“I take a torch and a rifle and some dogs and find his trail, then wait for him, just downwind,” Viti said.
It was dusk. The beer was sweet, like apple cider, but as strong as scotch.
“Sometimes I must chase him through the bush. He go up and down the mountain.” Viti laughed, miming himself thrashing through the jungle.
“It get dark. Then, after I kill him, I have to wait with him, all night. Only thing I have is my lavalava. I pull it over my head, but mosquitoes are so bad. So bad. It rains. I get cold. Then other pigs come, and all wait around me, because I have killed their brother. The dogs do not stop barking. The pig weigh maybe two hundred pounds. I cut him in two parts. In the morning I find a long stick to carry him, one part each side. But it can be far to a road. So far. You like go pig hunting?”
I thought Bryan would be thrilled to go. We drank another round of Viti’s brew.
Now Viti wanted some music. “Give us a song from your country.”
Bryan obliged with a round of a cappella Hank Williams.
I got a hot rod Ford and a two-dollar bill
And I know a spot just over the hill
The crowd—a gang of kids grinding garden cocoa beside the fale—went nuts. They hooted and clapped and laughed themselves silly. Bryan’s voice twanged merrily through the jungle. Viti grinned wildly. Now it was my turn.
But then a long, mournful double conch-shell blast came to my rescue. “Curfew,” I said. “No surfing, no singing.”
These curfews came twice a day. They lasted less than an hour, and people took them seriously. Nobody walked or worked until a second shell or church bell rang out. We had heard different explanations—that activity ceased out of respect for the chiefs, or for a period of prayer—but the general message about the strength of Fa’a Samoa, the traditional Samoan way, was clear. On Sundays the curfew was in force all day long. On a couple of occasions when the surf looked good, I had found the ban hard to accept. Surely we could slip out for a few quiet rides, far from shore, and offend no one.
Bryan took pleasure, I thought, in chastising me for these impious suggestions. “You think you’re an iconoclast?”
No, I did not. I just wanted more waves.
Another pair of conch-shell notes wafted through the trees. My turn to sing. I closed my eyes and, from deep memory, with no forethought, delivered all five verses of the Fool’s Song from the end of Twelfth Night. It was a strange choice, and I was no doubt off-key, but I got into it, the plaintive philosophical repetitions (“For the rain it raineth every day”), the chastened reflections on marriage (“By swaggering could I n-e-e-ver thrive”), and the applause afterward seemed raucously sincere.
• • •
SALA’ILUA HAD A SECOND WAVE. It broke just east of a half-collapsed waterfront pool hall. We spent a lot of time studying it. The wave was a bullet-fast left. It was long and hollow and the prevailing wind on it, remarkably, was almost straight offshore. It seemed that a steep mountain ridge behind the village bent the trades to the west right there, and an offshore canyon somehow combined with a broken slab of reef to bend swells into the wind. The result was a beautiful but lethal-looking wave, almost surely too fast and shallow to ride. It broke below sea level, into a short, deep trough that the wave itself created, then exploded up across an exposed coral shelf. The wave got better as the surf got bigger, though—more possible, at least, to mind-surf without impossible accelerations through ridiculously fast sections. I walked out on the shelf at low tide to study it more closely. The lagoon was full of both urchins and man-made hazards—fish and crab traps with clear line strung between poles. Set after turquoise, wind-brushed set roared past. The biggest waves were breaking maybe five feet from the rocks. No. Uh-uh. We named the spot Almosts.
Uo’s was sloppy and weak by comparison—just a new marriage rule.
On our last night in Sala’ilua, Sina gave us a feast. We had been eating well all week—fresh fish, chicken, coconut crab, clams, papaya soup, yams, and a dozen variations on taro (with spinach, with banana, with coconut cream). Now came pork sausage and banana bread with icing, somehow prepared over an open fire. Also a sharp-tasting black-and-green delicacy from the sea bottom—I missed the name—that toyed embarrassingly with my gag reflex. Bryan and I made heartfelt thank-you speeches and handed out gifts—a glass plate for Sina, balloons for the kids, Schlitz glasses for Viti, cigarettes for Sina’s father, a shell comb for her mother.
