A few days after we watched the farmer and four other farm volunteers snip pot buds in the kitchen, we ran away from the rain once again in the middle of weeding papayas. We looked for something to keep us busy indoors that still fell under the heading of “work”. There was little to do under a roof that the farmer considered beneficial to the farm, but earlier his wife brought a couple of boxes of lemons and limes to be squeezed for drink products the farmer produced for sale in local health food stores.
We'd done it before, laboring through a rainy morning and afternoon getting as much juice as we could out of the halved fruit, our hands stung by the citric acid as it came in contact with open blisters and cuts acquired through the previous week's machete-swinging and mulberry branch-hauling.
We finished half the load of citrus that day and assumed we'd get the chance to finish the rest the next time we had foul weather that lasted all day. We didn't wait long. Spring is the rainy season on the windward side of the Big Island. That's what we heard, anyway. To us, it seemed every season was the rainy season. In ten months on the island, we concluded that out of every seven days in a week, you could expect rain on at least three. Often, it's more like three days of heavy rain, four days of drizzle. Four days in a row of sunshine is a cause for celebration, and you should be grateful to get them. You want consistently good weather? Go to the Kona side and bake your brains out with the sun-blasted lava rocks.
As we entered the kitchen to start work on the rest of the fruit, we noticed that nearly everyone else on the farm had decided that they, too, would spend the day working indoors, but intently focused on something else. As they'd done a couple of days earlier, they sat around the rectangular dining room table just off from the kitchen, snipping at and inspecting the little green nuggets that we began to realize were something of a high priority on the farm. Already we saw that the trimming party from before wasn't “just a one-time thing” as the farmer had claimed. As of now, it was a two-time thing. Evidently, the crop was large enough to warrant more than one days' work.
As seemed to be the case about half the time on the farm, the farmer wasn't around. Important things going on at the jungle homestead, maybe. Nobody seemed to mind all that much. Tension eased like air leaked from an overinflated tire whenever he climbed into his battered work truck and left with the explicit intention of being away overnight. Everybody loosened up, talked more freely, joked more openly, went about their business with a smile. Imagine how people behave in totalitarian regimes when they know the secret police aren't around. Without his beaming, magnified gaze strafing their every move like a nearsighted spotlight, people felt more inclined to divulge an opinion or share an anecdote about him, as if duct tape had been yanked from their mouths.
One instance occurred while harvesting turmeric alongside Rick, using pitchforks to pry huge clumps of the orange root from the soil. He told us something about his first month on the farm.
“He had me clearing out razor grass from one of the fields here. I'd spend all day digging it up with a hoe-dad” (a hoe-dad is a tool similar to a hoe, but with a thicker, heavier blade and a shorter handle) “in hot weather just like this, just sweating my ass off. He wouldn't let me take a break or drink any water. If I said something about he just told me 'I drink all my water at the end of the day, and I do fine.' It really sucked. It would have been okay if he let me smoke bowls, but I couldn't do that, either.
“My friend who came here with me from Jersey, he left after two weeks. Couldn't take it. Told the farmer to go fuck himself and left. I decided to stay a while longer, 'cause I like what I'm learning here. I was going to stay until October, but I'm leaving at the end of the month because I'm sick of him. I've had enough.”
He summed up a feeling we heard expressed by more than one person on the farm. Naomi altered her plans and left sooner than she'd initially intended, for the same reason. She held out for several months, but the situation was getting to where she couldn't sustain her enthusiasm for the work anymore, or tolerate the farmer's personal idiosyncrasies.
It was the little things that made up her mind for her. On one occasion, while she and Samantha scrubbed off turmeric roots over metal washtubs and listened to music on a portable stereo, the farmer stopped by on his way to some other task and, without a word to either of them, turned the radio down so low neither of them could hear it. No one else worked in their area that day, the music was out of earshot of the rest of the farm, but the old farmer took it upon himself to police their listening habits during work, without bothering to explain himself. As could be expected, they waited until he was gone and turned the music back up.
