AxelRachelBank

So I’m in this coffee shop — WHOA! That is huge — and they have on the tip jar little index cards with fun facts on them, which seems to me like a non-asshole way to call your attention to the presence of the tip jar, and while I was waiting for the lady to ring up my latte and trifecta of micro-muffins, I was reading the cards, and one of them said something about how there is a word in the English language that has only one vowel but that one vowel appears six times and that word is INDIVISIBILITY, and I was looking at this and thinking “what about ‘Y’?” because I mean I know “Y” is the sometimes-vowel but in the case of “indivisibility,” it’s serving as a vowel because the word is pronounced “in-dih-viz-ih-bill-it-EE,” not “in-dih-viz-ih-bill-it-YHHH,” which would be how things would go if “Y” were acting as a consonant, that is to say, anything but a vowel, and I thought about pointing this out to the lady and then I realized that this is the kind of thing that makes them do something terrible to your latte, like make it with regular milk instead of soy, and so I’m keeping it to myself.

CLICK TO ENLARGE Kohala - driving up and there

So the kava turned out to be kind of a bust. I mean, I was worried that the euphoric desire to socialize would set in before I’d been able to disengage with the smelly guy, leaving me gagging and wanting so badly to just walk away from him but also being unable because I LOVE TALKING TO PEOPLE!!!

CLICK TO ENLARGE Kohala - driving up and there

But he pretty quickly left me to my pretending to transcribe notes while actually watching people buy shave ice and eat sandwiches and look like they’re realizing Kohala is cool but not all that happenin’. Not everyone wants this as badly as I do, it would seem.


In the evening, I go for a confined run through Auntie Mollie’s neighborhood, venturing only down and back the streets that sprout from hers so as to avoid getting lost and the main road, too. The wind that has picked up again in the twilight remains warmish, gusting across my face in way that reminds me, now, of jogging over the Charles River on the Mass. Avenue bridge in very early September, when Boston is no longer so hot but not yet mean. But the lunging, snarling yard dogs, not obviously on chains until the very last second, scare me, and so the run is a tempered one, its corners rounded slowly.


I jog back into the driveway just as Rory is returning from the memorial service for a Micronesian navigator who was lost at sea a few weeks ago, and together we make a dinner of vegetables: salad greens from the farm of a farmer she knows, beets from a woman who sells by the post office sauteed with garlic and grocery store carrots, a yogurt-avocado dip I make from the lone relic of my visit to Y.S. and family, and something hearty and leafy, pre-blanched then dressed with something miso of her making.

From Kohala - driving up and there

In Kohala this morning, I wake to an out-of-doors that makes me wish I had my mother along: 70 degrees or so, with a strong, strong breeze that blows the trees around in a way reminiscent of hilly North Carolina in early October. At the Saturday morning farmer’s market down the road, I find a woman who moved here from North Carolina nearly three decades ago (with a brief stopover somewhere in between, I surmise, based on her story about her twins’ birth and their age now) who sells quilted potholders and woven belts and batik’d caftans. But I suspect that her 29 years in Kohala will make her long since empathetic to the way my light homesickness has me, say, being sure that it was Dean Smith complaining at the taro stall about how his landlady is stingy with water, or certain that I saw a “The Original Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana: Coming Soon” sign in vacant window beside the hardware store in that strip mall we passed as we flew through Waimea, and so I keep the bit about the wind to myself.


I do, however, tell her what I’m up to in Hawai’i, and she gives the kind of answer that I should’ve known to expect from a well-spoken hippie who has moved from Lizard Lick, North Carolina, to Kohala, Hawai’i — she laments that it’s not possible to keep a few waiawi in a controlled environment, since the yellow fruit are delicious and lousy with Vitamin C, but adds that she sees no way around it, given what the trees are doing to the forest. Our chat drifts toward the hunters I’m ever-jonesing to talk with — but getting closer, if the thoughtful reply email I found upon waking is to be a clue! — and she tells me that while traditional pig-hunting with guns and dogs and day-glo vests is legal, to get a pig drunk on wine-soaked bread and then slit its throat isn’t. She is indignant about this, seeing the latter as more humane and, moreover, productive of a better meat that’s not all shot-through with adrenaline at the time of death (is this biologically admissible, by the way? It sounds nifty to me, but I’ve nothing to go on) and contemptuously calling the former the “violent, manly way,” but I wonder if such a law is about effort, trickery, and the like.


