The Ragged Edge of the World (12 page)

After I donned my snorkel and fins, I swam into the entrance of the cave, where I saw a teenage Polynesian. I asked him where the passage was, and he pointed toward the back. I asked him how long you had to swim before you saw light, and he was pretty vague. He was more definitive when I asked whether you could turn back once you had entered the passageway. He shook his head vigorously; the answer was no. Swell!

I couldn't back out at this point. I made a couple of exploratory dives so that I could efficiently locate the entrance to the passageway. Each time I surfaced the Polynesian boy encouraged me with hand gestures. After a bit more procrastinating I hyperventilated to saturate my lungs with oxygen, took a deep breath, and headed into the passageway. Any claustrophobia I might have felt took second place to my desire to keep going until I saw the light. It took several strokes, but then I did see a bright spot ahead and set out toward it, surfacing exultantly after a few more strokes. Piece of cake, really, and I'm sure every boy and girl on the islands makes that swim often with nary a thought.

By 1995 the Tahiti that had greeted Ed Ehrich and Homer Morgan was long gone, and even the Tahiti that had greeted me in 1971 had succumbed to the remorseless tide of visitors and the contagion of modernity they brought with them. Foreigners still sought out the Tahitian dream, but if they wandered into a club frequented by locals they risked getting beaten up. Rates of family violence, incest and rape had risen, and the poorest neighborhoods had the flavor of slums everywhere.

Tahitian nature was also a far cry from the ferns and forests that greeted the early sea captains. Bougainville began a trend by introducing oranges and pineapples, and Harrison Smith soon followed with grapefruit, breadfruit and rambutan. Miconia, a weed brought in for the botanical garden, seemed to be taking over the island. Hibiscus, flamboyant and bougainvillea, everywhere associated with the beauty of the tropics, were all exotics—non-native—as well. Even global warming might have been having an impact. Powerful El Niños had produced superheated waters and attendant coral bleaching.

The atmosphere of the neighboring island of Raiatea (the old royal center of Polynesia) remained similar to that of the Tahiti that had greeted me in 1971. The pace was slower, and each house had well-tended tropical gardens. It so happened that we (I was joined by Mary, then and now my second wife) arrived on a day of feasting before an armada of replicas of the huge double-hulled canoes set sail to re-create one of the great Polynesian feats of navigation—the trip from the Society Islands to the Marquesas and then up to Hawaii. The crews were to navigate using methods developed by their forebears, who would read stars, ocean currents, clouds, the feel of different waves and the movements of birds to find their way around the otherwise undifferentiated vastness of open water.

The food at the feast was authentic, too. Served on thatched plates made of palm leaves, the cuisine was a loving monument to carbohydrates. The menu offered an assortment of sweet potatoes, taro root, breadfruit and papaya, along with pig, chicken and fish. Here, laid out before me, was the answer to why Polynesians are the heftiest people on the planet.

One of the guests of honor was Ben Finney, a University of Hawaii anthropologist and a prime mover in the resurrection of the art of Polynesian navigation. He was beaming at the success of the venture because, among other things, he hoped the voyage would help restore Polynesian pride, which, as he put it, had taken “a real beating” in the modern world. He noted that thirty years earlier, the average Tahitian could build his own house; supply himself with food by fishing, gathering fruits in the mountains and farming; and then cook his meals in a traditional earth oven. “Today,” he said sadly, “most Tahitian young can't do those things.”

Finney's simple remark starkly underscored what is really meant by the statement “Tahiti is being spoiled.” What's being lost is not some playground created for the benefit of uptight, overworked Europeans (and now Asians and oil tycoons from the Middle East), but arduously acquired knowledge about the life and rhythms of the largest ocean on the planet and those few, widely scattered islands and atolls that dot its surface. What's being lost is the culture that bound the Polynesians to the sea and to one another, and that gave their lives meaning.