I should point out that I never saw him have a problem with any of the males listening to music while they worked. Possibly this was only a result of the farmer lacking the opportunity to micromanage the use of the radio during times when male volunteers worked together. If he'd had the chance, he might have behaved the same way toward them. To be fair, I heard evidence in favor of the notion that the farmer was an equal-opportunity hater of other peoples' music enjoyment, so maybe he can be cleared of the accusation of sexism on this issue (but not on others—I'll save that for a little later). After all, Rick had mentioned to me that early on in his stay on the farm, he had been flat-out forbidden to listen to his mp3 player while working. When he asked why it was a problem, the farmer said that, if Rick expected to be an effective volunteer, he should be intimately familiar with the sounds of the farm. He'd get to know the place better by listening to it.
I know I don't need to go into how ridiculous that is, but still—the main sounds on the farm were wind in the trees, frogs croaking at night, birds singing, the dog barking whenever a car or truck came rolling up the driveway, and tourist helicopters flying overhead. No human being will ever grow better fruits and vegetables by listening to those things. Without a doubt, it's pleasant and relaxing to soak in the sounds of nature, but I fail to see how doing so results in superior farm work.
Naomi and Samantha failed to see it as well. Sometime later that day, the farmer returned to find that—great God!--the stereo was just as loud as before, playing tunes recorded only within the last few years and nowhere near the unsurpassed majesty of the Grateful Dead or the Steve Miller Band. Once again he cranked the volume down, and the beat thumping through the speakers shrank to an ambient whisper barely audible over the sound of turmeric being scrubbed with stiff brushes.
Now the young women felt they were owed an explanation. What the hell was wrong with listening to music while performing a repetitive, boring task?
The explanation given turned out to be an extended riff on the one Rick tried to make sense of months earlier.
You see, the farmer had been on the farm one day, tripping on ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic vine from South America used traditionally in certain religious ceremonies, and that has gained a minor “religious” following in the U.S. The vine gave him pronounced insight, accentuating the sounds of the farm and the surrounding forest, making him realize...something. He got kind of fuzzy on this point. No doubt it was something very important. Hallucinogens are like that, revealing unfathomable truths about the cosmos that don't stand up very well under the strain of being verbalized. But it's never stopped anyone from trying. In this case, the farmer seemed to be saying that he heard things in a way that made them feel more significant.
Good for him. If he wants to trip out on farm noises, that's his deal. But don't tell other people how to work because of something you hallucinated. These two young women weren't high on ayahuasca, so what difference would it have made if they scrubbed roots without a stereo?
None at all, obviously. But it didn't matter with the farmer. You had to do things his way, or you were going to hear about it. Never mind if your style of working didn't affect the end result. He'd already figured out how everything should be done, and that's how you ought to do it. Failure to do so brought the risk of loud, irritable rebukes.
The man was a control freak, and he had a guru-complex on top of that. He had his admirers, people who thought that his knowledge of organic farming made him someone to be listened to and respected. And I'm not saying he didn't deserve some level of respect for what he did. He knew how to farm, and grew a lot on his property. Every couple of days people came by wanting to buy raw milk and products made from it, people who I'm sure hung on his words like college sophomores grooving on a beloved professor. Most of these customers did not seem to work in agriculture, so I'm sure the farmer's mini-lectures carried a good deal of weight with them. He possessed knowledge, he had decades of experience to draw on to conduct his business, and he knew how to keep the place running in an organized manner. But the attention clearly went to his head. The admiration stoked an ego that bubbled to the surface with predictable regularity. A couple of people on the farm described him as having a “paternal” approach to teaching and managing. That's one way of putting it, but his way with volunteers had a tone to it that skated awfully close to something more personally intrusive.
