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A stroll around the island turns out to be slightly more than I had bargained for. Even this early in the morning, the temperature is quickly climbing toward the mid-nineties. Air which seemed comfortably tropical to me a half hour prior, while sitting nearer the sea breeze with my coffee and postcards in the pâtisserie, now feels muggy and still. Though wearing nothing more than my bathing suit and a light pareu for a skirt, I have the sensation of ambling down the road cloaked in a heavy wool blanket. But today I’m determined to get away from the resort and explore the surrounding countryside for the better part of a day.

My loose plan was to walk a few miles to a floating café built over the water which I’d heard of in the marketplace, and see more of Moorea in a leisurely way impossible by Jeep. I’ve got the road to myself, and I relish the quiet, interrupted only by occasional calls of swallows and frigate birds. The weekend preceding drew visitors from France, Spain and Australia for a triathlon, choking this same road with bikers and runners and a raucous, cheerful holiday crowd egging them on. I had been happy to see them go, having felt just the smallest bit resentful, as if I myself am not a tourist as well.

The first time I traveled here to the South Pacific, I gladly staked a claim on the islands. I felt as if I’d finally found secure lodging for my heart, finding solace amidst the atolls and hibiscus bushes and coconut palms. In the same way one might feel immediate kinship with a stranger, I was enveloped by a sense of easy familiarity from the moment I stepped onto the tarmac in the Papeete airport. By the time I’d watched my first plum-colored sunset in Moorea from the edge of a long dock, a mynah crying overhead to salute the evening, I promised myself I’d come back.

It’s slow progress along the dirt road, and my flip-flops are not meant for ambitious hiking. I wipe my streaming brow with the edge of my pareu, a beautifully hand-painted cloth which can be twisted and tied and used for almost anything—towel, dress, pillowcase, purse. I’ve bought several as keepsakes of each trip. Going back to the States, especially the first time, was painful in a way I’d never expected: I grieved for long exhilarating days spent in or beside the turquoise sea, for the gentle, vanilla-scented breezes, for constellations so bright and close in the night sky they seemed to have human spirits. I tried to hold on any way I could, mostly with silly efforts like buying pineapples at the supermarket or watching Mutiny on the Bounty over and over. I danced to Tahitian drum music, bought gardenias and coconut-scented soap, practiced tying the colorful pareus I’d bought. I pored over the few photos I’d taken during the trip and put them in albums, along with a few stamps and postcards. But routine intruded—the tangle of daily life tightened its grip and the islands slipped away like sand, a little more lost each week.

I’ve visited Tahiti three more times over the years, each trip vastly different from the one before, but each homecoming distressing in a similar manner. I wait in line at customs, where no one is smiling, don street shoes again, wait in traffic under a sky dull with clouds. The remembered whisper of the tropics is buried beneath the roar of city life, an avalanche of news and fast-food joints and honking and car stereos booming. Worse still is the sense of murkiness which descends, as a feeling of connection recedes, displaced by schedules and concrete buildings, the tug of what must get done by tomorrow or should have been done last week.

My train of thought is interrupted by the purr of a moped whizzing by, which kicks up a trail of dust that swirls around me and clings to my damp skin. The driver is a stunning young Tahitian woman in bare feet; just when I think I’ve got the road to myself again, she backs up and turns around, finally stopping next to me and tilting one foot to the ground.
 

“Where are you going?” she asks me in French, and in a childish mix of half-remembered phrases and gestures, I attempt to convey that I am headed to the floating café, hoping she’ll get my drift. She smiles and pats the back of the moped, obviously commanding me to hop on.

“Oh, no, thanks,” I tell her. “I need to walk.” I have yet to ride on a moped, and she is slightly built, really barely older than a girl. Walking seems a safer enterprise than this miniature motorcycle, even if I’m about to wilt.

“Non, non! C’est trop chaud!” she cries, until I finally agree that yes, it is too hot, and clamber up behind her. The moped’s speed creates a lovely cool rush of air on my arms as we speed toward the café, which turns out to be farther than I’d even guessed. She accepts my invitation for coffee, and we spend a couple of hours talking at our table on the water, watching fish-laden canoes paddle by in the distance. She is patient with my halting schoolroom French, and delights in telling me about her husband and five-year-old daughter, finally insisting I accompany her to her house for the afternoon, where we wait for her child to walk home from school.

By the time she drives me back to the resort on her moped after sunset, we are friends. I have met Vaite’s family, seen her wedding pictures, drunk tea sitting on a floor in the hut which is her home and learned all about her work making shell jewelry. She twirled her daughter’s hair, and then mine, into graceful chignons and adorned them with flowers. The three of us squished our heads together in order to gaze at ourselves in a little pastel mirror which hung on her wall—three birds of Paradise—her husband laughing with us while he fixed rice for the evening meal. He tells me that Vaite’s name means “pure soul of the divine child.”

Two days later, it is time to fly home. I eat a last hurried breakfast of mango and toast at the resort, hoping for a few minutes to say goodbye to the ocean. A French staff member walks over and places a small, crudely-wrapped package by my plate. Vaite has left a small basket of exquisite shells to remember her by, and a lovely note with her address taped to the newsprint wrapping. I am mortified and angry when I learn later that she tried to visit me and bring me the shells in person, but the guards at the gate wouldn’t allow her in.

“Tahitian riff-raff,” the staff member tells me casually in English. “They try to sneak in here all the time but we kick them right out. They’re no-good peasants.”

As the plane ascends, and the mossy hills below turn to small green dots floating in the vast expanse of the South Pacific, I feel intensely sad, as if the gates of the garden are shutting behind me. I think of my generous friend, wondering how it is that she has managed to keep Eden so strongly within her, and how I will find my way back.

Stacy Appel is an award-winning writer in California whose work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune and other publications. She has also written for National Public Radio. She is a contributor to the book You Know You’re a Writer When… Contact Stacy at WordWork101@aol.com.