Pepper, Palisades and Pearls
Pohnpei
‘Epithets, like pepper, give zest to what you write; And, if you strew them sparely,
They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, you spoil the matter quite.”
Lewis Carroll
Our departure from the Yap airstrip had been de-lei’d, but not by all the Christmas presents which, because of the gift-wrapping, had sailed around rather than through security.
If the color of Yap had been money, the color of Pohnpei was black. The pepper was black, the palisades were black, and the pearls were black. Darker still was the intrigue that swirled around them, in one of the rainiest places on the planet. And the center of the intrigue was The Village people.
‘Together we will go our way, together we will leave some day.
Together your hand in my hand, together we will make the plans.
Together we will fly so high, together tell our friends goodbye.
Together we will start life new, together this is what we’ll do.’
No, not Village People, the gay fantasy disco variety, The Village people, the owners of The Village, the treetop eco-resort that Robyn and I had booked into. Eight years before Go West was released, as a single in 1979, Bob and Patti already had, as a young couple with four children. From Southern California, they pulled up stakes and went further west, leasing a steep-sided spit of land pointing out into the lagoon, and building the largest thatched structure in Micronesia. Bob had been an industrial designer, and retaught the locals how to do thatching, from what he had learned while living in Honduras. He imported mahogany from the Philippines for the floor of the Long House, and then, between the breadfruit and banana trees, built twenty more cottages.
‘I know that there are many ways to live there in the sun or shade.
Together we will find a place to settle down and live with the space
without the busy pace back east, the hustling, rustling of the feet,
I know I’m ready to leave too, so this is what we’re going to do.’
Robyn and I were driven across the Deketik causeway, through the capital of Kolonia (blacker than the Colonia we had left on Yap), past a burnt-out Japanese tank with the wrong sort of camouflage for where, and probably why, it was destroyed, another twenty minutes east to The Village. Up the stairs of the mangrove poles and expansive thatch was a bar called the Tattooed Irishman and beyond that, the restaurant, both open to spectacular views across the reef, the smaller islands that dotted the lagoon and, on the distant horizon, the profile of Sokeh’s Rock. Patti welcomed us with two cold coconuts and straws, and we took them out along a walkway that led to a thatched gazebo overlooking their tropical paradise. Sea breezes blew gently through the palms, and the space we were perched on. It was a damn fine coconut. We were shown to our cottage. Under the mosquito net was a waterbed. You can take the boy out of California. I hoped the floor would hold,
But small cracks began to appear in the Garden of Eden around dinnertime. Patti’s friendliness had disappeared, and she snapped at me for trying to compliment her on what she and Bob had accomplished, with time and thatch. I didn’t know then, about how it was all unraveling around them, and I wouldn’t for another ten years. The food was adequate for where we landed, but quesadillas were not what I had expected for a New Year’s Eve dinner. The huge spiders above us in the rusting ceiling fans were also a novelty. I should have learned from the ecoexperience on Yap, but The Village would take that several notches higher. Two young boys uncorked the bottle of Tokay we had brought to celebrate the New Year and poured it to the brim of our glasses. The path back to our shack was unilluminated, but I had my headlamp. The absence of water pressure in the shower was more than adequately supplemented by the mosquitoes, and the rats. In 1991 the US government bestowed Bob and Patti with the first eco-tourism award, for constructing a hotel‘in tune with nature, with a low impact on the environment and the culture.’ We slept somewhere between the howling of the dogs and the crowing of the roosters.
“Paradise.” Robyn whispered, into my twilight sleep.
“Paradise is exactly like where you are right now.” I said. “Only much better.”
She ordered a platter of Pohnpei hotcakes for breakfast next morning. It came with a maraschino cherry on top, like the ham and cheese sandwiches, on our flight to Juan Fernández. Outside the veranda, the rain was hosing down, trying to reach its annual quota of 300 inches in a single monsoon. Robyn and I did the only thing we could do on a New Year’s Day, in a torrential deluge, on a remote island in the Southern Sea. We rented a car.
