1996 - The Island of the Colorblind (11 page)

Bill brought this out, as we made our way through the dense vegetation: ‘Pohnpeians recognize and name about seven hundred different native plants, and, interestingly, these are the same seven hundred that a Western botanist would pick out as separate species.’ Of these, he said, about a hundred species were endemic – they had evolved on Pohnpei, and were unique to the island.
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This was often stressed in the species names: thus there were
Garcinia ponapensis, Clinostigma ponapensis, Freycinetia ponapensis
, and
Astronidium ponapense
, as well as
Ga-leolaponapensis
, a native orchid.

Pohnpei’s sister island, Kosrae, is a very beautiful and geologically similar high volcanic island, little more than three hundred miles away. You might expect Kosrae to have much the same flora as Pohnpei, said Bill, and many species are of course common to both. But Kosrae has its own endemic plants, unique to it, like Pohnpei. Though both islands are young in geological terms – Pohnpei is perhaps five million years old and Kosrae, much steeper, only two million – their flora have already diverged quite widely. The same roles, the same eco-niches, are filled with different species. Darwin had been ‘struck with wonder,’ in the Galapagos, at the occurrence of unique yet analogous forms of life on contiguous islands; indeed this seemed to him, when he looked back on his voyage, the most central of all his observations, a clue to ‘that great fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth.’

Bill pointed out a tree fern,
Cyathea nigricans
, with its massive trunk, twice my height, and a crown of long fronds overhead, some of them still unfurling in hairy croziers or fiddleheads. Another tree fern,
Cyathea ponapeana
, was now rather rare and grew only in the cloud forest, he added, but despite its name, it was not completely endemic, for it had also been found on Kosrae
[Cyathea nigricans
, similarly, had been found on both Pohnpei and Palau). The tree fern’s wood is prized for its strength, Joakim said, and used to build houses. Another giant fern,
Angiopteris evecta
, spread low to the ground, with twelve-foot fronds arching, tentlike, from its short stubby base; and there were bird’s-nest ferns four feet or more in diameter, clinging high up to the tops of trees – a sight which reminded me of the magical forests of Australia. ‘People take these bird’s-nest ferns from the forest,’ Valentine interjected, ‘and reattach them so they can grow, epiphytically, on pepper plants, sakau – the two of them together, tehlik and sakau, are a most prized gift.’

At the other extreme, Bill pointed out delicate club mosses sprouting on the base of a bird’s-nest fern – an epiphyte growing upon an epiphyte. These too, Joakim said, were traditional medicine (in my medical student days we used their spores, ly-copodium powder, on rubber gloves – though it was subsequently found to be an irritant and carcinogen). But the strangest, perhaps – Bill had to search hard to find one – was a most delicate, iridescent, bluish-green filmy fern,
Trichomanes
. ‘It is said to be fluorescent,’ he added. ‘It grows chiefly near the summit of the island, on the trunks of the moss-covered trees in the dwarf forest. The same name, didimwerek, is used for luminous fish.’
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Here is a native palm,
Clinostigmaponapensis
, Bill said – not so common here, but plentiful in the upland palm forests, where it is the dominant plant. Valentine told us the ancient story of how this palm, the kotop, had protected Pohnpei from invading warriors from Kosrae – seeing the hundreds of palms with their light-colored flowering stalks on the mountainside, the invaders had mistaken these for men’s skirts made from hibiscus bark. Thinking the island must be heavily defended, they withdrew. So the kotop saved Pohnpei, as the geese saved Rome.

Bill pointed out a dozen different trees used in making canoes. ‘This is the traditional one; the Pohnpeians call it dohng…but if lightness and size are desired, they use this one, sadak.’

The sadak tree he pointed out was more than a hundred feet high. There were many wonderful smells in the forest, from cinnamon trees with their aromatic bark, to native koahnpwil trees with their powerful, resinous sap – these were unique to the island and useful, Joakim said, for stopping menstrual bleeding or dysentery and also to kindle fires.

The drizzling rain in which we had started had steadily mounted in intensity, and our path was rapidly becoming a stream of mud, so, reluctantly, we had to return. Bill commented on the many streams which traced down through the forest to the gully. ‘They used to be absolutely clear and transparent,’ he said. ‘Now look at them – turbid and brown.’ This was due, he said, to people clearing forest on the steep hills – illicitly, as this is a state preserve – to grow their own sakau. Once the trees and vines are cleared, the soil on the hills begins to crumble, and washes down into the streams. ‘I am all for sakau,’ said Bill. ‘I revere it…you could call it one of the moral vines which hold us together – but it is madness to uproot the forest to grow it.’

