Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  Tavarua Island, Fiji, 1978

  By staying for even that short demonstration, our friends had been trapped by a dropping tide. They tied their boat to a tree. It was soon left high on the sand. There were four of them, all ethnic Indians. Bob was the leader. Stout, voluble, middle-aged, he liked to shout orders at Peter, his nephew, who was twenty-nine. Then there was an eight-year-old boy, Atiljan, and a thin, quiet, very old man with a white mustache. Bob and Peter were full of instructions for us. First, the snakes. Banded sea snakes, highly poisonous, would come ashore by the hundreds each night in search of freshwater. “Play with the snake, you will have to suffer,” Peter said. He went down the beach, quickly found a snake, grabbed it behind the head, and held it up. It was about four feet long, striped black and white, with a paddlelike tail. Peter returned it gently to the water. We had heard that this snake (Laticauda colubrina), whose name in Fijian is dadakulachi, was nicknamed the three-step snake, since that was how far you were likely to get if it bit you. It was supposedly the sixth-deadliest snake in the world, firing a fatal cocktail of neurotoxins and myotoxins through its fangs. The good news was that its mouth was very small. Peter showed us how to make a fist while handling one, or while paddling past one, so that it could not bite between one’s fingers.

  And between one’s toes?

  Peter shrugged. They were normally not aggressive.

  Bob showed us three big piles of dry wood at the edge of the jungle on the eastern shore. These, he said, were for signal fires. Fishermen used them to communicate with their families on Viti Levu. One fire meant you were fine—just staying the night to avoid rough water. Two fires meant you were not fine and would need help. “Maybe the engine not working.” Three fires meant an emergency. If one of us got badly hurt, we should light three fires at nightfall. A boat would come, “even if bad weather.”

  They showed us where wild papaya trees grew, not too far into the bush, and where good eating fish tended to run near shore at high tide. The tide was coming in now, and would soon be full enough, I thought, to let them cross the reef, but Bob said the wind was blowing too hard. They would spend the night. He would light one of the signal fires later to let their families in Nabila know they were here. Peter took a handline to the fishing spot and quickly caught a string of a dozen grey mullet. We grilled them on sticks, ate with our fingers, and washed the meal down with green coconut milk. Bob inspected our supplies. He was not impressed with our unused fishing gear. He ordered Peter to leave us some stouter line and better hooks. High above us, the wind thrashed in the coconut trees. The sun dropped into the western Mamanucas.

  Our campsite, which was at the edge of the jungle, facing the wave, was well sheltered from the trades and included what the Nabila men said was the only man-made structure on Tavarua: a fish-drying rack. The rack, which consisted of six short wooden poles driven into the sand and a thatch netting, was about two feet off the ground. It was the size and shape of a single bed. I tested the strength of its thatch. It seemed sturdy. Bob nodded approvingly. That was a good place to sleep, he said. The snakes, which were fast in the water but inept on land, could not climb those poles. Bryan planned to sleep in the tent. He had it pitched and zipped tight, and he let me know, with sign language, that if he ever found the zipped mesh left open I could expect to be tortured with sharpened stakes and Bob’s machete and our can opener. A brain fork—a popular Fiji tourist souvenir, purportedly used in cannibal days—might also come into play.

  The moon rose. Peter, staring into the fire, told us that his hair was cut short and strangely because he had recently lost his father. Peter had a cheerful, innocently confiding manner. He was tall, toothy, unshaven. His personal life sounded complicated. He talked about a girlfriend toward whom his intentions were unsettled. “If I leave her, she must marry,” he said. “She cannot stay home. You know the peoples, they cannot stay without sex.” Bob ordered him to go check on the boat, which now needed an anchor set. Peter jumped up and threw off his clothes. Bob said, “Get on, you bloody bastard, he doesn’t want to look at your dirty prick!” Peter loped off into the dark.

  Bob rolled up in my board bag. Peter used Bryan’s like a sleeping bag, draping the end flap over his head like a hood. The old man kept the fire going. Each time he threw on a dry palm frond, Peter would wake up and whip out a paperback and read a few lines by the light. His book was a detective novel in Hindi with a garish, worn cover. Little Atiljan slept in a nest of green leaves he had made. The old man did not sleep. He quietly prayed and sang, and his songs and prayers threaded through my dreams. He had a very thin face and high, sharp cheekbones. Whenever the fire flared, I could see he was gazing east, out into the night, at Nabila, across the channel.

