Last night we went to a party at Elizabeth's, the Pompeian woman we met the other night. A couple of shirtless guys were sitting in the open pavilion of her cook-house with a big flat rock resting on a pair of old tires; they were pounding a large mound of pepper-root with rounded stones: sakau. The big flat stone must have been very hard, for it rang like metal. I was of course fascinated by the drug preparations, so talked to the main guy, he had a mustache, reminded me a bit of my Filipino friend Bataan whom I got high with at Naropa some twenty years ago. He said the Pohnpeian sakau is better than Fijian kava; it's the roots of a slightly different pepper plant, also in Fiji they dry the roots and grind them into powder which they squeeze in a cloth back in a bowl of water. But in Pohnpei, they make their potion right from the roots, albeit moistening the roots with a cup or two of water. “Bataan” (I forget his real name) and his partner pounded the big flat rock for a long time when they were done pulverizing the roots. Like a dinner bell. A few people drifted into the cook house, though many others were circulating in the yard, drinking wine, sodas and fresh coconuts. A long table of food was nearly ready to be served.

Bataan laid out a long strip of fabric-like hibiscus bark, mounded a couple of pounds of pulverized pepper root on it, wrapped the bark around the root making a kind of tamale the size of his arm, then twisted the bark to squeeze out thick slimy juice. He mixed the first bit of juice back into the pepper pulp, added a cup of water to the pulp, wrapped and squeezed again, this time catching some of the juice in half a coconut shell. He offered some to Embry, the oldest guest, Embry had a sip, and a little later I got a couple of sips as well. I'd been wondering if I should have any, what with wanting to stay sober, but in the end I just had to see how it was.

Thankfully the effects weren't very strong for me. I felt a little tired, a little more relaxed, and just a shade zonked. Rather than wanting a whole lot more as I would have in the old days, my reaction was to remember that I don't like feeling zonked anymore. So I left it at that. They guys doing the squeezing were goin' for it for sure, they said they could get visions from it. They continually squeezed the roots for next several hours. Two American ex-pat guests were really into it, said they'd been doing sakau for years, I'd been talking to them beforehand, they had that weathered slightly off-kilter vibe of long-term stoners, like some interplanetary probe ship whose skin has been pitted and etched by the dust and hard radiation of outer space. Watching the world on instant replay. Calling mission control.

The sakau makers had repetitive chanting music playing on a boom-box, it was special music for a sakau party, and in fact the music was recorded by a local guy called Lorenzo, who's said to have a chance of becoming the next king of the Nett district of Pohnpei. A very dignified older native lady was there, she was the mother of this Lorenzo, it turned out. She'd look at me with level eyes, but wouldn't bother to smile. I'm like this three-foot-tall green alien from a UFO, an interloper in her court. Actually at the end, she smiled very pleasantly when I managed a native word which means hello or goodbye: kasalehlei.

The food was amazing. A suckling pig, a steamed fish half as big as a pizza, a mound of tuna sashimi, a mound of grilled chicken, white yams, taro, breadfruit, pineapple so ripe that even the centers of slices were soft and sweet, curried chicken, red and white rice, pickled cabbage, and three kinds of bananas: boiled in coconut milk, fried, and mashed. No green vegetables; maybe they don't matter after all.

Embry and I really were quite tired after a while, what with the sakau and my triathlon; we went home about ten. I let Embry drive.

I took the next day off from diving and drove downtown alone where I climbed this high ridge overlooking town. Saw a bunch of Japanese anti-aircraft guns at the top, rusted amidst flowers. A nice view of the large volcanic Sokehs rock. View of the lagoon and the outer reefs. A flock of red parrots, the name is lory, was squawking at me from a papaya tree, I pushed into the undergrowth to see them better and spent a half hour surrounded by the cries of birds. There were four different kinds, all aware of my presence and making noise about it. Coo-coo-coo, squawk-whistle, gahr-gahr. One of them flew down to get a really good look at me, he was black and gray with a fanned-out tail.

It felt a little melancholy up there, a bit pointless and lonely, I was thinking about my time here in Micronesia running out, and was concerned that I wasn't doing the best possible thing, as this ridge was noise-polluted by some vast machine in the harbor, and had a radio tower on the top, civilization, ugh. An attack of tourist anxiety, the greed to engulf more and more. I could have gotten a guide to take me deep inside the island, but that had seemed too hard.

