January 2004
I say this in all seriousness: for the first couple of days, I had a little
trouble believing this place is real.
Imagine water so clear that you can often stand on the shore and simply watch
as brightly-colored schools of tropical fish swim by in all directions, just
as if you were snorkeling without a mask.
Imagine an island so small that you can ride a mountain bike all the way around
in just a couple of hours... so quiet and isolated that it's hundreds of miles
to the next largest island, and almost two thousand miles to the nearest actual
city... and so thinly-populated that after just a few days, you realize you're
seeing the same friendly faces again and again, wherever you go.
Y'know that "beach" screensaver you see sometimes? Back home, when I stop working
for more than five minutes, my Macintosh begins a montage of ridiculously green
trees, blue water, and white sand. This is that. I can't swear to it, but it
sure seems like they must have taken some of those pictures here.
This must be what Honolulu looked like 50 years ago, before Waikiki became a
shopping mall with a beach. This must be what Tahiti looked like 25 years ago,
before Papeete began turning into a newer Waikiki.
It doesn't take long to realize this isn't actually paradise -- a six-inch
gecko losing its grip on the ceiling and dropping into your bed during the pitch-black
night is enough -- YAAAAGGHHfumblefumblejumpgrabgrabgrablightswitchYIKESohgeez
-- but there's sufficient bliss to make you forget that humans here make the
same mistakes they make everywhere, and the island suffers from many of the
same exact problems you see on the rest of the planet.
Until that sinks in, those first few are very good days. If you ever come to
Rarotonga, enjoy those first few tripped-out days as much as you can. Enjoy
the "shaquille, shaquille" calls of the ubiquitous mynah birds. But whatever
you do, don't make any sudden decisions.
People do come untethered from with reality here.
Rarotonga is littered with the detritus of impossibly large dreams, lunatic
schemes that no sane person could have imagined... but which are oddly understandable
here, remembering the first few days when oxygen was new in my lungs.
As I write these words, it's just a short walk from here -- actually, a short
walk from about half the island -- to a tour operator who invested in a wide
selection of Harleys, figuring perhaps that tourists would travel thousands
of miles for the chance rent a big ol' hog and blast a lap around the 1000-year-old
road that winds through fields of arrowroot and papaya.
Um, no. That narrow road, nestled among coconut trees and banana fields and
dappled with bright wild hibiscus flowers, is for slow, observant walking. You
can literally feel it in your feet. So... the Harleys are just sitting there.
A little further on, there's another guy with a giant speedboat, who figured
(because he likes to careen wildly, one assumes) that tourists would pay top
dollar to strap on life preservers and bounce around in the open sea, salt spray
bashing their giddy faces.
But the island is surrounded by a circular coral reef, which breaks 20-foot
waves into bathtub ripples right before your eyes. The water here demands quiet.
So... the speedboat is just sitting there.
Not far past the village of Avarua -- a gathering not much more than one small
city block in size, and the Cook Islands' national capital -- you can even find
the remnants of an old Polish train. Once upon a time, a European visitor became
intoxicated with the great green mountainside and imagined a steam-powered choo-choo
chugging along its bends.
But the mountain is jungle, and refuses our engineering. So... the train, covered
in foliage, is gradually being claimed by the island.
A few miles in the other direction -- and thus almost halfway around the island
from the train -- is an enormous ghost resort, a five-star uninhabited derelict
in which no tourist has ever stayed. The Sheraton corporation once got halfway
into full-on Waikikiification of this place. Now the empty giant concrete rectangles
echo with the flapping of mynah wings.
Which returns me to mentioning to humans being the same here as everywhere else.
The Sheraton project failed from more than just hubris; according to what I
hear in the RSA club (analogous to a VFW hall), corruption and graft were the
true reason for the super-resort's downfall. Paying off the loans for the Resort
That Never Was apparently still accounts for half of the national debt.
The nation which owes that debt, I should add, is the Cook Islands, a semi-independent
confederation of far-flung flecks of land, only about half of which are even
inhabited, occupying a total area smaller than Los Angeles, but dispersed over
a stretch of the Pacific as large as all of western Europe. If you're curious,
find Hawaii on a map, then follow your finger south. The Cooks are usually indicated
by an enormous polygon of water, in which, if you squint, you might see a few
brown flyspecks. I'm writing this from one of the southernmost specks.
The combined population is less than half the size of the small town in Ohio
where I grew up, the national police headquarters isn't much bigger than my
mother's house, and when I waved at the Prime Minister as his unescorted car
(recognizable by the "PM" license plates and a small flag on the hood) went
by, he waved back, then motioned kindly for me to get a hat on my head in the
tropical sun.
The Cooks are almost part of New Zealand, but not quite. They were once, and
might be again, but at the moment, they're referred to as "quasi-independent,"
whatever that means. In any case, Cook Islanders carry New Zealand passports,
the islands primarily function using New Zealand currency, and the economy is
highly dependent on New Zealand foreign aid for its survival.
Tourism perhaps should be a major draw, of course, but Rarotonga's isolation
is both its greatest asset and hindrance. Funny thing about rarely-visited,
almost untouched places: they're rarely visited, and almost untouched.
That's not to say that local culture remains in its pre-European form. God,
no (and I choose that phrase purposefully).
Just as British colonists once decided to save the island from its insects by
importing mynah birds -- which quickly drove every other bird species either
into extinction or far into the hills -- nineteenth-century missionaries managed
to largely obliterate not only the local Maori religion, but a large number
of the Maoris themselves. As in North America, the newcomers may have meant
to bring salvation to unenlightened souls, but their primary gift was rampaging
cooties that destroyed innocent bodies. First came Jesus; then came smallpox,
measles, and dysentery. Before long, the Maoris concluded (surely with no small
prodding) that they were being punished by the Lord Of Peace for not converting
more quickly.
(Nice god: if you don't do what he wants, he kills you, horribly. Sure, sign
me up to worship that guy...)
And so Rarotonga is now slathered in Christian churches of all denominations,
and on Sunday, almost the entire island shuts down for a morning of well-dressed
singing to the skies.
My own thoughts on religion aside... lord, what singing it is!
I'm not precisely sure how the harmonies are structured differently from, say,
American gospel, but I am certain that I have never heard hymns sung with such
soaring beauty -- and set against a complex rhythmic structure derived from
indigenous dance. The resulting musical creole is breathtaking.
I suspect this Christian-on-the-surface, Maori-underneath cultural character
extends into other customs on the island as well. Signs of this are everywhere
-- in the naming of children, certain rituals surrounding food and dress, and
(most obviously) in the constant sight of Tangeroa, a spectacularly well-endowed
fertility god, whose gigantic display of wooden genitalia is featured on everything
from postcards to local coins to the logo of the tourist information office.
I bet the Victorian missionaries wouldn't have approved.
In the center of Avarua, one of the gift shops prominently displays a man-sized
Tangeroa with a genderstick as long as your arm and as wide as your thigh. The
statue actually leans on this appendage as a stabilizing third leg. Yet small
children (some actually dwarfed by the wooden phallus) play on the sidewalk
without a care. Nobody -- nobody -- bats an eye.
Obviously, no civilization ever fell because the kids saw enormous wooden penises.
Still, I think John Ashcroft would see this and just fall to the ground, weeping
in anguished prayer.
Incidentally, you might have noticed that I'm referring to the indigenous locals
as Maori, just as in New Zealand. That's no coincidence; the two are clearly
related (as are most Polynesian cultures as far east as Easter Island), although
historians and archaeologists haven't fully agreed on precisely who went where
when. The general consensus involves a large exodus from Rarotonga to New Zealand
on outrigger canoes about six hundred years ago; there's even a circle of stones
marking the spot.
Pause for a moment and consider how advanced these folks were -- navigating
thousands of miles of unimaginably open sea in handmade wooden canoes -- hundreds
of years before coastline-hugging European explorers were able to do anything
remotely similar. Which means they also must have understood certain basics
of astronomy (since that's how you navigate in open sea at night) at a time
when more "civilized" Europeans were burning and torturing people for suggesting
the Earth might not be the center of the universe. (And suddenly I picture John
Ashcroft climbing up from the ground, wiping away his tears, and feeling much
better...)
Speaking of the night sky... an aside:
"Up" in the southern hemisphere is a remarkably cool thing when you've spent
your whole life getting used to the northern version of "up." I've spent my
whole life under one particular sky, the one you've probably known since childhood,
too: Ursa Major is over there, and the brightest seven stars in the big bear
are are the Big Dipper, and if you follow the leftmost two upward you reach
the North Star, which is attached to the Little Dipper, etc.
But suddenly, I look up, and I recognize nothing. Whee! The stars aren't
pre-grouped in my head. They're just random dots of light I don't comprehend.
It's like being a child again. The night sky fills me with wonder. Heck, it's
even better -- Rarotonga, which requires burning diesel fuel even to generate
electricity, doesn't exactly glow at night, so in the hours between the setting
sun and rising moon, the night sky becomes a brilliant, luminous playground.
