Vintage Sacks (14 page)

Looking at Pingelap, thinking of the lofty volcano it once was, sinking infinitesimally slowly for tens of millions of years, I felt an almost tangible sense of the vastness of time, and that our expedition to the South Seas was not only a journey in space, but a journey in time as well.

The sudden wind which had almost blown us off the landing strip was dying down now, although the tops of the palms were still whipping to and fro, and we could still hear the thunder of the surf, pounding the reef in huge rolling breakers. The typhoons which are notorious in this part of the Pacific can be especially devastating to a coral atoll like Pingelap (which is nowhere more than ten feet above sea level)—for the entire island can be inundated, submerged by the huge wind-lashed seas. Typhoon Lengkieki, which swept over Pingelap around 1775, killed 90 percent of the island's population outright, and most of the survivors went on to die a lingering death from starvation—for all the vegetation, even the coconut palms and breadfruit and banana trees, was destroyed, leaving nothing to sustain the islanders but fish.

At the time of the typhoon, Pingelap had a population of nearly a thousand, and had been settled for eight hundred years. It is not known where the original settlers came from, but they brought with them an elaborate hierarchical system ruled by hereditary kings or nahnmwarkis, an oral culture and mythology, and a language which had already differentiated so much by this time that it was hardly intelligible to the “mainlanders” on Pohnpei. This thriving culture was reduced, within a few weeks of the typhoon, to twenty or so survivors, including the nahnmwarki and other members of the royal household.

The Pingelapese are extremely fertile, and within a few decades the population was reapproaching a hundred. But with this heroic breeding—and, of necessity, inbreeding—new problems arose, genetic traits previously rare began to spread, so that in the fourth generation after the typhoon a “new” disease showed itself. The first children with the Pingelap eye disease were born in the 1820s, and within a few generations their numbers had increased to more than five percent of the population, roughly what it remains today.

The mutation for achromatopsia may have arisen among the Carolinians centuries before; but this was a recessive gene, and as long as there was a large enough population the chances of two carriers marrying, and of the condition becoming manifest in their children, were very small. All this altered with the typhoon, and genealogical studies indicate that it was the surviving nahnmwarki himself who was the ultimate progenitor of every subsequent carrier.
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Infants with the eye disease appeared normal at birth, but when two or three months old would start to squint or blink, to screw up their eyes or turn their heads away in the face of bright light; and when they were toddlers it became apparent that they could not see fine detail or small objects at a distance. By the time they reached four or five, it was clear they could not distinguish colors. The term maskun (“not-see”) was coined to describe this strange condition, which occurred with equal frequency in both male and female children, children otherwise normal, bright, and active in all ways.

Today, over two hundred years after the typhoon, a third of the population are carriers of the gene for maskun, and out of some seven hundred islanders, fifty-seven are achromats. Elsewhere in the world, the incidence of achromatopsia is less than one in thirty thousand—here on Pingelap it is one in twelve.

Our ragged procession, tipping and swaying through the forest, with children romping and pigs under our feet, finally arrived at the island's administration building, one of the three or four two-story cinderblock buildings on the island. Here we met and were ceremoniously greeted by the nahnmwarki, the magistrate, and other officials. A Pingelapese woman, Delihda Isaac, acted as interpreter, introducing us all, and then herself—she ran the medical dispensary across the way, where she treated all sorts of injuries and illnesses. A few days earlier, she said, she had delivered a breech baby—a difficult job with no medical equipment to speak of—but both mother and child were doing fine. There is no doctor on Pingelap, but Delihda had been educated off-island and was often assisted by trainees from Pohnpei. Any medical problems which she cannot handle have to wait for the visiting nurse from Pohnpei, who makes her rounds to all the outlying islands once a month. But Delihda, Bob observed, though kind and gentle, was clearly a “real force to be reckoned with.”

She took us on a brief tour of the administration building—many of the rooms were deserted and empty, and the old kerosene generator designed to light it looked as if it had been out of action for years.
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As dusk fell, Delihda led the way to the magistrate's house, where we would be quartered. There were no streetlights, no lights anywhere, and the darkness seemed to gather and fall very rapidly. Inside the house, made of concrete blocks, it was dark and small and stiflingly hot, a sweatbox, even after nightfall. But it had a charming outdoor terrace, over which arched a gigantic breadfruit tree and a banana tree. There were two bedrooms—Knut took the magistrate's room below, Bob and I the children's room above. We gazed at each other fearfully—both insomniacs, both heat intolerant, both restless night readers—and wondered how we would survive the long nights, unable even to distract ourselves by reading.

