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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.

I didn't expect to be struck the other day by a profound sense of the way the smallest thing can send the path of our life shooting off in a new and hardly imagined direction—not in a museum about a guy who made candy, at any rate. But that's what happened. A travel writer (among other things) friend suggested we meet up and see this new musem: The Hershey Story: The Museum on Chocolate Avenue. (There really is a Chocolate Avenue in the Pennsylvania town of Hershey, home of Hershey chocolate. It's the main drag.)

First we had lunch in the café. Updated food, paninis and such, and they didn't all have chocolate in them. But they did have a tasting bar where they served up a variety ofchocolate from different parts of the world mixed up in a syrupy liquid. It was like a flight of wines, and served with the utmost seriousness, and it really was interesting from a tasting standpoint. And I found it a bit intoxicating, but not in the kittenish food-writer sense: I've always heard that chocolate has psychoactive alkaloids, and as it happens I went staggering away with some kind of buzz going.

Then you go through the museum itself. They've obviously relegated the word "museum" to the subtitle, because although museum-going seems to be holding its own these days, there's a great deal of effort made to convey an experience, to tell a story. Nobody wants to go look at old stuff. But they do like stories, and this museum really does succeed in that. It's not about chocolate, it's about a guy named Milton Hershey. There's a huge emphasis in the beginning on his unpromising early life. He was apprenticed to a printer, didn't much enjoy it, and one day dropped his hat in the machinery in what was not necessarily an accident. This had a bad effect on the machinery and his tenure with the printing company.

Then he went into business himself and went bankrupt twice—they have a letter in a case in which he's asking for money from a relative. But he liked being in the candy business, was successful eventually with a caramel company, and then became fascinated with milk chocolate, a luxury item produced by the Swiss.

Hershey bought machinery to make chocolate, and bought a large parcel of land amid the dairy farms of Lancaster County. Through trial and error, experimenting with processes used on both the milk and the beans, he found a way to produce milk chocolate cheaply enough that it was affordable for a mass market. This did his fortunes no harm, and he became fabulously wealthy, creating an entire town to support his new venture.

He married, and the couple couldn't have children, so Hershey devoted himself to the welfare of his workers and the wider world. (The museum, with laudable forthrightness, describes the 1937 strike by Hershey workers, which Hershey found personally painful.) He made sure his employees had quality homes, transportation, schools, and recreation facilities at a good price. He established schools, a hospital, and the Milton Hershey school for needy children. As you leave the museum, you see video of teachers and children from the school today, and there's a palpable sense of the influence the man's generosity of spirit still has. It's quite something, really—he was born in 1857, and can still help people today.

But the thing that struck me most was at a point about halfway through. OK, you think, he made milk chocolate affordable. But what if he hadn't? What if he'd given up and gone to work for his cousin behind a counter of a hardware story in Terre Haute? (I'm making up the cousin, although I've heard Terre Haute is a real place.) Hershey bars would not be the utterly ubiquitous thing every living American has known since earliest childhood and finds as familiar as his or her own hand. I got this strange what-if-my-parents-had-never-met feeling about how life and fate go.

But Milton Hershey hung in there. And after he was successful he used his money well. Up until now, I always thought about calories when I saw a stack of Hershey bars at a newsstand counter. But from now on, I'll think a little bit about Milton and the roller-coaster of fate on which we ride—cats and kings, cops and candymakers, and most of all you and I. Interesting museum, I must say.

I was looking at who's visited here, and I had one visit from a place described simply as "European country," and I thought, That's it! Let's have a generic European country! It would have cathedrals and good food and art and cafés and inhabitants who are friendly, no really, they are if you know how to approach them and so forth, but it would be cheaper, because it would be generic, like generic beer or cigarettes. Can you imagine the tourism bucks that would flood in? Everything European and desirable, but slightly less good and much cheaper? It would work for a whole huge demographic that happens to include me. I know, I know, there are some details to work out but that's not my concern—I'm more of a big-picture person.