The Sex Lives of Cannibals

It was Mike who introduced to me to the world of surfing. In the late afternoon, I often saw him riding the waves behind the house. He lived a few doors down, and so one day I asked him if he would teach me how to surf.

“What should I do now?” I yelled, once I’d finally managed to bring both myself and a surfboard through the break zone, something that took me the better part of an hour to do, of which a good forty-five minutes were spent underwater in various states of distress.

“Look for a wave shaped like an A.”

An A. Hmm. I saw Zs and Ws and Vs. I saw the Hindi alphabet and the Thai alphabet. I saw Arabic script. I saw no As. Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move. The demon wave picked me up, and after that I have only a very vague recollection of spinning limbs, a weaponized surfboard, chaotic white water, all kind of churning together over a reef. I decided this was not for me.

“That really sucked,” I declared.

“You picked the wrong wave,” Mike said, after surfing the same distance in a state of such languid repose that he seemed to be mocking my anarchic tumble through the water. “Maybe you should try body boarding first.”

And so it came to be that I became a body boarder, a very good, very serious body boarder. I recognize that in the world of water sports body boarding does not rank very high, being regarded about as manly as synchronized swimming, but I spit on such opinions. Body boarding offers one the opportunity to become extremely intimate with a reef-breaking wave. You are in its bosom, sharing its fate, and when the wave is large and glassy smooth, and you are riding it just where you should be riding it—ahead of the break—and the wave doesn’t do anything really nasty like suddenly collapse above a boulder encrusted with sea urchins, well then, you find that you are really, really stoked. I don’t want to get all purple about it, but body boarding the waves just offshore a tropical island on the equator is about as sublime an experience as one can find on this planet.

Unfortunately, on Tarawa waves are rarely like those pictured in the glossy surf rags, the ones with the perfect barrels heading inexorably toward sandy beaches populated exclusively by buxom girls in string bikinis. The waves on Tarawa are, in fact, mean. They are breakers and dumpers and entirely unpredictable. They will lift you up high, as in twelve feet high, above a rapidly dwindling layer of water covering a very sharp reef shelf, and then just as you think you are going to race diagonally down and across its face, it will suddenly disintegrate, and you will feel yourself free-falling, and then there is an impact that leaves you winded, which is highly unfortunate because the wave, or rather the remains of the wave, still has forward momentum, and you will find yourself hurtling forward somewhere in the midst of tons of very angry, chaotic white water that is both lifting you and pounding you. Under no circumstances do you let go of your body board, because it will always float and you will not, and this is important, because you can hardly breathe from being winded, until finally you are spat out. You spend a few moments putting yourself together, and then you go back, certain that you have acquired just a little more knowledge, enough to ensure that next time you are going to let waves like that just roll on by.

Generally, I no longer engage in adrenaline rush–type activities that carry with them a strong likelihood of lifestyle-altering injury. I have been to a war zone. I have seen a mortar explode in alarming proximity to my being. I have fallen over a cliff. I have driven my mother’s car at speeds well in excess of 100 mph. In the rain. I have, on one night in particular, consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol, magic mushrooms, and marijuana, all more or less at the same time, just to see what it would feel like. I have engaged in… um, reckless personal behavior. After enough incidents and experiences, there came a moment when I realized that mortality is nothing to be trifled with. I suppose this is called aging. And yet, there is something about being on top of a wave, just at that moment when it catches you and you prepare to hurtle down its face, that brief moment when you are now committed, and even though you are now perched very high, and from this perch you can see with remarkable clarity the jagged coral reef below, with its body-sucking crevices and toxic spines, you are at this moment—and really, I am trying to find a better word, but can’t—pumped.

Whenever conditions looked particularly promising, Mike and I put our gear in the back of a pickup truck and searched the island for the best breaks. The smoothest waves were about a half mile off the Nippon Causeway. The biggest waves were off Temaiku, the southeast point of Tarawa, and to reach it we drove down the airport runway. The first time I drove down the runway, I wondered at the wisdom of doing so, but Mike accurately pointed out that Air Kiribati was down, Air Marshall had stopped its service, and the Air Nauru plane was impounded in Manila, so there was no need to worry about air traffic, just mind the pigs.

