The Hunting of the Ri
(1983–1985)
Now the Wizard and his wife’s tale’s not told.
For what did they do, you ask, with their gold?
Did they bank it or invest it or buy Bills of T?
No, they spent it chasing Mermaids in the Coral Sea!
—from “the unicorn—part 2” by orion stormcrow, 1986
NARRATOR: After the Unicorns had joined the circus, then MG and OZ had to figure out who the hell they were, as individuals and as a team. “What to do next?” became the big question. So much of their time and energy had gone into the Unicorns, and they had expected to continue in that direction, and couldn’t. But they had always had other things going in their lives. One of them was OZ’s artistic pursuits. In the fall of 1983, after the Faire season was over for that year, OZ signed up for art classes at the local community college in Ukiah. While he was there, he met someone who became in important part of both his life and Morning Glory’s. Her name was Diane, and she would join them on their next adventure, and many of the ones that would follow. She had a son named Zack, and he would grow up with all of them as parents and become Pagan in a way that the Zells’ own children hadn’t.
OZ: I enrolled in some pottery classes, and they were great. That was where I made my first sculptures of Goddesses. I was doing that for a couple of weeks, and then it was time for a field trip. This was an annual event that the whole art department went on. They took students down to visit art studios in the Bay Area. We went to glass-blowing, leather-working, tapestry, and wallpaper studios.
The bus left at like 6:00 a.m. This lovely red-headed woman sat down next to me, and we started chatting it up. We hadn’t met each other before, and we really hit it off. We were the only Hippies!
DIANE DARLING: I was recovering from a broken heart, and I went on the field trip because anything was better than hanging around in my own head. I just walked down the aisle of the bus until I found the most interesting-looking person. I sat down next to Otter and introduced myself. We kind of hung out the whole field trip.
OZ: Throughout the day the other people were observing this budding romance grow into something quite amorous, so we became the darlings of the field trip. It was sweet, sort of like when Morning Glory and I had met at Gnosticon. People create a support system around something like that. On the ride home late at night we got to be really close, canoodling in the back of the bus. By the time we got back from the trip, we were madly in love with each other.
DIANE DARLING: He was very solicitous and courtly. He was telling me stories about his wife and his Unicorn, and I was taking it all in. At that time he smelled liked a goat. I didn’t mind because I’m an animal person. I was in a period of celibacy because I was so screwed up by my previous relationship. He courted me for a period of six months, which I thought was really sweet. He would come down from the mountain and into town to hang out with me.
After about six months we decided to go ahead and have a love affair. I went with him in his beat-up old pickup truck to Greenfield. The Ranch road back then was very bad, and this was at night, in the wintertime, in the rain. So it was a harrowing drive. I used to say it wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, but you could see it from there. We got out there and Morning Glory, who had said she was sick and would not be joining us, joined us. So we had a threesome, and that was kind of how we went on from there.
OZ: She also had a young son, Zachariah, so both of them started spending time with us out at the Ranch. After a short amount of time, they both moved there. We had just acquired a large, quite nice, prefabricated, canvas-covered yurt from a community that no longer needed it. We set it up on Coeden Brith, and in the spring of 1984, Diane and Zack moved into it. For the next few years, they were with us on the Ranch.
ZACK DARLING: I was seven years old when I met the Zells. I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My mother was into Zen Buddhism. The reason we moved to California was to live in this Zen Buddhist commune called Spring Mountain in Potter Valley, which is near Redwood Valley. So my mother was a pretty devout Buddhist for most of the early part of my life. Then, through Otter and Morning Glory, she discovered the Goddess.
We became very close with them as the years went on. I remember Otter’s long hair and bushy beard when I was a little kid. I don’t really know my father. There were three major men in my mom’s life who were great for me in the sense that they were willing to step up and take me under their wings and be real strong male role models. Otter was definitely one of those. Otter and I would play “Primate.” We would find some trees that we liked, that we could climb on, and we would jump around like monkeys, pick imaginary fleas out of each other’s hair, swing from the branches, and make a lot of noise. He was really great with kids.
