Law Clerk on Gilligan's Island
Chapter 6- Work Begins
"She got homesick for her old job-- diving for tourist's
pennies in a Micronesian swamp."
-Moe Syzlak, "The Simpsons"
All good things must come to an end at some point. In this case, the "good thing" was my little tropical vacation, and "some point" happened to be 6:30 a.m., Friday, October 2, 1998. In my communications with the Court, I had somewhat arbitrarily selected October 1 as my starting date, and the person I cleared in with said that was fine. The advertisement for the clerkships said they started in October, and I just assumed that meant October 1. I tendered my resignation to my old firm to give me enough time to wrap things up and get my furniture moved back to Plattsburgh all by October 1, and booked a flight to Palau for late September to give me a couple of days to settle in before work started.
Nobody mentioned to me that October 1 is Palau's Independence Day, so that my first day of work also happens to be October 2-- a Friday. Nice, huh?
Friday morning, 6:30 a.m. Lying in bed, the chirping of my alarm clock echoing in my head, I realize something.
"This is the earliest I've voluntarily woken up in . . . um. . . .," I think to myself.
I really want to finish the thought, but my brain is still bitter about having to do recall work this early and refuses to cooperate.
". . . in a goddamn long time," I finally tell myself. It's true, though. In the last year or so at my firm, when my heart just wasn't in private practice anymore, I usually didn't even get out of bed until 8:15, or sometimes even 8:30. But here in Palau, by legislative edict, the work day runs from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. And I'm told that my judge in Long Island expects his clerks in at least that early as well.
I curse as I drag myself out of bed and plod to the bathroom. But no one's there to hear it, which takes most of the fun out of it.
I'm standing in the shower when something else occurs to me. Although the boxes I had shipped from Plattsburgh had begun arriving on island, the box containing nearly all of my clothes had yet to make its appearance. Included in that box were all of my long pants. The dress code at the Court is pretty loose-- no ties, any shirt with a collar is fine-- but it's pretty obvious that shorts are a no-no. And since all of my long pants were in a box somewhere between Plattsbugh and Koror, it was almost certain that they would not be in the bedroom where I was soon to be standing. If they weren't in that bedroom, the possibility of me wearing them to work seemed highly remote.
I curse again. The resonance of the tile in the bathroom adds a nice bass quality to it this time, making it slightly more enjoyable.
Of course, I did bring one of my suits in a garment bag on the plane, on the off chance that the President might die while I was there and I'd have to attend the state funeral. I toy with the idea that I could get away with shorts on my first day, seeing as how it's Friday and I'm the new guy, but I realize it's just wishful thinking.
In a few hours, it's going to be 90 degrees outside, but I go to my closet and put on the pants from my wool suit. I toy with the idea of wearing one of the short-sleeved button down shirts I brought with me for my regular work wardrobe, but I can't bring myself to put on a plaid short-sleeved shirt with the suit pants. So I pull on a white, starched, long-sleeved dress shirt.
In a nod to my tropical surroundings, I at least roll up the sleeves. Michele used to hate when I did that, but screw her. If she were here, she probably would have made sure I brought some work clothes with me, and I wouldn't be in the situation, so it's really her fault. And of course, I can't wear my boat shoes and no socks with the suit, so I drag out my shiny black wing-tips from the closet and put them on.
I ditched the suit-and-tie world to come here. Now, look at me: all I've managed to actually get rid of is the tie.
I curse once more. But it doesn't help. It's still not even 7:00 a.m.
I get a ride into work from Jill and her boyfriend, who are kind enough to go out of their way to pick me up. I realize that it will simply be impossible to live without a car here. It's too hot and stuffy to walk around, and anyway, I'd have to haul myself a couple miles each way to work, plus climb a big hill. I decide on the ride into work that, come Monday morning, I'll be driving myself. I absolutely hate imposing on people for mundane stuff like rides, and I know that, if I don't get a car soon, I'm going to have to hit someone up for a ride to the grocery store too.
Buying a car here is not really a big deal. There's a constant churning of automobiles among American lawyers working over here. Practically everyone buys a beat up clunker from some other American who's leaving. Most expats can give you the lineage of your car back at least two generations. And because the cars change hands so often, people take little if any care of it for the year they spend here. Then, they turn around to sell it to someone else for nearly what they paid for it.
The cars themselves seem to have no problem with this arrangement, either. Since there's too little road and too much traffic to do more than about 20 miles an hour anywhere, no one really cares if their car is fit for highway speeds. So long as it starts, turns, and stops reasonably close to where you want it to do so, it's driveable in Palau.
