But I had reconciled myself to the fact that there are in fact normal drinkers. Freak, I used to think whenever I saw someone leave a half-empty wineglass. No longer. Perhaps they’re allergic to peanuts. I happen to be allergic to alcohol. C’est la vie. And yet, I couldn’t pretend that everything was fine, that I’d reconciled my condition with my situation. Three flights of stairs above me there was a bar. I wanted—really, really wanted—to climb those stairs.
Finally it dawned on me why I was feeling so squirrely. I had boarded the ship at seven thirty that morning, having huffed my backpack the two miles it took to get from my guesthouse to the wharf, and when I climbed the gangplank I was handed a plastic cup of juice. Great, I thought. I’m thirsty. I brought the cup to my lips and then smelled something odd, like it was mixed with turpentine.
“C’est quoi ça?” I asked.
Rum punch.
Who the fuck drinks rum at seven thirty in the morning? What was this? A booze cruise? A convention of active alcoholics? Maybe I should have read the brochure. You’ve heard of Leaving Las Vegas. Come experience Leaving Papeete. The only people I know who’ve turned to Captain Morgan for a pick-me-up in the early A.M. are late-stage alcoholics who pour it into their coffee mugs to stave off the shakes, the palpitating anxiety, the early onset of delirium tremens, seeking to forestall impending death and/or hospitalization. And now here I was, with a cup of rum punch in my hands, handed to me with a nod and a wink. Good times, bro. Time to get your buzz on. And it got worse . . . well, depending on your perspective. There was free wine at lunch. Entire bottles. Red and white. Now, I’m sure many, right at this very moment, have left the page to book their vacations, but for those still reading, let me say that setting down a couple of opened bottles of wine right in front of a newly recovered alcoholic, the kind of alcoholic who once thought of himself as a bit of a connoisseur, is like handing a pipe to a crackhead. I read the labels, a white Bourgogne and a Rhône red, and then read them again. That alcoholic voice inside my brain, usually a devilish whisper, was now pounding the drums, doing the rumba, putting on a party hat and shimmying on the dance floor. Come on, it said. Drink it.
So it had been that kind of day. Challenging. It wasn’t simply that there was alcohol on board, but rather a kind of electricity that encouraged me to drink alcoholically. Rum with breakfast. A couple of bottles of wine with lunch. My body is wired for that. What to do? I steadied myself as the boat pitched over a wave and then headed inside to the stairs. Up or down. Up or down. Choices. Choices.
I headed down, into the bowels of the ship, unsure of what I was looking for. There was the laundry room. Did I have any laundry that needed to be done? I could do laundry. Wash. Fold clothes. Some kind of mindless Zen-like task. The machines were complicated European models. I studied the instructions. But I didn’t really have much that needed washing and so I moved on. Another door. I opened it. A gym. Hello.
It was tiny. There were some free weights, a couple of StairMasters, and a treadmill. I crab-walked inside and flicked on the lights. I was at water level and could see the waves smashing and foaming against the porthole windows. I unlatched the weights from where they’d been secured, grabbed what I needed, and sat on the bench press and started lifting, all the while gazing at the treadmill. Could I run on a machine in a pitching sea? I was aching for a run. Ever since rehab, it’s what I’d done. A couple of miles at first. Then four, seven, ten, fourteen, eighteen, even twenty-mile runs when the mood hit. I’d lost thirty pounds in two months and felt more physically fit than I had in years. Of course, I shredded my Achilles tendons—I could even hear them snapping (pop, pop)—but they healed, more or less, and I kept running. I’d never jogged on a treadmill, however, regarding them as expensive contraptions for dilettantes. I’d become a purist, pounding trails and pavement in wilting heat and bone-shivering cold. Someone once told me that I was simply replacing one addiction for another and that I wasn’t quite getting the program. I ignored him and started adding hills to my runs. All I craved was a run, and here at least was an urge I could satisfy.
