Where is the line
That defines present time?
Still, there is twine, ‘tween that life and mine
But it’s thinner and it’s thinning
It’s beginning, it’s beginning…
Six years ago, while living in Japan, I took a trip to Papua New Guinea with a group of Japanese and foreign ex-pats. In the in-flight magazine, Papua New Guinea’s leading, and as far as I could tell only author had written an essay about Papua New Guinea.
In it, he criticized the changes that have taken place over the last half-century. When his grandfather was young and got hungry, the writer praised, he would simply go over to the neighboring tribe and eat one of the tribesmen.
The author had great respect for this strength, and expressed his disappointment with the current situation – violence translated into a hedonistic and bedraggled society within the cities, rather than pointedly used between tribes for greater good – and apparently cannibalistic food production.
Whether the editor of the online magazine had pointedly included this section of the article in order to warn or prepare weak westerners who thought they were taking a typical beach vacation, or, as the typos and abrasive grammar choices would indicate, no one had actually read the article before it was published, having been written by the premier author of the entire island, I will never know.
We disembarked in Port Moresby, hopped a flight to Lae and were led past trash heaps and armed guards down to the northern coast and a small motor boat, which was to become our only mode of transport for the next ten days due to lack of roads and electricity in the villages, whilst staying with the tribes.
One night well after dark, there was a knock on the cabin door. My room mate and I glanced nervously at one another from beneath our mosquito netting, both having apparently read the same in-flight magazine article, and feeling a bit like white meat the past few days under the ever watchful gaze of the tribesmen, who sharpened their machetes and spit out beetle nut juice, thick and red as hour-old blood, into the sand at their feet.
The tribesmen led us down to the water and into a small rowboat. “Well, I suppose this could be it.” I only half joked with my friend. We managed a few coughed laughs, muffled by our curiosity and the general discomfort of the situation.
The moon that night was as bright as the sun and shone a light so white and strong that we could see across the bay that there was a group of people who seemed to be standing around some sort of large creature on the beach.
As we got closer, we could see some of the men trying to ride the creature, which, we soon realized upon closer inspection, was a leatherback sea turtle, 2-3 meters (6-10 feet) long and easily almost 700 kg (1500 pounds).
After the men were chastised by an elder sharply enough, they left off jumping on her back and amused themselves by shining a flash light up her neither regions so we could all see how she laid her eggs. After a while, however, even that got old, and we all stood under the sun-like moon and undulating stars while she scratched against the sand with her giant flippers to finish the laying and cover over the hole.
We must have stood there with her almost an hour. At some point, I began to cry quite silently and the un-tethered feeling I had been carrying for so long became almost unbearable. I rubbed my palms against my cheeks, feigning sleepiness, because the wet streaks of my tears would undoubtedly have shone in the moonlight, and I did not want the men to see.
Finally, when she had finished covering her eggs, she began to lumber slowly, excruciatingly, down the beach and back towards the water. Her huge body dragged itself across the sand as though she was carrying the weight of ten men on her back.
Until at last, she reached the water. Suddenly, the movement that had been haggard and rough became fluid. With an instantaneous and lightning stroke, she shot herself out into the ocean, and was gone.
I learned later that she had probably followed the jet stream from the California coast – almost 16,000 km (10,000 miles) just to lay her eggs there on that bright beach.
We made it back to the cabins, back to Japan, and back to our version of civilization safe and sound, with nary a bite mark (except for the odd sand fly) to prove our journey among the former cannibals.
And yet, I often think of her, catching the currents under the ocean and propelling herself forward through the deep.
This summer I took advantage of an extended summer holiday to return to the US for five weeks.
During my return flight to Istanbul, I watched an in-flight special about two Papua New Guinea tribesmen who were taken by a British biologist friend to the U.K. to document their perspective on the culture there.
The biologist brought the two men to dinner at his family’s somewhat posh home, led them through the fanciest neighborhoods and the crumbling projects, where teenage children, glossy-eyed and wielding sticks, practiced tribal dances with the two men.
In the follow-up interviews after each section, the Papua New Guinean chieftains politely extol the virtues of the luxuries that U.K. society enjoys, and express their bewilderment at the strangeness within the society.
Chuckling with one another they observe:
“It’s not easy to eat with the white man. They use as many tools to eat as you use to fix a car!”
“We thought all white men had beautiful houses, but it’s not true. There are some who have terrible houses, where it is dirty and everything is broken.”
“In the morning, white men say “Good Morning!” But at night, after they work all day they go home in a hurry and don’t talk to anyone.”
Later on, while visiting a farm in the countryside built over a old battlefield, they advise the farmer on why he has had such a prosperous year:
“I think the spirits of the dead who died here are still here, and they help you to grow your potatoes.”
As I watched the TV special, I wondered how much has really changed in those six years since I stood with the turtle in the moonlight while she laid her eggs. The same exuberant joy still jostles against loneliness and isolation in me, giving me flashes of great sorrow, but also moments of complete contentment.
I often wonder why the spirit is so inclined to experience the world with such sharp precision.
On a cellular level, six years is long enough for a body to have reproduced each of its cells at least once, or so the old wives tale goes, leaving me technically a completely new person compared with my 24-year-old self.
And yet, I remain the same. Better, perhaps, less lost, more confident, more understanding, less judgmental. But still, as each blog entry testifies, actively engaged in navel-gazing in order to reach a higher level of understanding.
Who the fuck knows the answers. I don’t.
But I know I thought of her as I flew over the Atlantic in my buckled seat, with my wine and soda water. I thought of her below the depths, carrying her eggs to safety; catching the swift current across the oceans.
