Surviving Paradise (31 page)

The islands were too far away to be visited by canoe, and gas for the motorboat was scant. I had to take matters into my own hands. I had a fifty-three-gallon drum of gasoline delivered on the supply ship in March, rolled up the beach, and deposited at Ariraen. Alfred told me to leave the drum in the outhouse, and to be sure to lock it every night. To protect it from theft? No, to protect it from
ri-nana
: “bad people” who would sniff the gasoline as a drug. Alfred told me that he had checked his barrel of fuel one morning and found a young man lying unconscious next to it. He also mentioned that I could have
ordered the gas from Kwajalein for a third the price. Again I puzzled over my hosts' reluctance to share useful information with me.

I was now free to move about the atoll. When word got out I was planning a trip, people started offering fantastic descriptions of these islands. Joja spoke of three-foot-wide clams and eels so large they could swallow a person. “I'm not afraid of sharks, but I'm afraid of eels,” he confided. “I've seen an eel swallow a fish bigger than myself.” A man named Randall, who I had previously known only for his superior ping-pong skills, continued this impressive account: “Bok Island is a very good island. But you must be careful. It is teeming with sharks. If you look out into the lagoon, you can see their fins sticking up from the water. There can be hundreds at the same time. And that's not all. There are eels eight feet wide and as long as palm trees, and clams that can grow to six, eight, or ten feet across.”

My excitement battled with my skepticism. Could there really be eels the size of whales, clams the size of cars? Was Bok Island also home to stegosauruses, woolly mammoths, Bigfoot? If the descriptions were to be believed, I was now embarking on an expedition to a lost Eden where dinosaurs still roamed and strawberries grew to the size of watermelons.

Lisson, Fredlee, and Joja were to be the intrepid explorers, and I their bumbling sidekick. Thankfully, my much-coveted stash of fuel meant I had more to contribute than comic relief.

One day before we planned to leave, Lisson hinted that something was missing. “Who's going to get the giant clam from the lagoon?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Can you do it?”

“Do you know Elmi? He is an expert at it.”

I agreed we should bring him along.

I later learned that Elmi's family owned several of the islands we were planning to visit. Like all islands, they had three tiers of owners: the
irooj
(“chiefs”), who held ultimate authority over them; the
alab
(“clan heads”), who dictated their day-to-day use; and the
rijerbal
(“workers”), who were allowed to gather food on them. In the case of Bok Island, Elmi's father, Sam, was the
alab
in question, and everyone other than his family and the chief had to ask permission before using
the island's resources. Since Sam was too old to come on the expedition, we were obliged to invite Elmi in his stead. In the usual Marshallese way, Lisson couldn't tell me this directly; he had to approach the issue from the side by asking who would fetch the giant clam.

On a Friday afternoon after school, we packed rice, coffee, pots, cups, matches, machetes, spears, snorkel masks, swimming flippers, and fifteen gallons of gas and waded into the lagoon to deposit the gear onto the motorboat. Fredlee siphoned gasoline from the drum into the outboard motor with his mouth, but it sputtered for an hour before it started. That was not an encouraging beginning to an expedition into watery wilderness. Finally we were off, heading northwest toward Bok Island on the inner side of the reef. I was excited to see these distant islets. My companions were excited to gather food.

The approach to the island was different than what I had become used to when riding on outrigger canoes. Instead of following the contour of the reef from within the lagoon, we crossed the reef and entered the open ocean. Fredlee guided the motorboat to a stretch of reef where the breakers were unusually mild. There were some tense moments as the men timed the waves, with Lisson and Elmi urging Fredlee to run the engine
now
and pass the break, but Fredlee holding back—and then finally he drove forward and the craft passed the danger zone with perfect smoothness.

We had left the atoll's womb and entered the large and unprotected sea. To the west there was nothing but the horizon, and below us there was only the blue ledge of an underwater cliff before a seemingly endless deep. The waves rolled gently, making the ocean into picturesque hill country, but the hugeness of the ocean was unnerving. I imagined all the water draining away and seeing the ocean floor as a broad valley, and distant atolls as flat-topped mountains. We were in a vast wilderness.

