Easter Island: In Search Of The Birdman (cont.)

At the disco, which is open all night to watch the world cup on TV, Ecuador is playing Mexico. In the flickering blue light, Pablo gives me a metal ring from his finger and a lighter in the shape of a Moai. I buy him a can of beer. Outside, we eat chicken roasted on a stick and walk back to his aunt’s house as the wind whips up a gray dawn. Standing on the porch outside my room, he presses me hard to the wall. Dogs snuffle around our feet. He opens the sliding glass door into one of the empty rooms and pushes me onto the bed. I put a lot of faith in my own cunning and remain calm. I wait and then slither out from under and to the door where I laugh as I dash to my own room and lock it. He whispers through the door that he is sorry, he will be mas carino, mas suave. He says what he thinks I want. Soon, I hear him cross the lawn to the main house. He does what he needs to do and I do what I need to which is: shove the blanket from my bed, some water, the crude map all in a backpack. I leave before the house rises, buy some rolls and soft cheese at the local grocer that smells of sea flakes, and start my walk around the island.

At the end of the first day of my walk, I reach Anakena beach. When Thor Heyerdahl was here in the sixties to study the mysterious origins of the statues and petroglyphs, he wanted to thank the villagers by allowing their children aboard his research vessel moored off the beach. He piled them into dinghies and rowed them out to the ship. On one of the trips, a rogue wave overturned the dinghy, and several children washed up on the beach drowned. By then, the Birdman cult was long vanished; the children had never learned to swim. Here on that white sand, I spread my blanket to curl up for the night. Instead of sleeping, I hear rustling and shadows darting in and out of waves. I hear the terns that skim the waters at night for surface fish and the bull moving through the grass to trample a circle for a bed. The line of Moai statues that Heyerdahl resurrected, stare inland.

On the second day the sun is intense, and my face burns up. My lips split; I have no more water. I switch to flip-flops because my blisters are bleeding. I keep the sea in mind and the sheer face of the Rano Roraku quarry in sight. I follow a path through grass above my head to the top edge of the crater and look down at the quarry and the lake. Statues in various stages of rising from the rocky earth are scattered on all slopes. Even after the population was diminished by war and starvation, the Rapa Nui continued to carve the Moai. Now they pitch feverishly to the side, coral eyes worn away, hands resting on bellies with protruding navels and lips poking quizzically as if awaiting World Cup scores. Some lie in relief, never freed from their rock beds, noses the length of a tall man.

As the sun sets on the second day of my walk, I hitch-hike the last stretch of road back into town. A truck stops, and I hop in the bed next to their crab traps. I'm happy to sit in the back on the spare tire, rest my feet and watch the road lay out behind us. I think about the tuna and how no matter how fast it swims, that it eventually will fumble into one of the local’s nets. I think about how in the emptiness of this place, it is difficult to tell what’s lost and what’s won. In the emptiness, we circle and repeat often losing tally.

In town, I get out at a restaurant and order ceviche in an earthenware bowl. I eat ravenously as if to incorporate the red tuna muscle I will need to walk the island over again and again, to swim the distance to Moto Nui, to make the migration out of here. At the hostel, I shake the sand from my blanket. I take a freezing shower and bandage my feet. I go to the main house and find Pablo sleeping on the couch. I watch him awhile and then say “Hey.” I will need to devour his energy too.

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