Pecked to death by ducks (14 page)

dozen men sitting in a circle on the floor. I recognized a shopkeeper and a cabdriver I had met. The men accepted me immediately and passed a wooden bowl containing a light gray liquid that tasted a bit like dirty dishwater and set my lips buzzing. Other than that, it had no effect on me whatsoever.

What did I think of Tonga?

Loved it.

The women?

Beautiful.

No trouble?

No, no, not a bit. Faka tonga all the way. Well, except for the airport. There had been some problem with my reading material. The officers, I informed the men of the kava circle, were talking about ratbags.

And the word sailed around the room in ever-decreasing circles so that, in the kava-colored silence, I asked, as politely as I knew how, if someone would please tell me what the hell a ratbag was.

My mouth was now tingling in the frozen manner I associate with the dentist's office. We had been drinking kava, which didn't affect me at all, for hours. I wanted to say something else, but it suddenly occurred to me that my tongue was a huge fat flap of flesh that occupied my entire mouth. I couldn't seem to get any words out around the great globular thing. The effort made me drowsy.

The men of the kava circle, I realized simultaneously, were the very finest men who had ever lived. They were talking to me about ratbags, and I heard them through a somewhat distant echo chamber. They spoke of a number of young men from New Zealand who had been members of some strange religious organization. They had worn beards and carried backpacks. They had known something of the government of Tonga and had gone about spreading rumors that there would be a coup. Which was ridiculous, for people revered and even loved the king. Tevita Helu, my bookstore friend, had said that while other island nations were changing rapidly, often not for the better, Tonga had retained much of its traditional culture—the weaving, the singing, the dancing, the feasting—because all these traditions were incor-

porated into royal rituals. Tongans, Mr. Helu had said, liked that.

The kava men agreed that the king was cherished and said that this reverence was why the rumors of a coup had upset people and why the bearded backpackers had been asked to leave the country. Someone mentioned that it was the men themselves who had referred to their rumor-mongering as ratbagging. A ratbag, the extremely wonderful gentlemen of the kava circle explained through the echo chamber, was in their opinion someone whose methods were aggressive, disruptive, and altogether something less than faka tonga.

It was raining hard, and I was hunched over in an open boat on my way to Falevai to interview the clam in question. From a distance the island of Kapa was an undulating delight of shimmering green hillsides, with limestone cliffs at the waterline. The village was set on a narrow sandy beach with the jungle rising up behind it. About two hundred people lived in Falevai.

The man who had taken charge of the clam circles was a former district officer named Vanisi Fakatulolo. He was a large, intimidating man with a sweet smile and biceps the size of my thighs. Inside his cement house he brewed me up a cup of tea on a kerosene stove. There were chickens clucking and muttering in a back room with a mud floor. Shiny paper stars and crosses hung from the wall, giving the house a festive, Christmasy look. Somewhere, in a back room, a baby fussed.

Mr. Fakatulolo said that, for the first time in his life, there were baby giant clams all over the reef in front of his house.

How many?

"Plenty, plenty."

He said that a year ago a few men from the village had gotten swacked on kava and had poached five giant clams from the sanctuary. Fakatulolo had gotten angry and had "raised a big force." He was a lay preacher at the church and had excoriated the men from the pulpit. For a time these men had lived in shame, a powerfully corrosive emotion in a small Tongan village: People accused in such a way sometimes actually commit suicide.

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS 4 II4

Since then there had been no other thefts, but it was because of the poached clams, five out of seventy-two, that Dr. Lucas of Australia had written Earthwatch and suggested that Chesher's project might be hastening the demise of the giant clams.

Not long after the poaching, Fakatulolo said, a man from Australia had come and asked to inspect the clam circles. The man dived for less than thirty minutes. (This man, I gathered, was Dr. Rick Braley, who, according to Lucas, had found no evidence that T. derasa were "breeding like crazy.")

Braley told Fakatulolo that "maybe the baby clams he see come from the rock." Fakatulolo did not speak good English: By "rock" he meant "reef." Dr. Braley was probably telling him that the new baby clams might have swum over from elsewhere on the reef, from other adult clams not in the circle. (Braley, I later learned, had not seen the baseline studies indicating that there were virtually no other adult clams nearby.)

