Hawaii: Part One
Or
Out of the Frying Pan, and Into the Volcano
My flight out of San Diego came none too soon; I was very sick and near despairing. What I needed was some relaxing time at a tropical location. Some rest and recreation at the beach was just the thing to get me back in good health and spirits. I first arrived in Maui, but I was heading to the Big Island of Hawaii, for many reasons. I had heard of some cool tucked away hip places that mainstream tourists didn’t see on that island, in fact, it was the least tourist driven of the Hawaiian Islands. After 3 months of wintering in a city, I wanted someplace warm, rural, and exotic to recover. Hawaii, the furthest western ‘state’ of the 50 in the US, seemed to be just the right ticket.
My two-day stay in Maui was unmemorable, except for one telling incident. I generally got the vibe that this was a place for surfers with connections, or tourists with cash, and seeing how I didn’t surf, had no connections, and, of course, no cash, I knew right away that this wasn’t going to be the place for me. But in the mean time, I decided to take a hike out of the town I was staying in, and climb one of the lush green mountains that overlooked the bay. So as I got to the foot of the mountain, I found myself, in Hawaiian suburbia. Every point of access to the mountainside was covered by an affluent plot of unattractive, but expensive, plastic homes with fences. No one walking the dogs, no kids, the place had a surreal vibe. As I approached some white people going from their house to their car in the driveway, they recoiled from me like I was going to rob them, or something. I have no criminal record (because I’m not a criminal), but I certainly got a vibe of fear from these people. Is it the long hair and sunglasses? I smiled my “I mean you no harm” smile, and asked if there was any trail to get up to the mountain. What mountain? they asked. Umm… the one right behind you? Why? Because I want to hike up it. I was given a look like I was from another planet (actually that’s not far off, but still…). Like hiking up a beautiful mountain in the middle of a lush tropical piece of paradise was the most foreign concept that could have possible entered these suburbanites’ minds.
I decided to move along and ask other people. Believe it or not, this scene repeated itself near identically two more times. In Maine, when you want to go hike in the woods or whatever, you are, through old unspoken rule, given free reign of passage through someone’s property or backyard, as long as you are just passing through. But with all the huge Neighborhood Watch! signs plastered on nearly every telephone pole in the area, I had the distinct feeling if I tried to cut through the swath of suburbia just a couple of dozen yards from the mountain, I’d be arrested, or shot at. Thus ended my notions of an excursion through jungle and up a mountain; foiled by suburbia. I should have known then that something was rotten in Denmark (or Hawaii, as it were), and as a got on a plane the next day, I convinced myself that the Big Island was a more hip place, and I would encounter these kinds of problems there.
I had first heard of the international organization known as WWOOF, or World Wide Organization of Organic Farmers by a pair of Canadian travelers in San Francisco. They spoke in glowing terms of the experiences they had in Canada with this program, where they traveled from one farm to the next meeting all kinds of cool and interesting people, and for a simple 20 hour a week work exchange, they got fed good organic food and were given accommodations on the small farms they worked at.
This sounded great, and looked excellent on paper after I joined, and was given the list of many dozens of diverse, not only organic farms in Hawaii, where I could go, but many types of Intentional communities, Perma-Cultures, Spiritual Retreat Centers, communes, beach houses, swimming with the dolphins… yes! Sign me up!
The reality of the situation… was somewhat different.
But first, a little bit of the history of Hawaii, a history of a state, we Americans, know virtually NOTHING about, making it seem like a foreign country, because, well, it is a foreign country that we usurped. This is nothing new to America; we killed off those pesky Red-men who originally had free reign of the lands of the continental USA, but the Hawaiians were the last of the indigenous peoples that we nearly wiped out. What open warfare and disease didn’t kill, the Christian missionaries and breeding out did the rest to carry out the near total assimilation of a people. By gun point we convinced other humans it was in their best interests to stop the easy life of fishing, simple farming, and eating fruit off trees, to a life of labor, harvesting coffee and sugar cane at wages that were not sufficient to buy the food they once had for free. Gone was the powerful Hula dance of the tribes, a kind of magic around fires, that was powerful and provocative, in grass skirts or nothing; it was now replaced by the Victorian Christian sensibilities that put head to toe wool dresses on women in a tropical location to preserve modesty, and changed the frenetic dance to a simple swaying with a ridiculous Western instrument replacing the powerful drums: the ukulele. Aloha!
