Friday, January 29, 2010

1/23: Krazy Kevin

Last night I eased my sore fingers into a game of Scrabble with the new couple working on the farm. Evening and nightfall at the Southernmost tip of the country bring only plaintive solitude. The sun falls and only a slow breeze comes alive- all else submits. There was nothing to ask for in the kitchen- dinner and company were already there.

And then footsteps sound in the darkness, shapes approach the screen doors, and instantly a party of men materialize. They drift in from the front and sides, which is why they're called drifters after all. Kenny is suddenly on the bench inside smiling at us, his new friend Max has collapsed into sleep in the corner, Hans is waving hands broadly through quiet air and embarking on strange stories, and most bizarre of all is the new character, Kevin.

He was obviously young and limber, wearing typical tight and brown Hawaiian skin. But his hair was white; white as polished silver and glowing with grease, and his eyes were burning blue like small flames. He seemed to fling away the night, now lighting up the room with his artificial luminescence, and cryptic, ageless energy. He was side by side with Hans, and yelling just as loud into the same story.

We were so bewildered we had not even dropped the plastic letters from our palms. Kevin was already far into his story. He and Hans were both laughing and gasping severely.

"Dude, it was a state of excellence," Hans cried.
"Dude, it was a state of excellence," Kevin repeated.
"Dude, what was it?"
"I've been around the world. Around the world seven times. Seven times! I've never seen anything like it."
"I swear I wouldn't believe it if someone told me. If someone told me I swear I wouldn't believe it."

The blabber continued for many minutes, far away from the point. They used more absurd words than were on the scrabble board. We chattered with the jesters for a while and let them rattle their jaws and roll their eyes. IN the end Kevin left us with one parting doctrine of Tigger:
"Sometimes you've got to stumble and bumble before you can trounce and bounce around."

Thursday, January 28, 2010

1/21: Kenny

There is a man named Kenny who roams the island. The island is not so big actually, so Kenny's dark wrinkled face and coconut white beard are well known. He is small but strong and bronzed from a life on beaches and in the back of trucks. He began appearing at my farm and hostel last week, after Hans met him on the bus.

I thought he was aggravatingly strange at first. I thought he was just a cryptic bum with a polished ivory smile, waiting to steal our dishes when we slept. He expresses careless happiness I mistook for drunkenness, and he laughs like has a fish swimming in the bottom of his belly. But the more he has stayed here the more I realize he is the truest form of the island Mana.

He has become something of a rustic teacher and father figure. I came home form work today to see him prodding a fire beneath a smoking rack of meat, next to an old truck with mattresses piled in its back, where he had slept the night before. I whined to him about my oppressive boss, who directed me moving boxes with caustic comments. I told him of how I fell through the rotted floor of a farm building on the job, and my boss walked past without a word of concern.

Kenny beamed at me with his smile that dissolved the malice behind my eyes. He wears a look that is both tragic and ecstatic. "Brother, don't be upset by that man," he said. "He doesn't know where he is."

Monday, January 25, 2010

1/20/10

All the other birds sing to me
slightly and politely, murmuring
over and over about their
view from a precious perch.
But your cries are shrill and
Shameless, young Hawk.
You scream as though nature's
hand has throttled you by the neck, and
you do not sing for others, and
you do not know who I am.
Your sharpened soprano wail
sends out sorrows darker than
A grey Tuesday Manhattan alleyway, and
pride more handsome than
the tattered Confederate battle flag.
But you do not know what these things
are from your singular perch,
and the most resounding triumph you can
summon is sinking your
claws into a soft field mouse, which
the world never even slowed down to watch.
Your song is the steam of ferment placed
inside of you, and you sing without dynamics and
You cry without feelings.

1/19/10

Too tired. All the wires in my body have stopped buzzing.

1/18/10

There are days between sunrise and sunset that are smooth and shapeless forms. NO conflicts or triumphs stand above the plane of events. There are no peaks or valleys.

The sunrise was soft and yellow. I stayed inside reading and writing all morning. I ate bananas from our backyards. My bike carried me to and through Naalehu like a swift and angular steed. The graveyard was an interesting sight. Citrus fruit and beer cans adorned the graves of many.

In town I reaped the waves of cell phone reception. I chose the harder of the two paths to home, the relentless steep ascent of six miles on the mountain road. In the afternoon I was ready to rest again.

The fields behind the cabins were still vast and unexplored this afternoon. I fought the still and soldierly elephant grass to reach the high side of the field., the one lined with trees and a stone wall. Countless thorny legumes were clinging to my clothes on the way back.

