Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

After dinner, we sat in a big communal hut with a small lantern on the floor and learned, to the locals’ immense amusement, to chew betel nut, a skill I hope never to use again. Betel is a mild intoxicant to which most Solomon Islanders are attached; you chew it until it gets soft and then dip a rolled pepper leaf into mineral lime to potentiate the pulp. The nut makes your mouth water, and you spit a lot as you chew it. It also turns your whole mouth a lurid red; chewed regularly, it makes your gums recede and your teeth fall out. If you’re not used to it, it can also give you a horrendous stomachache. It makes you dizzy. The lime can easily burn the roof of your mouth. It was a late eight o’clock by the time we had stopped spitting and curled up on the floor of our hut and drifted into deep, captivating sleep.

The next morning, we were led across the stream. On the far side, spear-wielding men in loincloths jumped out of the bush, yelling savagely, and we nearly jumped out of our skins; this, we later learned, was part of the traditional ceremony performed for even a local guest. Just beyond the spear-bearers, a group of village men were waiting for us, and in double file they led us into the village, playing bamboo panpipes, bent at the waist and swaying with the music. The sound was a cross between a steel drum’s and a bassoon’s; the movement, primal Martha Graham. They led us through an esplanade of ferns, up to the higher part of the village, where the women put on each of us a necklace of seeds and a headband of flowers, inviting us to sit on a sort of porch attached to the biggest hut. The music got richer and wilder. Big pipes in the central clearing, some seven feet tall, were propped on wooden stands, and the villagers played these as if they were a giant vibraphone, with the soles of rubber flip-flops for mallets.

The villagers asked what we wanted to see. We wanted to know how they built a hut, so they gathered sago palm leaves and showed us how to fold them over rods of wild betel-nut wood and sew them with rattan and layer them to form a roof or wall. They showed us how to rub gahuto sticks to start a fire, how to weave traps from aohe roots, and how to make a pudding by grinding up smoked ngali nuts in a giant mortar and pestle, mixing them with taro, stuffing it all into the central part of a bamboo rod, and roasting it in a fire. Finally, they showed us how they carved the rough but elegant wooden bowls from which we had been eating. We stayed the afternoon learning all these things and trying to imitate, in our appreciation, what might be local etiquette. If I had come in search of another world, I had found it.

Back at our hut, hens were trying to lay eggs on our sleeping mats, and when we had straightened that out, we ate eels caught that day (with ramen noodles). After dinner, we were preparing to go to bed when we heard the sound of music again. It’s hard to say that any of what we had seen was artificial; greeting ceremonies are so rare that they are partially reinvented on each occasion, and no foreigners had come to Hauta in a long, long time. But this sudden playing at night was completely spontaneous. Someone had felt like music, and the mood had spread. The pipers came to our hut with their instruments and played under the full moon, with the women singing at the back in chorus, and we listened for perhaps an hour to this abrupt beauty, so festive, so strange. Then they asked whether we had music in our culture, and when we said we did, they wanted to hear it. Suddenly we were the exotics. After a hurried consultation, the four of us decided to sing “Oklahoma!” and “Jamaica Farewell” and “America the Beautiful.” They asked whether we had other kinds of performance in our culture. Maybe dance? So Jessica and I stepped down, and to the eerie music of bamboo pipes in a clearing in the rainforest under a springtime moon, on the uneven ground at the top of a mountain, we did swing dancing; and when we did a dip at the end, we got hoots and hollers, and the music ramped up, and the mood lasted, miraculous as loaves and fishes.

We spent two days coming back down. While the carriers took the same steep route we’d followed on the way up, to keep our belongings dry, we took a gentler one that involved, however, more river crossings, including one swim across deep rapids (in our clothes—there was no way to keep anything dry). By this time we had become close to our guides and talked to them about all kinds of things, trying to answer all their questions and explain our lives: what big cities were like, and why we had all spent so many years in school, and the rules of football, and why we didn’t know anything about farming. One of the party had brought along his panpipes and played as we descended, and the birds called to one another through the rain.