by James Prosek
I continued up and down the streets of Kolonia, admiring handicrafts and other curiosities, and before I knew it, it was time to go see Adelino at the Ag Station.
We drove, with one of Adelino’s employees at the wheel, the twenty minutes from Kolonia to Awak. The way around the east side of the island was more exposed to the sea than the drive around the west side to Kitti.
Awak was a sea-blown village, with broad views of mangrove islets. We pulled into the sandy lot of a weathered blue and white Spanish-style church—the church of which Adelino was deacon. I insisted that the driver take some money for gasoline, which was quite dear on the island. Adelino acknowledged my offering as very generous.
A beautiful creek tumbled down the mountain behind the church, breaking into two branches that flowed around it, embracing it on its own little island. We stood on a bridge on one side of the church looking into the currents. Adelino pointed to some cement pilings on the bank and a monster eel lying straight and still between them.
“When I was a child,” Adelino said, “the old church was here, on these pilings. During services, we could hear the sound of the river under the wooden floorboards. The eels were never far away.”
The existing church, surrounded by tall palm trees, gleamed white against a menacing purple-black storm cloud. The ocean behind us was blue and choppy.
Leaving my bags in the church parking lot, I followed Adelino to the home of an old man who lived beside the river. His name was Manuel Amor. The man pointed out that the river here, the Kepin Awak, was tidal, and that the big eels could come and go as they pleased. He said when the eels got really big they went to the ocean and never came back—he believed that they were eaten by big sharks. He had a bowl of dishwater with a bit of fish meat suspended in it, and as he poured it into the river, big eels with wide heads, long nostrils, and strong, muscular bodies appeared from the sides and bottom of the pool. Some village children materialized from behind the house and stood at the edge of the pool. I had an underwater housing for my camera, and held it just under the water where the eels gathered, to take a few pictures. The eels were curious and nosed the camera housing and my hands. I thought it would be really embarrassing, not to mention painful, if one of the eels grabbed hold of my hand, so I pulled the camera out and stepped back from the pool.
Adelino next took me to his home. He said he was very busy preparing for services on Sunday, and in addition, the next day he was entertaining a visiting archbishop. But he was gracious nonetheless. We sat down on the front steps of his home, half hidden in the jungle. He said that his son Allen would be arriving soon and could walk me from the church down the road to visit Ester Alex.
Adelino leaned forward and asked me how I had come to find out about Pohnpei and the Lasialap people. I told him I’d been in coastal Maine doing research on the glass eel fishery when I met a Taiwanese eel dealer named Jonathan Yang. Yang first told me about the island, and shared a story about his friend Mr. Chen, who had died mysteriously after trying to export big eels.
Adelino nodded, as if the story meant something to him.
At that point Adelino’s son Allen arrived, a handsome, wiry young man. Adelino excused himself and Allen and I began our walk along the road to the home of Ester Alex.
In the waning sunlight sea birds called vigorously from the jungle on the west side and the deep mangrove thickets on the eastern, ocean side of the street. The homes of the people, nestled in the jungle, looked ragtag and simple. Most Pohnpeian homes are open on the sides, with a wall that may go as high as the knee—the people sleep in the open, surrounded by nature. Within, the homes are clean, pots stacked neatly, cement or dirt floor swept. I walked with Allen for about a mile, and by the time we got to the home of Ester Alex, it was nearly dark.
Her house was very small, with a corrugated metal roof held up by tree fern posts on a poured concrete floor. Erlinso, Ester’s son, put out a seat for his elderly mother on their front porch, then sat next to her, translating as she spoke. I was excited to be hearing my first eel story from a Lasialap. The soft chortling sounds of caged lorikeets, the voices of children, and the night sounds gave texture to the air. Erlinso, a schoolteacher in Awak who taught English, spoke softly and slowly, with many pauses. The pauses were partly to let his mother complete her sentences, but also, it seemed, to let the breeze and the night sounds flow freely in between the phrases.