The paternalism often took the form of criticism about diet. Any time you went into the kitchen to make something to eat, you ran the risk of getting an earful about the ignorance of your food choices. Hannah started throwing together a smoothie that had both fruit and vegetables in it. It prompted the farmer to lecture on the vice of “food mixing”, in which the hungry individual consumes more than one kind of food at a time, thereby confounding the digestive system and producing an excess of gas.
“You know how Rick farts a lot? You see the way he eats? He fills his stomach with all kinds of food and it doesn't digest right.” I'm sure Rick would've appreciated hearing that. The old man liked to complain about Rick. He ate too much, he ate the wrong foods, he wanted water when he was keeling over from dehydration. Weird kid.
Other opinions about food centered around the medicinal properties of certain plants, and milk. He was fond of saying that he didn't need health insurance because everything he ate made him so healthy. According to him, the process by which he amended the soil turned all the fruit he grew into superfood. The raw milk he drank provided his body with essential enzymes and bacterias that gave him superior intestinal health. (I once heard him say that most people had never had milk, because the pasteurized stuff wasn't the real thing.) He consumed smoothies made with a fruit found all over the island called noni, reputed to have properties that purge the body of impurities and treat illness. He was cocky about what he put in his body never shy about talking down to volunteers when he didn't like the looks of what they were eating.
Which is strange for a couple of reasons. First, he didn't look very healthy to me. Years of laboring in the sun turned him leathery, dry, and wrinkled. He was missing most, if not all, of his upper teeth. That's usually not a sign of a strong constitution, or good self-care. I will say that he had a lot of energy for a man in his sixties, more than you generally see. It's certainly possible that his diet had something to do with it. But he had a lot of the hallmarks of a person who had made some bad choices in the past.
Secondly, he drank his own urine. I never saw him do this, but he laid it out pretty plainly one sunny afternoon over lunch at his home in the jungle. It had something to do with the belief that all the waste products the body eliminates are absorbed into the feces, not urine. Pee contains...something...that is supposed to be good for you, or possibly something that's lost in the digestive process. So you drink it. Then you'll be really healthy.
I don't know where he got that idea. I've heard of it before, but I always had a hard time imagining someone actually doing it. What quack of a doctor sat down and wrote a book telling people that they should drink their own pee? Because you know that's how it happened. Somebody became convinced they had the answer to the world's health problems, just as so many individuals think they've hit on the magic formula to cure the physical ills of humankind, and talked other people into doing it. It probably wasn't even a doctor who came up with it, and I'm sure that didn't stop them from claiming there was a scientific basis for drinking piss. The farmer tried to make it sound pretty scientific, even though all the empirical evidence in the world couldn't get me to do it. Some people will always buy the bullshit other people are selling.
I assumed the farmer was one of those people fond of non-mainstream, alternative approaches to reality. He made a passing reference once to that fake documentary Loose Change, the one produced as a work of fiction by an aspiring young filmmaker, and then cynically marketed to gullible viewers as a look at what really happened on 9-11. He seemed to think it told the real story, and I could only roll my eyes because I knew full well the film had been discredited as a hoax, and not a very good one. I realize I'm getting petty (or even more petty) here, but that one statement about a nonsense 9-11 conspiracy film threw an unflattering light on just about anything that had come out of the man's mouth in the previous three weeks.
As I've made abundantly clear, unflattering things had a habit of jumping out of his head. To be fair, I should say that some things came out that he had mentioned to others with an expectation of privacy. Vanya felt it important to mention to a group of us that the farmer had referred to Samantha as a “man-hating lesbian”. In most cases, however, he didn't care who heard the foolish and offensive things he had to say. He complained that all the women on the farm had short hair, mainly because to him it made them all look like lesbians. Apparently gay women, or those who bear a passing resemblance to a stereotype of gay women, were a sore spot for him. Not atypical of men of his generation. He also felt the need to express his displeasure with the way his volunteers worked by saying he probably needed to hire a bunch of Filipinos. They were raised in agriculture, he reasoned, and farming was in their blood. They worked fast and didn't talk too much.