OZ: While she was still in Ukiah, Diane was making a little money by selling freshly pressed carrot juice to restaurant and health food stores. So when I stayed with her, we’d get up in the morning and press the juice from the carrots that we’d gotten the day before and go with her on her rounds to deliver the stuff in the morning. Well, MG and I were well known in the Ukiah area, so that kind of made a ripple in the community. Then in the afternoons Diane and Morning Glory would come into town to do things together. But when all three of us started showing up together, people just gave up and accepted that we were some kind of a set.
NARRATOR: In 1985 Otter got his next assignment from the Goddess: to go to the South Pacific and look for Mermaids.
OZ: Right around the time that we were making the arrangements with the circus, there were a number of intriguing articles appearing in various magazines, newspapers, and other places. I had just joined the International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC), founded by the legendary Bernard Heuvelmans (who coined the term), and was getting their annual journal, Cryptozoology, including back issues. In Volume 1 (Winter 1982) was an article about an interesting new unknown critter, said to be analogous to the Mermaids of legend and lore. These were being seen off of a little island north of New Guinea called New Ireland. Of course, native people’s reports of strange things in the jungle are always coming in. That sort of forms the background of the whole cryptozoological field (cryptozoology meaning “study of hidden animals”). But rarely do any of these quite get a solid confirmation.
But in this particular case, the report had come from Roy Wagner, a linguist and cultural anthropologist who was the head of the department of anthropology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He had been studying the people of New Ireland to try and document their languages before these unique and varied tongues completely died out and were replaced by the traders’ language Tok Pisin. Part of the process is recording and translating the vocabulary. One of the things that they came up with in a coastal village called Nokon Bay was a sea critter. In other areas it was called a Ri, but there it was called an Ilkai. The natives described this as a real living animal, not some fantasy or mythological creature. Wagner asked them what it was. So they took him down to the beach and pointed to the ocean. And there was an unidentifiable creature bobbing up and down out in the waves! At that distance, Wagner couldn’t see a whole lot, but there was obviously something out there, and it looked like it had a head and shoulders. He could see that there was more than one and that it might have been a family with a child.
Wagner asked them more about what it was, and they pointed to the picture on the label of a can of Chicken of the Sea tuna. They told him, “You catch ’em and eat ’em, just like some other fellas do here.” They thought that whatever was pictured on the label was in the can—just like there was a picture of a tomato on the label of a can of tomatoes! But Chicken of the Sea tuna didn’t have a picture of a tuna on it; instead, there was a picture of a Mermaid. So naturally they figured it was canned Mermaid. And the word for that in pidgin, which is what they were speaking, is pishmeri, which means “fishwoman.” And that is pretty much the same thing as Mermaid, which literally means “seawoman.”
Wagner was pretty amazed. His follow-up report in Volume 2 of Cryptozoology (Winter 1983) included the traditional, fuzzy, out-of focus photos that he had taken of something bobbing around out in the sea. At one point Wagner convinced one of the villagers to take him out in a little boat that they had. They went out in that, and Wagner definitely saw something there. It swam around, and when it dove, it would raise its tail up above water. It was this beautiful fluked tail—it looked just like a whale tail, only smaller. It wasn’t like a dolphin tail or that of any other animal Wagner could identify.
In describing it, the natives insisted that in the upper parts it is just like a human woman—that it had a woman’s breasts and genitals, but that the lower parts of it were fish. The natives absolutely insisted that this was, in fact, a Mermaid as we understand it. Articles about this critter ended up not just in mainstream journals but also in the National Enquirer, an airline in-flight magazine, and many other places. So we decided to mount our own expedition with the money that we got from the circus for the Unicorns, and go see for ourselves. And we would take along a professional video crew to document the trip. We hoped to be able to recoup the costs of the trip by selling the documentary to some TV adventure or nature show.
We assembled an expedition of thirteen people, sponsored by our own Ecosophical Research Association (ERA), which Morning Glory had founded and chartered under the CAW. We corresponded with Bernard Heuvelmans, president of the ISC, and received his encouragement. Roy Mackal, ISC vice president, and Richard Greenwell, secretary-treasurer, were also very supportive. Dr. Wagner and Greenwell considered joining us but were unable to do so. We started taking scuba lessons and got our diving gear. And we hired a film crew that had done the underwater footage on the movie The Deep.
