Sing Reverently

The upper level trough that had burst onto the scene while I'd been heading for landfall in Ha'Apai had moved on. The surface pressure charts were as clean as I had ever seen them; a little low brewing in the Tasman Sea, but otherwise a big swath of nothing. A weak high was moving east but remained in the higher latitudes and over all of Tonga there was not drawn a single isobar. The wind was gone, the sky mostly clear, the sun blazing.

I tied Tuerto to the wharf and walked across the dry gray dirt of Pangai. In a moment, I was sweating in the afternoon heat; in Tonga, folks where shirts, a practice I've begrudgingly joined along with other sailors to avoid offending people. I don't like it though, not one bit. Summer is quickly approaching and it has gone from hot to hotter, especially with the wind having taken a few days off. Thankfully, these islanders remain unconcerned with one's choice of bare feet.

It is interesting to see these minor cultural differences moving westward. The most glaring change, as any cruising sailor will note, is with regard to religion. There is an increasingly wide and thorough adoption of various Christian traditions as one moves from French Polynesia to the West. In Tonga, the effects on life and culture are obvious; most notably, Sunday is here treated with great seriousness and it is said that some locals would be outright offended to see folks doing basically anything, from swimming to boat work, on God's day. Nobody has tried to push a religious agenda on me or anyone I know, though, but we don't go about with flagrant disregard for their traditions; among sailors we do joke about the irony of the historical efficacy of missionaries in the South Pacific given the largely irreligious cohort who now sail among these islands. In any case, it is presumed that such cumbersome practices as the wearing of shirts in public places have emanated from the spiritual lore once carried to these islands by those old European navigators. I thus blame Christianity for my profuse sweating and now very smelly t-shirts.

Saltbreaker's crew was standing in the sun by the shore when I walked up. We started walking into town; Pangai is a very small town on a very small island, but it is the city-center of Ha'Apai and presumably the reason that the island, Lifuka, on which it is built would be later referred to by a man on the nearby even smaller island of Uoleva as "the mainland". A road passes by the wharf and underneath some ironwood trees that appear to play a role of great importance in the Pangai social scene given the near constant presence of a bevy of local men who there sit, sometimes playing chess, sometimes chatting, sometimes doing absolutely nothing. Across from the grove is a small concrete building with large portals to an interior with long, wide tables for displaying goods and adorned with the words "Fish Market" and "Paid for by Aus-Aid." Though there are almost always vegetables available for purchase, we have never seen a fish in the market. In fact, none of the lingering indications of fish is present, no smell, no scales from cleaning, no melted ice.

Past the market is the customs/immigration/post office. Pangai stands as having had the simplest, quickest and altogether most pleasant officialdom experience in the whole of the Pacific from my perspective. The customs agent simply took my Vava'u clearance form and asked how long I would be staying. Thinking I was in for passport checks and paperwork and probably some hassle for having taken over a week to get there since checking out of Vava'u, I told him a few days before I'd clear for New Zealand. He responded with, "Ok. You can do that." There was a long pause as I sat looking at him and awaiting his next command. Eventually, I said, "That's it?" to which he replied, "Yes. That's it. Come back before you leave." Checking out was equally simple and it was free, making Ha'Apai a much better place to officially depart Tonga than the more common departure point of Tongatapu.

On the next street there are a few Chinese shops, ubiquitously referred to as such because they're owned by some Chinese folks, not because they sell anything Chinese. In fact, they carry little at all. They have the important things though, and for these I walked in with Alex, Nick and David that afternoon; we grabbed a couple of cold beers apiece and a snack of roasted peanuts, enjoying the label with the Mr. Peanut knockoff and a banner reading, "Made With Pure Salt!" We had little to do on that hot day in the little town; we paid at the counter and, walking out, I asked, "Well, shall we go loiter down by the wharf?". It was getting to late afternoon. We sat on a bench under the shade of an ironwood tree and watched some local kids at play. A pig wandered up and started rolling in a puddle of mud before being chased off by a dog. We drank our beers and chatted. This was the Ha'Apai experience. It could have been considered boring except that we knew better than to take for granted our remaining time with that pace of life, that quietude, that climate; and we were content with our indolence.