At a table kitty-corner from her tent, I decline a sample of lilikoi cream pie from a pushy white man — another native mainlander, no doubt — holding my ground even when he insists that “THIS is the best breakfast there IS,” but still buy a $1 hollowed-out lilikoi shell filled with the chilled custard. I’ll have it later, after my breakfast of the Y.S. pineapple and two nine-inch summer rolls (lettuce, sprouts, basil and I don’t know what else) that I buy from the woman whose tent is devoted to her Thai food. In the coffeeshop a half-block back the way I came, I take a soy latte in a teddy bear mug up the colorful steps to an elevated deck adjacent to the coffeeshop and forward of the associated Art Show*Kava Kafe*Fudge shop; there, a skittish lizard with coloring like a parrotfish

From Kohala - driving up and there

and an only slightly less skittish cat with coloring like charcoal

From Kohala - driving up and there

patrol around me and the twitchy, weathered gentleman with a full-arm and bifocals who has set up a laptop, wireless mouse, and travel mug, presumably availing himself — as I hope to — of the morning quiet. He appears undisturbed by the grunting and clanging of my breakfasting, and so I feel unself-conscious as I go at the little pineapple from Y.S. and O.G., first sawing away the top

From Kohala - driving up and there

with my new single-blade gerber knife and then attacking the fruit itself. The first strip of scaly skin slices away to reveal flesh that’s nearly white, and I’m dismayed — is it so small because it’s unripe, or can there possibly be such a thing as a white pineapple? I don’t wait to pare and chop the whole thing as E.A. instructed yesterday but instead gash free a wedge and stuff its middle into my mouth, letting the syrupy sides hug my cheeks in a way totally unwise for someone essentially living out of a backpack and depending for hours on end on the kindness of public restrooms…but it turns out that yes, there must be such a thing as a white pineapple — or, if not, then one existed in the world, and I am now eating it — for it’s just the right softness and also incredibly sweet, if lighter in flavor than the yellow ones I’ve had thus far, and I make as good a mess I can with half of it before stuffing the second half — teeth-marked core and all — into the plastic container I’ve been carrying.


When the Kava Kafe opens, I ask the girl-woman at the counter — a lithe, sun-kissed nymphet whom I imagine would top my brother’s to-do list if he were to ever happen by here — what kava is.


“Like Valium,” she says, and when I ask if that means I shouldn’t have some before trying to do work, adds, “probably not. It makes you really talkative, and your mouth numb. And it’s legal.” Gleefully.


Has anyone ever heard of this? It’s apparently a root powered and then turned into a drink to be drunk very quickly, the effects of which are mellowness, mental clarity, and feeling sociable, or something.


“It tastes kind of earthy,” she says, and when I say that I’d like to try it but not now, she agrees to hold a little aside for me, since the Kafe only operates in its kava bar capacity Monday-Friday, and today is Saturday, and thus she only has a little on hand, and I’m leaving tomorrow.


Something that I as a writing person have never been good at is describing flavors — no food-writing future for me, I guess — which is unfortunate in this moment because of the way this lilikoi shell full of custard tastes when I dig into it, back at my table. It’s somehow milky, and the sweet tartness is like lemon-with-kiwi-with-I-don’t-know-what…maybe with-space-jam? Can that be a fruit? It’ll have to be, for now, to drive home the (figurative) tear-jerking pleasure of this dessert and how badly I want to run right back to the pushy haole and apologize for being so obviously from New York and therefore willing and able to push back and then beg him for the recipe so that, pending my success at smuggling a case of lilikoi back to the mainland* in my already over-stuffed suitcase, I can make this for my brother and boyfriend who both think they love key lime pie but — I now know — have no idea what love is.


When I have scraped the shell clean,

From Kohala - driving up and there

I espy on the bulletin board hung near my table a number of nifty notices clearly right up my alley but among them, most attractively, one reading “Organic, locally grown, vegan dinner Every Friday at Kava Kafe,” and I think I maybe need to move here.

From Kohala - driving up and there

Moreover, I have grown impatient about the kava and decide that — productive travelblogging be hanged — the time is nigh. Back inside, I’m instructed by the friendly nymphet and a gnome-like, 20-ish fellow who professes to be a local farmer and reminds me of my Friend School days except that he smells so bad that I, with a decent tolerance for people smell, am all but overwhelmed, instruct me to down it quickly and then do a sort of “I got it all” chest-high clap. She a greyish, cloudy liquid — maybe 10 or 12 ounces — from a plastic apple juice jug into a coconut shell cup, assuring me that “this isn’t apple juice” and then pushing it across the counter, adding that I should let her know which flavors of the fudge I’d like to taste. Then she fetches a heaping cone of pale pink shaved ice for the chubby child who has come in after me while the smelly farmer watches me doggedly drain the cup, its cold contents filling my nose with a loamy, slightly medicinal smell. I clap, and ask for a sliver of the Kona coffee fudge, my tongue already beginning to feel the way it does under a Sucrets lozenge or some other oral analgesic. I’m hoping it will render me clear of mind but sociable in the “I want to transcribe my interview notes”-kind of way…I suppose we’ll see…












__________________________________
*Dear TSA: I am just kidding. Really. I will not attempt this, I promise.

CLICK TO ENLARGE Kohala - driving up and there

Awaiting Rory’s arrival at the Starbucks to collect me, I’m dreading our ~2 hour drive for the way the inevitable conversation about waiawi, which I essentially can’t bear to think about for any more second but which is instrumental to our entire interaction and therefore likely the first thing she’ll bring up. After she’s pulled up and we’v identified each other and said our hellos and our how-do-you-dos and gotten into the truck and set off, pretty much the first thing she says to me is: “I’m going to try really hard not to ask you about waiawi; I’m sure you’re so very sick of talking about it,” and I kind of feel like weeping with gratitude.


