The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 12

In which the Author discovers, while rolling in a swell, Sunburned and Stinging with Sea Lice, and circled by a very large Thresher Shark, which, contrary to his nature, he was trying to catch, that the Pacific Ocean is a Very Great Thing Indeed.

There is a moment, shortly after you accept the imminence of your demise, when it occurs to you that you could be elsewhere, that if you had simply left the house a little later or lingered over a coconut, you would not be here right now confronting your own mortality. This thought occurred to me just as I encountered a very large wave, a rare wave, a surprising wave, a wave that really had no business being where it was, pitching and howling, leaving me with a fraction of a second to make a decision. The options were not good.

Ahead, I could see Mike paddling his surfboard furiously up the face of the wave. Mike had lived on Tarawa for seventeen years. Mike was not a normal guy. He had arrived all those years ago with his wife, Robin, a renowned artist from New Zealand who was seeking both a new motif for her work and the opportunity to bring a few I-Kiribati souls into the Baha’i faith. And so, like me, Mike found himself living on Tarawa more or less as an accessory to his wife. He had taught in every school on Tarawa and was currently working as an administrative aide at the New Zealand High Commission, but his world revolved around surfing and books. If a book arrived on Tarawa it would soon be in Mike’s hands, and this made him very valuable as a source for reading material. We often had deep and lively discussions about the books we read.

“What did you think of Midnight’s Children?” he would ask.

“I thought it was pretty good.”

“It was baroque drivel,” he would inform me. “What about Infinite Jest?”

“I really liked it.”

“It was the most profoundly disappointing book I have ever read.”

I decided that under no circumstances would I ever let him read a word I had written. Unfortunately, just days after the Washington Post published an article of mine, an article that I dearly wished would never be read in Kiribati, because it was a fusion of two separate articles which had been conjoined by the editor so that it became, in his words, “a Frankenstein-like monster sent lumbering into the world,” Mike stormed into the house with a copy. It had been faxed to the high commission by the New Zealand Embassy in Washington. “What kind of hack work is this?” he demanded.

Sigh.

As a source for books, Mike always tried to be helpful. “I think you should read this,” he proposed, handing me Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. This particular book is about a guy who really wants to be a novelist, but instead of becoming a novelist he becomes a loser alcoholic living a sad, sad life.

“Thanks, Mike,” I told him afterward. “I really enjoyed that one.”

“I thought you would,” he said with a sly grin.

It was Mike who introduced to me to the world of surfing. In the late afternoon, I often saw him riding the waves behind the house. He lived a few doors down, and so one day I asked him if he would teach me how to surf.

“What should I do now?” I yelled, once I’d finally managed to bring both myself and a surfboard through the break zone, something that took me the better part of an hour to do, of which a good forty-five minutes were spent underwater in various states of distress.

“Look for a wave shaped like an A.”

An A. Hmm. I saw Zs and Ws and Vs. I saw the Hindi alphabet and the Thai alphabet. I saw Arabic script. I saw no As. Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move. The demon wave picked me up, and after that I have only a very vague recollection of spinning limbs, a weaponized surfboard, chaotic white water, all kind of churning together over a reef. I decided this was not for me.

“That really sucked,” I declared.

“You picked the wrong wave,” Mike said, after surfing the same distance in a state of such languid repose that he seemed to be mocking my anarchic tumble through the water. “Maybe you should try body boarding first.”

And so it came to be that I became a body boarder, a very good, very serious body boarder. I recognize that in the world of water sports body boarding does not rank very high, being regarded about as manly as synchronized swimming, but I spit on such opinions. Body boarding offers one the opportunity to become extremely intimate with a reef-breaking wave. You are in its bosom, sharing its fate, and when the wave is large and glassy smooth, and you are riding it just where you should be riding it—ahead of the break—and the wave doesn’t do anything really nasty like suddenly collapse above a boulder encrusted with sea urchins, well then, you find that you are really, really stoked. I don’t want to get all purple about it, but body boarding the waves just offshore a tropical island on the equator is about as sublime an experience as one can find on this planet.

Unfortunately, on Tarawa waves are rarely like those pictured in the glossy surf rags, the ones with the perfect barrels heading inexorably toward sandy beaches populated exclusively by buxom girls in string bikinis. The waves on Tarawa are, in fact, mean. They are breakers and dumpers and entirely unpredictable. They will lift you up high, as in twelve feet high, above a rapidly dwindling layer of water covering a very sharp reef shelf, and then just as you think you are going to race diagonally down and across its face, it will suddenly disintegrate, and you will feel yourself free-falling, and then there is an impact that leaves you winded, which is highly unfortunate because the wave, or rather the remains of the wave, still has forward momentum, and you will find yourself hurtling forward somewhere in the midst of tons of very angry, chaotic white water that is both lifting you and pounding you. Under no circumstances do you let go of your body board, because it will always float and you will not, and this is important, because you can hardly breathe from being winded, until finally you are spat out. You spend a few moments putting yourself together, and then you go back, certain that you have acquired just a little more knowledge, enough to ensure that next time you are going to let waves like that just roll on by.

