Getting Stoned with Savages (2 page)

Now why, one may reasonably ask, would anyone want to go back to such a world? This is an excellent question. Boredom, a ferocious, unyielding boredom certainly played a part. That morning in Kiribati, I had managed, in a few short hours, to do something productive. I had disposed of a problem. I had swum in the Pacific Ocean. I had sensed danger. I had made a friend. I had a new story to tell. Certainly, I would not want to relive that particular day, but at least something had happened. Something interesting. While it may be true that finding a decomposing pig in your yard is not an ideal way to begin one’s day, I found that beginning each new day in Washington, as I did, with the shocking blast of an alarm clock buzzer, shortly to be followed by a frantic race to the office, where I would be greeted by a computer with the news that I had ninety-two new messages, of which thirty-seven were alleged to be urgent, and then to spend the remainder of the day stressing mightily about agendas and bullet points, memos and PowerPoint presentations, conferences and conference calls, only to call it quits long after sunset with the queasy realization that after all that time, all that energy, all that fussing, I really had nothing to show for my day, nothing real and tangible and good—well, I found that such a day stinks too.

In Washington, we were led to believe that we inhabited the center of the world, that the rest of the globe spun according to our whims and priorities. This can be a heady feeling. Should the Namibians have electricity? We decide. Should the Laotians be able to trade sugarcane? If they would just ask nicely. Is the Haitian government getting uppity? Fuck ’em. We’re taking them out. This tends to attract a certain kind of person, and when I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed my gray suit, my Brooks Brothers shirt, my silk tie, and my soft leather Italian shoes, I realized that I was not such a person. I felt like a tourist, dreamily walking through a life that was not meant to be mine. Some people are attracted to power. I’d rather be plucking at a ukulele on a faraway beach. I was not a soft-leather-Italian-shoe kind of man. I was a flip-flop man. And as a flip-flop man I knew what needed to be done. Kiribati may not have been paradise, but I was ready to keep looking. I knew how to do it too. My wife would have to find another job in the South Pacific.

IT WAS SO EASY, REALLY.
Unexpectedly so.

“The South Pacific would do nothing for my career,” Sylvia had countered.

“Career, schmeer.”
Blue, blue water.

“And it would mean a pay cut.”

“I have money, and if it runs out, well, we can live off love.”
Swaying palm trees.

“But I do think the South Pacific would be a great place to start a family.”

“Er…”

My wife, clearly, was an out-of-the-box thinker. It had been my understanding that when women felt the urge to procreate, it was usually accompanied by a need to settle down, to own a house, perhaps even in the suburbs, where the schools are rumored to be good and the neighbors chirpy. Not Sylvia. The motherhood instinct had somehow elicited a desire to flee, to remove herself as far as possible from America. She too had experienced the bewildering dissonance, the extreme culture shock that was the inevitable result of moving from a place like Kiribati to a city like Washington. Perhaps she wasn’t as inclined to romanticizing island life as I was, but there was enough of the islander in her for her to conclude that, all things being equal, she’d rather have children on an island far, far away. “It takes a village,” she said. “There are no villages left in America.” What fortuitous timing, I thought. I also had the urge to flee. And if it meant that sex might lead to a little bundle of consequences, well, I thought, abstractly, that would be pretty wonderful too.

Soon there was a job for Sylvia. The organization that she had worked for in Kiribati, the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific, had asked her to be the regional manager, a position that was based in Fiji. Fiji, of course, was not Kiribati. We knew this from experience. After we left Kiribati, we had spent a month traveling around the South Pacific, including to Fiji. Knowing its status as a favored destination for the rich and the beautiful, we were fairly confident that we were unlikely to encounter the deprivation that had so defined our experience in Kiribati. If Fiji was good enough for Nicole Kidman, we reasoned, it was good enough for us. Suddenly, life was looking pretty good. We had a plan. A fine plan, I thought. We would move to Fiji, the happy islands. I would write a book about Kiribati, and if that didn’t work out, there was always yam farming. Sylvia would do noble and uplifting work for the good people of the South Pacific. Our house would echo with the pitter-patter of little feet. With the future looking so bright, I felt confident enough to start hitting the snooze button.

And then our plan went up in smoke. I arrived at work one morning, comfortably after 9
A.M.,
more like 10
A.M.,
well rested, refreshed, and as I scrolled through my e-mail, there in the midst of innumerable agendas and consultant reports was a message with the heading
COUP!
That caught my eye. It was a mass mailing sent by an acquaintance of ours in Fiji.
We’re safe now,
it began, which I thought was a very lively way to begin an e-mail. The message was a stream-of-consciousness recounting of a very bad day.
Gunmen…prime minister held hostage…shooting…looters…Suva on fire.

