End Time in the Sunshine

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She didn't buy a word of it. She told me the seventh Nauruan president in three years had been forced out, and though she would ask the new one, Bernard Dowiyogo, about my request, she was fairly certain it wouldn't work out. On a subsequent phone call, she told me that under no circumstances would I be permitted on the island.

I booked a flight at once.

On board the plane to Nauru-Air Nauru's only aircraft-I began to get a deeper sense of the country's desperation. The flight was full, mainly of Nauruans and a few Aussies. The back third of the plane's seats were taken over by huge crates. Nothing is made in Nauru, so everything must be flown or shipped in-which, given the failure rate of the island's desalination plant, includes even water. Soon after arriving and checking in to the island's only hotel, I decided I would walk up the road about two miles to a knot of a dozen or so official buildings, which locals grandly call the 'capital city.' It's as if everyone on the island has decided to play a child's game called 'nation-state.' The country is ringed by a single circular paved road, so nothing's hard to find. On the way, I passed the Nauruan golf course, which must rank as one of the world's oddest. Because of the drought, there is no grass on the nine holes. The course is an enormous rectangular sand trap marked by a few struggling trees. But, then, all the trees on the island were struggling. The shore was lined with the usual tall palms, but many of the trees were obviously moribund from drought-coconutless, frondless, slightly obscene poles curving upward to a pale blister against a paler sky.

In the late-19th-century heyday of colonialism, when every European nation with a boat charged open-throttle to the Pacific to claim tiny islands, Germany was the first to put its boot on Nauru's shore. According to island legend, an early colonial officer noted a rock being used as a doorstop and realized that it was made of pure phosphate, a valuable ingredient in fertilizer. Right away the Germans built a small-gauge railroad into Nauru's interior and began carrying off, shipload by shipload, the island's soil.

Australia later seized the island, and during World War II the Japanese conquered it easily and moved the Nauruans to a Micronesian island north of New Guinea called Chuuk. At one point during the Chuuk exile, a Japanese commander asked the leader of Nauru to kindly send out some Nauruan girls to work as 'tea mistresses' aboard his ship. The leader replied that the commander would have to cut his throat first. The Japanese found their tea mistresses elsewhere. This proud moment, when Nauru's leader defended his people's virtue, is a story that still gets told more than half a century later. Maybe because it's the last time it happened.

After the war, Australia restarted the mining operation and earned enormous profits before the island managed to achieve independence in 1968 and take control of its finances. The Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust raked in the cash over the subsequent decades. Health care and education were guaranteed for Nauruans. The quality of life, from a Western perspective, soared. Cars, electrical appliances, air-conditioning, and imports of every kind were available to nearly all. The Chinese arrived to provide backup labor. In the early '90s the trust had an estimated principal of $800 million, making Nauru, per capita, one of the richest countries in the world. Nauru's leaders made some smart investments and became absentee landlords for luxury apartments in Australia and the United States.

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