Surviving Paradise (25 page)

That night's dinner was a gourmet feast by Ujae standards: rice topped with both canned tuna and canned vegetables. I was happy we weren't dining on the delicacy that one of the family members had mentioned: sea cucumbers, which is a euphemism if I've ever heard one. It is slander to name that sluglike creature after the light and inoffensive cucumber. The first time you eat a sea cucumber, I was told, you get wretchedly ill, but after that they are a delicious treat. They weren't on the menu today, and I counted my blessings.

Chirping sounds emanated from above us as we ate. The ceiling, like every ceiling in this country, teemed with geckos. Their whole lives of hunting, fighting, and mating were played out upside-down in plain view for audience enjoyment. They were benign creatures: they knew their place (the ceiling) and didn't encroach upon ours (the floor). They were so much more polite than cockroaches, which would continue to scurry toward you whether you had shooed them away or attempted to kill them. Geckos had another virtue: Marshallese belief held that it was good luck if their droppings hit your head. If so, there was a lot of good fortune to go around.

The next day, I explored the village. The island was much larger than Ujae: it curved along fifteen miles of Arno Atoll, and here, at its thickest point, it was two-thirds of a mile from the ocean side to the lagoon side—no island in the country, in fact, was much thicker than this. On the lagoon side, the beach arced until it was lost in the distance, sandy and inviting along its entire expanse. Distant islands formed a Morse code of green lines, dividing the blue of the sky from the blue of the lagoon. For the first time in months, I remembered what magic this thing called a coral atoll was.

In the village, the houses were more widely spaced than on Ujae. In fact, tiny Ujae was heavily peopled by outer island standards—its population density was almost as high as Taiwan's—and this excess was one of the reasons for the periodic food shortages. The vegetation on Arno was identical to Ujae's: coconut, pandanus, breadfruit. When Micronesian voyagers first reached the Marshall Islands, they brought these vital species with them. Two thousand years later, they still dominated jungle and village alike. Little else could grow in the country's black,
sandy, nutrient-poor soil, but it was also true that little else was needed. Marshallese jungles tended to have the overgrown and haphazard look of wilderness, but in reality they were many steps removed from their original state: humans had entirely remade these forests at least twice, first to grow subsistence crops, and then to grow copra for sale.

The children mobbed me, as I expected. But after several weeks of anonymity in Majuro, I was ready for another round of fame. Once again, there they were: more “I
Being a Princess” shirts. I never found out why these shirts were ubiquitous in the Marshall Islands. I only knew that at some point several thousand had entered the country and scattered to the remotest islets. Perhaps they were a failed product line—that seemed awfully likely—that an American company had donated to charity.

At night, Emily and I visited the ocean side. Across the now calm channel lay Majuro. From Arno, it was visible only as a haze of white light over the emptiness of the black ocean, an emerald city beckoning the outer islanders to moneyed life. It beckoned me, too, but for the moment I wanted nothing else than to be where I was. The outer islands were as exasperating as I could imagine and as sublime as I could hope.

DURING MY TWO DAYS ON ARNO, A MOST INTERESTING THING TOOK
place. A local woman fell madly in love with me. Tonicca was Emily's best friend on Arno, and she had accompanied the two of us on casual strolls through the village. I would say Tonicca was shy, except that truly shy people don't declare their undying love within a day of meeting someone. She said I should stay on Arno or take her to Ujae with me. She told Emily to inform me of her cooking and cleaning skills. She called me her husband, said she would be sad when I left, and told me I had to come back. She also said I was
tamejlaplap
, especially with her.
Tamejlaplap
? She translated it as “to make a mistake,” but her sly grin while doing so made me think there was more to it than that. I asked a young man for the definition. First he busted a gut laughing. When he was finished with that, he told me that the word meant “missing out on the most important thing.” And what, pray tell, was the most important thing? Well, on Arno, he answered, it was
the sex. In particular, he added, “helicopter-style” sex. Perhaps the Love School of Longar was real.

While Tonicca may have been coy about her physical intentions, she was not discreet about her matrimonial ones. She made it quite clear that she would discard her old life, marry me, and move to America on a moment's notice.

I briefly fantasized about it. Our children would be half-Marshallese and half-Caucasian, a genetic mixture of uniformly stunning results. We could spend summers on Arno. It would be wonderful.

No, no, it would not. I slapped myself across the cheek and told myself it was ridiculous. I have the admittedly quaint policy of not marrying someone who I've known for only two days. Even had I been tempted, another fact would have nixed the deal. Patrick—the same Patrick who had lived on Ujae—had briefly visited Arno and, surprise surprise, Tonicca had fallen in love with him. Once again, it seemed, Patrick and I had been made into rivals. More important, it proved that what attracted her to me was nothing more profound than my exoticness, and the feeling was mutual. So when the
Lakbelele
returned to Arno, I climbed aboard and left, Tonicca not in tow.

