Island Life

by Nick Niels Sanders

  He demonstrated the first move of the form. The others tried it, and became confused in various ways. He concluded he had started with too much. He demonstrated again, just a tiny fragment – he started with his feet about shoulder width apart, shifting his weight to his left foot, he rotated his right foot outward about 45 degrees. The group tried this several times and they all got it. He then combined that with the arm movement – as he shifted his weight, he brought his arms up, making a circle of them as if carrying a large ball, bringing his hands to shoulder height as he finished moving his weight to his left foot. He repeated this several times and they all seemed to be getting it. Then he added the next step, bringing his arms down to his sides while shifting his weight to his right foot and bringing his left foot next to it. This was more difficult, but they were doing pretty well with it. He walked among them, offering hints and tips.

  Deciding they should all understand what they were learning, Roger asked them just to watch as he did the whole form. They did. At the end, there was a round of applause.

  “Roger, that was amazing!” cried Jeanne. “I want to learn that. It’s so beautiful.”

  The others joined in either spoken or murmured agreement, except Mark, who was still grumbling to himself about how bad this would be for his knees.

  Roger started them in again at the beginning, again giving directions as he moved slowly through the movements: “Move slowly. This is not a race. We’ll call this first move ‘bounce the ball.’ Notice my hands coming up with my arms bent as if I am holding a large ball. While I do this, my weight shifts to my left foot and I pivot my right foot outward about 45 degrees. Now my arms are level with my shoulders and I begin to push down, moving my weight back to my right foot. My hands separate, gliding past my hips, giving a little slap toward the back as I move my left foot in front of my right foot. Everybody stop.”

  He looked at them. Everyone was doing pretty well.

  “We’ll do one more and stop. This is called ‘palm strike’ and it goes like this: as I step very slowly forward with my left foot, my arms come around and my hands meet in front of me, the edge of my right hand hitting the palm of the left as the heel of my left foot touches down. Everyone stop right again.”

  He turned to look. Everyone was in the correct position. “Congratulations. Let’s do a little more of the loosening up and call it a day. Good work all!”

  They did another two or three minutes of qi’gong exercises, then he told them they were done; the next class would be at 7:30 the next morning.

  Supper

  Supper

  Thirteen pairs of feet moved across the sand to the Kitchen Tent, carrying thirteen hungry people with them. Marcella told them it would be a few moments while she put the finishing touches on the supper. She had made a beef stew using brined beef and fresh potatoes, carrots and onions (which were all lasting well), accompanied by a pan bread. Chocolate pudding dessert came from various packages – a pudding mix, water and powdered milk for half of the milk called for and coconut milk for the remainder. She only hoped the pudding would be palatable; the stew she knew to be better than what she could make from the cans, but very soon she would have to use the cans because that would be all that there was.

  Marcella’s audience of twelve was appreciative, and played their usual game of “who can guess the spice mixture.” They generally seemed to be aware of the cayenne, and the sage was pretty obvious, but no one understood the role played by the turmeric and cinnamon in rounding out the mixture. She was pleased, in a way, but disappointed that people were not thinking of cinnamon in supper main dishes after having one with cinnamon in it three days in a row.

  There was enough fruit salad left to serve everyone. Marcella had augmented it with some shredded coconut, which Jeanne noticed and appreciated. Others joined in the praise.

  Conversation turned to Ralph’s adventure with a palm tree earlier in the day. Everyone was impressed with his recovery and non-fall, but there were various degrees of concern about how safe it would be to try again. Ralph had a sense of confidence that he and Jeanne were working on a modification to the climbing apparatus that would make the process simpler and safer. Many were uncomfortable that he should be taking such risks for coconuts, but they all appreciated the addition to the foodstuffs.

  Which raised the question of the flora on the other side of the island. James and Ron described the plants growing “over there.” Paul opined that there was a lettuce analog growing in just about every ecosystem on earth – and that they seemed to have found the one here. Tomorrow, there would be lots of leaves to harvest, and they might have salad. Everyone was heartened by this news.

  James asked Maria how the snorkeling lessons were going. He received a noncommittal reply that led him to believe that the women would not be contributing fish to the larder any time soon. He indicated to Paul by a raised eyebrow and a wink that it might be up to the two of them to do the fish hunting.

  Maria got up to join Julia and Marcella in cleaning up, so that story telling could begin. In the meantime, Jeanne had another suggestion to offer: “I think we should have a sand castle building competition.”

  “A what?” responded Mark.

