Get To Work, Hippie!

      So you want to come and work on the Big Island, eh?

      Alright, let's look at some options. Are you from the Philippines or Mexico? If you are, you might want to consider an exciting, adventurous career in the field of hotel service. Change sheets, clean toilets, wash dishes, and generally cater to the whims of wealthy and kind-of-wealthy caucasians who'll probably learn no more about the island you now call home than what the guidebooks tell them exist. (That is the function of guidebooks, you know. They define the parameters of reality.) Lucky you! On top of that, you can commute for two hours every morning and evening (maybe about six in the morning going in, midnight coming back--unless you're asked to do overtime, as I'm pretty sure you will) on an appropriated tour bus loaded with similarly-careered individuals who have the same fatigued, half-asleep look on their faces as you do. You'll become a member of a proud community of indentured servants, just like poor people everywhere. Work shall set you free!

      Huh? You don't want to work in a hotel? What, you're too good for tourists? I sincerely doubt that. They have more money.

      Oh, you're not from the Philippines. Well, your options just opened up! I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're wearing a backpack twice the size of a teenager, have dreadlocks that drag on the ground behind you—possibly with crumbs of organic granola stuck in them—and smell like a heady mixture of butt and the armpits of a corpse. I'm going to assume further that your idea of work is digging around in your pockets for an extra five minutes looking for lost bud. I was going to say you should try volunteering at one of Hawai'i's hundreds of small farms, but who are we kidding? Farming is work, dude. You're going to pitch a tent on a beach somewhere, smoke bowls and play hand drums until either the cops run you off or your parents stop sending you money.

      Not a hippie? No shit? Maybe I'm too quick to judge. Friends tell me it's a weakness of mine. I apologize. And anyway, who needs to do farm work? There are lots of local business looking to hire motivated, energetic, outgoing people. Just the other day I saw help wanted signs at the Radioshack, Wal-Mart, Burger King, Dairy Queen, Blockbuster Video, Starbucks...

      You worked at a Blockbuster Video in Boise. I didn't think there were any still open.

      Don't be so goddamn picky! It's not like you have a lot of choices, especially not with an attitude like yours, hippie. Unless you want to be a bus driver, in which case, attitude is everything. A surly, foul-tempered, unforgiving attitude. You can yell at passengers, sigh and roll your eyes when people ask perfectly reasonable questions, and from what I've observed, punctuality is not exactly a requirement. Or even a word. A good job for those who don't like to wear a watch.

      Seriously though, I think you ought to consider volunteering at a farm. The farmers appreciate the help enough that in some cases they'll even give you a place to stay. And food to eat. You'll have to work your ass off, but a little hard work never killed anyone. Well, it has, but this isn't a Virginia coal mine. You might get sunburned, or bitten by a centipede, which from what I hear hurts like a sonofabitch. One guy told me he knew a farmer who took a nap on his tractor. While he slept, a centipede crawled up the leg of his pants and bit him on the nuts. True story. And the moral is, if you're going to drive a tractor, try to stay awake through most of it.

      Agriculture is a major part of life on the Big Island. Fruits and vegetables grow like weeds. So why then, you may ask, are fruits and vegetables shipped to the Big Island? Because people are stupid. That's the only rational conclusion you can come to, and if at some time in the distant future an extraterrestrial tribunal of intergalactic magistrates tries the human race on the grounds of its wanton folly, a la Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the fact that the island of Hawai'i imports produce will be presented as Exhibit A, probably by a prosecutor whose species burrows in the ground and eats flying reptiles. I recently read an article that said the island produced 800,000 pounds of avocados last year, and half of that literally rotted. In the meantime, local grocery stores sell avocados from California.

      That has nothing to do with your predicament, but you see my point about the way stuff grows here. Eight-hundred thousand pounds of avocados is, like, a couple tons, at least. And if the produce grows like weeds, the weeds grow like spring-loaded snakes out of a fake can of peanuts. At night, when all is quiet, you can hear the guinea grass bursting from the earth.