  • • •

  ON THE FIFTH DAY, or maybe it was the sixth, we surfed. It was still too small, really, but we were so surf-starved by then that we scrambled out at the first hint of a swell. Thigh-high waves zipped down the reef, most of them too fast to make. The few we made, though, were astounding. They had a slingshot aspect. If you could get in early, top-turn, gather just enough speed that the hook didn’t pass you by, and then set the right line, the wave seemed to lift the tail of the board and hurl it down the line, on and on and on, with the lip throwing just over your back continually—a critical moment that is normally no more than a moment but that seemed to last, impossibly, for half a minute or more. The water got shallower and shallower and even the best rides didn’t end well. But the speed runs were dreamlike. I had never seen a wave peel so mechanically.

  As the tide peaked, something very odd happened. The wind quit and the water, already extremely clear, became more so. It was midday, and the straight-overhead sun rendered the water invisible. It was as if we were suspended above the reef, floating on a cushion of nothing, unable even to judge the depth unless we happened to kick a coral head. Approaching waves were like optical illusions. You could look straight through them, at the sky and sea and sea bottom behind them. And when I caught one and stood up, it disappeared. I was flying down the line but all I could see was brilliant reef streaming under my feet. It was like surfing on air. The wave was so small and clear that I couldn’t distinguish the wave face from the flats in front of the wave from the flats behind the wave. It was all just clear water. I had to surf by feel. This was truly dreamlike. When I felt the wave accelerate, I crouched for speed, and suddenly I could see it again—because the waist-high crest, seen from down there, was higher than the horizon.

  The trades puffed, the surface riffled, and the hyperclarity was gone.

  The tide dropped and we were back on the beach.

  Our hands, feet, knees, forearms, and Bryan’s back all streamed bright blood from brushes with the reef. Even medium tide seemed to be out of the question.

  • • •

  I HAD WRITTEN BY HAND eight pages of first-aid instructions in a small all-purpose notebook. Infections, fractures, shock, burns, poisoning, head wounds, heat exhaustion, even gunshot wounds—the basics of field treatment were spelled out in careful lists, extensively underlined. I had no training, and neither, as far as I knew, did Bryan. But I showed him where the instructions were, between drawings of Nuku’alofa and notes for my railroad novel, and I sometimes reread them myself, trying to commit the material to memory. Not much stuck. Near-drowning, splinting, tourniquets, unconscious victim—it felt, to my primitive mind, like bad luck to picture this stuff too clearly. Bryan mused that something common, like appendicitis, could quickly finish off one of us out here. We’d have to wait till nightfall even to light the signal fires. True enough, I thought, but, again, bad luck to imagine.

  It took twenty-five minutes to walk around the island, if you didn’t rush. Bryan counted the fresh snake tracks across the beach one morning: 117. The snakes were, as Bob said, ungainly on land. It took them minutes to cross the ten yards of sand between the high-tide line and the jungle. They were easy to spot and,
indeed, not aggressive. Away from the campfire at night, a flashlight was useful to avoid stepping on one. But most of my close encounters with dadakulachi were in the water, where they were plentiful, both on the surface and in the depths, both on the reef and in the lagoon.

  Everything was plentiful on the reef: urchins, eels, octopus, and, by my conservative estimate, eight million species of fish. I swam out every day at high tide, drifting with mask and snorkel but no fins or spear, following schools of ridiculously beautiful creatures through shallow coral canyons, around great crimson fans and stolid greenish brain-lumps and wicked-looking staghorn. I recognized a few familiar faces: parrot fish, goatfish, triggerfish (humuhumu!), grouper. There seemed to be a hundred different types of wrasse. There were angelfish, goby, puffer fish. I thought I saw sweetlips, tilefish, surgeonfish, snappers, blenny, coral breams, Moorish idols. I did see barracuda and a small whitetip shark. And yet, to me, most of the countless fish going about their business on the Tavarua foreshore were nameless, mysterious. Some were so pointlessly gorgeous I found myself groaning in my snorkel.

