Michael's Photoblog

So, I've been out in the workshop again (well carport really). We were getting ready to move into a new house and needed an entertainment center. Why spend a few hundred on a prefabricated particle board assembly job when you can build something yourself? Here's what I came up with. I call it the "moderate republican" because it leans just a little to the right. I know I should have checked for square, but I was working late at night with only a headlamp to light me, and as moving day drew closer this project went from "let's have some fun" to "just get 'er done." I was going to add a second set of matching doors above the ones you see, but oh well. Oh, and staining wood late at night in bad light is not a woodworking best practice. But "distressed" is hot right now, right? I hope so, because that's how I felt as I tried to sand off all the uneven blotches, leaving the surface with a weathered look.

The Waters of Samoa

My wife sprawls on the surface next to me, her masked face peering down into water so clear it’s almost like no water at all. Below, hundreds of fish, a thousand maybe, flash their silver underbellies as they dart in unison, controlled, it seems, by a single brain. We fan our hands against the pull of the current, what the Samoans call “ava.” It’s not a dangerous ava though. We’re safe.

We came to see the turtle. But he’s off somewhere else, doing whatever turtles do—eating or sleeping or burying eggs in the sand. Not that much different from our life here, actually, only instead of eggs we bury our children right up to their laughing faces and then watch them wriggle out to find hermit crabs.

If this were Hawaii or the Caribbean, I’d be swimming into people; bikinied bodies lining the beach, reclining, offering their flesh, a malignant sacrifice to the heathen gods of beauty as currently defined. But this is Samoa, and on a Saturday afternoon we have the beach and, it feels, the entire Pacific Ocean to ourselves.

Why is that I wonder? Must be a comfort thing. The flight to Hawaii is long enough without an extra five hours arching up over the fattest part of the earth and into the southern hemisphere. The boil water notices for e. coli can’t be good for tourism either. And then there’s the fetid smell rising up off the tuna factory, spreading out over the harbor like a fog. But that’s all on the other end of the island. Here the breeze smells only of hair-stiffening salt, and the water is clean and warm, washing away the stick of sweat and the heat of the equatorial sun.

I look down at the coral, reaching up to me like colorful fingers pushing through the sand. It’s dangerous, the coral. Sharp. More likely to hurt you than a shark they say. But coral doesn’t slip silently through the water toward you like a shadow, pushed by the whip of a muscular tail.

My wife gives me the thumbs up and then her flippered feet begin chopping at the water, pushing her clumsily toward the shore. Even with our artificially elongated and flattened feet we’re not well equipped for movement in the water; the fish must think us so awkward, so uncivilized, like fat, baseball-cap-wearing Americans in Paris.

On Monday I drive into Pago Pago to pick up a package. They don’t deliver packages to our post office box on the west end of the island, just letters and notices of packages.

On the way back, I stop at the Lyndon B. Johnson Tropical Medical Center, a hospital that looks salvaged from World War II, like a black and white memory my grandfather might dredge up on his way to a real hospital somewhere in the States.

My friend the artist is there to have puss drained from his foot. We met by chance and our friendship grew over stacks of faded art books, images of Van Gogh with his bandaged ear, cypress trees, Monet’s beaches and fields of poppies. Who would’ve ever thought I’d find myself sitting for hours in a Samoan hovel, fans clacking, ants marching single-file to a crumb, looking at Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and Renaissance paintings.

“Hello old friend,” I say as I come into the hospital room.

“Who’s there?” the artist asks. He’s gruff like that and sounds gruffer because of the phlegm thick and yellow in the clear plastic hole in his neck, a tracheotomy he once told me he didn’t think he really needed. You take your chances at this hospital.

Today my friend looks like Vincent Van Gogh or at least what Vincent might have looked like if he’d survived his insanity—straggly white beard growing down his neck, sharp nose, sharp eyes.

“It’s me,” I say. “What they got you in for this time?”

“Oh it’s you. Hello.” His face softens but not much. It’s his way. I know he’s happy to see me.

“I brought you a picture,” I say and slide a faded computer printout of a Monet onto the tray next to the food he hasn’t eaten.

“What’s that?”

“Have a look.” He sees it. He tells me it’s very nice. I point out how the red sails pull in the color from the top of the bluff. It’s the way he sees color in a painting; I’m repeating things he’s told me.

“It’s very nice,” he tells me again and I know he likes it.

We talk for a while. He complains about the nurses. I ask if he’s going to start painting again. He says he might. The skin sagging off his paintbrush-thin legs makes me think he might not. But you never know. Artists can surprise you—if they’re good.

“You see what they done to me last time I come in for a bad foot?” he says, and pulls back the covers. I look down. His big toe sticks up like a hitchhiker’s thumb, the other toes are missing.

“Gangrene,” he says. “It’s terrible for diabetics.”

Gangrene? Gangrene? What is this the civil war? These are my thoughts but I don’t say them.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “This one’s getting better though.” I look at his other foot, wrapped in gauze. “Drained a full cup of puss out of it.”

We’re quiet for a minute and then he says, “I like this doctor though, he’s trying real hard. I think I’ll do a painting for him when I get out. A seascape or something.”

I nod. “You’ll have to show me before you give it to him.”

“I’ll show you,” he says matter of factly.

The nurse he’s been waiting for finally returns from lunch. I say I’ve got to get back to work and it’s not a lie. He thanks me for coming and that’s not a lie either, he is thankful, and I’m glad I came.

Outside it’s hot and the air clings to my skin like a dirty sweat. As my pants brush against my sticky legs, I think I can feel the new mole I discovered in the shower that morning. It’s not painful, but I think I can feel it, and I imagine cancer spreading under the surface of my flesh like a black gangrene, like oil spilled in the clear waters of Samoa.

I know there’s no dermatologist on the island, but I go back in to the nurse’s station and ask anyway. She shakes her head. I don’t bother asking about a pathologist.

Epilogue*

After a rusty-scalpel biopsy (well maybe not that bad), the word from the pathologist in Hawaii was…definitely benign and somewhat hypochondriac.

*(for the benefit of those who care)