Getting Stoned with Savages (15 page)

It was as I was standing there, enjoying the fruits of my labor, that I felt an astonishingly painful jolt on my foot. The blood suddenly drained from my head. Then I experienced another spasm of pain on my other foot. I looked down and saw a foot-long centipede scampering down the hillside.

It felt like the concentrated effort of a thousand wasps, all plunging their stingers into the same spot. The pain was horrendous. I felt decidedly wobbly.

“Centipede,” I cried hoarsely, staggering up toward the house in my flip-flops. I felt cold. My feet throbbed.

“Another one?” Sylvia asked.

My feet were beginning to feel numb, disconnected from the rest of my being. “It bit me,” I said, reaching the patio.

Sylvia gasped appreciatively. I felt odd, bloodless. Was this shock?

“Aspirin,” I said. “Do we have aspirin?”

“Tylenol,” Sylvia said, running inside the house to search through our supply of medicine. I took three tablets. I had no idea whether it would do any good.

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Sylvia asked.

I considered. Island hospitals were places to be avoided if possible. And the morning after a cyclone, it was likely to be busy anyway. “Let’s just see what happens,” I wheezed.

The centipede had stung me on the tops of my feet. My left foot swelled to the size of an orange, my right foot to the size of a grapefruit. The skin around the wounds crinkled in a very strange manner, like elephant skin. I could hardly feel my feet. They dangled bizarrely. Well, I thought, what more could nature do?

A WEEK LATER,
I found myself hobbling around the house. I had taken an island attitude toward my ailments. I was alive. Why see a doctor? Now and then, I’d pinch the tops of my feet, wondering if I’d ever have feeling again. They were still hideously swollen. It could be worse, I thought. At least I didn’t have to wear shoes.

I had noticed that the neighbors had rebuilt their nakamal. Excellent, I thought. Surely, a few bowls of kava would reduce the swelling. If not, I figured, at least I would find a certain equilibrium in the numbness.

“So, tell me what you see,” Sylvia asked as I awaited the red light of the nakamal. “One line or two?”

She thrust a thermometer-like contraption in my hands. “Well,” I said, “I see two lines, very clearly.”

“Do you know what that means?”

“No idea.”

“You’re going to be a daddy.”

I
F THERE IS A STRANGER PLACE TO FIND ONESELF AT FIVE
o’clock in the morning than perched atop the narrow rim of an active volcano, I cannot quite imagine what that place might be. But this is where we found ourselves one morning, cautiously peering into the steaming cauldron of Mount Yasur, a provocatively lively volcano on the island of Tanna.

We were playing a little game with Mother Nature. After the excitement of Cyclone Paula, we had asked her,
What else you got?
She responded with Cyclone Sose. Okay, we said, two cyclones within a month is pretty good. What else do you have? She came back with an earthquake. It arrived one afternoon, completely unannounced, which is the thing about earthquakes, their very suddenness. Say what you will about cyclones, but at least they call ahead. We were idling at home when suddenly the house lurched left and then right.

“Whoa,” I said.

And then the earth continued to shake and rumble, rising and falling in intensity, for eternal second after eternal second. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, reaching for Sylvia as the bookcase tottered and the lamp swayed. We dashed outside. The children across the road giggled.

So it wasn’t a ten on the Richter scale. But that’s what makes earthquakes, in my mind, so terrifying. If I had been told that on Saturday, at precisely 4:47
P.M.
, there was to be a magnitude 3.8 earthquake, well, I might have grabbed a Tusker, settled into my chair, and enjoyed myself. But earthquakes aren’t considerate like that. When the ground begins to shake, you have no idea whether this is going to be just a little tremble, a slight rumbling of the continental plate, or whether this is your own personal end times.

What really got us marveling about Mother Nature, however, was the imminent prospect of parenthood. Technically, I knew where babies came from. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to feel suffused with a sense of cosmic wonderment, knowing that in nine short months, I would be admiring the contents of a baby’s diaper. This was life, a life that we had created. And what a miraculous thing that is. Every day our little embryo was sprouting a limb and growing a brain. “According to the book,” I said to Sylvia, “our child presently has a tail. Do you think that comes from my side or yours?”

