Life in the Ring of Fire Part 53: Rain Smoke

This week's Tautu language word is “tosalsal.” It means “white man.” Needless to say, I get called this a lot.

Mango season was starting. This was very exciting. Last year, to my dismay, I left out training village on Efate to come to Malekula before Efate's mango season and after Malekula's mango season, thus meaning I've been living in a tropical paradise for more than a year now and have eaten, maybe, a grand total of three mangoes. I considered this unacceptable. There are mango trees all around Tautu, big, towering behemoths with long slender leaves and tangles of branches. There's one right next to my house, actually. They make good shade trees. Their leaves are small, but there are a lot of them and so they generally provide a nice, dense canopy. I've actually taken to setting up something of an outdoor office underneath mine. There's a half-rotten (but still functional) wooden platform built of strips of coconut logs situated between the mango tree and a nangai (a kind of nut, sort of like an almond, but more oily) tree which is shaded all day long. Someone laid a long piece of timber across a couple of supports just behind the platform, meaning that I can sit on the platform and use the timber as a sort of table for my laptop. I generally have to vacate my house between the hours of noon and four these days. Spring is rolling in with a vengeance and is making me wonder how it was that I was able to deal with impending summer last year. The school also decided a few months ago that it needed to cut down a bunch of trees around my house, meaning that there are now no trees to keep the sun off my corrugated iron roof, thus turning my house into an excellent model of a solar oven. On top of all that, my fan, which has served me faithfully for so many months, is on the fritz (sometimes requiring me to give the blades a little nudge with a pencil in order to get them going). When I was in Vila last, I looked into upgrading to a more deluxe fan model, perhaps even one made in a country besides China, but discovered that such an upgrade would have cost about $100, which seemed like a lot then, but now is seeming like a very worthy investment. So anyway, bottom line, I now have to retreat to my office during the hottest parts of the day, giving me plenty of opportunity to watch the mangoes ripen. They start off as little, green, kidney-shaped buds and eventually grow into larger, green, kidney-shaped buds. Unfortunately for me, my tree is at the school which, for some reason, is always populated by a lot of kids. I'm not sure if it's impatience or custom or some gross misunderstanding of agriculture, but Ni-Vans (especially kids) NEVER let fruit ripen properly. For example, any fruit ripe enough to fall to the ground of its own accord from a tree is immediately deem inedible. So what generally happens, be it with mangoes, papayas, grapefruits, oranges, basically any fruit, really, is that before any of the fruit is really ripe, the tree is swarmed and picked clean by kids. The kids seem to have a special penchant for under ripe mangoes. They pick them while they're still hard and sour, use a knife to cut the flesh into little slivers and eat them. They call them mango apples. This practice was really getting on my nerves, as I'd purchased a blender when I was in Australia and was looking forward to making some smoothies, but so far the only fruit I'd been able to consistently get my hands on was bananas, and plain banana smoothies really left something to be desired. Oh well, perhaps I'll have better luck during pineapple season.

In another attempt to beat the heat, I'd taken to spending part of my afternoons down in the main part of the village, which is located right on the beach. Well, beach is perhaps the wrong word to use. It implies a nice, sandy swath bordering the ocean on which one can lay out on a blanket, play beach volleyball, frolic in the shallows, etc. Tautu's beach is only a beach in the sense that it is a piece of land directly adjacent to the ocean. It is sandy, farther inland, but the actual beach is a continuous stretch of sharp, craggy rock that I can't walk on without the aid of sandals (although the village kids don't seem to have a problem running on it in bare feet). The real draw of the beach, especially these days, is that there's almost always a strong breeze coming off the ocean that, if you kind of squint, can actually border on being cold. Tautu is situated on what is essentially a large bay. Looking straight out from the shore, you can see where the island curves back around near Lakatoro and Litz Litz, as well as a few small, offshore islands. It's a nice view, even on a bad day. If you're really lucky, however, and happen to be at the right place at the right time to catch a storm front rolling in off the ocean, well, things really can't get much better. Thursday afternoon, I headed down to the beach to find that the wind was coming in unusually strong. Although the sky above Tautu was pristinely cloudless, a shadow cast by a foreboding mass of incoming clouds was creeping over the ocean. It may seem a little counter-intuitive, but it's actually not bright, sunny days that bring out the ocean's colors the best. A sun that's too bright tends to wash out subtle differences in the ocean's color, making everything a dull, universal, blue-green. Of course, with no sun at all the ocean turns into an abyss, a deep and empty void that not even the brightest of artificial lights can cast adequate light upon. It takes the shadow of an impending storm to bring out the breathtaking potential of the Pacific Ocean, when the blanket of blue-green is lifted to show three, sharp, stark bands of color, as distinct as if painted. Closest to shore, the water takes on the yellowish brown of the craggy rock structure that makes up the beach. At about twenty meters out, it suddenly changes to a brilliant turquoise brought out by the coral reef beneath it. Another ten meters past that the reef disappears and the ocean floor suddenly drops, making the water above it turn a deep, imposing blue. This is the color which defines blue. It's upfront and simple, no undertones, no hints at even the possibility of the existence of another color. Just Blue. As the wind knives across this strangely dynamic and immutable landscape it brings to life brilliant slashes of white, frothing waves as unabashedly white as the ocean that birthed them is blue. How is it that water, plain, simple, clear, colorless, is able to take on such a myriad of hues? And how is it that they can be made to change so violently? Closer to shore, you can watch these frothing creations work their way along the surface and then dissolve back into the immensity of the ocean as they break upon things unseen, but farther out the waves seem not to move at all, they're frozen stark, white gashes carelessly drawn upon a canvas of blue.

