Scarred for Life

Some people are proud of their scars. I am a bit embarrassed by most of mine, as it seems they are almost all permanent reminders of my own stupidity. Boat life is, for me at least, an unending cycle of wound recovery: I am in a constant state of healing something, and about the time I manage to successfully form a scar, I start in on another wound, ever coming up with new and profoundly clumsy ways to hurt myself. Best part is that daily immersion in sea water guarantees that proper, rapid healing will not take place. All those wives tales about salt water being good for wounds? Take a glass of sea water and put it on your window sill for a couple of days, and tell me it doesn’t start looking like a high school science project involving a worse for the wear piece of Wonderbread. Now take that freshly scabbed wound of yours and, instead of cleaning it once a day in a shower and keeping it covered in Neosporin, soak it three times a day, an hour each session, in a lively biotic soup of water that, by nature of being in a closed lagoon, doesn’t really circulate the way the open ocean does. How’s that scab coming along? Keloid tissue, people. I’ve learned to welcome it. Proud of it? Not really, as it seems more a badge of stupidity than anything else. Wary and oh so devoted to avoiding it whenever possible? You bet. Ever finding new ways of covering myself in it, despite care and caution? Sigh. I’ve almost healed this diagonal gouge on my chest, so I’m off to find something to bang my head on in the engine room.

Doom Generation

People ask me what wreck diving is like. I have had a lot of time to think about it, mostly while I am wreck diving, and the best description that I can come up with, having been a teen during the advent of first person shooter video games, is that it is like playing Doom. Without the monsters and demons and shotguns and explosives and rocket launcher ammo and whatnot...actually, there are explosives and ammo here, there just aren’t zombies actively trying to use them on me. I’m getting ahead of myself.

For those of you who haven’t wasted inordinate amounts of your life playing video games, here’s the short version. First person shooter games present an explorable environment using the screen to give a first person perspective of what you would see if you were moving through that environment. Turn left and your view changes left, look up and you see what is above you, crouch to examine something on the ground and you zoom in on it as if you were getting closer to it. The themes of different games range from ancient times to the far future, with attendant weapons, foes, puzzles, maps, clues, etc., but certain mechanics of these games are pervasive. The world is broken down into areas. Each area has a layout, a map through which you navigate. The designers insert into the maps hidden areas and navigational puzzles to reward the observant, persistent, thorough player. Careful examination of each area reveals in the nooks and crannies hidden rooms with caches of goodies and passages that allow access to hard to reach areas or shortcuts through the map. Play enough of the games or figure out the designer’s logic, if there is any, and finding the hidden goodies becomes easier.

What the hell does this have to do with wreck diving? Simply this: exploring the wrecks, learning them, mapping them out mentally, poking into every nook, is similar to exploring in a first person shooter. I am looking for the same things: hidden goodies and ways to get to hard to access places. I get the same feeling in a wreck as I do in a game: show me everything, leave nothing unturned or unexplored, poke nose and flashlight everywhere. I enter new areas in wrecks the way I do in games, methodically moving from one side of the space to another, searching high and low. Granted there’re no aliens waiting to jump out and liquefy my face or axe wielding zombies bent on dismembering me when I disturb their lair, but I have found more than one pile of human remains in the wrecks, and that’s something one often encounters in the more macabre games. Ammo too. Much of a shooting game revolves around finding enough ammunition to get the job done, and there’s plenty, plenty of ammunition around here. I’m not going to fall back on that old video games are useful because they improve hand eye coordination saw, but I have solved more than one maze riddle in a wreck superstructure by using the always turn left trick everyone who ever played Castle Wolfenstein learned. Who said video games are a complete waste of time?

Agora Sweater

Ever have one of those simple misconceptions from childhood that bleeds over into adult life? You know, one of those things that you got in your head as a kid, something that seemed logical, and it just stuck until you had a definitive mental map reconstructing moment that put things on the right track? I’ll give you an example. I knew Washington was a state. I knew Washington D.C. was the capital of the country. Naturally I assumed that someone had parked D.C. in the state of Washington. Why would they be on opposite sides of the country? It took an embarrassing snafu in fifth grade geography to set me straight.