  “A sand castle building contest. We could make teams – maybe four or five teams – and each team would build a sand castle. Then the judges would award prizes. Originality, execution, style and so on. It would be a lot of fun.”

  There followed a conversation about the pros and cons of a sand castle competition. One advantage lay in the fact that there was a lot of sand available to use. A disadvantage was that the sand was all in bright sunlight, so the contest would have to happen in the morning or the evening. Who would be the judges? How would they choose teams?

  As the discussion continued, the three kitchen cleaners returned to the group. James brought them up to date on the sand castle conversation, then indicated that the conversation could be delayed for the night, to be taken up again tomorrow at lunch. It was time for a story. Who would tell today?

  Paul volunteered.

  Paul Tells His Story

  “Several years ago, as a graduate student, I was studying a group of Australian aboriginals. I spent some time among them, studying their social interactions, how they arrange marriages, ceremonies around births and deaths, stuff like that. I didn’t know their language very well, but I was learning fast, since I did not have an interpreter most of the time. It was interesting to be studying how human societies differ from one another and I thought I was doing pretty good work.

  “I came home and wrote up my research paper, for which I good pretty good marks and the paper was published as an article in the Australian Journal of Anthropology. It was not sensational, but it was good, solid anthropology in the style that was being done then.

  “But I felt that I had missed something. There were too many gaps in my understanding of the language. I thought that I had understood the general outlines of things, but I had not gotten the details. I took several courses in Australian native languages, which helped somewhat, but not a lot. I decided to go back and see if I could learn more.

  “About two years after my first trip to this particular group, I was back. They seemed pleased to see me, and I settled back into my observer role. But this time I probed more. I worked actively at understanding the language and the nuances of it. It was very hard work, because I was trying to do in a matter of a few months what a young child takes a decade to do. But I made progress. For two months I ate at family and group suppers, attended council meetings, talked with the women while they worked, talked with the men while they were hunting. I was a real pest, but I was determined to get the details. My command of the language increased – I was able to go through an entire meal without missing more than a handful of words. I am sure my spoken accent was really bad, but they were too nice to laugh at me.

  “Sometimes, I would ask for clarification of something I had not understood. Most of t
he time I understood the explanation when it was given; occasionally no amount of conversation was sufficient to help me to understand. One such occasion happened when I was out with the men hunting and I thought I heard one of the men refer to a rock as being his uncle. It was a reference I had not heard before, and it made no sense to me. The explanation wandered off into realms of metaphysics that I was not able to follow. But there was something going on here that I wanted to understand.

  “I had been acquainted with the habit of these natives of talking to their game animals, asking them if they were ready to be food, and thanking them for feeding the tribe. This no longer surprised me and I had accepted it as a quaint and interesting custom.

  “What I heard now seemed to go beyond custom into another realm. When they talked to or about almost anything in the world around them, they used honorifics. Now, we speak of brother sun and sister moon without thinking much about it, I suspect. And they did this too, but they also had brother rocks and sister trees and uncle rocky outcroppings and aunt swamps. These people had no idea of an afterlife and did not believe in reincarnation, so I was puzzled by what this was all about.

  “So I listened and I asked questions, and I got a lot of confusing responses. But gradually, I began to believe that I really did understand, and that I was getting to something that was the basis for the society I was studying. What I discovered was this – they did not believe that their human uncle had anything to do with the rocky outcropping any more than you think your brother has anything to do with the sun. But the terms were not just terms of respect because they actually thought of the rocky outcropping as being a part of their family, as close to them as their uncle. It was not just the hunters, it was also the women. I had been misinterpreting their songs and conversation all along; when they were singing of the ground and the earthworms, they were actually feeling a sense of kinship to both.

  “When I finally assembled what I had learned about their belief system, what I found was a group that had no particular belief in a god or gods, although there was a lot they didn’t understand that they ascribed to more powerful beings, those beings just weren’t thought of in the way we think about a god. The more important part of their beliefs was the pervading sense that each of them was just a part of something larger, and that the something larger included all of the plants and animals and the entire physical environment in which they lived. As individuals, they considered that they were being ‘the lesser me,’ and as functioning parts of a larger whole, they were ‘the greater me.’ They did not feel they were there to dominate or run or even care for the land around them; their job was to be a part of the whole of whatever it was that was made up of the animals, plants and physical environment and to follow the rules that allowed the whole to work together. And when they spoke of ‘uncle rock’ it was not really uncle in the way we would use the term. It was more like saying ‘my right hand,’ but without the possessiveness, something more like ‘partner right hand that is a portion of the same real entity that also includes the brain that thinks these thoughts and the voice that says these words.’ And so ‘uncle rock’ would mean ‘partner rock that is a portion of the same real entity that also includes this humble person who is out looking for food among the bushes you keep at your base.’

