Ron Tanner, chair of the Writing Department at Loyola College-Maryland, won a grant from the National Parks Service to help Marshallese college students preserve the oral culture of the Marshall Islands. He’s spending the 2008 spring semester (5 months) on Majuro to direct this pilot program, called the Marshall Islands Story Project. To get the full story of his personal experiences, be sure to check the archives to your left.

I feel like a creep when I do it. Call me tourist, ripalle, houle, gringo, vampire–who am I to intrude on people’s lives, aiming my lens at their talking with a neighbor, their grooming of a child, their cooking of a meal? The Marshall Islands is a gorgeous, thoroughly photogenic place—the people are attractive and interesting, their clothes and houses colorful, their islands otherworldly. I won’t be here long and I don’t know that I’ll ever get back. So I’m compelled to capture it all, every photo a firefly in a jar. But half the time I lack the nerve.

The phrase “taking a photo” is more accurate than we acknow- ledge. The truly good photo, we’ve been taught, is candid. So the truly good photographer is a voyeur. A sneak. A spy. Worse, he’s a thief. As I stroll through the neighborhood adjacent to my motel, my camera slug around my neck, I keep the camera turned on. When I stop, I pretend to be occupied with checking it, examining buttons, fiddling with the aperture. It’s a ruse. I’m stalling. Then, when it seems no one is looking, I raise the camera and shoot. Sometimes I’ll take a long shot, maybe from across the street, then extract the close-up at home. You can do that with high resolution. In any case, I’m stealing images from private lives. The usual rationale is that anything happening in a public space is fair game. But that’s not how it feels.

What I don’t want—what no self-respecting photographer wants—is the subject to see the camera. Then he or she will smile and all I’ve got is a snapshot. A hi-ya! pic. It’s worthless. Mind you, I love photos. When I’m pouring them into my Photoshop program, I’m thrilled. Always in the batch I find a shot that’s much better than my ability. It’s not simply that I want to document my experience. I want to capture something that may evoke interest and emotion in viewers. This is what makes photography an art obviously. Ultimately, it’s not about stealing a piece of somebody’s life, it’s about making something of a singular moment. So I should lighten up, shouldn’t I?

I’m working with a Nikon point-and-shoot. It’s a good camera but not professional by any means. A professional would find it simplistic. But I still haven’t figured out all it can do—in part because I don’t have patience for reading instructions. Just the other day I was sitting in a interview, where my jobwas to run the video-cam, the audio recorder, and take still photos. Taking still photos is an easy task. But after every snapshot, my camera made a mouse-like squeak to acknowledge its work. This went on for an hour—snap/squeak!snap/squeak!—at which point I decided I could turn off the irritating noise. After some investigation, I did.

Another time I was at formal ceremony where I had the opportunity to take a candid shot of some nuclear testing survivors. I chose a discreet setting, then aimed my camera. Suddenly the flash popped up and I strobed the side of my neighbor’s face. Which I’m sure he appreciated. Such experiences epitomize my relationship with this camera. I can hardly control the thing. Worst of all, because this is a digital camera, I have to wait for it to process the information—which might take up to 4 seconds, during which time I lose great shots. If I take a photo of someone jumping into the water, all I get is the splash, never the jump.

Last month I went out to gather photos as one might gather food from a field. I had yet to walk through this, my own neighborhood. It’s crowded, the plywood and cinderblock houses hunkered in the shade of breadfruit trees and coconut palms. Small children are everywhere, playing. Some pay attention to me, giggling as they succeed in eliciting a wave or a yokwe! from me. Others are too occupied with their games. I pass a sleeping hog under a bush. I hear the ocean crunching at the shore, just behind the houses to my right. But I can’t bring myself to take a shot.

Then the fast approaching shadows of two figures behind me tell me I’m not alone. These are two young ripalle men wearing dark trousers and white, short-sleeve shirts—and neckties. Yes, neckties. They’re Mormons. There are a lot of young Mormons on Majuro, I’ve noticed. We exchange pleasantries. Turns out I’m talking to Brother Chris and Brother Jones. They’ve been here two years. I ask, “Have the people been receptive to your message?”

“Oh, yes,” brother Chris says. “They’ve been wonderful.”

“It’s a very Christian nation,” I observe. “It may be the most Christian nation in the world. I’ve never seen so many churches.”

