Honolulu
August 15, 1969
Some of the best advice I received before going to Micronesia was from a Hawaii friend who frequently visits that vast spread of ocean and tiny islands the United States rules under United Nations mandate as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands:
“See a couple of the outside island districts before going into the political thing in Saipan,” he said. “And don’t act too much like a newsman. Relax at first, and let the feeling and issues come to you.”
That was part of the preface for a month of travel around a central Pacific area larger than the U.S. mainland. Before it ended, I found myself riding in President Nixon’s motorcade on the separate island-territory of Guam, covering the Congress of Micronesia, pursuing interviews, and doing other things a newsman does. Still the initial decompression in the Truk and Ponape districts of the Trust Territory served well: for not only is it virtually impossible to get a daily newspaper, I also found it possible to go without outside news of any sort.
It began, as most trips do, with a dash to the airport through a modern American traffic jam complete with smog and a helicopter trying to help frustrated Honolulu motorists. Undeveloped islands seem a long way off as you hustle down modern cement corridors into a jet, in this case the three-engine Boeing 727 of Air Micronesia, the Trust Territory carrier operated by Continental Airlines.
But there are differences: where travelers to San Francisco and Tokyo usually wear suits, those to Micronesia come casual in sport shirts, shorts and sandals. And there is an atmosphere about things — the Micronesian hostess in straw hat and miniskirt, other islanders going home from American schools, the front portion of the plane cabin piled with air freight, and even such fellow travelers as Philippe Cousteau, son of Oceanographer-explorer Captain Jacques, with a camera and diving crew going off to Truk to make a TV special on the dozens of sunken Japanese ships there from World War II.
Also different are the stops. For Air Micronesia’s year-old service has meant a jet-age return of the island-hopping and sightseeing that made trans-Pacific travel an exotic affair in the days of flying boats and limited-range World War II planes. Getting there now is a demonstration of what transportation and communication mean to scattered Pacific islands seeking economic and political viability in a world where they still cannot remain isolated.
It’s expressive to say that all of the Trust Territory’s 97,000 people could fit in a stadium like the Rose Bowl. But more important is the fact you could never got more then a fraction together; for they live in an ocean area of continental dimensions.
The first stop is hardly exotic. Some 700 nautical miles southeast of Hawaii, Johnson Island is a treeless coral atoll that gained brief note again recently as a stopping point for President Nixon when he watched the Apollo astronauts return from the moon. Mostly it serves-as a missile tracking station. Travelers are warned against using cameras, and while the jet refuels are escorted by armed guards into a windowless waiting room where rows of foreboding air pipes with rubber hoses stick down from the ceiling, “They tell me it s for debriefing SAC crews,” said one traveling American official. “But it looks like the gas chamber at Buchenwald.”
Micronesia begins over an hour later as the jet crosses the ocean boundary of the Trust Territory into the Marshall Islands, two parallel atolls and islands running some 800 miles north from the equator — about 1,000 tiny islands in all, only a fraction inhabited. As you come down, the pilot calls off some of the sights: “And out to the left is Arno Atoll, one of the most beautiful and unspoiled, the kind of place you think of when you drink San Miguel beer,” he says, joking about popular Pacific radio commercials that make use of exotic settings. Before the trip ends, I am to have one of the best days of my life at Arno, but now the atoll seems as unreal as a TV commercial a vast oval of quiet lagoon enclosed by a narrow wave-washed coral reef, its lush green islets stretching off into the hazy distance of cloud, shadow, and sea.
Air Micronesia’s island hopping route
Majuro, the next atoll, is the Marshalls District Center and “eastern gateway to Micronesia.” as local boosters put it. Here, as elsewhere in the Trust Territory outer districts, there are no straight-in landings. The pilot buzzes the coral airstrip to make sure that people, pigs, and other hazards are absent, and as he does passengers get a good look at the tropical shantytown that stretches for miles along between lovely vistas of ocean, reef’, and deep lagoon. Palm trees flash by both sides when the plane touches down. There is a roaring cloud of coral and s ray as the pilot brakes and reverses the engine on the short strip; it s safe but still quite a dramatic landing for jaded jet passengers.
