The E.t. And The Man From Bikini

Patricia Luce Chapman Author/songwriter [email protected] * 361/790-5715 www.patricialucechapman.blogspot.com

THE E.T. AND THE MAN FROM BIKINI © Patricia Luce Chapman I climbed quickly into the Marshall Islands plane, destination Kili Island—where the people from Bikini Atoll had been moved to before the 1946 atomic bomb testing on their home atoll. It was now 1996. I wanted to know how these people under our care, and still exiled from their home atoll after half a century, were being treated. It was about a two-hour flight from Majuro, the capitol of the Marshall Islands. Five Marshallese men occupied the back row with me. The 40-odd seats in front were replaced with boxes marked USDA. US Department of Agriculture. Huh? it took a couple of minutes for my brain to process this anomaly. Kili couldn't grow enough food for its people. When the flight was underway, one of the men offered me some coffee, glancing at me with reserved interest. "You going to Kili for the US government?" he asked. "No, I'm just a tourist." His face showed astonishment and humor. "Is someone meeting you?" "Oh," I smiled up at him, "I'm used to managing by myself. I'll look into little shops and have lunch somewhere." He looked at me with barely restrained incredulity. "I want to see how the Bikini people are doing," I explained. After an hour he pointed out the window and said, "We're coming up to Jaluit now. It's a beautiful atoll." The dark blue water turned to turquoise and green with streaks of purple and flows of beige as the plane passed over the irregular outer circle of reefs and islands. The large lagoon was calm, pale celadon green. "It's lovely!" I said. "Is Kili like that?" He gave a little laugh. "No." A scruffy spot of green appeared and disappeared. "What's that, one of Kili's out-islands?" "That is Kili." The plane banked and circled back over a dirt airstrip, some tin roofs. A heavy surf was breaking over rocks. I couldn't see a beach or lagoon. Well, OK, maybe I wasn't going to snorkel. We landed hard, stopped abruptly at the other end of the island, and taxied back. "That's a pretty short runway," I said. "Yeah," he said. "It's 4000 feet, the width of the island. The whole island is only about a third of a square mile." I stepped out and tripped over chunks of broken coral and burned coconut shells. My sunglasses fogged up in the heavy humidity. A sign read "KILI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. ELEVATION SEVEN FEET." People of all ages were running to the plane as it was being unloaded, picking up boxes of sugar, rice, noodles, frozen meat, frozen fish, and stacking them in the tin terminal. Frozen FISH? These were supposed to be fishermen. Several children

shouted out happily, "USDA! USDA!" Well, I thought, there's a new word. USDA = food from America. The heat was so intense that beads were forming on my forehead. I walked toward the lane cut into the forest of coconut trees, and began to grin despite the grim arrival, feeling like a romantic explorer as the greens of the palms, pandanus, giant ferns, breadfruit, papaya reached above me. The cries of birds were piercing. A car labeled "Taxi" rumbled up and passed me. The passengers all stared at me. I waved, called "Hi!" No one waved back, or smiled, or spoke. I stopped to wipe my forehead. A sudden breeze cooled me; it brought a faintly unpleasant smell. Not like Venice; not sewage. It was more like the decay of a dump. I giggled nervously. Maybe this place is a dump. Another car lurched past. Again everyone stared; again no one waved back. I realized that the lack of welcome was because I was a strange woman wandering alone into their town. I had expected to be one tourist among others. Now I could see why they'd have few casual visitors. A wood shack appeared through the palms, then another. The trees thinned, revealing a village of shacks set in grayish-white coral rubble. The coral crunched underfoot, and coral dust began to settle on my sandals and cling to my wet skin. What an ugly place, I thought. How can a tropical island be ugly? The flimsy shacks, placed irregularly on the coral, didn't look lived-in, but rather like temporary storage sheds on a construction site. Looking from one to the next I wondered where the Kili people actually lived. It couldn't be in this awful place. There had to be something nicer. At least a little port. Ten minutes later I found that there was nothing. Not even an identifiable village center. I'd found a church, a graveyard, a school, a gym. That was it. Kili's unpleasantness numbed me. I'd crunched my way past people washing and hanging clothes, unpacking food boxes, nursing babies, riding bicycles. I'd seen hyperactive, apparently stir-crazy people and others who sat immobile in what looked like deep depression. No one had spoken to me. All had stared at me silently. The only outsider, I was an intruder into their sorry existence. I decided to take some photos and then leave. Immediately I realized that the plane had gone. It wouldn't be back until 2:00. It was now 10:15. And what if it didn't return? I was trapped in this God-forsaken speck of land in burning heat. No phone, no road that went anywhere, no other land on the horizon, nobody to help me, no fresh water, no bathroom, no way to cool off. A sudden claustrophobic panic caught at me. My hair was clinging to my head in sticky wet ringlets and the perspiration dripping down my face was stinging my eyes. I bent down to mop my face with my skirt, then resolutely set off to tour the town again. There were wretched details. An attempt to farm: some potato vines struggled through the coral rubble. I visualized the fisherman turned apprentice farmer angrily kicking the unwelcoming hard lumps. One shack was painted with blue waves, another with a magenta door. A make-shift baby outrigger, unusable in Kili, stood against a wall. The futility of it. Kili was a testament to despair. Like the coral dust and the wet heat and the smell of decay, despair pervaded the island. Abruptly, I'd had enough. I had to escape and decided to return to the airport, where at least I could sit in the shade for the next few hours. As I searched among the shacks for the road to the airport, my heart suddenly gave an arrythmic thump. My God, I thought. This is a DP camp. It's a made-in-America Displaced Persons camp where we've dumped the Bikini people and are storing them and feeding them a product called USDA. Until when. Would forever be convenient for us? or them? It was already half a century. I began to feel disoriented, my feet not making proper contact with the road. Realizing that I was suffering from the sun, I slowed and tried to breathe quietly.

