Ike Clem Um*
The Tongan customs officer found something in my backpack that bothered him. He called over a man who appeared to be his superior, and as they sorted through my gear, the word ratbag passed between them.
Ratbag?
The first officer, a big huge powerful Polynesian giant of a man, had been shuffling through my underwear, swimsuits, diving equipment—all pretty much standard tourist gear—when he came upon a number of file folders located in the bottom of my backpack. The folders contained articles about Tonga, the idyllic South Pacific island kingdom located south and west of American Samoa and east of Fiji. It was this printed material that occupied the customs officials.
There was an article about the proud history of Tonga, the only South Pacific nation that has never been colonized by a European power. It all seemed pretty innocuous: a country of 170 islands located almost directly on the date line; a population of one hundred thousand people living on forty of the islands; four major island groups, with the government located on the island of Tongatapu.
I had also brought along several articles about Polynesia in
general, a few of which contained certain anthropological musings. Polynesian people, one theory ran, tend toward a certain physical immensity due to their history of seafaring. Five thousand years ago the ancestors of the man currently pawing through my effects had to cross vast expanses of empty seas in open canoes. Survival, the theory went, favored men and women of great upper-body strength: good paddlers. Additionally, a certain degree of fleshiness was necessary to withstand bitter wind and cold rains.
Was I going to be denied entrance to the country because some anthropologist had decided to comment on the size of the people? It wasn't as if the article were titled "Tongans Are Great Big Fatties." In addition, I had thought that physical size and prowess were matters of some pride to Tongans. The current king, Taufa'ahau Tupou IV, once weighed a properly regal 460 pounds. His Majesty—the first man in his nation's history to graduate from college—is now in his seventies. Concerned about his health, he has begun an exercise-and-diet plan and, according to a three-year-old magazine piece, has lost at least one hundred pounds. There were pictures of the king riding a specially made bicycle, with panting bodyguards jogging alongside.
"You are interested in our government?" the customs official asked, or words to that effect. Tongans speak Tongan, a Polynesian language of many vowels, few consonants, and plenty of glottal stops. Most everyone in the kingdom speaks some English, although not always with precision.
"I am here," I said, "to study giant clams."
The officials conferred together for some time. They spoke in Tongan, but I gathered they were concerned about the fact that I had a beard, carried a backpack, and was in possession of information relating to His Majesty, the king. Occasionally, in the midst of a tangle of Tongan, I heard again, in English, the word "ratbag."
Other people, those who hadn't thought to bring any reading material about Tonga, were being waved through the line. I, on the other hand, had taken pains to inform myself about the country and was, apparently, a ratbag.
Whatever that meant. Better, in this case, that the officials be-
lieve I was a scientist. I attempted to direct their attention to a number of scientific papers: "Prospects for the Commercial Cultivation of Giant Clams (Bivalvia: Tridacnidae)"; "Tridacna derasa Introduction in American Samoa"; "The Gastropod Cymatium muricinum, a Predator on Juvenile Tridacnid Clams."
Giant clams exist throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans. The largest, Tridacna gigas, can reach more than three feet in length and weigh in excess of two hundred pounds. In black-and-white movies, swimmers wearing sarongs get their feet stuck in giant clams, which, my experience would later prove, is sort of like grinding your arm all the way up to the elbow in a kitchen garbage disposal. It could happen to anyone—anyone at all with the brains of a cabbage.
At any rate, T. gigas doesn't exist in Tongan water. There are some T. derasa, which are about half the size of gigas, some smaller T. squamosa, and, smallest of all the Tongan giant clams, the oddly named T. maxima.
The customs officials examined these scientific papers, laden with bar graphs and pie charts, and seemed to relax a bit. Ratbags, I imagined, weren't interested in giant clams.
