The endless summer ends

I've been back in the land of my upbringing for almost four weeks now. The last month in French Polynesia was hectic, and I couldn't wait to leave. I went on a roadtrip around Tahiti for research with 4 other biologists, during which I was still too drained to really do much fieldwork. I did, however, get good driving practice on a "very dangerous road" in the back of the Papenoo Valley:

The objective of that particular day in the field was to collect fruit from another rare and protected Glochidion species, G. papenooense. It has fruit that are huge and swollen up, and borne in huge clusters along the stem.
Glochidion papenooense grows in wetlands. The particular one we visited was heavily infested by wild pigs. This is me up to my knees in the mud.Later on that day in the Papenoo Valley, we were lucky enough to see several Tahiti reed-warblers (Acrocephalus caffer) in hibiscus and bamboo thickets. The reed-warblers are among the few passerine birds native to Eastern Polynesia, and this species is endangered, extinct on all the Society Islands except Tahiti.

After this last fieldwork, my mom visited for 10 days; we went to Easter Island together, whiach was fascinating and bizarre, and I will talk about it more in a later blog post. After that I had 10 days left to pack everything up and go home, which I did in a characteristically harried fashion (throwing out dead rearing lots and cleaning my office on the day of my departure, etc.). I was not at all sentimental about leaving; in my 13 months on Mo'orea, I had realized that whereas life on a small tropical island had a simplicity that I admired, I missed too much my friends and family, and the intellectual stimulation and cosmopolitanism of university towns, to be happy there in the long term. Conveniently, I returned to the US just in time for the Republican National Convention to make me feel unwelcome back in my own country.

I spent a few days in Los Angeles to see Dan Grin before flying up to Oakland. Since then I've revisited Peet's Coffee and the Thai Temple and Moe's Books, and seen most of the people I've wanted to see. I've realized that whereas many of my friendships in French Polynesia seemed to be friendships of convenience, many of mine here in Berkeley were too. The first week was amazing; since then, I've been flung headlong into the complexity of life on a university campus and the realization that I have at any given point in time about 10 things to do. It's like looking up at a wall of water about to break over you. I'm a little sentimental now that I have left, but I'm still thrilled to be back in Berkeley.

My last day on Mo'orea, I went to see my friend Jim, an American expat who had lived in French Polynesia for upwards of 40 years, and who was my next-door neighbor for a number of months at the beginning of my stay. Jim lives as a caretaker for the weekend home of a wealthy American-Tahitian woman on the southeast coast of Mo'orea. The property is spacious and quiet, surrounded by trees and naupata bushes, right on the lagoon looking east towards Tahiti. It is hard to imagine a more idyllic place. I realized I had very few people I wanted to say goodbye to in French Polynesia, and Jim and I pottered around the garden and talked about this fact. It was an amazing experience, but the ephemerality of social interactions--trying to make friends with people on a remote island you'll never revisit, or with students who visit Gump Station only for a month--became unbearable after a year. What was nice, though, as I stood under the shade of pandanus and Hernandia trees, looking east towards the cloud-covered ridges of Tahiti and sipped my last cup of Nescafé for a very long time, was to spend the morning of my very unsentimental departure in a place that reminded me of what I had liked best about French Polynesia.