  Our fishing was pitiful. Even with the hooks and line the guys had left, and knowing the best spot and tide, we couldn’t seem to catch a thing. I pried an octopus off the reef, pounded and boiled it to a fare-thee-well, using way too much freshwater, and it was still too tough to eat. (I should have used salt, I learned later. That was if we had salt.) We did a piss-poor job generally of living off the land and sea. We soon picked and ate all the ripe papayas we could find. I climbed the shortest, most wind-bent palm trees for green coconuts, but I was defeated by the taller, straighter trees. There were lots of beefy bats with yellow-striped faces—they hung like gray seedpods in the upper story of the jungle by day and swooped overhead at night—that would probably have made great fruit-bat soup. We had no notion how to catch them. There were crabs of various types, but the ones that looked like the best eating lost their allure when we saw how efficiently they excavated and devoured human excrement.

  We had brought food, in any case. Cans of pork and beans, beef stew, corned beef, packaged soups, ramen, crackers, jam. And just enough water. There was no potable water on the island. The dadakulachi drank, apparently, dewdrops and tiny mud puddles in the bush. We wished we had thought to bring something sweet. We reminisced about favorite meals back in the world—fried chicken, big American hamburgers. Even the goat chow mein in Suva came to seem delicious in memory. We made a list of every bar in Missoula, Montana, where either of us had ever had a drink, coming up with fifty-three. We were becoming characters, we knew, in a desert-island cartoon. “Do me a favor, will you—stop saying ‘entre nous.’” At night we saw airliners flying overhead, and ships passing into the Nadi Waters, headed for Lautoka, all ablaze with lights. We were like cargo cultists, agog at the idea of electric lights. I particularly missed chairs.

  Bob and the gang returned, as arranged, after a week. We left our boards and most of our gear on the island, went into Nadi, a market town south of Lautoka, bought more supplies, and were back on Tavarua the next afternoon.

  • • •

  THE FIRST SOLID SWELL hit the next week, around the first of August. There were head-high days. There were overhead days. Oneiric, highly charged, the sessions run together in memory. On August 24, according to my journal, it was double-overhead.

  The wave had a thousand moods, but in general it got better as it got bigger. At six feet it was easily the best wave either of us had ever seen. Scaled up, the mechanical regularity of the speeding hook gained soul, its roaring, sparkling depths and vaulted ceiling like some kind of recurring miracle, the tracery on the surface and the ribbed power in the wall full of delicate, now visible detail, each wave suffused with the richness of a one-off. Sometimes the wind swung east, blowing into the hook and sending a hard chop up the face, particularly in the last hundred yards to the channel. When the wind blew south or southwest, it came around the west side of the island, making a mess of the waves as they approached us on the half-mile-long wrap from the southern edge of the reef. But then they cleaned up suddenly as they made the last turn into the lineup, and the slingshot aspect of the wave was doubled by a trailing wind that slipped under your board and whispered, Go.

  We slowly figured out the takeoff. There were extra-tall trees that, triangulated, worked as lineup markers, and reliable boils over big coral heads near what seemed to be the uppermost takeoff spot. The current ranged from slack to fierce, and it ran both up and down the reef, depending on the tidal flow. As the surf got bigger, breaking out in deeper water, being dashed on the reef receded as an issue. But it was still important to get in early. Catching the wave, even at the optimal spot, was like jumping on a train that was not slowing down. It helped to paddle deep, stroke hard against the grain of the water drawing off the reef, and then angle left as the wave began to lift your board, digging extra-hard into the bottom of the face, jumping up early, finding the speed in the wave’s belly with a quick pump before picking a line—before setting, that is, an initial course, to be intricately adjusted as the wave unfurled. When it got bigger and more consistent, deciding which wave to go on was a challenge in itself. What I struggled with then was adrenaline overflow. Paddling over the first wave of a set, seeing the lines stacked up behind it, with the next wave already cracking and peeling far up the reef, I would find myself gasping, heart slamming, mind juddering. What to do? I had never, in a lifetime of surfing, been confronted with such abundance.