One of the officials was reading about the sexual habits of tridacnid mollusks, which are exceedingly complex, if not actually perverse. Giant clams begin their mature lives as males, but by about the age of four will produce eggs as well as sperm. As the clams get larger, they settle into a state of ecstatic female fertility: A single full-grown T. derasa can produce at least forty times as many eggs as a clam at first female maturity. I wondered if this kind of filth—a treatise about hermaphrodites—was the sort of thing ratbags had in their possession, and so I sought to divert the officials' attention by gibbering about other clam-related subjects. A giant clam, I explained, has symbiotic algae living in its mantle, a lining much like skin inside the shell. Unlike lesser clams, a giant lies on its back, open to the sun, which nourishes the algae. The algae live on sunlight and the clam's waste products; the clam lives on the algae's waste. This is probably why a giant clam becomes so big: The animal actually incorporates a handy photosynthetic food system into its own tissues. Giant clams literally farm their own algae.
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"Good to eat," one of the officials said.
That was a problem I didn't want to get into at all. Because the clams grow best in shallow water, where the sunlight is brightest, they are easily harvested. In Tonga, one species of giant clam, Hippopus hippopus, was already extinct. T. derasa was endangered. Both these species had been an important source of food for the islanders since at least 1500 b.c. And now they were in danger of extinction. Which, I thought, said something depressing about the life of the sea in these parts altogether.
After successfully avoiding a discussion involving the decimation of an entire form of life, not to mention the disturbing sex life of bivalve mollusks, I was admitted to Tonga. I lugged my pack out into the humid night. What the hell, I wondered, was a ratbag?
Tonga's capital city, Nuku'alofa, on Tongatapu, has a main street of about six blocks lined with wooden buildings once painted white. There is the Sincere Variety Store, Tonga Radio, and John's Takeaway, where people sit on picnic benches and eat bowls of curry washed down with Coca-Cola. The name Nuku'alofa means "abode of love."
Several days after my arrival I had the good fortune to meet Tevita Helu in the best of the local bookstores. Mr. Helu, who had received a college degree in New Zealand, directed me to a number of books I might not have purchased on my own, including The Life of the Late George Vason of Nottingham, published in London in 1840. In 1796 Vason, an emissary for the London Missionary Society, traveled to Tonga, where he was to educate the heathen in the Christian faith. Vason chronicles a typical day among the Tongan men: "As soon as the morning dawned, they arose; and then took place the important ceremony of drinking kava and eating yams . . ."
Kava is a beverage derived from the root of a pepper plant and drunk for its tranquilizing effect. "They often drink kava from break of day to about eleven o'clock," observed Vason. "Then they go and lie down and sleep for two or three hours; when they rise, they bathe, walk among the plants, or amuse themselves in wrestling, boxing," or "an amusement" called "furneefoo,"
which, as described by Vason, seemed to be a form of bodysurf-ing.
Because foreigners are known in Tonga as palangt, literally "skybreakers," some early visitors flattered themselves with the notion that Tongans regarded them as gods from above. Vason had no such illusions: "They called us 'men of the sky' because, observing that sky appeared to touch the ocean in the distant horizon, and knowing that we came from an immense distance, they concluded that we must have come through the sky."
Vason—and I think this is the reason Tevita Helu recommended the book—changed his name to Balo, wore native dress, took a number of wives, and lived the life of a Tongan chief. The book, written by missionaries after Vason's death, has him sermonizing at the end of each chapter in a manner that rings entirely false. To wit: "I lament to say that I now entered with the utmost eagerness into every pleasure and entertainment of the natives."
Personally, I don't think George did much lamenting at all. The pace of events in Tonga plods along pleasantly through the vast-ness of geologic time. It's faka tonga, the Tongan way: seductive, relaxing, easy.
Much has changed since the days of George Vason, but the people are still attractive and athletic. They revere their king and seem to delight in royal rituals. The best way to do something is the simplest and most obvious way, the Tongan way. Large, complex operations are seen as jarring to tradition. They are not faka tonga.
I had come to Tonga because of a hopeful article about giant-clam conservation in Earthwatch magazine. Earthwatch, a nonprofit organization out of Watertown, Massachusetts, is involved in conservation efforts worldwide and helps preserve endangered species and habitats; it also supports archaeological digs in Mexico, Spain, Japan, and Chile. According to an Earthwatch promotional pamphlet, the programs "work a bit like the Peace Corps. We organize expeditions to research sites all over the world for
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leading scholars and scientists. We then recruit interested men and women like yourself who are willing to lend a hand by serving as staff volunteers."