In the- half-hour stop, many wander off the plans, past the one-room wooden terminal and out under nearby palms to take pictures, sip beer and soft drinks, and chat with fellow passengers or the dozens of local folk who come out to the airfield for what locally ranks as a regular social event. In faces, setting, and wood you are clearly and rather suddenly in Micronesia.
Out of Majuro, that is true in the plane also, for many Marshallese come aboard, headed for nearby Kwajalein or beyond to Truk and Saipan. Besides serious young officials with attaché cases, there are toothless grandmothers toting big boxes and paper packages, respected chiefs, and young couples hauling several children.
Other less-desirable passengers have gotten aboard the local flights. One crewman told the story of an islander who brought on two live crabs the size of dinner plates. Their claws were tied together and they were in a paper bag, but somewhere enroute they got loose and crawled near the foot of a lady tourist who almost instantly was standing on her seat and screaming amid general confusion, Quite casually the Micronesian hostess packed them off to the cargo section.
Kwajalein, the world’s largest atoll, has been linked with U.S. military activity for a quarter century, first as a World War II battleground, then as a staging point for nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok atolls to the northwest, and now as a missile test site. Missiles fired from California (and presumably from nuclear submarines) splash down in the lagoon; anti-missile missiles rocket up to intercept them. Such activity and its effect on the Marshallese people from these islands is an important part of the Micronesian story that will be discussed in other newsletters. For the traveler jetting through, however, the stop at the Air Force Base at Kwajalein is akin to that at Johnson — modern cement runway and other facilities, a look at sophisticated antennas across the runway, compulsory debarkation, confinement to a specific transit area, and no cameras, please. Except the visitor often finds his picture being taken by American civilian workers who have the run of the island.
Truk’s Mixed Image
For new arrivals, Truk can be both dazzling and depressing. The Truk Lagoon is a wonder of nature; it was once a huge island that over a million or more years ago settled into the sea leaving only eleven mountaintops that have become lush islands with their own coral reefs. Around this complex of green island and blue lagoon is an enormous barrier reef, forming a ring 40 miles wide in spots. This outer reef is dotted with sandy islands, each with palms hanging over a white beach.
The scene is not so lovely when the plane lands in a muggy downpour on Moen, the main island and district center. Here as in all remote Trust Territory districts the dirt and coral roads turn to mud and ruts when it rains and dust when it dries. Buildings are old or uninspired, Quonset huts from the war, dull metal warehouses, flat functional cement structures, and shacky wooden stores and houses roofed with rusty corrugated metal, so far one of America’s main contributions to physical progress in Micronesia. The town struggles for a mile or so along a waterfront road where the greatest joy is to look beyond the litter to the other islands floating in the great lagoon. In the colonial style of things, the district administration offices and housing occupy hills with a view.
Air terminals are informal in the islands
Further out, the scenes (but not the roads) are better. In one direction, down a palm-shaded route, you come to Southfield, acres of crumbling cement that once served as a Japanese air base and seadrome. Its small beach will be the site of Truk’s first resort-type hotel. Down the coast the other way the road winds past a, memorable mixture of people and scenery. There are little general stores, dim and cool, where the radio blares American Western tunes. Up the road, on my visit, a group of young men staggered with beer bottles; one, drunk in the violent Trukese fashion, pounded on the roof of my passing car and shouted an obscenity; his embarrassed friends pulled him aside. Everywhere naked children play along the shore, and smiling older folks wave as you pass. At the end, there is a village under clustered Palms where bare-breasted women bathe, men talk pleasantly and clouds of kids pose for pictures. The scenery can be marvelous, a mixture of mountain, shore, and reef. But the view also includes over-water outhouses, muddy mangrove flats, junked cars, and just plain rubbish.
