Fresh Air Fiend (45 page)

There I intended to hire a boat to take me to the small Ngemelis group, at the western edge of the reef of the Rock Islands. My chosen island was nameless, but when I say that its position was Lat. 7°07′25.1″ N, Long. 134°14′24.7″ E, it will be obvious that I also had with me a Trimbal global positioning system. The idea was that I would set up camp on this desert island and, in spite of my remoteness, be in touch and well connected. "Hold on, Mrs. Crusoe, your son Robinson is on the line..."

Palau, so far away, so pretty, seemed the perfect place to test communications equipment. In the Caroline Islands, in the western Pacific, just north of New Guinea and east of the Philippines, Palau is one of the last great island wildernesses of the world, another constellation of islands in the galaxy known as Micronesia. From Honolulu, it is a seven-and-a-half-hour flight west to Guam, a large ruined island of fast-food outlets, shopping malls, and bungaloid subdivisions. And then a two-hour flight southwest to the main island of Babeldaop and the town of Koror, which is the capital of Palau (Belau in its revised spelling).

I arrived and set up camp under the palms of deserted Omekang, one of the many Rock Islands. In the middle of the night, I crawled out of my tent and was uplifted. I had never felt such serenity in the open air. I had the strong impression of the physical world as a peaceful room. Perhaps because it was midnight, and I had just woken up, the specific image that came to me was an enormous bedroom. The night was dead still, and the full moon lighted the beach with a glow that was lovelier for its mild fluorescence. In the mass of bright stars the Southern Cross was distinct. I stood stark naked and marveled at my luck.

There was no wind, not the slightest movement of air. The temperature was about eighty, or a bit more. There was complete silence: the birds were asleep, the insects were still. The sea was flat—not only no waves, but no sound of water lapping at the shoreline. No flies buzzed. And—this still amazes me—no mosquitoes.

Palau has its hazards: sea snakes, stinging jellyfish, venomous cone shells, poisonous lionfish, crown-of-thorns starfish, stonefish, fire coral, crocodiles (
C. porosus,
the saltwater croc), sea urchins, sharks. There are drunks and bad drivers, too. There are harmless but sinister-looking creatures of which fruit bats and spotted eagle rays and huge eels are just three. Yet with certain precautions, it is possible to live more or less unscathed in this archipelago.

Bringing electronic equipment to a tropical island is another story, however. This stuff was expensive, and all of it was on loan. I worried constantly about the dampness, which ranged from Micronesian moisture to torrential downpours. I kept every item in a plastic bag; many of them I double- and triple-bagged, fearful of sand penetrating and fouling them. I watched most of
Top Gun
on my Sony camcorder. I kept my MPR Satfind 406 emergency rescue device near at hand. (Essential on a desert island, but I did not use it. You switch it on, it emits a signal, and they find you.)

I began making notes about this on my Newton message pad, but as soon as I wrote them down, they were turned into gibberish. Or was it? I wrote "Paul." It printed "tense." I wrote "This trip." It translated "the test." It seemed to be a sort of sibylline oracle that changed scribbles into gnomic utterances. Then the Newton complained of low memory, and hefting it in my hand was like holding an expensive, rather moronic, temperamental paving stone. I stowed it with the Virtual Vision goggles and the pager, and after that kept my diary in a small notebook with a ballpoint pen.

My Palauan friend Benna took me farther west in his boat, to the edge of the Rock Islands, and as this was the typhoon season, Michael Gilbeaux, from Athens, Georgia, came along to help me. Michael, who is twenty-five, runs the Sea Turtle Research and Conservation Project in Palau, which is basically a running battle with turtle poachers. Most of the Rock Islands—several hundred of them, great and small—are themselves turtle-shaped, of low and humpy limestone. They are the pitted remains of coral reefs thrust out of the sea long ago by the forces of undersea volcanoes.

