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[ Newest entries | 1998 >> ]
These are my very first entries, from before I figured out fonts and tables. I left them the way they were. The first few I wrote in a spiral notebook at the Navy Lodge and typed in once we had the computer hooked up in August. The typhoon ones I wrote by flashlight and typed in after the power came back. Newest is on top, so if you want to start at the beginning, scroll all the way down. -- Helen
Merry Christmas from a house with no electricity.
Santa found us. Taylor was very worried that he wouldn't, because there are no lights anywhere on the island to steer by, and Andy told her Santa's sleigh has radar now, like a ship. She accepted that. Max got a dump truck and spent the whole morning filling it with the little branches that are still all over the yard and dumping them on the porch, which I swept off yesterday. That's fine. That's what a dump truck is for.
We made coffee on Kerri's camp stove and ate cinnamon rolls out of a can that I cooked in a covered pan on the grill, which I would not have believed worked if I hadn't done it. Fred and Cynthia had us down for dinner. Their generator ran the rice cooker and one string of Christmas lights over the door, and every kid on the street came to stand and look at those lights like it was Rockefeller Center.
Mom, I talked to you for six minutes on the phone at the Estrellas' and I cried the whole six minutes and I'm sorry. It was not because I'm sad. I don't know what it was. It was Christmas Eve where you are and Christmas morning here and it just felt like a long way to stretch.
Here is something. I have been numbering these entries by days since we landed. I think I was counting the way you count a sentence. Tonight I sat on the steps in the dark with Kerri, and the stars were unbelievable with no lights anywhere, and the geckos were chirping, and I thought: I'm going to stop counting. Not because I love it here. I'm not there yet. But we came through something with these people, and you don't count days on people like that.
So that's the last number. Merry Christmas, everybody.
Still no power. Still no water out of the tap most of the day, because the pumps need power too. We fill jugs at the water truck and keep the bathtub full for flushing. I take a shower with a pitcher. It is ninety degrees in the house by noon so a cold shower is not exactly a hardship.
The sound of the island right now is generators. Everybody who has one runs it, and the ones who don't (us) stand near the ones who do. Fred runs a cord across the yard to us for two hours every evening so our refrigerator can catch up, which is the most neighborly thing anyone has ever done for me. Kerri and I take turns standing in the ice line. You stand in line an hour for two bags and then drive home fast.
The strangest thing is the trees. The typhoon took every leaf off them. The whole island is brown, like Ohio in November, and it's December and eighty-eight degrees. Fred says give it a couple of weeks.
Andy and Fred went up to Auntie Nieves's in the village yesterday. She lost part of her tin roof and her mango tree, and the kitchen got soaked. They spent all day up there with a bunch of cousins and came back sunburned and happy. Andy said nobody waited for anybody to come help. Everybody just showed up with a hammer.
The Estrellas' phone came back on yesterday afternoon, so I finally got to call. Ours is still dead. Mom, I'm sorry about the four days. I know you saw it on the news.
Our Christmas tree made it. It stood in the living room through the whole thing and didn't drop a single ornament. Taylor says it's a brave tree.
(Written in pencil, by flashlight.)
It came yesterday. We're all OK. I want to put that first.
Andy and Kerri's husband both had to stay at the command for it, so it was me and Kerri and her two boys and my two, all in my hallway with the mattresses, because the hallway has no windows. The kids thought it was a campout for about an hour. Then the noise started.
I don't know how to describe the noise. People say a freight train. It was like a freight train that doesn't go by. It just stays there, hour after hour, and every so often something big hits the house and you feel it in the floor. Water came in under both doors and right through the louvers on the windows, sideways, and Kerri and I mopped with every towel we own and wrung them into the bathtub. Max slept through most of it. Max would sleep through the end of the world. Taylor held my hand so hard she left marks, and sang every song from The Little Mermaid twice, and I've never been prouder of anybody.
Sometime in the night it got quieter and then it was just rain.
This morning we opened the door and the street was gone under branches and roofing tin and somebody's trampoline. Every tree is bare. Power lines down on every block. Two cars on our street have their back windows blown out. But every house on our row is standing, and every person in them, and when Andy came walking up the street at noon in his work clothes I ran out in my bare feet through all that junk and didn't care.
Fred stood in his carport looking at it all and said, "Well. That was a typhoon." He grew up here. He said it the way my dad says "that was a snow."
There's a typhoon coming. Its name is Paka. We've been watching it on the news for days, way out east of us, and now it's coming here.
