Planet Haolewood

Blog Entry #100... a Mystery

2009-06-22T22:44:00.000-07:00

These days I’m fortunate enough to be living within walking distance of one of Kauai’s most beautiful beaches. It’s an easy walk but it includes wading across a stream that’s anywhere from waist to chest deep, depending on the tide. Some of the signs in the area are confusing and a lot of tourists end up driving down the road I walk to the beach. They stand next to their cars and stare across the river, wondering how they ended up on the opposite side as all the other people enjoying the beach. Over and over again I give directions on how to get there by car, but many of them simply follow my example and plunge in. It’s not cold after all.

Recently, I noticed a path on the side of the road heading off into the jungle that I had never seen before. Thinking it might be a short cut to the beach, I plunged down the steep embankment to see where it went. A few feet down the path I saw a piece of wood propped up on a log. It looked like a ramp kids might have made to jump with their bikes.

I continued down the path where I saw several other small ramps and a machete stuck into a tree. Small trees and branches had been cut to clear this path.

A little further down the path I came across a much larger ramp constructed of pallets and stumps that rose up to a six foot high platform made of scrap lumber and attached to trees.

Beyond the platform the path continued for a while before ending in an impenetrable thicket. It did not continue to the beach as I had guessed. The only apparent purpose of the path was to get to the ramp and platform. But what was it? Someone had gone to considerable trouble to hack a path through the jungle, bring in all that material and build this mysterious structure. The smaller ramps suggested a course for bikes but the larger combination ramp/platform did not really make sense for jumping bikes. The ramp would make a good jump, but why the platform. I’ve been discussing the matter with friends and housemates, but no one can divine its purpose. Any ideas?

Molokai Moments

2009-05-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

People come from all over the world to Kauai for quiet and relaxation but have you ever wondered where those who live here go to “get away from it all?”

When the crowds, traffic and hectic pace of life on Kauai finally get to you, consider Molokai; this sleepy nub makes Kauai downright urbane.

There aren’t many people living on Molokai but the census bureau still has to count them so off I went to wander the dirt roads looking for plywood shacks and asking the friendly residents for their mailing addresses. That’s a more complicated question than you might think on Molokai. Folks may not be too sure about such details as house numbers or names of streets, but if the UPS driver is your cousin and the mailman used to date your sister, what difference does it make?

There are no stoplights on Molokai. The airport runway is too short for jets so it’s propeller planes only. Outside the airport an old man forwent any greeting or introduction and spoke to me as if we had been traveling together. He was having trouble opening the door to the car that a friend had left for him in the parking lot. The windows were broken or stuck open and the interior had been stripped. I reached inside and pulled a heavy-gauge wire that looked like it might open the door. I helped the man with his suitcase and sent him on his way. His friend had left the keys in the ignition.

Even the minimal formalities we observe talking to strangers on Kauai seemed to be unnecessary on an island where you might bump into the same person several times in the same day. So I was only mildly surprised when using the computer at Molokai’s only library, a man sat next to me and without even looking in my direction started talking to me about the online surf report on his screen. I studied it with him and we discussed surfing conditions for a few minutes before he actually looked at me and realized that I was not his friend David Garcia. I was just someone who looked a lot like him. We both got over the surprise soon enough, however and it really didn’t seem to matter much to either of us that I wasn’t who he thought I was. I imagine the conversation would have been pretty much the same if I were David Garcia.

There weren’t even really very many tourists there, actually. Most visitors to Hawaii stick with “the big four,” Oahu, Maui, Kauai and The Big Island. I did see hula dancers one evening as I dined on a garden burger at one of the island’s few restaurants, but they didn’t have costumes. They were just a couple in the audience who knew the guitarist playing that evening and got up to do a little dance they knew.

I ate a lot of garden burgers, actually. The woman behind the counter at Molokai Burger treated my vegetarian order no differently than any other. She told me that she would call my number when the food was ready. She looked down at the receipt and informed me my number was “zero.” There was one other customer in the restaurant at the time. I guess when you get a crowd of that size, you better start giving out numbers. I wonder what the other guy’s number was.

So why the picture of the phone booths? It just struck me that they aren’t many phone booths left. These ones on the wharf have probably been there a long time. They never got worn out. They never got vandalized and no one ever bothered to remove them.

More on Cat Toes

2009-04-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

Recent advances in camera battery charging technology have made it possible to bring you these stunning new photos of cat populations in the Anini-Kalihiwai area. The top photo documents Binky’s unusual toe placement. Cat experts throughout the Northern Pacific are baffled by this strange phenomenon.

The second photo captures Domino and GM (the neighbor’s dog) locked into one of their regular starring contests. GM (which stands for Gypsy’s Mom, since we don’t know her actual name) has been known to drool during these bizarre battles of will.

Closer to Home

2009-04-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

Well I haven’t been to any exotic countries lately, so in the tradition of many greats in the blogosphere allow me to tell you about two cats I recently came to know. Meet Binky (sleeping in photo) and Domino.

A noted cat expert on Kauai recently observed that Binky has six toes, but it turns out he actually only has five per paw (for a total of 20). It’s only the unusual placement of one toe only creates the illusion of the “sixth toe.” Planet Haolewood efforts to photograph this phenomenon have so far been stymied by a dead camera battery. Binky’s interests include napping and attempting to persuade anyone passing him on the porch to feed him.

Domino shares Binky’s interest in both napping and food solicitation, but he has also branched out into climbing the screen door and lengthy, intense starring contests with the neighbor’s dog. Once he caught a rodent and ate most of it on the porch, leaving the tail as a demonstration of his awesome hunting skills.

The only real impediment to total fulfillment as cats for these two is the local human population’s stubborn denial of their god-given rights as cats to go anywhere they want anytime. They are not allowed inside the house. Binky has identified cat sympathizers within the human community and manipulates them deftly into letting him in on occasion and while Domino has mastered the art of opening the screen door himself, he often hesitates to actually enter, preferring to sit outside and quietly contemplate the open door as a symbol of feline rights.

Be assured that Planet Haolewood will provide updates on this important new topic.

Epilogue

2009-03-23T00:51:00.000-07:00

“How was India?” The question kind of stumped me when I got back. “Good” seemed a little anti-climactic. “Great” is how you might describe a vacation where you scuba dived and sun bathed. Like India itself, my experience there was many things at once. The best I could come up with for a one-word answer was “different.”

Maybe that’s what those who travel independently to far away places are looking for. Wanderlust is a kind of boredom with the familiar, a desire to experience something genuinely different. Difference wakes us up out a pattern of relating to the world we already know. Instead of being able to anticipate what was coming my way each day, I was forced rely on my senses and react to events as they unfolded one moment at a time. On Kauai, I already know what’s around the next corner, but in India I had no choice but to relate to the world as it actually is instead of an idea of the world that already exists in my mind.

Wanderlust doesn’t run all that strongly in my veins. It had been 12 years since I’d left the country. While rewarding in the long run, the difference was exhausting. Indians looking to scam tourists are adept at recognizing this kind of exhaustion in their potential victims. I had been warned that the Deli train station was a particularly bad area for these con men but I was still fooled, if only temporarily. As I walked from a cab toward the massive and chaotic station a friendly man asked me what train I was taking. When I answered he told me that train was nine hours late but if I followed him he would take me to where I could exchange my ticket for another train that departed shortly. Like an idiot, I followed him even though he was walking AWAY from the station. It only took a few moments before I came to my senses, stopped following the man and headed back toward the station. Even more incredibly, when another man approached me with a similar story seconds later, I started following him, too! Again I did not go far before realized my mistake and ditched my new “friend.” Needless to say, my train turned out to be right on time.

Why was I so vulnerable to these con men? I’m not really that stupid and I knew enough about traveling in India to know that they were probably trying to scam me. Of course, I only went along with them for a few moments, but even that is amazing considering the implausibility of their stories. Here’s my explanation: I was somewhere truly different and had no idea what to expect. Anything was possible. How could I even entertain the possibility that a strange man would approach me in the parking lot of the train station, know that my train was late and offer to help me exchange my ticket? Because stranger things had happened.

As I stood in line at the entrance to the Taj Mahal, a friendly man approached me and asked if I had my cell phone charger in my backpack. He explained security would not let me enter if I did. Cell phones and cameras were permitted but not ipods and cell phone chargers. He offered to take me to a cloakroom where I could leave any prohibited items. As it happened I did have my cell phone and charger with me. I left my place in line and followed the man for several blocks to a deserted looking building with a sign in English, a couple of men sitting behind a desk and some lockers.

I know what you’re thinking. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. How could he be so naive?” But it turns out the guy was telling the truth. Cell phone chargers and ipods are not permitted in the Taj Mahal. When I arrived at security, they were turning away confused people who had these items with them and sending them to the deserted looking cloak room several blocks away which was in fact totally legitimate. There was no scam to steal my cell phone charger. I collected it without incident when I left. The man who helped me had hoped to gain my trust so that I would agree to hire him as a guide (which I did not).

How about another example of strangeness involving cell phones? I bought a SIM card in Mumbai and the man who sold it to me told me it would be activated in a few hours. My brother in law had bought a SIM card from the same man and his phone was working, but mine wouldn’t work. We had left Mumbai so I couldn’t go back to bought it. I found a help center and asked if they could get my phone working. The woman working behind the counter had a cold. It appeared to be near the end of her shift and she did not seem very excited about the challenge of figuring out what was wrong with my phone. She typed on her computer and fiddled with the phone, all the while sniffling and shaking her head. She told me I’d have to take it to the call center in Mumbai. When I told her I couldn’t do that she fiddled with the phone some more and then passed it around to several other people in the office, including, bizarrely, one of the other customers waiting for help. They all spoke to each other gravely in Marathi and shook their heads. I had been there quite some time and I was loosing hope. Finally she handed my phone to one of the other help center workers, who looked at it disinterestedly, pressed a few buttons and handed it back to me. “There’s a network problem. Try it tomorrow after four. It should work then.” I surmised this was the guy whose job it was to get me out of the office. I gave up. It seemed clear no one there was going to help me.

I did not have even the slightest hope the problem would magically go away the next day as the man had told me, but I tried my phone anyway. It worked and it continued to work without any problems for the rest of my trip.

What had seemed so improbable had turned out to be true. In other cases it was the other way around. A friendly woman at the tourist information counter at the Deli airport reassured me how easily I could catch a bus into the city but I wandered around in the chaos outside the airport and asked many people where the bus stop was. All I succeeded in finding were other confused people looking for the bus stop. I couldn’t get back into the terminal to ask the woman because I didn’t have a ticket. Eventually I just took a cab. What had seemed like a slam dunk turned out to be impossible, and that collision of expectations with reality is the difference between a trip and an adventure; it’s what creates the heightened awareness that I think so many of my friends with wanderlust like about international travel.

The day I left the ashram a boy approached me as I walked to the bus stop. He asked for my autograph. It was toward the end of my trip and the absurdity of the request registered only dimly in my mind. Dozens of foreigners walked up and down that road every day on their way to and from the ashram. I signed his notebook and continued on my way. I was getting used to the strangeness. Had I stayed in India longer, the feeling would have faded as that reality became more familiar.

Maybe it wasn’t a “great” trip or even a “good” one, but I got a lot out my travels in India. If I had it to do again I would have skipped the floundering and gone right to the good stuff, but that’s not how life works, is it? The floundering was an absolutely necessary part of a process and what I learned was that I’m more flexible and resilient than I knew.

The Taj Mahal

2009-03-20T09:38:00.000-07:00

For my last few days in India I totally abandon my practice of avoiding cities and tourist destinations. I took a two hour bus ride to Kerala’s capital, Thiruvananthapuram, spent the night there, flew early the next morning to Bangalore, then to Deli, the capital of India, traveled by train from Deli to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, the single biggest tourist destination in India, spent the night in Agra, went back to Deli the next day, spent the night there, flew to Taipei, spent the night there, took an overnight flight to Honolulu and arrived there the next day where I caught the short flight back to Kauai. That’s a lot of moving around!

The problem with the “seeing the sights” approach to tourism is that one becomes jaded and unable to appreciate even the most spectacular destinations. Since I hadn’t been seeing the sights, I wasn’t jaded and I arrived in a good state of mind to appreciate the Taj Mahal. It was worth the trip.

The first thing I noticed about “The Taj” as it is affectionately known, is its grand scale. The main building and its surrounding gardens are enormous. Its construction employed 20,000 workers and took 22 years. For comparison consider a wonder of nature such as a mountain. While its awesome size might take your breath away, there is also great beauty a wildflower you see as you walk along its base. So it is with the Taj Mahal. The great slabs of white marble from which it is constructed are inlaid with stones of various colors. In the interior the inlay work is done with brightly colored semi-precious stones. The amount of hand carved stone inlay work is staggering, it boggles the mind to think about how much time and careful work went into the construction of that building.

To my mind the scale and the fine workmanship are simply displays of wealth. The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum; it has no earthly function. Emperor Shah Jahan had a lot of money so he could afford to buy a lot of stone and hire all the best stone carvers. Anyone with that much money could do the same. What impressed me even more was the architecture. It is not known who designed the Taj Mahal but whoever it was had a kind of inspiration that money cannot buy.

It’s symmetry and singularity of focus are what really amazed me. It is as if all the beauty and careful work in every detail is focused on a single, unwavering goal, an architectural expression of the complete devotion to a single god so revered in Islam, the religion that puts the “mono” back in monotheism. While the gardens and the red of the surrounding walls and mosques are rooted in the earth the pale central building itself seems to float and shimmer as if it were almost perfect enough to simply float up to heaven at any moment.

Working hundreds of years before the invention of photography, the designers could not have anticipated how incredibly photogenic their creation would be. The urge to photograph is almost irresistible even when you know you’re taking the exact same picture that is taken hundreds of times a day and can be found printed with professional quality in books and on postcards everywhere.

It pleases me that people built such a sublime structure hundreds of years ago without the benefit of computers or modern engineering. Like all great works of art, it is a reminder that human genius is always present and that our age is no more advanced in its imagination despite all of our amazing technology.

Hare Krishna!

2009-03-18T11:48:00.001-07:00

Of all the places I visited in India my favorite was the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Dhanwantari Ashram. At least ninety per cent of the monks and other people staying at the Ashram were foreigners. Many of them were studying to become teachers of the Ashram’s particular school of yoga. The rest, like me were there for a “yoga vacation.”

The yoga vacation was a bit like boot camp would be if the point were to train for inner peace instead of war. Accommodations were Spartan. Vegetarian meals were served twice daily with seating on the floor and diners were expected to eat in silence. Attendance at all services, classes and lectures was mandatory. It felt safe, clean and friendly but it was by no means luxurious.

The typical day (and pretty much every day was typical) began with a wake-up bell at 5:20. At six, we assembled in the main hall for 20 minutes of silent meditation, followed by maybe 40 minutes of chanting in Sanskrit. The head monk would then read something from one of their guru’s books and explain some of the ideas he wrote about. Then it was time for morning tea. At eight we had a two-hour yoga class followed by the morning meal which they referred to as brunch. After eating it was time for Karma Yoga during which time we had the opportunity to improve our lot in the next life by raking leaves or cleaning toilets.

In the afternoon we had some free time followed by a lecture at two and then another two-hour yoga class at 3:30. Having finished that class we walked our limbered up bodies back to the dining hall for the evening meal. At 8 we gathered again for another round of meditation, chanting, and discussion of Swami Vishnudevananda’s (the spelling checker didn’t have any suggestions for that one!) teachings. Lights out at 10:30.

Are we having fun yet? Fun may not be the right word, but it was certainly pleasant. While I did not understand or agree with all of their ideas, living according to their routine had a very positive effect on my mind and body.

Have you ever heard of churches or religious orders offering a free meal? I guess the deal they are proposing is that they will feed you and in return they expect you to submit to their attempts to brainwash you. The situation at this ashram was the same except the carrot in this case was yoga instruction rather than a free meal. The whole package, including lodging, meals and four hours of yoga instruction daily cost about ten dollars a day. Most of the yoga vacationers were interested in those classes and feelings about getting up at six and chanting in Sanskrit ranged from enthusiastic to resentful. The chanting in particular seemed to rub a lot of the westerners the wrong way. The highly repetitive chants were mostly invocations of Swami Sivananda, his disciple, Swami Vishnudevananda and various Hindu gods. Most of the yoga vacationers were not Hindus, did not speak Sanskrit and had never heard of Swami Sivananda or any of his disciples. So the chanting felt a little like a non-catholic might feel attending a catholic mass in Latin.

I personally didn’t mind. The chants were a bit boring and didn’t do anything for me but the tunes were kind of catchy and they started growing on me after a while. Besides, the monks and other volunteers at the ashram were not in the least pushy. In fact, they were very sincere and friendly. What I was being asked to do was not onerous and considering what I got in return I felt it was a good deal. The quality of yoga instruction was quite good and the effect of four hours a day of asanas on my body was amazing. When I lay down to sleep I would hear popping sounds from my back and neck

The monks at the ashram emphasized that they had a different definition of the word yoga than we have in the west. To westerners yoga is associated with certain postures and movements. It is a physical exercise for strengthening and stretching. To them the physical exercises are only one part of a way of living that promotes inner peace. They could describe it in more detail than I but suffice to say it emphasizes clean living, humility, devotion, and discipline in addition to the physical exercises. For some, but not all of the yoga vacationers those other aspects of yoga were a hard sell.

One of those aspects was karma yoga which they translated as “selfless service”. For my karma yoga I was assigned to help serve food at the meals. Perhaps in a previous life I was a glutton who gorged himself while others starved. I don’t know but I kind of liked the job and there was plenty for me to eat when I was done serving. Food came from the kitchen in stainless steal buckets with ladles to serve it. I would walk up and down the lines of diners seated on the floor with a bucket of curried vegetables, for example, and dish some more out to whoever wanted seconds. The tricky part was that no one was supposed to talk during the meal. People broke that rule frequently, of course. Often, they would say, “om” to get my attention, as if that were cosmically more appropriate than saying “hey, you with the curry.” Most of the communication was non-verbal, though. I would look for eye contact and when someone nodded at me I would slop some more food on their plate. When I was seated to eat and wanted seconds (or thirds) I found the most effective way to communicate my desire was to hold my plate up.

“Om” was actually a pretty popular word there. They told us what it meant but the definition was so abstract that it seems to have floated away from my mind. They believe that simply by uttering certain words, karma can be improved and one’s lot in the next life might be better, which I guess is why they’re so big on the chanting. But they even used the words in more mundane contexts, for example when I said hello to a passing monk instead responding with, “hello, how are you?” she answered “Om nimashyvaya.” At the snack bar, where one could order delicious fruit salads or “bliss,” which in this case was a little ball of mashed up dates, the volunteer who took my orders would ring her little bell and call out “om” instead of “order up.”

My first meal at the ashram was the final meal for the 180 students in a month long teacher training course. They had just finished some rigorous tests and their mood was jubilant. As they lined up outside the dining hall they enthusiastically clapped and sang out, “Hare Rama, hare Krishna.” I wondered what I was getting myself into. Over the next few days the teacher training course students left the ashram leaving just the yoga vacationers. With their departure the customary pre-meal chanting withered until it was just the poor guy on the microphone leading the chant with hardly anyone joining in. I felt bad for the guy and by the end of my one-week stay I was chanting and clapping and hoping more people would join in. I don’t know what to think about karma and reincarnation but why not just do as the Romans? It certainly couldn’t do any harm.

In the office there was a bin where people leaving the ashram could leave reusable items they wanted to get rid of and anyone else could take them. I lightened my load by leaving the lotus flower I had carved and as I made my way down the hill toward the bus stop I felt light hearted and ready for my next adventure.

Back to School

2009-03-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

My arrival at the Vijnana Kala Vedi School of Traditional Indian Art in the little village or Aranmula coincided with the beginning of a ten-day festival at the local Hindu temple. The technicians in charge of amplifying the festival music were much more interested in volume than sound quality. Within the temple walls the music was so loud that I stayed at least 100 yards from the speakers at all times. To avoid the risk that those outside the temple might not be able to hear, they had set up loud speakers throughout the village. The loud speakers were set some distance apart from each other so sound reached one’s ears at different times. The cacophony was tremendous and they kept it up about 18 hours a day.

Aside from the near maddening and relentless racket of the festival, the village and the school were very pleasant. I shared a house provided by the school with two other students. Laurent was Swiss and studied tabla and cooking. Ludovic was French but lived in Ireland and studied Kalarippayattu, a martial art and Kathakali, a form of dance with striking costumes and make-up. They were kind enough speak English instead of French in my presence so that I would not be excluded from conversations. We sat on our balcony during the warm evenings and shared our stories while Ludovic rolled cigarettes.

For meals we gathered with the other fifteen students and ate delicious meals prepared by the school’s cooks and served on banana leaves. Each day I had one hour of woodcarving lessons and two hours of Karnatic singing. My singing teacher was Mr. Ravi, a jolly sixty year old whose diabetes had left him almost totally blind. He complained bitterly about the noise from the temple which made it hard for him to rely on his hearing to cross the street. He dictated long ragas from memory while I wrote them down in a notebook so I could practice them. My lessons began at 2:30 in a little hut near the area where we ate lunch. His blindness made it difficult for Mr. Ravi to get around so he usually hung around the area after lunch and waited until it was time for my lesson. With his belly full and the warm afternoon air, I often arrived to find him napping. I helped him arrange his things and we began our lessons.

On my second to last day at the school, I arrived again to find him napping but when I helped him up he was unusually sluggish and had trouble sitting up straight. I thought he was drowsy, but his strange state persisted until it became clear that something was seriously wrong. I went to get help and some of the school officials rushed him to the hospital. He seemed to be partially paralyzed on one side of his body. He remained hospitalized during the rest of my stay there but I don’t know what happened after that.

