A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  It was a simple matter, in the gloom, to imagine sacrifices committed by torchlight, to hear the screams and see the blood flowing over the holy stone. The people of Taipivai, the Typee, had been the most notorious cannibals of Nuku Hiva, the most feared tribe on the island. There had been skulls hanging from the branches of the sacred banyan tree; there had been human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism perhaps as late as 1900.

  Later, I sat on a vista point overlooking the valley of Hatiheu and let the afternoon sun bake away the vague, sickly sad sense of dread that had descended on me at the tiki above Taipivai. Hatiheu was the valley where Robert Louis Stevenson had lived. The gentle beauty of the place suited my mood. The hills, alive with soft, calf-high ferns, spilled down toward the sea in waves of variegated green. The sound of the surf rose faintly from the bay below and mingled with the lazy hum of insects, the sigh of the breeze through the trees, the thunder of the waterfalls and the constant symphony of bird song that was punctuated at odd intervals by a single strangled prehistoric croak.

  Below, a series of jagged black rock spires, too steep to carry vegetation, rose like sentinels just above the bay. They

  might have been the parapets of some alien civilization, or so I thought, and then the idea of blood flowing under the lurid light of torches hit me again so that the contrast of beauty and terror, of life and death, seemed especially vivid. The tiki had been female, but perhaps the swollen organs were not meant to indicate sexual excitement. Perhaps the god that stood over the place of death was in the process of giving birth.

  On the island of Hiva Oa, I stayed for a time in Puamau, a village of some two hundred souls. As is the case almost everywhere in the Marquesas, there is no commercial hotel in the village. A visitor simply asks to see the mayor, who makes it his business to provide shelter. The mayor of Puamau decided that I could stay in his village, and I was given a comfortable room in his own house, a poured concrete dwelling with a working toilet and shower. Meals were provided along with the room for a cost of about thirty dollars a day. I ate well on roast pork, passion fruit, platters of raw tuna fillets marinated in coconut milk and lime, and French bread that was baked daily in a wood-fired oven.

  I had come to Puamau to watch the single most important event in the economic life of the village. The copra schooner was about to make its monthly visit. Copra is dried coconut meat. The islanders collect coconuts, husk them, and leave the meat to dry in large wooden beds. The dried meat is stuffed into burlap sacks and taken to the beach for loading. The copra is transported by ship to a factory in Tahiti, where the meat is cleaned and crushed. The coconut oil is used in soap, shampoo, synthetic rubber, glycerin, hydraulic brake fluid, margarine, and vegetable shortening.

  Copra is the single source of income for most Marque-sans, and the arrival of the copra schooner is cause for celebration. People who live up in the hills bring down strings of horses loaded with copra. Everyone gathers on the beach as the boat steams into Puamau Bay. Women play

  a kind of bingo that may only otherwise be played on Sundays. Young boys strum guitars and sing. Children play in the surf. The able-bodied men hoist 150-pound sacks of copra on their shoulders and trudge out through the pounding surf to the schooner's "whale boat," a twenty-foot-long craft designed to carry heavy loads through the breakers and out to the anchored ship.

  The schooner is Puamau's link to the outside world. When the whale boat returns from the schooner, it is full of consumer goods ordered by the villagers and paid for with the thirty cents per pound they earn for their copra. I saw the men offload a few stoves, a refrigerator, and some furniture; but for the most part, the copra schooner delivered stereo systems, dirt bikes, motorcycles, and televisions. In the two days it took to load and unload the schooner, I saw at least half a dozen Sonys and as many VCRs invade Puamau.

  The French Polynesian government installed television transmitters in Taiohae and Atuona in 1979. Relay stations on the mountaintops beam the signal down to smaller villages like Puamau. The programs are recorded in Tahiti and broadcast, commercial free, for two hours a day. In Puamau, at the mayor's home, I saw Towering Inferno, an episode of "Shogun" and some kung fu epic out of Hong Kong.

  A French official, who would rather not be quoted, told me that the government provides television because the people love it. They love it so much, according to this man, that many of them might move to Tahiti simply to watch "Dallas" once a week. In Tahiti, however, jobs are scarce and there is a growing problem of overpopulation. "The idea is," the official said, "that if Marquesans have TV at home, we won't have to provide food and homes for them in Tahiti."

