“Hermit crabs,” Wheeler explained. “They’re the garbagemen of the island. Them and the rats, they clean up everything.”
“I haven’t seen any rats,” Jennifer said, hoping against hope. Her love of small animals didn’t extend to rodents.
“You leave food out, you’ll see ’em,” Wheeler promised. “Big ole wharf rats. Compliments of the U.S. Navy.”
The image made Jennifer’s skin crawl, and she began to watch more carefully where she stepped.
Arriving back at the lagoon, they encountered an old wharf and a barnlike warehouse. At the front was a dock where wartime supply ships had unloaded cargo. Behind the warehouse, there was a twelve-thousand-gallon water tank. “It doesn’t have a top on it anymore,” Wheeler noted. “With all the rain showers we get around here, we don’t have to worry about it getting empty.”
Someone had set up an old four-legged porcelain bathtub with a hose running off a tap from the tank.
“Guess you guys will want to be getting your towels,” Wheeler said, grinning like a schoolboy.
“I can hardly wait,” Jennifer said. She had to give him credit. He had saved the best for last.
But when she and Buck skipped off to the Iola, their plan for an immediate bath was postponed by another offer. A crewman on the Caroline hollered an invitation for a drink. On board, they downed rum mixed with coconut milk, accepted (and smoked) a joint from one of the younger crewmen, and swapped sea stories with their hosts. Briggs and his crew were shepherding a group of amateur radio operators who, like obsessed Boy Scouts, spent their every waking hour ashore tinkering with their transmitters and receivers. The next destination was nearby Kingman Reef, which occasionally bared a strip of sand a foot or two out of the water. “The radio boys want to set a record for establishing the most remote radio station in the world,” the charter skipper explained, rolling his eyes skyward to show what he thought of the idea.
An hour or so later, Jennifer gathered their soap and towels, and taking Buck’s hand, headed for the bathtub. They were merrily tipsy, and the cool bathwater added to their delight. Between deep soulful kisses, they splashed each other like kids running under a sprinkler on a summer day, and returned to the boat feeling tinglingly clean, refreshed, and optimistic.
Back aboard the Iola, Buck fiddled with the outboard motor while Jennifer began cooking a hunk of fish Jack Wheeler had brought over for them. They had it for dinner that night. The fresh fish was tender and delicious. After a poignantly lovely sunset, they wordlessly went below and made love by candlelight. Their floating cocoon rocked gently to their shared rhythm.
Later, Buck read aloud to Jennifer from a book she had brought along, Euell Gibbons’s account of purposeful beachcombing. He sensibly chose the chapter covering all the useful products derived from coconuts. Delectable possibilities seemed endless, but ice cream still topped Jennifer’s list.
They slept well that night. Jennifer no longer had to jump up every hour or so to monitor their course. Tied up to the dolphin in the placid lagoon, she felt they were safe at last.
The next morning, without prodding, Buck left early to help Jack Wheeler. When he returned several hours later, he was flushed and sweaty, and trudged off to take a bath. When he came back, Jennifer was taking some biscuits out of the oven.
“How’d the work go?” she asked, really wondering how he had gotten along with Mr. Wheeler.
“Okay, but I think nature is gonna win the battle.”
“Even if they fix it up, how can a plane land with all the birds on the runway?”
Buck shrugged indifferently. “Jack was talking this morning about having to poison them.”
“Poison them?” she said. The idea was unthinkable.
“Wheeler told me he has enough poison in one of the sheds to kill an army. He said they’d have to burn the nests and crush the eggs, too.”
Buck’s voice was so steady that Jennifer couldn’t tell whether he was opposed to the idea or not.
“Kill all those birds so a damn plane can land?” she said angrily. “For what? Probably so they can put in a golf course and fancy restaurant and hotel.”
“Yeah, it stinks.”
“They’ve already killed and wrecked enough things in this world in order to make money.”
“Fucking-A right!” Buck chortled. He seemed to be enjoying Jennifer’s display of righteous indignation.
“We can stage a sit-in on the runway so they can’t land.”
