Prelude

February 24, 2009:

There is a sign on the highway four miles north of my home. It reads, “The 45th Parallel -halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.” I’ve always liked that sign; it provides a perspective. The words ground me in the center of the Northern Hemisphere with all but 60 miles of North America spreading out before me to the east.

The 45th Parallel sign also reminds me that one can travel. The hemisphere reaches out both north and south and we are situated exactly in the middle, the perfect spot to start a journey in either direction.

Flip a coin. Heads travel north and tails travel south. The travel gods flipped the coin that holds my fate. It landed on tails.

My journey south begins by heading north. I pass the sign as my wife takes me to the airport so that I can begin my voyage. With each passing mile the present faded into the past. All that had become familiar in the last three and a half years disappears in the rearview mirror.

My destination is just a speck. A speck on the map in a sea of blue, a mere 6 degrees north of the Equator. To get there I traveled so far west that I am now on the eastern side of the map. Not so far east as to be in danger of slipping off the map, but close, at roughly 150 degrees longitude.

Scuba enthusiasts might know of the Trukk Lagoon, which serves as a graveyard for Japanese naval ships sunk during WWIIs Pacific Front. Sociology students might vaguely recall reading about the giant stone coins that served as currency on the island of Yap during earlier times.

They are both islands, and states, of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). I am on neither. I am on, Pohnpei, which serves as the capital of the FSM and is home to 34,000 of FSM’s 110,000 residents.

Micronesia literally means small island. It was aptly named and not by one prone to exaggeration. Pohnpei is the largest of the islands in the FSM. It dimensions appear to be roughly 12 miles by 15 miles at its widest and longest points. Its not a perfect circle but within its perimeter lay 129 sq. miles of land.

129 sq. miles may not seem like a lot unless you consider that the total land mass of FSM, is just 270 sq. miles. The country is more water than land. I read that 1,000,000 sq miles of ocean resides within its borders. The distance from its western most island (Yap) to its easternmost island (Kosrae) spans 1,550 miles. The 4 major islands of Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, and Kosrae, are not alone. There are 603 smaller islands dispersed in the sea – the outer islands they are called.

Why I am here? Why would a person bypass Polynesia, famed for its beauty and beaches, and bypass Indonesia, reknown for its culture art, and come to Micronesia? Why, I’ve come for the yams of course.