Mondaugen's Law:

Twenty-two years ago, I got my first summer job in a woodworking shop. I was 17, surly, socially awkward and really interested in how to make stuff. An architectural paneling business needed a kid to sweep, carry, stack and do whatever needed doing that took no skills. I had none of the right qualifications, but the owner was my girlfriend’s dad. So I got the job.

On the first day, I walked into the shop and found everything was covered in bright orange dust. Wood dust was brown, right? So what was this stuff?

“What’s this stuff?” I asked after my first sneeze.

“Pterocarpus dalbergioides” was the answer. I didn’t move. He seemed to soften with a bit of a smile and said “padauk.” I still didn’t move. Perhaps my new boss had just sneezed. “And shut up and get to work” he continued. So I did, mostly, still puzzling over the bright orange dust.

At the first coffee break, I tried to approach my new fellow employees with ‘shop talk.’

“So, what’s the bright orange stuff?” my icebreaker delivered with a wide smile.

“Wood dust, you moron” was the answer, accompanied by the type of sniggering that I deserved.

“Yeah, yeah, but what kind of dust?” I pressed on, pretending not to be a moron.

“Padauk dust, you moron.”

“Oh, I see” I lied then shut up. At least ‘pterodactyl dibertensis’ sounded intelligent.

“We’re paneling a corporate headquarters with it.”

“I see” I added with a thoughtful look, figuring silence was the better part of perceived intelligence.

That evening, I arrived home dirtier than usual and covered in orange dust. Actually, my mother shrieked as my face was red. The dust had mixed with sweat to produce a reddish tone on my skin. I washed off the dust, but not all of the color. I had been dyed red. Only exfoliation got the red out.

When my clothes came out of the wash, they also had a reddish tinge. It never came out.

The next day, my nose did not stop running. I began to worry. At the coffee break I couldn’t help myself and spoke.

“Wow, that dust is toxic. Makes me sneeze like crazy.”

“Wear a face mask, you moron.” At least this reply was helpful. But even with a dust mask, the nasal infection continued.

There was a huge amount of work to be done at the corporate headquarters, and the padauk dust wafted through the shop all summer. One of my jobs was unloading the lumber truck and stacking the fresh boards on the racks. My first splinter was an experience. It wasn’t just painful, it stung like crazy instantaneously.

“Ow ow ow ow” I cried, hopping around the shop looking for a tweezers.

“What’s wrong, you moron?”

“A spinter, a padauk splinter, a big one” I howled.

“Oh shit, let me help.” It was the first genuine sympathy I had gotten from my co-workers. A tweezer was found, the splinter was pulled from my hand with great pain, and blood trickled out. Some splinter that was.

“Better get some antibiotic ointment on that before it starts to fester.”

“No, I’ll be fine.” It was time to assert some poise and stop acting like a baby.

“Moron.”

That night, I awoke with a swollen, painfully throbbing hand. The damn thing was festering.. I stumbled to the bathroom, squeezed a huge volume of puss out and slathered antibiotic ointment all over it. In the morning, my hand felt broken.

At the next coffee break, my obviously swollen hand fetched more sniggers and not a few “morons.” In my frustration, I pressed for information.

“So where the hell does this awful shit come from?”

“The Andaman Islands, you moron.”

“Yeah fine, but where are they?”

“Somewhere around India. Other side of the planet. Why do you care?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just it’s awful stuff. Why are we building paneling out if it?” and I sneezed again.”

“Look at it when it’s finished, and you’ll know why. Moron.”

So I did, just to spite them.

And man was it gorgeous. Padauk finished with linseed oil gets very dark, becoming deep blood-red with black and purple streaks. The grain is really fine, with intricate eddies and sort of a flaky appearance in places. It was fascinating up close, impressive at a distance. This wood from another planet was wonderful.

I ended that summer with an odd orange tan, a new set of orange clothes and a healthy respect for the toxicity of tropical woods. But the corporate headquarters was stunningly beautiful. I vowed never to work with padauk if I had a choice.

Two weeks ago I spent Christmas on Havelock, one of the Andaman Islands, with my wife and kids. None of them (thankfully) knew me as a snot-nosed kid in my first woodworking job. So none understood when I abandoned them one afternoon to visit Chatham Island, just outside of Port Blair.

“I’ll be back. I just have to visit a sawmill.”

“Huh? Has dad lost his mind or is he just being stupid again?”

Chatham Island is occupied entirely by the largest sawmill in Southeast Asia. It’s the only sawmill in the islands, so all padauk is sawn there, always has been and probably always will be. For a mere 20 rupees, I got to visit the source of the wood I carried, stacked and hated so long ago.