It arrived as a silver Mitsubishi sedan, with windows so severely tinted, I wasn’t sure how we would navigate in the downpour. It was an endemic problem, as we were to discover. Everywhere we drove was littered with dead cars- eviscerated cars, cars upended on their side and braced up at strange angles with bamboo poles, perhaps to allow access to their innards, for most were missing parts, and all were missing their tires, for whatever reason. We sunk into potholes that should have drowned us, but thankfully the sun came out, before we reached the 300 inches.
It got positively wonderful at Kepirohi Falls, a seventy-foot cascade a fifteen-minute hike from the far end of the village of Sapwehrek. We swam deliciously in the bottom pools, paradise regained, until a freak gust of wind blew half the cataract through my Fuji camera. Maybe it was some form of retribution for what the Japanese had done to the Pohnpeians during the war, but all my photos would henceforth look like the burnt out camouflage tank we had passed in getting here.
Robyn and I stopped to visit the Catholic church in Awak village, with a simple but moving interior, backlit by open blockwork in the shape of two crosses. The exterior could have been Balinese,if rusted corrugated tin had been the construction material of choice in Bali.
We continued to the southern part of the island, where the dark intrigue began, with a soft-spoken Japanese farmer. Mr. Sei owned a cafeteria in Kolonia, but he also had the only remaining operating pepper plantation and processing facility. Only five of his hundred acres were planted in Indonesian and Sri Lankan pepper, on eight-foot balabala fern support posts. Among the long strings of green beaded pepper vines, were magnificent orchids, acting as coalmine canaries, like roses do for grapes in Burgundy.
To hear the way that Bob and Patti would tell it, the pepper business in Pohnpei was nearly dead, when they formed the AHPW Corporation, to produce black pepper and buttons, in 1985. No one had apparently told Mr. Sei that it was nearly dead, and no one can really explain what a black pepper enterprise has to do with manufacturing buttons from trochus shells. But that was what Bob and Patti did, when they borrowed more than $620,000 from the Federated States of Micronesia Development Bank. Bob and Patti assumed that the loan was made to their corporation. The bank assumed they were lending to Bob and Patti.
The following year a moratorium was placed on harvesting trochus shells, because of concerns about sustainability. The buttons went bye-bye, and all the button factory machinery that Bob and Patti had imported, went the way of the cars with the overly tinted windows. The year after that, in response to complaints by pepper farmers that Bob and Patti were being too fussy in purchasing only high-quality pepper, the State of Pohnpei got into the pepper processing business, and put Bob and Patti out of it, in 1998. When the bank called in their loan, for which they now learned they were personally responsible, paradise found became paradise lost.
A year before Robyn and I met The Village people, Bob and Patti filed a lawsuit, Civil Action 1999-053, against the governments of Pohnpei and the Federated States of Micronesia, alleging that ‘In buying pepper from Pohnpei’s pepper farmers at a price greater than market price, Pohnpei prevented competition in the manufacture of a commodity, in this case processed pepper,’ they had essentially driven AHPW into bankruptcy. The lawsuit also alleged that the State of Pohnpei had failed to hold the annual trochus harvest, even though AHPW had been repeatedly assured that there would be one, and that sixty metric tons would be available. Bob and Patti asked for $225,448 in damages. The FSM Supreme Court, to their initial delight, not only found in their favor, but tripled the amount of the damages to $676,344, which would have been enough to pay back the bank loan. When the State of Pohnpei appealed to vacate the trebling of damages, the Court not only refused, but also awarded Bob and Patti an additional $37,422, under the theory of detrimental reliance, for the loss of their button business. Time and thatch, however, unravel at different rates. The two bills that the Governor submitted to the Pohnpei State Legislature to pay Bob and Patti, failed to pass, even though there were sufficient funds to do so. While the State of Pohnpei was getting its head around having to pay damages to Bob and Patti, the FSM Development Bank was wasting no time in calling in its loan. It could have explained Patti’s black mood, and why she might have thought I was pushing her buttons.
‘Together we will love the beach, together we will learn and teach.
Together change our pace of life, together we will work and strive.
I love you, I know you love me; I want you happy and carefree.
So that’s why I have no protest when you say you want to go west.’