Generally, I no longer engage in adrenaline rush–type activities that carry with them a strong likelihood of lifestyle-altering injury. I have been to a war zone. I have seen a mortar explode in alarming proximity to my being. I have fallen over a cliff. I have driven my mother’s car at speeds well in excess of 100 mph. In the rain. I have, on one night in particular, consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol, magic mushrooms, and marijuana, all more or less at the same time, just to see what it would feel like. I have engaged in… um, reckless personal behavior. After enough incidents and experiences, there came a moment when I realized that mortality is nothing to be trifled with. I suppose this is called aging. And yet, there is something about being on top of a wave, just at that moment when it catches you and you prepare to hurtle down its face, that brief moment when you are now committed, and even though you are now perched very high, and from this perch you can see with remarkable clarity the jagged coral reef below, with its body-sucking crevices and toxic spines, you are at this moment—and really, I am trying to find a better word, but can’t—pumped.

Whenever conditions looked particularly promising, Mike and I put our gear in the back of a pickup truck and searched the island for the best breaks. The smoothest waves were about a half mile off the Nippon Causeway. The biggest waves were off Temaiku, the southeast point of Tarawa, and to reach it we drove down the airport runway. The first time I drove down the runway, I wondered at the wisdom of doing so, but Mike accurately pointed out that Air Kiribati was down, Air Marshall had stopped its service, and the Air Nauru plane was impounded in Manila, so there was no need to worry about air traffic, just mind the pigs.

As the months went by and time drifted from one year to the next, I found that I had become completely enraptured by the water, possibly because from the water Tarawa always looked good. All evidence of squalor was pleasantly concealed, and the island seemed idyllic with its masses of coconut trees rising from sun-streaked water colored every shade of blue and green.

If there was wind I went windsurfing. I had been windsurfing ever since I was a small child, when my grandmother purchased for my cousins and me a windsurfer with a glorious red sail. She had declared herself bored with the white sails of sailboats that typically populated the lake in Holland upon which my family has a summer cottage and sought to enliven the view. I had grown accustomed to windsurfing in frigid water underneath slate-gray skies, and so when Wieland, a German agronomist who had spent his career flitting from one Pacific Island country to another, declared that his beginner skills were no match for the custom-made board he had brought from Fiji, I eagerly purchased it from him, and in a very short while I was skimming across the lagoon in the presence of dolphins. I knew then that it was unlikely that I would ever again even raise a sail on the icy waters of a Dutch lake.

I happened to be traversing the lagoon, just minding my own business, when I saw four fins slicing through the water, approaching me with intent, and my first thought, of course, was that I was about to meet my end and that it would be a gruesome, horrific end, the kind of end that becomes Pacific lore—Did you hear about that guy windsurfing across Tarawa Lagoon? Four Tiger Sharks. Nothing left but a scrap of sail. My heart rate approached five hundred beats a minute. But then the creatures began to leap alongside me and I saw that they were not man-eating sharks but playful, curious dolphins, and I suddenly felt very happy to be alive here in the middle of Tarawa Lagoon, windsurfing in the company of dolphins. For a long while they stayed with me, darting underneath my board, swimming alongside, and then they went on their way, and as they left I sincerely hoped that they knew what they were doing, because dolphins trapped in the shallows of the lagoon were unlikely to avoid the dinner plate.

On other days, I saw flying fish that vaulted a hundred yards and more, and huge silky rays that glided below like shadows, and long sea pikes that leapt urgently above the waves, and schools of silver fish capering off the bow of the board. I saw a green turtle. Even when there wasn’t much wind, I sometimes went out just to glide across the lagoon in the late afternoon, when the island was flushed with color. Sailing canoes drifted by, and we waved the wave of lazy contentment, a flick of the hand reciprocated.

The more time I spent breathing in the currents of sea life, the more I wanted to be on the ocean proper. I had windsurfed, just a few times, on the waves breaking on the reef behind our house, but when I faltered and went down and saw my board and my one sail being ravaged by the surf, I decided that I had had just about enough of that. Crashing here, when the waves had already sent my gear rushing toward shore, also left me in the unhappy situation of having to swim back through the break zone—panic, dive, swim; panic, dive, swim—and this was something I never wanted to do again without big, floppy, speed-enhancing flippers. But of course the ocean, the real Pacific, lay beyond the reef. For a while I thought about asking around to see if I could join some of the fishermen who worked the waters off North Tarawa, Abaiang, and Maiana. I have no doubt I would have been taken aboard; the I-Kiribati are the most obliging people on the planet. But I was dissuaded by the knowledge that I-Kiribati fishermen are crazy.

I would go anywhere in a traditional sailing canoe, perhaps not happily, but at least with some confidence that with sufficient sun-block, a bit of rain, a few yards of fishing line and a hook, we would reach our intended destination, and possibly be alive too. Not so on an I-Kiribati–operated vessel of more modern design. There are only a couple of state-owned cargo vessels, rusting hulks kindly referred to as floating maneabas, and within a short span of time, one was impounded in Hawaii, where it was deemed unseaworthy, and released only after assurances were made that it would never ever enter American waters again, while the other spent nearly three weeks floating aimlessly in the great emptiness between Tarawa and Kiritimati, victim of an electrical problem. That it was overloaded with schoolchildren should have made this an international incident, but it is not the I-Kiribati way to proclaim Mayday. This is not due to excess pride, but to an unnerving combination of self-reliance and fatalism, a cultural attribute not to be confused with stupidity, which, frankly, is a mistake I sometimes made. How else to explain the monthly tally of fishermen lost at sea?

