Vintage Sacks

by Oliver Sacks

  I waded into the water, and started diving for sea cucumbers myself. At one time, I had read, there had been a brisk trade exporting sea cucumbers to Malaya, China, and Japan, where they are highly esteemed as trepang or bêche-de-mer or namako. I myself love a good sea cucumber on occasion—they have a tough gelatinousness, an animal cellulose in their tissues, which I find most appealing. Carrying one back to the beach, I asked James whether the Pingelapese ate them much. “We eat them,” he said, “but they are tough and need a lot of cooking—though this one,” he pointed to the Stichopus I had dredged up, “you can eat raw.” I sank my teeth into it, wonder if he was joking; I found it impossible to get through the leathery integument—it was like trying to eat an old, weathered shoe.48

  After breakfast, we visited a local family, the Edwards. Entis Edward is achromatopic, as are all three of his children, from a babe in arms, who was squinting in the bright sunlight, to a girl of eleven. His wife, Emma, has normal vision, though she evidently is a carrier of the gene. Entis is well educated, with little command of English but a natural eloquence; he is a minister in the Congregationalist Church and a fisherman, a man well respected in the community. But this, his wife told us, was far from the rule. Most of those born with the maskun never learn to read, because they cannot see the teacher’s writing on the board; they have less chance of marrying—partly because it is recognized that their children are likelier to be affected, partly because they cannot work outdoors in the bright sunlight, as most of the islanders do.49 Entis was an exception here, on every count, and very conscious of it: “I have been lucky,” he said. “It is not easy for the others.”

  Apart from the social problems it causes, Entis does not feel his colorblindness a disability, though he is often disabled by his intolerance of bright light and his inability to see fine detail. Knut nodded as he heard this; he had been deeply attentive to everything Entis said, and identified with him in many ways. He took out his monocular to show Entis—the monocular which is almost like a third eye for him, and always hangs round his neck. Entis’s face lit up with delight as, adjusting the focus, he could see, for the first time, boats bobbing on the water, trees on the horizon, the faces of people on the other side of the road, and, focusing right down, the details of the skin whorls on his own fingertips. Impulsively, Knut removed the monocular from around his neck, and presented it to Entis. Entis, clearly moved, said nothing, but his wife went into the house and came out bearing a beautiful necklace she had made, a triple chain of matched cowrie shells, the most precious thing the family had, and this she solemnly presented to Knut, while Entis looked on.

  Knut himself was now disabled, without his monocular—“It is like giving half my eye to him, because it is necessary to my vision”—but deeply happy. “It will make all the difference to him,” he said. “I’ll get another one later.”

  The following day we saw James, squinting against the sunlight, watching a group of teenagers playing basketball. As our interpreter and guide, he had seemed cheerful, sociable, knowledgeable, very much part of the community—but now, for the first time, he seemed quiet, wistful, and rather solitary and sad. We got to talking, and more of his story emerged. Life and school had been difficult for him, as for the other achromatopes on Pingelap—unshielded sunlight was literally blinding for him, and he could hardly go out into it without a dark cloth over his eyes. He could not join the rough-and-tumble, the open-air games the other children enjoyed. His acuity was very poor, and he could not see any of the schoolbooks unless he held them three inches from his eyes. Nonetheless he was exceptionally intelligent and resourceful, and he learned to read early, and loved reading, despite this handicap. Like Delihda, he had gone to Pohnpei for further schooling (Pingelap itself has a small elementary school, but not secondary education). Clever, ambitious, aspiring to a larger life, James went on to get a scholarship to the University of Guam, spent five years there, and got a degree in sociology. He had returned to Pingelap full of brave ideas: to help the islanders market their wares more efficiently, to obtain better medical services and child care, to bring electricity and running water into every house, to improve standards of education, to bring a new political consciousness and pride to the island, and to make sure that every islander—the achromatopes especially—would get as a birthright the literacy and education he had had to struggle so hard to achieve.