More important, of course, are the people you meet and talk with in a few days of wandering around. One of the first I went to see was Tosiwo Nakayama, a Senator in the Congress and one of Micronesia’s best known young political figures. Tosiwo spent several years at the University of Hawaii and has handsome racially mixed looks inherited from a Japanese father and an outer-island Trukese mother. He is very much a Micronesian in soft, smiling manner and serious thought, but the end result is much like talking to a friend from Hawaii. His house, in contrast to the modern halls of Hawaii’s East-West Center, is a neat, simple wooden structure where one sits and sleeps on the polished wood floor.
Tosiwo was both enjoying his family after several hard months of travel with the Congress’ future political status committee and preparing for the session opening soon in Saipan. He expressed hope that Micronesia’s new status and form of self-government and control of land could be set before any U.S. moves for land for new military bases. He was disturbed at word the Peace Corps was cutting its program that provided volunteer lawyers to help the Micronesian Congress and district legislatures. (“From our standpoint it was one of their two or three best programs.”) And like everyone he wondered about the intent and impact of a new 13-member U.S. Navy Seabee team that arrived with an impressive array of construction equipment and movies, which played to 200-300 Trukese every night. “I think the Seabees will show the Micronesians a side of the U.S. military they don’t know, since the image now is one of war.” He paused and grinned. “You know some of the older people talk about the time when the Japanese came (after World War I). They say there was sort of a Japanese peace corps that came first, then military civic action teams, and finally the troops. Now they wonder about the Americans.”
So the issues and opinions come up in talks with people as you try to let the situation come to you. A few other samples:
From an American businessman in Micronesia for many years: “In all I’m rather proud. People will point out what the Japanese did economically, but it was for themselves. I’ll grant you the roads are now terrible and we are without adequate water and electricity after 25 years under the U.S. But these things are less important than giving people control over themselves. We have developed people and encouraged them to be free….”
From a Peace Corps volunteer on an outside island: “Sure some good people get to college. But it’s still pretty sad to see a couple of dozen bright children graduate from elementary school when you know there is only room for eight or ten of them at the high school on Moen.”
From a local politician: “The (American) district administrator is new and very active, some say like a bull in a china shop. He has problems with local leaders … The district legislature doesn’t have much power, but the difference now is our speaker and chief can go up to Saipan on the jet and talk with our Congress and the High Commissioner.”
From the young Navy Seabee officer: “We were headed for Vietnam but diverted here…. We’re here to do what the local leaders ask — roads, docks, water catchments…. Somebody’s named us the Navy’s Peace Corps, but don’t let the men hear that. Actually we have a different mission from the Peace Corps.”
From a retired American businessman looking for investments: “There are opportunities here, but you would have to be here to baby-sit your money. Actually, the only place ready for big tourism yet is Saipan. For somebody like me, the surest investment is in Guam.”
From a young American Catholic priest: “As the anthropologists say there is form and function in society. The forms here are obviously changing, but whether the function is I don’t know…. An American going into a store gets served much slower than he did five years ago. What does that mean? … Yet people here are not as strong for change as they might be in some areas of the T.T.”
A Day on the Lagoon
There is one more thing about Truk — maybe the most important: it has the largest population of the six Trust Territory districts, some 26,000. But only 6,000 of them live on Moen. The rest live on other islands in the vast lagoon and the dozen or more separate atolls up to 150 miles away, which make up the Truk district. My excursion off Moen hardly qualifies as a field trip, but a day visiting islands on the Truk lagoon is both a thing of beauty and another dimension.
Outboards are the standard means of short-range travel around Micronesia’s islands. Mine was a 14-footer of some vintage powered by an 18 horsepower engine and guided by a smiling man named Mariok or “tapioca,” so named he said because his father was very fond of that staple.
