Getting Stoned with Savages (3 page)

Thus, if ever there was a cure for urban ennui, Vanuatu was it. As I rode the subway around Washington, gathering what I thought we needed for our new lives—snorkels, flippers, spare flip-flops, sunscreen (family size)—I could barely contain my glee. Typically, I found riding the Metro during rush hour hypnotically depressing. For some reason it felt perceptibly different from riding the subways in New York, London, or Berlin. Elsewhere, one senses a certain liveliness, with people babbling to their neighbors, and at least a third of the passengers, perhaps even half, appearing rather pleased to be here, right now, with you, convivially sharing a subway car. On Washington’s Red Line, which may as well be called the White Line as it rumbles below the city’s palest quadrant, the atmosphere is discernibly different. It is all rustling of newspapers and ruffling of reports. It is sighing and harrumphing, little nonverbal gestures that say, all things being equal, they rather wish the entire world would fuck off. Washingtonians, it occurred to me, were not flip-flop people. I wondered how different America would be if the capital had been located in Key West. What if the nation’s motto had been
Let’s get drunk and screw
? Would the world be a better place?

Such were my thoughts when the subway doors opened and on hobbled a stunningly attractive woman. As a married man, I try very hard not to be an ogre, but she possessed such beauty that I couldn’t help but furtively stare, even though she was nowhere near as good looking as my wife, a point I’m adding here under no duress whatsoever. Anyway, a real beauty she was. And tragically, she was in a cast, which had the effect of accentuating her thigh, a description of which I have been asked to remove. Now, if my sense of the male condition is correct, and I’m fairly certain it is, one would expect that on a crowded subway car the appearance of Aphrodite herself, straining with her crutches, would lead to a near riot of men tripping over themselves to gallantly offer her a seat. But no such thing happened. Instead, the papers were crisply rustled, and the men of Washington returned to their stewing. I found this, frankly, astonishing, for not only were they being terrifically rude, but they were also, evidently, eunuchs.

As the subway bounced along the tracks, I could see, to my considerable distress, that this poor woman was manifestly in pain. The subway car swayed this way and that, and she winced, struggling to hold herself upright. Beside her, comfortable in their seats, were two men. The man on the outside seat appeared to be thirty-something, besuited and balding, with the sort of gold-rimmed glasses that certain men wear to convey an appearance of wealth, though the effect is usually one of premature aging. I watched him, just sitting there mere inches from a woman standing with a broken leg, and I concluded that he was a cretin of the worst kind, and as I noted all the other men seated in the subway car, including those occupying the seats reserved for the elderly and the handicapped, this smug little puffin came to represent all that I found odious about Washington.

“Hey, man,” I said to him. “Stand up and let the lady with the broken leg have a seat.”

He looked, much to my gratification, as if he had just swallowed a lemon. His face began to contort as it tried to settle on an appropriate emotion. “How…who do you…,” he began to stammer. Then he thought better of it, and with considerable petulance, he rose.

“Thank you,” said she of the golden smile. I tried to think of something witty to say, but one has only a moment and the moment passed, and I could think of nothing more than a bashful, blushing “You’re welcome.”

This wouldn’t have happened in the South Pacific, I thought. Possibly because there weren’t any subways in the South Pacific. As the train rumbled through the tunnel I reflected on the Pacific Islanders I had known. They might kill you because they thought you were practicing black magic. They might burn your house down because you inadvertently helped yourself to a coconut from a tree that had been deemed taboo. But they were never rude. Occasionally violent, yes. Emotionally unpredictable, sure. But always courteous. And frankly, I thought, the world could use a little more courtesy.