Covered with pandanus and palms, the Rock Islands are known in the local language as Ellebacheb, which is also a synonym for small, uninhabited islands of rocks and trees. They are very green, rounded, all sizes, from small lumps in the ocean to long rounded ridges. Their sides are vertical and unclimbable. Some have white sand beaches. Birds nest in their hollows. One of the pleasures of paddling here is being able to listen to the sounds of birds: swifts, finches, swallows, the Palau fruit dove, the black Nicobar pigeon, the screech of the greater sulphur-crested cockatoo, the white-tailed tropicbird that swoops and glides and makes a clicking chatter among the heights of the islands and never seems to come to rest. Benna dropped Michael and me, with my bags and electronic equipment and some water and a sea kayak, on the beach of a tiny island in the Ngemelis cluster. This was at dusk. After we unloaded, one of Benna's crewmen stood in the bow, grunted, and threw his arms apart in a gesture of crucifixion.

"Shark!" he called out. "This big!"

"But sharks only feed at this hour, on an incoming tide," Benna said to reassure me. "Seldom on an outgoing tide."

Palau is notorious for sharks. I saw my first one in the Rock Islands on my first swim, while snorkeling at the edge of a reef called Blue Corner. It was a blacktip shark cruising along the coral wall about twenty feet below me, intent and preoccupied. It looked wicked and sleek, like a live torpedo, and its unhurried air made it seem more confident and more lethal. We were both swimming in the same direction. I was so alarmed by the shark that I hardly noticed its size. Only later I estimated that it was seven or eight feet long. I changed course, trying not to make much fuss, and swam away from it. And then I saw my second shark. This one was nearer, but similarly uninterested in me. I kept on, making for my kayak, and saw my third, fourth, and fifth sharks. These were resting, motionless on a flat ledge of coral, close enough for me to see the coarse texture of their skin. At last I was back at the boat.

Later—after the placid sharks, the calm air, the sunshine, the tropical heat, the birds, the fish, the bats—in my happy high-tech camp, on the green island at the edge of the reef, I stood under the moon and heard an intrusive rustling noise. It was a familiar sound, like a person kicking angrily through dry fallen leaves. This grew to a commotion. I got my flashlight from my tent, turned it in the direction of the sound, and saw ten or more rats, fat and black, with glittering eyes and raw pink tails and twitching whiskers, not at all deterred by my bright light. A whole verminous parade traipsing boldly through a mass of dead palm fronds.

So instead of sleeping on the beach, I zipped myself into my tent and reflected that no place was perfect but that Palau surely came close. The Rock Islands were as near as I have ever been to the Peaceable Kingdom of the natural world in which there was complete harmony. I'll make my phone calls tomorrow, I thought.

 

Waking in the night, I played the shortwave radio. This Sony twelve-band receiver was digital, with a scanner, and was technically better than my own knob-twirling radio, but I found the scanner a disadvantage here. I could not see what I was tuning, and the scanner skipped stations that were faint. Turning a knob is a more reliable way to find shortwave stations in the darkness of a tent on a tropical island. Nevertheless, I located the BBC World Service and Voice of America and learned (June 22, 1994, on my Micronesian island, June 21 in the United States) that the dollar had dropped to 99.9 Japanese yen (the lowest exchange rate ever) and was weakening against the pound sterling; that a hospital had been shelled in Rwanda; that Haitians fleeing their country had been picked up in the ocean and were being processed; and that O. J. Simpson had just been arrested in connection with the murder of his wife and been denied bail.

Meanwhile, all was peaceful on Rat Island. I went outside the tent, and though the accumulation of clouds had rendered the sky starless and moonless, I was able to carry out a vermin check with my Night Mariner night-vision binoculars. I saw no rats; instead, I watched large coconut crabs, which stood out vividly in the dark, tinted green by the workings of this wonderful device. Still in that darkness I walked up and down the beach, through the palms and overgrown bush back to my tent, the binoculars pressed against my eyes.

The morning was overcast, and I saw rain off to the northwest. I decided to make my phone calls while the campsite was dry. It was 5:15
A.M.
That meant it was 4:15
P.M.
the previous day in New York City, where I was hoping to prove to my editor that I could make this phone work.

I unpacked the phone and placed it on one of its plastic bags. I had already located my position with the global positioning system, so I entered my longitude and latitude on the receiver and was given an azimuth and an elevation for the antenna dish. I aligned the phone lid with my compass bearing (Davis hand-bearing compass, very nice—sturdy, waterproof, pistol grip, with a useful light) and lifted the phone lid—antenna dish to 50 degrees, aiming it at the satellite, the Pacific Inmarsat. I pressed the power button and got a hum. It took a while for me to lock on to the satellite; this required moving the phone here and there until I was about eight feet from the beach (the tide was coming in). When the Ready light was lit, I hit the Hook button and got a dial tone, then punched in some code numbers for AT&T, the country code, and the number.