“As many churches as take-outs,” Brother Jones jokes.

This brings to mind the reality of what they’re doing here. Let me be blunt: if these well-meaning young men are in a thoroughly Christian country, then why do they bother? At bottom, they’re nothing more than pitchmen striving to get the locals to switch brands. I could start a Church of the Modern Day Saints and compete with them. How about a Church of the Living Saints? the Wanna-be Saints?

The two Mormon men gently inquire about my circumstances. I quickly reveal that I’m a teacher from a Jesuit university. Translation: don’t mess with the Jesuits.
They nod appreciatively. Then we’re at their car. I’m surprised they have a car. In the States, they’re usually riding bicycles. I ask to take their photo. I should note that sometimes I DO ask people if I can take their photo, especially people who are doing work. Brother Chris says he needs a minute to wipe the sweat from his face. I tell him not to bother. We’re all sweating.

After the Mormons drive away, I feel determined to get some good photos. Compared to how intrusive these fearless proselytizers are, what harm can a geeky tourist do? For every five great pictures I see—a teenaged girl reading a book as she reclines against a lime-green wall, a small child on his back playing with a puppy, a mother braiding her daughter’s hair, a boy wrestling with an umbrella, a group of girls playing volley ball—I get one, if I’m lucky. Try as I might, I still don’t have the nerve to stand and gape, much less frame a photo, focus, then shoot.. I get off some good shots nonetheless. The Marshallese are so damned nice about it. They simply smile when they catch me tip-toeing through a yard or stumbling on one of their gatherings. Inevitably we exchange a greeting and a friendly nod. In another life, I will come back as a bug in a little boy’s jar, I am convinced.

But here’s a lesson to consider. I was pedaling home from the college one wet afternoon when I saw a huge sea turtle overturned in somebody’s front yard. I didn’t have my camera with me. So I pedaled on. Then I turned my bike around. My camera was just half a mile away in my office at the college. Didn’t I want a shot of this unusual sight? Nah. It was kind of depressing and I was eager to get to my dinner. So I turned around again and resumed my pedal home. But then I thought: wait, when will I ever have the opportunity to capture such a sight? It wasn’t a pretty sight, but that’s what made it interesting. If nothing else, it was culturally authentic. All right. So I turned around yet again, pedaled back to the college, fetched the camera, then returned to the yard.

I was sweating profusely when I dismounted finally, camera in hand. The overturned turtle was huge—over two hundred pounds and as big as an office desk. Though I saw no wound, he seemed to be dead. An old man with a cane stepped from the house. I asked him about the turtle. He said it came from an outer island and was caught either when it crawled ashore or was found idling in the shallows. What I didn’t know but would learn later from Newton is that an overturned turtle in someone’s yard signals a traditional feast for a very special occasion. The old man not only spoke English fairly well but seemed quite articulate. I decided he could make a great contribution to the Story-Telling Project, so I introduced myself, briefly explained what I was doing on Majuro, then asked him if Newton and I could talk with him about his life. He said that’d be fine. I wrote down his name (he showed me his driver’s license), then I took a photo of him with the turtle.

I was startled to discover that the turtle was very much alive. As the old man touched it with his cane, it flapped its flippers futilely. He said it would be baked in the ground. The sight of the ancient, overturned creature broke my heart, but I wasn’t about to betray my sentiment. And don’t you dare get sentimental either—unless you’re willing to stop eating hamburgers and chicken nuggets and pepperoni on your pizzas. It’s not like everybody on Majuro has a giant overturned seat turtle in his front yard. This is a rare sight. As I continued talking with the old man, he revealed that he is an irooj—a chief. A bead of sweat dangling from the tip of my nose, I told the chief that I was honored to meet him. I was thinking, holy cow, wouldn’t it be great to get an irooj interviewed for the project?

After I returned to my room, I phoned Newton and told him I’d met an irooj. “That’s our irooj,” he informed me, “the one I’ve been trying to get to for permission to visit Wotje!” Ever since we decided to visit Wotje—which is in the eastern, “Sunrise” chain of islands—Newton has been talking about securing permission to take this field trip. If you want the full cooperation of the people on an outer island, make sure you have permission from their chief. But the man I met is no ordinary chief. He happens to be a high chief: chief of the entire Ratak chain. Newton hadn’t been able to approach this high chief because Newton isn’t of sufficient rank, so—thanks to my urge to steal yet another photo–I was able to make contact with precisely the man we needed to see and we have since secured his permission to visit Wotje atoll. He’s going to send his nephew with us. Now we have to convince the chief to give us an interview.

