Guiding Star
The bay called Fagaalu was once the home of small fishing vessels called alias. This caught my attention because in the days of ancient Polynesian voyaging, which I know really little about but read this fact once while browsing the open stacks of the local library, the original alias traveled great distances in unchartered waters until they came upon land. I understand the modern alias are double hulled aluminum vessels about twenty three feet in length. They are powered by 20 to 80 horsepower outboard engines.
At one point during my stay in American Samoa, I actually went down to the pier in town and saw a working fishing alia. It was quite unremarkable. A double hull with a cuddy cabin to protect the crew from wind and water when the rains came or heavy seas washed over the side.
Imagining that, I tried to reconstruct in my mind what the original alias had for protection against the elements.
My stay on the island coincided with a religious conference. I wasn't a part of that but it made my stay more interesting because the surge of new faces on the island made me seem a bit less conspicuous. But I couldn't help interacting with the religious conferees. We all stayed at the same hotel, one of the few good ones in town. An evening walk from the hotel along the shore line and around a bend that defined the entrance to the great Pago Pago harbor first took me to Fagaalu village. There was a fine park where young women played a variation of the English game of cricket. The girls, quite stout and seemingly powerful batters wielded bats that, I must admit, appeared more like ancient war clubs than proper cricket bats. And while a few of the players wore sneakers and socks, the normal footwear was a well calloused foot. At the head of the bay is where I saw the first alia, and, upon questioning a more than helpful elderly gentleman, I became informed of the history of the place and the legacy of the now forgotten alia fishing fleet. Only this one remained and it was forlorn and not appreciably seaworthy.
So after being amused by the cricket activities, punctuated by the womens' whistles, rhythmic clapping and a chorus of well intoned group cheers, I took my leave of the place and headed back to the hotel. All in all, with a nearly full moon rising in the east, the stroll along the shoreline, with a breaking reef off my right shoulder, was as pleasurable as any description offered in a tourist brochure describing what a romantic night in the South Pacific might be like. Further out in the middle of the harbor a small, high prowed fishing vessel churned through the swells on her voyage in from some not too distant fishing grounds to off load her catch of tuna. I presumed the crew would soon be at carousing in one of several waterfront bars that service men who knew long hours and spartan conditions without the luxuries of drink, lovemaking nor comfort in any sense of the word.
I returned to my hotel. Upon reaching the immense comfort of the room, attendant hot water shower and cable TV, I found myself rather longing for the sea. So I slipped into a pair of casual cotton pants, a print shirt and sandals and went to the outdoor seaside bar to ease the tension of the day with a soothing Campari with orange juice on ice.
No sooner did my mind began to blur against the duel narcotics of a moon light shimmering ocean and the alcohol, a quite attractive woman took a seat at my table and struck up a conversation. She certainly was an islander and I presumed a Samoan at that. Her cheekbones were quite defined and I mean to say that she didn't have a round, or even a rounded face. And her nose was not flattened or splayed. In fact it was quite aquiline, straight and defined. Her lips were poutish and glistened quite beautifully against the rosy glow of the colored illuminated lights strung from one coconut tree to the next.
She wore a sleeveless print top that was haltered just below the bosom. The wide shoulder straps nicely offset her luxurious skin, olive and full sheen in the moonlight.
"So what brought you to the island?" she asked.
It wasn't the opening I expected and I was a bit taken aback.
" Well I think I'm here on business," I said, "But the island and her people are so beautiful I'm not sure if its really business or a vacation between meetings."
"That can happen," she said. "Some people never leave. It must be a kind of magic spell that grabs them; won't let them go." she offered.
I must admit her words somewhat grabbed me. Whether it was the way she spoke, or some knowledge she harbored, or perhaps that she had seen enough people who did in fact never leave, her words bit in and lingered long enough in my consciousness, that I took note of her bearing.
"You do read about that kind of thing happening," I answered. "Look what happened to the crew of the Bounty over at Pitcairn."
" Yes, and Robert Louis Stevenson too." she added.
By this time our short repartee had taken a quick rise in intensity. Literary references, notwithstanding, this woman who just then introduced herself as Losalia, emitted an embrace that extended from within and was able to spread out beyond her physical self and enter my mind. It was rather exhilarating to say the least and I wondered if my modest libido had any similar reaction to her across the table.
"So you never did answer my question about your stay on Tutuila?"
She pressed the issue and I felt compelled to answer.
