Lonely Island -- Chapter 18

Lonely Island

A True and Fictional

Tragical Historical yet Comical Account

Of the Myriad Mysteries and Enigmas

Of Easter Island

Clayton Bess

Chapter 18 only

boblocke@csus.edu

http://webpages.csus.edu/~boblocke/index.htm

Lonely Island

Chapter Eighteen

And Here Am I

And so now do you think that you have been able to sort through all of the mystery and all of the enigmas to understand our little grain of sand in the deep? Then you are surely more brainy than I. I, Toromiru, am as lost as ever, even though how could I be lost on a tiny island, every square foot of which I know by heart?

And there is so much about my people that I have not understood how to fit into this which has now become a full book. (Oho! Could I have ever imagined when I first began the writing of it!) I would perhaps have liked to tell you more about the various engineers who have come here attempting to understand how our people could have transported and erected so many giant statues of stone, when indeed all that our people will say upon the subject is, "They walked." (Ha!) I would perhaps have liked to tell you more about the diggings and cataloguing of the moai and so many details of that laborious work, but ho hum. I would definitely have liked to tell you more about our language, and how it differs from and is related to the various other Polynesian languages in such far away places as Tahiti, New Zealand and Hawaii. Oh, how that interests me!

I would like to tell you so many things about the Polynesian peoples who are scattered upon so many thousands of islands over so many thousands of miles—or, as Captain Cook pronounced it, "a fourth part of the circumference of the Globe"—about whom so many words have been written since the days of that good Captain Cook who so admired us. But alas, I do not know these things yet myself, about these people, my people. Or peoples. By now, after all these centuries, these different people on these different islands, so far apart, must surely classify as peoples, yes, by now.

I think you must understand that my intention has not been to try to explain our mysteries but to place them before you. As with the mystery of the carving, transport and erection of our moai and ahu, all at the expense of our forests and our climate, for me it is very simple; it was done, fait accompli, end of story. The deepest mystery, for me, is why. Why would my people have made not one, not fifty, not one hundred, but nearly one thousand of these moai which now lie all about our island, their necks broken, or which stand or lie lonely in their quarry?

You have seen the photographs in this book of the standing moai, and you are probably wondering how they came to be standing since Toromiru has gone to great trouble to tell you the terrible tales of the huri moai, during which time the moai were each and every one, tout-a-fait, pulled down, most of them decapitated.

Figure 60: Ahu Akivi

Well, these restorations of our moai started with a Mr. William Mulloy, who first came here with the expedition of Mr. Heyerdahl in 1955 and who, when he died in 1978, had his ashes buried not at his home but on our island, thus proving how much Mr. Mulloy loved his life here. In 1960 Mr. Mulloy oversaw the raising of the seven moai at Ahu Akivi. First it was necessary to reattach the heads of the moai with a kind of cement, which you can, unfortunately, see clearly when you look closely at my photograph, Figure 60.

Other expeditions have come to our island to erect all fifteen of the moai at Tongariki (Figure 62), the six and one-half at Ahu Nau Nau at Anakena Beach—four with eyes and pukao—some at Tahai, and others near Hanga Roa.

Figure 61: Here is a restored moai, with pukao atop and with eyes again in place.

We are very indebted to the many peoples of the world who have come to our island and who have been sponsored by their governments to restore our moai and erect them once again on their ahu. We ourselves, I know, could not have done it without these helps. And when I look at our moai, I catch a glimpse of who I come from.

Figure 62: Here at Ahu Tongariki we can see the fifteen standing statues, and one still prone, each reminding the other of the tragedy of the huri moai, or downing of the moai.

