You have to be careful about the farms you go to on Hawaii when you decide to be an agricultural volunteer. They're not all the same, both in what they grow and who is doing the growing. We have heard some appalling stories about the way volunteers are treated by various farmers. Some provide minimum shelter, a paltry amount of food, and expect volunteers to pay for all of their own needs. One person we spoke with who had done volunteer farming in Europe told us that Hawaii tends to abuse the work exchange system in a way not seen in other places. Much of the abuse most likely stems from the massive number of work volunteers who come to the islands. Farmers can afford to have a high turnover because there will always be someone else to replace the people who leave. It isn't uncommon for people to pack up and walk away from farms after things turn quickly sour. We've heard stories.
In late March, we left the Pa'auilo farming co-op, after staying for about four months, for a farm in another town farther down the Hamakua Coast. We had visited it earlier in the month after making contact with the hosts on line. There was a lot about the place to recommend it: a large communal kitchen with a gas stove, solar power, comfortable cabins, and a farmer who looked as if he knew what he was doing.
The place was big, probably around ten acres, with just about every kind of tropical crop imaginable. Papayas, bananas, pineapples, sugar cane, all growing in large, healthy, orderly patches in various locations around the farm. Bananas seemed prominent, growing tall and numerous near the kitchen area and along the top of the driveway leading up to the farm.
The farmer was a busy man, always running from one task to another, or answering a call on his cell phone. It took over an hour before he had a free moment to talk to us. As we waited, a young woman--lets call her Naomi--showed us around the place, pointing out this and that, telling us about all of the opportunities available to volunteers to learn about organic farming. Everything was organic, we were told, and not a drop of pesticide or petrochemical fertilizer touched the soil. Useful knowledge to take with you if you intend to travel to farms elsewhere. We had been thinking about how we needed to acquire skills that would make us look more attractive to prospective work exchange hosts in the future. There were also two dairy cows on the farm, and it was explained to us that most people who stayed were required to lend a hand milking them. In addition, the raw milk that wasn't sold to customers became yogurt, kefir, cheese, and sour cream. Hannah was intrigued. She had always expressed a strong interest in learning how to make dairy products by hand. What better opportunity than this?
At some point during the tour, as we spoke about what was expected of volunteers there (35 hours of work a week) and how best to ingratiate ourselves to the owner (strong work ethic a plus), Naomi happened to mention that the owner had a peculiar personality, and that she had almost left after her first two weeks on the farm “because of how he is”.
Oh? How was he, exactly? Was it something we'd need to worry about?
“He's a nut,” she said, in a flippant tone meant, I feel, to reassure us in spite of how she felt. “But he's basically a good guy. You can learn a lot from him.”
Judging from the look of the farm, it was apparent a person could come away from the place with a wealth of knowledge on the subject of tropical farming. We had to admit, the surroundings were beautiful.
Three or four young men and one young woman were pulling weeds from a row just tilled by the farmer, who was preparing the rows for papaya trees he was ready to plant. As they worked, they joked and conversed and sometimes leaned on their long-handled rakes to rest. The day was warm, after all, and all of the young men were shirtless.
Just as he finished the row he jumped off his tractor to check on some work being done by another young man at the gate to the property. We and Naomi continued talking, and after a couple of minutes I heard a voice yell, “Hey!”.
I looked down the driveway to the gate. The farmer was facing the workers in the field a few hundred feet away, his hands cupped around his mouth to project his voice.
“Hey, work while you talk!”
I had to assume he didn't care for the way his young volunteers were bullshitting as much as they were pulling weeds. In light of all the work that evidently needed doing, I could see his point, I guess. Still, something about the way he went about cracking the whip did seem a little....brash.
Naomi told us about the small kitchen garden maintained by volunteers. For the most part, she was the only one tending it. It would be great it some new volunteers helped out with the planting and weeding. Hannah expressed great interest in harvesting the fresh basil for meals and maybe even adding some new vegetables.