The water was quiet and clear down 20 feet or more as we went out over the fringing reef past the rusting hulk of a small Japanese freighter. Further out the lagoon drops to deep blue depths and birds chase schools of fish off toward the white line of surf and hazy green islets that mark the barrier reef.
Our first stop was the island of Uman, where the boat docks in shallow water against a narrow pier of rough coral rocks. A pair of Peace Corps teachers, Milton and Janet Bennett, are with me, returning to their village, and much of the little community turns out to greet them, It is a one-path village, maybe 200 yards long and in spots only 50 feet wide between the outhouses and muddy mangrove flats on the shoreline and the island’s steep mountainside. Friends bring a watermelon to the one-room wood, screen, and galvanized metal house of the volunteers. There is talk in Trukese of a few problems, including efforts to get a handicraft-making project going; a cripple boy comes by with some beautiful tortoise shell jewelry he makes for sale on Moen. Later we walk up the path under palm and breadfruit trees to sit on a log by the shore and catch the breeze in the midday heat, A couple dozen children, students of the volunteers, gather around, talking and playing with delicate toys made of wood and pandanus leaves. As easy as I would walk upstairs, one climbs a 40-foot coconut tree and throws down several green young nuts. With a big machete, another trims off the tops, making a quarter-sized hole for drinking. After we finish the cool liquid, he splits the husk and cuts a small chip off the outside for use in scooping out the soft white meat.
The heat and humidity of the day builds in the shaded village until finally the rain comes, not with violent winds but with a deluge of water that sends us all under a thatch boathouse. As suddenly, it all ends; the sun burns down and mist rises from the muddy path. The village seems ready for an afternoon nap as Mariok and I pole the boat out to deep water.
Dublon, the next island, is something far different. This was the site of Japan’s major naval base in the area, and off its shores and elsewhere in the lagoon are dozens of Japanese ships caught by American planes and sunk. Even in its wrecked, decayed, and overgrown state, Dublon is impressive. A neat rock seawall fringes a former fighter strip. Across the deep channel, a landing dock remains in such good condition it’s possible to imagine a Japanese admiral alighting from his barge. In the hills behind, what were once paved roads are now narrow, rutted paths leading past what was a well-developed living area. “The baseball field was there,” says Mariok pointing to a small grassy valley. Further up are the cement ruins of a Japanese hospital where graffiti marked walls echo with the shouts of children who never knew life in the Japanese heyday when, as Mariok says, Dublon was “s nice place.” In all, the effect of this island is like visiting the ruins of a lost civilization — which it is.
Nearby Fefan is far more rural and less disturbed. Its people are noted for the vegetables and fruit they grow on hillside farms, which serve as something of a breadbasket for the district center at Moen.
I stopped to see a Trukese acquaintance named Faustino the hotel handyman who commuted daily to Moen. We walked around the shore and hillsides, finally stopping at the Catholic mission to drink coconuts and chat with a group of men in the shade by the school. They were not up on recent Micronesian political developments, but they knew a choice would someday be made and were interested. Time and typhoons had battered the home of the absent priest and the stone church, built in the 1930s when the Spanish clergy still ministered in these islands. “Things were in better condition in the old days,” Faustino said.
On To Ponape
If Air Micronesia’s island-hopping route is reminiscent of wartime days, the spur run 380 miles southeast from Truk to Ponape is a throwback to earlier days. All will change soon when the new coral airstrip at Ponape is finally finished. But for now you make the trip in a roaring, rattling seaplane, a Grumman Albatross (“the SA-16”), that splashes down in the Ponape lagoon, taxies up an old Japanese seaplane ramp on a separate island where you transfer to an ancient landing barge (“the M Boat”) for the half-hour run to the capital of Kolonia. It’s all quite colorful and charming for the visitor, but for those who depend on it the system is full of inadequacies, frustrations, and breakdowns. It says something about the modern air age that it costs Air Micronesia almost as much on a per mile basis to operate the 15-Passenger seaplane as it does the 80-passenger jet.
