I awake in total exhaustion and lie for a long time
looking up at the slate gray sky. Moira is rocking slightly. I am morose, miserable, mad.
Freddy has her pillow over her head and seems to be asleep. I stagger into the forward
cabin, put on the coffee water and go to see the world. It matches my mood exactly. Dreams hassled me all night long. Whenever they woke me I kept feeling this
voice saying move, move, move. Today we will move. Anywhere.
Freddy gets up and fixes some liver pate on toast. "Lets go
over there behind that other island," I blurt out over breakfast. "Investigate
possibilities."
"Sure."
"I think the wind is more southeast today."
"Yeah."
I gulp down breakfast. "Come on, lets go."
"What's the hurry?" She looks hassled, peeved at my bouncy
need to go.
On goes the motor. Down comes the awning. Up comes the anchor. Voice
is ecstatically happy and with each act of moving I feel better and better.
"Which way?" Freddy calls from the helm.
"Over there, towards the pass and those three islands," I
go aft to check the chart.
"Why not over there? Or back to the anchorage on the big
island?"
"No, no. Over there. We go over by those islands." I am
confident and happy. That's where we go.
"Where the bullets are and there's no shallow water to anchor
in?" she snaps.
"Right!" Her smart-assed remark comes across as a
criticism of my choice. But I know if I ask her where SHE wants to go it will be,
"Where ever you want." I resolve not to play that stupid game. We motor towards
the pass for about five minutes in silence.
"You have any better ideas?" I finally snap, playing out
the game.
"We go where ever you want."
I climb into the rigging, looking for coral heads as Freddy steers
for the pass. It's blowing 25 knots from the SE and there's a fair chop by the time we
reach the pass. It's all very picturesque. Deep blue clear water threads through the
turquoise shallows edged by golden brown reefs and, in the distance, great rugged breakers
of white foam. To starboard the island is a deep rich jungle green with black rock cliffs.
We round the southern tip of the island and slide into its lee.
Bullets of wind, funneled by the jagged peaks of the mountain, whip across the deep blue
bay which cuddles in the curve of the island.
"What's the depth?" I call from the rigging.
"105 feet." Her voice holds that "told you so" smugness as another bullet blasts us.
"let's head down toward that last bay. By that little high
island." The little high island holds my attention. Something about it. An odd shaped
mound. The bay just this side of it looks promising. Moira swings to point at the center
of the little island. Everything is exquisitely beautiful, including my mood.
Inner voice is hopping up and down with delight. Satisfied. THIS is
where we were supposed to move to. Yes.
The reefs drop right down from about 2 feet deep to 100 feet. No
problem, we'll just anchor in deep water. I shuffle back and forth along the narrow rail
up by the first spreaders. I feel excited. Beautiful. Looks good.
"Come to starboard," I holler and Moira noses slowly into
the last bay. Yes, yes, this looks right. Just a little more. I look around and it seems
as if we are just coming into the right position. As if the scene around me now is one
preset in my head, and the pieces are lining up just right. I clamber down the ratlines
and run forward. The anchor plunges into the clear water with a burst of foam and the
rattle of unfurling chain. I signal Freddy to back up to set the anchor. I let all the
anchor chain run out. It needs cleaning and reflakeing anyway.
Freddy reverses until the chain comes tight. The anchor never budges
in the soft ooze 100 feet down. We shut down the engine and the world is soft and quiet. I
look up at the small island. "It is so beautiful."
"Yes," Freddy agrees.
"Hey, this is great. We could get lots of good shots here.
Fantastic, background for This Magic Sea. Let's go check out the small island."
Quickly, in a real hurry, we set off in the dingy. At the last
minute, just as we cast off, Walter Cat leaps into the Avon.
"He wants to come along." Walter presses against Freddy's
leg, insistent about coming.
"Christ, he's never done that before," I look at Walter
and he says, with his eyes, he IS coming along.
"I'll look after him," Freddy promises. "We'll stay
on the beach - if there is one."
