The Sex Lives of Cannibals (16 page)

Of course, not everyone lives and so you would think that when family members hear that one of their loved ones has gone missing at sea there would be worry, there would be vigils, there would be gnashing of teeth, but this is not so. When Abarao, a health education officer for the government who often worked with Sylvia in a collegial, professional kind of manner, which made him a rarity among government workers—not the collegial part, but the professional part—failed to return from Maiana, where he was sent to gather the family’s pigs for a celebratory feast, there was a notable lack of consternation among his family and colleagues. When I asked one of his cousins why this appeared to be so, he said; “In Kiribati, we don’t worry for the first two weeks.”

And after two weeks?

“Then we worry a little bit, but we keep it to ourselves.”

Two weeks passed and still no Abarao. Kiribati’s lone patrol boat, another gift from the good people of Australia, was dispatched to look for him. It returned to Tarawa several days later, listing strongly and belching long plumes of black smoke. They had not found Abarao. They had, however, encountered some excellent fishing off Nonouti, which was a considerable distance from where Abaroa was likely to have drifted, and in their enthusiasm for the excellent fishing, they had hit a reef, nearly sinking the boat.

And then, a week later, Radio Kiribati announced that a Korean fishing trawler had found Abarao off Nauru. He was reported to be in good condition. I wanted to hear how, exactly, does one remain in good condition after spending three weeks adrift in an open boat under the glare of the equatorial sun.

“Pig’s blood,” he said, when I met with him a short while later. I suppose desperation can lead one to think creatively about the uses of a pig, but I’m not sure it would have occurred to me. I see a pig and I see bacon, pork chops, pork tenderloin, ham, but not water.

Abarao was in his thirties, and though he was quick to laugh about his experience, he had a haunted air about him, as if the weeks drifting with the ocean current and all its attendant terror and tedium had led him to develop a knowledge of death that he did not wish to have. To find relief from the sun, he had spent much of his time in the water, hanging from the stern of the boat.

“What about sharks?” I asked. It is one thing to encounter a shark on a reef, where there are so many other tasty nibbles to choose from, but it is another thing altogether to meet a shark in the open water, where you are more likely to be treated as an unexpected meal.

“Yes, I saw sharks, but I couldn’t catch them.”

The I-Kiribati are different from you and me. They take their position on top of the food chain very seriously. Abarao’s answer reminded me of a story that John, an English volunteer, once told me. He was snorkeling in the lagoon when he noticed that he was being circled by a large shark. He popped up and spoke to his companions on a boat a short distance away. “There’s a shark here. Would you be so kind as to bring the boat over?” But it was too late. At the first mention of shark, his two I-Kiribati friends had leapt into the water to go shark hunting. Like I said, the I-Kiribati are different from you and me.

The cause of Abarao’s adventure on the high seas was the simple fact that halfway between Maiana and Tarawa he’d run out of gas. “I forgot the petrol,” he said sheepishly. This is probably the primary cause of adriftedness in Kiribati, but it wasn’t the most painfully dumb reason I’d ever heard for getting oneself lost at sea. This would belong to Epi and Joseph, two Catholic missionaries from Samoa and Tonga, respectively, who one day took the boat belonging to the Catholic high school out for a day of fishing. They got lost.

“We followed the birds,” Joseph told me when I spoke to him a few months later. “We thought that’s where the fish were, but then the birds flew away. We followed the birds again, but still we couldn’t find any fish. And then we noticed that we couldn’t see land anymore.”

“So what did you do?”

“We shut off the engine.”

It occurred to me that I would now trust Samoan and Tongan fishermen even less than I did I-Kiribati fishermen. They were not more than a couple of miles from Tarawa. A simple reading of the clouds would have told them what direction to go. Clouds reflect the color of the lagoon, and so when they drift over the atoll they take on a pale green hue, which means that while you cannot actually see the atoll you know where it is. But the missionaries were unaware of this basic island navigational technique, and so they began to drift.

“On the first night, there was suddenly a loud noise and the boat nearly turned over,” Joseph told me. “It was a whale and it had come up right beside us. I could see its eye.”

He was nearly quaking at the recollection. For a Catholic missionary adrift at sea, the appearance of a whale must be a fairly evocative thing.

“But that was the last fish we saw,” he continued. “We didn’t catch a thing. And then, one day, a bird landed on the boat and I was able to grab it.”

I asked him about water.

“It rained once, and we gathered about three liters.”

“And so that’s it?” I asked it. “One bird and three liters of water.”

“That’s it.”

The hapless missionaries were adrift for three weeks. They turned on the engine periodically when the sea ran high threatening to overturn the boat, but mostly they drifted silently across the largest ocean in the world. They prayed. A lot. Apparently someone was listening: They too were found by a Korean fishing boat, which took them to Papua New Guinea. Eventually, they made it back to Tarawa, where they have been feeling guilty ever since. Not only had the Catholic high school been forced to pay the exorbitant costs of their air travel from Papua New Guinea—there is not a more expensive corner of the world to travel in than the Pacific—but it had also lost its boat.

STILL, DESPITE MY
very great fear of drifting aimlessly across the ocean, I thought that I should at least gather some ocean-oriented experience. I was on an atoll in the very middle of the world’s largest ocean, an ocean whose sounds were omnipresent, whose very sight was unavoidable, and because the atoll is a very small place to be, the ocean is the only option for expanding one’s world. I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: “No, you’re not.”

“And what do you mean by ‘No, you’re not’?”

I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become sun-browned and sea-weathered. I would smell like fish. I would be a Salty Dog.