  None of this had panned out—he encountered an enormous inertia and resistance to change, a lack of ambition, a laissez-faire, and gradually he himself had ceased to strive. He could find no job on Pingelap appropriate to his education or talents, because Pingelap, with its subsistence economy, has no jobs, apart from those of the health worker, the magistrate, and a couple of teachers. And now, with his university accent, his new manners and outlook, James no longer completely belonged to the small world he had left, and found himself set apart, an outsider.

  We had seen a beautifully patterned mat outside the Edwards’ house, and now noticed similar ones everywhere, in front of the traditional thatched houses, and equally the newer ones, made of concrete blocks with corrugated aluminum roofs. The weaving of these mats was a craft unchanged from “the time before time,” James told us; the traditional fibers, made from palm fronds, were still used (although the traditional vegetable dyes had been replaced by an inky blue obtained from surplus carbon paper, for which the islanders otherwise had little need). The island’s finest weaver was a colorblind woman, who had learned the craft from her mother, who was also colorblind. James took us to meet her; she was doing her intricate work inside a hut so dark we could hardly see anything after the bright sunlight. (Knut, on the othe hand, took off his double sunglasses and said it was, visually, the most comfortable place he had yet encountered on the island.) As we adapted to the darkness, we began to see her special art of brightnesses, delicate patterns of differing luminances, patterns that all but disappeared as soon as we took one of her mats into the sunlight outside.

  Recently, Knut told her, his sister, Britt, to prove it could be done, had knitted a jacket in sixteen different colors. She had devised her own system for keeping track of the skeins of wool, by labeling them with numbers. The jacket had marvelous intricate patterns and images drawn from Norwegian folktales, he said, but since they were done in dim browns and purples, colors without much chromatic contrast, they were almost invisible to normal eyes. Britt, however, responding to luminances only, could see them quite clearly, perhaps even more clearly than color-normals. “It is my special, secret art,” she says. “You have to be totally colorblind to see it.”

  Later in the day, we went to the island’s dispensary to meet more people with the maskun—almost forty people were there, more than half the achromatopes on the island. We set up in the main room—Bob with his ophthalmoscope, his lenses and acuity tests, and I with a mass of colored yarns and drawings and pens, as well as the standard color-testing kits. Knut had brought along a set of Sloan achromatopsia cards. I had never seen these before, and Knut explained the test to me: “Each of these cards has a range of grey squares which vary only in tone, progressing from a very light grey to a very dark grey, almost black, really. Each square has a hole cut out in the center, and if I place a sheet of colored paper behind these—like this—one of the squares will be a match for the color; they will have an equal density.” He pointed to an orange dot, surrounded by a medium grey background. “For me the internal dot and the surround here are exactly the same.”

  Such a match would be completely meaningless for a color-normal, for whom no color can ever “match” a grey, and extremely difficult for most—but quite easy and natural for an achromatope, who sees all colors, and all greys, only as differing luminances. Ideally, the test should be administered with a standard source of illumination, but since there was no electricity to run lights on the island, Knut had to use himself as a standard, comparing each achromatope’s responses to his own. In nearly every case, these were the same, or very close.

&
nbsp; Medical testing is usually rather private, but here it was very public, and with dozens of youngsters peering in through the windows, or wandering among us as we tested, took on a communal and humorous and almost festive quality.

  Bob wanted to check refraction in each person, and to examine their retinas closely—by no means easy, when the eyes are continually jerking with nystagmus. It was not possible, of course, to see the microscopic rods and cones (or lack thereof ) directly, but he could find nothing else amiss on inspection with his ophthalmoscope. It had been suggested by some earlier researchers that the maskun was linked with severe myopia; but Bob found that although many of the achromatopes were nearsighted, many were not (Knut himself is rather farsighted)—and he also found that a similar proportion of the island’s color-normals were nearsighted as well. If there were a genetic form of myopia here, Bob felt, it was transmitted independently of the achromatopsia.50 It was possible as well, he added, that reports of nearsightedness had been exaggerated by earlier researchers who had observed so many of the islanders squinting and bringing small objects closer to view—behaviors which might appear to indicate myopia but actually reflected the intolerance of bright light and poor acuity of the achromatopes.

