Getting Stoned with Savages (22 page)

“A sock?”

“For the kava.”

“Ah…of course.”

I had remained loyal to the kava from Vanuatu, and it wasn’t long after we arrived in Fiji that I found the stall in the covered market that sold it. James respected my sophisticated palate, and now and then we had a sock or two of kava together. Soon we were all gathered around the kava bowl, men and women of disparate cultures sitting on woven mats on a balcony overlooking the island where George Speight was imprisoned, and as the sky reddened with the sun’s descent, I knew that at least here, on a hillside in Suva, peace and harmony reigned.

O
NE OF THE GREAT ADVANTAGES OF LIVING IN FIJI, OF
course, was living in Fiji. Suva, with its pervasive sense of doom and gloom, was technically in Fiji, but now and then, whenever events warranted, we had a hankering for the Other Fiji, the one George Clooney visited. Though still a rare sight in Suva, tourists had begun to return to the islands. For the visitors lounging around the resort pools, the coup was something the hotel employees whispered about as they fetched another round of daiquiris. As they admired the ocean vista from a verandah, local politics, no doubt, was the furthest thing from their minds. This was paradise, after all. And I understood. We too enjoyed the vista, even in Suva. From our house, we had a view of Nukulau Island, a picturesque islet that had once been the Suva equivalent of Central Park in New York, an outlet for urban steam. It was a picnic island, a place where the inhabitants of Suva took their families for an afternoon of swimming and frolicking. Regrettably, the island had now been transformed into a prison for George Speight and his fellow conspirators.

Though we couldn’t escape this reminder of recent events, we appreciated the view nevertheless. Most mornings, I settled myself on the balcony with my laptop, and as my eyes passed over the slums below and the navy patrol boat ferrying supplies to the prisoners, I’d recall our lives in Kiribati. I had found a publisher for my book, which was very exciting. “See,” I had told Sylvia, “I
can
earn a living.” More important, I now had an answer for my offspring. We had intuited correctly: a sonogram had revealed that Sylvia was carrying a boy. Years from now, I envisioned him asking, “I know Mom was working when I was born, but what did you do?” I had been worried that I’d have nothing more to say than a mumbled “writing” as I set off for my job manning the deep fryer. I might still be destined for the deep fryer, I thought, but at least I’d have a book to show the little one, though it occurred to me, as I finished a chapter on the mating habits of dogs in Kiribati, that I might not let him read it until he turned eighteen.

One morning, as we brought our coffee to the balcony we sensed that something was amiss. The view had been strangely altered. We felt somehow
higher.
It had rained throughout the night, but now the sun shone brightly. There was clarity, too much clarity. Everything seemed so much more open.
Hey,
I thought,
there used to be a tree there.
Peering over the edge of the balcony, we gasped and instinctively retreated back into the house. While we had slept, our backyard had disappeared. All of it. Where once there had been a gentle hillside planted with banana trees, coconut trees, and cassava, now there was air.

“Are we safe here?” Sylvia asked.

I had no idea. We had heard nothing, felt nothing. I cautiously returned to the balcony. While just the day before it had been a mere ten-foot drop to the ground below, we were now perched above a fifty-foot chasm. Looking down, I was suddenly horrified to see where the tons of mud and debris had fallen. Below us lived a family of Indo-Fijian land squatters. Their house was a tin-and-plywood shanty without plumbing or electricity. The mud slide had buried it up to its windows.

“Is everyone all right?” I yelled. Two men were busy with shovels, digging the house out from under the debris.

“Everyone okay,” one of them called back.

I seized a shovel and scrambled down the hillside, following the edge of the colossal pit the landslide had created. Looking up, our house seemed to be teetering on the edge of the abyss. The mud slide had sheared off the hill to within a few feet of the house’s foundations.

“You must build a retaining wall,” said Vijay, a laborer who lived in the mud-encrusted house. A few weeks earlier, five people had died in a mud slide on Rabi, the small Fijian island that the British had given to the I-Kiribati expelled from Banaba Island, which had long ago been rendered uninhabitable by phosphate mining. As we had learned in Vanuatu, mud slides were an ever-present threat on the hilly islands of the South Pacific.

