Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [60]
“It was at level three.”
We had arrived at the guesthouse the previous morning. “Just breathe into the paper bag,” Sylvia had said onboard the Twin Otter as we were buffeted by crosswinds. The guesthouse was set on a verdant bluff overlooking the sky-blue waters of Resolution Bay. Our hut, with walls of pandanus and a roof of thatch, stood just a few yards from a sheer cliff, not a place to amble about in the darkness without a courtesy kerosene lantern. In the mornings, the staff placed a hibiscus flower on the bed, underneath the mosquito net, which we agreed was a classy touch.
On the beach we had noticed steam rising from the tidal pools. Elsewhere, we could see steam rising in irregular bursts from the forest. This was the volcano venting. At a shallow tidal pool, we had come across a family boiling cassava and yams. “Do many people cook their food here?” we had asked. “Yes,” replied the father. “Bachelors.”
Across the bay rose the small eminence of Cook’s Pyramid, a rock from which the captain had sought to calculate where precisely he was on this planet. No doubt he would have recognized the anchorage. A verdant tangle of trees and wildflowers scaled the cliffs rising from the bay. A villager paddled his outrigger canoe across the emerald waters, periodically slapping his paddle on the water’s surface, beckoning the dugong, or sea cow, that lived there.
“Do you see it?” Sylvia asked later from our cliff-top perch. It was a nine-foot-long dugong that had popped its head up for a look around. No doubt, he was as perturbed by the sight as we were, and I daresay Captain Cook would have been, for an armada of French yachts had settled in the bay. They were, as we soon learned, from New Caledonia, participating in the annual sailing race from Nouméa to Port Vila. Now, typically, I don’t like to make grand generalizations about a people, but I’ll make an exception for the French colonists living in New Caledonia. They are pushy, rude, impertinent, and obnoxious, all the attributes generally attributed to Americans traveling abroad. We first encountered them in the village of Yakuveran, just beyond Port Resolution. I was playing soccer with the village youths, feeling profoundly humbled at every turn as these barefoot boys demonstrated why Vanuatu was the preeminent soccer power in the Pacific, when suddenly the colonists arrived, loudly streaming across the village clearing where we were playing. “France against Vanuatu!” yelled one man boozily in French, picking up the ball midgame. Half of us left the field. Most of the new arrivals were well on their way to drunkenness. As they played, their women and children were on the sidelines yelling, “Allez, allez. Vive la France!” Where once the village youths were playing with a dazzling ferocity, they had now lowered their game to accommodate the sloppiness of the French.
“Why are they letting the French win?” I asked the teenage boy next to me.
“Because it will make them happy,” he said.
Taking wary note of the yachts, we made arrangements to ascend the volcano late in the afternoon. William had a pickup truck waiting for us. “You stay until after dusk,” he said, “and see the magma in the darkness.” When we arrived to meet our guides, however, we discovered that the truck had been commandeered by the French. “I am very sorry,” William said, meaning it. “What can I do? Is it okay if you go in the morning before dawn?” No problem, we said as the truck heaved off, laden to the hilt with colonists. They returned some hours later, drenched through from a sudden downpour, which amused us immensely.
At dinner that evening, we shared a long table with the colonists. “I am a veteran of the war in Chad,” said a burly Frenchman. He had been hitting on Sylvia throughout the meal in that slurpy manner some middle-aged men have whenever they find themselves in the presence of a blond. We asked him about New Caledonia. We had spent the New Year’s holiday in Nouméa, the capital, and had found it