Cover Acknowledgments Prologue Contents Part VI Part VIII Glossary

Chapters 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

"I see Richard at the wheel," Paul reported with enthusiasm from the bow pulpit.

Although it might have first appeared as though we were on a collision course, I turned Querencia's wheel as we closed the final distance between boats; amid a flurry of clicking camera shutters we ran downwind along side Richard's large catamaran, Vehia .

"Ahoy, Richard!" we hailed. He was already eyeing us carefully. His young son, towheaded and brown as a berry, stood at his side. We had met Richard on our 1981 trip down to Bora Bora by plane. He was an American who had first sailed down to Tahiti from Hawai´i with some buddies. While in the Society Islands he met a beautiful French/Tahitian woman, Martine, and they married and soon had a son they named Maui. Richard quickly learned to speak Tahitian as well as French and reaped a lot of respect from the locals. Their tourism business had flourished as a result.

"Well, I can't believe it!" Richard whooped, looking us over as our two boats raced down the lagoon with just a few yards between us. His initial look of concern was changing to jubilation.

"Do you remember us?" Davey yelled across.

"Sure I do. You guys really did it! How the hell are you anyway?"

"Great!," the three of us chorused back, "It's good to be here!"

In a quick exchange we brought Richard up to date on our transit times. He had his first mate toss us a couple of cold canned Budweisers as he pointed out a safe anchorage for us. We would get together later. As I turned the wheel and Querencia pointed her bowsprit away from Vehia , the deck full of tourists were still taking pictures of our pretty Querencia as we waved them good-bye.

The anchorage was between the Yacht Club, identifiable by floating "fares " or huts, and an extension of land known as Point Pahua. There was only one other boat, a French steel hull and we anchored about thirty yards away from it in seventy feet of water. Despite our close proximity to shore it was very deep and to add to my surprise the anchor windlass had completely frozen up from salt deposits. We had to set our anchor twice by hand before we were satisfied and by then both Paul's arms and mine felt like wet spaghetti.

Our dream had come to reality. Querencia bobbed off her hook in crystal clear waters, once again in the center of a prism. Before us stood the magical mountain of Bora Bora, O´temanu, surrounded by lush tropical foliage, blushing faintly. I felt a certain harmony, or rhythm, to the this place, as if Querencia were inside a hologram.

Davey was quick to remind me to get a few chores done before sunset. It was already four in the afternoon. Davey was right -- there were the sails and sheets to be put away, we had to pump up the raft, unstuff below decks, and rearrange our ocean-going, oversized "wind-surfer" into a floating home with accommodations for three.

By dark we had everything done that needed to be, including taking luxurious fresh-water showers and putting on fresh T-shirts and shorts. We all climbed into the raft and rowed to the Yacht Club with all the francs we could find. It was a long row but Paul had no problem in pulling us to the dock.

I carefully tied up the dinghy with a clove hitch and the three of us jumped up on the foreign dock which was dimly lit by lights from the bar and kitchen. I could see that under the opposite, lit-end of the dock people were sitting at small tables drinking and eating.

"Bonsoir!" rang a voice from a dark silhouette moving in the shadows next to us. Startled, we all jumped about three feet straight up.

"Bonsoir," I said. "Je suis Américan. Moi et mon famille arriver Bora Bora a la petite bateau cinquante jours depuis California."

"Fifty days from California?" he said in very good English but with a French accent.

"Well, actually we stopped in Nuka Hiva in the Marquesas for a few days."

"Ohhhhhhgh! Debbeeee. Debbeeee. Ohhhhhhgh! Oh my god! Welcome to Bora Bora! My name is Noel!" He yelled to the bar emphatically in French and you could hear the words "Americans cinquante jours California" echoing from one table to the next. Everyone was eager to see the Americans as Noel led us out of the shadows and onto the eating lanai at the head of the dock.

"Please join me and my fiancée, Debi, at our table as our guests," insisted Noel, "we are the new managers of the Yacht Club Bora Bora!"

Learning to grate coconut

Then it was cocktails followed by a huge feast accompanied with the finest of French wines. As soon as we finished one course Noel would order another. Debby and Noel spoke very good English. The food was excellent and the conversation delicious. It was wonderful to be truly wined and dined in the paradise of our choice, complete with the Southern Cross constellation overhead. At the end of the evening we rowed back to Querencia in the still waters of the protected lagoon. We looked forward to our coming days on Bora Bora, happy to be anchored to our dream.

45.

In the past Davey and I had each divided our lives into different areas, like job, family, and spiritual practice and they all had become somewhat independent activities. This had worked to our advantage earlier in our lives because it had enabled each of us to go into greater detail in one area or another depending on our interests, concentration, and available time. It was the natural way "to be" since focusing our energy on one thing at a time was the only way it seemed we could fulfill our selves. But because of this division Davey and I had lost a sense of wholeness in our lives. Rediscovering that wholeness was our quest and we indeed re-discovered it in our five-month stay on Bora Bora.

It was a fulfillment of paradise. Can paradise be explained? For each of us life was now an inward experience, quiet and subtle, as compared to the overwhelming material and outward focus of daily activity in a metropolis. No longer did we view our existence as something that one has little control over, a victim of cause and effect. Moreover we had proved to ourselves that visualization, such as visualizing sailing Querencia to Bora Bora, was a very real and relevant act.

For me to have once upon a time pictured Querencia anchored in Bora Bora in my mind's eye while being in Seattle seemed crazy or like a dream. Yet, now we had actually done it and were in Bora Bora and there was a magical quality to IT . It was the magic of joining inner and outer worlds while at the same time achieving a major life goal. It was the magic of believing . Feeling accomplished, our minds were now free to re-examine the cause and effect of our very own life choices and those around us. With this image in our minds, feeling the water and hearing the surf and being surrounded by such stunning quintessence every single day profoundly relaxed all of us. Memory of the tension-filled situations of modern man in everyday life faded away. We remembered urban existence as a way of living that made life more tragic than magic.

After sailing so many thousands of miles across the open ocean following our dreams and our hearts we now knew that the order of nature goes along without consulting Carl Sagan, and that it is indeed possible that harmony can emerge of itself without any sort of external compulsion. Nature is only complex in its relation to man.

Bora Bora represents a poetic twist of this nature, where titanic forces transformed the molten furnace of a volcanic crater into the diaphanous waters of a lagoon and then inhabited it for the most part with a race of people whose way of life, temperament, and carefree existence became a legend throughout the world.

Geologists compute that Bora Bora is in actuality about seven million years old. The volcanic mountain gradually sank under its own weight and the caldera eroded and filled with water to leave a vast central lagoon partially fringed with remaining land. Here the coral barrier reef formed in a near perfect circle, making an offshore breakwater. The naturalist Charles Darwin when on his famous voyage aboard the Beagle studied the reef structure of Bora Bora closely and later used it to put forward his now accepted theory on the formation of coral atolls.

The island remained uninhabited until about 200 or 300 A.D. when the wave of Polynesian ocean migration reached the area. They found its waters provided sustenance and recreation and centered their life around the lagoon. Inland the remnants of the volcanic crater remained vertical monoliths, wild and unscalable, standing over 2,000 feet high. Belief in strong spiritual taboos of the past lurked there along with legends of the Polynesian gods and how they co-mingled with man and nature. The Polynesian people have their own belief in how Bora Bora came to be.

Since a written language did not exist until the arrival of the first Europeans, all history was dependant on the memory of story telling members of the society, oripo , and passed from one generation to the next. Versions varied depending on who was "talking story." One Polynesian version of the creation of Bora Bora credits the mating of a turtle stone, ofai honu , with a cliff on the mountain of Bora Bora. Turtles were thought to be shadows of the gods of the ocean and therefore sacred. This supernatural mating not only produced the island, but the ancestor of a royal family known as Firiamata O Vavau , and the island was originally named after him and known as Vavau . Vavau the chief was a great warrior and navigator and Polynesian tribes from the Marquesas, Tuamotus, Cook Islands, New Zealand and even the "islands with smoking mountains in the north," Hawai´i, trace ancestry and legends to the Vavau dynasty and its kings.

The warriors of Vavau were feared by all the neighboring islands which at one time or another had come to have differences with them. It was during this time that the island's name gradually changed from Vavau to Porapora which translated generally to "fleet of canoes with silent paddles." The Bora Bora warriors specialized in surprise attack, and accomplished this by muffling their paddles when they attacked other islands in their war canoes.

When Captain James Cook arrived on December 8, 1777, he recorded the name "BolaBola" in his log, the written English interpretation of Tahitian speech being what it was. This was the initial malapropism of Porapora that eventually led to its present name of Bora Bora.

46.

"Ia ora na ," was the familiar greeting from the Tahitian women we met along the way and it meant "good morning." They didn't just say it, but sang it like a quiet, little song as if from a bird. The female Polynesian face was one that appeared in its modeless state as if something terribly sad was weighing heavily on its shoulders; the brow was wrinkled and the eyes dark and deep. Their shoulders bent inward as if they had been reflecting deep and long on a very sad subject. The most remarkable reverse was witnessed upon exchanging greetings; at least 100 watts of sheer elation poured out from their person and their eyes grew wide and joined a big new smile that affirmed their happiness with the world as it was.

Without ice available for our icebox, going to Vaitape was the only way to get fresh food which we enjoyed dearly. Even still, the supply boat from Papeete only arrived on Tuesdays and that was the only day you could find exotic vegetables like lettuce , or meat such as beef in the grocery stores. Fresh, long, green beans and poultry might manage to stay in the stores a bit longer, but if you wanted to score you had to be there Tuesday mornings after the ship arrived from Papeete. So we usually had a lot of motivation to schedule a trip to town on the second day of the week!

But in actuality we went anyway almost every day, just for the walk and to pick up some wine or beer, and bread, cheese, and tomatoes. These were our staples. The bread, or baguette loaves, were made fresh daily and smelled and tasted absolutely wonderful. It was even delivered daily to the little homes along the way. As we walked along the road each mailbox would have a baguette sticking out of it.

Usually back at Querencia by eleven-thirty in the morning we would have a typical lunch of a baguette loaf stuffed with slices of cheese and tomatoes garnished with Dijon mustard. Sometimes when Paul and I were really missing the good old U.S.A. we would fill a baguette with peanut butter. We were glad to have brought over a large supply of peanut butter with us in ship's stores, because here in Bora Bora it was nearly five dollars a jar when you could find it.

Paul as it turned out had some luck in making friends on Bora Bora. As a tall, good-looking, American lad with bright blond hair, he attracted a lot of attention especially with his island peers. He had met and made friends with Lauren (pronounced Lor-ohn). Lauren was France's answer to Eddie Haskell, Wally Cleaver's friend on TV's Leave it to Beaver . He was very polite and forced himself to speak English in the presence of Davey and me. When we reciprocated in attempt to speak better French, he helped by teaching us. He was also a bit of a rascal, an excellent shell diver, and very ebullient. It just so happened that his father was the Chief of Police on Bora Bora, an officer in the gendarme service on assignment from France. I do not know if this had anything to do with the courteous service we received from the gendarmes as we posted our security bonds and filled out the paper work for our visas, but it was obvious that it did not work against us.

