The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 7

In which the Author settles into the theme of Absence, in particular the paucity of food options, and offers an account of the Great Beer Crisis, when the island’s shipment of Ale was, inexcusably, misdirected to Kiritimati Island, far, far away from those who needed it most.

It is entirely possible that somewhere on planet Earth there exists a cuisine more unpalatable than that found in Kiribati. I accept this possibility like I accept the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. I have never encountered it. I cannot imagine it. I simply accept that there is a statistical probability of its existence. An eensie-weensie tiny little probability.

How can this be, you wonder, when Kiribati is really nothing more than a vast habitat for fish. Good fish. Delicious fish. Dip a line with six baited hooks off reef’s edge (about 150 yards of line), tug for a minute or two, and you will pull up six large, succulent red snappers. Got a hankering for octopus? Just wander over the reef shelf during a neap tide and look under the rocks. Are you thinking mantis prawns? Search the lagoon flats at low tide for the telltale burrows, insert a sliver of eel, and pluck the creature out. Shark fin soup? Cut open a few flying fish, toss liberally around your boat, bait your hook with the liver of a ray, shake a rattle in the water, watch your arm now, await inevitable arrival of frenzied shark, hook it, tie line to boat, enjoy sleigh ride as shark tires itself out. Cut fin. Want a turtle? Well, you shouldn’t.

Elsewhere in the world, people are willing to pay good money for the fish found in Kiribati. And they do. Every now and then a decaying Chinese vessel limps toward Kiribati to gather the hundreds of shark fins culled by fishermen in the outer islands. The Chinese also take on live lagoon fish—the more luminous, the better—which are then transported to Hong Kong, where a meal isn’t a meal unless something endangered is served. Octopi and bêche-de-mer, turdlike creatures that function as reef cleaners, are rounded up for the Japanese, perhaps the most fastidiously hygienic people on the planet, who are clearly unaware of what exactly a reef cleaner in Kiribati cleans.

The real prize, however, is tuna and Kiribati has the world’s richest tuna fishing grounds. Dozens of industrial fishing boats from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and the United States ply across the more than two million square miles of ocean that comprise Kiribati’s exclusive economic zone. Quite likely, these floating colonies of trawlers and mother ships—Death Stars to the fish community—that receive and process the catch, are the very same ships that have emptied the North Atlantic and the South China Sea of life. Add to this an unknown number of illegal fishing boats—Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Russian—and you begin to understand that industrial fishing is something very different than the fishing rhapsodized about in the tomes churned out with alarming regularity by big city writers who summer in Montana. Rich countries are good at offering sweet words, little odes to environmental sensitivity, the homage to sustainable harvesting, haiku for nature—but appetites are not to be denied.

In an average year, nearly $2 billion worth of tuna is legally caught in the Pacific. This is a lot of money, particularly for nations where flipflops are regarded as evidence of conspicuous consumption. Yet, Pacific island nations typically only receive around $60 million annually in fees from fishing licenses. Kiribati, no surprise, receives a disproportionately small share. This is because—how to put this politely?—in the Pacific your average minister of fisheries is a) an idiot, or b) corrupt, and c) usually both. It does not help that license fees are tied directly to foreign aid. Japan, for instance, balks at paying more than 4 or 5 percent of the catch value in fees, arguing that it more than compensates in aid. But consider the aid. In Kiribati, this consists of the Fisheries Training Center, where young I-Kiribati men are groomed to work Japanese fishing boats for wages no Japanese would accept, and the construction of a new port to service, yes, Japanese fishing boats. Neat, huh?

