Law Clerk on Gilligan's Island: Chapter 8-- Miscellany

Law Clerk on Gilligan's Island

Chapter 8- Miscellany

There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made
it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything.
-James Hilton, Lost Horizon

That's another way of saying "you get used to it." Which is certainly the case here. After a full month of residence, I've gotten to the point where, whenever something odd happens, I no longer think "Hey, that's weird...," but instead just file it under "that's Palau...."

That's right. Today's officially my 30th day here. I know, I know, two chapters ago, it was my first day at work. Now, all of a sudden, we're 8% of the way through this trip?

Frankly, yes. Pursuant to narrative convention which dictates that the author not supply, and the reader not expect, detailed recitations of mundane daily events, I've omitted several weeks of time from the equation. Feeling taken advantage of? Then read the following paragraph 30 times. Go ahead, we'll wait:

Alarm off at 6:30 a.m. Continued hitting snooze until 7:05. Shower, brush teeth, dress for work. Download e-mail from night before, then pack up computer. Car, traffic, office. Read e-mail, respond to e-mail, store responses for transmission later. Work, liberally interspersed with non-work. Lunch. More work, with ratio of work : non-work increasing somewhat during afternoon. Check mail at Clerk's Office. Boxes of clothing still not arrived. Librarian turns lights off in library at 4:30. Car, traffic, home. Upload e-mail responses, download any new mail. Softball. Contemplate dinner, prepare dinner, eat dinner. Wash dishes. Read book, work on website, write more e-mail for transmission in the morning. Brush teeth, lights off, bed.

Of course, the astute among you may have noticed that the preceding paragraph does hint at a few narrative gaps in our story so far. As will happen with a story told contemporaneously, rather than in hindsight, interesting nuggets of information that don't fit into the current storyline get put aside, and often, forgotten about by the time the next chapter is written. So, since things have been pretty quiet in the last week or so, let me take this opportunity to circle back and tie up some of the loose ends that I meant to talk about at some point prior to now.

Dress for work. When last we discussed the matter, I was wearing my suit, sans tie, to work. In reality, that lasted all of two days. After it became clear to me that my clothes were having an exciting journey of their own, I took a trip down to the Ben Franklin Department Store, the Wal-Mart of Palau.

The Ben Franklin is, in many ways, a running joke with the expats here. Because it is perhaps the single most American-ish establishment here, it's a little like a McDonalds in downtown Shanghai: outwardly, we joke about it being out of place, but secretly, everyone appreciates the fact that it's there. Every expat here likes to fancy themselves as at least moderately adventuresome (why come otherwise?) and that spirit of adventure implicitly demands that, whenever possible,you deal with "authentic" local establishments as much as possible. But when you deep-down need something, you're not willing to mess around with the "Palauan" version of things; you hie yourself on over to the Ben Franklin, and the familiarity of the classic American department store provides soothing psychic reassurance that you're not completely adrift in a strange sea.

In this case, I badly needed pants, and I wasn't about to stop in the small tin building down the street whose sign read "T.M. General Contractor and Fashion Boutique." Not that I have any reason to question the skill of a man who can price out 600 square feet of concrete while dropping the cuffs on a pair of chinos, but I wasn't willing to take the risk.

I had had the good sense to pack several days worth of boxer shorts and t-shirts in a bag to take on the plane. I hadn't, of course, packed any pants suitable for work, largely because I am an idiot who was willing to believe the postal service when they said that Priority Mail shipments to Palau arrive in 3 days. I had thrown a couple of short-sleeved button-down shirts suitable for wearing to work in my carry on, so if I could lay my hands on a pair of practical khakis for work, I could live without my box of clothes for a fair amount of time.

I arrived at the Ben Franklin at about 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. Immediately, I started wondering if I was assuming too much. I wondered whether stores in Palau kept to America business hours or adhered to some sort of laid-back tropical hours. I was half convinced I was going to wander in on a bunch of Philippinos scrubbing the floor in the dark.

But the door was unlocked, and the apparently mute middle-aged Palauan cashier who had wordlessly sold me postcards on my first afternoon in Palau was again languidly manning the register by the front door. I wandered to towards the 180 square foot patch of floor that constituted the clothing "department," and immediately found a serviceable-looking pair of khakis. Mindful of the warnings I had been given that the Ben Franklin was notorious for outrageous prices, I poked around until I actually found a pair that had a price tag. $35. A little steep for some second-rate pants that were all but guaranteed to wear out on my within a couple of months, but I was in no position to wear my suit again tomorrow. I grabbed what appeared to be the closest size and headed off to the "dressing room."

