Kava is a brown, pasty liquid that tastes like grated, juiced raw potatoes with an alkaloid bitterness. It’s a mild drug that provides a high reminiscent of an alcohol-marijuana mix. The restaurant owner brought out a large plastic bucket of kava and two coconut shell cups. After our first shell, the prime minister told me he’d grown up in a village on Pentecost Island, 200 kilometres north of here. As a young man, he’d entered the construction business, done well, become involved in politics, and, presto, been elected to national office. He then suggested we chug a second shell.
As the drug raced to our brains, we found chairs and sat quietly by the sea, watching the evening fall as surf pounded the beach. It occurred to me that I was a journalist and this was a rare opportunity; that I should slip away, grab my tape recorder, and conduct an interview. But the chair felt comfortable, and I didn’t think my now-good-buddy Ham wanted to be interviewed. Instead, I mentally paddled my kayak into the breakers, muscles straining, and foam bubbling up into my sinuses.
Ham must have been lost in a similar reverie. “You know,” I remember him saying, “it’s not so much fun being prime minister. Kayaking is fun. You are having fun. You are travelling like our ancestors did. When I was a boy, I had a dugout canoe, and I would go to the reef to fish. We didn’t have many things, but we always had food. In Vanuatu, every man owns four metal tools: a machete, an axe, a spade, and a curved knife for removing coconut meat from its shell. Some have fish hooks, maybe a speargun. That is all. Everything else comes from the forest or the sea. We use our tools to clear the forest and plant our gardens. We build our houses out of sticks and leaves, without nails. Women own pots, but often they bake food in banana leaves, over hot stones.
“Before I had a construction company, before I became prime minister, we were very poor. But I could do whatever I wanted to do, whenever I wanted. If I wanted to work in my garden, I worked. If I felt lazy, I would sit under a tree and talk to my friends. If I wanted to go fishing, I went fishing. Now that I am prime minister, life is not so much fun. I have a list of things to do every day, and I must do them exactly in a specific order.”
He paused for a while.
“You will be paddling to the islands. People are kind. They will give you food and water — whatever you need. Look at their life and think about what I have said.
“An orderly raced up and handed Ham a cellphone. Several cars drove in and guests spilled out. We never spoke again.
Over the next few days, Nina and I paddled across confusing waves off Devil’s Point and northward along the west coast of Efate Island. We were running low on food, so we made camp, and Nina rested while I followed a narrow path through the jungle toward the village of Siviri.
After a few hundred metres, I passed a banyan tree. Having grown up in northern forests, when I think of large trees the spire-like spruce of British Columbia or the giant sequoia of Northern California usually come to mind. But if large conifers are akin to minarets, a banyan is more like a warrior city state. It competes with its neighbours not by reaching for the sun, but by spreading out, murdering, and acquiring territory. First it dispatches horizontal branches from its central trunk. When the branches become too heavy to support their own weight, they move downward and eventually grow roots to buttress the tree. On their journey from the heights to the dirt, the incipient roots coil around and choke hapless, lesser trees, smothering them before stealing their territory, sunlight, water, and nutrients. When all is accomplished, the twisted and gnarled roots recall serpents or octopi guarding the castle walls.
On my earlier visit to Vanuatu, a man named Wigley took me to a large banyan tree on a more northerly island. He picked up two sticks and beat a rhythm on the soil, which seemed oddly hollow, and then smiled, his white teeth and clear eyes glowing against his black skin and the darkness of the forest. “This tree has power, mana,” he told me. “Can you feel it? Can you hear it talking beneath my drumsticks?” I nodded. “Before the missionaries, people came to this tree for ceremonies,” he said. He drummed on, staring at the earth. “Once, a long time ago, the men from this island paddled out to Pinalum Point, and they killed a man. They brought him back to this tree, built a big fire, and heated stones. Then they cut the man up and baked him in banana leaves on the hot stones.”
