The Victims Who Aren't Anonymous

This is Teannaki. When I went to Christmas Island (Kiritimati in Gilbertese) last year, he was the first person I met. Top-notch fishing guides tend to be self-possessed, quietly confident people, but I've never met anyone who had that quality more than Teannaki. He was as burly as a stone god, and I thought to myself that he looked like he was carved from the trunk of an oak tree. He spoke little, and he radiated authority.

He also seemed to have a thoughtful, preoccupied air, which might have been his nature or might have come from the tremendous complexity of guiding anglers in an environment with multiple variables—tide, weather, light, fish—that are always changing. He seemed to prefer thinking to talking, and it showed in his expression.

But as we bumped down the dirt road in a van heading to the fishing camp, I saw his lighter side for the first time. He said that after we got settled in and unpacked, we'd get together and talk about our daily routine for the coming week in a open-air meeting hall in the camp's center. "The maneaba," I said. I'd done some reading, and in the Gilbert Islands (now the republic of Kiribati), it was a tradition for each village to have a large palm-thatched structure by this name where people would meet and discuss things. It's a central part of their culture, still important today—the republic's parliament is called a maneaba, for example.

When I said that one word, Teannaki smiled for the first time since we'd met. He leaned forward and gave my arm a friendly poke with one of his stubby, strong fingers. "That's our word," he said. This was no great feat of linguistics on my part, but it really broke the ice. Teannaki was sitting in a van with four foreign strangers that he would be babysitting for a week, and I'm sure that in his thoughts was one big variable—what kind of people were we? Good guys? Jerks? And maybe my coming out with that one unexpected Gilbertese word, like a magician taking a dove out of a top hat, suggested to him that we were at least going to try to be good guys. Or maybe it was just a pleasant shock of recognition, like when you unexpectedly run into an old friend in a town full of strangers.

At any rate, it was a nice moment, and not the only one. Teannaki showed us the best week of fishing any of us had ever had, and he and his staff earned our respect and affection many times over. And now there's a god-damned tsunami spreading across the Pacific. I can tell you there's not a lot of high ground in Christmas Island, and probably not a lot of it anywhere in Micronesia—it's all coral atolls, and they just don't grow all that high. The people there must have some provision for tsunamis, because they've been there for thousands of years. I hope they do, at any rate. When you've been to a far-off place and met people there, it worries you when you hear that they're facing a potential disaster. That little girl who came and did traditional dances for us the last night, the band that sang popular songs, the other guides, the nice folks who made our food and straightened up our rooms, Teannaki who smiled and poked me with his finger—I hope they're going to be safe. I hope the same for everyone, of course, but those people are real for me now, even if they live literally on the other side of the world, and I hope it for them even more.

UPDATE: It appears that outside the area around Chile, this was kind of a meh event as tsunamis go. Seems like nobody has seen more than a knee-high wave anywhere. So for Teannaki and the little girl this was just an ordinary day, for the most part. Just another day in paradise—palm trees, frigate birds, the usual. Glad it turned out that way.