Winds like surrendering songs of fishermen’s ghosts docking sunken boats to seek their mates (and a drink) wind through the low-built harbor town. They dash our morning snorkel dreams against the concrete tetrapods replacing dying coral reefs (and prayers), neither of which can protect humans still trying to live on these islands and islets after millennia of failure.

Archaeologists don’t know why the archipelago’s inhabitants from thousands of years ago left no descendants, why Southern Song dynasty peasants decided to stay on islands others only visited briefly in passing, calling it 澎湖 Penghu: splash loch for the strong waves and freshwater lake at the center of the main island whose name was corrupted through palimpsestic translations and transliterations written by waves of settlers: the Dutch     Qing     Japanese     ROC     then US militaries, the last deflected. Colonizers planted trees they knew from home to block winds like they’d never known before, untamable crop-destroying decolonial air. Omit the French who failed to dent the locals’ defenses, and Portuguese who only had time to call it the Pescadores, isles of fisherfolk, referring to mainlanders who came in the Ming and gathered shellfish, tried to farm, though they had to ring their gardens with stone walls to protect plants and animals from storied winds.

Hear, the strong waves assailing the seawall where we walked last night, puzzling the indecipherable morse code in the tide pools: the lamps of poachers—I call them as though a shovel (with bucket) is worse than bottom trawlers     driftnets     longlining     blast and cyanide fishing, muro-ami ‘reef hunting’ pounding coral with cement blocks hung from cranes on industrial ships to scare out the small fish, juveniles, now with no chance to populate the ocean. No wonder the Good News Bringer in the islanders’ parades is a clown.

Now, the islanders build their homes of concrete not coral, collect more New Taiwan Dollars than abalone, their local dialect echoes lives of their fisherfolk ancestors: forceful and precise     with pauses     where the wind might bluster away words shouted between boats, like their reasons, lost to the waves as well as winds.