Authors: Tania Aebi
Then, after Fred put new terminals on the ends of the degenerated circuitry, we gently sponged down my engine with soap and fresh water. We reglued the wooden frame around a cockpit locker and he gave me all sorts of compounds that he had found essential over the years: double-component adhesives and metal pastes.
We bought limes and he showed me how to keep
Varuna's
teak clean and permanently bright. “These limes are magic,” he said, squeezing the juice all over the trim. “Who needs acid cleaners when nature provides the most efficient ways?” The wood gleamed, turning a completely different shade of light brown, breathing free from over a year's worth of grime and oils. We took apart my self-steering gear and replaced all the worn-out pieces, then Fred attacked all the stainless steel on it, and my pulpits, wiping away any rust spots with his own special products.
Fred was fanatic, but his fanaticism was catching. It was fun sprucing up the boats and figuring out ways to fix things with only the materials we had available. And the more time we spent together, the more I recognized how much I already knew. I'd had all sorts of patient teachers over the past year, and each had revealed to me new things about the workings of my own boat. In that time, I had gotten over any embarrassment about admitting ignorance of something and had learned not to hesitate to ask questions, questions and, if I was still too thick to understand, more questions. By no means had I learned everything, but I had come this far with one notable realization: anything can be dealt with by a level head and a little common sense.
The
Kreiz
crew and I had planned on staying for just a few days in Wallis, but we found plenty of good reasons to remain for two weeks. As a vista, the slight, rounded island, unlike those in French Polynesia, was not much to write home about, but the beauty was in what the people did with their land.
It was a minuscule place, about 9 miles long and 5 miles wide, but on this patch they had managed to fit in three magnificent kingdoms. The island was technically under French rule along with Futuna, another territorial island 120 miles to the west, and their connections with the outside world all passed by way of New Caledonia. Strolling down the neat dirt roads lined with flowers and charming thatched homes, it was hard to imagine a place more secluded from the sophistication of its French rule. Beautiful, unmarked and off the beaten track, the kingdoms of Wallis seemed to compete with each other to see which could be the most picturesque. One afternoon, I actually saw a man sweep his lawn.
On Wallis, pigs were the princes. In the place of cats and dogs, piglets, sows and boars roamed around in complete liberty. Perfect little bungalows sat on manicured plots skirted with flower beds. Hibiscus hedges, mutated into myriad strains, colors and sizes, framed every tableau. Fred and I walked around in awe, passing the
friendly islanders and saying hello. The fabrics of their
pareus
were exotic and gay; and they draped the beautiful bolts over graves in the cemetery and changed them often.
On shore, where we landed our dinghies, was a house with a family of innumerable children and hordes of pigs. They smiled and generously pointed us to their well water to fill our jerry cans and, politely, we sideskirted their lawn in order not to upset the nap.
The Polynesians have been traveling among these islands for centuries, astounding modern navigators with the prowess of their ancient sailing outriggers. They have created a vast network, connecting the neighboring islands into a sort of brotherhood and, regardless of changes they have endured at the hands of those who have tried to colonize them, fundamentally, they have remained the same.
Patrick, arriving on a sailboat, was welcomed as a long-lost brother by the boys in Wallis, even though he spoke a different language. When I watched them talking, they seemed to understand each other perfectly, as if there were a sort of universal plane on which the different islands could relate to each other. They greeted him like royalty and he basked in his own novelty, Fred looking on with pride, like a father who made these things possible for his son. We would only see Patrick every now and then, when he rowed in with his friends to bring fish they had caught in the lagoon for Dinghy and Mimine.
Magrete, Reidar and their two sons arrived and anchored
Renica
next door to us as a depression disturbed the peaceful skies for several days, postponing our departure. One day, our whole gang was invited to one of the kingdom's annual feasts. Men and women in colorful costumes sang religious songs and danced in front of a veranda where the king and his entourage sat holding court. The dancers had petroleum jelly smeared all over their arms and shoulders, and onlookers stuck paper money on their favorites, in this way making a collection for a new building.