Fakatulolo got the idea that Braley was telling him the reef had spit up the clams by some sort of spontaneous generation. This irritated him, and he put the Ph.D. straight in no uncertain terms. "The man," Fakatulolo said, "he borned the man. The fish, he borned the fish. The clam, he borned the clam. The rock, he no borned the clam."

Rick Chesher was still furious about the visit. "This goes beyond academic bickering," he fumed. "When you go to the villagers who are involved in this awareness project and tell them it's not working, what happens? What can you expect will happen? People will simply go take the big clams. Luckily, Vanisi knew better."

Indeed, Fakatulolo had noticed over the past few years that fishing was getting better and better in front of the village. In his opinion it had to do with the clam circles. There was no reason people couldn't fish with a net over the circles—that was acceptable—but no one did. "They think," Fakatulolo explained, "that if someone sees them there in the day, and then later maybe someone takes the clams at night, they will get blamed." So the people of Falevai had created, almost accidently, a small marine reserve. And now they were catching more fish, closer to the village. The "conservation ethic" was paying off.

"We used to break the rock," Mr. Fakatulolo said. People had used iron bars, he explained, to break the reef structures and drive fish into nets. "I think now, if you break my house down, I do not come back here to live. Same with fishes."

It was as Dr. Chesher had said: The community clam sanctuary was "a beginning, a way of raising consciousness."

I dived on the Falevai Circle and counted nineteen juvenile T. derasa in two breathhold dives. I visited the clam in question: the one Dr. Lucas had identified as T. gigas. No doubt about it, it was T. derasa: the smoothness of the shell, the number of interlocking teeth, the size.

The largest T. derasa lay open on their backs, exposing their mantles to the light. Some of the mantles were bright or dark blue, with a yellow pattern that looked a bit like the whorls of fingerprints. Most had yellowish tiger stripes on the rims of their shells. They were colorful and interesting and not very cuddly.

Later I dived at nearby Port Maurelle, looking for more juveniles thrown off by the Falevai circle. The water was shallow, and I could see waves breaking above me as I drifted through multicolored corals where such scenic fish as Moorish idols, butterfly fish, and great schools of blue jacks were busy making a living.

I was scanning the bottom for juvenile T. derasa, concentrating fiercely and ignoring the schools of jacks that were swimming past my face in the way that flocks of birds sometimes swoop in front of your windshield. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out of the ocean, and a black abyss opened up below. Whoa . . .

After the first few hours I found myself not really looking much anymore. Searching for clams a couple of inches long and buried in deep coral is hard work. I listened to the rain hiss on the surface above, powered out over the drop-offs for a quick adrenaline rush, and swam at top speed toward coral knobs, pulling up at the last minute like a jet just clearing the trees at the end of the runway.

That's what I was doing, pulling up with my mask inches from the coral, when I saw a tiny T. derasa everyone had missed. Rick Chesher swam over, measured it with calipers, mapped its position, and said that this six-month-old tridacnid bivalve mollusk

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS i Il6

would be known, henceforth, as Tim. Tim, as might be expected, was not a fubsy individual.

I spoke with Dr. Lucas on the phone. It took quite some time to explain Rick Chesher's ideas about sabotage. Chesher had told me that he had no objection to the Lucas-led clam mariculture project and indeed believed that a mariculture program and the clam-circle concept complemented each other. He had, however, been stunned when Lucas wrote to Earthwatch.

"Dr. Chesher," I said, "wondered why you didn't write him, instead of his funding organization."

"I was interested," Lucas said, "in journalistic accuracy."

"But you were wrong about the picture of the clam," I pointed out. "It was T. derasa, not T. gigas."

Lucas said that he had made a mistake, and that the photograph, taken with a wide-angle lens, had made the clam look larger than it was. He seemed to regard this as some kind of trick, although he said that after another look at the picture, he had written a second letter to Earthwatch apologizing for his earlier inaccuracy. (Mark Cherrington, the editor of Earthwatch magazine, described that letter as "one of the most ungracious apologies I've ever read.")