At that point, Hannah felt it necessary to explain to him that her own mother had done migrant work for many years and had managed to make a living at it, but it was “probably in her blood” because her mother is Mexican. It's just possible that her sarcasm got through to him. At the very least, he didn't have anything else to add.
Again in fairness to him, I'd like to point out that his prejudice was not out of place on the Big Island. I can't speak for the other islands, but it seemed to both Hannah and me that there was a lot of racism on Hawai'i, particularly shocking when you consider how racially diverse the place is. Most ethnic groups keep to themselves, and though there is some intermingling, it's often superficial. A lot of people speak of other ethnic groups in terms of stereotypes: Portuguese talk all the time, Hawaiians are lazy, the Japanese are private and refuse to assimilate, etc. And many white people are under the impression that they get singled out for discrimination on the part of Hawaiians, apparently unaware how ironic that notion is. The farmer was only one of several whites I heard say that local bus drivers refused to pick up white passengers. In nearly a year on the island, Hannah and I never noticed anything of the kind. Many of the drivers were assholes, but that's true of bus drivers everywhere. As often as we heard it said, we never came across evidence to support the claim.
What didn't make as much sense was the farmer's tendency to exaggerate, if not outright lie. Maybe “lie” is a little harsh. Better to say that he periodically said things that appeared to hover right around the border of Bullshitland. He liked to hear himself talk, liked the fact that he had an audience that could not easily refute his claims, and some of those claims, although not impossible, put credulity to the test.
While watching us milk one morning, he happened to mention, with zero prompting, that he had been a hari krishna while living in England in the sixties. Sometimes, he and the other hari krishnas would be invited to George Harrison's mansion, where they would take part in long jamming marathons (with tambourines, I imagine) that went on for days. Occasionally, the other Beatles would show up.
Maybe this happened, maybe it didn't. All I'm saying is, my spider-senses start to tingle when I hear people say certain things, like the time they watched JFK get assassinated and clearly saw an alien spacecraft throw a robot at him from behind the grassy knoll, and the time they met all of the Beatles.
A week or so later, the farmer discovered that wild pigs had dug up some of his newly-planted papayas during the night. The only thing for it was to bust out his 30.30 rifle and hope to catch one in the act. Because he couldn't be on the farm every night, waiting on the porch of his cabin for a pig to show up, he needed to teach someone else how to use the rifle for the times when he was away. That someone else turned out to be Rick.
Hannah and I happened to walk into the kitchen a little after the farmer ran Rick through a crash course on how to shoot. He was in the middle of a hunting story from his boyhood, regaling Rick and a couple of other volunteers with the dangerous particulars of an accident he had while firing at an animal. His rifle had exploded, spraying him with shrapnel and wounding him badly. He crouched down on one knee and aimed his 30.30 at an imaginary target to illustrate how he had been poised to take the shot when the accident occurred. As he told his story, he made reference to the “Indian guide” who had been there with him and his father at the time. The detail struck us as kind of odd. Did people still hunt with Indian guides in the US after the nineteenth century? You don't hear about it much. Actually, I've never heard about it at all. I don't hunt, and don't pretend to have any in-depth knowledge about the way people hunt throughout the country, but the majority of people I've spoken to on the subject talked of hunting with friends or family, not hired guides.
As with the Beatles story, it's not impossible, or even wholly improbable, but it's odd and random enough to make you question whether or not the event described really took place. What it reminded me of was Faulkner's story “The Bear”, in which you have a young man traveling to a family hunting ground for many years, learning his hunting skills from an old American Indian. It put Hannah in mind of one of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Indian hunting guides turn up in that, too. Possibly they turned up in the farmer's story because that's what really happened, but I'm inclined to think he came across the idea from another source, and used it to spice up an old hunting anecdote for the benefit of his younger audience.
