One morning, as we brought our coffee to the balcony we sensed that something was amiss. The view had been strangely altered. We felt somehow higher. It had rained throughout the night, but now the sun shone brightly. There was clarity, too much clarity. Everything seemed so much more open. Hey, I thought, there used to be a tree there. Peering over the edge of the balcony, we gasped and instinctively retreated back into the house. While we had slept, our backyard had disappeared. All of it. Where once there had been a gentle hillside planted with banana trees, coconut trees, and cassava, now there was air.
“Are we safe here?” Sylvia asked.
I had no idea. We had heard nothing, felt nothing. I cautiously returned to the balcony. While just the day before it had been a mere ten-foot drop to the ground below, we were now perched above a fifty-foot chasm. Looking down, I was suddenly horrified to see where the tons of mud and debris had fallen. Below us lived a family of Indo-Fijian land squatters. Their house was a tin-and-plywood shanty without plumbing or electricity. The mud slide had buried it up to its windows.
“Is everyone all right?” I yelled. Two men were busy with shovels, digging the house out from under the debris.
“Everyone okay,” one of them called back.
I seized a shovel and scrambled down the hillside, following the edge of the colossal pit the landslide had created. Looking up, our house seemed to be teetering on the edge of the abyss. The mud slide had sheared off the hill to within a few feet of the house’s foundations.
“You must build a retaining wall,” said Vijay, a laborer who lived in the mud-encrusted house. A few weeks earlier, five people had died in a mud slide on Rabi, the small Fijian island that the British had given to the I-Kiribati expelled from Banaba Island, which had long ago been rendered uninhabitable by phosphate mining. As we had learned in Vanuatu, mud slides were an ever-present threat on the hilly islands of the South Pacific.
I began helping the family clear the debris, feeling awful about the situation. Here we were, guests in their country, and look at the mess we had made. Thank goodness, I reflected, that no one had been injured. Fortunately, our landlord agreed to build a retaining wall. Unfortunately, the retaining wall was built on island time, and during the subsequent weeks and months, as the workers followed a schedule known only to themselves, we’d find ourselves huddling in the back of the house whenever it rained, fearful that our weight alone would prove to be the tipping point that sent the house hurtling down the hill. Here, we thought, was one more very good reason to get out of Suva, and whenever we could, we hopped into our clunky secondhand car and set a course for the sun.
It was a bewilderingly odd juxtaposition of worlds. One moment we were at home, fearful of the house toppling off the hill, half-expecting to hear an exchange of gunfire as the trial of George Speight got under way, and the next moment we’d find ourselves on the west side of Viti Levu, that other world of beaches and deluxe resorts, contemplating which of the glimmering offshore islands we fancied going to for a swim. These were the Mamanucas, a group of small coral islands fringed with white-sand beaches. They look exactly as one expects islands in the South Pacific to look, possibly because the Mamanucas and, a little farther out, the Yasawas, are the preferred locations for films set on tropical islands—movies like Castaway and Blue Lagoon. Once the tourists began to return to Fiji, the Mamanucas were back in business.
The names of the individual islands alone suggested that this, very possibly, was not exactly the real Fiji. There’s Castaway Island, Beachcomber Island, Bounty Island, South Sea Island, and Treasure Island, among others. That’s all right, we thought. We lived in the real Fiji, and now and then, we wanted off. We decided one day to go to Beachcomber Island, which we soon discovered was an excellent place to go to if you’re in your thirties and, just for the fun of it, you want to spend a few hours feeling really old. From our hotel on the main island, we hopped onto a sputtering bus and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half stopping at a dozen hotels to pick up every shirtless backpacker in the greater Nadi area. Beachcomber Island, apparently, was a mecca for backpackers living out a fantasy of young adulthood, a fantasy I had deeply envied when I was fifteen.
