Surviving Paradise (26 page)

It was an inauspicious beginning, but I got better. I speared my first edible fish a few days later, and soon I was averaging a few catches an hour and a few hits per dozen (okay, hundred) shots. I was one-twentieth as good as a native, but the men seemed to agree that for a silly white man such as myself, my fishing skills were almost respectable.

As I improved, I began to understand that aim is less than half the skill: the other half is knowledge. Every species had different habits. Some bolted the moment they saw me. Some waited until I was closer. Some fish required several near-death experiences before they got the hint that I was trying to kill them. Some swam fast, some swam slow, some swam straight, and others darted left and right like a motorcyclist pursued by a machine-gunning helicopter. Some never reemerged after fleeing into the bowels of the coral reef, while others periodically poked out their heads to see if I was gone, giving me another chance to spear them.

I learned that loners and pair swimmers were reasonable targets, but schools were fool's gold. When I first spied one of these clouds of fish with a spear in my hand, I was convinced I wouldn't even need to aim. What I didn't realize was this: when one sees you, they all see you. It was a single organism with a thousand eyes. They skedaddled long before I was in range.

I learned which species were edible and which were not. I could not find this information in a book: a delicious species on one reef
might be dangerously poisonous on another. Only the local people knew which fish were safe, and a visitor would be insane not to ask before tucking in. One American who spent six years on the outer islands, long enough to break such rules from time to time, said that fish poisoning fell into two categories, both of which he had experienced. The first variety gave you an almost-pleasant tingly feeling and made you wonder whether you ought to try this “fish poisoning” thing again some time. (Maybe there was a good reason that
kadek
meant both “poisoned” and “drunk.”) The second variety was a real-life nightmare: it temporarily paralyzed you, making it impossible even to scream for help. It could prove fatal. I played it safe and learned which species were which. It turned out that my protracted
tiepdo
hunt had been not only fruitless but also pointless: that variety was toxic around this island.

As my hauls of fish increased, it became obvious that my catch-a-fish, swim-to-the-shore, deposit-it-on-the-sand, and reenter-the-lagoon method was lacking. The men used long lengths of rusting wire to string the fish they caught, but I preferred to learn the quainter technique I had occasionally observed. Lisson taught me the traditional way to make a fish cord, or
ile
, by removing the midrib of a palm frond, pulling backward and then upward. (Pull only backward and the cord will be too long; pull only upward and it will be too short.) While the men were cutting off
ile
s from a spool of wire, I was making one from a palm frond like their ancestors. This was only one of many such curious reversals—times when the foreigner used a native method and the natives used a foreign method. For “smart” I would say
malotlot
, and for “blanket,”
kooj
, deliberately avoiding the foreign equivalents that had entered their language. Meanwhile the islanders happily used the English words. I had gone to so much trouble to learn the more difficult word that I felt cheated; but they were more interested in communicating than in being traditional.

Entering the water, I would tie the
ile
onto a belt loop, but the real challenge came after catching a fish. I had to thread the cord through the gills and out the mouth—or, worse, through one eye and out the other. With the fish flopping like mad, the current yanking on my body, and the string breaking and fraying, this could take five minutes of tedious concentration. Then I had two choices: either kill
the animal by crushing its skull with my teeth, or simply let it swim around live on the line as I continued the hunt. The local fishermen preferred the second method because the meat would be fresher when eaten, and I preferred it because I had a general policy against putting my mouth on live wild animals. So, like a true spearfisherman but for all the wrong reasons, I let my captive swim around in a little chain-gang by my side, undoubtedly vowing revenge but able to do no more than periodically startle me by brushing its slippery body against my leg. Sometimes I would see an expert fisherman towing a string of so many big, live fish that I was convinced it was only lack of cooperation that stood between the prisoners and freedom—if the fish could only agree to swim in the same direction, then they could carry the fisherman wherever they pleased.

