The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 13

In which the Author discusses how unfuckingbelievably scary the South Seas can be.

The next day, in the dim blue light of a tempestuous dawn, we were surprised to see Martha anchored in the lagoon, the boat battened down like a fortress.

“Too rough,” Beiataaki said when we encountered him on the beach. He had sailed the Gilbert Islands for thirty years. His skin was blotched from sun damage. His face was creased from wind. That he had declared the conditions too rough for sailing, particularly when he did not have any queasy landlubbers on board, suggested some intense roughness indeed. “We got through the channel, but then the waves were too big to keep sailing,” he said. “We’ll try again later.”

But they did not try again later. As the days passed, the storm did not. Each day saw Maiana swept with wind and rain. Papaya trees were felled. Maneabas lost their roofs. The island was bathed in a dismal gray. Villages were sodden. Women shivered as Atenati conducted cooking demonstrations, showing how island-grown vegetables rich in vitamin A could be used in the local diet, alleviating the night blindness that stalks malnourished children in Kiribati. Bwenawa returned to the guesthouse late in the afternoons, having spent his days roaming from garden to garden, offering tutorials on the proper sun-to-shade ratio for optimal tomato growth and spreading the wonders of chaya, bele, and nambere, the only green leafy vegetables that grew on an atoll. Making the weedy leaves edible was Atenati’s job.

In the maneabas, the unimane fretted about the wind and the harm it had inflicted. Each village had at least one maneaba with a damaged roof and the old men were concerned about the lack of young men with sufficient maneaba-building skills. The population on Maiana was dwindling as each year more of its young people were lured by the flickering lights of Tarawa.

Sylvia and I grew ever more intimate as we made do without a mirror.

“You have eye gunk.”

“You’ve got a booger.”

“There’s something…”

“Where… here?”

“No… not…”

“Did I get it?”

“Here… let me.”

As the storm ebbed and flowed, with rain showers followed by hard winds, Maiana seemed a gloomy, dejected island, enlivened only—from my perspective—by the unbearably pleasant feeling of coolness, a briskness to the air that meant I could now go through a day without risking dehydration, without feeling the need to douse my food with salt, without succumbing to the torpor of midday, when, typically, the entire country’s energy level is reduced to just a shade above comatose. I had long wondered why the temperate world was so much more advanced than the equatorial world, but it seemed obvious to me now that the heat was the key. How productive are New York and Paris in August? Not very, and they have air-conditioning. Now imagine the perpetual August without the cool breath of a humming air conditioner. Would New Yorkers still be working eighteen-hour days, churning out lawsuits and magazines? Would anyone care if Cisco dropped by forty points? No. In the perpetual August, New Yorkers would spend their workdays draped and drooling over their desks, just like the government of Kiribati.

There was another unexpected benefit brought about by the wind. It was too rough to fish, and we had resigned ourselves to rice-intensive meals, when Kiriaata, the gracious caretaker of the guesthouse, apologized for the lack of dinner options. “I can make the chicken curry,” she said, holding up a rusty can of Ma-Ling Chicken Curry, which I knew from hard experience contained only those parts of the chicken that even the Chinese would not eat—gizzards and bones. “Or we can have crayfish,” Kiriaata offered, reaching for four of the largest, most delectable lobsters I had ever seen. “I am sorry. That is all we have.”

Sylvia and I mewed and groaned and made all sorts of deeply primal noises.

“You want chicken curry?”

“No!” we barked. “Crayfish.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

The I-Kiribati do not have a taste for lobster. I believed this was because their taste buds died when the English arrived. Not only was the I-Kiribati diet pretty grim to begin with, it was now enhanced with canned corned beef and “cabin biscuits,” the staples of the nineteenth-century seaman’s rations. This combination of atoll food with English food that can survive for years and years on a boat had destroyed the I-Kiribati palate. I thought it would be impolite to test this theory on Bwenawa, so I simply asked him why the I-Kiribati don’t like lobster. He explained that they regarded lobster as a disgusting reef cleaner, and he looked at me knowingly, until finally I said: “Ah, yes, I see your point.”

It mattered not. While I might not have eaten a lobster caught on the reef in South Tarawa, a quick risk analysis of the situation on Maiana suggested that I could eat a lobster and probably maintain my health, and even if I did get sick it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’d gotten sick eating in Kiribati, and at least I would have had the pleasure of actually eating something I liked.

“I don’t suppose you have any butter or a lemon here?” I asked Kiriaata.

“Akia,” she said.

Nevertheless, it was the tastiest meal I ever ate in Kiribati. Bwenawa and Atenati eyed us warily as we slavered over our lobster.