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Ron Tanner, chair of the Writing Department at Loyola College-Maryland, won a grant from the National Parks Service to help Marshallese college students preserve the oral culture of the Marshall Islands. He’s spending the 2008 spring semester (5 months) on Majuro to direct this pilot program, called the Marshall Islands Story Project. To get the full story of his personal experiences, be sure to check the archives to your left.

I got in late last night because Newton and I finally tracked down Letallik, a story-teller who had been eluding us for weeks. The old man divides his time between Arno and Majuro. When we were on Arno, he was in Majuro. When we returned to Majuro, he was on Arno. When we found him at last, he was in the mood to talk, so we sat with him behind Newton’s house—Newton’s sandy yard ends at the water’s edge, under two huge lukej trees. Letallik (his name means “man who walks on oceanside”) sat on the sea wall, the dark lagoon behind him. He is a short, slight man with a full head of silver hair. It’s clear that he was quite handsome in his youth. As a young man on Jaluit, he lived through World War II. Jaluit was the Japanese headquarters for the southern Marshalls and has some notable war ruins.

One of Letallik’s stories recounts how he and a young Japanese officer on Jaluit became friends during the war. When the Americans blockaded the atoll, the Japanese ordered the Marshallese to stop harvesting their breadfruit and coconuts and such. The Japanese wanted control of all food. Soon everyone was starving, even the all-controlling Japanese, and everything edible—even a single coconut—was rationed on penalty of death. One day the officer-friend asked Letallik to climb up and get him a coconut because he could not stand the hunger. Though weak from hunger himself, Letallik obliged him. (Note how the Marshallese will do anything, even risk their own lives, for a friend.) Letallik made it to the top of the tree, but was unable to hold onto the coconut. The nut fell with a crash into the brush. The noise drew the attention of a Japanese officer who happened to be scouting on the nearby beach. He shouted for Letallik to stop, then he pulled out his pistol and took aim. Letallik was certain that this was his end. But his officer-friend, obscured by the undergrowth, shot the other officer dead. They stripped the dead man, buried his clothes, then dragged away the body along the waves’ edge, where the water would wash away the blood. They laid him in the current between islands, then weighed him down with stones until high tide came and swept him out to sea.

There’s more, but you get the idea. Very striking stuff. Our goal is to meet with at least three story-tellers a week for the next two months. This means that I have to be ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice and follow Newton when he finds who he’s looking for. Making appointments is often useless. As Newton and I are now increasingly on the run, it’s impossible to bring the students on every interview. But the students are very involved and a couple have had the opportunity to conduct the interview themselves (everything’s in Marshallese). I have to be careful, though. I asked one student to ask a former senator about his role in the formation of the country. Those were my words, “the formation of the country.” The student ended up asking him about the geological formation of the atolls. When I heard the interviewee mention “volcano,” I knew we were off track. We straightened it out after I rephrased the question: your role in creating the Republic?

My students are in the midst of translating the stories we brought back from Arno. This involves transcribing the stories verbatim into Marshallese. Then translating this into English. They’re doing this in groups, huddled around the computers as one student types while the others confer, debate, and decide what’s being said and how it’s spelled. The recordings are digitized and played back on Media Player, which makes transcription fairly fast because the player is easy to pause and rewind. Newton will work with them on the final draft. It promises to be a great teaching moment because he’s an elder who brings both cultural and linguistic expertise. Speaking of recordings: by far the project’s best buy was an Olympus digital recorder. It’s about half the size of a cigarette pack, runs for 12 hours on a single AAA rechargeable battery, and stores up to 555 hours of audio. We could keep the entire project on the thing, though I dare not. I download every night.

The class showed off its websites at the college’s Foundation Day, when students from Majuro schools are invited to see what college is about. We lined up our laptops and visiting students were able to tour each 3-page website. These were my students’ mid-term projects and feature personal elements, such as snapshots from Arno, as well as story-telling elements, such as a family story that each student had to translate.

