We continued following the contour of the atoll. Flying fish skimmed over the surface of the water like dragonflies, and dozens of spinner dolphins jumped around the boat. Lisson said these were Ujae dolphins: they spent their lives circling the ocean side, never leaving the atoll. I didn’t see how he could know this, but I wanted to believe that he was right—that these dolphins, like many of my Marshallese friends, had called this little coral bend their home for all their lives.
After a few hours we passed Bokerok, a hundred-foot-wide islet swarming with seabirds, and then we approached Bok Island. A deep channel carved its way into the lagoon between Bokerok and Bok. In the clear water, it was a stroke of dark blue between the sky-colored shallows. This opening allowed the free exchange of lagoon and ocean water, as well as a convenient place for boats to enter the lagoon without risking shipwreck on the jagged coral that circled the rest of the atoll. This was where the supply ship had entered Ujae Atoll a few weeks before, bringing the gasoline that had brought us here.
We reentered the lagoon through the channel, gingerly navigated through the minefield of coralheads that guarded Bok’s shore, and waded to shore. The remoteness was stirring. The lagoon reef showed its topology perfectly through the water. Five miles away, across the width of the lagoon, two uninhabited strings of green cut the horizon.
Elmi took me to the camp he had built. It was a cozy clearing surrounded with pandanus trees, breadfruit trees, and ni-kadu: the short variety of coconut tree that generously grew its fruit within arm’s reach. It had a well, a rainwater collection tank, and a radio antenna at the top of a twenty-five-foot-tall pandanus tree. The tree, with its flimsy trunk and widely spaced branches, must have been a dangerous climb, so the presence of that antenna attested to the desire for some connection, any connection, to the outside world on this isolated islet. The camp sported a tiny shack with a gravel floor, wooden walls, tin roof, and requisite portrait of Jesus. Most important of all, the whole compound was within twenty feet of the lagoon. In short, it was everything a Marshall Islander needed. It was the Marshallese answer to the American dream—not a three-bedroom house, a manicured lawn, and a quiet suburban street, but a one-room shack, a grove of essential fruits, and a quietly teeming ocean of food.
It was already afternoon, and there was no time to be lost relaxing in the opulence of Elmi’s camp. Hunting and fishing were the orders of the day. Now, stripped even of the meager amenities of Ujae, my companions were truly in their element. They were once again hunter-gatherers, as their ancestors had been.
The men set out to hunt for coconut crabs. The species was named for its ability to break open coconuts with its claws; reportedly, those claws could also remove one’s finger. These giant purplish beasts, whose legs could span sixteen inches, had been overhunted on Ujae Island. Now only the occasional undersized specimen could be found there. Lisson quipped that eating these immature crabs constituted child abuse. Ethics aside, there was almost no meat on them. When I watched villagers struggling to extract tiny bits of flesh from the Q-tip-sized legs, I was sure they were burning more calories than they were getting. But on Bok, an embarrassment of fully grown coconut crabs could be easily found scattered in the interior.
I followed Lisson through the trackless jungle. Human hands had not tidied this place. Rotting palm fronds crisscrossed the forest floor, and spider webs hung everywhere. Huge breadfruit trees formed a thick, dripping canopy, casting an Amazonian darkness over the understory. I watched Lisson as he located his prey. He sharpened a stick with his machete and repeatedly poked it into the ground to find the crabs’ hiding places. He examined crumbling logs and hollow tree trunks. When he had found a crab, he brazenly stuck his hand into its lair, then pulled on the creature for five minutes before it finally let go.
After two successes, Lisson handed me a crab to carry. It was not difficult. Coconut crabs would grab absolutely anything that touched their claws. Presumably this had led to more than a few unpleasant incidents, but it also meant that they were easy to keep once you had caught them. You only needed to place a twig next to the animal, and it would hold on as if its life depended on it—when, in fact, its life depended on it not doing so.
