The Blood in Wineglass Bay 2

“Cascade?” Asked JB, handing me a cold beer. Q. Why is Australian beer served cold? A. So you can tell it from urine.
“You and Robbie have a bed made up in the garage.” Said Deb.
“We think we’ve cleared out all the redbacks.” JB added, referring to one of the indigenous venomous spiders. I asked him why, with a diet that consisted of small insects, their venom had to be extravagantly toxic enough to drop a large horse.
“Tough neighborhood.” He said. “There are no survivors with sissy poison in Tassie.” JB explained that, since the arrival of his convict ancestors, entire species had been shot, hunted or worn into extinction. Facing this type of accelerated evolutionary existential challenge, any red-blooded redback would have automatically developed stronger venom and learned how to hide in the shoes of the invader.
“Either that, or its the justice of a vengeful God.” We shook out our bedding.
Whatever it was that burst through the garage door next morning, landed on my chest like a lost section of the old Tasman Bridge.
“Did you bring me a lolly from Santa?” She asked. I looked up into the eyes of my sugar-seeking niece, relieved that we had bought the jumbo size Toblerone in duty-free. In coming days, the garage would become the secret bolt-hole, where everyone snuck in, to wrap their Christmas presents they had bought for each other, in shifts so no one would see.
And JB and I would head for the water, to provision the family for Christmas Day brunch. He would dive for crayfish and abalone, and then we would drop our lines, for fish. But this was Tasmania, and nothing you hooked, wouldn’t try to hook you back.
“Watch the spines, mate.” JB said, as I pulled up the slimy brown mottled puffy prehistoric Pisces off the bottom. “They’re poisonous.” Like the adjective wouldn’t be surplus.
“Watch the teeth, too.” He said. “Flatheads bite.” I thought of romantic Polynesian words for other fish in the Southern Sea. Mahimahi, kawakawa, ahi, wahoo. But there was only one fish in this Tasmanian water. Flathead.
“Easy to catch, mate.” He said. “They’ll bite everything.” As we would do on Christmas Day.
There was bubbly with orange juice to start the festivities. In Australia, unlike in France, appetizers were called entrées, and for the size of them, could have been. Shiraz and chardonnay accompanied the main course. Debbie had baked a big ham, and assembled several salads, to go with our fish and seafood. And Win, not to be outdone, had three kinds of Christmas ‘pud’ on the table, each one more poisonous that the last. There were rum balls (with rum), trifle (with sherry), and Win’s own homemade Christmas cake (with enough brandy to bring down the new Tasman bridge).
“I like my sweets, Wink.” She said. “And my cuppa tea.” She settled back to watch her family, as full as bulls’ arses in the middle of spring, charge into the new above ground swimming pool, in the back yard. Uncle Wink put a dance CD on the blaster, and everyone waded around the water, churning the water around, waving their arms, in time to the music.

                      ‘This summer I did the backstroke
                       And you know that's not all
                       I did the breast stroke and the butterfly
                       And the old Australian crawl, the old Australian crawl.’

Some of the purest water on the planet is in Tasmania, and its use and abuse has often unleashed a cascade of controversy in a population of rogues and rebels. In the 1970s, as the result of the state government’s announcement of a plan to flood Lake Pedder, the world’s first green party was established. Ten years later a dam proposed on the Gordon River, that would have impacted the environmentally sensitive Franklin River was damned and bulldozed by a populist blockade, resulting in 1217 arrests, and the subsequent imprisonment of almost half of them, for breaking the terms of their bail. In one of the oldest and most notorious penal settlements in the world, they had run out of cells to hold them. Let the Franklin flow, let the wild lands be.
Just east of Hobart, on the other side of the Carlton River, was the family shack on Susan’s Bay at Primrose Sands. Every landscape was a watercolor. We headed there on Boxing Day, and built primrose sandcastles. To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

   “In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans; in one
    aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence.”
                                                                         Khalil Gibran

The Blood in Wineglass Bay 1

                 “Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.”
                                                                                                           Lao Tzu


