Life in the Ring of Fire Part 32: It Has POINTY Fins

Saturday McKenzie was slated to return from her hospital visit in Vila and so I headed down to the airport to meet her. Unlike in the US, where airports are generally associated with stress, hassle, inconvenience and other negative feelings, Norsup airport has the care-free airport concept down pat. A casual 15 minute stroll from my house brings me to the airport. I generally like to show up a bit early so I can spend some quality time in the waiting room: a gorgeous white sandy beach complete with a pleasantly cooling sea breeze and plenty of sun; an excellent place to bring a book and strech out for a bit. After about half an hour, you honestly couldn't care less whether or not the plane you're waiting for shows up or not, which is good because, more often than not, it doesn't (really, they need to rig up a similar system at O'Hare. I can almost guarantee a 90% increase in passenger apathy regarding flight cancellations). Thus, I wasn't particularly surprised when I got a text from McKenzie informing me that her flight had been canceled. I hung out at the beach for a little while longer and then got up to leave. A couple other people, who were also waiting for the plane to come, noticed my departure and asked me where I was going. I explained that the flight from Vila had been canceled, and so I was heading back home. Apparently, I was the only person on the island to receive the flight cancellation memo, as pretty soon basically everyone in and around the airport (including the airport staff) where asking me about the flight and then leaving when I told them it wasn't coming. About five minutes later, the whole airport had cleared out, and so I hoped that there wasn't another plane or something that was supposed to be coming, because all the airport ground crew had gone to get kava.

On Sunday, McKenzie did manage to make it in, and I was happy to see that she looked significantly less like she was about to die than the last time I saw her. She also arrived bringing various new and exciting food items from Vila, including apples, yogurt (I'd forgotten about yogurt), and Snickers bars. We headed to a nakamal and she told me the various ins and outs of her morphine-filled trip to the big city. I'm not sure what I was more amazed by: her various morphine dreams, or the descriptions of such a fantastically futuristic city filled with speeding, motorized contraptions, cold air generating machines, and a plethora of ready-to-eat comestibles.

Monday I was slated to go night spear fishing with my friend, Kalo. I'd had a diving light sent from the states almost a month prior in anticipation of such an event but, so far, no one had volunteered to take me out. Thus, I was pretty excited by the opportunity, and so around dusk I set out to look for Kalo. Seeing as, in my six months at Tautu, I'd only ever seen him in two places: his house, or Duncan's nakamal, it didn't take a very long or extensive search to locate him at Duncan's, where he was about to drink a shell of kava. I took this as an indication that we were probably not going spear fishing, but I asked him about it nonetheless. “We can't go because my flashlight is out of batteries,” he explained to me. Now, I've been in this country for a while and thus am well aware of the fact that Ni-Vanuatu are kings of the ridiculous excuse (the classic “I have to wash my hair” put-off has nothing on these guys. They're so afraid of telling a straightforward “no” to anyone that “no” most frequently takes the form of “Yes, but *insert absurd excuse here*” For example, you might ask a storekeeper if they have any bread and, instead of telling you that it's sold out, they'll say “Yes, but a rat's gotten to it”), but I was still caught off-guard by the sheer lameness of Kalo's battery excuse. First of all, the lack of batteries for a flashlight seems like the kind of thing that one could easily check and remedy several hours before attempting to embark on an activity that requires a portable light-producing device. Second, and more to the point, every single store in Tautu, including the one located a mere six feet from where we were standing, sells batteries. I briefly considered purchasing some batteries for him, thus forcing him to come up with an even lamer excuse for why we weren't going fishing, but I decided to let him off the hook. I headed to Duncan's store to put a couple beers in the freezer, being careful not to trip over the enormous stacks of batteries that littered the floor along the way, and settled in for a standard night at the nakamal.