We bumped into the other men. They had caught so many crabs already that they could no longer carry them by hand. This called for Advanced Crab Technique. The hunters placed the captured crustaceans into empty bags of rice, which they had brought for this purpose. How many Marshall Islanders does it take to put a crab into a bag? Two. One man held the bag open while the other immobilized the crab’s legs, then threw the creature down into its plastic prison before it could grab the side of the bag. If the crab succeeded in grasping the edge of the bag, then one of the men would tickle its abdomen until it released its grip—this was a handy trick in other situations as well—and try stowing the crab away again. Then they placed the small plastic bags into large burlap bags, which they carried over their shoulders. When the plastic bags ran out, they tied the crabs up with palm-frond cord and put them directly into the burlap bag. Soon the burlap bags were positively writhing with the combined movements of dozens of crabs.
At sunset, we returned to camp and cooked dinner. A handful of rice was in my hand, en route to my mouth, when I heard Lisson say, “Jen jar” (“Let us pray”). He spoke a heartfelt grace as I shamefacedly returned the food to my coconut-leaf plate. Before this, I had seen the islanders say grace only at large gatherings. Now they were doing it in a company of five, in the quiet remoteness of a desert island. I immediately understood the motivation: never before had I been in a place more appropriate for appreciating the bounty of the Earth.
The brief spirituality gave way to the normal off-color humor of all-male groups. The subject that night was whether I liked old women—most specifically my eccentric next-door neighbor who greeted me, unfailingly, and for no obvious reason, with a hearty “konnichiwa.” I fielded questions about the characteristics and demographics of nude beaches in America, to the fascination of all four men. As I was about to discard a skeletonized fish, Fredlee stopped me. “Hand it over,” he said. “I like to suck the brains.”
It was no joke. Sucking fish eyes was a common practice, and one expat I knew had done so with the First Lady of the country. I had never heard of sucking the brains, but I was hardly fazed by the revelation. I let Fredlee have his treat.
After dinner, Joja took me to look for lobsters on the ocean reef. During the full moon, dozens of them (or just as often none at all) would crawl up from the deeper reef into the shallows between islands. There were no lobsters that night, but many other things kept my attention. Sand-colored eels slept with menacing expressions in tide pools, while tiny white crabs floated over the sand like ghosts. I looked in a tide pool and saw an extraordinary creature slinking in and out of the water. It was a foot long and half an inch wide, faintly blue and red in color, and lined with hundreds of tiny legs. Only by the direction of its movement could I guess which end was the head. At the time I could only describe it as an aquatic millipede, but later I learned that it was a clam worm.
Back at the camp, I lay outside and watched the dark forms of frigate birds flying overhead, their bodies absurdly tiny between their huge pterodactyl wings. The stars shone in such strength and number that the constellations seemed lost among them. The Milky Way was a cloud.
When I woke up in the wet morning air, my companions had already built a fire for their morning coffee. They had brought all the fixings from Ujae, including powdered creamer. A single morning without coffee was apparently unthinkable; these Micronesian huntsmen were as addicted to caffeine as Western office types. Lisson used his machete to fashion spoons out of palm fronds, and soon we were scooping sugar into hot cups of joe.
Breakfast was white rice, but a single unopened Cup Ramen lay conspicuously next to me. “That’s for you,” said Fredlee, and then explained flatly, “Ribelles don’t eat rice for breakfast.” True enough—but then again, they don’t generally eat smo
ked turtle flippers either, and I had done that. I prevailed upon them to feed me the rice, and the respect I gained for that was palpable.
The itinerary for that day was as follows: hunt, eat, repeat. Lisson told me that this was the way of life on the uninhabited islands—not just morning, noon, and evening, but every hour of the day was mealtime, broken only by more hunting and gathering. The food was so abundant that we could eat five meals a day and still leave with a boat full of it.
I followed the men on their expeditions, or just sat in camp and watched them return with yet another kind of plant or animal. If it wasn’t crabs, it was seabirds; if it wasn’t seabirds, it was little yellow fish, shiny green fish, or coconut seedlings. They fried the fish on corrugated tin, husked the sprouted coconuts, dunked the crabs in boiling water, and then cracked the hard shells open with rocks. Soon the grounds of Elmi’s camp had transformed into a savage smorgasbord, complete with jagged crab shells, half-eaten fish, and the plucked black carcasses of birds.