"Actually I'm in the hospitality business and my job is to secretly evaluate the hospitality at the other large hotel on the island. So I'll be a diner at the restaurant, a guest at the spa and stay three nights there all unannounced to the management. Then I'll write my report and go on to my next assignment, in Tahiti. And in all fairness, do you live here or are you a visitor, at the church conference perhaps?"
" Church conference," she gave out with a hearty laugh. "I don't expect they would enjoy hearing what I have to say about my beliefs in Christianity. Yes, I am visiting but I'm actually from here, from the village of Fagaalu just around the corner from here. I live in Hawaii now, you know, island girl who couldn't get totally away from the spirit of the islands."
She had ordered a vodka and cranberry and took a deep draw, enough to tighten her neck muscles and put a squint in her eyeline as the bite of the alcohol passed her tastebuds and throat.
"My father was a minister." she volunteered. "He passed away two weeks ago. We put him to rest last Saturday."
I offered my condolences, as I thought appropriate.
" Well thank you. We were very close. I've been on island for six months caring for him at home. We had some good times together before he passed. I'm at ease with it now. I still talk to him every day."
"You talk to him? You mean you think about him?"
"No, no, not at all. We talk. Don't expect to understand what I said to you. Its something we Polynesians do. What island in Tahiti will you be traveling to?"
How she transitioned from the grief of her father's death, to talking to a dead man to wondering about my next destination was a mystery to me. I reflected on the subject for a moment while she seemed preoccupied with a distant object, or thought, somewhere on or beyond the barely visible horizon in the distance. Perhaps death for her was a form of travel. Where a spirit can be here and then vanish and return knowing all the while how to find the way back to a village or more exactly a fellow spirit in the this life. And I thought briefly about herself. How she might become of the proper mental state to receive a spirit message and separate her physical self from the realm of another world where energies defy normal human understanding. Given that she was a very attractive woman about who any man, myself included, would allow ones self a fair amount of mind wandering, that is in a physical sense, should be quite natural, and I expect quite normal as well.
"Well you can think what you like", she said, "but I have that power within me. I don't consider it to be at all supernatural. In fact I was born with it. My father though, maybe because of his own brand of religious beliefs, nurtured me and my brothers and sisters with the set of mind to see and feel things that don't register in the air like other things; Like a house or a tree, or for instance, a shell that washes up on the beach and is polished and worn around a handsome boy's neck."
Now this may appear strange, but at that very moment I thought closely about my next destination in Tahiti. I wasn't going to Bora Bora, or one of the larger tourist sites. My new destination was to a small atoll island named Havaiki about 60 miles and fifteen degrees north of Bora Bora itself. I had only found it on a map and plotted my course via Auckland, New Zealand and then on to Bora Bora and then by a two engine island hopper aircraft to the island's small landing strip.
"I'm going to a small island called Havaiki," I said, half wondering to myself if either the intoxication of my second Campari, or merely her aural presence may have started to cloud my senses.
"I don't know it. I'll ask my father", she said, without, by the way, a hint of either doubt or self recrimination that I might question if she really could, in my way of thinking, communicate with the dead.
"You said your father was a minister but that your religious beliefs were, uh, unorthodox from, say, the beliefs of the conventioneers." Oh hell, I thought. She's proved her spiritual credits. Let's take this conversation a bit farther, I said to myself.
"Yes, he was a minister. In one of the bigger churches too. And he knew the new and the old testament and the prophets and the gospels and the psalms. He loved the psalms, their language and their poetry. He said it reminded him of the poems his grandfather had taught him."
"Tell me about that, " I said.
"First I have to know about your beliefs. Are you a church man?"
"Of sorts, but to be honest, in the past few years I've come around to a belief in the power of nature itself. Its part of earth warming and climate change, new age way of seeing things. Very modern. I believe in a strong force in the earth. Maybe we can call it God or even gods."
She got up from her chair, which was then across the small outdoor table from me. She placed the chair and herself in it just next to me so that her profiled face shown in the night and the rise of her breast shadowed against the light too and she looked at me directly so that I might know her words were meant to dig deep inside of me and share, not tell, a story about a life she was born to and clung to and a force within her that transcended the good book in ways not known to people of other places.
"Did you know, we Samoans, have our own gods. Ones that are thousands of years older than the bible?"
I didn't. "No I'm not aware of that." At this point, I must concede, I had no idea where, or for how long, this conversation was going.
"I'm staying here at the hotel before I go back to Hawaii. Some of the family members are getting on my nerves. They are still stressed out over dad's passing. I can't quite understand why. So here I am. Actually I saw you walking in Fagaalu over the past couple of days. I've been playing cricket with the other village girls. We won the flag day tournament way back when."
