Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  In the canoe weaving back through the mangroves to the landing where the bus stopped, I sat opposite a chubby teenage girl. Her T-shirt had on it a drawing of a cat sprawled drunk in front of a television, under the caption HAPPINESS IS A TIGHT PUSSY. I had to assume that no one, starting with her mother, got the joke. The low gray skies of the river delta—we had not seen the sun once in Nukui—now opened and drenched us with cold rain. We spread ponchos over our packs. We were definitely in the wrong part of Fiji. The place had three hundred islands.

  • • •

  SUVA IS A RAIN-GREEN, bustling city, the biggest in the South Pacific. It straddles a hilly peninsula above a broad blue harbor. We stayed in an affable dive—half brothel, half dormitory—called the Harbourview. The owners were an Indian family. Half the population of Fiji (and most of the business class) is ethnically Indian. Sailors of every known nationality reeled into the Harbourview’s bar at night, got into old-fashioned fistfights, and took the bargirls upstairs. We slept and stored our gear in a stifling room with many bunk beds for a few bucks a night. Downtown Suva was full of tourists, expats, cruise-ship passengers. We each lucked into brief flings with Australian lasses on their way through.

  Our plan was to head west, and maybe back south to some promising-looking islands out in the swell window. Suva is a popular stopover for cruising yachts, so we scoured the noticeboard at the Royal Suva Yacht Club for sailboats looking for crew. While we waited for something to come through, I started spending my days in the Suva City Library. It was in a fine, airy colonial building on the waterfront. At one of its wide mahogany reading tables, I made a new start on my railroad novel, in longhand, with new main characters.

  There were a couple of surf yachts docked in Suva. One belonged to an American with a Tahitian girlfriend. He was heading west but his boat, Capella, was small. The other was a fifty-five-foot Australian ketch called Alias. It had a rust-streaked hull and a salty, heavy-weather look, with frayed, old-fashioned fittings and bicycles and surfboards lashed to the bow rails. I guessed the boat was eighty years old. It turned out to be two. A surfer commune had built it from scratch near Perth, in Western Australia, with stolen wood and parts and scavenged tools. The women in the group had waitressed to keep the workers fed. The hull was ferrocement. A tall, sun-wrecked, curly-haired character named Mick told us the boat’s story. Alias had barely survived its maiden voyage, he said, after its novice sailors, impatient for wind, took it far south, into the Roaring Forties, and got clobbered by a gale. “Seas were as high as the mast,” Mick said. “Got knocked down once. We were all down below, praying. Thought we were going to die.” When they limped into South Australia, half the group disembarked, swearing off sailing forever. Four people—two couples—had stayed. Now Mick’s girlfriend, Jane, was heavily pregnant, so Alias would be going nowhere until after she delivered.

  One morning, while I happened to be visiting, the marine radio on Alias crackled with a fragment of electrifying news. I missed it, but Mick did not. He yelled as if he’d been shot. “Graham!” Graham was the other surfer aboard. He appeared in the companionway, two narrowed bright eyes surrounded by a blond lion’s mane. “‘A perfect three-hundred-yard left,’” Mick said. “That’s what I just heard. I think it was Gary, calling his mate here.” What he meant, he explained to me later, was that a third surf yacht, skippered by an American named Gary, was in Fiji. Gary had been traveling with Capella, but he had gone ahead alone a few weeks before. The radio call was clearly about a discovery somewhere to the west. Mick went to work on the guy who had received the call. He was a plump, wary fellow named Jim, and he was not happy to be getting the third degree from a tall, determined Aussie. He eventually allowed that Gary was sailing in the Yasawa Group, in northwest Fiji, and had apparently found waves up there. That made no sense. The Yasawas were blocked from receiving south swells by an archipelago called the Mamanucas and by a very large, reef-encircled area west of Viti Levu known as the Nadi Waters.

  • • •

  A NOTICE WENT UP: a yacht seeking crew. While I wrote down the particulars, a young Englishman also checking the noticeboard told me that he had just left the yacht in question. “Don’t do it, mate,” he said. The skipper, he said, was a maniac. An American. His entire crew had deserted here in Suva, after one short crossing, and the same thing had happened to the same skipper plenty of times before. “Once you’re at sea, he starts shouting abuse nonstop,” the Englishman said. He gave a persuasive little shudder. “Just another New Yorker battling his way through paradise.”