Ponape’s main street
Ponape is the second largest island in the Trust Territory and capital of a big district that stretches down to include Polynesian islands near the equator. It is a “high” island, beautiful and lush from heavy rains that send dozens of streams crashing off mountain waterfalls and rushing down to the lagoon inside the fringing coral reef. Older colonial regimes are remembered in a moss-covered Spanish wall in Kolonia; in an agricultural station started by the Germans, with impressive displays of healthy products from green peppers and pineapples to fat pigs, from rice to rambutans; and in the round-the-island road built by the Japanese which years of neglect, too many floods and not enough funds has reduced in most areas to a memory and a muddy footpath.
By much testimony, Ponape has some of Micronesia’s best agricultural potential. It could grow two-thirds of the rice now imported for Trust Territory needs or produce tons of rich citrus, but organization and a dependable ocean transport system are still lacking. A quality pepper-growing industry was started but hasn’t found a market. Good cacao is grown, but world prices are a problem. It says something when the government-run hotel serves canned pineapple and vegetables while the same local products are available in the fresh food market a few blocks away.
Boyd McKenzie, a Hawaii man with years in the Trust Territory, was new in the job of Ponape district administrator during our visit. Driving around the coral-patched streets of the town, he said: ”Nothing much has happened here in the way of development for ten years except the new airport.”
And he might have added that the airstrip represents a costly goof. Dredged coral used in extending and surfacing was not properly packed for the jet; now valuable time and money is being spent in repacking.
Still there is no doubt the jet age will speed up change in Ponape. Local leaders view the prospect of tourism with mixed feelings, but some of the change will be good in terms of better communication and government interest. There is even hope that a government which can bring jets to this island can eventually rebuild the Japanese road, opening the way for rural produce to reach the market and shipping.
Again there was a variety of opinions gathered in traveling around town.
From a drunken young government technician in one of Kolonia’s 21 bars: “Before we were a brave people. Now we are becoming like Americans, not brave but okay.”’
From a Micronesian Trust Territory government official: “With larger budgets we need new development concepts and to get moving, but it is hard to do things economically until you know where you are going politically.”
From a municipal official: “People here are still now at politics…Some of us don’t understand what the political status commission means when it talks about making Micronesia a free associated state.”
From a leader of the Ponape District Legislature: “Our relationship with the (Trust Territory) administration is not clear. If we want something, we pass a resolution. Sometimes they ignore it, sometimes give us good excuses. We were completely ignored until two years ago. Now things are improved. That’s because of creation of the Congress of Micronesia.”
Micronesia’s Venice
An at least modest future in tourism for Ponape seems guaranteed by its natural beauty and the fact it is the site of Nan Madol, ruins of an ancient civilization spread across more than 80 partially manmade islands at the southeast shore of the main island. One goes by speedboat to this decayed Micronesian Venice, down the shore with the white line of the barrier reef on one side and steep green mountains with high white waterfalls on the other. Even on a grey day it is beautiful.
Nan Madol sits on tidal flats, and since we arrived at a lower tide it was necessary to wade in knee deep across a mucky bottom rich with eelgrass and sea slugs that squish underfoot. It’s worth it, for Nan Madol is a relic with a gateway temple made of huge basalt crystals, black-rock logs piled in buildings up to 40 feet high still standing amid the dark of breadfruit trees and other vegetation as you wade up the narrow channels in a falling mist with jungle birds calling in the trees.
Nan Madol ruins
“Haunting is the word,” I said as we climbed over the rocks of Nan Towas, a temple called “The palace of lofty walls.” I thought of comparing it with the Ankor Wat and other man-made wonders of ancient times.
But a scientist friend looked at the scene sadly: “Whenever a people accumulate wealth they figure out some way to piss it away, either on pyramids or battleships. They don’t know what to do with it. They fight for power and with it comes such excess wealth they feel it necessary to appease some gods. That’s what you call civilization.”