Royal kava, a South Pacific potion made from the root of the kava tree, was served to the king and his family while fifty baskets with roasted pigs lay waiting in the sun. On the way down from climbing a tree to capture the festivities on film, I lost my footing on a stubby outcropping and fell to the ground, landing with my dress over my head. It took a second for the stars to clear before realizing that I was surrounded by a group of giggling children, thrilled by my exotic performance during a familiar ritual that had otherwise been boring for them.
Soon enough, July 4 swung around. Not only was it the day of the anniversary of my country and the Statue of Liberty's birthday gala in New York Harbor, but it was also Fred's birthday. For most of the day, Laurence, Marie, Estelle and I huddled below on
Varuna
with my box of magic markers and colored pencils, making birthday cards and talking about possible presents. I bought a bolt of fabric and used it to wrap up the
Fat Freddy's Cat
cartoon book that I had received in New York and that, by now, I knew by heart. On the card, I drew a picture of
Varuna
, Dinghy and Mimine thanking Fred for everything he had done and for being such a good friend.
That evening, Laurence baked a chocolate layer cake with raspberry filling. Marie set up cameras and took pictures of our group and then we went out on deck to send off a red flare. This was the first time I had ever seen an emergency flare go off. It lit up the whole sky and slowly descended, bathing
Kreiz's
deck in a rosy glow. The next morning, we realized that we had sent up an SOS a hundred feet from an island littered with people and nobody saw anything. I wondered what would happen in the middle of the ocean.
Soon after, I had a last dinner on
Renica
before they set off for new islands the next day, and that gave the rest of us incentive to pack up and start thinking about moving on as well.
Watching the skies and the barometer on the breezy morning of July 7, we picked up our anchors and said goodbye to each other, promising many letters.
Kriez
towed
Varuna
out of the lagoon. I stood on the bow, waving and calling goodbye as we threw last jokes back and forth.
Saying goodbye had never become any easier. I thought of the drawing of our two boats that Fred had given me with a caption that described my feelings perfectly: “What a nice meeting. Exactly the thing I hate about our way of traveling. âHello' . . . âGoodbye' . . . âSee you' . . .”
Once were were out beyond the last reef, I cast off and went forward to hoist the mainsail. Taking in two reefs in the gusty wind, booming the main out and tying down the preventer cord, I went back to the cockpit to set the self-steering. Gathering up the jib, I clambered back onto the foredeck and started hanking it onto the forestay. Engrossed in getting
Varuna
under sail, I didn't notice
Kreiz
on a collision course until we were very close, and then stood up in alarm to see if they were going to move. Everybody was occupied in getting his sails up, so I hollered a warning and ran back to disengage the self-steering to round up into the wind before impact.
Too late. The bungie-cord fastening stubbornly refused to undo
itself fast enough and, as if in slow motion, I saw Fred turn his head my way, his face register shock and
Kreiz's
exhaust sputter blue smoke as he slammed her into hard reverse. Surprisingly, the hard jolt I expected never came.
Varuna's
bow hit
Kreiz
amidships at the same moment that I was finally able to round her up, while
Kreiz
pulled back in full power.
Quickly resetting the self-steering, I looked at
Kreiz's
hull, expecting to see a gaping hole. There was nothing. Stunned, I looked at
Varuna
and realized that here, on the other hand, something was amiss. The lifelines hung limply down on the deck, and I looked forward to the bow pulpit. Stepping around the spray hood and holding on to the grab rail, I saw the damage. The pulpit had absorbed the entire shock and was smashed backward out of its deck supports and crumpled like an accordion.
All of a sudden
Varuna
was naked and helpless, and I realized how secure those lifelines had made me feel. They had formed the perimeters of my playpen. Whatever happened outside of
Varuna
was all right, just as long as those two long strands of wire on either side held me in. With all my muscle power, I tried to push the pulpit back out and into some sort of shape, but the stainless steel wouldn't budge. I ran back to the cockpit, down into the cabin and heard Fred's voice on the radio.
“Hi, Fred. Wow, that was close. How's
Kreiz?
