Chapter One
Everyone has problems. Spend a few moments catching up with friends and you’re likely to hear a litany of catastrophes.
“I lost my job at the prison,” one might say.
“I’m going to prison,” says another.
“I’m about to lose my home.”
“I blew mine up to collect the insurance.”
“My ferret died.”
“I ate mine.”
“. . .”
“Long story.”
Tales of woe had become inescapable. What were once simple quandaries now seemed to come equipped with trapdoors. One misstep and you’d tumble into the chute of doom, where demotions became terminations, homeowners became squatters, and Little Bandit was no longer safe. I was no exception. I too had problems. Multitudes of problems. If something could go wrong, it usually did. The only law that seemed to apply to me was Mr. Murphy’s. For a long while, decades even, the sun had shone upon me. Life had been an effortless glide. I’d traveled the world, married my soul mate, sired two strapping boys, and wrote books that—I’ve been confidently informed—landed on the bestseller list in Eugene, Oregon. I couldn’t explain why good things happened to me. They just did. But then, like a bad Chinese proverb, my good fortune evaporated like a spilled Slurpee in a Phoenix parking lot. Everything that could go wrong . . . was not a thought I dared to finish. It could always get worse, and usually it did.
What’d happened? I wondered. Good luck seeks no antecedent, but bad luck demands an inquest. Was it simply written in the cosmos? Did the yin of happiness necessitate the yang of misery? Could it simply be bad karma? No, I thought, as I reflected on the causes of my misfortune. Behind every event, every circumstance, lay a cold, hard trail of facts. I needed only to follow the breadcrumbs of past experience to bring me to the source of my tribulations. And there, sadly, I found something immense and unmovable:
Continents.
Bad things happened to me on large land masses. Terrible things.
This was a most unfortunate realization, of course. How I’d hoped to discover an unhappy childhood, an unjust prison sentence, or a soul-scarring bout of acne to explain the recent trajectory of my life. Who wants to blame their woes on something as inalterable as the North American tectonic plate? After all, continents are—at the very least—nice to look at. I too could admire majestic, snow-glazed mountains, the rivers that flowed with the tide of history, the buzz of the megacity. I am, for the record, appreciative of boreal forests and rain forests, deserts, and the vast expanse of the northern tundra. I like New York and Los Angeles, as well as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Dubai. I am fond of small towns. Also apple pie and yak, though not together. All this can be found on continents. But, alas, experience tells me that if I’m not surrounded by an ocean, my life crumbles like a stale cookie.
It’s true.
Take my most recent sojourn in North America. I’d protected my well-being by living on a peninsula. Surrounded by water on three sides, I navigated the perils of the modern world, and whenever events or situations threatened to leave my eyes agog and my head a-splitting, I retreated to a rented sailboat, where secure in a finite space surrounded by the infinite blue of the ocean, I navigated pitching waves and morning fog with an aplomb that failed me on dry land. On water I was free and sure; on land I felt like a lost fish. But then, chasing a job, I moved deeper into the continent, distant from familiar waters and sandy dunes, and there I fell.
Into the bottle to be precise. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. In retrospect, it was probably a foregone conclusion. I’d always had a temperamental shut-off valve. Open-minded to the mind-altering, I’d long ago learned to be wary of the seductive offerings of both the street and the pharmacy. I’d known that drugs could be a problem and that it was best to dispense with the experimentation early on. I pretty much maxed out on magic mushrooms. Instead, I’d settled into the steady companionship of pint glasses and decanters. Like everyone. It was normal, no? A few beers at the bar; wine with dinner. It was all good. In fact, hard liquor was a no-no in my world—until, eventually, it wasn’t, and there was that unknown moment when the proverbial invisible line was crossed, when everything started to tumble with a terrifying ferocity, and despite untold As-God-Is-My-Witness promises to get this under control, to show some restraint, I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop. Not until my wife, bless her, deposited me at rehab, where, sedated with Librium, I learned that lucky-ducky that I was, I had a fatal brain disease and should I ever pick up a drink again I might as well put five bullets in a six-shooter and shove it down my piehole.
