Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

I admired Bryan’s stubborn dissent from liberal orthodoxy. I had also acquired, while braking on the railroad, some of the workingman’s gimlet eye for soft cant.

  But bumming around in the South Pacific was bringing out something else in me, something more troubling, from Bryan’s perspective, than facial hair. I was getting interested in self-transformation. I was straining to understand the worldview of the islanders whom we moved and lived among—and I had been doing so since before Guam, when I let myself sink deep into the coral-pebble speed-checkers subworld around the sakau bowl in Pohnpei. I had come here to learn, I figured, and not just a few things about some far-flung places and people. I wanted to learn new ways to be. I wanted to change, to feel less existentially alienated, to feel more at home in my skin, as they say, and in the world. This was a hopelessly New Age wish, and I would never have mentioned it to Bryan. But it came out in my quickness to pick up local expressions, local lore, wherever we found ourselves, and in my wholehearted admiration for subsistence farmers and fishermen, and the ease with which I fell into a kind of intimacy with many of the people we met. I had that facility with strangers, but it had a new intensity now, and I wondered if Bryan sometimes felt abandoned by me, or disgusted.

  Then there was the self-disgust, which we each wrestled with differently. Being rich white Americans in dirt-poor places where many people, especially the young, yearned openly for the life, the comforts, the very opportunities that we, at least for the seemingly endless moment, had turned our backs on—well, it would simply never be okay. In an inescapable way, we sucked, and we knew it, and humility was called for. But we had different ways of interpreting this obligation. Bryan’s conservative instincts thrilled, I thought, to the heavy patriarchy of the Samoan chief system. My romanticism, meanwhile, filled village social interactions with a prelapsarian warmth and psychic health.

  Surfing, under the circumstances, was a godsend. It was our project, why we got up in the morning. After we ran across a group of Western backpackers in Apia, I grumbled, according to Bryan, that they “were nothing but goddam sightseers.” I didn’t remember saying that, but it was in fact how I felt. We did plenty of palagi looking-looking-looking ourselves, and there was something obscene about that, but at least we had a purpose, an objective, however fleeting, pointless, idle, and silly it might seem to anyone else.

  • • •

  WE FOUND A SURFER on Tongatapu, an American named Brad. Actually, he heard we were there, staying at a beach hostel northwest of Nuku’alofa, and one day he appeared, on a horse. He was twenty-three, with very short hair. He seemed to be a missionary of some kind. He said he was living in a village nearby, where he was helping to build a Pentecostal church and was engaged to marry a local girl. He was from Santa Barbara, California, via Kauai, and had been in Tonga eight months. He had an odd, deliberate manner that I found entirely familiar. I guessed he had traveled the same path that a great many surfers took, from California beach town to Hawaiian outer island, ingesting an overload of hallucinogens along the way, and then arriving, somewhat fried, at the feet of their Lord and Savior. People called them Jesus freaks.

  But Brad did not preach. He just wanted to talk surf. We were the first surfers he’d seen in Tonga.

  We had only one question: Were there waves?

  Oh, yes, he said. Oh, yes.

  But not this time of year.

  He had a north swell spot, Ha’atafu, up at the north end of the Hihifo peninsula. It broke from November to March or April, on long-period swells from the North Pacific. There were several rights, all reef passes, that Brad compared favorably with the best spots on Kauai. That was a high standard indeed. He had been surfing these passes completely alone. This time of year, he said—it was now June—there were a few lefts wrapping around from the south, but they were small and insanely shallow.

  I insisted that we go immediately to Ha’atafu. It was a long walk. Brad took us as far as a trailhead, deep in the woods, and gave us directions to the spot. By the time we reached the coast, it was late afternoon. The reef was far from shore, across a broad lagoon, and the sun was blazing behind what looked like chopped-up waves. But the glare was too fierce to tell anything, really. I wanted to paddle out to get a better look. Bryan demurred. The wind was onshore. The sun was going down. There wasn’t enough time to discuss it. I stuck my flip-flops under a bush and struck off paddling.

