First days/last days

I never published, or only briefly published, my first blog post about Guam.

For those who don't follow the link, the post was about a weekend trip to Jeff's Pirates Cove, a southern bar/restaurant that features heavily in pirate iconography (strangely) and touristy knicknacks, at which my new reporter colleagues and a handful of off-islanders got drunk and merrily detailed Guam's many political and social foibles.

I wrote the piece, but rightly decided that chronicling the first bits of Guam's dirty laundry thrown my way for public consumption would likely not go over too well with my new employers.

Two and a half years later, and no longer in fear of being fired for lack of objectivity, or just generally talking shit about Guam -- although that was about half of our coverage on any given day -- I am revisiting the post.

What's interesting is how so many of my first impressions (or my first impressions based on the drunken cynical bluster of my colleagues) still hold relatively true.

But then, so much of that stuff I first heard came with the territory of reporting, and reporting on the stuff we report on, because that's what we report on.

My job was to see in finer and finer detail all the dysfunctional crap so broadly painted for me during my first few days on the island.

I ingested a whole bunch of it, and spewed it out. And I don't really remember much of it. And am not sure it's really worth remembering. It's all very fuzzy.

But there are other things about Guam that are much less fuzzy: walking my dogs on beaches, swimming at night, a few startling nights of bright stars, New Years' lanterns, sunset, lots of sunset, driving around the island in my beat-up car, or a beaten-up-more truck to go to different beaches. Jungle. Rain. Lots of rain.


On my last day on Guam, I wandered around Tumon Bay by myself, having nowhere to go, nothing to do, and looked at the blue water.

I felt like a tourist, and sort of was a tourist, for a day.

And all that stuff I had learned and carried around and ingested and fretted over was gone.

There was just blue.

similar thoughts about Saipan

I went to Saipan, like, a month and a half ago, but didn't bother posting any photos. I meant to, but the whole moving across the Pacific got in the way.

Most of what I saw were places off which people jumped/committed horrible suicide. There were also some mind-bogglingly tacky (even for Guam) tourist shops, and birds/beaches/jungle.

Here are some photos:

The first notable site we visited was "Banzai Cliff." Cheerily named because a bunch of Japanese families living on Saipan threw themselves (and their children) off the cliffs during World War II, when the American invasion was imminent. This was by far the most crowded of the sites we saw in our two-day Micronesian jaunt. Above: Japanese tourists take photos at sunset.

More Banzai Cliff. There were a lot of nice Buddha statues. This place also had that sort of haunted  feeling. Apparently there are white birds that roost on the cliffs, allegedly (love that word) carrying the souls of the dead.

More Buddha.

Having lived on Guam for so long, where trash is left in all sorts of inappropriate spots, I was at first  annoyed to see all the open bottles of water. And then I realized, oh wait, offerings. Sorry guys.

A view from Banzai Cliff. It should be noted that all that cliff stuff  is made of coral, sharp razor coral.

Which brings me to Suicide Cliff. Some ways up from Banzai Cliff is the aptly named Suicide Cliff. Japanese soldiers jumped off the cliff, otherwise did away with themselves at this spot as the U.S. forces pushed them farther and farther up this hill as they invaded.

Also, a very long way down.

Buddha and sunlight on Suicide Cliff.

This is just this really cool place called "the Grotto" where a bunch of rushing waves hit the rocks in this big cave, and then create a somewhat calm pool at the mouth of the cave.

Bird Island Sanctuary. All the birds died sometime after the war, when the brown tree snake at them all. Apparently they can't swim. And thus, there are still birds in this one place.

From above.

Sunset. The end.

the bomb holes

I went to Tinian to see the atomic bomb holes.

I rationalized going to the island to attend the (8th?) annual boonie pepper festival, which turned out, as I suspected, to be a large(ish) village barbecue, complete with coconut crab races and slippery pigs.

Tinian also hosts some other stuff -- big latte stones, more impressive and certainly more precise, than any I have seen on Guam.

There's a Chinese money-laundering casino, providing the best luxury a 1980s Las Vegas hotel room can offer.

But while being picked up at the airport by a limousine, stocked with the latest in VHS technology, and ferried to your entirely pink-striped room, complete with a pair Lucy-and-Desi appropriate (also pink) twin beds, has a kind of novel appeal, really, the bomb holes are why I came, and probably why most come to the island.

Once a Japanese sugar plantation, and then the center of American bombing operations in the Pacific, the island is green and mostly empty.

San Jose, the bustling urban center, is made up of a few neighborhoods of well-tended flat concrete houses, a convenience store that serves as the island's Wal-Mart, and other things I am sure I missed.

There's a nice beach, an abandoned and deteriorating pier, and some lovely walkways through coconut trees.

Outside the village, signs of domestic life quickly give way to what feels like a large field -- essentially the rest of the island.

Heading north, concrete roads constructed in straight lines become gravel roads constructed in straight lines, the north- and south-bound lanes separated by a wide grass median.

Along the way there are a few notable sites here and there, a Japanese shrine circled by roadway, some memorials to Korean workers enslaved during the war, a rocky ocean geyser.