I took off my flip-flops and decided to run barefoot. I flipped the machine on, let it gather speed, began to jog, and was pitched off by the next wave. I got back on and tried again. The same thing happened. But soon I found a rhythm. I got a sense of the waves and how they’d impact the boat. It was like running among the hills of San Francisco after you’ve had way too much to drink, the upper body lurching in one direction, pinballing through the air, carried by an indefinable momentum, and the legs scooting and halting and twisting to keep from having the whole edifice come crashing down. This, I discovered, was right up my skill set. The kilometers—it was a French model—ticked by—three, four, seven—and soon I felt that happy, calming surge of endorphins, my brain and body aglow in a sense of well-being. Suddenly, finally, I felt good.
But you know what would be really good right now?
This would be my brain talking again. What? I answered wearily.
A cigarette.
And this, alas, I found irresistible.
Chapter Three
Every child has a hero. Or at least they should—a person whose attributes and accomplishments are so prodigious and compelling that they stoke a kid’s imagination, shaping and molding a burgeoning consciousness, subtly altering the course of their life in weird and unpredictable ways. You never know who’s going to step up to the hero plate, of course. Every kid is different. For some it’s a ball player—the Joe Namath of yore giving way to the Robert Griffin III of today (a great trade IMHO; Namath was a punk, RG3 is a rock star). For others, it’s a Steve Jobs or Oprah Winfrey, entrepreneurs who transformed the world and in the process revamped their own difficult beginnings into lives full of rainbows and unicorns. Parents, of course, seek to influence who their child’s heroes are, which is why, around the dinner table, young Jacob and Isabella are sometimes regaled with stories describing the lives of Sally Ride or Barack Obama, demonstrating what a wonderful country this is, a place where little girls can grow up to be astronauts and little Muslim boys from Kenya can one day become president. But really, you never know what’s going to stick. Leave them be with the television remote one day, and the next thing you know they’re cursing like sailors, exclaiming about the necessity of spray tans and six-pack abs, and all of a sudden a decade is lost as they model their young adult lives on Snooki and “The Situation.” It’s a perilous world out there.
My own personal childhood hero was Thor Heyerdahl, the great Norwegian adventurer, and the original Most Interesting Man in the World. I’m not exactly sure how this came about—probably some combination of early exposure to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark franchise, the presence of National Geographic magazine in our home, and a fortuitous encounter with Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft during my formative years back in the Neolithic Age. This was before the advent of Facebook and Call of Duty: Black Ops, when bored children still perused their parents’ bookshelves, hoping to find an illicit collection of Penthouse Letters or even Scruples, but settling for anything that sounded exotic. I devoured Heyerdahl’s books—Kon-Tiki, The Ra Expeditions, The Tigris Expedition—and even when I learned that he’d been mistaken about everything—Polynesia was settled via Asia, not South America as Heyerdahl maintained; the ancient Egyptians did not sail to North America—my estimation of him only increased. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he’d stubbornly held on to his beliefs, creating his own reality, one that was far more interesting and lively than the humdrum offerings of the mainstream world. This was a man I understood.
On board the Aranui, I spent much of my time reading Heyerdahl’s Fatu Hiva: Back to Nature. Initially published in Norway in 1938, Back to Nature recounts Heyerdahl’s first great adventure, when he and his new bride up and left their comfy, bourgeois existence in a hamlet in Scandinavia and set forth for the Marquesas, to an island, as he writes, “renowned for
cannibalism and fornication.” He had auditioned potential wives, dropping them when he sensed a lack of enthusiasm for his grand plan, which was to “run away from bureaucracy, technology, and the grip of twentieth-century civilization,” until he met a young woman of a similar disposition—Liv, who would go on to be the first of his three wives. “What do you think about turning back to nature?” he’d asked her.
“Then it would have to be all the way,” she’d replied, demonstrating that both she and Thor must have been really stoned at the time, because no one talks like that unless they’ve had a blunt or two. Off they went to Fatu Hiva, the southernmost island in the Marquesas, to live off the bounty of the land, breathing in the heady aroma of the tropics, and otherwise cavorting as if they were on the set of The Blue Lagoon. Ten pages in and I could already hear the faint echo of my adolescent brain. This, I thought, should be good.