We traveled northwest along the edge of the atoll, and then I discovered why my companions had left the comforting bounds of the lagoon. There was food to be found here. Not far out in the ocean, huge flocks of dark birds were repeatedly diving down onto the surface of the water. The birds had found a school of fish, and now we had too. Lisson let out a long fishing line, and Fredlee drove us at full
speed through a tangle of black wings. Then he circled around and did it again, and we landed a smooth, silvery fish called a
nitwa
: the same name as Ujae's master storyteller.

We continued following the contour of the atoll. Flying fish skimmed over the surface of the water like dragonflies, and dozens of spinner dolphins jumped around the boat. Lisson said these were Ujae dolphins: they spent their lives circling the ocean side, never leaving the atoll. I didn't see how he could know this, but I wanted to believe that he was right—that these dolphins, like many of my Marshallese friends, had called this little coral bend their home for all their lives.

After a few hours we passed Bokerok, a hundred-foot-wide islet swarming with seabirds, and then we approached Bok Island. A deep channel carved its way into the lagoon between Bokerok and Bok. In the clear water, it was a stroke of dark blue between the sky-colored shallows. This opening allowed the free exchange of lagoon and ocean water, as well as a convenient place for boats to enter the lagoon without risking shipwreck on the jagged coral that circled the rest of the atoll. This was where the supply ship had entered Ujae Atoll a few weeks before, bringing the gasoline that had brought us here.

We reentered the lagoon through the channel, gingerly navigated through the minefield of coralheads that guarded Bok's shore, and waded to shore. The remoteness was stirring. The lagoon reef showed its topology perfectly through the water. Five miles away, across the width of the lagoon, two uninhabited strings of green cut the horizon.

Elmi took me to the camp he had built. It was a cozy clearing surrounded with pandanus trees, breadfruit trees, and
ni-kadu
: the short variety of coconut tree that generously grew its fruit within arm's reach. It had a well, a rainwater collection tank, and a radio antenna at the top of a twenty-five-foot-tall pandanus tree. The tree, with its flimsy trunk and widely spaced branches, must have been a dangerous climb, so the presence of that antenna attested to the desire for some connection, any connection, to the outside world on this isolated islet. The camp sported a tiny shack with a gravel floor, wooden walls, tin roof, and requisite portrait of Jesus. Most important of all, the whole compound was within twenty feet of the lagoon. In short, it was everything a Marshall Islander needed. It was the Marshallese answer
to the American dream—not a three-bedroom house, a manicured lawn, and a quiet suburban street, but a one-room shack, a grove of essential fruits, and a quietly teeming ocean of food.

It was already afternoon, and there was no time to be lost relaxing in the opulence of Elmi's camp. Hunting and fishing were the orders of the day. Now, stripped even of the meager amenities of Ujae, my companions were truly in their element. They were once again hunter-gatherers, as their ancestors had been.

The men set out to hunt for coconut crabs. The species was named for its ability to break open coconuts with its claws; reportedly, those claws could also remove one's finger. These giant purplish beasts, whose legs could span sixteen inches, had been overhunted on Ujae Island. Now only the occasional undersized specimen could be found there. Lisson quipped that eating these immature crabs constituted child abuse. Ethics aside, there was almost no meat on them. When I watched villagers struggling to extract tiny bits of flesh from the Q-tip-sized legs, I was sure they were burning more calories than they were getting. But on Bok, an embarrassment of fully grown coconut crabs could be easily found scattered in the interior.

I followed Lisson through the trackless jungle. Human hands had not tidied this place. Rotting palm fronds crisscrossed the forest floor, and spider webs hung everywhere. Huge breadfruit trees formed a thick, dripping canopy, casting an Amazonian darkness over the understory. I watched Lisson as he located his prey. He sharpened a stick with his machete and repeatedly poked it into the ground to find the crabs' hiding places. He examined crumbling logs and hollow tree trunks. When he had found a crab, he brazenly stuck his hand into its lair, then pulled on the creature for five minutes before it finally let go.

