A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (22 page)

“You could reconfirm for next week’s flight,” the woman said brightly. There was, of course, no reason to believe that another series of reconfirmations would be recorded.

Ordinarily, in such a situation, I might be tempted to batter my way onto the flight using journalistic clout. However, claiming that I was a big-deal travel writer from the United States would cut no ice whatsoever in Atuona, where there are exactly three tourist bungalows. The accommodations are more a matter of Polynesian courtesy than an attempt to cash in on big tourist bucks.

“You could,” the woman suggested, “go out to the airport. Maybe one of the confirmed passengers won’t show up.”

In another country, I could possibly bribe one of the five passengers: offer a free ticket next week to anyone willing to give up a seat. After spending several weeks in the Marquesas, however, I knew better than to try. The islands are so provident, so rich in game and fruit, that reasonably able folks can live quite well off the land itself. This produces a cavalier attitude toward cash; money is best spent on toys, luxury items, travel. A Marquesan might give up a seat on the plane because he or she liked me, or felt sorry for me, but never for money.

At the airport, all five passengers showed up for the flight. I was destined, it appeared, to enjoy the Marquesas for another week. Or more. There was just enough money left to rent one of the bungalows in Atuona. Oh well, I could hang out on the black beach. Drink cheap rum. Do a lot of writing: hard-hitting, sinewy romantic stuff, full of adventure.…

The Marquesas have always been a good place for this sort of creative work. Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson both lived for a time on the northern island of Nuku Hiva. Belgian-born singer and songwriter Jacques Brel moved to Hiva Oa to live the last years of his life when
he discovered he had cancer. Paul Gauguin came to Atuona in 1900, looking for inspiration in uncorrupted savagery. Gauguin and Brel are buried in a small cemetery on a hillside overlooking the town of Atuona. Most of the graves there are draped with seashell necklaces and are neatly tended. Brel’s stone features a bas-relief of the man. Gauguin’s simple grave is headed by a sculpted female figure—Oviri, a disturbing, hollow-eyed symbol of the savagery the painter hoped to find in the Marquesas. A plumeria tree grows beside the figure of Oviri.

At the airport, I found myself thinking about these graves as the small, single-prop plane took off without me. The day I visited the cemetery, Gauguin’s plumeria tree had been in full and fragrant bloom. It had bothered me then that roots surely must protrude into the grave itself. Now, standing alone on a vacant airstrip 740 miles from anywhere, I began to think of those profuse and fragile white plumerias as an expression of the artist’s soul. It was a romantic and melancholy thought. Perhaps I would be buried in that pleasant cemetery along with Gauguin and Brel. My tombstone would read: “Tim Cahill: We Had No Record of His Reconfirmation.”

T
he Marquesas Islands are volcanic peaks that rise two to four thousand feet above the surface of the ocean. Six of the islands are inhabited, and the population stands at about six thousand. Hiva Oa is the administrative center of a southeast cluster of islands, while Nuku Hiva, the main island, is the economic and administrative center of a northwest group. The single weekly flight from Tahiti lands at Nuku Hiva, where the first-time visitor is immediately introduced to the difficulty of travel in the Marquesas.

Nuku Hiva’s airstrip is on the northeast shoulder of the island, in a dry rolling grassland that looks something like the wind-whipped high plains of Wyoming, and is called Terre Déserte, Deserted Land, because little that is edible
grows there. The main town, Taiohae, lies directly over the spine of mountains that bisects the island, and a dirt road runs from the airport to the village. It is a narrow, dangerous, sometimes boggy affair; a twisting, rockstrewn washboard of a road in which every other turn features heart-stopping dropoffs. The rutted path passes near the highest point on Nuku Hiva, 3,865-foot-high Mount Ketu. It is probably less than thirty miles to Taiohae from the Deserted Land, and the drive takes all day.

Anyone in a hurry takes the ferry, a clattering sixty-foot, twin-diesel vessel that docks at a small cove called Haapoli. Boarding the ferry is an adventure in itself. Because the Marquesas are volcanic in origin—the islands simply erupted out of empty ocean—they are not protected by a fringing reef, and the full force of the Pacific Ocean batters them ceaselessly. There is no breakwater at Haapoli, which means that the ferry, docked at a small cement pier, rises and falls as much as eight feet on swells and breakers. Passengers try to step aboard as the deck rises to the level of the dock. To stumble at this point could be catastrophic: a passenger in the water would be crushed between the lurching boat and the cement dock.

