Fresh Air Fiend (49 page)

Later that day, looking for a new island, I ran across Acong. He was fishing on the reef, and with his shirt wrapped and folded neatly around his head against the sun, he looked like an Egyptian sitting cross-legged in his canoe. He had learned English at school but had dropped out "in elementary." His boat was too small for taking people out to the islands. He used it for fishing and for transporting the rattan and coconuts he collected to barter with.

"Those people are from Visaya," Acong said of the village at the far end of the little island on which I had been camped.

He said it with a trace of bitterness, because it was unregulated immigration. Many people in Palawan told me that such squatting was the cause of land disputes. Yasmin Arquiza had said, "Tribal people here had no homestead patents." To protect them, the Philippine government instituted a "Certificate of Ancestral Domain Claim." This was not a land title, but it gave them priority when the government handed out concessions for rattan and
almasiga,
a resin (sometimes called copal) used in varnish. The indigenous people had rights to the concession and could profit from it.

I told Acong that I was looking for a new campsite on an empty island. He suggested one that had a hidden cove, a sandy beach, and a coral reef that had not been dynamited or poisoned. Acong's outrigger was small enough to negotiate shallow water, silted-up rivers, and remote parts of the great bay where coral heads jutted out of the water. I followed him to these places in my kayak. The largest river that emptied into the bay is the Darapiton. We traveled it up to a narrow tributary, the Togdunan. The rivers were muddy, narrow, humid, buggy, and the deeper we went, the more shadowy they became, overhung with a tunnel of boughs. The inconvenience of such branches is minor, but coiled on many of them were snakes—the thick, yellow and black five-footers Acong called
binturan.
Strung across other branches were spider webs with hairy, deep green, claw-shaped spiders clinging at the edges, at the level of my face.

"The snakes will not trouble you if you do not trouble them," Acong said.

After a few miles on the tributary we came to an obstruction, a tree lying across the river. Acong was surprised and worried: it was not the custom of the people here to block the rivers. It was widely known that the Tag Banua and the Palawan and Batak peoples had no traditional concept of land ownership. So this barrier was a grotesque novelty that had been brought about by all the encroachment and the new settlers.

"We could slide our boats over the log," I said. But I was just needling him, to see what he would say.

"No. We stop here."

Even though these people were of his own language group, he felt it was a bad idea to go farther. Our intrusive presence might be misunderstood.

The Tag Banua were not territorial in any modern sense. Like many indigenous peoples, they did not buy or sell land, because they could not separate themselves from the land: it would be perverse to sell it, something like an amputation.

On the way back, he told me about the loggers, and how Japanese ships had been moored for years just offshore to pick up the big apitong logs, and how the logging coincided with the mudslides, and how the rivers and river mouths were not deep anymore.

The word
banua
interested me, because it seemed so similar to the Fijian word
vanua,
or land (as in Vanua Levu, the name of the second-largest Fiji island). Acong said that
banua,
too, meant "land," and Tag Banua meant "People of the Land." I had made it a habit to compile word lists whenever I was in a remote place in Oceania, to assess the linguistic relationships among islanders who had dispersed the Austronesian languages over thousands of nautical miles and thousands of years. There are fifty basic words that are useful to compare. Alfred Russel Wallace lists many of them in an appendix to
The Malay Archipelago.
I asked Acong the words for various numbers and for "big," "small," "dog," "fish," "eye," "canoe," "house," "day," "sun," "moon," "water," and so forth; and I discovered that many Tag Banua words were cognate with ones from the Celebes, and others were taken straight from Malay—
ikan
for fish,
lima
for five, and
mata
for eye (as in Mata Hari, "Eye of the Day").
Mata
in Hawaiian is
maka.
Captain Cook, also a compiler of Polynesian word lists, was the first to observe that Oceania is linguistically one world.

Some days, when it was too hot to go paddling—the tropical
aldow
dazzled in a cloudless sky—there was little else to do except sit under a palm tree and interrogate Acong and his extended family. These people were settled, but some Tag Banua in the north were nomadic.

