The Bad Farm, Part 2

    

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

The Bad Farm

       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

 

Volcanoes and Tsunamis!

     I've been wanting to write something about the volcanoes of Hawai'i for a while now, and I've found, after a couple of attempts, that I don't have very much to say on the subject. Nothing that hasn't been said already, at any rate, and by people much more knowledgeable than myself; I'm no geologist or vulcanologist, and what education I've received on Kilauea, Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa puts me in no better position than most tourists who come to the Big Island and manage a trip to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in between swimming with the dolphins and purchasing authentic Hawaiian clothes and jewelry made in the Philippines. Some of the lucky bastards have even gotten the privilege of seeing Kilauea as it disgorges lava in fiery streams. My wife and I have not been so fortunate.

      I can tell you what things we have seen relating to the volcanoes here, as undramatic as some of it might seem. Who needs drama anyway? It's overrated. Sometimes it's the small details, the quiet details, that say the most.

      There's a small, quiet thing locally referred to as vog, an airborne combination of volcanic gas and glassy particulates coughed up by Kilauea, and considered by most to be a health hazard. I've never heard of any vog-related deaths, but lung irritation is common to people who suffer prolonged exposure, much of which seems to occur on the western side (or mountain side) of the island, where Kona is. There's a gratifying poetic justice concealed in that fact, if you're at all class-conscious: the Kona side of the island is where most of the wealth has accumulated, where the majority of the fancy upscale homes and resorts and millionaires are found, and where most tourists wind up staying, for the simple reason that the Kona side gets more sun. Some folks might find a certain smug satisfaction in the fact that those on Hawaii with the most money also have to breathe its worst air.

      It's important to take into account that resort and hotel workers bussed in from the poorer side of the island (the Hilo side, where we live) have to breathe that air as well, and possibly suffer the same ill effects. I was disappointed when I first considered that idea, but was disappointment has been mitigated somewhat by the fact that those working poor who wait on and service well-to-do mainlanders don't have to live with that shitty air all the time, and at least can go home at the end of their shifts and breathe easier.

      Health food stores sell supplements that are supposed to counteract the effects of vog. I'm pretty sure one of them is called Vog Buster, although I could be making that up. I've never talked to anyone who's used them, and have no idea if they work. I suspect they're like a lot of supplements you can buy in health food stores, which might work, maybe, for some people, provided you take the right brand at the right dose, and even then you're probably wasting your time. My advice to anyone suffering from vog exposure is to get away from Kona.

      Vog was one of the few things we got to enjoy about Kilauea when we made a visit to the park a few months ago. The trip came unexpectedly. An old farmer we've done some work for was heading to the creatively-named town of Volcano to have a look at an old shed the owner was thinking of parting with, and he offered to bring us along and stop by the park so we could take a gander at the famous volcano. Who could say no? We both grew up in a state that has had, to the best of my knowledge, the mainland's only recent volcanic eruption. St. Helen's exploded when we were very young, and living a couple of hundred miles away, so our chances of seeing it in action were slim at the time, not to mention fatal. Washington State has at least a couple of dormant volcanoes but, being dormant, they don't get up to much except freezing the occasional hiker to death. Here was an opportunity to see a volcano with a little something going on.

      That something, at the time, was a very sedate, even tasteful, column of gas and steam coming out of the big vent in Kilauea's crater. It rises like the effluent of a refinery smokestack, at a slower pace but with greater volume, inspiring visions of underground factories or smelting plants beneath the apocalyptic ruin of the crater, which looks like a chunk of terrain transplanted from Mars then painted brown and gray, with vertical ridges all around its circumference and a variegated plain of lava rock making up its floor.

      Along its edges steam emanates from unseen openings, as if someone left open the doors to several saunas at once. The steam clouds pass by you as you gaze out over the crater. You are, in a real sense I suppose, being touched by the volcano. To become even more intimate, you can hike out over the fields of sharp, granola-textured a'a, lava that has cooled at a different rate than the flat, undulant pahoehoe, a type of lava that looks a lot like spilled asphalt.

      According to those who run the national park, people would be well-advised to spent their entire visit looking over their shoulders. Danger lurks everywhere, waiting to claim yet another life. Most nature preserves have some element of peril, but the video shown in the screening room of the visitors center could put a faint-hearted person off the idea of ever leaving the parking lot.

      One should never walk on the a'a in flip-flops (called slippers or, more properly, “slippahs”, in Hawaii), only shoes or boots. Don't go without a flashlight, because if it gets dark while you're out there you don't have a hope of making your way along the bumpy, jagged, pointy rock and back to a trail without planting your face in some of it, and then Search and Rescue will have to bring their flashlights when they come and get you, an expense I'm sure the state government would rather not have to shell out on your account. The video shows a still photo of a cut and bleeding hand belonging to someone who neglected to heed the warnings of Parks and Recreation, and look where it got them—an uncredited spot in a safety video.

      Probably happens all the time.

