THE TERRARIUM
The flat earth community has been on a fast, upward climb.
(Published in Guernica Magazine, June 2020)
"We are the teachers now,” Joshua Swift declares from the stage. Standing next to a poster board announcing that the EARTH IS FLAT, he addresses the hundred people in the room. “We have to reeducate people,” he tells us, “We have to reeducate what America looks like.”
Swift gained fame in the flat earth community by standing on Minneapolis street corners, putting a camera in people’s faces, and asking for two pieces of proof that the Earth is round. He would then upload his respondent’s hesitations to YouTube for his 3,700 subscribers. For this, he earned an invitation to present here, at the Second Annual Flat Earth Conference in Denver, Colorado.
“He’s hardcore, man,” offers Darryle Marble, another flat earth celebrity. “He’s crashing fieldtrips at courthouses. He’s just getting into people’s face.” In one video, Swift provokes a father with his two young sons at a hockey game, “Lie to your kids some more,” he says as the family walks away, “and Santa Claus isn’t real,” he says, following them through the concession stands, yelling, even after security asks him to stop.
“But,” Marble continues. “It’s time for activism. It’s time to get out there.”
Continue reading here (for free) at Guernica Magazine
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PADDLING THE SEWERSHED
The Bronx, New York
(Audio version published in Out There Podcast as "This Concrete Life," produced by Willow Belden with music by Aaron Leeder. April 2017)
(Published as "Take me to the (Bronx) River" on The Big Roundtable, June 2016)
We splurged on the raft. While the picture on the box clearly showed two young kids paddling a placid lake, it also boasted a “motor-mount fitting” for an engine. It was comforting to know that this raft at least pretended to be built for rougher stuff.
My paddle-buddy, Cuong, paused in front of a cheaper one. “Are you sure this one won’t do?” he asked. It had one air compartment and looked even more like a toy. “It’s only $32.”
We should have known then that we were in trouble. Neither of us knows much about paddling a river. We are friends through rock climbing. Cuong is a photographer and graphic designer, I’m an English professor, and we became friends through outdoor adventure—climbing in Central Park, surfing in Brooklyn, and mountain biking in Queens.
It’s a ridiculous idea. We plan to paddle the entire twenty-four miles of the Bronx River, top to bottom, in two days. It’s so ridiculous that there is no evidence of anyone even talking about doing it, let alone attempting it. Only the last eight miles of the Bronx River are officially paddleable (with a permit we do not have), and there are no campgrounds anywhere along the river. In fact, I’m not sure if any part of this trip is legal.
What we do know is that it’s generally a bad idea to take a blowup raft down a shallow river. Coming from downtown Manhattan, though, we couldn’t figure out how to get a canoe through the subway turnstiles.
“Let’s get the raft with three air compartments,” I said. “Just to be safe.” Plus, at $44 it also came with a patch kit, paddles, and a pump.
“Okay,” Cuong laughed, “I guess we don’t want to end up swimming down the Bronx River.”
Continue reading here, on The Big Roundtable.
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TAPPING A FLOWER
Christmas Island, The Republic of Kiribati
(Published in The Common, August, 2013)
I’m forty feet above the ground hanging, onto a palm frond for my life, and Batiota wants me to go higher. He motions for me to take my foot from the palm’s trunk and place it on the fronds above. I hesitate and give him a look that must be something between, What am I doing up here? and Why are you trying to kill me? Palm fronds grow green from the top, but whither and fall from below, so all I can see to step on is a dying frond, connected by nothing more than a thin, brown-red scar.
Batiota is supremely patient with me. He looks down under jet-black hair with a face far too calm for his 15 years. His body swings with the wind as one foot scratches the top of the other, resting softly on a brown frond.
Batiota climbs a dozen of these palm trees each day to collect sap for his family. It is an essential part of life on Christmas Island, a place where well water runs shallow and drinkable liquids are difficult to find. But his work is not without hazard. Deep scars run down Batiota’s right arm and leg, and when he’s on the ground, offset hips and a heavy limp cause him to favor one side. When he was 13, he fell from one of these trees—a dangerous thing on an island with no hospital.
I climb into the fronds carefully, stretching high to put my foot on the greenest frond I can reach, but I find myself sideways. One leg is too high while the other is too low. My hands grip a high green frond so tight that my knuckles are white. And I am on the wrong side of the tree.
“Come,” Batiota says. I move carefully around the fronds, trying to swing as gracefully as Batiota does, but I can hear young kids giggling below. A crowd is gathering.
The only way to get to Christmas is on a weekly flight from Hawaii, 1,200 miles northeast of here. Christmas Island is considered one of the best saltwater fly-fishing spots in the world and is on top of many fishermen’s lists, but because of the atoll’s remoteness less than a thousand people visit each year. A white man in a tree is a bit of a spectacle.
I get myself upright and lean against the green fronds. The lagoon begins only a few dozen feet away, and from this height I can see its fifteen miles of calm, clear water and sandbar flats—a painter’s palette of blues, greens, reds, and yellows made from crushed coral in a massive lagoon.
Next to me, Batiota stands over one of the two thick flower stems, the source of the palm’s sap. Each stem juts two feet from the palm’s head and is bound with twine where the flowers should grow. Batiota makes quick work of the stem, exaggerating his movements so I can learn. When he finishes, he motions for us to go to the next. It is my turn.
We swing around the tree so that I am squatting over the second flower stem. Tiny buds press out from the sappy end and a thin frond has been tied to guide the sap into a plastic soda bottle. I untie the twine that holds it all together and hand Batiota the full bottle, which is filled with frothy yellow goo and a couple of flies. I take his machete, shave off the flower buds, and tie on an empty bottle, positioning a new frond to lead the sap into it. In ten hours, this bottle will be filled too.
“Good job,” Batiota says, offering the smile you give a small child. I am close to twice his age.
A talented cutter can collect up to a gallon of sap per tree each day. It is a significant amount in a place that gets less than thirty inches of rain a year, but the Kiribati have learned to stretch their local resources far. Every part of the palm is used: husk for twine, shells for bowls, trunk for timber, fronds for thatching, milk for drink, coconut meat for food, and sap for sweetener, syrup, sustenance, or fermented into kiokioke, a kind of beer.
With two liters collected and new bottles set up, we step around the tree to climb down. Batiota points at a clump of coconuts and asks if I’d like one.
“Sure,” I say. He kicks two from their perch and the tree shudders and howls. I fight the urge to hug the fronds as the coconuts fall 45 feet and bounce to a stop.
We climb down the machete-cut steps to the bottom and some of the kids I’ve met in the last few days walk over smiling. One asks, “So how was it?”
“Good,” I say, “but I was a little scared at first.”
“Yeah,” laughs Kuariata, a shy fourteen-year-old in the group. She points at my legs and then shakes hers violently. The other kids laugh as she gives me a playful punch on the arm.
Batiota opens the two coconuts with his machete, and we sit in the hot equatorial sun, sipping the cool milk. The kids gather around, laughing and speaking in I-Kiribati. Some shake their legs in imitation and then pat me on the back to show that they are proud of me. The rest laugh nervously. They are all at the age that if their family needs it, they will learn how to tap these flowers.
Batiota goes to another tree, leaving me behind. It is shorter and slanted over the lagoon.
