Fara Way 14

 “They came off in a fleet of canoes, rested on their paddles, and gave
  the war whoop at stated periods. They were all armed with clubs,
  and meant to attack us, but the magnitude and novelty of such an
  object as a man of war, struck them with a mixture of wonder and
  fear.”
                                           George Hamilton, Pandora’s surgeon, 1791



We spent the last magical days on Rotuma with Julie and the family on the whitest and most peaceful Motusa beach, and the nights in a Fara way kind of narcosis. Robyn had her own pandanus mat by now, and her perpetual motion fan continued to perform its double duty, keeping her cool, and the flies off her face and the watermelon.
“It’s a curse and a blessing.” Said Julie. She saw my puzzled look.
“The isolation.” She said. “But even when the plane breaks down, and the boat doesn’t come, when the shops run out of basics, we still have this, and our love. Fia’ama.” So What.
So what if they lived to eat, and the insects and heat were as thick as each other. They had more than most of us.
“That’s why the ones that came and stayed, stayed.” She said. And she was right.
Our final evening, Julie’s daughters danced for us, in elegant red and white layered dresses, and combed Robyn’s hair, and anointed her with coconut oil, and initiated us both with lei. And then Robyn danced for us as well, and very well. We ate my favorite palusami, and cucumber and crayfish, and steaming octopus with tahroro fermented coconut sauce, and pork, and a variety of stodgy fekei coconut desserts that Robyn adores.
The next morning, before the plane left, we hid along the soft sand roads of Rotuma, secretly hoping that no one would find us in time to take us to the airport. But nothing is secret on Rotuma. The land has eyes. The islanders, passing with light footfalls and low voices in the sand of the road, lingered to observe us, unseen...
We found ourselves on the tarmac, walking toward the Britten-Norman Islander that brung us, and Robyn dissolved into tears. And Julie dissolved into tears. And it wasn’t that long before the pilot sliced up back up into the huge cloud he had that he had found a week earlier, over six hundred kilometers north of the rest of Fiji, sideways, like he was cutting a grey soufflé. It wasn’t that many kilometers Fara way from Julie, when our plane almost stalled. For a moment, my heart stopped, with no defibrillator on board. And then, like some noctural protective ghost from below, it cranked over.
Strummummummummummumm.