Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  I am the same and different too. Now I am an anthropology student in need of fieldwork experience, making the idea of returning to Ujae seem almost well advised. My job this time is to understand things as they are, not to imagine them as they should be. Annoyances are converted into material. My erstwhile pupils forget to challenge me because I am no longer an authority to be challenged. Instead they greet my return with shocked smiles that I find touching. Little Easter has graduated from the threatening threes to the somewhat saner sixes, and, as a result, has two tantrums per day instead of per minute. As a final blessing, the island has become inexplicably cockroach-free. For a week or two, I achieve an almost sustainable happiness on Ujae—until I slip into that familiar malaise, the emptiness of being everyone’s friend and nobody’s intimate.

  THE GREAT GIFT OF MY SECOND JOURNEY TO UJAE WAS THAT I COULD separate my feelings from theirs. I still felt discomforts, severe ones, but I now recognized them as my own. While I was still grumpily unconvinced that this society had preserved some sort of primal wisdom long since abandoned by the West, I did come to wonder if people on this island were happier than on my own. An unhurried ethos combined with massive subsidies let the outer islanders live quite contentedly. They took pleasure in much of their work, they expressed pride in their culture, and they seemed not to worry unduly. As I participated in the leisurely summer activity of kabwiro, in which families gather to peel and slice breadfruit for preservation, I told a woman, “I think Americans could learn a few things from Marshallese people.”

  “We could learn things too,” she replied.

  It was a beautiful moment.

  But this time around, there was something on my mind more important than my immediate happiness and theirs. There was even something telling me that islanders’ apparent lack of worry might itself be something to worry about. It was those trees, those fallen palms, and what I knew they suggested. Was the erosion really a result of global warming? It didn’t matter. Whatever the cause, it made the threat of sea level rise feel immediate and real, rather than distant and abstract. Most of my first year, I had managed not to think about the issue. Now my denial was challenged.

  The funny thing was this: my reaction wasn’t fear. It was relief. Precisely at the moment I accepted the threat as real, I stopped being terrified by it. After all, what may happen in the future was always scarier than what is happening now. Acceptance didn’t add a burden—it took one away. I was freed from the weight of nervous denial.

  There were other reasons to welcome the realization. Given that the problem was real, I was glad that it was obvious and visible rather than subtle and insidious. I felt thrilled to be a small part of a global effort. And maybe, just maybe, I was happy to have some really sexy material for my master’s thesis.

  So I did what any self-respecting young anthropology student would do: I studied it. The fallen palms had forced me to face the issue, but had they done the same to the islanders? I went around in that way that anthropologists do, confounding the locals with sideways questions. “Are there any problems on this island?” I asked everyone I could corner.

  They smiled and said things were quite nice, really. We have coconuts and pandanus and breadfruit and we give them to each other.

  I asked, “How is life going to be in the future?”

  They predicted the erosion of their culture but did not mention the erosion of their shores.

  I asked, “Will Marshall Islanders still live here in fifty or a hundred years?”

  They told me that some of their relatives had emigrated to America, but they usually came back. They liked it here.

  It seemed undiplomatic to ask, “So, how do you feel about the possible destruction of your entire country?” Instead I said, with the feigned stupidity that is a staple of the ethnographer’s life, “I’ve seen a palm tree that has fallen toward the lagoon shore. I don’t know why this has happened. Can you please explain it to me?”

  They said it was the wind, or the currents, or maybe the coconut tree was just old—and not to worry, because it was only that one tree.

  I knew that the Marshallese parliament had discussed climate change on the radio, and that the islanders listened to their local stations nearly nonstop. It was inconceivable that they had never heard of rising seas. Meanwhile, concrete evidence, amounting to much more than “one tree,” was sitting in their backyard. Why didn’t they talk about it?

  There were some who did. A few said they had heard the scientific predictions but trusted they weren’t true, because God had promised to Noah that he would never flood the earth again. “When he destroys the earth the second time, it will be with fire, not water,” they would say, reassuringly.