THERE ARE FEW
sensations stranger than jet lag. For hour after hour you sit in an airplane doing nothing more taxing than reading a plot-driven novel, periodically eating, and perhaps, if you are very fortunate, even napping, and yet despite all this pampered nothingness, when you emerge from your airplane some hours later, you inevitably feel shattered. I can never quite understand it. Typically, I am awake for about seventeen hours a day. When I am employed, much of the day is occupied by work. If I am feeling particularly ambitious, I will use an hour to exercise. The rest of the day is spent in the usual manner, and after seventeen or so hours I may feel a little tired, a little groggy, and I call an end to the day. Put me on an airplane for seventeen hours, however, and I feel as if I’ve just completed the Bataan Death March.

“So this is New Zealand?” I said to Sylvia as we found ourselves standing on a curb at Auckland Airport.

“It’s cold,” Sylvia noted.

“And gray,” I added.

“Very wet also.”

“We’ll have to come back one day,” I said. And then we turned around, marched back into the terminal, and caught the flight to Vanuatu. Five hours later, we found ourselves on the curb at Bauer-field International Airport, a few miles outside Port Vila, on the island of Efate. What a long, strange day it’s been, I thought as I wrestled with our luggage, sweating freely in the heat. When I woke up the previous morning, I had been on the other side of the planet. And now here I was on an island in the South Pacific. Look, palm trees. Were those parrots? And hey, everyone’s African American. No, not African American. Melanesian. Where am I?

Sometimes, when traveling long distances, it feels as if you have hardly moved at all, that you have simply exchanged the white noise of home for the same noise spoken in a different language. Not so in Vanuatu. The islands feel satisfyingly far away, like Lilliputian planets inhabiting the bluest of universes, distant places where, as we enviously took note of the airport workers snoozing in the afternoon shade, there is always time for a nap.

But not for us. Not yet. Still stupefied by jet lag, we soon found ourselves in the spirited company of Rex, Sylvia’s new boss, a Solomon Islander who had once served as his country’s representative to the United Nations in New York. That evening, he very kindly hosted a dinner for us at his airy home, of which, alas, I have only the barest of memories. Exhaustion combined with a glass of wine or two does not do wonders for my sociability. I dimly recall an animated discussion about the situation in Fiji that ended with me lying supine on his couch, from which, no doubt, I charmed my fellow guests with the occasional, gasping snort. Somehow, and probably with much relief, we were deposited in a motel room, where we slept for fourteen hours straight under the crisp whir of a ceiling fan.

“Did I utterly embarrass myself last night?” I asked Sylvia when we awoke the next day.

“I have no memory of last night,” she said.

“Probably just as well.”

So it was a surprise when Kathy, another of Sylvia’s colleagues, arrived at the motel with her SUV. Evidently, we had made arrangements the previous evening to borrow her truck and go rambling around the island. This struck us as a very agreeable way to begin our stay in Vanuatu, and we were pleased that we had thought of it, though a little befuddled that we had not remembered.

“Just be really careful,” Kathy warned us. “It rained a couple of days ago, so the road is likely to be dangerous.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “While it may be true that I have never in thirty-some years of life actually owned a car, I assure you that I am an excellent driver.”

“You’ve lived in America for most of your life and never owned a car?”

“Or driven an SUV,” I added happily. She gave a nervous twitch, but I pried the keys out of her hand, and soon we were off, tires squealing. It was a bewilderingly odd sensation. One day we were shuffling about Washington, D.C., quietly contemptuous of our surroundings, and a day or so later, here we were on faraway Vanuatu, driving a large sport utility vehicle. This was dissonance at its best.

Within moments, we had put the paved roads of Port Vila behind us and begun our cautious circumnavigation of Efate, following a sixty-mile-long, deeply gutted dirt road that meandered around the island. Port Vila, we had already discerned, was an island within an island. It had electricity, stores, restaurants, and resorts. There was even a disco. But the moment one left the town limits, it was the raw Pacific that beckoned. Very often the road would narrow into a bush trail before suddenly widening into enormous mud pits where bulldozers stood idle and empty, parked in a remarkably haphazard fashion, as if they were forgotten remnants of some long-ago road-improvement project. The signs read
COURTESY OF THE GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN.
Otherwise, the road was barren of vehicles, which was just as well, for despite being in a four-wheel drive, I frequently found myself wildly fishtailing across the mud.

