Chapter 3 DRAFT 2.0

A Chapter by F. Mary Jesson

Chapter 3

The Midway Way

Midway had been occupied continuously since the turn of the 20th century when the Pacific Cable Company built homes for its workers, the Cable Houses, with two story verandahs and tall windows to coax in cool ocean breezes. During the Cold War, Midway’s several thousand inhabitants, among other things, monitored Soviet submarines with hundreds of radio antenna and an under water “listening post” that could detect whale songs for miles. Navy staff and their families lived, worked, worshiped, played, went to school, were born and died on the islands. For five decades, thousands of people at any given time had called Midway home, even if temporarily. When I arrived on Midway, I was one of only 25 people populating a ghost island.

You know those apocalyptic movies where the world ends in a flash, and all of mankind is gone but for a handful of plucky survivors? The survivors wander around a place where people stopped existing in an instant, and left everything frozen in time when disaster hit. An ashtray over flowing with butts, as if they had just been snuffed out. Pens and pencils lying on a desk blotter, the user having had casually gotten up to refresh his coffee when the end came. Files half riffled through on a desk, in the middle of some project no longer necessary, no longer important.

Midway had been most recently occupied and operated, including the airfield, by Midway-Phoenix Corporation. A cooperative partner with Fish & Wildlife with the somewhat misguided idea to run the island as an eco-tourism resort, Midway-Phoenix had had a rocky relationship with Fish & Wildlife. The honeymoon didn’t last long, if there had ever even been one, and the divorce happened almost overnight. About a month or so before I arrived on Midway, Midway-Phoenix pulled it’s several hundred staff off the island, telling them they’d all be back in short order once Mom and Dad worked things out. It was as if they had all been going about their normal workaday lives, and were told to stand up, walk calmly to the exits and board a plane for the mainland. Well, Mom and Dad didn’t kiss and make-up, and the kiddies were never allowed to come back and pack up their rooms. Time stood still.

It was an eerie feeling, wandering around the airport terminal. The ground floor was mostly warehouses, some of them almost completely empty and echoing, others overflowing with stock, supplies, bits, parts, equipment, and enough toilet paper to last until doomsday, for reasons I’ve never sussed out. And there was an awful lot of just plain useless crap. Virtually everything that one would utilize, eat or drink has to be shipped by boat or plane to Midway. So, it stands to reason, that not much ever actually leaves Midway. Transistor radios, 5 1/4 floppy disks, 5 1/4 floppy disk drives, dot jet printers for which ink cartridges hadn’t been made in forever, brick cell phones, televisions and computer monitors, dozens of them, from the 1970’s. And that’s just the stuff I could identify based on the fact that I was born in 1968. I remember wandering one day through shelves and shelves of parts to what, for all I knew, was a trebuchet siege engine.

It all makes for some quality five-finger discount. Scavenging, scrounging and squatting were our way of life. The Midway Way. You need a place to live? Just be the first one in the best place you can find and you have home-sweet-home. No microwave? No TV? No couch? No problem. Go harvest one of each or two of each out of a room no one is using. Or be one of the only two single females on the island, and a microwave and DVD player will materialize at your door by a hopeful suitor. Flowers be damned. I want technology.

It was amazing how quickly I learned to scavenge. I spent the first couple of days wandering around my ridiculously huge terminal looking for something trivial, like a pencil or pad of paper, and inevitably ended up with an armload of stuff. “Ooh, I need one of those.” “Hey, I could use that.” “An extension cord " Score!”

I also learned pretty quickly that to improvise was the only way to get anything done. There were hundreds of printers in the terminal, every one different, all using different types of ink in limited supply. I would use one type of printer until I couldn’t find any more ink cartridges, then hook up another, and another, and another.

When the FAA ordered us to paint four 10 feet by 10 feet yellow X’s to mark the closed runway, we scrounged for yellow paint and calculated only enough on island for about a quarter of the job. The X’s also had to be outlined in black and there was no black paint on the island at all. The nearest Home Depot was 1,200 miles away, so I sent my staff to the storerooms with one instruction " figure something out. What they came back with was ingenious. They found plenty of tar to use in place of the black paint. Then they’d prime the X’s with a light greenish color of which there was plenty. They’d use what yellow paint we had on hand and make the rest we needed by crushing yellow bricks into white paint.

There was a bone yard with dozens of old broken down golf carts, a few automobiles or trucks and got know what else. Ingenious mechanics and other staff harvested bits and pieces to keep the island running when the supply plane was weeks away, and didn't have enough hold to bring everything we might need, anyway. It's amazing how quickly you can get used to crap and be happy about. But that's the Midway Way.

Cooking With Sak

There is no fresh water on Midway. All water for all aspects of human habitation was “made” by a perpetually smiling Thai national named Sak. Sak was the closest thing to a Midway native, having made it his home for over 20 years by the time I came ashore. Even before the Navy decommissioned the base, they had employed Thai civilians. When Midway-Phoenix was there, they employed almost all Thai civilians and Sak had stayed on. He was the only person on the island while I was there who had been there that long continuously. He had done just about every job a skilled laborer could do, but had finally become indispensable to us by making our water.

All fresh water on Midway comes from rain run-off of the airport’s runways and taxiway. It’s obvious why, the airfield is flat and comprises over half the available landmass, perfect for collecting rainwater. The run-off collects and is moved through a series of underground covered sand filtering chambers until finally Sak would add chlorine and god only knew what other chemicals to clean it up for at least bathing and washing dishes. It was supposedly and technically safe to drink, but you wouldn’t want to do anything more than brush your teeth with it. There were times the water was so heavily chlorinated that my bathroom smelled like an indoor pool, and my hair and skin dried out as if I were Esther William's stand-in.

We got our drinking water from a reverse osmosis system. A large capacity system was set up that could produce enough good water for 70 people per day and was rigged with a garden hose to make filling up easy and quick. With less than 30 people on island, we never ran out. We each had a cache of several dozen two liter plastic bottles, and every couple of weeks, you’d make a trip to machine to fill up. It was fun. I came to really understand the "village well" analogy. You'd run into one of your island-mates, shoot the s**t while you waited your turn, exchange maybe some gossip.

Smokers, Tattoos, Chipped Teeth, and Sarongs

My initial glimpses and encounters with my island mates stopped me dead, wondering what I had gotten myself into. It didn't take long for me to see that I had no common ground with anyone I would be sharing this tiny clod of land with. The folks I met in the first couple of days were a rag tag group who’d already been on island a month or so and had taken on the distinct air of the shipwrecked.

D.P. was the first one I met, if you can call it a meeting. He was a great big, 300 plus pounds, 19-year old of Samoan and German descent. He had heavy brows, swarthy complexion, overtly active middle fingers that expressed everything from hello to f**k-off, and a tribal tattoo on his upper arm. I saw him for the first time on my first morning on island as I was heading for breakfast at the Clipper House, the old restaurant from the resort days. D.P. came stomping down the steps of the kitchen wearing orange flip flops, a ratty thread bare t-shirt, an orange flowery sarong tied about his waste, and a long Rastafarian wig. He said not a word to me, but scowled and plodded past me, his sandals flipping away and kicking up sand. He scared the s**t out of me. He looked like he might break me in two with his bare hands for the fun of it. I decided I’d better give him a wide berth.

About 30 minutes after my encounter with D.P., I met Danny. Danny was in his mid-twenties, leanly muscular, completely free of body fat, and tan with a closely shaved head. The tattooed icon of a saint in the Orthodox style stretched from his inner left bicep down to his wrist, complete with crucifixes, halo, a bible, and Cyrillic writing. When he smiled, I saw a chipped front tooth probably damaged in a bar brawl, and his eyes glinted in a way that made me think the only thing saintly about Danny was his ink. When I met him, I was sitting in a low deck chair on the porch of the Clipper House, sipping coffee and working on my laptop. Danny strolled out to introduce himself, and welcome me to Midway.

"A bunch of us are meeting down at the cargo pier later if you want to go swimming or snorkeling or whatever. " He said.

"Uh. Ok."

He was wearing nothing but loose, well-worn and slightly stained army-green cargo shorts, slung low on his hips. His bare feet and shins were sandy and from where he stood and I sat, I was eye level with his belly button. I was unnerved. He was cordial, polite, and friendly in the way I'd expect a well-bread eighteenth century pirate to be. Between him and D.P., I felt like a babe in the woods.

I don't remember when I first met Jerry, or my first impression of him. But I soon found out that Jerry said the word f**k more often than anyone I’ve ever known before or since. It was his all-purpose verb, noun, adjective, adverb, oath and exclamation. I once made an effort to count how many times he said it during one short life-story. I lost count around 26 after only about four minutes. He doubled as the tug oat captain and auto mechanic. Most days, Jerry looked as though he’d climbed out of either a shallow grave or the bottom of a waste oil drum, or some combination of the two. He smoked like a chimney. He was about the same age as me. But, very unlike me, had spent most of his adult life crisscrossing the ocean on tugboats pulling barges to far reaches and tiny islands. He had hammerhead shark tattoo on his right forearm and an unfinished joker on his right upper arm. He had light hair and a ruddy complexion that looked more permanently burned than tan from days upon end spent in the Pacific sun.

Joel always had the faint scent of jet fuel about him because he ran the fuel farm and saw to the storage of about 100,000 gallons of the stuff. He was tall, big and broad. He shaved his head bald rather than sport a big recede, but made up for it with an impressive nearly black goatee that he let grow over several months to at least 10 inches. It was so long that it blew sideways in the wind, and when he first realized this, he told us about it later that day at dinner, giggling cheerfully. He and Jerry were two peas in a pod and generally where one was, the other was nearby. Joel, like Jerry and most everyone else except me, smoked like a chimney. He liked his Jim Beam with ice, no water. He had the look of a bouncer at a rough dive, but was so ticklish that merely pointing my finger at him with a threat to poke his arm him could send him into girlish giggles.

It took only days for me to see that for the first time in my life, being “the other” now meant something completely different. I had never fit in with most people because I am generally aloof and stand-offish. I never ran with the popular kids in school, or the popular adults once I was out of school. I didn't know how to relate to most people even if they were my own age and from a similar, middle to upper class background. On Midway, I was “the other” all right but this was a completely different kind of other. There were only about 25 or so of us on island, and there's something to be said being out of your element. It can bring things out of you you didn't even know were there.

I began to spend most of my non-working hours with this rough lot. They were different from me, no doubt. They came from very different backgrounds, and until we were all thrown together on Midway, we really didn’t have much in common and our paths would have never crossed. Or more accurately, if I had walked into a saloon to see them sitting at the bar, I’d have turned and walked out as fast as I could. All we had in common now was where we were, and that was enough.

Jerry, Joel and I established a routine. We all worked a regular 5-day workweek and every day at quitting time, met up at the Captain Brooks Tavern. Midway-Phoenix had built the Tavern for their resort guests and named it honor of Midway’s discoverer. It was bungalow-like, with an open-timber ceiling painted white, tile floor, and tall windows around three sides to take in the best view of the beach and lagoon. With Midway-Phoenix departed and the resort closed, though, for us the Tavern meant no cover charge, no rope line, no bouncer, no VIP list, no bartender, no menu, and no prices. We stocked the bar a couple times a week from the island central storehouse, and all of it was gratis. Whatever Midway-Phoenix had left behind became the possession of Fish & Wildlife and they, Fish & Wildlife, had no desire to be resort operators. Room, board and all the leftover alcohol were part of the contract.

Jerry and Joel would head straight to the Tavern each day, covered in whatever dirt, mud, oil, fuel, sweat and general grime they’d picked up at work. I wasn’t so bold. I’d take a quick shower, leave my hair wet, don clean clothes and be sitting with them at the bar by 5:20. It was completely self-serve. We mixed our own drinks, from the limited supply of mixers, grabbed our own beers, washed our own glasses, brought our own music, and cleaned up at the end of the night. We all worried that one day we’d return to the real of the world and get thrown out of a bar for trying to head straight behind the bar and help ourselves.

Jerry, Joel and I were there every night. We were the regulars in our own sitcom, with others drifting in and out now and then, but none were fixtures like Jerry, Joel and me. We’d laugh our asses off, tell stories about our lives pre-Midway and recount our strange days on Midway. We boomed rock and roll on my CD player and if Joel brought his SonVolt tape, he'd dance by himself.

DP and Danny often joined us. DP turned out to have a giggle that belied his size, preferential scowl and active middle fingers. If you stared at him too long he’d collapse into the giggles that made sweat bead up on his brow and the rest of us chortling right along with him. Even though DP had scared the crap out of me that first day, he, in fact, was deferential of woman to the point that I could scare him. He had four older sisters who’d taught him never to mess with a woman.

He was bold and brash and sometimes uncouth with the men of Midway, but he treated me with respect, decency and near chivalry.

Danny, I soon discovered, was wild and a wildcard. He was a wildcard because he sometimes kept to himself, but whenever he came around, he was fun and funny and goodhearted, but he enjoyed thumbing his nose at authority. And the authority on Midway was the Refuge Manager. He and Danny did not get along, and that contributed to Danny being permanently banned from Midway after only a few months. I think the last straw was when Danny peed off the cargo pier.

The Refuge Manager was bristly guy named Tim. Tim was in all honesty an ok guy who took his job, protecting endangered species, seriously, and ended up straddled with an airfield and it’s sometimes hard to control contractors. I’m sure Tim spent far more time running the island instead of the refuge. I could sympathize with him, but from the other perspective. I took my job seriously, too. My job, though, was to make sure airplanes could land and take off safely on an island with over three million birds. A few years after my time on Midway, just two birds would land a plane in Hudson. With thousands of birds in the air at any given time, the success of a plane operating in or out of Midway was always a crapshoot.

Tim made no bones about the fact that he’d have liked nothing better than for all of us to leave, and our reason for being there, the airfield, to just go away. But there was a political game of chess being waged in the headquarters of FAA and Department of the Interior over Midway’s runway, with major players like Boeing and the world’s largest international airlines lobbying hard us to stay. So Tim had no choice and we all knew he didn’t like it much.

It was a little like being in no man’s land, or the western frontier. Midway is a US possession, but when you are there, you are not in the United States of America. Not as we know it, anyway. It’s not entirely correct, I suppose some lawyer would say, that there are no laws on Midway. The refuge is a legal entity, formed by regulation, but that doesn’t really give the place things like speed limits and drinking ages, and sales tax. The kinds of day-to-day laws and regulations most of us live with and take for granted. Whatever establishing regulation governed Midway put the Refuge Manager solely in charge as authority, judge, and jury and, to quote the US President at the time, deciderer. There were a lot of things that were either not allowed or that we were required to do, mostly because the Refuge Manager laid down the law. He had that authority.

Why there was a drinking age on Midway I never understood. But there was and it was 21. One of my staff, Matthew, was only 19, but that didn’t stop him trying to drink in public places. I couldn’t have cared less if he drank, so long as he didn't come to work drunk or too hung over to work. He never had. I was his boss, not his mother. What he did off-duty was his business. Except that Tim didn’t see it that way. For some reason, Tim thought that I was responsible for my staff and their actions 24 hours a day 7 days a week, whether they were on the clock or not. Tim came to my office one day and told me to talk to Matthew about his drinking. I was flabbergasted; a little insulted, and didn’t at all like the fact that Tim was effectively making up my job description on the fly. I didn’t tell Matthew to stop drinking. I just told him to not be stupid about it, to not be seen drinking, and to do these things, not for himself, but so that I could stay out of it in the future.

I didn’t count on being anyone’s mother when I went to Midway to run the airport, nor did I expect to be pressed into kitchen duty or to spend half a day collecting and disposing of hundreds of bird carcasses. But you do what you got to do.

The first few months, there was only one man to run the kitchen; cook and clean. Our cook was a particularly grotesque former Navy cook named Fred who was so poorly versed in personal or restaurant hygiene that it’s a wonder he didn’t kill us all. At least the men got off easy in that all Fred could do to them was poison them. For us few females, there was also Fred’s constant eye f*****g, which made my skin crawl. To actually call Fred a cook was a little like calling Hitler an artist. What came out of Fred’s kitchen may have started out as edible, but with his intervention, it became at best, tasteless, and at worst botulism. We invented a rating scale, the FI, or Fred Intervention, scale so we could warn each other if it was worth going to dinner at the Clipper House or popping a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s. An FI1 meant Fred had had so little hand in the food that it was worth a try. A perfect example of FI1 was easy bake cookies, the kind that come in a perforated sheet, and all Fred had to do was make sure they didn’t burn. And wash his hands. The top of the scale was FI4, which meant not just horribly tasting but quite possibly lethal.

Fred once boiled a twenty-pound prime rib roast. Although not lethal, the sacrilege alone warranted an FI4. A spaghetti meal was congealed balls of pasta overcooked to sticky mush and warmed but completely unseasoned, undoctored, unflavored canned tomato sauce. A grilled cheese sandwich was burned on the outside and still cold, un-melted cheese on the inside. Someone once caught him sneezing into mash potatoes, but he just laughed and said it would make them creamier. He served veal patties he’d dug out in frozen blocks from the back of cold storage that were left over from the Navy days. Mind you, the Navy had decommissioned the base some eight years prior. He was made to throw away all the remaining veal patties only after Danny cut one open and it was green inside. When Fred developed an oozing rash in his crotch area, he took great pleasure in displaying it to any unsuspecting male, usually as he stood there in front of whatever gruel he had cooking on the stove. The worst though, the breaking point, what got Fred literally voted off the island, was the ham.

Since Fred couldn’t cook and clean up for three meals a day seven days a week, every island inhabitant was put on rotating kitchen crews. Fred worked Monday through Friday and prepared breakfast, lunch and dinner. He’d clean up the breakfast and lunch dishes, but one of the kitchen crews would clean up after dinner. On weekends, we were on our own for breakfast and lunch, and expected to clean up our own messes. Saturday and Sunday dinners were prepared by one of the crews. On average, you cleaned the kitchen dinner mess every three days and cooked one dinner every three weekends.

We were lucky Fred’s ham hadn’t poisoned the entire island. Fred worked 6 AM to 2 PM, which meant that our dinner was left either warming on the stove or in chaffing dishes by the time we showed up after 5 PM. The ham that night had been left on the stove.

The ham was the precooked variety, so all Fred had to do was warm it through and not burn it. A relatively safe FI1. There were the obligatory sweet and mashed potatoes. Anywhere from an FI1 to FI3, depending on the sneezing factor. We all ate ham dinner that night with relative confidence we wouldn’t die hemorrhaging our internal organs through our asses.

Unfortunately, the entire clean up crew on duty that night forgot that they were on duty. It was not uncommon for one, even two members of a crew, to forget a duty night. It was unheard of for the entire crew to flake. But they did that night. Fred showed up the next morning at 6 AM to find the kitchen a mess, and that what was left of the dinner ham had sat on low burners on the stove all night long, 14 hours in what cooks, and the Health Department, call “the danger zone”.

He served it for lunch. None of us thought anything of leftover ham sandwiches, and we all ate it. It was days later when the errant kitchen crew of that night had realized they’d all failed to show up for duty and started putting two and two together. Not long after that, I was called to a secret meeting of the logistics manager, the refuge manager and a few others to try and find Fred guilty, in absentia, of being one of the grossest human beings we’d ever known. He left on the next flight out.

It wasn’t so bad, kitchen duty, after I got over the initial “You want me to do what?” moment. I remember my second or third day when the Marjan, the woman who managed the logistics, and therefore, the kitchen, told me in her matter of fact, I’m not joking way, that I and my airport staff, was expected to wash dishes. It was right there in black and white, posted on the kitchen door, my rotation schedule. I’m sure what Marjan saw were my eyes go wide and my jaw drop in stupid amazement. I hadn’t worked in kitchens since I was a teenager. I was the airport manager; didn’t she understand that? I was important, educated and had not come here to wash slop or better yet, sling it!

I didn’t say any of that, of course. It telegraphed on my face, and Marjan just shrugged, gave me a “You ain’t that special, so get over yourself” look and said everyone does it and so would I. Having kitchen duty was life altering and I have never been so grateful that someone made me do something I didn’t want to do. It is how I learned that I not only can cook, but I love to cook.

Kitchen duty, like lots of things that seem undesirable at first, could be fun if you made it fun. And drank during it. My crew, to start out, was two of my airport guys and DP. Of the four of us, I was the only one who truly understood the definition of words like clean, sanitary, hygienic and disinfected. DP was a right old slob, and I don’t think Matthew had ever set foot in any kitchen except his mother’s and certainly not to clean it. The guys just wanted to get in, do the least possible to make it look as though we’d done something, and get the hell out. One night, all the dishes and pots and pans were washed. The floor had been swept and the trash taken out. As far as the boys were concerned, we were done. As they headed for the door I started wiping down the outside of the fridge with 409. DP looked at me in abject horror as though I’d lost my mind. He made a feeble attempt to convince me that I was just going too far. This way lead to madness. I assured him he could go, I didn’t mind finishing up. But he was too afraid and respectful of a woman to do that and found something else to do while I was polishing the stainless steal. Our next rotation, I had to turn away and stifle a laugh when DP picked up the 409.

We made cleaning the kitchen fun. We played music, laughed at each other and occasionally accidentally sprayed each other with the dish hose. Life is what you make it. But it was the cooking that made the real impact on me. I could barely boil an egg when I found myself part of a crew that was expected to cook a dinner for an entire island population. Thank god DP was on our crew. The other two guys looked at me as though cooking skills came with a vagina. Yeah, not so much fellas. I lived on freezer food and take out before Midway. But DP was a good cook and saved our asses. Under his direction, we made dishes like pineapple chicken and baked fish and it was pretty gratifying that we weren’t poisoning anyone and getting compliments from our island mates.
But DP’s time on island was only a couple of months and once he left, I had the Mama’s boys with 1,000 yard stares, expecting me to transform miraculously into Martha Stewart. Thank god for the internet and my mother. There's something surreal about standing in a professional kitchen thousands of miles from anywhere on the phone with your Mom saying, "So, what do I do with the chicken, now?"