A while into the ride, she pulls off the road without warning and suggests I get out and try to do some breathing, some centering, some transitioning-from-work-to-something-less-like-work, and I feel a little annoyed that we can’t just be getting on with the getting to our destination and then with the sleeping until I see what she has taken me to:

CLICK TO ENLARGE Kohala - driving up and there

And so I stand on the little stone wall and look down over Laupāhoehoe Point and look up at its sky and windmill my arms and then she unrolls from nowhere a map and shows me roughly where we are (see Point B, above), and tells me the sad story of the surprise tsunami in 1946 that thrilled children with the live fish suddenly flopping on the rocks, left there by the sea as it pulled back, gathering itself to up to crash over them and their little schoolhouse.


We stop for dinner at a strip mall in Waimea, the largest town on the interior of the Big Island (see Point C, above), and the number of people whom Rory has an exclaiming reunion with before we’ve even ordered makes me ask one of them if she’s in fact the mayor of the whole South Kohala District. After dinner, we move along the strip — me pausing to photograph a rendering of what must be a Paniolo, a Hawaiian cowboy — to the KTA, a Hawaiian grocery store, so that Rory can pick up the dish soap her landlady-slash-housemate has requested. We scrutinize the shelves, searching for the brand to match the coupons that 89-year-old Auntie Molly — so called in keeping with the Hawaiian tradition of addressing elders with no biological relationship to oneself as “Auntie” and “Uncle” (but for the ordering, so like the Indian tradition that I’m growing used to) — clipped and, I imagine, pressed into Rory’s waiting hand.

CLICK TO ENLARGE Kohala - driving up and there

By the time we reach Kohala, the rural mountain town where Rory has been conducting agricultural research for two years, it is dark; when I am too slow to unscrew the cap of my aluminum water bottle, I’m sprayed in the face by the pressure system created inside as we’ve moved higher and higher above sea level.

From Trip into Forestry Service field site

On the morning of my last day in Hilo, I have breakfast at Ken’s House of Pancakes on the corner of Hwy 11 and Kamehameha, which utterly shocks me in giving me an opportunity to order a “Mauna Loa Scramble” of egg whites, spinach, and mushrooms served with vegetarian sausage links, whole wheat pancakes, and brown rice. (Of course, I have the choice of bacon, white rice-or-hashbrowns, and toast instead, but that’s precisely what makes the hippy-dippy/rabbit options all the more thrilling in this 24-hour diner. What’s more, what I think is regular syrup turns out to be some kind of deep magenta-colored tropical fruit syrup, and, let me tell you, you can’t ever really recover from that.


Once I’ve stuffed myself silly, I go to meet R.R., the technician who works under R.J., the Forest Service entemologist who’s been doing all this research on the biocontrol scale insect in question for the last 10 years and who was intimately involved in — or overwhelmed by, you might say — the draft Environmental Assessment-related doings that unfolded between spring 2008 and spring 2009. R.R. leads me to the airport, where I return my rental car and demand a refund for the navigation system that wouldn’t charge and therefore didn’t work, thinking as the Budget representative genially complies that perhaps I should have aimed higher and requested some recompense for the stress of having to, ugh rely on my brain. Then we hoist into the truck my too-heavy suitcase and too-heavy backpack and the little pineapple and one big, round avocado that are all that remain of my Y.S. and O.G. booty, and then we head off to what I believe she says is a shade structure, or shade site, or something, roughly near the Hilo Zoo and where A.S. took me for the first strawberry guava sighting. There, I watch and ask questions about the testing of insects as a biocontrol while she looks over her enormous miconia plants, themselves an invasive plague at risk of doing to Hawai’i what badness they’ve done to Tahiti, hose-watering the ones that she’s moved them from the shade structure, and while I note the paradox inherent to this exercise, of course it won’t do to try to learn about a plant, invasive or not, that’s all parched.