Same with agoraphobia. I’d heard and read the word enough in context to think I knew what it meant: a fear of large spaces. It took junior high Latin and, by association, Greek to find out that the root, literally translated, was fear of the marketplace. It took walking into my first Super Ultra Mega Do You Like What We’ve Done With This City Block Consume Anything Your Greedy Heart Desires Welcome Back to America For the First Time in Two Years Sucka Wal Mart to really, really understand agoraphobia.

I traveled to Texas while on vacation and, on a whim and the need to feed a super premium jones, I entered a Super Wal-Mart in an effort to make up for two years of ice cream deprivation. Everything’s bigger in Texas, but Lordy I wasn’t prepared for what happened as the automatic doors hissed apart at my approach.

I took two steps inside and froze, woodland creature in headlights, completely overwhelmed and confused. Fluorescent lit space disappeared into the unfathomable distance in all directions. Cavernous, yawning commercialism stretched as far as I could see. The hugeness was staggering. Those patient enough to have read some of my other entries know I’m not above hyperbole to make a point, but I kid you not, my chest actually tightened, my breathing became labored, my vision started to tunnel, and I broke out in a prickly sweat. I make a living squeezing my body into small, dark, claustrophobic places inside collapsing shipwrecks, and here I was, in a store, the most innocuous of places, panting, jelly kneed, fight or flight response fluttering. I backed up against the wall just inside the door and put my hands on the gumball and temporary tattoo machines to steady myself.

Super Wal-Mart. Ultra K-Mart. Mega Target. Did we really need to supersize these already massive establishments? Only in America could a bunch of guys sit around the board room and decide to take America’s largest indoor business establishments and make them bigger. “I know what old Sam Walton would have wanted. Let’s EXPAND. Not just our store numbers. Our internal volume. Our footprint.” Can you picture it? “We’ve already undersold small town America into oblivion, wrecking every local business economy we enter. But the grocery stores are still in business. There’s a slice of middle America’s paycheck we aren’t getting. We should do something about that.”

I finally got over the fact that I was standing in a store that had a greater volume of retail space than every store in the town in which I live put together, and far more stock, to boot. I remember getting off the live-aboard in Kona after a long stint at sea and wandering around a regular Wal-Mart thinking that it was like being in downtown NYC, but this feeling was somehow different. In Chuuk, people are content with little, mainly by necessity. They’d be just as happy to have the cardboard container or the wooden pallet in which all the merchandise I was seeing was packed, much less the contents. I was standing in a space, a huge space, where you could get, well, anything. By design, you can go into Super Wal-Mart with a wildly diverse list of needs and errands and knock out every one, from grocery, appliance, garden, kitchen, and electronics shopping to meals, a health check-up, bank visit, and a new set of prescription glasses.

I guess I don’t have to tell you guys; you can see it any time you want, and I envy that on many levels. Point is, people ask me what strikes me as different in the US since I left. Being on a bus full of people absorbed by the data devices whose screens they are poking and massaging, relating not a bit to the outside world or anyone in it until their PDA’s GPSs tell them they have arrived where they are going; that’s different. Successful business models for artisanal bakeries and chocolatiers that make nothing but seven dollar cupcakes or thirty dollars a pound chocolates; that’s different. Having a mobile pet grooming service willing to arrive at my doorstep in a small RV and wash my pet; that’s different. Seeing someone in a type of shoe other than a flip flop and driving down at a road at double digit speed, both very different. Turning on the internet and having a web page load up instantly is certainly different.

People also ask me what I’ve missed in the US since I left. The food, the variety, going to a movie theater or a museum, those things I’ve missed. Super Wal-Mart? Not so much.