Kenny the bum was here again today. He is deep brown like tree bark, and just as wrinkled. He amazes me with his calm shuffling pace to life and blissful attitude. He is genuinely satisfied with sleeping in the back of his truck, just for the opportunity to see us. He is an honest man.

The new couple arrived tonight, ready for work early in the morning. They come from Wisconsin, and seem to bring a traditional continental perspective. And that is near the end, and we all retired early after hearing my outlandish boss drone our ears with childish lectures. Hans said the boss had him working on Christmas Day. "He's so fucking out of it that he had me picking fruit that day," he said, "He doesn't understand- the last thirty five years, the heaviest thing I've lifted on Christmas Day is my nuts."

Thursday, January 21, 2010

1/16/10: Uncle G

There are many rice cookers in stacks beneath the stoves. They are sitting in high piles, rust flecked, bent and cold. Dishes are gleaning with grease, piled in the sink. Discordant ukuleles are pattering together, and thick tobacco smoke is sauntering through the air. Fragments of strange conversations are all I can hear, phrases like, "what is right is wrong." The man called G is leaving, and I do not even move to say goodbye.



This morning a hostel guest, Nathan, spread the possessions of the trunk of his car across our lawn. HE sought to give everything away, or barter it for camping gear. Inside I was cooking eggs. The man who cooked us marlin the night before stumbled in the back door. His colorful van was still parked in our backyard, and the fire ring was littered with plastic bottles and cans.



He was moderately short and fat. His face was pointed like turtle's beak, and wrinkled through and through. His skin was dark on the shoulders and neck, and his voice had a sharp rasp, like his lungs were lined with iron. He called himself 'G,' and sometimes 'Uncle G.'



It was hard to ignore his stories.

"You ever heard of the Madra?" he asked.

"You ever heard of the Men in Black?" he asked.

"You ever heard of Ardsley, Washington?" he asked.

And each questions was proceed by a story, so fantastic and pompous and filled with epic dimensions and mythic men that I was close to laughing at first. But then I realized that he was in earnest. He was lying in complete earnest. He was sincerely living in a twisted golden dream.



He told stories of Mafias and families and clans and powerhouses and weapons of mass destruction and government conspiracies. He told stories about Jews and Indians and Russians and secret agents, all tangled up in clandestine, black-robed combat and dealings with slim briefcases. And in everyone he was the hero. He was the leader of a primal war tribe storming a nuclear power plant, he was the one on the ship of uranium in the Swiss canal, stealing a Russian tanker. And the reason why we ignorant, basic, near-sighted University students had not hear of any of it was of course because it was completely classified and shielded from our eyes and ears. And here was the man, 'G,' wearing a ragged tank top tight over his gut, living in a van on the big island of Hawaii.



But he was very proud of his acquaintance with the island. He offered us a ride to the South Point cliffs, to pursue another day on the edge of the world. We piled into a van coated with stickers, spray paint, insignias, and scratches. The star of David was on one side, and the cross on the other. "Aloha," "Mana," and "Pele," all plastered in various places. "4/20," spray painted on the bumper. The back window was broken, and fishing tackle dangled out the end, over shards of glass clinging to the frame. Inside were stacks of cookware, clothes, lumber and all varieties of blades and hand weapons. I got a seat on top of a rough piece of driftwood.



But clouds overwhelmed the sky as we moved closer to South Point, and rain started falling. Our driver and navigator offered to take us instead to the Kona side of the island, where it was always sunny. There he promised us many grand adventures under his leadership. He knew the island well, and the island knew his van just as well, he claimed. At our first stop for gas it was clear how well the island actually knew him. He began talking to locals at their car, describing the "hoalies" that he was carting around the island. "Hoaly" is a slang label for white people on the island, used by natives. The men at their car chuckled and skirted their eyes from the bumbling and shirtless white man talking to them.



On the way to Kona he began narrating fabulous stories of Hawaiian folklore. Each sentence swas sprinkled with Hawaiian words, which he slowly stopped to translate for us. "Malka," he rasped, "that means mountain. Makai, that means sea." He returned once and again to his favorite Hawaiian word, "Kapu," each time sliding fingers across his throat like a knife. "No lawyers or trials," he rasped,"Just Kapu."