      That's something you can do, cut guinea grass. There's plenty of it, everywhere, as many blades of guinea grass as there are handguns in Tucson.     The day after my wife and I came to the island, one of our first duties was to clear the grass away from the shack where we were to stay. It took three days. Most of it was as tall as us. I kept thinking we'd find bodies dumped by yakuza or hidden treasure, but all we turned up were two mildewy deck chairs.

      Guinea grass does not like to be cut, and employs as a natural defense tiny, stubbly bristles that poke into skin like porcupine quills and itch like mosquito bites. The more you handle, the itchier you get. You should wear gloves, long pants, and a long-sleeved shirt, even though they'll let you down.

      Grasp a bunch of grass with one hand and saw it with a short serrated sickle with the other. Throw the grass on the ground and walk on it, cursing it. Now you have lovely walkways for your jungle shack made of lush, green grass that in a few days will be stringy, dead, brown grass. It beats walking in the mud.

Now get a shovel. Push the blade under the stumps of grass where they have grown in a tight bunch, going all the way around the stumps and prying with the shovel each time. At some point, possibly today, you'll pry enough roots out of the dirt to pull out the whole clump. Some are bigger than others, and have a firmer hold on the ground. Go ahead and throw your back out now, just to get it out of the way. Repeat the process every two days when the grass has reached six feet.

      Cutting guinea grass is exhausting work. You look like you could use some coffee. Man, did you come to the right place. Kona coffee is thought by some to be the best in the world, but an inside source of mine tells me it's nearly impossible to get on the mainland. What sells as Kona is usually only 10% Hawaiian and 90% something else. It's a scam that pays, because the producer can stretch the spendy Hawaiian stuff further and still charge a fortune per pound.

      Coffee is fascinating, too, with a long and illustrious history. Did you know the Confederate army used as talcum powder and wart remover? Hardly anyone does. The ancient Chinese considered coffee an aphrodisiac, and would often wear it in place of a shirt. Very strong coffee opens a doorway to the world of the dead, and causes the recently deceased to rise and seek employment with Greyhound. Sigmund Freud sometimes snorted coffee when he didn't have any cocaine left, as did Richard Pryor.

      Yes, coffee is important and better than most people, and you won't get any until you pick some. That is the first level of coffee knowledge. I can totally hook you up, too, because I know somebody who grows it. It's not even that far from here.

      My wife and I have been helping this guy harvest coffee cherries for the last three months, and I can tell you assuredly, it is relaxing, soothing work. The higher branches of the trees shield you from the sun's unrelenting rays as you make your way down the rows. Your coffee-gathering bucket or whatever it's called, fastened over your shoulders by a harness, hangs in front of you like a beer belly made of plastic, with a kidney-shaped opening at the top. Birds chirp like tiny birds. Hens follow you around as you pick, hoping they'll get some bugs out of the deal. Foolish hens—I tell the bugs terrible secrets, and chickens are   eternally forbidden.

      You will step on many big snails hiding in the damp debris of fallen leaves. There'll be a crunch and then kind of a slippery feeling. That's okay, because they're not welcome in Hawaii in the first place. Kill as many as you want, it's not like they'll stop making them.

      Asian spiny-backed spiders spin wide, sticky webs all over the orchard so you can walk into them face-first. They look a lot like bumpy-shelled crabs, as you will discern from the ones hitching a ride in your hair. Say hello to your new friend.

      Hawaiian stink bats, so called because of their powerful fecal musk, hang upside down from the branches. Many are the size of housecats. Do not be frightened when they flash their long, gleaming fangs—this is a common bat greeting. Avert your gaze all the same. If you give them bananas, or whatever change you might have, they'll sometimes toss cherries into your bucket from the branches that are harder to reach, so don't go acting all stuck up and shit. When startled, they fly away with a cry of “Ko-ko-ki-ree-ree-REE! Ko-keelee-ree-rubba-tiya-too-poooo!” and wait until you're gone.

      Jesus, is it always this hot? It's like an outdoor sauna. Maybe we ought to sit down, take a break. No harm in that, is there? Let's sit under this rambutan tree, have some rambutan for lunch. Did you bring any water? No? Shit. I'm getting parched. My vision gets all blurry every time I stand up. I'll have to eat more rambutan, then. Funny fruit, this rambutan. The outside looks like a spiky alien spore, and the inside looks like a gooey white egg. I didn't know they existed until I came to the Big Island. They totally look like little aliens. They're like those aliens in that one movie...You know, where they were gonna...they were gonna eat people or turn them into aliens...spiky monsters...Danny DeVito's in it...wh...

