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.

Some Real Work On The Big Island

    

  I posted a jokey and smart-assed entry a while back about work, and I feel like I owe any regular readers of this blog a more sincere rendering of our working lives on the Big Island.

      When we arranged with Janice to stay on her property, she stipulated eight hours of work from each of us in exchange for the privilege. In nearly four months, we've seldom had to work more than three to four days out of the week, and only half days at that. The work varies, and we've been free to do it at our own pace, a pace that is almost always efficient but never hurried.

      In a past entry I mentioned that we spotted whales while working on our outhouse. “Outhouse” might not be the best word for it. Outhouses have deep pits beneath them for depositing what most people don't like to talk about. Ours still has the same five-gallon bucket with a plastic bag in it that we started out with, situated under a portable toilet seat. (In case you were wondering, we've never used the five-gallon bucket to its maximum capacity, and the plastic bag gets changed frequently. We're not savages, after all.) The difference now is that we can use it without getting soaked when it rains, and there is increased privacy.  It's built from four, eight-foot long posts of ironwood, chainsawed from a tree felled on Elmer's property. The roof is corrugated tin, just scraps of it that Janice has collected over the last year, and the walls are mainly cut from a giant sheet of black plastic and either nailed or stapled into place.

     

Four of us—me, Hannah, Elmer, and Janice—used a post hole digger to drill four holes in the ground and then set the posts in them. We nailed 2x4's between the posts to stabilize them. The rest of the building Hannah and I did ourselves.  We added extra planks of wood for extra stability, ran three more across the top for the roofing, attached the tin sheets to these with roofing screws, and cut and stapled the plastic sheeting to the posts. It's held up pretty well, although we've had to re-staple the plastic a few times because the trade winds yank it loose. At one point we needed to re-screw a portion of the roof, again because of the trade winds. One edge caught the wind just right, causing the roofing to shake and rattle, until the holes made by the screws had stretched and ripped wide enough that the screws no longer held the roof down on the windward side. Our solution was to add three times the screws and lash the roof down with used irrigation tubing.

      That was one project. We discovered before long that, in order to fulfill our eight-hour-a-week obligation, we'd have to be proactive and come up with projects ourselves. Janice's farm is in its infancy, and as it stands, there isn't yet enough work to keep three people consistently occupied. She's a single woman struggling to finish any number of farm-related projects that need attending to, and sometimes has to rely on the help of friends to make any progress. Because they're also busy with projects, that help is sometimes long in coming. In the meantime, we've been doing light building and helping to keep the guinea grass down with hand sickles and her sickle-bar mower.

      I described the process of cutting guinea grass in the other work-related post. There were a few things in that post I made up just to amuse myself, but I was honest about the guinea grass. The area all around the shack was choked with it, and it took a few days of cutting and digging to get most of it cleared away. We reclaimed a sizable portion of land that looked like the floor of a jungle when we arrived. Now it almost looks half-civilized, and the shack has the look of a well-maintained hut in a prosperous tropical village. Plants that had languished from a lack of sunlight started to grow at an accelerated rate, including a young avocado tree that has nearly tripled in size.

      We've done some light construction in addition to the outhouse. This astonishes me because neither of us is a builder, most especially not me. Some years ago I apprenticed as an electrician at a small business in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and as a result I both gained experience with tools I had seldom or never used before, and learned that I never wanted to pursue a career in construction. Whether this is because of a lack of serious aptitude on my part or the fact that I strongly disliked everyone I worked with during my apprenticeship, I can't decide. My money is on the latter. If I were to apply myself strenuously to the study of a construction trade, I'm confident I could develop more than passable skill in it. But that would mean I'd have to work with construction workers. My apologies to anyone reading this who works construction, but if my experience as an apprentice was typical, a disturbingly large number of you guys are assholes. Seriously, grow the fuck up. Of the four employees who made up the rest of the staff, one was a shit-talking drunk, one was an ex-Navy master chief with acute anger management issues, one was a Bible-thumping bigot, and the last was an electrical journeyman who I believe might have been either bipolar, or hooked on some kind of stimulant.

