The First Four Hundred Words: The Wizard and the Volcano

I met the wizard of Mount Merapi in June 2006, six weeks into the eruption, at his home on the volcano’s slopes. The one-story structure, built of wood and cement, sat in a patch of bamboo in Kinahrejo, the highest village on the volcano. I had rented a motorbike to drive the hour from Yogyakarta, a college town thirty kilometers from the volcano, near the Indian Ocean shore. The two-lane road was well paved and fast, lined on each side with trees, palm groves, and farmland. Merapi’s smoking cone, which towers 3,000 meters over over Central Java, Indonesia, was visible most of the way. As the road started climbing, the normally lush, green landscape was monotone gray. Ash from inside the erupting mountain had covered the trees and the road.

Though most of Kinahrejo’s 200 people were dairy farmers, the wizard, whose name was M’bah Maridjan, was a government functionary. He earned the equivalent of eighty cents a month to explain the volcano’s behavior to the public and report to a royal court in Yogyakarta. Yogyakarta is the seat of a Javanese monarchy, a young one reaching back only to the eighteenth century, that still runs affairs in that part of Indonesia. Maridjan was entering his twenty-fifth year on the job. His daily duties included reading the volcano’s moods and appeasing its gods using techniques he had learned from his father, the previous wizard. A few times a year, he would hike hours uphill by steep trail from his home in the village to hold ceremonies near the caldera.

When I arrived at Maridjan’s doorstep, a handwritten note was tacked onto a wooden sign. It announced the house as Official Headquarters of the Wizard of Mount Merapi, and said he was no longer granting audiences. I knocked anyway. A man in his forties in an expensive sarong and a peci, a cylindrical cap like a fez, answered the door. He was from the palace in Yogyakarta. Maridjan was a popular public figure, and his refusal to leave the village despite an evacuation order had become a public relations crisis for the monarchy. They had sent this man, a minder, to stay with the wizard. The minder was pleasant and did not seem bothered by me. He said the sign was to ward off TV cameras from the evening news in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, ten hours west. The...

www.decastories.com/wizard The First 400 Words RSS 

Permalink