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By Root 907 0

explosions, nature would, at the very least, grant a pleasant climate. One would be wrong. While Vanuatu has wonderfully fair weather for half the year, the other half is occupied by cyclones. From November through April, the islands can reliably expect to be walloped by two or three cyclones, which is what hurricanes are called in this corner of the world. When you consider that most of the inhabitants of Vanuatu live in villages constructed of wood and thatch, where they survive largely through the cultivation of fruit trees and vegetable gardens, one can see how potentially devastating cyclones are for the islanders, or Ni-Vanuatu, as they are called. Not only can the typical Ni-Vanuatu depend on losing his home and livelihood during a cyclone; he can expect this to happen several times over the course of his life. Such is the world that nature has bequeathed to them. It did not surprise me, then, to learn that the water around Vanuatu is also shark-infested.

I recalled life in Kiribati, where every facet of existence was starkly shaped by the environment. It was very different from Washington, where nature had been reduced to just another trite political issue, and one’s thoughts on the environment indicated whether one played for the blue team or the red team. On Tarawa, fish migrations determined what one had for dinner; a rain squall meant that, finally, there would be enough water to wash your hair; and the tides limited how far you could travel on the island. Life was reduced to its most elemental, and this, of course, affected the culture. Where I’m from, when we see a shark, we get out of the water. In Kiribati, when people see a shark, they gleefully dive in and try to catch it. Geography, as they say, is destiny.

Similarly, the isolated, trembling islands of Vanuatu, with their fire-breathing volcanoes and tempestuous cyclones, have produced a particularly intriguing culture uniquely adapted to the world they live in. During our time in Port Vila two years earlier, it seemed as if every Westerner we met was an anthropologist, freshly returned from the deepest, darkest bush, pith helmet in tow. It is no wonder. While the Ni-Vanuatu are Melanesian (Latin for “of the black islands”), descendants of intrepid voyagers who first sailed from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands roughly four thousand years ago, they share little in common beyond appearance. Vanuatu is a country of chiefs and clans, each with unique traditions and beliefs. Some thought a bone through the nasal septum made them particularly fetching. Others manipulated the skulls of their infants until they became suitably elongated. As mentioned earlier, many Ni-Vanuatu men today wear nothing more than a namba, a modest leaf wrapped around their penis. Naturally, there are Big Nambas and Small Nambas. And they don’t like each other.

Then there are the languages. The two hundred thousand people who call Vanuatu home speak more than one hundred languages. There is no place on Earth that offers more linguistic diversity. On some islands, and these are not large islands, the inhabitants will speak one of more than two dozen local languages, all unintelligible to one another. How can this be? you wonder. These people have been sharing an island—an island!—for a thousand years, or two, or four, and yet their languages have evolved utterly independent of those of their neighbors, a mere conch-shell blow away. Visiting the islands, one quickly understands that the topography certainly has something to do with it. The islands of Vanuatu are invariably rugged, as one would expect of islands prone to blowing up. And the interiors of most are forbiddingly dense with jungle. On Tanna, an island in the south, this area is known as the Middle Bush, an evocative name straight out of J. R. R. Tolkien. Mordor, if you will, can be found on the Ash Plain, where centuries of volcanic eruptions have decimated all life, leaving a gray, barren, and twisted landscape that fairly shouts DO NOT ENTER.

But, clearly, something else must have been afoot for so few people