Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [168]
In its prime the hotel had twenty-eight bungalows, a kitchen, a couple of bars, a dining room and reception area. Over the years I have spent millions on it, though it has never been profitable. Some of the money was lost because of hurricanes, some to wishful thinking and unfulfilled dreams, some to projects started and never finished, some to thieves. A lot of people robbed me—a few who worked for me, others who were con men and came to the island promising to do things they never did, took my money and then disappeared. One operator promised to produce lobsters in the lagoon through aquaculture, and I invited about twenty scientists to the island with their wives. There was a lot of wonderful talk about harvesting lobsters that came to nothing. Storms frequently struck the island; every time we finished a new building, it seemed that another hurricane came along and damaged it. But I enjoyed all of it. Ever since I was a kid I’ve relished having projects, and I didn’t want to spend all my time lying on the beach. We did a great deal on the island to protect the environment, including saving a lot of hawksbill turtles. They were depositing their eggs on the island, only to lose most of them to predators. We fenced the area, created a basin where the eggs could hatch safely, and fed the young turtles until they were large enough to have a chance of surviving at sea.
In that part of the world, I learned quickly, people fail at their peril to take hurricanes seriously. Shortly after the turn of the century, a glancing blow from one killed hundreds of Tahitians, and I was on my island in the early 1980s when meteorologists in Papeete sent a warning that a hurricane potentially as powerful as that earlier one was forming in a tropical depression near Bora Bora. Soon we were buffeted by stiff winds, the barometer fell, the surf outside the reef began to rise and the meteorologists predicted that the storm’s main thrust would hit Teti’aroa within forty-eight hours. When the birds started to leave, we were told, it would be there soon. Then all of a sudden everything returned to normal; it became very peaceful, the winds died and the ocean was calm again. We thought the storm had passed us by, until a ham radio operator on Bora Bora warned me not to relax because the winds appeared to be loitering off Bora Bora and gaining more strength.
A week later the storm slammed into Teti’aroa with the fury of an avenging angel, hitting us so suddenly that I didn’t have time to call a plane from Papeete to evacuate people. Even the birds barely managed to escape in time. First there were high winds, then towering waves that smashed the reef with such force that it felt as if a thousand cannons were bombarding it from an armada of ships just offshore. But it was the sound of the hurricane that made it most frightening. It was a Wagnerian opera, the thunderous roar of the waves pounding the reef and winds screaming through the trees like ten thousand Mongol warriors on horseback wailing a war cry behind Genghis Khan.
The wind quickly knocked down the radio tower and made so much noise that we couldn’t hear one another speak; we shouted, but the wind defeated us, and walking into it was like stumbling into the exhaust of a jet engine. I put on a sou’wester and told everybody