The other indigenous peoples of Palawan live in the interior: the Batak, who are related to Negritos, on the slopes of the central mountain chain, and the Pa'lawan people farther south. One guidebook reports, "The Tau't Batu in the south of Palawan were only discovered in 1978." This story of the Stone People (
batu,
"stone," is another Malay cognate) is not quite true. These people keep to themselves and use blowguns and poison darts for hunting. They live in a bowl-shaped valley on the slopes of Palawan's highest peak, Mount Mantalingahan, and move nearer the coast during the dry season. But this recent "first contact" was one of several hoaxes perpetrated by a minister in the Marcos regime, one "Manda" Elizalde, who tried to gain international prominence by pretending to discover unknown ("Stone Age") peoples in the Philippine hinterland. The Tasaday, who live near Lake Sebu in south Mindanao, were another of his preposterous discoveries. This can be put down to a Filipino variation of Munchausen syndrome—attention-seeking by the retailing of tall stories.

Many indigenous people in Palawan nonetheless still subsist using traditional means: hunting wild pigs with spears and blowguns, feasting on monkeys, and snaring fish in lovely woven traps. And they lament the day that Palawan's resources began to be stripped away by non-Palawans—its fish to Japanese factory ships and canneries and Hong Kong restaurant aquariums, its trees turned into chairs and chopsticks.

Palawan had been on the brink of devastation, but its fall had been arrested. Much of the island was still wild—I prayed that it would remain so. In the course of ten days' paddling, I made a circuit of a dozen Pagdanan islands and camped on three of them, island-hopping northwest to the largest island, Boayan. On my return, one very hot night, on the uninhabited Double Island I found myself lying in my mosquito-net tent, the moon bathing the ground and the treetops in a lunar fluorescence. I had achieved the ultimate in fresh air fiendishness. I was flat on my back. Fulfilled, content, naked, alone, happy. I thought:
I am a monkey.

A
MBO KEEBWA
, a Kiribati, was twenty-two and living in Tarawa in 1957 when he heard that able-bodied men were needed to work for the British on Christmas Island. The place name transfixed him. "I like 'Christmas' so much! I think, There must be many nice things there." Imagining the bounty of a year-round, nonstop Yule-tide, Ambo signed a three-year contract and traveled hopefully to this magic-sounding place, 2,013 miles away. One morning, a few months after he arrived on the arid, empty, coral-crunchy shore, the British exploded an H-bomb over the island, shattering Ambo's eardrums. After that, he just worried and cowered under the coconut trees and prayed for deliverance.

On that early morning, this, the largest atoll in the Pacific, trembled like a meringue, the earth and sea quaked, and millions of seabirds, the feathered glory of Christmas Island, were instantly blinded and scorched. The birds flopped and screamed piteously, and the whole lot of them starved to death under the horrified eyes of the several hundred islanders and the thousands of British soldiers. When a second bomb was announced, Ambo and his fellow islanders begged to be sent back to Tarawa.

"We put a complaint to the big man. We wanted to go home. We were afraid. We were praying to God to help us be safe. The air vice-marshal said, 'We will look after you. Don't be afraid.'"

The night before the second H-bomb test, the Kiribati (pronounced "Kiribass") men were taken to a ship that was anchored offshore and shown cowboy movies, cartoons, and British films, one after the other, from seven in the evening until four-thirty the next morning, when suddenly the same searing ear pain returned ("much worse than when you are in an airplane"). The ship shuddered so violently that rust flaked from the ceiling and walls of the cramped cabin in which the 140 islanders sat goggling at the movie screen. The men went up on deck and saw again the aftermath of a thermonuclear explosion. "Like a big flower opening," Ambo said, "the color of clouds, with flames inside."

Millions more birds died. Parts of the island were closed off. But it was nowhere near the end. In the succeeding four years, there were thirty-two additional explosions, the latter series cosponsored by the United States. Some of the bombs were the most powerful ever detonated on the planet—up to twenty-five megatons, quite a lot for a coral atoll sitting at sea level. By then the authorities had become so blasé they simply handed out blankets to the Christmas Islanders and told them to gather at the tennis courts in town and sit under the blankets.

