Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  "Shark!" he called out. "This big!"

  "But sharks only feed at this hour, on an incoming tide," Benna said to reassure me. "Seldom on an outgoing tide."

  Palau is notorious for sharks. I saw my first one in the Rock Islands on my first swim, while snorkeling at the edge of a reef called Blue Corner. It was a blacktip shark cruising along the coral wall about twenty feet below me, intent and preoccupied. It looked wicked and sleek, like a live torpedo, and its unhurried air made it seem more confident and more lethal. We were both swimming in the same direction. I was so alarmed by the shark that I hardly noticed its size. Only later I estimated that it was seven or eight feet long. I changed course, trying not to make much fuss, and swam away from it. And then I saw my second shark. This one was nearer, but similarly uninterested in me. I kept on, making for my kayak, and saw my third, fourth, and fifth sharks. These were resting, motionless on a flat ledge of coral, close enough for me to see the coarse texture of their skin. At last I was back at the boat.

  Later—after the placid sharks, the calm air, the sunshine, the tropical heat, the birds, the fish, the bats—in my happy high-tech camp, on the green island at the edge of the reef, I stood under the moon and heard an intrusive rustling noise. It was a familiar sound, like a person kicking angrily through dry fallen leaves. This grew to a commotion. I got my flashlight from my tent, turned it in the direction of the sound, and saw ten or more rats, fat and black, with glittering eyes and raw pink tails and twitching whiskers, not at all deterred by my bright light. A whole verminous parade traipsing boldly through a mass of dead palm fronds.

  So instead of sleeping on the beach, I zipped myself into my tent and reflected that no place was perfect but that Palau surely came close. The Rock Islands were as near as I have ever been to the Peaceable Kingdom of the natural world in which there was complete harmony. I'll make my phone calls tomorrow, I thought.

  Waking in the night, I played the shortwave radio. This Sony twelve-band receiver was digital, with a scanner, and was technically better than my own knob-twirling radio, but I found the scanner a disadvantage here. I could not see what I was tuning, and the scanner skipped stations that were faint. Turning a knob is a more reliable way to find shortwave stations in the darkness of a tent on a tropical island. Nevertheless, I located the BBC World Service and Voice of America and learned (June 22, 1994, on my Micronesian island, June 21 in the United States) that the dollar had dropped to 99.9 Japanese yen (the lowest exchange rate ever) and was weakening against the pound sterling; that a hospital had been shelled in Rwanda; that Haitians fleeing their country had been picked up in the ocean and were being processed; and that O. J. Simpson had just been arrested in connection with the murder of his wife and been denied bail.

  Meanwhile, all was peaceful on Rat Island. I went outside the tent, and though the accumulation of clouds had rendered the sky starless and moonless, I was able to carry out a vermin check with my Night Mariner night-vision binoculars. I saw no rats; instead, I watched large coconut crabs, which stood out vividly in the dark, tinted green by the workings of this wonderful device. Still in that darkness I walked up and down the beach, through the palms and overgrown bush back to my tent, the binoculars pressed against my eyes.

  The morning was overcast, and I saw rain off to the northwest. I decided to make my phone calls while the campsite was dry. It was 5:15 A.M. That meant it was 4:15 P.M. the previous day in New York City, where I was hoping to prove to my editor that I could make this phone work.

  I unpacked the phone and placed it on one of its plastic bags. I had already located my position with the global positioning system, so I entered my longitude and latitude on the receiver and was given an azimuth and an elevation for the antenna dish. I aligned the phone lid with my compass bearing (Davis hand-bearing compass, very nice—sturdy, waterproof, pistol grip, with a useful light) and lifted the phone lid—antenna dish to 50 degrees, aiming it at the satellite, the Pacific Inmarsat. I pressed the power button and got a hum. It took a while for me to lock on to the satellite; this required moving the phone here and there until I was about eight feet from the beach (the tide was coming in). When the Ready light was lit, I hit the Hook button and got a dial tone, then punched in some code numbers for AT&T, the country code, and the number.

  A bubbly undersea ringing tone ensued, and then, "Hello?"

