Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  Some days, when it was too hot to go paddling—the tropical aldow dazzled in a cloudless sky—there was little else to do except sit under a palm tree and interrogate Acong and his extended family. These people were settled, but some Tag Banua in the north were nomadic.

  The other indigenous peoples of Palawan live in the interior: the Batak, who are related to Negritos, on the slopes of the central mountain chain, and the Pa'lawan people farther south. One guidebook reports, "The Tau't Batu in the south of Palawan were only discovered in 1978." This story of the Stone People (batu, "stone," is another Malay cognate) is not quite true. These people keep to themselves and use blowguns and poison darts for hunting. They live in a bowl-shaped valley on the slopes of Palawan's highest peak, Mount Mantalingahan, and move nearer the coast during the dry season. But this recent "first contact" was one of several hoaxes perpetrated by a minister in the Marcos regime, one "Manda" Elizalde, who tried to gain international prominence by pretending to discover unknown ("Stone Age") peoples in the Philippine hinterland. The Tasaday, who live near Lake Sebu in south Mindanao, were another of his preposterous discoveries. This can be put down to a Filipino variation of Munchausen syndrome—attention-seeking by the retailing of tall stories.

  Many indigenous people in Palawan nonetheless still subsist using traditional means: hunting wild pigs with spears and blowguns, feasting on monkeys, and snaring fish in lovely woven traps. And they lament the day that Palawan's resources began to be stripped away by non-Palawans—its fish to Japanese factory ships and canneries and Hong Kong restaurant aquariums, its trees turned into chairs and chopsticks.

  Palawan had been on the brink of devastation, but its fall had been arrested. Much of the island was still wild—I prayed that it would remain so. In the course of ten days' paddling, I made a circuit of a dozen Pagdanan islands and camped on three of them, island-hopping northwest to the largest island, Boayan. On my return, one very hot night, on the uninhabited Double Island I found myself lying in my mosquito-net tent, the moon bathing the ground and the treetops in a lunar fluorescence. I had achieved the ultimate in fresh air fiendishness. I was flat on my back. Fulfilled, content, naked, alone, happy. I thought: I am a monkey.

  Christmas Island: Bombs and Birds

  AMBO KEEBWA, a Kiribati, was twenty-two and living in Tarawa in 1957 when he heard that able-bodied men were needed to work for the British on Christmas Island. The place name transfixed him. "I like 'Christmas' so much! I think, There must be many nice things there." Imagining the bounty of a year-round, nonstop Yule-tide, Ambo signed a three-year contract and traveled hopefully to this magic-sounding place, 2,013 miles away. One morning, a few months after he arrived on the arid, empty, coral-crunchy shore, the British exploded an H-bomb over the island, shattering Ambo's eardrums. After that, he just worried and cowered under the coconut trees and prayed for deliverance.

  On that early morning, this, the largest atoll in the Pacific, trembled like a meringue, the earth and sea quaked, and millions of seabirds, the feathered glory of Christmas Island, were instantly blinded and scorched. The birds flopped and screamed piteously, and the whole lot of them starved to death under the horrified eyes of the several hundred islanders and the thousands of British soldiers. When a second bomb was announced, Ambo and his fellow islanders begged to be sent back to Tarawa.

  "We put a complaint to the big man. We wanted to go home. We were afraid. We were praying to God to help us be safe. The air vice-marshal said, 'We will look after you. Don't be afraid.'"

  The night before the second H-bomb test, the Kiribati (pronounced "Kiribass") men were taken to a ship that was anchored offshore and shown cowboy movies, cartoons, and British films, one after the other, from seven in the evening until four-thirty the next morning, when suddenly the same searing ear pain returned ("much worse than when you are in an airplane"). The ship shuddered so violently that rust flaked from the ceiling and walls of the cramped cabin in which the 140 islanders sat goggling at the movie screen. The men went up on deck and saw again the aftermath of a thermonuclear explosion. "Like a big flower opening," Ambo said, "the color of clouds, with flames inside."

