Surviving Paradise (32 page)

I followed the men on their expeditions, or just sat in camp and watched them return with yet another kind of plant or animal. If it wasn't crabs, it was seabirds; if it wasn't seabirds, it was little yellow fish, shiny green fish, or coconut seedlings. They fried the fish on
corrugated tin, husked the sprouted coconuts, dunked the crabs in boiling water, and then cracked the hard shells open with rocks. Soon the grounds of Elmi's camp had transformed into a savage smorgasbord, complete with jagged crab shells, half-eaten fish, and the plucked black carcasses of birds.

Joja offered to show me the ocean side of the island. (I hardly needed a guide to take me three hundred yards, but his company was nonetheless welcome.) As we reached the other shore, I remembered all the qualities I loved about this part of a coral islet. The waves here dashed themselves on the jagged red rocks that marked the edge of the reef. For a moment, after the crest of the wave had begun to double over but before it had broken, the wave was a glorious blue, and I could see straight through it to the coralscape on which it broke. Smaller wavelets reached the shore, and as they withdrew from the gravelly beach they made the crisp, sifting sound of a sleeping person drawing in her breath.

It did not take a geologist to see the island's origin etched clearly into the surface of each and every rock on the shore. Some were pockmarked, others covered with circles, still others lined and sharp. The rocks, each and every one of them, were dead, petrified coral. In fact, the entire island—and the entire country—was nothing more than this. Like every coral atoll, Ujae Atoll was what remained when a large volcanic island eroded into nothingness over tens of millions of years. While the dead island shrank and became a lagoon, the living reef around it held fast. Eventually, only the ring of coral remained, tracing the edges of the now vanished island. Dead coral became limestone, and here and there it accumulated and broke the surface, making an islet like the one I was standing on.

(Elsewhere in the world, other tropical archipelagoes are at different stages in the same process: the Hawaiian Islands are young and not yet eroded; middle-aged Bora Bora is half eaten away, with its reef far removed from its shores; and death's-door Aitutaki is very creatively called an
almost atoll
—the island is nearly gone, with only the encircling reef left to indicate its former size.)

Every iota of the Marshall Islands was thus born as a living creature. I was walking on skeletons, surrounded by growing flesh. The dead rock of the original volcanic island had long since vanished,
but its halo of coral had remained, precisely because it was alive and growing. For seventy million years, the atoll had been assaulted on every side by violent breakers, but the great coral monument had always won. I hoped that, somehow, that would always be so. I knew full well it might not.

Some coral rocks had only recently died and washed up on the shore intact. Joja pointed out one specimen that was black and looked like a small, wiry tree. It seemed fragile, but Joja convinced me I could do almost anything to it and it would not break, so I crushed the supple coral into a ball and watched as it sprung back unharmed into its original shape. Other things had found their final resting place on the beach: bottles, rugs, but above all flip-fop soles—dozens upon dozens of them, because that's what everyone wore. Elsewhere in the country people had discovered cocaine hidden in beached buoys. When a drug-trafficking ship was caught during its run, the crew would jettison the cargo, and the contraband would end up on some unsuspecting island. According to legend, Ujae was in
kapin meto
, the “bottom of the ocean,” where detritus and demons alike washed up to shore.

At noon, the men prepared the boat and we left, driving to a section of reef where Elmi had promised to find a giant clam. The best spot, he said, was next to the channel, where the inflow of ocean water created a powerful current. When I splashed into the water to watch Elmi's clam hunt, I quickly exhausted myself fighting the current, even with my swimming flippers. I was not pleased to remember that this area was as famous for its sharks as it was for its giant clams. Meanwhile, Elmi, so much more skillful than myself, was moving effortlessly against the push of the water, kicking off with impervious bare feet from one sharp coralhead to another.