  There were others who told me, “Yes, the trees have fallen. There is more water in the ocean nowadays. Scientists have said the world is warmer and the ice is melting.” They would provide apocalyptic visions, much worse than what scientists said: that the sea would rise fifty feet in fifty years, that it would reach the top of the palm trees, that they would have to swim. “Ujae won’t be good for living,” said Fredlee, “but it might be good for spearfishing!” And he laughed. The faithful (or was it faithless?) interpreted sea level rise as a second biblical flood: God was punishing Marshallese people’s sins, their waning allegiance to their traditional values, the tendency of young women these days to break old taboos and flirt and drink and fornicate. The rising tide was a sign of biblical End Days, along with violence, disease, and radiation. One man even gave a date: by 2010, people would start killing each other.

  And they shared stories with me. When I was on Ujae the first time, the fact that waves had unearthed an old corpse had seemed like nothing more than a random factoid on an island full of random factoids. Now it was part of a pattern. High tide was exposing ancient burial grounds: they were a jolot—precious inheritance—from their ancestors, locals told me. They added that, in one area, the shoreline had receded by fifteen feet in the last few decades. There were other worrisome developments, too. Years before, a Japanese fishing boat had run aground on the reef several miles from Ujae. That in itself wasn’t a problem—in fact, it had created a prized fishing area. But now, the ship had started to erode. Just three years before, the boxy shape had dominated the horizon in this panoramically flat world. Now it was barely visible. Lisson said, “I think you will come back in a few more years. And when you do, that ship will be gone.” As it collapsed, it had spilled batteries into the water. Fishermen said that the coral near the wreck had turned black, and if you swam there, your skin would hurt. One man said that he wouldn’t swim even around Ujae, miles away.

  I asked Fredlee why so many people declined to talk about climate change when there were so many signs that seemed to confirm it. Surely they had heard of the problem? His answer: “Yes, they know. We’ve all heard about it on the radio. But, you see—they know, but they don’t really believe.” It was a classic case of denial.

  Or perhaps it was grace. Were the islanders avoiding the issue out of fear or out of a desire to get on with their lives? When they answered the question “Will Marshallese people still be here in fifty years?” with a heartfelt yes and no mention of rising seas, was that delusion, or was that determination?

  I wanted to get the government’s perspective on the threat, and I was, despite the excitement of my inquiries, predictably giddy with loneliness. I decided to go back to Majuro.

  This I barely achieved.

  You see, I had a plane ticket, and I considered it a wonderfully tangible piece of constancy in a country where plans always changed. But there was one thing I had forgotten, and that was that a ticket, no matter how tangible, is useless if the vehicle in question doesn’t arrive. And this plane had not arrived in a month. When I first made my plans, there was to be a flight in just a week. Then it was supposed to be in two weeks, and then it was supposed to be in eight days, and then it was supposed to be in ten days, until the schedule was changing nearly minute to minute, and I
realized that there was no schedule. Only one-third of Air Marshall Islands’ fleet was operational. That meant one plane. As a result, the scheduling was so tight and desperate that the last plane to Ujae had come only to evacuate a villager to the Majuro hospital. What if the one remaining plane broke? There might never be a flight to Majuro, I realized, and it’s hard to communicate how nervous this can make one feel.

  Then the airline representative announced that there would be a flight in four days, and he seemed more convinced than usual that this was actually true. I scrambled to his “office”—meaning his thatched house—and after dutifully eating baked breadfruit dipped in grease, told him that I needed to be on that flight.

  He said it was full.

  That was when true island fever set in. It was not within my power to leave, nor even to know when I could leave. “Curse Air Marshall Islands,” I spat. “A pox on both their offices!”

  No was not an answer. I nagged the agent until he got visibly annoyed with me, which was something that took doing in this country. But he was adamant: the flight was full.