“You know, there was a story about eel.” Erlinso pronounced eel with an h, “heel.” “A long, long time ago, there was a couple in Kitti. One day the wife went out fishing with a fishing net. So when she dipped the net in the water and lifted it up, there was a small rock, or stone, in the net. She took the rock and threw it away, and she moved away from it, maybe ten or twelve feet away. And then she put the net in again. When she lifted it up, the same stone was in there! And then she picked up the stone again, and threw it away, and she moved to another place. And the third time she put the net in the water she lifted up the same rock.” His voice expressed the amazement and exasperation the fisherwoman must have felt when she pulled up the rock a third time. “And then she put the rock in her basket and went home. When she got to her house she showed the stone to her husband. And the husband advised her to put the stone in a small well—they used to drink from that well. And then one day, they found that the stone had cracked open, and a small fish came out—an eel.
“They used to feed the fish in the well,” Erlinso continued, “and when it got bigger, they decided to kill that eel. And so, unfortunately, the fish heard about their plan. They planned to kill the eel, but the eel heard them … she was a ghost. So she moved from there, from the well, into the forest and finally landed in Madolenihmw, and she gave birth to a woman, and that woman was Lasialap. And so we are descended from that woman. Our clan is known as Lasialap.” He paused, and it seemed as though the story was over. Then his mother spoke again.
“And then the eel went out to Kosrae,” he said, translating. “Have you been in Kosrae? The eel left Pohnpei and then went to Kosrae, and then, in Kosrae, the eel gave birth to another woman. That woman came back to Pohnpei. The nahnmwarki of U, the uncle of Adelino Lorens, he is descended from that woman that came from Kosrae. Then, after that, the eel moved from Kosrae to Pingelap and then from Pingelap to Yap, and then from Yap she came back to Pohnpei and died in Nett.* There is a mountain in Nett. If you look at that mountain, it looks like an eel.
“So, we the Lasialap, we really, you know, respect that eel. But you know one bad thing—some people, from Kosrae, they came out here and killed some eel to eat. If we didn’t make a rule, then very soon the freshwater eel will disappear and all the waters will dry up.” Ester stopped speaking and stared at the floor, her sunken mouth closed.
“So, the freshwater eel is a human,” Erlinso continued on his own. He wiped his face with a rag and lifted his eyes to look at me. “You know, they used to whistle just like you.”*
“The eels whistled?” I asked, wanting to make sure I’d heard correctly.
“Yes. The people, they get mixed up, they thought people were doing that, but it was the eel. You know, when the nahnmwarki of U dies you will see the freshwater eel walking on the road. Just the day before the nahnmwarki dies, usually we see the eels dancing on the road, and that’s a sign that something will happen, especially to high-ranking people. We the Lasialap, we don’t play with the eel. We really honor that fish. When the sun is too hot and the small wells are drying up, sometimes we take the eels and bring them to the ocean so they don’t die.
“Well,” Erlinso said suddenly, putting his hands on his knees and motioning for us to get up. “Thank you for coming.” He shook my hand.
Allen and I walked back to the church and his father’s home on the dark road. Everyone in the village, it seemed, was out walking on the road: boys and girls, young men and old women, dogs and chickens. The street is a village, a social landscape.
On the way back, Allen spoke openly with me. He told me
that his grandfather had been the nahnmwarki of U, and when he died, they went up into the mountains and dug a big sakau plant for the ceremony. “I was just a boy,” Allen said, “but I was old enough to go with them. When they brought the sakau back to the village, here to Awak, they prepared to chop the big root in half. As the man raised his machete to strike the root, an eel appeared. I saw it, standing up on the tip of its tail, in the middle of the stump. The people carried it down to the river and let it go.”
Adelino had told me that he was spending the evening with his family at a retreat by the ocean. He said they got together a few times a year, ate, drank sakau, and camped by the ocean, but he did not ask me if I wanted to come. As Allen and I continued on the road to the church, I was wondering when he was going to say goodbye. But we continued talking and had gone beyond their home, and soon turned onto a sinuous path made of piled coral that wound through the flooded mangroves. I was surprised when Allen mentioned that we were going to meet up with his family, and I wondered when his father had had a change of heart and decided to have me there.