“Uumh…”

“Oooh…”

“Aaah…”

We asked, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if we could have lobster every night. Each evening Bwenawa and Atenati picked at their tinned chicken gristle, while we ate our lobsters with ill-disguised obscenity. Not knowing when such an opportunity might present itself again, we took a few lobsters with us when it was time to depart Maiana.

Beiataaki and Tekaii spent the entire week riding out the storm in Maiana Lagoon. There might have been windows of opportunity for them to sail back to Tarawa, when the wind lessened to a still considerable twenty knots, but the idea of sailing across storm-tossed water only to return a day or two later to do it all over again dissuaded them. On Friday, as we gathered with our gear on the beach, so too did fifty-odd people beseeching us for a lift to Tarawa. “It’s Sylvia’s decision,” Beiataaki informed them diplomatically. Sylvia took one look at the size of the crowd, another look at the size of the boat, and yet another look at the ominous black clouds stirring on the horizon, and said in as reasonable and polite a manner as she could muster, “No.” Then she returned to gazing at the ominous black clouds stirring on the horizon.

“What do you think?” she asked me. “Should we go? You’re the sailor.”

Technically, this was true. I do sail. I have sailed on Lake Ontario and the Chesapeake Bay, but the vast majority of my sailing experience had been confined to a small lake in Holland, with an average depth of five feet, across which I schussed along in a Laser, a tiny little boat generally used by tiny little people learning how to sail. My only experience in blue water sailing thus far had occurred on the trip to Maiana, and though I was very favorably disposed to blue water sailing, I got the feeling that the journey back to Tarawa would be a little different.

“I think we should leave it up to Beiataaki,” I said.

Beiataaki had his eyes on the sky, quietly trying to discern its intent. The wind was modest, at least by the previous week’s standard, but the darkness of the sky promised nothing good.

“If we go, we have to leave now,” Beiataaki said. He was considering the day’s tides, which were unfavorable for us, and the fact that there were no lights on the buoys marking the channel into Tarawa Lagoon. This meant that we had to get through the channel before nightfall if we wished to avoid spending a night tacking back and forth on a heaving ocean while awaiting the light of dawn. “I think we should sail to the channel here and decide then,” Beiataaki declared.

This we did. With the sail reefed and the engine droning we spent the morning hours crossing the lagoon. A week of gales had stirred the sand at the bottom of the lagoon and the swirling gray clouds gave the water a milky ice-blue tint that looked strangely surreal. As we neared the wooden pilings that marked the channel’s entrance, Beiataaki put the engine in neutral and began to fret. We had arrived at precisely the low-water mark, when the channel was at its most treacherous. There would be no room for error. The boulders we had glided over on the way in could sink us on the way out. The reef that extended outward from the channel seemed to be under assault by the ocean. Ponderous waves broke with a dull thunder and dissipated into a churning froth that extended all along its contours.

Beiataaki climbed the mast and there he remained for a very long while, studying the channel and gazing at the ocean. When he clambered down, I asked him what he thought. He shrugged his shoulders like a Frenchman. It is bad either way, he seemed to suggest. And then he seemed to decide.

“I want to go home. I miss my wife.”

He climbed back up the mast. Tekaai stood at the rudder waiting for instructions. Sylvia and I exchanged glances. What the hell. Let’s go sailing. We inched forward and it was immediately clear that this channel at low tide was the nautical equivalent of a minefield. We were surrounded by great jagged bursts of coral. The channel meandered this way and that, zigzagging through jutting fingers and barely submerged boulders. The boat, as I have had occasion to ponder before, was made of plywood. There would be no chance of it surviving a collision. And then, once the passage was behind us, I wished with all my might that we would have sunk the boat in the channel, ending the misery right there and then.

The ocean raged.

Twenty-five feet. This was the height of the waves that greeted us when we emerged from the channel. Twenty-five feet. From cavernous trough to foaming peak. Twenty-five feet. And these were not rolling swells, gently lifting and rising. These were steep, pitching waves, tightly packed by the sudden rise of land. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the sight of these waves.

