Easter Island (4 page)

With a shake of her head, she now said, “No. No vertigo. Excitement.
Emoción. Sí?”

“Ah, sí. Emoción.”

Then Greer turned from him.

Excitement—that was what she was feeling. This was her first fieldwork in years. For months she’d been researching this island, writing letter after letter to arrange accommodations and lab space, packing equipment. She’d always wanted to study an island ecosystem but hadn’t been sure she would, in the end, actually go. The preparations were such a useful diversion from life, from thoughts of Thomas, she began to fear it was their only purpose. But the day before, when her alarm rang, she had gotten out of bed, sealed her duffels, locked all the windows and doors, unplugged the appliances, turned the heat down—when that was done she double-checked everything to keep herself in motion—and finally stepped into the taxi, not looking back at the quiet house she was leaving behind. Now here she was, seven thousand miles from home, thirty-three, and alone. No one was depending on her. She was, for the first time in years, and in a way that felt almost frightening, free.

Greer pressed her forehead to the plane window, which framed, like a giant ocular, the long-awaited specimen of basalt. A mass of cumulus clouds hung just beyond its southern tip. Must be downwind, thought Greer. The warm air rising from the island is blown toward the sea, where it condenses. This was how the Polynesians had found their islands, settling every habitable landfall over eleven and a half million square miles of ocean a century before European explorers even thought to raise their sails. New Zealand was known as Aotearoa—“land of the long white cloud”—before the slender hulls of Polynesian canoes had reached its sands. Wouldn’t it have looked to them, Greer thought, as though the cloud had given birth to land? Even in research it was easy to confuse cause and effect, to see the cloud first and think the land below was its shadow. The cloud, though, was the real shadow, a white silhouette, the island’s ghost hovering above its igneous twin.

Greer could now see the whole of Easter Island—the southeastern vertex of the triangle of islands known as Polynesia. The island was itself an isosceles triangle, buckling inward at its three midpoints. In each corner there was an extinct volcano, bulbous and perfectly round, and dozens of smaller craters pocked the landscape. The island was oceanic, its raggedness the relic of an ancient deep-sea eruption. Leagues below, a fifty-four-hundred-mile scar stretched across the ocean floor; the East Pacific Rise, a volcanic mountain range, ran parallel to the western coast of South America, its occasional magmatic bleeding leaving well-known volcanic scabs: the Galápagos, the Society Islands, the Marquesas. Some two million years earlier, one of its volcanoes erupted and left another lifeless heap of cooled lava: Easter Island.

Easter was the ideal controlled experiment—this was what intrigued Greer. Never linked to a continent, the island had needed to wait patiently for flora and fauna to be carried to it by wind or ocean currents, and by a few determined birds whose feathers had swaddled seeds. Continental islands, like Bali and Tasmania, had been brimming with lemurs and mammoths and marsupials when the seas rose, and they were set adrift like overcrowded arks. But oceanic islands were tabulae rasae, naturalists’ favorites. The Malay Archipelago had lured Wallace; the Galápagos, Darwin. But Easter made an even better subject. Fifteen hundred miles from another landmass, it would have taken thousands of years for plant life to reach its shores, far longer for Homo sapiens. This time spread meant the number of outside influences, the unknowns and extras that made any scientific answers so eternally dubious, could be reduced. Easter Island was, she thought, the perfect microcosm.

Greer thrummed her fingers one last time on the book in her lap and crammed it into her backpack. It pleased her to see her bundle of field gear—notebook, pollen guide, camera. She needed this trip—eight months of solid research. Draping her mind in data had always soothed her. Even as a child, looking into her father’s microscope, she had discovered science was a room your mind could enter, a safe chamber of contemplation in which there was no space for sadness. Later, she came to realize it was a matter of scale. The minuscule—pollen grains—and the massive—geological time, the motion of epochs—made the day-to-day, made even the months and years of simple, human-size disappointments, seem trivial. Science had become, over the years, the blanket she reached for when she felt a chill from life.

