My tour of the ruins was cut short by the sound of laughter; a group of children had followed me across the river. They led me down to the beach and into the ocean for what I thought would be a quick swim. Instead, it turned into a scene from a water park back in the States.
All the children began imitating airplanes, using their arms as wings and making motor sounds with their mouths. They buzzed around haphazardly in the shallow water until one of them yelled something. Then they immediately lined up into an attack-fighter wing formation and took up a course for the whale bones. It was infectious behavior. I too turned myself into a plane and joined the squadron for the bombing run. We chased one another around the shallow water to the delight of a group of onlookers who had gathered on the beach, and once again they began chanting, “Keed bok, Keed bok.” Something told me this was all leading somewhere, but I had no idea what I would find when I got there.
After the aquatic dogfight, I asked Berkeley about getting something to eat, and from out of nowhere, grilled lobsters, poi, slices of fresh pineapple, and a bucket of cold beer were brought to the beach by a procession of young girls.
After lunch, I decided to heed Jetfuel Joe’s advice and returned to my hut for a nap. Before I closed my eyes, I thought that if the world all went to hell, Dalvalo wouldn’t be a bad place to be stuck.
I don’t know how long I slept, but I was awakened by a loud rumble and realized that my bunk bed was moving. I flashed back to a time when I was laid up in a swanky hospital in Los Angeles with a broken leg when an earthquake hit. Instead of caring for their patient—me—the nurses in the room completely panicked and ran out into the hallway to seek shelter. They left me dangling in traction to ride out the tremor.
I am a swamp creature. Heat, mosquitoes, and hurricanes are things I grew up with, so they seem natural. The ground moving does not.
I sprang up in my bunk bed and looked around. The walls of the hut were moving as well, and the rumbling began to get louder. Then it suddenly stopped.
“It’s just the volcano doing its thing,” a voice said from the shadows. And it wasn’t Jetfuel Joe or Berkeley speaking, unless they had attended accelerated English classes during my nap.
“Like everybody and everything on this island, the volcanic activity comes, and it goes. Welcome to Dalvalo, Captain Singer. I am Waltham. I hear you are looking for me.”
The next thing I knew, I was seated in the passenger seat of an ancient military Jeep as Waltham, the leader of the Captain Keed cargo cult, drove down a deserted grass road lined with sandalwood trees. We had two very modern long boards strapped across the roll bar of the Jeep.
“I know you surf. I have seen your music videos and thought you might enjoy this break after your long trip from Santo. It’s kind of like a miniature Waikiki without two million tourists and a skyscraper shoreline.”
The invitation to go surfing and the news that Waltham had been to Hawaii just added to the mystery surrounding my visit. The one thing I knew at that point was not to ask a lot of questions, so I just listened.
Waltham apologized for not meeting me upon my arrival and said that there was much to do, as the following day was Captain Keed Day. When I asked him about the American gravestones, he, like Berkeley, avoided the question.
“It all must seem quite confusing, I am sure, but I promise I will explain everything. I am much better at conversation when I’m on a beach or sitting outside a surf break. How about you?”
As we buzzed down the road, I noted that Waltham certainly did not fit the image of a model on a surf-magazine cover. He was more a cross between an aging lifeguard and a sumo wrestler. He looked to be around six feet tall, and his skin was the color of coffee with a slight splash of cream. Blond ringlets surrounded a perfectly circular bald spot on the back of his scalp, and he wore camouflage board shorts and a tank top. From his neck to his ankles, every visible inch of skin was covered with tattoos.
His forearms and shoulders carried the firm muscle tone that a life of paddling will produce, but he sported a rather large beer gut and held a big, cone-shaped spliff in his right hand, almost like an extra appendage. He viewed life from behind a pair of reflector Ray-Bans. A string of shark’s teeth and black pearls hung around his neck, and he had a .45 automatic stuck in his shorts below his potbelly.
Whatever he was, he was obviously in charge, and I was strictly following orders. I didn’t really know what I was doing on Dalvalo, but for the moment, surfing wasn’t a bad option.
As we broke out of the hardwood canopy, the ocean appeared instantly, and the road paralleled an endless stretch of white-sand beach along the leeward shore to a point in the distance.
Waltham sang along with a Polynesian singer on the radio. I had a thousand questions, but I was trying not to act like a white man in a hurry, so I just enjoyed the view.
“Your arrival has caused much excitement in the village—do you know?”
“I know, but I don’t quite understand,” I said.
“I would say you came to the right place at the right time. I don’t think your visit is a coincidence.”
“I know. I was sent here with a message from Captain Keed.”
“I didn’t say that,” Waltham told me with a laugh.
“But you are the leader of the Keedos?” I asked.
“That is true, but you have to understand. You came from Florida on the eve of Captain Keed Day in a giant seaplane from the past. On Dalvalo, that is seen as much more than a coincidence. Would you not agree?”
“Well, maybe you could explain to them that I am just a visitor and not a messenger from their god,” I said.
“Oh, no!” Waltham laughed. “I told them exactly the opposite. I told them that you do bring a message from Captain Keed.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because whether it is true or not, they need to hear it. And as their leader, I have to do what I think is best for them.”
