Coconut Juice

Temporary Beach House 1
Originally uploaded by rjschmidt.

A few days ago we were out walking and we found a couple of guys on the beach who’d built a kind of fort out of some boards they’d collected. Their platform was the foundation of their old house, which had been completely stripped away, leaving only the well standing higher than a bee’s knees. They had quite the place: pleasant, remote, removed from all other civilization by a two kilometre strip of wreckage behind them, and such a great view out to the sea that it almost made you forget that anything had happened.

It seemed like a peaceful life. It was midday when we wandered by and they were just waking up. Actually, the guy up in the tall hut on stilts beside the main house didn’t wake up until we were almost ready to go. All we saw of him for most of the visit was his two napping feet, hanging out the second story doorway at the top of the ladder. When he woke up his head appeared, smiling down at us with all three of his cigarette stained teeth. He insisted we stay for coconuts and set about organizing a boy who was hanging around grinning to look sharp and get some for us. Then he came down, shook hands all around, said winningly, ‘spek good ingrish,’ and led me out to the beach to tell me that boats can go on the water … I think.

These were good guys. They’d been keeping busy. There were a whole bunch of bottles under the house that they’d collected. It reminded me of the old 7-Up bottles in the root cellar of my grandparents’ house when I was a kid. There’s something nice about bottles all lined up like that. It’s so … normal. There was a tube of toothpaste and a mashed toothbrush by the well and laundry hung between two palm trees, waving in the wind. The dishes, unwashed in a plastic basin, were collecting ants. These guys were living. Considering what they’d been through, that was saying something.

The coconuts arrived, after some good-natured yelling at the boy, who still couldn’t stop grinning. The men set to happily arguing who had the best technique for rendering coconuts for drinking. They all had a go, and when the champion emerged, there were no hard feelings from our hosts that it turned out to be our driver. We sat there dribbling coconut milk down our chins and listening to their stories. One of the guys said that the wave had picked him up, carried him inland and dumped him in town, two kilometres from the shore. He somehow got on top of it and rode it by holding on to things, and so kept his life. But that was all he got, his life. He lost his house, his whole family, all his belongings. This plot on the beach is the only other thing he has left, so he came back and built this little house. Starting again from scratch. Literally. Whatever you can scratch up from the ground.

They described what this strip had been like, before the wave. I looked up the beach and saw that it was haunted by the ghost of a beautiful past, flitting around in the wreckage and the few standing trees: Beachfront houses and cafes, the coconut palms for shade, the breeze off the ocean to cool you, sitting on the veranda with your toes in the sand. A lazy day. A cold drink. The sound of kids. And now, just this house of old boards and collected bottles. Dining on coconuts, smoking cigarettes, talking, planning to rebuild it somehow. I admired their fortitude.

We offered to give some of our tents to them and to their neighbours. They called everyone over and we made a list. ‘But what about the Green Line?’ we asked them. The Indonesian government has decreed that no buildings are to be built within 500 metres of the shoreline, a coastal buffer to which they have given this cheery name. ‘Aren’t you afraid if you build here, the army will come and move you?’ Three-teeth laughed and dismissed this with a wave of his cigarette before he lit it and took a long drag. ‘This is my home,’ he said as if that settled it. Then he added, with a sly look, ‘If they say I cannot build my house here, I will open a café!’ He laughed.

Meanwhile, back down the beach, the Indonesian army was busy digging up sand by the dump truck load to use in the foundations of the (surprise) army-style barracks they are building everywhere to resettle people. Temporarily, they say, but they’re sure making a lot of them. I haven’t met a single person that thinks they are a good idea. They’re afraid that between the barracks and the Green Line, the army will grab all the good land for themselves. It wouldn’t be the first time. And the locals here aren’t too happy about their beach getting dug up. They’d brought out the local UNHCR rep to take a look even though it was Sunday. She was a little fireball Italian revolutionary, leading her entourage up the beach like Che Guevara. ‘These people are too passive!’ she crescendoed when we’d got her going. ‘In Italy we would be RIOTING if this happened!’ She looked around, but as no one seemed inclined to do as they do in Rome, she gathered her troops and marched off to find a more fertile environment for popular revolution.

We watched her go, lazy and full of coconut juice. The beach kind of gets into you here. But I hope she’s successful. In the meantime, the guys up the stretch will sit in the shade of the coconut trees, nap in the heat of the day, and gather their lives back around them. Just a small thing, a house on the beach, but it’s always the small things, isn’t it? Just pray that the Big Things don’t come and take it away. You’d hate to see vice ganging up with nature to beat the hell out of these guys again.