Marcien, the cook at the Yacht Club, besides having a small son also had two daughters; one named Carole (pronounced "care-ol"), seventeen, and Michelle, thirteen. Carole was a big-boned happy girl. She acted as waitress at night for her dad and helped out in the kitchen too. She loved to listen to us speak English. She spoke English very well as a result of her serious study of the language and was thrilled at the opportunity to "try it on" with us. She got the biggest kick out of my French, breaking out into tremendous laughter some evenings when she would take my order for dinner, which was "bifteck avec frites " or some of Marcien's bouillabaisse when it was available. We had a standing joke about me having to order a glass to get ice, which is "glace " in French. Carole also loved it when the three of us would teach her slang phrases like "skip the sauce" or "hold the mayo" or "let it slide." We taught her how to use these phrases in everyday conversation and she loved it.

Carole took her studying very seriously though, and Davey and I took this as a good influence on Paul. Often after school Lauren would come to the Yacht Club where he would try to study with Carole, Michelle and Paul. Paul was committed scholastically to those dreaded assignments he had to complete in order to pass his high school extension courses from U.C.L.A. Often the four of them abandoned their books and resorted to fishing off the dock or in the event of boredom, some sort of mischief.

One day when we returned to the Yacht Club from Vaitape we discovered that Lauren and Paul had split a Pinache ( 7-Up and beer and very popular with the European youngsters) and were taking turns riding a bicycle off the end of the dock, much to the amusement of some of the local Tahitians, including Gaston, a very handsome Tahitian student who started coming by on his scooter regularly to see Paul.

Noel and Debi it turned out were getting more than a little edgy about the Yacht Club being turned into a teen-town of sorts, so it was a very good idea when Lauren came up with the idea that Paul join him at school. Davey met with the high school principal to secure permission and soon Paul was getting up every morning before the sun rose and rowing to shore in one of our dinghies to join the French and Tahitians at their high school. He didn't have to walk through three feet of snow, but he did have to blow up his dinghy every morning because of a persistent leak. Lauren scored a school soccer shirt for Paul and he was all set. He loved the experience, sitting in with Lauren in all his classes, and then studying his U.C.L.A. courses in the school's study hall.

Some evenings Paul would go home with Lauren to spend the evening with his family. There he would help Lauren organize and polish his shell collection before dinner. Dinner at Lauren's was often Paul's favorite meal; swordfish cooked only in a way that Lauren's mother could cook it. Quite understandably it was expected that Paul would speak French when he visited Lauren's family, just as Lauren spoke English when he spent time on Querencia .

47.

I am sure that Metata is some sort of saint, and most assuredly a mischievous one at that, a sorcerer defined by the society around him. If he had been an American Indian he might have been a shaman. If he had been an African native, a witch doctor. If he had been in India he might have been a yogi. Wherever he might be on this day, he may be only paddling his canoe and singing to a blue sky, or drinking beer and laughing heartily. But he is a sage and it is probably true, as the mystic poet Thomas Merton once said, that just eight such individuals in the world would be enough to keep our planet in an acceptable state of grace.

At fifty-five years of age, he had an aquiline nose and looked like a Tahitian version of Paul Newman. His hair was frosted gray of medium length. He had deep brown eyes delineated by thin fuzzy eyebrows and a playful, smirking smile with lips like rubber, often seeming to contort as much as Daffy Duck's. His skin olive and bronzed, he was of medium height and great physique. He was so solid it was hard to find any pudge on him whatsoever, although he told us that he was once fat.

"Like a pig!," he said emphatically.

In the five months he was our friend, I never saw him eat anything.

Meteta was very animated, mostly due to his twinkling eyes and expressive face. When he spoke he repeatedly contracted his forehead muscles, using them like punctuation marks in a sentence, his eyebrows moving up and down in short, smooth movements.

Although we once saw Meteta at a wedding wearing a white pareau with a flower neatly tucked behind his ear and playing his ukulele, he told us that pareaus mostly got in his way. He usually dressed in just a pair of tan cotton shorts, and he must have only had one or two pair. We never saw him in a pair of shoes or flip-flops. When the maramu (the winter wind) blew he would don a sweatshirt, or for evening attire he would wear an American T-shirt. His favorite was a red T-shirt with yellow lettering on it that read "Tuscon Fire Department". He got the T-shirt when he traveled to the U.S. as part of a Tahitian troupe that promoted tourism (from Arizona) for a large hotel chain. He laughed when he remembered the black pointed shoes that they wanted him to wear on that trip.

"Can you imagine," he said to us, "me in such funny shoes?"

In the evenings his hair was so well groomed he could have been a movie star. In the early morning hours though, if you caught him, you would see his stubbled grey beard. He would quite often be wearing a golfer's hat with the entire brim turned upwards and at such times he looked a little like a sprite. Other than his beard, his body was mostly hairless, warm and smooth, like a full-blooded Apache might be. But he would remind us, "I have white people's blood in me."

We were first introduced to Metata after paddling over to join Debi and Noel for lunch on their floating fare. These floating fares were basically A-frames on pontoons, complete with lanais, thatched roofs, sleeping lofts, and kitchens. With the exception of Debi and Noel's management unit, they were rented to tourists, along with boats to get back and forth from shore. Ground tackle tethered them to a two meter cube of concrete on the bottom of the lagoon and in the lee of Point Farepiti they bobbed around like lazy fishing floats. Atop each fare were two large solar panels that kept a twelve-volt battery system alive and well enough to supply electrical power for lights and refrigeration to the unit. Noel was happy to see us paddle over to their fare and join them for lunch. He had just finished showing Metata the solar panels. Following spectacular dives off the roof they both climbed back aboard and Noel introduced us to Metata. We had wondered who this fit Polynesian man was who had just dove from the roof singing out his loud call, laughing and giggling. He couldn't stay for lunch, but after acknowledging our brief meeting, he winked at us and said, "I like you guys." He then paddled off in his outrigger.

The next time we met Metata was soon afterwards, following a morning in which Davey and I had been both afflicted with "Polynesian paralysis." As Querencia twirled around on her mooring in the gentle southeast trades we alternated between lying below decks and in the cockpit, contemplating nothing and everything -- a perfect picture of two daydreamers completely overcome by laziness. By the time noon had rolled around we were wise enough to recognize the wisdom of abandoning all ideas of doing anything of real value for the rest of the day. Instead we rowed Querencia's tender to the yacht club for a cool beer.

A few Tahitians were laughing and joking at the small bar inside the yacht club when we arrived. I could tell by Marcien's expression that everyone was having fun. With a little hesitation I went up to the bar and squeezed myself in with the announcement, "Inu Pia ," which I had learned in Tahitian means "Drink Beer!"

Metata was seated at the small bar, and Davey and I rounded out the attendance to an even six in number. Metata was hand rolling a cigarette from loose French tobacco called "Bison " but when I interrupted he sprang from his seat to produce two more bar stools for us to sit on and cheerfully insisted to his friends in melodic Tahitian that he be the one to order large Hinano beers for everyone. After he finished rolling his cigarette he slid the papers and tobacco pouch down the bar in front of me as if he knew I was dying for a smoke.

"Don't ask," he said. "What's mine is yours." He spoke in perfect English.

"Oh, really? Thank-you!," I replied.

Metata answered, "Yes, but what is yours is mine also. This is the Tahitian way."

His english voice was electrifying -- full of spark and happiness. It was obvious that he liked to laugh and he liked to make other people laugh as well.

A nervous chuckle burst out of Davey and me as the rest of our new companions in the bar howled with amusement.

"But it's no problem. Aita pea pea! ," Metata reassured us. "I will take care of you guys and give you whatever you want. Please. Sit down, be happy!"

Davey and I were as game as anyone, but for a moment I was having second thoughts, even though I was laughing as I pulled up to chair.

"But I think maybe you worry too much." Metata said, looking me straight in the eyes, focusing my attention.

"Yes, I do." I couldn't believe I was talking this way all of a sudden. What was I talking about?

"And I think maybe you have a sad heart from your family back in The States. Your father was very sick and died from the cancer. You were sick too. High blood pressure and your nerves," Metata quipped.

"Now this is strange," I remember thinking to myself. "How does this man know anything about my personal history ?"

Davey and I had maintained our anonymity ever since we had left Seattle. All of us, including Paul, considered ourselves anonymous warriors without pasts. We kept to ourselves. We hadn't shared any secrets or personal history with any of our precipitated new friends, nor did we want to.

All of a sudden I felt as if I had been hit a sharp blow to my diaphragm and the wind had been knocked out of me. I wanted to cry. How did this man know anything about me? Davey grabbed my hand and leaned over in amazement herself, her eyes big, looking back at Metata.

Everyone else, including the bartender, were at a loss as to what exactly was going on; they didn't understand English.

"Your father was very, very sick and you have a very sad heart. There were other problems too. You were both married before and you miss your two daughters."

"You mean Rain and Caroline?" I asked.

"Yea, I think that's right. You have a lot of pain from family and friends that have rejected you. You guys, you make my heart sad! I think maybe it was good you take a sailboat and come across the ocean to Bora Bora. That was very smart because I think maybe that place was horrible for you guys. Why would you ever go back to that horrible place? I think maybe you should stay in Tahiti." He was really chipping away at our reality now.

Metata had been so direct. He hadn't said much, but he had been precise in his facts and relentless in his approach. Here I was unexpectedly all choked up. What was going on? I stared out the thatched window at the palm trees gently swaying in the trade winds, the turquoise lagoon in the background. I felt a flood of tears ready to break the dam. It was true. I did carry a lot of pain around inside, but I thought I hid it well.

"No, wait a minute, I don't even think about hiding my pain, I just do it automatically, like everyone does," I thought to myself.

My attention snapped back to center and my eyes quickly looked to Metata when I heard him starting to chuckle. But it was easy to see he was really half-chuckling, half-crying; as if he could feel what I was feeling and hear what I was thinking. Abruptly he insisted that now it was time to laugh rather than feel sorry for one's self.

Instantly my heart felt lighter and I lifted my Hinano in a toast. I managed a smile and said rather incredulously, "How did you know all that?"

"Sometimes I dream. I believe it comes from the God. There must be something. Something with you and with me .," he said .

"You mean like the soul?"

"Uh-huh. Yea, I think so." He nodded his head and creased his forehead to emphasize his point.

And that was how we first came to know Metata. We spent the rest of the day with him and went back to Querencia that night feeling like we had spent the afternoon with Santa Claus. He never really demonstrated any "psychic" abilities much beyond what we witnessed that afternoon, and to tell you the truth that was not what impressed us about the man. It was the tremendous feeling of love that we had when we were around him.

48.

