• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 925 0

kava, however, was not a forgone conclusion. I had tried it for the first time in Tonga, where, in strange circumstances, I attended a kava ceremony for a visiting Fijian princess. I had made a friend in Nuku’alofa, a Nepalese Sherpa—it’s a long, digressive story—and we sort of invited ourselves and made ourselves comfortable sitting on the floor next to the princess, whom we knew only dimly. She was being honored by the Fijians living in Tonga, and unaware then what a big deal a kava ceremony was among Fijians and their aristocracy, we proceeded to make silly fools of ourselves. After a few bowls of kava, I turned to the princess, meaning to ask her how much kava, did she think, was too much kava. Instead, not yet realizing that kava’s effect upon the mouth is similar to that of a shot of Novocain, I said: “Wincess, how wuch wava is woo wuch wava?”

My Nepalese friend thought this was hilarious. “You walk wunny,” he said.

“You walk wunny woo,” I pointed out, as we tumbled over in sidesplitting laughter.

We cracked each other up.

The effects soon wore off, however, and we were left with queasy stomachs and a growing awareness that we were making a faux pas of a nature that had escaped us. Kava, it seemed to me, was nothing more than a mild euphoric. It had made me a little tongue-tied, a little giddy, and I didn’t understand what the Fijians were so serious about. All things being equal, I thought I’d much rather have a couple of beers.

This having been my only experience with kava, I entered the world of Vanuatu kava with an unfortunate disrespect for its power. We were invited one day to visit one of Port Vila’s innumerable nakamals by Patricia, an American who worked with Sylvia, and her partner, Dirk, a Dutchman who worked as a handyman. On the outer islands, a nakamal was sacrosanct. In Port Vila, a nakamal was simply a kava bar. At the time, Sylvia’s organization was top-heavy with expatriates, and thus our early forays into our new milieu tended to be guided by foreigners. My work certainly didn’t lend itself to the rapid acquisition of new friends. Writing, of course, is the most solitary of endeavors. You simply sit inside your own head for a while—and what a strange place that can be—and hopefully, after four or five hours, you have seven hundred words to show for it and you call it a good day. Now and then you find yourself wishing you had a co-worker, someone to complain with, just for form’s sake, about the incompetent boss and the appalling work conditions, and you realize it’s time to get out more. I was, therefore, looking forward to an evening at the nakamal, to be followed by a splendid meal at one of Port Vila’s fine restaurants. I caught a minibus to Sylvia’s office, a modest house on a hill behind the town center, where we soon found ourselves piling into Dirk’s small compact. He drove us farther into the hills, and we spent the time talking about his last trip to Holland. I was born in Holland, and we reminisced about our mother country—how gray it was, how cold, how crowded, how soul-crushingly depressing winter could be, and how, despite these formidable strikes against the country, we both missed it enormously.

“It’s the pubs that I really miss,” Dirk said. “No one knows how to do a pub like the Dutch do. Even in the godforsaken villages of northern Friesland, you will still find a great pub.”

I was in emphatic agreement. There is not a finer place to drink than in a cozy Dutch pub. On many a winter’s eve—and there is not a crueler winter than those experienced in Northern Europe—when the wind and the bleak melancholic darkness left me trembling in despair, I only had to step inside a pub, almost any pub in Holland would do, where I would soon feel revived, not solely by alcohol—the Dutch have an unfortunate tradition of pouring their beer into pitifully meager glasses—but by a convivial atmosphere that I have not seen replicated anywhere else. And if that didn’t work, there was always the hash bar next door.

We spoke for a while longer about what a fine country Holland was, until Sylvia asked