By now, the farmer had walked back up the field and stood among the volunteers. I couldn't make out everything he was saying, but it was clear he was scolding them in greater detail regarding the vice of not working while you talk. Employers everywhere have the same problem with young workers. But even though I could acknowledge that it was probably a recurring problem in a setting like this one, there was a certain quality to his harangue that gave me pause.
I've worked around a few jerks in my life. I've had a few friends who were jerks. I've gotten to a point now where I feel I have a pretty well-attuned radar for them. If someone is an asshole, it doesn't take long for me to realize that's who I'm dealing with, because I have a good idea what behaviors to look out for. One such behavior is a tendency to raise your voice at people with little provocation.
I had the uncomfortable feeling that was exactly what I was observing here.
It took some time, but eventually the farmer was ready to talk to us. He was about to take a trip into Hilo, and offered us a ride. We climbed in to the battered work truck and the farmer steered away from the big communal kitchen we'd admired with its gas stove and refrigerator, the little frog pond nearby, and the lush and inviting glade of banana trees, within which was a bamboo foot bridge spanning a shallow slue. In the course of our talk with Naomi, she had directed us to the part of the farm where the workers' cabins were located; sturdy, comfortable looking structures that would be, for us, a marked improvement over our current living space. No more partial walls and windows for wild insects and scavengers to enter through, and no dirt floors.
As we rode to Hilo the farmer conducted a brief, cursory interview. He didn't seem to want to know very much about us, just when we would be able to settle down on the farm. He had already, apparently, decided that we should stay and work there. He filled us in on some details about himself, how long he'd been on the island, and how many farms he'd had here over the years. It sounded like he had done a lot. I noted the incongruity between the high level of energy that we had observed before and his wizened, sun-dried appearance. Looking at his scrawny, sinewy body, I thought of beef jerky, of a dehydrated celery stalk. His teeth looked bad; many appeared to be missing. Yet that sustained, intense activity had to have a source somewhere, had to be a sign of good health in spite of his appearance.
He dropped us off in Hilo near the farmers market, and we spent part of the day shopping there and in the Salvation Army before taking the bus back home. By the time we returned it seemed like we had made up our minds already. We felt a healthy amount of trepidation: yes, the farmer came across as a bit of a hardass, both from what we'd heard and seen; the hours per week required were much greater, and the work much harder, than what we were accustomed to; the farm was populated almost exclusively by people in their 20s, and when we considered how low a tolerance we had for the follies and antics of youth now that we were in our mid-to-late 30s (four years of living in a university town will do that to you), we became concerned about how well we would fit into such a college-aged setting. Were we fated to be the old, slow couple on the farm that held back and frustrated everyone else?
We told our host Janice our plans. She was happy for us, she'd heard of the particular farm where we were going, and she was enthusiastic about all that we would have the opportunity to learn. We had a month left with her before we moved. We counted the days, did our work, and chewed our fingernails. In the last week before departing, a new volunteer showed up, a young woman from California who worked as a graphic designer and had previous experience as an organic gardener. No need, then, to feel guilty about leaving Janice in the lurch. One less thing to worry about, at least. A couple of days before departing, our friend Elmer came by with smoked pork and smoked sausage to make into an incredible stew with a side of stir-fried squash and onions. Janice and the new volunteer came over to the shack too, and we all had a delicious and, to me anyway, meaningful farewell dinner by lamp light. Given our meager circumstances, I don't think we could have asked for a better send off.
We left for our new home that Sunday morning, and missed the bus. In keeping with what I assume is a long held Hele-On tradition, it didn't arrive when scheduled. In this case, the bus arrived fifteen minutes early, while we sat in front of the little convenience store in Pa'auilo, a hundred feet from the highway, drinking coffee and waiting for a bus that was supposed to come fifteen minutes later. We watched it cruise on by, fully aware that there wouldn't be another bus for several hours.