“Why didn’t he take me up that one?” I laugh to the kids. “This one was too tall.” They all laugh.
Kuariata climbs up behind Batiota, showing off. At the top, she hangs far away from the palm—one foot on the trunk, two hands on the end of a green frond, her body over an abyss. She swings back and forth, pivoting on her bare foot, nothing but air below, smiling ear to ear.
I remember that smile from when I was her age—high on a swing, swinging as far as it would take me, worried and thrilled that I could go over. Sitting among these kids, I cannot help but find that smile again.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The flat earth community has been on a fast, upward climb.
(Published in Guernica Magazine, June 2020)
"We are the teachers now,” Joshua Swift declares from the stage. Standing next to a poster board announcing that the EARTH IS FLAT, he addresses the hundred people in the room. “We have to reeducate people,” he tells us, “We have to reeducate what America looks like.”
Swift gained fame in the flat earth community by standing on Minneapolis street corners, putting a camera in people’s faces, and asking for two pieces of proof that the Earth is round. He would then upload his respondent’s hesitations to YouTube for his 3,700 subscribers. For this, he earned an invitation to present here, at the Second Annual Flat Earth Conference in Denver, Colorado.
“He’s hardcore, man,” offers Darryle Marble, another flat earth celebrity. “He’s crashing fieldtrips at courthouses. He’s just getting into people’s face.” In one video, Swift provokes a father with his two young sons at a hockey game, “Lie to your kids some more,” he says as the family walks away, “and Santa Claus isn’t real,” he says, following them through the concession stands, yelling, even after security asks him to stop.
“But,” Marble continues. “It’s time for activism. It’s time to get out there.”
Continue reading here (for free) at Guernica Magazine
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PADDLING THE SEWERSHED
The Bronx, New York
(Audio version published in Out There Podcast as "This Concrete Life," produced by Willow Belden with music by Aaron Leeder. April 2017)
(Published as "Take me to the (Bronx) River" on The Big Roundtable, June 2016)
We splurged on the raft. While the picture on the box clearly showed two young kids paddling a placid lake, it also boasted a “motor-mount fitting” for an engine. It was comforting to know that this raft at least pretended to be built for rougher stuff.
My paddle-buddy, Cuong, paused in front of a cheaper one. “Are you sure this one won’t do?” he asked. It had one air compartment and looked even more like a toy. “It’s only $32.”
We should have known then that we were in trouble. Neither of us knows much about paddling a river. We are friends through rock climbing. Cuong is a photographer and graphic designer, I’m an English professor, and we became friends through outdoor adventure—climbing in Central Park, surfing in Brooklyn, and mountain biking in Queens.
It’s a ridiculous idea. We plan to paddle the entire twenty-four miles of the Bronx River, top to bottom, in two days. It’s so ridiculous that there is no evidence of anyone even talking about doing it, let alone attempting it. Only the last eight miles of the Bronx River are officially paddleable (with a permit we do not have), and there are no campgrounds anywhere along the river. In fact, I’m not sure if any part of this trip is legal.
What we do know is that it’s generally a bad idea to take a blowup raft down a shallow river. Coming from downtown Manhattan, though, we couldn’t figure out how to get a canoe through the subway turnstiles.
“Let’s get the raft with three air compartments,” I said. “Just to be safe.” Plus, at $44 it also came with a patch kit, paddles, and a pump.
“Okay,” Cuong laughed, “I guess we don’t want to end up swimming down the Bronx River.”
Continue reading here, on The Big Roundtable.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TAPPING A FLOWER
Christmas Island, The Republic of Kiribati
(Published in The Common, August, 2013)
I’m forty feet above the ground hanging, onto a palm frond for my life, and Batiota wants me to go higher. He motions for me to take my foot from the palm’s trunk and place it on the fronds above. I hesitate and give him a look that must be something between, What am I doing up here? and Why are you trying to kill me? Palm fronds grow green from the top, but whither and fall from below, so all I can see to step on is a dying frond, connected by nothing more than a thin, brown-red scar.
Batiota is supremely patient with me. He looks down under jet-black hair with a face far too calm for his 15 years. His body swings with the wind as one foot scratches the top of the other, resting softly on a brown frond.
Batiota climbs a dozen of these palm trees each day to collect sap for his family. It is an essential part of life on Christmas Island, a place where well water runs shallow and drinkable liquids are difficult to find. But his work is not without hazard. Deep scars run down Batiota’s right arm and leg, and when he’s on the ground, offset hips and a heavy limp cause him to favor one side. When he was 13, he fell from one of these trees—a dangerous thing on an island with no hospital.
I climb into the fronds carefully, stretching high to put my foot on the greenest frond I can reach, but I find myself sideways. One leg is too high while the other is too low. My hands grip a high green frond so tight that my knuckles are white. And I am on the wrong side of the tree.
“Come,” Batiota says. I move carefully around the fronds, trying to swing as gracefully as Batiota does, but I can hear young kids giggling below. A crowd is gathering.
The only way to get to Christmas is on a weekly flight from Hawaii, 1,200 miles northeast of here. Christmas Island is considered one of the best saltwater fly-fishing spots in the world and is on top of many fishermen’s lists, but because of the atoll’s remoteness less than a thousand people visit each year. A white man in a tree is a bit of a spectacle.
I get myself upright and lean against the green fronds. The lagoon begins only a few dozen feet away, and from this height I can see its fifteen miles of calm, clear water and sandbar flats—a painter’s palette of blues, greens, reds, and yellows made from crushed coral in a massive lagoon.
Next to me, Batiota stands over one of the two thick flower stems, the source of the palm’s sap. Each stem juts two feet from the palm’s head and is bound with twine where the flowers should grow. Batiota makes quick work of the stem, exaggerating his movements so I can learn. When he finishes, he motions for us to go to the next. It is my turn.
We swing around the tree so that I am squatting over the second flower stem. Tiny buds press out from the sappy end and a thin frond has been tied to guide the sap into a plastic soda bottle. I untie the twine that holds it all together and hand Batiota the full bottle, which is filled with frothy yellow goo and a couple of flies. I take his machete, shave off the flower buds, and tie on an empty bottle, positioning a new frond to lead the sap into it. In ten hours, this bottle will be filled too.
“Good job,” Batiota says, offering the smile you give a small child. I am close to twice his age.
A talented cutter can collect up to a gallon of sap per tree each day. It is a significant amount in a place that gets less than thirty inches of rain a year, but the Kiribati have learned to stretch their local resources far. Every part of the palm is used: husk for twine, shells for bowls, trunk for timber, fronds for thatching, milk for drink, coconut meat for food, and sap for sweetener, syrup, sustenance, or fermented into kiokioke, a kind of beer.
With two liters collected and new bottles set up, we step around the tree to climb down. Batiota points at a clump of coconuts and asks if I’d like one.
“Sure,” I say. He kicks two from their perch and the tree shudders and howls. I fight the urge to hug the fronds as the coconuts fall 45 feet and bounce to a stop.
We climb down the machete-cut steps to the bottom and some of the kids I’ve met in the last few days walk over smiling. One asks, “So how was it?”
“Good,” I say, “but I was a little scared at first.”