Sylvia called. “Did you hear?”

“Yes. But hopefully this will resolve itself soon.”

But it didn’t resolve itself. On that balmy morning in Fiji, a group of men armed with automatic guns and machetes had entered the parliament in Suva, the capital, and taken the prime minister and much of the government hostage. Typically, the South Pacific receives nary a mention in the world press, with the notable exception of the occasional celebrity sighting in Tahiti. Now, however, the back pages of newspapers around the world were full of stories with headlines like
TOURISTS TERRORIZED AT POSH ISLAND RESORT.
There had been a previous coup in Fiji, in 1987, and the wits in the press began to refer to Fiji as “coup-coup land.” We consumed all the news we could find, hoping that the coup would prove to be a mere blip, a temporary usurpation of law and order, and that the tensions would quietly dissolve with a kava ceremony, an apology, a group hug, and the solemn exchange of a whale’s tooth. But as the hostage drama unfolded over the following fifty-six days, and as we watched aghast as the television broadcast images of Suva in flames, it grew harder to maintain the illusion that this was anything other than a very serious problem. Nevertheless, I kept trying. We had a plan. Coup or no coup. Until one day, Sylvia came home and declared: “Fiji has been postponed.”

“Alas,” I said. “I had rather been counting on moving to Fiji.”

“So was I. But, you know, there’s been a coup.”

“Which would make living in Fiji even more interesting,” I contended. “It’s not the first coup there. The other one turned out fine.”

“But this time they’re killing each other.”

“Yes, it’s terrible. It’s just that…well, I got fired today.”

“You were fired?”

“Well, they were very nice about it, saying that they were declining to renew my contract, funding issues and the like, and that they would think of me in the future, but their meaning was quite clear. I cleaned out my desk. So, you see, I was thinking that moving to the South Pacific now would work out pretty well as my schedule is, well, presently rather open.”

“I can’t believe you got fired.” Sylvia shook her head.

“It’s not my proudest moment.”

“Well, fortunately for you, they’d like to base the job in Vanuatu for the time being. Still willing to go?”

Out of the ashes, a new plan.

A
ND SO VANUATU. THIS REALLY WAS A MOST FORTU
nate turn of events, and it made the sting of being an unemployed consultant cast out of the halls of power exceedingly bearable. While I would have preferred to have delivered a decisive
I quit,
the important thing was that the deed was done, and as I wandered the streets of Washington with a sprightly spring in my flipflops I was beginning to feel more than a little smug.
Yeah, you there,
I thought, spying a harried-looking lawyer clutching an Au Bon Pain sandwich with one hand while the other was weighed down by a forty-pound briefcase.
An associate, aren’t you, working ninety hours a week, no life to speak of…? I’m off to the South Pacific.
Seeing a young woman staggering with two laptops as she struggled to keep up with a very important looking fellow carrying the lightest of cell phones, I thought,
Intern! You poor thing. Get out now…Melanesia, baby, Melanesia.

It was all so very liberating, because not only were we returning to the South Pacific with all its attendant beauty and languor; we were going to Vanuatu. I had once before alighted upon the islands of Vanuatu, and while I had been there for only one short week, I recalled feeling that the country was very likely one of the oddest on Earth. Mind you, I had just spent two years on an atoll, utterly isolated from the greater world, and so I was in a frame of mind to be addled. But there was something peculiar about Vanuatu, an enduring strangeness that I found particularly appealing. As I tossed my suits and ties into a bag bound for charity, I couldn’t have been happier. Begone, gray suits. I won’t be needing you anymore. I’m off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tied around a penis.

As we packed, I recalled all the mistakes I had made preparing for island life in Kiribati. Packing for the South Pacific is different from packing for other regions. This was more like packing by subtraction. Sweaters, pants, socks—gone, gone, gone. Couch? Table and chairs? In the Pacific, one sits on the floor. As the days passed we divested ourselves of much of our clothing, all of our furniture, and soon little remained of our lives except a couple of suitcases heavy with tattered shorts and floral-print shirts. I am very fond of new beginnings. Indeed, I daresay I rather excel at new beginnings. One invariably becomes good at something when one does it often enough. It pleased me that after thirty-some years of life, the baggage I carried could be reduced to one suitcase.

