How the Winds Laughed

Pete has begun his projected work of repairing Joe Renga's cushions, which are a washout. In six months the underside cloth has rotted to tatters, and the stitching, in plain cotton thread, is falling apart. For $140 wholesale we should have done better, although they have had rough treatment and been almost constantly wet since we left Santa Barbara. Pete is replacing the black backing cloth with 5-ounce Dacron left over from our sail making. If we need to do a major sail repair job, I guess we'll have to rip apart the cushions. Pete is sewing by hand through the heavy blue material and the Dacron using a sailmaker's needle, a tedious task that I had dreaded. He is using the heavy brown waxed thread. So far he has done the small cushion on top of the lazarette. All of a sudden, whether the black tobacco horrors are gone or whether our talk last night about my telling true and about his working came to fruition, Pete is delving into it like a fiend.

Excerpted from Wa's log

We awoke before dawn to the thunder sound of rain, a very heavy squall. After it subsided we went out, in the gray light, and saw an ominous picture all around us. The wind was freshening. It had swung northerly, a bad sign I thought as I remembered the stories of wrecks on the reefs in Rarotonga during northerly gales. We got down the twins in a hurry. Even under double-reefed main and jib we were doing six to seven knots, and for a while, under the jib alone, we were doing five. We spent most of the day making sail changes and worrying about the weather. Fortunately, the seas never mounted much. We think we were at the edge of the storm.

Excerpted from Wa's log

Saturday morning, as Saua and Tien guided Wa out the pass, Pete wept.
***
Pete had run out of cigarettes and was going through nicotine withdrawal. He spent most of his time reading and holding his breath to cut the tobacco craving. It was as if he’d disappeared into some alternate reality, leaving only the husk of himself behind.
Because the varnish in the cockpit was weathering, I sanded it in preparation for applying three new coats. While I worked, my anger festered at his sloth. Finally, when I’d finished writing two stories for the News-Press, I confronted him.
“I wish you’d do something useful,” I said. “I can’t do it all myself.”
He looked up from Caroline Mytinger’s Headhunting in the Solomon Islands. Sunlight glinted off his glasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes. The only other thing he was wearing was his safety harness.
“Who makes sail changes in the middle of the night? I haven’t seen you up on the foredeck lately.” He hunched his knees next to his chest, as if to protect himself, took off his glasses, and wiped sweat from his face with a towel.
I sucked in my breath. “I’m sorry. That’s fair. But I guess I want a companion, not a zombie.”
Because I seldom criticized him about personal issues, he looked at me as if I’d hit him over the head with a frying pan. “A zombie?” He put down his book, climbed the companionway, hooked his safety harness to the lifeline, and disappeared forward. Hanging on to the forestay, he stared at the horizon for hours. Although he was less than twenty feet from me, he might as well have been on the moon. Even the husk of him had disappeared, and I felt completely alone.

Excerpted from my memoir, How the Winds Laughed

We said goodbye to the headmaster and children and walked across the motu to find Saua and Mrs. Saua at her parents’ house. Her relatives sat outside, some on wicker chairs and others cross-legged on mats. Heat hung on the early afternoon; even the flies were still. The only sound was the roar of breakers on the reef.
After a while the old man called Kaua picked up a coconut and began to whittle pieces of white flesh from it. He threw them onto the ground at the feet of a nearby rooster. The rooster strutted, shook his red comb and white tail feathers, scratched the earth with his claws, and followed the trail of coconut. He was greedy, this rooster, gobbling the coconut, and vain, scratching the earth and glancing around to see which hens were watching.
Kaua threw more coconut, until the bits were in a ring in front of his chair. When the rooster bent to eat, Kaua threw a piece of coconut with his right hand and with his left hand so swift I hardly saw it move pounced upon the rooster’s back.
The rooster squawked, screeched, and bellowed. Placidly Kaua lifted the rooster to his lap and jammed him between his knees. Then he riffled through the tail feathers, pausing every so often to pluck one. Each time he plucked, the rooster squawked. It seemed too much bother to listen to the noise, so someone handed Kaua a pair of scissors.
When Kaua had finished, he asked if anyone else needed white fishing lures. No one did, so he set free the rooster, who wobbled off, shook himself, and glanced around to see if the hens had noticed. Then he strutted off, as cocky as ever. Kaua repeated the performance with a Rhode Island red rooster with shiny green and blue tail feathers.
***
That afternoon, returning to Omoka, we anchored at a reef to dive for pearl shell. The oysters, six to eight inches in diameter, were crusty and the color of coral and, so, very hard to see. The trick was to grasp the shell on its underside, where the edges weren’t sharp, and twist rapidly before the oyster had time to put its foot down. Burdened with the large shells, I soon found swimming difficult. My legs ached, and I felt cold all the way to the marrow of my bones.
Back on the boat, we ranged our trophies along the starboard rail and relaxed with cups of coffee. Besides the large oysters, which were collected for mother of pearl, the men also had brought back one-inch shells, which sometimes contained pearls. They had found no pearls.
“A good diver,” Saua said, “can collect four gunny sacks of one-inch shells in a day and expect to find fifty pearls in a sack of shells.”
“That must be heavy!” Pete exclaimed. “How can he carry all that weight?”
Saua shrugged. “They must be strong. But you couldn’t collect a whole sackful of shells on one breath of air, could you?” He smiled.
“Of course not.” Pete paused. “The divers we met on our second day here said they go to more than a hundred feet. Can you dive that deep?”
Saua laughed. “No. I’m not a professional diver. They usually go for mother of pearl, anyway, which fetches twenty cents a pound. A good diver can earn eighteen to twenty dollars a day going for shell.”
“That’s good money for being in the water from ten in the morning till three in the afternoon,” I said. “Charles Gifford makes much less—thirty dollars a fortnight—as chief of police.”
Saua frowned. “Charles and I are too old to be divers, who are old men by the time they’re forty. Going that deep squeezes your body to pieces.” I nodded, remembering the aching in my legs and the cold that was just beginning to melt away, and Jacques Cousteau’s remark that a diver burns four thousand calories a day. It wasn’t an easy life.

