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.