The best travel stories on the internet.

Powered By Travel Channel

• Home»
• Features»
• Travel Stories»
• Where the Roads Diverged

Where the Roads Diverged

Her small house stood on a shady, sandy lane on the outskirts of Hanga Roa, the island’s only village. She had one room to rent, a sunny, recently added annex that felt instantly familiar. The walls were varnished plywood, like a summer cabin up north, and the furniture looked like the stuff in the government clinic where my father worked—chrome tubing, green leatherette cushions.

The reason made me smile. Everything in that room—walls, furniture and louvered windows—was indeed U.S. government issue, liberated by the locals after our Air Force abandoned a satellite-tracking base on the island in the 1960s. Even the varnish smelled like home.

Yolanda Ika Tuki was short and thick-bodied, like most of the older island women, with dark skin and black hair. She might have been 40 or 50 or even 60. I never knew. Yolanda cooked for me, interpreted the island for me, introduced me to her neighbors and friends, included me in her household. It felt like a family but wasn’t quite, so I fitted right in.

There was a quiet man I assumed was her husband, whom I saw mainly at dinner. A pretty little girl who was a neighbor’s out-of-wedlock child—Yolanda said the mother’s new husband didn’t want the girl around. And the child of another neighbor, a slender boy of about eleven whose history had a different twist.

He was half-American, one of about 30 youngsters that the U.S. airmen had managed to father while they were here. It was a noticeable number, out of a population of less than 2,000—600 of them kids. The islanders loved children— people joked that babies were “our biggest product’’—but this boy wasn’t happy. He yearned to find his father and go live with him in the States.

“I know my father loves me,” he said, “because he wrote to my mother once.” One day the boy showed me the precious letter. The American man had promised nothing, hadn’t included his address or even his last name. He was just saying goodbye.

This is what outsiders have always done in Polynesia, starting with the first European explorers and their crews—love ‘em and leave ‘em, down through the centuries. It made me feel ashamed, but the islanders didn’t seem to mind. All good stories, in fact, seemed to begin, “when the Americans were here….”  They had brought the modern world with them— electricity, piped water, Coke in cans, movies, the airport. “We loved the Americans,” one islander told me.

Islanders didn’t feel that way about people from Chile, which has governed Easter Island since 1888. They said Chileans couldn’t be trusted, were lazy and given to stealing. Chileans said the same things about them. 

Among themselves, the islanders spoke their own language; it was soft, rounded and full of vowels, like all its cousins across Polynesia. With me, they spoke Spanish, the island’s second language and mine as well. But while I heard about local problems—feeling discriminated against by mainlanders was mentioned often— no one dragged me into them. I think it was because I was under Yolanda’s wing—not a part of the community, but not an ordinary tourist, either. She treated me more like a daughter.

Sometimes, when she called me for breakfast, she would come in and perch on the foot of my bed and chat. She also gave me advice. It wasn’t always wise, but it was always the same: Disfrute su vida, Catalina, she said. Enjoy your life, Catherine. And I did.

I began to exist in the present tense, as if I had no past regrets and no future fears. It was something I’d never done before. That, and the incredible distances surrounding us, lent me an exhilarating freedom. I likened it to hiding in a childhood tree fort with the rope pulled up. “No one knows where I am,” I kept thinking. “No one can find me.” 

My days quickly fell into their own gentle rhythm: Go out walking after breakfast. Explore a cave, a volcano, a vista. Take pictures. Talk to people. Go home for lunch. Nap or write or poke around Hanga Roa. And in the late afternoon, walk over to Tahai—the row of giant statues, called moai, that stood closest to town—and watch the sunset paint the sky in the direction of Tahiti. 

After supper, the island’s only TV station went on the air, and I joined Yolanda’s household around the set. The programs, flown in once a week, would have been odd anywhere, but here in the uttermost corner of Polynesia, the mix was especially peculiar: decades-old “Beanie and Cecil” cartoons, a British-made series of English lessons (“Why are there no onions in the onion soup?”), a quiz program on Chile’s fishing industry and American reruns, subtitled in Spanish—“The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Rockford Files.” 

“Is there a lot of that in the United States?” an adult asked reasonably after one of Rockford’s chronic car chases. The children thought the Six Million Dollar man was real. I couldn’t get over the station’s signature logo: three dancing moai, wiggling their world-famous bellies on the screen.

One evening I stayed in my room, writing. Between gusts of wind that rattled the trees, I caught gusts of soft music. In the church down the lane, people were singing Polynesian hymns. If I’d known nothing about this culture, that music alone would have told me they’d been seafarers. There was a canoeing cadence in it, like the throb of waves or the steady beat of paddle strokes.

There was distance in it too, and a touch of sadness. It made me think of the complicated, crisscross navigations that populated the Pacific in ancient times, and the vast emptiness that early voyagers sailed into without knowing what lay ahead, and how many must have been lost before others happened upon this tiny fleck of land.

“Wind and music and nothing to do,” I wrote in my journal that night, “Sunday on Easter Island.” But it didn’t feel like Sunday. It felt like Saturday. Every day on the island felt like Saturday.

I knew what my favorite place would be before I saw it—Rano Raraku, the extinct volcano where the giant statues had been quarried and carved. They were already old friends. Face to face, they looked exactly as they had in the books of my childhood—an army of elongated heads frozen in mid-journey down the grassy slopes.

This was where, in the late 1600s, the ancient carvers put down their stone chisels and never picked them up again. The reasons aren’t fully known, but shrinking resources likely led to warfare, devastating the old culture.

The heads at Rano Raraku were the ones that never reached their destinations, travelers stranded in mid-trip. Islanders said these moai were blind. They had not yet received or gotten their stone topknots, and they would never stand on an altar like Tahai’s.

The cylindrical topknots—like top hats the size of corn cribs—were quarried at another volcano, Puna Pau, where the lava rock was rusty red instead of grayish black. Abandoned topknots lay on the ground like giant red boulders. They all had been hollowed out inside, the better to fit onto a statue’s head. One afternoon, I curled up inside a topknot and spent an hour watching white clouds drift across brilliant blue sky, over a landscape of yellow grass; it reminded me of a Kansas prairie.

The weather reminded me of Hawaii—frequent showers, followed by clearing skies and rainbows. But the resemblance stopped there. The island was a big pasture edged by cliffs. It wasn’t tropical, and it wasn’t lush. Outside of gardens and protected valleys, there were almost no trees, and the beaches were black rocks.

Yolanda told me there was another American on the island, a woman about my own age. I ran into her one sunset at Tahai, and we struck up a friendship. She had visited the island before, drawn by its archaeology, but she was back this time because of a boyfriend, an islander. She wanted to see where that relationship was going to lead. I soon knew what she was wrestling with.

Next Page »

Travel Blog

Photos Courtesy:  REUTERS  |  iStockPhoto  |  flickr  

©2024 World Hum, All Rights Reserved

• About Us
• Submissions
• For Advertisers
• Visitor Agreement
• Privacy Policy