In the meantime I finished up the lotus flower I had been carving with the help of my instructor, Shagi. He drew the design on a block of wood and demonstrated how to use various shaped chisels to carve it. For someone accustomed to using power tools, it seemed laborious and imprecise, but the work was soothing to the mind.

The school had excellent Internet access which I used to arrange the next part of my trip.

Utopia?

2009-03-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

Some people call Kerala the Hawaii of India. It’s certainly warm, pleasant and populated with even more coco palms than all the resorts and golf courses in Hawaii put together. It’s also more laid back than other parts of India but the comparison probably ends there.

Kerala has the world’s only democratically elected communist government. Che Guevara’s eyes gazed stoically at me from posters at bus stations, as if passing judgment on my capitalist intrusion. With excellent education and little industry, Kerala’s chief export is human brains. Often working in the gulf states, these energetic workers support Kerala’s economy with their remittances and return to build what we might call “monster homes” along the quiet by-ways of their home state.

Kerala has a tradition of matriarchy with better rights for women than other parts of India and the lowest birth rate in the country. Its health care system is the envy of the third world. The average life expectancy compares to that of the United States even though they spend a minuscule fraction of what we spend on health care. Kind of makes you wonder why our “free enterprise” health care systems couldn’t be more efficient, doesn’t it?

My trip to Kerala began in the wee hours of the morning when my overnight train pulled into a station near an area of lakes and canals known as the backwaters. Crowds of pilgrims slept on the platform I stepped onto and a short rickshaw ride took me to the ferry where I would catch the first boat of the day. In the beautiful light of the morning, the ferry slowly made its rounds through a complicated system of canals picking up men with their fishing gear and children on their way to school.

I spent a few days in the area, enjoying the scenery and warmth. Living in Hawaii has left me very little tolerance for cold and I had been quite chilly in the mountains. Southern India in the winter is like Hawaii in the summer. That’s more like it!

Adrift

2009-03-11T00:31:00.000-07:00

I know people who told me they would never go to India. Others told me they would have cancelled their plans in light of the Mumbai attacks one month prior to my visit. My sister said me her biggest fear was that she or her family might get sick. Most people I talked to about their travels in India did get sick at some point. Others told hair-raising stories about bus drivers seemingly bent on taking all their passengers with them in a kind of involuntary suicide pact. But my greatest fear wasn’t that I’d be attacked by terrorists, poisoned by contaminated food or crushed in a high-speed collision. My fear was that I would be adrift in a strange land without any idea of what to do with myself. I never saw a terrorist. I never got sick and I never had a traffic accident. But I did face my greatest fear.

Grey skies seemed about to drizzle the day I wished my sister and her family good-bye, left the cozy enclave of the Indian Institute of Science and began the solo part of my trip. A jolly auto-rickshaw driver dropped my off at the train station. Ticket in hand I went to look for the train to Mysore. Maybe it’s difficult to understand my fear. After all the world was my oyster, right? I could go anywhere and do anything I pleased. India is really not a very dangerous place for foreigners at all, despite what many Americans seem to think. The problem was I didn’t really know where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I had come to India counting on inspiration to lead me once I was there. As I stood on the platform wondering if I were in the right spot it seemed like inspiration was running a little late.

India’s not a good place to lack clarity of purpose. I’m the kind of person who gets over-stimulated at the mall. I avoid them whenever possible and I only go when I have a specific mission so I can get in, take care of business and get out without having to wander around looking for things. American malls are clean and orderly filled with relatively friendly people who speak English. Even on the busiest day of the year they aren’t crowded by Indian standards. And I didn’t have any mission beyond a vague idea of “experiencing India.”

So imagine my relief when an Indian man I asked for directions at the train station turned out speak impeccable English and happily helped me find my train. It was his train, too. Perhaps sensing my vulnerability, he took on helping me with my travel arrangements as his own personal project. He phoned ahead to a hotel he knew in Mysore and made a reservation for me. Once we arrived, he personally took me to the hotel and gave me his two cell phone numbers in case I needed anything. The next morning he accompanied me to the bus station and made sure I got on the right bus. Things seemed to be going well.

I’d spent most of my time so far in Indian cities and I was determined to find some peace and quiet. Mysore is a smaller city than Banglaore but not small enough. I headed for the hills. But to what end? I read through my guidebook. An Indian woman on Kauai had told me about dozens of beautiful temples I could visit. Other travelers had told me about great food and “spiritual entertainment” in the nearby state of Goa. But none of the tourist spots really appealed to me. So what was I doing there? My lack of purpose was confounded by my lack of traveling skills. Up to that point I had relied on my brother-in-law who has traveled in India many times to make arrangements for me. Now I was on my own.

I had made it to Madikeri, a mountainous town in a coffee growing region. With a population of around 30,000 it was a quieter than other places I’d stayed, but very few people spoke English and I had difficulty figuring things out. I was floundering just as I had feared. It was a low point of my trip. I wanted to change my ticket and go home early. But go home to what? I had been laid off from my job and had moved out of my apartment and put my things in storage. I was homeless and unemployed. Rushing home to Kauai seemed like a ridiculous idea. I decided to give it a little more time. I would have to persevere even though I did not know what exactly I was holding out for.

Hiking is a natural choice for me but trails were neither mapped nor marked so trekking without a guide was out of the question. The guide I spoke to would only take me if he found additional tourists to share the trip. There didn’t seem to be any forthcoming but at the last minute a lovely English couple rolled into town signed up to go hiking into the hills with me. Now at least I was in my element, but southern India is not known for its adventure tourism and while it was pleasant tromping about I couldn’t help but wonder what was the point of coming to India to hike terrain I could have found in Hawaii or California?

As the three-day trip wound down, I was anticipating the question of what to do next. The English woman told me about a school of Indian art in Kerala that friends of hers had recommended. I figured it was better to have a plan than not and that sounded like a good enough plan for me. As soon as we got back to town I contacted the school. They asked if I would like to study Karnatic vocal music and woodcarving. I told them to sign me up.

How often does inspiration come as a flash of light anyway? The clarity of purpose I had hoped for finally arrived as a process that unfolded on step at a time. I still couldn’t figure out how to get the bus I wanted so I ended up going to another city fairly far out of my way that seem to have more buses. Maybe I wasn’t going exactly the right direction but at least I was moving.

Taking a Break

2009-03-09T10:31:00.000-07:00

If I ever win the lottery (which seems unlikely since I never play) I won’t rush out to buy a new house or car. First I’ll hire a personal chef and I would have them decide what to make for me. It’s even better than eating out at a restaurant because you don’t have to make any decisions. Delicious meals simply appear before you.

Traveling in India is a bit like winning the lottery because though I’m not rich by US standards, just being able to afford to fly to India makes me fabulously wealthy by Indian standards. I didn’t hire a personal chef to travel with me but every meal I ate in India was prepared by someone else, ridiculously cheap and -without exception- delicious.

The next stop after our visit to the village was the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. While my brother-in-law met with a colleague of his there and my sister prepared to give a talk to ecology students, we stayed in a guest house on the grounds of the leafy, spacious campus that reminded me of Stanford University where as a kid I rode my bicycle to the video arcade. We played poker with pieces of yarn for chips, did laps in the pool and ate in the dining hall where visiting foreigners ate fabulous meals three times a day.

Not a bad existence, actually, and we needed a rest after all the long car rides. The pleasant pace of life at the IIS was a sharp contrast to the chaos of the streets of Bangalore outside its walls. One of the fastest growing cities in Asia, Bangalore is exhausting to navigate and has little to recommend it for sightseeing. So we mostly favored our pleasant refuge with only brief forays into the outside world.

Did I mention the food was good? India is without a doubt the most vegetarian friendly place I’ve ever been. Santa Cruz is a only a DISTANT second. Indian food is my favorite and I’ve lived almost three years on an island without a single Indian restaurant. I never got tired of the food and I never spent more than four dollars on a meal.

Contact

2009-03-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

[Note that some names and other details have been changed]

Where were you on December 31st, 2008? I slept soundly in India. I was later told I slept through a lot of noise that night, but it had been a long and eventful day and I had completely forgotten about New Year’s Eve.

It was one of those days when the seemingly improbable suddenly became reality as if I had woken from a dream. The call to prayer rang out from a nearby mosque and the day began with my head stuffed up from a cold. I had slept terribly and the idea of piling into the car with my sister, brother-in-law, their two kids, driver and a social worker traveling with us for another long drive did not appeal. I thought about bowing out to rest and watch American movies at the hotel, but we had come so far it would have been a shame to miss out just when things might start to get interesting.

After all, this was the day I had come to India for, wasn’t it? Why HAD I come? What was I doing there? I was really just tagging along on my nephew’s quest to discover his roots, but he didn’t seem quite sure why he was there either. In fact, he seemed quite happier to play with his Nintendo GS and take pictures of any dogs we encountered than to search for the village where he was born. He’s seven. Fortunately, the leader of our group and the Don Quixote of this windmill mission was his adopted father and my brother-in-law, George. And he had enough certainty of purpose and enthusiasm for us all.

It was too early for breakfast at the hotel when we left so we accepted an invitation to have tea at the home of the social worker’s parents when we stopped to pick her up. My other nephew, 15-year-old Michael, had taken his anti-malarial medication on an empty stomach and was throwing up in the street outside. The social worker worked for the orphanage where Alice and George adopted my nephew and they had hired her to come with us to try and find the village where he was born. The orphanage does not approve of such projects and she could loose her job if her boss learned she was helping us. George clutched photocopied pages of information about the boy’s roots and drew the social worker aside frequently to discuss our plans.

We didn’t have much to go on. It started with documents they had obtained illegally when they adopted the Indian boy seven years ago. His name was (and is) Ishan, which has some spiritual meaning in the local language. No one knows who named him. The documents indicated that he was found in a field. They also provided the name of the village and of the owner of the field. Unfortunately the village was so small that it did not appear on any maps and there were several other villages of the same name. The man who found him was most likely dead.

Nonetheless, George had some pictures from google earth with the area where he believed the boy was born circled. It seemed like a long shot, but we had to at least try. So we had driven hundreds of miles across rural India’s spotty highways, with their cane-laden ox carts and relaxed approach to the rules of traffic safety. And that morning after a few more hours we rolled into the supposed village not knowing what to expect.

The villagers certainly must not have expected to see us. Since we had not been entirely sure where we were going and did not have any contacts, notifying anyone of our visit before hand was impossible. Instead, we simply showed up. The village was home to a few hundred people who farmed the nearby land and lived in dirt-floor houses made of sticks. We later learned that ten years had passed since a foreigner set foot in the village. No one there spoke English.

While the social worker went to find the village leader, which she enigmatically referred to as the “police patil,” we waited by the car. The villagers seemed afraid to look directly at us though they were clearly curious and when I said hello to one of them terror flashed in his eyes. We were invited to tea in one of the few concrete houses. In turned out to be the home of the son of the man who had found Ishan in the field and we waited while someone went to fetch him from the fields where he was working.

A small group of people gathered outside the house and starred curiously. They asked questions and the social worker translated. We told them who the boy was and why we were here. Fearful curiosity became great excitement and word got out to the rest of the village. The crowd outside quickly grew and people took turns standing near the doorway to catch a glimpse of us and especially of Ishan.

Our host told the social worker that we were in fact in the right village and that he remembered the baby they had found seven years ago. Actually, everyone in the village remembered. They knew who Ishan’s biological parents were. The mother lived there in the village. She had married another man and had a six month old child. The father did not live in the village.

The rapid turn of events went far beyond what we had expected to find. When Ishan was an infant medical tests revealed that he had been exposed to HIV. While he doesn’t have it, the test indicates that his mother probably did. Our assumption was that she would have died sometime in the past seven years. The possibility of learning her identity at all seemed remote. That we could discover who she was and that she was still alive was stunning. The chance of meeting her in person, and event we had not imagined possible now suddenly seemed close at hand.

The villagers took us the spot in the field near the village where Ishan was found. By now the crowd had swelled to over a hundred and they swarmed around us talking excitedly and snapping pictures with their cell phones. It was a celebratory mood and many photos were taken as we moved through the village and into the field.

Ishan’s biological mother did not come forward and the villagers did not tell us who she was. We can only imagine that she stood in the crowd and saw her son and his adopted American family. We stayed for a few hours and looked around the village but we were drawing a lot of attention and were worried that when word got outside the village others might come and our social worker wanted to keep a low profile. So we piled back into the car and headed back to our hotel. It had been an extraordinary day.

Ishan is shy around strangers and he didn’t really like all the attention, but he held up well during the visit. The experience did not seem to make much of an impression on him. The village was as far from his life as it is from any seven-year-old American’s life. Maybe when he’s older he’ll be more curious about that far away village where he might have lived had he not been adopted. Maybe he’ll remember this trip as he grows up and explores his identity. I’m just glad I didn’t stay in bed and nurse my cold.

Just a Tourist

2009-03-04T12:47:00.000-08:00

Tourists in rented convertibles sometimes cruise Kauai highways with cameras held up, simply photographing the view from the road. Those of us who live here shake our heads and wonder what kind of idiot would take pictures of the road that we drive on every day. We’ve become jaded to the beauty around us.

So I had to laugh when I found myself pointing my camera out of the window of moving cars and trains as we traveled through India. “Look!” I exclaimed, “there’s a cow on the road!” I can only imagine the Indians who saw me thinking, “what kind of an idiot would take pictures of a cow on the road? What’s so unusual about that?”

Snapping photos from a moving car yields about on picture worth keeping for every twenty taken, but it’s something to do on a long ride.

Lighting the Menorah in Mumbai

2009-03-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

In late November 2008 a month before I planned to fly from Hawaii to Mumbai terrorists attacked the city. They struck several places and shot it out with Indian commandos for three days. 173 people were killed.

One of the targets was Nariman House, a Jewish outreach center. Six people were killed there including the Rabi and his wife who ran the place. On their flight from New York to Mumbai, my brother-in-law, a non-practicing Jew, met a man who was headed there for a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the attack. He invited him and the rest of us traveling with him to come.

Amidst piles of rubble and riddled with bullet holes the building still stands. A crowd of mostly reporters and cameramen milled about in the narrow path at its door. It was clearly a media event but nothing was happening yet. As foreigners our arrival attracted some attention and when my brother-in-law began to chat with a French journalist the cameras all turned on him.

After a lot of waiting, they erected a huge Menorah and leaned out the window of the building to light it. A visiting rabbi made a short speech about the importance of persevering with the mission of the center and then they took down the menorah, strapped it to the top of the taxi and the whole party (which now included the five of us) along with the entourage of reporters made its way a few blocks away to the Gate of India, an important Mumbai landmark for another round of speeches and menorah lighting.

On our way to the gate some of the friends of the Nariman house got into a heated debate with police officers who had closed the road in front of the Taj Mahal Hotel, another one of the terrorists’ targets. They felt the police should make an exception and allow us to pass, but the police weren’t budging. Walking around the hotel would not take us far out of our way and the argument seemed pointless to me, but our new companions were adamant and we soon participating in a sort of spontaneous civil disobedience. Being the brother-in-law of some guy that one of them had met on the plane, I wasn’t really sure why I should be risking open defiance of the police, but breaking up the solidarity of our little party didn’t feel like the right thing to do so I stuck with the group. Cooler heads prevailed among the police officers and they let us pass.

While the gathering assembled and they re-erected the menorah, rabbis kept the crowd entertained by recruiting Jews from the audience to participate the ritual of laying of tefillin, in which leather straps are bound around one’s arms while something in Hebrew is recited. I’m don’t know what the significance of this practice is but my brother-in-law rose to the occasion and I took pictures.

A Whiff of India

2009-02-27T16:05:00.000-08:00

“What does India smell like?” someone I talked to before my trip wondered out loud. He had always wanted to go and envied me the opportunity. Travelers to India had tried to tell him about the smell, but the task had apparently been beyond their descriptive abilities.

On Christmas Eve I smelled India for the first time and my advice to him or to anyone who’s curious about it is to go and smell it for yourself. I was prepared as you can possibly be, just as an infant in the birth canal is as prepared as he or she can be for life as a human. I’ve seen movies, I’ve read books, I’ve listened to many people who’d been there before me but it was still a shock. It’s a lot different than Kauai. For one thing there are a lot more people, about 20,000 times as many, actually.

As I stepped out of the airport the assault on my state of mind began with the taxi drivers. I was “prepared” for them, of course. By that I mean someone had told me about them. They surrounded me with pushy desire, catching sight of a chance for easy money in my dazed vulnerability. And so the confusion began. There were blue taxies, black taxies auto-rickshaws, and a crowd of drivers shouting at me each with his own particular agenda. I entered what seemed to be the right vehicle and gave what seemed to be the right instructions to the driver and off we went.

The ride to my hotel was almost an hour long and every single street we drove down was lined with people. I had been traveling for days and when I arrived at the hotel all I wanted to do was take refuge in my room. I gave the bel-hop what I later realized was an obscenely huge tip and went to sleep. Some amount of time later knocking on my door woke me. It was my brother-in-law, having just arrived on a 15-hour flight from New York. “Merry Christmas!” I managed sleepily even though neither of us really cares about the holiday. I was very glad to see him. Our rendezvous on the other side of the world had come off without a hitch.

Planet Haolewood Goes Planetary

2008-12-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

VINCENT
So if you're quitting the life,
what'll you do?

JULES
That's what I've been sitting here
contemplating. First, I'm gonna
deliver this case to Marsellus. Then,
basically, I'm gonna walk the earth.

VINCENT
What do you mean, walk the earth?

JULES
You know, like Caine in "KUNG FU."
Just walk from town to town, meet
people, get in adventures.

VINCENT
How long do you intend to walk the
earth?

JULES
Until God puts me where he want me
to be.

VINCENT
What if he never does?

JULES
If it takes forever, I'll wait
forever.

VINCENT
So you decided to be a bum?

JULES
I'll just be Jules, Vincent – no
more, no less.

VINCENT
No Jules, you're gonna be like those
pieces of shit out there who beg for
change. They walk around like a bunch
of fuckin' zombies, they sleep in
garbage bins, they eat what I throw
away, and dogs piss on 'em. They got
a word for 'em, they're called bums.
And without a job, residence, or
legal tender, that's what you're
gonna be – a fuckin' bum!

I am a World Famous Photographer

2008-12-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

The Schmap Maui and Molokai Guide has included this photo I posted on my flickr sight in their new guide. I guess they figured it was easier to use people's vacation photos than to send a photographer to Maui.

Lucky Chicken

2008-11-21T20:45:00.001-08:00

Feral chickens roam Kauai’s jungles and beaches with impunity. But as I gaze into their eyes and try to plum the modest depths of their minds I feel certain these birds have no appreciation whatsoever for just how fortunate they are. With few predators, a mild climate and abundant food, these chickens have got it good.

It wasn’t long after I moved here that I stopped noticing the chickens. While they seem novel to visitors, island residents take no more notice of them than mainlanders might take of a pigeon. So when we started finish work on a guesthouse recently, I barely noticed the hen and her brood scratching around in the leaves. But it seems these were an especially curious bunch and pretty soon they started hopping up on the plywood deck and bobbing their heads inquisitively. It became lunchtime entertainment to watch their inner struggle between fear of getting to close to us and hunger for the crumbs we would leave for them. For one chicken in particular, hunger won out decisively and before long it was eating from our hands.

We only feed them at lunch, but they come around at all times of the day now, freely wandering around the house looking for a handout. Apparently, they’ve concluded that we’re more likely to give them food then we are to eat them.

I’ll be moving on from this job soon so I won’t get to see how the chicken drama unfolds, but the other guys have nicknamed the favorite chicken Boreas.

Curvy Lines

2008-09-12T20:28:00.000-07:00

Finish carpentry is all about precision. We like straight lines and when we make curves they are precisely calculated like those you’d find in an archway. But the other day at Mr. Money’s house I installed a countertop with one edge that had been left natural. I cut three of the sides exactly square to fit inside a cabinet but the forth side was left more or less in the shape of the tree from which the board had been cut. It turned out the “naturally shaped” side was too irregular and I would have to cut it, too. But of course I couldn’t cut it in a straight line or even an arc. I had to cut it irregularly. That sort of stumped me. It was like asking a firefighter to burn down a building. It’s my job to make things look straight and now I was being asked to make sure my cut didn’t look straight.

I asked the interior designer how he wanted it to look. He said it should look like a piece of wood that has been sitting outside for 100 years and told me to scrape it with a wire brush after I cut it so it would look distressed. I hesitantly drew a line that more or less followed the original curvy edge. The countertop was made up of two pieces of Indonesian teak 14” wide and 2” thick. It had arrived recently in a shipping container full of furniture from that exotic land. Wood like that is not easy to come by on Kauai or anywhere else for that matter, so it was important not to mess it up. I set my saw at an arbitrarily chosen angle and cut away. Then I worked on it with a power planer followed by a belt sander, an orbital sander and finally I hand sanded it to take away the marks left by power tools (which don’t look very natural).

Everyone seemed pleased with the results. Most of what I do is more like a math problem than an art project. There may be different ways of getting there but there is only one “right answer.” But as I contemplated finished product I wondered at how I probably could have cut it a number of different ways and it still would have “looked right.”

Paddle Part 2

2008-08-21T23:13:00.000-07:00

Actually it wasn’t REALLY the end of the season. It was just the end of the SPRINT season. I raced in two long distance races this year. The first was an 8-10 mile from Hanalei to Kalihiwai and back which took us about an hour and a half. We finished 7th out of nine canoes in our division. But that was really just a warm-up for the Na Pali Challenge one week later. Those of you following my paddling career closely will note this is the race I skipped last year so I could go to Summer and Graham’s wedding. (Happy anniversary, guys!) The course runs 32 miles from Hanalei to Kekaha along some of Kauai’s most beautiful coastline. It’s a unique race in that each boat has both a women’s and men’s crew who switch every half an hour, kind of like a relay race.