A proper bus came through the village at 4 a.m. Sina roused us, gave us coffee and biscuits, and, along with Viti and his wife and one of their children, waited with us by the road. The sky was cloudy with stars. A fruit bat flew low overhead; we could hear the leathery flap of its wings. The Southern Cross glistened. The bus arrived, with tinny music spilling through its open door. A silent boy riding on the roof took our boards.
• • •
WE MET OUR SHARE of odd bods in Samoa. A young man named Tia led us to a remote beach that turned out to have no surf. As a consolation prize, I suppose, he told us elaborate stories about each cove and outcropping and reef we came across. There were fratricides, patricides, and a vivid cast of Christianized devils. There was a mass suicide—a whole village self-sacrificed. I was impressed. Every rock on the coast seemed to have a place in a sacred literature. Then Tia said, “You come back in three years, this beach will be really nice place, because I got moneys in the New Zealand bank, so I buy some dynamites and make it nice.”
We fell in with a Presbyterian minister, Lee, and his wife, Margaret. They were from New Zealand but had just spent nine years in Nigeria. Now they were living behind a church in Apia, with three small kids. Lee was eager to show us around. He wore tight red shorts and large gray dentures. He had a deeply dimpled chin, thick glasses, and a startling amount of body hair. He didn’t actually know much about Samoa, and his interest in us soon waned, but Margaret took up the slack and kept inviting us on outings, or over to their place. Lee had a friend, Valo. Young and studly, Valo had LOVE ME TENDER tattooed on one bicep. Lee watched Valo constantly, rapturously, and when Valo wasn’t around he talked about him. At a beach, wistfully: “Valo and I could come here and just find a little corner where no one would ever come across us.” I felt sorry for Margaret, who was dumpy and sweet and, when Lee snapped sarcastically at her, just widened her eyes girlishly behind her glasses and smiled at us. Valo told Bryan that Rothman’s were his favorite cigarettes because there was a secret message buried in the brand name: “Right on, Tom, hold my ass, now shoot!” When the next picnic loomed, Bryan and I spoke Spanish to plot our excuses.
We stayed, on the outskirts of Apia, at a place called the Paradise of Entertainment. It was partly a motel, with a few modest bungalows, but mostly it was an aptly named neighborhood boîte, owned and run by an enormous parliamentarian named Sala Suivai. There was a sunken outdoor stage with a curved bank of bleachers. Some nights they showed movies. Dance bands played on weekends. Once they set up a boxing ring and a giddy crowd watched local scientists go at it. Nobody paid us much attention—the palagis with their bandaged feet, their nautical charts spread across the tables near the bar. And being ignored, the urbanity of it, made a nice change.
• • •
FINDING RIDABLE WAVES with nautical charts was a long shot at best. We looked for south-facing island coasts that weren’t “shadowed” by any barrier reef or landmass farther south. We looked for points and bays and reef passes where the shallow water soundings showed, after one or two fathoms, a sharp drop-off to seaward—places where swells would come suddenly out of deep water into the breaking-wave zone, giving them extra power and hollowness. The angle of any promising patch of reef or beach was critical. The rough line along which waves might be expected to break needed to be canted away from, even curved away from, the open ocean to the south, giving waves a chance to bend, peel, and turn into the wind. We looked for offshore canyons that would f
ocus long-interval swell, and the canyon walls that would cause waves to refract into shallower water. Many stretches of coast—most stretches—could be ruled out for one reason or another. But that left a huge number of places with some abstract surf potential, and actually settling on a spot worth traveling to was, in the end, just glorified guesswork. We had no local knowledge; our charts weren’t perfect, and their scale was always too big to account for the individual boulders and chunks of reef that would finally make all the difference. We tried to picture what the swarming numbers meant, as they fell into single digits in the pale blue ribbons of the inshore waters that surrounded the dull yellow splashes of dry land. Looking at the chart of a place you knew, particularly a place that you knew got waves, it was so easy. This is why that spot is good, under the right conditions. A two-dimensional chart suddenly became a multidimensional vision of ridable waves. You could isolate half a dozen factors on the chart alone. But studying charts of places we had never even seen? We were flying blind. This was decades before Google Earth. We had to trust in Willard Bascom, the great oceanographer, who wrote, in Waves and Beaches, “This zone where waves give up their energy and where systematic water motions give way to violent turbulence is the surf. It is the most exciting part of the ocean.”