In the Saw Doctoring Unit, I met a sawyer tuning a blade. He had worked at the mill all his life, starting 25 years earlier. I thought he might have sawed the board that gave me that horrible splinter. But he would have been a snot nosed apprentice back 25 years ago, so I didn’t punch him in the nose. But I took his picture.

I found the main sawing floor. The logs are carried from the forests to the Mill on ships. The loading docks are on the same level as the mill, so the logs are rolled directly onto carts and fed into giant bandsaws. It’s quite an operation.

I found a shop, but nobody working. On a table was a block of padauk in the process of being carved into an elephant. The milling machines looked very 1950’s British.

The Mill seemed prepared for woodworking tourists, since there was a museum between storehouses. It told the tale of padauk and other species found on the Andamans. The museum featured some burls (called “cancers”) some wide boards, awful furniture a buffalo, and a dolphin, all equally coated with gloppy varnish.

In a big storehouse, I found a pile of freshsawn padauk, perhaps cut that morning, still damp to the touch. All the wood we used back when was kiln dried, and largely odorless except for the stinging sensation of breathing in the dust. But the fresh stuff smelled wonderful: a bit of cinnamon, a bit of stale socks, a bit of potpourri, a bit of I don’t know what. I lingered so long the stock manager asked if I was all right. I was.

I picked off a large splinter from one board, stuck it in my pocket and walked away. I felt like a moron again.

After six weeks of traveling around India, in Rajasthan and the Andaman Islands, I have more than one story to tell. Instead of a blog to end all blogs and permanently damage all reader relationships by outpacing Dickens for wordcounts, I’ll hold my tongue as much as possible.

The first installment is about the Andamans in general. The next will be about padauk, a wood that has a certain significance to me. Finally, I think one about Rajasthani Castle Forts is in order. I may throw in a nightmares-of-Indian-travel tale as well, but my stamina may even flag by then.

The Andaman Islands are a marvelous mix of historical oddities and truly pristine wilderness, one of the last places on earth where stone-age and pre-stone age people live relatively undisturbed. Nobody really knows what the Jarawa, Shompen or Sentinalese are like. Some still fire arrows at anyone who tries to contact them. Even the names they use to describe themselves aren’t known by the rest of the world. The few photos of them are marvelously disturbing, as their ethnic heritage seems amazingly diverse, from Africa to Burma and Siberia.

The natural habitat on many islands are equally undisturbed, in spite of immigration from the Indian mainland. The undisturbed bits are visible from all the tiny human settlements. The Andaman and Nicobars are a submerged mountain chain. They have reefs, but also huge rainforests that grow right up to the beach, and mangrove shorelines. This makes them, um, different, from most tropical islands, many of which are coral atolls covered in coconut and palm trees. Sme of the photos will show this lovely oddity.

The pristine beaches and somewhat pristine coral reefs (damaged by the tsunami in 2004) are the main tourist attractions. Who could resist? So we went. Here’s a mostly visual description of where we went, what we did. Sadly, I forgot my camera, so these are shots taken by friends. And I can’t show the best bits, the coral reefs that we snorkeled twice every day we were there, as I had no underwater camera equipment. Sorry.

000110 This is Port Blair, the main port, from the air, looking Southeast. It's the big city in the middle On the left is Ross Island, where the British created their own bit of England in the 19th century, complete with tennis courts, gothic stone church and bungalows in the Arts and Crafts style (or a near enough approximation). Bottom left of Port Blair you may be able to see the Cellular Jail, notorious in Indian history as this was where the British sent the political prisoners during their rule. Conditions were horrible, to say the least.

These are two views of Havelock Island from our ferry. If it looks pristine and untouched, it largely still is, though not if the hotel industry has its way. They're building as furiously as bribery allows them. No one could tell me if the dead trees on the beach were a result of the 2004 tsunami or something else, but I think the tsunami is to blame. It didn't topple the trees, but it undermined their root systems, took away the soil closest to the beach.

Our hotel really wasn't a hotel, more a group of tents, huts and shacks (can't find that photograph) in a coconut grove just off beach #5. This shot looks from the beach into the resort, to a little hut where we had dinner now and again. The decorations are for Christmas and New Year.

This is the beach right next to our hotel during high tide. Please ooh and aah over the color of the water, which is perfectly clear, over white sand. clumps of sea grass and corals. The water here is quite shallow--no more than eight feet deep at high tide, though shallower in many places--as it's a bay between islands. You can swim for close to a kilometer before finding the deep water channel.

