The Sex Lives of Cannibals (18 page)

Fuck.

These people were insane. I looked at Sylvia. She had a look of glee about her. You too, woman?

Beiataaki began to toss chunks of ray overboard. Bwenawa was fiddling with gear. Atenati was beside herself. “There’s my shark. This way. This way.”

The shark listened. It neared. And then it submerged. And then it became a shadow. An enormous shadow. This was exactly what Steven Spielberg would have the shark do. I could hear the music.
Do-do-do-do do-do-do-do
. The shark passed underneath the boat. It was at least twenty feet long. I braced myself for that moment of impact, when this mass of muscle and teeth would shoot up and shatter the boat, tossing us into the water, and oh, the horror of it then.

Beiataaki moved to the other side of the boat as the shark glided underneath. He was throwing big chunks of ray into the water. I did not encourage this. It was as if we were at some duck pond in a park, merrily feeding the quackers. But this was not a duck. This was a twenty-foot shark.

“They’re crazy,” I offered.

“Yes,” Sylvia said. We stood watching, agape. Two forces, both irrational and armed, were about to collide.

But the shark was having none of it, bless him. He was a smart shark. A good shark. He just kept on swimming, leaving a turbulent wake with his eight-foot tail fin.
Swish, swish
. I began to like the shark. I liked the shark for swimming away. Swim, shark, swim. Off you go. Leave these fools behind you.

“Bwenawa!” Atenati screeched. “You didn’t catch my shark!”

“Ha-ha.” Bwenawa seemed energized. A yellowfin tuna, a great barracuda, and, if they had just been a little better prepared, a twenty-foot thresher shark. He was in good spirits.

THE DAY WAS FADING
. We drew in the fishing line in and began to search for the channel into Maiana Lagoon. John had installed a Global Positioning Satellite receiver on board, but its accuracy was not fine enough to navigate a crooked thirty-foot-wide channel that meandered through a boat-chomping reef. The channel was marked by wooden stakes, and as we approached, lowering our sail, two frigate birds took to the air, flying in tandem, their angular wings extended, seeking an updraft to carry them elsewhere. Beiataaki climbed the mast and guided Tekaii through the reef. Here was a plump display of brain coral. There a luminous coral garden. Here a jagged finger. All of it just a yard or two distant from our hulls. The ocean seemed to trip as it encountered the reef, sending forth rolling plumes of white water. I wondered how Maiana managed to get any supplies at all. Everything would have to be offloaded in the deep water, and transported through the reef and across another four miles of lagoon by a smaller vessel.

Beiataaki gestured from his perch in the mast. Left, now right, hard right,
hard right
. Tekaii’s eyes were focused solely on Beiataaki as he manipulated the rudder. Even a simple scrape against the bristling reef could sink us. We were still a long distance from land, too far to swim. Twenty long minutes passed. No one except Beiataaki and Tekaii exchanged a word. There was tension on the boat, the giddiness had dissipated. And then we were through and into the relative safety of the lagoon. Beiataaki clambered down from the mast, shaking his head. “I don’t like this channel. It’s the worst in Kiribati.”

Ahead we could see a green palisade of trees that soon sharpened into the minaret stems of coconut trees and the great tumbling canopies of breadfruit trees. We motored across the lagoon toward the middle of Maiana, where just as on every other island in Kiribati, the government maintains a station, called Government Station, which struck me as very Conradian. This was where the island’s guesthouse was located, as well as a first-aid clinic, a secondary school, and a fisheries office. A few
maneabas
were visible and then entire villages of thatch and stilts.

“The wind is changing,” Beiataaki noted. “A westerly.”

The wind vane began to flutter and twirl. Suddenly it hit us, a few gusts that threatened to take our hats, followed by a sustained gale that quickly turned a placid lagoon into white-streaked chop. I had never seen wind turn and strengthen so quickly, not even in Holland, where, typically, one can expect the wind to strengthen the moment you get on a bicycle and to turn as you do, so that no matter which direction you bike you will always be biking into a gale-force headwind. This was different. On a languid, sunny day the wind direction had changed by 180 degrees and hardened into a forty-five-knot gale within two minutes. This did not threaten the boat; the sail was down, the lagoon was shallow, and waves splattered harmlessly against the hull. Still, I had grown accustomed to the torporous monotony of equatorial weather, and now deeply regretted not bringing my windsurfer.

Beiataaki anchored
Martha
in shallow water just off the beach near Government Station. We gathered our gear and waded in. The coconut trees were bent by the wind, their canopies folded in like collapsed umbrellas. I could hear the dull thuds of coconuts loosened by the wind. Children on the beach ran with outstretched lavalavas like gangly birds at takeoff. Our accommodations were on the ocean side of the atoll and we walked along a path that crossed the breadth of Maiana, about a hundred yards, taking care to avoid the trajectories of falling coconuts. The guesthouse was a gray cinder-block house with a dirt floor. It had a living area with a hammock. The sleeping quarters were arranged like horse stalls with hard bunks and mosquito nets. A well and a bucket supplied our water needs.