Our Pohnpei circumnavigation turned north, and the high volcanic cone formation of Pwusehn Malek, in Palikir. The local legend relates a story of the defeated ruler of the Saudeleur dynasty, who changed himself into a giant rooster, to fly to Nan Madol, leaving an enormous pile of his droppings. At the foot of Chickenshit Mountain, Robyn and I met a group of inebriated women, celebrating New Year’s Day, all flip-flops and Santa hats, carrying green plantains, and banging their bottles and big square tin cans with sticks, and laughter. We posed in front of an old panel van, with so much vegetation growing so fast out of its cockpit, we made a mental note to close our tinted windows, later. Kolonia was empty, but the signs were still there- Do not spit betel juice on the premises. Pigs for sale 50 lbs to 75 lbs Call and ask for Welson Nedlic… Must be sold during Xmas. Back in The Village’s restaurant that evening, I had the chicken salad. The disparity between the price and food quality had risen in direct proportion to the size of the pepper mill. It was gigantic, and I had an awful black feeling that Patti and Bob had known exactly where we had been.
‘I may not know much, but I know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad.’
Lyndon Johnson
* * *
‘What breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be
in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!’
Alexander Herzen
They had been constructed from long prismatic columns of hexagonal black basalt almost 20 feet in length, piled log-cabin style, some sixty feet high, forming 92 artificial islands over an area of 200 acres. Robyn was barely visible in the deluge, held captive in the kayak next to mine, navigating the mangroves, and the palisades between them.
Two days before, we had found the poverty of Pohnpei, in the Kirinese carvers of Porakied, transplanted by the Japanese in 1919 from Kapingamaranga atoll, 35 inches above sea level and 740 kilometers south of their old new village of thatch and corrugated iron. Hanging banana bunches and full rain barrels, rigged from commercial food containers, projected off rooftops, and car wrecks rusted languidly under the coconut palms in the front yards. On the day of our visit, their settlement, like their origins, was mostly water. The concrete graves in the cemetery glistened silver in the rain, and even their connected crosses were of cement, a cementery, the only color coming from scattered bouquets of plastic flowers extruded from more temperate climates. We bought a handmade turtle carving, flippers woven from light natural coconut and darker pandanus fibers, from an old Kapingamarangan lady, whose smile betrayed how much more her people had lost than gained, in the move onto higher ground. She was still perhaps more fortunate than the other Pohnepeian immigrants from Pingelap, Oliver Sack’s Island of the Colorblind. My camera, meanwhile, was afflicted with the opposite problem, and was adding colors not found in nature, to the washed-out pig roast celebration, congregating in a clearing back towards the center of Kolonia. Japanese flatbed trucks arrived on masse, each with monster pigs, legs already tied around the poles that four men would be needed to huff and puff them down from, into the waiting firesmoke. Other smoulderings hung around mirrored sunglasses, from cigarettes on lower lips, as breadfruit and yams suspended on similar staves, were portaged bouncing, towards plastic tarps and waiting knives. Perhaps it might have been more festive if there had been fewer Japanese and American ghosts in the vaporized psychedelic images on my memory card.
Robyn and I passed into the main part of town, and the signage that announced its urbanity. Welcome to Good Luck Bingo. Said one. Site Bingo $500 cashpot. Good Luck. On Pohnpei, apparently, luck was easier to come by than justice. Outside the Dollar-Up-Enterprises shop, Growing with Pohnpei, and the Island Soda Headquarters, a big yellow smiley face, surrounded by pennants and Chinese lanterns, tried to provide both. Please try and park straight…so everyone can have a parking place. An Israeli flag, lurking behind a large Santa Claus decal, carrying a bagful of toys, seemed to promise neither. And another sign, STD’s: The Quiet Epidemic Gonorrhea Syphilis Hepatitis B HIV/AIDS etc. offered a hybrid of the good and the bad. I wondered what the etcetera was.
Robyn and I posed for photos on the wrong camouflage of the old Japanese tank, and under the arch of the Spanish wall fort remnant, near the Pohnpei Ladies Club, halfway between Honolulu and Manila. A flame tree posed more brightly near the clock tower. A philodendron was making a nest in the cab of another dead truck, near the spot that we picked up our ride, hitchhiking back to The Village. The views of the lush bay behind us, from our open truck bed, were idyllic, and left the heat and humidity with our exhaust, until we stopped.