I am trying to be calm about this because everyone here is calm about it. Cynthia says her family has been through more typhoons than she can count, and the houses on Guam are made of concrete for exactly this reason. Andy says the base does this all the time. It goes by conditions, like a countdown, and every time it goes up a step there's more to do. Today we did ours: filled every pot and the bathtub with water, put the patio chairs inside, bought batteries, canned tuna, peanut butter, crackers, diapers, and the last two flashlights at the Exchange. Kerri got a radio. We are going to ride it out together at my house because mine has the hallway.
The Christmas tree is up already. I keep looking at it and wondering if I should take it down. Taylor says absolutely not.
Mom, don't watch the news too much. We'll call when we can. It could be a couple of days.
Happy Thanksgiving! We already had ours. It is nine at night here, which means it is six in the morning in Ohio, and Mom is just now getting up to put her turkey in. So the McDonalds of Guam have officially eaten Thanksgiving dinner before anybody else in the family. I would like that noted.
Andy's ship came in Monday, right on time, so he was home for it. We had dinner at Kerri's: turkey from the commissary, my stuffing, her sweet potatoes with the marshmallows, which I think are a crime but the kids love, and the Estrellas brought a huge pan of red rice and a plate of chicken kelaguen, because Cynthia says Thanksgiving on Guam has red rice or it doesn't count. She's right. I had two helpings of the rice and one of the stuffing, and I'm from Ohio.
Thankful list, short version: Andy home. Taylor and Max healthy. Kerri. The Estrellas. Air conditioning. Mom, for the box with the leaves in it.
Andy's been underway nine days, and has almost three weeks to go. I'm fine. I keep saying that.
Halloween: Taylor was a ladybug and Max was a pumpkin, in eighty-six degrees, and the pumpkin lasted four houses before he made me take it off and went the rest of the way in his diaper and a T-shirt. Every house in housing gives out candy, so they came home with more than they can eat by Easter. It melted in the bag on the way.
Mom sent a box. Inside, along with the Halloween candy that also melted, she put three red maple leaves ironed between wax paper, like we used to do in grade school. I put them on the refrigerator and then I sat on the kitchen floor and cried for ten minutes. It's fall at home. Here it's just hot, and then it rains, and then it's hot.
Kerri came over with her boys and we let the kids watch a video and we ate the melted candy with spoons. She says the first six months are the worst at every duty station, and I'm at four. She's been doing this nine years.
We went to our first fiesta!
Cynthia's mother lives up in her village, and every year the village has a fiesta for its patron saint. First there's Mass, and then a procession through the street with the statue, and then everybody goes home and feeds every person they've ever met. Cynthia told me, "Come hungry and bring a cooler." I thought she was kidding about the cooler.
Auntie Nieves (everybody calls her Auntie, so now I do too) had two long tables under a tent in her yard, and I have never seen so much food in my life. Red rice, which is colored orange-red with achote seeds soaked in water. Chicken kelaguen, chopped up with lemon and grated coconut and little hot peppers. Barbecue ribs and chicken that one of the uncles had been cooking since six in the morning. Something called finadene, which is a sauce of soy sauce and lemon and onion and hot pepper that goes on everything. A soft flat bread called titiyas. A cake with custard and cinnamon on top that I could eat a whole pan of. And lumpia, and pancit, and a big ham, and potato salad, and Spam, because Guam loves Spam.
Max sat on Auntie's lap and ate red rice by the fistful and she let him. Taylor ran around with about thirty kids she didn't know and came back with a sunburn and two new best friends. Andy played cards with the uncles and lost two dollars. And yes, when we left, Cynthia filled our cooler with plates for later. We are eating fiesta food until Wednesday.
Everyone said "Hafa adai" to me like they meant it. I felt like a person here today, not a visitor. First time.
I saw my first brown tree snake.
Let me back up. The power went out last night at about nine, for the third time this week. On the mainland when the power goes out it's a storm. Here it's usually a snake. They climb the power poles and get across the lines and short them out. They came here on cargo ships after the war, nobody knows exactly when, and with nothing to eat them they took over, and they ate nearly all the forest birds on the island. That's why it's so quiet here in the mornings. I noticed that the first week and couldn't figure out what was wrong. No birds. In Ohio you can't sleep past six in the summer for the robins.