The numbers, truly, were astonishing. There is one radio station in Kiribati and most weeks it dutifully reported the number of boats that had failed to return. These are all open boats, typically about fifteen feet long, made of wood, and powered by a single outboard engine. They do not carry sails, or oars, or life preservers, or radios, or flares, or spare parts for the engine. They do not even carry fishing rods, just fishing line, some hooks, and some bait. The rest is done by sheer muscle. Imagine trying to pull in a fifty-pound tuna, a fish that clearly does not want to go where you are taking it, with a slippery line just a few millimeters in diameter. And now imagine that you are out of sight of land. And the engine dies. Imagine that awful silence, the only sound the Pacific Ocean, an ocean that with each passing hour is taking you far, far away from land. If you are a normal person, you panic and die. If you are an I-Kiribati, you say, Oh well, shit happens, and then you set about doing what needs to be done to survive.

And here is the really astonishing thing. Very often, they do survive. I do not have the figures on who has the record for spending the longest time adrift in an open boat, but I would bet that the top ten positions are all held by I-Kiribati, which bespeaks of both the lunacy of I-Kiribati fishermen and their jaw-dropping capacity for survival. One day Radio Kiribati reports that three men failed to return from fishing, and you think, well, they’re done for, and then nine months later Radio Kiribati will announce that the fishermen have been found drifting off the coast of Panama, which is approximately four thousand miles away, and that they are reported to be in good condition. Good condition! If it were me, there would have been nothing left except the powdered remains of my bones.

Of course, not everyone lives and so you would think that when family members hear that one of their loved ones has gone missing at sea there would be worry, there would be vigils, there would be gnashing of teeth, but this is not so. When Abarao, a health education officer for the government who often worked with Sylvia in a collegial, professional kind of manner, which made him a rarity among government workers—not the collegial part, but the professional part—failed to return from Maiana, where he was sent to gather the family’s pigs for a celebratory feast, there was a notable lack of consternation among his family and colleagues. When I asked one of his cousins why this appeared to be so, he said; “In Kiribati, we don’t worry for the first two weeks.”

And after two weeks?

“Then we worry a little bit, but we keep it to ourselves.”

Two weeks passed and still no Abarao. Kiribati’s lone patrol boat, another gift from the good people of Australia, was dispatched to look for him. It returned to Tarawa several days later, listing strongly and belching long plumes of black smoke. They had not found Abarao. They had, however, encountered some excellent fishing off Nonouti, which was a considerable distance from where Abaroa was likely to have drifted, and in their enthusiasm for the excellent fishing, they had hit a reef, nearly sinking the boat.

And then, a week later, Radio Kiribati announced that a Korean fishing trawler had found Abarao off Nauru. He was reported to be in good condition. I wanted to hear how, exactly, does one remain in good condition after spending three weeks adrift in an open boat under the glare of the equatorial sun.

“Pig’s blood,” he said, when I met with him a short while later. I suppose desperation can lead one to think creatively about the uses of a pig, but I’m not sure it would have occurred to me. I see a pig and I see bacon, pork chops, pork tenderloin, ham, but not water.

Abarao was in his thirties, and though he was quick to laugh about his experience, he had a haunted air about him, as if the weeks drifting with the ocean current and all its attendant terror and tedium had led him to develop a knowledge of death that he did not wish to have. To find relief from the sun, he had spent much of his time in the water, hanging from the stern of the boat.

“What about sharks?” I asked. It is one thing to encounter a shark on a reef, where there are so many other tasty nibbles to choose from, but it is another thing altogether to meet a shark in the open water, where you are more likely to be treated as an unexpected meal.

“Yes, I saw sharks, but I couldn’t catch them.”

The I-Kiribati are different from you and me. They take their position on top of the food chain very seriously. Abarao’s answer reminded me of a story that John, an English volunteer, once told me. He was snorkeling in the lagoon when he noticed that he was being circled by a large shark. He popped up and spoke to his companions on a boat a short distance away. “There’s a shark here. Would you be so kind as to bring the boat over?” But it was too late. At the first mention of shark, his two I-Kiribati friends had leapt into the water to go shark hunting. Like I said, the I-Kiribati are different from you and me.

The cause of Abarao’s adventure on the high seas was the simple fact that halfway between Maiana and Tarawa he’d run out of gas. “I forgot the petrol,” he said sheepishly. This is probably the primary cause of adriftedness in Kiribati, but it wasn’t the most painfully dumb reason I’d ever heard for getting oneself lost at sea. This would belong to Epi and Joseph, two Catholic missionaries from Samoa and Tonga, respectively, who one day took the boat belonging to the Catholic high school out for a day of fishing. They got lost.

“We followed the birds,” Joseph told me when I spoke to him a few months later. “We thought that’s where the fish were, but then the birds flew away. We followed the birds again, but still we couldn’t find any fish. And then we noticed that we couldn’t see land anymore.”

“So what did you do?”

“We shut off the engine.”

It occurred to me that I would now trust Samoan and Tongan fishermen even less than I did I-Kiribati fishermen. They were not more than a couple of miles from Tarawa. A simple reading of the clouds would have told them what direction to go. Clouds reflect the color of the lagoon, and so when they drift over the atoll they take on a pale green hue, which means that while you cannot actually see the atoll you know where it is. But the missionaries were unaware of this basic island navigational technique, and so they began to drift.