As we approached the island by high-speed catamaran, the smell of diesel gave way to the odor of sunscreen radiating off a hundred bodies draped in the sun. From a distance, the island looked like a wildlife sanctuary for pink seals. What else would be flopping about under the midday sun? Like most Pacific Islanders, we had come to regard sunbathing as one of those peculiar things that foreigners do. As we stepped ashore it became clear that many of the figures lying prone on the beach were sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. Beachcomber Island was, as the kids like to say, a place to party. At least a third of the slumbering bodies had horrific sunburns. Many of the women were topless, though there was a large sign stating that topless sunbathing was really un-Fijian, so please keep your bikinis on, we’re Methodists. “That’s going to hurt,” Sylvia said, nodding toward one woman whose breasts were toasted medium rare.
Apparently, while we had been living abroad, someone had sent a missive to all Western women under the age of twenty-five: Put a large tattoo above your butt. Another directive must have been sent to the men: Tattoo barbed wire around your arm. As far as I could tell, resistance had been futile. We went for a swim and enjoyed the looks that the island’s other guests gave Sylvia, who was in a bikini. You couldn’t tell she was pregnant from behind, but then she’d swing her ballooning belly around and we’d hear the gasps. We could see them thinking, I hope that’s not contagious.
Beachcomber Island was a speck of an island, easily circumnavigated in five minutes. It had a beach, a few palm trees, a large dormitory filled with bunk beds, and a bar. “Bunk 83, please come to the bar,” someone said over the loudspeakers. Bunk 83? It sounded like hell to me.
Very clearly, we had passed through some invisible barrier, some passage that prevented us from seeing the appeal of sharing a large dorm room with a hundred people in various states of inebriation. We felt deeply out of our element, possibly even more so than the Japanese couple wearing inscrutable T-shirts. IRONY, declared the woman’s baseball cap. WORK HARDER, said her T-shirt. Okay, I thought, I get it. I think. But what about her friend? He wore a T-shirt with an image of a bottle of soy sauce. SOY SAUCE, it said. What did that mean?
Waiting for the boat to take us back to the main island, we settled at a table near the bar and eavesdropped on a couple of flirtatious youngsters. “I really like beef,” said the boy.
“Do you eat wheat bread?” asked the girl.
“Not really,” he said.
“How about vegetables? What’s your favorite?”
“Um…I guess potato. I like french fries a lot. But what I really like is beef.”
This went on for a half hour. It was strangely riveting, even endearing, and as we left we hoped that they’d find happiness and perhaps attend Homecoming together.
We too wanted to feel young, and so on our next trip to the sunny side of Fiji, we booked a passage through the Yasawa Islands on the Blue Lagoon Cruise. It was very pleasant, and as we hopped from island to island we felt our youth restored.
“So you don’t own a house?” asked Bill as dolphins skipped above the waves. Bill and his wife, Susan, were from California.
“No. We just rent.”
“It’s probably too late for you, then.”
“Too late?”
“Let’s see,” Bill said. “We bought our house back in ninety-eight for $525,000. Today it’s worth $1.3 million.”
“More like $1.5 million,” Susan added. “Remember, Sven and Jean sold theirs for $1.3 million, and we have more square footage.”
“How many square feet do you have?” asked Jim. He and his wife, Katherine, were from Massachusetts.
Bill told him. “So that works out to about $415 a square foot. We’re roughly at $375 where we live. I bought a house last month that I plan on flipping w
hen it gets to $400.”
“Wow,” Katherine said to us. “So you’re going to have a baby and you don’t even own your home?”
It was just what we needed. Suddenly we felt like a couple of reckless kids, footloose and fancy-free.
Eventually, we found a place where we felt neither too young nor too old. Among Sylvia’s programs was a coral-restoration project near Sigatoka on Viti Levu’s Coral Coast. Because of changes in the water temperature, the coral in front of the Fijian Resort was bleached, and Sylvia’s organization was involved in attempts to restore its health. Whenever she traveled to the project site, she stayed at the resort. I accompanied her because…well, because I could. The Fijian was a family resort, and when Sylvia was free, we studied the families. After all, we were soon to become one ourselves. “What you really need to be doing,” a kindly Australian woman told Sylvia, “is sleeping.” This struck Sylvia as an excellent plan, preferable to the one I had concocted for the afternoon. I had hoped to visit the Sigatoka Sand Dunes, an archeological site where the shifting sands were continuously unearthing bones and pottery that dated from Fiji’s earliest settlers some three thousand years ago.