We set off, the three of us, to see the little island. It is almost
as high as it is wide, the sides rising steeply to a rounded top. It is about 100 meters
from stem to stern. A jungle of plants covers the whole island except in a few places
where black rocks peek through like the glimpse of a thigh up a woman's skirt. The closer
we get the more excited I become. My eyes dart here and there, finding small areas of
perfectly arranged photo settings. "Look at those rocks and those light green orchids
just there along the coastline," I point them out to Freddy. Walter Cat has his front
paws up on the tube of the Avon looking just where I am pointing, too.
"Oh, wow, it's magnificent!" Freddy is as excited as I am.
"A real uninhabited, natural paradise island," we grin at
each other and Walter turns and gives us an eye-squeeze (his way of smiling).
We round the westerly point, a soft, golden beach appears nestled
against a jet black wall of giant boulders.
"DAMN!"
"What?" Freddy turns to look at me.
"LOOK!" She looks. "There. A flight of stairs going
up the side of the island towards the top." They are cut into the sharp rock wall.
I circle in towards the beach, feeling robbed of my strange tropical
paradise. There is nothing wrong with people living here, but... "The rock and cement
stairs must mean there is a European's house up there. No local person would build a
flight of cement stairs like that." From the size and number of steps the builder
must be really wealthy.
"Maybe they don't come here during the week," Freddy looks
disappointed, too.
"Yeah, maybe." We anchor close to the beach. It is so
beautiful I ache at the thought of having anyone else here. Like the island was mine - no
- like the island was - sacred, a magic place. A power point of Earth. Special. People
living here violate her beauty.
Freddy jumps out onto the beach with Walter in her arms. She puts
him down on the sand and he walks about with his tail straight up, shaking vertically in
the hilarious way he says he is in the highest state of pleasure.
I wade ashore and the sand is soft, soft, soft. Everywhere I turn my
eyes I see another photograph of natural beauty. As if Mother Earth had made this her
finest design. Each rock, every plant, the sent of the jungle and sea reaches deep inside
me and touches rich and powerful emotions.
Freddy and Walter are confined to this corner of the island. Mostly
because Walter moves about one inch an hour in his total sensory overload. I walk up the
beach and, just under the lee of a big black cliff face are two thatch houses. They look
deserted. I wonder how long it's been since people were here. Inside the first I see a big
swath of red cloth hanging from the rafters. A flower necklace - decayed about 4 or 5
days, lies under it. Tracks of birds and crabs crisscross the sand floor.
Nobody lives here. Maybe they come here on weekends, like Freddy
says. Good. Or maybe these are servant's quarters for the big man on the top of the hill -
only occupied when the big man is in town. Probably a politician.
Freddy, in a pink bathing suit, is down on her hands and knees in
the sand looking for tiny shells for kaleidoscopes. Walter is helping. "Hey, les
petits coquillages!" she calls and starts digging in earnest.
She's found the little coquina clams we love to eat and starts to
collect a bunch of them for dinner. I watch her for a moment and announce, "I'm going
to walk around the island."
I head south, past the stairs to the big man's house, and round a
rock point. The beautiful rocks we saw from the dingy confront me and I stop and stare at
them, drinking in the perplexing wonder of their allure. Just there is a place where, eons
ago, the lava flowed out from a crevice. The mystery is how and why it seems to have
formed such an aesthetically pleasing arrangement. Further on I find another flow of black
glossy lava edge-crisped in deep green and gabled with gnarled roots of trees which look
like carefully arranged bonsai trees. Every place my eyes turn I am confronted with
perfect harmony.
I'm beginning to feel tingly all over. The rocks grow huge and
brown. I step over their sea smoothed surface and look up at the soaring cliffs and trees.
Each aspect is a perfect vision of power and life.
All at once, I can FEEL the
planet's interior under my feet. I visualize
the upwelling volcanic sap forming this tiny
magic island. I think of the mound at Port
Douglas, Queensland. The Aboriginal
Place of Power. The sacred power place.
This is like that, but more so. I am 'singing'
inside, vibrating with the planet, trembling
as I walk. This is one of those special places,
a place of deep power, a mysterious vortex
connecting life with the whole planet. I stop
and close my eyes and my mind reaches right
down into the molten core of Earth.
