The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“Akia,” she said.

Nevertheless, it was the tastiest meal I ever ate in Kiribati. Bwenawa and Atenati eyed us warily as we slavered over our lobster.

“Uumh…”

“Oooh…”

“Aaah…”

We asked, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if we could have lobster every night. Each evening Bwenawa and Atenati picked at their tinned chicken gristle, while we ate our lobsters with ill-disguised obscenity. Not knowing when such an opportunity might present itself again, we took a few lobsters with us when it was time to depart Maiana.

Beiataaki and Tekaii spent the entire week riding out the storm in Maiana Lagoon. There might have been windows of opportunity for them to sail back to Tarawa, when the wind lessened to a still considerable twenty knots, but the idea of sailing across storm-tossed water only to return a day or two later to do it all over again dissuaded them. On Friday, as we gathered with our gear on the beach, so too did fifty-odd people beseeching us for a lift to Tarawa. “It’s Sylvia’s decision,” Beiataaki informed them diplomatically. Sylvia took one look at the size of the crowd, another look at the size of the boat, and yet another look at the ominous black clouds stirring on the horizon, and said in as reasonable and polite a manner as she could muster, “No.” Then she returned to gazing at the ominous black clouds stirring on the horizon.

“What do you think?” she asked me. “Should we go? You’re the sailor.”

Technically, this was true. I do sail. I have sailed on Lake Ontario and the Chesapeake Bay, but the vast majority of my sailing experience had been confined to a small lake in Holland, with an average depth of five feet, across which I schussed along in a Laser, a tiny little boat generally used by tiny little people learning how to sail. My only experience in blue water sailing thus far had occurred on the trip to Maiana, and though I was very favorably disposed to blue water sailing, I got the feeling that the journey back to Tarawa would be a little different.

“I think we should leave it up to Beiataaki,” I said.

Beiataaki had his eyes on the sky, quietly trying to discern its intent. The wind was modest, at least by the previous week’s standard, but the darkness of the sky promised nothing good.

“If we go, we have to leave now,” Beiataaki said. He was considering the day’s tides, which were unfavorable for us, and the fact that there were no lights on the buoys marking the channel into Tarawa Lagoon. This meant that we had to get through the channel before nightfall if we wished to avoid spending a night tacking back and forth on a heaving ocean while awaiting the light of dawn. “I think we should sail to the channel here and decide then,” Beiataaki declared.

This we did. With the sail reefed and the engine droning we spent the morning hours crossing the lagoon. A week of gales had stirred the sand at the bottom of the lagoon and the swirling gray clouds gave the water a milky ice-blue tint that looked strangely surreal. As we neared the wooden pilings that marked the channel’s entrance, Beiataaki put the engine in neutral and began to fret. We had arrived at precisely the low-water mark, when the channel was at its most treacherous. There would be no room for error. The boulders we had glided over on the way in could sink us on the way out. The reef that extended outward from the channel seemed to be under assault by the ocean. Ponderous waves broke with a dull thunder and dissipated into a churning froth that extended all along its contours.

Beiataaki climbed the mast and there he remained for a very long while, studying the channel and gazing at the ocean. When he clambered down, I asked him what he thought. He shrugged his shoulders like a Frenchman. It is bad either way, he seemed to suggest. And then he seemed to decide.

“I want to go home. I miss my wife.”

He climbed back up the mast. Tekaai stood at the rudder waiting for instructions. Sylvia and I exchanged glances. What the hell. Let’s go sailing. We inched forward and it was immediately clear that this channel at low tide was the nautical equivalent of a minefield. We were surrounded by great jagged bursts of coral. The channel meandered this way and that, zigzagging through jutting fingers and barely submerged boulders. The boat, as I have had occasion to ponder before, was made of plywood. There would be no chance of it surviving a collision. And then, once the passage was behind us, I wished with all my might that we would have sunk the boat in the channel, ending the misery right there and then.

The ocean raged.

Twenty-five feet. This was the height of the waves that greeted us when we emerged from the channel. Twenty-five feet. From cavernous trough to foaming peak. Twenty-five feet. And these were not rolling swells, gently lifting and rising. These were steep, pitching waves, tightly packed by the sudden rise of land. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for the sight of these waves.

All of us turned a ghostly white as we internalized the sheer terror of being on a plywood trimaran in twenty- five-foot seas. And then some us began to turn green. As one, Bwenawa, Atenati, and Sylvia retreated to the sheltered aft of the boat, leaned over and began to vomit, and there they remained. Beiataaki steered a course that confronted the waves diagonally, and as we crested a wave, there was a long second when it felt like we had taken flight, an airlessness that made it seem as if we were not sailing across the ocean, but above it, only to be followed by a precipitous slide over the spine of the wave, sending the left hull plowing into the next curling swell, causing torrents of white water to swamp the deck and soak those who stood upon it, stalling the forward movement of the boat until buoyancy was reclaimed, and then the boat pitched ever upward, continuing the shattering routine. The troughs were windless caverns. The mast was swallowed. The sail went limp. On the crests, momentum was regained. All eyes turned toward the waves, dreading the rogue wave, the forty-footer. We watched and judged: That wave there, the third one, the big one, when it hits us it will be a wall of water. Beitaaki would adjust the rudder to confront it head-on, and as we rose above it and the hulls went airborne, there followed the crunching slap of the boat plunging back into the sea, an ear-piercing sound that made those of us still on deck wince with worry.

“What do you think?” I asked Beiataaki. It had begun to rain. I was shivering, cold, and in a state of stupefied awe. My hands were curled around a railing. Tekaai was busy with the sail, raising it here, reefing it there, lowering it altogether, reacting to a capricious wind that gusted and howled but remained unsteady. For safety, he was hooked to the lines running the length of the boat.

“I think we can make it. Once we are away from Maiana the waves will be more round, less steep.”

The waves, forged by a week of storms, continued to pound poor Martha. It was like being part of an endless car wreck, when you know you no longer have control over the situation, and you are just waiting for its grim conclusion. I went to check on Sylvia. There were stairs to navigate. The boat lurched and I bounced and stumbled and baby-stepped my way down. Sylvia was not well. She sat slumped on a bench, listlessly cradling her head, and muttering cryptically.

“What’s that?” I asked her.

“I want to get off this fucking boat.”

Hmmm… Sylvia is not one for cussing. There were no windows in the aft compartment. A blue tarp had been pulled down to keep the rain out. Atenati and Bwenawa sat on the bench opposite looking equally miserable. Every few minutes, one of the three would poke their head underneath the tarp and over the railing and begin to barf. Not good. Though I wasn’t typically afflicted by seasickness, the pitiable sight of these three and the heaving and lurching of the boat was beginning to make me feel nauseated as well.

“Why don’t you come up on deck,” I said to Sylvia. “The problem here is that you can’t see the waves and so your inner ear is confused. My inner ear is confused down here.”

“We should have stayed in Maiana,” she began to moan. “We should never have gone today. I should have said let’s wait until the sea calms down. I didn’t know it would be like this. Boo-hoo.”

She didn’t actually say boo-hoo, but she might as well have. I believe that if one- half of a couple becomes weepy and mopey, it is important for the other half to respond with refreshing bursts of sunnyness. This often entails lying.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Beiataaki said that he has seen much worse than this. We’re perfectly safe.”

Actually, Beiataaki had told me that this was about the worst he had ever seen, and if the wind rose, we might have to run with the waves, dragging a sea anchor to ensure that we wouldn’t flip end over end, which would add a considerable amount of time to the trip, quite likely several days.