“On the first night, there was suddenly a loud noise and the boat nearly turned over,” Joseph told me. “It was a whale and it had come up right beside us. I could see its eye.”

He was nearly quaking at the recollection. For a Catholic missionary adrift at sea, the appearance of a whale must be a fairly evocative thing.

“But that was the last fish we saw,” he continued. “We didn’t catch a thing. And then, one day, a bird landed on the boat and I was able to grab it.”

I asked him about water.

“It rained once, and we gathered about three liters.”

“And so that’s it?” I asked it. “One bird and three liters of water.”

“That’s it.”

The hapless missionaries were adrift for three weeks. They turned on the engine periodically when the sea ran high threatening to overturn the boat, but mostly they drifted silently across the largest ocean in the world. They prayed. A lot. Apparently someone was listening: They too were found by a Korean fishing boat, which took them to Papua New Guinea. Eventually, they made it back to Tarawa, where they have been feeling guilty ever since. Not only had the Catholic high school been forced to pay the exorbitant costs of their air travel from Papua New Guinea—there is not a more expensive corner of the world to travel in than the Pacific—but it had also lost its boat.

STILL, DESPITE MY very great fear of drifting aimlessly across the ocean, I thought that I should at least gather some ocean-oriented experience. I was on an atoll in the very middle of the world’s largest ocean, an ocean whose sounds were omnipresent, whose very sight was unavoidable, and because the atoll is a very small place to be, the ocean is the only option for expanding one’s world. I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: “No, you’re not.”

“And what do you mean by ‘No, you’re not’?”

I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become sun-browned and sea-weathered. I would smell like fish. I would be a Salty Dog.

“I mean,” Sylvia said, “that when the engine dies and you start drifting, which will happen, because things like that do seem to happen to you, you will not survive two days. Your skin will fry, you will collapse from dehydration, and because you will be the most useless person on the boat, you will be regarded by the others as a potential food source.”

I didn’t like the imagery here.

“And,” she continued, “if you’re off drifting on the ocean, who will do the shopping? And what about the nights when it’s your turn to cook?”

Can you feel the love?

Nevertheless, I proceeded with my plans because a line had been drawn and lines must be crossed. I would, however, bring extra sunscreen and lots of water. I tried to think of ways to be useful on a boat adrift in the Pacific, but I could not come up with anything except shark bait.

The following day Sylvia came home and said that she had spoken with Temawa, Bitaki’s sister. Temawa worked at FSP as an environmental education officer. It often seemed as if the FSP staff alone were related to the entire country.

“She said Farouk had gone fishing with her brothers.”

“And… what did he say?”

“You should ask him.”

I sensed a trap.

Farouk was Temawa’s husband. He was, like nearly every other foreigner in Kiribati, a missionary. What made him a little different was that he was a Muslim missionary from Ghana. If you were an I-Kiribati woman looking for a way to subvert traditional mainstream island society, you could not do better than to marry a Muslim missionary from Africa. This streak of good-hearted independence is what drew Sylvia to hire Temawa when she was eight months pregnant with their second child. Temawa held a graduate degree in environmental studies from a university in Canada (“It was so cold,” she said), and rather than seek lifetime employment with the government, she genuinely wanted to do something which would allow her to “make a difference.” You believed her too.

Her husband Farouk was a gentle man with a sly sense of humor. “A man walks into a bar and says ‘Allah Akbar.’ What should you do?”

“What?”

“Duck.”

Farouk had yet to convert a single I-Kiribati to Islam. Not even Temawa would make that kind of leap, but he remained in buoyantly good spirits, working primarily as a minibus driver to help out with the family’s expenses. When I asked him about his experiences fishing, he broke out into a wide grin and declared: “I have never been so scared in my life.”

Did I mention that Farouk had fought the Russians in Afghanistan? No? Well, he did. Farouk was one of those fearless souls whose life had become one long adventure. He was deeply at ease with himself, exuding an air of preternatural calmness, and so when he remarked that he had been shit-scared while fishing with his brothers-in-law, I paid attention.

“I just wanted to lie down in the middle of the boat, close my eyes, and pretend that I was somewhere else. The waves were so big, and the boat goes up and down, up and down, and I became very sick,” he said. “But I couldn’t lie down.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was busy bailing. It is a very leaky boat. For twelve hours I did nothing but get sick and bail.”

Score one for Sylvia.

Fortunately, sweet necessity soon reared its head. We had planned to fly to Maiana with Bwenawa and Atenati, who also worked in the FSP garden, in order to conduct nutrition and gardening workshops in each of the island’s villages, but Air Kiribati was once again grounded, awaiting spare parts from the other side of the globe. An efficient airline Air Kiribati is not, and a sea journey was thus happily needed. One would think that given the troubles of its airline, inter-island shipping would be a high priority for the government, but this is not so. There is but one creaking, rusting hulk of a vessel that periodically sails to the outer islands to deliver supplies and gather copra, the dried coconut meat used in soaps and oils, which provides outer islanders with their only source of income. The ship’s schedule is mysterious, its sightings infrequent, and most islands go four months and more between ship visits. Pleas from outer islanders requesting more shipping are duly and ceremoniously acknowledged and then ignored altogether. The more cohesive and industrious islands have taken it upon themselves to buy their own island boats. There is the Abaiang boat, and the Onotoa boat, and so on, and the man who builds them is John Thurston, a Californian who left the United States some thirty years ago.

