So I persevered, and, several times, I was rewarded. It proved to be worth the effort, which is saying a great deal.
I weaseled my way into a canoe ride one breezy Saturday morning in late October with the boys: Lisson, Fredlee, and Joja. Today, fishing was to be not just for fun and food, but also for the Marshallese observance of International Women’s Day. The men were catching fish for the women, in order to thank them. None of the fair sex were to be aboard, though, because of an old belief that women would cause bad luck if they accompanied men on fishing expeditions. Maybe that belief flowed from native Marshallese understandings of fortune, gender, and contamination. Or maybe it was just a way for the men to have time to themselves for bonding and dirty jokes.
The men promised to show me the World War II fighter plane that now formed a decomposing monument on the lagoon floor. The fact that they were willing to postpone the almost sacred task of fishing in order to show me this sight eased my fear that they had never wanted me along.
Our vessel was named Limama (“Mom”). It was perched between the dirt and the beach so that it could be quickly deployed but not carried away at high tide. Launching the canoe across this field of shells, rocks, and decaying coconuts required a special technique. (But of course, so did most everything on this island, including taking a shower in the morning from a bucket of water.) The men placed palm fronds crosswise in front of the canoe to act as rollers. Then Joja said “eeeeeeee-EPP,” which seemed to mean nothing but “everyone push . . . now,” and everyone did just that. When the canoe had passed over the palm fronds, the men placed them in front again. After a few repetitions, the craft was in the water.
“Uwe” (“get on”), Lisson told me. They gave me the “chief’s seat”—the square platform between the hull and the outrigger, and the only place on the canoe where I had a fighting chance of staying dry. Lisson claimed the tiny platform on the other side of the mast, while Fredlee and Joja straddled the ends of the hull with their feet nearly in the water. They shouted quick commands to one another as they pulled on this rope, untied that one, let another one slack, and retied the first one with expert speed.
The triangular blue sail unfurled. Everything was in its correct orientation, and the anchor was up. But the canoe stood still for another thirty seconds. Then, as if mentally willed to do so, it began to move. This happened every time I rode on a canoe, and I never understood what final adjustment set the whole contraption into motion. It seemed like a telepathic command.
As we set out into the lagoon, I felt what I always felt at the beginning of a sea journey. The sail inflated, the bow sliced through the water, the land retreated behind us, and all my frustrations as a teacher or man alone in a foreign land became an old and faded dream. The past unhitched from my mind and I saw only a blissful present. It was the most perfect moment in any sea voyage, not in the least because I couldn’t possibly have gotten seasick yet.
Then the mast fell over.
A rope snapped, sending the mast and sail down in a flurry of falling objects. A heavy beam nearly hit my head. But far from revealing my companions’ incompetence, this gave them an extra chance to prove their skill. They had to remount the mast and sail mid-voyage. Half an hour later, they had somehow achieved this using only the ropes available to them. In the United States, a vehicular breakdown would be occasion for cursing. Here it was occasion for laughter.
We were on our way again. The sail caught the wind perfectly and the craft all but skipped over the water. Earlier that morning, the canoe had rested heavily on the beach, utterly inert. Now it felt weightless. Dryness soon became only a memory. Fredlee and Joja, straddling the ends of the canoe, were partly underwater half of the time, and high in the air the rest of the time. Even the chief’s seat got sprayed, but the water was warm before the wind cooled it down. Fredlee dutifully bailed the body of the canoe with half a plastic jug attached to a stick.
Soon we were more than a mile from Ujae, and I could see its whole length without turning my head. Through the water, I could make out the ghostly form of a sunken plane. The men reefed the sail. While Lisson cast a fishing line, Joja and I prepared to get in the water. I saw Joja scrubbing his snorkel mask with some sort of tuber. He explained that it was the aerial root of the pandanus tree—one of the curious appendages that propped the tree up at the base—and that it would prevent the mask from fogging up. The soapy innards of the root were far more effective than saliva, which I had been taught to use in America. They were also preferable to the islanders’ other technique of chewing a palm leaf and spitting its green juice into the mask. I wondered how they had learned this skill. Using native plants in ingenious ways epitomized the word “traditional,” but here they were doing so to clean a snorkel mask.