  The fact that television exists in so remote a land, in a place littered with the artifacts of the old times and the old beliefs, sometimes staggers the imagination and presents the traveler with a number of truly remarkable culture crosscurrents. The day after the copra boat left, for in-

  stance, the mayor led me on a short walk through the jungle to a tiki that stood above his house. There are more than twenty-five tikis in the Puamau valley, but this one was eight feet high: the largest tiki in all of French Polynesia.

  Above the ceremonial site there was a steep, rocky spire that rose to a needlelike summit. We began climbing this spire, the mayor and I, using rope he'd brought along. After a stiff hour's climb, we reached the summit. The mayor moved down a few feet among the ironwood trees and reached into a small cave about two feet in diameter. He pulled out a human skull and began telling a long, incredibly involved story about how a man—or more properly, a man's head—came to be buried there.

  It seems that some time ago—I later placed the date at about 1900—there was a queen in Puamau who lived in a house on the large stone terrace not far from the mayor's house. In this time, said the mayor, a prolonged drought threatened the staple breadfruit crop, and there was danger of famine. The queen requested a human sacrifice to appease the gods, and three men took it upon themselves to perform this duty. They pulled all the hair out of their heads and hung their machetes around their necks, which was a dead giveaway to everyone else in the village that they were looking for someone expendable. The people of Puamau gathered together on the beach for mutual safety.

  The three hairless men were forced to find a victim in another drainage. "It was over there," the mayor said, pointing to a small ridge, "where they saw a man in a coconut tree." The story became very detailed here. The mayor wanted me to know precisely how many shots were fired (three), how many times the man was hit (twice), and which was the fatal shot (the one that passed through the right kidney).

  The dead man's head and long bones were carried to the top of the spire, where they were placed in the cave. The rains came immediately, of course, and Puamau was saved. The French heard about the murder, however, and sent a gunboat to Puamau Bay. The queen was imprisoned on the ship until the village surrendered the killers. The three men

  were taken out to the ship at gunpoint and were never seen again. The queen was released.

  The mayor pointed down to a house in Puamau and said the name of the family that lived there. "That is this man's family," he said, holding up the skull. The mayor stared into the empty eye sockets, in the manner of a man who is mentally adding a set of figures. "This is the great grandfather," he said at last.

  "And the family knows he is up here?" I asked.

  "Yes, of course."

  "And they don't want to get this skull and bury it properly?"

  "No," the mayor said. He seemed to regard the question as both strange and mildly offensive. "Why would they?"

  It was late in the afternoon—the mayor's story had taken almost two hours to tell. He carefully placed the skull back in the cave and said we would have to hurry back down to the house. The television would be coming on soon, and he wanted to watch "Dynasty."

  I am living in Atuona, in a bungalow near the black sand beach where Gauguin painted many of his most famous oils. The bungalow stands on the site of Gauguin's house. In recen
t years, the place sometimes has been the home of travelers whose reconfirmations were not recorded. Perhaps these hapless visitors reacted as I did; perhaps they spent a day or two trying to figure out how to change their schedule or contact the people they were supposed to meet at home. Over the space of days, perhaps others also felt the sun burn away their anger, and maybe they settled into the gentle rhythm of life in the Marquesas. These days I rise at six o'clock, just as the five or six roosters who seem to live under my window explode in paroxysms of ear-shattering bravado. The old man who lives next door is generally up already, sitting on his porch and playing taped Tahitian laments on his immense JVC boom box.

  I pull on my shorts and step out onto my own porch. The old man and I nod to each other, but he expects me to ignore him for the rest of the day, just as I expect him to ignore me. Mind your own business, as the bishop said, is the motto here.

  About seven-thirty, I walk five blocks to the bakery and buy a loaf of good French bread fresh from the oven. I keep forgetting to bring money, but the woman behind the counter recognizes me and runs a tab under the name of "M. Americain."

