My house in the Marshall Islands is 15 feet from the ocean’s edge. That is not saying a lot because everything here is about 15 feet from the ocean’s edge — but it is still special to me. At night, when I am laying in bed, I can hear the ocean. It is a quiet, white roar that lulls me to sleep and wakes me up again come morning. When everything is working just right there is a breeze that comes in off of that ocean and into my room. It makes my curtains sway and dance and it cools me off. That ocean that is 15 feet from me is the same ocean I had back home — the great Pacific Ocean.
The ocean is an important thing for me here. Not only is it a link home, it is my air conditioning. On nights when there is no wind, my room temperature gets hot and heavy with humidity and I am left to toss and turn on tangled sheets, slowly sweating and melting into my own bed.
On nights like that I can’t sleep and when I can’t sleep I hear things. The first night that I spent in my house I woke up to this strange scuttling sound. It was a small sound but in my quiet, personal hot-box it seemed to shake the walls. I sat up in bed and turned on a flashlight. There on the floor was a big, reddish cockroach exploring a the puddle of water I had spilt from my Nalgene right before I went to bed. Carefully and slowly, so as not to scare off my prey, I grabbed a thick book (“Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens) and floated it over the roach where he felt out with the puddle his huge antenna.
BOOM! I dropped the book but the roach had sensed what was coming and almost avoided the strike altogether, but two of his legs were caught under the oppressive weight of Victorian literature. The roach clawed at the air from the flat of its back and struggled to free its legs. Then, as I moved in for the kill with a second book (“Teacher Man” by Frank McCourt) the little beast did a desperate thing which I am sure I couldn’t do in a similar situation. The roach ripped his body away from his legs and scrambled back under my bed.
I stared at the legs sitting there, and I contemplated cleaning them up, but it was late and all I wanted was to find some sleep during that sweltering night so I laid back down.
As the night went on and the Pacific failed to give me more breeze, I woke up and out of curiosity, shined my light down on the legs of the cockroach. The legs were covered by ants. I shrugged, and went back to sleep. The next morning when I woke up there was nothing on my floor. No hobbled roach, no missing legs and no ants.
It was the circle of life.
So, things are very nice at my house when the Pacific is wafting up a breeze, if not then things get downright savage.
In my house I will have one roommate. His name is Hemant and he was an investment banker in New York for three years before he came here. When we all opened accounts for our meager volunteer stipends and were debating between checking and savings, Hemant did the only sensible thing and opened up both. Hemant is a nice guy but is so sarcastic sometimes you do not know what to do — laugh or run.
Aside from the two rooms for Hemant and I, there are a kitchen/living room and a bathroom. Both are pretty good sized but as there is construction going on a few feet from the side of the house every morning so when I get up to make some coffee in my boxers there are construction workers busy building the new section of the high school and that can be a bit awkward.
The living room is a pretty big section of real estate and when the Pacific is kind, it stays pretty cool. We have not been able to make much use of it however, as a volunteer named Cox has used it for his bedroom until he gets a boat to the outer island where he teaches.
To get to my house you have to walk past the dorm, where eight other volunteers live, on this thin little path that is severally overgrown. Every time that I am on that thing, especially at night, I am paranoid that I am going to get bit by one of the poisonous centipedes that live on this island. It wouldn’t kill me, but I hear that it hurts pretty bad.
All in all life is pretty good 15 feet from the ocean. Life is even better when it is whipping up a breeze, but I don’t have to worry because the windy season will be here in about a month, and those will be some high times when I sleep right through the scuttling sounds from the floor.
The love you give comes back in the end.
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