​The Samoan Way
I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting but still broad and bright . . . The land breeze blew in our faces and smellt strong of wild lime and vanilla . . . Here was a fresh experience; even the tongue would be quite strange to me; and the look of these woods and mountains, and the rare smell of them, renewed my blood.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Beach of Falesā
​So here we are, finally, in Pago Pago—palm trees, surf-washed beaches, perfumy air, the whole bit—and all I can think about is getting out of these clothes. Sweat is pouring from parts of my body I never thought would perspire, and the atmosphere is too saturated with its own moisture to soak up any of mine. A flutter of breeze, feeble as a butterfly, stirs the air. It's nothing but a tease, utterly incapable of cooling.
This get-up that seemed so stylish when we set out on our journey—the perfect travel ensemble for a girl of sixteen, my mother assured me—was fine in Oklahoma City and Los Angeles and other points along the way. But here in Samoa, my outfit, so absurdly wrong for both climate and culture, only reminds me how out of place I am.
It was 5:30 a.m. on a September Sunday in 1965 when our Pan Am flight from Honolulu touched down at Pago Pago International Airport. As the jet taxied in from a runway that jutted into the Pacific, I squinted through the window, eager for my first glimpse of the island where my parents and I had come to live, hopeful that this pin dot on the map, six thousand miles from home, would be the paradise I'd envisioned, the setting for my transformation from flatlander to islander, from small-town girl to woman of the world.
The sky was still too dark to reveal much beyond the tarmac, the backdrop of mountains just a shadowy hulk, like a heap of rumpled bedding in a dim room at dawn. I could make out a low-slung, modern building with lava rock walls and a roof that looked like thatch but was covered with wood shingles instead of palm fronds. It had to be the terminal, yet why did it look so deserted? The flight had been full—planes from Hawaii came only once a week—and most of the passengers surely expected friends or family members to meet them. Where were they? And wasn't someone supposed to meet us?
As the plane rolled toward the building, another structure came into view. Oval-shaped and about the size of a large living room, it had no walls, just a high, rounded roof—this one made from real palm thatch and supported around its perimeter by poles that rested on a raised platform. I recognized its type from photos I'd been studying since I'd learned we were moving to Samoa: a Samoan fale, the traditional building style used for houses and meeting halls. But in the pictures I'd studied, fales were small and spare. This one was jam-packed with people—really big people. Some sat cross-legged, others slept on woven mats.
How . . . primitive. A shudder wormed under my skin and wriggled to the top of my spine. Have they been crammed in there together all night, when there's a perfectly lovely, up-to-date building sitting empty just steps away? Is this how people live here?
I glanced at my parents—my mother beside me, my father across the aisle, both staring into the semi-darkness. My mother, sensing my gaze, patted my hand without looking away from the window and smiled, a bit tight-lipped. Was she trying to reassure me or herself? Either way, it was going to take more than an absent-minded pat.
When the plane came to rest and the engines stopped whining, the people in the fale rolled up their mats and moved toward the chain-link fence that bordered the airfield. Barefoot or wearing rubber flip-flops, they strolled toward the plane as if they were taking a morning walk down a beach, not bustling toward an airport gate. Taking . . . their . . . time.
A flight attendant swung open a door near the cockpit, and I followed my parents down the crowded aisle, my sky-blue Pan Am flight bag bumping against my hip and excitement thrumming my anxiety into submission. Our adventure was beginning—our adventure—and after living all my years in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where excitement amounted to incessantly circling the parking lots of Main Street's three drive-in hamburger joints, I was more than ready for a taste of something exotic. I'd always thought of myself as an adventurer, even if I'd never had a true adventure. I had adventure potential. I was sure of it.
As I stepped onto the metal stairway that was wheeled up to the cabin door, I felt Samoa before I saw it. The air was so dense with warmth and moisture it weighed on my skin. Even my hair felt heavy, and I suffocated in the travel outfit I couldn't wait to shed: a one-piece dress with dotted red bodice and straight, pinstriped skirt; a matching pinstriped jacket; sheer pantyhose; and red calfskin pumps with two-inch heels. My parents, too, looked more like they were on their way to church than about to set foot on a South Sea island. My father's suit was charcoal, my mother's pearl gray. As we snaked through a sea of floral prints to claim our baggage, did we look as ridiculous as I felt?
No one seemed to notice, or care. When we'd stopped off for a few days in Honolulu on the way down, smiling girls in ti-leaf skirts had draped leis around our necks, and a photographer had snapped pictures we felt compelled to buy. Here, no flowers or flash bulbs or ukulele players greeted us.