“In all that bird poop?” he said, cracking a smile.
“It’s not funny,” she said. “Don’t laugh.” Then she laughed.
“Who’s laughing?” Buck said, laughing.
He kissed her. “You’re beautiful when you’re mad,” he whispered as he took her in his arms.
June 29. Buck went to help Jack Wheeler and son in clearing runway. We’re hoping to improve PR with the Wheelers and maybe get them to recommend to the owner that we stay on officially as caretakers—so I’ll bake an extra loaf of bread for them. Made some grated coconut ice milk sherbert and froze it in ice box. What a luxury.
Buck and Jennifer’s effort to ingratiate themselves with Jack Wheeler took a nose dive the next day when Popolo bit his son. At Jennifer’s suggestion, Buck had tied up his dogs, because Wheeler obviously didn’t approve of their running loose. Unfortunately, young Wheeler had run past Popolo within the reach of his chain, and the dog had nipped him on the thigh. Though the youth’s skin was broken, rabies was no threat, since no Pacific island (including Hawaii) has ever recorded a case. Even so, the Wheelers were upset.
On June 30, a couple hours after sunset, the Caroline, with her complement of ham radio operators, departed Palmyra, reducing the island’s population to seven. By then, the fallout from the dog incident had dissipated. Buck was back helping Wheeler and his son clear the runway.
The following morning, Jennifer and Buck resumed their exploration of Palmyra, taking the dinghy directly across the lagoon from Cooper to Home Island. When they neared shore, they got caught up on a sandbar in about two feet of water.
Buck gave Jennifer the oars and got out. He pushed several times until the dinghy came free.
Jennifer saw the fast-moving shadows in the clear water before he did. She screamed.
In an instant, three sharks, flashing swiftly and silently through the water like menacing torpedoes, had converged on Buck from different directions.
Now aware of the danger, Buck yelped and jumped into the dinghy so hard Jennifer thought his feet might go through its wooden bottom. The small boat rocked precariously. Worried about being spilled out into the water, a distracted Jennifer lost her grip on one of the oars and it floated out of reach.
All three sharks were now circling the dinghy, as if desperately trying to pick up a lost scent. Her heart was thudding in her ears.
“Get us out of here, Buck! Now!”
With the single oar, he rowed them crookedly to shore.
Long after the sharks disappeared, Jennifer couldn’t shake the incident. She had thought that sharks wouldn’t attack unless they saw or smelled blood. Wrong. No sooner had Buck stepped into the water than these aggressive creatures had homed in on him. And the way they had circled the dinghy afterward…With a chill, Jennifer thought it was as if they knew dinner was inside the boat. She resolved to never step foot in the lagoon, so picturesque, but teeming with danger.
The next afternoon, Jennifer spotted from the deck of the Iola a two-masted sailboat anchored just outside the channel. “Looks like we’re due for a population explosion tomorrow,” she cracked to Buck.
Actually, two boats glided into the lagoon the following day, July 2. First in was the double-masted boat she’d seen; its name, Sea Wind, now legible on the stern.
Buck rowed out to greet the new arrivals, sizing up their boat along the way. He recognized her as a ketch with unusually graceful lines. A middle-aged couple were bringing her in, the man concentrating at the bow but directing a blond woman
at the helm.
As they drew near, Buck shouted, “There’s an extra space over by us. Can I help you get in?” He was suddenly all smiles and hospitality, as if he’d usurped the mayoralty of Palmyra.
“Thanks just the same,” the man yelled back. “We’re looking for more privacy.” He and the woman kept up their work.
Miffed, Buck rowed back to shore, where Jennifer and Wheeler were watching.
“Looks like he knows what he’s doing,” Wheeler said levelly, spitting out a twig he’d been chewing. “Boy, what a beauty of a boat. He’ll probably put in at the little cove up the way. It’s deep enough. Only problem is, without the dolphins to tie on to, it will take a lot of securing so they don’t drag anchor and end up beached when the wind comes up.”