He fulfilled his promise. He found a giant clam, though it was nowhere near the twelve-foot monstrosity Randall had described before I left. The hundred-strong shark armadas and elephantine eels had also failed to materialize. It was clear that Randall had a very tenuous grasp of measurement, if not reality. Remembering the other descriptions of this Lost World, not to mention the previous volunteer's godlike skills, it dawned on me that exaggeration was a habit among local men.

Nonetheless, the giant clam lived up to its rather descriptive name.
Although it was a fifth of the size it was in Randall's imagination, it was also ten times the size of any clam I had seen before. At two and half feet across and a foot wide, it was far too heavy for Elmi to lift, and its shell was so dense and hard that the ancient Marshallese had made adze blades out of it. Elmi cut out the inner meat with a machete and left the monstrous shell where it was. He dropped the meat onto the boat, and a stranger object I have never seen. It was a multicolored gelatinous mass, fringed with wrinkled folds and surrounding a core of alien organs. If I hadn't known what it was, I would have guessed it was an extraterrestrial embryo. Also, from the size of it, I could tell I was going to be eating it for the next few weeks. (It turned out to taste exactly like clam, albeit in chunks as large as pancakes.)

Then Joja spied a sea turtle. Its head broke the surface a hundred yards from the boat, and suddenly we were chasing it. I waited for the men to impress me with some ancient, ingenious trick for catching the three-hundred-pound beast. But they just jumped into the water and tried to grab the animal with their hands. The turtle swam into the open ocean before they could subdue it.

We spent the rest of the day island-hopping, treating the atoll like a grocery store with no price tags. Staying dry on this expedition was simply not an option. I was deluged with rain, soaked with sweat, blown with ocean spray, swimming in salt water, bushwhacking through wet undergrowth, sitting in a half-inch puddle of water (or worse) in the boat, and the humidity was always around 80 percent. The thrill of adventure alternated with fantasies of putting on dry socks.

We headed along the eastern edge of the atoll. At Alle Island, the men collected clams on the spectacular coral reef—not giant clams, but the medium-sized clams that lived embedded in the coral. The animal inside the shell was a brilliant turquoise or golden brown, and the psychedelic colors made this species a favorite in aquariums. Their Marshallese name,
mejanwod
, meant “eye of the coral.” As I looked at the blue or brown slit of flesh peering out of the coral, opening when safe and closing when threatened, I could understand how the species earned its name.

Next stop was Bik, an island as beautiful as its name was boring. (To the Marshallese ear it was even worse:
bik
was very close to the word for “sperm,” which the guys were only too happy to point out.) The
shoreline sands, at six feet high, were towering cliffs in this country, and from the top of them I gazed upon an extraordinary progression from white sand to auburn rock to bright shallows to dark lagoon.

One island remained on our whirlwind tour. Ebeju was a postcard-perfect islet with a haunted cemetery, buried treasure, and a host of colorful tales, one of them involving a woman having an affair with an eel. It was also the legendary home of
jebwa
dancing, as the elder Nitwa had explained to me.

Though the island was now uninhabited, Elmi had grown up here with his parents, siblings, and a few other families. He recalled the lifestyle with fondness. “Life was better there. There was no one to bother you. On Ujae, people always bother each other and talk behind each other's backs. But here you can be alone and peaceful.” The other men agreed that it was unfortunate that everyone had left the remote islands of Ujae Atoll and moved to Ujae Island. Too many people now called it home, and village harmony had suffered for it. They mentioned that one family had built a second home on the deserted ocean beach of Ujae, and they considered this their “vacation home.” No matter that it was a five-minute walk from their primary home. When they felt the need to get away from the micropolitics of village life, they would hike those five hundred yards and arrive at their very own fortress of solitude.

Elmi gave me a rundown of Ebeju's lore. There was an old graveyard that only a select few could visit without arousing the anger of the spirits. Elmi said that as a one-time inhabitant of this island, he could visit the cemetery, but I absolutely could not. I promised Elmi that I wouldn't.

