by Don George
Fishing?!? Oh, right, at one point during the jet-lagged night, Retire had told me he had arranged a fishing expedition. Somehow I’d forgotten that it was for the next morning, and that he’d said he’d come by to get me at 5:30. Ah, paradise.
So I scrambled into some clothes and we set off to a friend’s house, where we attached a small motorboat to Retire’s car and drove to the Arutanga wharf. Retire and his friend maneuvered the boat into the water, and Retire steered through an imperceptible break in the reef to the deeper waters beyond. When we stopped after a half hour to drop our lines, the sky blazed with more stars than I’d ever seen, and the night was absolutely still. We tried two favored lagoon locations with no luck, but at the third spot, as I was savoring the stars, the rising breeze, and the salty tang of the sea, my pole began to bend.
“You got one!” Retire shouted. “Pull it in, pull it in!”
For a moment I stared dumbly at the pole, then childhood muscle memory kicked in and I began to pull up and reel in, pull up and reel in.
“That’s right!” Retire said. “Another twenty minutes and you have fish!”
Pull up, reel in, pull up, reel in. It seemed like forever and my arms felt like stone but eventually I got the fish to the side of the boat and Retire swooped down with a net and hefted it in. It was a modest-sized queenfish, but big enough to keep, Retire said.
“Make good dinner for my friend,” he winked.
Before the morning was over, I’d reeled in two more queenfish and a rainbow-colored parrotfish.
“Big party tonight!” Retire beamed.
Later, back on land, Retire took me for a drive along the coast. A lush green tangle of vines, bushes, and trees climbed into the interior; bright yellow and white blossoms and plump papaya, banana, pawpaw, coconut, and mango hung heavy from boughs; simple one-story cinderblock houses, painted in tropical reds, greens, and blues, showed immaculate lawns and vegetable plots—with here and there stately granite family tombs set among them; goats and chickens and baby pigs wandered heedless by the road; on a palm-strung clothesline, multi-colored pareus wafted in the breeze like Polynesian prayer flags; children in crisp red-and-white and green-and-white uniforms played volleyball in a school yard; and always the blue-green waters glinted in the lagoon.
About fifteen minutes into our tour we passed a group of houses set back from the road. An elderly man sitting on the stoop of the middle home waved toward us. Instinctively I looked toward Retire, but he was watching the road. I glanced behind us to see who he was waving at, but there was no one. Then I realized—he was waving at me! I waved back. A few houses later, a young mother with a plump pink-dressed toddler at her knee was standing outside. Would she wave? Yes! We passed a couple of kids kicking a soccer ball on a lawn. Yes! A white-haired woman pedaling in the opposite direction; three middle-aged men in a truck. Yes and yes! Soon I felt like the mayor of Aitutaki, waving at everyone I passed and being waved at in return, with smiles as bright as the sun all around.
We swerved inland, bouncing along wild boar trails under ponderous branches and past slapping vines to the summit of the central hill, Maungapu, the island’s highest point at 400 feet, which legend says was brought from Rarotonga by Aitutaki warriors who decided the island needed a mountain. Retire showed me the plot of land where he planned to build his “Retire-ment” house someday, and took me to a number of marae, the traditional pre-Christianity meeting and ceremonial sites which are marked by elaborate arrangements of massive boulders. Retire showed me one set of blood-chilling rocks where he told me human sacrifices were performed.
“See,” he said, pointing to one peculiarly chiseled stone, “this is where the man’s neck was held for the sacrifice, and this”—he pointed to a slithering rivulet of rock—“is where the blood ran down and was collected.” He looked at me appraisingly. “What size neck you have?”
