Islands, Paradise and Change

In the last few months, two significant personal anniversaries passed: my 55th birthday and the 15th anniversary of the beginning of my life as an expatriate. When I turned 40 (one of those landmark birth dates like 21, 30, and 50), my life was already spinning on an orbit that I hadn’t planned – my son had left my home to finish his senior year in high school with his mother, my third wife had left me for a career free from my less than supportive comments, and I had been offered a job teaching in a small international school in the highlands of New Guinea where an American mining company had carved out a small town as the base for their gold and copper operations. With my personal life in disarray, a move to a remote island seemed like a sign from the heavens. I took Horace Greeley’s advice to “Go West, young man!” to heart in spite of being somewhat past what I considered to be the “young man” years, and I set off for life in the jungle.

When the two anniversaries arrived recently, I was wrapped up in the daily activities of my current teaching job on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia – yet another mining company. It was only with the discovery of a long-forgotten book, Savage New Guinea that I began to reflect on the past 55 and 15 years of my life. The book has an inscription from an old colleague from my days as a graduate student in anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. The short inscription reads, “ A present for Bruce from Lee, fellow travelers.” Lee and I had done fieldwork in the same area during the same period in a rural, mountain area in northern California. Upon discovering the book, I realized that I had never finished reading it, and began to do so.

The Danish author, Jens Bjerre, was a former newspaper editor who reinvented himself as an explorer. Bjerre’s New Guinea book, published in 1964, is amply illustrated with color photographs of tribal residents of the highlands. The book’s dustcover notes that Bjerre “…often shares their life, sleeps in their huts and eats their food…the expedition was twice attached by armed natives and Jens Bjerre himself was wounded by an arrow.” As I read the dustcover, I could remember the bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley where Lee and I had scouted for books before my move to the jungle. This one seemed lurid enough to give me something to compare my future experiences to.

The first chapter of the book starts, as do many travel books, not in the destination, but in the process of reaching the destination. Thus, we get a chapter on the “South Seas paradise” of Tahiti that Bjerre notes is renowned as the “island of love.” Bjerre treats the reader to a description of the treats awaiting the intrepid traveler with the brown-skinned beauties. (Actually he comments that the “pure Tahitian” women is not beautiful at all, but the women who are a mix of Chinese and Polynesian are the most beautiful women in the world.) Bjerre’s “anthropological” descriptions of the Tahitian woman note that they are childlike in their simplicity, easily amused, faithful for the time that they are with a partner, but ready to move on to another partner when the time comes. He recounts his meeting with an elderly American businessman who took up with a vahine and sold his business in the States so that he could live in bliss in paradise. The rest of the book describes his encounters with various tribes in the highlands of New Guinea.

The reason that I bring Bjerre’s book up is more the first chapter than the rest of the book. It is the notion of paradise, free love, the simplicity of life in the tropics that most interests me about Bjerre’s writing. For these are some of the same notions that I held, in spite of my anthropological training, when I first came to Irian Jaya, and then just four months later to the island of Bali – another “paradise” (often mistaken in popular myth as being in the South Pacific). I’ll come back to a few more of Bjerre’s comments later in this article. For now, I want to discuss the concept of tropical paradise.

I consider these topics while sitting under a makeshift shelter of a few bamboo poles and a piece of plastic tarp on the back of my land in Sumbawa while watching my construction crew work on finishing my new house – my latest house – the last house. A troop of monkeys screeches in the bush off to the right that borders our property. A half dozen eagles float in the clear sky looking for meal. A southern wind cools me as the sun travels through the sky up to its noon position. Sumbawa is one more island that presents itself as a paradise. But what is paradise for the foreigner? This certainly isn’t the island of love that Bjerre wrote about – no bare-breasted Tahitian vahines flirting with the foreigners. Sumbawa isn’t even Bali, another of the fabled islands of love with bare-breasted Balinese women gazing doe-eyed at the gaping foreigner.

So what is it that makes a paradise for the Westerner? Let’s make a list: warm weather – the tropics; palm trees, coral reefs, warm seas.

I’ll finish this later in the week.

Another Friday

I haven't had much time to post anything here during the week - just too busy as is usual. I wanted to write something about living in the tropics, but I just haven't been able to get around to it. At least it's Friday. Tomorrow is the last baseball game and then my time is my own again for another year, or until I leave here.