On this side of the island we remained in the wind’s shadow, and, despite the gale, we were able to get a fire going and grill Bwenawa’s barracuda. The tuna was left with Beiataaki and Tekaii, who had quickly turned
Martha
around and were racing across the lagoon to navigate the channel before sunset. They planned to sail through the night back to Tarawa and return a week later to pick us up. As the day diminished into an opaque dusk, we could see the ocean churning in the graying light, deep chasms were carved as the wind sent waves rushing and hissing across the horizon. Rain began to pelt the guesthouse. Leaks appeared in the roof. Pools of water turned the floor into mud.

“I think it is raining on Tarawa too,” Bwenawa said. We hoped it was. We hoped this storm marked the end of the drought.

“Just think of it,” I said to Sylvia. “Full water tanks.”

“Provided that the water actually gets into the tanks,” she said dryly.

Sylvia still had little faith in my fixing abilities. But I was confident. I had spent hours clearing the roof and gutters of leaves and nettles. I had, very ingeniously I thought, used the materials at hand to plug the holes in the gutter—plastic lids and an extremely valuable roll of electrical tape.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a Dutchman. And Dutchmen know how to channel water.”

“You’re only half Dutch,” Sylvia noted. “And you left Holland when you were six.”

“It’s an innate knowledge. We’re water people. Soon, you’ll be able to wash your hair guilt-free.”

“Twice a week?”

“Twice a week. I promise.”

We paused to listen. It was an angry storm.

“I am glad we’re not on the boat now,” Atenati said. We all pondered for a moment what it must be like for Beiataaki and Tekaii, sailing
Martha
through the black darkness of a starless night, the ocean a violent maelstrom, rogue waves unseen. And then we went to sleep.

CHAPTER
13

In which the Author discusses how unfuckingbelievably scary the South Seas can be.

T
he next day, in the dim blue light of a tempestuous dawn, we were surprised to see
Martha
anchored in the lagoon, the boat battened down like a fortress.

“Too rough,” Beiataaki said when we encountered him on the beach. He had sailed the Gilbert Islands for thirty years. His skin was blotched from sun damage. His face was creased from wind. That he had declared the conditions too rough for sailing, particularly when he did not have any queasy landlubbers on board, suggested some intense roughness indeed. “We got through the channel, but then the waves were too big to keep sailing,” he said. “We’ll try again later.”

But they did not try again later. As the days passed, the storm did not. Each day saw Maiana swept with wind and rain. Papaya trees were felled.
Maneabas
lost their roofs. The island was bathed in a dismal gray. Villages were sodden. Women shivered as Atenati conducted cooking demonstrations, showing how island-grown vegetables rich in vitamin A could be used in the local diet, alleviating the night blindness that stalks malnourished children in Kiribati. Bwenawa returned to the guesthouse late in the afternoons, having spent his days roaming from garden to garden, offering tutorials on the proper sun-to-shade ratio for optimal tomato growth and spreading the wonders of
chaya, bele
, and
nambere
, the only green leafy vegetables that grew on an atoll. Making the weedy leaves edible was Atenati’s job.

In the
maneabas
, the
unimane
fretted about the wind and the harm it had inflicted. Each village had at least one
maneaba
with a damaged roof and the old men were concerned about the lack of young men with sufficient
maneaba
-building skills. The population on Maiana was dwindling as each year more of its young people were lured by the flickering lights of Tarawa.

Sylvia and I grew ever more intimate as we made do without a mirror.

“You have eye gunk.”

“You’ve got a booger.”

“There’s something . . .”

“Where . . . here?”

“No . . . not . . .”

“Did I get it?”

“Here . . . let me.”

As the storm ebbed and flowed, with rain showers followed by hard winds, Maiana seemed a gloomy, dejected island, enlivened only—from my perspective—by the unbearably pleasant feeling of coolness, a briskness to the air that meant I could now go through a day without risking dehydration, without feeling the need to douse my food with salt, without succumbing to the torpor of midday, when, typically, the entire country’s energy level is reduced to just a shade above comatose. I had long wondered why the temperate world was so much more advanced than the equatorial world, but it seemed obvious to me now that the heat was the key. How productive are New York and Paris in August? Not very, and they have air-conditioning. Now imagine the perpetual August without the cool breath of a humming air conditioner. Would New Yorkers still be working eighteen-hour days, churning out lawsuits and magazines? Would anyone care if Cisco dropped by forty points? No. In the perpetual August, New Yorkers would spend their workdays draped and drooling over their desks, just like the government of Kiribati.

