Marilyn BauerWriter
Travel · Reporting

Ulithi

This side of paradise
By Marilyn Bauer · Environmental News Network

Jumping from the cockpit of his 1950s Beech 18 aircraft, Peter Reichert balanced on the shiny silver wing of Pacific Missionary Air and surveyed the scene at the Fallop, Ulithi, airport in the West Pacific.

He searched the crowd huddled under thatch-roofed structures in anticipation of more driving rain. Typhoon Bills had wreaked up some pretty heavy tolls but the villagers weren’t going to miss the spectacle on the runway.

The cobalt blue of the men’s cotton loincloths, or thu, radiated in the heat-hallucination of the afternoon sun. Bare-breasted women and women less traditional, covered by T-shirts with slogans such as “Just Do It,” carried caravans of kids on shoulders and backs.

Reichert looked along the rutted runway where only days before he had been unable to land. First it was the fat, feral dogs unafraid of the noise or size of his plane. After six days they were shot; a group of Americans had requested permission from the Council of Tamol to visit the island atoll. The chiefs had agreed and given the order to execute the mutts.

A young boy points to Ulithi on a painted map
Ulithi · Micronesia

Pointing to a map painted on the side of his schoolhouse, a young boy locates his island home.

I was traveling in Palau and Yap, picking up stories for ENN, Natural Traveler and the paper I work for, The Tribune in San Luis Obispo, California. I was a long way from home. It was even farther when Bills hit. The weather had been abysmal for most of my trip, but the jade-green paradise of the northwestern Pacific was impossible to compromise.

I had made arrangements to visit Ulithi before I left the U.S., petitioning the council, the traditional governing body of the outer islands, as a journalist intrigued by the 3,500-year-old culture, largely extant.

Only 22 of the volcanic islands are inhabited, and the archipelago is surrounded by a fringing reef ranging from one-half to two miles long. The outer islands are mostly atolls, wisps and curls of coral and sand rising just enough above the Pacific’s waters to support a tiny strand of jungle and the coconut trees that sustain human life.

Ulithi anchorage during World War II
Ulithi anchorage · World War II

History beneath the water

Despite the tiny land masses, the atolls often have huge lagoons. Ulithi’s is the fourth largest in the world and harbored a thousand ships during World War II. Flying overhead, one is struck as much by its grandeur as by the rusting remains of tanks and fighter planes partially submerged in the aquamarine shallows.

Fallop, Ulithi

It was cloudy, dinghy-gray when we arrived, and the sky continued to darken. I was here to check out the new resort built to service wreck divers whose traffic had increased of late.

We were scheduled to have lunch, hosted by Rumal, and a meeting with the village chief. Later we could swim or, as Peterson pointed out, dive as the shelf falls away rapidly from the shore of the resort.

The radio call came in moments later. Reichert couldn’t take off again. The storm was bad on Yap. We would have to stay the night, maybe longer in Ulithi. Typhoon Bills scythed across Micronesia claiming lives and destroying property. We were stranded.

Stuck in a Lodi

I wandered into the village, careful to skirt the homes and community houses, careful not to break any precedents of behavior. Junior told me American journalists had never visited here, but that there had been instances of Taiwanese disturbing families in traditional villages tied forever to the past.

Most of the atoll’s women were baking for a celebration of some sort that would take place that evening. Children spilled out of huts recycled and recreated from wartime tin into byways of dirt now pocked with pools of mud.

Tiny Bubbles’ mother came out and smiled. No one talked to me, although they all spoke English. I thought, as it began again to rain, it should be time for dinner soon.

Men's club on Ulithi
The men’s meeting house on Ulithi

The Japanese ruled Yap from the time of the outbreak of World War I in the early 1900s. A secret treaty entered into with the British guaranteed them control over the Pacific islands north of the Equator at war’s end.

The Japanese administration ruled by means of an iron fist from a police station on the island of Maap. When World War II broke out, they conscripted Yapese — children and old men as well as the able-bodied — to work in labor gangs on airports and other military installations. (According to the tourism board, there is even a “widely believed” rumor the Japanese intended to round up the Yapese, deposit them in a cave and dynamite it to prevent the indigenous people from spying.)

Ulithi is where the Japanese first launched their suicide submarines, called “kaitens,” sinking the USS Mississinewa in the lagoon. The area was seized by the U.S. Army 81st Division in late 1944 and transformed into a massive staging area.

The flotsam and jetsam of this time in the Pacific remain preserved in a veritable underwater museum spread over the Ulithi lagoon. In addition to the hulking remains of tanks, there are spent shells, machine guns and downed aircraft.

We never had a chance to dive — a shame as much of the lagoon and surrounding waters are unexplored. But the stay at the Ulithi Adventure Resort was great. We were up most of the night. I remember storytelling requests coaxed from tablemates with whoops of “to-o-ba, to-o-ba.”

The next morning

First thing in the morning, we were rustled out of bed, fed a breadfruit and instant-coffee breakfast and rushed at breakneck speed to the airport, where Reichert was waiting. The weather had cleared overnight, and most of the village was already at the airport, participating in their favorite spectator sport: watching the runway.

I’m going back to Ulithi, this time to dive. I wonder if Peterson will still be there. And Tiny Bubbles. I wonder if launching a full-fledged diving operation will alter life on the atoll.

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