I can't count the number of times that we would row back to Querencia and find her cockpit full of papaya, limes, bananas, and grapefruit. Metata the mischievous guardian angel had been there again! One time he even left a brand new fifth of Johnny Walker Red Label for us. You couldn't find quality scotch like that just anywhere in the South Pacific, and even if you could it would cost at least forty dollars.

He was a well-traveled man and we discovered he had helped deliver yachts all over the South Pacific as well as Hawai´i and New Zealand.

"Ai yi yi yi yi!," he remarked speaking of his trip to New Zealand. "But all we had were small cans of green beans to eat and a big storm came and grabbed our boat. The white guy; he was sick the whole trip. But the storm was no problem, I just took all the sails down. But the beans big problem."

He had even been sent by Club Med to work in Sicily for a period of time, but didn't care for it he said.

"I like Americans the best," he always assured us. Although he had always lived with one Tahitian woman with whom he had at least two daughters, he was not married he insisted.

"I think maybe it would be nice to have an American wife," he would remark, the corners of his mouth curling upwards in a smirk while his eyes sparkled at Davey.

One day I did pursue him. I had been reading the book A World to The West written in the early seventies by a young European cruising couple. It was a book loaned to us by a Dutch couple aboard a boat also anchored at the yacht club. Quite unexpectedly I came across a description of a benevolent Tahitian who had lived on the island of Raiatea and went by the name of Meketa . The description sounded perfect. All excited, I rowed to shore and went and woke Metata up from a nap at his home. He had never heard of the book, but remembered the couple and their boat anchoring near his home on Raiatea when he had lived there about ten years earlier. We sat on a bench in his garden at the front of his home, in the shadow of Mt. O´ temanu, as I read the few pages to him. He listened to every word intently and patiently. In the end he said it was all true. I could tell it made him very happy to hear again about these cruisers he had befriended. I was amazed. Here it was almost a decade later and this man was treating us with the same generosity and care that he had shown them.

Although Metata did not read English, as I said, he spoke it very well. Some of his favorite sayings were:

"I go with you." (sounded like "which you")

"I think so."

"I know this."

"I noticed."

These last two phrases he would say so that it was difficult to tell the difference. And he would say this to us at the funniest of times, almost seemingly on purpose.

"I don't know what I will do with the rest of my life when my sailing days are over," I would say.

"I know (no) this (ticed)," Metata would invariably respond. Davey and I would have hysterics wondering what he had just said exactly , and he most definitely enjoyed seeing us think twice.

One day, insignificantly, I told Metata that "I was sorry."

He looked at me in the strangest way and said, "Forget about that! In the Polynesian people's language there is no such word as sorry ".

I asked, and he said it was the same way with the word guilt . We were talking about more than language he assured me. We were talking about the way a person thinks of himself. But yes, there is a translation for the word shame .

The beautiful Polynesian people seemed to Davey and me to be easily shamed. Maybe that's why thieving was rare. You could leave your groceries on the curb and go into a store and not so much as worry.

One day at the gendarme's office I tried to make light of the differences between me and the officer attending my visa with a small joke.

I pointed at a map on the wall of Bora Bora with three colored thumbtacks stuck into it. "Are they the bad guys?" I jokingly asked him with a big American John Wayne sort of grin.

"As a matter of fact, monsieur, they are !" he said to me in a perfect Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Seller's) accent.

We were returning from Vaitape to Querencia one day when we saw Metata sitting with two other men near the entrance of a small, dimly lit hardware and grocery store. Our eyes met and he motioned for us to leave our groceries on the curb and meet his two old friends.

By the time we had set down our bags, taken off our back packs, and walked up to the entrance Metata and his friends had gathered several large, heavy rice bags and made a makeshift couch for Davey to sit on. At first I was concerned because it seemed we were partially blocking the threshold, but Metata insisted that I stop worrying and sit down. He had a fast round of Tahitian rap with the clerk running the cash register, mostly to assure us there was nothing to worry about. Davey plopped herself down on the rice bags but I balked. Finally I sat down on the dirty floor feeling somewhat inappropriate.

One man was quite aged. His name was Tetupa'a. For his small size he had a large warm smile and small dark eyes. His other friend was introduced as Perry.

They talked about the days when they had been little kids, recalling all the adventures they had experienced growing up together. Metata would translate for us, and after a bit Perry began having fun playing interpreter, too, although he spoke only broken English. All of them had fond memories of Americans in World War II. Perry told us his father had been an American soldier.

I told them a story about the first time Davey and I had been on Bora Bora in 1982.

We had flown down on holiday with Davey's family. Davey and I had rented a small scooter to circumnavigate Bora Bora. Half way around the island we found a large Tahitian, easily weighing 300 pounds, husking coconuts along the road. He would sell the husks to the electrical generating plant for fifty francs a kilo. We approached him and were able to communicate a little with him; enough for him to tell us that he liked Americans and that his dad had been an American in WWII by the name of Joe.

"Your father then was one 'G.I. Joe' stationed here during the war?" I asked.

He quietly nodded in the affirmative then smiled and handed us some white meat freshly removed from a coconut.

"Maururu! [Thank-you] My name is John and this is Davey. What's your name?" I mumbled hoping to keep the conversation alive.

"Joe," he said matter of factly.

They liked that story and howled with laughter. In their unanimous decision our Hinano bottles were already showing the slightest sign of being warm and they insisted that they be replaced; Tetupa'a rattling off another round to the grocery clerk teller while Metata made a quick trip to the cooler, returning with fresh ice-cold full ones. While we were trying to figure out what we were going to do with all this beer, Perry continued story telling by announcing that his father's name had been Perry as well!

"And that my friends is the truth," Perry finished. I detected the slightest southern drawl in his English.

Both Perry and Tetupa'a had grown up learning and applying the skill of making large fish traps using intricate rock ponds. These fish ponds which are found throughout Polynesia are now important cultural and historical testimony of another civilization. Tetupa'a explained that we would have better appreciation for the benefits of a fishpond if we could have seen the lagoon twenty years ago, when it was teeming with i'a [fish] and people depended more on gathering their food from nature. Metata affirmed that both Perry and Tetupa'a were the best fishpond makers in both Raiatea and Bora Bora.

It was a rich experience listening to these older Tahitians recall their youth. Many things had changed, but not their friendship or their togetherness. After a while all the Hinano beer was having a warming effect on us and we all seemed to be bathing in a sort of reverie, or aura, together. Maybe it was the famous Hinano glow.

We had been talking for a long time. I was by now leaning way back on my right hand when all of a sudden a large, black, spiked high-heel came down between the knuckles of my outstretched fingers. Avoiding eye contact with any of us, Lauren's mother, the head gendarme's wife, squeaked her heel and literally stepped over me in her pleated white skirt and red lipstick to get into the store. She was an attractive woman of class and position; for a second Davey and I felt totally embarrassed. And then we couldn't help laughing and giggling like the Tahitian friends we were with. I'm sure we weren't invisible, but it felt like we were. Lauren's mother seemed not to see us.

It was a good cue however to consider picking ourselves up and meandering back to the boat.

"My God!" I said, looking at my watch. Three hours had passed. Both Perry and Tetupa'a said "Goodbye John! Goodbye Davey!" and suggested we give some serious thought to Metata's offer to grow watermelons on his land on the small island of Maupiti.

Back at the curb our two heavy sacks of groceries awaited us. Metata had his daughter's scooter and rather than let us walk the last mile to the yacht club he insisted on making two round trips to deliver us, one with Davey and one with me, each of us bulging with provisions. It seems we were always stocking up for the inevitable trip north.

49.

I looked down at Lauren sitting on the teak deck. It was still wet from Lauren taking turns with Paul diving off the bow. They were having their own free-dive contests in the crystal clear waters. On Paul's final dive he was surprised to find a beautiful tiger shell cowrie just waiting for him on the bottom at seven meters. Together they had also just finished scrubbing Querencia's hull as a way of returning a favor to Davey and me for taking the boat to the south end of the lagoon for a few days play. It had been possible to anchor in a sand patch where the deep bottom of the lagoon ran up swiftly and left a white desert ledge at the edge of a coral forest. The diving was excellent and the boys were thrilled. It brought me much happiness to see the two of them enjoying diving as much as I did at their age.

"Yes Lauren, Bora Bora is very far-out ," I answered.

He liked the word "far-out." He giggled and then suggested that he and Paul go get some ice for our cocktail hours. He was a bundle of energy.

"Ice! Did I hear someone say ice? I'll take some ice!" Davey quickly yelled up from the galley, where she was preparing another one of her many feasts.

"Oú est la glace, Lauren? Come'on now there's no ice around here."

"Ah. But there is, John! Paul and I will go get ice for you in this very far-out place called Bora Bora. And then you will have some ice for your wine tonight. That would be very far-out , no?" Lauren giggled.

"We'll take some glace for our glasses , won't we hon?" I answered.

"Sure!"

Everyone was still laughing, including Paul, when the two of them jumped back into the water and swam ashore to the Bora Bora Hotel. In a matter of minutes they returned with a zip-lock bag full of ice they had obviously withdrawn from a guest ice machine.

After a short stern lecture, in which I couldn't help but return Lauren's undeniable grin, Davey and I had a glass of wine complete with glace .

Then Lauren thanked Davey and me and jumped in to swim back to shore and go to his parents' home for the evening.

"Good night Paul. Good night Davey. Good night Dr. McGrady! I will see you tomorrow!" he yelled to us.

Boy, I was tired. I hooked one arm around the shrouds as a hedge against falling overboard while I took a pee into the phosphorescent ocean. It was a still night so far. I noticed that the lights of the Hotel Bora Bora were very far away.

"WHAT!" rang out in my head. "Oh no, we've slipped our hook," I mumbled to myself, biting my lower lip hard. Startled, I finished my business as quickly as possible and went forward to peer over the bow into the darkness. There was the anchor chain hanging rather limply, and yes, the lights of the Hotel Bora Bora, which earlier had been less than 100 yards off our port beam, were now maybe a mile and a half off the bow to windward. Behind us, the motu Topua was maybe a hundred yards away. My heart had picked up its tempo and the rushing blood was now warming me up from head to toe. I was almost nauseous.

I raced back to the navigation station and grabbed a flashlight. Back in the cockpit I peered over the side directing the beam below the water's surface. There was coral all around us just below the surface. I couldn't believe that we weren't hard aground. Looking forward over the bow I could see the water was deeper, maybe 10 feet. Some how we had drifted back into a trough and the hook had caught again, luckily just in time.

I went below and tried to wake Paul as quietly as possible.

"Paul... Paul ... Please be quiet and come up on deck. Don't wake Davey just yet. I don't want to alarm her." I hadn't quite figured out the best way to get us out of this mess yet, and I was looking forward to having a powwow with Paul about it before waking up the prime minister. "Turn on the spreader lights on your way up." I whispered.

We were both shocked to see where Querencia had managed to drift to. There were so many coral heads around us and such little room to navigate. Negotiating any sort of turn, or swing, on Querencia would be impossible.

