Getting Stoned with Savages (16 page)

It took a while for this last thought to find us. When we awoke, in darkness, to the insistent
tap-tap
of William knocking on our hut, my first thought, as I remembered why we had slept so little, was to wonder whether I could hit the yachts anchored in the bay below us with a few well-aimed rocks. The lights on their boats presented an appealing target. And then I felt an overwhelming need for coffee.

“No coffee,” William declared. “The guides are here. Here are your flashlights.”

We stumbled onward, following the glare of the flashlights. A light drizzle fell. Our guides were Simi and Joseph, two men from a nearby village, one of several that claimed to be the traditional landowners of Mount Yasur. Sylvia joined Joseph in the cab of the truck, and I hopped in the back with Simi. I cannot say I had any great enthusiasm for sitting on the cold, wet metal rail of a pickup truck. It was 4
A.M.
I was shivering. It is rare to feel cold in the South Pacific, but that is the state in which I found myself. We gingerly made our way toward the volcano, following a muddy trail illuminated by the truck’s headlights. We crossed the barren Ash Plain. Above, I could see the red blaze of Mount Yasur reflecting off wet clouds that swirled low above its rim. The air had begun to smell strongly of sulfur, like a million extinguished matches. The truck slowed, and Simi jumped down to unlock a gate that crossed the path leading up toward the rim.

Mount Yasur was the most famous landmark in Vanuatu, and the few visitors who traveled to Tanna paid hefty sums for the privilege of ascending its peak. Since my trip to Malekula, I had come to appreciate outer-island tourism, such as it is, in Vanuatu. The islands are hard to get to. They lack roads, electricity, running water, and pretty much everything else that all but your more intrepid traveler yearns for on a vacation. There is no threat of a Hilton resort opening up on an outer island anytime soon. And yet, for the privilege of traipsing about the mud on an island infested with malaria, sleeping in primitive shelters lacking in amenities, and dining on food that is, at best, a nutritional chore to be endured, visitors find themselves hemorrhaging money. Want to see a kastom dance? 2,000 vatu. See a waterfall? 1,500 vatu. Climb a volcano? 5,000 vatu. See a circumcision ceremony? 10,000 vatu. In the end, it would be much cheaper to take the package deal to Bora-Bora. But what I liked about visiting the outer islands of Vanuatu was that not a dime of what one spends leaves the island. Everything goes to the villages, and you feel good knowing that you have done nothing to contribute to the delinquency of Paris Hilton.

The truck began its ascent, following a steep path that climbed a ridge. Simi seemed to be perking up. So far, both of us had spent the trip silently curled deep within ourselves, seeking to fend off the wet cold.

“Have you been to the volcano many times now?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “many times.” He paused for a moment. “But it is not the kastom to go to the volcano.”

“In kastom times, people didn’t go to the top of the volcano?”

“No. It was taboo.”

Indeed, Cook had tried to march toward Mount Yasur on his own. Fortunately for him, he soon discovered that without a guide the trek would prove to be too daunting, and he turned around, just in time to encounter thirty armed warriors who had been dispatched to prevent him from approaching the volcano.

“So what’s it like up there?” I ventured.

“You must pay attention,” Simi said. “When the magma comes up over the rim, do not run.”

“Do not run?”

“No, do not run. You must stop and watch where it goes, and then you can get out of the way.”

I was certainly awake now.

“Yasur is very unpredictable,” Simi continued. “It can change at any time. It is very dangerous.”

“Do you like going to Yasur?”

“No. I do not like it.”

Joseph stopped the truck. We had arrived. Immediately, we heard the whooshing, the volcano breathing. It sounded like a sloshing ocean encased within a chamber of stone. The putrid smell of sulfur was overwhelming. With unsettling frequency there were loud blasts, explosions. The drizzle had lifted, and as we alighted from the truck, the ground felt strangely warm under our feet.

