Wednesday, July 27, 2005

Gumbi Dances Across Waimea for My Brother's Birthday


Happy Birthday, Bryan! Since everyone saw the pictures of his wedding, I thought it might be acceptable to do a public announcement, especially since it is a big one for him. So happy 30th birthday! I hope the next year is a good one.

For those of you who are not my brother, the town of Waimea is one of the last towns on Kauai's western shore. It does not generally feature a giant stuffed Gumbi doll. In fact, it's known for being more like "old Kauai," in that it hasn't become touristy or developed yet. In general the south and west shores are quieter than the north and east. Someone told me that there are only four patrol cars for the south and west shores combined. This makes driving a bit like playing poker, with patrol cars as aces. As I drive I count them, so I know how many are still out there in front of me. I should note that this is practically wishful thinking on my part; my car is so old that I'm usually the one pulling over to let the faster cars by.

Monday, July 25, 2005

Hope and Union


I have to step out of Kauai and back to my other island for a moment--I've wanted to post something on my friend Sigrid's restaurant/cafe, Hope and Union, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for some time now. Her cafe became an important part of my life before I left ny; I was stopping in several times a week, for chai, a glass of wine, or brunch (she even keeps a copy of my key in case I lock myself out, and I'm not the only one in east/south billyburg who can say that). So food lovers everywhere, particularly those in ny now, or who might be visiting in the future, take note. (For those who don't fall into this group, here's a little slice of my life back in Br'klyn.)
Siggy and her husband, John, used to work for Mario Batali at Babbo (that's where they met, in fact), and they are both super talented, wonderful people. I didn't realize what gnocchi could be until I ate John's, and Siggy's cranberry orange scones were my reason for living Wednesdays this spring (we had our meetings at my heinous job on Wednesdays). Their coffee and chai are top notch, if you happen to be in the neighborhood in the mornings, and the weekend brunches are worth the trek (trust me). They have a great patio, and though they no longer have a regular dinner service, they do a Thursday evening grill out. Siggy has created a real community where there was a definite need, and her generous personality has as much to do with that as the food (and maybe some of that comes through in the food...there's some real Like Water for Chocolate magic going on here), so if you get a chance, treat yourself, and support a great local spot.

Drive Down from Koke'e State Park/Waimea Canyon

Waimea Canyon

I hiked into this canyon one of my first weekends here. The hikes in Koke'e State Park are in much lusher territory (there are even a few redwood groves there), but I drive by the canyon to get up there.

Sierra Club Hikers

The past two weekends I've hiked in Koke'e State Park, near Waimea Canyon. These are the people I hiked with weekend before last. The couple in the center, Mel and Vera, got me into volunteering at the sink hole and NTBG. Vera is wearing a light green tank and Mel has a baseball cap on.

Dasher

Dasher and I have gotten into the habit of taking a walk on the road above the farm every evening at sunset (which reminds me that I should get back, the sun's a settin'). She's extremely good company, I have to say, though she has developed an interest in the little gray dog that lives nearby, and the little dog is a bit overwhelmed by Dasher's attention, I think. But Dasher is the sweetest, most sensitive dog I've ever spent time with. She's really a very good soul.

Shot of the Shack Kitchen

A shot of the kitchen, with me and Dasher's head. You can see the Fiestaware tea cups, which I love, and some flowers from the farmer's market. The fish that are painted at the bottom of the walls show a bit in this one. The shack's builder, Delpha, painted them, and Gay has done her best to preserve them.

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Thinking Things Over in the Shack

I just found an email from Gay with pics from the shack. This is my writing space, the night we hung the hammock. The hat I bought in Colorado. After living in Texas for 20 years without ever owning one, I thought the time had come.

I'll go through the others and get more up later in the week. Thanks, Gay!

Gumbi Presents Beautiful Kauai Scenery

I know everyone was wondering what happened to Gumbi, and here he is...my brother (or "brah" as they say here) handed him off to me before I left CO. He sits on the desk and makes me dream about my childhood.