...huhhh...Goddamn, it's hot. Or humid. One of those. Can't sleep on the job, remember that. Wouldn't do at all. Weren't you looking for a job or something? I remember you saying something like “Hey, I need a job on the island” and I was like “Go work at a hotel, hippie” and then you said you weren't a hippie and I thought yeah, whatever. That happened, right? Did I make it up? I do that sometimes, I...What was that movie? Had...Sharon Stone or somebody like that...the...uhhh...

...nnnn...

...Zzzzz...

...chickens...

Hawaii Nightlife

     For two nights we had heavier rains than any we'd seen since arriving on the island. Not sheets of it but walls, whole skyscrapers, a deluge pouring out of some vast Niagara Falls in the sky that concentrated its will in an effort to displace the ocean, tear open the Earth, and lay bare its molten core. It hammered on the metal roof of the shack like nails fired from ten million nail guns for hours at a time, and only at night. Not during the day, because it knew we don't sleep during the day, but at night, when it could make sleep impossible.

      Imagine staying in a house where it has been arranged for someone to turn up in the evening and spend every hour until morning slamming doors, pounding walls, rattling the tables and chairs against the floor, screaming and swearing in vein-popping rage. We crawled from bed at sunrise like reverse vampires, eyes red-rimmed, brains murky with semi-consciousness, craving elephantine doses of caffeine.

      Prior to these explosive downpours, the noisiest threat to our rest was the tradewinds. These kick up every couple of weeks, and blow with a ferocity that makes me wonder how a hurricane could be much worse. I've always liked strong, gusting winds, from the time I was a small child. Then, I felt thrilled as my surroundings were brought to maniacal life under the influence of an unseen force, like a roomful of toys jumping up and going to war. Trees dipping and swaying, leaves and bits of trash racing each other down the road, traffic signs twisting and wobbling as if about to be uprooted. During my boyhood, a windy day meant some excitement to spice up the dull routine of school and chores and homework.

      Let's say that my attitude toward high winds has grown more nuanced, particularly in light of the last couple of months. They can be a relief from the mid-day heat when working without the benefit of shade, and bring a relaxing, rasping sigh from the unmowed fields of guinea grass. They also have decided that it might be fun to tear our shack to pieces, not that they've had any success. Bags of tea and containers of food might fly about like starlings, but wood and metal have remained firmly fastened together. My compliments to the builder.

      If any of the sheets of black plastic we've placed around the shack to keep out rain have not been thoroughly nailed and stapled into place, the wind will snap them with a sound like the sharp pops of a snare drum. One such sheet is situated over the head of our bed; just as we drift off to sleep, the wind can billow it like a sail with a sudden crack that brings us fully awake. It can go on for hours, and has prompted us to buy earplugs to keep us from becoming half-insane from sleep deprivation.

      That kind of noise, from either wind or rain, is in stark contrast to the average night out here in the weeds. There is a hush, a notable lack of mechanized sound, that only comes from living far outside a populated area. I've only encountered it before while camping in the Washington state rainforest. It would be disingenuous to call it silence. There is no silence in this place, it's alive with living sound at all times and at night, when sound carries farther, it's as if a voice that had elected to remain mute for an extended time has begun to murmur to itself audibly, muttering things that are weird and sinister, but nothing that makes complete sense.

      Every sound is much more fearsome, much more fraught with the implication of an invasive entity, after the sun has gone down. You lay awake in bed, the moonlight as powerful as a streetlamp and framing each dark silhouette—the hanging clothes and hats and bags—with an icy, blue and silver luminescence. Timed to the subtraction of daylight, cicadas buzz like electricity coursing through a fog-dampened transformer, so loud it's only when they stop that you realize how much their buzzing has been pressing on your eardrums. Cows in the nearby pasture call and bellow, trying to find one another in the dark, vocalizing in ways you didn't think cows were able to, shouting like irritable human beings and braying like donkeys.