Joja offered to show me the ocean side of the island. (I hardly needed a guide to take me three hundred yards, but his company was nonetheless welcome.) As we reached the other shore, I remembered all the qualities I loved about this part of a coral islet. The waves here dashed themselves on the jagged red rocks that marked the edge of the reef. For a moment, after the crest of the wave had begun to double over but before it had broken, the wave was a glorious blue, and I could see straight through it to the coralscape on which it broke. Smaller wavelets reached the shore, and as they withdrew from the gravelly beach they made the crisp, sifting sound of a sleeping person drawing in her breath.
It did not take a geologist to see the island’s origin etched clearly into the surface of each and every rock on the shore. Some were pockmarked, others covered with circles, still others lined and sharp. The rocks, each and every one of them, were dead, petrified coral. In fact, the entire island—and the entire country—was nothing more than this. Like every coral atoll, Ujae Atoll was what remained when a large volcanic island eroded into nothingness over tens of millions of years. While the dead island shrank and became a lagoon, the living reef around it held fast. Eventually, only the ring of coral remained, tracing the edges of the now vanished island. Dead coral became limestone, and here and there it accumulated and broke the surface, making an islet like the one I was standing on.
(Elsewhere in the world, other tropical archipelagoes are at different stages in the same process: the Hawaiian Islands are young and not yet eroded; middle-aged Bora Bora is half eaten away, with its reef far removed from its shores; and death’s-door Aitutaki is very creatively called an almost atoll—the island is nearly gone, with only the encircling reef left to indicate its former size.)
Every iota of the Marshall Islands was thus born as a living creature. I was walking on skeletons, surrounded by growing flesh. The dead rock of the original volcanic island had long since vanished, but its halo of coral had remained, precisely because it was alive and growing. For seventy million years, the atoll had been assaulted on every side by violent breakers, but the great coral monument had always won. I hoped that, somehow, that would always be so. I knew full well it might not.
Some coral rocks had only recently died and washed up on the shore intact. Joja pointed out one specimen that was black and looked like a small, wiry tree. It seemed fragile, but Joja convinced me I could do almost anything to it and it would not break, so I crushed the supple coral into a ball and watched as it sprung back unharmed into its original shape. Other things had found their final resting place on the beach: bottles, rugs, but above all flip-fop soles—dozens upon dozens of them, because that’s what everyone wore. Elsewhere in the country people had discovered cocaine hidden in beached buoys. When a drug-trafficking ship was caught during its run, the crew would jettison the cargo, and the contraband would end up on some unsuspecting island. According to legend, Ujae was in kapin meto, the “bottom of the ocean,” where detritus and demons alike washed up to shore.
At noon, the men prepared the boat and we left, driving to a section of reef where Elmi had promised to find a giant clam. The best spot, he said, was next to the channel, where the inflow of ocean water created a powerful current. When I splashed into the water to watch Elmi’s clam hunt, I quickly exhausted myself fighting the current, even with my swimming flippers. I was not pleased to remember that this area was as famous for its sharks as it was for its giant clams. Meanwhile, Elmi, so much more skillful than myself, was moving effortlessly against the push of the water, kicking off with impervious bare feet from one sharp coralhead to another.
He fulfilled his promise. He found a giant clam, though it was nowhere near the twelve-foot monstrosity Randall had described before I left. The hundred-strong shark armadas and elephantine eels had also failed to materialize. It was clear that Randall had a very tenuous grasp of measurement, if not reality. Remembering the other descriptions of this Lost World, not to mention the previous volunteer’s godlike skills, it dawned on me that exaggeration was a habit among local men.
