Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [28]
A sock. I was beginning to realize that kava is like the sausage of the Pacific. One didn’t really want to know how it was made.
I watched the Ni-Vanuatu men imbibe their shells and was struck by how different the culture of kava was here compared with elsewhere in the South Pacific. Kava is found on most of the islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. It is typically consumed communally, with men gathered around a large bowl, and a host passing a single shell among his guests. No formal event in Fiji or Tonga occurs without kava. But mostly, kava is used as a social lubricant. It is not uncommon for men in Fiji to spend an entire day around the kava bowl, shooting the shit, as it were, as they consume upwards of thirty shells. It’s different in Vanuatu. No one drinks kava during the day. Not even the kavaheads, the true addicts. It is taken only around dusk and into the early hours of the evening. And more interestingly, I thought as I watched a man take his shell and wander away from his companions, one drinks kava alone in Vanuatu.
“What you do is this,” Dirk said. “You take your bowl and find something nice to look at—the sunset, the stars, the trees—something poetic. Then, with that image in your mind, you take the kava all at once.”
“And then what?” I asked.
“Then you listen to the kava.”
“And try not to throw up,” Patricia added.
So instructed, we each found a space of our own. It was not hard to find something poetic to admire. The sky was streaked with crimson, and a fresh breeze stirred the banana trees. The sailboats in the harbor bobbed in an alluring manner, and looking down from afar, I understood the appeal of just lingering here, in Port Vila, far from the continental world. A sailor had once explained to me that crossing the Pacific was the psychological equivalent of going to war: days and days of unrelenting tedium punctuated by moments of sheer, horrifying terror. Many had planned to circumnavigate the world, but after their experience in the Pacific—and from the Panama Canal to Vanuatu is a very long way, a journey that takes some boats two months to complete—some sailors found their ambitions deflated and chose, instead, to remain where they were, floating on their boats, savoring the splendor of sunset from the enchanting confines of Vila Harbor, lending their boats to the exotic, tranquil vista that I now stood contemplating, kava shell in hand. I closed my eyes, retaining the image in my mind, and brought my bowl to my lips. The odor was earthy and peppery, almost toxic, a bitter brew, and to send it down my gullet seemed unnatural, as if defying a hard-gained evolutionary warning trigger, the one that says that this is surely poison. I managed to swallow half the bowl before my stomach protested. I paused for a moment, asked my gut to refrain from sending the kava back up, because that would be really embarrassing, and when my stomach complied, I finished the remaining kava, emitting a groaning, squinting, incoherent curse, as a child might when forced to swallow acrid medicine. I returned my bowl to the kava shed, dimly noticing that it was taken and rinsed in a bucket of murky water, then stacked with the other bowls, awaiting the next user. Had I refreshed my hepatitis shots? I wondered. I couldn’t remember.
“That was absolutely vile,” I said a few moments later.
“Awful,” Sylvia agreed.
“Here,” Patricia offered. “Have some gum.”
“Good kava today,” Dirk said. “Very smooth. I find that, after a bowl of kava, a cigarette goes very well. Want one?”
I took the proffered Rothman’s and, noting Sylvia’s sidelong glance, immediately felt a solidarity with Dirk as we tended to the demands of our addictions. We spoke idly of work and the mysteries of Vanuatu, and it wasn’t long before I felt suffused with a pleasant calmness, a contentment with my world. I wasn’t certain whether this was attributable to the kava