1996 - The Island of the Colorblind (4 page)

I had seen photographs of Ebeye – the island itself scarcely visible, with virtually every inch of it covered by tar-paper shacks – and hoped we might get a closer look as we descended; but the airline, I learned, was at some pains to keep the sight of it from passengers. Like Ebeye, the other infamous Marshallese atolls – Bikini, Eniwetak, Rongelap – many of them still uninhabitable from radioactivity, are also kept from ordinary eyes; as we got closer to them, I could not help thinking of the horror stories from the 1950
s
: the strange white ash that had rained down on a Japanese tuna fishing vessel, the
Lucky Dragon
, bringing acute radiation sickness to the entire crew; the ‘pink snow’ that had fallen on Rongelap after one blast – the children had never seen anything like it, and they played with it delightedly.
8
Whole populations had been evacuated from some of the nuclear test islands; and some of the atolls were still so polluted, forty years later, that they were said to glow eerily, like a luminous watch dial, at night.

Another passenger who had got on at Majuro – I got to chatting with him when we were both stretching our legs at the back of the plane – was a large, genial man, an importer of canned meats with a far-flung business in Oceania. He expatiated on ‘the terrific appetite’ the Marshallese and Micronesians have for Spam and other canned meats, and the huge amount he was able to bring into the area. This enterprise was not unprofitable, but it was, above all, to his mind, philanthropic, a bringing of sound Western nutrition to benighted natives who, left alone, would eat taro and breadfruit and bananas and fish as they had for millennia – a thoroughly un-Western diet from which, now, they were happily being weaned. Spam, in particular, as my companion observed, had come to be a central part of the new Micronesian diet. He seemed unaware of the enormous health problems which had come along with the shift to a Western diet after the war; in some Micronesian countries, I had heard, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension – previously quite rare – now affected huge percentages of the population.
9

Later, when I went for another stretch, I got to talking to another passenger, a stern-looking woman in her late fifties. She was a missionary who had got on the plane at Majuro with a gospel choir composed of a dozen Marshallese in flowered shirts. She spoke of the importance of bringing the word of God to the islanders; to this end she travels the length and breadth of Micronesia, preaching the gospel. She was rigid in her self-righteousness and posture, her hard, aggressive beliefs – and yet there was an energy, a tenacity, a single-mindedness, a dedication which was almost heroic. The double valence of religion, its complex and often contradictory powers and effects, especially in the collision of one culture, one spirit, with another, seemed embodied in this formidable woman and her choir.

The nurse, the Spam baron, the self-righteous missionary, had so occupied me that I had scarcely noticed the passage of time, the monotonous sweep of the ocean beneath us, until suddenly I felt the plane descending toward the huge, boomerang-shaped lagoon of Kwajalein. I strained to see the shantied hell of Ebeye, but we were approaching Kwajalein from the other side, its ‘good’ side. We made the now-familiar sickening landing, crashing and bouncing along the huge military runway; I wondered what would be done with us while the bent wheel was finally mended. Kwajalein is a military encampment, a test base, with some of the tightest security on the planet. Civilian personnel, as on Johnston, are not allowed off the plane – but they could hardly keep all sixty of us on it for the three or five hours which might be needed to replace the bent wheel and do whatever other repairs might be necessary.

We were asked to line up in single file and to walk slowly, without hurrying or stopping, into a special holding shed. Military police directed us here: ‘PUT YOUR THINGS DOWN,’ we were told, ‘STAND AGAINST THE WALL.’ A slavering dog, which had lain panting on a table (it seemed to be at least a hundred degrees in the shed) was now led down by a guard, first to our luggage, which it sniffed carefully, and then to us, each of whom it sniffed in turn. Being herded in this way was deeply chilling – we had a sense of how helpless and terrified one could be in the hands of a military or totalitarian bureaucracy.

After this ‘processing,’ which took twenty minutes, we were herded into a narrow, prisonlike pen with stone floors, wooden benches, military police, and, of course, dogs. There was one small window, high up on a wall, and by stretching and craning I could get a glimpse through it – of the manicured turf, the golf course, the country club amenities, for the military stationed here. After an hour we were led out into a small compound at the back, which at least had a view of the sea, and of the gun emplacements and memorials of the Second World War. There was a signpost here, with dozens of signs pointing in all directions, giving the distances to major cities all over the world. Right at the top was a sign saying ‘Lillehammer, 9716 miles’ – I saw Knut scrutinizing this with his monocular, perhaps thinking how far he was from home. And yet the sign gave a sort of comfort, by acknowledging that there was a world, another world, out there.

