Free Surviving Paradise by Peter Rudiak-Gould Page B

they happened to hit a coconut, impale it, and retrieve it from the sand, then that counted as one ek (“fish”). They played to see who was the best fisherman. I suggested that the game be called Joda Woda (“bad fisherman, good fisherman”) and the children approved.
    Realizing their love for playing in the sand, I wondered if they knew tic-tac-toe. I was thrilled, in a wow-this-really-is-the-middle-of-nowhere kind of way, to discover that they had never heard of it. Of course I couldn’t resist the urge to teach it to them. Thus I spent a little bit of the precious, finite, and depleting resource that is “bits of Western culture that have not yet reached them.” The next volunteer would therefore have one less bit of quaint isolation to be charmed by. Tic-tac-toe was a hit: none of the children forgot how to play it or say its whimsical name.
    Another beach activity was collecting shells. The children had already honed their skills by delivering shells to their parents, who would make them into necklaces and ship them to the urban centers to be sold. I had become a shell enthusiast as of the first time I walked on Ujae’s beach. When word of this got out, the children began to search for shells to give to me, handing them to me in person orleaving them on my windowsill. The youngsters also delivered the worn-down spines of dead sea urchins. They were as light as balsa wood and made a pleasant high-pitched sound when they hit into each other—ideal material for a windchime.
    The colors of the seashells were more than just interesting—they were artistic. One gift from the children was a checkered spiral of red and white. Another was bright yellow stars on a night sky. Yet another was a geometric study in subtle browns. The reef fish, with their blended pastels or bold primary colors, impressed me in the same way. If I had been a painter, I would have begun a series of abstract pieces called “In the Style of the Squirrelfish,” “In the Style of the Tiger Cowrie,” and so on.
    The hermit crabs had already claimed the best shells as their mobile homes. I was jealous of their beautiful possessions, but I could never bring myself to steal one. I asked the children to follow the same rule when they collected shells for me, and they agreed. Even so, I soon had far too many specimens to keep. I had to make secret journeys to the ocean beach, with my pockets full to bursting with cowries, in order to discard the less-than-perfect ones without hurting anyone’s feelings.
    I saw now that the children, for all their invasiveness and insensitivity, wanted to please me. I was exotic. I was easily the most interesting thing on the island. Not only that, I was the only adult who they could call a friend. A Marshallese man who joined the children in a rousing game of hide-the-pandanus would be dubbed an eccentric or worse. But the villagers knew that Americans were different. Among the weird habits of ribelle s—such as daily showers, obsessive reading, and swimming just for fun—was their willingness to play with youngsters.
    There were impromptu games of baseball, in which a dry, sucked-out pandanus kernel was an acceptable substitute for a ball, and the bat was whatever stick or board they might find lying around. They played these games on the road, but they never had to scurry away from oncoming traffic, because there was none. I had initially been disturbed by what I interpreted as parental neglect, but I could now see one of the reasons behind this hands-off approach to caretaking: on Ujae, the children had little to fear. There were no strangers tokidnap them or cars to run them over, and it was impossible to get lost. How overprotective, how coddling and yet distrustful American parents would have seemed to the people of Ujae.
    I joined the kids on their adventures in an inflatable raft. So many naked children crowded onboard that it was hard to tell which brown