I'm not sure I've ever seen a jack fruit before, let alone one the size of a basketball. Elmer handed it down to me after cutting it free from a branch with a pocket knife. It was covered in hard, knobby spikes, reminding me of a puffer fish. The shade of the tree offered some relief from the mid-day heat. My wife Hannah, our work-trade host Janice, and I toured around our new neighbor's farm for an hour to get acquainted with some of the produce he grows. Chickens, close to a hundred according to Elmer, pecked and scratched as we listened to the names of fruits and vegetables that were either completely new to me and Hannah or barely remembered from some time in the distant past.
In the course of a day--our first full day on the Big Island of Hawai'i--we've eaten bananas grown on a tree no more than fifteen feet from the shack we're staying in; consumed several rambutans, a white, pulpy fruit encased in a rubbery, reddish skin and covered in flimsy hooked spines; and been given avocados about the size of softballs, the biggest either of us has ever seen.
My apologies to anyone who has eaten this way for years, or already possesses an intimate knowledge of agriculture--to us, this is a novelty on top of a novelty. Before now, most of our food came from the grocery store or a food co-op, or was the kind of commonplace stuff grown by our folks back in Washington State. Sure, we've had garden vegetables, but garden bananas? A fresh orange picked right off the tree? No, never. We brought home an armload of almost-ripe star fruit and thought, Where the hell else could we experience this? No place we've lived. Fruit is delicious but much simpler where we grew up, consisting usually of apples, pears, raspberries, strawberries, and blackberries. All of which is good, but it's not exactly exotic, is it? And Arizona is pretty spare when it comes to produce. Neither of us has been to a genuinely tropical environment, almost the total opposite of the climate where we've lived the last four years. Tucson, AZ is dry and dusty, but Hawai'i is as lush and green as anything we've experienced. Although we both loved the Sonoran desert, there's something reassuring and exciting about living in the place where so much grows with so little provocation.
We now live on a farming co-op without much in the way of permanent structures, so we've spent the last week eating and sleeping in a shack with only two walls, no electricity except for a solar-powered 12-volt battery, and a single cold-water outdoor faucet with plastic sink our host thoughtfully rigged for us, fed from a length of hose. There is also a two-burner propane stove that has more than proven its worth.
I'm surprised at how well we've adapted to the situation. The only thing that really bothers us is the lack of a flush toilet. An outhouse would be perfectly acceptable--but we simply shit in a bucket under a chair/toilet seat combo, lined with a medium-sized garbage bag to collect all the putrefying foulness. It attracts more flies than roadkill, and it's bad enough that it makes me want to avoid going to the bathroom altogether, which is, for obvious reasons, not an option. We're planning to build a roof to cover the "bathroom" that will at least keep the rain off it, and keep us from getting soaked when we have to use it in bad weather. Wet TP is an atrocity.
That's the only noteworthy downside we've encountered, although I feel I should say something about public transit on the Big Island--what exists, and there isn't much, does so only begrudgingly. The hotels on the rich side of the island apparently run a fleet of buses to ship employees, many of whom are from the Philippines, from less well-to-do places. Because they take state subsidies, they're required to be available to the public, not to mention free, or a dollar if you're carrying a large item. This also means they run on a slim, skeletal schedule, and in a couple of cases we've encountered, don't show up at all. A bus to Waimea arrived 20 minutes late...Not so bad, but when on a different day the 12:25 to Honoka'a didn't show, I began to wonder: is the schedule just an arbitrary, we'll-come-if-we-fucking-feel-like-it kind of thing? Pretty scary, if that's the case. In Tucson, it wasn't uncommon for the buses to break down. One pulled in to a stop with smoke fuming from under the rear wheel well, and had to pull over and kick off all of its passengers five minutes later. If that happens here, you're stranded for hours. Public transportation is important to us now, because without a vehicle, it's the only way we have to shop for what things we can't get in work trade, do our laundry, or get to a place with free wi-fi. I assume we'll get the hang of the idiosyncrasies, but still...
The work trade arrangement is a huge plus. Granted, we've only been here about a week, so we don't really know how things are going to pan out. Our host seems like a good person and has been very helpful to us. At this writing, Elmer has given us more star fruit than we can eat before it rots, as well as the giant jack fruit and avocados, tons of greens such as dinosaur kale, chinese cabbage, mustard greens, something that looks like bok choy but isn't (I'll figure out what all this stuff is eventually), a sweet root called yacon that tastes halfway between an apple and a pear, and juicy, delicious papayas. We came to Hawai'i with food stamps from Arizona that are good for about three more months, and we've done some supplemental grocery shopping in Honokaa and Waimea. Beans and rice, plus a handful of spices and nonessentials, are all we've bought so far, leaving a substantial balance on the EBT card.
What I hope this means is that we won't have to work at traditional jobs our whole stay in Hawaii, which was a big goal during the planning stage. We've done the standard work-week thing--it's time to give something else a try for a while, if not for good. We got married in April of this year, and didn't have the money to do two things we wanted in our near future together: to go on a honeymoon, and to move out of Arizona. Doing work exchange in Hawaii accomplishes both things in a big way. We are, technically, honeymooning in Hawaii (although it might be a while before we lay eyes on a beach), and we'll be living here for the better part of a year if we keep a full wind in our sails.
Work up till now has consisted largely of picking coffee beans on Elmer's farm and clearing out guinea grass around our shack. Guinea grass grows tall and everywhere you look. Yesterday I used a sickle-bar mower for the first time to clear out an area of short guinea grass and cut the grass growing on the unpaved roadway through Janice's land. Kind of fun, but my ears rang and my hands hummed like tuning forks from the vibration of the handles. Taller guinea grass has to be cut by hand with a small, serrated sickle which Janice tells us is also called a japanese lawnmower, ostensibly because lawns in Japan tend to be so small and only require a tiny sickle to cut. I have no idea whether that's a fact or a stereotype or some kind of mixture of the two.
With no drinking water available at the shack, it's necessary to hike uphill about a mile with empty wine jugs to a spigot across the highway and 30 yards up another steep grade. When we were making preparations to come here, I'd wonder sometimes how much exercise we would get. I get the feeling that, between our nearly-but-not-quite vegetarian diet, the daily hikes up to the highway for water and such, and working, we'll drop 20 lbs. in the next month and be as strong as gorillas. It could happen.The names of some individuals mentioned in this blog have been changed to protect their privacy. All photos by the author or his wife.
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