"James Island" is a very small, formerly nameless island. It is a few hundred yards from Kennedy Island of PT 109 fame, firmly anchored in the middle of the endless Solomon Islands Sea.

It began in 1979, when I asked a question of my 7 foot friend, Nikolo Kuriti. I met Nikolo in Honiara, the capitol city of the Solomon Islands on Guadalcanal. We both served as advisors to the Solomon Islands Parliament. My next stop by air was to be Port Moresby, but I decided instead to accept Nikolo's invitation to go to his home first, and fly out of Gizo to PNG months later. He went on ahead to the Western Solomons when Parliament adjourned. By arrangement and short-wave radio, I took the two day sail from Guadalcanal to the very distant port & air strip village of Gizo (towards Papua New Guinea) and re-connected with Nikolo. We were now en route on a commercial vessel to Nikolo's home in the Western Province on the high, volcanic island Parana and Rarumana Village to spend the Christmas season. Nikolo's father was the "Big Man" or chief -- not by lineage, but by personal power -- of their large, lush volcanic island (8° 12' 0" South, 157° 1' 0" East), and their village was the lead village (on the coast; we fished waist deep in the lagoon and threw the caught sharks back into the water -- "their skin is too tough."). I studied and got a rudimentary understanding of their language. Rumors persisted that Japanese soldiers left over from WWII (possibly thinking the war was still on) were hiding or simply living in the bush and jungles of adjacent volcanic islands. Solomon Islanders didn't want to look.

We perused hundreds of thousands of square miles of the vast seas and dozens of distant islands in every direction, some on the horizon and some next to us. Nikolo caught my attention and pointed from the ship's bow: "Over there," he said, is an island "special to you Americans…your President Kennedy's island." Under our feet was the watery graveyard and battle site where PT-109 went down and John F. Kennedy emerged a World War II hero. Caught by surprise, I contemplated what I knew of this famous history. Intrigued, I asked Nikolo the name of the single, lone, low coral island "right next to Kennedy's."

Nikolo smiled. "That 'island,' as you call it, is much too small to have a name. It doesn't even have fruit...we don't name islands that don't have a use." A crew member, overhearing us, laughed and shouted "Hey, that's James Island!" Soon, everyone on the ship was laughing and slapping me on the back about "my" island. And, just as soon, everyone forgot about the whole thing, including me, and went back to their business. This is not, however, why the island is called "James Island" -- nor why it has that name on the local map. To continue...

A couple of weeks later it was CHRISTMAS DAY for me, the world, and the hundreds of residents of "our" village of Rarumana on Nikolo's huge, wooded island of miles of sandy beaches and perfect weather. After successions of humorous village skits (mostly put on by women for men's entertainment ) pretending to saw WWII bombs in half and making out like hiding Japanese soldiers (still thought to be a threat), Nikolo and I and a few friends harvested wild sprouting coconuts (you find them on the ground, trying to implant themselves after dropping) to sell later that day, as seeds, at the port city over the horizon (Gizo). We carefully piled and tied down the delicate, tentacled coconuts in the hold of Nikolo's small, open motorboat. Our friends eagerly climbed on board to the point of overloading (Solomon Islanders love certain things, such as Americans, chewing betel nut, and drinking beer; plus Nikolo was their leader). They tagged along with us to drink the beer we would purchase at Port Gizo with the proceeds of our sprouting coconuts (actually, our real reason for going at all, and virtually, our only need for money except fuel). With Nikolo in command, we set course across the great sea to the distant destination.

On the way, a tropical storm erupted. They come and go, but this one was different. Land was not visible in any direction. The sky darkened with an unsettling quickness, the blue sea turned black, and a worried looking Nikolo powered the boat to full throttle on a bee line to Gizo. High winds began tossing us like toys, high waves began battering us, and the rain and waves began filling our small boat like a bottle. Trying to steer in any direction became useless. Nikolo cut power and we tossed and floated just as the surfaced junk of the vintage Japanese and American ship wrecks below us. We found our little boat's entry into the normal avenue of calm and commerce was not exempt from calamity, not even for locals, not even for Christmas.

It was dark. We could hardly see each other. Bolts of lightning, giant in effect and incessant in staccato, erupted the massive sky and sucked out of us any feeling we were alive or had meaning. The blows to our heads and pains to our eardrums were small price to pay to remind us we lived. We heard our own death cries, but not each others'; our freezing saturation, our disorientation, our despondency gave us no more than unkind winds, rains, thunderclaps and thrashings -- and a sinking boat. We knew the worst was about us when, suddenly, everything stopped. No movement, and everything was dead in its tracks but the heavenly onslaught of concrete walls and high voltage rain. In stopping, we were somehow saved, deep in the middle of one of earth's most unbounded, unforgiving seas. In a miracle of Christmas Day, against a million odds...in the middle of one hundred million acres of bare open water, we found ourselves beached on the South Pacific's most beautiful beach, a beach heretofore untouched, the pristine, sandy beach of James Island.

In the frenzied torrential rain of the safe ground, Nikolo directed us to scramble for shelter under the scrub brush. I remembered the seeds and instead ran back to our water-filled boat and grabbed three sprouting coconuts. An unbelieving Nikolo and the others watched as the unpredictable American (me) ran towards them, and then past them, eschewing the shelter (which was useless anyway) to jog the perimeter of the island. With single-minded purpose I accepted the torrents as needed water, and planted one nut each at what I determined to be the island's three corners. In the downpour, this crazy American meticulously dug three deep holes, and melted into each a vibrant and beautiful, green and ready sprouting coconut -- one each for the Kennedy brothers who died, shouting above the din: "This one's for Joe!"…"This one's for Bobby!"..."This one's for John!" I could not hear my friends, but I could see them, especially Nikolo looking on and dying; not this time by drowning, cold, and exposure, but dying by great laughter -- and by great approval that the bizarre stories about Americans were true. After they all punched me around for being so (epithet deleted), we got the boat, bailed it, and started it. We went to Gizo and accomplished our mission, and returned home by way of a beautiful Christmas night moonlit sail. It was a good day.

The seeds took deep root in the neglected, rich sand. To this day, my friend Nikolo Kuriti of Rarumana tells visitors the story of how 'James Island,' just over the horizon and next to Kennedy's, got its name. Now, on Christmas day, the women of the village have another skit. This one makes fun of Americans. It also teaches as an oral tradition how a once "useless" island became a source of wealth in a number of ways, and that it now has a nice triangular stand of high yield coconut trees -- regularly harvested on behalf of its first "surveyor" and given as tribute to the people of Rarumana as an emblem of the old turned into the new, a new kind of Christmas tree.