I spend my first morning at work sitting in on an oral argument on one of the appeals. Oral argument comes after the parties have submitted written briefs explaining why or why not the trial court's decision should be affirmed. Kendall is tied up for the morning, and only has a moment as we're walking into the courtroom to fill me in on the issues that are going to be discussed. No big deal, I figure-- I've practiced law for four years, I'm sure I'll pick it up.
After sitting through the whole thing, I'm not so sure. For one thing, the acoustics in the courtroom are terrible, and the normally soft-spoken Palauan attorneys are even harder to hear with their backs to me. And I'm still not used to the accent. But that's not what's throwing me.
It's the words. It's words like "eldudu" and "dinermau." Every fourth or fifth word out of the attorneys' mouths is some Palauan term. The Court had assured me that all legal proceedings were conducted in English, but it's clear that the attorneys use a fair bit of Palauan when necessary to get a point across.
Afterwards, I ask Kendall what the heck was going on.
"Oh," he says, "it's just because it was a land case."
Land ownership in Palau is a huge subject of litigation. Cases involving real property account for probably half of the court's docket. The reasons aren't entirely clear to me, since only a tiny fraction of the real property in Palau is occupied. The island of Babeldaob, for example, has about the same area as Washington, D.C., but only has a handful of villages on the coastline, totaling not more than 2,000 residents. On the other hand, practically all the land in Palau was seized by the Japanese government during World War II, and the Americans didn't do the most thorough job giving it back to the right people when the war was over.
Or maybe it's just the fact that people who live on a small island give more thought to the land and water than who have a whole continent to explore. One of the books I'm supposed to read to help me out with land issues is an old anthropological paper on land ownership patterns in Palau. It's said that Eskimos have 60 different words for "snow." When you live in an environment where it snows all the time, it's helpful to be able to differentiate between subtle varieties of the stuff. So it should come as no surprise that his book detailed 13 different Palauan words used to describe the space between the ocean and the mangrove swamps the fringe the coast:
The sea between the lalou [mangrove swamp] and the outer reef (elmoll) is called dailehei, which is subdivided into uet (shallow, muddy, or sandy region with sea grass), lemau (mud-bottomed fairly deep passageway at the end of the uet), kerker (fringing reef), chis (small deep pools in the fringing reef), daimechesengl (deep passages in the lagoon), melesokl (coral heads that rise in the daimechesengl), and ngeraol (the inner slope of the barrier reef). Prominent rocks on the reef are called iloil. Parts of the barrier reef shallow enough for people to walk across at low tide are called oreiall. The outer slope of the barrier reef is called elmoll. The outer sea is the ngeuaol.
Got all that? Want more? As it turns out, the area inside the mangrove swamps has another bundle of words attached, including separate words for passages between the mangroves that are big enough for canoe traffic, and passages that are too small for canoes to pass through, and so on.
The reason why the oral argument was peppered with Palauan words is that Palau's laws are heavily affected by local customs. For example, wills are somewhat unusual. Instead, when a male dies, a native form of probate entitled "cheldecheduch" takes place. (That's the "eldudu"-sounding thing mentioned above. A "ch" in Palauan is not pronounced.) At the cheldecheduch, the family of the deceased pays elbechiil, techel otungel, and ududir-ar-ngalek..., oops, sorry, that's "in-laws' money", "wife's money", and "children's money" (respectively). In essence, the deceased's family pays off the in-laws, spouse, and children of the dead person, thus buying off any further claims by those people to membership rights in the deceased's clan.
What's that? Yeah, I said "clan." Every Palauan is a member of a clan-- two really, one on their mother's side, and one on their father's side, although paternal clan ties are much weaker. Clans are loose affiliations of several family lineages, and serve as both an extended family and local government. Much of the land in Palau is owned by clans and lineages, and individuals live on it only with the clans' permission. Because membership and leadership in the clan can be a transitory thing, there are incessant disputes about whether land is owned by an individual or by the clan. Decisions made an an cheldecheduch thus become important, since the disposition of a deceased person's property often includes transfer of individually owned lands. Unfortunately, the cheldecheduch is a customary meeting where decisions are rarely written down, and many court cases turn on events that happened at an cheldecheduch decades ago.