      The last guy was fun, in an ironic sort of way. He was a tall, red-headed, beer-bellied redneck who I privately nicknamed John the Moody Journeyman. From one day to the next, you didn't know who you were going to get: cheery, jocular, grinning, hard-working John; or sullen, mumbling, truculent, fall-asleep-behind-the-wheel-on-the-freeway-at-seventy-five-miles-an-hour John. They were two different people inhabiting the same body. Happy John was helpful, willing to instruct an inexperienced co-worker, and reasonably patient. Miserable John once threw the entire contents of a work van on the ground because he couldn't find the right-sized connector for a length of conduit, and how the fuck could they expect him to fuckin' work if they wouldn't give him the RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE FUCKIN' JOB!!!

      It beat working with the ex-Navy guy, who threw things and muttered angrily under his breath half the day and hated the fact that he was a journeyman electrician still wiring shitbox houses at sixty; or the bigoted fundamentalist Christian (also a former sailor) who once suggested in outrage at the news that Elton John was getting married to another man that, because he was a “faggot”, he should be shot, and more than once expressed disgust at the sight of a white woman with a black man; or the drunk, who could seldom wait until he got home to start drinking and pounded beer in the work truck on the way back to the shop.

      

      In a roundabout way, I'm trying to make the point that it's astonishing to me that we built an outhouse and a potting shed. Hannah has no construction experience, and what little I have I don't exactly hold close to my heart. The finished structures are pretty solid, if jarringly unprofessional-looking, and will probably be fixtures on this plot of land for a while to come. We also patched up an old shed that used to serve as a shelter for cane workers. That entailed hammering extra nails into wood that was either thoroughly rotted or eaten through by termites, and screwing in extra roofing. The shed is now a storage space for tools and building materials, and looks as if a stiff breeze would knock it flat.

      An interesting fact about the farming co-op in which Janice participates: it started as a means to give unemployed cane workers, pushed out of their jobs by the death of the sugarcane industry on Hawai'i, a way to re-establish themselves. They could farm the land for subsistence while living in housing that once belonged to the cane companies, sold to former workers at low cost. Elmer, a farmer I've written about several times in the blog, is an ex-cane employee. Interestingly, he seems to represent a tiny demographic in the co-op. At some point, many of the former employees left the co-op in frustration, mainly from the lack of dependable water for irrigation. In time, the state took over the lease on the land, began providing more consistent water, and started leasing to the general public. The co-op now leases the land from the state, and issues sub-leases to individuals who have demonstrated sufficient interest in farming to satisfy the co-op's board of directors.

      Originally, those leasing from the co-op had to go to school and receive a degree in agriculture in order to keep the lease. That requirement has been set aside, and the result shows in plots of land with nothing more growing on them than drooping forests of guinea grass. Many lease-holders rarely set foot on the land they're responsible for, grow nothing, and produce no revenue. Now the co-op is close to losing its lease because it can't pay the state—no produce sold equals no money to pay the rent. If that happens, the state will only recognize sub-leases of people who are producing a crop, and the co-op itself will likely be dissolved.

      We've been to a couple of farms in the co-op where production seems to be relatively high. Elmer grows coffee, an annual crop that brings him a modest revenue. He picks, husks, and dries it himself, then sends it out to be roasted. We've had some; it's great. We sent a pound to my parents and they were very impressed by the quality. As I mentioned in my jokey blog entry, Kona coffee is some of the most admired coffee in the world. What we've been picking at Elmer's still qualifies as Kona, even though it grows in a town less than an hour away from Hilo, on the opposite side of the island. According to Elmer, it's also difficult to obtain on the mainland because distributors lie to consumers, selling coffee as 100% Kona that is in fact only 10%, leading to a lower quality of coffee and people wondering why all the fuss over Kona. Also according to Elmer, you can only get the real thing if you know a Hawaiian coffee farmer. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't—Elmer is sometimes prone to exaggeration. What I can personally attest to is that, of all the coffee I've had, Elmer's is some of the best. Possibly that's because it's a good deal fresher than most coffee I've had. Whatever the reason, the flavor is excellent.

      Another part of my earlier post concerned the process of picking coffee cherries. The spiders and snails are real, and the stink bats, I'm almost positive I don't need to say, are not. The snails are an invasive species, like much of what grows and thrives on the island, and feed on the kinds of things snails are renowned for eating. The position taken by Elmer and Janice, and I assume many other people who grow produce, is to stomp them on sight. I've squashed a few, and I have to admit I felt a twinge of remorse. Can't say why exactly, except that the little creatures are slow and their thin shells provide them with scant protection, making them seem pitiable to me. If I were a farmer, I doubt I would feel so sentimental.

