Daybreak in Rota is a lovely occurrence. The black sky grows purple and then a paler and paler blue as oranges and pinks streak across newly forming clouds and the hot white pinpoints of stars evaporate. The ocean is tranquil and still, calm in the mood that accompanies the first moments of waking. The island’s birds are just beginning to forage for breakfast; they swoop about lazily, sending clear, strong cries through the cool air. Every morning at dawn, Dr. Bill Peck leaves his house in Rota Village and walks four miles, through the town and out to the forest, to a vantage point by an old wartime cannon from which he can look across the bay. At the age of 83, Peck is an honorary citizen of the island; it has been his home for over a decade and Micronesia his stomping grounds since the 1950s. Peck came to the Pacific with The Bomb. “A strange way to start an odyssey!” he has written. “Though it turned me against bomb testing and bomb testers, it gave me such a profound respect for islands and island people and such passion for adventure and discovery that it determined my subsequent career.” These days, sitting in a dark, cool living room filled with the detritus of a traveling life, Peck, a quick, humorous man, is happy to reminisce about the forces that batted him about the globe, and about the ways in which his perceptions of the world have changed since he was born on the Iowa-Missouri border in 1910.
Peck was the only boy in a brood of five. His father ran a hardware store, his mother was a devout member of the rigid Scottish Reform Presbyterian Church (eight decades later the doctor describes himself as a “pious agnostic”).
When he was 18, Peck moved to Iowa City to attend the University of Iowa Medical School. His schooling coincided with the Depression; he worked his way through by washing dishes and assisting in medical research. Why medicine? “It never occurred to me to go anywhere else,” he says simply. “I regarded medicine as a very humane thing to practice.” After years of doing research, Peck tired of the academic life and decided to intern at a military hospital in San Francisco. At the end of a year's internship, he got married and X-rayed; a chest radiograph showed tuberculosis. The diagnosis kept Peck out of World War II and encouraged an interest in the disease that soon led him to a position in a TB sanatorium on the outskirts of Detroit. After the war he transferred to the North Carolina State Sanatorium.
“While I was working in North Carolina, there was a general uneasiness in the country about bomb testing. The U.S Public Health Services wanted physicians from each state to come to Nevada to study radiation and fallout,” remembers Peck. He leapt at the chance and soon found himself in Nevada for a month-long series of seminars on this strange new matter. There he wrote his first poem, a mutant ode to Frenchman's Flat, one of Nevada's bomb testing sites. It concludes: “Spawner of monsters/You know the anxiety of nations, of geneticists and diplomats/But do you know the anxiety I feel for my radioactive shoes?”
Soon after Peck returned to North Carolina, he read that the United States planned to resume testing atomic bombs in the Marshall Islands. Intrigued, he picked up the phone. “I called Washington and said, ‘I hear bomb testing in the Marshalls is to be renewed,’” Peck recalls. “The man on the other end said, ‘Don’t say another word. That’s classified.’ I said, ‘I just read it in my morning newspaper.’ He said, ‘I’ll call you back.’”
Before long Peck found himself on a military transport plane headed to the North Pacific. These days Peck is stoic about his folly of believing in the bomb: “At the time it had some of the charm of a crusade. I thought by going to the Marshalls I could perform a miracle and enjoy it.” A few months on Rongelap Atoll quickly disabused Peck of that notion. The Rongelapese had suffered severe radiation exposure when, following the infamous Bravo 15-megaton hydrogen-bomb test of ’54, the winds shifted, causing fallout from the test to coat the atoll. The Rongelapese were moved to Majuro for three years while their island was “cleaned up”; when they were repatriated and the United States was ready to resume testing, the military wanted a doctor on the island to monitor radiation levels. Enter Peck, stage right. His part in the drama involved caring for the islanders’ medical needs and checking the Geiger counters every morning to make sure the needles hadn’t crossed the danger point. If they had? Peck’s orders were to have everyone walk into the lagoon and submerge themselves “until help arrived.” Luckily, the “rescue plan” never needed to be put into effect.
Peck’s first serious writing endeavors centered around the bomb and Rongelap. “We weren’t supposed to write anything about it, but I did, and Rinehart wanted to publish it,” Peck recalls of his first attempts to get his work into print. “I was a little scared by the McCarthy days, so I said I’d better get clearance from Washington. I sent off a chapter about the Rongelap evacuation. It had a line, ‘The sailors stepped over the Rongelap people with disgust.’ The military changed it to ‘The sailors stepped over the Rongelap people with compassion.’” At that point Peck gave up on the idea of the book.
Peck spent four months on Rongelap, long enough to convince him that he had no interest in living in America again. After a short sojourn home to pick up his wife and daughter, he headed to Guam where he accepted a post as director of public health for the island. Peck spent four years in Guam; his second poem, an ode to the small fishing boat in which he ventured out from his much-loved home in Merizo, was published by Harper’s magazine in 1962.
In ’64 Peck headed for Africa and spent three years in Malawi, “a small, mountainous, mostly jungle country,” where he set up a successful program for identifying and treating TB, then rampant in the country. Peck today recalls Malawi as the most foreign and curious of his homes: His cook died after drinking a poisoned concoction administered to test if he was a witch, and baboons were constant freeloading passengers wherever the Pecks drove their car.
In 1967, with the Vietnam War raging, Peck accepted a post as head of the Trust Territory of Micronesia’s health programs, a position that put him in charge of the health care of every person in a three-million square mile area encompassing four time zones, where making rounds from his base in Saipan could take months. In the five and a half years that Peck served as director of the TT’s programs, health care in the region improved significantly: Hospitals were built, staffs recruited, training programs instituted.
In ’73, having, as he put it, “tired of colonialist-style living in Saipan and Guam,” Peck accepted a job in Chuuk training medical personnel. There he and his wife lived on Dublon Island, inhabited by 2,400 Chuukese and no other foreigners. Today Peck speaks of the Chuukese and of days spent spearfishing and commuting across the lagoon by boat with great fondness; he recently authored a book of translations of Chuukese chants (his denotation of Chuukese gods as a “personable, robust, tough lot” immediately calls to mind the description’s author).
But by 1975, at the age of 65, Peck was thinking of retirement. He moved back to Saipan and in 1982 moved to the southernmost of the Mariana Islands, the exquisite, lush islet of Rota where he lives today in a small house at the base of the cliffs in the shadow of a breadfruit tree.
At the age of 83, he has just completed his autobiography, A Tidy Universe of Islands. The book is an enticing and literate tale of, as Peck titles his final chapter, “the making and unmaking of a vagabond.” It includes wonderful anecdotes spanning three decades, ranging from listening to an old Marshallese woman tell stories at night (“I would lie stretched out on a pandanus mat, looking dreamily into the flame of a smoking kerosene lantern, the old women and Izidiel lying or sitting about me, and several sleepy children playing quietly just beyond the circle of yellow light”) to viewing the pre-dawn detonation of a megaton bomb on Enewetok (“I looked into . . . the heart of the bomb: a tortured carnival of orange and violet flame churning its way upward while fragments, like sparklers, fell away into the water”). Peck is now looking for a publisher for the book. In the meantime he wakes every morning at dawn and walks out into the tidy universe he has created for himself.