fruit and black coffee, all expertly prepared by our villa’s caretaker on an open-air grill. We stared blankly at Uluwatu’s unfathomably blue ocean until a friendly voice startled us to our feet: “Mr. Jasper! Mr. Jasper!” We exited the property’s gates and met our driver to begin the three-hour trip to Tulamben, a small fishing village on the northeast coast of Bali that happens to be the point-of-entry for one of the most spectacular dive sites in the world. Every year, thousands of tourists come through the otherwise nondescript town to dive the USAT Liberty wreck. This was the most anticipated day of our two-week trip through Bali, worlds away from our home in New York.
On the ride up, I read the wreck’s history aloud. A U.S. Army ship, the USAT Liberty first left the New York Navy Yard in 1918 to deliver a cargo of horses and war equipment to the Allied Powers in Europe. After the war, the ship continued making cargo runs and in 1929 it collided with a small French tugboat, killing its two crew members. The ship was recommissioned after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, and exactly five weeks later it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, washing up on the beaches of Tulamben where it would sit for over twenty years. The ship finally slid back into the ocean during the deadly eruption of Mount Agung in 1963, a casualty alongside over 1,100 Indonesian people. Some time later, the clumsy ship from New York would find its way onto virtually every “top dive sites” list in existence.
Our driver’s name was Nyoman. He was our third Nyoman of the trip, a fact that surprised us until we told him as much. He laughed, and then explained that most Balinese children are named based on birth order, so a small handful of names make up the vast majority of the island’s population. He narrated the entire drive, and on the final road leading to the beach, as locals on scooters weaved through vans full of tourists, he pointed out every last one of the dozens of dive shops; Tulamben, like much of Bali, had evolved to support a booming and unrelenting tourism industry. I asked Nyoman what he thought about tourism in Bali. “Good for me. Good for economy. Not good for environment.” Rachel and I exchanged a sheepish look. We’d had a few sobering conversations about the consequences of tourism, but this was our first time hearing it from a local.
Just after 9am we reached the launch point, a rocky beach swarming with western tourists and their Balinese dive guides. Our guide ran through a 5-minute Scuba 101 (I was already certified, Rachel was not) before we suited up and marched towards the sea. In order to begin the dive, Rachel would first have to pass a series of tests in chest high water. Inflate and deflate the BCD. Clear water out of the mask. Reach back and grab the backup regulator. Strip the weight belt. All went smoothly until the final test, which required that Rachel fully submerge, remove the regulator from her mouth, open her mouth to let water in, put the regulator back into her mouth, and then finally clear the water out of the regulator and resume breathing. In the final step, the trick is to simultaneously exhale while pushing the “purge” button on the regulator so the water has nowhere to go but out. Forget to exhale and the water will be forced further into your mouth or throat — a bit like being waterboarded — something that happened to Rachel on her first two attempts causing her to surface in a panic. Sensing that she was starting to lose faith, our guide decided that what he’d seen was good enough. We were there to dive, and he was there to take us diving — nothing was going to stop us at that point. “Everything will be fine,” I said to Rachel, and we descended.
Once underwater, all was calm. A relic of war and death, the Liberty wreck is now teeming with life, an endless variety of fish and coral having made a home of it. A Parrot Fish swam across the deck. A moray eel lurked in a dark crevice. A gun, overtaken with green coral, jutted out from the ship’s stern. A school of small yellow fish swam above us, so massive that it blotted out the sun. Everywhere you looked, more colors, more sea life. In the waning moments of the dive, we found ourselves face-to-face with a 3-foot barracuda, its underbite exposing long, skinny fangs. Rachel stared it down — there was no fear, only awe.
We surfaced after 40 minutes. After any dive, there’s a feeling of elation — the sun hits your face, the nitrogen leaves your body, and you realize, you’ve survived. Cold beers were coming our way soon. Après Scuba, if you will. All smiles, we bought two Liberty Wreck tee shirts from a man selling them on the beach (negotiated from $20 to $15) and met Nyoman to begin the trip home.
Five minutes into the drive we ran into bumper to bumper traffic. Nyoman leaned into his horn, joining a chorus of honking from other tourist vans that assaulted the afternoon quiet. “Sorry,” he said as he looked back and smiled, “scuba dive traffic.” We inched along for ten minutes and then came across a crowd of about two dozen people standing in the road. In the middle of the crowd, with three to four feet of empty space surrounding it, a body was sprawled out in the road. A wrecked, smoking scooter lay nearby. Nobody was performing first aid, and there was stillness around him. His arms were spread wide, but his body wasn’t mangled. He wore a helmet, and his head was turned towards oncoming traffic. He was Balinese. The only blood was a single, thin stream that made its way down the entire length of his face — it started beneath his helmet, dripped down his forehead, between his eyes, over his nose, through his dark moustache, over his lips, to the bottom of his chin. His eyes were wide open, and he stared straight ahead, his final moment now sealed into his face. I covered Rachel’s face so she wouldn’t see what I was seeing, but I couldn’t look away. We made eye contact, or something like it, and I could still see his humanity. I felt like I knew him. I stared into his eyes until we had driven by and he was out of view. Nyoman shook his head but said nothing.
