Fresh Air Fiend (46 page)

Some corals look like flowers, but with more extravagant blossoms than ever seen on land. Under the sea they have the effect of a great embankment or bower, flowers clustered together in glorious profusion. Some corals look like miniature hot-air balloons, others like polyps or grotesque millipedes or spiders. Still more look like the Gorgon Medusa. Others like human organs, red and pulsing. These and hundreds more exist in the waters of Palau. I was especially struck by a gray and elongated type of coral that looked like a bundle of bones, the youngest varieties looking like ribs, the oldest like a cluster of femurs, a whole clutch of leg bones. The action of storms, or perhaps anchors thrown casually over the sides of dive boats, had broken many of these corals, and I began to think of this particular spot as the Boneyard.

Eventually, Benna's boat came and took us to Koror, where I charged the batteries, and then we returned to the Rock Islands. We carried our kayaks on the deck of his power boat, which I thought of as the Mother Ship. We went to Mkumer, a large, beautifully formed island on the outer reef. On one of its beaches the Micronesian megapode birds lay their eggs and leave, letting the eggs incubate and hatch in the heat generated by rotting palm litter. As a tenacious coconut crab attacked one of my gear bags, Michael photographed it, hoping to get his picture into the Patagonia catalogue.

"I am looking for a deep dark cave," I said to the boatman.

He said he knew one, a burial cave, where there were bats. It was to be the ultimate test of the night-vision binoculars. We moored alongside and I swam to the rocky shore, holding the binoculars out of the water, keenly aware of their dollar value ($2,400) as I carefully backstroked to shore. I climbed to the mouth of the cave and walked in, looking out for sea snakes (none) and bats (many). As for the burials that had taken place here, all old coral has the appearance of shattered human bones. When I removed my binoculars I could not see my hand in front of my face. With them, I was able to walk out, all the while seeing green bats flapping erratically along the green walls in the green air.

One of the most beautiful island clusters in the Rock Islands lies in the southwest, and is called Ngerukewid, often referred to as the Seventy Islands. In fact, there are forty-six—very green and rounded and close together, and so strangely shaped that paddling among them in the limpid green water is as disorienting as paddling in a maze, among misleading shapes, bays, and openings. The foliage is thick, and consequently the bird life is more various and vibrant: noddies, terns, swallows, kingfishers. A variety of swiftlet that is endangered elsewhere in the Pacific prospers here.

It was the lowest tide of the year—inches deep in some shoaly places—but we were able to make our way to a cave entrance and paddle as far as an interior corner. We had kayaks here in Ngerukewid. We drew our boats up on a narrow shelf of coral and climbed into the cave, where we found a log platform, a rusted transformer, and an old moldering radio. Without question this was an outpost of World War Two, but whether the haunt of a Japanese soldier looking for Americans, or vice versa, it was impossible to tell. Certainly no one else had left a mark there. It gave the impression of a gravesite, or more properly a burial chamber, another mausoleum of the war.

Scott Davis, another member of the sea turtle project, joined us. He showed me a turtle nest that had been raided by poachers, many of the eggs gobbled on the spot by a Palauan or two, who were helping to assure the extinction of the hawksbill turtle in these islands. The turtles may lay eighty to ninety eggs, but only one or two hatchlings survive to maturity.

"Some Palauans can be strange," Scott said. "I was camping with a woman friend on an island, and at two in the morning we were wakened by a Palauan. He might have been drunk. He said, 'I'm going to fuck your girlfriend and kill you.' He had a gun, too, one of those rifles they hunt pigeons and bats with."

It was to me a terrifying story. How had he calmed the Palauan? "I said, 'Hey, listen, I'm real tired right now. Why don't you come back and kill me tomorrow?'"

Amazingly, this logic had worked.

We snorkeled and fished in the morning, snoozed under trees in the heat of the day, and set off again in midafternoon, looking for a camp around five or six o'clock. The coral was only one of the wonders of the Palau depths. The profusion of fish was another, and it was not their numbers—the schools of grouper and tuna and surgeonfish and barracuda—it was also their size. Thirty- and forty-pound grouper were not unusual, and the wrasse were the size of big dark pigs. Seeing some fish jumping beyond the western edge of the reef, we headed out and saw about two dozen dolphins surrounding a school of tuna, which themselves had been feeding on smaller fish—a churning example of the food chain.

