A flying fish leapt and soared a hundred yards and more. On the bow of the boat, people stirred in the languorous heat, aware suddenly that we had visitors. I moved forward and joined them. We were accompanied by a dozen spinner dolphins, surfing the bow waves, just inches from our noses, as we lay flat peering over the front of the boat.
“You ever eat the dolphin meat?” the man next to me said. “It’s very good.”
Swim, dolphins, swim, I thought. Do not lurk here. What did we look like? A whale-watching cruise? You’ve got the wrong boat. Swim away.
But they didn’t, and as we crossed the open seas they tumbled up front like eager scouts on point, blazing a trail across the great depths of the sea. It was a crowded boat, with families clustered on mats in the shade of the awning, finding space amidst crates of canned food and old bicycles, with more people gathered up top, absorbing the full blast of the sun. The crew had cast a couple of fishing lines off the stern of the boat, and when hours passed without a bite, no doubt due to the enormous Asian fishing vessels lurking around Tarawa, they pulled the lines back in as we approached the channel into the lagoon at Abaiang. A green turtle swam near and I gave my tattoo an affectionate pat. You’re not alone, crooked turtle. The acid really kicked in here, because Abaiang’s lagoon shimmered with such breathtaking displays of color that even Gauguin’s paintings seemed monochromatic and dull in comparison. There was a village on the southernmost tip of the island and I could see its thatched-roof dwellings and maneabas, the meetinghouses where the I-Kiribati congregate for events large and small, and then the atoll marched toward the horizon, a long display of coconut trees and white sandy beaches and all around turquoise water so dazzling and lustrous that you’d think you’d died and gone to heaven. Except, surely God offered a better meal than this. The chase boat was unhooked from its perch on the side of the vessel, and the crew filled it with boxes of Fabulous Pork Luncheon Meat, MJ China Cabin Biscuits, bags of rice, and fruit-flavored bubble gum. And so we moseyed down the length of the atoll, hopscotching from village to village, where people and the grim fare of the islands were unloaded, as local sailing canoes, lean and swift, carried fisherman across the lagoon.
Sister Matarena had radioed the Catholic high school on Abaiang and informed them that they’d have a visitor. I hopped off the chase boat in the shallows of the lagoon and waded ashore. The school was like a village. Students from throughout Kiribati boarded here, and I saw them sweeping and transforming a field of coral and scrub into a track, complete with lanes delineated with sand. In a maneaba, a group of teenagers sang one of the old songs, a high-energy number that shook coconut trees and caused the water to ripple. The I-Kiribati can sing. It’s one of those countries—maybe Jamaica and Mali are comparable—that breathes music.
Nearby, there were a number of gravestones announcing that here lay Father Leon Marquis (1902–1942, killed in the Marshall Islands) and Brother Louis Latour (1875–1919) and Sister M. St. Pierre (1874–1952) as well as a dozen small unmarked graves that I presumed held the remains of students who have died here. A sister came to fetch me and took me to the kitchen to show me the rainwater tap while a piglet and a puppy played and wrestled on the floor, and then she marched me to the guesthouse, which looked like an L-shaped thatched maneaba with beams of coconut timber lashed together with coconut fiber. Inside, there were plywood partitions separating four rooms. Mine had a small wooden bed frame with a foam mattress and a mosquito net. On the wall, there was a picture of Jesus praying. The sister returned a short while later with dinner—fish, rice, breadfruit, both boiled and fried, and bitter green bele mixed with onion—and as I ate, I was briefly joined by the headmaster, a kindly man with hangdog eyes, who had once been a ship’s captain.
“What’s the strangest place you’ve been to?” I asked.
“Antarctica on an icebreaker.”
This made me laugh. An ice cube seemed to challenge the reach of one’s imagination on Abaiang, never mind an iceberg. Many I-Kiribati men trained to become seamen, but very few rose through the ranks to become a captain. I asked if he missed it.
“It can be difficult to be on land. I miss the sea. But I am a graduate of this school, and when they asked me to come back, I couldn’t say no.”
