Big Money 6

The new rulers conscripted the islanders to modify their ancient footpaths to accommodate wheeled vehicles, and dig a canal across the archipelago. When the Yapese proved unwilling, the Germans painted black crosses on the most valuable rai in the disobedient villages, a symbolic takeover of ownership, to be reclaimed only by in provision of the labor being withheld. The modern financial management was more barbaric than the megalithic culture it was fused with. Even worse, the Germans forbade the Yapese from travelling more than 200 miles from their island, solving the problem of inflation by cutting off supply, and price-fixing the largest money in the world. The one good thing the Germans brought was an end to the highly complex caste seven tiered ranking system that existed among Yap villages, based on violent warfare and inter-village intrigues. Lower ranked villages were required to pay tribute, and prohibited from harvesting and eating more desirable seafood.
Robyn and I moved out of our first accommodation to what would become our favorite, a great family run place further into Chamorro Bay, with a view of the water, and the coconut palm forested hills on the other side. The ESA had opened in the 1970s, but was as good as new. We arranged our books and Honey Crunch cereal and Japanese bottled water on our table looked down from our balcony onto another, full of wrapped Christmas presents for the staff party that evening. The only thing the ESA didn’t have was a corkscrew, so Robyn and I walked back to the Pathway’s bar, to open our bottle of Jacob’s Creek chardonnay for the evening festivities. There was an old State of Yap jeep, filled to the roof with garbage, along the roadway. It was surrounded by splotches of betel nut chew.
And the Spanish had begat the Germans, who begat the Japanese. In 1914 Japan brought rice and infrastructure, and a law allowing Japanese men to marry Yapese women, but not vice versa. The vice continued with the expulsion of all foreign companies and Japanese control over all business, the importation of Chamorros from Saipan to work the phosphate mines with the locals, and the conversion of Colonia into a small Japanese town, the Nipponese and other foreigners outnumbering the Yapese inhabitants. In 1942 they began drafting the islanders into the Japanese military. Luckily, the Americans bypassed Yap, in their ‘island-hopping strategy’ of WWII. Unluckily, they bombed it instead. I posed inside the rusted cockpit of one of the wrecked zeros on the airfield, a good six feet behind where its bent propeller had landed. The sun grew merciless, descending headfirst onto the elaborate floral hearts and crosses, dominating a group of freshly dug graves.
We hiked off into the forest, along one of the betel palm flagstone paths ‘improved’ by the Germans, to an abandoned village on a raised platform, fenced with a malal bank of big money stone discs. Coconut palms of different ages, grew randomly, out of the middle of the dais. Immense wheels stood on edge, like upright Flintstone circular saw blades, surrounded by more organic chickens and taro and yams, and bananas and breadfruit, and papayas and pineapple, and tobacco. I could hear the syncopation of the stick dance and the standing dance, in the stillness of the space. And I thought of how the great ancient navigators had migrated from New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Malay Peninsula, and the Indonesian Archipelago to their new home of Wa’ab, and how some Spaniard had misinterpreted what a native had misinterpreted, when he asked the name of the land, as was told the name of the canoe paddle the native had though he was pointing to.
“Yap.” I said.
“Yep.” Agreed Robyn.
And then Richard appeared out of nowhere, with his goatee and original heavily soiled white T-shirt and far too baggy shorts. Richard was from Oregon, and had come decades ago, because even Oregon was too far from the land and the sea. He lived alone with his solar cell connection to the outside world, just enough to remind him of the sanity he had chosen, instead. He was glad to see us, which you could see upset him, because of his choice had been totally pure, he should not have been so glad. He told us of the five kinds of big money on Yap, and the five main kinds of magicians. Oh, there were magicians for the usual ailments of society and individuals, those with a talent for sickness and epidemics and revenge and affairs of the heart, but these magicians were very expensive and not the five main types, although they used the same eggs and coconut fronds and crabs and bones and plants and small stones, in their magic. But mainly there was Trur, who brought luck in fishing, Plaw, who brought success in navigation, Yaw, who brought victory in war, and Dafngoch, who could increase the population. And finally, who not only brought rain during drought, but could also control typhoons by keeping them away from the islands, or getting rid of them when they came. The material he used was stone, turning it in different ways, to cause rain to come or typhoons to leave. I told Richard that, in my estimation, or all the magicians, it was Ganiniy, who was the underachiever.
Robyn and I rented a car next day, a silver sedan that was fabricated in a place that was totally alien to where we would drive it. Yap was only ten miles long and seven miles wide, and it didn’t take long. The shores were lined with mangrove swamps, and all the villages were located near the shore, in coconut groves. We found thatched bai, with black octopus and sharks on white planks, on leaning yolk yellow pilings, among gigantic red hibiscus, a church with a Yapese Jesus, and Yapese kids swimming together, like nothing had begat anything, and nothing had come headfirst down any trees. But the only thing that was important, was the magnificent Honey Crunch magical chardonnay full moon that Robyn and I sat and marveled at, on our balcony overlooking Chamorro Bay, after midnight, on a flyspeck in Southern Sea.