How do you switch crews in the middle of a race? I was wondering the same thing and we never practiced “water changes” at the canoe club until two days before the race. It turned out not to be as hard as it sounds.

The excitement was building in the days before the race. Paddlers who had raced Na Pali before told us we could expect to be on the water, either in the escort boat or paddling in the canoe for between four and five hours so we should bring food and water. Space would be limited on the boat so the coaches told us to bring water only for ourselves, not whole cases to share. When someone asked how much would be enough for one person, “a gallon,” was the recommendation.

The night before I packed two 12 oz plastic bottles and a camel back with water, two one-quart canteens with “electro mix” and water, a pineapple, a papaya, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a granola bar, some crackers and peanut butter, a bag of trail mix, and some dates. It sounds like a lot but bear in mind that the pineapple was pretty small. I had my long-sleeved club jersey, two pairs of padded paddling shorts (worn concurrently), a hat, my camera in a dry bag, wax for the floor of the canoe and of course my paddle, which I never used. I felt as prepared as I would ever be.

I arrived at the pier where paddlers were loading escort boats at 6:30 the morning of the race. There was a lot of activity in the bay and on the shore. Since each of the 20 canoes racing has its own escort boat, there were twenty small motorboats most of them lashed together in a kind of flotilla. Canoe clubs from all over the island had rented small fishing boats and tour boats for the race. The small pier is normally only used for fishing and as a diving platform and couldn’t accommodate so many boats. So when one boat moored to load supplies, other boats simply moored to it instead of the pier. I had to hop across two other boats to get my belongings and myself onto our escort boat.

The captain of our escort boat was a chubby shirtless man with a kind of sideways Mohawk and blood smeared on his stomach (apparently from a cut on his finger). Since the women’s crew was to start the race, we would start by cheering from the escort boat. We could see all the women paddlers gathered on the beach probably listening to some instructions that we would never hear. They got in their canoes and waited for the start. As the flag came up, over a hundred paddlers sprang into action and sped off like a horde of Amazon Argonauts.

Our escort boat scooted along a short distance away from our canoe and we yelled encouragement to the women. Normally, our coaches assign each paddler a seat in the canoe but in all the excitement we had never gotten our instructions so it was up to us. The strongest paddlers sit in the middle of the canoe, seats 3 and 4. The steersman sits in the back and of the remaining crew, I was selected to sit in front, the seat with the responsibility of setting the pace. I had never sat in seat one during a race before, but I was happy to have the opportunity.

After a half an hour, race officials announced by radio that it was time to change crews. Captain Bloody Stomach piloted his boat ahead of the canoe and we all jumped into the water and lined up. The women steered the canoe toward us so that we passed between the boat and the outrigger. At the last second, they jumped out on the right side and we climbed in on the left side and began to paddle immediately. The idea is to change crews without the boat ever stopping.

After taking a few strokes to bring the boat up to speed, I stopped to zip up the nylon cover which formed a seal around my torso and kept water from splashing into the boat. I quickly got back to paddling and settled into a rhythm. The odd thing about sitting in front is that you can’t see anything that happens in your boat. I could hear my teammates calling out when it was time to switch to paddling on the other side and there was a constant banter of encouraging shouts but the only thing in my field of vision was the bow of the boat and the open ocean beyond. As we paddled over waves sometimes the bow would rise so high that I couldn’t reach the water with my paddle. The next moment it would come down so low that the nose was underwater. That’s why I like sitting in front.

While I couldn’t see what was happening behind me I did feel it when another boat ran into us. There were some shouts but the general idea is to keep paddling no matter what. I figured my teammates would tell me if there was some reason to stop. Hours later they told me that the other boat had flipped after hitting us.

We passed at least three boats and soon our half hour was up. I watched the women jump off the escort boat and line up in the water. As we got closer, I unzipped the cover stowed my paddle and ejected myself into the water. We swam to the escort boat and split a bottle of Gatorade.

And so the hours rolled by. The men’s crew paddled four times and the women’s five. On our second turn the swells were coming in right at our backs and we were able to “surf” as we went. Spinner dolphins leapt into the air with irrational exuberance (is there any other kind of exuberance?). And we were exuberant, too, so much so that on one occasion we jumped into the water and switched with the women too early and were penalized ten minutes.

As the men finished our last turn in the canoe one of the boats behind us caught up. They were right behind us as the women, clearly fatigued and beginning their fifth turn paddling, dragged themselves into their seats. The other team overtook them and the last twenty minutes were heated battle, the canoes within one boat length the entire time. The ladies never regained the lead but I guess it wouldn’t have mattered anyway since ten minutes were tacked onto our time thanks to us guys’ blunder.

I haven’t been able to find any results posted on line and the local newspaper hasn’t gotten around to printing them yet so I don’t know how we did, But let’s just say we weren’t first and we weren’t last. It was a great experience and I don’t really care anyway.

Paddle Part 1

2008-08-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

It seems the entire paddling season has gone by and I never updated my loyal readers about how it was going. I know you’ve all been lying awake at night asking yourself over and over, “how was the second paddling season at Planet Haolewood?” Well, I will tell you. It reached its dramatic finish yesterday when I competed in The Na Pali Challenge, the most important long-distance canoe race of the year on Kauai, but before I tell you about it I’ll recap the season.

One of the many factors contributing to my difficult life here is having to make choices between all the fun things there are to do. For example the paddling season started in February, which is still the prime time of year for surfing. I thought long and hard and decided I liked surfing better than paddling but I still wanted to paddle since it would give me something to do in the summer when the surf is not so good. So I skipped the first few weeks of practice with the canoe club and resolved that I would only go to practice if the surfing conditions were less than ideal. I had also resolved that I didn’t enjoy regattas so the first part of the season I spent trying to figure out how many practices and races I could skip and still remain a member in good standing of the club.

As spring turned to summer and my favorite surf breaks became like placid mountain lakes, my commitment to the club solidified. Unlike other team sports in which a teams competes against each other one at a time, all seven canoe clubs on Kauai come to every regatta, which means that you’re always competing against pretty much the same people. But all of the regattas (each team hosts one) are really just warm-ups for the Garden Island Canoe Racing Association Championship which takes place in Hanalei each July. The winner of each race at that event moves on to the state championships. It’s the race we train for all season, the ultimate in 6-man canoe sprints on Kauai.

As a second year paddler, I raced in the men’s ‘Novice A’ division. There are many divisions and I still don’t understand how they all work so I won’t try to explain it here. In the final week before the Garden Island Championship we eased off on training so we’d be fresh and mostly practiced turns.

Races take place on a course made up of buoys spaced 1/4 mile apart. Our race would be one mile, which means executing 3 turns around the buoys. Hit the buoy while turning and we would be disqualified, turn too widely and we loose precious seconds. So the trick is to turn as tightly around the buoy as possible without hitting it. Most of the responsibility for the turn falls on the steersmen who sits in the back of the canoe and uses a paddle like a rudder. Though a novice like the rest of our crew, our steersmen had the turns down pretty well.

The day of the race arrived and we lined up with the other clubs’ canoes on the starting line. The starter raised the green flag and we dug in with our paddles. As we approached the buoy for the first turn it was a close race. “Uni!” shouted the steersman, giving the command to start the turn. The boat lurched to the right and I saw the outrigger rise about three feet above the surface of the water. The boat was about to flip. In the next instant we were all in the water looking at the bottom of the canoe’s hull while the other boats completed their turns and raced on. By the time we flipped the boat back over and bailed it out the race was over and so was our season. There would be no trip to the state championship for the men’s Novice A crew.

Surfing Barak Fantastic

2008-08-11T23:53:00.000-07:00

Well ok so I didn’t go surfing with Barak Obama. In fact he never even came to Kauai, but he is on Oahu for vacation so that’s pretty close, I think. It’s kind of a big deal, actually. Presidential candidates NEVER come to Hawaii. With 4 electoral votes, it’s not much of a prize to travel half way across the pacific for. And since it’s not a battleground state, our votes are already presumed cast. He’s not really campaigning here so there’s not much to say about his visit. Yesterday’s paper reported that he went jogging on Kailua beach. At first he was wearing shoes. Then he took them off. Does this mean he really is a flip-flopper, as McCain says?

Obama was born and raised on Oahu, but in all I’ve heard about him and read I’ve never encountered any mention of surfing in his past. In his book he admitted to marijuana and cocaine use. But maybe he wants to keep his youthful experimentation with surfing quiet. While I would personally consider it totally awesome to have a surfer in the oval office, many voters, acting on their stereotyped perceptions of the slacker-surfer, might consider it un-presidential. It’s hard to believe that someone who spent his youth in Hawaii never touched a surfboard. So, how about it, Barak? It’s better to come clean now and reveal all of your youthful indiscretions so they don’t come back and create a scandal later.

While Oahu may be as close as he ever gets to Planet Haolewood world headquarters, there was an Obama event yesterday on Kauai. Obama enthusiasts gathered at the one-lane bridge over the Hanalei River to participate in “Yes We Span,” A campaign to photograph Obama supporters on bridges. I’m not kidding. I did not attend. That bridge was built in 1912 and I wasn’t sure it could take the weight of all those Obama faithful.

I’m sure the bridge was fine, actually. But I’m not really an Obama supporter. I think of the American voter as a woman in the process of breaking up with the worst boyfriend in the history of boyfriends. She sees Obama as a knight in shining armor. “He really GETS me!” she woozily explains to her friends, who think she’s totally crazy for ever getting with the last boyfriend, anyway. We’re on the rebound and there’s no law of symmetry that demands Obama’s presidential capabilities be equal to Bush’s “perfect storm” of arrogance and incompetence.

I’m reserving judgment on our friend, Barak, (at least until I have reliable evidence that he is, in fact, a surfer.) My main reservation is that he has accepted far more money already than any presidential candidate and we still have a long time to go. Nothing is free. The people and organizations giving him money are buying influence. He originally said he would conform to public financing limits, but when he realized he could raise more money than he could get from public financing, he reversed his position. That’s a real flip-flop on an issue that really matters.

It matters so much because it’s at the root of every other problem in government. We have a democracy of dollars. One dollar = one vote instead of one person = one vote. That’s why, for example, we continue to subsidize ethanol even though it benefits no one except those directly receiving the subsidy. It’s difficult if not impossible to make progress on all the things that need changing as long as the democracy of dollars goes on. Obama seems to be really good at raising money, so he can thrive in the status quo. It would be nice to think that he sees his compromise on public campaign financing as means to and end and that as president he’ll try fix the system he has described as “broken.”

As they say, “talk is cheap.” The only way to evaluate a candidate is to look to his or her actions. Obama doesn’t have a long record to look back on, but the way he handled public campaign financing doesn’t bode well.

Words of Wisdom

2008-07-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

Above all recommendations I give visitors to Kauai, I tell them “Kayak the Na Pali coast.” The 17 mile ocean voyage pushes the limits of the English language’s ability to describe wonder. I first made the trip soon after I moved here. Without any experience ocean kayaking and without knowing anyone who might take me along, I shelled out an ample (while certainly well deserved) fee to go with a professionally guided tour. What kind of people are Na Pali guides? What kind of people get up and go to work to do what others might describe as “the adventure of a lifetime?” Their gifts most likely include youth, and certainly include physical stamina, but a lot of folks have those. I guess it’s probably the kind of job some people are just meant for and the rest of us can be glad such people find their way to their natural niche in the world. Without them the honeymooners, dreamers, and adventurers who come to Kauai would probably miss out on a sublime experience.

Kayaking Na Pali is a one-way trip. By the time you pull your boat from the water, you’re a 2-hour drive away from where you started. The guides load the kayaks onto large-wheeled dollies, roll them across the beach and hoist them onto a trailer pulled by the van that carries guides and customers back to the shop where the whole thing started earlier that morning.

In the back of the van I chatted with one of the guides. Not surprisingly, we found a shared interest in surfing. The same conditions that make summer the only time of year to kayak Na Pali make the rest of the year ideal for surfing. I don’t know what he did for a living the rest of the year but he was probably less concerned with that than with taking advantage of the great surf. He spoke some words to me which at the time I found amusing, but they stuck in my mind and their significance to me seems to have grown with time. I wish I could remember his exact words. It’s too bad this isn’t fiction, then I could just make them up. But he essentially said that he preferred surfing to being in a relationship with a woman. The idea of mutual exclusivity is what I found funny at the time.

Since then I learned a lot more about surfing and a little more about relationships and it doesn’t seem as funny anymore. Real surfers (and I’m not really prepared to included myself in that group) are married to the ocean. As a spouse, the ocean has a lot to offer. For starters, it’s immortal. Its physical beauty, certainly more wonderful and varied than any human’s, never fades. It has no ego to bruise and no feelings to hurt. You can rage against it, or even ignore it and it won’t hold it against you. In fact it asks nothing of you except that you show up. It’s certainly more generous that people, who seldom give without some kind of selfish motivation. It sends wave after wave weather there is anyone there to surf on them or not. It’s always there for you and yet always true to itself.

Perhaps there are advantages to human partners. All I’ve gotten from my relationship with the ocean hasn’t completely replaced my desire for human companionship. All I’m saying is that kayak guide may have had a point.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

2008-07-06T23:47:00.001-07:00

I tried stand-up paddling, a new kind of surfing for the first time the other day. Among surfers, it’s controversial because the use of a paddle gives stand up paddlers an “unfair” advantage over regular surfers in the competition to catch waves, but to me it looks like fun and I was happy to try it.

As I pulled up to a calm section of river where my friend was already practicing, I became so excited that I a) left my keys in my ignition and the door unlocked and b) left my flip-flops so close the rivers edge that they floated away with the rising tide. Fortunately, no one steals cars on Kauai and flip-flops sell for about $3 a pair.

Sweat

2008-06-11T23:43:00.000-07:00

Happy Kamehameha Day! I’m sure you’ll all remember that I started this blog two years ago today! Perhaps I have not been blogging as much as I did at first. And perhaps I’ve run a little dry on material. But the surf on Kauai’s North Shore goes flat in the summer so I don’t really know what to say.

It’s been hot lately, which has got me to think about how much water I drink. Every morning I start my day with two big glasses of water about 16 oz each. I bring a half-gallon jug of water with me to work and if I’m working on the sunny side of the house as I have been lately, I’ll drink the whole thing. After work I paddle with the canoe club, which generally involves more profuse sweating and even more water. Despite all the water I’ve drunk, (over a gallon), I’m often still thirsty by the end of the day. I don’t pee any more than usual which means that most of that water is leaving my body through respiration or perspiration. That’s my little thought nugget for you to chew on today.

PS Check out the link on the right to my new Flickr page.

What I Do at the End of the Workday

2008-05-24T00:14:00.000-07:00

Perhaps some of you have noticed a dearth of photos on my blog lately. My camera broke and when I went to my old camera I found it was broken, too. I’ve ordered a new camera which is a good thing since I live is such an incredibly photogenic setting. One could simply take pictures at random and come out looking like the next Ansel Adams.

In the meantime, enjoy this picture my co-worker took from our job site this week. The house we are building overlooks a spot known as Donkey Beach. Most days out of the year it’s not a good surfing spot. But from this week’s rare combination of a long period southeast swell and light variable winds sprang forth an excellent surf break where there is usually none. The conditions lasted throughout the week. Every member of our five man finish carpentry crew is a surfer and we watched helplessly as perfect sets rolled in. On Friday the swell was starting to taper off but it had enough life in it so I went down and surfed a break I had never surfed before. A great way to start a three day weekend.

People Leave

2008-05-02T23:02:00.001-07:00

In the past couple of months seven people I know have moved away from Kauai “back to the mainland.” It kind of sucks. I suppose it a characteristic of our age of mobility for people to be coming and going, but the population on Kauai is especially transient. Local people have a reputation for not bothering to get to know anyone who hasn’t already been here a few years and it’s understandable. Why make friends with someone who lives on the island as a temporary experiment and may hop a plane back to “real life” at any moment?

I’m coming up on two years living here myself which makes me still malihini (newcomer) as far as the locals are concerned, but I’ve actually lived here longer than a lot of people I meet.

Living on this remote island sometimes seems like a fragile experiment that could be terminated at any time. Even Hawaiians can only trace their lineage back a few centuries. No place on earth is newer to human habitation. So when people leave it gives me a sense of uneasiness, as if the party is about to start winding down.

That feeling doesn’t accurately reflect reality, of course. Today, like every other day here, plane loads and plane loads of people arrived on Kauai, mostly tourists, some coming home, and some like me two years ago, just beginning a new chapter -and for them the party has just begun.

More of the Same

2008-03-22T20:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve been getting a lot of inquiries here at Planet Haolewood asking about what surf conditions on Kauai’s North Shore have been like lately. The answer is VERY GOOD, so good that blogging has taken a back seat to surfing. This winter has been by far the best of my surfing career. While there will still be good surf before it goes flat for the summer, the peak of the season has passed and this weekend it’s looking pretty flat.

Jay sustained serious damage in an unfortunate incident at Hideaways in which the leash became wrapped around the tail and pulled so hard during a wipeout that it dug into the rail and became embedded halfway across the board. By the time I had extracted the leash, the gash was so severe that I probably should have taken it to be professionally repaired. But I opted instead to apply my meager fiberglass repair skills to the task. After a couple of weeks in dry dock the result is ugly but functional.

A highlight came for Emile (the board) when Emile’s brother-in-law (the person) borrowed it and went out to surf some very, very large waves. I was a little concerned about the possibility of contributing to young widowhood for Emile’s sister. I still feel guilty for the adolescent cruelty my friends (you know who you are) and I delivered upon her. We came up with a variation on a popular song that essentially placed responsibility for ALL EVIL in the world at her feet. Needless to say she had done nothing to deserve such bad treatment and was then as now a kind soul. The fear that our cruelty inflicted permanent psychological damage hangs over me to this day. To see her standing pregnant on the beach as the sun went down over an ocean that had just swallowed the love of her life while I tried to explain why I had encouraged him to take my board was not a possibility I relished. But happily both Emile (the board) and Emile’s brother-in-law (the person) emerged unscathed from a session with the monsters. While I may never work my way up to surfing those kind of waves, it’s nice to know one of my boards has experience out there.

Even as the surfing season begins its ebb, the paddling season has begun and the longer days find me just as likely to be sweating in a six-person outrigger canoe as bobbing around in the line-up on my board. This time of year presents a dilemma for an ocean enthusiast like me. Paddle or surf? I can only do one at a time. Last year I went to every practice at the canoe club and missed out on some good spring surfing. This year I have reasoned that there will be plenty of time to paddle during the summer when there’s no surf so I skipped the first few weeks of paddling and have resolved to bail on practice whenever the surf gets good again. A senior paddler who asked me where I had been during the first weeks of practice seemed to find my explanation an acceptable excuse. Only in Hawaii.

Farewell to Haolewood

2008-01-26T23:39:00.000-08:00

Yes it’s time to move on to another planet. I’m moving 15 minutes down the road to the lovely town of Kilauea and leaving behind a year and a half of interesting memories at the original Planet Haolewood world headquarters. Roommate #1, let’s call him Scooter, appeared to be drunk on the day that he moved in, shortly after I had taken up residence myself. He introduced me to his “ex-girlfriend” who was helping him move. I thought that was a little odd, but she went on to behave more like a girlfriend than an ex, cooking at the house, doing laundry, curling up with Scooter to watch a movie and frequently spending the night. Scooter was an ex-marine who tended bar in a near-by watering hole. Once he offered to give me his old car battery that he was apparently keeping at his former apartment a short distance away. As we pulled up he advised me to stay in the car and not to be concerned if the neighbors were shouting at him when he came back out with the battery. I guess Scooter had made some enemies there. We had little in common (except for surfing, of course) and we got along well by having opposite schedules. Scooter eventually moved in with some of his friends elsewhere in Haolewood.

So it was on to roommate #2 who I will call Dan. To describe Dan as reclusive would be an understatement. When he first moved in he went in and out of his room through a separate entrance in the back of the house and did not enter the living room or kitchen. Eventually he started using the front door but still kept to himself, emerging only to do his laundry. Dan was a roofer. I asked him what he did when it rained (as it does year-round) and he told me they just keep working. “What about when it rains heavily?” I persisted. “We just keep working.” Was his only response. Dan didn’t surf. We got along well within the very limited context that we saw each other.

Dan had a little trouble with the law a few months after he moved in, some confusion about driving with a suspended license, I guess, and told me that he had decided to flee the state rather than appear in court.

So I made the acquaintance of Roommate # 3 who also happened to be named Scooter. The first Scooter had been a slob but the new Scooter spent the first few days of his tenancy THUROUGHLY cleaning the common areas of the house. I was a little concerned that he would expect me to match the cleanliness precedent he was setting. I knew I was not up to the task but I made an effort to be a little cleaner and accommodate his sometimes-quirky requests, such as switching from a glass to a plastic cutting board so the sound of my chopping cucumber while making my lunch in the morning would not wake him up.

The new Scooter drove a cab and spent a lot of time hanging around the house while on call. He did not keep to his room at all. He liked to watch television and movies in the living room and was quite catty compared with my previous roommates. He and I had almost completely opposite tastes in movies the only exception being “For the Love of the Game,” a documentary about a girl’s basketball team, which we both really liked. He had surfed “back in day” and was still interested in talking about it even though he no longer got on a board. He almost always asked me where I had surfed and what the conditions were like and occasionally gave me tips on good spots he had seen while driving his cab around the island. He was a sensitive and considerate roommate and we got along well.