So this was bad. And it happened on a continent. In my mind, the case was closed.
Now hold on right there, someone might say. Do you mean to suggest that there was a link between the pint of vodka you kept tucked in your sock during the last month of your drinking and the fact that you inhabited a continent?
Yes, I do. And furthermore, having noted the correlation between large landmasses and big problems in my own personal life—the larger, the bigger—I gave thanks every day that I didn’t inhabit Asia, where I undoubtedly would have ended up a crackhead in Pyongyang. It’s important to think positively, I figure. It could be worse. Aware now that my well-being depended on my proximity to an ocean, I made a point not to travel deeper into the country lest I get run over by a hog-feed truck in Iowa or catch Ebola in Omaha. You can’t be too careful.
It has, of course, invariably been pointed out to me that my reasoning is a trifle thin and specious (Hello, Father Mark!), and that perhaps I ought to dig deep and conduct a searching and fearless moral inventory. Well, I did do that. Beyond the dismal lack of presence at the end there, when the drink became the end-all be-all of my day—unforgiveable, all things considered—I discovered that, in all likelihood, I am not as evil as Simon Cowell, but not nearly so good as Oprah Winfrey, which probably makes me average, morally speaking. Reading the scientific literature on the neurobiology of addiction, as I did with the fervency of a medical student, I discovered that deep in my noggin, I simply had an amygdala that hummed a little differently than most. Addiction is a brain disease. You either have it or you don’t. It can gestate for years, but once it awakens it will kick your butt thoroughly and mercilessly. And so it did with me. That it did so on a continent, however, I felt was not entirely coincidental.
The reason I am not entirely in jest about this last point is that, rose-tinted glasses or not, I am able to do a little compare-and-contrast. Some years earlier, I lived on the sun-dappled atolls of Micronesia and the high islands of Melanesia. Like most good things, my time in the South Pacific was accidental. I certainly didn’t know anything about the region. Can anyone name the leaders of Niue, or Tuvalu, or Vanuatu? Does anyone even know where these places are? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I too had not an inkling. I’d found myself on the far side of the world because one evening, during grad school, I’d gone to a keg party, where I’d met a woman and become smitten, and because it seemed like an excellent idea at the time, I’d followed her out to Kiribati—the end of the world—where she’d landed a job with an NGO because no one else wanted to work on a remote, drought-stricken, heat-blasted sliver of rock just a notch above the equator and worlds removed from anywhere. While Sylvia occupied her days building composting toilets—atollettes she called them—and growing sad little vegetable gardens, I was busy surviving. I’d envisioned a rustic Club Med, a South Pacific musical, Survivor-lite. Life on a remote island in the equatorial Pacific would be like a Corona commercial, I’d thought.
Of course, it turned out differently. “To picture Kiribati,” I’d written at the time:
Imagine that the continental U.S. were to conveniently disappear leaving only Baltimore and a vast swath of very blue ocean in its place. Now chop up Baltimore into thirty-three pieces, place a neighborhood where Maine used to be, another where California once was, and so on until you have thirty-three pieces of Baltimore dispersed in such a way that 32/33 of Baltimorians will never attend an Orioles game again. Now take away electricity, running water, toilets, television, restaurants, buildings, and airplanes (except for two very old prop planes, tended by people who have no word for “maintenance”). Replace with thatch. Flatten all land into a uniform two feet above sea level. Toy with islands by melting polar ice caps. Add palm trees. Sprinkle with hepatitis A, B, and C. Stir in dengue fever and intestinal parasites. Take away doctors. Isolate and bake at a constant temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The result is the Republic of Kiribati.
This was home. And I grew to like it. Moving from North America to an atoll was like being transported from the lush cacophony of Saint Peter’s Basilica to the austerity of the Bodhi Tree. You get used to it. True, there were times when I would have endured the amputation of my left foot by a rusty hacksaw in exchange for a decent meal, a cool breeze, and news of stirrings beyond the breakers. More often than not, when Sylvia got home from doing her good deeds, we’d typically have a conversation that went something like this:
Sylvia: What’s for dinner, honey?