Tuesday was my last day of class for the term which, believe me, is just as exciting from a teacher's perspective as it is from a students'. For the past month or so, my students' ability to focus on my lessons had been steadily waning. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that most of my colleagues had decided to stop giving class several weeks before. I however, was doggedly pushing forward, still entertaining hopes of making it from rounding to algebra by the end of the year. The rest of the week, however, was taken up by public holidays, so I gave my end of term exams on Tuesday and called it quits. It felt good to have completed my first ever term of teaching and, an added bonus which I discovered when I graded the exams, some of my students actually seemed to have learned something.

Thursday I finally got my chance to go night fishing. The headmaster of the school had asked Kalo and I to try and catch some fish to sell at a school fund raiser the following day, which was a bit of a downer, as it meant that we wouldn't be able to eat the fish that we caught, but I wasn't about to complain. Kalo showed up at my house around six and I donned my swim trunks and grabbed my mask and snorkel and light. “Wait a bit,” Kalo told me “we can't go yet.” “Why?” I asked, “too early for fishing?” Kalo explained that, no, it was, in fact, the perfect time to go fishing, but we couldn't leave the house yet because it was too light and if a pregnant woman saw us on our trek down to the ocean, we wouldn't catch any fish. “That's why, whenever you go fishing, you have to wait until it's dark and then sneak out of the village so none of the women see you.” I deemed this plan unlikely to work as, regardless of how dark it is, it's impossible to take ten steps in Tautu without twenty people, both male and female, asking you where you're going. After about fifteen minutes of wait, we struck out. As I anticipated, we'd gone about thirty feet when a girl spotted us from the road. “You going fishing?” She asked, glancing at the enormous spear gun Kalo was carrying, and the mask and snorkel I was clutching. “Yeah,” I said, at exactly the same time as Kalo said “No, just swimming.” The girl nodded politely, as if actually believing this blatant lie, and we continued on our way. I resigned myself to the fact that there were some things about this country that I would never understand and let Kalo do the talking for the remainder of the walk down to the water, during which we were spotted by probably half of the women in the village, although, fortunately, none of them seemed to be pregnant.

At the beach, we were joined by a village boy who was carrying a makeshift spear gun that he'd rigged by tying a length of metal to a piece of elastic and the rattiest looking snorkel kit I'd ever seen. Looks can be deceiving, however, and I had no doubt that this kid could bring in more fish than me, even if I were equipped with state-of-the-art, laser guided, fish-seeking harpoons. As the person deemed (probably accurately) least likely to catch any fish, I was made the fish bag holder, which is the very definition of a shit job. When I'd first gone spear fishing with Duncan, almost two months ago, I'd been tasked with securing all the fish we caught to my body with a piece of wire. However, as it turns out, Duncan isn't a particularly good spear fisherman, and so we'd only caught two fish, which were easy enough to carry along with a wire. This time, however, I was going out with the pros and we were swinging for the fences. Thus, strapping our caught fish to ourselves just wasn't going to cut it, and so Kalo had brought along a woven plastic rice bag into which we could deposit our fish. It was my responsibility to lug this bag around as we made our way through the water. What makes this a shit job is the fact that shooting a fish with a spear gun usually doesn't kill it, as the spear is too thin, and so after about fifteen minutes in the water, I was carrying around a bag filled with very alive and very pissed off fish. Further compounding the shit job factor, it turns out that a lot of fish have sharp, pointy fins (probably to discourage animals from doing exactly what we were doing namely, killing and eating them), and a plastic bag isn't exactly fish spine proof. Thus, I had to told the bag at arm's length to avoid being skewered by fish spikes. Even so, the third fish into the bag managed to stick me in the thumb and middle finger before being consigned to its plastic prison and, apparently, this particular fish was poisonous, because my fingers quickly swelled up and began to hurt a lot more than they really should have, given the small size of the puncture wounds. I tried to fix an image of the fish in my head, hoping to be able to recognize it in cooked form the following day so that I could purchase and eat it, thus getting the last laugh. I was, understandably I think, glad when we started to head back to shore after about an hour out in the water, where we surveyed our catch. We'd pulled in 15 or 20 fish, each at least the size of my hand, which I though was pretty good. Kalo, however, was disappointed. “Bad luck for us,” he said, nodding his head sadly. I guess one of the village women was pregnant after all.