Earthwatch also has its magazine. In the April 1990 issue there was a quarter-page article about the giant clams of Tonga, along with a picture of a snorkeler regarding a clam that looked to be several feet long.
The community giant-clam program, as funded by Earthwatch and supervised by Dr. Richard Chesher, was, it seemed, a good idea: simple, inexpensive, imminently workable, very faka tonga. Fishermen would collect endangered giant clams from outlying waters and arrange them in circles, in shallow water, in plain view of a village. A clam would issue sperm into the water, followed by eggs, which would trigger other clams to spew out sperm, then eggs. No matter which way the currents were flowing, the circular arrangement of the clams would make for fertilized eggs.
The village would be able to collect smaller clams in perpetuity, provided the larger clams in the sanctuary—the brood stock —remained unmolested. Honest fishermen would be warned off by the circles, which would be obviously man-made. Poachers would avoid taking clams because the circles were in plain sight of the village and belonged to the people there.
It seemed a hopeful story: an endangered species preserved at no cost to the Tongan people. And not only were the giant clams being preserved, but breeding success meant food for the people in the form of baby clams thrown off by the circle. The short article, entitled "Turning Around Extinction," was very nearly ecstatic about the project:
For four seasons Earthwatch teams have monitored giant clam circles and encouraged a conservation ethic on these South Pacific islands. Now Dr. Richard Chesher has some extraordinary news: Tonga's endangered giant clams are breeding like crazy. Tongans had arranged the giant clams in circles to improve their breeding success several years ago but until this summer the circles that Chesher helped establish off the island of Falevai [actually Falevai is a village on the island of Kapa in the Vava'u island groupl pro-
duced no offspring. Now Chesher reports k a dramatic increase in both Tridacna squamosa and Tridacna derasa. . . .'
More importantly, the concept of community stewardship of the clam circles—central, in Chesher's view, to the clam circles' success and the environmental education of Tongans—seems to have caught on.
A biologist friend of mine believes some animals are naturally "fubsy," which is to say, in less than scientific terms, cute. The public at large loves fubsy animals. When our fubsy pals are endangered—when people go around braining baby harp seals with clubs—something snaps inside us. Some ancient instinct is outraged.
The great naturalist Konrad Lorenz tried to define that impulse and to quantify cuteness. He suggested that certain features of human babies, when evident in other creatures, trigger our maternal and paternal instincts, our need to care and protect. Among those features are "a relatively large head, predominance of the brain capsule, large and low-lying eyes, bulging cheek region, short and thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency, and clumsy movements."
By this definition, koala bears are fubsy. Baby seals are fubsy. Pandas. Puppies. Decidedly not fubsy are spiders, snakes, fleas. People the world over are not easily moved to preserve the odd endangered invertebrate.
More to the point, giant clams rate lower on the fubsy scale than even snail darters. Giant clams do not have large heads, or indeed any protuberance at all that we might identify as a head, which effectively eliminates a predominant brain capsule or bulging cheeks or low-lying eyes. Giant clams do not possess thick extremities, and they do not move in a clumsy manner. After the first week of life they generally don't move much at all. By the time they are adults, they just lie there, effectively headless. They are, for all intents and purposes, the very antithesis of fubsy.
And yet every one of the dozen Earthwatch volunteers I met on Vava'u (the main island in the group of the same name) was highly enthusiastic about giant clams. They actually used the word "cute." It was, I suppose, a case of "to know them is to love them."
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Some of the volunteers were keen divers in their late teens and early twenties. Others were pushing seventy, but they all worked together. The volunteers had paid their own ways to Tonga— besides donating nearly two thousand dollars apiece to Earthwatch—and were living in a less-than-luxurious guest house that reminded me of a dormitory at a particularly Spartan Bible college. Most of these people had regular jobs and were spending their vacations working on this project. Most, like a former Peace Corps volunteer I met, were people who loved to travel and thought they needed to "give something back." By their example, these people thought, they were imparting a larger message about the life of the sea.