Me: Rotten shark, weevils, and rice boiled in seawater.
Sylvia: Oh, good. I was getting so tired of Filet Mignon with the Truffled Mushroom Ragout.
Then, two thousand miles from the nearest cow and oceans removed from a mushroom, we’d laugh dementedly. But the laughter would be true. Perhaps suffering from Stockholm syndrome, we’d adjusted to our peculiar reality. Once I’d accepted the inherent isolation of island life, when I’d internalized a world demarcated by a fringing reef and the rolling waves of the Pacific, I lived life as God intended me to live—slowly and weirdly, among coconut palms and breadfruit trees, in a timeless place where each morning, as I sipped my toddy, I could confidently pencil in a dose of misadventure and a tonic of bewilderment. I felt, more than anything, at home on a South Seas isle, and I shared with Pacific Islanders their bafflement at the hurry-hurry ways of those unfortunate enough to live far away from the balmy waters of the South Seas. This was my world—happy mostly, kind of kooky, and strangely beguiling.
Indeed, we liked it so much that, having learned where it was, we went on to live in Vanuatu, the oddest island nation in Melanesia—volcanoes, cargo cults, a hundred languages, mind-molting kava—before settling for a spell in Fiji—coups, championship rugby, fearsome chiefs, coups—where we felt sufficiently at home to have our first child, whom we now lovingly refer to as our anchor baby for when the SHTF in the West. The Pacific, we learned, is its own vast universe; each island a star, and our lives revolved contentedly around its languid rhythms, coups and crappy food notwithstanding. Unsurprisingly, I would later think very fondly of these distant places, their palm-fringed beaches lapped by the emerald waters of a lagoon, the cragged eminence of a volcanic isle, the ancient songs voiced by islanders whose ways had changed little since the first exiles washed ashore. It wasn’t long until I’d gaze at the big blue space of a world map with finger-gnawing longing. Of course my pining was motivated by pure, unadulterated escapism, but I’d always answered that with an enthusiastic so what? While drinking yourself into rehab is evidence of escapism gone horribly wrong, the desire to experience the far side of the world reflects the optimistic hope that a little skull-jarring dissonance could stir the soul. Falling off the map, I knew, could be good for you.
And so, as I adjusted to the post-drinking landscape, which, early on, felt about as weird and unsettling as finding myself on the planet Tatooine, I decided to read the early literature on the South Seas. Evidently, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries nothing aroused the ardent spirits of readers enduring the slate-gray skies of northern climes quite like tales from the sunny South Pacific. When De Bougainville, captain of the first French ship to circumnavigate, published his Voyage Around the World in 1771, his descriptions of the sublime beauty and easy love of Tahitian women gave rise to the enduring legend of Polynesia as an Edenic paradise before the Fall. And it is no wonder, really. Imagine reading De Bougainville’s torrid descriptions on a frigid night in Lyons. “The young girl negligently allowed her loincloth to fall to the ground,” he wrote, describing a Tahitian lass who’d climbed aboard his ship, “and appeared to all eyes as Venus showed herself to the Phrygian shepherd. She had the Goddess’s celestial form.” Or how about this, courtesy of Philibert Commerçon, the botanist on board the Étoile? “Here, modesty and prudery lose their tyranny. The act of procreation is an act of religion; its preludes are encouraged by the voices and songs of the assembled people, and its end is greeted by universal applause.” Public sex? Clapping? No wonder the pith-helmeted fascination with the South Pacific. This was shocking stuff for its day. Even in the unflappable Captain Cook’s journals, you can almost feel the man blush as he describes the hip-shaking Otea, which he calls the “indecent dance.”
For the next hundred years the literature on the South Pacific rarely deviated from the same sultry script. It was the Girls Gone Wild of its day. Herman Melville, in Typee, his largely fictional account of being marooned on one of the Marquesas Islands, lauded the cheerful immodesty of the island’s female inhabitants—“bathing in company with troops of girls formed one of my chief amusements,” he wrote—though watching them dance, he observed, “was almost too much for a quiet, sober-minded, modest young man like myself.” One day, while gliding in a canoe with the Polynesian nymph Fayaway, he noted her “happy idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she disengaged her ample robe of tappa . . . and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier little mast than Fayaway made was never shipped a-board of any craft.” Are you wincing? Clearly, he saved the nuance for the whale.