The first one we picked up was a grey and yellow man. He was waiting at a gas station, swigging a little plastic flask. "This is Uncle Rock," G rasped. "He's a local legend." He seemed only a legend of piss poor decrepitude to me. His face was pitted with wrinkles and his hair and beard were tangled into one dirty slick mass. He climbed in and silently glanced at the people around him. And he stayed silent for most of the ride except for spontaneous outbursts like, "I want to jump off a cliff!" Uncle G would chuckle and cackle, "I hear you bruda." The second one we picked up was a glamorous Hawaiian woman standing by the road. G swerved the van and waved excitedly to the hesitant woman, who asked to be dropped off, politely, as soon as we entered Kona. We left her and moved on.


The first stop was an ancient burial ground. A field of black rocks abutted the ocean. There were high piles and walls still standing, and trenches still lining the ground. Mounds of rock were arranged at the head of the field, now ancient tombstones. "This place has powerful Mana," he said, "That means spirit. Don't walk off the path or its Kapu."


G swaggered in front of us, shirtless, but with a scythe tied in to his belt. He rasped about the historic significance of this hallowed ground. I thought he would make a good park service guide, if he wasn't so disgustingly unpleasant. He gave snide greetings to a pair of tourists carrying beach chairs, who just laughed quietly.

The array of mind-blowing and mysterious sites he promised us unfolded in smaller dimensions than expected. Most of our destinations were simple, sand bays, beautiful, yes, but already busy with tourists. I watched Tyler and Stephanie's silhouettes move in the forefront of the falling orange sun, on the rocks of an ancient pier. Lee bumbled around beside me, picking up and examining pieces of coral. He walked in a clumsy way that seemed his wrists and ankles held his centers of gravity, dragging his body around in a jerking path.

On the way home G asked me for twenty dollars, to cover gas expenses. I had already given five, and I looked at Tyler and stephanie, who only returned sheepish stares, because they had no money. Lee and I agreed to each give ten. He put only enough gas in to push the needle above the empty line, and pocketed the cash.

We were still in Kona when he made the stop to buy weeed. "Wait here," he rasped, and left us inside the van in the parking lot of a yellow apartment. I watched him carry the cash I'd just given into the seedy palce. He began smoking in the parking lot and continued for the next half hour, holding the wheel with his knees. "Twenty five years without a DUI," he rasped. I was just glad the van was moving South, the direction of home.

His iron-lined voice scratched my ears most of the return trip. Tyler took over driving shortly , which only gave G greater freedom to assail us with gruesome Hawaiian stories. He insisted we stop at a McDonald's, then gas station after gas station, riding on a near empty tank and handing out the rest of the money on soda then licroice then burgers then candy. "You're a little skinny bruda," he turned to me, "learn how to eat like me and maybe you'll have some of these," he said, flexing his wrinkled and soft arms.

Then a song came on the radio that I liked. I watched the glowing red Hawaiian sun sink out the window, and felt the warm wind on my face. I hadn't heard music in a long while, and I let it wipe away all of G's rusty words.

We were finally home, and I rushed out of the stinking van. G followed us inside, but by now no one was acknowleding him. We let him stumble around, groping for milk and cereal, spilling carelessly on the floor. "What you cooking up, bruda," he asked, trying to peer around my efforts to guard the food from him. "You got a big chicken in the fridge man," he rasped, "maybe you should cook it up. It's goin to go bad by tomorrow."

Once he learned I was at Brown opened a scathing commentary. "They wanted me up there man, up at Phillips Andover," he rasped, " They wanted me up in the Skull and Bones, but I didn't want none of that," he rasped. I sat in silence, letting him dig into deeper and deeper tunnels of fury. "You'll never know how the real world works in school my friend. Let me tell you, I've moved so mouch money that it would make your head spin," said the man living in his van.

And he continued to excite himeself more and more, and I looked on in silence. "Do you know who invented the internet?" he asked. "Bill Gates, my friend. Ever heard of him? And he was a fucking dropout too. When he invtented MSDOS, the command system for IBM with Paal Allen, he signed a secret agreement with the FEDs. He would forever have backdoor keys to the internet, and in return for helping the government build weapons of mass destruction, they would make him the richest man in the world until he died. That's right my friend, I know these things." I kept trying not to laugh.

"So are you published yet?" I asked him. "Brother the shit I do never gets published. They had me working on Black Projects. They're like black holes- because nothing ever escapes. I'll give you something right now that will blow your mind," and he furiously began searching for pen and paper. On the back of a bus schedule in highlighter he scrawled:

[p squared x infinity = infinity x p squared]

"Know what that means?" he asked. "Poop?" I replied.
"Of course you don't. That's where Einstein had it wrong. This is thefinfinte perspective and possibility theory, which has helped me solve many unthinkeable problems," said the man living in a dirty van.