The mangroves were dense and it would have been hard to see the path were it not made of bleached white coral. There are no sand beaches on the island of Pohnpei (part of the reason it has never become a tourist destination), just on the outer atolls; the edges of the island are mostly mangrove forests that flood at high tide, so if you want to be near the ocean, you generally have to build a platform of coral or stone.
We came to the other side of the mangrove thicket and the campsite where Allen’s family was spending the night. A ceremonial open-air structure called a nahs was perched near the water, and Adelino and his extended family were seated under its roof around a peitehl, pounding and drinking sakau. Adelino welcomed me and introduced me to what he described as his entire extended family. He asked me to sit next to him. All the men were shirtless, and I followed suit. The two young men at the peitehl were preparing the hibiscus bark to squeeze the sakau. One laid out the long strips of hibiscus bark, folded at one end. He evened out the fibers of the slimy bark on the lava stone and loaded it with a mound of crushed root, then held the bark at both ends and twisted, squeezing the root wrapped inside. At the end of the squeeze the man was straining his muscles as the other held out the coconut shell to capture the fluid. The coconut shell was passed to Adelino, and Adelino passed it to me. He said, “This is the fourth cup. We are honored to have you here. Please drink.”
Beneath the nahs was spread a feast, but it was all covered and it didn’t appear that anyone was eating yet. The cup was filled and passed and filled and passed. As we drank more, conversation slowed. I wondered what had encouraged Adelino to ultimately invite me to this gathering. It could have been that he finally understood my passion for the eel—or it could have been that he wanted to somehow repay me for giving his driver $20 for gas.
“We knew this man from Kosrae,” Adelino told me, “who came to Pohnpei and married a Lasialap. One day, when his wife was away, he could not resist—he killed a big eel and ate it. The next day he felt sick, and a month later he died.”
Adelino did not speak further, just stared. The night was silent now. People had drunk enough that they stopped talking.
Later in the trip I heard the same story about the Kosraean who ate the eel, but from a different source, a woman named Shelly who was born on the Pohnpeian atoll of Mwoakilloa. She said that her husband’s auntie had married a Kosraean. He lived in U because his wife was Lasialap. He saw the eels in the stream near their home and always talked about eating them.
“His wife wouldn’t let him,” Shelly said. “She was really against it, she didn’t want him to eat them. But one day he went behind her back and caught one eel and cooked it and ate it, but didn’t tell his wife. A few days later, he started to get sick, and ended up in the hospital. His sickness only got worse, so they took him home to Kosrae, where he died. They said he had spots on his skin like a rash that resembled eel skin.”
Serlene, at the Nature Conservancy offices, followed Shelly’s story with her own. One day when her husband was a kid he was out in a stream and decided he’d try to kill eels for fun. He speared one, then another, and he was about to spear a third when he fainted. They took him to the hospital, where he was very sick for days. They said his vomit smelled like eel.
I did not want to overstay at Adelino’s family gathering. I got up and took a walk by a kind of man-made enclosure, a pen of water circled with coral. There were a few big sea turtles in the water, and children ran around the periphery, chasing the turtles, which swam gracefully in the moonlight.
Bill had spent the morning readying soil for planting and was covered in dirt and sweat. He’d inserted plant cuttings at intervals in the dark mounds of soil. The cuttings were wilted, and I wondered out loud how they would recover.
“We don’t water anything,” Bill explained, grabbing a hoe from the soil and leaning it against a tree. “Any time of year, it is sure to rain soon.” Rain it did, and Bill’s cuttings rose from limpness toward the sky.
The night before I had walked to the Village Hotel in Awak, clambered to my room—a freestanding hut in the jungle—in the dark, and woke to one of the most beautiful ocean views I had ever beheld. From the ridge was a stunning view of Sokehs Rock, far in the distance, and in the foreground, in the tops of the palm trees, cardinal honeyeaters flittered in and out of the fronds.