R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, Charles Stoddard’s South Sea Idylls, even Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa all continued to feed the popular imagination of islands inhabited by winsome, available women and savage headhunters. Which is fine. Nothing wrong with that. I’m all for the titillating yarn. But among the early books on Oceania, none rang particularly true to me. Where was the rawness of the Pacific, the withering heat, the poisonous reef, the giant centipedes, the roaring westerlies? And where were the human beings? The islanders depicted in these pages had all the complexity of a coconut frond. It hadn’t been written yet, but nineteenth-century literature on the South Pacific already seemed like a PG-13 derivative of Mutiny on the Bounty, tidily cinematic with mature themes.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to have noticed that so much of the era’s writings on the South Seas read like the gauzy, Technicolor pantings of a fevered sentimentalist. “Everybody else who has tried,” observed one perceptive reader, “got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic.” Then, as if in a dare, the writer confidently asserts: “You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.”
Here was Robert Louis Stevenson. He was, I’m embarrassed to admit, a stranger to me. I knew, of course, that at some point in his life the author of Treasure Island had become a creature of the Pacific. When I’d lived on the sun-blasted atolls of Kiribati, I’d been aware that Stevenson was of that small tribe of foreigners who’d once weathered its shores—the few, the proud. And when I’d settled in Monterey, I was dimly cognizant that he was somehow tangentially associated with the town. A plastic-sheathed menu at a Cannery Row restaurant would inform visitors that the day’s specials included Calamari à la Robert Louis Stevenson alongside John Steinbeck’s Famous Clam Chowder. But I’d never actually read him. His books, in my mind, were homework, the sort of thing you’d be assigned to read for an eighth-grade book report. He was someone you were supposed to read for your edification, and much as my ten-year-old son scrunches his nose at Huckleberry Finn while counting the days for the next Rick Riordan book, I passed on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in favor of, well, anything but the musty prose of some muttonchopped Victorian. Robert Louis Stevenson, I thought, was boring. He was stuffy. He was probably English.
So I was an idiot. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of the drink, the harrumphing triumphalism often found deep inside the second or third bottle of Pinot Noir. But as the months rolled by and the cobwebs lifted, as I returned to earth from whatever awful orbit I’d been inhabiting, I found myself strangely attached to this, ahem, Scotsman. Perhaps it was the descriptions of him. Robert Louis Stevenson, a contemporary noted, was prone to “smoking cigarettes without intermission except when coughing and kissing.” Wasn’t RLS some kind of weak-lunged, tubercular, sickly waif, the sort of unfortunate that was said to be suffering from consumption? Encountering Stevenson on a beach in the South Pacific, a missionary observed that he strode barefoot, “dressed in a shabby suit of white flannels that had seen many better days, a white drill yachting cap, a cigarette in his mouth.” I liked the cut of the man. In fact, I sort of dressed like him. While I no longer smoke—inexplicably, I’d taken up long-distance running; something had to give—I recognized immediately a kindred spirit. Robert Louis Stevenson, I sensed, was animated by the fuck-its.
How else to explain the moment he found himself aboard the Casco, a ninety-foot schooner, he’d chartered in San Francisco? Imagine the scene: Stevenson, five foot ten and weighing all of ninety-eight pounds, standing on the bow of a rich man’s pleasure yacht, his only experience at sea a short jaunt around the Hebrides, a lazy meander through the rivers and canals of France, and two Atlantic crossings on board ships ten times the size of the Casco. He wouldn’t know it, of course, but once he escaped the shadow of California he’d never set foot on a continent again, unless you count Australia, which—let’s be honest here—is just a large island. For two years he’d voyage among the Marquesas, the mysterious soaring islands that are the bedrock of Polynesian culture; the Tuamotu Islands, the Dangerous Archipelago where slivers of land encircle luminous lagoons alive with sharks and manta rays; and the Gilbert Islands, my erstwhile stomping grounds in Kiribati, as remote in my day as it was in Stevenson’s. He’d build his home in Samoa, call it Vailima, and dress his staff in tartan lavalavas, and write of his escapades and encounters in the fabled South Seas with an earthy realism that defied the twittering primness of the Victorian era (official motto: We are not amused).
