CARRY ME

Carry me, carry me, carry me above the world

About ninety minutes out of L.A., we hit turbulence.  Never-ending turbulence.  Just shy of scary turbulence.  The steward told us the captain said it would last all the way to Tahiti.  So we girded ourselves.  We talked, we read, we tried to relax.  But we didn’t sleep.  And then, not quite an hour from the islands, not long after our cabinmates agreed it was all right to raise our window blinds, the sun started to set through the clouds.  But this was no Pacific sunset.  No Vermont sunset.  Not even a Key West sunset.  The sun had a warm red/orange glow, but it was the clouds that provided the show.  Some were horizontal.  At different distances from the plane.  But what was truly astounding was the gray vertical puffs.  Like those snakes you used to buy as a kid, that you lit a match to.  You remember, they started out as little tablets, but when they caught fire they expanded, into long wisps of barely heavier than air ash.  Imagine bunches of these scattered throughout the sky.  Plumes.  With that same ashen color.

We figured it was momentary.  An anomaly over the ocean.  But this is the kind of sunset you get EVERY NIGHT in Tahiti.  These shows are enough reason to make the trip.

SALT OF THE EARTH

Let’s drink to the hard working people
Let’s think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag-taggy people
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth

Cruise ships are populated by Filipinos and Indonesians.  They put on a smile and do the shit work.

Seven days a week.  Living in the bowels of this floating hotel.  Cleaning up after and servicing tourists.  I could only ask myself…how fucking BAD must life be where they came from that they chose to work on a boat like slaves for little remuneration.

The fact that we have a President who never left the country before ascending to the throne astounds me.

You see we Americans think we know everything.  That we rule.  We watch television and figure we don’t have to leave the couch, it’s all there in living color.

But until you leave your comfort zone, until you’re on THEIR turf, not your own, you just don’t get it.

My grandfather struggled.  My father struggled less.  So I can live a life of choice.  The choices of those in so many parts of the world are extremely limited.

I never asked anybody to do anything for me.  I just didn’t want to add an IOTA of labor to these people trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

EVERYDAY PEOPLE

Then it’s the new man
That doesn’t like the short man
For being such a rich one
That will not help the poor one
Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby dooby dooby

Ooh sha sha
We got to live together

The first stop was Raiatea.  Where they warned us there was nothing to do.  Since it was SUNDAY and the shops were locked tight.

This turned out to be true.  But we took a stroll in the ninety degree humidity anyway.

And at the far end of the island, on an outcropping near the water, we heard something.  DRUMS!  We approached slowly.  Eager to get a closer look at Tahitian life.  And then, when we were ten feet away, the music stopped.  There we were, Felice and myself, with thirty islanders.

We were frozen.  I won’t say everybody was staring, but I wondered if we’d interrupted a religious rite.

Then I realized there wasn’t an Anglo in sight.  We hadn’t seen ONE on our journey.  They could kill us and toss the carcasses in the ocean and nobody would ever know what really happened.

Our Verizon cell phones, CDMA-based, didn’t work.  We were on their turf.  I suddenly understood the plight of the explorers.  Who knew if the islanders were friendly or belligerent?

But then the music restarted.  We were safe.

But it was a head-turner.  We feel we’re ENTITLED to our well-being in the States.  But in the rest of the world, we’re dependent on the kindness of strangers.

THUNDER ISLAND

Can you hear me now calling your name
From across the bay
A summer’s day laughing and a-hidin’
Chasing love out on Thunder Island

The captain took us on a zodiac from the Gauguin to the private island.  He was from Croatia.  Younger than me, he had two kids already out of the house.  And a wife halfway around the world.  Funny how you admire these macho guys.  As they face the challenges without blinking.

We spent the day snorkeling.  And lying in the bathtub-temperature water.

But I’ve got to warn you.  There are SEA CUCUMBERS!

Oh, you wear reef shoes.  But littered on the bottom of the ocean are these…well, CUCUMBERS!  But they’re alive.  And squishy.  And they urinate.  And it’s almost so gross you don’t want to go in.  You CERTAINLY don’t want to step on one.

They served us drinks in coconuts.  And I must say I felt like a tourist from a Jimmy Buffett song, but it was so FUNNY, like being on "Survivor’ or something, that I forgave myself.

BLACK MOUNTAIN SIDE

There can be no lyrics.  No words to express the view of Bora Bora off in the distance as the sun set.  THIS is Tahiti.  THIS is what you’ve come for.  An island in the middle of nowhere with a rock slab towering out of its middle resembling nothing so much as the icon in "2001".  You just can’t believe God built this.  What was he THINKING?

You can’t stop looking at it.  Knowing that no matter how you describe the never-climbed peak, only those who’ve been there, who’ve SEEN IT, will get it.

We took a car around the island.  They insisted on giving us an interpreter.  Like in "The Treasure Of Sierra Madre", we kept saying WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING INTERPRETER.  But the woman we rented the taxi from kept feigning a lack of understanding and Pascal jumped in the van, never to exit.

Pascal was French.  He traveled the world and settled here.

And it’s BEAUTIFUL!  But what the fuck you do day in and day out I have no idea.

Thank god we got Pascal.  He showed us where the human sacrifices took place in the 1800s.  He got the crabs to come out of their holes in the ground.  He showed us the kind of shit you can’t find in a guidebook.

We had lunch at the legendary Bloody Mary’s.