I went back to cooking in silence, laughing in my mind. "I would of held off on the cereal if I'd known you were cooking something up bruda," he said.

"Sorry," I said, "there's nothing left, brother," and fed the rest of my food to the cat.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

1/12/10: Tropical Facts

In all of these adventures I have carried myself high and proud, stomping through obstacles even when the rain was in my eyes. But this is a different challenge that I am experiencing now. There is no bridge to build, no orders from bosses, no Katahdin. There is only me and vast and uncaring land. There are numberless pieces of fruit dandling on thousands of branches across hundreds of acres and countless hours to pass.

Romantic poets referred to Nature with a capital N, because they believed in its mystic, living correspondence. What i have discovered here, near the Southernmost point of the country, and on young and broken volcanic land is something inhuman a nature without the capital spirit. There are wonders here which have no equal in anything I have ever experienced. Bright birds, bright flowers, bright skies, black Earth and glowing fruit decorate this near imaginary landscape. The weather is called idyllic anywhere else: consistent temperatures of 75 degrees, low humidity and almost no rain. Here is is just commonplace.

My job here basically entails picking fruit. In supermarkets my eyes used to glean over oranges carelessly, but no w have been honed to fasten on every pore. Color is crucial in this industry, so the difference between light and dark orange, the fickle threshold of ripeness, is the hinge of the job. Wasting a single piece is expensive collateral. These little orbs command a picky customer following along the East coast and throughout the islands. They are grey, speckled with dark spots of red, and misshapen, but all organic and whereas the golden spheres with the Dole sticker have a sugar content of three percent, these are about fourteen. They really are like liquid gold.

Picking is not too hard a task, but it can be very tedious. It requires a wiry neck and strong shoulders, since its all done with a retractable 15 foot pole, and a constant amount of looking up. I think of my mothers nervous face, and hear her tell my brother to get down from a tree, every time I am dangling 20 feet above the ground on a limb with a pole reaching far for a piece of fruit.

After work I come home to the worker housing. There is a complex of eight tiny cabins and one communal kitchen and bathroom. They are rectangular shacks of thin wood and tin, with insect screens for windows. It is very much a camp environment, but without the carefree spirit.

The comfort is not in the buildings, but in the people. In a few days I feel that we have already become family. There is a couple from Washington, a student from New York, a mystical Puerto Rican woman, and an eclectic, comical, dirty rogue and former marine, who serves as our overseer. The bosses and owners of the farm are polite and industrious, after seeing the color orange become the color green for thirty years, but they are uncaring humans.

There is no cell phone reception here, no televisions, radios or computers, and hardly a whisper of the world outside this island. But who else in the nation can see the source of their bananas and oranges?

1/15/10: Thick Air

Tyler swung us recklessly in the back of a truck. He and Hans piloted from the front as we were captive in the bed. He skidded us into the entrance of Volcanoes National Park, tires screeching in the gravel right before the ranger station. We crawled out in the haze of a scenic crater overlook. The sulphurous fog was heavy and crawling into my lungs. Tyler kept asking where we were and where we were going. He swung us around further, careening through the visitor center and towards the lava tubes. We plunged deep into the crater breathing fog. We wandered through a massive, empty, cosmic, black thumbprint. Steam was rising between the rifts in the cracked floor. We came back to the truck and ate sweet Tangelo fruit in the parking lot, pulling ourselves back into awakeness.

Some of us went back to South Point. Earlier in the day Tyler told me that once he took the jump, he dreamed of the jump. He was afraid of nothing else. I watched each of them fall off the cliff, diving through silence before the resounding splash. I steeled myself for the plunge and fell off the slab, and feel so long and through many stretched seconds, before sliding into the water. There was a rusty ladder hanging from the top of the cliff.

Back at the hostel we met a guest who was grilling us freshly caught marlin. I ate what I needed but spent most of dinner thinking about Tyler, who touched no food but rolled one cigarette after another in his dirty fingers.

1/14/10: Cliffs

At the southern cliffs I forgot all the troubles of the fields. I forgot that only hours ago I was cutting vines in tangled orchards. I forgot of the bizarre and tainted Hawaiian culture. I forgot the past and looked at the brim of this planet spinning slowly into the future.

