High White Sound
Five. The Detour
Flights to the end of the world take off only at night. After hours of tunneling black an orange fire pierces the East of the white cotton sea. Red and cream and rose spill over the glowing white ocean like endless paint – and the canvas goes endless for miles. This is where the sun comes to rise.
The plane floats down through the pink waves, and then – an island! Flush with hills of green, and its a thrashing coastline kissing an aquamarine sea. On the shore there was a single spire sparkling like a dirty jewel – and around it, a city. I stared through the window at the sloping green hills in longing.
"Volcanoes," the guide at the front of the bus corrected.
I had made it to an island, but not as I expected. Instead the trip had been sponsored by an Ohio college, which packaged two dozen students into one cheap bundle and middle-managed their way across the Pacific. A bus had picked us all up at the airport and dumped us on a volcano on the outskirts of the city.
On top of the volcano I stared out at the lashings of teal and liquid cerulean that made the city sparkle and marveled that familiar old America lay on the other side. The water churned against rotting wood and the white spires of thousands of moored yachts danced like flashes of light on the sea. Another volcano sat in the harbor, frowning at the buildings.
"They’re extinct, of course – or at least somewhat.” The guide grinned.
A girl with tight brown curls and arms crossed stood beside me. “What do you mean somewhat?”
“The field is merely dormant. In fact, it’s due to erupt some time soon.” He let out a short laugh. “Hopefully not too soon!”
The whole bus grew quiet. No one had said a word about this before we got on the plane.
“The country is on a fault line too. But,” the guide winked, “this is not a land for people who concern themselves much with sound decisions. After all, our ancestors had to come over on a very long boat ride."
“I’m not supposed to be here.” The girl with curls’ voice was flat. She let out a deep sigh. “I wanted to be in Fiji. I’m as close as I can get.”
“It’s a dirty little island city, isn’t it?” I mused, scanning the jagged skyline.
She narrowed her eyes. "Put together with just the amount of thought one imagines someone would use when building over fault lines."
"Half these buildings look abandoned."
“It’s summer,” the guide replied. “Everyone’s at the beach.”
“The West Coast.” I pointed right out to the sea. "That is where we need to be." There iron deposits turn the sand black, like the breathing world of an undiscovered Ansel Adams photograph. Where the sun sets on the water and endless surf breaks lap up on the sands.
"Be careful of the West Coast," warned the man. "Those waves will come and snatch you right off the beach.”
"They are good for surfing though, right?”
The man let out a short laugh. "If you like getting tossed around. Next thing you know you wash up somewhere and you don't even know WHERE you are."
Unconquered nature, I thought. She is a mystery.
“One of our national heroes was just swept out to sea while saving his little brother. It's been a week, and no one has found him."
"Un femme fatale.” I thought of the untold lives commanded every year by the brutal call of nature. I liked this wild and savage country. Beautiful on the surface. Deadly underneath.
There was something soothing about it. It reminded you that there was something bigger than you, and that some things still exist only for the land, only for itself, rather than the whims of the people that slummed their way across the surface. It kept things orderly in a fierce Darwinian sense.
We were set to spend three days on the coast before descending into the city. The bus snaked along slithering roads hanging off mountains with trees that grow sideways and bushes with pink flowers and leaves that spilled out like a thousand green and white tongues. The winding twists and hairpin turns revealed flashes of majesty. In the distance were the most calming mountains, and groves with rivers and springs, and ten thousand different trees blooming in the valleys. I rested my head against the window and watched the green mounds rise and fall in the distance.
The sky was so blue you could taste it. Horses galloped across golden plains. How had it come from a place I dreamed, even though I was seeing it for the first time?
“Wouldn’t it be fun to roll down one of those hills?” I sighed.
“It looks like death,” the girl beside me replied. Her name, she said, was Leslie.
“They’re beautiful.” I insisted.
“I don't know what you're talking about.” Leslie replied. “They’re just hills.”
The bus scraped to a halt in front of a sign that said LOOKOUT POINT. Leslie solemnly lifted a little shiny silver box to her face. One click with the sign, one without, one with the bus, one self-portrait – with tight undercut faces and blurry outstretched arms. Did anyone look back fondly at these thousands of throwaway moments, with their gritted teeth and false poses? Or was it just to prove that they were once here?
At straight ten that morning we arrived at a small town near a marine reserve for some group snorkeling. The guide stood at the edge of the rock, frowning at the couches and car seats dragged out onto the sand. It seemed like everyone on the island was at the beach. Like the water was the final leveling – whether you came on a helicopter or sat on a couch with springs – everyone came to gaze out at the same thing.
“No use snorkeling,” the guide said, shaking his head.
"Look at those weirdos," Leslie snorted.
Just beyond the reach of the water sat a row of kids dressed in black. Their stares were vacant and unbroken behind thick sunglasses. They were all in lawn chairs. Several held strange fat glass bottles. Not one of them moved.
I caught the gaze of one of the men in black, and we watched each other as I passed. It felt as if I was floating in slow motion.
“Time to get up Addison.” The guide strode to the window and yanked open the curtains, flooding hot orange light into my dreams. I yelped and hid under the covers. I felt her fists grab hold of the covers. “It’s six am. We’re leaving in ten minutes for the walk. Let’s go.”
“Who goes on a walk at six in the morning?” I moaned from my dark retreat.