But why go all the way to the South Pacific? He was an ill man when he’d boarded the Casco. Half resigned to an existence as the perpetual patient, ceaselessly nursed and fussed over, he’d told people that he decided to decamp for distant islands to restore his health, which had been failing since the day he was born. While it certainly made sense for a man prone to lung infections and fever to depart cold and damp Edinburgh—I reach for a scarf just thinking about Scotland—he’d already long ago assumed the itinerant life, wandering the European continent before setting forth for America in pursuit of a woman. Now, this I understood. You meet someone, they end up on the other side of the planet, you go follow them. It’s called stalking, and sometimes it works. Stevenson married Fanny Osbourne, an American divorcée ten years his senior, and after several years in Europe, they returned to the United States. While spending a winter in upstate New York, where he began The Master of Ballantrae, it occurred to him that it might be an excellent idea to set forth for the South Seas. Well, duh, you think. That’s what everyone says after spending a winter in upstate New York. But why go, really?
Of course, it was relief from his lung-splattering cough that he was seeking. It’s what brought him to the Adirondacks in the first place. It was that same quest that caused Stevenson to move to England, and to France, and to Switzerland, and to California. It was the reason he gave for boarding the Casco. No doubt this was true. Illness, as only the sick know, is maddening. But, in his letters, one senses another motive for the long journey to the South Seas. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go,” he wrote. “I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” He was irrepressibly restless, a born wanderer. He traveled, I thought, not because he was ill, but in spite of his health. He was, he noted, prepared “to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale.” Frail or hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson had the twinkling eye of the nomad. To be still was to languish.
And yet, a few years later, after what he’d planned as a seven-month sojourn to the South Pacific had become the odyssey of his lifetime, he wrote from his home in Samoa: “Few men who come to the islands leave them”:
They grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor.
The rootless exile had found his place in the lush islands of the South Seas. He’d become known as Tusitala, the teller of tales. Among his readers in England, there was little love for his dispatches from the Pacific. Where was the serialized fiction, the colorful yarns, that’d made him famous? What on earth would compel a gentleman to live among cannibals and heathens? Stevenson, true to his character, cared not for the opinions of London society. The vagabond had settled in the distant backwaters of Empire, where he immersed himself like a highborn chief, signing his letters as the well-pleased South Sea islander.
What happened, I wondered, after he passed through the Golden Gates of San Francisco? Roaming the South Pacific as his fancy dictated, Stevenson lived like a jaunty beachcomber, flitting from island to island, the warm breezes offering him the sustenance that would carry him through his remaining years. It wasn’t merely a lazy idyll that he’d inhabited. Rarely did he write about beaches and ukuleles. He did not, as far as I could tell, spend much time in tiki bars. The mai tai remained unknown to him. Indeed, he’d come to know the Pacific as a “stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes.” Drama there was aplenty. But what did he find there, in what realm of experience did he now live, that caused this man, racked by illness, to embrace his world with such saucer-eyed glee? “The whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem,” he’d write. Were the restorative powers of Oceania so great that a sick man could reclaim a life of wonder? Could a person, adrift in the continental world, find redemption on the temperate islands of the Pacific?
I pondered this question for a long time. It’d been a year since I crossed borders other than those found in my own mind, and suddenly the world beyond seemed alive and inviting. I reached into my bookshelf and finally pulled out Stevenson’s In the South Seas, and as I did so I felt a lean hand grip mine, and soon I was aloft, floating over arid plains and towering mountains, the night a whirl of stars and motion, until at last I was set down on the deck of a boat rolling in the swell of the blue blue sea.