Joja and I entered the water. Thirty feet below me, a decaying plane rested on the sandy bottom of the lagoon. Far from fouling the reef, the hulk seemed a boon for underwater life: coral sprouted from the twin engines, and fish surrounded the coral. This was just one of many war relics in the country. Several islands were littered with rusting Japanese artillery, bunkers, and command centers. One of the old military buildings had been converted into a church, and bomb craters were now used as wet pits for growing taro. I suspected that the bullet I once found in the sand had the same origin. The bottom of Bikini Lagoon was the final resting place for entire fleets of ships that had been sunk on purpose by nuclear bombs. These artifacts, which included an aircraft carrier, now formed the basis for a successful Bikini Atoll diving business and had become a mecca for wreck enthusiasts. Nuclear testing hadn’t destroyed what little tourism this country had; it had created it.
The women on Ujae were expecting fish—we couldn’t play all day. We sailed farther into the lagoon, and the men attached lead weights to their fishing lines and dropped them into the blue depths. Soon they were pulling up little ambassadors of that alien world: sparkling white coral and weird deep-lagoon fish that I had never seen before. The fish sported unusual colors and patterns—one was bright red, and another was brown with brilliant crimson gills that flared up like fire when the creature gasped for water. Each time an object was reeled to the surface, in the moment after it became visible but before it had left the water, it was bathed in an ethereal blue light, glowing bright against the dark backdrop of the water.
True to form, the men kicked off a good-natured fishing competition. The scoring was inspired by baseball: each fish counted as one base, and four fish was a home run. Keeping close score, it became clear that Joja was falling behind. Lisson had scored a home run and Fredlee was on third, but Joja hadn’t even reached first. It was in this way that I learned about a most interesting Marshallese belief: a man who had sex at night would have bad luck at fishing the next day. (The same was supposed to be true of a man who had eaten crab, but somehow that wasn’t as exciting.)
The belief, it appeared, served mainly as fodder for teasing unlucky fishermen. If Joja hadn’t scored a home run at fishing, then he must have scored a home run the night before. Lisson found a red spot on Joja’s neck and decided it was a hickey. Apparently the English word “kissmark” had found its way into Marshallese as kijmaak. So Joja earned a new nickname, using the masculine prefix that is used for such things: he was now La-Kijmaak. I took it upon myself, nobly, to introduce the men to the American word “hickey.” Now he had another nickname: La-Hickey.
(Joja never lived the incident down. For weeks afterward, men would ask me to recount the story, the humor tripled by the fact that the ribelle was narrating. When word got out that I was aware of the no-sex belief, men would ask me expectantly why a certain individual had come back with such a paltry catch of fish, and I would dutifully give them the answer they wanted: it was because he was having so much sex, with so many women, the night before. This was funny by itself, but when the white man said it, it was arguably the funniest joke in the world.)
On the canoe, Joja’s dubious hickey might easily have filled half an hour with
extremely sophisticated entertainment, but it was at that moment that the mood abruptly changed. Fredlee pulled up half a fish. It was the front end of a bread-loaf-sized creature, with the back end cleanly bitten off. The pattern of semicircular indentations along the severed edge left no doubt of that. To me this was ominous; to my companions, this was exciting.
“There must be sharks around here,” said Lisson. “We might catch one.”
Yes, they ate sharks. They pointed out that it was quite fair—sharks ate people and people ate sharks.
Then Fredlee felt a very powerful tug. He reeled the creature to the surface until we could all see it. He had hooked a shark. It was rare to see these islanders showing anything less than perfect composure, but these were exceptional circumstances. Several things started happening at once. The shark thrashed mightily from side to side, its small size more than compensated by its rage. Lisson shouted “Mane!” (“hit it! kill it!”) while Joja reached for a machete. Fredlee said, “It’ll bite me!” and kept the animal on two feet of line. I knew my duty at times like these, and that was to stay the hell out of the way. It just so happened that, in that instance, my duty and my desire coincided.
