“No,” Mareile noted. “It was among the first things the missionaries forbade. These days people prefer alcohol.”
A poor trade in my opinion. Missionaries in the nineteenth century, with some notable exceptions—like Father Damien, who tended to the lepers exiled on the island of Molokai in Hawaii—could be such narrow-minded, overbearing half-wits. In fact, it was probably part of the job description. I was the kind of drunk who in the end preferred to simply amble up to the attic of my own mind, shut the shades, and tune out the world for a good, long while. Others—many, many others, apparently—get all riled up and agro after belting a few shots of whiskey. They cause problems, which is why drunkards have such a bad name. But no one causes trouble after a few shells of kava. They don’t do anything, frankly, except from time to time look up at all the pretty stars and the lush glow of the moon and then they fall asleep and have weird and lively dreams. But kava was foreign, different, exotic, and unfamiliar for dogmatic evangelizers, and therefore it was banished by the narrow-minded clerical numbskulls that seemed to make up the vast majority of the nineteenth-century missionary corps, whether French Catholics, English Episcopalians, or American Methodists. I think I can state with some certainty that the introduction of alcohol on the islands left a trail of carnage far deeper and wider than any that could reasonably be attributed to kava. I may have a little bias here, but if there happens to be a Marquesan reading this, go on, toss out the bottle of Pernod, go back to the old ways, and get yourself a nice bowl of kava. The Mrs. will thank you for it.
Mareile was obliged to wait for the huffing German-speaking contingent of hikers, and I hiked onward, soon encountering my old friend. “Ça va bien, Edgar?”
“C’est extraordinaire, n’est-ce pas?” my roommate said, wheezing, but with a bright twinkle in his eye. He was wearing his GOOD BUSH BAD BUSH T-shirt, upon which there was an image of our former president—that would be the bad Bush—next to a photo of a more feminine bush. Honestly, I don’t make this stuff up. Go to the Marquesas, and eventually you’ll see some tiny long-haired seventy-five-year-old French guy wearing a shirt with an image of the president next to the female pudendum. I have no explanation for this.
We were standing on a high ridge. To the left of us, steep cliffs cascaded a thousand feet and more to the darkened blue of a deep-water ocean, the white outline of the Aranui toy-like and fragile as it made its way around the headlands to the next village. Across from us, on the right, was a deep, lush valley and a wall of mountains, the Tauauoho range, which rose to a respectable 3,600 feet. Up here, the landscape had changed dramatically. It was more pastoral, with cragged pandanus trees bravely leaning over the ridgeline, and a topography that rolled and wobbled, like a green storm-tossed sea.
We stood there, admiring the scenery, until our eyes gazed across the valley and up the formidable wall of mountains, where we noticed a peculiar white oval-shaped something. Edgar thought it might be a satellite dish. This seemed highly improbable to me, and I asked if I could borrow his camera, whereupon I zoomed in. “Non,” I said, and then explained that it was a hole in the mountain, and if you looked closely, you could see a narrow, perilous cliff-side trail leading toward the opening. I recalled what I’d read in Heyerdahl’s book. In the old days, Marquesan men, in the weeks preceding their marriage, were sent high up these cliffs and through this narrow porthole, which opened to the wild and forbidding eastern coast of Fatu Hiva, where they were expected to survive on their own, to become men, to prepare for their roles as husbands and fathers and village leaders.
This, I explained to Edgar, contrasts with my own particular culture, and since he appeared, judging from his T-shirt, to have certain preconceived notions about the United States, I felt it important to illustrate some of our own traditions. In my country, I explained, in the weeks preceding a marriage, men are expected to travel with a posse of their closest friends to a place in the desert, far away from their known world and all who know them. We call this place Las Vegas. And here too the men are expected to survive on their own, which they do by drinking copious amounts of liquor while carousing with strippers and gambling away their savings on games of chance. Afterward, they make a solemn oath to never tell another soul about their experience in this desert. What happens in Vegas, they say, stays in Vegas. Edgar said that he very much preferred the American tradition, and this pleased me because so many people these days have less than positive feelings about the United States, and so I try to do what I can, because what are we as travelers but ambassadors for our own countries?