  Bryan turned out to be right. It wasn’t worth it. The waves were awful. And it was indeed insanely shallow. The worst part, though, was the currents. The Hihifo peninsula is five miles long, and I was near the tip of it, being swept seaward and sideways like flotsam. I had to fight my way back into the lagoon, grabbing coral heads to hold position, getting dragged and sliced and, though I had no time to think about it, scared. Once I escaped the surf zone, having caught no waves, I had zero chance of hitting shore anywhere near where I had started. There were short, nasty coral cliffs lining much of the coast. I ultimately reached land at some tiny cove far to the east at dusk. Then I had to hike through the woods barefoot in the dark, a long, uncomfortable slog. Bryan was frantic, understandably. This was a regular chafing point between us. I thought he worried too much. He thought I took stupid risks. Neither of us was wrong.

  • • •

  SOMEBODY HAD PERSUADED the king of Tonga that he was sitting on billions in offshore oil and gas. An American company, Parker Oil and Drilling, had generously agreed to help him find the stuff, and a few of its employees and their dependents were staying at the same half-built beach hostel we were. It was called the Good Samaritan. The owner was a Frenchman named André. He had half a dozen small tourist fales finished, with more in the works, and a funky little outdoor restaurant with a limited but excellent menu (fresh-caught fish, essentially), for which André was the chef. Tables at André’s were limited. I found myself sharing one with Teka, a Parker Oil person. She was slim, sharp-featured, nineteen, from Texas. Her dad was doing something important for the king. Teka had just flunked out of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, she told me, and was on her way back to Singapore, where her family lived, and where she worked as a model.

  Teka took a sort of anthropological interest in Bryan and me. We were surfing Ha’atafu every day now, striking off early while the winds were light and usually returning, famished and sun-fried, to the Good Samaritan in the afternoon. The waves had been frustratingly small but well shaped and vicious. My hands and feet were a salade russe of coral cuts, and Bryan had a large raw scrape on his back, the dressing on which I changed twice a day. The water was so shallow at the reef passes we surfed, I even managed to smash the nose of my precious board on the bottom. Teka had watched me elaborately patching the ding on a makeshift rack in the shade of a breadfruit tree.

  Bryan and I, Teka announced, were exactly like every other “beach bum” in California, Florida, and Hawaii. We had no goals, no cares for tomorrow. Our type could be found “especially at Waikiki Beach,” she said. “If there was an earthquake, you wouldn’t worry about your house or your car. You’d just say, ‘Oh, wow, a new experience.’ All you care about is finding a perfect wave, or something. I mean, what will you do if you find it? Ride it five or six times and then what?”

  It was a good question. We could only hope that at some point we’d be forced to answer it. In the meantime, without disputing that we were highly typical bums, I wanted to know who Teka knew who had worthier goals than we did. Her mother, she said. Her mother, Cherie, intended to “write a book, actually three,” this summer. Cherie was on the premises. She rose late and was drunk by noon. Her main occupations seemed to be sunbathing, putting on makeup, smoking dope with her daughters, and changing her “outfit” many times a day. But then one evening she told me, “I put you in my book today. It says, ‘I love you.’” So there was a book being written. That was more than Bryan or I could claim. Teka had another example: her boyfriend, who was managing a disco, she said, in Huntsvil
le, but who had his sights set firmly on someday “owning and managing a men’s clothing store.”

  One of Parker Oil’s field managers was a big, thick-spectacled Texan named Gene. He had a face like turkey wattle, a scary smoker’s voice, and a local girlfriend who was seventeen. Gene was pushing sixty. His girlfriend was a knockout but not happy. I overheard her telling the wife of a Parker executive that she was a half-Fijian orphan, and therefore a social outcast in homogeneous Tonga. She had turned to prostitution, she said. She was now desperate to get away from Gene. “Help me! Help me!” she pleaded.

  The executive’s wife looked stricken. I couldn’t hear what she said to the girl, but I was standing there when she approached Gene. She timidly tried to make conversation, mentioning that she had heard that his young friend was half-Fijian.

  Gene snarled, “I don’t care what she told you, honey, she’s a nigger.”

  Brad came by that night on his horse. I asked him if the police could be trusted to enforce the law against Parker Oil’s employees. He gave me a long, thoughtful look, and then shook his head. “They’re with the king,” he said. Gene’s desperate girlfriend would be the one arrested if charges were laid.