  The dog that has adopted me follows at my heels. He strolled into the bungalow several days ago and I shouted one of the few phrases I know in Marquesan: "Keer aw." The words, generally addressed to invading dogs, chickens, horses, or pigs, mean "get out." I had the misfortune of running into a dog who thought his name was Keer Aw. He gave me one of those open-mouthed looks of keen canine anticipation, the kind that seems to say: "Oh boy, wanna play, got something for me to eat?"

  So Keer Aw lives on my porch. He sleeps at my feet while I type and tips over the garbage whenever he thinks I'm not looking.

  About eleven-thirty, when it gets too hot to work, I walk down to the Gauguin beach for a swim. I am trying to improve my French with the aid of a French/English dictionary and a French comic book I found about the American cowboy, Stormy Joe, and his comical sidekick, Sardine. Already I have learned to say, "Drop your gun or I'll kill you like a mad dog."

  Keer Aw lies in the sand while I read. After an hour or so, he gets up and slinks off down the beach, looking back over his shoulder in the most guilty fashion imaginable. "It's not what you think," he says. "I'm not really sneaking back to the bungalow to tip over your garbage."

  About two-thirty, I walk back home and clean up the garbage. Keer Aw, skulking under the picnic table on my porch, eyes me cautiously. I step into the bungalow, bleach myself down, take a cold shower, and lie down for a brief nap. Outside my window, chickens are lunching on some

  ants that are feeding on spilled garbage. I find the pluck and cluck of contented poultry curiously soothing.

  Some days, I borrow a stallion from a lady who lives nearby and ride over the ridge to a bay called Taaoa where there is a beach that seems devoid of nonos. There is something almost unbearably romantic about riding alone, galloping bareback across the sand as the breakers thunder into the shore.

  Some evenings I go to a Chinese family's home on a hill above Atuona's hundred lights. The family runs an informal restaurant. I'm particularly fond of the river shrimp dinner.

  Strangely, I've stopped my habit of visiting the airline office and reconfirming my flight every day. I think I'm becoming almost Marquesan in my attitude: if I'm on the next plane out, fine. If not, what the hell. My work is going well, the food is good, the land is vibrant, I'm content and my dog loves me for no very good reason. Money is no problem. There is plenty to eat growing on the hills above town if it should come to that. Worrying about something I can't control, something like another missed flight, would simply spoil an otherwise perfect day.

  WET WORK

  N

  comatose, like a man in a sensory-deprivation chamber. Each time I took a breath, I'd rise a few inches; each time I exhaled, I'd sink a like amount.

  I was neutrally buoyant, completely free of the gravity that had seemed a cruel and unreasonable force only an hour before. The silence sang, and the moral aspects of my condition began to recede. I really wasn't such a bad guy, and it probably wouldn't cost all that much to get the tux cleaned and mended. The pain in my joints, which had made my arms and legs feel the way trees growing at the edge of the tundra look, had begun to subside. Each time I exhaled, another portion of my pain arose inside the bubbles and burst on the surface of the world, leaving me feeling stronger, healthier, more morally staunch.

  And so it came to me, as I lay on the bottom of the pool, exhaling ailments, that scuba diving cures hangovers. And I was hooked.

  ^ to e can learn from the wacky antics of our under-

  I ^k M water friends and even apply these lessons to IH V our everyday life: a single example should suf-mMwm fice. In tropical waters, especially around coral ^B ^V reefs, one often sees small blue-and-black or yel-low-and-black fish known as wrasses. They usually hover close to coral heads and escape into small niches when big, predatory fish approach. A few of the smaller species of wrasse, however, stay well away from any protection. Out in the open water, in what is called a cleaner station, these cleaner wrasses twitch about in such a way that their colors catch the sun and attract the very fish that habitually eat most wrasses.

  The predator in question may be a two-foot-long grouper. It approaches the cleaner wrasse and opens its mouth wide. The wrasse swims directly into the grouper's open mouth, an apparent suicide, but there it eats the tropical parasites that accumulate and annoy the grouper. This is an

  example of a good business deal: the wrasse gets a meal; the grouper gets rid of its parasites. Symbiosis. Mutual advantage.

