Today’s the day me and my big giant head set off for Easter Island, or as I prefer to call it, Rapa Nui. Or at least, I THOUGHT that’s what I should call it. Googling the Wikipedia entry on Easter Island provides background on the name for this island, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world:
Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen came across the island on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722., and christened the place “Easter Island.” Since that time, efforts to track down the indigenous original name have proved inconclusive and contradictory. A French ethnologist thinks the loose translation is “Navel of the World” and the phrase Rapa Nui was coined after the slave raids of 1860s, though some researchers cite Rapa as the original name for the place. Winston Churchill actually asked what the place was called originally and was apparently unable to suss out the Polynesian name and concluded there may not have been one.
For centuries inhabitants thought of themselves as the only land mass on earth, the only people in the world, surrounded as they were by neverending seas as far as the horizon. An unprecedented era of peace and social prosperity ensued but sadly after close to a millennia, there was a breakdown in community. Factions arose, partly due to now overly consumed and limited natural resources, partly due to a rise in power dynamics. Many view the island culture as a microcosm of our own global issues and concerns… given how things played out for the indigenous people, their land over-populated and over-used to the brink of extinction and chaos, one has to hope that we can George Santayana this and learn from our past so we do not repeat it in our future.
Easter Island, with its Moai giant heads and unique cultural development, has long been a dream destination for me. And in a few short hours, I will be winging my way there… not just to see it, but to run a marathon there.
The mind boggles at what the Rapa Nui-ans and Jacob Roggeveen would think of me flying to the island to run 26.2 miles on it. Heck, I’m astonished and amazed and I kinda, sorta know what I’m doing!
O brave new world,
That has such people in ‘t!”
—The Tempest, Act V, scene i