Getting Stoned with Savages Read Free Page B

Mind you, I had just spent two years on an atoll, utterly isolated from the greater world, and so I was in a frame of mind to be addled. But there was something peculiar about Vanuatu, an enduring strangeness that I found particularly appealing. As I tossed my suits and ties into a bag bound for charity, I couldn’t have been happier. Begone, gray suits. I won’t be needing you anymore. I’m off to an island nation where formal wear consists of a leaf tied around a penis.
    As we packed, I recalled all the mistakes I had made preparing for island life in Kiribati. Packing for the South Pacific is different from packing for other regions. This was more like packing by subtraction. Sweaters, pants, socks—gone, gone, gone. Couch? Table and chairs? In the Pacific, one sits on the floor. As the days passed we divested ourselves of much of our clothing, all of our furniture, and soon little remained of our lives except a couple of suitcases heavy with tattered shorts and floral-print shirts. I am very fond of new beginnings. Indeed, I daresay I rather excel at new beginnings. One invariably becomes good at something when one does it often enough. It pleased me that after thirty-some years of life, the baggage I carried could be reduced to one suitcase.
    With the day of our departure nearing, our minds turned to Vanuatu. The impression we had taken from our short stay there two years earlier was that these islands constituted one unusual little nation. The geography itself accounts for no small measure of the country’s strangeness. This is because Vanuatu’s eighty-some islands lie directly on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which, as the name implies, is a rather fearsome place to find oneself. There is quite likely no greater force than that created when one tectonic plate with, let’s say, Australia and the Indian subcontinent on its back decides to get personal with another tectonic plate carrying, oh, how about the mass of the Pacific Ocean, the west coasts of North and South America, and, for good measure, Japan on its shoulders. Yet this is where Vanuatu finds itself, and what an exciting place it is, geologically speaking. “As solid as the earth below one’s feet” is not an expression often used in Vanuatu. The islands are young, temperamental adolescents, prone to mood swings and sudden growth spurts, and it is not uncommon for an island in Vanuatu to experience a sudden jolt and find itself thrust upward another yard or two. Now and then, an island loses it altogether and, in an apoplectic fit, blows itself up entirely, as happened to Kuwae in 1452. And always there are the earthquakes—many, many, earthquakes—that happen each and every day. Most are inconsequential, mere tremors. Though for those, like me, who have never before seen cutlery dance across a table in a restaurant, they can still be vividly disturbing.
    “What was that?” I had asked the waitress in Port Vila, the capital, once I had reclaimed my wits.
    “That was calamari.”
    “No, no. That shaking, what was that?”
    “Nothing. Just a little earthquake, a hiccup.”
    A hiccup, most likely, caused by the belching of one of Vanuatu’s nine active volcanoes. True, two of them are underwater, but seven living volcanoes occupying a land mass not much greater than Connecticut is an astonishing concentration of raw, Vulcan power. In Vanuatu, the Earth is alive and well, thank you, and it is there where one can experience the awesome might of the planet. To stand upon the rim of such a volcano, even when it is merely wheezing, sending forth with surly indifference the occasional car-sized boulder or a long, snotty stream of flaming magma, is to behold the immense potency of Earth.
Do not trifle with me,
you sense it telling you, and immediately you want to throw a few Hummer owners over the rim, a small offering to the gods. Alas, it’s not the owners of monster SUVs who suffer when the planet is feeling particularly churlish—not yet, in any