Late Storms for Darwin: Vague Journal Foreword by Dr. Athol Pyne

Copyright © 2013 by John C. Gleason.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 05/18/2013

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: Passengers

Chapter 2: Storms

Chapter 3: Fearless Pilot

Chapter 4: Desert Isle

Chapter 5: Castaways

Chapter 6: Best Of Things

Chapter 7: Uphill Climb

Chapter 8: Crusoe And Friday

Chapter 9: Primitive As Can Be

Postscript

Trudy and John, thanks for the genes.

Written in Perth, Western Australia in 2013 by John C Gleason

‘Late Storms for Darwin: Vague Journal Foreword by Dr Athol Pyne’ is fiction. Any character’s resemblance to a real person is unintended.

Foreword

By Dr Athol Pyne

Late Storms for Darwin (LSD) is an extract from the professional journal of a colleague: the cultural anthropologist, Dr Jacques Vague. Vague is French Canadian (Quebec); the ‘g’ is soft. It is a story of sinister design and misfortune, an account of peculiar and deadly occurrences.

LSD unfolds in the remotest part of the Northern Territory of Australia where some people know what an anthropologist is—something to do with Aborigines. Anthropologists in Australia are material experts when it comes to certain legal transactions involving Aboriginal interests in land.

Elsewhere they study the human condition, what keeps a society ticking and what causes it to decline and fade away. They know what a savage mind thinks.

Of course, Vague’s international notoriety stems from the infamous 1989 Atheistman cartoon which led to the Iranian fatwa on his life.

The central event in LSD occurred in February 2011, and is tagged the East Crocodile Island (ECI) Tragedy by national media. ECI is just off the northern coast of Arnhem Land in the Arafura Sea, a tropical basin on the south-west margins of the Pacific Ocean.

As well as the awful and gruesome facts of the event, LSD documents the first case of a feral monkey in Australia.

Dr Vague’s is the only written record of what actually occurred on ECI. Federal police forensic examination of LSD would later question the author’s state of mind at that time, and whether the document can be relied on as an account of the real situation.

When LSD is recorded, Vague is employed by the Territory Aboriginal Land Council (TALC) as a consultant genealogist for the negotiation of a major mining development on Aboriginal Land. A deal has been struck, and he is on a two-day trip to the remote north-west corner of Arnhem Land for the official signing of the Gove Uranium Mining Operations (GUMO) Land Access Expansion Agreement between the local Aboriginal landowners and multinational resource company, Red Creek Corporation (RCC). It is the last job of his current contract.

Vague has lived with his family in Darwin for most of a year, and the annual monsoonal rainy season is lingering in February. Soon the northern wetlands will start to dry out, but now unsealed tracks throughout the Top End are submerged in vast waterways, and the only way to get around is by light aircraft.

At this point, Australian readers of the Vague Journal are advised (as is the convention) that reference to Aboriginal (and other) people who may be deceased is made, and there is description of secret male ritual that should not be read by women.

I’ve known Jack Vague for thirty-odd years, ever since his first appearance before the Anthropological Federation’s Ethics Committee on which I served as chair until recently. The file of complaints against Vague beggars its nearest rival by an order of magnitude. In the 1970s and 1980s, he’d stride confidently into committee hearings, facing one charge or another (intoxication during fieldwork, fornication with tribal women, or some other moral corruption), and when no witnesses appeared, he’d be on his way in a trice, as if he’d just dropped off the laundry.

Vague is tall and had a lanky gait in younger years. But he’s sixty now and pot-bellied, and these days you’ll find him plodding, mostly from one indoor environment to the next. Just about all his remaining hair has turned white. It’s thinned out completely on top and what’s left grows long out the sides and is tied at the back in a ridiculous ‘hippy’ ponytail. He admits it’s a pathetic attempt to clutch onto fragments of youth, but it’s how he’s always worn his hair. His beard is full, in the Northern Territory ‘hillbilly’ style of what happens when you don’t shave. Apparently, his wife of twenty years recently cut some of it off one night after Vague passed out drunk, but he argues that Aborigines prefer their anthropologists to have bushy, white trustworthy beards, and it keeps the flies off his face when he’s in the field. So she lets him keep it.