We went forward on deck and looked ahead. There was the channel. Straight ahead was clear. Well, sort of. It was pitch black. Nevertheless we surmised that we must have drifted straight back into a slot of deeper water amidst the coral heads.

Paul went and awoke Davey, breaking the news to her, and I started to slowly pull in on the anchor chain and pull us out the coral channel. The wind had started to blow a bit by now and I was more than a little glad to be working on the problem. Soon we were in twelve feet of water but the hook wouldn't come up any farther, even on the beefy bronze windlass. The hook was fouled. The three of us stood there on the bow looking down. You could hear little wind-driven waves now licking the hull. Huge coral heads reaching their way up from the bottom still surrounded us on all sides except dead ahead.

"Well Paul," I said, "it looks like you'll have to grab the diving light, your mask, and some fins and go down and unfoul the hook."

"What? Nah! Your kidding." Paul responded.

"John's right Paul, you could do it in a flash." Davey blurted, suddenly realizing that she was confident of her son, and happy that he was around to do the job. Me too.

After a brief discussion on the various types of dangerous marine life one is apt to find while holding his breath and diving below the surface of a tropical lagoon in the black of night, Paul, much to our amazement, like a good soldier jumped in! After a short dive, he surfaced to report that the anchor had caught on the overhanging roof of a cave of coral. Now, along with the chain rode, it had fouled. In two more dives he had it free, and while Paul hauled himself on board I hauled in the hook while Davey putt-putted us forward with the engine.

Once clear and after a short hero's welcome for Paul, we agreed that the best place to point Querencia 's bow was directly upwind from where we came from, pointing towards the only two lights I knew for sure, the two up by the hotel. Then we would re-anchor using all 200 feet of chain rode.

Earlier the previous morning I had shortened our anchor scope to bring Querencia into shallow water while cleaning the hull. I didn't pay it out again before calling it a day. Obviously with a rising tide and a little surge we had pulled our anchor off the sand ledge near the hotel, and with it hanging straight down in deep water we had drifted across the lagoon while we slept. We were lucky enough for good weather and to have the hook catch again in a forgiving location across the bay.

By the time we had re-anchored in front of the hotel and found time to look at my wrist watch it was after four in the morning! The wind had really picked up by now and the dingy was thrashing around on its painter. Waves beat over the reef and slopped against the hull. It was starting to sprinkle rain too.

We had been very lucky. The three of us went below and back to our bunks. I etched the following afflatus in a corner of a page in Querencia's log book before nodding off.

We linked up with the French crowd although we never felt totally comfortable. Often we would feel like outsiders when we were with the French (never with the Tahitians) and would really miss just speaking with some Americans for a change. But we were entertained, and we understood more French than we spoke or that they thought we knew.

Soft-spoken Bernard held our fascination. He actually was very warm to us in comparison to the others and was quick to tell us that he considered himself more American than French. He had a recording studio in San Francisco that had brought him financial success and independence, having pressed labels that sold well globally.

"Please accept my apologies, the French can be so incredibly arrogant at times that it embarrasses me," Bernard said in perfect English but with a trace of accent. He admitted being slightly prejudice himself these days. His father had died in France recently and the French government would not allow the inheritance to be taken out of the country.

A small man in his thirties, his hair was worn long although he was slightly balding on the top of his crown. His relaxed demeanor and loose clothing were a perfect match to his calm mannerism. He told us that a few years back he had been an interpreter and friend of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, a position he acquired through his father, an influential man in France. For a number of years, as part of the exiled ruler's entourage, he had done an incredible amount of traveling, usually sitting at the left hand of the Dalai Lama , who was an incarnation of God according to Tibetan belief. About the Dalai Lama Bernard said, "The Dalai Lama is the most wise and non-violent human being I have ever known."

Davey and I asked Bernard what he thought about the state of the world. Beyond the environment, with him it seemed clear. Our two biggest human problems were described as a beast called greed and the entanglement of our lives in bad politics and/or bad drugs.

"Drug use directly reflects an aspect of the current human social and political weaknesses and strengths," he remarked. "This was true in the sixties with our fascination with the exploration of self."

I listened carefully.

"And you know of course that Hitler's whole Third Reich was on cocaine," he said matter-of-factly.

"What? Really?" It was the first time I had heard this.

"Yes it's true. As a matter of fact, Himmler was going through detoxification during the Nuremberg trials," he continued in his tranquil voice. "Cocaine is a drug reflective of a fascist social structure where activities such as hoarding profits and power are more important than humanitarian values."

We continued to talk about capitalism, socialism, fascism, communism, along with a dash of synthesizers, computers, medicine, and spirituality. To Bernard, clearly we were a pivotal generation with a need to re-examine our ethics, understand what we have inherited from the earth's bounty, nurture our knowledge and responsibility, and pass it on to future generations.

Davey and I were a bit bewildered from such unexpected discourse on this little island in the middle of the Pacific ocean with a man such as Bernard, and hoped to spend some more time talking to him again. But it was not to be. Bernard continued on his holiday and flew out of Bora Bora the next day.

Igor was a contrast. His father had started the black pearl farming business in the Tuamotus and had become a multimillionaire. Igor had rebelled against his father's wealth and withdrawn from the family business, choosing instead to seek adventure at a young age. Eventually he and a young friend joined three other men in an attempt to deliver a yacht to New Zealand from the Tuamotus. As Igor told the story to us, the skipper, in addition to his wealth of inexperience, wound up being totally seasick and disoriented. Igor and the other mate took over steering and navigating using nothing more than common sense.

They were lucky to wind up alive somehow in the islands of New Caledonia, although dangerously starved and exhausted. There Igor and his friend jumped ship and had to spend the night on a beach full of snakes and horrible insects. The serpents had been so bad that they had to sleep in a tree the first night. When they finally found civilization and a bar the next day, a surly bartender with a bone through his nose told them that if they knew anything about his stolen "Walkman" which had disappeared recently and didn't tell him they would be automatically hexed .

"But these people will kill you with their hexes in this part of the world! Do you understand?" Igor asked of Paul.

Images of voodoo and shrunken heads and a few die-hard cannibals filled my mind. It was a friendly reminder that some remote islands to the west of the Society Islands and the Cook Islands definitely have a different flavor than Bora Bora.

Igor's bright blue eyes accentuated his dark features, a blend of Burt Reynolds and John Travolta rolled into one. Being very confident and animated helped make him a fascinating story teller. His favorite stories were about sharks. He knew them all; the sharks you could swim with and the ones you didn't dare. Paul loved his stories, especially the one about how he had been chased out of the water by a tiger shark. Narrowly escaping from the snapping jaws of the beast, he scrambled up on a small clump of coral just barely above the water's surface. It scarcely accommodated him. The shark would not be denied however, and continually attacked the small coral islet itself, crunching and ripping big rocky chunks of it off in his powerful jaws. This went on for a quarter hour before la tigre finally gave up. Igor said they were absolutely the most terrifying moments of his life.

Paul in turn told Igor how there was a man hobbling around Vaitape with one leg and a crutch. Lauren had told Paul that it was the result of an attack by a shark in the Teavanui Pass into Bora Bora about ten years ago. I denied that such a story could likely be true, but Noel backed Paul up. Davey and I had been skin diving the day before in Teavanui Pass, and I realized that if we had had the knowledge yesterday that we had today we might not have been so adventuresome.

51.

Below the surface of the water was a composition of plant, fish, and coral creatures arranged in a rainbow of colored images beyond words. Swimming through the pass in the reef we were flanked by coral cliffs plunging down into deep water. Beautiful nooks and crannies provided homes for all manner of fish, many adorned with vivid "electric" pigment. We had become used to seeing the occasional and relatively shy sand shark, as well as moray eels and the venomous lionfish. We were, however, much more concerned with stonefish. One may lie motionless in shallow flats looking like a stone covered with debris. Put your hand or foot down on its dorsal spine and, similar to a snakebite, it unleashes a poison potent enough to kill a man. Everyone warned us of the stonefish. Luckily, they're for the most part rarely seen in Bora Bora despite their most assured existence there.

The sunlit coral garden was quite the haven for all forms of ocean life, and it was obvious that the great mysteries of this underwater wonderland held more living creatures numerically than any place on land I had ever been. Here the strange-looking octopus lived in his submarine cave. We found one venturing out in the open looking possibly for a Blue Spotted Reef Crab. Lucky for the octopus, today I would not pursue him as the predator I usually was. Davey, Paul, and I had brought our appetites for them from Puget Sound where they were quite a bit larger. There I had collected them using either scuba gear or the local fish market. While we were on Bora Bora we usually ate smaller octopus that we could gather diving once or twice a week. We were thankful for their bounty.

Huge schools of small silver fish swam this way and that as if they were dancing in a shimmering, emerald light. Now and then the fast and powerful jack tuna would rush by in a torpedo-like attack scattering a school like a shattered mirror. We saw two big, undulating reef sharks swim slowly in and out the pass, but they were shy and even the large shoals of needle fish seemed unimpressed. I was much more alarmed when I saw a flash of light zip up to me before making a screeching halt, turn quickly and disappear. It may have been a barracuda attracted to the metal on my wristwatch. But no matter, whatever it was it had made a hasty retreat once it had sized me up.

Davey squeezed my hand hard as we hung suspended just below the water's surface like Peter Pan and Mary Poppins, then she pointed suddenly with her free hand at two large manta rays swimming gracefully just twenty feet below us, their wing-like fins beating to a slow ancient rhythm. The manta rays were particularly abundant inside the lagoon and we had even seen one leaping six feet out of the water one morning. It was easy to understand how they had been tagged "devil-fish" by early sailors despite the now-known fact that the biggest thing they digest is plankton! The fins that look like horny protuberances actual roll down into two extensions of their gaping mouth when feeding.

Over the edge of the reef ledges moray eels were even more frequent, but for the most part they either retreated or eyed you without interest unless you provoked them. Interestingly enough, it seemed that the really big ones, the ones six feet long and armed with large sharp teeth, were less likely to be aggressive than the smaller, younger eels. Once in the lagoon, though, I had run into a large moray that absolutely refused to let me retrieve my spear after I missed a shot at a squirrel fish and the spear had stuck into the same coral head where the eel had his lair.

The squirrel fish, or rouge fish as the French called them, were relatively small red fish with big dark eyes. They hid in the shadows of coral heads during the daylight hours. They made for tasty safe eating, but we usually only collected them for food once a week because they were so boney and so much work to spear. I found myself getting metal rods at the hardware store in Vaitape and filing new spears to fit my spear gun almost on a weekly basis to replace the ones I bent or lost.