As I lost my myself in Heyerdahl’s world, the ocean had calmed, and it wasn’t long before the smell of vomit that had prevailed throughout dissipated, replaced by the fragrant offerings of whatever Muana, the ship’s waiter and resident tattooist for those so inclined, carried on his trays. There were only two other solitary travelers—my roommate, Yvette, who proclaimed her dislike of Bora Bora (“They were speaking Tahitian. We are in France. They should be speaking French.”)—and an impeccably groomed Swiss banker, who could usually be found on the uppermost deck, smoking Cohibas, while plotting ways to launder the money of the criminally rich and devising new and creative means to destroy the world, as bankers are wont to do.
The other passengers were largely older—I felt like a pup—and they sported shirts that bragged of prior expeditions across the Sahara, cycling treks in Tibet, and cruises up tributaries of the Amazon. Some carried binoculars, members of the birder cult who could spot the differences between a red-footed booby and a red-vented bulbul. They were invariably interesting. I spoke to a central banker who’d penned two books on Napoleon and a retired French naval pilot who had survived not one, not two, but three plane crashes. They were, by and large, members of the luckiest generation the world has ever known, baby-boomer European pensioners who came of age in the post-war years with guaranteed jobs, heaps of benefits, oodles of vacation time, early retirement, and superannuation payments that ensured a comfortable, prosperous existence till the end of their days. From time to time, because I’m that kind of person, I’d note the 50 percent of Spain’s youth that could not find jobs, the riots in Greece, the Italians who could not afford to leave home until the age of forty, and the youthful Irish families who’d lost hope and were again emigrating as their forefathers had done in generations past. Everyone agreed that this was vraiment dommage—very sad, a true crisis—and went back to perusing the wine list, searching for better offerings than the house table wine. I didn’t begrudge them their good fortune, of course. Live long enough, and eventually you learn that so much of life is pure serendipity.
The ship was largely lorded over by George, an affable Romanian engineer who strutted about like a haughty sovereign. He’d been there from the beginning, in a shipyard on the Danube, six hundred miles from the Black Sea, where the Aranui III had been constructed. The owners, a Tahitian-Chinese family that had run the business since buying the first Aranui in Australia in 1947, had searched far and wide for a new ship, and no one, not the Chinese, not the Germans, nor the French, could match the price offered by George for a cargo vessel with a shallow draft capable of taking passengers and material on the Tahiti-Marquesas run. “We started building in 2004,” he said, “and finished in eighteen months. And you know what?” he said, waving his finger. “It floated!” He beamed at this. “I came for six months. It’s now ten years. Tahitian time. So it goes.”
I liked George. Out here, he said, waving toward the immensity of the ocean, you have to forget your identity. We are just people, and there are not very many of us in this part of the South Pacific. In ten years, he’d seen only seven other ships. Even the whales avoided this place. In Monterey, I saw whales—grays and humpbacks and orcas, the occasional Blue—nearly every week, viewing them from a pine-forested ridge or from a sailboat. But in this remote expanse of the South Seas, they were strangely absent. George said he’d encountered them just three times in his decade at sea. And so it was just us out here, a small crew and perhaps 125 passengers.
Mostly, however, I sought out the company of Mareile, a soft-spoken Swiss archeologist who had lent me the Heyerdahl book. “He was wrong about everything,” she had noted. “But he pushed people to think, to try to figure out the mystery of the Marquesas. He arrived there forty years after your Stevenson, when things were very grim.”
Mareile lived in Tahiti, and from time to time joined the voyage as a resident expert. She used to sail full-time—two weeks on, a week at home—but had recently scaled back her travels. “It was lousy for my marriage,” she declared.
