HIGH TIMES in Easter Island

Our intrepid reporter journeys to the most isolated piece of real estate on Earth to learn the secret of survival in the land of the stone giants. Along the way, he finds some bud, too.

Within minutes of disembarking the Lan Chile plane on Easter Island, I ran into what I imagined was the island’s only drug dog. A friendly little mutt – some beagle/spaniel bitch that jumped onto the luggage-filled conveyer belt like a yuppie mounting a Nordic Track. I learned later on that this little pup was a bone of contention for the Rapa Nui stoner crowd, who, previous to her arrival, thought little about bringing a few pounds of bud back with them every time they flew home from mainland Chile. I was told one story of how, a few years back when the Chilean cops felt the need to crack down on Easter Island’s marijuana trade, one of the islanders ripped a plant from a patch in his backyard, brought it to the police station and said, “Take this, tell the bigwigs in Chile you’re making progress, and now please leave us alone.”

Anywhere else, I would think this story was bullshit, but here, on the most isolated inhabited land mass on the globe, it makes perfect sense. For starters, the native population tops out at around 3,000 people – the size of a large urban high school in America. Everyone knows each other, which explains why there is very little law enforcement and almost no crime. It’s the closest thing to Saint Thomas More’s Utopia I’ve ever seen. Sure, it took 1,500 years of war, starvation, cannibalism, slavery and colonization to get there, but this little piece of volcanic tuft midway between South America and Tahiti, this place of community, economic stability and staggering natural beauty, would warm the heart of Saint Thomas, had King Henry VIII not ordered that his head be chopped off and stuck on a pike by London Bridge one dreary British morning back in 1535.

You want to be a saint, you’ve got to roll with the punches, I guess. It’s a hard club to get into and the hazing is rough. But really, it takes more than one misguided dog to defeat the ingenuity of these people, responsible for one of history’s finest examples of monolithic culture. Take a look at any one of the ancient stone heads on the island and you know that time is on their side.

Rebekah, my companion on this expedition, and I are staying at what I guess you’d call a rooming house – no TV, no air conditioner, just a simple room with clean sheets and roosters that wake you up at dawn. Animals roam free on the streets here in Hanga Roa, the island’s only town. Horses and dogs walk around with the same freedom that squirrels are allotted in the States. Our place is run by two artists, Anna and her husband Bene, one of the master sculptors on the island whose work appears in museums around the world. Next-door is the island’s only music studio, run by Mauricio, Anna’s son-in-law, and there’s all sorts of music playing at odd hours of the night, from the traditional folky Rapa Nui acoustic stuff to Mauricio’s preferred metallic Sepultura-inspired thrash. The weather is perfect all day and night; it rains a bit, but you can actually see the dark clouds and avoid them if that’s what you wanted to do.

We rented a scooter the first day – no money down, because if you really wanted to steal it, where would you go? To those who live here, the place is known as Rapa Nui, as opposed to the “Easter Island” moniker given it by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen back in 1722 because he “discovered” it on Easter Day. In the early days, it was called Te-Pito-te-Henua, which translates roughly as “the Navel of the World.”

The island’s first settlers came sometime between AD 400 and 800 from a land they called Hiva, thought to be in the vicinity of the Marquesas, some 2,500 miles away in Polynesia. Their king was Hotu Matua, a name that, all these years later, still commands great respect on the island. Sometime around 1200, they started carving these gigantic statues (moai) out of the porous volcanic tuft, monuments to their ancestors, great storehouses of spirit – or, as it is known here, mana. After a while, they’d set up a Henry Ford–like production line of moai that required the daily attention of the island’s best people, and also that the trees be cut down in order to roll the massive idols to the shore. There wasn’t a whole lot of farming or fishing going on at this time, so the trees disappeared one by one until, far too late, the islanders realized they’d gone and fucked up their entire ecology in the race for bigger and better moai. This quest for power destroyed their world, leading to war and cannibalism and all sorts of likewise horrible behavior.