Of course, it is not just rapacious foreigners doing the fishing in Kiribati. The country survives at a subsistence level, and subsistence is maintained almost solely by the consumption of fish. Consider this: Annual per capita fish consumption in Kiribati is over four hundred pounds. Pause for a moment and absorb this startling fact. The average man, woman, or child in Kiribati eats more than four hundred pounds of fish every year. That’s fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, fish for dinner. And in Kiribati, there are really only two ways to eat fish, raw or boiled. This, of course, was a dispiriting discovery. Raw fish has a place in my culinary world, but raw fish consumed before an intermediary stop in a refrigerator is, I can attest, a very effective way of eliciting weight loss. And boiled fish, well, I think it’s safe to say that we can blame the English for that. Not for the first time, I wished Kiribati had been colonized by the French, particularly after I asked Bwenawa if there were any local spices on the island.

“Spices?” he said.

“Yes. You know, like salt, pepper, saffron, that sort of thing.”

“Ah yes… like the salt fish.”

“Salt fish?”

Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. “You see,” said Bwenawa. “The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It’s kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish.”

“Ah,” I said. “In my country we call it rotten fish.”

Since I had, as Sylvia liked to point out, “more time,” it was left to me to gather the daily fish for our evening meal. In the late afternoon, after a hard day of thinking, I usually went biking. Sometimes I turned left and went down the atoll, sometimes I turned right and went up the atoll, but mostly I wished I had somewhere else to bike to, because frankly, biking up and down an atoll every day for two years does little to alleviate island fever. The quest for something edible gave my journeys up and down the atoll a welcome purpose.

As I soon discovered, finding food on Tarawa that is tasty, nutritious, and available is no easy task. After biking the entire length of Tarawa, I realized that the island is, in fact, two distinct places. Where the island’s lone road unfolds along the southern axis of the atoll is called South Tarawa; where a narrow bush trail links the village of Buota with the wind- and sea-blasted end of the atoll at Na’a is known as North Tarawa, and the differences between the two are vivid. North Tarawa, officially classified as an outer island, is beguiling. It is isolated from any hint of modernity. There is no electricity, no running water, no towns, not even a road. With the light and the water and the snow-white fairy terns fluttering in the casuarina trees, it feels very much like paradise ought to feel, except, of course, it is too hot. We were drawn there most weekends, enticed by long swaths of golden beaches, where we tramped like beachcombers, sifting through the tide’s curiosities, eyes straining along the reef, searching for turtles. To reach North Tarawa, we crossed the channel separating Tanaea from Buota—at high tide with a villager poling his canoe through the current—and walked along a footpath through a grove of coconut palm trees until we reached the aptly named Broken Bridge, a slab of cement that functions as a seesaw over a fish-laden channel. Across the bridge lies the islet of Abatao, the first of twenty-nine such islets in North Tarawa, perpetually chiseled by an ocean rushing and running twice daily, and the farther one walks the more elemental the islets seem. There is always the sea, the blinding light, but the wind begins to feel strangely potent, and soon you understand why the three thousand inhabitants of North Tarawa rarely go to Na’a, the northernmost tip of the atoll. Na’a is haunted. To stand in this desolate place, where drought has rendered most trees into lifeless stumps, where the ocean runs high, where enormous waves pound the reef with majestic indifference, is to feel an unshakable eeriness, until you turn around and march quickly back, past the graves of the last ten Japanese soldiers to die on Tarawa—suicides—until you reach the village of Buariki, overlooking the friendly lagoon and some friendly mangroves, where you sit in the maneaba, gratefully slurping a proffered coconut, and inquire of the resident unimane the correct I-Kiribati word for spooky.

Fishing here is not a job, or a way of life. It is, like water, an essential precursor to life, and befitting something elemental, it is accompanied by magic and governed by taboos. On North Tarawa, like on the other islands in Kiribati, each family provides for its own needs, and the mechanics of fishing—places and methods—are deeply held secrets, no less guarded despite the replacement of bone hooks by metal, and coconut fiber by industrial-grade line and mesh. Between tides, fish traps are built with stone, tidal pools are scoured, rocks are lifted, and food is secured for another day. Water is procured from shallow wells. Babai, or swamp taro, is grown in pits. Homes are made of wood and thatch. Alcohol is forbidden. Disputes are settled in the maneaba.