I've grown accustomed to dressing rooms that provide a minimal level of privacy--the kind that resemble a bathroom stall", with walls that extend down only as far as your ankles and slatted doors that threaten to expose your imminent partial nudity to any peeping tom shrewd enough to scout out the optimal viewing angle. Those places seem like Fort Knox compared to the sad excuse for a dressing room at the Ben Franklin.

Ben Franklin's "dressing room" is little more than a couple of strategically placed sheets of whitewashed plywood next to the cash register, apparently designed to allow the cashier to double as security guard. Perhaps intended for petite Japanese travelers, the walls of the dressing room start about chest-high on my 6 foot frame, and end a millimeter or two below my knees. By the time I got the barely-covering-your-torso folding door to it's full extension-- which was a good inch or two shy of the width of the doorframe-- and began trying on the pants, I felt like the cartoon of the naked guy wearing a barrel, only with slightly more squared corners.

I was tugging here and there at the pants when something in the back of my mind suggested I look up. I casually looked up from my waist and saw the cashier looking blankly at me from about eight inches away on the other side of the dressing room "wall." It's not that I'm shy or self-conscious, but for some reason, standing in my boxers, staring at the cashier, with about an inch of plywood and half a foot of air separating us from an otherwise very intimate encounter made the question of whether the pants really fit seem needlessly petty. I decided that the pants appeared to be within several inches of fitting, figured that was good enough, and quickly pulled my shorts back on and exited, barely needing to open the door to get out. The cashier's robotic gaze was still fixed in the direction of the dressing room, I noticed over my shoulder.

I walked around the store a little more, hoping that the time might induce the cashier to forget that moments earlier, but for a thin sheet of particle board, I was practically exposing myself to her. Of course, since I was the only customer in the store, it seemed unlikely that the crush of business would be sufficient to drive that thought from her mind. Fortunately, she was appearing to take the situation with silent Palauan stoicism. Either than or she had quietly passed away earlier in the evening and was just now beginning to stiffen from rigor mortis.

I crossed a strangely empty expanse of floor to the "notions" area to pick up some a needle and thread, and thankfully, was able to check out at the register of some 15-year old Palauan girl's register in the "electronics" department, where a stack of 13" t.v.'s replayed some fuzzy soccer highlights from a badly split cable. The total bill came out to just $35, reminding me that, even if Ben Franklin inflated prices a little, the lack of a sales tax in Palau made anything shy of a 10% price markup an unexpected bargain as compared to purchases in the states.

Hoping to forestall my exit past the cashier at the front as long as possible, on the outside chance that the morgue might come take her away before I left, I took my time leaving by wandering through the five shelves constituting "housewares." I though about buying a large plastic garbage can for my house, rather than relying on my ad hoc system of tossing whatever garbage I had in a grocery bag on the counter, but decided against it when I noticed that the cans were marked as "$66.0 0." I tried to convince myself that there was just some misplaced decimal point there, and that they were only $6.60, but that acutally seemed too cheap. Then I saw that a Rubbermaid laundry hamper nearby was priced as $45, and some straw brooms in a bucket were tagged at $18.50 each. Half expecting the cashier to run up to me and explain that the pants I had just bought were incorrectly discounted from $350, I decided to make my exit and fast.

The cashier didn't even flinch as I passed by on my way out. I mumbled a "good night" to her on the way out, but she obviously felt that what we had shared was too big for words.

Download e-mail: The single most important question, one which I was woefully unable to get an answer to until about two weeks before I left, was whether Palau had internet and web access. A question posted to a Usenet newsgroup on the Pacific Islands returned a single response from some woman who had lived here several years ago. She had no idea whether Palau had internet access, but she apparently had an ax to grind over a marriage to a Palauan guy that went bad, and shared with me several bits of advice that, reading between the lines, showed her to be pretty bitter about the whole scene.

