King Joe 1916-2023

Wednesday, 15 March 2023 // Motorcycles & I-Matangs

7:36 PM

81.1°00’3”N. 157°26’02”W.

London, Kiritimati

I hear children playing across the street, a small cylinder motorcycle comes around the bend, coconut palm trees rustle above my head from the ever-present trade winds from the east. A bell clangs in the distance. Is it a real bell? Or a recording? I have yet to figure that one out. Maybe the latter. Am certain it was a recording outside the Catholic manweaba a few days ago.

Regardless, that’s what it sounds like at the moment.

The rain shower I was caught in on my motorcycle for a half an hour has passed, and the temperature feels just about right. All are glad for the rain today, yesterday, as there has been a drought here on the island for several years.

I feel a profound sense of connection as I sit here. A connection to a man I never knew and a connection to a place I have only imagined for several decades. The profundity is compounded by the fact that I am 100% certain my grandfather, Joe English, walked past the location where I now sit on a simple concrete slab porch, more than 100 years ago. Then, where I now sit the area was tropical brush.

I just got up and paced off the 42 steps to the road. In barefoot, upon a sand so soft, it’s like powder. There is no soil to speak of on the world’s largest coral atoll. Instead, eons of coral have been ground down by the millennia, and are now under foot. Most people are barefoot here or in flip-flops if they have an office job, but they still marveled at those on their motorcycles in bare feet. Fortunately, the inexpensive – at least to me – Chinese motorcycles have an easy rocker shift where one does not need to use their toe to upshift but instead use one's heel.

I’m certain my grandfather would have preferred to have a motorcycle here, as compared to the 1916 Model-T Ford he used to get around the 65 square-mile island.

Once he had worked his way up the chain of command, and became manager of the copra plantation, one of his tasks was a daily log line in the manager's journal. More often than not it was one or two lines, detailing a section of the plantation, who worked there, what was done. He only started editorializing once he realized he was marooned.

I’m dictating this. Because I’m too tired to write and it takes a half an hour to write a page, something I learned long ago. Yes, I will write out the page in what has become my “manager's journal,” but I won’t wax philosophic or paint many imaginative pictures. That’s where my actual journal comes in, the one I started when I was nine years old, stopped and started, but most likely stopped, until I was 37 and started writing with some degree of regularity.

That’s where the waxing and painting comes in. Maybe I’ll get to that tonight, but as I noted, I’m tired.

I have been on the island eight days now, having spent close to two weeks under sail to get here, on relentless seas, with winds close to gale force. And then at anchor, due to somebody’s fuck up regarding COVID and quarantine data. But it wasn’t me -- I’ve had all my paperwork ready since day one.

Of course the irony is my grandfather was marooned due to the Spanish flu and here I could not get on the island because of the latest pandemic.

For the third time, I’m tired. Trying to squeeze 20 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag, because I only have two months here, not two years. Joe was here 1916 through 1919.

I’ve spent the last week doing everything from befriending locals, too, being in almost every civic office there is: immigration, the post office, IT, tourism, the “council building,” the state run broadcasting facilities (don’t get excited, it’s just a concrete bunker of sorts with doors that have not seen paint in years. That said the marketing manager there, in T-shirt and shorts, which is essentially both office wear, and every day we’re here, is a very friendly guy.

I bought that cheap motorcycle because it was pragmatic as I can only go to the well so many times asking locals to drive me somewhere even if I pay them as I don’t want to be a burden. That I bought a motorcycle and got a drivers license for the Republic of Kiritibati in less than five days should tip one off to how I’m used to getting things done.

I have met the other I-Matangs – an 80 year old Scotsman, who has been here since the age of 23 and knows the Pacific inside and out, a mysterious and intelligent Frenchman, who lives in a freight container, and two 30-something Aussies here for a water project that is jointly funded by the EU, New Zealand, and Kiribati. I am the Yank, with a connection here longer than all their years here put together.

The local representative, for the minister of tourism has asked me to join his team, surveying the island with GPS, to create a new tourist map, and I am told I may be able to get a few minutes with the republic's President, who will be here within a matter of weeks. And then there’s the stuff I want to do. Need to do. Paint, sketch, write, interview, film, and experience as much as I can of the people and culture here and how my grandfather and I share many of the same experiences.

King Joe once walked around here naked for close to a year. King of all he surveyed. I’ve already seen plenty of little kids, naked, and to a person they are all smiling.

I’m keeping most of my clothes on, but doing my best to earn my share of smiles. OK. I’m done talking for the night.

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