And with her husband’s death, a deep chill had settled within her. As she moved through the house in Marblehead, packing up Thomas’s belongings, everything she touched—old photographs, his flannel shirts, his notebooks—dizzied her with memory and regret. When she couldn’t bear to see his things, or their things, she sat on the porch for hours, watching the ocean. When winter came, she retreated to the basement lab, listlessly reading old data logs, examining new pollen collections. If she left the house, it was usually for a slow walk through Harvard’s herbarium or the Peabody Museum.

The idea of this trip, though, had finally begun to pull her from her malaise. The arrangements kept her busy, kept her in contact with the outside world. For months, Easter Island had loomed before her as a goal, something, in the bewilderment of her grief, to look forward to. And here, finally, she was.

The plane nosed down now, and around her passengers clasped their armrests and checked their seat belts. But for Greer it was getting on the plane that had tried her nerves; arriving was easy. She simply tucked her hair behind her ears and pulled some chewing gum from her pocket.

The plane’s wheels gripped the asphalt and the machine steadied itself as silence filled the cabin. Through the window, Greer watched the twin propellers slow, the silver blades revealing their true shapes: swirling steel samaras, iron descendants of the winged maple seeds she’d watched as a child spin to the ground. So few viable shapes, she thought. The winged seed of the Asian climbing gourd (
Alsomitra macrocarp
) had inspired early aircraft and glider design. Milkweeds (Asclepiadaceae) and western salsify (
Tragopogon dubius
) could drift across entire valleys with their feathery umbrellas. Greer had always liked to imagine the awe of the first humans to see these seeds. How long, she thought, before envy arose, before someone wondered: Could
I
do that?

The plane gently came to a halt. A brief applause swept the cabin, and immediately the passengers around her stood. They clutched their purses and straw bags, and something—an elbow? briefcase?—knocked the back of Greer’s head. “
Perdón, perdón
” drifted forward. Despite her excitement, after nine hours of sitting patiently, it seemed absurd to hurry. Greer remained seated, letting the rest of the plane depart before her. When she reached the exit, the impeccably groomed stewardess beamed at her. “
Buen viaje!
Enjoy your visit!” she said, her tone arrestingly cheerful. Greer couldn’t help but wonder what this woman did on bad days, how difficult it would be to smile like that in the midst of a divorce, after a lump had been discovered, or after your husband of eight years had died.

Greer was the last of the travelers to spill down the portable steps into the warm air of the tarmac. Before her spread a squat one-story building marked
AEROPUERTO MATAVERI
and below that
Iorana, Bienvenido, Welcome, Wilkommen.
A Chilean flag flapped from a tall pole. This was the smallest airport she’d ever seen, but the island was only about twice Manhattan’s size, and mostly uninhabited. She’d been told any correspondence, though she expected little, could simply be addressed: Dr. Greer Farraday, Correo Isla de Pascua. The Lan Chile flight arrived only once a week, and that, she knew, had started just a few years earlier. Nineteen sixty-seven—the same year MacArthur and Wilson published
The Theory of Island Biogeography,
the monograph that had been a turning point for her own work. Greer recalled sitting at the kitchen table and noticing an ad in the
Globe
’s travel section for Lan Chile’s Santiago–Rapa Nui–Tahiti line. How perfect it seemed. Island biogeography, a fledgling theory about distribution and speciation on isolated landmasses, and Easter Island, the world’s most remote island. But at that time, she was working in Thomas’s lab. And Thomas’s enthusiasm for an Easter Island study was tempered, as was all his enthusiasm, by anxieties about his magnolia research. There was no chance of Greer getting funds to go alone, so she stayed in Cambridge.

The door of the cargo bay hung open, and a man in coveralls was tugging out the long box with her Livingston corer, struggling with the uneven weight of the six-foot steel rod and piston. Greer walked over to help—she’d carried that corer often enough, and couldn’t risk having it damaged—but as she approached, the man signaled her with an insulted shake of the head that he had things under control. Greer nodded, then shifted her attention to the crates beyond her corer: the ones marked
EXTREMELY FRAGILE
in which she had carefully packed her microscope, her slide mounts, beakers, and her centrifuge. Another marked
TOXIC
(
YES
,
ONE WHIFF CAN KILL YOU
)
CHEMICALS
pasted with skull-and-crossbones stickers held her jars of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids. She’d brought everything she would need to take core samples and analyze data—it was impossible to obtain scientific instruments on the island. Flanking her box of chemicals was a canvas sack bulging with letters—the island’s mail delivery, she assumed. Past that, another crate, with
PORTALES
stamped on all sides. Portales—the name stirred a vague memory, but one she couldn’t place. Greer thought it best not to hover and moved slowly toward the terminal.