“Yeah,” laughs Kuariata, a shy fourteen-year-old in the group. She points at my legs and then shakes hers violently. The other kids laugh as she gives me a playful punch on the arm.
Batiota opens the two coconuts with his machete, and we sit in the hot equatorial sun, sipping the cool milk. The kids gather around, laughing and speaking in I-Kiribati. Some shake their legs in imitation and then pat me on the back to show that they are proud of me. The rest laugh nervously. They are all at the age that if their family needs it, they will learn how to tap these flowers.
Batiota goes to another tree, leaving me behind. It is shorter and slanted over the lagoon.
“Why didn’t he take me up that one?” I laugh to the kids. “This one was too tall.” They all laugh.
Kuariata climbs up behind Batiota, showing off. At the top, she hangs far away from the palm—one foot on the trunk, two hands on the end of a green frond, her body over an abyss. She swings back and forth, pivoting on her bare foot, nothing but air below, smiling ear to ear.
I remember that smile from when I was her age—high on a swing, swinging as far as it would take me, worried and thrilled that I could go over. Sitting among these kids, I cannot help but find that smile again.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
FISHING THE FLATS
Christmas Island, The Republic of Kiribati
(Published Gray's Sporting Journal, February/March 2010)
I might as well have picked a country out of a hat, but with grad school grant money to spend I was looking for an adventure. I bought a flight to the most remote spot I could find, an island in the middle of the Pacific, a place most maps don’t note and the rest represent as a fleck of dust ready to be washed off the page.
“You’re going to Christmas Island?” my friend Steve asked. His mouth was wide open.
For a guy who spent six months learning to juggle fire in the Guatemalan rain forest, I would have thought it’d take more to impress. “You’re going to fish, right?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You know it’s some of the best saltwater fly fishing in the world, right?”
I didn’t. In fact, I knew very little at first. I’ve always thought I had a good grasp of geography but until a month before I had no idea there was even a country called Kiribati. And I’d known for even less time that the infamous Christmas Island—the Christmas Island of British and American nuclear tests (done near and over civilian populations)—was part of this 33 island Central Pacific country. Besides, I’m not much of a fisherman to begin with.
“You have to take my rod,” Steve insisted.
Pulling the fishing rod out of the case he handled it like a newborn. The rod alone, he told me, was $650. I’d paid less for my first motorcycle.
“Just wash it off with fresh water every day you use it.” He grabbed a small plastic container from his fly-tying kit that looked like eye drops—something meant for careful hands. “And mix a couple of drops of this in the water. If you don’t use the rod much, just wash it once a week anyway.”
“Okay,” I said, taking the gear cautiously.
“The Pacific kills rods.”
And still, three weeks in on Christmas and all I’d done is hang a borrowed spin-caster off the edge of the pier, sipping beers with an Aussie oil man, catching nothing. It’s sacrilege and I know it. I’ve searched enough for articles on Christmas Island to know that there’s more written about Christmas bonefish than the nuclear tests. Fishermen save for years for the trip. It’s like an architect finally making it to Italy or a surfer catching Bali during an offshore storm. You don’t spend your time doing other things.
It’s not like I’ve been idle. I’m staying in a renovated mechanical shed behind the Catholic Church, nestled up to Christmas’s lagoon, and each morning I wake to sun cutting through the shed’s cracks. Rats and geckos running around while I sleep, and my fresh water is rainwater collected in a rusted container, but I’ve chosen to stay in town rather than at the hotel 20 miles south because I’d rather be around locals than the rotating set of a dozen American fishermen that visit this island each week. Even still, this corrugated shack is luxurious in a country where running water and electricity are not common and most homes are made from palm and pandanus thatching.
My morning routine starts with breakfast with Temuti, the nursemaid to the French priest, the last of a dying breed of missionaries who came here in the 1960s. Temuti has become something of a surrogate mother, teaching me the basics of her culture, helping me with the language, inviting me places and introducing me around. Because of her, I’ve seen a baby’s christening, a one-year-old’s birthday party (worthy of great celebration in a cash poor country), and drank kiokioke—fermented coconut sap. Today she tells me about how good a fisherman her husband was. He would take his outrigger out alone on open water for days and always come back with a full boat.
“He was a great fisherman,” she says.
One week though his canoe came back alone, evidence of a shark attack on the fragile hull.
This is not a forgiving land.
I search for a proper response when Temuti gets up and steps toward my shack’s door. Something’s caught her eye. “Do you want to go for a picnic?” she asks.
It is too beautiful a day to dwell, it seems. She points at the metal case leaning up against my bed. “You can bring your fishing rod. It is a fishing rod, no?”
“It is,” I nod, realizing that I haven’t taken it out of its case once. For three weeks it’s been sitting on this slip of land no wider than 100 yards from salt ocean to salt lagoon. Every bit of metal I’ve seen here is rust red with a white salt coating. Thatching isn’t just a neccesity of economy, it’s practical.
I pick up the tube under the premise of showing her that yes, it is a rod, but I expect to see a pile of rusted flakes. “See,” I say, pulling it out of the tube and it’s velvet pouch, “A fishing rod.” Not a pile of dust. Phew.
“Good, you catch fish and we will swim and eat and sit in the sun.”
Temuti arranges the whole thing, inviting her cousin, who has a car, and her nephew Tiio and his wife. “He is your age, you will like him,” she says. “We will go Saturday.”
After she leaves I check my gear. I have no flies, not even any hooks. I’m going to need some supplies.
When I came here, I expected a bit more. Christmas is one of the top fly-fishing spots on the planet. Naturally I assumed it would have a shopping district, but the town’s stores are a random mix of basic local needs: yards of cloth, bags of rice and sugar, and the occasional t-shirt for the tourists. But 100 tourists a year does not necissitate a tourist shop, it seems.
I weigh my options. I could stop by the “Mini-Hotel” in town where my new Aussie friend, Tony, an engineer here to help the government with their fuel storage, is staying. It is the only other hotel on the island, a bed and breakfast where two fishermen came in for the week a few days before. Their choice was commendable, choosing the locally-owned hotel in town versus the government-owned hotel in the woods, but they hadn’t done it to be closer to the culture or people.
A few days before, after a day exploring the unpopulated eastern part of the island, Tony and I sat with them over some beers. We’d had a great week, hitting the local spots with new friends, checking out the new Japanese spaceship landing strip, and getting drunk off of kiokioke. We tried to share it with them, to tell them that they’d do good to take a day away from fishing, or at least head for a night at Big Eddy’s, the local “dance club.”
“No, I don’t think I could do that,” one of the fisherman said. Both were still dressed in their beige hats, vests and shorts. Their six top-of-the-line fly rods hung behind them on the wall. “The fishing is too good here. I can’t take a day off.”
These guys get up at five each morning, fish until seven at night, eat, and then go to bed. It’s the schedule for just about all of the thousand or so fishermen that come here each year. They are pretty much the only visitors Christmas gets and there’s not the slightest interest in the fact that they’re in a foreign country.
“Just take an afternoon,” I said, backing up Tony’s suggestion.
“No, I don’t want to miss a single moment of sunlight out there,” the second fisherman agreed. “We’ve been waiting for this trip for years.”
