Tim Cahill, Outside's tireless roving reporter, has a new book out, a collection of 23 tales of adventures and mishaps that have appeared in Outside and other magazines. Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered will not only entertain, but give you
that itch to pack up and head for parts little-known.
By Mark Bryant
Outside Online
A call to Tim Cahill at the end of January caught him a day before he embarked on yet another journey, this time to join a caravan in Mali, at the southern edge of the Saharan Desert.
He expected to lose 20 pounds during the 240-mile trek from Gao to Tombouctou. The Caravan of White Gold has been happening for centuries, earning its name in the days when salt was traded for gold, pound for pound. Each of the scores of camels carries four 60-pound slabs of mined salt. Cahill, the everyman's adventurer, decided to plod along with the desert travelers.
"I'm always on the lookout for things," Cahill says from the cool comfort of his home in Montana.
In his 20 years with Outside magazine, Cahill has carved an envious niche for himself--traveling the world, having adventures, and writing about them.
 Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered is his fourth collection of globe-trotting tales. (He's written two
additional books: his first one, about a serial killer, and Road Fever: A High-Speed Travelogue about a manic 15,000-mile, three-week drive from the tip of South America to Alaska.)
Back when Outside began in 1977, adventure writing was of the high-testosterone, low-sense stuff for the macho and the witless. Readers faced cheesy tales in such magazines as Argosy and Saga, such as scuba divers disemboweling sharks with their penknives. But as Cahill points out, a
superman offers no drama, because he can get out of anything. So he suggested to the Outside editors to find someone who's not entirely competent, just an average joe. They agreed--and gave him the job.
As an everyman traveler, he's obviously struck a chord, and not just with men who think, "If this clown can do it, so can I." More than half his mail, he says, comes from women, thanking him for the inspiration, even passing along their travel plans.
Two decades of traveling the earth certainly offers some perspective, some of which he includes in his latest collection. "The world's changed mightily," Cahill says. "Western popular culture, you find it almost everywhere."
In "Among the Karowai: A Stone Age Idyll," the last tale in Butterworms, he heads 500 miles upriver in Irian Jaya, hiking through a malarial, miserable swamp, into jungle where everything stings or stinks. Despite the step back in time, Western influence is very much present.
"... the homogenization of humanity--seems to be the direction of history. There is a certain sad inevitability about it all. For the upriver people in the Asmat, it happens like this: Missionaries come, followed by the government in the form of soldiers and policemen and bureaucrats. And then the multinational developers arrive, hard on the heels of the government, and
they promise a better life to anyone who wants to log the forest and farm the waste. Perhaps the development would involve mining or petrochemical exploration, but the result has always been the same. Everywhere. The living culture is entombed within museums."
But as they take from us, we take from them--souvenirs, photos, and a romantic delusion of a paradise lost. But often these tribes, no longer isolated, simply want what Westerners have for the same reason: to make life easier and safer.
"I don't know that drudgery all the time equals dignity," Cahill says.
And wouldn't we act the same? In the same chapter, he writes:
"I tried to imagine myself in an analogous situation. What would I want?
"What if some alien life force materialized on earth with a superior medical technology, for instance? They have the cure for AIDS, for cancer, but they feel it is best that we go on as we have. They admire the spiritual values we derive from our suffering; they are inspired by our courage, our primitive dignity. In such a case, I think I'd do everything in my power to
obtain that technology--and the hell with my primitive dignity."
Other Butterworms tales are simply adventures that make you smile, such as traveling across Mongolia, where courtesy dictates that goods offered mean gifts returned. So Cahill and cohorts eventually find themselves facing a rapidly diminishing supply of crucial outerwear. Or as a 13-year-old boy, letting the school hotshot take a whack at what
he believed was a spider nest. Tim, knowing what's about to happen, feigns fear and runs away screaming. The next day, the cool kid shows up at school covered with lumpy bee stings.
Cahill doesn't simply bound from outpost to outpost. He reads about customs, gets language tapes, learns some history of the place and the people. He learns a few key phrases, such as "Excuse me," "I didn't know," "Hello," "Goodbye."
He also recommends that non-seasoned adventurers go with an outfitter, which can take care of all those nuisance details, like visas and survival. People may find that travel is simply something they don't like to do. "A lot of travel is god-awful boring," says Cahill.
Some things he packs: appropriate clothes, a notebook, a tiny tape recorder, Imodium A-D, and a wide-spectrum antibiotic. And to occupy those long spells of waiting, he suggests a classic novel, one you've always meant to read, such as Crime and Punishment or War and Peace--not a little detective novel that'll be
gone in an afternoon.
So read Cahill at home, otherwise you might think he has more fun traveling than you do. But after any adventure, we just remember the cool stuff. Some get to write about it.
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