Water. I keep coming back to Tasmania. Most of those who carved its history only wanted to escape, but I kept coming back. It was elemental. Water and wind and earth and fire. But water first.
Robyn and I returned to Tasmania just over a decade after our banishment by the Medical Council bureaucrats, for the sin of having not attended one of the imaginary schools on their register of recognized epicenters of higher learning. Mr. Lemon was likely long gone, and the scotch-slugging president gynecologist had likely perished in the delirium tremens horrors in front of him.
Familiar faces met our reemergence. Debbie and JB, Robyn’s sister and brother-in-law, also a decade older, greeted us in the arrival hall of the Hobart airport. Their two children, little Kate and Ryan, had stayed at home in Montagu Bay, with JB’s elderly mother, Win. We laughed and hugged each other, the reunion closing the gap of elapsed time in only minutes. Robyn told them of our visit to Jules and Mark in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, just a few days earlier. Julie had been traveling with Robyn when I first met her in Pakistan, and both her and Mark, and his big handlebar moustache, had welcomed me to Sydney, on my first touchdown in the Antipodes. And now they had received us at their wooden shack in the wop-wops, tall tin chimney, corrugated iron water tank and matching roof, and a ballet of giant red kangaroos bounding through their property at dusk.
We drove through the brick bungalow edges of Hobart, across the kilometer-long Tasman Bridge, to the eastern shore of the Derwent. I looked over the side, 200 feet down, where the motorists, who had found out too late that the white line had gone, had also gone, over the gap in the old bridge, created by the pylon collision of the bulk zinc ore carrier, Illawara, and into the watery whirlpool of death below. Of the twelve people killed, five had been occupants of the four cars that drove off, and seven had been crewmembers, trapped and crushed by falling debris. Two drivers managed to stop their vehicles at the edge, but not before their front wheels had dropped over the lip of the bridge deck. They balanced on their automatic transmissions, until they were rescued. Although the loss of life was less than it could have been (it was a Sunday night), the social debonding and isolation that hit the communities of Hobart’s eastern shore, took a toll anyway. In the six months after the disaster, neighborhood quarrels and complaints rose 300%, crime rose 41%, and car theft rose almost 50%. On the western side of the Derwent, crime rates fell.
Squeezed in between Rosny, Rose Bay and Lindisfarne, Montagu Bay was named after one of the usual type of political picaroon that had administered the early days of the penal colony. Algernon Montagu was known as a quarrelsome ‘Mad Judge,’ before he was himself exiled to Sierra Leone, finishing his days with more scandal, a Creole mistress, and two illegitimate children.
The bay named after him had a boat ramp and jetty, filled with yachts at anchor. The trans-Derwent swim, a difficult crossing of almost two kilometers, in incredibly strong currents, began from here. We passed a boatbuilding shed from the early 1920s, and the Clarence War Memorial Pool, covered with a white inflatable bubble. Montagu Bay was fed by a freshwater creek, whose aboriginal dialect word for it, meant ‘drinking place.’

Happy Lucky Welcome Fun 8

                                   “The bikini waxing, after we go there you can't turn back.”
                                                                                                Khloe Kardashian