South Tarawa is a different place. In the velvet light of early evening, with the tide in and the men high in the trees cutting toddy and singing epics about either a woman or a fish that got away, it is possible to believe that all is well, that here on distant South Tarawa, far away from the hubris of continental life, the good life has prevailed. It was awfully pretty at sunset, and with such an ostentatious sky, the sweet finality of each and every day, illusions and delusions were tolerated. But in the glare of midday, with the tide out and revealing the desolate emptiness of the reef shelf; with the lagoon retreated, its water replaced by desert; with the aesthetic imbalance of sunsets and high water corrected, South Tarawa is exposed as a wretched island, often indistinguishable from a forgotten refugee camp. From Bonriki through Bikenibeu, past the great maneaba in Eita, across the causeways to Ambo and Bairiki and finally Betio, Tarawa’s lone road unravels from idyllic to raw to a Malthusian hell.

There are, simply, too many people on South Tarawa, particularly on the islet of Betio, which has the world’s highest population density, greater even than Hong Kong. Unlike Hong Kong, a city in the sky, there is not a building above two stories on Betio. Some eighteen thousand people, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, live on this shattered islet, one square mile of blight linked to the rest of Tarawa by a mile-long causeway. The tangible squalor of their lives shocked us initially, before we became numb. Housing was most often a strange fusion of coconut wood, thatch, corrugated tin, plywood, and rice bags, and it took time before we could distinguish the dwellings of humans from those of pigs. The beaches on Betio, both facing the lagoon and the ocean, were a minefield of fecal droppings. The odor at low tide, as waste both human and otherwise sizzled in the sun, was repellent, like eighteen thousand stink bombs going off at once. To be on the beach at low tide is to feel your body absorb the stench, internalize the repulsive, until you too feel the need to emit something somehow. Clean water was impossible to find. Most people relied on well water. They did not have to dig deep. The water lens is only about five feet below the surface, which would be convenient if coral wasn’t so porous, allowing everything dropped or spilled, such as piss and diesel, to quickly be absorbed by the groundwater, which soon becomes the happy abode of interesting parasites. Boiling water was essential, but few had stoves or the money to pay for gas canisters. There were still palm trees on Betio, which provided coconuts and toddy, but there wasn’t any shrub left for firewood, which is a poor emitter of heat anyway. Everyone had worms. Every child had hepatitis A. Tuberculosis was rampant. There were lepers. Cholera was inevitable: It had struck once before. It would strike again. Betio still functioned as a village, but it was no longer a village. It was a slum. The rest of South Tarawa trailed behind.

In this environment, the odd mixture of Robinson Crusoe–like isolation combined with the favelas of Rio, good eating was hard to find. On South Tarawa, anything caught inshore—lagoon fish, octopus, mantis prawns, sea worms—was guaranteed to induce gastric explosions in the unfortunate diner. More distressing, ciguatera poisoning was common. This occurs when untreated wastewater, which is the technical term for shit, leads to toxic algae, which is then eaten by fish, which are in turn consumed by humans, who soon feel a tingly, numbing sensation in their mouth, the first sign of the impending collapse of the body. The hands and feet become paralyzed. The skin feels like it is carrying an electric current. Bones creak. And if you are old or very young or if your immune system is weak, you may very well die. The most sensible advice we received from a volunteer teacher on the outer islands, who had became ill with ciguatera poisoning from a contaminated red snapper at a first birthday celebration, a feast that ultimately claimed the lives of three children and one old man, was to stick your finger down your throat at the first tingle and keep puking until you can puke no more. Even then, it might be too late.