I left Edgar to contemplate the mysteries of the American bachelor party and picked up my tempo. The trail led higher again and I walked past a few remaining hikers, nodding to them with a friendly Bonjour or Guten Tag, until I reached a series of steep switchbacks, shaded by a thick growth of trees, where the air suddenly felt cooler and misty. Aha, I thought, as I saw a familiar form, the Swiss woman from the gym, hiking alone with a determined pace, three switchbacks above me in the haze of a passing cloud. The competition. I realized, of course, that trying to beat a forty-ish woman to the top of a modest peak during a vacation cruise to the Marquesas was perhaps not the noblest or most uplifting of ambitions, that in fact it was kind of pathetic and small-minded, but having scraped across several bottoms and endured a few significant losses, I sought victory and triumph wherever I could. I climbed faster. I could feel a satisfying burn in my thighs and noted the increased rate of my pulse. Two switchbacks. Now one. And then she sensed my presence.
And she sped up! I could feel her thinking—no way was she going to let some forty-ish American beat her, a Swiss citizen, a woman of the mountains, to the summit. I increased my pace again. So did she. Unbelievable. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who behave like this, and here we both were. I contemplated running. Should I do that? Just sprint past her with a whoosh and a cold, eat-my-dust, beady-eyed glance. I wanted to. But then what? I did a brief mental inventory. That would be really childish, wouldn’t it? But not in a good way. And yet, I would then be first—like Edmund Hillary on Everest—and that would be a victory, a proud moment, an accomplishment to be celebrated for all time, a sweet memory for when I become old and feeble. But then she was out of my sight, and I rounded a corner, swiftly, the rubber burning off my shoes, and found her sitting on a picnic table. This was the mighty peak, the summit where we’d been told to wait for the others. She gave me a satisfied smile, cat-like. I smiled back, nobly, I thought, all relaxed, like I wasn’t really trying to finish ahead of her or anything.
“Grosser Gott,” I said, the only Alpine German I know, a common greeting heard in the mountains of Bavaria.
“Grosser Gott,” she said with an arched eyebrow. God is great, indeed. And then she reached into her rucksack and pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds, offering me one. Yes, I thought, we are definitely of the same tribe, and we sat quietly smoking, and though we had no more words to speak, it only takes two of our kind to call it a meeting. And this pleased me and I felt good and soon I was lifted from the crushing sting of defeat.
Oh, these missionaries. What have they wrought?
And I say this as a God-loving man, a churchgoer, a Roman Catholic, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t actually intend to become a Roman Catholic, of course, even though I’d been loosely raised as one. No, I’d wanted to become a Buddhist and study the Four Noble Truths and follow the Noble Eightfold Path as I learned of the Four Immeasurables while making my way through the Three Marks of Existence. And so when it was time for me to look into this Higher Power business, Buddhism had been my go-to religion. I spent time in monasteries in Tibet. I visited the sacred tree near Varanasi, India, where the Buddha, Mr. Siddhartha Gautama, delivered his first sermon. These Buddhists, I thought, seemed cheerful and jolly, happily pursuing the Middle Way, and I wanted whatever it was they had. But, as I soon learned, Buddhism isn’t actually a religion with a Higher Power. It’s a tool, a meth
od for living, and though compassion is stressed, its precepts—at least to my eyes—involved enormous amounts of self-absorption and, frankly, the last thing I needed was to spend more time inside my head, though I did pick up, cafeteria-style, the habit of at least trying to meditate.
So I moved on, dragging my family—wife willing; kids not so much—from church to temple, trying to find a spiritual home that felt comfy and snug. We’d tried the Unitarians—nice people, Prius drivers, earnest bumper stickers—but there didn’t seem to be much of a there there, and as we watched the congregation’s youth club perform their interpretation of a Higher Power—the girls performing a skit in which they worshipped Justin Bieber; the boys a superhero robot—we said adios. We tried the Episcopalian Church, which was just as WASPy as we’d feared, and then, when we heard them sing, we covered our ears and fled. I’m sorry. It has to be said: Episcopalians sing like bleating goats. What to do? Should we become Jews? Many of our friends were Jewish. And Saturdays worked for us. But this conversion business? So much trouble, what with all the circumcisions, the Bar Mitzvahs, the learning of Hebrew. What else was there? I told my wife that I thought she’d look pretty fetching in a burka. Very mysterious. But that conversation went nowhere.
