This is the third in a series of impressionist travelogues, Talk Story, about that one time I answered a transpersonal call I should have sent to voicemail and journeyed down a mountain, then across an ocean and up a volcano. Because daily holotropic breathwork plus alpine plunge and Ho’oponopono practice is truly ascension medicine. Help yourself to part one, about a kahuna called Kaos chased by part two, in which a white owl with a warning enters the chat.
Saying that Kilauea is awake is a misunderstanding that the fire of creation ever sleeps. On the dry side of the Big Island, she simmers in plain sight. Unlike an earthquake, an active volcano isn’t an environmental disaster waiting to happen; it’s a smoking gash of a trauma wound hanging visibly above all else. Looming, like Pele herself, who’s been spotted hitchhiking along the Saddle Road in a dress the color of lava with whiskey in hand.
On my work/trade farm in Captain Cook, I went to bed brave. Pueos and kahunas notwithstanding, omens were definitely not the boss of me. I stared at the inky sky above my tent, where I’d relocated on a scrawny patch of fountain grass. Uncle A, who occupied the lanai on which I crashed after hours of picking in fire ant-infested groves, who watched without pretense as I showered outside, was growing agitated by my presence.
Cash crops like coffee and mac nuts extract everything from the ‘aina and her children; what’s left, the tourists take. Farmers, workers, and locals are desperate for resources that have been drained or even ruined beyond repair. Uncle A lamented the economic havoc caused by coffee cherry season, the futility of which he drowned in Coors tallboys, telling me the brewery tour in Golden, Colorado, was a must-see in my lifetime.
Shit with Uncle turned tense in a heartbeat when another work/trader clocked a bright blue-legged centipede advancing across the lanai’s plywood platform. Without hesitation, I reached behind me for a hammer, which I kept next to the pillow of my hammock. I struck the centipede squarely in the center, slicing the insect in half. Both parts continued their march, unthwarted. Smack! Smack! Two more swings were all it took.
KAPU! Uncle A stood over me, glowering. His face twisted into the same rage he’d worn, ranting the night I first landed in Kona: how his family was driven from Maui, how he’d rebelled at a State school, how he’d done a lot of time before and expected to do more.
Behind Uncle, a leather belt hung from a nail next to a stamped sign stating the official business of the farm’s lanai: Nut House. Unlike Bobby Brady’s legendary brush with Island taboo, I did not foresee a happy ending here in Cook.
After my open flirtation with the forbidden, Uncle made his beef with me known. Using high-pressure air, he patrolled the perimeter of the lanai and evicted every creepy crawly lurking below until a venomous legion immigrated upstairs to my sleeping quarters. I found untied and emptied burlap sacks of mac nuts I’d picked weeks before, in groves where I’d been dispatched to pick them again.
Uncle blamed pua’a despite an astounding lack of proof: total absence of their tell-tale scattering of nuts and shredding of burlap. That’s when Uncle began firing shots off the lanai at all hours, buck naked and eyes wild.
So: was I surprised to find Uncle, illuminated like a DC villain by the Pisces Full Moon, hovering above my tent with a shotgun trained on my forehead while I slept? I was not. I’d been warned twice—by a kahuna and a pueo. I’d ignored both caution signs, sealed and delivered by the cosmos. My bad. Uncle, in the Sierra, we only point guns at folks if we’re gonna use ’em.
Uncle retreated away from my tent. His bare butt disappeared into the mac grove. I directed my attention to traveling North Kohala way as I packed up, leaving one of my machetes and my tent behind for the other work/trader to claim. I sensed my gridwork mission, this wander, was drawing to a close. Hawi would be my base camp for offering Poli’ahu prayers at Mauna Kea.
Hawi is considered an artist colony, so it tracked when I contacted an eccentric trust funder from an art world family, renting out what he billed as custom wabi sabi cottages, too cute to be real. The trust funder eagerly invited me to his mother’s birthday party, which happened to be the same afternoon I landed in Hawi. He’d texted me nonstop, I discovered, during my trip from Kona Town to North Kohala.
I sat at a quaint table in the coffee company on the tiny town’s only block. I didn’t bother to read the onslaught of WhatsApp messages. Per Google, the eccentric trustfunder’s mother was an acclaimed painter who passed away almost five years prior.
In the coffee company, the perky young new agers sipping matcha next to me waxed poetic about their guided tour tonight. They were driving up to Mauna Kea with twenty or so tourists to see the stars at $300 a head, which their smartphone calculations confirmed was equal to one mortgage payment on an AirBnB they picked up for a song.
Had the cops cleared out the native protestors blocking access to the telescopes? The new agers checked their newsfeed—yes, good, that’s out of the way. They rehearsed their script for the tour, heavy on unsubstantiated rumors of alien abduction.
This moment is when I learned the universe will send warning upon warning, and if all else fails, the message becomes a mirror. How many clicks away was I from the perky young new agers, bent on material conquest? How dare I fall to my knees and offer prayers to a snow goddess held by a volcano to fill up a lake 2,500 miles away, when my presence was protested by her people?
As Poli’ahu’s icy mantle spread across my shoulders, I shivered with the shame of a colonizer’s appropriative entitlement. Sure, I’d disguised my intentions even from myself, but no matter how many fields I worked or groves I picked, I’d still come to extract from the ‘aina.
I kept my meeting at the wabi sabi cottages, absent an alternative to sleeping in the Kona airport until my flight the next morning. From there, I had no idea what came next. I approached the property line, and the door of a curbside unit opened; I heard a familiar voice greet me. There stood a dude I’d known from the kava bar in Cook. Did I want to spark one and talk story? I did. Suddenly, it all tumbled out of me. I’d never felt so lost and found all at once.
Why had I bothered coming to the Big Island, and where the fuck was I headed next from here? The dude just handed me a sack of weed, and said to help myself:
