Getting Stoned with Savages (4 page)

On the north shore of Efate, the views took a sudden turn toward the dramatic. There, offshore, were the volcanic islands of Nguna, Pele, and Emao, and farther in the distance, the Shepherd Islands, jagged green domes that rose precipitously out of the sea, the only visible remnants of a single island, Kuwae, that exploded—as islands in Vanuatu are wont to do—in a titanic fifteenth-century volcanic eruption. What remained of the island soon receded into the sea, leaving only the crests that today constitute the Shepherd Islands.

Remarkably, local legends spoke of one man who survived the catastrophe, Ti Tongoa Liseiriki, who, when he died, was buried wearing three round pig tusks around his arm. Even today, curved pig tusks are highly prized in Vanuatu, much to the consternation of the islands’ pig community. The tusks curve after a pig’s upper teeth have been yanked out. Subsequently, the animal must be fed by hand. The tusks continue to curve until they loop back through the snout and upper jaw, completing the circle. A really unfortunate pig will finds its tusks completing two or, very rarely, three complete circles as its owner celebrates his good fortune. The possessor of a triple-circle tusk is a wealthy man in Vanuatu. Less valuable than the pig tusks, however, were the wives and many of the men who had proclaimed fealty to Ti Tongoa Liseiriki. They too were buried alongside him. All had been killed for the occasion. In the 1960s, a French archeologist, José Garanger, took heed of the legend and, shovel in hand, proceeded to dig up Mr. Liseiriki, complete with pig tusks and entourage.

This wasn’t the only legend Monsieur Garanger chose to investigate in this corner of Vanuatu. There was also the tale of Roy Mata, a chief who counted northern Efate and the Shepherd Islands as his domain. In the mid-thirteenth century, Roy Mata—just Roy to his friends—violently conquered the region, and once he was recognized as the preeminent chief, he very sensibly declared that henceforth warfare would be forbidden. Every five years his subordinate chiefs held a grand feast to celebrate the peace, which endured for a long fifteen years until, very sadly for the chiefs, Roy Mata was poisoned, presumably by his brother, who is believed to have been called Gary. While this intrigue was as compelling as any that occurred among the kings of medieval Europe, its ending was uniquely macabre. It was said that upon the death of Roy Mata, his eighteen loyal subservient chiefs joined him in the grave, where, fortified by a particularly strong brew of kava, Vanuatu’s favorite narcotic beverage, the men awaited their end. Joined by their twenty-two wives, who had been strangled to death, the chiefs were buried alive. The grave, on Eretoka Island, was declared taboo. Hearing of this legend, Garanger brought his shovel to Eretoka, where he soon found a grave with forty-one skeletons, including one bejeweled with pig tusks, an obviously high-ranking chief who could only have been Roy Mata.

I mention these disturbing details because if you ever happen to find yourself on north Efate—particularly at the small cove we found, where the water lapped gently against a glorious white sand beach, and in the near distance a small fringing reef captured the ocean swell, and a little farther on a couple of perfect green islets framed the vast, astonishingly blue South Pacific—you will be very hard-pressed to imagine that anything even remotely dark or cruel or gruesome could possibly occur in such an Edenic setting. Certainly, no such thoughts occurred to us.

“Let’s go for a swim,” I said to Sylvia a tad impulsively.

“I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”

“It’s Sunday. Who cares?”

Well, perhaps the Ni-Vanuatu Christians would have cared. But we knew where they were, and so we celebrated creation in our own way, in the buff, with a delightful swim in the mild waters of the South Seas. It was like a baptism of sorts, a chance to wash off the sins of office life and begin anew. I couldn’t think of a better way to resume our island existence than to spend a Sunday afternoon cavorting in the tranquil waters of a protected cove, somewhere off an island on the far side of the world. It didn’t occur to us then that this was a reckless and foolhardy thing to do. Vanuatu is notorious for shark attacks, and to tempt fate by swimming near a reef without first enquiring about the resident shark population is exceedingly rash and ill-advised. For all we knew, the local name for this beach might have been Place Where Many Large Sharks Come to Feed on Stupid Naked Tourists. Happily, though, our swim went uncontested by large sea critters, and we settled into the kind of mirth that occurs when, after a long spell elsewhere, you suddenly find yourself in a good, good place.