      Trips to the shoreline where the lava flow spills over into the Pacific, during those times when Kilauea is producing lava, opens up yet another possibility for injury. Death even, if you're one of those people incautious enough to wander along the extreme edge of the shore, close to the water, near to where lava has been splashing and cooling in the surf. It sometimes creates a ledge of fresh rock that looks to the untrained eye to be sturdy, but has a tendency to break away and sink. More than one person has perished this way. The helpful video demonstrates this phenomena with a crude computer-animated cartoon, followed by a newspaper clipping concerning a young man lost to the sea while standing on one of these trick ledges.

      The volcanic gas contains sulfur dioxide, and in concentrated doses can cause harm to those with respiratory problems or heart problems, to kids, pregnant women, the elderly, and everyone else.

      Overall, the park is a great place to take the family if you're not terribly fond of them.

      Lava flows sometimes create lava tubes, long passages in the rock that look a lot like mining tunnels. One of the park's tubes is open to the public, lit for about the first 100 feet in.  Another public tube has no lighting at all. You were supposed to bring a flashlight anyway. 

     The walls and ceiling are damp, fostering the growth of lichen that hangs from above like the tendrils of a cave-dwelling jellyfish. Footing is treacherous, as the way is uneven and rocks are strewn about the floor. We walked far enough that all traces of daylight from the opening were gone, and then turned off our flashlight. Predictably, the darkness was absolute, like deep space. Another couple that had been walking ahead of us snapped a flash photo, making a split-second burst of illumination that left a momentary after-image on our retinas. By then we were satisfied that we had come to appreciate the interior of a lava tube as best as we were able, and made our way back.

      Months before I had heard a story on the radio about impoverished families sometimes living in lava tubes. A social worker made the discovery while doing some follow-up work on one of her cases. I wasn't surprised to hear that desperately poor people where improvising homes out of available space—poverty on the island is rampant—but in light of our tour through one of these tubes, I'm struck by how much people can bring themselves to tolerate when they're presented with few alternatives. That place did not look comfortable, let alone livable, and as I said, it was damp. I can't recall what the location of the tubes was said to be in the story, but if they were anywhere near Kilauea, those people must be terribly cold at night. The elevation is high, the air is chilly, and that part of the island receives the most rain. Still, I can empathize with folks who would rather live in a dank cave than pay the exorbitant rents asked for even small studio apartments on the Big Island. It could be said that Hawai'i is most like the mainland in its inability to provide affordable housing.

      During Kilauea's most recent eruption, we received a few worried emails expressing concern for our safety. We never felt any sense of danger at the time, primarily because we live two hours away from the volcano, and the eruptions are always confined to a relatively small area. Without a doubt the island's vulcanism is something to take seriously and regard with a reserved wariness, as large swathes of the western side of the island attest. As you come down the saddle road, huge fields of a'a, adorned with innumerable “so-and-so was here” signs fashioned from chunks of white coral, take over from the rolling hills blanketed in dry scrub and the odd prickly pear cactus. That is where the island becomes an extraterrestrial landscape of geologic upheaval frozen in place, dark and crumbly and raggedly formed. On some slopes the hardened black pahoehoe fans out in a cone shape, and has been there long enough that grass has begun to break through it, cracking it into smaller pieces, beginning the slow process of turning rock to soil. From a distance these dark patches look like the aftermath of a brush fire. Over the years, neighborhoods have been swallowed up by lava flows; gift shop postcards sometimes depict objects such as street signs poking up from a field of hardened volcanic rock.

      But it's probably not the lava that'll get you. The Pacific Ring of Fire, with all of its hyperactive plate tectonics, has other ways to interfere with the regular flow of human life. In the Jagger Museum, on the rim of Kilauea's crater, a seismograph indicates with lines scratched onto a scroll of paper the level of seismic activity on the island of Hawai'i. More than once people have mentioned to us the earthquakes that occur here from time to time. In 2007, the island was struck by a quake measuring greater than 7.0 on the Richter scale. The farming co-op where we stayed for several months had its water supply cut off by quake damage.

      After the recent earthquake in Japan, a tsunami warning went throughout the island, and Hannah and I stayed up in bed at ten o'clock that night listening to the Pa'auilo air raid siren go off, as it did once an hour until about two in the morning. Our host came out to the shack periodically to give us updates on when the tsunami was supposed to hit, and to fill our heads with dire notions of tsunami-related destruction and how portions of the island might be cut off by flooded roadways. In hindsight, we realize we didn't have much to worry about—Japan is to the west of the islands, meaning the wave would hit with the greatest force on the side of Hawai'i opposite us. And even if the wave had been coming the other way, Pa'auilo and most of the Hamakua coast within several miles of it are a couple of hundred feet above sea level.

      If you take a look at Big Island history over the last seventy years, you see good reasons to be nervous about tsunamis. On April 1^st, 1946, a tsunami wave wiped out most of the bayfront area in the city of Hilo, destroying a predominantly Japanese settlement called Shinmachi and killing many. A memorial to the settlement stands in its old location, now Wailoa Park. The same tsunami destroyed a schoolhouse at Laupahoehoe Point, and killed twenty children who ran toward the water to pick up fish stranded by the first wave. Another memorial stands at that site. Photographs taken afterwards in Hilo show demolished buildings, boards and planks piled like scattered matchsticks, cars buried under debris.