We decided to hitchhike. It's a common practice on the island, though technically illegal. The police tend to look the other way, I guess. Our first ride, after waiting half an hour, was a woman with a pickup who took us as far as Laupahoehoe Point, still a good twenty miles from where we needed to be. With rain coming down, we stuck our thumbs out again, and after close to an hour, were picked up by two guys in a beat up, sagging minivan with reggae music thumping from the speakers. In this instance, the ride came with an entry fee: the four dollars we had on us so that they could get enough gas to make it to Hilo.
It worked out all right, even if we were down four bucks. We got to the farm, our backpacks compressing our spines, and marched up the driveway to the communal kitchen. No one was around. There was no sign that a single human being was anywhere on the property. A scrappy-looking but very sweet dog we had seen on our first visit trotted up with it's tail wagging. We also caught site of a small, dirty, white cat, almost still a kitten, with ears that were painfully torn and scabbed over. One of us commented that someone needed to get the poor animal to a vet.
A strange predicament. No one to welcome us or tell us what was next, neither of us had had anything to eat or drink for the last few hours, and it appeared that we would have to wait before everything was straightened out. I felt kind of self-conscious, as if I had just wandered into somebody's home. I didn't want to overstep any boundaries, but Hannah confidently opened the fridge to see what there was to eat. We helped ourselves to some of the fresh milk, and waited.
A couple of hours later, Naomi arrived. She explained that the place usually cleared out on Sundays. The weekend was mostly free time, and people often went to the beach or into town. Generally everyone was back by evening.
She showed us to our cabin, way at the end of a field of newly planted papaya trees, and flanked on one side by another cabin a couple of hundred feet away. We gratefully unpacked and rested for a while.
Later, we went to the kitchen to make ourselves dinner. By this time more people had arrived: a young man named Vanya we'd encountered once before in Pa'auilo; and Rick, a younger, long- haired boy who often wore a bandanna tied around his head and looked as if he'd stepped right our of 1975. Rick was sitting at the long table in the dining area of the communal building. Across from him sat Naomi. He was attentively trimming a marijuana bud, his gaze never seeming to leave the small green clump as he turned it slowly over and over, giving it a judicious look and then snipping where he thought appropriate with a tiny pair of scissors. The farmer had mentioned something about some volunteers smoking during their off hours, so neither of us was surprised. What did strike me was the fact that he was doing it in the common area; I had to presume that pot use was permissible enough that there was no real need to hide it, no fear that the farmer might come in the door and catch somebody in the act. It wasn't an activity that was confined to the volunteers' cabins.
All right then, we'd have to get used to it. We'd already gotten a heads up that it was going to be around in some small way. People engaging in a little personal use probably wasn't going to bother us.
The farmer wasn't around. He was at his other property an hour or so away, out in the jungle where his actual home was. I was apprehensive about getting an idea of what he was like to work with and how he trained people. We weren't really going to know until the day after tomorrow.
I should mention that we had some idea of what it might be like to work with the farmer. On a bus ride from Hilo two weeks earlier, we met with a couple of people we had seen on the farm during our previous visit. One of them, a girl not much older than eighteen, replied to our question about how best to prepare for being on the farm by telling us, “it helps if you have a really thick skin. He can be pretty blunt.”
That's the thing I felt we had to really steel ourselves for: a blunt, cranky old farmer who told people off and didn't mince words. I had a mental picture of us getting chewed out on a regular basis because we weren't really going to know what we were doing until after the first few weeks. Naomi had made a point of telling us that it helped to listen carefully to his instructions because he didn't like to repeat himself. Well, wonderful. What if we didn't understand his instructions perfectly the first time around, as so often happens when you're learning how to navigate in a new environment? Would we be hollered at for asking for clarification? I don't like to get chewed out. Nobody does that I've ever met. I especially don't like it if it's not really justified. But in this situation, that was only part of the problem. It would be one thing if I were being dressed down--how was I going to have to respond if I heard him raising his voice to my wife?
Questions such as these had been turning over in my mind for a while. I was getting impatient to see if my concerns had any validity, or if I was just stressing myself out over nothing, as I'm sometimes in the habit of doing.