There is no sakau in Pingelap; like alcohol, it is forbidden by the Congregationalist Church. But in Pohnpei, the drinking of sakau, once reserved only for those of royal blood, has now become virtually universal (indeed I wondered whether it was partly responsible for the lethargic pace of life here); the Catholic Church, more accommodating than the Congregationalist, accepts it as a legitimate form of sacrament.
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We had seen sakau bars in town and thatched, open-air bars all over the countryside – circular, or semicircular, with a great metate, or grinding stone (which the Pohnpeians call a peitehl) in the center, and we remained eager to try some ourselves.

We had been invited by a local physician and colleague of Greg’s, May Okahiro, to experience a traditional sakau ceremony that evening. It was a cloudless evening, and we got to her house at sunset, and settled into chairs on her deck, overlooking the Pacific. Three Pohnpeian men, wiry and muscular, arrived, carrying pepper roots and a sheaf of slimy inner bark from a hibiscus plant – a large peitehl awaited them in the courtyard. They chopped the roots into little pieces, and then started pounding those with heavy stones, in an intricate, syncopated rhythm like the one we heard across the water on our return from Nan Madol, a sound at once attention holding and hypnotic, because, like a river, it was both monotonous and ever changing. Then one man got up, went to get fresh water, and poured this in, a little at a time, to wet the pulpy mass in the metate, while his companions continued their complex, iridescent rhythm.

The roots were all macerated now, their lactones emulsified; the pulp was placed on the sinewy, glistening hibiscus bark, which was twisted around it to form a long, closely wound roll. The roll was wrung tighter and tighter, and the sakau exuded, viscous, reluctant, at its margins. This liquid was collected carefully in a coconut shell, and I was offered the first cup. Its appearance was nauseating – grey, slimy, turbid – but thinking of its spiritual effects, I emptied the cup. It went down easily, like an oyster, numbing my lips slightly as it did so.

More sakau was squeezed out of the hibiscus sheath, and a second cup of fluid obtained – it was offered to Knut, who took it in the proper way, hands crossed, palms up, and then quaffed it down. The cup, emptied and refilled half a dozen times, went to each person, according to a strict order of precedence. By the time it came back to me, the sakau was thinner. I was not wholly sorry, for a sense of such ease, such relaxation, had come on me that I felt I could not stand, I had to sink into a chair. Similar symptoms seemed to have seized my companions – but such effects were expected, and there were chairs for us all.

The evening star was high above the horizon, brilliant against the near-violet backdrop of the night. Knut, next to me, was looking upward as well, and pointed out the polestar, Vega, Arc-turus, overhead. ‘These are the stars the Polynesians used,’ said Bob, ‘when they sailed in their proas across the firmament of space.’ A sense of their voyages, five thousand years of voyaging, rose up like a vision as he talked. I felt a sense of their history, all history, converging on us now, as we sat facing the ocean under the night sky. Pohnpei itself felt like a ship – May’s house looked like a giant lantern, and the rocky prominence we were on like the prow of the ship. ‘What good chaps they are!’ I thought, eyeing the others. ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world!’

Startled at this unctuous, mellifluous flow of thought – so far from my usual anxious, querulous frame of mind – I realized my face was set in a mild, vapid smile; and looking at my companions, I could see the same smile had them too. Only then did I realize that we were all stoned; but sweetly, mildly, so that one felt, so to speak, more nearly oneself.

I gazed at the sky once again, and suddenly a strange reversal or illusion occurred, so that instead of seeing the stars in the sky, I saw the sky, the night sky, hanging on the stars, and felt I was actually seeing Joyce’s vision of ‘the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.’
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And then, a second later, it was ‘normal’ again. Something odd was going on in my visual cortex, I decided, a perceptual shift, a reversal of foreground and background – or was this a shift at a higher level, a conceptual or metaphoric one? Now the sky seemed full of shooting stars – this, I assumed, was an effervescence in my cortex, and then Bob said, ‘Look – shooting stars!’ Reality, metaphor, illusion, hallucination, seemed to be dissolving, merging into one another.