Back in Majuro, I knew where I needed and wanted to go. Arno was only a fling, long enough to feel the initial high but short enough to avoid the hard work that follows. Ujae was a true relationship, with all the vicissitudes that such a thing entailed. So Arno would always remain perfect in my mind, and Ujae would always be imperfect, but it was Ujae that I would hold closest to my heart. I was still in love with the romance of exotic places, but I also saw the romance of familiarity. I was ready to return to Ujae.

It was a strange joy to feel the wheels of the plane once again contacting the grass airstrip of Ujae Island, and to see rows of expectant villagers coming into view. The faces were now the faces of friends. The colors and curves of the island, once exotic, were now intimately known. Where burning curiosity first pulled me, sweet familiarity returned me. The joy of returning to civilization, to amenities and companionship, was matched only by the joy of returning to my island.

It felt almost like coming home. It felt exactly like returning to a lover, time and distance having sweetened the relationship.

 

 

 

 

YOU ARE ALONE IN A SILENT WORLD, ACCOMPANIED ONLY BY THE SOUND
of your own breathing. In slow motion, you half walk, half fly past neon rocks and alien plants. Your face is masked, your feet webbed. Your hands clutch a metal rod, tipped with needle-sharp tines. Engulfed in a blue mist, you hunt the multicolored creatures that hover around you.

You are spearfishing on a coral reef.

Impaling aquatic creatures with sharp sticks had never featured prominently on my checklist of life experiences. I had never caught a fish by any method, let alone on the end of a spear, and fishing in general struck me as a sport for meditative old men reconnecting with their lost childhoods. But moving to a small island in the middle of the world's largest ocean had a way of redirecting one's interests. Surely I could give fishing a try.

First, I should confess that this pastime isn't quite as rugged as it sounds. My friends back home imagined me gnawing chunks of drift-wood
to a point, standing on rocks and impaling fish with expertly aimed throws from ten feet away, à la Tom Hanks in
Castaway
. This was less than entirely accurate. A spearfisherman doesn't stand in the shallows, but rather floats on the surface of the water, looking down with his snorkel mask and propelling himself with swimming flippers. His spear consists of a fiberglass shaft with a three-pronged steel end, not a sharp piece of wood. Instead of picking it up on the beach, he picks up his spear at Ace Hardware. (Admittedly, this was the
Majuro
branch of Ace Hardware, which carried certain items that you weren't likely to find in American hardware stores, such as machetes.) Dagger-sharp and five feet long, however, the spear can quickly be forgiven for its untraditional origin. It could become a lethal weapon in skilled hands, or, even more likely, in unskilled hands. Yet one could nonchalantly take it as carry-on luggage when flying to the outer islands—which is exactly how I brought my spear from Majuro to Ujae.

I started to hone my spearfishing skills as soon as I returned from Majuro. I sought the tutelage of Lisson, fisherman extraordinaire, and he gave me a single one-minute lesson. A loop of surgical rubber was attached to the butt of the spear. Lisson told me to hook my thumb into this elastic band, pull the shaft back until it was frighteningly taut, and release. I performed a test launch into a tree trunk. It took a minute to dig it out of the bark. Now that I knew how to shoot, the rest was up to me.

I sauntered off to the lagoon, got in the water, and shot at everything that swam. After an hour and a half, I had hit nothing. The next two days, I tried again with the same results. I would go out, scare some fish for a few hours, and come back empty-handed. Here I was, fishing in waters positively infested with targets, and yet I felt less like a fisherman and more like an exercise coach for fish.

One species seemed like ideal prey. Called
tiepdo
, it abounded in the lagoon and showed little fear. As I approached, it would stare at me as if in curiosity, registering no reaction as I readied my spear inches from its body. But, when I let the weapon fly, the
tiepdo
would dodge with the speed of teleportation, and my spear would embed itself in the coral. Then, as if to taunt me, the creature would pretend that nothing had happened. It would look at me again with feigned obliviousness and let me shoot several more times before it finally got bored and swam away.

My first impression of fish was that they were very, very stupid, but also very, very fast. That basic impression holds to this day.

Day number four earned me fish number one. It was not impressive: a thick-lipped, white and blue fellow, about the size of a dumpling, but much less appetizing. I later came to know this species, the
liele
or triggerfish, as the playground outcast, the embarrassing uncle, the village idiot of the fish kingdom—a clumsy, sluggish, oblivious fool that natural selection had spared out of pity. This was the only species that I ever hit with my spear without launching it, and the only species for which such an absurdity was possible. But this was my first fish. I was proud.

Elina was not. She crumpled her face at my tiny, inedible offering. “
Jej jab mona kain ne
,” she said. “ We don't eat that kind.” She threw my accomplishment on the garbage heap.