Later they got scammed again and again buying cigarettes and t-shirts. Neither Tony nor I had seen even the slightest dishonesty in the shopkeepers here. It baffled us. “It must be the safari hats,” Tony laughed.
I judge them in their ridiculous matching clothes but I know better. They aren’t here to experience a new world or to meet new people. And they probably don’t care if they’re paying too much for things. They’re on vacation. They’re fishermen here to fish. And what’s wrong with that? They’ve drooled for months over articles on bonefish. They probably see it the way some would see a drive to Vermont to pull a few trout from the river. Is it wrong to not stop in the local town to buy a bit of maple syrup and have a conversation with the old guy sitting on the porch? Probably not. Would they get more out of their day if they did? Maybe. And yet these guys still frustrate me. I’m not entirely sure why, but whatever it is I don’t want to ask them if I can borrow or buy a few fishing supplies.
So I head into town, hoping to come across a store I’d missed. In a town of no more than a dozen storefronts it’s extremely unlikely but halfway through, without any luck, a pickup slows down and the driver asks if I need a ride. I don’t. I live half a mile away and am not really finished searching yet. “Sure,” I say anyway, figuring I’ll just walk back after they drop me off.
I’ve spent my time on Christmas experiencing some great things by being open to offers like this ride. Walking circles has become a fine thing to do. Along with the things I’ve done with Temuti and Tony in the past two weeks, I’ve gone to a Kiribati-version rehearsal dinner (for a wedding between a 33 year old man and a 15 year old girl), been kidnapped (sort of) by a bunch of drunks and taken to Terabawiakoa (“The Bay of Sharks”) for an afternoon of drinking, and I’ve headed to the local “movie theater” with a bunch of young girls looking to marry me. It’s why I haven’t fished.
I hop in the pickup bed, headed back the way I’ve just come. The man in the back is perhaps 55, with wild curly black hair and a struggling mustache. His eyes are bloodshot like he’s been drinking for 48 straight hours.
“What is your name?” he asks after a moment of silence. It is the deliberately worded question I’ve gotten several times before. It means he speaks very little English.
“Brice,” I answer, “Antai Aram?” (What is your name?)
He responds excitedly, quickly, in Kiribati.
“I only speak a little,” I say. I’d used a tenth of my Kiribati vocabulary just asking his name.
“My name is Capodinaere,” he says, slapping me on the shoulder. “Cap. Aram Cap.”
“Capodinay?” I try.
“No, no,” he cringes. “Cap.” He pats his chest. “Aram Cap.”
“Okay, Cap,” I say, shaking his hand. It is thick and raw, like an old bricklayer’s hand.
“Do you know if there’s a fishing store here?” I try after a bit of silence.
“Fishing? You fish?”
“Sort of,” I say. I’m a somewhat regular trout fisherman. In my late teens and early twenties I fished to supplement my packed food while I hiked, but I’ve never fly fished in the ocean.
“Do you know if there are flies here?”
“Fly fishing?” His eyes light up again. “I fish.”
He has no idea what I’ve just asked. If language could be conducted like two 13-year-olds in a dark basement for the first time, this would be it.
After a bit of sign language and broken speech, I agree to meet him at his house the next day. I have no idea what for. All I understand is “fish,” “business,” and “house.” I hope that means he runs a fly shop out of his house but it seems pretty unlikely. I have no idea which of my words he’s understood.
The next day I head over to Cap’s, on the lagoon shore across town. Cap’s house is part traditional, part “modern,” like many on Christmas. There are a handful of palm and pandanus thatched roof structures surrounding a larger cement and corrugated steel building. The bigger building with Western materials is a sign of wealth here—proof that he is part of the near-non-existant cash economy here. It’s looking good.
Christmas is the largest atoll in the world. Its lagoon alone is 15 by 10 miles—a tranquil blue upset only by the occasional sandbar or palm-covered islet. Looking out from Cap’s land, to the right are 15 miles of calm flats, to the left the lagoon opens to thousands of miles of dark Pacific.
As I walk up, a young boy waves me into the cement building. He quickly runs off, leaving me alone. The main room is filled with rusted scuba gear and tools and strewn with random boat and scuba parts. But this is not a scuba shop. The floor is cracked cement, the walls are clapboard and full of holes. In the corner, the walls are stripped open to a dock where a small boat is parked almost inside. Next to it, four large plastic tubs of water sit filled with hundreds of small colorful fish.
“Brice, yes?” a man says, shaking my hand as I walk in. He’s the driver who asked me if I needed a ride. “I am Etuare, Cap’s brother-in-law.” Etuare is perhaps 30 and wears nothing but a pair of red shorts far too small for his body. He’s barefoot, and dark sun-worn skin stretches across his back. He looks like he’s straight out of a 1970s porn flick.
He explains that Cap is fixing an engine. They are about to go fishing.
“For what?” I ask.
“Pet fish.”
“Pet?”
“Yes, you know. For pets. Fish for pets.”
“Aquarium fish?” I guess. He nods and explains that they net fish to send to Hawaii. Hawaii then ships them to the mainland.
I’ve been told how they do this before. They take a boat out to the lagoon’s coral canyons where three or four men with scuba gear and a large net separate on either side of each chute. The two with the net spread it on one side of the canyon while their partners swim at the fish from the other side, making as much noise as they can to scare them into the net. It’s a lucrative business but popular. The lagoons are quickly becoming overfished.
“Come, let me show you,” Etuare says. He brings me over to the caught fish. “They are pretty, yes?”
There are perhaps 200 fish, dozens of species, all in their own little metal cages in four bins. If they could see over the rim they’d realize the lagoon is a tempting jump away. About two dozen of them are dead. Some look like they’ve been dead for a while—their eyeballs hang out of their sockets and fungus grows on their bodies. Etuare grabs three or four of the worst looking ones and tosses them into the lagoon.
“Yes,” I say. “Pretty.”
And they are. There are some beautiful fish that I recognize from the pet stores when I was younger. At 10 or 11 years old, though, I never considered where they came from.
“Kantara, yes?” Cap says, walking up behind us. (Beautiful, yes?)
“Kantara,” I say.
Cap leads me over to the workbench, a raised area in the corner where their tools sit. Etuare disappears in back as Cap pulls out a fly tying kit. It is the same type I’ve got at home for tying trout flies. “I will… for you,” he says, showing me a streamer pattern in the box. I stand grateful and confused as he begins to silently tie.
“He used to guide,” explains Etuare, walking by carrying scuba tanks to the boat.
Cap ties five or six streamers as quickly as I’ve seen it done, then pulls down a box and gives me four more, smaller streamers. He has no other patterns.
While I know nothing about ocean fly fishing, I assume there are several types of fly patterns just like there are in river fishing. I consider asking him to tie some others, but he stands and begins picking up scuba gear. Apparently he is finished, though he’s given no indication of it. He’s barely made eye contact since I walked in.
“How much do I owe you?” I ask.
He looks confused.
“Bona?” I ask again, pulling some Australian dollars from my pocket. (The price?)
“Oh, no, no,” he says, moving faster. He throws gear in the boat and walks past me toward a storage room.
“Okay,” I say, almost to myself. I’m not sure if I’ve insulted him or if he’s in a hurry. I hesitate putting the cash back in my pocket. I have trouble accepting such kindness from strangers. Especially—and I feel guilty writing this—because I am so much wealthier. A strange thing for a grad student $30,000 in debt to say, but true all the same. “Thank you,” I say.