 

We decided to camp on one of the low islands, where there was a sandy beach and easy access for our kayaks. We had left our Mother Ship anchored in a pretty bay, and we returned to this bay in our kayaks and made camp, choosing a spot well away from the tidemark. As we set up our gear, fruit bats jostled in the high trees, then took off, great flights of fat creatures beating across the channel to find food.

The phone battery was dead again (it had been good for thirty minutes of transmission time), and the camcorder battery was flat, too. I had given up on the Newton. The radio was working well, and so were the night-vision binoculars. But almost everything—even the compass with its light—needed batteries. In time almost all this stuff would become useless. It seemed pathetic that the vitality of such sophisticated electronics depended upon such clumsy, feeble batteries.

And so, in a matter of days, as the battery life drained away, my uplink was as useless as the doubloons that Robinson Crusoe mocks on his island: "I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. 'O drug!' said I aloud, 'what art thou good for?... One of those knives is worth all this heap.'" Indeed, my little lamp with its stump of candle, my jackknife, and my kayak paddle were of more use to me now than the phone, the camcorder, the radio, the Newton, all dead weight. A single fishhook was of far greater value than my global positioning device or my pager, and in the fullness of time would have been the difference between life and death in these islands. My high-tech camp went quiet.

It is rare to find silence anywhere in a natural landscape. There is always the wind at least. The rustle of trees and grass, the drone of insects, the squawk of birds, the whistle of bats. By the sea, silence—true silence—is almost unknown. But on my last day here in the Rock Islands, there was not even the lap of water. The air was motionless. I could hear no insects, nor any birds. The fruit bats flew high, beating their wings in absolute quiet. It seemed simple and wonderful: the world as an enormous room.

M
Y OUTLOOK CHANGED
radically, and I was inspired to write my novel
Millroy the Magician,
one day a few years ago when I happened to be camping on a beach on Kaileuna, one of the smaller of the Trobriand Islands. This delightful place, off the coast of New Guinea, is about as far off the map as it is possible to be. But it is plagued by tropical diseases, which was another reason for my astonishment that day, when I found myself thinking,
Every person in this village has beautiful teeth.

Most Trobrianders I had seen had terrible teeth, from their habit of chewing the mildly narcotic betel nut and mixing the nut with lime from a coral reef. This stained their teeth bright red and then destroyed the enamel, which resulted in rotten stumps. My villagers with the lovely white teeth were exceptional, and were also unusually energetic and muscular.

Later in the week, some villagers and I were out diving and spearfishing from an outrigger canoe when I discovered the reasons for this good health. A shark nosed toward us as we were harrying some fish, and then another, much larger shark took an interest. These great pale creatures moved effortlessly through the greeny depths. I surfaced, and after what seemed a long time the rest of the divers hoisted themselves into the canoe. I asked Zechariah, one of the young spearfishermen, whether he had seen the sharks. Yes, he had seen three.

"I shout at them, 'Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!' That scares them away. They are stupid fish."

Howling underwater is reckoned in coastal New Guinea to be a good method for sending a shark on its way.

"Why didn't you kill it?" I said.

"Because we don't eat sharks," he said.

It is inconceivable that someone in the Trobriands would kill something that is not eaten afterward.

"We are Seventh-day Adventists," he said, and soon he was quoting me the food prohibitions in the Mosaic law set out in Leviticus 11, specifically regarding fish without scales—shark, tuna, ray.

Also, no smoking, no betel-chewing, no pig-eating, no manner of fat, and so on, even unto Deuteronomy 14. Religious piety explained the villagers' white teeth, sturdiness, energy, and absence of excess body fat. It was not their fault that their life expectancy was less than fifty years. Severe malaria and bacterial infections were common on the islands, and so were tuberculosis and leprosy. Under the circumstances, they were doing well.