We would have been happy to avoid reef and lagoon fish altogether, but dining options were few. Little grows on Tarawa. A drought combined with nutrient-deficient coral does not do wonders for the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. The I-Kiribati are quite possibly the only people on Earth without a tradition of gardening. As a result, FSP had a demonstration garden where people were taught how to cultivate something besides coconut trees. The garden was Bwenawa’s pride and joy, though it looked very much like an overgrown dump yard. Tin cans were strewn about and buried to boost the iron content of the soil. Fish guts and pig manure were regularly shoveled into the trenches. And the compost that was the happy result of Sylvia’s Atollette was placed around the banana trees, where, at the staff’s insistence, it would not touch anything edible. Every day, the garden was calibrated just so, but the yield was nonetheless meager for the effort. Tomatoes were no bigger than pinballs. Eggplant could not be coaxed to grow larger than crayons. A head of Chinese cabbage would not feed a rabbit. Bananas refused to bud without rain.

Despairing at the utter meagerness of the island’s culinary world, I too decided to start a garden. Like many writers, I believed that clearing brush under the equatorial sun was preferable to actually writing, and so with machete in hand I carved what would become our garden. It was more like recovering a garden, since years earlier the shady plot conveniently located to take advantage of any leaks in the water tanks, was, by all accounts, a particularly fertile garden, quite likely because years earlier there was rain. I had high hopes that one day soon we would be dining on light and refreshing salads and snacking on tasty fruit. I asked Bwenawa about compost and shade and water and all sorts of other highly technical gardening questions, but he dismissed my inquiries and told me that the most important thing about gardening on Tarawa was a sturdy fence. “Dogs, pigs, chickens, and crabs,” he said. “They must be stopped.” Fortunately, I had the remnants of the old fence and I set about constructing what Bwenawa called a “local” fence. This consisted of sticks tightly knotted together with coconut fiber rope. The effect was to enclose the garden inside something like a mock colonial fort. I say mock because deep down I knew that if a pig so much as huffed and puffed on my garden fort it would blow down, but it looked good and it provided me a fleeting sense of accomplishment. Sylvia too was very impressed with my fence, though her confidence in my construction skills, and possibly even my judgment, suffered when she took a closer look at the gate.

“Where did you find that?” she asked.

“What?”

“That,” she said, pointing at the thin plastic tubing I used as a latch for the gate.

“Oh that. I found it on the reef.”

She stared at it. Her face contorted. She was appalled. I had, it appeared, done something wrong.

“That’s a hospital IV. It’s full of blood.”

And so it was. It’s funny how you can miss things. The hospital incinerator hadn’t worked for years, and so hospital waste, like so much of the detritus that Tarawa generated, was thrown on the reef, where each day the tides took it out and redistributed it a little farther down the atoll. I unraveled the IV—how could I have missed that?—and tossed it into our burn bin. “Maybe I should wash my hands.”

My adventures in gardening ended soon enough. One morning, I discovered that the fence was gone. I knew immediately what had happened. Every evening, the neighborhood kids swept through in a quest for firewood and te non, a foul-smelling fruit that was used for pig food and traditional medicine. They were very polite about it at first. A few boys shyly asked if they could have the te non that dropped uncollected and possibly gather any twigs that might be lying about. Soon though, armies of children besieged what remained of the natural world around our house. A dozen boys would climb the casuarina tree and hack at the branches with large bush knives. The te non would get shredded from the bush, and then the bush itself would be taken. When I saw the kids begin to chop down the one tree that provided us with any shade, I decided that the time had come for a few limits. “Hey, you kids,” I found myself saying, suddenly feeling very old. “Please don’t cut down the tree.” The following day we found our pickup truck smeared with te non, the island equivalent of being TPed. In Kiribati, as elsewhere in the world, there is no more destructive force than an eleven-year-old boy. My fence, as I knew it would, had become firewood. The garden, and the mango tree I defiantly planned on cultivating, remained an unrealized dream.