“I don’t think so,” Sylvia told me. “It’s, what, ninety-five degrees today?”
“It’s a little toasty,” I agreed.
“And I’m eight months pregnant.”
“Indeed you are.”
“Well, I could waddle up and down sand dunes in the blistering sun. Or I could turn the air conditioning on and have a nap. Not much of a choice for me. So I’ll see you later. Have fun.”
I drove our little Toyota a few miles down toward the dunes, nearly colliding with an errant cow. It made driving the Queen’s Road particularly exciting, knowing that around every curve there might lurk an eight-hundred-pound ruminant. I parked the car in the shade near the ranger’s station and began marching up the wooded incline. The air reeked of burning rubbish from the nearby town dump. What was it about dumps in Fiji? I wondered. Why would anyone place a burning town dump beside one of the most important archeological sites in the Pacific? As I crested the hillside and emerged from the woods my nostrils burned and my eyes watered from the smoke. Really, I thought, they should just appoint me emperor of Fiji and we’d have a swift end to such things. Despite the burning air, I paused to read the information plaques in front of various trees. One in particular I found notable. It was for a small tree called a vau, which among its uses included: “An infusion of the leaves is also given as a tonic to mothers after childbirth to prevent a relapse.”
A relapse? Like a relapse of shingles? Then it occurred to me that this was a very sensitive way of saying that the ancient Fijians used contraceptives.
I moseyed on and finally encountered the dunes. Rising more than a hundred feet, sand dunes of these dimensions are not typical of the South Pacific. In this case, however, the Sigatoka River lay a few miles distant, and over an eon or two, it had carried sediment toward the ocean. The freshwater prevented coral from forming, and the waves pushed the sediment back toward the beach, where the wind had carved it into the massive dunes found today.
I stepped onto the sand, and soon I was madly hopping about—hot, hot, hot. Though I was wearing sandals, the sand was scalding. Clearly, marching up sand dunes on a hot, sunny afternoon in Fiji was not the wisest thing to do. Hurts, hurts, hurts. I sprinted up the face of the dune. It was agonizing. At the top, where wind swept in over the ocean, the sand was tolerable to stand on, and I spent a moment fanning my feet. Looking down, I saw something. Could it be? It was about a foot long, alabaster white, broad and tapered at the ends. As I stumbled down the dune I noticed that the object was sharp with serrated edges. Was this an artifact? Had I stumbled across some ancient relic? I picked it up. Should I just leave it there, I wondered, and inform an expert of my find? They’d probably want to arrange a dig in this spot. But if I just left it there, the wind would soon cover it with sand, and this, this…find might be lost forever.
After much deliberation, I carried it back with me toward the beach. Who had been the last person to use this implement? I wondered. A chief? A cannibal? Was this perhaps used to carve human flesh? I followed the path along the beach. A stiff breeze whipped up whitecaps on the ocean. An arrow pointed me toward a trail leading back to the road. I noticed a man studiously reading a plaque in front of what appeared to be a very unremarkable tree.
“Look what I found,” I said with giddy enthusiasm. “What do you think it might be?”
He took it in his hands and pondered it for a moment. “It’s a cuttlefish,” he said in a thick Scottish brogue.
Great, I thought. Just when I needed one, I had run into a Scottish naturalist.
“Ah,” I said. “I know that many Pacific Islanders used fish bones as tools.”
He gazed attentively, no doubt amazed by my knowledge.
“The I-Kiribati, for instance,” I went on, “used fish bones for hooks and shark teeth for swords. They even put blowfish on their heads, using them like helmets.”
“Well,” he said, studying the relic. “It is calcified. You should take your find to the park ranger.”
My thoughts exactly. I trudged on through a more wooded area. There was a cacophony of noise, like a thousand rattling rattlesnakes. Were the gods displeased?
When I arrived at the ranger station, I showed the relic to the Fijian woman there. She seemed amused.
“Is the ranger in?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “He’s in Suva.”