Professionally, Vague sees exactly how the rest of his life will likely play out. His globetrotting days—one year in the Amazon Jungle observing young bride-exchange rituals among the naked Edo Tribe, and another in the Atlas Mountains of the Sahara arbitrating savage Berber blood feuds—are almost over. Although formally advised years ago that his fatwa had been downgraded to only a permanent ban on entering Iran, he continues to suffer (and not silently) generalised anxiety about the rest of his life, and about mortality, principally his own.

In LSD, Vague shows diminishing respect and patience for the circumstances and real-life concerns of most everyone he encounters—strangers, colleagues, Aboriginal people, and even his family. There is a diary entry referring to the birthday of his youngest of four sons described unflatteringly as ‘W(eakly) I(nteracting) M(assive) P(article)—No. 4’. He has become a conceited and argumentative social curmudgeon; his transformation from an empathetic to a misanthropic anthropologist is virtually complete. He has externalised causality in his life. ‘One person can make a difference but it’s not me, and if you only listen to one fool, you’re just as much a bonehead’ (Vague Journal).

Some of Vague’s comments and observations in LSD will be considered offensive by a wide range of groups and individuals. Vague lacks subtlety in condemning big religions for proselytising indigenous people to a point where they’ve lost traditional beliefs. Most readers will recall that his 1989 satirical cartoon parody of ‘alter ego’ Atheistman fighting Ayatollah Khomeini in a Mexican professional wrestling ring offended the nation of Iran and Muslims worldwide. Afghans, Australians, Berbers, Brazilians, Catholics, the Dutch, the Edo Tribe of the Amazon, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Kunmubilpilguru Aboriginal Clan of the Northern Territory, Mexicans and Pentecostalists—all are advised that some LSD entries may be disturbing and unwelcome.

Vague never intended that the journal be made public. Following the ECI Tragedy, Australian Federal Police requested that I assess certain sections in LSD to ensure no secret or sacred Aboriginal taboos would be breached prior to the journal being forensically examined for evidence of crimes. I reviewed the LSD entries and then the journal in its entirety. It contains scholarly data about strange customs, bizarre sexual practices and weird primitive religions but is not principally an anthropological treatise. Many entries in LSD are personal and contain disquieting quasi-philosophical observations about absolute truth and ultimate reality. The review was a troubling and unwholesome experience.

It cannot be said that Dr Vague holds high standing within the anthropological scholarly fraternity. He published only two papers: his PhD thesis Notes on the Meaning of Life (1970) and immediately following, his Bio-chemical/Socio-cultural Interface theory that reduces ‘life’ to a set of chemical and social factors that ultimately have no meaning or life. He makes frequent and unfortunate references to the BSI Theory but LSD requires no specialist training or prerequisite reading.

The journal’s anthropological data dates from his 1970 doctoral dissertation and records the years he spent as the UN principal ethnographer from 1973 to 1989. The earliest journal entries (circa 1965) mostly concern his role in the Underground Comics movement during the drug-fuelled 1960s as the creator of the Atheistman superhero character.

One Atheistman comic book was printed in very limited addition. No copy is known to survive. Underground Comics became far more famous for their R-rated drug-and-sex cartoons, and Atheistman was considered offensive even by the godlessly depraved standards of most hippies.

There is no mention of Vague’s role in Underground Comics on the Internet, but the 1989 cartoon drawing depicting Atheistman slamming a copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species into the face of Ayatollah Khomeini is the first search result for Dr Jacques Vague. Others include:

• Brazilian Government documents: illegal hardwood logging in the Amazon River Basin (1973)

• Mazari Sharif News report UN Funds Missing: Amu Darya Bridge Project (1974)

• Algiers Daily News: Berber Communal Violence Intensifies (1976)

• Interpol arrest warrants: Bougainville Rebellion (1987)

• UN Fatwa Watch Committee: New Additions (1989)

• Nevada State Gamming Authority: List of Permanently Banned Persons (1989)

• UN Enquiry into the Vague Prejudice Profiler and the conduct of Dutch troops at Srebrenica (1996)

• Bre-X gold fiasco in Borneo (1997)

• Enron vs Vague (2000) Brazilian court proceedings: oil leases on Edo Tribal Land

• Anthropology Digest: Research Grant Linked to Massive Cannabis Crop (2005)

• Darwin News: Traditional Owners Oppose GUMO Expansion (2010)

For the record, Vague was never convicted of a crime in relation to any of these matters.

