by Kirk Adams
“What kind of schooling will there be?” Tiffany asked. “Won’t we need teachers?”
“Can we wait to set up a schooling schedule in a few weeks?” Lisa replied. “We’ll take an early summer break.”
Tiffany nodded. “But how many teachers?”
Lisa looked at her notes. “One should be enough,” she said. “We can set a tent aside with the books since there are only four children. Once the land is cleared and crops planted, I’d think that we could even pull a couple people from manual labor to help teach the children later this summer or early in the fall. Maybe we can build a schoolhouse before rainy season.”
“That’d be great,” Tiffany said.
Lisa then proposed that work assignments be delegated—with weekly rotations of the various responsibilities to insure that every neighbor mastered every job. It also was decided that the Chief Neighbor should select work details in accord with immediate needs and the state charter, only insuring everyone be rotated through the full range of partners and opportunities without racial or sexual discrimination.
Next, Lisa prepared to assign the first week’s jobs. “Alan,” she said with a grin, “we’ll let you gather food and watch the kids this week. Can you keep an eye upon four children while picking coconuts, breadfruit, and pineapples?”
Alan shrugged and everyone laughed a little.
“Don’t worry,” Lisa continued. “Everyone gets a turn. And you can pick your own assistant.”
Alan turned toward Tiffany until Lisa cut him short.
“No parents,” Lisa said.
Alan faked a grimace and everyone laughed. He panned the crowd until he fixed his sight on one particularly able-looking young woman.
“Her,” Alan said, pointing at the girl.
“Any objections, Heather?” Lisa asked.
Heather had none, so she was assigned food gathering and child-care duties with Alan.
Land clearing was assigned to Ryan and Maria and chopping wood to Jose and Linh. Sean and Deidra were told to construct trails and explore the district while Steve and Kit were given cooking responsibilities. Hilary and John volunteered to prepare seeds and plants for sowing and Viet chose to work with Ursula to clean the camp and dig sewage pits. Jason and Sean were given construction duties: first for a rope-lashed wood bridge over the stream and then a storage barn. This left Brent and Jason to fish and Charles to help Lisa develop a town plan after his return from Executive Council. The older children would tend the few animals held by the village. It was a productive session and at the end of the hour, almost everyone was pleased with initial assignments.
Villagers also agreed the first few days of work should be approached with caution—to avoid making irreversible mistakes. Since Lisa didn’t want the forest torn up haphazardly, she directed several neighbors to survey resources and make maps so she and Charles could approach both village planning and forest management most effectively. Trails, she noted, needed to be both as direct as practical and as far from old growth forest as possible. The neighborhood also decided that half of the community would return the next morning to New Plymouth to collect remaining provisions, livestock, and plants while those who remained were to gather food and organize the camp. And because it was already Sunday evening, it was voted to start work the next morning. Both wood and food were needed immediately and a bridge had to be built before anyone could take a day off.
Several days later, crates of tools and boxes of supplies were stacked in the center of the meadow and a flock of goats was penned near a water trough filled from the Pishon River (as it was named) via tile irrigation pipes. After surveying the district, Lisa decided (with the consent of her neighbors) that the meadow where they first arrived remained the most suitable site for encampment since it was located near the stream, centered between fruit orchards and the beach, and situated amidst a ready supply of harvestable wood. A main path was routed toward the sea: with separate forks leading to the beach and a grove of coconut palms located where the stream flowed into a small inland bay. A second pathway was slated to cross the Pishon River over a ten-foot bridge and eventually to cross Mount Zion. A narrow trail was planned to link the camp with its latrine (and recycling area) in the south woods while an old-growth forest located upstream was designated for permanent conservation. Several young forests were marked for harvesting—though only after forest reclamation was factored into the production cycle. Lisa assessed that a properly managed planting and harvest of trees would permit settlers to leave virgin forests untouched as long as human populations didn’t outstrip available resources.