With each passing week, the baby developed eyes and ears, fingers and toes. Time, suddenly, took on a whole new meaning. Babies, we were confidently told by other parents, change your life in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. If you were planning to do anything at all that did not involve a changing table and a diaper bag, now might be a good time to do it. Well, we thought, it might be nice to see a volcano, and since to the best of our knowledge there weren’t any volcanoes with stroller paths, we soon found our way to Mount Yasur.

It was the same volcano that had lured Captain Cook to Tanna. He had noticed its red glow in the night and heard its constant rumbling, and so he brought the
Resolution
toward a small bay on the southeastern side of the island, which he named Port Resolution. There is a small black-sand beach at the mouth of the bay, and Cook soon found its shore occupied by what he estimated to be a thousand armed warriors. If it had been me standing on the quarterdeck, I would have said, “Right, Jenkins. Make a note of it
—Natives hostile.
Now, let’s turn this barque around and get out of here.” Captain Cook, however, decided to hop in a rowboat and pay the islanders a visit. With a few men, he rowed toward the beach. Feeling that the natives were just a little too close for comfort, he gave an order for a musket to be fired over their heads. Here, in Cook’s words, was the response: “In an instant they recovered themselves and began to display their weapons, one fellow shewed us his back side in such a manner that it was not necessary to have an interpreter to explain his meaning.”

What this conclusively proves, of course, is that mooning transcends culture. A display of the buttocks speaks a universal language. In the end, Cook was fairly well received on the island, though tolerated might be the more apt description. He tried very hard to be conscientious in naming the island. One of his men, a Mr. Forster, had pointed to the ground, indicating to one of the locals that he’d like to know the name of this place. Tanna, he was told. Tanna it is, then, wrote Captain Cook, filling in his chart, and so to this day the island remains known as Tanna, which means “ground” in the local language.

Captain Cook, however, was prevented from approaching Mount Yasur, which from his description was in a particularly active phase—“The volcano threw up vast quantities of fire and Smoak, the flames were seen to ascend above the hill between us and it, the night before it did the same and made a noise like thunder or the blowing up of mines at every eruption which happened every four or five minutes.”

We were more fortunate. Mount Yasur was currently shuttling back and forth between levels 1 and 2 on the four-point scale used by the islanders to describe the volcano’s activity. Level 4 is merely an innocuous shorthand for
You’re all going to die.
Level 3 says
Those of you on the volcano are going to die,
which was precisely the fate of a Japanese woman and her two guides shortly before our arrival. “We told her it was unsafe,” said William, the manager of the village-run guesthouse we were staying at in Port Resolution. “But she wanted to take pictures. No, no, we said. Too dangerous for pictures. But she wouldn’t listen to no from the guides. So two boys from the village agreed to take her, and they all die.”

“And at what level was the volcano when that happened?” I asked, suddenly sobered by the prospect of standing on its rim.

“It was at level three.”

We had arrived at the guesthouse the previous morning. “Just breathe into the paper bag,” Sylvia had said onboard the Twin Otter as we were buffeted by crosswinds. The guesthouse was set on a verdant bluff overlooking the sky-blue waters of Resolution Bay. Our hut, with walls of pandanus and a roof of thatch, stood just a few yards from a sheer cliff, not a place to amble about in the darkness without a courtesy kerosene lantern. In the mornings, the staff placed a hibiscus flower on the bed, underneath the mosquito net, which we agreed was a classy touch.

On the beach we had noticed steam rising from the tidal pools. Elsewhere, we could see steam rising in irregular bursts from the forest. This was the volcano venting. At a shallow tidal pool, we had come across a family boiling cassava and yams. “Do many people cook their food here?” we had asked. “Yes,” replied the father. “Bachelors.”

Across the bay rose the small eminence of Cook’s Pyramid, a rock from which the captain had sought to calculate where precisely he was on this planet. No doubt he would have recognized the anchorage. A verdant tangle of trees and wildflowers scaled the cliffs rising from the bay. A villager paddled his outrigger canoe across the emerald waters, periodically slapping his paddle on the water’s surface, beckoning the dugong, or sea cow, that lived there.