  In these same waters there is another fish that looks very much like the upright and businesslike cleaner wrasse. The blenny, however, is an entirely different type of fish. The sly blenny finds a wrasse in full dance at its cleaner station, and there it sets itself up for wicked business by imitating the dance of the honest fish. When the grouper approaches, mouth open, the blenny darts in, tears off a hunk of flesh, and escapes to a nearby niche the enraged grouper can't penetrate. The blenny is a fish that lives in treachery and feeds off the flesh of those who would freely feed it. It is sometimes called a false cleaner, though I prefer to think of it as a lawyer fish.

  Diving makes you feel so good you could just die: rapture of the deep is a wonderfully poetic name for nitrogen narcosis, an intoxication produced by breathing nitrogen gas under pressure. The only time I've been noticeably "narked" was in the Blue Hole, a four-hundred-foot-deep pit off the coast of Belize (formerly British Honduras). The hole is set in shallow water, about an hour by light plane from the coast, and it contains structures that help prove a long-held scientific theory. It is thought that during the ice ages so much water was concentrated in the form of ice at the polar caps that the seas of the world were actually shallower by some four hundred feet.

  To see the structures that support that theory, I was going to have to dive deeper than the maximum safe sport-diving depth of one hundred thirty feet. There are several dangers involved in exceeding recommended depths, and to understand them you have to know a bit about gas laws. The air in your tank is just ordinary air. But it is packed in there at somewhere between two thousand and three thou-

  sand pounds per square inch. The genius of the regulator is that it feeds air into your mouth at ambient pressure: if the water is pressing on you at five times the surface pressure, then you are getting air that is five times as dense as surface air.

  You need this pressurized air. Your body is mostly water, and for diving purposes, it is best to think of it as a sealed plastic sack full of water. The lungs are two air-filled balloons inside that sack. The deeper you dive, the more pressure on the sack, and the more the balloons want to collapse. Breathing ordinary air at a hundred feet would be as difficult as trying to suck that air into your lungs from the surface with a narrow straw.

  At one hundred feet, a diver is breathing air that is four times as dense as sea-level air. Each breath contains four times the normal compone
nt of nitrogen. Nitrogen is pretty much inert, and it is passed into the tissue and fluids of the body without being utilized. The fatty tissues of the brain and nervous system, however, seem most susceptible to nitrogen absorption. All this excess nitrogen banging around in your brain can make you perilously goofy. Divers use martinis as a rough measure of narcosis: each thirty-three feet of depth makes you feel as light-headed as one martini on an empty stomach.

  To see for myself the reason that the Blue Hole is an object of scientific study, I was going to have to go about two hundred feet, or a little more than six martinis' worth. At that depth some divers have felt a euphoria so intense they've given their regulator to a fish and died laughing.

  The hole is shaped like an hourglass, and I sank past its high waist at about ninety feet. The wall sloped inward then, forming a "ceiling" over me. At one hundred thirty feet I saw the first structure. It was a stalactite, hanging from the roof of the wall. There were others, deeper down, twelve to fifteen of them. They were huge, twenty-five to thirty feet long, and there was no oceanographic explanation for them. Stalactites can only grow in terrestrial caves, which meant the Blue Hole must have been a dry cave or

  sinkhole during the shallow-water times of the ice ages.

  I remember floating upside down, looking at the stalactites, pleasantly aware of a growing euphoric narcosis. The stalactites pointed down, deeper down, and they were of a shape I remember from church. They looked like statues of the Virgin in her robes. The sound of my exhalations was symphonic, and the Virgins hung there, pointing into the darkness far below. Inexplicably I thought of Atlantis. If the legendary island had been an oasis of culture and knowledge during the ice ages, then the flood that destroyed it must surely have come when the polar caps released their water. The thought seemed monumental, earthshaking, historic in import. Bubbles rose up my body and rolled up a Virgin's robe, so that in one small corner of my mind I knew I was still upside down, and I was shining a light on the end of a stalactite, and there were crimson blotches, like carnations, where the face of the Virgin should have been. She was pointing down into the darkness, and oh, I wanted to dive deeper. Even deeper.