  We ended up leaving Suva on a westbound bus. The south coast of Viti Levu was dense with small towns and fishing villages. As we left the wet zone, rain forest gave way to small sugarcane farms. There were signs for tourist resorts tucked away in sunny bays. Craning to catch glimpses of waves, we saw nothing too encouraging. There was swell, but the reef was mostly quite far out, and the trades were still onshore.

  The obvious place to start looking for surf was in the southwest corner of Viti Levu. That region comprised a lacuna, unfortunately, in our chart collection. At the chandlery where I got the charts, in California, the clerk had said that this one chart had, absurdly, remained classified since World War II, when the Allies, concerned about a Japanese attack—Fiji would have made a good staging ground for assaults on New Zealand and Australia—didn’t want maps of the shipping entrance to the Nadi Waters in free circulation. So we were employing even more guesswork than usual. Still, it was clear from any land map that we should check out the mouth of the Sigatoka River, which drained most of west Viti Levu, and then work our way west from there.

  The Sigatoka River mouth turned out to be a spooky patch of coast. For a start, there were huge sand dunes. I had never seen anything like them in the tropics, and the villagers we met in the neighborhood were unanimous: the dunes were unnatural. Indeed, they were haunted. The surf breaking off the dunes was also, in my experience, a tropical first. It was a big, cold, foggy beachbreak. It belonged in Oregon or Northern California, not Fiji. The water was cold because the mighty Sigatoka debouched at the east end of the beach. And the big river brought not only chilly, brown, semifresh water from the mountains but a steady supply of dead animals, muddy reed mats, plastic bags, and other garbage. All this stuff came swirling and bobbing through the lineup. The waves, however, were good, particularly in the mornings. They were shifty, powerful A-frames. Pig corpses aside, these were the best waves we had surfed in the South Pacific. There was no village near the surf—see haunted dunes, above—so we hiked west until we found a small grove of trees in a gully behind a high dune. It was a well-protected spot, both from the trade winds and from intruders, who could approach from only one direction. We camped there.

  Aboard Alias, Suva Harbor, Fiji, 1978

  The tent we carried was too small for both of us to sleep in comfortably. I preferred sleeping outside anyway. But the gully where we camped had an unusual amount of ground-level night life—rats, crabs, snakes, centipedes, and I didn’t want to know what else. I strung up a hammock and slept better there. For supplies, we hiked inland to a village called Yadua. We made tea on a little cooking ring fired by a blue Gaz propane cartridge. For bigger productions, like oatmeal or canned corned beef, we built a fire. One night, heavy rain chased me into the tent. I didn’t like being crammed against Bryan, and I imagined he didn’t care for it either. I crawled out at first light. The garbage in the surf was thicker than ever, with the runoff from the downpour, but the swell was clean and had built overnight.

  Down toward the river mouth there was a reliable channel running out to sea. We used that to paddle out. But when the surf got big—over six feet—there were outer sandbars that started breaking, and the wisps of dank fog that drifted out from the dunes over the dun-colored water—perfect clammy products of the weird Sigatoka microclimate—made it feel like there might be something much larger lurking out there, a huge set preparing to mow us
under. As it was, I took some memorable beatings after going left, surfing away from the channel. I kept telling myself to take only rights, but then a big, sweet left wall would appear, and I would find I lacked the willpower to say no. Did I mention that the place felt sharky? Fishermen in Yadua, when they heard we were entering the ocean there, told us, with something between disgust and alarm, that we were nuts. That beach was a shark pit. With all the offal in the water, we had already assumed that. But shark attack was a distant third on my own list of Sigatoka worries, after, one, drowning under a rogue set and, two, contracting some hideous illness from the waterborne filth.