Into all this sailed Roggeveen and the Dutch West India Trading Company, the decidedly less prosperous cousin of the East India Trading Company that had made its stamp throughout Africa and Asia. After dropping anchor, they managed, in a fatal panic, to shoot a dozen islanders before their boots had even stepped on dry land. They spent a day, bugged out on the statues, fucked the women and left in search of Terra Australis, the mythical “southern continent,” a land that, plain and simple, did not exist. Then came the Spanish, who claimed the land for their crown 50 years later and never returned. Captain Cook spent a day or two here, five years before he was butchered by the Hawaiians. The French, the Americans, the Russians … each visitor seemed to take more than they gave until the time in 1862 when Peruvian slave ships landed and carried away more than half the population, including the last king, to collect guano in caves along the coast of South America. An outcry from Tahitian bishops facilitated the return of those Rapa Nui slaves who were still alive – and in so doing, typhoid, tuberculosis and leprosy were introduced to the land. By the time the missionaries came from France to Christianize the heathens, there were only a few hundred left.

A Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier had the bright idea to turn the island into a gigantic sheep farm, forcing all the natives into one little barbed-wire pen at Hanga Roa, and to this day that’s still where most of them live. Chile took it over in 1888. A century later, Dictator General Augusto Pinochet saw Easter Island as a chance to live down some of the massive human-rights abuses that were rightfully being pinned on him after his US-backed coup on September 11, 1972, and the decade-long kidnapping / torture / murder campaign, Operation Condor, that followed, and so he gave the land and a certain degree of autonomy back to the people of Rapa Nui. There were a few token ceremonies where Pinochet shook hands with the local dignitaries and was serenaded by schoolchildren, then it was back to La Moneda and the more serious business of killing commies. Kevin Costner came in 1993 and made a ridiculous movie, tourists started to arrive sometime thereafter, and today the people here aren’t rich, but they’re doing all right.

At night in the streets of Hanga Roa, you can smell marijuana smoke emanating from the joints of the jurgos, the Rapa Nui hippies. You see them during the day, riding through town bareback on horses. They look like rock stars with their Rapa Nui tattoos and their hair in long, flowing dreadlocks woven with various bits of fabric, kind of like Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow from the Disney movies. I don’t know what they do all day – fuck the tourist ladies, I imagine. Rebekah and I met one girl from San Francisco whose mission it was to bed down one of these dudes, and it took her about 15 hours. Lord knows how many Rapa Nui zygotes gestate in the wombs of Lan Chile passengers as they pour salted peanuts down their throats on their way back to France or Germany or wherever.

I heard one story about how U2 stopped over and Bono and company walked the streets surrounded by bodyguards, and the locals were a bit perplexed because they didn’t really know who these guys were. Axl Rose apparently paid this place a visit too, accompanied by a gigantic black bodyguard, but when the local girls got a look at his Nubian sentinel, Axl soon found himself wandering the streets of Hanga Roa alone – which was all right, because with his hair and tats, most people just mistook him for one of the jurgos.

We hired a guide to show us around. His real name was Mahatua, followed by a whole lot of words that he rattled off for 45 seconds, but his "slave name," he said, was Leo, "like the Ninja Turtle," so that's what we called him. He ran the only TV station on the island and had a little cinderblock office next to a mammoth satellite dish surrounded by barbed wire that captured one single channel from mainland Chile and disseminated it amongst the local television sets.

Leo’s Rapa Nui bloodline goes back to the first boats. His grandfather was the mayor here. He went to school in Chile (primary and eight years of university), and he once got in trouble in Santiago for breaking into a crypt drunk with his friends and taking pictures with some unfortunate people’s bones – and when the authorities caught him, he said: “You people have been disturbing the graves of my ancestors and taking pictures with my ancestors’ bones for 100 years.” He told us the first time he saw television in the ’80s as an adolescent, he thought: “This is big.” At first he studied philosophy in Santiago, but that was in the Pinochet years, and when they replaced his philosophy teacher with one of Pinochet’s generals, Leo caused a stink that landed him in jail for a little while. When he got out, he decided to study radio and TV production. In the early ’90s, he heard that Kevin Costner was going to film the movie Rapa Nui here, and that there might be a job for him if he learned English, so he taught himself the language in a few weeks by watching a lot of movies with subtitles.

Leo picked us up in a bouncy little truck. He was smoking a pack of Marlboros that had a warning on the cellophane, a picture of a man dying of cancer who looked uncannily like Pinochet with the words “Smoking will kill you” printed on it, and that’s why he’d bought the pack – because he liked the idea that smoking might kill Pinochet (who, in fact, was already dead). He said going to school in Santiago back in those days was like living in Nazi Germany, with tanks on the street and soldiers spraying machine-gun fire into crowds and not caring who got shot. As a younger man, he used to like to eat peyote and LSD and San Pedro cactus seeds; these days he smokes marijuana pretty much all day long. In fact, he told us he once got high with Kevin Costner, but the man who dances with wolves apparently bugs out and has to lie down after he dances with joints.

According to Leo, there are two kinds of pot on the island, pito moke, which translates as “small weed,” and petardo moke, which is “the good stuff.” It’s a hybrid of the myriad South American strains that have been coming over from the mainland since the ’60s. I don’t know whether I came during a dry season, or whether it had become so scarce that folks harvested before the plants were mature, but the bud that I saw was leafy schwag in the most basic sense of the term. 

One of the most interesting parts of our day was when we were in Ranu Raraku, a burned-out volcanic crater the size of a baseball stadium that served as the quarry where most of the statues were carved. All around us were moais in various states of completion. Some were half-formed and still imbedded in the hills; others were completed but had stalled inexplicably on their journey down the hill to the shore. It’s like a photograph of that moment when the people threw down their tools and abandoned statue carving forever, a production line frozen, a mechanism ground to a halt.

I asked Leo why they’d stopped carving statues, expecting to hear something about ecological devastation and all the other reasons that I’d read in books. Instead, he hit me with the legend.

“The tradition say that there was one woman cooking for all the workers here all day. One day, the people catch a big lobster, a big lobster, man, and don’t bring nothing for the woman. She was very angry: ‘All day I’m cooking for you and you don’t bring me a little leg of the lobster for me?’ And she use her mana and shouted at the sky. The tradition say this woman, normal woman, the cooking woman, have the power to stop the moai work. Any person have the mana or the energy to stop the moai work again.Everybody has the energy to destroy everything in the universe, and this is true, physically. An atom, you cut an atom, you make a big mistake. We knew this in the past – we didn’t exactly know about the atom, but we knew in the past that energy existed in any thing and any people.”

It had started to rain, so we ducked under a large moai stuck in the ground with his head tilted to the side and this look on his face that is almost indescribable, the way they say the Mona Lisa is indescribable with that odd smirk. No smirk on this one, just solemn, stoic, serious-as-fuckness emanating from his face. As the rain came down, the three of us huddled beneath the moai’s chin. Leo rolled a spliff and, as we passed it around, I stared out at the cliffs, the sky, the water crashing on the black volcanic rock, and I understood why the Rapa Nui used to call this place the Navel of the World. First, they believed that the rest of the world had sunk into the sea, right up until the Dutch showed up in their ships and started shooting them. But also because the island felt like you were ensconced in one of those Christmas snow globes and the sky was a dome over your head and that’s all there was. When I asked Leo what the islanders used to make of the stars, he said that they believed they were the campfires of the gods. You can imagine how comfortable it must have felt to sleep at night surrounded by so much deity. Monotheists – the Christians, Muslims and Jews with their one angry God – they deny themselves this holy blanket, and as a result, I don’t think any of them has ever had as good a night’s rest as Hotu Matua used to enjoy.

The island is covered with animal skeletons, some bleached white by the sun, others lying torched on the ground where someone poured gasoline on them and set them alight to hasten the inevitable return of molecules to the earth. It took me a while to get it, the cruel joke of fate that brought hoofed animals like horses and cows to this island and its sharp, steep, volcanic-rock coast. One wrong step and they meet the reaper. But I guess there were always bones on the cliffs here – the altars, or ahus, upon which the rows of moai stand were burial places where bodies were left to decay. Visitors from the first Dutchmen to Thor Heyerdahl in the ’60s noted the presence of human bones by the ahus. Death here has never been something to hide.

I ask Leo if they’ve ever figured out which moai was the first one carved and he tells me the legend, punctuating it with the line: “And then a German expedition came, and now it is in a museum in Berlin.” He tells us that he wishes he had enough money to visit the various museums and stake claim to the artifacts that have been stolen over the years. It’s a great idea. We laugh that maybe Michael Moore could put some money behind it and it would be called Dude, Where’s My Moai?  

It was late in the afternoon, still light out, but the moon was up and full. The place where we were going, Orongo, where the Birdman ceremonies used to be held, was closed, but none of the monuments or sites had fences around them. “Closed” just meant that the guy you were supposed to pay an admission fee to had already gone home.

Once carving moai began to fall out of vogue, the idea emerged among the Rapa Nui that perhaps the leadership of their people should be based on a contest of strength and skill. The sooty tern returned to the island at the same time every year and nested upon a small rock outcropping a mile or so offshore. It was decided that the various clans on the island would sponsor an athletic competition, and the head of the winning clan would be ariki, or chief, of the island for the year. The idea was for members of the various clans to swim out to the rock where the birds nested, through rough, shark-infested waters, and return to the island with an unbroken egg. In effect, they created their own Olympics. Moai production had all but destroyed them, so they paved a new road to power. Mana was restored to the flesh once they realized it was wasted when it was trapped in stone.

Rano Kau is one of the volcanoes that formed the island 750,000 years ago – an eruption of molten hawaiite and basalt spewed from the liquid center of the earth. Compared to the continents, this was young land. Down in the middle of the crater was a large pool of fresh water scattered throughout with marsh grass, so that its surface looked not unlike the surface of the moon that its water reflected. They say Hotu Matua was guided here by a dream that one of his priests had. I don’t believe they could have found it any other way. When you do the math, calculating the probability of a few outrigger canoes sailing from Polynesia across the Pacific and coming across a 14-mile-long island 2,500 miles away from land in any direction, the safe bet would have been on certain death.

But next to chiseling rock, survival is the ultimate skill of the Rapa Nui people. Sure, they used to eat each other for dinner, but we all do that one way or another.

We talked of the changes on the island, the fact that the Explora people (known for their lavish compounds in Patagonia) had already built a $500-a-night hotel there, the potential for exploitation, the withering of the coast, the rising global climate, the topsoil that was getting rained into the sea, the white mold that ate away at the faces of the moai, the German tourists with their sun-baked ham tans trampling over the sacred burial sites like they were Czechoslovakia. Leo said that if it gets really bad, he’s out of here.

“I’ll find another island,” he told me with the sunset at his back as he lit the half-joint we had left over from before. I don’t know why he’d want to leave, but he was insistent. “I know that there’s a bunch of Rapa Nui who took over an island in Patagonia. There are lots of islands there that people don’t want because it is too cold. In fact, they have found biological evidence – bones that they have DNA-tested – that says that Rapa Nui people went to Patagonia hundreds of years ago.”

It’s human nature to squeeze the earth dry. Conservation, green living, eating organic this or driving a hybrid that just prolongs the inevitable. Sometime down the line, we’ll be eating each other too. That’s the breaks. No U-turns on the drive to Armageddon.

The Rapa Nui people were lucky to have Hotu Matua on their side. Our prophets – Jesus, Moses and Muhammad – they don’t seem to take as personal an interest in our well-being. We could use the spiritual hand of someone who knows what it’s like to wind down a clock. I suggest we all start reading the Gospel according to John Dillinger, the bloody outlaw American apostle who knew that if you have to lose, you might as well do it with class.