Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  Suddenly an unoccupied bed materialized, and I was placed upon it. A nurse hooked me to an IV. Between memorizing the pattern of dots on the ceiling, I struck up a quick friendship with my Australian bed-neighbor.

  “So what are you in for?” I asked.

  “I cut my hand down to the bone while cleaning a yacht. You?”

  “I have a 104-degree fever and hallucinations from the curse of the ghost of an ancient chieftess from a remote outer island.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too.”

  My fear of impending demise began to subside. But some things in the emergency room did not inspire confidence. A few cockroaches were milling about on the floor in their aimless robotic way, and the occasional mouse scampered from one hole in the wall to another. The door to the emergency room said, “Absolutely No Admittance,” but it was wide open, and my friends sashayed in and out at their leisure to check up on me. Another sign, in plain view of the patients, said, “ We have done an audit of all the narcotics in all the wards. There were many errors and omissions. This is unacceptable.”

  I was moved to another room, where I spent the night. In the bed next to mine, separated only by a curtain, a Marshallese man and woman were chatting in a mix of their language and mine, although they barely spoke the latter.

  “Long time no mona,” said the man.

  “No eat, no eat,” agreed the woman.

  I decided then and there that “Long time no mona” was another candidate for the volunteer T-shirt slogan.

  By morning, I was far from well, but the fever had eased to the point where I could be discharged. The hospital fee, as always, whether they treated me with aspirin or open-heart surgery, was seventeen dollars. If I had been Marshallese, it would have been five. In some respects, I realized, the health-care system of this Third World country was ahead of my own.

  I started a course of antibiotics, but after a few days I noticed that I would run out of the prescription before the ten-day cycle was finished. I went to the pharmacy. The pharmacist confirmed that the printed dosage was in error, and I had been taking twice the correct amount.

  “So have I done anything horrible to my body?” I asked.

  “No. In fact, you did something good to your body. You cleaned it out of anything at all you might have had.”

  That was comforting. Then again, this was a country where they handed out antibiotics like they were candy.

  In the follow-up consultation, the doctor told me that the diagnosis was unclear, but typhoid was a possibility. Having already survived the disease, I was hoping that it was indeed typhoid: a deadly sounding scourge if there ever was one. How impressed people would be when they heard that I contracted this exotic malady and lived to tell the tale.

  Of course, I had my own theory: the Curse of the Ancient Chieftess.

  I had learned two things: 1) take no chances with weird possessed objects, and 2) if you think you might have destroyed your hand, you should seek medical attention whether or not you actually have.

  MAJURO. I COULDN’T BELIEVE I WAS STILL IN MAJURO. I HAD MISSED my scheduled flight back to Ujae while recovering from my demonic curse. Then the next flight was canceled. The next flight after that was also canceled, then uncanceled without anyone being informed of it, so the plane took off without me. The flight after that was canceled and remained so. Now I had missed two flights to Ujae, and I wondered what my family and students were thinking. “He must hate us,” perhaps. It wasn’t far-fetched, considering how displeased I had looked that last month.

  I needed to go back. I needed to let them know I wasn’t giving up. But I was at the mercy of the airline. In the comparatively huge capital city, I started to feel more bored and confined than I had ever felt on Ujae. The boundaries of tiny Ujae had rarely pressed against me: they were simply the edges of my world. But in Majuro I began to feel the languor and dissipation of being where I knew I shouldn’t be. A pathetic case in point of my boredom was when I went to a restaurant and spent seven straight hours there, eating breakfast and lunch on the same tab. I started to pine for the island that a few weeks ago I had been so thrilled to leave.

  I took advantage of my extended vacation to visit Arno Atoll, where another volunteer was teaching. Majuro and Arno lay side by side, with the shore of each visible from the other on clear days. The journey between the two was only a short boat ride.

  Arno Atoll had a few claims to fame. In two places, the loop of the atoll doubled over on itself, forming small secondary lagoons. But if that bit of geological esoterica isn’t exciting enough for you, I’ve got something much better: Arno was also renowned for the “Love School” on Longar, which had reputedly instructed young women in the art of pleasure. Some called it a tourist’s myth, while others claimed that classes were still held. The atoll was also home to the last practitioners of maanpa: the martial arts of the Marshall Islands. Again reputedly (one heard many stories in this country) the proper practice of this skill required one to ingest the wut in kio, an orange blossom that grew only on Wake Island, five hundred miles north of the nearest inhabited atoll. Sailing across these lonely waters to retrieve the flower was once a test of valor for chiefs-to-be. For maanpa men, the wut in kio slowed down time, sci-fi action film style, so they could watch their opponent’s fist traveling toward their face and dodge it.

