Atlantic High Read online

  It occurred to me, after the hamburger and beer had slightly revived us, to look about and see what it is about Fiji that hits you right away. Answer: Nothing. The Regent Hotel could be a super-luxury hotel in any tropical area anywhere in the world. The air is about what you would expect for spring in the tropics. We would learn something extremely important, which is that although most of the books tell you that the rains and the clouds come to Fiji only after the first week or two in November, those books may be statistically correct but are by no means to be counted on. Nadi is at the west end of the big island (Viti Levu); Suva—which is the center of all boating activity, and where you start from when you head out to sea on a charter boat—is about 100 miles away, to the southeast. There it rains 40 inches per year. And most of that rain is during the three or four summer months, beginning in November. During the ten October days we were with the party, we had spotty sun for only two or three days. I read a lot about Fiji—to be sure, a lot of it in travel bureau prose. (“Stretches of Uncrowded White-Sand Beaches …Palm Trees …Inviting Lagoons …The Fijian Format for Rediscovering Yourself …You are fifteen miles due west of Nadi International Airport. You have just moved onto an idyllic South Sea island with picture-postcard white-sand beaches and bending palm trees. You strip off your city clothes and dive into the sea …and here you are. Suspended in the silk-warm water …motionless.”) But nothing to suggest you might find yourself motionless because if you move without moving the umbrella along with you pari passu, you will be deep in silk-warm water even while standing at a street corner one mile from the beach.

  But our spirits were very high. Later in the afternoon we would take the island-hopper (a Viscount turboprop, if memory serves) for the trip to Suva, put up at the Tradewinds Hotel overlooking the yacht basin, and set out to sea the next day, after Jack joined us. From our hotel rooms we had the first glimpse of the great Tau sitting in her slip, awash with the usual swirl of children, electricians, plumbers, banana vendors, each in some way umbilically related to any large boat at the outset of a charter.

  She is a great ketch, designed by her architect-owner Captain Philip, who also built the Tradewinds Hotel. The dimensions (90 feet overall; mainmast of 110 feet) are noble. But, even taking into account the drizzle’s dampening effect on the spirits, one must be frank: The boat’s topsides are painted in two shades of brown, what must have been the finalists in a worldwide contest to select the most emetic pigment imaginable. I do not know which was the winner, which the runner-up. And then aft, commencing at about amidships, a strange structure which we ended up referring to as “the spare garage.” It was wonderfully useful for laying out all our scuba gear, and would have been indispensable for storing, say, five thousand cans of tuna fish. It was not useful for much more, having only church-pew benches in it, suitable for convoying prisoners to penal colonies. There were of course many other factors to be considered in judging Tau, but to these we were not to be introduced until the next day when, formally, the charter began, in a drizzle, with Jack—but without Jack’s bags, which had been lost by Pan American, which had lost them undoubtedly because Pan Am was preoccupied with looking for the lost bags of Jack’s wife Drue, which had been lost on our trip from Los Angeles. But we set out to the mouth of the harbor, and we were happy in the spirit of those who come together to begin an enterprise in the distinctive unity only a boat imposes.

  Monday. Jack’s bags arrived, along with a few delicacies carried aboard by a half-dozen porters, and we were ready to go. One should know, in sailing the Fiji Islands, that the distances between islands are not inconsiderable. More like the Antilles, say, than the Virgins or the Bahamas. The winds are as one would expect, ranging from northeast to southeast—I had consulted a weather chart in a think-session with Jack at which, during the summer, we made a major mistake.

  I shall try to remember to tell my grandchildren that just as, in order to fall, one must first rise; so, in order to travel downwind, one must first travel upwind. We are now all agreed that it would have made sense to ask the skipper to deadhead Tau east—perhaps as far as Tonga (500 miles); certainly as far as Mbalavu (150 miles). Because what lay ahead was a lot of very uncomfortable sailing, concerning which a few generic remarks.

