Pacific Island Times August 2018 Vol 3. No 8 | Page 5

Photo by JT Libyan
Brief Chat
Age Doesn’t Matter
C
By Joyce McClure
olonia — Marjorie Cushing Falanruw’s
parents were known as Captain Mars the
Human Cannonball and Marjorie Bailey
the Sky Lady. While most young girls her age
had fathers who went to work every morning and
mothers who stayed home and managed the house-
hold, Margie’s mother performed aerial ballet on a
sway pole 171 feet in the air while her father was
a famous high diver and, like his title suggests, a
human cannonball.
As circus performers, Frank and Marjorie Cush-
ing were well known in Guam where they settled
down and developed a popular carnival grounds
after World War II and a career that had taken their
family thrill show to California, Hawaii, the Philip-
pines and throughout Asia.
Now 75, Margie pursued a very different career
after spending her youth performing on the high
wire, trampoline, horseback, trapeze and motorcy-
cle. Earning undergraduate and graduate degrees at
universities in California and the South Pacific, she
entered the somewhat tamer world of academia,
teaching biology and environmental science at the
University of Guam.
When she married, Margie and her husband
moved to his home island of Yap and she has been
here ever since. But she never lost track of her
circus roots, stretching a tightrope across her taro
patch to provide brief rest periods while writing her
doctoral thesis.
In the intervening years, Margie worked for
the U.S. Forest Service throughout Micronesia
as she raised their three children. Today, she is a
great-grandmother and still works in forestry, hav-
ing compiled a seminal field guide to the trees of
Yap in just four months during 2016.
Not one to sit still, Margie was the oldest par-
ticipant in the 2018 Micro Games, joining Yap’s
va’a canoe team to compete with women who are
40 to 50 years younger. She wasn’t planning to
participate in the quadrennial event because “the
stakes seemed too high. But I had trained for the
Yap-Palau Games last year for fun. Then, when we
were short on team members for the Micro Games,
I became a part of the team.”
Even though the women’s team did not win any
medals, the six members improved on their practice
times in the sprint races, and, “in the long-distance
race, we accomplished our first all women, non-
stop 10- mile paddle!” she says.
“The long-distance race was especially tough as
it was a hot day and most of the team had already
competed in multiple races and even in other
sports,” she adds. “I was inspired seeing these
young ladies paddling so hard for such a long dis-
tance. I’m really proud of our team for having the
guts to participate!”
They were tired, sunburned, dehydrated and hap-
py when they crossed the finish line, elated by their
accomplishment.
“For me, exercise is a prayer of thanksgiving for
health,” she said. Taking up paddling at the sugges-
tion of a friend in Palau many years ago, Margie is
a regular participant in the weekly paddling get-to-
gethers that meet after work around sunset on the
lagoon in Yap.
“Paddling on Yap is fun,” she said, “because
we’re the most heterogeneous group of people that
does anything together on this island. We’re male
and female, short and tall, dark and light, young
and old, different nationalities and all walks of life.
It’s not uncommon for us to have speakers of more
than three languages together in a canoe paddling
for the fun of it. Language is no problem since the
commands are just ‘hut, ho’. We’ve had people
from all over the world join us from the Pacific and
countries like Germany and Romania. We present
our guest paddlers with a certificate from the Yap
Association of Paddlers, or YAP, with our motto,
‘Life is better when we paddle together.’”
Seven new canoes were built and delivered to
Yap for the Micro Games.
The Micro Games “provided a great chance for
young people on Yap to become acquainted with
the sport and to see how well teams from other is-
lands perform,” she says. “Especially the women’s
team from Palau who won all three gold medals for
women’s races. Our Yap men’s team won all three
gold medals for men’s races and that was so thrill-
ing.” Margie also noted that a number of young
women expressed interest in joining paddling, “so
eventually the sport of canoe paddling will grow on
Yap,” she smiles. “Va’a canoe paddling is a sport
that has no age limit.”
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