AND SO WE BECAME dependent upon the ship. Every six weeks or so, a ship arrived to discard food deemed unsuitable for Australian consumption—rusty cans of vegetable matter, corned beef with a fat content guaranteed to induce a cardiac event within minutes of consumption, weevils together with rice and flour, rubber that was alleged to be meat, packaged chicken “pieces” that had been frozen and defrosted so often that each package had right angles, food products generally that had expired three to twelve months prior, and all priced beyond the range of everyone except those truly desperate to nibble on something beside a fish. Fortunately, the Australians came through with the beer, which was a good thing because South Tarawa had a prodigious appetite for beer. On a few rare occasions potatoes, oranges, and cheese could be found, but one had to be quick because certain unnamed wives of foreign men on lucrative aid contracts were unscrupulous hoarders (you know who you are). Bonriki wives we called them, after the village where most of them lived in their A-grade houses. Nonetheless, among the I-Matang on Tarawa it was gleeful pandemonium whenever a ship arrived as rumors swept the island of exciting edible goods to be found in the otherwise depleted stores.

“There’s broccoli at the One-Stop!” Sylvia would inform me, calling from her office.

“Hush. Don’t be saying things like that.”

“Go now!”

And I would pedal with demonic fury only to see one of the Bonriki wives—women who referred to the I-Kiribati as “the blacks,” doughy, petulant women who never ever should have been allowed to leave suburban Adelaide—inevitably marching out of the One-Stop with the entire shipment of broccoli, the last potatoes, the only oranges, and every package of Tasty Cheese that had not yet turned green. I would be left stewing in my bile, empty-handed once again. I wished them ill.

The ship—it was always The Ship—was what sustained existence on South Tarawa, if not always by what it carried, then through what it promised. Often enough there were very real shortages of the basics—rice, flour, diesel—and it was just the knowledge that, sometime in the foreseeable future, replenishments would arrive that enabled us to endure. In the meantime, I hunted for surprises at our local shop, the Angirota Store, which despite its modest cinder-block façade, represented the entirety of the I-Kiribati free enterprise system. There were five I-Matangs on Tarawa, long-term residents with I-Kiribati wives, who had started businesses of their own—the One-Stop, Betio Hardware, a used-car dealership, Yamaha Motors, and a sign-painting/electrical repair conglomerate, but the Angirota Store was the only business, the only true business, to be run by I-Kiribati. Every other shop on Tarawa was a government-run cooperative, where you were as likely to find a dead rat on the shelves as anything edible, though now and then, a startling find could be made at the Nanotasi, such as when an entire wall was devoted to the display of fabric softener, which was very interesting because there is not one dryer on Tarawa. Not one. I checked.

At the Angirota Store in contrast, one could find seven different audiotapes featuring “La Macarena,” which might actually constitute an argument against capitalism, but I admired the Give the People What They Want attitude. It was subversive in Kiribati. But even at the Angirota Store, there was only so much that could be done to improve the fare on Tarawa. There was a counter behind which the available goods would be displayed—canned tuna, canned tuna with tomato sauce, canned corned beef, cans of Ma-Ling Chicken Curry, “cabin biscuits,” Milo powdered sport drink, powdered milk, Sanitorium brand peanut butter. It was little different than the victuals found on an English ship, circa 1850. There was a refrigerator with a glass door that contained cans of Victoria Bitter, Longlife milk, apple-cranberry juice, and now and then wilted cabbage. In a wooden cabinet with a fly screen there were loaves of sweet white bread. In addition to the aforementioned collection of “La Macarena” tapes, one could also find A Techno Christmas, Melanesian Love Songs, Big Band Celebration, and what appeared to be the collected works of Wayne Newton.

The routine was almost always the same. The woman tending the store would be draped over the counter, a pose that reminded me of tedious school days when the boredom would creep in and slowly I would lean and extend myself forward and breathe the ammonium scent of my desk, dreaming, until clubbed by the chalk or eraser that a thoughtful teacher would hurtle my way. I would enter with a hearty “Mauri” (greetings) and with colossal willpower she would heave herself off the counter and arch her eyebrows. English was an official language of Kiribati and so I just plowed forward. “Any fruit today, apples, oranges, strawberries, something, anything?” The brow would crinkle and this would mean no. “How about bread, a rustic batard, a loaf of sourdough, Jewish Rye perhaps?” She would twitch her nose and nod toward the bread cabinet, which contained the weevil-infested loaves of what passed for bread on Tarawa. It was mere stomach filler. I would ask for the peanut butter and she would arch her eyebrows in acknowledgment. Apple-cranberry juice? And once again the eyebrows were launched. Inevitably, once I got home I would discover that the juice had expired three months before, and that the jar of peanut butter contained a colony of ants entombed in a sticky, nutty quagmire. The juice would get drunk, the ants would get scraped out, the weevils plucked from the bread, a peanut butter sandwich would be eaten, and I would be pleased with myself for finding sustenance that did not involve a fish.