“What’s your biggest headache here?”
“The kids,” he said with a roll of the eyes. “Typical teenage behavior.”
He needed to attend to his duties, and I stayed up for a short while reading my Kindle with the aid of a flashlight, and then once I turned it off, spent much of the night being feasted upon by ravenous mosquitoes. Somehow, they had managed to find every hole in the netting, and when finally I did fall asleep, I was soon awoken to the CLANG-CLANG-CLANG of the bell rustling everyone up for predawn Mass.
And that’s when I stepped on my Kindle. It was like two worlds colliding—the pre-electric past, wherein there are no light switches to help guide your feet when you are suddenly and noisily awoken—and the whiz-bang gadgetry of the present. Here, the past won. The Kindle gave a desolate croak and could not be roused. Curses, I thought. A real book wouldn’t do this to me. I resolved to go back to print until the brainiacs in Silicon Valley fixed this fatal flaw in their hardware. What good is a book if you can’t step on it?
I hobbled to the maneaba just as Mass commenced. The students were in uniform and divided into neat rows, boys on one side, girls on the other. I sat quietly in the back, picking pieces of Kindle out of my foot, and was pleased to discover that the service would be in English.
“Life is about living, not dying,” said the priest, a stern-faced man with a helmet of black hair and flowing purple robes. Fair enough, I thought. We should focus on life, not death. “But what is the meaning of life?” the priest bellowed. I waited with eager expectation. It seemed only right and true that I’d discover the answer during predawn Mass on a remote atoll in the South Pacific. “What is it?” the priest repeated. Yes, I thought, what is it? “You don’t know?” he suddenly hissed. No, Father, I don’t. What is the meaning of life? “You really don’t know,” he said, his voice dripping with bitterness. “I am very disappointed in you.”
And then he segued into the blessing of the sacrament. Wait, I thought. You’re not going to tell us. At least offer us a little guidance, or a clue, or at minimum, a parable for us to deconstruct. C’mon, not even a hint? But he kept the meaning of life to himself and proceeded on with the Blessing of the Eucharist. We responded in English with the words used in all Masses since time immemorial, and as we did so, he lowered the Eucharist and glared at us. “Why do you reply so softly?” he said. I dunno. It seemed plenty enthusiastic to me, given that the sun hadn’t even risen yet, and some of us were plucking shards of plastic out of our feet. “Why?” he said. “Do you not know the words? Is that it? Is that why you speak so softly? YOU DO NOT KNOW THE WORDS.”
His voice echoed off the lagoon and now there was a long moment of silence. The students shifted uncomfortably, heads down. The few dogs that had been lingering outside the maneaba shuffled off. A rooster’s bluster broke the still air. Finally, the priest picked up his chalice and bowl of wafers, lowered his head and exited the maneaba, striding to the old stone church and disappearing into the nave and whatever dark lair he had constructed for himself.
We sat stunned. First you deny us the meaning of life, and now you march off in a snit with billowing robes, forbidding us the sacrament? I’m not sure if you’re aware of this Father Cranky-Pants, but all through the islands there are missionaries—Mormons, Baha’i, Seventh-day Adventists—just looking for disillusioned Catholics. You’ve got to at least try, don’t you think? But no, instead you give us “the last tyrant,” storming off “in a woman’s frock.” That just won’t do these days. People have options, you know? It’s like my Kindle. I have a library’s worth of choices . . . Oh, that’s right. We’re back in ye olden days now.
Fortunately, the Church also
has nuns, who, while certain petulant clerics stewed in a sea of resentment, were busy running rehabs, cooking meals, tending to the sick, teaching kids their math lessons, and otherwise cheerfully going about their business of making the world a better place. And you can’t fool a nun. Over a breakfast of sweet, stale bread and expired peanut butter I watched them happily make mincemeat out of the kids trying to talk their way out of school.
“He said he left his books in the village,” Sister Teetang said with a smile, after dismissing a boy. “He wanted to walk to the village and get it. All day walking to the village. All day walking back from the village. I sent him to class.”