  Bryan turned thirty while we were camped there. He only told me about it later. I was a bit stunned. It seemed like such a strange secret to keep. Or maybe “secret” was the wrong word. It was just silence, really, a form of privacy, a refusal of some obvious, conventional sentiment, and as such, very Bryan. For all the intensity of our friendship, and despite our now constant companionship, I always felt, in some basic way, shut out. Was it me in particular, or the world in general, that he seemed to keep his guard up against habitually? The old-school masculinity that so many people, including me, found attractive carried with it no small loneliness. Then Bryan double-surprised me by saying that he could not think of a better way to spend his thirtieth birthday: surfing good waves at an unmapped spot in the South Seas, gone from the known world.

  Was he really happy? I wasn’t, especially. I was intent on our search, determined to keep pushing, and I could feel deeply satisfied by a good surf session. I was also interested in Fiji, which presented not only an abundance of the preindustrial village life I wanted to lose myself in but also more social complexity, livelier politics, and many more women of interest than Tonga or Western Samoa had. (Australians counted.) Still, I was anxious frequently, and given to lacerating self-doubt. And I obviously didn’t see Bryan the same way he saw himself, which I found disorienting.

  To me, he seemed to be going troppo. He said he was delighted to be here, but that wasn’t how it looked. Tiny hassles, and all kinds of innocuous people we met, annoyed him, I thought, unduly. He had taken to pacing, with hunched shoulders, furrowed brow, hands locked behind his back, and to sighing, and pronouncing, with exaggerated precision, on the idiocy of various people and things. That bus driver who told us we could walk from Sigatoka town to the coast? He didn’t know where the ocean was any more than he knew where his side of the road was. That walleyed lady who ran the Harbourview? She was a crook and a menace. I actually thought Bryan was getting scary. He was certainly making me nervous.

  We started drinking kava with some guys in Yadua. They had a shack on the edge of the settlement, which was near a paved artery called the Queens Road, making it feel more like a little highway town than a traditional subsistence village. And yet the kava ceremony proceeded much as it did anywhere else. It started in the late afternoon. We would head over there after the surf blew out. We sometimes stumbled back to camp at midnight. The regulars at the kava shack were fishermen who kept their boats in a cove just west of the dunes, but other men from Yadua also came. The only woman around was the wife of a guy named Waqa. She helped prepare and serve the grog. People were curious, of course, about the camping palagis—kaivalagis, in Fiji—but they were also remarkably cool, I thought, with us, letting us explain ourselves at our own pace, or not.

  I loved watching people chat, even when I understood nothing, which was often, since they usually spoke Fijian. They seemed to have an enormous repertoire of gentle, intricate social expressions. They used their mouths, hands, eyes—all the usual communication apparatus—but also chins, brows, shoulders, everything. Watching people listen was even better. There was a lovely, widely shared mannerism that I couldn’t recall seeing before: a slight, jerky shifting of the head from side to side; a constant cocking of the neck, notch by notch, the way a bird does. I read it as a gesture of extreme tolerance. The listener was continually resettling his mind at different angles in order to take in different speakers, different impressions, with maximum equanimity. We kaivalagis provoked a visible speedup of this mental-spinal repositioning, I thought, but that might have been paranoia.

  Bryan, meanwhile, was assailing my equanimity with his testiness to a degree that no amount of head-bobbing would let me tolerate. One night, lit with kava courage, I announced that I was sick of walking on eggs around him. He announced, astonished, that he was sick of walking on eggs around me. We hiked back to camp under a gibbous moon in a jolly mood. I said I hoped his tent was full of scorpions. He hoped I fell out of my hammock. The expression, anyway, was walking on eggshells, not eggs.

  • • •

  THE MORE WE STARED at the Yasawas on the map—these were the islands where the American yachties had supposedly found waves—the dumber the idea seemed. They were blocked from south swells, period. Still, we went up to Lautoka, a port in northwest Viti Levu. Boats ran from there to the Yasawas. We dithered on the quay, pricing ferries, asking questions. Nothing we heard changed our minds: going out there with surfboards was silly. We gave up on the whole west Fiji idea, defeated, and booked an early-morning bus back to Suva. But we got only as far as the station. Bryan had a bellyache that was getting worse. An all-day bus ride was not on. We returned to our hotel. Bryan went back to bed. I strolled around Lautoka.