It was difficult, however, to go through an entire day without resorting to the consumption of a fish. Almost always it would be a tuna, either skipjack or, preferably, yellowfin. One fish, say about two feet long, cost roughly 50 cents American, and its purchase was the culminating errand of my bike rides. At this point, because I tended to bike hard and it was always—I really want to stress this—hot, I was usually sweaty, not sweaty like northeasterners get after a brisk workout in an air-conditioned gym, but sweaty like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, drenched, and the reason I bring this up is because it is really difficult, almost impossible actually, to bike on a road congested with pigs and chickens and pedestrians and minibuses while carrying a large wet fish in a perspiring hand. The women who sold me the fish were amused by my efforts. I was a novice to fish buying at first and I spent a lot of time shuffling from cooler to cooler, prodding the fish, studying the eyes, sniffing for fishiness, and this, because they are fish people, was the source of much mirth and cackling to the vendors. That I would stand soaked from head to toe in sweat induced by exercise, which is an unfathomable concept in Kiribati, further confirmed that I was a fool and in need of mocking. When I accused them of being tokonono (naughty), they emitted screams of laughter.

With my fish selected and paid for, and confident that my very existence on Tarawa was amusing to so many, I eased myself back on my bike, a tuna fish dangling from one hand, the tail fins hooked between my middle fingers, and weaved precariously until I built sufficient momentum to continue in a more or less straight line, steeling myself for the gauntlet. It was always very exciting biking past several hundred hungry, emaciated, mange-ridden, angry dogs while swinging a fish past their snouts. The trick was to bike very, very slowly, sneaky-like, particularly when confronted by a pack of dogs. Under no circumstances should eye contact be made. And never let them sense your fear. This knowledge, of course, is hardly intuitive. I lost three fish to the snarling hell demons before I figured out that a pack of hungry dogs will always move faster than a cyclist gripping the handlebars with one hand while using the other to swing a fish like a club, a tactic that was remarkably unsuccessful, though it did leave bystanders doubled-over in belly-rumbling laughter. I am sure they are still talking about it today.

Once safely home with an intact fish I set about preparing it. Off went the head. Then the tail. The knife sliced open the underside of the fish. The skin was pulled off. The dark, blood meat was trimmed, worm indentations were scoured for, and if none were found and I was hungry, I had myself a snack of raw tuna. Then there was the question of what to actually do to the tuna steaks. How to dress it up, as it were, for the dinner plate? Sylvia might inquire if the mayonnaise I purchased for a tuna salad was actually safe to eat, given that it had expired six months earlier. She would sniff it and wonder, “I can’t tell if it’s bad because it’s turned or because it’s Australian.” It was a pet peeve of hers, Australian mayonnaise, but if it wasn’t rancid it was eaten. If there were a couple of tomatoes available, I would make tortillas from scratch, sear the fish, and have fish tacos. When finally we succeeded in cultivating yogurt from a yogurt culture that had been passed from desperate I-Matang to desperate I-Matang as if it were some sacred life force, I pasted the yogurt on the fish and sprinkled on the curry powder we found deep in the recesses of the kitchen closet. We had stir-fried tuna, sautéed tuna, pan-fried tuna, grilled tuna, boiled tuna, raw tuna. We even had tuna carpaccio. The one question that was never asked was What’s for dinner? Until…

