Looking Ahead

Denerau, Fiji - Sitting on the breakfast verandah and watching the moisy myna birds in the lawn below fighting over the scraps of out raisin bread, one sort of expects to see Ensign Nellie Forbush and the planter Emile de Becque come strolling over from the sandy ocean beach, hand in hand, to offer "bola," the universal Fijian greeting. After all this is South Pacific, and the English-speaking Melanesians of Fiji are pretty much the same people as the Prench Polynesians of the Rodgers and Hammerstein epic, and the gruff-mannered but friendly bartender who fetches Passion Fruit-flavored punches during the day and doubles as the bare chested spear-bearing warrior in the tourist girl threatening native dance and music act at night might be a distant relative of Bloody Mary’s, who sang "Bali-Hi."
I came to Fiji hoping to recapture the charm of Michener’s South Pacific that bewitched the readers of his post-WWII tales, and was not disappointed. The tour guests of Fiji are whisked away from the Nadi Airport of Viti Levu by the omni-present Rosie tour guides to the Denerau Island, a golf course drained by Japanese investors around 1975 out of a mangrove swamp in their days of power, and taken over by the Starwood’s Sheraton people, who have built five hotels around it. It totally natural now, with huge coconut palms, and charming Royal Poinciana and Golden Shower trees casting their orange and yellow coloration over the lawns.. There a re low ochre-colored two-story row buildings, and cottages hidden behind bushes of giant-leaf lobster-claw and hibiscus hedges, and the song of invisible feathered hosts fills the air as tourists stroll along. Occasionally one catches a glimpse of of what appear to be brilliant- feathered macaws; the plainer crested doves, magpies and myna birds do come out in the open.Animals visit the island, although its mongoose population (bushy tailed rodents) keeps it free of of snakes. Natives of the 3rd World country outside come here only to work.
We visited the villages on a guided tour, after having been warned of the proper etiquette - to keep our hats off in the village and to never, never touch anyone’s hair. The Fijians still remember the last missionary, rev. Thomas Baker, eaten in an outburt of long suppressed cannibalism, in 1867, after he, with the best intentions, offered a tortoise-shell comb as a gift of friendship to a native chief and explained its use by trying to comb the host’s bushy chevelure. He was promptly dispatched, sauteed and eaten by the tribe. Today’s villagers keep their hair neat, are friendly and bring out tables of carvings and beads for sale. Three rough fishermen using scrap wood to cobble together a table, having found out that we are New Yorkers,offer their condolences. Although there are few cars, they all claim to have TV and watch CNN Asia.
The villages are sort of extended families with clans: the fishermen all food for the village, the carpenters build houses and sheds, the warriors defend it, and the executive clan provides leadersship. The chief’s family rules. Membership is hereditary, marriage partners are often sought outside the village, arranged marriages nowadays are practiced only in the Indian community..
Half of Fijians stem from the Indian subcontinent. The ferocious native Melanesians, who culturally treated shipwrecked visitors, conquered neighbor islanders and any strangers found on the premises as food, were weaned away from their strange habits by European and American arrivals around 1820. The newcomers started sugar cane plantations. Americans were too free- wheeling, and the Fijian king invited the Britons to extend the protection of the Empire over the islands. Indentured laborers from India were brought in for five-year terms in 185x, and in 19xx were permitted to stay. Independence came in 197x. The Indians, three generations in the islands, have taken over the commerce and have grown to nearly half of the population. A native revolt, led by a white immigrant, John S, overthrew the elected Indian government in 1997, held the Parliament in custody for xx months, and was cured by an election that gave the presidency to a village chief (the one whose people we just visited). The tumultuous Fijians have lost their membership in the British Commonwealth twice in the past decade, and are still suspended. The leader fo the revolt, in jail for treason, has been reelected to the Parliament.
We were fortunate to visit a local grade school. It was a special event for the kids . The neatly uniformed barefoot sixth-graders cheerfully sang for us, recited the alphabet to help us count the letters in their language ( there are 23, vs 14 im Maori and a similar number in Hawaiian), and read the daily lesson in unison. We asked for the name and address of the school, and a bunch of the kids volunteered to write their names and addresses and shyly passed the slips to us. We now have acquired Christmas card correspondents in the Pacific. Any grade schoolers interested in outreach across te ocean can get the names from me. These bright bilingual kids are mostly doomed to incomplete schooling, since elementary education is not free, and the families often cannot afford the tuition beyond the read-write-arrithmetic level. Our well-spoken Rosie tour guide had to drop out a year befor his highschool graduation, to help the family.
The romantic Pacific islands and their laid-back natives are doomed to be tourist paradises for the duration. The copra (coconut) and sugar can industries cannot compete in the world market. High technology industries are just not in the cards for these charming unworldly people, who claim to be unable to compete in commerce, because the social and family structure obligated them to take care of the families and not ask for repayment of debts. The cost of living is high, since most goods are imported (they buy chicken by the container from the US). The hospitality industry is welcomed to build these hotel enclaves like Denerau, and the islands provide native dancers and singers to perform entnically correct entertainment. The islands protect themselves by not permitting land purchases and by selling only long-term leases to the outside investors (this is the way Mexico protected its ocean frontages; alas, no longer).Thus, the terrorist induced war and a severe drop in tourism is deadly for the islands, and our efforts are welcomed, even though a quarter of the Asian population is Moslem. .