Should I smile? Try to make eye contact? Say hello? Does anyone even understand English? All I heard was babble that didn't sound like words to me—strings of vowels punctuated with hiccups. Even the voices sounded foreign: loud, nasal and abrupt.
At the far end of the baggage claim, a slight, ruddy-faced man in a flowered Hawaiian shirt stood out in the crowd of sturdy, bronze Samoans. When he spotted us and hurried over, I wanted to throw my arms around him—and believe me, I was not one to dole out hugs to strangers.
My father looked relieved, too. The sharp-edged expression he'd worn since we'd stepped off the plane softened into the Good-to-see-you face he wore in public back home, where he knew everyone and everyone knew him. Big ol' smile filling the space between chin and ears, eyes tipped up at the corners like he was already thinking of a joke to share. He could relax a little now because the man headed toward us was a peer—not just another small, light-skinned person like us, but another doctor like my dad.
"Dr. Donaldson?" my father said.
Please, I prayed, don't let him say, "I presume."
Dr. Donaldson shook my father's hand and made a little bow toward my mother and me. "Welcome to Samoa," he said. He pronounced it SAH-mow-uh, as we'd been told the Samoans did. "Let's see if we can find your luggage. We'll drop it off at your apartment and then I'll take you on a tour of the island." His words were friendly, but there was something distant, wistful, about his delivery. As he spoke, his eyes scanned the sky above our heads as if he were watching for flocks of birds and preparing to fly away with them. His ethereality made his first name—Manley—seem like a lifelong joke at his expense. But never mind that, or his peculiarities. We'd arrived, we had a ride to town, and soon we'd see our new home.
By the time we collected our bags and loaded them into the blue government-issue Jeep, the sun had risen, but gray veils like vaporous cobwebs still hung over trees and gathered in low places, and a campfire-ish pungency scented the air. Smoke from underground ovens, Dr. Donaldson explained. In the villages, Samoan men and women were preparing the Sunday meal of roast pork and palusami—coconut cream baked in taro leaves. My stomach mumbled a reminder that I hadn't eaten on the overnight flight from Honolulu. I had a distinct craving for fried chicken and mashed potatoes, our usual Sunday fare.
Dr. Donaldson pointed out some of the sights as he drove us along the 55-square-mile island's one main road: here a coconut plantation, there the island's tallest mountain, a 2,000-foot peak with jagged contours padded in dense vegetation. On either side of the sunlit road, the forest deepened and darkened with an intensity that gave me the willies. On family vacations I'd ridden in spooked silence through densely wooded Appalachian hillsides and stood, Lilliputian, in California's sequoia groves, but I'd experienced nothing as darkly alluring as this jungle and its impenetrable blackness. With the growing realization that I was half a world away from anything familiar, I slid closer to my mother in the Jeep's back seat.
We passed through a village where half a dozen fales sat in a semi-circle around a common green, and I picked up a scent that reminded me of flowers I'd seen everywhere in Honolulu. They looked like little stars carved from wax—five creamy petals with a smear of butter yellow in the center—and their fragrance melted in the air like the scent of gardenia or jasmine. What did my dad call them? Frangopango? Frangipani? That was it, frangipani; the entire village smelled of frangipani. My breathing slowed, and I dissolved into my seat.
My mother tapped my arm and tilted her head toward the village. "Nancy, look!"
I turned to see a small boy in what I would learn was a lavalava, chasing a scrawny dog, then stopping just short of the road to wave and smile as we passed. Finally, a friendly gesture. I grinned and waggled my hand like a doofus.
In the next village the houses were all square, with sturdy walls and tin roofs, and some sat atop concrete pillars that hoisted them a full story off the ground. Better in hurricanes, Dr. Donaldson told us.
"Oh?" The lines between my mother's eyebrows deepened, and her voice came out like a sliver, barely piercing the thick air. Hurricanes.
Behind one house, a man bathed at an outdoor faucet. He held his lavalava around his body like a shower curtain, deftly maneuvering it from back to front and side to side with one hand as he washed himself with the other. Across the road from the village, boardwalks led from a narrow strip of sand into the ocean, and at the end of each pier-like walkway sat a privy. I tried to remember if indoor plumbing had been mentioned in the description of our quarters in Utulei.
"Do they still use those?" My mother nodded toward the outhouses.
"Afraid so." Dr. Donaldson turned his head toward my mother but gazed beyond her shoulder. "We're trying to phase them out and introduce flush toilets, but . . . "
He shrugged.
"Fa'a Samoa."
Fa'a Samoa: The Samoan way.