The next morning, Naomi took us down to the cow pasture to show us how the milking was done. We were going to be expected to do this at least once a day, and it was a good idea for us to get a feel for how it was done. Milking is an involved process, we learned. The cow is enticed into the little cow-barn with a bucket of feed, which is poured into a plastic tub at the head of the stall as the cow comes in. It has to be done fast or the cow gets confused and might start backing out. Once her head is through the opening at the back of the stall, a board is lowered behind her head and locked in place, preventing her from backing up during milking. Her tail is tied in place at the other end with a chain to save milkers from being smacked in the side of the face while they work. (I had a hard time mastering the skill of efficient and quick tail tying; it took me a couple of weeks to get it down, during which time three different people showed me three different ways to do it, which only made things worse). The actual milking is what you might imagine it to be, except in this case there was always two people milking at once to get it done as quickly as possible, the reason being that the sooner fresh milk gets refrigerated, the longer it keeps.
Then, after the milking was done, the milk was carried in stainless steel jugs back to the milk room adjacent to the kitchen, where it was poured in to glass jars through a paper filter and then stored--very carefully to prevent the jars from breaking--in a fridge that looked like a converted deep freeze.
When the farmer demonstrated how to put away milk, he placed a special emphasis on cleanliness. Specifically, he told us that, when he had been in India, they said to him the three rules of milking were, cleanliness, cleanliness, cleanliness; except, instead of putting it succinctly like, that he said, “cleanliness and so on, cleanliness and so on, cleanliness and so on”. I can't say for certain what the “and so on” referred to. Possibly it was the obsessive scrubbing of jars, pails, jugs, and other paraphenalia, specifically with the rough scrubbing side of the sponge, along every square inch of the objects' interiors and exteriors. What we learned for sure was that proper dairy procedure is an intensive and painstaking process, especially when done by hand on a small scale.
The next morning, I went down with Rick and the farmer. The farmer came down, I presume, to show me his way of doing it, which, I would come to realize, was the only way of doing something in his view.
I should probably pause here for a moment to provide the reader with something like a disclaimer. A lot of what I'm going to say about the farmer's behavior throughout the rest of this post might come across to some as petty or back-biting. Some might feel that, out of a small-minded desire for revenge against what might appear to be only minor slights, I've set out to assassinate a man's character, albiet a man whose name I'm taking great pains to withhold. Maybe readers will think I'm easy to offend and overly sensitive, kind of a wimp. If that's the case, the failure is with me and my inability to adequately convey how stressful an environment the farmer's personality created for nearly everyone volunteering there during our stay. I've compressed a number of events into a shorter length of time to save on space. Nevertheless, it's my wish to make clear to anyone reading this the overall negative spirit of the farm, and the insufferability of the man who runs it. I'm doing this partly to contrast our time at this farm with some of the immensly positive experiences we've had while on the Big Island. People who come to the island to volunteer their work deserve more respect than this, and I hope that this post, as well as the one that will follow it, illustrates my point without leaving an impression of being merely mean-spirited and nasty.
Part of prepping the cows for milking was to spray off the teats with a hose. That way, no dirt or cow dung that might have gotten on them would fall into the milk. After the cow was secured in the stall, Rick stooped down with the hose and quickly sprayed the utter from the back. He then set the hose down and grabbed a towel to dry off the utter and teats.
“Why did you only spray it from the back?” the farmer asked with some incredulity.
“That's how I always do it.”
“That's how you always spray them off? You've been milking for four months and you still aren't getting that part right? Look,” he said, and picked-up the hose from the ground. “You have to get in there and spray from both sides to make sure you get all that shit off.” As he said this, he crouched low under the cow, squinting up at the utter like someone peering into a crawlspace, and sprayed the teats again with water.
That was pretty much the farmer's way, from what I gathered. He'd watch you perform a task for two seconds, not like what he was seeing, snatch the tool you were using away from you, or butt into the space you were occupying, and show you the way he wanted it done. He wouldn't say, “Let me show you another way” or “May I?” or “Excuse me”, he would invariably just push you aside with a grunt and begin his demonstration. The frustrating think was that his method was often nearly identical to yours, or it involved a technique that was so physically uncomfortable that it made the work twice as hard.