  During the initial trip to the island of Ovalau, sailing on the wind, the Tau ripped its mainsail, depriving us of practically all lateral stability. No effort was made to mend it while under way, and it transpired that the captain, a man of great resourcefulness and, even at age seventy-two, resolution, had never heard of such American commonplaces as sail tape. We departed without spare battens and without adequate stitching paraphernalia; so that when, the following day and thereafter, we hoisted the mainsail, it was reefed, the tear having ripped the bottom one third of the sail. The broken battens were never replaced, so that the noise of the flapping leech was almost always with us during the windward passages.

  Having chartered a dozen boats and chartered out my own schooner, I take leave to express a rule of thumb. Boats longer than about fifty feet are thought by owners or captains to be, in fact, motor sailers. The Sealestial, as we will see, is a noble exception. Experience teaches us that ninety percent of the time the boat is moving, the engine will be on. Sometimes the engine is required merely to move: I have traveled on boats the profiles of which would appear to qualify them to race out of Cowes or Newport, but when the sails (usually with some reluctance by the captain) are hoisted, suddenly—nothing very much happens. A decade’s accretion of big propellers, huge water and fuel tanks, and myriad heavy, comfortable junk have all but immobilized them as sailboats that will cruise at eight or ten knots. Typically, after your first attempt to sail, the captain waits patiently for ennui to set in among the charterers. In my case this happens quickly, and thereafter the sails are used primarily for the purpose of steadying the boat. In the case of the Tau, with its huge masts, one would have expected a moderately zippy performance under sail. We got nothing of the sort when on the wind. The genoa was cut like a bikini, and if we relied on canvas to get us anywhere, these words would have been written at the other end of the international date line.

  Probably the principal fault is the charterer’s. He tends to ask for mutually exclusive amenities. He wants both spacious staterooms and sportscar performance, sailwise. He wants scuba diving equipment for six people (our situation) and 12-meter performance under sail. The postwar designers have done a great deal to achieve livability in small (forty-foot) racing sailboats. But the difficulties increase geometrically, and those who charter a sailing boat of ninety feet expecting both to sail and to luxuriate are going to do one or the other—almost inevitably the latter, since that turns out to be the preference, given the alternatives, of those who charter huge sailing boats.

  However, the captain or owner is not absolved from responsibility. He should frankly acknowledge the limitations of his vessel, if only to tamp down the revolution of rising expectations. Of course, there is no organic reason for failure to carry extra battens, or sail tape, or stitching gear.

  An appropriate moment, as I think back on that first day’s sail-in the drizzle, and against the seas to Levuka Harbor—to define a rule I have finally decocted, and wonder that it has not been formulated before:

  The sea, if you leave aside for a moment the factor of vicissitudes, which obviously overrule even the most elaborate fine-tuning, is an invitation to tranquillity. I lay it down as an unchallengeable, uncontradictable proposition that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between very loud noise and tranquillity. One can, of course, get used to anything. In My Sister Eileen, where the play’s two principals lived in a basement apartment next to the Third Avenue El in New York City which before it was torn down used to roar by every seven minutes with a noise the designers of the Concorde would have pronounced intolerable, the author-director managed a marvelous manipulation of the players and the audience by causing the actors, every seven minutes for about ten seconds, to raise their voices to sc
reaming pitch, as though nothing unusual had happened. After a while the audience almost failed to notice the difference, much as one gets accustomed to the background noise on an old record, training the ear to hear only Caruso.

  But on the other hand noise is noise, even as ugliness is ugliness. There are instruments that measure, with scientific exactitude, decibels of sound. Since this is the season for constitutional amendments, I propose one that would require every charter spec sheet to give out the decibel level, at engine cruising speed, 1) in each stateroom; 2) at the cockpit; 3) at the doghouse; 4) in the main saloon. The prospect of a five-hour run from one Fijian island to another under power in hostile sea conditions to a significant degree varies in the intensity of discomfort with the volume of engine noise. I know one or two people whose conversational patter has made me long for the relief of the robust noise of passing subways; but there were none such aboard the Tau, and when the engine operated, which was most of the time during the eastward passages, communication was virtually excluded in the principal areas of social congregation, and inflected conversation could only have taken place in the crow’s nest. I found that most of my companions sought out narcotic relief, either in escapist literature, spirits, or sleep: not infrequently all three, a useful progressive curve. Why is it, on cruises, that one tends to nap in the afternoon? An odious bourgeois indulgence. We tell ourselves it is the wind and the salt and the exuberance of corporal health. I say it is probably nature’s reaction to an unnatural licentiousness at lunch, a guard against the possibility of boredom during a long day; and—I say this with utter gravity—a means of attempting to solace oneself against a grinding, encephalophonic engine noise which, however we adjust to it in the manner of our sister Eileen, insinuates its insidious vibrations into our nervous system leaving us, at the end of a day’s experience, with the ocean’s equivalent of jet lag. A kind of noise jag.