So this continued into the 20th century with more Navy bases appearing, more Chinese and Japanese immigrants were being shipped over to do coolie labor in the fields, and Hawaiians continually lost more and more ancestral ground. After the 60s, many people seeking alternative communities moved out to Hawaii, and that's where I was interested, not to say that I didn’t feel for the Hawaiian plight. But about three years before I arrived in March of 2006, an unexpected development occurred, or one I didn’t hear of anyway. It seems at the height of the Real Estate Boom that enraptured many Americans around 2003, within a month of each other, two people of enormous influence, Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump, announced on nationwide television that the best and cheapest real estate in the WORLD was on the Big Island of Hawaii. Overnight, huge chunks of land were bought up in a land-raping frenzy, and mainly Southern California, with their sketchy values of plastic consumerism, moved in. Jungle was being cleared and condos were built, that might have occupants for maybe 3 months out of the year. Four lane highways where there was only a dirt road 4 years ago. The simple beach life was being sold out.
Many of these previously open to all communes and permacultures, I found once I began calling around, now flashed in big neon letters “NO VACANCY” with, in the fine print, “unless you have plenty of cash to donate”. Hmm.
I found a farm that in an out of the way (which is saying something for the Big Island) place, which seemed to suit my needs. It was an out of production former ginger farm, run by a man I'll call Shylock who was mainly retired from organics, and more interested in setting up a Southeast Asian Art gallery. He in mainly dealt with pottery, Buddha statues;
and murals shipped from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. I primary was there for landscaping, and kept the warehouse open for any visitors or potential buyers.
Ironic, I had always had an aversion to becoming a drug dealer (despite many offers to such an enterprise), and here I was, a pot-dealer. Ok, bad pun, moving along…
The situation suited me, as Hawaii was going through one of its rainiest seasons ever (my great timing), so I could use a low key place where I could stay dry and heal from San Diego and my many maladies there, while catching up on some reading. My first book I absolutely loved and would recommend to anyone. I had read parts of it years before, but I was too young and inexperienced in life to fully appreciate or comprehend, and it actually came up as a reading assignment from my old buddy Prof. Xavier; The Once and Future King by T. H. White. The next was a series of plays by Henrik Ibsen. There’s a little back-story on how this book came into my possession. While I was in the South Bay Area, I came across a small coffee shop called the Sufi Café.
It was my first encounter with someone on the path of Islamic Mysticism, and he was an intriguing character. He made the best cups of coffee I've ever had, and in my stays there we had some interesting talks about different authors, like the one whom I was currently reading, Dostoevsky.
When I told him that I was a freelance writer, he offered me a position on a Sufi magazine, which I declined, as I didn't know enough about the Muslim religion.
Out of his book collection that he had for sale, one he particularly recommended to me, which was the collection of Ibsen plays, from which I'd learn much about life that I hadn't known before. Cowboy Bebop even based one episode from one of these dramas by Ibsen. Curious, but there was even deeper meanings that I was to find over the course of my travels through Hawaii.
So, this situation wasn’t working out too well after a month of so. I was in a farm in the middle of the island, isolated, and alone. Not quite the environment I was looking for, as I didn’t come to Hawaii to be cut off from humanity, again. Despite Shylock’s assurances that he’d have more people coming shortly, I should have seen his true intentions coming.
So… after Shylock’s sexual advances were rejected, I found myself locked out of the farm. I pretty low-class stunt… on par with sheep-rapists if you ask me. He also physically threatened me with his so-called black-belt kickboxing skills, I laughed, told him I wasn’t afraid of him, got my things and left.
So I moved to Na’Alehu, the furthest point south you can go and still be in the USA, to work at a farm/spiritual retreat centre.
It worked on a New Age style of things, an amalgam of Buddhist, Hindu and indigenous peoples like the Native American and Hawaiian tribalism.