  Millions more birds died. Parts of the island were closed off. But it was nowhere near the end. In the succeeding four years, there were thirty-two additional explosions, the latter series cosponsored by the United States. Some of the bombs were the most powerful ever detonated on the planet—up to twenty-five megatons, quite a lot for a coral atoll sitting at sea level. By then the authorities had become so blasé they simply handed out blankets to the Christmas Islanders and told them to gather at the tennis courts in town and sit under the blankets.

  "They said, 'Turn away from the blast,'" a man named Tonga Fou told me. "But even so, we saw the light through the blanket and got the pain in our ears and felt the heat on our back."

  I asked each man, "What would you say if someone came today and said he wanted to test a bomb?"

  "Now I would say, 'No! Get off!'" Tonga said. Ambo agreed.

  "Did anyone die from the effects of the blast?"

  Tonga said, "No one examined us. People died. We don't know why. No doctors have ever looked at our bodies."

  Years after the tests, Henry Kissinger said, regarding radioactivity and Pacific islanders, "There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?"

  Merry Christmas, suckers!

  I had stopped by Tabakea village to see Ambo and Tonga on one of my paddling trips through the lagoon. Tabakea was halfway to London, the settlement where most of the island's roughly thirty-five hundred people live. The other villages of any size were Banana and Poland. Paris, across the channel from London, was just a ruin.

  Most of these places were named by a whimsical priest who started a huge coconut plantation in 1914. The priest was Father Rougier, the first entrepreneur, a wily French clergyman who had abandoned preaching in favor of being Coconut King. He leased the island from a British trading company and lived in Paris, on the southwest horn of the atoll. He earned a reputation as a slavedriver—Mistah Kurtz in a dog collar. His workers were mainly Chinese and Tahitian. Having made a fortune on the copra, Rougier retired to Tahiti, another colorful rascal in paradise.

  By the late 1930s the island, part of the Gilbert and Ellice group, was again run by a British trading company, and after the Second World War reverted to being a copra plantation. Christmas had been occasionally visited by whalers and castaways, and perhaps, in an earlier epoch, by Polynesian voyagers who had been driven off course. To the ancient Kiribati it was known as Abakiroro, "Distant Land." But it had never qualified as an inhabited island, and until the early twentieth century it was as barren and unpopulated as it had been around Christmas 1777, when Captain Cook first anchored near the lagoon entrance and named it. It became Kiribati, a corruption of "Gilberts," when Britain granted the islands independence in 1972. It is still not much more than a copra plantation, run by the Kiribati government, though the National Space Development Agency of Japan has just been given permission to develop a "spaceport" (missile recovery station, hotel, communications, landing strip) on the southern portion. No one on the island has any idea when this will happen, or whether it will happen at all.

  I had taken the once-a-week three-hour flight from Honolulu—Christmas is Hawaii's nearest neighbor of any size. After I got my bearings, I headed for the empty interior. I camped alone at the eastern side of the lagoon, among the low saltbush. This shrub, a feebler cousin of the mangrove, covers the island but offers no shade. Nor is there much fresh water; persistent droughts are one of the reasons the island remained uninhabited for so long.

  Perhaps it should have remained uninhabited. It is a dazzling place, an arid Eden that even H-bombs could not destroy, a giant bracelet of coral, dappled with the hardiest shrubs and a million coconut trees; a lagoon that is not only shaped like a palette, but a palette splashed with every shade of green and blue; and the most fearless and friendly birds I have ever seen. Much of t
he island is still empty—just screeching terns and the wind in the saltbush. But it occurred to me again and again that it is hard for such a place, blessed with birds and fish and balmy air, to be shared with humans. Certain areas of the world are harmonious in their peculiar fauna and flora, but because of their remoteness or hermetic ecosystem are unsuited to the intrusions of people and their pussycats, their bad habits, and their toilets.