I explored the island on a bicycle borrowed from the sisters. There is a coral and sand path that follows the length of the atoll, next to the lagoon, undisturbed by vehicles since there are but three working trucks on the island and not a single car. In between villages there are long, serene stretches and I often stopped to have a quick swim. Toilets are mostly unknown on the outer islands so it’s best to avoid the beaches near settlements. The sand there is thick and slimy and often fertilized. But away from the villages what you find is a beach of such languorous beauty that you can’t believe that such a place still exists, uncorrupted and untainted by tourists, its rhythms as immutable as dawn and dusk. I watched reef herons wade through the shallows of the lagoon, stealthily hunting. Swimming some distance from shore, I was astonished to see that the beach itself was alive. What I had taken as a smattering of inanimate shells and rocks, were in fact tribes of crabs, all marching and scurrying as if this were rush hour in Times Square.
More serene were the villages themselves, where subsistence living still predominates. Subsistence living, of course, is the technical term for men sitting on their asses all day while the women do all the work. Sure, at some point before nightfall the men will catch a fish or two. And from time to time, they’ll build a wood and thatch home or repair a maneaba. But that’s pretty much it. Meanwhile, the women are hacking open coconuts and laying them out to dry. They’re weaving mats and entwining palm fronds. They cook, tend to the fires, sweep the day’s dust and leaves, take care of the kids, and otherwise keep the whole edifice of island society standing upright and firm.
I passed a village with the second-largest maneaba in Kiribati—think of an aircraft hanger made from the remains of coconut trees—and another, Koinawa, that offered a cathedral, built under the guidance of a Belgian missionary who failed to notice that big stone churches are really uncomfortable on the equator. The exterior is lovely; the interior gutted and ruined. Even Father Cranky-Pants recognized this enduring truth of the tropics. It’s hot out here, which is why the giant maneaba gets love and tending and the stone church does not.
But I was looking for another village. On Tarawa, Sister Matarena, a native of Abaiang, had told me about Tebunginako. “The sea, it swept it away,” she told me. “The people who were out, they came back to find their possessions floating away.” The village is located near the northern end of the atoll, a pit of land wide enough to encompass a freshwater lagoon, where milkfish once thrived and fed the village. That lagoon was the first to go as it flooded with saltwater that soon killed the milkfish and nearby coconut palms. There were once babai pits, sunken depressions where locals cultivated taro, and in a few short years the encroaching ocean turned the water lens so brackish that nothing could grow. As spring tides, or king tides as they’re sometimes referred to, began to flood homes, the village picked itself up and moved fifty yards inland. But it wasn’t far enough. The ocean continued to surge, lapping at the edge of the village. The inhabitants built seawalls. The ocean tore them down. Finally, as sea levels continued to rise, the village was abandoned and the people dispersed. All that remains of Tebunginako today are the ruins of a maneaba and the skeletons of homes surrounded by a great flood of water. It is a haunting sight. And it is different and it is new. This was not the past or the future. This was today, the land receding under the waves.
Chapter Eighteen
Why Samoa?
This is a question that has vexed readers and biographers since Stevenson first planted his flag in the hills above Apia, building what would become the only true home he’d ever know as a grown man. Reading through his letters, one searches in vain for a clue, some foreshadowing of his decision to settle here, far away from the bustle and glare of the continental world, on an island stirred by little else than trade winds and rumors. On board the Equator, as he toppled down the latitudes from Kiribati to Samoa under a glaring sun so hot that the wood on the ship’s deck buckled, Stevenson betrayed no hint or promise of his fateful decision to remain in the South Seas. Indeed, from his pen, one senses a longing for London. “I can hear the rattle of the hansom up Endell Street and see the gates swing back, and feel myself out upon the monument steps—Hosanna home again.” And yet, a few weeks after writing those words he will have purchased four hundred acres of land and begun work on what would become Vailima, his haven, abounded by five streams, where he would become known as Tusitala, the teller of tales, in a place where “headhunting, besides, still lives on my doorstep.”
