From aloft , the atoll looked skeletal and toothy, its beige reef serrated and contoured, split by ten azure passes, arteries of the lagoon. Photo: Kew
“How do they do it?”
“Very early in the morning, they give you a kind of drink.”
“What’s in it?”
“In our culture, it is forbidden for the magicians to share this. But basically it’s from the water of a young coconut, and they mix it with the young shoot of a noni plant. The dancer will drink this, and the magic will live with her forever. Many local people die from this. They have the black magic inside of them and sometimes it comes out when they dance. Not every dancer experiences it.”
“But the girl who collapsed tonight, she did?”
“Yes.”
We were driving through a clearing that ran along the beach. The water sparkled beneath the sinking crescent moon. The ocean looked lifeless.
“No waves,” I said.
“You did some surfing today?” Tebau asked. “At the harbor? Some Australians have surfed there but in a different time of year. Huge waves at full
moon. And spring tide. Now it is neap tide and not full moon, so the waves are very small.”
“I noticed.”
What surf existed that morning had long vanished. The atoll’s leeward Pacific became a lake, and two days later I ascended again, watching an atoll shrink in the distance through the scratched plastic of an Air Kiribati window, eventually landing on another atoll which from aloft looked skeletal and toothy, its beige reef serrated and contoured, split by ten azure passes, arteries of the lagoon.
Most of them had high surf potential but were all ill-placed. Swell in the Gilberts normally arrived from the wrong side, the windward side, so good waves—and southwest swells—were rare.
But for three days, alone at two of the passes, while the boatman fished, I rode two perfect rights, engaging a private daydream that all surfers would desire. Both passes had a left opposite the channel. The rights were head-high and fast. The wind was offshore. The coral reef was kaleidoscopic. This place was nothing like home.