The tuna disappeared. Just like that. I biked the entire length of South Tarawa searching for a tuna. But there was nothing. Just the dreaded salt fish and a few sharks. It was as if giant nets had suddenly appeared to enmesh every tuna in the greater Tarawa area. It was like that because that’s what had actually happened. The Korean fishing fleet had gathered in Tarawa Lagoon to offload their catch onto huge mother ships. Emptied of fish, the trawlers immediately set forth to empty the seas around Maiana and Abaiang, the fishing grounds that supplied Tarawa. I could see them from the house, giant fishing machines with industrial silhouettes that I had last seen in New Jersey, and I could only imagine the effect of their wakes on inshore canoes. That the government of Kiribati allowed this was deplorable. There are two million square miles of ocean in Kiribati’s exclusive economic zone in which the trawlers can fish, and yet they were permitted to work the twenty square miles of water upon which half of the nation’s population depends for sustenance, betraying again the ineptitude and petty corruption of Kiribati’s leaders. The fish sellers were glum. Each day they appeared with a few reef or lagoon fish, all that their husbands and brothers and fathers could catch now that the deepwater fish, the fish that could be consumed with a strong likelihood of maintaining one’s stomach intact, had been netted, destined for the canneries of Korea. Usually, we could weather these periodic convergences of idiocy and bad luck, but during these same tuna-less weeks an event of cataclysmic proportions occurred, an event that tested our very will to live. The beer ran out.

This was shocking. South Tarawa was completely dependent on beer. It was completely dependent on beer because a large proportion of the male population had what those of a more judgmental disposition might call a drinking problem. On payday Fridays it was impossible to drive on Tarawa, not simply because every driver was drunk, but because a good percentage of the male population could be found sprawled on the road, resting, or as some prefer, passed out. These nights were usually very lively and I made a point of always keeping a large bush knife within easy reach. I had become much more sympathetic to Kate’s experience on Tarawa. The house was riddled with gaping holes in the plywood trestle that gave the roof its slope, reminders of all the attempted break-ins she’d had to endure. Most of the window screens had been sliced open by Peeping Toms, who would quietly insert a stick and pry open the curtains. This did not happen as much now that I, a man, had moved in, but still it happened, and now and then I would quietly step outside for a cigarette only to discover some cretin snooping at the window, hungrily watching Sylvia read a book. This bothered me to no end, and with a surge of angry adrenaline, I frequently gave chase, wildly hurling rocks and epitaphs to compensate for my slow feet, encumbered by flipflops, which were no match for the callused bare feet of the detected perv. No one would dare lurk around an I-Kiribati household, but we I-Matangs were fair game, unprotected by family and clan. I dearly hoped to catch one of these creeps, but if I sensed they were drunk, I eased my way back into the house, bolted the doors, and grabbed the machete. When sober, I-Kiribati men are typically shy and gentle and all-around good guys, but when drunk something seems to give way—let’s call it reason—and the I-Kiribati male becomes the most frightening creature in the Pacific.

Outsiders tend to believe that Samoans are the islanders to fear. Ask a Pacific islander, and he will tell you that the meanest, toughest, scariest islander is the drunk I-Kiribati. There is even a word for what happens when an I-Kiribati man loses his mind and any semblance of restraint: koko—a word that I think nicely captures that state of lunacy caused by drink among I-Kiribati men. On payday Fridays, I put on my best Don’t Fuck With Me face and made sure that Sylvia’s pepper spray worked. The neighborhood dogs worked hard on those nights.