We spent the summer and fall of 1984 getting prepared—taking diving classes in the cold waters and kelp forests off the Northern California coast to get scuba-certified for the expedition. My son Bryan got out of the Army in September and went to diving school in Florida. We rented a dive boat in Australia that would take us on the trip. Orion was one of the major coordinators of all this. He was perpetually doing this—I would come up with some big thing that involved logistical coordination, and he would be right there doing the roadie work. He was quite good at that. In March of 1985 we left for the expedition. Besides Morning Glory and myself, our members included Tom Williams; Orion Stormcrow; Bryan; Diane Darling and her lover at the time; our old friend from the early days of Green Egg Daniel Blair Stewart and his wife, Meadow; the film crew; and a couple of other friends.
BRYAN ZELL: We flew into Sydney, Australia. And waiting at the airport was this group that Dad had been corresponding with for a while. They were Gardnerians. They were all in robes at the airport. I attended one of their rituals.
OZ: This whole bunch of wonderful Aussie Pagans, Witches, and Magicians took us home with them and put us all up and had a marvelous time showing us around. In fact, our visit evidently became part of a precipitating series of factors in what became the emergence of a significant Australian Pagan community. At the time that we arrived, the only Neo-Pagan influences in Australia—I’m not talking about the native Aboriginal religion—were Alexandrian Witchcraft and a little bit of Gardnerian Wicca. These were two competing branches of very similar forms of Witchcraft. So you had these various covens that didn’t talk to each other or have anything to do with each other. There were also some Ceremonial Magickal Lodges, but they mostly kept to themselves also. So when we came in, everybody wanted to meet us because they had read Green Egg and they knew who we were. Now for the first time a bunch of people from different traditions came together and had a big party so that they could meet us. There were too many of us for any one group to take on, so they set aside their conflicts and cooperated in order to make it happen.
We spent days talking to people, promoting the idea that they could have a movement that was bigger than any single group, and that could embrace all different traditions. It was a novel concept that a number of folks thought was great. A lot of people joined CAW at that point, and that eventually mushroomed into something pretty big. Later there were major festivals, publications, and an entire Australian Pagan movement that were all galvanized by this event. So we felt pretty good about how it all went down. It was a wonderful event. Eventually, in 1992, CAW became the first non-Christian church to become legally incorporated in Australia!
We left Sydney and flew on up to Port Moresby, New Guinea. We stopped in the Trobriand Islands that Margaret Mead had made famous, and hiked through the woods to the ruins of an ancient temple. The people told us that the missionaries had told them that it was a bad place and they shouldn’t come there. We asked one man if there were any stories the old people told about the place before white people came, but he just shook his head and shrugged his shoulders: “Maybe everyone has forgot now.” We told him to keep asking the old folks if anyone knew any stories because it was not good to forget what your ancestors made.
MG: The thing that I most liked to do when we dropped anchor and rowed into shore was to greet the children who gathered on the beach to meet us. I decided that I wanted to put a little magickal energy into everyone I could, so I bought a dozen or so boxes of those little gummed-paper foil stars that teachers give out to grade-school kids on their papers. I bought gold and silver, red, blue, and green, and every time I would land on the beach I’d stick a silver star on my forehead and show them the box and ask if they wanted one too. They always did, and so I had fun sticking colored stars on the foreheads of hundreds of kids of all ages. They would run off and gather up more brothers and sisters to bring them back; there was no need to fight over anything because there were plenty of stars for everyone.
Even the moms would come around and ask for stars and we would laugh together, sharing the excitement of the children. Once, one of the women asked me in pidgin what the stars were for. Maybe she was concerned that her kids were joining some weird religious cult or that they were being marked for kidnapping or something. After all, we were certainly not at all like any of the other white folks they had ever encountered before, so I guess a little caution was justified. I told her that in our schools when a child was good, the teacher would give them a star like that; then I asked her, “Aren’t all these good children?”
Of course she laughed, and I saw the relief bloom in her eyes: “Oh yes, yes, all these children are very good!” Then shyly, she asked me if she could have a star too.