At one point Hannah and I went with two other volunteers to the farmer's other property to carve holes in the impossibly rocky soil with pick-axes and clear out mulberry trees. The farmer cut down the larger branches with a chainsaw and then the branches were to be further cut down with machetes and thrown on a compost pile. I grabbed a machete and set to cutting branches.
The farmer watched me for the better part of a second, then reached for the machete in my hand.
“Here,” he said. “You shouldn't do it like that. See, you're swinging it like this--” and he chopped at the air a couple of times to illustrate my inferior machete skills, “but you should come in at an angle like this.” He hacked at the branch for a few seconds, succeeding mostly in making wood chips collect on the ground.
“Okay,” I said, sounding as agreeable as I possibly could. In order to avoid setting off any temper tantrums that might be lurking behind his probing eyes, I decided I should try to cultivate an air of amiable agreeability. It's a method I've often employed around people who come across anywhere from mildly to acutely unstable. So far, I still filed the farmer under the “mild” heading, but you never can tell with some people.
I went back to cutting branches, wielding the machete pretty much as I had before.
“Yeah, like that,” he muttered approvingly, and wondered off.
The next day we woke early. Generally, we liked to get up a couple of hours before beginning our day because it gave us time to ease into the morning slowly, drink coffee or tea, make a decent breakfast, and not allow ourselves to feel rushed or tense. The rest of our day would always seem the better for it. We left our cabin at six and trudged along the path toward the kitchen.
It was still dark and the lights in the kitchen were on. We came in to see that the farmer had risen before us. There was nothing surprising about this; farmers are notorious early risers. We had been hoping that we might have the place to ourselves for a while before everyone came shuffling in, and enjoy some peace and quiet before we had to hike down the driveway, laden with milk jugs and feed buckets, to milk the cows. This was not to be.
The farmer leaned against a counter, drinking from a jar some strange-looking fluid the color of chocolate milk with dark, granulated bits floating in it.
“ 'Morning,” he said with a slight upward lilt to his voice. His normal speaking pattern was a clipped staccato convoy of barked syllables with the end of each word bitten off hard, not too unlike the honking of an irritable goose. At times this verbal machine gun was nominally restrained, meaning that you would have to be standing at least fifty feet away before you would have trouble making out what he was saying. At other times, when he was becoming particularly worked up over some topic or another (like, say, the general public's attitude toward the health benefits of raw milk over pasteurized, or when he perceived that someone was being wasteful with the propane), you might be obliged to put as many as 500 feet between yourself and his naturally-endowed megaphone before most of the thrust of his tirade was dampened by the distance.
To be fair, the farmer was very hard of hearing, and it's possible that he fell prey to the same assumption most people do when they have trouble hearing their own voices; they assume you can't either.
“Good to see you guys are early risers,” he added, and went back to sipping his unidentifiable concoction. I took the tea kettle off the stove, filled it with water at the sink, and started the gas burner with a duct-taped Bic lighter. I was still a little nervous moving around in this unfamiliar kitchen; as I mentioned before, being here was like being in a stranger's home. Everything I touched belonged to the farm, and I was eager to show a proper level of respect toward the farm's--and by obvious extension the farmer's—property.
While doing this, I couldn't help notice the farmer watching me closely, supervising with an attentiveness you would normally expect from a parent watching her three year old using a knife and fork for the first time. I tried not to feel perturbed by the intensity of his scrutiny, but I found it difficult not to feel at least slightly harassed. Part of the reason was that he seemed to have a habit of watching you over the tops of his glasses, the way people who wear bifocals often do, giving his gaze an overtly paternal aspect that was personally unflattering. It didn't help that the glasses he wore were of such a strong prescription that they made his eyes look almost twice their normal size, the owl effect that plagues wearers of strong eye glasses without the wherewithal or the vanity to get contact lenses. I had the sense that my movements and actions were being appraised for their correctness. I found this kind of close scrutiny offensive. It would seem acceptable if I were in the fourth grade handing in math homework that was supposed to have been turned in two days before. It's not nearly as acceptable if you are a full grown adult trying to make a cup of coffee at six in the morning so you don't walk into door jams and squirt dish soap over your oatmeal instead of honey.