A few more beers, some ice cream and some unaccounted time consumed, we four walked down the road to the restaurant. It is called Mariner's Cafe after the voyager William Mariner, for whom many things here, including the odious Patch by which I had sailed, are named. There is another food joint in Pangai that is open for lunch and serves for the equivalent of about three dollars the best fried chicken, I dare say, in the South Pacific; it is not really a restaurant, but a blue house with a menu hanging next to the door. It has no name, but we quickly became regulars and, needing to refer to it over the course of the three or four days we were in Pangai, we came to call it Blue House. It was, after all, the only blue house around.

Mariner's Cafe fits well into the set of establishments scattered across the cruising routes that by virtue of location, price, accommodation and lack of alternatives become places where sailors convene. We sat around a table in the covered rear patio playing chess and awaiting our hamburgers. After a few rounds and a leisurely meal we slowly got up to leave, not knowing where we were going next. It was dark by then. The only thing we could think to do, after we had stopped by the Chinese store for some beers, was to see about finding some kava.

Across the street from the Chinese store some guys that looked about our age were sitting on a stoop. We walked over to them and exchanged brief pleasantries before I asked casually, "Do you know where we can find some kava?" One of the characters, Stephen, looked up at us from his seat on the curb by the stoop.

"You want to drink kava-Tonga?"

"Yeah." For some reason they all called it "kava-Tonga." Stephen and the others talked amongst themselves in Tongan for a minute or two. Then, Stephen and two others stood up and beckoned us to follow them.

"Ok. We go drink kava-Tonga."

Later we would remark how incredibly easy that had been, but at the time we just followed Stephen down the street, chatting. It turned out he was in the Navy, though he and everyone else called it the Army, possibly because they have no boats. He didn't look much like he was in the Navy, being that he wore a sleeveless white undershirt, shorts and flip-flops. He took us back to the Naval Base by the wharf, which, in spite of the sign on the fence that said "Naval Base," was referred to by Stephen and the others as the Army Base. We walked through the gate, which was unlocked, and across the grounds to the open building where there were a few wooden cots in one room and a ping-pong table in the other room. It started to become clear that Stephen's uniform was actually very well matched to the Navy of which he was a part.

We stood out on the porch chatting with one of Stephen's friends while he and a few others folded up the ping-pong table, swept the floor of the room and unrolled a woven grass mat. They got two buckets and filled one of them with water from the cistern. Then they took a long sort of mesh bag to use as a filter and poured in the off-white powder that is the ground-up root of the kava plant. We sat down on the kava mat with the four Tongan men after they had made up a batch and brought a large bowl of it inside. We drank the kava from a halved coconut shell, which had been buried in the sand for several days so that it gained a black color and an ivory-like sheen. The taste was quite bitter, but not overpowering.

The coconut shell was passed around time and time again and the Tongans told us about the tradition of kava drinking among other banter. The kava circle is a men's affair in Tongan society, though on some nights they would get a woman to do the preparing and serving of the drink and would pay her tips at the end; on many such nights the kava circle would go on until near sunrise. It was a jovial and, at least in Pangai, a very frequent social event, though we would learn that, at least in part because kava itself provides a mildly sedative effect, the circle is often fairly quiet. If one desired another round of kava he needed only to clap once; we were instructed on this clap, which was to occur at chest level and with slightly cupped hands so as to produce a unique sort of muffled, low note.

As we drank and talked, other men trickled in. Before too long, there were fifteen or so Tongans and we were going through literally gallons and gallons of kava. Eventually, one of the men that joined the circle recognized us; earlier that day, we had been sitting in the cockpit of Saltbreaker, which was med-moored so that it was only a few feet from shore, playing instruments and singing songs. He asked if we were the ones that were singing songs and, once confirmed, told everyone around something of the matter in Tongan. David and Nick are the real musicians and Alex can hold his own in a jam, too. Soon the former were being asked repeatedly to go and retrieve their instruments and play songs for the crowd. Promises were made to alternate, with the sailors playing a song then the Tongans playing one. These promises were eventually broken, but they would have said anything to get David to agree; he, being the only decent, if shy, singer, was the most hesitant.

