Dove

by Robin L. Graham

  I spoke of this problem to a yachtsman friend, Dick Johnston, who had spent a lot of time among the Fijians and knew their language. He urged me to stop bargaining and quit giving away my old clothes and pens. He warned me not to return a gift for a gift, but only to make my thanks.

  The idea sounded strange but it worked well. As a bonus, my attitude toward the Fijians changed. From this time on I was rarely short of food and found I got on much better with the islanders.

  Dick Johnston, who had fallen out with his yacht skipper, sailed with me from one of the Fijian islands to the port of Suva. At the Suva yacht club Dick overheard someone mention the name of a girl he had once known in California. The girl was apparently on the other side of the main island, at Lautoka. Dick decided to take a bus and see if he could track her down.

  So I was alone again on Dove, moored off the yacht club, when a club waiter came down to tell me that Joliette had been run over by a truck.

  The waiter gave me the report as lightly as though he had been talking about the weather. He could not have understood that Joliette had been my shipmate for a year; that she wasn’t just another cat around the harbor, now kicked into a gutter, but a proved comrade of the high seas.

  At that moment I would have traded half my gear on Dove to have her back, to feel her nuzzling my ankles or to hear her crying for her dinner. I locked myself inside Dove’s cabin and cried like a kid. I had not felt lonelier five hundred miles from land. There was no one to talk to, least of all some of those people at the yacht club who made no secret of their dislike of me—“that barefoot boy in torn pants.”

  At dusk and in savage gloom I went to the yacht club bar and bought a bottle of vodka. I returned to Dove and then proceeded to get totally and blindly drunk.

  Two days later I was awakened by someone thumping the cabin roof, the noise hitting my eardrums like cannon fire. My mouth tasted of smoldering tennis shoes and the light streaming through the companionway looked like the inner fires of hell. I had the kind of hangover that could have been written up as a cautionary tale in the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Dick was bumbling on about a girl—some girl who needed a place to sleep because her boss hadn’t paid her wages and “she’s rather short on funds.”

  I sat up and covered my eyes with my palms. “What are you talking about?” I croaked.

  Dick took in the situation—the empty vodka bottle, the chaos in the cabin. “Look,” he said, “it’s just for the night. We’ll fix her up somewhere else later. Come and meet her?”

  “Can’t you get out of here?” I said, and scanned the blurred face of my watch. “Wow! Is that the time?”

  Unbelievably it was midafternoon. I hadn’t eaten for forty-eight hours and was shivering with nausea. Dick came down the companionway and shuffled my arms into a sweaty shirt and my legs into oil-stained Levi’s. Painfully I came up on deck and climbed to the wharf. I stumbled toward the lawn in front of the yacht club and raised my head.

  This was my first sight of Patti Ratterree.

  She looked gorgeous. Her head was thrown back in laughter, and she was wearing a brilliant blue island dress, very feminine. Her wheat-colored hair was long on her shoulders. I looked enviously at Dick.

  “Nice,” I drawled, and then to Dick, “I can see why you went to the other side of the island.”

  The girl stopped laughing, and with a slim, honey-colored leg kicked my bottom.

  “What’s that for?” I protested.

  She studied me for a few seconds with mock gravity. “That’s one of my friendly kicks, but it’s just to remind you that I can look after myself.”

  Then she laughed again, her teeth marvelously white, her eyes very blue. There was a splash of amber in her left eye as if it had caught and held some of the sunlight. I grinned.

  Dick was looking at each of us, at first anxiously and then with relief. He said, “You two are obviously going to hit it off.”

  The three of us returned to Dove and Patti picked up the empty vodka bottle. She didn’t say anything. She just went over to the stove and started to brew some coffee.

  Patti slept on Dove, but if anyone at the yacht club had played Peeping Tom he would have demanded his money back. I didn’t even touch her hand. It wasn’t because of inexperience. Kids grow up quickly in California, quicker still in the South Seas, and I was now in my eighteenth year.