In ensuing days I met woodcarvers and pareu-makers, schoolteachers and hotel owners, chefs and tour guides and Internet entrepreneurs. I met thirty-something Maoris whose parents had emigrated to New Zealand and Australia and who had moved back for the grounded values and saner pace; teenage Aitutakians who planned to head for the bright lights of Auckland or Sydney as soon as they could; Westerners who had visited on holiday and never left. Some people worried about the influx of travelers and the ongoing building boom, which was evident: When I compared the tourist maps for July-December 2004 and January-July 2005, four new hotels had opened, plus a new tourist shop and a dive operation, and on my island explorations I saw a half-dozen new hotels in various stages of completion. Some complained that outside money was going to seep into the economy and unbalance the place; others lamented the islanders’ dependence on canned goods from New Zealand and the youngsters’ indifference to preserving local ways and words. Clearly, the island was not without its anxieties, yet to this 21st-century refugee, the place seemed as close to peace, plenty, and paradise as I’d ever come.
Those feelings crystallized one day on a visit to the motu known as One Foot Island. Through a serendipitous arrangement a skipper dropped me alone on the motu in the morning and said I could hitch a ride back with a lagoon tour group that would arrive in the afternoon. In my mind I immediately became a Cook Islands castaway, the lord of my private island. Surveying my domain, I turned a corner to a scene that simply took my breath away: a brilliant scimitar of white-sand beach washed by a transparent lagoon, green near the shore, then green-blue, then blue-black as it deepened. Arcing palm trees lined the beach, their fronds green, yellow, and brown against a deep blue sky. It was so beautiful I wanted to cry. I waded into the baptismal sea, the air warm and swaddling, the water buoyant and serene.
I began my last day on Aitutaki by attending the 6:30 a.m. service at the main church in Arutanga, the oldest in the Cook Islands, a majestic limestone structure with stained-glass windows and painted ceilings. Aitutaki was the island where the pioneering 19th-century English missionary John Williams, of the London Missionary Society, entrusted a Polynesian convert, Papeiha, with the conversion of the locals. Papeiha was so proficient that he was later moved to Rarotonga, where he was similarly successful. By the start of the 20th century, virtually all Cook Islanders were Christians. A double-sided monument to these two persuasive preachers graces the weathered churchyard.
On my visit the main church was closed for restoration, but when I entered the spare, humble side building where the service was being held, about two dozen people nodded and smiled at me. The women wore fancy woven-pandanus hats and bright floral muumuus and the men were in crisp polo or aloha-style shirts. The room itself had cloud-white cinderblock walls, sky-blue windows, about two dozen plain wooden benches, and a varnished wooden ceiling. At 6:30 precisely a preacher in a suit and tie began to speak in Cook Islands Maori. As he spoke a gentle breeze blew through the unscreened windows, a choir of cocks cock-a-doodle-doo’d, the wind swayed in the trees, and the mingled scents of tropical blooms and moist earth wafted in. After a while the preacher stopped speaking and the congregation rose all together. Suddenly a torrent of song surged forth; all two dozen parishioners were singing at full voice, pouring all their bodies into the song. The melody soared, subsided, soared again, the voices pounding, straining, merging, lilting, rising, falling, filling the humble space and seeming to lift the entire building, the entire island, with their force.
Later that day, as dusk was falling, Retire rejoined me. “Big surprise tonight. Island Night. Buffet and performance. Perfect for you!”
We drove to an open-air, thatched-roof restaurant called Samade, a stone’s throw from the lagoon on the placid powdery stretch of Ootu Beach. Tourists sat at about fifteen tables set in the sand. The evening began with a sumptuous buffet featuring more than a dozen platters: pork cooked the traditional way in an underground oven, tuna, chicken, beets, tomatoes, cucumber, papaya salad, and ekamata (raw fish marinated in lime and coconut)—all washed down with cold Steinlager beer.
After we had feasted for an hour, a half-dozen musicians trooped in bearing ukuleles and wooden drums, then groups of young dancers stepped onto the floor in pandanus skirts and coconut bras and began informal, enthusiastic renditions of the dances I’d watched four nights before. Their passion and energy were infectious, and with the warm, caressing air, the delicious food, the music mingling with the stars, and the dancers’ supple limbs and exuberant smiles, it was easy to get lulled into the spirit of the dance. At one point, I returned from getting seconds at the buffet table to find Retire gone; then I spotted him with the musicians, banging away on a homemade drum. And at the end of the evening, when a young beauty with copper skin and flowing hair materialized before me and invited me to dance, I found myself suddenly on that sandy stage, hips swaying and legs pounding as they never had before.
Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa-thumpa! Pumpa-pumpa-pumpa-pumpa! My feet were pistoning as fast as they could, trying to convince the ancient gods—and my undulating partner—that I was a worthy warrior. In my mind I was barefoot and dressed in green ti leaves with black tattoos on my legs and arms and a crown of white and yellow flowers on my head, and I was fending off all enemies with a long spear and a menacing glare.
Time slowed, and all the discoveries of my five-day stay coursed through me: the island’s slow, stately pace, the warmth of the people and their fervent faith, the soul-soaring beauty of the place, the bountiful humor I had encountered in all, the sense of plenty in papaya, mango, and pawpaw, the sense of peace in palm tree, lagoon, and beach, the answering power of pure belief. The leg-thumping, heart-pumping rhythms reached my deepest core like a key, turning and turning, unlocking mysteries that seemed even older than me.
And suddenly I found myself in a place I’d never been but knew instinctively. Drums pounded, hips swayed, gardenia perfumed the balmy, palmy, mango-slow scene. In an instant I recognized this South Seas culmination: I had found the island of Salvation.
The Intricate Weave
When my dad passed away in November 2007, it took me half a year to begin to come to terms with his passing and many more months to feel “normal” in the world again. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect, the journey described in this piece, which took place eight months after his death, was an essential part of that process. I was in the Lake Garda region of northern Italy leading a travel writing workshop. As part of our activities, we were making daily excursions in the area, to wineries, markets, and museums. My dad had served in Italy during World War II, and so I had been thinking about him throughout the trip, but he wasn’t explicitly in my mind the day we decided to visit the violin museum in Cremona. As a result, what happened there, and the lessons it imparted about the special people in our lives, seems all the more powerful and precious to me.
MY DAD PASSED AWAY IN NOVEMBER OF 2007. He enjoyed a long and full life and died after a relatively swift and painless decline, so I have no unfinished longings or regrets about his life. But there are still times when I wish he were by my side so we could share something we both exulted in.
In his waning months, I understood on some level the inevitability of his demise, but no matter how I tried, I could not prepare myself for his death, or the gaping hole it would leave in the fabric of my life. Eight months later, I realized that I couldn’t prepare myself for something else that would happen after he passed away: how the intricate weave of his life would continue to thread through my days.
I was on a two-week tour of northern Italy. I was with a small group of people who had never met before the trip, and we were bonding and braiding and dissembling as such groups do—fussing over idiosyncrasies and annoyances, sharing deep-rooted passions, planting and watering dreams that were just beginning to bloom.
One of the many riches of the trip was a visit to the violin museum in the city hall of Cremona, where priceless violins hundreds of years old are reverently housed. Each day, some of these violins are taken out and played as a way of keeping them in their finest condition. We were privileged on our visit to hear the exquisite “Il Cremonese” built by Antonio Stradivari in 1715. As we sat in that simple hall, surrounded by 17th-century paintings and 13th-century stones, I lost myself to the strains of the violin. With heart-plucking clarity, they swooped, descended, spiraled, and soared until at one point I was at the apex of the room, just a shining sliver of sound reverberating.
My dad loved music; he sang in our church choir and regularly attended the local symphony’s concerts, and afterwards he would speak glowingly about how this pianist or that flutist, that violinist, had played. He also had served in Italy during World War II, and one of the memories that had stayed in the forefront of his mind was how as an aide du camp, he had navigated his beloved general through Italy without harm. So he had been with me throughout my Italian journey—and from Venice to Verona, I would catch myself wondering if he had looked at the same vineyard-latticed hills or cobblestoned squares sixty-five years before.
But it was at that moment in Cremona, at the apex of that room, that I felt his presence most powerfully, felt that his spirit and mine were intertwined in the music of those strings. And I realized that people, from new-made friends to life-long family, inevitably come and go in the composition of our lives, but that once they have appeared, they never really leave.