When we got to New Ireland, we stopped at a town called Namatanai, and I decided to go ashore in search of ice cream. I had been craving it the whole time we’d been in the tropics because it was too difficult to keep on board the ship. I went into this small convenience store run by a Chinese couple and asked if they had ice cream; they just shook their heads. Undeterred, I kept looking around the store because it looked exactly like the kind of store that should have ice cream bars. Finally, I went back to the Chinese proprietors and asked them again if they had ice cream; this time I asked them in pidgin, in French, and in Spanish, but they still shook their heads.
Then a very tall, Papuan native man walked up to me. His hair was fanned out into an Afro-type style with many small, elaborate braids in the front. He had intricate swirling facial tattoos and a kina shell piercing his nasal septum; he also was wearing a suit and tie. He spoke to me in flawless English with a slight British accent: “Madam, if you want to find someone who speaks English, you will have to ask one of the tribal folk; these people don’t speak any language but their own.” I blinked and stood there speechless for a minute and then thanked him profusely. Next he directed me to the tiny freezer with ice cream. I laughed at myself all the way back to the boat. My bubble of Western provincial assumptions had been thoroughly popped.
Everywhere we went, we asked about the Pishmeri. Most of the places we visited with Melanesian populations said, yes, they knew about such creatures and would tell us a story. One tale was that the Pishmeri followed people in boats, and if you threw trash into the ocean she would reach out and grab you and drag you in. But everyone said that nobody had seen any of them for a long, long time. Only the Polynesian people in the Trobriands said that they didn’t know of anything that looked like that; they identified dolphins, whales, sharks, and dugongs—but no Pishmeri. They were significant seafarers, fishing for their living as well as annually sailing their ceremonially decorated Kula canoes all over their island chain to renew the cultural bonds between them.
We sat in a dozen or more quiet bays overnight up and down the coasts of New Guinea, New Britain, and New Ireland, and we scanned the waters with binoculars when the sun came up because that was the time that the creatures most often appeared to feed.
We felt that we needed to get grounded because our luck just wasn’t working. But we were in the middle of the ocean, so we decided to hold a Circle in the water. Everyone donned their gear and swam out away from the boat and held hands while we called upon Mama Yemaya to help us and I sang an Irish song that Ruth Barrett had taught me to call the Silkies. We saw dolphins and turtles and, most wonderful of all, a whale shark, but we never saw anything that fit the description we were looking for—until we got to Nokon Bay in New Ireland.
I was up on deck on watch with the divemaster, and suddenly I saw tail flukes rise up out of the water. I called him over to check it out, and as we both watched we saw these rolling dark backs and then, after a three-to-five minute pause, would come this graceful long tail waving up and out of the water as the creature used it for leverage to dive down deep. We had found the Pishmeri exactly where it was supposed to be!
OZ: Eventually we got to Nokon Bay, along the north side of New Ireland. We pulled into the harbor and dropped anchor in the evening. And there out in the water were the critters we’d come to find. It was clearly a family—two adults and one child. From the vantage of the boat we couldn’t get a good look, but we were pretty excited about it. In the morning the same family showed up again.
The next day we got up and we saw the Ilkai coming in. We were going to send some divers down to try and get pictures, but the captain said that it was likely that the bubbles from regulators would scare the critter away. So he volunteered to swim out with just a snorkel and shoot some pictures. It was a long swim but he was really good, and he came back saying he got a look at the animals even though the water was a little murky and thought he might have gotten a good picture. But these weren’t digital cameras—the film had to be sent to Australia and developed before we knew what we had captured on the film. All we could tell at the time was that these animals were real. We spent the day diving in the reefs and around, gathering seaweed, shellfish, and other things that might be food for the creatures, but we didn’t see them again.
In the evening on the second day, the local people invited us to come on shore for a sing-sing, which is sort of like a beach party. They had a fire and cooked up a bunch of fish and shellfish, coconuts and papayas, and we brought some hot dogs and marshmallows from the boat. We all shared the food around, and we sang songs around the campfire.