  But we were in unknown territory, strange and full of tension. It was not religion or anything that held us back, for both of us were as pagan as Congo pygmies, and I didn’t care a damn what those people in the yacht club were thinking. Some dirty little minds were working overtime anyway.

  Patti and I tried to pretend there was nothing between us, each of us putting up a front of flippancy, our conversation bantering, our laughter too easy. But it was like putting up a picket fence against the tide.

  A few days later I asked her if she would sail with me to the Yasawas, a Fiji group beyond the usual tourist routes.

  “We can get away from people there,” I said quickly. “We can get into clear water. We can go diving together, go hunting for shells.”

  She was sitting on the cabin roof, her brown legs dangling over the companionway. She studied my face seriously for a long time. Then she nodded her head.

  I began preparing Dove for the trip and was ready to start the outboard when I remembered it was Friday.

  “We can’t go today,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I once made the mistake of sailing on a Friday.”

  She laughed. “You don’t look like the superstitious type.”

  We did not sail till after midnight—two minutes after.

  4

  Love and Blue Lagoons

  THE NIGHT WAS MOONLESS. Suva’s harbor entrance is almost five miles long, narrow, flanked by coral reefs sharp enough to rip the bottom off a freighter. Navigation by daylight calls for watchfulness. By night, and especially for the single-handed sailor, it demands full concentration.

  The problem was to line up the pilot lights, which I knew had been well sighted. But still there was an eerie feeling because we could hear the noise of the surf on the reef. Patti sat beside me in the cockpit hugging her knees. She was silent and scared. I was pretty nervous too as Dove pitched and rolled in the swell. I put my arm around Patti and she rested her head on my shoulder. We kissed for the first time, very gently.

  Then Patti went into the cabin to sleep. She was a bit seasick and rather miserable. The boat was self-steering well, but I stayed up on deck to keep a lookout.

  We joked about it later, but we had taken a chance. When dawn came we struck calmer water on the lee of the little island of Savala. After the sun was well up Patti came on deck. She was still pale but managed to smile. She began to brush her hair and then to braid it.

  She began to talk, just quietly. She spoke about her life, her childhood. She had been born, she told me, not twenty miles across the sprawl of Los Angeles from where I had been born. Her parents had been divorced when she was quite young. She had remained very fond of her parents, but the effect on her life of an unsettled though affluent home was to make her self-reliant. She had tried a short spell at college but found campus life too shallow and irrelevant. So she had sold her sports car, bought a backpack and hitchhiked with a girl friend through Mexico. There for the first time she met people with values as simple as their needs. She was convinced that the exciting frontiers were beyond Los Angeles, beyond America.

  Sometimes she stopped talking and I could see her mind was far away. Then she would look up at me and smile and go on again. Rather shyly she talked about discovering in Mexico a strange sort of intuition that may have saved her life.

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” she said, “but I have sometimes had a feeling of being able to see a little way ahead—as if time were a sort of path, and I could pick out my footprints before I made them.”

  I did not grin, and she continued more confidently
. “I’m not a witch or anything, but I’ve sometimes seemed to know what to do, sort of where the thorns are. It was as if somebody was helping me.

  “In Mexico my friend and I were waiting for a ride on a dusty, isolated road. It was as hot as hell and we hadn’t seen a car for an hour or more. Then a truck came rattling down the road and my friend thumbed it. The truck stopped. The Mexican driver invited us to get aboard. My friend had already thrown her pack in the back when I grabbed her, and said, ‘No, this isn’t our car. Let’s wait.’

  “My friend was absolutely furious. We were madly hungry and thirsty. We stood there arguing on the road until the Mexican shrugged his shoulders and drove off. My friend sulked as we tramped on. Another car picked us up soon afterward. We’d gone on about four miles when we came across a group of people standing on the road. They were looking over a cliff. The Mexican’s truck had gone over the side.”

  Patti paused and then added, “There have been other times like that. I must tell you about them sometime. It’s rather odd and scary.”

  Her story had fascinated me so completely that I had not realized Dove was heading toward some rocks. I moved the tiller over and reset the wind vane. I asked, “Was it intuition that made you decide to come with me last night?”

