Getting Stoned with Savages Read Free Page A

mass mailing sent by an acquaintance of ours in Fiji.
We’re safe now,
it began, which I thought was a very lively way to begin an e-mail. The message was a stream-of-consciousness recounting of a very bad day.
Gunmen…prime minister held hostage…shooting…looters…Suva on fire.
    Sylvia called. “Did you hear?”
    “Yes. But hopefully this will resolve itself soon.”
    But it didn’t resolve itself. On that balmy morning in Fiji, a group of men armed with automatic guns and machetes had entered the parliament in Suva, the capital, and taken the prime minister and much of the government hostage. Typically, the South Pacific receives nary a mention in the world press, with the notable exception of the occasional celebrity sighting in Tahiti. Now, however, the back pages of newspapers around the world were full of stories with headlines like TOURISTS TERRORIZED AT POSH ISLAND RESORT. There had been a previous coup in Fiji, in 1987, and the wits in the press began to refer to Fiji as “coup-coup land.” We consumed all the news we could find, hoping that the coup would prove to be a mere blip, a temporary usurpation of law and order, and that the tensions would quietly dissolve with a kava ceremony, an apology, a group hug, and the solemn exchange of a whale’s tooth. But as the hostage drama unfolded over the following fifty-six days, and as we watched aghast as the television broadcast images of Suva in flames, it grew harder to maintain the illusion that this was anything other than a very serious problem. Nevertheless, I kept trying. We had a plan. Coup or no coup. Until one day, Sylvia came home and declared: “Fiji has been postponed.”
    “Alas,” I said. “I had rather been counting on moving to Fiji.”
    “So was I. But, you know, there’s been a coup.”
    “Which would make living in Fiji even more interesting,” I contended. “It’s not the first coup there. The other one turned out fine.”
    “But this time they’re killing each other.”
    “Yes, it’s terrible. It’s just that…well, I got fired today.”
    “You were fired?”
    “Well, they were very nice about it, saying that they were declining to renew my contract, funding issues and the like, and that they would think of me in the future, but their meaning was quite clear. I cleaned out my desk. So, you see, I was thinking that moving to the South Pacific now would work out pretty well as my schedule is, well, presently rather open.”
    “I can’t believe you got fired.” Sylvia shook her head.
    “It’s not my proudest moment.”
    “Well, fortunately for you, they’d like to base the job in Vanuatu for the time being. Still willing to go?”
    Out of the ashes, a new plan.

A ND SO VANUATU. THIS REALLY WAS A MOST FORTU nate turn of events, and it made the sting of being an unemployed consultant cast out of the halls of power exceedingly bearable. While I would have preferred to have delivered a decisive
I quit,
the important thing was that the deed was done, and as I wandered the streets of Washington with a sprightly spring in my flipflops I was beginning to feel more than a little smug.
Yeah, you there,
I thought, spying a harried-looking lawyer clutching an Au Bon Pain sandwich with one hand while the other was weighed down by a forty-pound briefcase.
An associate, aren’t you, working ninety hours a week, no life to speak of…? I’m off to the South Pacific.
Seeing a young woman staggering with two laptops as she struggled to keep up with a very important looking fellow carrying the lightest of cell phones, I thought,
Intern! You poor thing. Get out now…Melanesia, baby, Melanesia.
    It was all so very liberating, because not only were we returning to the South Pacific with all its attendant beauty and languor; we were going to Vanuatu. I had once before alighted upon the islands of Vanuatu, and while I had been there for only one short week, I recalled feeling that the country was very likely one of the oddest on Earth.