As web-designers, my students have competence so far in basic HTML to make website tables, banners, navigation bars, and buttons—plus they’re wizards at Photoshop. This week they’ve moved to CSS, cascading style sheets, which will change their world. By the semester’s end, a month away, they should be fairly self-sufficient. We’re almost to the point where I can step back and watch them run. In fact, a couple are running already and helping the others. That’s a critical component in the teaching—letting them teach each other. It’s a blast hearing one or more across the room exclaim “Oh!” as he or she gets it at last.

It was a blast too watching them show younger students what a website does. Though there’s internet on the island, this technology is out of reach for nearly everybody. Very few students have access to a computer outside of school. As far as I can tell, nobody on the island has worked with Dreamweaver. That doesn’t mean students aren’t adept if given the chance. My own students surprised me with their abilities when we were on Arno. We were lounging around camp one afternoon when I heard music drifting from one of the students’ cameras. And then I heard music rising from another. What gives? I asked. They showed me: they had discovered that each comes equipped with software to make slide shows with music. So that’s what each student had done, made a slide show on the camera’s view screen. I had no idea the cameras could do that—and I bought the cameras.

My motel—the “resort”–has been rationing water for two weeks. We get the wet stuff between 6-9:00 in the morning and 6-8:00 at night. Worse, the hot water has disappeared completely. If I want hot water, I have to microwave it in a bowl. When faced with a cold shower in the morning, I start having second thoughts about the benefits of air-conditioning. Though we get rain twice a day, it’s not enough to supply 25,000 people on this small island. But rationing is not universal. The hotel up the road isn’t rationing water, I’ve heard. I’ve taken to storing a couple of gallons for daily use. But there’s no getting used to it. Too often, I find myself at the sink, my hands open and waiting and the faucet gargling and choking, unable to give me what I want.

I phoned my mother this week. She’s been having nightmares and calling Jill nearly every day to voice her worries. I regret not phoning her sooner. I was trying to save money. But talking to Mom’s worth any amount, I remind myself. My computer phone program, I’ve discovered, allows me to access conventional phones for about 20 cents a minute. A bargain. I’ve promised Mom I’ll phone her weekly from now on. She says she sent me an envelope of money a month ago when the grant still had not come through. I’d warned her not to because the mail here is unreliable. I never got the envelope. “Oh, well,” she said, “I’m sure the person who got it appreciated it.”

I haven’t seen Jill in two and a half months. She can’t get her passport until she gets her birth certificate, which she still hasn’t received, even though—after weeks of run-arounds–she sent in for “expedited” service. In the age of information, you’d think things would go faster. We’re running out of time because my calendar gets busy in May and June, as the project comes to a close. Actually, the end will be the beginning—if all goes well. Newton and I are exploring ways to sustain the project. This has been the aim all along, to show how and what could be done so that it can continue. Otherwise, what’s the point? I’ve pledged my support to the project for however long it may need my help. But, come July, the project will have a new—Marshallese—director.

Sustaining programs is the Republic’s greatest challenge. It’s a small nation, keep in mind. Resource analysts have come up with a formula for how well a population of a certain size can produce enough college-educated adults to build and sustain the country.
With only 63,000 people in the nation, the Republic of the Marshall Islands is at the low end. This is why the ripalle run the College and so many Chinese, Filipinos, Australians, New Zealanders, and other outsiders have businesses here. They are filling in the gaps. It gets complicated. Talented Marshallese students, like those in my courses, move on to four-year colleges in the States and many never come back. If they do come back, they may not find work. Even when there is work available, the customs of hierarchical privilege and familial influence may frustrate their efforts.

The second check for the grant is three weeks late. But Josepha, the director of the Historic Preservation Office, informs me that it’s on its way. She explained that when the money disappears as it has in my case, it’s been “reprogrammed,” a term that makes her roll her eyes and laugh. Short, energetic, and funny, Josepha is my boss, though she doesn’t act like a boss—which is why she’s easy to work with. If you try to keep up with her, you’ll see that she’s doing way too much for one person, hosting a daily radio program in addition to running the HPO and trying to stir and sustain interest in preservation not only all over the island but all over the nation. By the way, her talk-radio show (which covers a variety of topics, many related to culture) is so popular that the former government banned it. (I continue to be amazed at how repressive the former government was.) One of the things Josepha does is worry about the Alele museum. She doesn’t run it, but its holdings belong to the HPO.