I tossed and turned all night, kept awake in part by the heat and humidity; in part by a strange visual excitement such as I am sometimes prone to, especially at the start of a migraine—endlessly moving vistas of breadfruit trees and bananas on the darkened ceiling; and, not least, by a sense of intoxication and delight that now, finally, I had arrived on the island of the colorblind.

None of us slept well that night. We gathered, tousled, on the terrace at dawn, and decided to reconnoiter a bit. I took my notebook and made brief notes as we walked (though the ink tended to smudge in the wet air):

Six o'clock in the morning, and though the air is blood-hot, sapping, doldrum-still, the island is already alive with activity—pigs squealing, scampering through the undergrowth; smells of fish and taro cooking; repairing the roofs of houses with palm fronds and banana leaves as Pingelap prepares itself for a new day. Three men are working on a canoe—a lovely traditional shape, sawn and shaved from a single massive tree trunk, using materials and methods which have not changed in a thousand or more years. Bob and Knut are fascinated by the boat building, and watch it closely, contentedly. Knut's attention is also drawn to the other side of the road, to the graves and altars beside some of the houses. There is no communal burial, no graveyard, in Pingelap, only this cozy burying of the dead next to their houses, so that they still remain, almost palpably, part of the family. There are strings, like clotheslines, hung around the graves, upon which gaily colored and patterned pieces of cloth have been hung—perhaps to keep demons away, perhaps just for decoration; I am not sure, but they seem festive in spirit.

My own attention is riveted by the enormous density of vegetation all around us, so much denser than any temperate forest, and a brilliant yellow lichen on some of the trees. I nibble at it—many lichens are edible—but it is bitter and unpromising.

Everywhere we saw breadfruit trees—sometimes whole groves of them, with their large, deeply lobed leaves; they were heavy with the giant fruits which Dampier, three hundred years ago, had likened to loaves of bread. I had never seen trees so generous of themselves—they were very easy to grow, James had said, and each tree might yield a hundred massive fruits a year, more than enough to sustain a man. A single tree would bear fruit for fifty years or more, and then its fine wood could be used for lumber, especially for building the hulls of canoes.

Down by the reef, dozens of children were already swimming, some of them toddlers, barely able to walk, but plunging fearlessly into the water, among the sharp corals, shouting with excitement. I saw two or three achromatopic kids diving and romping and yelling with the rest—they did not seem isolated or set apart, at least at this stage of their lives, and since it was still very early, and the sky was overcast, they were not blinded as they would be later in the day. Some of the larger children had tied the rubber soles of old sandals to their hands, and had developed a remarkably swift dog paddle using these. Others dived to the bottom, which was thick with huge, tumid sea cucumbers, and used these to squeeze jets of water at each other. . . . I am fond of holothurians, and I hoped they would survive.

I waded into the water, and started diving for sea cucumbers myself. At one time, I had read, there had been a brisk trade exporting sea cucumbers to Malaya, China, and Japan, where they are highly esteemed as trepang or bêche-de-mer or namako. I myself love a good sea cucumber on occasion—they have a tough gelatinousness, an animal cellulose in their tissues, which I find most appealing. Carrying one back to the beach, I asked James whether the Pingelapese ate them much. “We eat them,” he said, “but they are tough and need a lot of cooking—though this one,” he pointed to the
Stichopus
I had dredged up, “you can eat raw.” I sank my teeth into it, wonder if he was joking; I found it impossible to get through the leathery integument—it was like trying to eat an old, weathered shoe.
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After breakfast, we visited a local family, the Edwards. Entis Edward is achromatopic, as are all three of his children, from a babe in arms, who was squinting in the bright sunlight, to a girl of eleven. His wife, Emma, has normal vision, though she evidently is a carrier of the gene. Entis is well educated, with little command of English but a natural eloquence; he is a minister in the Congregationalist Church and a fisherman, a man well respected in the community. But this, his wife told us, was far from the rule. Most of those born with the maskun never learn to read, because they cannot see the teacher's writing on the board; they have less chance of marrying—partly because it is recognized that their children are likelier to be affected, partly because they cannot work outdoors in the bright sunlight, as most of the islanders do.
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Entis was an exception here, on every count, and very conscious of it: “I have been lucky,” he said. “It is not easy for the others.”