With the day of our departure nearing, our minds turned to Vanuatu. The impression we had taken from our short stay there two years earlier was that these islands constituted one unusual little nation. The geography itself accounts for no small measure of the country’s strangeness. This is because Vanuatu’s eighty-some islands lie directly on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which, as the name implies, is a rather fearsome place to find oneself. There is quite likely no greater force than that created when one tectonic plate with, let’s say, Australia and the Indian subcontinent on its back decides to get personal with another tectonic plate carrying, oh, how about the mass of the Pacific Ocean, the west coasts of North and South America, and, for good measure, Japan on its shoulders. Yet this is where Vanuatu finds itself, and what an exciting place it is, geologically speaking. “As solid as the earth below one’s feet” is not an expression often used in Vanuatu. The islands are young, temperamental adolescents, prone to mood swings and sudden growth spurts, and it is not uncommon for an island in Vanuatu to experience a sudden jolt and find itself thrust upward another yard or two. Now and then, an island loses it altogether and, in an apoplectic fit, blows itself up entirely, as happened to Kuwae in 1452. And always there are the earthquakes—many, many, earthquakes—that happen each and every day. Most are inconsequential, mere tremors. Though for those, like me, who have never before seen cutlery dance across a table in a restaurant, they can still be vividly disturbing.

“What was that?” I had asked the waitress in Port Vila, the capital, once I had reclaimed my wits.

“That was calamari.”

“No, no. That shaking, what was that?”

“Nothing. Just a little earthquake, a hiccup.”

A hiccup, most likely, caused by the belching of one of Vanuatu’s nine active volcanoes. True, two of them are underwater, but seven living volcanoes occupying a land mass not much greater than Connecticut is an astonishing concentration of raw, Vulcan power. In Vanuatu, the Earth is alive and well, thank you, and it is there where one can experience the awesome might of the planet. To stand upon the rim of such a volcano, even when it is merely wheezing, sending forth with surly indifference the occasional car-sized boulder or a long, snotty stream of flaming magma, is to behold the immense potency of Earth.
Do not trifle with me,
you sense it telling you, and immediately you want to throw a few Hummer owners over the rim, a small offering to the gods. Alas, it’s not the owners of monster SUVs who suffer when the planet is feeling particularly churlish—not yet, in any case. The people of Ambrym, an island with the distinction of having two exceedingly energetic volcanoes on its shores, have suffered through forty-eight major eruptions since 1774. If the people of Ambrym seem a little skittish to the outsider, a little prone to pessimism and ill humor, there is a very good reason for it. It affects one’s sensibilities, the knowledge that at any moment your world can go
boom.

One would think that in a place where the land itself is frequently prone to vigorous shaking and intemperate explosions, nature would, at the very least, grant a pleasant climate. One would be wrong. While Vanuatu has wonderfully fair weather for half the year, the other half is occupied by cyclones. From November through April, the islands can reliably expect to be walloped by two or three cyclones, which is what hurricanes are called in this corner of the world. When you consider that most of the inhabitants of Vanuatu live in villages constructed of wood and thatch, where they survive largely through the cultivation of fruit trees and vegetable gardens, one can see how potentially devastating cyclones are for the islanders, or Ni-Vanuatu, as they are called. Not only can the typical Ni-Vanuatu depend on losing his home and livelihood during a cyclone; he can expect this to happen several times over the course of his life. Such is the world that nature has bequeathed to them. It did not surprise me, then, to learn that the water around Vanuatu is also shark-infested.

I recalled life in Kiribati, where every facet of existence was starkly shaped by the environment. It was very different from Washington, where nature had been reduced to just another trite political issue, and one’s thoughts on the environment indicated whether one played for the blue team or the red team. On Tarawa, fish migrations determined what one had for dinner; a rain squall meant that, finally, there would be enough water to wash your hair; and the tides limited how far you could travel on the island. Life was reduced to its most elemental, and this, of course, affected the culture. Where I’m from, when we see a shark, we get out of the water. In Kiribati, when people see a shark, they gleefully dive in and try to catch it. Geography, as they say, is destiny.

Similarly, the isolated, trembling islands of Vanuatu, with their fire-breathing volcanoes and tempestuous cyclones, have produced a particularly intriguing culture uniquely adapted to the world they live in. During our time in Port Vila two years earlier, it seemed as if every Westerner we met was an anthropologist, freshly returned from the deepest, darkest bush, pith helmet in tow. It is no wonder. While the Ni-Vanuatu are Melanesian (Latin for “of the black islands”), descendants of intrepid voyagers who first sailed from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands roughly four thousand years ago, they share little in common beyond appearance. Vanuatu is a country of chiefs and clans, each with unique traditions and beliefs. Some thought a bone through the nasal septum made them particularly fetching. Others manipulated the skulls of their infants until they became suitably elongated. As mentioned earlier, many Ni-Vanuatu men today wear nothing more than a
namba,
a modest leaf wrapped around their penis. Naturally, there are Big Nambas and Small Nambas. And they don’t like each other.