• • •
WE PLANNED TO GO to Tahiti next, or possibly American Samoa. Both places had surfers and known surf spots. Instead, we went to Tonga, about which we knew nothing.
It was a snap decision made during a chance encounter in a waterfront bar with the Australian purser on a freighter bound for Nuku’alofa, the Tongan capital. We boarded the ship, not sober, at midnight. It left Apia at dawn.
The captain only learned we were aboard later that morning. His wrath was reportedly all spent on the purser. With us, he was perfectly pleasant. His name was Brett Hilder, M.B.E. He had a neatly trimmed white Vandyke and wore his uniform well. He gave us a tour of the bridge. That drawing of the king of Tonga on his cabin wall? Captain Hilder had done it himself. The monarch had liked it so much, he signed it. Had we read Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific? Well, the originals of those stories had all come from Captain Hilder. That’s why the book was dedicated to him. (So it was.) But did we know how and why a certain Pacific Island bird had found its way into Herodotus, and into the prophetic books of the Bible? We were about to find out. Incidentally, Captain Cook had dubbed Tonga the Friendly Islands only because he missed by two days the feast at which he and his crew were going to be surprised and made the main course.
Bryan and I found Tonga friendly enough. But the surf was a major tease. On Eua, a solid, tilted lump of an island some twenty miles southeast of Nuku’alofa, I thought we were on the brink of a real discovery. The east coast of Eua was all high cliffs and onshore winds, but the swell sweeping up the southwest coast was highly promising. It looked huge. On the ferry from Tongatapu, the main island in Tonga, just seeing the lines out at sea made my heart pound. Eua is rugged and has few roads. We rented horses and rode up and down rough trails, through thick bush, checking out likely stretches of coast. Every place we managed to see was a mess—rocky, blown out, closed out, unridable. We kept edging north. Part of the northwest coast had a dirt road, which made life easier, but the swell dropped steadily. At the end of the road, we finally found a ridable wave, in a little palm-lined cove called Ufilei.
It was a wild spot. We paddled out through a gap in the reef that was maybe four feet wide. A short, heaving left was exploding spectacularly at the south end of the cove, just off an exposed lava slab. The waves rose so quickly out of deep water that the faces were still an open-ocean navy blue when they broke. We edged into the lineup. The wave was so fast and thick that it looked more like a sudden drop in sea level than a normal swell. I eventually caught four or five waves. Each drop was critical, airborne, obliging me to throw my arms straight up in the effort to stay over my board. I did not fall. After the drop and one screaming bottom turn, the wave petered out in deep water. The rush of the takeoff was ferocious—the bigger waves were well overhead—but the danger-to-reward ratio, surfing so close to an exposed slab, was absurd. Many months later, on a beach in Australia, we met a guy who said he had surfed Ufilei. He was a well-known board builder, sailor, and filmmaker from California named George Greenough—one of the inventors of the shortboard. By his calculations, he said, a five-foot wave at Ufilei was seventy feet thick. It was an eccentric measurement—I have no idea how one determines the exact thickness of a breaking wave—but a good description of the spot’s weird ferocity. After an hour or so, we called it a session.
But we had trouble getting back through the keyhole. There was so much water rushing out of the lagoon through the tiny gap that it was like trying to paddle up river rapids. I gave up, swerved a few yards north, caught a line of whitewater, and bumped and scraped my way across an inch-deep reef. Bryan chose to put his head down and power straight into the current, going nowhere until he was exhausted. My advice, called out from the swimming-pool calm of the lagoon, seemed unwanted. He fumed and struggled. I watched. The sun sank. I don’t remember what route he ultimately took, but I do remember how haggard he looked when he finally made it across the reef. He did not say a word to me. I expected him to crawl up the beach, shipwreck-survivor style, and rest, but instead he rushed from the water and set off, board under arm, at a furious clip. We were staying in a guesthouse five miles away. I found him there, still glowering.