But the real attraction is what's not there -- an expansive air field long ago carved out, now partly swallowed up by jungle and overgrowth.

Runways have been reduced to pot-holed gravel, and little vines with purple flowers encroach like tarantula legs from the corners of the greenery.

Real spiders, and proliferate wasps nests, have taken over whatever remains of bomb shelters and the buildings that housed Japanese military operations, located in what now look like concrete parking lots.

Maybe it's just that abandoned places are usually abandoned for a reason -- containing pasts better left undisturbed.

And I am, of course, biased. But clusters of large spiders in corners and hallways, and walls matted with brown wasps' mounds seem to signal a place haunted by the deeply wrong -- bellwethers marking things long askew.

Pilgrimages to World War II memorial sites -- or any war memorial sites, but particularly those from the "good war" -- can veer into the "Saving Private Ryan" territory pretty quickly.

Not that it wasn't all tragic, but mindless sap about sacrifice and all that does irk me.

There are World War II sites all over Guam, landing beaches, artillery guns and tanks rotting in the jungle, pill boxes turned into trash cans. But familiarity from tourist buses and dog walks has sapped most of the power from the sites, beyond the satisfied knowledge that Things Happened Here.

This place, however, did not ring of sacrifice or tourist buses.

I am sure Japanese tourists unload every now and then to see the markers of the weapons that ended the war.

But there were few, in fact, none others when we arrived at the site of the two glass caskets enshrining the holes that once held the atomic bombs.

Rationally, I know that we bring to places our own set of notions. We expect and we find. Not always what we expect, but we bring something to the equation that changes what we find.

This place was not like that.

I could have arrived giddy, or bemused or reverent -- I don't think it would have mattered.

Two holes, carved into the ground, with ladders climbed by real people, a plaque or two, some photos, the leftover scars of mechanical uplift -- that's all there was.

And yet, the place throbbed, sadly, deeply.

A weekend in Tinian (in photos)

Tinian from above (in a really small plane full of terrifyingly giddy tourists).

Seriously, you thought I was kidding about the whole 
Lucy and Desi thing.

Pretty beaches!

Kids spent most of the afternoon at the Boonie Pepper festival hanging outside this pen, which housed a soon-to-be unfortunately greased up piglet, and some chickens, for the festival's greased pig/chicken catching contest.

Latte stones.

Scenic blowhole thing.

Ominous wasp decoration at the former Japanese Air Operations
 Building.

the origin of the coconut

Two and a half years ago, the first event I covered at the still unnamed local newspaper I work(ed) at, was an evening of Halloween-themed storytelling, hosted at the house of a loopy old man into crystals and his entirely too young wife in sunglasses, at a beach house in Ipan.

Told on large lawn leading to a dark beach, the stories were an amalgamation of the typical campfire spook story (dead aunts appearing the back of cars, zombie maidens arising from the sand) and ancient-sounding legends I guessed were made up for the event.

(I still ended up asking one of the story tellers where the tale about the taotaomo’na stalking a pig hunter in the jungle came from, to which he incredulously replied, "I made it up.")

One of the storytellers at the event was a local historian, whom I have since bumped into several times while frantically running about the island doing reporterly things.

He once talked to me about medicinal plants at a family-sponsored public clean up that I was sent to only because someone knew someone or bought an ad, or maybe both.

He took me down to see a hotno -- one of the few remaining Spanish outside ovens on Guam.

I watched him peform a blessing as the now nearly extinct ko'ko' were reintroduced to Cocos, and met him while bopping about festivals -- a jovial uncle/aunt of the Chamorro cultural revitalization.

I don't know if I really made that much of an impression on him -- except as one of the dozens of annoying reporters who has likely called him over the years asking about cultural whatever. Or maybe I'm the only one. I don't know.

I think many of my journalistic endeavors were simply excuses to look at stuff that I find cool, and the coolest stuff I encountered on Guam usually had to do with historical or cultural or scientific or otherwise non-journalistically relevant topics.

It seemed fitting, therefore, that for my last assignment I sat across from him at a fold-out table at the Department of Parks and Recreation office -- which is now inexplicably underneath the bleachers of the island's baseball stadium -- and listened to a story.

Ostensibly I went to him to add his cultural expertise to a story I was working on about a book on Chamorro folk tales.

But, I didn't really need to talk to him about the project, which it turns out, is actually not happening/on hold, in the way that projects run by very small grassroots nonprofits find themselves.

So while I plied him for wisdom about the importance of folktalkes in Chamorro culture, and tried to get answers about how that art has been lost in the younger generations, he told me the story of  Sirena, the disobedient girl turned fish -- which on the face of it seemed to be a warning tale for children to obey their parents. 

But the tale, he explained, had more to do with the detrimental effect negative words have on children -- as a mother's curse causes eternal separation from her now mermaid daughter.

Breaking into a Chamorro chant, he told me the story of Puntan and Fu'una -- the island's gods of creation.

And he told me about the origin of the coconut, which for some reason stuck in my head.

