Law Clerk on Gilligan's Island
Chapter 5- Explosions
The fireworks are hailing over little Eden tonight.
-Bruce Springsteen, "Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)"
Today is October 1, Palau's fourth "Independence Day." I've made arrangements with some people I've met to go diving for the first time today. Scuba divers generally regard Palau as perhaps the best diving in the entire world, and it's a common weekend activity for the expats here.
That may be so, but I have more immediate concerns. First off, I have no bathing suit, since the box I shipped it in has yet to arrive.
Secondly, we're leaving at 8:00 a.m., but I've forgotten to get any more bottled water to bring. It's easy to dehydrate while diving all day, but I'm out of water, the tap water is unsuitable for drinking, and the stores open late today because it's a holiday.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I've never done this before!
O.k., so the first couple things are a little petty, but this last one had kept me up last night. Sure, I breezed through my scuba certification course in Buffalo and had no problems with the couple of practice dives we did in Lake Erie, but Palau is a different story. The scuba books I've read list practically ever dive in Palau as "advanced," with strong and shifting currents. More importantly, the first newspaper I read here reported that a Japanese divemaster had been killed (we think-- he just went down and never came up) on a dive here. On top of that, I'm going out with used scuba gear I had just purchased used in Houston on my way out, and hadn't had a chance to even test out yet. Something in the back of my mind is telling me that this is a bad idea.
We got to a small marina on the southern end of Koror and boarded a boat along with several Japanese tourists. As we cruised towards the edge of the atoll encircling Palau, Keith, our divemaster, asked me about my experience as a diver. I could tell that he was a little bit wary having a total novice to look after, particularly since the other people I was with had plenty of diving experience and would not want to be slowed down, any more than Keith himself probably wanted to hold my hand (not literally, you idiot) the whole day. After discussing the situation, we decided that I would stick close to Keith during the dives and just play it by ear.
After a 25-minute ride across the calm, blue water, we reached the dive spot on the western edge of the Palau lagoon and tied up to a mooring buoy. The water was amazingly clear, and I could clearly see the coral reef that started out about 15 feet underwater, then suddenly dropped away into the darkness. Keith pulled us together to profile the dive we were about to do. As he started explaining what we were going to do, I recalled the limitations on my basic scuba certification expressed in my PADI Open Water Training Course Manual.
"Today, we're going to dive a site called Sai's Tunnel," Keith said. "We'll start along this wall you see below us, and descend down to about 110 feet..."
Following completion of the PADI Open Water Diving Course, you will be certified to dive at depths up to a maximum of 60 feet. Should you decide later to complete the PADI Advanced Open Water Training Course, you would be able to dive at a maximum depth of up to 100 feet. -- PADI Open Water Training Course Manual
"...where you'll see a big cave opening. We'll swim into the cave..."
Always avoid confined underwater areas such as caves and tunnels. Should a sudden emergency require you to surface immediately, you could easily become disoriented and trapped. You will learn special skills for confined space diving in PADI's optional Wreck Diving specialty class.
"...and have a look around for a little while. Then we'll come up to about 50 feet and spend the rest of the dive along the wall."
In this course, you will learn to use the PADI Dive Table to calculate maximum underwater time limits to avoid decompression sickness. Note that the PADI Dive Tables are designed for dives of a uniform depth. Should you wish to plan multi-level dives, you must learn to use the PADI Wheel dive planning calculator. Ask your PADI instructor about classes involving use of the Wheel.
Well, I thought, this ought to be interesting.
I got my gear all together, and dropped into the water. I slowly drifted down with the rest of the group, and being under 100 feet of water felt no different than my practice dives in 35 feet of water in Buffalo. We entered the tunnel Keith had talked about, and he pointed out a number of spiny brown and white stripped fish swimming upside down near the roof of the cave. He had explained before we went in that fish have no conception of up or down, and they just instinctively swim with their bellies facing the reef which is usually underneath them. Here, where the roof of the cave is the only reef around, they just flip over and go about their business.
I'll generally spare you the rest of the tour guide-style descriptions of the dive, and simply say that we also saw a moray eel poking its head out of its hole, and a gray reef shark swam by about 25 yards away, completely disinterested in us. Visibility was an amazing 70 feet or more, ten times what the distance I could see in Lake Erie. By the time the we surfaced, I had realized that I was needlessly nervous that morning.
We went back up on the boat, and ate lunch while we headed over to the next dive site, as I had managed to grab some animal crackers and bottled water at a gas station on the way to the boat. After lunch, we anchored near the channel off Ullong Island for our second dive. Allegedly, one of the best parts of the Ullong Channel dive is riding the current that rushes through a break in the reef wall, carrying water from the Philippine Sea briskly into the lagoon that surrounds Palau. However, because we were a couple of days shy of the half-moon, when the current is at its strongest, the Channel dive was likely to be less of an event. That was just fine with me. The tunnel dive had been fine, but the mysterious "currents" I had heard so much about and the death of the Japanese diver last week still had me a bit concerned.