“Oh my god,” I said. I took a few long breaths. Rachel put her hand on my back, asked if I was okay. “Yeah, but, wow.” She didn’t want to know what I saw. I had no words, anyway.
And suddenly, the high from the day collapsed into itself, and I hit the lowest low — like finishing a race and falling straight into a dark pit. This whole day — no, the whole trip — had been leading to this man’s death. I thought back to the dive; the ocean felt grim, the wreck was menacing. That ship had been a vessel of death — an American one, no less — and we were there to ogle it. And how foolish of us to move forward with the dive after Rachel had failed the final test! We had talked about tourism and the terrible price it extolled from the land, and yet, that was always someone else’s problem, someone else’s fault. But there, right in front of my face among the fish and coral there was also plastic, swaying as if caught in a breeze. Had the thought even crossed my mind to grab any of it and take it with me? We’re destroying our oceans, plastic choking the life out of it — something Nyoman alluded to only hours earlier — and I couldn’t be bothered to take the smallest of steps to help. A feeling sunk in; we were intruders in the ocean, intruders in Bali. I looked back at the crowd of people in the road and was sure they were all staring back at me. Did they blame me for the accident? Surely this man would still be alive if not for tourists like me. I sat there in my new tee shirt — a shirt that I’d haggled down the price of simply because I could — and I felt pathetic.
The drive went on. We passed through villages, saw schools and laughing children. We talked about other topics. Nyoman began narrating again. On the surface, things went back to normal, but I felt like something had changed. A new reality set in: our trip through Bali was a zero-sum game, and there was no escaping our impact. I couldn’t shake a creeping sense of guilt.
The next day I searched online for news of the accident, but there was nothing. No shortage of stories about western tourists in deadly scooter accidents, but nothing about a local man dying in Tulamben.
I wrote out a story in my journal to honor him. His name was Putu, the firstborn of three children. He had a wife, Ketut, and two kids. After work (he was a mechanic) he stopped to pick up groceries for the family, and on his way home he ran into the “scuba dive traffic.” He tried to pass a van but lost control of his scooter, hitting the ground hard and dying instantly from blunt force trauma. One week later, his eldest son, also Putu, would drop out of school to take over his dad’s job at the auto body shop in order to provide for the family. Eventually they moved out of Tulamben to be closer to Ketut’s family, and away from the trauma of the wreck that changed their lives.
We had ten days left in our trip. We saw beaches, temples and jungles, and I saw Putu everywhere I looked — drivers, street vendors, construction workers. We made an extra effort to connect with the locals, but the built-in dynamic couldn’t be undone — we were the clumsy tourists, they the gracious hosts. On the second to last day Rachel picked up a nasty stomach bug and a local doctor, unassuming and patient, came to our hotel and nursed her back to health (“Bali belly, no problem.”).
After the trip home — thirty hours across ten thousand miles — we slept for a full day before resuming our normal, comfortable lives in New York. For weeks we were asked on a daily basis, “How was Bali?” I dreaded the question. Each time I described the trip it reinforced my feelings of guilt. I’d try to make a point of mentioning the accident, a tribute of sorts, but it never felt right, nor did the responses. I eventually stopped sharing it altogether and it came as a relief when enough time passed that we were no longer asked about the trip. My life returned to normal, but still, I thought about that moment, and this man I had never known, and would never know.
But really, he was never part of it — that moment, the connection that I felt, has always been mine and mine alone. And perhaps it’s that which feels so strange and uncomfortable. I much prefer the thought of sharing it with you, so if I may, please hear me out for just one second:
Putu, thank you for welcoming me into your beautiful country, for tolerating us western tourists. We’re not always the most conscientious of travelers, and I apologize for that; by and large, we mean well, but that’s not enough. And I’m sorry that your life ended in that way, especially if we played a role in it, which I think we did. I looked into your eyes on that day, and for a moment, I felt like I was with you. Of course that means nothing to you, and it in no way changes what happened. But I do want you to know that it changed me — you changed me. I think I’ll stay at home for awhile, but when I do return to traveling, never again will I turn a blind eye to the impact of tourism. I will actively seek out the humanity in wherever I go, and I know that I’ll see you everywhere I look. You didn’t ask for any of this — this burden shouldn’t be yours to carry. But it is, so just know, you are with me in all of my future travels.
