The Sex Lives of Cannibals (19 page)

“And because of the conditions,” I continued, “we’re making excellent time. This will be over before you know it.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Actually, we were making terrible time. Each shattering wave stalled us and it would be a miracle if we made it through the channel into Tarawa Lagoon before sunset. Beiataaki was constantly checking his watch and taking our position with the GPS. I asked him why the government didn’t just put lights on the buoys that marked the passage into the lagoon. He told me they did, but that the lightbulbs were soon stolen, and so Tarawa remained unapproachable after sunset. It was the same with the airport runway. Lights were installed, but they too quickly disappeared. Only once had I seen an aircraft land at night. A British aid worker had accidentally backed her truck over her young son, crushing his legs, an injury well beyond the capacity of Tarawa Hospital. An air ambulance loaded with doctors and medical equipment was immediately dispatched from Australia. It arrived in the middle of the night, landing under the glare of the headlights emitted by dozens of cars strategically parked along the length of the runway. The boy returned to Tarawa a few months later, unburdened by permanent injury, and fortified by the knowledge that in the years to come his mother would likely spoil him rotten.

I escorted Sylvia up to the deck. Beiataaki had been right. Away from Maiana, over the deep water, the waves had become more rounded, more swell-like, than the steep masses of water that flayed us earlier. It was still a twenty-foot trip up and down for each twenty feet we gained horizontally, but
Martha
no longer cleaved her way forward, the violence of the sea had lessened, and I was beginning to enjoy myself. The sailing was raw sailing, but it was just shy of terrifyingly raw, and that is pretty much how I like my encounters with the natural world to be.

“See,” I said to Sylvia. “Isn’t this better?”

Silence.

“You know,” I said. “You don’t look so good.”

Sylvia lurched toward the railing. She threw up. And then she eased her way back to her familiar position in the aft compartment, her head dangling over the rail, her eyes closed, muttering darkly. I felt that the moment needed recording, and I took out our camera.

“Say cheese.”

This, it occurs to me now, was an unfortunate choice of words. I might as well have said
Imagine swallowing snails and warm butter
. When Sylvia was done vomiting, she turned to me, composed herself for the camera, and flipped me the bird. Click.

“Suitable for framing, I should think.”

She smiled wanly, and sunk back into her misery.

The day was getting on. Beiataaki was becoming less concerned with the waves, and more concerned about the approaching darkness. There is no variation in the timing of the sunset on the equator. The sun is down at 6
P
.
M
. each and every day of the year. As we crested the waves, Tarawa gradually came into view. The waves began to pitch and steepen once again as the deep water reacted to the approaching atoll. The sky was gray and darkening and this made the waves seem even more foreboding. We could see Tarawa clearly now, a washed-out little island. There is not a bleaker sight than an atoll in the gray twilight, hunkered down against a wet gusting rain. It was a melancholic vision.

Beiatakki knew where he was going. He had spent a lifetime sailing through the channel that opened Tarawa Lagoon to the ocean. The channel was clearly marked on the chart he used to plot our position, and using the GPS alone, he could locate the channel, give or take fifty feet. But it wasn’t enough. We needed to sight the buoys before risking entry. A mistake, one that landed us on the reef, would kill us. No boat could withstand being reefed while hammered by twenty-five-foot waves.

Lights began to flicker on Tarawa. There was no majesty to the sunset. The color just seemed to drain from the sky. As we crested the blackening waves and disappeared in the troughs, so too did the buoy we sought. For a few fleeting seconds while we rose high with a wave, we scanned the water, searching for silhouettes, and as the sky darkened we worried. Only minutes remained until night utterly claimed the sky. The waves, with their height and girth, seemed ever more ominous. I realized that I could barely unclench my hand from the railing I held, it had been molded into a claw. Sylvia, Bwenawa, and Atenati now were braving the deck, lending their eyes to the search for the buoy. We wanted to go home. The mere thought of spending the night tacking back and forth in a running sea while awaiting morning light was more than most of us could bear.

“There it is!” I yelled.

It was bobbing, disappearing, visible again, a dark shadow that jerked wildly. The buoy was about four hundred yards off the left bow.

“I see it,” Beiataaki said. “You have good eyes.”

Sylvia gazed upon me with newfound ardor.

“You’re my hero,” she said. Typically, when Sylvia utters words such as those, there is—how shall I say it—a bit of a tone, and frankly, there was a bit of a tone this time too. But Sylvia was suddenly chipper again. Green, but chipper.

We made our way through the channel. It was much broader than the one in Maiana and as we entered the lagoon it was if someone had just reached for the dial and turned down the sea. It was no more than a six-foot swell that diminished into flat water as we neared the port in Betio. It was discombobulating. I had become completely used to the heaving ocean, and when I finally set foot on dry land, I experienced something very like seasickness. My eyes were adapted to a world that went up and down. I tottered with legs splayed. I was accustomed to shifting my weight from one leg to the other to maintain my balance on the boat. I had, it appeared, developed sea legs. I felt unbalanced, my sense of equilibrium disturbed by an unmoving and stable surface, and so with each step, I waited for a moment while that corner of my cranium perceived the transition from sea to land and made adjustments accordingly.

“I am so happy to be on land again,” Sylvia groaned.

“I feel dizzy,” I replied.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
Tarawa sparkled in the sun. The island had received a long overdue cleaning. The water tanks were full. The wind had vanished. The waves remained.

“Have you seen it?” It was Mike, calling from the New Zealand High Commission.

“It’s beautiful.”