The line snapped before Joja could make good use of the machete, and the creature from the blue lagoon disappeared instantaneously into the depths. The fish had won—we would not catch a shark that day.
The men had found action, danger, and humor. But they hadn’t found many fish. Deeming the latter goal to be at least as important as the former, the men resolved to do some netfishing. We set sail farther into the lagoon, several miles along the reef, until Ujae Island was no closer than its nearest uninhabited neighbor. We passed by light blue areas in the lagoon, as if spotlights were shining up from the seafloor. These were patch reefs: coral mountains that had grown from the depths of the lagoon almost to the surface, stopping only at the point where they would be exposed to the air at low tide. On a few atolls, these coralline mounds had broken the surface and formed islands in the middle of the lagoon, wreaking havoc with the standard Marshallese binary of lagoon side/ocean side.
My companions recited the names of these prime fishing grounds as we passed by. There was Wodindap (“coral reef of the moray eel”), Wodkarjin (“kerosene coral”), Boran Joalon (“head of Joalon,” a legendary character), and Laloklok (whose meaning was unclear, but which the guys, in their endless lascivious creativity, were quick to mention sounded rather like the word for a woman washing her genitals.)
Finally, we were at Wodinmon (“coral reef of the squirrelfish”). Lisson cast the anchor. It was nothing more than a donut-shaped chunk of coral rock tied to a rope. It snagged on the jagged coral, tethering the canoe. This reef had an aura of remoteness—a barely sunken island in a vast ocean. But, otherwise, it looked like any other reef. I put my mask on and prepared for some enjoyable, but unspectacular, sightseeing.
I was mistaken.
What greeted me was a Himalaya of coral disappearing into the unseen floor of the lagoon. Elkhorn coral covered the slopes like trees on a mountainside. Clouds of fish surrounded me, glinting like drops from a fountain, and darted back in unison when I extended my hand. A school of rays flew through the water like birds through the sky. One coralhead was the color of copper, and it took me a while to notice that hundreds of fish of the same color were hovering over it. Worms that looked like multicolored feather dusters disappeared instantaneously into their coral homes when they sensed me near. In the shallows, a splotch of coral growth discolored the rocks; anywhere else, I would have assumed it was neon green spray paint. The sun cast shafts of light into the clear lagoon, while walls of abruptly colder water—called thermoclines—distorted the liquid atmosphere like heat in dry air.
Coral reefs, I realized, were a microcosm of all the reasons that I had come to this country. The overpowering curiosity that had brought me, the fear and pull of the exotic, were felt all at once in a concentrated form as I looked at this resplendent coral mountain, and its drop-off into the ghostly depths. I smugly imagined the hordes of snorkelers who would flock to this place if it were even faintly accessible to tourism.
The men, unlike me, were not here for beauty. They didn’t see the reef that way. Instead, they got straight to business, plopping unceremoniously into the water and tying a long fishing net between two coralheads. Then they started a ruckus. Fredlee picked up a piece of living coral and threw it violently back into the water. Lisson slapped the surface of the water with his hands, and Joja yelled and jumped in and out. It seemed hardly the time or place for a game, but then I saw what they were doing. They pulled the net into the canoe, and it was littered with so many large fish that the hull dipped noticeably in the water. It had taken five minutes to set up the net, and another ten to scare the fish into it, and their reward was about twenty pounds of food.
We rendezvoused with another canoe, and they gave us an octopus. The creature, so graceful in the water, was limp and helpless outside of it, but colors still streamed and fluctuated eerily through its body.
Fredlee prepared a few of our fish to be eaten sashimi style—that is, raw. He made several expert cuts with his knife and then tore the skin off neatly with his teeth. It was curiously unbloody. Lest the scene not be colorful enough, Fredlee flavored the meat by smearing it with the creature’s intestines. I ate some, and congratulated myself for it.