As we continued our swim we noticed a sea turtle lumbering along, surfacing every now and then to breathe, waving his flippers back and forth to propel himself through the water and moving his stubby, sharp beaked head from side to side. He caught a glimpse of us and was gone, expressing sheer fright! The turtle is still hunted in Bora Bora by the Tahitians, especially those living on the motus. As a matter of fact I was surprised one weekend when we went to Tiapai's for dinner. Tiapai was a very kind and gentle Tahitian about forty-five years of age. Unfortunately he spoke no English but spoke excellent French. He worked for the yacht club and owned his own motu near the airport end of the island. His family had befriended us much to our blessing. An avid fisherman, he was always giving us fresh tuna. As a small gift I had given him our crab trap that we still carried from our crustacean-harvesting days of the San Juans, hoping that he might find a way to use it for catching lobster on the reef. I was surprised and not too pleased to find he used it instead for a holding pen to keep captured turtles prior to eating them.

The tide was beginning to change in the pass and there was a fair amount of current going out to sea. Bucking a two-knot current is not something done with ease and I signaled to Davey that we should return to our raft before the return swim became a tough struggle. It was anchored inside the pass behind the motu Ahuna . As we swam back to the raft, all along the coral ledge and attached to the rocks were sea anemones and other polyps with their pretty fringed heads weaving in the constantly moving current, like flowers leaning in the wind. Pencil urchins and black urchins were scattered about in some secret order.

Before we untied the raft and headed back to Querencia we decided to collect pahua , or giant clams, for dinner since they seemed abundant in the shallows beneath the raft. Indeed the pahua were still a staple part of the diet for many who lived off the sea in Bora Bora. Also known as giant clams, or Tridacna, these large clams have been known to grow nearly four feet across and weigh over 500 pounds. Igor had told us a story about a free diver having to cut a finger off in order get free of one that had shut on his hand, nearly drowning him. Here in Bora Bora though, the average size was under a foot. Firmly anchored in the coral, they feed on algae and by filtering out plankton from sea water with their brilliantly colored mantles of blue, purple, yellow, and green. Locals taught us how to harvest them using a tire iron.

Paul and Davey and I went out many times to gather a gunnysack full of pahua, which is what it would take to make a meal. It took a while before we learned how to pry them free without breaking the coral reef or the clam shell. Of course, as with most good tasting food, proper preparation is the key. Debi showed Davey how to include them in a special curry sauce that included the squeezed shredded white meat of a coconut for an excellent meal. Even today, these recipes along with Debi's Dijon vinaigrette salad dressing are still amongst our favorite. We found the meat of pahua delicious, and I'm confounded at the number of cruisers we've met that have never even tried them.

Maybe that's for the best. The sea, after all, has been able to balance itself and the life in it in a natural, normal way for a thousand million years without the need of man or a tire iron.

52.

So it came to be that Davey and I wanted to get out and stretch our legs on O´ temanu, that awesome Close Encounters type of rock that juts 2,379 feet high out of an island that is only six miles long and two and a half miles wide. From what we had surveyed of O´ temanu in going around the island on a motor scooter, it appeared that the last quarter mile of it was unscalable, at least without technical equipment. Nevertheless, the big and tall Tahitian, Taoto , that we had talked to in Vaitape, had told us that you could get to the top, but only from one side.

"I have been up there many times!" he said to me when I had asked about O´ temanu. He had caught up to us when we came out of the post-office one day, wanting to speak with us. He had noticed that we were Americans. He loved Americans and parties.

"Someday, maybe, I will take you to the top," Taoto had said.

He was a big, handsome Polynesian man. He was in his late twenties and nearly seven feet tall, towering above us as we spoke up to him. Atop his head he wore a crown of fragrant flowers and leaves, a "hei upo´o ", that partially blocked out the sun. He attracted a lot of attention, and many local people yelled their greetings to him.

"My mother Bora Bora! " Taoto had insisted to us, leaning heavily on my shoulder. He repeated himself a few times to me as if to make sure I understood. I assured him I understood, but it remained in my mind an odd thing to say. I had heard another Tahitian saying the same thing at a bar a few weeks earlier. That fellow had been quite drunk and sad and just kept repeating it over and over until finally somebody encouraged him to go home to his fare. He reminded me of a sad American Indian and it moved me, putting a lump in my throat.

Later that evening Metata said it was true that Taoto's mother was Bora Bora. His family's lineage was Bora Bora, and because of that Taoto held much prestige and honor in the Polynesian society, many considering him king of the lagoon, particularly Povai bay. Metata said "maybe" though when we asked about the ease of getting up the mountain. He used to go up there and collect plants for medicinal purposes, but now-a-days there wasn't much need for him to go up the mountain because the plants had lost their powers. He said however that for the most part there was still much tapu about the mountain and people didn't do much on the mountain other than some people were trying to grow coffee high up on the slopes.

"How did the medicine plants lose their power?" I asked.

"Because of the balm." Metata seemed to answer.

I stared at Davey for an explanation or an interpretation but she had none. She returned a blank stare instead.

"Oh!" I said, turning back to Metata, not really understanding but pretending to, "You mean like today people have creams, or balms , for medicine?"

"What? No, no," Metata laughed. Then after a short pause to reflect he spoke seriously, emphasizing the English "b" consonant, "Not balm, but bom-b! " Indeed, he reminded me that the French nuclear testing that was active in the South Pacific was not appreciated by the plants, the fish, the Polynesian people, the medicine men, or the Earth.

"The bomb shakes the world and makes everything crazy," Metata elaborated.

He finished by saying if we wanted to go up the mountain for us just to go ahead and go up from a place along the road near his house. We could go up until we couldn't go any higher.

"'Aita pe'ape'a (no problem)," he assured us, seeing a glint of worry in Davey's eyes.

We had gone up off the road where I figured we would find some sort of ridge line once we had gained a little elevation. Sure enough, we found the ridge and almost immediately came upon a couple of large guns located strategically, one pointed directly at the single pass through the barrier reef. The guns were left over from 1942 when the American military in World War II used Bora Bora as a fueling and staging area for ships and submarines.

The seven-inch guns were quite large, maybe twenty-two feet long, and were almost completely overgrown with jungle foliage. They seemed strange relics from the past, a testimony of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the subsequent rapid progress of the Japanese through the Philippines to Singapore. Bora Bora had become the necessary secret link through the South Pacific from the Panama Canal to Sydney. All other routes to Australia and New Zealand had been controlled by the Japanese. At one time there had been about 6,000 American servicemen on Bora Bora, yet, no enemy forces ever came to the island. Today the population rests at about 3,000 with most of the population being entirely Polynesian.

Higher up on the ridge we hiked into an area where the ridge itself became more defined and we took a short break. We could see both to the north and to the south from our vantage sight. We had left behind the coconut palms, pandanus, kapok, lime, and hibiscus, and tiare tahiti that grew along the lagoon. On the intermediate slopes to the north grew breadfruit, some mango, and great vistas of banana. The tops of Metata's papaya and grapefruit patches were visible, poking up from his yard. To the south we could look down through banyan, ironwood, and oleander onto the little village of Vaitape with its low-slung houses, spired church, little stores, and concrete dock. In the school playground far below children were playing Bora Bora's favorite sport of soccer in the green grass of the school yard. Dressed in their little colorful suits of mostly red and yellow they were running about like characters suddenly freed from an oil painting.

Farther up, perhaps a hour later, the ridge became steeper and steeper although it widened. Now the flora, mostly scrubby shrubs and ferns, were tall enough that they were well above our head. Still we went on, determined to reach the last pinnacle amidst the abundant volcanic debris and vegetation. The high mountainous interior had appeared more open and less overgrown from below; but having arrived, we instead found ourselves clawing our way through dense growth. It was hard going and we were dripping with sweat.

Eventually we came to the base of the last rock pinnacle. We were totally exhausted and stimulated at the same time. It was a magical place to be. We walked in the umbra along the whole west face of the pinnacle as best we could, the ferns damp and the rock wall face bleeding moisture here and there in eroded grottos. We both felt a manner of lonely presence, that, if you thought about it too much, made the hair on the back of your neck stand up, as if you could hear the distant hum of primordial people thinking. For the most part it was dark and eerie inside this canopy verdure and we couldn't help but feel fearful that we might stumble upon some sacred site of old, reserved for Polynesian gods or royal Tahitians. There were tiny caves and fractures in the rock face that suggested that one might be able to get higher without technical gear, but we chose instead to stop our vertical jungle pursuit and return to the day's full light. We climbed to a spot with a view we picked on the north edge of the face and sat there relaxing in the sunshine letting the trade breeze cool us down while we sipped water from a boda bag.

Far below us the cyan lagoon twinkled as if the sun's light was passing through a kaleidoscope. Around the periphery of the lagoon were numerous motus, or islands, that had grown from coconuts and debris that had washed onto the barrier reef over the centuries. The barrier reef, made of coral itself, was a great wall where waves from the azure blue of the South Pacific ocean crashed into it, making a white ring of surf around the entire island. Davey and I were impressed just thinking of the ancient Polynesian family that had settled here. The sound of their laughter seemed to rest on the sunbeams and it seemed to us that nothing could equal the serenity that they must have experienced during their lives on Bora Bora.

Below and away we could just make out Querencia . She looked a little like a toy from our perspective, but she wasn't. She was a tough little ship that had brought water warriors across thousands of miles of ocean prairie to climb a magic mountain in paradise.

53.

"That would be fine with me," I said, eager to learn the edible lagoon fish and put some protein on the table.

Metata said, "Maybe, some day, I go with you."

I couldn't wait.

Several days later Metata rowed up to Querencia in his outrigger. He was ready to go stick some fish with me.

"You know how to paddle?" asked Metata.

"I think so Metata, but if I need to learn I would like you to teach me."

As we paddled across the turquoise lagoon with me in front and Metata in back, he hummed and sang Polynesian melodies. I turned around to talk to him.

It definitely was a relaxing day. Metata looked again like a little elf -- the mischievous Metata. He had the old golfing cap with the brim turned up and he was wearing his favorite pair of beige shorts. His beard was stubbled and his eyelids blinked and his eyes twinkled as usual. He was taking big powerful strokes with his paddle that both moved the canoe forward and commanded our direction.

"But " Metata blurted out, "you aren't paddling!"

"Oops! Sorry! Not paying attention!"

"Aita pe'ape'a".

I tried to pull us forward by leaning into my stroke with all my might in order to make up for sleeping on the job.

"But " Metata started.

I looked back at him. He was smiling and had now quit rowing and was resting his paddle across the canoe.

I smiled.

He smiled even bigger, that great big Paul Newman smile of his, and then, at the precise moment that his eyes twinkled and his forehead formed a crease of concern, he spoke.

"I notice."

Or did he say "I know this," I wondered.

"I think maybe you try too hard. Don't care about that too much. But maybe you shouldn't fight my outrigger so much. Relax your shoulder, maybe. That's right. Mmmmmm. Mmmmmm."

Soon we were gliding across the lagoon as smoothly as an ice skater on Olympic ice. We passed Point Teahuatea and angled in towards the shore line of the motu on the south side of the pass.

"I think maybe here is good," Metata said. He took a large round rock out of the bottom of the canoe and tied a rope around it. He handed it to me to lower over the side in the shallow water as an anchor. We stowed our paddles, and I made a quick survey of the rest of the equipment for our expedition.

