We came back to Rikitea to leave with the boys, and we got as far as the dock. The engine ran ten minutes and the temperature climbed without bothering to plateau. No seawater cooling. We pulled the sea strainer and found a jellyfish that had been shredded into something embarrassing. We blamed the jellyfish for the rest of the morning, but the real culprit was a heat exchanger half-blocked by years of small offenses. The fix was unglamorous and the seals needed to sit overnight. We had an unplanned day.

The plan came together in the slow way that bad ideas do. We would circumnavigate the island on foot. No one checked a map, no one checked the weather, no one looked up the distance. The island looked round enough. Provisioning, when we finally got to it, was five pounds of ice and a few six-packs of the local beer. Beer counts as food in this kind of math. The general store sat on the left, so we went clockwise. The thumbs came out for hitchhiking, which on a Pacific island is fair game. There is always a stretch of road equidistant from both ends of town where no car will ever stop, and the bigger the island, the longer that stretch. We were optimistic about ours.

The first hour was good road and good company. Chickens crossed the lane on their own schedule. A few rides came easy. We picked up a brown and white support dog who attached himself to the group and then, mid-stride, killed a chicken in mid-flight to prove his worth. He seemed disappointed by our reaction. The heat built. The kilograms in the bag became kilograms in the shoulders. Naps started happening on any horizontal surface, sometimes after the rock had been removed first, sometimes not. Clouds came in low over the ridge, and the rain began thinking about itself.

A dry porch took us in. The porch belonged to Dada, a pearl farmer in a Rodman jersey with a sleeve of tattoos and a workbench scattered with the working life of pearls and silver. We spent the rest of the daylight there learning the craft, asking too many questions, watching him bend wire into small things that took thirty seconds and looked like they took an hour. He sent us off with simple pieces he had made while we talked. Then the rain came in like a wall, with enough wind to lay a tree across the road, and Dada offered us a ride back to the boat. The 360 was a failure on paper. It was not a failure.