Nonetheless, the giant clam lived up to its rather descriptive name. Although it was a fifth of the size it was in Randall’s imagination, it was also ten times the size of any clam I had seen before. At two and half feet across and a foot wide, it was far too heavy for Elmi to lift, and its shell was so dense and hard that the ancient Marshallese had made adze blades out of it. Elmi cut out the inner meat with a machete and left the monstrous shell where it was. He dropped the meat onto the boat, and a stranger object I have never seen. It was a multicolored gelatinous mass, fringed with wrinkled folds and surrounding a core of alien organs. If I hadn’t known what it was, I would have guessed it was an extraterrestrial embryo. Also, from the size of it, I could tell I was going to be eating it for the next few weeks. (It turned out to taste exactly like clam, albeit in chunks as large as pancakes.)
Then Joja spied a sea turtle. Its head broke the surface a hundred yards from the boat, and suddenly we were chasing it. I waited for the men to impress me with some ancient, ingenious trick for catching the three-hundred-pound beast. But they just jumped into the water and tried to grab the animal with their hands. The turtle swam into the open ocean before they could subdue it.
We spent the rest of the day island-hopping, treating the atoll like a grocery store with no price tags. Staying dry on this expedition was simply not an option. I was deluged with rain, soaked with sweat, blown with ocean spray, swimming in salt water, bushwhacking through wet undergrowth, sitting in a half-inch puddle of water (or worse) in the boat, and the humidity was always around 80 percent. The thrill of adventure alternated with fantasies of putting on dry socks.
We headed along the eastern edge of the atoll. At Alle Island, the men collected clams on the spectacular coral reef—not giant clams, but the medium-sized clams that lived embedded in the coral. The animal inside the shell was a brilliant turquoise or golden brown, and the psychedelic colors made this species a favorite in aquariums. Their Marshallese name, mejanwod, meant “eye of the coral.” As I looked at the blue or brown slit of flesh peering out of the coral, opening when safe and closing when threatened, I could understand how the species earned its name.
Next stop was Bik, an island as beautiful as its name was boring. (To the Marshallese ear it was even worse: bik was very close to the word for “sperm,” which the guys were only too happy to point out.) The shoreline sands, at six feet high, were towering cliffs in this country, and from the top of them I gazed upon an extraordinary progression from white sand to auburn rock to bright shallows to dark lagoon.
One island remained on our whirlwind tour. Ebeju was a postcard-perfect islet with a haunted cemetery, buried treasure, and a host of colorful tales, one of them involving a woman having an affair with an eel. It was also the legendary home of jebwa dancing, as the elder Nitwa had explained to me.
Though the island was now uninhabited, Elmi had grown up here with his parents, siblings, and a few other fam
ilies. He recalled the lifestyle with fondness. “Life was better there. There was no one to bother you. On Ujae, people always bother each other and talk behind each other’s backs. But here you can be alone and peaceful.” The other men agreed that it was unfortunate that everyone had left the remote islands of Ujae Atoll and moved to Ujae Island. Too many people now called it home, and village harmony had suffered for it. They mentioned that one family had built a second home on the deserted ocean beach of Ujae, and they considered this their “vacation home.” No matter that it was a five-minute walk from their primary home. When they felt the need to get away from the micropolitics of village life, they would hike those five hundred yards and arrive at their very own fortress of solitude.
Elmi gave me a rundown of Ebeju’s lore. There was an old graveyard that only a select few could visit without arousing the anger of the spirits. Elmi said that as a one-time inhabitant of this island, he could visit the cemetery, but I absolutely could not. I promised Elmi that I wouldn’t.
He told me another tale. During World War II, two Japanese soldiers had given Elmi’s grandparents a large stash of gold. They buried it for safekeeping, but died before telling anyone where it was hidden.
We landed on the smooth beach. I began to see why many of the islanders considered this the most desirable of all the atoll’s islands. The beach was entirely free of rocks, and the lagoon floor sloped gracefully down from the shore. Ten feet out, the water was deep enough to accommodate large coral formations and their fish populations, which could be caught by line from the beach. Elsewhere on Ebeju, the lagoon was sandy and free of coral, making ideal spots for swimming and bathing, and the deep water made it easy to approach the island in a boat.
Surviving Paradise Page 22