The Alele is the nation’s cultural museum, which has fallen to ruin—for reasons no one can quite articulate. Newton and I dropped by the Alele the other day. The place was closed and looked abandoned. I mean, really abandoned, like no one’s been there in five years. Its concrete steps are crumbing, paint is peeling, etc. It went bankrupt a few years ago and has sat un-air-conditioned for as long as a year. Everyone worries about its extensive holdings of audio and video tapes and other fragile artifacts. The recordings date back to the sixties and seventies, which means they capture elders’ memories from the early colonial days. When I found out that the Alele’s URL (website address) expired last year and was up for sale, I offered to buy it for the HPO. Josepha said that’d be a good idea. So I did that today. As with all efforts here, we’ve got to take it one piece at a time.

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Ron Tanner, chair of the Writing Department at Loyola College-Maryland, won a grant from the National Parks Service to help Marshallese college students preserve the oral culture of the Marshall Islands. He’s spending the 2008 spring semester (5 months) on Majuro to direct this pilot program, called the Marshall Islands Story Project. To get the full story of his personal experiences, be sure to check the archives to your left.

Two story-tellers got away from us on Arno. One sneaked off to Majuro just before we arrived. The other decided that he didn’t want to talk. It wasn’t clear why he didn’t want to talk—Newton offered a one-on-one, no cameras, no students, but the story-teller continued to decline. We concluded that Newton would have to return to Arno to see if he could catch the one who got away and, more importantly, the eldest elder, who’s suffering from diabetes. This meant that our last day on Arno was wide open. So Newton recruited one of the young spear-fishermen to take us octopus hunting on oceanside.

I wasn’t thrilled about snorkeling on oceanside—deep water scares me. The students weren’t thrilled either. Only one agreed to join us. The rest said, “No way. Sharks!” We waded out at low tide. When we were knee deep, we began swimming. My nose was about a foot from the reef—it was like plunging my face into an aquarium. Small fish, bright yellows and blues mostly, darted past my mask. The reef looked latticed, full of holes, each with a fish. To keep our masks from fogging up, we had chewed the incredibly bitter kirin leaf and smeared it across the glass. It worked great. As the water gained depth, the reef table dipped and branched out, ending abruptly in a cliff that dropped 25 feet to the sandy bottom. Not far beyond that, the sand slid steeply to the ocean floor—two thousand feet. Cold currents up-welled from those depths, like a draft from a dark cellar.

The cliffs project jaggedly over the sand like the bows of sunken ships. The coral variety here is the broadest in the world: coral fingers, fans, bulbs, mounds, swirls, ridges, ribs, filigrees , crenellations, convolutions . Every ten yards or so, the cliff recedes into a coral-craggy canyon, each shaded recess a unique habitat. Because of the varied terrain, it was difficult to keep track of my three companions and I often found myself alone. A mask is a narrow window, about 40 degrees out of 160, if that. It’d be easy for something to sneak up on you. My mask was leaking, so I had to surface frequently to clear it. Newton soon found me and signaled for me to follow. They had speared an octopus. I hadn’t taken the octopus hunt seriously. It took Newton and the spear-fisherman about fifteen minutes and many dives to the bottom to finish the job—it’s a process, apparently. Then they carried their catch to the surface and cleaned it, a number of fish attracted by the ink-cloudy mess.

I thought of sharks. The Marshalls have just about every kind of shark you can name, with the exception of the great white. The most dangerous are tigers and hammerheads. Until recently I was terrified of sharks. However, after watching National Geographic TV’s week-long special on sharks, I’ve changed my mind. The main thing to know is this: sharks want an easy catch. Humans are not an easy catch. Sharks love eating sardines, for example. Little things. They don’t want to mess with something as big as us. Grizzly bears, by contrast, are accustomed to taking down elk, moose, and deer, so they think nothing of taking down a human.

If you want to be scared of something in tropical waters, be scared of the stone fish. It hides in the sand of the shallows. Step on one of these and you’ve got about twenty minutes before you go into shock and cardiac arrest. Its dorsal spines inject neurotoxins. Or how about the reclusive sea snake, the most poisonous serpent in the world? More neurotoxins. Or a flotilla of ten thousand jelly fish, each the size of a quarter? Cardiac arrest within minutes. When I lived on Kwajalein as a kid, the beach was sometimes closed because the jelly fish were passing through. Or how about the gorgeous turkey fish, also called the scorpion fish? Its flowery appendages are highly toxic. You get the idea: out here, it’s not the sharks that are gonna get you, it’s the little things.