While the roommates in the main house came and went, my “property-mate,” who I will call Chuck, lived quietly in a separate guest house in the back yard as he had for many years. The only problem with Chuck was that he didn’t always pay his rent, a quality that my landlady found frustrating. Chuck thought that the problems between them were more personal in nature. He claimed that they had once been a couple and her difficulties with him were baggage left over from their brake-up. He lost his job and fell further behind on the rent.

He finally got evicted but instead of leaving completely, he moved all his belongings into the garage and started living there. The garage had a partial bathroom, but no shower or kitchen. After a long struggle with my landlady, he got himself, his dog, his three cars and almost all of his stuff out.

In the meantime, I had begun to notice Dan around town. I would see him walking down the road with his hat pulled down low to cover his face. It seemed he was back and was looking for a place to live. I’m not sure what his legal situation was but he no longer had a car and he was excited about moving into the newly vacated guesthouse. It was an ideal arrangement for his dream of seclusion. He tore out the carpet (without asking for permission) and put in a new vinyl floor.

The neighbors complained that he played his music too loud and his reaction was to turn it up louder. When the Haolewood security forces started pounding on his door he turned off all the lights and pretended that he was not at home. They kept knocking for twenty minutes.

In the meantime, Scooter had announced his plans to move out. I prepared to meet roommate #4, but soon after Scooter left my landlady told me that they were ending their lease and if I wanted to continue to live there I would have to deal with the owners myself. I decided to look for a new place to live. There never was a roommate #4. For the last month it was just me in the house. Dan stayed in the Guesthouse and devoted himself to installing soundproof paneling. But soon he left, too. I only knew this because a carton of 11 eggs appeared in my refrigerator along with an assortment of frozen dinners in the freezer. I guess he had not wanted to throw the food away and figured I would eat it. I haven’t seen him since. I gave the eggs to Pussycat and ate the frozen dinners (which, happily, were vegetarian).

What I’ve learned from this experience is that I’m pretty good at getting along with a variety of different kinds of people. It’s a very useful skill!

Big Waves

2008-01-15T22:40:00.000-08:00

Jay has a serious ding and can’t go in the water until it’s repaired. But that’s ok because the waves have been more Emile sized lately. Emile is my most challenging board to surf on. It paddles slower. It’s harder to catch a wave and it’s less stable once I’m standing on it. The conditions appropriate to surfing on Emile are also the most challenging conditions that I ever surf in. So I have the least confidence going into the most difficult waves.

The other day I surfed at Hideaways and spent the whole session waiting for one good wave, but when it came it made it all worthwhile. While Emile may be difficult to ride, it’s much faster and more responsive than any board I’ve ever ridden and when the right wave comes, I’m in the right place to catch it AND I execute it well, it’s an exhilarating experience. I had such an experience that evening.

Today I hoped for something similar as Cameron and I headed to Hideaways again. The waves were somewhat larger than before and we had difficulty paddling out. In fact paddling through the surf proved impossible even for Cameron who’s a much better surfer than I. I’m still working on my duck diving (passing under a wave with your board) but I kept at it as wave after wave of white water pushed me back and erased any forward progress I made. Finally the current carried us so far down the shore that we could paddle all the way around the braking waves and then make our way back to the spot we wanted to surf. I was so exhausted by the time I made it out that I decided if I got caught inside again I would not attempt to come back out.

I sat on my board catching my breath and watching some other surfers drop in on some waves I can only describe as huge. At this point I should point out that size is relative. I’m not surfing what people call “big waves.” I guess you could say they are just biggER than I usually surf. I bided my time until I was in position to paddle for a wave. When it came, I stood up and dropped in. I slid quickly to the bottom and with the top of the wave towering over my head and about to break, I thought to myself, “that’s a really big wave!” I also realized that my execution was less than perfect. It had not been a total disaster. I had successfully caught the wave, popped-up to my feet, dropped in and I was still standing. However, I had miscalculated my angle of take off so that I essentially went straight down instead of sideways along the face of the wave. I was at the bottom of the wave with no way to accelerate and continue my ride or even get out of the way of the crashing wave.

There was only one thing left to do. I turned toward shore in hopes of catching a ride on the whitewater inside where the wave’s power would be diminished and I could get out. A reasonable plan under the circumstances, unfortunately the force of the whitewater catching up to me knocked me off my board and down I went. I was held under for what seemed like a very long time but was probably only a few seconds. When I came up I realized I’d had enough and it was time to develop and exit strategy.

A strong current had carried me down the shore to a point where there were only cliffs and no way to climb out. To get back to the beach I would have to paddle up stream. I could have simply alowed the current to carry me to the next beach down but that would have meant a long walk back to my car with no shoes and I found that by paddling steadily against the current I could make slow but measurable progress. I eventually made it in, winded, but unharmed.

It was arguably the biggest wave I have ever caught and certainly the meanest. It was also probably the longest I have ever been held down. I was in over my head but on the whole I was pleased with how well I did.

Damn, it's cold!

2007-12-30T12:05:00.000-08:00

Researchers here at Planet Haolewood have concluded that lack of sunshine coupled with copious rain is significantly correlated with decreased surface ocean temperatures. Practical implication: it’s time for a new wet suit.

When I moved to Kauai it was May and I thought it was pretty hot. One of the first things I did was buy a rash guard so I that I wouldn’t get sun burned while surfing. I was so concerned about the heat that I bought a white rash guard instead of black reasoning that it would reflect the suns rays. That first summer I surfed with no wet suit.

By the time winter came along I realized that being too hot while surfing was really not much of a problem. It’s often windy or overcast or both here and I usually go surfing around sunset when it’s cooler. I wanted a wetsuit but I had no desire to revisit the straightjacket like experience I had when I used to surf in Northern California. So I got a sleeveless shorty with an open collar, no arms and no legs below the thigh. I figured I’d wear it during the winter only but I ended up wearing it year round. It served me well until now.

The weather hasn’t been too great lately. The surf is good but a lot of surfing is time spent sitting on your board waiting for a wave. What happens when I get cold surfing is that I stop having fun. When a wave comes I don’t feel motivated to paddle for it which is ironic because not moving around just makes me colder. So yesterday I bought a brand new spring suit with short sleeves and a collar that seals up around my neck. Am I a wimp? Perhaps. It’s as cold as it ever gets in Kauai and many of the surfers around me are wearing nothing but a bathing suit. Still I’d rather be a warm wimp and have more fun surfing than a cold wimp paddling in early because he can’t stop shivering.

Priorities

2007-12-22T00:14:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about surfing is how the ocean can surprise me just when I think I have it figured out. Conditions have been pretty flat lately, unusually so for this time of year. But there is always hope so on Tuesday after work I loaded up Matt, since it’s the board best suited to small waves, and headed down to check out The Bowl. I was not impressed. So I gave up on surfing that evening and sat in my truck looking out at the sunlight streaming through the clouds onto the green mountains and the sparkling bay.

Generally speaking The Bowl breaks bigger than other nearby spots so if its too small there, the prospects aren’t good, but after a while I decided I had nothing better to do than go and check out another spot even if it was a lost cause. Lo and behold Grandpa’s was pumpin’. I got a number of good waves on a day that I had totally given up on.

My absolute favorite time to surf is Friday after work. I cannot imagine a better way to end the week. Maybe my mind was on surfing but I forgot my lunch bag at work today and it contained not only my paycheck but also the envelope my boss had given me which presumably contained my Christmas bonus. I realized my mistake when I got home.

It’s dark by 6:15 this time of year so to make the 50 minute round trip to the job site would mean missing out on Friday surfing. What to do? I did not relish the idea of leaving my lunch bag and its important contents at the jobsite but Friday only comes once a week after all. So I loaded up Matt and headed to Middles. A beautiful evening with some nice waves.

After I had eaten dinner and showered I returned to the jobsite and retrieved the bag which was sitting right where I had left it. The moon was shining so brightly that I did not even need the flashlight I had brought.

I'm not the Only One Who Likes to Surf

2007-12-13T19:40:00.000-08:00

Overcoming jetlag means forcing myself to stay up until a reasonable bedtime. I figured it was unlikely I would fall asleep on my surfboard so I paddled out to the bowl with Matt. Even though the waves were larger than ideal for Matt, it’s a good board for crowds since it catches waves so well that I can position myself to get on the wave before other surfers. However, there’s a limit to what I can do even with Matt and the day I returned from my trip to California was just not my day for surfing. With a smaller crowd I could have surfed those waves and with smaller waves I could have surfed with that crowd but the combination was not working for me. Oh well, it’s still good to get wet.

Jay or Emile?

2007-12-04T23:10:00.000-08:00

The problem with having more surfboards is that I have to choose one each time I go out. Perhaps it would be easier to describe the situation if I gave my boards names. Let’s call my 9’6” tri-fin Matt. My 8’-0” I’ll call Rolly. My new boards I’ll name Jay and Emile. On Friday I took out Jay. All things being equal Jay is my favorite right now so I when in doubt I pick him. But the waves were small and probably Rolly would have been the best choice. On Saturday the waves were supposed to be big so I took Emile, who is best suited to larger waves, but alas I had trouble catching anything because while the waves were big they weren’t big enough for Emile. Jay would have been the best board.

Cameron, the guy who sold me Jay and Emile, called me after work and told me Chicken Wings was epic (meaning the waves were good there) and suggested I bring either Jay or Emile. I put them both in the back of my truck but when I saw conditions for myself I remembered how I regretted choosing Emile and went with Jay. It was a good choice.

Incidentally, just so no one reading this blog will persist in the idea that the weather is ALWAYS nice on Kauai, I will tell you that the emergency broadcast system came on the radio twice today while I was at work: first to issue a flash flood warning and a few minutes later a high wind advisory.

Without rain there are no rainbows or waterfalls and without wind there’s no surf .

Everything You Always Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask

2007-11-30T23:36:00.000-08:00

It’s time that I faced a blogging reality. The only thing that I really have left to write about is surfing. I’m troubled by this fact because I feel reasonably certain that my readers have no interest in the subject whatsoever. But I figure I might as well just go with it. If you get bored there are a number of other interesting blogs you may want to check out listed to the right.

I’ve been interested in surfing for a few years now, but recent developments have prompted even greater enthusiasm. First the surf on the North Shore of Kauai, which I call home, underwent its annual transformation from flat to awesome. Like Puff frolicking in a land called Hanalei so do I revel in the return of good surfing conditions. And I have a winter and spring of more surf to look forward to. Second, my skill level has increased making it possible for me to surf more and get more out of it. Lastly, and most significantly, I have taken up short boarding.

Up until recently I have surfed long boards exclusively. I owned a 9’6” and an 8’-0”. But recently I have added two more boards to my quiver: a 7’4” single fin and a 7’-6” tri-fin. I’m not going to try to explain how important a change that is. Suffice to say I can now “shred.”

Today the surf forecast predicted a large swell would hit The North Shore tonight creating waves up to 34 feet high. However, there was no sign of those kind of monsters when I hit the water at about 5:15. I surfed Middles in Hanalei Bay. Conditions were glassy (meaning there was no wind) with long waits between waist to chest high sets. The 200-yard paddle from shore was bliss but I had brought the wrong board. In my expectation of bigger waves I chose my 7’-4” when I would have been better off with one of my long boards. There were 10-15 long boarders and a couple of stand up paddlers for company so I set up inside of the crowd and waited around for some nice waves that they might miss.

As it got darker the crowed thinned and I finally I was the only one left trying to feel when a wave came since it was becoming so hard to see. Overall, a very mellow and enjoyable session. I’m considering dawn patrol tomorrow.

Best and Worst

2007-11-20T22:39:00.000-08:00

It’s time for the Planet Haolewood award for the best and worst ideas humanity has ever conceived. For worst idea ever I nominate war. The conventional wisdom is that war is a necessary evil and while the process may have many undesirable side effects, it’s worth it in the end (if the war goes your way, at least). In other words the end justifies the means. I could list examples of good things that have been brought about by war but I trust that my readers are informed enough to think of your own. I’m skeptical of the it’s-worth-it-in-the-long-run argument. Since there is no alternate reality like in Star Trek to compare to, we don’t know what would have happened if The North had simply allowed The South to secede from the union without a fight. In our reality we eliminated slavery and got a devastating war and another century of brutal racial oppression in the south. How certain can we be that that’s better than what would have happened with no war?

I’ve always thought of the Geneva Convention as kind of absurd. Don’t get me wrong I’m not in favor of torture or targeting of civilians but I think its unrealistic to expect “fair play” from people engaged in an organized effort to commit mass murder. Which brings me to the heart of the problem with war. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. War always has unacceptable “collateral damage” it always harms civilians, it always has unintended consequences, there are always excesses like Abu Grab. Justice is always a casualty. It’s not a mistake when these things happen. It’s the very nature of war. The choice to fight always has unknowns either way. We don’t know what will happen if we don’t go to war, but we can count on horrible things becoming routine if we do. I think those who argue “it’s worth it” have too much certainty of the value of what they claim to be fighting for and underestimate the cost.

The current war is perhaps too easy of an example to prove my point. The US has no legitimate cause on its side and the costs both long and short term loom larger every day. Considering other wars through history seems more morally nuanced but I’m talking about all wars here and I’m concerned that dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq is just a reaction to loosing. It would have been a bad idea if the US had won, too.

For the best idea ever I nominate surfing. Surfing may not move us any closer to ending war or solve any of humanities pressing problems but I find it infinitely rewarding. The identity of the particular Hawaiian who invented surfing is lost to history but I feel grateful to whoever it was.

I will accept other nominations for humanities best and worst ideas from anyone reading this blog before announcing the winners.

Wipeout

2007-10-29T23:27:00.001-07:00

There comes a time in a surfer's career when he experiences his first broken leash.

Move Over, Iz

2007-10-27T22:46:00.000-07:00

Blogging has taken a back burner to other projects here at Planet Haolewood and today I’d like to tell you about one of them. This ukulele belonged to my grandmother. Like the canoe I raced in, it's made of Koa, a hardwood unique to Hawaii. According to the guy at Larry’s Music, it was made in the 1960s by Kamaka, a ukulele maker of note. I’ve started learning to play it by downloading chord charts. So far I’ve learned to play:

Blowin’ in the Wind
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Take on Me
YMCA
Hold me now
You Shook me all Night Long
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
The Lumberjack Song
Ring of Fire
Amazing Grace

Stunning Upset at State Canoe Race

2007-08-25T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Hawaii Canoe Racing Association holds its annual championship regatta every other year on the island of Oahu. The other years the race alternates between one of the three “neighbor islands:” Maui, The Big Island and Kauai. Expert mathematicians have concluded that means it comes to Kauai once every seven years. On Kauai it is held in Hanalei Bay which has a great beach and excellent conditions for racing at that time of year. It just so happens that 2007 was the year the championship came to Hanalei and I live 10 minutes away.

An especially fortuitous turn of events since I have recently taken up outrigger canoe racing with the Hanalei Canoe Club. In order to qualify for the state regatta, my six-man team of first year paddlers had to win our race against other first year paddlers from all over Kauai. We didn’t. However, through a series of events I don’t fully understand we ended up competing in the championship anyway.

The 100-year-old Koa wood boat was lowered from the racks where it stays the rest of the year and entrusted to our humble group. (In the state championship, all canoes must be Koa, a more traditional material than the fiberglass most boats are made from.) Thousands of paddlers from around the state converged on Hanalei. Roads were blocked and parking restricted but when I showed my Hanalei Canoe Club parking pass to a police officer he told me to “go right on through, cuz.”

It was a close race and it was hard to tell how we did from lane 14. Later I heard that we came in 11th place. I had expected to finish dead last so I’d say we did pretty well.

Photo from the Archives

2007-08-14T19:22:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid people used to tell me I looked like Mick Jagger. It seemed that my lips had grown to full adult size before the rest of my body had. Happily, a better balance was eventually attained.

Am I Off the Beaten Path Yet?

2007-07-28T17:22:00.000-07:00

Ancient Kauains believed that when a chief died his bones should be hidden so that enemies of their tribe would not be able to use the power stored in these remains against them. There are probably a lot of hiding places on Kauai where one might place such remains and one particularly inaccessible spot is Honopu beach. Overhanging cliffs up to 1200 feet high completely surround Honopu so the only access is by sea. I wouldn’t even know how to get to the top of the cliffs surrounding Honopu by land since they are located at the bottom of and extremely steep and dangerous canyon. There must have been a way down, however, because when a chief died a warrior would descend using a rope and place the bones inside holes in the cliff. No one except for the warrior knew where the bones were and once he had accomplished his task he would cut the rope and fall to his death, the secret knowledge of the bones’ location dying with him.

These days no one gets there that way. For nine months out of the year rough seas and a dangerous shore break make landing a boat impossible. Even anchoring a boat offshore and swimming in would be foolhardy. Nearby Kalalau beach, which is accessible by land, gets partially washed away in the winter by the pounding surf making it impossible to walk to the end from where one could theoretically swim to Honopu if it weren’t for the dangerous surf and currents.

Summer’s calmer seas make boat landings possible, but they are prohibited. So the only safe and legal way to get to Honopu is to swim there from Kalalau beach during the summer. But you can’t get to Kalalau by car. The only way to get there is by boat or by hiking a challenging (even for a seasoned hiker like myself) 11 miles along the crumbling cliffs of Kauai’s northwest side.

So after hiking all day to Kalalau I walked to the end of the beach which is the “jumping off point” for the swim to Honopu and contemplated the situation. The beach ends at a sheer cliff. You can’t see Honopu. You can’t see what’s beyond the cliff at all. According to maps and what I had been told Honopu was just around the corner but to actually jump in and just start swimming off along this stretch of coastline demanded a lot of faith in what I had been told. I had also been told that the current flows with you as you swim to Honopu and against you as you return. Not knowing precisely how long a swim it was the possibility of becoming exhausted on the way back, getting marooned at Honopu and sharing the fate of the warriors who cut their ropes did not excite me.

When I said that the sea is calmer is the summer I was speaking relatively. It can still be pretty rough. I stood and watched the waves pound against the cliff and decided I’d come back in the morning.

The wind eased during the night and the oceans was calmer the next day so I walked to the end of the beach again put on my goggles and swam into the unknown. After a short distance I went around a corner and Honopu came into view. It was about a 200 yard swim and not difficult for a strong swimmer accustomed to swimming in rough seas. I walked along the sand and appreciated what is certainly the most unique and pristine beach I have ever visited. A massive rock arch separates one part of Honopu from the other. Nearby a waterfall pours out a fissure in the cliff into a stream that flows through the arch and into the sea.

When I got to the far end of the beach I suddenly felt tired so I lay on my back and stared up at the overhanging cliffs. From hundreds of feet above little drops of water were dripping and I watched them become larger as they fell and landed on the sand next to me. It was the end of the road and there are no more beaches you can swim to. I did have to swim against a slight current on the way back but it wasn’t too difficult.

I’d love to post a picture of Honopu but my camera’s not waterproof so you’ll just have to use your imagination. Actually I have no doubt that there are dozens of photos of me at Honopu. Tour boats favor the early morning for cruising by Honopu and I saw at least a half a dozen go by just off shore, some with as many as 40 people standing on deck starring at me. If they didn’t take my picture then I’m sure someone on one of the many helicopter tours flying by must have got one.

Do you Believe?

2007-07-09T00:35:00.000-07:00

On Friday after work I was jumping off some rocks into the ocean at a nearby beach when a 15-year-old from Idaho –let’s just call him Jared- accosted me and offered to show me some more rocks to jump off of nearby that ranged in height from “fifteen to fifty-five feet.” I thought to myself, “how does some kid from Idaho know of good jumping spots that I don’t know about?” but I told Jared to lead on. We scrambled over the cliffs of lava rock scoured clean by pounding waves that hit in the winter and when we arrived Jared turned his back to the ocean, his toes on the edge of the cliff, his heels hanging over, pushed off and executed a perfect back flip into the sea at least forty feet below. I asked Jared who had showed him this spot and he told me that he had scoped it out earlier that day himself. When his attempts to convince his 12-year-old brother to come with him failed he figured he would share his spot with me instead. I climbed down to a somewhat lower ledge and jumped feet first.

After a few jumps Jared explained that he should be heading back to his family at the beach so we scrambled back and I returned to jumping off my regular rock, about ten feet high. Later as I lay on the beach I watched Jared play in the surf with his brother, sister and dad and it seemed to me that they were having an almost unnatural amount of fun. It was as if they had been released from prison and deposited directly on that beach. They played a game in which Jared’s little brother would strike a pose before on oncoming wave, his feet planted in a wide stance, his fist upraised and defiantly proclaim, “I believe!” The wave would immediately knock him over and he would tumble around before taking his stand again. Over and over he repeated this scenario as the sun went down.

Some people around here resent tourists. They drive too slowly. They crowd beaches and roads. They don’t understand local customs but Jared and his family’s enthusiasm was contagious and I was happy to be sharing the beach with them.

Moron -oops I mean- More On Shoes

2007-06-25T21:24:00.000-07:00

In my world there are basically two kinds of shoes: flip-flops and everything else. Flip-flops are good for any situation except particularly rocky or muddy travel in which case you need something from the second category. (See my previous blog entry about shoes for more info on that. –I’m too lame to make a hypertext link)

A recent visit from my dear friend, Dude E., however, has led me to the realization that there is yet another form of shoe with which I am almost entirely unfamiliar. This third category of shoe would appear to have no practical value whatsoever. They seem to be designed to be worn INDOORS and become useless at the first sign of gravel, rocks or mud. They have no traction and in some cases elevate their wearer above the ground making balance difficult. They come in a bewildering variety of designs and colors. It almost seems as though they are meant to be admired more than worn, like something you’d hang on your wall or place decoratively on your coffee table.

So what a sophisticated women like Ms. E supposed to do when she has to scramble down a hillside and swim under a waterfall? Maybe she just hasn’t found herself in such a situation that often. Bare feet seemed to work nicely.