  Tuesday. A great day. Unforgettable. Where oh where have I been? Why did nobody tell me? (Everybody did, for years, but I did not listen.) The divers were convening for the first plunge. But to begin with, Vane would check me out—to see what I could handle after my hour in the swimming pool. I proudly displayed the gear I had bought on leaving New York. To wit: 1) a knife; 2) a snorkel tube; 3) a face mask; 4) an inflatable life vest; 5) flippers; 6) boots for the flippers; 7) an underwater watch; 8) gloves; 9) defogging liquid; and 10) an illustrated textbook called Safe Scuba. Vane cast an eye on it all and told me he thought the flippers exaggeratedly big, made to go with the boots, which were unnecessary; he would lend me some appropriate flippers. The vest was okay, though he didn’t believe in them. The face mask leaked and the purge mechanism, through which one blows out water that gets into the mask, didn’t function. The gloves were adjudged too coarse for flexibility. I didn’t need the watch, but I did need a depthometer, which Vane provided, and a spear gun, ditto. My knife was fine, and it turned out that the book, when Bindy finally opened it one evening, was good for hours of entertainment.

  Vane took me down, in stages, to seventeen feet, after first lecturing me sternly on the point that there is no such thing as a macho diver; there are only bright and stupid divers, the latter defined as those who continue to go deeper even after feeling pain in their ears. You “clear” your ears (there are technical ways of saying all this) by applying pressure, over the rubber of the mask, to close your nostrils and then attempting to blow through your nose. Either you do, or you do not, experience instant relief. If you do, proceed on down. After another ten or fifteen feet, the pain will resume. Clear away. And proceed. Don’t Go Down Farther Than 120 Feet. Because below that depth odd things happen to the nitrogen content in your blood, to dissipate which your rise to the surface has to be achieved more gradually than your tank’s capacity makes possible. When you do rise, do so gradually. It is a good idea, while ascending, to breathe out. When there is no breath left, pause, inhale, and then resume the ascent while exhaling. At the surface a dinghy that has been carefully following you by tracing the wake of your bubbles will be waiting. Its pilot will lift the tank off your back, collect the other paraphernalia and—perhaps a little chilly, but certainly greatly exhilarated—you will reboard the master vessel, maybe with a fish or two in Vane’s pouch.

  Except that my mask leaked a bit, I found it as easy to habituate myself to underwater life as I would to get used to a freshly discovered Mozart symphony. The pleasure of the weightlessness …of three-dimensional movement …the disappearance of gravity …the lights in greater, more playful variety than ever seen before …the underwater life which, observed behind the glass of aquariums, seems menacing and slimy, now suddenly friendly, frisky, endearing (though Vane pointed at a crevice in a shoal, shaking his fingers and forming an M with the two thumbs and index fingers—all of which was later explained to me as the means of warning against a moray eel he had spotted). We descended to 120 feet, and I never felt more carefree, even while observing, more frequently than my experienced companions, the gauge that indicated how many of the precious thirty minutes of air were left to me.