Temuti had told me we’d leave on Saturday at two pm, but the pickup pulls up at three-thirty. That’s early on Christmas Island time. She makes the introductions and a guy named Tiio and I hop in the pickup bed. Temuti, her cousin, and Tiio’s wife get up front. From what I understand, Tiio’s wife and Temuti’s cousin do not speak English. Tiio is my age, 26, and has a small gut. His face is round and dark, but he seems more hardened than the ever-smiling Christmas Islanders I’ve met so far. He tells me he’s just moved here from Tarawa, the capital island 2,000 miles to the west, an island with 20,000 residents as opposed to Christmas’ 4,000.
“You have your fishing rod?” Temuti asks before we pull away.
I pat my bag, the metal tube sticking out.
“Good, you can go fishing with my brother.”
She’s talking about Tiio, her nephew. It’s a common thing to say here. Everyone is your brother or sister if you’re related to them.
“Are you fishing too?” I ask Tiio. There are no other rods in the truck.
“No, I don’t fish.”
Maybe she was talking about someone else, then?
Temuti leans out the window as we head east. She yells something in Kiribati.
“We have to stop by our house,” Tiio says.
We pull through some trees, off the road, and into a small set of thatched-roof houses and corrugated steel shanties. Like many villages near town, the government has recently installed running water and electricity for the community.
“Come,” Temuti says as she gets out of the truck. “I show you my house.”
Temuti’s house is not one of the thatched houses, but one of the corrugated sheet shanties that are beginning to replace them. They are easier to maintain, if not a bit uglier, and are a sign of wealth. I follow her inside.
Temuti’s house is one room with a dirt floor, about 15 by 12 feet, and has two wooden platforms with palm frond mats that serve as beds. A small counter with a two-burner camping stove serves as the kitchen. It is luxurious by Kiribati standards with a 30” TV and a VCR—byproducts of her holding one of the few cash-based jobs on the island.
“This is my house,” Temuti says. “Only half though,” she laughs.
Temuti and her nine-year-old daughter sleep on one platform bed, Tiio and his wife on the other.
Temuti grabs a bag of food, our picnic I assume, and we’re off.
20 minutes south, we take a right and the road quickly turns to dirt. We pass a field filled with rusted-out remnants of the British military base: steam rollers, cranes, trucks and paddy wagons. There are caches of old oil drums and vehicles rusting in piles throughout the coconut plantations, seeping god knows what into the soil and groundwater. The British left everything they could when they allowed this colony its independence in 1979, a date suspiciously soon after both the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the exhaustion of phosphate mining in Kiribati.
We drive deeper in and the road opens up to white coral sand beach.
It is truly a tropical paradise. Ahead stretches a baby lagoon inlet before a short sand bar and 15 more miles of water. In the baby lagoon the remnants of a small dock poke haphazard from the brilliant blue water. The dock planks are long gone, grabbed for houses or taken by a sea storm. It is a postcard scene. We pull up to a thatched-roof open-air structure called amaneaba, or meeting house, and place palm frond mats on the sand under the hut’s roof.
“Okay,” Temuti says as she lays the food and blanket on the sand, “you go with Tiio to fish. There is good fly fishing here. Or maybe you take the car and fish?”
“No, it’s okay,” I say, “I don’t have to fish.” No one else is fishing. I don’t want anyone to have to sit there and watch me. I’d be just as happy swimming. Fishing was just an afterthought anyway. I almost didn’t even bring a rod to Christmas with me.
Temuti looks at me for a few moments. She seems confused.
“Come,” Tiio says, “let’s go fishing.”
We take turns and walk the lagoon flats. Tiio is just as clueless as I am on how to fish these waters but it is a beautiful scene. The lagoon dips in submerged sandbar flats, spreading fingers around half the lagoon. The coral sand is ground to a painter’s palette, swirling color under a thin layer of clear water. The sun is a bit hot but we walk these fingered flats cooled by an offshore breeze.
Fishing is a beautiful movement to me—the fly whipping past your ear, your wrist trying to land it just right so the fly hits perfectly. I don’t even care if I catch anything most times. It’s just a great excuse to stand waist deep in tropical waters, dunking my head when I get hot.
For two hours we walk the sand bars and catch nothing. Not that I expect to. I have one fly pattern, no polarized sunglasses, and neither Tiio nor I have a clue what we’re doing. “Should we go back?” I ask. We haven’t even seen a shadow, let alone a fish, and we’ve covered most of what we could walk or wade to. This is why those fishermen pay thousands for guides and boats.
“No, no, we’ll catch some fish,” Tiio says.
After another hour I offer again. He wants to press on.
“I don’t think we’re going to catch anything here,” I say. It’s hot and I can feel my nose burning. “I haven’t even seen a fish.”
“It’s okay, you’re tired. I’ll cast for a while.”
I try not to be insulted. I’m not tired, not exactly. I just don’t see any fish. It happens sometimes when you fish. I have no problem cutting my losses and calling it a day… Calling it a nice day, in fact. I hand him the rod. “Sure,” I say, “but I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”
This is the moment—when you say something like that—that your buddy inevitably catches a fish on his first cast. It’s happened to me multiple times. Your friend gets a good laugh and it becomes a better fishing story.
Not this time, though. Tiio casts for another hour before finally giving it up.
Heading back to the truck he seems defeated. I’ve never felt that way about fishing before. I don’t understand. I just stood thigh-deep in warm blue waters, soaking up the Pacific sun. Is there anything better? I don’t think so.
When we pull back up to the maneaba Temuti comes up to the car.
“Did you catch anything?”
“No,” I say. “Didn’t even see a fish.”
“Oh.”
She looks just as defeated as her nephew. I don’t get it. The people I’ve met on Christmas are some of the more relaxed, carefree people I’ve met in all my travels.
“Okay,” she says. “We eat now.”
Temuti pulls the containers from her bag and opens them up in front of us. There’s rice in one container and rice in the other. “No fish, that’s okay,” she says.
My stomach drops. Finally I get it. Nothing, not a trip that seems to be leisure, not a scrap of food, is to be squandered here. You don’t just pack up storebought food and head to the beach, you bring a fisherman. I was to provide the meat for our lunch. I had been lulled by my own culture, a place where recreation—like vacation—is separate from feeding your family.
I close my eyes, hoping to make the scene disappear, hoping to erase my misunderstanding. But the moment passes—for everyone else at least—and no one minds that we have no fish. Everyone smiles and talks while they eat their plain white rice. They’ve lived without before. This is not a place where food is easy, where you can dwell on disappointment. There are no hard feelings. Sometimes there simply are no fish to be caught.
On the way home we stop for coconuts, filling up the pickup bed. I decide to help, to do my best to make up for my own misperceptions, to do a bit of work to pay my own way on this picnic.
“Do you keep the brown ones?” I ask, seeing Tiio throw some in the truck. I want to make sure I’m doing it right.
“Yes, some of them,” he says. “We feed the brown ones to the pigs. The green ones we eat or sell.”
I ask more questions. I grab a machete in my teeth as Tiio had and I climb one of the smaller, slanted trees to cut down a clump of green ones.