It is certain from entries in the journal over many years, and in many exotic locations, that Vague has an uncanny talent for picking up languages. He speaks several southern and eastern Asian languages as well as those spoken by many Aboriginal communities in Brazil, Canada, the United States and Australia. He puts this down to an innate ability to imitate sounds and recognise patterns and rules in speech. He doesn’t have to work hard at it.

Vague is also interested in theoretical physics, and demonstrates an informed layman’s grasp of basic principles of particle dynamics which appears in the journal mostly as the unfortunate framework for some form of ‘objective reality’ (and for occasionally insulting his children). He evidently believes that the Universe is really some sort of ‘high energy Gravity force field’—not the place you want to find yourself if you’re a ‘complex of biochemistry’. It causes him appreciable angst.

Incidentally, Vague only consented to LSD being published because it was already in the public sphere, having been made the subject of an Australian police investigation. Federal authorities found no hard evidence of a ‘prosecutable offence that could reasonably lead to conviction’ or that Vague is a psychopath.

Nevertheless, he has become unreasonable and litigious concerning anything to do with the journal. Recent emails sent to his TALC office about publishing further non-incriminating extracts brought a formal response on the letterhead of Winston Crying-Cloud and Partners, a firm of copyright solicitors with head office in Las Vegas, USA. Background due diligence on the legal firm revealed that it shares offices with Lilly of the Virgin Marriage Chapel and Clark County Bail Bond Bureau where, respectively, Vague married a very youngish Shoshone Indian princess, eventually proven to be old enough, and may have borrowed money to get de-incarcerated while the girl’s birth certificate was being verified.

That was in 1989, and Pam and Jack Vague have been together ever since. But after twenty years of domestic life, like all things in the Universe, their love is subject to the insidious process of Entropy—that ‘damned Second Law of Thermodynamics’ as he puts it.

The particular way Entropy works for Vague is, on the one hand, to weaken the physiological ‘biochemical complex’ responsible for his libido, and at the same time, ironically, he sees it seemingly undermining the integrity of his wife’s confidence in his fidelity. He makes reference in the journal to increasingly frequent images of his wife Pam’s traditional native cutting, gutting and skinning knife that he knows sometimes ends up in the crotches of philandering husbands in Shoshone culture.

It’s just a family heirloom now, but she apparently keeps the long thin cruelly curved ‘moon-crescent’ blade scalpel-sharp and on display on a shelf above the TV in Vague’s house in Darwin, along with a small brown Indian medicine-bag pouch made from something’s (or someone’s) cured scrotum skin that has shrunk, puckered and diminished over the ages so that it’s as fragile as wasps’ nest paper. Inside are the aged fragments of teeth and claws from a long-dead cougar, Pam’s Shoshone totemic sister. His wife is rarely referred to in LSD even as Vague faces death.

A thick red elastic band holds Dr Jacques Vague’s battered black leather-bound journal closed and secures a 2H pencil sharpened to a fine point inside. The hard 2H pencil doesn’t smudge but leaves only a very fine line that fades a bit over time. Vague has to press hard when he writes, and every page has occasional tiny craters where pencil points have broken.

Aside from slight fading in the older sections, LSD is legibly intact. There is no forensic sign that the manuscript has been tampered with, except for seven pages. These show that the original text has been erased and written over. But it’s possible to see most of the original writing simply by holding up the pages against strong light.

Unimaginable Sapphic erotica, apparently one page donated to each of seven sexually deviant themes, was and still is contained on these pages. They are the same two women in each of the scenarios: one tallish, glamorous and sultry (Girl 1) and the second shorter, slim and boyish (Girl 2).

Reasonable decent people will understandably ignore this tampered section; it’s simply the crude pornographic fantasies of an old man wishing he was a young man again. The following edited example is included here to demonstrate they are unrelated to events on ECI:

Girl 2: You know, G1, back home when it gets really hot like this, we go skinny-dipping in the old pond.