The plane was repaired in less than three hours, and though the crew was very tired – with the long delays in Johnston and Majuro, it was now thirteen hours since we had left Honolulu – they opted to fly on rather than spend the night here. We got on our way, and a great sense of lightness, relief, seized us as we left Kwajalein behind. Indeed there was a festive air on the plane on this last lap, everyone suddenly becoming friendly and voluble, sharing food and stories. We were united now by a heightened consciousness of being alive, being free, after our brief but frightening confinement.

Having seen the faces of all my fellow passengers on the ground, in Kwajalein, I had become aware of the varied Mi-cronesian world represented among them: there were Pohn-peians, returning to their island; there were huge, laughing Chuukese – giants, like Polynesians – speaking a liquid tongue which, even to my ears, was quite different from Pohnpeian; there were Palauans, rather reserved, dignified, with yet another language new to my ears; there was a Marshallese diplomat, on his way to Saipan, and a family of Chamorros (in whose speech I seemed to hear echoes of Spanish), returning to their village in Guam. Back in the air, I now felt myself in a sort of linguistic aquarium, as my ears picked up different languages about me.

Hearing this mix of languages started to give me a sense of Micronesia as an immense archipelago, a nebula of islands, thousands in all, scattered across the Pacific, each as remote, as space surrounded, as stars in the sky. It was to these islands, to the vast contiguous galaxy of Polynesia, that the greatest mariners in history had been driven – by curiosity, desire, fear, starvation, religion, war, whatever – with only their uncanny knowledge of the ocean and the stars for guidance. They had migrated here more than three thousand years ago, while the Greeks were exploring the Mediterranean and Homer was telling the wanderings of Odysseus. The vastness of this other odyssey, its heroism, its wonder, perhaps its desperation, seized my imagination as we flew on endlessly over the Pacific. How many of these wanderers just perished in the vastness, I wondered, never even sighting the lands they hoped for; how many canoes were dashed to pieces by savage surf on reefs and rocky shores; how many arrived at islands which, appearing hospitable at first, proved too small to support a living culture and community, so that their habitation ended in starvation, madness, violence, death?

Again the Pacific, now at night, a vast lightless swell, occasionally illuminated, narrowly, by the moon. The island of Pohnpei too was in darkness, though we got a faint sense, perhaps a silhouette, of its mountains against the night sky. As we landed, and decamped from the plane, we were enveloped in a huge humid warmth and the heavy scent of frangipani. This, I think, was the first sensation for us all, the smell of a tropical night, the scents of the day eluted by the cooling air – and then, above us, incredibly clear, the great canopy of the Milky Way.

But when we awoke the next morning, we saw what had been intimated in the darkness of our arrival: that Pohnpei was not another flat coral atoll, but an island mountain, with peaks rising precipitously into the sky, their summits hidden in the clouds. The steep slopes were wreathed in thick green jungle, with streams and waterfalls tracing down their sides. Below this we could see rolling hills, some cultivated, all about us, and, looking toward the coastline, a fringe of mangroves, with barrier reefs beyond. Though I had been fascinated by the atolls – Johnston, Majuro, even Kwajalein – this high volcanic island, cloaked in jungle and clouds, was utterly different, a naturalist’s paradise.

I was strongly tempted to miss our plane and strand myself in this magical place for a month or two, or perhaps a year, the rest of my life – it was with reluctance, and a real physical effort, that I joined the others for our flight onward to Pingelap. As we took off, we saw the entire island spread out beneath us. Melville’s description of Tahiti in
Omoo
, I thought, could as well have been Pohnpei:

From the great central peaks…the land radiates on all sides to the sea in sloping green ridges. Between these are broad and shadowy valleys – in aspect, each a Tempe – watered with fine streams and thickly wooded.…Seen from the sea, the prospect is magnificent. It is one mass of shaded tints of green, from beach to mountain top; endlessly diversified with valleys, ridges, glens, and cascades. Over the ridges, here and there, the loftier peaks fling their shadows, and far down the valleys. At the head of these, the water-falls flash out into the sunlight as if pouring through vertical bowers of verdure…It is no exaggeration to say, that to a European of any sensibility, who, for the first time, wanders back into these valleys – the ineffable repose and beauty of the landscape is such, that every object strikes him like something seen in a dream.