But it was possible I was being kind of touchy, considering what time of day it was. I should probably have given him the benefit of the doubt.
“Scot, when you're heating water don't fill the pot up so much. It just wastes propane having to heat up all that water.”
“Okay,” I replied, amiably and agreeably, or as amiable and agreeable as I could manage to be at that hour. It struck me as an odd request, especially if you consider that some of the hot water would be used by Hannah, not just me. If I'd only been boiling it for myself, there would have been less in the kettle. I could have made that point, but then, how quickly would my retort degenerate into an argument? How badly did I want to debate the issue of water in a tea kettle and how long it takes to heat? The answer to the latter question is, not very badly at all. Less than not at all.
I moved on to pouring hot water over my freshly ground coffee. Good, strong stuff, perfect for this kind of morning. I did so in the small space at the junction of counter tops between the sink and the stove. As soon as my cup was full, I'd add some fresh cream.
“You know Scot, you shouldn't pour your coffee there, you should do it at the other end of the counter. That spot you're in tends to get used a lot.”
Yes, and? People can't work around me for the three minutes it takes my coffee to brew? I had noticed that the farmer showed a knack for always trying to occupy the same space in the kitchen that I was trying to use, no matter where I happened to be. I shouldn't have been surprised, he was the kind of man who needed to be in motion, busy with some kind of physical or mental activity, from the first moment he rose from bed. Moving about so much also made it easier for him to keep an eye on what people were doing, I'm sure.
With my coffee ready, I went to add the cream from the milk jar in the fridge. Almost every jar of milk had a layer of cream at the top; it was the perfect thing for coffee, and an indulgence I'd never had the opportunity to try until now.
I took a small stainless steel scoop out of a jar of utensils next to the sink, opened the milk jar, carefully scooped out a dollop of thick cream, and poured it into my coffee. I rinsed the scoop off and set it in the sink, intending to wash it as soon as I finished breakfast.
I sat down at the table to drink my coffee, thinking how I would like to have a bowl of homemade granola with milk for something quick and easy. Almost as soon as I was seated, the farmer walked over to the sink and picked up the stainless steel scoop I'd just used. He held it close to his face, examining it through his telescopic lenses as if trying to gaze into it's molecular structure.
“You wanna wash stainless steel as soon as you use it,” he announced, not really looking at me as he did so. “If you don't, the milk will dry on it and you'll never be able to wash it off.”
He then washed to scoop and placed it in the drying rack, the very thing I had been planning to do as soon as I'd finished eating.
I thought about what he'd said. I figured I would have to just let that one go. He clearly had spent much more time fussing and obsessing over stainless steel utensils than I ever had, and I probably wasn't as qualified to judge their proper care and handling as he was. But all the same, doesn't the “stainless” in “stainless steel” mean something? Am I wrong about that? Besides, hadn't I already rinsed it? There was nothing left on it to make a stain. It just needed to be washed.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. I took a sip of coffee and wondered how agreeable I still sounded.
My cup halfway gone, I stood to get some breakfast. I grabbed a bowl, filled it with granola, and went back to the fridge to get the same jar of milk. Pouring the milk out of the jar wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do. Big, wide-mouth jars aren't really designed for it. As you might assume, a few drops of milk ran down the side. I wiped off the bottom of the jar with the sink sponge and went to put it back in the fridge.
Practically lunging at me, the farmer snatched to jar out of my hands.
“After you use the jars you should wipe 'em off with your shirt like this,” he said, wiping down most of the big jar with his T-shirt. “I've been seeing a lot of milk stains in the refridgerator from people not wiping the jars off.” He put the milk back in the fridge and walked away, sipping his strange drink.
