Frank Flies to Taveuni in a Small Plane

Frank Flies to Taveuni in a Small Plane is the journey that turns a routine island hop into an immediate encounter with mortality. On a cramped flight from Nadi, Frank fears not chiefly that the aircraft will fail but that its elderly pilot might suffer a human bodily collapse. The experience brings back a childhood discovery of a dead roe deer and opens into a broader crisis: the vertebrate paleontologist must recognize himself not as an observer of animal remains but as an animal whose life, too, is finite.

The flight from Nadi

Frank is returning from Auckland and chooses to spend a few days in Fiji before continuing home. He has already spent a week in the islands, but has not visited Taveuni, known as the Garden Island of Fiji for its lushness and relative preservation. The flight from Nadi is full, so his luggage travels on the scheduled service while Frank and four other passengers are assigned to a small aircraft nicknamed the “matchbox plane.”

The aircraft’s physical narrowness makes the nickname apt. The passengers have to enter almost on all fours; the central aisle is about fifteen centimetres wide, and the plane has only six seats. Its white-haired pilot greets them with a broad smile, announces that no refreshments will be served, and forbids unnecessary trips down the aisle. Two missing fingers on the hand with which he welcomes them add to the flight’s macabre atmosphere.

The plane jolts in strong winds as its engine strains to carry it over Mount Tomaniivi on Viti Levu. Its windscreen is cracked, and at least a couple of its instruments are temporarily out of order. Yet the pilot remains amiable and talkative. Sitting with his knees pressed against the pilot’s back, Frank hears him ask where the passengers come from and sees him point out their position on a map and enthusiastically indicate coral reefs. The pilot’s cheerfulness and the plane’s apparent precariousness occupy the same small cabin.

Fear of bodily failure

Frank is accustomed to travelling in small aircraft, having spent recent weeks moving between islands, but this flight makes him acutely uneasy because there is only one pilot. He recognizes that a sudden illness at five thousand feet is not an irrational possibility: the pilot is in his late sixties, and fainting in tropical heat is an ordinary human vulnerability. The danger that grips Frank is therefore not simply mechanical failure. He fears the body inside the machine failing at the controls.

His own body registers the fear as a racing pulse, as if he had just run a marathon. He wonders about the pilot’s pulse, cholesterol, and coronary arteries, while acknowledging that he knows nothing about the man’s medical history or what he has eaten or drunk. Nor can Frank know what the pilot believes about eternal life, whether a woman has recently left him, or whether he may be facing a serious confession of financial embezzlement later that day. These imagined possibilities enlarge the pilot from a reassuring presence into an unknowable person on whom Frank’s survival depends.

The height, confinement, and inability to escape strip away the distraction of the view. Frank cannot enjoy Mount Tomaniivi, dolphins, or coral reefs. His gin, which he thinks he would not have been ashamed to drink for reassurance, is in his luggage aboard the scheduled flight. On the small plane, he is left with the heightened awareness of being a fleshy vertebrate strapped into a seat, as vulnerable as the man at the controls.

A disclosure about Frank’s state of mind

Addressing Vera, Frank insists that this is not simply a fear of flying and that his account is not meant as a travel story. He uses the flight to speak about a deeper disposition that usually comes to the surface when he wakes in the morning or when he is drunk. He associates intoxication with a more exposed and candid frame of mind, but says that the flight brought him to a similar state more abruptly and with sharper senses: he was neither half asleep nor numbed by alcohol. He describes the experience as having handed responsibility for his being or not being to an elderly pilot in a small aircraft with a cracked windscreen and faulty instruments.

The fear continues after the plane reaches Taveuni. Frank has secured a seat on the regular flight back to Nadi, but this does not restore his composure. Back on land, he feels caught in a panic from which he expects never to emerge. The mood combines something like the lucid exhilaration of alcohol with the conviction that this time he has drunk a wine that will never leave his body. The flight’s consequence is thus not merely relief at having arrived: it leaves him in a lasting state of existential alarm.

The childhood memory reopened

On the island, Frank recognizes himself as a paleontologist afraid of bones, a zoologist struggling to accept that he is an animal, and an evolutionary biologist confronting the limit of his time on Earth. He has spent his working life examining the remains of vertebrates with insatiable curiosity; now the prospect that he will one day contribute to the same material fills him with panic. He describes this recognition as an unavoidable clarity rather than a compulsion.

That clarity reopens a memory he has long resisted discussing in depth. When he was seven or eight, before his family moved to Madrid, he ran through a forest near his home in Vestfold with hazelnuts in his pockets, eager to show them to his mother. On the damp forest floor, beneath autumn leaves, he found a small roe deer. He initially thought it was asleep and approached, perhaps to touch it or brush away the yellow and red leaves covering it. The animal was dead.

Frank explicitly connects the flight from Nadi to Matei with the return of this old wound. The child’s encounter with death and the adult’s fear of a pilot’s possible collapse converge: each makes mortality present as a fact of bodily life, not an abstraction safely confined to scientific study. The remembered deer gives the panic a personal history, while the flight forces the memory back into the present.

From personal fear to evolutionary history

After the recognition of his own mortality, Frank mentally rewinds the history of life on Earth to its beginnings roughly four billion years earlier. He understands that history as his own lineage: not only descent through mammal-like reptiles, earlier reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, and the first living cell, but a continuous succession of cell divisions reaching into the present. In his account, the genes in his body carry an age reaching back to those ancient origins.

This evolutionary perspective does not cancel his fear. It places him within a long biological continuity while sharpening the contrast between that deep history and the finite individual body now confined in a plane. The flight’s significance lies in that collision: the scientist who studies vertebrate remains experiences himself as part of their material history. The journey to Taveuni therefore begins the inward reckoning that accompanies his stay, just before he turns to his encounters with Ana, José, and Gordon.