Made by Hand (2 page)

But on that New Year’s Day in 2003, Carla and I realized that we really
could
move to Rarotonga. As freelancers, we could write from anywhere, and living in Rarotonga would cost a lot less than doing so in our Los Angeles suburb. At the very least, a frugal life on a paradisiacal island would be a lot more fun. Instead of picking up our kids from “playdates” and zapping frozen organic soy cheese macaroni in the microwave for dinner, we could be picking mangos and breadfruit, buying taro root and coconuts from people’s front porches, and fishing for supper. We’d be experiencing life’s moments, rather than trying breathlessly to keep up with our schedules.

The more we talked about it, the more the idea made sense. I was doing various illustrating jobs for newspapers and magazines, and there was no reason I couldn’t do them in Rarotonga, as long as the place had Internet connectivity. (It did. It was slow and expensive, but it got the job done.)

We could write articles about living on the island, maybe even get a book deal out of it. We’d stay for a year, and if we liked it, we’d stay longer. The only question left in our minds was “When do we leave?” June seemed to be the right time, after Sarina had finished kindergarten. By then, our new baby (due around the first of April) would be two and a half months old. That gave us about five months to prepare.

We began writing a list of things we needed to do before moving:

Next, we started a packing list:

As the months went by, the list grew longer. Much longer. This wasn’t a plan for a simpler life. This was a condensed catalogue of the modern conveniences we were trying to escape.

Looking back, I can see that, in addition to mosquito nets and sunscreen, this list contained the seeds of our destruction.

I began reading up on the Cook Islands. I was especially interested in learning about city folk who had tried doing what we were about to do. I read several books by Robert Dean Frisbie of Cleveland, who in 1920, at the age of twenty-four, headed for the South Pacific. For several years Frisbie wandered from island to island, eventually settling on Pukapuka, one of the Cooks’ remote northern islands, in order to live in “a place beyond the reach of the faintest echo from the noisy clamour of the civilised world.” There Frisbie ran a trading post and wrote the first of a dozen novels and memoirs of living an unencumbered, rustic life in the South Pacific.

In his later years, Frisbie was befriended by Tom Neale, a sailor from New Zealand who had taken a job at the general store in Rarotonga’s capital, Avarua. Like Frisbie, Neale longed to escape the noise and congestion of civilization and live on his own terms. He thought that the only way he could do that was by living alone on an island where no one could tell him what to do. In the early 1950s, egged on by Frisbie (now nearly bedridden from a chronic respiratory ailment), Neale moved to a tiny uninhabited Cook island called Suwarrow and set up house in a little shack that had been built as a World War II monitoring post. He caught fish, raised chickens, and hunted down the feral pigs that tore up his garden at night. His days were filled with hard physical labor, but he was profoundly happy on the island, where he lived, on and off, for sixteen years. He wrote about his time on Suwarrow in his memoir,
An Island to Oneself
.

Neale’s and Frisbie’s books thrilled me and made me even more excited to move to Rarotonga. But I failed to understand that what they had done and what we were about to do were entirely different things. Neale and Frisbie chose to be responsible for making and maintaining every object and system needed to ensure their survival, while Carla and I were still going to be dependent on others to provide for all our necessities and luxuries. We weren’t really changing our behavior; we were just changing our environment.

All I can say is, we didn’t understand it at the time. We thought that by living on an island, inhabited by people who lived at a slower place, we’d somehow become that way ourselves.

Over the next five months, we went through our to-do list: selling the house, storing our furniture, selling our car, buying supplies. It was exciting, and we talked about little else. At night, lying in bed, we discussed our plans, hopes, and fears. We talked about how our friends thought we were crazy; we sometimes wondered if they were right. We talked about what needed to be done before we got on the plane and left the United States. The one thing we didn’t talk a lot about was what we were going to do once we got there.

We had vague notions that we’d simply spend a lot of time hiking and beachcombing and sitting under palm trees while Sarina explored tidepools and our baby slept in a miniature hammock. Beyond that, we didn’t have a plan. Part of the reason for that may have been that we really wanted to escape the crazy schedule of kids’ playdates and school functions and other social obligations that raised our stress levels. So the idea of not having a plan appealed to us.

When the day came to leave, our friends Liz and Craig dropped in to help with last-minute details. The amount of gear we had lined up in the hallway surprised them: eight giant roller suitcases, a carry-on for each of us, plus a stroller, a portable crib, and a car seat for the baby. We needed two taxis to take us to the airport—one for the four of us and a van for all the luggage. (That luggage became an anchor that dragged on us for our entire stay in the South Pacific. Carla had packed thirteen pairs of shoes, and she never wore any of them, always either sporting a pair of two-dollar flip-flops she bought in Rarotonga or going barefoot.)