The meat of Chesher's accusations, I explained to Lucas, came down to money. Chesher's own project wasn't cheap: $106,000 from Earthwatch for the four-year start-up. But his was not, he said, like many traditional South Pacific aid programs that "recycle" money between the aid program and the donor governments without much of it reaching the people. His project was simple, it involved the community on a grass-roots level, and now that the clams were breeding, he could do what he had said he would do: walk away and leave it all to the people.

Lucas's mariculture project, funded jointly by the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and James Cook University of North Queensland, was, Chesher charged, somewhat more complex. I knew that the initial re-search-and-development phase of the project (involving Fiji, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea) had been approved in March 1984 and that expenditures for the first three years were

estimated at $836,245 Australian (about $650,000 U.S.). Lucas's current budget for another three-year phase was reportedly $1.8 million Australian (about $1.4 million U.S.), split among maricul-ture facilities in five South Pacific nations. Chesher thought that this was a lot of money— even if the Tongan hatchery in Sopu received only a portion of it—and that Lucas saw any successful clam-conservation project as a threat to his funding.

The reasoning went like this: Mariculture works, but it is expensive and complicated. There are a land-based hatchery and cement raceways to be built, maintained, and guarded twenty-four hours a day. Clams grown in the raceways must be returned to the ocean in plastic-mesh containers ("predator exclusion trays") to grow a bit larger before being released onto the reef. But any time you put an unnatural concentration of living things on the reef, you will attract predators. In addition, the little buggers in the ocean nurseries are susceptible to certain parasitic organisms that must be picked out by hand, twice a week in some seasons. These clams, as the experience in American Samoa has shown, are also objects of temptation to local people. They get pulled up in their plastic boxes and eaten for lunch.

These are problems Lucas's mariculture project would address. But research money is hard to come by. What if ACIAR saw a relatively cheap, effective alternative that, not incidentally, raised the awareness of the local people and created a de facto system of marine reserves? Chesher believed that Lucas saw the clam sanctuary concept as a threat to his funding, to the millions of dollars that had been put into the program in Tonga and elsewhere.

To defuse that threat, Chesher believed, Lucas had attempted to discredit Chesher with Earthwatch and, most galling, to undermine the program with the people it would benefit.

Dr. Lucas denied these allegations and said his actions involved scientific credibility and journalistic accuracy. Truth was very important to him, he said. And indeed, after consulting with Rick Braley, he said that Braley had never spoken with Vanisi Fakatulolo, aside from asking him for permission to dive at Falevai.

Then who was this Australian scientist that Fakatulolo had been talking about?

Lucas didn't know. But, he wondered, what did it matter, anyway? "If Dr. Braley had seen little evidence of giant-clam recruitment and reported this to a local authority, would it have been wrong for him to be telling truthfully what he had seen?"

Well—completely aside from the fact that Dr. Braley had never seen the baseline studies and that he would be basing his report about a four-year program on one half-hour dive—yes, one would think it would be wrong.

I spent my last day in Tonga back on Tongatapu with Tevita Helu, who took me to the southern coast of the island to see the magnificent Houma blowholes just at sunset, as the tide was pounding into the shore. The beach was a raised coraline limestone platform that extended ten feet above the level of the sea. As the waves came in, they pounded into the cliff face, where there were a number of natural vents. Great plumes of water erupted out of the top of the limestone bench. There were hundreds of them, some a hundred feet high. They reminded me of the eruptions at Old Faithful in Yellowstone, except that they all fired at once, all up and down the deserted beach for miles. When the sea fell back from the wall, the spouts faltered, and there was the sound of a hard rain falling.

Mr. Helu wanted to know what I had learned in Vava'u. I told him about the clam circles and about Dr. Chesher and Dr. Lucas. Helu had once taught in the Tongan school system and felt he knew something about Tongan attitudes. People would simply take the clams, for that's the way it was in Tonga. He said this with some sadness. The people just wouldn't understand. It would take a generation before Tongans grasped the concept of a marine reserve, much less the idea of an inviolable brood stock.