Our Continental ‘island hopper’ flight left the ‘sunset’ western Ralik chain, for the Marshall Island eastern ‘sunrise’ Ratak chain and capital, Majuro. On the map, it didn’t really look like a country. It looked like a large expanse of empty blue nothingness, with the very odd circular flyspeck of sand, as if you took the number of people visiting Disneyland every day and dusted them over Mexico. There were only seventy square miles of land, chopped into 1200 islets, over an area of three quarter of a million miles.
As well, Marshall Island life existed in one dimension. The narrow sand halos, around most of the vast lagoons, allowed its inhabitants to live only in single file. The pig our taxi hit, on the one ribbon road that encircled Majuro, had nowhere else to run.
Robyn and I had actually landed at Amata Kabua International Airport after sunset. I’m still not sure that Continental had informed our hosts that we were coming. If they had, no one was really paying attention. Its not as if we were bringing them anything they could use. The ‘downtown’ was actually a linear connection of three smaller settlements, code name D-U-D, not a totally inappropriate acronym, given what we were about to experience. In the middle of the dud of Delap-Uliga-Diarrit was our Continental-approved accommodation, the Outrigger Hotel.
The lobby looked promising, with a large central bouquet of flowers beneath a large illuminated inverted breast of a chandelier, under a mural of hand-painted fish stuck on a powder blue ceiling. The desk clerk handed us a room key, and noted that we would have to hurry to the restaurant, if we wanted anything to eat.
Bright and cheery disappeared down a gloomy hallway lined with food scraps, to a dingy box with battered and faded furniture. The carpet was sticky, with the unmistakable musty odor of old vomit. Water dripped from the floor above. The roaches scurried to escape the flick of the bathroom light switch, but the ants continued to circle the sink, headed for no specific destination and less purpose. The water that came out of the tap was brown, and the shower piping had come away from the wall, likely in self-defense. There were no towels. To flush the toilet, Robyn needed to hold down the handle, long enough for me to be given the task to get towels and sort out the water problem. I returned to the front desk.
“There are no towels in the room.” I said.
“People steal them.” He said, handing them over. They were stained. I promised I wouldn’t steal them.
“The water is brown.” I said.
“So is the swimming pool.” He said, handing me a bottle of water, and noting that we would have to hurry to the restaurant, if we wanted anything to eat. I clubbed a roach to death on my way to fetch Robyn. She told me there was now no water, of any color.
The only anything to eat in the restaurant turned out to be pizza, which hadn’t arrived after half an hour of waiting. I asked about the delay.
“The oven is broken.” She said. And then she brought the pizza. It was sticky, and smelled like the carpet. Also, we weren’t supposed to be there.
The Americans we had met had been under the impression that the Marshalls had been ‘taken back’ from the Japanese, but the islands had never been under Washington’s administration, prior to the initiation of the US Trust Territory of the Pacific, after WWII. In fact, the Marshallese had been treated as Japanese subjects, which made perfect sense, since most had been educated in Japanese schools, spoke Japanese, and blended Japanese and local customs in their daily lives. A third of the islanders had Japanese ancestry. At the time of the U.S. invasion, some were applying for full Japanese citizenship, and were likely to have it granted. Some are still nostalgic for the life they enjoyed in the pre-militaristic Japanese era. I know Robyn and I were. If things had been different, we might not have ended up eating soggy pizza, after midnight, in the tropical heat.
Between the complex carbohydrates and the simple light of dawn on the lagoon, was insomnia. I rolled out of bed, and told Robyn I needed to see what I could of Majuro, before out next Continental adventure whisked us on to Kosrae, later that morning. I needed to see the result of how an ambiguous clause in the League of Nations Mandate had elevated the Marshallese into ‘liberated persons under American wardship.’
The beach, that had appeared so paradisiacal, in the first rays of my twilight awakening, was strewn with trash and broken glass. There was a feeling of poverty, and indifference, and indifference to poverty. There was no indifference from the marauding packs of feral dogs, however. They were aggressively alpha American, and I quickly secured a heightened awareness, a bamboo cane, a pocket full of rocks, and an attitude, in order to continue my explorations.
The hand-painted closed shop signs conveyed no small optimism. There was the Welcome Fun Store, where the offer existed, without spaces, to discover the special lowpriceherecanrefundcanchangplywoodclothingsoreforsale. Along the only street possible, I found the Lucky Store, the Happy Store, and the Happy Garage. But then, outside the pastel concrete colors and glass block windows of the Crazy Price Mart was a life-sized plastic facsimile of a coconut tree, with a yellow trunk, and six bright yellow coconuts hanging under as many lime-green fronds, sticking out the top at odd angles, just down the street from a row of real ones. Somewhere, someone, was mass-producing giant plastic coconut trees. These people were doomed.
It turns out that the Marshallese may have been doomed for more than their free association with the extended nuclear family. On Christmas Day in 2008, the government declared a state of emergency in Majuro and Ebeye. Unprecedented extreme waves, from storm surges and high tides, caused widespread flooding and the displacement of hundreds of residents from their homes. The floods hit the cemeteries, dramatically increasing the alarm about public hygiene, and the risk for contagion. The most immediate problem for people that live less than a meter above sea level, is not that their homes will soon be underwater, but that they will be uninhabitable, in less than fifty years. Even occasional ‘overwash’ will salinate the fresh water, and kill the land that their agriculture depends on. Climate change is also slowing the normal annual centimeter vertical coral growth in the protective fringing reefs, through ocean acidification and thermal bleaching. Even the stainless steel flushing mechanism on the urinal in the airport, was cobalt blue corroded from the Southern Sea.
If the Marshallese can’t live on their islands, they will have to relocate; if they relocate, they will no longer have their country. They will lose their identity.
There is one final reason why the Happy Lucky Welcome Fun is about to become a quadruple oxymoron. In September of 2012, the first Ahmadiyya mosque opened in Majuro. The mosque’s imam, Matiullah Joyia, was quick to publicly reject ‘jihad by the sword,’ a reassurance that was undoubtedly received with the most relief by Majuro’s marauding packs of feral dogs. The Muslim community had committed instead to an ‘intellectual jihad of the pen,’ whatever that implies. Meanwhile, the bikini is now banned from the Miss World contest, and Iran is about to get nuclear weapons. Which brings us full circle to Diana Vreeland’s remark. The bikini is the most important thing since the atomic bomb. No, Diana. Bikini is the atomic bomb, and the Marshallese have not only been designated ground zero, they’re about to have zero ground.
In the three-way inundation race between Washington, Wahhabism and water, in the Marshall Island sea world of Happy Lucky Welcome Fun, it’s awash.