"I was told there was a small fishing fleet there at one time.", I said.
"My father was a fisherman too. He would take me on the boat with him and we would stay out all night. I loved that. Yes he was a minister, but he told the church congregation about how Christ fed the masses with the fish and the loaves and how Christ calmed the waters when Peter feared for his life while fishing during a tempest."
"Do you believe that?" I asked
"I believe that some very special people have that power to talk with the gods of nature."
This perplexed me to no end. I had only just then commented on my own naturalistic belief which even I had to admit to myself was more fadish belief than one intoned as a true devotional guidance.
"My father knew that the age of our traditional beliefs had been interrupted when the missionaries arrived. He partially accepted the changes but in his heart the old ways were where his true heart and soul remained. You see, in our old beliefs, nature and spirit and mankind are linked by certain deities both godlike and human. My father, through his father and his father's father and so on was one of those people who was godlike. He held special powers to give advice, to find his way in the world and calm the inner spirits of plain mortals. Would you like to go for a walk? Are you wearing flipflops?"
I answered yes to both questions. Soon thereafter we walked along the same road toward the village of Fagaalu. It was after eleven and there were few vehicles on the road. For the life of me I had no idea what Losalia's intentions were. I didn't fear her. From the first moments we talked I noticed her scent. Now as we strolled it came back to me. She had a gardenia in her hair. When we arrived at the end of the small harbor Losalia pulled back the low hanging branches of a shoreline tree. There was a small dugout canoe and two paddles.
"Ever tried this?" she asked.
Of course I hadn't and maybe better sense would tell me not to try. There was a pull. The moon maybe, the strong and musky scent of her gardenia. Or more likely her spiritual attraction that now lifted me from a new age romantic to the beginnings of a belief that I knew little about but felt the tug of a thousand, or thousands, of years.
On a flat moonlit sea we paddled along a course set by a line of sight described by a distant point of land in front and the spire of a church to the stern of the small boat. She held a course that she obviously knew well until we came to a point where the eastern and western horizons where visible fore and aft.
"What's the name of your next island?" she asked.
"Havaiki." I answered..
"Look ahead," she said. "do you see those three stars in a row?"
I recognized the stars in Orion's belt albeit they were upside down from my normal perspective.
"Now follow them down to a well in the horizon. That's your heading to Havaiki. And look behind. Do you see the two stars together there just above the horizon at our stern?"
I did see them and I was eager to let Losalia know that I saw them. When I turned back to tell her, Losalia was bare and in the light her figure stood out like an earthly goddess. She paddled strongly and her muscled torso belied the image of her I had back at the hotel. I followed and removed my shirt. We paddled in unison and the small canoe broke a neat bow wave as we ran into the wind, lifted by the ocean swells and the land line receding behind us.
"Follow the line of our guiding stars fore and aft until the three stars rise this far above the horizon. Then we will follow two new rising stars before and behind us. In two days we will reach a small island where there is water and plants to nourish us and replenish our energy. In seven days and three stops total we will reach Havaiki."
She spoke with such knowledge and conviction that I had no alternative but to paddle on and live the life of an ancient time when and where a people were guided by divine knowledge of the seas and all things in the heavens and the gods and goddesses who ruled them. And who exactly was I to decry this supernatural being, Losalia, who led me to this place and time where nature and a mortal meet in unison and are guided by celestial beings both known and unknown.
Losalia turned to me and signaled to stop paddling. But the spell was not yet broken. She embraced me and carried me prone to the bottom of the canoe. Her skin was more than warm. She enveloped me and took me in a way that moved my senses in no way other before. I was absorbed by her senses of fragrance and spirit and her strength. I do not know if our union and climax was only human for my mind and body seem transported to another world. Our embrace seemed eternal and I believe it was.
When we both knew that we had reached a level of contact between our souls and spirits the magic slowly diminished. As I looked up anticipating the long paddle back to the village, I was surprised to find that the wind and currents had taken us back to the place where we departed. This surprised me but not at all Losalia.
"We may not see one another for a while" she said. "But we will talk. Tonight I will sleep on my father's grave because what we did and where we went will please him much."
Some time later, back at the hotel, sitting on a lounge chair on my small lanai, the scent of gardenia wafted through the air. When I awoke the next morning there was a message from Losalia. She had departed for Hawaii earlier that morning. She said she would contact me and I believed she would do exactly that.
"Guiding Star" is a short story from the collection of short stories entitled, "The Handy Couple's Guide to Bush Sex in American Samoa."