All of us turned a ghostly white as we internalized the sheer terror of being on a plywood trimaran in twenty-five-foot seas. And then some us began to turn green. As one, Bwenawa, Atenati, and Sylvia retreated to the sheltered aft of the boat, leaned over and began to vomit, and there they remained. Beiataaki steered a course that confronted the waves diagonally, and as we crested a wave, there was a long second when it felt like we had taken flight, an airlessness that made it seem as if we were not sailing across the ocean, but above it, only to be followed by a precipitous slide over the spine of the wave, sending the left hull plowing into the next curling swell, causing torrents of white water to swamp the deck and soak those who stood upon it, stalling the forward movement of the boat until buoyancy was reclaimed, and then the boat pitched ever upward, continuing the shattering routine. The troughs were windless caverns. The mast was swallowed. The sail went limp. On the crests, momentum was regained. All eyes turned toward the waves, dreading the rogue wave, the forty-footer. We watched and judged: That wave there, the third one, the big one, when it hits us it will be a wall of water. Beitaaki would adjust the rudder to confront it head-on, and as we rose above it and the hulls went airborne, there followed the crunching slap of the boat plunging back into the sea, an ear-piercing sound that made those of us still on deck wince with worry.

“What do you think?” I asked Beiataaki. It had begun to rain. I was shivering, cold, and in a state of stupefied awe. My hands were curled around a railing. Tekaai was busy with the sail, raising it here, reefing it there, lowering it altogether, reacting to a capricious wind that gusted and howled but remained unsteady. For safety, he was hooked to the lines running the length of the boat.

“I think we can make it. Once we are away from Maiana the waves will be more round, less steep.”

The waves, forged by a week of storms, continued to pound poor Martha. It was like being part of an endless car wreck, when you know you no longer have control over the situation, and you are just waiting for its grim conclusion. I went to check on Sylvia. There were stairs to navigate. The boat lurched and I bounced and stumbled and baby-stepped my way down. Sylvia was not well. She sat slumped on a bench, listlessly cradling her head, and muttering cryptically.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

“I want to get off this fucking boat.”

Hmmm… Sylvia is not one for cussing. There were no windows in the aft compartment. A blue tarp had been pulled down to keep the rain out. Atenati and Bwenawa sat on the bench opposite looking equally miserable. Every few minutes, one of the three would poke their head underneath the tarp and over the railing and begin to barf. Not good. Though I wasn’t typically afflicted by seasickness, the pitiable sight of these three and the heaving and lurching of the boat was beginning to make me feel nauseated as well.

“Why don’t you come up on deck,” I said to Sylvia. “The problem here is that you can’t see the waves and so your inner ear is confused. My inner ear is confused down here.”

“We should have stayed in Maiana,” she began to moan. “We should never have gone today. I should have said let’s wait until the sea calms down. I didn’t know it would be like this. Boo-hoo.”

She didn’t actually say boo-hoo, but she might as well have. I believe that if one-half of a couple becomes weepy and mopey, it is important for the other half to respond with refreshing bursts of sunnyness. This often entails lying.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Beiataaki said that he has seen much worse than this. We’re perfectly safe.”

Actually, Beiataaki had told me that this was about the worst he had ever seen, and if the wind rose, we might have to run with the waves, dragging a sea anchor to ensure that we wouldn’t flip end over end, which would add a considerable amount of time to the trip, quite likely several days.

“And because of the conditions,” I continued, “we’re making excellent time. This will be over before you know it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Actually, we were making terrible time. Each shattering wave stalled us and it would be a miracle if we made it through the channel into Tarawa Lagoon before sunset. Beiataaki was constantly checking his watch and taking our position with the GPS. I asked him why the government didn’t just put lights on the buoys that marked the passage into the lagoon. He told me they did, but that the lightbulbs were soon stolen, and so Tarawa remained unapproachable after sunset. It was the same with the airport runway. Lights were installed, but they too quickly disappeared. Only once had I seen an aircraft land at night. A British aid worker had accidentally backed her truck over her young son, crushing his legs, an injury well beyond the capacity of Tarawa Hospital. An air ambulance loaded with doctors and medical equipment was immediately dispatched from Australia. It arrived in the middle of the night, landing under the glare of the headlights emitted by dozens of cars strategically parked along the length of the runway. The boy returned to Tarawa a few months later, unburdened by permanent injury, and fortified by the knowledge that in the years to come his mother would likely spoil him rotten.

I escorted Sylvia up to the deck. Beiataaki had been right. Away from Maiana, over the deep water, the waves had become more rounded, more swell-like, than the steep masses of water that flayed us earlier. It was still a twenty-foot trip up and down for each twenty feet we gained horizontally, but Martha no longer cleaved her way forward, the violence of the sea had lessened, and I was beginning to enjoy myself. The sailing was raw sailing, but it was just shy of terrifyingly raw, and that is pretty much how I like my encounters with the natural world to be.

“See,” I said to Sylvia. “Isn’t this better?”

Silence.

“You know,” I said. “You don’t look so good.”

Sylvia lurched toward the railing. She threw up. And then she eased her way back to her familiar position in the aft compartment, her head dangling over the rail, her eyes closed, muttering darkly. I felt that the moment needed recording, and I took out our camera.