It is one of the small pleasures of living in Kiribati that the foreigners one meets tend to live life in a vivid and eccentric sort of way, and when you listen to their tales of high adventure in the South Seas, you find that you are subsequently ruined from a conversational point of view, that you can no longer even pretend to be remotely interested in someone’s trip to the mall, or their thoughts about the stock market, or their opinions about the relative merit of a football player, and soon you will be branded as aloof, simply because once, on a faraway island, you heard some good stories. John had some of the more colorful tales. He was a surfer from Anaheim who one day picked up and left for Hawaii to surf the big waves. In appearance and mannerism, he reminded me of Brian Wilson, the tormented genius behind the Beach Boys. There were demons. They were slayed. And the story of that battle manifested itself in the lines on John’s face and the near-stuttering quality of his speech. He had become a Baha’i, which is something I never asked him about, because I once heard that members of the Baha’i faith are not permitted to proselytize unless someone asks them about their faith, and it says much about the graciousness of John and Mike and the other Baha’is I met that I remain as clueless about the religion now as ever.

In the early 1970s, John set out for Tarawa, where he was charged by the Baha’i powers that be to start up a youth center similar to the one he had run on Maui. Soon enough, he discovered he was broke and so he began to build boats, catamarans, and trimarans with shallow drafts to accommodate lagoons and reefs. They were made of plywood and whatever other material he could find, and John set up business as an inter-island trader. With independence in 1979, he moved on to the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Fiji, Samoa, and eventually to Papua New Guinea, where he lived for six years, trading food and tobacco (but no alcohol) in exchange for shells in areas where few had ever encountered a westerner. The violence and mayhem of Papua New Guinea eventually compelled him to leave, and he returned to Kiribati with Martha, his yellow 36-foot homemade trimaran, which would become our home on the voyage to Maiana.

His house, an airy bungalow that took him two months to build after a fire reduced his old place to little more than flickering embers, overlooked the lagoon. It was as much a workshop as a home, and I stopped by one day to get some help repairing the sail I used for windsurfing. A tumble on the reef had created a foot-long gash. As John set about lining the tear with sail tape I set about prying stories from him. John is a modest man, friendly in that wholesome American kind of way, but hardly one to expound unbidden, but eventually he told me about the girl he’d found floating in the ocean.

“We were sailing off Abaiang when Beiataaki noticed something strange in the water,” he began. “At first we thought it was a turtle, and then as we got closer we saw that it was a body, a little girl, couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.” His eyes widened, as if to say, Can you believe that? “We sailed alongside. She was just bobbing in the water. Her eyes were closed and we thought she was dead. She was about ten miles or so from land. And, I’ll never forget this, swimming through her hair were all these little fish, little colorful fish, blue and red, like flowers. We were about to pull her in, when suddenly she opened her eyes. Well, that was a surprise, I can tell you. We got her aboard and gave her some water and some food. She had been drifting since the day before. We took her back to her village and arrived right in the middle of her funeral.”

“My goodness,” I said. John was the sort of person to whom you could say my goodness without feeling self-conscious. “How did she end up drifting in the ocean?”

“She saw her father and brother fishing from a sandbar in the lagoon. She tried to get to them, but the tide got her. They tried to reach her, but couldn’t, and so she drifted right on out of the lagoon and into the ocean. The entire village set off in canoes looking for her, but they couldn’t find her.”

“You must be a popular figure in Abaiang.”

“They’re good people. They’re all good people here.” He paused for a moment. “Well, there are a few bad apples, just like everywhere.”

Once, when I happened to be elsewhere, Sylvia noticed two drunks lurking around the house. It was during the day, which was unusual. Sylvia called John, who immediately rushed over. He is a big man, and he literally picked up the two men, and threw them out onto the road, loudly shaming them for their behavior. “And don’t you ever come back!” And they didn’t.

John had decided to move to Abaiang. He had leased a plot of land that stretched from lagoon to ocean, where he planned to build a house, a few more boats, and live out his remaining years. “Too many people on Tarawa,” he said. “And the smell is beginning to bother me.” It was true. Where he lived, the fetid stench of sizzling shit at low tide was breathtakingly foul. He had no plans to return to the United States. Only once in the past thirty years had he set foot on American soil, and he understood that the U.S. was no place to be for a sixty-year-old man with just fifty dollars to his name. He would have been fine were it the nineteenth century, but millennial America no longer had room for his form of self-reliance. He joked about pushing shopping carts.

Sylvia chartered Martha, to take Bwenawa, Atenati, and ourselves to Maiana. John, however, would not be sailing her. Our captain would be Beiataaki, John’s longtime crew member. He brought Tekaii, a young Baha’i convert, to help out on board. Beiataaki had sailed the boat the length of the lagoon the day before, and we boarded Martha in Betio, where if conditions were favorable it would take us a day to reach Maiana. John was there to see us off and I mentioned how much I liked Martha’s toilet. It extended off the stern of the boat like a whimsical throne. It was exactly what Salvador Dalí would have done.

“Yeah… when it gets rough it’s like that French thing.”

“A bidet?”

“Yeah, a bidet.”