Consider, for instance, how Polynesian navigators voyaged from Tahiti to Hawaii before the advent of global positioning systems. They relied on the sun, the wind, the stars, the feeling of the sea, the color of the sky and the movements of birds. Here are the beginning of their directions, literally, as I wrote them down in my notebook: “Turn right towards the setting sun when blows the
Maraouu
. 2) Blue-green sea and the sky is the color of the sea. 3) When the star
Tetia Hoe
plunges in the night—that is his guide follow her. Wind push—the star pulls. When the sun rises . . .”

By 1995 Finney's observations were a familiar variant of comments I had been hearing all over the world: about the Penans in Borneo, the Cree on Hudson Bay, the Machiguenga in Peru, and dozens of other tribes from the Arctic to the equator. In some cases the loss was happening before my eyes, while in others it had taken place long ago. In almost all cases, however, the unifying theme was that the loss was voluntary, as tribes abandoned their knowledge and ways in favor of the conveniences and seductions of the consumer society.

But Ben Finney was not just rehearsing an old lament: He had hope. He retained the belief that traces of Tahitian identity remained alive in what he referred to as “deep culture, the knowledge and attitudes one learns at one's mother's knee.” Finney was confident that the embers of Tahitian identity might one day flame again, particularly since most Tahitians still spoke their language and controlled their lands. And no matter how Westernized Tahitians appeared to be, he argued, at times of critical life decisions, their reactions were characteristically Tahitian.

If human culture is anywhere near as resilient as nature, there may indeed be cause for hope. The west coast of the Americas was repopulated with elephant seals from just a few dozen that remained on remote islands off Mexico after being given protection by the Mexican government in the early twentieth century. While human cultures are far more intangible, they might have some capacity to rebound similarly. Perhaps it's the remnant embers of Tahitian culture that perpetuate the lure of the South Pacific, and still give Tahiti a feeling different from that of Hawaii, however much Tahiti itself seems hell-bent on acquiring all the surface trappings of the Mall of America.

Tahiti retained its magic for me long after I outgrew any fantasies of exploring the lagoons with Povana's granddaughter, the iconic maiden of the South Pacific featured in Michener's
Return to Paradise.
I realized that it wasn't so much that I wanted to indulge in the idyllic lifestyle Tahiti offered, but rather that I wanted the reassurance that someone, somewhere on this hectic planet, still had the opportunity to live that way.

This dream should not be viewed as some romanticized, Rousseauflavored misinterpretation of full-blown Polynesian culture, which, after all, involved warfare, human sacrifice, and other unsavory practices alongside its luaus and liberal attitude toward sex. Tahitians did not need to perform human sacrifice in order to navigate the Pacific, any more than Americans need to resort to torture to protect our borders. To say “Tahiti is a place where nothing matters” only underscores how important it is that certain things matter to the person saying the sentence. The real Tahiti is a place where the fundamentals matter—nature, life, intellect, hospitality, family, honor.

This special magic was very much on my mind when I left Tahiti for Vietnam in 1971. As I waited to leave for the airport, I watched two Tahitian women lounging under a palm tree by a lagoon in a tableau that might have been witnessed by Gauguin many decades earlier. I had little notion of what Vietnam might bring me, but the war was killing people by the many thousands each week, and while its reverberations echoed around the world, I felt certain that they wouldn't reach Tahiti. I wanted to stay, but I left. Tahiti was for Tahitians. Maybe someday it would be for me, but not yet. The deep culture I learned at my mother's knee was more akin to Jeff Stookey's than to a Polynesian's.

Twenty-four years later I stood on the atoll of Rangiroa, watching the sunset across the second largest lagoon in the world. As I described the scene in
Condé Nast Traveler,
the horizon turned pink and yellow; I followed the progress of showers marching across the waters. Such is the size of the sky that the dominant color remained blue for both sky and water despite the thunderheads scattered over the lagoon. Looming over the tiny village of Tiputa, illuminated by the fading sun, was a cloud that had assumed the perfect shape of a
moai,
one of those mysterious Polynesian idols erected in bygone times on the shores of Easter Island. For a brief moment, this diaphanous echo of ancient Polynesia floated over the atoll and its people like a shadow of the past. Its unreadable features gave no indication of whether they were baleful or benign, but its presence was somehow reassuring, a transient reminder of the deep culture that hovers over the present. Even as this thought entered my mind, the
moai
began to disassemble as it was buffeted by the complex air currents of the onrushing evening.