  My brother Gene, speaking from his law office, and he asked, "You're where?"

  We conversed awhile about the island, the equipment, and the exchange rates. Was this not an auspicious time to turn sterling into dollars? He would inquire, he said.

  "Can you use your call forwarding to connect me with Condé Nast Traveler in New York?"

  "Gayle's on vacation"—his secretary—"but I'll try."

  "Please make it fast. I only have one battery."

  Michael crawled out of his tent and yawned. "I can't believe you're on the phone," he said, and snapped my picture.

  Gene dithered for several minutes. Believing that I might have lost him, I cut off the call and phoned the magazine myself, to give them an update. "Call home," Klara Glowczewska suggested, and then, with an editor's instinct for a slug line, added, "PT phones home!" I privately wondered whether I should name this little place Glowczewska Island, in the manner of explorers who put their patrons' names on the islands they saw.

  I called Honolulu. I called New York again. Then, giddy, and indeed feeling like an alien on a tiny planet who had figured out how to communicate with Earth, I called Cape Cod, murmuring, "PT phones home."

  The line was busy. I called again, seven times. It was now early evening on the Cape. My mother was using the phone.

  The tide was coming in, and the clouds were darkening. I packed the phone in its waterproof bags, made breakfast, and went for a swim. The air was inert, portending rain; and then around noon the rain came, noisy and thick, smashing the big leaves and cracking against the sea, pounding my tent, where I crouched, earphones on, listening to Branford Marsalis, I Heard You Twice the First Time, on my minidisc player as the rain continued. There I lay, for seven hours or so, happily reading a biography of Sir Richard Burton by Byron Farwell. Farwell explained that Burton, a heroic explorer, hated inconveniences but loved hardships. Yes, of course, I understood; that was why I was happy.

  I had arranged for Benna to pick me up at the early evening high tide that day, but the rain was still heavy, and there was no sign of him as night fell. I would have phoned him, but I wanted to save my battery power. And so I spent another night on the island.

  Dawn was fine, the air cleansed by the rain, the sky clear. I wrote a script for a video: "Opening shot: A cluster of coconuts high on a palm; we hear someone yakking, talking about Palau. The camera tracks slowly down the slender palm trunk to the base, where we see PT speaking on the phone..."

  Michael Gilbeaux was the cameraman. We made the video, then watched it until we were warned that the battery was low. Our fun with the camcorder was at an end.

  I called my folks on Cape Cod again. The line was busy again. The satellite phone told me that the battery was weak. On my last roll of the dice, I got through and spoke to my mother long enough to hear that she was well and to say that I was in Palau ("It's southwest of Guam!" I shouted, standing on the beach, feeling absurd). Then, having made contact, made a video, caught a news program on the radio, and discovered that you can teach a Newton to recognize your handwriting, we paddled to Eil Malk Island, hiked to Jellyfish Lake, and went snorkeling.

  There are a number of such marine lakes in the Rock Islands. This one lies in a limestone bowl in the center of the island. Some are connected by caves to the sea, others are sealed. They have high sides and muddy brackish water and mangroves. We swam through the salty water where a mass of jellyfish lived and shimmered—millions of them, perhaps. There was no question that Jellyfish Lake was a wonder of nature. In a previous incarnation, these jellyfish were poisonous. Here they had evolved and become harmless, and there was not
one, but two kinds: the mastigias, like a large soft polyp, orangey pink, and the aurelia, white and rounded and delicate, almost lacy, and when it filled to propel itself, it resembled a white mobcap or a billowing hankie. The jellyfish were so thick in the water that they softly crowded me and slid against my face and arms, my whole body. I was suspended in a gelatinous mass so dense I could hardly move my arms.

  Palau is famous for its quarter-ton giant clams, but its undersea beauty is in its coral. There are 69 species of hard corals in the Caribbean. There are 400 varieties of hard corals in Palau; in addition, there are 200 species of soft corals. The merest glance into Palau's lagoons is a vision of abundance.

