I posted a jokey and smart-assed entry a while back about work, and I feel like I owe any regular readers of this blog a more sincere rendering of our working lives on the Big Island.
When we arranged with Janice to stay on her property, she stipulated eight hours of work from each of us in exchange for the privilege. In nearly four months, we've seldom had to work more than three to four days out of the week, and only half days at that. The work varies, and we've been free to do it at our own pace, a pace that is almost always efficient but never hurried.
In a past entry I mentioned that we spotted whales while working on our outhouse. “Outhouse” might not be the best word for it. Outhouses have deep pits beneath them for depositing what most people don't like to talk about. Ours still has the same five-gallon bucket with a plastic bag in it that we started out with, situated under a portable toilet seat. (In case you were wondering, we've never used the five-gallon bucket to its maximum capacity, and the plastic bag gets changed frequently. We're not savages, after all.) The difference now is that we can use it without getting soaked when it rains, and there is increased privacy. It's built from four, eight-foot long posts of ironwood, chainsawed from a tree felled on Elmer's property. The roof is corrugated tin, just scraps of it that Janice has collected over the last year, and the walls are mainly cut from a giant sheet of black plastic and either nailed or stapled into place.
Four of us—me, Hannah, Elmer, and Janice—used a post hole digger to drill four holes in the ground and then set the posts in them. We nailed 2x4's between the posts to stabilize them. The rest of the building Hannah and I did ourselves. We added extra planks of wood for extra stability, ran three more across the top for the roofing, attached the tin sheets to these with roofing screws, and cut and stapled the plastic sheeting to the posts. It's held up pretty well, although we've had to re-staple the plastic a few times because the trade winds yank it loose. At one point we needed to re-screw a portion of the roof, again because of the trade winds. One edge caught the wind just right, causing the roofing to shake and rattle, until the holes made by the screws had stretched and ripped wide enough that the screws no longer held the roof down on the windward side. Our solution was to add three times the screws and lash the roof down with used irrigation tubing.
That was one project. We discovered before long that, in order to fulfill our eight-hour-a-week obligation, we'd have to be proactive and come up with projects ourselves. Janice's farm is in its infancy, and as it stands, there isn't yet enough work to keep three people consistently occupied. She's a single woman struggling to finish any number of farm-related projects that need attending to, and sometimes has to rely on the help of friends to make any progress. Because they're also busy with projects, that help is sometimes long in coming. In the meantime, we've been doing light building and helping to keep the guinea grass down with hand sickles and her sickle-bar mower.
I described the process of cutting guinea grass in the other work-related post. There were a few things in that post I made up just to amuse myself, but I was honest about the guinea grass. The area all around the shack was choked with it, and it took a few days of cutting and digging to get most of it cleared away. We reclaimed a sizable portion of land that looked like the floor of a jungle when we arrived. Now it almost looks half-civilized, and the shack has the look of a well-maintained hut in a prosperous tropical village. Plants that had languished from a lack of sunlight started to grow at an accelerated rate, including a young avocado tree that has nearly tripled in size.
We've done some light construction in addition to the outhouse. This astonishes me because neither of us is a builder, most especially not me. Some years ago I apprenticed as an electrician at a small business in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and as a result I both gained experience with tools I had seldom or never used before, and learned that I never wanted to pursue a career in construction. Whether this is because of a lack of serious aptitude on my part or the fact that I strongly disliked everyone I worked with during my apprenticeship, I can't decide. My money is on the latter. If I were to apply myself strenuously to the study of a construction trade, I'm confident I could develop more than passable skill in it. But that would mean I'd have to work with construction workers. My apologies to anyone reading this who works construction, but if my experience as an apprentice was typical, a disturbingly large number of you guys are assholes. Seriously, grow the fuck up. Of the four employees who made up the rest of the staff, one was a shit-talking drunk, one was an ex-Navy master chief with acute anger management issues, one was a Bible-thumping bigot, and the last was an electrical journeyman who I believe might have been either bipolar, or hooked on some kind of stimulant.
The last guy was fun, in an ironic sort of way. He was a tall, red-headed, beer-bellied redneck who I privately nicknamed John the Moody Journeyman. From one day to the next, you didn't know who you were going to get: cheery, jocular, grinning, hard-working John; or sullen, mumbling, truculent, fall-asleep-behind-the-wheel-on-the-freeway-at-seventy-five-miles-an-hour John. They were two different people inhabiting the same body. Happy John was helpful, willing to instruct an inexperienced co-worker, and reasonably patient. Miserable John once threw the entire contents of a work van on the ground because he couldn't find the right-sized connector for a length of conduit, and how the fuck could they expect him to fuckin' work if they wouldn't give him the RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE FUCKIN' JOB!!!
It beat working with the ex-Navy guy, who threw things and muttered angrily under his breath half the day and hated the fact that he was a journeyman electrician still wiring shitbox houses at sixty; or the bigoted fundamentalist Christian (also a former sailor) who once suggested in outrage at the news that Elton John was getting married to another man that, because he was a “faggot”, he should be shot, and more than once expressed disgust at the sight of a white woman with a black man; or the drunk, who could seldom wait until he got home to start drinking and pounded beer in the work truck on the way back to the shop.