There was another unexpected benefit brought about by the wind. It was too rough to fish, and we had resigned ourselves to rice-intensive meals, when Kiriaata, the gracious caretaker of the guesthouse, apologized for the lack of dinner options. “I can make the chicken curry,” she said, holding up a rusty can of Ma-Ling Chicken Curry, which I knew from hard experience contained only those parts of the chicken that even the Chinese would not eat—gizzards and bones. “Or we can have crayfish,” Kiriaata offered, reaching for four of the largest, most delectable lobsters I had ever seen. “I am sorry. That is all we have.”

Sylvia and I mewed and groaned and made all sorts of deeply primal noises.

“You want chicken curry?”

“
No!
” we barked. “
Crayfish.
”

“Really?”

“
Yes.
”

The I-Kiribati do not have a taste for lobster. I believed this was because their taste buds died when the English arrived. Not only was the I-Kiribati diet pretty grim to begin with, it was now enhanced with canned corned beef and “cabin biscuits,” the staples of the nineteenth-century seaman’s rations. This combination of atoll food with English food that can survive for years and years on a boat had destroyed the I-Kiribati palate. I thought it would be impolite to test this theory on Bwenawa, so I simply asked him why the I-Kiribati don’t like lobster. He explained that they regarded lobster as a disgusting reef cleaner, and he looked at me knowingly, until finally I said: “Ah, yes, I see your point.”

It mattered not. While I might not have eaten a lobster caught on the reef in South Tarawa, a quick risk analysis of the situation on Maiana suggested that I could eat a lobster and probably maintain my health, and even if I did get sick it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’d gotten sick eating in Kiribati, and at least I would have had the pleasure of actually eating something I liked.

“I don’t suppose you have any butter or a lemon here?” I asked Kiriaata.

“
Akia
,” she said.

Nevertheless, it was the tastiest meal I ever ate in Kiribati. Bwenawa and Atenati eyed us warily as we slavered over our lobster.

“Uumh . . .”

“Oooh . . .”

“Aaah . . .”

We asked, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if we could have lobster every night. Each evening Bwenawa and Atenati picked at their tinned chicken gristle, while we ate our lobsters with ill-disguised obscenity. Not knowing when such an opportunity might present itself again, we took a few lobsters with us when it was time to depart Maiana.

Beiataaki and Tekaii spent the entire week riding out the storm in Maiana Lagoon. There might have been windows of opportunity for them to sail back to Tarawa, when the wind lessened to a still considerable twenty knots, but the idea of sailing across storm-tossed water only to return a day or two later to do it all over again dissuaded them. On Friday, as we gathered with our gear on the beach, so too did fifty-odd people beseeching us for a lift to Tarawa. “It’s Sylvia’s decision,” Beiataaki informed them diplomatically. Sylvia took one look at the size of the crowd, another look at the size of the boat, and yet another look at the ominous black clouds stirring on the horizon, and said in as reasonable and polite a manner as she could muster, “No.” Then she returned to gazing at the ominous black clouds stirring on the horizon.

“What do you think?” she asked me. “Should we go? You’re the sailor.”

Technically, this was true. I do sail. I have sailed on Lake Ontario and the Chesapeake Bay, but the vast majority of my sailing experience had been confined to a small lake in Holland, with an average depth of five feet, across which I schussed along in a Laser, a tiny little boat generally used by tiny little people learning how to sail. My only experience in blue water sailing thus far had occurred on the trip to Maiana, and though I was very favorably disposed to blue water sailing, I got the feeling that the journey back to Tarawa would be a little different.

“I think we should leave it up to Beiataaki,” I said.

Beiataaki had his eyes on the sky, quietly trying to discern its intent. The wind was modest, at least by the previous week’s standard, but the darkness of the sky promised nothing good.

“If we go, we have to leave now,” Beiataaki said. He was considering the day’s tides, which were unfavorable for us, and the fact that there were no lights on the buoys marking the channel into Tarawa Lagoon. This meant that we had to get through the channel before nightfall if we wished to avoid spending a night tacking back and forth on a heaving ocean while awaiting the light of dawn. “I think we should sail to the channel here and decide then,” Beiataaki declared.

This we did. With the sail reefed and the engine droning we spent the morning hours crossing the lagoon. A week of gales had stirred the sand at the bottom of the lagoon and the swirling gray clouds gave the water a milky ice-blue tint that looked strangely surreal. As we neared the wooden pilings that marked the channel’s entrance, Beiataaki put the engine in neutral and began to fret. We had arrived at precisely the low-water mark, when the channel was at its most treacherous. There would be no room for error. The boulders we had glided over on the way in could sink us on the way out. The reef that extended outward from the channel seemed to be under assault by the ocean. Ponderous waves broke with a dull thunder and dissipated into a churning froth that extended all along its contours.