Obviously, it's not in Palau's interests to be trumpeting their internet services. In a time when even such information services dinosaurs like America Online have all but discontinued timed service plans, Palaunet fiercely clings to an absurd fee schedule. Apparently (their written materials being no more edifying than the e-mail they sent), basic connection time to send and retrieve e-mail is unlimited, and included in the $15 monthly fee. Access to the internet, on the other hand, is free for the first 2 hours a month, and is thereafter priced by the second. That's right-- linger over that online porn for an extra 10 seconds, and you're in hock to Palaunet for another 4 cents.

But that's not the half of it. The software Palaunet makes available to its customers configures itself during setup, based on directions from the host computer. In our case, loading up Palaunet treats you to a daily dose of the PNCC's logo-- a guy in a sumo wrestler's diaper blowing on a conch shell (honoring ancient means of communication, get it?). You are also treated to PNCC's stirring motto "Launching Palau into Cyberspace: Surfing Since March 19, 1997." Hell, I remember March 17, 1997 (seeing a marriage counselor, worrying about a blown statute of limitations on a case I was involved with, dog jumping out window, snow), and knowing that my only practical means of communication with the outside world had only been around since last spring didn't fill me with confidence.

Nor did the paranoid threat that constantly scrolls across a marquee at the bottom of the window whenever you're on Palaunet: "Reminder Notice: The Palaunet tariff strictly prohibits using PalauNet for 2-way voice communication." I guess when you let the phone company, who already charges about $3 a minute for incoming or outgoing overseas calls, handle all internet traffic as well, there's a natural fear that people will use the internet for the practical advantages it provides, like making voice-only or video telephone calls for, essentially, free. An Australian friend I knew in Buffalo kept in touch with his parents in Oz that way, and I had seriously considered investing in a couple of microphones and cameras to keep in touch with my folks the same way. So much for that idea. I'm told that overseas rates are so high because the infrastructure to provide universal phone service domestically is so expensive that costs have to be recouped somewhere, but that doesn't make me any happier to subsidize it.

To be fair, Palaunet has, in the past couple weeks, apparently corrected some problems that made the likelihood of getting connected on a single phone call less than 1 in 3, and in a country where either the power or phone goes off for at least half an hour at least once a week, Palaunet has been reasonably reliable in getting my e-mail to and from the people I communicate with. But I'll be glad to get back to the states where I can diddle around on the internet to my heart's content without checking my watch every five minutes. Maybe then, I'll finally be able to update the Links page.

Traffic: Yep. They've got it here, and it's pretty nasty. Whether the odometer in my car is calibrated in miles or kilometers, it's a shade over 3 units of whatever it's measuring from my house to the court building, and the entire trip is bumper to bumper traffic on the way in every morning. That's on a good day; on a bad day, the traffic extends past my house, and I have to wait at the end of the driveway for some polite motorist to let me in. The traffic is so bad that each morning, prisoners from the jail are loaded into the back of a truck and slowly driven along a section of road downtown to drop cones to mark off an additional lane for inbound traffic. In the afternoon (apparently after storyboard carving hour), they're rounded back up to relocate the cones to provide an extra lane for outbound traffic.

There are some obvious reasons for the whole mess. Naturally, since the vast bulk of people work in downtown Koror, the trip in is bound to be busy, and there's only one road that leads downtown from the outlying neighborhoods. Add to that the fact that there is no traffic control to speak of-- there are traffic lights at several intersections, but they are apparently non-functional-- and no left turn lanes, and you've got the makings of a world-class traffic snarl. Not to mention that there are several schools along the main road, thus encouraging people to stop to drop off their kids, or to wait while kids cross the road. All in all, the commute from my house to work has taken me as long as 20 minutes some mornings, even though the actual distance is probably less than 2 miles.

The traffic situation is greatly exacerbated by the radio options. Palau has a good half dozen radio stations scattered across the AM and FM dials. None are particularly compelling. I leave the car radio tuned to 88.9 FM, largely because the only other FM station I can reliably tune in seems to adhere to an all-talk format, 90% of which is in Palauan. (I'm told that the host, Alfonso Diaz, is the "Rush Limbaugh of Palau." I'm not sure if that's supposed to be good or bad.)