The next day, Robyn and I climbed up Sokeh’s Ridge. We were warned at the bottom. Danger- Steep road. Hazardous for both motor vehicle and pedestrian traffic Travel at your own risk!! The hike was arduous in the midday heat, but the panorama of Kolonia harbor from the top, and the ocean expanse beyond, was just that breathtaking. There were nesting tropicbirds and fruit bats on the way up, WWII Japanese antiaircraft battery, pillboxes, and tunnels at the top, and strange bracket fungus, like cuneiform commas, on the way down. Robyn and I continued by coconut-oil coiffed women in an open boat among the sailboats mooring below, giant hibiscus, and an old guy with a backwards New York baseball cap, jeans, and miraculously white T-shirt, barbequing chicken in an open kettle on the street. It was brilliant. I may not know much…We returned to The Village to collect shells and snorkel, and to float asleep on the waterbed later, until the mosquitoes found the hole in our net before dawn.
‘Once upon a time, a man named Sapkini built a large canoe. He knew that the sky is a roof that touches the sea at its edges. His people, sailing in their fine canoe to the place where the sky meets the sea, would find land there. On the way, they met an octopus who showed them a shallow reef in the ocean. The people brought rocks and stones from faraway lands to make the reef higher. But the waves broke up the stones. So they planted mangrove trees to protect the island. But the ocean was still too close. So they built a fringing reef around the island. Two women brought soil and the island grew larger. On its top the people built a shrine to the spirits and named their new land- Pohn-Pei, Upon-the-Altar.’
Upon the altar of too many soft consonants of Mandolenihmw district, were the palisades on the other side of dawn, where the sky met the sea, beyond the kayaks that had come off our hour-long speedboat trip to the southeast coast of the island. Robyn and I had been dropped onto the mangrove-covered coral shore flats in a torrential downpour. Even with the protection of our ponchos, it was going to be an elemental day. We had the place to ourselves, wherever it was. The rain and the wind, washing over the thick green jungle and slate grey ocean chop beyond, made the unadorned black architecture even more intimidating.
It had originally been called Soun Nan-leng, the ‘Reef of Heaven.’ But we were paddling the Venice of the Pacific, named for the ‘spaces between’ the canals that crisscrossed Nan Madol.
“Rubble.” Said Robyn, summing up every megalithic ruin on the planet. Instead of an enlightening verifiable historical record to marvel at, rubble was always buried into even deeper confusion, by voluminous academic speculation. The rubble expert, so as not to appear ignorant, in the absence of knowledge and meaning, would describe and invent and publish what he thinks he should be seeing.
According to legend, Nan Madol had been founded by two brothers, Olisihpa and Olosohpa, twin sorcerers from the mythical Western Katau. They had arrived in a slightly larger canoe than ours, seeking to build an altar and religious community, focused on the adoration of the sea, and dedicated to the god of soft consonant agriculture, Nahnisohn Sahpw. On their third attempt, the brothers levitated huge stones with the aid of a flying dragon. After Olisipha had died of old age, Olosohpa became the first Saudeleur, the first ruler of the Dipwilap Deleur dynasty. From about 1200 AD, over the next five hundred years, the clan chronicle emerged from legend to lineage with each subsequent saudeleur.
A few were benign rulers. Inenen Mwehi established an aristocracy, and Raipwenlang was a skilled magician. Others were cruel. Raipwenlake used his magic to locate the fattest Pohnpeians, and ate them. Another, Ketiparelong, is remembered for his gluttonous wife who was fed her own father’s liver by suffering commoners at a banquet. Perhaps that worst was Sakon Mwehi, who taxed his people ruthlessly, requiring frequent tributes of seafood and breadfruit during rak, the season of plenty, and yams, taro, and fermented breadfruit during isol, the season of scarcity. Over time, the initial seasonal demand became much more demanding of labor and material, leaving a wake of starving slaves in the tidal canals. Each time that public dissatisfaction broke to assassination, another Saudeleur simply rose in place of the last.