"You want a drink?" I jumped. The voice came from young man lounging in a doorway. "No—no thanks," I stammered Several young men appeared and eyed me. Terrified, I wondered if they began drinking so early. Were they going to harm me? Who would know or care? I was at the mercy of this harsh place and of the bitter people who had been forgotten here. Briefly I considered the possibility of being raped and thrown to the sharks. I walked quickly around a corner. A pack of dogs began circling me, barking and snarling until a girl called them off. My heart was beating unevenly. I knew I had to get out of the sun and found a shady tree to rest against. A man approached. I eyed him warily. "You hungry?" he asked. "You like breakfast?" With steady eyes he studied me. His face showed no menace. "Is there someplace to eat?" "Yes. We go. What you do here? You US government?" The question now had depths of meaning. "No, just a tourist." How absurd that sounded. Expressionless, the man asked, "You like Kili?" I replied carefully, "The coconut trees are pretty." He laughed. "Oh, Kili very pretty." I burst out laughing. "Come, we go to restaurant. My name is Eddie, what's yours?" I had a friend on Kili. We walked to the shack where the man had asked me in for a drink. Now I understood: this was the restaurant and he had been offering a drink of water. The restaurant was cooled by a fresh, sweet-smelling breeze from the ocean. At the counter, Eddie carefully sat with a stool between us. I began to feel better. He ordered ramen, and we looked at each other with interest. Eddie was a shy, wiry, slight man in his mid-30's, I guessed. His face evinced years of deprivation, as though he had been underfed and under-loved all his life. Hard lines cut into his skin; and there was about him, and about all but the very young, a sealed-off stillness, an impression that nothing could hurt, that he expected to be misused but that he would tough it out. Several people had come in, apparently to stare at me. Clearly I was a freak, an Extra Territorial who had landed here on Kili. Their faces showed their mixed ancestry—Japanese, German, Chinese, Portuguese, French, British, Spanish, American of many ancestries, Russian. Whalers, missionaries, explorers, occupiers, liberators, shipwreck survivors. Many young girls were beautiful with long glossy dark hair into which flowers or ornamental combs were placed. The women wore colorful dresses, the men shirts and pants. There was one topic of conversation: how and when they could return to Bikini. "Bikini like Jaluit," an elder recalled. "We sail, we fish, we visit other place. Plenty to do. Kili, nothing to do. No lagoon, ocean too rough. Bikini have fruit, have fish. Bikini beautiful, sweet." The 150 Bikinians had arrived on Kili in 1948. The men told me there was no port. People were injured trying to get a boat across the rocks, and they could fish only when the ocean was calm. Many goods still had to be ferried on floats to the beach. There was no doctor, only a helper. Medicines? I was shown a half-bottle of cough syrup. "Why can't you go to Jaluit? It looked beautiful." The people of Jaluit didn't want them, he said, because they were not from Jaluit. "To Marshallese, lose homeland is lose life," Eddie said. The Bikinians had been stripped of their identity. They had to return to their homeland. How could Americans understand this? To us, one beach with a palm tree is much like another. Eddie told me that the reason they were put on Kili was that it was uninhabited. No one had ever wanted to live here. Now, most Bikinians lived on Kili, another several hundred on an island in the capital.. He went out to get cigarettes. Taking advantage of his absence one man said