      But while slowly making one's way up and down the rows of coffee trees in Elmer's orchard, one finds it impossible not to step on them. Their brown coloration blend them into the similarly brown decaying leaves on the ground perfectly, and at least half a dozen times in the course of picking I'd hear the mixed crunch and pop of a snail shell giving way under the sole of my shoe. Just doing my part to preserve Hawaiian agriculture.

      The only things about picking coffee neither of us liked were the clouds of mosquitoes. I'm going to assume that mosquitoes are more than likely a problem throughout all of the tropics. What I know for sure is that they are not native to the Hawaiian islands, and I've heard two different stories about how they got here. Or rather, two versions of the same story. One version depicts a British whaler in 1826 anchoring off Maui and, in the course of emptying and refilling water casks, its crewmen innocently depositing mosquito larvae into an island stream. At least that's what the little comic-strip interpretation of events hanging on one of the walls of the visitors' center at Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park seems to imply. Another, more interesting, version says that the captain of the whaler, angry with a local chief, deliberately dumped mosquito-infested water into streams out of spite.

      The second version strikes me as the truer one, because you can feel the bitter acrimony in every bite delivered by those little monsters. The first day of picking, our arms, necks, and faces were covered in red welts like an outbreak of chicken pox. They come at you in a squadron ready to attack every point on your body where they can draw blood through their minuscule straw snouts. We hear their high, goose-pimpling whine at every farm we visit, because standing water is never far away in a place where irrigation is used and rain collects in abandoned equipment and old tires.

      Just about everyone hates them, although I've noticed that some people seem immune to mosquito bites. “They just don't bother me,” they say, and I want to slap them. Little can be done about mosquitoes that doesn't involve obliterating the islands themselves with explosives or banning all water. I know of only one attempt at mosquito management, which has so far had mixed results. At some point in the not-too-distant past someone made the decision to import coqui frogs to the Big Island. Lots of things seem to get released into the wild in Hawaii—geckos, mosquitoes, mongoose (mongeese? I don't know), housecats, pigs, goats, innumerable plants and trees, any living thing that can be set free out of negligence or stupidity to wander and proliferate in a tropical habitat. Frogs were released in the vain hope that they would devour mosquitoes, much in the same manner mongoose had been distributed on the islands in the hope they would eat rats. The occasional mongoose does indeed eat the occasional unlucky rat from what I've heard, and I'm sure the little tree frogs probably mange to ingest a mosquito or two in the course of their day. I'm also sure that they do no good, because mosquitoes breed much faster and in greater numbers than frogs ever have. The frogs, called coqui after their unique croak, have spread across a significant portion of the Big Island, anyplace where rainfall is fairly consistent, and in places such as the rainforest, they fill the night with their chorus. Along with the mosquitoes they were intended to eat, they very likely gobble native insects found nowhere outside of Hawaii and that will, given time and froggy tenacity, become endangered or extinct.

      Getting back to coffee for a moment, I'd like to add that we picked it over a period of four months and never filled more than two full five-gallon buckets between us in four hours, in spite of the fact that, according to Elmer, professional coffee pickers—often the kind of immigrant labor that toils in American agriculture—can do four full buckets, per person, in about six hours. This knowledge was a source of frustration for us as we waddled over to Elmer's coffee husker with our measly one bucket apiece. I don't like to think we're slow, it doesn't feel like we're working slowly, and maybe part of the problem is that many of Elmer's trees were right about at the end of their season, and so didn't have a lot of cherries left to pick. Elmer was always really good about it; he never gave us a hard time, and seemed to enjoy our company enough that we didn't feel hard-pressed to astonish him with our labor prowess.

      We have worked for farmers almost exclusively since coming to the island. After about six months of working on farms, mostly weeding and observing what farmers have to endure in order to maintain an operation that brings in enough money just to break even, we've decided that we never want to farm, ever, at any point in our lives, for any reason, not even in our dreams. Farmers work hard, with no days off and no real breaks in their routines, and usually for next to nothing. That appears to be the case here, at any rate; I can't say how it is for huge agribusinesses on the mainland. One old farmer we know—I'll call him Tom—has worked in one demanding field after another his entire life. He's been a master machinist, run a trucking company, run construction outfits, had a stint in the military, and has generally worked with his hands for the better part of seventy-five years. For his “retirement” he's been farming for about ten years. He doesn't have much help. Like most small farmers, he has too many projects that need to be attended to right away, and barely enough time to start even one. On top of that, he does favors for friends up and down the Hamakua coast, often in the form of mowing grass with his tractor, tilling for farmers who don't have tractors of their own, or repairing vehicles and farming equipment.