After two successes, Lisson handed me a crab to carry. It was not difficult. Coconut crabs would grab absolutely anything that touched their claws. Presumably this had led to more than a few unpleasant incidents, but it also meant that they were easy to keep once you had caught them. You only needed to place a twig next to the animal, and it would hold on as if its life depended on it—when, in fact, its life depended on it
not
doing so.

We bumped into the other men. They had caught so many crabs already that they could no longer carry them by hand. This called for
Advanced Crab Technique. The hunters placed the captured crustaceans into empty bags of rice, which they had brought for this purpose. How many Marshall Islanders does it take to put a crab into a bag? Two. One man held the bag open while the other immobilized the crab's legs, then threw the creature down into its plastic prison before it could grab the side of the bag. If the crab succeeded in grasping the edge of the bag, then one of the men would tickle its abdomen until it released its grip—this was a handy trick in other situations as well—and try stowing the crab away again. Then they placed the small plastic bags into large burlap bags, which they carried over their shoulders. When the plastic bags ran out, they tied the crabs up with palm-frond cord and put them directly into the burlap bag. Soon the burlap bags were positively writhing with the combined movements of dozens of crabs.

At sunset, we returned to camp and cooked dinner. A handful of rice was in my hand, en route to my mouth, when I heard Lisson say, “
Jen jar
” (“Let us pray”). He spoke a heartfelt grace as I shamefacedly returned the food to my coconut-leaf plate. Before this, I had seen the islanders say grace only at large gatherings. Now they were doing it in a company of five, in the quiet remoteness of a desert island. I immediately understood the motivation: never before had I been in a place more appropriate for appreciating the bounty of the Earth.

The brief spirituality gave way to the normal off-color humor of all-male groups. The subject that night was whether I liked old women—most specifically my eccentric next-door neighbor who greeted me, unfailingly, and for no obvious reason, with a hearty “
konnichiwa
.” I fielded questions about the characteristics and demographics of nude beaches in America, to the fascination of all four men. As I was about to discard a skeletonized fish, Fredlee stopped me. “Hand it over,” he said. “I like to suck the brains.”

It was no joke. Sucking fish eyes was a common practice, and one expat I knew had done so with the First Lady of the country. I had never heard of sucking the brains, but I was hardly fazed by the revelation. I let Fredlee have his treat.

After dinner, Joja took me to look for lobsters on the ocean reef. During the full moon, dozens of them (or just as often none at all) would crawl up from the deeper reef into the shallows between islands.
There were no lobsters that night, but many other things kept my attention. Sand-colored eels slept with menacing expressions in tide pools, while tiny white crabs floated over the sand like ghosts. I looked in a tide pool and saw an extraordinary creature slinking in and out of the water. It was a foot long and half an inch wide, faintly blue and red in color, and lined with hundreds of tiny legs. Only by the direction of its movement could I guess which end was the head. At the time I could only describe it as an aquatic millipede, but later I learned that it was a clam worm.

Back at the camp, I lay outside and watched the dark forms of frigate birds flying overhead, their bodies absurdly tiny between their huge pterodactyl wings. The stars shone in such strength and number that the constellations seemed lost among them. The Milky Way was a cloud.

When I woke up in the wet morning air, my companions had already built a fire for their morning coffee. They had brought all the fixings from Ujae, including powdered creamer. A single morning without coffee was apparently unthinkable; these Micronesian huntsmen were as addicted to caffeine as Western office types. Lisson used his machete to fashion spoons out of palm fronds, and soon we were scooping sugar into hot cups of joe.

Breakfast was white rice, but a single unopened Cup Ramen lay conspicuously next to me. “That's for you,” said Fredlee, and then explained flatly, “
Ribelle
s don't eat rice for breakfast.” True enough—but then again, they don't generally eat smoked turtle flippers either, and I had done that. I prevailed upon them to feed me the rice, and the respect I gained for that was palpable.

The itinerary for that day was as follows: hunt, eat, repeat. Lisson told me that this was the way of life on the uninhabited islands—not just morning, noon, and evening, but every hour of the day was mealtime, broken only by more hunting and gathering. The food was so abundant that we could eat five meals a day and still leave with a boat full of it.