In the 2003 book by Mssrs. Flenley and Bahn, one of their final chapters is called "The Island that Self-Destructed". It begins with this paragraph:

It is common and convenient in archaeology to divide cultures or periods into three, such as Lower/Middle/Upper. Easter Island is no exception to the rule... Settlement (up to AD 1000), Expansion (1000-1500) and Decadence (1500-1722)... It is reckoned that no more statues (or at least very few) were erected on platforms after c. AD 1500 … and that, economically and demographically, it was all downhill after that. (191)

"All downhill after that." Does that not make you heave a dreadful sigh? Still downhill, I suppose. At least we have planted some trees again, even if those are mostly Eucalyptus trees that are very drying to the soil. But now, when you walk through our town of Hanga Roa, where some of the streets are even paved, you will walk in the shade of trees planted along the roadside. When you go to the beach at Anakena, you can come out of the sand and sun and rest in the shade of palm trees.

Our people have learned at least some of our mistakes and, with the outside world coming here and wanting to help us, we are turning around our self-devastation.

Figure 63: This ahu clearly can never be restored to the way it was.

I may or may not ever leave this island. My savings account in the bank in Chile is growing so long as the Joneses continue their kindnesses and generosity to me. I have plans to go to university. I would like to travel the globe around, like the Joneses, like my beloved Captain Cook and his Mr. Wales. Will I ever? I hope for it so much that sometimes I tremble with it.

Meanwhile, please take this caution for yourself. My people on my island were so imprudent that they cut down each and every tree of our once great forest. They changed our island and its climate perhaps forever. Most certainly they changed the history of our people. From what Mr. and Mrs. Jones told me when they were here on this island and studying—with me in tow—I am now aware that there are many problems in the world. There are other places where they are felling all their trees, as we did. No one is stopping them from this terrible thing. Greed motivates them, and stupidity and not looking toward the future allows them to move forward as they use up our most precious resources on our planet.

Indeed, the Joneses have just sent me a new DVD to play on the new DVD machine that they have also sent me. Oh, the technology! Oh, the humanity! This DVD is of the movie An Inconvenient Truth presented to us by the unfortunate Mr. Al Gore. I say unfortunate because he lost the presidency of the United States of America, and there is shame all around that loss, as I understand it. But I am so far away here that I am helpless to fully understand such things as these. But this documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, documents such future horrors as I have never imagined, so much worse even than the bleakness of this, my island.

The planet is warming, Mr. Al Gore tells us, very convincingly. This man has such stature and intelligence that he appears in my mind to have high credibility. Also, what he explains rings with clear and utter resonance to what I know from the experience of my own people on my own island. Mr. Al Gore says that because of what people worldwide have done and are continuing to do on this planet, we are filling the top layers of the thin atmosphere of the Earth with a gas called carbon dioxide, with the result that the rays of the sun no longer bounce properly off into space but are held close to the Earth, warming the planet year after year. The most impactful part of what Mr. Al Gore says is in regard to the North Pole and South Pole of the planet which once were covered far more completely with ice. The white of the ice is very good for the bouncing off into space of the rays of the sun, and thus it has been for the Earth for millions of years. But lo! a change, a very bad change. Now, as the planet warms, the ice melts, and the white of the ice gives way to the dark blue of the sea which does not bounce the rays back into space, but absorbs the rays. The result? As you may easily understand, an even faster and greater warming, melting yet more ice, making yet wider blue sea and raising the levels of the oceans ever more.

. Imagine being on an island when the ice melts. Imagine the waters of the ocean rising, eating up the tiny land allotted to us farther and farther. Now imagine Toromiru looking out to sea, eyes wide, then turning my back to the sea, like our moai, but to see what? My island shrinking. The people with ever less high ground left to climb to, ever less ground into which to plant our sweet potatoes, ever more fighting for ever less food and water.

But what is a continent but an island? Will the rest of you on your continents not also lose great portions of your own land to the ever growing oceans?

The Joneses have written me that their house, where they live in San Francisco, will be under water. They say this will be within perhaps so soon as fifty years, if we do not start to work today to begin to stop the warming right now. In his film Mr. Al Gore shows other places in the United States, in the city of New York for example, where the waters will rise and drown the land and buildings. I believe that the city of New Orleans, which I understand was once such a wonderful place, has already suffered a great flood due to a great hurricane made larger than any hurricane previous because of the global warming that has already taken place. But this tragedy of New Orleans, according to Mr. Al Gore, is merely the beginning of the great tragedies that lie before us on this planet due to global warming.