Finally, we shrugged and with no great hope, we wandered into a local Catholic Church. My wife too had been raised as a Catholic, and like so many had wandered onward. We had no great love for the Vatican. But then, inside the church, we heard the music, the singing, and it was spine tingling. And the sermon? It was about social justice. So we began to learn a little more about this particular church. It was gay friendly. Weekends were filled helping the homeless. There was a constant stream of volunteers and aid money being sent to Haiti. There was a Zen Buddhist meditation group that met in the church every Saturday. And others for single parents and the unemployed. Whoa, we thought. Was Rome aware of this parish?
We’d stumbled upon some rebellious outpost of the Church, where the priests were approachable and thoughtful, and always up for a good argument. They empathized with the phenomenon of doubt, valued and cultivated intellect and reason. They were—and I think I need to keep this quiet, lest some ambitious monsignor in Rome hears about it and files a report, but they belonged to an order with a long history of independent thinking—the Jesuits. We were happy here, and I even began to sing during Mass, which, because I sing like an Episcopalian, is an excellent way to embarrass your children.
So I’m no Church hater, no enemy of Christendom. But these early missionaries? They irk me. I’ve always had a suspicion that no matter which religion I choose to adhere to, I’ll be wrong. Die, and the next you know you’re face-to-face with the elephant god Ganesh. I figure it’ll be no big deal, because after all, it’s the effort that counts, and I like to think that the Supreme Being thinks likewise. In the meantime, it’s nice to have choices. The more the better, I say. And this is what bothers me about missionaries. Imagine the world in say the year AD 1400—the astonishing diversity in beliefs and customs, all the extraordinary manifestations of spirituality, humans in every corner of the world finding their own way to the Big Questions, seeking to satiate some primal instinct to connect with the Cosmos. What a great menu of religion that would have been, and imagine that instead of greedy conquistadors and militant Wahhabists and prim Puritans, people would have been left free to choose their own way, guided by their own conscience and wandering curiosity. I’ll tell you what that would be like: We’d still have the Bay of Penises in Fatu Hiva.
The descent from the summit was swift and punishing. Unlike the ascent, parts of the way down were paved. From time to time four-wheel-drive vehicles needed to make the journey from Omoa to Hanavave, and given the pitch of the mountain, it’d be impassable without this narrow sliver of cement. And it was bone-crushing, every step an act of gravity-defiance. But the views were stupendous. With every small movement of the sun, the palette of colors on Fatu Hiva changed and mutated, like an eternal kaleidoscope, lending to the island different moods, an ever-varying temperament. One moment you sense something serene and halcyon, and then as you turn a corner and come across some steep, cascading green rampart in the shadow of a passing cloud, you feel something intimidating and colossal, some force that was not to be trifled with. Lower down, I walked past a small shrine to the Virgin Mary, carved into the cliff and surrounded by stones and flowers, a foreshadowing of a certain name change.
Soon, I was down in the valley, back among the fruit trees and the swaying of coconut palm fronds. I heard the soft neighing of a horse tied to a tree and then the ever-present whoosh of the ocean, the sound of waves washing ashore. Hanavave is located in a narrow basin, surrounded by astonishing black basalt cliffs, many shaped like conical towers, which loom above the village. As I walked through the small settlement, there was nary a person to be seen, until I reached the rocky shore, where the men were loading bags full of noni to be transported back to Tahiti, while the women, all dressed in red lavalavas, waited for us visitors to arrive. See native dancing.