After a tortuous day of pulling weeds from their strangling grip on orange trees, I walked home slowly and shirtless. Hans said that we were going to watch the sunset at South Point. Within a crew of six there are hardly and exclusive invitations. We rolled won the barren road in a borrowed pickup truck. There were high and white wind turbines waving on the west side of the road. As we went further and further South the amount of vegetation around us quickly dwindled. I felt hair tickling my eyes in the wind.

And then we were there, at the edge of the country and the Earth. There was no gentle ramp into the sea. High and sharp cliffs of black rock loomed over blue water. I remembered my awe at the rocky cliffs and thunderous waves along the Southern coast of Maine, and realized how dwarfed they were by these monstrous black walls. The curve of the Earth was clear, slowly moving from the light of the sun, and to the North was the misty mass of the giant volcano. Watching the sun set was like looking at the future, at a spectrum of colors glowing in the sky like something I can only imagine.

1/13/10: A planetarium is an aquarium of dreams

Spent a simple day pulling tangeloes from their clever perches, and slapping them with stickers afterwards. I quickly inflated my tires after work with the tedious labor of a hand pump, then raced down serpentine volcanic hills to Naalehu, rewarded by sweet blessings of the bakery. There was a high fire burning tonight, and I got to see my crew in a different light. Life is wondrous and becoming wonderful. The bum Kenny joined us for the fire tonight.

1/11/10: First Day of Farm Life

There is nothing compassionate about farm labor. There is no sympathy or cooperation from the Earth, and no correspondence with the mystic Nature with a capital N, the one romanticized for centuries. Reaping the bounty of the Earth is a job handed to the ground dwellers by the apartment and carpet dwellers, it is the necessary fuel to keep the Energy moving.

Without mirrors and without many faces around me and without much property I can quickly forget who I am. I am a reflection of a motley cast of faces. Many extravagant pieces of this landscape will soon be unfolded- the paths, plants, people, and wild, wild animals.

Monday, January 4, 2010

The Vestibule



Greetings from the wide digital frontier. One week still stands before I am off of this old continental soil. Until the adventures start, this is just a landfill for the riddles dancing in my mind. One new year's eve someone kindly reminded me that this is the decade I, and many of you as well, turn 30. We better start squeezing every minute.
It's unusually cold in North Carolina. Winter in the south is perhaps nature's most dismal show of colors. There is none of the snowy evergreen enchantment of New England; rather, many brown and lonely trees. When the leaves fall in these forests the spaces seem so much wider, and old stands of trees look like wide and empty hallways. Everything is brown, brown, brown and cold. I feel like part of a geriatric pageant.

Which is why I'm excited about the seven months of summer ahead. It will be a welcome change to swim in the warm primal soup, where the velocity of the earth spills the waters higher on the bowl. By the way, in the coming months I will be one of the most southern people in the United States. All of you proud tarheels who drawl your vowels and drink sweet tea intentionally should check your latitude twice if you don't think I'm the real southerner here.

Working in Hawaii is essentially a portal to the plans that follow. The guiding intention of taking time off was completing the PCT, and Hawaii is the preparation for that trial, rather than the trial itself. Conventionally, people begin walking North on the Pacific Crest Trail around late April, with the objective of finishing before October. The intermediary obstacle is snowfall in the high Sierras. Thus, one starting too early meets unmelted snow in the Sierras, and one starting too late meets the obstacle of snow in the Cascades.
In this final week I have a few meager goals: Playing Ukelele, mailing my gear across the country, and saying long goodbyes. Maybe I will write some things too. Including these words. Here are some of the questions that I commonly encounter:

How long is the trail?
Somewhat over 2,660 miles.

How long will it take you?
Until school begins on September 1st.

What will you eat?
Many breads and spreads.

My friend Dangerous Magnolia illustrated an angle of the riddle over which I have puzzled a long time. I had always assumed that time is a path down which we can walk in only one direction. There is a terminus far in the horizon, where our travels will ultimately finish. Looking back over shoulders is possible, but the path is too narrow too turn around, or pick up things we dropped. Now Mr. Magnolia expanded the path to another dimension. Imagine that the path is straight only within our limited perspective, but from a wider glimpse it is clear that we are in fact walking around a sphere, as if walking around the circumference of the earth, only to end right where we began.

Here is also a good opportunity to give thanks:
To my uncle Bill for helping me with some west coast logistics.
To A Neon Leg Mall for loaning me a camera.
To Risk Per Lazer and Jock in Bagel for schooling me in freestyle verse, and who would also be proud to hear how much I've honed my rhymes.
To my Mom who taught me how to live kindly.
To my Dad who taught me how to live easily.