  Some corals look like flowers, but with more extravagant blossoms than ever seen on land. Under the sea they have the effect of a great embankment or bower, flowers clustered together in glorious profusion. Some corals look like miniature hot-air balloons, others like polyps or grotesque millipedes or spiders. Still more look like the Gorgon Medusa. Others like human organs, red and pulsing. These and hundreds more exist in the waters of Palau. I was especially struck by a gray and elongated type of coral that looked like a bundle of bones, the youngest varieties looking like ribs, the oldest like a cluster of femurs, a whole clutch of leg bones. The action of storms, or perhaps anchors thrown casually over the sides of dive boats, had broken many of these corals, and I began to think of this particular spot as the Boneyard.

  Eventually, Benna's boat came and took us to Koror, where I charged the batteries, and then we returned to the Rock Islands. We carried our kayaks on the deck of his power boat, which I thought of as the Mother Ship. We went to Mkumer, a large, beautifully formed island on the outer reef. On one of its beaches the Micronesian megapode birds lay their eggs and leave, letting the eggs incubate and hatch in the heat generated by rotting palm litter. As a tenacious coconut crab attacked one of my gear bags, Michael photographed it, hoping to get his picture into the Patagonia catalogue.

  "I am looking for a deep dark cave," I said to the boatman.

  He said he knew one, a burial cave, where there were bats. It was to be the ultimate test of the night-vision binoculars. We moored alongside and I swam to the rocky shore, holding the binoculars out of the water, keenly aware of their dollar value ($2,400) as I carefully backstroked to shore. I climbed to the mouth of the cave and walked in, looking out for sea snakes (none) and bats (many). As for the burials that had taken place here, all old coral has the appearance of shattered human bones. When I removed my binoculars I could not see my hand in front of my face. With them, I was able to walk out, all the while seeing green bats flapping erratically along the green walls in the green air.

  One of the most beautiful island clusters in the Rock Islands lies in the southwest, and is called Ngerukewid, often referred to as the Seventy Islands. In fact, there are forty-six—very green and rounded and close together, and so strangely shaped that paddling among them in the limpid green water is as disorienting as paddling in a maze, among misleading shapes, bays, and openings. The foliage is thick, and consequently the bird life is more various and vibrant: noddies, terns, swallows, kingfishers. A variety of swiftlet that is endangered elsewhere in the Pacific prospers here.

  It was the lowest tide of the year—inches deep in some shoaly places—but we were able to make our way to a cave entrance and paddle as far as an interior corner. We had kayaks here in Ngerukewid. We drew our boats up on a narrow shelf of coral and climbed into the cave, where we found a log platform, a rusted transformer, and an old moldering radio. Without question this was an outpost of World War Two, but whether the haunt of a Japanese soldier looking for Americans, or vice versa, it was impossible to tell. Certainly no one else had left a mark there. It gave the impression of a gravesite, or more properly a burial chamber, another mausoleum of the war.

  Scott Davis, another member of the sea turtle project, joined us. He showed me a turtle nest that had been raided by poachers, many of the eggs gobbled on the spot by a Palauan or two, who were helping to assure the extinction of the hawksbill turtle in these islands. The turtles may lay eighty to ninety eggs, but only one or two hatchlings survive to maturity.

  "Some Palauans can be strange," Scott said. "I was camping with a woman friend on an island, and at two in the morning we were wakened by a Palauan. He might have been drunk. He said, 'I'm going to fuck your girlfriend and kill you.' He had a gun, too, one of those rifles they hunt pigeons and bats with."

  It was to me a terrifying story. How had he calmed the Palauan? "I said, 'Hey, listen, I'm real tired right now. Why don't you come back and kill me tomorrow?'"

  Amazingly, this logic had worked.

  We snorkeled and fished in the morning, snoozed under trees in the heat of the day, and set off again in midafternoon, looking for a camp around five or six o'clock. The coral was only one of the wonders of the Palau depths. The profusion of fish was another, and it was not their numbers—the schools of grouper and tuna and surgeonfish and barracuda—it was also their size. Thirty- and forty-pound grouper were not unusual, and the wrasse were the size of big dark pigs. Seeing some fish jumping beyond the western edge of the reef, we headed out and saw about two dozen dolphins surrounding a school of tuna, which themselves had been feeding on smaller fish—a churning example of the food chain.