  It was, for me, as a regularfoot, a considerable irony that the wave was a left. I could surf it only half as well as I might have surfed a comparable right. My backhand technique improved, though. Esoteric questions of rail unweighting that I had never considered were suddenly illuminated in the endless screaming run under the endlessly pitching lip. I began switching rails straight off the bottom turn, keeping my outside rail, my toe rail, down on the water even as I tracked up the face, thus staying ready to bank downward on an instant’s notice, and not letting the offshore breeze get under my board and blow me up higher than I wanted to be. My board went faster than I thought a board could go. I learned to relax, to a degree, in critical positions where my instincts shouted that it was time to brace for impact. Again, it seemed that, on this wave, that last-second moment could go on for a very, very long time.

  Bryan was on his frontside. He could rise to his feet on the drop and watch the whole thing come to him. He didn’t have to twist and look over his shoulder. He could let his left hand trail on the face. He refused to hurry, even when I thought he should. The first part of the wave, where you had to quickly get up to speed, sometimes picked him off when a couple of scrambling pumps near the top after the takeoff might have let him escape and set sail. But he didn’t appreciate my saying so, and the stylishness of his attack was unimpeachable—the casual entrance, the bullfighter’s calm as the wave stormed around him, then climbing and dropping in long arcs at hull speed. Bryan was still surfing Rainbows, I thought, back on Maui, drawing his own idiosyncratic lines far from the madding crowd, and I was still surfing Honolua, high-amping because I thought the wave demanded it.

  Paddling back out after a long ride was a nerve test. Exalted and depleted both, I found I could not calmly watch another set pour through unridden. I was hardwired to grab a wave, even just an end-section. The idea that there would be more, that in ten minutes we would very likely be looking at another, equally good set from a much better takeoff spot far, far up the reef, simply had no traction in the psychology of scarcity, which was still mine. Bryan laughed unsympathetically as I hesitated, moaning, hyperventilating.

  Our conversation changed. It usually had a busy, must-say-everything edge to it, even during the long, lazy days of waiting for waves on Tavarua. But out in the lineup, once the swells started pumping, large pools of awe seemed to collect around us, hushing us, or reducing us to code and murmurs, as though we were in church. There was too much to say, too much emotion, an
d therefore nothing to say. “Look at this one” felt like grandiloquence. And it was only inadequate shorthand for “My God, look at this one.” Which was in turn inadequate. It wasn’t that the waves beggared language. It was more like they scrambled it. One overcast afternoon, with a southwest wind scrawling small-bore chop like scrollwork across the approaching faces, I realized I was seeing long German words in Gothic script, Arbeiterpartei and Oberkommando and Weltanshauung and Götterdämmerung, marching incongruously across the warm gray walls. I had been reading, in my hammock, John Toland’s biography of Hitler. Bryan had read it before me. I told him what I was seeing. “Blitzkrieg,” he muttered. “Molotov-Ribbentrop.”

  I rode a wave one evening, long after the sun had set, with the first stars already out, that stood up and seemed to bend off the reef toward open water, which was impossible. There was a dark, bottle-green light in the bottom of the wall and a feathering whiteness overhead. Everything else—the wind-riffled face, the channel ahead, the sky—was in shades of blue-blackness. As it bent, and then bent some more, I found myself seemingly surfing toward north Viti Levu, toward the mountain range where the sun rose. Not possible, my mind said. Keep going. The wave felt like a test of faith, or a test of sanity, or an enormous, undeserved gift. The laws of physics appeared to have been relaxed. A hollow wave was roaring off into deeper water. Not possible. It felt like a runaway train, an eruption of magical realism, with that ocean-bottom light and the lacy white canopy. I ran with it. Eventually, it bent back, of course, found the reef, and tapered into the channel. I didn’t tell Bryan about it. He wouldn’t believe me. That wave was otherworldly.

  Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They’re quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell. The best days at the best breaks have a Platonic aspect—they begin to embody a model of what surfers want waves to be. But that’s the end of it, that beginning. Bryan had no interest in perfection, it seemed to me, and his indifference represented, among the surfers I’ve known, a rare degree of realism, maturity, and philosophical appreciation of what waves are. I didn’t have much interest in the perfection chimera myself. More than he did, though.