I've been volunteering at the National Tropical Botanical Gardens and having a great time. I kind of stumbled into it through a Sierra Club hike last weekend. I'll take a ton of pictures and relate more in the next few weeks. It's all pretty menial work, but they give the volunteers private tours of parts of the garden we might not see otherwise. It's really an amazing place. I think I'm going on Sunday to volunteer at a project involving a sink hole I definitely could not get in to see otherwise. It's all been a good balance to writing. Not a lot of thinking, just weeding and re-potting, and learning the names of plants.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

View from Sleeping Giant

This is a view of the town, Wailua, from the top of the Mount Nounou, or Sleeping Giant. We also climbed up there for July 4th to watch the fireworks.

Opaeka'a Falls


This waterfall is across the road from the heiau.

Poli'ahu Heiau


This is a picture of a heiau, or outdoor temple, near Kapa'a on the East shore. I hiked near here on the July 4th weekend. It was apparently used by King Kaumuali'i, Hawaii's last king. If the picture were bigger, you could see that some offerings have been left recently. They wrap a rock with a ti leaf and leave it there as a kind of prayer.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Nocturnal Visitors

Last night in the middle of the night I was awakened by a lot of noise. I sleepily assumed it was the rat, which often knocks things over in the night--she's a rather clumsy rat--but the noise was loud and seemed to be coming from all around the house. I looked over to see if Dasher was up, but she was on her pillow, as groggy-headed as I was. I decided that we definitely had more than one rat. Then I thought to myself, "What could they be doing?" And then, after listening another moment, "They must be really big." I waited for Dasher to start up in a rat-hunting frenzy, but Dasher, smart dog that she is, only looked at me as though to say, "Well, are you going to take care of this or what?"

Meanwhile, the banging around the house intensified. It sounded as though something was rubbing itself against the walls. The shack practically groaned. I could hear things being knocked around, though I couldn't tell exactly what things or where they were; the sound seemed to be everywhere. I picked up the flashlight and sat up in bed. I aimed it at the kitchen, giving the rats a heads up so I wouldn't actually have to see them, and then got out of bed. Out of bed I finally started to wake up, and I realized that the sound was outside, not in the kitchen or upstairs as I had thought.

My situation was made worse by the fact that I had gone to bed listening to AM radio. On Friday nights the New Zealand station and Radio Australia both broadcast rugby, so I'm left either with Japanese stations, which sometimes have programs in English, or AM talk radio. The last program I listened to before falling asleep was on the mainland, where it would have been the middle of the night. It consisted of men calling in to describe their paranormal experiences. Some of the stories were pretty entertaining, but the last one was a guy talking about the "shadow man" who had visited him at the foot of the bed. This one was actually pretty creepy, so I switched it off before hearing the end, afraid that it was going to keep me up at night.

So there I was, in the middle of the night, visions of shadow men in my head. I bravely went to my window, nonetheless, as the noise was at this point really too loud to ignore. I immediately saw something big and solid move down the hill beside the house. My first thought was that it was a man, because it did sort of look like a man sliding down a hill. I ducked down so that he wouldn't see me. As I squatted under the window in the dark, I realized that if the thing I'd seen was a man, then that meant that there were many men, all around the house--that the shack was being invaded for some reason, which was highly unlikely. It also struck me that the thing I'd seen was too big to be a man, and then that whatever I was hearing had more than two feet. After listening for a few seconds to confirm the fact that it was a four-footed creature, I got up and shone my flashlight out the window. Unfortunately this mostly illuminated the screen over the window and ruined my night vision. I switched the flashlight off and peered into the darkness. There I now discerned four or five giant black shapes, negative fields against the white moonlight on the yard. "My God," I thought, "that guy had a shadow man, but I've got shadow cows.

Realizing that the idea of shadow cows was crazy, I turned the flashlight back on. In the beam of the flashlight, now that I knew where to aim it, emerged cow after cow, all peering back at me, russet- and white-faced, as normal as milk carton cows, except that these had extremely guilty looks on their faces. (One of them had been busy pushing everything off the porch of my bathroom/storage shed with his head; I'm not sure what the others were up to). Their expressions, the fact that they were there at all, and the crazy things I had imagined, struck me as hilarious and I started laughing. The sound startled the guilt-ridden cows, who all began to move away, practically running at first, back to wherever they'd come from.