That was morning, and that was the tone of so many mornings on that farm, whether he said anything or remained comparatively silent. He didn't need to open his mouth—just his presence, lank and spindly, wrinkled and staring with the blazing highbeams of his often red-rimmed eyes blown up as big as golf balls through those industrial strength lenses, or shrunk back down to normal as he tipped them down to look over the top rims, a gesture frequently prefacing a sententious declaration nobody asked for—just that presence was enough to tighten your gut and make your breakfast sit like five pounds of gravel in your stomach. I disliked mornings, and only the ones when he was away from the farm were pleasant.
He didn't just pick on me, it was in his nature to be gruff with those who worked for him. I believe the man was constitutionally incapable of grasping the rudiments of politeness and courtesy. Compliments were out of the question—possibly the part of the brain that respects the feelings of others withered away in him long ago. After tasting a sample of cheese Hannah had made, over which she had drizzled some olive oil and fresh rosemary for a garnish, he commented: “It would be better if it didn't have all of that stuff on it so I can actually tell what it tastes like.” After trying some stove top granola another volunteer, Samantha, had made, he decided that “It would be better if it didn't have raisins in it.” None of these things were said too harshly but they fit in neatly with his overall attitude, and fit the fundamental disposition of his mind. Praise came as easily as lemonade from a carrot, and criticism as quickly as a hawk to a mouse.
Afterwards, we settled in to work for the day, the work we did most often during our time at the farm—weeding the rows of papaya at the easternmost edge of the property, near our cabin. It was long and monotonous, as weeding always it. When the sun was out, it beat down on us like a heavy boot. When it rained, we took cover at he cabin and waited for the shower to pass. We did a lot of rain-dodging, it being the rainy season at the time. The work we did there in the field, and the milking, took up the total of our work day.
Sometime after our third day of work, we dragged ourselves to our cabin to change into clean clothes and rest a while before going to the kitchen for dinner. It was already dark, and the squeaky calls of coqui frogs embroidered the soft swish of trees as they stirred in the light wind. As we stood on the porch of our cabin, the farmer came up the narrow foot path alongside it. I had the feeling he would want to discuss the quality of our work with us, or explain some more rules of conduct, or tell us what he wanted us to do the next day.
He started off kind of awkwardly, as if not sure how to begin.
“Pretty nice out here, huh?” he said, looking away as he spoke. When he returned his gaze to us, he continued in earnest. “I suppose you probably saw Rick smoking out the other day. He's kind of our resident stoner. There's always somebody who's kind of the token stoner around here.”
We nodded, failing to see where he was going.
“Anyway, when you get up to the kitchen, we're going to be trimming pakalolo.” (He used the Hawaiian word for marijuana.) “As you can imagine it's pretty hard to afford to keep a farm going just by growing produce. Sometimes you have to do a little extra something on the side. So sometimes I sell a little herb to help make ends meet. I'm just letting you guys know so you're not shocked when you get up there, and I wanted to make sure you'd be okay with it.”
It was wise of him to ask. More to the point, he should have felt an obligation to do so. On our first visit, a month before, we'd had a short conversation with him on the subject while he sat on his tractor. We had made it clear in our e-mails to him and his wife, and in at least two phone conversations, that we were sober, and wanted to work on a farm where sobriety was encouraged. Both of us have past substance abuse issues, and were both well aware that many young people who come to Hawaii to do volunteer farm work do so because of the access it will give them to Hawaiian pot. It follows that, at most of the places where people volunteer, pot is going to be smoked. It's decriminalized on the island (an individual can grow up to seven plants for personal use) and law enforcement doesn't see it as a high priority, especially now that crystal meth is so prevalent. Pot use is a deeply ingrained part of Hawaiian culture, at least as common as alcohol or tobacco consumption.