   “I now have absolute proof that smoking even one marijuana cigarette
    is equal in brain damage to being on Bikini Island during an H-bomb  
    blast.”
                                                                                        Ronald Reagan

Happy Lucky Welcome Fun 7

Two years later the final American Pacific bomb, code name Fig, was detonated. The Bikinian exile continued another twenty years, until in 1968, some Atomic Energy Commission scientists convinced Lyndon Johnson that the radiation levels at Bikini Atoll no longer offered ‘a significant threat to health and safety.’ Lyndon ordered the 540 Bikinians living on Kili resettled ‘with all dispatch,’ and by the mid1970s, over 150 islanders were living in new houses, and eating breadfruit, coconuts and pandanus from new plantings. In 1977 the scientists realized they had been terribly wrong in their estimates, recording alarming increases in cesium 137 isotope levels in the islanders. Three ships floated them all away on a sea of tears, back to Kili, and to Majuro. The only thought left on Bikini was the sign in the machine shop. We can fix everything except broken heart.
But wait. The scientists were back with two more Happy Lucky Welcome Fun promises in the mid1980s. They had discovered that, by applying large amounts of potassium fertilizer to Bikini’s soil, cesium levels could be reduced ten-fold. Furthermore, this combined with the simple removal of the topsoil layer, would get the Bikinians very close to the 15 millirem safety standard necessary for repatriation. And, there was other good news.
The Bikinians had come into some real money. In 1986, as part of the new Compact of Free Association with the US, they had received $75 million in damages. Two years later, they got another $90 million, designated specifically for radiological cleanup. The compact also set up a Nuclear Claims Tribunal, which meant that their grievances all the way back from the early 1980s, would be heard by a new US court. The Bikinians, ‘if they desired, could go back.’
But the Bikinians had not only been living in a cultural and scientific and financial limbo for over thirty years, for over thirty years they had changed. They were the five thousand children of original 147 of the deep cobalt blue and coconut palms and breadfruit and pandanus. They no longer fished with homemade nail hooks baited with hermit crabs, nor swam in crystalline waters. They were the children of housing and food subsidies and insurance and medical plans and scholarships and health care. They were part of the Marshallese forty per cent unemployment and four per cent population growth and emigration to Oregon and Arkansas. Their trust fund balances were chopped in half by the market crashes of 2001 and 2008, and the critical mass was reached in 2010, when they lost their Nuclear Claims Tribunal case against the US government. The Supreme Court of the United States of America, the country responsible for their 66 year nuclear exile, their starvation, their irradiation and medical experimentation, their five time relocation, the loss of their way of life, and the exploitation of their generosity of spirit, determined that, like Bob and Patti on Pohnpei, it didn’t have the right to rule over international agreements. The nation that had spent twenty billion dollars on the Manhattan Project, fourteen billion dollars on a thousand ICBM launch pads and silos, that had built 67,500 nuclear missiles and 4,680 nuclear bombers, and given the Marshallese the equivalent of 7,000 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs at the rate of eleven a week, producing 104,000,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste, had no jurisdiction over or responsibility for the few Pacific islanders they had so ignobly made permanently dispossessed and homeless. One might think that there could be no better glow, after such a Bikini waxing. But you would be wrong.
According to the Compact of Free Association, the Marshallese are not allowed to shop in the facility stores on Kwaj, or swim in the pools, play on the tennis or racquetball courts, or tee off on the golf course. They’re probably teed off enough, already.
Frankie Avalon hermit crab nailed it, in Bikini Beach.
“Baby.” He said. “I think we associate with a very unstable group.”