“Just tap the breaks,” Sylvia suggested helpfully.

“That’s what I’m doing. But if you’d like, you can drive.”

Sylvia shook her head. “I have to work with Kathy. If we’re going to crash her truck, it’s better that you do it.”

I had no intention of crashing someone else’s truck, so we moseyed on as prudently as we could. Efate, we could see, was a dauntingly lush island with a jungle that toppled over steep hillsides, much of it enveloped with the mile-a-minute vine planted by the Americans in World War II—camouflage run amok. Along the shore, there were coconut plantations and a couple of cattle ranches, where cows idled under massive banyan trees. Life on the isle, the human kind, was also largely found on the fringes. In the few somnolent villages we passed through, there were small kiosks made of clapboard and tin with shelves offering vegetables, seashells, and sixty-year-old Coke bottles for sale. Payments could be dropped inside the Honesty Box. And all along there was the ocean, the South Pacific, majestic and beguiling.

“Where is everyone?” I wondered as I deposited a few coins inside the Honesty Box in exchange for a couple of green coconuts. We were in a small seaside village. To our Western eyes, it looked very poor, with homes made of wood, thatch, and corrugated tin and gardens encased by rickety chicken-wire fences. But one’s sense of poverty becomes skewed in moving so quickly from America, where technically most people are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and even the poor have televisions, to a place like Vanuatu, where wealth is measured in pig tusks.

“I think it might be Sunday,” Sylvia said as she used our Swiss Army knife to carve holes into her coconut like an old Pacific hand.

At some point in our journey, we had crossed the international date line, that imaginary line where today becomes tomorrow, and the moment you were experiencing just a moment ago is now, apparently, a couple of days behind you. Or something like that. We stood for a long while, puzzling through the complexity of time, and just as our brains began to hurt, we heard hymns emanating from the tin-roofed church just up the road. Sunday it was.

“No wonder there’s no one else on the road,” I said. Not all Ni-Vanuatu are Christian, of course, though Efate, as the most Westernized island in Vanuatu, has largely been converted. On the outer islands, many retain the old ways and follow the dictates of kastom
.
How traditional they actually were was something I planned on exploring. Others belonged to cargo cults, eagerly awaiting the day when fortune would smile and illuminate their lives with tinned Spam and revolvers, the detritus of World War II. But as elsewhere in the South Pacific, for the Christians in Vanuatu, Sundays were for devotion. There is no quieter place on Earth than a Pacific island on a Sunday. Unless you venture inside a church. When it comes to singing, Pacific Islanders would give Southern Baptists a run for their money.

We continued on our excursion, and the farther we traveled from Port Vila, the more treacherous the road became. After a rather exhilarating slide down a hill with my foot pressing the brake as far as it would go, we probably ought to have listened to our more sensible instincts and turned around. We drove on, however, partly because I am constitutionally incapable of backtracking, but mostly because the scenery was so alluring and each curve and every crest promised another vista of paradise. There were coconut palms with their fronds moving like languorous fans, and I was feeling tremendously pleased to be among them again. The hillsides were impressively dense and green, exuding an air of primordial wilderness. Those woods, I had read, contained a multitude of lizards, including the banded iguana, a fearsome-looking dragon that grows upwards of three feet in length. There was also the Pacific boa, an eight-foot-long snake that I hoped never to encounter. It is said that the Pacific boa is harmless, but I didn’t believe that for a moment. Raised as a Catholic, I still find it difficult to have warm and mushy feelings toward snakes. We stopped here and there, never encountering another vehicle, and listened to the quiet buzz of insects and the lazy calls of birds slumbering in the midday sun. There was a torporous serenity to the island, and the lingering small pressures that remained of our lives in Washington, the urge to hurry on, to check e-mail, to do errands, evaporated with the rising heat.