  Allegedly, a boat called the Lakbelele traveled to Arno every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at around noon. I looked for an office or a posted schedule. I found neither. After six months in the Marshall Islands, I still believed that there would be an official process to it all, that the boat was required to do what it did. In reality, the Lakbelele came and went as its owners pleased, and I was lucky it followed any vague pattern at all.

  I arrived at the dock several hours early, to slightly reduce the chance that I would be too late. Sitting near the harbor was a group of ten Marshallese men, drunk beyond all recourse at eleven AM on a Wednesday. They introduced themselves. Most had respectable jobs, and one was even a principal. It was not at all obvious what these working men were doing downing beers at the waterfront on a weekday morning. They helped me pass the time, though, and this was a good thing because the boat I had arrived two and half hours early for ended up leaving an hour and a half late.

  Aboard the Lakbelele, I started to feel a bit cocky. It was a predictably beautiful day. I was chatting in a little-known Austronesian language with the passengers. I didn’t feel the slightest bit seasick. I was looking forward to a relaxing passage to the tropical paradise that Arno surely was.

  Things went downhill from there. As we left the haven of the lagoon, the waves grew larger and larger, until the distance from crest to trough was a good ten feet. That may not impress veteran sailors, but it scared the hell out of me. The ocean, which I had always known as gentle hill country, was now a mountain range. The boat started rocking on every axis, sending water, cargo, and myself flying across the deck. An icebox tipped and spilled its contents. Children began crying. I became violently seasick. I steadied myself on a bench, only to find at the next large wave that the bench wasn’t attached to the floor. Then the crew caught an enormous fish—this was not a fishing boat, but they had line out, just in case—and so, in the midst of this watery chaos, there was suddenly a leviathan flopping like mad on the deck, and the men were trying to subdue the monstrous beast with the age-old technique, no doubt perfected over many generations, of hitting it repeatedly on the head with a hammer.

  Between contemplating whether my nausea was worse than or merely as bad as my fear of drowning, I gained a new appreciation of ancient seafarers. In handmade canoes, a hundred times farther from land, with no rescue teams, they had braved weather as bad as this or worse and lived to beach their canoes again.

  Like them, I arrived intact. At the dock, Emily, the American volunteer on Arno, was waiting for me. We caught a ride along the bumpy jungle road on a decrepit pick-up truck. It was truly an outer islands
vehicle: the back had been completely reconstructed out of wood, and, as for the windshield, there was none. After the long ordeal required to start the engine of this jalopy, only a fool would dare to turn it off before the end of the journey. Unfortunately, one of the tires also had a permanent leak. Instead of patching it, they simply drove on while it deflated, and then jumped out to inflate it again while the car inched forward. This car could exist nowhere else but in the outer islands.

  We arrived in the village, and I met Emily’s Marshallese host family. I mounted a preemptive strike on the inevitable question: no, I was not her boyfriend. Contrary to popular Marshallese belief, not all American men and women who appeared in public together were romantically involved. They accepted my visit anyway.

  Emily’s host brother decided to give me the country’s standard greeting: a coconut to drink. In order to do that, he first had to retrieve it from a thirty-foot palm tree. He climbed to the top, hardly using the notches that had been cut into the sides to help him, and knocked down a green fruit. He climbed back down and showed off a skill no self-respecting Marshallese man would neglect: eddep, or husking a coconut. He approached a sharp metal stick that had been planted in the ground at a forty-five degree angle. Holding the coconut firmly in both hands, he brought the fruit down with frightening strength and accuracy on the pointed end of the stick. One inch too far in one direction and it would have pierced his hand; one inch too far in the other direction and it would have pierced the nut, sending juice everywhere. With the sharp stick implanted in the fibrous outer covering, he put his weight on the fruit and ripped off a large chunk of husk. After a few deft repetitions of hold, slam down, and twist, the inner nut was exposed. He gave me my drink.