The building was cool and dim after the bright sunlight. Most of her fellow passengers had left. A plump woman, hair pulled in a loose and slightly graying bun, held a sign that read
FARRADAY
and stared determinedly beyond Greer, out onto the tarmac. Her eyes were large and wide set, her nose broad, her cheeks full, slightly weathered by the sun—a face distinctly Polynesian. A white dress clung to the supple curves of her body, flaring at the knees, lending her a distinctly feminine grace, and she stood with one foot tucked behind the other as though at any moment she might curtsy. Around her neck hung a garland of white hibiscus. Family: Malvaceae, thought Greer. Species:
Hibiscus moscheutos.

“Residencial Ao Popohanga?” Greer asked.

A look of apology softened the woman’s face. She had the solidity of one who had seen sons, husbands, whole nations, fall, but the gentleness of one who feared admitting the milk was finished, or that the cookie jar was empty. “
Sí, sí.
Residencial Ao Popohanga. But no more rooms. Maybe Residencial Rapa Nui. Or Hotel Pascua. They have a table for the Ping-Pong. Very very nice.”

“I believe I already have a room.” She extended her hand. “Doctor Greer Farraday.”

“Greer? Greer? Doctor?
Una mujer?
Ahh.”

“Yes, I’m a woman,” said Greer with a slight smile, trying to hide the frustration this moment still produced in her.

The woman’s hand rose to her cheek. “I not know!
Doctora.
Mujer
. It is good. It is very good. Very American, yes?” At this, the woman beamed, lifted the hibiscus garland from her neck, and laid it over Greer’s head. She kissed Greer on both cheeks. The smell of gardenia and coconut oil lingered about her. “I am Mahina Huke Tima.
Iorana
.”

“Iorana?”

“It is hello and good-bye in the Rapa Nui language.”

“Well, hello for now,” said Greer.

“Yes, hello for now,” repeated Mahina, her hand resting gently on Greer’s shoulder. “Very very hello.”

The Jeep wound slowly along a red dirt path, kicking up light chunks of volcanic rock, red dust rising like vapor from its wheels. Each time the Jeep approached a figure on horseback, Mahina, now wearing a wide straw hat, tapped the horn and called out a greeting. She seemed reluctant to clasp the steering wheel, her fingers dangling like tentacles. A few times, as she shifted gears, the Jeep bucked. A woman who has learned to drive late in life, thought Greer.

“How many cars on the island?” asked Greer. “
Cuántos autos en la isla?
”

“Solamente un automóvil,”
said Mahina. “For the mayor. Others have Jeeps, like this, but not many. This Jeep, not mine. It belongs to my brother-in-law. I ride the horse. You ride the horse?”

“Sí,”
said Greer. But her Spanish was better for questions than answers. “Not for many years. But they say it comes back.”

“Yes, yes. And you drive the car?”

“Yes,” said Greer.

“The woman is
doctora.
And the woman drive the car! Very good. And how many hours you are on the plane?”

“Almost ten,” said Greer. “
Diez
. From Santiago. Another thirteen or so from New York. One more from Boston.”

“
Veinticuatro!
So much time on the airplane!”

A strong wind rose up and Greer fastened her hair into a lumpy ponytail. She had meant to cut her hair before the trip—the island would be hot in February—but had forgotten, and it now hung well below her shoulders, tousled and unwieldy. She glanced in the sideview mirror: Her narrow face was pale from winter, tired from travel, but she saw the same high forehead, the familiar dark eyebrows. It was odd—nothing in her expression revealed the sadness of the past year. No sign of what her husband had done, that she’d been recently widowed. She appeared young, healthy, a bit disheveled, but basically composed, not at all like someone trying to start a new life.

Greer looked toward the coast, where the water shimmered in the light, a sharp contrast to the dull landscape. Even though she’d read about the island’s depleted biota, the terrain’s visible starkness surprised her. Only bleached grass—family Gramineae, that dogged monocot—had made its way across the land.