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60 chapter 3 The Aunties in the Lake Meet Batara Guru + Ancestral Soundscapes lake toba is a cool, blue-green lake with an island in the middle, suspended in a crater that is all that remains of an ancient explosion ten times the magnitude of krakatoa. the lake and its surrounding lands are an eighthour bus ride from Medan, though it will seem longer if you are stuck in a middle seat, hemmed in by cigarette smoke. (if you choose the front middle, you’ll pay for the steady view with a perch atop an overheating engine and the smell of hot vinyl. you’ll find this out as the ride progresses.) once you arrive, though, the exhaust from the bus will fade away, revealing grassy slopes and bright yellow flowers. this return home is a regular observance for tobas who maintain ties to their village. Many men earn a living bringing people and goods safely through roads expanded by the Dutch from footpaths, roads now waging a muddy war for their infrastructural independence. a persistent stereotype in indonesian metropolises is the taxi driver with a thick toba accent, the aggressive toba tout of the bus stations, the young toba guy hanging out the minibus door and barking its destination. But in north sumatra the men who make the daily transit between the toba huta (t: village) and the city are respected: the hairpin turns on the descent into the crater are enough to make an experienced driver blanch and seek an easier, though longer, route. every few months a new story of a swerve off a two-hundred-foot cliff makes its way through the social networks connecting village and city. the casualties of such falls have included prominent national officials as well as people equally important within their smaller circles. on the road to the village, passengers are shown the exact spot of the accident, whether or not this grisly information was solicited. human error is not always blamed for these tragedies. Poor vision, The Aunties in the Lake Meet Batara Guru / 61 winding roads, and driver exhaustion cannot account for everything. in 2002 Bapak and i made a routine errand run to the island by the family motorboat . as the carved prow cut across the waves, we saw a line of people standing at water’s edge, on the margin between road and lake, far away from any village. We heard the reason when we tied off at the dock. the night before, a bus filled with men, women, and children had inexplicably left the safety of the road and plunged into lake toba. it caught on a snag and hung for a time, allowing some passengers and the driver to escape, but then fell into depths no grappling hook could reach. Friends and family in harian discussed the incident for days after—who the victims were, the stories of their lives, and the sadness of their families. But nobody could fathom how such a mistake had been made. in the place where the minibus fell, the road was plumb straight and clearly marked, running parallel to the lake with no turnoffs or buildings to distract. People began to suspect a nonhuman intervention. as the story drifted around the village, these conjectures were made solid by the testimony of the driver, the rookie who had scrambled out of the sinking window. he was confused, but resolute: on the night of the incident , he had seen not one but two roads leading toward Pangururan. knowing there was a hot springs in the mountains to the left, he chose the road closest to the lake and took the bus directly into the water. at least that is how i heard his version went—the story got mixed up in the following days as it acquired other details, including the presence of a diaphanous woman on the road. something otherworldly must have been responsible —after managing the cliff road, no driver would be so foolish as to drive into the lake unassisted. swimming in lake toba, the deepest volcanic lake in the world, has always held risk. children dare each other to swim out past fishing floats, and parents make sure that no one is bathing at the shore after sundown. i remember one early research trip when i, newly graduated and with summers of lifeguarding still in my muscles, was summoned from the sitohangs ’ porch to the place where a city teenager had just drowned, silently, seventy-five meters...

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