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A moment in time: Palikir Pass, February 2000
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For me, Pohnpei represents a moment in time as much as a place on a map. Devastated over the breakup with my ex-fiancée, I arrived in the throes of emotional and psychological upheaval, which I hoped the three-pronged novelty of fresh routine, exotic environment, and geographic isolation might resolve. Instead of resolution, I found a disorientation that both primed the senses and left me vulnerable to oscillations of spirit. A successful lesson plan might prod my sense of purpose, while the crooning of a bar jukebox might induce a tear-jerking nostalgia. Natural splendor might produce a moment of rapture, easily shattered by the pestilential portrait of a cockroach posed on my cookware. To reprise the sentiment evoked by Matthew Arnold in his classic poem "Dover Beach," I found myself in a "land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new," yet often felt isolated upon "the vast edges drear/and naked shingles of the world."
The dichotomy reached its physical extreme during a twelve-hour span in February, 2000. By day, amped on the adrenaline that comes from riding perfect reef-pass surf, I felt blissfully alive. That night, gasping for breath, I awoke to what the medical clinic later diagnosed as a bout of acute asthma--an immune response, the doctor surmised, to a relentless assault of plant pollens and mildew. (Asthma remained a problem until my return to California.) Unable to find the steady-state contentment necessary to dull the edge of Expatica, I remained vulnerable to tragedies that others took in stride. In May 2000, when a cholera outbreak made a U.N. medical team consider a quarantine of the island, I returned to California, where a series of job interview invitations had coincidentally materialized.
People often find in pictures of perfect surf and lush valleys a summons to paradise. The summons projects from internal desire as much as external reality. Images conveniently extract moment from context. For me, moment and context remain inextricably linked. The perfect wave provides a prelude to asthma, and the sunlit valley a momentary respite from rain.
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The view from my front yard: A (momentarily) sunny sky, August 1999. Photo: S. Jacques Stratton
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