Then there are the languages. The two hundred thousand people who call Vanuatu home speak more than one hundred languages. There is no place on Earth that offers more linguistic diversity. On some islands, and these are not large islands, the inhabitants will speak one of more than two dozen local languages, all unintelligible to one another. How can this be? you wonder. These people have been sharing an island—an island!—for a thousand years, or two, or four, and yet their languages have evolved utterly independent of those of their neighbors, a mere conch-shell blow away. Visiting the islands, one quickly understands that the topography certainly has something to do with it. The islands of Vanuatu are invariably rugged, as one would expect of islands prone to blowing up. And the interiors of most are forbiddingly dense with jungle. On Tanna, an island in the south, this area is known as the Middle Bush, an evocative name straight out of J. R. R. Tolkien. Mordor, if you will, can be found on the Ash Plain, where centuries of volcanic eruptions have decimated all life, leaving a gray, barren, and twisted landscape that fairly shouts
DO NOT ENTER.

But, clearly, something else must have been afoot for so few people sharing so little land to speak so many languages. A quick glance at the early literature on Vanuatu provides a clue. The year 1893 saw the publication of the intriguing tome
Cannibals Won for Christ,
which was soon followed by
My Adventures Among South Sea Cannibals, From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands,
and 1922’s seminal
Cannibal-land.
Colorful titles all—at least I certainly thought so. What the books so subtly referred to was the lusty appetites Vanuatu men had for other men. Cannibalism was rife in the islands, and that small fact, I deduced, was why the Ni-Vanuatu went to such trouble to avoid one another. Imagine, if you will, going for a stroll through the forest, where you chance upon a few men from the neighboring village. Elsewhere in the world, one might spend a couple of minutes idly talking about the weather, local politics, or real estate prices and then, with a friendly wave, wander on. Or perhaps you would ignore each other completely. In Vanuatu, however, you’d better run like hell, for if you were captured by your neighbors, you could be assured that, very shortly, you would be shat out their backsides.

Surely, you think, this was all a very long time ago. A century or two of contact with other cultures must undoubtedly have tempered habitual cannibalism. And it did, though not before scores of missionaries and sailors ended their days by stewing in a pot. But tradition has a way of hanging on. The last
officially recorded
incident of cannibalism in Vanuatu was in 1969 on the island of Malekula. I was born in 1969, and while I am willing to concede that 1969 is rapidly receding into the dim mists of time, it wasn’t
that
long ago. Humor me. It seemed to me that if people were still officially gnawing at human limbs in 1969, it was more than possible that, since then, there had been some off-the-books cannibalism going on in Vanuatu. Our companions in Port Vila agreed. On Ambrym, they said. It’s the island of black magic. Or on Malekula, particularly among the swaggering Big Nambas.

But, of course, it is not all cannibalism in Vanuatu. We are, after all, more than what we eat. On many islands, the inhabitants still live according to the tenets of
kastom,
the venerable traditions and beliefs that have infused Ni-Vanuatu culture since long before ships arrived from the West bearing muskets and missionaries. While the Ni-Vanuatu may have abandoned the consumption of human flesh, many still cling tenaciously to the old ways, in which the curve of a pig’s tusk is of far greater value than the thinness of a flat-screen television. This is a world of spirits, magic, and sorcery, where an enemy can be slain with the right spell. But
kastom,
a pidgin word meaning “custom,” manifests itself differently on each of the islands in Vanuatu. On Pentecost Island, for example, there are land divers, courageous boys and men who leap from homemade towers that soar upwards of ninety feet with nothing more than a vine tethered to their ankles, then plummet, grazing the hard earth with their hair, thus ensuring a successful yam harvest. On a few islands, however, the peculiarities of local culture have been infused with the peculiarities of the Western world, with the result that some villagers fly the U.S. Navy flag and march like American soldiers in the fervent hope that one day soon an enigmatic stranger will visit them bearing U.S. Army surplus material.

Yes, it is an odd country, made odder still by its colonial history. I had a hard time imagining the British and the French sharing anything but a healthy disregard for each other, but before Vanuatu’s independence in 1980, the two countries jointly ruled the islands, which were then known as the New Hebrides, or Nouvelles-Hébrides, as the other half preferred. The two colonial powers spent the entire era, nearly a hundred years, crudely trying to undermine each other, with the result that today half the country is francophone while the other half leans anglophone—this in addition to the myriad indigenous languages. Naturally, for the Ni-Vanuatu to be able to communicate with anyone from outside their village, one more language had to be created: Bislama, an island pidgin. Mixing phonetic English with phonetic French, the Ni-Vanuatu now had a simple way to say “I don’t understand”:
Me no save.