In which the Author flies Air Kiribati, Lives, Explores the island of Butaritari, famed for Merrymaking, followed by some thoughts on what it means to be Marooned, since the Author had a lot of time to ponder what it Means to be Marooned, because, frankly, Air Kiribati is not one of the world’s More Reliable Airlines.
The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness, pitiless isolation, food shortages, and the realization that so much of what ails Tarawa, the overpopulation and all its attendant health and social problems, need not be as bad is it is. It was after one such low that I found myself surprisingly amenable to Sylvia’s suggestion that we fly Air Kiribati to Butaritari, one of the northern Gilbert Islands. We were to accompany Te Iitibwerere, a local theater troupe that Sylvia had hired to produce message-oriented plays on the importance of green, leafy vegetables and the proper treatment for diarrhea, among other topics not typically explored on Broadway. And so we found ourselves at the airport, where despite our more sensible instincts, we were checking in for a flight on Air Kiribati.
Truthfully, I would have preferred to visit a city, some place with an old town. Despite illusions to the contrary, I was a creature of the city. I was not immune to the lure of comfort, convenience, and options. I liked the hum of a metropolis, the energy that emanates from hundreds of thousands of people tightly confined, by choice working and living among crowds, and I particularly enjoyed the corner respites, the cafes, bars, and restaurants that encouraged lingering and merriment. A perfect day would be spent perusing bookstores and the finery of brick town houses in a city’s old quarter, dawdling in a cafe and contemplating the listings of plays and films I probably wouldn’t see, having a couple of beers at a friendly neighborhood bar, enjoying dinner at a restaurant with sublime food and easy atmosphere, and returning to a charming hotel, confident that the electricity would be on and the water running. Also, it would be fall. I would wear a sweater.
Alas, Air Kiribati didn’t offer weekend packages to Copenhagen. Instead, we would be flying the wanikiba, or flying canoe, to Butaritari, an island that intrigued us because it was lush and verdant, which was unusual in Kiribati, and its people had a reputation throughout the islands for being exceptionally languorous and easygoing. This excited our curiosity. It is difficult to convey exactly how hard it is to acquire such a reputation in Kiribati, where energy conservation is a quality long cultivated and, as far as we could see, already perfected. Also, Butaritari was known for merrymaking, and this finally sold us on the island as our destination. Each island in Kiribati is known for something—Maiana for white lies, Tabiteuea North for settling disputes with knives, Onotoa for frugality, Abemama for oral sex (I kid you not)—and spending a week idling and carousing seemed like an appealing way to learn a little more about Kiribati. But we had to fly Air Kiribati to get there, and it says much about my willingness to explore an island where the lack of a functioning sewage system did not affect the overall quality of life that I checked in for the flight without the assistance of heroin.
After bowel movements, the state of Air Kiribati was the favorite topic of conversation on Tarawa. Did you hear about when the plane ran out of fuel midair and had to glide in for a landing, someone will say. Or… about when the engine died, or about when the pilot passed out mid-flight, or about when they forgot to turn the beacon on at the airport, or, my favorite, The pilot let me fly the plane. Distressingly, these were not mere rumors. I had never been so uneasy about boarding a flight. It did not help that the shoeless airport official was not pleased with my weight. The expression on his face, which just moments earlier had revealed only benign indifference, contorted into something approaching a scowl. As I stood on a rusting, antiquated scale, fulfilling my role in a preboarding ritual meant to instill anxiety in travelers, I watched the creases on his forehead burrow deeper, saw his eyes recede in a squint of deep concentration, and listened to the strange clucking noises emanating from his mouth. “Tock, tock, tock,” he said. He seemed personally affronted by my weight. And, I must add, I am not a fat man.
Indeed, standing on the scale, I was startled by how much weight I had lost—twenty-five pounds—with absolutely no effort at all on my part. I was fit when I arrived on Tarawa, so this wasn’t a loss of excess baggage. This was a withering away, and I had once been proud of my iron gut. The Tarawa diet is the ultimate weight loss plan—hookworm, roundworm, dash of salmonella, hint of dysentery, season with cholera to taste—results guaranteed, except for women. Sylvia lost not a pound, which confirmed for me that when challenged, women have a much stronger constitution than men. This makes sense, of course. Life in Kiribati has a strong Darwinian cast to it, and men, except for one brief glorious moment, are pretty useless from an evolutionary perspective and can therefore be allowed to wither, whereas women are hardwired to survive. The “weaker sex” moniker may apply to the bench press, but Nature isn’t a gym rat.
And I nearly lost a few more pounds when I contemplated the plane we were about to fly. This would be an old Spanish prop plane that predated Franco. It tilted ominously, exuding an air of exhaustion. As the airport official clucked and fretted over our small, featherlight backpacks, I watched the pilot stand on a stepladder and tug at a wing until it aligned with the other wing. Then I smoked eighteen cigarettes. Even Sylvia asked for a cigarette. Sylvia doesn’t smoke. She’s from California.
I did not want to cause a scene, but walking across the tarmac I did feel it was my duty to highlight to the members of Te Iitibwerere that the two engines were connected to the wings with masking tape. Really. They regarded this as very funny, and I knew then that the I-Kiribati would remain forever unfathomable to me. It was explained to us that the masking tape wasn’t actually connecting the engines to the wings, but merely covering up the parts of the plane that were corroded through with rust, and strangely, as I regarded the swaths of masking tape elsewhere on the fuselage, I didn’t really feel that much better.
The interior of the aircraft, a CASA, resembled that of an aging, decrepit school bus, complete with benches, though it was not nearly so large or comfortable. As we taxied, I hoped that someone was restraining the dogs, pigs, and children that usually occupied the runway. Pigs, let it be said, are stupid animals, though, as we discovered earlier, they do make landing a plane on Tarawa a uniquely interesting experience. Once we were in the air, a cool breeze was felt inside the cabin and it would have been pleasant had it originated from an air- conditioning unit. Clearly, more masking tape was needed. Two men, wiser than I, sought comfort on top of the luggage that was strewn haphazardly in the back of the plane, and as the engine coughed and sputtered and the aircraft trembled, I found myself envying them their alcoholic stupor. The Pacific Ocean below appeared placid and lush and impossibly vast, like a blue universe unraveling toward infinity. It seemed presumptuous to fly over something so expansive and grand as the Pacific Ocean in a contraption so pitiful as ours, and I thought it ominous that when we began to descend we could see in the near distance the island of Makin, a small atoll traditionally regarded as inhabited by the spirits of the I-Kiribati no longer residing in the temporal world. Missionaries, however, dispute this.
Landing on a rock-strewn strip cleared of coconut trees was exactly as I expected it would be. Terrifying. The passenger door jammed, and we scrambled out through the rear cargo door and soon we began to feel like Martian invaders. I-Matang I-Matang, said a chorus of tiny voices. But they quieted when I bared my teeth, and the youngest even scattered into the bush. Parents in Kiribati tell their children to behave or otherwise an I-Matang will devour them, which has led to the wonderful result that the younger segment of the population believes I-Matangs to be cannibals. I, of course, did nothing to dissuade them. Literary endeavors, which I imagined myself to be engaged in, were not enhanced by an