I began helping the family clear the debris, feeling awful about the situation. Here we were, guests in their country, and look at the mess we had made. Thank goodness, I reflected, that no one had been injured. Fortunately, our landlord agreed to build a retaining wall. Unfortunately, the retaining wall was built on island time, and during the subsequent weeks and months, as the workers followed a schedule known only to themselves, we’d find ourselves huddling in the back of the house whenever it rained, fearful that our weight alone would prove to be the tipping point that sent the house hurtling down the hill. Here, we thought, was one more very good reason to get out of Suva, and whenever we could, we hopped into our clunky secondhand car and set a course for the sun.

It was a bewilderingly odd juxtaposition of worlds. One moment we were at home, fearful of the house toppling off the hill, half-expecting to hear an exchange of gunfire as the trial of George Speight got under way, and the next moment we’d find ourselves on the west side of Viti Levu, that other world of beaches and deluxe resorts, contemplating which of the glimmering offshore islands we fancied going to for a swim. These were the Mamanucas, a group of small coral islands fringed with white-sand beaches. They look exactly as one expects islands in the South Pacific to look, possibly because the Mamanucas and, a little farther out, the Yasawas, are the preferred locations for films set on tropical islands—movies like
Castaway
and
Blue Lagoon.
Once the tourists began to return to Fiji, the Mamanucas were back in business.

The names of the individual islands alone suggested that this, very possibly, was not exactly the real Fiji. There’s Castaway Island, Beachcomber Island, Bounty Island, South Sea Island, and Treasure Island, among others. That’s all right, we thought. We lived in the real Fiji, and now and then, we wanted off. We decided one day to go to Beachcomber Island, which we soon discovered was an excellent place to go to if you’re in your thirties and, just for the fun of it, you want to spend a few hours feeling really old. From our hotel on the main island, we hopped onto a sputtering bus and proceeded to spend the next hour and a half stopping at a dozen hotels to pick up every shirtless backpacker in the greater Nadi area. Beachcomber Island, apparently, was a mecca for backpackers living out a fantasy of young adulthood, a fantasy I had deeply envied when I was fifteen.

As we approached the island by high-speed catamaran, the smell of diesel gave way to the odor of sunscreen radiating off a hundred bodies draped in the sun. From a distance, the island looked like a wildlife sanctuary for pink seals. What else would be flopping about under the midday sun? Like most Pacific Islanders, we had come to regard sunbathing as one of those peculiar things that foreigners do. As we stepped ashore it became clear that many of the figures lying prone on the beach were sleeping off the excesses of the previous night. Beachcomber Island was, as the kids like to say, a place to party. At least a third of the slumbering bodies had horrific sunburns. Many of the women were topless, though there was a large sign stating that topless sunbathing was really un-Fijian, so please keep your bikinis on, we’re Methodists. “That’s going to hurt,” Sylvia said, nodding toward one woman whose breasts were toasted medium rare.

Apparently, while we had been living abroad, someone had sent a missive to all Western women under the age of twenty-five:
Put a large tattoo above your butt.
Another directive must have been sent to the men:
Tattoo barbed wire around your arm.
As far as I could tell, resistance had been futile. We went for a swim and enjoyed the looks that the island’s other guests gave Sylvia, who was in a bikini. You couldn’t tell she was pregnant from behind, but then she’d swing her ballooning belly around and we’d hear the gasps. We could see them thinking,
I hope that’s not contagious.

Beachcomber Island was a speck of an island, easily circumnavigated in five minutes. It had a beach, a few palm trees, a large dormitory filled with bunk beds, and a bar. “Bunk 83, please come to the bar,” someone said over the loudspeakers. Bunk 83? It sounded like hell to me.

Very clearly, we had passed through some invisible barrier, some passage that prevented us from seeing the appeal of sharing a large dorm room with a hundred people in various states of inebriation. We felt deeply out of our element, possibly even more so than the Japanese couple wearing inscrutable T-shirts. IRONY
,
declared the woman’s baseball cap. WORK HARDER, said her T-shirt. Okay, I thought, I get it. I think. But what about her friend? He wore a T-shirt with an image of a bottle of soy sauce. SOY SAUCE, it said. What did that mean?

