Saturday, 8 April 2023 // "A gift from Japan" / Ngaon Te Taake
4:42 PM
98°
“A gift from Japan,“ it’s a sign I’ve seen here for a few weeks, starting with the government buildings in London. In Poland just a few days ago I saw it on the primary school.
Today the words were on the side of the truck I was in. Rodney, Angus, and I, and our gear, along with the driver from the wildlife division, headed over to the old port. We left around nine and a 12-foot fiberglass boat with outboard motor and headed out, southeast, deep into the lagoon.
Exactly a week ago, we had taken another government vehicle from London to Paris, which has the same “gift” sign on the door. They are the best vehicles on the island I would wager, but for John Bryden‘s Hilux from Australian, and mystery-man Garry, who works for the Japanese equivalent of NASA, maintaining their radar station here. You can see him flying down the road in his white Toyota pickup, or maybe it’s a Nissan. Either way, he’s got the gas pedal to the floor, as I bounce and rattle over the wracked road in the opposite direction.
Our task today is similar to our task of last week. Then we visited nine sites around the island, documenting each with stills, film, and my drone for the government to use for a presentation of some kind. Angus, the dentist for the Line Islands, is a hobby photographer, having dabbled while in college in Fiji. I think Angus should be charging the government, but he’s doing it for free.
I watched the film which he shot, edited, did graphics for, put music over, and I was impressed. Not because of the piece of film-making, but because he knocked it out in two days and I know what the reaction will be.
Ten or 15 years ago a similar presentation would involve two dozen slides: images and text. Or a PowerPoint presentation. In 2023 it’s a film, including high resolution drone footage.
The ministry back in Tarawa liked the presentation so much they wanted to add more content. Adding content is a typical bad client move: changing the deliverables, the parameters, once they realize — via the creative mind at work — other possibilities. Why a “bad” client? Because it’s not a process inviting the creative person to the table to discuss possibilities, but more of an edict. When one is doing the work for free — or in my professional career, as “non-profit” — that kind of behavior gets corralled in quickly.
Now the ministry wants to include the nesting sites that any bird watcher would give their eye teeth to visit. The sites have been protected preserves since the British colonized the island.
Unlike the sooty terns I literally ran into more than a week ago, heading to the southeast peninsula, the birds we visited are on protected islands, built up of millions of years of coral, with sparse vegetation. The inner lagoon of this island is a mind-numbing maze of sand bars, slight islands, knee-deep salt water flats. It’s the flats where the elusive bonefish may be found, that pre-pandemic, dedicated fisherman from around the world would spend big dollars to get here, catch, and release.
There are just a few channels, deep enough for us to navigate deeper into the lagoon, or lagoons, to find the nesting colonies
Frigate birds, boobys, the Christmas Island Warbler, and Audubon’s Shearwater, a bird, that burrows underground, that used to wreak havoc with the roads 100 years ago. Finally, the beautiful Tropic Bird, with its long, slim, bifurcated, red tail, behind the long, white body. It’s this bird that is on the 1916 Pacific Coconut Plantations Company, LTD. postage stamp, which Fr. Rogier designed and had printed in San Francisco.
The man helming the boat has worked for the wildlife division for several years. Fifty years old, he tells us when he was a boy in Tabwakea, one could wade into the lagoon and very quickly the water would drop off, deep, swimmable. Today it is knee-deep, fifty years of sand having washed in with every tide, every surge, every swell and storm. I wonder what it was like, 100 years ago when my grandfather was here? Those with whom I spoke believe the plantations were wetter than now. Yet they were always suffering drought back then, as well.
The first time in a month, I’m wearing long sleeves, even though my skin is brown as a coconut, that I don’t burn more than necessary. I’ve pulled a piece of cloth over my face, turban style, having forgotten sunblock, my nose and cheeks are already more than ruddy. I realize my grandfather never had any reason to be where I am, this far deep into the lagoon, considering he has a job managing an island.
Long ago, the birds currently in the protected area served as vital proteins to the early Polynesians that found themselves mending their boats here, found freshwater, as well as eggs to supplement their fish catch. In my grandfather’s time, less than 100 people on the island before his marooning, the birds and the supply of eggs likewise helped vary the diet of fish or occasional bully beef. [Bully beef: tinned corned beef, which WWI soldiers essentially lived on, in the trenches.]
I feel fortunate to be included in this government trip. Tourists would be paying upwards of $300 to whatever hotel where they stay, for the hotel to arrange a boat, as well as be accompanied by one of the Wildlife Department’s overseers, who must accompany them when the bird watchers go toward the colonies. One is allowed to beach their boat, be on the shore, on the sand, but not to intrude any further than high tide.
