Debbie Downer Tells You an Allegedly Funny Food Story that Takes Place on Easter Island

A recent development in my life may prevent me from returning to school next year. In fact, it may prevent me from returning to school until 2013. At least.

I can't let this happen. For fuck's sake. I'm Juniper Shoemaker. I may presently be an unmitigated loser, but I am still smarter than a lot of motherfuckers. I always have been, and I always will be. Moreover, I am perfectly free. I have no husband or children to factor into the equation, and I pretty much can do whatever the hell I manage to make happen. So I cannot let this happen to me. I cannot let myself become one of those people who only have dreams.

This morning, I woke and immediately wrote a frivolous story that I originally intended for an old post of Candid Engineer's. Don't ask me why. I just did it. I'm too gloomy to give you a clever reason. It got too long to inflict on her blog, though, so I am posting it here.

I will lose half my readership with this frivolous post. It matters to me, too, because I take blogging with unabashed seriousness. You may all be running labs and going to class and taking over the whole fucking world, but this is my only portal into an arena of scientists. No one in my real life begins to understand what the fuck it is that I want to do. Not lately. So I despise the prospect of degrading my foundering science blog.

I also think it's mercilessly bourgeoisie to tell "field stories". I can picture my sister rolling her eyes now.

Here goes:
Read more. . .

I did archaeological field work on Easter Island for six weeks in the summer of 2006. My professor intermittently ran a field school with one of his colleagues there, and students helped collect data for their research.

I had once before studied abroad in a location with far fewer amenities than my pampered American ass had at home. So I paid close attention to the advice of field school veterans. They unanimously warned me about food. "Bring food," they insisted. "Bring ground coffee and a French press, too. Or you'll be sorry."

Now, I have inherited my fastidious father's unsophisticated palate, which means there are only some six or seven foodstuffs in the world that I will heartily eat. My hotel charges allegedly covered three meals a day. Nevertheless, I filled my suitcase with ten pounds of trail mix, peanut butter, crackers, and 70% dark chocolate bars from Trader Joe's.

I forwent the French press only because I couldn't afford it. I had to buy Gortex hiking boots that withstood punishing lava rocks, you know. Anyway, I needed clothing. I gazed thoughtfully inside and figured, meh. I'll be as grown-up as I can, and, meanwhile, I won't starve.

So. I packed, and I arrived with my group on Easter Island. It was not long before I was presented with a "field sandwich", to pack for lunch. The field sandwich consisted of a carefully halved biscuit, generously buttered on each side and fitted with a perfectly round hot pink disc of Mystery Meat.

This last fascinated me and a friend more than the impossibility of keeping biscuits from molding before consumption on the most isolated (if most gorgeous) rainy rock on the planet. Meat of any kind is especially precious on Easter Island.
The island isn't self-sustaining, and it currently exists as a (marginalized) territory of decidedly non-Polynesian Chile.

(The entire community still invited every single one of us to an annual holiday feast, where a lot of beef and pork and chicken was grilled. By the way.)

Eventually, we investigated. On Rapa Nui's main street, we found our answer in a grocery store: a sausage-shaped package in a glass deli case, cartoonishly hot pink as ever inside the wrapper, identified by little more than the brand name, "Mortedello". Or something close to that.

"'Morte'?" I cracked. "Like, 'death'?"

It was a bad joke, as well as demonstrative of why I'm a twenty-nine-year-old without a career. Yet we burst into hysterical laughter. I had never tried to eat Death Meat anyhow. I usually traded my sandwiches to the boys for hard-boiled eggs they didn't want, so as not to waste them. Now, though, as we chortled, I knew my fate was sealed. I was going to work a ten-hour field day fueled by scarce more than instant coffee and bread rolls ingested at dawn, until we got back on the plane.