I had brought my jet fins, mask, a wet suit diving jacket, gloves and booties, my double arbalener five-foot spear gun, diving knife, and a goodie bag. Metata had nothing except a four-foot metal rod with one end sharpened to a point and a slingshot. Actually, it looked like a slingshot except that a one-inch steel nut had been meticulously tied with repeated wrappings [whipped] into the crotch of the "v." Metata demonstrated how he used it, passing the butt of the spear through the nut and pulling it back along with the surgical tubing, aiming at an imaginary fish. It was hard for me to see how he could spear anything with that homemade contraption.

"No wonder he's not too hot to go spear fishing," I thought to myself.

When we entered the water and stood up, waist-deep, I started to spit into my mask as I had always done before, to keep my face lens free from fogging.

"Why are you doing that?" Metata laughed, "I think maybe that's disgusting!"

I was wondering contentiously if he thought I should have brought professional defogging liquid from a dive shop or something! He motioned for me to follow him as he waded to the shore line to pluck a green leaf from a bush growing at the water's edge. "Use this instead," he said, demonstrating how to pinch the leaf and smear it around the glass on the inside of the face mask.

"This will keep your mask clear while you swim," said Metata.

"Really?" I wondered what kind of special plant it was.

"Sure. But it's not special." he said, reading my thoughts. "Any green plant that grows along the water's edge works just fine." He was already busy doing something else. He had selected a long palm reed and was busy attaching it around his waist.

To this day I have never spat in my mask again. I have always used a small green leaf or frond growing at the water's edge. It always works, just like Metata said it would!

Soon I was swimming around with my big professional spear gun focusing my attention on finding some fish. But there weren't very many, and my explorations were taking me further and further from the dugout where Metata was splashing around. He looked almost silly bent over with the white soles of his feet sticking out of the water periodically.

After thirty minutes I was really frustrated. I had swum over 200 yards in a widening circle away from the outrigger. I had only seen five fish close enough to spear. I had missed all of them in my anxiousness and was frankly getting in a very sore mood with myself. Re-cocking the huge gun was getting to be monotonous and tiring. I was going to have to go back to the outrigger empty-handed. Fortunately, for my pride, I figured Metata was having similar luck. In the distance I could see him bobbing around in, what appeared to me, a half serious manner with the white soles of his naked feet still sticking now and then out of the water.

Swimming back over the little reef I suddenly came to a sandy spot that seemed to sink deep into the clear waters between brilliant coral heads. There on the bottom in about fifteen feet of water, partially sticking out of the white sand, were the largest mussels I had ever seen. Some nearly a foot in length, they were fairly well rooted in the sand. It took more than a little effort free diving to gather eight of them and stick them into my goodie bag. I was confident that Davey would save the day's catch with mussel chowder or some other creation.

By the time I got back to the canoe, Metata was already aboard sitting in the back seat singing one of his Tahitian melodies. In the bottom of the outrigger was the reed he had been wearing around his waist. It was completely strung with fish. To say that seeing the whole bottom full of fish was a surprise would be an understatement. I couldn't believe my eyes! I counted them -- fifty-five fish! Unbelievable, and most of them were larger than the reef fish I had been chasing. How could he have done that? In less than an hour he had speared all those fish with the whittled crotch of a tree branch and a metal rod with a sharpened tip.

Metata was more interested in what I had in the bag and I was glad for that! I showed him the mussels. He said I had been very lucky because half of the mussels I had selected were hard to find. They were slightly rounder in shape than the others and when he carefully opened them with a knife it was easy to see why they were so special. Unlike the others, which were black on the inside, these were coated with Mother of Pearl. They just didn't look like Mother of Pearl, they were The Real McCoy!

"Imagine if we found a pearl!" I exclaimed.

"Now that would be something!" answered Metata with equal enthusiasm.

We pulled up our stone anchor and paddled back to Querencia . Davey couldn't believe her eyes when we came alongside.

54.

We stopped along the roadside by the concrete wharf and waved. We walked towards each other, meeting half way out the jetty, smiling at each other.

Suddenly I saw movement from the corner of my eye. We all saw it, although Metata seemed the least impressed. It was a very large octopus barely below the surface of the water. It was glistening from head to tip of tentacle, all shiny and undulating.

Of course I loved octopus and had learned to catch it whenever I could as it provided a good meal for my family. My first instinct was to capture it. My mind raced as I thought about how to handle the situation in front of Metata.

"Aita pe´ ape´ a, John. Don't worry about the octopus. I think, maybe you think too much."

Metata's voice took command of the moment.

By that time we had all turned and we were standing there looking at this beautiful octopus in the morning light.

"The octopus will be there when you need him," Metata said casually. So casually, neither Davey or I gave it a second thought.

It must have been a month later and it was one of those Sundays when you just can't seem to get off your duff. We just laid there getting lazier and lazier. I remember when I was growing up the adults around me were always calling days like these the "dog days." I was thinking about that a lot, lying there, until I finally forced myself to get up and look up the meaning of "dog days" in the Webster's Collegiate dictionary we had on board.

dog days n pl [fr. their being reckoned from the heliacal rising of the Dog Star (Sirius)] (1538) 1: the period between early July and early September when the hot sultry weather of summer usually occurs in the northern hemisphere 2: a period of stagnation or inactivity.

Taking an expedition in the dictionary had been stimulating. Why not try and write some prose?

The tropics, the craziness, the laziness, the sexiness, the mad longing delivered unto fullness of fulfillment, maxing out your dreams beneath the old volcano and wondering how long you can stand this heavy feeling called paradise, all friends, and family, and personal history fading from your memory like invisible ink washed out by the sun.

After reading what I had just written, I called out to Davey and Paul, "I'm bored you guys," imploring them to toss me a cure.

"Dinner looks pretty bleak, too," Davey reminded me. It was late afternoon. We hadn't fished and the stores were always closed on Sunday. We were resigned to canned goods for our evening meal.

Paul was flat on his back alternating between reading a book and staring at the headliner. He was lost but I did manage to talk Davey into rowing the tender into the yacht club. From there we would take a walk along the shore and at least get some exercise.

We tied the dinghy to the wooden dock joining several other tenders. The dock had been busy all day with cruisers from French and German yachts. They were fishing with little bamboo poles. In the idle hours of the day back on Querencia I had spent several hours watching them through binoculars. They were catching tiny fish and putting them into plastic buckets. We stopped and chatted with them. They said they were catching the small fish with plans of using them for bait later that evening. They explained in broken English that with a little luck, they could catch something larger for dinner. We empathized with their predicament, then set off for our stroll.

We walked along the shore line and after about a block we came to the concrete meteorological dock. We jumped up on it and together were walking down the quay. There off to the side, much to our amazement, was the octopus that Metata had said would be there when we needed it. We had been on this same quay many times since that time with Metata and had never seen the octopus again. Actually we had not even thought about it. But, today, there he was. There was no hesitation this time.

Without fully sizing up the situation, I jumped off the dock, diving and grasping toward the octopus. He was below me in waist deep water and I grabbed him with my hands in each gill on either side of his mantle. I could see that he was larger than the average one- to three-foot octopus I was used to seeing in the lagoon, but I wasn't prepared to pull up a six-footer! I hadn't seen an octopus that large since Puget Sound.

I must say my sluggishness had totally evaporated. I was so fast that the octopus was on the dock in a second, all six feet and twenty pounds of him wrapping around me with the sticky grip of an Olympic wrestler. Its tentacles were lined with hundreds of sucking cups, each now trying to hold fast and control the intruder. I kept rolling his head away from me in an attempt to keep his parrot like beak, well concealed in its mouth which is buried between the trunks of his tentacles, off of my naked skin.

The octopus is actually a bivalve Cephalopod, a Mollusk along with the univalved Gastropods which make their lives in the ocean's seashells. Although usually timid, it is capable of using its well equipped venom apparatus that accompanies its beak to inflict a painful puncture wound in a human being. Although recovery is almost always guaranteed, I was to read later in a small caption on the back side of a pilot chart that there is a recorded fatality from the bite of an unknown variety in the South Pacific.

"Please grab the ends of those tentacles and pull them off of me," I blurted out, bringing Davey to action. With our bare hands, Davey continued peeling back the tips of the tentacles, releasing their grip on me while I constantly turned the octopus inside out. Eventually we had the octopus under control.

"Whew!" we chorused.

When we got back to the dock with our catch we had been gone less than ten minutes. As we clambered into our dinghy one of the French cruisers set his fishing pole down and said, "You Americans! You sure know how to go out and get dinner! Bon appetite!" I yelled back a thank-you as I started pulling us back towards Querencia .

Back onboard Paul sprang to life. And that was a good thing, because there is a lot of work involved in preparing octopus the way we like it best. Cleaning and pounding the tentacles were just the beginning. Then it was sliced and battered with egg, flour and oregano before being dropped into our favorite frying pan and cooked for twenty minutes over our gas-flamed stove.

That evening, just as we were cooking everything up, Tiapai came by in his fishing boat, speeding his way across the lagoon after having steered his way through Teavanui pass. He'd had a good day fishing and had come to share his catch with us, handing us two fresh Bonito tuna.

"Maururu!" the three of us sang out. There was absolutely nothing better than fresh tuna, another favorite meal. We would not only eat well this day but for the next few days that followed.

We invited Tiapai to tie up along side Querencia and we had a little party. We were prepared to be the hosts this time! Davey passed Hinano beers to Tiapai and his two cousins. Happy all together, we ate octopus and repeatedly smiled at each other. Tiapai and his local buddies loved the octopus and indicated that they had never had it prepared that way before. The two boats bobbed around together bathed in colors; the clouds appearing like whorls crested with flame. All of us, including our Polynesian friends, were struck with the grandeur of the spectacle of sunset at Bora Bora.

The catch phrase would work. I turned to Davey and Paul and said, "This truly has been just another day in paradise ."

55.

Tiapai

"Far-out!" I grabbed my baseball hat and sun glasses and quickly jumped aboard.

I wished Tiapai spoke English beyond the few words Davey and I taught him in exchange for his Tahitian tutoring. As the number one worker at the yacht club he was strong and dedicated to his every task whether he was doing carpentry, or free-diving to hand-set an anchor, or driving the jet boat to the airport to pick up tourists. He was an incredibly hard worker, as was his wife Tupea, who also worked at the yacht club doing yard work, cleaning, or weaving pandanus for the roofs or special decoration. She was shy and giggled at the slightest embarrassment. They came to the yacht club every day except for Wednesdays and Sundays. They always brought their grandchildren with them to work. Their own children had moved to Papeete in hopes of making more money at less traditional work. This was fairly common for most families in the outer islands. The young adults left and only returned to their parents' island for the holidays. Everyday it seemed harder for younger generation islanders to cling to their ancient way of life. Each new generation seemed more likely to leave for the big city, submitting to a rigid timetable, routine, and supervision in the hustle and bustle of an encroaching modern world.

