Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [84]
Apparently, while we had been living abroad, someone had sent a missive to all Western women under the age of twenty-five: Put a large tattoo above your butt. Another directive must have been sent to the men: Tattoo barbed wire around your arm. As far as I could tell, resistance had been futile. We went for a swim and enjoyed the looks that the island’s other guests gave Sylvia, who was in a bikini. You couldn’t tell she was pregnant from behind, but then she’d swing her ballooning belly around and we’d hear the gasps. We could see them thinking, I hope that’s not contagious.
Beachcomber Island was a speck of an island, easily circumnavigated in five minutes. It had a beach, a few palm trees, a large dormitory filled with bunk beds, and a bar. “Bunk 83, please come to the bar,” someone said over the loudspeakers. Bunk 83? It sounded like hell to me.
Very clearly, we had passed through some invisible barrier, some passage that prevented us from seeing the appeal of sharing a large dorm room with a hundred people in various states of inebriation. We felt deeply out of our element, possibly even more so than the Japanese couple wearing inscrutable T-shirts. IRONY, declared the woman’s baseball cap. WORK HARDER, said her T-shirt. Okay, I thought, I get it. I think. But what about her friend? He wore a T-shirt with an image of a bottle of soy sauce. SOY SAUCE, it said. What did that mean?
Waiting for the boat to take us back to the main island, we settled at a table near the bar and eavesdropped on a couple of flirtatious youngsters. “I really like beef,” said the boy.
“Do you eat wheat bread?” asked the girl.
“Not really,” he said.
“How about vegetables? What’s your favorite?”
“Um…I guess potato. I like french fries a lot. But what I really like is beef.”
This went on for a half hour. It was strangely riveting, even endearing, and as we left we hoped that they’d find happiness and perhaps attend Homecoming together.
We too wanted to feel young, and so on our next trip to the sunny side of Fiji, we booked a passage through the Yasawa Islands on the Blue Lagoon Cruise. It was very pleasant, and as we hopped from island to island we felt our youth restored.
“So you don’t own a house?” asked Bill as dolphins skipped above the waves. Bill and his wife, Susan, were from California.
“No. We just rent.”
“It’s probably too late for you, then.”
“Too late?”
“Let’s see,” Bill said. “We bought our house back in ninety-eight for $525,000. Today it’s worth $1.3 million.”
“More like $1.5 million,” Susan added. “Remember, Sven and Jean sold theirs for $1.3 million, and we have more square footage.”
“How many square feet do you have?” asked Jim. He and his wife, Katherine, were from Massachusetts.
Bill told him. “So that works out to about $415 a square foot. We’re roughly at $375 where we live. I bought a house last month that I plan on flipping when it gets to $400.”
“Wow,” Katherine said to us. “So you’re going to have a baby and you don’t even own your home?”
It was just what we needed. Suddenly we felt like a couple of reckless kids, footloose and fancy-free.
Eventually, we found a place where we felt neither too young nor too old. Among Sylvia’s programs was a coral-restoration project near Sigatoka on Viti Levu’s Coral Coast. Because of changes in the water temperature, the coral in front of the Fijian Resort was bleached, and Sylvia’s organization was involved in attempts to restore its health. Whenever she traveled to the project site, she stayed at the resort. I accompanied her because…well, because I could. The Fijian was a family resort, and when Sylvia was free, we studied the families. After all, we were soon to become one ourselves.