Stretches of deep forest alternated with bright villages and views of the Pacific. Placid at the horizon, the ocean turned energetic near shore, flexing and relaxing, glinting and glowing like a muscular showoff. Each time we passed from sun to shade, I shivered, though the air remained balmy. I twiddled the silver ring I wore, stroking its smooth sides, twisting it around my finger and pressing its angular designs into my skin to make x-shaped impressions, soothing myself with the familiar feel of the metal.
At last, the Jeep rounded the final bend. "Here we are," Dr. Donaldson said. "The Utulei apartments. You're in I-7."
Ahead was a cluster of new-looking, two-story buildings with corrugated metal roofs and cinder block walls at each end. Each unit had a wide front porch overhung by a second-story balcony, and the buildings all faced a central courtyard, where a few American-looking families sat talking and laughing at picnic tables. Now this was starting to look civilized.
"Very nice," my father said, but his eyes darted across the road, where a row of squat, white houses faced a bay, offering views of green peaks on the other side. Penicillin Row—the houses usually offered to doctors. No vacancies there right now, but we were on a waiting list.
As we neared our apartment building, I noticed that the walls running between the cinder block ends weren't walls at all, but panels of screening.
Oh great, a see-through house. Isn't that the dream of every self-conscious sixteen-year-old? We might as well be living in some thatched hut.
Once inside, I saw that the screens were outfitted with wooden louvers that could be closed for privacy. A smile—albeit a tiny one—took hold of my lips, and I looked around to see what else our new home had to offer. The floors were covered wall-to-wall with woven mats that smelled like dried grass and scritched beneath our dress-up shoes. Very South Pacific-y. That should make my dad happy—my dad, the romantic whose Rodgers and Hammerstein-fueled fantasies had landed us here.
A galley kitchen separated the living room and dining room, which were furnished with rattan tables, chairs and sofa. I had nothing against rattan, but with the cinder block-and-jalousie walls, the overall effect was a bit like a cheap Florida motel—the kind we'd been forced to stay in while vacationing, on days when we'd spent too much time beachcombing and waited too long to start looking for the night's lodging. Not exactly the airy beach house I'd imagined. Then again, better than a fale stuffed with four-hundred-pound Samoans.
Dr. Donaldson said he'd give us some time to "get situated." He'd return in an hour or so to pick us up for the island tour. "I'm sure you'll want to freshen up"—he smiled vaguely as his eyes drifted across our dress-up clothes and fixated on a point on the wall just beyond where we stood—"and change."
I took a few more minutes to investigate the first floor, then dragged my suitcase up the staircase, past the--yes, thank you—bathroom, to have a look at the three bedrooms. I claimed the middle one, a narrow, nondescript box with tan vinyl floor tile, a plain dresser against one wall, and a twin bed against the opposite wall. Heaving my suitcase onto the bare mattress, I pictured my bedroom back in Stillwater: the wide bed with its Martha Washington woven spread, the coffee-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, the double doors that opened into an adjacent room my parents had converted to a sitting room for me after my older brother moved out and married. In that private suite, I entertained friends and, when alone, engaged in secret rites of diary-keeping and tracking on graph paper the ups and downs of my attitudes toward various interests, romantic and diversionary.
My new room in Utulei was maybe a quarter the size of the space I had at home and more suited to a novitiate than to a girl whose idea of deprivation was giving up her Princess phone. The room's one redeeming feature was a door that led onto the balcony, from which—by squeezing myself into one corner and craning my neck—I could glimpse the bay and inhale its bouquet: essence of ocean creature steeped with seaweed in a salty broth, a scent that gave me a vacation-y feeling.
I began unpacking the few clothes I'd brought to wear until the rest of our belongings arrived by ship in a month or two. I tucked white cotton underwear, denim shorts and my aqua-and-lime striped two-piece swimsuit into dresser drawers and hung print dresses and blouses in the closet.
As I lined up my sneakers and sandals, I noticed a light bulb in a wire cage about eight inches above the closet floor. We'd been warned against bringing leather shoes; they'd mildew in the humidity. But just in case we were foolish enough to ignore the advice—which we were—the constantly burning light bulbs in our closets were supposed to help keep our shoes dry. The wire cage was there to prevent anything from resting against the hot bulb and catching fire.
We'd gotten other warnings as well, like about the geckos—tiny lizards with translucent skin and suction-cup toes. They weren't dangerous, but they were everywhere.
