The Ragged Edge of the World (11 page)

A tall man with a genial stoop, Boyack then lived not far outside Papeete with his wife, Vera, and two children. Through him I met a number of Tahitians and other expatriates, many of whom had come to the island drawn by the paradisal dreams its name had conjured. Some of them had had actually succeeded in living those dreams.

Homer Morgan, owner of the Bel Air Hotel, told me that he had initially come to Tahiti on vacation in 1952. One of the first things he did was find a bicycle, planning to spend a few days cycling around the island. After his first few hours pedaling, he stopped to ask an old man where he could find an inn. Because he spoke neither French nor Tahitian, he used a slate and chalk to illustrate his needs. The old man turned out to be the chief of the district and insisted that he stay with him. That night everybody feasted and drank in Morgan's honor. The next day he awoke and groggily started to pack his bike, only to discover that his clothes were missing. He angrily confronted his host, who merely smiled and pointed to the freshly laundered clothes drying in the sun. Clearly their guest could not leave until they had properly dried. Three days later Morgan prepared to be on his way, only to be gently trapped into another round of feasts. By the time he returned to Papeete, more than a week behind schedule, he was making plans to stay permanently.

The magic that entrapped Morgan and others like him was something other than the sheer physical beauty of the place. The landscape is dramatic, with mountains, grottoes and waterfalls, but the islands of French Polynesia are not nearly as lush and diverse as the Hawaiian chain, 1,500 miles to the north. What ensnares expatriates is the
feel
of Tahiti. For most American visitors, though, the Tahitian way of life most often hovers like an entrancing sprite, just out of reach.

Some of those I met achieved only the surface trappings of the dream. They built airy houses on beautiful promontories, met and married enchanting Tahitian wives, but they had a difficult if not impossible time entering into what might be called the Tahitian state of mind, a worldview in which the simple satisfactions of life on a small island—family, fishing, feasts and music—are sufficient.

The cruel twist of Tahiti is that a constrained worldview is not just sufficient for life on a tropical island; it is also necessary for long-term contentment. And, as I was to discover many years later, the consequences of a Westerner's inability to accept the boundaries of island life could be far more ugly than Pacific paralysis.

During that first trip I did meet one man who managed to pull off the trick of living in a place where nothing matters. Ed Ehrich, a potbellied gray-haired American expatriate, was in his late sixties in 1971. When I met him, he lived with his Tahitian
vahine
in a self-designed meld of airy Polynesian and Cape Cod styles on a point in the Papara district, then quite a ways removed from the bustle of Papeete. After dropping out of the Yale class of 1927, Ehrich had lived in Greenwich Village for a year (where he roomed with a young vaudevillian named Archie Leach, later to gain fame as Cary Grant) before taking up a short career in broadcasting. He eventually realized that he didn't have any particular ambitions and did not want to work that hard, so in 1950 he set off for the one place that he imagined would suit him.

“All that's necessary for an American to be happy in Tahiti,” he told me in 1971, “is that he be preternaturally lazy.” Apparently Ehrich had strolled that walk for two decades, professing to have done nothing other than build a place to live, tend his garden, and read. The reading helped maintain his wry pedantry. Ehrich told me that a few years before my visit a Yale undergraduate had dug his name out of an alumni register and had contacted him in the hopes of securing an invitation to come visit. (Apparently Jeff Stookey and I were part of a long line of Yalies who had a thing for the South Seas.) In his letter the young man wrote, “I've always had a certain amount of fascination for the South Pacific,” to which Ehrich promptly replied that his grammar suggested that the South Pacific had always been fascinated with him, and Ehrich doubted that this was the case. What a comedown Ehrich's reply must have been for the hapless undergrads whose dreams of escape were probably fired by the hope of escaping precisely this kind of nitpicking.

Among the American expatriates, Ehrich was famously hermetic. One very social hostess remarked to me with unintended irony, “I just don't understand why Ed doesn't come into town. Some people come to Tahiti and just cut themselves off.” But what worked for Ehrich didn't work for most Americans, who couldn't suppress their characteristic restless knee syndrome. They started businesses, built hotels, took on hobbies, or became drunks—sometimes all of the above.

One American I ran into, Jean Jacques Laurent, had his own solution to dealing with the confines of the island. To break what he called “the monotony of the climate,” he would go off on expeditions each year to collect artifacts from Polynesia and Melanesia. His Tahitian-style thatch-roofed
fare
was festooned with totems, charms, masks, shields and skulls. The gods must have found it a very confusing place. When I joined him for dinner one night, he recalled a bartering trip in New Guinea during which he had pointed to a weathered old mask in the corner of a tent and asked in pidgin, “How much?” The mask turned out to be the chief's very much living grandmother, and the chief promptly offered to sell her to Laurent for $20.

When Ed Ehrich first arrived in Tahiti, horses and buggies plied the streets of Papeete. By 1971 that Tahiti no longer existed, though after I got over the shock of traffic jams in Papeete, it was possible to see if not partake in the naïve ebullience of the place. I spent the first few days in the Hotel Stuart, a dump back then, but a famous dump where many of Tahiti's most celebrated expatriates stayed when they first arrived. I then spent a few days camping out in the offices of the
Tahiti Journal
. Finally, Jim Boyack offered me a place in the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs, just under the thatch roof of the house where he and Vera were staying.

