MOLOKAI.
Home to 7000, a former leper colony (made famous in the movie Papillon, where Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen are prisoners serving out time with lepers as neighbors and maybe they escaped on the raft of coconuts and maybe they didn’t!)a supermarket called Friendlies where I saw a flyer requesting an anvil (any size considered), and zero stoplights. Nowadays, instead of leprosy, you say Hansen’s Disease. Only people and the nine-banded armadillo are susceptible to leprosy.
In Catholic tradition, people (and armadillos) suffering from leprosy were considered to be going through Purgatory on Earth, and for this reason their suffering was considered more holy than the ordinary person’s. The monastic colonies, like Father Damien’s on Molokai, were encouraged as havens for those struggling to secure a fate of clouds, not fire.
At the Paniolo Hale (Cowboy House (?) ) condo complex on western Molokai there is a night watchman named 2 things. First - Kawika. Second - Dave. He tells me his name also translates to “the EYE” and I assert that it is perfect for his job and he agrees and we continue chatting and he tells me something astounding. The EYE was surfing in Molokai, long ago, and was crushed by a massive wave that wedged him into a big hole in the coral reef. The roiling sea water made it difficult to see. He wasn’t sure which way was up or out. He remembered to maintain his cool and waited for things to mellow. He says it was at least 1-2 minutes. He oriented himself, squeezed out, and raced for the surface. His board was on shore. He looked at it, turned his back and walked away, never to surf again.
Kamaka is the name of a family that makes quality ukuleles. According to the glossy inflight magazine of Hawaiian Airlines they once hired a deaf worker and discovered that they make excellent instrument builders because their touch and sight are enhanced and lend well to making structurally perfect “ukes”. They began actively recruiting people who couldn’t hear to make objects that enchant ears. Sounded a little in-flight glossy magaziney, but I’m buying it and spreading it, and enjoying it.
Robert Louis Stevenson spent a good part of his life in Hawaii. Here’s a little of what he said: “I cannot say why I like the sea; no man is more cynically and constantly alive to its perils; I regard it as the highest form of gambling; and yet I love the sea as much as I hate gambling. Fine, clean emotions; a world all and always beautiful; air better than wine; interest unflagging; there is upon the whole no better life. - Yours ever, R.L.S.
and
“If I could only stay there the time that remains, I could get my work done and be happy; but the care of my family keeps me in vile Honolulu, where I am always out of sorts, amidst heat and cold and cesspools and beastly HAOLES. What is a haole? You are one; and so, I am sorry to say, am I. After so long a dose of whites, it was a blessing to get among Polynesians again even for a week.”
The EYE taught me the word “dakine”. It’s an interchangeable word who’s meaning is declared by the context. It can literally mean everything and anything. Linguistic all-star!
I enjoy sharing fun conversations with people but prefer a fuller spectrum. SO, I asked the EYE what he thought of tourism. The EYE told me the older people of Hawaii, the kahunas, have a better sense of the aloha spirit (love, compassion) and are therefore not as angry as the younger generations in regards to tourism. I think the EYE’s diplomacy was in full effect. I gave the EYE a pineapple the night before I left, not out of some grand gesture of a HAOLE filling crappy about imperialism and the syphilis and other diseases whitey brought to the islands but because we had a ton of leftover food and I liked his stories. Even the more mundane ones like the “story” of how he was going to reconstruct his clothesline, pitching the poles at angles, so when the line weighed down with wet shirts and pants, it would pull the poles to perfect 90 degree angles. Dakine.
At one point on the trip I hurled a dakine that whipped about majestically in the air, arcing perfectly around the parking lot of the Molokai Post a Nut US Post Office where you can send coconuts to people by writing their addresses right on the husks, coming to rest on the roof, where it remains today. Dakine.