      I don't know where he finds the energy. I don't know where any these old farmers find the energy. I have to assume they had a mercilessly strict work ethic pounded into them at a young age, or they have an all-consuming passion to leave behind a legacy of banana trees and taro. Tom seems to live on nothing but canned food and Mountain Dew, and is still more active, and looks more fit, than someone half his age. His partner in the farm—who I'll call Dean—probably not much more than ten years younger than Tom, is the same way. We worked with him for a day in Kona disassembling metal irrigation pipes in a huge abandoned greenhouse. For hours he struggled with two pipe wrenches, unscrewing one length of pipe from another, working continuously like a machine and taking only ten minute breaks every hour or two. I helped by manually unscrewing the pipes as he turned the wrenches, and although I wore gloves I ended the day with blisters on my palms and a bloody knuckle. In contrast, his hands looked the same as they did when we started, because he has callouses like gloves of leathery human skin.

      I should also point out that we started out for Kona from Pa'auilo at four in the morning on a Saturday, which means Hannah and I had to get up around three in order to be ready on time. Dean was doing this job in addition to his work for the Department of Agriculture during the week, because the owner of the greenhouse was giving him the metal pipes for free. Dean intends to use the pipes for a fruit orchard he's starting, with an eye on commercial production. Like Tom, dean works virtually every day, starting before the sun and finishing around the time it goes down.

      There's always some kind of work for farming volunteers, because farmers in Hawaii get little support from the state, and growing season is year-round. We've found it to be a worthwhile means to enjoy Hawaii. It's not always easy, but the opportunity to learn about Hawaiian agriculture, the islands, the people, and history is there at every step, and it makes our time here greatly more rewarding than if we had simply come here as typical mainland tourists. Rather than spending time at a hotel or a resort, barely meeting anyone local who doesn't work in the service industry, and seeing little of island life firsthand, we are living in the middle of the thriving, verdant heart of the Big Island every day. It's a superior way to travel, in my opinion, and it's a means we intend to apply to other parts of the world in the not-too-distant future. We want to live this way for a while yet, and Hawaii has given us a very encouraging start.

Eat Wild Pig!

     

     Of all days to forget the camera.

     I had even thought about it the day before. I told myself that I should take the digital camera with me when we went to Elmer's to pick coffee in his orchard the next morning. Now I know it was some kind of premonition, or an intuitive message sent up from the idea section of my subconscious. Because there was something pretty extraordinary to take pictures of.

      It's not the first time we've been caught without a camera at Elmer's. The first wild pig we ever saw, about two weeks after coming to the island, was caught in a trap on his farm. An astonishing thing for someone not accustomed to the sight of wild pigs, and a photograph would have been appropriate. But, as I said, no camera. You'll have to take my word for it that it was impressive.

      That pig was taken away by Elmer's brother to be slaughtered at a later time. The next pig we saw, the one I'm going to tell you about, was to be dispatched by Elmer himself that day, right there on the farm. He told us as soon as we showed up for work that he'd trapped one the night before and was going to shoot it.

There was a stench of decay in the air as we approached.

      “I shot another one a couple of days ago, but it ran off into the grass and died. I'm not going to go in there and get it. Frick that.”

He explained that the one in the trap was a female. He'd seen her before with two piglets, which were presumably still running around. The trap was located next to deep gulch running along the south side of the farm.

      Without bothering to look, we got to work in the orchard and picked coffee cherries for about three hours. We came back out around mid-afternoon, hauling our buckets of cherries under the shelter attached to Elmer's workshed, where he keeps the husker for extracting the beans.

      After a few minutes he came out from feeding his chickens.

      “Now I have to shoot this pig. And when I'm done, you can take some home with you.”