G1: I was in a movie once. It was a scene around a swimming pool—the wind blows my bikini top away, and as I run after it, my bottoms blow away too.

G2: Well, the boys aren’t around and I’m going swimming . . . Come on, G1, I’ll race you to the beach.

The Gs head off at moderate ‘run’, hand in hand, in cute girly way.

At this point Vague describes in a ham-fisted pulp fiction style, lesbian sexual encounters between ‘Girl 1’ and ‘Girl 2’ in lurid detail which cannot be included here. The following will give a gentle reader sufficient understanding; it’s apparently the ‘climax’ of the ‘lovemaking’:

And G1 and G2 are like naked goddesses in the night sky. Bright stars outline their hot bodies against multicoloured gas clouds and giant super nova nebulae.

They embrace now throughout the immensity of the Universe. G2 has G1 pinned face forward against the Sloan Great Wall of galaxy clusters and G1’s legs are spread several hundred million lights years wide. G1’s [deleted] is about 1.75783 times the diameter of the Milky Way.

But suddenly their love is shrunk to nano-scale and G1 and G2 writhe in sweaty embrace on fluffy, pastel coloured complex molecules. G2 is a dominant vixen and uses strings of hydrogen atoms to bind G1’s hands.

G2 is moaning hoarsely and little gasps escape G1 as the scale gets smaller and smaller. G2 is furiously massaging G1, her fingers firmly knead G1’s swollen [deleted].

The space containing them shrinks profoundly, much smaller than the wave function of a light photon. There’s only darkness and sound of G1’s and G2’s hot panting. G1 squeals in high pitched ecstasy, a tiny oozing of clear fluid emerging from G2’s pulsating [deleted] now only Planck Units wide.

It’s the end of everything . . . G2’s Quantum Foam.

I have taken legal advice concerning the threats to myself contained in the ‘postscript’ to LSD. In so far as they’re directed at the public, that’s a police matter.

AP

‘Once upon a time in the multiverse, quantum fluctuations ignited a Big Bang. Energy cooled, matter formed, stars incubated… and on one little blue planet in a medium-sized galaxy somewhere in the Virgo Super Cluster, a tiny portion of a Universe came alive.

. . . and the life became aware of itself,

. . . and it made tools and a language to understand,

. . . and saw its place: alone and doomed.

Pity all round, really’ (Vague Journal).

Chapter 1

PASSENGERS

7 February 2011

Vast eucalypt woodland covers north-east Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory wilderness. Burning in the summer sun and sweltering in the wet, it offers fleeting shade and privacy of isolation for ancient secret business, little else. In the stormy season, monsoon rains swell rivers into World Heritage listed Pristine Tropical Wetlands—stinking, piss-yellow swamps to my mind.

On the forest fringe, where it meets the warm waters of the south Pacific, a tiny piece about two kilometres long and one wide has been cleared of trees and bulldozed flat for Red Creek Corporation’s (RCC) Gove Uranium Mining Operation’s (GUMO) airstrip, one of the most northerly jet-capable in Australia, probably the remotest. It covers a low granite plateau jutting into the far eastern Arafura Sea where it blends into the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The all-weather runway is oriented east-west generally parallel to the coastline so planes take off and land into prevailing winds. RCC’s current underground uranium operations and accommodation village are ten kilometres inland, directly south. The port facility is five kilometres east of the mine on the far north-west coast of the Gulf. The mine workforce flies in and out using this airstrip on a staggered roster mostly from Darwin, but many commute from Townsville in northern Queensland. There’s normally one flight in and out per day: early morning or late afternoon.

It’s 1 p.m., and as we drive over the crest of a small ridge, the GUMO airstrip comes into view 500 metres dead ahead. Beyond, is the turquoise-blue sea, glittering painfully in midday sunlight. I’ve seen it all before, and as I vacantly focus in on the tiny white aircraft parked on the tarmac, I’m wondering about the damn chest X-ray Pam finally got me to have just before leaving Darwin a few days ago. There’s a chance I might have lung cancer . . . in my wife’s view. I’m a sixty-year-old smoker. Statistically, she might be right.