Sadly, the shark has been over-hunted, mostly for fin soup, believe it or not. Apparently, Taiwan is the most egregious abuser. As a result, sharks may soon become an endangered species. We kill four sharks a minute. Add that up. I have: 5,760 sharks a day. These are big animals, keep in mind. Top of the food chain. Six thousand a day. That’s not good for the ecosystem, no matter what you think of sharks.

By the time Newton and the spear-fisherman were done, they’d caught two octopi, several reef fish, and harvested some clams. I assumed we’d simply toss the octopi on the barbie and be done with them. No. First, you have to cover them with kirin leaf (yeah, the same stuff we used on our dive masks), then pound them for about ten minutes. Newton did this with a hardwood club Then one of the students washed off the pounded octopi in the shallows, where he attracted five moray eels. Newton said the morays were like stray dogs. He often tosses scraps to them and so they stay around.

Cooking the octopus was complicated. You boil it in coconut milk, onion, garlic, and lime leaf. You can’t let the milk curdle. While the spear-fisherman did this, two of the camp-hands were preparing breadfruit. It’s green, the size of a grapefruit, and has a nubby skin. You have to bury it in or under hot coals and roast it like a potato. Then scrape off the rind. This is woman’s work, by the way, but the men were allowed to do it because there were no women watching. Still smarting from the pancake incident, I told Newton I was relieved to see that even these hardened men would stoop to women’s work when necessary.

Baked breadfruit has the consistency of tender eggplant near the rind. It’s bland, chewy, and great for dipping. If it’s been roasted on a campfire, it will have a smoky flavor. Newton instructed me to dip mine in the milky octopus stew. It was heavenly, the meat buttery, the stew piquant. By far, the best octopus I’ve ever had. The only thing that would have made it a bit better: a cold beer.

After dinner, we went hunting for coconut crab. The biggest land crab—capable of growing as big as a basketball—they live in burrows under fallen coconuts. Earlier, Hiram and the spear-fisherman had made an elaborate treat of roasted, grated coconut to attract the crabs. “Usually the crabs come out only when the moon is down,” Newton explained, ‘but they’ll make an exception for roasted coconut. They’re crazy for roasted coconut.” Coconut crabs are increasingly hard to find. Chinese businessmen on Majuro have been known to pay as much as $300 for a single coconut crab, they are such a delicacy. We tiptoed down the sandy road to the dark, coconut-cluttered places we had sprinkled the roasted coconut earlier. I felt a little bad for tricking the crabs. I imagined them crabbing along and suddenly coming upon the treat: Hey, what’s that smell? Holy seacow, it’s roasted coconut! A pickup rumbled past and ruined our surprise visit, so the crabs got away. I was happy about that.

When we returned to camp, I sat with the students and talked. They asked about American urban legends, many of which they’d heard. Then they told me about Marshallese folklore—stuff I hadn’t heard before. There is a race of little people, nooniep who live underground, are mischievous, and steal children. They are great fishermen and grow giant-sized fruits. You might think they resemble leprechauns, but tales of nooniep go way back in the Marshallese culture. There is also a demon who’s as tall as the stars. If you look upon it, you will die or go crazy. There’s a race of scaly humanoid creatures, riikijet, that live in the deep. They feed on clams, which they open with their long claws, but come ashore for the sweet sap of coconut trees. There’s also an evil spirit that may inhabit a tree or a bush. Newton’s wife believes he has one at the camp, living in the big tree on the lagoon side. She’s put a crucifix and a container of holy water on the hut nearest the tree. Fishermen have reported that they’ve seen a weak glow of light in the camp when it’s vacant. Some neighbors have advised Newton to cut down the tree. But he believes it’s better to leave the spirits alone.