WPKR 88.9 (or KRFM, depending on which station bumber you want to believe) plays music, but its playlist is somewhat, well, let's say "eclectic." Copyright laws are practically non-existent in this part of the world, so re-makes of American hits by Palauan groups on cheap Casio synthesizers, all set to the same cha-cha beat, are common. So is dead air, which occasionally goes on so long you start to wonder if the transmitter blew up, or the d.j. quit or something. The advertisers don't seem to mind, since I've only heard a total of maybe four ads the whole time I've been here. I don't know how they manage to stay in business. This is all interspersed within a weird mix of stale American rap and R&B, and ocasionally, some creaky classic rock.

To give you a feel for a typical week's worth of radio listening, I compiled a list of what I've heard on my commute for the past five days. Here's a small sampling:

Unbreak My Heart, Toni Braxton
Reggae-style cover of Foreigner's I Want To Know What Love Is
Hook, Blues Traveler
Some rap-y kind of thing by someone named "Aliah"
A Palauan-languge cover of Bryan Adams' Straight From the Heart
Palau's current celebrity, "Tamara" with a song whose lyrics are in Palauan, but whose chorus sounds like "Ichi me ba ono"
Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car, Billy Ocean
That Stupid Aerosmith song from "Armageddon," Aerosmith
A 3-minute long spoken word advertisement about National Tourism Awareness Week ("Sustainable tourism, for you, for me, for Palau") over the endless repitition of the first 16 bars of Jimmy Olsen's Blues by the Spin Doctors
I'm Not a Player, Big Pun
What sounded like a cover of Beatles' Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da sung in a language that might have been Japanese
A different Tamara tune, more uptempo, also in Paluan. The chorus sounds like "mem ah boo rah"
A reggae song of indeterminate language, but certainly not English
Something by Coolio
The Palauan Straight From the Heart again
A cover of Tina Turner's What's Love Got to Do With It? by some guy.
A 2-week old broadcast of Rick Dees' "Weekly Top 40," but with no commercials played during the commercial breaks.
The first Tamara song again
Don Henley

Everytime the radio goes on, it's a crapshoot as to whether you'll hear something interesting, or something that makes you want to drive the car into the nearest mangrove swamp to make it stop. Of course, even though I never would have listened to, for example, the Spanish radio stations at home, when your options are either a song in a language you don't understand or long, pre-recorded educational sermons about the Bible on the AM station ("The Book of Job is one of the oldest books in the Bible. It tells the story of Job's boundless faith in God despite terrible personal tragedies...."), I say bring on the weird Palauan stuff.

The music, bad as it is, does often suffice to distract me from the fact that I'm 10,000 miles from civilization and still stuck in traffic. Not that smoothly flowing traffic is something to be wished for. The quality of driving leaves a lot to be desired here. Since there's little chance to exceed 30 miles an hour anywhere, drivers rely more on reflexes than actual accident prevention skills. Signaling turns is apparently optional, as is looking to see if there's traffic coming before backing out of a parking lot. People will drive into oncoming traffic with the expectation that the car with the right of way coming towards you will stop and wait. Most disconcerting, however, is the consistently held belief that the smallest amount of space left between two moving cars is an invitation to fill it.

Whether you call it aggressiveness or carelessness is immaterial; driving here requires constant vigilance, not only for other drivers on the road, but for the kids, old people, dogs, and whatnot that teem along the shoulders, never more than a few feet from the traffic whizzing by. Stephanie brought her bike here, thinking that she could use that to get around instead of having a car. However, recent stories of several people getting hit by cars while riding bikes caused her to rethink that notion.

Softball: The court has a team in an softball league that just started playing. It's an over-35 league, but I was told that, since the Clerk of the Court is the official registrar of birth certificates in Palau, my relative infancy would not be a bar to my participation. (Jill and Stephanie, each of whom are also under 35, are nevertheless allowed to play since the age limit does not apply to females on the co-ed teams.)

At this point, it is worthwhile to mention that I am, even on my best days, a mediocre athlete. Despite trying out twice, I never made a Little League team as a child. (Having told this story in the past, I've frequently encountered responses that "I thought everyone got to play Little League if they wanted to." Not in Plattsburgh, they didn't. Granted, the first year I tried out, of the 30 or so kids who showed up for tryouts, the only other people that didn't make the team besides me were two girls, but that's beside the point.) I played softball on an intramural dorm team in college, but our focus there was less on playing ball than it was on drinking beer and hitting on the handful of girls that showed up. (I was as unsuccessful in that sort of "hitting" as I was on the field, for what it's worth.) So when Natus put the rush on me at the airport to play for the court's team, I was a little wary.

