by James Prosek
* I never asked him such questions about his life until years after I first met him.
chapter nine
THE LASIALAP OF
U
Pohnpei
Pohnpei is a five-million-year-old volcanic island cloaked in rain forest, ringed by a barrier reef and a blue, blue sea. It is thirteen miles across and 2,500 feet in elevation, high enough to have cloud forest habitat, supporting thirteen endemic birds and more than a hundred endemic plants. It is as wet as anyplace on earth, with an annual average rainfall of over four hundred inches and more rivers than any other island in the region. It is tropical and hot.
Ever since I had heard Jonathan Yang’s story about the giant eels of the island and the failed shipment of live eels to Taiwan that had doomed his friend Mr. Chen, I had wanted to go there. But I felt that without having someone who could be my way in, as Stella had been in New Zealand, it would be a waste of time. Then I met that person unexpectedly at an international conference of the Nature Conservancy in Quito, Ecuador. He was giving a presentation on the disintegration of the reefs and rain forests of Micronesia. I asked him if he had ever been to Pohnpei. He knew it well enough, he said—he had lived there more than half his life. He spoke the language fluently and was married to the daughter of a high chief.
Bill Raynor, fair-skinned and tall, originally from Lodi, California, confessed that his knowledge of eels was limited, but confirmed that the eel was very important to Pohnpeians, especially the Lasialap people of U (pronounced “ooh”) municipality, for whom the freshwater eel was a kind of totem. His area of expertise was the indigenous flora of Pohnpei and traditional methods of agroforestry. But even in his work on island plants he could not escape the eels’ significance.
“Eels are part of the hydrology of the island,” Bill said. “The Pohnpeians believe that the eels help keep the rivers open and free-moving—if you take the eels out of the rivers, the water will stop flowing.”
If I traveled there, Bill said, he would make introductions that would facilitate my research.
After a twelve-hour layover in Hawaii I was happy when the plane finally left for Micronesia. We landed on a handful of islands—Majuro, Kwajalein, Kosrae—before finally making our descent over the outer atolls to Pohnpei.
Bill was waiting at the Kolonia airport to pick me up when I landed and took me in his beat-up four-wheel-drive vehicle into town. He was wearing shorts topped by a T-shirt with holes. He advised me to surrender to the heat and rain.
“Be prepared to get wet, muddy, sweaty, and dirty.”
He dropped me off at a small hotel in Kolonia called Yvonne’s. Bunches of bananas hung on hooks outside the first-floor rooms for guests to eat. From Yvonne’s, Bill said, I could walk everywhere in town, and in the open-air lobby there was always an assortment of expatriate guests milling around.
Intermittent squalls were followed by blasts of sun. When the rains came, it was as if someone had opened the floodgates and then shut them just as abruptly. In the wake of the showers there was often a rainbow, sometimes two simultaneously. The endemic maroon parrots, Pohnpei lorikeets, with hints of green and yellow on their wings, could be seen flying in chattering flocks over the causeway to the airport. From there also was a clear view of Sokehs Rock, a massive basalt outcropping that is the signature geological feature of the island. Every morning at first light, colorful reef fishes were unloaded at a street market along the sea. The diversity of fishes was almost unbelievable—blue parrotfish, pink and orange snappers, wrasses in rainbow reds, yellows, and greens.
One of Yvonne’s permanent residents was an American named Karen Nelson from Wisconsin who taught English at the College of Micronesia (COM, a community college—the closest university was in Guam). I stopped to talk to her in the lobby while getting my morning coffee. She looked very tired—white skin with fig-colored shadows under her eyes—as she waited for a taxi to take her to the school. Oftentimes the taxi was very late.
“If there’s anyplace in the middle of nowhere, it’s here,” she said of Pohnpei. “There’s no tourism, in part because Continental Airlines has a monopoly on flights and they can charge whatever they want. And it takes a full two days to get here from just about anywhere.” She said her Pohnpeian students liked it that way—the thought of tourists walking through their sacred sites unnerved them.