An hour later, the island’s newest visitors came traipsing down a jungle path toward the Iola. They all amiably introduced themselves. Jennifer thought Mac Graham looked the part of a storybook adventurer, with his military-style haircut, dark aviator glasses, knife-edge khaki shorts, and bare brown chest. He dismissed their sail from Hawaii—only seven days—as if it had been child’s play.
“How many people are here?” he asked unhappily.
“Too many,” Buck said, agreeing with the implication. “Hell of a note. We came here to play Adam and Eve on a deserted island.”
Mac laughed. “We had the same idea.” He took a pack of Marlboros from his waistband and couldn’t help but notice that Buck stared with the pale intensity of a helpless addict. “Like a smoke?” Mac asked obligingly, offering the open pack.
“Sure,” Buck eagerly replied. He snatched out two cigarettes at once.
Jennifer smiled knowingly. There went Buck’s typically ineffective plan to give up smoking when his tobacco ran out. One day en route to Palmyra he had even broken open a Lipton tea bag and rolled an ersatz cigarette. Since they’d reached Palmyra, he’d been desperate for a fellow smoker with a supply to share.
In this first sociable encounter, Mac did most of the talking. He acted so open and friendly that Jennifer had liked him immediately. It was apparent how thrilled he was to see his goal, Palmyra. His vibrant smile, expressive eyes, and quick sense of humor contrasted sharply with Jennifer’s first impression of his wife, who seemed reticent, shy, perhaps even standoffish. Clearly, the woman stood in her husband’s shadow.
Only a couple of hours later, the Journeyer, a sleek forty-five-foot cutter owned and sailed by Bernard and Evelyn Leonard, moored next to the Iola.
“Four boats,” Wheeler grumbled to Jennifer. “Most I’ve ever seen here at one time. This must be the most popular vacation spot of the year.”
Unspoken was the resentment practically everyone felt toward everyone else. Certainly, Wheeler, Buck, and Mac each believed, at some irrational level, that the others were intruding upon his territory. There was gridlock in Paradise.
CHAPTER 8
AS WHEELER HAD GUESSED, Mac and Muff had slipped the Sea Wind into the small cove, where the curvature of the shore afforded them the privacy they coveted. Mac tied the boat stern-first to two trees near the water, then dropped an anchor well off the bow. That would have been enough to satisfy most skippers, but Mac was extra careful with his beloved boat. He ran another line off the port bow and sank a second anchor in the shallow reef there. Eventually a squall, not an uncommon occurrence in the equatorial regions of the Pacific, would probably blow across the lagoon, and he wanted rock-steady protection against going aground.
Muff and Mac wrote their first letters from Palmyra two days later and gave them to Jack Wheeler to mail in Hawaii, where he and his family headed on the morning of July 6. These were the first of many letters that would keep relatives and friends back home eagerly awaiting the next entertaining installment of life on an enviably tropical and serene, if not deserted, Pacific island.
July 4, 1974
Dear Mother,
It is now just past midnight and at eight o’clock I was still working on the mooring and anchor lines. The temperature is 88 degrees, relative humidity 90 percent. There’s a light breeze.
The island is beautiful beyond my wildest hope. Everything is exciting and I’m anxious to be off exploring. I hope to find some peace and quiet—where a man can sit at leisure.
Palmyra is everything I ever hoped for—and more.
Love,
Mac
Muff’s first letter home—to her mother and two sisters in San Diego—expressed a different view.
July 4, 1974
Dear Mother, Peg and Dot,
Mac had to practically push me out of Hilo harbor. I didn’t want to leave. We had a good sail down until we arrived off Palmyra. When we were ten miles away, a huge storm hit. It was like one of those Hollywood studio gales, where someone turns the fan on, only it was for real and I was terrified. We waited it out until the next morning.
There are a lot of poisonous fish here, red snapper for one, sharks and manta rays in the lagoon. It’s incredible the amount of birds nesting here, mostly on an old runway. They cover it entirely. It is never quiet for a minute, not even at night. You’d think you were in Disneyland on the jungle safari ride.