  I asked Brad about his life in Tonga. He rarely left this area, he said. Nuku’alofa, which is a small, drab town, had come to seem like the bright lights. He was the only palagi in his village, which was farther out the peninsula and deep in the woods. His neighbors and future in-laws were nonplussed by surfing, he said. “They see me head off into the bush toward the sea with this flimsy craft. Then I come back hours later empty-handed. They think I’m a very poor fisherman. All I do, they think, is float.”

  It was remarkable to think that this mild, unprepossessing kid had been surfing Ha’atafu alone, month after month. On northwest cyclone swells, he said, he had ridden it double-overhead—ridden waves, that is, twice his height. This was electrifying news. It was also, at ultra-shallow Ha’atafu, a scary idea. Had he ever hit the bottom hard? I asked. He gave me a little sideways look that meant, Every session, dude. You’ve surfed it. But if he got badly hurt, I thought, the distance between that reef and help would be enormous. There were the waves, the coral, the howling rip, the wide lagoon, the cliffs, at least a mile of jungle to the nearest village, and at least an hour on a very infrequent bus to town, where the medical facilities were probably sketchy. None of this needed saying.

  Brad’s immersion in rural Tonga far outstripped, of course, anything I was likely to do in the South Pacific, unless I joined the Peace Corps or married a village girl or both. I had to laugh at myself. Was Brad feeling less existentially alienated as a result of his experience? I didn’t know him well enough to ask.

  I was curious about the king, Tupou IV. He was an absolute monarch who weighed, reportedly, 440 pounds. But Brad blanched when I asked about him. He obviously didn’t know me well enough to feel safe discussing the king. I asked if it was true that all the fruit bats in Tonga were the official property of the king, and that only he was allowed to hunt them, which was why the woods were so thick with bats at night. A fisherman on Eua had told me about the king and the fruit bats. Brad declined to confirm or deny the story. He mentioned that he had a Bible study session to go to. He retrieved his horse and rode away down the beach in the moonlight.

  • • •

  I SAW A GRAFFITO in Nuku’alofa, ALL OUTER PROGRESS PRODUCE CRIMINAL. At the post office I tried to send my father a telegram. It was his fiftieth birthday. But I couldn’t tell if the message actually went. The guy behind the counter, who looked like Stokely Carmichael, had little colored postal stickers pasted all over his face. He was friendly, but he fiddled with his ancient typewriter in a slack-handed way that did not inspire confidence. I had not heard from my family, or from anyone else, since Guam—more than a month. There was no way for them to contact us. Did anyone back home even know what country we were in? I wrote lots of letters—to my parents, to Sharon—but they would take weeks to arrive. Phoning never occurred to me. Among other things, it was too expensive.

  I wandered down a road of half-built cinderblock houses—their construction presumably on pause until the next batch of remittances arrived from family members in Australia. I passed a graveyard. There were slim brown beer bottles—Steinlager, from New Zealand—stuck neck down in the sand around some of the graves. Steinlager bottles were everywhere in Samoa and Tonga. Local fruit drinks came in them, relabeled. They were used as borders for gardens and school yards. In the cemeteries in Tonga, late in the day, there always seemed to be old women tending the graves of their parents—combing the coral-sand mounds into the proper coffin-top shape, sweeping away leaves, hand-washing faded wreaths of plastic flowers, rearranging the haunting patterns of tropical peppercorns, orange and green on bleached white sand.

  A shiver of secondhand sorrow ran through me. And an ache of something else. It wasn’t exactly homesickness. It felt like I had sailed off the edge of the known world. That was actually fine with me. The world was mapped in so many different ways. For worldly Americans, the whole globe was covered by the foreign bureaus of the better newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal—and, at that time, the big newsweeklies. Every place on earth was part of somebody’s beat. Bryan understood that map before I did, having gone to Yale. But when I’d found an old copy of Newsweek on Captain Brett Hilder’s bridge, and tried to read a George Will column, I’d burst out laughing. His Beltway airs and provincialism were impenetrable. The truth was, we were wandering now through a world that would never be part of any correspondent’s beat (let alone George Will’s purview). It was full of news, but all of it was oblique, mysterious, important only if you listened and watched and felt its weight.