Karen’s taxi arrived, and as she left, a mustachioed man in a kind of guayabera shirt came into the lobby and joined me for a cup of coffee. We sat on multicolored couches and chairs, watching the rain. He was a diplomat from the nearby island of Kosrae. He asked where I was from, and watched me making notes and sketching the view out of the lobby toward the sea. Seeing I was new to the island, he offered his views on Micronesian culture.
In Micronesia, he said, self-worth is based not on an individual’s achievements but on modesty, humility, and knowing that one has a secure place in the family. Attempts to get ahead are frowned upon. “The tallest tree is struck by lightning” is a popular saying. Instead of building a home bigger than the neighbors’, people endeavor to build their houses smaller.
Such modesty, the Kosraean cautioned, can be a veil for laziness. The social position about not wanting to stick out had become an excuse to do nothing. And the already languid attitude of the people was exaggerated not just by the incessant heat and humidity but by a popular narcotic drink called sakau, known elsewhere in the Pacific as kava. Most Pohnpeians viewed sakau as one of the island’s virtues (there is no dispute that cannot be settled over drinking sakau), while others felt it was impeding Pohnpei’s progress (it dulls the central nervous system).
The Kosraean grabbed the coffeepot and refilled our cups. He got a twinkle in his eye and leaned forward.
“I heard you talking about eel,” he whispered. “You know, on Kosrae we eat eel.”
“You eat—” I started.
“Shhh,” he said. “I don’t want to offend the girl working at the front desk. She is Lasialap, the eel clan.”
He leaned back, stirring sugar in his coffee.
“Personally, I love eel,” he said, “but to her it would be like eating a human. The Lasialap believe eels are people, you know.”
I asked him how eels are prepared in Kosrae. He licked his lips.
“What we do in Kosrae is, we put the eel in boiling water to take off the slime and then cook it in an um, or earth oven. We wrap the eel in a special leaf that seasons the meat. You don’t want to stop eating—it tastes really good.”
Kolonia is Pohnpei’s biggest city, though it is very small. They have no traffic problems, so there are no traffic lights. You would be hard pressed to find a stop sign. Storefronts are eclectic. You might see a shop offering “gold teeth services” (dentistry) next to a Mormon mission. Other shops sell goods carved from ivory nuts (the seed of an endemic palm), bracelets made of hawksbill turtle shells (which can’t legally leave the island), hardware, or photocopy services. There are a few places to stay and a few restaurants, representing cuisine from cultures that have occupied the island—German, Japanese, American.
The Visitors’ Bureau is on the eighteen-acre campus of the Agriculture Station, a series of bunker-like buildings shaded by giant breadfruit trees. In front of the Visitors’ Bureau is a rusty sign with arrows indicating the distance to major cities of the world: New York, 8,158 miles; Paris, 10,326; Cape Town, 10,187; Melbourne, 5,288.
Inside, a couple was bargaining with a man selling black pearls. On the back wall was an array of posters promoting everything from dental hygiene (the habit of chewing betel nut, Areca catechu, had destroyed many Pohnpeians’ teeth) to the consumption of native carotenoid-rich foods—bananas, taro, breadfruit, and pandanus.*
I asked a woman mopping the floor where I could find Edgar. She went behind a door and moments later a man appeared, dark-skinned with dark hair and wearing a light blue button-down shirt and long gray pants.
“Bill told me you might be able to help me,” I said. “I’m do
ing research on—”
“Oh yes,” Edgar said, fidgeting with his glasses. “Bill told me about you. I’m very busy at the moment. I do know an eel story, but not very well. There are people who know it better. You need to visit the high chief of the Lasialap. His name is Sahngoro. His Christian name is Elter John. He is also the leader of U—the nahnmwarki.”
“Can you introduce me to him?” I asked. “Well, it’s not that easy,” Edgar said. “You see, someone has to bring you to him formally, someone with a title, and there has to be a sakau ceremony. I could not bring you to the nahnmwarki because I am not a chief and I am not Lasialap. And someone would have to teach you the proper etiquette. For instance, your head can never be higher than the head of a nahmwarki. I think Bill has already asked Adelino Lorens, our deacon and minister of agriculture, if he could help. Adelino is high up in the Lasialap clan.”
“Can you tell me your eel story?” I asked Edgar. He smiled, taken aback at my directness.
