All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [31]
The plane lands on a strip cleared in a dense jungle of banyan trees, propellers winding down. A few villagers in rust-rimmed cars greet the other passengers, but there are no taxis. I hitch a ride with a school principal, who offers that he’s going that way anyway. We bump our way over dirt to the main paved road that circles the island, passing open-walled houses, oval thatched huts, and cacophonous tropical gardens.
We chat, and he can’t understand that I came so far to write about fa’afafine, whom Samoans hardly think twice about. “Why don’t you write about how our islands are sinking into the sea instead?” asks the principal. He explains that global warming is affecting people who have no fault in creating the problem and can do nothing to change it. I agree that it would be a better story.
“When Manhattan starts to sink, the magazines will pay attention,” I tell him, and he smiles broadly.
He points to a group of huts with corrugated steel roofs. “This is your hotel.” He gives me the name of a fa’afafine I could talk to, a schoolteacher named Tara, and draws a map of where she lives.
I wander around the resort, a main house with a wide porch upstairs and some landscaped oval fales set around a wide grassy yard, with clusters of ginger stalks waving their waxy red flowers. My little hut is screened, with matchstick blinds, two cots, one frayed pink towel, a cold-water shower, and a cistern of drinking water. Tall coconut palms line the road, and across the street, a white beach seems to stretch forever.
I gather my things for the beach. As long as it’s Sunday, I’m taking the day off. I wander across the road and climb over a rock wall to the beach. It’s the kind of beach you dream of, the kind you never find when you go on a package tour that advertises a beach just like this one: fine white sand, palm trees, no trash, no people, no nothing but beach and water as far as you can see.
I unwrap my lavalava, spread it out on the sand, slather on sunscreen, and lean against a warm rock, reading. The sun penetrates layers of my skin until I’m glowing from inside like an ember. I dash across the burning sand and plunge into the water, swimming out far around a jutting rock. Then I float, letting the gently rocking water take me where it will.
I swim back, not because I can’t swim far but because there is no one on the beach to say, as the Professor always would, “Stay a little closer to shore.” I have to be that person for myself, the one who doesn’t trust her own strength or the gentle tides. Stay a little closer to shore.
I flop down on the sarong, then doze. I sense a presence and open my eyes. Not far down the beach, a large Samoan man is walking. I suddenly feel alone. I stand up, quickly shake the sand out of the lavalava, and wrap myself. I gather my things and start to walk along the beach, safer in motion.
The only time I was ever assaulted, the only time in all my travels I’ve ever been in serious danger—if you don’t count visiting Baghdad ten days before the first Persian Gulf War as a guest of Saddam Hussein, with no confirmed ticket back to Jordan—was when I was alone on a beach. It was twenty years ago. I’d been traveling in Egypt with another woman, who was fifteen years older—younger than I am now, I realize. She’d seemed so old then. I met Edie on an Israeli kibbutz where I worked as a volunteer for three months—fishing, picking dates, cleaning used flypaper off of grapefruit trees—and we decided to travel on to Egypt together. We both wanted to explore the Sinai Desert, the tombs of Luxor, the ancient temples and pyramids, but from the moment we arrived in Cairo, we realized it wasn’t so easy to travel around, we couldn’t leave each other’s side.