Get To Work, Hippie!

      So you want to come and work on the Big Island, eh?

      Alright, let's look at some options. Are you from the Philippines or Mexico? If you are, you might want to consider an exciting, adventurous career in the field of hotel service. Change sheets, clean toilets, wash dishes, and generally cater to the whims of wealthy and kind-of-wealthy caucasians who'll probably learn no more about the island you now call home than what the guidebooks tell them exist. (That is the function of guidebooks, you know. They define the parameters of reality.) Lucky you! On top of that, you can commute for two hours every morning and evening (maybe about six in the morning going in, midnight coming back--unless you're asked to do overtime, as I'm pretty sure you will) on an appropriated tour bus loaded with similarly-careered individuals who have the same fatigued, half-asleep look on their faces as you do. You'll become a member of a proud community of indentured servants, just like poor people everywhere. Work shall set you free!

      Huh? You don't want to work in a hotel? What, you're too good for tourists? I sincerely doubt that. They have more money.

      Oh, you're not from the Philippines. Well, your options just opened up! I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're wearing a backpack twice the size of a teenager, have dreadlocks that drag on the ground behind you—possibly with crumbs of organic granola stuck in them—and smell like a heady mixture of butt and the armpits of a corpse. I'm going to assume further that your idea of work is digging around in your pockets for an extra five minutes looking for lost bud. I was going to say you should try volunteering at one of Hawai'i's hundreds of small farms, but who are we kidding? Farming is work, dude. You're going to pitch a tent on a beach somewhere, smoke bowls and play hand drums until either the cops run you off or your parents stop sending you money.

      Not a hippie? No shit? Maybe I'm too quick to judge. Friends tell me it's a weakness of mine. I apologize. And anyway, who needs to do farm work? There are lots of local business looking to hire motivated, energetic, outgoing people. Just the other day I saw help wanted signs at the Radioshack, Wal-Mart, Burger King, Dairy Queen, Blockbuster Video, Starbucks...

      You worked at a Blockbuster Video in Boise. I didn't think there were any still open.

      Don't be so goddamn picky! It's not like you have a lot of choices, especially not with an attitude like yours, hippie. Unless you want to be a bus driver, in which case, attitude is everything. A surly, foul-tempered, unforgiving attitude. You can yell at passengers, sigh and roll your eyes when people ask perfectly reasonable questions, and from what I've observed, punctuality is not exactly a requirement. Or even a word. A good job for those who don't like to wear a watch.

      Seriously though, I think you ought to consider volunteering at a farm. The farmers appreciate the help enough that in some cases they'll even give you a place to stay. And food to eat. You'll have to work your ass off, but a little hard work never killed anyone. Well, it has, but this isn't a Virginia coal mine. You might get sunburned, or bitten by a centipede, which from what I hear hurts like a sonofabitch. One guy told me he knew a farmer who took a nap on his tractor. While he slept, a centipede crawled up the leg of his pants and bit him on the nuts. True story. And the moral is, if you're going to drive a tractor, try to stay awake through most of it.

      Agriculture is a major part of life on the Big Island. Fruits and vegetables grow like weeds. So why then, you may ask, are fruits and vegetables shipped to the Big Island? Because people are stupid. That's the only rational conclusion you can come to, and if at some time in the distant future an extraterrestrial tribunal of intergalactic magistrates tries the human race on the grounds of its wanton folly, a la Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation, the fact that the island of Hawai'i imports produce will be presented as Exhibit A, probably by a prosecutor whose species burrows in the ground and eats flying reptiles. I recently read an article that said the island produced 800,000 pounds of avocados last year, and half of that literally rotted. In the meantime, local grocery stores sell avocados from California.

      That has nothing to do with your predicament, but you see my point about the way stuff grows here. Eight-hundred thousand pounds of avocados is, like, a couple tons, at least. And if the produce grows like weeds, the weeds grow like spring-loaded snakes out of a fake can of peanuts. At night, when all is quiet, you can hear the guinea grass bursting from the earth.

      That's something you can do, cut guinea grass. There's plenty of it, everywhere, as many blades of guinea grass as there are handguns in Tucson.     The day after my wife and I came to the island, one of our first duties was to clear the grass away from the shack where we were to stay. It took three days. Most of it was as tall as us. I kept thinking we'd find bodies dumped by yakuza or hidden treasure, but all we turned up were two mildewy deck chairs.

      Guinea grass does not like to be cut, and employs as a natural defense tiny, stubbly bristles that poke into skin like porcupine quills and itch like mosquito bites. The more you handle, the itchier you get. You should wear gloves, long pants, and a long-sleeved shirt, even though they'll let you down.

      Grasp a bunch of grass with one hand and saw it with a short serrated sickle with the other. Throw the grass on the ground and walk on it, cursing it. Now you have lovely walkways for your jungle shack made of lush, green grass that in a few days will be stringy, dead, brown grass. It beats walking in the mud.

Now get a shovel. Push the blade under the stumps of grass where they have grown in a tight bunch, going all the way around the stumps and prying with the shovel each time. At some point, possibly today, you'll pry enough roots out of the dirt to pull out the whole clump. Some are bigger than others, and have a firmer hold on the ground. Go ahead and throw your back out now, just to get it out of the way. Repeat the process every two days when the grass has reached six feet.

      Cutting guinea grass is exhausting work. You look like you could use some coffee. Man, did you come to the right place. Kona coffee is thought by some to be the best in the world, but an inside source of mine tells me it's nearly impossible to get on the mainland. What sells as Kona is usually only 10% Hawaiian and 90% something else. It's a scam that pays, because the producer can stretch the spendy Hawaiian stuff further and still charge a fortune per pound.