Traveling around the world in wartime
This family has just returned from a trip that exceeded the circumference of the Earth (24,000 miles) by some 4,000 miles and involved 12 flights, taking us through Australia, New Zealand and Melanesia. To answer the most frequently asked question first, about security, it was confidence-inspiring. The suggestions made by the President and Mayor Giuliani that Americans need not be afraid of travel and should resume normal activities make a great deal of sense. To begin with, no terrorist will get away again with waving a smuggled knife or even gun, or a pretend bomb, and asking the passengers not to do anything stupid, that the hijacking is a political statement and that the airplane is being returned to the airport. That worked with the early flights on 9/11. The "do not resist" policy advocated by airlines used to early hijacks with planes taken to Cuba no longer applies. Note that the heroic passengers on Flight xxx, hearing of the WTC destruction, rallied and forced the attackers to crash in the fields of Pennsylvania. Terrorists are not likely to try this venue, heir advantage is gone. And now we have some air marshalls, and pilots will not open the cockpit doors, no matter what the threat.
But this is logic, and I should talk facts, about the hardening of access to flights, in the US and abroad. Nowadays getting on board a plane is difficult and time-consuming, but we were thankful for the security, although it made our lives painful. Sometimes we felt profiled for extra searches, but that is all for the good. There were Smiths and Browns in the pat-down group, not just people with strange names and Mideastern appearances.
To begin with, the routine searches were thorough. Checked luggage was x-rayed and carry-on bags were searched by hand after passing through the machines. The US, Australian and Fiji governments now own several dangerous items that we once called ours. The JFK Airport searchers found our inch-long curved nail scissors in the hand luggage and took them away. Our fault, should have reviewed the contents of the toiletries case before packing. The extra search to which we were summoned just before boarding involved being patted down with electronic wands, arms and legs spread, and another hand-search of the luggage. That effort unearthed a pair of knitting needles, in the bottom of the bag, obscured by the seam. They are a no-no, whether metal, plastic, wood or flexible, and would have been confiscated by the flight attendants anyway. No chance to while away the long ocean flight hours with the creation of a sweater. A nail clipper was found acceptable, since it has no points to speak of.
We thought ourselves secure, until our arrival in Sydney and transfer to a domestic flight. There the Qantas body searchers, under a stricter application of the same rules, confiscated not only the nail clipper found harmless by JFK people but also found another, with a fold-out nail file, clearly a weapon. Facing a total loss of hand-care resources, I thought of another out, by way of placing the dangerous tools in our book bag and adding that to the checked luggage. It worked.
Being careful, we managed not to lose any more property until our departure from Nadi Airport in Fuji, on our way to LA. The round-headed tweezers heretofore deemed harmless, in the toiletry case, were declared not permissible, and Air Pacific packed them separately, to be retrieved in LA. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed two hours - AP, Qantas and another carrier had combined three thinly booked flights into one, which reduced our transfer time to an LA-NY flight to one hour, not enough for pasing through immigration, agriculture, customs and luggage search, not to speak of retrieving a small toiletry item. We missed the flight by twenty minutes, and AP had to put us up, along with three other couples, in day rooms at the airport Sheraton, which gave us a few hours of sleep, not to be frittered away chasing lost tweezers.
Such flight plan changes were happening all along. We ended up in a day room in Sydney for ten hours when Qantas rearranged our flight to Christchurch, NZ, due to the sudden bankruptcy of Australia’s domestic Ansett,Airlines but would not pick up the costs of the rooms. That had to be done by our tour supplier, Vantage Worldwide, an honorable company with superb tour guides.
A weird wartime casualty was a section of our tour, held up in LA for two hours because a pair of Mideastern travelers had an argument that involved the mention of terrorists. They were detained, and the entire luggage compartment had to be evacuated, in order to remove their suitcases. I also recall an Aeroflot flight detained forever at JFK when a passenger with a boarding pass failed to be seated, and the flight was endangered, with his checked lugage on board. I never found out how that ended, we left before them.
Incidentally, on-board magazines are a thing of the past, BYO reading material, and airplane meals have shrunk, in frequency and contents. The Qantas utensils still feature metal forks and spoons, but the knives are plastic.

LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis

Linda- I use the abbrev TGAG later in the article; please try to keep it in title else it needs explanation.
Every year, in early October, this family comes out of hibernation to watch the Yankees’ post-season travails. This year we started worrying early, through the September slump, but the team was rescued by the misfortunes of other contenders and experienced their usual miraculous recovery, managing to boost themselves into the Series.