It takes about two hours to get to Taiohae, and the boat sails by rocky cliffs, crusted with ancient lava, that rise eight hundred feet above the surface of the sea. Oceanic swells explode into polished rock. The thunder and spray of high sea meeting solid rock is a constant spectacle: water rises against the rock in immense sheets, reaching twenty-five feet or more like moving molten silver under the high tropical sun.

There was no one living above those cliffs on the Deserted Land, and Nuku Hiva was as it always had been, as it was two thousand years ago when the first of the people who were to become Marquesans landed on the island. They had come out of the west, in dugouts filled with coconuts, breadfruit, chickens, pigs, dogs, and heroes. The people, the first Polynesians, ranged as far south as New Zealand, as far north as Hawaii. The Marquesas are the farthest east they came, and the Marquesans’ mystic
culture—terrifying, brutal, and beautiful—developed in the splendid isolation of these most lonely of Polynesian islands.

As the boat rounds a point by the bay of Hakaui and moves to the windward side of Nuku Hiva, the scenery begins a sledgehammer assault on the sense. The mountains rise sheer, impossibly green, and waterfalls thunder down the drainages, carving out narrow valleys where the people live. The valleys are separated one from the other by high, vegetation-choked ridges. In the time before the first Euro-Americans visited the Marquesas, the people who lived along the streams in those valleys called themselves The Men. Their coconut and breadfruit thrived in the fertile volcanic soil; the chickens and pigs multiplied beyond counting. Feasting was a way of life—there were feasts for marriage and death and birth—and The Men, to Western eyes, were among the most beautiful people on the face of the earth.

Art was integral to the life of The Men. They carved human images of wood and filigreed tiny representative scenes on ear ornaments and tortoiseshell fan handles. Males sometimes decorated their entire bodies with tattoos in contrasting bands of light and dark, in swirling circular patterns that followed the contour of a buttock, the curve of the biceps or thigh. There were ritual tattoos that marked the large events of life, such as puberty and marriage. Since the process of tattooing was extremely painful—the colors were made of ground candelnut, ash, and water and were generally applied with a sharpened piece of bone—some body decorations were simply signs of courage: those that swept across the eyelids, for instance, or the genitals.

The most fearsome tattoos served to frighten enemies. The Men were always at war, valley against valley. Groups of warriors would trudge up over the ridges and descend upon those in the neighboring drainage, looking to capture a suitable sacrifice, a man to be killed in the name of the gods. The great stone terraces that The Men built in dark groves above the beach rose to the sculptured stone figures called
tikis:
large, squatting statues with huge empty eyes
and scowling mouths. To consecrate the holy place, the bones of victims were hung nearby, in the branches of the sacred banyan tree. Sometimes, The Men practiced ritual cannibalism.

The first European to set foot on the Marquesas was Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendaña, who landed at Hiva Oa in 1595 and named the islands for the Marquesa de Mendoza. In 1813, American naval officer David Porter claimed the islands for the United States. President Madison declined the offer, and France declared the Marquesas a part of its empire in 1842.

That was the same year that Herman Melville sailed into the bay of Taiohae aboard an American whaler. In
Typee
, the novel he wrote about Nuku Hiva, Melville described the horseshoe-shaped bay: “From the verge of the water the land rises uniformly on all sides, with green and sloping declivities, until from gently rolling hillsides and moderate elevations it insensibly swells into lofty and majestic heights, whose blue outlines, ranged all around, close in the view. The beautiful aspect of the shore is heightened by deep and romantic glens.…”

As the ferry from the airport enters this bay, the view is precisely as Melville described it, which is to say, awe inspiring. Taiohae is, arguably, the most spectacular bay in the world. “Very often when lost in admiration at its beauty,” Melville wrote, “I have experienced a pang of regret that a scene so enchanting should be hidden from the world in these remote seas.” The staggering beauty of the bay bursts upon the eye like privilege.