Just before we left the boat for the sing-sing, we saw a little tugboat pulling into the harbor and dropping anchor. But they didn’t make any contact with us. It had a Japanese flag and the lettering on the bow identified it as The Cuddles. We asked the natives about it. Lined up along the shore on one side of the dock was a huge raft of logs. What we were told was that some Japanese representative had come to the village and asked if they could cut down some trees. These were big, old teak trees. They offered to give them a jeep in exchange for the trees. The natives didn’t really think it would be much of a problem, because the forest was huge, and the wood of the trees was so hard that it was almost impossible to cut—especially with just axes.
So they made a Devil’s bargain, and then the Japanese showed up with these tree-cutting machines the size of houses that came onto the island like a lawnmower and denuded half of the entire forest. They would take the logs down to the water’s edge, float them, and bind them together. And then every few months a big ship would come, anchor out at sea, and the tugboat would come to shore, lash onto the raft of logs, and haul it out to sea where it would be taken aboard the ship. All the arrangements had been properly made, but the natives were embarrassed about it. They had made themselves a deal with the Devil, with no idea what they were getting into. It was horrible, and a total environmental travesty. The villagers told us this was one of those tugboats.
We started singing. Some of our folks knew how to play guitar. We sang some of our favorite Grateful Dead songs. Then they sang us their songs; even though the songs were in their own language, the tunes sounded familiar. When we asked what the songs were about, they apologized, telling us, “Our traditional songs are lost to us. When the missionaries came, they forbade us to sing our own traditional songs. But they taught us Christian songs in our own language.” So they sang “Away in a Manger” and “Jesus Loves Me” in Sursurunga, which is the language of that village. It’s spoken by maybe a hundred people.
There were no artifacts in the village because traders had come and taken them all. We’re talking a culture that goes back 40,000 years, clear back to the Ice Age. And it was all gone. The people had no heritage to pass on to their kids. And now their forest was being taken away, and the kids were learning English in Australian schools and losing their language.
We went back to the boat and went to bed for the night. We had people set to get up at dawn and watch for the Ilkai. But the next morning the person on watch hollered and woke us up. He said there was some commotion going on down at the beach that we needed to see. We could see that on the beach the natives were clustered around what appeared to be a large, dead creature floating in the water. We realized it was a dead Ilkai. And the Japanese tugboat was gone, without taking the flotilla of logs.
At that point I dove overboard and swam to shore. I didn’t wait for the dinghy to row ashore. We got there and found that the female of the family had been shot. There was what looked like a bullet hole in her side, right behind her armpit. She was dead. We arranged for local guys to drag the body up on shore.
Now we could see clearly what it was: an Indo-Pacific dugong, which is a relative of the manatee. It is a sleeker, more slender, silvery creature with a beautiful whale-like tail. It has arm-like flippers. It has a head that looked somewhat like a manatee’s head but not exactly. The peculiar arrangement of the jaw and facial parts did, from a distance, look much like a human face, only with the wrong components. So there was a vaguely human look to it even if it was pretty homely by anyone’s standards. And it clearly had a distinct head and shoulder arrangement.
So we recognized the species. But the behavior that had we had observed didn’t correspond to what had been officially known about dugongs. It became clear to us at that point that this creature was the foundation of the legends of the Mermaids. Their skeleton, which we were later on able to study at the Australian Museum in Sydney on our return trip, has arms that are nearly identical to human arms, but with longer fingers that form a flipper when they’re covered with skin.
I did a bit of an autopsy to determine what had caused its death. One of the natives thought that it had been jabbed with a hot spear, but that seemed awfully unlikely. I pretty much determined that it was a bullet hole, but I was not able to dig deep enough to find the bullet, which would have confirmed it. So we decapitated it and took the head to be able to preserve the skull. We tied ropes on the body and towed it out to sea behind the ship and set it adrift. Morning Glory was pretty upset about it all and sang some dirges when we cut it loose. I spent the next few days cleaning the skull. There was no reason to stay there anymore, so we sailed on up to Madang, a port city on the north side of New Guinea.
MG: I guess that among all my regrets about this adventure, the one that comes to haunt me the most is the disrespectful way we dealt with that animal in front of the people of the village. I couldn’t help but cry over the body of this poor mother dugong, one of the last of her endangered kind, which I’m sure must have seemed strange to the local people, but I still can’t help but feel that it was a very bad decision to do a necropsy in such a public way. At the very least we should have towed the intact body to a more private location.