We got to the dock early the next morning because the boat can get crowded. It’s a small boat. The ocean looked calm. But who could say? I was determined I wouldn’t get ill. Newton told me where to sit for the easiest ride. I stared hard at the horizon and wouldn’t look at anything else. The ride back is always better, I heard, because the boat is going with the wind. It was better, much better. But it was the longest hour and a half I’ve ever sat through. Newton was napping up front, I noticed. As we neared Majuro, I lost sight of the horizon. The waves swelled, we rose and dipped, I hung on. And on. Then I was abruptly sick, once, twice, thrice. This was disappointing, needless to say. I hung on some more. Soon we were through the channel and into the lagoon and calmer waters, and I felt better.

The moment we docked, I jumped off . Newton had a van waiting for us—that’s how good he is at planning. I waved the thumbs-up to him. He had to stay behind to load the equipment. Twenty minutes later, when I walked into my motel room, I was startled by the dramatic change in temperature and humidity. Air conditioning—I’d forgotten all about it! When we were on Arno, air conditioning simply didn’t factor in because it doesn’t exist anywhere, not even in the vehicles. What I missed was hot water. As I unpacked my dirty clothes, I heard singing outside my room. It was from the church across the street. I stepped out, leaned into the balcony wall, and listened to the happy congregants clapping and praising the lord. It was good to be back.

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Ron Tanner, chair of the Writing Department at Loyola College-Maryland, won a grant from the National Parks Service to help Marshallese college students preserve the oral culture of the Marshall Islands. He’s spending the 2008 spring semester (5 months) on Majuro to direct this pilot program, called the Marshall Islands Story Project. To get the full story of his personal experiences, be sure to check the archives to your left.

Our third day on Arno, we ran out of water. We’d brought 15 gallons. Newton started boiling the catchment water, which lay in a stone cistern at the center of camp. It had a faint coppery color but tasted fine. We also had to return the town council’s van. Newton’s nephew loaned us his dual-cab pickup. Though it wasn’t very old, it was a wreck. Nothing worked except the steering, the gearbox, and the engine. It had no brakes, not even an emergency brake. Newton said, “This thing scares me. There are too many children in the road.” Arno toddlers tend to stand in the middle of the road and gaze at oncoming vehicles. This had happened a few times to us the day before and we’d had to wait until a parent came out and snatched up the errant child. “I will take the jungle road,” Newton announced.

“There’s another road?” I asked.

“The jungle road,” he repeated. “It goes to jungle town, the village in the interior.”

For a brief span, Arno widens to about half a mile.

“Haven’t we been on the jungle road all this time?” I asked. “Isn’t everything around us jungle?”

“This is the real jungle,” he said. “Nobody will be back there.”

Entrance to the jungle road is little more than two muddy ruts through a grassy yard. I thought it was a driveway. We passed Reimers’ plantation, a quarter acre garden and green house. The mango and cherry tomatoes I see on Majuro come from here. Then, quite abruptly, we were in the jungle, the road shaded by over-arcing the trees. As Newton predicted, nobody was back here.

Our story-teller, Samuel, was a big man. Wearing a ‘do-rag over his long silver hair and a black tank-top with dirty, gray shorts, he looked like an old Hell’s Angel. We walked back to his smoke house, just a coconut’s toss from the ocean, which we could see through the trees. Surrounded by jungle, his place was private, very unlike houses on the main road, where your neighbors (and their many children) are a few steps away.

Samuel told us about Rilong, the giant whose footprint we visited. Rilong was the son of a king and he became king himself after saving Arno from his warring grandfather, who’d come to conquer Arno and kill his own son. The intra-family fighting—fathers and sons at each others’ throats—appears to be a universal theme.

After Samuel finished his story, Newton asked him to tell us about his life and how things used to be. Samuel said that, when he was a young man, he wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings. He was always making trouble, he said. Newton asked Samuel to tell us what he could remember. Samuel hesitated. Newton asked again. Samuel then made Newton promise not to let his (Newton’s) family know all that he was about to reveal.

Years ago, Samuel told us, he stole a pig from Newton’s wife-to-be and her aunt. It was a pet pig. Samuel ate it. Samuel was always doing things like that. In fact, at one point he had to leave the island for two years in order to let one of his enemies cool down. Samuel was notorious for playing practical jokes, like tying hanging this man’s wheeled cart from the top of a coconut tree. His exploits and misadventures have become legend on Arno. The students and Hiram, our guide, asked Samuel several questions. His answers brought much laughter. Then the students presented Samuel with his gifts (coffee, sugar, cigarettes, tinned meat, and rice).