Over time, though, it appeared to me that the team was a pretty casual affair. Talk of softball came freely among the court staff. Even some of the older women in the office, who I had a hard time picturing sliding into second with their cleats up to break up the double play, talked about how much fun it was to play for the court.

I showed up for the first game, but it got cancelled somehow, so several of us just hung around on the field tossing the ball and taking some light batting practice. I was a little better than I had expected after not having touched a bat or glove in over a decade, but I still dropped as many balls as I caught. Everyone else seemed to be equally more reliable, although there were a couple exceptions. Natus, for example, was hitting deep fly balls with only one hand on the bat. Given the overall lack of skills for the majority of the team, I assumed that this was a "just for fun" league.

We had our first "official" game a couple weeks later, after the first three scheduled games got rained out-- the idea to start a softball league during the rainy season here was far short of brilliant. It was a totally different scene. The team compliment had nearly doubled since the first game, everyone wearing tie-dyed "Supremes" shirts. (Lawyers never seem to tire of calling a supreme court "the Supremes." It wasn't funny the first time I head it in law school, and it isn't funny now.) I showed up just before the team was to take the field, and Natus, after chiding me for missing warm-ups, went to change the lineup card to add me.

Lineup card?

"Yeah," he said. "It's for the umpires and the announcer."

Umpires? Announcer? This was a lot bigger deal than I had been led to believe. Several members of the other team, and a few on ours, had brought out their baseball pants, stirrups, and cleats. An announcer in a press box above home plate provided play-by-play (in Palauan) over a loudspeaker, and I overheard at least one comment that the game was being videotaped for later broadcast on the local public access channel. Great, not only was I going to potentially disappoint my team, but I was going to do it in front of the whole island community.

I'll skip the game description, except to say that, by divine providence, I was not called on to do much fielding. I played various positions in the outfield, and did manage to scoop up a ground ball single and throw out the runner trying to stretch it at second. On the other hand, I came in too far when one of the girls on the other team was batting (a minimum of three females on the field at all times, and maximum of five is prescribed by the rules), and wound up getting a long fly ball knocked well over my head, so I broke even fielding.

I was money at the plate, though-- three singles in four at-bats, all to the opposite field. I was swinging for the fence, but the best I could manage were ground balls that barely got out of the infield. I guess getting on base is better than nothing. Nevertheless, we lost, 15-14. Some people on the team were visibly disappointed. I was just glad to be able to go home where, hopefully, I might finally stop sweating. Even though the game ended at 7:30 p.m. under the lights, there was no breeze whatsoever, and the humidity was as oppressive in the evening as it was during the day.

Jill and Stephanie, although both present, never got put into the game. The official reason stated was that they hadn't been to any of the practices held in the previous weeks, which was true enough, but there was some belief that their gender was a factor too. "If we were men," one of them explained later, "we certainly would have been substituted for some of the worst guys out there." I'm somewhat compelled to agree, as we had our share of lousy male players that got swapped in and out of the lineup. (In what was apparently an oversight, I played the whole game.) If this were a less competitive league, as I had expected it to be, things like "practices" wouldn't really matter, and anybody who came out to play could get fitted in somewhere. But it was clear from the whole atmosphere that those involved take softball pretty seriously.

Which makes it less fun for me to play. Because I'm not a very able athlete, I like playing for the fun of it, but when things turn competitive, I lose interest. The game stops being fun when other people start relying on me to not screw up. More importantly, it's hard to enjoy playing a game if your friends are excluded. I'm hoping that it really was just a matter of being fair to those who came to practice beforehand, and I'm trying to talk both of them into coming to the next practice, in the hopes that the problem with thus resolve itself. But I have a vague suspicion that, come the end of the season, softball will turn out to be too competitive for my tastes, and will disappear from my daily itinerary described above.

Well, does that bring us up to date? Not quite, but for now it'll do. I suppose a post-mortem on my first month here might be interesting, but I think the quote at the top sums it up. It's certainly "strange" here, but it's getting harder and harder to pinpoint to exactly what makes it that way.

I guess I'm just getting used to it.

This Chapter uploaded on 11/1/98.

On to Chapter 9...

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