A bubbly undersea ringing tone ensued, and then, "Hello?"

My brother Gene, speaking from his law office, and he asked, "You're where?"

We conversed awhile about the island, the equipment, and the exchange rates. Was this not an auspicious time to turn sterling into dollars? He would inquire, he said.

"Can you use your call forwarding to connect me with
Condé Nast Traveler
in New York?"

"Gayle's on vacation"—his secretary—"but I'll try."

"Please make it fast. I only have one battery."

Michael crawled out of his tent and yawned. "I can't believe you're on the phone," he said, and snapped my picture.

Gene dithered for several minutes. Believing that I might have lost him, I cut off the call and phoned the magazine myself, to give them an update. "Call home," Klara Glowczewska suggested, and then, with an editor's instinct for a slug line, added, "PT phones home!" I privately wondered whether I should name this little place Glowczewska Island, in the manner of explorers who put their patrons' names on the islands they saw.

I called Honolulu. I called New York again. Then, giddy, and indeed feeling like an alien on a tiny planet who had figured out how to communicate with Earth, I called Cape Cod, murmuring, "PT phones home."

The line was busy. I called again, seven times. It was now early evening on the Cape. My mother was using the phone.

The tide was coming in, and the clouds were darkening. I packed the phone in its waterproof bags, made breakfast, and went for a swim. The air was inert, portending rain; and then around noon the rain came, noisy and thick, smashing the big leaves and cracking against the sea, pounding my tent, where I crouched, earphones on, listening to Branford Marsalis,
I Heard You Twice the First Time,
on my minidisc player as the rain continued. There I lay, for seven hours or so, happily reading a biography of Sir Richard Burton by Byron Farwell. Farwell explained that Burton, a heroic explorer, hated inconveniences but loved hardships. Yes, of course, I understood; that was why I was happy.

I had arranged for Benna to pick me up at the early evening high tide that day, but the rain was still heavy, and there was no sign of him as night fell. I would have phoned him, but I wanted to save my battery power. And so I spent another night on the island.

Dawn was fine, the air cleansed by the rain, the sky clear. I wrote a script for a video: "Opening shot: A cluster of coconuts high on a palm; we hear someone yakking, talking about Palau. The camera tracks slowly down the slender palm trunk to the base, where we see PT speaking on the phone..."

Michael Gilbeaux was the cameraman. We made the video, then watched it until we were warned that the battery was low. Our fun with the camcorder was at an end.

I called my folks on Cape Cod again. The line was busy again. The satellite phone told me that the battery was weak. On my last roll of the dice, I got through and spoke to my mother long enough to hear that she was well and to say that I was in Palau ("It's southwest of Guam!" I shouted, standing on the beach, feeling absurd). Then, having made contact, made a video, caught a news program on the radio, and discovered that you can teach a Newton to recognize your handwriting, we paddled to Eil Malk Island, hiked to Jellyfish Lake, and went snorkeling.

There are a number of such marine lakes in the Rock Islands. This
one lies in a limestone bowl in the center of the island. Some are connected by caves to the sea, others are sealed. They have high sides and muddy brackish water and mangroves. We swam through the salty water where a mass of jellyfish lived and shimmered—millions of them, perhaps. There was no question that Jellyfish Lake was a wonder of nature. In a previous incarnation, these jellyfish were poisonous. Here they had evolved and become harmless, and there was not one, but two kinds: the mastigias, like a large soft polyp, orangey pink, and the aurelia, white and rounded and delicate, almost lacy, and when it filled to propel itself, it resembled a white mobcap or a billowing hankie. The jellyfish were so thick in the water that they softly crowded me and slid against my face and arms, my whole body. I was suspended in a gelatinous mass so dense I could hardly move my arms.

 

Palau is famous for its quarter-ton giant clams, but its undersea beauty is in its coral. There are 69 species of hard corals in the Caribbean. There are 400 varieties of hard corals in Palau; in addition, there are 200 species of soft corals. The merest glance into Palau's lagoons is a vision of abundance.