I tried to get up, but found I could not. There had been a gradually deepening numbness in my body, starting as a tingling and numbness in my mouth and lips, and now I no longer knew where my limbs were, or how I could get them to move. After a momentary alarm, I yielded to the feeling – a feeling which, uncomprehended, was frightening uncontrol, but which, now accepted, was delicious, floating, levitation. ‘Excellent!’ I thought, the neurologist in me aroused. ‘I have read of this, and now I’m experiencing it. Lack of light touch, lack of proprioception – this must be what de-afferentation feels like.’ My companions, I saw, were all lying motionless in their chairs, levitating too, or perhaps asleep.

All of us, indeed, slept deeply and dreamlessly that night, and the next morning awoke crystal clear, refreshed. Clear, at least, cognitively and emotionally – though my eyes were still playing tricks, lingering effects, I presumed, of the sakau. I got up early and recorded these in my notebook:

Floating over coral-heads. Lips of giant clams, persev-erating, filling whole visual field. Suddenly a blue blaze. Luminous blobs fall from it. I hear the falling blobs distinctly; amplifying, they fill my auditory sensorium. I realize it is my heartbeats, transformed, that I am hearing.

There is a certain motor and graphic facilitation, perseveration too. Extracting myself from the sea bottom, the clam lips, the blue falling blobs, I continue writing. Words speak themselves aloud in my mind. Not my usual writing, but a rapid perseverative scrawl which at times more resembles cuneiform than English. The pen seems to have an impetus of its own – it is an effort to stop it once it has started.

These effects continue at breakfast, which I share with Knut.
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A plate of bread, but the bread is pale grey. Stiff, shining, as if smeared with paint, or the thick, shiny, grey sludge of the sakau. Then, deliriously, liqueur chocolates – pentagonal, hexagonal, like the columns at Nan Madol. Ghost petals ray out from a flower on our table, like a halo around it; when it is moved, I observe, it leaves a slight train, a visual smear, reddish, in its wake. Watching a palm waving, I see a succession of stills, like a film run too slow, its continuity no longer maintained. And now, isolated images, scenes, project themselves on the table before me: our first moment on Pingelap, with dozens of laughing children running out of the forest; the great floodlit hoop of the fisherman’s net, with a flying fish struggling, iridescent, inside it; the boy from Mand, running down the hill, visored, like a young knight, shouting, ‘I can see, I can see.’ And then, silhouetted against the heaventree of stars, three men round a peitehl, pounding sakau.

That evening we all packed up, sad to be leaving these islands. Bob would be returning directly to New York, and Knut heading back, by stages, to Norway. Bob and I had seen Knut at first as a charming, scholarly, slightly reserved colleague – an expert on, and exemplar of, a rare visual condition. Now, after our few weeks together, we saw all sorts of other dimensions: his omnivorous curiosity and sometimes unexpected passions (he was an expert on trams and narrow-gauge railways and was full of recondite knowledge on these), his sense of humor and adventure, his cheerful adaptability. Having seen the difficulties which attend achromatopsia, especially in this climate – above all the sensitivity to light and inability to see fine detail – we had a renewed appreciation of Knut’s determination, his boldness in making his way around new places, his openness to every situation despite his poor sight (perhaps indeed his resourcefulness and unerring sense of direction had been heightened in compensation for this). Reluctant to say goodbye, the three of us stayed up half the night, finishing off a bottle of gin which Greg had given us. Knut took out the cowrie necklace which Emma Edward had given him on Pingelap and, turning it over and over in his hands, started to reminisce about the trip. ‘To see an entire community of achromats has changed my entire perspective,’ he said. ‘I am still reeling from all of these experiences. This has been the most exciting and interesting journey I will ever make in my life.’

When I asked him what stayed in his mind above all, he said, ‘The night fishing in Pingelap…that was fantastic.’ And then, in a sort of dreamlike litany, ‘The cloudscapes on the horizon, the clear sky, the decreasing light and deepening darkness, the nearly luminous surf at the coral reefs, the spectacular stars and Milky Way, and the shining flying fishes soaring over the water in the light from the torches.’ With an effort he pulled himself back from the night fishing, though not before adding, ‘I would have no trouble at all tracking and netting the fish – maybe I’m a born night fisher myself!’