               ‘No longer can I stay, it’s true
                No longer can I live in peace and harmony
                No longer can I rest on my sleeping mat and pillow
                Because of my island and the life I once knew there
                The thought is overwhelming
                Rendering me helpless and in great despair.’
                             Lore Kessibuki, Rongerik horror, 1946

Happy Lucky Welcome Fun 6

The first blast, code-named Able, was a bit of a dud. The bombardier had missed his target. Baker, the second detonation, drove a half mile wide column of water into the sky in less than a second, falling as millions of tons of atomized reef and ocean collapsing back in the lagoon, sinking the 26,000 ton battleship Arkansas, and lifting the stern of the 880 foot Saratoga 43 feet in the air. Harry had his proof.
Meanwhile, 125 miles away, the Bikini islanders waiting patiently on Rongerik, had discovered that the reef fish were poisonous, the island’s coconut trees had been damaged by fire, and there wasn’t enough water. Benign neglect was turning to tragic neglect, and starvation set in. They tapped Uncle Sam on the shoulder. Are we there yet? Unfortunately Uncle Sam had discovered that Baker’s shock wave had released massive amounts of radiation, and saturated the soil of Bikini with cesium 137. The isotope’s half-life was thirty years. No one but the Americans was going home anytime soon. They moved the Bikinians to Kwaj, and let them camp out on a small strip of grass next to the runway. A few months later, they relocated them again, this time to the island of Kili, to a different kind of disaster. Kili was a true island, no coral fringing reef, no protected lagoon, no forested outer islands to fish and hunt, just the big breakers of the Southern Sea crashing up against rocky shores. Fishing was almost impossible. They began to starve again, saved only by an emergency airdrop.
In 1952, the first US hydrogen bomb, Ivy Mike, vaporized the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak group and, two years later, the Americans detonated another load of happy lucky welcome fun on Bikini. Because they thought that one of the isotopes, lithium 7 was inert, and it wasn’t, the force of the resultant explosion would be underestimated by a factor of four. On March 1, 1954, Bravo blasted into a crimson15-megaton thermonuclear hydrogen fireball almost five miles wide within the first second, seen and felt on Kwaj over 400 kilometers away, the equivalent of a thousand Hiroshimas, and the largest US nuclear detonation in history. Expanding at 330 feet per second, the mushroom cloud was 9 miles high and 7 miles wide within the first minute, and 25 miles high and 62 miles wide, within the first ten. It raised the temperature of lagoon to 99,000 degrees, and vaporized three islands in the atoll. The crater was over a mile wide and 250 feet deep.
Bravo killed every living thing in the air, on land, and in the sea for miles around. The fallout cloud contaminated more than seven thousand square miles of the Pacific, and included some of the inhabited surrounding islands. Three to four hours after the blast, the sixty-four inhabitants of neighboring Rongelap Atoll, watched in wonder as two inches of snow-like ash covered their island. Children played in it. People drank water saturated with it. Their eyes burned, and their arms, and legs and necks swelled. Vomiting and diarrhea followed.
The Americans had not bothered to tell the Rongelapese about the bomb. They also hadn’t informed the crew of the Japanese boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), which had been fishing for tuna in supposedly safe waters. Six months later chief radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died of radiation sickness.
The other fallout came from Project 4.1, the medical study of those Bikini Atoll residents exposed to Bravo’s radiation. After the end of the Cold War, the Clinton administration declassified a number of secret documents about the test, which revealed that (1) The military knew that the winds were going to change, and detonated the device anyway, (2) The US had planned beforehand to implement the medical study, an admission of exposure premeditation, (3) It had injected radioactive substances into Rongelap residents and fed them radiation-containing drinks. Despite the adjudication of ‘acceptable fallout,’ the Marshallese, exposed to 4 times the radiation experienced by residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, began to suffer from birth defects, and die from cancer at accelerated rates. By 1956, the Atomic Energy Commission regarded the Marshall Islands as ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world.’

