themselves to his water, which may be why a few days later his water basin/laundry area was encased behind a chicken wire fence that extended from ground to ceiling. I took this as my cue to seek other water sources.
Fortunately, Sylvia had discovered that it was possible to actually buy water. The Public Utility Board sold it for $3 per cubic meter. I went to their office and bought five cubic meters of water, all that our two tanks could hold. This felt good. We now owned enough water to last us a year, no small feat on a dry atoll. The problem was transporting the water from the water tower at the airport to our water tanks. Any suggestions? I asked the clerk at the PUB. He picked up his telephone and after a few minutes he told me that, regrettably, I could not use the fire truck. It was still broken, alas.
A fire truck. This was well beyond my expectations. It was like calling a veterinarian to inquire about a cat’s fleas and suddenly finding an ambulance complete with police escort to transport the kitty to the hospital. I was curious, however. “Um… what’s wrong with the fire truck?” I inquired.
“It can’t carry water.”
This was an interesting problem for a fire truck on an island without anything like hydrants. Tarawa’s lone fire truck was of a certain age and long past its prime. It resided at the airport, where, to satisfy regulatory need, it was trotted out to the edge of the runway to attend to each landing and takeoff. That it could do nothing in case of fire was entirely beside the point. Air Marshall and Air Nauru, the two airlines that occasionally flew to Tarawa, insisted on having a fire truck present to attend to their crashes. And so Kiribati obliges them.
The clerk made another call. I was impressed with how helpful people were. Nothing seemed to work on Tarawa, except the telephone system, which as Kate pointedly noted, was managed by
The clerk asked me where I lived. There are no addresses on Tarawa. There is the one road, called the main road, and it slithers halfway up the atoll, uninterrupted by stoplights or even stop signs. I described where I lived and the clerk asked me whether it was the green house or the pink house. I said the green and he mentioned as much to whomever he was speaking with on the telephone. He hung up and told me that a truck with a water tank would pick me up and haul the water I now so happily owned. It would cost $70.
The truck was a flatbed with a blue tank, the kind often seen in rural areas, used to store fertilizers and pesticides and other things one doesn’t want to mix with drinking water. The tank could hold one cubic meter of water and so we would have to make five trips. The driver grunted. “Maybe two trips today. Three another time.”
I didn’t care. Every morning I approached a neighbor as a supplicant, empty canisters and buckets in hand, and I knew that each drop I took from them brought them that much closer to our own situation. The dishes we used remained barely cleaned. Bathing was done with a sponge. Washing our hair seemed out of the question. The toilet was flushed with buckets of seawater. We still boiled our drinking water, but just for a minute so none was wasted through evaporation. And I was a mess. All the little insignificant cuts I had received turned septic. Sylvia too found herself with a festering mosquito bite that soon began to discharge fluid in ever deepening shades of green. It was impossible to battle the microscopic critters of Tarawa without water. We needed water.
I hopped into the cabin of the truck. We were in search of Abato, the gatekeeper of the water tower. He lived in the village of Bonriki and we found him asleep on his
“You have a water pump?” the driver asked me.
“Eh?”
“A water pump. We have to pump the water.”
“You don’t have a pump?” I asked, brilliantly.
“No pump.”
We did have a pump, but it was bolted solidly into place and fitted for the pipes that brought the water from the tanks into the house. We contemplated it.
“Do you think… ?” I asked him.
“I don’t think so,” said the driver.
We stood there, our eyes darting back and forth between the truck and the water tanks. So close. It took the rest of the afternoon to locate a water pump that we could borrow or rent, and when finally we found one at Tarawa’s lone hardware store, it was nearly dark. And then, just as we started the portable pump and water began to flow into our tank, a shadow passed above, the sky darkened, and I felt a drop of water, then another, and soon there was a deluge of rain, a tropical downpour of the kind that the island had not seen for more than a year. I became primal man—man need water, man get water—and I scurried around the house, checking the gutters that would stream this clean, fresh rainwater into our tanks, and I became horrified when I saw that the gutter was corroded and that this precious water was flowing uselessly through a gap onto the ground. I ran into the house, grabbed a chair and a notebook, and for the eight minutes that it rained, I stood underneath the gutter, pressing the notebook up to fill the gap, conceding that when one reduces life to its essential needs, it is water that precedes all else.
When the shower passed, the driver was smiling. “Maybe tomorrow it will rain again.”
But it didn’t rain the next day, nor the day after that, nor did it rain in the following weeks. It didn’t rain for months. Tarawa remained parched. The truck became perpetually unavailable and we never saw the other four cubic meters of water. We tracked our water as others track their money. And then, of course, the electricity failed.
At first, it wasn’t so bad. For a few hours every couple of days, the ceiling fans would cease their whirling, the water pump would stand idle, and my computer remained off, which was just as well, in case inspiration hit me and I completed my novel in a month or two, and what would I do then? Best to pace myself.
But soon the electricity was off for days at a time and we became dependent for our light on kerosene lanterns, which are extremely useful and easy to use, except when you turn the lever-thing the wrong way and your filament disappears into the kerosene basin and, of course, it’s dark so you can’t see what you’re doing, and inevitably your girlfriend is standing there beside you saying, “What, again?” and you remind her that from the beginning you were very up front about your competence as a handyman.
More troubling than lighting issues, and more irritating than slogging buckets of water from the tank to the house, was trying to sleep without a fan, which we typically had to set to hurricane force for it to become cool enough to sleep. A cinder-block house might be useful to have on the Siberian steppes, but not so on an equatorial atoll devoid of power. The heat was enraging. Rivulets of sweat streaked the body. When I turned, Sylvia would declare: “You’re too close. Don’t touch me.” Throughout the night, no longer softened by the white noise of a whirling ceiling fan, the waves, the booming earth-quaking sound of breaking waves, would cause heart palpitations. Meanwhile, in the absence of our nightly gales, mosquitoes humored themselves with a few flybys, causing us to slap ourselves senseless, until they quietly did their feeding and, as the night progressed, an even tempo would be reached—
And then the ants came marching in. Apparently, they found their living quarters in the exterior mortar of the house a little cramped and so they dug through and suddenly we were sharing the bedroom with a billion ants. On that awful dawn, I awoke with a howl to the bites of hundreds of ants clambering all over me, though curiously they left Sylvia alone, which may say something about how ripe I was then. But just as Sylvia began to feel confident that my magnetism within the bug world would save her from the visitations of night creatures, she awoke to find a beetle in her ear. Naturally enough, she wanted to share this news with me, which she did, with considerable aplomb. “There’s a bug in my ear,” she declared, and indeed there was. It was a coconut beetle, burrowing toward her brain, and this Sylvia wanted removed pronto. It took some work. I tried floating it out with water, but the little bugger was persistent, and so tweezers were needed and I’m pretty sure I got most of it out. Sylvia didn’t think it funny when I speculated about eggs.
It wasn’t all glum, however. I forged a strong friendship with Buebue, who was the chief electrician on Tarawa. In the United States, when one calls, well, just about any corporate-type organization for any reason at all, one is inevitably left seething after three attempts to navigate the automated customer-service line (“to serve you
