Between The Lines

Island Life
By Larry Burke, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

A half-century ago U.S. Navy Commodore Ben Wyatt strode onto the crushed coral of Bikini, a tiny atoll in the isolated Marshall Islands of the Pacific, and asked King Juda Kessibuki whether his people would be "willing to sacrifice their island"--temporarily--"for the good of mankind." Temporarily, in this case, proved to be a long time. From that day forward, the American presence would be keenly felt throughout the Marshall Islands, most dramatically in the form of 66 nuclear bombs that the U.S. military would detonate throughout the archipelago between 1946 and 1958. But the Marshalls have been saddled with more than just the legacy of contamination. Fed on a steady diet of American junk food and American guilt money, the Marshallese have seen much of their identity crushed under the suffocating weight of the United States. Now the local government, casting about for any economic tool to wrench the Marshalls free, has taken an unlikely tack, trying to jump-start a tourism industry. True, this stretch of Micronesia does have some major assets, including pristine beaches, fine saltwater fishing, and some of the best wreck diving on earth. But attempting to transform a nuclear proving ground into a recreational paradise would seem to remain an impossibly daunting task.

It was against this backdrop of image-bending that Tad Friend took a two-week island hop across the Marshalls, from the shantytowns of Majuro to the eerie wrecks in Bikini's lagoon. The result, "Lost at Sea," offers a sobering look at how a tiny republic struggles to clean up the mess left by the American empire and reclaim a sense of itself. "The Marshalls are an absurd and extraordinary place," says Friend. "It's odd to travel 7,500 miles on four different airplanes only to find yourself eating Spam and watching endless broadcasts of Star Wars. One wonders what the place would be like had we never washed up on their shores."

From the Marshalls, we take you to a slightly less remote American shore--Hawaii--where a man named Darryl Haley has been doing some intriguing image-bending of his own. Haley is a six-foot-five, 300-pound former NFL lineman and, it's worth mentioning, an African-American, who has for the last two years created a deafening buzz at the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon, that bastion of whippet-thin white athletes. The darling of sponsors, fans, and fellow competitors alike, Haley is far from being a contender in the triathlon world, but as executive editor John Tayman found out at the 1996 Ironman in December, that's beside the point. "Darryl is something of a cross between a rock star and a glad-handing politician, and he has a great time puncturing the sport's racial and physical stereotypes," notes Tayman. "He keenly understands the larger game he's playing, and it isn't triathlon."

Elsewhere in this issue: Mark Levine offers a quirky, revealing, and slightly unnerving essay on a certain six-legged creature he calls "the dark partner of domestic bliss"--aka the termite. From the remotest woodlands of Montana to the cellulose-rich suburbs of "Colonial Linda Vista," Levine searches high and low for the shocking truth about this ubiquitous pest of pests.

If you find your bliss on two wheels, point your browser toward our annual bike section, packed with all the equipment reviews and riding techniques you'll need to be a thoroughly up to speed velo-American--whether your venue is dirt or asphalt. In our Field Notes column Richard Todd takes us to England's last holdout of feudalism, a strange little island called Sark, whose medieval charms have recently been spoiled by bothersome interlopers: an oddball pair of billionaire twin brothers.

A final note: For those of you who can't get enough of our own wanderer-at-large Tim Cahill, we're pleased to announce the arrival this month of his sixth book, Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered (Villard), a spirited collection of outback yarns and far-flung tales most of which originally appeared in our pages. Whether he's in Honduras or Mongolia or at the North Pole, Cahill's classic journeys will tempt you to reach for your passport, a bottle of malaria pills, and a round-trip ticket for the antipodes.