  I held on to an irrational optimism. In the world of Marshallese bureaucracy, nothing was certain. That was the source of my desperation, but also the source of my hope. If there was no plan, then anything could happen—even a miracle. And if the Air Marshall Islands staff was incompetent enough to keep their fleet of exactly three planes operational, perhaps they were just incompetent enough to let me on board an already full flight. Perhaps the pilot would see the look of crazed desperation in my eyes, and sense the urgency. But what if he didn’t? What lengths would I go to, what depths would I sink to in my quest to escape? Would I be capable of bribing the pilot? What about playing the Caucasian card and usurping the reservation of some poor Marshallese child trying to get off Ujae in order to start school? What about faking an illness and demanding a medical evacuation—or intentionally injuring myself for a get-out-of-jail-free card, like some sort of Vietnam War draft dodger? I flashed through a catalog of horrible fantasies.

  The morning of the flight came. I packed in a frenzy, feeling certain I would not fly that day, but equally sure I could not bear to stay. I arrived at the airport and avoided eye contact with the airline agent, who surely thought I was cracked. A tense hour passed. Finally the vessel arrived in that flurry of sound and wind that accompanies a propeller-drawn plane landing a hundred feet in front of you. The pilot climbed out. I walked up to him, heart pounding. “Hear my tale of woe,” I nearly said. Instead I told him, lamely, “I know the flight is full, but I need to leave today.”

  He looked at me and said, “Are you on the list?”

  I felt like a tramp attempting to crash the Oscars. I said, “No.”

  I was astonished when he replied, “I’ll see what I can do.” What could he possibly do? You could see the whole cabin in one quick glance: either there was a seat or there wasn’t.

  Several minutes passed. Passengers and packages were loaded and unloaded. Two bright pink Australian tourists, just now returning from a week-long diving adventure at Bikini Atoll, gazed upon the picturesqueness of a grass airstrip, an airport shack, and a hundred outer islanders. I heard one say to the other, “Let’s get some footage of these villagers.”

  Then the pilot got my attention.

  He gave me the thumbs up.

  I’ve been lucky enough to have a few transcendent moments in my life. This was one of them. When I stepped on the plane, I knew that nothing could take me out. In a seat at the back, I spied the airline agent—the same man who had told me the flight was full. He had conveniently declined to inform me that he was one of the passengers. Our eyes met. He had said “impossible” and I had proven him wrong, and I couldn’t blame him for being irked.

  I have no idea why I was allowed on board. My seat faced backward and nearly blocked the emergency exit—perhaps some sort of special “desperate stranded expat” seat, kept around for occasional missions of mercy.

  If so, my rescue was the last. That one functioning plane broke a few days afterward, and flights to the small islands were canceled. A year later, there was still no plane to Ujae.

  I had escaped Ujae forever—again. Now I was back in Majuro, where little had changed other than the taxi drivers receiving a whopping 50 percent raise, to seventy-five cents per journey. I lived for a week on the concrete floor of a cookhouse with Alfred and Tior, who were staying in Majuro while Alfred visited the hospital. He was a diabetic like so many in this country of rice and sugar eaters, and the doctor had been forced to amputate half of his foot. That part of him had been cut short, but his gentle humor had not.

  It took half a week at this house before it dawned on me that one of the people who lived here, that girl with the quiet little infant, was my very own student from Ujae. She was Jolina, my favorite of them all, clever and ambitious and kind, and one of the two who had passed the high school entrance exam. I hadn’t recognized her, perhaps because I couldn’t conceive of one of my children now having a child of her own. She had dropped out of high school in Ebeye after just a few months, and now, at nineteen, she had a baby with the eldest son of Lisson and Elina.

  Of course I felt disappointed. I had invested so much in her. I had tutored her specially for the test. I had tried and hoped. And I had a grand plan for her: she was to be a leader in a new generation of educated, empowered Marshall Islanders. Now I understood that this was my idea, not hers. She had taken a different path, and this was a valuable lesson for me. With a kind-hearted husband, a healthy daughter, and more contentment than I could shake a fist at, she had succeeded in the true sense of the word.

