Moments later, she was lying on the ground, violently ill. The sky darkened, and a heavy tropical rain drenched everything and everybody. I set up the tent, and Nina crawled in, her body convulsing into a tight fetal position. Finally, she fell asleep.
After loading the last of the copra, most of the men returned to the village, but five stayed and started a fire in the now-empty storage shed. One grilled a mangy-looking pig stomach on a green stick. Afternoon slowly turned to evening. A flock of half-naked kids collected on the beach and, aided by an older man with buckteeth and the countenance of a village idiot, built a dam in the sand to restrain the rising tide. Waves rolled in and eroded the base of the dam. The village idiot, wearing black and white striped underwear, pranced in the waves, kicking the water, screaming screams of joy with the kids as the tide destroyed the dam.
One of the men strolled away, and returned with a stringed instrument made from a wooden burl still attached to a thick branch, which served as the neck. He had carved a sound box out of the back of the burl, and affixed four pieces of fishing line to rotating pegs. The strings were identical but tuned to different tensions, and each had its own voice. He sang and played sweetly while we ate pig stomach and watched the sun slowly sink, red and flattened, toward the western ocean. Wind whispered through the palms, and surf churned the black sand and pink coral on the beach. The rain stopped.
Suddenly, we heard the sound of a small motorcycle engine. A man on a 125cc Yamaha gunned his machine across the grass, standing on the foot pegs, jumping up and down and making it bounce. The musician put down his instrument: “Here kam doctor blong yumi [Here comes our doctor]” — “He kam to fixum wife blong you.” Someone had told the doctor about Nina.
The six of us walked toward the tent. The motorcycle headed straight for me, full throttle. I tried not to flinch. At the last moment, the brakes screeched, and the machine slid sideways in the mud. A tall, gangly man with a cracked helmet, fancy led headlamp, and stethoscope jumped off theatrically. He had a friendly, almost goofy animation about him.
His English was good. “Hello, I am Abel,” he said, “like Abel from the Bible. I am manager of the nursing station. I came to make your wife better.” He strode purposefully toward the tent and pulled back the rain fly. Nina woke and lifted her head weakly. He peered in, much of his bravado gone. Nina groaned. The doctor jumped backward as if bitten by a snake.
We stood in the twilight, awkwardly. Abel asked about our journey, then walked over to inspect our kayaks. He ran his hands across the smooth plastic and looked inside the cockpit. Rainwater had collected in Nina’s seat, and Abel smiled. “Ah, there is water in her seat. That is why she is sick. She has been sitting in cold water.” No doubt his diagnosis was flawed — rainwater could not pool inside her kayak while she was paddling — but nonetheless, carefully and doctorlike, he sponged the seat dry. When he finished, he announced, “Your wife will be better in the morning.” He paused and shrugged. “Ninety-five percent chance your wife will be better in the morning.”
The next morning, Nina was still sick. Abel was on a kava bender, and the nursing station was closed. We’d have to make do without medical attention.
Early that afternoon, Pastor Moses invited us to stay at his house until Nina was well. The pastor — a short, dark-skinned man with close-cropped, receding hair and a thin, greying beard and moustache — lacked the articulated musculature of most Vanuatu men. He and his wife, Estella, lived in a concrete house with a tin roof and store-bought doors, which they sealed with a padlock when they were away. They had lots of cargo inside: futons to sleep on, an electric clock (that would tell time if there was electricity to activate it), books, statues of Jesus hanging from the cross. But while their neighbours ate a varied diet of root crops, island cabbage, fruit, and fish, Moses and Estella had no garden and ate white rice, ramen noodles, and crackers from the store.
I was reminded that since the onset of agriculture 13,000 years ago, the vast majority of us have eaten a diet less varied and nutritious than that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and recalled the storekeeper’s comment: “If you hangri, why you kam to store?” Like the prime minister, Moses and Estella had stepped out of the island economy; unlike him, they hadn’t stepped far enough to drive a black Buick, and they seemed poor and unhealthy.