P
ingelap is one of eight tiny atolls scattered in the ocean around Pohnpei. Once lofty volcanic islands like Pohnpei, they are geologically much older and have eroded and subsided over millions of years, leaving only rings of coral surrounding lagoons, so that the combined area of all the atolls – Ant, Pakin, Nukuoro, Oroluk, Kapingamarangi, Mwoakil, Sap-wuahfik, and Pingelap – is now no more than three square miles. Though Pingelap is one of the farthest from Pohnpei, 180 miles (of often rough seas) distant, it was settled before the other atolls, a thousand years ago, and still has the largest population, about seven hundred. There is not much commerce or communication between the islands, and only a single boat plying the route between them: the MS
Microglory
, which ferries cargo and occasional passengers, making its circuit (if wind and sea permit) five or six times a year.

Since the
Microglory
was not due to leave for another month, we chartered a tiny prop plane run by the Pacific Missionary Aviation service; it was flown by a retired commercial airliner pilot from Texas who now lived in Pohnpei. We barely managed to squeeze ourselves in, along with luggage, ophthalmoscope and various testing materials, snorkelling gear, photographic and recording equipment, and special extra supplies for the achromatopes: two hundred pairs of sunglass visors, of varying darkness and hue, plus a smaller number of infant sunglasses and shades.

The plane, specially designed for the short island runways, was slow, but had a reassuring, steady drone, and we flew low enough to see shoals of tuna in the water. It was an hour before we sighted the atoll of Mwoakil, and another hour before we saw the three islets of Pingelap atoll, forming a broken crescent around the lagoon.

We flew twice around the atoll to get a closer view – a view which at first disclosed nothing but unbroken forest. It was only when we skimmed the trees, two hundred feet from the ground, that we could make out paths intersecting the forest here and there, and low houses almost hidden in the foliage.

Very suddenly, the wind rose – it had been tranquil a few minutes before – and the coconut palms and pandanus trees began lashing to and fro. As we made for the tiny concrete airstrip at one end, built by the occupying Japanese a half century before, a violent tailwind seized us near the ground, and almost blew us off the side of the runway. Our pilot struggled to control the skidding plane, for now, having just missed the edge of the landing strip, we were in danger of shooting off the end. By main force, and luck, he just managed to bring the plane around – another six inches and we would have been in the lagoon. ‘You folks OK?’ he asked us, and then, to himself, ‘Worst landing I ever had!’

Knut and Bob were ashen, the pilot too – they had visions of being submerged in the plane, struggling, suffocating, unable to get out; I myself felt a curious indifference, even a sense that it would be fun, romantic, to die on the reef – and then a sudden, huge wave of nausea. But even in our extremity, as the brakes screamed to halt us, I seemed to hear laughter, sounds of mirth, all around us. As we got out, still pale with shock, dozens of lithe brown children ran out of the forest, waving flowers, banana leaves, laughing, surrounding us. I could see no adults at first, and thought for a moment that Pingelap was an island of children. And in that first long moment, with the children coming out of the forest, some with their arms around each other, and the tropical luxuriance of vegetation in all directions – the beauty of the primitive, the human and the natural, took hold of me. I felt a wave of love – for the children, for the forest, for the island, for the whole scene; I had a sense of paradise, of an almost magical reality. I thought, I have arrived. I am here at last. I want to spend the rest of my life here – and some of these beautiful children could be mine.

‘Beautiful!’ whispered Knut, enraptured, by my side, and then, ‘Look at that child – and that one, and that…’ I followed his glance, and now suddenly saw what I had first missed: here and there, among the rest, clusters of children who squinted, screwed up their eyes against the bright sun, and one, an older boy, with a black cloth over his head. Knut had seen them, identified them, his achromatopic brethren, the moment he stepped out of the plane – as they, clearly, spotted him the moment he stepped out, squinting, dark-glassed, by the side of the plane.