  (It took him thirty seconds to eddep. The one time I had tried this on Ujae, it had taken me thirty minutes. The next day I was sore in my shoulders, back, chest, upper arms, forearms, hands, and fingers. It was the Marshallese extreme upper-body power workout. But I stopped my training because I was too afraid that I would miss the coconut and end up husking a part of myself instead.)

  I reciprocated with several gifts of my own. I had given the family only an hour’s notice of my arrival, and I hoped that the rice, flour, sugar, coffee, creamer, cookies, Spam, canned tuna, canned corned beef, and chewing gum would make up for that fact. They did. “Kwomaron bar itok jabdewot iien” (“You can come again any time”), declared Emily’s host mother. I was welcome to sleep in their house for the two nights I was planning to spend on Arno.

  That night’s dinner was a gourmet feast by Ujae standards: rice topped with both canned tuna and canned vegetables. I was happy we weren’t dining on the delicacy that one of the family members had mentioned: sea cucumbers, which is a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one. It is slander to name that sluglike creature after the light and inoffensive cucumber. The first time you eat a sea cucumber, I was told, you get wretchedly ill, but after that they are a delicious treat. They weren’t on the menu today, and I counted my blessings.

  Chirping sounds emanated from above us as we ate. The ceiling, like every ceiling in this country, teemed with geckos. Their whole lives of hunting, fighting, and mating were played out upside-down in plain view for audience enjoyment. They were benign creatures: they knew their place (the ceiling) and didn’t encroach upon ours (the floor). They were so much more polite than cockroaches, which would continue to scurry toward you whether you had shooed them away or attempted to kill them. Geckos had another virtue: Marshallese belief held that it was good luck if their droppings hit your head. If so, there was a lot of good fortune to go around.

  The next day, I explored the village. The island was much larger than Ujae: it curved along fifteen miles of Arno Atoll, and here, at its thickest point, it was two-thirds of a mile from the ocean side to the lagoon side—no island in the country, in fact, was much thicker than this. On the lagoon side, the beach arced until it was lost in the distance, sandy and inviting along its entire expanse. Distant islands formed a Morse code of green lines, dividing the blue of the sky from the blue of the lagoon. For the first time in months, I remembered what magic this thing called a coral atoll was.

  In the village, the houses were more widely spaced than on Ujae. In fact, tiny Ujae was heavily peopled by outer island standards—its population density was almost as high as Taiwan’s—and this excess was one of the reasons for the periodic food shortages. The vegetation on Arno was identical to Ujae’s: coconut, pandanus, breadfruit. When Micronesian voyagers first reached the Marshall Islands, they brought these vital species with them. Two thousand years later, they still dominated jungle and village alike. Little else could grow in the country’s black, sandy, nutrient-poor soil, but it was also true that little else was needed. Marshallese jungles tended to have the overgrown and haphazard look of wilderness, but in reality they were many steps removed from their original state: humans had entirely remade these forests at least twice, first to grow subsistence crops, and then to grow copra for sale.

  The children mobbed me, as I expected. But after several weeks of anonymity in Majuro, I was ready for another round of fame. Once again, there they were: more “I Being a Princess” shirts. I never found out why these shirts were ubiquitous in the Marshall Islands. I only knew that at some point several thousand had entered the country and scattered to the remotest islets. Perhaps they were a failed product line—that seemed awfully likely—that an American company had donated to charity.

  At night, Emily and I visited the ocean side. Across the now calm channel lay Majuro. From Arno, it was visible only as a haze of white light over the emptiness of the black ocean, an emerald city beckoning the outer islanders to moneyed life. It beckoned me, too, but for the moment I wanted nothing else than to be where I was. The outer islands were as exasperating as I could imagine and as sublime as I could hope.