The fish had another advantage: they seemed somehow exempt from the lagoon's powerful current. The meaning of the word “Ujae” most likely traced to “rough currents,” and for good reason. When the tide went out, the lagoon water was drawn toward the northwestern channels that linked the lagoon to the ocean, like sink water toward the drain. By coincidence, the trade wind blew in a similar direction, multiplying the effect. It was the windy season now, and the result was that I was learning to spearfish in a current worthy of a river. It could easily knock me over in waist-deep water. Staying stationary was exhausting, and moving against it was nearly impossible. So I would enter the lagoon upstream and let myself be swept downstream. It was high-stakes, high-thrill fishing, a natural amusement park ride where I got one chance to catch my prize before being carried away to the next target. As long as I returned to shore before being swept into the deep lagoon, and kept my eyes out for the stinging tentacles of the Portuguese man-o-war, it was a safe sport.

Fishing at night added the challenge of darkness and disorientation, but eliminated another challenge: many of the fish slept under rocks, easy targets if you could find them. I ventured out at night only once, before I knew how to fish, to watch the fearless experts at work.

The night was moonless and astonishingly dark. Our flashlights lit the underwater scene with eerie effects; the yellowish-green beams, swirling with particles like dust in headlights, cut only thin swaths
through the black water. The dim contours of coral were barely visible, surrounded by endless blackness. When the beams were aimed up, the light bounced off the surface of the water from below and cast another beam at an angle toward the seafloor. In the distance, the ghostly figures of the other men were floating in green light. When I lifted my head out of the water, I had no idea where the island was. Then my main light lost power, leaving only a flashing red light to prevent my companions from spearing me. Tossed to and fro by waves, with no visual anchor, I became nauseated, and Lisson had to lead me to shore. In its usual way, adventure had shown itself to be an act of strenuous memory making. The comforting thing was that both sublimity and agony made good stories, and the dull bits between would be forgotten.

But currents, darkness, and potential ichthyological revolutions were only half-hearted dangers. What I really had to worry about was sharks.

In
Solomon Time
, Will Randall tells of falling out of his motorboat in the shark-infested Solomon Sea. While swimming for land, some unpleasant thoughts flash through his mind:

Of course, the statistical chance of being attacked by a shark is small. It did strike me at that moment, however, that all the statistics I had ever heard quoted were based on samples taken from a broad range of the population. This broad range presumably included people who were, at present, walking down city streets, sitting in offices and traffic jams, watching television, or in the bath, where clearly the chances of being eaten by a large fish were slim.

As for my own aquatic adventures, I tried to forget the fact that shark attacks are most common on people who are either wading (in which case the shark spies two small fleshy objects and can't resist) or spearfishing (in which the shark smells freshly bleeding fish and, again, can't resist). I was frequently doing both.

The danger of a shark attack was not one of those silly old fears that lead people to wait an hour after eating before going for a swim in case their full stomach might make them sink, or (I heard about this one just before leaving America) to be buried with your cell phone in case you turned out to be alive and needed to call for help. Two men
from Ujae, while living in the wilds of a normally uninhabited island, had been bitten by a shark in one ugly incident, and I had seen the bandages on their feet to prove it. Steven, one of the schoolteachers who had become my friend, had told me about his own close calls. One time a shark chased him on the shallow reef. Steven ran; the shark swam after him. By the time he reached the shore, a semicircular chunk of swimming flipper was missing. Another time, the predator removed two of the three steel prongs from Steven's spear. The sharks in the open ocean were reportedly far worse than this: one species was said to attack for sport even when it was full, inspiring a sort of “call me fishmeal” fatalism when it was spotted.