I drove around the harbor area after the climb, expecting to see some natural glens, but it was pretty densely inhabited, lots of people out and about, it's a Saturday, a lot of them are getting out of church. Some boys standing by the church drinking sakau (?) out of little wax-paper cups. I see more houses like open pavilions — what you might take for a public shelter, until you notice the bedding and the kitchenware. Actually, talking to a Pohnpeian, I learned that often these are cook-houses, and that the family also has an enclosed house where they keep their valuables and sleep when it's wet. The pavilion without walls is cooler; it gets very close in a house when it's hot and raining.

I went back to the hotel and rented a kayak, which was better, I paddled about a mile against the wind to get to Mwahnd Island, completely edged by mangroves. Here and there were breaks in the mangroves and I could paddle in through channels — which turned out to be entrances leading to native huts.

One hut's image sticks in my mind: painted two-tone, dark blue on the bottom half of the wall, light blue on the top, a roof of corrugated tin, with some patches of red-painted corrugated metal. A hill behind it covered with palms halfway up, and big leafy trees on top, maybe breadfruits. Above the trees a fat white cloud echoing the shape of the forested hill. The kayak quiet in the calm, silty water, mangroves on either side, quivering schools of tiny pale blue fish. A family is outside the house, a naked boy covering his crotch with both hands, the women in tropical skirts, the men working with their boats. Another entrance leads to what must be the village center, I hear voices chanting in unison — church? A group of girls peers at me from a porch glimpsed through mangrove branches, a bit like the way the parrots had peered at me from the papaya tree, profiling their hooked beaks as they eyed me. I wave to everyone I see, they wave back in a friendly fashion. I'm in a raspberry pink plastic sea kayak, wearing swim-suit, print shirt, my constant Tilly hat, my shades.

On the way back I tied up to a channel marker and wallowed into the water with my snorkel gear. My final farewell to the fish of Micronesia and the pale green, pale lavender, pale pink soft corals. A triathlon day: mountain climbing, kayaking, snorkeling.

Embry and I rented a car and drove to Liduduhniap Falls near Kolonia on Pohnpei. Not that near actually, it was up a long dirt road that was hard for us to find. The guidebook had said there was a store at the end of the road by the falls, and that you should pay a dollar to the storekeeper to use the falls. So we get up there, and there's not a soul in sight, a pair of rudimentary Micronesian buildings, though none of them looks particularly like a store. There's the sound of a radio or TV from one of the buildings, we walk over there, and there's a bare-breasted brown-skinned woman asleep on the ground. No matter how low you set your expectations of formality, the Micronesians continue to slip under it. We went swimming in the waterfall pool, which was great, exciting to have the water beat down on you, a feeling of healing there, the two old boys together in the swimming hole.

When we came back up it was raining and we ran under a kind of pavilion across the street from the house where the woman had been sleeping on the ground. Standing in the open pavilion we realize its a house. There's a raised U-shaped concrete platform, with tree trunks set into it holding up the slanting roof of corrugated tin. Along one side is a counter holding pots and pans — a kitchen. On the rear side is a mattress. The sleeping quarter. This is a house. Some people come out of the house across the street, and now the sleeping woman is up and at 'em. She's pulled her elastic-waisted flower-printed skirt up a bit to cover her breasts. (These skirts are what all the women wear, very brightly colored, usually with a zigzag edge at the bottom, made in the Philippines. I ended up getting two of them, one actually locally made by the cousin of the girl I bought it from.) We give her the two dollars, she's friendly. Her son lives in Arlington, Texas, she says. I don't have the heart to ask if he's in the military, who seem to scooping up so many of the Micronesian youths. It's maybe one of the only ways out into the wider world for them.

This morning Embry and I went for one last manta dive . We left early, were the first at the site, and glimpsed a manta in the water before we jumped in. Our guide was Stahmp, a native of Chuuk who moved to Pohnpei to live with his local wife, he was mellower than the Japanese dive master we had the first day out.

We dropped down to a sandy crushed-coral bottom at about fifty feet, crept up into a couple of coral heads, and there they were, two mantas, both dark on top, one light on the bottom, and the other dark on the bottom, which is unusual. They were hovering over these coral heads to be cleaned by wrasses, these wriggly little-finger-sized fish with three stripes along their length, the wrasses make their living by nibbling the parasites off other fish and off mantas as well. The other fish like this, they seek out the wrasses, the coral heads with wrasses in them are called cleaning stations.