      Coffee is fascinating, too, with a long and illustrious history. Did you know the Confederate army used as talcum powder and wart remover? Hardly anyone does. The ancient Chinese considered coffee an aphrodisiac, and would often wear it in place of a shirt. Very strong coffee opens a doorway to the world of the dead, and causes the recently deceased to rise and seek employment with Greyhound. Sigmund Freud sometimes snorted coffee when he didn't have any cocaine left, as did Richard Pryor.

      Yes, coffee is important and better than most people, and you won't get any until you pick some. That is the first level of coffee knowledge. I can totally hook you up, too, because I know somebody who grows it. It's not even that far from here.

      My wife and I have been helping this guy harvest coffee cherries for the last three months, and I can tell you assuredly, it is relaxing, soothing work. The higher branches of the trees shield you from the sun's unrelenting rays as you make your way down the rows. Your coffee-gathering bucket or whatever it's called, fastened over your shoulders by a harness, hangs in front of you like a beer belly made of plastic, with a kidney-shaped opening at the top. Birds chirp like tiny birds. Hens follow you around as you pick, hoping they'll get some bugs out of the deal. Foolish hens—I tell the bugs terrible secrets, and chickens are   eternally forbidden.

      You will step on many big snails hiding in the damp debris of fallen leaves. There'll be a crunch and then kind of a slippery feeling. That's okay, because they're not welcome in Hawaii in the first place. Kill as many as you want, it's not like they'll stop making them.

      Asian spiny-backed spiders spin wide, sticky webs all over the orchard so you can walk into them face-first. They look a lot like bumpy-shelled crabs, as you will discern from the ones hitching a ride in your hair. Say hello to your new friend.

      Hawaiian stink bats, so called because of their powerful fecal musk, hang upside down from the branches. Many are the size of housecats. Do not be frightened when they flash their long, gleaming fangs—this is a common bat greeting. Avert your gaze all the same. If you give them bananas, or whatever change you might have, they'll sometimes toss cherries into your bucket from the branches that are harder to reach, so don't go acting all stuck up and shit. When startled, they fly away with a cry of “Ko-ko-ki-ree-ree-REE! Ko-keelee-ree-rubba-tiya-too-poooo!” and wait until you're gone.

      Jesus, is it always this hot? It's like an outdoor sauna. Maybe we ought to sit down, take a break. No harm in that, is there? Let's sit under this rambutan tree, have some rambutan for lunch. Did you bring any water? No? Shit. I'm getting parched. My vision gets all blurry every time I stand up. I'll have to eat more rambutan, then. Funny fruit, this rambutan. The outside looks like a spiky alien spore, and the inside looks like a gooey white egg. I didn't know they existed until I came to the Big Island. They totally look like little aliens. They're like those aliens in that one movie...You know, where they were gonna...they were gonna eat people or turn them into aliens...spiky monsters...Danny DeVito's in it...wh...

...huhhh...Goddamn, it's hot. Or humid. One of those. Can't sleep on the job, remember that. Wouldn't do at all. Weren't you looking for a job or something? I remember you saying something like “Hey, I need a job on the island” and I was like “Go work at a hotel, hippie” and then you said you weren't a hippie and I thought yeah, whatever. That happened, right? Did I make it up? I do that sometimes, I...What was that movie? Had...Sharon Stone or somebody like that...the...uhhh...

...nnnn...

...Zzzzz...

...chickens...

Hawaii Nightlife

     For two nights we had heavier rains than any we'd seen since arriving on the island. Not sheets of it but walls, whole skyscrapers, a deluge pouring out of some vast Niagara Falls in the sky that concentrated its will in an effort to displace the ocean, tear open the Earth, and lay bare its molten core. It hammered on the metal roof of the shack like nails fired from ten million nail guns for hours at a time, and only at night. Not during the day, because it knew we don't sleep during the day, but at night, when it could make sleep impossible.

      Imagine staying in a house where it has been arranged for someone to turn up in the evening and spend every hour until morning slamming doors, pounding walls, rattling the tables and chairs against the floor, screaming and swearing in vein-popping rage. We crawled from bed at sunrise like reverse vampires, eyes red-rimmed, brains murky with semi-consciousness, craving elephantine doses of caffeine.

      Prior to these explosive downpours, the noisiest threat to our rest was the tradewinds. These kick up every couple of weeks, and blow with a ferocity that makes me wonder how a hurricane could be much worse. I've always liked strong, gusting winds, from the time I was a small child. Then, I felt thrilled as my surroundings were brought to maniacal life under the influence of an unseen force, like a roomful of toys jumping up and going to war. Trees dipping and swaying, leaves and bits of trash racing each other down the road, traffic signs twisting and wobbling as if about to be uprooted. During my boyhood, a windy day meant some excitement to spice up the dull routine of school and chores and homework.

      Let's say that my attitude toward high winds has grown more nuanced, particularly in light of the last couple of months. They can be a relief from the mid-day heat when working without the benefit of shade, and bring a relaxing, rasping sigh from the unmowed fields of guinea grass. They also have decided that it might be fun to tear our shack to pieces, not that they've had any success. Bags of tea and containers of food might fly about like starlings, but wood and metal have remained firmly fastened together. My compliments to the builder.

      If any of the sheets of black plastic we've placed around the shack to keep out rain have not been thoroughly nailed and stapled into place, the wind will snap them with a sound like the sharp pops of a snare drum. One such sheet is situated over the head of our bed; just as we drift off to sleep, the wind can billow it like a sail with a sudden crack that brings us fully awake. It can go on for hours, and has prompted us to buy earplugs to keep us from becoming half-insane from sleep deprivation.

      That kind of noise, from either wind or rain, is in stark contrast to the average night out here in the weeds. There is a hush, a notable lack of mechanized sound, that only comes from living far outside a populated area. I've only encountered it before while camping in the Washington state rainforest. It would be disingenuous to call it silence. There is no silence in this place, it's alive with living sound at all times and at night, when sound carries farther, it's as if a voice that had elected to remain mute for an extended time has begun to murmur to itself audibly, muttering things that are weird and sinister, but nothing that makes complete sense.