  That afternoon I saw a strange thing on the street: blond hair. A young white woman, no less. I followed her into a café and introduced myself. She was from New Zealand, named Lynn, and happy to chat. Over coffee, she said that she was on a yacht with a couple of American guys, including her boyfriend, and a Tahitian woman.

  Where had they been sailing? I asked.

  They had been anchored off a little uninhabited island for weeks, she said, “so the boys could surf.”

  Oh.

  She knew she was spilling a secret. But she seemed to relish the mischief. Her boyfriend was a schoolteacher in American Samoa, she said, John Ritter.

  I knew him, I said. In truth, another surfer-teacher on Guam had told us to look up Ritter in Pago Pago, but we had never made it there. This was fantastic, I said. Take me to him, I said.

  She did.

  Ritter was startled when I turned up with Lynn, and visibly alarmed when I started rattling off the names of surfers he knew on Guam and insisting he come to our hotel to meet Bryan. Ritter was soft-spoken, watchful, in his late twenties. He had bushy, sun-whitened hair and granny glasses patched with duct tape. He didn’t try to hide his irritation with Lynn. But then he seemed to decide that the jig was up, and he agreed to come have a beer.

  The wave, he told us, was not in the Yasawas. That was a ruse. It was in the Mamanucas, which made way more sense. Actually, it was out on the Malolo barrier reef, which protected the Mamanucas, on the southern edge of the Nadi Waters. The island was called Tavarua. It was roughly five miles off west Viti Levu. The wave wrapped all the way around the west side of the island and broke back into the trades. Ritter drew a rough map on a napkin. It could be fickle, he said. It needed the right swell. He didn’t seem to want to say more.

  The next day, while we were getting ready to go investigate, I found the missing chart. Bizarrely, it was in a rack of tourist brochures. The prohibited chart had been used as the backdrop for a placemat-sized ad for a “three day magical lagoon cruise” on a yacht running out of a resort down the coast. The ad was on heavy browned paper, with ragged, scrolled edges drawn to look like a pirate-age treasure map. The chart, evidently pulled from somebody’s prewar library, was the real thing, however, the missing piece in our collection. Tavarua was on it, and the long barrier reef running northwest from the island, with “Blind Rollers” and “Breaks Heavily” and “Awash” written along its billows. The closest village to Tavarua on Viti Levu was called Nabila.

  We took a bus there. The village was several miles from a paved road. There was a miniature sugarcane railway running under burnt brown hi
lls. Mangroves grew in dull profusion along a waveless coast. The bus stopped under a breadfruit tree. “Nabila,” the driver said. The village was hot, silent, sleepy. There seemed to be nobody around. We climbed a big hill that rose behind the village, slowly winding past thatch-roofed, mud-walled huts into which surprised-looking children scampered. They didn’t see a lot of tourists here. The trail was dusty and very hot. A few hundred feet up, we came to a good lookout spot. We turned and trained our binoculars on the tiny island across the channel. We were looking straight into the wave. It was coming from the northwest, having wrapped nearly 180 degrees. It was a long, tapering—a very long, very precisely tapering—left. The walls were dark gray against a pale gray sea. This was it. The lineup had an unearthly symmetry. Breaking waves peeled so evenly that they looked like still photographs. There seemed to be no sections. This was it. Staring through the binoculars, I forgot to breathe for entire six-wave sets. This, by God, was it.

  • • •

  THE FISHERMEN WHO TOOK US across from Nabila had never seen a surfboard before. They had never seen even a photo or a drawing of one. They refused to believe that we rode waves on them. They figured our boards were little airplane wings. Did we use them for fishing? When we got to Tavarua, coasting in with outboard engine lifted through a coral-studded channel on the northeast shore, we could see that the swell had dropped sharply from the day before. It actually looked too small to ride now. But our companions would be confirmed in their doubts if they didn’t see some surfing, so I quickly paddled out. The water over the reef was absurdly shallow, less than a foot deep, and the waves were knee-high and weak and really too quick to surf. But I managed to snag one, and when I jumped to my feet I could hear shouts and whistles coming from the beach. I rode for a few yards, then bellied in. The swell we had seen from the hillside was dead.