The fact that the farmer was habitual bullshitter was a little obnoxious, but it was tolerable on its own. Combined with his other personality traits, it added up to a man you generally wanted to avoid. I think I've made it sufficiently clear here and in my last post how the farmer's attitude consistently put us off, and had that been the only problem, we might have hung in and stayed the length of time we'd originally planned. But certain things that took place tried our patience to the point of making rethink where we wanted to spend the next few months.
Elements of the farmer's business cropped up frequently enough that we started to consider leaving for good. Trimming didn't stop in the kitchen, and people weren't waiting for convenient rainy days to get the work done. As Hannah and I pulled weeds in the heat, everyone else sat at the table with their scissors and piles of dope, smoking out and making it look like the work was the first and foremost priority of the farm. There was other work to do, but after seeing three days of volunteers making weed customer-ready, we started to get a feel for how important this particular crop was. Maybe the farmer needed the money right away, and the processing had to be rushed. Clearly he didn't have the patience to take people over to his other property to finish the job.
We felt insulted on some level, even if the insult wasn't intentional. We didn't smoke dope or want to throw our labor into producing it, so we got to sweat in the sun while everybody else partied indoors. We arrived at the farm with the idea that it produced food for its money, that all the work went into fruit and vegetables and dairy, that everything was legitimate and on the level, nothing we'd have to bite our fingernails over. It turned out that we couldn't stay without compromising our principles regarding our sobriety, and without feeling like we'd been suckered.
Because we had been suckered. Everything we saw contradicted what the farmer said when we spoke to him a month before, when we were struggling to make up our minds about staying there. We didn't just see our co-volunteers smoking recreationally during off hours, a whiff of pot hitting our nostrils every few days as we went about our own affairs. This was a business, it fueled the farm as much as papayas and sugarcane and taro, it was the invisible crop that possibly shouldered much of the weight of keeping the operation afloat. It wasn't invisible to us. We saw plenty going on right out in the open.
It's baffling when you think about it, because the farmer took an incredible risk here. He didn't know us when he took us on, he didn't know anything about us, but the greatest precaution he took when he decided to conduct trimming work on the farm was to ask if it was okay with us. He made no effort to hide it. In fact, he told us straight up what was going on. What if we'd been narcs, passionately opposed to illegal drugs? Isn't it possible we might have gone to the police with the information he gave us? Marijuana is still enough of a controlled substance in Hawaii to give a sizeable grower serious headaches from law enforcement if the right information winds up in the wrong ears. And yet, he acted almost as if weed were no more controversial a crop than his bananas.
The lack of care in managing who was in the know about his illegal activities became even more obvious when Rick decided to cook himself a batch of pot butter to sell on the mainland. For a full day, and most of the evening, a large cooking pot sat on the gas stove bubbling and steaming, putting out an odor that was halfway between marijuana and boiling spinach. Rick had to wait until the farmer had left for a couple of days, because he'd been explicitly told not to cook any butter. It wasted too much propane. At some point, Rick found it necessary to throw a small amount of butter out. Whether it was part of an older batch that had gone bad, or part of the batch he was in the process of cooking, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that he tossed it onto the big compost pile about fifty feet from the kitchen.
The next morning, while people filed into the kitchen for breakfast, I watched from the window over the sink as the dog wandered around in the garden. Something appeared to be really wrong with him. He staggered like a drunk, and when he sat down, he swayed back and forth as if he'd just stepped off a carnival ride.
I waited a while before I said anything, just to see if his behavior would change. A little later, he showed up at the kitchen door, still swaying and seeming to have a hard time focusing his eyes. He laid down on his side, his breath rapid, and when food was put out for him, he ignored it.
“I think something's wrong with the dog,” Samantha said. We all had a look at him. His symptoms had us worried. To make matters worse, he wet himself as he lay on the ground, and made no move to get up.