Family Matters

Between Christmas, visits with the folks, and a trip to Honduras with just about everyone on my mother’s side of the family within one generation of me, I spent a lot of time with my family the last couple of months. First time I’ve been around most of them in two years. They are the coolest people I know. Now that could be because I’ve been around them all my life and I’ve just gotten used to them, but I don’t think so. I really believe that I just hit the jackpot and happened to fall into the deep end of the gene pool. My family is as diverse, talented, intelligent, and downright interesting a clan as you could ever expect to meet. As a bonus, the cousins in my generation are marrying age, and many of them are dating or getting married to entertaining, fun people who mesh perfectly with the rest of us. There’s no other group with whom I’d rather spend my time, and the fam was the highlight of my trip.

Okay, enough sappy gushing; let me get to my sappy point. My family gets along famously. There are no warring factions or people on the outs or members who, through withdrawal or due to distance, have achieved long lost status. Nobody bickers or does anything backhanded. It’s all love, respect, support. In this, I’m lucky.

Some of you reading this may not be so lucky. There may be issues, real or imagined, that keep your family members apart. It is to you that I say the following: take the first step. Rift in your family? Someone with whom you don’t see eye to eye? Hate the person your family member married? Old grudge? Skeletons in the closet? Long distance hindering communication? So what? Let the healing begin, people! Make the effort to reach out. Patch up an old misunderstanding. Send a thoughtful gift to the niece you never met. Write a newsy catch up letter to a lonely uncle. Forgive a debt. Forgive a slight. Hash out your differences with a sibling. Basically, recognize the fact that blood is thicker than water, that you are stuck with your relatives, and that you may as well enjoy their company. Who knows what redeeming qualities you may discover or rediscover? Naive advice? Perhaps. But hey, they’re family. Give it a try. Okay, preaching over, soapbox kicked aside.

Publish or Perish

That’s how the old expression runs. Though I feel in no threat of imminent demise due to my recent laziness, I want to thank those who have gently and not so gently pestered me to get off my butt and type something. It is to those of you I now apologize for the...bloginess of this entry. Merely a way of catching up so we don’t jump from Nan Madol directly into tepid Truk without a little backstory. I’ve been in the US a couple times since last year; musings to follow. The differences are overwhelming. Not good or bad necessarily, just mighty different. In between those US trips I have spent a couple months back in Truk and am back again until the end of the year. New boat responsibilities have introduced a new learning curve that has been eating up my time and sleep, making writing a distant second. No excuse, unfortunately, for all my off time when I could have been writing instead of messing around. It’s fun to blow off a year’s worth of weekends in a two months, but not conducive to keyboards. So, without further bloglike ado, some half baked stuff that’s been kicking around on the drive for a while. Once again, thanks for reading and prodding me to get back to it.

The Spaces In Between

            Round about 1100 A.D., one of Pohnpei’s chiefs decided to erect himself a compound, a series of buildings that would act as the proverbial county seat and leave a legacy of his power and status after he was gone.  Not an uncommon urge among ruler types with a god complex and a handy supply of slave labor.  Think Egypt.  Think terra cotta warriors of the Q’uin dynasty.   Think lots of heavy rocks and a bunch of tired guys encouraged in not so subtle ways to carry them around.  Think wonders of the ancient world that to this day boggle the minds of modern man in their complexity, innovation, and the sheer amount of work required to turn a megalomaniacal dream into reality.  The place I visited on Pohnpei deserves recognition alongside Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, the heads on Easter Island, and other of man’s mammoth undertakings the mystery of which’s origins, purpose, and construction methods last as long as the edifices themselves.  If you ever go to Micronesia, put the ruins of Nan Madol on your list.