  On the ferry back from Eua, I had ridden on the roof with three boys who said they planned to see every kung fu and cowboy and cop movie playing at the three cinemas in Nuku’alofa until their money ran out. One boy, thin and laughing and fourteen, told me that he had quit school because he was “lazy.” He had a Japanese comic book that got passed around the ferry roof. The book was a bizarre mash-up: cutesy children’s cartoons, hairy-armed war stories, nurse-and-doctor soap opera, graphic pornography. A ferry crewman frowned when he got to the porn, tore each page out, crumpled it, and threw it in the sea. The boys laughed. Finally, with a great bark of disgust, the sailor threw the whole book in the water, and the boys laughed harder. I watched the tattered pages float away in a glassy lagoon. I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. This was what I was chasing: not the exotic, but a broad-beamed understanding of what is what.

  The sadness of the obscure graveyard, of unforgotten elders buried under sand, made my chest tight. It seemed to mock this whole vague enterprise. Still, something beckoned. Maybe it was Fiji.

  • • •

  OUR FIRST EXPEDITION in Fiji was a botch on several fronts. First, we went east from Suva, the capital, which is itself on the wet side of the main island, Viti Levu, which meant that we just went deeper into the mud. Our charts showed a major river mouth with a nicely curved bay and a well-angled gap in the barrier reefs that otherwise stopped most swell coming into southeastern Viti Levu. The bay was in fact there, and the swell did sneak through, but the wave was just a long muddy close-out. It took us a couple of days to figure that out, though, partly because we took the wrong grog.

  Bryan and I had learned not to show up in remote villages empty-handed. Ballpoint pens and balloons for the kids were optional, but something for the chief or the coastal landowners really wasn’t. The best gift, the traditional offering, was an armload of the root from which kava is made. In Fiji it’s called waka. We had planned, leaving Suva, to buy a batch at a farmers’ market near the bus station, but suddenly our early-morning bus was leaving and, in haste, we dodged into a shop and bought a fifth of Frigate Overproof Rum instead. The rum would be welcome, we figured, and we were right. The probl
em was that when we reached Nukui, a village near the bay we wanted to check—this was after a long ride in an outboard-powered canoe through a maze of impressively dense mangrove swamps—the headman, Timoci, who greeted us warmly, insisted on opening the rum immediately and passing the flagon around the small circle of men who happened to be on hand. We polished off the bottle in fifteen minutes. It was still early afternoon. We were now kneewalking. We never made it to the beach that day.

  Kava is a much more civilized beverage. It needs to be pounded and prepared and is usually consumed only after nightfall. A group, normally men-only, sits cross-legged on mats around a great wooden bowl, known in Fiji as a tanoa. A coconut cup is passed around. In Fiji the group claps three times, hollowly, and the drinker claps once and says, “Bula” (hello, or life), before taking the cup, which is known as a bilo. After draining the cup, the drinker claps once and says, “Maca” (pronounced matha—it means dry, or empty), and everyone claps three times together. The ceremony can go on for six or seven hours and innumerable bilos. Guitars get played, stories told, hymns sung, often with a stunning soprano harmony part.

  The closed-out waves at Nukui were at least good for shoving kids into the whitewater on our boards. Some of them were extremely quick learners. One group of boys, getting impatient, dragged two coconut logs into the water and actually caught waves on those. Smaller kids ran up and down the sand with coconut shells on strings under their feet, making a sound exactly like clopping horseshoes. The children in Nukui had a great many homemade toys: round nuts that they used in a never-ending game like marbles; tin-can tops on a string that somehow spun and whistled; a coconut leaf twisted on a stick into an elegant wind-spinner. Amid all this tender ingenuity, I found myself staring one evening, after a great deal of kava, into the ceiling of a hut and suddenly seeing on a crossbeam a pair of child’s rubber boots. The boots were dusty and cut in a vaguely cowboy style, and the sight of them pierced me unexpectedly. They were a talisman both from the manufactured world and from my own Lone Ranger boyhood.