It was. I had forgotten that a reef-breaking wave could be something other than a wicked dumper. At low tide, I wandered out to the edge of the reef, where big, glassy waves, the kind you do see in the surf rags, rolled in with barreling perfection. They were plump and round and they broke in regular patterns.

Sylvia too was impressed. “These are real waves,” she declared. Even before the recent unpleasantness on the return trip from Maiana, Sylvia had been a little less than thrilled by my growing enchantment with waves. When I had returned one day from a morning of body boarding chattering about the gnarly conditions and how stoked I was to catch a particularly awesome wave, she said: “Did you just say
gnarly
?”

“Yes.”

“And did you say
stoked
?”

“Yes.”

“You remind me of my ex-boyfriends.”

Her ex-boyfriends went up in my estimation.

“I spent my entire youth listening to guys talk about gnarly waves and how stoked they were. This was why I left California. And now it begins again with you?”

What could I say?

“Just know this. If you ever address someone as
dude
, I’m leaving.”

And go where, I thought. We’re on an atoll. Besides, my English-language skills were unlikely to mutate much further. I was absorbing my surf lingo from a hyperliterate, ex-hippie New Zealander who had been living in complete isolation for much of the past two decades.

That morning, Mike suggested we go to the Betio causeway. “With this tide, four o’clock should be about right.”

Technically, I was not supposed to use the FSP pickup truck to transport surfers and surfing gear from one end of the atoll to the other. The pickup truck was a perk of the job for Sylvia. When not needed to transport people and material for FSP-related business, Sylvia was allowed to use it for her own needs. She was meticulous about what constituted proper use for an FSP-owned vehicle. Everyone on Tarawa knew that this particular pickup truck belonged to FSP. People would talk if they saw a couple of
I-Matangs
barreling down the road on a workday with surfing gear jutting out of the bed of the truck. Even though I handled much of the maintenance for the truck, and I did spend an awful lot of my time ferrying FSP staff from one thing to another, Sylvia was a stickler for propriety and unlikely to be moved by a request for a favor.

“Hi,” I said when I reached her on the phone at the office. “I need to get another gas canister.”

“Again? I thought we got a new one last week.”

“It must have been half-full. Anybody using the truck?”

“No.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Mike and I parked the pickup truck on the side of the causeway and gazed toward the waves. It would be a long paddle just to get there, nearly a half mile of swimming, but once there the hard work would be over. A narrow channel had been blasted through the reef. It was used by fishermen and allowed us to bypass the break zone.

“This is the best I’ve seen in seventeen years,” Mike said.

I put my flippers on and settled on my body board, which, truth be told, wasn’t much of a body board. It was more like a small paddle board used by little people learning how to swim, but it was enough. We followed the channel and spent a long time lingering beside the break zone, mesmerized by the waves. There is something hypnotic about their motion: the protuberant swell suddenly rising from the blue void, gathering a coiled height and becoming a pure force that rises into a funneling wall of water, and then a long, tense moment until it dissipates in a thunderous climax. There are times when I could spend hours just watching waves, but this wasn’t one of them. We paddled ahead and lined up and for the next hour caught wave after wave, each more perfect than the last. I edged deeper into the break zone, determined to catch my waves at their maximum height and extend my rides, spending a long minute carving loopy
S
s. And that’s when it appeared.

The rogue wave. The wave that has swallowed several other waves. The wave that was born in some tempest in the southern ocean; the wave that grew into something monstrous and horrible during a week of gales in the central Pacific; the wave we had feared on the torturous journey home from Maiana. This wave was now approaching. We were caught inside. Waves such as these do not explode where other waves do. They do their violence farther out. Mike turned his board straight toward it. His arms were like cartoon arms, spinning and spinning like paddle wheels in overdrive. As the wave took him, he was stretched vertically on its face, and I could see that the wave was three times bigger than he. He clawed at its face, climbing this liquid mountain. He ascended, peaked, and disappeared over the frothing lip.

I was too deep. I could not follow Mike. The wave began to pitch and totter. It sucked in ever more water. I moved high up on my board, freeing my arms, and then swam faster than any man has swum before. I was headed diagonally into the face of the wave, trying to outrun the initial break. But the wave detonated. It boomed. I knew then that I would not get over in time.

And then I became stupid. I was abandoned by good sense. My survival instinct took a holiday. There was only one sensible option and that was to dive as deep as I could, but this I did not do. I did not have a leash connecting me to my board. If I dove, I would then have to swim all the way back to shore to retrieve my board, and somehow this little inconvenience caused my brain to stop working. Instead, I turned the board around, thinking, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I could catch this wave at its very peak, zip down its face, and then establish enough momentum to outrun the break. I was wrong.

I can attest now that having an eighteen-foot wave break upon your head is a remarkably unpleasant experience. There is the physical dimension, in which the wave rips off your board and your flippers, and suddenly you do not know up from down, you cannot breathe or see, but you can hear, and what this wave is telling you is that it can destroy you. There is crushing, and pounding, and hurtling. And there is pain. And there is panic. And it is terrifying. This wave is immensely more powerful than you, and it scars the psyche seeing this demonstrated in such a personal way. When I emerged, bruised and panting for air, I actually prayed, saying thank you for sparing me here, I will be very good from now on, et cetera et cetera, and then I scoured the beach for my board, found my flippers bobbing in the shallows, and I returned to the waves, to the ocean, with respect and humility.

“Did you catch that monster?” Mike asked, as I lined up alongside, my eyes on the swells and what they would become.

“No, dude,” I said. “But it caught me.”