• • •
THE GIRLS WHO WORKED at the guesthouse were having their fortunes told. Tupo, a sleepy-eyed, broken-toothed teenager in a striped shirt, dealt the cards. Jacks went across the top. The jacks represented, Tupo explained, the four races of husbands: palagi, Tongan, Japanese, Samoan. Each time Tupo drew a card, she matched it by suit with a jack, tapped it significantly, and declared, “You know!” The other girls, huddled around a kerosene lamp, listened to her with eyes wide and breath bated. They all had a buttery, slightly stale smell.
To me, Tupo explained, “Girls who are fat and lazy will get Tongan husbands, who only allow them to cook and wash. Girls who are thin and beautiful and work hard will get palagis, who will wear watches, and drive them around in cars to moving pictures, and look, look, look at everything. Girls who marry Japanese will go to Japan’s land and live very well, smoking cigarettes and only sometimes mopping, but their husbands will become angry with their laziness and one day come home and carve them up with a knife. Girls who marry Samoans will go to Samoa and live like we Tongans do, except they may see TV.”
One of the girls sighed. “In Pago Pago I see television. Very beautiful!”
Tupo predicted that within a month I would get a letter with money from my family. I would marry a palagi girl, but I would leave someone weeping in Tonga.
Hanging out with the guesthouse girls, joking and passing the kerosene-lit evenings, I couldn’t help but notice that I had abandoned, at least temporarily, my ambition to sleep with women from many lands. Rural Polynesia was not a place for the casual hookup, never mind old sailors’ tales of wanton Tahiti—or, in a movie version seared in memory, the island princess burning up the screen with Brando’s Fletcher Christian. Captain James Cook’s sailors had actually found a wanton Tonga, I learned later (from Tony Horowitz’s Blue Latitudes). One of Cook’s crewmen described the local women as “to the last degree obliging”—willing to sleep with a visitor in exchange for a single iron nail. And a Dutch surgeon on a seventeenth-century voyage reported that in Tonga the women “felt the sailors shamelessly in the trouser-front, and indicated clearly that they wanted to have intercourse.” Such stuff was a long way, alas, from the exceedingly Christian women we met. Most of them wore a stiff woven mat called a ta’ovala around their midsections, tied closely over their other, already cumbersome clothes. These were small, conservative societies that we passed through on our oddball quest. Many of the women we encountered were wonderful flirts, but the boundaries were clear, and
they seemed essential to respect. I did not want to leave someone else weeping. Neither did I want to get my ass kicked by her uncles.
• • •
“IT LOOKS GOOD,” Bryan said. “You look like a really liberal priest.”
He was talking about my beard, which had become increasingly scruffy. But of course he was talking about more than that, I thought. We were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Moving through unfamiliar worlds, we carried a world together, full of shared understandings, into which we could retreat. But it was crowded in there, with two big egos jostling. We were so dependent on each other, so constantly together, that any little difference chafed and inflamed. I found myself copying into my journal a passage from Anna Karenina about Oblonsky and Levin and their strained friendship. Was Bryan smiling ironically at me? I thought so, and I took little gibes like that priest remark too much to heart.
That was because I knew he was on to something. Bryan was a stick-in-the-mud sophisticate, skeptical of all things nouveau. In college at the height of the student antiwar movement, he had held the fury of his classmates at arm’s length, once carrying a sign at a protest march with the un-gung-ho message, WAR IS SPACE—GO METS. He still found the phrase “world peace” hilariously inane. I was more earnest. In high school I had marched against the Vietnam War, fervently believing it must be stopped. I had been raised on coffeehouse protest music—Joan Baez, Phil Ochs—and it still had a secret place in my heart. Bryan loathed such stuff and all the sentimental, suburban self-congratulation it represented. I never heard him quote Tom Lehrer, whom I knew slightly from Santa Cruz, but I was sure he would dig Lehrer’s sly lines:
We are the folk song army
Every one of us cares
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares
Barbarian Days Page 18