It was bad enough that the Nokon people had lost their Ilkai, their good-luck bringer. The men and all their wild stories had been disproved and shorn of all their glamour, and I think the women seemed a little smug about that, but the village as a whole lost something precious and unique: they lost their Mystery. Like their missing songs, their missing artifacts, and their missing forest, now strangers had come and taken away one more irreplaceable treasure. I know we were definitely not the ones to kill the creature, but I don’t know if the people believed that in the end, especially after we cut it apart and took its head away.
It was the breeding female of a small family group of critically endangered animals. All the other dugongs in villages all up and down the coast had been killed and eaten because those people did not have a taboo about eating it. The very word Ilkai in Sursurunga means “not to eat,” and so this little family had managed to survive in this one small pocket of safety thanks to this one tradition that the Nokon people had hung on to, even in the face of all the overwhelming changes the modern world was bringing them. We traveled halfway around the world to solve a Mystery, and instead we arrived to witness the death of one.
DIANE DARLING: We were just devastated. Because it’s likely no one would have shot her if we hadn’t been there to draw attention to the animals, or at least that’s what I think. When it turned out to be a dugong, people started behaving badly. There were fights, people yelling at each other. It was pretty miserable to be on that boat after the disappointment.
DANIEL BLAIR STEWART: Everybody had their sights aimed a little bit too high. We wanted to discover a new species. We thought it was going to be some kind of semi-aquatic descendent of some local primate—some primate that branched off from some ape lineage, say, during the Eocene period about thirty-five or forty million years ago, and just took to the water. But when we got there, it was no such creature. It was the Indo-Pacific dugong. And I, quite frankly, felt that it was a successful expedition because we did put the lid on the mystery. We found out it was what they all turned out to be: dugongs or manatees—depending on which ocean you’re in.
I’d been doing a bit of dabbling in personally investigating unexplained phenomena, and I always found the best you really can do is close it up and say, “Hey, now we know what it really is.” Because when you come up against something unexplained, all too often the phenomenon itself doesn’t show, or when it does, it gets away, or half the people see it and half don’t. You try to solve as much as you can, because what is left is the real unexplained factor that you have to deal with.
TOM WILLIAMS: The results of the expedition, while not what we had fantasized, nonetheless constituted a contribution—modest though it may be—to the body of science. Our activities had also attracted the attention of the provincial government of New Ireland. We had promised to deliver a report to the governor, and, during our stop in the provincial capital of Madang, I was able to arrange a meeting with the governor and presented a written report. I also wrote a detailed account of the expedition that was published in Cryptozoology, the publication of the International Society of Cryptozoology (ISC). In addition, Oberon and I attended the annual meeting of the ISC in San Diego, where I gave a presentation with slides from the trip.
OZ: A couple of years later when I was traveling in Europe, I discovered a little anthropological museum in Florence, Italy. And one little room there was stacked floor to ceiling with artifacts from Nokon Bay. I saw, there, all the stuff that they had taken from that village. It wasn’t on display. It was just stacked in boxes with a sign on the door that said, “Nokon Village, New Ireland.” I opened the door, and that’s where it was. That sort of wrapped up the mystery of what happened to all their stuff. I wish I could have bought the stuff and taken it back to Nokon to give to the people there.
That tiny anthropology museum had a remarkably large collection of tribal artifacts from aboriginal peoples worldwide. I couldn’t help but be struck by the observation that all this stuff is in this museum, and in countless other museums the world over, and thus no longer accessible to the very people whose heritage it is. The tribal villages and council houses are empty of their treasures and artifacts—stolen to reside permanently in glass cases, drawers, or storerooms in stone buildings in faraway cities, no longer to be passed on as the cultural heritage to a new generation. Considering how small most tribal communities are, and how many of these sacred artifacts are now in public and private collections, it’s no wonder that tribal people are perceived as “primitive” and “culturally impoverished.” We Westerners would be pretty impoverished too if everything we owned, and all the trappings of our history and civilization, were removed to some remote and inaccessible location . . . say, on another planet.