The Saudeleur derived his legitimacy from the central cult of the Thunder God, Nahn Sapwe, who used the sakeu ceremony, the kava of Fiji and Vanuatu, as an elaborate affirmation of dominance and dedication. Sakau was first made through magic, also by two brothers, Widen-ngar and Luhk. Widen-ngar was the ghost of thunder, and Luhk, the ghost of the underground. Luhk had hurt his foot on the way to the Pohnpei, and his injured skin was pounded it into small pieces and, using hibusicus bark, squeezed out the liquid, using Widen-ngar’s kneecap to catch it.
The meat of the ‘Life-Giving’ Turtles and the ‘Watchmen of the Land’ dogs was reserved especially for the Saudeleur. He controlled potential rivals by requiring them to live in Nan Madol, rather than their home districts, in the same way that Louis XIV controlled his nobles at Versailles. He controlled his population with the food and water supply, which needed to come across in boats from the mainland.
All of Nan Madol, itself, in fact, had to have come over from the mainland. Prisms of black basalt were dislodged from their main island quarries by building large fires at their bases, and cooling them suddenly with sea water, to cause them to fracture. The stones were manoeuvred onto rafts, floated within the fringing reef across to the building site and, with inclined planes of coconut palm trunks and strong hibiscus fiber rope, slid into orthogonal islets of headers and stretchers, and filled with local coral. Pole and thatch structures were erected on top of the platforms, residences, and meeting houses for all the black intrigue that would follow. For a people that had no pulleys, no levers, and no metal, the 750,000 metric tons of black rocks moved into place at Nan Madol, averaging almost two thousand tons a year for four centuries, represented a much larger per capita effort than had taken place during the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.
In 1628, the last Saudeleur was overthrown by an outsider named Isohkelekel, who divided Pohnpei into the multiple nahnmwarki chiefdoms that still endure. Hidden weapons had suddenly appeared.
Robyn and I kayaked down the Nan Madol main street, the central waterway separating Life and Death. To the southwest was Madol Pah, the lower town administrative sector where royal dwellings and ceremonial areas had been located. We pulled up onto the high-walled complex islet of Pahankadira, the residence of the Saudeleur, a basalt battleship almost three footballs fields in area, the ‘place of announcement,’ surrounded by prismatic palisades over sixteen feet high. A bathing pool had been excavated inside. On the islet of Idehd was the place where turtle entrails had been offered to the sacred eel, kept in a sacred tunnel-like channel, constructed of carefully cut coral laid between basaltic prisms. We passed a row of sakau pounding stones, where two conch shells trumpets had been excavated. Nearby was Durong, where clams had been cultivated. The largest walls rose almost sixty feet high, on the south corner of Pahnwi.
It began to teem down, as we paddled towards the 58 islets northwest mortuary sector of Madol Powe, the upper town where the priests lived, and the tombs. Some islets served a special purpose- food preparation, canoe construction on Dapahu, and coconut oil preparation, for anointing the dead, on Peinering, the most beautifully proportioned islet on Nan Madol. Students of Western architecture familiar with the Golden Section of 1:1.618, would hear the arias of stacked prismatic basalt headers tilting markedly upward, projecting beyond the exterior wall faces to form a crafted cornice of some of the most sensitive skilled masonry in the world. The sun came out.
The crowning achievement of Nan Madol was the elaborate royal mortuary of Nandauwas, a 25 foot massive sea-walled palisade surrounding a central moss-encrusted tomb enclosure within the main courtyard. One of the cornerstones weighs 50 tons. Here were entombed the Saudeleurs, before being buried elsewhere. Powerfully conceived, sensitively sited, and skillfully executed, we approached it by kayak from the open lagoon, and moved along the jungle-covered islets on both sides of the canal, ascending steps that led to the interior courts, enclosures, and tombs. The breaking waves were deafening. Here were found adzes, circular heads, bracelets, needles, breast pendants, necklaces, pearl-shell fishhook shanks, and other valuable shell artifacts. Even a gold crucifix and silver-handled dirk were found by visiting ships’ captains between 1834 and 1840, suggesting possible Spanish contact before the 1820s.
Robyn and I arrived on a beach with hermit crabs and button shells and returned for dinner out in a café under thatch along the river, tortured by a cute young girl with two red orchids in her hair. The food arrived under aluminum foil, from the main island.
‘Go west, life is peaceful there.
Go west, lots of open air.