And I realized too that the people we love—the memory of the people we love, their enduring, pulsing presence in our lives—is like those violins. Every day, in one form or another, we take them out and play them, if just for a while. We become them, swooping, spiraling, soaring to the apex of our minds. We honor them and keep them alive—as they do us, intertwined.
Unexpected Offerings on a Return to Bali
I first visited Bali in 1978, on the same trip where I encountered the layers of Indonesia at Prambanan, which I described in a piece earlier in this collection. This essay describes my return to Bali thirty-four years later. Much had changed in those thirty-four years, of course—inside me as well as inside Bali. And yet much remained the same. Bali is one of those rare places that seem charged with a special energy, where the shields/layers/skins that separate us from the spiritual core of the universe seem thinner, more porous. As a result, magic seems to happen more readily there, more easily. I’ve been to Bali a few times since that first visit, and something unexpected, magical, has happened to me every time—some gift that fundamentally rearranges and reinvigorates the way I live in the world. In the journey described here, the quest to see a gamelan orchestra led me to a resonant lesson in desire and fulfillment.
IN THE FALL OF 2012, I SPENT a week on the Indonesian island of Bali as a guest of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. This was my first visit to that blessed place since I’d fallen in love with it thirty-four years before.
Like me, the island had lost some of its innocence in the intervening years. Unlike my earlier trip, when the Balinese I met had simply welcomed me with wide eyes and hearts, this time most immediately asked me if I’d been there before. When I answered, “Yes, thirty-four years ago,” their eyes opened wide for a different reason and they smiled and shook their heads. “Oh, Bali has changed much since then!” they’d laugh, though many of them couldn’t say exactly how because they hadn’t even been born thirty-four years before.
Of course, to my eyes too, Bali had changed. The streets were much busier, clogged with trucks and motor scooters, than I remembered, and the towns were more built up; the road from Denpasar to Ubud was lined with many more buildings and fewer rice paddies than I recalled.
But in a deeper sense, the spirit of the place seemed hardly changed at all. During a few free days of wandering, I passed a number of festival processions flowing through the streets. Every day I was enchanted as I had been three decades before by the sweet, simple canangsari offerings—hand-sized compositions of colorful flowers on green coconut leaves, some graced with a cracker—that were meticulously placed outside my door and on bustling sidewalks, off-the-beaten-path fo
ot trails, temple thresholds, and business entrances alike. And while I realize I know nothing about the difficulties of being Balinese—the need to scrupulously follow rigorous traditions, for example, or the unpredictabilities of relying on a tourism economy—the people I met exuded a gentleness, tranquility, contentment, and sense of sanctity in the everyday that was as exemplary, expanding, and restorative for me as it had been thirty-four years before.
But it wasn’t until my last day in Ubud that Bali’s soul-binding offerings really came to life for me.
I began the day with a mini-pilgrimage to a paradisiacal place I had visited earlier in my stay. I had been introduced to it by a local expat who had taken my all-day writing workshop. During the workshop lunch break, she had described a beatific organic restaurant perched among the rice paddies, a short walk from central Ubud. She kindly offered to take me there, and the following day we met at Tjamphuhan bridge, walked a few minutes uphill along Jalan Raya Campuhan, then turned left up a wide paved driveway. At the top of this driveway was a sign neatly hand-lettered: to rice fields sari organik.
After a few minutes following this narrow path, and frequently having to step aside for a seemingly endless succession of motor scooters, we entered what seemed an enchanted land of rice paddies, palm trees, and, here and there, one-story “villas” with red-tiled roofs. As we threaded through the paddies on this narrow path, we passed a spa, an art gallery, a couple of “house for rent” signs-of-the-times, and a fledgling neighborhood of new homes called Dragonfly Villas. After about twenty minutes, we came to a sign and a stone pathway that led to Sari Organik.
An open-to-the-breezes restaurant of some two-dozen tables blossoming in the middle of verdant rice paddies, Sari Organik has one of the most exquisite settings of any restaurant I’ve ever visited. We sat in this tranquil place sipping juice from fresh-cut coconuts, and as sunset slowly gilded the paddies, the centuries seemed to slip away.