While settling in here, I called the cops on Shylock. I did this for two reasons; first, he owed me money. The swindler had plenty of it, and to cheat a traveler out of a couple of hundred dollars is swinish of a high degree. But the main reason is that while bragging to me, he told me how he like to lure Asian girls over from Thailand, get them in a position where they needed him to stay in the country, and then have his way with him. An old perverted bastard, who liked taking advantage of others; I wanted to see him in jail. Well, the police, tried to dismiss my claims, and write me off, but I wasn't going to let defenseless girls be exploited, so I insisted. I basically got the run around, being told since I didn't live on the island, my case was a low priority. Justice was only for the land owners. I saw pig culture.
I stayed around the area for weeks, yawning at the New-Age pseudo-religion, but I knew this to be a stepping stone for a connection I wanted to make to people who could perhaps help me find what I was looking for. While in Na'Alehu, I began to see sides of America in that area that I never knew existed, and life in some its rawest, more extreme forms.
Slaves, in a word.
I saw immigrant workers from the Philippines being bused from one coolie job to the next. I saw families from the Marshall Islands, leftover refugees from the days when we used their island as a hydrogen bomb testing site, now living in squalor and dirt poverty. As I was being led around one of their ghetto-farm neighborhoods/shanty-towns (it’s hard to contextualize the squalor) I saw a large enclosed area full of chickens. The girl I was walking with, who was a local, asked me to look close to see if I saw any hens. Nope, hmm… guess the locals who didn’t have cable TV hooked up to their shacks used cock-fighting for their entertainment.
Hawaii had been a place for many stray dog travelers to come and wander for many years. Picking up work here and there, you could live on the beach and have a decent go of it, that is until the socio-economic structure changed drastically over the past several years, bringing in large industry in new development projects. Beaches were being carved up, as was the old style of farm work.
Hawaii had been known for its laid-back by-the-beach lifestyle, was now being infested with yuppies, and so called hippies that drove Lexus and did their part by overpaying at natural food stores.
What used to be an island known for its plentiful, primo herb, with such legendary varieties as Maui-Wowie and Kona Gold, weed was becoming a scarcity.
This was due to several factors, but primarily the new population didn’t like seeing lazy Hawaiian beach-bums peacefully smoking weed and surfing. No, to live in this new condo society you had to earn your money the old fashioned way; by having a trust-fund set up as child, ensuring you’d never have to do a day’s work in your life.
In Hawaii’s new industrial society, you now had to WORK for your wages, no more surf dreamers. There were all kinds of paranoid ramblings I heard from growers about new systems of narcs, and undercover cops raiding grow-ops, and I had the tendency to believe some of this as I witnessed routine aerial patrols with low-flying helicopters to spot and eradicate cannabis growth. Nevermind that is was an enormous waste of money and fuel, and was a serious noise-pollution problem, (not to mention privacy invasion… etc) that didn’t find nearly enough weed to cover the costs of such a program, OPERATION GREEN HARVEST, as it was touted, was a message: Die Hippie culture!
And with the death of beach culture, except for those who could enjoy viewing the beach from their air-conditioned luxury resort windows, in came a new working force to build all the new highways and complexes and Wal-Marts. People who were proud of working 60 hour weeks for a somewhat decent wage while destroying the culture and environment. And what fueled this work frenzy?
Methamphetamines!
Yes, the scourge of crank had infected the island, making speed freaks out of the peaceful natives. It was a scourge upon the land. And with large crystal meth (or ice) manufacturers, came more mafia and organized crime, more guns, more violence, more police corruption.
There was one bumper sticker that summed it up nicely, and I saw a few vehicles brave enough to flag it:
THANKS TO GREEN HARVEST, HAWAII IS NOW ON ICE.
Yes! I always raised a fist of unity to these cars. They knew. So many others were asleep, or in the throes of greed and lust of exploitation of resources, land and people. Dominator culture!
As I traveled about more, I saw what more and more WWOOFers were becoming and became; burnt out husks of former hippies, those without the connections to maintain a wandering lifestyle. There was a new system in place to try and make tame dogs out of strays.
The commune systems, and New Age ideals, were subverted into the Dominator Culture, led by tame dogs.