  Now she smiled, her teeth white as the surf. “That—and other reasons.”

  But I was to remember Patti’s intuition in the months to come.

  She continued to tell the story of her life, of how she had returned to Los Angeles with a wanderlust and had worked for a spell as a dentist’s assistant to save enough money to travel again. With another friend she hitchhiked to Panama, staying at cheap hotels, finding little back-street cafés, always turning, as she put it, cents into dollars. In Panama she learned of an old but comfortable yacht going to Tahiti and was invited to join the crew, comprising a tough Swedish skipper, a German-Canadian cook, two Jamaicans and an older woman. The voyage took four months, with a six-week stopover at the Galápagos islands. It was not a happy voyage. The skipper was another Captain Bligh, she said, a bully who kept his own stock of food and treated everyone like dirt.

  In Tahiti, Patti found, as I had as a boy of thirteen, that the Polynesians are people who have discovered their own source of happiness.

  But Patti’s goal was Australia. She had met a number of people who were enthusiastic about Australia offering a new way of life. From Tahiti she island-hopped across the Pacific to the Fijis, finding work where she could to supplement her savings. Her funds were low when she reached Suva and she was grateful to find a job as hostess on an inter-island tourist boat. Her duties were to point out the sights, to know something of the history of the islands and to hand out seasickness pills when water came over the prow. Returning to Lautoka after her first tour, the lecherous veteran skipper of the craft claimed that it was time for her to share his bunk. Without waiting for her wages, she jumped ship.

  A few hours later, walking down a street alone, Patti heard a familiar voice shouting her name from a bus window.

  “It was unbelievable! Dick Johnston! I’d known him in California,” she said. “Does that bring me up to date?”

  “And what does your intuition say about the days ahead?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Bliss,” she said.

  And she was right.

  We were children as we sailed the islands of the Yasawa group, kids reveling in sun and surf, knowing a glorious sense of freedom and timelessness. When the sun had risen high enough to warm our bodies and light the caverns and ledges in the coral reefs, we dived for shells and poured our treasure into Dove’s cockpit. We found violet conchs, zigzag and spotted cowries, grinning tuns (Malea ringens), quaint delphinia snails, pagoda periwinkles, murex, tiny moon snails, fashioned with a jeweler’s skill, delicate striped bonnets, tritons, augers and olives.

  The cowries we loved best—some as large as a fist, skins silken smooth, dappled in warm browns. We swam together, Patti graceful as a dolphin.

  Shell hunting among coral reefs is not all child’s play. It has its dangers. Some shellfish are as dangerous as a rattlesnake. Under a rock shelf I found and fortunately recognized a cloth-of-gold (Conus textile). I pried it loose and, holding it with the tips of my fingers, swam to Dove and placed it on top of my drying Levi’s. We watched its wicked-looking little proboscis come out of the mouth of the shell as the mollusk felt for its enemy. Then there was a faint swishing noise as the proboscis shot out its tiny harpoon into the cloth of my pants.

  If the poison from the harpoon had pierced my finger I would probably have survived, but only because I was in good health. A few days earlier I had heard about a tourist who had picked up one of these rare shells. The harpoon had stabbed the palm of his hand and he had died in great pain three hours later.

  While we were in the Yasawas I had a truly close shave. I turned over a rock on the reef at low tide and thought I had discovered a rare shell. But it was a stonefish, with a vicious sting in its dorsal spine. The sharpest pain I had ever known started at my finger and went up my arm.

  The wound began to bleed a lot. There are plenty of stories of people dying from a stone fish sting, and I was really frightened. We were quite alone on the rocks. Patti tore the rubber band off her ponytail and made a tourniquet around my finger, which was already beginning to swell. The pain made me sick. Patti urged me to suck the wound and to spit out the blood and then she ran down the beach for help. She came upon a group of native women and with sign language and drawings on the sand she explained what had happened to me. One woman who could speak a little English told Patti that my finger should be boiled in gasoline.

  I was not very happy when Patti returned with this prescription. We agreed that it would be better to take the odds on my surviving the poison than face the prospect of being blown up by boiling gasoline siphoned from the stove.

