Month: October 2009
Surrendering Control
Posted on October 25, 2009 in Driving Vacation Fall 2009
Going on vacation — especially to Hawaii by way of LAX — can mean you place yourself in the hands of strange drivers. First there are the ones who drive you to and from the airport. On the morning of the fourteenth, we packed ourselves into a deep blue Supershuttle van. The chauffeur was kind, but traffic was not. Two thirds of the way it slowed to stop and go. If you live in one of the larger metropolitan areas, you knows what this means. Move forward just another to get your stomach sliding, then stop abruptly, letting it quiver and shake. Repeat ad nauseum. Literally ad nauseum.
We got to the airport only because the driver turned off and made the last leg by surface streets, an accomplishment that she thanked my queasiness for. I had no trouble on the plane because planes don’t do it for me just like ski lifts don’t trigger my acrophobia. We rented a car in Hilo, but there were two more situations when I surrendered control of the drive.
The first was aboard the boat to the lava flowing into the ocean near [[Kalapana,_Hawaii|Kalapana]]. Here was a curious experience. After meeting the chief guide at an Aloha gas station in the darkness near [[Pahoa]], we followed a long string of cars through jungles to [[Isaac Hale Beach Park]] where we unloaded in the darkness for bathroom breaks and a brief discussion of what to do in the case a [[lava bomb]] pierced a hole in the hull and we suddenly got a whiff of mortality. Then we got on the boat, a large catamaran which was sitting in the parking lot. This would be the worst part for me — I hated having to climb in using a cheap handyman’s ladder.
The cruise didn’t bother me because I had prepared myself with [[Dramamine]]. But near the [[lava tube|lava tubes]], the pilot went into stop-start-stop-start mode. I did okay with this until I took in a lungful of the sulfur steam from the [[fumarole]] and gagged.
Things cleared up as soon as the boat got moving again and I got a new lungful of fresh air. Had a great talk with one of the guys and a man from Kansas, trading fishing stories. They loved my story about how I caught a shark on light line ((He was barely 11 inches long, but he was a shark!)). Incredibly, the guide pointed out a spot in the open ocean where he had caught a record-breaking [[Wahoo|Ono]]. I tipped the crew well because — aside from my brief experience of nausea — I not only had a good time but felt entertained.
I make it a point to try to talk to the drivers as if they were human beings, but the one we had on the [[Mauna Kea]] trip existed in another place entirely. It’s not that he was nasty or inconsiderate. He just curled into his own head when I attempted to talk to him. When I mentioned hunting and fishing, he said “I hate fishing.” So I asked him a few questions about life on the island, a subject which he could describe best in grunts.
He was kind when my wife developed altitude sickness. When he dropped us off, he literally begged for his tip. I gave him $6.
Spam Spam Spam Spam
Posted on October 25, 2009 in Strange Vacation Fall 2009
I kid you not. Spam is considered a delicacy on the Big Island of Hawaii. There is absolutely no shame attached to the eating of this meat. They serve Spam for breakfast. You can buy Spam sandwiches. And most bizarre of all, a Kona sushi bar sells Spam [[nigiri]].
If you say anything other than “Spam is good” in Hawaii, you are summarily executed. And ground into Spam.
Goodbye to rampant greens and warm rains
Posted on October 21, 2009 in Reflections Vacation Fall 2009
My last therapist told me that I didn’t like change. I figure that this was just a standard line she used on people like me who defied her Rogerian expectations. I do like change. It’s changing back to the same old thing and feeling unable to do anything about it that undoes my contentedness.
So tomorrow at 4 pm, I’m going back to southern California. There are people there who are visiting for a week like I am visiting here and aching because they are returning to their ordinary. I will sing once more of the chaparral here, just as they will see the vivacity of their red autumns. A place is much like a person: no one location can fill your needs. I’ve been needing the rampant greens and warm rains. Lynn’s pocketbook limits what we can afford in the way of time. so it is goodbye to this personality. Hello to my everyday, insufficient and yet substantial. Life.
Hawaii’s Saddleback
Posted on October 21, 2009 in Vacation Fall 2009 Weather
Kona is the sunshine coast of the Big Island. Condos go up as fast as they did in 1990s Orange County (( Provided the land is not owned by the state or the federal government or the native Hawaiians)) . Leave downtown Kona on Highway190, however, and you quickly find yourself on the northern slopesof Mauna Loa. Cattle country, home of the Parker Ranch, a major Hawaiian beef producer and tourist attraction. A few miles shy of Waimea, another highway –numbered 200 — departs on the right for the rift between the two great mountains of the Big Island –Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea.
Nowhere are the night stars as vibrant as they are upon Mauna Kea. The trouble is that to see this spectacle, you must hazard the Saddleback Road. You must know a few things about this thoroughfare. First, it was constructed by the military during the Second World War. The planners wanted to link Kona and Hilo without making it attractive to either the Japanese or civilians. So, they made the bridges narrow, the slopes steep, and the way winding. Second, crouched between the Kona Coast and the turnoff for the Mauna Kea observatory lie those weather phenomena known as clouds. We who live in the lowlands experience these gangs of water droplets from beneath, but the clouds of the northern end of the Saddleback Road wait on the road. When you meet them, they close in on you as fog.
Now imagine the hell of the highway designed by military experts who wanted to discourage you from driving on it staffed by the demons of low-flying pre-precipitation. Inflict upon yourself strange moments when lights from oncoming cars descend from the road in front of you or cows materialize in your desired path seemingly out of the stuff of water vapor. Consider the happiness you feel when you get to the Hilo side of the valley where the clouds have the good grace to dissolve into torrential rain.
Welcome to Hawaii’s Saddleback. The hazardous weather might make you yearn for raging brushfires like the ones that sweep California’s.