A couple on a boat here had lived on Palmyra for a while about 15 years ago. Then, things and buildings and equipment on the island were still intact. Now it is falling down and what hasn’t fallen down, vandals have torn down and destroyed. There are beds, mattresses, a fire engine, trucks, jeeps, all left over from the military. But everything is stripped like at a junkyard. It’s sickening.
The other local inhabitants are land crabs, coconut crabs, hermit crabs, rats, tiny lizards, spiders, ants, roaches that fly and some that don’t, mosquitoes, flies, and you-name-it. If it’s creepy and crawly, it’s here. This place is really a jungle.
Mac is thrilled to be here at last. But I already miss all of you and our friends.
Love,
Muff
Nonetheless, Muff dutifully joined Mac in setting up housekeeping in earnest. As she reorganized the galley for life in port, he hooked up the boat’s power source to their large generator and serviced the Sea Wind’s engine. To make more living space on the Sea Wind, they removed the sails and carefully folded them. Mac lugged them to a nearby storage shed and, using a block and tackle, suspended them from a rafter, well out of the reach of rodents.
He hacked away the brush near the boat, then set to work building a makeshift dock with lumber scavenged on the island. That completed, he ran a rope from the dock to the boat ladder at the Sea Wind’s stern. They could now pull either one of their two dinghies back and forth to shore without always having to bother with a motor or oars.
Aboard the Sea Wind, Muff tied canvas awnings from the shrouds to cover the deck area and provide shade from the blazing sun.
One morning that first week, Mac declared that they needed a break. He persuaded her, despite her uneasiness about the jungle and its creeping things, to do some exploring with him before the day got too hot.
As they worked their way down a well-worn winding path, Muff realized how serious Mac was about exploring the island. “Most people stay on the trails,” he said, taking out his machete. “But not me.” He began hacking at what looked like an impassable wall of vines, shoots, and fronds.
Muff watched passively for a few minutes, then wandered alone up the path. She came across an enclave of old buildings that had been all but swallowed up by the jungle. Peeking into the crumbling shells of the structures, she had the strong feeling that strange, tragic things had happened on and around this island. Was it just her imagination?
Walking on, she was soon surrounded by a panoply of violenthued flowers. She recognized wild morning glory, thick with deep-purple and carnelian red blossoms. Poinsettia, growing in abundance and tall as trees, were in full bloom, the showy scarlet bracts setting off the tiny yellow flowers. From behind the veil of forest echoed the calls of unseen, unfamiliar birds. Small sudden movements teased the periphery of her vision.
&
nbsp; It wasn’t long before Muff became aware that she could no longer hear Mac at work behind her. She quickly headed back, but when she came to a sharp curve in the trail she didn’t recognize, she realized she had taken a wrong turn somewhere. She wheeled around.
“Mac. Where are you?”
There was no answer.
“Mac!” Her loudest shout sounded weak, ineffectual, all but absorbed by the unrelenting jungle.
She felt everything closing in on her. But she held on to the knowledge that the lagoon and the Sea Wind were just on the other side of a wall of vegetation in front of her. Or were they? Was the lagoon actually in the other direction? Now, the trails and the palm trees, everything, all looked alike to her. Where could Mac be? The jungle had devoured him without a trace.
Suddenly, she heard a commotion nearby. Midway up the ninety-foot-high trees she caught a glimpse of several blue-footed boobies clumsily trying to take flight.
Common in the Pacific, the appealing gull-like boobies have a white chest, gray wings, and a pretty dappling of blues and oranges around their eyes. These nesting birds, disturbed by Muff, had panicked.
As she watched, they flew directly into a leafy barrier. She couldn’t imagine they could get through, and they didn’t. But they continued to beat themselves against the thick foliage, squawking in fear. My God, they’re going to beat themselves to death, she thought, realizing with shock that she was the aggressor here.
Muff hurried down the trail, hoping the birds would calm down when she was gone, and give up their suicidal escape attempt.
Suddenly, there was scurrying at her feet. She looked down to find a fat brown rat staring up at her, its tiny nose quivering in the air as if trying to place her scent.