I headed straight to the water, took off my shoes and shirt, emptied my pockets, and dove in, swimming past the kids playing in the surf, and headed farther out, toward the deep water. I wanted to get a proper look at this bay, the full panorama, and I kept swimming, figuring that if there were little ones playing in the water, then there was unlikely to be a shark problem. It is the telltale sign in the South Pacific. Are the children in the water? If so, then it’s all good. Or do they not dare play in the ocean? That’s your cue right there that here lurk Tigers and Bulls and Hammerheads, and therefore you do not swim, no matter how alluring the warm, lapping, azure sea. So I felt confident, safe, pleased to feel the grime of the hike wash off of me, and I swam until I was some distance out and finally I turned to take in the splendor of what many—or at least those few who have made it to Fatu Hiva—call the most beautiful bay in the world.
It is indeed striking and glorious and worthy of its reputation as one of the finest visual tableaus in the Pacific. The play of the late-afternoon light lent a soft radiance to this spectacle of cliffs and palms and a gentle curving shoreline above which rough, phallic-shaped towers of rock extended their shadows. It is obvious why, for so long, this place was known as the Baie des Verges, the Bay of Penises, a noble name, and also funny, which may be why I’m attached to it, since—as I’ve been told—for the addict/alcoholic, their emotional and intellectual development becomes stunted right around the moment of their first using, which would bring me exactly to the age when I’d think the phrase Bay of Penises guffaw-inducing hilarious. And perhaps that is why I felt so saddened that the missionaries deemed this description entirely unacceptable, and therefore they’d inserted a discreet i, a semantic fig leaf, so that it became the Baie des Vierges, the Bay of Virgins. As I treaded water and beheld the massive citadels, I didn’t think that any actual virgins would take solace in the name change—those basalt towers are an intimidating sight.
But then my mind moved into an entirely different direction. I heard a splash nearby. And then another. Heavy splashes. My senses were now hyperaware. Tuna? No, they’re a pelagic fish. They wouldn’t be this close to shore. Wahoo? Barracuda? No, whatever it was was heavier, bigger. And then, not twenty yards distant I saw a fin. Oh no, really? This is how it ends? I finally clean up only to be eaten by a fucking shark. My heart was going thump-thump-thump. Then I saw another fin, three, six, more. And then I saw them leap and twist and dance in the air. Spinner dolphins. A whole pod of them, feeling footloose and acrobatic, and as I watched them swim by I thought it didn’t really matter what you called this bay, and that Stevenson was right—as usual—when he said that your first island in the Marquesas will always, at the very least, touch a virginity of sense.
Chapter Six
On day six of this voyage on board the Aranui III, while docked in a small bay protruding deep into the island of Tahuatu, I discovered that I was wrong, apparently, about the co
rrelation between children playing in the water and the presence of carnivorous sharks. The morning had begun promisingly enough with the sighting of a large manta ray swimming—no, flying, hovering, gliding—right next to the portside railing of the ship, where I had stood, breathless, in stunned wonder, for it had long been a dream of mine to actually see one of these wonders of the deep. Oh, oh, oh, I said over and over again, a manta ray, a manta ray. This was a lone wanderer, with perhaps a twelve-foot wingspan, and it moved with a gasp-inducing grace, silently flying near the surface, appraising the ship.
I immediately barreled my way toward the gangplank, stopping briefly to pick up snorkeling gear, and soon found myself on a cement jetty, where I scanned the shoreline for a suitable entry point into water colored a milky aquamarine. Swimming with manta rays was right up there on my Top 100 Things to Do Before I Croak list, and now was the time to seize the moment. Fifty yards ahead of me I saw a small ramp, a boat launch, where a dozen kids cavorted and swam. A narrow seawall extended a short distance into the bay, creating a protected cove of calm water. The boat launch, I noticed, was slick and mossy green, and a few of the crazier kids took running starts and glided down the incline like tropical snowboarders before splashdown. I’m going to shatter my tailbone, I thought, if I’m not careful, but I figured the indignity of sliding down the ramp on my butt was worth the payoff of getting up close and personal with a manta ray. I marched onward with flippers dangling from my hands and a mask and snorkel jammed on my forehead. Three Marquesan women in repose, their forms shaded by trees from the morning glare, offered an indifferent Bonjour. I scanned the water, searching for the telltale shadows of surfacing manta rays, when right there in front of my nose, deep into this sheltered cove aswarm with precious little people, the water rippled as a dorsal fin emerged from the depths.
Headhunters on My Doorstep Page 8