“It is the story of how the eel came to Pohnpei,” he said. “In this story, the starling, called sloahk, brought a seed from another island, and that seed became the first eel, which we call kemisik. But for now, I’m afraid, that’s the best I can do. I’m late to a meeting.
“Some advice,” he added as he walked away. “There are not many keys in Pohnpei. But sakau is the key to unlock everything you’re looking for.”
I stopped to look at a poster about the forests and birds of Micronesia. There, among the cardinal honeyeater, native pigeon, kingfisher, and fantail, was the Micronesian starling, the bird that had brought the eel to Pohnpei. It was black, with yellow eyes.
In the early afternoon, Bill met me at Yvonne’s and we walked toward the sea to the office of the Conservation Society of Pohnpei (CSP), a nongovernmental organization he helped found in 1998. CSP was the first platform for environmental conservation on the island, and one of the first in Micronesia.
One of CSP’s main objectives was to prevent the further deforestation of the island. Cultivation of sakau for commercial export—to Guam, Saipan, Hawaii, and Kansas City (where there is a large Pohnpeian diaspora)—had set off an ecological imbalance that had never occurred when crops were grown on a small scale strictly for domestic consumption. Since the mid-1980s, clearing of trees (mostly for sakau cultivation) had reduced the native forests of Pohnpei by more than two-thirds, to only 15 percent of the island’s area.
To combat the devastation, CSP staff initiated the Grow Low Sakau campaign, encouraging farmers to cultivate the lowlands, where the forests had already been degraded. The challenge is that farmers prefer to plant their sakau in the uplands, where the soil is richer and their crops grow larger and faster. But by clearing hundreds of acres of steep forest hillsides, they were causing erosion and landslides that destroyed their own crops. Without the trees at the headwaters of streams and their shade and roots that retain moisture, the streams were drying up—which was having an ill effect on the freshwater ecosystems, including the population of native eels.*
In the CSP offices, with stunning views of the lagoon and outer atolls, Bill called the dozen or so young staff members together.
“This is James,” Bill said, addressing the circle of people around the room. “He’s visiting from the States to learn more about eels in Pohnpei. I think his time here is a good opportunity for us to consider our freshwater ecosystems, which we don’t really know a whole lot about.” Bill continued on, switching from English to Pohnpeian. As he spoke, the staff members nodded, looked at me, and smiled.
“Okay,” Nixon, one of the CSP employees, said at last. “Marciano and I are going to take you to Pwodoi, a village in the municipality of Kitti,” pronounced “Kichy.” “In the creek there is a pool where the local children feed the eels and swim with them.”
The single ring road that follows the coast around the island (completed in 1986) winds through the lush forest with intermittent and shockingly beautiful vistas of the Pacific Ocean. Because it is the main avenue for foot and car traffic and because of the road’s poor condition, it can take a good long time to get from Kolonia to anywhere else. But no one seems to be in much of a hurry.
A few miles east from town, Nixon pulled off the road and we walked down a path through the trees. In the distance I could hear a kind of percussive music, a two-tone pank penk pank penk. Eventually we came to a clearing. A rooster and some hens picked in the soil around the smoking embers of a fire. A blackened kettle boiled, steam coming out of the spout. Beneath a thatched roof held up by the hard trunks of tree ferns, two men sat at a large flat slab of lava rock. Shirtless, baring their strong deep-brown torsos, they worked rounded stones over the slab, producing the hollow and metallic sound I’d heard from a distance. They were pounding the roots of Piper methysticum, otherwise known as sakau.
The root, a beautiful Medusa-like tangle, was dug from the ground, scrubbed of soil with water and brushes, and cut into pieces (some sakau root clusters weigh as much as five hundred pounds). The pieces were placed on the slab of lava rock, called apeitehl, and mashed with round river stones. Water was added slowly to make a soggy pulp. When the root was sufficiently macerated, it was laid on ribbons of slimy bark, freshly stripped from the trunks of hibiscus bushes. One man gathered and twisted the fibers of the hibiscus, encircling the crushed root, and wrung the bulge like a wet towel, while the other man captured the fluid that streamed out in the half shell of a coconut. As the sakau was squeezed, the slime of the hibiscus bark emulsified the oils in the mashed root (which contain the narcotic agent), suspending them evenly throughout the drink.
