Climbing the Coconut Tree
Originally published on Salon.com
Reprinted in Left Coast Writers Anthology, Hot Flashes: Sexy Little Stories and Poems
Included in Travelers’ Tales The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2005, due April 2005
“I’ve been watching you all week,” he said. “You have a nice smile.” And then, inexplicably, “You are a good wife and mother.”
He was a waiter at Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Samoa and I was on my last day in the country, lying by the pool, trying not to think about leaving this paradise. He had been standing in the sun’s heat for forty-five minutes, holding his tray and trying to convince me to meet him in my hotel room.
When I pointed out the blinding difference in our ages, he said, “For Samoans, age isn’t important. Only the love is important.” I was amused, but not at all tempted. He was beautiful—a tall Samoan with a generous smile and cocoa-colored skin. He was also younger than any of my children and seemingly out of his mind. About six feet away an Australian couple lay silent, lapping it all up.
I’ve traveled to the South Pacific often, always to the tiny island nation of Samoa. The young men there, in all honesty, are ravishing. Before they settle into their village chiefdom where the size of their bellies reflects their status, they are gods of the rain forest. As boys they run barely clad through the taro plantations on errands for their elders. They tote water, palm branches and baskets of coconuts suspended on poles that span their widening shoulders. And they climb coconut trees.
I watched an eight-year-old boy fetch my breakfast one morning: he tied one end of a rag to each ankle to keep his feet about ten inches apart; then he wrapped his arms around the hairy trunk and mounted the tree, scampering up in thrusts. Soon the blond nui, the youngest coconuts, dropped, rolling in all directions. It takes any kid on the island about ninety seconds to whack out a hole in the top of the fruit with his bush knife. The prize is sweet—creamy, cool, coconut milk.
These boys, whose small hands become deft handling bush knives as children, grow to young men with prominent calf muscles and broad backs, black hair and flashing smiles. I’d see them at large along village roads, completely bare, except for the brightly colored sarong-like lava lavas knotted at their waists and the large hibiscus flowers stuck behind one ear. They seemed so comfortable in their bodies. I envied their robust capability.
These are young men who spend hours in the ocean spearing fish and octopus, who cut the grass by hand, their bush knives doing the mower’s work. Many come of age by enduring weeks of tattooing, painfully earning the tatau that covers every inch of their lower bodies in traditional patterns. They are works of art in their own natural setting, Polynesian possibilities of the imagination.
Most fully grown women who travel outside the U. S. know how easy it is to attract a man’s lingering glance far from home. Once away from the States’ tiresomely stylish and annoyingly fit females, normal-sized American women who travel to other, more reasonable cultures are valued for their natural and uncontrived charms. It’s fun and it’s flattering. But when the attention comes from mere boys, it’s always so surprising.
During one hour-long wait for takeoff at LAX on a nearly empty plane, I desultorily resisted a young Samoan man’s invitations for me to sit beside him for the nine-hour trip to Pago Pago. I had no desire to sit beside anyone when I could have an entire row to myself and mostly ignored him. But after he described the tour of the island he had in mind for “us” on our arrival, I finally asked, “Why are you interested in me? I’m probably your mother’s age.”
“But I like you.”
I asked him if he was attracted to me “because I’m palagi”—not Samoan.
He admitted to it, saying, “Palagi women have white skin, and they know what they want.” I thought he meant they are self-directed, independent women who travel alone and love it, as I do. Later, I wondered just what all those other women wanted and how they knew it.
The attention kept coming. A young policeman in Apia, the island’s only town, stopped me while I was out running early one morning. I trotted right over, thinking he beckoned for official reasons. But he was wondering the all-pervasive question, “How long are you staying?” And then, “Do you go to the night club tonight?” There was Fia Fia, a nineteen year old I interviewed for ten minutes in an outlying village. A month after I returned home my mail brought a letter from him, telling me he “wanted to marry up” with me.
Amazing and amusing. It’s not like this at home in Northern California. I teach nineteen-year-old boys at home. I grade their reading skills and encourage them to develop their essays with specific details; I’ve pretty much never thought about taking one home. I’d be happy if it were just a bit easier to get dates with a man close to my age—not necessarily older, but at least a few respectable years older than my thirty-year-old son. But such men aren’t as quickly attracted.
Of course, the air’s different in California. It’s not nearly as heavy and erotically moist. The fish don’t fly and glow in the moonlight just below the tranquil Southern Cross. On my west coast there’s no pungent smoke from cooking fires early in the morning, redolent with hemp. The cab drivers aren’t named “Rambo” and don’t offer tours of the island “because you make my cab smell good.”
After my last trip to the South Pacific, I went on to Bali in Indonesia, another tiny island. Though I wasn’t really there to check out the men, I couldn’t help but notice. Bali’s well-known for its compelling beauty. And everything on the island—both nature’s shapes and those made by the Balinese—seems a gift of a brilliant artist’s hand. It’s sensually stimulating, but not really sensuous. The Asian men I encountered there seemed so placid. Basically, they were men wearing skirts—men who drove and walked and talked with a sort of spent composure.
Until Nyoman, that is. At first Nyoman seemed like the other Balinese men, though he had a playfulness to him I hadn’t seen since Samoa. He was about twenty-five years old and worked at La Taverna Hotel in Sanur. He learned my name as soon as I arrived, and we spoke a few times as he fetched beach towels or icy fruit drinks for me.
Our conversation one evening started so gradually I was completely unprepared. Standing in front of the hotel in the dusk of the Balinese night waiting for my cab, we were both watching some men who’d just arrived and who were excitedly speaking Balinese while waving and pointing to the top of a huge coconut tree right in front of us.
I asked Nyoman what they were saying. He told me they were talking about climbing the tree to get the coconuts.
“Do you ever climb coconut trees, Nyoman?” I asked, filling the languid time with small talk.
“Yes, every night,” he answered.
Thinking that was sort of odd, I replied, “Really?”
“Yes, sometimes seven times in one night.”
I was still staring up, straining to see the actual coconuts in the branches. I immediately recalled those eager boys and young men in Samoa with their easy strength, mounting the coconut trees there. I couldn’t turn toward Nyoman; I couldn’t let him see I knew what he was really saying. Then I thought, what is he really saying? Still, I stared straight up while he said, closer now, right in my ear, “I’d like to climb the coconut tree with you.”
Then the cab pulled up and its door opened. I was safe again from the absurd image of consorting with one of my students. And now I remind myself there’s nearly always more happening than meets the eye and apparently more going on with these men below the surface—behind their ear flowers, their motor scooters, their bush knives and, of course, their skirts.
Back in the States, living as close to the very edge of the continent as I can afford, I fall into my regular lanes of travel to and from work and play. I think about Nyoman’s hopeful appreciation and still laugh when I remember the waiter’s persistence in Samoa. I’ve always admired the prowess of young men—all those years I watched Rudy Curinga quarterback my high school’s games, the long white seasons I skied the slopes with a trove of guys in college, and the fearlessness of those backpackers I see in my travels. They easily sleep anywhere and explore anything.
I still spend the whole of my days from August through June accommodating young men’s restlessness. I know them so well and feel affection for them—for their lanky sprawls, their amiable readiness, their effortless potential. But, like the ability most of us have to admire fine art without needing to own it, I can appreciate them as landscape.
And more and more lately, as the gravity of my own age nudges me, as I realize how limited women of my generation feel, I find I don’t really want a nineteen-year-old boy of my own. I want to be one.