  My first mission in Majuro was to talk to Ujae’s chief, Mike Kabua. I met him at his compound just across the road from the De Brums’ Majuro homestead, and interviewed him while the Marshallese equivalent of a personal assistant delivered canned corned beef and sea turtle fat on a platter and fanned the flies away by hand for the duration of the meal. It was a sultan’s court.

  Mike Kabua talked a bit about life in the outer islands. Then it happened. “Peter,” he said. “I heard about the jewelry that they found on Ujae. I want it back. Please go to the museum and get it. It belongs to me.”

  The saga of the cursed artifacts continued.

  I could have pulled an Indiana Jones on him, broke out a bullwhip and bellowed, “They belong in a museum!” But I decided against it. Instead, I taxied to the museum, convinced I had been sent on a fool’s errand. Why would the staff of the national museum just give me these artifacts, merely because I claimed to be on assignment from a chief? I argued my case to a bored-looking employee. He betrayed no hint of skepticism, as if he received these sorts of requests every day. He took me around the display room and asked me which artifacts I was referring to. Imagine that! I could have pointed to any of the objects on display, the finest of their collection, and he would have opened the case and handed them over. I said that I didn’t think the artifacts were on display, so he took me to the storage room, and gave me free reign to ransack the place. Unaware of any irony, he breezily told me how a former employee had made off with a huge number of items. I secretly thought, well yeah, if you’ll give display-quality artifacts to any random foreigner who asks for them. . . .

  The jewelry from Ujae could have been anywhere in that room, and the man had no information with which to help me—such as a system of organization, for example. I prepared myself mentally for a very long search. I chose a drawer at random and opened it. It housed a nudie magazine. Perhaps it was some sort of ancient Marshallese pornography flawlessly preserved in a peat bog. I opened a second drawer, pushed aside a few baggies of soil samples, and spied a little envelope. I opened it, and to my great surprise, there they were: two bracelets and a necklace—those unassuming bits of ancient bling that had earned me so many strange experiences.

  A note was attached to them, and it had my name on it. I was sure I had donated the artifacts anonymously, to avoid assassination, but no matter now. Th
e employee led me to the museum director, who listened to my story, glanced at the objects, and, without even asking for ID, okayed the operation. Once again I was in possession of the artifacts, and once again I couldn’t understand why they had been entrusted to me.

  I met the chief the next morning at a parliament meeting, where he was wearing his senatorial hat. The security consisted of a guard asking me to change out of my shorts into pants. Fair enough. Returning in formal wear (T-shirt, flip-fops, and pants), I watched the parliament do its thing. Their discussions were serious and formal, but the atmosphere wasn’t. Seven out of twenty-one senators arrived late. Then, with the entire country listening via radio, a senator’s cell phone started bleeping one of those familiar electronic ditties, and everyone in the chamber laughed. When it was getting close to lunch, one senator turned on his microphone and said, “Can’t we take a break? We’re hungry!” The Speaker carried the motion and the parliament adjourned for lunch. I said hello to my old friend Senator Lucky and delivered the artifacts to Mike Kabua. He was delighted.

  Now that I had redeemed my soul, lifted my curse, and joined the global movement to repatriate indigenous artifacts to their customary owners, I had a second mission: to meet the president. This time for real.

  It seemed feasible. I had nearly managed it three and half years ago using nothing but an imperfect grasp of the language, and now I had a second advantage: I had already gotten in good with the Marshallese government, and it wasn’t just the two senators. After leaving Alfired and Tior with many thanks and even more bags of rice, I shacked up with the just-retired Marshallese ambassador to the United Nations. (Bush had once asked him, off-handedly, how life was in the Marshall Islands. The ambassador was tempted to reply, “You should deal with the legacy of nuclear testing,” but instead retreated to, “Just fine, thank you.”)