The weather was faultless. A steady breeze brought lazy whitecaps to the lagoon. A few scattered clouds drifted above, their colors evolving from green to a translucent blue as they passed the lagoon. Blighted Betio began to recede as we sailed toward the channel. Waves broke on the long shoal that extends north of Betio and already we could see the green islets of North Tarawa. A sailing canoe appeared and as it neared I saw that it had an unusual black sail. Peering closely, I noticed that the sail was in fact an ingeniously cut garbage bag. “Look,” I said to Sylvia. “A floating metaphor.”

As we cleared the channel, Bwenawa let out a long fishing line baited with a plastic squid. He knotted the line at the stern of the boat and every now and then he tugged at it.

“Maybe we’ll catch something here, but I think when we are near Maiana we will catch many fish,” he said.

“I want a shark,” said Atenati. “A big shark.”

Atenati was the scourge of Bwenawa’s existence. Her last name was O’Connor, and she exhibited the devilish twinkle of her beachcomber ancestor. Atenati and Bwenawa feuded like an old couple that had been married much too long. For years, they had worked side by side in the FSP garden. Each had firm opinions about what constituted ideal growing conditions for tomatoes and eggplants, and both were stubborn. I joked with Bwenawa about the dangers of provoking Atenati. She was not above using magic.

“That’s right, Bwenawa. You listen to the I-Matang or I will put a spell on you,” she said.

“Ha-ha. You’re tokonono, Atenati.”

I could tell Bwenawa was wary of her magic. Like all I-Kiribati, at heart he believed in taboo areas, spirits, and magic. Christianity simmered at the surface—Mike called it tribalism, the need to belong to a group competing against another group—but in most ways the spiritual life of the I-Kiribati remained uncorrupted by a century of missionaries. This is why even on crowded South Tarawa there still remained swaths of land devoid of homes and people. Spirits lived in these places, and spirits were not to be trifled with.

As Tarawa receded I marveled that we had made this dust speck of an island our home. The utter isolation of it. Its starkness. Its fragility. Its beauty. Its sordidness. Its people, so engaging, so violent. That it was beginning to feel very much like home was a realization that sometimes frightened me. Most I-Matangs sent to Kiribati lasted only a few months before sickness and the oppressive claustrophobia of island fever drove them elsewhere. The couples that arrived generally dissolved. Everything was permitted on Tarawa. There were no rules. There were also no secrets. That was too much for many.

I, however, could not think of any place I would rather be than on a homemade wooden trimaran plying the sun-dappled water between Tarawa and Maiana. Beiataaki had caught a ray and it was drying on the mesh that laced the hulls at the bow of the boat. Sylvia was happy. It was impossible not to be. Traversing this patch of sea tinted the lush blue of the great depths in a trimaran painted a fading carnival yellow with blue trim under an equatorial sun between two tropical green isles is to have an experience in color that I did not know was possible without the aid of pharmaceuticals. At the boat’s stern, Bwenawa continued to jig his fishing line, coaxing a bite. Atenati provided commentary: “Have you caught my shark yet?”

By mid-afternoon Maiana became visible and I realized that this was how atolls ought to be approached. From the sea, there is first the luminous clouds drifting over the lagoon, and then a glimmer of green that enlarges and continues to lengthen, the slender ridge of a sea mountain cresting low above the ocean, and then the water begins to change, its blue revealing the sand and coral below, and everything seems somehow both untamed and serene. Bwenawa was getting excited now.

“Aiyah, aiyah. Birds!”

Beiataaki maneuvered the boat toward where the seabirds were hovering.

“Aiyah!”

Something had bit. Bwenawa strained to pull the fish in. His hands clasped the line. He heaved himself back until he was lying nearly parallel to the deck.

“Aiyah, aiyah!”

“Yah, Bwenawa!” Atenati rooted.

Bwenawa began drawing the fish in. It was clearly a big fish. Bwenawa’s muscles were pulled taut. He was sweating heavily. I had never seen him happier.

“Aiyah, aiyah!”

He pulled the fish in, each handful of line a small victory. The fish began to lose its fight. As Bwenawa drew the line in, one hand over the other, I recognized the motion from a traditional dance that I-Kiribati men perform. Finally, gleaming in silver light below the surface was a yellowfin tuna. Beiataaki hauled it in. The fish must have weighed a good twenty-five pounds; it would have been worth several hundred dollars in Japan. On deck, the tuna continued to leap spasmodically until Beiataaki took a club to its head. Crimson blood splattered all over the boat, and by the time the fish succumbed, the deck looked like some horrific crime scene. This surprised me. I had never associated fishing with blood.

Bwenawa retrieved the hook and the plastic pink squid and tossed the line back into the water. Below the surface, we could see outcroppings of coral and a sandy bottom and this made the water take on ever more permutations of blue. Visibility must have been at least a hundred feet. Within minutes, Bwenawa landed another fish. It fought even more ferociously than the tuna.

“Aiyah, Aiyah!”

I worried that Bwenawa might have a heart attack. He was ecstatic. Again he hauled with all his might. Watching him was like watching a heavyweight tug-of-war. He heaved. He worked the fish. He released a hard-fought yard of line and then pulled it back in. As the fish neared, I could see that it was long and slender. “What do you think, Beiataaki? A sea pike?”

“No,” he said. “That’s a barracuda.”