“Say cheese.”

This, it occurs to me now, was an unfortunate choice of words. I might as well have said Imagine swallowing snails and warm butter. When Sylvia was done vomiting, she turned to me, composed herself for the camera, and flipped me the bird. Click.

“Suitable for framing, I should think.”

She smiled wanly, and sunk back into her misery.

The day was getting on. Beiataaki was becoming less concerned with the waves, and more concerned about the approaching darkness. There is no variation in the timing of the sunset on the equator. The sun is down at 6 P.M. each and every day of the year. As we crested the waves, Tarawa gradually came into view. The waves began to pitch and steepen once again as the deep water reacted to the approaching atoll. The sky was gray and darkening and this made the waves seem even more foreboding. We could see Tarawa clearly now, a washed-out little island. There is not a bleaker sight than an atoll in the gray twilight, hunkered down against a wet gusting rain. It was a melancholic vision.

Beiatakki knew where he was going. He had spent a lifetime sailing through the channel that opened Tarawa Lagoon to the ocean. The channel was clearly marked on the chart he used to plot our position, and using the GPS alone, he could locate the channel, give or take fifty feet. But it wasn’t enough. We needed to sight the buoys before risking entry. A mistake, one that landed us on the reef, would kill us. No boat could withstand being reefed while hammered by twenty-five-foot waves.

Lights began to flicker on Tarawa. There was no majesty to the sunset. The color just seemed to drain from the sky. As we crested the blackening waves and disappeared in the troughs, so too did the buoy we sought. For a few fleeting seconds while we rose high with a wave, we scanned the water, searching for silhouettes, and as the sky darkened we worried. Only minutes remained until night utterly claimed the sky. The waves, with their height and girth, seemed ever more ominous. I realized that I could barely unclench my hand from the railing I held, it had been molded into a claw. Sylvia, Bwenawa, and Atenati now were braving the deck, lending their eyes to the search for the buoy. We wanted to go home. The mere thought of spending the night tacking back and forth in a running sea while awaiting morning light was more than most of us could bear.

“There it is!” I yelled.

It was bobbing, disappearing, visible again, a dark shadow that jerked wildly. The buoy was about four hundred yards off the left bow.

“I see it,” Beiataaki said. “You have good eyes.”

Sylvia gazed upon me with newfound ardor.

“You’re my hero,” she said. Typically, when Sylvia utters words such as those, there is—how shall I say it—a bit of a tone, and frankly, there was a bit of a tone this time too. But Sylvia was suddenly chipper again. Green, but chipper.

We made our way through the channel. It was much broader than the one in Maiana and as we entered the lagoon it was if someone had just reached for the dial and turned down the sea. It was no more than a six-foot swell that diminished into flat water as we neared the port in Betio. It was discombobulating. I had become completely used to the heaving ocean, and when I finally set foot on dry land, I experienced something very like seasickness. My eyes were adapted to a world that went up and down. I tottered with legs splayed. I was accustomed to shifting my weight from one leg to the other to maintain my balance on the boat. I had, it appeared, developed sea legs. I felt unbalanced, my sense of equilibrium disturbed by an unmoving and stable surface, and so with each step, I waited for a moment while that corner of my cranium perceived the transition from sea to land and made adjustments accordingly.

“I am so happy to be on land again,” Sylvia groaned.

“I feel dizzy,” I replied.

THE FOLLOWING DAY Tarawa sparkled in the sun. The island had received a long overdue cleaning. The water tanks were full. The wind had vanished. The waves remained.

“Have you seen it?” It was Mike, calling from the New Zealand High Commission.

“It’s beautiful.”

It was. I had forgotten that a reef-breaking wave could be something other than a wicked dumper. At low tide, I wandered out to the edge of the reef, where big, glassy waves, the kind you do see in the surf rags, rolled in with barreling perfection. They were plump and round and they broke in regular patterns.

Sylvia too was impressed. “These are real waves,” she declared. Even before the recent unpleasantness on the return trip from Maiana, Sylvia had been a little less than thrilled by my growing enchantment with waves. When I had returned one day from a morning of body boarding chattering about the gnarly conditions and how stoked I was to catch a particularly awesome wave, she said: “Did you just say gnarly?”

“Yes.”

“And did you say stoked?”

“Yes.”

“You remind me of my ex-boyfriends.”

Her ex-boyfriends went up in my estimation.

“I spent my entire youth listening to guys talk about gnarly waves and how stoked they were. This was why I left California. And now it begins again with you?”

What could I say?

