Anna had entered the moonshine business. We were so proud.
Her extended family was gathered around the kava bowl. I didn’t know when next I’d find myself sitting around a kava bowl, so I savored every bitter shell.
“You don’t have kava in America?” asked Peter, Anna’s oldest son.
“Sadly, no.”
“But I thought you could find everything in America.”
“Not kava, alas.”
We pondered this tragic state of affairs for a moment. I hadn’t left the Pacific yet and already I was beginning to miss it enormously. To spend a few hours clustered around a kava bowl, even one containing Fijian kava, in the company of friends and family had come to exemplify the civilized life for me. Lukas too apparently agreed. He had spent the afternoon in the arms of the village, and now as he descended back to earth, he launched himself like a rocket in diapers, crawling straight for the kava bowl.
Anna laughed. “Just like his father.”
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Sylvia added.
Good boy, I thought. Always be true to your roots.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Among the books I consulted in researching the region, several proved particularly useful. To Kill a Bird with Two Stones by Jeremy MacClancy is, to the best of my knowledge, the only general history book on Vanuatu. Ron Crocombe’s The South Pacific provides an excellent survey of the region. Fiji’s Times: A History of Fiji by Kim Gravelle offers a very lively account of that country’s past. Though first published in 1858, Fiji and the Fijians: The Islands and Their Inhabitants by the Reverend Thomas Williams remains among the most insightful books delving into traditional Fiji.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every writer likes a challenge. Actually, that’s probably not true. Nevertheless, as I began to think about this book, this second book, I wondered, what could I do to make the process of writing it a little more challenging. I thought long and hard about it, and decided that on a scale of difficulty, having a baby—a second child—three months before a deadline would rank pretty high. And so this is what I did. Not entirely by myself, of course. But I was there. As I cradled the littlest one with one hand while assembling a Hot Wheels Super 6 in 1 Motorized Race Track with the other—a toy loved equally by father and firstborn son—my wife made the utterly baseless observation that I might be procrastinating. I wasn’t procrastinating at all, however. I was parenting. Still, when my deadline began to recede into the dim mists of time, and I turned my attention to Chapter 3, I thought, what else could I do to make the writing of this book a little more arduous? I pondered this for a long while and decided that this would be an excellent time to sell our house. So that is what we did.
As you may have surmised, I belong to the how-not-to-write-a-book school of writing. Fortunately, I am also very lucky. Ann Campbell, my editor at Broadway Books, remained unflappable and gracious as she sharpened and prodded the book to life under incredible time pressures. Among the good folks at Broadway, I’d also like to acknowledge Ursula Cary, Joanna Pinsker, and the mysterious “production people”: Rebecca Holland, Nora Reichard, and Barbara Barthelmes. Apparently, I made their work…er, challenging. BJ Robbins, my supercool agent, injected humor and levity into my world whenever I needed it. In the Pacific, of the many, many islanders I am grateful to, I want to particularly acknowledge Rex Horoi and the people at FSP. Above all, I am profoundly grateful to my wife, Sylvia, whom, as they say, I owe big time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. Maarten Troost is the bestselling author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific. His essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and the Prague Post. He lives with his wife and two sons in California.
ALSO BY J. MAARTEN TROOST
The Sex Lives of Cannibals
PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS
Copyright © 2006 by J. Maarten Troost
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.broadwaybooks.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Illustrations by Andrew Barthelmes
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Troost, J. Maarten.
Getting stoned with savages : a trip through the islands of Fiji and Vanuatu / J. Maarten 2Troost.—1st ed.
p.cm.
1. Fiji—Description and travel. 2. Vanuatu—Description and travel. 3. Troost, J. Maarten—Travel—Fiji. 4. Troost, J. Maarten—Travel—Vanuatu. 5. Fiji—Social life and customs. 6. Vanuatu—Social life and customs. I. Title.
DU600.T75 2006
919.59504—dc22 2006042612
eISBN: 978-0-7679-2493-1
v3.0
Getting Stoned with Savages Page 23