Avocados, DVDs, etc...

2007-06-09T19:22:00.000-07:00

A recent survey of Ramblinmatt’s delightful blog has served to remind me that a lack of something profound to say does not preclude a blogger from providing amusing or even totally uninteresting tidbits for faraway friends to read. So without further ado, here are…er… some things.

I love avocados. I never met anyone as into avocados as I am until my newest housemate moved in. I thought of myself as an avocado connoisseur but this guy is like the Dali Lama of avocados. He seems to have a perception of their quality and ripeness that extends beyond the five senses. And keep in mind that the avocado situation is considerably more complicated than on the mainland. Sure we have the avocados from California and Chile but we also have several varieties of locally grown avocados that have unique ripening processes. I call my housemate “the avocado whisperer.”

I’ve reached that age where electronic devices are becoming more and more confusing to me. Yesterday I tried and failed to watch a DVD while house sitting. It took me at least 10 minutes just be able to turn on the TV and have a program appear on the screen. As further sign of my ‘retreat from technology’ my Netflix queue has run totally dry. The last movie I had sat on my coffee table for a month before I watched it. Despite the slow rate of consumption I haven’t been putting enough movies in my queue to keep up. I was once an enthusiastic champion of Netflix. Now it seems I may be burning out.

Finally something for all you big city folk: A local guy was telling me about his recent trip to Chicago and New York City. I asked him what he thought and paused to consider before repying, “plenty people.”

What do yo want to eat?

2007-06-05T17:27:00.001-07:00

The other day I had a bite of Ahi Tuna served as Poke, a Hawaiian way of preparing raw fish. I wasn’t coerced or cajoled. It was just there on the table as I ate lunch with my co-workers. I picked up a toothpick speared a little pink chunk and put it in my mouth. I had a similar experience a few months ago while eating dinner with a friend. I had a bite of her fish and I liked it. I’ve been a vegetarian for 10 years but it seems that I may be slipping.

Perhaps the lapse is not so great. I’ve consumed less than an ounce of dead animal in a decade but there’s something about living on an island surrounded by thousands of miles in every direction that makes me start to wonder about eating fish.

For those of you who have never tried vegetarianism it’s really not that hard. There are plenty of plant foods to eat and you don’t go hungry or suffer any nutritional deficiencies. Just about the only thing I miss about the omnivorous diet is the convenience. While there’s nothing inherently more difficult to obtain about plant foods, the fact that most people don’t share my preference means grocery stores, restaurants and social events cater to the majority. I remember at work one day I was going for lunch and I asked one of the guys if he wanted me to pick anything up. Since I wasn’t familiar with options in the area I told him we didn’t know what kind of food we would get so he just gave me some money and told me to just get him anything. I envy that guy who never needs to worry about finding something good to eat wherever he goes.

There are still many good reasons to go veggie and my feelings about it really haven’t changed. For me the benefits still outweigh the downside. It’s the most personal and meaningful thing I can do to make the world a better place so I guess I’m not ready to change anything yet even though that Ahi was quite tasty.

A Tale of Woe

2007-05-25T20:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is so much easier to see the sickness is other people’s interpersonal relationships when you are not involved. Surely we have all had the experience of watching a friend or relative continue in a relationship that clearly makes them unhappy but they seem blind to the fact that they are being used and manipulated and insist that he or she is “really a good person.”

It is with great sadness that I find my dear friends Robe and Supernova in this kind of lamentable situation with their new “friend,” Zipper. It all started about a year ago when Robe and Supernova were planning a honeymoon on Kauai and a visit to Planet Haolewood. Shortly before they were to arrive, Supernova called to tell me that she was having medical problems and would have to cancel their trip. It turns out these “medical problems” were actually caused by Zipper. I had never met him before but apparently his mere presence was so disruptive to Supernova’s health that she ended up being hospitalized. Happily, she recovered and I thought for sure that she and Robe would stay away from Zipper in the future but despite all the damage he had caused and Supernova’s own weakened condition they stood by Zipper and even nursed him through his own hospitalization. They are certainly kind and generous people but isn’t that going a little far?

But the saga of their unhealthy relationship with Zipper had only just begun. Instead of going back to wherever he came from upon release from the hospital, Zipper moved in with Supernova and Robe. To this day he pays no rent, does not even have a job and shows no consideration for his hosts’ privacy or need for sleep.

Despite this ogre’s intrusion into their lives Supernova and Robe still managed to plan a trip to Kauai to make up for last year. Of course Zipper has become so enmeshed in every facet of the lives now that they even brought him along on the very trip they had had to cancel thanks to him.

When I finally met Zipper in person the situation was even worse than I had imagined. He is possibly the most selfish, inconsiderate person I have ever met. He refuses to walk anywhere on his own, insisting that Robe or Supernova carry him. His communication skills are abominable. Instead of asking politely for what he wants or even using coherent sentences he simply screams, leaving Supernova and Robe to guess what he wants. He’s clearly suffering from some kind of severe mood disorder and insists on engaging in strange sexual encounters with Supernova several times a day often in public! Robe just stares on and seems to be pretending that nothing unusual is going on.

Most distressing of all is how Supernova and Robe indulge him. I never once saw them assert their needs to Zipper instead they seem preoccupied with keeping him happy. Whatever happened to healthy boundaries?

It’s crystal clear that Supernova and Robe are in a complete state of denial. They see nothing wrong with Zipper’s outrageous behavior or with the totally one-sided nature of their relationship. They naively maintain that he will “grow out” of the “stage” that he is in. Will they ever learn?

Isn't it Romantic?

2007-05-23T19:18:00.001-07:00

Happy first anniversary to Robdromeda! Can you believe it's been a year already?

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

2007-05-10T09:25:00.001-07:00

When I moved to Hawaii it was such a big change and I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Am I moving there for just a little while or for good?” Of course I didn’t know the answer so to avoid wasting my time worrying about it I made a deal with myself: I would stay for a year before making any decisions. There were no consequences if I broke the deal, however. If after a month I was ready to go back there was nothing to stop me. A year just seemed like a reasonable length of time to give a new place a try since I had spent some energy and money in moving.

That was exactly one year ago. About the only decision I feel prepared to make is that I ‘m not moving back to California or any where else TODAY. I’m tempted to make another deal to stay another year and THEN see how I feel. I liked having a year off from worrying about the future. So why not take another year off? Call me greedy but I’m inclined instead take the rest of my life off. So here’s my new deal. If I wake up tomorrow and feel like staying here then I will. If and when the day comes when I no longer feel that way, then I’ll go somewhere else. Some people call that living “one day at a time.”

Why Waikiki?

2007-05-04T22:34:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever been to Hawaii you’ve probably been to the island of Oahu, even if only to wait around at the Honolulu airport. Some interesting facts about Oahu: while it is only about %10 larger than Kauai, it has 15 times as many people living there and gets 4 times as many tourists. And then there’s Waikiki, a strange square mile separated from the rest of Honolulu by a canal and made up entirely of high rise hotels, gift shops and restaurants. %44 of the tourists in the entire state of Hawaii stay in Waikiki on any given night and for one evening which I hope to never repeat I joined them.

I could go on and on about how much Waikiki sucks but what’s the point? And if it’s so terrible why do so many more people choose to got there than any other place in the Hawaiian islands? I think its just one of those things I will never understand.

The traffic reminded me of California. The beaches were crowded and even though there were very few waves while I was there the line-ups had more surfers sitting around than I’ve seen on the best days for surfing on Kauai. I will say that I liked everywhere on Oahu I went outside of Honolulu and Waikiki. But on the whole, I was glad to return to The Garden Island.

Hairboy gets a Tattoo

2007-04-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

Where were you in the summer of 1982?

2007-04-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I was walking across this bridge. It's another photo from the archives of our family vacation to Kauai. That was then. The photo below is now. Mahalo to my dad for the first photo and to Pussycat for the other. Recreating that picture was more difficult than it would seem.

In November of 1982, long after the van Nouhuyses had returned to California, Hurricane Iwa struck Kauai. It was the worst hurricane to strike the state in decades.

Important Shoe Update!

2007-04-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

If you're confused about why this picture is here, read the previous post and comments.

Has Anyone Seen my Shoes?

2007-03-31T23:14:00.000-07:00

Perhaps life on Kauai is simple but there is one thing that is definitely more complicated. Move to Kauai and you can throw away most of your clothes. Formal attire just gets moldy in your closet. Rain gear would seem to be in order but most people just allow themselves to get wet and figure they will dry out later when the sun comes out. Jackets, sweaters, scarves –I don’t even remember what they look like. (I had a Twilight Zone experience the other day in the grocery store when a worker emerged from the refrigerated area in a full snowsuit). Shoes, however, are the notable exception to this trend. With so many different environments for tootsies to roam, wet, dry, sandy, muddy, I’ve found myself acquiring a variety of footwear.

Consider the picture above, at 12 o’clock the trusty tennis shoe, my default choice living on the mainland. I hardly ever wear them now. To its right, my all-vegan, Italian hiking boots, good ankle support and well suited to trails that are no too slippery and when you are carrying a lot of weight. At three o’clock Hawaii’s universal footwear. Available at grocery stores for three dollars a pair, you’ll find a pile of them at every front door. Next we have the sandal that would SEEM to be ideally suited to life in Hawaii but for two fatal flaws: they are harder to put on and take off than their cheaper cousins, the flip-flops, and while they are great for crossing streams they are a poor choice for hiking in muddy conditions since slime finds it way in between your foot and the sandal so that your feet slip around IN your shoe.

At six o’clock is the newest and most exciting addition to my shoe family: Spiked tabis (TAA-bees) imported from Japan. With a sole like a soccer cleat and uppers like something a ninja might wear, these babies offer unparalleled traction, the perfect choice for rock hopping up mossy streams or rappelling down waterfalls. To the left, the more traditional tabis with a felt bottom to grip slippery rocks. (I got them before I got the super Japanese tabis.) The debate between split-toed tabis and non-split-toed tabis is beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice to say there are strong opinions on both sides.

At nine o’clock you see my neoprene wet suit booties. In California I surfed in these but here that is happily not necessary. Now I use them only for snorkeling and Scuba diving. And finally my steel-toed, vegan safety boots from the UK which I wear at work. They’re hot but well suited to their purpose.

So you can see that my feet are well taken care of here which is ironic because a lot of the time I just don’t wear any shoes at all!

Spawn

2007-03-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

I have read with interest recent thoughtful blog entries by Judy and Ramblinmatt on the subject of procreation. To breed or not to breed seems to be the question. When I was a kid I don’t think I comprehended that having children was optional. It seemed like all the adults I knew had kids and of course all the kids I knew had parents. Looking back I realize that there were some adults I knew that didn’t have children but somehow that didn’t enter my consciousness. It seems very natural to have children. We’re just animals like any other and the instinct to reproduce is about as strong as any we have. On the other hand maybe we’re not just like other animals. We live in an arguably more complex world and we have choices about how we live our lives. I humbly submit that we also have a greater capacity to reflect on our choices than say, an amoeba.

I used to eat meat. Now I choose not to. I don’t consider vegetarianism to more or less natural than omnivorism. It’s just a choice I make based on my own desires and beliefs. Maybe choices about having a family are similar. It would seem to be the natural thing to do but the fact is many people don’t want children and it seems crazy to suggest they should have them anyway just because it fits within some perception of the natural order of things.

So if it’s not about what’s natural then the question is about what you WANT. I know several people who’ve had kids recently and seem very happy about being parents. I know other people who have not yet had kids but clearly want to. I have to admit I don’t really understand that feeling. When I see my sister with her daughters or my other friends with their children I appreciate the kids and how the parents’ lives seem to have been enriched but I don’t think to myself, “Gee, I wish I had on of those.” In fact, I’m a little surprised that anyone would choose parenthood.

To put it another way, I don’t want kids, at least not at this point in my life. I guess it’s an area where each person should just follow his or her heart so I might not feel this way forever, but its kind of a moot point since I’m missing a key part of the whole baby-making operation. No matter how much I love my surfboard, I can’t impregnate it.
In closing I say yeah for parents! Yeah for babies! Yeah for pets!

Time Zone

2007-03-12T23:22:00.000-07:00

Of all of my possessions, the oldest may be my clock-radio. I don’t remember getting it but it is at least 20 years old. It may not be so unusual to keep something of sentimental value for many decades. Most of my belongings of that type sit in dark boxes in my parents’ basement over 2000 miles away. But my faithful clock radio sits on my desk next to my bed where it reliably tics away the seconds and wakes me up in the morning just as it has done for so many years. The shelf life of electronic devices has become so short it seems as though your average mosquito will live to see at least three new formats for recording music but the clock fulfills such a simple need that cannot really be improved upon. Every time I packed up my belongings I reasoned that I would certainly still need an alarm clock and the one I had was as good as any so I might as well take it with me.

Well, maybe it’s not quite as good as any anymore. The buttons for setting the time and alarm have sunk into the clock so they can no longer be pressed without the aid of a tool. I use a bent paper clip or a pen. Power outages are frequent here in Haolewood and resetting the clock can be tedious, but it still works.

When I was a kid I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. Knowing how long I had been lying in bed not sleeping made me worry more which only made it harder for me to get to sleep. It was important that I NOT know what time it was but I couldn’t manage to avoid looking at the clock. Sometimes I would just turn it around but later I taped a piece of orange construction paper so that it hung down and covered the clock’s display and could be folded up during the day when there was no need to hide the time. That orange construction paper stayed with the clock for years. Mostly I sleep pretty well these days and if I wake up and don’t want to know what time it is I just don’t look.

The buttons are getting worse. A day will come when I’m no longer able to set the clock and I’ll have to replace it but my curiosity about just how long an cheap clock radio can last compels me to continue this experiment until the bitter end.

Wrokers of the world unite!

2007-03-05T22:47:00.000-08:00

I am now a member of the Hawaii Carpenters Union. My knowledge of unions is informed primarily by what I have learned watching The Soppranos in which gangsters arrange for “no work” jobs where they sit around in lawn chairs all day and draw a union pay check. This is gonna be great!

The D-word

2007-03-02T18:39:00.000-08:00

One year ago today a judge in Alameda County declared me officially divorced. Divorce sucks. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Getting married is easy: a few papers at the courthouse, a small fee and your hitched. Anything else you do to mark the occasion is what you choose. Weddings can become huge projects but they are (hopefully) joyfully chosen. Divorce may be chosen, but there’s sure nothing joyous about it. There’s just no quick fix to a broken marriage. The quickest the state of California will give you a divorce is six months from the day you file which was four months after my separation.

In the midst of my marriage ending, moving out on my own and selling our house I realized that I knew almost nothing about how divorce works and I had to start learning right away. I knew plenty of divorced people but it’s not something people often talk about. How do you file for divorce? How do you divide property? Do you need a lawyer? How much is this going to cost and who’s going to pay for it? How do you manage finances while separated but not yet divorced? What happens if you don’t agree on how to proceed or what the final terms of the divorce should be? I read books. I asked questions from people who knew. I got professional help in filling out and filing legal documents and I paid a lawyer $300 and hour to answer my questions. That was some of the best money I’ve ever spent.

What I learned was that you either come to an agreement on the terms of your divorce or you fight it out in court and let a judge decide. Everything I read and everyone I spoke to emphasized how undesirable the second option was for everyone. So what was left was to hash things out with the one person with whom I had realized I couldn’t hash things out. But that’s what we did. It was no fun. It was probably the most unfun thing I’ve ever had to do. There was so much bad feeling and the good will had been exhausted. All that was left was self-interest and a shared desire to get it over with.

As divorces go it could have been much worse. We had no children and since we both had similar incomes there was no question of spousal support. It pretty much just came down to money and the law was pretty clear on how it would be divided. But there were still hard feelings and angry words. At times it seemed like we could get through it and still be friends but I’m sorry to say that that didn’t happen. The best thing about the divorce process was that it eventually ended and there was no unfinished business.

Having said all that divorce was the best thing that could have possibly happened. It’s a great irony that what I feared so much and tried so hard to avoid may have been the best thing that has ever happened to me. Letting go is hard to do but I found that everything I needed to make the changes in my life was there for me. There were people to support me and there were answers for me when I didn’t know what to do. When I got married I felt CERTAIN mine would not be among the fifty percent of marriages that end in divorce but I learned that even when things turn out drastically different from how they were planned a lot of good can come out of it.

The Simple Life?

2007-02-14T22:37:00.000-08:00

It was never a conscious goal of mine to simplify my life but that is the direction it has gone and I find that it suits me. I’m not in a relationship. I own no property. I’m fortunate enough to have a job that requires hard work while I’m at work, but demands little of my attention when I’m done. I dispatched with many of my possessions and left others in my parents’ basement and I moved somewhere underpopulated and far away from just about any other place. I didn’t seek any of these things; that’s just how it worked out.

It’s remarkable how simple my life has become. Sometimes the biggest decision I make in a day is which surfboard I want to take out. I sleep well at night. Even in the tsunami dreams I’ve been having lately I can see the danger clearly and seem to be able to get to higher ground without much trouble. Life is slow paced on Kauai. Sometimes after work the whole crew just sits down on the plastic chairs under our sun/rain shelter and hangs around. No one’s in a hurry to get anywhere.

It’s been said many times and many ways that acquiring more things is but a dead-end off of the pathway to happiness but I find myself inclined to chime in anyway. Having less things is not only just as good. It’s BETTER. Life in Hawaii supports that position. Almost every social situation is casual and the weather doesn’t change much so you don’t need many clothes. Things you do have tend to get rusty or mildewed so it’s really more trouble than its worth.

Just how simple CAN life get? And how simple would I want it? My life may not always be this simple. Things happen after all and I might even make conscious choices that make my life more complicated. Wasn’t it the Buddha that said desire is the source of suffering? Getting what we desire doesn’t bring us peace because there is always more to desire. It’s only in letting go of desire that we can find peace. I wouldn’t say that I feel at peace with my simple life; I feel a little bit uncomfortable actually. I’m not really used to it. But I’m working on it.

Brrrr!

2007-01-16T22:23:00.000-08:00

It’s come to our attention here at Planet Haolewood that there has been some cold weather on the mainland. Now we all know that temperature alone does not fully convey the reality of the weather experience. That’s why meteorologists came up with the concept of wind chill, which as most probably know, takes into consideration the added chilling effect of wind during cold weather. Then there’s the ‘heat index’ which takes into account the humidity to give a better idea of how hot it FEELS on a muggy day. While many people don’t think of Hawaii as ever getting really cold it can sometimes FEEL cold to those who live here and whose bodies are unaccustomed to drops in temperature. In order to convey the feeling of the weather as Hawaii residents experience it, we at Planet Haolewood have come up with a system we like to call the Hawaii Temperature Index. This is how it works: think of 70 degrees as zero degrees so that if the temperature were to fall down to say, 67 degrees, you would instead say the Hawaii temperature index was 3 degrees below zero. I think that gives a better picture of how we on Hawaii truly suffer when it gets cold. Now instead of thinking of us in Hawaii as basking in the sun and enjoying a carefree life while you on the mainland huddle inside and wait out ferocious winter storms, you can see that really we are all in the same boat.

My friends, I feel your pain. But together we can make it through the winter cold. I want to help so I have come up with a list of practical suggestions for what to do when it REALLY gets cold.

1. Start by turning off any fans that you may have on. No sense it bringing more outside air in if its cold out.

2. Close the door. (I don’t mean the screen door. I mean the ACTUAL door –with the lock and the handle and stuff) that will stop air flowing from outside.

3. Put on a shirt.

4. If you’re going into the ocean whether to surf, swim of snorkel, consider wearing a wetsuit. Sure the water’s not that cold, but if the breeze picks up you might get chilly without it.

I have found those four measures are more than adequate to deal with even the most extreme cold weather. However, for those of you who are especially sensitive to cold here are some additional measures you can take.

1. Try closing the windows. If it gets stuffy you can always open them again.

2. Put on long pants.

3. Wear closed-toed shoes. In extreme cases you may want to put on socks.

4. If you get cold in bed, you can put another sheet over yourself. If it gets really cold use a blanket. If YOU feel cold but your bedmate thinks you’re crazy you could try wearing pajamas. (anyone who has to go to such lengths probably IS crazy!)

If all that doesn’t keep you warm I don’t know what will! On a more serious note, I want to talk a little about global warming and our responsibilities as citizens of the earth. I realize that some people have become convinced of the necessity of artificially heating their homes. The people of Hawaii have set an example to the world by voluntarily choosing not to heat our homes with fossil fuels. In fact our homes don’t even have heaters! You may think that you will “freeze to death” if you don’t turn on your heater but people have been living here for hundreds of years without heaters and no one has ever frozen to death. So come on people! More and more of us have traded in gas-guzzlers for hybrids, why do so many continue to cling to their heaters? Just think of all the carbon emissions we could prevent if the whole world would follow the example that Hawaii so humbly sets. So suck it up, people! The next time you start feeling sorry for yourself about how cold and miserable you are just think about me here at Planet Haolewood heading out to go surfing in the middle of winter. Do you hear me complaining?

A Hindu Monastery in Kauai?

2007-01-10T15:25:00.000-08:00

Well, the answer to that question is yes. I wouldn’t have much to blog about if it were no, would I? It seems unlikely; how many Hindus are there on Kauai anyway? I don’t know but at a minimum there are the twenty monks that inhabit Kauai’s Hindu Monastery and they are building a temple out of hand carved stone that may last over a thousand years. It seems that in 1968 Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami came to Kauai and had a vision instructing him to found a monastery there. It’s located in a lush mountainous area near a beautiful river and they have tours once a week.

