ARIANE THREW HERSELF into the task with great verve. She studied Rarotonga and the route that they would take to get there. She found from the start that Rarotonga itself interested and appealed to her more than sailing the sea to get there, and her intuition told her that it would be the same for Grandmother, but she felt a responsibility to the route, and to the man who had to pretend to be sailing it, that kept her at the charts every day. She pinned them to the walls in the kitchen, where she could mark the route each day. Together, she and Grandfather would concoct a daily prevarication. They had to make some progress, so that Grandmother wouldn’t become suspicious, but they didn’t ever want to reach Rarotonga, only to continually voyage toward it, so every day had to have its reverses: they were blown off course, they were becalmed, they made navigational errors, and Ariane recorded the meandering route with a carpenter’s pencil.
At the library, she read all the works of Robert Dean Frisbie, a Clevelander who went to the South Seas as a young man around 1920. Frisbie lived on Pukapuka and Rarotonga and wrote numerous books and articles about his adopted home, including Mr. Moonlight’s Island and The Island of Desire. She also read Miss Ulysses from Puka Puka, the book that Frisbie’s daughter Johnny wrote when she was fifteen. She read Julian Dashwood’s I Know an Island. And she read the brief entry on Rarotonga in Scented Isles, a guidebook to the South Sea Islands by the Christensen sisters, Susanna and Elizabeth, who billed themselves, at various times, as the “Peripatetic Patooties” or the “Footloose Spinsters”:
Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, lies just north of the Tropic of Capricorn, east of Fiji and Samoa, northeast of New Zealand. It’s a mountainous island, ringed by coral reef, 20 miles in circumference, 26 square miles in area. The interior is covered with dense jungle, the beaches are dazzling white, and the waters of the lagoon make for excellent swimming, but the cuisine is nothing to write home about.
[to be continued]
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🎧 723: Ariane threw . . .