      Every sound is much more fearsome, much more fraught with the implication of an invasive entity, after the sun has gone down. You lay awake in bed, the moonlight as powerful as a streetlamp and framing each dark silhouette—the hanging clothes and hats and bags—with an icy, blue and silver luminescence. Timed to the subtraction of daylight, cicadas buzz like electricity coursing through a fog-dampened transformer, so loud it's only when they stop that you realize how much their buzzing has been pressing on your eardrums. Cows in the nearby pasture call and bellow, trying to find one another in the dark, vocalizing in ways you didn't think cows were able to, shouting like irritable human beings and braying like donkeys.

      The breeze blows and the branches of the pigeon pea tree closest to the shack scrape on the tin roof like claws. Banana trees creak like old floorboards. Nocturnal geckos chirp and scuttle briefly on the wall outside. The hum of a moth's wingbeats pinballs around the shack for a while and then departs into the late chill. Each individual sound is magnified, projected as if amplified into the peaceful hours as you try to go to sleep. Something in the tall grass twenty feet away scurries, almost certainly a rat, but how can you tell when you can't see what's there? During moments like this you entertain thoughts of six-inch centipedes marching on their hundreds of legs across the ground and into the bed, aching to inject their painful venom into your skin.

      There's more scurrying, louder now, and coming from different locations. A fight breaks out in the fallen leaves, followed by a chattering squeak. Now you know for sure it's rats. In time, if they haven't found something else to occupy them, one or more will make their way into the shack to run stealthily along the walls, scrounging what food scraps they can or whatever hasn't been securely locked away. You might hear them poking around under the bed, right beneath where your head rests on the pillow, scratching with their claws for reasons only a rat would be able to explain.

      Or maybe tonight, for once, the rats aren't here. What comes in their place are phantom sounds, things you can't pinpoint or identify, and aren't able to fully visualize. The thing on the roof that wants to dig or chew its way through, slowly, its patient labor halfway between a scrape and a crunch. The thing that seems to dig at the outside corner of the shack next to the bed, keeping up its work for maybe half an hour before spending the rest of the night somewhere else, not as patient as its friend on the roof. Each single scuff and shuffle has an author, a creature doing its night-time work.

      So let's assume you can't sleep. Your system is too full of adrenaline. You see no point in lying awake in bed when sleep might be a couple of hours away, so you get up—slowly, so as not to disturb your wife—and quietly step out into the night air. The moon is only half full, but already illuminates well enough that you don't need a flashlight to see by; you can even make out details of objects ten feet away. It's a cold light, a half-hearted cousin to the sun, but comforting in the way it pulls the veil of darkness partway back and lets you observe your surroundings with your eyes as well as your ears.

      You look up into the colossal basalt ceiling of the sky, barely touched by the glowing domes of light from nearby towns, and it is vibrant with stars. It makes you regret that you didn't pay more attention to astronomy in school. What are the constellations you remember? That's Orion's Belt, you can find that one easily enough. And the Big Dipper, another easy one. The Little Dipper's around somewhere, maybe that's it over there. Is that Mars? Maybe. It's reddish, anyway.

      There are more visible stars by far than you would ever see near the ambient glow of a city. So many that you can make out layers of them, dimmer stars behind—or beyond—the bright primary clusters, further out into space and dense to the point of creating something like a fog out of star vapor that makes you think of frozen clouds. You suspect they are the most remote fringes of the Milky Way, a distance of thousands, if not millions, of light years that is well beyond your ability to consciously grasp.

      Like stars themselves, cruise ships appear to float in mid-air against the rich blackness where the ocean and the sky seamlessly meet. They glide slowly, languidly, and you wonder about the people out there on the water at this time of night. Most are probably asleep, but it could be that a few are still up and walking the decks. You wonder how much it costs to go on a cruise like that. Thousands, you figure. You wonder if any of the people out there have ever been on a vacation that didn't involve such luxury. Maybe when they were younger, on a road trip to California. Or maybe that cruise is the first vacation they've taken in years. Retirees and the overworked, parents whose kids have finally moved out of the house. You could put anyone on those ships from where you stand.

      It's not silent, out here under the moon with a patch of dried grass under your feet, but it is still. Just the breeze, and the insects, and the waves pummeling the rocky shore at the base of the cliffs with a low rumble and persistent hiss, like the sound of a distant highway. Or the steady breathing of someone in the deepest part of sleep.

      You yawn, run a hand over your face, feel the weary heat of your eyes when you close them. Your thoughts become listless and undirected, and urge you to go back inside.

     After you have climbed, slowly and carefully, into bed, stretched yourself out and adjusted the pillow to its most comfortable position, it's the steady, whispering breath of the waves that follows you into unconsciousness, like an eternity of restful nights.

A Trip to the Beach

    

     People of religious faith will sometimes warn those of us who lack it, “It's important to believe in a power greater than yourself,” or something along those lines, implying that agnostics or atheists not only don't believe in any kind of a higher power, but are so egotistical and self-absorbed that they think themselves the greatest, the wisest, the only relevant power in town. The idea is that those of us who don't kowtow to an omnipotent being are guilty of the sin of pride; and in addition, we're a smug, complacent bunch of delusional assholes.

      I've got to say, I've never really understood that line of reasoning. I know I believe in a power greater than myself, there's never been any question of it. Many powers, in fact. A grizzly bear is much more powerful than me, a knowledge I find appropriately humbling. A hurricane is mightier than a trailer full of grizzlies, so that's a lot stronger than me too. I'm pretty sure lightning or a downed power line would reduce me to a glob of sizzling gristle if I should ever be unfortunate enough to run into them head-on. Fact is, the world is full of deadly things that, exactly because of their lethality, I'm required to accord a generous amount of respect.

