Before dinner, Embry and I noticed a young girl wearing a grass skirt and a floral lei. Her breasts were bare. She came into the dining area, an open patio of plastic furniture. Invisible insects biting me every second. She was the daughter of the manager lady, a 31 year old woman whose teeth have been dissolved down to tiny black stubs from constant chewing of betel nut. The daughter had just been to an ethnic dance held in their home village twice a week for tourists. There was no embarrassment or self-consciousness over the bare breasts, you see older women walking bare breasted on the streets, it's an old-fashioned family-values thing to do.

After dinner we saw the daughter again, dressed in jeans and T-shirt now, playing with her pet fruit bat. Her grandfather had shot this little bat's mother, to eat, and had found the baby under one wing, and the girl had raised it. She let me play with the bat, it's “play” consisted of biting all my fingers. She had a wad of betel nut in her cheek now too. A regular sweet teenage girl. Thanks to the betel nut, though, her teeth were already a bit worn down; chewing betel eventually erodes the teeth down to blackened stubs.

We ate a grilled parrot fish, lots of firm meat on those colorful reef nibblers.

I got the people at the hotel to drive me up to a beach by the village of Wanyan. Yap seems only to have two beaches; the other was even more trashed by the last typhoon. I took my snorkeling gear, and swam out to the reefy deep water twice, looking at fish and coral. Saw some great 3D Zhabotinsky coral. When I'm snorkeling alone, I enjoy the coral more, I can relax and not have the rest of the party being ahead of me or behind me.

All property in Yap is privately owned, even the beaches, so I had to pay someone for permission to use the beach. There's absolutely no signage in Yap. I was in the Pathways van with a beautiful woman and a twelve-year-old boy, both Yapese, the boy the brother of the girl with the bat. They have lovely, rounded features. We pull into a driveway near the beach, and the woman and I get out and she talks in Yapese to the man for a several minutes over my beach fee, and the upshot is that we drive back into the village to discuss it with a different guy. He comes out of his dilapidated house — made of driftwood and corrugated sheet metal — and has an even longer discussion with my Pathways guide. His mouth is red and bulging with betel nut. I get out, ready to pay, but then we get back in the van. “How much does he want?” I ask. “Two dollars.” “Should I pay him?” “No, we'll do it through the hotel with paperwork.” Ah, humanity, and our love of complicating things. I had the idea that this guy doesn't have much action — I am the only person I see coming to the beach this morning — so enjoyed making the most of the deal.

One the beach there actually is another group, a Filipino family of a man, woman, and two daughters, one with Down's syndrome, she runs around with her tongue hanging out. The woman's mother is there too.

The beach is littered with ocean debris, dotted with coconut palms that are very wide at the bottom, I think of women's hips. The water is shallow for about a hundred yards, then there's some dark blue deep water, some turquoise shallow water, and maybe a mile out the breakers where the open sea crashes into the reefy shelf around the island. The sky is changing every minute, fluffy white puff alternating with gray rain clouds, showers of a few minutes, then back to blue and wafting breezes. The coconut palms slant every which way, making a frieze within which the Filipino family and I move.

The man, Julio, comes over and invites me to eat. I join them, they've laid banana leaves on a low table, and he's grilled some fish: tilapia and parrot fish, also there's rice and a bunch of quartered roasted sweet potatoes which were just harvested by the mother-in-law from her garden. They talk about their worries about the one daughter, I sympathize.

And then I put on my shortie wet suit and snorkel way out to the deep water. 3D Zhabotinsky scroll coral. Gemlike blue and aqua fish in tiny staghorn coral heads.

Later I take a talk along the beach and find four major shells, the kinds of shells I'd buy in stores. The beach is filling up with teenagers, boys and girls, playing volleyball, picnicking, playing guitars and, yes, ukuleles. I relax, leaning against a fat coconut palm, admiring the handsome brown people moving through the frieze of trees. Noa noa, I'm in a Gaugin picture. For once I'm utterly content and happy. A long way from writing about death. “Sir,” a Yapese man walks over. “You like some banana?” He gives me a little bunch of three stubby bananas, sweet, firm, thin-skinned, delicious.

Later I snorkel out to the fish again, and then the hotel van picks me up, my posse, two women and a two-year-old this time, also a big guy who'd carried our bags at the airport. All of them chewing betel nut, calm and friendly, enjoying the drive. On the way out through the Wanyan village, an old guy whose mouth is bright red with betel stops us and has a long conversation with the guy in the back seat with me. I think they're discussing the big deal of my beach fee.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.