angrily: "You from USA, you tell USA we real live people here on Kili. US put us here, US must take us off, clean Bikini, keep promise." His eyes were hard. Another spoke harshly: "US put man on moon, US can clean Bikini." Some people left, others arrived. They seemed unnaturally jumpy. Eddie returned. "OK so? Take coffee?" I nodded. He went out to get matches. While he was away I asked a woman, Queenie, about a toilet. With an apologetic look she whispered, "We use ocean, hide behind rocks." Eddie returned. "Now I keep my word for you. I going to show you any place you want." He pulled some dollar bills out from the pocket of his ill-fitting pants. One of the bills was patched together with band-aids. I reached for my wallet. "No," he said firmly. "I pay for your breakfast." My goodness, I thought. I'm on a date. When I stepped out, the glare of the sun blinded me. Several taxis were noisily honking at dogs and children as they crunched along on the rubble, people getting on and off. Eddie asked, "You like shells?" "Yes." "Ok, first I give you some shells." He guided me through the maze of paths to his place. "You stay here," he said, going in. He returned with a paper bag which he handed to me me shyly. Three lustrous, very large cowrie shells glowed in the wrinkled bag. Eddie had given me pearls and diamonds. "What present can I give you? What do you like?" I asked. "Anything. Anything." He looked down. The sudden misery in his face shook me. "You can see all I got." He motioned with his hands. "I got nothing. I like anything." A taxi stopped for us. Eddie sat me in the front seat while he climbed in back. Three girls were in the car, their hair tossing as they chattered, their eyes as lustrous as the cowries. "You have husband?": one asked. "No, my husband is dead." "Eddie have no woman now, you no husband," another called out. The girls tittered. "You nice for him." "Gracious, I’m too old for Eddie." "No, you not too old, you have nice, pretty face. Nice for Eddie." Eddie muttered to them in Marshallese, and they stopped teasing. Our sightseeing trip took us to the airport. Some people got off the taxi, others got on. But no one was going anywhere. The taxi circled to drive the few minutes back to town. "You like ride again?" Eddie asked. "Sure, is there another road?" I asked "No, only one road." Dodging taxis and people we drove to the end of the village, turned, and drove back down the street and out to the airport again and back. Taxis and bikes and motorcycles drove back and forth on the same circuit and they had been doing this for decades. Eddie stopped the taxi. He paid a couple of dollars for the trip, as though this were a real taxi taking us to a real place. We walked to his house, where he again asked me to wait outside. This time he returned with champagne: a paper cup of ice water. ":Good clean cold water," he said. "You like?" I felt him watching me as I slowly, gratefully, sipped the water. He was observing me to see if liked it as though I were a creature from outer space. His kindness dazed me. How could such gentleness grow in so harsh a place? "We go to ocean now," he said. I was nervous at first, walking alone with Eddie in the forest. But he walked deliberately on the other side of the road. We reached the ocean. "You there," he said, pointing with firmly muscled brown arm to the ocean. Rocks screened the ocean from view of the road. "I here." He pointed toward the forest. This was the bathroom area: ladies over there, gents over here. The sensitivity touched me almost to tears. I wanted to wrap my arms around him.

Leaning against the rocks, I looked at the empty horizon and watched the ocean retreating and pounding back. The beach sloped into a flat of rock with jagged protrusions. Two men were struggling to get a rowboat over the rocks. Eddie had emerged from the forest. He was sitting silently on a log, his head to one side, watching me. Now he got up and said, "We go to airport. Come." We walked beside the runway. A girl called out, "You have husband?" "No." "Good, you take Eddie home with you to America!" another shouted. A man on a motorbike sped past and spoke angrily to a driver. "That's police," Eddie said. "Tell driver not to drive on runway." My goodness, I thought, they even have make-believe policemen here. Eddie and I joined some men squatting on the coral chunks. A white-haired man began to hum, and soon all the men were softly singing in harmony. "This is Bikini song," Eddie told me. "That's why John always singing this song. He is try to remember what was there on Bikini." "Yokweh Bikini! Yokwe Bikini!" John cried out. Yokweh, similar to aloha, meant hello, goodbye, and I love you. Eddie got up, so I rose too. He walked slowly, keeping a good distance between us, toward a group of women fanning themselves in the terminal. He motioned me over to the women, said something I didn't understand, and walked away. He didn't return. As time passed I became miserable and frightened. Why would he have left me? The plane could now be heard in the distance. I began to search for him. I couldn't leave without thanking him for making my visit to wretched Kili a day of beauty. Finally I saw him with a group of men, went up to him, and took his hand. He looked embarrassed; the men gave him teasing smiles. "I don't want to leave without saying goodbye," I said. "You have been so kind to me." He put his other hand over mine for a moment. The rough-textured touch pleased me; his hand was warm and firm. Quietly, his eyes lowered, he said: "You know how I feel, what I say." And then he walked away again. He didn't speak to me or glance at me as the plane landed and unloaded its boxes of food. Slowly I climbed aboard. The plane took off. Kili became smaller in the distance; smaller; then it disappeared. Yokweh Kili, I whispered. Yokweh.