The further I read, the more I thought it sounded like a job for Jimmy Buffett: “Attorney general. Should possess 10-15 years experience in the legal field, demonstrate expertise as an effective negotiator and be willing to adopt an island lifestyle.” A complete job description could be had by e-mailing wildcard@niuhicom.co.nz.
You’d never catch a big, serious country like Canada or India running such an ad. But islands can do things like that and get away with it. In this case Niue, all 100 self-governed square miles of it.
I’m a collector of islands. I think we all are. That’s how it happened that in my spare time I came across Niue, as with my fingers I sailed the paper seas of the South Pacific east of Fiji. Niue stopped me because it has one of those names I wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce.
I nurse particular notions about islands–you do, too, if you’ll let yourself dwell on the subject–and one of mine is that the harder an island’s name is to pronounce, the fewer Americans there are who’ll pay it a visit. Just look at Kauai. Sumptuous as that island is, and despite the fact that that’s where they filmed “South Pacific,” people didn’t start going there in significant numbers until their tongues understood that its name rhymed with Hawaii and not Maui.
To prove my point, I set my fingers sailing through the pages of the World Tourism Organization’s Yearbook of Tourism Statistics. And sure enough, Niue welcomed only 209 Americans in 1999. Fiji got 62,131 that year. Never mind that Niue is but one island rather than an archipelago, that it has no harbor and that the two flights a week that serve its 1,800 inhabitants arrive from Tonga. If we knew how to pronounce the blasted thing, we’d create an easier way to get to it.
Still, like all islands, Niue has found reason to crow. It is one of the largest upraised coral atolls in the world. Thus, it’s not just any old speck of dust in the sea; it’s the Rock of Polynesia. Niue’s two-tiered topography includes jagged limestone pinnacles, sea arches, lots of unexplored caves and the one-of-a-kind fresh-water Anapala Chasm–vastly more to be desired, I decided as I navigated the island’s Web site, than the rivers and lakes you’d find on some big boring continent.
Islands are such braggarts. Square mile for square mile, they make more fuss about themselves than any island-sized continental nation. Do you ever recall 11,000-square-mile Equatorial Guinea regaling you with stories about its mainland beaches? How recently did 8,000-square-mile El Salvador pull you aside to pitch its cloud forest? And when’s the last time that less-than-a-square-mile Monaco reminded you that it has absolutely no unpaved roads?
But islands? Just look at Iceland, shamelessly claiming not only its islandhood, but also maintaining that it is part of two continents. Easter Island, the hussy, parades its giant stone heads, or more to the point, the mystery of them, to make us want to go there all the more. If they wanted to, I’ll bet Jamaica’s reggae or Cuba’s salsa could kick Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville-singin’ Key West right out of the Caribbean. Which is another reason he should look into that job on Niue.
It’s a little hard to imagine why he’d need all that legal experience. As far as I can tell, the only litigious problems Niue’s government faces are a tiff over the country’s Web site, the financial status of one of the island’s hotels and a political snarl over airline service. Buffett could probably smooth everything over with a round of drinks and the Tahitian chorus of “One Particular Harbor.” That’s how things get done, or ought to, on an island.
Islands can do whatever they want . . . whatever we want. They can rescue castaways, hide treasure, imprison criminals, nurture strange animals, spawn great cities, erupt in flames, even disappear. Islands are magic, because they are and because we need them to be.
The more fantastic their story, the more passionately we want to believe in it. We’d never have bought the tale of how America and Britain almost went to war over a dead pig if the hostilities hadn’t cropped up on an island; the truth about how San Juan Island really became part of Washington state is a yawn in comparison. We refuse the account that Amelia Earhart and Frederick Noonan died in a crash in the Pacific because there were islands in the vicinity of their plane’s last known location. If not Howland Island where they were headed, then . . . surely . . . a smaller one nearby?
We’re certain Atlantis existed, though we have no proof. But Plato wouldn’t have lied would he? And everybody knows that King Kong would be alive and well and eating dinosaurs this very day if only Fay Wray hadn’t gone ashore with Carl Denham’s film crew.
If you believe that truth is stranger than fiction, then you know it’s stranger still on an island. Go ahead. Imagine just about any scenario, and chances are an island has beaten you to the punch. A place where polar bears outnumber coal miners, you say? Sorry, Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean already has that one covered. A tropical idyll that nevertheless harbors an abyss of natural asphalt? Nope. Trinidad, of the Caribbean’s Trinidad and Tobago, has had that gig for centuries.
On Cyprus, in the Mediterranean, you can go see a play in an ancient Greco-Roman amphitheater. On oh-so-private Fregate Island, in the Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, you can walk a canopied path through cashew thickets where giant tortoises take their meals. From the top of the Martian-like landscape of Haleakala Crater, on Maui, you can look across on a clear day and see the snow-capped peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii.
Islands are so therapeutic, if they didn’t already exist, Oprah would invite one of her self-help guru-guests to invent them. Each and every one of them is bucking the system, making its own way, a defiant scrap of turf in a world of big bully land masses. Islands don’t take any crap from anybody. Least of all Niue.
When Capt. James Cook was sailing around the Pacific, he tried once, twice, three times to come ashore. But–and Niue history is quite specific on this point–the people of Niue repelled him with the utmost vigor. In what sounds very much like a fit of spite, Cook named it Savage Island and sailed away . . . ultimately to Hawaii, where the people of Hawaii killed him with the utmost vigor.
There’s a moral to that story. Several, actually. I’ve settled on mine. And because you’re a collector of islands like I am, I know you’ll find yours. You can bet Jimmy Buffett will too. It looks like the attorney general stint would leave him plenty of time to put it down in a song. Provided he figures out what in the world rhymes with Niue.