Our next story teller lived nearby but Newton and I found him asleep in an out-building. We did not wake him. His family said he’s ill with diabetes, which is common among elderly Marshallese. Newton would have to come back when the old fellow was feeling better.

When we returned to the truck we discovered Hiram, Samuel, and the students gathered around the rear left tire, which was flat. Hiram had brought a hand pump: you had to pump up the tire every twenty minutes, we learned. Before one of us could stop him, Samuel was at the pump, slamming away. It’s not good form to let your host work but, then, it’s not good to interfere with your host either.

Newton had one other story-teller lined up: Biti. We found him home. Biti is a renown spear-fisherman, now retired. He told us two traditional tales in a wonderfully effusive manner. Then Newton asked him about his life. Suddenly he was on his feet and we were following him into the yard—Sako snatching up the audio recorder, Obet grabbing my bag, and I cradling the tripod and video camera. Biti said he had to show us how to make a torch from fallen palm fronds. This is what he used on moonless nights to attract the flying fish.

With deft hands, Biti wove a single fallen frond into a long wand. He happened to be sitting in front of the gravestones of his father and mother. Because land is scarce, this is where most ancestors are buried—in the back yard. It made a poignant scene as Biti recounted enthusiastically the lost art of spear-fishing and the navigation it entails. He described how, before setting out, the fishermen would have a feast, after which they would throw everything they could into the sea. His listeners were puzzled by this. Why throw everything into the water? one of the students asked. We throw in everything so that it will float on the surface—the way we hope the fish will float to the surface when we hunt them. At this everyone in the group said, “Oh!”

Biti told the many names for the water one encounters when fishing. These names are now all but forgotten. Then he began to chant. Chants are nearly sacred and very secret. Outsiders never get to hear them. Later, Newton shook his head in wonder. “I’d heard of these things,” he said, “but I’ve never heard them. This was very special.”

After we pumped up the flat tire again, we had enough daylight left for a quick swim off the concrete dock. Newton loves to spear-fish. It wasn’t long before he was tossing his catch onto the pier. One of the students showed me how to skin a just-caught fish with your teeth—for the freshest sashimi. I did not follow his example. The students played a game where you sink a bunch of pandanus (about the size of a beach ball) and then dive to see how many pandanus pieces you can break off and bring up (each piece the size of cell phone). Then the students chewed on it. Pandanus is starchy, slightly sweet, and very stringy. Raw, it’s a challenge to go at. Its consumption demands half a day of gnawing. Cooked, it’s much more manageable and tastier.

Wearing my new snorkel and leaky mask, I swam out to otherworldly coral heads—a couple looked like gargantuan flat-headed fungi, eleven feet across. Another was a white brain coral so big I could not have wrapped my arms around it. Well below me, I saw a school of striped fish as big as cats. Closer by I passed a raincoat-yellow fish with a black snout. Then I was in a flurry of tidbit-sized fish as blue as bluebirds. My ignorance of the water is monumental. I’ll talk about that next time, when I recount our octopus hunt.

When we returned to camp, the camp-hands fried up the flying fish the spear-fishermen had brought us the night before. Nobody bothers cleaning or scaling the fish. Just drop them on the grill or in the pan, douses them in soy sauce, then dump them in a bowl of rice. It had gotten to the point where I’d eat just about anything put in front of me and I’d eat with my hands. I no longer cared what I looked like or how many critters crawled through my hut. Another few days of this and I’d look and act like a cave-dweller. Newton, by contrast, looked as well-groomed and civilized as always. What I did and did not know often gave him a laugh. I was obsessing about the inevitably rough ride back, for instance. “Look at that water, how calm it is!” I exclaimed. “Don’t dwell on it,” he advised with a smile. “The water’s calm here because the curve of the island shelters it from wind.”

Despite his advice, I was thoroughly, irrationally optimistic about my prospects on the trip back—because I was several days past recovery from the crossing and I was feeling good and strong and ready for just about anything. But I knew I was delusional, possessed of the kind of optimism that allows women to try childbirth a second time or explorers of old to seek the Northwest passage. Still, I gazed at the ocean, which seemed so calm, and I thought, Maybe, just maybe. . . .

Next: the octopus hunt and the boat-trip back.

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