Happy Lucky Welcome Fun 5

Robyn and I were headed from Pohnpei to Kosrae, but Continental, being the large landmass landing that it was, missed it, and we ended up in the Marshall Islands instead. Our entry point was the Kwajalein Atoll, or ‘Kwaj,’ as the American military missile expert sitting next to me referred to it, just before he deplaned. And that was the second reason we weren’t supposed to be there. Because Kwaj, at 2174 square kilometers, was the planet’s largest lagoon, and the site of the Reagan Test Site, the biggest missile catcher’s mitt on Earth.
“All nonmilitary personnel must remain on the aircraft.” Said the stewardess. I hadn’t realized we were personnel. It felt more like we were impersonnelators.
There were some nonmilitary personnel that were getting off the plane, however. These were local Marshallese, who lived outside the Reagan Test Site area, in the adjacent Slum of the Pacific island-city of Ebeye. Over 13,000 residents lived in abject poverty, on 78 acres of semi-permanent project housing, in one of the most densely populated places in the world. It had been like flying over Soweto.
Every flimsy shack had up to forty inhabitants. Whatever Marlon Brando had said about privacy entitlement on Tetiaroha, hadn’t sailed over on any stick and shell charts to these people. The gutters were full of aluminum cans, and the storm drains clogged with rainy season dirt.
Natives and migrant workers went from undersized children to supersized hypertensive diabetic adults, from the ramen noodle and American potato chip and candy bar and cola junk food downtown diet. Some of it had paradoxically saved some lives, four years before Robyn and I arrived.
Ebeye’s drinking water came over from the US military instillation in trucks, already chlorinated, but apparently not enough. The citric acidified sugar bomb powdered drink mixes, which some residents added to the liquid, had killed the cholera that had killed their neighbors.
The other lethal liquid that was killing them was alcohol, which accounted for most of the criminal acts, and practically all of the suicides. Ebeyites killed themselves at a rate of ten times that of the suicide rate in the States. A third of the population tested positive for syphilis, and AIDS was on its way.
For 1800 years before the Spaniards decided they owned them, the Marshallese had lived a tranquil existence in the sun and waves, on a diet of fish and coconut meat, in thatched huts to keep out the rain and wind. But then the worlds of the third and the first collided. In 1788 a British convict transport captain named John Marshall cruised through, on his way to China, and named the islands ‘Lord Musgrave’s Range,’ before his own name was attached. Spain sold them to Germany in 1885, which ceded them to Japan in 1914, until the Americans overran everyone in 1944.
And paradise went from free, to commoditized, to lost- mournful, monotonous, and superficial. Ebeye is less than a mile long and about 200 yards wide. Trees and plants are scarce. Children swim off the crumbling pier, in water polluted by human waste and ‘pampered’ by disposable diapers. Sores on faces and bodies are common. They seldom return to school after lunch, if there is any. Instead, they play on run-down basketball courts, or bicycle aimlessly. Their older brothers kill time in a similar manner, circling the island in already rusted new vehicles, air conditioner and boom-box hip-hop cranked, all day every day, headed for no specific destination and less purpose. There is only one gas station and no service station. The minimum wage was a flat two dollars, and cash was king.
From the serenity and symbiosis of breadfruit trees and coconut trees pandanus trees and flame trees with brilliant red blossoms where, on the Eastern ‘towards dawn’ Ralik chain, the island of Kuwakleen had actually been named Ri-ruk-jan-leen for ‘the people who harvested the flowers,’ with an uncrowded way of life that included raising pigs and chickens and fishing and collecting snails, had become a prison.
After more than 40 years of American control, the metal and plastic and glass ‘benign neglect’ garbage was dumped where it fell, forming ugly rings around the Marshall Islands.
It’s not as if the Americans were deliberately trying to kill them. It was simply that they were measuring how they would die, in the lethal environment they had decided to create for them. Some of the outer island migrants that had been relocated to Ebeye had come from the place that had given Diana the name of her swimsuit- the group of atolls that had originally been named in 1529 ‘Los Jardines,’ The Gardens, by Spanish explorer Alonso de Salazar, arriving on his ship Florida, to the first place in the Marshalls he had been received with gifts, rather than stones, from amazing 30-foot outrigger canoes that could hit over 20 miles per hour. Bikini.
Between 1946 and 1958, the Americans did what any civilized liberating force would have done. They detonated 67 nuclear weapons in the ‘Pacific Proving Grounds.’ In August of 1945 what Harry Truman was trying to prove was that he could sink a warship at sea with an atomic bomb. He sent 42,000 military personnel, 242 ships, 156 aircraft, 300 cameras with 18 tons of film, and 1.3 billion dollars to sink 95 ships (including the Nagato flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto had launched the attack on Pearl Harbor), 3,350 rats, goats and pigs, sheared and smeared with suntan lotion, to the ground zero waters of Bikini lagoon, in the most spectacular and expensive science experiment in history. He called it Operation Crossroads. The local US military governor had persuaded the 167 dutifully Christian Bikini Islanders to leave their remote idyllic paradise temporarily, ‘for the good of mankind and to end all world wars.’ They were shipped 125 miles east to Rongerik Atoll and given a few weeks’ worth of food, with cheerful assurances that they could return as soon as the tests were over. No one could imagine that they would never come back.