  DURING MY TWO DAYS ON ARNO, A MOST INTERESTING THING TOOK place. A local woman fell madly in love with me. Tonicca was Emily’s best friend on Arno, and she had accompanied the two of us on casual strolls through the village. I would say Tonicca was shy, except that truly shy people don’t declare their undying love within a day of meeting someone. She said I should stay on Arno or take her to Ujae with me. She told Emily to inform me of her cooking and cleaning skills. She called me her husband, said she would be sad when I left, and told me I had to come back. She also said I was tamejlaplap, especially with her. Tamejlaplap? She translated it as “to make a mistake,” but her sly grin while doing so made me think there was more to it than that. I asked a young man for the definition. First he busted a gut laughing. When he was finished with that, he told me that the word meant “missing out on the most important thing.” And what, pray tell, was the most important thing? Well, on Arno, he answered, it was the sex. In particular, he added, “helicopter-style” sex. Perhaps the Love School of Longar was real.

  While Tonicca may have been coy about her physical intentions, she was not discreet about her matrimonial ones. She made it quite clear that she would discard her old life, marry me, and move to America on a moment’s notice.

  I briefly fantasized about it. Our children would be half-Marshallese and half-Caucasian, a genetic mixture of uniformly stunning results. We could spend summers on Arno. It would be wonderful.

  No, no, it would not. I slapped myself across the cheek and told myself it was ridiculous. I have the admittedly quaint policy of not marrying someone who I’ve known for only two days. Even had I been tempted, another fact would have nixed the deal. Patrick—the same Patrick who had lived on Ujae—had briefly visited Arno and, surprise surprise, Tonicca had fallen in love with him. Once again, it seemed, Patrick and I had been made into rivals. More important, it proved that what attracted her to me was nothing more profound than my exoticness, and the feeling was mutual. So when the Lakbelele returned to Arno, I climbed aboard and left, Tonicca not in tow.

  Back in Majuro, I knew where I needed and wanted to go. Arno was only a fling, long enough to fee
l the initial high but short enough to avoid the hard work that follows. Ujae was a true relationship, with all the vicissitudes that such a thing entailed. So Arno would always remain perfect in my mind, and Ujae would always be imperfect, but it was Ujae that I would hold closest to my heart. I was still in love with the romance of exotic places, but I also saw the romance of familiarity. I was ready to return to Ujae.

  It was a strange joy to feel the wheels of the plane once again contacting the grass airstrip of Ujae Island, and to see rows of expectant villagers coming into view. The faces were now the faces of friends. The colors and curves of the island, once exotic, were now intimately known. Where burning curiosity first pulled me, sweet familiarity returned me. The joy of returning to civilization, to amenities and companionship, was matched only by the joy of returning to my island.

  It felt almost like coming home. It felt exactly like returning to a lover, time and distance having sweetened the relationship.

  12

  Confessions of a Spearfisherman

  YOU ARE ALONE IN A SILENT WORLD, ACCOMPANIED ONLY BY THE SOUND of your own breathing. In slow motion, you half walk, half fly past neon rocks and alien plants. Your face is masked, your feet webbed. Your hands clutch a metal rod, tipped with needle-sharp tines. Engulfed in a blue mist, you hunt the multicolored creatures that hover around you.

  You are spearfishing on a coral reef.

  Impaling aquatic creatures with sharp sticks had never featured prominently on my checklist of life experiences. I had never caught a fish by any method, let alone on the end of a spear, and fishing in general struck me as a sport for meditative old men reconnecting with their lost childhoods. But moving to a small island in the middle of the world’s largest ocean had a way of redirecting one’s interests. Surely I could give fishing a try.

  First, I should confess that this pastime isn’t quite as rugged as it sounds. My friends back home imagined me gnawing chunks of drift-wood to a point, standing on rocks and impaling fish with expertly aimed throws from ten feet away, à la Tom Hanks in Castaway. This was less than entirely accurate. A spearfisherman doesn’t stand in the shallows, but rather floats on the surface of the water, looking down with his snorkel mask and propelling himself with swimming flippers. His spear consists of a fiberglass shaft with a three-pronged steel end, not a sharp piece of wood. Instead of picking it up on the beach, he picks up his spear at Ace Hardware. (Admittedly, this was the Majuro branch of Ace Hardware, which carried certain items that you weren’t likely to find in American hardware stores, such as machetes.) Dagger-sharp and five feet long, however, the spear can quickly be forgiven for its untraditional origin. It could become a lethal weapon in skilled hands, or, even more likely, in unskilled hands. Yet one could nonchalantly take it as carry-on luggage when flying to the outer islands—which is exactly how I brought my spear from Majuro to Ujae.