Ryan wore khaki shorts and tall boots as he sweltered in the sun. Before him an ironwood tree (more than a foot wide at the trunk) had been chopped up: chips of wood scattered every direction. The tree hadn’t fallen as Ryan intended, but had crashed atop a young beech tree and the latter also required trimming. Bundles of cut cord were stacked nearby: the wood’s sap congealing in the heat as Ryan wiped sweat from his brow and motioned to Maria.
“What d’you say? How about a break?”
Maria pushed aside branches she was trimming and dropped a wide-toothed saw. She took a long drink from her canteen and wiped sweat from her brow.
“I do need some water.”
Ryan said he’d go with her and soon they walked toward the stream—where they filled their canteens and started back for their untrimmed trees. When they came to a fork in the trail—one path leading to the beach and the other toward their work—Ryan asked Maria if she felt like swimming.
Maria nodded.
“But first,” the young woman said, “I’ve got to eat something. I’m famished.”
“I have bread in my sack,” Ryan replied, “and we can crack a coconut. Maybe I can find a mango for dessert.”
“A little siesta does sound nice.”
It took them a few minutes to reach the bay where the Pishon River reached the sea. There, Ryan picked up a coconut from the ground and shook it. Hearing sloshing, he cracked the nut with a stone and let Maria take the first drink. When she dribbled a bit of coconut water on her chin, Ryan wiped it off with a forefinger.
“You promised me a swim,” Ryan said as he pointed to the lagoon. “We’d better take it before the noon whistle. Lisa’s a stickler with her schedules.”
Maria untied her boots, then emptied her pockets and started for the water in her tee shirt and shorts—though stopping just as her knees splashed in the lagoon.
“I just remembered,” the young woman said, “this is salt water. Our clothes will be sticky when they dry—and we still have to sweat in the sun.”
Ryan also had removed his boots, stripped his shirt, and waded knee-deep into the lagoon. “But it feels good now. What should we do?”
Maria smiled. “We have two options: we can swim nude or we can rinse off in the stream afterwards.”
“There is,” Ryan said, “a bucket near the stream which ...”
“Which,” Maria said with a laugh, “Kit would prefer we use.”
When Ryan turned his back toward shore and took a step into deeper water, Maria followed until the water lapped at her hips. For a second time, she hesitated.
“I don’t want to ruin this bra,” Maria said. “Turn around.”
As Ryan turned his back, Maria lifted her shirt, slipped through her shoulder straps, and unsnapped her bra. After pulling it through her sleeve, she threw the bra to shore and slipped under the surface. When she came up, she saw Ryan glance at the tee shirt clinging to her breasts. As she tugged to separate the wet shirt from her chest, Ryan blushed and turned away.
The two neighbors swam an hour before returning to work.
Alan climbed to the crown of the coconut tree and looked down. Panic struck and he twisted around the crown—his arms and legs secured to the foot-thick trunk with braided rope—to survey forest and beach, but saw nothing.
The twins were gone.
“Boys, get back here!” the caretaker shouted into the fo
rest. “Keep away from the water!”
No one answered as Alan scanned the area a third time and saw nothing. He shimmied down the tree, soon touching earth. It was at that very moment that he saw skin flash through the bushes: a shirtless boy in hiding. As the boy darted toward the beach, Alan started to chase before he suddenly stopped to look for the twin—immediately seeing that the second twin was running toward camp.
Alan froze.
One boy was headed into forest and the other for water. Only when he heard the squawk of a gull did the beleaguered babysitter sprint for the sea, turning his head to yell for Theodore to stop where he was. Theodore kept running and so did Alan.
Wham!
Alan smashed into a tree. The impact was violent and he bounced back hard, landing on his back. He felt his head spin, the world go black, and his body go limp—waking a moment later as one boy tapped his forehead with a stick and a second giggled out loud.
“Agghh ... What ... Where ... Give me that damned stick.”
