Jul 5 - Up at 4:30 to get some breakfast. Enjoy the last few moments of peace beneath rustling palms and distant crash of surf. A pickup truck is used to transport one load of people, and we go to the dodgy SUV with Nona. Her three-year-old child spots us leaving the car park and cries out from his bedroom. He races downstairs, gets in the back seat with Janet and Odette, and falls asleep.
It takes a while to get to the airport. We are almost there when the car dies, prompting a quick calculation of walking distance and time to decide if it is physically possible to get to the flight. If we don’t make this one, we would have to wait a week. Start out walking with the packs, but after five minutes Nona manages to get the car started and catches up with us.
There is only one ticketing counter at the tiny airport, the one for Fiji Airways. The security check is a torture, as none of their (new) equipment is operational so they have to sort through everything in our bags by hand. It is the longest security check of the trip. The departure lounge is already hot and stuffy at 6:00.
The flight lands (the only plane on the tarmac besides a tiny two-seater parked in the corner). Everyone disembarks but we sit for an hour waiting to go out there. There is an airport worker standing out there whose job seems to be kicking crabs away from the plane.
Talk with a Canadian who has been here for the last two years. I assume he is French Canadian but he scoffs at this dismissively. No! I am from Calgary!
We talk about the atomic testing on Kiritimati.
The testing began during the British occupation of the island in four series in 1957-58. The program was called Operation Grapple. These tests were explosions in the air, either suspended by balloons over the southeast corner of the island, or offshore. Though the British government claimed that the island was uninhabited (for the purposes of assuaging the public), there were a number of permanent inhabitants who had immigrated from further west in Kiribati. The testing was rather traumatic for them; bright flashes, sirens, long-term health effects. According to the Canadian, some of the anchor platforms for the balloons are still there.
The island was then turned over to the US, who conducted even more tests in 1962, immediately after the 1958-61 atomic testing moratorium expired. The program was called Operation Dominic, and consisted of 29 bombs air-dropped from B-52’s over the southern edge of the island.
Finally board the aircraft. The passengers already on board (from Fiji) tell us that the security team was really taking seats apart searching for something or the other, thus the delay in boarding. Uneventful flight to Honolulu over the endless Pacific.