A great barracuda. It was nearly four feet long. It was a primordial fish. It looked like it belonged in another era, when the size of one’s teeth was the most important thing in determining whether you survived or not. It too was clubbed, more thoroughly than the tuna. Even so, Bwenawa could not bring himself to retrieve the hook. “I don’t like those teeth,” he said. Beiataaki gingerly unclasped the hook from Jaws and again the line was drawn out behind the boat.

“Let’s see the I-Matang fish,” Atenati taunted.

“I may need some magic,” I replied.

I took the line, but not before applying some more sunscreen. After a day sailing the equatorial Pacific, I could feel my freckles mutating into something interesting and tumorous. I tugged the line and just like that I had a fish; and just like that I realized that applying sunscreen a moment before grasping a wispy fishing line that was connected to a fish, and I believed it was a mighty fish, was not a particularly clever thing to do. I don’t think Hemingway would have made the same mistake. Then again, Hemingway had a fishing rod, which as I struggled with this behemoth from the depths, struck me as an eminently useful tool for fishing. I held on to the line with one hand, while trying to wipe the grease from the other on my shorts. I was dangling precariously over the edge of the boat. My arm felt like it would soon spring from its socket. I believed I had hooked a tiger shark.

“Hey, I-Matang!” Atenati yelled. “In Kiribati we fish with two hands.”

Atenati was always helpful. Just as I was finally able to maintain a firm grip on the line, I began to notice a stinging sensation on my hands, which as I battled with my sea beast, began to rapidly spread to my arms and chest. It was a burning, itchy feeling, the kind that soon leaves its sufferer in a state of frothy madness. “I itch!” I cried. “Something stings!”

“It’s only sea lice,” Beiataaki informed me.

What the fuck were sea lice? So typical, I thought. Even the ocean in Kiribati has lice.

Atenati began to cackle. I wondered if she had anything to do with it. I gave her the evil eye.

I struggled with my monster. I heaved and hauled. My muscles ached. I put my legs into it. I was engaged in an epic confrontation between man and beast and I was determined to win. I would demonstrate my prowess as a hunter. I would serve notice to the fish world that there was a new master in town. This shark was mine.

Only it wasn’t a shark. Nor was it a great barracuda. Or a tuna. No, it was an itsy-bitsy trevally, a little more than a foot long, and as I finally hoisted it out of the water, I was struck by its dainty color, a shimmering blue-green. No one clubbed my fish.

“Aiyah, Aiyah,” Bwenawa said, with a decided lack of oomph.

I continued to itch.

“I feel sorry for the fish,” Sylvia said. “Look, its colors are fading.”

We stared at the fish. Flop, flop. Pant, pant. And then it was no more. I felt like my dominance over the fish world had not yet been conclusively demonstrated. And then Atenati yelled: “Look!”

We all turned.

Oh-oh.

The sea monsters depicted by early explorers in the Pacific no longer seemed so fanciful. Not far off the bow was an immense creature. We watched its dark silhouette displace water like an indolent torpedo. It could only be here, at reef’s edge, for one reason. It was hungry.

“Is it a whale?” asked Bwenawa. “A pilot whale?”

“It’s huge,” Sylvia noted

“Jesus,” I said.

Beiataaki stared long and hard. “Thresher shark,” he declared.

I suddenly noticed how small our boat was. I remembered that it was made of plywood. Thin plywood. Thin and old plywood. Thin and old and rotting plywood. Thin and old and rotting and easily breached plywood. Imperceptibly, I moved to the middle of the boat. What were we thinking, washing fish blood off the deck in shark-infested waters? A patch of water where sharks can be confused with whales.

About forty yards distant, we watched a tail fin, a tail fin that rose four feet out of the water, of which it followed that another four feet were under water, suggesting a tail fin of eight feet—an eight-foot tail fin!—and it was coming our way.

“There’s my shark!” Atenati declared. “Bwenawa! Catch me that shark!”

Bwenawa was already rummaging around for a stronger line and a bigger hook. Beiataaki was slicing up his ray. The shark was nearing. Swish-swish went its eight-foot tail fin.

Fuck.

These people were insane. I looked at Sylvia. She had a look of glee about her. You too, woman?

Beiataaki began to toss chunks of ray overboard. Bwenawa was fiddling with gear. Atenati was beside herself. “There’s my shark. This way. This way.”

The shark listened. It neared. And then it submerged. And then it became a shadow. An enormous shadow. This was exactly what Steven Spielberg would have the shark do. I could hear the music. Do-do-do-do do-do-do-do. The shark passed underneath the boat. It was at least twenty feet long. I braced myself for that moment of impact, when this mass of muscle and teeth would shoot up and shatter the boat, tossing us into the water, and oh, the horror of it then.

Beiataaki moved to the other side of the boat as the shark glided underneath. He was throwing big chunks of ray into the water. I did not encourage this. It was as if we were at some duck pond in a park, merrily feeding the quackers. But this was not a duck. This was a twenty-foot shark.

“They’re crazy,” I offered.

“Yes,” Sylvia said. We stood watching, agape. Two forces, both irrational and armed, were about to collide.

But the shark was having none of it, bless him. He was a smart shark. A good shark. He just kept on swimming, leaving a turbulent wake with his eight-foot tail fin. Swish, swish. I began to like the shark. I liked the shark for swimming away. Swim, shark, swim. Off you go. Leave these fools behind you.