  The Fiji Islands are famous for the opportunities they give you to dive. I wish I could successfully transcribe the formulae by which Vane led us, day after day, to the wonder spots, but one could as easily explicate the dowser’s art. He did require, I remember, that the water be deep, preferably over 100 feet. The tide should recently have come up against the reef structure, which is something like an underwater Gothic cathedral. That is where the fish collect, individually and in little and great schools: It was nothing to see ten thousand fish of one hundred distinct species and sizes during a single dive. The whole thing has only one disconcerting impediment, that it is impossible to smile. If you smile, alas, you drown; so that nothing is permitted to be wrenchingly funny, or wry. But the impulse to smile, as one would at a spectacular sunset, or burst of wildlife, or during an aria splendidly executed, requires concentration to overcome, particularly when there are comic encounters, as when your rump backs into something and you wheel about convinced you have backed into a shark. Nothing is less sharklike than Bindy (Viscountess Lambton), whose rump it was, though probably she is bigger than any shark, like Kirsten Flagstad. She is the original earth mother, with a whimsical rolling laugh that chokes off the words that are constantly amusing her and, through her, you. On Sunday she accompanied me to Mass at Suva because, she said, although not a Catholic she thought it would be good to pray for the new pope designated as such the previous day. I told her that was a very nice thing to do, that I had to confess the unlikelihood that I would go to Mass specially to pray for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and she said I most certainly should, since the poor man has few enough people praying for him these sad, schismatic days.

  The beautiful Bindy requires the coordination of two men to hoist her on board the dinghy, but whole armies would disengage for the pleasure of serving Bindy, who only yesterday could have posed for the most convincing statue of Brünnehilde ever struck. She saw that I was cold and, after the first day, gave me her spare wet suit, greatly increasing my comfort. And, as soon as we got back on board, she would make up for all the laughter we missed during the two half-hour dives Vane permitted us every day (more than one hour out of twenty-four in the deep does something, once again, to the nitrogen content of your blood, which needs rebuilding). It was Bindy who said to me innocently, a book on her lap during the cocktail hour, “What is an irresponsible flake?”

  “A what, Bindy?”

  “An ‘irresponsible flake.’ That’s what it says here.” She showed me page 146 of Safe Scuba, under the heading “Selecting a Buddy.”

  I was introduced to what is the most hilariously periphrastic English in print. The co-authors must, between them, have attended at least five teachers’ colleges to achieve their prose style. “Most often, we have little choice with regard to the selection of a buddy,” you read on, “in many cases we may be married to our buddy, or involved in a similar relationship to marriage, or we
may be assigned a buddy by a divemaster on a boat, if possible, regardless of how our buddies are selected it is an extremely good idea to know the person with whom you are going to dive. You should know your buddy’s character patterns and diving skills. If your buddy is an irresponsible flake on the surface, the chances are excellent that the same idiotic behavior patterns will continue underwater.”

  I told Bindy that honest injun, most people in America don’t talk that way, and took the book from her. There are acres and acres of the same kind of thing. The authors’ intention, clearly, is to persuade anyone who wants to scuba dive that he (or as they would put it: “he or she, as the case may be”) should spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars in instructions. My very favorite passage deals with the rather simple question: Can you swim? “…failure of a swimming test may not demonstrate the student to be in poor physical condition, but only that the student lacks effective swimming skills. The swimming does not necessarily demonstrate that the diver will function well in the sub-aquatic environment. Mental conditioning, cognitive and affective, and proper habit patterns may be far more relevant to learning diving skills and surviving in the open water than physical conditioningas the prime criteria in dive student selection.” All that and one mashed potato will get you two mashed potatoes. But I had already resolved never ever to do anything, in the sub-aquatic environment or in the super-aquatic environment, to permit Bindy to think of me as an irresponsible flake.

  Wednesday. The captain and crew got up early and powered the Tau northeast sixty miles to the island of Taveuni, which is the third largest island in Fiji, and said by some to harbor the most spectacular diving and snorkeling reef in the whole area. It is the Somosomo Strait, and of course Vane led us unerringly to a spot that could not have been more enchanting. In the late morning we dinghied out on the Tau’s Zodiac, into which the sea-skittish Drue was coaxed on the solemn promise, reiterated by all hands, that Zodiacs have the distinctive feature of being absolutely unsinkable, a proposition Drue finally came to believe until, a few days later, the Zodiac sank in front of her eyes, disappearing into the vasty deep without so much as a gurgle of resistance, leaving Captain Philip in great distress.