Did I mind? Honestly? Not overly much. I barely ate while I was in Ghana, and that was a much longer trip. Sure, I missed my chicken burritos. But I wasn't going to whine about it, like some titty-baby undergrads not blessed with my handy masochism and also afflicted by strange sexual compulsions that they didn't mind our professors rooming down the hall in our tiny hotel on an island that is deathly quiet at night knowing about. On all occasions but for that one day of crazy anomalous menstrual cramping, I loved Easter Island. Field work made up for the food. Being allowed by my favorite professor to participate in a lot of the very coolest fieldwork pretty much "made up" for everything.

Besides. Though dinner was frequently as bizarre as cilantro "soup" and excellent homemade pasta artistically drizzled with grape-flavored gel instead of sauce, I could stomach most of it. Twice, too, dinner was fresh ahi steaks, grilled and served with salad, and beyond delicious. Easter Island's shores are crystal clean, and an abundance of tuna regularly encircles the isle.

(You're going to ask why the hotel didn't just keep serving us tuna, right? Instead of numerous dishes of, say, "shepherd's pie", which is far more expensive to prepare on Rapa Nui, and which was always an unappetizing oily square unappetizingly drooled over with precious ketchup. Don't. To this day, no one has the answer to that question.)

Besides, anyone who didn't like the hotel food could buy French fries, gelato, decent chicken quesadillas and imported hard liquor on Main Street, any day of the week.

Besides, even though I purposefully teetotaled the whole time, and even though I paid my own way to Easter Island and therefore did not have the cash to spend thirty dollars on exorbitantly-expensive-'cause-exorbitantly-expensive-to-ship-over-thousands-of-miles-of-open-sea food each day, I had a mondoginormous plastic jar of Peanut Butter. A Staple Foodstuff Acceptable to Juniper.

BESIDES, I spent most of my time in Ghana sick with malaria as well as with my own egregious immaturity. I wasn't sick now. I had the appetite to gnaw through my suitcase full of food and keep my strength up for a paltry six weeks.

In general, too, the boys fared worse than the girls. They were much bigger, and they were used to larger portions-- even the ones who ate everything they were given and then bought some more. Eventually, they didn't want to trade their hard-boiled eggs anymore, but most of them accepted my sandwiches anyway. Thus I avoided the guilt of throwing them out. Or barfing.

Sure, it got a little hard after I burned through everything but the dark chocolate and peanut butter, only to relinquish this last to a devoted vegan grad student who was about to starve to death if someone didn't do something. However, lots of guavas grew on the island. As long as you watched out for the guava-loving wild stallions, which roamed the island at will, and which tended to bite and kick, and as long as you didn't trespass into private parts of the island where residents ran off nosy tourists with sawed-off rifles, you could pick and eat them. They're woolly inside, and they're a lot of work. The jewel-pink pulp within is very good, though.

Really, the genuine difficulty began one morning, with a sniffle at my breakfast table. It was our last week on the beautiful island.

"Oh, Juniper. You're getting it too."

"The stupid cold everyone's been getting one by one for a month? It's just a fucking cold."

"I've had it already. It's worse than you know. Here, have some of my Airborne. I really hope you feel better soon."

I couldn't find any leftover dinner rolls, and the marmalade crepes were really only for the professors and TAs. I stole back to my room to quickly eat a bar of dark chocolate. My face felt hot as I ate. Not in that way it does when a tall gorgeous blond thirty-something man whom I bump into on Second Street with inevitable klutziness stares approvingly at me for a loooooooong moment, either. In a bad way. My stomach churned, too, and my head ached. Dark Chocolate magically transmuted into a thick bittersweet bar of wax that just seemed like part of the curse. To this day, I have not recovered my erstwhile love of dark chocolate. It's milk chocolate or bust. Motherfuckers!

The final two days of our stay, our hotel manager moved students out of choicer rooms to make room for unexpected guests. I and two other girls moved to cots in the drafty equipment storage room. The healthy Juniper would have found this hilarious. The miserably sick Juniper just got miserably sicker. And hungrier.