I sought her out because, despite having lived in the South Pacific for five years, I knew next to nothing about the Marquesas. Look at a map and no island group is as peripheral as this one, no small feat in a region that defines marginal. One would assume that by now, in the twenty-first century, there’d be some kind of cohesion to Oceania, a unifying theme. They do, after all, face many of the same issues, like climate change. You’d think that when confronted with rising sea levels, which are projected to rise upward of three feet over the next century, rendering many of the islands, in particular the atoll nations, uninhabitable, that perhaps the region’s leaders would unite, speak with one voice, nice and loud, and say something like HEY YOU CHINESE PEOPLE WITH YOUR POLLUTING FACTORIES AND YOU AMERICANS WITH YOUR CADILLAC ESCALADES AND YOU INDIANS WITH YOUR COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS AND ALL YOU BIG RICH COUNTRIES SPEWING CRAP INTO THE AIR, YOU’RE KILLING US OUT HERE, but, no, there’s none of that, which is part of the charm, I suppose, the fact that the islands remain distinct, even kind of unaware of each other, but perplexing all the same. These countries and territories just do not have anything to do with each other, which is why it’s possible—even if you’ve lived in three of these nations—to still think of the Marquesas as somehow off the map, a terra incognito, a blank slate upon which I could only project a giant question mark.
Fortunately, I had Mareile to turn to. I was interested in the ancestry of the Marquesans. And really, how could you not be? Perhaps no island group is more out there than this one. How on earth did anyone get there? And why, exactly, did the first Pacific Islanders, whose ancestry can be traced to the Eurasian landmass, leave the continents in the first place? What was wrong with Asia? Not big enough?
What we know is this: Sixty thousand years ago, during the Pleistocene Era, when much of the northern hemisphere was encrusted with a thick layer of glacial ice, a hardy troop of early humans somehow managed to transport themselves from the Eurasian landmass to Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the islands of Indonesia. For decades, this feat had confounded scientists. This was millennia before any known group of humans was constructing boats of any kind, much less the sturdy vessels with sails and rudders needed for a blue water passage, no matter how short the distance. Perhaps, it was thought, these humans had rafts. And let’s say one day there was a storm, a tempest that blew a raft or two to Northern Queensland, and upon these rafts were enough men and women with sufficient genetic diversity to populate a continent and several large islands. This, for some years, was the prevailing theory. How else to explain the miraculous appearance of humans on islands in the South Pacific?
The truth is even more arresting. Those early vagabonds, the restless souls forever searching for the better place, walked to the isles. It’s true. It’s uncanny, isn’t it, how they were able to just amble from a continent to an island? Like Jesus. From Africa to Europe to Asia, our ancestors were roamers, carelessly wandering as far as their hairy legs would take them, searching for a better meal and a nicer view, and what finer place than a beach hut overlooking a balmy seascape
in the South Seas.
Except there was no sea. Not there in any event. Not then. Here we have a most unusual circumstance. Humans got there—Australia, Papua New Guinea, parts of Indonesia—before they became islands. From roughly 2.6 million years ago until 11,700 BC, give or take a year, sea levels were approximately three hundred feet lower than they are today, enabling restless humans to wander from Africa to Europe to Asia and onward, with some heading north to Siberia and across a land bridge to Alaska and the Americas—which must have been heaps of fun to do during an Ice Age—and others, the lucky ones, making their way to the south, to Australia/PNG/Indonesia. And then, because the earth can be temperamental, impulsive, overcome by sudden urges to rearrange things, the ocean rose, swiftly, without warning, isolating our hardy bands of hominids on their new islands. You can imagine the scene:
“Hey, Fred, come look at this.”
“What is it, Barney?”
“Look. All of a sudden, we’re surrounded by an ocean.”
“Well, shit. I promised Wilma I’d take her to China for Christmas. Now what do I do?”
Build a boat, of course. Which, five thousand years ago, is exactly what our intrepid band of explorers did. But did they head back to Asia? No, they did not. They set sail for the east, into the unknown, their vessels pointed toward the horizon, where sky and water intersected and blurred. Why not? Something must be over there, right? Let’s check it out. How big could this ocean be? And they kept going, these crazy people, who we now call the Lapita, and they discovered New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, and kept sailing until they arrived all the way out in Samoa. How do we know this? Pottery. That’s right. While the English were still playing with stones, our Lapita were cruising the South Seas in mega-yachts, colonizing the island universe and, in their spare time, firing up the kiln to craft vases and jars.
Headhunters on My Doorstep Page 4