And so we were once more treated to the familiar spectacle of the Yankees rising to the occasion and annihilating the opposition
Although we, the October fans, are not taken seriously by the real day-to-day followers of the team, this family can claim some additional credentials. During the season, we hear Yankee radio announcers Michael Kay and John Gambling, worthy successors to Mel Allen, Curt Gowdy, Red Barber and Vince Scully. We can also match some memories with the real fans... Looking at the dour slumped figure of Joe Torre in the dugout accompanied by the faithful bulldog Don Zimmer , we hark back, fondly, to Billy Martin, standing on the dugout steps, ready to jump in and claim infractions, during his winning years of 1976 (ALC) and 1977-78.
In the next 16 bad years we heard and watched the games, off and on. The managers kept changing - Billy came back three times, interspersed with Bob Lemon, Dick Howser, Gene Michael, Yogi Berra and Lou Piniella, then Bucky Dent, Stump Merrill and Clyde King, until Buck Showalter pulled the team together (1992-95), and Joe Torre led them back to victory (1996, 1998-2000). During the bad years starting pitchers Tommy John, Phil Niekro and Ron Guidry and closers Goose Gossage and Dave Righetti labored mightily, as did Don Mattingly on first, Willie Randolph on second and Graig Nettles on third base, with the powerful Dave Winfield, the scrappy Rickey Henderson (still active as a Mariner, seen in the playoffs) and the elder Ken Griffey in the outfield . Those were the years of inadequate pitching. We used to watch the ruling Kansas City and Atlanta, marveling at the skills of Maddux and David Justice.
Some of the recent winners, Bernie Williams, Paul O’Neill (also Wade Boggs and Luis Polonia) came with Showalter in 1993, eventually joined by the badly needed pitchers, David Cone, Andy Pettite and Mariano Rivera - and Derek Jeter - to win the division title in 1995 (Bernie has actually been a Yankee for 10 years). Jeff Nelson and Graeme Lloyd joined the team in its first Torre World Series year, 1996, and the rest is history.
We, one tune baseball followers, really did not know what toexpect of the wild-card Mets, perennial underdogs who hit it lucky, so it seems, in beating the St. Lois Cardinals, who had slain the Amazin’s perennial rivals, the Atlanta Braves. In the first year 2000 WS game they looked a bit like country bumpkins, missing their outfield plays and making errors, while the athletic Yankees caught balls and relayed them with style and precision. Only their stellar pitcher, the remarkable Al Leiter, was playing like a possessed, holding the Yankee hitters in check. The Yankees, nervously retying their glove straps (this Knoblauch mania seems to have infected others) and stoically holding their nerves in check, seemed to be ready for Dr. Freud’s couch, as they kept missing scoring opportunities and leaving men on bases in this longest ( 4 hours 51 minutes) World’s Series game.
The poets who write the sports for the New York Times, sometimes leave the plebeian box scores of the games out of the paper, while singing love paeans to their team (hello, neighbor Robert Lipsyte, nice piece on October 22, miss your New York column), therefore I cannot give the details of the first game, but it was remarkable. So was the second - my office water-cooler seminar group had two in-depth sessions deconstructing the Clemens broken-bat incident (he really needs that shrink).
By the third game we began feeling sorry for the Amazin’, and our wish-fulfillment came. But the Yanks held, the veteran O’Neill had recovered his hitting ability (he has great control with slower pitchers), Martinez owned the Mets, and the fearless Jeter (he needs no shrink) was Ruth-like. Manifest destiny for the Yankees was evident.
Friday following the final game seemed to be a good time to do some Third Avenue sidewalk interviews while shopping, and our fellow New Yorkers did not disappoint me. Vaguely remembering some statistics rules from Baruch, I tend to do testing in individual samples, to validate the reliability of the results. I can tell you that the drugstore people were all Yankee supporters, the Police Academy recruits were four of out of five Yankee, the hardware and florist bunch predominantly pro-Met, and the sidewalk coffee shop loungers and my building co-tenants came across as more smartass and anti-TGAG. The Yankees had the majority, 57 percent, with 23 percent for the Mets and 20 percent other. All samples combined fell within 2 standard deviations, which makes them totally unreliable, with many more tests theoretically indicated for precise results, if anyone cares. These were the types of responses that makes me mistrust political pollsters.
Some of the answers to my vague "Did you like the Yankees or the Mets?" ran an interesting range..
Most were positive, or wishful: "Mets in seven (who says I have to accept reality)," "I’m a Yankee, but I was rooting for the Mets," "Wish the games had gone to seven," "I didn’t care, they were great games." The dismissive type answers, "We certainly did," and "Yes (by yes I mean yes)" came up twice. Negatives - "Who they?", "I don’t care," "Ask my husband (yes, he told me but it was in one ear, out the other)"and "They should pay those salaries to medical researchers" were a minority.
To all this, dear fellow New Yorkers, my answer is in the immortal words of John Gambling: "The Yankees win! Th-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a Yankees win!" Now, time to return to reality, politics and the Middle East.