The boy wasn’t particularly quick and Alan seized the stick without much trouble, shaking the stick at Theodore and Tyrone before breaking it against a tree and hurling both halves into the forest.
“Sit down,” Alan ordered with a snarl—and both boys did as they were told while the injured man sat up slowly, blood dripping down his cheek and his bruised eye already swollen shut. Blood flowed from his forehead and his cheek was dark purple, with bits of bark smashed into torn skin. When he checked his teeth, he noticed that while none of them were loose, his lip felt fat.
Now Alan staggered to his feet and picked up a burlap bag half-filled with coconuts while wiping blood from his face and flinging it to the earth.
“You little sh ... boys better follow me home or I won’t be the only one hit with a stick.”
The boys followed close, afraid to talk as they walked behind the bruised and bloodied adult. Only when they reached the safety of camp did they sprint past their ill-tempered guardian to romp. For his part, Alan found a bottle of aspirin in the medicine box to mitigate a headache that had begun well before he ran into the tree. Afterwards, he told Heather he’d failed to pick his quota of fruit and asked if she’d help.
While Heather called for Linh’s daughters and started toward the lagoon with a wood crate and canvas bags, Alan confined the boys to their parent’s tent (where they played pirates on their sleeping bags). When the boys finally slipped from the tent, they sat near the kitchen area and made jokes about Alan—eventually deciding he should be called a cracked coconut head.
The injured adult found no amusement in their antics and several times warned the boys to leave him alone.
By the first full week’s end, the village showed signs of good order and Lisa and Charles had drafted an urban development plan adopted almost verbatim by the rest of the village—especially proposals to establish a recycling center and raise a storage barn. Indeed, based on their push for a central village with planned development, tents were rearranged into a square: sixteen tents in four rows (each one fifteen feet apart) and eleven were zoned residential. Tiffany and Brent shared a tent with their twins and Viet and Linh with their daughters. Five additional tents were assigned to married and cohabiting couples. Of the single villagers, Hilary and Lisa a shared a female dormitory while Jose, Jason, Maria, and Heather each chose to live alone.
Residential tents mostly were nylon and stood between five and seven feet. Many were single-room homes (though family tents included nylon partitions that provided a veneer of privacy). As for the larger storage tents, they were made of canvas—flaps tied open on both sides for airflow—and pitched in rows near the commons. One contained a firewood reserve, loose piles of kindling, and waterproof tins of matches. Another housed bottled water and emergency rations (mostly unopened MREs and decades-old C-rations) while a bright orange tent beside them stored camp records and the nucleus of a library. A hospital tent was pitched nearby and a tool tent behind—with the hospital tent including medical emergency kits and cabinets of medicinal supplies while the tool tent stored little more than a tool chest, boxes of hardware goods (such as nails and screws), and sawhorses on which shovels and axes were stored safely above the dew-drenched floor.
The village’s public layout also was simple. The four rows of residential tents were pitched on the north side of the camp and cords of firewood stacked to the west. On the south side was the cooking and dining area and in the center was an open lot for public meetings and children’s play. Cooking facilities included two fire pits twenty feet apart—one a small rock-filled pit for grilling and the other a bonfire emplacement used for warming toes and drying clothes (both fire pits were equipped with canvas tarps and poles that could be stretched as cover in the event of rain). Dining facilities were limited to a twenty-foot dining fly covering a picnic table (made from a self-assembly kit) surrounded by log stumps used as chairs. Nylon mesh fell to its sides, allowing air to circulate while keeping tropical insects out. Even in Paradise, insect bites itched.