Go west to begin life new.
Go west, this is what we’ll do.
Go west, sun in wintertime.
Go west, we will do just fine.
Go west where the skies are blue.
Go west, this and more we’ll do.’
The Village People, Go West
* * *
‘Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.’
William R. Alger
Black clouds swirled over the remaining intrigue on Pohnpei. In 1886, the Spaniards, as part of their claim to the Caroline Islands, as part of the Manila-based Spanish East Indies, founded Santiago de la Ascensión, in a place that the Pohnpeians had known as Mesenieng, the Face of the Wind. The Germans had renamed it Kolonia.
Robyn and I visited the Pohnpei Visitors Bureau, admiring the old thatched buildings and the soft curves and consonants of Miss Madolenihmw, on a poster inside.
Outside we met Johnny, one of the hosts, who showed us the botanical gardens.
“These trees are very, very old.” He said. “Like you.” According to the signpost, we were standing18127 miles from Berlin.
It hadn’t made any difference to the German colonial administration how far they were from Berlin. They had brought all their ideas, and toys. One of their ideas was to force the Pohnpeians to labor 15 days a year on public works projects. One day in October of 1910, a young man from Sokeh Island refused the instructions of his overseer and was flogged for his transgression. The following morning, all the Sokehs refused further labor, and returned to their island. The district commissioner, Gustav Boeder, with his assistant Rudolf Brauckmann and two translators, was rowed to Sokeh by six Mortlock Island boatmen, to ‘reason’ with the laborers. Riflefire rang out from a concealed position, and only the two translators and one oarsman escaped. It took two months for the news to reach the Colonial Office in Berlin. A month after that, the light cruisers SMS Emden and SMS Nürnberg, joining the gunboat SMS Cormoran and the survey ship Planet, fired their main batteries on the rebel fortification on Sokeh’s ridge, and then launched an assault team of sailors and Melanesian police up the mountain. The rebels gave as good as they got, but couldn’t hold out, and surrendered on February 22, 1911. Two days later, fifteen of them were executed by firing squad, and the 426 remaining souls of Sokeh’s tribe were banished to Palau.
The Styrofoam crosses in the storefront window, behind all the left footed shoes on display, were decorated with colored ribbons, and bouquets of artificial flowers, that flowed into the patterns of the material shop next door. We passed the Touch ‘N Go Windward Mart, and a handpainted poster of a pregnant woman, smoking. Simoke sika karehda serihkan ipwidi paun tikitik.
The burned-out ruin of the State Department of Education, with the Japanese Kanji script below, had stopped smoking after the American delivery of 118 tons of bombs, 600 incendiaries and their own naval artillery bombardment had destroyed Kolonia during WWII. A newer sign underneath the ruin, was buckled and soiled. Pohnpei Sarawi Our Home Our Pride.
Another, at the library posted its ‘standing rules.’ Keep quiet at all times. The following are not allowed: No food, pets, smoking, betel-nuts and fighting.
The Japanese had brought thousands of Okinawans to Ponhpei, during their occupation. Visitors to Kolonia in the 1930s reported that they had been able to walk the length of Namiki Street under shopkeepers’ canopies without getting wet in the rain. The Americans had bombed out the canopies, and Robyn and I enjoyed no such protection. We were drenched by the time we found Joy’s Restaurant, and a table for one of Joy’s black and red lacquer tray tuna sashimi lunches. Two men with dark faces and white teeth joined us, after Joy had made a phone call, after we had seen the brochure on her counter. They were Polynesians from Nukuoro atoll, a remote island 450 kilometers southwest of Pohnpei, with 300 residents, no airstrip, a sea charter connection that called only every few months, and cost ten thousand dollars per visit. George had been the Chief Magistrate for Nukuoro. He pulled out a case of what he had brought, each one nestled in a little round plastic box with a white foam bed. They were charcoal, with iridescent hues in blues and greens and violets. They were gorgeous.
George’s cooperative had seven employees who harvested about 6000 black pearls a year, enough to find enough round ones to make a single necklace.
