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Blogs, in general, straddle the borderline between tolerable blather and hubristic self-aggrandizing myopic adventures of me. Given that I tend to wander rather far into the second realm, I am conscious of frequency. Excepting your family, people can only tolerate so much. On one end of the spectrum is noble silence. Very admirable. On the more prolific end of the spectrum is friend Mark (denver on a spit), who churns out culinary recommendations at a gluttonous pace. That said, his topic, taco trucks and pork, are two of the better things in life, so his verbosity is warranted. Somewhere in the middle is friend Joel, an irreverent stream of consciousness commentary on living in Korea that is motivated mostly by recent noteworthy events, i.e. a visit to the DMZ, realizing neighborhoods in Korea are called dongs, the Royals winning 3 in a row etc. As I am not wise enough to follow Twain’s advice, and much too lazy to keep up with Mark, I follow Joel. He posted something a week or so back, so I reckon I ought to. Even greater motivation is being provided by the paper I am supposed to be editing right now: “Intergenerational equity in Brazil:
social security and public education transfers among generations born between1923 to 2000”; not only riveting, but also incomprehensibly translated.
The major downside to carly accepting a post in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia is that we have to leave Chile. Moving often does a place wonders. Whereas the future looms in the scary darkness of the unknown, the present becomes infused with the gauzy irrationality of nostalgia. Memory fabricates a ludicrously ideal snapshot, which time polishes. Having lived in a number of places, I have memory bins stuffed full of candy coated non-realities. Easily romanticized places like india, brazil, paris, and lake tahoe, have to share space with odd bedfellows like tacoma and kansas city. Moving is also an excellent motivator. I used to tell myself the convenient lie about ‘next time‘, but if I have managed to learn anything at all while bumbling through life, it is that there rarely is a next time. Which explains how I found myself cruising at 30,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
The destination was Isla de Pasqua; Easter Island, Rapa Nui - different names for the same place. Easter Island is all of about 65 sq miles and was created when
ahu tepeu
what happens to the gods when they stop being useful to the humans who created them three volcanoes poked their heads out of the water at some distant past time. What is truly unfathomable, however, is that sometime in the last thousand years, Polynesians settled the island. This is remarkable because 1) 65 sq. miles is really really small, 2) the ocean is really really big, 3) there is nothing but water anywhere within a 1000 miles, and 4) the colonizing Polynesians got there in wooden catamarans.
After this suicidal float across the Pacific, the Polynesians, famously, got busy building a civilization, most notable for giant ‘it must have been the aliens’ totemic statues. By digging around in the dirt an doing carbon dating and other sciency stuff, it is believed that the ancient Heaven’s Gate expedition leader Hotu Matu'a landed on a verdant tropical island covered with some 16 million of the largest species of palm trees in the world. It was also home to bird colonies that had evolved without the knowledge that a human with a big stick is something to be worried about. So, life was good and food plentiful and they were fruitful and multiplied. Then they got religion. Having not heard the good news, the locals went for the
rano raraku
still in the quarry: everyone quit, went home and never came back ever popular ‘cult of the ancestors’. The Rapa Nuians decided the ancestors would be best served by making giant heads, moai, and lining them up as a backdrop to their villages. Today, some 887 moai, ranging between two and twenty-one meters, litter the tiny island. Clearly, production was taken seriously and size mattered.
Alas, people have always been rapacious idiots, and that is as true for mythic noble savages as it is for drill, baby, drill, simpletons. On Rapa Nui, they eventually chopped down all the trees. No trees meant no canoes and no more open sea fishing. The birds had been mostly clubbed out of existence. Moreover, there was nothing anchoring what was left of the exhausted soil, so it blew away. The population that had swelled with food excess suddenly couldn’t feed itself and couldn’t leave. Things didn’t go so well from there. Moai production ground to a halt and, whether from disgruntled descendants unimpressed with the ancestors or just vindictive hungry neighbors, the moai in the villages fell from grace and came tumbling down. There they stayed awaiting tourism’s future redemption.
It could have been the realization that birds were doing a much better job
orongo
the cult of the bird man petroglyphs, and the island where they pilfered bird eggs to decide who got to live in a cave alone for a year of providing sustenance, but at some time in that chronology, the cult of the birdman usurped the ancestors. The birdman religion had its own particular version of crazy. This involved swimming through shark infested waters to a nearby islet to steal the first egg of a nesting migratory bird population and then swimming back. Then the lucky winner got shaved, painted, and sequestered in a cave to live in total isolation and grow his finger nails for a year in sacred suckiness. Whether environmental and societal collapse led to intertribal warfare and widespread cannibalism is still debated. However, if they didn’t kill each other, the arrival of the west eventually did the job. By the time Chile annexed the island in the late 1800s, slavers, smallpox and tuberculous had reduced the population to less than a couple hundred.
So with Ethiopia on the horizon, we answered tourism’s clarion call and went to be impressed with the detritus of a lost civilization. Along with the history lesson, we got great weather and about 400 pictures of moai. Upon reflection, there are a few obvious morals of Rapa Nui that no one probably wants to hear. First of all, the old
yarn about the arrival of ‘civilization’ being really really bad for your health if you are a stone age society. Also, it seems fairly obvious that trashing your environment has some pretty serious consequences, and any religion, whether it be ancestor worship or capitalism, raping the environment should probably be reevaluated. Not to point out the obvious, but Rapa Nui is an island surrounded by a whole lot of water. There was life beyond the big water, but for all intents and purposes, they were alone in their own universe. When they f@#ked up the environment, they died. Clearly, there is a difference of scale, but Rapa Nui is a pretty good metaphor for our little island in the universe.
Though I love sanctimonious hectoring as much as the Sunday faithful, I am not so naive to have forgotten the economist John Kenneth Galbraith: “Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.“
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Mike Snell
non-member comment
happy trips
Another great read... you can use a bunch of words for good purpose. Thank you. Mike Snell