This is the same beach, #5, at low tide. Now you can literally walk a kilometer out in the bay. Closer, the clumps of coral are exposed. Hermit crabs were the most fun to catch, though the bigger ones pinched in frustration at being disturbed.

Just a marvelous slightly-offshore tree on beach #5.

This little shrine has a lovely story. Tribes along the Burmese coast built rafts, put shrines or houses on them, and set them adrift. Many of them end up in the Andamans. Fishermen come across them floating along the coast. They're towed back and sold for their bamboo. The rafts are made from big bamboo (8 in diameter and up) logs, which is valuable to the locals as it doesn't grow on the islands. Another much larger raft (sorry no picture) had two stories: a shack below with a fire pit and a platform above, I'd imagine for sleeping.

I heard many accounts about the rafts. One theory suggested the rafts were designed to lure demons away from families beset with troubles. You build the raft, live on it for a while, assume the demon lives with you, then set the raft afloat when the demon is sleeping and escape yourself. Demon awakes miles out to sea. The little shrine suggests some other use, probably not involving human passengers, as the construction was pretty crude (just bunches of different-length bamboo lashed together).

At night, someone would always burn beach debris (coconut palms, leaves, driftwood) to keep the sandfly population down. It made for excellent fun, and an opportunity to create light angles with a slow aperture.

And this little fellow washed up in the night. I think it's some kind of trumpet fish. We saw them swimming in groups above the reefs. Nice shape but boring colors. Lovely rows of sharp little teeth, though.

It wasn't long before we hired a boat to go snorkeling at a good site. This is South Button Island. From a distance it really looks like a button. Again, I thought I had an image from afar, but can't find it now. The reefs are all around the island, though on one side, the island plunges down vertically, so you can swim by a wall of rock with gloom below. Very atmospheric.

Here are some brave kids, jumping in with no seeming bottom, and no real shore to swim to. I found it mildly disconcerting, this being my first real snorkeling adventure. A few months previous, I swam around Lakshadweep's reefs, but without flippers or a proper mask, since the government resort doesn't keep such things to rent (and there's no other source on the island). Nevertheless, I adored it.

South Button was simply magnificent. I can name very little of what I saw, except a half-eated sea snake, millions of the oddest looking neon-colored fish, and the wildest forests of coral. The Sea of Green in the Beatles' movie Yellow Submarine featured really bizarre creatures. I thought they were flights of fancy due to overstimulation from LSD. Now I know the animators had simply snorkeled around reefs, and based their creatures on fact.

The island itself is very simple, very rural. There are two roads from the jetty, one leading North, the other South. You pass by farms, animals and Indians living much the way they do on the mainland. There are the same animals, ame lazy stray dogs, same bedraggled buildings and same smiles on faces. I do think, though, the tuktuk drivers are bit more bored than usual. As we were a large groupwe often took two tuktuks to the other side of the island. Invariably, the drivers raced each other. I come away in awe that they never lifted a wheel off the ground, ran off the road or screeched tires. This isn't to say there aren't plenty of accidents. A jeep ran off the road right in front of our hotel. Took 20 people to push his jeep back right.

Elephant beach, lovely isolated and with excellent snorkeling right off the beach was a 40 minute boat ride from the jetty. There's no road to the beach, and the forest path to reach it is about 3 km long, part of it through a tidal swamp. So we took local boats there. The boats were leaky affairs with incredibly noisy motors. This was the only downside, as you either held your ears or reached the beach unable to hear anything.

This is a lighthouse on the way to Elephant beach.

And this is our boat waiting for us.

Elephant beach was truly lovely, made mysterious by all the dead trees. Some of them displayed the most amazing grain (yes, the woodworker in me is surfacing). Sad to see them slowly rot.

But the coconuts will sprout anew and replace them in time.

I've saved the best for last, which is Beach #7. It has a bit of fame, considered one of the nicest in the world, but so far is still amazingly undeveloped (though for how long, who can tell). This shot gives some sense of the length and gentle curve. Just off the beach is a desnse forest of ancient trees. You always had a choice of cool shade or hot sun. While there were no elephants on Elephant beach, there were a few on Beach #7. For 20 rupees, you could have a ride.

This is a little cove on the Western end of Beach #7. We most often settled here for the day. The kids had great fun in the surf, and excellent snorkeling was just off the beach. I saw two hawksbill turtles here, one for quite a long time as it was resting on the bottom and didn't seem disturbed by my presence.