The Island of the Colorblind

by Oliver Sacks

fitfully

immurement

erudite

vicarious

tussocks

zoysia,

detritus

squalor.

scummy,

turbid

clamber

idyllic

the mass of islands (ninety-one in all) that form Kwajalein atoll, surrounding the largest lagoon in the world. The lagoon itself, she told me, is a test target for missiles from U.S. Air Force bases on Hawaii and the mainland. It is also where countermissiles are tested, fired from Kwajalein at the missiles as they descend. There were nights, she said, when the whole sky was ablaze with light and noise as missiles and antimissiles streaked and collided across it, and reentry vehicles crashed into the lagoon. “Terrifying,” she said,

horror stories from the 1950s: the strange white ash that had rained down on a Japanese tuna fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, bringing acute radiation sickness to the entire crew;

some of the atolls were still so polluted, forty years later, that they were said to glow eerily, like a luminous watch dial, at night.

expatiated

weaned.

slavering

emplacements

voluble,

frangipani.

wreathed

plying

shoals

pandanus

I myself felt a curious indifference, even a sense that it would be fun, romantic, to die on the reef—

mirth,

lithe

“we don’t just go by color. We look, we feel, we smell, we know—we take everything into consideration, and you just take color!”

Many of us use color as a surrogate for other tbings: Ripeness, taste…

Lyellian

lofty

The typhoons which are notorious in this part of the Pacific can be especially devastating to a coral atoll like Pingelap (which is nowhere more than ten feet above sea level)—for the entire island can be inundated, submerged by the huge wind-lashed seas. Typhoon Lengkieki, which swept over Pingelap around 1775, killed ninety percent of the island’s population outright, and most of the survivors went on to die a lingering death from starvation—

romping

stiflingly

tousled,

I took my notebook and made brief notes as we walked (though the ink tended to smudge in the wet air):

breadfruit trees—sometimes whole groves of them, with their large, deeply lobed leaves; they were heavy with the giant fruits which Dampier, three hundred years ago, had likened to loaves of bread.20

tumid

holothurians,

whorls

skeins

Sloan achromatopsia cards.

Ishihara plates,

jostled

indignantly

Wittgenstein was either the easiest or the most difficult of house-guests to accommodate, because though he would eat, with gusto, whatever was served to him on his arrival, he would then want exactly the same for every subsequent meal for the rest of his stay.

having a sort of passion for monotony,

copra,

unctuous

Paul Theroux’s book The Happy Isles of Oceania,