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.