This stirred me up inside and I found myself often feeling angry about these beautiful islanders having to succumb to the pressures of making a living from a thing called "money", especially when I saw how hard they had to work to make money and how expensive things were. Once I had argued with Noel about the abusive pay scale the French offered Tahitians and he had reminded me that each true Polynesian receives a subsidy check from the government as well. Nevertheless, such subsidies, which probably do keep the Tahitians distracted from the nuclear fallout and sated in their desire for national independence, fall short of the freedom that once must have filled their lives.

But today, Wednesday, was not a day to analyze and solve. Not for Tiapai or for me. Today was a day to go fishing. Four men of three nationalities would accept what pleases and ignore the rest.

I had been eager to take a closer look at Tiapai's boat. He was very proud of it and it provided him with not only recreation but a very real way to provide for his extended family. He had built it himself entirely out of wood and it was of a specific design I have only seen in Polynesia. It looked similar to a typical speedboat except that the forward deck was cut out in the shape of a box just large enough for Tiapai to climb down into and stand up. From here he steered the boat with a joy-stick type of device. To this long stick that came up from the bottom of the boat to his shoulders, cables were attached that were guided aft through pulleys to the outboards. Tiapai just had to lean the stick left or right for steerage. Mounted on the side of this "pilot box" he was standing in was a typical throttle arrangement. The cockpit was entirely empty except for fishing gear; mostly a couple of dozen empty water jugs with line spooled around them, each line ending with a plastic squid lure equipped with a double barbed stainless steel hook. There was a gaff, and then most curious of all to me, a long spear or trident harpoon that extended the length of the twenty foot boat, situated in a crutch ready for quick use.

The overall design of the boat and rig was ingenious. No wonder Tiapai couldn't wait to go fishing! At near full throttle the pilot had a smooth ride on the nose of the boat, almost flying, completely out of the water. From here he could stare down into the clear waves over which he rode and seeing a mahi mahi spear it with his harpoon. The boat was obviously incredibly fast as well.

Peu sat aft and Noel and I stood behind Tiapai's box. Then Tiapai hit the throttle. The bow picked up and the force of acceleration nearly knocked me off my feet.

"Can you find your center?" Noel asked with a laugh, demonstrating how it was necessary for one to bend their knees and balance as we skipped over the waves.

"I'd settle for a hand rail, Noel!" I yelled, competing with the noisy, monstrous twin outboards.

In a matter of seconds we were out the pass like a bat from a cave. Out on the deep blue waters. Riding the waves in this unusual boat I may have made an odd picture, clutching as best I could to a small piece of wooden molding, flexing my thighs and keeping my knees bent to prevent them from buckling as we crashed between waves, but Tiapai was in his element. He reminded me of a Polynesian version of Ben Hur racing along in a Roman chariot. Up and down the waves we went with the nose of the boat pointed high, the trusty craft charging along. There was Tiapai with the joystick in his hand, turning the rudder left and then right, steering up one wave and down the next. The throttle lever was mostly left unattended and full forward! Noel and Peu and I clutched as best we could the aft portion of the boat as it crashed between swells. Up and down, forward, port and starboard we went. I wasn't sure exactly where we were going but I was excited. Tiapai's hair was jet black and wavy, his handsome features square and his body fit and brown. He could see no birds on the horizon and they were his indicators for fish. Anxiously he scanned the horizon as we zipped along for the first half-hour, complaining in rapid Tahitian to Peu and in French to Noel that there were no mahi mahi to be found. White tropical birds flew above mahi mahi. Without such an indicator, this type of fishing where you chase fish was nearly impossible.

Then finally and quite suddenly Tiapai was steering fantastic figure eights and the rest of us could barely hang on. Through the excitement Noel informed me that Tiapai saw a sailfish and we were chasing it! Peu was helping free up the aft end of the pÅtia , or harpoon. For a split second I too thought I might have seen a glimmer of silver and blue on the side of a wave, but then--nothing. Tiapai suddenly let out a big sigh and pulled the throttle all the way back and shrugged his shoulders.

"Ai yi yi yi yi!" he whooped. The huge sailfish had suddenly disappeared, no longer to be found by Tiapai's piercing eyes.

"Really?" I asked after Noel had translated for me. "Wow."

No sooner had we gotten underway again when Tiapai slowed the boat down again, this time near an apparently lonely piece of drifting wood.

"Tiapai sees a Sea Bass there underneath that piece of wood," Noel once again translated.

"He does?" I asked rather incredulously. I was as fascinated with this type of fishing as I was with Tiapai's excellent eyesight!

Tiapai lifted the long harpoon up from its chocks and then balanced it high above his head. He arched his back into a big bow and then released the patia with all his force, it's sharp points disappearing below the water's surface near the log. Then by pulling on the lanyard it was tethered to, he recovered the end of the spear, grasped it with both hands, and flipped a big fish into the back of the boat.

"Tano ! [well done]" I exclaimed.

I couldn't believe it. There gasping as it flapped around was this large-mouthed grouper-type fish, reddish brown with dusky bars on each side and a large spiny dorsal fin. It easily weighed twenty pounds. Peu quickly pulled it off the lance and whacked it to silence before throwing it into the iced box.

It was better than nothing but it was not the catch that satisfied. Tiapai slowly motored off again scanning the horizon in frustration. "I hea manu? I hea manu ? [where are the birds?]" he repeated.

Unexpectedly Tiapai hit the throttle again, pointing at the horizon excitedly saying, "Manu! 'Auhopu! [Birds! Tuna!]"

I could see no birds and neither could Noel. After more than five minutes of racing towards the horizon I still couldn't see any birds.

"'Ua 'ite au ia ratou! [I saw them!]" Peu suddenly exclaimed.

"Up until now I've always thought I had excellent eyes," I screamed at Noel over the engines. He laughed.

"Yes. Aren't these Tahitian's eyes, especially Tiapai's, amazing?"

After a few more moments I was just starting to see birds on the horizon, brown dots diving and dashing this way and that. In few more minutes we were amongst them and Tiapai cut the throttle, turned around in his pilot box, and ordered us to quickly get the lines out.

"'Oi'oi, vitiviti! Vitiviti! "

Peu, Noel, and I tossed the lures over the transom and unraveled the spooled monofilaments from the plastic water bottles. In seconds we had at least three tuna on; we pulled them aboard hand over hand. I wished I had worn gloves, the line nearly cutting through my skin. We all just kept pulling the fish in and flipping the lures out and pulling in more fish, helping each other as much as we could.

Tiapai was laughing not so softly, and I knew he was laughing with us more than at us, although the sight of three men slipping around in a cockpit full of flapping fish must have been a pretty hilarious sight. I was trying not to lose a fish still hooked on a bottle held under one arm while holding down another fish with my left knee and pulling in the line with both hands. In just a minute or so we had eight tuna on the boat and the birds were gone. Tiapai motioned for us to bring all the lines in.

"Tano! Bien!" he yelled out, then hit the throttle full forward again. We were racing off, bouncing around with the fish, trying to straighten out all the lines. We weren't very organized when suddenly we were amidst birds and fast moving tuna once again and Tiapai repeated his command to get the lines out. Now I knew why there were so many hand lines aboard. In just another couple of minutes we had ten more tuna aboard and a slightly bigger tangle of fish and monofilament.

This went on for another hour before Tiapai suggested we quit and head back for the pass. I had been so busy that for the first time I looked back at Bora Bora. We had gone quite a distance from the island in a relatively short time and only the mountain of O´temanu stuck up above the horizon. The sun was starting to fall rather quickly from the lofty sky. I counted twenty-seven tuna, mostly bonito (Skipjack or aku ) in the back of the boat. I sat down along with Peu and Noel and started in the long but satisfying process of restoring order to Tiapai's fishing boat.

In a short period of time we were racing back in through the single pass of Bora Bora again and as we planed over the smooth water of the lagoon toward Querencia I felt what Tiapai must always feel when he comes back from such fishing expeditions -- fired with success as a victorious provider.

Tiapai pulled up alongside Querencia to let me off before dropping Noel off at his floating fare and then zipping off to his own family motu a couple of miles away at the northeast end of the reef. Davey was back from town and her eyes were as big as silver dollars. Her face reflected the thrill that was still in mine.

"Now that was a fishing trip I won't soon forget!" I told her.

56.

Davey and Debi and I put two cases of Hinano beer and ourselves into our twelve-foot sailing dinghy. It was ten o'clock in the morning when we left the yacht club. Despite our load the main and forward sail, driven by the trade winds, pulled us briskly across the lagoon. We had grown to really love our Metzler sailing dinghy, complete with roller furling and leeboards; it had really been "the ticket" for us on Bora Bora.

Motu Ahuna and the large motu Teviriroa soon passed to port and we threaded our way through narrow channels of coral and sand hollowed by surge flooding over the reef. We continued our northeast course for forty-five minutes, finally able to ease the sails and go downwind towards the reef, coming to a sandy point on Tiapai's family's motu. Tupea and a friend were busy collecting black sea urchins for their eggs. They stopped and sang out a friendly "Ia ora na " greeting to us. We unloaded the dinghy in the shallows and then pulled it up onto the white sand beach of Motu Ha'apititi.

The motu was about the size of a football field and you could hear the surf beating on its other side where the reef lay. In the middle of the motu was the living area which was composed of several structures -- one a bath house, very clean with large showers, another a cooking building where all the food was prepared; a third was just a large family room complete with VCR. I presumed the other building to be sleeping quarters or workshops. Electricity, when needed, came from a generator a few hundred feet away. It was easy to see that Tiapai was very pleased with his accomplishments. He had built most all the structures out of concrete with guide wires anchoring the major beams to the ground. The vero or cyclones of recent years had impressed upon him the need to build strong foundations. There had been quite a bit of damage in the previous years. Today however, with the exception of a few up-rooted trees, things were in order, even the sand on the paths, and the natural open gathering areas had been carefully swept with reed brooms and rakes. Amidst the shadows cast by the palm fronds patterns ran hiding from the spirit of Mt. O´temanu and the tourist.

Tupea's handicraft was everywhere -- the handwoven bowls she had weaved with reva [leaves] sitting in her kitchen, the plaited leaf-mats, and the pandanus thatched roofs atop the fares. She explained to us through Debi that all the leaves were in their natural color, the dark brown being male leaves and the lighter or white leaves being female leaves. For baskets it was necessary that the reva be cut green, boiled, and then dried in the sun for a period of three months, or until they dried. Then they were stripped, and woven. This took a period of weeks.

Davey had that look in her eyes as we peeked at each other to acknowledge the translation. We both knew that this time consuming skill known as weaving was becoming a lost art form in many parts of Polynesia. We would sadly find it even more so in Hawai´i.