I
t was my long-standing desire to see real
moai,
not just an accidental evocation in the clouds, that prompted the last part of my trip to the South Seas in 1995. From Tahiti, I went on to Pitcairn and Easter islands, each of which, for very different reasons, offers evidence that not every Polynesian island made its peace with modernity. Some met fates every bit as sordid as war-torn Europe, and demonstrated that island living can be as brutal as life anywhere else on the planet. Polynesians weren't always as outwardly easygoing as cliché has it today. Indeed, in the fate of Easter Island, Polynesia's bequest to posterity is a cautionary tale of the horrors of ecocide.

I particularly wanted to visit Easter Island (the European name for Rapa Nui) because through the years its catastrophic decline has served as testimony to the dangers of overpopulation and ecological degradation. Its story has been variously told, but the basic elements are as follows: Polynesians arrived on Easter Island somewhere between AD 400 and AD 800, and by 1600, the population had soared to 7,000. In the ensuing years the natives stripped the island of its trees, ultimately depriving themselves of the very material from which to construct fishing boats. A brutal competition for resources started a descent into cannibalism and barbarity from which the Easter Islanders never recovered. By the time Europeans arrived in 1722, the population had been reduced to 3,000, living in primitive conditions. So complete was their cultural devolution that the survivors had supposedly forgotten the purpose of the great stone heads called
moai
that had been erected during the island's glory days.

It's an irresistible story, and variants of it appear with numbing regularity. The most notable recent iteration was offered by Jared Diamond, who in books and articles has spun a narrative in which the fatal mistake of the Easter Islanders was the overharvesting of trees in order to transport the
moai
from the center of the island, where they were quarried, to the shores, where they were erected to face out toward the ocean. Easter Island still stands as an example of ecological folly, but its ruin likely took an even more circuitous path than Jared Diamond imagined.

I traveled to these remote islands in style. To reach the eastern Pacific I agreed to be a speaker aboard Cunard's five-star liner
Sagafjord
on the segment of its annual world tour that took it from Tahiti to Chile with stops at Pitcairn and Easter islands. My accommodations were comfortable, and the food and wine were spectacular. For a significant percentage of those on the cruise, the boat served as a type of ultraluxe assisted living. Many of the passengers were widows, a good percentage of whom made the trip every year. Some left a full wardrobe on the boat to save the trouble of shipping steamer trunks back and forth, and even though every night at sea was black-tie, I was reliably informed by one of my dinner companions (a woman who was a regular herself) that many of the guests brought enough clothes to go through the entire world cruise without wearing the same outfit twice.

Those of us speaking and entertaining were an odd lot. One of the other speakers was an expert on Captain Bligh's astonishing feats of navigation after he was set adrift from the
Bounty;
another, an astronaut who had piloted the space shuttle. Dino Anagnost's Little Orchestra Society from New York played during the evenings, and the musicians filled me in on some of the peculiarities of life at sea with septuagenarians. I learned, for instance, that there was a morgue on board with capacity for fifteen bodies. Although I did not try to verify the stories, I was also told that when a hubby conked out during the cruise, on more than one occasion the widow put his body into cold storage and continued the cruise.

As there were many widows on board, Cunard thoughtfully provided dance partners for these women. My orchestra friends said these jobs were highly sought after, and had a heavy representation of gay men from the Midlands of England. One attraction for the dance partners was that these women were quite affluent and quite old, and sometimes, if things worked out, they married the dance partners, ensuring their financial security.

Also on board was a young lawyer who was traveling to Pitcairn from New Zealand as part of a periodic visit to look after the island's affairs. He told me about some of the problems that came from managing a population of a few dozen people who lived almost completely removed from any contact with modern society. Their naïveté, he said, set them up for violent cultural collisions for which they were completely unprepared.