Sometimes ignorance really is bliss. If you've ever enjoyed letting your mind
automatically turn random cloud shapes into pictures (the exact pattern-imposing
process responsible for superstition, religion, and occult beliefs, incidentally;
we humans are inherently irrational, and quite brilliant at it), this is the
same thing, but with the lights turned off.
So I plunked down on the beach and let my mind draw pictures in the sky: stick
warriors, snakes, geometric shapes. I now officially cut the Greeks more slack.
Then I saw a big H thing, a lot like the constellation Orion, but upside down,
if I remember right. And then I realized that this was precisely what it was.
Cool: I'm on the other side of the planet. Uncool: maybe the fun's over, and
my mind is only gonna start recognizing things instead of organizing them anew.
And then I saw it. I swear to God this is true.
You may have to drive to the middle of nowhere to see it, but I'm really not
kidding...
There is a gigantic rubber ducky just to Orion's left. Plain as day.
It's the clearest image in the starry sky, at least when there's hardly a damned
bit of light for a thousand miles and all the stars are out.
From here, she (imposing gender) is just to the left of Orion, about the same
size, and turned 90 degrees so her bottom points toward Orion and her beak is
pointing to Earth. Which means, I guess, that in the northern hemisphere, Bob's
Great Big Rubber Ducky (as I hope future astronomers will call her) would be
to Orion's right, with the beak pointing away from the ground. Unless I have
the angles wrong. But she's there. I swear.
I'm really not kidding. I pointed out the BGBRD (pronounced "Big Bird")
to a young couple walking on the beach, and once they got done thinking I was
nuts, they saw it, too -- even laughing about how obvious it was.
I may have to start a cult or something.
If I do, and I rake in tens of millions of dollars from naive people who don't
know how their own brain imposes inductive rules on the world, Rarotonga is
also a good place to move my ill-gotten riches.
Up in Avarua, hidden among a small array of souvenir shops and food stands,
you'll find about a half-dozen deceptively modest storefronts with names involving
the word "Trust." You wouldn't even notice them if you weren't specifically
looking. They look like rundown travel agencies might: inside, there's typically
a guy with a small computer sitting at an unimpressive desk on an old rug.
And that guy's probably handling a couple of billion dollars.
I'm not gonna get into the ethics or morality or sheer damn lack of common sense
of international banking laws right here. Not because there isn't room; it's
just that there's nothing to argue. On an island where most people make in a
year what you probably make in a month, enough money to feed and educate every
child for 2000 miles -- more money, as near as I can tell, than the entire nation's
Gross Domestic Product -- flies in and out at the furtive click of a computer
mouse, thus avoiding taxation in some other country with its own batch of people
without a damn thing to wear, just so some wealthy bastard can continue a personal
quest to own everything while avoiding public accountability.
Think about it, and I believe you'll agree: anyone arguing that this practice
is remotely sane must be, prima facie, an asshole. Also, it also puts
you firmly in the mainstream of early 21st-century economic thought. Which explains
a little about how come two billion of us on this tiny planet don't have clean
water. I digress.
But speaking of assholes, there's this thing called global warming, which assorted
first-world liars living on high ground have the privilege of denying exists.
Tell them to come to the South Pacific, where everybody knows the water level
is rising. Tell them to come to Fiji, where 90 percent of the population lives
in vulnerable areas along the coast. Tell them to come to Kiribati or the Marshall
Islands, whose entire disappearance is increasingly considered likely. Tell
them to come to Tuvalu, a nation about to go Atlantis in the next fifty years,
whose entire 11,000-person population is planning to offload en masse
to New Zealand.
Or tell them to come to Rarotonga.
Climate change is far from Rarotonga's main problem. No, the island is actually
a lot more likely to be flattened by a violent storm long before sea levels
rise. In fact, this outcome is almost certain: the same recent cyclone that
whacked Niue missed Rarotonga by hundreds of miles, and still blasted
the crap out of six kilometers of coastline here, with several small resorts
heavily damaged by flooding. (I saw the results firsthand; my plane landed the
next day, while everyone was still cleaning up.)
Next time they might not be so lucky. The harbor at Avarua is tragically unprotected,
and only minimal amounts of seawall exist anywhere else on the island. Seawall
costs money, unfortunately, and except for the guys in the tiny offshore banking
offices tip-tapping away, nobody here is particularly near significant cash.