As I helped my professor pack equipment, clear snot poured down my face, and my voice dried to a whisper. I couldn't help my heaving cough. It was terribly embarrassing. "Stupid fucking cold," my professor said sympathetically. In a disturbingly hoarse voice.

We stopped over in Tahiti, for three days. I've traveled a lot, because I'm a military brat. But Tahiti remains the only place that made me wish I were married, just for the sake of this verdant, aquamarine, white-sanded, coconutted honeymooners' absolute fantasy. (And I view marriage-- no, I view serious long-term romantic relationships-- as a dismal trap.) Nevertheless, my "cold" grew steadily worse. I did not eat much after my first lunch there, which consisted of a banana split sundae and a plate of French fries, and which cost twenty-four US dollars. And I didn't shower at my hostel, because I feared the mysterious hand-lettered signs everywhere that read: "CAUTION: SALMONELLA WATER".

However, I cleaned up a bit by swimming in the warm water with a lot of friendly and astonishingly colorful fishes flitting among the corals. I ate part of a fallen coconut, while many of the others enjoyed the beach and filled theirs with Bacardi. (I ate fallen coconuts on EI, too. It's not supposed to be warm enough that far south of the equator for the non-indigenous trees to bear fruit at any time, much less winter, but "climate change" has induced the production of coconut crops for several years now.) I bought some gifts, including a black pearl for my mom. I warmed to the Old World style that the French maintain in much of Papeete; it reminded me of my childhood. For a sick, hungry, unmedicated, neurotic, clinically depressed person, I was holding my own just super. It's hard to sulk on vacation in Tahiti.

I kept my chin up and looked forward to the plane home. I could brush my teeth and wash my face with bottled water, drink all the orange juice I wanted, and sleep undisturbed. I cheerfully fantasized about orange juice and sleep as I stood in a long line with my friends at Papeete International.

"What's this?"

A flyer from the US Department of Homeland Security. No travelers carrying more than 3 oz. of any given fluid would be permitted to enter the States. No plane carrying any of these travelers would be permitted to enter US airspace. Effective immediately. Peace out.

Dutifully, airport employees divested us of bottled water, bottled juices, face wash, Pepto-Bismol, and Argentine wines. Then they conferred among themselves. They returned after two hours. They began a slow, grueling process, in which passengers also lost prescription meds in tablet or gel form; Tylenol; Advil; face powder; mascara, lotion, lipstick, eye shadow, and pencil liners; food; Scotch tape; toothpaste; hand sanitizer; gum and any other item that might conceivably offend the Department of Homeland Security.

This hurt our wallets and our pride. Of course, this also delayed our plane.

By nine hours.

Overnight.

Papeete International is no LAX. When I was there, only one vendor sold food-- ham and cheese paninis and small bottles of water. Most of us had spent the last of our francs, but all of us received a complimentary snack. After they closed for the evening, we had only what we'd brought. Of course, what we'd brought was now in garbage cans that had been wheeled away. Bereft, we decided to substitute sleeping for eating.

Most of the chairs and sofas in the small, gazebo-like lounge were preoccupied. I sat on the edge of a brick planter for awhile, chattering and listening to the warm rain drip off the eaves. When my head split open, my fever increased and my voice disappeared completely, I found a space in a corner beside my professor's wife, who is now one of my favorite friends ever. She sympathetically kept me company-- leaving only to poke her ailing husband when he snored-- and rummaged around until she found a stray Tylenol in her bag. This miracle, I swallowed dry, as I could not drink the tap water, and neither could anyone else.

When I finally got on the plane, I was coughing so violently that no one wanted to have anything to do with me. And I was unbathed, uncombed and donning apparel that hadn't been washed in six weeks. But I didn't care. I just wanted to eat pancakes and drink orange juice. Airplane food never tasted so good in my life. I was willing to retool my opinion of the entire enterprise.

I have a month and a half to solve my motherfucking problem. Excuse me while I eat dinner and then hide in my room to cry with frustration and loneliness.