Wednesday, 5 April 2023 // Poland Coir & Domestic Abuse
6:35 AM
80°
Poland
I just cut a 10”-long strand of loose coir from the edge of the roof of the kia-kia I slept in last night. Looped it and tied it around my left wrist. I use the small marlin-spike on my pocket knife to ease a knot from the cord.
I look up and Keiti and her son have arrived on the family motorcycle.
Half an hour later, they depart. Her son is eight, they’re off to the trading store with a large plastic yellow bowl to get rice. It’s rice and fish for breakfast. She’s told me of the four ways of cooking fish or eating fish. Raw, boiled, fried in oil, or over the fire. There is also dried, but we don’t get into that.
I met her first time I visited Poland, at the Catholic mwaneaba, and she proved most helpful as her English is excellent: she is engaging and inquisitive.
She helps me tie the coir cord around my wrist. There is nothing soft about the cord. Made from the fibers of the coconut husk, it is coarse and rough.
A few weeks back, I spotted a man, knee-deep in water, working a rock-lined hole in the water at the edge of a canal, on the lagoon side in Tabwakea. I assumed correctly: he was readying coconut husks to make coir. Husks are soaked for a specific period of time to soften, and they then braid the brown fibres into the sturdy 1/8” cords used in much of their traditional building, or for lashing anything as needed. Kora, as it’s called in I-Kiribati, is much in demand, prices haven risen from $5/roll to fifteen dollars.
How long this cord will stay on my wrist is anyone’s guess, because it’s a bit like wearing a hair shirt, abrasive. [note: it doesn’t last a week]
Some here have asked what I wear on my right wrist, a length of leather cord, that I braided with four turns around the wrist, finished in a knot. I’ve always worn bracelets, at least since high school. The first one I bought was a piece of copper that turned my wrist green. The next one might have been one of the best, as it was an elephant hair bracelet made with real elephant hair. That was the 70s and elephant hair was still legal to sell.
They ask about the leather bracelet, as nobody wears anything like that on the island. The leather braid is the most obvious, but they miss the thick rubber gasket I also wear around that same wrist. I have been wearing it for almost 40 years.
It was June, 1985 and I was humping my backpack down the road, away from Canyon deChelly, in Arizona, where I just spent a couple days and nights. I was on my way to the Hopi reservation for more exploration and discovery.
I had just spent more than two weeks with a team of researchers, documenting, pictographs and petroglyphs, specifically the overlap of the Fremont, and what were then called the Anasazi. The Fremont, of Utah, and the Anasazi of Arizona, and New Mexico had similar, and of course, differing, artistic styles. my role on the team was to reproduce the images on a scale, drawing, along an X/Y axis.
My part of the research over, I had been hitchhiking up to Moab and then back south, to examine more glyphs on my own. I was heading towards Bryce Canyon, but ended up standing for 12 hours beside Lake Powell, trying to hitch a ride. I finally turned my back and started heading back east. Finally made it to Canyon DeChelly.
My pack then was about 60 pounds, and it never got lighter, as I was always finding rocks and odds and ends to take with me. Humping my pack down the road in the early morning, a slight bend at the waist, I was looking down and saw the rubber gasket. I bent, and put it on my wrist and it has stayed there ever since.
1985 were the days of Madonna and Michael Jackson. Madonna had just broken big with her first album. I saw a Hopi kid get off of a school bus, wearing one white glove, clearly a devotee of Jackson. Rubber gaskets were all over peoples arms as decoration. The moment I put it on I knew I could always be 26-years-old again, every time I looked at it. I anticipated years into the future, being in a boring meeting, or someplace radically different from where I then stood, high on the Colorado plateau. I knew I could instantly find myself back in time back in the Four Corners, alone on a road.
It’s now 39 years later, and that rubber gasket — plain, simple, unassuming — has never been decoration for me, but a reminder of who and what and where and why and how I was at that very moment, outside Canyon de Chelly.
Now it is April, 2023. A full moon will be up again tonight. I hear a young child cry not far away, hear the sound of plastic, and realize she’s being hit by her mother. Father has a 3-foot-long switch in his hand. Mother throws a coconut husk at the child, the little girl, shirtless, in a pair of shorts, squats and still squatting gathering sticks from the ground. I think she sees me all these yards away. Minutes ago, while I was dictating, she happened to be right over here by the kia-kia, playing with rocks on a concrete slab.
I had planned on narrating exactly what I hear at this moment, standing in Poland: the mechanical sound of 150cc motorcycles; the rustle of wind through palm leaves; the distance sounds of children playing (or crying); the sound of a young woman 30 yards away sweeping her yard with a broom, creating order; the roosters’ call and response, near and far; the clang of empty propane tanks, that serve as bells, being whacked with a piece of metal, a quarter-mile away; also distant, the song of a toddy cutter at work out among the coconut palms, 100 yards away. I hadn’t expected domestic abuse.
Another motorcycle goes by with a little boy sitting behind the mother, a younger child, a baby, on her lap as they ride. The sound is the sound I have heard so often on this island, a child singing.
A man rides by, shirtless, and no doubt barefoot, his daughter, behind him with a backpack, another child in front of him I see him look at my direction, and I give a wave. He keeps his right hand on the throttle, waves with his left as they pass. The girl with the backpack turns and gives me a wave.
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