End Time in the Sunshine

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

But in that volatile decade, some extremely bad investments were made, too. Maybe you were in London in the early '90s and caught a musical based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci called Leonardo: A Portrait of Love. It was a major flop, and its primary backer was the country of Nauru. The Nauruan government officials flew themselves, their families, and their friends to London first class to catch the show. They booked the front rows of the theater for opening night, which was smart, since closing night was soon to follow. The fiasco cost $4 million.

In 1992 Nauru lost $8.5 million in a bogus scheme of 'prime bank notes,' a scam that convinced naive investors that the superrich secretly traded these notes for enormous, fast profits.

Now that the scams are over and the bubble has burst, Nauru's entire national endowment is estimated (that is, exaggerated) to be $130 million. And there is no other economy in waiting. Unlike on other tropical islands, tourism is nearly an impossibility. The beaches are raked with small razorlike coral formations, making swimming dangerous. There is no natural harbor. Even the phosphate container ships are loaded via a cantilever-piping system that reaches out into deep water. The work creates a huge phosphate cloud that often hovers just offshore, a frightening industrial phantom.

Oh, and there is one other problem-the elephant sitting in the room, and certainly the most profound explanation for Nauru's contemporary interest in money laundering: A century of phosphate mining has denuded roughly 80 percent of the island.

Early one hot morning, I wandered the island's perimeter. Most of the houses on Nauru are made of cinder blocks. The yards are squares of talc. Everyone has a car. Trash, which is apparently too expensive to export, is simply piled in yards. There is an Appalachian quality here. Few yards lack a dog, a pig, or some critter of unknown phylum.

As I walked, a car pulled over, and the driver offered me a ride. He said his name, which I couldn't understand, but he had the same eyes as a childhood friend of mine named Brian, so that is how I remember him. Brian offered to take me on a tour of the island.

For 20 minutes we drove the circumference of Nauru, stopping once in a small store to buy the only item it had for sale: processed white bread. The tour occurred in complete silence. Nothing was noted or pointed out. The eerie, persistent silence of Nauru exists because there is only one thing anyone really wants to see, and people are loath to talk about it. Brian eventually pulled up beside the giant factory where huge, stony clumps arrived from the interior to be roasted and processed into refined, powdery phosphate. 'You want to see Topside, right?' he asked, using the local nickname for the interior of the island.

Brian turned up a dirt road. As we slipped behind the outer scrim of trees, shrubs, and ground cover, all things green disappeared to reveal a sight at once both terrible and spellbinding. The road became a kind of levee laid atop a frightening expanse of pure ruination. On we drove to the very center of what's left of the interior mound of the atoll, where we could see in one sweeping view the belly of the island.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print