After a twelve-hour flight we landed at Rarotonga’s tiny airport, across the road from the ocean, which consisted of a simple airstrip and a one-story building with a blue-and-white wooden sign that read WELCOME TO THE COOK ISLANDS. We were greeted by a group of men wearing floral batik shirts who strummed ukuleles near the immigration inspection line. The blue sky went on forever, patched with just a few white fluffy clouds.

As we found out later, we had just missed a four-day rainstorm.

We found a van large enough to take our luggage and us to the holiday bungalow where we planned to stay until we found a place to rent. It took only about two minutes of looking out the van’s window to wipe out any preconceived fantasies we had harbored about island life. We passed a long stretch of diesel tanks, refineries, and warehouses. The main road was clogged with cars and noisy motorscooters. Everywhere we looked, there were signs of neglect and ugliness: rusting oil drums, falling-down cinderblock fences, and small packs of skinny feral dogs trotting along with their tongues hanging out.

We didn’t remember any of this from our first visit. It had been there, of course, but we had seen it through tourists’ eyes. Now that we were back to stay, in a van that reeked of diesel exhaust, passing little houses on the side of the road with missing windows, rotting roofs, and torn curtains in lieu of doors, five months of romanticized notions flew from our heads and were replaced by one question:

What the fuck had we gotten ourselves into?

Our first impulse was to turn around and get the hell out. Our tickets were open-ended, which meant we could leave anytime we felt like it. But we couldn’t do that. The humiliation would be excruciating; we would never be able to face our friends again. More than that, the months of planning and work that we’d put into doing this would have been for nothing. Worst of all, going back home would have meant abandoning a dream that we had come to believe in.

By the time the van dropped us off at the tiny bungalow, the sky was dark gray. As I dragged the luggage in, it started to rain. The baby began to cry. A sleep-deprived, whiny Sarina asked over and over again if we could go to the wind-whipped beach.

It wasn’t that we had an
awful
time in Rarotonga. We just didn’t find what we were looking for there. Part of the problem was that we didn’t know what we were looking for, other than that we wanted to feel good. Our problems, which we assumed were caused by living in Los Angeles, had taken the plane ride with us. It turned out that
we
were the problem. Moving to a so-called paradise couldn’t change things.

In some ways, our life on the island was even poorer than it had been in Los Angeles. We had a hard time making friends because the people who lived there were, understandably, not interested—who wants to invest time in forging a friendship with transients? So we lacked a social network. That too was something we hadn’t thought about. Since we’d always had friends and family to give us support when we needed it, we hadn’t realized how important a circle of friends could be until we didn’t have one.

Sarina missed her friends and complained about it incessantly. Jane, at three months old, needed constant care, and Carla missed being able to hang out with mothers of kids the same age. It was just the four of us, and at times it became stifling, with Sarina insisting on having Carla and me as her constant playmates.

Our daily routine involved one of us playing with Sarina while the other took care of Jane. When Jane napped, one of us would frantically write for an hour while the other played with Sarina. We felt just as time-deprived and stressed out as we’d been in Los Angeles, if not more so.

Still, some of our experiences on the island did hint at a more rewarding way to live. After we’d settled into a small house near the ocean (a house once lived in by Robert Frisbie’s daughter, Johnny), we enrolled Sarina in a school and, as a result, became friendly with a family on the island. Lori was a Canadian who had met her husband, John, who was half Rarotongan and half Canadian, while he was doing his stint as a Mormon missionary in Canada. They had eight kids and lived across the street from the school, so we often went over to visit at the end of the school day.

One day I saw Lori impale a coconut on a half-inch steel rod sticking out of the ground before husking the fibrous outer coating. I asked if I could try, and she was happy to let me because she needed a lot of coconut meat for her baking that night. Lori showed me how to get leverage by stabbing the coconut husk onto the rod, then rolling it to peel the husk away.

After husking a half dozen, Lori showed me how to crack the coconuts in half by whacking them with the dull side of a machete (what Rarotongans call a “bush knife”). Her seven-year-old daughter, Neomi, was there to catch the coconut water in a pitcher. Next, Lori demonstrated how to use a coconut-scraping bench, a small wooden surface with a blade protruding from one end. She straddled the bench and scraped the meat of a coconut into a white plastic bowl below the blade. I gave it a try and got the hang of it quickly. Sarina wanted to try it, too, so I let her and was surprised to see how easily she took to it.

That evening, when I went to our landlady’s house to pay the rent, I asked her where I could buy a coconut-scraping bench. She told me I would have to go to the junkyard in town and buy a piece of a leaf spring from a broken car, take it to a metal shop to have it forged and get the end serrated, and then take that to a carpenter to have a bench made for it.