“Yes,” Tiio says, “These are good.”
We make several stops, taking coconuts even when it seems we can’t fit any more in the truck. I’m having fun climbing trees, plucking coconuts in the afternoon sun, and I feel good for it.
By the time we reach the main road there are so many coconuts that Tiio and I can barely sit.
Back on the main roads we pick up speed over potholes that haven’t been fixed since the British left decades ago. The coconuts roll and bounce from under us as we take the corners fast. Tiio and I smile on each precarious bump or turn, laughing like a couple of kids, holding on for dear life.
Christmas Island, The Republic of Kiribati
(Published Gray's Sporting Journal, February/March 2010)
I might as well have picked a country out of a hat, but with grad school grant money to spend I was looking for an adventure. I bought a flight to the most remote spot I could find, an island in the middle of the Pacific, a place most maps don’t note and the rest represent as a fleck of dust ready to be washed off the page.
“You’re going to Christmas Island?” my friend Steve asked. His mouth was wide open.
For a guy who spent six months learning to juggle fire in the Guatemalan rain forest, I would have thought it’d take more to impress. “You’re going to fish, right?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You know it’s some of the best saltwater fly fishing in the world, right?”
I didn’t. In fact, I knew very little at first. I’ve always thought I had a good grasp of geography but until a month before I had no idea there was even a country called Kiribati. And I’d known for even less time that the infamous Christmas Island—the Christmas Island of British and American nuclear tests (done near and over civilian populations)—was part of this 33 island Central Pacific country. Besides, I’m not much of a fisherman to begin with.
“You have to take my rod,” Steve insisted.
Pulling the fishing rod out of the case he handled it like a newborn. The rod alone, he told me, was $650. I’d paid less for my first motorcycle.
“Just wash it off with fresh water every day you use it.” He grabbed a small plastic container from his fly-tying kit that looked like eye drops—something meant for careful hands. “And mix a couple of drops of this in the water. If you don’t use the rod much, just wash it once a week anyway.”
“Okay,” I said, taking the gear cautiously.
“The Pacific kills rods.”
And still, three weeks in on Christmas and all I’d done is hang a borrowed spin-caster off the edge of the pier, sipping beers with an Aussie oil man, catching nothing. It’s sacrilege and I know it. I’ve searched enough for articles on Christmas Island to know that there’s more written about Christmas bonefish than the nuclear tests. Fishermen save for years for the trip. It’s like an architect finally making it to Italy or a surfer catching Bali during an offshore storm. You don’t spend your time doing other things.
It’s not like I’ve been idle. I’m staying in a renovated mechanical shed behind the Catholic Church, nestled up to Christmas’s lagoon, and each morning I wake to sun cutting through the shed’s cracks. Rats and geckos running around while I sleep, and my fresh water is rainwater collected in a rusted container, but I’ve chosen to stay in town rather than at the hotel 20 miles south because I’d rather be around locals than the rotating set of a dozen American fishermen that visit this island each week. Even still, this corrugated shack is luxurious in a country where running water and electricity are not common and most homes are made from palm and pandanus thatching.
My morning routine starts with breakfast with Temuti, the nursemaid to the French priest, the last of a dying breed of missionaries who came here in the 1960s. Temuti has become something of a surrogate mother, teaching me the basics of her culture, helping me with the language, inviting me places and introducing me around. Because of her, I’ve seen a baby’s christening, a one-year-old’s birthday party (worthy of great celebration in a cash poor country), and drank kiokioke—fermented coconut sap. Today she tells me about how good a fisherman her husband was. He would take his outrigger out alone on open water for days and always come back with a full boat.
“He was a great fisherman,” she says.
One week though his canoe came back alone, evidence of a shark attack on the fragile hull.
This is not a forgiving land.
I search for a proper response when Temuti gets up and steps toward my shack’s door. Something’s caught her eye. “Do you want to go for a picnic?” she asks.
It is too beautiful a day to dwell, it seems. She points at the metal case leaning up against my bed. “You can bring your fishing rod. It is a fishing rod, no?”
“It is,” I nod, realizing that I haven’t taken it out of its case once. For three weeks it’s been sitting on this slip of land no wider than 100 yards from salt ocean to salt lagoon. Every bit of metal I’ve seen here is rust red with a white salt coating. Thatching isn’t just a neccesity of economy, it’s practical.
I pick up the tube under the premise of showing her that yes, it is a rod, but I expect to see a pile of rusted flakes. “See,” I say, pulling it out of the tube and it’s velvet pouch, “A fishing rod.” Not a pile of dust. Phew.
“Good, you catch fish and we will swim and eat and sit in the sun.”
Temuti arranges the whole thing, inviting her cousin, who has a car, and her nephew Tiio and his wife. “He is your age, you will like him,” she says. “We will go Saturday.”
After she leaves I check my gear. I have no flies, not even any hooks. I’m going to need some supplies.
When I came here, I expected a bit more. Christmas is one of the top fly-fishing spots on the planet. Naturally I assumed it would have a shopping district, but the town’s stores are a random mix of basic local needs: yards of cloth, bags of rice and sugar, and the occasional t-shirt for the tourists. But 100 tourists a year does not necissitate a tourist shop, it seems.
I weigh my options. I could stop by the “Mini-Hotel” in town where my new Aussie friend, Tony, an engineer here to help the government with their fuel storage, is staying. It is the only other hotel on the island, a bed and breakfast where two fishermen came in for the week a few days before. Their choice was commendable, choosing the locally-owned hotel in town versus the government-owned hotel in the woods, but they hadn’t done it to be closer to the culture or people.
A few days before, after a day exploring the unpopulated eastern part of the island, Tony and I sat with them over some beers. We’d had a great week, hitting the local spots with new friends, checking out the new Japanese spaceship landing strip, and getting drunk off of kiokioke. We tried to share it with them, to tell them that they’d do good to take a day away from fishing, or at least head for a night at Big Eddy’s, the local “dance club.”
“No, I don’t think I could do that,” one of the fisherman said. Both were still dressed in their beige hats, vests and shorts. Their six top-of-the-line fly rods hung behind them on the wall. “The fishing is too good here. I can’t take a day off.”
These guys get up at five each morning, fish until seven at night, eat, and then go to bed. It’s the schedule for just about all of the thousand or so fishermen that come here each year. They are pretty much the only visitors Christmas gets and there’s not the slightest interest in the fact that they’re in a foreign country.
“Just take an afternoon,” I said, backing up Tony’s suggestion.
“No, I don’t want to miss a single moment of sunlight out there,” the second fisherman agreed. “We’ve been waiting for this trip for years.”
Later they got scammed again and again buying cigarettes and t-shirts. Neither Tony nor I had seen even the slightest dishonesty in the shopkeepers here. It baffled us. “It must be the safari hats,” Tony laughed.
I judge them in their ridiculous matching clothes but I know better. They aren’t here to experience a new world or to meet new people. And they probably don’t care if they’re paying too much for things. They’re on vacation. They’re fishermen here to fish. And what’s wrong with that? They’ve drooled for months over articles on bonefish. They probably see it the way some would see a drive to Vermont to pull a few trout from the river. Is it wrong to not stop in the local town to buy a bit of maple syrup and have a conversation with the old guy sitting on the porch? Probably not. Would they get more out of their day if they did? Maybe. And yet these guys still frustrate me. I’m not entirely sure why, but whatever it is I don’t want to ask them if I can borrow or buy a few fishing supplies.
