I'll Follow the Sun

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Other assignments took him to the fringes of archipelagoes to bring back tales from a South Pacific undiscovered by Club Med. Like the time he teetered on the 'rim of creation' for a story about Yasur, Vanuatu's belching and spewing volcano, or canvassed Guadalcanal-still haunted by 'the overpowering force of a thousand ghosts'-and found Aaron Kumana, one of the guardian angels who came to John F. Kennedy's rescue after his PT 109 crew was sunk off Plum Pudding Island.

Gravelle's employers have even condoned drinking on the job, provided he didn't down so much kava that he couldn't get the details straight later. Besides, partaking of the grog bowl is only the polite thing to do when socializing with Pacific Islanders, who tend to drink Gravelle under the tapa mat at these sessions. 'Soon after the sixth or seventh bilo (cup), my nose bumped the dirt,' he writes about one such evening in far-flung Rotuma, Fiji's answer to the Emerald City.

Born in northern Michigan, Gravelle grew up knowing that 'if I ever had a chance to forgo shoveling snow, I would.' His first signs of wanderlust came at age 19, when he spent six months motorcycling across Europe, surviving on wild lemons in tight times.

Back in the States, Gravelle and his new wife headed to Oregon, where he flirted with yuppiedom while working as a journalist. The familiar rhythms of the nine-to-five seduced him for several years until divorce nudged him to break out the passport again. This time he chose the balmy South Seas as his next port of call.

But Gravelle's Pacific odyssey didn't start so well. He set off for New Zealand, lured by visions of an exotic Polynesian heritage. Auckland's urban pace and chilly breezes didn't live up, so he skipped to Tasmania, where he lucked into a job on a lobster boat. That romance, however, faded just as quickly. 'Outside the harbor, it didn't take but 20 minutes before I realized I'd made a dreadful error,' recalls Gravelle, flashing back to the unforgiving waters of the Southern Ocean. 'It got to the point where I was lying on the deck, and I thought, if they just roll me off into the sea, I don't care.

Feet firmly planted on soil, Gravelle set his compass for Darwin, the hottest and driest spot he could think of, and after that made his way to Melbourne, where he started writing for an oil-industry magazine. The publication sent him to Papua New Guinea for a story on oil exploration in the Gulf of Papua. 'They stuck me in a helicopter, took me 300 to 400 miles somewhere, dropped me off on a riverbank, and there was a long canoe waiting with men to paddle it,' remembers Gravelle. 'We started up the river, and crocodiles were slipping off the bank and pythons were hanging out over the river.'

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