Around the next rock outcrop a long sand spit leads towards the
larger island like a pointing finger. I walk around entranced with the feeling of naked
rock from the interior of the earth mixed with sunlight and air and sea producing ....
life. Awareness. Nerite shells line up along a rock fissure in the intertidal zone. A
perfect example of the edge phenomenon where life seeks out and clusters along borders.
Photographs, photographs, everywhere I look.
This is the setting. This is why I was so miserable and discontent
at Faioa Island. This is why Voice kept pushing at me to move. I had to come here. Like a
boat caught in a whirlpool I was being drawn here to this place. A feeling of complete
satisfaction - as if I had just had an orgasm with Nature - suffuses me from head to toe
as I step around another rock outcrop and place my foot into the soft sand of the next
cove.
I cry out with the ecstacy. The cove is filled with the heavenly
perfume of jungle flowers in bloom. The sand is powder soft and my feet sink almost to the
ankles into its sun warmed surface. I stop and turn my head back and forth, transfixed by
the mystical beauty of this tiny cove. Fragrant air, cool and sweet, sweeps through me in
great trembling gulps. I hear a small animal sound and realize I am making it.
I move my feet over the sand and onto the next rocks. the sand in
the next cove is cool and rock hard - the contrasts are wonderful, everything perfect. A
big crab lives here. It's stalked eyes follow me as I cross its domain. When I arrive back
at the white beach and see Freddy sitting in the shade of the cliff with Walter Cat I am
exhausted and entering a state of postcoital depression.
"Isn't is fantastic?" Freddy gets up and runs over to me
as I come closer.
"Unbelievable, unreal, marvelous, exquisite," I agree as
she comes into my arms and gives me a big kiss as if I had been gone on a week long trek.
"I guess I'd better get it over with and go see who lives up the stairs."
Freddy walks over to the stairs with me. "Impressive." She
comments.
"Yeah." I walk up them, two at a time, looking for tracks
in the dirt which has settled on the treads during the last rain. Nothing. The land has
been cleared of vegetation for about 10 feet on either side of the cement stairs. Up and
up. Must have been a bitch of an effort to lug all this cement up here and notch the rock
like this. The steps are wide, maybe two meters or more and yet they have a short rise.
Like the owner walks with little steps. But what owner needs a stair step two meters wide?
Hell of a lot of work. Big money. Up and up. I lose count of the steps after I pass 100
and am only half-way to the top. Finally the top comes into view but I can't see over the
sharp edge to get a look at the house. Up and up, I am huffing hard by the time I reach
the last stair and stand looking at the top of the Magic Island.
There is no house. This information puddles in my oxygen deprived
brain - relief - curiosity - wonder. Wonder, because right in the middle of the clearing
on top of the island is a giant cement and stone platform with TONS of beach sand filling
it. This notable achievement is decorated with lovely flowering ornamental plants. Best of
all, a three meter high cement statue of a man painted with silver paint crowns the
platform. The man has sharp, European features with a neatly trimmed cement beard under a
hawksbill beak. He holds a cement staff in one hand. He is wrapped with a cement cape and
draped over the cement cape some considerate soul has tied a faded red cloth flapping in
the wind. `Wallis and Futuna' is stenciled on the cloth.
Spell-bound, but recovering by breath from the climb, I draw closer
to the statue. The Cement Man is looking out over a staggering vista of reefs and sea and
sky and islands. On his shoulder there is a small baby boy - also made of cement - also
suspiciously European looking - who is gloating over a sphere he is holding in his lap.
There is a cross on top of the sphere.
I am impressed. Shocked, even. Imagine lugging this thing up here. I
know I should recognize this man, this boy. I am sure it represents a Christian myth. The
man must be one of the Christian saints. I've seen him before, but I can't think of the
name. Anyway, he's one of the Christian aristocracy. The boy is probably Jesus with his
favorite toy - Planet Earth, dominated by the cross used to nail him into hominid history.
The scenic overlook, unobserved by the cement-vacant eyes of man and
boy, is terrific. I walk back and forth from one part of the platform to another just
drinking it in from all angles.
My mind is awhirl with relief, as if I just discovered my love had
not been violated at all. The island is not inhabited. In fact, whoever had gone to the
enormous effort to slop those cement stairs up that cliff and hoist this multi-ton statue
and its pedestal of sand and stone to the top of this island must feel exactly the same
way about this little island as I do.