“Just know this. If you ever address someone as dude, I’m leaving.”

And go where, I thought. We’re on an atoll. Besides, my English-language skills were unlikely to mutate much further. I was absorbing my surf lingo from a hyperliterate, ex-hippie New Zealander who had been living in complete isolation for much of the past two decades.

That morning, Mike suggested we go to the Betio causeway. “With this tide, four o’clock should be about right.”

Technically, I was not supposed to use the FSP pickup truck to transport surfers and surfing gear from one end of the atoll to the other. The pickup truck was a perk of the job for Sylvia. When not needed to transport people and material for FSP-related business, Sylvia was allowed to use it for her own needs. She was meticulous about what constituted proper use for an FSP-owned vehicle. Everyone on Tarawa knew that this particular pickup truck belonged to FSP. People would talk if they saw a couple of I-Matangs barreling down the road on a workday with surfing gear jutting out of the bed of the truck. Even though I handled much of the maintenance for the truck, and I did spend an awful lot of my time ferrying FSP staff from one thing to another, Sylvia was a stickler for propriety and unlikely to be moved by a request for a favor.

“Hi,” I said when I reached her on the phone at the office. “I need to get another gas canister.”

“Again? I thought we got a new one last week.”

“It must have been half-full. Anybody using the truck?”

“No.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Mike and I parked the pickup truck on the side of the causeway and gazed toward the waves. It would be a long paddle just to get there, nearly a half mile of swimming, but once there the hard work would be over. A narrow channel had been blasted through the reef. It was used by fishermen and allowed us to bypass the break zone.

“This is the best I’ve seen in seventeen years,” Mike said.

I put my flippers on and settled on my body board, which, truth be told, wasn’t much of a body board. It was more like a small paddle board used by little people learning how to swim, but it was enough. We followed the channel and spent a long time lingering beside the break zone, mesmerized by the waves. There is something hypnotic about their motion: the protuberant swell suddenly rising from the blue void, gathering a coiled height and becoming a pure force that rises into a funneling wall of water, and then a long, tense moment until it dissipates in a thunderous climax. There are times when I could spend hours just watching waves, but this wasn’t one of them. We paddled ahead and lined up and for the next hour caught wave after wave, each more perfect than the last. I edged deeper into the break zone, determined to catch my waves at their maximum height and extend my rides, spending a long minute carving loopy Ss. And that’s when it appeared.

The rogue wave. The wave that has swallowed several other waves. The wave that was born in some tempest in the southern ocean; the wave that grew into something monstrous and horrible during a week of gales in the central Pacific; the wave we had feared on the torturous journey home from Maiana. This wave was now approaching. We were caught inside. Waves such as these do not explode where other waves do. They do their violence farther out. Mike turned his board straight toward it. His arms were like cartoon arms, spinning and spinning like paddle wheels in overdrive. As the wave took him, he was stretched vertically on its face, and I could see that the wave was three times bigger than he. He clawed at its face, climbing this liquid mountain. He ascended, peaked, and disappeared over the frothing lip.

I was too deep. I could not follow Mike. The wave began to pitch and totter. It sucked in ever more water. I moved high up on my board, freeing my arms, and then swam faster than any man has swum before. I was headed diagonally into the face of the wave, trying to outrun the initial break. But the wave detonated. It boomed. I knew then that I would not get over in time.

And then I became stupid. I was abandoned by good sense. My survival instinct took a holiday. There was only one sensible option and that was to dive as deep as I could, but this I did not do. I did not have a leash connecting me to my board. If I dove, I would then have to swim all the way back to shore to retrieve my board, and somehow this little inconvenience caused my brain to stop working. Instead, I turned the board around, thinking, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I could catch this wave at its very peak, zip down its face, and then establish enough momentum to outrun the break. I was wrong.

I can attest now that having an eighteen-foot wave break upon your head is a remarkably unpleasant experience. There is the physical dimension, in which the wave rips off your board and your flippers, and suddenly you do not know up from down, you cannot breathe or see, but you can hear, and what this wave is telling you is that it can destroy you. There is crushing, and pounding, and hurtling. And there is pain. And there is panic. And it is terrifying. This wave is immensely more powerful than you, and it scars the psyche seeing this demonstrated in such a personal way. When I emerged, bruised and panting for air, I actually prayed, saying thank you for sparing me here, I will be very good from now on, et cetera et cetera, and then I scoured the beach for my board, found my flippers bobbing in the shallows, and I returned to the waves, to the ocean, with respect and humility.

“Did you catch that monster?” Mike asked, as I lined up alongside, my eyes on the swells and what they would become.

“No, dude,” I said. “But it caught me.”