“I could live here,” Sylvia said.

“And now you do.” I smiled.

As we hopped back into the truck we were feeling immoderately satisfied with ourselves. We had done it, escaped the proverbial rat race and its ceaseless hustle and bustle and exchanged that world for one where, we hoped, we would once again live as contented exiles, modern Crusoes, finding gratification in the small pleasures life offers, like languid dips in the temperate waters of the South Pacific Ocean. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that a short while later we found ourselves back in the truck and gasping theatrically as we slipped down a perilously steep incline, the wheels locked in place by the foot brake, then by the hand brake—and yet still we could not halt the descent. Looming at the bottom was a glade of coconut trees, and those trees, I could see, were not going anywhere.

“Brake!” Sylvia yelled.

The mud-slicked road curved around the trees. Straining to control the truck as it slid toward its seemingly inevitable collision, I released the brakes, pressed the gas with as much confidence as I could muster, swung the wheel around the curve, and then immediately felt a sickening panic as the back wheels proceeded around in a graceless arc, up and over the road embankment, and with a shocking thud we found ourselves implanted upon a berm of mud.

“Well,” I said once my heart had slowed, “on the plus side, we’re alive.”

“On the down side, we’re stuck,” Sylvia noted.

“Not necessarily.” I gave the gas an optimistic tap, and as I felt the truck begin to shudder, I pressed the pedal more firmly, whereupon I noticed to my dismay that the back of the truck was discernibly sinking ever deeper into the mud. I took my foot off the gas. “Now we’re stuck.”

We spent a long, silent moment absorbing the situation. This was the most remote corner of Efate. We were miles and miles of hard trekking from the nearest village. We had not seen another vehicle all day, and it being Sunday, we were unlikely to encounter one until the following day. We had, very possibly, damaged someone else’s truck. We were stuck in mud.

“Don’t you just hate it when good days go bad,” I said.

With sighs of resignation, we opened the doors and plopped down into the mud, a viscous, gooey mass of brown slime that embraced us up to our shins. The back wheels were deeply implanted, and even more worrying was the ridge of thick mud and rock upon which the truck’s frame rested, with the front wheels only lightly grazing the ground. It was eerily quiet, even the birds and bugs choosing to remain silent in the midafternoon heat. We suddenly felt very much alone, far removed from everything except our problem.

There was nothing else to do but to start digging. From either side of the truck, we attacked the berm with our hands, scraping aside the mire, flinging most of it upon ourselves.

“You look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon,” Sylvia commented a short while later as we took a short break from our excavations.

“You should talk.”

Soon, we were both encrusted in thick layers of primeval muck that oozed as it mixed with rivulets of sweat. As we drained the contents of our last remaining water bottle, flies appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and soon they began to pester us with shocking rapacity. We returned to our digging, periodically pausing to slap ourselves senseless in a futile effort at murdering these swarms of misery. I resolved that if we ever had children, I would show them how amusing it is to pluck the wings off flies.

After much effort, the rear wheels were cleared of about as much mud and debris as we could manage, and I set about foraging for fallen coconut fronds, hoping that they could provide sufficient traction for us to extract the truck. Stepping into the crunchy detritus of fallen leaves and branches, I noticed an assortment of small lizards scattering hither and thither, and it was only with determined effort that I managed to refrain from hightailing it up a tree. What a pansy-ass city boy I had become in Washington, I thought. I wondered if there might be a large boa constrictor lurking underfoot, just waiting for a serendipitous encounter, and shuddered grimly at the thought. Soon, however, as I pulled a few long fronds toward the truck, it was the mosquitoes that were driving me toward the brink. The buzz in my ears was followed by the ringing of my ears as I battered myself in a hopeless quest to stem my blood loss. With each puncture, a dozen flies would feed on the welt, leaving me stewing and foaming, quietly muttering,
fucking tropics.

“Are you being attacked by mosquitoes?” I asked Sylvia.

“Yes,” she said, “which is why I’m going to sit inside the truck now.”

“Ah…perhaps you’d like to turn on the air conditioner too, maybe find something pleasant to listen to on the radio, perhaps read a magazine.”

“My thinking exactly.”