In a roundabout way, I'm trying to make the point that it's astonishing to me that we built an outhouse and a potting shed. Hannah has no construction experience, and what little I have I don't exactly hold close to my heart. The finished structures are pretty solid, if jarringly unprofessional-looking, and will probably be fixtures on this plot of land for a while to come. We also patched up an old shed that used to serve as a shelter for cane workers. That entailed hammering extra nails into wood that was either thoroughly rotted or eaten through by termites, and screwing in extra roofing. The shed is now a storage space for tools and building materials, and looks as if a stiff breeze would knock it flat.
An interesting fact about the farming co-op in which Janice participates: it started as a means to give unemployed cane workers, pushed out of their jobs by the death of the sugarcane industry on Hawai'i, a way to re-establish themselves. They could farm the land for subsistence while living in housing that once belonged to the cane companies, sold to former workers at low cost. Elmer, a farmer I've written about several times in the blog, is an ex-cane employee. Interestingly, he seems to represent a tiny demographic in the co-op. At some point, many of the former employees left the co-op in frustration, mainly from the lack of dependable water for irrigation. In time, the state took over the lease on the land, began providing more consistent water, and started leasing to the general public. The co-op now leases the land from the state, and issues sub-leases to individuals who have demonstrated sufficient interest in farming to satisfy the co-op's board of directors.
Originally, those leasing from the co-op had to go to school and receive a degree in agriculture in order to keep the lease. That requirement has been set aside, and the result shows in plots of land with nothing more growing on them than drooping forests of guinea grass. Many lease-holders rarely set foot on the land they're responsible for, grow nothing, and produce no revenue. Now the co-op is close to losing its lease because it can't pay the state—no produce sold equals no money to pay the rent. If that happens, the state will only recognize sub-leases of people who are producing a crop, and the co-op itself will likely be dissolved.
We've been to a couple of farms in the co-op where production seems to be relatively high. Elmer grows coffee, an annual crop that brings him a modest revenue. He picks, husks, and dries it himself, then sends it out to be roasted. We've had some; it's great. We sent a pound to my parents and they were very impressed by the quality. As I mentioned in my jokey blog entry, Kona coffee is some of the most admired coffee in the world. What we've been picking at Elmer's still qualifies as Kona, even though it grows in a town less than an hour away from Hilo, on the opposite side of the island. According to Elmer, it's also difficult to obtain on the mainland because distributors lie to consumers, selling coffee as 100% Kona that is in fact only 10%, leading to a lower quality of coffee and people wondering why all the fuss over Kona. Also according to Elmer, you can only get the real thing if you know a Hawaiian coffee farmer. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't—Elmer is sometimes prone to exaggeration. What I can personally attest to is that, of all the coffee I've had, Elmer's is some of the best. Possibly that's because it's a good deal fresher than most coffee I've had. Whatever the reason, the flavor is excellent.
Another part of my earlier post concerned the process of picking coffee cherries. The spiders and snails are real, and the stink bats, I'm almost positive I don't need to say, are not. The snails are an invasive species, like much of what grows and thrives on the island, and feed on the kinds of things snails are renowned for eating. The position taken by Elmer and Janice, and I assume many other people who grow produce, is to stomp them on sight. I've squashed a few, and I have to admit I felt a twinge of remorse. Can't say why exactly, except that the little creatures are slow and their thin shells provide them with scant protection, making them seem pitiable to me. If I were a farmer, I doubt I would feel so sentimental.
But while slowly making one's way up and down the rows of coffee trees in Elmer's orchard, one finds it impossible not to step on them. Their brown coloration blend them into the similarly brown decaying leaves on the ground perfectly, and at least half a dozen times in the course of picking I'd hear the mixed crunch and pop of a snail shell giving way under the sole of my shoe. Just doing my part to preserve Hawaiian agriculture.
The only things about picking coffee neither of us liked were the clouds of mosquitoes. I'm going to assume that mosquitoes are more than likely a problem throughout all of the tropics. What I know for sure is that they are not native to the Hawaiian islands, and I've heard two different stories about how they got here. Or rather, two versions of the same story. One version depicts a British whaler in 1826 anchoring off Maui and, in the course of emptying and refilling water casks, its crewmen innocently depositing mosquito larvae into an island stream. At least that's what the little comic-strip interpretation of events hanging on one of the walls of the visitors' center at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park seems to imply. Another, more interesting, version says that the captain of the whaler, angry with a local chief, deliberately dumped mosquito-infested water into streams out of spite.
The second version strikes me as the truer one, because you can feel the bitter acrimony in every bite delivered by those little monsters. The first day of picking, our arms, necks, and faces were covered in red welts like an outbreak of chicken pox. They come at you in a squadron ready to attack every point on your body where they can draw blood through their minuscule straw snouts. We hear their high, goose-pimpling whine at every farm we visit, because standing water is never far away in a place where irrigation is used and rain collects in abandoned equipment and old tires.
