Surviving Paradise (16 page)

I was grossed out but also engrossed. The strangest image I had yet observed on Ujae was that of a young man, sitting by himself with his back propped up against the cookhouse, contentedly gnawing on just the tip of the pig's snout. It was still easily identifiable as such by the fact that it had two nostrils. Meanwhile, the rest of the head was being passed around like a box of truffles, its various morsels eaten with no less pleasure. I accepted one man's offer of a portion of the tongue. He assured me it was the choicest piece of the entire animal. I swallowed it as quickly as I could, hoping this tongue would have minimal contact with my own.

Once Lisson presented me with a bowl full of marble-sized objects, identifiable only as internal organs of some kind. He told me they were
tu
. I decided to eat them first before looking the word up in the dictionary. When I did consult the dictionary, the definition was this: “fish stomach.” I had a stomach full of stomachs, I realized. But the fact I had eaten them at all proved I was overcoming my First World squeamishness. I reached a point where I would eat almost anything given to me—even, or especially, when I didn't know what it was. Of this I was proud.

I was less proud of the fact that I had a private supply of snack food on the side, shipped in from the States by my parents. It was all there. Junk food—enormous quantities of junk food. Dried fruit. Beef jerky. Candy bars. I knew that my experience on Ujae would be that much more authentic if I refused these goodies, but I also knew that anyone in my position would understand the necessity of such a stash for one's basic sanity.

I had to keep this treasure from being plundered, but it wasn't easy. Ants swarmed to any unattended bit of food, so numerous that their individual bodies blurred into a single moving cloud. Within a day, they had found individually wrapped candies in a plastic bag in a sealed Ziploc bag inside another plastic bag under some clothes in my zipped-up duffel bag.

And it wasn't just the ants that wanted my food: it was the people too. The Marshallese rule was to share, but I didn't want to. Sharing here was not a matter of giving one morsel to each person as a token of generosity: it was a matter of putting the whole feast out for public consumption, and I couldn't bear to lose 90 percent of my riches. I made sure to never breathe a word about my food stash to the De Brums. I hereby submit the following word of advice to people preparing care packages for loved ones marooned in small villages: do not send crunchy food! The recipient will shut himself in his room and begin blissfully munching on those Doritos, thinking that no one will know. But then, inevitably, someone will enter the room next to his, and, in a moment of horror, the poor castaway will realize his crunching is audible. With chips still crammed in his mouth, he will have to either wait until the other person leaves or find some way to swallow the food without chewing it. My technique was to soften it with saliva and then mash it into a paste with my gums.

Still, the junk food kept me sane. When the supply ran empty, all was chaos and darkness. I once got so hungry before dinner that I would have eaten an entire bag of cough drops—the only “food” I had left—except for the fact that, after wolfing down a few of those luscious treats, I read the package and discovered that they had actual medicine in them. I didn't want my epitaph to read: “Here lies Peter: deceased from ODing on cough drops.” It would have been a tragic, though perhaps appropriate, end to my year of culinary misadventures.

 

 

 

 

IT WAS NOT BEHIND GLASS; IT WAS RESTING NEXT TO THE LAGOON
it was built for. It was not an artifact; it was still wet from use that morning. When it had been launched, it was not in the name of tradition, but in the name of survival. It was a practical object that harnessed the free power of the wind, made the ocean as navigable as the land, and brought food to the table. But it was also an ancient object, perfected over thousands of years. It was not in a museum only because it was so useful.

It was a Marshallese canoe, an example of some of the finest vessels built in the Pacific, and a far cry from the rough-and-ready dug-out log that I had always associated with the word “canoe.” The hull was tall, narrow, and sleekly contoured, coming to a sharp edge at the bottom and at both ends. It was sealed at the top except for a few holes for bailing water and storing gear. This meant that the passengers couldn't sit snug and cozy in the hull, but that was just as
well, because they had work to do: they sat cross-legged on top or straddled the canoe at its narrow ends. A thin mast sprouted from the center at a slight angle, a triangular sail rested one of its vertices at the prow, and an impressive array of riggings held it all together.

But the lifeblood of the vessel was the outrigger: a small secondary hull attached at a distance from the canoe's main body, preventing the boat from capsizing in any weather short of a hurricane. This was the technological innovation that, more than five thousand years before my trip abroad, had allowed the indigenous people of Taiwan—the Austronesians—to settle almost every inhabitable island across half the globe. They had regularly sailed to Hawaii across two thousand miles of landless ocean. They had founded the world's most remote civilization on Easter Island. They had discovered Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles from any of their compatriots. They had brought back the sweet potato from South America. And they would have done none of these things without the outrigger. That unassuming piece of wood was the reason that there were any people on these islands at all.

(The importance of the outrigger was reflected in the Marshallese language as well. A mistress could be referred to as an outrigger,
kubaak
, and to say that one's outrigger had sunk meant that one had returned to a place to find that one's previous female prospects had all been married in the meantime.)