“Bwenawa!” Atenati screeched. “You didn’t catch my shark!”

“Ha-ha.” Bwenawa seemed energized. A yellowfin tuna, a great barracuda, and, if they had just been a little better prepared, a twenty-foot thresher shark. He was in good spirits.

THE DAY WAS FADING. We drew in the fishing line in and began to search for the channel into Maiana Lagoon. John had installed a Global Positioning Satellite receiver on board, but its accuracy was not fine enough to navigate a crooked thirty-foot-wide channel that meandered through a boat-chomping reef. The channel was marked by wooden stakes, and as we approached, lowering our sail, two frigate birds took to the air, flying in tandem, their angular wings extended, seeking an updraft to carry them elsewhere. Beiataaki climbed the mast and guided Tekaii through the reef. Here was a plump display of brain coral. There a luminous coral garden. Here a jagged finger. All of it just a yard or two distant from our hulls. The ocean seemed to trip as it encountered the reef, sending forth rolling plumes of white water. I wondered how Maiana managed to get any supplies at all. Everything would have to be offloaded in the deep water, and transported through the reef and across another four miles of lagoon by a smaller vessel.

Beiataaki gestured from his perch in the mast. Left, now right, hard right, hard right. Tekaii’s eyes were focused solely on Beiataaki as he manipulated the rudder. Even a simple scrape against the bristling reef could sink us. We were still a long distance from land, too far to swim. Twenty long minutes passed. No one except Beiataaki and Tekaii exchanged a word. There was tension on the boat, the giddiness had dissipated. And then we were through and into the relative safety of the lagoon. Beiataaki clambered down from the mast, shaking his head. “I don’t like this channel. It’s the worst in Kiribati.”

Ahead we could see a green palisade of trees that soon sharpened into the minaret stems of coconut trees and the great tumbling canopies of breadfruit trees. We motored across the lagoon toward the middle of Maiana, where just as on every other island in Kiribati, the government maintains a station, called Government Station, which struck me as very Conradian. This was where the island’s guesthouse was located, as well as a first-aid clinic, a secondary school, and a fisheries office. A few maneabas were visible and then entire villages of thatch and stilts.

“The wind is changing,” Beiataaki noted. “A westerly.”

The wind vane began to flutter and twirl. Suddenly it hit us, a few gusts that threatened to take our hats, followed by a sustained gale that quickly turned a placid lagoon into white-streaked chop. I had never seen wind turn and strengthen so quickly, not even in Holland, where, typically, one can expect the wind to strengthen the moment you get on a bicycle and to turn as you do, so that no matter which direction you bike you will always be biking into a gale-force headwind. This was different. On a languid, sunny day the wind direction had changed by 180 degrees and hardened into a forty-five-knot gale within two minutes. This did not threaten the boat; the sail was down, the lagoon was shallow, and waves splattered harmlessly against the hull. Still, I had grown accustomed to the torporous monotony of equatorial weather, and now deeply regretted not bringing my windsurfer.

Beiataaki anchored Martha in shallow water just off the beach near Government Station. We gathered our gear and waded in. The coconut trees were bent by the wind, their canopies folded in like collapsed umbrellas. I could hear the dull thuds of coconuts loosened by the wind. Children on the beach ran with outstretched lavalavas like gangly birds at takeoff. Our accommodations were on the ocean side of the atoll and we walked along a path that crossed the breadth of Maiana, about a hundred yards, taking care to avoid the trajectories of falling coconuts. The guesthouse was a gray cinder-block house with a dirt floor. It had a living area with a hammock. The sleeping quarters were arranged like horse stalls with hard bunks and mosquito nets. A well and a bucket supplied our water needs.

On this side of the island we remained in the wind’s shadow, and, despite the gale, we were able to get a fire going and grill Bwenawa’s barracuda. The tuna was left with Beiataaki and Tekaii, who had quickly turned Martha around and were racing across the lagoon to navigate the channel before sunset. They planned to sail through the night back to Tarawa and return a week later to pick us up. As the day diminished into an opaque dusk, we could see the ocean churning in the graying light, deep chasms were carved as the wind sent waves rushing and hissing across the horizon. Rain began to pelt the guesthouse. Leaks appeared in the roof. Pools of water turned the floor into mud.

“I think it is raining on Tarawa too,” Bwenawa said. We hoped it was. We hoped this storm marked the end of the drought.

“Just think of it,” I said to Sylvia. “Full water tanks.”

“Provided that the water actually gets into the tanks,” she said dryly.

Sylvia still had little faith in my fixing abilities. But I was confident. I had spent hours clearing the roof and gutters of leaves and nettles. I had, very ingeniously I thought, used the materials at hand to plug the holes in the gutter—plastic lids and an extremely valuable roll of electrical tape.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a Dutchman. And Dutchmen know how to channel water.”

“You’re only half Dutch,” Sylvia noted. “And you left Holland when you were six.”

“It’s an innate knowledge. We’re water people. Soon, you’ll be able to wash your hair guilt-free.”

“Twice a week?”

“Twice a week. I promise.”

We paused to listen. It was an angry storm.

“I am glad we’re not on the boat now,” Atenati said. We all pondered for a moment what it must be like for Beiataaki and Tekaii, sailing Martha through the black darkness of a starless night, the ocean a violent maelstrom, rogue waves unseen. And then we went to sleep.