I spent a few weeks in Samoa, traveling between Upolu and Savai’i, the less populated of the two islands, where I hoped to encounter the fa’a Samoa, or Samoan Way. It is a pious country, with speed bumps enforcing a go-slow mandate in front of churches belonging to Congregationalists, Methodists, Mormons, and Seventh-day Adventists. The buses are painted in trippy colors and have God-fearing names such as Kingdom Transport, Paradise in Heaven, God Bless Samoa, Forever Strong, and Jesus—I Trust in You. Then there is the Bon Jovi bus, which together with the It Wasn’t Me bus, prowl Samoa like a couple of young hoodlums playing hooky. Invariably, the buses are crowded and it is common to see passengers sit in each other’s laps. Samoans are among the largest people on earth, and it is no wonder that buses seek divine protection, because God only knows how they manage to roll without shattering the suspension.
On Savai’i, near the village of Manase, I found a small beach fale with a thatched roof and walls of flapping mats, modernized only by the presence of a mosquito net, where I watched the squalls lining up on the horizon like tornadoes on the Great Plains. Samoans fear the water. You rarely see kids swimming or men fishing from canoes. Life seems very much turned inward here. The myth about the South Pacific is that it is a great, open expanse where escapism can run amok. But it’s not like that at all. The appeal of the South Seas is really about how small you can make your world. It’s not about broadening your possibilities; it’s about reducing them until all that is left is sustenance and family.
The beach fale was owned by the high chief of Manase, who every evening would drive on the sand in his pickup and offer a regal wave. I liked him. I could only speak a few words of Samoan but despite the language barrier I sensed he was a wise and sagacious chief. I know this because in an act of dictatorial might, he had banned dogs and so I ran freely from village to village, past tin-roofed shops featuring murals of Jesus and Bob Marley, and designated bus stops where locals left clusters of bananas to be eaten by any with a hankering for a snack. It was a runner’s paradise. In the village of Avao, I came across some men building a church and a stone monument and as I paused to have a look, I was joined by a barefoot man in a lavalava who spoke as if his voice box was stuck on fast-forward.
“ItistocommemorateJohnWilliams,” he said all at once. “He- waswiththeLondonMissionary-Society. HecometoSamoain1830. In1844hegaveusthefirstBibleintheSamoanlanguage.”
I absorbed this. “Do you drink kava here?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Ohyes. ItisSamoansfavoritebeverage.”
Obviously, he didn’t drink enough of it.
The hyperkinetic kava drinker aside, Savai’i seemed as sedate an island as any I’d ever visited in the South Pacific. Life moved easily between church and farming, where people cultivated land so lavishly bountiful that everything grew here,
from coffee to cocoa to vanilla to taro to coconuts. I hiked deep into the hills, to the summit of Mount Matavanu, a volcano that had last erupted in 1911, burying forty square miles and a few villages under lava flows so thick that in some places they measure nearly four hundred feet in depth. Near the top, a path had been cleared by Da Craterman, a bushy-headed guy with a massive wart on his chest, who bedecked his trail with a plethora of signs commemorating all those who had sojourned here.
“I have been visited by people from one hundred and twenty countries,” he said.
“So which countries are you missing?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have no map.”
Near the top, Da Craterman’s signs displayed a touching concern for the hiker’s well-being. 3RD WARNING. VERY DEEP DOWN. VERY DANGEROUS. At the edge of the crater, I beheld a Lost World, a steep and lushly overgrown cavern alive with the songs of birds. It was difficult to imagine that this had once been a lively and active volcano. It was difficult to imagine that anything on Savai’i was once lively and active at all.
On the ferry to Upolu, I met an Australian fishing captain on his way to Pago Pago in American Samoa, where his boat was being prepped for another run. He had a license to fish the Cook Islands until May, he said.
“We’re going to fish the snot out of it until our papers expire,” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen more fish in the past four years than I’ve seen at any point in my life. But the bloody greens closed the fishing grounds around Australia and New Zealand. Bloody prancers.”
“But aren’t rising ocean temperatures changing fish migratory patterns?” I asked.
Headhunters on My Doorstep Page 23