From Trip into Forestry Service field site

We meet R.J. for lunch and I interrogate him gently about the ordeal of hearings and so forth following the first waiawi biocontrol draft EA, the one released back in spring of 2008, which was ultimately withdrawn because it had been modeled on a federal EA rather than a state one, the key difference of accounting for cultural impact having proven too much. This time around, I learn, the EA process has been outsourced to a specialist contractor and is being overseen by state departments instead of the Forest Service, anyway, which is a good thing for R.J., since he doesn’t have the time to go through all that again, he says. On that note, he takes the last few bites of his potato-mac salad (a common side dish here, I’ve noticed), pushes back his plastic chair from the plastic table we’ve chosen outside the cantina component of the Volcano Village General Store, collects from me and R.R. the computers and other valuables we’d rather not leave roadside during our imminent tromp through the forest, and heads back to the biocontrol office and lab facilities in Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.


At the edge of what looks to me like an impenetrable tropical thicket, R.R. parks the truck and then gives me a “tailgate safety talk” (so named for where we’re standing while it happens, I’d guess?) about the dangers of tromping through this forest: slipping (which sucks in and of itself but particularly when it yields a sprained or broken anything bodily); hypothermia (due either to cold rain or regular dry cold, up here on the volcano); head injury due to falling branches (which risk keeps anyone from doing this when the trade winds are high); harassment by the wild pigs (they mostly go away if you in their direction but should be respected nonetheless); being shot by hunters. As she talks, we suit up like players on a kids’ television show, donning one piece for each of her enumerations: the heavy ankle boots I bought at the Sally in Hilo that are good enough but still make me wish for my vegan Garmonts; yellow rain tops and bottoms of the one-size-fits-pretty-much-no-one variety; hard hats the color of underripe tomatoes with the same muted gloss; orange mesh vests with reflective strips of the please-don’t-shoot-me,-hunters variety.


When we are done, we — or at least I — look like the photo below, and then she gives me a zip-lock bag for my camera, and we head in.

From Trip into Forestry Service field site

It should come as a surprise to no one that I awoke on Monday protein-hungry and cashed-strapped. But it may come as a surprise to everyone, or at least everyone who knows me and my dietary habits, to learn that my solution was to get breakfast at the Jack In The Box I passed on my Ward Ave. walk to Starbucks, breakfast in the form of two Breakfast Jacks and hold the ham, if you please. (A note to my brother, who is beyond certainly not reading this: “I’ll let you hold it after you buy it.”) Breakfast Jack, by the way, prior to pillaging by me, consists of ham ‘n’ egg ‘n’ cheese on a bun, and so my plan was to peel away the “egg” and “cheese” — is there a way to do extra-double-quotes to show, like extra-double-ironic usage?? — from the bun of my hamless iterations and have a nice, high-protein, high-artificial growth hormone breakfast without any bun or bread or anything, which we all know girls do not eat, seeing as they both start with “B” and girls will have none of that. Anyway. It was all going fine until I lost my head for a moment and let a bite of the bun past my no-longer-reliably-B-blocking lips, and as my teeth sank down…
down…
down…
into the pillowy whiteness, I swear to you, I could really and truly taste the corn syrup, and I went instantly into a(n internal) moment of bourgeois silence for those less fortunate than me. Of course, this has nothing to do with Hawai’i specifically, and everything to do with U.S.America.


Anyway.


After the morning at Starbucks — which would be fast becoming my routine were I not to successfully meet up with E.L. as planned at the same time that I just ran into O.S. in that same one Starbucks WOW I am such a regular girl-about-Honolulu-town, pretty much unable to get herself a cup of coffee and sit in the same place for six hours without running into every single person she knows, for Pete’s sake — I made the trek out to visit H.A. at her office.


It goes something like this: venture away from the Starbucks in the directions opposite that from whence I came, note that Honolulu seems to be about as hot for this whole plain, tangy frozen yogurt business as New York is i.e. VERY but that plant-based topping choices include lychee and something called azuki, which turns out to be a sugary red bean relish, look around at the be-yoo-tiful weather and decide I haven’t given Honolulu a fair shake, walk long enough that H.A. calls to ask where I am and subsequently tell me to get on a bus because I am way too far from anything to not be on one already, spend an embarrassingly long time trying to mentally apply bus map to map map, catch bus at last, have excellent first bus-riding experience out to H.A.’s office on UH-Manoa campus, meet with H.A., talk mucho about introduced species and outreach and stuff (more later, maybe, or maybe you’ll just have to buy the book MUAHAHAHAHA), struggle toward end not to ask her to make me a gift of all the very cool 100-lb burlap sacks formerly holding rice and coffee that line her office walls.