For the first time in the very brief time I had known him, the smile disappeared from Waltham’s face. He crushed the spliff out on a rock. “Things have not been good here lately. The government hassles us constantly. We are like the Rastafarians of the Pacific. We are an easy target—crazy people on a distant island who worship airplanes and a dead aviator. The outsiders blame all their inadequacies on us, but we are still safe for the time being here. They don’t come to Dalvalo because they know they won’t go home in one piece. The rest of these islands are worshipping the tourist dollar. I ask you, Captain Singer, why can’t we worship our airplanes and be left alone?”
“First of all,” I said, “my friends in the islands back home call me Singa Mon. Second, I would say that your freedom is a threat to them.”
“Spoken like a true messenger from the gods. See? I knew I had the right man.”
“So you invented me?”
“How could I invent you, Singa Mon? You exist. You are on the radio all over the world, and today you are right here, riding in my Jeep.”
“I can’t argue that point,” I said with a laugh.
Waltham lit another huge joint, took a big hit, exhaled, and continued. “We are all supposed to be certain places at certain times, and right now you and me are supposed to be out there.”
Just then, we rounded the rocky point, and Waltham stopped the Jeep. Below us was a crescent-shaped bay, ringed in primitive beauty. Long lines of perfect, glassy waves cascaded down the reef line nearly all the way across the bay to the deep channel just below where we had stopped.
“We call this spot the Chinese Restaurant because you can order up just about any kind of surf you want. We’ve got gaping barrels, long, perfect lefts, and beach breaks for the kiddies. Looks like the special of the day is a mile-long, chest-high left break.”
In the distance, I could see what looked to be a weathered, carved pyramid midway down the beach. “Was this a holy spot in the old days?” I asked.
“You mean that pyramid? That’s Chinese, the other
origin of the name of the bay.”
“It looks ancient,” I said.
“It is,” Waltham told me. “The Chinese knew these waters long before Magellan or Captain Cook. They sent a treasure fleet out in 1421 to explore the world and discovered most of it, including America, long before Columbus set out to sea. Columbus actually used their maps. The Chinese fleet stopped here on its way back from Antarctica, where they went to find Canopus, their steering star for the southern hemisphere.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The Chicken Man,” Waltham answered. “It seems that all up and down the West Coast of North and South America and into the Pacific Islands, Asiatic chickens were discovered by the Spanish when they got there. The Chicken Man is Professor Whit from England, who came here to do some research. He was pretty convincing, and then he showed me how the pyramid was aligned with the stars of the Southern Cross. He said the Chinese put them all over the world.”
“Did they surf?” I asked.
“No, they didn’t surf,” Waltham said, “but we do.”
We drove to the bottom of the hill where the sand road ended, and then we kept going, directly out onto the beach.
When we reached the pyramid, we stopped. There was power on that spot for sure, and I imagined a Chinese fleet anchored out in the bay. “Does anybody else know about this place?” I asked.
Waltham began laughing as we unloaded the boards and leaned them against the pyramid. “Let’s just say that it’s a private spot. A few years back, a group of Brazilian surf Nazis arrived one day on the mail boat with boards, camping gear, and video cameras. They were all set to claim the Chinese Restaurant as theirs. Berkeley and I met them at the beach. We had chosen to dress in traditional cannibal costumes, complete with shrunken-head belts, spears, and bones through our noses, not to mention a couple of old Thompson submachine guns in our hands.
“The surf dudes fled to the whaling village and stayed there until the boat returned a week later. They scrambled aboard and headed north. A month later, our little episode showed up in a surf magazine, and of course it was blown out of proportion, but nobody has been here since.”
We paddled out from the beach, and I followed Waltham through a small channel that led through the reef. If any remnants from my kava night in Santo were still lodged in my brain, they were certainly cleaned out by the succession of head-high lefts that broke all afternoon.
Between rides, we flopped on our boards, and there I learned a little more about Waltham. He told me he was born and raised on Dalvalo. His father had been a member of a local group of coast watchers and guerrillas that had been organized by Captain Keed and had raided Japanese installations in the Solomon Islands during the war. Having been exposed in a unique and indirect way to American culture, he wanted to see it firsthand.
Waltham had been sent by his father to America with a mission to explore the country and go to Pensacola, Florida, and see if Captain Keed was ever coming back. Waltham told me that Pensacola had not turned out to be heaven, even though he had seen the Blue Angels flying down the beach. No one there remembered Captain Keed.
Waltham stayed on in Florida and wound up in Orlando, but he didn’t last long there. He drifted down to Fort Lauderdale, where he spent another couple of years working at the Mai-Kai before heading to California and then home to Dalvalo.
Shortly after he returned, his father passed away, and it wasn’t long before Waltham had been elected chief. “After seeing America, I couldn’t tell my people that it was heaven.” Waltham said that since his trip, all he was trying to do was prevent his people from becoming victims of a materialistic tidal wave.