As I stepped into the monastery gardens I felt as though I was no longer in Kauai but had been transported to India. A friendly monk showed us around and explained some of the basics of Hinduism. The natural beauty of the are makes it an extraordinary place but the really amazing part was the San Marga Iraivan Temple which is still under construction. In 1991 a crew of 70 began hand carving granite stones in Bangalore. Ten years later the first of these stones was laid in Kauai. A crew of six more stone carvers fine tunes the stones and assembles them. They project the temple will be complete in 2010 and include 4000 stones. The beauty and intricate detail of the stone work, performed only with iron chisels, is astonishing. Next time you are in Kauai, don’t miss it.

Something Poetic About the Moon

2007-01-04T13:56:00.000-08:00

In the last year I’ve taken a renewed interest in the moon. It’s always been there, but I just seem to notice it more. This change undoubtedly has a lot to do with living in Kauai. There aren’t so many lights around and when it’s dark, it’s dark. Unless, of course the full moon is shinning like a spotlight as it was last night. I thought of someone running across the prison yard and getting caught in the bright light from the guard tower, only the moon would be more likely to help by lighting the prisoner’s way then to try to foil an escape.

It was about a year ago when I was on Kauai on vacation when I first re-noticed the moon. The moon over Hanalei Bay is something very special to see. In fact I think someone wrote a song about it, but when I returned home to California I found that the moon had not lessened its grip on me. All those city lights may drown some of the dimmer stars but they are no match for the moon. And so I gazed at the same moon that inspires songs in Hanalei and everywhere else and made the decision to move.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against the sun. We own everything to the sun. Without it there would be no life on Earth. The sun is all business; it comes up; it does its job and allows us to do ours and then goes down. It’s like a co-worker who always shows up on time and does their job well. We could still have life on earth if it weren’t for the moon. Tides would be much more moderate and poets would have less material to work with but we would get by. On the other hand some planets have many moons. Perhaps there’s an alien on a planet with seven moons writing a blog right now and wondering what life on a planet with only one moon would be like. Our moon is actually kind of boring compared with many heavenly bodies. It has no color and without any atmosphere it always looks the same. But there’s plenty of change here on earth. I like the moon the way it is.

Sometimes when I get home at night and get out of the car in my driveway I pause and watch the moon. There’s nothing to see that I haven’t seen before and if the moon and I could communicate I’m not sure what there would be to say but I watch anyway.

Mele Kalikimaka!

2006-12-25T18:47:00.000-08:00

'Tis best to neither give nor receive

2006-12-09T11:27:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I told everyone in my family that I wasn’t going to get them any Christmas gifts and I didn’t expect them to get me any and every time the season rolls on in I’m so glad that I did. I’m not talking about fewer gifts or just small gifts I mean NO gifts whatsoever. What a relief. No more going to the mall. No more trying to figure out what to get someone and in the end settling for something that I knew was lame, but at least it was something. Everyone in my family has pretty much everything they need or want, maybe even much more than they need or want. Of course, there are those “gifted” gifters out there, people who excel at choosing great gifts and get satisfaction from it, but I am definitely not one of them. I don’t think I’m a selfish person; my talents and inclinations simply lie elsewhere.

My family had a mixed reaction. Some of them liked the idea and some did not. No one has followed my example and they continue to give both to each other and to me. I don’t mind them giving to each other. It was never my intention to convert anyone to my point of view. However the fact that they continue to give to me at first made me feel a little odd. But now I just appreciate the gifts I get and the fact that everyone seems to tolerate my rather unusual decision.

Now before you call me a grinch let me make it clear that I’m not against Christmas. I like getting together with friends and family, eating, celebrating, etc… I like Christmas music and Christmas trees. I don’t care that it’s a Christian holiday and I’m not a Christian. Any excuse to celebrate is fine with me. I’m not even against exchanging gifts if it makes people happy. It’s just that it doesn’t make me happy. It’s more of a personal preference than a political statement. Happy Holidays!

Does high school really never end?

2006-12-05T21:15:00.001-08:00

Perhaps you've heard "High School Never Ends" by Bowling for Soup. My question is are they right?

[For those of you who haven't heard it the lyrics go like this]

Four years you think for sure
That’s all you've got to endure
All the total dicks
All the stuck up chicks
So superficial, so immature
Then when you graduate
You take a look around and you say HEY WAIT
This is the same as where I just came from
I thought it was over
Aw that’s just great

The whole damn world is just as obsessed
With who‘s the best dressed and who‘s having sex,
Who‘s got the money, who gets the hunnie's,
Who‘s kinda cute and who‘s just a mess
And you still don’t have the right look
And you don’t have the right friends
Nothing changes but the faces, the names, and the trends
High school never ends

Check out the popular kids
You’ll never guess what Jessica did
How did Mary Kate lose all that weight
And Katie had a baby so I guess Tom’s straight
And the only thing that matters
Is climbing up that social ladder
Still care about your hair and the car you drive
Doesn’t matter if you’re sixteen or thirty-five

Reese Witherspoon,
She’s the prom queen
Bill Gates,
Captain of the chess team
Jack Black, the clown
Brad Pitt, the quarterback
Seen it all before
I want my money back

The whole damn world is just as obsessed
With who’s the best dressed and who’s having sex,
Who’s in the clubs and who’s on the drugs,
Who’s throwing up before they digest
And you still don’t have the right look
And you don’t have the right friends
And you still listen to the same shit you did back then
High school never ends

High school never ends

The whole damn world is just as obsessed
With who‘s the best dressed and who‘s having sex,
Who‘s got the money, who gets the hotties,
Who‘s kinda cute and who‘s just a mess
And I still don’t have the right look
And I still have the same three friends
And I’m pretty much the same as I was back then
High school never ends

High school never ends

High school never ends

Here we go again

Kalalau

2006-11-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

Come with me on a journey, won’t you? A journey of the mind through time and space. Oh, come on it won’t kill you. Our journey begins in Europe oh let’s say a few centuries ago. Things are changing. New ideas float around in the air like cotton wood fluff on a summer day. But the creative people who want to pursue these ideas often meet resistance from the powers that be. What will they do when their ideas are so revolutionary that experimentation is squashed. There is a way out. They go to America. Whether they’re religious fanatics with visions of creating their own utopia, or their imaginations tend more toward mercantile innovation here is a place for the dreamers of Europe to come and try something new. And so they came and that was how our country got its start.

And when it started to get crowded along the Atlantic Coast and the dreamers started to feel a little stifled they headed out into the wilderness once again pursuing their dreams be they mad or mundane. And finally this tide of romantics and radicals swept all the way to California where it just kept flowing. For generations those who wanted to make their fortune, start a cult, become a celebrity, lead a revolution, create a new operating system or pursue any other kind of dream came to the shores of the Pacific and got busy for better or for worse. And so you’ll find a collection of some of the most creative people from all over the world in California.

But while most set about concocting new endeavors for humanity. Some just stood and stared out across the biggest expanse of ocean in the world and felt maybe they weren’t ready to stop going west. Their spiritual ancestors had begun surfing a wave hundreds of years ago that the dreamers of yore rode right across the Atlantic and which in turn had been caught by the American visionaries who heard the call of “go west young man!” And for some California is just not far enough west.

Everyday someone somewhere gets on a plane and moves to Hawaii. Maybe to Maui or maybe to Honolulu but the dreamiest of the dreamers surely go as far west as the can to Kauai. The airport on Kauai lies on the east part of the island and as the road winds around it leaves the biggest of the towns and heads to the green and wild North. Here you’ll find Princeville home of the Planet Haolewood World Headquarters, where the most conservative of the dreamers have made a home with golf courses and fine dinning. A little further down and the road becomes more narrow and windy. There are no gas stations, no postal service, houses sit high on pillars to protect them from Tsunamis. Finally your cell phone service fades away and you find yourself in a parking lot at The End of the Road. And what do you see at 7:30 in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving?

Why it’s me! The chairman and CEO of Planet Haolewood himself. I’ve got a backpack fully loaded with camping gear. Where the Road West ends the foot path begins and I’ve come to hike it. Won’t you come with me? You come this far already; why stop now?

The missing link in the road that would circle Kauai is called the Na Pali coast and the Kalalau trail is the path that traverses it. Na Pali is Hawaiin for “the cliffs” and looking at the verticle landscape from the below it’s almost impossible to imagine how a trail could be built. For 11 miles the trail climbs up and down and weaves in and out of steep costal canyons and makes for the most spectacular hike I’ve ever been on. It’s narrow, steep, rocky, muddy, poorly maintained and provides a challenge to even the most seasoned hiker.

Even if it led nowhere it would be a hike worth traveling the globe for (as many do) but at the end of the path lies the idyllic Kalalau Valley and nearby Kalalau Beach. Beyond the beach the cliffs become impassible. This is the End of the Path that began at the End of the Road. The Kalalau Valley is surrounded by cliffs that make it impossible to reach except via the strenuous trail I hiked or by sea and harsh surf makes beach landings impossible most of the year.

If Kalalu’s beauty and remoteness don’t bring out the romantic dreamer in you I don’t know what will. And what about those dreamers who have followed that trail all the way west? They are here: camped on the beach or up in the woods living a simple life getting by on what they could carry in and what they can gather or grow in gardens hidden in the valley. The state tries to evict them and confiscates their belongings but still they come and stay. Maybe it’s hard to go back once you have come that far and discovered a place so beautiful and seemingly so suited to human habitation.

So where does the road west lead to? The New World? California? Hawaii? Kalalau? I’ll bet everyone who has traveled it has a different answer and maybe the final destination ended up being not so important as the experience of traveling the path itself.

[Sorry, no pictures... problems uploading... use your imagination!]

Centipedes and Interior Design

2006-11-14T22:01:00.000-08:00

My landlord’s wife recently observed upon entering my house, “This place looks like a bachelor pad.” She may have had a point. I share the house with one other single male and we both share a certain –how shall I say this?- -lack of concern- with décor. After all, it’s very convenient to store your surfboards in the living room especially when there’s not a lot of furniture to compete with for space. There IS a couch and a comfy one at that. There’s a table which has an exciting kind of rock to it when you lean on it and only three of the eight chairs are broken. There’s no artwork on the walls, not even a poster of a scantily clad woman to complete the effect, but there are some screws in the wall so that if we ever decided to hang something we would be half way there.

What’s really remarkable is our collection of cups and glasses. There must be at least 50 of all shapes and sizes. No two match. It’s as if someone went around collecting all the drinking receptacles that didn’t sell at garage sales and brought them here. While it’s great to have a variety of vessels to choose from when you pour yourself some water, I wish we had more than two bowls. If anybody wants to film one of those reality shows where they re-do (or in this case just do) your home décor this might be the place work on. Otherwise we probably won’t be doing any fancy entertaining.
Of course we do have lots of guests of the insect variety. The ants are so firmly established and seem so small and harmless that I hardly notice them anymore. Just brush them off whatever your eating and chow down. I’m not so nonchalant about the cockroaches. Have you ever considered that cockroaches don’t actually do any harm. They don’t bite you and they seem to make an effort to stay out of your way, remaining hidden most of the time and only coming out at night. Their only real crime is being hideous. It’s sort of like The Phantom of the Opera. Someone should write a musical about that. Nevertheless, I swat them with a rolled up magazine whenever I see them. Their numbers seem to be diminishing but I don’t know if that’s because of my killing spree or if I have all those cute little chirping geckos to thank.

I’m just grateful that the centipedes haven’t found our little love shack. They are definitely NOT harmless. I’m not squeamish but I recently heard some centipede stories so bad that I’m not going to detail them here out of sensitivity to some of my centipede-phobic readers. Suffice to say these stories revolved around the centipede’s apparent instinct to seek out the warmth of the human body.

So maybe centipedes aren’t all that bad after all. They like to snuggle. And this photograph I took actually shows the centipede’s caring and maternal nature as it gathers together its mass of wriggling off-spring which I had scattered when I poked them with a stick. Maybe it’s that just that feminine touch that my house is missing.

Rare Double Albino Sighting on Kauai

2006-11-14T21:02:00.000-08:00

Hawaii 101

2006-11-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

It has come my attention that some people who do not live in the Pacific Ocean may be a bit confused about the geography of Hawaii. Since I recently had the opportunity to travel to another island let, allow me to educate you. The four largest islands in Hawaii are Kauai, Oahu, Maui and Hawaii. There are other islands but this is Hawaii 101 so let’s just keep to the basics, shall we? “But Mr. Haolewood,” you ask, “you just said that one of the four largest islands in Hawaii is Hawaii. I’m so confused!” A very understandable question and one which drives to the heart of many misunderstandings about Hawaii. The largest of the Hawaiian islands is called Hawaii just as the state is called Hawaii. In an effort to clear up the confusion the island of Hawaii is generally referred to as “The Big Island.” The Big Island is the most volcanically active as you can see from the picture of steam vents that I took during my recent visit there.

But just because it’s big doesn’t mean a lot of people live there. In fact far more people live on Oahu than all the other islands combined. Oahu is home to Pearl Harbor, the famous beach Waikiki and the state capitol, Honolulu. So if you are still confused just remember The Big Island is the largest, Oahu is the most populated, Maui is the whitest and Kauai is the best.

We've Got a Jumper!

2006-11-01T16:22:00.000-08:00

I think I have found my recreational soul mate. Have you ever traveled with someone who had different interests than you? You want to go to an art gallery and your companion is dying to play golf. Your traveling buddy has a keen interest in ancient Mayan ruins but you would rather go parasailing. It can be an awkward situation if time is short and there are only so many things you can do. Well imagine the opposite. You want to go surfing and your friend says “let’s go, dude.” You say you want to jump off cliffs into the ocean and he responds, “how high?” You suggest a 10 mile hike on an unmaintained trail through rain and mud so that you can wade through water filled tunnels with a headlamp to light your way and he tells you to lead the way. Well, I believe I have found such a kindred soul in a friend who I will call Neal-A.

Neal-A likes to jump off of things into water. So do I. Of course I’ve known him a long time so I was familiar with our shared interest. There’s a popular spot in Kauai known a Kipu Falls and the first time I visited it I thought to myself, “Neal-A would love this place.” I was not wrong. A tall tree towers over the deep pool at the base of Kipu Falls. A rope hanging from the tree makes for a great way to swing over the pool and jump in. It’s not for everyone but for those brave enough to try, it’s an exciting ride, thrilling enough for most. Neal-A, however, swung on the rope swing only once before he was climbing the tree from which the rope hung. While others were swinging and letting go of the rope so that they fell from the bottom of the rope into the water below, Neal-A was jumping from the TOP of the rope. We visited Kipu twice during his stay.

But what kind of “jumping tour” of Kauai would be complete with only freshwater locations? Afterall, Kauai is surrounded by ocean. So we headed off to Shipwrecks Beach where we played in the waves and contemplated the nearby cliffs where people are known to jump into the surf below. After talking to a jumper who we had seen take the plunge we were ready to try it ourselves. Neal-A went first. I think the picture says it all. After jumping a current carried us gently back toward the beach where our friends watched and we had only a short distance to swim and a few surfers to avoid before we were back on the dry land and ready to go again.

Who's Next?

2006-10-29T12:15:00.000-08:00

Some people visit Kauai and decide not to leave. As I was saying in my last blog entry I have some friends that go way back but none goes further back than the one sleeping on my couch right now, who I will call Pussycat. I was so young that I can’t remember meeting her but it must have been around the first or second grade when we were both students at Rivendell, a one-room, parent-run co-operative school with about 15 students K-6. It made Peninsula School, which we both later attended after Rivendell expired, seem large and conservative by comparison. It was not the kind of school where one learned to spell very well but how many one-room school houses put on performances of The Ramayana? Or cancel all classes and devote an entire day to roller skating?. Perhaps it was those early experiences that gave Pussycat her gift for thinking outside the box.

And for most people moving from Estonia to Kauai might seem like a big deal but for her it seems natural. The day she arrived was warm as always but somewhat rainy and not so nice by Kauai standards. Even so, within 24 hours she was looking at rentals in the paper and now she has signed a lease, re-scheduled her return flight acquired several appliances and applied for jobs in the area. In all the years I’ve known her I’ve never seen her so excited; it’s like someone who has just fallen in love.

Who's That Sleeping on my Floor?

2006-10-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

How many people do you know who are still friends with people they met in college? How about people they met in high school? Grade school? What would it be like to have a group of friends that you have been close to your entire adult life and most of your childhood? Most people I know don’t know the answer to that question but I do.

Of course, this won’t come as news to most of my readers because you are those friends. Why do some friends drift apart while others stick together or inexplicably return after long absences? I have no idea, but I consider myself very, very lucky to have the friends that I do. It’s like having a second family.

A Performance

2006-10-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Kauai, come on by and here my chorus sing.

1982 Family Vacation

2006-10-08T00:15:00.000-07:00

Each of the students in my eighth grade class (a group whose members probably compose the majority of Planet Haolewood’s audience) wrote a short paragraph in our school year book that was supposed to sum up how we felt about our cozy little school. I chose to relate a story about how in the summer after 4th grade my teacher instructed each of us to write a letter while school was out, photocopy it and mail it to everyone else in the class. That way each of us would receive 20 letters over the summer. Most of the class did not complete the assignment (you know who you are, people! I’m still waiting for that letter…) and of those who did I was apparently the only one who sent a copy to our teacher, Roger. On the first day of the next school year Roger thanked me and gave me a box on pencils to take with me as I set out to begin life in “the upper school,” which is what we called 5th-8th grade.

In the letter I wrote about my family’s trip to Kauai and about our hike to a beach. While we were at the beach it rained so much that the small stream we had crossed to get there had swollen to a raging torrent. When it was time to leave we had no choice but to cross the stream again and risk being swept out to sea. I held my dad’s hand tightly and I remember being very scared but we all made it ok. That was 24 years ago.

No one in my family remembered the name of the beach but it’s a small island and I have been able to figure out where it was. I’ve been there several times and crossed that very stream on days when it was not flooded. At the age of 10 trying to imagine what I would be doing when I was 34 is something that never would have occurred to me. Had someone asked me I probably would have responded with an indifferent “I dunno” and run off to play in the ocean. Where will I be in another 24 years? I dunno… I’m going surfing.

Is there something in the water here?

2006-10-03T00:37:00.000-07:00

Kauai is fertile ground for the imagination. Like the non-native plants that quickly spread their vines and roots as soon as they arrive here so the minds of humans, who are, after all, just as non-native as the Coqui Tree Frog seem to sprout fantastic branches that would surely grow more modestly in other climates. Just try lying on a Kauaian beach and starring up into the sky with the hypnotic sound of the surging surf singing to you like some kind of primordial and formless mermaid sometime and see where your mind goes. You might be surprised. It’s suddenly seems not so impossible that a magic dragon might frolic on over and invite you to play even if you haven’t been smoking Pakalolo.

We’re a long way from anywhere out here. Even the other Hawaiian Islands are not visible on the horizon. While there is a community college on the island, institutions of higher learning and governmental authorities seem far away. The need to verify facts that normally tethers the mind’s fancies seems to have lost its grip. And of course, all the other inhabitants of this island’s minds have been steeping in the sun for various lengths of time so you can’t count on them to reign in your imagination. Like a rumor at a church luncheon whatever story emerges from the creative Kauai mind is likely to be spread around and even amplified by all the other folks here.

A huge mountain dominates the landscape on Kauai’s North Shore. Most days its top is hidden in clouds but on those days when the mists part its towering peak and the waterfall issuing forth from a cleft just below the summit provide a stunning sight. I’ve asked several people, some of whom have lived here their entire lives, what the name of that mountain is and none of them knew. Would the power of the sight be somehow diminished by people knowing the name? I have no explanation.

But while no one seems to know the name of the enormous mountain in our own backyard, they “know” a lot of other truths that seems to have eluded the knowledgeable just about everywhere else in the world. In my short time here I have heard some interesting home spun theories here. One day I observed some SUVs equipped with radar paraphernalia in a local park. I asked someone about it and was told that when VIPs such as The Clinton Family visit, which has been known to happen, these vehicles were stationed here to monitor possible vessels approaching into Hanalei Bay. That sounded incredible to me but in a time when we are being asked to surrender toothpaste before boarding an aircraft anything seems possible. As I approached one of the vehicles the man inside considerately turned off the radar (which might have knocked off my head had I gotten too close) and invited me inside to get a look at the research he was doing on sea birds for the state of Hawaii. He talked to me for a few minutes and then told me he had to get back to work as a new group of birds had appeared on his screen.

I talked to someone else who told me that he had been watching the ocean and weather conditions for several years and had observed that each year winter arrived a little later and this had been going on for so long that the seasons had now almost completely reversed themselves.

A friend of mine who used to own a business here told me that local some local residents believed that he was using his business as a front so he could sell marijuana. Others thought the business was a cover and that he was actually a CIA agent sent to investigate pot farmers. He assured me there was no truth to either story.

If enough people believe something does that make it true?

Miraculous New Weight Loss Plan that REALLY WORKS!

2006-09-21T21:46:00.000-07:00

Do you want to shed some of those unwanted pounds? Are you gullible? Is your self-esteem so low that you are vulnerable to unscrupulous quacks selling hopelessly unrealistic “miracle solutions?” Then look no further, my friend because today by some freak stroke of good luck you have stumbled upon a miraculous new weight loss plan that inexplicably succeeds where every single other plan has failed. And the best part is that you don’t have to buy anything, change your diet, your exercise habits or change anything about your life at all for that matter. And what’s more it will SAVE you money. That’s right: eat exactly the same diet that got you fat in the first place, exercise no more than you do now –even if you do nothing at all but watch television- and watch in amazement as the fat simply vanishes before your eyes –all without spending a dime. In fact, you’ll SAVE money.