Beiataaki climbed the mast and there he remained for a very long while, studying the channel and gazing at the ocean. When he clambered down, I asked him what he thought. He shrugged his shoulders like a Frenchman. It is bad either way, he seemed to suggest. And then he seemed to decide.

“I want to go home. I miss my wife.”

He climbed back up the mast. Tekaai stood at the rudder waiting for instructions. Sylvia and I exchanged glances.
What the hell. Let’s go sailing
. We inched forward and it was immediately clear that this channel at low tide was the nautical equivalent of a minefield. We were surrounded by great jagged bursts of coral. The channel meandered this way and that, zigzagging through jutting fingers and barely submerged boulders. The boat, as I have had occasion to ponder before, was made of plywood. There would be no chance of it surviving a collision. And then, once the passage was behind us, I wished with all my might that we would have sunk the boat in the channel, ending the misery right there and then.

The ocean raged.

Twenty-five feet. This was the height of the waves that greeted us when we emerged from the channel.
Twenty-five feet
. From cavernous trough to foaming peak. Twenty-five feet. And these were not rolling swells, gently lifting and rising. These were steep, pitching waves, tightly packed by the sudden rise of land. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the sight of these waves.

All of us turned a ghostly white as we internalized the sheer terror of being on a plywood trimaran in twenty-five-foot seas. And then some us began to turn green. As one, Bwenawa, Atenati, and Sylvia retreated to the sheltered aft of the boat, leaned over and began to vomit, and there they remained. Beiataaki steered a course that confronted the waves diagonally, and as we crested a wave, there was a long second when it felt like we had taken flight, an airlessness that made it seem as if we were not sailing across the ocean, but above it, only to be followed by a precipitous slide over the spine of the wave, sending the left hull plowing into the next curling swell, causing torrents of white water to swamp the deck and soak those who stood upon it, stalling the forward movement of the boat until buoyancy was reclaimed, and then the boat pitched ever upward, continuing the shattering routine. The troughs were windless caverns. The mast was swallowed. The sail went limp. On the crests, momentum was regained. All eyes turned toward the waves, dreading the rogue wave, the forty-footer. We watched and judged: That wave there, the third one, the big one, when it hits us it will be a wall of water. Beitaaki would adjust the rudder to confront it head-on, and as we rose above it and the hulls went airborne, there followed the crunching slap of the boat plunging back into the sea, an ear-piercing sound that made those of us still on deck wince with worry.

“What do you think?” I asked Beiataaki. It had begun to rain. I was shivering, cold, and in a state of stupefied awe. My hands were curled around a railing. Tekaai was busy with the sail, raising it here, reefing it there, lowering it altogether, reacting to a capricious wind that gusted and howled but remained unsteady. For safety, he was hooked to the lines running the length of the boat.

“I think we can make it. Once we are away from Maiana the waves will be more round, less steep.”

The waves, forged by a week of storms, continued to pound poor
Martha
. It was like being part of an endless car wreck, when you know you no longer have control over the situation, and you are just waiting for its grim conclusion. I went to check on Sylvia. There were stairs to navigate. The boat lurched and I bounced and stumbled and baby-stepped my way down. Sylvia was not well. She sat slumped on a bench, listlessly cradling her head, and muttering cryptically.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

“I want to get off this fucking boat.”

Hmmm . . . Sylvia is not one for cussing. There were no windows in the aft compartment. A blue tarp had been pulled down to keep the rain out. Atenati and Bwenawa sat on the bench opposite looking equally miserable. Every few minutes, one of the three would poke their head underneath the tarp and over the railing and begin to barf. Not good. Though I wasn’t typically afflicted by seasickness, the pitiable sight of these three and the heaving and lurching of the boat was beginning to make me feel nauseated as well.

“Why don’t you come up on deck,” I said to Sylvia. “The problem here is that you can’t see the waves and so your inner ear is confused. My inner ear is confused down here.”

“We should have stayed in Maiana,” she began to moan. “We should never have gone today. I should have said let’s wait until the sea calms down. I didn’t know it would be like this. Boo-hoo.”

She didn’t actually say
boo-hoo
, but she might as well have. I believe that if one-half of a couple becomes weepy and mopey, it is important for the other half to respond with refreshing bursts of sunnyness. This often entails lying.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Beiataaki said that he has seen much worse than this. We’re perfectly safe.”

Actually, Beiataaki had told me that this was about the worst he had ever seen, and if the wind rose, we might have to run with the waves, dragging a sea anchor to ensure that we wouldn’t flip end over end, which would add a considerable amount of time to the trip, quite likely several days.