The Island of the Colorblind

Six o’clock in the morning, and though the air is blood-hot, sapping, doldrum-still, the island is already alive with activity – pigs squealing, scampering through the undergrowth; smells offish and taro cooking; repairing the roofs of houses with palm fronds and banana leaves as Pingelap prepares itself for a new day. Three men are working on a canoe – a lovely traditional shape, sawn and shaved from a single massive tree trunk, using materials and methods which have not changed in a thousand or more years. Bob and Knut are fascinated by the boat building, and watch it closely, contentedly. Knut’s attention is also drawn to the other side of the road, to the graves and altars beside some of the houses. There is no communal burial, no graveyard, in Pingelap, only this cosy burying of the dead next to their houses, so that they still remain, almost palpably, part of the family. There are strings, like clothes lines, hung around the graves, upon which gaily colored and patterned pieces of cloth have been hung – perhaps to keep demons away, perhaps just for decoration; I am not sure, but they seem festive in spirit.

My own attention is riveted by the enormous density of vegetation all around us, so much denser than any temperate forest, and a brilliant yellow lichen on some of the trees. I nibble at it – many lichens are edible – but it is bitter and unpromising.

Everywhere we saw breadfruit trees – sometimes whole groves of them, with their large, deeply lobed leaves; they were heavy with the giant fruits which Dampier, three hundred years ago, had likened to loaves of bread.[17] I had never seen trees so generous of themselves – they were very easy to grow, James had said, and each tree might yield a hundred massive fruits a year, more than enough to sustain a man. A single tree would bear fruit for fifty years or more, and then its fine wood could be used for lumber, especially for building the hulls of canoes.

Down by the reef, dozens of children were already swimming, some of them toddlers, barely able to walk, but plunging fearlessly into the water, among the sharp corals, shouting with excitement. I saw two or three achromatopic kids diving and romping and yelling with the rest – they did not seem isolated or set apart, at least at this stage of their lives, and since it was still very early, and the sky was overcast, they were not blinded as they would be later in the day. Some of the larger children had tied the rubber soles of old sandals to their hands, and had developed a remarkably swift dog paddle using these. Others dived to the bottom, which was thick with huge, tumid sea cucumbers, and used these to squeeze jets of water at each other…I am fond of holothurians, and I hoped they would survive.

I waded into the water, and started diving for sea cucumbers myself. At one time, I had read, there had been a brisk trade exporting sea cucumbers to Malaya, China, and Japan, where they are highly esteemed as trepang or beche-de-mer or namako. I myself love a good sea cucumber on occasion – they have a tough gelatinousness, an animal cellulose in their tissues, which I find most appealing. Carrying one back to the beach, I asked James whether the Pingelapese ate them much. ‘We eat them,’ he said, ‘but they are tough and need a lot of cooking – though this one,’ he pointed to the Stichopus I had dredged up, ‘you can eat raw.’ I sank my teeth into it, wondering if he was joking; I found it impossible to get through the leathery integument – it was like trying to eat an old, weathered shoe.[18]