I knew nothing about sailing, but I was immediately struck by the grace and almost obsessive specificity of the canoe's design. This craft had been tested and refined in extreme conditions for millennia. Experts on the subject had noted the asymmetrical hull and the movable mast as two uniquely Marshallese innovations on the already excellent design that allowed them to find their islands in the first place. European sailors from the other side of the Earth had been awed by the speed and seaworthiness of these vessels. In 1816 and 1817, Adelbert von Chamisso visited the islands as the resident naturalist on a three-year scientific expedition, funded by the Russian czar, which also included my very own San Francisco Bay Area. On the subject of Marshallese canoes, Chamisso had this to say (translated by H. Kratz):

These sons of the sea, I said, will be surprised indeed when they see our giant ship with outspread wings like a seabird move contrary to the direction of the wind that carries it, penetrate the protecting walls of their reefs, and then move toward the east in the direction of their dwellings. And behold! I was the one who had to look on in surprise, as, while we laboriously tacked about and gained very little on the wind, they in their artfully constructed craft went straight ahead on the same route we went in a zig-zag fashion, hurried on ahead of us, and dropped their sails to await us.

It was a testament to the skill of these ancient seafarers that all the far-flung Marshallese populations, scattered sparsely across hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, still spoke a single language after their two-thousand-year history. With less frequent voyages, the dialects would have diverged more and more until they became as different as Spanish and French.

A man on Ujae told me with obvious pride about the superiority of his country's watercraft. “Marshallese canoes are the greatest canoes in the world,” he said. “Canoes from most other countries look like toys.” Indeed they did. After seeing the elegance of a Marshallese vessel and its refinement in every conceivable detail, many other canoes looked like stick models. A Marshallese canoe was as deftly proportioned as a Renaissance sculpture, and, in the outer islands, those skills had not been lost.

The islanders had, however, made some excusable upgrades in the last hundred years. The sails were now tarps instead of finely woven pandanus mats. The sennit riggings of yore had been replaced with synthetic cords. Instead of lashing together the canoe with handmade rope, modern islanders used glue. These changes didn't spell the death of heritage, only of pointless labor. The women no longer wasted time repairing sails after a storm, and the men could spend their time fishing instead of endlessly bailing water from the leaky hull. (It must have been an onerous task, because there was an old word in the dictionary,
kwodaelem
, that meant “land given by a chief to a commoner as bounty for bailing out the chief's canoe in battle expeditions”.)
Meanwhile, the canoe's design and building material—the wood of the breadfruit tree—were the same as they had always been.

THE ISLANDERS WERE FOND OF THEIR WORD
jambo
, WHICH MEANT
everything from “go on an expedition” to “wander around aimlessly.” There was no better vehicle for this than an outrigger canoe. Walking to my medieval dungeon of a classroom in the morning, I would often jealously watch as the men prepared for a relaxing day sailing on the lagoon. I had to join them.

Weekdays were out because of school. Sundays were out because work was prohibited. So I spent my Saturdays in convoluted quests to be invited aboard a canoe. I usually failed. The men seemed happy to have me tag along, but a jungle of unspoken customs stood in the way.

The first obstacle was that the villagers would not volunteer information. Fredlee and Joja eagerly answered my general questions about island life, but they were allergic to discussing their day-to-day plans. If pressed, they would often give me information that was incomplete, vague, or outright false. I had recently been shocked when my host mother, Tior, left the island for a two-month absence, and I found out only by seeing her climbing onto the plane at the airport. Other friends had disappeared onto the supply ship without any advance notice or farewell. At the school, the students knew about teacher meetings before I did, and I could learn about village festivals only by happening upon them after they had already started. The villagers were overjoyed when I participated in island life, but they made it as hard as possible for that to happen. I couldn't fathom why. This was more than inconvenient; it was distressing. Isolation from knowledge was harder than physical, linguistic, or cultural isolation, and the fact that it was done deliberately made it all the worse.

The second obstacle, counterintuitively, was the Marshallese penchant for appeasement. In the Marshall Islands, white lies were not just excusable but admirable. I had rarely been insulted, but just as rarely been told an unpleasant truth—no matter if I desperately wanted to know it. I had encountered this early on in my attempts to meet Ujae's chief. He was a quasi-celebrity, a senator, and the chief of more
atolls than this one; he deemed to visit little Ujae only occasionally. I would often ask when he was coming next, and the villagers would always tell me he was flying in “next week.” He never came.

That same sort of polite dishonesty led to what expats called the “compliment trap”: if you complimented an islander on his shirt, he might just take it off and hand it to you. No matter if he didn't want to part with it and you didn't want to have it, he was obligated to give it and you were obligated to accept. It was tempting to take advantage of this custom by casually remarking, “Say, you've got a lovely island here.”

The third obstacle was Marshallese Time. Will Randall named his entire book after the Solomonese brand of this time sense, and his description of “Solomon Time” fits Marshallese Time nearly as well:

“Solomon Time plays by nobody's rules, yet it loosely dictates that something may happen a little late or perhaps a little early or days late or even days early; it may have happened already or it may never happen at all. Schedules and timetables become irrelevancies, arrangements, meetings, deadlines inconsequential . . . Solomon Time can be magical . . . But then, of course, sometimes it can just be bloody irritating.”