It was for this reason that we felt it necessary to specify, to any potential host, that we were looking for a sober living environment. We didn't care if people smoked pot on their own time, in their own space—we just didn't want to have it in our faces. During our conversation with the farmer the month before, that's how he had made it sound. “I know you guys said you didn't want to be around any drug use. I'll just say that some of the volunteers smoke herb after work, but I don't let them do it during the work day. I smoke it if I hurt myself, but other than that I don't touch the stuff.”
It didn't sound perfect, but it was workable. If people smoked on their own time, and it was around us, we could always walk away from it. We knew we would be staying in a cabin of our own, and we didn't have to be exposed to anything we didn't want to be.
What the farmer was making clear to us was altogether different. A trimming party in the kitchen meant that, if we wanted to eat, we'd have to be within spitting distance of a substantial amount of weed. Nobody takes up much space trimming small amounts, or takes the trouble to announce it to prospective witnesses when small quantities are involved. Chances were that the amounts being processed were somewhere in the range of at least a few ounces, if not more. Less than an ounce or two wouldn't be profitable enough to lend credence to what he'd said about needing to “make ends meet”. In Washington, when I was smoking it, an ounce of pot went for about three to four hundred dollars, depending on the quality and the distance it had to travel from it's place of origin. In Hawaii, I can only assume it sells for less because people are allowed to grow it for personal use. In order to make any real money, you most likely have to deal in pounds.
The implication was that bud-trimming in the common area might be going on for some time, maybe over the space of several days.
As if anticipating our complaints, the farmer assured us that such a situation was not going to arise.
“This is just a one-time thing,” he asserted. “We hardly ever have grass on the farm.”
Reluctantly, and with strong reservations, we gave him our consent. How much of a choice did we have? Or maybe another way of putting it would be, how much of a choice did we give ourselves? Our plan was to stay at this farm for three months, through most of the summer. We wanted to learn what there was to be learned here, and that meant hanging around for a while. To us, we had made a commitment. Without saying anything out loud to each other, we decided to tolerate being in the presence of people prepping weed for sale, as long as it was just this one time.
The farmer strolled away, back towards the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later, Hannah and I went in the same direction, murmuring to each other about the inconvenience of this new development, about the ubiquity of Hawaiian pot culture, about what we were going to have for dinner.
Entering the kitchen, we took in a scene pretty much identical to the one we had pictured. Rick, Naomi, Samantha, and the farmer sat around the dining table, each with a small pile of buds, snipping away at them with little scissors. On the table was a large mixing bowl of untrimmed weed, looking to be about three ounces worth, possibly more. A big ziplock bag sat next to the farmer, containing trimmed pot suitable for sale, probably amounting to another three ounces. Just as Rick had been doing a few days before, each person carefully studied the bud he or she worked on, turning it over and taking it in from various angles, cutting away any bits that stuck out and took away from the appearance of relative smoothness. Pot buyers are the same as any other person shopping for produce: they want the product to look neat, clean, and give no impression that it grew out of dirt.
Conversation moved from one subject to the next, but always came back to the business at hand:
“You're not taking enough off.”
“It looks fine to me. When I was in California I did this for some friends of mine. It helped pay my way here.”
“Your friends grew dope?”
“Not a ton, but they grew enough. You can get a lot of work in California trimming weed. People put out ads in some of the papers. It's pretty open.”
“I was thinking about going to California for a trimming job before I came out here. I might still do it when I get back to the mainland.”
“It's boring work but it pays pretty well. Plus the free weed.”
“That's pretty much how I'm getting paid here. Free dope.”
Sometimes the farmer would interject with advice.
“Rick, don't take so much off. You keep taking too much off and it doesn't look right. Did you do this one?”
“That's one of yours.”
“Mine don't look like that. I've been handling herb for years, I know how it's supposed to look.”
“Okay.”
“Cut it like this, see? Looks better that way.”
“Okay.”
On the other side of the kitchen, moving between the stove and the fridge, we went about the business of putting some food together. Whatever our meal turned out to be, circumstances would force us to squeeze in to what little space was left at the table.
We should have made reservations.
CONTINUED IN PART 2
CONTINUED IN PART 2