      We knew these things as we listened in the dark to the air raid siren wailing like an enormous, lonely hound. We also knew those towns were at sea level, unlike Pa'auilo, and more likely to be hit in the event the wave hit the east side of the island. Despite what we knew, a sense of urgency and apprehension kept us from sleeping every bit as much as the siren did. Would the damage be bad? Were we going to need to lend a hand in aid work, maybe pulling victims from the wreckage of their flattened houses? Would we be busy the next day helping crews pull fallen trees and other objects out of the roads?

      As we considered what the near future would hold for us, the shack began to tremble. Not a lot, not even visibly, but a rumbling coming up from the ground and through our mattress simulated the sensation of sitting in the back of a moving pickup truck. Some of the dishes, jars, and other odds and ends rattled. The tremor lasted no more than three seconds, followed by another, smaller one that was even briefer.

      It was a good deal more unsettling than waiting to see if we'd get doused with salt water. This was happening right now. And what if it got worse? As I mentioned, we've heard from longtime residents that earthquakes, though uncommon, can sometimes be strong. Earlier that day Japan's quake had caused unprecedented damage; maybe we were going to get residual vibrations from that quake, or maybe the tectonic activity over there was aggravating fault lines over here. We sure as hell had no idea.

      Earthquakes are unnerving; I've been through two tremors before, and nothing makes you feel as helpless as the idea that the ground beneath you, which you normally regard as being so dependably motionless, might start to buck and vibrate like a washing machine with an uneven load, and shake much of the town you live in to the ground.

      I would have felt a lot safer if the tsunami had been the only possible natural disaster we had to worry about.

      It's important to reflect at such times, when the natural world seems to have taken a keen dislike to the human race, that some wonderful things result from all that geologic fury. If it were all anxiety and dread, no one would ever bother to come here, and the islands hardly ever act up the way I've been describing.

We experience the volcanoes only peripherally, in a second-hand kind of way, and mainly by the visual evidence they leave. Lava rock is the most obvious example; the beaches are strewn with it, or at least that's the case with the ones on the Hamakua coast. If the beaches have black sand, that's another sign—black sand is pulverized lava rock, and not as popular with the tourists as the white sand beaches that result from pulverized coral.

      The biggest volcanic icon we've seen, the most prominent in our day to day lives in the last eight months, is Mauna Kea. It's a monolithic growth, over 13,000 feet high, that comprises much of the western horizon. While we stayed at the farming co-op, the mountain stood almost directly in our line of sight whenever we had to hike the steep road uphill to get drinking water. On some days, banks of clouds blown to the northwest by the trade winds obscure the peak, hiding from view the battery of stellar observatories nestled atop it like a cluster of bulbous white mushrooms. On other days, the peak is wholly covered in a layer of snow, incongruous under the brilliant light of the sun, and disregarding the tropical heat stewing much of the rest of the island.

      Mauna Kea is broad, squat, and immense, imposing in the way mountains are always imposing. The only thing I can liken it to in my personal experience is Mount Ranier; it has some of the same disquieting presence as that other sleeping volcano, and it gives a similar impression of something eternal, almost godlike in its scope and impervious solidity, a natural cathedral that will continue on, immobile and gargantuan, long after the human race is no longer around to contemplate it.

      Seen from the window of a bus as you pull into the town of Waimea, it becomes the scaly brow of a buried colossus. It arrogantly pushes most of the horizon out of the way and tells it not to come back. With a rumpled blanket of rolling hills and meadows spread about its base, and rain-darkened clouds crawling over its peak the way a slug inches over a stone, it becomes a spectacle out of The Lord of the Rings, if Middle Earth had more cattle ranching in its economy.

      It was the view of the mountain from Waimea that caused me to understand how big the island of Hawaii really is. All of the visible land surrounding it, from the foothills to the barrier of haze miles beyond, appear to stretch on to infinity, and even if one is aware that the ocean comes into view again just outside of town, the sense that this emerald world is endless subsides only gradually. Up until that point, I'd thought the island was about the size of two or possibly three counties squeezed together. Now I had to consider the idea that I was standing on something much larger. It's only recently that I've learned the Big Island is approximately the same size as Connecticut. I was a little shocked to realize how far off I was in my estimation. It's the size of a goddamn state. No wonder it takes hours to drive around the whole thing.

      It would be nice if, at some while we're still here, Kilauea were to erupt again, and we were to have the opportunity to see it. It probably won't work out that way, but it would be great to see. I suppose we'll have to settle for that view of the crater, and the sight of Mauna Kea, and a few pumice stones brought home as souvenirs. That would be fine with us. Without having seen the volcanoes at their most dramatic, we've still seen what they've made possible in the form of the island and everything that comes from it. For myself, I've come to respect the natural world a little more, and I feel just a little less intimidated by it...

      ...at least, until hurricane season starts.