The people of Ujae told me repeatedly not to swim on the ocean side. When the islanders, utterly familiar with their little world, supremely competent in all their skills, told me that something was too dangerous, I knew not to do it. So I didn't. But each time they told me this, they also told me, half in admiration and half in admonishment, the story of Mimi, a Peace Corps volunteer who had lived on Ujae several decades before. Mimi, if you are reading this, I want you to know that the people of Ujae have not forgotten, and will never forget, the time you swam the length of the island's ocean side, without a breathing tube or flippers, while fearlessly photographing sharks for the folks back home. The story will be passed down from generation to generation until it becomes a legend, the tale of Mimi the Brave, or Mimi the Foolish. Either way, you have found a place in the folklore of Ujae.

It was an impressive story, but was it meant as a cautionary tale or a hero's saga? It was hard to tell. The shark threat was an ambiguous one, and I occasionally wondered if I was being had. Several islanders told me that the creatures were quite harmless “as long as you know how to control them.” “Hit them on the head and grab their tail,” said one lad. “Then you can do with them as you please.” Another young man claimed to killed sharks with spears, and if they ever tried to eat fish off of his
ile
, he would just say “
Emoj am bot!
” (“Now stop that misbehaving!”) and shove them away. The men once went fishing on the ocean reef, which they claimed was teeming with bloodthirsty leviathans, and returned unscathed. Lisson told me that sharks would only hurt me if I paid attention to them, but that sounded suspiciously
like what mothers tell their children about bullies, and I assumed the advice about sharks would fail just about as spectacularly.

In the end, I decided I'd rather play the gullible paranoid foreigner than the skeptical dead foreigner. Fear got a bad name in my society: it was a useless emotion that prevented people from doing what they should. Such a philosophy could only have originated in a place with crosswalks on every street corner and native predators hunted to extinction; it ignored the fact that being terrified can be an excellent source of information. Now, in a country with hungry sharks, poisonous fish, and deadly currents, I realized that sometimes the most mature thing to do was to flee in terror. So I ignored the mixed messages and accepted that I ought to be wary of large carnivorous fish. Thus began the “shark check”: a periodic 360-degree scan of the reef whenever I was in the water.

For all the hype, I saw sharks only a handful of times. But each time, I felt something I had never experienced before: a primal circuit was activated in my brain, and the emotion can only be described as terror. In the shark's defense, however, it always ignored me and continued gliding around as sharks do—beautiful even, reflecting blue light off its smooth body—and disappeared.

The closest I came to death by shark was a time when I never saw a shark. I swam a mile out from the island, to a deep lagoon pool I had seen and wondered about from the shore. I could tell from its low-tide colors that it was teeming with coral, but I had never worked up the courage to make the long journey until now. Many times I considered turning back. All distances seemed quadrupled underwater, and I knew that if anything went wrong, there was half an hour of hard swimming between me and salvation. But one thing other than wanderlust encouraged me to continue: I could see a fellow fisherman's head poking up from the pool.

I arrived and discovered that it was a rock.

Suddenly I was alone in an alien landscape—a coralline abyss that plunged from ridges and peaks into the infinite blue of the deep lagoon. It is difficult to describe the feeling of this place, except in the melodramatic terms with which the devout describe the presence of God: an inconceivable vastness, a terrible beauty, stranger than imaginable, both dreadful and wondrous, overwhelming the mind with a
sense of helplessness and grandeur. Like every great mystery, it poked to the surface but plunged into unreachable depths. I never felt this on land, only at sea—and only truly on a coral reef. This was not my world.

I was also slightly nervous about sharks.

I swam back to Ujae. When I saw Fredlee the next day, I asked him if there were sharks in that distant pool.

“Yes, one,” he replied.

“‘One'? One individual shark?”

“Yes. A black one with a gash down its face. Someone must have caught it on a line and tried to kill it with a machete. Now it's angry and wants to kill people.”

“What do you do if you see it?”

“You flee!”

The story amused me as much as it rattled me. When I asked Lisson about this shark, he laughed and said, “I've probably been there a thousand times, and I've never seen it.” Had I narrowly escaped death, or just played the part of the credulous American? Even if the “evil shark” story was apocryphal, the otherworldly feeling of that spot was enough to deter me. I never returned to that place.