Wall of Photos and Board of Stats

The gulches of the coast
pooof!
Found this in the trash
This is my house
meow!
Day 1
Day 45
Days spent illegally camping: 18
Days actually working on farm: 8
Hours at Starbucks: 100+
Number of insect bites: 75
Distance driven: 1631 miles

Number of coconuts harvested and eaten: 40-50
Number of $5 footlongs eaten: 50-60
Fish caught with hooks: 7
Fish caught with net: 3
Fish caught with spear: 0
Fish caught with trap: 0
Dead fish found: 3
Percentage food gathered: 10%

Volcano Wine

The only thing I did this day was a few rounds of wine tasting at the Volcano Winery. This place is okay for being the only winery on the island. For some strange reason, the folks here like to reference UC Davis in the description of their production process. I found that a little curious so I revealed to them that I was alumni and asked them what they knew about UCD. They knew nothing. They'd simply purchased their vines there.
So basically, they were stealing the Davis namesake. I guess that's the wine business.

I bought a bottle of their guava and macadamia honey wine. Pricey.

Day 44: Kalapana

See that ReMax sign? It's for sale you know. A bargain buy.

"Aloha.", said a man who came out on the second floor balcony. He was barely dressed in a white pair of underwear. "How did you get here?"

"From the black sand beach over there.", I yelled, "Where am I?"

"This is Kalapana.", he said. I'd read about this place in a magazine. Kalapana was once a prominent Hawaiian community, home to the Royal Gardens, but was buried by a lava flow in the 90's. Now it was nothing more than a field of glossy black volcanic rock. Back then, a handful of residents had refused to leave and rebuilt their houses on top of the cooled lava. This was an isolated community of stubborn, rustic people.

"What you did was very dangerous. People often try to cross this lava field and twist their ankle. Just 3 weeks ago, a fella and his son was airlifted to the hospital.", he continued to say. The old man was wrong. Crossing the rocks was easy, but I preferred not to argue with him.

"I suppose I should count myself lucky.", I said. "How do I get out of here?"

He showed me the road out and asked me if I could make it. It was a few miles. No problem. "So long", I told him

"Aloha", he said in departing.

Day 45: Nice Night for a Walk

Walking out of Starbucks, I saw a bunch of kids drive into the parking lot with a pickup truck full of snow. They started throwing snowballs at each other. What the hell? Oh yeah...I'd heard it was snowing at the top of Mauna Kea, altitude 13,803 feet.

I had to get up there. But when I did, my car couldn't take the thin air on top of the massively steep grade. At around 9000 ft, I stopped at a visitor outpost, where the University of Hawaii system hosts nightly stargazing hours. This is considered one of the best places on earth to see the stars. The combination of thin air and the island's natural isolation gives the starscape particular clarity. There were thousands of them, with so many visible stars that you could see the rough shape of the galaxy. Several powerful electronic telescopes were in the courtyard, where at the click of a button you could see any celestial object you wanted by inputting the name. Some physicist from Caltech was hosting the visitor center that night, pointing at things with a green laser and talking excitedly about all the things in the sky. Our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. The 7 star cluster. The 12 constellations in the Zodiac. They were all clearly visible. The mark of winter, Orion, actually looked like a guy with weapons.

As a kid, I used to love this shit. I've always liked planetariums, aerospace, and all that. But as I got older, I looked up at the sky less frequently and instead, looked down to whatever pedantic piece of schoolwork was on my desk that night. Right there, I felt like I had gotten it all back. I hadn't been missing anything.

After a few hours, the cup of hot water I was drinking had turned completely cold and I was freezing my ass off. I headed down all the way to sea level to a warm night on the beach.

Day 47: Bye Bye

After eating sparingly this entire trip, I used one of my unused meal tickets from the hotel dining lounge and for the first time, ate a ridiculous amount of food. Man, what a boost.

My last day here was unremarkable. "Last days" of anything usually are. I threw away all the funny trinkets I'd gathered during my trip. In preparation for my return flight, I started buying up all the things on my exportation shopping list, spending nearly $300 within the hour. To get used to living like a civilized person again, I checked into a hotel. It was the first time I had taken a piss in a toilet all week.