Anyway. Power out, I go outside with the flashlight to see if the whole street is dark, and there on the chain-link fence by the carport is a long thin brown snake, about as long as I am tall, just hanging there looking at me. I screamed. I'm not ashamed. Kerri came out, Fred came out, and Fred took care of it with a shovel while Kerri held the flashlight and I stood on the steps. Fred says they're mostly harmless to grown-ups but you watch the little ones, and you keep the screen doors shut. I am checking under the beds with a flashlight every night now. Andy thinks this is funny. Andy can check under the beds himself next time.
We have a house! And our furniture! And a computer that's on the Internet! And now a home page, which is what you're reading, and which took me four nights and a library book to make, so be nice.
The house is base housing, a concrete duplex with a carport and a little yard. Everything on Guam is concrete because of the typhoons. It looks like a bunker painted beige, but it has air conditioning and three bedrooms and a washer, and after five weeks at the Navy Lodge it looks like a palace. We lived with the Navy's loaner furniture for ten days until our household goods came, and when the truck pulled up with our own couch on it I almost kissed the movers.
Neighbors: Next door is Kerri, from outside San Antonio. She knocked on our door the day we moved in holding a plate of brownies in one hand and a can of bug spray in the other, and said, "You're going to need both." She has two boys, five and three, so Taylor is in heaven. Her husband is a first class. She's been a Navy wife nine years and knows everything.
Two doors down are the Estrellas. Fred is Andy's chief at work, and he's from here, from Guam. He joined the Navy at eighteen, went all over the world, and now he's home on orders, which he says is the best thing the Navy ever did for him. His wife Cynthia is from here too. They have three teenagers and about four hundred relatives. Cynthia has already invited us to her mother's village fiesta in October.
So that's two friends in two weeks. Mom, you can stop worrying a little bit.
Early Wednesday morning, in the dark and the rain, a Korean Air jet coming in to land went down in the hills short of the airport. More than two hundred people died. A lot of people from the bases went up to help. Some of the men Andy works with were up there. They don't talk about it, and nobody asks them to.
The whole island has been quiet since. I don't know anybody who was on that plane, and I've been here a month, and I still felt it. At the commissary yesterday nobody was talking in line. The chaplain held a service and the chapel was full.
I don't have anything else to write tonight. I went in and watched the kids sleep for a long time.
Things I have learned about Guam in ten days:
1. It is hot. I knew it would be hot. I did not know it would be hot at six in the morning, hot at midnight, and hot in the rain. You walk outside and your glasses fog up.
2. It rains almost every afternoon. Hard, for twenty minutes, and then the sun comes out and the street steams. This is the rainy season. There's a dry season starting around January, which everybody here talks about the way we talk about spring.
3. Everything mildews. My good sandals already have a fuzzy green coat. Kerri (I'll tell you about Kerri when we get our house) says you keep your closet doors open and leave a light on in there.
4. There are little lizards called geckos on every wall, and at night they chirp. Taylor named one Mister Lizard. There are also big toads that sit in the road after dark, and frankly I'd rather not talk about the toads.
5. Milk is expensive. So is everything that isn't at the commissary.
6. People say "Hafa adai." It means hello, more or less, and everyone from the man at the gas station to the lady at the Lodge desk says it with a big smile.
Andy started at his new command Monday. He's tired, and he likes it, and he likes his chief, who is from here. We're on the list for base housing and should have a house in August. Until then it's the Navy Lodge, one room and a kitchenette, and the four of us are getting to know each other very well.
I miss home. I miss Mom. I missed the Fourth of July at the fairgrounds and the corn coming in. I'm trying not to say that every time I write.
Hafa adai from Guam! I learned that at the airport. It means hello.
We made it. We left Dayton Tuesday morning and landed here Thursday night, with a four-year-old and a fifteen-month-old, on three airplanes. Most of Wednesday happened over the ocean and some of it doesn't seem to have happened at all. Max screamed from Los Angeles to Honolulu. Taylor was perfect until the last hour and then threw up on Andy. Andy's sponsor from his new command met us at the airport with a cooler of cold drinks and drove us to the Navy Lodge, and I could have married him, except I'm already married to the man covered in throw-up.
When they opened the airplane door it was like opening the dishwasher in the middle of a cycle. That's the only way I know how to describe it.
Nobody has slept right since. Max is up at three in the morning ready to play. Taylor asks every day when we're going home, and I tell her this is home now, for two years or so, and she says "No, I mean our real house." Me too, baby.
Andy says it's beautiful here and it is. The water is a color I didn't know water could be. I'll try to see it better when I've slept.
Mom, when you read this, it's yesterday for you. Ohio is fourteen hours behind us. I'll explain that some other time when I understand it.
[ Newest entries | 1998 >> ]