He slapped the covers. “Now get up. We finished eating, but there’s more oatmeal downstairs.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Oh.” He stopped. “Well, it’s your turn to do the dishes. Everything is by the sink.”
Within minutes, there we were, perched on rusting cycles with bent handlebars, chipped foam helmets cocked on our heads, as we tottered dangerously near careening cars on the highway and tried to enjoy the beautiful mountain backdrop while attempting not to get broadsided by a passing semi.
“I’m exhausted,” Leslie declared at the end of the day, a fist propping up her cheek. “That would go a lot faster if they just blew through some of those mountains instead of having roads that wind all over the place.”
“Now.” The guide tapped at a bat. We were in another field.
“Why are you teaching us baseball?” A wall of laughter erupted. A boy jabbed an elbow at one of his friends.
“Once again, this is not for baseball.” The guide’s tan face withered under a bed of wrinkles. “This is cricket. It’s time you learned about the culture of our island.”
The boy slowly looked up from his long gaze at the bat, and turned to his friend. “Do you know what he’s saying?” He cast a look between the two. “I can’t understand a word he says.”
“Forget hitting balls. This looks like it could be good for something else,” another replied, a hand sliding up the paddle. His lips slithered into a smile. “First to get the bat wins!” One whooped and the others all piled on top.
“I can’t wait to go surfing," I tried. But there was no time. Instead there were schedules,
and timetables, and check-in times. It transported me back to being seven, the moment that light switch is flipped on, at six am, and orders are barked for showers, packing, people, vague and hazy in the distance calling out names. Early risings, enforced rules, and feeding times, clambering up hills for the sole purpose of staring blankly at far-distance landscapes and ragged cliffs, nodding, shivering in the wind, and heaving back down, the highlight of the day marked, completed, finished.
I hate these kinds of vacations. Scenic views are so overrated when one is trapped within schedules and droll beasts masquerading as humans.
But the worst was yet to come. After being bumped and jostled for kilometers along a lonely dirt road pebbled and coursing with bruises, the suspension on the bus gave out on the right side. Gnashing his teeth, the guide slammed on the brakes, pulled the bus over to the side of the road, ripped open the hood and stared angrily at the wrong area.
“I knew we should have paid extra to get this thing checked by a mechanic."
He dusted off his hands and climbed back into the seat. “If we keep it steady at fifty we should be able to make it to the next town by midnight.” He adjusted the rear view mirror. “Everyone lean to the left.”
Around the hills and valleys between the last town and the one next snaked a slow-moving train of no less than twenty-seven pairs of headlights. The little white bus led the parade, leaning heavily to the left, crawling in front of a towering silver cab. A series of honks and horns bleated out desperately.
“I can’t pull over!” The guide hollered out the window before jerking his head back into the bus with a huff.
“It really is a shame,” Leslie said softly. “The view is so pretty.”
“Left!” The guide snapped when we straightened out.
The cops stopped us. But when we told them the problem they just laughed.
“I wonder how close we are,” I said after what seemed like days.
"I can't wait to get out of this seat," Leslie agreed.
Her boyfriend’s ears perked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What? Nothing…”
“You think I don’t want some time apart? You think I’m just following you around?”
Leslie fell silent.
“I didn’t come to this island just to be with you.” The boy was going frantic. “I have other friends. You know, maybe we should just break up.” The remaining two hours of the trip was driven in silence, twenty-six pairs of eyes widened, lips sealed, noiselessly leaning to the left. When the road ended we set up our tents in the blackness and retreated to wait out the rain.
The next morning later I woke up with a throbbing head and the vague memory of downing an entire bottle of champagne. I looked up. Red. At least I was in my tent.
I poked my head out the tent flap. Hundreds of sagging blobs sank low on the horizon.
We had gone to sleep in an empty field and woke up with two hundred odd cars and tents in scattered patterns, and the smell of sausages wafting up under the knotted trees. Kids hung off the sides of trucks and sprawled across hoods of old rusted vans, beer in hand. Some were leaning against cars painted black and peeling off rusted green. Others were stretched over mattresses and crates.
“Who are these people?” Leslie gasped.
“So that was the noise last night,” her boyfriend said.
I stepped gingerly over bottle caps and cigarette wrappers and inched towards the cliffs.
“This girl has not seen her last evening,” I mused, peering over the edge. “Though in her madness,” I added, remembering the drunken stumbles of the night before, “was close to it.”
Suddenly I felt very alone. I turned my eyes to the sky. What was I doing out here, in a shadowed forest? Then something in the distance caught my eye. It was the same kids that I had seen in black at the beach. Now they were draped over blankets, forming a sort of haphazard circle of laziness under the shade of a bending palm. Some had leaves in their hair as if they had just fallen out of the sky. Soaked others looked like they had rolled straight out of the sea. There was something intriguing, something I liked in the way they sat together staring across at nothing, contorting across the bodies to pass a dying cigarette, slowly nodding their heads against the beating sun. It was as if they moved along with the light.
I was never a risk taking kid. I certainly didn’t just walk up and start talking to strangers. There were too many uncertains, too many unknowns. But… what’s the worst that could happen? In the distance the crowd from the bus sat in silence, washing dishes in perfect time, three counterclockwise scrubs on each gleaming plate. And I drifted towards the kids.
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