So I head into town, hoping to come across a store I’d missed. In a town of no more than a dozen storefronts it’s extremely unlikely but halfway through, without any luck, a pickup slows down and the driver asks if I need a ride. I don’t. I live half a mile away and am not really finished searching yet. “Sure,” I say anyway, figuring I’ll just walk back after they drop me off.
I’ve spent my time on Christmas experiencing some great things by being open to offers like this ride. Walking circles has become a fine thing to do. Along with the things I’ve done with Temuti and Tony in the past two weeks, I’ve gone to a Kiribati-version rehearsal dinner (for a wedding between a 33 year old man and a 15 year old girl), been kidnapped (sort of) by a bunch of drunks and taken to Terabawiakoa (“The Bay of Sharks”) for an afternoon of drinking, and I’ve headed to the local “movie theater” with a bunch of young girls looking to marry me. It’s why I haven’t fished.
I hop in the pickup bed, headed back the way I’ve just come. The man in the back is perhaps 55, with wild curly black hair and a struggling mustache. His eyes are bloodshot like he’s been drinking for 48 straight hours.
“What is your name?” he asks after a moment of silence. It is the deliberately worded question I’ve gotten several times before. It means he speaks very little English.
“Brice,” I answer, “Antai Aram?” (What is your name?)
He responds excitedly, quickly, in Kiribati.
“I only speak a little,” I say. I’d used a tenth of my Kiribati vocabulary just asking his name.
“My name is Capodinaere,” he says, slapping me on the shoulder. “Cap. Aram Cap.”
“Capodinay?” I try.
“No, no,” he cringes. “Cap.” He pats his chest. “Aram Cap.”
“Okay, Cap,” I say, shaking his hand. It is thick and raw, like an old bricklayer’s hand.
“Do you know if there’s a fishing store here?” I try after a bit of silence.
“Fishing? You fish?”
“Sort of,” I say. I’m a somewhat regular trout fisherman. In my late teens and early twenties I fished to supplement my packed food while I hiked, but I’ve never fly fished in the ocean.
“Do you know if there are flies here?”
“Fly fishing?” His eyes light up again. “I fish.”
He has no idea what I’ve just asked. If language could be conducted like two 13-year-olds in a dark basement for the first time, this would be it.
After a bit of sign language and broken speech, I agree to meet him at his house the next day. I have no idea what for. All I understand is “fish,” “business,” and “house.” I hope that means he runs a fly shop out of his house but it seems pretty unlikely. I have no idea which of my words he’s understood.
The next day I head over to Cap’s, on the lagoon shore across town. Cap’s house is part traditional, part “modern,” like many on Christmas. There are a handful of palm and pandanus thatched roof structures surrounding a larger cement and corrugated steel building. The bigger building with Western materials is a sign of wealth here—proof that he is part of the near-non-existant cash economy here. It’s looking good.
Christmas is the largest atoll in the world. Its lagoon alone is 15 by 10 miles—a tranquil blue upset only by the occasional sandbar or palm-covered islet. Looking out from Cap’s land, to the right are 15 miles of calm flats, to the left the lagoon opens to thousands of miles of dark Pacific.
As I walk up, a young boy waves me into the cement building. He quickly runs off, leaving me alone. The main room is filled with rusted scuba gear and tools and strewn with random boat and scuba parts. But this is not a scuba shop. The floor is cracked cement, the walls are clapboard and full of holes. In the corner, the walls are stripped open to a dock where a small boat is parked almost inside. Next to it, four large plastic tubs of water sit filled with hundreds of small colorful fish.
“Brice, yes?” a man says, shaking my hand as I walk in. He’s the driver who asked me if I needed a ride. “I am Etuare, Cap’s brother-in-law.” Etuare is perhaps 30 and wears nothing but a pair of red shorts far too small for his body. He’s barefoot, and dark sun-worn skin stretches across his back. He looks like he’s straight out of a 1970s porn flick.
He explains that Cap is fixing an engine. They are about to go fishing.
“For what?” I ask.
“Pet fish.”
“Pet?”
“Yes, you know. For pets. Fish for pets.”
“Aquarium fish?” I guess. He nods and explains that they net fish to send to Hawaii. Hawaii then ships them to the mainland.
I’ve been told how they do this before. They take a boat out to the lagoon’s coral canyons where three or four men with scuba gear and a large net separate on either side of each chute. The two with the net spread it on one side of the canyon while their partners swim at the fish from the other side, making as much noise as they can to scare them into the net. It’s a lucrative business but popular. The lagoons are quickly becoming overfished.
“Come, let me show you,” Etuare says. He brings me over to the caught fish. “They are pretty, yes?”
There are perhaps 200 fish, dozens of species, all in their own little metal cages in four bins. If they could see over the rim they’d realize the lagoon is a tempting jump away. About two dozen of them are dead. Some look like they’ve been dead for a while—their eyeballs hang out of their sockets and fungus grows on their bodies. Etuare grabs three or four of the worst looking ones and tosses them into the lagoon.
“Yes,” I say. “Pretty.”
And they are. There are some beautiful fish that I recognize from the pet stores when I was younger. At 10 or 11 years old, though, I never considered where they came from.
“Kantara, yes?” Cap says, walking up behind us. (Beautiful, yes?)
“Kantara,” I say.
Cap leads me over to the workbench, a raised area in the corner where their tools sit. Etuare disappears in back as Cap pulls out a fly tying kit. It is the same type I’ve got at home for tying trout flies. “I will… for you,” he says, showing me a streamer pattern in the box. I stand grateful and confused as he begins to silently tie.
“He used to guide,” explains Etuare, walking by carrying scuba tanks to the boat.
Cap ties five or six streamers as quickly as I’ve seen it done, then pulls down a box and gives me four more, smaller streamers. He has no other patterns.
While I know nothing about ocean fly fishing, I assume there are several types of fly patterns just like there are in river fishing. I consider asking him to tie some others, but he stands and begins picking up scuba gear. Apparently he is finished, though he’s given no indication of it. He’s barely made eye contact since I walked in.
“How much do I owe you?” I ask.
He looks confused.
“Bona?” I ask again, pulling some Australian dollars from my pocket. (The price?)
“Oh, no, no,” he says, moving faster. He throws gear in the boat and walks past me toward a storage room.
“Okay,” I say, almost to myself. I’m not sure if I’ve insulted him or if he’s in a hurry. I hesitate putting the cash back in my pocket. I have trouble accepting such kindness from strangers. Especially—and I feel guilty writing this—because I am so much wealthier. A strange thing for a grad student $30,000 in debt to say, but true all the same. “Thank you,” I say.
Temuti had told me we’d leave on Saturday at two pm, but the pickup pulls up at three-thirty. That’s early on Christmas Island time. She makes the introductions and a guy named Tiio and I hop in the pickup bed. Temuti, her cousin, and Tiio’s wife get up front. From what I understand, Tiio’s wife and Temuti’s cousin do not speak English. Tiio is my age, 26, and has a small gut. His face is round and dark, but he seems more hardened than the ever-smiling Christmas Islanders I’ve met so far. He tells me he’s just moved here from Tarawa, the capital island 2,000 miles to the west, an island with 20,000 residents as opposed to Christmas’ 4,000.