"They said, 'Turn away from the blast,'" a man named Tonga Fou told me. "But even so, we saw the light through the blanket and got the pain in our ears and felt the heat on our back."

I asked each man, "What would you say if someone came today and said he wanted to test a bomb?"

"Now I would say, 'No! Get off!'" Tonga said. Ambo agreed.

"Did anyone die from the effects of the blast?"

Tonga said, "No one examined us. People died. We don't know why. No doctors have ever looked at our bodies."

Years after the tests, Henry Kissinger said, regarding radioactivity and Pacific islanders, "There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?"

Merry Christmas, suckers!

 

I had stopped by Tabakea village to see Ambo and Tonga on one of my paddling trips through the lagoon. Tabakea was halfway to London, the settlement where most of the island's roughly thirty-five hundred people live. The other villages of any size were Banana and Poland. Paris, across the channel from London, was just a ruin.

Most of these places were named by a whimsical priest who started a huge coconut plantation in 1914. The priest was Father Rougier, the first entrepreneur, a wily French clergyman who had abandoned preaching in favor of being Coconut King. He leased the island from a British trading company and lived in Paris, on the southwest horn of the atoll. He earned a reputation as a slavedriver—Mistah Kurtz in a dog collar. His workers were mainly Chinese and Tahitian. Having made a fortune on the copra, Rougier retired to Tahiti, another colorful rascal in paradise.

By the late 1930s the island, part of the Gilbert and Ellice group, was again run by a British trading company, and after the Second World War reverted to being a copra plantation. Christmas had been occasionally visited by whalers and castaways, and perhaps, in an earlier epoch, by Polynesian voyagers who had been driven off course. To the ancient Kiribati it was known as Abakiroro, "Distant Land." But it had never qualified as an inhabited island, and until the early twentieth century it was as barren and unpopulated as it had been around Christmas 1777, when Captain Cook first anchored near the lagoon entrance and named it. It became Kiribati, a corruption of "Gilberts," when Britain granted the islands independence in 1972. It is still not much more than a copra plantation, run by the Kiribati government, though the National Space Development Agency of Japan has just been given permission to develop a "spaceport" (missile recovery station, hotel, communications, landing strip) on the southern portion. No one on the island has any idea when this will happen, or whether it will happen at all.

I had taken the once-a-week three-hour flight from Honolulu—Christmas is Hawaii's nearest neighbor of any size. After I got my bearings, I headed for the empty interior. I camped alone at the eastern side of the lagoon, among the low saltbush. This shrub, a feebler cousin of the mangrove, covers the island but offers no shade. Nor is there much fresh water; persistent droughts are one of the reasons the island remained uninhabited for so long.

Perhaps it should have remained uninhabited. It is a dazzling place, an arid Eden that even H-bombs could not destroy, a giant bracelet of coral, dappled with the hardiest shrubs and a million coconut trees; a lagoon that is not only shaped like a palette, but a palette splashed with every shade of green and blue; and the most fearless and friendly birds I have ever seen. Much of the island is still empty—just screeching terns and the wind in the saltbush. But it occurred to me again and again that it is hard for such a place, blessed with birds and fish and balmy air, to be shared with humans. Certain areas of the world are harmonious in their peculiar fauna and flora, but because of their remoteness or hermetic ecosystem are unsuited to the intrusions of people and their pussycats, their bad habits, and their toilets.

In the island's interior, the sameness of the saltbush and the absence of palm groves, or any landmarks, make it easy for a traveler to become disoriented. I got seriously lost twice, and found that on the idlest jaunt away from my tent I was constantly using my compass. Two of Captain Cook's men lost their bearings the moment they stepped ashore. They groped for twenty-four hours, and survived only by drinking a turtle's blood. Many of the islanders I spoke to had a personal experience of befuddlement. I had been proud of my sense of direction until I began wandering around the mazelike shores and inner lagoons of Christmas Island. Even temporary disorientation acquainted me with a suffocating breathlessness: the bone in the throat, the rising sense of panic, the wavering compass needle. All the while curious birds squawked overhead—boobies, frigate birds, tropicbirds, terns in their thousands. Absolutely unafraid, many of them flew near my head and nipped at my paddle blade when I raised it.