      I suppose what the religious really mean is that one should acknowledge a higher authority. Okay then, let's take that into consideration. Most types of authority a person is likely to run into are strictly human in origin, and almost all of it is coercive: “Do as we say, or you'll get yours.” Meaning a fine, jail, or the death penalty in places that have it. God's authority, interestingly enough, looks very much the same: “Do as I say, or go to Hell.” Hell being spirit jail, where the sentences are incredibly harsh, and cruel and unusual punishment is strongly encouraged. It's the kind of authority you'd expect from a petty dictatorship, and I won't be the first person to say that I don't feel comfortable around people who only behave themselves because they think doing otherwise will put them on God's shit list. I tend to imagine them going on long drinking, whoring, and     gambling binges in Vegas whenever they have a “crisis of faith”.

      A higher authority, personified by an omnipotent being, never assured good behavior from anyone in the entire history of religious belief. Just look at the Crusades or the horrors of the Inquisition. And as someone very sagely noted in the documentary The God Who Wasn't There, there are very few atheists in maximum security penitentiaries.

      Ideally, moral authority comes from within, not without, and right behavior stems from a respect for others, not a fear of reprisal. Personally, I feel if I must respect something out of fear, and acknowledge its authority to grant me life or death, I'd rather it be an element of the natural world that I can verify empirically with my own senses, and that doesn't bear an ill will toward me for childish reasons as a human authority figure or institution might.

      I can think of a pretty good recent example, and it's no accident that it just so happens to relate to the main theme of this blog. Hannah and I took a trip to the beach a few weeks ago with some friends who are on the island doing construction work. We owe them a debt, because it would have been very difficult for us to get to a beach any other way. On our side of the island, waves run into a shoreline of steep bluffs, and what beaches there are tend to be spare and rocky. It's pleasant to watch the waves from the cliff's edge, especially the way the water turns aquamarine along their apex as they begin to crest, but we have no desire to descend the treacherous walls just to get our swimwear wet.

      The beaches near Waikoloa are altogether different: sand and palm trees, surf and body boards. The waves are big and hypnotic, low undulating humps that crest in shimmering, bubbling froth, able to lift fully grown adults off their feet and push them over in waist-deep water. We saw boarders and swimmers ride each rolling advance like shorebirds maneuvering into a stiff wind. Children shrieked and squealed with excitement as the waves came at them, as if strapped into a carnival ride.

      Once in the water, Hannah and I didn't go more than thirty yards from shore, fearing we'd be dragged out to sea, struggling and floundering toward the infinite horizon as broad as deep space; the recoil of the waves pulling back from the sand could easily yank a swimmer several feet at a time and make it hard to stay safely close to the beach.

      I had never gone swimming in the ocean before, and the thing that struck me immediately was the irresistible power of it, the nearly overwhelming force that only a strong and experienced swimmer could navigate with relative security and ease, and even then always with a mind on possible hazards. Suffice it to say I'm neither a very experienced, nor a strong, swimmer. I thought of all the times I'd heard about riptides and undertows, never having a solid grasp of what those words really meant, and the dangers such things pose to an unwary person. But floating there, enveloped in salt water, I could feel the meaning swelling all around me, and I quickly gained a fresh respect for the frightening and potentially destructive strength of water. I have to say I sort of liked it, being in the grip of such a monstrously huge and utterly indifferent entity, squeezed into the narrow space between mortality and a really good time, a little like Fay Wray swinging on the end of King Kong's arm. It's not base-jumping or rock climbing, it's not even like driving too fast, but nevertheless there was a thrill inherent in the knowledge that it could kill me.

      Spencer Beach was scary in a different way. We gave snorkeling a try, using our friends' equipment. I don't know about Hannah, but I hadn't been snorkeling in decades, and then only in a lake, scooting along and looking down into weeds and mud and maybe a sunfish or two not much longer than my index finger. This here was ocean snorkeling, in the waters of Hawaii, the kind people generally mean when they say “snorkeling”, because who gets excited about any other kind who's over the age of eight? That's what made the experience unsettling for me: this was a much, much larger body of water than any I'd ever dipped my toes into, with a different topography and a great deal more living things whirling around in it. I'd already had a look at the crabs—ghost crabs if I'm not mistaken—chittering along the short point of jagged rocks flanking one side of the beach, as fast or faster than sun-baked lizards, so I wasn't on the lookout for anything   with pincers and scrambling legs.

      As insensible and paranoid as it sounds, I kept an eye out for sharks, knowing full well the likelihood of one appearing so close to the beach was roughly the same as winning the lottery. I might as well have been worried about giant squid or terrorists with spear guns. But in my defense I should say that to float in such a strange setting leads to a feeling of vulnerability, an awareness that one is on the edge of a wilderness with creatures in it capable of harm. In spite of this, with the primal instinct in me calling up these vague notions of dread, I think a small part of me might have actually gotten a kick out of seeing something like a shark in its natural habitat. My guts would've turned to cement, but I know there is no other encounter in the world as charged with significance as an encounter with a large wild animal, and I'm sure fear would have given way, in some small measure, to awe.

      Visibility was low because of the sandy, opaque grittiness of the water. I paddled mostly with my hands, my face pressed down below the waterline, listening to my breath go shakily in and out with exertion and unease, touched by feelings of vertigo as the bottom would appear sometimes to drop away below me and leave only the topmost spires of green-and-white coral reaching up like stalagmites. Darting amongst the coral, or just hovering a few feet from the bottom like tiny helicopters, were small fish; not schools of them, no more than a couple dozen, but some unmistakably tropical, flat and yellow with dark stripes down their sides and tapered mouths like puckered lips. They swam alongside darker fish of about the same size but more solidly built, closer to trout in shape. Sea urchins, ranging very dark brown to black, clung to the sides of the coral towers, their prickly spines flaring out in frozen starbursts.