The story goes:

A young maiden is dying (there always seems to be a young maiden in these stories, he tells me). A young maiden is dying, and her parents ask her what they can do to save her.

And she tells her parents they must go into the jungle, and find a fruit from which no one had ever drunk.

And her parents go into the jungle, and search and search, and whenever they found a fruit, someone had  already tasted it.

They returned unsuccessfully, and the girl died.

But from her grave rose a tree that no one recognized. And from the tree grew a fruit that no one recognized. And when the young maiden's father took the fruit, he shook it and heard there was liquid inside.

And when he opened the fruit, he said, 'this is the body of my daughter.'

And the fruit was the coconut, the fruit of life, from which all things spring.

And then, with much less fanfare, he told me another story, about a maiden whose life was also at peril, and whose parents went searching in the jungle.

But the parents did not search for fruit, but for a piece of the Holy Cross, which the maiden said would heal her.

There was no Holy Cross, but the parents brought her a piece of wood, and told her it was the Holy Cross. And she so much believed them, she was saved.

She was giving salvation by a higher power, but she did not give herself in the way that our first maiden had, my friend the historian said.

I don't know what these stories mean -- beyond being an example the stupid ways that Christianity ruins stuff. 

I didn't actually use any of this stuff in my story, which I wrote, a few perfunctory quotes from the historian included.

But I got to hear a story. 

And now, in turn, do you. 

closing thoughts

Being a journalist is, for better or worse, creating a file cabinet of the world.

After two and a half years of local journalism, I have cataloged quite a number of things, the details of which slide in and out of my brain, and appear at random moments like book titles I once shelved on the Judaica/cooking island of the Strand.

Although our job is ostensibly telling stories about the world, I often found myself often cataloging rather than chronicling -- which implies some kind of interpretation, or an attempt to detail a thing that should be seen.

We are the librarians that take on the task of ordering things, but not necessarily making sense of them.

the newsroom

That sounds like one of those 1980s/1990s/1930s-era movies showing the scrappy, dedicated, world-weary reporters cynically speaking truth to power, while challenging, but ultimately winning the approval of hardened grumbly editors, and barking domineering publishers -- and, of course, getting the story right, hiccups and all.

In fact, the newsroom, my newsroom, is a conglomeration of smashed together desks, with computers and papers and phones all askew, stupid tangled wires that make it impossible to do anything technologically helpful at all, broken computers, shitty lights, random exclamations.

Every time I see the newsroom I think of my co-worker The Intrepid Reporter, not to be confused with other lower-case intrepid reporters, hopping up and down at his desk, with one hand on the computer, another waving about frantically, threatening the execution of his laptop and/or cell phone, while yelling about the magistrate of an arrested sex abuser, or government worker who tested positive for drugs, or the latest press release with a comment from the governor responding to comments from legislators to hit our email inbox.

So far, so stereotypical. Really stereotypical.

The panicky sound of heels -- so unnecessary in a newsroom of 10 people -- clacking clacking, for no other reason than to grind the stress into the ground as the deadline looms and the near hysteria of unusable quotes and unreturned phone calls disburse in waves around the reporters.

Intrepid Reporter returns flushed with pad in hand, pencil in ear. Overwhelmed not incredibly intrepid reporter with four pens in messy hair (like, insane person messy) puts head in hand, types, looks at computer with incredulous stare -- am I really doing this?

Phones ring. Ohmigod, it's like we all don't have voice mail and there's no secretary. (We do, and there is, and yet someone get the phone).

At 6 p.m. the news comes on and we tensely watch our (two) competitors, wondering if they got a story we didn't get.

Dear god, did they get an interview with the superintendent who didn't answer my phone calls about the middle school gym? Did the governor's special assistant give a comment about visa waivers we didn't get? What the hell? They have a story about an investigation into the sale of bath salts? Nooo.

Make phone calls. We'll just cover the basics, and do a folo tomorrow.

It's not even that it's not like it is in the movies. It is exactly what it's like in the movies -- shrill and panicked and self-important.

All of us the fluctuating white noise fading in and out, but never in tune, scrambling for the scoop, racing to get the latest press release up on an excruciatingly slow website seemingly designed to hasten aneurysms.

Having emerged from this seething cocoon and moved to the lifestyle desk (and then further removed to the empty special sections desk), I have spent the last few weeks watching from afar (10, maybe 20 feet) the self-impalement of the news reporters.

It's like watching a group of people on a trampoline in a closet, wondering why they keep hitting a wall.

Little eggs, sizzling on a pan we shouldn't have on high anyway.

My account may be amplifying the tension of what I can only assume is a fairly low-stakes newsroom. The New York Times we are not. But that sort of reinforces my point.


What the hell are we doing?


We are pantomiming a profession that seems more and more irrelevant -- because the world has changed and the huddled masses are no longer waiting for the belated dissemination of the next press release from our information center.

And even if we were in the golden age of the printed word -- what the hell are we doing?

Somewhat tired media analysis aside, it's just not a way to live.

There are bigger things.

And more humane ways of telling stories, which, at the very least, one can do on a blog sans trampoline.