Does she have any marks?”
“No, she's all right,” he said, “but how about
Varuna?”
“Well, I think I have to go back into Wallis and try to fix her,” I answered shakily. “The pulpit is completely smooshed out of shape, so I don't have any lifelines. I don't want to sail like that.”
“Wait a minute,” he answered. I imagined him sitting at his chart table, talking with the excited girls, trying to think of a solution. His voice came back, “Listen, Tania. I have an idea and everybody here thinks that this is what we should do. Of course we have to help you. We should have been watching out for
Varuna
. Now, what we should do is go to Futuna Island and there we'll do our best to fix the damage. It's only 120 miles away. That's one day's sailing. What do you think?”
“Thanks, Fred. That sounds good to me. Hey, this isn't so bad. We'll all see each other again sooner than we originally thought, right?”
Our moods lifted as we began to joke about a job badly done. If
Varuna
had sunk, we teased each other, then they would have had to rescue me and goodbye would never have to be said. We sailed within
sight of each other through the rest of the day and that night on a disagreeable ocean full of squalls and erratic winds.
The next afternoon, a solitary mountain loomed and we motored on the lee side of it until arriving at Sigave, the only anchorage. On Futuna, there was virtually no fringing reef and the only protection for the anchorage was the island itself, as long as the trades blew consistently from the east. A mooring ball lay just offshore, set for the occasional supply ship. As soon as we tied up, a swarm of dugout canoes filled with laughing Polynesians came out to greet us, and when they saw Patrick there was a great round of frivolity and backslapping.
Fred came to look at
Varuna's
pulpit, we decided to attack it in the morning, when we felt fresh, and that evening we went ashore to a hut where a lady had agreed to prepare a chicken dinner for us. After the excitement of the day, we all went home to our boats and slept like the dead. When I woke up in the morning, something felt funny.
My eye made the rounds of
Varuna's
cabin. All my favorite cassettes, which I had listened to over and over again and stored on top of the rest, were gone. Also gone was the tape recorder used to make cassettes for my family and friends at home. I jumped out of the companionway and leapt onto
Kreiz
.
In an early-morning stupor, Marie was poking around looking for her Walkman, and Fred was fumbling for a carton of cigarettes, muttering that he knew that he had placed them “somewhere around here.” I told them that some of my belongings were missing, too. As we slowly realized that the boats had been robbed while we were having dinner the night before, the others began running around to assess the damage. Tallying up, they found their waterproof tape deck, more tapes and the Walkman were definitely gone. Marie and Laurence elected to go to the village chief and
gendarmerie
. All we could do was wait to see what transpired.
Futuna was the most untouched place I had ever seen. There was no electricity on the island, apart from privately owned generators, and the younger village people took turns according to gender in showering at a faucet coming out of a cement wall on the beach. Giggling, the girls formed a human wall around the bathers, each in turn. There were two general stores with the inevitable Sao crackers and Laughing Cow cheese with the wedges fitting into the familiar round box. Ever since Tahiti, this had become my standard sea fare, as it was always the cheapest and easiest to prepare.
In the late afternoon, Fred and I set to work fixing the pulpit
while the rest went ashore to do some laundry. Fred sized up the problem and formed a plan. He boomed out his spinnaker pole so that it was directly above
Varuna's
damaged bow, and with a line attached from the pulpit to a block-and-tackle system from
Kreiz's
spinnaker pole, we winched it back into shape, inch by creaking inch. Fred used gauze and epoxy like a plaster cast to form bases to repair the broken ones and we smeared the gook all around the weakened corners.
Bending stainless steel weakens its properties and I scrutinized the pulpit to discover that there were little faults beginning. It would never again be the same and I would no longer be able to trust my weight against it. This meant that the lifelines encircling the boat couldn't be trusted either. I felt guilty looking at
Varuna's
bow as if, by no fault of hers, I had marred her beauty and destroyed a certain amount of her integrity. That evening, as everyone came to admire a job well done, Patrick informed us that he had received a message that the captains of the two boats were summoned to the home of the village chief at seven the next morning.