Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [50]
Micah and I were sitting together, watching all of this when he finally turned to me.
“I think I know what your problem is,” he said.
“What problem?”
“Why you get so stressed all the time.”
“Why do you keep talking to me about this? Here I am, enjoying my first South Pacific sunset, and you want to start probing my psyche.”
“Your problem,” he said, ignoring me, “is that you need more friends.”
“I have friends. I have a lot of friends.”
“Guy friends?”
“Yeah.”
“But do you do anything with them? Do you go out with them? Go fishing or boating or whatever it is you do down south?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes, or rarely?”
I hesitated. “Okay, so I don’t do much with them. But I can’t. To have the time to go out with friends, I’d have to give up time with my family. I have too many kids to do that. And besides, most of my friends have kids, too. I’m not the only one who doesn’t have a lot of free time to just hang out.”
“You should, though. Just hang out. Not all the time, of course, but you should try to make it more regular. Like I do. I joined an indoor soccer league and we play every Thursday. Just a group of guys out there having fun. You should do something like that.”
“We don’t have an indoor soccer league. I live in a small town, remember?”
“It doesn’t have to be soccer. You can do anything. The point is that you should do something. Relationships are the most important thing in life, and friends are part of that.”
I smiled. “Why do I get the impression that you think the solution to all my problems is to be more like you?”
“Hey, if the shoe fits.” He shrugged, and I laughed.
“So you still think you have to take care of me, huh?”
“Only when I think you need it, little brother.”
“And what if I started talking to you about God, because I think you need it?”
“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll listen.”
Above me, the sky was filled with stars clustered together in unrecognizable constellations, and the words rose up almost unexpectedly.
“God keeps his promise, and he will not allow you to be tested beyond your power to remain firm; at the same time you are put to the test, he will give you the strength to endure it, and so provide you with a way out.”
Micah glanced over at me. Despite the darkness, I could see him raise his eyebrows.
“First Corinthians,” I said. “Chapter 10.”
“Impressive.”
I shrugged. “I just always liked that verse. It reminds me of the footprints story—you know the one where God walks with man on the beach. Scenes from the man’s life flash in the sky, and during flashbacks of the most trying times of the man’s life, he sees only one set of footprints. Not because God abandoned the man in times of need . . . but because God carried the man.”
Micah was quiet for a moment. “So you don’t think he abandoned us?”
“No,” I said. “And I don’t think he wants you to abandon him either.”
The following morning, we set off to see the first of the Moai statues, which were located less than a few minutes from the hotel, just up the coast. Had we known where we’d be going, we could have seen them from our hotel room.
As we rode in the vans with the archaeologists who made their living studying them, we were informed that at one time there were roughly fourteen different tribes on the island, each with its own ruler. These rulers ordered the carving of these statues from volcanic rock—most were made to resemble said rulers—and over time, these statues grew larger and larger, as each ruler tried to impress on the people his own importance. Some of the Moai weigh up to thirty tons, and stand twelve feet high; one unfinished statue mea-sures sixty-six feet and is estimated to weigh nearly fifty tons.
Afterward, we were told about the absence of trees.
When it was first colonized, Easter Island had resembled other islands in the Pacific, but as the population expanded, trees became the most overused of all the natural resources. They were employed in construction of dwellings and for cooking fires; mature trees were used to roll the Moai across the island. In the past when Polynesians migrated,