When we decide together that we are through, I realize I have no return bus fare and am also quite far from anything other than a strange university on summer vacation, so I walk and I walk I walk in the direction from whence I’ve come until I come to an area boasting a Bank of Hawai’i boasting an ATM. This is nice, for it’s at that time that I can get some cash, if some cash with a $2.50 premium, and by the way, just about everything in Hawai’i is more expensive than it is elsewhere due to the plain fact that very little of it is manufactured or otherwise created there and therefore the price of very much of it gets jacked up to compensate for shipping costs, and so while I know that the ATM premium I pay is pretty much par for the course for withdrawals from any bank not your own bank, it gets me wondering: is there a branch of the bureau of printing and engraving on any of the islands and, if not, is money more expensive in Hawai’i? Anyway, being able to get cash makes it a time when I can at last try to catch a bus back somewhere resembling my usual routine, thank you very much…


…But it’s also one of those times when I cannot bear to have my hair as long as it is for many additional minutes, and suddenly I turn the corner and see that lovely blue-and-white striped pole that leaves no room for doubt as to what it signifies, and I get closer and see that it is not just a relic of some business opportunity bygone, left up not because it’s cute but because to do so is cheaper than taking it down — lo, there are people inside, people actively being on both sides of the no-I-got-them-all-cut equation, and by George, I am going in there to get them all cut. Well, first I’m going to trot across the street, looking both ways to be sure that I’ve exhausted all street-crossing possibilities and settled on the legal’est one, to get myself a little snackie-poo at this here farmer’s market, lest I morph fully into Hypoglycemic Hyperbitch whilst the nice little barber is starting to give me bangs that we didn’t discuss but that he thinks would look nice and I, seeing that, rip off my own arm to hit him with it before taking a few bites, which would be disgusting because I’m a vegetarian. So at the farmer’s market, being not completely of sound marketing mind, I buy a mango that I know not to eat on the spot unless I want photodermatitis, a sack of cherry tomatoes, and three cucumbers. Fine. It would have been worse had that nice farmer’s son not let his true feelings about whether I’d be happy about that 12-inch daikon radish when I got home show through, so thank you very much, Sir! Now: stuff several tomatoes into mouth (savoring, of course, always savoring), and then trot back over to the hair cuttery, where I am immediately cared for by a lightly wizened older gentleman who looks rawther Hawaiian or at the very least Japanese and who does a bang-up job in spite of the language barrier. It continues to be difficult for me to believe him that his name is Evan, though.


After that, it’s back across the other street (University, that one, and bigger) to the Asian grocery, where I wander] up and down the aisles for awhile, just loving the establishment as I do love those until I settle on a prepared delicacy labeled “Spicy Mabo Don (Spice Tofu Bowl)” and a teeny-tiny can of MATE Sencha shot UNSWEETENED INTENSITY VIGOR WELL BEING (the latter for later, like tomorrow, of course) and settle against a butterfly knife, which would have been useful for getting to eat my mango immediately without photodermatitis but less useful for not impaling myself or others through my bookbag at any point between now and the end of time. Then I sit down at one of their little tables to enjoy my Spicy Mabo Don, and about halfway through, it becomes acutely apparent that the weird, meaty taste I have been detecting is not shiitake but, well, meat, and I consider taking it back to the register and pitching a fit about how it should have been labeled and I need to be given a refund and, moreover, compensated for the suffering I have endured, which has no price tag. And then, now, I understand haole, and I just toss it away and leave.

In the afternoon, I’m picked up by E.L., the male part of my host duo, in the Camry he and S.A. bought from a friend upon moving to the island and whose cartoony hibiscus-print seat covers, he tells me, allegedly decrease the risk that the vehicle will be stolen. “It makes the car look more ‘local,’” he tells me, “or something.” It makes the car look less like it’s owned by haole (”how-lee”), a Hawaiian word that apparently crops up a lot and refers, roughly, to outsiders on the islands: white people; rich people. He’s kind enough to ferry me to the house of H.A., a woman prominent in the Coordinating Group on Alien Pest Species (CGAPS), who has invited me to dinner. The whole reason I’m here, for you listeners at home who don’t already know, is to pursue insight into the presence of this plant, waiawi, non-native to Hawai’i and rapidly spreading, and the proposal to release a scale insect that’s expected to slow its growth; thusly it’s over dinner at H’s house, of course, that the REAL reporting will begin.


However, we have a bit of a layover before I’m due for dinner, and at home, E.L. shows me the front page of the The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, which bears a non-sensical headline of “‘Golf ball’ radar back in isles,” and incredibly creepy photograph in which a young body rides a boogie board through the Hawaiian surf while, in the background and at such strange placement and proportion and plain old appearance that it looks like a bad job of photo editing, a tri-monolithic structure topped with an enormous golf ball lurks. Ah, the Hawaiian military presence.