  We decided to camp on one of the low islands, where there was a sandy beach and easy access for our kayaks. We had left our Mother Ship anchored in a pretty bay, and we returned to this bay in our kayaks and made camp, choosing a spot well away from the tidemark. As we set up our gear, fruit bats jostled in the high trees, then took off, great flights of fat creatures beating across the channel to find food.

  The phone battery was dead again (it had been good for thirty minutes of transmission time), and the camcorder battery was flat, too. I had given up on the Newton. The radio was working well, and so were the night-vision binoculars. But almost everything—even the compass with its light—needed batteries. In time almost all this stuff would become useless. It seemed pathetic that the vitality of such sophisticated electronics depended upon such clumsy, feeble batteries.

  And so, in a matter of days, as the battery life drained away, my uplink was as useless as the doubloons that Robinson Crusoe mocks on his island: "I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. 'O drug!' said I aloud, 'what art thou good for?... One of those knives is worth all this heap.'" Indeed, my little lamp with its stump of candle, my jackknife, and my kayak paddle were of more use to me now than the phone, the camcorder, the radio, the Newton, all dead weight. A single fishhook was of far greater value than my global positioning device or my pager, and in the fullness of time would have been the difference between life and death in these islands. My high-tech camp went quiet.

  It is rare to find silence anywhere in a natural landscape. There is always the wind at least. The rustle of trees and grass, the drone of insects, the squawk of birds, the whistle of bats. By the sea, silence—true silence—is almost unknown. But on my last day here in the Rock Islands, there was not even the lap of water. The air was motionless. I could hear no insects, nor any birds. The fruit bats flew high, beating their wings in absolute quiet. It seemed simple and wonderful: the world as an enormous room.

  Tasting the Pacific

  MY OUTLOOK CHANGED radically, and I was inspired to write my novel Millroy the Magician, one day a few years ago when I happened to be camping on a beach on Kaileuna, one of the smaller of the Trobriand Islands. This delightful place, off the coast of New Guinea, is about as far off the map as it is possible to be. But it is plagued by tropical diseases, which was another reason for my astonishment that day, when I found myself thinking, Every person in this village has beautiful teeth.

  Most Trobrianders I had seen had terrible teeth, from their habit of chewing the mildly narcotic betel nut and mixing the nut with lime from a coral reef. This stained their teeth bright red and then destroyed the enamel, which resulted in rotten stumps. My villagers with th
e lovely white teeth were exceptional, and were also unusually energetic and muscular.

  Later in the week, some villagers and I were out diving and spearfishing from an outrigger canoe when I discovered the reasons for this good health. A shark nosed toward us as we were harrying some fish, and then another, much larger shark took an interest. These great pale creatures moved effortlessly through the greeny depths. I surfaced, and after what seemed a long time the rest of the divers hoisted themselves into the canoe. I asked Zechariah, one of the young spearfishermen, whether he had seen the sharks. Yes, he had seen three.

  "I shout at them, 'Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!' That scares them away. They are stupid fish."

  Howling underwater is reckoned in coastal New Guinea to be a good method for sending a shark on its way.

  "Why didn't you kill it?" I said.

  "Because we don't eat sharks," he said.

  It is inconceivable that someone in the Trobriands would kill something that is not eaten afterward.

  "We are Seventh-day Adventists," he said, and soon he was quoting me the food prohibitions in the Mosaic law set out in Leviticus 11, specifically regarding fish without scales—shark, tuna, ray.

  Also, no smoking, no betel-chewing, no pig-eating, no manner of fat, and so on, even unto Deuteronomy 14. Religious piety explained the villagers' white teeth, sturdiness, energy, and absence of excess body fat. It was not their fault that their life expectancy was less than fifty years. Severe malaria and bacterial infections were common on the islands, and so were tuberculosis and leprosy. Under the circumstances, they were doing well.