Hilo
Posted on October 17, 2009 in Vacation Fall 2009
Hilo is an odd town, a splendid town where 130 inches of rain fall every year. The rain comes down in the middle of the night and during the first hours of light. Then the clouds part and you have a blue meadow grazed by cumulous. It’s a place where they serve sushi-sandwiches called mosubi: the meat is often Spam or red-red hot dog. On Wednesdays and Saturdays people go to the Farmer’s Market to buy odd delicacies such as these or fruits like atemoya, dragonfruit, star fruit, lingon, white pineapple, apple bananas, and durian. Dogs seem to be of toy varieties mostly and the cats, too, are small. You know that any animal you see is rabies-free because of the strict quarantine laws. Even the mongooses are small: the first I saw were mistakable for squirrels.
Only tourists rush to get anywhere. The locals yawn at the rumble of airports and keep to the speed limit. Lynn suggests, that the mood here derives from a diversity like that of New York or Los Angeles coupled with the easiness of the towns of Down East Maine.
If it weren’t for the necessary and abominable sacrifice of our pets, I could live here.
Notes on an inferno
Posted on October 17, 2009 in Vacation Fall 2009 Video
Dawn was a concept I had heard of, but seldom experienced. the idea of putting myself to bed and then waking at an hour where I might see it slightly worried me The lure of seeing lava flowing directly into the ocean was too powerful to resist. we made the reservations, got up at three, and met the party outside the Aloha gas station in Pahoa.
A twenty minute drive took us through a black jungle — a long pergola of tropical trees that arched over the road and dropped long roots from their branches. At Isaac Hale State Park, we met the boat, which was raised upon its trailer in the parking lot. We boarded via an aluminum handyman’s ladder. They took us to the boat launching ramp andbacked us into the sea.
Here are things I noted:
- The lava jumped out of the cliff or pali as a series of orange falls – a few large ones and fewer tiny tributaries.
- Rocks floated in the water. These were cinders that were still molten at their core. when they cooled through, they sank.
- The guides told us that this was the only place in the world where magma chuted straight into the ocean.
- The shelf had actually retreated by several yards in the previous weeks. It appeared that the forces of Nature were out to reclaim the loss.
- Steam churned upwards in white, obscuring clouds that reeked of sulfur. I ate a whiff of it and had the dry heaves that I shouted overboard.
- Pops of gas welled up from the cooling slag beneath the water and rocked the boat.
- I noticed two people viewing the lava from atop an adjacent pali. When I called this to one of the guides’ attention, he called them idiots.
- “A good day,” the guides declared.” The sea was like glass.”
After the trip, I tipped the guides. We then went back through the now lit pergola. A pair of small mammals that I mistook for squirrels whirled in the road: I had never known mongooses were so small.
The name of the outfit we chartered was LavaOcean Adventures.
Dude
Posted on October 12, 2009 in Cats Dogs
A man we know likes to take his cat for walks in the park. The man strolls down the street and the cat — a smallish gray tabby boy — follows along. Once at the park, Dude, as the cat is known, looks around and then follows the man home. The dogs in the park evidentally don’t know what to do with this feline because I have had no report that he has been bothered by them.
There’s a bush just outside the fellow’s apartment that Dude likes to hide in. When I come back from the park with Drake, Dude likes to leap onto Drake’s back. This causes Drake to startle and do a left circle until he is behind me. Dude then tries to make friends with Drake, but my Boston Terrier will have nothing of this. He turns his face to his right, away from the victorious tabby.
“Dude,” I like to laugh to the cat’s owner, “has Drake’s number.”
Tension
Posted on October 12, 2009 in Body Language Coronary
From my journal, dated 8 October 2009:
Yesterday, a hood of deadened nerves encapsulated my head and shoulders. Dr. Ip’s nurse put the cuff on my arm, listening until the sound of my pulse stopped before releasing the pressure. She announced that my blood pressure was 150 over some awful number. I could feel the insensitivity clasping my neck. Into the night it bothered me, shook me, mangled my equanimity. It was impossible to sit comfortably to watch television. It hurt. I was broken, flattened, squeezed. My eyelids fluttered. Heavy as they were, I could not relieve myself by sleeping. The flattening numbness wouldn’t let me go.
Dream
Posted on October 9, 2009 in Dreams
I’ve sailed into a gigantic library from the San Francisco Bay where I am researching the history of a huge white prison that was constructed to replace Alcatraz. Inside the library is a broad fountain cast in the form of a rectangular maze. The path is easy enough to follow, but the water on the side I enter on gushes cleanly. As i wend my way towards the other end, the water becomes filthier until I am walking through an inch or so of shit. Realizing that I have gone from excellent to worst, I go back, cleaning my shoes as I go. When I get to the other end, I watch as a few students open up part of a wall so they can enter the maze through its most immaculate stream.
One Day, No Hate
Posted on October 6, 2009 in Hatred Reading
Today is One Day, No Hate, a cause that some of us have taken up by avoiding political discussion on Twitter and Facebook — me, included. This means not engaging in political discussion or any of the playful banter which I am noted for.
The netival ((Neologism that you first saw here. Meaning “net festival”.)) has led me to crack Eric Hoffer’s [amazonify]0060505915:align:text:bycommandofemper:width:height:The True Believer[/amazonify] and uncover this relevant passage:
There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him an injustice. That others have a just grievance against us is a more potent reason for hating them than that we have a just grievance against them. We do not make people humble and meek when we show them their guilt and cause them to be ashamed of themselves. We are more likely to stir their arrogance and rouse in them a reckless aggressiveness. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnamity is to blunt our hatred for him. (p. 96)
The Twitter hashtag for this is #1Day0Hate
