Not opiates or barbiturates or the other chemical compounds I heard in the 6th grade at Jamestown Elementary during the D.A.R.E. session when a rent-a-cop stopped by our classroom, put before our impressionable pre-teen minds as an authority on drug use, vice, and addiction. No, my demon is doubt—the recriminations of self-doubt, the enduring conviction that I ought to doubt others, both known and unknown, kin and stranger.
I’m awakening to the possibilities, the reality, the enduring history of some humans collaborating, aligning with others, known and unknown, rather than waddling in the despair and isolation that humans solely seek to extort or extract, due harm, manipulate. Lord of the Flies, first published 70 years ago, pervades and pollutes our collective consciousness, unlike the Tongan castaways, whose #sixwordstory would be: six teenagers stranded together on ‘Ata.
The Tongan, teenage boys experience spanned 15 months from 1965 to 1966, 11-12 years after William Golding’s novel for pubescent audiences, though consumed by readers of all ages, regurgitated, passed down as lore from generation to generation. My hunch is that other people can recall the names of some of the boys from Lord of Flies. All that I recall are their archetypes: bully, henchmen, monster-masquerading-as-strong-leader, victim, and extras. But the names of Kolo, Luke, Sione (aka Mano), Sione, Tevita (aka David), and Tevita (aka Stephen) could be mononyms (half with nicknames) in societies that placed a greater value on collaboration, harmony, human vulnerability inside the awe-inducing might of the world.
As I reread their history, I marvel at the legacy of Kolomaile, the ruins of an old village that they depended upon and resuscitated for their survival. I also wonder what factors pushed them to runaway from their Anglican boarding school: was it as simple as adventurous mischief or as sinister as abuse by teachers who anointed themselves as God’s chosen enforcers? That they kept a fire burning for more than a year seems otherworldly. Humans having the ability to tend to a fire for that many consecutive days is as incomprehensible to me as the fires that burn underground:
- for decades in PCentralia, Pennsylvania,
- for millennia in the Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk in Iraq,
- for centuries like at/in Marshall Mesa in Boulder County, which is 1 of more than 100 known fires in Colorado, and
- for more than 50 years in the Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert, burning since 1971.
It’s a tremendous planet out there where every fire isn’t hellish. Where humans, flora, and fauna live and what we live in proximity to exceeds our imagination. Fires beneath the surface are a little bit closer to the omnipresent magma that swirls underneath the continents and all of the saltwater. The Earth’s ability to absorb, to reconstitute exceeds our collective imagination.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 