“It takes eighteen months to produce a pearl.” Said George. “We must bring in a ‘seeding technician’ from Tahiti to seed them, and that costs about three dollars an oyster.” In the photo, George held up his brochure, his assistant held up the traveler’s cheques, and Robyn held up her new pearls. She was the pretty one with the jewels. A thing of Joy is a beauty forever.
A quarter of a century earlier, Laurie Anderson, the experimental performance artist and wife of Lou Reed, had arrived in Pohnpei to work on her new album, The Ugly one with the Jewels. It got very ugly, and the joy ran out, as she eventually related in her track, Word of Mouth.
‘In 1980, as part of a project called Word of Mouth, I was invited, along with a living other artists, to go to Panape, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. The idea was that we’d sit around talking for a few days and that the conversations would be made into a talking record. The first night we were all really jet-lagged but as soon as we sat down the organizers set up all these mikes and switched on thousand white light bulbs. And we tried our best to seem as intelligent as possible. Television had just come to Panape a week before we arrived and there was a strong excitement around the island as people crowded around the few sets. Then the day after we arrived, in a bizarre replay of the first TV show ever broadcast to Panape, prisoners escaped from a jail, broke into the radio station and murdered the DJ. Then they went off on a rampage through the jungle, armed with lawnmower blades. In all, four people were murdered in cold blood. Detectives, flown in from Guam to investigate, swarmed everywhere. At night we stayed around in our cottages, listening out into the jungle. Finally the local chief decided to hold a ceremony for the murder victims. The artist Marina Brownovich and I went, as representatives of our group to film it. The ceremony was held in a large thatched lean-to and most of the ceremony involved cooking beans in pits and brewing a dark drink from roots. The smell was overwhelming. Dogs careened around barking. And everybody seemed to be having a fairly good time… as funerals go. After a few hours Marina and I were presented to the chief, who was sitting on a raised platform above the pits. We’d been told we couldn’t turn our backs on the chief at any time or ever be higher than he was. So we scrambled up onto the platform with our film equipment and sort of duck-waddled up backwards to the chief. As a present I brought one of those Fred Flintstone cameras, the kind where the film canister is also the body of the camera, and I presented it to the chief. He seemed delighted and began to click off pictures. He wasn’t advancing the film between shots, but since we were told we shouldn’t speak unless spoken to, I wasn’t able to inform him that he wasn’t going to get twelve pictures, but only one, very, very complicated one.After a couple more hours the chief lifted his hand, and there was absolute silence. All the dogs had suddenly stopped barking. We looked around and saw the dogs. All their throats had been simultaneously cut and their bodies, still breathing, pierced with rods, were turning on those pits. The chief insisted we join in the meal but Marina had turned green and I asked if we could just have ours to go. They carefully wrapped the dogs in leaves and we carried their bodies away.’
A thing of Joy is a beauty forever. For Bob and Patti and black pepper, as well, joy was about to run out. In December of 2008, the FSM court issued an order finding them in contempt for non-repayment of their loan and filed a lawsuit for default. After they refused to sell their shares in Apple Computer, they were found guilty of contempt of court, placed under house arrest, and their US passports were confiscated. On June 10, 2009, Bob and Patti fought back, and filed their own suit against The State of Pohnpei, the Federated States of Micronesia Development Bank, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and US Secretary of the Department of the Interior Ken Salazar, for breach of contract, breach of Compact, and unjust enrichment. Two years later, the US Court of Appeals dismissed their case because of non-jurisdiction ‘over the foreign state.’ At the same time several different long-term land leases came due, and some landowners refused to renew. In 2013, Laurie Anderson’s husband got a new liver, and The Village people, after 40 years of operation, shut down their dream.
One of the word-of-mouth rumors that came out of the sakau bars was that Bob and Patti were relocating on Yap, to take advantage of the Deng Hong’s big money investment, coming in from China. But like the pepper and the palisades and the pearls, it’s the dark matter of dark intrigue.
‘And the colored girls say
Doo do doo do doo do do doo …’
Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side
Lawrence Winkler is a retired physician, traveler, and natural philosopher. His métier has morphed from medicine to manuscript. He lives with Robyn on Vancouver Island and in New Zealand, tending their gardens and vineyards, and dreams. His writings have previously been published in The Montreal Review and many other literary journals. His books can be found online at www.lawrencewinkler.com.