For what is a planet but an island?

This inconvenient truth is rather more, indeed, than merely inconvenient. And since I have watched this film, my mind is full of new catastrophe. From where I stand on my island, there appears nothing I can do to help. But perhaps if people in power read my words here, and see with horror the history of my once-great people on this island I so love, perhaps they will open their eyes to this inconvenient truth of Mr. Al Gore, and they will change their ways.

It is the oil, you see: the oil that makes the gas that runs the automobiles that carry the people to their work in the factories, all spewing carbon dioxide into the thin atmosphere. And it is the cutting down of the trees that would absorb this carbon dioxide and convert it into healthy oxygen. Oh, Mr. Al Gore lays it out very clearly, and he states very firmly at the end that there is hope if our leaders recognize the danger now and lead us into a stopping and reversing. These would needs be leaders more wise than our leaders on this island who, alas, never did stand on the high point of our island and see the last of the trees being felled and cry out to us, "Ai! Stop, people! Stop what we are doing. Now! Not tomorrow, not next year, not right after this last moai that we so foolishly construct and transport, but now, today."

Perhaps, indeed, the peoples of the world will be wiser than the people of my island who were too content to cut down all our trees and destroy our island, to change our climate to one of drought, to cause our food to become scarce to the point where we went to war and ate each other to try to survive.

Figure 64: The Earth from Space, the Arctic Ice Cap melting

For, indeed and forever, what is our planet but an island? Like the people of our island with no place to flee, where can the people of the planet flee? As the planet grows ever hotter, its ice caps and glaciers melting into the salt waters of the ocean, with ever diminishing fresh water to drink and to sustain the plants and animals of the world, the people will begin to fight, yes. We will retreat to our caves again, in fear of our neighbors, again, coming out in the dark of night to kill and eat each other.

And so, yes, we do have our Mr. Al Gore standing now on the high point, crying to us, "Ai, stop!" And Mr. Al Gore gives us some very good advices about what we can do now. And he gives us hope that mankind really can change the course we have taken. Will we listen to him, I wonder. Will we stop, and reverse? And if not … !

Dot dot dot. Exclamation point.

But, for hope, and for one example of how an island—or planet—might recover, I offer you this postscript about our little, twisted and tortured Toromiro tree that has existed here, and only here, in the loneliness of the planet. This comes from the 2003 book by Mssrs. Flenley and Bahn:

Thanks to the depredations of the inhabitants, and the introduction of browsing and grazing animals by Europeans, the toromiro declined, so that by the time Thor Heyerdahl visited the island in the 1950s he could find only a single, almost dead specimen in the crater of Rano Kau. Since then, no botanist has recorded it; and the species appeared to be extinct.

Miraculously, phoenix-like, it rose from the grave in Sweden. Seeds collected by Heyerdahl from the last surviving specimen on the island germinated in the botanic gardens at Göteborg. The species is now flourishing there, as well as in the botanic gardens at the University of Bonn. Attempts have been made to reintroduce it to the island; the first attempts were unsuccessful, and there was concern that perhaps some vital ingredient was no longer present in the island soil. Later attempts by the Chilean Forestry Service are succeeding, but slowly. Recently the genetic diversity of the surviving specimens has been assessed, and it is clear that several cultivated specimens survived in Chile and elsewhere. A concerted effort to re-introduce the species is underway. The outcome of the latest attempt is awaited with great interest. (22-3)

Toromiru is here, doing what I can for my island, for my planet. I treasure my island so. The Navel of the World, the Navel of the Deep. And I so treasure the tiny planet on which my island is such a tiny grain of sand. Lonely planet. Lonely island.

Figure 65: Sunset on my island.

The End

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