            Pohnpei is, along with Chuuk, one of the four island states in Micronesia.  It is the country’s capitol, with friendly people, a clean and beautiful environment, and solid infrastructure as far as Pacific Islands go.  A welcome departure from Chuuk.  Though settled around 200 A.D., not much is known of Pohnpei’s history before the 1100’s, at which time a tyrannical dynasty called the Saudeleurs took control of the population. Determining the need for a power base from which to rule, one of the Saudeleur kings selected a building site on the island’s eastern side, hired some architects, and gently suggested that his subjects limber up for some exercise in the form of several consecutive lifetimes of heavy lifting.

            Nan Madol is located at the edge of a small island, Temwen, just off Pohnpei.  Temwen is in a shallow tidal zone shielded from the open ocean by a fringing reef, beyond which perfect barrels tirelessly hammer the protecting coral, Inside, however, the water is shallow and calm right up to the mangrove growth on the edge of the island.  When I say that Nan Madol is on the edge of Temwen, what I really mean is that it is off the edge of Temwen.  Imagine the faces of the royal dynastic engineering corps when the boss explained to them that the plan was to construct a city in the shallow waters of the tidal flat next to the island.  It must have been like telling your contractor today that you want your four bedroom family home to levitate a few inches off the ground.

            So.  Build a city.  In the water.  Step one is to figure out how to get the buildings above the water.  Going to need to make some islands.  Sounds so easy from a modern day perspective once you see pictures of Dubai, but we’re talking 1100 A.D. here.  Luckily, Pohnpei is volcanic.  It is made of basalt, a hard, dense, black stone formed by the partial melting of the earth’s mantle.  Through the forces of geothermal heat, pressure, and subsequent cooling, basalt naturally forms large crystals with a hexagonal cross-section.  Large is such a nebulous word.  I say crystals and maybe you are thinking rock candy, or eighth-grade science projects with a string dangling in a supersaturated salt solution mixed with some food coloring, or a head shop in the Haight with some really pretty geodes.   Readjust your thinking to include a six sided log of ferrous rock as big as a telephone pole weighing up to 50 tons.  Technically it’s a crystal.  Nothing you want to lay on your chest to tune up your chakras, but still a crystal.

            Unfortunately these crystals, good island building material that they are, had to be quarried and transported from Pohnpei island proper.  Unfortunate for the guys who had to do the dragging and the grunt work, but fortunate for the designers and engineers as, though they will never be individually recognized or exalted or studied the way Khufu (forgive the spelling) might, their ingenuity and methods are still a stumper.  How do you move a 50 ton log over land and, better yet, water?  Get enough guys with ropes and something you can use for wheels and you can move heavy rocks.  Ask the Egyptians.  But how do you float them, circa 1100?  Nobody’s figured it out, and that includes some folks on one of those cable channels who recently did a special on the place and put modern engineers and eggheads with fancy computer modeling software on the case, and still left scratching their heads.  Check it out on your net TV viewing station of choice by searching Nan Madol and you too will scratch.

            Okay, gloss over the genius and the labor required to move these logs of stone.  Levitate them from the quarry to the shore into the water and to the site.  Stack them horizontally in square and rectangular matrices to create retaining walls that stick up out of the water along the tidal flats and the reef area.  Fill the walls with coral rubble and rock, and you have an artificial islet.  Repeat.  92 times.  In a grid every bit as thought out as a city zoning plan, better than most, in fact.  Over a 220 acre area stretching half a mile by a mile.  Leaving a navigable series of waterways and canals between the islets.  Can you tell how desperately I am trying to convey the enormity of this achievement?

            It gets better, of course, because now you have all these islets sticking out of the water.  Level them properly and build a city on them.  Temples, burial complexes, ritual sites, meeting areas, housing, bathing pools, holding pens for food fish and turtles, food preparation sites, ceremony sites, all separate islets.  They built an islet for coconut processing.  Unreal.

