February 28 – Jeudi – Tupuai

“So you are interested in fishing techniques? What books have you read? Did you read Sinoto? No? Do you speak French? No? Then what are you doing here?” This is the volley of questions that the Crazy Guy fires at me as I first chat with him over the gas pump at his service station in the village. In the face of this fusillade I first feel a bit like the coconut palms in Manihi during the squalls; swept back and agitated. Then I get a bit indignant and in the firmest possible way advise him that I am a Scientist, so back off, and if fluency of language was the condition of learning about other cultures, we would learn precious little about each other on this earth. He seems a bit mollified and agrees to see me at his house a little later in the morning. This does not seem so good.

So at the appointed hour I pedal the 20 minutes to his house, a low-slung affair with a nice front yard hidden from the road by a tall hedge. There is the front porch which opens onto the office of the Crazy Guy, and one crazy office it is. The walls are filled with bookshelves stuffed full of old books with gorgeous gilt bindings, the floor is covered with dusty cardboard boxes and the desks bear a respectable load of esoteric clutter and many computer monitors. The ice of our previous meeting is quickly broken, and I get the sense I have just met someone very, very interesting. And indeed Larry Miller (for that is his name) turns out to be this and much, much more. Ok, for just a taste go ahead and google Miller + Tubuai and spend even 10 minutes looking at his site - you’ll get an idea of what kind of expansive, creative, inquisitive and obsessive mind we are talking about here. He is, in his own words, an ex-hippie from Vancouver, Canada, who stumbled on these islands about thirty years ago on a quest to realize the lifestyle of his dreams.

He is an ex-hippie all right. And by this I mean that he possesses an organized and almost obsessive approach to his undertakings that doesn’t quite square with our notions of hippiehood. An example: He first tried the Marquesas Islands where he lived in Nuku Hiva for about six months. He found the place (where he built a large tree house for himself, by the way…) too hot and buggy, so he conducted a very thorough climatological study of the Polynesian Archipelago complete with amounts of insolation, rainfall, average day/night temperatures etc. All this is meticulously and artistically recorded in one of his notebooks that are beautifully illustrated and generally fit for publication as a series of books. But I digress… He eventually settled in Tupuai and has lived here with his enchanting family since the early 80’s.



After settling and buying some land, he became obsessed with the past of the island. It is easy, to become obsessed with the past here. The past is everywhere. You stub your toe in it walking in the fields and the woods, your eye catches it in the construction of the canoes and you hear it in the names of the children, named after ancestors. So Larry, in his unique way, starts to study up on the past and collects a library that contains pretty much everything worth reading on the Austral Islands. Simultaneously he sets about to collect all the loose stone adzes, fishing net weights, mortars and anything else that spontaneously pop up from the earth when the fields are plowed for spring planting. The results are impressive, and I again urge you to take a look at his website. Though not formally trained in archaeology, he has nonetheless participated in a number of professional digs on the island, and has presented some of his own findings in international professional meetings.

Needless to say, I learn a lot from him. Examples: in a good account from the 1840’s, the island’s population was reduced by disease to a mere 140 inhabitants. That the majority of the stone tools so readily found around here are really not that old; the people of Tupuai actually preferred their stone adzes to the European iron axes when first comparisons were made and produced them until well into the 19th century. That the island speaks Tahitian because the original language of Tupuai did not survive through the epidemics and the early missionaries. I could go on, but you get the idea.

After some hours of conversation he jumps up and pulls me along for a tour of the best Marae (ancient temple) of the island. After inspecting it and receiving his guided tour, he drags me to a neighboring potato field that has just been plowed for planting. He tells me he has found all sorts of artifacts on this particular field and others just like it. We walk up and down the furrows under the blazing early afternoon sun, the red volcanic soil turning to dust under my shoes and sweat dripping and stinging my eyes. And then I spot this grey shape in the midst of the red earth and pick up a half of a broken adze. I pick it up stunned by the discovery, and excitedly examine the area around me. When I locate the absent rear portion even Larry is a bit surprised; in his experience you don’t generally find the missing half. We keep walking the field for a bit longer before yielding to the heat of the sun and pile back in his pickup truck.

Next stop is Larry’s plantation, his 10-acre plot on the mountainside partially prepared for building the villa of his dreams and partially planted with fruit of every imaginable kind, from grapefruit to grapes. At this point we are getting along famously, and I get an invitation to join the family for a dinner out to celebrate the birthday of his daughter. I gladly accept and spend a very pleasant evening with this lovely family at the only restaurant on the island.

I return a couple of days later to view his collection of artifacts, which is quite extensive. He is preparing to transport it all to a small office at the municipal building, eventually to be organized as a local museum. The collection, now piled in five large plastic tubs, is extensive enough to have attracted a visit by Yoshi Sinoto, the noted Polynesia expert and archeologist from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. In classic archeological thought, the value of an artifact mostly stems from the context in which it was found; other artifacts, dwellings, food remnants, burial arrangements etc. It is Larry’s thesis that when you find tools by the bucket load, even with no context other than a modern potato field, you can still study the artifacts themselves in an organized way and derive useful information from it all. He calls this the field of implementology, and has since moved on to apply this to bookbinding tools in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Hence the books in his lair. Really – google Miller + Tubuai.

Larry may be the island’s pre-eminent authority on the pre-contact Tupuai, but hardly the only person interested in the past. My stay coincides with a youth event at the local protestant church and I have the opportunity to attend two evenings’ worth of dancing, singing, playing and instruction in some traditional fishing techniques. Yes, the good people of Tupuai are educating their young in things traditional, and the said youth seem genuinely interested. Yes, there is still a back row of the sullen types melding minds with their Gameboys, but overall the vibe is entirely positive and not forced. I mean we are talking about 5 year olds learning how to tie together a basic hook and line setup and how to use it, with the adults telling me they do this because Tupuai lives from the sea and it is necessary for the next generation to know these skills. I am impressed by the spirit of togetherness and all the music and dance that comes from everyone of the 200 or so assembled parishioners.





Oh, and why Crazy Guy? He calls everybody that; everyone is a crazy guy to Larry, even when he addresses them in French. Ça va, crazy guy! And who am I to argue with him? This small island has four churches of all the denominations around. This translates to 20 places of worship, divided amongst the faithful Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Sanitos (a reform Mormon sect) and 7th day Adventists. I’m talking to an ex-hippie who collects and studies rare old European books and dreams of tree houses. Meanwhile the said hippie is talking to me, an expat Finn in a French and Tahitian-speaking land who is doing the rounds talking to people about fishing. The situation seems surreal enough to warrant his point of view. You go, Crazy Guy!