      The breeze blows and the branches of the pigeon pea tree closest to the shack scrape on the tin roof like claws. Banana trees creak like old floorboards. Nocturnal geckos chirp and scuttle briefly on the wall outside. The hum of a moth's wingbeats pinballs around the shack for a while and then departs into the late chill. Each individual sound is magnified, projected as if amplified into the peaceful hours as you try to go to sleep. Something in the tall grass twenty feet away scurries, almost certainly a rat, but how can you tell when you can't see what's there? During moments like this you entertain thoughts of six-inch centipedes marching on their hundreds of legs across the ground and into the bed, aching to inject their painful venom into your skin.

      There's more scurrying, louder now, and coming from different locations. A fight breaks out in the fallen leaves, followed by a chattering squeak. Now you know for sure it's rats. In time, if they haven't found something else to occupy them, one or more will make their way into the shack to run stealthily along the walls, scrounging what food scraps they can or whatever hasn't been securely locked away. You might hear them poking around under the bed, right beneath where your head rests on the pillow, scratching with their claws for reasons only a rat would be able to explain.

      Or maybe tonight, for once, the rats aren't here. What comes in their place are phantom sounds, things you can't pinpoint or identify, and aren't able to fully visualize. The thing on the roof that wants to dig or chew its way through, slowly, its patient labor halfway between a scrape and a crunch. The thing that seems to dig at the outside corner of the shack next to the bed, keeping up its work for maybe half an hour before spending the rest of the night somewhere else, not as patient as its friend on the roof. Each single scuff and shuffle has an author, a creature doing its night-time work.

      So let's assume you can't sleep. Your system is too full of adrenaline. You see no point in lying awake in bed when sleep might be a couple of hours away, so you get up—slowly, so as not to disturb your wife—and quietly step out into the night air. The moon is only half full, but already illuminates well enough that you don't need a flashlight to see by; you can even make out details of objects ten feet away. It's a cold light, a half-hearted cousin to the sun, but comforting in the way it pulls the veil of darkness partway back and lets you observe your surroundings with your eyes as well as your ears.

      You look up into the colossal basalt ceiling of the sky, barely touched by the glowing domes of light from nearby towns, and it is vibrant with stars. It makes you regret that you didn't pay more attention to astronomy in school. What are the constellations you remember? That's Orion's Belt, you can find that one easily enough. And the Big Dipper, another easy one. The Little Dipper's around somewhere, maybe that's it over there. Is that Mars? Maybe. It's reddish, anyway.

      There are more visible stars by far than you would ever see near the ambient glow of a city. So many that you can make out layers of them, dimmer stars behind—or beyond—the bright primary clusters, further out into space and dense to the point of creating something like a fog out of star vapor that makes you think of frozen clouds. You suspect they are the most remote fringes of the Milky Way, a distance of thousands, if not millions, of light years that is well beyond your ability to consciously grasp.

      Like stars themselves, cruise ships appear to float in mid-air against the rich blackness where the ocean and the sky seamlessly meet. They glide slowly, languidly, and you wonder about the people out there on the water at this time of night. Most are probably asleep, but it could be that a few are still up and walking the decks. You wonder how much it costs to go on a cruise like that. Thousands, you figure. You wonder if any of the people out there have ever been on a vacation that didn't involve such luxury. Maybe when they were younger, on a road trip to California. Or maybe that cruise is the first vacation they've taken in years. Retirees and the overworked, parents whose kids have finally moved out of the house. You could put anyone on those ships from where you stand.

      It's not silent, out here under the moon with a patch of dried grass under your feet, but it is still. Just the breeze, and the insects, and the waves pummeling the rocky shore at the base of the cliffs with a low rumble and persistent hiss, like the sound of a distant highway. Or the steady breathing of someone in the deepest part of sleep.

      You yawn, run a hand over your face, feel the weary heat of your eyes when you close them. Your thoughts become listless and undirected, and urge you to go back inside.

     After you have climbed, slowly and carefully, into bed, stretched yourself out and adjusted the pillow to its most comfortable position, it's the steady, whispering breath of the waves that follows you into unconsciousness, like an eternity of restful nights.