introductions...

My first week here on Guam, I had an assignment to cover a Halloween-themed storytelling festival in Talofofo.

It was held on the private beach property of an aging hippie and his sunglasses-wearing wife, who I suspected at the time were the Guam equivalent of crusty activists. My suspicions were confirmed some little while ago, when I heard one or both of them railing against nuclear armaments at a recent EIS hearing.

At any rate, the stories were an odd mixture of mundane and macabre, with some detailing merely odd incidents, like the sighting of a passed-away relative in the back of a car, and others more elaborately structured, like miniature stage plays on a sandy moonlit beach.

The most compelling of the evening, I thought, was a story about a red-eyed giant ghost spirit the teller met on a pig trail one afternoon.

He referred to the creature familiarly as Taotaomo'na. Literally translated as 'those who have come before', Taotaomo'na is, according to the very helpful guampedia.org, the embodiment of Chamorro ancestors and spirits who once walked on the island with the living.

It was my first week on the island, and it was probably my second or third assignment. So I was stuck asking all sorts of uncomfortably obvious questions, like, "where did this story come from?" and how do you spell "ta-to-mono?" -- to which the teller balked, "Uh, I made it up..." and "I don't know."

I think I spelled it wrong in my article -- after unsuccessfully googling several creatively misspelled iterations of the word -- but I'm pretty sure an industrious copy editor fixed it before publication.

Since then I have figured out how to spell Taotaomo'na, and have run into references thrown out here and there, by locals who still say little charms before entering into the jungle governed by Taotaomo'na or refer fondly to hijinks carried out by the forest spirits.

Over Christmas I interviewed a Chamorro couple, who annually descend into jungle brambles to collect fresh moss for their alter to baby Jesus. Christ-worship notwithstanding, they spoke in semi-seriousness about Taotaomo'na, who often played tricks on them, stealing machetes and getting them lost.

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to a motley group of free-spirited former mainlanders, who had been living in the wild refuge of Guam for some years as professors and cruise-boat owners. We ran into them on a road while walking the incredibly friendly rottweiler with which I have recently become acquainted, and they invited us up to their "sunset" at a house on a hill in a still wildish area of Chalan Pago called Fa'ma. The group was made up of several extended families, neighbors who had known each for what I guessed was decades.

After the sun went down, we headed from the hilltop house, where we had eaten cheese and crackers and done a number of what I suspected were home-brewed shots, to a property called affectionately "the Ranch."

It had been built by hand, over the course of decades, by a tall, white-haired, gregarious guy named Bruce and his family, who, according to one of the daughters, had slept in half-finished rooms for most of their lives.

The place, sitting on a sloping hillside, was impressively built, with open-air concrete kitchens and showers, and large loft-like platforms built underneath a carved wooden A-frame that I'm told had to be transported from the nearby jungle after the last typhoon. Out front of the cluttered garage a large electric peace sign beckoned welcoming.

Bruce gave us the tour and invited me back for Scrabble night sometime, apparently a Friday night ritual. Before I left, I was told that I had to partake in a short ceremony, which apparently all new visitors to the ranch have to undergo.

They had had some problems back in the day with Taotaomo'na. One of the younger sons, now in early adulthood, had fallen in a hole once and "gone all Lord of the Flies on us," Bruce casually tossed out.

There had been middle-of-the-night scratching, visitors at the door who weren't there. It got bad enough that at some point they brought a priest, who, upon entering the property turned around. He needed more stuff -- his holy water and crosses not being sufficient.

"There are some things the Catholic church cannot explain," he told them.

Since those early days, they have found a way of appeasing the forest spirits, by offering them introductions.

Bruce walked me, along with several other new additions to the Ranch, a young guy visiting from Japan with one of the daughters, and a somewhat bewildered Japanese teenager, who spoke little to no English, out onto a deck ringed by large disinterested spiders that looked out onto the wild regions below.

He, once again, brought out the home-brewed shots, served up in tiny ceramic shot glasses. And shouted out to the woods, "Taotaomo'na.... Taotaomo'na..." following with a few sentences in Chamorro, before turning to us all and asking us to shout our names.

I shouted my name out to the jungle, and half-expected a response back.

There wasn't one, but that's not how these things work, I think.