  I asked the achromatopes if they could judge the colors of various yarns, or at least match them with one another. The matching was clearly done on the basis of brightness and not color—thus yellow and pale blue might be grouped with white, or saturated reds and greens with black. I had also brought the Ishihara pseudoisochromatic test plates for ordinary partial colorblindness, which have numbers and figures formed by colored dots, distinguishable only by color (and not luminosity) from the dots surrounding them. Some of the Ishihara plates, paradoxically, cannot be seen by color-normals, but only by achromatopes—these have dots which are identical in hue, but vary slightly in luminance. The older children with the maskun were particularly excited by these—it turned the tables on me, the tester—and they jostled to take their turns pointing out the special numbers that I could not see.

  Knut’s presence while we were examining those with maskun, his sharing of his own experiences, was crucial, for it helped remove our questions from the sphere of the inquisitive, the impersonal, and bring us all together as fellow creatures, making it easier for us, finally, to clarify and reassure. For although the lack of color vision in itself did not seem to be a subject of concern, there were many misapprehensions about the maskun—in particular, fears that the disease might be progressive, might lead to complete blindness, might go along with retardation, madness, epilepsy, or heart trouble. Some believed that it could be caused by carelessness during pregnancy, or transmitted through a sort of contagion. Though there was some sense of the fact that the maskun tended to run in certain families, there was little or no knowledge about recessive genes and heredity. Bob and I did our best to stress that the maskun was nonprogressive, affected only certain aspects of vision, and that with a few simple optical aids—dark sunglasses or visors to reduce bright light, and magnifying glasses and monoculars to allow reading and sharp distance vision—someone with the maskun could go through school, live, travel, work, in much the same way as anyone else. But more than words could, Knut himself brought this home, partly by using his own sunglasses and magnifier, partly by the manifest achievement and freedom of his own life.

  Outside the dispensary, we began to give out the wrap-around sunglasses we had brought, along with hats and visors, with varying results. One mother, with an achromatopic infant squalling and blinking in her arms, took a pair of tiny sunglasses and put them on the baby’s nose, which seemed to calm him, and led to an immediate change in his behavior. No longer blinking and squinting, he opened his eyes wide and began to gaze around with a lively curiosity. One old woman, the oldest achromatope on the island, indignantly refused to try any sunglasses on. She had lived eighty years as she was, she said, and was not about to start wearing sunglasses now. But many of the other achromatopic adults and teenagers evidently liked the sunglasses, wrinkling their noses at the unaccustomed weight of them, but manifested less disabled by the bright light.

  It is said that Wittgenstein was either the easiest or the most difficult of houseguests to accommodate, because though he would eat, with gusto, whatever was served to him on his arrival, he would then want exactly the same for every subsequent meal for the rest of his stay. This is seen as extraordinary, even pathological, by many people—but since I myself am similarly disposed, I see it as perfectly normal. Indeed, having a sort of passion for monotony, I greatly enjoyed the unvarying meals on Pingelap, whereas Knut and Bob longed for variety. Our first meal, the model which was to be repeated three times daily, consisted of taro, bananas, pandanus, breadfruit, yams, and tuna followed by papaya and young coconuts full of milk. Since I am a fish and banana person anyhow, these meals were wholly to my taste.

  But we were all revolted by the Spam which appeared with each meal—invariably fried; why, I wondered, should the Pingelapese eat this filthy stuff when their own basic diet was both healthy and delicious? Especially when they could hardly afford it, because Pingelap has only the small amount of money it can raise from the export of copra, mats, and pandanus fruits to Pohnpei. I had talked with the unctuous Spam baron on the plane; and now, on Pingelap, I could see the addiction in full force. How was it that not only the Pingelapese, but all the peoples of the Pacific, seemingly, could fall so helplessly, so voraciously, on this stuff, despite its intolerable cost to their budgets and their health? I was not the first to puzzle about this; later, when I came to read Paul Theroux’s book The Happy Isles of Oceania, I found his hypothesis about this universal Spam mania:

  It was a theory of mine that former cannibals of Oceania now feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. “Long pig” as they called a cooked human being in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the people-eaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absense of Spam they settled for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor.