Their diet—a sort of Pritikin Diet enhanced by Holy Scripture—of fish and fresh vegetables, with almost no seasoning, made them excellent physical specimens. Contemplating those villagers, I began imagining a novel in which spiritual regeneration was accompanied by enormous physical vitality, the entire American package derived from between the covers of the Bible. And it made me think that so many of our habits are written on our bodies. This is not a new idea. Anyone in 1850 who had read Dickens's description of Uriah Heep in
David Copperfield
would instantly have grasped that Heep's pallor and red eyes indicated that he was an ardent onanist. In many cultures (Italy is just one) a man's big nose indicates that he is virile. Sitter's Butt and Drinker's Nose are familiar to most people, but I began to see Druggie's Eyes, Sweet-Eater's Fatigue, Carnivore's Gut, Smoker's Face.

 

It was a happy accident, this discovery. I needed regeneration—most writers do. Unlike the life of a Pacific islander, the routine of a writer is extremely unhealthy. All serious writers work long hours and inevitably feel trapped.

I had gone on that trip through the Pacific because writing a book at home is like imprisonment, and for that reason I have always been a traveler. I grow sick of being indoors, alone all day for several years, needing isolation and at the same time hating the hostage like atmosphere of alienation. I am sure some writers love this monkish inactivity, but a long spell of it drives me nuts. I think it is also physically unhealthy to be incarcerated like this.

That cue from the Trobrianders suggested to me that even a writer who is trapped in his room writing a book ought to be able to find some harmony in his life. Being Seventh-day Adventists and living on a remote island, my villagers ate the simplest foods imaginable. In great contrast, I saw that islanders on Samoa and Tonga loved Spam, corned beef, and soft drinks. This careless diet turned them sullen and sleepy and mountainous. The piety of the Trobrianders seemed to explain their good health; the obesity of other islanders seemed like a logical consequence of their wayward Spam-eating, junk-gobbling, hymn-singing hypocrisy.

In order to understand Pacific islanders' syncretic cosmology—their spiritual salad of beliefs, mixing Christianity and Polynesian animism—I read the Bible. Besides the Seventh-day Adventists' clinging to Leviticus (which reads like a tract in defense of endangered species), there were Jehovah's Witnesses, who frequently invoke their horror of eating "the blood of strangled animals"; Christian Scientists, inspired by Mrs. Eddy's
Science and Health,
urging spiritual self-help; and the Mormons, the most American of any religion, ubiquitous in the Pacific because of its hordes of proselytizers.

I profess no religion, and so I read the Bible with an open mind. I discovered what many people know already, that the Good Book is full of food, full of meals, and there are plenty of recipes, some implied and others set out as systematically as in a cookbook. Of course there are the well-known mentions of loaves and fishes, and milk and honey, but also obscurer references to apricots and vetches (fitches), herbs, grains, pulses, beans, and various vintages of wine. Daniel cannot work magic unless he reverts to his old diet of lentils (Daniel 1:1–21); Ezekiel (4:9) provides a precise recipe for nourishing high-fiber bread. Nearly all Bible food is nutritious, bulky, beany, energy-inducing, low in fat and sugar.

I started to dabble in food myself. After all, I was stuck in a room with only writing to occupy me. And what began as idle dietary speculation became more serious experimentation. At first I regarded my body as my hobby, and then it became my chief preoccupation. If you are home all day, it is very easy to turn your house into a laboratory where you are the guinea pig. I had been a casual vegetarian, but Bible-reading—and writing my book in seclusion—made me more tenacious. There is a certain amount of meat-eating in the Old Testament, and so much roasted lamb that it is difficult to read certain prophets and not think continually of mint sauce. Yet hardly anyone is carnivorous in the New Testament. Christ usually arrives at mealtime, but the expression "they sat down to meat" is often merely a Jacobean way of saying "they ate." There is a good example of this in 1 Kings 19:8—the Gideons Bible describes Elijah the Tishbite eating, and uses the word "meat," while a better translation in the Revised English Bible gives "food."

People in the Bible eat remarkably well. "Your bowels shall sing like a harp," Isaiah says, and it is easy to see why. Only one person (Eglon, in Judges) is described as being "a very fat man." Inevitably, biblical people live a very long time. This could be due to some ancient method of reckoning years, yet a little arithmetic shows two hundred to be a typical life span. That is not an unreasonable goal.