      Hannah and I both perked up. Fresh wild pig? Seriously? It was an idea we hadn't really dared to entertain, mainly because we have no way to refrigerate food. Fresh meat can turn in a day in the tropical heat. The only thing to do is eat it the same day, if we have it. Besides, we never presumed that it would ever be available to us, assuming that if Elmer killed a pig and took some of the meat, he'd want to keep it for himself or his extended family.

      He motioned for us to follow him toward the gulch. The trap was homemade, an old pickup bed supporting a length of chain-link fence and assorted barred metal frames. The pig inside pushed with its hooves and snout against the bars as if testing for a weak spot. She was plainly very strong, maybe as strong as a healthy human being, with bristly black hair, a wiry frame, and a long head. She looked markedly different from a farm-raised pig—her body was as lean and muscular as a hound dog's, and similar in size. I wondered if she might have the strength to shake the trap apart, and what then? Chances were she'd run off, but if a pig such as this felt the need to attack and got a bead on someone, that someone could easily end up in the emergency room.

      “I need to hose it down before I shoot it,” Elmer told us, and reached for a length of hose that lay coiled next to a nearby tree. He showered the animal thoroughly with a powerful stream of water, first one side and then the other as it turned around in the cramped space of the trap. It seemed not to mind at all, and even halted in its efforts to get free as if taking a break to freshen up.

      When he finished, Elmer dropped the hose and went to his truck. He fished around in the back seat and pulled out a .22 rifle. He came back to the trap, raised the rifle, and took aim. Hannah and I covered our ears.

      Over one eye there was a deep cut from one of the times she had smashed her head into the bars. For a second I found myself concerned for her health, and then reminded myself she only had about that long to live.

      The rifle went off with a loud pop and the pig went down immediately. We moved in closer to get a better look. A thin, steady stream of blood spurted from the wound at the top of her head while she lay on her right side, kicking her legs as if still trying to get away, convulsing as though most of the life still remained in her body. The left eye stared up blankly at nothing.

      Elmer picked up the hose again and doused the pig with more water. The weakening bloodflow mixed with it on the metal floor of the trap into a pinkish liquid.

      “Come on, enough already!” Elmer hollered at the kicking body.

“You guys can take some of the meat home with you. I'll give some to the dogs. They'll eat everything, the fur, the bones, all of it.”

      A couple of minutes went by before the pig had mostly stopped moving. Elmer reached into the trap, yanked the body out, and let it flop onto the ground. Although it was dead, the hooves still moved feebly.

He took out a small pocket knife, hardly longer than a pairing knife.

      “You're just going to use that?” Hannah asked.

      Elmer shrugged. “It's all you need. I'm not going to keep very much. You just need to cut the skin, get through the meat and the joint, and poof, you're done. The rest I'll throw in the gully. Once it starts to rot, the other pigs down there will come around and eat it.”

      He held up a foreleg and sliced into the skin where it joined the torso, into the layer of fat underneath, past that into the muscle, and detached the shoulder at the joint. An opened vein filled the wound with blood like water filling a basin.    The smell of blood and animal musk reached our nostrils.

      We took the foreleg to the workshed, and Elmer wedged the hoof into the rear bumper of a Ford pickup he keeps parked there. He cut into the shoulder, pulling away the bristly hide, and separated a substantial hunk of meat, about the size of a ten-ounce steak. Looking closely at the hanging leg, I could see some of the muscle tissue still twitching.

      “You have to cool the meat down or it'll start to rot really soon,” he informed us. We placed the meat in a plastic bag and filled the bag with water from a two-liter soda bottle.

      “That should help cool it down,” he said.

      Bloody water squirted from the bottom of the bag.

      “Maybe I have another bag that doesn't leak.”

      I put the leaking bag inside another he had lying around the workshed.

The meat looked appetizing, even when submerged in a bag of pink water. It seemed just as good as anything you'd see in a supermarket, the same color and texture as a fresh cut of pork loin.

      Elmer went back to the carcass and removed the other three legs. What remained he picked up and tossed into the gulch. Loud thunks echoed back up to us as it hit boulders and tree roots on the way down.

He gave the legs to his two black mutts, Two and Four. They're named after the number of white feet they have respectively. Pulling against their chains, they leaped and barked as we arrived bearing these rare treats. As soon as Elmer tossed the legs to them, Four buried one in the dirt.

      “They like to do that. He'll dig it back up and eat it as soon as it starts to smell.”