As the months went by and time drifted from one year to the next, I found that I had become completely enraptured by the water, possibly because from the water Tarawa always looked good. All evidence of squalor was pleasantly concealed, and the island seemed idyllic with its masses of coconut trees rising from sun-streaked water colored every shade of blue and green.

If there was wind I went windsurfing. I had been windsurfing ever since I was a small child, when my grandmother purchased for my cousins and me a windsurfer with a glorious red sail. She had declared herself bored with the white sails of sailboats that typically populated the lake in Holland upon which my family has a summer cottage and sought to enliven the view. I had grown accustomed to windsurfing in frigid water underneath slate- gray skies, and so when Wieland, a German agronomist who had spent his career flitting from one Pacific Island country to another, declared that his beginner skills were no match for the custom-made board he had brought from Fiji, I eagerly purchased it from him, and in a very short while I was skimming across the lagoon in the presence of dolphins. I knew then that it was unlikely that I would ever again even raise a sail on the icy waters of a Dutch lake.

I happened to be traversing the lagoon, just minding my own business, when I saw four fins slicing through the water, approaching me with intent, and my first thought, of course, was that I was about to meet my end and that it would be a gruesome, horrific end, the kind of end that becomes Pacific lore—Did you hear about that guy windsurfing across Tarawa Lagoon? Four Tiger Sharks. Nothing left but a scrap of sail. My heart rate approached five hundred beats a minute. But then the creatures began to leap alongside me and I saw that they were not man-eating sharks but playful, curious dolphins, and I suddenly felt very happy to be alive here in the middle of Tarawa Lagoon, windsurfing in the company of dolphins. For a long while they stayed with me, darting underneath my board, swimming alongside, and then they went on their way, and as they left I sincerely hoped that they knew what they were doing, because dolphins trapped in the shallows of the lagoon were unlikely to avoid the dinner plate.

On other days, I saw flying fish that vaulted a hundred yards and more, and huge silky rays that glided below like shadows, and long sea pikes that leapt urgently above the waves, and schools of silver fish capering off the bow of the board. I saw a green turtle. Even when there wasn’t much wind, I sometimes went out just to glide across the lagoon in the late afternoon, when the island was flushed with color. Sailing canoes drifted by, and we waved the wave of lazy contentment, a flick of the hand reciprocated.

The more time I spent breathing in the currents of sea life, the more I wanted to be on the ocean proper. I had windsurfed, just a few times, on the waves breaking on the reef behind our house, but when I faltered and went down and saw my board and my one sail being ravaged by the surf, I decided that I had had just about enough of that. Crashing here, when the waves had already sent my gear rushing toward shore, also left me in the unhappy situation of having to swim back through the break zone—panic, dive, swim; panic, dive, swim—and this was something I never wanted to do again without big, floppy, speed-enhancing flippers. But of course the ocean, the real Pacific, lay beyond the reef. For a while I thought about asking around to see if I could join some of the fishermen who worked the waters off North Tarawa, Abaiang, and Maiana. I have no doubt I would have been taken aboard; the I-Kiribati are the most obliging people on the planet. But I was dissuaded by the knowledge that I-Kiribati fishermen are crazy.

I would go anywhere in a traditional sailing canoe, perhaps not happily, but at least with some confidence that with sufficient sun-block, a bit of rain, a few yards of fishing line and a hook, we would reach our intended destination, and possibly be alive too. Not so on an I-Kiribati–operated vessel of more modern design. There are only a couple of state-owned cargo vessels, rusting hulks kindly referred to as floating maneabas, and within a short span of time, one was impounded in Hawaii, where it was deemed unseaworthy, and released only after assurances were made that it would never ever enter American waters again, while the other spent nearly three weeks floating aimlessly in the great emptiness between Tarawa