      I controlled my nervousness enough to enjoy myself. Hovering over the bottom, even at a depth of little more than fifteen feet, was a similar sensation to me as hanging over the edge of a very tall building. After twenty minutes of this, I was eager to get back to solid ground.

      The thought went through my mind that coral was reputed to be very sharp. I knew I'd heard of people being badly cut by it, and I tried to take care not to let my feet graze any as I swam. On our way back to shore, in about four feet of water, I felt something scrape hard against the bottom of my left foot. It hurt, but I didn't think much of it as we went about the rest of our day. How many times had I scraped myself against rocks in my life and gotten barely more than a mild, hardly even noticeable scratch? Hundreds, probably.

      Late the next day I was putting on socks and happened to look at my foot. In the area between the first knuckle of my big toe and the pad of my foot was a three-inch gash, clean and almost surgically neat, not bad enough to need stitches but ugly enough to give me pause. The last time I'd been cut like that I was five and stepped on a piece of glass in my bare feet. Hannah assured me that the salt water had probably cleaned it, but the severe look of it prompted me to apply some ointment and medical tape. More than once people have warned us about the possibility of staph infections on the Hawaiian islands.

      I choose to think of that cut as a momento from the ocean, or perhaps even the cosmos itself. Why not? I have been humbled and given a proper sense of perspective about my place in the great order of being. Those who insist on a religious interpretation of what takes place around them, and require the ghostly police state insisted upon by the concept of an authoritative god, can have them. A couple of visits to the beach in the space of about as many days, in the face of the terrific power of one of the Earth's elements at its grandest, is all I need to tell me of how little power I have in comparison, of how small a creature I am in the context of a universe too big and too ancient for me to begin to understand it, and how easily something as small as me can be snuffed out. That quick cut below my big toe served to emphasize the point. That's all the higher power I think I really need.

A View Of The Ocean

     The view from the highway overlooking our part of the farm co-op, on a day when the wind is blowing at a sprinter's pace and the sun is out, the clouds are spread like loose hunks of cotton batting pulled thin, and the overgrown grass that frames the road below us whips and thrashes in a riot of snapping leaves, while cows feed among ironwoods and macadamia trees in grazed pastures bordering fields of more writhing, untended guinea grass, together forming a wide ribbon of green ending where the treeline marks the edge of the land, falling away as cliffs into a titanic blue Pacific that runs on toward a horizon made indistinct by imperceptible distance—this is one of the best things I've seen.

      It is a simple and unadorned view, with very little about it that would mark it as distinctly Hawaiian except for the monstrous expanse of the ocean, a vast blue plain stretching off into a hazy mist of virtual infinity, meeting with the sky to create a wall closing off an entire quadrant of the Earth. Barges and cruise ships are dwarfed like caterpillars crawling across the floor of an empty ballroom, waves rippling along its surface appear as small as the wrinkles in a shirt. There is something unsettling in the realization that this immensity surrounds you on all sides, that the land mass on which you stand is two-thousand miles from the nearest continent. It would make Hannah and I feel profoundly isolated if the island of Hawai'i weren't so large.

      For me, to look at the ocean often leads to thoughts of what lives out there, the hidden menagerie that thrives beneath the waves just off shore. I've always had a fascination with, and fear of, aquatic creatures, particularly the very big ones. I know there are sharks out there, a few different kinds if I'm not mistaken, hunting fish among the reefs and further out where the water opens into an inky abyss. There might even be great whites—there's no real reason for there not to be—ghostly and huge in the deep water, their powerful bodies pushing along perhaps not even that far away, just a mile or so, if even that, and visible if not for the screen of the ocean's surface, as close to them as I've ever been in my life, even as I stand there thinking and wondering about them. Manta rays are out there as well, from what I understand, big as hang gliders, flying in the Pacific brine like liquid condors. And there are whales...

      Every night they make noise, and they've been doing it for over a month now at least, slapping their tails on the water so steadily and rhythmically you'd think a person was smacking a two-by-four against a tree stump, leaping and impacting with a sound like a distant shotgun blast, chuffing so loudly through their blowholes I swear sometimes they crawl up on dry land like sea lions and pass by twenty feet from the shack. I heard one just now, as I'm writing this.

      We've seen them, at last, after weeks of being teased by the sound of them, and not in the way portrayed in National Geographic: out on the water in a motor-driven raft, with a guide drawing on years of study and an intimate knowledge of the life-rhythms of great cetaceans, coming so close you could reach out and pat one on its barnacled head. No, we were putting a roof on our outhouse and saw first one, then two misty spouts firing out of the waves a couple of miles from shore. If the wind had been blowing we might not have seen them at all—the whitecaps would have camouflaged any sign. With the tradewinds still, their movements stood out in sharp relief against the water. One jumped, I think, its body barely visible at that distance, just a vague black shape and the foamy white aftershock of its splash, and I'm sure I saw a tail wave as it arched down into the blue. More spouts came as the pod moved along the general line of the shore, the black humps of their backs bobbing up and then down, going off to the left of where we stood watching, in the direction of Honoka'a. We didn't start work again until they were gone.

      They're humpback whales, the kind I've only seen on TV, and I've now been able to see them with my own eyes, albeit from a couple of miles away. All it took was a moment outside to work on the bathroom. We'll go on seeing them from time to time. The other day, as we were coming down the hill with jugs of water, a massive black tail rose out of the ocean and slid back in again, close enough that we could make out the cleft of the fins. Our attention is always drawn back to the ocean; it's as unavoidable as the sky, and from our perspective on the island, nearly as big.