  In the island's interior, the sameness of the saltbush and the absence of palm groves, or any landmarks, make it easy for a traveler to become disoriented. I got seriously lost twice, and found that on the idlest jaunt away from my tent I was constantly using my compass. Two of Captain Cook's men lost their bearings the moment they stepped ashore. They groped for twenty-four hours, and survived only by drinking a turtle's blood. Many of the islanders I spoke to had a personal experience of befuddlement. I had been proud of my sense of direction until I began wandering around the mazelike shores and inner lagoons of Christmas Island. Even temporary disorientation acquainted me with a suffocating breathlessness: the bone in the throat, the rising sense of panic, the wavering compass needle. All the while curious birds squawked overhead—boobies, frigate birds, tropicbirds, terns in their thousands. Absolutely unafraid, many of them flew near my head and nipped at my paddle blade when I raised it.

  My camp was near a sanctuary for red-tailed tropicbirds, on the water. I had to tie down my tent with guy lines, and in paddling I always seemed to be fighting the wind, even in the recesses of inner ponds. It was impossible to peregrinate the lagoon and not feel haunted by past nuclear events. One of the bombs had been detonated by mistake at a lower level than planned, and it flattened the whole southeast end of the island. The damage is still obvious.

  Being old-timers, Ambo and Tonga were among the few people on the island who lived on their own land, in the village of Tabakea, on the narrow edge of the northern part of the island between the lagoon and the sea. Most of the rest of the island is owned by the Kiribati government and run as a coconut plantation, though a heavily subsidized one, because the copra price is so low. Apart from picking coconuts and fishing, there is little else on the island to keep the inhabitants busy. Farming is limited to a handful of breadfruit trees and some bananas, but there is no soil to speak of, and even the greenest thumb would not produce much in the crushed coral.

  "Anyway, they are not cultivators," the local priest, Father Gratien Bermond, told me.

  A native of an Alpine village in Haute-Savoie, he had lived in Kiribati for thirty-seven years. Father Bermond was fluent in the language and knowledgeable about the myths and customs. He encouraged traditional dancing, drumming, and singing in his church meeting hall.

  "They are people of the sea," he said.

  It's true. They are good fishermen and canoe builders, and as for downtime, many engage in traditional Kiribati dancing and singing, while others like nothing better than firing up the VCR, cracking open a beer, ripping the lid off a can of Ox and Palm Prime Luncheon Beef, and watching American videos until they are too drunk to see straight. Drunkenness is a serious problem—everyone says so. Littering seems habitual. Where there are no people, there are masses of birds and wind-scoured beauty and wind-driven waves lashing the emptiest beaches imaginable. But the settlements, villages, and picnic spots are sensationally littered with beer cans and the Spam and corned beefcans that pose a particular hazard to the unshod foot. To be fair, this blight is small compared to the reckless detonation of the British and American nuclear devices; and as for trash piles, few junk heaps can compare with the vehicle graveyards that the military left behind. There are whole five-acre motor pools decaying in the coconut groves. In the remotest recesses of the atoll are collapsed oil drums and rusty paraphernalia dating from the tests, mercifully decomposing into dust.

  Some of the islanders are expert fishing guides, eagerly showing up at the airport for the weekly flight from Honolulu to scope out clients. In the last fifteen years, Christmas Island has been justifiably regarded as possessing the greatest opportunities for bonefishing anywhere. Much has been written in praise of the quality of the fishing in the lagoon flats—not only bonefish, but milkfish, goatfish, and trevally. World records are set on Christmas Island, and there is hardly a wall at the Captain Cook Hotel, one of the island's two hotels, that does not exhibit a photograph of a foreigner, pop-eyed under the weight of a potbellied, scaly, slack-jawed trophy—the mirror image of its captor. No, I am not a fisherman.

  I had gone to Christmas Island to find some solitude, go bird watching, and paddle my kayak. The wildlife warden in London sold me a $5 permit to enter a Closed Area, where visits are regulated because of the many nesting birds. He said I could camp there for a night. I was intentionally vague about the number of days I would be out, and he was much more worried about bird poachers. He was a scowling man named Utimawa, who, like so many others on the island, had come to Christmas in the 1980s from distant Tarawa. Compared to overcrowded, unsanitary, drought-stricken Tarawa—with one of the highest population densities in the world—this was heaven. Here, you just reached out and there was food. The trouble was, the reaching out was regarded as poaching.