  My finger throbbed for three days and it carried the scar for three months.

  Apart from meeting up with stonefish and deadly mollusks, survival in the Yasawas gave us few problems. When we were hungry we dived for clams or fished for mahimahi. Sometimes a squid would jump aboard Dove. Squids are delicious. When there were no mosquitoes about we went ashore and built a fire to boil or barbecue our seafood. We drank from coconuts or we made drinks from papaya juice or fresh limes.

  When Dove was anchored in a lagoon we did not usually have to wait long before being hailed from shore. Often there would be young girls standing there with baskets of fruit—papayas, bananas, breadfruit and limes. Sometimes we would barter for a chicken.

  One scruffy-looking chicken so closely resembled a childhood pet I had called Henrietta that I could not bring myself to kill it. For several days Henrietta II was kept in a banana crate on the top of the cabin, and Patti fed it rice. When I decided that it was time for a chicken supper it was now Patti who pleaded clemency for Henrietta. But one evening, after a day of poor fishing, I concluded that Henrietta’s hour had come. Patti was in the cabin, and on the excuse of sanding the deck I closed the hatches. To make sure Patti would not hear Henrietta’s last squawks I began to sing. At least I made noises which were meant to be a song.

  Patti’s chicken fricassee Henrietta II was superb.

  One learns from the sea how little one needs, not how much. These were our islands now, islands cut off from the world of concrete and steel, from freeways and television.

  On the island of Naviti we climbed the shore and made our way through a grove of palms to a sort of meadow that overlooked the sea. Here we stood for a while soaking up the beauty of the morning.

  Patti said impulsively, “Let’s build a house.”

  We pulled down palm fronds and cut some poles. In a short time our house was built. It even had a front door that closed on leafed hinges. Whispering and secretive as children, we went inside and knelt together on the grass floor. The sun shone through the interweave of fronds as if they were tiny windows. The only sound came from the surf below the cliff.


  A moment later and we were children no longer. It was a game no more. We had laughed and joked as we had gone about the building, just as kids laugh when they build a house in a back-yard tree. But now our playhouse was suddenly important, not like a tree house at all. If only, I thought, this place, this time could be forever—that here we could sleep and eat and love and sleep again.

  In the cool light I reached out for Patti, felt the silk of her hair, the warmth of her body.

  In the same moment there was a sudden pounding on the door. Someone was beating our palm frond house with a stick, so violently that it threatened to crash about our heads. There followed a rough demand:

  “Hey, you two in there, what are you doing?”

  It was one of the islanders and apparently we had trespassed on his land. After freezing in alarm we roared with laughter and scrambled into the sunlight, stammering explanations and apologies.

  I am no diarist and would rather face a squall than write a letter. To mark Dove’s progress I always used the tape recorder. But with the best of intentions I had bought a typewriter in Pago Pago. Patti discovered the machine and began to put down brief impressions of these Yasawa days. Often while I was shell-diving I would hear her tapping away in Dove’s cabin. Her sea-stained manuscript survived the voyage. It captures some of the color and the happiness of our time in the Yasawas. Here are some quotes from her diary:

  AUGUST 25: Arrived at Waialailai after nice sail from Vomo. It’s an island midway between the mainland and Yasawa group. Anchored around 2:30 and immediately got ready for diving. Swam with dinghy to sandy area and found quite a few nice shells. Went ashore and met the only family on the island. They seemed pleased to see visitors and presented us with papayas. Since it was still very warm at 4:00 we swam back to the boat over magnificent coral reefs, beautiful colored fish and giant underwater caves. Our best find was a beautiful triton, spiral-shaped and faultless. Robin has been looking for that shell for seven months. He spotted it encrusted in a coral growth about six feet down, decided to investigate and behold, it was the jewel! We’ll have to polish it a little and peel off the coral. We also found large trochus and smaller edible shellfish. I boiled them all, including the triton, which did not taste as good as it looked. The spider conchs are the best eating—rather like crab. The island is covered with long yellow grass and reminds me of California—just a bit.