      I've heard people talk about natural vistas that can make a person feel microscopic, insignificant, that bring on humbling notions of the spiritual or the cosmic because of their grandeur. Some have to hike along the spine of a sprawling mountain range or reach the top of Mt. Everest for that feeling to occur. It seems almost unfair that merely by standing on the shoulder of a highway, gazing out over cow pastures and an unmarked road, we see something that has almost the same impact on the senses.

How To Eat on Hawai'i, Part II

 

      The farmers market in Hilo has been an additional source of food when we feel the need to branch out, or when nearby stores don't stock what we're looking for. It's also helped us do some research on what we've been eating, as far as names and spelling are concerned (“rambutan”, to my ear, kept sounding like “ramatan”). I was interested to find out that the kind of bananas we've been eating are apple bananas; and if they aren't, they look just like the ones we saw at the market, whatever they are. We had our first opportunity to try atemoya, a green, knobby fruit with an interior that is soft and creamy, almost like a sorbet; and soursop, a fruit that appears similar to atemoya but has more tang to its flavor.

      We kept our eyes open for durian, the notorious fruit that is reputed to stink like rotten meat but taste great, if some testimony is to be believed. We first heard of it on the show Bizarre Foods—Andrew Zimmern was not a fan. Janice told us she likes it a lot because of its pleasing, creamy texture, but you have to toss out the smelly rind so you don't condition yourself to associate the flavor with the smell. A couple of other people have told us they not only enjoy it but, rather than turning them off, the smell heightens their anticipation for the experience of eating it.

Durian

      On the few occasions we've gone to the market, we contemplated buying a durian, but the specimens on sale seemed substandard or unripe, and it can get expensive. The ripe ones were usually sold by the time we arrived. It never looks like they have many, although a vendor told us that the season is only just starting. If more are available, I'm certain we're going to wind up with one. A guy hanging around outside the market had bought one and was eating it as we strolled by—we both had the urge to ask him if we could smell it, just to see if our fears were well founded. The inside looked yellowish and similar to the inside of a jack fruit. I didn't detect any weird rotten odors, though I should point out that Janice says there's more than one kind. Maybe he had a non-stinky variety.

      It's tough not to splurge at the market: on one trip, we took home a small container of local chipotle salsa; a sauce called East/West Sauce made with, among other ingredients, tahini and ginger, and produced by a company called Broke the Mouth; a jar of macadamia honey; and peppers and sweet basil. We lunched on green eggplant curry and a Hawaiian-style bento box with chunks of roasted chicken, Portuguese sausage, spam, and rice. As a dessert we bought sweet rice cakes that were going for just a dollar apiece.

      The hardest part about storing food in our shack is keeping it safe from animals. It's always an uphill battle to keep insects and rats from getting to our food before we do. There's nothing like opening a jar of honey or peanut butter and finding a dozen or so of them racing around inside the lid. We have a spray bottle filled with a mixture of vinegar and water to discourage them from gathering around the condiments.  Nevertheless, we've begun to have a grudging acceptance of insects, both living and dead, floating in our glasses of water and speckling our plates of food.

     And rats have lately been a more pressing issue than they had been before. For several nights we heard them scurrying in the dark around the area where we keep stuff like flour, cornmeal, and hot cereal. They raided a small sack of sunflower seeds I'd unthinkingly left out, leaving empty husks all over the floor, and during the course of which doing a lot of squeaking, fighting, running along the edges of the walls, under the floorspace where the kitchen is located, or even on the roof. A bag of cereal we hadn't even gotten around to eating had a hole chewed in the corner, and there was no way we were going to touch it after that.

      We set out traps, but never caught anything in them. They always managed to get away, or circumvented the traps altogether as if equipped with maps. We had a stroke of luck when Elmer came across a bag of rat bait somebody had tossed out at the dump. We left out two blocks of that, two nights in a row, and both blocks were gone the next day. Since then, the rat problem has been halved, at the very least. There's one more block it sitting out that nothing has touched yet, waiting for the next rat to give in to temptation.

      Now, most of our food is in lockdown, assigned to protective custody, lest we see it walking away on the backs of vermin. Grains go in jars, sealed tight like a bank vault. Anything sweet such as honey or some brands of peanut butter is zipped up in resealable plastic bags. With that partly taken care of, we have the lack of refrigeration to deal with.

      We tend to get so much food in trade, there's no way we can eat it all before it goes bad. We try, but rarely make it more than halfway through whatever bunch of greens or rambutans or bananas we have before they start to wilt or get mushy or become little more than bait for fruit flies. For about a week we were giving bananas away to anyone who'd take them. The huge bunch hanging in our shack ripened all at once, some even falling on the floor in the middle of the night (and becoming yet another attractive prospect for rats), and it wasn't long before we were sick of eating them. And we weren't the only ones with this problem—during one attempt to fob a dozen or so off on a neighbor, he flatly told us, “No. I'll give you fifty.” It's just as well we didn't take him up on his offer. We now have another fifty or so bananas, fresh from Elmer's farm, hanging or stowed away in the shack.

      We're not likely to starve any time soon.

How To Eat on Hawai'i, Part I

   

  For a while before we came to Hawaii, and for a short time after we arrived, I was concerned about how we would be set for food. Most of what we would eat, we realized, would have to come to us through work trade, and I couldn't imagine that was going to add up to very much. We ate reasonably well back in Tucson, cooking good, mostly healthy food at home and even managing to go out to a meal from time to time when we weren't feeling too cheap. During our three-week stay in Washington, we ate at a level we both found a little embarrassing, especially when you take into account the lofty goals we had set for ourselves before leaving.

      Our biggest fear was that the transition from a sometimes-rich to consistently spartan diet would be a terrible shock to our systems, and to deaden the impact we concentrated on eating healthier meals in smaller portions, with an increased amount of vegetables and whole grains. We got into eating multigrain cereals in the morning, and brown rice or quinoa with dinner. We told ourselves that when we got to Washington, we'd just have to insist to our families and friends that we just weren't going to eat the same gut-rotting poison that everyone else was eating—oh no, we were health nuts now, our bodies were goddamn Buddhist temples.