I don’t want to disappoint you, but it’s not much more than a hut.  Serving burgers and fries.  Cool, but THIS is the place all the stars come to?  I guess I should have known better, what with them listing every famous person who’d visited right out front.  I didn’t have time to read them all, but the minor rockers, people like Fee Waybill and John McFee, made me smile.  There was one highlight though.  Chris told me I had to visit the lavatory.  Where I found a bubbling brook sink and a flush handle over the urinal consisting of a long dangling dick.  Feeling inhibited, I almost couldn’t reach up and pull it.  When I was finished, I had to call in Felice for a look-see.

At night we went back to the island for dinner at…  Shit, I can’t remember the name of the restaurant.

The edifice was towering.  The interior resembled nothing so much as the inside of Old Faithful Inn, next to the geyser in Yellowstone.  There was enough headroom for Gulliver.  And French music that Chris immediately identified and the others pooh-poohed but I loved, finding it akin to Deep Forest.

But what was truly shocking was the "waitress".

It was clear from first encounter, it was a MAN!

Was he/she a transvestite?  Or a transsexual?  I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  But he/she never broke character.

MAN SMART, WOMAN SMARTER

Let us put man and woman together
And see which one is smarter

Turns out she WAS a he.  But this wasn’t unique.  This was a longstanding Tahitian tradition.  To raise young boys as women.  Which they remained their ENTIRE LIVES!

We learned this during the ENRICHMENT LECTURE!  Led by some archaeologist with a ponytail who seemed to be the all time rambler until you figured out that his digressions were in service to packing in important details and he always found his way back to the original point.  He was SO good that we even woke up for an 8:30 lecture the following day on the REAL story of the Bounty.

Oh, they’d showed the 1984 remake, with Mel Gibson, who was so fucking YOUNG, in the Grand Salon the night before.  I only caught about fifteen minutes.  It’s solely about the original, RIGHT?  But, I was too stupid to know until Felice informed me that Fletcher Christian was REAL!  The whole story was REAL!

So, parked the next morning in Moorea, in the same bay that they filmed the Mel Gibson flick, we heard what REALLY happened.

It had nothing to do with love.  You see, back then nobody in Europe BATHED!  Like a beautiful Tahitian woman was going to want to leave paradise with some sweaty, unkempt seaman for rainy England?  Right!  Shit, following the islanders, some of the crewmen did dip into the water to cleanse themselves.  But they didn’t bother to take off their long underwear.  Hell, they often BURIED people in their hair-suits, since they couldn’t separate the garments from their skin!

Oh, it took Roger two hours to tell the entire story.  Involving the personality of Bly, who turned out to be manic-depressive.  And the playboy/entitled antics of Christian.  Who, after returning to the island and picking up hostages threw the ugly women over the side.

Oh, there’s gonna be a book.  A best seller if this oral rendition is any indication.

And, riveted by Roger, whose lecture was better than ninety percent of those I endured in college, Chris and I signed up for his "Trails Of The Ancient" trek.  Wherein we got in a rickety bus and drove up to the Belvedere, under the vertical peaks, the caves of which contained the bones of island ancestors, and surveyed the whole landscape of Moorea.  It was like Switzerland without snow.  And the homemade banana ice cream I purchased at the concession trailer was better than any I’ve had previously.

Then we descended into the rain forest.  To visit religious sites.

Roger’s waxing rhapsodic.  And then he says it’s going to rain.  Just that calmly.  And then there’s a THUNDEROUS noise.  But it’s not what comes after lightning.  It’s the mega-droplets hitting the canopy.  The foliage of the trees a hundred feet above us.  Down below…we were barely getting wet.  It was ASTOUNDING!

FULL MOON FEVER

It truly felt like we were free fallin’.  When suddenly, over the towering peak right behind the ship, the moon began to appear.  If it had been a movie, you wouldn’t have believed it.  You’d have thought it was a painting.

We’re sitting on deck.  With a zillion stars in the sky.  Two thousand foot peaks surrounding us.  It was a religious experience.

WHERE TO NOW ST. PETER?

I took myself a blue canoe
And I floated like a leaf

The Paul Gauguin has a marina in the rear.  A hatch opens and you can windsurf, water ski and kayak.  They’d told Felice in e-mail that it would be closed, in light of the recent pirate activity on the high seas, but when we arrived, they announced it would be open.

No way I’d leave the platform the first few days.  God, the ship ITSELF was drifting in the current.

But anchored in the bay in Moorea…the water was calm.

We wanted to go water skiing.  But it turns out we didn’t register early enough.  So, we went kayaking.

I won’t say I felt like an early explorer.  But alone on the water, enveloped by a landscape mortals could not even DREAM up, I felt fully alive.  No iPod was necessary.  No Internet connection.  Actually, I intentionally left my laptop at home.  I wanted to unplug.  I wanted to get the full experience.  And, after exploring the nooks and crannies of the bay, when we stopped paddling, and just drifted, in the quiet, I told myself this must be just like paradise.

So where to now St. Peter
Show me which road I’m on
Which road I’m on

I owe a debt of gratitude to Ginny, Felice’s mom, who took me along on this family trip.  Which was not only a phenomenal time, but enlightening.

Not only did I not want to go home, I was already contemplating where I wanted to go next.  You can travel all over the world in front of a computer screen, but you SEE things and don’t FEEL them.  And life is about the sensations.  The world is full of stimuli.  You’ve just got to leave home and be open to being touched.