Bill’s house was in the municipality of Madolenihmw, at the opposite end of the island from Kolonia. He had invited me to stay the night, go to church with his family the next morning, and then visit Nan Madol.
We walked down a steep path below Bill’s house. It was jungle, but not dense, with taro, tomatoes, sakau, eggplant, yams, different varieties of banana, breadfruit, and avocado. We stayed out for part of the day through several heavy showers. As the sun was setting and a delicious sea breeze started to blow, Bill walked me back to his house.
Bill and his wife, Beli, lived in an open communal-style home of cement blocks covered in plaster and painted salmon pink. Beli is a dressmaker, employing two seamstresses. She is a direct descendant of the nahnmwarki of the Breadfruit Clan. Besides the house they also have a large open nahs for big family gatherings.
In the home and the nahs, children, men, and women had gathered just before dark. They ate blue parrotfish, taro, chicken, and rice out of bowls with their hands, and staked out territory for sleeping.
“If you’re not a social person,” Bill said, “you won’t survive in Pohnpei.”
A few young men appeared with a sakau root and began washing, cutting, and pounding it on the peitehl. Simultaneously, children and adults began watching a Japanese horror movie on a television hooked up to some remote power source. You could not escape sakau if you wanted to.
The next morning we walked to the church, across the street from the school, now closed, where Bill had had his first job on the island. Like the church in Awak, this was on the ocean, and the doors and windows were wide open, allowing the fresh morning breeze to flow through. I recognized the man leading the service in front of a large congregation of adults and children in colorful blues and greens: Valentin, an employee of CSP whom Bill had said was knowledgeable about plant magic. Bill had explained that there were three main divisions of social structure, church, government, and the traditional system, and “if you are high-titled in all three, you’ve got it made.” Valentin was one such man.
After the service we headed for Nan Madol, the stone ruins sometimes called the Venice of the Pacific (because canals of sea water once coursed between the buildings). There was no sign indicating the turnoff from the main road. Bill drove down a weedy track to a small kind of house that belonged to the family who claimed to own the land and the reef beneath the ruins. A man collected a few dollars as an entrance fee, and Bill asked him in Pohnpeian about eels.
“That guy,” Bill said, “he says he has a story of a big eel that lives in the mangroves. But that’s all he will sa
y.”
Nan Madol was the political and religious seat of Pohnpei under the Saudeleur Dynasty (ruled by one man, the Saudeleur) until at least the sixteenth century. Covering 150 acres, Nan Madol consists of ninety-three man-made coral islets. The area was occupied as early as 200 B.C. but the structures of giant basalt crystals that make it one of the most magnificent architectural feats in Oceania were probably not built until the twelfth century.
It is said that priests fed dogs and turtles to a giant moray eel that lived in the coral footings. The eel, named Nan Samwol, was considered a guardian spirit of Nan Madol.*
“At a time determined by divination and the change in agricultural seasons, the priests performed an extended ceremony of homage, supplication, and atonement called Pwung en Sapw. The ceremony culminated in the offering of a turtle as tribute to Nahn Samwohl, the great saltwater eel that dwelled in a shallow pool on the islet of Idehd in Nan Madol. Nahn Samwohl’s acceptance of the offering indicated that Nahnisohnsapw [the principal god of the saudeleur] was pleased with the conduct of human affairs on Pohnpei.” So writes David L. Hanlon in Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890.
Nan Madol
It is believed that the pentagonal and hexagonal basalt crystals (some twelve to fifteen feet long) that make up Nan Madol were quarried from lava outcrops at distant parts of the island. A cornerstone on one part of the ruin weighs more than fifty tons, the average being well over ten, so modern people have naturally wondered how the ancients got them there. Some say they moved them on bamboo rafts, but bamboo, according to Bill, is not native to the island. The islanders say that a magician flew the stones across from Sokehs Rock, where much of the basalt was likely quarried. Archeologists have tried to determine what kind of rafts they may have floated the stones on but have come up with no feasible method—certainly none that’s been successfully tested.