      The first meal we had after being picked up at the airport was an all-you-can-eat buffet at the Tulalip Casino off I-5. We stuffed ourselves with grilled salmon and fried chicken and crab legs and pork ribs and pie. And while we stayed with our parents, our meals were, if anything, heavier than what we'd normally eat at home: we had steak one or two nights, a pork roast was consumed at some point, we dove into yummy treats at the Calico Cupboards in both La Conner and Mount Vernon (not to mention some of the fatty, sweet, big-as-your-head apple fritters from the Donut House in Anacortes) and, even though I had weaned myself off of caffeine for the previous two weeks to prevent the inevitable withdrawal symptoms from the lack of same in Hawaii, I spent our time with the folks drinking Costco coffee every morning, plus the odd latte, just because I could.

      We were going to be wrecks when we got to Hawaii. I visualized us trying to squeak by on two spoonfuls of cooked rice a day, monastic rations that wouldn't keep a hummingbird from dropping dead. We'd resort to foraging off the land, forced to eat worms and bugs and roadkill. After two weeks, we'd have the sunken, emaciated look of war refugees, or vegans.

Now that about a month has gone by, I'm pleased to say that we didn't die. We've lost some weight, enough that some of our tighter clothes fit a little looser, and this can be put down the combination of exercise and not eating nearly as many sweets as we used to. We showed up to the farming co-op with a few handfuls of trail mix and a couple of apples. By the next day, we were inundated with fruits and greens. It was still much less than we were accustomed to eating on a daily basis, but we seemed to do alright and never felt like we were going hungry. Mostly I put it down to the stress of moving to a new, unusual place, and the implicit understanding that we were going to have to adapt or be very uncomfortable.

      It was only a few days later that a package we had mailed to ourselves from Tucson arrived at the post office, and along with some extra supplies such as rubber boots, a small frying pan and saucepan, there were also rice and beans. These had been a staple for us back in Tucson, and we've found they go very well with fried greens and a little soy sauce or hot sauce.

      After about a week we made into town to replenish our pantry even more, mainly with basics such as peanut butter, tea, more rice and beans, hot cereal, and things we'd need to prevent our diet from becoming monotonous and bland such as hot sauce (Hula Girl chipotle habanero, with a vintage-looking 1940's grass-skirted pinup on the bottle), curry, cinnamon, and cumin. As we've gotten more settled in, we've become better situated to prepare meals that taste good and cover most of our nutritional needs.

      Which isn't to say there haven't been mishaps. We were told that the pea of the pigeon pea tree is perfectly edible, and we were interested in giving them a try, seeing as we had a bunch of it growing just a few feet away. We elected to boil it, and flavor it with some sweet chile sauce. Unshucked pigeon pea, as we discovered, boils up fine when it's young and tender. As we were told later, they're mainly good when they've matured and been shucked from their pods. That in-between phase? The pods are tough and chewy like hay, bad enough that we had to spit most of them out. It's something like chewing on the woody part of an old asparagus. It also stained the water red like raspberry Kool-Aid, which made us wonder if anyone's ever used it as a fabric dye.

      That's been the only really negative culinary experience we've had so far; most of the time I'd say we do great. The jack fruit and yamagata avocados I described in the first post finally ripened after about two weeks. Neither of us knew anything about jack fruit except that its flavor is reputed to have been the basis for Juicy Fruit gum. That's not surprising—as we've found, the meat of the fruit is mildly fibrous and chewy, giving it a consistency not unlike a wad of bubble gum. Most of the meat is comprised of soft, yellowish pods encasing seeds about the size and shape of beach pebbles. There are other portions that contain no seeds. We had to use a butchers knife to cut through the fruit's thick, spiky hide, separating it into two halves. As you can see from the picture, the interior isn't pretty to look at, a bit like an extraterrestrial egg or the inside of an ant colony.

      The avocados went well with sea salt, salsa, chips, or sliced and served in an omelet. We each ate half of one avocado one morning and were full until lunch. Seriously, they're at least as big as softballs.  They also make a damn fine guacamole. We recently acquired three more, which is good because the tree they came from is about done for the season.

      I've included a few photos of some things we've put together in the last few weeks. Not all of the ingredients came from local farmers, but a lot of them did. Elmer supplied us with eggs from his own chickens. They're fertilized eggs, which are allegedly better for you. Not that we care either way—farm eggs are always better than store-bought. The chickens tend to be better fed, have room to run around, and always produce a better-tasting egg. The first time that I recall eating local eggs, I couldn't believe the difference in quality. It makes you think that the factory-raised stuff must come from some pretty sickly chickens, fed the same kind of stock feed all day and stuffed into cages where they can't forage on their own. Chickens that eat well, lay well.

Eggs over easy with tapioca hashbrowns and sliced bananas

Barbecue pork over sautéed kale, onions, and garlic 

      Tapioca root, we're really pleased to find out, makes decent hash browns. The farmers that gave them to us said that they never really cook down to the point where they're soft, so Hannah figured that by grating and frying them, we might wind up with something similar to, but firmer than, hash browns made with potatoes. We've done this twice and they seem to fry up really well with a little butter and oil.

Fried banana chips and ketchup

      Cooking with green bananas has been another discovery for us, and a useful way to reduce the huge quantity of bananas we seem to wind up with. At that stage, they have almost the same consistency as raw potatoes, and can be cooked much the same way. Hannah's decided she prefers banana french fries to the traditional kind. They seem to fry best when sliced to about a quarter inch. We tried boiling them once and the result was adequate but not satisfying, plus the sticky latex sap from the peels is a pain to clean off the inside of the pot.