Cords of firewood stacked beneath the umbrage of a beech tree west of the village were not counted among emergency stores kept in the canvas tent, but were considered the deadwood, driftwood, and drying logs slated for everyday consumption. An east-leading path led to a bridge across the Pishon River—from which perishable goods were submerged in the cool water of the stream in a plastic crate. Indeed, an assortment of food and other goods stored in the water included a case of wine, two canned hams, and a sealed tub of medicines. Further south of the commons and dining area (separated by a long walk that kept its odor at bay), there was a sewage and recycling center where waste products were transformed into compost and mulch. Between the dining areas and the bridge a nature preserve was situated—where several trees already had been trimmed for children’s play. To its south stood an old growth forest officially constituted as an environmental sanctuary. Open pasture and farmland were being cleared to the north of the residences. To the west, the main trail split into separate paths to the beach or lagoon not far from where the Pishon River emptied into the sea.
A cold breakfast was served late Saturday morning—the first day of rest after eight days of uninterrupted work. Alan’s child-watching troubles not withstanding, the staff had doubled their efforts Friday and even baked an extra batch of flat bread and prepared a vat of vegetable soup for reheating. Several gallons of the soup were poured into glass jars and sealed with wax, then wrapped in plastic bags for refrigeration in the stream while a smaller pot of the soup was reheated for Saturday’s lunch. While several villagers promised to gather food or carry supplies to a planned dinner party, nothing really needed to be worked until later in the afternoon and most inhabitants spent the day resting, exploring, or playing. Some read books and others took hikes. Lisa jogged twice around the entire island, though she proved to be the only westerner who hurried to do anything that day.
9
The First Holiday
“Hey guys, what’s going on?”
Ryan walked toward Kit—who sat on a log at camp’s edge, her legs crossed at the ankles and a summer skirt pulled to her knees. Two children played beside her, each one digging into a shallow hole with a stick. Both answered with the high-pitched voices of very young boys.
“I’m making a stick hole,” one said.
“I’m digging dirt,” his brother added as both returned to their play, not long distracted by the irrelevance of adults.
Ryan looked at his wife. “What’re you doing here, Kit?”
“Alan had a headache.”
“Where’s Heather?”
“With the girls.”
“So you’re stuck babysitting on a Saturday? This is our time. Alan can do his own work.”
Kit stretched her legs, toes pointed outward and lifted a few inches from the ground before lowering them as she answered. “I wanted to take them for a walk.”
Ryan folded his arms as he stared at the boys. One flung dirt into his brother’s ha
ir and giggled. Almost on cue, both threw dirt as fast as they could—at least until Kit called to them.
“Settle down,” Kit said. “Do you want a hurt eye like Alan?”
The boys laughed.
“He looks like a coconut eye,” one boy declared.
“Yeah,” his twin said, “he’s a coconut head.”
After Kit warned the boys to be nice, they returned to their digging and the older soon found a worm curled around his improvised shovel, squealing with glee at the size of his captive. His brother dug frantically to find his own prize, though he settled for a large beetle following several minutes of fruitless searching. As Kit watched the boys play, she leaned forward—her hands folded and eyes sparkling. She paid little attention to her husband.
“Kit,” Ryan said after a time, “let’s take a walk. By ourselves.”
Kit didn’t turn her eyes from the boys.
“In a while.”
“Let’s go now. You are one beautiful pilgrim, so ...”
”Ryan Godson,” Kit said as she put a forefinger to her lips, “stop that talk. These children have ears.”
“I mean it, Kit. Maybe we can take a swim. By ourselves.”
“In a bit. I told Alan I’d watch the twins till dinner.”
“Alan can fend for himself,” Ryan said with a voice both pained and sharp. “You’re my wife and it’s been a long week. I’d really like to be alone for a while. Abstinence isn’t exactly the paradise I’d planned.”
Kit brushed her fingers across Ryan’s shoulders. “You’re right,” she whispered, “but I did promise and I never had a chance to be with young children before. It was always nannies and formals. Can’t you wait just a bit?”
“I suppose I’ll have to. I wouldn’t want to impose upon Alan.”
Kit forced a smile. “Sit down, Ryan. Beside me.”
Ryan took a seat beside his wife, but looked to the forest—sullen and unspeaking. Only after Kit nestled against his shoulder did he relax.