I’m sure you’re dying to know the details of this incredible weight loss program but before I describe it to you I want to tell you about myself. I’m not a doctor, dietician, psychiatrist, or guru. In fact, I have no training or expertise whatsoever. I’ve never lost weight using this program nor do I know anyone else who has which is why it’s so amazing that this incredible plan REALLY WORKS!

So how does it work? Let me tell you how I discovered this incredible weight loss process. Last winter I was remodeling a house in a particularly shady dark little valley in Northern California where it tended to get a little cold. All the windows and doors had been torn out so I was working all day in the cold. Everyday I would come home FAMISHED. I ate huge dinners. In anticipation of my hungry days I started eating bigger breakfasts and still I was hungry all the time. I couldn’t get enough to eat because my body was burning so many calories just to keep warm. What do you suppose I found when I moved to Hawaii? You guessed it. My appetite diminished dramatically. Even though I am just as active if not more so I need fewer calories because the temperature is higher.

So how can my experience help you shed those extra flabs of fat? Those of you who live in a climate where heating your home is necessary simply TURN DOWN YOUR THERMOSTAT and do nothing else differently. Of course you must not eat more. If you increase your caloric intake you’ll cancel the effects of lowering the temperature in your home. How can I be so sure the miraculous plan works even though I’ve never tried it? It’s the laws of physics, people. For every action there is an equal and opposite REaction. What goes up must come down. Every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force inversely proportional to the square of the circumference of your hips. Or something like that. Like I said, I’m not psychiatrist. It’s not important why or how it works or even WEATHER it works. Nothing can diminish for one moment the indisputable logic of my simple plan.

Of course, not only will you be loosing weight, you’ll be saving money on your heating bill. And not only will you be saving money but you’ll also be saving the world from global warming AND reducing the United States’ dependency on foreign oil thus preserving the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, helping to bring peace to the Middle East, taking the umph out of the War on Terror, and restoring our nations tarnished image around the world! Little Iraqi babies will be named after you by parents overwhelmed with gratitude for your role in bringing an end to the bloodshed in that far away land. And best of all you will look better than you do now.

So as the chill of fall approaches and you find yourself brushing up on the directions printed on the inside flap of your thermostat just remember my amazing and simple idea and ask yourself, “could that actually WORK?”

The Electric Green Flash Test

2006-09-17T23:10:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve been watching a lot of sunsets and I’ve learned a few things. The sunset is much more than just the moment when the sun drops below the horizon. Actually the sun setting is really just a opening act for the real show of colors that begins AFTER the sun has set, a show which may go on for a good half an hour. The area where the sun set glows yellow and orange like a bonfire left to burn out, but as the show goes on any clouds in the rest of the sky light up with a whole range of pinks which brings me to the other thing I’ve learned about sunsets. They’re not just about that one spot on the horizon where the sun sets. A good sunset stretches out along the horizon and even touches the middle of the sky. I like to look at the pink clouds but I also notice the more subtle blue part of the show. As my gaze moves from the orange of the horizon upward I see yellow which fades and becomes the lightest of blues which in turn deepens until it is a nightfall violet high in the sky. And of course every sunset is unique.

And then there’s “The Green Flash,” a brief glimmer of green sometimes visible just after sunset. It may sound like a myth, but there is a scientific explanation for it which I won’t go into here. Brain swore he saw it. Sally said she didn’t. I thought I saw something but I described it as more of a dot than a flash. Maybe it’s like a Rorschach test. I think I’ll keep looking.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2006-09-15T00:35:00.000-07:00

Update! This link actually works now.
Click here to view Winterforest

The Kauai 2-Step

2006-09-10T13:15:00.000-07:00

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People Years, Part 2

2006-09-06T23:26:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I’ve oversimplified. Maybe the experience of passing time cannot be described by such a simple calculation. There are strange “time warps” in life during which the acceleration I’ve described seems to stop or even reverse itself. I recently experienced one myself actually. The first few days after I moved to Hawaii were so over stimulating that they seemed to last a VERY long time. I remember telling someone that I met I had only been on the island for 48 hours and when I thought about it later I realized that I had actually only been here 24 hours but I said 48 because it had seemed like such a long time. So strong was my feeling that I had been there for more than one day that even after I realized my mistake I had to carefully retrace where I had been and what I had done to convince myself that it had really been one day and not two.

The following days also passed slowly but not quite so slowly. Gradually they began to speed up to a pace equal to what I experienced before I moved. New experiences, big changes, traumatic events and crisis can cause these “time warps.” So maybe if I moved to a new state every day I could slow down my perception of the passage of time so much that I would become virtually immortal! But I don’t think I’m going to do that because while I might achieve life ever-lasting I’d be too exhausted to enjoy it. Besides surf conditions on the North side of Kauai usually pick up in the fall so I don’t want to move yet.

My experience (and I’m sure you have all had similar experiences of your own) suggests an explanation of why we feel time’s acceleration as we age. To a new born child every moment is filled with new things. Imagine how long even a single day must seem to them. As a child grows and as we adults age we become more and more familiar with our world. The implication would seem to be that in order to live a full life we should all be seeking out new experiences as we get older.

I’m all for doing new things and I’ve been known to try a few myself. It can make you feel more alive. I’m sometimes tempted to end a blog entry at a point when it makes a nice tidy conclusion like right about now. Life is short so make the best of it. Nothing wrong with that, right? But this time I’m going to resist temptation and ramble for at least a few more sentences because there’s something about that conclusion that rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to view the passage of time as something that needs to be resisted. Aging and the changes in the perception of time that go along with it are natural phenomena which every human experiences and they are going to eventually catch up with everyone form the time waster to the one who lives each day to the fullest. I guess what I’m saying is that to really live life to the fullest is to appreciate all its qualities, INCLUDING its fleeting nature and not in spite of it. So I say let the “people years” pass on by at whatever speed they do. We don’t know where we’re going anyway so why worry about how quickly or slowly we’re getting there.

People Years

2006-09-06T00:39:00.000-07:00

If you’ve been around on the planet for a few years you may have noticed that time seems to accelerate. When I was a kid and the holidays had ended I remember the year that stretched before me until the next holiday season seemed so long that it might as well have been infinite. But don’t those years go speeding by now? And doesn’t it seem as though each is shorter than the last? Things have sped up quite a bit since I was a kid and I’m only 34!

A few months ago I broached this topic as I ate dinner in an Ethiopian restaurant with my mother, father, aunt and uncle. Their ages range form the 60s to the 80s and they confirmed to me what I already suspected was true: the acceleration of the perceived passage of time continues throughout one’s life. If it seems fast to me at my tender age (at least compared with my fellow diners) imagine how the years must fly by for them!

Consider a 15 year old cat. It seems wrong to say that kitty is 15 years old, as if he were attending his first school dance and looking forward to getting his learning permit. He is a respected elder of the feline world. So we use cat years to express his age. We multiply by 5 or 7 or whatever it is and pronounce him 105. The math never seems to work out right but the concept rings true.

I submit that we need a similar conversion to describe our age in years as we actually perceive them. But calculating one’s age in “people years” requires a little more advanced math than simple multiplication. I haven’t actually worked it out and I think it involves calculus. So it there is someone out there is the blogosphere who can express this idea in a mathematical equation please post a comment.

So here’s how it works. I like to think that I am going to live to be 100 which means that I’m about 1/3 of the way done right now. But because my early years SEEMED to pass so slowly and the years ahead are going to go by even faster than I perceive them now in “people years” I’m already well passed the 1/3 mark. Realistically I’m probably passed the 1/2 mark. Let’s just say for the sake of argument that in “people years” I’m 60. That means that assuming that I live to be 100 the amount of time I’ve lived so far FEELS like about 3/5 of the amount of time my whole life will feel like by the time I die in 2072.

That’s a rather alarming thought isn’t it? My proposed equation really brings home the idea that life is short.

Gratuitous waterfall picture

2006-09-02T22:09:00.000-07:00

Six things I like about Kauai

2006-08-31T00:13:00.000-07:00

1. The Princeville (aka Haolewood) dump is open seven days a week until 5:30, it’s free and you never have to wait. Most dumps that I’ve been to charge by the ton, have long lines and inconvenient hours.

2. Surfing and current surf conditions are a legitimate topic of conversation. You will still be treated as an adult if you bring them up.

3. Call me crazy but I LIKE the tourists. Sure they create traffic jams and crowd the beaches but it’s kind of cool being around so many people who are so excited about being here.

4. Everyplace has its song: “New York, New York,” “I left my heart in San Francisco,” etc. But Hawaii has inspired virtually its own GENRE of songs. There are countless songs extolling the natural beauty and aloha of Hawaii. They are just like love songs except they are about a place instead of a lover and they make new ones and play them on the radio all the time.

5. You can say “dude” as much as you want without fear of not being taken seriously. “Dude” has always come naturally to my lips but I learned to suppress it in order to “pass” as the kind of person who does not say “dude.” No longer! You can also address someone as “brother” without sounding hokey.

6. I’ve probably seen more waterfalls and more rainbows in a few months than I had in my entire life before coming here.

Gone Hiking

2006-08-29T23:58:00.000-07:00

Bumper Stickers, Changing the World and Tow-in Surfing

2006-08-20T01:07:00.000-07:00

Before I moved to Hawaii I lived in Berkeley, California, the world capital of bumper stickers. In most places everyone is entitled to his or her point of view but in Berkeley it’s not enough just to have an opinion. What good is that? You’re not really in the spirit of things unless you distill your opinion into a few (preferably biting) words and paste them to the back of your car. But just one bumper sticker might warrant sideways glances from your neighbors; a true Berkelite couldn’t sleep at night until the whole back of their car forms a mosaic of provocative slogans so complete that a tailgater would have no clue as to the vehicle’s original color. Even those noble urban bicyclists who forgo fossil fuel in favor of pedal power are obliged to cover the frames of their bikes with conciseness raising slogans despite the fact that the only way to read them would be to place your disembodied head in a sort of orbit around the tubular frame.

But it’s hard to keep up. There’s always some new group of oppressed people whose plight really needs to be brought to the attention of those five or six people in town who may not have already heard about it. And the world is changing all the time. “Re-elect Carter” just doesn’t seem to speak to a younger generation. So in the interests of simplifying I have come up with a couple of good bumper sticker slogans that are timeless and general enough to capture the gist of any issue a citizen of Berkeley might want to draw attention to. Consider it my little gift to the city I once called home. I propose that the simple one word statement “Indignant” could replace the whole range of bumper stickers found in Berkeley. But if one statement seems almost TOO concise I’ll supply a few variations to round out the selection.

“More indignant than you” puts a little bit finer of a bead on the feeling many are trying to convey with their stick-on message. Or maybe “indignant about something more obscure than you” would capture the mood. For those who really want to bring home the message I suggest “indignant that you’re NOT indignant.”

My least favorite bumper sticker reads “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention.” I’m a well-educated, thoughtful and caring person whose consciousness of MANY issues has been raised and raised again. I am paying attention and sometimes I do feel outraged but things are the way they are and being in a perpetual state of outrage about them is not appealing to me nor does it help anything. I want to decrease the outrage and increase peace I feel. The paradox of change is that I have to accept the world for what it is before I can do anything to make it a better place. Surely the most lasting changes start not with outrage but with calm resolve.

If I gave the impression that I was about to unveil a master plan to bring about meaningful change to the world I apologize because that’s a little beyond the scope of this blog.

The bumper sticker I have seen the most of around here reads “GMO free Kauai.” But my favorite is “Eddie would Tow” which is a variation on the more commonly seen “Eddie would Go.” Both stickers refer to Eddie Aikau, a legendary Hawaiin beach lifeguard and big wave surfer who died in 1978. “Eddie would Go” simply reminds us to be fearless. Eddie would surf in almost any conditions regardless of how dangerous they might be, and so, it would seem to imply, should anyone who sees this bumper sticker. “Eddie would Tow” is a much more subtle argument. Tow-in surfing, in which surfers are pulled like water skiers by a jet ski into waves so big they might be impossible to surf conventionally, has only been around a few years and certainly did not exist during Eddie Aikau’s lifetime. Old school surfing purists consider tow-in surfing cheating and some believe in goes against the spirit of the sport. The “Eddie would Tow” bumper sticker implies not only how Eddie would have weighed in on this particular controversy of the surfing world, but in invoking the name of such a revered hero seeks to bolster the legitimacy of surfers who have found a way to “go big” that is comparable to the pioneers of big wave surfing’s first attempts to push the envelope of what was possible.

Maybe it’s just because it’s something new but I find it refreshing to live somewhere where bumper sticker dialogs revolve around what it means to surf instead of what place the US should get out of this week. Does that mean I’m not paying attention?

Pow! Right in the Kisser!

2006-08-15T23:03:00.000-07:00

Before I die I want to be slapped in the face. Not hard. I don’t want a broken jaw or anything. The blow I’m looking for isn’t meant to injure me; it’s more of an expression of unbridled disgust, preferably delivered by a woman. Perhaps someone reading this has been the victim of such a swat. Or maybe some of you have even perpetrated a smack of disgust and you wonder why anyone at Planet Haolewood would ASPIRE to be involved in such a sordid exchange.

It’s all about finding balance. I’m a nice guy, not the sort of fellow you would imagine saying or doing something so offensive that he deserves a pop in the kisser and there’s the problem. It’s not good to be too easy to pigeon-hole. There are probably many guys out there who need to work on REDUCING the number of disgust-inducing words and actions they produce but for every Yang there is Yin and maybe, in the interest of cosmic harmony, I’m the guy who needs be just a little bit MORE offensive. I’m not saying I want to make an open-palmed crack across my face a regular occurrence in my life, but if it NEVER happens, not even ONCE, then might I be considered a little too cautious? Surely there are ideas floating around in all of our minds that if expressed openly would inspire such a violent response. And while polite people usually keep such thoughts to themselves or at least make them more palatable before giving them utterance, isn’t it a little unhealthy not to let one slip through just once?

What I’m really talking about here is taking a chance. I’m not really convinced that I will ever achieve my unusual goal but think of all the provocative things I could say and do while I pursue it! Politeness is a fine characteristic but at what point does it become just a fear of saying what we really think? Maybe someday we’ll live in a perfect world where frankness never leads to a slap in the face but in the meantime I just hope who ever ends up slapping me isn’t wearing too many rings!

It's a jungle out there!

2006-08-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

Is blessed a one-syllable or two-syllable word?

2006-08-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

It was three months ago today that I arrived in Kauai with the intention of living here for a year and seeing how I liked it. So far so good. It’s a fascinating place; Everything here seems so unlikely. In this part of the world the ocean is the main event. Land is a freakish anomaly. It was the last place on earth to be discovered and populated by humans and sometimes it seems like we aren’t really meant to be here. We are land creatures after all and the territory which surrounds these tiny islands for thousands of miles in every direction is totally inhospitable to us. Maybe theses islands belong to the sea and we are just trespassers.

But if this is the forbidden island then there has never been a more tempting place to trespass. Hawaii seems as if it were made specifically for humans to enjoy. The climate is ideal and healthy living seems to come naturally here. And it’s not just physical health, the landscape just seems to inspire a more spiritual attitude.

And then there are the people. They seem a bit like flukes, too. It seems like everyone I have met here, even those born here, are people who have experienced some kind of random streak of good luck and decided to go with it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just seeing myself in them. I guess the short version is to say that the place and the people seemed to be blessed.

Bless is a level one Cleric spell in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s not a very powerful spell; even a novice cleric can master it. It just gives who ever the Cleric chooses a “+1.” That orc still might defeat you in battle or you still might no be able to find that secret door, but you’ve got just a little bit better shot at it if a cleric has cast bless on you. So maybe that’s how it is here. You’ll find all the challenges and joys of being human just as you would any other place but there’s a +1 that makes everything just a little better.

I Would Rather Sit by a Waterfall than Sit at a Bar: A Short Rant

2006-08-06T21:19:00.000-07:00

I don’t like bars. Why would anyone want to spend time in a bar? I can’t imagine anything more boring than an establishment whose purpose is to provide a place for people to sit around and do absolutely nothing. I have probably spent less time in bars than the average person of my age and I’ve never enjoyed it. The only exceptions were when I played pool or when I hung around pubs in London and played cards. I enjoyed myself because I was playing pool or beating my friends at Hearts. The bar was just a convenient location.

As a place to socialize it’s just a notch above a firing range. How many people are tearing up their vocal cords and ruining the hearing in the shouting matches that pass for conversations in bars right now? I would prefer a quiet café or a park or a beach. Maybe people go to bars to meet people but the only people you are going to meet in a bar are people who like to hang around in bars! And why would I want to meet them?

Surprise!

2006-08-01T21:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last day of work before my boss left on a two week vacation so it was a bit of a hectic and as it turned out LONG day. A few minutes after I got home my phone rang and I saw it was my boss no doubt calling to tell me one last thing he forgot to tell me before but instead he said merely, “Middles is epic.” I had just cut into an avocado which I had planned to make into the guacamole which forms the centerpiece of my favorite food, the burrito. But upon hearing these words I dropped the avocado, shoved a hastily prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my mouth and headed out the door with my surfboard.

My boss lives a short walk from a spot at the beach where he can easily scope out the surf conditions at his favorite surf spot, Middles. The North side of Kauai doesn’t get much surf during the summer and Middles lies dormant but every once in a while there will be a fluke swell that lights up Middles like a visit from Santa in July. The National Weather Service website hadn’t said anything about it and these summer swells tend to disappear quickly so it’s a good idea to take advantage.

Middles, aptly named, lies in the middle of Hanalei bay and it takes about ten minutes to paddle out to it. “Epic” turned out to be a bit of an exaggeration. The waves weren’t that big but the lack of wind gave the ocean a glassy quality and the only sound during the lulls between waves was the little splashes of the other surfers hands paddling through the water.

I’m a little hesitant to write about surfing because I just don’t think I can do it justice with the written word. I’m afraid it would be like a postcard of The Grand Canyon; it’s just not the same as being there. But I suppose a postcard is better than nothing so imagine a visit to a chiropractor, a masseuse, a personal trainer, a psychiatrist, a priest and a lover all wrapped into one and you’ll have an idea of what a good day surfing feels like. It can be all of those things and yesterday was especially nice since not only were the conditions sublime but it also came as a complete surprise.

I didn’t get out there until six and it’s only light until about 7:30 so as the clouds burned pink with the afterglow of sunset the other surfers paddled in and I was left alone, the last one out, waiting for one more wave to carry me home.

Shangri-La?

2006-07-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

The inhabited portion of Kauai is shaped like a donut. In the middle or the island, its summit nearly always shrouded in clouds stands Mt. Wai’ale’ale whose 451” of annual rain fall make it the wettest spot on earth. It’s really what’s left of the rim of the crater of a once massive volcano that has been extinct for thousands of years. The terrain in this central part of the island is a quagmire of cliffs and swamps all of it overgrown with thick vegetation. More recent arrivals to the island have followed the ancient Hawaiians’ example and stuck to the coastline.

All the towns in Kauai are found near the ocean and the only road connecting them circles the perimeter. There is no way through the mountainous interior. If you want to get from one side of the island to the other, you go around. Some roads lead part way inland and Kuomo’o road will take you as close to the base of Mt. Wai’ale’ale as you can get. It winds up through the forest before the pavement gives way to a rough dirt road. At the end of the dirt road is the trailhead where I went hiking yesterday.

The central part of the island has captured my imagination. It is truly an untamed wilderness. It’s there, but you can’t get to it and you can only catch glimpses of its edges when the clouds part but what you do see is a wonderland of lush mountains and innumerable waterfalls. Beyond those waterfalls lies a huge swamp at over 5000’ above sea level. The mystery is irresistible.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever get to the top of Mt. Wai’ale’ale but there’s still plenty of island to explore. The trail I sought was not maintained and there were no signs to point me in the right direction. Within five minutes of starting my hike I was lost. Tracing trails so faint they could have been pig trails around in circles, I crossed the same bog three times in mud up to my knees only to end up right where I had started. After an hour bushwacking less than a quarter of mile from where I had parked I was about ready to quit when I finally found the real trail. It wasn’t much of a trail; the brush crowded it from both sides and I had to stoop as I hiked to keep my head from hitting the branches which closed overhead like a tunnel. But it led me along a beautiful hike up the mountain and through the lush, jungle-like landscape. For 2 and a half miles I thrashed before arriving at my destination. If I had turned around and gone back at that point I would have had a challenging and beautiful five mile hike but I hadn’t come that far just to turn around.

There’s only one sugar cane operation left on the island but cane used to be king and in the 1920’s someone built a mile long tunnel through the mountain to get water from all those beautiful waterfalls to their plantation. The irrigation tunnel is no longer used but it’s still there and I had come to explore it. Standing at the mouth of the tunnel I starred into the blackness and saw a tiny point of light. That point of light became the focus of my attention for the next half an hour as walked through the tunnel. The light I saw was the other end of the tunnel. As I approached it, it became larger while the light from the entrance became smaller. It seemed to take a very long time for the point of light to become larger. I’m not prone to claustrophobia or fear of the dark but this was pushing it.

And then the batteries in my flashlight went dead. Did I mention that I was alone? I know people who like hiking but I couldn’t think of anyone who I could count on to see this expedition all the way through. (Where’s Brain when you need him?!) I told myself the situation wasn’t so bad. I had thought to bring extra batteries. They were in my backpack. All I had to do was find them and put them in my headlamp –all 4 batteries with the + and – ends oriented correctly- without being able to see. I also noted it was important that I not drop them into the ankle deep water at my feet. Breathe deeply, work carefully and in a few moments it was done. The beam of light sprung to life and I was on my way toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
On the other side of the tunnel I ate lunch in a beautiful canyon at the headwaters of the Hanalei River –the same Hanalei where Puff the Magic Dragon frolicked. As I ate I thought a lot about batteries. The spare batteries I had put in my headlamp were rechargeable and rechargeable batteries have a finite capacity to be re-used before they loose their ability to take a complete charge. I wondered how old the batteries were. I pondered the question of just how completely fucked I would be if my batteries ran out again. There was absolutely no other way out of this canyon and I hadn’t seen another sole all day. I had no map, no compass, no extra food and no cell phone service.