The channel dive was only about 40 feet deep the entire time, and the legendary current through the channel was, thankfully, pretty minor. Nevertheless, we got to see some more moray eels, several sharks sleeping on the sandy bottom of the channel (at least one was awakened by the noise of our bubbles and lazily swam off), some sort of rare angelfish that Keith was quite excited by, but which looked to me like any other fish. Right at the end of the dive, Keith signaled to me to come over and see what he was pointing at. It looked like just another strange lump of coral, about 4 feet wide, with a rubbery-looking strip of colored flesh down the middle. But Keith reached down and poked a finger part of the flesh and the thing suddenly snapped shut. In reality, it was not a hunk of coral, but one of Palau's endangered giant clams, a refugee from some 50's underwater science-fiction movie. I wanted to stay and check the thing out some more, but by that time, we were out of air again, and it was time to head back to the surface.
When I got home, I threw my scuba gear in the bathtub to rinse the salt off of it. As I went to shut off the water, the faucet came off in my hand.
Uh oh.
Suddenly, a high-pressure jet of water was shooting out of the wall where the faucet had been, spraying against the back wall of the tub enclosure. I tried to jam the faucet back in the hole in the wall, but the water pressure made it impossible to screw the handle back in. I stood there, holding the faucet in place, watching the water squirt out around the knob as I considered my options.
I figured that, like most bathtub fixtures, there was a shutoff valve somewhere on the other side of the wall; in this case, it was probably in a storage cabinet on the other side of the wall near the side door. I took a deep breath, let go of the faucet, and sprinted around to the side of the house. Flinging open the cabinet, I found some old paint roller trays, and a bag of potting soil, but no pipes or valves or anything.
I listened to the water splashing over the side of the tub now, and I began to panic. I didn't know anyone to call here for help. And even if I did, I couldn't call the because my phone hadn't been hooked up yet. And even if it was, it was 4:00 in the afternoon on a national holiday. I seriously wondered if I would have to stand there all night, holding the faucet in the wall like Hans friggin' Brinker, until I could catch a cab to work in the morning and talk to someone who could fix it.
Then I started wondering if I might have packed duct tape. Maybe I could tape something over the hole as a makeshift fix until tomorrow.
Jesus, was I an idiot? Duct tape?
I realized that I had to get this fixed pronto. I threw on some shoes, and ran across the street to the U.S. Embassy, thinking I could use their phone to call a plumber. Wasn't that what the embassy was for-- to help out American citizens in their time of need? But there wasn't anyone there and the doors were barred shut. Damnit!
So I ran back across the street to my next door neighbor, and knocked on his door. But there was no answer there either. I calculated that, at three gallons a minute, my house was probably now filled with roughly sixteen billion gallons of water. As I turned around to run back home and jam the faucet in the wall again for a few minutes, I noticed two people going to unlock the embassy.
"I'm sorry to bother you, but I really need some help," I pleaded. I explained that I needed to use the phone to call a plumber. They looked at me bewildered for a second, and one finally said something to the other in Palauan ("Quick! This young man needs help!" Or maybe, "Lousy haole. Let him drown.") The woman said something back to him, and showed me to the phone. I grabbed the phone book and opened it up the the Yellow Pages.
Shit! "Plumbing supplies" was there, but not a single entry for "plumbers." I tried "handyman"-- nothing.
"Mechanic?" Nope.
I tried to calmly ask the woman if the embassy had someone who came and handled simple mechanical problems. She told me to try calling the local hardware store. I punched in the number, and someone answered with some garbled words. I blurted out the nature of my problem, but the woman on the other end had no idea what to tell me and suggested I try another number. I dialed that one and listened to it ring and ring. Softly, in the background, I could hear the high-pressure stream of water crashing against my shower wall across the street. I tried a different hardware store. Another garbled answer, but I hurriedly explained my problem and the person on the other end of the phone told me they didn't have anyone who could do it because today was a holiday. I tried yet another number, and got the first person I talked to again. What sort of Kafkaesqe nightmare was this?
