Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

In the long afternoon light, when we and they could dance no more, we set sail and passed great schools of flying fish that soared above the water for five hundred feet; a pod of about two hundred dolphins that came and played all around us, in such numbers that they seemed to be waves, suffusing the air with exuberance; terns and frigate birds and brown boobies; and perfect little islands like the ones in children’s books, dome-shaped, living-room-size, uninhabited, and bedecked with five perfect coconut palms. Occasionally we saw fishermen in dugout canoes waiting to spear fish. We were caught in an endless postcard, a Pacific arcadia, and we sang and talked and drank local beer on the front deck.

Many of the smaller islands in the Solomons are coral atolls, and these are concentrated around the Marovo Lagoon, the world’s largest island-enclosed lagoon, which may soon be protected by UNESCO. Marovo was described by James Michener as the eighth wonder of the world and was the object of our sailing trip. Over four days, we stopped at various isolated spots in the lagoon for snorkeling, including Uepi, where the variety and density of species outclasses that of the Great Barrier Reef. I saw huge schools of chromides, black-tipped reef sharks and gray whale sharks, a dozen kinds of parrot fish, various wrasses, including the endangered Maori wrasse, angelfish, squirrelfish, clown fish, hawksbill turtles, eels, butterfish, a manta ray, foul-looking groupers, giant clams with fluorescent pink and lavender mouths that closed when you approached, needle-nosed gars, many-spotted sweetlips, mudskippers, lionfish, black-and-blue sea snakes, electric-blue starfish. It was an underwater safari.

To me, though, the fish were almost secondary, because the coral of the living reef looked as though Buckminster Fuller, Max Ernst, and Dr. Seuss had collaborated on it. There were long, pink- and blue-tipped asparagus, a thin damask-rose lace that a Spanish lady might have worn to church, expanses of olive-colored stiff scrub brushes, gorgonian fans, lurid striped erections, vaulting mauve domes, voluptuous yellow hydrangeas, orange dreadlocks, and fields of embossed purple grosgrain. Strange things rotated like lava lamps on turntables, and the mimosas of the sea seemed to recoil at our approach. By the time we got out, we were dizzy with color and sheer variety. Every day we sailed; every day we dived into the water; every day we saw wonders beyond all imagining.

After our immersion in the Melanesian culture of the Solomons, the nation’s primary culture, we wanted to see some of its Polynesian life. We left our beloved Lalae in Honiara and flew to Rennell, the largest of the Solomons’ Polynesian islands. Our guide, Joseph Puia, packed us into his car and we headed for Lake Tegano, the biggest freshwater lake in the South Pacific and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stopping from time to time so that Joseph could machete with astonishing speed and assurance through trees that had fallen across the road.

The lake is dotted with islets of giant mangrove and pandanus and is home to a multitude of endemic flora and fauna, including unique birds and orchids; it also contains nine US planes downed during World War II (two of which we could see when snorkeling). Because a US military base had stood by the lake during the war, locals still welcome Americans. Despite the best efforts of obtrusive missionaries, the lake people believe that the spirits of the dead travel as shooting stars to meet God beyond the eastern shore.

In our large, motorized canoe, we saw the famous sunrises over the water, visited the cave where the legendary lake octopus was said to have lived, and saw another cave that Joseph described as “formerly a residential accommodation”—villages have not existed very long on Rennell. We encountered flocks of glossy swiftlets, frigate birds, terns, cormorants, and ibis; as you approached their island rookeries they took to the skies by the hundreds, wheeling like a beautiful reworking of Hitchcock. We visited Circumcision Island, inhabited by the only South Pacific tribe to endorse the practice. We were thirsty, so our boatman shimmied up a tree, threw down fresh coconuts, and brought us limes with green skins and bright orange flesh, a 1960s fashion from the kingdom of fruit. We saw flying foxes, a species of fruit bat, both in the air and hanging in trees like the devil’s Christmas ornaments. We both saw and ate coconut crab, a local species that takes thirty-five years to mature.

Alas, we did not get off the island as planned; the flight was canceled for five days because of weather, and we spent those rainy afternoons in the depressing guest room of the island’s missionary center. We resisted the call to the local version of evangelical Christianity—John, by reading Moby-Dick; I, by writing this article about the wild and gentle new reality we had come to love.