Finally they went and grabbed the guitar, the uke, the Brazilian uke-like thing, and the little breath-powered keyboard that Saltbreaker carries. The kava-drinkers were delighted, exclaiming that the musicians would now direct the kava drinking; after each song, we would all drink kava. So it went. After a number of melodies the Tongans began to peruse through the large songbook that was also brought in from Saltbreaker. Those that couldn't get their hands on the book shouted out requests. Mainly things like Celine Dion, Phil Collins, Kenny Rogers and other pretty bad pop-rock hits from the eighties and nineties. Given that it was a room full of grown men, we found it pretty comical how ubiquitous was their taste for slow love-songs of that era.

Eventually they began to find some songs in the book that they liked. The first one, graciously played by Saltbreaker, was Swing Low Sweet Chariot, to which all of the Tongans attempted to sing along, though none actually knew all of the words. I couldn't help cracking up when the chorus struck and suddenly there were more than a dozen voices booming "Swing low, sweet chariot... carry me home!" Not long after, the few Christmas songs in the book were discovered. The first requested was Joy to the World, which was sung with equally piecemeal though enthusiastic contributions from the group. The sailors laughed at the note above the written music, which normally describes the intended tempo and such (e.g., "Moderately" or "Softly" or "Quick") but, in this case, read, "With Spirit." The song sort of tapered off mid-way, though, as David simply couldn't bring himself to sing with the requisite spirit, and none of the Tongans could remember any more of the words.

After that little number, we sailors looked at one another, silently acknowledging the comedy of being coaxed with so much enthusiasm into singing gospel songs and the like, which would otherwise have been very unlikely to see any air time in our circle of friends. It was clear that we all felt the inward awkwardness as the next song request came in from across the room. Silent Night was it, and much excitement the prospect brought; the note on the page this time read, "Sing Reverently." I adored the juxtaposition and the beautiful irony of it all, watching these Christian Tongans become infused with energy as the songs got more religious. I suppose it was pretty key that they remained unaware that we didn't quite share the sentiment (my sarcasm was not picked up when I shouted at David, "More spirit, dammit!" but several Tongans concurred), but we certainly got a good kick from the novelty: playing Christmas songs for a circle of Tongans while drinking kava at the Naval base. What?

The gesture was truly appreciated. We're pretty sure they enjoyed some of the other songs David and the Kleeman brothers played as well. In any case, we had a great time, but by midnight were exhausted. We told them we were beat and they laughed as, to them, the night was young and the kava circle just getting started. They expressed real concern for our safety as we went to leave, as though the kava had us highly impaired. It did not. Not in the least. When I was about to leave, though, the guy next to me looked at me very seriously and asked, "Are you alright?" I replied that I was fine, but when I went to stand, he held out his hands anyway as though I might just topple over. We had ingested quite a bit of kava but the only noticeable effects were a slight numbing of the tongue and gums and a little bit of a sedate feeling. It remains unclear how much of the liquid one would have to ingest before he really would be capable of toppling over or failing to make it home.

Before we left Pangai, we saw one of our friends from the kava circle at Blue House and asked him where we could buy some of the powder; this after having already asked at the vegetable market, where they had run out of kava but had pointed us on to what would become a string of stores, each of whom said they had none but pointed us on to the next store. The guy at Blue House said, "Yeah. Remember Stephen? Go down to the Army base and ask him to buy some. It's five dollars for a bag." A bag makes twenty liters and by dollars, he meant ponga, which exchange at about 60 cents to the US dollar. We laughed again at the irony at being sent to the Naval base essentially to buy drugs.

Sure enough, Stephen, who looked pretty kava-brained at the time, would be able to help us out; he sent the young lad who hung around playing ping-pong at the base to pick us up a few bags and told us that he had been up until four in the morning drinking kava-Tonga. He had awoke at six o'clock, raised the flag on the flag pole and picked up some of the rubbish in the compound.

The little boy came back with the bags of kava for us and Stephen passed them over. We chatted a little more with our Tongan friend. It was early afternoon and clouds had rolled in over Lifuka. Stephen looked out with glassy eyes and said, "Good weather for drink kava-Tonga." We laughed and asked him what he was going to do today. "Nothing," he replied, "cook food." We laughed again at the Navy man before we set off from the base; we walked slowly, for it was just another day in Ha'Apai. The clouds brought a welcome respite from the heat, the children ran around, the old men played chess under the trees by the market, the dogs chased the pigs and we had some loitering to do down by the wharf.

**Posted via radio.