I dislike leaving familiar places. I suppose it's human nature to get materially attached and to want things to remain the same or stay comfortably preserved. Of all the things people are required to face in life, I probably hate this one the most. So ends this opportunistic and whimsical vacation. Cold weather awaits me at home.

Week 5: The Guava Farm

In Hawaii, there is a system of work-trade here that pairs small farms and transient people into a temporary agricultural collaborative. Farms provide food, supplies, and shelter to people who come to work on their farms. This is a common practice among hippies on the Big Island and is usually called "WWOOFing".

The one I ended up on was a family farm working a guava orchard. The guava crop picked from the orchard was turned in for money several times a week, a critical supplement to their household income. The farmhouse was constructed out of sheet metal. The windows were made out of mesh. Water came from the rain, electricity came from a generator, and food from Walmart. A pit toilet was short walk from the front door.

As I continued to live and work there, I found more and more things that I didn't like. These people were highly religious. They were conspiracy theorists that were afraid of things like Fluoride in the drinking water, GMOs, and government plots to poison people with dairy. They believed in unusual diet fads. They had greedily speculated in the housing market gaffe. They were obsessed with harvesting from their guava orchard, believing that it would lead them to fortune at the pace of 17 cents/pound. The relatives secretly hated each other. The 4 kids were hyperactive and annoying. Why did they have so many freakin kids?

Despite this weirdness, I found them to be decent and sociable people. They worked hard and actually cared about the affairs of the world. They were polite and didn't impose. Life on the farm was a mundane normalcy. After 2 weeks, I felt that I had nothing more to gain. It was time to move on.

As I started eating the pieces of taro I'd stir fried, I got this tingling feeling in my mouth. The tingling turned into a sharp pain that made it hard to swallow. Was this taro or had I made a mistake?

I rushed to the local public library and got the librarian to log me onto the internet so I could look up "oral/throat pain upon ingestion" in the online medical sympton dictionary. "Go to google, please", I told her.
She got me to http://goggle.com and asked if this was what I was looking for. The librarian had never heard of Google before. Son of a bitch. That explains why Hawaiian kids are so dumb.

I took over the console and started doing searches in a database of poisonous plants. As it turns out, all taro are naturally poisonous and are spiked with an irritant called Calcium Oxalate. I hadn't cooked the root long enough to denature the toxin. Damn. That was a pretty stupid move.

Lost and Found

For weeks, I've been searching high and hell low for wild taro. I found nothing but useless ferns and a few spare berries. Where the hell are they? Once cooked, delicious taro root is one of the best local foods available. The native Hawaiians have cultivated them for centuries. Wait...since they farmed them at the banks of rivers, where would wild taro be found today? It was in the gulches of these waterways where I found them growing amongst the thick jungle brush. I found not only taro but a bounty of purple sweet potato as well, all of it left by the native settlers long past. They were massive plants, hiding in front of my face the entire time.

I'm at a Starbucks/Borders. Just now, a guy started seizing at the magazine racks. He fell to the floor and started shuddering. Classic Tonic-clonic seizure. A guy came over and shoved a baseball cap into his mouth and looked around for help. People stared. A few folks came over, kneeled down, and started petting him.
....
The EMT crew came and stuck him on their stretcher. By this time he was fully conscious and was able to speak. I hope he likes talking, because he is going to have a lot of dumb questions to answer at the hospital.

After they left, I went over to see what magazine the seizure guy had been reading. It was a DC comic about the Green Lantern. The illustrations were dark and overtoned in sepia, a twisted 10 page story with a morbid theme. Ah shit. A bit of that guy's sputum had been sprayed on the cover. I tossed it in the trash.

Pidgin Speak

"we wuz driving down I-5 and den one guy jes wen buss out da kine howzit brah - throwing us da shaka - he mussa wen spock ouwa dakine Kam skoo sticka or da fish hook on da mira. We wen give him da howzit back too. He had da Hui sticka on his one."

What the fuck is that?