            What did they use for building material?  Was it coconut logs and thatch?  Some of the structures surely were, but remember those big chunks of basalt?  Many of the edifices were constructed with them, are still standing, and are wildly impressive.  The least ruinlike island of the ruins is Nan Douwas.  The outer walls of the compound are twenty-five feet tall, made of basalt crystals stacked like lincoln logs.  They tower above the crushed coral walkway that surrounds the outer edge of the island, dripping history and lichens.  Pass between the soaring walls, down the main walk, and into the inner compound, another series of walls and sanctums that served as burial chambers and crypts for members of the Saudeleur dynasty.  Big buildings of stacked stone with stairs and crawlways leading inside, cool dark interiors with slits of bright equatorial sun winking in from between the rocks and somewhere underfoot the millennium old remnants of the family who built and ruled this place.  When I say crypt, and ancient ruin, are you getting an Indiana Jones vibe?  It was definitely there.  I kept recalling one of the scenes in the latest of those films, one of the scenes I didn’t sleep through, where they are looking for whatever the macguffin is in the ruins where the midget savages jump them.  If midget savages were ever going to jump me outside a Hollywood set, this would be the spot.

            I make light, but the whole experience was awe-inspiring.  After exploring Nan Douwas, we got into kayaks and paddled all over the compound, through the thoroughly thought out and planned canals between the islets, outside to the lagoon between the fringing wall that protected the city and the reef, past the ocean entrance to the city, navigating a grid as neat and orderly as a planned community.  Everything was bursting with life, from mangrove swamps and lush vegetation to water birds hunting in the shallows to marbled rays spooking underneath the boats as we paddled above them.  The jungle and the ocean were slowly reclaiming this place, creating a harmony between the man-made and the natural usually only experienced in ancient places. Somehow it became impossible to tell if the ruins were slowly fading away or if they were somehow maturing and revealing themselves after centuries of incubation.

            In traveling along the canals we were moving in the spaces between the islets, just as while exploring the walkways, crypts, meditation chambers, and walled compounds, we were moving in the spaces between the structures.  I don’t want to get too spiritual or insinuate that I profoundly understand anything about this ancient culture, but I was certainly moved by the experience, more so after finding out that the name of the place, Nan Madol, is loosely translated as ‘the spaces in between.’

            Technologically staggering edifices of near incomprehensible magnificence don’t just pop up, or every culture would have created them.  When you think of all the people who have gone before us, there is scant little evidence to mark their passing, and precious few monuments of them survive.  In a modern world where indoor ski slopes, impossibly tall skyscrapers, massive bridges, and channel stretching tunnels seem commonplace, it is a treat to get to witness an ancient and still inexplicable marvel built in a time when everything was done with hand tools, elbow grease, and lots and lots of vine ropes.  I’m just glad we didn’t live in Pohnpei around 1100 A.D. to see it happen, because they probably would have insisted that we pitch in and help.  

Dawning Truth

            Sunsets and sunrises here are ridiculous. At seven degrees north latitude, when the sun makes its move, there’s no fooling around.  Bang.  It’s up or it’s down.  But that brief period in between is, barring overcast weather, outrageous.  The reds, oranges, pinks, and purples are indescribable as they light up layer upon perfect layer of clouds stretching so far into infinity the earth’s curve is almost perceptible, creating a cineramadome panorama of such heart crushing beauty that I sometimes find myself transfixed, paralyzed until darkness falls. 

            I don’t thrill to the feel of power as I throw a German sedan through winding curves.   There isn’t a theatre showing the new Tarantino flick for a thousand miles.  No one is going to stop by my table to decant an effusively boisterous yet darkly mysterious petite syrah that will nicely compliment a foie gras stuffed rosemary encrusted quail with roasted fingerling potatoes and heirloom tomato roux. I don’t own a phone.  Or keys.  It’s been forever since I danced to live music.  The few minutes of free time I get a day are spent passing out as I read three paragraphs in the same book I’ve been trying to finish for two months.  Internet is a joke here.  I wouldn’t even know how to act on a date.  I’d kill for a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.  But if each of us is allotted a given number of perfect sunsets, I am well into or even over my quota, and I may be cutting into yours.