We got out of the water shortly before sunset. Waltham came ashore with a large red snapper and produced a grill and utensils from his Jeep. I managed to knock a few papayas free from a tree at the edge of the jungle, and we devoured the fish and washed it down with cold beer from Waltham’s cooler. He told me that normally we could camp out on the pyramid, and he would show me how to line up the stars from the top of it, but tomorrow was the biggest day of the year on Dalvalo, and we had to get home.
We drove back to Huakelle under a purple sky. Several rain clouds swept down the side of the volcano, and we stopped and stood in the rain for a few minutes to wash the salt from our bodies. When we made it back to the village, it was strangely deserted. The flag had been taken from the bamboo pole, and a smoldering fire sent a plume of wood smoke skyward.
Waltham told me that everybody was resting for the big day, which would start very early. He suggested I do the same. He stopped at the entrance to my hut. “You will be my guest of honor tomorrow for the march,” he said. “There is something up on the mountain that I think might be of interest to you. Work on your speech before you go to bed.”
“What speech?” I asked.
“The one you bring from Captain Keed and will deliver tomorrow night at the celebration.”
It is not often in life that you fall asleep to the rumbling of a distant volcano, but on that night, I was so worn out from my journey to Dalvalo, and my afternoon at the Chinese Restaurant, that when my head hit the pillow, I really didn’t care if the mountain exploded and blew us all sky-high.
Obviously, that did not happen. I was awakened out of my coma by several nudges from a firm hand, and I turned to see the face of Berkeley illuminated by a torch. “Captain, it is time to go.”
I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when I remembered that I had forgotten about the speech.
Shortly before dawn, what sounded like a symphony of conch shells began an eerie tune. The villagers of Huakelle began to assemble around the flagpole. I was munching on a piece of pineapple and sipping a cup of coffee that Berkeley had brought me when I saw Waltham walk out of his hut. He was wearing a khaki flight suit, and an old helmet and goggles were propped on his forehead. He completed his naval officer’s uniform with a white ammo belt and holster that now housed his pistol.
As Waltham walked to the flagpole, a column of twenty men fell in behind him. They wore green khaki shorts and had the words U.S. NAVY painted in blue across their bare chests. They were soldiering bamboo replicas of M1 rifles and submachine guns. He and his little army marched to the flagpole, where, in English, he ordered the detachment to halt.
At this point, another group of men came forward and ran the American flag up the pole. As it flapped away in the tropical breeze, Waltham pulled his gold-plated .45 out of the white holster and fired one shot into the sky. The flag was immediately lowered and folded by the honor guard into a perfect triangle and handed to Waltham, who made a short speech in pidgin. Then he put his gun back in his holster and turned to face the men with the bamboo rifles.
The villagers fell in behind the little army, and Waltham motioned for me to join him at the front of the parade. A small band of drummers gathered at the end of the formation and began to beat out a cadence. Waltham turned to me and whispered, “How do you like our religion so far?”
Before I could answer, he shouted a command and pointed at the volcano that had begun to materialize on the edges of the gray dawn. The procession began to move. As we went forward through the jungle, the drummers kept playing, and the villagers sang.
“What are they singing about?” I asked Waltham as we walked.
“It is the story of Captain Keed and how he arrived here. Would you like to hear it?”
Somewhere between Waltham’s first shot and the rhythm of the jungle, I had forgotten any logical reason why I was on the island. I had become caught up in the moment. I could feel the excitement of the marchers. “Yes,” I told him, “please tell me.”
“Very well,” Waltham said. “Our book of Genesis starts back with those damn missionaries. We couldn’t eat them all. They were like the big moray eels on the reef—once they wrapped their tails around a piece of coral, it was almost impossible to shake them loose. Next thing you know, the Bible started to take the place of the religion of our ancestors, and pre
tty soon the missionaries were telling the people that kava was evil, dancing was sinful, and wife swapping would send you to hell. It was not a good time. But everyone knew the gods would send us help. Then came the war, and our shamans told us of visions of a warrior who would come out of the sky. It would be the sign to throw the Bibles into the sea and go back to the traditional ways. And that is exactly what happened.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The path we were following opened into a clearing where a small waterfall poured down a volcanic ledge. This created a deep pool that then spilled over the edge in a long, misty cascade to the sea below. The villagers broke rank and dashed for the water and began splashing and playing around in the idyllic spot.
Waltham waded into the water up to his knees. “This is called Bible Falls, and this is where it happened. One moonless night, my father and the other elders of the village secretly collected all the Bibles from the village. They brought them up here and tossed them into the ocean. Then they told everybody in the village it was a sign from the gods. About a year after that, the missionaries left the island, and the people were happy.
“This is a sacred pool for the Keedos. It is where the whole thing started, and it also happens to be the perfect resting spot before the big climb. I love it when spirituality and practicality merge—which isn’t very often, you know.”
I found a spot in the shade and sat on a big boulder. I gulped water from my canteen and thought again about the speech I was supposed to give.
“We will rest here for fifteen minutes, and then we will continue the climb. We must reach our destination by sunset,” Waltham said.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Waltham took a drink from the canteen and then pointed up to the rim of the southernmost volcano. “Up there,” he said. Then he lit a spliff, and in the serene surroundings of Bible Falls, he continued telling the story of Captain Keed.