“Do you see it?” Sylvia asked later from our cliff-top perch. It was a nine-foot-long dugong that had popped its head up for a look around. No doubt, he was as perturbed by the sight as we were, and I daresay Captain Cook would have been, for an armada of French yachts had settled in the bay. They were, as we soon learned, from New Caledonia, participating in the annual sailing race from Nouméa to Port Vila. Now, typically, I don’t like to make grand generalizations about a people, but I’ll make an exception for the French colonists living in New Caledonia. They are pushy, rude, impertinent, and obnoxious, all the attributes generally attributed to Americans traveling abroad. We first encountered them in the village of Yakuveran, just beyond Port Resolution. I was playing soccer with the village youths, feeling profoundly humbled at every turn as these barefoot boys demonstrated why Vanuatu was the preeminent soccer power in the Pacific, when suddenly the colonists arrived, loudly streaming across the village clearing where we were playing. “France against Vanuatu!” yelled one man boozily in French, picking up the ball midgame. Half of us left the field. Most of the new arrivals were well on their way to drunkenness. As they played, their women and children were on the sidelines yelling, “Allez, allez. Vive la France!” Where once the village youths were playing with a dazzling ferocity, they had now lowered their game to accommodate the sloppiness of the French.

“Why are they letting the French win?” I asked the teenage boy next to me.

“Because it will make them happy,” he said.

Taking wary note of the yachts, we made arrangements to ascend the volcano late in the afternoon. William had a pickup truck waiting for us. “You stay until after dusk,” he said, “and see the magma in the darkness.” When we arrived to meet our guides, however, we discovered that the truck had been commandeered by the French. “I am very sorry,” William said, meaning it. “What can I do? Is it okay if you go in the morning before dawn?” No problem, we said as the truck heaved off, laden to the hilt with colonists. They returned some hours later, drenched through from a sudden downpour, which amused us immensely.

At dinner that evening, we shared a long table with the colonists. “I am a veteran of the war in Chad,” said a burly Frenchman. He had been hitting on Sylvia throughout the meal in that slurpy manner some middle-aged men have whenever they find themselves in the presence of a blond. We asked him about New Caledonia. We had spent the New Year’s holiday in Nouméa, the capital, and had found it bizarre, a sunny police state where the French frolic while the Kanaks, the indigenous Melanesians, are sent deep into the mines.

“C’est paradis,” he said. Like most of them, he spoke only French.

“Perhaps you could help us understand something,” I said. “Why are you there? Or rather, why are the French still in New Caledonia? The nickel that you mine does not come anywhere close to matching the subsidies that the French government sends you each year. And as far as I can tell, France has no particular strategic interests in the region.”

“It is our patrimony,” he said. “After Algeria, we said never again.” The others nodded. “New Caledonia was France yesterday. It is France today. And it will be France tomorrow.”

Vive la France!

They’re mad, I tell you. But the answer pleased me, for now I felt free to truly despise them, a feeling that peaked sometime after midnight as we lay awake, groaning to yet another loud, drunken rendition of “La Marseillaise.” I mean, really now. Who on earth stays up deep into the night singing the national anthem of a faraway motherland? They’re nuts, and I had for them nothing but ill will. Okay. Enough. But the next time Germany invades…Okay, I’ll stop now…well, it’s not going to be me saving their ass.

MOUNT YASUR
is often described as the world’s most accessible volcano. It rises to no great height, a mere one thousand feet, and a four-wheel-drive vehicle can easily deposit you within three hundred feet of the summit. It will tolerate, now and then, the presence of drunken paleo-nationalist Frenchmen. It even lent its name to one of the tribes on
Survivor: Vanuatu,
the television game show, which was filmed on the island of Efate, on a beach a short distance from the comforts of Port Vila. These facts may lull some—until, that is, they find themselves in Yasur’s fiery presence. The landscape of Tanna is flamboyantly green, a veritable Eden, and so to come across the Ash Plain, a grim, forbidding, lifeless savannah of desolation, is to be reminded that Mount Yasur is very much alive. Indeed, the volcano has been continuously active, rumbling and emitting great torrents of magma and lava bombs, for more than eight hundred years. Near the base stands Lake Isiwi, a large, poisonous pond containing scores of uprooted trees, deposited there by cyclones. Already, here, one can inhale the sulfur and feel the trembling of the ground whenever Mount Yasur flares. Ash is continuously expelled from the crater, and as these plumes of dirt rise and billow from the summit, it occurs to you that standing on the rim is perhaps not the most reasonable or prudent thing to do.