Adopt a Beach
Adopt a Beach (Roi Style) - originally published January 10, 2002
My household goods have not arrived here yet so I’ve had to find other things to keep me busy. My boating lessons don’t start until next week and I need to get my c-card to dive. But they have a program here called Adopt A Beach. It is where you can adopt an area of the beach to maintain and use. I decided this would be a good idea so I did it. I’ve got a lovely area with some coconut trees and a big pandana tree for shade. I took over the area from Smitty who isn’t her anymore and it had really gone to pot in his absence. Pretty much all that was left over from the Smitty era was some fishing floats dangling from the tree. I guess they were to give a nautical feel to it. …
I spent the weekend raking up pandana leaves and stacking coconuts to one side creating a border between me and the cop next door. My other neighbor is Matt who is a real nice guy. Both Matt and the cop have structures on their property. Matt even has solar panels on his roof and a water collection apparatus so that he can take showers after a day at the beach. I just use the shower in the public area about a 1000’ away though Matt said I could use his anytime. I thought it would be cool to surround the pandana tree with a deck. But I’m still deciding if I want to put that much work into it (at the time that I left Roi in 2004 the deck was still not built). The beach here is pristine. Often times my footprints are the only ones on it. After a days work whether it is cleaning my area or real work in the office I like to take a dip. This is on the lagoon side of the island so the water is fairly calm. But you have to do what I call the stingray shuffle when walking through the water. I guess stingrays like to hid in the sand so that they can swat you with their tail when you step on them.. The way to foil these attempts at inflicting pain on unwary engineers is to shuffle when you walk so that they sense your foot and swim away to safety. Right now the water is a frigid 81 but they say it will warm up to 84 this summer. The water is crystal clear.
I had occasion to fly to Kwaj yesterday and when I looked down from the plane, which was flying at 3000’, I could see sunken ships below. There are quite a few sunken Japanese ships in the lagoon. I don’t know if my father’s boat sunk all of them. I think he was mostly looking for subs to sink. I invested in a beach chair and when my household goods arrive I will have a hammock and a lounge chair. I plan to string up the hammock and sleep on the beach sometimes on the weekend. I have to figure out what to do if it rains. I figure I could always hide out in Matt’s place until the rain was over but I’m thinking about putting up some sort of canvas cover in the pandana tree to block the rain. I was raking leaves in the rain Monday and it seemed like most of the rain was coming horizontally owing to the prevailing wind. I don’t mind the rain here because it is pretty warm out so it is only a matter of getting wet. There are a number of people who have adopted an area of the beach and many of them have added various structure from simple decks to a roofed cabana with wet bar. The nicest one is probably the Parrot Club but the Surf Shack and Jim’s place is pretty nice. Two doors down from me is an area that was sponsored by the Rainbow Connection. I figure they must be Hawaiians as Hawaii is known as the Rainbow State. I met a nice lady who was using the area but she didn’t really look Hawaiian to me so I don’t’ quite get the Rainbow name. I guess some Hawaiians are white but I haven’t seen any men Hawaiians at the Rainbow place. This whole adopt a beach thing reminds me some of the Monty Python skit where there are a bunch of hermits living on a hill and they are talking to each other. Well, you have to see the skit to know what I’m talking about. I also felt a bit like Tom Hanks in Castaway as I was working on my beach. Before Jim leant me his rake I was trying to figure out a way to rake the leaves using a coconut palm branch but had little success. I’d kind of like to build my structure totally of native materials following their building practices whatever that is. Then all I’d need is a volleyball named Wilson and I’d be just like him. I checked in Gimbals and they had volleyballs but I think they were Voit’s. It wouldn’t be quite the same. Sometimes I hum the song to Gilligan’s Island while I work.
After supper I like to ride my bike down to the beach and sit on my beach chair and watch the sun set. You get desperate when you don’t have a TV. I sat there on night long past sunset looking at the zillion stars in the sky and pondering life. Mostly I was pondering what life was like on Third Island. Third Island is where the nearrest Marshallese live. They have their own name something like Ebeyeke or some crazy thing like that but we call it Third Island because it is 3 islands away from ours (Editor’s note: it is called Enniburr or Santos). Believe it or not, they don’t have any public electricity or running water on their island. We have a fenced in area on our island by the ferry terminal where they can come and use some washing machines that we provided for them. I don’t know how they wash their dishes because I haven’t heard of a dishwasher in the closed area. But back on their island it is pretty primitive. Can you imagine what it must be like with no electricity? I’m assuming that they don’t have phones or cable modems so even if they had a laptop they wouldn’t be able to use the internet. While I sit in my chair I always wonder what they area doing at night there and if there are any unattached single women over the age of 18 who aren’t fat on their island. It is the kind of deep philosophical things you think about when you are on a small tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I asked one of the guys here what they do on their island at night and he said they sleep. He also added that sometimes they make babies at night too. As dark as it gets here at night I don’t know how they tell their wife from their neighbor’s wife in the dark. I also asked what building materials they use and after a chuckle my friend said they pretty much just use plywood. I’m trying to figure out how they cut it without electricity.
Figure 1 - The not so Mythical Island of Enniburr
One night I stayed so late it was quite dark. We don’t have street lights so the only lighting I had was from the runway which kind of crosses the width of Roi. I went of the road a few times on the way home because I was pretty much pedaling by touch alone since I couldn’t see anything. I guess it was a good thing that there wasn’t anyone else on the road but me and that I hadn’t been splicing the main brace (honest I wasn’t).
That is pretty much it for my adopt a beach story. It s about time I go home and head for the beach for tonight. I use it as my attitude adjustment. I don’t really have much stress here but if I did it would go away as soon as I go to the beach.
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One Response to “Adopt a Beach”
 Comment by Natalia Sokolova January 9th, 2008 at 5:33 pm |
Hi there…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Wednesday . |