Day of Infamy

"I'll take this.", I said to the lady at the bookstore. I was buying a guide on local edible plants. She ran my debit card and looked at the receipt.
"Let's see...what's the date today?", she said. "Uhhh December 7th. Oh yeah -Pearl Harbor Day."
The woman chuckled and said something about not remembering these things.
It didn't seem particularly infamous from my perspective. I looked at the manual I'd just bought. It had Japanese translations. Outside, some fobby looking tourists were hanging out and talking to each other in rapid-fire Japanese. Down the street, the flag was flying at half mast.

Day 32: Unlimited Coconuts

are at my disposal now that I've figured a way to climb the trees. Not being particularly lightweight, the conventional methods that the natives use didn't work for me. I had to think of something else, a smarter way to create enough friction on the tree to negate 200 lbs of downward body weight. The answer was 2 pieces of cloth and a clever wrapping, allowing me to leapfrog up the trunk.
A few weeks ago, a friendly local guy saw me throwing rocks at a coconut tree and furiously trying to scale the trunk with my bare hands. He came over, took off his shoes, and at no obligation, climbed up the trunk with ease and tossed down a few coconuts. He briskly shredded the husk with a knife and handed me the final product. Just unbelievable. He said he did it because he'd just had a beer and he was bored.

Recently, I've been having this urge to be around people that are similar to me. It would be nice to be around some people that are about my age for a change. A few Asian people here and there would make the scenery much more interesting. It would be a refreshing perspective to talk to someone about something besides Hawaiian social issues, wild animals in the gulch, or the status of the Volcano. Hearing somebody talk in normal English rather than this garbly island tongue would be nice too.

Psychologists say that all people seek the things in life that most resemble the world as they would like to see it. I obviously haven't found that yet.

Day 31: How Innovative

While Californians are wasting time watching videos of skateboarders faceplanting, this is what Hawaiians are watching on YouTube. It's a guy on a surfboard fishing for marlin! He is surfing, sport fishing, and water skiing all at the same time. What will those groovy dudes think of next?

When I got back to my tent tonight I found the cat there mewing at me again. For some reason I was happy to see it. As a traveler, I rarely see anyone twice around here. I struck up a fire on the beach, which the cat was afraid of, and made some deep fried breadfruit, which is just the best shit ever. Damn I love breadfruit. The taste is consistent with potatoes but tastes succulent like fruit.

I caught a tiny fish fry for the cat. It didn't want it. What the hell.

I went to get shit from my car. The cat was following me again, but this time at a closer distance. It followed me into my tent and started clawing at my blanket. I picked it up and put it in the corner and laid down. It walked all over my laptop and then climbed onto my stomach and started sleeping. It was snoring. I mewed at it. It woke up and mewed back.

A voice in the back of my mind started listing all the diseases I could get from a feral cat.

In the morning I woke up as usual. There was no wind and the waves were calm. Boats full of tourists were sailing by. The sun was really beating down. I heard a meow. The cat was hiding in a nearby patch of grass. Today I am leaving the harbor and going to Hilo to work on a farm. I said goodbye to the cat and scratched its ears. I'm going to miss this cat. We get along so well. It would've been nice if I could keep him. If I did, I think I would've named it "Stray".

Day 30: Stray

Last night as I was brushing my teeth at the harbor, a stray cat came up to me and started mewing loudly. It had a shiny mixed black and white coat and gleaming green eyes. Cute cat. I made some mewing sounds at it. It walked circles around me and started climbing up and down the nearby rocks.

As I went back to my tent, it started following me. Every time I walked 20 feet, I would look back and it was back there trailing me at a distance. Cool. It followed me across the beach, over a jetty of lava rock, and to the patch where my tent was. The cat walked a few circles around my tent. I gave it some ramen and soymilk, which it didn't want.

I zipped up my tent and went to sleep. It started clawing at the tent fabric and climbed all over it, walking on my face on the process. Augh.
I heard it hiss. There were now 2 cats outside my tent.
Too tired to keep mewing at it all night, I went to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning, it was gone.

How does one adopt a cat?