Pam’s on another one of her tedious campaigns to make me live longer. Without an X-ray showing otherwise, the treacherous nag has determined that I’m probably dying of lung cancer already. She’s in pre-grieving, watching me constantly for signs: shortness of breath, more frequent, prolonged fits of coughing, and then comes the lecture on the value life and the tragedy of throwing it away. I only want to endure this process once and for the shortest period possible (or not at all if she predeceases me) so I saw the doctor to get her off my back. I don’t feel like I’ve got cancer and I think it’s something I’d probably notice, but I resolve to check the X-ray results as soon as I get home. If they’re positive, I’ll keep the news to myself just to keep Pam from gloating I told you over and over until the last miserable moments of my life, and I’ll stock up a fatal dose of drugs to make sure it’s all over quick, enough for now and/or later.

One of my fellow charter plane passengers, RCC boss Mattius Korda, I know has ‘terminal’ cancer because he told me last night over drinks. He seemed robust enough during dinner at the mine village, even after we shared several bottles of wine. But as the night wore on, a sick pallor drained his face, he lost interest in cheap wine, and his chemo-bald head started glowing red with fever.

Well, better him than me. I figure the odds of two people on this charter flight having cancer—factoring in age, sex and lifestyle—at about a hundred to one. Statistically, I should be all right.

I share the back seat of the vehicle with one other passenger. The driver is a GUMO employee. He’s middle-aged with a darkish, slightly acne-scarred central Asian face, perhaps a northern Afghan. He introduced himself as Yousef and made a few polite enquiries about the purpose of our trip. The uranium mine probably doesn’t get many visitors but I just stated, sharply, mind, that I’m the land council anthropologist here for the expansion agreement, and I began fiddling with my mobile phone, making it clear I didn’t want to talk. He had the evil eye of his marauding Mongol ancestors and enough malevolence in his smile to set my guts twitching knowing the Darwin Refugee Detention Centre is full of them.

The other passenger is the charter aircraft pilot, Bob Palmer. He’s been talking on his mobile phone in the back seat for the entire ten-minute trip from the village.

Driver Yousef sees neither of his passengers being sociable and engages no further. He spoke with an educated southern Uzbek accent. If he’s a recently released refugee, perhaps he was an eminent doctor or engineer in Kabul with Taliban enemies. Maybe he used the excuse of war (sport for most Afghans) to find a place of peace and higher income in the West.

The well-maintained gravel track ends at the locked gate of the airport security fence. Then it turns left skirting the south-west perimeter, and continues west, roughly following the coast for several kilometers, snaking along the shoreline. It peters out beyond the airport to a few sandy wheel ruts but with a four-by-four, it’s drivable across the high Arnhem plateau south of Goromuru River in the wet season for about a hundred kilometres, all the way to mouth of the Woolen River south of Banyon and East Crocodile Islands.

On the right is the small paved airport parking area and the concrete pathway leading to the airport terminal building. Beyond the two-metre-high wire-mesh security fence is the width of the airstrip, and then nothing but the sparking expanse of the Arafura Sea.

We turn into the parking lot and stop in front of the terminal: five or six large ship containers joined together side by side, hollowed out and painted white. The airport will be upgraded now that RCC has managed to screw down Aboriginal landowners in a deal to expand mining at GUMO into a gigantic open-pit operation. Now it’s basic and low-tech. Above the building’s windowless entrance is a small red stencilled sign faded by weather but still reading Departures/Arrivals/Secure Area.

Beyond the terminal, our charter aircraft is parked on the tarmac close to fuel pumps: a twin-engine prop plane seating ten passengers, gleaming brightly in the sun. A red line runs horizontally from the nose down along the white fuselage and forms NTDT in metre-high slanted letters before straightening out to the tail. The harsh barren setting makes the precision flying machine look all too easy to break.

RCC paid for this charter and will pay the bill for my professional anthropological services when we get back to Darwin. The flight should take about three hours to travel the 500 kilometres almost due west. I should be home for dinner. With only four passengers, there’s a bit of extra legroom and we’ll be flying during my normal naptime.