      People are a little more civilized in their eating habits. He advised us to cook the meat very well—very well—to kill the trichinosis virus. It's the same advice you hear in regard to all pork, the difference in this case being that the pig is almost guaranteed to be a carrier.

      Pork of this kind is sold in various parts of the island, but always by roadsides, never in stores. It's illegal to sell commercially, presumably because of the threat of disease. The hunting of wild pig is a fairly common practice here, done usually with the aid of dogs to help track them down and hold them .

      Pigs may have first come to the islands with the original human settlers. They most certainly came with the tide of Europeans, who weren't terribly concerned with the effects the pigs had on island ecosystems. Little surprise, then, that some went feral, and have been reproducing in large numbers ever since, making a devastating impact on the unique—in some cases nearly extinct—island flora. Sows can birth two litters a year, and without hunting their numbers would likely grow wildly out of control. Local farmers consider them, at best, a nuisance, and at worst a serious threat to crops such as macadamia nuts. One solution is to erect fencing to keep them out, but that does little to help rare, wild vegetation. On islands with a fixed amount of square mileage, and hundreds of thousands of years to wait before any more turns up, keeping the wild pig population down is an important concern, and hunting is an expedient way to accomplish that.

      It isn't easy to see a living creature destroyed in front of you. It's not something to be taken lightly, and without a suitable degree of contemplation. At the same time, if you're one to eat meat, it's very important to witness the death of an animal that will be consumed as food. Too many people approach what they eat from a mental distance, and have a relationship to it that is several times removed from the source. It puts me in mind of a lyric from the Citizen Fish song “Flesh and Blood”: “The meat you eat is wrapped up neat/You didn't see it bleed”. The overall message of the song—that the consumption of meat wastes resources, and is essentially evil and cruel—is not one that I fully agree with, but the band makes a good point. If you are an omnivore who includes a measure of animal protein in your diet, it makes sense to observe the death and preparation of a living creature and come to terms with it, one way or the other.

      A couple of years ago, Hannah and I were watching a DVD of the French horror film Eyes Without A Face. Included on the disk was a documentary by the same filmmaker called Blood of the Beasts, shot in the '40's in slaughterhouses outside Paris. It provides a very unflinching glimpse into the killing and processing of livestock: calves have their necks slit while strapped down to a metal table, then are decapitated and dismembered, the stumps of the legs still twitching forcefully even with the head laying atop a pile of other calves' heads; several sheep are tied down on their backs and have their throats slashed, kicking at the air as they bleed out. A horse is killed in a businesslike manner with a bolt gun, then bled and skinned by a man with one leg—a leg he lost by a slip of his own knife, cutting himself too badly for the limb to be saved.

      After watching all this, we felt we had a decision to make. Did we feel that we could continue eating commercially mass-produced meat, in light of how systematic and brutal the process is? It's not like we didn't already know, we just hadn't been confronted with the bloody reality of it in a long time. As a kid, I cleaned and gutted fish I caught on summer vacation. I watched my dad kill chickens that we would later eat, hanging them upside down and bleeding them alive much in the way some of the animals in the documentary bowed out of this world. Neither of us was naïve or uninformed about death in relation to food. Watching the grim viscousness of commercial production, however, left us feeling a little sick.

      We set the notion of converting to vegetarianism to the side as something to consider. We even began a sampling of non-animal proteins that could be eaten as a substitute for meat, such as tempeh and fake hot dogs. Veganism was out—we both like cheese too much, and vegan cheese is nowhere near the same. We're aware that, for many vegans, the choice is a moral or health-conscious one, and is not based primarily in food aesthetics. But that's what eventually proved to be our undoing. We like the taste of real meat, and certain flavor profiles and textures are only really available to you when you are an omnivore.

      That's the main reason we never took the next step and stopped eating meat. It's just too good, and in my opinion anyway, good for you if eaten in moderate amounts. The human body does well with a certain amount of animal fats and proteins, and the amino acids in meat help the body to assimilate the proteins more efficiently. I'd put money down on the claim that every culture in the world, throughout the entirety of human history, has consumed protein in one form or another from things that walk, swim, crawl, or fly. Our species evolved to derive nutrients from a broad spectrum of sources, animals included.

