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My bond to the geography was growing—there was still the tangled, hilly interior to explore—and I was also feeling more connected to the people on the island. We had a beach bonfire every evening, and on the seventh night I sat down next to a middle-aged Fijian woman named Va, with whom I often worked in the camp kitchen. As we watched the flames dance against a backdrop of the ocean and starry sky, she asked about my job as a writer, and I trotted out some tales that I thought would impress her—climbing mountains, exploring caves.
"Hmmm," Va said after I'd rambled on for a while. "I have heard once about two travelers, a priest and a nun, who got lost while trying to cross the Sahara." She launched into a long narrative about their travails—sandstorms, starvation, thirst—and minutes passed before I realized she was telling a joke. The punch line came, and it was exceptionally funny and exceptionally dirty, involving the priest, the nun, a camel, and a sexual act that definitely isn't referenced in the Good Book.
Va was the island's head cook, and I'd formed a vague impression of her as a mild, cheerful woman. Now we were getting to be buddies, and I detected a more mischievous personality. On Vorovoro the usual depressing wall between tourists and locals was noticeably low: digging postholes, shoveling compost, and washing dishes side by side draws people together.
As we drank beer (lukewarm) and Fijian rum (high proof), the night got rowdier. Dan Keene hosted an island Olympics with contests in coconut hurling and crab racing; Poques broke out the cards for Texas Hold 'em; Suzi Scarborough, a 49-year-old woman from central Florida, appeared fireside in a black dominatrix getup complete with fishnet stockings and whip. "I like to keep things lively," she said. Scarborough had undergone a sex-change operation only three years earlier. As an engineer working for a military systems contractor, Scarborough said she grew "tired of being held prisoner to everyone else's expectations." After the transition she embraced unconventional activities ("I used to miss out on a lot") such as going to Burning Man, dressing up as a pirate or Santa Claus—not on Halloween or Christmas, mind you—and most recently, joining an island tribe.
It was at this point in the festivities when it became clear that Chief Bengazi—the Sergey Brin of the South Pacific—was drunk. He stumbled away from the crab racing table and began singing joyously and dancing spastically. It looked as if his smile was going to split his face in two. All of us, to a certain degree, took it for granted that we were here on the island, getting to play tribe, but only Ben Keene had known the idea when it was just an email and a dream.
For thousands of years people have yearned for mythically perfect places—"where every torrent flows with wine," as the Greek poet Telecleides put it in the fifth century B.C.—and quite often, those places are envisioned as tropical islands in the South Seas. This makes practical sense. New societies need a blank canvas and breathing room, favorable weather and abundant natural resources, and if there's anywhere on Earth where you could actually establish such a "fortunate isle"—in the parlance of utopian literature—the South Pacific is probably it.
In real life, though, if you tell your friends that you're heading off to create a happy new civilization among the palms, don't expect them to rejoice—they'll probably imagine Jonestown and warn you to steer clear of the Kool-Aid. Tell them about a visionary such as Keene and they'll picture David Koresh. The modern view of utopian communities is a conflicted one, and while almost everybody fantasizes about jump-starting civilization on a forgotten island (witness the huge popularity of the TV show Lost), it is deemed inevitable that the settlers will struggle horrifically (ibid, Lost).
Fictional books brim with examples, and before embarking for Fiji, Keene looked to them for real-world wisdom. His analysis of Lord of the Flies was that the characters wound up sharpening sticks and pushing chubby boys off of cliffs because they were trapped; on Vorovoro people would always be coming and going, so tensions wouldn't build up and boil over. Plus, the tribe had a Web site where members aired thousands of opinions, so Keene hoped that "whatever conflict we have takes place virtually." The backpackers in the film The Beach mistakenly believed they could divorce themselves from reality, while society on Vorovoro would remain healthy by staying economically and socially connected. "We never set out to shut ourselves off from the world," Keene said.
He and James, in fact, hoped to do the opposite. In classic utopian tradition, they wanted to stand far enough apart from society that they could create a new and better way of life, but not so far that they couldn't show it off. Aided by a powerful public relations team, Tribewanted has been featured in newspapers on four continents and on the Today show and Good Morning America. Plans call for the island to be rigged for Internet access so that every day, members can post photos, blogs, podcasts, and episodes of Tribal TV. The purpose of all of the PR? "People can follow the story and see that simple living without lots of materialism is actually fantastic," Keene said.
Tribewanted's challenge, however, was to develop paradise without destroying it, to be a financial success as well as an ideological one, and by the fall, the company was struggling. Neither blessed with independent wealth nor supported by venture capital, Keene and James were operating on a hand-to-mouth basis out of membership revenue, which they needed to increase. The original business plan called for 4,000 more members (for a total of 5,000), with up to a hundred on the island at a time, which, many of the First Footers believed, was too many given Vorovoro's small size. A dozen visitors was paradise—eight times as many would be a zoo.
One option was to have fewer people but to charge more. The current rateof $220 a week, including food and airport transportation, was cheap bordering on a steal. Keene considered himself a capitalist who needed to keep "money in the bank and gas in the boat" or all of the good intentions would be for naught; a realist who knew that Vorovoro was a real place, not a problem-free utopia. "This is an experiment," he said toward the end of the first week. "If you ask me to judge the project right now, I'd say there will be some amazing things that come out of it—and some things that people, and even I, don't think are very good."
Keene's words proved prescient, but the trouble came sooner than he or anyone else expected. On September 9, several Internet tribe members were in a boat returning from Vanua Levu when they saw an alarming sight. Rising from the center of the island, dark and thick, was a column of smoke.
"The island is on fire! The island is on fire!"
People onshore were just finishing lunch when they heard the frantic calls from the boat. Becky Hunter dashed into the jungle, kicked through bushes and shin-slashing vines, reached a clearing, and looked up. A long, crackling line of flames was consuming a brushy hillside. From somewhere inside of the fire line, she could hear people shouting.
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