What a strange little place.

Well, I have been here three weeks. I definitely have a bunch of thoughts about life here on Kwajalein.

First, let me just say that I will not put a bunch of pictures in here until I go through all the rules with someone high up in the garrison, because I don’t want to get chucked off the island for posting the wrong picture or saying the wrong thing.

So, not too many visuals on this one…

Kwajalein is a tiny little island on a tiny little atoll in the vast and gigantic Pacific Ocean. It feels strange on the island because it is so easy to forget this fact. we go about our days, and we really don’t think all that often about how tenuous a grip we actually have on this tiny little coral lifeboat in the middle of nowhere (I guess for some people it may sit heavily on the mind to think about it too much).

I am not sure why, but I don’t suffer from either claustrophobia or agoraphobia here (or any other island fever type of thoughts for that matter).

If you haven’t been on any of these atolls in the Pacific, you probably don’t understand what I am talking about. Our little island is just under one and a quarter square miles in size, and is part of a total of less than six square miles of land that makes up the entire atoll. And, this whole thing sits in the middle of the nearly sixty four million square miles of the Pacific Ocean.

And the highest point above sea level is six feet…

It really redefines the idea of “small”.

It is really hard to capture these atolls, and the scale of them, from an airplane window, but it should give some sense of scale….

So far I think we like it here!

First thing is the place:

Almost everything here was built in the period of time between WWII and the 1970’s, and upgraded and remodeled along the way to accommodate the technological infrastructure that the government maintains here, like a bunch of funny-looking buildings and domes and things that I can’t take pictures of (more on this later after I learn what I can actually say about this stuff). The upshot of this is that everything here is kind of coming apart at the seams, and it must be a nightmare to maintain everything in this corrosive salt environment.

Stuff rusts.

A lot.

And what doesn’t rust just kind of dissolves over time.

Yes. Even our bikes are barely maintainable, and somewhere in the process of dissolving even as we ride them (don’t even think about caliper brakes or multi-speed bikes. That stuff corrodes up solid and stops working in the first week).

From the street, the hospital looks like all the rest of the buildings here, but on the inside it reminds me of the tours I have taken through 1950’s era submarines.

But with a little less headroom.

Our rooms are actually pretty nice. The island exists in an epic and eternal battle with that rust and mold, but they do a pretty decent job of keeping that at bay with good exhaust ventilation and air conditioning in the rooms. The BQ’s (bachelor’s quarters) are actually pretty comfortable studio units. We each have one, so we use one for a bedroom, and the other for the living room. We were laughing the other day that the rooms remind us exactly of the rooms our mothers have at their old-folks homes, and with about the same amount of planned activities available on any given day.

Meaning, yeah, a lot of activities.

Some examples of, first, community activities:

Volleyball tournaments (season just ended).

Baseball, softball, basketball, and any of those other ball sports that ballers have a ball playing.

We just signed up our team from the hospital to play in the inner tube water polo league. Yup. It is exactly as it sounds. Remember those crazy, raw rashes you used to get as a kid paddling your inner tubes down the river back home? I see the same thing here.

I will let you know.

There are other outdoor activities and indoor activities too:

Free golf.

Boats to take out and spend the day on (both sailboats and power boats).

A library (and not too bad of one at that).

A ceramics and woodworking shop.

The adult recreation center (no, you pervert, it is not that kind of adult recreation), with pinball, ping pong, air hockey, and pool.

Oh, yeah, and there are two pools. There is one for families and another only for adults (the first one is probably about eleven percent urine, and the second one at least twelve percent beer).

And there are a whole bunch of non-community events also:

Snorkeling (and diving). And it is fucking fantastic here. Like, just, wow! It’s like being in an aquarium. But like a really big one that is really clean, with clear water, and sharks (my favorite), and eagle rays, and turtles, and giant mantas (my other favorite), and all sorts of other beautiful fishy type critters.

Surf!

So far we have only seen some small stuff, but surf season doesn’t really hit until May through October. I personally can’t wait for this one. I see the potential for great waves to come with the South swells here, and on some neighboring islands.

Kiteboarding!

We have had a couple of really fun sessions. There are a few spots to kite here on the island, and several others accessible by boat. So far it has been amazing, with warm water and twenty to thirty knot winds all day every day. Tam is not the biggest fan of a couple of the launches though… a bit tricky.

The rest of the island — the living, kind of day-to-day stuff is so strange. We can only really describe it as “Leave It To Beaver” meets “Pleasantville” meets “lost”. The people here are the friendliest folks. It feels like what I imagine small-town 1950’s in the midwest must have been like. Everyone waves and says hello when you pass on the streets (on bikes, because that is the only way to get around here — no cars), and we all stop to talk so much that, some days, it’s a bit difficult to get where you are going. The streets are all paved, and the lawns and fields are all manicured and landscaped and perfect. Right now everyone has the craziest Christmas decorations in their yards. Imagine South Florida Jimmy Buffet yard design meets South-Pacific Island drunk-sailor-nautical motif, and that pretty well describes it here (my favorite is the psychedelic, light up, five foot tall inflatable octopus with Santa Claus behind him hanging upside down from the roof by his underwear).

And palm trees everywhere.

The official community Christmas tree is a fifty-foot tall palm tree with lights spiraling all the way up to the fronds at the very top. In red and green of course. They just had a great parade and tree lighting event last week.

The “Lost” part of it comes in when you look around and realize that there are top-secret buildings and strange-looking structures all over the place. It definitely feels surreal most of the time. I have never been in the military, but this is a US Army Garrison, and there is a military feel to it. There are, however, very few uniformed-up military personnel in sight. Mostly it is just us civilian contractors, some rocket scientists, MIT and DARPA folks, and a bunch of construction workers and local Marshallese people during the day (strangely, all of the Marshallese folks need to go back to their homes on Ebye — the next island over — at the end of the workday).

There are not many outdoorsy folks around here (I am definitely the only person riding a unicycle around here… ever), and very few people out in the water. It is so strange to see the paradise this island sits in, but see so few people taking advantage of the water and the surroundings. Sure, some people scuba dive, but there are only about five kiteboarders out here, and maybe ten surfers (I’m not complaining. It is not crowded).

Mostly people just work, eat, and — when that is over — drink.

We eat at the DFac (dining facility). Lets just say it is hit and miss… Three days the food will be pretty good, and the next, well, the hermit crabs get the leftovers. There is always an amazing salad bar with a great variety of super fresh vegetables and extras. Honestly, I guess I would have to say it is mostly pretty decent. And there is a lot of variety. It is strange though, because so much of our day is scheduled around meal times (kind of like our mom’s old folks homes again).

This was Thanksgiving day lunch from the chow hall. It wasn’t too bad!

This is the spot that Tam and I sit pretty much every evening after dinner. We take some meaty leftovers and feed our little crabby hermit crab friends, and hundreds of them come crawling all over whatever we set out for them. I think we may be missing the dogs a little bit…

The weather is always perfect for sitting on those two little blue wooden chairs out there on the edge of the reef and feeding our little buddies. The temperature is always about eighty degrees, and there is constantly a nice breeze (wind) off the ocean to keep us comfortable.

It is pretty great.

Because it is a combination of these wildly different components: Marshallese people, military, and civilian contracting companies, sometimes getting anything accomplished can be a trying exercise in patience. It took us three weeks just to get our housing sorted out, and we are still waiting on all of our belongings to arrive by container ship. There is a very “island time” mentality to the Marshallese way (which I love), and an exasperating slowness to the contractor and federal side of things. If we lean into it it drives us a bit crazy, but once we started to go along with — and embrace — the “Kwaj Way”, everything just sort of settles down and you go about your day with a slightly baffled grin on your face.

Its actually pretty damned cool.

I have more to write about… about the job, and the place, and the “Kwaj Way”, but I need to get some permissions, and I need to try to include some other photos soon (as soon as I know what I can and can’t take pictures of). But these things will have to wait a bit, so I guess we will too.

One more picture.

This is the surf end of the island. No waves this day, but it is gorgeous out here.

More to come…