"They'll even get on your toothbrush, so check before you put it in your mouth," Dr. Donaldson had cautioned. I'd already encountered one when I'd taken a tumbler from the kitchen cabinet and—just as I was about to fill it with water—noticed a cricket-sized gecko attached to the inside wall of the glass, staring at me with its head cocked like a curious puppy. I set the glass back on the shelf. I could do without a drink.
Even grosser were the ants—black specks like marching coffee grounds that were attracted to body secretions and, we'd been told, would chew holes in your underwear if you left it lying around overnight.
As I puttered around the bedroom, I left the shutters open, hoping that immersing myself in the sounds and smells of my new environment would make this strange place seem more like the Shangri-La I'd imagined. I'd signed on for palm trees and surf, not moldy shoes, creepy lizards and panty-eating ants.
But hey, I was in Samoa. I'd come here of my own accord—no whining or pouting when my father came up with the crazy notion of uprooting us and moving us from Middle America to the middle of the South Pacific. After all, being a teenager in Stillwater, Okla-boring-homa hadn't been all that hot; this had to be better, fungus, fauna, and all.
Still, I wished I'd packed a few knick-knacks that would make the room feel like the haven I needed it to be. Then I remembered the one thing I had brought that would connect me with the life I'd left behind. Swaddled in tissue paper and stashed in a pocket inside my suitcase was a small, brass picture frame decorated with flower-like clusters of imitation pearls. I unwrapped it and gazed at the black-and-white photograph behind the glass.
Danny. My romantic fixation for the past twenty months and twenty-four days. Was it really possible I wouldn't see him for two years? Two years times three-hundred-sixty-five days. Seven-hundred-and-thirty days. That was longer than we'd known each other. That was forever. Picture-Danny beamed back at me like he didn't know the meaning of the word.
I set the framed photo on the dresser and sank onto the bed. Six thousand miles hadn't seemed so terribly far when, sitting on my bed in Stillwater, I'd considered the journey ahead. Fifty round-trips between Stillwater and Oklahoma City. Two Florida vacations. But now I understood that miles were not the only measure of distance. I was very, very far from home.
Overcome by heat and overwhelmed by surroundings, I closed the shutters, the slats clacking like some primitive musical instrument.​
The clothes are coming off. I unbutton my jacket, tug my dress over my head, kick off my pumps, and peel my sticky pantyhose down like I'm skinning overripe fruit. Standing in my underwear, I feel the moisture in the air merge with the sweat on my skin. I could use a shower, I'm thinking, and as that thought enters my mind, I remember the man bathing in the open with only a lavalava between my eyes and his nakedness. Could I ever do that? I don't mean just the skillful whipping around of the sarong, but the comfort with lathering up al fresco. Could I do that? And could I drift off to sleep on the crushed coral floor of a fale, shoulder to shoulder with my kin, and rise to breakfast on boiled taro? And after sleeping and rising and breakfasting and bathing day after day in a village where my every move is exposed, who would I be? Would I be the same girl who'd left Danny and Stillwater behind, or would I be changed in some essential way?
​ I glanced at the room's one regular window—a vertical pane that ran alongside one of the screened panels—and wondered if anyone in the apartments across the courtyard could see into my room. Before I could give that possibility much thought, something else caught my eye. Nailed across the bottom of the window was a square of painted plywood with something scratched into its surface. I moved closer. The scratch marks were names, like you'd carve on a park bench or the top of an old school desk when no one was looking: PETA, MAIKA, TIVA, BELINDA + MEIF, BARB + ISIDORE.
I knew who had carved those names, brazenly defacing my room. It was Barb, the American girl whose family had lived in apartment I-7 before us. All I knew about her was her name and that she had recently graduated from Samoana High School and returned to the States to live with a friend while her parents continued working in Samoa. Still, staring at the graffiti she left behind, I pictured her whole life. I saw her dressed in colorful island prints, smiling, surrounded by the friends whose names circled hers on the plywood square. I imagined her dancing with brown-eyed Isidore, laden with flower leis and shell jewelry from her island beau. And then, flushed from the dance, laughing as he popped a piece of mango into her open mouth.
I saw it all, and I envied what I saw. Somehow, in this alien world, Barb had found her fa'a Samoa. Maybe, just maybe, so would I.
The garments of my former life, so tight and stifling, are heaped upon the floor. I kick them aside on my way to the closet and survey the selection hanging there. My hand reaches for a splashy, red-and-orange print, then hesitates and settles on a simple, flowered shift in muted shades of blue and green. I slip into the dress and slide my feet into sandals.
I'm an island girl now, I tell myself. As if transformation were as easy as changing my clothes.
Copyright Nan Sanders Pokerwinski 2019