The people of Wallis - some of them anyway - recognize the special
power of this place. This redoubles my relief and joy - I am not insane - this is not just
a crazy reaction to a nice place - other hominids have perceived exactly the same
bewildering vortex of power focused in this island. Here, right here, where I stand, next
to the cement saint and the cement Jesus, we are in the center of the eye of a planetary
vortex. I feel it flowing through me like 100,000 volts of ecstacy.
I am on the beach with Freddy and Walter. Numb with wonder. We are
aboard Moira, still numb but also getting hungry for some of those little clams. I write
everything which happened. Walter lies on the settee gently beating the very tip of his
tail to the music - eyes not quite closed. Freddy cleans a small mountain of surf clams
with a toothpick. The clam dinner smelling spicy and good.
"There," she finishes.
"What's the name of that island?" I ask as she gets up.
She looks on the chart. "N-u-k-u-t-a-p-u," she spells out and hands me the
chart. Nuku....tapu. I note all the small islands on the chart of Wallis are called nuku.
It must mean small island. There is Nukuofo, Nukufetau. Nukuaeta is the big one we are
anchored next to. And tapu...Holy Christ! "Tapu, tamboo, tapoo, taboo - Hey. Wow! The
old Polynesian name for the island means the forbidden isle, or the sacred isle."
30 October. It's murder out there. Nukuaeta gives us some shelter
but also compresses the wind into bullets which ricochet off the rigging and whine through
the stalk of over-ripe bananas hanging on the boomkin. Moira sloshes about in the confused
high-tide chop but it's not too bad. The wind is back out of the east south east. Not
going anywhere today, nope, just lay back and take it easy.
As the coffee water heats, I wonder again if maybe we should just
sit tight here in Wallis for the hurricane season. But the dead reefs offer little in the
way of photo opportunities and I would really like to get on with the program. Now that we
have responded to the weird call to come visit Nukutapu the inner urgency to move has
gone. I'm content to wait for a few more days or even weeks, but then we really have to
get going.
On a dareing impulse I add a bit of chocolate to the coffee this
morning. Walter, lying on his back on the deck, lunges for me as I walk by with the
coffee/chocolate and furry paws with just a hint of claws grab my right ankle.
I take the coffee into the cockpit. The sky is heavy with big leaden
coagulated clouds. One of them has an amazing donut shape. Could it be an embryonic
hurricane? Sliding along the uterus of the great ITCZ serpent? I sip my coffee and watch
it sail by, thinking about the approaching hurricane season. Hurricanes actually do form
in the belly of the ITCZ serpent. Mr. Donut cloud really could be an infant hurricane. I
look at it with the binoculars and can see the wall cloud twisting in a king of spiral
motion. It makes me want to get to a more secure anchorage, but there really don't seem to
be any good hurricane holes in Wallis.
Nukutapu is a mysterious velvet green this morning. The trees flash
pale leaf bottoms in the driving wind. I try to decide what the sacred island looks like.
The way you might mentally imprint clouds with animals or people or embryonic hurricanes.
Nothing comes to mind except an excerpt of the book Flowers for Algemon, "What
do you see?"
"An inkblot." "Yes, but try to see something in the
ink." "But there is nothing in the ink except paper." Said Charley.
Nukutapu is just Nukutapu. That island right there with a cement man
and boy looking out over our heads. An island, unique and special. Dressed in velvet
green, edged with black and brown rocks and white sand. She pokes solidly out of Earth's
mantle and sea, ruffled but not disturbed by the 30 knot ESE wind.
I sip my chocolate coffee and think maybe Charley's viewpoint wasn't
without merit. The island is complete without my projecting anything onto it but
recognition.
11 November. Hot diggity damn! It is, at last, a beautiful morning.
Blue sky with a few white puffy summer clouds. The ITCZ must have wandered north or south
of us. Sea is a golden glitter, the wind a soft caress. Wallis Island trickles little
noises through the open hatch - roosters crowing, surf breaking on the outer reef, birds
chirping, little wavelets chuckle Moira's Hull. What a relief. I get up and look ashore.