On that note we left to see another kind of priest, Jesuit Father Hugh Costigan who presides over a mission several miles down the shore that is dominated by a broad two-story white cement structure high atop a grassy hill, almost in the style of George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
“Is that the church?” I asked the boatman as we came around the bay.
“No,” he said, “it’s the school.”
Father Costigan, with his rich New York Irish brogue and 22 years of effort on Ponape, is hardly an undiscovered story. He’s been noted in magazines, featured on a TV special about missionaries, and during my time in Micronesia another camera crew sought him out. He also knows how to hit the foundations and the fund-raising circuit. But none of that should negate the respect in which he is held. His jungle-bordered empire includes one of the best practical agricultural and technical training schools in Micronesia. He has helped teach some of Ponape’s top leaders. Smoking a string of cigarettes and relaxing in T-shirt and bare feet, Father Costigan is frank in his views:
“Some say the people are getting more anti-American. But really I think they are reacting against the kind of administration they have had for twenty years.”’
He gives credit to some dedicated officials and sincere efforts but adds: “There have been too many real deadheads, real timeservers…. It’s easy to sit back and blame a lack of supplies when you should be innovating.
Father Costigan
Father Costigan’s school on the hill and unfinished church at right
These guys are clever. They’re not off in some bar getting drunk; they are there in the office waiting for the supplies that don’t come in.”
Father Costigan has hustled his own supplies over the years with a special brand of missionary zeal. His school, a two-story affair that spreads out across the hilltop, seems the best building this side of Saipan. But far down the hill with less priority is the unfinished beginnings of a church to be completed later; meanwhile, services are held in a small wooden structure.
Father Costigan explains that this was an area of heavy Protestant effort, that only about 20 per cent of the people on this corner of Ponape are Catholic. “I don’t push it too hard,” he says when asked about evangelical effort among the people. “It may sound kind of Billy Sundayish, but I preach brotherhood, kind of getting along. In fact, tomorrow I’m going down the road a bit to help dedicate a Protestant church we helped build.”’
On the way home, we dived around the reef, looking without success for the “Crown of Thorns” starfish that is supposedly ravaging coral in the Pacific. However, there were only rainbows of little fish and a curious six-foot shark that my scientist friend said would be no problem. We rode the outboard home wearing masks and snorkels to help breathe in a blinding, stinging rain. I thought about Nan Madol, Father Costigan dedicating the Protestant church, and what the jet age would do to Ponape.
Back to Politics
There was a day’s delay in schedule when the pump that fuels the seaplane on the offshore island broke down; barrels of gas were rolled out, but we had to wait overnight until the water and rust settled. So at this point what’s a day? You talk to a few more people, read a paperback, drink more beer, and wait.
Still when the seaplane carrying us from Ponape finally came over the great reef at Truk, I felt eager for the more complicated life, even for a bit of news. Decompressing was over, and people I had met on Truk now seemed like old friends, fellow “island hands.” We talked, and not long after, the jet from Honolulu enroute to Saipan came in. Hawaii friends appeared along with Micronesian politicians headed for their congressional session; you talk in the sunshine glaring off the tan coral airstrip and muddy puddles from a recent rain. In the jet preparing to takeoff a few minutes later all is cool and comfortable, a bit of home at its best, although with some pleasant touches of Micronesia.
“I think you’ll find Saipan interesting,” says Amata Kabua, the Marshallese President of the Senate in the Congress of Micronesia. “It will be our most important session.”
Later walking back to the washroom I hear a snatch of conversation from one American businessman talking to another: “I just came from Africa, and the only two stable nations are South Africa and Rhodesia.”
Decompression is really over.
Received in New York on August 27, 1969.
Mr. John Griffin is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu, Hawaii. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Griffin, the Honolulu Advertiser, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