Vanya had classes in the morning at the University in Hilo, so he offered to take the dog in to the vet on his way. The poor animal couldn't be coaxed into standing, and a couple of us had to pick him up and place him in the truck. Vanya left for the day and we all hoped the dog would pull through.
Hours later, the farmer came back to the farm with the dog. Someone had called him to let him know what happened, and he had gone to the vet himself to straighten things out. The dog was okay, although he had a small bandage on one of his forelegs where an IV had been inserted.
The farmer had a few words for Rick. It seemed that the dog had eaten the pot butter Rick had left on the compost pile. “THC is very bad for dogs,” the farmer reprimanded. “It can kill them.” I have to say, I didn't know that. When I think back on all the stoners I've known who used to blow pot smoke in their pets' faces, it makes me cringe, even though I know the concentration of THC in smoke is small compared to what you find in butter.
That wasn't all, though. The vet's office had to fill out a police report because the dog had suffered THC poisoning. I'm assuming the farmer had a quick excuse ready about his dog getting into his private stash or something, and maybe the vet's office or even the police bought it. Even if they hadn't, it wouldn't have been too difficult to get the weed moved somewhere else before the cops got there. I'm sure the farmer had sympathetic neighbors who would hold it for him.
Still, talk about cutting it close. One of his volunteers accidentally feeds pot butter to the dog, the dog gets incredibly sick, goes to the vet, and somebody at the vet contacts the police. That situation could have gotten really bad really fast, and what then? Run the farm from behind bars? If he was having such a hard time making ends meet, I can't imagine he could easily afford a lawyer that could keep him out of jail.
Obviously, none of this would have been the case if he didn't have weed on the farm. Sure, he told Rick not to cook pot butter, and Rick ignored him. So someone might say it was all Rick's fault. But the atmosphere the farmer encouraged by processing weed, letting volunteers smoke it, and tolerating other drug-related activities such as Rick and Vanya getting wasted on shrooms they picked in the cow pasture, opened up the possibility that something like this would happen. And you know something? If he had been on the farm when the dog had gotten sick, I bet he wouldn't have let anyone take it to the vet. Judging from the way he treated animals (remember the white cat with the chewed-up, bloody ears I mentioned in the last post? That creature never saw the inside of a vet's office) he would have rather let the dog die than take a chance on the cops finding out about his weed.
Think about this whole situation for a second. Most people who sell drugs, if they're smart, take extra precautions to ensure that as few people as possible know what they're up to. I've known pot dealers who only sold to people they knew well and never to strangers, or went to buyers' homes to sell so they wouldn't have a lot of traffic going in and out of their own house. They took steps to make sure they weren't caught, unlike a guy I heard about who drove around in a car with a brake light out and two pounds of weed in the trunk. You can guess what happened after he was pulled over.
I'm saying this because the farmer wasn't a dumb guy. For all his faults, he had a good enough brain to learn how to farm in Hawaii and make it happen, as well as maintain a small dairy. He was fairly literate, and good with his hands. But he was in no way modest. He enjoyed it that he had people who looked up to him and thought of him as an organic farming guru. I'm certain he took a lot of pride in the fact that he had put nearly the entire farm together himself, from the cabins to the barn to the kitchen with its propane fixtures and solar power panels on the roof. I would too. I'm also sure his pride had at some point in his life turned into full-blown arrogance. And I believe his arrogance convinced him that he could sell drugs without having it come back on him in any detrimental way. No matter what happened, he would be able to fix it. So why bother being cautious?
It was around this time that we decided we'd had enough. We were fed up with the farmer, with the weed-trimming parties and animal poisonings, with the serious compromise we had to make in order to keep working. I want to make it clear that neither one of us cares if people smoke pot. I don't recommend it, but it's none of our business what others put in their bodies if it doesn't effect us directly. The problem we had—and this was especially true with me—was that we didn't feel comfortable working in an environment where drugs were such a huge part of the culture. It bothered Hannah a lot, and I felt like a recovering alcoholic who has inadvertently found himself tending bar.