And there was still another tunnel left to explore. To understand why I was interested in the second tunnel let me quote from the Ultimate Kauai Guide Book’s description of the end of the second tunnel. “Scoot up and you’ll emerge in a Shangri-La that will make you giddy with joy –a cathedral of 200 foot sheer walls so steep they actually lean INWARD. Water drips from above creating an exotic backdrop. To the left is a pounding waterfall. The setting is unbelievable and worth all the effort you went through to get here.” I’m not even quite sure what Shangri-La means but it sounds pretty fucking good!

But my experience with the flashlight going out in the first tunnel had left me wary. I decided I would just see if I could find the entrance to the second tunnel and then decide whether to proceed. I found it without difficulty. In a pathetic attack of wishful thinking, I put the old batteries back in my headlamp and half-convinced myself that the feeble yellow glow could get me through. I figured I might as well go a hundred yards into the tunnel just to see what it was like. I didn’t really need a flashlight near the entrance anyway. The moment of truth had arrived. On the one hand I had no spare batteries and I did not even no for certain if I had enough life in the rechargeable batteries to get me back through the first tunnel let alone enough to make a round trip through the second tunnel and make it back through the first. On the other hand I had come so far already and “Shangri-La” was SO CLOSE. I had been fortunate enough to come on a sunny day. It rains a lot in that part of the island. Who knows when I would have this opportunity again. What would you do?

Well, I turned around and went home. Shangri-La will have to wait for another day and next time I’m going to bring a suitcase full of batteries.

Feral Cats

2006-07-16T23:46:00.000-07:00

Have you ever pondered the feral cat situation? Last August I moved into an apartment in Berkeley, California where I met Lucy. Lucy is one of those cats that likes to play hard to get. She mewed coquettishly and pranced about all squinty-eyed and rubbing up against things but she would not let me pet her. Today I met a cat on the other end of the spectrum. It had strangely squished looking ears and lay on the counter of the Moloa’a fruit stand where I was munching on an avocado sandwich and slurping on a smoothie with four different kinds of fresh tropical fruit. Squishy Head was completely oblivious to everything around him, completely focused on his continued studies of napping. I don’t know for a fact but I suspect Squishy Head has been working on those skills most of his life. Even a passing lizard did not arouse his predatory instincts so much as the swish of a tail. It was only when a toddler went from petting him to virtually smothering him with his enthusiastic affections that Squishy Head was moved to get up and slink on down the counter a little ways. My point is that Squishy Head didn’t mind if you pet him. He didn’t mind much of anything at all.

But I’m not here to blog about Squishy Head. He probably has his own blog. I’m here to blog about Lucy and other feral cats who do not have internet access. Lucy WAS certainly a people cat. She knew how to communicate with people. She new how to say, “look at me aren’t I adorable” and, “why don’t you feed me?” This cat had clearly targeted me as a sucker. She persistently hung around the front door and greeted me when I came home or came around my back window. I was hooked. The fact that she wouldn’t let me pet her only made her more enticing. I thought if I was patient she would warm up to me but it never happened. I bought cat treats which she ate out of my hand. Once she accidentally rubbed against my leg, but whenever I reached out my hand she bolted.

I talked to my neighbors and learned a few things about Lucy. She did not belong to any of them. She had lived there for at least seven years and the previous tenant of my apartment had fed her. I never learned how she got the name Lucy.

Lucy expected me to feed her and not just the occasional kitty treat. I didn’t want to adopt a cat, especially a cat that wouldn’t let me touch her and I didn’t think Lucy wanted to be adopted. It was clear she was born feral. She was accustomed to being around people but she was never held or pet and she did not want to come inside. So should I feed her? That question brings me back to the “feral cat situation.” Do you remember that from before all the Squishy Head stuff? Feral cats are common most places where people live. They are neither pets who have a human looking after them nor wild animals with their own place in the natural world. Many cities consider them a problem and while extermination is going out of fashion, cats that are truly feral cannot be rounded up and given out for adoption because they will never become pets. Only kittens who are handled by humans can do that.

So is it wrong to feed a feral cat? I had no reason to believe that Lucy was spayed. By feeding her would I be contributing to growth in the feral cat population? I didn’t plan to necessarily live in that apartment for long. Would it be responsible for me to feed her for a few months and then move leaving her without a regular supply of food?

There are cat people out there who advocate a “trap-neuter-release” strategy for dealing with feral cats. In other words it’s ok to feed them but you should trap them in a cage, take them to a vet to “fix” them and then release them again so they won’t go on to breed and make more feral cats. Seems like a good idea and I can’t help but think that this would be a much tidier blog were that what I had done. Maybe I should invoke poetic license and make up a story about trapping Lucy and taking her to the vet but the truth is that I just starting feeding her. She seemed hungry.

Enter The White Cat. Turns out while Lucy may have known how to work humans for what she needed she was not so adept and positioning herself within the feral cat hierarchy. The White Cat was not at all charming, He ran away at the first site of a person. He was dirty and looked –well- kind of like a stray cat. He would slink around in the shadows near the back porch where I fed Lucy and as soon as I was gone he would scare her away and eat her food. I was outraged. This interloper was stealing food from MY Lucy. What to do? If I stood by and waited I could ensure Lucy got her food since The White Cat was afraid of me and would not approach while I was there. But why did I begrudge The White Cat food? I had no more responsibility to feed Lucy than I did The White Cat. Besides Lucy seemed to know how to look out for herself while the White Cat had a sort of desperate, pathetic quality that made it seem like if I didn’t feed him he’d surely perish. So I figured I would just put the food out and whoever got it got it. The result was daily feedings for The White Cat while Lucy looked forlornly on. Later I discovered that feeding The White Cat distracted him enough that I could sneak some other food to Lucy while he ate and he wouldn’t try to steal in from her.

In May I put out the last cat breakfast and left the sealed container of cat food on the back porch in hopes the new tenant might find it and get the idea to feed the cats. I expect Lucy had similar ideas. I didn’t solve Berkeley’s feral cat situation. I didn’t even solve Lucy or the White Cat’s long term problem of finding food. I just fed them for a few months and I figure that’s better than nothing. Did I do the right thing? You be the judge.

If you’re still reading at this point I commend you. Perhaps the rather long and rambling story of some cats I fed once is not as interesting as some of my other blog entries, like the last one about the mailbox, for example. You may be wondering what this has to do with a toolbox, a change of underwear or a surfboard. “What about the feral cats in Hawaii?” you may wonder. There are feral cats here along with pigs and goats. (For more about feral goats see “Operation Billy Goat”) Mostly there are feral chickens and LOTS of them. I haven’t started feeding them yet but there is this one sad looking hen that keeps hanging around my back door. Hmm…

For more info on feral cats check out www.feralcat.com (it’s not a joke)

Neither Rain Nor Sleet Nor Snow

2006-07-11T23:27:00.000-07:00

A mailbox. Pretty simple right? You move to a new address; you get your mail there. That's what I thought. There are some unusual aspects of postal delivery in Kauai. When I moved into my new place in Princeville (aka Haolewood) I got forms from the post office so that I could have my mail forwarded. But when I talked to my friend in the neighboring town of Hanalei she told me that there was no postal delivery in Hanalei or Princeville. I talked to the previous tenant who told me that UPS would deliver packages but no, in fact there was no regular mail delivery and that if I needed mail service I should try to get a post office box. “IF I needed mail service?” I guess I had never really pondered the mail-free lifestyle and I wasn’t sure that I was ready. When I looked at the place and signed the rental agreement I failed to notice that the house simply did not have a mailbox.

The Princeville post office is only open from 10:30-3:30 so during my lunch break one day I went to inquire about a PO box. There were none available there or at the post offices in the two neighboring towns. My name went on a waiting list 50 long. Post office boxes here are like rent controlled apartments in Manhattan. Those who have them never let them go and those who don’t are out of luck. I was finally able to get a mail box at a private mail service at significantly greater cost than a post office box.

In the meantime I noticed that many of my neighbors had mailboxes in their driveways. And one day as I was walking to the nearby shopping center to check my mail box I saw a mini-van with a post office logo and a dude delivering mail. He was a rural letter carrier who drove his own vehicle, wore no uniform and delivered mail in Princeville. He explained to me that all I had to do was put up a mailbox, fill out a form (which he gave me), put it in the box and raise the red flag. He would pick it up and begin delivering mail. I did as he said. So far the only letter I have received was the test letter I sent my self. It read “Dear Boreas, I hope you are enjoying your new mail box. Love Boreas,” and it had a Honolulu postmark.

I don’t know how old this house is or how many people have lived here, but until that letter arrived no one had ever received mail here. I’m not sure why the whole situation seems so funny to me.

Operation Billy Goat

2006-07-05T00:25:00.001-07:00

My associate had told me only to meet him at Nawilili Harbor. I would receive further instructions when I got there. “Go past the one lane bridge to the park on the left” he told me. When I arrived he told me to park next to him while he loaded a backpack and a rifle wrapped in a garbage bag into the back of my truck. He glanced around nervously and climbed into the back of my truck himself, instructing me to drive a little further down the road. Our destination had still not been revealed to me.

I pulled over next to a tree lined river. A small opening in the vegetation provided a clear path from the road to the water. Soon a small boat motored toward us. My associate spoke to the pilot in hushed tones and I could decipher very little of the heavy pidgin they spoke. I gathered only that his other boat had been boarded by the coast guard and we had better stash the rifle out of site. He was nervous about his rear mounted engines getting stuck in the mud and he told us to stand near the front of the boat as we pulled out into the river.

We crossed to the other side of the river to a similar opening in the trees and disembarked with our gear. I was now where few Haoles ever tread. I had the distinct feeling that what we were doing was not entirely legal. I was right.

But what were we doing? This vegetarian of nice years was going hunting on the 4th of July. To be more precise I was tagging along with my friend who was going hunting. I did not participate. My friend was born and raised on Kauai and when you get his voice mail it explains that he can’t come to the phone because he’s “either on the ocean or on the mountain.” When he offered to take me to his favorite hunting spot I explained that I didn’t hunt but I loved hiking and when you take away the part about shooting animals isn’t that what hunting is? Here was an opportunity to do something very new to me and to go somewhere seriously off the beaten path.

We were hunting for pigs and goats. Piggy got away but Billy wasn’t so lucky. I watched as my friend pursued and killed a goat and then beheaded, de-hoofed and gutted it. We loaded the remaining meat into a backpack and returned to the pick-up point. A “hike” of about four hours through steep and overgrown terrain, on unmaintained use trails or no trail at all, we were the only people around and were treated to stunning ocean views.
That’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to hunting. I never fired the gun. The only time I held it was when I posed for the picture.

Welcome to Haolewood

2006-06-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Some people who move to Hawaii simply take up residence on the beach. While I enjoy camping I decided not to go that route. I ended up living in a town unlike any place I would ever have pictured as my home.

I had a temporary place to stay when I first arrived and my first task was to find a more permanent place to lay my head. I checked the classifieds, bulletin boards, and spread the word among the few people I knew that I was looking. There is not a lot to choose from on the North (less inhabited) side of Kauai so I focused on the basics: rent, convenience, etc… What I ended up with is a house I share with one other guy in Princeville. It had a washer and dryer. The rent was reasonable for the area. So I took it. It would still be a few weeks before I moved in.

In the mean time Sally and Brain arrived. They had arranged for a vacation rental in Princeville of all places. As we drove through town I suddenly saw the place from the point of view of a visitor and it occurred to me for the first time just how strange of a place it was for me to be living. According to Wikipedia Princeville is a “carefully landscaped planned resort community.” It’s a gated development built around two golf courses. A little bit of Orange County in Hawaii.

The landscaping strikes you immediately. Parking is not allowed on the street. Every new home owner must have a landscaping plan approved by the Princeville authorities and every yard is professionally maintained. The rules go on and on and are enforced by a private patrol. An army of weed wackers and lawn mowers keep the fast growing plant life in check. The effect is a uniform, manicured look that brings to mind “Somewhere that’s Green,” Audrey’s dreamy ballad from Little Shop of Horrors.

I don’t like it. I wouldn’t like it anywhere but it’s worse here because it is so out of place. At the main entrance to Princeville stands an enormous and absurdly garish fountain. It’s impossible for me to convey how incongruously this feature sits relative to its surroundings. The North side of Kauai is a wet, wild place, beautiful BECAUSE nature seems still untamed. But in Princeville it’s packaged for your comfort and enjoyment.

Having said all that, it’s really not a bad place to live and everyone who I have met here is really nice. The sunset from the lawn outside Sally and Brain's condo makes up for any number of tacky fountains. I guess it really just all comes down to taste. I never realized I had strong opinions about landscaping but this place has brought them out.

Quick! Let's go have another sublime experience before dinner!

2006-06-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying that when one moves to Hawaii one can expect to have more visitors than one might have if one moved to, say, Lubbock, Texas. But I have to admit I was not expecting them to arrive so soon after I did. My friends -let’s call them Sally and Brain- arrived from California less than three weeks after I had arrived. I had not yet even found a permanent place to live when they jetted in for a long weekend.

Before moving here I had vacationed on Kauai three times. And while visiting the island I did what visitors do: I packed in as many sights and activities as I possibly could in a short amount of time. Sally and Brain were no exception to this trend. In fact Brain in particular exemplified the phenomenon. Gung Ho is not just a city in China. He was not satisfied with merely filling his own days with everything to see and do on Kauai. In between scoping out the next Hawaiin ruin and snapping photos of feral chickens he extolled me to summit a nearby peak (which he had named Mt. Boreas) as if to ensure that even after he left there would be someone to carry on his legacy of manic island exploration.

Living here I feel differently. I’m as thrilled as Brain to be exploring the island, but for me there is always tomorrow. So when, after a grueling 8 mile hike complete with swimming under a 300’ waterfall followed by snorkeling with a gaggle of sea turtles, Brain insisted on a second snorkel before we called it a day I wondered if I could keep up. It was at that moment that I spied a Hawaiin Monk Seal dozing on the beach like a tropical sausage and thought maybe I would follow its example while Sally and Brain worked on uping their turtle tally.

I hope I’m not starting to sound superior here. “Look at me at one with the spirit of Hawaii while my silly friends scamper about in a vain attempt to absorb something that can only be understood by an enlightened soul such as mine” was not what I was going for. I simply have the luxury of more time than they and the next time I visit some new place I will no doubt run around and exhaust myself. I was really glad to have Sally and Brain visit and I look forward to seeing other friends on Kauai.

"Uh... did you just say you're moving to HAWAII!?"

2006-06-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

Here’s a fun little experiment that you kids can try at home. Just for fun, tell people that you’re moving to Hawaii and then just sit back and observe the reaction. I’ve had occasion to deliver such news a number of times over the past few months. Responses were often preceded by a long pause. Some people looked at me with confusion as if I had just told them I had booked a one-way ticket to Narnia.

Of course, Hawaii isn’t Narnia. People know that it is a REAL place. Many have even visited. Many people have visited Disneyland, too but you still don’t hear about anyone taking up residence in a condo on the slopes of Space Mountain. Hawaii is a VACATION destination. Maybe you get a timeshare if you really like it, but you don’t just MOVE there. Some people became excited when I told them my plan. The woman from PG&E who helped me when I called to cut off the electricity at my old apartment became down right CHATTY with all sorts of questions about how this move had come about and what I was going to be doing there. I don’t think you’d get that kind of response if you told people you were relocating to Los Angeles or Memphis. Maybe someone reading this can try THAT as an experiment and we can compare notes about the reactions we got.

Turns out people move here all time and not all of them are professional surfers or independently wealthy. Lots of ordinary people like me just pack up their things and come to the most remote islands in the world. It’s not something I ever really imagined doing but here I am. So far so good.

Filmer is my Hero

2006-06-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

My car-that-won’t-start story had a happy ending as you may have guessed. I’m not still down there sleeping on the beach and stealing food from tourists all the while hoping that someone will read my blog and send help.

I know very few people on this island but in my hour of need I remembered that my co-worker Mike had a friend who worked on cars. I had Mike’s number in my cell phone’s memory. I assumed I would have to get the truck towed and that I would have to wait until the next day. But I thought I would get a jump on my car repair by calling Mike that night. Mike put me in touch with his friend Filmer who told me that he would rather come and work on my car that night because he had to work the next day. Filmer works at a hydroponic lettuce farm.

One of the other very few people I knew on the island happened to live a very short distance from where I was surfing. He came down in his huge truck and took me and my surfboard to his house where he and I watched Fast Times at Ridgemont High while I ate fruit salad and waited for Filmer to call me back.

Filmer had brought a couple of spare batteries with him but neither of them would work in my truck so he removed the battery from his own car, used it to start mine then removed it and replaced my old battery while the engine was still running. I rolled on home and parked on a hill so I could push start my car in the morning. The next day I bought a new battery.

I didn’thave any money with me to pay Filmer. He said the he would charge me $25 dollars and that I could pay him later. I’ve left him several messages offering to come and pay him cash but he has not returned my calls.

“What is the point of this story?” you may be asking yourself about now. “Why am I reading a blog about a guy’s car repair when I could be learning about all kinds of new and fascinating things on Wikipedia?” The point of the story is that Filmer is a really nice guy. I thanked him repeatedly when he started my car and he just said that he was glad he could help. That, my friends, is Aloha. It’s not just something cooked up by the Hawaii tourism bureau. There’s something special about this place.

Gratitude, Part 2

2006-06-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

Ok so you’ve had your perfect day surfing. You’re filled with serenity. The stoke courses through your veins as walk through the pine trees toward that primitive parking lot. Time to go home, have a late dinner and drift off to sleep to the sound of palms in the wind. But when you turn that key to your truck that has started faithfully for ten years you hear only a pathetic clicking sound. Now where’s your gratitude, huh? It’s dark, you’re at the bottom of a rut-laced mud track and your car isn’t going anywhere. How fucking ENERGIZED are you now, huh?

Ok, deep breath. Maybe friendly surfer people camped on the beach have jumper cables. Ah ha! They do! Let the gratitude flow once more! But what’s this? It doesn’t work. Your battery won’t take a charge. Friendly surfer man is sympathetic but there’s nothing he can do. What happened to that bliss that filled you only a few moments ago?

I guessed it passed just as everything does, good or bad. So maybe living in Hawaii isn’t so different from living anywhere else. Sure it’s beautiful and the weather is great but people still get sick, bills still have to be paid, and the whole range of disappointments that go along with being human are present including cars that won’t start.

Gratitude

2006-06-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

How do you think it feels to work all day in the heat, skip dinner and surf until it’s too dark to continue? Though you leave the water physically tired, you feel energized and above all grateful.

Picture this. You finish work and the plans you had for after work fall through. Oh well. That’s the way Hawaii is. Things change without warning. Best to be flexible. You make the short drive to check out the waves. It’s a bad time of year for surfing on your side of the island but an unseasonable swell has been forecast to arrive. There is some small surf but you don’t have your board anyway.

Back home. It’s time for dinner but seeing those waves has planted something in your gut that won’t go away. You can eat any time. There’s only a couple hours left of daylight to surf in. Dinner can wait. A fifteen minute drive down the highway and you turn off onto a side road. A quarter of a mile down that road and you turn onto a dirt road mostly blocked off with a “road closed” sign. Who knows why. The road descends steeply into a valley leading to the sea. There are three or four cars in a primitive dirt parking lot. Not a good sign. If the surf were good, the word would be out and the lot would be full, extra cars crammed onto the side of the narrow road leading uphill. You can hear the ocean and feel the breeze on your face.

You leave your board in the back of the truck and flip flop down to the beach to see if you just wasted a trip. You watch a single surfer bobbing up and down 100 yards out. “If he catches something while I’m standing here watching, I’ll paddle out.” Bingo there he goes. As you come back down to the beach the surfer is on his way out. “Am I wasting my time?” you ask. “No,” he answers, “it was fun. Occasional chest high sets.” That turns out to be an exaggeration.

It looks like you’ve got this spot all to yourself. It was a hot day and the water at the surface is remarkably warm. It’s an easy paddle out. The conditions aren’t great: small waves with relatively little power but they’re fun and easy to catch. The ocean is pitching you softballs today. Nice underhanded tosses like a game of catch in the backyard and you catch wave after wave. The sun is behind a hill leaving your spot in shadow. As you sit on your board your feet dangling below you, you can feel the cooler water just below the surface. The wind has gone quiet and you feel neither hot nor cold. A couple other surfers paddle out and join you, mellow, friendly guys.

Despite having worked a full day. You are neither hungry nor tired. Each wave you catch motivates you to paddle out again for another. The sky darkens and you see the moon. The sun shines on Hawaii long after it has set on the mainland and you are still out surfing in that last hour of light. And then there’s the moon. It’s almost full and as the sunlight fades its shine appears on the water. You wonder if it’s possible to surf by moonlight. Some perverse competitive part of you wants to be the last surfer out after everyone else has gone in, but those other two guys just keep surfing. You know you’re having a good time when you keep telling yourself that this one will be the last wave, but then you paddle out again anyway.

A star is visible in the evening sky and it’s getting hard to see even in the moonlight. Maybe you can let those other guys have satisfaction of being the last surfers out tonight. They’ll always be more waves for you tomorrow.

Does high school never end?
	They're right. High school never ends. I'm going to go and kill myself now.
	It's true that people can be petty and superficial but there's a lot more to adult life than that.
	I liked high school!
	High school never ends for those who continue to think and behave as they did back then.
	I haven't been to high school yet. Is it really that bad?

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