“I mean,” Sylvia said, “that when the engine dies and you start drifting, which will happen, because things like that do seem to happen to you, you will not survive two days. Your skin will fry, you will collapse from dehydration, and because you will be the most useless person on the boat, you will be regarded by the others as a potential food source.”

I didn’t like the imagery here.

“And,” she continued, “if you’re off drifting on the ocean, who will do the shopping? And what about the nights when it’s your turn to cook?”

Can you feel the love?

Nevertheless, I proceeded with my plans because a line had been drawn and lines must be crossed. I would, however, bring extra sunscreen and lots of water. I tried to think of ways to be useful on a boat adrift in the Pacific, but I could not come up with anything except shark bait.

The following day Sylvia came home and said that she had spoken with Temawa, Bitaki’s sister. Temawa worked at FSP as an environmental education officer. It often seemed as if the FSP staff alone were related to the entire country.

“She said Farouk had gone fishing with her brothers.”

“And . . . what did he say?”

“You should ask him.”

I sensed a trap.

Farouk was Temawa’s husband. He was, like nearly every other foreigner in Kiribati, a missionary. What made him a little different was that he was a Muslim missionary from Ghana. If you were an I-Kiribati woman looking for a way to subvert traditional mainstream island society, you could not do better than to marry a Muslim missionary from Africa. This streak of good-hearted independence is what drew Sylvia to hire Temawa when she was eight months pregnant with their second child. Temawa held a graduate degree in environmental studies from a university in Canada (“It was so cold,” she said), and rather than seek lifetime employment with the government, she genuinely wanted to do something which would allow her to “make a difference.” You believed her too.

Her husband Farouk was a gentle man with a sly sense of humor. “A man walks into a bar and says ‘Allah Akbar.’ What should you do?”

“What?”

“Duck.”

Farouk had yet to convert a single I-Kiribati to Islam. Not even Temawa would make that kind of leap, but he remained in buoyantly good spirits, working primarily as a minibus driver to help out with the family’s expenses. When I asked him about his experiences fishing, he broke out into a wide grin and declared: “I have never been so scared in my life.”

Did I mention that Farouk had fought the Russians in Afghanistan? No? Well, he did. Farouk was one of those fearless souls whose life had become one long adventure. He was deeply at ease with himself, exuding an air of preternatural calmness, and so when he remarked that he had been shit-scared while fishing with his brothers-in-law, I paid attention.

“I just wanted to lie down in the middle of the boat, close my eyes, and pretend that I was somewhere else. The waves were so big, and the boat goes up and down, up and down, and I became very sick,” he said. “But I couldn’t lie down.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was busy bailing. It is a very leaky boat. For twelve hours I did nothing but get sick and bail.”

Score one for Sylvia.

Fortunately, sweet necessity soon reared its head. We had planned to fly to Maiana with Bwenawa and Atenati, who also worked in the FSP garden, in order to conduct nutrition and gardening workshops in each of the island’s villages, but Air Kiribati was once again grounded, awaiting spare parts from the other side of the globe. An efficient airline Air Kiribati is not, and a sea journey was thus happily needed. One would think that given the troubles of its airline, inter-island shipping would be a high priority for the government, but this is not so. There is but one creaking, rusting hulk of a vessel that periodically sails to the outer islands to deliver supplies and gather copra, the dried coconut meat used in soaps and oils, which provides outer islanders with their only source of income. The ship’s schedule is mysterious, its sightings infrequent, and most islands go four months and more between ship visits. Pleas from outer islanders requesting more shipping are duly and ceremoniously acknowledged and then ignored altogether. The more cohesive and industrious islands have taken it upon themselves to buy their own island boats. There is the Abaiang boat, and the Onotoa boat, and so on, and the man who builds them is John Thurston, a Californian who left the United States some thirty years ago.

It is one of the small pleasures of living in Kiribati that the foreigners one meets tend to live life in a vivid and eccentric sort of way, and when you listen to their tales of high adventure in the South Seas, you find that you are subsequently ruined from a conversational point of view, that you can no longer even pretend to be remotely interested in someone’s trip to the mall, or their thoughts about the stock market, or their opinions about the relative merit of a football player, and soon you will be branded as aloof, simply because once, on a faraway island, you heard some good stories. John had some of the more colorful tales. He was a surfer from Anaheim who one day picked up and left for Hawaii to surf the big waves. In appearance and mannerism, he reminded me of Brian Wilson, the tormented genius behind the Beach Boys. There were demons. They were slayed. And the story of that battle manifested itself in the lines on John’s face and the near-stuttering quality of his speech. He had become a Baha’i, which is something I never asked him about, because I once heard that members of the Baha’i faith are not permitted to proselytize unless someone asks them about their faith, and it says much about the graciousness of John and Mike and the other Baha’is I met that I remain as clueless about the religion now as ever.

In the early 1970s, John set out for Tarawa, where he was charged by the Baha’i powers that be to start up a youth center similar to the one he had run on Maui. Soon enough, he discovered he was broke and so he began to build boats, catamarans, and trimarans with shallow drafts to accommodate lagoons and reefs. They were made of plywood and whatever other material he could find, and John set up business as an inter-island trader. With independence in 1979, he moved on to the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Fiji, Samoa, and eventually to Papua New Guinea, where he lived for six years, trading food and tobacco (but no alcohol) in exchange for shells in areas where few had ever encountered a westerner. The violence and mayhem of Papua New Guinea eventually compelled him to leave, and he returned to Kiribati with
Martha
, his yellow 36-foot homemade trimaran, which would become our home on the voyage to Maiana.