We told the farmer we were leaving after putting it off for a day. We weren't looking forward to the potential argument we might have to engage in to make our case. As it happened, he took it fairly well. He knew immediately why we wanted to leave without having to hear it from us. His reaction was less emotional and more condescending. He wanted us to know that we'd never find a farm to stay at on the island where people weren't into weed. It was to big a thing on Hawaii to get away from. We'd also never find another farm that was as good as his. I'll concede that point. I doubt many organic farms on the island are as well-equipped as his. Not that it matters when the climate is so alienating.
He brought up the fact that he had asked us if we were alright with people trimming weed, and we'd said yes. We replied that he had told us it was just going to be that one time, not something that we'd wind up seeing every other day.
“Well, my friend wanted me to move this stuff for him, so it had to get done right away. I guess it was more than I thought it would be. I don't know, my wife keeps telling me I should get out of the pakalolo thing. Maybe from now on I should just have people work on it away from the farm.”
Good idea. I wondered how things would have been if he'd thought to do that before.
We parted company more or less amicably. He took the news better than we thought he would, and we'd made ourselves understood. He knew that we'd leave the farm inside of two weeks.
We couldn't help but notice that he had lied to us again. He wasn't moving the weed for a friend—Rick had told us he grew it himself, as he'd been doing for decades. Maybe he was taking precautions in distancing himself from the source of his dope when talking to people who weren't directly involved in his business. It seemed a very thin curtain to hide behind.
There isn't much more to say about it than that. We got rid of a bunch of our stuff that we figured we could do without in order to make traveling easier. We got ourselves down to a backpack apiece, and when we left the farmer didn't say goodbye. We went back to Janice's place in Pa'auilo, where we stayed a month. After that, we moved to the property of another woman in Pa'auilo where we mostly did gardening and yardwork, with a little light construction and animal husbandry thrown in. We were comfortable and happy there, enjoyed the company of our host, and I'm glad to say that the farmer's assumptions about how hard it would be for us to find a good place to stay were totally wrong. We finished out or stay on the island of Hawai'i in a beautiful and peaceful setting.
I'd like to make it clear that, as irritating as our experience at the bad farm was, what helped to make it tolerable were the people we worked and lived with. If anyone who was there reads this and recognizes themselves, I hope you don't feel I placed you in a bad light. If I did, I apologize. It wasn't my intention to make any of you look bad, or to speak ill of you. You all were what made the place liveable, you made us feel welcome and appreciated, and we want to thank you for the all-too-brief friendship we enjoyed with you.
I want to finish up by saying that I hope these last two posts haven't given anyone the impression that we were unhappy on the island. Quite the opposite is true. We saw and did things there that will be a part of us for the rest of our lives, and if we had to do it all over again the same way, we would in a second. Everyone should make an effort to go there, however they can manage it. You don't have to be rich, and you're not restricted to staying in an overpriced resort. We stayed there a year on just a few thousand dollars we spent the previous year saving up, and if you have the guts to challenge yourself with work you've never done before, in a setting that can sometimes seem strange, you'll do alright.
I also hope that this blog hasn't seemed too negative or off-putting. My goal was to show people every facet of the island as we experienced it, both the good and the bad. Hawaii isn't a paradise, it's a place. It's a very beautiful place, with a life and a culture that is unique to it, but you'll find many of the same problems there that you'll see anywhere else in America. There's drug addiction, the poor and the homeless, violence and a weakened economy. There are also people who are generous and friendly, landscapes like the worlds in dreams, great food, weather that is almost never cold, and good beaches open to the public. A person can be extremely content there.
This is the last post for Hawaii Timewarp. My thanks to everyone who has followed it, and anyone who has taken a glance. It's been fun to share the experiences Hannah and I have had on the big wonderful island of Hawaii, and I hope that others will be inspired to go and check it out for themselves.
Scotimus Maximus
October 12, 2011