The first full cup of sakau was handed to Nixon. He took a drink, then rotated the cup a half turn and handed it to Marciano. Marciano drank and turned the cup again, handing it to me.
“You’re supposed to close your eyes when you drink,” he said, “probably because it doesn’t look very appetizing.”
It slid and slumped down my throat, mucus-like and slimy. The cup was refilled and passed around again. Before we left, Nixon gave the man a few dollars. We got back in the car and headed along the road to Kitti. Nixon drove even more slowly, talking and laughing freely. They seemed to be enjoying their afternoon out of the office.
Sakau originated as a drink when people saw rats become dizzy and sluggish after nibbling on the root. The effects of sakau are often described as calming or numbing. Bill Raynor, who had published several papers about the plant, wrote in the book Dangerous Harvest: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes, “The psychoactive effects of kava [sakau] are, in general, mildly narcotic, soporific, diuretic, and muscle relaxing.” They are not, as members of Captain Cook’s crew described, opium-like or hallucinogenic.
Before hibiscus bark was used to squeeze sakau, young virgin women squeezed it in their long hair. High chiefs would kneel at their feet and drink it as it cascaded down their smooth brown legs. When the Catholic missionaries first came to the nearby island of Kosrae, they forbade the drinking of sakau. It is widely believed that sakau root was smuggled to Pohnpei in a woman’s vagina—enough, at least, to start a new plant.*
I asked Marciano why the drink had survived in Pohnpei. Hadn’t the missionaries tried to forbid it there as well?”Pohnpeians are more stubborn,” he said. But in general, the reason Pohnpei had retained its early traditions better than neighboring islands was because more of its people survived smallpox.
Kosrae’s population was almost wiped out when whalers from New England first brought the deadly disease. With only about two hundred survivors, the Kosraean culture had broken down. But for some reason in Pohnpei about two thousand people survived (around 20 percent of the population), enough to carry on customs and resist the advances of the Spanish missionaries who arrived soon after the devastation.
Marciano said that most Pohnpeians were Catholic but practiced a kind of hybrid spirituality, incorporating native beliefs with Christian ones. Bill Raynor had originally come to Pohnpei as a Jesuit volun
teer and soon learned that the indigenous faith had never gone away, just entangled itself about the church like a tenacious vine. He told me later in the trip, “Anyone who’s a straight, Western-style Christian should stay off the island.” Such an integrated culture left room for eels (which could easily be assimilated as the snake figure in the Garden of Eden).
At last we arrived in the municipality of Kitti and the pool of eels at Pwodoi.
Beside the street, above the creek, was a small stand where boys sold betel nut. The oval palm seed, locally known as pwuh, was chewed with lime (usually crushed coral) wrapped in a leaf of a native pepper plant, called kapwohi (Piper betel), and produced a mild stimulant effect (as well as a bright orange-red fluid).*
Nixon and Marciano bought some betel nut, and the young vendors led us down to the creek. We stood at the edge of a large pool where the water passed under the street through a culvert. One boy had a can of mackerel and punctured the top with his knife, allowing fishy juice to leak into the water. A few large shapes began to emerge from under the broad-leafed foliage overhanging the brook, and as they stirred across the light sandy bottom into a ray of sun, I saw for the first time the beautiful golden color and brown mottling of the tropical freshwater eel, Anguilla marmorata.*
One of the boys stepped into the creek and put his hands beneath the belly of a particularly large eel. Even Nixon and Marciano cringed slightly, as the eel was longer than the boy was tall. But the big fish allowed the boy to caress its body, even lift most of its body out of the water. Pohnpeians maintain that only those of the Lasialap clan can safely hold a large eel; anyone else who tried would be bitten. When I first heard this I was skeptical, as I had touched, petted, and even dived with large eels in New Zealand and never once been bitten. What was remarkable was how the boy was able to hold the eel out of water for so long with so little protest from the fish. I tried this later and was un- able to do so. There was something special about the relationship between these people and the eel.*