“You have your fishing rod?” Temuti asks before we pull away.
I pat my bag, the metal tube sticking out.
“Good, you can go fishing with my brother.”
She’s talking about Tiio, her nephew. It’s a common thing to say here. Everyone is your brother or sister if you’re related to them.
“Are you fishing too?” I ask Tiio. There are no other rods in the truck.
“No, I don’t fish.”
Maybe she was talking about someone else, then?
Temuti leans out the window as we head east. She yells something in Kiribati.
“We have to stop by our house,” Tiio says.
We pull through some trees, off the road, and into a small set of thatched-roof houses and corrugated steel shanties. Like many villages near town, the government has recently installed running water and electricity for the community.
“Come,” Temuti says as she gets out of the truck. “I show you my house.”
Temuti’s house is not one of the thatched houses, but one of the corrugated sheet shanties that are beginning to replace them. They are easier to maintain, if not a bit uglier, and are a sign of wealth. I follow her inside.
Temuti’s house is one room with a dirt floor, about 15 by 12 feet, and has two wooden platforms with palm frond mats that serve as beds. A small counter with a two-burner camping stove serves as the kitchen. It is luxurious by Kiribati standards with a 30” TV and a VCR—byproducts of her holding one of the few cash-based jobs on the island.
“This is my house,” Temuti says. “Only half though,” she laughs.
Temuti and her nine-year-old daughter sleep on one platform bed, Tiio and his wife on the other.
Temuti grabs a bag of food, our picnic I assume, and we’re off.
20 minutes south, we take a right and the road quickly turns to dirt. We pass a field filled with rusted-out remnants of the British military base: steam rollers, cranes, trucks and paddy wagons. There are caches of old oil drums and vehicles rusting in piles throughout the coconut plantations, seeping god knows what into the soil and groundwater. The British left everything they could when they allowed this colony its independence in 1979, a date suspiciously soon after both the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and the exhaustion of phosphate mining in Kiribati.
We drive deeper in and the road opens up to white coral sand beach.
It is truly a tropical paradise. Ahead stretches a baby lagoon inlet before a short sand bar and 15 more miles of water. In the baby lagoon the remnants of a small dock poke haphazard from the brilliant blue water. The dock planks are long gone, grabbed for houses or taken by a sea storm. It is a postcard scene. We pull up to a thatched-roof open-air structure called amaneaba, or meeting house, and place palm frond mats on the sand under the hut’s roof.
“Okay,” Temuti says as she lays the food and blanket on the sand, “you go with Tiio to fish. There is good fly fishing here. Or maybe you take the car and fish?”
“No, it’s okay,” I say, “I don’t have to fish.” No one else is fishing. I don’t want anyone to have to sit there and watch me. I’d be just as happy swimming. Fishing was just an afterthought anyway. I almost didn’t even bring a rod to Christmas with me.
Temuti looks at me for a few moments. She seems confused.
“Come,” Tiio says, “let’s go fishing.”
We take turns and walk the lagoon flats. Tiio is just as clueless as I am on how to fish these waters but it is a beautiful scene. The lagoon dips in submerged sandbar flats, spreading fingers around half the lagoon. The coral sand is ground to a painter’s palette, swirling color under a thin layer of clear water. The sun is a bit hot but we walk these fingered flats cooled by an offshore breeze.
Fishing is a beautiful movement to me—the fly whipping past your ear, your wrist trying to land it just right so the fly hits perfectly. I don’t even care if I catch anything most times. It’s just a great excuse to stand waist deep in tropical waters, dunking my head when I get hot.
For two hours we walk the sand bars and catch nothing. Not that I expect to. I have one fly pattern, no polarized sunglasses, and neither Tiio nor I have a clue what we’re doing. “Should we go back?” I ask. We haven’t even seen a shadow, let alone a fish, and we’ve covered most of what we could walk or wade to. This is why those fishermen pay thousands for guides and boats.
“No, no, we’ll catch some fish,” Tiio says.
After another hour I offer again. He wants to press on.
“I don’t think we’re going to catch anything here,” I say. It’s hot and I can feel my nose burning. “I haven’t even seen a fish.”
“It’s okay, you’re tired. I’ll cast for a while.”
I try not to be insulted. I’m not tired, not exactly. I just don’t see any fish. It happens sometimes when you fish. I have no problem cutting my losses and calling it a day… Calling it a nice day, in fact. I hand him the rod. “Sure,” I say, “but I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”
This is the moment—when you say something like that—that your buddy inevitably catches a fish on his first cast. It’s happened to me multiple times. Your friend gets a good laugh and it becomes a better fishing story.
Not this time, though. Tiio casts for another hour before finally giving it up.
Heading back to the truck he seems defeated. I’ve never felt that way about fishing before. I don’t understand. I just stood thigh-deep in warm blue waters, soaking up the Pacific sun. Is there anything better? I don’t think so.
When we pull back up to the maneaba Temuti comes up to the car.
“Did you catch anything?”
“No,” I say. “Didn’t even see a fish.”
“Oh.”
She looks just as defeated as her nephew. I don’t get it. The people I’ve met on Christmas are some of the more relaxed, carefree people I’ve met in all my travels.
“Okay,” she says. “We eat now.”
Temuti pulls the containers from her bag and opens them up in front of us. There’s rice in one container and rice in the other. “No fish, that’s okay,” she says.
My stomach drops. Finally I get it. Nothing, not a trip that seems to be leisure, not a scrap of food, is to be squandered here. You don’t just pack up storebought food and head to the beach, you bring a fisherman. I was to provide the meat for our lunch. I had been lulled by my own culture, a place where recreation—like vacation—is separate from feeding your family.
I close my eyes, hoping to make the scene disappear, hoping to erase my misunderstanding. But the moment passes—for everyone else at least—and no one minds that we have no fish. Everyone smiles and talks while they eat their plain white rice. They’ve lived without before. This is not a place where food is easy, where you can dwell on disappointment. There are no hard feelings. Sometimes there simply are no fish to be caught.
On the way home we stop for coconuts, filling up the pickup bed. I decide to help, to do my best to make up for my own misperceptions, to do a bit of work to pay my own way on this picnic.
“Do you keep the brown ones?” I ask, seeing Tiio throw some in the truck. I want to make sure I’m doing it right.
“Yes, some of them,” he says. “We feed the brown ones to the pigs. The green ones we eat or sell.”
I ask more questions. I grab a machete in my teeth as Tiio had and I climb one of the smaller, slanted trees to cut down a clump of green ones.
“Yes,” Tiio says, “These are good.”
We make several stops, taking coconuts even when it seems we can’t fit any more in the truck. I’m having fun climbing trees, plucking coconuts in the afternoon sun, and I feel good for it.
By the time we reach the main road there are so many coconuts that Tiio and I can barely sit.
Back on the main roads we pick up speed over potholes that haven’t been fixed since the British left decades ago. The coconuts roll and bounce from under us as we take the corners fast. Tiio and I smile on each precarious bump or turn, laughing like a couple of kids, holding on for dear life.