  So far as I knew, though, there was no tradition of cannibalism on Pingelap.

  Whether or not Spam is, as Theroux suggests, a sublimate of cannibalism, it was a relief to visit the taro patch, the ultimate source of food, which covers ten swampy acres in the center of the island. The Pingelapese speak of taro with reverence and affection, and sooner or later everyone takes a turn at working in the communally owned patch. The ground is carefully cleaned of debris, and turned over by hand, and the soil is then planted with shoots about eighteen inches long. The plants grow with extraordinary speed, soon reaching ten feet or more in height, with broad triangular leaves arching overhead. The upkeep of the patch devolves traditionally on the women, working barefoot in the ankle-high mud, and different parts of the patch are tended and harvested by them each day. The deep shade cast by the huge leaves makes it a favorite meeting place, particularly for those with the maskun.

  A dozen or more varieties of taro are grown in the patch, and their large, starchy roots range in taste from bitter to sweet. The roots can be eaten fresh, or dried and stored for later use. Taro is the ultimate crop for Pingelap, and there is still a vivid communal memory of how, during typhoon Lengkieki two centuries ago, the taro patch was inundated with salt water and totally destroyed—and that it was this which brought the remaining islanders to starvation.

  Coming back from the taro patch, we were approached by an old man in the woods, who came up to us diffidently, but determinedly, and asked if he could get Bob’s advice, as he was going blind. He had clouded eyes, and Bob, examining him later at the dispensary with his ophthalmoscope, confirmed that he had cataracts, but could find nothing else amiss. Surgery could probably help him, he told the old man, and this could be done in the hospital on Pohnpei, with every chance of restoring good vision. The old man gave us a big smile and hugged Bob. When Bob asked Delihda, who coordinates with the visiting nurse from Pohnpei, to put the
man’s name down for cataract surgery, she commented that it was a good thing he had approached us. If he had not, she said, he would have been allowed to go completely blind. Medical services in Pingelap are spread very thin, already overstretched by more pressing conditions. Cataracts (like achromatopsia) are a very low-priority concern here; and cataract surgery, with the added costs of transport to Pohnpei, is generally considered too expensive to do. So the old man would get treatment, but he would be the exception to the rule.

  I counted five churches on Pingelap, all Congregationalist. I had not seen so great a density of churches since being in the little Mennonite community of La Crete in Alberta; here, as there, churchgoing is universal. And when there is not churchgoing, there is hymn singing and Sunday school.

  The spiritual invasion of the island began in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1880, the entire population had been converted. But even now, more than five generations later, though Christianity is incorporated into the culture, and fervently embraced in a sense, there is still a reverence and nostalgia for the old ways, rooted in the soil and vegetation, the history and geography, of the island. Wandering through the dense forest at one point, we heard voices singing—voices so high and unexpected and unearthly and pure that I again had a sense of Pingelap as a place of enchantment, another world, an island of spirits. Making our way through the thick undergrowth, we reached a little clearing, where a dozen children stood with their teacher, singing hymns in the morning sun. Or were they singing to the morning sun? The words were Christian, but the setting, the feeling, were mythical and pagan. We kept hearing snatches of song as we walked about the island, usually without seeing the singer or singers—choirs, voices, incorporeal, on the air. They seemed innocent at first, almost angelic, but then to take on an ambiguous, mocking note. If I had thought first of Ariel, I thought now of Caliban; and whenever voices, hallucination-like, filled the air, Pingelap, for me, took on the quality of Prospero’s isle: