The Island of the Colorblind

By sunrise, we were back at the airport, settling in for the long flight on the ‘Island Hopper,’ which calls twice a week at a handful of Pacific islands. Bob, jet-lagged, wedged himself in his seat for more sleep. Knut, dark-glassed already, took out his magnifying glass and began to pore over our bible for this trip – the admirable Micronesia Handbook, with its brilliant, sharp descriptions of the islands that awaited us. I was restless, and decided to keep a journal of the flight:

An hour and a quarter has passed, and we are steadily flying, at 27,000 feet, over the trackless vastness of the Pacific. No ships, no planes, no land, no boundaries, nothing – only the limitless blue of sky and ocean, fusing at times into a single blue bowl. This featureless, cloudless vastness is a great relief, and reverie-inducing – but, like sensory deprivation, somewhat terrifying, too. The Vast thrills, as well as terrifies – it was well called by Kant ‘the terrifying Sublime.’

After almost a thousand miles, we at last saw land – a tiny, exquisite atoll on the horizon. Johnston Island! I had seen it as a dot on the map and thought, ‘What an idyllic place, thousands of miles from anywhere.’ As we descended it looked less exquisite: a huge runway bisected the island, and to either side of this were storage bins, chimneys, and towers: eyeless buildings, all enveloped in an orange-red haze…my idyll, my little paradise, looked like a realm of hell.

Landing was rough, and frightening. There was a loud grinding noise and a squeal of rubber as the whole plane veered suddenly to one side. As we skewed to a halt on the tarmac, the crew informed us that the brakes had locked and we had torn much of the rubber off the tires on the left – we would have to wait here for repairs. A bit shaken from the landing, and cramped from hours in the air, we longed to get off the plane and stroll around a bit. A stair was pushed up to the plane, with ‘Welcome to Johnston Atoll’ written on it. One or two passengers started to descend, but when we tried to follow, we were told that Johnston atoll was ‘restricted’ and that non-military passengers were not allowed to disembark. Frustrated, I returned to my seat and borrowed the Micronesia Handbook from Knut, to read about Johnston.

It was named, I read, by a Captain Johnston of the HMS Cornwallis, who landed here in 1807 – the first human being, perhaps, ever to set foot on this tiny and isolated spot. I wondered if it had somehow escaped being seen altogether before this, or whether perhaps it had been visited, but never inhabited.

Johnston, considered valuable for its rich deposits of guano, was claimed by both the United States and the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1856. Migratory fowl stop here by the hundreds of thousands, and in 1926 the island was designated a federal bird reserve. After the Second World War it was acquired by the U.S. Air Force, and ‘since then,’ I read, ‘the U.S. military has converted this formerly idyllic atoll into one of the most toxic places in the Pacific.’ It was used during the 1950s and ‘60s for nuclear testing, and is still maintained as a standby test site; one end of the atoll remains radioactive. It was briefly considered as a test site for biological weapons, but this was precluded by the huge population of migratory birds, which, it was realized, might easily carry lethal infections back to the mainland. In 1971 Johnston became a depot for thousands of tons of mustard and nerve gases, which are periodically incinerated, releasing dioxin and furan into the air (perhaps this was the reason for the cinnamon haze I had seen from above). All personnel on the island are required to have their gas masks ready. Sitting in the now-stuffy plane as I read this – our ventilation had been shut off while we were on the ground – I felt a prickling in my throat, a tightness in my chest, and wondered if I was breathing some of Johnston’s lethal air. The ‘Welcome’ sign now seemed blackly ironic; it should at least have had a skull and crossbones added. The crew members themselves, it seemed to me, grew more uneasy and restless by the minute; they could hardly wait, I thought, to shut the door and take off again.