In the elevator, he tells me about the relationship between Brigham Young University and the Polynesian Cultural Center, a relationship that I don’t entirely understand but agree with him warrants further investigation, like later, like when I’m done with this book. And back in the car, with its blue-and-white hibiscuses (DISAPPOINTMENT. I want “hibiscii” — who’s with me??), we see a rainbow arching into the hills north (north?) of town, near the Diamond Head Crater whose diameter of 3,520 feet and 760-foot summit I was NOT expecting. E tells me that the governor of Hawai’i recently signed a ban on same-sex marriage (or the like), and yet he understands she herself has lived with a (female) partner for many years. We spot a second rainbow, not doubling but a few rainbow-widths away from the first (and that is the only acceptable unit of measurement for sighting rainbows in the sky, n’est-ce pas?); their backdrop is an angry thicket of heavy grey clouds, sort of like the way a Hawai’i license plate looks on a car that hasn’t been washed in awhile.


Between H.A.’s professional sphere and the way that her significant other, O.S., has obviously done himself a disservice by going to work for the United States Geological Survey instead of teaching geology, dinner is an exercise in sustaining the good manners to not pull my notebook from my bag…

Due to various realities of 21st-century air travel, Hawai’i Day Three is actually Day One of any actual seeing and experiencing of the state of Hawai’i instead of airports and airplanes and airport hotels and the houses of boyfriends who will take you home with them and then drive you to the airport the next day when your flight is re-booked.


As it turns out, my life in Hawai’i so far resembles my life in New York in two ways of note — I get a little lost on the way to the baggage claim, and I spend a lot of time sending emails in Starbucks — and no others. There’s so much to tell and say (not the same AT ALL, by the way) that I don’t know where to start or how to structure this, and so I’m just going to go for a vague chronology, sometimes dipping into bullet points, and hope that will satisfy my 2-3 readers once they understand that trying to develop a semblance of structure will likely yield my freaking out and documenting none of this at all.


So. After a grateful 9 hours or so on the couch of some second-degree friends, I collect directions from my male host and make my way on foot toward the Starbucks that he said is perhaps ~20 minutes away. His fiancee, whose intern year in her medical residency is what mandated their move to Honolulu, told me the night before that when she leaves for the hospital in the peri-dawn hours of the morning, she is surprised by how much of the city is up and at ‘em; the bars here close at 12:30 or so, they say, although whether or not this is hyperbole remains unclear; of course, to be out and about a little before 10 a.m. on a Sunday doesn’t make me particularly privy to this.


In the whopping five days between buying my ticket and actually leaving for this trip, I maintained some sort of semi-conscious position that I had no idea what to expect; heading out, I realize that in fact what I was expecting was something like the supa-pixelated image of palm silhouettes against a sunset that signified, c. 1996, my computerized westward pursuit of one of Carmen Sandiego’s henchmen. For that reason or for others, I’m struck by the mere fact of experiencing Honolulu as a regular city, a small and somewhat dingy one. The architecture is weird — bits and pieces of it vaguely recall downtown Miami, but what in the Magic City is a categorical high-climbing homage to the 80s and coke feels, in the Big Pineapple, somewhat feeble. The state house, word has it, was designed to evoke a volcano, and palm trees, and the way water surrounds the Hawaiian Islands, but the effect instead is that of a sombrero with the crown sawed off; on my morning walk, I pass a building shaped like an enormous portobello mushroom standing at attention, and in front of it, a small, round structure that looks for all the world like the top 25 percent of R2D2, and I am not kidding you even a little bit. Aside from these questionable (ad)ventures in urban design, there’s a lot of asphalt and concrete, and a lot of shops, both little (South Pacific Pipes and Cigars, Fine Oriental Carpets & Hawaiian Rugs) and big (Ross, Sports Authority) all of uncertain operational status and all appearing to have been there for a long, long time. The day dawned overcast, and everything seems to have a grimy hue, or a limp posture, or a damp smell.


Nevertheless, there remains something that charms me, all likely tied to the evidence that I’m not in Riverdale anymore. The plumeria — or frangipani, if you prefer — are everywhere, the waxy substantiality of their blossoms defying my every mid-Atlantic preconception of what ubiquitous tree blossoms can and should look like. Jay-walking is really and truly prohibited, under threat of $100 fines, and so no one jay-walks; there is very little honking for a capital city. That is, it is — how you say? — not New York: even the derelict is rendered dear, or at least somewhat benign, and when the hoboes I pass tell me I look pretty this morning, I don’t feel I have to give them my stoniest I-don’t-care-that-you-used-to-be-a-bond-trader, you-keep-your-eyes-off-my-body glare; instead, I can just say thank you.


