Getting Stoned with Savages (14 page)

“I can’t take this heat anymore,” Sylvia said one night as we lay side by side, sweating in the darkness. “Let’s turn on the air conditioner.”

I closed the windows, sealing the room, and turned the unit on. It clanked and thudded and groaned and eventually began to whir, suffusing the room with a cool, humid air that stank of dead reptiles.

“I can’t take this smell,” I declared a half hour later. “Let’s open the windows.”

So we opened the windows and the odor slowly melted away, along with the hard-won coolness. Again we sweated miserably.

After a few nights of this, even Sylvia was looking forward to a cyclone, anything that would end the sweltering misery. I believed most of the town was of a similar line of thinking. Nothing, I felt, burdens a person’s disposition more thoroughly than unrelenting heat and humidity. Vila was generally a friendly town. But now, as people stood fanning themselves in the shade, quietly suffering through the cruel stillness and the enervating stickiness, tempers began to flare, sudden bursts of frustration that broke through the unhappy listlessness.

And then, one morning, Radio Vanuatu announced, in three languages, that the arrival of Cyclone Paula was imminent. All precautions should be made. Those living in low-lying areas should move to higher ground. Homes should be secured, shutters installed. Bulletins would be announced every hour, updating listeners on the cyclone’s progress. It would hit that evening.

I couldn’t wait.

IT BEGAN,
for us, inauspiciously. Attached to the house was a heavy wooden shed where the cyclone shutters were kept. I pried the door open and immediately knew that creepy things lived inside. In the tropics, creepy things can reliably be found in damp, dark places, and the shed was particularly damp and dark, with innumerable nooks and crannies. I startled an impossibly large spider, as big as my hand, and it scurried behind one of the shutters. What else could there be? I wondered. More centipedes? My mind turned to snakes. One of the neighborhood youths had recently caught a six-foot-long Pacific boa constrictor. He was in the habit of walking around with it, dangling it from his arms. I had always given him a wide berth.

I entered the shed and reached for the nearest shutter. It was heavy and ungainly, and as I pulled it free, a centipede ran toward my feet. I shrieked, managing to hit an octave I’d thought I had lost with the onset of puberty.

“What?” Sylvia cried, running out of the house.

I offered a colorful tirade of cuss words in response.

“Okay,” Sylvia said. “But what did you see?”

I jiggled the shutter. Out ran the centipede.

“Oh my God,” Sylvia gasped. “That’s a centipede?”

This time, however, I knew what to do. I went back inside the house and changed into my jeans and work boots. I grabbed a shovel, reentered the shed, and did battle, eventually chopping the centipede into two and then four squirming pieces.
Splat!
it went as I crushed each segment with my boots.

With much fear and trepidation I dragged each of the shutters out, laying them on the ground, where I inspected them closely to see whether there might be another centipede clinging on, hoping to avenge its lost brethren. The first bands of rain had arrived. The clouds above had begun to swirl, and they had taken on a peculiar orange hue. As we affixed the shutters over the windows, the rain steadily increased. We had a steep dirt driveway that sloped toward the house from the road above, and soon water was rushing down it, carving gullies that channeled the water directly to our front door, where it began to pool alarmingly. If I had known that cyclones involved so much work, I reflected, I might not have been so looking forward to experiencing one. Something needed to be done about the water immediately, or we would soon find ourselves flooded. I grabbed the shovel.

Out on the road, Sylvia and I encountered the neighbors across the way. The children were gleefully celebrating the rain. It had begun to truly pour, a copious drenching that laid down thick walls of water. I had seen such rain before, during the brief peak of a Mid-Atlantic summer squall, but I had never witnessed such a sustained downpour, and it only seemed to grow in intensity. The neighbors were laying cinder blocks on top of their corrugated-tin roofs. “If you want to take shelter in our house,” I said to one of the mothers, “please don’t hesitate to come down.”

Looking at our house from the road, I understood why she didn’t leap at the offer. Water, of course, is subject to gravity, and our house seemed to possess a considerable gravitational pull. The runoff streamed down the hillside, all of it draining straight down toward the house, where it was rising with startling rapidity. There were two steps leading up to our front door. The water had already engulfed the first step. I brought this to Sylvia’s attention. We stood there in the rain, feeling far beyond soaked.

“You know what I’m beginning to worry about?” I said, raising my voice above the thunderous din of rain.

“Mud slides?”

“Exactly.”

Somehow, we needed to channel the water so that it cascaded around the house, where it could gush freely down the hillside toward the harbor below us. I no longer cared about flooding. I was worried about the entire house sliding down the hillside once the soil became too soggy to support a foundation. As the afternoon wore on and the rain pelted ever harder with the rising wind I shoveled trenches and troughs—in front of the house, on the slope of the driveway, on the dirt road itself—trying with some desperation to convince the water that it really wanted to go somewhere else. My hands, accustomed as they were to the soft
tap-tap
of the keyboard, were soon bloodied and calloused. The rain was overwhelming, a pounding blizzard of water. Eventually, there was nothing more we could do. I had dug as much as I could. Sylvia had been busy keeping the new trenches free of dirt and debris. Thankfully, most of the water was now flowing alongside the house. What had begun as a steady stream was now a frightful torrent of white water. We stood for a long moment, considering the trenches we had cleared. In a few hours, we had managed to destroy the landscaping around the house.

“The landlord won’t be happy,” Sylvia said.

“We’ll just tell him we had to sacrifice the land to save the land.”

Inside the house, we listened to the radio. “Cyclone Paula,” said a soothing voice, was “moving to the southeast with sustained winds of 180 kilometers an hour. It can be mapped on the cyclone tracking map in quadrant G-4.” The telephone book was handily equipped with a cyclone tracking map, and as the evening progressed we plotted the storm’s movements with each weather update. The eye was expected to pass over Efate shortly after 1
A.M.
The wind had risen to a strong gale, and we stood on our covered patio watching the palm fronds fold in like blown umbrellas.

As a gloomy, howling darkness descended we attached the last shutter over the glass sliding door leading to the patio. We had now officially battened down the hatches. The wind fetched up alarmingly, and looking through the slats in the shutters, I could see branches and twigs flying through the night. By 11
P.M.,
the power had been lost. In the darkness, we listened to the shortwave radio. The eye of the storm was now on a direct course for the north part of the island. The house had begun to shudder, buffeted by ferocious winds. I was beginning to worry about the roof. The wind had passed through the howling stage, lingered briefly in screaming mode, and was now hurtling like a rumbling locomotive.

“Isn’t this amazing?” I said.

I was somewhere in that sweet spot between wonder and fear. We opened the glass sliding door and peered through the slats.

“All three banana trees are gone,” Sylvia noted.

“Papaya trees too,” I said. “And look, there goes the gardening shed.”

At that instant, before we could stop him, Pip leapt through the slats and vanished into the night.

“Tell me the cat didn’t just do that,” I said.

“We have to get him!” Sylvia pleaded. “He’s just a kitten.”

I looked at her. “PIP!” she yelled frantically. “PIP!”

Where had this come from? I wondered as the rain seeped in. At best, Sylvia had always been ambivalent about the cat. She didn’t despise it, but as far as I could tell, she had no great affection for it either.

“You have to go find him,” she pleaded.

“But there’s a cyclone,” I observed. “In cyclones, people are supposed to stay inside a shelter. They’re not meant to wander about in hundred-mile-per-hour winds looking for lost kittens.”

“He’s just a kitten,” she protested. “Go get him.”

“But…it’s windy.”

“PIP!” Sylvia yelled through the slats. “PIP!”

Stupid cat, I thought as I grabbed a flashlight. I left the house through the front door, the only exit left without a shutter, and crept around the side of the house, keeping the walls between me and the full brunt of the storm. Still, the wind and rain were such that I was soon drenched. The trees were bent and anarchic. I reached the small expanse of our backyard, then stuck my hand out and felt the cyclone. The wind nearly popped my arm out of its socket. The rain smacked my hand like pellets. Branches, twigs, and all sorts of indistinguishable projectiles were hurtling through the air. It occurred to me that cyclones are a lot more fun when you’re watching them on television. I had moved well beyond awe and was now seized by the grip of fear.

I knew one thing. The cat could have gone in only one direction—with the wind. I shone my flashlight on the bushes lining the fence. “PIP!” I yelled.
S
tupid cat. “PIP!” I scanned the trees. No, I thought. There’s no way he would have made it into a tree. I scanned the bushes again. There he was, huddled like a wet rat in the narrow space between a shrub and the wooden fence. I could see him crying out, but I could hear nothing over the thunderous roar of the cyclone. I turned the flashlight into the wind, searching the sky for sheets of tin and other items capable of inflicting a sudden decapitation. I made a dash for it, leaning my weight into the maelstrom. I was smacked by a thousand leaves. The rain stung. A twig hit me in the back of my head. I grabbed the cat and fought my way through the wind back into the house.

“Pip. There you are,” Sylvia cooed, rushing forward and toweling him off.

I stood in the doorway, drenched and panting.

“Um…could I have a towel too?”

IN THE MORNING,
once the cyclone had been reduced to a gale, we emerged from the house and surveyed the damage. The gardening shed had been lost, along with the fruit trees. Our front yard and the driveway had disappeared under a foot of mud. Everything else, unsurprisingly, was a mess, a jumble of tree limbs, branches, and leaves. But the house still stood. And Pip had remained among the living. Stupid cat.

We walked into town. The permanent structures had withstood the cyclone, though here and there, a roof had been lost. Anything with a thatch roof had to be written off. Most of the smaller fruit trees had been toppled, and a good many of the larger trees had been knocked over too. The whole town seemed to have been inundated with a blizzard of wet leaves. At the harbor, we counted eight yachts sunk, their masts just cresting above the surface. But all in all, Port Vila had escaped the worst a cyclone could offer.

A Chinese shop was, inexplicably, open for business, and we walked in seeking basic provisions. Before the cyclone, Radio Vanuatu had suggested that people stock up on food and water. We’d followed this advice closely and bought a bag of cookies. Now we were in need of both, so we bought a few bottles of water and, as there was nothing else available beyond a few rusty cans of chicken curry, another bag of cookies. Remembering the state of our yard, I also purchased a machete.

“You know what this feels like?” I observed as we headed home. “It feels like a snow day.”

And now it was time to do the tropical equivalent of shoveling snow. As a child growing up in Canada I was, of course, very familiar with shoveling snow. But a few hours later, as the machete left my hand, hurtling through the air like a tomahawk when all I had meant to do was hack away at a torn branch, I acknowledged that I was not quite in my milieu here. We spent the day hacking at dangling tree limbs and shoveling mud. Since I was out there trimming, I figured, I might as well prune the hedges, which had grown to such a height as to obscure what there was of our view. There was something vaguely enjoyable about the chore, and the results of my efforts were satisfying. The heat and humidity of the previous days had blown away, and there was a steady cool breeze. I felt like we had survived something, and surviving anything always left me feeling very happy. Everyone we had encountered seemed to be of a similar disposition. Cyclones can kill. It was one thing to know this in a theoretical sort of way. It was something else entirely to actually experience a cyclone and realize that you were just a gust or two away from joining Dorothy in Oz. Not everyone was so lucky, alas. Flooding had taken lives elsewhere in Vanuatu. But we didn’t know this then, and like everyone in Port Vila, I felt pleased to just be here, on the island, cleaning up.