Waiting for the boat to take us back to the main island, we settled at a table near the bar and eavesdropped on a couple of flirtatious youngsters. “I really like beef,” said the boy.

“Do you eat wheat bread?” asked the girl.

“Not really,” he said.

“How about vegetables? What’s your favorite?”

“Um…I guess potato. I like french fries a lot. But what I really like is beef.”

This went on for a half hour. It was strangely riveting, even endearing, and as we left we hoped that they’d find happiness and perhaps attend Homecoming together.

We too wanted to feel young, and so on our next trip to the sunny side of Fiji, we booked a passage through the Yasawa Islands on the Blue Lagoon Cruise. It was very pleasant, and as we hopped from island to island we felt our youth restored.

“So you don’t own a house?” asked Bill as dolphins skipped above the waves. Bill and his wife, Susan, were from California.

“No. We just rent.”

“It’s probably too late for you, then.”

“Too late?”

“Let’s see,” Bill said. “We bought our house back in ninety-eight for $525,000. Today it’s worth $1.3 million.”

“More like $1.5 million,” Susan added. “Remember, Sven and Jean sold theirs for $1.3 million, and we have more square footage.”

“How many square feet do you have?” asked Jim. He and his wife, Katherine, were from Massachusetts.

Bill told him. “So that works out to about $415 a square foot. We’re roughly at $375 where we live. I bought a house last month that I plan on flipping when it gets to $400.”

“Wow,” Katherine said to us. “So you’re going to have a baby and you don’t even own your home?”

It was just what we needed. Suddenly we felt like a couple of reckless kids, footloose and fancy-free.

Eventually, we found a place where we felt neither too young nor too old. Among Sylvia’s programs was a coral-restoration project near Sigatoka on Viti Levu’s Coral Coast. Because of changes in the water temperature, the coral in front of the Fijian Resort was bleached, and Sylvia’s organization was involved in attempts to restore its health. Whenever she traveled to the project site, she stayed at the resort. I accompanied her because…well, because I could. The Fijian was a family resort, and when Sylvia was free, we studied the families. After all, we were soon to become one ourselves. “What you really need to be doing,” a kindly Australian woman told Sylvia, “is sleeping.” This struck Sylvia as an excellent plan, preferable to the one I had concocted for the afternoon. I had hoped to visit the Sigatoka Sand Dunes, an archeological site where the shifting sands were continuously unearthing bones and pottery that dated from Fiji’s earliest settlers some three thousand years ago.

“I don’t think so,” Sylvia told me. “It’s, what, ninety-five degrees today?”

“It’s a little toasty,” I agreed.

“And I’m eight months pregnant.”

“Indeed you are.”

“Well, I could waddle up and down sand dunes in the blistering sun. Or I could turn the air conditioning on and have a nap. Not much of a choice for me. So I’ll see you later. Have fun.”

I drove our little Toyota a few miles down toward the dunes, nearly colliding with an errant cow. It made driving the Queen’s Road particularly exciting, knowing that around every curve there might lurk an eight-hundred-pound ruminant. I parked the car in the shade near the ranger’s station and began marching up the wooded incline. The air reeked of burning rubbish from the nearby town dump. What was it about dumps in Fiji? I wondered. Why would anyone place a burning town dump beside one of the most important archeological sites in the Pacific? As I crested the hillside and emerged from the woods my nostrils burned and my eyes watered from the smoke. Really, I thought, they should just appoint me emperor of Fiji and we’d have a swift end to such things. Despite the burning air, I paused to read the information plaques in front of various trees. One in particular I found notable. It was for a small tree called a
vau,
which among its uses included: “An infusion of the leaves is also given as a tonic to mothers after childbirth to prevent a relapse.”

A relapse? Like a relapse of shingles? Then it occurred to me that this was a very sensitive way of saying that the ancient Fijians used contraceptives.

I moseyed on and finally encountered the dunes. Rising more than a hundred feet, sand dunes of these dimensions are not typical of the South Pacific. In this case, however, the Sigatoka River lay a few miles distant, and over an eon or two, it had carried sediment toward the ocean. The freshwater prevented coral from forming, and the waves pushed the sediment back toward the beach, where the wind had carved it into the massive dunes found today.