Some kids in the village are playing skip-rope with a vine. I can hear their voices and
the slap, slap, slap of the vine as it whaps the mud road leading through the little
thatched coastal village. It's a great experience to hear something other than a demented
wind keeping us uncomfortable and half-awake every night.
The last vestiges of a red sky give the scene a rosy illumination so
I get out my camera for an early morning shot. A fisherman paddles out to the reef with a
big monofilament net piled in his canoe. I sit in the cockpit and watch him place his net.
"What happened to the ITCZ monster?" Freddy asks sleepily
as she hands up a cup of freshly brewed New Caledonian Coffee.
"Vanished into thin air," I mutter. Actually, it probably
did. The vision of a giant cloud serpent lying over half of the Pacific Ocean is a fun way
to visualize the phenomenon. It's head poked down into French Polynesia, its tail lashing
the southern Solomon Islands, its body writing in great loops along the tropics.
What a typically human inversion. Weather forecasters perpetuate
this kind of mental inversion. They talk about a hurricane as a low pressure area and then
give the low a name and plot it's course. They talk about a `front' bringing northeast
winds and moving at so many knots towards the east. But really the low pressure zone does
not create the bad weather, it is the result of the movement of great, churning masses of
air.
The Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone is not a thing, but the result
of two ocean-sized swirling membranes of air, one in the northern hemisphere moving
clockwise in a vortex thousands of miles in diameter, the other in the southern hemisphere
sluicing counter-clockwise. Where these come together, they create the turbulent
conditions called the ITCZ. The same principle applies to a front, the boisterous
convergence of vast gyres of swirling gasses.
Fronts and Hurricanes are not things, but focal points of many
different forces interacting with each other. This morning, the two interacting masses of
air happen to flow happily side by side, sliding along from east to west on parallel
courses. And the ITCZ has poofed into non-existence.
But it could materialize back into this reality tomorrow and beat
the stuffings out of us out there.
"Too bad it didn't poof out of here yesterday," Freddy
puts breakfast on the table. "Would have been nice to have this weather when we did
our grand tour of the island."
"Yeah, I would have liked to climb down and investigate the
lake."
"Crater Lake? You nuts? Giselle said there was no way down the
cliffs, and anyway there are monster 20 foot-long blind white vicious eels in the
lake."
"She said that?" I miss a lot when everybody talks in
French. "20-foot long blind white vicious eels? Down in the crater lake? What would
they eat?"
"Crazy American tourists," she pours another cup of
coffee.
Over breakfast I think more about weather systems. It's really a
kind of 'edge phenomenon.' Sometimes, when a certain behavior is formed, it continues
along with a life of its own. Hurricanes are like that. Once they get formed, they
influence the atmosphere and get stronger and bigger, feeding on excess thermal energy,
building themselves into a kind of living thing. Their existence perpetuates their being
and they move out of the belly of the ITCZ as living progeny which sweep down from the
tropics into the higher latitudes. Once formed, they change the conditions of the
atmosphere, bending the masses of air they collide with, behaving just like a furious
living creature.
 The fisherman is still hard at work, swimming along,
arranging the floats, beating the water with a stick to chase fish into his web. I decide
to go over and take some underwater photos of all this energetic Polynesian fishing.
I slide in the water with my camera and flipper over to where the
man is thrashing about. He looks up and waves. I show him the camera. He holds up a string
of fish he has caught. Wow! Unreal! He has three tiny little tropical fishies on his
stringer. He's been out here all morning flopping around, whapping the water, fiddling
with his net, and that's ALL he's got? And he's smiling?
"Richard," I say, pointing to myself.
"Mikale," He taps his chest and beams. Mikale is a big
Wallician, perhaps 35 or 40. His house is at the north end of the village. His canoe is
ready to sink. His net is empty. He's cold. He's happy. I take some photos of him with his
meager catch and look around the reef. No fish. The turquoise tropical lagoon is devoid of
anything even remotely eatable.
"No fish," Mikale observes in French, as he stuffs the net
back in his boat. He wiggles aboard without totally swamping the canoe, and paddles off. I
fin back to Moira.
