FIELD NOTES, Part 1

The following is the opening of a piece in Overseas: stories, all of which are set in the 1980s on the island of Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia. The stories in the book are linked as the narrator of one can be found as a character in another. All of the stories are from an expat's point of view as I cannot presume to enter, except superficially, the heart and mind of an islander. Those who have read Miss Gone-overseas will note that she, too, was an outsider to the island and its culture.


The road to Salvador’s is hard and smooth, the potholes freshly filled with coral rubble and rolled. I pass the derelict pepper plantation, the vines spiraling up fern logs, many leaning at crazy angles, like a battalion of exhausted soldiers.

It’s the heart of the dry season, those few short weeks when the rains cease and the sky becomes a glorious blue, when the acacia trees bloom pale gold, when conjunctivitis is endemic.

I drive slowly. A pickup passes, the back full of islanders returning from jobs in town to their homes in the outlying villages. A cloud of coral dust from the truck’s wake settles on my windshield, making it opaque. Then a sudden THUMP. At once the front of the car is up and over, and before I can brake, the back wheels follow. I quickly pull off the road. I panic, fearing I have run over a child, or someone’s dog, but it’s only the corpse of a small banana tree, felled the night before by the rainless wind.

Last night I had listened apprehensively as the wind played tricks with the night noises: the snap of twigs, the rasp of palm fronds across the metal roof, and the pandanus scratching at the window screen like the insistent fingernails of a night crawler.

My house is secure, but night crawlers can sometimes be more than a nuisance. A couple of years ago an elderly expat, an eighty-year old missionary, was raped and robbed. They caught the boy. He had a history of dementia.

When my husband was here and we lived up at Seven Houses, our place was broken into, but all I found missing besides some food and soft drinks were a hand mirror, the hair-cutting scissors, and a bottle of cologne. Not long after that the banker’s place was hit and they took all his wife’s dresses. Blanche claims to have seen her clothes walking around town.

Then there’s the old story of the Peace Corps volunteer who was raped. This was years ago. She was out walking in the jungle and a man threatened her with a machete. Some say he just happened to be carrying a machete when he asked her for a fuck. They say he didn’t threaten her at all and she could have easily said, No thanks, not today.