Happy Lucky Welcome Fun 4

                                “The bikini waxing, after we go there you can't turn back.”
                                                                                          Khloe Kardashian


Our Continental ‘island hopper’ flight left the ‘sunset’ western Ralik chain, for the Marshall Island eastern ‘sunrise’ Ratak chain and capital, Majuro. On the map, it didn’t really look like a country. It looked like a large expanse of empty blue nothingness, with the very odd circular flyspeck of sand, as if you took the number of people visiting Disneyland every day and dusted them over Mexico. There were only seventy square miles of land, chopped into 1200 islets, over an area of three quarter of a million miles.
As well, Marshall Island life existed in one dimension. The narrow sand halos, around most of the vast lagoons, allowed its inhabitants to live only in single file. The pig our taxi hit, on the one ribbon road that encircled Majuro, had nowhere else to run.
Robyn and I had actually landed at Amata Kabua International Airport after sunset. I’m still not sure that Continental had informed our hosts that we were coming. If they had, no one was really paying attention. Its not as if we were bringing them anything they could use. The ‘downtown’ was actually a linear connection of three smaller settlements, code name D-U-D, not a totally inappropriate acronym, given what we were about to experience. In the middle of the dud of Delap-Uliga-Diarrit was our Continental-approved accommodation, the Outrigger Hotel.
The lobby looked promising, with a large central bouquet of flowers beneath a large illuminated inverted breast of a chandelier, under a mural of hand-painted fish stuck on a powder blue ceiling. The desk clerk handed us a room key, and noted that we would have to hurry to the restaurant, if we wanted anything to eat.
Bright and cheery disappeared down a gloomy hallway lined with food scraps, to a dingy box with battered and faded furniture. The carpet was sticky, with the unmistakable musty odor of old vomit. Water dripped from the floor above. The roaches scurried to escape the flick of the bathroom light switch, but the ants continued to circle the sink, headed for no specific destination and less purpose. The water that came out of the tap was brown, and the shower piping had come away from the wall, likely in self-defense. There were no towels. To flush the toilet, Robyn needed to hold down the handle, long enough for me to be given the task to get towels and sort out the water problem. I returned to the front desk.
“There are no towels in the room.” I said.
“People steal them.” He said, handing them over. They were stained. I promised I wouldn’t steal them.
“The water is brown.” I said.
“So is the swimming pool.” He said, handing me a bottle of water, and noting that we would have to hurry to the restaurant, if we wanted anything to eat. I clubbed a roach to death on my way to fetch Robyn. She told me there was now no water, of any color.
The only anything to eat in the restaurant turned out to be pizza, which hadn’t arrived after half an hour of waiting. I asked about the delay.
“The oven is broken.” She said. And then she brought the pizza. It was sticky, and smelled like the carpet. Also, we weren’t supposed to be there.