      We still had to address the issue of factory farming. Just because we'd made the decision to remain omnivores didn't mean we were shutting our eyes to the nauseating facts behind mass production. One of the most effective arguments against the consumption of meat—and eggs and dairy, to a large extent—is that the raising of livestock requires the use of too much land, too much grain to feed animals, and is grossly unsanitary because of the conditions in which the animals are kept. These are excellent points, and for myself, I feel that the methods employed by factory farms should be discouraged, and eventually eliminated. If more of us, over time, can agree that people should be closer to their food from the beginning, from growth to consumption, in the locavore style, then we will likely agree as well that the commercial production of meat and dairy should diminish to the point that it becomes virtually nonexistent.

      Ideally, people should raise their own animals, under far more humane conditions, and in conditions that are much more sanitary and healthy. This would mean that the quantity of meat available to people would be greatly reduced, but that should be the case anyway if one takes into account that animal fats and proteins ought to comprise a proportionately small percentage of one's diet. Asian cuisine is probably one of the best examples of this idea: meals are made up of a preponderance of grains and vegetables, with some fish or meat included.

      And then there's hunting. To hunt for sport is wasteful and largely pointless, encouraging an unhealthy element in the minds of those who partake in it, inasmuch as the pleasure involved is in the act of killing itself, abstracted from any need for food. Hunting for food, provided the target animals are abundant, is an effective means of acquiring good meat free from artificial hormones, a feedlot diet, and the general cruelty of factory farming. The pig Elmer caught was a wild animal that is in no small supply on the island, and belonged to an invasive species besides. Reduction of their numbers is important to local agriculture, and to kill them without eating them is to let good meat go to waste.

      It could be pointed out that if everyone hunted for their meat, there wouldn't be any animals left. It could also be pointed out that there is no way everyone on Earth can find the space to raise enough chickens, cows, goats, rabbits, pigs, or whatever other types of livestock needed to provide humanity with meat, dairy, and eggs, not if we're all supposed to do it ourselves.

      We are now at the seven-billion marker on the road to human overpopulation. To feed all of these people will require the use of an enormous amount of land, regardless of the kind of diet they consume. Meat, grain, vegetables, fruit, all need space to grow, and all are vital to human existence. The nutritional needs of our species do not change just because we've allowed ourselves to expand way out of proportion to our environment and its capacity to sustain us. The problem, in terms of land use for food production, isn't that people should give up animals as a food source. The problem is that there are too many people.

      As I said, it's not an easy thing to watch an animal be killed for food, or for any other reason, but I was glad to find that I didn't feel repulsed, or morally offended, or turned off by the blood and death throes of the pig from the idea of eating meat. I felt that I had passed some kind of test. Granted, I wasn't the one doing the trapping and shooting, but that's a small step from watching it happen. Elmer's rough butchering of the pig did not disgust me in any way; I found the fresh meat I saw beneath the layers of skin and fat to be appetizing, not repellent.

      Speaking of appetites: when we got the pork home, Hannah placed it in a bowl of salt water to tenderize it and draw out some of the excess blood. An hour later, she cut away the tougher, more fibrous layers of muscle, and put the meat in a bag with soy sauce and balsamic vinegar as a marinade. Some time after that, when the meat had absorbed the flavor, she put it in a pan with the marinade and boiled it until the liquid evaporated. This helped to draw out some of the oils and reduce the gaminess.

      She sliced it into strips, chopped some onion and bell pepper, and sautéed these until the meat was very well done. The result had a strong enough flavor, and dark coloring, that I would have mistaken it for beef if I hadn't known better. It reminded me a lot of what comes in Mongolian beef at Chinese buffets. It was some of the best pork either of us had eaten in a long time, and easily the wildest.

      We're both really grateful for the opportunity to enjoy our food the way we do on the island of Hawai'i. Most of what we eat, whether vegetable, fruit, or protein, comes from farms we either work on or visit. Apart from growing it yourself, there is no better way of getting food. I can't help but think that we experience Hawaii in a way most tourists don't by living in this manner. How many tourists not only eat wild pig, but see it shot and butchered in front of them? How many eat produce directly from farms and gardens, and not purchased in a store or served in a restaurant? How many even take a look at where native-grown food comes from? Not many, I'll bet. We're able to see the Big Island in a way that the majority of visitors here don't, and that opportunity not only makes us feel lucky, but a little bit wiser as well.

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.