He told me another tale. During World War II, two Japanese soldiers had given Elmi's grandparents a large stash of gold. They buried it for safekeeping, but died before telling anyone where it was hidden.

We landed on the smooth beach. I began to see why many of the islanders considered this the most desirable of all the atoll's islands. The beach was entirely free of rocks, and the lagoon floor sloped gracefully down from the shore. Ten feet out, the water was deep enough to accommodate large coral formations and their fish populations, which could be caught by line from the beach. Elsewhere on Ebeju, the lagoon was sandy and free of coral, making ideal spots for
swimming and bathing, and the deep water made it easy to approach the island in a boat.

Lisson said he would show me where the
jebwa
legend had taken place, so we set out into the jungle. He pointed to a small hole in the ground: this was the well where the handsome spirit had appeared before disrupting the
jebwa
dancing. Then he pointed to a five-foot hill: this was the
jebwa
“mountain,” where the villagers' drumming had gone out of tempo. There were not many countries where a small hole and a five-foot hill could achieve the status of a monument. But in this flat world, the smallest variations became noticeable; the most minute contrasts seemed dramatic. Each Marshallese islet had once looked to me like just another homogeneous slice of paradise. Now they were as distinct to me as people.

By the time we left Ebeju, the boat was full to overflowing with fifty enormous crabs, forty lobsters, five giant clams, a hundred small clams, dozens of fish, scores of coconut seedlings, assorted gear, and five cramped passengers. Everywhere there was something you didn't want to put your feet on: a live crab, a heap of clam innards, a half-eaten fish, your friend's head, or a pool of fish blood and lobster entrails.

We passed Ruot, the only island on Ujae Atoll that I never set foot on. I was glad for this. I wanted one place to remain unknown—not just one unvisited island in Ujae Atoll, but one uncharted region of the world. I had always had the desperate sense that the unmapped was a species nearing extinction, that exploration killed the very mystery that inspired it. I had thought that solving the mystery was what sustained me, but now I realized that it was the mystery itself that had done so. I fantasized about establishing a “mystery reserve”: an international park for the unknown, protected not just from development but from exploration, too. It would sit there, distant and unknowable, and we would dream about it.

It had been a glorious day. Islands and water had taken turns framing each other. Of all the myths of tropical paradise I had been deconstructing in my mind since arriving on Ujae, the cliché of beauty was not one of them. No color enhancement had been applied to the photographs I had seen. Everything really did burn that brightly. In the tropics, all of nature's Technicolor tricks converged: colorful animals, lush plant life, clear water, vivid sunsets, blinding
daylight. I couldn't help but wonder, riding back from the splendor of those islands, whether there was some reason why this part of the world had been made so violently gorgeous.

Then the engine broke.

I learned a new word that day:
pelok
, to drift aimlessly. That was what the boat was now doing, five miles from Ujae Island, as Fredlee labored in vain to restart the engine. Then I remembered the CB radio that my wise friends had brought with them for just such a situation. I suddenly found that I no longer resented that bit of encroaching Western technology. But for a moment, I let myself wonder what they would have done without it. Perhaps they would have fashioned makeshift paddles and rowed to the shallow reef, then pushed the boat back to Ujae. Perhaps they would have reached the shipwrecked Japanese fishing boat, cooked dinner, called it a night, and waited until morning for a rescue party. Perhaps they would have rigged a sail out of their jackets and let the wind take us home. They could probably have swum back to Ujae, if need be. After seeing these men slip so easily into their old hunter-gatherer selves, so effortlessly inhabiting the wilderness of Ujae's remote islets, I had complete confidence that they would have resolved the situation—calmly, skillfully, even cheerfully.

Fredlee called the CB radio's twin on Ujae. Half an hour later, Ujae's other motorboat appeared in the distance with the minister at the controls. He shifted easily from his everyday ecclesiastic duties to this impromptu rescue mission. His job was salvation, after all, and as usual the service was performed with a smile.