  Bird catching was easy, because the birds were so numerous and so innocent. (Utimawa: "You will not need binoculars.") It was a serious problem, Utimawa said. "We have one or two incidents a week. We find corpses of tropicbirds and boobies. They also get the eggs—they eat them on the spot or take them home."

  I asked him why, and he delivered what I consider to be the epitaph for many endangered species: "Because they taste good."

  A red-tailed tropicbird was plump enough to feed two people. Its decorous tail was also prized by the islanders. And it breeds only once a year.

  Some islanders were caught and fined $200 for poaching, but the illegal killing was still said to be brisk. It was a hungry island. A can of corned beef or Spam was expensive. Never mind that world-class sashimi and the choicest cuts of tuna were readily available to any of the fishermen. Boobies were tastier. "All you do is put a red rag on a stick," an islander told me. "Boobies are attracted to the color. You wave the stick, and when the booby swoops down, you whack it."

  Ambo said, "When we first arrived on the island, we ate the birds all the time. I like the tei-tei — frigate bird. It's very easy to catch. Offer it fish with your left hand, and when it comes down to take it, you grab the bird's neck with your right hand and twist it."

  Many terns nested on the ground. Their eggs were snatched. Tropic-bird chicks huddling in the brush under the salt scrub were just plucked, their necks wrung.

  "I like crabs," a man named Tabai said. "No—don't need a trap. Just pick them up with your hand."

  That was the trouble with the Peaceable Kingdom. All these serene creatures were there for the picking. The island was full of sitting ducks.

  I asked Ambo, "Why does the government stop you from eating the birds?"

  He said, "Because people come from overseas and want to see the birds. I-matang like birds."

  This word was interesting. I-matang was generally used to mean "foreigner" (there are four such people on Christmas Island), but etymologically it was "the person from Matang." In his celebrated book about the old days in the Gilberts, A Pattern of Islands, Arthur Grimble explained that Matang was the ancestral home of the I-Kiribati, the original fatherland, a place of fair-skinned people, so the word implied kinship. And by the way, it is an actual place, Madang, on the northern coast of New Guinea, conjectured by historians to be the origin of these Micronesian people.

  Terns strafed my camp; boobies followed me when I was paddling—sometimes large numbers of them, thirty or forty big brown birds, often shadowed by the larger frigate birds, which seemed, in spite of their thieving ways, angelic guardians. The sky was always filled with birds; and ghost crabs scuttled and crunched across the smithereens of infertile whitish-gray coral that passed for earth; and large fish were constantly thrashing the shallow lagoon—I could see
them: bonefish, milkfish, yard-long blacktip sharks, moving like torpedoes.

  I could not remember ever having camped in a place so blindingly bright, where there was so little shade. In the heat of the day I crouched under my flapping tent fly and read Céline — Journey to the End of the Night, in which the main character, Bardamu, in Africa speaks of a man with "ten thousand kilos of sunshine on his head," or again, "If you don't want the sun to burn your brains through your eyes, you have to blink like a rat."

  Those descriptions resonated at the back of Christmas Island's lagoon, where it was dark at 6:20, and then everything went black: too ambitious a walk or a paddle meant my having to grope back to camp in moon shadow. For four days I saw no other people, and would have stayed longer in the bush but for running low on drinking water. Even so, an old-timer told me that I was only the second person who had ever gone camping on the island.

  When I had first arrived I had looked at London—the small sleepy beat-up town, the cheery people in its cheerless shops selling identical canned goods, its littered main street, its defunct businesses, like the Atoll Seaweed Company, a victim of El Niño. The island had so few motor vehicles that mongrels slept contentedly in the middle of the street, and only the foraging piglets were active. In one of the tiny shops, a young girl in a T-shirt leaned on a counter, murmuring as she read a foreign magazine she had borrowed from the library: "One of the very nicest treats arising from an English summer is to be able to have afternoon tea in the garden. It is even more delightful because of the infrequency of exactly the right weather ... elderly retainers tottering under the weight of silver trays groaning with plates of thinly-cut cucumber sandwiches, tall silver teapots and the best china. Superior cakes, madeleines, sandcakes, meringues and sachertorte" — at which point she said to me (I was buying beer), "Mister, what is this word?"