Just about everyone hates them, although I've noticed that some people seem immune to mosquito bites. “They just don't bother me,” they say, and I want to slap them. Little can be done about mosquitoes that doesn't involve obliterating the islands themselves with explosives or banning all water. I know of only one attempt at mosquito management, which has so far had mixed results. At some point in the not-too-distant past someone made the decision to import coqui frogs to the Big Island. Lots of things seem to get released into the wild in Hawaii—geckos, mosquitoes, mongoose (mongeese? I don't know), housecats, pigs, goats, innumerable plants and trees, any living thing that can be set free out of negligence or stupidity to wander and proliferate in a tropical habitat. Frogs were released in the vain hope that they would devour mosquitoes, much in the same manner mongoose had been distributed on the islands in the hope they would eat rats. The occasional mongoose does indeed eat the occasional unlucky rat from what I've heard, and I'm sure the little tree frogs probably mange to ingest a mosquito or two in the course of their day. I'm also sure that they do no good, because mosquitoes breed much faster and in greater numbers than frogs ever have. The frogs, called coqui after their unique croak, have spread across a significant portion of the Big Island, anyplace where rainfall is fairly consistent, and in places such as the rainforest, they fill the night with their chorus. Along with the mosquitoes they were intended to eat, they very likely gobble native insects found nowhere outside of Hawaii and that will, given time and froggy tenacity, become endangered or extinct.
Getting back to coffee for a moment, I'd like to add that we picked it over a period of four months and never filled more than two full five-gallon buckets between us in four hours, in spite of the fact that, according to Elmer, professional coffee pickers—often the kind of immigrant labor that toils in American agriculture—can do four full buckets, per person, in about six hours. This knowledge was a source of frustration for us as we waddled over to Elmer's coffee husker with our measly one bucket apiece. I don't like to think we're slow, it doesn't feel like we're working slowly, and maybe part of the problem is that many of Elmer's trees were right about at the end of their season, and so didn't have a lot of cherries left to pick. Elmer was always really good about it; he never gave us a hard time, and seemed to enjoy our company enough that we didn't feel hard-pressed to astonish him with our labor prowess.
We have worked for farmers almost exclusively since coming to the island. After about six months of working on farms, mostly weeding and observing what farmers have to endure in order to maintain an operation that brings in enough money just to break even, we've decided that we never want to farm, ever, at any point in our lives, for any reason, not even in our dreams. Farmers work hard, with no days off and no real breaks in their routines, and usually for next to nothing. That appears to be the case here, at any rate; I can't say how it is for huge agribusinesses on the mainland. One old farmer we know—I'll call him Tom—has worked in one demanding field after another his entire life. He's been a master machinist, run a trucking company, run construction outfits, had a stint in the military, and has generally worked with his hands for the better part of seventy-five years. For his “retirement” he's been farming for about ten years. He doesn't have much help. Like most small farmers, he has too many projects that need to be attended to right away, and barely enough time to start even one. On top of that, he does favors for friends up and down the Hamakua coast, often in the form of mowing grass with his tractor, tilling for farmers who don't have tractors of their own, or repairing vehicles and farming equipment.
I don't know where he finds the energy. I don't know where any these old farmers find the energy. I have to assume they had a mercilessly strict work ethic pounded into them at a young age, or they have an all-consuming passion to leave behind a legacy of banana trees and taro. Tom seems to live on nothing but canned food and Mountain Dew, and is still more active, and looks more fit, than someone half his age. His partner in the farm—who I'll call Dean—probably not much more than ten years younger than Tom, is the same way. We worked with him for a day in Kona disassembling metal irrigation pipes in a huge abandoned greenhouse. For hours he struggled with two pipe wrenches, unscrewing one length of pipe from another, working continuously like a machine and taking only ten minute breaks every hour or two. I helped by manually unscrewing the pipes as he turned the wrenches, and although I wore gloves I ended the day with blisters on my palms and a bloody knuckle. In contrast, his hands looked the same as they did when we started, because he has callouses like gloves of leathery human skin.
I should also point out that we started out for Kona from Pa'auilo at four in the morning on a Saturday, which means Hannah and I had to get up around three in order to be ready on time. Dean was doing this job in addition to his work for the Department of Agriculture during the week, because the owner of the greenhouse was giving him the metal pipes for free. Dean intends to use the pipes for a fruit orchard he's starting, with an eye on commercial production. Like Tom, dean works virtually every day, starting before the sun and finishing around the time it goes down.
There's always some kind of work for farming volunteers, because farmers in Hawaii get little support from the state, and growing season is year-round. We've found it to be a worthwhile means to enjoy Hawaii. It's not always easy, but the opportunity to learn about Hawaiian agriculture, the islands, the people, and history is there at every step, and it makes our time here greatly more rewarding than if we had simply come here as typical mainland tourists. Rather than spending time at a hotel or a resort, barely meeting anyone local who doesn't work in the service industry, and seeing little of island life firsthand, we are living in the middle of the thriving, verdant heart of the Big Island every day. It's a superior way to travel, in my opinion, and it's a means we intend to apply to other parts of the world in the not-too-distant future. We want to live this way for a while yet, and Hawaii has given us a very encouraging start.
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