Then comes the rain. Not from above me, at least not yet, it's a little ways off still, but its presence is given away by the appearance of a thick, smoky haze that envelops the offshore islands and blots out the lush green of their vegetation, changing all color to a drab gray. For once, Bislama succeeds in being more poetic than English. The haze of an approaching rain is so perfectly dubbed “smoke blong rain” -- rain smoke. Slowly this smoke creeps its away across the ocean until even the closest offshore island, so clearly visible on a sunny day that you can pick out the shapes off village houses on its beach, becomes nothing more than a faint outline. Everyone knows what's coming. Women and children scramble to collect clothes drying on lines and men out net fishing in the shallows make a beeline for their houses. And then the rain starts. No, rain is an inadequate word to describe a thing of this magnitude. It's like suddenly standing at the base of a waterfall. A wall of water pouring from the sky. A deluge. Yes, English once again comes to the rescue with its voluminous vocabulary. Smoke blong rain was good, Bislama, but you're still behind by a lot. Finally, the rain having blotted out all but the most trivial of views of the ocean, I headed back to my house.

Fortunately, I'd finally fixed my rain gutter just a few days before. Ever since I'd dismantled my water system for cleaning after returning from Australia, I'd been unable to keep the spout connecting the gutters with the water tank from falling down. I hadn't broken or lost any important connective piece or anything. Apparently, the entire setup had been held together by some variety of mystical force, which I'd been unable to re-invoke (or maybe the dirt which I'd removed during the cleaning had been playing a crucial role in supporting the structure). In any case, I finally fixed the problem with the generous application of duct tape, which I hoped would be able to retain its adhesiveness despite the fact that, since it was part of a water system, it would probably be getting wet a lot. When I got home, I was pleased to see that the tape appeared to be holding just fine and that a nice flow of water was entering my tank.

I don't think I can describe to you how awesome that rain was. We hadn't had a good rain for almost two months. Almost all the rain tanks in the village were dry. I had taken to getting water from a well near the school. Everything was choked with dust. I'd been coated in dust for weeks. Not even the longest and most through of showers could remove the thin film of dirt from my skin. Either that or it was instantly replaced with new dust upon emerging from the shower. I think one of the coolest things about living in Vanuatu is how happy a simple thing as rain can make you. I could just feel the rain pouring vitality back into the parched landscape. It was like every person, animal, and plant on the island was breathing a collective sigh of relief. And watching my gutters divert a veritable river of water into my water tank awakened a very primal and instinctive glee. I literally jumped with joy. I was bounding up and down across my floor, doing fist pumps and screaming “Yes!” to no one in particular. I felt suddenly indestructible, because, after all, what can anyone possibly do to hamper the spirits of someone who's made happy when it rains?

Thursday and Friday it rained all day. My early Friday afternoon, water was pouring out of my tank's overflow pipe and I couldn't have been more please. The rain was even considerate enough to stop right around kava time on Friday to allow me a nice walk to Duncan's through the pleasantly damp and cool evening. Of course, I knew that soon enough the dampness on the ground would transform into oppressive humidity and the sudden influx of water would probably mean a monster hatch of mosquitoes, but I tried not to think of such things. For the time being, all was right with the world.