Excellent, I thought. I was headed back to Suva the following day. “Do you think I might be able to bring this to him in Suva?”
“You want to bring this to the park ranger in Suva?”
“Yes, if it’s not too much trouble. I understand, though, if you want to keep it here.”
“No,” she said with a laugh. “You may take it to Suva.”
She wrote down the appropriate address. It seemed a trifle irresponsible to let a stranger wander off with what might very well be an important discovery illuminating the history of the ancient Fijians. Nevertheless, I happily drove off with my artifact.
I found Sylvia sitting by the pool at the Fijian, chatting amicably with the Australian woman who had recommended rigorous napping for the last weeks of pregnancy. “This is Beth,” Sylvia said, introducing us.
“Look what I found,” I said, showing them my discovery. “I’m taking it to the park ranger in Suva.”
“You’re bringing a cuttlefish bone to the park ranger?” Beth asked, looking at me rather oddly. How is it, I wondered, that everyone around here seems to know what a cuttlefish is?
“Well,” I said, “I think it might be very old. And did you look at the sharp edges? It looks like a tool to me.”
“We give them to budgies to gnaw on.”
“Budgies?”
“It’s a pet bird. They love chewing on cuttlebones.”
“But…how would this cuttlebone find its way over a hundred-foot sand dune?” I asked.
“They’re very light,” Beth said. “The wind probably blew it. Why don’t you smell it?”
To my dismay, it smelled like dead fish.
ONE MORNING, WHILE I WAS BROWSING THROUGH THE bookstore at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, I came across a book called Misconceptions, by the writer Naomi Wolf. There had once been a bookstore in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, but it had burned down, leaving the USP bookstore as the last remaining outpost of literature in the South Pacific. Very often, a shop in Fiji would decide to call itself a bookstore, but invariably it sold little more than stationery. As the sole proprietor of books in Oceania, the USP bookshop had a remarkably small selection, a fact that caused me no great loss of sleep. I do not respond well to too much choice, and very often in the U.S., whenever I set foot inside a book emporium containing thousands of titles, I’d leave empty-handed, confounded by options. Choice was not a problem in Suva, however, and presented with so little to choose from, I
bought whatever caught my eye. Misconceptions was about the author’s experiences with motherhood. Well, isn’t that something, I thought. Sylvia was on the cusp of motherhood, and so I purchased the book, thinking that she might like to read a little about what awaited her.
At home, I dipped into the book, idly scanning its pages. And then I began to read it more thoroughly. Apparently, motherhood wasn’t so wonderful. Indeed, motherhood sounded grim and awful, a curse borne by women.
“Where’s that book you got?” Sylvia asked.
“Uh…I don’t know,” I lied.
In truth, I had hidden the book in the deepest recesses of a closet. This was no time for negativity. I had no idea what having a baby entailed. Indeed, the very idea of having a child still seemed a little amorphous to me. I did, of course, realize that something was afoot. Despite evidence to the contrary, I knew that Sylvia hadn’t swallowed a basketball. But still, the knowledge that there was a baby on the way seemed nebulous at best. All I knew was that it was important to be chipper.
Sylvia had had a happy pregnancy, and she was at her happiest when I’d arrive home with takeout from the Hare Krishna Restaurant. It had become extreme, this fixation with food from the Hare Krishnas, and I feared that our son might be destined for the airports. Now and then, of course, we’d come across someone determined to dent our optimism. “I can’t believe you’re having your child in Fiji,” wagged an American nurse at the Fourth of July party at the U.S. Embassy. Well, Naomi Wolf didn’t make having a baby in the U.S. sound so peachy either, I thought. In the U.S., as I understood, a pregnant woman was subject to a barrage of tests, many with a high likelihood of false positives or ambiguous results. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know that your child had a 19 percent chance of developing Down syndrome, a 22 percent chance of spina bifida, and a high likelihood of developing male-pattern baldness and a hairy back. What is it that doctors expect women to do with such information, except go into angst overload? Fortunately for us, this wasn’t a problem in Fiji, because there was no high-tech testing done in Fiji.
Getting Stoned with Savages Page 19