I regretted scaring them, and stopped laughing, to watch instead. Without the flashlight they were again made strange--great moonsilver creatures, moving together like pilgrims toward a shared destination. The only sound was the sound of their hooves through the grass; they moved around the house, up the hill, and through the hole in the fence that must exist, but which I haven't yet been able to find.

Surf Lesson Went Great!

The surfing class turned out to be really fun, and great exercise. There were only three of us for the afternoon class: a middle-aged lawyer from Boise, Idaho, named Jack; a ten-year-old from Laguna Beach, California, named Jake, who had surfed before and was already trying to "hang five"; and me. The woman who signed us up was from Jersey, so we talked about the East coast, and after that the surf instructor, a native Hawaiian, gave me a hard time for being from Brooklyn. For instance, when we were still on land, he had us each get on the board, then he would lift up the end and simulate waves so that we could practice our balance. With me, he kept yelling out (there was a bit of audience for our lesson), "Don't hit me! She's from Brooklyn. Don't hit me, Brooklyn!" When we got into the water, the ten-year-old turned to me and said in a low voice, "Hey, where's Brooklyn?"

Anyway, I got up almost every time, so I guess I did right by my borough. It's much harder, of course, when someone isn't there to pick the waves for you...

Also, the instructor said that he had made his name by teaching his pet pig. He said that if he could teach a pig to surf, he could teach anyone.

Friday, July 15, 2005

Surf Lesson Jitters

I'm at the Koloa Public and School Library (most of the branch libraries are also the school library, it seems). I have an hour until my surf lesson. I'm a little nervous, actually, and excited. I'll post next week to let you all know how it goes. Hang ten all you dudes and dudettes out there.

Coconut Guy at Farmer's Market


Thanks to Dean and Gay, I don't have to buy my coconuts at the farmer's market. It is some work to husk the coconuts, but I'm getting the hang of it, and it's worth the effort. I picked up a few tips from watching this guy. He said that coconut milk is the purest water in the world. He said that during WWII, they'd just hook up an IV to a coconut. Who knows if its true, but its fun to think about.

Koloa Farmer's Market

I've begun to make this a habit on Monday afternoon. It's the one thing I've seen Kauaiians get intense about. It opens at 12:00 and apparently people get there early; there's a small barrier with a sign telling people to wait behind it until then. If I get there after 12:30 things are already sort of winding down some. But it is understandable, because it is some of the best fruit I've ever had, and there are a lot of organic items that would be hard to find or very expensive in the grocery store. This week I bought home pineapple, papaya, two different kinds of mango, zucchini, limes, avocado, red peppers, and a big bunch of tropical flowers. I don't think I even spent $10.00.

Koloa History Center

This is a nice place to eat lunch...you can get an Hawaiian plate lunch at a nearby stand: fried mahi mahi, rice, mac and cheese, and a guava-passion fruit drink for under $6.00.

Koloa Town

Here's Koloa, which I talked about in an earlier blog. The first sugar plantation was here; the main drag is composed of historic buildings.

Monday, July 11, 2005

The Mild Dangers of Kauai

Shipwreck Beach

This is my favorite nearby beach.

Apple Bananas


Gay and I went collecting fruit week before last and cut down these bananas. They've been ripening upstairs ever since, the ones I haven't eaten for breakfast already, that is. They're delicious fried.

Looking Down on the Valley

The Tree Farm Ho'ola'au

Here's where I've been spending my days and nights...you can see some of the hardwood trees Gay has planted in the foreground. A coconut tree is in the middle ground; I husked and opened my first coconut last night, using the husker that Dean installed last Friday.

The tree farm is located in a valley, near the Lawai Stream, which you can also find on the map. I write upstairs and sleep on a fold-a-bed downstairs.




Posted by gwiehardt

Friday, July 01, 2005

And science:

The Hawaiian archipelago is a chain of giant shield volcanoes that arose via the activity of a "hot-spot" below the ocean floor. This "hot-spot" has probably been actively erupting lava for perhaps as many as 70 million years, if the Emperor Seamounts are considered part of this chain. The Hawaiian Archipelago has formed as the ocean floor has moved across this "hot-spot" in a northwesterly direction. There are at present 132 islands, reefs, and shoals with eight main islands. This is the largest assemblage of volcanic islands that are the most isolated from a continental landmass than any other similar set of islands in the entire world. An island arises if the flow of lava is sufficient over time to build it up above the surface of the sea. As the sea floor continues to move, the island is carried beyond the lava fountains from which it was formed. Wind and water wear away the landscape and the island presses down upon its supporting floor and subsides. The aging islands possess the rugged and spectacular scenic grandeur that looks so magnificient on picture postcards.