Late the following morning Pete and I went ashore and found Tien. “Could we visit the school?” I asked. “I’d like to see what you and Rakoroa gave up.”
He smiled and led us to a concrete block building stuccoed with coral, where we were met by the headmaster, an earnest young man. He ushered us into his office and sent two boys scurrying for chairs and two others up a nearby coconut tree to fetch nimata. I chuckled at the thought of this strange “teachers’ lounge coffee break,” with the palms stirring in an idle breeze and the roar of water on the windward reef. The noise wasn’t so different from the constant roar of autos on a freeway, but I felt a part of this place; Los Angeles always had felt alien to me.
Outside, during recess, the children played rugby with a coconut husk. The girls, in freshly laundered green uniforms, joined the game with as much spirit as the boys. They didn’t seem to care that they had no ball.
This school went through grade six. For grade seven the children went to Omoka, where they lived with relatives. At the end of that year they took an examination for secondary school. If they passed, they went on to high school in Rarotonga, where they were separated by more than eight hundred miles of ocean from their families.
After recess the headmaster took us into the second grade classroom and a lesson on set theory as an introduction to algebra. The children were attentive and quick, although shy with us at first. Their lesson books were more advanced than my elementary texts had been. And interesting. There were histories of the American Revolution and Westward Movement, tales about Captain Cook and the exploration of the Pacific, stories about New Zealand.
I was so engrossed in a Maori legend that I didn’t notice Pete, Tien, and the headmaster standing over me. “Come and see the library,” the headmaster said.
It was a bare, whitewashed room with half a dozen piles of dogeared paperbound textbooks on the floor. My conscience needled me for coming from the richest country in the world and not doing anything to help those less fortunate.

Tuesday afternoon we restepped Wa’s mast. On Wednesday morning we took the Taruias and Tien sailing to the village of Tatautua, where Mrs. Saua’s family lived, nine miles across the lagoon. Saua took the helm, with Mrs. Saua at his side. There was a good breeze, so Pete turned off the engine as soon as we’d cleared the three shoal patches dead to windward of our Omoka anchorage. Wa’s newly refurbished mast didn’t even tremble in the breeze.
The Sailing Directions warned against navigating lagoons such as Tongareva’s without the aid of local knowledge. Unmarked reefs, shoal patches, and coral heads popped up everywhere. The only navigational aids were sticks, sometimes topped with metal plates, jammed into the edges of the reefs.
Because Tatautua was upwind and we had to tack the nine miles across the lagoon, it was getting on toward dusk before we came up on the village. The green Steuben glass turned the murky green of water off the California coast. As it lost its translucency, we couldn’t distinguish depths.
Suddenly there was a crunch to port, and Wa stopped dead. Pete jumped overboard to port, Tien ran forward, and Saua stood, a statue at the helm. I sprang to lower the main, then the genny.
When Saua recovered his composure, he leapt into the water beside Pete, and they began to push. Wa floated off the coral easily, for it was upwind of her and had just knicked her. Fortunately, the sharp stone had scratched only Wa’s iron keel.
Saua took us the rest of the way to Tatautua under power and kept a sharp lookout. We anchored in blue-green water so clear and still that I saw the coral sand bottom thirty feet down and the sea cucumbers upon it. That night, under a nearly full moon, Wa cast a shadow on the white sand bottom. Bathed in warmth and silence, the night was magic.