  “And I found this sense of each human as a functioning element of a larger entity whose other components included all we could see around us was a sense that pervaded everything they did. These were fierce hunters and warriors whose definition of the size of the larger entity did not include the tribe next door, but within what they saw as their entity, they were as gentle as they could be.

  “This sense came back with me to the college, and I wrote it up. This article, interestingly, did not receive nearly as much attention as the one describing sexual practices among the group, but within the department where I worked, it was looked upon with considerable regard.

  “More important, the cosmological premise intrigues and haunts me. Should we – here, now – be thinking about the beach as ‘sister beach, partner beach that is a portion of the same real entity that also includes me and my fellow travelers?’ I wonder….”

  They were all silent for a time, considering what they had heard. Then Jim stood up and announced it was time to sing.

  Singing

  “Tonight, we are going to sing two Australian songs. It seems only fair, you know, because six of us are Australians – with a nod to Tasmania, which is part of Australia even though it is its own separate island. The songs I want to sing tonight are both ones that you Yanks will have heard, you know, but now you get to learn them. Here’s the tune for the first one.”

  He pulled out his recorder and played “Kookaburra” on it. Maria and Julia both smiled – this was a song they had learned in Girl Scouts.

  Jim continued his explanation of how the singing would go. “There are no harmony parts to this song, you know, so everyone just sings the melody. I will play the starting note. Basses can sing an octave lower, sopranos an octave higher if you want to. That part should be easy, so let’s sing the first verse and, um, you know, get comfortable with the tune.”

  Jim played the starting note he had described, and they sang the first verse:

  Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree

  Merry, merry king of the bush is he

  Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra!

  Gay your life must be

  “Well, you know, you all sound very good. Now comes the challenge, you know. This song is often sung as a round. The first two lines are part one and the second two are part two.” Jim divided them into two groups. “OK, group one starts and group two comes in to start the verse when group one starts to sing ‘laugh,’ you know. So let’s try singing that same verse several times as a round. First time through, we’ll all sing together, then split into groups.” He played the starting note and started them off. After once through, group one started over and group two waited, starting after group one finished two lines. They sang it through as a round three times and Jim stopped them.

  “Good work, you know. So, let’s sing more verses. Ron and I’ll sing each verse the first time through, you know, then we’ll all sing the verse the second time, then well do it as a round twice, then, you know, Ron and I’ll sing the next verse.” Jim played the note again, and they sang the first verse again followed by:

  Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree

  Eating all the gum drops he can see

  Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra!

  Leave some there for me

  Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree

  Counting all the monkeys he can see

  Stop, Kookaburra! Stop, Kookaburra!

  That's not a monkey, that's me!

  Kookaburra lands in the old gum tree

  Fluttering his wings for all to see

  Laugh, Kookaburra! Laugh, Kookaburra!

  Happy as can be!

  They gave themselves a rousing round of applause.

  “You know, you sound wonderful. I think I’ll have to take you all home to show you off to my colleagues in Sydney! That was very good. One night soon we’ll work on a song where harmony is everything, you know, because that is how good I think you are. But now we must get on to Waltzing Matilda.”

  Again, Jim played the tune, which everyone knew, even Marcella. “Here is how we are going to do this. Ron and I will alternate singing the verses and you will sing the refrains. The refrain is pretty easy, but the third line is different each time – and, you know, it is a repeat of the third line of the verse. I’ll sing the first verse and refrain for you.”

  And he sang:

  Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong

  Under the shade of a coolibah tree,

  And he sang as he watched and waited ‘til his billy boiled

  "You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me."

  Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda

  "You'll come
a-Waltzing Matilda, with me"

  And he sang as he watched and waited ‘til his billy boiled,

  "You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me."

  James spoke up at this point: “Jim, I don’t understand a lot of the words in the song. It would be more fun to sing if I knew what was going on. Can you explain what a swagman is, or a billabong, or a billy?”

  Jim just looked baffled, but Roger, Paul and Ron joined in a rotating recitation of the meanings of the Australian linguistics.

  Roger: “A swagman is like a bum or a hobo – a man without property who lives off the land or by begging.”