The embassy woman said to try an air conditioning place. "What the hell," I thought, "I'll try anything about now," and dialed. But the woman who answered just hung up as soon as I started talking. I stood there, heart pounding, watching through the embassy window as water flowing out of the bathroom door of my house formed small lakes in the driveway. I didn't have the faintest idea of what to do next. I realized that the phone wasn't going to get me anywhere, so I thanked the embassy people, and trudged back across the street. I listened to the thundering in my bathroom and tried to convince myself that "it's not that bad, I can just leave the door to the outside open and live with it until tomorrow,"
My neighbor from down the hill, the elderly Palauan man, came walking up the path just then. So I ran up to him. "Hey, can you help me?" I asked. After all, if I left the water running all night, wouldn't it run down the hill too? But as he stared at me quizzically-- he didn't speak much English, I found out-- I suddenly finally realized that there had to be a main water shutoff for the whole house somewhere. (Actually, the thought first came to me as I was holding the faucet in place, but as soon as I thought about there also being a separate shutoff for that fixture itself, I forgot all about looking for a main water shutoff. So much for clear thinking in an emergency.)
Running around the perimeter of the house, I found a pipe connected to a steel box marked "water meter." I turned the knob on the pipe furiously, hoping that either the water would stop or the house would just blow up and kill me, putting me out of my misery. After about five turns, just when I was about to give up, I heard the sound of the fountain in the bathroom slow, then finally stop.
Relieved, I flopped down on the lawn, nearly in tears, but not quite sure if they were tears of joy or frustration. (I recall asking myself what the hell I thought I was doing in this ridiculous place at one point during this crisis, and that feeling returned as a sat on the lawn trying to catch my breath again.) I figured that, despite the fact that my first day of work was tomorrow, and that I was covered in salt from diving, and that I was sweating like crazy, I could live without water for a few days until someone could come fix the damn thing.
I went back inside, wished I had a beer I could guzzle, and picked up the offending faucet. As I flipped it over and over in my hands, and peeked into the dark hole in the wall that, moments ago had been a veritable water cannon, I realized how the two pieces fit together. I screwed the handle back into the wall. It seemed to fit snugly, so I went back to the main valve and slowly turned the water back on. I turned the water all the way back on, and listened carefully for the sound of Niagara Falls resuming in my bathroom.
But nothing happened. I suddenly realized that I had gotten completely worked up over what was, in actuality, a miniscule problem. I felt a great sense of relief at having fixed the faucet, but I was quite upset about my own increasingly hysterical reaction to the problem. I moved out here to try and start a new life, and yet at the first tough experience, I practically have a nervous breakdown. Great.
Shortly after the faucet explosion was resolved, Kendall came over to invite me to the Independence Day fireworks that were being held at an old Japanese seaplane ramp left over from World War II. We cabbed it down and checked out the celebration taking place. There were tents from various restaurants selling food and drinks, and up in a traditional-looking thatched roof hut at the end of the ramp, a bevy of island dignitaries were giving speeches, mostly in Palauan. Thankfully, the P.A. system was so bad that you couldn't hear the speeches unless you were within 50 feet of the podium, so most of the crowd was safe from the hours of pontificating going on.
We hung around the crowd at the ramp for about twenty minutes, then decided to watch the fireworks from our co-clerk Jill's apartment balcony. Jill's Palauan landlady and family were also hanging out, and we had a discussion about the nature of Palau's independence. Apparently, this was to be the first fireworks demonstration since the actual day four years ago when Palau finally gained its independence. The landlady said she had heard that Japan had donated the fireworks as a gesture of goodwill, and that there was supposed to be a full hour of fireworks.
I scoffed to myself. Fireworks displays in the U.S. are never more than 20 minutes. I was certain that the Palauans had heard that there was going to be a few fireworks shot off, and that rumors had inflated it into an hour-long extravaganza. would be an hour of fireworks here. In fact, as recently as a few minutes ago, some people I had met were betting on whether, given Palau's reputation for ambitious schemes that don't work out, there would be a single firework that night.
But once again, I was wrong. As I nursed a beer on Jill's porch, we watched nearly 55 minutes of explosions, ending with a finale of special "yellow circle inside blue circle" ones, signifying Palau's flag, and "red circle in white circle" ones signifying Japan. Cute.
Of course, by that point, I was totally exhausted. After a sleepless night apparently caused by nervousness over the impending scuba outing, and the tumultuous events of the day, I was too tired to enjoy much of the showcase of alleged "native dancing" of the Pacific Rim that followed the fireworks show. (Acts included the staff of the Palau Pacific Resort in grass skirts and t-shirts more or less mugging onstage to some uninteresting calypso song, and an apparently Japanese troupe whose dance seemed to consist of men wearing hats topped by ribbons on a swivel, so that when the men furiously threw their heads back and forth, the ribbons spun around in huge circular orbits.) Kendall and I caught a ride home from two girls with room in the back of their car, and I collapsed into bed immediately. I had had enough explosions for one day, and my first day of work was about 8 hours away.
This chapter uploaded on 10/9/98.
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