Apart from the social problems it causes, Entis does not feel his colorblindness a disability, though he is often disabled by his intolerance of bright light and his inability to see fine detail. Knut nodded as he heard this; he had been deeply attentive to everything Entis said, and identified with him in many ways. He took out his monocular to show Entis—the monocular which is almost like a third eye for him, and always hangs round his neck. Entis's face lit up with delight as, adjusting the focus, he could see, for the first time, boats bobbing on the water, trees on the horizon, the faces of people on the other side of the road, and, focusing right down, the details of the skin whorls on his own fingertips. Impulsively, Knut removed the monocular from around his neck, and presented it to Entis. Entis, clearly moved, said nothing, but his wife went into the house and came out bearing a beautiful necklace she had made, a triple chain of matched cowrie shells, the most precious thing the family had, and this she solemnly presented to Knut, while Entis looked on.

Knut himself was now disabled, without his monocular—“It is like giving half my eye to him, because it is necessary to my vision”—but deeply happy. “It will make all the difference to him,” he said. “I'll get another one later.”

The following day we saw James, squinting against the sunlight, watching a group of teenagers playing basketball. As our interpreter and guide, he had seemed cheerful, sociable, knowledgeable, very much part of the community—but now, for the first time, he seemed quiet, wistful, and rather solitary and sad. We got to talking, and more of his story emerged. Life and school had been difficult for him, as for the other achromatopes on Pingelap—unshielded sunlight was literally blinding for him, and he could hardly go out into it without a dark cloth over his eyes. He could not join the rough-and-tumble, the open-air games the other children enjoyed. His acuity was very poor, and he could not see any of the schoolbooks unless he held them three inches from his eyes. Nonetheless he was exceptionally intelligent and resourceful, and he learned to read early, and loved reading, despite this handicap. Like Delihda, he had gone to Pohnpei for further schooling (Pingelap itself has a small elementary school, but not secondary education). Clever, ambitious, aspiring to a larger life, James went on to get a scholarship to the University of Guam, spent five years there, and got a degree in sociology. He had returned to Pingelap full of brave ideas: to help the islanders market their wares more efficiently, to obtain better medical services and child care, to bring electricity and running water into every house, to improve standards of education, to bring a new political consciousness and pride to the island, and to make sure that every islander—the achromatopes especially—would get as a birthright the literacy and education he had had to struggle so hard to achieve.

None of this had panned out—he encountered an enormous inertia and resistance to change, a lack of ambition, a laissez-faire, and gradually he himself had ceased to strive. He could find no job on Pingelap appropriate to his education or talents, because Pingelap, with its subsistence economy,
has
no jobs, apart from those of the health worker, the magistrate, and a couple of teachers. And now, with his university accent, his new manners and outlook, James no longer completely belonged to the small world he had left, and found himself set apart, an outsider.

We had seen a beautifully patterned mat outside the Edwards' house, and now noticed similar ones everywhere, in front of the traditional thatched houses, and equally the newer ones, made of concrete blocks with corrugated aluminum roofs. The weaving of these mats was a craft unchanged from “the time before time,” James told us; the traditional fibers, made from palm fronds, were still used (although the traditional vegetable dyes had been replaced by an inky blue obtained from surplus carbon paper, for which the islanders otherwise had little need). The island's finest weaver was a colorblind woman, who had learned the craft from her mother, who was also colorblind. James took us to meet her; she was doing her intricate work inside a hut so dark we could hardly see anything after the bright sunlight. (Knut, on the othe hand, took off his double sunglasses and said it was, visually, the most comfortable place he had yet encountered on the island.) As we adapted to the darkness, we began to see her special art of brightnesses, delicate patterns of differing luminances, patterns that all but disappeared as soon as we took one of her mats into the sunlight outside.