Fara Way 2

“Welcome to Rotuma.” Said the big frizzy-haired Fijian
stewardess. And we were. In spades.
Down the stairs and just beyond the stone tiki and the long variegated croton hedge and the coconut palms, was a single white Nissen pickup, a ponytail, and the biggest smile in the Southern Sea. She wore a blue shirt and a floral lava-lava, and nothing on her feet.
“Are you Robyn and Wink?” She asked. The odds were rhetorical.
“Are you Julie?” Robyn asked. She beamed.
“These are my three daughters.” She said. And everyone felt like it was a homecoming, for the first time. We all piled in the back of the pickup, and the driver, a friend of the family, took off ahead of us. We bounced along the soft white coral sand road, in and out of potholes, towards Motusa village, near the narrow isthmus. There were seven districts on Rotuma, and Motusa was in Itu'ti'u. We came through another croton hedge, to a simple concrete house with an iron roof, and a full clothesline that went on forever, under the flame trees and coconut palms and breadfruit.
Julie’s husband, John, was smiling as well, as he had laid out two big sharks out front, and was preparing to filet them, for our dinner. The flies were everywhere, and crazy. I didn’t realize until later, that it wasn’t just the sharks. Most of the biomass of Rotuma was flies.
Julie and her family had constructed two new tiny white shacks, with white vinyl siding and powder blue doors. She opened one, and invited us to put our packs inside. There was a sponge mattress on a linoleum floor. In a corner was a box covered with a lava-lava, on which sat a big yellow bouquet of flowers. On the only shelf was a bird of paradise. A pair of bare wires projected through the concrete, above the treated New Zealand pine paneling. Julie handed us two cold green coconuts. It was ecstasy.
We asked if we could go for a walk down the beach. I thought it was a polite formality, and it never occurred to me that, in an island culture so remote and isolated, the idea of separating awhile from your family, real or adopted, might ever be interpreted as antisocial behavior. But, for a brief movement, I saw a sag in Julie’s smile, before it came on again, twice as bright.
“Of course.” She said. “My daughters will go with you.” And six brown feet led the way, six white soles spraying six small plumes of whiter sand in front of us, as we bolted for the water.
We didn’t get very far. The girls watched Robyn and I wade into the lagoon, but they wouldn’t swim themselves. Apparently they didn’t know how. In it or on it, the Rotumans had long since turned their backs on the sea. Most of the fish they ate was out of a tin because, outside the thin reef were hundreds of miles of raging water, and only two or three seaworthy boats, whose outboards could consume a week’s wage in petrol in less than an hour.