Sohmer and Gustafson, Plants and Flowers of Hawai'i

In this book I also read that seeds could only come to the islands via "wind, water, or wing"--blown thousands of miles by a storm, carried by a bird taken off course, or washed ashore after floating for many weeks in sea water. If you look on a map it seems highly unlikely that this would ever happen at all, and in the course of the island's 70 million years, it is believed that it only happened some 300 times--that all the vegetation that the Polynesians found here was the result of those 300 chance encounters, spread out over 27-70 million years.

Merwin on Hawaii's Beginnings

A number of people commented on the Merwin poem with which I began this blog, and I thought, since I'm reading it more consistently now that I'm here (it's over 300 pages), the time had come to include another passage, if I could find a good reason to. I'm also perusing here and there a few books on the natural world of Hawaii, and happened to read, on the same day, two very different accounts of Hawaii's beginnings. Here's Merwin:

The mountain rises by itself out of the turning night
out of the floor of the sea and is the whole of an island
alone in the one horizon alone in the entire day
as a word is alone in the moment it is spoken
meaning what it means only then and meaning it only
once with the same syllables that have arisen
and have formed and been uttered before again and again
somewhere in the past to mean something of the same nature
but different something continuing and transmitted
but with refractions something recognized in its changes
something remembered from what is no longer there
and behind it something forgotten as the beginning
is forgotten and as the dream vanishes the present
mountain is moving at its own pace at the end
of its radius it is sailing in its own time
with the earth turning away under it as the day
turns under a word and it came late as a word comes late
with a whole language behind it by the time it is spoken
its fire came late among the fires in the dark of space
its burning plume rose late through the plated shell of the globe
it formed late at the end of the old plume unfurling into
the black depth of the sea and it burst up at last into
the air higher and higher collapsing sliding away
and pressing anew from beneath splitting open lifting
and finally moving away from the fire-plume and cooling
almost twice as high in its youth as the scored peak
in the story and setting out in that giant time
following its elders the earlier usages
already invisible beyond the late day

Merwin, The Folding Cliffs

Another Disappointment

In addition to the tragic discovery of the cockroaches, I have also realized, through Isabella Bird's Hawaiian writings, that she is a little bit racist. I know the Avenue Q people would assure me that everyone is a little bit racist (perhaps especially in England in 1873), and I know that she was extremely progressive for her time, but it's still disappointing. I didn't notice it in her Rocky Mountain writing, I suppose because in that case her racism was directed toward Americans, and it's hard to feel very defensive about a country that would one day give birth to George W. Bush.

I've tried to avoid any politics here, because it would give birth to a rant, and I hate reading them on other people's blogs, but July 4 is coming, so I feel it is excused this one time. (And now I wonder, in the spirit of Graham Greene, if the FBI will now start a file on me. You know, even try to break into my library records. I would wonder about the CIA, but everyone knows how good they are at collecting information. Well that was a cheap shot. But Republicans, any who might be reading, know that only real love of country and the resulting heartbreak could take me to that level, at least in a public forum.) That said, happy 4th everyone. Here's to something nobler than Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay in the Republican's next (and hopefully last) 3.5 years.

Buick Update

Well, the Buick has cockroaches. Never thought I'd see the day when I had to put cockroach traps in my car. I'm trying to be grateful that it's not fleas. Also worrisome is that the battery light on the dash goes on when I'm going uphill. I suppose this is balanced by the fact that the "service engine soon" light goes on when going downhill.

Gay and Dean saw my car on Wednesday, when they were installing a new gas line, and they said that my car was NOT that ugly, and would certainly not be the ugliest car in any parking lot. I said, well, you have to make the stories interesting. But something happened yesterday at the beach to make me feel better about my car: I noticed that the most badass surfers are sure to have the ugliest, most saltwater-rusted heaps on the lot. So perhaps there is some hope for me in that direction. Delpha gave me the name of a friend who gives lessons. I'll have to check it out.