Taiohae hasn’t changed much since the days of Melville. There are no high-rise hotels, no condos or “planned resorts.” There are three good reasons for this happy state of affairs. First is the remote nature of the islands. Second, land in the Marquesas is generally owned by family groups that may number in the hundreds. To acquire a legal deed, a developer must obtain the signature of every owner. This sometimes means tracking down a cousin who is living in Bakersfield or Borneo or Bimini. Often, by the time the last owner signs, one of the first signatories changes his or her
mind. The third good reason that there are only two small hotels on all of Nuku Hiva is the existence of a nasty little sand gnat called the nono fly. The nono’s bite is painless, but, over a period of several hours, it raises an ugly red welt that itches like fury. Scratch the welt and it is likely to burst, bleed, become infected. The nonos are a plague, and the lack of condos in the paradise of Taiohae is a tribute to the gnats’ vicious ubiquity.

In the town of Taiohae, I stayed in one of the Keikahanui Inn’s three bungalows. The inn is owned by an American couple, Frank and Rose Corser, who taught me how to deal with the nonos. A mixture of five parts water to one part liquid bleach is splashed on the body in the shower, then rinsed away. The bleach prevents possible infection and also kills the itch for up to five hours. While in the Marquesas, I generally bleached myself three times a day.

My first Sunday in Taiohae, I went to mass at the Catholic church. Sitting in the pew, smelling faintly of Clorox, I listened to the bishop speak and recalled the passage in
Typee
in which island maidens swim out to the American whaler and do things with the sailors that Melville felt he “dare not mention.” The practice of trading sexual favors for such precious items as fishhooks and iron nails was common throughout Polynesia at the time, and the French, through their Catholic missionaries, strove to put an end to the practice.

The missionaries believed that the sins of licentiousness and ritual cannibalism were endemic to Marquesan culture, which they therefore systematically set out to destroy. In this they were aided by the French military, and more significantly, by the diseases they had brought with them. The population of the islands, which probably stood at fifty thousand in the 1700s, fell to under five thousand. There was a brief period of revolt against the French—against the death that had come to the islands aboard the big ships, against the killing of the people and its culture—and in the late 1800s, this pathetic revolution erupted into a period of defiant and orgiastic cannibalism. By 1900, the revolt had been crushed, the culture destroyed. Today, the Marquesas
are the most staunchly Catholic islands in all of French Polynesia.

After mass, I talked with Bishop Hervé-Marie Le Cléac’h at his home. He was a tall, aristocratic Frenchman who had been in the Marquesas for fourteen years. “The people here,” the bishop said, “are as they were in the olden time. Nobody obeys chiefs because no one ever did. If the people work together on a project, they do so because they want to and not because someone told them to. They are very individualistic. The motto here is ‘mind your own business.’ ” The bishop seemed to think that this was a good thing.

He was critical of the kind of Catholicism that decimated the culture of the islands a century ago. “Even now,” he said, “the Marquesans are governed by foreigners; they learn a language in school that is not their own. They don’t know their ancestors, their legends, their history, their art.”

What the missionaries had taken from the people, the bishop wanted to give back. “I want them to be proud of their heritage,” he said. “I feel I was sent here to make the people proud to be Marquesans. When a man is proud and happy, when he is content with himself and understands his place in the history of his land, then my job is made easier. He has conquered his confusion, you see, and is then free to accept or reject God as he pleases.”

Later the bishop and I visited Damien Haturau, a handsome and imposing man who is probably the best-known sculptor in the Marquesas. The church had commissioned Damien to carve a life-sized wooden Madonna in the Marquesan manner. He had worked on the sculpture for three weeks, but now he thought there was a fault in the wood, and he told the bishop he wanted to start over.

Damien lived above the beach in the Meau Valley, sometimes called Sculptors Valley because so many good wood-carvers had chosen to live there. The artist took me into the open-sided shed where he kept his chisels and mallets. On the table, recently completed, was an exquisite carving of an elaborately tattooed Marquesan warrior. Beside the sculpture was a scholarly work on the archaeology of the Marquesas
that had been written by a German around the turn of the century. Damien was using the sketches in the book to be certain that the tattoos were absolutely authentic. He was, it seemed, in the process of reinventing his own culture using the archaeology of another.