Birdman 10

The fleshy Polynesian lady with the pink skirt, yellow shirt, old boots and floppy hat, looked subjugated and sad, like the indigenous mixed blood and bloodied of Chiloé. The Chileans had treated them the same way. Their cara-cara hawks, circling overhead, were hunting Polynesian rats with the same mainland metaphorical madness.
In 1888, as Alex Salmon and Robert Louis Stevenson were converging on the Tuamotus, as the paramount chief was being poisoned in Valaparíso, and when enough other Polynesians had been extinguished by the epidemics, the Chileans annexed Easter Island. The naval officer responsible, Policarpo Toro, who had also been a second lieutenant in the British Navy, had the main street of Hanga Roa named in his honor. The Rapanui couldn’t miss it, as they were confined within the town by a wall constructed by the Compañía Explotadora de la Isla de Pascua, a subsidiary of the Scottish Williamson-Balfour Company, which had rented the rest of the island as a sheep farm, until the Navy took it back in 1953. They didn’t let the locals out of their gulag until 1960. In the next decade the Rapanui were granted citizenship and, when Pinochet came to power, forbidden to speak their own language.
Two years after Robyn and I arrived, members of the Hitorangi family would occupy the Hanga Roa Eco Village and Spa, a hotel bought from the Pinochet government, in violation of the ancestral ownership of the land. They created a standoff. The titular owner, industrialist Christoph Schiess, of the powerful holding company Empresas Transoceania, had close ties with the former billionaire businessman, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. Schiess, whose name translates as ‘shooter’ in German, and whose father was a German soldier on the Russian front in WWII, would provide the two shuttle buses for the 50 heavily-armed carabineros, Chile’s uniformed police, who would burst into the hotel on an early Sunday morning, six months after the Hitos had occupied the US$800 per night resort. The national motto of Chile is ‘Por la razon o la fuerza.’ By reason or force. The violent actions of the carbineros, on the families and children inside, and in the bloody brutal raids and point blank pellets that came later, would leave little doubt of their loyalty to the mantra.
But that hadn’t happened yet, and the Rapanui and their invaders were still enjoying a measure of entente, when Robyn and I took a last wander around the back lanes of Hanga Roa. We had attended many Sunday church services in other parts of the Pacific, and were usually enraptured by the tight choral singing, that flowed in honeyed harmonies out of Polynesian parishioners. The sound that came out of the rounded mouths and off the outstretched hands of the these worshippers, however, was more tentative, didn’t quite fill the space, and had an oom-pa-pa beat, like the Teutonic martial music of a Latin American army. Heyerdahl’s theory of the direction of corpulent colonization had turned out to be correct. He was just off by a few hundred years.
A mother and daughter rode by on a horse, with a blanket where the saddle would have been, each with a hibiscus behind an ear. A bunch of ripe bananas hung off to our side. They smiled and waved.
Edith had allowed us to hang out at the empty Taura'a, to wait for our flight, on our last afternoon in a deserted Hanga Roa. She and Bill, and everyone else, had left to prepare for their New Year’s Eve party, at their new place in the country. Whatever country that might have been. Robyn and I sat in the open patio, surrounded by hanging bunches of bananas. We played Scrabble until Bill returned, in a hurry to take us out to the airfield. His parting words were not quite profound. “Invest in commercial real estate.” He said.
We lay on the ground beside the runway, in front of a volcanic wall, hand decorated with images of goggle-eye birdmen. The size and power of the Boeing 767 that came out of the sky shook us back into our own time. Halfway up the airstairs, Robyn and I turned to look behind.  We were leaving an island of half as many people as wild horses, the descendents of 36 dead voices who had survived the most intrepid collective ocean journey in human history, ecological disaster and famine, civil war and epidemics, and slave raids and violent imperialism. We found our seats and looked out at the angry clouds of a brooding storm... At this time, make sure your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright position. Also make sure your seat belt is correctly fastened.
Lightning flashed outside. There was thunder. Flight attendants, Cabin Crew, doors on automatic, cross-check and report. We began to roll.
It was then I heard the music, reverberating from our overhead speakers. Wild wild horses couldn’t drag me away...
Like the Rapanui, Rolling Stones...If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask one of our crewmembers. We wish you all an enjoyable flight.
Scary, swirling images, then silence.



                    “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to
                      remake the world- that is the myth of the atomic age- as in being able
                      to remake ourselves.”
                                                                                               Mahatma Gandhi