A shaded path provided a welcome detour on our descent through lush forests and gardens. We came out at the bakery. Its exterior was lavishly painted in murals of Yapese legends. One in particular, the Legend of the Lizard-Man of Dugor, seemed to dominate.
In the village of Dugor, lived a lizard who could turn himself into a
man. As a man he was very handsome, and every young woman on Yap
was attracted to him. Unfortunately, however, any woman who went
with him to his cave was never seen again. Their families never found
out what had happened to them. After a time, and the disappearance of
several young women, the villagers began to suspect that there was
something not quite right about this handsome young man. One day,
the lizard-man met another beautiful young lady, who promptly fell in
love with him. He thought he would enjoy her company for a while
before eating her, and took her to his cave. When she became hungry,
he brought her foul smelling frogs and crabs and other dead creatures.
Terrified, she remembered the stories she had been hearing about a
suspected lizard-man, and ran away home as fast as she could. The
young woman told her parents about the horrible experience, and the
father thought of a way to deal with the lizard-man, and discover his
identity. He waited for him to come looking for his daughter, and when
he arrived, the father asked the lizard-man to climb a tree and get him
a coconut. Anxious to please the old man, lizard-man climbed the tree.
But as he came down the tree with the coconut, he gave away his
identity, descending headfirst. The father was prepared, with a pole
with a loop at the end, and at just at the right moment he slipped the
loop over the head of the lizard-man and pulled it tight, strangling him.
The lizard-man fell to the ground, dead, and reverted to his true form
as a lizard.
Robyn and I read and obeyed the warning on the entrance. Do not drink beer inside the bakery...Thank you. We walked past a large hardwood carving of a maiden with generous naked breasts. She had a red and white Santa cap on her head. The air conditioning had cooled my ardor, and Robyn had already ordered two coconut tarts, and a Japanese bottle of water from the beer fridge. A valid drinking permit is required to purchase any alcoholic beverage! I think I was less astounded by the fact that you needed a valid drinking permit to buy a beer, than by the fact that the drinking water was imported from Japan, and wondered from where the drinking permits were imported. The bakery seemed to be the hangout for local teenage girls who, between sips of their colas, seemed to be waiting for their own lizard-man to arrive. One of them drove up to the entrance as Robyn and I were leaving, slicked-back hair, sunshades, and a four digit license plate on the rusted bumper of his Japanese Corolla. Yap State... Island of Stone Money.
The next morning, Robyn and I walked along the southern shore, to find some. Hibiscus grew wild along the roadside, humungous flowers as big as your head, sharing the traffic with bird of paradise and a hundred other inflorescences. Here was stone money, large heavy wheels of it, leaning up against rock walls and coconut trees and lining paths, like it was waiting for a ride. And we rubbed it for luck and posed for pictures on it, and we must not have given it a second thought, because of the flagstone path that took us up into the tropical garden and mimosas and big leaf taro above it, and eventually to a truck box painted with a Japanese zero undercarriage, in flight overhead, and back to the I.L.P. restaurant that night, where we offered to pay in stone money.
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