That my hosts and neighbors turn out to be integral parts of the government has proven beneficial. That I am here, with a knowledge of history, of which they are unaware, and are as eager to learn more, as I am about them, makes this a win/win scenario for all involved. Not to mention, they’re using my drone, which makes the film look damn fine.
After a late-morning snack of peanut butter and jelly on crackers, which we break in half and stick right into the jar, we head northwest, on a circuitous route back into the main lagoon.
Now we are in search of manta rays, as our search for bonefish was a bust. The anglers spend a week, with guides, out on the flats all day, searching for their quarry. We were a few guys with cameras hoping to get lucky. No luck.
So now we are on the lookout for manta rays. In my grandfather’s time they were called “sea bats” and there could be schools of 30 or more. I’m told during mating season large numbers can be seen.
A pair of rays are spotted, looking like undulating black blankets in the pale, turquoise water. I would imagine that were you to jump in the water with a snorkel the view would be a radically different. Angus and I get the drone in the air, he takes control, bringing it over the 4-foot-wide ray.
My concern is landing the drone back on the boat, a moving target. All’s well, that ends well. All ended well.
The biggest contributors of financial aid to Kiritibati are, in this order: Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, Japan, China. Australia and New Zealand are part of what I would consider a good neighbor policy plan. The Pacific and Oceana and Australia are tied together. I’m guessing the EU, with countries like England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, having colonized the hell out of the Pacific, they feel some degree of responsibility for what they left in their wake.
Japan and China, duke it out for Asian influence, but it’s the Japanese that outright murdered thousands of Gilbert islanders, as the I Kiribati were then called, during the Second World War. If the EU has it’s share of responsibility, Japan is making amends. They even have a radar station on the island and once planned on landing their version of NASA space shuttle here in the middle of the Pacific.[Side note: That “Joe’s Hill” is mentioned in a Japanese Space Program document pleases me to no end. He’d laugh, too.]
The United States used Christmas Island as a steppingstone in their battle for the Pacific, during WWII, after the devastation of Pearl Harbor. The airfield they built was the first functioning airfield on the island. The current airport — Cassidy International — is named for a US airman who has lost during the war. I’m told his name is spelled incorrectly. After the British were done using the island for atomic bomb testing, the Americans used it for atomic bomb testing.
You won’t find that information in any American history books.
I have agreed to help Angus with his film, for though I appreciate the graphics he did, and they are more than competent, I know I can add my decades of experience and raise it a slight notch. He is appreciative, as am I appreciative of the things he has shared with me, stories that bear repeating, which I have yet to tell. Like the story of why mothers wish to have their sons circumcised. It’s a hoot.
It’s a gift. It’s all a gift. When I arrived back from a few days in Paris yesterday Rodney has a meal waiting for me. Just half an hour earlier, stopping in Tabwakea to visit with Tureta the Teacher, she too, had food for me. So many gifts and so many stories. I’m happy to share my knowledge, professionally or personally. With Tureta’s son, I offer song producing input in his sound studio, replete with a floor of sand.
The power is out here. I was hoping to sit in front of an electric fan, having spent the day on the lagoon in blistering sun, two cold showers not having helped at all.
I should point out the cold showers are the only kind of showers, as there is no hot water on the island. But it all works out just fine. So I sit here speaking into my telephone, watching the power drain since electricity is out, fanning myself with a hand fan, woven of pandanus, a gift from Angus a couple weeks ago, he knew I was eager to collect as many handicrafts as I can.
It’s Easter weekend, and the holiday is a Big Deal here with so many different heavy-duty Christian churches and associations, to which most every islander belongs. There are no Easter bunnies, no chocolate, no Easter eggs. When I was in Poland, trucks came from London to pick up people, along with all sorts of goods, foods, housewares, bedding, as everybody is essentially camping with their families here in London.
Next door Angus is cranking a song that I’ve heard a million times over the last week. I have learned to hate it when it comes on after midnight, and I am trying to sleep, but during the day, it’s a catchy pop song,I found myself pretending to sing with any number of children. I can hear Angus playing his ukulele along with the song. That is also a gift.
This trip started to become a reality as a gift from Robin, the ticket allowed me to fly from Austin to Honolulu. I think it’s a gift, the conversation I had with the guy who sits outside New Island Traders in Tabwakea, where he checks your receipt against the goods you bought. I pretty much always ignore him, or at least the checking out part as I walked out, instead always engaging him with a smile and a few words. Today he hit me up in Spanish, and then I learned he had learned it as a sailor, leaving the middle of the Pacific for any number of points around the world, including the Mediterranean.
He is now tired of the deep sea, and I can understand. We share a few smiles, a few laughs, and those are gifts I will take with me and try to pass along if possible.
5:33 PM, 90°
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