My first night there, the Boyacks had to go out to dinner, and I stayed behind with their two young children and the babysitter, an achingly beautiful young Tahitian who later won a Tahitian beauty pageant. Having flown many time zones west, I was still suffering from jet lag and went to bed early. I'd never slept under thatch before, and one of the tricks it plays is that the leaves amplify the wind, and until you get used to it, your body reacts to the sound they make by generating heat to compensate for the cooling suggested by their rustling. Consequently, I was shortly soaked with sweat under the sheets, but cold when I threw them off. After tossing and turning, I got up and groggily wandered to the landing at the top of the stairs. I looked down, and there was the future Miss Tahiti, looking up at me with a bold frankness that I'd never before encountered in any girl. I didn't need Homer Morgan's chalk and slate to figure out that there for the taking was the image that had lured me to Tahiti in the first place.

So what did I do? Nothing. For one thing, I didn't know how old she was, and didn't relish spending the rest of my youth in a Tahitian jail (if they had such things). I also felt that accepting that invitation would somehow violate the hospitality of the Boyacks, who, after all, had assumed that they were only offering me a place to stay, and not the consummation of a
rite de passage
. In another sense, to have the dream so close at hand, and so soon after my arrival in Tahiti, was simply overwhelming. Oh, and I did have a girlfriend back in the United States.

I'll never know what might have been. Had I accepted the unspoken invitation, I, too, might have succumbed to the succulent allure of the South Pacific, maybe even ending up like Ed Ehrich. (Although that was unlikely, since one undiscussed ingredient of his successful indolence was money—something I didn't have, not even a little bit.)

While my subsequent encounters with Tahitians were never so heavy with promise, I did get a firsthand look at some of the ways Tahitians incorporated the constant assault of modernity into their lives. For instance, one evening a group of us went to a show, ostensibly put on for the benefit of some French sailors. The promoters had unaccountably imported a stripper, and the most enthusiastic members of the audience were not the sailors but the Tahitian girls who came by out of curiosity and who with gusto and hilarity cheered on the somewhat startled performer. On another occasion I attended a dance where modern pop alternated with traditional Tahitian dance music. The Tahitians, both men and women, were amazing dancers, and the song that got everyone on the floor and engendered the most excitement was José Feliciano's “Feliz Navidad,” with its refrain “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas.” The dance took place in August.

Since 1971, I've been back to Polynesia twice. I returned in 1976 when I was researching my book
Affluence and Discontent
(in which I used Tahiti to illustrate the point that there is much more to a consumer society than a simple desire for consumer goods). Then, in 1995, I returned again on assignment for
Condé Nast Traveler
. During these subsequent trips I was able to move away from the somewhat self-referential perspective on the elusiveness of the South Pacific dream, and looked a little deeper into Polynesian culture and how it was adapting to modernity.

To that end, for instance, my then-wife, Madelaine, and I went in 1976 to Bora Bora on the cheap and found lodging with a Tahitian couple who had a small guesthouse called Chez Aimé. The accommodations would have met with approval from the most austere Amish. Our room (no bathroom, of course) was sparsely furnished and lit by a single bare lightbulb, which went off with the generator at 11 p.m. After a few days, though, we felt ourselves falling under a spell. A beguiling order slowly emerged from what initially looked like a mere haphazard tropical garden in the front yard. Aimé began showing up with fish that he would catch before he went off to work in a copra plantation. He grew and ground his own coffee. We were inundated with fresh fruit—papayas, mangos, bananas and pineapples. He took us snorkeling. He eschewed swim fins, claiming (in French) that his feet could propel him perfectly well.

He and his wife lived what could be called a mixed subsistence economy. But what a subsistence! Apart from the aforementioned fruits, he grew manioc, breadfruit, vanilla and coconut. He kept hens and a sow. His tools were old and outdated, but they all worked. I left thinking that if World War III broke out, Aimé might not notice.

Back in Tahiti, we had a comical encounter with one of those charming scoundrels who prowl the backwaters of the world. I met Emil Yost through Madelaine, who found herself the object of a Gallic full-court press (including several rum punches) while I was off on an errand. When I returned to the bar at the Tahiti Village, Emil turned his charm on me, treating me to a monologue in broken English. “Yes, I have vineyard in California—Brookside, you have heard? . . . My house is next to Bob Hope. . . . We play golf, just off Hollywood Boulevard. . . . But I think I sell vineyard and move to Miami. . . . I try to buy this hotel [the Tahiti Village]. . . . I have four million in Swiss account, three millions in New York, yes! . . . and certificates of General Motors. . . . I say to my son, ‘Why work when we have money?' But he want to travel. . . . Donald Nixon, a good friend, but bad businessman . . .”

We arranged to play tennis the following day, but he didn't show. Then I got a call from him. “I'll meet you at the bar at 9:30. . . . I will explain.” Emil arrived with an official-looking man in uniform, and begged off. “I am sorry, I have appointment at 10:00, I forgot, yes?! But maybe I not go to Bora Bora and we meet later.”

That was the last I saw of Emil. Later, talking with another expatriate, Nick Rutgers, I discovered that Nick had run into Emil at the gendarmerie later that morning, and that Emil had been carrying a briefcase. He told Nick that he had an appointment, but Nick knew that he had just been convicted for passing bad checks, and suspected that he was at the police station to begin his sentence.

I did live out one small fantasy. During the 1976 trip, Madelaine and I visited Western Samoa before I went on by myself to New Guinea. Traveling around the green, green island of Upolu, I remembered a story Jeff Stookey had told me about snorkeling through an underwater passage that linked two caves, each of which opened to the ocean. You could swim in the mouth of one cave, take a deep breath and swim underwater until you saw the light hitting the surface of the water at the back of the other cave. Although the caves were linked at the back, their mouths on the ocean were several hundred feet apart. On a whim I asked one of the locals if he had heard of these caves, and somewhat to my disappointment (because I knew that if I went to the cave, I was going to have to try to make the swim) he had. He gave me directions. Madelaine was very dubious about the whole idea.