“Just one question before you retire. Is there malaria on Efate?”

“Only on north Efate.”

“I see…But we’re on north Efate.”

“Which is why I’m going to sit inside the truck now.”

Sylvia closed the door with a satisfied thud. Then she rolled down the window. “I’ve decided that getting a truck out of the mud is man’s work.”

“Have you now?”

“Yes. And see, you’re a man, so I think it’s very simple.” And with that she rolled up the window.

Why was it, I wondered, that this was always a one-way conversation. How come
You’re the woman. Now go get me a beer
never worked. But
You’re the man. It’s your job to fix the faucet, mow the lawn, get the truck out of the mud,
and so on was always greeted with a stoic acknowledgment of one’s duty and a solemn commitment to do what needs to be done sometime very soon, possibly tomorrow even. It was entirely unjust. Nevertheless, I returned to my manly obligations and confidently placed the fronds under the rear wheels. I tapped on the window.

“Sorry to disturb you, but if it’s not too much trouble, would you mind terribly putting the truck into gear and, at my say-so, giving it a bit of gas?”

Sylvia chuckled. “No, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

I positioned myself behind the truck, slapped a few flies and mosquitoes off my face, and fervently hoped that in a few short minutes I too would be allowed inside the truck, task accomplished. I sought some leverage by placing a foot against a rock, leaned into the truck, and said, “Okay. Now!”

Sylvia floored it. The wheels spun wildly, and if we had happened to be on a paved road, we would have undoubtedly been moving at well over one hundred miles per hour. But since we were not on a paved road but on a berm of mud, I saw, to my consternation, that the truck was in fact sliding ever farther backward. I heaved with all my might. The palm fronds splintered into nothingness. The spinning wheels dug through layers of mud, spraying a brown mist deep into the bush. I took my foot off the rock, and then my flip-flops lost all traction. “BRAKE! BRAKE! BRAKE!” I yelled as a ton of steel pushed at me with incontestable momentum.

A moment later I was in the passenger seat, panting from the exertion. I turned the air conditioner to its highest setting. “So, how long have we been in Vanuatu now?”

“A little less than twenty-four hours,” Sylvia answered.

We looked at each other, noted the streaming sweat, the mottled hair, the strata of grime, and the innumerable mosquito welts, and agreed that maybe we should have spent the day at a hotel pool, lounging and imbibing froufrou drinks.

“What do we do now?” Sylvia asked.

“Well,” I said, looking a little more closely at our map, “I think we’re about ten kilometers from the next village. We have, what, three, four hours left before darkness? We should probably start walking. We’ll at least be able to find some water and food there. And we’ll probably have to spend the night. There might be a guesthouse.”

Before setting out, we crossed the road—or the big pile of sopping mud that was euphemistically called a road—and wandered toward the nearby ocean. There was, alas, no beach, just cragged ridges of rock absorbing the hard impact of a heaving ocean. It was much too rough for swimming, and we stumbled about in search of a tidal pool, hoping to cleanse ourselves of our filth. We found one and, mindful of the crabs and urchins, we swabbed ourselves clean, ignoring the sting of salt water flushing our mosquito bites.

“I hear something,” Sylvia said, cocking her ear toward the road.

“What?”

“A car…no, a truck.”

It was unmistakable, the muddled grind of a large diesel engine straining in the mire. We dashed across the rock, throwing prudence to the wind, and as we reached the road we saw the aged dump truck coming from the opposite direction from whence we came. Here was something that could salvage us from our predicament. Sylvia stood in the middle of the road and proceeded to do what appeared to be very spirited jumping jacks, complete with flopping ponytail.

“I think he sees you,” I said.

“Just making sure.”

The truck grinded to a stop. In the back hold there were several dozen people dressed for church. The men had shirts on, and the women wore prim Mother Hubbards, one-piece frocks that were highly recommended by nineteenth-century missionaries. They smiled warmly at us. The driver, a stout, bearded fellow with an opaque expression, emerged from the cab and proceeded to say something. I had no idea what he was saying but recognized the language as Bislama. I recalled what I had learned during my first trip to Vanuatu and, using every word I had gleaned back then, said, “Me no tok-tok Bislama…uh…truck…uh, problemo…bugger up…Do you speak English?”