As I towel off, it occurs to me the formation of hurricanes is a
good analogy to how masses of interacting forces create individual living beings -
creatures which then alter their own local environment to bend conditions towards their
survival. The analogy works even at higher levels of behavior. Economic conditions move
wildly different hominids together - people with completely different backgrounds and
goals. They feed on the excess energy of funds and build a corporation which then becomes
a self-sustaining being, sucking money-power out of the sea of human finance years after
the formative forces have dissipated. Or like governments which form in the low of a
depression and then are impossible to change until they cool into oblivion in the arctic
latitudes. Or like self-starting schools of fish which, once formed, alter the ecology of
the open sea, migrating vast distances and changing even the chemistry of Sea in their
passing. Or like atoms which lock their behavior together to form new kinds of elements or
molecules.
Yeah, hmmm. I ponder the electron as a mini-eye of a hurricane in
the massive matrix of universal forces.
Thump, thump, thump. "Whose there?" Freddy says.
I look out a porthole, "Mikale."
"Mikale who?" She grins, lusting after a snappy reply.
"Hi Mikale," He has a hand of bananas in his banana-sized
fingers. I invite him aboard and Freddy fixes him some tea and a slice of orange cake. His
hands are filthy. In fact he's got dirt everywhere except his big feet which are clean
only because he waded out to his canoe. The garden-calloused fingers carefully crumble off
half a slice of orange cake and he looks at Frederique with a curiously out-of-focus gaze.
I can't understand a thing he says. Eventually he halts his
monologue and puts his mouth in chew.
Freddy explains, "He says there was once a girl here in the
village who came home one day to announce she was no longer a girl. She had changed into a
boy. And it was true. The big event in village history."
No doubt this is a much edited version of the story but it is all
she is going to give me as the orange cake has been gobbled and Mikale is monologuing
again. I sit and think about a girl changing into a boy. All I can think of is that this
is a very common practice for giant clams and certain kinds of fish, except in these
creatures the boys change into girls.
I get up and find a photo of a clown fish and I show
it to Mikale. Carefully, in my miserable French, I explain how, if the big female gets
eaten, the small male grows bigger and changes into a female. He does not believe me.
After dinner, the ITCZ serpent slithers back over Wallis and the
wind is shrieking again. Freddy and I climb into the sac wondering if we are ever going to
get to Samoa. I toss and turn in the choppy, howling anchorage, the wind moaning through
the rigging, wondering if I'm ever going to get to sleep. Eventually I drop off into a
troubled doze.
Three hours later I am wide awake. Well, awake anyway. I would have
to be deaf, drugged, or dead not to hear the noise which assails my ears even above the
noise of the wind.
"Haaaaaaaaayyyyyyy! OHOOOOOOO! I HAVE A PROBLEM! I HAVE A
PROBLEM!" I swing my legs over the edge of the bunk and stand up unsteadily.
"AHOY, AHOY, HAAAAAYYYYYY, I HAVE A PROBLEM!" I curse the nautical idiot from
the depth of my sleep-ridden being. Next he'll be shouting avast me maties.
Freddy growls from the depths of the bed, "Sounds like a
midnight parade of mental midgets."
"Get the flood light," I go on deck. It is a solid,
absolute pitch black. I peer out into the night in the general direction of the man with
the megaphone mouth. Freddy hands up the light and I switch it on and point it towards all
the shouting. "It's Robert," I say to Freddy who is standing on the aft ladder
airing her tits.
"So what's his problem. If he can yell like that this long it
can't be exactly life threatening." Robert is off the other boat in the anchorage.
He's paddling furiously, waves crashing over his ridiculous little Samoan dug-out canoe.
He thinks the hollowed out log is in keeping with the romance of the South Pacific. He
traded a perfectly good little fiberglass dingy for it in Western Samoa.
"What's wrong?" I shout, moving aft, getting ready to
untie our dingy. This is not necessary, however, as he finally makes it to Moira and hangs
on, huffing and gasping, the canoe almost awash.
He can't find his yacht. He forgot to leave an anchor light on and
is disoriented by the wind and waves and darkness. In fact, if the bulging eyes, trembling
hands and drooling mouth is any indication, he is scared out of his skull. I put him in
the Avon and tow his log over to his yacht as Freddy lights our way with 250,000
candle-power.
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