Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [54]
So much excitement already, and it wasn’t even ten in the morning. I looked outside. It was sunny and calm, though oppressively hot. I have, I confess, a slight weather fetish. Few things make me happier than a blizzard or a spectacular thunderstorm. I had once even contemplated spending a summer chasing tornadoes. In Washington, whenever there was a hurricane pummeling Florida, I’d eagerly watch the news, envying the brave, brave TV correspondents, reporting that the wind was picking up and any moment now their umbrellas were sure to fail. There was always a shot of people merrily goofing around on the beach in Key West, people who had ignored the evacuation orders and were carelessly enjoying the scene as the winds increased from gale to hurricane strength. Drunken idiots is what most people called them. I saw them as fellow travelers.
Cyclones are hurricanes, and just as hurricanes in the Atlantic are named, so too are cyclones in the South Pacific. Ours was to be called Paula, and as it gathered strength in the Coral Sea northwest of Vanuatu, I followed its progress with a perverse sense of anticipation. Though Vanuatu averages two or three cyclones a year, there had been an unusual dearth of them in the region recently. The Ni-Vanuatu I spoke with, not unreasonably, thought that this was a good thing. Everyone spoke of Cyclone Uma, which had walloped Vanuatu in 1987, causing considerable damage. Scores of boats had been lost in Vila Harbor. The metal lampposts, I was confidently informed, had been bent in half. Many of the downtown roofs had been shorn off. The villages, of course, suffered even more cruelly. The people on the outer islands had taken shelter under the massive roots of banyan trees, the age-old cyclone shelter, only to return to find that their villages of thatch no longer existed. Shelter, however, was easily replaced. It doesn’t take long to build a traditional home using locally available materials. More difficult, however, was replacing the fruit trees that had been lost, and upon which a good deal of the country’s population depended for sustenance.
I certainly didn’t wish for a repeat of Cyclone Uma. I was hoping for a middling cyclone, the kind that would offer optimum weather drama while producing, ideally, no damage whatsoever. I wasn’t sure if such a cyclone existed, but if it did, I wanted to experience it.
Over the next few days, the weather became unbearably sticky and humid, a sure precursor to a storm. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, and yet everything was damp and soppy. The heat and humidity were such that we even considered turning on the window unit air conditioner in our bedroom. This required considerable fortitude on our part. Since our arrival, three geckoes had somehow managed to die deep within its bowels. I had disassembled as much of the unit as I dared and scraped out what I could of the lizards’ carcasses. But much remained, slowly, ever so slowly, decomposing beside our bed.
“I can’t take this heat anymore,” Sylvia said one night as we lay side by side, sweating in the darkness. “Let’s turn on the air conditioner.”
I closed the windows, sealing the room, and turned the unit on. It clanked and thudded and groaned and eventually began to whir, suffusing the room with a cool, humid air that stank of dead reptiles.
“I can’t take this smell,” I declared a half hour later. “Let’s open the windows.”
So we opened the windows and the odor slowly melted away, along with the hard-won coolness. Again we sweated miserably.
After a few nights of this, even Sylvia was looking forward to a cyclone, anything that would end the sweltering misery. I believed most of the town was of a similar line of thinking. Nothing, I felt, burdens a person’s disposition more thoroughly than unrelenting heat and humidity. Vila was generally a friendly town. But now, as people stood fanning themselves in the shade, quietly suffering through the cruel stillness and the enervating stickiness, tempers began