The mantas were just as alien as I'd hoped. Incredibly streamlined, all about curvature and torsion, a body roughly the shape of a sea turtle, but with meaty triangular wings going out on either side, a rudder-type fin near the rear, a long spike at the very back. They were ten or twelve feet across. Their eyes are in protruding knobs at either side of their heads, not that they really have a separate head, “anterior end” might be more appropriate. They have a slit mouth they can open to be fairly big and round so as to suck in water; they're filter-feeders. They have a pair of little appendages sticking out of the sides of their heads, fleshy and oar-like rather than fin-like. Sometimes one of these would be rolled up, but usually they were sticking out, gently adjusting themselves to the current, playing a role, I suppose, analogous to an airplane's horizontal stabilizer fin at the rear. They had five gill slits down either side of their chests; they opened up the slits like lipless mouths, and the cleaner wrasses were in and out of the slits, worrying the skin, also busy along the rear edges of the mantas body. Occasionally a wrasse would nip too hard, and the manta would twitch it loose. They raised up and lowered down several times, once the white one was up overhead and released a nasty and alarmingly large cloud of poop; the nearby fish were all over that, of course. The black one was close enough to me that I could have touched it, had my arm been twice as long. A very, very satisfying experience.

Afterwards we did another long shallow dive along a reef of soft corals, loaded with fish, probably my last dive in Micronesia, I was nostalgic for it already, saying goodbye the corals and fish, the pale green and pale lavender disks with the fractally folded edges, the brilliant yellow guys, the little guys who are green or gray or blue depending on the light and all these shades so lovely and watery and gleaming, the school of twenty tiny damselfish each one a different size like a line of carved ivory elephants hovering over the chartreuse (yellow-green) single-trunked flat-topped forest of fire coral, the last nudibranch with black body and yellow edge and red chemical sensor antennae and red tree-like naked gill growing out of his back, the last parrot fish, goodbye, Micronesia diving, goodbye.

I did sixteen SCUBA dives in all.

The people diving with us were fascinating, Scott and Jeanette Johnson, regular contributors to the Sea Slug Forum, and biologists turned tech workers for the US missile range at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands east of here, which also a part of the archipelago of Micronesia, although not part of the Federated States of Micronesia. They knew all about cone shells, in fact they’ve made several great videos of Micronesian sea life. (That cone picture above is by the Johnsons.) Yes, the cones do live here, but I haven't seen them because they spend most of the day buried under a shallow layer of sand and come out to hunt at night. There are three groups, one eats algae, one eats other shell-creatures such as cowries, snails and cone shells, and the baddest mofos of all eat fish. I think they said Wolfram's textile cones fall in the second category, but I'm not sure about the tent cones, who have simpler looking patterns. They said once they'd caught a tent cone and put it in a bucket and they irritated it so they could watch it lashing out and firing poison dart after poison dart. They said if you find an empty cowrie shell, that means a textile cone ate the poor cowrie. By the way, Scott found a nice empty “map cowrie” shell for me. They're also big fans of giant clams, Jeanette said she has hundreds and hundreds of photos of their mantles. They said the Solomon Islands are good place to see cuttlefish and cone shells. So now I want to go there too, although I think Sylvia's up for Tahiti next, which would be good, too.

More cone shell info from the biologist divers another day. The cone has a proboscis that sticks out from inside its mouth, and the stinger is in the proboscis. When eating a fellow mollusk, the cone slimes its mouth tube inside the victim's shell, engulfing it in situ. The proboscis is red. When a cone eats a fish, what you find the next day is a little pack of bones wrapped in mucus. They're such nasty little beasts. Great article about them in the latest Scientific American, by the way, and you can find lots more the Cone Shell and Conotoxins web site. I happened on a book about cone shells at the beach in Sanibel just now. They’re closing in on me!

I’ll use cone shells for the bad guys in my novel, and maybe in a story as well. What a great horrific image. A cone shell is hiding under the sandy dirt of the pumpkin patch in the backyard of someone's house in Santa Cruz, with only its vigilant proboscis protruding, and it creeps out at night and eats this guy, and then all that can be found the next morning is his bones wrapped in mucus. Resting on his pillow. Gary Ziff: parrothead, stoner, termite inspector, R. I. P.