It was time to return to Ujae. To do this the men had to tack: reverse the sail’s orientation in order to catch the wind. In doing so, they demonstrated one of the more surprising features of the canoe’s design: the sail and the mast were attached to nothing. The base of the mast sat loosely in a small hole in the middle of the hull, allowing it to pivot. Meanwhile, the wood beams that lined two of the sail’s three sides rested their intersection point on a depression on one end of the canoe. This allowed the entire sail to be removed from its resting place, reversed, and carried to the other end of the canoe. There was no bow and no stern on this boat; it was a fully reversible craft.
Marshall Islanders made almost all of their skills look easy, but tacking was an exception. From the moment my friends lifted the sail from its resting place, there was a desperate suspense. The men strained. The sail was still fully inflated, and the wind threatened to blow it over, taking the mast and riggings with it. Tacking required three strong seamen, and it was so difficult even an expert couldn’t make it look easy.
But they prevailed. We beached the canoe at Ariraen, and Lisson, Fredlee, and Joja divided the fish evenly, never mentioning who had caught what. Even the useless ribelle got a quarter of the spoils. While the men might posture about their fishing abilities, in the end it didn’t matter how many fish each had caught. Equal distribution was an island axiom.
I was in good spirits and so were they, but our reasons were entirely different. “The reef was so beautiful,” I told them repeatedly.
“We caught many fish,” they always responded.
10
It Takes a Village to Break a Spirit
DECEMBER WAS AS HOT AS ANY MONTH, BUT A COLD WINTER BEGAN TO settle on my soul.
The trouble was not all mine. The island was experiencing one of its periodic food shortages. This was another difference between American food and Marshallese food: there was much less of the latter. Many families had run out of rice and flour in the two months since the last supply ship, and breadfruit was out of season. When I walked back to my house with a half-dozen squirrelfish that a man had given me, an eight-year-old girl begged me for just one of the cookie-sized creatures.
The De Brums’, thankfully, were one of the families that still had rice. Even so, Lisson and Elina were working unusually hard to supplement the dwindling supplies of food. I was hardly pulling my weight, and so, in a fit of guilty generosity, I told Lisson I would kakijen (gather food) by learning to fish and raanke (scrape dry coconut meat out of the shell). Lisson smiled at my offer, but then again he smiled at most everything I said, no matter how ridiculous. Later th
at day, I overheard him telling Elina what I had said, and both of them laughed. Apparently it was especially hilarious that I had said I would help kakijen. At least I tried.
My only kakijen initiative that got anywhere at all was a tiny garden behind the cookhouse at Ariraen. Lisson and I dug a rectangular pit and filled it with soil filtered through a sieve to eliminate coral rocks and, occasionally, jittery purple crabs. As we took turns shoveling dirt in the post-school afternoon sun, Lisson fired questions at me about the Iraq War. I responded with sparkling political insight in fluent, articulate Marshallese. Or maybe it was more like “Some person, uh, say . . . Bush like . . . war, uh, just for . . . to get gas.” More successful than our conversation was the progress on the garden. Once we had germinated the seeds in coconut half-shells and transplanted them, our little patch of garlic, beans, and corn didn’t look half bad, considering my involvement.
Joja heard about this, and now he wanted a garden too, and would I help him? For a few days, I thought I had stumbled into a second career as an agricultural aid worker. But it was not to be. Our garden at Ariraen failed most decisively. Maybe it was because, after we had gone to so much effort to set it up, Lisson didn’t bother to tend it. Or maybe it was because, after we had gone to so much effort to set it up, I didn’t bother to tend it. Joja retracted his request, and my rice remained ungarlicked.
My half-hearted agricultural project wasn’t the first one to fail. Just a month before, a Marshallese man from an organization in Majuro had arrived to help the villagers set up a community garden with corn, beans, squash, and some island favorites like banana. The project seemed a model of local participation: while the visitor supervised, dozens of Ujae men performed the labor. When it was finished, the garden looked beautiful and poised to flourish. Within a month, however, it was overgrown and abandoned. I learned that the urban do-gooder (now long gone) had paid the men for their work. Now it appeared the wages were all that had motivated them.
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