I joined Tiapai and his son-in-law at the side of the cook-fire pit along with Noel who had just arrived. Davey and the other women disappeared down one of the many paths leading to the reef, Tupea leading. I remembered a saying that the real music of the islands is the "giggling of the girls" and chuckled to myself. They had time. For the moment, their work was done. Metata had told us of the respected traditional division of labor between men and women [tane and vahine ] in this culture. Women tended the plots, collected coconuts from the earth, collected mussels and urchins from around the motu, gathered wood, and prepared and served the food after the men had cooked it. They also cared for the animals that were slaughtered for food and wove bark and leaves to provide fabric not purchased.

One of Tiapai and Tupea's daughters, probably in her twenties, remained behind when the rest of the women walked to the reef, almost as if she was shy or "hiding" in the centrally located fare dedicated to meal preparation. There she stood, her silhouette entrancing, quietly preparing fruits and poe and banana (fei ). I couldn't help but notice that she was very pretty and very pregnant. She lived in Papeete with her French husband; she returned to the motu only to bear her children.

Tiapai's daughter

In a few hours Tiapai judged the food in the earth oven, or hima'a [imu in Hawaiian], to be done and he shuffled things about, removing the food that had been cooked in large leaves trapping all the natural smoky flavors. His timing was terrific; there had been just enough time for the men to enjoy a few Hinanos and talk of fishing, birds, weather, tools, and politics.

Then we all, men, women, and children, sat down together at picnic tables. Out came suckling pig, mahi mahi, chicken, breadfruit (uru ), Tahitian spinach (fafa), taro, and yams, much to the exclamation of everyone. Also on the table were popular imported canned goods and imported table wine, despite their expense. Eating and happiness were the essence of this traditional Sunday feast.

"Te tama´ a nei te vahine! " Tiapai kidded Tupea, noticing that she was enjoying her food as much as he was.

After dinner Tupea lit a few coconut husks so they smoldered just enough to keep the bugs away and we talked until after the stars came out. Then Tiapai and Tupea took Noel and Debi and Davey and me back to the yacht club in their fishing boat, towing our sailing dinghy behind, a waxing moon rising behind the magic mountain.

Back at Noel and Debi's floating fare Davey and I untied our raft to sail for Querencia less than 100 yards away.

Almost as if to reward us, Tiapai said unexpectedly in perfect english, "Good night, John. Good night, Davey." Having never heard him speak any English before, we were stunned. It was crystal clear and like a melody.

"Toto mete [sweet dreams]," Tupea giggled.

"Na na [good night]," Davey answered for both of us. "Maururu roa! [Thank-you very much]." Her smile was big and responsive. I felt a special kind of warmth from head to foot.

57.

Our early morning departure, however, was delayed. Just at daylight I was awakened by what sounded like water boiling all around the hull. I came up on deck and found that the immediate area in the lagoon all about us was literally packed with small Papio , or little Pompano (Carangidae). It wasn't the first time, and we were prepared. The three of us pulled out our bamboo poles and each of us tied on a fishing line and a hook. On the hooks we had tied small white feathers we found along the road. On this morning; however, we discovered that even bare hooks would work. These little fish bit at everything and soon I was cleaning six of them for breakfast! They were delicious and reminded us somewhat of trout in size, taste, and texture.

Other cruising boats in the bay were up and busy collecting their share of this abundant natural resource, with the exception of the yacht, Irma , from Stockholm. Aboard were Hanar and Usa and they seemed to be quite comfortable in their cockpit doing nothing else but watching the activity. Hanar rowed over in his dinghy a while later when he saw us unbagging the sails. It was then that I found out why they hadn't joined the other cruisers in fishing the bounty. A huge Jack, madly charging through a school of Pompano, had jumped and landed right into their dinghy attached by its painter to the stern of their boat. Hanar said he had heard all this racket just before sunrise and when he went up on deck he had been shocked to see this huge fish just flapping around in their hard dinghy. Hanar jumped in the dingy and whacked it a couple of times and there it was; ten kilos of excellent fresh food. He passed us a couple of fish steaks for which we were very grateful, along with some cassette tapes to play during our planned week away from "home."

We departed out the Pass Teavanui from Bora Bora with a fresh breeze building and Querencia responded beautifully. She impressed us with her speed, taking off like a jack rabbit once we got into the channel between Bora Bora and the islands of Raiatea and Taha´ a. Raiatea and Taha´ a showed themselves in the distance, two inactive craters of seamounts that broke the surface of the Pacific to form a joined pair of islands lying within the same hourglass-shaped, coral-fringed reef. It was blowing a good twenty knots and under the cheerful sun the sailing turned out to be absolutely terrific. Waves washed the deck now and then as we dipped the starboard rail in the water charging across the channel. Within three hours we were cautiously going along Taha'a's reef.

We found the Pass Rautoanui on Raiatea's West side and easily slipped inside the barrier reef. There we motored up the inside passage until we rounded Point Farepoe where we could then see the small concrete basin located at the end of a small bay. It looked awfully crowded, almost as if boats were stacked on top of each other! But the anchorage, our only other alternative, was very deep (over a hundred feet deep) so we started up the engine and motored into the 'marina', hoping to find a place to tie off.

The wind had picked up and the sky quite unexpectedly was graying over. The concrete basin was only about a hundred square yards in size and as soon as we cleared the entrance our throttle linkage broke. The engine suddenly revved up as I slipped the gear into neutral.

"Oh my god! What's wrong?" Davey asked rather incredulously.

Paul joined her with a blank stare on his face.

I hated situations like this.

"Throttle linkage just broke. Hold on while I slow her down," I answered.

I briefly put the gear lever into reverse until Querencia finally came to a near stop in the middle of the basin. People were coming out of their boats and joined others gathering along the quay looking at us. Some were shouting varying forms of advice. Some shook their heads as if we didn't know what we were doing.

"Pay attention you guys. We can take care of this problem ourselves. Don't let the crowd distract you," I advised Paul and Davey. Davey took over the wheel while I scrambled below decks and popped off the engine cover and adjusted the engine throttle linkage manually until it idled. Then I scrambled back on deck.

"Hey, John! Maybe we can get in there! " Paul called from the pulpit, pointing to a narrow little slot at the end of the row of boats.

He was right, there was just enough space at the innermost corner of the basin, although we would have to drop a hook off our stern and run a rather weird arrangement of lines off our bow to warp into place if we got lucky enough to get Querencia anywhere near position.

"How deep is it there?" I asked the crowd on the quay, pointing to the chosen corner.

At first it seemed that no one understood English, and then a voice rang out, "Must be about six or seven feet."

"Nothing like an American accent at times," I said to myself as I proceeded to maneuver Querencia into place by intermittently slipping in and out of gear. Finally in place, Paul jumped ashore to secure a bow line and I winched our stern out hauling-in on the rode from the anchor we had dropped on the way in. We turned off the engine and said hello to the American from Arizona while thanking the others. Davey was fending us off from the cleatless concrete quay on our starboard side. I could see she was scratching her head as to how we were going to tie things off a little better.

Now, quite suddenly, most everyone's attention was turning away from Querencia to an unusual black cloud approaching from the southeast. It was weird! It was the type of cloud you'd expect to see in Kansas or in the Wizard of Oz , a windstorm with waterspouts. Well aware of the powerful storms that can form over tropical waters and the destructive effects that can come from the whirling winds near their vortex, my interest moved from concern to alarm. In the distance you could see a few sailboats ahead of this diabolic cloud; they were on their sides from the wind before being swallowed up and disappearing. I guessed we had ten minutes at the most before it reached us.

"We're going to have to hustle and get some lines out if we're going to keep Querencia off this concrete wall!" Davey pleaded. With the engine throttle broken we weren't going anywhere else.

I quickly jumped into the water with my fins and Paul passed me the ends of two 200-foot lines which I rigged with some purchase across the basin, thanks to the help of a friendly Tahitian. It was just in time. The squall hit and it was blowing fifty mph with near zero visibility before we knew it. We were bouncing on the mud bottom and against the bumpers between us and the quay on the starboard side, but we were okay. Everything that we couldn't tie down we threw below, including ourselves. Peering out the portholes we watched the wind rattle the rigging of all the boats around us like wind chimes. The air was full of debris flying every which direction and some tarps were shredding like lettuce. Then after about thirty minutes, just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended. How strange it was and how glad I was that we weren't caught in the channel between islands when it hit. Later in the day the news reported it as an unseasonal and unusual cyclonic storm that caused minor damage ashore and necessitated the rescue of four boats in the vicinity.

Raiatea was very obliging to our needs. By law we were required to check in at any island we visited and we were disappointed that the gendarmes weren't anywhere as friendly as the gendarmes on Bora Bora. But the people were, despite the fact that their lives were obviously a bit more hectic and business oriented. There were many more stores and hotels and other services, and competition came between people. Still, it was a far cry from the hustle and bustle of Papeete, and we enjoyed the compromise.

Provisioning was easy, with the exception of transporting the goods back to the boat basin which was about five miles from the town of Utaroa. We found everything we needed in the grocery stores, marketplaces, and drug stores. We appreciated the no-questions-asked recognition that was given our checks drawn on a U.S. bank. For a return address, the checks simply had the name of our sailing vessel and the country we hailed from, in the upper left.

Yacht Querencia
United States of America

Walking about town we were quite surprised to see everywhere posters of the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb, along with a variety of popular anti-nuclear protest slogans. There definitely was an independent movement here amongst the Tahitians against the constant nuclear testing on the atoll of Mururoa. This protest carried over to further protest against being an autonomous French possession. Maybe that's what made the gendarmes uptight; the fact that these beautiful and fabled independent islands, originally blessed with tremendous and incomparable resources, were now destabilizing socially, economically and politically as a French territory. With the ways of old having fallen behind, the remaining Tahitians were searching for a new identity and a new way to develop it. They are not a French or European people.

Pierre at the SPYC recharged my scuba tank for me and refilled our propane tank, too, one of our major concerns. There was no suitable connector to go directly from his large French tank to our American tank (metrics vs. inches) but he knew how to work around that. He took a full 100-liter bottle and hung it in a tree over our little five gallon tank and then proceeded to hook the smaller to the larger using a garden hose and hose clamps. Then by opening both tank valves and letting gravity do its thing he was able to fill our tank mostly full!

"C'est bon!" piped Pierre as he twisted the valves close.

"Hey, that was pretty slick," I acknowledged.

After fixing the throttle linkage and filling the propane tank, my only other major concern was changing the zinc plates on the hull in front of the rudder. This periodic chore is critical to prevent electrolysis and failure of metal hinges, like the ones that hold on the rudder! We had gone through all of our pre-cut and pre-drilled zinc plates and now I needed to find a drill press and make some newly prepared plates from a large zinc slab stored in the bilge. Once again Pierre came to the rescue and took me up to the vocational school in Utaroa. The chore of cutting and drilling new zincs ready to screw on to the hull was accomplished in a matter of moments and I had the pleasure of meeting some very nice young Polynesian students in the process. I was impressed with how seriously they took their studies and how helpful the school was to a foreigner.

Finally, our days on foot scouring the