This very plane is chartered often by my principal client, the Territory Aboriginal Land Council (TALC), and occasionally flown by Bob Palmer. It’s operated by Top End Aboriginal-owned tourist outfit, NT Dreamtime Air and whips around the Arnhem Land communities regularly on jobs for TALC, picking up land councillors for meetings in Darwin. I have flown on it many times. It’s a Brazilian-made Lorina LR600. I’m surprised Brazilians are so clever; I normally think plane-building better suited to more temperate climes. Because of its long thin cabin and sleek profile, giggly TALC staffers nicknamed it the ‘Pencil of Death’.

My job on this trip: to attend the formal signing of the GUMO expansion land acquisition agreement between RCC and clan leaders from the local Aboriginal community. I am the TALC consultant anthropologist responsible for making sure only correct Aboriginal people sign, and that the signatories understand the nature of the deal and as a group, consent to it.

It’s my tenth and last trip, each one more boring and predictable than the previous but thankfully, each one shorter and more alcohol-sodden. I can’t complain though; mining company jobs are lucrative. I’ve made a lot of money as a consultant over the years, a small fortune from turning the real-life concerns of indigenous people into intellectual fodder. Part of me would like to give something back, retire to pro bono work or maybe do something for community kids. ‘Part’ might be an overstatement—more like my Aunt Fanny’s big fucking toe.

Yesterday’s mine-deal signing ceremony started at 2 p.m., lasted about fifteen minutes, and a traditional Aboriginal ‘welcome to country’ ceremony, performed half-hearted, topped it off. The dancing’s more like street theatre these days and you get what you pay for. Then the Aborigines drove off home to Minjiningga Aboriginal community seventy-five kilometres south of the mine. The whole affair was over in an hour. I get paid by the day so afterwards I enjoyed the catering and drank the company’s wine, all the while looking forward to getting away from cranky cynical Aborigines and pushy arrogant miners.

It’s an oppressively hot steamy day even for February. I get out of the air-conditioned car, step on to the concrete footpath, and it takes only seconds for sweat to pour.

Bob struggles with his large bulk; he’s a big fat pilot—very rare in the tropics. He’s also famous as a former Hell Cheaters motorcycle thug. He was filmed severing the jugular of a rival biker in a knife fight at a Sydney rock concert in the 1980s, and staying to watch him bleed to death. There was blanket TV footage in all the news.

He was ‘fat-beefy’ in those days, a true gladiator, wearing several inches of fat like body-armour thick enough to absorb a flick knife to the hilt without catastrophic damage to vital organs; and he moved far faster than a dying man would credit a fat man. He’s clinically obese now, even for a 185-centimetre tall man. He’s about fifty. He’ll have a coronary anytime soon, possibly within hours.

I knew Bob twenty years ago in central Australia. It was during the years of fatwa and my life was all skulking in flat, empty, shade-less red terrain with nary a tree to hide an assassin, as far from Iran as a white man can run and stay out of snow.

And all because of one of my silly cartoons, a Malaysian journalist who couldn’t mind his own goddam business and the evil old Tyrant of Tehran himself, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. No sinner had a blacker heart than this madman and no martyr, a more puritanical nonsense of humour.

But I suppose as he lie dying in 1989—from too tight a sphincter in my view—and looked back at a lifetime of evil deeds all in the name of piety, religious satire was not likely to set a wry smile anywhere in that fleas’ nest beard of his. If a bit of social humour caused a tizzy-fit that helped the megalomaniacal brute into the bosom of his oblivion, it was probably the best thing for him, and certainly, the world.

Of course, had he the sense to snuff it a year or two sooner, I might have avoided fifteen years of constant back-watching, still have my cushy UN job, married a girl other than Pam (or not at all), and never set foot in the scorching sun-painted landscape of the Australian Outback, the peerless hellhole of the Western world.

In the 1990s, I’d run into Bob from time to time as I surveyed for Aboriginal sacred sites near Alice Springs for TALC. He was known as ‘Captain Bob’ by the local Aborigines. I flew with him around Pitjantjatjarra communities on occasions. On the fight over yesterday he mentioned he’d just moved to Darwin and I might have seen him around town recently.

He did a lucky five years at Long Bay Goal for the very public knife brawl, met tribal Aboriginal men inside and ‘got to know the lore’ (as he puts it). He found a sense of social justice in jail, of all things, and when he got out he travelled to Alice Springs and reinvented himself.

Back then, Australian cultural mythology held that a crooked man could go straight in