Continued in Part II

Wildlife Encounters on Hawai'i, Part II

     The shack we stay in is partly open on two sides. There is no door. Anything can come in any time it wants, and there's not much we can do about it if we're asleep or not home. As you can imagine, this arrangement has its drawbacks. We now have three rat traps set up around the shack, mainly to protect our food. We've made two fruit fly traps from jars filled with an inch of vinegar and hole-punched plastic stretched across the openings, because it's gross to have hundreds of fruit flies where you live and eat.

      But the same arrangement has benefits. Some mornings we have stunning, green day geckos hunting for bugs in the kitchen corner. We first noticed them climbing around on the walls outside the shack a couple of days after we arrived. They're bright green with three red spots on their backs, like paint splashes, toward their hind legs, and blue toes. I've included a picture of one that I think might be one of the best pictures I've ever taken, simply because the animal is so impressive to look at.

So far we've seen three of them—one about six inches long, the other two a little shorter and less thickly built. One of the smaller geckos has made itself useful by eating some of the fruit flies and ants that congregate around the narrow window over the propane stove.

      We've seen other, less colorful geckos, the nocturnal species, often hunting around in the spaces between the corrugated metal roof and the beams. According to an article Hannah read on the way here, geckos, while not native to Hawaii, have been here for 1500 years, brought over on boats going between the Hawaiian islands and Tahiti. The colorful day geckos are more recent. A naturalist released some into the wild in the '70's for no other reason than he thought it would be cool to have them here. He was right, if incredibly irresponsible. People like them so much that they're reluctant to give them up to animal control officials. I can't say I blame them. We really enjoy the ones we have.

      There are chameleons as well, but I'm not expert enough on the subject reptiles to identify them properly. They're very different from geckos, with smaller eyes, longer, more streamlined faces, skinny tails, and thinner, clawed, more elongated toes. They engage in territorial behavior such as push-up displays (which I've observed in one Southwestern species as well), and puffing out a round, flat neck-frill. They also seem aggressive; I've seen a couple chase off lizards that come too close.

      Earlier I mentioned a vague, nagging fear about the idea of tarantulas on Hawai'i. I associate tarantulas with banana trees (which you can blame on Harry Belefonte), and there are a lot of those on the island. Janice never said anything about them, and I'm actually pretty sure that Brady Bunch episode was full of shit.

      It might have been nice if she had said something about cane spiders, though. I'm not saying I wouldn't have come to Hawaii if I had known about them, but it might have been nice to mentally prepare myself for the eventuality of their arrival in the shack.

Take a good look at the pictures I've included here. Those are two of three different spiders that have turned up in our living space. The first one, the one pictured both on a package of toilet paper and in my gloved hand as I was preparing to release it into the guinea grass, I spotted one evening as I was reaching for a book under the bed. I was taken very much by surprise, accompanied by a feeling that was, oddly, something like relief. At least now I knew. There are big spiders here, and here was one of them. It was big, but not tarantula big. More like a very young tarantula, or a very, very large garden spider.

      I put on a glove and snatched it up to take it outside. I'm like a lot of people in that I'm pretty creeped out by spiders, but I had no interest in harming it. I just didn't want it crawling across our sleeping faces one night while it looked for something to eat. We have rats for that. I walked about thirty feet from the shack and placed it on the fallen branch of a pigeon pea tree. I was astonished to feel how strong it was as it pushed its way out from between my fingers, and unnerved to see it leap two feet like a grasshopper to first one blade of guinea grass, then another, and on into the darkness.

      I thought to myself, I hope that's the only one I see for a really long time. No such luck. A week later, in the space of a few hours, two more appeared. As I write this, the smaller of the two still lives on top of one of the beams, nestled in the little archway made by one of the hollows in the corrugated roof. It comes out for a few hours during the day to sit and wait for stray insects to fly by. The bigger one is the biggest I've seen so far. It could probably cover the palm of my hand with leg to spare. I discovered it hiding behind the washcloth we have hanging from a nail next to the bed.

      By this time, as a result of all the fruit we had, there was a serious bug problem in our tiny house.

      “I wonder if he'll eat some of the bugs in here,” Hannah mused, and as if by way of an audition, the arachnid grabbed a small moth out of the air with its forelegs and hungrily consumed it. In both appearance and behavior, it reminded me a lot of a crab. I was both horrified and fascinated. I'd never seen a spider hunt in that manner, with no recourse to a web.

      As nervous as I was having it around, it was that behavior that resigned me to its presence; I have no problem with giant spiders if they help clean up around the house. And don't bite me.

      I said something about it to Janice the next morning and she said she'd never heard of anyone being bitten by a cane spider. After watching it feed, I wonder if it even has much venom, or any. Spiders use venom to immobilize their prey and suck the juices from them at a later time. The spider I saw ate that moth like a man wolfing down a buffalo wing. A disturbing sight, but it makes me feel more secure that we don't have spider bites to worry about.

      I want to leave off by saying that, in spite of how negative some of the experiences I recount might sound, we really do get a kick out of our new environment, and the novel and sometimes enchanting creatures we share it with. Every morning we've woken to the song of a female cardinal, her staccato chirps heralding us out of bed at around 6:30, and continuing on for a good hour or more after that. Sometimes her mate turns up, a bird with brilliant red plumage that stands out against the greens and browns of our surroundings like a stop light. There are tiny, fat little green birds and even smaller birds with with reddish feathers on their heads and tails that keep us company throughout the day. There are husky bumblebees that hover around the blossoming plants. At night, for the last couple of weeks, we can hear whales exhaling noisily through their blowholes and slapping their tails on the water. The sounds have grown more frequent, indicating that more might be gathering for the winter mating season. I want us to try to make an effort to see them from shore, now that we know a way to get closer to the water from where we're situated. That's the kind of thing we came to Hawaii to experience, including everything we've experienced so far. And as our stay lengthens, we'll savor these times that I don't think we could have had anywhere else.