Of course, soon enough I get to Starbucks and am reminded that, by and large, a Starbucks is a Starbucks, the main differences between my time in this one and my time in others being that, here,


a) I feel less righteous in passing judgment on the people wearing Hawaiian shirts;


b) twice, someone ventures in wearing only board shorts and flip-flops, i.e., no shirt, and while the first time, the individual is in and out quickly enough that perhaps no one had time to invoke any Health Department laws and toss him, I wonder fleetingly if that should be taken as an indication of a topographically-affected attitude to eating establishment dress codes, the way it’s okay to go barefoot into the grocery store that stocks your favorite ice cream sandwiches at the beach;


c) at points throughout the morning, I look out of the front windows and see rain and then out of the side windows and see…no rain; and


d) I’m a few blocks from Waikiki. Otherwise, though, it’s pretty freakin’ similar.


Fortunately, my day consisted of more than sitting in a Starbucks. (Perhaps that should have been (e).) Fortunately, again, for my research but unfortunately for my comprehensive documentation, things are picking up enough that I’ll have to add “Part 2″ later on…


Until then, alohhhhha!

Having been not just unruffled last night by said tall drink of water but altogether rescued from the Crowne Plaza, I got a chance to do laundry at his parents’ house and be hugged one last time by people I’ve actually met before, ever, before being deposited, curbside at Newark, into the hands of fate as I’ve tried to shape it.


On the flight to MSP (that’s Minneapolis-St. Paul, baby, and boy am I into airport codes these days). the next seat is occupied by a tan, scruffy guy of the twenty-something ilk who wears shorts, a Yankees cap, a tattered pair of flip-flops, and an air of insouciance about the whole thing, expressing irritation when the flight attendant collects his beverage prior to take-off.


“Oh I was just in Honolulu,” he says once the requisite where-are-you-goings have been exchanged. He is in aerial land surveying and mapping, he says, or some such thing; in a meaningful way, he specifies his employer, a company whose name neither rings any bells nor promises to take hold in the mind but that, apparently, should have. Per a recent memo sent to all employees of said apparently prominent employer, he is under strict instructions not to talk to the press (is that what I am? Hardly) but will gladly schmooze off the record. This of course proves wholly unhelpful, taking the form of me nodding sympathetically and pretending that his every thought about what it’s like to travel a lot for work is totally original, but I do learn that Hawai’i has a light rail system in the works. Also, apropos nothing I’ve told him I’m working on, he says, “hey, when you’re in Honolulu, ask them about the water quality of the canal. People have totally fallen in that and gotten, like, staph infections and died and stuff.” Excellent.


For those who like window seats and must endure some mid-western layover, I highly, highly recommend a layover in Minnesota, at least during the warmer months — as I noticed en route to Vegas a couple of months ago and was again pleased by today, flying into Minneapolis is sort of like flying into Swiss cheese, like the Alpine lace kind, except that the cheese is beautiful green curlicues and slivers of land, and the holes are ponds and rivers and streams. They’re not kidding about this Land of 10,000 Lakes business.


During my layover at MSP (which is AWESOME, by the way, for anyone who, like me, kind of likes hanging out in airports. There, I easily find and purchase the book that I wasn’t able to find at LGA: the proprietor of the bookstore at C13 calls the proprietor of the bigger bookstore at C1 to confirm that they’re stocking what I want, and so I walk the half-mile to that part of Concourse C, feeling incredibly lucky that it wasn’t found in a branch in Concourse A or B, D, E, F or G, or, Heaven forbid, in some Terminal other than Terminal 1), I learn in any email from one of my sources that Oahu is in fact spelled “O’ahu,” with the punctuation mark that’s an ‘okina, that looks, when written properly, like the mirror image of an apostrophe and that marks the phonetic glottal stop in many Polynesian languages. Totally cool. I thank the source for the correction, and he responds with the enthusiastic expounding that I was kind of already thinking, that adherence to (or at least consideration of) this kind of orthographic principle ties into larger questions of who defines a place. He goes on to alert me to something known as the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, which I’ll have to investigate further…


On the flight to Portland-then-Honolulu, I’m seated next to a petite older woman — sixty-five, perhaps — who wears white pants dotted with embroidered blue dachshunds and an ACE bandage on her right wrist, and I feel guilty for not moving quickly enough to help her manipulate the overhead air nozzle, a task that appears to be a strain for her because of her wrist injury or stature or both. As we are reaching our cruising altitude, I notice that the bandage has moved to her left wrist, and I wonder about the nature of her now-dual injuries and feel abstractly sad at her apparent skimping on reparative equipment. As announcements are made about beverage choice, she takes from her handbag a Game Boy.


When the captain announces our descent onto Portland, I remember the look out the window and — sorry, Minneapolis — am immediately punched in the face by the appalling beauty of Mt. Hood, which is, like, RIGHT there. Seriously: my limbs kind of go cold and my heart quickens just enough to lift it up toward my throat briefly, like a mostly flightless bird startled involuntarily off the ground for a moment or two.