Despite the excesses though, I found I quite liked the easygoing, anything goes, why-not-have-another-beer air of Tarawa. It was refreshingly different from the prissiness that characterizes life in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. Government leaders in Kiribati were of an entirely different disposition than the lifeless ogres of Washington. At one function, I asked the minister of health why cigarettes were so cheap in Kiribati. We both had a cigarette in one hand and a can of Victoria Bitter in the other. “Because otherwise the people can’t afford them,” he said, an answer I liked very much. At the same event, the secretary of health, a doctor by training and a politician by temperament, insisted that we take a few beers with us for the drive home. “I always like to have one for the road,” he said, waving us off. Some might regard this is reprehensible, but I think this why-the-fuck-not attitude was reflective of a certain joie de vivre. The daily consumption of several cans of Victoria Bitter became an integral part of my well-being, possibly because I am of Dutch-Czech stock and thus warmly inclined toward beer, but also because it is immensely fun to quaff beers with your loved one while sitting at reef’s edge watching the world’s most spectacular sunsets. Plus, beer tends to be parasite-free and calorie-laden, two very useful attributes on Tarawa.

So imagine my despair when I walked into the Angirota Store to buy a six-pack only to be confronted by a glaringly empty refrigerator. “Bia?” I asked hopefully, using the I-Kiribati word for beer, which sounds very much like the Australian word for beer. “Akia,” I was told. Akia is the most commonly used word in the Kiribati language, which can be roughly translated as “unavailable.” The words akia te bia are the most painful words I have heard spoken. The owner of the shop, Buorere, a large man with the grooviest sideburns this side of the dateline, was as stunned as I was. As the only local capitalist on the island, he was no doubt aware of what the absence of beer would do to his profit margins.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“Kiritimati Island,” he muttered darkly. “They sent the beer to Kiritimati Island.”

Kirimati Island was approximately two thousand miles east of Tarawa. It seemed unlikely that they would send the beer back. In one of those screwups that seemed to typify life in Kiribati, Tarawa’s shipment of beer had been accidentally sent to an even more remote corner of the country. I abandoned my loyalty to the Angirota Store, and immediately set off to scour the island’s co-op stores for beer. Surely, the government would have a reserve stock of beer, hidden and well guarded, which could immediately be brought into circulation during a time of crisis. Akia te bia I was told, again and again. Clearly, better planning was needed.

I turned to the Otintaii Hotel, where every Friday the island’s European and Australian volunteers gathered on Cheap-Cheap Night for an evening of immoderate drinking.

Akia.

This was dire. There had to be beer somewhere on the island, I thought. Tarawa without beer was incomprehensible. Life on the island just wasn’t worth it without beer.

“Have you tried the Betio Saloon?” Sylvia asked. Not much of a beer drinker before arriving on Tarawa, after a few months on the island Sylvia had adapted to local cultural mores. She now crushed beer cans on her forehead. Actually, that’s not true, but she had developed a taste for ale, and while she wasn’t quite as shaky about the prospect of a beerless Tarawa as I was, there was no doubt that the absence of beer represented a serious downgrading in her quality of life on the island. If anyone still had beer on Tarawa, it would be the barflies at the Betio Saloon, a one-room tin shed deep in the heart of Betio, where the island’s more dissolute I-Matangs could usually be found.

“It’s a fucking tragedy, mate,” said Big John, one of the proprietors.

Akia. A fucking tragedy, I agreed.

“We’re going to have to fly a few cases in,” he said. Big John, who had lived on Tarawa for twenty-odd years, was a man of action. I admired this. Soon the entire island was talking about Big John, who at six foot five was easily the biggest man on Tarawa. Big John’s flying in three hundred cases from Nauru.

We waited. Five weeks would pass until beer returned to Tarawa, via a fully laden Air Nauru. They were dark days. True, they were peaceful days, but in no way does this compensate for the ache of a beerless evening.

Sitting over a bowl of rice, Sylvia plucked the weevils out, and declared, apropos of nothing: “Avocado.”

I hated when she did this, for it triggered so much. “Blueberries,” I said.

“Bagels,” she said.

“With lox and cream cheese.”

“Apple-leek soup.”

“Asparagus.”

“Antipasto.”

“Risotto.”

“Salad. A real salad.”

“Steak. Grilled medium rare.”

“Beer.”

“Anchor Steam.”

“Harp.”

“Bitburger.”

“Duvel.”

Sigh.

“More rice?”