Free Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould Page A

proved me right: I overcame boredom almost immediately. Here I took a lesson from the children: there is always something to do. Some of the youngsters had never left Ujae, yet none of them complained of boredom. (The one exception to this was during my English classes, as I would find out in a few days when school started.) One would be more likely to find a child at loose ends in the First World, where every imaginable pastime lay at his fingertips.
    I came to the conclusion that boredom has little to do with the number of available activities and much to do with how well one is integrated into one’s environment. I would hazard the opinion that no indigenous society suffers from a lack of entertainment, no matter how isolated or austere its homeland. There are always possibilities for recreation, and people have had thousands of years to find them. If the options are limited, that only means that the locals will be incredibly skilled at the few things they do.
    I once watched a nine-year-old boy skipping stones on the beach at Ariraen. Each stone would jump once, twice, then five times more, until each hop became so small that the rock appeared to glide over the surface of the lagoon. At last it would sink, fifty yards from where it had been thrown. If young American rock skippers had seen this, they would despair. Farther down the beach, a girl was flying a kite one hundred feet in the air, and the children were trying to peg it with rocks. They were never more than ten feet off. Then Tamlino appeared with an ingenious toy: a blowpipe made from a single plant. The weapon was the long, hollow stem, and the ammunition was the tiny green fruits. His aim was impeccable. He succeeded in annoying his older brother.
    The happiest I had felt in four weeks on Ujae was joining the youngsters in their beach games. I discovered their charm and inventiveness, and I realized they could be a joy when I did not demand peace or solitude. They played all sorts of games on the beach. The girls would sit and pat the sand in front of them into a little semicircle. Then they would look for discarded objects—a plastic shard, an old battery, a bit of driftwood—and carefully arrange them in their canvas of sand. They might spend half an hour in that spot, perfecting their little world: arranging, rearranging, adding, subtracting, and always patting down any stray bits of sand to maintain a firm background. The items did not appear to stand for anything. It was not a game of house with a seashell representing the mother and a rock representing the father. It was just a solo act of abstract expression.
    Next to these girls, a boy might be playing another solitary game, holding out the tips of his index, middle, and ring fingers in a little equilateral triangle and using this printing press to poke patterns ofholes in the sand. He would challenge himself to see how fast he could draw a perfect pyramid of dots in this way. Next to him, a group of young teenagers would be playing dodgeball-meets-monkey-in-the-middle: the unlucky middleman had to dodge a ball thrown back and forth between two other players. It would end, invariably, with three sand-covered children collapsed in giggles on the beach. There were sleight-of-hand games, too, played with a rock and three coconut half-shells.
    The children often invented new games on the spot. In the West, a caretaker would be watching the youngsters’ every move, and any play with a dangerous object would last all of five seconds before the horrified adult put a stop to it. Here, the children were free to play with what they pleased, and they rose to the occasion by doing so safely. One day, I saw two ten-year-olds discover an old wooden board with the sharp end of a nail sticking out of it. They gathered four or five embryonic coconuts, about the size of tennis balls, and buried them in shallow holes on the beach. Then they took turns whacking the sand with the nail end of the board. If