On the ground at PDX, the flight attendants are changed out, and when we re-plane, although I take the same seat, something has changed. Yes, the flight attendants are circulating with Mai Tais, but it’s more than that: the announcements have assumed an air of party bus, of theme park, of destination — even the captain puts ETA updates in terms of what I imagine they imagine (rightly, no doubt) the Hawai’i bound public wants to hear, e.g. “okay, folks, we’ve reached a cruising altitude of ##-thousand feet, and now it’ll be about five hours to Paradise.” I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet it still comes as a reminder, so engrossed have I been in looking at my ultimate port of call through the lenses of bureaucratic proceedings and NGOs and environmental brouhahas and academic infrastructures and other — let’s be honest — mundanities inherent to every other state in this country. And so to be suddenly faced, for the first time since spring break my junior year in college, with the commercial facade that equates to Hawai’i in the minds of an overwhelming majority of U. S. Americans is jarring, and helpful.


Hawai’i, I venture to submit, has such a strange, fraught identity that I can’t as of demonstrate in any other way than to describe the flight attendants passing the pineapple-adorned cocktails some thirty minutes before they pass out the forms that, one per household, must be filled out and submitted to the Hawai’i Department of Agriculture’s Plant Quarantine Program. These no doubt deepen the exoticism of our flight — even I freak out fleetingly, wondering for an idiotic few seconds if I was supposed to have packed my passport — and yet what it really evidences is our destination’s environmental vulnerability.

I’ve done a lot of dragging myself out of bed over the years, but this morning was one for the books.


Having not slept at all the previous (Wednesday) night in my efforts to finish a grant application (and, okay, memorize the entire script of each of the four episodes of ‘The Office’ currently available online), and then not falling asleep until c. 3 a.m. on Friday just because I first had to get all my ducks in a row for the early departure and then was STILL so freaking wound up…I think I’m justified in saying that the sound of my alarm at 5:50 this morning really and truly hurt. Okay, whatever. Wash, dress, cram as much food as possible into shoulder bag, grunt and sweat suitcase and self up Broadway from Cousin Nancy’s apartment on 95th to where the M60 starts at 106th, board bus, apologize to passengers injured by suitcase, think to text relatives, feel pissed to somehow have neither Mike’s nor Evan’s number, make mental note to call Grandma Mae as soon as phone is charged (got to Mickey last night), notice time, freak out a little, get to LaGuardia, do everything just fine, settle in at gate with plenty of minutes to spare.


It seemed that boarding of Zone 4 i.e. MY Zone but also i.e. the FIRST Zone had been stalled, so I found a nice little patch of floor space to sit on near an outlet to charge my phone at, replete with a nice little patch of wall space to lean up against. Cool. Get joined by excessively cute guy with perfectly effortless facial scruff and meticulously ripped jeans who promptly plugs in his iPhone beside mine, idly wonder if he’s the type of guy who will appreciate being told, “if I were wearing a cooler outfit, this could totally be an iPhone commercial,” realize for the elevendy hundredth time in my life that my outfit is far, far too uncool for him to appreciate being told anything at all by me, realize for the first time in my life that I’m probably too old for him, anyway, hear announcement that my flight to Atlanta has been delayed by two hours, register that I will miss my first connecting flight to LAX and my second to HNL.


I am surprised to find myself enormously impressed by how patient and cordial the delta agents are in working their way through the line (or maybe “clusterfuck” would be a better word) of irate passengers formerly of Delta flight 1747 to Atlanta. I am wholly unsurprised by the idiocy, sense of entitlement, and simian vocabulary of the air-traveling American public, at least as it exists around me, so when I encounter a gentleman who understands nothing but Italian and seems distressed about his immediate future in Atlanta as well as the status of his luggage, I don’t hesitate to call and interrupt my father at work so that we could at least conspire to reward the guy for having eluded English into middle age. Anyway. It really fascinates me to speculate about the stories behind people in that situation, what it is that causes them to be SO MAD about getting to Jackson, Miss., four hours later than they were going to, or to sigh kind of tearfully and resignedly (she was wearing/carrying all black except for her pants, which were white, which made feel like she probably wasn’t going to a funeral — especially since that’s kind of how I always look — but she seemed so sad that I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t, just in case she would think I was mocking her. Which, let’s be serious, unless she really was going to a funeral, I was), or to not understand things like “that city does not have an airport.”


Anyway. When it was finally my turn, the ticketing agent was — I suspect — so grateful that I didn’t have a complete and total conniption about waiting until tomorrow to be lonely and disoriented in Honolulu that he put me on the executive floor of this here Crowne Plaza LaGuardia, and now — having napped at length — I am enjoying a lovely dinner of whole fruit, cookies, and cheese cubes at a table with breathtaking tarmac views. And soon, my long-suffering and tall drink of water will be stopping by on his way to New Jersey to unruffle any feathers that still need smoothing. Here’s to tomorrow…