Land cases are further complicated by the fact that Land Court proceedings are conducted in Palauan, and have to be translated into English before they can be appealed. The translations are always disputed, since many expressions in Palauan lack clear English meanings. Even more difficult is the fact that, because many land claims turn on events from years ago, the Land Court has decided that all evidence relating to a claim is admissible, so that the testimony often reads "according to the Chief , my father told my uncle that the land should be given to me." Or "I think that we grew up in that house, but I moved out when I was three so I'm not really sure." Trying to sort out the competing claims can be a nightmare.
Anyway, sitting through the oral argument, then slogging through the maze of terminology and unusual legal concepts that accompany land cases got me thinking that maybe two memos a month was going to be more work than I thought.
I ended my first day of work by heading over to the bank with an expat who was leaving and selling her car. Another newly arrived couple was also bidding on it, so I told her that I'd give her her asking price if I could take the car right away. I figured the extra couple hundred dollars I could have bargained her down to was far less important than the indignity of having to walk all over for another week or two. She accepted my offer if I could giver it to her in cash, so off we went to the bank.
While waiting at the bank, we ran across the other couple who had made her an offer, and apparently, she had not informed them that she was instead selling the car to me. As she tried to explain her way out of the situation, by pointing out that I had made a higher offer and agreed to pay in cash, I just stood there, awkwardly absorbing the wrath that I'm sure was directed at me from behind their clenched-teeth smiles. The couple was quite gracious about it, but I have a feeling that I've inadvertently made a couple of enemies here already.
So, moments later, I was the owner of a shiny, not-very-new 1986 Toyota Caribe. Oh, you've never heard of the Toyota Caribe? Well you probably haven't heard of the Nissan Bluebird or the Toyota Sprinter either. Most of the cars in Palau are brought over from Japan, and there's not a recognizable model name in the bunch. The Caribe looks very similar to the Toyota MR2 (I think that's what it was) in the states-- a boxy four-door hatchback with on-demand 4 wheel drive. The latter feature was nice, since outside of Koror, there are few paved roads, and a sightseeing trip up through Babeldaob could easily get bogged down in a muddy dirt road miles from the nearest telephone. The pea-green car with orange racing stripes was an eyesore, but it only had about 60,000 kilometers on it and seemed to run pretty well. Like so many cars here, had a steering wheel on the right-hand side. It didn't take me very long to get used to driving from the slightly shifted perspective, but getting used to the turn signals being operated on the right-hand side of the steering column took some time, as did my natural tendency to walk around to the left-hand side to get it.
I got home from work, changed clothes, and, after a while, headed up to the Seabee camp for a party. The Seabees are engineers from the U.S. Navy, stationed on Palau to perform various construction-type projects for the public benefit. ("Seabee" is shorthand for "Construction Battalion" or "C.B." Get it?) Each team serves a rotation of several months, and then vacates the camp for the incoming team. The party tonight was to celebrate the current exchange of teams. I got there a little late and the beer had pretty much run out, which was just as well because I was exhausted from having gotten up so early this morning. Nevertheless, I met up with Jill and her boyfriend Dave, and chatted with a few of the incoming Seabees.
One invited us in to see his huge collection of fishing gear. We went into the tiny room that suffices for Seabee barracks, and, true to local custom, I kicked off my old leather dock shoes and left them on the doormat outside. (I didn't notice that Jill and Dave left their sandals on until later.) When we came back out a few minutes later, my shoes had disappeared from the mat by the front door. I looked around, expecting someone to toss them to me after having a laugh at my stunned look, but a moment passed, then another, and after a while, it became clear that my shoes had been appropriated permanently by the U.S. Navy. (Actually, it was more likely that one of the more seedy looking locals that had been milling around drinking all the free beer walked off with them. Jill recognized one of the people in the crowd at the party as a local transient who had tried to charge them $5 each to walk along a public pier a few days earlier.)
I grumbled about it, getting a laugh from the Seabee, who seemed shocked that such a thing could happen, but he graciously offered me a pair of flip-flops that had been left behind in his barracks when he got there. I was a little upset about losing my shoes, because they had been a Christmas gift from Michele a few years ago and I had gotten quite accustomed to them, but on balance, it was not a tragic loss. Standing in them for any length of time made my feet hurt because of the lack of cushioning and support, and the inside soles had begun to come loose and bunch up. Plus, I had a feeling that the air and salt water all around me was going to make short work of them soon anyway. Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the party checking out everyone who walked by's feet, half expecting someone to walk by wearing my shoes.
And so ended my first day of work, shoeless, $3300 lighter in the wallet, and still without most of my clothing. But at least I didn't have to walk home.
This chapter uploaded on 10/16/98.
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