Sylvia and I exchanged glances. We were not in our element here. This was not a place for humans. Indeed, this was not a place for life. Even in the darkness, we could sense the desolation.

“Remember,” Joseph said. “When you see the magma come up over the rim, do not run. You must watch where it falls.”

With our flashlights on we followed a narrow trail to the summit, weaving around boulders and steam vents.
Whoosh.
We could hear fiery blasts. It seemed evident to us why this volcano was taboo. Something else lived here, something fearsome and terrifying. As we crested the rim we were greeted with a swirling cauldron of steam radiating an ethereal red. A gray dawn began to emerge. The crater was nearly a thousand feet across, and seeing these hazy red clouds of steam whirling below was like viewing an immense witches’ brew.

“Be careful,” Simi cautioned. “It is very steep.”

Only a few steps in front of us, the ridge plummeted three hundred feet. We stood as close to the edge as we dared. The ground around us trembled and shook. With each blast, smoke ascended. Magma and lava bombs exploded like firecrackers, arcing across the expanse of the crater, just below the rim. There were three open vents spewing and foaming with magma. As the sky grew lighter the steam caused by the drizzle earlier began to dissipate. We began to walk around the rim, stupefied by the spectacle.

“Do not go too far,” Joseph warned us. “This is the highest point. There,” he said pointing to his right, “is lower. More chance of magma going over the rim.”

The sun rose, and the contrast between the expanse of the volcano and the rest of Tanna was stark. The island was exuberantly alive. We could see the lofty eminences of Mount Tukosmera and Mount Melen, both rising above three thousand feet, with verdant, green ridges, an endless canopy of trees that extended in every direction toward the ocean. But around us, and stretching for a long distance, was nothing but a barren wasteland, populated by car-sized boulders and gray ash.

“Let’s go back to the higher ridge,” Sylvia said. We had wandered a ways around the crater, utterly transfixed by the volcano. Now we noticed that Joseph and Simi had remained on the highest point of the rim, where they crouched down, with one eye on the cauldron and one on us.

“Well, that ought to tell us something,” I said.

The volcano wheezed and trembled. The blasts seemed to shake even the air. We walked back toward where Joseph and Simi stood. Suddenly, the volcano inhaled, a loud, stretched-out
wheesh.
Time seemed to stop. There was a long, painfully long silence.

The blast brought us to the ground. “Watch where it goes!” I yelled. A long inferno of magma and a cascade of lava bombs stretched high above the rim, up, up it went. The noise was deafening, an ear-puncturing explosion. Black smoke plumed in the crater. We were on our feet now.

“It’s coming down,” Sylvia shouted.

The magma fell back to earth, swallowed by the cauldron. Briskly, we made our way back to Joseph and Simi.

“Thanks so much,” I said as a cloud of ash swirled around us. “We’d like to go down now, please.”

TANNA, AS WE
had come to expect of islands in Vanuatu, is remarkably diverse in its population. Nearly thirty thousand people live on the island. There are seven indigenous languages, and the population is more or less divided equally among Presbyterians, kastom believers, and the followers of John Frum. It was this last group that particularly intrigued us. The John Frum Movement is the Pacific’s most notorious cargo cult. Whereas, elsewhere in the world, people had greeted the wonders of Western material goods by asking,
How did you make that?,
in parts of Melanesia, islanders suddenly confronted by airplanes and refrigerators had asked,
Which god will give us loot too?
The missionaries weren’t especially helpful on this point. Indeed, the John Frum Movement on Tanna began sometime in the 1930s as a reaction to the increasingly restrictive dictates of the missionaries, who had banned most of the important traditional ceremonies and even went so far as to prohibit the consumption of kava. They were that cruel.

A legend arose—its origins are unclear—that told of a mysterious white man who called himself John Frum. He told the islanders to ignore the missionaries and said that if they resumed the old ways and danced and enjoyed kava, he would return one day bearing Western goods, or cargo. For many, this seemed sensible, and they abandoned the churches, took their children out of the mission schools, and set up new villages, where every Friday they danced until dawn. Most unusual for Vanuatu, the women too were encouraged to drink kava.