(If you ask me, the ghost Sheraton sure looks like a great source of concrete
barrier wall, but what do I know...) Which means someday a storm is gonna come
from a slightly more northerly direction, a lot closer than cyclone Heta did
a couple of weeks ago... and WHUMP.
But even if that storm never comes, most of Rarotonga's people and history are
along the low-lying coast. Since its volcanic peaks rise thousands of feet,
Rarotonga certainly won't disappear anytime soon. Instead, local inhabitants
might someday join the entire non-mynah native bird population in slowly heading
for the hills.
However it shakes out exactly, a century from now, climatologists predict that
life in this region is going to be unrecognizably altered. And the screensaver
beach where I sit writing these words will likely not be here.
<>Now I have to go back home, and watch people in suits claiming that none of
what I am seeing with my own eyes is true.
On my last night on Rarotonga -- the last night of my around-the-world trip,
in fact -- I rented a small kayak and started paddling into the ocean. The sky
was clear, the moon was an hour from rising, and upside-down Orion and all the
other completely random stars came out in full glory.
I sat in silence, wobbling gently against the reef-broken waves, looking at
the shore of this tiny island, sadly wishing away my knowledge of its fate.
The idea that this beautiful place could be in such quiet danger, that its people
are facing several forms of eventual impending doom, was more than I wanted
to think about.
And I couldn't help but feel, just for a moment, like I was looking at a microcosm
of our tiny, fragile planet. Which, once you've been all the way around, can
never seem large again. All of us -- all of us -- are living on a tiny
island in a hell of a lot of trouble we don't want to see.
I looked up at the giant Rubber Ducky and smiled against tears, wishing I had
the slightest idea how humanity will avert the many disasters we've managed
to create for ourselves. Wishing I didn't have to go home and resume the struggle.
Wishing I didn't feel so tiny in this giant rising ocean. Wishing I could at
least feel more certain that all the damn fighting was worth it -- that there
really was at least enough hope to keep trying.
And then came a violent splashing noise behind me. I tried to turn, but that's
not easy for a novice in a kayak, and so for a moment, all I knew was that something
large and loud in the dark was headed right for me.
And then I realized... it was giggling.
They were giggling.
Two Maori boys, maybe ten or twelve years old -- I couldn't really see for sure,
to be honest -- had apparently seen me paddling along the shore and thought
it would be fun to hop in the water and either help push me along or grab on
for a ride.
I never figured out which, since between the laws of physics and my utter lack
of kayaking skills, it could have been either one. Either way, nothing happened,
other than a whole lot of pointless splashing and gleeful kicking.
And I was laughing, too.
I wish you could have heard their laugh. In fact, I wish everyone reading this
could have heard the laughter of all the children I heard everywhere on the
entire trip. Because it's the same exact laugh.
In Kuala Lumpur, near the Petronas
Towers, there's a pool with a waterfall in a park. And the kids there splash
and go Whee! just like my own niece and nephew in Ohio did at that age.
In Singapore, when the young Chinese
girls gave sand-breasts to their male friend buried to his neck on the beach...
the laugh was the same.
On a beach south of Cape Town, as
I was taking a picture of a modest little resort, an African kid about the same
age surprised the hell out of me by leaping out and performing a running airborne
somersault in front of my lens. Sure enough, my digital camera caught him in
midair -- I'll post this and my other favorite pictures one of these days,
I promise -- and when I showed him the picture in the camera's little display,
he let out a delighted squeal.
And here's the thing I realized: as you read these words, I bet you already
know exactly what that giddy giggling sound was like.
All children, everywhere, laugh pretty much exactly the same way.
The more I think about it, the more I think that's the single best thought I've
ever had.
Honestly.
I can't help but feel instinctively that maybe we're still gonna be OK somehow.
I wish everyone could hear the laughter of kids halfway around the world and
recognize it as their own.
And so, the Maori kids kept churning away, splashing and shouting. I paddled
to no effect whatsoever, laughing along with them. This lasted only about a
minute or two, tops, but in memory, it's already one of those perfect moments
that stretches into hours.
Eventually, my arms were exhausted, just as the kids got tired and sloshed back
to shore. We waved, and they wandered off, one chasing the other.
So, at last, I just sat there, bobbing in the tide, looking at the sky and watching
as the gigantic Rubber Ducky showed Orion her bottom for what must have been
the millionth time.
And finally, at the end of the longest trip I will probably ever take, I realized
that I am only writing these very words, reaching out to people I don't even
know halfway around the world in a home I'm not even certain of...
... because I am full of hope.
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