In the 1940s, the arrival of World War II convinced the followers of John Frum of the righteousness of their cause. Vanuatu, and particularly the island of Santo, was an enormous staging area for the war in the Pacific. Tens of thousands of soldiers passed through the islands, including James Michener, who subsequently based his book
Tales of the South Pacific
on his experiences in Vanuatu. The John Frum followers on Tanna took particular interest in the African American soldiers. It was obvious to them that these black soldiers were originally from Tanna, and that they were fighting for John Frum and the liberation of their island. These soldiers, to their eyes, moved so easily among the white men, whereas they had been accustomed to a rigid hierarchy in which white missionaries and planters ruled. And, of course, there was the cargo, an endless supply of jeeps, planes, iceboxes, radios, and tinned food.

After the war, the followers of John Frum constructed airstrips of their own, clearing the bush in an effort to lure John Frum back to Tanna with his promised riches. They built wooden replicas of the guns they had seen and marched in formation through their village clearings. They danced through the night every Friday and drank prodigious amounts of kava. When John Frum still didn’t return with his promised cargo, the believers shrugged and danced some more. Christians, they sagely observed, have been waiting two thousand years for Christ to return.

Today, in the village of Sulphur Bay, in the shadow of Mount Yasur, two flagpoles erected by followers of John Frum continue to fly the baby-blue flag of the U.S. Navy and the Stars and Stripes. This, Sylvia and I agreed, was one of the stranger sights we had encountered in the South Pacific. Almost as an afterthought, another pole carried the national flag of Vanuatu, hoisted grudgingly to appease the government, which periodically clashed with the John Frum Movement over its refusal to pay taxes to the state.

The village was constructed with almost geometric precision, like a barracks, with traditional homes arranged around a grassy ceremonial square. Ponderous waves broke heavily on the beach. Above loomed Mount Yasur, belching ash. It seemed a desolate place. We arrived with William in the afternoon, following our Yasur climb, and we waited as the villagers sat in the shade offered by two great trees. A heated argument of some sort was under way, with one elderly man in a sarong pointing a knobby cane at another elder, seated on an enormous tree root.

Eventually, the elder with the cane made his way toward us. “This is Chief Fred,” said William. Chief Fred greeted us warmly. “You are from America?” he asked through William, who acted as a translator.

Yes, we said, we are.

“I have been to America,” he said enthusiastically. “I have been to San Francisco, Denver, Houston, New York, and Washington, D.C. I am the Big Man in Sulphur Bay, and I went to meet your Big Men in America.”

“And did you meet our Big Men?” I asked.

“Yes. We talked about important things. They asked about Sulphur Bay.”

“And what did you tell them.”

“That Sulphur Bay is an ally of America.”

“Well, I’m sure they were very pleased to hear it.”

Sylvia asked, “Did you find traveling to America expensive?”

“Yes,” Chief Fred admitted. “It was very expensive. The people worked very hard to send their Big Man to America.”

He beckoned us toward the John Frum church, which looked like the other homes but had in its center a red wooden cross.

“I will tell you something,” Chief Fred said. “Jesus was from Tanna.”

“Ah…,” we said. Who knew?

“He was crucified on this cross,” he said.

“This one?” I said. Well, I thought, pondering the cross, Jesus must have been a dwarf. The cross was about four feet high and had the symmetry of the cross used by army medics to distinguish themselves from regular soldiers.

“Bethlehem,” continued Chief Fred, “was there on the hill, above the village. The River Jordan was Lake Isiwi.”

This was all news to us—not simply the fact that we were apparently in the Holy Land but that the followers of John Frum had anything to do with Christianity.

“But,” said Chief Fred, “we lost this knowledge. It was only when the missionaries came with the Bible that we learned our history.”